The Trial of Warren Hastings

Classical Oratory and Reception in Eighteenth-Century England

Chiara Rolli

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350112759
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'antica Roma

The impeachment trial of Warren Hastings lasted from 1788 until 1795. Hastings was the first Governor-General of Bengal and his trial had a formative impact on the British Empire. Chiara Rolli shows that in an age when British education consisted mainly of classical studies, it was antique views of rhetoric and imperial governance that permeated the trial. Prosecutor Edmund Burke was figured as a modern-day Cicero fighting corruption in the colonies, while Hastings was Verres, the corrupt propraetor of Sicily in the first century BC. In their prosecution, both Burke and Richard Brinsley Sheridan employed certain coups de théâtre – such as fainting for emphasis – advised by Cicero and the later Roman rhetorician Quintilian, whose style of spectacular justice played particularly well amid the eighteenth-century vogue for sentimental drama. Burke's defence of natural rights and passion for extirpating vice in the colonies similarly reflected an admiration for Cicero, just as Hastings' preference to rule the conquered by means of their own traditions recalled models of Roman provincial administration. Using contemporary journalism, satire and other ephemera, the book reconstructs the public's equally profound grasp of these parallels. It illuminates new aspects of early British discourse around the Empire, and shows how deeply classical precedents influenced the cultural and political imaginations of eighteenth-century Britain.

1

Cicero, Verres and the Classics in Eighteenth-Century Britain

In his classic monograph on Greek studies in England, M. L. Clarke notes that, from the sixteenth century onwards, the education of the British cultural and political elite was ‘based entirely on the classics. […] Other languages and other subjects were scarcely taught at all’.¹ Throughout the eighteenth century, tutors, philosophers and scholars discussed and published extensively on the advantages or disadvantages of such an education.² Unsurprisingly, the established system had its critics. As early as 1693, for example, the renowned philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) admitted the necessity of Latin for a gentleman and Greek for a scholar. For a boy intended for trade or business, instead, the study of the Classics was useless.³ In spite of Locke’s and other critics’ remarks, however, the education of the elite was not modified until well into the nineteenth century.⁴ A significant example, in this sense, is provided by John Stuart Mill (1806–73), the celebrated philosopher and economist whose family had extensive connections with India.⁵ In 1873, he wrote in his autobiography:

He [my father] advised me to make my next exercise in composition one of the oratorical kind on which suggestion, availing myself of my familiarity with Greek history and ideas, and with the Athenian orators, I wrote two speeches, one an accusation, the other a defence of Pericles, on a supposed impeachment for not marching out to fight the Lacedemonians on their invasion of Attica.⁶

As John Stuart Mill’s memoirs suggest, members of the governing class regarded the study of Greek and Latin as a means of acquiring a quick wit, precision in speech and sharpness of thinking: ‘classical attainments contribute much to the refinement of the understanding, and the embellishment of the style. The utility of Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic, are known and felt by every one’, the jurist John Dunning (1731–83) wrote in a letter to a gentleman of the Inner Temple in 1779.⁷ With political careers depending largely on rhetorical skills, eighteenth-century gentlemen were trained in classical models, and Greek and Latin orations, as well as classical treatises on rhetoric, were at the heart of their education.⁸ A quotation from the correspondence of one of the most profound scholars of the century, Sir William Jones (1746–94), will suffice for many examples. In an epistle addressed to Viscount Althorp (1758–1834), his fifteen-year-old pupil destined for a political career, Jones noted in 1773: ‘I am glad you admire Tully, and his charming work De officiis […]. He is the Man, whom I propose to you as your model, and whom I hope you will imitate’.⁹

