Notes

Introduction

1 William Eden, The Journal and Correspondence of William, Lord Auckland, 2 vols (London, 1861), i, p. 469. Mr. Storer to Mr. Eden (22 February 1788).

2 Gilbert Elliot, Life and Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, ed. The Countess of Minto, 3 vols (London, 1874), i, pp. 196–7. To Lady Elliot (3 March 1788).

3 Robin Theobald, ‘Scandal in a scandalous age: the impeachment and trial of Warren Hastings, 1788–95’, in J. Garrand and James L. Newell (eds), Scandals in Past and Contemporary Politics (Manchester and New York, 2006), p. 142.

4 I take the charges from P. J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (Oxford, 1965), pp. xiv–xv. See also Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2006), pp. 19–20.

5 Theobald, ‘Scandal in a scandalous age’, p. 137.

6 Quoted in Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (London, 1992), p. 360.

7 Frances Burney, Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay, ed. C. Barrett, 7 vols (London, 1842–6), iv, p. 63. Other contemporaries also remarked on Hastings’s sickly pallor. Sir Gilbert Elliot (the future Lord Minto and Governor-General of Bengal), for example, told his wife: ‘I never saw Hastings till to-day, and had not formed anything like a just idea of him. I never saw a more miserable-looking creature, but indeed he has so much the appearance of bad health that I do not suppose he resembles even himself. He looks as if he could not live a week’. Elliot, Life and Letters, i, p. 194. To Lady Elliot (13 February 1788). Commenting on the third day of the trial, the politician Anthony Morris Storer similarly observed that ‘the prisoner was but a mean-looking fellow, and did not appear at all as Alexander the Great ought to do at the Old Bailey’. Eden, The Journal and Correspondence, i, p. 468. Mr. Storer to Mr. Eden (15 February 1788).

8 The epistle is addressed to George Nesbitt Thompson (1753–1831), Hastings’s former secretary in India. See S. Arthur Strong, ‘Warren Hastings’s own account of his impeachment’, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 110 (1904–5), pp. 89–95 (p. 95).

9 F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke, Volume One: 1730–84 and Volume Two: 1784–1797 (Oxford, 1998–2006), ii, p. 159. P. J. Marshall has stressed that the managers ‘constantly made allegations which bore no relation to the charges’. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings, pp. 83–4.

10 Siraj Ahmed, ‘The theater of the civilized self: Edmund Burke and the East India trials’, Representations, lxxviii (2002), p. 44.

11 Daniel O’Quinn, Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London 1700–1800 (Baltimore, MD, 2005), pp. 164–221.

12 Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago and London, 1992), pp. 49–74. Kate Teltscher has similarly argued that the trial of Hastings was a public spectacle in which British guilt over the colonization of India was given expression. See Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600–1800 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 157–91.

13 Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, 2005), p. 69.

14 Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings. Richard Bourke, Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton, NJ, 2015), pp. 627–75; 820–50.

15 Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2010), p. 96. See also Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings, pp. 70–1.

16 Edmund Burke, The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. T. W. Copeland et al., 10 vols (Cambridge, 1958–78), v, p. 357. To Henry Dundas (1 November 1787). The passage is quoted in Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings, p. 71.

17 Nechtman, Nabobs, p. 106.

18 David Francis Taylor, Theatres of Opposition: Empire, Revolution, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Oxford, 2012), p. 84.

19 Ibid.

20 Philip Dormer Stanhope, Letters Written by the Late Right Honourable Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, to His Son; with Some Account of His Life, 4 vols (London, 1815), ii (24 November OS 1749), p. 297.

21 H. V. Canter, ‘The impeachment of Verres and Hastings: Cicero and Burke’, The Classical Journal ix (1914), pp. 199–211 and Geoffrey Carnall, ‘Burke as modern Cicero’, in G. Carnall and C. Nicholson (eds), The Impeachment of Warren Hastings: Papers from a Bicentenary Commemoration (Edinburgh, 1989), pp. 76–90.

22 See, for example, Paddy Bullard, Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 16–17.

23 Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, p. 49.

24 Burney, Diary and Letters, iv, p. 96.

1 Cicero, Verres and the Classics in Eighteenth-Century Britain

1 M. L. Clarke, Greek Studies in England 1700–1830 (Cambridge, 1945), p. 10. A good sense of the importance of the Classics in British education may also be derived from M. L. Clarke, Classical Education in Britain 1500–1900 (Cambridge, 1959); J. A. K. Thomson, The Classical Background of English Literature (London, 1948); Robert Maxwell Ogilvie, Latin and Greek: A History of the Influence of the Classics on English Life from 1600 to 1918 (Hamden, CT, 1964) and C. O. Brink, English Classical Scholarship: Historical Reflections on Bentley, Porson, and Housman (Cambridge, 1985).

2 See, for example, Joseph Addison, A Discourse on Ancient and Modern Learning (Dublin, 1739); John Gordon, Occasional Thoughts on the Study and Character of Classical Authors, on the Course of Literature, and the Present Plan of a Learned Education. With Some Incidental Comparisons between Homer and Ossian (London, 1762); James Beattie, Essays: On Poetry and Music, as They Affect the Mind; on Laughter, and Ludicrous Composition: on the Utility of Classical Learning, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1776); Joseph Cornish, An Attempt to Display the Importance of Classical Learning, Addressed to the Parents and Guardians of Youth: With Some Candid Remarks on Mr. Knox’s Liberal Education (London, 1783); William Stevenson, Remarks on the Very Inferior Utility of Classical Learning (London, 1796).

3 See John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Oxford, 1989), p. 217 (§ 164).

4 Clarke, Greek Studies, p. 10.

5 John Stuart Mill served for three and a half decades at India House, while his father, James (1773–1836), was the author of the History of British India (1817).

6 John Stuart Mill, Autobiography of John Stuart Mill Published from the Original Manuscript in the Columbia University Library (New York and London, 1960), pp. 50–1.

7 Dunning’s letter is included in The Templar; or, Monthly Register of Legal and Constitutional Knowledge, 2 vols (London, 1789), i, p. 11.

8 Carey McIntosh has calculated that in the first half the eighteenth century ‘there were thirty-one editions of Aristotle, Quintilian, Longinus and Cicero’s De Oratore, ten in translation and twenty-one in the original Latin or Greek’. See Carey McIntosh, ‘Elementary rhetorical ideas and eighteenth-century English’, Language Sciences xxii/3 (2000), pp. 231–49 (p. 233).

9 The Letters of Sir William Jones, ed. G. Cannon, 2 vols (Oxford, 1970), i, p. 125. To Viscount Althorp (23 April 1773). Other examples of renowned British politicians and orators who forged their rhetorical abilities on classical models, may be found in Christopher Reid, Imprison’d Wranglers: The Rhetorical Culture of the House of Commons 1760–1800 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 115–16; Philip Ayres, Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1997), p. 42; M. L. Clarke, ‘Non hominis nomen, sed eloquentiae’, in T. A. Dorey (ed.), Cicero (London, 1965), p. 100 and John L. Mahoney, ‘The classical tradition in eighteenth century English rhetorical education’, History of Education Journal ix/4 (1958), pp. 93–7.

10 Ayres, Classical Culture, p. 165.

11 C. A. Vince has collected a number of passages from Latin poets, which were quoted by British MPs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to Vince’s study, the most frequently cited Roman poets were Virgil, Horace, Juvenal and Ovid. See C. A. Vince, ‘Latin poets in the British Parliament’, The Classical Review xlvi (1932), pp. 97–104.

12 Robert Bisset, The Life of Edmund Burke (London, 1798), pp. 197–207.

13 Italics original. The author of the Preface to Bellendenus is the renowned classicist Samuel Parr. A list of newspapers and magazines commenting on Bisset’s comparison of Burke and Cicero includes True Briton (24 August 1798); The British Critic: A New Review for July, August, September, October, November, and December 1798 (London, 1798), pp. 296–300; The Historical, Biographical, Literary, and Scientific Magazine. Miscellaneous Literature, for the Year 1799 (London, 1799), pp. 19–25; The European Magazine, and London Review. From January to June 1799 (London, 1799), pp. 101–5.

14 David H. Solkin, ‘The battle of the Ciceros: Richard Wilson and the politics of landscape in the age of John Wilkes’, in S. Pugh (ed.), Reading Landscape: Country – City – Capital (Manchester, 1990), p. 49.

15 For a detailed description of Gillray’s print, see the British Museum’s website: http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1628932&partId=1&searchText=design+for+theew+gallery+of+busts+and+pictures&page=1 (accessed 20 September 2016).

16 Nollekens was commissioned to produce, among others, the busts of Charles James Fox (1791; 1801) and William Pitt the Younger (1807). Interestingly, John Kenworthy-Browne has described the 1801 bust of Fox as having ‘the dignity of a Roman republican’. See Ayres, Classical Culture, p. 74.

17 Italics original.

18 Italics original.

19 The New London Magazine, vol. viii (1792), p. 36.

20 ‘Les membres du Parlement d’Angleterre aiment à se comparer aux anciens Romains autant qu’ils le peuvent’. See François Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Lettres écrites de Londres sur les Anglois et autres sujets (Basle, 1734), p. 49. The English translation is mine. Even though Letter VIII – whence this quotation derives – is centred on the British Parliament, references to the Roman Senate, or Roman historical characters, such as Marius and Sulla, are abundant.

21 The authors most frequently cited were – in order of preference – Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Juvenal and Cicero. For a fuller discussion of the frequency with which Latin and Greek authors occurred in the Spectator, see ‘Classicism’ in Brill’s New Pauly: Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World, eds H. Cancik, H. Schneider and M. Landfester, 22 vols (Leiden, 2002–), Classical Tradition, i, p. 881.

22 Solkin, ‘The battle of the Ciceros’, p. 50.

23 Other examples drawn from the India Gazette include: Effects of War. Rome in the Reign of Romulus (3 November 1788), concerning Rome’s state of constant war ‘to enslave the universe’ and Of the Supper Given to Cicero and Pompey, by Lucullus (17 November 1788), about Lucullus’s renowned sumptuous feasts, particularly that organized for Cicero and Pompey.

24 See, for example, the India Gazette (18 February 1788): Horace, Book II. Ode III. Imitated or the India Gazette (19 May 1788): Horace. Ode XVI. Book II. Imitated. Interestingly enough, on 15 February 1787, The Calcutta Gazette; or, Oriental Advertiser published An Ode Written by Mr. Hastings, on Board the Berrington, in his Voyage from Bengal to England, in 1785. Addressed to John Shore, Esq. In Imitation of Horace, Book II. Ode 16.

25 Edmund Burke, The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. T. W. Copeland et al., 10 vols (Cambridge, 1958–78), vii, p. 501. To Arthur Murphy (8 December 1793).

26 Susanne Gippert, ‘The poet and the statesman: Plutarchan biography in eighteenth century England’ in L. De Blois, J. Bons, T. Kessels and D. M. Schenkeveld (eds), The Statesman in Plutarch’s Works: Proceedings of the International Conference of the International Plutarch Society, Nijmegen/Castle Hernen, May 1–5, 2002, 2 vols (Leiden and Boston, 2004), i, p. 307.

27 Plutarch’s Lives. Translated from the Greek by Several Hands, ed. J. Dryden, 5 vols (London, 1684–8).

28 Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives Translated from the Original Greek; with Notes, Historical and Critical and a Life of Plutarch, by John and William Langhorne. A New Edition, Carefully Corrected, and the Index Much Amended, and Accurately Revised Throughout. In Four Volumes, trans. J. Langhorne and W. Langhorne (Philadelphia, 1822), iv, pp. 10; 31–2.

29 Ibid., pp. 5; 7.

30 Ibid., p. 26.

31 Ibid., pp. 19; 35.

32 See George Lyttelton, Observations on the Life of Cicero (London, 1733), p. 3. An in-depth analysis of Lyttelton’s text may be found in Matthew Fox, ‘Cicero during the Enlightenment’, in C. Steel (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Cicero (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 329–31.

33 Lyttelton, Observations, p. 39.

34 Christine Gerrard, ‘Lyttelton, George, first Baron Lyttelton (1709–1773)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

35 For an overview of the history of the composition and publication of Middleton’s Life of Cicero, as well as the polemical quarrel from which it sprang, see, in particular, Robert G. Ingram, ‘Conyers Middleton’s Cicero: enlightenment, scholarship, and polemic’, in William H. F. Altman (ed.), Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Cicero (Leiden and Boston, 2015), pp. 95–123.

36 See Howard D. Weinbrot, ‘History, Horace and Augustus Caesar: some implications for eighteenth-century satire’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vii/4 (1974), pp. 391–414 (p. 397, n. 18). In 1763, the Critical Review ironically observed that ‘princes, nobles, and literati of all degrees had given their opinions, before they had read a single line of the work, that it was the finest performance that ever appeared’. See Critical Review xvi (1763), p. 401. I take this reference from Addison Ward, ‘The Tory view of Roman history’, Studies in English Literature, iv (1964), pp. 413–56 (p. 432).

37 See Howard D. Weinbrot, Augustus Caesar in ‘Augustan’ England: The Decline of a Classical Norm (Princeton, NJ, 1978), p. 74.

38 See Yasunari Takada, ‘An Augustan representation of Cicero’, in P. Robinson et al. (eds), Enlightened Groves: Essays in Honour of Professor Zenzo Suzuki (Tokyo, 1996), p. 245.

39 Conyers Middleton, The Life of Marcus Tullius Cicero, 3 vols (London, 1741), i, p. xxx. Cicero is further eulogized as a ‘shining pattern of virtue’ (iii, p. 301) and ‘sublime specimen of perfection’ (iii, p. 310).

40 Ibid., iii, p. 307.

41 See, for example, Ward, ‘The Tory view of Roman history’, pp. 435–56.

42 Anonymous, The Death of M-L-N in the Life of Cicero: Being a Proper Criticism on That Marvellous Performance (London, 1741), pp. 1–2.

43 Ibid., pp. 20; 22.

44 Ibid., pp. 46–7.

45 Colley Cibber, The Character and Conduct of Cicero, Considered, From the History of his Life, by the Reverend Dr. Middleton. With Occasional Essays and Observations upon the Most Memorable Facts and Persons during That Period, By Colley Cibber, Esq; Servant to His Majesty (London, 1747), p. 206.

46 Ibid., p. 209.

47 Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 2 vols (London, 1782), ii, pp. 260–1.

48 Anonymous, A Free Translation of the Preface to Bellendenus; Containing Animated Strictures on the Great Political Characters of the Present Time (London, 1788), p. 6.

49 Ibid., p. 8.

50 In 1983, M. L. Clarke reconsidered this pertinent question, reaching the conclusion that ‘there is no justification for accusations of plagiarism’. See M. L. Clarke, ‘Conyers Middleton’s alleged plagiarism’, Notes and Queries, xxx/1 (1983), pp. 44–6 (p. 45).

51 See P. J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (Oxford, 1965), p. 14.

52 Encyclopaedia Britannica; or, A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, &c. Illustrated with above Two Hundred Copperplates, 10 vols (Edinburgh, 1778–83), iii, p. 1976.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid., p. 1975.

55 Ibid., p. 1979.

56 Ibid.

57 A note specifies that the ‘modern writer’ in question is Swinburne. See: Encyclopaedia Britannica; or, A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Miscellaneous Literature; … Illustrated with Five Hundred and Forty-Two Copperplates, 18 vols (Edinburgh, 1797), v, p. 5.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid., p. 6.

