Clive

by Robert Harvey

  To relieve his physical pain, he was prescribed opium, which he was later to take also to relieve his depression. But there is no evidence that he took opium when well – that he became an addict. He may have been nursed by Margaret Maskelyne as he lay ill, which would have increased his feelings for her and satisfied her concern for him.

  As the illness began to wane, Clive also experienced intense homesickness. He had not seen his father and family for fully ten years. His task in India seemed over for the time being and he wanted to enjoy the fruits of his achievement in a less claustrophobic small-town atmosphere than that of Fort St George.

  As a poor boy made good, he undoubtedly wanted to demonstrate how the Clive family’s steady drift downward in circumstances had been reversed. He may have felt, too, that his Indian ambitions had for the moment been satisfied: he had made a considerable fortune. As he later admitted, he was never lacking in ambition. He now wanted to go into British politics, perhaps believing he would one day become prime minister.

  Returning to health, he still seems to have been uncertain about Miss Maskelyne. There can be no doubt that he was more attracted to her than to any suitable young lady of his acquaintance. But he was a man who hated to be tied down, and he feared that his days of womanising and jovial male company might be at an end. Although she was highly intelligent and acceptable, he may have felt she was slightly inferior to him in social terms: he the scion of a gentry family, she from the Home Counties’ professional classes.

  Who knew but that he might find a better match in Britain? He booked a single passage from India on 15 February aboard the Admiral Vernon. What then happened is not known. But Margaret may have got to hear of this. Her disappointment and sweetness may have touched a chord in his heart. Three days later, with Clive’s customary impulsiveness, they were married; and ten days after that they set sail for England.

  CHAPTER 10

  Clive Superstar

  It would be hard to imagine a less auspicious start to Clive’s sudden marriage than the seven-month journey back. Although the couple left amid the plaudits of the settlement at the fairytale wedding of its hero, there was a considerable amount of backbiting as well. Saunders and Lawrence had fallen out once again, and the haughty, reserved governor considered Clive primarily a protégé of Lawrence’s.

  This impression was confirmed by one of the least attractive personalities who had attached himself to Clive as a bosom companion for – as later events revealed – motives of pure self-interest. Robert Orme, now 24 years old, had first met Clive in Calcutta and moved to Madras a couple of years earlier. Orme appears to have tried to make mischief between Lawrence and Saunders, letting it be known that Clive sided with the former. Orme himself openly denigrated Saunders.

  The latter unjustly assumed that Orme was Clive’s mouthpiece, and took offence, whereas Clive had been trying to mediate between the two men, both of whose patronage he had enjoyed. Saunders refused even to send the traditional letter of thanks for Clive’s services on his departure, and did not see him off.

  Orme apologised to the governor for ‘his slanders’ just before boarding ship, mending his own fences, but not Clive’s. Clive was deeply wounded: ‘I think in justice to the military in general I cannot leave this coast without leaving a paper behind me representing the little notice taken of people of our profession,’ he wrote to Lawrence. ‘I hope the world will not accuse me of vanity or be of the opinion that I think too highly of my own successes as I seldom if ever open my lips upon this subject.’ However, Saunders was too big a man to put down Clive, who had served him so well, in writing to the directors.

  Under this slight shadow, the ship sailed. Macaulay’s description of life aboard an Indiaman (during Warren Hastings’s time, just twenty years later) has the ring of truth:

  No place is so propitious to the formation either of close friendships or of deadly enmities as an Indiaman. There are very few people who do not find a voyage which lasts several months unsupportably dull. Anything is welcome which may break that long monotony, a sail, a shark, an albatross, a man overboard. Most passengers find some resource in eating twice as many meals as on land. But the great devices for killing the time are quarrelling and flirting. The facilities for both these exciting pursuits are great. The inmates of the ship are thrown together far more than in any country seat or boarding house. None can escape from the rest except by imprisoning himself in a cell in which he can hardly turn. All food, all exercise, is taken in company. Ceremony is to a great extent banished. It is every day in the power of a mischievous person to inflict innumerable annoyances. It is every day in the power of an amiable person to confer little services.

