Edmund Burke led the attack on Hastings and in his opening speech labelled him variously ‘a robber’, ‘a professor, a doctor upon the subject of crime’, ‘a rat’, ‘a weasel’, ‘a keeper of a pigsty, wallowing in corruption’, and charged him ‘with injustice and treachery against the faith of nations … With various instances of extortion and other deeds of maladministration … With impoverishing and depopulating the whole country … with a wanton, and unjust, and pernicious, exercise of his powers’.fn3
