It would be interesting for those who grumble about the excesses of the modern tabloid press to consider the insults heaped upon Clive in those pre-libel days. According to various scurrilous tracts put about anonymously but almost certainly financed by his enemies from Indian days, Clive, when not indulging with Covent Garden prostitutes, was flitting between the beds of actress Peg Woffington, the mistress of actor David Garrick, Kitty Clive, the ex-wife of his cousin, and George-Anne Bellamy, the mistress of his friend, the lawyer George Wedderburn. On one visit to Paris, according to the same sources, he had affairs with the Marquise de Courtanvaux, Mlle Clairon (mistress of his old adversary in India, the Marquis de Bussy), and indulged in homosexual orgies dressed as ‘the Prophet Mohamet’ with others disguised as the Holy Roman Emperor and Pope Honorius I. He was also initiated into the ‘Sacred Fraternity of Glorious Pederasts’, with the honorific title of King of Sodom, joined in a homosexual ronde and indulged himself with the Comte de Mirabeau, later to be celebrated in the French Revolution.
Later attacks were to include fictitious ‘journals’ allegedly written by Clive’s doctors. One, by the supposed surgeon in Fort St David, Dr John Rae, suggested that Clive had acquired a demonic libido after being circumcised as a young man in India. He and his colleagues were also ‘raped’ by a gang of wild Indian women. There is no record of a Dr Rae having lived in India at the time.
According to ‘Dr Ingham’s journal’, ‘If opportunity offers, his Lordship will indulge his desire for laced mutton; if not he will content himself with her ladyship or retire to his toilet-room and masturbate. ’Tis no exaggeration to say His Lordship hath one of the most abused membrums in Europe, for that he is affected with priapism (satyriasis, persistent erections and excessive desires) and must spend his semen or go out of his wits.’ Clive’s friend and doctor in later life was indeed called Ingham, but he had died several years before many of the entries in his ‘journal’. This gives some flavour of the squalor of the attacks upon Clive – which may have been remotely based on his reputation as a womaniser in his youth. He certainly appears to have had a healthy sexual appetite – but there is no firm evidence that it extended to anyone other than Margaret after his marriage.
He was denounced as ‘the great wicked lord that sold his soul to the devil’, ‘the king of vice and corruption’, a ‘monster mogul’ and ‘vice nabob’. Walpole claims facetiously to have asked Clive, ‘Is it true that in India money grows on trees? I have just got wind of a so-called pagoda tree, which yields golden fruit, and that to shake the pagoda tree is to harvest a rapid fortune. Pray tell me more of this fabulous growth.’ To which Clive is supposed to have retorted, ‘My dear sir, you wonder why Britons have dirty ears. You’ve been talking in them for twenty years!’
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However, even the leaders of respectable opinion joined in the condemnation of the state of Indian affairs. Chatham spoke of ‘that rapacity, plunder, and extortion which is choking to the feelings of humanity and disgraceful to the national character … India teems with iniquities so rank as to smell to earth and heaven.’ Burke was carried away: ‘The Tartar invasion was mischievous, but it is our protection that destroys India … There is nothing before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting. Every rupee of a profit made by an Englishman is lost forever to India … the golden cup of abominations – the chalice of fornications, of rapine, usury and oppression – which was held out by the gorgeous eastern harlot, was drained to the very dregs.’ These speeches reflected a genuine groundswell of opinion; significantly, however, both men were to back Clive in his later trials.
It was bad enough for Clive to be subjected to an assault from his old Indian enemies. But opinion among the educated classes, which had once viewed India as a jewel in the Crown, had been revolted by the famine and astonished by the fall in East India Company stock, as well as the sudden reversal in British fortunes there. A myth grew up that the famine, which in fact was caused by drought, had been the result of exploitation by the Company.