60 Ibid.

61 See Conyers Middleton, The Epistles of M.T. Cicero to M. Brutus and of Brutus to Cicero: with the Latin Text on the opposite page, and English notes to each epistle. Together with a prefatory dissertation, In which the Authority of the said Epistles is vindicated, and all the Objections of the Revd. Mr. Tunstall particularly considered and confuted (London, 1743). In reply to Middleton, James Tunstall wrote Observations on the present Collection of Epistles between Cicero and M. Brutus, representing several evident Marks of Forgery in those Epistles; and the true state of many important Particulars in the Life and Writings of Cicero, in answer to the late Pretences of the Reverend Dr. Conyers Middleton, by James Tunstall, B.D. Fellow etc. (London, 1744). For an overview of the debate around the authenticity of Cicero’s letters Ad Marcum Brutum, see, in particular, Ward, ‘The Tory view’, p. 435, n. 72.

62 Owing to the keen interest in English classical scholarship in Germany at the end of the century, Brüggemann also compiled a voluminous text listing all the English translations and editions of ancient orators published in Britain, as well as literary comments: A view of the English Editions, Translations and Illustration of the ancient Greek and Latin authors with remarks by Lewis William Brüggemann, Counsellor of the consistory at Stettin in Pomerania, and Chaplain in Ordinary to his Prussian Majesty (Stettin, 1797).

63 Brüggemann, A View of the English Editions, Translations and Commentaries of Marcus Tullius Cicero with Remarks (Stettin, 1795), p. 27. This observation is taken from the Critical Review for February 1778, pp. 22–8.

64 Ibid., p. 22. This comment is derived from the Monthly Review for February 1755, pp. 96–8.

65 Ibid., p. 10. Here, Brüggemann is quoting from the Critical Review for June 1789, p. 427.

66 J. M. S. Tompkins, ‘James White, Esq.: a forgotten humourist’, Review of English Studies, iii/10 (1927), pp. 146–56 (p. 147). The following year, White published a pamphlet entitled Hints for a Specific Plan for an Abolition of the Slave Trade, and for Relief of the Negroes in the British West Indies and signed this work with the periphrasis ‘By the translator of Cicero’s Orations against Verres’.

67 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero against Caius Cornelius Verres, Translated from the Original, by James White, Esq. with Annotations, trans. J. White (London, 1787), p. vii.

68 Ibid.

69 Ibid.

70 Margaret M. Miles, Art as Plunder: The Ancient Origins of Debate about Cultural Property (Cambridge, 2008), p. 302.

71 Ibid., p. 303.

72 Anonymous, Verres and his Scribblers: A Satire in Three Cantos. To Which is Added an Examen of the Piece, and a Key to the Characters and Obscure Passages (London, 1732), p. 60. Italics original.

73 Ibid., pp. 66–7.

74 Jonathan Swift, the Examiner (23–30 November 1710). Italics original.

75 Ibid. A detailed textual analysis of Swift’s anonymous article and Cicero’s Verrines may be found in Pat Rogers, ‘Swift and Cicero: the character of Verres’, Quarterly Journal of Speech lxi (1975), pp. 71–5. See also Fox, ‘Cicero during the Enlightenment’, pp. 322–3.

76 George Mackenzie, An Idea of the Modern Eloquence of the Bar. Together with a Pleading out of Every Part of Law. Written by Sir George MacKenzie … Translated into English (Edinburgh, 1711), p. 47. Italics original. For another example of the presence of Verres and the Verrines within legal contexts, see also John Taylor, Elements of the Civil Law (Cambridge, 1755), p. 215: in this case, Cicero’s Verrinae are mentioned as a text offering ‘many notable Instances’ of a corrupt praetor.

77 Miles, Art as Plunder, p. 291.

78 John Breval, Remarks on Several Parts of Europe, Relating Chiefly to Their Antiquities and History Collected Upon the Spot in Several Tours Since the Year 1723; And Illustrated by Upward of Forty Copper Plates, from Original Drawings; Among Which Are the Ruins of Several Temples, Theatres, Amphitheatres, Triumphal Arches, and Other Unpublish’d Monuments of the greek and Roman Times, in Sicily, and the South of France, 2 vols (London, 1738), i, pp. 13, 26. Italics original.

79 Edward Chaney, The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations since the Renaissance (London and Portland, OR, 1998), p. 32.

80 Patrick Brydone, A Tour through Sicily and Malta. In a Series of Letters to William Beckford, Esq. of Somerly in Suffolk; from P. Brydone, F. R. S., 2 vols (London, 1773), i, p. 353.

81 Richard Payne Knight, Expedition into Sicily, ed. C. Stumpf (London, 1986), p. 43.

82 John Campbell, The Travels of Edward Brown, Esq; Formerly a Merchant in London. Containing His Observations on France and Italy, his Voyage to the Levant; his Account of the Island of Malta; his Remarks in his Journies through the Lower and Upper Egypt; Together with a Brief Description of the Abyssinian Empire …, 2 vols (London, 1739), i, p. 186.

2 A Clash of Characters

1 Clements R. Markham, George Bogle, Thomas Manning, Narratives of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet, and of the Journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa (London, 1876), p. 30.

2 Ibid., p. 6.

3 Among the most recent biographies of Burke, see, in particular, Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (London, 1992); Nicholas K. Robinson, Edmund Burke: A Life in Caricature (New Haven, CT, and London, 1996) and F. P. Lock’s very detailed Edmund Burke, Volume One: 1730–1784 and Volume Two: 1784–1797 (Oxford, 1998–2006). The numerous studies on the life of Hastings include: George Robert Gleig, Memoirs of the Right Hon. Warren Hastings, First Governor-General of Bengal …, 3 vols (London, 1841), which incorporates Macaulay’s Memoirs of the Life of Warren Hastings, First Governor-General of Bengal; Alfred Comyn Lyall, Warren Hastings (London, 1889); Lionel J. Trotter, Warren Hastings (London and Toronto, 1925); A. Mervyn Davis, A Biography of Warren Hastings (New York, 1935); Penderel Moon, Warren Hastings and British India (London, 1947); Keith Feiling, Warren Hastings (New York, 1954); Jeremy Bernstein, Dawning of the Raj: The Life and Trials of Warren Hastings (Chicago, 2000). Hastings himself wrote a book about his Indian years, Memoirs relative to the State of India (London, 1786), as well as an account of his impeachment, The History of the Trial of Warren Hastings, Esq. Late Governor General of Bengal, […] (London, 1796).

4 James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., […] (London, 1785), p. 257.

5 Paddy Bullard, Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge, 2011), p. 16.

6 Sir Philip Francis, A Letter Missive from Sir Philip Francis K. B. to Lord Holland (London, 1816), p. 17. Italics original. Part of this passage is quoted by Robert Murray, Edmund Burke: A Biography (Oxford, 1931), p. 36, n. 4. In a letter penned to Burke in 1793, even the king of Poland, Stanislaw II Augustus (1732–98), called Cicero ‘one of the most illustrious models of your eloquence’. Edmund Burke, The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. T. W. Copeland et al., 10 vols (Cambridge, 1958–78), vii, p. 375. The King of Poland to Edmund Burke (12 June 1793).

7 The portrait of Burke is part of an article titled ‘Memoirs of the celebrated Edmund Burke, Esq. Member for Wendover in Buckinghamshire’. London Magazine, xxxix (April 1770), pp. 174–5.

8 Ibid., p. 174. David H. Solkin mentions and comments on this plate in his article on Wilson’s landscape, ‘The battle of the Ciceros: Richard Wilson and the politics of landscape in the age of John Wilkes’, in S. Pugh (ed.), Reading Landscape: Country – City – Capital (Manchester, 1990), pp. 56–7.

9 See Phiroze Vasunia, ‘Barbarism and civilization: political writing, history and empire’, in N. Vance and J. Wallace (eds), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, 4 vols (Oxford, 2015), iv, p. 135. James Zetzel observes that, in the Reflections, Burke cites numerous Ciceronian texts, ‘including the Somnium Scipionis, pro Sestio, de Legibus and de Senectute’. See James Zetzel, ‘Plato with Pillows’, in D. Braund and C. Gill (eds), Myth, History and Culture in Republican Rome: Studies in Honour of T. P. Wiseman (Exeter, 2003), p. 136, n. 35. Extending over a period of more than fifty years, Burke’s Correspondence appears to be very significant in this sense. Indeed, references to Cicero’s works are quite copious. In particular, Burke mentions or quotes from Pro Archia Poeta (To Richard Shackleton and Richard Burke, Sr, 25, 31 July 1746, i, p. 69); Epistulae and Orationes (To Richard Shackleton, 21 March 1746–7, i, pp. 89–90); Orationes De Officiis (To Richard Shackleton, 5 December 1746, i, p. 74); Ad Atticum (To William Baker, 1 October 1771, ii, p. 243); De Amicitia (To Dr William Markham, post 9 November 1771, ii, p. 257); De Senectute (To Richard Shackleton, 15 October 1744, i, p. 32; To Sir Charles Bingham, 30 October 1773, ii, p. 481 and To Earl Fitzwilliam, 5 June 1791, vi, p. 275); Pro Plancio (To Charles O’Hara, 11 December 1773, ii, p. 496); and In Vatinium (To William Windham, 16 October 1794, viii, p. 41).

10 I have relied on the two surviving catalogues of Burke’s library, a printed sale catalogue, Catalogue of the Library of the Late Right Honourable Edmund Burke (1833), included in Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons, ed. A. N. L. Munby et al., 12 vols (London, 1971–5), viii, pp. 183–240 and an earlier manuscript shelf-list held by the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Catalogue of a Library of Books Late the Property of the Rt. Hon. Ed. Burke dcsd, August 17 1813 (Bod. MS 16978). For a comment on the books possessed by Burke, see Carl B. Cone, ‘Edmund Burke’s library’, Bibliographical Society of America, Papers 44 (1950), pp. 153–72.

11 Some scholars believe, instead, that Burke was born in County Cork. See Daniel I. O’Neill, Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire (Oakland, CA, 2016), p. 124.

12 Basing his rigorous research on parish registers and other evidence, Lock has come to the conclusion that Burke was probably born in 1730. For an in-depth exploration of the subject, see Lock, Edmund Burke, i, pp. 16–17.

13 Ibid., p. 49.

14 Bullard, Edmund Burke, p. 68. For an overview of the presence of classical studies at Trinity College Dublin, see, in particular, M. L. Clarke, Classical Education in Britain 1500–1900 (Cambridge, 1959), pp. 160–6; Bullard, Edmund Burke, pp. 68–70 and Christopher Reid, Imprison’d Wranglers: The Rhetorical Culture of the House of Commons 1760–1800 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 128–9. For an in-depth analysis of the practice of rhetoric at Trinity College, see Jean Dietz Moss, ‘ “Discordant Consensus”: Old and new rhetoric at Trinity College, Dublin’, Rhetorica xiv/4 (1996), pp. 383–441.

15 Burke, Correspondence, iv, p. 48. To William Jones (12 March 1779). Elsewhere the orator confessed: ‘My knowledge of Greek was never perfect and critical’. See ibid., vii, p. 582. Appendix I, Edmund Burke’s Character of His Son and Brother.

16 Ibid., iv, p. 48. To William Jones (12 March 1779).

17 Michael J. Franklin, ‘Accessing India: orientalism, anti-“Indianism” and the rhetoric of Jones and Burke’, in T. Fulford and P. J. Kitson (eds), Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830 (Cambridge, 1998), p. 48. For a survey of the relationships between Burke and Jones, see Garland Cannon, ‘Sir William Jones and Edmund Burke’, Modern Philology liv/3 (1957), pp. 165–86.

18 Edmund Burke, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. P. Langford et al., 9 vols to date (Oxford, 1981–), i, pp. 187–8.

19 I derive this quotation from Carl B. Cone, Burke and the Nature of Politics: The Age of the American Revolution, 2 vols (Lexington, 1957–64), i, p. 162.

20 Donald Cross Bryant, ‘The contemporary reception of Edmund Burke’s speaking’, in R. F. Howes (ed.), Historical Studies of Rhetoric and Rhetoricians (Ithaca, NY, 1961), p. 292. For an insightful overview of Burke’s rhetoric, see Christopher Reid ‘Burke as a rhetorician and orator’, in D. Dwan and C. J. Insole (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 41–52.

21 Cone, ‘Edmund Burke’s library’, p. 154. For a general survey of the influence of British theatre on Burke, see, among others, Paul Hindson and Tim Gray, Burke’s Dramatic Theory of Politics (Aldershot, 1988), in particular pp. 6–8 and Lia Guerra, ‘ “The great theatre of the world”: Edmund Burke’s dramatic perspective’, in L. M. Crisafulli and C. Pietropoli (eds), The Language of Performance in British Romanticism (Bern, 2008), pp. 195–9. Notably, Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) is pervaded by references to the theatre. Among the rich critical literature that explores the relationship between the orator’s theatrical style and his counterrevolutionary argument, see, for example, Christopher Reid, ‘Burke’s tragic muse: Sarah Siddons and the “feminization” of the Reflections’, in S. Blakemore (ed.), Burke and the French Revolution: Bicentennial Essays (Athens, GA, and London, 1992), pp. 1–27; Frans De Bruyn, ‘Theater and counter-theater in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France’, in R. DeMaria (ed.), British Literature 1640–1789: A Critical Reader (Oxford, 1999), pp. 271–86 and Anne Mallory, ‘Burke, boredom, and the theater of counterrevolution’, PMLA cxviii/2 (2003), pp. 224–38.

22 See Bullard, Edmund Burke, p. 20.

23 For a discussion of this famous scene and how it was represented by contemporaries, see, among others, Gillian Russell, ‘Burke’s dagger: theatricality, politics and print culture in the 1790s’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies xx (1997), pp. 1–16; Bullard, Edmund Burke, pp. 20–1 and Reid, Imprison’d Wranglers, p. 227.

24 Ian Haywood, Bloody Romanticism: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776–1832 (Basingstoke, 2006), pp. 141–2.

25 I borrow this expression from Robert W. Jones, Literature, Gender and Politics in Britain during the War for America 1770–1785 (Cambridge, 2011), p. 72.

26 Burke, Writing and Speeches, iii, p. 356.

27 Haywood, Bloody Romanticism, p. 157.

28 Burke, Writing and Speeches, iii, p. 356.

29 Ibid., p. 358.

30 Ibid., p. 361.

31 Ibid., p. 358.

32 Burke, Writing and Speeches, iii, pp. 363–4.

33 See Luke Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime (Cambridge, 2003), p. 183. Gibbons offers a detailed analysis of the McCrea episode; see pp. 183–93.

34 Burke, Writing and Speeches, vi, p. 421.

35 I take this comment from Paul Langford, ‘Burke, Edmund (1729/30–1797)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

36 Langford, ‘Burke, Edmund (1729/30–1797)’.

37 Cone, ‘Edmund Burke’s library’, p. 165.

38 Other texts on the Indian subcontinent and the relationship between Britain and India included in the catalogue of sale of Burke’s library are: Maurice’s Indian Antiquities (no date is provided); On Indian Stock (1764–6) by Lord Clive and Johnstone; Ives’s Voyage from England to India (1773); Macpherson’s History of the East India Company (1779); Reports Relative to the Affairs in India (1781); Debates on the East India Bill (1784); Debates on Pitt’s East India Bill (1784); Papers Relating to the Nabob of Arcot and Rajah of Tanjore (1785); Transactions in India (1786); Correspondence in India between the Country Powers and East India Company (1787); Raynal’s History of the East and West Indies, by Justamond (1788); and Manuscript Papers Relating to India. Proceedings of the Governor-General and Council in Consequence of the Insurrection at Rungpore (no date is provided). See Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons, viii, pp. 183–240 and Catalogue of a Library of Books Late the Property of the Rt. Hon. Ed. Burke.

