There is no evidence that the relationship with the older man was romantic or sexual. Clive, still dashing, remote, usually absent, uncommunicative to his young wife, was the stuff of which romantic heroes were made. Yet Carnac was certainly the second love of her life.
She had long pressed Robert to return to England; they had been abroad for more than three troubled years, during which Clive’s energies were exerted to the full. She had lost her third child, and must have been desperately anxious for the health of the one she was bearing. Although pampered beyond most people’s wildest dreams, the tranquillity, good health and luxury of life in eighteenth-century England for the very wealthy beckoned – as did the prospect of seeing more of her husband. It was time to go home.
* * *
Parting was not without its sorrow. The grandees of Calcutta, so contemptuous of Clive when he arrived, were thrown into a panic: ‘There is so strong an appearance of intestine wars, foreign invasions, or irruptions from the inland country powers, and which is only prevented by the eminent character you deservedly bear throughout the Mogul’s dominions.’ As one observer wrote, ‘It appeared as though the soul were departing from the government of Bengal.’ There were threats again that the Shahzada would return in alliance with the Nawab of Oudh.
When Clive went to Murshidabad to take his leave of that old rogue, Mir Jafar, the latter for once appeared sincere in wishing him to stay. Intrigue against him as they might, the Indians regarded Clive as a kind of god-figure, invincible and also, by comparison with their own rulers, merciful. Clive believed the threats were much exaggerated. Bengal, he said, was ‘out of all danger but that of venality and corruption’. In any case, it was for others now to show their worth. British dominion in India could not depend upon the reputation of one man alone, or it would surely perish.
The real threat, as he saw it, came from the board of directors in London. ‘I may perhaps be able to serve you more effectually [in England] than my continuing here.’ He had left the fortunes of Bengal in good order, the Nawab dependent on the British, the Hindu merchant class their close allies, Fort William immensely strengthened, the borders of Bengal and Bihar settled and secured. He could not stay for ever.
Substantial reinforcements were on their way to the garrison at Calcutta under Major Caillaud, a soldier with a distinguished record. Clive’s successor as governor, Henry Vansittart, was a friend with a solid reputation in the Carnatic. The French had been crushed in India, the Dutch swatted aside from Bengal. Clive left his empire in as good order as seemed possible.
He had no doubt he was departing his empire for ever, that he would never see that sluggish, languid, muddy river again as the ship set out on 21 February 1760; he was now to make his political fortunes in his own land. The only Englishman who had ever been an emperor gazed back at the land of his absolute power for more than two years. He and Margaret were accompanied by his young cousin, George Clive, and Carnac, along with many servants and animals. However, Margaret’s new baby, Bob – their fourth, and only the second surviving – was not well, and had to be left behind at the last moment with Dr Fullerton.
When the ship reached St Helena a couple of months later, Carnac learnt he had been appointed to a senior command in Bengal, and returned on the next ship back. He wrote with passionate disappointment at being parted from Margaret, but consoled her with the thought that he had bought ‘a coral with bells’ for tiny Bob to play with. The baby was dead by the time he reached Calcutta, the third of Clive’s four children to die in infancy.
* * *
Clive arrived at Spithead on 9 July 1760, after a lightning voyage for those days of only four and a half months. He must have viewed his return with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension. Even just twenty weeks of enforced idleness aboard the Royal George, while allowing him to get over his ailments and depression, had him like a caged lion, striding about the ship.
Now at last he believed he had enough money to acquire real political power in Britain. He was returning as the hero of Plassey, conqueror of Bengal. He was Pitt’s ‘heaven-born general’. He had prestige and fame. He would acquire a clutch of parliamentary seats and would attach them to the prevailing interest. He would not repeat his old mistake of siding with the opposition. He now had a real prospect of becoming a senior minister, perhaps one day he would even become prime minister. At just 34, his ambitions were as great as ever. The man who had ruled over an empire much more populous than Britain in his early thirties was now coming home to conquer his own land politically.
