Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 2.djvu/18

 10

NOTES AND QUERIES. do* s. n. JULY 2, MM.

must have occurred in some part of Germany. A lady, falsely accused of setting fire to her town was publicly tortured and finally burnt alive. Thenceforth her supposed crime was made the subject of a yearly sermon, think it must have been between 1884 and 1888 that her innocence was established.

F. R. J. H.

LANCASHIRE TOAST. Who is the author of the following, which appeared in the Literary World on 23 January, 1903?

Here 's to thee an' me an' aw on us. May we ne'er want nowt, noan on us, Noather thee nor me nor onybody else, Aw on us ; noan on us.

ROBERT MURDOCH LAWRANCE. 71, Bon-Accord Street, Aberdeen.

THE FIRST WIFE OF WARREN HASTINGS.

(10 th S. i. 426, 494.)

ANXIOUS to economize space, I neglected to recapitulate in my former communication the evidence (which first appeared in the Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal for July, 1899, and was cited by me in an article in Elackwood's Magazine for April, 1904) leading indubitably to the startling conclusion that all the biographers of Warren Hastings have been wrong in their identifi- cation of his first wife. As the omission has led to a fresh enunciation of the old fallacy by two of the correspondents who kindly referred to my query, I will summarize the case as briefly as possible.

In my novel ' Like Another Helen,' pub- lished in 1899, in which Hastings appeared as one of the subsidiary characters, I pointed out that either the date (1756) usually assigned to his first marriage by his bio- graphers, or their identification of the bride as the widow of Capt. Dougald Campbell accidentally killed at the capture of Baj-baj, must be wrong, since Baj-baj was not capturec until 30 or 31 Dec., 1756. My suggestion was that the marriage took place in the spring of 1757 ; but a correspondent, personally unknown to me, writing from Calcutta pointed out that the error lay in the othei direction, and forwarded a copy of the Pro ceedings mentioned above. At the monthly general meeting of the society there reporteo a paper was read by the Rev. H. B Hyde, MA., on 'The First Marriage o Warren Hastings,' in which he records hi accidental discovery, in a miscellaneou bundle of old Calcutta Mayor's Cour records, of a "Petition of Warren Hasting

f Cossimbazaar, Gentleman, in behalf of his ife Mary Hastings, relict to John Buchanan, ate of Calcutta," asking for letters of dministration to the estate of the said Captain John Buchanan, late of Calcutta, Gentleman," who had died intestate- We now from Hoi well that Buchanan was the nly one of the senior military officers who howed any capacity, or even courage, in the isasters of June, 1756, and that he was one f the victims of the Black Hole. I may mention that there are few things more trange than the utter absence of any mention of Hastings's first marriage in the fast mass of his papers which I have gone hrough at the British Museum; a few ds of perfunctory condolence from Scraf- on on "y r Domestick Misfortunes" are the mly trace. It may, of course, be different with he papers still in private hands ; but it is vorth noticing that Gleig, to whom large quantities of these were entrusted for the jurposes of his biography (as shown by a list nade by Mrs. Hastings the second), gave urrency to the mistake which has so long leld sway. I can only suggest that during lastings's long married life with his second wife she discouraged so studiously any reference to her predecessor that even her name was lost, and that Gleig, in collecting lis materials, followed some incorrect tradi- tion, supported by the fact of Capt. Campbell's death near the time of the marriage.

With regard to the tombstone at Barham- pur (Malleson) or Kasimbazar according to Mr. Hyde (in the paper cited above), MR. JAMES WATSON, and F. DE H. L. Malleson points out that the month of the lady's death is wrong, and Mr. Hyde that her husband does not seem to have known her exact age, since the figure now reads merely "2 ," adding that the remainder may have been obliterated when the Bengal Government restored the whole some years ago. Morad- bagh was the suburb or quarter of Murshida- bad in which Hastings lived as Resident at the Nawab's Court, and from which all his letters are dated. With regard to his only son George, it is interesting to note that when he was sent to England he was placed in the charge of the Rev. George Austen, of Steventon, and his wife, the parents of Jane Austen a fact which certainly goes to support that connexion between the first Mrs. Hastings and the Austen family which I am trying to establish.

Stronger evidence than Mr. Hyde's as to the identity of Mary (Buchanan) Hastings can hardly be required, but corroborative