12. Warren⁴ Hastings (Penniston³, Penniston², Penyston¹) was born in Churchill, Oxford 15 December 1732. Warren died 22 August 1818 in Daylesford, Worcester, at 85 years of age.

He married Ann Elliott.

http://www.marquise.de/material/1700/1765_1.shtml Portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds Warren Hastings: * 6/12/1732 Churchill + 22/8/1818 Daylesford Employee of the East India Company from 1750, first Governor-General of India from 1773 to 1784. Impeached for extortion and misconduct in office, but vindicated after ten years of trial which left him financially ruined

http://www.npg.org.uk/search/person.asp?search=ss& sText=hastings&LinkID=mp 02080 6 pictures at the National Portrait Gallery

Compton's Encyclopedia: (1732-1818). India's first governor-general, Warren Hastings consolidated and organized British power in India, building on foundations laid a few years earlier by Robert Clive. Hastings's administrative skill enabled the British to counter threats both from internal interests and from the French at a time when the British were involved in the American Revolution. Hastings also established sound procedures for administering justice and collecting revenues during a difficult time of transition.

Hastings was born on Dec. 17, 1732, in Churchill, Oxfordshire. He was left at an early age in the care of an uncle, and attended Westminster School in London. Hastings became a clerk with the East India Company and, at the age of 18, arrived in Calcutta. Clive recognized the young man's abilities. Before he left India he made Hastings agent for the East India Company in the court of an Indian prince, the nawab of Bengal. Later Hastings served the company in Madras. In 1772 the company recalled him to Calcutta as governor of Bengal. Hastings, finding the administration in confusion and the company in debt, instituted reforms.

The East India Company was originally a mere trading corporation that governed only its own trading posts. Clive had extended the rule of the company from Calcutta over all Bengal, a vast continental area (see Clive ). The British government saw the need to exercise stricter supervision over a corporation that collected taxes, maintained armies, and, in return for giving them protection, exacted large sums of money from Indian princes. In 1773 Parliament appointed Hastings governor-general of all the company's possessions in India.

During the American Revolution France joined the American Colonies in their war with Britain. In India the French hoped to take this opportunity to expel the British. French officials plotted with Indian rulers, and French officers drilled Indian troops. Hastings took decisive action.

An army was dispatched across the peninsula to Madras to put down Hyder Ali, the sultan of Mysore. Hastings's action saved India for the British, but the wars cost money. To pay for them, Hastings exacted increased tribute from the raja of Benares and the nawab of Oudh.

Hastings also had to uphold his authority against a faction in his own governing council, a faction led by his personal enemy, Sir Philip Francis, whom Hastings had wounded in a duel. When Hastings returned to England in 1785, Francis, then a member of Parliament, denounced him for corruption and cruelty. The orator Edmund Burke and the playwright Richard Sheridan took the lead in demanding Hastings's impeachment. The trial opened in the House of Lords in 1788 and dragged on a full seven years. Hastings was finally acquitted in 1795. He retired to the country and lived there quietly until his death on Aug. 22, 1818, in Daylesford.

Macauley: Warren, the son of Pynaston, was born on the sixth of December, 1732. His mother died a few days later, and he was left dependent on his distressed grandfather. The child was early sent to the village school, where he learned his letters on the same bench with the sons of the peasantry; nor did anything in his garb or face indicate that his life was to take a widely different course from that of the young rustics with whom he studied and played. But no cloud could overcast the dawn of so much genius and so much ambition. The very ploughmen observed, and long remembered, how kindly little Warren took to his book.

