Clive skilfully saw his chance to reduce Mir Jafar’s power still further by lending his protection to the conspirators, while at the same time continuing to support the Nawab’s rule. For the British, a weakened Mir Jafar was the best option of all. From Murshidabad, Clive travelled upriver to join the Nawab at Rajmahal, where he summoned Rai Durlabh to a reconciliation in his tent on 30 December.
Having sorted out the matter, he turned to the question of the Nawab’s late payment of the treaty revenues to the British. The Nawab protested that he had no money. Clive proposed that he raise special taxes – tuncas – on four provinces. Under threat of British military intervention, Mir Jafar had no choice but to obey. These taxes were particularly harsh on the peasants and resented by all classes. Mir Jafar now resolved to set off on his expedition to Patna, although Clive urged reconciliation with Ramnarayan.
The British commander appears to have been in much better health away from the disease-ridden lower Ganges and travelled like the emperor he in effect was in a budgerow, a long barge with a windowed cabin, followed by a colourful retinue of lesser boats. In this leisurely and luxurious fashion, he was sucked much further into the Indian interior than he had ever been before, to the very boundaries of his new empire.
When he arrived, he was unexpectedly struck down with a painful attack of gout. A few miles from Patna, he met the astute and dignified Ramnarayan, and engaged in vigorous horsetrading. Ramnarayan had indeed been engaged in a plot with Rai Durlabh to overthrow the Nawab, and had nearly already attempted to stage a coup. Clive discouraged this, promised him his protection, but equally insisted that the Nawab be reconciled to Ramnarayan.
At last Mir Jafar, fearful of concerted action by all his enemies – the Nawab of Oudh across the border, the Marathas, Ramnarayan and Rai Durlabh – agreed to recognise the government of Patna on 23 February. However, he then stubbornly refused to return to Murshidabad, no doubt hoping to launch an attack on his northern enemy as soon as Clive had departed. Clive saw through his bluff and stayed until April. Eventually Mir Jafar relented, sending back most of his army.
Clive and Rai Durlabh returned together, the English dictator well satisfied. He had frustrated Mir Jafar’s attempt to subdue his northern dominion. He had lent his protection to Rai Durlabh, the Nawab’s chief rival, and Ramnarayan, governor of his biggest outlying province, so that they owed their survival to Clive.
Mir Jafar in turn was weakened and unable to use his armies against the British. It was as fine and subtle a use of the divide-and-rule principle as any, and showed how natural and consummate an administrator Clive could be. The humiliated Nawab saved face by returning in a magnificent convoy from his futile expedition, bearing tigers and other animals he had caught, entertained by a large company of the most beautiful women in Patna, whom he had carried off on elephants as a consolation prize.
Clive might have been forgiven for complacency after he had put down Mir Jafar’s attempt to escape the British yoke. He returned to find the capital in an appalling mess, and dressed down Miran, who had been largely responsible. From there he travelled back to Calcutta – to hear the astonishing news that the very foundations on which British India had been built were under threat.
* * *
On 20 June 1758, he learnt in Calcutta that Fort St David, in whose defence he had played such a part ten long years before, had fallen to the French virtually without a fight. The walls had not been breached, the British fleet had been nearby. Once again, the impotence of British colonial settlements without military leadership of the kind provided by Clive, Lawrence and Coote was exposed. He raged, ‘were our enemies supplied with wings to fly into the place? … I would wish for the honour and welfare of our nation, that court martial would make the severest example of the guilty in these cases.’
He had immediate and sound advice for Pigot: ‘remember all is at stake in India and that necessity has no law’. He suggested that Pigot ravage the countryside so that the French would be unable to find food or money to buy it with. ‘Their great want of money is well known, and every method which can be thought of to increase their want of it, must greatly conduce to overset all their offensive schemes: can’t a body of Maratha or other horse be taken into pay to burn, ravage and destroy the whole country, in such manner that no revenue can be drawn from thence?’ The British, in contrast, could be supplied from Bengal.
