Although it is possible to read from this letter that even at this early stage Clive had formulated a hidden agenda of imperial conquest in Bengal, he was only stating the obvious: that after the Nawab’s attack on Calcutta restoration of the status quo ante was not an option. Any settlement with the Bengalis would have to ensure that no such attack could be repeated.
As for a plan to attack the French, this would be only in the event of war breaking out between Britain and France in Europe. The goals of the expedition were to change and grow as Clive and his forces were sucked inexorably up that river of ambition and delusion. Significantly, Clive was given the vaguest of remits – which suggested that the directors in London, at least, did not wish to limit his ambitions: he was to ‘pursue such measures as you shall judge most conducive to the Company’s benefit’.
* * *
On 16 October one of the mightiest expeditionary forces ever assembled in the eighteenth century set sail. The people of Madras turned out in their hundreds to wave goodbye to this formidable and magnificent spectacle. There were four major ships of the line – the Kent, Watt’s flagship, with 64 guns; the Cumberland, under Admiral Pocock, with 70 guns; the Tyger, with 60 guns; and the Salisbury, with 50. In addition, there was a smaller ship, the Bridgwater, with 20 guns, and a fireship named, without imagination, the Blaze. They were escorting three company warships (also equipped with some guns), the Protector, Walpole and Marlborough, and three ketches. There were more than 500 British Company soldiers, 150 marines, 100 artillerymen, nearly 1,000 Indian troops and 160 support troops. Including the crews, over 2,500 sailed with six weeks’ worth of provisions.
Pigot had tried to tie Clive’s hands with the admonition that ‘the sword shall go hand in hand with the pen’. He now sent Siraj-ud-Daula a threatening letter which also held out the hope of avoiding hostilities: ‘The great commander of the King of England’s ships has not slept in peace since this news and is come down with many ships, and I have sent a great sardar who will govern after me, by name Colonel Clive, with troops and land forces … You are wise: consider whether it is better to engage in a war that will never end or to do what is just and right in the sight of God.’
But Clive was not to be inhibited by Pigot, who would soon be several hundred miles away in Madras. He had been bewitched by Calcutta on his only visit there, as by the river leading away into a kingdom of vast wealth and extent. Siraj-ud-Daula had furnished him with the pretext for going after it.
As the prows of the ships steered proudly north-west, and the cheers from the quayside grew more distant, Clive, who had been so scarred by the humiliation of the British surrender at Fort St George years earlier, felt pride surge in his breast. He had been picked to command the restoration of British rule to another scene of national shame and humiliation. He knew that he was at another turning point in his life. Once again, fate had thrown him the dice and he must seize the initiative.
His exploits in the Carnatic, while remembered, had propelled him only to the status of a minor British hero: his personal ambitions in Britain had been frustrated and his fortune diminished. His immense abilities and energies were now in their prime, leavened by experience.
He understood that a defeat would never be acceptable to a restless tyrant like Siraj-ud-Daula. Nothing less than the removal of the Nawab from his throne would secure British rule in Calcutta again. But if the Nawab were to be removed, why should the British make terms with another oriental despot? They would be mad to relinquish any authority they acquired. A new law was to apply to Clive’s gains in Bengal: the law of accelerating ambitions. To secure a gain it is always necessary to annex more land, and then secure that, and so on.
Clive felt he had been placed in a position of unprecedented authority for a British commander (although he was to underestimate the resistance to him from his peers). The bulk of the forces – the Company troops and the sepoys – were under his sole command. The council in Madras, much less the directors in England, were too far away to restrain him. The council in Calcutta was discredited. He had the power to enforce his own settlement on Bengal; he had been given, in effect, the authority and discretion of a dictator.
In the Carnatic he had always been subordinate not just to the military commander, Lawrence, but to the civilian power as well. Now he possessed both. His hour of destiny had arrived. The once obscure, diffident clerk was in charge of the greatest British force that had ever sailed the seas off India.
