As the ships came opposite Fort William, volleys of cannon exploded at them from the fort – dangerously, as the ships were now caught in a swirl of tidal eddies and swung around helplessly until anchored. Then they responded with a few massive broadsides that quickly put the shore gunners to flight, along with the rest of the small garrison left by Manik Chand, which escaped through the Eastern Gate. There had only been nine deaths on board the ships. Once again, the Indian commander had preferred to withdraw – out of fear, or in preparation for an ambush later?
Coote, along with a naval officer, was put ashore to take Fort William: the spectacle he encountered there was dismal indeed. The magnificent factory that had towered over the battlements had been gutted. Anything wooden had been torn down and used for firewood. Window fronts, doors and furniture were all ripped apart. Many of the houses within the fort had been burnt. Outside, the once magnificent merchants’ houses had been burnt down and the ‘black town’ was a wreck, plundered from end to end. The place was deserted, desolate, and stank of destruction and decay.
Farce now intruded into this pitiable scene. Coote, so infuriated by being denied the ‘honour’ of taking Budge Budge, was delighted in his historic – if not particularly hard-fought (in his case not fought at all) – prize of Calcutta, all the more so when Clive’s troops approached through the desolate remnants of the ‘black town’ and the ruins of one of the walls of the fort, destroyed to make way for the mosque that Siraj-ud-Daula decreed should be built there.
Coote took pleasure in having the commander of Clive’s sepoys arrested and pushing out his soldiers. He said he had received instructions from Watson to let no one into the fort. When the matter was reported back to Clive, he was incensed. ‘This I own enraged me to such degree that I was resolved to enter if possible, which I did.’
He walked forward in front of his troops, confronting Coote and declaring that the latter would be put under arrest unless he handed over control of the fort to Clive himself. While Coote had been absurdly heavy-handed in denying Clive’s men entry – and it is possible to detect the hand of Watson behind him – it was true that the honour of possessing Calcutta really belonged to the navy, which had done what little fighting was necessary. Clive’s land forces had played no part.
Coote stalled for time, signalling Admiral Watson what was happening. Now it was Watson’s turn to behave as though the fever had reached him. The admiral threatened that if Clive’s men did not leave the fort immediately, ‘he shall be fired out’, as the captain of Watson’s flagship, Henry Speke, put it. ‘If you still persist in continuing in the fort, you will force me to such measures as will be disagreeable to me, as they possibly can be to you.’
Clive stood firm. He ‘could not answer for the consequences but he would not give up his command’. It looked as though the first real battle of the Bengal campaign was about to be fought – between Clive’s Company troops and the British navy, backed by the King’s soldiers in this burnt-out shell of a once elegant eighteenth-century town on a tropical waterway, between three angry Englishmen bitterly quarrelling their way upriver watched by an unseen, stealthy, always retreating enemy.
An intermediary was despatched by Watson in the shape of Thomas Latham who, although a naval captain, was a friend of Clive’s and married to Margaret’s cousin, Jenny. An agreement was reached by which Clive was to take over the fort, being the senior officer on land, and hand over the keys to Admiral Watson next day, in recognition of the fact that the navy had actually taken over the garrison. In turn Watson would hand them over to the civil authority – the strutting, self-important and cowardly Drake and his council. Thus was Clive’s face saved: he was the commander of the land forces, and recognised as such; but the honour of victory – such as it was – went to Admiral Watson.
* * *
This astonishing episode was no more than one example of how the madness of the jungle could affect three men in a boat, each possessed with a mighty ego. It represented the beginning of a conflict that was to be etched deep into the history of the British in India. The contempt of the King’s men – both army and navy – for the Indian regiments and their sepoys was to run like a constant thread throughout the Raj. So was the tension between the civil and military authority, represented by the council at Calcutta and Clive and Watson.
