Warren Hastings
T.C. Owtram introduces Warren Hastings. After thirty years in the service of the East India Company, eleven of them as Governor-General, Hastings returned in 1785 to face impeachment at Westminster Hall
In the pleasant Evenlode Valley, where Oxfordshire borders on Gloucestershire, was born, in 1732, the man who was destined to play the part of Augustus to Clive’s Caesar in the British empire of India. Warren Hastings, deprived by death of a mother in his infancy, was abandoned soon afterwards by his father. He was brought up in the house of his clergyman-grand-father, a widower. He went to the village school; his companions were the village boys; but his grandfather had acquainted him with the past grandeurs of his Hastings ancestors to which the tombs in the near-by churchyard of Daylesford bore witness. At an early age, he resolved that, one day, he would buy back the ancestral mansion and the lands that went with it.
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