The French attack represented a completely new kind of challenge in India. Equipped with a large fleet and a force of some 4,000 European soldiers, they had decided to attack the British and win through what would now be called conventional military tactics. The Comte de Lally, one of the foremost military commanders schooled in the new tactics, was their commander. He was a fine soldier, with no experience of India, unlike Dupleix or de Bussy, and all the contempt of a professional soldier for the French settlers in India.
Triumphant at Fort St David, Lally’s force now marched on Madras itself: its only setback was that the French fleet, under Admiral d’Ache, had fought two indecisive naval engagements with Admiral Pocock’s ships, and then decided to withdraw from the coast of India. As Clive had predicted, Lally was short of money and set off on a series of expeditions to bully local rulers into paying for his army. Lally got as far as Tanjore, and was forced to pull back without a fight or a siege of the city because of the state of his men.
In his own words, his troops were without ‘victuals, money or munitions, barefoot and half-naked, worn out with fatigue and in despair at having engaged in so wild an adventure’. He returned to lay siege to Madras again; but as there was no French fleet to blockade it, it could be supplied from the sea. In June he ordered de Bussy, so long the ruler by proxy of the Deccan, to his side. Once again, the British conquests in India seemed precarious – at the mercy of the largest and most formidable European army ever seen on the continent.
Word of the French successes soon reached Mir Jafar, who silently began to conspire against the British and his domestic enemies. Rai Durlabh found his position increasingly precarious: he attempted to flee to Calcutta, but his palace was surrounded by Miran’s supporters, intent on murdering the chief minister, until Scrafton came to his rescue with a British contingent. Under British protection, Rai Durlabh and his family fled to Calcutta.
Clive, always quick to react to a change in circumstances, became supplicant again to the Nawab, inviting him to Calcutta on a formal visit, which turned into a mixture of carnival and orgy. As Scrafton lamented afterwards, ‘Thank God his excellency has at last gone. He has led me a hell of a life here by the constant attendance I have been obliged to pay to him and his wenches, for he never went twenty yards from his house but they were with him.’ The Nawab was presented with, among other copious gifts, ‘twelve standing venusses to pull off behind; one lying ditto’. Mir Jafar may have felt that at last the British hold on Bengal was weakening.
In fact, Clive as usual was far from idle. With his genius for sniffing out the weakness of his opponents, and his propensity to gamble, he had hit on the most efficient way of striking back at the French in southern India. He decided to send his ablest officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Forde, to take charge of an expedition to wrest control of de Bussy’s mini-empire now that its leader had at last been forced to leave by Lally, along with most of the French forces there.
Forde was an extrovert, loud personality, and a natural leader of men, to whom Clive had immediately taken a shine. On the first anniversary of Plassey, he had held a wild party at Kasimbazar with dancing girls provided for his officers. As one witness recounts, ‘“By God this is mine, I know her by the ring in her nose,” shouted one officer, but when he went to call his servant to take her to his room, one of his comrades whips the ring out of her nose, and carries her off before his face.’ Forde, however, was forced to entertain the formidable Mrs Warren Hastings at the party, and while doing so, sadly, ‘the Adjutant had the assurance to carry off the lady he had fixed to sing him to sleep after the fatigu
es of the day’.
This soldier’s soldier was despatched in September 1758, with 500 of Clive’s best European troops and 2,000 sepoys, to go to the help of the local rajah who had grabbed hold of Vizagapatnam from the departing French forces. Clive’s action deeply alarmed the burghers of Calcutta, who saw their garrison reduced by two-thirds at a time when Mir Jafar and Miran were showing signs of increasing cockiness. It was another apparently reckless decision.
But Clive accurately understood that Mir Jafar’s bark was worse than his bite, and that if the French advances went unchecked, the British position in Bengal would be endangered much more than by a temporary withdrawal of forces. Local princes began to conclude that the British were, after all, a paper tiger. Forde’s expedition was delayed by storms, and did not reach Vizagapatnam until after late October.
After a month in which Forde established himself, trying to control restless and ill-paid troops, he met a French force under de Bussy’s deputy, Conflans, at the Battle of Condore, and inflicted a decisive defeat. After nearly ten years, the private French kingdom of the Deccan was under threat. Winning a series of further clashes, Forde captured the main French garrison at Masulipatam four months later. French reinforcements did not arrive, but fled to Ganjam.
