“HONORABLE SIR,—­I this morning, in obedience to your orders of last night, proceeded with a few of my orderlies, accompanied by Lieutenant Stalker, to Shewalla Ghaut, the present residence of Rajah Cheyt Sing, and acquainted him it was your pleasure he should consider himself in arrest; that he should order his people to behave in a quiet and orderly manner, for that any attempt to rescue him would be attended with his own destruction.  The Rajah submitted quietly to the arrest, and assured me, that, whatever were your orders, he was ready implicitly to obey; he hoped that you would allow him a subsistence, but as for his zemindary, his forts, and his treasure, he was ready to lay them at your feet, and his life, if required.  He expressed himself much hurt at the ignominy which he affirmed must be the consequence of his confinement, and entreated me to return to you with the foregoing submission, hoping that you would make allowances for his youth and inexperience, and in consideration of his father’s name release him from his confinement, as soon as he should prove the sincerity of his offers, and himself deserving of your compassion and forgiveness.”

X. That a further order was given, that every servant of the Rajah’s should be disarmed, and a certain number only left to attend him under a strict watch.  In a quarter of an hour after this conversation, two companies of grenadier sepoys were sent to the Rajah’s palace by the said Hastings; and the Rajah, being dismayed by this unexpected and unprovoked treatment, wrote two short letters or petitions to the said Hastings, under the greatest apparent dejection at the outrage and dishonor he had suffered in the eyes of his subjects, (all imprisonment of persons of rank being held in that country as a mark of indelible infamy, and he also, in all probability, considering his imprisonment as a prelude to the taking away his life,) and in the first of the said petitions he did express himself in this manner:  “Whatever may be your pleasure, do it with your own hands; I am your slave.  What occasion can there be for a guard?” And in the other:  “My honor was bestowed upon me by your Highness.  It depends on you alone to take away or not to take away the country out of my hands.  In case my honor is not left to me, how shall I be equal to the business of the government?  Whoever, with his hands in a supplicating posture, is ready with his life and property, what necessity can there be for him to be dealt with in this way?”

XI.  That, according to the said Hastings’s narrative of this transaction, he, the said Hastings, on account of the apparent despondency in which these letters were written, “thought it necessary to give him some encouragement,” and therefore wrote him a note of a few lines, carelessly and haughtily expressed, and little calculated to relieve him from his uneasiness, promising to send to him a person to explain particulars, and desiring him “to set his mind at rest, and not to conceive any terror or apprehension.”  To which an answer of great humility and dejection was received.