Just three months after he arrived he wrote dutifully to his father, ‘I can assure you my stay in this place is in every respect pleasant, and as satisfactory to me, as it is blessed with the hopes (if it please God to preserve my life) of being able to provide for myself and also of being of service to my relations.’
* * *
Yet Clive’s desperation at discovering that all his dreams of excitement and prosperity in India amounted to no more than finding himself at the bottom rung of a long and very English ladder eventually showed through even to Richard Clive. A few months later his son wrote: ‘The world seems to be vastly debased of late and interest carries it entirely before merit, especially in this service, though I should think myself very undeserving of any favour were I only to build my foundation on the strength of the former.’
Needing his father’s financial support – debts were frowned upon by the Company – he became ingratiating. ‘I think myself not only very happy, but infinitely obliged to you for my education, and as it has rendered me in a fair way of improving my talent, I flatter myself with the hopes of enlarging tenfold. I shall always make it my duty to behave truly and deserving of your confidence and esteem and am willing to give up all pretensions to your favour in case I don’t behave with that sobriety and diligence which is expected.’
He begged his father for money, favours and a transfer to Bengal, where the opportunities were reported to be much greater. The once insolent teenager waxed positively prissy in seeking to justify his requests for drink: ‘I hope you’ll be so kind as not to take exception at the wine as there are no other sort of drinkables here but that, and punch, and as I shall always drink it with water, intend to make it serve me a whole year.’
To his devoted Uncle Bay he was more honest: ‘The pleasant and delightful days which I have spent with my kind relations and friends in Lancashire, refreshed and entertains my mind with very agreeable ideas. I must confess at intervals when I think of my dear native England it affects me in a very particular manner, however knowing it to be for my own welfare rest content and patient, wishing the views for which my father sent me here may in all respects be fully accomplished.’
* * *
Surprisingly, for one who was an obvious and rebellious leader of boys, and soon to be so of men – he was later to enjoy an enormous circle of friends – he seems to have shunned company in India at first. Tall, gangling and shy, he was not at first close to the three fellow writers he knew from England – his cousin, William King, John Pybus and John Walsh – the latter the natural leader of the pack, self-confident and well-off with a considerable fortune of some £2,000 after the death of his parents. Walsh knew India well, having been brought up in Madras. Clive may have resented Walsh’s natural leadership at this early stage.
Clive felt himself to be in a community of suffocating incestuousness, comprising only 400 people. He was well aware that his survival and promotion depended on self-discipline; for the first time in his life he was trapped into conventionality and he hated it. Resentful and sometimes insolent to his superiors, he was forced to apologise on one occasion for his rudeness to the secretary of Fort St George. The rigidity of life there was underlined by the fact that he, like all writers, had to attend church twice a day.
There were just three consolations. The first was typical of a young writer confined to the village of Fort St George: acquiring the local habits. Clive took up chewing betel-nut and smoking hookah. Second, he took up drinking wine in a serious way; particularly outside the confines of the fort, there were many drinking parlours where it was acceptable to while away one’s spare time over a bottle of wine.
However, any closer association with the locals would have been frowned upon. There was a rigid distinction between the two communities; in particular, there is no evidence at this stage of his frequenting the brothels of the ‘black town’, whatever his later activities. For a young clerk in his social position that would almost certainly have been unacceptable to the stodgy hierarchy of the settlement.
His third consolation was the most unlikely of all. His father had furnished him with an introduction to the Governor of Madras – who, however, had already left before Clive arrived after his interminable journey. The new governor, Nicholas Morse, a pleasant if ineffectual man, nevertheless invited Clive to dinner on his arrival – a considerable boost to his status – and offered him access to the huge library at Government House.
The previously unacademic Clive passed many hours of his free time reading on a huge variety of subjects. During those two years, he acquired a genuine breadth of scholarship that he was to prove much too busy to pursue in later life. His education was being completed in the rather Spartan finishing school of Fort St George.
The surly rebel without a cause, the undisciplined, unlettered youth of Market Drayton, improbably, was becoming a bookish intellectual under the crushing pressure of expatriate, small-town boredom. Prickly, sensitive, intellectually inquisitive, dreamy, ambitious – Clive was unrecognisable from the young thug of the past.
Often Clive would wander by himself to the outskirts of the settlement, to gaze at the seemingly endless expanse of the Choultry Plain and the arid, near-desert Carnatic beyond. He tried to come to terms with what lay beyond, with the vastness of the subcontinent. Madras was just a pimple upon its cheek. The British had barely scratched the surface of India.
His contact with the Indians, the respect they showed all Europeans, made him wonder whether there were much greater opportunities at hand than were being exploited by the stuffy, unimaginative functionaries of Fort St George. The Indians had been a people oppressed so long, often by outsiders; they were accustomed to subservience. Why not to the English?
He was a dreamer, but he could only dream: he was merely a junior clerk not yet out of his teens. As the great fireball of the sun plummeted with perceptible speed from the dark blue sky to the level land horizon, drawing down the curtain of darkness, he would turn disconsolately away: he knew so frustratingly little about the lands and people out there.