Yet the potential conflict between motherland and colonists that was to erupt so explosively in America 20 years later was never allowed to reach a similar breaking point through much abler British policy in India. Also present was the jealousy between Madras and Calcutta (and to a lesser extent Bombay) that was eventually to result in the creation of a single authority – Governor-General of India, a position Clive was effectively to fashion, in large part, for himself. Finally, there was also the perennial inter-service rivalry between army and navy. Every subsequent snobbery and struggle for hierarchy in British India was present, in microcosm, on that first expedition up the Hugli.
The near-firefight between Clive, Watson and Coote also said much about Clive’s state of mind. He had been given full authority over the expedition, particularly now that it had reached land. Yet the admiral, with his massive firepower along the river, was still trying to retain control.
So far the expedition had proved a complete fiasco: all three forts had been taken virtually unopposed. In the one serious engagement, Clive’s forces had been taken by surprise and only narrowly survived an attack by a relatively small enemy force. Clive’s tactics of a night attack by stealth had been held up to ridicule by the abandonment of the enemy fort.
The hero of the Carnatic, so given to boisterousness and loud behaviour, so self-confident in Madras, so boastful of his exploits, the dreamer of an Indian empire, had done nothing to impress Watson – who reasoned that he had taken both Gheria and Calcutta through the navy’s efforts – or Coote. Apart from Gheria, Clive had not seen active service for nearly four and a half years; he was now 31. He must have wondered if his magic touch was failing, if his youthful successes had been merely a sudden flash of early exuberance.
Both Watson and Coote relished the humbling of a man of great reputation. There was no evidence on this expedition to justify his swollen-headedness. Clive’s own prickliness reflected his concern that his reputation was diminishing by the moment to that of a braggart who had been put to the test and was failing. Arcot and Trichinopoly meant nothing to Watson and Coote, who had seen only the dismal evidence of Budge Budge and Calcutta.
But both Watson’s and Coote’s behaviour did them even less credit than Clive’s. Coote was an arrogant, impetuous young man with a chip on his shoulder, later to show himself a fine soldier, but of no major intellect. Watson, certainly an able seaman, showed no great depth either.
After the occupation of Calcutta, it gradually became apparent that the appalling Drake had suborned Watson at Fulta, playing on his pretensions and resentments against Clive after the long sea voyage. The former governor and his council had both insisted that Watson ensure that authority in Calcutta was handed to them, rather than to Clive with his mandate from distant Madras. Despite Clive’s stand – justified by Coote’s effrontery – this in fact happened.
The men who had deserted Calcutta so shamefully thus regained their wrecked capital. Clive recognised this: he commented bitterly in a letter to Pigot at Madras that he had been the victim of a ‘dirty underhand contrivance’. In respect of Drake and his council, ‘I would have you guard against everything these gentlemen can say, for believe me they are bad subjects and rotten at heart and will stick at nothing to prejudice you. The riches of Peru and Mexico would not induce me to dwell among them.’
He was deeply depressed by Fort William. ‘It is not possible to describe the distresses of the inhabitants of this once opulent and populous town. The private losses amount to upward of two million sterling,’ he wrote to his father. To Pigot he confessed, ‘Between friends, I cannot help regretting that ever I undertook this mission.’ The dreamer of empir
e was back on earth, amid the petty jealousies and intrigues of lesser men.
* * *
Once in occupation of Fort William, Clive could hardly wait to get out and away from Drake and his crew. The next target was Hugli, which Clive said should ‘fall a sacrifice’ for the invasion of Calcutta. Thus the first fateful step was taken: the restoration of Calcutta was not enough for the British commander: his further designs were coming into view. He could defend himself on the grounds that Calcutta was indefensible unless the British occupied Hugli, but with Bengali territory outside Calcutta now being attacked for the first time, it was impossible for Siraj-ud-Daula not to respond without losing face. His conquests were being reversed. Now his nose was being tweaked.
