The war with Sulivan broke out in earnest early in 1763. The battleground consisted of 2,000 stockholders of the East India Company, substantial men, more than a third of whom lived in London and the Home Counties. Clive could no longer conceal his hatred for ‘this treacherous, deceitful fellow’, ‘this mushroom of a man’. Both Clive and Sulivan resorted to buying up East India stock, and increasing the number of voting shares on either side by ‘splitting’ those of others – anyone with a share over £500 was entitled to vote. However, much of the stock remained in the hands of those who belonged to neither side.
In March, the first vote took place, Clive making a strong and major speech in defence of Rous, who had opposed the treaty. Sulivan, a bookish, waspish man, was not a natural speaker, and failed to answer most of Clive’s points. One of the latter’s friends told him, ‘Mr Sulivan, Sir. Stand up and answer for yourself. I have been informed that you did propose to give up the whole Coast of Coromandel to the French.’ While denying this, Sulivan admitted that he would be prepared to give up the whole coast for one inch of the Company’s possessions in Bengal. ‘You did say! And pray, Sir, if you give up the Coast of Coromandel, how are your ships to get to Bengal?’
The retort brought the house down. Clive’s party went on to win by 61 votes. However, having won the vote, Clive lost in the next round – the election of directors. Sulivan promptly ordered payment of the jagir stopped, claiming that the emperor had not approved it – an entirely bogus argument (although Clive’s nominal claim rested, equally speciously, on his nominal rank in the Mogul’s army). Clive promptly began legal proceedings, and sought the formal approval of the emperor; but meanwhile the jagir was frozen.
* * *
Towards the end of the year, however, Clive eventually caved in and moved away from opposition to the government towards negotiation with a more acceptable prime minister, a compromise between Bute and Pitt – Pitt’s brother-in-law, George Grenville, whose sister had the added advantage of being married to the most powerful territorial family in North Wales, the Williams Wynns, confidants of Clive’s patron, the Earl of Powis. Grenville agreed to use his influence to get the directors to pay Clive his ‘Black Jagir’ for a year or two, and said he would also try to secure a peerage for Clive.
Clive’s choice of political patron, George Grenville, was not as incongruous as it might seem. Grenville has gone down in history as a dullard, the man who lost Britain the American colonies through the introduction of the Stamp Act in 1764, the first real taxing measure on the Atlantic possessions, which aroused a storm of opposition under the cry ‘no taxation without representation’: he was to resign in ignominy shortly afterwards. Grenville was later described by Edmund Burke as thinking ‘better of the wisdom and power of human legislation than in truth it deserves. He conceived, and many conceived along with him, that the flourishing trade of this country was greatly owing to law and institution, and not quite so much to liberty.’ Punctilious to a fault, highly competent, a skilful and experienced parliamentarian, he appeared to be the legalistic antithesis to the temperamental, intuitive Clive.
Yet Grenville, like his eloquent brother-in-law, Pitt, had many appealing aspects. He was a man of integrity and strength of character; he had no time for meddling in politics by the king’s favourites. He was the first of a new breed of high-minded professional politician who considered that the Crown and the old Whig oligarchy had had their day in politics; and unlike Walpole, Newcastle and Pelham, he did not rule through patronage and corruption.
He believed in good, disinterested government. He was the father of all that was best about the British system of government, both in politics and the civil service. The Stamp Act was but one of a whole series of long-considered measures intended to put the colonies so recently enlarged on a sound legislative and financial footing, and he enjoyed the support of virtually all shades of opinion.
Grenville himself came from the second generation of a family that had risen to considerable wealth in a short time. The Grenvilles, a relatively well-do-do family in Buckingham, had married into the family of the enormously wealthy and successful Viscount Cobham, a family titled since the days of Charles I. The Cobham estate passed over to them and they were propelled to the financial front rank, owning a magnificent house at Stowe (now the school).
The eldest son of the couple became Richard, Earl Temple. He turned out to be a brilliant administrator of the family fortunes and the leader of the Grenville interest in parliament as First Lord of the Admiralty and Lord Privy Seal. A leader of the opposition under George II, he was detested by the monarch, who wrote that ‘he was so disagreeable a fellow, there was no bearing him, that when he attempted to argue, he was pert, and sometimes insolent; that when he meant to be civil, he was exceedingly troublesome, and that in the business of his office he was totally ignorant’. He was arrogant and independent-minded, and in 1759 persuaded Pitt, his brother-in-law, to threaten to resign so that the king would give him the Order of the Garter. The king is said to have thrown the garter at Temple when he was installed the following year.
His more agreeable, politically sharper brother, George, was equally contemptuous of royalty. However, Temple broke with him when he accepted the job of prime minister following the fall of Bute, who had been partly brought down by the Wilkes affair, Wilkes being one of Temple’s followers. The new prime minister treated the young George III rather like an errant schoolboy and constantly attempted to undermine Bute, the power behind the throne, at length getting the crabbed old Scot virtually excluded from court.
George III’s revenge was swift in coming: he dismissed Grenville and installed a comically inept and inexperienced administration of Whig grandees ‘from the stud to the state’ under the Marquess of Rockingham. This soon fell apart, although Rockingham to his credit in turn quarrelled with ‘the King’s Friends’. In the end, although the king flatly refused to have Grenville back, he had to send for the towering figure of William Pitt, related to the Grenvilles through his marriage to Hester, sister of Temple and George.
Thus Clive had allied himself with the most prominent political family of the third quarter of the eighteenth century, and his own political failure can in part be ascribed to their downfall. When at last the king secured a more congenial and able minister in Lord North, he was to remember Clive’s connection with the hated Grenvilles.
The next generation of Grenvilles, like the Pitts, were to have a further moment of political glory early in the nineteenth century under the wise, skilful and immensely rich Thomas and William, who was to head the Ministry of All the Talents. Their sister, Charlotte, one of the great letter-writers of the age, married Clive’s Welsh landed neighbour, Williams Wynn. Their elder brother, George, first Marquis of Buckingham, was to be a larger-than-life spendthrift, rake and minor politician, exceeded in his excesses only by his elder son, the first Duke of Buckingham, whose extravagance was eventually to help bring about the fall of the dynasty.
Walsh, and others of Clive’s Indian friends, were appalled by his ‘betrayal’ in joining Grenville. Walsh said he was unwilling ‘slavishly to follow the weaknesses of a master, not affording a sensible and manly support to a friend’. However, Clive seems to have persuaded him, and his small party supported the government as it began its epic prosecution of the contemporary mischief-maker John Wilkes. The story was put about how, obsequiously, Richard Clive met the king and told him his son was ‘coming to town, and then Your Majesty will have another vote’.
* * *
Had Clive’s career been cut short at this stage, he would have cut a sadly reduced figure in history. Although his youthful triumphs were undeniable, and his conquest of Bengal and subsequent vigorous consolidation of it would undoubtedly have earned him a major place in history, his reputation in England three years after his return was little short of disastrous, even comical. He had first sought advancement by siding with the government, then, in an admirable burst of principle, turned against it.
Now, for reasons of material self-advancement, he had supported it again.
He had achieved nothing in politics, not even a minor job. He had dedicated two years to securing his own colossal source of income from the East India Company’s own funds. Sulivan, although a personality entirely lacking in Clive’s qualities – indeed by all accounts an extremely unpleasant man – had outmanoeuvred and, for the moment, defeated him.
At the age of 37, the dashing young warrior no longer, Clive had been made to look slightly ridiculous – immensely wealthy in most people’s eyes, yet concerned mainly to protect that wealth. The only political issue he had shown himself passionately concerned about, after his admirable opposition to the peace treaty, was the defence of his own income. His British public career was spectacularly dead in the water. The chattering classes of the time, best exemplified by Horace Walpole, had him in their sights.
