did sign a declaration, on the 23d of May, at Lucknow, forming the basis of a new article, and making a new party to the treaty, after it had been by all parties (the Supreme Council of Calcutta included) completed and ratified, and did transmit the said new stipulation to the Presidency at Calcutta, solely for the purposes and at the instigation of the Nabob of Arcot; and the said declaration was made without any previous communication with the Presidency aforesaid, and in consequence thereof orders were sent by the Council at Calcutta to the Presidency of Fort St. George, under the severest threats in case of disobedience:  which orders, whatever were their purport, would, as an undue assumption of and participation in the government, from which he was absent, become a high misdemeanor; but, being to the purport of opening the said treaty after its solemn ratification, and proposing a new clause and a new party to the same, was also an aggravation of such misdemeanor, as it tended to convey to the Indian powers an idea of the unsteadiness of the councils and determinations of the British government, and to take away all reliance on its engagements, and as, above all, it exposed the affairs of the nation and the Company to the hazard of seeing renewed all the calamities of war, from whence by the conclusion of the treaty they had emerged, and upon a pretence so weak as that of proposing the Nabob of Arcot to be a party to the same,—­though he had not been made a party by the said Warren Hastings in the Mahratta treaty, which professed to be for the relief of the Carnatic,—­though he was not a party to the former treaty with Hyder, also relative to the Carnatic,—­though it was not certain, if the treaty were once opened, and that even Tippoo should then consent to that Nabob’s being a party, whether he, the said Nabob, would agree to the clauses of the same, and consequently whether the said treaty, once opened, could afterwards be concluded:  an uncertainty of which he, the said Hastings, should have learned to be aware, having already once been disappointed by the said Nabob’s refusing to accede to a treaty which he, the said Warren Hastings, made for him with the Dutch, about a year before.

That the said Warren Hastings,—­having broken a solemn and honorable treaty of peace by an unjust and unprovoked war,—­having neglected to conclude that war when he might have done it without loss of honor to the nation,—­having plotted and contrived, as far as depended on him, to engage the India Company in another war as soon as the former should be concluded,—­and having at last put an end to a most unjust war against the Mahrattas by a most ignominious peace with them, in which he sacrificed objects essential to the interests, and submitted to conditions utterly incompatible with the honor of this nation, and with his own declared sense of the dishonorable nature of those conditions,—­and having endeavored to open anew the treaty concluded with Tippoo Sultan through the means of the Presidency of Fort St. George, upon principles of justice and honor, and which established peace in India, and thereby exposing the British possessions there to the renewal of the dangers and calamities of war,—­has by these several acts been guilty of sundry high crimes and misdemeanors.