A life of unrelieved tedium as a minor merchant in India, slowly rising to greater authority and the power to tell young clerks what to do in turn, lay ahead, Clive supposed. According to Malcolm, the best informed if most pedantic of his biographers, writing fifty years after the event, he retired to his quarters one night, took out a pistol, and held it to his head; there was only a click. He repeated the attempt, with the same result. ‘I am reserved for something!’ he is said to have exclaimed. His explosive, unconventional energy and nature had been shut up in a bottle, and he preferred self-destruction to continued existence as one of the lowliest cogs in a genteel, confined village at the back of beyond.
Clive’s modern biographer, Mark Bence-Jones, doubts this story; yet it is hard to believe that Clive, from whom it must have come, made it up, prone though he was to exaggeration sometimes. Suicide was frowned upon at the time much more than today, even regarded as cowardly. The story hardly reflects well upon a great leader of men. Almost certainly the incident is a polished version of something that really occurred.
* * *
Robert Clive endured this imprisonment of his restless nature for just two years; then his spirit was freed by violent action of a kind that, for the complacent burghers of Fort St George, threatened disaster. It was little consolation that the fateful turn of events that was to result in the razing of the comfortable little English settlement and its placid, self-aggrandising way of life, transforming Clive into a leader of men, was largely the English traders’ fault.
The English – and indeed the European – presence in India had begun as an exclusively commercial one. The four English enclaves – Bombay on the west coast, Fort St George (Madras) and Fort St David on the south-east coast, and Fort William (Calcutta) in the north – were just that. Although possessed of garrisons, their main raison d’être was as entrepots for the European markets. The East India Company had been founded in 1599, primarily
to trade in spices and undermine the Portuguese monopoly.
Over the next hundred years, however, the Portuguese were gradually beaten back by the Dutch, who also forced the English out of Indonesia and back to India, where they had to do battle with the Portuguese again. The first real toehold was established when the British promised to protect the then Mogul Emperor from attacks by Portuguese warships in exchange for trading enclaves. Sir Thomas Roe, the father of this early stage of British intervention in India, argued that ‘if you will profit, seek it … in quiet trade; for without controversy it is an error to affect garrisons and land wars in India’.
In 1641 Fort St George was founded; in 1674 Bombay followed; and in Bengal the entrepôts at Hugli and Kasimbazar were established – although Calcutta, with its deep-water port next to tropical swampland, was soon to replace the first. In 1686 the English, with 600 men and 10 ships, declared war on the Mogul Empire and were forced out of Bengal. Only in 1690 were they allowed to return, chastened, in a purely trading role. However, within their enclaves, they soon exercised virtually all administrative powers, collected taxes and even administered justice.
In the late seventeenth century, the French set up their own small trading centres, the biggest being in Bengal at Chandernagore, about 16 miles from Calcutta up the Hugli river, and at Pondicherry, a town some three-quarters of the way between the British Fort St George and Fort St David on the Coromandel Coast. The French presence was small, however, and when war broke out between France and Holland, the latter captured Pondicherry and held on to it for six years. The British were dismissive of French efforts.
But in 1720 the French government suddenly decided to take over the French East India Company, increase its resources and effectively turn it into an instrument of national colonial expansion. The French company became in effect a branch of the state, while the British one remained primarily a commercial enterprise. The French now began to engage in serious commercial rivalry with the British.
When war broke out over the Austrian succession in Europe between Britain and France in 1744, the year Clive arrived in India, the French attempted to maintain their neutrality, fearing that they were militarily inferior. The British East India Company, however, saw a chance to make inroads into the lucrative French trade in saltpetre, indigo, silks, cotton and spices which had made such a dent in their own commerce. The East India Company asked the British government to send out a fleet to attack the French.
In 1745 this reached the Coromandel Coast and attacked a number of French ships, some belonging to the Governor of Pondicherry, Joseph-François Dupleix, who lost a large part of his personal fortune. Incensed but powerless, Dupleix called on his government to send its own fleet; this eventually arrived under the command of Admiral Bernard La Bourdonnais and engaged the British fleet in July 1746.
The able and adventurous British naval commander, Commodore Barnett, had died a few months before. Poorly led, the British ships broke away from an indecisive battle with the French and made for repairs in Ceylon; La Bourdonnais’s ships, which had suffered much worse damage, took advantage of the respite to flee for Pondicherry for repairs. Two months later the French fleet sailed out again to engage the British. Astonishingly, the English fleet chose not to fight and fled for Bengal. Dupleix now had his chance of revenge.
But first it was necessary to indulge in a little local politics. Both the French and British settlements were nominally subject to the local ruler, the Nawab of the Carnatic, even though they effectively administered their own territories. In order to prepare the way for their attack on Madras, the French promised that the enclave would be turned over to the Nawab when it was seized. The Nawab acquiesced in this, although he was nominally at peace with the British and mistrustful of the French. La Bourdonnais was then ordered to proceed by the ebullient French governor, who had heard false reports of the success of the French-backed Jacobite uprising in England, which had apparently deposed the English king.