Certainly its servants had been responsible for terrible abuses which had damaged agricultural production, but Clive had sought energetically to counter these, and they were not the cause of the famine. This was too subtle for public consumption. The ever snide and sarcastic Walpole continued to make mischief. ‘The groans of India have mounted to heaven, where the heaven-born general Lord Clive will certainly be disavowed. What think you of the famine in Bengal, in which three millions perished, being caused by a monopoly of the provisions, by the servants of the East India Company?’
The ‘chattering classes’ of the time were, in addition, affected by a wave of social envy. After Clive returned with his ostentatious wealth, a whole succession of other men with new fortunes from India had followed. Many Clive himself had persecuted on his last tour of duty. They were derided and reviled as ‘nabobs’, the familiar corruption of Nawab.
Samuel Foote’s satire, The Nabob, opened in 1773. Its villain was Sir Matthew Mite, who, ‘from the Indies, came thundering amongst us; and, profusely scattering the spoils of ruined provinces, corrupted virtue and alienated the affections of all the old friends to the family’. Mite has social ambitions and has to be taught by a waiter ‘the oaths and phrases that are most in use at the club’. He seeks to enter the House of Commons, bribing his opponent with a jagir. He is frustrated at last by moralisers who point out that, ‘corrupt as you may conceive this country to be, there are superior spirits living, who would disdain an alliance with grandeur obtained at the expense of honour or virtue’… ‘The possessions arising from plunder very rarely are permanent; we every day see what has been treacherously and rapaciously gained, as profusely and full as rapidly squandered.’
Richard Batwell, a venomous opponent of Clive, was as rich as the latter when he retired. Francis Sykes, an old lieutenant of Clive’s, was worth around £400,000. Thomas Rumbold and Paul Benfield made colossal fortunes in Madras. Dick Smith, the military commander, enriched himself hugely. Smith and Sykes both bought big houses near Basildon. Both were disdained in polite society for their humble births, although Smith was in fact from a farming background, not the son of a servant, as was put about.
These men represented the first wealth independent of both the state itself and the urban merchant class of the big cities. They were vastly richer than most of the gentry class. By 1774 they controlled 26 seats in parliament and ten years later no fewer than 45. Small wonder a tide of envious educated gentry and middle-class opinion soon flayed the nabobs for their excesses and vulgarity. That Clive himself had fought to control these excesses went unnoticed; that he had left India long before the Bengali famine began was equally disregarded. He was by far the most famous prince of the Indian-enriched plutocracy, and the three furies of jealousy, snobbery and humbug battered against his door.
Cruelty, extortion from the native Indian aristocracy, oppression of the masses, greed, bad taste – all were blamed on Clive, although he less than any had been guilty of them. The greatest irony was that his worst critics were the representatives of the nabob class that he had persecuted during his last tour of duty.
The great whirlwind of moral indignation and vituperation, whipped up by score-settling enemies, now set upon Clive with unparalleled force. Macaulay for once was not exaggerating:
He was, in fact, regarded as the personification of all the vices and weaknesses which the public, with or without reason, ascribed to the English adventurers in Asia. We have ourselves heard of men, who knew nothing of his history, but who still retained the prejudices conceived in their youth, talk of him as an incarnate fiend. Johnson always held this language. Brown, whom Clive employed to lay out his pleasure grounds, was amazed to see in the house of his noble employer a chest which had once been filled with gold from the treasury of Moorshedabad, and could not understand how the conscience of the c
riminal could suffer him to sleep with such an object so near to his bedchamber. The peasantry of Surrey looked with mysterious horror on the stately house which was rising at Claremont, and whispered that the great wicked lord had ordered the walls to be made so thick in order to keep out the devil, who would one day carry him away bodily.
Clive gave every indication of being genuinely bemused by the ferocity of the attacks. Apart from his bouts of depression and illness, he had seemed settled in the role of powerful country magnate and political broker. His following of eight MPs was one of the largest for an individual in the House. He could still entertain ambitions for government office or another generalship. He was rich, powerful, feared, respected and famous.