39 Burke, Writings and Speeches, vi, p. 20. Burke’s detailed speech on the wide diversities among Indian cultures and religions performed on the first day of his ‘Speech on the Opening of the Impeachment’ attests to the Anglo-Irish orator’s avid interest in India. See ibid., pp. 300–12.

40 For a discussion of Burke’s devotion to the interests of Indians, see, in particular, P. J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (Oxford, 1965), pp. 186–7.

41 Frederick G. Whelan, Edmund Burke and India: Political Morality and Empire (Pittsburgh, PA, 1996), p. 303. Among the vast number of studies exploring the deep affinities between Burke’s and Cicero’s political thought, see, in particular, Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago and London, 1953), pp. 295; 321; Reed Browning, ‘The origin of Burke’s ideas revisited’, Eighteenth-Century Studies xviii/1 (1984), pp. 57–71 and Iain Hampsher-Monk, ‘Rhetoric and opinion in the politics of Edmund Burke’, History of Political Thought ix (1988), pp. 455–84 (p. 459). More recently, Gary Remer has studied Cicero’s anticipation of modern representation in the writings of theorists of political representation, including Burke. See Gary Remer, ‘The classical orator as political representative: Cicero and the modern concept of representation’, The Journal of Politics lxxii/4 (2010), pp. 1063–82 (in particular, pp. 1073–6).

42 Peter J. Stanlis, Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (Ann Arbor, MI, 1958), p. 36.

43 Burke, Writings and Speeches, vi, p. 350.

44 Ibid., p. 268.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid., pp. 346; 350; 28.

47 This resemblance has been noted by H. V. Canter: see H. V. Canter, ‘The impeachment of Verres and Hastings: Cicero and Burke’, The Classical Journal ix (1914), pp. 199–211 (p. 209). For a definition of ‘geographical morality’, see Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, 2005), p. 77.

48 Burke, Writings and Speeches, vi, p. 346.

49 Cicero is referring here to Verres’s unjust promulgation of edicts governing inheritances. Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Verrine Orations, trans. L. H. G. Greenwood, 2 vols (London and Cambridge, MA, 1966).

50 Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings, p. 13.

51 Bullard, Edmund Burke, p. 141.

52 Burke, Correspondence, vi, p. 46. To Charles-Jean-François Depont (November 1789).

53 Remarks on the Policy of the Allies with Respect to France (1793), in Burke, Writings and Speeches, viii, p. 461.

54 Quoted in O’Brien, The Great Melody, p. 431.

55 F. P. Lock, ‘Burke’s life’ in D. Dwan and C. J. Insole (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke (Cambridge, 2012), p. 24.

56 For an overview of the caricatures of Burke and his Reflections, see Nicholas K. Robinson, Edmund Burke, pp. 136–70.

57 Burke, Correspondence, vi, p. 183. Pierre Gaëton Dupont to Edmund Burke (30 November 1790). For a fuller discussion of the contemporary reception of Burke’s Reflections, see, in particular, F. P. Lock, Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1985), pp. 132–65.

58 See Walter Sichel, Sheridan (Boston and New York, 1909), p. 404.

59 Andrew Rudd, Sympathy and India in British Literature, 1770–1830 (Basingstoke, 2011), p. 26.

60 For a comment on the expensive garments worn by Hastings in his 1766–8 portrait, see Aileen Ribeiro, The Gallery of Fashion (Princeton, NJ, 2000), p. 124.

61 Hermione De Almeida and George H. Gilpin, Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India (Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2005), p. 110.

62 P. J. Marshall, ‘Hastings, Warren (1732–1818)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

63 According to the sale catalogue of Hastings’s, library, his collection of Latin authors included: Cicero’s Orationes (1684); Horace’s Art of Poetry (1783); Horace Translated by Boscawen (1795); Works of Horace, translated into Prose (1787); Lucani Pharsalia (1760); Terentius, accesserunt variae Lectiones (1751); Terence’s Comedies (1768); Virgil Translated into Blank Verse (1794); Virgilius, a Heyne (1793); Virgil’s Works, Translated by Warton (1778); Virgile, par Delille (1804). See Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons, viii, pp. 243–76.

64 See Bernstein, Dawning of the Raj, p. 56.

65 As P. J. Marshall explains, the fortune amassed by the Governor-General of Bengal was not large, but still a sizable one. Hastings lost most of his fortune ‘by his generosity, carelessness and extravagance’. P. J. Marshall, ‘The personal fortune of Warren Hastings’, The Economic History Review xvii/2 (1964), pp. 284–300 (p. 299). At the end of the trial, in 1795, Hastings pleaded poverty. In spite of the annuity granted to him by the East India Company, he left at his death several debts unpaid.

66 Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ, 1996), p. 24.

67 The sketch is mentioned in P. J. Marshall, ‘Hastings, Warren (1732–1818)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

68 De Almeida and Gilpin, Indian Renaissance, p. 109.

69 See P. J. Marshall, ‘The making of an imperial icon: the case of Warren Hastings’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History xxvii/3 (1999), pp. 1–16 (pp. 7–8); Sudipta Sen, ‘Imperial subjects on trial: on the legal identity of Britons in late eighteenth-century India’, Journal of British Studies xlv/3 (2006), pp. 532–55 (p. 544); and Michael S. Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India 1770–1880 (Basingstoke, 2007), p. 20.

70 P. J. Marshall, ‘Warren Hastings as scholar and patron’, in A. Whiteman, J. S. Bromley and P. G. M. Dickson (eds), Statesmen, Scholars and Merchants: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Literature presented to Dame Lucy Sutherland (Oxford, 1973), p. 246.

71 Feiling, Warren Hastings, p. 236. See also S. N. Mukherjee, Sir William Jones: A Study in Eighteenth-Century British Attitudes to India (London, 1987), p. 73.

72 Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, A Code of Gentoo Laws, or, Ordinations of the Pundits, from a Persian Translation, Made from the Original, Written in the Shanscrit [sic] Language (London, 1776), pp. ix–x.

73 Quoted in Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, p. 70.

74 Quoted in Phiroze Vasunia, The Classics and Colonial India (Oxford, 2013), p. 3.

75 Ibid.

76 Mukherjee, Sir William Jones, p. 73.

77 Charles Wilkins, The Bhagvat-Geeta, or Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon; in Eighteen Lectures; with Notes (London, 1785), p. 10. The quotation is taken from a letter that Hastings wrote to Nathaniel Smith, Chairman of the East India Company, dated 4 October 1784. For an in-depth analysis of Hastings’s letter, see, among others, De Almeida and Gilpin, Indian Renaissance, pp. 112–14 and Vasunia, Classics and Colonial India, p. 243.

78 Jones’s study of Sanskrit and his formulation of the Indo-European family of languages is well documented. See, for example, Garland Cannon, The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones: Sir William Jones, the Father of Modern Linguistics (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 241–70; Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford, 1992), pp. 12–16; Michael J. Franklin, Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746–1794 (Oxford, 2011), pp. 1–42.

79 Jones asserted the linguistic ascendancy of Sanskrit, as well as its affinity with Greek and Latin, in his ‘Third Anniversary Discourse’ to the Asiatick Society (2 February 1786). See Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, p. 13.

80 Vasunia, Classics and Colonial India, p. 17. The citation is from Thomas R. Trautmann, quoted in ibid.

81 See Burke, Writings and Speeches, vi, pp. 79–91.

82 Ibid., p. 106.

83 For a discussion of the tensions between Hastings and Francis, see, in particular, Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2006), pp. 94–100.

3 Classical Oratory and Theatricality in the Trial against Warren Hastings

1 The Times (13 February 1788).

2 Ibid.

3 Daniel O’Quinn, Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London 1700–1800 (Baltimore, MD, 2005), p. 168.

4 For an overview of Lady Charlotte Schreiber’s fans and fan-leaves collection, see, in particular, Lionel Cust, Catalogue of the Collection of Fans and Fan-leaves Presented to the British Museum by Lady Charlotte Schreiber (London, 1893) and Charlotte Schreiber, Fans and Fan-leaves – English, Collected and Described by Lady Charlotte Schreiber, 2 vols (London, 1888).

5 MacIver Percival, The Fan Book (New York, 1921), p. 110.

6 Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2006), p. 87.

7 Glynis Ridley, ‘Sheridan’s courtroom dramas: the impeachment of Warren Hastings and the trial of the Bounty mutineers’, in J. E. Derochi and D. J. Ennis (eds), Richard Brinsley Sheridan: The Impresario in Political and Cultural Context (Lewisburg, PA, 2013), p. 178.

8 See, for instance, Siraj Ahmed, ‘The theater of the civilized self: Edmund Burke and the East India trials’, Representations, lxxviii (2002), pp. 28–55; Anna Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton, NJ, 2004), pp. 84–112; Dirks, The Scandal of Empire, pp. 87–131; O’Quinn, Staging Governance, pp. 164–257; Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ, 2005), pp. 74–5; Ridley, ‘Sheridan’s courtroom dramas’, pp. 177–90; Julie Stone Peters, ‘Theatricality, legalism, and the scenography of suffering: the trial of Warren Hastings and Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Pizarro’, Law and Literature, xviii (2006), pp. 15–45.

9 Lock has calculated that temporary stands could hold around 2,000 people. See F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke, Volume One: 1730–1784 and Volume Two: 1784–1797 (Oxford, 1998–2006), ii, pp. 149; 189, n. 136. This was not the first time that temporary stands had been constructed. The Office of Works, which built the wooden structure inside Westminster Hall, followed plans used on previous occasions.

10 Gilbert Elliot, Life and Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, ed. The Countess of Minto, 3 vols (London, 1874), i, p. 193. To Lady Elliot (13 February 1788).

11 Gerald Campbell, Edward and Pamela Fitzgerald; Being Some Account of their Lives, Compiled from the Letters of Those Who Knew Them (London, 1904), p. 41. The diary of Lady Sophia Fitzgerald is quoted by Lock, Edmund Burke, ii, p. 190.

12 Eddy Kent, Corporate Character: Representing Imperial Power in British India, 1786–1901 (Toronto, 2014), p. 44. Similar solemn processions into Westminster Hall had been held on the occasion of previous trials, such as that of Lawrence Earl Ferrers (1720–60) in 1760, and that of William Lord Byron, Baron Byron of Rochdale (1722–98) in 1765. For a detailed description of these processions, see Thomas Bayly Howell et al., A Complete Collection of State Trial and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors from the Earliest Period to the Present Time, 21 vols (London, 1816), xix, pp. 885–7 and 1177–8 respectively.

13 London Chronicle (13 February 1788). Quoted in Kent, Corporate Character, pp. 44–5. The London Chronicle’s account appears almost verbatim in Warren Hastings’s The History of the Trial of Warren Hastings, Esq. Late Governor General of Bengal (London, 1796), Part I, pp. 1–2.

14 The Gentleman’s Magazine: and Historical Chronicle. For the Year MDCCXCIX. Volume LXIX. Part the First (London, 1799), p. 76.

15 The Times (14 February 1788).

16 Morning Post and Daily Advertiser (14 February 1788). Emphasis original.

17 Elizabeth D. Samet, ‘A prosecutor and a gentleman: Edmund Burke’s idiom of impeachment’, ELH lxviii/2 (2001), pp. 397–418. For extensive comments on the importance of Burney’s diary to understand the theatrical atmosphere of the impeachment, see also Betsy Bolton, ‘Imperial sensibilities, colonial ambivalence: Edmund Burke and Frances Burney’, ELH lxxii/4 (2005), pp. 871–99 and O’Quinn, Staging Governance, pp. 222–57.

18 Frances Burney, Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay, ed. C. Barrett, 7 vols (London, 1842–6), iv, p. 63.

19 Jean Marsden, ‘Shakespeare and sympathy’, in P. Sabor and P. Yachnin (eds), Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century (Aldershot, 2008), p. 33.

20 James Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, 2 vols (Philadelphia, 1825), i, p. 80.

21 Jeffrey N. Cox, ‘Spots of time: the structure of the dramatic evening in the theater of Romanticism’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language xvi (1999), pp. 403–25 (p. 405).

22 Burney, Diary and Letters, iv, p. 84.

23 See Lock, Edmund Burke, ii, pp. 149–50.

24 Catherine Eagleton, The Collections of Sarah Sophia Banks (Annual Lecture 2013, Sir Joseph Banks Society). Available at http://www.joseph-banks.org.uk/members/research-papers/annual-lecture-2013/ (accessed 13 January 2017). Besides a substantial collection of printed ephemera, Miss Banks assembled a significant numismatic collection. For an overview of the latter, see Catherine Eagleton, ‘Collecting African money in Georgian London: Sarah Sophia Banks and her collection of coins’, Museum History Journal vi/1 (2013), pp. 23–38. For a survey of Miss Banks’s collecting practices, see Arlene Leis, ‘Cutting, arranging, and pasting: Sarah Sophia Banks as collector’, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal ix/1 (2014), pp. 127–40.

25 Anthony Pincott, ‘The book tickets of Miss Sarah Sophia Banks (1744–1818)’, The Bookplate Journal, II/1 (March 2004), pp. 3–30 (p. 13). Although it focuses on Miss Banks’s collection of book tickets, Pincott’s article also offers an excellent overview of Sarah Sophia’s life and her collecting interests.

26 St. James’s Chronicle: or, British Evening Post (16–19 February 1788).

27 London Chronicle (12–14 February 1788).

28 In the tickets collected by Sarah Sophia we read, for example, the names of Hampden (BM J,9.36), Cardiff (BM J,9.39), Jersey (BM J,9.71) and Stanhope (BM J,9.79).

29 The practice of changing tickets ‘in colour as well as in the form of the engraving, so that forgery is rendered impracticable’ is confirmed by a report in the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (20 February 1788).

30 See Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2010), p. 105, n. 38.

31 Edmund Burke, The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. T. W. Copeland et al., 10 vols (Cambridge, 1958–78), v, p. 380. To Sir Peter Burrell (February 1788).

32 Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (20 February 1788).

33 For a detailed description of James Sayers’s For the Trial of Warren Ha[stings]/Seventh Day and James Gillray’s Impeachment ticket. For the trial of W-RR-NH-ST-NGS Esqr, see Lock, Edmund Burke, ii, p. 150 and Nicholas K. Robinson, Edmund Burke: A Life in Caricature (New Haven, CT, and London, 1996), p. 101. See also the British Museum online description and curator’s comments. Available at http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1627140&partId=1&searchText=impeachment%20ticket (accessed 16 January 2016) and http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1461440&partId=1&searchText=james+sayers+ticket&page=1 (accessed 16 January 2016), for Gillray’s print and Sayer’s parody respectively.

34 The World (19 February 1788). Italics original.

35 Lock, Edmund Burke, ii, p. 150.

36 Burke, Correspondence, v, p. 380. To Sir Peter Burrell (February 1788). Burke’s letter to Burrell is mentioned by Locke, Edmund Burke, ii, p. 150, n. 27.