Salabat Jang, so long the French puppet ruler in the Northern Circars, assembled a large army against Forde, but entered into negotiations with him when the British threatened to install his brother on the throne. Eventually he agreed to help the British drive the French out. Forde’s expedition had been a complete, though hard-fought, success.
* * *
Meanwhile the leaden-footed Lally was laying siege to Madras, while de Bussy fumed not just at his decision to abandon the Deccan, but at his ham-handed tactics. De Bussy was regarded by Lally as intrinsically corrupt and gone native; whereas the former, for all his love of ostentation and vainglory, was by far the most skilful and adept servant of the French in India, outstripping even Dupleix, who was less realistic.
De Bussy advocated alliances with the local nawabs centred on the remaining French influence at the court of Hyderabad. He was an intriguer by nature. ‘Among a people as doublefaced as are those with whom we have to deal, to show only straightforwardness and probity is, to my thinking, only to be their dupe, and we shall inevitably be that if we do not conform to the usages of the country.’ He was probably right, but Lally replied brusquely, ‘The King and the Company have sent me to India to chase the English Company out of it … It does not concern me that such and such rajahs dispute for such and such a nawabship.’
Lally’s large army marched on Madras, taking one small settlement after another and consuming their supplies. On 14 December the French attacked the city itself, entering the ‘black town’ and laying waste to much of it. The French cannon now laid siege to Fort St George, doing immense damage to it, and opening a large breach.
The British forces, headed by Pigot and Stringer Lawrence, fought back with ferocity. The fort continued to be well supplied from the sea. Lally’s forces were large and well disciplined, but the British resistance was equally formidable. At last, on 16 February, Pocock’s fleet reappeared, and the French realised the fight was over as they came within the range of British naval guns.
The capture of Fort St David had not been followed by a further triumph in Fort St George. Although the pride of the British in southern India had been savaged for the second time in a decade, Madras had held out. The ghastly fiasco of the fall of Madras, which had launched Clive’s military career, had not been repeated.
Clive wrote with relief, warmth and admiration to one of his younger protégés in Madras, Henry Vansittart, ‘I would gladly have given some of my riches to have shared some of your reputation. I know it has been a conceived opinion among the old soldiers in England that our exploits in India have been much of the same nature as those of Hernando Cortés; but your foiling such a man as M. Lally, and two of the oldest regiments in France, will induce another way of thinking.’
Clive’s old friend, Orme, who fled Madras before it came under siege, came under suspicion of cowardice, and was to return to Britain a relatively poor man. The French failure to capture Madras represented the end of their last really major push in India. Huge forces had been committed, exceeding those available to Dupleix; and under Lally’s less subtle hand they had failed. It was a turning point.
Clive had not been directly involved. His own achievement in Bengal had now been matched by two other spectacular feats of British arms – Forde’s in the Carnatic and Northern Circars and Lawrence’s in Madras. The British ascendancy was no longer so dependent on one man. Meanwhile Clive’s gamble in despoiling Calcutta of most of its forces had paid off: the Nawab had made no move, although Clive had been careful to take no major initiative in Bengal.
Instead, the longstanding threat to British rule in Bengal, an attack by de Bussy from the Northern Circars, had been removed. Forde’s expedition had been a masterstroke. Forde himself had taken over de Bussy’s mantle at Masulipatam, peering over the shoulder of Salabat Jang. In effect, a large slice of India had been seized from the French and appended to British rule.
While the British appeared to be on the run in southern India, this achievement did not appear to be especially impressive. But, after the lifting of the siege of Madras, the French were in retreat. Lally’s army was openly mutinous, owing to the lack of pay and supplies after the departure of the French fleet.
The latter, deprived of its usual source of supplies from Chandernagore, had had to sail as far as South Africa to stock up. When it returned in September 1759, the British fleet attacked; Admiral d’Ache was wounded and half his ships destroyed. He limped to Pondicherry, deposited the stores and money he had picked up, and departed at speed, so as not to be caught by the British ships again. Lally was furious; in fact, unknown to d’Ache, the British ships had suffered such serious damage to their masts that they could not have taken on the French again. The endgame for the French was now in sight.
