Clive

by Robert Harvey

  When news of Plassey finally filtered across, the directors in London awarded Clive the post of governor. His family lavished praise on him – his father exclaimed, ‘may heaven preserve you safe to Old England, where not only your friends and relations but strangers who never saw you will congratulate you for the glorious actions you have done for your country. With what joy shall I embrace you! Oh, may I live to see that day! Your mother and sisters are sitting with me round the fire, drinking to your health a safe voyage.’

  His five-year-old son Ned drank his health every day. His other relatives were persuaded that they would be spared the need to travel to India because their fortunes had already been made. Clive promised his cousin an eastern prince. She replied, ‘I have a taste to be a princess. Pray, is he a black in the Othello taste and I to be his Desdemona?’ There seems little doubt that Clive’s success had struck a genuine chord among ordinary people and the gentry. ‘Every person is your friend,’ remarked Clive’s cousin, the judge.

  George II was reported to have said to a young nobleman, ‘If he wants to learn the art of war, let him go to Clive.’ William Pitt, secretary for war and foreign affairs, and England’s greatest statesman at the time, elevated Clive to new oratorical heights in the House of Commons, particularly after a succession of setbacks for Britain in other parts of the world.

  ‘We had lost our glory, honour and reputation everywhere, but in India. There the country had a heaven-born general who had never learned the art of war, nor was his name enrolled among the great officers who had for many years received their country’s pay. Yet he was not afraid to attack a numerous army with a handful of men, and overcame them … Everyone knows that I mean Colonel Clive.’ He went on to compare him with Alexander the Great. This was the highest possible accolade from a government of the time. If Clive had been in England, he would have basked in popularity and glory and perhaps been elevated to the House of Lords.

  * * *

  But, out of public spirit, Clive had remained in India to consolidate his success instead of returning home to capitalise upon it. It was a fatal decision. Even at this stage his enemies in England were beginning to gather. John Pym, chairman of the East India Company, proposed no reward and actively dissuaded the prime minister, the Duke of Newcastle, from giving him an honour. The directors were alarmed by his successes, jealous of his popular appeal, and determined not to let him become a rival to their constitutional authority: the example of the American colonists was before them. Clive had to be kept in his place.

  As the months of his rule in Bengal passed by, the directors affected to grow alarmed by what they saw. True, Clive had secured a massive new province for the Company. But instead of revenues, bills came flooding in: the expeditions to Patna were paid by Mir Jafar, but Forde’s expeditions to the Northern Circars had been expensive, and so had the cost of local troops employed throughout the campaigns. Meanwhile the merchants of Calcutta continued to borrow money at extraordinary rates from Bengal, issuing promissory notes – ‘drafts’ – in abundance. The directors in London became increasingly concerned and wrote to Calcutta.

  Holwell, now Clive’s deputy, drafted a rude reply: ‘The diction of your letter is most unworthy of ourselves and us in whatever relation considered, either as masters to servants or gentlemen to gentlemen … Groundless information have without further scrutiny borne with you the stamp of truth.’ Clive signed the letter: it was evident that after the directors’ decision to appoint Coote as commander of the Company’s forces in Bengal he now regarded them with contempt.

  Part of this was folie de grandeur – the visible corruption of Clive after two years as conqueror and emperor of Bengal. Yet Clive understood that Britain’s power in India depended upon territorial acquisition. If this proved expensive in the short term, so be it: large revenues would accrue in the long term. The directors instead were concerned with the immediate cash flow.

  In Bengal, Clive’s word was law; he was looked upon with awe and fear by the native population, and with uncritical respect by the cowed and subdued council. He had no time for those men seeking to make money out of his exertions from the comfort of their offices in London. His ambitions were altogether greater: to establish the foundations of an empire that would belong not to the East India Company but the Crown itself. In this he was ahead of his time, and was to be found guilty of unpardonable treason by the East India Company.

  He wrote to the Company shortly before he left, ‘a glorious opportunity now presents itself of making us considerable indeed in India and perhaps of giving a King to Hindostan’. To Pitt, his admirer, one of the most powerful men in England, he wrote advocating the incorporation of Bengal under the Crown: ‘I leave you to judge whether an income of upwards of two millions sterling, with the possession of three provinces abounding in the most valuable productions of nature and of art be an object deserving the public attention … an acquisition which, under the management of so able and disinterested a Minister, would prove a source of immense wealth to the kingdom and might in time be appropriate in part as a fund towards diminishing the heavy load of debt under which we at present labour … this project may be brought about without draining the mother country, as has been too much the case with our possessions in America.’

  He undoubtedly saw this as a stepping stone towards the establishment of a unified British empire in India of which he would be Governor-General – an idea already discussed in letters to his father. To Pitt, Clive’s ideas may have had some attraction, both on the revenue side and in offsetting the disastrous losses elsewhere in America and Europe. However, the state had limited resources. Preventing the loss of the American colonies had priority, as had the struggles against the French in Canada and North America.

  Clive’s ideas were to be shelved, but not before the directors of the East India Company had heard of their nominal servant’s intention to bypass their authority in the Crown’s favour. The directors admired, distrusted and feared Clive all at the same time. Their chief ambition was now to contain him, to cut him down to size. A new and formidable chairman was appointed to head them: Laurence Sulivan.