He was a striking figure: ‘To a countenance which was saved from vulgarity only by the expression of decision and natural intelligence which pervaded it, he added a figure without symmetry or grace,’ according to his biographer Grieg, ‘which he rendered doubly conspicuous by the elaborate care with which it was his custom to adorn it.’
He returned to a fine official welcome and an astonishing broadside of sniping and animosity from the sneering classes that must have left him gasping. He was greeted by his elderly father, Richard, who in spite of his years had been exasperating his contemporaries by promoting Clive’s interests at home; and by the six-year-old Ned, the couple’s only surviving child of four.
Clive was invited to Leadenhall Street by Sulivan and the directors of the East India Company a couple of days later. They proposed that a statue be erected in his honour at East India House. Sulivan later invited Clive to his sumptuous house at Mile End, a village east of London. Less than a week after his return, Clive, along with his adoring father, was invited to an audience with the doddering 77-year-old George II at Buckingham Palace. It was clear that the king, at least, was one of Clive’s warm admirers. Unfortunately, the monarch was not to live long. In September Clive was given an honorary degree by the University of Oxford and accorded a unanimous vote of thanks by the East India Company. He was a popular hero, although eclipsed a little by the dramatic death of Wolfe at Quebec.
* * *
The Britain in which Clive had disembarked in 1760 at the height of his riches, success and power, was itself on the threshold of national glory. With his non-aristocratic origins and fabulous wealth he embodied a new age for a country which, for the next century and a half, was to blaze a glorious trail as the foremost nation on earth. Its system of freedoms and government, so painfully forged on the anvil of civil war over the previous century, was to give it the resilience to weather revolutionary pressures and the advent of a mass society for generations to come.
The country’s colossal overseas empire, created in part by accident, in part by design, was just coming into being, dwarfing any the world had ever seen. Britain’s artistic achievement, so long the poor relation of Europe, was now about to flower in a dazzling display of innovation and taste. Catalysed by the capital and labour freed from the land by enclosure, as well as by the proceeds of empire, the country’s economy was about to embark on the world’s first industrial revolution, leaving other nations standing.
Clive straddled the end of a previous age for Britain and the birth of a new one. He was the last of the old military adventurers – a romantic hero in the mould of Drake or Raleigh, in contrast to the mechanical ‘professional’ generalship of Wellington and his successors; he was also the first of the new breed of self-made men. To have lived in Britain in 1760 was an uplifting experience: even those at the very bottom enjoyed domestic peace, rising living standards and an era of social concern as yet spared the terrible conditions of deprivation and urban squalor that were to sully the age of industrialisation in the next century. To be fabulously wealthy, after having been born into gentrified poverty, must have been a heady experience indeed.
It was an age of greatness for Britain’s constitution and government. To some modern historians, the eighteenth century reeked of faction, corruption and squalid backroom dealing. Yet it is possible to identify in mid-eighteenth-century Britain every key ingredient of the system of liberties which was eventually to become a model
for democracy around the world.
First, the British monarchy had become constitutional, a valuable and sometimes powerful underpinning to national continuity, but no longer the foremost power in the land. The attempts by George III to restore the Crown’s influence were to underline that only through intrigue and prestige could it become first among equals again – not as of right. It took the king the best part of his reign to acquire influence on a level with his prime ministers, and even then he was far from unchallenged.
In other countries, such as France, the monarchy had in practice become a figurehead too. But there its power had been usurped by the state, which was largely unchecked. In Britain the power of the state was subordinated to that of parliament, and a host of written and unwritten rules also restrained it, guaranteeing the individual – in practice the propertied and professional classes – against its encroachments. This was no mere matter of form: it was almost certainly the reason why Britain, almost alone, survived the revolutionary turmoil that periodically engulfed continental Europe over the next couple of centuries.