This time, both Watson and Clive were keen to move on to the offensive. On 4 July Kilpatrick, Clive’s second-in-command, was sent upstream at the head of a substantial force of more than 500 men on three ships, one of which promptly ran aground but was floated again after a Dutch pilot was press-ganged in to help. The river was deeply treacherous, constantly changing course. When the tide was ebbing it was hard to fight the current. More dangerous still was the tidal bore, a huge wave, when it thundered upstream. A few days later troops were landed at Hugli, while the familiar boom of cannon rolled out again from the ships opposite the town. Manik Chand, with a force of around 2,000, was based there. As the bombardment got under way, he withdrew yet again.
Clive’s troops set about looting the town – presumably in retaliation for the rape of Calcutta. Eyre Coote, with a small party, was then despatched to burn down the Nawab’s granaries upriver. Hugli itself was burnt down. The British were taunting the Nawab to attack; they could hardly have been more provocative. At last, news came that he had assembled a huge army north of Hugli.
Clive, meanwhile, had not been slow in improving the defences of Fort William. ‘Fort William can never be taken by the Moors except by cowardice,’ he remarked, in a stinging rebuke to what had happened under Drake. However, there was no cause for complacency: bad news had just reached Clive. War had broken out between Britain and France at last, and he had to reckon with the possibility that the French would attach their 300-strong European garrison at Chandernagore to the Nawab’s forces.
CHAPTER 14
The Battle of Calcutta
A real battle was now approaching. With furious energy, Clive formed 300 or so irregulars into the First Regiment of Bengal Native Infantry. He also set about the more difficult task of persuading Watson to lend his own forces to the defence of Calcutta. He complained bitterly that as for the King’s soldiers, ‘it had been better for the service they had never come and I had the like number of Company’s in their room’.
He begged Watson for assistance in terms the latter found impossible to refuse, as he said when later justifying himself to his superiors. ‘You are very sensible sir, that with sickness and other accidents how far this force falls short of what was intended to act offensively against the Nabob of Bengal; indeed at present nothing but our strong situation can enable us to act against him at all. I must therefore request a favour of you, Sir, to land the King’s forces and to lay your commands on the officer [Coote] who commands them to put himself under my orders; assuring you at the same time that whenever you think it good for the service to recall them, upon signification thereof to me by letter, they shall be returned.’
Watson had no choice but to agree. Drake and the select committee pompously announced to Clive that he would have to carry out their orders – to which he replied that he would if they happened to coincide with his. Drake said he should attack forthwith and defeat the Nawab. Clive ignored them. He now proceeded to set out his terms for an agreement with the Nawab, clearly designed to be unacceptable: reparations, the restoration of the British to their privileges, permission for the settlement to be fully fortified and for a mint to be set up at Calcutta – the last two openly insulting in that they had been refused by the Bengalis before the seizure of Calcutta.
Clive seems to have been anxious to provoke the Nawab to strike before the French could come to his aid. The Nawab, in return, sent flowers and fruit to Calcutta, while his army moved closer. Clive responded to this deceit by sending him an embassy consisting of his old confidant Walsh and Luke Scrafton. Whether either believed he was fooling the other was not clear.
It was evident that the Nawab was preparing to attack and Clive to defend; indeed, it was clear that Clive favoured a Bengali attack on Calcutta as being on his chosen ground, rather than that of the Nawab. Clive positioned his troops at Bernagul, north-east of Calcutta, enclosed by the river to the south, the Maratha Ditch to the west, and salt lakes to the north.
The Bengali army moved steadily closer. Clive anxiously waited for reinforcements from the Carnatic or Bombay to enable him ‘to finish everything by a decisive strike’. Reports were reaching him of the huge size of the Nawab’s army, which helps to explain why the usually quarrelsome Watson and Coote were being so quiet and accommodating, ready at last to put their trust in a single commander, Clive, who knew India well and was reacting to the crisis with vigour and coolness.
The Nawab, meanwhile, was bent on securing French support. He wrote to Pierre Renault, Governor of Chandernagore, that he would ‘abolish for ever the annual imposts on your commerce and give you the right to establish a mint at Chandernagore. I will demand a firman for this from the Light of the Presence, the greatest and purest, the Emperor of Delhi, and will send it to you. Until the arrival of the firman I will you a parwana, with my seal, so that you may exercise these two privileges with perfect tranquillity of mind.’
