Clive

by Robert Harvey

  Clive was brazen about the decision to forge Watson’s signature. ‘I gave Mr Lushington leave to sign Admiral Watson’s name to the fictitious treaty; and to the best of my remembrance, Admiral Watson gave Mr Lushington leave to sign his name to the fictitious treaty … I should certainly not have declared that Admiral Watson had consented to have his name put to the fictitious treaty if I had not understood so from Mr Lushington. But I would have ordered his name to be put, whether he had consented or not.’

  As to the jagir: ‘What injustice was this to the Company? What injunction was I under to refuse a present from him who had the power to make me one as the reward of honourable service? I know of none. I surely had a particular claim, by having devoted myself to the Company’s military service and neglected all commercial advantages. What … pretence could the Company have to expect that I, after having risked my life so often in their service, should deny myself the only honourable opportunity that ever offered of acquiring a fortune without prejudice to them who, it is evident, would not have had more for my having had less?… I never sought to conceal it, but declared publicly in my letters to the Court of Directors that the Nabob’s generosity had made my fortune easy.’

  Clive was asked, ‘Should a servant be the lord of his master?’ He replied pithily: ‘I call upon the Court of Directors to declare whether they think, without the Battle of Plassey and its consequences, the East India Company would now be in existence.’

  Pressed upon his rewards, he made his most famous, impassioned speech. He described his temptation:

  When I entered the Nabob’s treasury at Murshidabad – with heaps of gold and silver to the right and left, and these crowned with jewels – being under no kind of restraint but that of my own conscience, I might have become too rich for a subject … The Hindu millionaires, as well as other men of property, made me the greatest offers – which are usual upon such occasions – and had I accepted these offers, I might have been in possession of millions which the present Court of Directors could not have dispossessed me of. But … preferring the reputation of the English nation, the interest of the Nabob, and the advantage of the Company to all pecuniary considerations, I refused all offers that were made me …

  Am I not rather deserving of praise for the moderation which marked my proceedings? Consider my position. Consider the situation in which the victory at Plassey had placed me. A great prince was dependent on my pleasure. An opulent city lay at my mercy. Its richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles. I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone, piled on either hand with gold and jewels. [He struck his forehead theatrically.] By God, Mr Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation.

  Burgoyne was relentless, talking of ‘crimes which shock human nature even to conceive … I look upon the deposing of Siraj-ud-Daula and the bringing about of a revolution in favour of Mir Jafar, to be the origin of all the subsequent evils which have operated to the temporary distress, if not total destruction, of the Company.’

  Clive shot back,

  I am accused of not having observed the rules of ethics in my dealings with a notorious scoundrel such as Omichand. It was my duty as a politician to deceive so great a villain. If the whole transaction were to be repeated, I should again enact what the gentlemen are pleased to term forgery or fiction; for so far was I from repenting the part I took in that revolution, that I glory in it as an act in every way conformable to my duty as a servant of that Company whose existence was preserved by the very means I am now to be censured for adopting …

  Certain people would have me punished for the negotiations leading to the victory of Plassey and making it possible … Let future generations judge how it is possible that the victor of Plassey should be treated like a sheep-stealer by his own countrymen. The Baron of Plassey has acquired for the Company an income of four million sterling and a trade in proportion! If the authorities had done their duty, the spectre of ruin would not now be hovering above our Indian possessions.

  Now a scapegoat is sought. And who has been chosen for that? I, who cleared out the Augean stable of corruption – and Bengal was nothing less than that – regardless of the fact that I was drawing the enmity of a whole class of people upon myself, those very men who thought they could plunder a nation of thirty millions with impunity … I pushed away the hands full of gold which were stretched out towards me, damned the flood of corruption which was submerging the country …

  It was nothing but my duty. The committee have criticised my actions with spiteful meanness, and subjected me to a merciless cross-examination. I have acknowledged all the artifices which I have used; and I say frankly that I am not ashamed of any of the means which I have employed, and that I would use them again today under the same circumstances.

  The committee raked over all the supposed misdemeanours of Clive. A huge number of witnesses were called – virtually all the major players in Bengal that were still alive. Very little of the mud could be made to stick. He emerged unscathed from the allegations about the salt monopoly and the supposed murder of Najm-ud-Daula. Only the Omichand affair continued to rumble.

  * * *

  Nevertheless, Clive could be satisfied: he had escaped the inquiry in reasonably good shape, and he had reason to believe that the controversy would now die down. That June he was installed a Knight of the Bath. Lord North, who wanted his support in parliament, installed him as lord lieutenant of Shropshire after his old patron and friend, the Earl of Powis, had died.

  In the summer of 1772 Clive, attended by these marks of official favour, had reason to feel confident. The press campaign against him rumbled on. His enemies fumed. But he had been largely exonerated by parliamentary inquiry. Yet he had failed to take account of three things: first, the increasingly precarious finances of the East India Company – which required a scapegoat. Second, his increasingly isolated and exposed position in parliament: his political patron, Grenville, was dead; his hero, Chatham, incapacitated.