* * *
Clive, like any inhabitant of Fort St George, was aware of the first indecisive naval engagement; when the British fleet sailed away, anxiety turned to panic in the ‘village’ of Fort St George. Nicholas Morse, the well-meaning governor, knew full well how exposed he was. Commodore Barnett, before his death, had written of the fort’s defences, ‘The works seem rather built by chance than design; the bastions are placed contrary to all the rules … if I was governor, I should never sleep soundly in a French war if there were 500 Europeans in Pondicherry.’ The garrison consisted of some 300 men, about half of them ‘Europeans’ and half Indians, none with any experience of fighting.
On 7 September 1746, Clive awoke to find Fort St George in a state of turmoil. Out to sea, several French ships could be seen; troops were being landed. The women and children of the settlement were rushed to safety and civilians to positions of shelter. Clive, like the other young clerks, took up a vantage point from which to watch events. Within hours, he first heard the sound that was to become a constant companion through the rest of his life: the boom of cannon. He watched the chaos of the fort, the small and ragged garrison manning their positions, their striking red uniforms in place, the governor and senior Company officials watching anxiously.
The first explosions had no apparent effect, and by nightfall the garrison had been lulled into a sense of false security. It seemed the threat was more apparent than real. Before turning in, Clive and his friends gazed out on the twinkling lights of the French fleet at sea, and the glittering fires of the French encampment on shore, cursing roundly the cowardice of the fleet that had left Madras to its fate but confident that the assault would be seen off.
At dawn the young writers were woken again by the sound of cannon. This time sudden explosions just off the fort and within the walls showed that the gunners had found their range. Fire and destruction, although limited, induced panic among the inhabitants of Fort St George. The offer of Clive, like all his able-bodied companions, to help was gratefully accepted. As the day wore on, men on the battlements, before Clive’s eyes, were injured and killed. He saw them borne away on stretchers as he helped to ferry ammunition to the defenders.
A total of four Indian and two English soldiers were killed that day, and several more wounded. The garrison seemed incapable of responding to this fire from two sides – land and sea. It had no plan, beyond firing back ineffectually. Its commander was an old man. As the relentless, if hardly overwhelming, barrage went on, the soldiers began to abandon their stations and disobey orders.
A French shell burst open one of the warehouses containing liquor. The terrified, insubordinate soldiers, always openly despised by their civilian counterparts in times of peace, seized the supplies and began to drink. Clive watched contemptuously with his friends as drunken soldiers roamed the small town shouting and laughing and the civilians sheltered indoors.
Alcohol and fear had taken over, and the women and children were at risk; the garrison was more of a threat than the French. The pompous, slow pace of this stodgy bourgeois settlement had been shattered in an instant, and a passionate 20-year-old could not but wonder at the shambles wrought by his superiors, coldly gazing upon the worst that can befall any army: indiscipline among the troops.
* * *
The following day, desperate to put an end to the breakdown in order among his own men, Governor Morse sued for peace and secured astonishingly favourable terms for the British. The French would occupy the fort and take over the Company’s stores while the English would remain ‘on parole’ – that is to say, free men. For a ransom still to be agreed, the British would be handed back the town. It was to be a punitive expedition, but no more.
That would not have been apparent to Clive and the other apprentices: there was nothing more humiliating to these burning, angry young men than the disintegration in a single day of British resistance to the hated French, and the handover of their hard-won commercial stores and gains.
On 10 September Clive watched as
the blue-tunicked French entered the gates of the citadel, La Bourdonnais at their head, disarming the garrison brusquely and beginning to remove the stores, while treating the civilians with tolerable civility. The women and children were now bold enough to come out of their lodgings. Distraught East India Company officials watched in horror as their possessions were confiscated. The British flag was lowered and the French raised high.
Proud and passionate, Clive felt the humiliation of his country bitterly; he had no role, and there was nothing he could do; he was now unemployed and subject to the swagger of foreign domination. For several days Clive and his followers hung about, drinking idly, encountering stray French soldiers, being barked at by them, longing to pick a fight but too wise to try.
Meanwhile a furious row had broken out between the French commanders. Dupleix was angry that La Bourdonnais had conceded such favourable terms; the former’s objective was nothing less than the permanent French annexation of Madras. La Bourdonnais insisted he would not go back on his word to the English and, with his 1,200 French soldiers and formidable firepower, his view for the time being prevailed – although it seemed at one stage that Dupleix was planning to attack Fort St George to wrest it from his fellow countryman. The English could only watch in helpless horror as their once cherished citadel threatened to become a battleground between warring French factions.
* * *
In mid-October, after Madras had been occupied for a month, Clive awoke to a new sound: the ferocious, relentless drumming of tropical rain. The skies above were overcast and laden. He gloried for a moment in the refreshing luxury of the downpour, so welcome after the heat and dust of the searing summer. Later that day, with the rain, came the wind too, also mercifully cooling. Then followed the shout from John Walsh, the effective leader of the small group of writers in the fort. ‘The French ships! They’re leaving by God!’
Clive Page 4