The daily sight of the lands which his ancestors had possessed, and which had passed into the hands of strangers, filled his young brain with wild fancies and projects. He loved to hear stories of the wealth and greatness of his progenitors, of their splendid housekeeping, their loyalty, and their valour. On one bright summer day, the boy, then just seven years old, lay on the bank of the rivulet which flows through the old domain of his house to join the Isis. There, as threescore and ten years later he told the tale, rose in his mind a scheme which, through all the turns of his eventful career, was never abandoned. He would recover the estate which had belonged to his fathers. He would be Hastings of Daylesford. This purpose, formed in infancy and poverty, grew stronger as his intellect expanded and as his fortune rose. He pursued his plan with that calm but indomitable force of will which was the most striking peculiarity of his character. When, under a tropical sun, he ruled fifty millions of Asiatics, his hopes, amidst all the cares of war, finance, and legislation, still pointed to Daylesford. And when his long public life, so singularly chequered with good and evil, with glory and obloquy, had at length closed for ever, it was to Daylesford that he retired to die.

When he was eight years old, his uncle Howard determined to take charge of him, and to give him a liberal education. The boy went up to London, and was sent to a school at Newington, where he was well taught but ill fed. He always attributed the smallness of his stature to the hard and scanty fare of this seminary. At ten he was removed to Westminster school, then flourishing under the care of Dr. Nichols.

At fourteen he was first in the examination for the foundation. His name in gilded letters on the walls of the dormitory still attests his victory over many older competitors. He stayed two years longer at the school, and was looking forward to a studentship at Christ Church, when an event happened which changed the whole course of his life.

Howard Hastings died, bequeathing his nephew to the care of a friend and distant relation, named Chiswick. {SA This was Joseph Creswick, an executor in Howard's will}. This gentleman, though he did not absolutely refuse the charge, was desirous to rid himself of it as soon as possible. Dr. Nichols made strong remonstrances against the cruelty of interrupting the studies of a youth who seemed likely to be one of the first scholars of the age. He even offered to bear the expense of sending his favourite pupil to Oxford. But Mr. Chiswick was inflexible. He thought the years which had already been wasted on hexameters and pentameters quite sufficient. He had it in his power to obtain for the lad a writership in the service of the East India Company.

Whether the young adventurer, when once shipped off, made a fortune, or died of a liver complaint, he equally ceased to be a burden to anybody. Warren was accordingly removed from Westminster school, and placed for a few months at a commercial academy, to study arithmetic and book-keeping. In January 1750, a few days after he had completed his seventeenth year, he sailed for Bengal, and arrived at his destination in the October following. He was immediately placed at a desk in the Secretary's office at Calcutta, and laboured there during two years. Fort William was then purely a commercial settlement. In the south of India the encroaching policy of Dupleix had transformed the servants of the English Company, against their will, into diplomatists and generals.

Doneva: *1st Wife of Warren Hastings: ................................ +Anne Elliott ....................................10 George Hastings b: December 1757 in Kasimbazaar,India ....................................10 Elizabeth Hastings b: 1758 in Kasimbazaar, India .................................*2nd Wife of Warren Hastings: ................................+Anna Maria Apollonia Von Chapuset b: Abt. 1747 in Stuttgart, Wuertemburg,Germany d: 1837