  Of Irish origins, a successful trader in Bombay, Sulivan spent six years in England as a director of the Company before being elected chairman in 1758. He was what today would be called a ‘company man’, more concerned with the interests of his organisation even than with his own. He was fussy, methodical and puritanical (although he claims to have led a wild life in his youth). As he wrote to his son: ‘I call upon my son in the space of twenty-five years if he remembers me ten times in a tavern, eight times in a coffee house, rarely ever from my family.’

  He was devious, vicious, implacable towards his foes, a good judge of character, an autocrat who controlled the Company through his friends even when he was not its chairman, and relentlessly devoted to its interests. He was an early example of the authoritarian corporate bureaucrat, skilful at managing his company and at maintaining his authority within it. Dame Lucy Sutherland, chronicler of the East India Company, wrote that he was ‘one of the greatest of the company’s rulers, fertile and expedient, quick to recognise merit’.

  A contemporary view is less kind: Richard Atkinson wrote that he had ‘great experience and some talents, great cunning, will go through thick and thin with his party while he remains attached to it, but not to be trusted for a moment when his own views lead him to be faithless’. He was devoted to his wife, to whose judgement he deferred.

  He was the polar opposite of Clive, who was generous, boastful, adventurous, brave, larger than life, direct, an outdoor figure who despised the directors in their chairs in London, loved to indulge in the pleasures of life, and was none too shy of leaving his wife for months at a time. Their only common points were tactical cunning, a penchant for unremitting hard work, a furious and vindictive temper, and a tendency to be petty. Sulivan’s sensitivity was that of the pedagogue; Clive’s that of the creator, the artist.

  Sulivan was to bec
ome perhaps the most effective and implacable enemy Clive had ever faced, with the bureaucratic skills and intelligence to match him. In place of the bravery of Chanda Sahib and the cunning of Siraj-ud-Daula, Clive now had an opponent much more like his old foe, Dupleix – clever, devious and ruthless, and also possessed of the formidable power of the Company.

  Clive was deeply concerned as he realised in 1759 the extent of the opposition to him within the Company. As ruler of his empire, he could afford to treat his fussy superiors, at six months’ minimum sailing distance, with contempt; but in London, their power would be far greater. For its part the Company was deeply apprehensive that Clive would seek to bypass its authority or even destroy it.

  The scene was set for Clive’s next battle, to be waged by word, pen and slanders, not swords, guns and manoeuvres in the night. To his roles as soldier, diplomat and administrator was now to be added that of businessman – in an environment every bit as hostile as that which he had first encountered in Bengal.

  CHAPTER 19

  The First Couple

  Exactly why Clive decided to return from Bengal after two and a half years as its absolute ruler cannot be known for sure. His depression and the concern that matters were getting out of hand among the directors certainly contributed. Sulivan’s general letter of March 1759 had furiously censured Clive’s administration. He may also have felt that his reputation in England was being undermined; his wave of successes, reaching its crest at Plassey, had subsided.

  He still nursed huge political ambitions in England, where he believed the real power to lie. Had he returned immediately after Plassey, as so many others did, he would have been a popular hero and politically powerful. Instead, in an entirely worthy attempt to secure the conquests he had made, he may have feared he had missed his moment to capitalise on his success in his own country. He may simply have been worn out by a succession of exhausting and nerve-racking crises to preserve his Indian dominion.

  Now possessed of immense wealth, he could enjoy the elevation of status it would grant him back home, having discharged his duty to Bengal and been fortunate enough to avoid the early deaths by disease suffered by so many of his contemporaries – a run of luck that might not endure forever. In the course of the last thirty months he had approached the very brink of madness – the megalomania of the all-powerful, where all reality is distorted by men’s apparent obeisance and backhand plotting.

  Clive the merciful had displayed fierce vengeance – admittedly for the first time in his career, and in a small area. Clive the judicious had squeezed a colossal and controversial exaction from his own countrymen, tipping his privateering into naked greed. Clive the statesman was now behaving with needless arrogance and contempt towards his superiors. Clive the de facto emperor now wished to become Governor-General of the continent, as previously evinced in his letter to his father. Although not unhinged, he had become unbalanced; darkness was gnawing at a mind which had so far resisted corruption. It was time to go home.

  * * *

  Margaret certainly thought so. She had viewed her life in India over these past four years with deeply mixed feelings, although these are never apparent in her letters to Robert, which were full of loyalty and affection. She had arrived expecting to lead the comfortable, if staid, life of a wife of a deputy governor in a colonial backwater. Instead she was to face much greater challenges, although her husband was absent for much of the time.

  She had pined for Clive during the first ten months of his expedition to Bengal; when she reached Calcutta at last, she experienced a settlement in the throes of rebuilding after the devastation inflicted upon it by the Nawab the previous year. She was housed in the finest luxury in the heart of Fort William, in a spacious mansion with an extensive, colonnaded verandah. It was furnished with huge mirrors, wardrobes and marble-topped tables. The impression, typical of its time in India, was one of space, air, high ceilings and proportion, elegance rather than an excess of furniture or decorations.