37 Ibid.

38 Jeffrey N. Cox, ‘Spots of time’, p. 411.

39 Sophie von La Roche, Sophie in London, 1786; Being the Diary of Sophie v. la Roche. Translated from the German, with an Introductory Essay, by Clare Williams. With a Foreword by G.M. Trevelyan (London, 1933), p. 133.

40 BM J,9.1; BM J,9.2; BM J,9.3; BM J,9.4; BM J,9.5. The hand that wrote the annotations added on BM J,9.3 is definitely neither that of Sir William, nor that of Sarah Sophia. The other tickets bear no inscription. As with official passes, also the tickets to enter the box of Sir William Chambers were printed in different colours: green (BM J,9.1), blue (BM J,9.2; BM J,9.3; BM J,9.4) and brown (BM J,9.5).

41 In 1770, Sir William Chambers was appointed riddare (knight) of the order of the Polar Star by Gustav III of Sweden. Consequently, George III permitted Sir William to adopt the address of English knighthood.

42 Or so it seems, for on the back of a ticket bearing the inscription ‘Great Chamberlains Box’ (BM J,9.20), Sarah Sophia added the date ‘Feb. 12. 1788’. Peeresses and their daughters only were entitled to seats in Westminster Hall (later this prerogative was extended also to the wives of the eldest sons of peers). Miss Banks did not enjoy this privilege, nor did Lady Banks, as Sir Joseph was not a member of the Lords.

43 On the back of this ticket Sarah Sophia wrote: ‘Feb. 12. 1788’. Presumably, the ticket was given to Sir Joseph on that day.

44 Burney, Diary and Letters, iv, p. 110.

45 William Eden, The Journal and Correspondence of William, Lord Auckland, 2 vols (London, 1861), i, p. 469. Mr. Storer to Mr. Eden (22 February 1788).

46 Elliot, Life and Letters, i, p. 205. To Lady Elliot (3 June 1788).

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid., p. 197. To Lady Elliot (3 March 1788).

49 Nicoll Allardyce, The Garrick Stage (Manchester, 1980), p. 82.

50 ‘The worst crush of the century’ – White continues – ‘was at the Little Theatre in February 1794. Fifteen died when someone tripped descending a staircase to the pit’. Jerry White, London in the Eighteenth Century: A Great and Monstrous Thing (London, 2012), pp. 308–9.

51 London Chronicle (3–5 June 1788).

52 Elliot, Life and Letters, i, p. 206. To Lady Elliot (3 June 1788).

53 Letters Written by the Late Right Honourable Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, to His Son; with Some Account of His Life, 4 vols (London, 1815), i (8 February 1746), p. 284.

54 Paddy Bullard, ‘Rhetoric and eloquence: the language of persuasion’, in J. A. Harris (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2013), p. 92.

55 This translation is provided in a footnote.

56 Joseph Addison, The Spectator, ed. D. F. Bond, 5 vols (Oxford, 1965), iii, p. 522.

57 David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (Edinburgh, 1742), I.XIII.19.

58 Ibid., I.XIII.2; I.XIII.6. For a thorough discussion of this essay, see, in particular, Adam Potkay, The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume (Ithaca, NY, 1994), pp. 24–30.

59 Paul Goring, The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge, 2005), p. 38. Italics original. For a recent survey of the rhetorical treatises and cultural practices that constituted the elocutionary movement see also Paul Goring, ‘The elocutionary movement in Britain’, in M. J. MacDonald (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies (Oxford, 2017).

60 James Burgh, The Art of Speaking (London, 1761), p. 2. Italics original. Burgh’s detailed manual had eight English and ten American editions. For a comment on this text, see Peter De Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford, 1989), p. 159.

61 John Ward, A System of Oratory, Delivered in a Course of Lectures Publicly Read at Gresham College, London, 2 vols (London, 1759), ii, 334.

62 Classical rhetoric has been the subject of innumerable publications. As far as Roman eloquence is concerned, an overview may be found in Roman Eloquence: Rhetoric in Society and Literature, ed. W. J. Dominik (London and New York, 1997); Joy Connolly, The State of Speech: Rhetoric and Political Thought in Ancient Rome (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, 2007); Form and Function in Roman Oratory, ed. D. H. Berry and A. Erskine (Cambridge, 2010); Catherine Steel, Roman Oratory (Cambridge, 2006); M. L. Clarke, Rhetoric at Rome: A Historical Survey (London, 1953), George Alexander Kennedy, The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World (Princeton, NJ, 1972); A Companion to Roman Rhetoric, ed. W. Dominik and J. Hall (Oxford, 2007).

63 The best commentary on Cicero’s De Oratore is still Anron D. Leeman, Harm Pinkster (and others), M. T. Cicero. De Oratore libri III. Kommentar, 5 vols (Heidelberg, 1981–2008). A selection of the rich bibliography on De Oratore includes: James M. May, Trials of Character: The Eloquence of Ciceronian Ethos (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 1988); Elaine Fantham, The Roman World of Cicero’s De Oratore (Oxford, 2004); Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero. On the Ideal Orator (De Oratore), ed. and trans. J. M. May and J. Wisse (New York and Oxford, 2001); Jon Hall, ‘Persuasive design in Cicero’s De Oratore’, Phoenix xlviii/3 (1994), pp. 210–25.

64 For a detailed discussion of this acclaimed speech, see, in particular, Lock, Edmund Burke, ii, pp. 114–18 and P. J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (Oxford, 1965), pp. 52–3.

65 Additional Supplement to the Calcutta Gazette (21 June 1787).

66 George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. L. A. Marchand, 13 vols (London, 1973–94), iii, p. 239 (17, 18 December 1813).

67 Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago and London, 1992), pp. 53–4. According to Lock, this inordinate price is not believable. See Lock, Edmund Burke, ii, p. 190, n. 137. Sir Gilbert Elliot gives the more credible sum of twenty-five guineas. See Elliot, Life and Letters, i, p. 204. To Lady Elliot (28 May 1788).

68 Ibid., pp. 204–5. To Lady Elliot (2 June 1788).

69 The letter is dated 25 April 1788 but was published in The World issue for 14 May 1788. Emphasis in the original. Burke himself wrote to Sir Peter Burrell to request ‘two or three Tickets for Sheridans [sic] day, in addition to my personal Stock’. See Burke, Correspondence, v, p. 401. To Sir Peter Burrell (ante 3 June 1788).

70 Christopher Reid, Edmund Burke and the Practice of Political Writing (Dublin, 1985), p. 98.

71 Ibid.

72 Thomas Moore, Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 2 vols (London, 1825), i, p. 452. For Sheridan’s resistance to the commercial circulation of his speeches and writings, see Frank Donoghue, ‘Avoiding the “cooler tribunal of the study”: Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s writer’s block and late eighteenth-century print culture’, ELH lxviii/4 (2001), pp. 831–56.

73 See, for example, James M. May, ‘Ciceronian oratory in context’, in J. M. May (ed.), Brill’s Companion to Cicero: Oratory and Rhetoric (Leiden, 2002), p. 59. For the close similarities existent between orators and actors, see in particular De Orat. I.18; I.118; I.125; I.128–9; I.156; I.251; II.242; II.244; II.251–2; III. 83. Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton, 2 vols (London and Cambridge, MA, 1959). Brut. 290. Marcus Tullius Cicero, Brutus, trans. G. L. Hendrickson, Orator, trans. H. M. Hubbell (London and Cambridge, MA, 1962). Inst. I.11.1–3. Marcus Fabius Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed. and trans. D. A. Russell, (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2001). Unless otherwise stated, further references to Cicero’s and Quintilian’s texts, as well as their translation into English, are to these editions.

74 Orat. I.156. The translation is mine. In his account of Cicero’s life, Plutarch stresses how both the great Roman orator as well as his Greek counterpart, Demosthenes, had frequently turned to theatre. See Plutarch’s Life of Cicero, 4–6. Similarities between orators and actors in ancient Rome have been discussed by numerous scholars. Cicero’s familiarity with drama is amply demonstrated by numerous references with which his corpus abounds. For references to theatre and drama, see Frederick Warren Wright, Cicero and the Theater (Northampton, MA, 1931); Emanuele Narducci, Cicerone e l’eloquenza romana: Retorica e progetto culturale (Rome and Bari, 1997), pp. 82–7 and Alberto Cavarzere, Gli arcani dell’oratore: alcuni appunti sull’actio dei Romani (Rome and Padua, 2011), pp. 126–41. For comedy, in particular, see Jerzy Axer, The Style and the Composition of Cicero’s Speech ‘Pro Q. Roscio Comoedo’: Origin and Function (Warsaw, 1979); Katherine A. Geffcken, Comedy in the Pro Caelio, with an Appendix on the In Clodium et Curionem (Leiden, 1973); Ann Vasaly, ‘The masks of rhetoric: Cicero’s Pro Roscio Amerino’, Rhetorica iii (1985), pp. 1–20; Joseph J. Hughes, Comedic Borrowing in Selected Orations of Cicero (Ph.D. Diss. University of Iowa, 1987) and Joseph J. Hughes, ‘Inter tribunal and scaenam: comedy and rhetoric in Rome’, in W. J. Dominik (ed.), Roman Eloquence, pp. 182–97.

75 See William Batstone, ‘The drama of rhetoric at Rome’, in E. Gunderson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rhetoric (Cambridge, 2009), p. 212.

76 Ibid.

77 Inst. VI.2.35: Vidi ego saepe histriones atque comoedos, cum ex aliquo graviore actu personam deposuissent, flentes adhuc egredi. Quod si in alienis scriptis sola pronuntiatio ita falsis accendit adfectibus, quid nos faciemus, qui illa cogitare debemus ut moveri periclitantium vice possimus? Emphasis in the original translation.

78 De Orat. III.56.214.

79 ‘… when the speaker rises the whole throng will give a sign for silence, then expressions of assent, frequent applause; laughter when he wills it, or if he wills, tears; so that a mere passer-by observing from a distance, though quite ignorant of the case in question, will recognize that he is succeeding and that a Roscius is on the stage’ (Brut. 290: … cum surgat is qui dicturus sit, significetur a corona silentium, deinde crebrae assensiones, multae admirationes; risus cum velit, cum velit fletus, ut qui haec procul videat, etiam si quid agat nesciat, at placere tamen et in scaena esse Roscium intellegat).

80 Stone Peters, ‘Theatricality, legalism, and the scenography of suffering’, p. 27. Commenting on the Letters from Simpkin, Stone Peters notes that ‘Rather than causing the audience to mistake theater for reality (as the truly artful actor does), the managers have caused the audience disturbingly to mistake reality for theater’. Ibid., p. 27.

81 Ralph Broome, Letters from Simpkin the Second to his Dear Brother in Wales, Containing an Humble Description of the Trial of Warren Hastings, Esq. From the Commencement to the Close of the Sessions in 1789 (London, 1789), p. 19. Emphasis original.

82 Ibid., p. 7. Emphasis original.

83 Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, CA, 1993), p. 81.

84 John Hill, The Actor: A Treatise on the Art of Playing (London, 1750), p. 106. Emphasis in the original. Horace’s prescription is in the Ars Poetica 102–3: ‘If you would have me weep, you must first feel grief yourself’ (si vis me flere, dolendum est | primum ipsi tibi). Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (London and Cambridge, MA, 1966), pp. 458–9. An admirably detailed commentary on the Ars Poetica is still C. O. Brink, Horace on Poetry: The ‘Ars Poetica’ (Cambridge, 1971). For an overview of the vast bibliography on the Ars Poetica, see Andrew Laird, ‘The Ars Poetica’, in S. Harrison (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Horace (Cambridge, 2007), p. 143. For a discussion of the reception of the Ars Poetica, see Leon Golden, ‘Reception of Horace’s Ars Poetica’, in G. Davis (ed.), A Companion to Horace (Oxford, 2010), pp. 391–413.

85 Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. L. Ferreira-Buckley and S. M. Halloran (Carbondale, IL, 2005), p. 361.

86 Ibid., p. 363.

87 Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings, p. 141. For an overview of the prosecution of Sir Elijah Impey, see ibid., pp. 60–2; 132–42.

88 Burke, Correspondence, v, pp. 368–9. To Lady Elliot (13 December 1787). For a recent comment on this passage, see Richard Bourke, Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton, NJ, 2015), p. 673.

89 Elliot, Life and Letters, i, p. 177. To Lady Elliot (13 December 1787). Italics original.

90 De Orat. II.188. See also Quintilian, Inst. VI.2.26: ‘The heart of the matter as regards arousing emotions, so far as I can see, lies in being moved by them oneself’ (Summa, enim, quantum ego quidem sentio, circa movendos adfectus in hoc posita est, ut moveamur ipsi).

91 De Orat. II.190: Ut enim nulla materies tam facilis ad exardescendum est, quae nisi admoto igni ignem conciper possit, sic nulla mens est tam ad comprehendendam vim oratoris parata, quae possit incendi, nisi ipse inflammatus ad eam et ardens accesserit. See also, for example, Orat. 132: ‘and I am sure that the audience would never be set on fire unless the words that reached him were fiery’ (nec unquam is qui audiret incenderetur, nisi ardens ad eum perveniret oratio).

92 A fuller discussion of Sir Gilbert reading Sheridan may be found in David Francis Taylor, Theatres of Opposition: Empire, Revolution, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Oxford, 2012), pp. 82–8.

93 Elliot, Life and Letters, i, pp. 208; 210. To Lady Elliot (5 June 1788).

94 Ibid., pp. 208–9. Italics original.

95 Speeches of the Managers and Counsel in the Trial of Warren Hastings, ed. E. Bond, 4 vols (London, 1859–61), i, pp. 493–4. Emphasis added.

96 For an in-depth analysis of this passage, see, in particular, Taylor, Theatres of Opposition, pp. 100–1.

97 Elliot, Life and Letters, i, p. 209. To Lady Elliot (5 June 1788).

98 Ibid., p. 214. To Lady Elliot (7 June 1788).

99 Ibid., p. 213.

100 Speeches of the Managers and Counsel in the Trial of Warren Hastings, i, p. 562. Emphasis added.

101 Elliot does not mention Sheridan’s third oration. After speaking for almost two and a half hours, Sheridan was taken ill. As a result, the proceedings were abruptly suspended. Lock wonders whether Sheridan’s illness may be seen as a (perhaps unconscious) imitation of Burke’s similar indisposition after the Rangpur speech, also on his third day of speaking. See Lock, Edmund Burke, ii, p. 188.

102 Elliot, Life and Letters, i, p. 218. To Lady Elliot (14 June 1788).

103 The Times (14 June 1788).

104 Ibid.

105 Julie A. Carlson, ‘Trying Sheridan’s Pizarro’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, xxxviii/3–4 (1996), pp. 359–73 (p. 366).

106 Speeches of the Managers and Counsel in the Trial of Warren Hastings, i, p. 689.

107 O’Quinn, Staging Governance, p. 210.

108 Speeches of the Managers and Counsel in the Trial of Warren Hastings, i, p. 690.

109 Thomas Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution: Together with Two Dissertations on Language; and Some Other Tracts Relative to Those Subjects (London, 1762), p. 132.

110 Ibid., pp. 132–3.

111 Elliot, Life and Letters, i, p. 218. To Lady Elliot (14 June 1788).

112 Edward Gibbon, The Letters of Edward Gibbon, ed. J. E. Norton, 3 vols (New York, 1956), iii, p. 109.

113 To George Nesbitt Thompson (17 July 1788), in S. Arthur Strong, ‘Warren Hastings’s own account of his impeachment’, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 110 (1904–5), pp. 89–95 (p. 93).