http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/bo oks/reviews/janeausten.h tm David Nokes has a very different opening to the Austen story: He takes us first to India, to the isolated and melancholy outpost of Tysoe Saul Hancock, husband of George Austen's sister Philadelphia, and official father of Jane Austen's cousin Eliza. In fact Eliza, who subsequently married the Comte de Feuillide, was believed by many to be the daughter of Warren Hastings, governor-general of India, later impeached for corruption and acquitted at a famous trial. Hastings was a friend and connection of the Austen family, and his young son was cared for by Jane Austen's parents, who took in pupils and boarders to eke out George Austen's meager clerical stipend. On visits to Steventon, Eliza Hancock, clever and sophisticated and some years older than her cousin Jane, flirted with Jane's elder brothers, took part in Austen family theatricals, was a decided literary influence on Jane, and is supposed by many critics and biographers to bethe original of Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park. Hitherto biographers have been wary or tactful about Eliza Hancock's parentage, but, since Warren Hastings took continual interest in Eliza and gave her several handsome presents of money, his connection with her is now generally accepted, and certainly by both the present biographers.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longter m/books/chap1/janeausten abiography.htm. Mr. and Mrs. Austen were in London partly at least to visit his sister Philadelphia and niece Betsy. While they were with them word came from India of the death of Phila's husband, Tysoe Saul Hancock. He had in fact died months earlier, in November 1775, even before the birth of Jane, but news travelled slowly, letters from India taking six months or more. Mrs. Hancock was naturally afflicted to hear of her husband's end. Worse, it appeared that he died penniless: "all his effects will not more than clear his debts here," wrote Mr. Woodman, the lawyer who advised her, and the same man who had lent George Austen money. Sadly, Hancock was little George's godfather, and now there was no hope that he would be able to contribute to the cost of his care; he had worried about the growing number of Austen children, and how the family would manage. The situation of his own wife and daughter was not, however, as bad as it appeared at first. Three years earlier, Mr. Hancock's patron in India, the great Warren Hastings of the East India Company, on becoming Governor of Bengal, had made a gift to his god-daughter, Betsy Hancock, of £5,000; and in 1775 he doubled the sum, making Betsy an heiress-not a great one, but with enough to ensure she would find a husband. The Hancocks were sworn to secrecy about the whole matter, but the two trustees for Betsy's fortune were the lawyer, Mr. Woodman-Warren Hastings's brother-in-law-and Mrs. Hancock's brother, George Austen, who was doubtless in London partly to carry out whatever duties his trusteeship demanded.

http://home.earthlink.net/~lfdean/austen/mitton/ch apter1.html They had undertaken the charge of a son of Warren Hastings, who died young, and they had a large family of their own, as was consistent in days when families of ten, eleven, and even fifteen were no uncommon thing.

http://www.periyar.org/mr/9902mr7.htm A fascinating aspect of Jane Austen's life relates to the paternity of her delightful cousin and sister-in-law Eliza de Feuillade nee Hancock who evidently inspired some of her more lively characters. Eliza's mother, Philadelphia Austen, was orphaned and went out to India to find a rich husband. She married Tysoe Saul Hancock, a surgeon, but she was childless until they moved to Bengal and she had a love affair with Warren Hastings, an official of the East India Company, a business partner of her husband and a connection of her brother, the Reverend George Austen. Indeed Hasting's son George boarded with Jane Austen's parents, the Reverend George Austen and Mrs Cassandra Austen nee Leigh, and sadly died of an illness in their devoted care. A colleague of Warren Hastings in Bengal, George Vansittart, later helped to save Jane Austen's Aunt Jane Leigh-Perrot from the gallows or transportation to Botany Bay over the alleged theft of some lace from a milliner in Bath. It is most likely that Eliza was a product of this affair of Philadelphia Hancock and Warren Hastings. Indeed when Philadelphia and her daughter returned to England, Hastings provided for them to the tune of 10,000 pounds (an immense sum in those days).

http://www3.theatlantic.com/issues/98jan/austen.ht m Her aunt Philadelphia, cut off from her inheritance by tightfisted relatives, voyaged to India in search of a husband who might save her from the poorhouse, or worse. (She found one.) Eliza, Philadelphia's daughter, was an extraordinary woman, and almost definitely the product of her mother's adulterous affair with Warren Hastings, the governor-general of British India; though Hastings never legally acknowledged Eliza, he helped her with money and with his connections until he died. As a result of Hastings's generosity, but also because of her intrepid nature, Eliza moved in the highest social and political circles in Paris and London. She married a dubious French count, journeyed back and forth between England and France during the French Revolution, barely escaped the Terror, and returned to live in England, where she married one of Jane's brothers after the guillotine took her unfortunate first husband's head.

Warren Hastings and Ann Elliott had the following child:

13 i. Elizabeth⁵ Hastings was born in Kasimbazaar, India 1758.

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