Clive

by Robert Harvey

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  What exactly was Clive suffering from? According to Strachey, his secretary, he had a very painful dyspepsia, accompanied by vertigo, which in turn caused acute depression. Chaudhury believes he was suffering from porphyria, the same disease as was to afflict George III: in its hepatic form, it causes abdominal pain and nausea, as well as hysterical and indeed psychotic behaviour. If that behaviour included aggression, this could have had a bearing on the circumstances of Clive’s death.

  By an extraordinary irony, Clive was suffering from symptoms similar not only to those of his monarch later, but of his political hero, Chatham, who had succumbed to a major depressive illness seven years before. In addition to his main illness, Clive is thought to have suffered from a stomach ulcer, gout and kidney trouble. These were ailments of stress and excess. He might have seemed an unusually unlucky man – yet many of his contemporaries in India had died as young men from tropical diseases.

  Although blessed with remarkable determination and not morbid by nature, it may be speculated that the combination of pain, depression and mania this time had a far greater humiliation to feed upon than any that had previously occurred in Clive’s life. When healthy, the ferocious personal attacks rained upon him during the past few years could be easily withstood. When ill, even two years after his acquittal, they may have assumed massive proportions in his mind.

  Yet Clive was not a man to be afraid. He had brushed contemptuously with death more often than a platoonful of front-line soldiers: when swept overboard off Brazil as a youth; in the ditch outside Pondicherry when a bullet went through his hat; outside the fortress of Devikottai, when he was nearly cut down; in the foolhardy attempt to seize the French guns outside Arcot, when another man took the bullet destined for him; in his constant exposure along the walls of Arcot; during the ambush at Kaveripak; during the astonishing fracas at Samiaveram, when he was first slashed by enemy swords and then two others took the fire intended for him; at Budge Budge, when he was nearly cut down by enemy horse; in the morning mists of the Battle of Calcutta when he stumbled into the Nawab’s camp; in the front line at Plassey itself; in exposing himself to the assassin’s bullet at Monghyr. Death had been his constant companion, and he showed no fear of it. Perhaps his frequent exposure to danger was itself a symptom of a death-wish. It was living unhappily which he feared most, and was least bearable.

  Yet there is no reason to believe he felt the slightest remorse or regret for the actions of his eventful life. His defence in the House of Commons had been robust, eloquent and unyielding. By his account, he had nothing to be ashamed about. Towards his long parade of vanquished Indian enemies, he felt only the contempt of the victor: the ghosts of inexperienced, rash Raza Sahib, of his murdered father Chanda Sahib, of butchered Siraj-ud-Daula, of deceived Omichand, of biblically avenged Miran and of destitute Mir Kasim held no terrors for him.

  For his defeated French foes – Dupleix, Jacques Law, Jean Law, de Bussy, Lally – he felt the comradeship of old adversaries-in-arms. For his British foes – Sulivan, Vansittart (now dead), the Johnstones, Fletcher – he felt bitter contempt for men he despised as shortsighted, venal and incompetent. No, Clive felt no torment. He was not a man troubled by self-doubt or anguish.

  The only real psychological baggage he carried was a relatively new one: the realisation that neither his king nor his countrymen felt indebted to him for his staggering achievements in India. In spite of his exculpation by parliament most people, high and low, regarded him as tarnished after the furious personal campaign waged against him in England; some of the mud had stuck. Allied to this sense of the ingratitude of his fellow countrymen may have been the feeling that his life’s work in India, even after his cleansing of the Augean stables, was again unravelling: that he had created nothing of permanence there. He could not have guessed or expected that the empire he founded was to expand greatly and last the better part of two centuries.

  The sense that his achievement was unrecognised, and that it was doomed, when magnified by his mental state and wealth of physical infirmities, may have proved unbearable. But this must be pure conjecture. For in no published writing do the wounds of hurt pride or of a sense of failure show through. Rather the reverse: he brushed aside his English enemies, showed indifference to what the public thought of him, scorned scurrilous press attacks, and keenly studied events in India to see how his legacy could be strengthened.

  Unless this was only a bold front for the tortured soul inside – for which there is not the slightest evidence – if he did kill himself, it could only have been because ‘the balance of his mind was disturbed’. His actions had caused him no despair or remorse in later life because he still felt them to be fully justified. It was illness, physical and mental, that brought on misery, and may have magnified his sense of failure.

  Previous bouts of ill-health had not caused him to attempt to take his own life. This time, the administration itself, spearheaded by George III and with Lord North’s tacit support, had joined the malicious offensive against one of Britain’s greatest sons. This may have tilted the balance in that strong, but proud and sensitive mind after illness had stripped it bare of its defences. If it was suicide, it was homicide too, the perpetrators being the monarch and the state he had served so well – as well as public opinion, in one of its earliest outbursts of ill-informed, wrong-headed moral indignation.

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  How did Robert Clive die? His last major British biographer, Mark Bence-Jones, states unequivocally that ‘in a paroxysm of agony, he thrust his penknife into his throat’. Equally unequivocally, an earlier biographer, R. J. Minney, states that he ‘definitively’ established that Clive died of an overdose of opium and that the theory of suicide was a ‘contemptible slander’. In view of the torrents of abuse heaped on Clive in his last years, this might not seem improbable. In fact, though, there is remarkably little evidence for either view, although the balance of probability is that his throat was cut.