But the French were still resentful at the Nawab’s exaction of a ransom after the fall of Calcutta, and rightly distrusted him. If he defeated the British, they believed he would then pick them off; if, on the other hand, the British won, they would instantly turn their fire on the French. In the circumstances they tried to use the threat of intervention on the Nawab’s side to obtain a neutrality agreement from the British. They refused to help either side – which must have come as an immense relief to Clive, as well-trained European troops supporting the Nawab’s immense army might decisively have tipped the scales against him.
On the morning of 3 February the advance guard of the Nawab’s army reached Calcutta, and Clive despatched first a small force, then a large one, to meet them. The two sides exchanged cannonades for about an hour before the Nawab’s outriders returned to camp at nightfall.
The British commander had already witnessed the arrival of the Nawab’s army on the flat land to the north of the city; and a fearsome sight it made. There were around 22,000 infantry and camp followers, 18,000 cavalry, 50 elephants and 40 guns, besides camels and oxen. Some reports put the enemy strength around 100,000, although half of these at least were servants and prostitutes. Clive had seen nothing like it since the spectacle of Chanda Sahib’s huge army at Trichinopoly years before.
He has been criticised for failing to attack the Bengalis on their arrival. But his caution was justified by the sheer size of the force; he watched as it made camp north of the Maratha Ditch. Absurdly, the Nawab informed Clive that he had marched upon Calcutta merely to find a better camping ground.
Clive’s two emissaries meanwhile found that the Nawab had departed his camp, and hurried back to catch up with him. On 4 February, at seven in the morning, they reached Siraj-ud-Daula at his headquarters: he had crossed the Ditch and taken up residence once again in Omichand’s country house.
The Nawab was surrounded by an impressive phalanx of well-armed senior officers. Walsh and Scrafton were not allowed to address him, because he believed ‘they had private arms about them and waited to assassinate him’, but his ministers refused the English request to withdraw the Bengali army. Walsh and Scrafton were then advised to see the Seths’ agent as ‘he had something to communicate to them that would be very agreeable to their colonel’.
The two Englishmen, suspecting this was a trick and that they wo
uld be arrested, turned in for the night, pleading exhaustion, and slipped away across the lines to tell of their encounter. Clive immediately decided to launch a daring attack straight at the Nawab himself in his refuge in Omichand’s garden. ‘I went immediately on board Admiral Watson’s ship and represented to him the necessity for attacking the Nawab without delay; and desired the assistance of four or five hundred sailors, to carry the ammunition and draw the artillery; which he assented to. The sailors were landed about one o’clock in the morning. About two, the troops were under arms, and by four, they marched to the attack of the Nawab’s camp.’
* * *
It was Arcot all over again: a surprise attack in the early hours of the morning at the very heart of the enemy, ignoring the massive odds against him, with just 470 soldiers, 600 sailors, 800 sepoys and 70 artillerymen equipped with a howitzer and six guns. It nearly went disastrously wrong, and was to require all Clive’s skill at last-minute improvisation to save the day.
The fog of the early morning provided cover for Clive’s men, as his force crossed the road to Dum Dum, intending to bypass the Nawab’s main camp to the south and reach another road, the Causeway, which crossed the Maratha Ditch; just beyond was Omichand’s house, the Nawab’s headquarters. However, the guides got lost in the mist and led Clive’s force straight into the heart of the enemy camp.
Suddenly aware of the vast concourse of people about them, they loosed off shots in all directions, causing panic. The enemy were able to assemble a force of some 300 cavalry, which charged. The British stood their ground, and fired volley after volley until the attacks ceased.
They then blundered on by this roundabout route to the road leading to the Causeway; but the Nawab’s forces, alerted to the danger to their leader, had assembled there and put up such resistance that a crossing of the Ditch proved impossible. Clive’s men were now in a desperate state: with the huge enemy army behind them, they had also been cut off from returning over the Ditch to the garrison. His only hope was to press on and reach the next crossing, across some paddy fields.
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