Clive

by Robert Harvey

The public business is become a burden to me and if anything endangers my constitution it will be my close application to the desk. I am no longer walking about the room talking politics or dictating Persian letters to Nabobs, Rajahs etc. I am no longer making preparation for campaigns and fighting. My whole time is taken up in introducing economy and subordination among the civil servants, in reforming most notorious abuses, and sometimes, when I am dared and compelled to it, in detecting frauds and bringing to shame individuals. In short I will pronounce Calcutta to be one of the most wicked places in the universe. Corruption, licentiousness, and a want of principle seem to have possessed the minds of all the civil servants. By frequent bad examples, they are grown callous, rapacious and luxurious beyond conception, and the incapacity and iniquity of some and the youth of others here obliged us to call from Madras four gentlemen to our assistance. With their assistance I expect to bring this settlement to some order, although the gentlemen here all mutinied upon their being sent for. However, they shall be brought to reason and ruled with a rod of iron until I see a reformation in their principle and manners …

  In short, I have undertaken the most disagreeable and odious task which my honour obliges me to go through with. I am become the slave of the Company and the detestation of individuals, and my constitution cannot bear it long if I am not relieved by the Madras gentlemen.

  Within three months, the mini-rebellion had petered out.

  The vigour and zeal with which Clive sought to stamp out corruption had a dramatic effect. It laid the foundations of the moral administrative approach later to be adopted by the Raj. Starting as an unashamed plunderer at a time when there were no inhibitions against this, Clive was ending his career as a colonial warden determined, first, to limit the greed of his fellow countrymen; second, to create a new governing class of public-spirited and uncorrupt civil servants; third, through regulating and legitimising the British presence, to endow the British with the authority to rule in India; and, finally, through a policy of incorruptibility, to secure the support of the local people.

  He moved rapidly too to revive his old divide-and-rule policy, keeping the feeble Nawab and his chief minister on the defensive by favouring the Hindu merchant class again, in particular the sons of the murdered Seths. In the short term, Clive was not to succeed. However rigidly his policies were applied at the centre, abuses continued unabated in the countryside, and for a while after he departed it seemed he had never been.

  Yet he had blazed a trail; for the same policies were to be pursued by Warren Hastings and his successors, and were to underpin nearly two centuries of British rule, a remarkable achievement of colonial administration over so large and diverse a continent. Clive had started out as a warrior. He was bowing out as a gimlet-eyed reformer, setting goals of probity which other men were to follow.

  * * *

  Within weeks of his putting down the ‘puerile’ rebellion on the council, Clive was faced by potentially the most serious crisis of his career. Those who believed he had become a cantankerous, luxury-loving middle-aged colonial administrator were soon to be surprised: for he was to show that he retained the speed, courage and cool-headedness that had characterised his early career. The crisis threatened to rock the very foundations of Clive’s rule – his control of the military – and in the process place British control of Bengal at severe risk.

  The crisis erupted on Clive in Murshidabad, where he had gone to receive the revenues of the tax collectors. Departure from the capital had provided the excuse for a deep-seated conspiracy to be rid of him. He had travelled upriver in style, as always, with a budgerow for sleeping in, one for dining in, and as many as 40 lesser vessels in support. His destination was the palace at Pearl Lake.

  There, at the end of April, he sat beside the Nawab as the tax collectors made their submissions. In the evenings there were exotic dancing and tiger fights. As he withdrew from one of these he was met by Sir Robert Fletcher, one of his three principal commanders, who told him that all officers below the rank of major throughout Bengal had resolved to resign their commissions unless Clive rescinded his decision to abandon the ‘double batta’ – a payment initially made to officers by Mir Jafar which had become institutionalised. The directors had insisted that it be cut, although Clive tried to compensate by increasing officers’ expenses.

  This mass desertion was unprecedented; worse, an army of 50,000 Marathas was said to be advancing on Allahabad, the furthest reach of British power. A revolt of this kind, if it became known, could also spark off a major insurrection within Bengal. It was as if the kind of plotting so natural to the court at Murshidabad had spread to the British army, fatally undermining its authority.

