Clive

by Robert Harvey

  In September 1770 Clive suffered another ferocious attack of depression, falling over on several occasions. Sometimes he felt ecstatically well, sometimes at death’s door. Three months later he travelled to Bath where he learned that his political patron, Grenville, had died. At about this time he engaged the services of an able but sardonic and somewhat disillusioned Scottish lawyer, Alexander Wedderburn.

  Clive continued in his role as great magnate. He estimated his own worth at £555,000 (about £11 million in today’s values). He bought estates in Radnorshire and Monmouth, in the Welsh hills, Shropshire, and as far as Okehampton in Devon, which gave him an additional seat in parliament. He was an enlightened landlord, repairing his tenants’ fences and improving their land. In 1771 he bought the magnificent Oakly estate near Ludlow, which had belonged to the Earl of Powis, and began to convert the house. He also bought the Earl of Chatham’s house in Bath, which he assiduously restored.

  The year was tinged with sadness. Richard Clive, so earnest a promoter of his son’s interests, fell ill. Clive promptly sent him ‘a hogshead of the best port wine which can be bought for money’, but he died in May. His mother also soon passed away.

  The same year Clive became an avid collector of paintings, relying on an American painter, Benjamin West, and the Scottish expert William Patoun to advise him. Clive made some poor choices, but bought a magnificent Veronese ‘Visitation’, a ‘Cephalus and Procris’ by Claude, and a Poussin, ‘The Family of Moses’, hanging most of them in Berkeley Square. Later, he bought two Vernets. Clive’s taste was not spectacular and he was reliant upon expert advice; but he must have had something of an eye for a good picture.

  He also paid a visit to Spa in France in 1771, and felt much recovered. Apart from the bouts of illness, life was pleasant although not active enough for this most mercurial of men. He faced decades of tranquil prosperity ahead unless his energies were once more required by his fellow countrymen.

  * * *

  Britain in 1771 was on the threshold of a new, altogether more serious age. The effervescence of the eighteenth century and its light, airy, exuberant art, architecture, literature and criticism were about to be replaced by the ponderousness of responsibility. The string of colonial victories was now coming to an end, as the threat of rebellion loomed in America. The huge Indian empire acquired by Clive’s buccaneering adventurism in the finest tradition of the English gentleman amateur now brought searing responsibility. Above all, the new supremacy of the middle classes, based on prosperity, a flourishing entrepreneurial spirit and technical and business innovation, was about to give way to the new mass period of disfiguring urbanisation and industrialisation.

  Major change was perceptibly creeping across the land. It was the age of speed, travel, and the end of the first generation of bright young things since the Restoration a hundred years before. Clive would have observed the revolution from his luxurious carriage as he travelled rapidly between his estates, on the roads and along the rivers, in the fields, on the approaches to the expanding metropolitan centres and in their new main streets. The next 50 years wrought more change to the British landscape than the previous 500.

  As Clive’s liveried carriage hurtled along, it would have overtaken others belonging to wealthy noblemen, the ultimate status symbol, as well as public hackneys and stage-coaches with their relatively well-off passengers huddled inside and the poorer ones freezing on top. But Clive’s own fast-moving vehicle would have been passed not just by hard-riding, mud-spattered couriers but by dandified figures in light post-chaises taking advantage of the new network of ‘turnpike’ roads.

  Speed astonishing by the standards of previous generations was now possible. As late as 1740 it still took around six days to travel from Chester to London. By 1780 it took just two days. The time from London to Gloucester was slashed from two days to one. A journey from Bath to Oxford would take only 10 hours, at a miraculous speed of seven miles an hour.

  The novelist Richard Gaves had one of his characters comment in 1779 that ‘the most remarkable phenomenon which he had taken notice of in these late years, in his retirement, was the surprising improvement in the art of locomotion, or conveyance from one place to another. “Who would have believed thirty years ago,” he says, “that a young man would come thirty miles in a carriage to dinner, and perhaps return at night? Or indeed, who would have said, that coaches would go daily between London and Bath, in about twelve hours, which, twenty years ago, was reckoned three good days journey?”

  Others tut-tutted about the new craze for speed. The novelist Charles Jenner had one of his characters denounce ‘flying, a practice with which he always found great fault. He has often observed to Norris, that it was a great pity there was not some officer whose business it should be to stop every man travelling post, and inquire whether his business was such as could justify killing a horse or two, risking the necks of half a dozen post-boys, throwing three or four servants into fevers, from excessive exercise in keeping up with their master’s chaise, and forty other like accidents, which happened more or less every day, from the fashionable mode of travelling [for] the mere satisfaction of saying at York, I was in London this morning.’

  For Clive, the speed must have been more reminiscent of his furious rides between Trichinopoly and the coast than his stately progresses by barge up the Hugli. Accidents and congestion had become major problems, as was the new corruption of morals as landowners neglected their estates for the bright lights of the city and young ladies descended on the towns, making new acquaintances among fellow-passengers on stage-coaches.

  As Clive’s own coach clattered inexhaustibly from Shropshire to Bath to his estates in the West Country and then to London and Kent, he could reflect on the new roads that made the speeds possible. In stark contrast to the muddy tracks of the past, the roads were paved, properly maintained and run to make money. In Clive’s youth, during the 1730s, there had been only 25 turnpike acts; between 1750 and 1770 there were 340.

  By 1770 turnpike roads, which had barely linked Birmingham, Chester and Manchester with London 20 years before, criss-crossed the whole country in an intricate gridlock from Truro to Aberystwyth, Holyhead, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Hull, Norwich and Dover. By 1765 there were an astonishing 20,000 private coaches on the road, excluding stage-coaches and hackneys for public transport. The proliferation of private transport broke down rural isolation and local commercial monopolies, bringing local prices tumbling.

  As Clive gazed out on the busy highway, he would also observe the other revolutionary communications enterprise under way – the canals snaking across Britain. This had begun with the waterways constructed to bring cheap coal to Liverpool and Manchester in the late 1750s. By the 1780s a hugely improved canal system permitted the economic transport of bulk goods the length and breadth of England, transforming local economies and making possible the development of cities well away from the coast or from ready sources of raw materials. It was this colossal public investment, harnessing private capital, that permitted the industrial revolution to get seriously under way.

  * * *

  As Clive peered out over the fields of England’s green and pleasant land, he could not but observe that a revolution was under way there too: enclosures, by which individual farmers took over common land, were spreading rapidly. The land not owned by the big estates was being privatised. Nearly 4,000 enclosure acts were passed between 1750 and 1810, affecting roughly a fifth of all land in England and Wales.

  The old village communes were replaced by a class of prosperous middling farmers, while the poorer rustics became seasonal labour dependent on the farmers’ whim. There was some hardship caused, but the employment offered by the new agricultural improvements was also considerable. ‘Engrossing’ permitted the amalgamation of small tenant farms into bigger units, driving many peasant smallholders off the land. Farming banks sprang up around the country, financing the new prosperous farms to stockpile their produce and drive up pri
ces.

  The novelist Frances Brooke summed up the impact of the changes in her History of Lady Julia Mandeville: ‘It is with infinite pain I see Lord T— pursuing a plan, which has drawn on him the curse of thousands, and made his estate a scene of desolation; his farms are in the hands of a few men, to whom the sons of the old tenants are either forced to be servants, or to leave the country to get their bread elsewhere. The village, large and once populous, is reduced to about eight families; a dreary silence reigns on their deserted fields; the farm houses, once the seats of cheerful smiling industry, now useless, are falling in ruins around him; his tenants are merchants and engrossers, proud, lazy, luxurious, insolent and spurning the hand which feeds them.’

  There was a breakdown in the old privileged relationship between landowner and farm labourer: many of these became the fodder for the new industries. It is wrong, though, to see enclosures as a cause of the industrial revolution, except in that they released some capital. Industry did not spring up to absorb surplus labour: rather, the new unemployed were lucky that industry expanded at about that time to provide them with work. Even farm workers with settled employment were attracted by the supposed comforts and wages of the new industries.

  Arthur Young, on his travels, heartily welcomed the new trends, complaining of the ‘sleeping, dronish state of vegetation in which so many landlords are ever content to drawl on, and not raise rents because their grandmothers did not’. He urged that Salisbury Plain be enclosed: ‘What an amazing improvement would it be, to cut this vast plain into farms, by inclosures of quick hedges, regularly planted with trees as best suit the soil.’ Today’s countryside, with its hedges, large fields, copses of trees and occasional villages is largely descended from this era: the isolated smallholder with his field or two and the heavily populated village cultivating common land were becoming a thing of the past.

  Even so, the image of a countryside near to social breaking point under the impact of commercial change and the exactions of the rich is wide of the mark. The naturalist Gilbert White wrote: ‘As to the produce of a garden, every middle-aged person of observation may perceive, within his own memory, both in town and country, how vastly the consumption of vegetables is increased. Green-stalls in cities now support multitudes in a comfortable state, whose gardeners get fortunes. Every decent labourer also has his garden, which is half his support, as well as his delight; and common farmers provide plenty of beans, peas, and greens for their kids to eat with their bacon; and those few that do not are despised for their sordid parsimony and looked upon as regardless of the welfare of their dependents. Potatoes have prevailed in this little district, by means of premiums, within these twenty years only; and are much esteemed here now by the poor, who would scarce have ventured to taste them in the last reign.’

  * * *

  As Clive’s carriage passed through Birmingham or reached the outskirts of London, he would have appreciated the enormous, self-confident expansion of urban Britain. London, from around 500,000 inhabitants in 1700, had nearly doubled by 1800. Even more impressive in relative terms was the fourfold growth of Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds between 1700 and 1770. At the beginning of the century only seven towns – Newcastle, Bristol, Yarmouth, York, Exeter, Norwich and Colchester – had more than 10,000 people; by 1800 the number was more than 50. The urban population jumped from around a fifth in 1700 to around a third in 1800, or about 2 million of England’s 6 million people.

  The second half of the eighteenth century also at last saw a concerted drive for urban improvement: the dingy, higgledy-piggledy, crack-paved, open-sewered streets of Clive’s youth were no more. In 1754 Westminster was paved and lighted. Drain-pipes replaced spouts. Jutting house signs were replaced by numbers. Piped water was introduced, as celebrated by George Keate in 1779: ‘The good order preserved in our streets by day – the matchless utility and beauty of their illumination by night – and what is perhaps the most essential of all, the astonishing supply of water which is poured into every private house, however small, even to profusion! – the superflux of which clears all the drains and sewers, and assists greatly in preserving good air, health, and comfort.’

  Slums and appalling conditions continued to thrive in the approaches to London and other major cities. But the cramped industrial kennels of the Victorian era had not yet sprung up. For the most part Clive’s England was a joyous combination of the best of the old with the vigour, dynamism and change of the new before the latter’s ill-effects were to sink in. Clive was himself to be partly responsible for one other major contribution to the industrial revolution: the capital from empire that was to produce the spark that fired Britain’s economic engine.

  To Clive, then in his mid-forties, the 1770s offered a combination of excitement, vigour, elegance and intellectual challenge. It was good to be alive. He was immensely rich, powerful and widely respected. Four years later, he was dead, denigrated, despised and probably the most detested man in England.

  CHAPTER 24

  Typhoon

  The first sign that Clive was about to face the final drama of his lifetime came in 1771. His old enemy, Laurence Sulivan, broken and destitute, had left the board of directors in 1770. But Lord North, the new prime minister, who had taken a shine to Sulivan (Clive was still in opposition), persuaded the proprietors to re-elect him. Clive saw Sulivan as no threat at all.

