Johnstone, himself a veteran of Plassey, was a tough-minded, obstinate man with a large bald head, a determined brow and huge eyebrows. He ruthlessly imposed the British terms upon the unfortunate young man. The new Nawab was forced to make the council a further gift of £140,000 – which Johnstone claimed to have been spontaneous, but the boy was later to assert had been extracted from him. Only a month before, an edict had arrived from the Company in London forbidding employees to accept gifts of more than 4,000 rupees. This Johnstone and his colleagues blatantly ignored.
Clive commented bitterly in a letter to Carnac on the mess he had inherited. ‘I arrived here this morning to take possession of a government which I find in a more distracted state, if possible, than I had reason to expect.’ He was truly appalled as he caught up on his papers the following day. He found ‘evils’ shocking to human nature. ‘What do we hear of, what do we see, but anarchy, confusion, and, what is worse, an almost general corruption.’
He flung himself upon the council like an avenging tornado. He summoned it to tell it that its powers had been superseded by himself and a select committee of three – including his friend Carnac – appointed by the directors in London. One young council member asked a question, and was brutally cut short by Clive.
Johnstone rose and suggested that the select committee’s powers were in fact limited. Clive fixed a furious stare upon him and asked if he was dissenting from the formation of the new committee. Johnstone, disconcerted, replied that this was not the case. ‘Upon which,’ in Clive’s words, ‘there was an appearance of very long and pale countenances, and not one of the Council uttered another syllable.’
From the first, Clive considered Johnstone the prime instigator of the general corruption in Bengal. He had been in partnership with William Bolts, perhaps the most notoriously venal and oppressive of Company servants, and had made a colossal fortune in just two years. Within weeks Clive had the evidence he needed. The young Nawab came to see him, and claimed that Johnstone had extorted the £140,000 present from him.
Clive promptly arrested two of Johnstone’s servants as witnesses, and reported him to the directors in London. Johnstone resigned, and in retaliation sought to find legal reasons why Clive should not draw on his jagir. Clive had made a bitter and powerful enemy: one of Johnstone’s brothers was under the protection of the Bath estate. Another, an MP, had previously supported Clive in his disputes with the Company in the hope of getting John Johnstone reinstated after an earlier dismissal by Vansittart.
Not only did this not happen, but Clive relentlessly persecuted the man. Johnstone petitioned the directors. Clive scathingly wrote to them, ‘I hope you will not forget Mr Johnstone’s minute and that you will make such discoveries as may enable you to give that gentleman such an answer as his impertinence and principles deserve.’ In Bengal Clive’s word was law. Matters were to be much more complex in England.
CHAPTER 22
Statesman at Last
Clive’s greatest concern was to reach a settlement that guaranteed the western borders of Bengal; most of these had already been secured by Carnac. Taking advantage of his immense prestige among the Indian princes, Clive set out in style to overawe that most ostentation- and magnificence-loving of peoples. On 25 June he left Calcutta in his splendid budgerow – a luxurious houseboat – and accompanying craft.
Mun Maskelyne and Strachey were with him, as well as a string of servants including his butler and valet, manservants, chef, pastry-cook, hookah bearer, betel-nut attendant, shaving barber and wig barber. An elephant, horses, hawks, and even a pack of English hounds were specially brought; on the way he also acquired a tiger. In an oriental luxury that perhaps no Englishman has ever flaunted, before or since, the party made its way upriver, stopping first at Murshidabad. There he stayed in a palace by the Pearl Lake endowed with magnificent gardens.
He greeted the young Nawab as ruler to subject. The British were given control of revenue collection from Bengal, Bihar and Orissa and handed the proceeds necessary to the Nawab to govern his province and maintain his city. The boy would retain 50 lakhs for his own household. However, he would also formally continue as governor of the province, to whom other Europeans would pay their respects.
Thus the Nawab was reduced to the status of constitutional monarch, having no power, not even that of raising revenue. He would administer his province in name alone. The young man was, Clive believed, overjoyed at having so large an income placed at his disposal, ‘to squander away among whores, pagy fellows, etc. “Thank God,” he exclaimed, “I shall have as many dancing wenches as I please.”’
Clive continued on his triumphal progress to Patna, where he was due to meet with the troublesome but brave young Mogul Emperor and the fearsome Nawab of Oudh, Shuja-ud-Daula, to conclude a definitive peace treaty. But they had not yet arrived. On 1 August Clive’s enormous cavalcade moved into the stunning Hindu holy city of Benares, with its 1,400 temples, many dating from before Christianity, which he was seeing for the first time.
As he arrived on the fabulous and macabre waterfront, with its funeral pyres and floating corpses, he was greeted by his old and dear friend Carnac – and at last by Shuja-ud-Daula. The latter was a remarkable-looking man, entirely different from the languid and dissipated princes of Bengal. Tall, enormously strong, in a long tartar dress that fell to his ankles, with a large fur cap on his huge head, his piercing gaze and broad, stiff black moustache gave him the appearance of an avenging tribesman.
Although past his prime, he delighted his guests with his party piece of slicing off a buffalo’s head with a single stroke of his sword. Clive recognised that this was a man the British needed to ally with to secure the frontier, not a weak and devious leader of the Bengali kind. The two men instantly liked each other; and the peace agreement was a formality. Clive decided to be generous and to give Shuja-ud-Daula back all of Oudh except for Allahabad and Korah, which were to become the private fiefs of the Mogul emperor; in exchange he would have to pay the relatively small sum of 50 lakhs to the Company, and the British were to be allowed to trade duty-free in Oudh. His kingdom and Bengal were to be bound by an alliance.
The agreement was, in fact, a skilful piece of statecraft. Only a few years before, Clive had tantalised Pitt with the prospect of conquering all of northern India. Now he was determined that the British should not overreach themselves, but consolidate their hold on Bengal. He had bitterly criticised British penetration into the subcontinent as far as Allahabad – ‘a march I highly disapprove of. I mean absolutely to bound our possessions, assistance and conquests to Bengal.’
Now he added: ‘To go further in my opinion is a scheme so extravagantly ambitious and absurd that no governor and council can in their senses adopt it, unless the whole system of the Company’s interest be first entirely new-modelled.’ He was undoubtedly right. The British could not possibly have held on to Oudh as well as Bengal in the long term, and would probably have lost both if tested at this juncture.
It had been Vansittart’s grandiose folly even to consider this. Clive’s modest hope was that his treaties would bring ‘a peace for two or three years’. In fact the Nawab respected the treaty for eight years, and Oudh was to provide a sometimes unsatisfactory buffer state for the British Raj for almost a century.
* * *
Clive’s decision was a model of far-sightedness, restrained ambition and good judgement. His next appointment was with the emperor, who languidly declined to come forward to meet him, sending him ludicrously inconsequential letters instead. If the Mogul could not go to Clive, Clive must go to the Mogul, and he set off to Allahabad on 9 August to meet the largely powerless figure with the greatest family prestige on the subcontinent, a man who approved every princely appointment yet commanded barely any real forces or territory – except those the British were about to give him.
As the Shahzada he had been one of Clive’s most persistent and troublesome foes; he was far from being the usual decadent holder of his th
rone. He had proved himself strong-willed, a good and tenacious fighter, not excessively given to cruelty, and something of a tactician and a statesman, carving out for himself a role from the very poor hand he had been dealt as the son of a puppet, however distinguished.
Clive found him a young man, very dark, with a ‘grim deportment bordering upon sadness’. He repeated his old ambition for the British to restore him to the throne at Delhi, which Clive politely declined. In exchange for the diwani – his seal of approval for British tax collection for Bengal, Bihar and Orissa – he accepted the two provinces of Oudh that were offered him and an income from Bengal of 26 lakhs.
