Governor General
In 1773, he was appointed the first Governor-General of Bengal. The post was new, and British mechanisms to administer the territory were not fully developed. Regardless of his title, Hastings was only a member of a five man council so confusedly structured that it was difficult to tell what constitutional position Hastings actually held.
In 1784, after ten years of service, during which he helped extend and regularise the nascent Raj created by Clive of India, Hastings resigned. On his return to England he was charged in Parliament with high crimes and misdemeanors by Edmund Burke, who was encouraged by Sir Philip Francis, whom Hastings had wounded during a duel in India. He was impeached in 1787, but the trial, which ran from 1788 to 1795, ended in acquittal. Though Hastings spent most of his fortune on his defence, the East India Company provided substantial financial support towards the end of the trial.
His supporters from the Edinburgh East India Club, as well as a number of other gentlemen from India, gave a reportedly "elegant entertainment" for Hastings when he visited Edinburgh. A toast on the occasion went to the "Prosperity to our settlements in India" and wished that "the virtue and talents which preserved them be ever remembered with gratitude."
In 1788 he acquired the estate at Daylesford, Gloucestershire, including the site of the medieval seat of the Hastings family. In the following years, he remodelled the mansion to the designs of Samuel Pepys Cockerell, with classical and Indian decoration, and gardens landscaped by John Davenport. He also rebuilt the Norman church in 1816, where he was buried two years later.
Read more about this topic: Warren Hastings
Famous quotes containing the words governor and/or general:
“Three years ago, also, when the Sims tragedy was acted, I said to myself, There is such an officer, if not such a man, as the Governor of Massachusetts,—what has he been about the last fortnight? Has he had as much as he could do to keep on the fence during this moral earthquake?... He could at least have resigned himself into fame.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“At Hayes’ General Store, west of the cemetery, hangs an old army rifle, used by a discouraged Civil War veteran to end his earthly troubles. The grocer took the rifle as payment ‘on account.’”
—Administration for the State of Con, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)