Now he was being battered by waves of criticism from his many enemies – but nothing, he believed, against which he could not defend himself. His appearance at this time was arousing comment: he was prematurely aged, his faced lined and careworn, his hair fast receding under his wigs, his teeth broken and yellowing. Yet these were the consequences of a life expended at a furious pace under extreme conditions as much as of the stress brought on by his critics. He was at his best under attack.
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In May 1772 he at last had his opportunity to defend himself. The Company sought to forestall the wave of public clamour for the excesses in India to be brought under control by insisting on the ‘better regulation’ of the colonies. Sulivan initiated the debate in the House of Commons, while the Earl of Chatham, a pale shadow of his former self, watched.
After a few speeches, Clive was called. Considered no orator in the House before, he held it spellbound with a detailed and fluent defence of his last tour in India. He described how he had never indulged himself in corruption, or flinched from opposition to him within the Company.
Three paths were before me. One was strewed with abundance of fair advantages. I might have put myself at the head of the government as I found it. I might have encouraged the resolution which the gentlemen had taken, not to execute the new covenants which prohibited the receipt of presents; and although I had executed the covenants myself, I might have contrived to return to England with an immense fortune infamously added to the one before honourably obtained. Such an increase of wealth might not have added to my peace of mind, because all men of honour and sentiment would have justly condemned me.
Finding my powers thus disputed, I might in despair have given up the commonwealth and left Bengal without making an effort to save it. Such conduct would have been deemed the effect of folly and cowardice. The third path was intricate. Dangers and difficulties were on every side. But I resolved to pursue it. In short, I was determined to do my duty to the public although I should incur the odium of the whole settlement. The welfare of the Company required a vigorous exertion, and I took the resolution of cleansing the Augean stable.
It was that conduct which has occasioned the public papers to teem with scurrility and abuse against me, ever since my return to England. It was that conduct which occasioned these charges. But it was that conduct which enables me now, when the day of judgment is come, to look my judges in the face. It was that conduct which enables me now to lay my hand upon my heart and most solemnly to declare to this House, to the gallery and to the whole world at large, that I never, in a single instance, lost sight of what I thought the honour and true interest of my country and the Company; that I was never guilty of any acts of violence or oppression, unless the bringing offenders to justice could be deemed so; that, as to extortion, such an idea never entered into my mind; that I did not suffer those under me to commit any acts of violence, oppression or extortion; that my influence was never employed for the advantage of any man, contrary to the strictest principles of honour and justice; and that, so far from reaping any benefit myself from the expedition, I returned to England many thousands of pounds out of pocket – a fact of which this House will presently be convinced.
He concluded, in a blaze of cold indignation:
The Company had acquired an empire more extensive than any kingdom in Europe, France and Russia excepted. They had acquired a revenue of four millions sterling and a trade in proportion. It was natural to suppose that such an object would have merited the most serious attention of the administration; that in concert with the Court of Directors they would have considered the nature of the Company’s charter and have adopted a plan adequate to such possessions. Did they take it into consideration? No, they did not. They treated it rather as a South Sea Bubble than as anything solid and substantial. They thought of nothing but the present time, regardless of the future. They said, let us get what we can today, let tomorrow take care of itself. They thought of nothing but the immediate division of loaves and fishes.
Nay, so anxious were they to lay their hands upon some immediate advantage that they actually went so far as to influence a parcel, of temporary proprietors to bully the directors into the terms. It was their duty, Sir, to have called upon the directors for a plan; and if a plan, in consequence, had not been laid before them, it would then have become their duty, with the aid and assistance of Parliament, to have formed one themselves. If the administration had done their duty we should not now have heard a speech from the Throne intimating the necessity of Parliamentary interposition to save our possessions in India from impending ruin.
The speech went down superbly. Chatham dubbed it ‘one of the most finished pieces of eloquence’ he had ever heard in the House of Commons. One newspaper wrote, ‘Had his voice not suffered from the loss of a tooth, he would be one of the foremost speakers in the house. In fluency he has scarcely an equal; in a speech of three hours hesitating less than any person could imagine. His delivery is bold, spirited.’
