seemed
rather to have been forced into his mouth, and which he was obliged to
spit out again, about the possibility that he might have had some right
to the effects of the Begums.

We next come to consider the manner in which these acts of violence were
executed. They forced the Nabob himself to accompany their troops, and
their Resident, Mr. Middleton, to attack the city and to storm the fort
in which these ladies lived, and consequently to outrage their persons,
to insult their character, and to degrade their dignity, as well as to
rob them of all they had.

That your Lordships may learn something of one of these ladies, called
the Munny Begum, I will refer you to Major Browne's evidence,--a man who
was at Delhi, the fountain-head of all the nobility of India, and must
have known who this lady was that has been treated with such indignity
by the prisoner at your bar. Major Browne was asked, "What was the
opinion at Delhi respecting the rank, quality, and character of the
Princesses of Oude, or of either of them?"--"The elder, or Munny Begum,
was," says he, "a woman of high rank: she was, I believe, the daughter
of Saadut Ali Khan, a person of high rank in the time of Mahommed
Shah."--"Do you know whether any woman in all Hindostan was considered
of superior rank or birth?"--He answers, "I believe not, except those of
the royal family. She was a near relation to Mirza Shaffee Khan, who was
a noble of nobles, the first person at that day in the empire." In
answer to another question put by a noble Lord, in the same examination,
respecting the conversation which he had with Mirza Shaffee Khan, and of
which he had given an account, he says, "He [Mirza Shaffee Khan] spoke
of the attempt to seize the treasures of the Begums, which was then
suspected, in terms of resentment, and as a disgrace in which he
participated, as being related by blood to the house of Sufdar Jung, who
was the husband of the old Begum." He says afterwards, in the same
examination, that he, the Begum's husband, was the second man, and that
her father was the first man, in the Mogul empire. Now the Mogul empire,
when this woman came into the world, was an empire of that dignity that
kings were its subjects; and this very Mirza Shaffee Khan, that we speak
of, her near relation, was then a prince with a million a year revenue,
and a man of the first rank, after the Great Mogul, in the whole empire.

My Lords, these were people that ought to have been t