The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

to the practice of that crooked policy which, generally defeats its own purpose, but
sincerely attached to his master." The reality of the said attachment was not improbable, but
altogether useless, as the said minister was the only one among the principal persons about
the king who (besides the total want of all military and civil ability) possessed no territories,
troops, or other means of serving and supporting him, but was himself solely upheld by his
influence over his master: neither doth the said Hastings free him, any more than the
persons more efficient, who were to be destroyed, from a disposition to alienate the king
from an attention to his affairs, and from all confidence in his own family; but, on the
contrary, he brings him forward as the very first among the instances he adduces to
exemplify the practices of the ministers against their sovereign and his children.

XVI. That the said Warren Hastings, recommending in general terms, and yet condemning
in detail, every part of his own pretended plan, as impracticable in itself, and as undertaken
in favor of persons all of whom he describes as incapable, and the principal as indisposed to
avail himself thereof, must have had some other motives for this long, intricate, dark, and
laborious proceeding with the Mogul, which must be sought in his actions, and the evident
drift and tendency thereof, and in declarations which were brought out by him to serve
other purposes, but which serve fully to explain his real intentions in this intrigue.

XVII. That the other members of the Council-General having abundantly certified their
averseness to his intrigues, and even having shown apprehensions of his going personally to
the Mogul and the Mahrattas for the purpose of carrying on the same, the said Hastings was
driven headlong to acts which did much more openly indicate the true nature and purpose
of his machinations. For he at length recurred directly, and with little disguise, to the
Mahrattas, and did open an intrigue with them, although he was obliged to confess, in his

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