Yet the wider press onslaught against Clive continued unabated. After the second reading of the India Bill, the government proposed that a parliamentary committee of 31 be set up to inquire into the affairs of India. The chairman was Major-General ‘Gentleman Johnnie’ Burgoyne, a loud-mouthed, self-confident blusterer who had eloped with the daughter of an earl, amassed huge debts in his twenties, and was later to prove a disastrous general in the wars of American independence. Clive’s bitter enemies, George Johnstone, a coarse-mouthed killer and frequent dueller, older brother of John, as well as another brother and a nominee of Sulivan’s, were members. Clive, although himself a member, had the support of only Strachey. The rest were neutral.
The committee was nothing less than an inquisition into Clive’s career. His past governance of India had effectively been put on trial; if some of the allegations against him were proven, it might yet be a prelude to his impeachment. Lacking the backing of a powerful parliamentary faction now that Grenville had died and Chatham was retired, Clive was effectively on his own. It seemed extraordinary that this cantankerous and bilious personality should be capable of making a reasoned defence against the huge forces arrayed against him. But once again, cornered by huge odds, he rose to the occasion.
What followed was one of the most dramatic, if shortlived personal confrontations in the history of the House of Commons, as one of its most eminent members was effectively put on trial. The argument raged backwards and forwards, first against Clive, then in his favour, then against. At no stage were his prospects of victory certain; indeed for much of the time his indictment seemed certain. The trial of Charles I in nearby Westminster Hall had been more celebrated; the trial of Warren Hastings was to be much longer and better remembered. But Clive’s was as dramatic as either.
His latest scene of battle was just off the elegant eighteenth-century chamber of the House of Commons, smaller, more relaxed and even rowdier than its gloomy Victorian counterpart. It was, however, crushed and malodorous when fully attended, well-lit by Georgian windows by day, but ill-lit by lamps at night. Peppered by faction and the independence of its members, poorly controlled by government, it was rowdy, easily persuaded by oratory, capable more than at any other stage in its history of being swayed by a fine speech or a rush to ju
dgement.
Clive’s parliamentary enemies were led by a legion of embittered Indian foes: Sulivan, Vansittart and his brother Arthur, two of the Johnstone brothers and Sir Robert Fletcher. There were many other old Indian hands present too: Eyre Coote, Hector Munro, Thomas Rumbold, George Pigot, Francis Sykes and Luke Scrafton.
Johnstone insisted that the scope of the investigation should be pushed back as far as 1757, and Clive himself was one of the earliest witnesses in what was to be a lengthy and fierce cross-examination which he likened to being treated as a sheep-stealer. The conspiracy against Siraj-ud-Daula, the deceit of Omichand, the deal with Mir Jafar – all were raked up in minute detail. Clive defended himself articulately and coolly, although his memory sometimes failed him.
Clive was relentlessly cross-examined. His starting point was that ‘Indostan was always an absolute despotic government. The inhabitants, especially in Bengal, in inferior stations are servile, mean, submissive and humble. In superior stations they are luxurious, effeminate, tyrannical, treacherous, venal, cruel.’ Burgoyne probed mercilessly: why had Omichand been deceived? ‘Because one and all considered him in the light of a public enemy, a traitor to the cause.’
Clive admitted he had thought up the plan for the treaty ‘when Mr Watts … informed me that Omichand had insisted upon 5% of all the Nabob’s treasure and threatened, if we did not comply with that demand, he would immediately acquaint Siraj-ud-Daula with what was going on and Mr Watts should then be put to death … I thought art and policy warrantable in defeating the purposes of such a villain. I therefore formed the plan of a fictitious treaty, to which the Council consented. I never made any secret of it. I thought it warrantable in such a case, and still think so, and would do it again a hundred times.’
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