seizing of the treasures was
proposed, was also directed: not one only, but both sides of the
alternative, being enforced upon the female parents of the Nabob
aforesaid, although both the one and the other had been secured to them
by a treaty with the East India Company.

XVIII.[60] That Sir Elijah Impey, Knight, his Majesty's chief-justice at
Port William, did undertake a journey of nine hundred miles, from
Calcutta to Lucknow, on pretence of health and pleasure, but was in
reality in the secret of these and other irregular transactions, and
employed as a channel of confidential communication therein. And the
said Warren Hastings, by presuming to employ the said chief-justice, a
person particularly unfit for an agent, in the transaction of affairs
_prima facie_ at least unjust, violent, and oppressive, contrary to
public faith, and to the sentiments and law of Nature, and which he, the
said Hastings, was sensible "could not fail to draw obloquy on himself
by his participation," did disgrace the king's commission, and render
odious to the natives of Hindostan the justice of the crown of Great
Britain.

XIX. That, although the said Warren Hastings was from the beginning duly
informed of the violence offered to the personal inclinations of the
Nabob, and the "apparent assumption of the reins of his government," for
the purposes aforesaid, yet more than two years after he did write to
his private agent, Major Palmer, that is to say, in his letter of the
6th of May, 1783, "that it has been a matter of _equal surprise and
concern_ to him to learn from the letters of the Resident that the Nabob
Vizier was with difficulty and almost unconquerable reluctance induced
to give his consent to the attachment of the treasure deposited by his
father under the charge of the Begum, his mother, and to the resumption
of her jaghire, and the other jaghires of the individuals of his
family": which pretence of ignorance of the Nabob's inclinations is
fictitious and groundless. But whatever deception he might pretend to be
in concerning the original intention of the Nabob, he was not, nor did
he pretend to be, ignorant of his, the Nabob's, reluctance to _proceed_
in the said measures; but did admit his knowledge of the Nabob's
reluctance to their full execution, and yet did justify the same as
follows.

XX. "I desire that you will inform him [the Nabob], that, in these and
the other measures which were either proposed by him or received hi