The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

and criminal disrespect to the Court of Directors, and of a most flagrant breach and
violation of their orders, which he was bound by an act of Parliament to obey.

VIII. That the said Hastings having early in the year 1784 procured to himself a deputation
to act in the upper provinces, the Council, being well aware of his disposition to engage in
unwarrantable designs against the neighboring states, did expressly confine his powers to
the circumstance of his actual residence within the Company's provinces. But it appears that
ways were found out by which he hoped to defeat the precautions of the board: for the said
Warren Hastings did write from Lucknow, the capital of the country of Oude, to the Court
of Directors, a certain postscript of a letter, dated the 4th of May, 1784, in which he informs
the Court that the son and heir-apparent of the Great Mogul had taken refuge with him and
the Nabob of Oude; that he had a conference with that prince on the 10th of the same month
of May, "no person being either present or within hearing" during the same; and that in the
said conference the prince had informed him of the distresses of his father, and his wish for
the relief of the king and the restoration of the dominions of his house, as well as to rescue
him from the power of certain persons not named, who degraded him into a mere
instrument of their interested and sordid designs, and that, on a failure of his application to
him, he would either return to his father, or proceed to Calcutta, and thence to England; and
that the said Warren Hastings did give him an answer to the following effect: "That our [the
British] government had just obtained relief from a state of universal warfare, and required
a term of repose; that our whole nation was weary of war, and dreaded the renewal of it,
and would he equally alarmed at any movement of which it could not see the issue or
progress, but which might eventually tend to create new hostilities; that he came hither [to
Lucknow] with a limited authority, and could not, if he chose it, engage in a business of that
nature without the concurrence of his colleagues in office, who he believed would be

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