  The king and his supporters looked on the upstart from India with some distaste as an unreliable ally and, worse, a supporter of the hated Wilkes during the rioting and troubles he had provoked. Lord North had no great regard for him. Clive was regarded as a maverick, a loose cannon beholden to no one, too often prone to do his own thing. The opposition parties – the Whig grandees who looked down on him, and the more radical elements who regarded him as an exploitative plutocrat – held him in no high esteem. In spite of his backing for Wilkes, Clive was a man of many enemies and few friends.

  But he suffered from a greater disadvantage still. Clive had emerged from his last tour of India as the principal colonial reformer in the land, a man unafraid to defy not just the implacable opposition of the colonial settlers in India, but his own parent company, in an effort to impose good, stable and permanent government on Bengal. He had long pressed for Indian decisions to be taken out of the hands of the grasping and incompetent East India Company for the British government to administer directly itself – a wish which was soon partially fulfilled.

  In so doing – even though he was right – he had antagonised virtually everyone involved in Indian affairs. He stood for realism and moderation in colonial expansion, good government, honest administration and the favourable treatment of colonial peoples. He seemed the natural person to apply incorruptibility and common sense to the American empire, now plunging into a dangerous crisis. The alternative approach was more simple-minded: to extract whatever material gain was possible from empire, and to rule with a heavy and corrupt hand.

  Yet the king and government were deeply apprehensive about entrusting this most critical of problems to so independent a figure. Clive was known to view American independence as all but inevitable. Worse, he was believed to subscribe to the view of his old political hero, Chatham, who had emerged a morose and implacable opponent of the government’s policies on America – a view in which he was to be fully vindicated.

  The main force behind Lord
North’s American policy – which the prime minister himself only half-believed in – was George III and his crusty old sycophant, Lord Bute. In Clive, Bute and the king discerned a threat, a possibly very influential opponent of policy on America if he were not, indeed, to be appointed British commander there. For many influential figures in government, it was essential to discredit Clive.

  The pleasant and calm summer of 1772 was to prove utterly deceptive for Clive. For India was about to be plunged into a fresh crisis: both the East India Company and the government had need of someone to blame. Worse, the Indian crisis actually provided a distraction from the far more serious and imminent American crisis; and Clive was regarded as far too dangerous and honest a man to be allowed near the latter. To Lord North and the government, Clive was expendable: he could be thrown, like Admiral Byng, to the dogs of opposition to keep the critics at bay. He was now to be politically assassinated, with government connivance, as effectively as though he had been physically shot. The government’s cynicism combined with a furious fit of public moral outrage into a lethal brew. He had few allies and the king’s friends in parliament – the largest block in the governing coalition – distrusted and disliked him.

  It was the cynical decision by the government to turn against Clive that threatened suddenly to strip the ex-emperor of Bengal not just of his wealth but of his good name and even possibly his life. He was the latest major figure to be tossed to the wolves to divert the government’s enemies at a moment of acute crisis. In practice, if George III had had an ounce of good judgement, he would have looked to the commonsense Clive and the Cassandra-like prophecies of Chatham to rescue him from utter humiliation in America. Both Chatham and Clive believed a much more liberal attitude to the colonists was the only way of averting disaster in the Americas – and were bitterly opposed by the government.

  * * *

  Chatham was to break his silence at last in bitter denunciation of the American policy just after Clive’s death, in oratory that resonates down the centuries for both its language and its prescience:

  An hour now lost may produce years of calamity – I contend not for indulgence but justice to America. Resistance to your acts was necessary as it was just. The Americans are a brave, generous and united people, with arms in their hands and courage in their hearts; three millions of them, the genuine descendants of a valiant and pious ancestry, driven to those deserts by the narrow maxims of a superstitious tyranny. Of the spirit of independence animating the nation of America, I have the most authentic information. Destroy their towns and cut them off from the superfluities, perhaps the conveniences of life … and they would not lament their loss whilst they have – what, my Lords? – their woods and their liberty.

  To such a united force, what force shall be opposed? A few regiments in America and 17,000 or 18,000 men at home? The idea is too ridiculous to take up a moment of your Lordships’ time. Laying of papers on your table or counting numbers on a division will not avert or postpone the hour of danger. It is not repealing this act of Parliament, it is not repealing a piece of parchment, that can restore America to our bosom: you must repeal her fears and resentments; and you may then hope for her love and gratitude … To conclude, my Lords, if the ministers thus persevere in misadvising and misleading the King I will not say that they can alienate the affections of his subjects from his crown; but I will affirm that they will make the crown not worth his wearing. I will not say that the King is betrayed; but I will pronounce that the kingdom is undone.

  Chatham’s condemnation of the ministry was Olympian in its contempt:

  This bill, though rejected here, will make its way to the public, to the nation, to the remotest wilds of America … I am not much astonished, I am not surprised, that men who hate liberty should detest those who prize it; or that those who want virtue themselves should endeavour to persecute those who possess it … The whole of your political conduct has been one continued series of weakness, temerity, despotism, ignorance, futility, negligence, and the most notorious servility, incapacity and corruption.