His one pang of regret was leaving the pregnant Margaret in Madras. Her brother, Mun, sailed with him as a captain of Company troops, and her cousin Walsh as paymaster of the forces – Clive’s lucrative old job – with Clive’s own cousin George in a junior post. Those twelve ships headed by the seven magnificent warships steering into the wind made the greatest spectacle Fort St George had seen in years.
* * *
It was not to last: few expeditions can have got off to a less auspicious start. As though all the Hindu gods had decided to try and block its passage to Bengal, the post-monsoon winds were ferocious, the seas extremely rough. Those elegant eighteenth-century craft, with their three masts, billowing sails, defiant prows, buoyant, stately, tub-like hulls and erect, duck’s-bottom sterns were buffeted and dispersed all the way down to Ceylon in the first fortnight of sailing, the wretched soldiers on board, who had departed in such high spirits, cramped, battered and sickly in the tumultuous seas.
As the winds veered round, the fleet made its way slowly back up towards the Bay of Bengal, only to be blown again by typhoon-like winds across to the other side, the coast of Tenasserim (Burma). It was remarkable, indeed, that none were lost; the near-helplessness of the vessels before the storm must have given Clive and his men pause for thought.
But those sturdy ships fought their way back again across the heavy seas, although two – Pocock’s Cumberland and the Marlborough, further south than the others and encountering fierce winds, were forced to turn back to Madras. This reduced Clive’s force by more than a third; he lost 243 infantry and 430 sepoys; the Cumberland’s 70 guns were also sorely to be missed. A third ship, the Salisbury, sprang a leak early in November and threatened to go under, but carpenters worked night and day to repair the damage, and the ship managed to limp along with the rest of them.
The delay caused by atrocious weather forced the ships to cut down to half rations, and supplies of rice ran out, so that the sepoys had to be persuaded to feed off beef and pork. ‘Some did submit to this defilement, yet many preferred a languishing death by famine to life polluted beyond recovery.’ Water was rationed, and scurvy broke out.
After this dreadful voyage, and in a much sorrier state than when they had set out, on 5 December the ships at last reached the mouth of the Hugli, with the troop carrier the Protector proudly in the vanguard. The fleet was now approaching hostile territory, controlled by Siraj-ud-Daula. There were no local pilots available, and the waters at the mouth of the river were boiling with currents and impregnated with reefs and shifting mudflats.
Only on 8 December did a high tide arrive to buoy them, permitting them to start the long journey upriver. For Clive, striding impatiently up and down his ship, despairing for land and for action, deeply frustrated by the ferocious sea passage, the spectacle of the endless rainforest that lined the banks of that huge waterway seemed an enormous relief, but also a challenge beyond anything yet undertaken, luring him into the very heart of northern India.
He at least sensed that an empire was at his feet. He would be enticed slowly up into the silent jungle, he was being offered the chance of true greatness. The recapture of Calcutta was but the first step. He would have to go on and on, ever greater ambitions and dangers unravelling before him, as well as temptation beyond most people’s endurance.
It is hard to accept, as some biographers have, that he blundered slowly upriver and won an empire by accident. All the evidence suggests he was quite conscious of the opportunities when others about him were not, and he was det
ermined to make the most of them. He was both hugely ambitious and clear-sighted about his goals: those two qualities were to transform him into an emperor.
As the mudflats and green foliage slipped past on that dismal and eternal river, the question was whether, like many of his fellow countrymen, he would become suborned and destroyed by the riches of the civilisation he now sought to subdue and by power over the huge territories he now sought to control. He had the authority, he believed, to behave like a despot and fulfil his wildest dreams: the foundation of a British Indian empire no longer seemed impossible.
But could even a character as strong as Clive’s resist the corruption of personality that absolute authority over a huge area of the world’s surface would ultimately bring? Over the next few months, treachery, power and money were each to clasp him to their bosom; he was to be pursued to the end of his life by the accusation that they had blackened the very depths of his soul. The truth, as we shall see, was somewhat different.