  Margaret had an extensive library and a harpsichord, which she enjoyed playing. By any standards her life was idyllic, particularly so for India in the eighteenth century. She had all the servants she could possibly want – from Chowry, the butler, to Black Robin, their attendant, the nurse Maria, and Mercury, a boy-servant, as well as parlour-maids, cooks and manservants. She possessed a small menagerie of pets – a tame mynah bird, ‘a young tiger, a bear, two porcupines, three of these new-fashioned birds and an owl almost as big as myself’.

  Busying herself with ordering the household, entertaining, writing letters, reading, or playing the harpsichord, she led a life of agreeable leisure. Her letters convey its flavour: ‘It is just turned of eleven o’clock and the sun’s so fierce that our umbrellas and a gentle southerly wind which comes charging at my windows are not sufficient to keep me from almost fainting … my genius is, I cannot say chilled or frozen, but quite (to use a country expression) expended, and myself in danger of expiring. Thank you, good Chowry, you have quite restored me to health by your seasonable supply of toasted bread scrubbed with nutmeg, and the glass of Madeira wine. Having drunk half thereof, without any ceremony, as life and death were in the case, I tope of the remainder to the health of my friends in Camp … Mrs Hancock is squeezing mangoes down her throat to your health and safe return, and, if she be not sincere, she wishes that they may choke her. Amen, say I.’

  After her afternoon siesta in the heat, she often went for a ride with respectable male friends, and then had dinner. Only ‘squalls and hurricanes’ which raged through the house, blowing out candles, as well as ‘swarms of flies, mosquitoes, cockroaches and doubledores’ interrupted this heady existence. ‘We have all the plagues of Egypt together, for some of my visitors have boils.’

  Tragically, the suppurating heat of Calcutta was soon to claim another tiny victim: her infant daughter Jenny, to whom she had devoted herself the previous two years, died in the autumn. Following the loss of her second child in England, the tragedy affected her deeply; but to her joy she was soon pregnant again.

  Clive shows no sign of having been a thoughtless husband and father. He was devoted to her and her letters show she revered him. The trouble was he had so little time to spend with her. For much of the thirty months or so she was in Calcutta, he was absent from the city, on expeditions to secure control of his vast domain. When he was in Calcutta, he was the first citizen of the town and on official business much of the time, presiding over a household of guests and huge dinner parties, at which bread rolls were thrown high-spiritedly about.

  He seems to have spent little time in conversation with her, his interests being public affairs, soldiering and good living, hers astronomy, pets and gossip. He preferred the company of his cronies, playing cards for sizeable stakes, and smoking his hookah, which was inlaid with precious stones and beautifully wrought. He did not regard it as part of the duty of a husband to spend much time alone with her; others were present with them both virtually throughout the day.

  Today she would be described as lonely. But she was very rarely alone, and she showed no signs of minding this lack of intimacy, except when he was up-country and she pined for him. Married to the most famous man in India and ten years older than her, she could not but accept force majeure. She protected herself by having her own circle of intimates – most rather bluestocking, like her: a matronly woman friend, Philadelphia Hancock; a Swedish missionary; a minor English clergyman; her doctor, William Fullerton. Jane Latham, Margaret’s cousin and intimate, had left with her husband and the fleet. She had her own small court to make up for Clive’s absence, and he happily tolerated this state of affairs. Endless conversations took place between these earnest, somewhat sycophantic intellectuals and the first citizen’s wife while Clive rushed about on affairs of state or was away altogether.

  She pined for Clive, complaining of his absence in the most enchanting terms. ‘May the heroes return shortly to receive the wreath of laurel their ladies are preparing them! Alas! I
think of mine too often for my repose, but on such an account who would not wish to be in my case? … Every one of my past melancholy ideas is far overbalanced by the most pleasing hope of seeing again the comfort of my life.’

  Her greatest consolation in those years was Major John Carnac, Clive’s aide-de-camp, older than his superior at nearly 40, a slightly fussy and effeminate man, whose ‘blooming cheeks are dyed with colours all their own, excelling far the pride of roses newly blown’. He seems to have cut a faintly comical figure, which he may have played up to, although he was also a formidable soldier. It is not known how close this relationship was, save that Carnac made up for Clive’s absences. He found her intelligent, attractive in her petite, sweet way and, at 23, still extremely young; she found him a mixture of father figure and attentive courtier – which Clive assuredly was not.

  Carnac was Margaret’s closest male friend since her marriage to Clive. Clive seems to have borne no resentment – indeed appears to have favoured the relationship, perhaps because he felt guilty at his own absence and may have believed his subordinate incapable of indiscretion – which may indeed have been the case. Carnac, still unmarried, was much more of a retainer than a potential lover.

  She wrote to the aide at great length when he accompanied Clive on his expeditions, but probably more to find out what her husband was doing than from affection. She complained, ‘I frequently accuse him [Clive] of writing less than any other husband, and so great is my impudence that I mention these neglects before company.’ She may have been trying to provoke a pang of jealousy in Clive through her attentiveness towards Carnac.