  Clive’s three main commanders were Fletcher, Robert Barker, a sturdy soldier, and Dick Smith, brave if highly strung. Each commanded a brigade made up of a European battalion, artillery, a troop of Indian cavalry and six sepoy battalions. Fletcher’s was quartered at Monghyr, Barker’s at Patna and Smith’s at Allahabad. Now all were apparently in revolt, in a well-organised plot co-ordinated by Clive’s civilian enemies and the traders whose livelihoods he had encroached upon, who had close friends in the army.

  In reality, the conspiracy was more serious and complex still. The rebellion had been instigated by none other than the vain and ambitious Fletcher himself. He had accurately calculated that Clive, in alienating the civil authority, now had only the backing of the military to enforce his will. An army revolt would demonstrate how exposed he was: if he gave way over the issue of the double batta, Fletcher and the army would dictate policy. Naked military dictatorship now threatened to leave Clive a puppet.

  Clive, awoken from his indolence enjoying the dancing girls and tiger fights, responded as if he had been called to arms again. He volleyed orders to his commanders to arrest and despatch mutinous officers to Calcutta. He sent for officers from Madras to replace them. He bade farewell to the young Nawab, who was struggling from an infection that was to kill him four days later (his half-brother, Saif-ud-Daula, was placed on the throne) and set off for Monghyr, the centre of the mutiny.

  * * *

  It was the Clive of old. The officers had threatened to desert on 15 May. Clive furiously forced his small forces through ferocious heat, letting them sleep only three hours a night. Some of his men dropped dead along the way. He was blocked for a time by a river which had flooded, and failed to arrive in Monghyr until the 15th itself, by which time many of the rebels had left.

  On their departure, part of the European force had mutinied, but had been bought off and threatened by sepoys under one Captain F. Smith pointing muskets at them while a band played the ‘British Grenadier’ to rally the men. The garrison at Monghyr was only just under control. Clive was told of a plot to assassinate him on his arrival. He took no notice. He insisted on entering the gateway to the fort in the company of only a major. There he faced an armed battalion of European troops.

  Coolly, he ordered them to place their guns on the ground. They obeyed. ‘Now I am satisfied you are British soldiers and not, as I was erroneously informed, assassins,’ he told them. He had proclaimed as he approached the gate, ‘I must see the soldiers’ bayonets levelled at my throat before I can be induced to give way.’ In the event it was not necessary. The loyal sepoys, who looked on Clive with something approaching veneration, were rewarded with two months’ double pay (which cost rather more than the double batta). The rebel officers, who had camped outside Monghyr, were ordered back to Calcutta to be shipped home.

  He marched on to Patna, where the mutineers submitted without a struggle. There he raised reinforcements. The Nawab of Oudh, now his ally, gave him a necklace for Margaret, which, unusually, he accepted. At Allahabad, learning that Clive was coming, most of the mutinous officers soon yielded. Only the ringleaders were arrested. Through his personal decisiveness and courage, Clive had shown that he could crush his own rebels more effectively than any Indian prince.

  He then displayed his old moderation a
nd magnanimity. Many of the officers facing deportation were promised reinstatement. This was granted for all but those at the very peak of the conspiracy, provided they signed three-year contracts which rendered them liable to the death penalty if they repeated their offence.

  Clive had been informed by the rebels at Monghyr that Robert Fletcher had been the instigator of the revolt, persuading them to resign their commissions. He had already contradicted himself by first saying he had known of the plot since January, then only since April. In his late twenties, good-looking, petulant, arrogant and ambitious, he had already once been dismissed from his command for insubordination in the Carnatic. A protégé of Sulivan’s, he was corrupt, a plunderer and a falsifier of expenses.

  Confronted with the evidence, he claimed he had tried to penetrate the conspiracy from the inside. He was arrested in July, found guilty of mutiny and cashiered – although by rights he should have been executed for so serious an offence and for endangering the British position in Bengal. Meanwhile the chief rebel officers were forced aboard ships at Calcutta at gunpoint by sepoys. The most prominent, Captain John Stainforth, who had ‘uttered threatening expressions against Clive and proposed to assassinate him’, was merely cashiered, Clive insisting benignly that he ‘bore a very good character, was recommended strongly to me by some friends, and is nephew to the Bishop of London’. He was reinstated in 1770, and went on to a distinguished eleven-year career, dying in India at Cawnpore in 1781.