Disaffection in Britain, from about the middle of the century, had its place, enshrined at the very top. On one major issue after another debate raged in parliament between different factions, first one side gaining the upper hand, then the other. Certainly much of the infighting was squalid enough. The instability this generated might have seemed a serious weakness for the nation: in fact, though, it was a massive strength. All strands of opinion within the propertied classes were represented, and even the uneducated, who were not, took sides. With the competing claims of all viewpoints wrangled over in public, there was little opportunity for dissent to build up outside parliament.
In France and other eighteenth-century continental systems, while faction struggles raged at court, these were largely in secret, neither corresponding to the real balance of forces in the country as a whole, nor providing a safety valve for discontent. Democracy must be seen to be done to work. Nor was debate confined to the ranks of an aristocratic and haute bourgeois élite, as in France; while the aristocracy fought to retain its influence, its real power had been diluted in the struggles of the previous century by the much larger middle class of country squires, urban merchants and professionals.
In the parliamentary maelstrom, monarch, dukes and commoners battled it out, now one gaining the upper hand, now another, none succeeding in imposing his will for long. After the reign of the Whig grandees had ended with the installation of the Hanoverians, Walpole, bourgeois, stolid, cunning, a machine politician, and his successors Pelham and Newcastle had ushered in the new political age.
In turn the newly ennobled Grenvilles and ‘commoner’ Pitt – ‘issue politicians’ in an almost twentieth-century mould – had come to dominate the stage, vying with the remnants of the old Whig aristocracy represented by the Duke of Devonshire and the Marquis of Rockingham, and the newly assertive ‘court party’ of George III, represented by the cack-handed Earl of Bute and, later and more successfully, by Lord North. The system embraced all dissent: it is scarcely surprising that it became the age of oratory, for rarely have political leaders felt so free to express their own viewpoints, unhindered by fear of official reprisal, or by the harsh disciplines of the party machine.
The vitality of parliamentary debate was but one of the lasting innovations of the eighteenth-century system. Another was the way in which general elections – although most of the seats went uncontested or were in the gift of political bosses – actually mattered. Governments could be undone and were unseated by the verdicts of the limited electorates in the small number of contested seats. Public opinion – however restricted the franchise – had real influence.
A third key new feature was a massive extension in the power of the press. The astonishing vigour and vitriol of press and pamphlet attacks in the eighteenth century would shame tabloid newspapers today: rarely in human history can political issues have been aired so freely, with such crude vigour and vicious character assassination.
The test case for press freedom was, of course, the struggle of John Wilkes, in his often scurrilous attacks against not just the king’s favourite, Bute, but the monarchy itself. Initially dragged off to the Tower in 1763, Wilkes was freed after middle-class and ‘mob’ uproar, discredited, and then exiled. He returned in 1768 to secure election for Middlesex. When the government had him expelled from the Commons and fined for obscene libel, he was tumultuously re-elected while rioting spread, leading to the killing of twelve demonstrators by a company of grenadiers.
In 1769, Wilkes was again unseated, and disorder reached a crescendo, effectively bringing down the mediocre government of the Duke of Grafton, and ushering in the more pragmatic and skilful North ministry. The Wilkes agitation gradually subsided, not least because, although a gifted polemicist, he was no public speaker, nor even a real revolutionary. But his virulent journalism showed just how far the limits of press freedom now extended, and the vigour of the parliamentary debate about his fate made it impossible for him to mobilise opinion against ‘the system’ – even if he had wanted to do so.
The nearest equivalent of a Danton or Robespierre in England was, in the end, more of an Irish rogue than anything else, and not one to bring the constitution down. The Wilkes riots never posed the threat to the body politic that revolution did in France twenty years later. The system had shown that it could respond – indeed Wilkes brought down a government – and the challenge gradually faded, after securing its greatest triumph: the right to report parliamentary debates in the press.
