1899.] The Revd. H. B. Hyde — First marriage of Warren Ilastings. 79 



The following papers were read : — 



1, The first marriage of Warren Ilastings. — By The Revd. H. B. 

 Hyde, M.A. 



In the old Residency Burying-fji-ound at Cossimbazar is an epitaph, 

 to the memory of Mrs. Mary Hastings and her infant daughter Eliza- 

 beth. The date of the former's decease is given as July 11th, 1759, but 

 her age was either not accurately known to her husband Mr. Warren 

 Hastings who, according to the epitaph, erected the monument, or else 

 was half obliterated from the stone when the Bengal Govei'nment 

 restored the whole some years ago: for it now reads merely " 2 

 Anyhow she was under thirty. Mr. Hastings was at the time Com- 

 pany's agent at the court of the Nawab of Bengal at Moorshedabad and 

 in the 9th year of his Indian Service. 



All Hastings' biographers, from Gleig to Sir Alfred Lyall and the 

 writer in the Dictionary of National Biography, state with more or 

 less confidence that this Maiy was the widow of a Captain Dugald 

 Campbell, an officer who had been accidently shot a few days before the 

 recovery, on the 2nd of January, 1767, of Calcutta from the Nawab of 

 Bengal. Thus Sir Alfred Lyall having related how that Hastings on the 

 outbreak of hostilities in 1756 escaped from Moorshedabad to Chunar and 

 thence made his way down the Ganges and joined the refugees from 

 Fort William at Fulta, says : — "Here he met the widow " (wife) "of 

 a Captain Campbell whom he afterwards married, and in 1758 he wrote 

 to a friend that he was very happy and found every good quality in 

 his wife. But the poor lady died in 1759 after bearing him two 

 children, neither of whom survived childhood ; and of this brief 

 episode in his eventful life only the bare facts remain." 



Accident has lately revealed that this identification of the first 

 Mrs. Hastings is a mistaken one. On turning over, in April last, a 

 miscellaneous bundle of old Calcutta Mayor's Court i-ecords (since 

 properly distributed), I found in my hands a paper (endorsed "No. 217, 

 Ecclesiastical Suits ") bearing the fine, bold signatui'e of Warren 

 Hastings. It was a petition which had been filed by him in the Court 

 on the 9th of June, 3758, respecting the administration of the estate 

 of his wife's late husband. The document is entitled " Petition of 

 Warren Hastings of Cossimbazaar, Gentleman, in behalf of his wife 

 Mary Hastings, relict to John Buchanan late of Calcutta, " and 

 declares that " Captain John Buchanan, late of Calcutta, Gentleman," 

 had died intestate and that the petitioner requested letters of adminis- 

 tration to the deceased's estate, because he had married his widow 

 Mary. This petition was accompanied by two other documents, the 



