Clive

by Robert Harvey

  In fact, Clive’s England represented the triumph of the middle classes well before the arrival of the Victorians: if the latter have been identified with bourgeois values, it is because the problems of industrialisation became much more acute during the nineteenth century, exciting both criticism and a response from the middle classes. If more extensive social reforms were passed during the nineteenth century, it was because the conditions which required them had not yet materialised during the eighteenth century. But the middle classes during the eighteenth century showed just as much sensitivity to social conditions as their descendants. The triumph of the respectable bourgeoisie had already taken place during the eighteenth century, overlaid as it was with an aristocratic veneer.

  No period in British history could have been more agreeable for the well-off. Scientific innovation, following in the footsteps of Newton earlier in the previous century, abounded; intellectual and philosophical discourse raged. It was the era of a renewal of the British literary tradition – epitomised by the fashionable obsession for Shakespeare, popularised by the great actor-producer of the age, David Garrick – and such writers as Samuel Johnson, whose Dictionary was published in 1755; Henry Fielding, whose Tom Jones was published in 1749; and, later, Goldsmith, Gibbon and Sheridan.

  Clive’s immensely wealthy neighbour, Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, was patron to Garrick, who was godfather to his son Charles, who in turn patronised his friend the poet Robert Southey, while Reynolds, Hudson, Lawrence and Hoppner painted his family. A member of the Dilettanti Society along with Sir Thomas Hamilton, consul at Naples and husband of the wayward Emma, Williams Wynn embodied the artistic and intellectual pursuits of the aristocracy in the late eighteenth century.

  In architecture the Palladian fashion had been succeeded by the neo-classical and, later, by the Gothic revival. Robert and James Adam, James Wyatt and William Chambers scattered their beautifully proportioned gems around England. In art, Hogarth’s acerbic and idiosyncratic brilliance was succeeded by the finest generation of British painters – Gainsborough, Stubbs, Constable, Hudson, Ramsay, Zoffany, Lawrence, Turner, Hoppner and Reynolds. The Royal Academy and the British Museum were founded.

  The Grand Tour to Italy became de rigueur for wealthy Englishmen, who called on Venice, Florence and Rome, travelled to Naples to experience eruptions of Vesuvius, and, in the case of the wealthiest, had their portraits painted by Pompeo Batoni. Clive was also to go. It was the greatest flowering of art, literature and architecture in British history.

  The Britain of 1760 was also the hub of a new empire. The previous few years had seen the most staggering victories in a catalogue of imperial expansion under the ‘patriotic’ ministry of Pitt. Gaudeloupe had been conquered in the Caribbean, the French fleets defeated at Cape Lagos and Quiberon. The forts of North America had fallen one by one. French Canada had been captured, all the way from Louisburg to Quebec. In the east the French had been defeated in India and Clive had conquered Bengal.

  * * *

  It was an age of artistic elegance; of intellectual discourse and innovation; of freedom, debate and political criticism; of religious tolerance and humanity; of prosperity; and of British self-confidence and triumph abroad. Such was the Britain Clive returned to in 1760, having made his name and a fabulous fortune, the former ruler of a state four times larger and more populous than Britain, now bent on political success to match in his homeland. He could little have guessed that the new moralism, the new priggishness, the new responsibility, would claim him as its first victim.

  He wasted no time in using his new wealth to project luxury and political power. He endowed his father with enough to retire from business and keep a coach, writing off a debt of £9,000 for the old man; he paid out about £500 to his old comrade in arms, Stringer Lawrence, who grudgingly accepted (although in fact he had a fortune of his own of around £20,000). He embarked on rebuilding the tiny manor at Styche into a large dwelling, and decided to rent a London residence and a country house appropriate to his new station, while he looked for a more permanent country seat to buy.

  He found a London abode on the west side of fashionable Berkeley Square to rent from Lord Ancram at £600 a year. It was a fine gentleman’s house in one of the smartest squares in London. In the country he rented Condover, a magnificent Elizabethan mansion about five miles south of Shrewsbury, which had belonged to the Owen family. Margaret, with her rather more modern, suburban tastes, described it as ‘just like a church … windows from top to bottom but not a sash, all dismal casements’. However, she enjoyed its pleasant, formal gardens and extensive park; the house itself was reckoned to have around 100 rooms. Thus equipped with the essential accoutrements of a local magnate, he secured the nomination to be one of two members of parliament for Shrewsbury.

  Yet that autumn he fell ill again, crippled by gout or rheumatism, as well as his old abdominal pain. A curious kind of nervous prostration also struck him, which seems to have been more severe, although less misery-inducing, than his old depression. The illness put him out of action for most of the next six months. He spent much of his time going off to Bath, where the waters improved his health.

  According to a contemporary, he lived there ‘in little pomp, moderate in his table, and still more so in equipage and retinue’. The simple habits of the soldier, which dwelt so incongruously alongside his love of extravagance and finery, apparently died hard – or perhaps Clive was just feeling too wretched to indulge in shows of display. He bitterly lamented that his illness impeded him from tackling more serious problems, both in England and the Company. ‘If health had not deserted me on my first arrival in England, in all probability I had been an English peer, instead of an Irish one, with the promise of a red riband,’ he lamented to a friend. ‘I know I could have bought the title (which is usual), but that I was above, and the honours I have obtained are free and voluntary. My wishes may hereafter be accomplished.’

