Over the course of this book I have traced specific overlaps between classical culture and the trial of Warren Hastings. Through the analysis of Burke’s and Sheridan’s spectacular performances, as well as Burke’s constant references to Cicero’s Verrines, we have seen the extent to which British parliamentary oratory appropriated and inflected classical, particularly Roman, rhetorical strategies towards the close of the eighteenth century. At the time, Cicero’s Verrines circulated widely among educated British gentlemen. Two possible explanations for this may lie in the promotion of a classical frame of mind by the British elite, on the one hand, and in the orations’ relevance to an actively imperialist society on the other.
As I have pointed out, the education of the British elite was thoroughly modelled by and based on classical languages and cultures. It was thus not surprising that all parties in the British Parliament identified themselves with the Roman Senate and that eminent MPs trained their sons in classical models, particularly favouring Cicero. Burke himself had a wide-ranging knowledge of Greek and Latin antiquity, demonstrated by his writings and speeches, as well as the surviving catalogues of his library. Like many of his contemporaries, he followed classical models of rhetoric; hence his powerful grip on his hearers’ emotions.
The Irish-born orator’s particular empathy for and affinity with Cicero’s writings and career encouraged him to adopt the persona of the great Roman lawyer, especially through the long years of the impeachment of Warren Hastings. As Burke modelled himself as Cicero, he found in Hastings a Verres, the notorious villain propraetor of Sicily, whom Cicero had brought to trial more than eighteen centuries beforehand.
In point of fact, this was not the first time that the character of Verres was evoked as the archetype of a powerful, corrupt man, as a close examination of the Verrines’ circulation in eighteenth-century Britain and their manipulation in the political rhetoric of the age indicates. In the preceding pages I have described how Jonathan Swift’s satirical attack on the first Earl of Wharton, for instance, was underpinned by the incipit of the first Verrine; similarly, the anonymous author of Verres and his Scribblers criticized Sir Robert Walpole’s monetary policy through the medium of Cicero’s speeches.
Alongside the contemporary context within which Burke’s monumental prosecution of Hastings germinated, Lorna Hardwick reminds us that we should not lose sight of the ‘two-way relationship’ between the hypotext and the new work – specifically, in our case, Burke’s ‘Speech on the Opening of the Impeachment’. Indeed, it is by virtue of this ‘two-way relationship’ that sometimes we may ‘frame new questions or retrieve aspects of the source which have been marginalized or forgotten’.1 As a matter of fact, before the Governor-General of Bengal was arraigned by Burke, the propraetor of Sicily embodied two main vices in the British elite’s collective imagination: rapacity and corruption. In the speeches delivered between 15 and 19 February 1788, the Irish-born orator also referred to such attributes as cruelty and monstrosity – characteristics of Verres that had, in fact, been brought into sharp relief by Cicero. In this sense, Burke’s indictment of Hastings somehow affected the reception of the original text, for it illuminated some prominent aspects of the Latin text that British satirical writers had set aside.
If this book has proved the effectiveness of Burke’s self-(re)presentation of a Cicero inveighing against the Governor’s iniquities, then it has also shown that from the commencement of the impeachment, newspaper reporters followed and discussed the proceedings against Hastings in terms of a re-enactment of the arraignment of Verres, and satirists published cartoons representing Burke as a British Cicero and Hastings as a latter-day Verres. Tellingly, both Sayers and Boyne portrayed the Irish-born orator in the plastic pose of a Roman orator – his right arm emphatically lifted up in the air.
Welcoming the comparison with ancient oratores, Burke modelled his rhetoric on classical prescriptions, including Cicero’s insistence on the superiority of actio or enactment (namely, air, gestures and enunciation, among others) over the contents of the oration. Indeed, his emphatic, theatrical histrionics which culminated in a (feigned) illness at the end of the account of the Rangpur atrocities may partly be ascribed to the Roman trend to transform legal debates into staged productions or spectacles of justice. Owing to its unusual emotional intensity and to Burke’s sensational performance, the 18 February 1788 oration on the Rangpur horrors turned out to be immensely successful. Among the spectators, ladies swooned and gentlemen wept. No less importantly, many years later, Hastings himself would confess: ‘I felt a villain under the magic of the orator’.2
Burke was not alone in acting out his speeches: with their histrionics, his fellow managers established parliamentary oratory as a theatrical show. Sheridan, in particular, showed that political debates could be turned into great public spectacles. In describing one of the impresario’s spectacular performances, the lawyer Charles Butler (1750–1832) recalled: ‘The rush to obtain places at the first commemoration of Handel, when all London seemed to pour into Westminster abbey, was not equal to the rush into Westminster-hall, on the day in which Mr. Sheridan brought his charges against Mr. Hastings’.3 Certainly, contemporary cultural and social practices, such as the vogue for melodrama, influenced Hastings’s prosecutors’ exaggerated delivery. In my reading of Burke’s and Sheridan’s embodied language I have chosen to trace and emphasize classical rhetorical practices. As we have seen, in the Graeco-Roman tradition verbal eloquence went hand in hand with physical eloquence and particularly Cicero had stressed that oratory, ‘like acting, is an embodied, public performance art’.4
The inextricable link between classical oratory and theatrical performances in the trial of Hastings can still be sensed in nineteenth-century declamations. Beginning around fifty years after the acquittal of the Governor-General, Burke’s orations against Hastings were included in the programmes of the Speech Days of some of the most prestigious public schools, including Harrow and Eton: as Paul Elledge has noted, the structure where Speech Days were held became ‘a theater packed with patrons expecting to be entertained by actors trained in the performance of roles’.5 Interestingly, along with distinguished parliamentary speeches, as well as classical, Renaissance and, occasionally, contemporary dramas, the declamations delivered on Speech Days included excerpts from classical orations, such as ‘Cicero in M. Antonium’, ‘Cicero in Catilinam’ and ‘Speech against Verres’.6
The fact that the Verrines were recited even in schools attests, once again, to their deep and far-reaching impact on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British elite. Their frequent resurfacing in a variety of different contexts – from education to parliamentary orations, from translations and satirical publications to cartoons – leads us to conclude that not only did they have a formative role in the perception of Roman rhetoric, but they also informed the British understanding of Roman rule. As such, Cicero’s speeches against Verres had important ramifications for British rule overseas, with eighteenth-century Britons identifying themselves with the conquering classical Romans.
Britain might have replaced Rome in the creation of a vast empire but, in the minds of Burke and others at least, she was failing in the attempt to govern India according to the ‘eternal laws of justice’, and this was an area in which Verres’s conviction could function as a relevant paradigm. By means of this authoritative Roman antecedent, Burke – though, in the end, unsuccessfully – endeavoured to prove that, after the rapacious years following the battle of Plassey, Britain had to secure a ‘natural, immutable and substantial justice’ for India’s people before seeking any gain herself.7
This book has only begun the work of recovering the complex and multiple interfaces between classical culture and the impeachment of the first Governor-General of Bengal. In particular, what I have collected on Roman rhetoric and Burke’s speeches against Hastings should be considered introductory. There is still much to be done, especially when considering that Burke regarded these orations as his greatest achievement, as he himself observed in a letter significantly penned on 28 July 1796, a year after the ending of the Hastings impeachment and a year before his own death. Addressed to his friend and close collaborator, French Laurence (1757–1809), the epistle gives us an image of Burke as a modern-day pater patriae who, in a titanic effort against ‘this cruel, daring, unexampled act of publick [sic] corruption, guilt, and meanness’ – namely, the acquittal of the Governor-General – constructs his orations as a monument-monumentum for posterity. It is presumably no coincidence that, as much as the Verrines constitute the only surviving Ciceronian prosecution oration, as well as the sole extant example of any Roman prosecution speech, so does Burke – on his ‘departure from the public stage’ – ask Laurence to let his speeches against Hastings be his ‘monument; The only one I ever will have. Let’ – the crusading prosecutor of Hastings concludes – ‘everything I have done, said, or written be forgotten but this’.8