As far back as 1760 Walpole had written, ‘General Clive is arrived, all over estates and diamonds. If a beggar asks charity, he says “friend, I have no small brilliants about me”.’ Walpole kept up the attack. The Annual Register ludicrously estimated the Clives’ fortune at about £1.5 million. In fact, even if Clive had possessed a capital sum capable of yielding an income as large as the jagir, he could have been worth no more than £500,000. Yet the damage to his reputation had been done. Drake had been buried at sea, Raleigh had been executed, Marlborough had been fabulously ennobled, Wolfe and Nelson were martyred on the field of battle, Wellington became prime minister – but Clive was being immortalised as a rich man fighting to double his income.
Nor were the East India Company and the gossip columns of the time the only ones to sneer at Clive. In spite of his wealth and the steady expansion of his landed estates, he remained outside the ranks of fashionable society. The king and the prime minister, of course, dealt with him and received him in the course of their official duties. But Clive never made it into the ranks of the aristocracy.
There were several reasons for this. One, which he strongly believed, was that he lacked the necessary peerage. Clive was also a new phenomenon – one of Britain’s very first self-made men. Previously people had joined the aristocracy through royal patronage or appointment: Elizabeth I’s elevation of the bourgeois Robert Cecil to found the Salisbury dynasty is a classic example. Now the powers of the Crown in patronage were considerably diminished.
Although some city traders had amassed large fortunes, by and large they were despised by the great ducal and noble families of England, whose wealth was founded on land. Very few people had the necessary wealth to buy into their ranks except through trade – until Clive came along, an object of curiosity because he had done so through a feat of arms. In the nineteenth century, large fortunes were to be created by the industrial revolution, and although the old families accorded them second-class status, in practice they intermarried with the former, which were often in need of money, and became more or less assimilated.
At Clive’s time, social status was static, more than before or since; royal patronage was gone, the new wealth had not yet arrived; and he was not admitted. The first citizen of India was considered an upstart in eighteenth-century England. Not that either Clive or Margaret made much effort to become fashionable. Unlike in Calcutta, they held no balls and kept away from the salons of London, preferring to hold court socially in the country with a small number of friends from British India, while making business and political excursions to London.
Clive himself, moreover, was the very reverse of the fashionable dandy, fop or wit. ‘He would sit in company quite sluggish, while there was nothing to call forth his intellectual vigour; but the moment that any important subject was started, for instance, how this country is to be defended against a French invasion, he would rouse himself and show his extraordinary talents with the most powerful ability and animation.’ He probably did care about his social exclusion – as his unflagging hunt for a title with a seat in the Lords suggests – but he affected not to show it. He was the first nouveau riche from British India – and suffered accordingly.
Loud, vulgar, ostentatious, gauche, awkward in society, a bore – all these epithets were to be applied to him. In fact he was no more ostentatious than anyone endowed with substantial wealth at the time, and his numerous houses were to be distinguished by taste and elegance more inspired by the simplicity and elegance of the colonial style in India than over-ornamentation. Yet much of the mud stuck, at the time and for later generations.
Clive’s wealth and ostentation were put into perspective by his Welsh neighbour, Williams Wynn, who owned some 500,000 acres, as well as resources of coal, lime, lead, tin, copper, corn and timber, and who was part owner of the turnpike roads running through his property. Among his residences were the colossal Wynnstay in Denbighshire, with its own theatre, the elegant Llangedwyn in Montgomeryshire and a fine house in St James’s Square in London. When the young Watkin Williams Wynn came of age, 15,000 guests were entertained, consuming 30 bullocks, 50 pigs, 50 calves, 80 sheep, 660 fowl, 73 hundredweight of bread, 125 plum puddings, 60 barrels of pickled oysters and 18,000 eggs.