114 Ridley, ‘Sheridan’s courtroom dramas’, p. 181.

115 For a discussion of Garrick’s acting style, see, for example, Shearer West, The Image of the Actor: Verbal and Visual Representation in the Age of Garrick and Kemble (London, 1991), pp. 58–68.

116 Thomas Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, 2 vols (London, 1780), ii, p. 339. This passage is quoted in Reid, Edmund Burke, p. 100. For another example of Burke’s high esteem for Garrick, see Paul Hindson and Tim Gray, Burke’s Dramatic Theory of Politics (Aldershot, 1988), p. 58.

117 Jim Davis, ‘Spectatorship’, in J. Moody and D. O’Quinn (eds), The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730–1830 (Cambridge, 2007), p. 59.

118 Elliot, Life and Letters, i, pp. 201–2. To Lady Elliot (10 May 1788).

119 Ibid., p. 202.

120 The demand for an immediate engagement of the audience’s sympathy in eighteenth-century British theatre needs to be placed within the context of the contemporary culture of sensibility. A good survey of sensibility in the Romantic period may be found in Julie Ellison, ‘Sensibility’, in J. Faflak and J. M. Wright (eds), A Handbook of Romanticism Studies (Oxford, 2012), pp. 37–53. For a discussion of the vocabulary of the sentimental (sympathy, sentimentality, sensibility) and how it underwent significant alterations throughout the eighteenth century, see Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore, MD, 2006), pp. 14–36. John Mullan offers an analysis of the ‘signs’ of sentiment, especially in the fiction of novelists such as Richardson, Sterne, Henry Brooke and Henry Mackenzie in Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1988). For a discussion of the importance of sympathy in the acting of the period, see Leigh Woods, Garrick Claims the Stage: Acting as Social Emblem in Eighteenth-Century England (Westport, CT, 1984); for an overview of sentimental drama, see Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (New York, 1986), in particular pp. 32–48.

121 May, ‘Ciceronian oratory in context’, p. 61. In his Orator (Orat. 130), describing his own ability to arouse pity (miseratio), Cicero proudly observes how ‘even though there were several speakers on our side, they always let me make the closing speech. I owe my reputation for excellence on such occasions, not to any natural gift, but to a genuine sympathy’ (etiam si plures dicebamus, perorationem mihi tamen omnes relinquebant; in quo ut viderer excellere non ingenio sed dolore assequebar). Among the several instances of highly pathetic Ciceronian perorations, see, for instance, Pro Milone (On Behalf of Milo) 105: ‘But no more. Indeed I can no longer speak for tears, and my client forbids that tears should plead his cause’ (Sed finis sit; neque enim prae lacrimis iam loqui possum, et hic se lacrimis defendi vetat). Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Speeches: Pro T. Annio Milone – In L. Calpurnium Pisonem – Pro M. Aemilio Scauro – Pro M. Fonteio – Pro C. Rabirio Postumo – Pro M. Marcello – Pro Ligario – Pro Rege Deiotaro, trans. N. H. Watts (London and Cambridge, MA, 1964), pp. 122–3. For other examples of passages of high emotion, see May, ‘Ciceronian oratory in context’, p. 61, n. 31.

122 De Orat. II.45.189: Neque fieri potest, ut doleat is, qui audit, ut oderit, ut invideat, ut pertimescat aliquid, ut ad fletum misericordiamque deducatur, nisi omnes illi motus, quos orator adhibere volet iudici, in ipso oratore impressi esse atque inusti videbuntur. Quintilian, as well, observed and recommended: ‘Nothing but fire can burn, nothing but water can make us wet, and “nothing gives colour but what colour has”. The first thing, then, is that those feelings should be strong in us which we want to be strong in the judge, and that we should ourselves be moved before we try to move others’ (Inst. VI.2.28: nec incendit nisi ignis nec madescimus nisi umore ‘nec res ulla dat alteri colorem| quem non ipsa habet’. Primum est igitur ut apud nos valeant ea quae valere apud iudicem volumus, adficiamurque antequam adficere conemur).

123 In the late Republic, persuasive appeals to the audience were based both on emotions and on character. The latter was indeed extremely important in the social and political milieu of Cicero’s Rome, as we are explicitly told in De Orat. II.182: ‘A potent factor in success, then, is for the characters, principles, conduct and course of life […] of those who are to plead cases’ (Valet igitur multum ad vincendum probari mores et instituta et facta et vitam eorum, qui agent causas). The best account of pathos and ethos (emotion and character) as crucial means of persuasion is still Jakob Wisse, Ethos and Pathos from Aristotle to Cicero (Amsterdam, 1989). See, also, Alberto Cavarzere, ‘La voce delle emozioni: “Sincerità” e “simulazione” nella teoria retorica dei Romani’, in G. Petrone (ed.), Le passioni della retorica (Palermo, 2004), pp. 11–28.

124 Brut. 89: cum duae sint in oratore laudes, una subtiliter disputandi ad docendum, altera graviter agendi ad animos audientium permovendos, multoque plus proficiat is qui inflammet iudicem quam ille qui doceat.

125 A thorough account of the Rangpur episode can be found in Lock, Edmund Burke, ii, pp. 158–61.

126 Edmund Burke, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. P. Langford et al., 9 vols to date (Oxford, 1981–), vi, p. 268.

127 Burke, Correspondence, v, p. 372. To Philip Francis (circa 3 January 1788).

128 Bourke, Empire and Revolution, p. 672.

129 Lock, Edmund Burke, ii, p. 160.

130 Burke, Writings and Speeches, vi, pp. 410–27.

131 Ibid., p. 269.

132 Ibid., p. 421. Sara Suleri pays close attention to this episode. See Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, pp. 60–1. Among others, see, also, Michael J. Franklin, ‘Accessing India: orientalism, anti–“Indianism” and the rhetoric of Jones and Burke’, in T. Fulford and P. J. Kitson (eds), Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 53–6.

133 Burke, Writings and Speeches, vi, p. 420.

134 London Chronicle (16–19 February 1788).

135 Eden, The Journal and Correspondence, i, p. 469. Mr. Storer to Mr. Eden (22 February 1788). The daughter of Tantalus and Dione or Euryanassa, and wife of the Theban king Amphion, Niobe had seven sons and seven daughters, who were all exterminated by Apollo and Artemis. Overcome by pain, Niobe turned into a rock, with tears incessantly flowing from it. The best-known source of Niobe’s myth is Ovid’s Metamorphoses (6.146–316).

136 Edmund Burke, Revolutionary Writings, ed. I. Hampsher-Monk (Cambridge, 2014), p. 83.

137 Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (19 February 1788). The same consideration appears verbatim in the London Chronicle (16–19 February 1788).

138 Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser (19 February 1788).

139 Elliot, Life and Letters, i, p. 178. To Lady Elliot (13 December 1787).

140 The Times (5 March 1788).

141 Burney, Diary and Letters, iv, p. 114.

142 Burke, Writings and Speeches, vi, p. 426.

143 The World (19 February 1788).

144 Ahmed, ‘The theater of the civilized self’, p. 44.

145 Stone Peters, ‘Theatricality, legalism, and the scenography of suffering’, p. 20.

146 Horace Walpole, Journal of the Reign of King George the Third, from the Year 1771 to 1783, 2 vols (London, 1859), i, p. 338.

4 Spectacles of Passion: Cicero’s In Verrem and Burke’s ‘Speech on the Opening of the Impeachment’

1 H. V. Canter, ‘The impeachment of Verres and Hastings: Cicero and Burke’, The Classical Journal ix (1914), pp. 199–211.

2 Geoffrey Carnall, ‘Burke as modern Cicero’, in G. Carnall and C. Nicholson (eds), The Impeachment of Warren Hastings: Papers from a Bicentenary Commemoration (Edinburgh, 1989), pp. 76–90.

3 See such studies as Edmund Burke, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. P. Langford et al., 9 vols to date (Oxford, 1981–), vi, pp. 28–30; Frederick G. Whelan’s Edmund Burke and India: Political Morality and Empire (Pittsburgh, PA, 1996), pp. 302–3; Philip Ayres’s Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 42–7; Margaret M. Miles’s Art as Plunder: The Ancient Origins of Debate about Cultural Property (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 302–7; Paddy Bullard’s Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 16–7; Andrew Rudd’s Sympathy and India in British Literature 1770–1830 (Basingstoke, 2011), p. 27; Eddy Kent, Corporate Character: Representing Imperial Power in British India, 1786–1901 (Toronto, 2014), pp. 47–50; and Richard Bourke, Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton, NJ, 2015), pp. 631–2.

4 The collection of Burke’s speeches pronounced against Hastings throughout the eight years of the trial is a massive work. It comprises, in fact, two volumes (VI and VII) and over one thousand pages of the Oxford edition.

5 I take this phrase from Burke, Writings and Speeches, vi, p. 264.

6 F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke, Volume One: 1730–84 and Volume Two: 1784–97 (Oxford, 1998–2006), ii, p. 154.

7 See ibid., p. 153. See also Burke, Writings and Speeches, vi, pp. 266–7.

8 Burke, Writings and Speeches, vii, p. 1.

9 ‘I was over-persuaded by Lord and Lady Amherst to go to the trial, and heard Burke’s famous oration of three hours and a quarter without intermission’ – Hannah More confessed to one of her sisters – ‘Such a splendid and powerful oration I never heard […]’. William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, 2 vols (New York, 1834), i, p. 287. The account refers to the speech pronounced by Burke on 18 February 1788. Similarly, Frances Burney recorded in her Diary how ‘His [Burke’s] opening had struck me with the highest admiration of his powers, from the eloquence, the imagination, the fire, the diversity of expression, and the ready flow of language, with which he seemed gifted, in a most superior manner, for any and every purpose to which rhetoric could lead. And […] when he related the particulars of those dreadful murders, he interested, he engaged, he at last overpowered me; I felt my cause lost. I could hardly keep on my seat. My eyes dreaded a single glance towards a man so accused as Mr. Hastings; I wanted to sink on the floor, that they might be saved so painful a sight. I had no hope he could clear himself; not another wish in his favour remained’. Frances Burney, Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay, ed. C. Barrett, 7 vols (London, 1842–6), iv, pp. 119–20. For an overview of contemporary opinions about Burke’s four-day speech, see Burke, Writings and Speeches, vi, pp. 459–60.

10 I follow the version provided in the Oxford edition.

11 Bullard, Edmund Burke, p. 19.

12 A full discussion of the transcription of Burke’s ‘Speech on the Opening of the Impeachment’ may be found in Burke, Writings and Speeches, vi, pp. 264–6. In this chapter, further references to Burke’s Writings and Speeches, vi, will be provided parenthetically in the text.

13 Christopher Reid, Edmund Burke and the Practice of Political Writing (Dublin, 1985), p. 129. See, also, Lock, Edmund Burke, ii, p. 152.

14 I take this quotation from Ayres, Classical Culture, p. 45. In fact, this sentence does not appear in the volumes of The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke edited by P. J. Marshall. Ayres derives it from The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (London, 1887).

15 Burke, Writings and Speeches, vii, pp. 662–3. According to M. L. Clarke, it is not credible that all Burke’s audience had read the Verrines. However, ‘that he himself had read them cannot be doubted’. Presumably, Burke read them in the original, while a student at Trinity College Dublin. See M. L. Clarke, ‘Non hominis nomen, sed eloquentiae’, in T. A. Dorey (ed.), Cicero (London, 1965), p. 101. Margaret M. Miles contends that Burke may also have read Cicero’s orations against Verres in his school days (as the expression ‘in our early education’ seems to suggest). See Miles, Art as Plunder, p. 305, n. 40.

16 Here, I utilize the terms ‘appropriation’ and ‘adaptation’ according to Lorna Hardwick’s definitions. See Lorna Hardwick, Reception Studies (Oxford, 2003), p. 9.

17 Ann Vasaly, ‘Cicero’s early speeches’, in J. M. May (ed.), Brill’s Companion to Cicero: Oratory and Rhetoric (Leiden, 2002), p. 89. A perceptive analysis of how Cicero publicly positioned himself on the question of judicial corruption and the senatorial monopoly of the juries can be found in Ann Vasaly, ‘Cicero, domestic politics, and the first action of the Verrines’, Classical Antiquity xxviii/1 (2009), pp. 101–37.

18 As soon as the trial of Verres came to an end, the lex Cornelia iudiciaria was abolished and replaced by the lex Aurelia iudicia (70 BC). This latter decreed that the juries of tribunals were to be equally drawn from senatores, equites and tribuni aerarii. For a survey of Roman tribunals, see, for example, Emanuele Narducci, Processi ai politici nella Roma antica (Rome and Bari, 1995), pp. 13–23.

19 Throughout the Actio Prima Cicero constantly alludes to the close relationship between money (pecunia) and Verres’s hope to be acquitted by bribing the judges. See, for example, Verr. I.2: ‘Gaius Verres appears, to stand his trial before you […] already acquitted, according to his own confident assertions, by his vast fortune’ (reus in iudicium adductus est C. Verres […] pecuniae magnitudine sua spe et praedicatione absolutus); I.10: ‘he looked upon his money as his only possible means of escape’ (omnem rationem salutis in pecunia constitueret). See also Verr. I.3–4; I.16–17 and I.19. Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Verrine Orations, trans. L. H. G. Greenwood, 2 vols (London and Cambridge, MA, 1966). Further references to Cicero’s Verrines are to this edition.

20 The adjective divinitus – and, therefore, the idea that the trial against Verres is a heaven-sent opportunity – appears repeatedly throughout the Verrines. See, for example, I.43 and II.3.178.

21 Cicero often refers to the people present at the trial. See, for instance, Verr. I.4; I.15; I.48 and I.54. Among the several passages in which Cicero refers to foreign peoples, see, for example, II.4.64 and II.4.68.

22 Whelan, Edmund Burke and India, p. 303.

23 See also the following expressions: ‘crimes not against forms, but against those eternal laws of justice’ (p. 275); ‘you are not bound by any rules whatever except those of natural, immutable and substantial justice’ (p. 276); ‘God forbid that […] it should be supposed that that narrow partiality, so destructive of justice, should guide us’ (p. 278); ‘enlarge the circle of justice to the necessities of the Empire’ (p. 279); ‘Your Lordships will exercise the great plenary powers with which you are invested in a manner that will do honour to your justice, to the protecting justice of this Kingdom’ (p. 279); ‘those reports […] have only got abroad to be defeated and entirely overturned by the humanity, simplicity, dignity and nobleness of your Lordships’ justice’ (p. 279). Emphasis added.

24 Ann Vasaly, Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory (Berkeley, CA, 1993), p. 164. For an analysis of the Roman point that, the East conquered, Rome is herself conquered by oriental licentiousness, see, among others, Erich S. Gruen, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome, 2 vols (Berkeley, CA, 1984), i, pp. 260–6.

25 See, for example, Verr. I.5: ‘as he has been quite open in amassing his stolen wealth, so he has revealed quite clearly to everybody the plans and schemes by which he aims at corrupting his judges’ (ut apertus in corripiendis pecuniis fuit, sic in spe corrumpendi iudicii perspicua sua consilia conatusque omnibus fecit) and I.38–9. Cicero repeatedly warns the Senate against the perils of bribery, as in I.36, where he passionately thunders against ‘all those who are in the habit of depositing or receiving deposits for bribery, of undertaking to offer or offering bribes, or of acting as agents or go-betweens for the corruption of judges in our courts’ (qui aut deponere aut accipere aut recipere aut polliceri aut sequestres aut interpretes corrumpendi iudicii solent esse).

