12th August, and Postscript of the 16th August, 1783. Translation of a Letter to the Chairman and Directors of the East India Company. Received from Mr. James Macpherson, 14th January, 1784

Your astonishment and indignation will be equally raised with mine, when you hear that your President has dared, contrary to your intention, to continue to usurp the privileges and hereditary powers of the Nabob of the Carnatic, your old and unshaken friend, and the declared ally of the king of Great Britain.

I will not take up your time by enumerating the particular acts of Lord Macartney's violence, cruelty, and injustice: they, indeed, occur too frequently, and fall upon me and my devoted subjects and country too thick, to be regularly related. I refer you to my minister, Mr. James Macpherson, for a more circumstantial account of the oppressions and enormities by which he has brought both mine and the Company's affairs to the brink of destruction. I trust that such flagrant violations of all justice, honor, and the faith of treaties will receive the severest marks of your displeasure, and that Lord Macartney's conduct, in making use of your name and authority as a sanction for the continuance of his usurpation, will be disclaimed with the utmost indignation, and followed with the severest punishment. I conceive that his Lordship's arbitrary retention of my country and government can only originate in his insatiable cravings, in his implacable malevolence against me, and through fear of detection, which must follow the surrender of the Carnatic into my hands, of those nefarious proceedings which are now suppressed by the arm of violence and power.

I did not fail to represent to the supreme government of Bengal the deplorable situation to which I was reduced, and the unmerited persecutions I have unremittingly sustained from Lord Macartney; and I earnestly implored them to stretch forth a saving arm, and interpose that controlling power which was vested in them, to check rapacity and presumption, and preserve the honor and faith of the Company from violation. The Governor-General and Council not only felt the cruelty and injustice I had suffered, but were greatly alarmed for the fatal consequences that might result from the distrust of the country powers in the professions of the English, when they saw the Nabob of the Carnatic, the friend of the Company, and the ally of Great Britain, thus stripped of his rights, his dominions, and his dignity, by the most fraudulent means, and under the mask of friendship. The Bengal government had already heard both the Mahrattas and the Nizam urge, as an objection to an alliance with the English, the faithless behavior of Lord Macartney to a prince whose life had been devoted and whose treasures had been exhausted in their service and support; and they did not hesitate to give positive orders to Lord Macartney for the restitution of my government and authority, on such terms as were not only strictly honorable, but equally advantageous to my friends the Company: for they justly thought that my honor and dignity and sovereign rights were the first objects of my wishes and ambition. But how can I paint my astonishment at Lord Macartney's presumption in continuing his usurpation after their positive and reiterated mandates, and, as if nettled by their interference, which he disdained, in redoubling the fury of his violence, and sacrificing the public and myself to his malice and ungovernable passions?

I am, Gentlemen, at a loss to conceive where his usurpation will stop and have an end. Has he not solemnly declared that the assignment was only made for the support of war? and if neither your instructions nor the orders of his superiors at Bengal were to be considered as effectual, has not the treaty of peace virtually determined the period of his tyrannical administration? But so far from surrendering the Carnatic into my hands, he has, since that event, affixed advertisements to the walls and gates of the Black Town for letting to the best bidder the various districts for the term of three years,—and has continued the Committee of Revenue, which you positively ordered to be abolished, to whom he has allowed enormous salaries, from 6000 to 4000 pagodas per annum, which each member has received from the time of his appointment, though his Lordship well knows that most of them are by your orders disqualified by being my principal creditors.

If those acts of violence and outrage had been productive of public advantage, I conceive his Lordship might have held them forward in extenuation of his conduct; but whilst he cloaks his justification under the veil of your records, it is impossible to refute his assertions or to expose to you their fallacy; and when he is no longer able to support his conduct by argument, he refers to those records, where, I understand, he has exercised all his sophistry and malicious insinuations to render me and my family obnoxious in the eyes of the Company and the British nation. And when the glorious victories of Sir Eyre Coote have been rendered abortive by a constant deficiency of supplies,—and when, since the departure of that excellent general to Bengal, whose loss I must ever regret, a dreadful famine, at the close of last year, occasioned by his Lordship's neglect to lay up a sufficient stock of grain at a proper season, and from his prohibitory orders to private merchants,—and when no exertion has been made, nor advantage gained over the enemy,—when Hyder's death and Tippoo's return to his own dominions operated in no degree for the benefit of our affairs,—in short, when all has been a continued series of disappointment and disgrace under Lord Macartney's management, (and in him alone has the management been vested,)—I want words to convey those ideas of his insufficiency, ignorance, and obstinacy which I am convinced you would entertain, had you been spectators of his ruinous and destructive conduct.

