Rajah of
Benares, and of deposing him, did not believe him guilty of that
premeditated project for driving the English out of India with which he
afterwards thought fit to charge him, or that he was really guilty of
any other great offence: because he has caused it to be deposed, that,
if the said Rajah should pay the sum of money by him exacted, "he would
settle his zemindary upon him on the most eligible footing"; whereas, if
he had conceived him to have entertained traitorous designs against the
Company, from whom he held his tributary estate, or had been otherwise
guilty of such enormous offences as to make it necessary to take
extraordinary methods for coercing him, it would not have been proper
for him to settle upon such a traitor and criminal the zemindary of
Benares, or any other territory, upon the most eligible, or upon any
other footing whatever: whereby the said Hastings has by his own stating
demonstrated that the money intended to have been exacted was not as a
punishment for crimes, but that the crimes were pretended for the
purpose of exacting money.

XXVIII. That the said Warren Hastings, in order to justify the acts of
violence aforesaid to the Court of Directors, did assert certain false
facts, known by him to be such, and did draw from them certain false and
dangerous inferences, utterly subversive of the rights of the princes
and subjects dependent on the British nation in India, contrary to the
principles of all just government, and highly dishonorable to that of
Great Britain: namely, that the "Rajah of Benares was not a vassal or
tributary prince, and that the deeds which passed between him and the
board, upon the transfer of the zemindary in 1775, were not to be
understood to bear the quality and force of a treaty upon optional
conditions between equal states; that the payments to be made by him
were not a tribute, but a rent; and that the instruments by which his
territories were conveyed to him did not differ from common grants to
zemindars who were merely subjects; but that, being nothing more than a
common zemindar and mere subject, and the Company holding the
acknowledged rights of his former sovereign, held an absolute authority
over him; that, in the known relations of zemindar to the sovereign
authority, or power delegated by it, he owed a personal allegiance and
an implicit and unreserved obedience to that authority, at the
forfeiture of his zemindary, and even of his life and propert