In particular, he treated the directors, who were by no means ill-disposed towards him, with thinly veiled contempt. His great friend, Scrafton, now himself a director, warned him that he should appreciate the efforts being made for him. He responded with regal disdain. ‘Know, Scrafton, I have a judgement of my own, which has seldom failed me in cases of much greater consequence than what you recommend. As to the support which you say was given to my government by the Directors, they could not have done otherwise.’
When it was suggested he become a director himself, he responded loftily, ‘The being a Director may be an object to the Directors, but not to Lord Clive.’ Scrafton had underestimated the extent to which Clive despised the Company and sought to bring India under direct government control. His hauteur had reached manic and self-damaging proportions. The decision to approve the extension of the jagir was railroaded through with the reluctant acquiescence of the directors, winning Clive no friends and much unpopularity. Most considered he had enough wealth without the jagir, and gave it their ‘unanimous though languid’ approval.
Clive treated the directors as though they were his underlings, and complained alternately about them as ‘mean’ and ‘sneaky’ or ‘timid and irresolute’. In fact they now sought eagerly to do his bidding on most Indian matters, including the appointment of officers, but Clive’s illness and psychological state prevented him meeting them halfway.
He had by now become an emperor without clothes in a country with hundreds of years of constitutional development, an autocrat in a land where he had money but little power. All his old illnesses, physical and psychological, had returned to plague him with a vengeance; nor did England’s cold and wet climate suit his constitution.
He travelled from house to house, estate to estate, as though visiting his far-flung dominions in India. He spent long periods in Bath, apparently the only place that agreed with him. From there he travelled to Birmingham where he fell ill. He was by turns gloomy, restless, hypochondriacal, constantly proclaiming himself at death’s door. When he recovered, the long-suffering Margaret declared ‘to all our family and friends. If all the bells are set a-ringing, I’ll pay the ringers what they please.’ There he sat up ‘very hearty … forming schemes of future good behaviour as to eating and drinking and keeping quiet and in great spirits’.
He had an acrimonious squabble with Vansittart, whom he had taken care to cultivate, in spite of having had to pick up the pieces of his disastrous rule in Bengal. Vansittart indicated he wanted to return as governor there; Clive said he would try to help him return as governor of Madras – where he would cause less trouble. Vansittart then claimed Clive had promised to back him for Bengal.
Clive exploded, calling Vansittart ‘the greatest hypocrite, the greatest Jesuit and the meanest, dirtiest rascal that ever existed’. It also became known that Clive had amassed a dossier of evidence of Vansittart’s acceptance of presents – which, however, he refused to release out of consideration for his old protégé. Vansittart, who had already been Sulivan’s friend, now became Clive’s deadly enemy.
* * *
Yet the conqueror of the Indies’ reputation – if not his health – was still riding high when he was advised by his doctors to go on an extended tour of France. He was accompanied by his ‘court’ – Margaret, her brother Mun, Strachey, his secretary, Ingham, his doctor, Jenny Latham and a host of servants. It proved to be a roaring success, for both his health and his psychological state.
The couple visited a succession of churches and chateaux, spent a fortnight in Paris sightseeing and attending operas and plays, and travelled to Fontainebleau, Dijon and Nimes, before settling at a delightful country house at Montpellier. Clive seemed in excellent spirits, playing cards and chess on an Indian set resplendent with elephants and camels.
Margaret, as had happened with Carnac, developed a fixation with Strachey, a man nearly her own age – 33. When he left the French party unsuccessfully to stand for parliament in England, she bombarded him with teasing letters. ‘What, you think to be written to again and again?’ Margaret’s interest in other men was entirely forgivable: Clive was older, had an impossible temperament for much of the time, and was always the public man, affording the two of them little privacy. If he resented her flirtations and relationships, there is no evidence for it – indeed Strachey, like Carnac, enjoyed his own closest favour.
Subsequently Clive’s most scathing detractors – in particular Caraccioli – suggested that, as in Bengal, Clive’s progress through France had been a string of sexual relationships with the locals. Yet however vigorous his sexual appetite in his youth, there is no evidence to suggest that Clive was unfaithful to Margaret; and his relationship with her remained real enough, for she became pregnant again the following year.
After the sojourn in the south of France, the party returned to Paris, visiting Versailles and Brussels and meeting with Clive’s ablest and most capable adversary, de Bussy, before returning to England in September. Clive wrote sadly to Strachey, ‘I suffer in the manner I did on board the Britannia, both from the bile and my former nervous complaint, but not more; which convinces me the roots of both disorders still remain, and I much fear I must be unhappy as long as I live, though I am certain there is nothing mortal in either of them and in all probability I shall drag on a miserable life for fifteen or twenty years longer as I have already done ever since the year 1752.’
Yet he was now plump, could ride for 15–20 miles, and had given up opium. He had had time to reflect on his ambitions in early middle age, and it was soon apparent that he had abandoned his goals in British politics. Rather, he preferred to perform two roles: as a wealthy country magnate and as a kind of godfather of Indian affairs, keeping his eye on events there and seeking to influence them his way.
It seemed a recipe for a gentle decline into comfortable obscurity – well deserved after his astonishing feats in India. Although still only in his early forties, his lifetime of responsibility and illness made him appear much older. The dynamo in India was now becoming a portly, sometimes cheerful, sometimes grumpy, country gent. But the controversy that had dogged his career was not about to leave him yet, and was to return in a backlash of blinding fury.
* * *
At the beginning of 1768, the horizon still appeared tranquil. Clive had succeeded in securing the election of three more MPs – his younger brother William as member for Bishop’s Castle, Carnac as member for Leominster, and Strachey as member for Pontefract. Together with his father Richard, his cousin George, John Walsh, and Edmund Maskelyne, he now had eight MPs to represent him in his still somewhat languid dabblings in politics.
The issue of the day was John Wilkes, the roguish MP and the father of the modern tabloid newspaper. His scurrilous journal, the North Briton, had mercilessly satirised the king’s favourite, the Earl of Bute, with such force that Wilkes was charged with sedition and expelled from parliament in 1764. It was he who made the famous riposte to the Earl of Sandwich; after being told, ‘I am convinced, Mr Wilkes, that you will either die of the pox or on the gallows,’ he replied, ‘That depends, my lord, on whether I embrace your mistress or your principles.’
Wilkes went on to contest and win the following election, and was repeatedly expelled. But Grenville, Clive’s patron, had moved into opposition and supported Wilkes. Clive found himself in the unlikely position of allying with the radical politicians, even attending a dinner held at the Thatched House Tavern in Pall Mall in honour of Wilkes’s martyrdom. Wilkes, who had once attacked Clive, was now grateful to his plutocratic supporter.
But Clive’s prime concern remained India. He regarded the directors as hopelessly incapable of running its affairs, while the government continued to take only a limited interest, preferring to extend the 1767 agreement for five years rather than take over the direction of the Company. With foresight, Clive remarked, ‘Our wide and extended possessions are become too great for the Mother Country or our abilities to manage. America is mak
ing great strides towards independency, so is Ireland. The East Indies also I think cannot remain long to us, if our present constitution be not altered.’
The bickering within the Company continued. In 1769, Clive’s enemies, Sulivan and Vansittart, were elected back on to the board of directors, largely through borrowing and buying stock. The new chairman, Sir George Colebrook, a lightweight although good company, kept the balance between the two main factions – those of Sulivan and Clive, although the latter remained the more powerful. To Clive’s further dismay, Sir Robert Fletcher, the unpleasant, arrogant head of the mutiny against him, had managed to persuade Clive’s old friend Stringer Lawrence that he had been unjustly accused and was reinstated as a colonel and elected to parliament, then sent to Madras.
* * *
The first rumbles of real trouble – but they were only distant ones – came when, following Clive’s departure, the news from India began to turn bad again. The new governor, Verelst, a stolid, likeable man, was far less decisive than Clive. Dick Smith, the senior military commander in Bengal, was soon quarrelling with the council.
Clive’s chief Indian agent, Nubkissen, his closest Indian intimate, who had been created a maharajah and set up a magnificent palace under Clive’s patronage, had been accused of robbery, rape and abusing women in Clive’s name – a move engineered by the latter’s enemies in Calcutta now that the emperor was out of town. Johnstone told the general court of the Company that Nubkissen was known among his fellow Hindus as ‘the Catamite’ – a slur designed to rub off on Clive. However, Nubkissen was soon cleared of all charges, which had clearly been trumped up. A more formidable challenge soon emerged.
In mid-1769, Hyder Ali, a ferocious common soldier who had seized power in Mysore, marched on Madras, laying waste to the countryside. British troops were sent to fight him, but were forced to retreat after a series of clashes. It was the first time in recent history that the English had shown themselves to be vulnerable to Indian attack, and East India Company stock sank by more than 30 points – incidentally ruining both Sulivan and Vansittart, who had borrowed the money they needed to purchase stock to secure election to the board of directors.
Faced by this crisis, a temporary truce was arranged by Colebrook between Clive and Sulivan, who both recommended that a governor-general be appointed to run all British possessions in India. Sulivan insisted upon the wretched Vansittart for the post, and Clive would have none of it. Finally it was decided to send three ‘supervisors’ – Vansittart in Sulivan’s interest, Scrafton in Clive’s, and as a neutral, but in reality a close friend of Clive, his old fighting colleague, Forde.
The frigate Aurora set sail carrying the triumvirate in September. After leaving the Cape in December, it was lost with all hands. The incompetent Vansittart was no more, but nor were Clive’s two great friends, Scrafton and Forde. Some investors blamed Clive for inflating the East India Company stock price – and for his rashness in selling £100,000 of his own stock when it peaked. But Clive could weather these minor irritants.
* * *
Meanwhile he pursued his interests, buying land and estates, improving his houses and suffering occasional bouts of dreadful depression and fatigue. Styche had been almost wholly rebuilt as a comfortable country house. His now frail father, Richard Clive, still dwelt there. Walcot had been elegantly and unostentatiously refurbished.
His other Shropshire estate, only 15 miles away, was more modest, but it was a fine and beautifully positioned house nevertheless. Oakly was set spectacularly in lush parkland overlooking the River Teme beneath the bustling and elegant town of Ludlow, long guardian of the borders against the wild Welsh to the west. Clive had substantially altered it, spending much of the summer there. The river, a fast-flowing, impressive current, cradled the house in a loop. On a steep rise above, Oakly was a picture of eighteenth-century elegance and tranquillity, surrounded by huge, ancient trees set in a park that rolled away towards sloping hills beyond.
Clive’s third mansion was his London house, Number 45 Berkeley Square, on its west side, bought from Lord Ancram for £10,500. It was a fair-sized gentleman’s house with a Palladian façade and a fine staircase. Furnished, according to Clive’s wishes, ‘in the richest and most elegant manner’, with two drawing rooms whose walls were covered in scarlet damask and ceilings in gilded foliage, it also temporarily housed the art collection intended for Claremont. The American painter Benjamin West was preparing a magnificent set of paintings of Clive’s exploits in India.
Claremont, near Esher in Surrey, bought by Clive for £25,000 in 1769 from the widow of his old enemy the Duke of Newcastle, who had died the previous year, had already one of the most distinguished and lovely gardens in England. The estate, originally owned by Sir John Vanbrugh, had been sold to the Duke, for whom Vanbrugh built an enormous and attractive house between 1715 and 1720. Vanbrugh and Charles Bridgman, the foremost garden designer of his time, tried modestly to break away from the French concept of rigid formal gardens and symmetry which were supposed to contrast with unpleasingly untamed nature beyond. The garden boasted a magnificent belvedere, a round pond, and a steep and elaborate decorative turf amphitheatre.
This daring approach was developed further by the famous William Kent in the 1730s. His speciality was to create gardens that, although highly contrived, appeared to all intents and purposes natural, just like the fashionable eighteenth-century landscape paintings of the time, with their decorous copses and ruins tucked picturesquely away. Sir Thomas Robinson wrote in 1734 that Kent’s method was ‘to lay them out and work without level or line … This method of gardening is the more agreeable as, when finished, it has the appearance of beautiful nature, and without being told, one would imagine art had no part in the finishing. The celebrated gardens of Claremont, Chiswick and Stowe are now full of labourers to modernise the expensive works finished in them ever since everyone’s memory.’
The round pond became a lake with an island. A pavilion and a menagerie – the ancestor of the modern safari park – were built, the boundaries of the garden that gave on to nearby green fields were blurred, trees were planted more haphazardly and informally, and a picturesque grotto was created. Horace Walpole in 1763 described a fête in the garden: ‘From [the Belvedere] we passed into the wood, and the ladies formed a circle of chairs before the mouth of a cave, which was overhanging to a vast height with woodbines, lilacs and laburnums, and dignified with tall stately cypresses. On the descent of the hill were placed French horns; the abigails, servants and neighbours wandering below by the river; in short, it was Parnassus, as Watteau would have painted it.’
After Clive bought it six years later, he invited the next giant of landscape gardening, Capability Brown, to do away with the rambling old house, on the grounds that the land around it was damp and low-lying, and replace it with a more compact neoclassical edifice on deeper foundations. Brown also sought to do away with what remained of the formal garden, including the amphitheatre (fortunately he was not successful). Brown was unhappy about tampering with the work of his predecessors, as well as the restricted size of the garden, and did not get on well with Clive. He was instructed against his will to set up a high fence around the estate to keep Clive’s exotic animals in. Clive created Britain’s first safari park there: a herd of antelope, Cape geese, guinea hens, cyrus birds and a pair of nylghau were among the more exotic species. There can be no doubt that Clive intended Claremont to be his main residence for the rest of his life, a fitting ducal seat – which makes his death, if it was suicide, all the more bizarre.
A garden designed by the very greatest designers of the classical age of English landscape gardens – Vanbrugh, Bridgman, Kent and Brown – Claremont was to enjoy an equally distinguished history after it was sold by Margaret in 1775. Forty years later it became the residence of George IV’s daughter, Princess Charlotte, who, however, died in childbirth a year later. Her grief-stricken husband, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, was later to become father to the n
otorious King of the Belgians during the bloody and dark period of that country’s colonisation of Africa.
Leopold frequently entertained his niece, the young Princess Victoria, and as queen she was to recall her happy days there with affection. After his death she in turn lent it to the exiled French king, Louis Philippe, and his wife, before it was passed on to the Duke of Albany, the queen’s youngest son, and his wife, parents of Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, who lived there into the 1920s. It is now a recently restored National Trust property.
Clive had smaller houses as well: apart from his old, renovated family house at Styche there was a town house at Bath bought from his old political patron, the Earl of Chatham, and several minor estate houses.
* * *
Margaret erected her own defences against her husband’s erratic moods, retreating into her own world of music and learning languages, as well as – like her brother – becoming increasingly obsessed with astronomy. She entertained a little salon of intellectuals as well as her old confidants, in particular Jenny Latham, who in 1770 had married Margaret’s favourite among Clive’s retinue, Strachey. Maria Ducarel became Margaret’s other close companion, and Clive found her something of an old bore.
The Clives only occasionally entertained in a grand style, holding the odd ball, and continued to be snubbed by the eighteenth-century aristocracy. However, his Indian cronies remained loyal and frequent visitors. Apart from Strachey, there was Walsh, Carnac and Clive’s old companion, ‘Daddy’ King. Only Dalton seems to have fallen out with Clive, while the dejected Orme complained, wrongly, that Clive neglected his old friends. In Orme’s case, this was understandable.
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