For all the theatre of the occasion – indeed one of the prosecutors was the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan – this was not just the greatest political spectacle in the age of George III, it was the nearest the British ever got to putting the Company’s Indian Empire on trial. They did so with one of their greatest orators at the helm – the Anglo-Irish Whig statesman and political theorist Edmund Burke, supported by his no less eloquent and much more radical rival, Charles James Fox.