Forde confidently expected to be appointed commander-in-chief of British forces in Bengal after his successes, on Clive’s recommendation. In 1759, to the fury of both men, the directors in London, disapproving Forde’s original appointment, made Eyre Coote commander of the Company’s forces in Bengal. Clive had always loathed Coote. ‘I tremble when I think of the fatal consequences of such a man as Coote commanding here. For God’s sake keep him on the coast, where he can only get a little drubbing, but here he may ruin the Company’s affairs for ever.’ Forde, in a blind fury, immediately resolved to return to England by way of Bengal.
Coote indeed seems to have had a talent for upsetting people. But his military abilities were not in doubt. In January 1760, he won a tremendous victory against the French at the Battle of Wandewash, in which Lally was wounded and de Bussy taken prisoner. A year later, Coote finally mopped up the last major enclave of the French in India by capturing Pondicherry, nearly twenty years after Dupleix had become its governor and had set about the seemingly impossible and mad dream of creating the first European empire in India. Four years later, ‘the city was like another Jerusalem, razed to the ground, its walls overthrown, its houses destroyed and its inhabitants led to captivity’. French power was eliminated from India for ever, the last French stronghold captured, and the baton had passed to the English.
* * *
With two-thirds of the garrison at Calcutta absent, Mir Jafar was growing more troublesome, and a new danger suddenly materialised. Indeed, Clive, ever since he had become effective Nawab of Bengal, had faced a fresh challenge whenever one was fended off. This was nothing new. Siraj-ud-Daula had also had to deal with repeated threats while establishing his ascendancy.
The latest came from no less than the occupant of the nominal throne of India, the Mogul Emperor in Delhi – or rather his son. Accurately diagnosing the depletion of British forces in Bengal, and overestimating the size of the threat the French posed to their interests, the heir to
the Mogul throne, the Shahzada, had cast his eyes eastwards towards Bengal. A tough fighter and a farsighted young man, he was determined not to become a puppet like his father, Alamgir, and had fled Delhi when the vizier, Ghazi-ud-Din, had seized power.
The Shahzada was no decadent like Siraj-ud-Daula or Miran; moreover, he possessed the immense mystical prestige of the imperial court. Loathing Mir Jafar, the Seths decided to conspire with the Shahzada. It has subsequently been argued that they were doing no more than currying favour with the emperor’s heir. Yet the evidence suggests that they, representing the Hindu upper classes, saw the Shahzada as a replacement for the Nawab.
The Seths left on a pilgrimage with a force of some 3,000 soldiers and four pieces of artillery to protect them from attack by the deeply suspicious Mir Jafar. In the north, Ramnarayan, Governor of Bihar and the Nawab’s old enemy, was said to be considering supporting the Shahzada, presumably as a way of deposing the Nawab. But instead he sent an urgent appeal both to Clive and to Mir Jafar for help as the Shahzada’s army approached.
Mir Jafar and Miran also appealed to Clive frantically. Their recent cockiness had evaporated: they were terrified of the combination of the Governor of Bihar, the Seths and, possibly, the Mogul Emperor’s heir. The Shahzada’s army consisted of nearly 10,000 Rohillas – the formidable Afghan fighters with their own kingdom in northern India and a reputation even more fearsome than the Marathas – as well as some 400 mercenaries under the command of the ever peripatetic Jean Law, and an Indian army of 30,000 men. The Shahzada wrote to Clive in tones of imperial hauteur, telling the British to obey him ‘like a faithful servant’.
Clive’s reply was blunt. ‘I am under the strictest engagements with the present Nawab of these provinces to assist him at all times; and it is not the custom of the English nation to be guilty of insincerity.’ Clive told Mir Jafar: ‘It is the custom of the English to treat the persons of ambassadors as sacred, and I told the Shahzada’s agents as much; but at the same time warned them never to come near me again, for, if they did, I would take their heads for their pains.’
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