  It had been a remarkable performance. Clive had displayed unflinching courage and firmness in dealing with this challenge to his authority – and also clemency, perhaps too much so, for mutiny was usually a capital offence at that time, and his enemies were far from grateful. But Clive was never one to lust after blood. When he had first arrived in Bengal on this tour, he had insisted that all death warrants in Bengal should be shown to him – not the practice before – in an effort to limit the number of unnecessary executions.

  * * *

  Clive’s last great challenge in India was over: he had crushed a dangerous military mutiny and a major challenge to the civil authority. His nearly 20 months of frenzied activity in Bengal as its dictator against his own countrymen was far from being a joyless affair, however. His last months in India were marked by his continued love of partying, pomp and pageantry.

  His ‘fandango’ to mark the peace treaty with the Nawab of Oudh lasted four days, involving a dinner for 300, a ball, fireworks and fights between such exotic animals as a buffalo, a tiger and a camel, as well as an elephant and a rhinoceros. One elephant went wild after a fight with a rhinoceros and killed several spectators. Two days later, two elephants fought fiercely, their riders being thrown and killed, until they were separated with fireworks exploded under them.

  At his palatial and now extended house, he would produce the best European wines (he had brought nearly 150 bottles of claret with him from England). His table served the best French as well as Indian dishes. One of his severest detractors paints a perhaps not wholly inaccurate picture of him at this time: ‘If he was in good humour, he would encourage a free circulation of the bottle and by intervals stimulate mirth and jollity; but he soon relapsed in his natural pensive mood, and was after silent for a considerable time. His conversation was not lively, but rational and solid. As he seldom drank freely enough to be seen without disguise, he was impenetrable excepted to a few confidants to whom he entrusted the execution of his schemes and designs.’

  The same source, the journalist and polemicist Charles Caraccioli, claims that Clive indulged himself in a succession of undignified advances to women, some successful, others not. In fact, Clive spent most evenings at his country retreat, Dum Dum, just outside Calcutta, with his two chief aides-de-camp, Mun Maskelyne and Strachey, and Samuel Ingham, his doctor, leading a quiet life.

  Clive followed up his ruthless house-cleaning with two acts of administrative dignity and self-abnegation. Left a substantial legacy by Mir Jafar, who seems to have had a genuine affection for him, possibly because he had extended British protection to him at various crucial moments, Clive turned this into a fund for his soldiers’ widows and invalid officers.

  Second, he formally took an oath as governor not to engage in trade in exchange for a concession of one-eighth of the Company’s revenues; it was another step on the road to setting up a salaried, independent colonial administration. Clive also ensured that his own nominee, Henry Verelst, would succeed him by discrediting the deputy governor, William Sumner, who had proved ineffectual and had apparently taken a large bribe from Mir Kasim. Clive also detested his wife – his companion on board ship two years before.

  In November the governor fell ill again and plunged into a deep depression accompanied by the old abdominal pain and malaria; once again his constitution was catching up with the furious explosion of activity and overwork of the past two years. He wept and ranted. Carnac wrote to Margaret:

  It grieved me beyond measure to see a person endued with such extraordinary firmness so oppressed in his spirits as to exceed any degree of hysterics I was ever witness to. I was more shocked as I had never seen him so before, but Mr Ingham [Clive’s doctor] informs me he had a like attack or rather worse, in England, and he, who from his long attendance upon his lordship must be well acquainted with his constitution, has never judged him to be in any danger. It was thought proper to move my lord to Barasut, where we keep him clear of business, and from the change of air with the help of the bark the bile is wholly thrown out of his blood.

  He began to revive only after the New Year.