The powerful influence exercised by the Classics on the eighteenth-century British aristocracy and gentry is a matter too vast to be developed here. Insightful studies, such as Philip Ayres’s Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England (1997), have demonstrated how classical antiquity, and in particular Republican Rome, represented for the English elite a source of paramount values, including political liberty and civic virtue. In this chapter, I will not repeat Ayres’s observations. Confining my attention to a number of emblematic examples, I will show, instead, how classical orators and allusions to the ancient world figured prominently in eighteenth-century British parliamentary debates, as well as in the press and satirical prints. After this, I will turn to the numerous biographies of Cicero and translations of his speeches circulating in Britain at the time. In particular, I shall look at notions of character and eighteenth-century historical judgement of the great Roman orator who played a crucial role in Burke’s life and rhetoric. By means of a few significant instances, I will argue that, although to a lesser extent, also Verres, the villain governor of Sicily, as well as the Verrines, were mentioned and referred to in a number of eighteenth-century texts. In doing so, I will make clear how, at the end of the century, it was possible for Burke to imply that he himself was Cicero and that Hastings was Verres ‘without a trace of irony’.¹⁰ In fact, the identification that the Irish-born orator was attempting to foster in his audiences was made not just by the former in his speeches but also by his contemporaries, both inside and out of the doors of Westminster Hall. As we will see in particular in Chapter 5, newspaper reporters and satirists portrayed Burke and Hastings as though they had simultaneously been eighteenth-century gentlemen discussing a grave legal case in front of the Lords and the protagonists of an ancient trial held in the Forum of Rome.

Latine loqui

Throughout the eighteenth century, debates in the Commons and the Lords echoed with quotations from classical authors in their original languages, and British politicians and orators were often compared to Cicero or Demosthenes.¹¹ In his Life of Edmund Burke (1798), the Scottish writer Robert Bisset (1758/9–1805), for example, included a ‘Comparison of Burke and Cicero, in materials, disposition, language, and object of eloquence’.¹² At the time, newspapers and magazines largely commented on Bisset’s comparison. The Times (25 August 1798), for instance, reported that:

Dr. BISSET’s life of Mr. BURKE has given much offence to the Author of the Preface to Bellendenus. This grave Gentleman thinks the comparative merits of Cicero and Burke have been too partially weighed, and laments that the modern orator should be deemed superior to the ancient.¹³

It is from this perspective that we should also read the Oracle Bell’s New World celebration of the Earl of Mansfield (1705–93). On 7 November 1789, commenting on an important speech delivered at the House of Commons, the paper stressed how the Earl:

so eminently distinguished himself, that Sir Robert Walpole declared the merit of his speech to be so great, that it almost appeared to him to have been an oration of Cicero. Mr. Pulteney in the same instant rose to complete the eulogium, by observing, that he not only could imagine the speech which had been just delivered, was the composition of Cicero, but that the Roman Orator had himself pronounced it.

These are but a few examples among the multitude of cases that could be mentioned. Indeed, references to and comparisons with the greatest orators of antiquity were so copious in parliamentary debates, literary publications and the London press, that – as David H. Solkin has noted – the leading figures of antiquity seemed to have ‘miraculously returned to life, in order to participate in the most pressing political and social debates of the day’.¹⁴

The practice of comparing renowned Members of Parliament and orators to eminent figures of classical antiquity leads us to another consideration, which is that throughout the eighteenth century, the Classics represented a significant point of interconnection and mutual influence between different media, such as the London papers and satirical prints. Leading political figures were, in fact, often associated with Greek and Roman orators in caricatures.

One of the best examples is Design for the New Gallery of Busts and Pictures (17 March 1792: BM 8072) by James Gillray (1756–1815). In 1787, Catherine II of Russia (1729–96) had begun a second war against the Ottoman Empire. Owing to troubles in the north, by 1789 she was anxious to conclude a peace and entered into negotiations. A crucial point was Catherine II’s unwillingness to surrender ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Cicero, Verres and the Classics in Eighteenth-Century Britain
• 2 A Clash of Characters
• 3 Classical Oratory and Theatricality in the Trial against Warren Hastings
• 4 Spectacles of Passion: Cicero’s In Verrem and Burke’s ‘Speech on the Opening of the Impeachment’
• 5 The Reception of the Hastings Trial in the Newspapers and Satirical Prints
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright