Free Calcutta by Geoffrey Moorhouse Page B

court the sittings were not only extended beyond the norm, but ran through a Sunday as well and at the end Sir Elijah made a summing up that was to cost him impeachment, too, thirteen years later. The entirely European jury found Nuncomar guilty, he was refused leave to appeal, and he was sentenced to death as a felon. A number of petitions on his behalf were either ignored or were stillborn, including one that Francis proposed from the Three but which Clavering and Monson declined to sign. Nuncomar hanged within seven weeks and he died with much dignity. And for every man in Calcutta who thought that he had got what he deserved, there were two convinced that he was the victim of judicial murder. After the two impeachments, posterity became as much inclined to take the first view as the second. At this distance the biggest pity of it seems to be that Hastings, of all people, should be tainted by it.
    But tainted he was, and goaded he still was, and he was to remain so long after he and Francis had fought their duel. By the time enmity had reached that stage both Monson and Clavering were in their graves but Francis was still single-minded in his pursuit of prey and prize. The calumnies continued on their way to London; the Governor-General was now glorying in General Burgoyne’s surrender in America, he was preparing a retreat in Switzerland, he was totally incompetent in directing a war against the Mahrattas near the Malabar coast. In the end Hastings turned on his tormentor, determined to destroy him morally by exposing his dishonour if possible, willing to obliterate him physically if that failed. Characteristically , he laid his plans with care. He sat down and wrote a minute he proposed to put before a Council which was now less weighted against him, though with Barwell soon to leave India anything might shortly happen; indeed, at any time a ship might sail in from London bearing both the warrant that was to depose him andthe new favourite who was to succeed. It was a long and provocative document but the essence of it went as follows: ‘My authority for the opinions I have declared concerning Mr Francis depends on facts which have passed within my own knowledge . I judge of his public conduct by my experience of his private, which I have found to be void of truth and honour. This is a severe charge, but temperately and deliberately made, from the firm persuasion that I owe this justice to the public and myself as the only redress to both, for artifices of which I have been a victim, and which threaten to involve their interests with disgrace and ruin. The only redress for a fraud for which the law has made no provision is the exposure of it.’ Then he packed Marian Hastings out of town, to stay with the Dutch Governor at Chinsurah. And he waited six weeks until Philip Francis had got over a bad bout of fever. On 14 August 1780, he had a copy of the minute sent round to Francis’s house, with a note to say that the original would be on the Council’s table the next day.
    They met at six in the morning on the road to Alipore, by a double row of trees that had once been a walk of Belvedere Garden. Colonel Watson, the Chief Engineer at Fort William, was already there with Francis when Hastings arrived with Colonel Pearse, the Commandant of Artillery (the one with a Begum wife and a half-caste son at Harrow). Colonel Pearse thought the place very improper for the business, so near to the road and the hour close to riding time when horsemen and women might soon be passing by. So they walked some distance towards Mr Barwell’s house, and found a retired and dry spot. Colonel Pearse discovered that both gentlemen seemed unacquainted with the procedure on these occasions (as they were; Francis had never fired a pistol in his life and Hastings only once or twice) and took the liberty to tell them that if they would decide on their distance, he and Colonel Watson would measure it out. Watson suggested fourteen paces, which