  His prospects still seemed rosy enough by the spring of 1761, when a general election was held in March. Clive’s political patron in Shropshire was the Earl of Powis, one of the oldest and biggest territorial magnates not just of Montgomeryshire, but Shropshire, who secured his nomination against the interests of the powerful Earl of Bath. The Earl of Powis also secured the election of Richard Clive for the pocket borough of Montgomery, across the border in Wales, near where his own seat, Powys Castle, was based.

  Richard Clive, the impecunious, hard-working, crotchety old lawyer from an insignificant family of minor gentry, was now ending his career and life as an MP and confidant of kings – thanks to his son’s dazzling success. One of Robert Clive’s more attractive characteristics – the mirror image of his animosity towards his enemies – was his loyalty to family and friends. He had gone out of his way to reward a father who once thought of him as a scapegrace, but had worked ceaselessly for him since.

  Clive also secured the nomination for the city of Worcester nearby for his old friend John Walsh. Down in Penryn in Cornwall, Clive furthered the campaigns of two more candidates, his brother-in-law, Mun Maskelyne, and cousin, George Clive, spending some £10,000 on them. This was a serious business, undertaken with the same energy and commitment as displayed in India; with five seats in his interest, Clive would have had a small voting block to rival those of the large landowners, if not the very greatest political dynasties and ducal houses. In fact he was soon to ally with the cause of Pitt and Grenville.

  Clive’s two Cornish candidates were, however, defeated; but he still had three votes. Judiciously used in the factional politics of the mid-eighteenth century, when governments were made or unmade by political barons and their supporters changed sides with bewildering speed, he now had limited, but real, political clout – which he was determined to use shrewdly.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Innocent

  Clive was soon thrown into an agonising dilemma. The politician he was closest to, who had almost approved his proposals for India and had acclaimed his triumph
s to the House of Commons, was Pitt, the Great Commoner, the dominant leader of the age, whose administration had just presided over a dramatic revival in Britain’s overseas fortunes.

  However, in October 1760, just three months after receiving Clive, George II, a bluff, straightforward old man who could hardly speak English and resisted the temptation to meddle much in English politics, died. His son, vigorous, impetuous and young, was determined to restore some of the Crown’s status through intrigue – a prescription for disaster, the exact reason why the Stuart dynasty had been rejected in favour of the Hanoverians, who could be trusted to take no interest in British politics.

  George III promptly determined to have his favourite, the Earl of Bute, a narrow-minded northerner who was intimate with the king’s mother and had captured the young prince’s imagination, brought into government. Pitt hated this didactic, middle-aged man, and resisted his ascent, just as he opposed the re-entry of a meddlesome and politically active monarchy less than eighty years after most Englishmen believed it had finally been put in its place. Crowds pelted Bute’s carriage, ignored the king’s and cheered Pitt’s. However, the arch-intriguer of the age, and Pitt’s oldest enemy, the Duke of Newcastle, saw his chance to replace the Great Commoner, and moved over to become the monarch’s candidate for prime minister, promising to support Bute for the highest positions.

  Clive was faced with the dilemma of backing his old champion, Pitt, in opposition, or supporting the winning side – the same Duke of Newcastle who had blocked his election to parliament six years before. Clive was determined not to be on the losing side again. With the duplicity he believed he had learned at Plassey, Clive switched sides and backed the more powerful force, that of the Duke of Newcastle – for a price: not an English peerage, which Newcastle said he could not deliver, but the next best thing, an Irish peerage, as Baron Clive of Plassey, after a small estate in Ireland which he had bought and renamed (as the title had to be derived from an actual place in Ireland).

  He was also promised the first vacancy as Knight of the Bath, the monarch’s most prestigious order. Although an inferior kind of peer, he would have direct access to the court, and the queen served as godmother to his latest daughter, who to their great joy was born in good health.

  * * *

  Early in 1761, in spite of Clive’s illness, his prospects seemed rosy: controlling three seats in parliament, promised a peerage and the order of the Bath, on the side of the Crown and the government, he had everything to look forward to; he had cynically sold himself to the most promising bidder in British politics.

  Little did he guess that in a matter of months his enemies in the East India Company would launch a ferocious campaign to deprive him of his main source of income and that instead of conquering the citadels of power in England by throwing his small band of supporters from one side to the other, as he had among the princes of Bengal, he would once again be cast into the political wilderness. He had abandoned the principled Pitt for the scheming Newcastle. His new ally was to prove unreliable – and was anyway soon to be dumped for the king’s favourite, the disdainful Bute.

  The episode was to illustrate the tension between Clive the brilliant, decisive pragmatist and Clive the romantic. We have seen how Clive was slowly sucked into Bengal’s heart of darkness, and how in a society dominated by the values of conquest, corruption, plunder and politics, he slowly became their prey.