  Margaret’s subsequent devotion suggests she would have been one of the latter, forever trying to please Clive. Still only 17, she was too besotted with, and hero-worshipping of, Clive to complain of the discomforts of the voyage. Ten years older than her, he was still a figure of awe.

  From the first he loved her with, for him, real sensitivity and kindness; but his idea of marriage was not that of every girl, even in the eighteenth century. Much of the journey he spent discussing the recent military campaign with the ubiquitous Orme.

  Orme, labelled Cicero by Clive, was at least a fine writer. Vain, bad-tempered, effeminate and snobbish, he was presumably resented intensely by Margaret as Clive spent much of the journey pacing the deck or closeted with him. Clive, for his part, later remarked that being cooped up in an East Indiaman was hardly conducive to romance. Few nights in the cramped bunks in their tiny cabin could have been given over to passion.

  Provisions were low and had to be rationed, increasing the discomfort. Reaching Cape Town at last, they were transferred to a roomier, better-stocked ship and conditions improved, though Clive and Orme spent innumerable hours discussing the recent campaigns while Margaret socialised with the other young ladies. Orme had already begun to write his History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan.

  When he arrived in England, he was to use the draft of the initial text to impress the Duke of Cumberland to appoint him a councillor in Madras – remarkably, as he had no record of achievement there. Clive remarked tolerantly at the way his friend unashamedly used him for his own advancement, ‘You will allow that dear self gets the better of every other consideration.’ Describing his friend as ‘proud and overbearing’, he continued to have a soft spot for him.

  * * *

  The Pelham docked on 18 October 1753. The Britain Clive returned to was not all that different from the one he had left. George II was still on the throne. In Clive’s absence, the country had reeled from the earthquake of the 1745 rebellion by the ‘Young Pretender’, Bonnie Prince Charlie, which had plunged Scotland into civil war and proved strikingly more dangerous than anyone had expected. At one stage the 5,000-strong rebel army was approaching Derby, with virtually no government forces between them and London. But the failure of the Welsh, under Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, and of the English Tory squirearchy to rally to the Young Pretender forced him to retreat; and the last dynastic challenge to the Hanoverians was over in a shower of bloody revenge by ‘Butcher’ Cumberland.

  The newly dominant Whig prime minister was Walpole’s carefully groomed successor, Henry Pelham, skilful, statesmanlike and trusted by the king; and when Pelham died in 1754, shortly after Clive’s return, he was succeeded by another of the political grandees of the eighteenth century, his brother the Duke of Newcastle. At first, Newcastle seemed something of a minor figure: seated in the Lords, he was an unimpressive orator, a small, nervous, excitable man, who was widely ridiculed. He made up for this by being a skilled manipulator of men and a dispenser of patronage on a grand scale. He was, in modern terms, a political survivor and a fixer.

  At first he was overshadowed in the Lords by the formidable minister of war, the Duke of Cumberland, and in the Commons by the foremost speakers of the age, William Pitt and Henry Fox. It was natural that the headstrong young Clive should
look to the patronage of these two larger-than-life figures as he sought to make his entrance on to the British political stage.

  Pitt, a Ciceronian orator with a hawk-like profile and a streak of cold ruthlessness, displayed an almost uncanny prescience and clarity of thought, and was deeply distrusted by the new king. ‘The Great Commoner’, from a middle-class background, was already spellbinding the nation. Fox, a former Tory, was regarded as the corrupt and devious Machiavelli of modern British politics, a man of dazzling, raffish charm, insincerity and great wealth. The strutting victor of Trichinopoly was sucked into the struggles between the three men and tossed aside a couple of years later like a discarded plaything.

  Clive, the prosperous young hero, epitomised the cocky, wealthy nouveaux riches now asserting themselves throughout the land. London was for the first time becoming a middle-class city: the division between the palaces of the great and the crowded slums and hovels of the poor was being cut through by a proliferation of neat, purpose-built housing for men of considerable, though not excessive, prosperity. One observer, Arthur Young, rejoiced of another city that ‘each side of the whole street forms but one front, and in a very neat taste. How much is it to be lamented, that it is not the method in all the towns of England.’