  On reconsideration I must allow you one merit, a strict attention to your own interests: in that view you appear sound statesmen and politicians. You well know, if the present measure should prevail, that you must instantly relinquish your places … Such then being your precarious situations, who should wonder that you can put a negative on any measure which must annihilate your power, deprive you of your employments, and at once reduce you to that state of insignificance for which God and nature designed you …

  You may traffic and barter with every little pitiful German prince that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign prince; your efforts are forever vain and impotent … your own army is infected with the contagion of these illiberal allies. The spirit of rapine and plunder is gone forth among them. But, my Lords, who is the man that, in addition to these disgraces and mischiefs of our army, has dared to authorise and associate to our arms the tomahawk and scalping knife of the savage?…

  It is not the least of our national misfortunes, that the strength and character of our army are thus impaired: infected with the mercenary spirit of robbery and rapine – familiarised to the horrid scenes of savage cruelty, it can no longer boast of the noble and generous principles which dignify a soldier … Besides these murderers and plunderers, let me ask our ministers, what other allies have they acquired?… Have they entered into alliance with the King of the gypsies? Nothing, my Lords, is too low or too ludicrous to be consistent with their counsels …

  Whilst this is notoriously our sinking condition America grows and flourishes … You have been three years teaching them the art of war: they are apt scholars … My Lords, if I were an American as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country I would never lay down my arms – never – never – never!

  Had a general of the calibre of Clive been allied to Chatham, the government and its American policy would have been in dire straits indeed. But Clive was dead, Chatham on his last legs (he expired a year later). It was to Lord North and Burgoyne that George III entrusted his policy on America and the former, at least, had the sense to extricate himself from it as soon as he reasonably could – but not before the utter humiliation of British arms.

  BOOK FOUR

  THE FALL, 1771–1774

  CHAPTER 25

  The Last Battle

  In the late summer of 1772 a series of financial collapses were triggered off by the failure of a Scottish bank. This had a knock-on effect on the East India Company, whose revenues had dropped to £174,000 in the year following the famine, while military spending continued at a rate of more than £600,000 a year. The Company had to borrow £1 million from the government, a reversal of the position two decades before. In September 1772 the directors had to take the drastic step of stopping the payment of dividends. Company stock fell overnight from 219 to 160. The directors had to seek a further government loan of £1 million – which now enabled the latter at last to intervene decisively in the affairs of the Company.

  The Regulatory Act was passed soon afterwards, providing for a measure of government control and an attempt to correct abuses at home and abroad. An independent court of justice was set up for Bengal and the Company’s small proprietors were stripped of their voting rights. Clive gave the government his own memorandum on the subject. Some of his ideas were adopted, including that of establishing a single governor-general with a large salary – £25,000 a year – and a council of five to regulate him. These were old ideas floated in the past with Chatham, who was in agreement with the need for reform.

  With the dismal nature of East India Company finances now open to public scrutiny, the directors had need of someone on whom to pin the blame. To Sulivan, Clive presented himself once again as the obvious target. A series of charges against him were raised, and the press was again merciless in its attacks. Sulivan was, however, himself ejected from the board in April.

  When the Regulatory Act came u
p for debate the following month Clive made a second speech which confirmed the House in its impression that it had an orator of genius hidden in its midst. He was forthright and to the point. He defended himself against the accusation that he had made money from the salt monopoly by pointing out that there was no living European in Bengal not trading in salt. Of his stock exchange dealings he claimed, ‘The transaction was neither illegal nor dishonourable, yet I say, Sir, I should not have given my enemies even this slender twig to hold by.’

  Clive, always regarded as a direct and serious speaker – although in private he could be cheerful and entertaining – then displayed a remarkable show of wit. Sulivan, he remarked with devastating accuracy, had been ‘so assiduous in my affairs that really, Sir, it appears he has entirely neglected his own’.

  As to himself, he had been examined like a sheep-stealer. ‘I am sure, Sir, that if I had any sore places about me, they would have been found. They have probed to the bottom. No lenient plaster has been applied to my sore, they have been all of a blistering kind composed of Spanish flies and many other provocatives. At the India House, Sir, the public records have been searched from top to bottom as to charges against me.’

  He remarked that as the Jacobite heads on Temple Bar had been removed, they should be replaced by his own, with Sulivan and Colebrook on either side – an allusion to the anti-India witchhunt at the time. The House burst into laughter and applause for several minutes. He went on to portray the directors as ‘devouring the turtle and all kinds of viands out of season and in season, and swilling themselves with whole hogsheads of claret, champagne and burgundy’.

  This brilliant, self-deprecating defence earned the approval even of Walpole. ‘It was not a piece of regular and set oratory, but the artful effusions of a man, master of his cause, of himself, and of the passions of others, which he raised, interested or amused, as he found necessary … his allusions and applications were happy, and when he was vulgar he was rarely trivial … while the Ministers and the Parliament sunk before him, he shone eminently as a real great man, who had done great things, and who had the merit of not having committed more (perhaps not worse) villainies.’