  The dashing young commander in his twenties had become the devious, brilliant political tactician of his thirties. In turn, his masterstroke at Plassey had begotten the military dictator-emperor figure who had ruled and consolidated a huge nation with verve and improvisation, but had also become increasingly corrupted by violence and greed. The raging conflict within himself was resolved by the decision to return home, where he would have to start again at the foothills to conquer the infinitely higher summits of British politics.

  He had made his first throw well. But an extraordinary thing was to follow; he was to be confronted with a choice between his old romanticism and his new-found cynicism, between hanging on to his old Indian creation and advancement in British politics. He was to make the wrong choice for the best of reasons. He found himself outmanoeuvred by the pushy, puritanical, scheming spider of Leadenhall Street, his political ambitions all but destroyed, fighting for his financial life.

  The issue in question was simple. The treaty which had ended the seven-year war in Europe with the French restored their Indian possessions as at 1749, including those won by Dupleix. At a stroke, the efforts of the British in India against the French were to be unravelled.

  Clive was appalled, concluding, probably rightly, that the British negotiator, the Duke of Bedford, had been bribed by Dupleix and de Bussy. With all the impetuousness of the younger man and none of the caution of the older, he declared, ‘the King of England has no right to give away the Nawab’s dominions without his consent’. He believed he had to act as the spokesman for the British in India. However, he was taking on the government itself.

  Bute, now prime minister, made intense efforts to change Clive’s mind. He was offered the British peerage he had craved. His cousin George was offered a £6,000-a-year government sinecure. Almost certainly, if he had played his cards right, he would have secured government support in his impending battle against the East India Company.

  Instead, Clive reverted to becoming a man of principle and defender of India, revelling in the support and admiration of his Indian followers, glowing in his sudden reversion to being his own master again. The former Emperor of Bengal would not, after all, grovel for place; the liberator of the Carnatic would not abandon his people again to the French. He declared roundly, ‘I still continue to be one of those unfashionable kind of people who think very highly of independence, and to bless my stars, indulgent fortune has enabled me to act according to my conscience.’

  It was the action of an honest man, one raised above the need to compromise with his peers by immense power and wealth from another country – and an arrogant man, one without the necessary humility to work his way up the parliamentary ladder. It was also a ferociously self-inflicted wound; for not only had he made an enemy of Bute and the government; his deadly rival, Sulivan, with exquisite cunning, had chosen to support the government.

  In thus apparently betraying India’s interests, the Company chairman had in fact skilfully connived in private with one of the chief ministers, the Earl of Shelburne, to renegotiate the terms of the agreement and thus deprive Dupleix once again of his old conquests. Sulivan now had the tacit support of the government in his campaign against Clive. In a single, recklessly romantic move, Clive had found himself as surrounded by enemies and bereft of allies as at Plassey. What followed was one of the first and greatest corporate takeovers in history, which was to absorb eighteenth-century England much more than the sterile posturing in parliament.

  * * *

  Sulivan now made his move. Taking Clive aside, in the role of candid friend, he informed him that his income of £27,000 a year for the Company’s rent of the lands around Calcutta, awarded to him by Mir Jafar, might come under challenge. The Nawab had not met his obligations under the treaty anything like in full, so the Company had some technical and moral justice in doing this.

  To Clive, now embarked on a course of acquisitions of country estates and parliamentary interests, which were expensive to run and yielded a rent of no more than around 5 per cent a year, it would result in a halving of his income and influence, both in politics and outside. He embarked on a ferocious defence of a privilege he had better never have acquired. In fact, although he had bought his way into politics, he might have enjoyed more political success humbly working his way up the parliamentary ladder than through a naked defence of his self-interest and money.

  Although rich by the standards of an eighteenth-century grandee and fabulously so for a man of fairly humble origins, he now lamented his lack of independence and poverty. ‘Of all places in the world, dread
your native country the most if you are obliged to return to it in a state of dependence … he must be a philosopher indeed, and master of all the passions, who can live upon a little in England.’ ‘Little’ was hardly a fair description of his fortune!

  Initially Sulivan’s threat had the desired effect. Clive reined in his opposition to the Company chairman. ‘I would not think it prudent to risk it by quarrelling with Mr Sulivan, although he should not pay that attention to my recommendations which I have a right to expect…’ But he was soon incensed by Sulivan’s refusal to promote Carnac and Forde. He now enlisted the support of the new chairman of directors, Thomas Rous, formerly a placeman of Sulivan’s. The great civil war of the East India Company at last broke out.

  It is hard not to conclude that Clive’s love of wealth and finery had gone to his head. His political ambitions – so promising just a few months earlier – were now subordinated to his desire for an income sufficient to reimburse him for his loss of the luxury and pomp of his life in India.

  While this desperate fight was about to take place, Clive at last had found the enormously expensive country seat appropriate to him – Walcot Hall, belonging to a family of the same name, a 6,000-acre estate in western Shropshire with a fine gabled house that Clive was to redecorate lavishly into a delightful and airy eighteenth-century palazzo with one of the finest gardens in England. Walcot had the added advantage of controlling the seat of Bishop’s Castle nearby, which was to become immediately vacant, permitting Clive to add to his parliamentary interest. He was also engaged in negotiations to buy his rented Berkeley Square town house from the Ancram family.