The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

represented by the said Hastings's own agent, and this the public opinion of it, although to
impose on the ignorance of the prince with regard to the proceedings at his father's court
would have been unworthy in itself, yet he, the said Warren Hastings, could not hope to
succeed in such imposition, as in the postscript aforesaid he represents the said prince (who
was the king's eldest son, and thirty-six years of age) as a person of considerable
qualifications, and perfectly acquainted with the transactions at his father's court, and as one
who had long held the principal and most active part in the little that remained of the
administration of Shah Allum. And the said Hastings conferring with a prince so well
instructed, without making the slightest allusions to his said positive and recent
engagements, or without giving any explanation with regard to them, the said Warren
Hastings must appear to the said prince either as a person not only contracting
engagements, but actually being the first mover and proposer of them, without any
authority from his colleagues, and against theirs and the general inclination of the British
nation, and on that ground not to be trusted, or that he had used this plea of disagreement
between him and his Council as a pretence, set up without color or decency, for a gross
violation of his own engagements, leaving the princes and states of the country no solid
ground on which they can or ought to contract with the Company, to the utter destruction of
all public confidence, and to the equal disgrace of the national candor, integrity, and
wisdom.

X. That in a letter dated from the same place, Lucknow, the 16th of the following June,
1784, the said Warren Hastings informs the Court of Directors, that Major Browne, their
agent to the Mogul, had arrived there in the character also of agent from the Mogul, with
two sets of instructions from two opposite parties in his ministry, which instructions were
directly contrary to each other: the first, which were the ostensible instructions, being to

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