The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

would not suffer Nundcomar to appear before the board at his accuser; that he attempted to
indict his said accuser for a conspiracy, in which he failed; and that the said Rajah
Nundcomar was soon after, and while his charge against the said Warren Hastings was
depending before the Council, indicted upon an English penal statute, which does not
extend even to Scotland,!!] before the Supreme Court of Judicature, for an offence said to
have been committed several years before, and not capital by the laws of India, and was
condemned and executed. That the evidence of this man, not having been encountered at
the time when it might and ought to have been by the said Warren Hastings, remains justly
in force against him, and is not abated by the capital punishment of the said Nundcomar,
but rather confirmed by the time and circumstances in which the accuser of the said Warren
Hastings suffered death. That one of the offices for which a part of the money above
mentioned is stated to have been paid to the said Warren Hastings was given by him to
Munny Begum, the widow of the late Mir Jaffier, Nabob of Bengal, whose son, by another
woman, holds that title at present. That the said Warren Hastings had been instructed by the
Court of Directors of the East India Company to appoint "a minister to transact the political
affairs of the government, and to select for that purpose some person well qualified for the
affairs of government, to be the minister and guardian of the Nabob's minority." That for
these offices, and for the execution of the several duties belonging to them, the said Warren
Hastings selected and appointed the said Munny Begum, a woman evidently unqualified for
and incapable of such offices, and restrained from acting in such capacities by her necessary
seclusion from the world and retirement in a seraglio. That, a considerable deficiency or
embezzlement appearing in this woman's account of the young Nabob's stipend, she
voluntarily declared, by a writing under her seal, that she had given fifteen thousand pounds
to the said Warren Hastings for an entertainment,—which declaration corresponds with and
confirms that part of the charge produced by Rajah Nundcomar to which it relates. That

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