* * *
Those with him were occupied with more prosaic matters than dreaming of empire: that of restoring the morale of the seasick, hungry, discontented men aboard, to whom the even waters of the Hugli were a massive relief after the buffeting at sea. When they reached the settlement at Fulta, which was no more than a scruffy makeshift village on a malarial swamp, they found the remnants of the British colony at Calcutta in a wretched, ragged state, but joyous in their welcome for the avenging force whose several large ships seemed hugely impressive to them.
Drake pompously received Clive and Watson, announcing that a new ‘select secret committee’, consisting of himself, Holwell, Watts and a newcomer, Becker, had been set up to steer the affairs of the British in Bengal. Clive and Watson merely ignored them. With food now at last plentifully available, after three weeks’ resupply, the fleet was at last ready to move on.
Clive sent a letter to the Nawab’s governor of Calcutta, Manik Chand, couched in courteous terms, and then asked him to pass on a veiled ultimatum to Siraj-ud-Daula. The British force, said Clive, ‘was one never before seen in your province’. Manik Chand insisted that the letter be addressed to his master as ‘sacred and godlike prince’. Clive brushed the request contemptuously aside. ‘I cannot consistently with my duty to the Company or their honour, accept of your advice in writing to the Nabob a letter couched in such a style, which, however proper it might have been before the taking of Calcutta, would but ill suit with the present time, when we are come to demand satisfaction for the injuries done us by the Nabob, not entreat his favour and with a force which we think sufficient to vindicate our claims.’
* * *
Without waiting for an answer, the fleet made its first strike upriver on 29 December. Clive and a force of 500 and two cannon were landed to lead an attack on the fort at Budge Budge. Clive had wanted to go by ship, but was prevailed upon by Watson to land downriver. Manik Chand, warned of the enemy’s approach, sensibly evacuated and camped outside.
Unaware of this, Clive spurred his forces across appalling terrain on one of his characteristic night marches. ‘In order to prevent discovery’, the guides ‘led the troops at a distance from the river, through a part of the country which was uninhabited indeed, but full of swamps and continually intersected by deep rivulets, which rendered the draught and transportation of the [gun] carriages so tedious and laborious that the troops did not arrive until an hour after sunrise at the place of ambuscade’.
On arrival, Clive sent half of his men forward in thick bush country towards the fort – which he could not see – believing Manik Chand to be still there, and remained with a force of some 250. He was exhausted and, unusually for him when in the field, in low spirits. Suddenly, a force of around 3,000 cavalry from Manik Chand’s camp launched a surprise attack. The British were very nearly overwhelmed but, instead of fleeing, stood firm against the swords and pikes slashing at them, and launched flanking attacks. After Manik Chand’s turban was grazed by a shot, the Indian force retreated with the loss of around 150 men.
Meanwhile, the ships had arrived opposite the fort, where they came under fire. Hearing that Clive was under attack, a company of marines was landed to help him. Clive himself, still exhausted, now made for the river bank and embarked for Watson’s flagship.
There he met with the seasoned, commonsense, if occasionally prickly admiral and Captain Eyre Coote, the king’s officer, commander of the marines, who despised Clive as a ‘Company’ soldier – in his eyes not an officer at all. The spectacle of Clive worn out after his first engagement, leaving his men behind, made Coote more contemptuous still.
The two commanders of the expedition, Clive and Watson, decided to postpone the attack on the fort until the following morning. Coote, who was to have led it, was furious. Good-looking, haughty, arrogant, hot-tempered, quarrelsome, vain, lacking Clive’s intelligence and coolness, Coote was nevertheless a brave soldier and an able commander.
He lived under a shadow. He had been court-martialled for cowardice at the Battle of Falkirk, acquitted though cashiered, then pardoned, probably through the intervention of the Duke of Cumberland. He was deeply anxious to regain his reputation and self-respect.
