On the 3d of March following, the Council agree to send the following order to Mr. Bristow.

“We desire you will inform us if any and what means have been taken for recovering the balance due from the Begum at Fyzabad, and, if necessary, that you recommend it to the Vizier to enforce the most effectual means for that purpose.”

My Lords, you see the fraud he has put upon the Council.  You will find that Mr. Bristow’s letters, up to the 3d of March, had been suppressed; and though then communicated, yet he instigated his cat’s-paw, that blind and ignorant Council, to demand from the Vizier the renewal of these very severities and cruelties, the continuance of which the letters in his pocket had shown him were of no effect.  Here you have an instance of his implacable cruelty; you see that it never relaxes, never remits, and that, finding all the resources of tyranny useless and ineffective, he is still willing to use them, and for that purpose he makes a fraudulent concealment of the utter inefficacy of all the means that had been used.

But, you will ask, what could make him persevere in these acts of cruelty, after his avarice had been more than satiated?  You will find it is this.  He had had some quarrel with these women.  He believed that they had done him some personal injury or other, of which he nowhere informs you.  But, as you find that in the case of Cheyt Sing he considered his visit to General Clavering as an horrid outrage against himself, which he never forgave, and revenged to the ruin of that miserable person, so you find that he has avowed the same malicious disposition towards the Begums, arising from some similar cause.  In page 367 of your printed Minutes, he says,—­“I am sorry that I must in truth add, that a part of the resentment of the Begums was, as I had too much reason to suspect, directed to myself personally.  The incidents which gave rise to it are too light to be mixed with the professed subject and occasion of this detail; and as they want the authenticity of recorded evidence, I could lay no claim to credit in my relation of them.  At some period I may be induced to offer them to the world, my ultimate and unerring judges, both of that and of every other trait in my political character.”

My Lords, you have an anecdote here handed to you which is the key of a great part of this transaction.  He had determined upon some deep and desperate revenge for some injury or affront of some kind or other that he thought he had received from these people.  He accuses them of a personal quarrel with himself; and yet he has not the honor or honesty to tell you what it was,—­what it was that could induce them to entertain such a personal resentment against him as to ruin themselves and their country by their supposed rebellion.  He says, that some time or other he will tell it to the world.  Why did he not tell his counsel, and authorize them to tell a story which could not be unimportant, as it was connected