* * *
If Clive’s Britain was politically vibrant and mature, it was also endearingly and dottily obsessed with precisely the same sorts of issues that preoccupy the British chattering classes to this day. The conduct of the royal children was a national obsession. Aristocratic scandals were highlighted by the press, from the trial of the Duchess of Kingston for bigamy, to that of Lord Baltimore for rape (he was found to have been set up by the victim’s family), to the rakish life of Lord Lyttelton, and to the indiscretions of the dazzling young Duchess of Devonshire.
The fashionable woman, in 1775, was criticised by the London Magazine for her tendency to ‘rise at ten, throw herself into a hurry, dress before she goes out, fly away to the exhibitions of painting and models and wax, and a thousand other things: take a peep at a play to encourage a poor player on his benefit night – fly to the Pantheon [the hugely fashionable new gathering place on Oxford Street] to hear Agujari sing – whisk from thence to Ranelagh, to meet dear Lord William, and adjourn with the dear creature to Vauxhall to finish the evening with a glass of burnt champagne: then, yawning on her return, assure her dreaming lord, that she cannot support it; it is too much; the human spirit will not endure it, sink dead as a flat into her bed, and rise next morning in pursuit of similar follies’.
The historian Paul Langford points to the
apparently limitless desire for new sensations. The ideal social event, both from the commercial standpoint, and for those who attended, was one which carried an air of exclusiveness while exhibiting to the public at large an extravagant spectacle. The Thames regatta, patronised by princes of the blood, met this criterion. So did elaborate public gardens and firework displays, though some of the latter caused much annoyance in the new suburban surroundings in which they were located. One of the more influential innovations of the period was the fête champêtre, the most celebrated of which was held on the marriage of Lord Stanley at his Surrey House, the Oaks, in June 1774 … Stanley took full advantage of the rage for rural fantasy. There were shepherds and peasants, druids and dryads, fairy lights, rustic sports and games. The occasion cried out for a Hogarth to display its ironies.
In 1787, there was a royal pronouncement against vice and immorality after a long campaign to restore family values, which inveighed against drinking, swearing and gambling. There was vigorous debate between those like the Derbyshire poet Erasmus Darwin, who advocated bringing up children
without discipline, and those who urged mental control and physical punishment. Measures were enacted to improve the lot of poor children, keep them off the streets and regulate their use as chimney sweeps, (which had increased as a result of the new narrow chimneys on Georgian terraced houses).
Animal and even vegetable rights were championed. Fox-hunting was criticised. Travel, and travel-writing, became middle-class obsessions. Women’s fashions were characterised by plunging necklines and provocatively protruding bottoms. Debate raged over the ‘masculine’ roles of active women and the need to keep them attending to home and children. Sexual mores were chewed over relatively openly, and books such as Fanny Hill fed the public’s appetite for the nascent industry of pornography. A prominent playwright, Samuel Foote, was ruined by his homosexuality.
Rich young men indulged in the ‘macaroni’ pursuit of foreign fashions and deriding English tastes. Capital punishment, penal reform and poverty were earnestly debated. Aristocratic decadence and irresponsibility were satirised and demonised while George III and Queen Charlotte came to represent the essence of bourgeois respectability taken to prudish extremes.
As Langford, the best modern chronicler of the period, points out:
It has been argued, none the less, that Georgian England was an essentially aristocratic society. This view mistakes appearance for reality, and consequence for cause. Blue blood and rank, without property, counted for very little in late eighteenth-century England, and rendered their possessors objects of pity rather than envy. It was wealth which brought power and prestige. Inherited wealth was a large proportion of the whole in a society which resisted direct taxation and social reconstruction by the state. The great landowner, with or without title, was guaranteed his share of power and prestige. But the base of propertied society was broadening and diversifying in the late eighteenth century … The feeling that aristocratic influence was getting stronger during this period was probably mistaken. If peers controlled more constituencies at the end of the eighteenth century, when reformers first began conducting systematic surveys, it was as much a result of the deliberate expansion of the peerage in the 1780s and the 1790s as of a tendency to electoral oligarchy.
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