  At about the same time, however, there arrived the news of the awesome famine of 1769–70 that wiped out one-sixth of Bengal’s population. R. J. Minney writes, ‘People gnawed at the barks of trees for nourishment. Mothers fed on their dead infants. Children ate their dying parents … Hundreds of villages were left without a single survivor.’ An eyewitness wrote: ‘The Hugli every day rolled down thousands of corpses close to the porticos and gardens of the English conquerors, and the very streets of Calcutta were blocked up by the dying and dead.’

  The country’s wealth seemed endangered for ever. One poetic witness, Lord Teignmouth, wrote in words that still resonate in India today:

  Still fresh in Memory’s eye, the scene I view,

  The shrivell’d limbs, sunk eyes and lifeless hue;

  Still hear the mother’s shrieks and infant’s moans,

  Cries of despair and agonising groans.

  In wild confusion, dead and dying lie:

  Hark to the jackal’s yell, and vulture’s cry.

  The Company had just appointed a new governor in place of the three supervisors lost at sea – Warren Hastings, who had served his apprenticeship with Clive, but had since become Vansittart’s intimate. Both Clive and Sulivan had approved the nomination. Hastings, Clive claimed, had ‘the opportunity to become one of the most distinguished characters of this country’.

  He wrote patronisingly, though with genuine insight, to Hastings that he must face difficulties ‘with cheerfulness and confidence, never entertaining a thought of miscarrying till the misfortune actually happens; and even then you are not to despair, but be constantly contriving and carrying into execution schemes for retrieving affairs, always flattering yourself with an opinion that time and perseverance will get the better of everything’.

  Clive still seemed loftily unconcerned that Sulivan, with his fierce, workaholic personality, was once again in control of the board of directors and that Hastings was his nominee. Clive’s deadliest, most unforgiving enemy was in control of the Company just as total disaster struck in India. Clive had no idea of the typhoon that was about to be unleashed against him.

  Hastings’s first action had been to unravel the system of government set up by Clive – the ‘dual system’. He assumed direct responsibility for raising revenue and displaced the Nawab’s chief minister, Muhammad Reza Khan, as effective ruler of Bengal. He also ended the tribute to the Mogul, in order to save money.

  Clive considered this to be a double mistake. He pointed out that Hastings would be unable to police all of Bengal with the small British force at his disposal and, as the British were now legally re
sponsible for the administration of the country, which was no longer formally in Bengali hands, the British government could argue it would have to assume responsibility for the country (this was in direct contradiction to Clive’s old view that the government should take over Bengal from the directors).

  * * *

  But Clive’s advice was ignored. For the Company itself, spurred on by Sulivan, was about to make him the scapegoat for every ill that had occurred in Bengal since his departure. To achieve this, Sulivan probably – although there is no decisive evidence – connived with the embittered colonists Clive had waged war upon during his last trip to India. They joined forces to destroy the man who had curbed their own brutal blood-sucking operations in India.

  John Johnstone’s influential brother, George, published an anonymous booklet attacking Clive; he and Ralph Lycet, whom the former governor had forced off the council in Calcutta, worked together to spread stories about Clive. At the same time Johnstone’s former partner William Bolts, responsible for many of the atrocities perpetrated against the Bengalis, began to spread malicious gossip. He argued in a ferocious and untrue article called ‘Considerations on India Affairs’ that Clive had set up the salt monopoly purely to enrich himself (he had unwisely invested a small amount in it).

  Clive was also accused of buying stock on ‘insider’ information – he had made a profit of a meagre £1,000 on stock bought in Madras before arriving in Bengal. He was charged with manipulating the coinage to make a fortune for himself, which was entirely untrue, and even of murdering Najm-ud-Daula, the unhappy puppet boy king, for which Clive had not the slightest motive.

  Alexander Dow, one of the officers involved in the mutiny against Clive, followed these accusations up with a vicious attack on Clive in his preface to the third volume of the History of Hindostan. Another officer, John Petrie, also involved in the rebellion, furnished evidence to the directors about Clive’s alleged corruption. The press now carried ferocious attacks on him – as an opium addict, an extortionist and a whorer.