The following day, in a slightly ludicrous ceremony in Clive’s tent, the lugubrious young man was placed on a throne consisting of a draped armchair on a dining-room table, and formally awarded the diwani to Clive, his subject, beneath him. Thus occurred the formal beginning of the British Raj in India.
Clive stayed on another three days at the court of his nominal imperial master, before being driven by ‘bugs and flies’ to leave. He left behind a brigade of European troops in Allahabad to protect the Mogul Emperor in his ‘palace’, a bungalow, where he retained a ‘shabby sort of grandeur, continuing to implore the British to fight to reinstate him to Delhi’. In later life he briefly regained this, only to be defeated by the Rohillas. Blinded, so that he could not see the treasure he allegedly concealed from his conquerors, he had to seek British protection again.
Clive returned downstream in his luxurious river procession, taking just a fortnight. He wrote sweetly to Margaret on the way: ‘It would amaze you to hear what diamonds, rubies and gold mohurs have been offered to Lady Clive because she has not signed covenants. However, I have refused everything … Action, as formerly, agrees better with me than indolence and laziness … I am as happy as a man at such distance from his wife and family can well be. I have the testimony of a good conscience to support me in the most arduous task that ever was undertaken, no less than a total reformation in every branch of the civil and military departments, never was such a scene of anarchy and confusion, bribery, corruption and extortion seen or heard of…’
He also handed out an admonition against Philadelphia Hancock, the doctor’s wife Margaret had made such a close friend in Madras, who had become a close confidante of Vansittart and his wife, and had then had an affair with Warren Hastings, bearing his son. ‘In no circumstances whatever keep company with Mrs Hancock for it is beyond a doubt that she abandoned herself to Mr Hastings, indeed, I would rather you had no acquaintance with the ladies who have been in India, they stand in such little esteem in England that their company cannot be of credit to Lady Clive.’
Margaret was evidently furious at Clive’s comments, and crossed out the lines referring to Philadelphia Hancock. It was another sign of what seemed to be a subterranean rift between the two. She had failed to accompany him to India at the last moment for the best of reasons – her pregnancy; and now defended her friend against his priggish admonition – which was surprising for one who had had a relaxed attitude towards sex during his youth in India.
His royal progress along the Hugli to the heart of India seems to have gone to his head a little. He claimed that the diwani would provide extra revenues for the Company of around £1.7 million ‘without oppressing or overwhelming the inhabitants’; his reforms, he said, would generate well over £2 million a year – a wildly optimistic forecast, although it was true that significant additional revenues were transferred from the Nawab’s tax collectors to the British. The expense of the government of Bengal, which Clive reckoned at around £600,000, turned out to be nearly £1 million.
Undoubtedly the diwani helped the Bengali government significantly – but at considerable expense. While it limited the amount the Nawab and his court could cream off the revenues, it depended upon the exactions of the zemindars – tenants-in-chief – from the peasants. Naturally, so as not to be out of pocket, these raised their rents to meet the required amounts from the British. Worse, Clive set up a sepoy troop called the pargana battalion to enforce the payment of taxes brutally and often corruptly.
Moreover, Clive continued to rely on the inefficient and corrupt advisers of the Nawab, whose authority was now minimal. The governor had no alternative: he had far too few advisers to administer his huge realm. But the Nawab’s government, devoid of the necessary force and funds for bribery to keep the government going, deteriorated, losing authority and plunging Bengal into a state of nature.
It might be easy to see in Clive’s achievement an almost classic morality tale of the destruction wrought by colonisation. An established local structure of administration was being gradually undermined by the seizure of its revenues. Yet a generation later the vacuum was to be filled by that master-administrator, Warren Hastings. Clive certainly undermined the foundations of what in reality was a longstanding system of colonial rule by an Islamic upper class. But a much stronger political system was soon to be imposed and arguably this was less despotic, if no less colonial, than that of the old nawabs.