  In Clive’s London, the relentless expansion of middle-class housing westwards, away from the centre where people worked by day, was already under way. The villages around the capital were being gently clasped into the capital’s embrace: in 1744, John Armstrong, in his popular Art of Preserving Health, had celebrated the salubrity of London’s half-developed country villages: ‘Umbrageous Ham’, ‘sun-burnt Epsom’, ‘Chelsea low’, ‘high Blackheath, with wintry woods assailed’, Hampstead ‘courted by the western wind’, Greenwich ‘waving over the water’, Dulwich ‘yet by barbarous arts unspoiled’. Only Richmond was expanding rapidly. Thirty years later all these villages were growing fast, mainly to accommodate middle-class housing.

  Clive’s own house in Queen Square, Ormond Street, was not far from the expanding mecca of cheap middle-class housing, St Marylebone, and just north of the recently constructed elegance of Berkeley Square, Grosvenor Square, Cavendish Square and Hanover Square. Nearby Regent Street was an insalubrious dive of prostitutes and footpads. Clive, in his well-appointed, modern, terraced surroundings, was worldly and full of himself, every bit the representative of a new class, and the young military hero of his times. With his high-powered wife and a comfortable household which included two Indian servants and a carriage, he was glad to cock a snook at the fusty aristocratic former ruling class. He was new money, and proud of it; he was set to conquer England.

  Within two years, he had fallen flat on his face.

  * * *

  Clive’s reception from family friends, the East India Company and the populace was an ecstatic one. England was badly in need of heroes after so long a period of internecine strife; and Clive had youth, vigour and a spectacular succession of victories on his side.

  One verse addressed to Clive perhaps overstated it:

  The proof is now beyond all doubt

  Since about Clive they keep such rout

  Where’er he goes ’tis holiday

  The Tradesmen throw their work away,

  All run in crowds unto the windows

  To see the Conqu’ror of the Indies.

  But it gives a flavour of his reception. In the Company he was widely viewed as the man who had frustrated the designs of Dupleix and saved the settlements in southern India. The directors nicknamed him ‘General Clive’. His string of victories – Arcot, Arni, Kaveripak, Trichinopoly, Covelong and Chingleput – had been followed breathlessly, if with a time-lapse of several months, by much of London society.

  He was summoned by the directors and offered a gold-lined sword set with diamonds worth around £500. He refused to accept it unless Lawrence was offered one: the Old Cock was then awarded a sword worth £750 to reflect his rank in relation to Clive. Wherever Clive was received he was treated as a national hero.

  He was not yet the superstar he was to become, but the dashing and successful young man of 27 provided a focus for popular pride and patriotism in a country only recently reunited after a succession of civil wars and rebellions, the last of which had ended just eight years before. He was Hanoverian Britain’s first real popular hero.

  His parents, now lodged in a large house in London, possibly rented on the expectation of Clive’s financial support, and his sisters and brothers gave him a warm welcome. Richard Clive doted on the successes of his son, and as an advocate pushed him assiduously in order to obtain the young man’s preferment in whatever exalted circles he could.

  Clive himself pressed hard in the Company for promotion, endlessly recounting his exploits to the directors. He was offered a senior post and the chance to succeed George Pigot, now designated Saunders’s successor as Governor of Madras. Although Pigot had been a friend, Clive was disappointed not to be offered the governorship himself. An inkling of this might have been the cause of the quarrel with Saunders. Clive refused to return immediately to India – at the same time not burning his boats by offering to come out a year later.

  He and his father were keener on a more ambitious route to the top, this time in England: that of becoming a Member of Parliament. Thomas Herring, Archbishop of Canterbury, was an acquaintance of his father; as was the Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Hardwicke, a friend of Clive’s one distinguished cousin, Sir Edward Clive, a judge of the Court of Common Pleas. The latter had been MP for the Cornish rotten borough of Mitchell for four years.