Or take the Grenvilles. According to a maid present at the visit of King George’s daughter, Princess Amelia, to the Grenville family seat at Stowe: ‘nothing can exceed the grandeur and order by which everything was conducted. Twelve gentlemen, well dressed, waited at table, and twenty-four in livery waited in the next room, and in the grand hall near the dining room was a grand concert of music; the same evening, and every evening during Her Royal Highness’s stay, the state apartments were illuminated with 120 wax lights … I never saw any entertainment conducted with more care, order, and decorum in all my days, every one endeavouring to outdo another in their places appointed them by their noble master and mistress.’ Beside this, Clive was modest. He lived in an age of showing off, and he was by no means the showiest.
Clive’s experience in England demonstrated one thing: that while he was a beached whale there, in India he was a kingfish. Even in England it was always Indian matters – the peace treaty, the break with Sulivan – that dominated his time. Once again, events in that far-off continent now stirred to tug at his destiny.
BOOK THREE
STATESMAN, 1764–1771
CHAPTER 21
The Cesspit
For once, to say that all hell had broken loose after Clive’s departure from Calcutta would not be wide of the mark. As with the fall of the city, a staggering succession of blunders by the British in Bengal soon threatened to undo everything Clive had achieved – and even imperilled continued British dominance there; the firm hand of the dictator-emperor had been sorely missed. The two main ingredients of the disaster were to be the cupidity of the settlers, who regarded Bengal as no more than a treasure house for plunder; and the arrival of a new, young and intellectually arrogant governor in the shape of Henry Vansittart.
The greed of the British colonists seemed to know no bounds. It was responsible for the bitter unpopularity into which British rule descended; such goodwill as had existed among the majority of professional people – the lower castes counted for nothing – was soon dissipated. The Hindu middle class, the backbone of Bengali society, which had viewed the British seizure of power from the Moslem aristocracy with indifference, even with sympathy, was soon to be wholly alienated. Clive’s elaborate construction of a system of divide and rule – keeping the Moslem aristocracy and the Hindu merchant class suspicious of one another – was soon eclipsed by their mutual hostility towards the British.
The main British abuse was informally to extend a monopoly of trade to Company agents not just for exports but in all internal commerce. They were exempted from the high customs imposed through the use of duty-free passes – which in theory were intended only for the use of official Company trade, not the private transactions of the British colonists themselves. In fact the colonists remitted very little to the Company in Britain, starving it of revenue and forcing it to buy from them at prices they
themselves set.
Meanwhile the Company was having to support the huge cost of maintaining an army in Bengal. The directors’ response was furiously to demand more money from the settlers; their reaction was to find yet new ways of extracting revenue from the Bengalis to pay off their nominal masters in London and increase their own profits. It was classic colonialism of the most profiteering kind.
As these practices spread, much of the Hindu merchant class went out of business. In their place a large parasitic class grew up consisting not just of Company agents but of Indian crooks and middlemen, foreign adventurers and others who went about under a British flag with small parties of sepoys, plundering the countryside, compelling farmers to give them their products, forcing them to sell salt, tobacco, and betel at low prices, and then reselling these at vastly inflated prices to the local population. These were the gamashtas, of whom Clive was later to write, ‘They swarm like so many bees and all have sepoys in their service … it is really very shocking to think of the distress of the poor inhabitants.’
These abuses generated bitter resentment of English rule in Bengal. It was to take more concrete form as a result of the singularly inept judgement of a man who had risen far above his abilities, Josiah Holwell, and of the inexperience of the young Vansittart. Between them they decided that the best way to extract yet more money from the government of Bengal, which was still behind in its payments, was to seek to replace Mir Jafar, or at least make him more pliable. The Nawab was seen to be a stubborn and weak old man, forever frustrating the British and indulging in minor conspiracies against their rule. Worse, he appeared to be deeply under the influence, in his haze of drink, drugs and women, of his venomous son, Miran, who from the start resented British dominance. However, fate was first to intervene on the side of the British and against Miran.
Clive Page 33