  On 1 February he sailed for the last time from the scene of his conquests, glory, trials and magnificence, leaving that exotic Palladian mirage on the Hugli. Carnac accompanied his master. Himself hugely rich, he was soon to be married to Elizabeth Rivett, celebrated as the prettiest woman in England. They called in at Madras, that other most elegant and rebuilt of forts whose fate had fashioned his early adulthood, and then set sail for England with a large menagerie of exotic animals and a dazzling display of jewels, cash and swords, some of them presents from Indian princes to the king of England, to arrive on a cold July day in 1767.

  CHAPTER 23

  The Plutocrat

  Clive on his arrival in England was still only 42 years old – on the face of it with a long career ahead of him. He was fêted now as the man who had cleared up the mess in Bengal and established the East India Company on a new financial footing. His allies among the directors, notably the chairman, Rous, had crushingly defeated Sulivan at the last election.

  Within two days of his arrival he was received by the king and queen, to whom he handed a large array of exotic presents, including two diamond drops for the queen from Muhammad Ali, which entranced her. Even the catty Horace Walpole, who loathed Clive, for once shared in the general admiration for his achievement in Bengal: ‘Lord Clive has just sent us the whole kingdom of Bengal, which the Great Mogul has yielded to this Little Mogul without a blow … and when all expenses are paid, there will be remitted to England yearly a million and a half – we may buy another war in Germany, and subsidise two or three electors.’

  Of the presents to the Crown Walpole hissed, ‘Lord Clive is arrived, has brought a million for himself, two diamond drops worth twelve thousand pounds for the Queen, a scimitar, dagger and other matters covered with brilliants for the King, worth twenty thousand more. These baubles are presents from the deposed and imprisoned Mogul, whose poverty can still afford to give such bribes.’ In fact the Mogul had for the first time been granted his own small territory by Clive.

  The returning statesman remained a subject of widespread public admiration. The directors were still his allies – although somewhat miffed at having to raise their dividend because of the expectations caused by his achievements in Bengal; he later suspected them of belittling him, but they were concerned that the value of East India Company stock should not reach unrealistic levels.

  His success had prompted the government, n
ow once again led by his old ally, William Pitt, elevated as Earl of Chatham, to set up a committee of inquiry with a view to the administration taking over the revenue and the running of Bengal – Clive’s old idea, and one which inspired deep mistrust of him among the directors. There were rumours of an agreement between Chatham and Clive that this should happen in exchange for government support of an extension of his jagir for another ten years. In the event, Chatham in 1767 suddenly fell victim to a manic-depressive illness not unlike Clive’s, and the Duke of Grafton became prime minister. The agreement, if there was one, was shelved and forgotten.

  * * *

  Clive’s journey ended with his being reunited with Margaret after nearly three years’ separation. She had lived at Westcomb, near Blackheath, so as to receive news of her husband from London more quickly. There her little coterie continued to surround her. Jenny Latham, her lively young cousin, had recently lost her husband. Ned Maskelyne had become Astronomer Royal and was based at nearby Greenwich. She busied herself with music and learning Italian.

  Clive had written infrequently but tenderly to Margaret. He told his son, Ned, ‘You have laid the foundation of that knowledge which alone can make you the gentleman, and distinguish you from the herd of your fellow creatures … Attend diligently to your studies and to the advice of your Tutor but above all follow the instructions of your mother, let her excellent example be your guide and you will render yourself truly worthy of that great fortune which Providence seems to have designed for you.’

  She had continued to write adoringly. ‘Language is ever too weak to express the feelings of a tender heart,’ she gushed. She had given birth to a beautiful baby girl, Elizabeth, but again tragedy had followed. The infant contracted smallpox and died, the fourth child to do so. Margaret had the consolation of Ned, just going to Eton, and the three surviving girls.

  Soon after Clive’s return, he fell ill. Margaret was exposed again to the worst side of his character, which tended to come to the fore when he was in England. His absolute authority in India had gone to his head once more. In his home country, where it was by no means so easy to get others to do his bidding, he tended to behave with command and brusqueness. This was all very well for servants and inferiors, but was deeply trying to his family and equals. The very trappings of his wealth contributed to the delusion that he was more powerful in England than he really was.