26 Burke’s preoccupation that the Lords may be corrupted is evident from a number of expressions. See, for example: ‘My Lords, I must confess that […] the Commons do not approach your Lordships’ Bar without some considerable degree of anxiety. I hope and trust that the magnitude and interests which we have in hand will reconcile some degree of solicitude for the event with the undoubting confidence with which we impose ourselves upon your Lordships’ justice’ (p. 270).

27 Emphasis original.

28 Emphasis original.

29 David Hume, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, 4 vols (Basil, 1793), ii, p. 28. For a general discussion of maladministration in the provinces and the close political affinity between British and Roman imperial practice, see Peter N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 190–4.

30 Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2010), p. 13.

31 A critical analysis of The Nabob may be found in Daniel O’Quinn’s Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800 (Baltimore, MD, 2005), pp. 43–73 and Rudd, Sympathy and India, pp. 37–9.

32 Rudd, Sympathy and India, p. 35.

33 Quoted in Philip Lawson and Jim Phillips, ‘ “Our Execrable Banditti”: perceptions of nabobs in mid-eighteenth-century Britain’, Albion xvi/3 (1984), pp. 225–41 (p. 238).

34 Burke, Writings and Speeches, v, p. 402.

35 Ibid., p. 403.

36 Iain Hampsher-Monk, ‘Edmund Burke and empire’, in D. Kelly (ed.), Lineages of Empire: The Historical Roots of British Imperial Thought (Oxford, 2009), p. 133. For more on Burke’s concern that Indian wealth and luxury may debilitate Britain, see Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600–1800 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 169–72.

37 Phiroze Vasunia, The Classics and Colonial India (Oxford, 2013), p. 255.

38 See Pierre Boyancé, ‘Cicéron et l’empire romain en Sicile’, Latomus cxxi/1970, pp. 140–59.

39 Cicero reasserts the same concept over and over again. See, in particular, Verr. II.3.219–22.

40 William Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. Martin Fitzpatrick et al., 7 vols (London, 1993), i, p. 253.

41 Jonathan Sachs, Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789–1832 (Oxford, 2010), p. 67.

42 Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings, i, p. 283.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid., p. 287.

45 Ibid.

46 By means of ancient Rome Godwin is, in fact, referring to contemporary Britain. The comparison between Rome and Britain is indeed constant throughout the letter, General Burgoyne being, for example, compared to Caesar and Lord Clive to Dolabella. See Ibid., pp. 284–5.

47 Ibid., p. 284. For a discussion of this point, see Sachs, Romantic Antiquity, p. 68.

48 See, for example, I.36: ‘To all those who are in the habit of depositing or receiving deposits for bribery, of undertaking to offer or offering bribes, or of acting as agents or go-betweens for the corruption of judges in our courts, […] in this present trial, take care that your hands and your minds are kept clear of this vile crime’ (qui aut deponere aut accipere aut recipere aut polliceri aut sequestres aut interpretes corrumpendi iudicii solent esse, […] abstineant in hoc iudicio manus animosque ab hoc scelere nefario). Emphasis added.

49 See, for instance, I.43: ‘Now I entreat you, gentlemen, in God’s name to take thought, and to devise measures, to meet this state of affairs’ (Cui loco, per deos immortales, iudices, consulite ac providete !); II.1.22: ‘You, gentlemen, you must take thought and make provision for what concerns the credit, the good name, the safe existence of you all’ (Vos, quod ad vestram famam existimationem salutemque communem pertinet, iudices, prospicite atque consulite ). Emphasis added.

50 See the expressions: ‘your Lordship have great and plenary power’ (p. 272); your Lordships […] are not bound by any rules whatever except those natural, immutable and substantial justice’ (p. 276); ‘Your Lordships always had a boundless power; I mean, always within the limits of justice. Your Lordships always had a boundless power and unlimited jurisdiction’ (p. 277).

51 See, for example, ‘God forbid […] that your Lordships should ever reject evidence on any pretended nicety, which I am sure you will not (p. 277); ‘God forbid it should be said that no nation under heaven equals the British in substantial violence and informal justice’ (p. 278).

52 A few illustrative examples of the major contrasts between the trial of Hastings and that of Verres may be found in Canter, ‘The impeachment of Verres and Hastings’, pp. 202–3.

53 Throughout the Actio Prima Cicero repeatedly argues that Verres brought about the devastation of Asia, Pamphylia and Sicily. See, for example, Verr. I.11 and I.40.

54 Anna Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton, NJ, 2004), p. 102.

55 Emphasis added.

56 See, for example, II.1.1: tam audacem, tam amentem, tam impudentem; II.1.6: eius audacia atque amentia; II.3.64: in tanta audacia, in tanta impudentia; II.3.166: crimen tantae audaciae tantaeque impudentiae; II.5.34: vi et audacia; II.5.39: tuam cupiditatem et audaciam; II.5.62: Huncine hominem, hancine impudentiam, iudices, hanc audaciam!

57 Verr. II.3.22: Eorum omnium qui decumani vocabantur princeps erat Q. ille Apronius […]. Hic est Apronius quem […] Verres […] nequitia, luxuria, audacia sui simillimum iudicavit.

58 Verr. II.3.30: homine nequissimo ac turpissimo; Verr. II.3.140: homo improbus atque impurus; Verr. II.3.134: contaminatum, perditum, flagitiosum, qui non modo animum integrum sed ne animam quidem puram conservare potuisset.

59 C. E. W. Steel, Cicero, Rhetoric, and the Empire (Oxford, 2001), pp. 37–43.

60 Ibid., p. 43.

61 P. J. Marshall, The New Cambridge History of India. Bengal: The British Bridgehead. Eastern India 1740–1828 (Cambridge, 1987), p. 119. For an account of Ganga Govind Singh, see P. J. Marshall, ‘Indian officials under the East India Company in eighteenth-century Bengal’, Bengal Past and Present lxxxiv (1965), pp. 95–120 (pp. 111–20).

62 ‘Arcadians both, ready to sing and to reply’. I take this translation from Burke, Writings and Speeches, vi, p. 408, n. 1. Burke did not provide the Lords with an English version of Virgil’s verses, thus reinforcing the idea of an audience with a strong classical background. Virgil was quoted repeatedly by Burke during the trial. For an overview of Burke’s citations of Virgil, see Vasunia, The Classics and Colonial India, pp. 258–60.

63 Cicero’s indignation reaches its climax in the rhetorical question phrased in II.1.93: ‘Could you not keep your hands from outraging your guardian’s duty, your ward, your friend’s son?’ (manus a tutela, manus a pupillo, manus a sodalis filio abstinere non potuisti?). In 80 Verres was legate (legatus) on the staff of Gnaeus Cornelius Dolabella, governor of Cilicia. When Gaius Malleolus, Dolabella’s quaestor, died, Verres replaced him, and together with the governor plundered the provinces until Dolabella’s trial in 78. The governor of Cilicia was ironically convicted mainly on Verres’s evidence.

64 Verr. II.2.93: Malleolus a me productus est et mater eius atque avia, quae miserae flentes eversum a te puerum patriis bonis esse dixerunt.

65 Nechtman, Nabobs, p. 13.

66 Lock, Edmund Burke, ii, p. 157.

67 Cicero suggests that avarice is often accompanied by either wickedness (nequitia) or crime (scelus). See, for example, Verr. II.3.152: ‘Well then, gentlemen, this man’s avaricious greed, his unblushing and criminal wickedness, are already proved, and proved unmistakably’ (Tenetur igitur iam, iudices, et manifesto tenetur avaritia, cupiditas hominis, scelus, improbitas, audacia); II.5.24: ‘this scoundrel’s cupidity’ (avaritiae scelerique); II.5.59: ‘your greed and wickedness’ (avaritia ac nequitia tua); II.5.91: ‘the iniquitous cupidity of Verres’ (istius avaritia nequitiaque).

68 See II.3.48: ‘After such dishonesty, after such cruelty, after the infliction of so many grievous wrongs’ (tu in tanta improbitate, in tanta acerbitate, in tot ac tantis iniuriis). As this example shows, the repetition of the adjective tanta, tanta, tantis, with polyptoton and variatio in the third colon, gives special emphasis to the cruelties repeatedly inflicted on the Sicilians. See, also, II.3.153: ‘Verres’ criminal wickedness’ (istius scelere atque improbitate); II.5.141: ‘Verres’ rascality and wickedness’ (istius improbitate atque nequitia); II.5.92: ‘what a matchless piece of foul wickedness on the part of Verres!’ (o istius nequitiam ac turpitudinem singularem!).

69 For a discussion of Hastings’s criminality in terms of corruption, see, in particular, Kent, Corporate Character, pp. 26–58. While focusing on Burke’s accusation of corruption, Kent also refers to the trial of Verres. See ibid., p. 50.

70 See, for example, Verr. II.1.42: ‘What shall be done with a man like this? For what possible use should you keep so treacherous and savage a creature?’ (Quid hoc homine faciatis? aut ad quam spem tam perfidiosum, tam importunum animal reservetis?); II.5.109: ‘But why do I speak of the bond of hospitality in connexion with this beast and monster? […] Nay, is it the cruelty of a human being that we have here – is it not the monstrous savagery of a wild beast?’ (Sed quid ego hospitii iura in hac immani belua commemoro? […] Cum homine crudeli nobis res est an cum fera atque immani belua?).

71 Vasaly, Representations, p. 117.

72 I take this quotation from Vasunia, The Classics and Colonial India, p. 259.

73 Ayres, Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome, p. 44.

74 Warren Hastings, The History of the Trial of Warren Hastings, Esq. Late Governor General of Bengal, … (London, 1796), Part VII, p. 151. Emphasis original. This section is referred to as Curious Collection of Mr. BURKE’S Abuse of Mr. Hastings in the table of contents (under Part VII).

75 Ibid., p. 152. Italics original.

76 Ibid., p. 153. Italics original.

77 Ibid., p. 155.

78 Ibid., p. 152. Italics original.

79 See, for example, the speech pronounced on 19 February 1788: ‘these were the very lands of the Rajah of Dinagepore, from whom or from whose Country he had taken a bribe of £40,000. My Lords, this appears to be a monstrous thing’ (p. 444). Burke also utilizes phrases such as ‘monstrous head of corruption’; ‘monstrous consequences’ (p. 379); ‘monstrous raised revenues’ (p. 382); and ‘monstrous failure’ (p. 383).

80 A fuller discussion of this caricature may be found in Daniel O’Quinn’s Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800 (Baltimore, MD, 2005), pp. 172–80; Nicholas K. Robinson’s Edmund Burke: A Life in Caricature (New Haven, CT, and London, 1996), pp. 99–101; and the British Museum’s website, available at http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1634523&partId=1&searchText=the+raree+show&page=1 (accessed 28 April 2016).

81 See Mark Neocleous, ‘The monstrous multitude: Edmund Burke’s political teratology’, Contemporary Political Theory iii (2004), pp. 70–88.

82 Mary Fairclough, The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture (Cambridge, 2013), p. 69. Lia Guerra has shown how the term monstrosity ‘as a disquieting presence’ connected to the French Revolution had, in fact, already appeared in a 1789 letter penned to Burke’s son: ‘the Elements that compose Human Society seem all to be dissolved, and a world of Monsters to be produced in the place of it’. Guerra further notes how even in successive works, such as Further Reflections of the Revolution in France and Letters on a Regicide Peace, ‘the imagery of monstrosity continued to interfere with Burke’s writings’. See Lia Guerra, ‘ “The great theatre of the world”: Edmund Burke’s dramatic perspective’, in L. M. Crisafulli and C. Pietropoli (eds), The Languages of Performance in British Romanticism (Oxford, 2008), p. 197.

83 Paul Youngquist, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism (Minneapolis, MN, 2003), p. 24. In his article on Burke’s use of the metaphor of the monstrous, Mark Neocleous has also observed that ‘the monster is in essence a threat to order’. See Neocleous, ‘The monstrous multitude’, p. 79.

84 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ, 1975), p. 477.

85 Isaac Kramnick has contended that ‘the bitterest example’ probably occurred on 22 July 1727, when the paper pictured Walpole as a famous monster in exhibition in Westminster: ‘The Body of this Creature covered at least an Acre of Ground, was party-colour’d, and seemed to be swelled and bloated as if full of Corruption. He had Claws like an [sic] Harpy; his Wings resembled Parchment, and he had above five hundred Mouths and as many Tongues; from whence he took the name of POLYGLOTT’ [sic]. Emphasis original. For a detailed analysis of the Craftsman’s characterization of Walpole as a giant and a monster, see Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, MA, 1968), p. 21. Commenting on the image of the Prime Minister in English prose fiction, Jerry B. Beasley has further observed that the anti-Walpole narrative portrays him ‘as a grotesque, even bestial figure, a creature of enormous excesses’. See Jerry C. Beasley, ‘Portraits of a monster: Robert Walpole and early English prose fiction’, Eighteenth-Century Studies xiv/4 (1981), pp. 406–31 (p. 419).

86 James M. May, ‘Cicero and the beasts’, Syllecta Classica vii (1995), pp. 143–53 (p. 144, n. 3).

87 Ibid.

88 See, for example, Verr. II.3.171: ‘I felt that it was something too monstrously unnatural to be called a mere robbery’ (Non mihi iam furtum sed monstrum ac prodigium videbatur); II.4.47: ‘Think what this means. What monstrous abortion is this that we sent to rule our province?’ (Quid hoc est? quod hoc monstrum, quod prodigium in provinciam misimus?); II.5.145: ‘After long years Sicily was once more the prey […] of a new and monstrous creature’ (Versabatur in Sicilia longo intervallo […] quoddam novum monstrum).

89 According to Graeco-Roman mythology, Scylla was a six-headed sea monster with a triple row of teeth and twelve feet. This creature lived in a cave opposite Charybdis, a cliff with a dangerous whirlpool. Three times a day Charybdis sucked in everything, then spat it all out. The Cyclopes were one-eyed giant man-eaters. The most famous of them was Polyphemus, whom Odysseus cunningly blinded.

90 Verr. II.5.146: Non enim Charybdim tam infestam neque Scyllam nautis quam istum in eodem freto fuisse arbitror: hoc etiam iste infestior quod multo se pluribus et immanioribus canibus succinxerat: Cyclops alter multo importunior, hic enim totam insulam obsidebat, ille Aetnam solam et eam Siciliae partem tenuisse dicitur.

91 E.g. hic tyrannus (II.4.123); tyrannicis interdictis tuis (II.5.21); importunus atque amens tyrannus (II.5.103); nefario tyranno (II.5.117).

92 In his ‘Cicéron et les tyrans de Sicile’, Ciceroniana 4 (1980), pp. 63–74 (p. 63), Pierre Grimal has pointed out that, since an early age, ancient Romans were familiar with Sicilian tyrants. Romans residing in Syracuse, for example, envisaged themselves as the heirs of the greatest Sicilian tyrant, ‘le “roi” Hiéron’. For an overview of the Sicilian tyrants mentioned in Cicero’s works, see ibid., pp. 63–74.

93 Vasaly, Representations, p. 117. For other characteristics of Verres as a tyrant, see also pp. 122–4.

94 Steel, Cicero, Rhetoric, and Empire, p. 30. Italics original.

95 Kathryn Tempest, ‘Saints and sinners: some thoughts on the presentation of character in Attic oratory and Cicero’s Verrines’, in J. R. W. Prag (ed.), Sicilia Nutrix Plebis Romanae: Rhetoric, Law, and Taxation in Cicero’s Verrines (London, 2007), p. 35.

