The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

with regard to the dignity and liberty of the Mogul emperor, did represent him as a person
wholly disqualified, and even indisposed, to take any active part whatsoever in the conduct
of his own affairs, and that any attempt for that purpose would be utterly impracticable; and
this he hath stated to the Court of Directors as a matter of public notoriety, in his said letter
of the 16th of June, 1784, in the following emphatical and decisive terms.

"You need not be told the character of the king, whose inertness, and the habit of long-
suffering, has debased his dignity and the fortunes of his house beyond the power of
retrieving either the one or the other. Whilst his personal repose is undisturbed, he will
prefer to live in the meanest state of indigence, under the rule of men whose views are
bounded by avarice and the power which they derive from his authority, rather than commit
any share of it to his own sons, (though his affection for them is boundless in every other
respect,) from a natural jealousy, founded on the experience of a very different combination
of those circumstances which once served as a temptation and example of unlawful
ambition in the princes of the royal line. His ministers, from a policy more reasonable, have
constantly employed every means of influence to confirm this disposition, and to prevent
his sons from having any share in the distribution of affairs, so as to have established a
complete usurpation of the royal prerogative under its own sanction and patronage."

XV. That the said Warren Hastings, having given this opinion of the sovereign for whose
freedom he pretended so anxious a concern, did describe the minister with whom he had
long acted in concurrence, and from whom he had just received the extraordinary secret
embassy aforesaid for the purpose of effecting the deliverance of his master, the Mogul,
from the usurpations of his ministers, as follows. "The first minister, Mudjed ul Dowlah, is
totally deficient in every military quality, conceited of his own superior talents, and formed

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