  The borough contained 55 votes. Sir Edward pointed his young cousin in that direction. Backing Clive in the contest was Thomas Scawen, the major local landlord, and the Earl of Sandwich, who between them controlled just under half the votes. It was necessary to secure others to get elected, and in those days patronage and bribery were the standard methods.

  Clive spent around £5,000, and when the votes came in his investment had paid off – he won 30 out of the 55 votes cast. He had now taken the first step up the ladder of power in Britain itself.

  Although still occasionally laid low by bouts of fever – he had to go to Bath to recover – life must have seemed very rosy to Clive. An MP at just 28, an acknowledged hero, he gave his father £6,000 to reduce the mortgage on Styche, the country’s family estate, to just £2,500. He was also generous to his friends.

  The Clives do not appear to have entertained much at their London house. Margaret herself, self-reliant and withdrawn, was occupied with bearing their first child, Edward, in March 1754, and seems to have led a reclusive life, not uncommon for a young mother. A second child was born a year later, but was sickly from the first.

  * * *

  Clive was soon in financial difficulty: part of his fortune was being repatriated in the form of diamonds, and local customs officials did not permit them to go forward from Holland, where they had been disembarked; he had to sell them for well below their value. This rude shock coincided with a sudden decline in his political fortunes.

  The two candidates he and his colleague had defeated were supporters of the Duke of Newcastle, the prime minister, who was a shrewd and underhand political survivor. Clive had been backed not just by Sandwich but by Henry Fox, the most gifted politician of his day, and one with a reputation for reckless intrigue. Fox had gone into opposition against Newcastle within the ruling party, the Whigs (the Tories were outcasts after the failure of the 1745 ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ rebellion, in which many of their supporters were implicated) and was challenging him for the job of prime minister.

  Newcastle was a vicious and implacable opponent. Clive was suddenly made aware that, fearless as he might be against large armies in India, he was out of his depth in the political intrigues of eighteenth-century Britain. The young man was a pawn in a ferocious power struggle.

  The election was adjudicated by a Committee of the Whole House. Fox made speech after speech on Clive’s behalf, tearin
g to shreds the arguments put across by the lawyers from the opposite side. The committee decided in Clive’s favour, and their recommendation was then reported to the House for a final vote. The fate of the government depended upon it: if Clive’s party had won, Newcastle would have been ousted and Fox become prime minister.

  The small Tory opposition was appalled at the prospect: Fox was a far abler man than Newcastle. The Tories preferred a weak Whig prime minister to a strong one and joined Newcastle. They turned the scales against Clive’s election. This was narrowly defeated after a year of wrangling. The same day as the defeat – which he had anticipated – he signed up at last for the East India Company’s offer. He was starting all over again. India had always been the alternative: and he was now fast running out of money, having wasted a great deal of it on trying to get into parliament.

  Clive found his spell in London deeply frustrating. He had been disappointed on his first attempt to get into parliament, after an intense battle, and had lost a lot of money as a result. After his warm initial reception as a returning hero had worn off, he could sense that his Indian successes cut little ice in the real centres of power in England. The great noble houses, which still controlled many seats in parliament through their placemen, made no effort to receive him. His sponsors, Fox and Sandwich, had been slightly raffish characters, outside the social mainstream.

  * * *

  Just eleven days after signing the contract, Clive and Margaret set sail again on the Stretham for India, along with two young cousins to keep Margaret company and make their own fortunes. The two were Jenny Kelsall, a good-looking, flirtatious and precocious 16-year-old daughter of Margaret’s uncle; and George Clive, a cousin of Robert’s. Jenny was very close to Margaret, and helped to make up for her sorrow in having to leave her two infant children behind.

  Richard Clive and Jenny’s father rushed down to the dockside to say goodbye to their children, but the ship had already sailed. At the age of 29, Clive’s second great adventure in India was about to begin. Few – least of all Clive himself – dreamt that it would far eclipse even his first.