But against me, and my son, Amir-ul-Omrah, has his Lordship's vengeance chiefly been exerted: even the Company's own subordinate zemindars have found better treatment, probably because they were more rich; those of Nizanagoram have been permitted, contrary to your pointed orders, to hold their rich zemindaries at the old disproportionate rate of little more than a sixth part of the real revenue; and my zemindar of Tanjore, though he should have regarded himself equally concerned with us in the event of the war, and from whose fertile country many valuable harvests have been gathered in, which have sold at a vast price, has, I understand, only contributed, last year, towards the public exigencies, the very inconsiderable sum of one lac of pagodas, and a few thousand pagodas' worth of grain.

I am much concerned to acquaint you that ever since the peace a dreadful famine has swept away many thousands of the followers and sepoys' families of the army, from Lord Macartney's neglect to send down grain to the camp, though the roads are crowded with vessels: but his Lordship has been too intent upon his own disgraceful schemes to attend to the wants of the army. The negotiation with Tippoo, which he has set on foot through the mediation of Monsieur Bussy, has employed all his thoughts, and to the attainment of that object he will sacrifice the dearest interests of the Company to gratify his malevolence against me, and for his own private advantages. The endeavor to treat with Tippoo, through the means of the French, must strike you, Gentlemen, as highly improper and impolitic; but it must raise your utmost indignation to hear, that, by intercepted letters from Bussy to Tippoo, as well as from their respective vakeels, and from various accounts from Cuddalore, we have every reason to conclude that his Lordship's secretary, Mr. Staunton, when at Cuddalore, as his agent to settle the cessation of arms with the French, was informed of all their operations and projects, and consequently that Lord Macartney has secretly connived at Monsieur Bussy's recommendation to Tippoo to return into the Carnatic, as the means of procuring the most advantageous terms, and furnishing Lord Macartney with the plea of necessity for concluding a peace after his own manner: and what further confirms the truth of this fact is, that repeated reports, as well as the alarms of the inhabitants to the westward, leave us no reason to doubt that Tippoo is approaching towards us. His Lordship has issued public orders that the garrison store of rice, for which we are indebted to the exertions of the Bengal government, should be immediately disposed of, and has strictly forbid all private grain to be sold; by which act he effectually prohibits all private importation of grain, and may eventually cause as horrid a famine as that which we experienced at the close of last year from the same shortsighted policy and destructive prohibitions of Lord Macartney.

But as he has the fabrication of the records in his own hands, he trusts to those partial representations of his character and conduct, because the signatures of those members of government whom he seldom consults are affixed, as a public sanction; but you may form a just idea of their correctness and propriety, when you are informed that his Lordship, upon my noticing the heavy disbursements made for secret service money, ordered the sums to be struck off, and the accounts to be erased from the cash-book of the Company; and I think I cannot give you a better proof of his management of my country and revenues than by calling your attention to his conduct in the Ongole province, and by referring you to his Lordship's administration of your own jaghire, from whence he has brought to the public account the sum of twelve hundred pagodas for the last year's revenue, yet blazons forth his vast merits and exertions, and expects to receive the thanks of his Committee and Council.

I will beg leave to refer you to my minister, James Macpherson, Esq., for a more particular account of my sufferings and miseries, to whom I have transmitted copies of all papers that passed with his Lordship.

I cannot conclude without calling your attention to the situation of my different creditors, whose claims are the claims of justice, and whose demands I am bound by honor and every moral obligation to discharge; it is not, therefore, without great concern I have heard insinuations tending to question the legality of their right to the payment of those just debts: they proceeded from advances made by them openly and honorably for the support of my own and the public affairs. But I hope the tongue of calumny will never drown the voice of truth and justice; and while that is heard, the wisdom of the English nation cannot fail to accede to an effectual remedy for their distresses, by any arrangement in which their claims may be duly considered and equitably provided for: and for this purpose, my minister, Mr. Macpherson, will readily subscribe, in my name, to any agreement you may think proper to adopt, founded on the same principles with either of the engagements I entered into with the supreme government of Bengal for our mutual interest and advantage.

I always pray for your happiness and prosperity.