To Coote, as was the case to a lesser extent with Watson, Clive’s reputation in the Carnatic meant little. Neither had seen any evidence of this self-assured visionary’s military prowess; and this first example was hardly inspiring. Coote fumed on board ship, his chance for glory postponed, late that afternoon. Worse was to follow. He recorded:
One Strahan, a common sailor belonging to the Kent, having just been served with a quantity of grog (arrack mixed with water) had his spirits too much elated to think of taking any rest; he therefore strayed by himself towards the fort, and imperceptibly got under the walls; being advanced thus far without interruption, he took it into his head to scale it at a breach that had been made by the cannon of the ships; and having luckily gotten upon the bastion, he there discovered several Moor-men sitting on the platform, at whom he flourished his cutlass, and fired his pistol, and then, after having given three loud huzzas, cried out, ‘the place is mine’.
Others rushed to join him, and only four were wounded altogether in the seizure of the virtually abandoned fort. ‘Thus the place was taken without the least honour to anyone!’ The unfortunate Strahan was summoned before Watson for indiscipline and threatened with punishment. He was said to have muttered the immortal lines, immediately after his dressing down for what was largely a case of wounded vanity on the part of his superiors, ‘If I am flogged for this here action, I will never take another fort by myself for as long as I live, by God.’
The first engagement was thus a colossal anti-climax. Budge Budge had been seized without a fight. Manik Chand had sensibly chosen to make his stand elsewhere. Clive’s own first engagement had been only narrowly won against a well-prepared Indian ambush. A day later the fort was demolished.
* * *
By now it was beginning to become apparent in the oppressive heat of the lower Ganges basin that the main enemies of the British – as indeed was the case with the Bengalis – were not their opponents but their own internal hatreds, jealousies and rivalries. Clive had been nearly seven weeks cooped up on board the rolling flagship at close quarters with Admiral Watson. Impatient, overbearing, fuming at the length of the journey, casting aspersions on the navy’s navigational ability to make it to the Hugli river at all, Clive made an impossible guest particularly as, when at sea, he was subject to Watson’s authority.
Moreover, Colonel Adlercron, by having his soldiers designated ‘marines’, had placed them under Watson’s authority, thus sidestepping the ‘upstart Indian’ Clive. Watson, while a more even-tempered man than Clive, himself resented the dual command and, as a king’s officer, looked down on the amateur soldier. By the time they had reached the mouth of the Hugli, tempers were already at boiling point.
These internal jealousies were further exacerbated by the loathing of the ludicrous Drake and his coun
cil for Clive, whom they saw as the creature of the Governor of Madras, unanswerable to them, and usurping their authority. When the clammy heat of the jungle and the invisibility of their opponents was added to the brew, the mixture was explosive; a madness had taken hold of the British, and in particular of these three men.
Clive had hoped that a spectacular action at Budge Budge – the seizure of the fort after one of his daring night marches – would assert his authority. Both the other two men were themselves intent on seeking credit for the victory. In the event it had proved a risible fiasco.
The following day – New Year’s Day – the fleet reached Thana, while the sepoys marched by land. The town had been hastily abandoned by the Bengalis, who left some forty guns – most of them seized from Calcutta. Once again the enemy, unseen, was melting before them, leaving them uncertain when it would turn to make a stand, or of the size and disposition of its forces. The territory was hostile, reports from spies few and probably misleading. The British ships crept slowly forward through the overcast gloom. That same night, advance boats from the fleet discovered several vessels laden with wood to be used as fireships, and burned them.
The progress so far had been unsettling and eerie. With the exception of Clive’s first accidental firefight, the enemy was moving before them beyond the trees and bushes, unseen. They could be all around them or, more probably, some way off, luring them into a trap, or genuinely retreating. Calcutta itself was now just upriver. As the elegant ships glided through the slow-moving waters, the silence was nerve-racking.
At 5 a.m. on the morning of 22 January, Clive and his Company troops landed to liaise with the sepoys, still moving by land. Watson moved upstream with his two main ships, the 64-gun Kent and the 60-gun Tyger. Now random shooting at last started from the shore; but soon the ships spotted the great green-damp walls of Fort William and the skyline of half-burnt buildings. Cannon opened up on them from within; but the spectacle of the immense ships and their firepower soon caused the Bengali artillerymen to panic.
Clive Page 20