96 See, for instance, the expressions: singulari crudelitate (Verr. II.3.52); tuo scelere, importunitate, avaritia, crudelitate (II.3.126); dissolutissimus crudelissimusque semper fuisti (II.3.129); tua crudelitate (II.5.21); culpas istius maximas avaritiae, maiestatis, dementiae, libidinis, crudelitatis (II.5.42); tantam crudelitatem inhumanitatemque (II.5.115). An analysis of Verres’s cruelty in the second section of In Verrem II.5 may be found in Thomas D. Frazel, The Rhetoric of Cicero’s ‘In Verrem’ (Göttingen, 2009), pp. 158–60.

97 Among the numerous references to Hastings’s cruelty, see, for example: ‘We bring him [Hastings] before you for having cruelly injured persons in India; […] he has cruelly injured them’ (p. 370); ‘there is undoubtedly oppression, breach of faith, cruelty, perfidy charged upon him [Hastings]’ (p. 377); ‘the last act of Mr. Hastings’s life was to be an accomplice in the most cruel and perfidious breach of faith’ (p. 439). Burke also uses expressions, such as ‘cruel exaction’ (p. 383); ‘cruel scourge of oppression’ (p. 417); ‘cruel and savage war made upon the country’ (p. 418); ‘scenes of horrors and cruelty’ (p. 421); and ‘horrid and nefarious cruelties’ (p. 424).

98 Verr. II.3.6: ‘Shall one who deplores our allies’ wrongs and our provinces’ misfortunes feel no resentment towards you for stripping Asia, and making havoc of Pamphylia, and plunging Sicily into tears and mourning?’ (Qui sociorum iniuriis provinciarumque incommodis doleat, is in te non expilatione Asiae, vexatione Pamphyliae, squalore et lacrimis Siciliae concitetur?). In order to induce his audience to sympathize with Verres’s victims, Cicero utilizes a highly pathetic language. To offer but a few examples, we can think of the Sicilians’ dolorem et iniurias, incommoda, agros vexatos (II.3.103); Cicero also refers to aratorum fugae, calamitates, exilia, suspendia (II.3.144).

99 See, for instance, the expressions: magnum et acerbum dolorem (II.4.47); maximo dolore (II.4.52); Hic dolor erat tantus (II.4.111) Mediocrine tandem dolore eos affectos esse arbitramini? (II.4.132); mirum quaendam dolorem (II.4.135); eorum dolorem (II.4.140).

100 In II.3.24, for example, the Sicilians are described as ‘loyal allies and worthy fellow-citizens’ (fidelissimos socios optimosque cives). See also II.2.2: ‘No other nation has equalled her in loyal goodwill towards us: once the various states in the island had embraced our friendship, they never thereafter seceded from it; and most of them, and those the most notable, remained, without a break, our firm friends’ (Sola fuit ea fide benevolentiaque erga populum Romanum ut civitates eius insulae, quae semel in amicitiam nostram venissent, numquam postea deficerent, pleraeque autem et maxime illustres in amicitia perpetuo manerent).

101 See, for example, II.2.2: ‘She was the first of all to receive the title of province, the first such jewel in our imperial crown’ (Prima omnium, id quod ornamentum imperii est, provincia est appellata); II.2.5: ‘Cato Sapiens called her […] “the nation’s storehouse, the nurse at whose breast the Roman people is fed” ’ (ille M. Cato Sapiens cellam penariam rei publicae nostrae, nutricem plebis Romanae Siciliam nominabat). For Sicily as a source of profit (fructosamque provinciam), see, in particular, II.2.6.

102 The emphasis is mine.

103 It is worth remembering that the Actio Secunda was never delivered. As Ann Vasaly has suggested, it ‘would not have been written until after the suspension of the trial’. See Vasaly, ‘Cicero’s early speeches’, p. 90.

104 Beth Innocenti, ‘Towards a theory of vivid description as practiced in Cicero’s Verrine orations’, Rhetorica xii (1994), pp. 355–81 (pp. 356–7).

105 Ibid.

106 See inst. VIII.3.64: ‘Cicero is outstanding in this area, as in all others’ (Plurimum in hoc genere sicut ceteris eminet Cicero). Marcus Fabius Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed. and trans. D. A. Russell, (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2001). Further references to Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria are to this edition.

107 On Verres’s thefts of art, see, in particular, Thomas D. Frazel, ‘Furtum and the description of stolen objects in Cicero In Verrem 2.4’, American Journal of Philology cxxvi/3 (2005), pp. 363–76; Renaud Robert, ‘Ambiguïté du collectionnisme de Verrès’, in J. Dubouloz and S. Pittia (eds), La Sicile de Cicéron: Lectures des Verrines. Actes du colloque de Paris, 19–20 mai 2006 (Besançon, 2007), pp. 15–34 and Miles, Art as Plunder, pp. 152–217.

108 Verr. II.4.52: Quem concursum in oppido factum putatis, quem clamorem, quem porro fletum mulierum? qui videret equum Troianum introductum, urbem captam diceret. Efferri sine thecis vasa, extorqueri alia e manibus mulierum, ecfringi multorum fores, revelli claustra.

109 Vasaly, Representations, p. 127. For a comment on the Ceres of Henna episode, see, among others, Domenico Romano, ‘Cicerone e il ratto di Proserpina’, Ciceroniana iv (1980), pp. 191–201.

110 The semantic field of mourning appears repeatedly in Cicero’s ‘miniature dramas’. See, for instance, the case of Sagesta, where Verres removed the statue of Diana. Cicero suggests that the image (simulacrum) of the goddess was taken away amidst tears and laments: ‘Amid the grief and lamentation of the whole community, with tears and cries of grief from every man and every woman in it’ (Verr. II.4.76: Magno cum luctu et gemitu totius civitatis, multis cum lacrimis et lamentationibus virorum mulierumque omnium).

111 II.4.110: ‘I think of that sanctuary, that sacred spot, that solemn worship: before my eyes rises the picture of the day when I visited Henna, my reception by the priests of Ceres wearing their fillets and carrying their sacred boughs, my address to the assembled townsfolk, in which my words were heard amid such groans and weeping as showed the whole town to be a prey to the bitterest distress’ (Venit enim mihi fani, loci, religionis illius in mentem; versantur ante oculos omnia, dies ille quo, cum ego Hennam venissem, praesto mihi sacerdotes Cereris cum infulis ac verbenis fuerunt, contio conventusque civium, in quo ego cum loquerer tanti gemitus fletusque fiebant ut acerbissimus tota urbe luctus versari videretur).

112 John Granger Cook, Crucifixion in the Mediterranean World (Tübingen, 2014), p. 62. For a critical comment on the crucifixion of Gavius within its historical context, see ibid., pp. 62–9.

113 Verr. II.5.159: ‘I will put the bare facts before you. They speak so forcibly for themselves that there is no need of eloquence, from my own feeble lips or from the lips of anyone else, to kindle your indignation’ (rem in medio ponam; quae tantum habet ipsa gravitatis ut neque mea, quae nulla est, neque ciuiusquam ad inflammandos vestros animos eloquentia requiratur).

114 Cook, Crucifixion in the Mediterranean World, p. 65.

115 Verr. II.5.170: ‘To bind a Roman citizen is a crime, to flog him is an abomination, to slay him is almost an act of murder: to crucify him is – what? There is no fitting word that can possibly describe so horrible a deed’ (Facinus est vincire civem Romanum, scelus verberare, prope parricidium necare: quid dicam in crucem tollere? Verbo satis digno tam nefaria res appellari nullo modo potest).

116 See, also, II.5.163; II.5.166 and II.5.169.

117 See, for example, Inst. IV.2.113: ‘Does not Cicero, when he describes the flogging of a Roman citizen, move every emotion in a few words, not only by emphasizing the victim’s standing, the scene of the outrage, and the sort of flogging, but also by praising the man’s courage? He shows us a hero who, when beaten with rods, neither groaned nor begged for mercy, but only cried out that he was a Roman citizen’ (An non M. Tullius circa verbera civis Romani omnis brevissime movit adfectus, non solum condicione ipsius, loco iniuriae, genere verberum, sed animi quoque commendatione? Summum enim virum ostendit, qui cum virgis caederetur non ingemuerit, non rogaverit, sed tantum civem se Romanum esse.

118 Vasaly, ‘Cicero’s early speeches’, p. 93.

119 Verr. II.5.161: ‘Then he made for the market-place, on fire with mad and wicked rage, his eyes blazing, and cruelty showing clearly in every feature of his face’ (Ipse inflammatus scelere et furore in forum venit; ardebant oculi, toto ex ore crudelitas eminebat). The image of flames and fire associated with Verres (Ipse inflammatus) and in his eyes (ardebant oculi) encourages the readers to visualize and to construct their own picture of the governor.

120 See De orat. III.53.202: ‘For a great impression is made by dwelling on a single point, and also by clear explanation and almost visual presentation of events as if practically going on – which are very effective both in stating a case and in explaining and amplifying the statement, with the object of making the fact we amplify appear to the audience as important as eloquence is able to make it’ (Nam et commoratio una in re permultum movet et illustris explanatio rerumque quasi gerantur sub aspectum paene subiectio, quae et in exponenda re plurimum valet et ad illustrandum id quod exponitur et ad amplificandum, ut eis qui audient illud quod augebimus quantum efficere oratio poterit tantum esse videatur). Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton, 2 vols (London and Cambridge, MA, 1959).

121 Italics original. Inst. IX.2.40: Illa vero, ut ait Cicero, sub oculos subiectio tum fieri solet cum res non gesta indicatur sed ut sit gesta ostenditur, nec universa sed per partis. Throughout his Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian repeatedly refers to the technique of vivid descriptions. In Inst. VI.2.29, for example, Quintilian notes that ‘The person who will show the greatest power in the expression of emotions will be the person who has properly formed what the Greeks call phantasiai (let us call them “visions”), by which the images of absent things are presented to the mind in such a way that we seem actually to see them with our eyes and have them physically present to us’ (Quas φαντασίας Graeci vocant (nos sane visiones appellemus), per quas imagines rerum absentium ita repraesentantur animo ut cernere oculis ac praesentes habere videamur, has quisquis bene ceperit is erit in adfectibus potentissimus).

122 Gell. X.3.10: ‘the mere words “he ordered that he be stripped and bound, and rods brought” arouse such emotion and horror that you do not seem to hear the act described, but to see it acted before your face’ (Iam haec medius fidius sola verba: ‘nudari ac deligari et virgas expediri iubet’ tanti motus horrorisque sunt, ut non narrari quae gesta sunt, sed rem geri prosus videas). Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, trans. J. C. Rolfe, 2 vols (London and Cambridge, MA, 1927).

123 Ian Haywood, Bloody Romanticism: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776–1832 (Basingstoke, 2006), p. 3.

124 Ibid., p. 4.

125 Among the many publications looking at violence in representations of slavery, see ibid., pp. 11–59; Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore, MD, 2006), pp. 190–7; and Karen Halttunen, ‘Humanitarianism and the pornography of pain in Anglo-American culture’, The American Historical Review c/2 (1995), pp. 303–34 (pp. 321–5).

126 Teltscher, India Inscribed, p. 167.

127 Although movement is a central feature in the episode of Gavius, as Donovan J. Ochs notes, ‘many stories of Verres’ atrocities display character in action rather than character as reported’. Donovan J. Ochs, ‘Rhetorical detailing in Cicero’s Verrine Orations’, Central State Speech Journal xxxiii (1982), pp. 310–18 (p. 315).

128 Innocenti, ‘Towards a theory’, p. 370.

129 Verr. II.5.162: ‘and all the while, amid the crack of the falling blows, no groan was heard from the unhappy man, no words came from his lips in his agony except “I am a Roman citizen” ’ (Cum interea nullus gemitus, nulla vox alia illius miseri inter dolorem crepitumque plagarum audiebatur nisi haec: ‘Civis Romanus sum’).

130 Frans De Bruyn has notably associated ‘this harrowing and at times extraordinarily explicit account’ with the celebrated passage in the Reflections on the Revolution in France in which Burke describes Marie Antoinette’s narrow escape from a gang of French revolutionaries. See Frans De Bruyn, ‘Edmund Burke’s Gothic romance: the portrayal of Warren Hastings in Burke’s writings and speeches on India’, in Criticism xxix/4 (1987), pp. 415–38 (p. 432).

131 Indian virgins were violated ‘in the presence of the day, in the public Court’; the wives, instead, ‘lost their honour in the bottom of the most cruel dungeons’, but ‘were dragged out, naked and exposed to the public view, and scourged before all the people’. Burke, Writings and Speeches, vi, pp. 420–1.

132 Innocenti, ‘Towards a theory’, pp. 378–9.

133 ‘They bound the father and son face to face, arm to arm, body to body; and in that situation they scourged and whipped them, in order with a refinement of cruelty that every blow that escaped the father should fall upon the son, that every stroke that escaped the son should strike upon the parent; so that where they did not lacerate and tear the sense, they should wound the sensibilities and sympathies of nature’. Burke, Writings and Speeches, vi, p. 420.

134 Verr. II.1.76: Constituitur in foro Laodiceae spectaculum acerbum et miserum et grave toti Asiae provinciae, grandis natu parens adductus ad supplicium, ex altera parte filius: ille quod pudicitiam liberorum, hic quod vitam patris famamque sororis defenderat. Flebat uterque non de suo supplicio, sed pater de filii morte, de patris filius. For an analysis of the Philodamus episode, see Manfred Fuhrmann, ‘Tecniche narrative nella seconda orazione contro Verre’, Ciceroniana iv (1980), pp. 27–42.

135 Inst. IV.2.114: ‘Take the misfortunes of Philodamus. Does not Cicero both fan the flame of indignation throughout his account, and fill our eyes with tears at the moment of punishment, when he describes, or rather sets before our eyes, the father weeping for his son’s death and the son for his father’s? What more pitiful effect could any Epilogue produce? (Philodami casum nonne cum per totam expositionem incendit invidia tum in supplicio ipso lacrimis implevit, cum flentis non tam narraret quam ostenderet patrem de morte filii, filium de patris? Quid ulli epilogi possunt magis habere miserabile?).

136 Ibid.

137 Richard Bourke, Empire and Revolution, p. 629. For Burke’s use of ‘the moral psychology of “sympathy” ’, see, in particular, Daniel I. O’Neill, Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire (Oakland, CA, 2016), pp. 94–5.

138 The court had allowed Cicero one hundred and ten days to collect the evidence against Verres, but the Roman lawyer used but fifty: Verr. I.6: ‘I covered the whole of Sicily in fifty days, so effectively, that I took cognisance of the wrongs, and the documents recording the wrongs, of all the communities and individuals concerned’ (ego Siciliam totam quinquaginta diebus sic obii ut omnium populorum privatorumque litteras iniuriasque cognoscerem). On Cicero’s rapid tour of Sicily, see, among others, Vasaly, ‘Cicero’s early speeches’, p. 88 and Andrew Lintott, ‘The citadel of the allies’, in J. R. W. Prag (ed.), Sicilia Nutrix Plebis Romanae: Rhetoric, Law, and Taxation in Cicero’s Verrines (London, 2007), pp. 7–8.