Clive exulted ludicrously at achieving the diwani: ‘Fortune seems determined to accompany me to the last; every object, every sanguine wish is upon the point of being completely fulfilled, and I am arrived at the pinnacle of all I covet, by affirming the Company shall, in spite of all envy, malice, faction and resentment, acknowledge they are become the most opulent company in the world, by the Battle of Plassey; and Sir Hannibal Hotpot shall acknowledge the same.’ Hotpot was Sulivan, who had been defeated in the 1765 election of directors.
* * *
Clive now plunged with furious rigour into reform; after trying to put the Company finances on a sound basis he tackled what he saw as one of the worst abuses of the system. The Company’s agents were merchants whose prime motive was the amassing of large fortunes for themselves. It was unsurprising that abuse occurred on the large scale that it did, because their role was that of profiteers – a legacy of the days when the Company controlled a string of trading posts, not a territory the size of France.
Clive tackled the problem frontally. He established the Society of Trade, to replace the worst abuses in the commerce of salt, betel nut and tobacco, charged a 15 per cent levy for the salt monopoly – about half the previous level for Bengalis – and used its revenues for the first time to pay for a properly salaried civil service – in place of the previously nominal pay that Company servants, who were supposed to make up the bulk of their income from trade, had received. The governor was to receive £17,500 a year, council members £7,000 and so on down the scale.
Clive’s bold and imaginative idea for setting up a new salaried official class, funded by a monopoly that had long existed in the past and was levied at a tolerably low level, was to be rejected by the directors in London – but reinstated by Warren Hastings. It was the embryo of the Indian Civil Service, the backbone of the Raj later on; yet it was soon to result in opprobrium being heaped upon Clive.
His lesser reforms consisted in ordering the first land survey of Bengal, founding a postal system and chipping away at the exploitation inflicted by the settlers. He also tried to force Company employees to stick to the new limits on accepting presents, most of which were not bribes but, worse, had been extorted.
He grimly stuck to his guns before the council. As one member wrote, ‘Clive is really our King. His word is law and … he laughs at contradictions.’ His chief opponents there, after Johnstone’s departure, were a young man, Ralph Leycester, and George Gray. The latter’s Indian agent was notorious for oppressing and robbing the local people, and Clive had him formally accused of extorting money from the prostitutes of Calcutta – to which Gray imaginatively replied that he had intended to set up a hospital for their ‘loathsome distempers’. Leycester, more hotheaded, accused Clive of trying to set up a military dictatorship, whereupon he was suspended from the council. Gray returned home shortly afterwards.
Clive now had a majority on the council, as well as his con
trol of the select committee. Undoubtedly his rule was arbitrary and despotic. On the other hand his end was just – to control the excesses of the colonists, and was probably the only means available under the circumstances. His detractors compared him to Henry VIII. Vansittart’s younger brother, George, accused him of being ‘guilty of so many acts of violence and oppression that his name will forever be abhorred in Bengal’.
Another council member, the unstable William Billiers, who had been notorious for repressing the population at Patna when he was its chief, was placed under investigation by Clive. He killed himself, stabbing himself thirteen times. Clive is said in private conversation to have told Carnac, ‘General, had I been in Vansittart’s place, I would soon have gained the majority, for I would have sent you in arrest and then voted you away to the army.’ Clive the dictator had no time for constitutional niceties even as he pursued the cause of good government in Bengal. It was the great irony of his third and last tour in India.
There were now four council vacancies. Clive refused to nominate new members from Calcutta, and sent instead to Madras for supporters: he had had enough of the ‘children and fools, as well as knaves’ of Calcutta. This caused a group of them under a 23-year-old, William Mahendie, to occupy the council room and block proceedings, while appealing directly to the directors in London against the injustices of Clive’s rule.
Clive promptly dismissed Mahendie, as well as George Vansittart, another of the protestors; duty-free passes for their supporters were cancelled, causing them to lose their trading privileges. He wrote despairingly to Margaret:
Clive Page 36