139 See, for example, Verr. I.6: Itaque cum ego diem inquirendi in Siciliam perexiguam postulavissem, […] ego meo labore et vigiliis consecutus sum […] ego Siciliam totam quinquaginta diebus sic obii (‘That is why, when I had applied for a very short space of time in which to go and collect my evidence in Sicily […] I have achieved with my own hard work and watchfulness […] I covered the whole of Sicily in fifty days’). Emphasis added.

140 Verr. I.33: hominem tabulis, testibus, privatis publicisque litteris auctoritatibusque accusemus. The evidence that Cicero intends to bring before the tribunal is mentioned again in I.56: ‘we will use witnesses, and private records, and official written statements’ (Hoc testibus, hoc tabulis privatis publicisque auctoritatibus). In Shane Butler’s reconstruction of the opening day of the trial of Verres (5 August 70 BC), at around three in the afternoon, Cicero – waiting for the jurors – was not alone: besides his assistants and witnesses, there was a vast number of document boxes (capsae), which certainly were guarded. See Shane Butler, The Hand of Cicero (London and New York, 2002), p. 63. A perceptive analysis of Cicero’s strategic use of witnesses may be found in Luca Fezzi, Il corrotto. Un’inchiesta di Marco Tullio Cicerone (Rome and Bari, 2016), pp. 62–5 and Lintott, ‘The citadel of the allies’, pp. 11–14. For a list of the staggering number of witnesses and documentary evidence against Verres in the Actio Secunda, see, in particular, Fezzi, Il corrotto, pp. 208–15; Michael C. Alexander, The Case for the Prosecution in the Ciceronian Era (Ann Arbor, MI, 2002), pp. 255–62; and Ettore Ciccotti, Il processo di Verre: Un capitolo di storia romana (Milan, 1895), pp. 183–92.

141 For a survey of the Indian testimonials, see Teltscher, India Inscribed, pp. 177–86.

5 The Reception of the Hastings Trial in the Newspapers and Satirical Prints

1 Christopher Reid, Imprison’d Wranglers: The Rhetorical Culture of the House of Commons 1760–1800 (Oxford, 2012), p. 10.

2 David Musselwhite, ‘The trial of Warren Hastings’, in F. Barker, P. Hulme, M. Iversen and D. Loxley (eds), Literature, Politics and Theory: Papers from the Essex Conference 1976–84 (London and New York, 1986), p. 92.

3 Paul Langford, ‘Burke, Edmund (1729/30–1797)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. For an account of Burke’s editorship of the Register, see F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke, Volume One: 1730–84 and Volume Two: 1784–97 (Oxford, 1998–2006), i, pp. 165–79.

4 ‘When Cicero came forward as the accuser of Verres, what were the arguments he advanced why the prosecution should be committed to him? “Because,” said he, “I am acquainted with the evasions and sophistry of his advocate Hortensius. I am accustomed to combat and to overthrow them” ’. Annual Register (1788), p. 143.

5 As with Chapter 1, I have based my research on eighteenth-century British newspapers issued in India on the collection held by the British Library.

6 Hicky’s Bengal Gazette; or the Original Calcutta General Advertiser, no. xi (31 March–7 April 1781) and no. xiv (21 April–28 April 1781). Emphasis original. Even though the second article is described as the ‘continuance’ of the first, the version appearing in no. xi is a translation of the opening of the Divinatio in Caecilium, while that published in no. xiv is the incipit of the Actio Prima. It is worth noting here that, besides comprising the Actio Prima and Actio Secunda, the Verrine orations also include the Divinatio in Caecilium, ‘the only example’, as Ann Vasaly explains, ‘of an oration delivered at a preliminary hearing before a court empowered to decide who would be allowed to prosecute a given defendant’. See Ann Vasaly, ‘Cicero’s early speeches’, in J. M. May (ed.), Brill’s Companion to Cicero: Oratory and Rhetoric (Leiden, 2002), p. 87.

7 Hicky’s Bengal Gazette; or the Original Calcutta General Advertiser (21 April–28 April 1781). Emphasis original. I have reproduced the name ‘Pillage’ with a slightly bigger type, as in the original.

8 P. J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (Oxford, 1965), p. 14.

9 Ibid., p. 12. Marshall goes on to suggest that, even though Thomas Rumbold was ‘the immediate victim’ and scapegoat for the British defeat in Madras, ‘accusations were also made against Hastings’. In a letter to Sir Thomas Rumbold (23 March 1781), Burke described Hastings as the author of ‘the present ruinous Maratta War’. See Edmund Burke, The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. T. W. Copeland et al., 10 vols (Cambridge, 1958–78), iv, pp. 344–5. To Sir Thomas Rumbold (23 March 1781).

10 Other phrases emphasized in the two issues include: ‘daring impiety’, ‘Wanton Cruelty’, ‘miserable helpless people’, ‘Exemplary Justice’, ‘Vindication’, ‘Delinquents’, ‘distressed’, ‘clearly convicted’, ‘scourge’, ‘Mankind at defiance’, ‘tryal’ [sic], ‘exemplary justice’, ‘abusers of power’, ‘mal administration’ [sic], ‘great riches’, ‘money’, ‘presents’, and ‘ruin’.

11 A brief introduction to the article explains that ‘the following debate, which we have extracted from the MADRAS COURIER, upon the Subject of Mr. HASTING’S [sic] IMPEACHMENT, exhibits very different Opinions and Views of his Conduct, from what we have observed in former Speeches upon it’. Emphasis original. In spite of this reference to the Madras Courier, it should be noted that the same story appears verbatim in the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser (10 May 1787).

12 India Gazette: or, Calcutta Public Advertiser (7 January 1788). Emphasis original.

13 Unlike the India Gazette, this article is only partially derived from the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser (10 May 1787).

14 Calcutta Gazette; or, Oriental Advertiser (9 May 1787). Emphasis original.

15 According to The Times (10 May 1787), ‘He [Mr. Courtenay] observed, that Mr. Hastings had been compared to Verres and the two Scipios. He might be like the first, but he could not conceive how he resembled the two Scipios’.

16 Warren Hastings, The History of the Trial of Warren Hastings, Esq. Late Governor General of Bengal, … (London, 1796), Part I, p. 16.

17 Ibid., p. 19.

18 According to the Calcutta Gazette, while focusing on Cortés, Courtenay remarked how the Archbishops ‘contrived to get several affidavits sworn, that the deponents heard a chorus of angels sing in the Mexican language, Gloria in Excelsis, and the blessings of heaven upon the head of Ferdinando Cortez, for his humanity and benevolence to the Mexicans and Peruvians. The Archbishop of Toledo transmitted these to bench of his reverend brother Chief of Justice; they persuaded the people to believe the facts deposed; a general credulity prevailed, and at the same time, Cortez sent Charles the fifth some jewels […] and all Spain rang with the praises of Ferdinando Cortez’. The Calcutta Gazette does not specify whether Courtenay explicitly suggested (or left it, instead, implicit) that also the Governor-General of Bengal was seeking out testimonies from Indian elites asserting his virtue and benevolence, or, that Hastings had bribed the king. This section of the Gazette concludes rather abruptly that: ‘Mr. Courtenay dwelt for some time on the analogy between the conduct of Cortez, and the conduct of Mr. Hastings, and at length concluded a very long speech’. The Calcutta Gazette; or, Oriental Advertiser (17 January 1788).

19 Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago and London, 1992), p. 69. For criticism concerning Pizarro and the trial of Hastings, see also Julie A. Carlson, ‘Trying Sheridan’s Pizarro’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, xxxviii/3–4 (1996), pp. 359–78; Julie Stone Peters, ‘Theatricality, legalism, and the scenography of suffering: the trial of Warren Hastings and Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Pizarro’, Law and Literature, xviii (2006), pp. 15–45 (pp. 29–40); and David Francis Taylor, Theatres of Opposition: Empire, Revolution, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Oxford, 2012), pp. 121–41.

20 I am referring here to the early English-language Indian newspaper. It should not be confused with The World published in London.

21 The World (4 January 1794). I was not able to trace the epistle Aristophanes here refers to, as the British Library collection of The World includes only the 4 January 1794 issue.

22 Edmund Burke, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. P. Langford et al., 9 vols to date (Oxford, 1981–), vi, p. 346.

23 Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, 2005), p. 78. Insightful discussions of the term ‘geographical morality’ may be found, among others, in ibid., pp. 77–85 and Frederick G. Whelan, Edmund Burke and India: Political Morality and Empire (Pittsburgh, PA, 1996), pp. 281–91.

24 Burke, Writings and Speeches, vi, p. 63.

25 Ibid. The theme of corruption – both in Britain and ancient Rome – was not new in Burke’s writings. An epistle penned on 22 June 1784 proves that at least four years before the commencement of the trial of Hastings Burke had complained about Britain’s moral decline: ‘At present the picture of the English Nation does not appear to me in a very favourable light’, he confided to his friend William Baker (1743–1824). Indeed, so depraved did the Court and Ministry appear to the Anglo-Irish orator that he dishearteningly observed: ‘I do not think any thing was correspondent, even in the worst times of the Roman Republick’ [sic]. See Burke, Correspondence, v, p. 155. To William Baker (22 June 1784).

26 Emphasis original. Swift is called ‘Dean’, as he was Dean of Saint Patrick Cathedral in Dublin from 1713 until his death in 1745. The issue of the Examiner in which Swift published his translation was not ‘No. 17’, but No 18. Probably owing to space restrictions, the translation printed in The Times is slightly abridged.

27 The article published on 9 March 1787 and the letter printed in the issue for 12 June 1788 are identical but for the introduction to Swift’s translation. As for the letter to the Editor, it begins as follows: ‘Sir, among the many proofs that the world has been the same in all ages, it may not be unworthy of observation, that Caius Verres was guilty of the same crimes above eighteen hundred years ago, that are now laid to the charge of Mr. Hastings’.

28 The series is mentioned by P. J. Marshall in Burke, Writings and Speeches, vi, p. 29, n. 2; Lock, Edmund Burke, ii, p. 91, n. 151; and Margaret M. Miles, Art as Plunder: The Ancient Origins of Debate about Cultural Property (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 306–7.

29 Public Advertiser (5 February 1788). Italics original.

30 Ibid. Italics original.

31 In particular, Amicus Curiae’s programme asserts: ‘First to state the characters and conduct of Verres and Hastings from facts: Next to draw a parallel between Marcus Tuilius [sic] Cicero, the accuser of Verres, and The Right Hon. Edmund Burke, the accuser of Warren Hastings, Esq; And lastly, to suggest such reasons drawn from the conduct of Mr. Hastings, as, in my opinion, should operate in favour of that Gentleman’s exculpation’. Ibid. Emphasis original.

32 Public Advertiser (6 February 1788).

33 Miles, Art as Plunder, p. 307.

34 Public Advertiser (6 February 1788). Italics original. See Verr. II.2.19–22. Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Verrine Orations, trans. L. H. G. Greenwood, 2 vols (London and Cambridge, MA, 1966).

35 Public Advertiser (6 February 1788). Italics original.

36 Ibid.

37 The story of Antiochus is reported in Verr. II.4.61–68.

38 Italics original.

39 Italics original. See Verr. II.5.146. A description of the Lautumiae may be found in Verr. II.5.68 and II.5.143

40 Public Advertiser (11 February 1788). Italics original.

41 Ibid. Among the many examples he cites of Verres’s cruelty, Amicus Curiae notes that ‘so wantonly and inhumanly did he [Verres] oppress the natives, the tributaries and allies, and so scandalously degrade the character of the Roman arms, as not only to produce a famine, but eat up all resources of public revenues’; ‘Verres, during his short government, pushed his avarice to such barbarous and unheard of lengths’; ‘he immediately overturned [Sicily’s police and finance] in the most direct and despotic manner – making his will the laws of the province, and his avarice and extortions the panders of his will’. Ibid.

42 Ibid. The writer further highlights that ‘so far from having a single petition against him, [Hastings] parted from his government with the expressed regret of his fellow-servants and countrymen; on his return to his own country, so far was he from being thought guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, that he received the unanimous thanks of his own immediate masters, the Court of Directors’. Ibid. Italics original.

43 Public Advertiser (13 February 1788).

44 Ibid. Italics original.

45 Ibid. Italics original.

46 Ibid. Italics original.

47 Public Advertiser (15 February 1788).

48 Ibid. Emphasis original.

49 Burke, Writings and Speeches, vi, pp. 270–1.

50 Public Advertiser (5 February 1788).

51 Jim Davis, ‘Spectatorship’, in J. Moody and D. O’Quinn (eds), The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730–1830 (Cambridge, 2007), p. 63.

52 Ibid.

53 Among the scholars who have touched on Sayers’s and/or Boyne’s satirical print, see, in particular, Nicholas K. Robinson, Edmund Burke: A Life in Caricature (New Haven, CT, and London, 1996), p. 82 and Lock, Edmund Burke, ii, p. 91.

54 See Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings, pp. xiv–xv. For the Benares charge, see, in particular, ibid., pp. 88–108.

55 Robinson, Edmund Burke, p. 82. A fuller discussion of this episode may be derived from Lock, Edmund Burke, ii, p. 5.

56 Daniel O’Quinn, Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800 (Baltimore, MD, 2005), p. 190.

57 The only extant Roman text which provides detailed information about oratorical gestures is the eleventh chapter of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. A discussion of the orator’s movements and gestures may be found in Inst. XI.3.66–137. Quintilian, Marcus Fabius, The Orator’s Education, ed. and trans. D. A. Russell, (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2001).

58 After the Shelburne administration fell in February 1783, Fox and Lord North formed a coalition, which was ousted in December the same year. A study that is especially useful for getting a sense of the Fox–North coalition within the years of acute crisis of the constitution (1782–4) is John Cannon’s The Fox–North Coalition: Crisis of the Constitution 1782–1784 (Cambridge, 1969).

59 See, for example, Noah Webster, An American Selection of Lessons in Reading and Speaking (Philadelphia, 1787), pp. 298–302; John Walker, The Academic Speaker (Dublin, 1796), pp. 146–52; and Lindley Murray, The English Reader (London, 1799), pp. 153–7.

Conclusion

1 Lorna Hardwick, Reception Studies (Oxford, 2003), p. 4.

2 Quoted in Robert Murray, Edmund Burke: A Biography (Oxford, 1931), p. 336.

3 Charles Butler, Reminiscences (London, 1822), 3rd edition, p. 207. The passage is quoted in Christopher Reid, Imprison’d Wranglers: The Rhetorical Culture of the House of Commons 1760–1800 (Oxford, 2012), p. 16.

4 Michael J. MacDonald, ‘Introduction’, in M. J. MacDonald (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies (Oxford, 2017), p. 17.

5 Paul Elledge, Lord Byron at Harrow School: Speaking Out, Talking Back, Acting Up, Bowing Out (Baltimore, MD, and London, 2000), p. 9. For a list of the speeches declaimed at Harrow which included Burke’s orations against Hastings, see, for example, The Times (6 July 1846; 1 July 1870). As for Eton, see, for instance, The Times (5 June 1875).

6 See The Times (25 July 1853; 6 July 1854) and The Morning Post (6 July 1877), among others.

7 Edmund Burke, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. P. Langford et al., 9 vols to date (Oxford, 1981–), vi, p. 276.

8 Edmund Burke, The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. T. W. Copeland et al., 10 vols (Cambridge, 1958–78), ix, p. 62. To French Laurence (28 July 1796).