  The key point about Clive’s death is that it was assiduously and comprehensively covered up. There was no post-mortem, no inquest, no death certificate, no official explanation for his death. Even for a family of immense wealth and influence at the time, this flouting of legal norms was extraordinary. The family said nothing, a tradition which has persisted to this day (the video of his life at the Clive Museum in Powis Castle makes no mention of how he died). To the extent that there was no legal explanation of an untimely death, officialdom must have connived with the Clive family in the cover-up.

  More remarkable still, Clive’s body was rushed up to Styche in Shropshire the very afternoon he died, and then, highly unusually, buried the following evening at dusk in well-attended secrecy in an unmarked grave from which it could not be exhumed. His resting place has not been definitely established to this day, although it seems highly likely to have been inside the church, as the commemorative plaque put up by his family suggests.

  Chaudhury suggests that the plaque could have referred to the ‘boundary walls’ of the church, but that strains credulity. If Clive was buried on consecrated ground, as the plaque makes clear, it would have been extraordinary not to have interred someone of his eminence inside the church. All of this is testimonial to the astonishing lengths gone to in order to ensure that the manner of Clive’s death remained secret, and that his body should not be seen by anyone outside the immediate family.

  To Minney, the reason for such inordinate precautions was ‘the desperate desire of the family to elude the prying eyes of a gloating public’. This is not as improbable as it might seem. Clive was the most hated man in England, and his funeral might have been an occasion for a public demonstration by his detractors – but surely not to the extent of desecrating his grave, particularly if located inside a church. Nor does this version explain why no death certificate was issued. The question remains: why the cover-up?

  The view that he died of an accidental overdose of laudanum (a mixture of brandy and opium) or
even naturally, of a fit, seems the most implausible. This was certainly the version the family initially wanted people to believe, and the one given to respectable newspapers at the time. The Morning Post wrote on 24 November: ‘On Tuesday evening, of an apoplectic fit, died Lord Clive at his house in Berkeley Square.’ Two days later, the General Evening Press suggested he had ignored his doctor’s orders not to take ‘opiates … and was found dead the next day’. The London Evening Press said he ‘was taken with a fit of apoplexy as he was in his dressing room’ and expired a few hours later. All of these accounts are contradictory, although they imply natural or accidental causes. The timing of the first two reports has since been established as wrong.

  Horace Walpole, himself a walking, if not especially accurate, newspaper, wrote the day after Clive’s death, citing the Lord Chancellor – who should have been a reliable source – ‘Lord H [Hertford] has just been here and told me the manner of Lord Clive’s death. Whatever had happened, it had thrown him into convulsions, to which he was very subject. Dr Fothergill gave him, as he had done on like occasions, a dose of laudanum, but the pain in his bowels was so violent, that he asked for a second dose. Dr F. said, if he took another, he would be dead in an hour. The moment Dr F. was gone, he swallowed another, for another, it seems, stood by him, and he is dead.’

  However, Hertford, as the nation’s top law officer, must have been in on any official decision to exempt Clive’s death from the normal legal formalities, and his indiscretion in talking to the country’s foremost society gossip looks remarkably like an early version of the modern calculated ‘leak’. Hertford’s story was clearly the one officialdom wanted the country to believe.

  Another support for this theory was a letter written by Robert Pardoe, a lawyer at Lincoln’s Inn, who for some reason was regarded as an authority on the matter, although it is not clear why. Written three days after Clive’s death, the missive was prominently displayed in the Powys papers. He stated: ‘I am very sorry for the death of Lord Clive, which was sudden. He had been taking opium for many years, and finding the disorder in his bowels very painful, he took a double dose against advice, and died in a fit. He had several of those fits before, some friends of mine have seen him seized with them in the Rooms at Bath. So that the little surmise of his dying unnaturally is without foundation. I mention this for fear it should reach the country.’ Again, this letter from a lawyer who must have been close to the family bears the hallmark of an inspired leak.

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  None of this is very convincing. The newspapers were clearly floundering in the dark. Walpole was in any event an unreliable source and Pardoe’s own informant is unknown. More important, there can have been no reason for obscuring the cause of death, for hurrying the body away from London to an immediate funeral, or for keeping the whereabouts of the grave secret, much less for the family to persist in the conspiracy of silence, if Clive had suffered an accidental or natural death.

  The available family papers give no clue as to the cause of death. Clive’s son, Ned, gave full access to the papers to Sir John Malcolm, his first posthumous biographer, who passed over the issue of Clive’s death in silence. A later biographer, Sir George Forrest, who also had access to the family papers, records that ‘Clive died by his own hand’. Certainly this view was quick to gain currency in the days after his death.

  One fashionable, reliable and formidable contemporary, Lady Mary Coke, who was visiting Lady Hertford in Grosvenor Square at the very time of Clive’s death, at first heard the same story of the double dose of opium that her hostess’s husband had given Walpole. By 28 November she had heard from the Duchess of Montagu: ‘It is strongly reported that Lord Clive had not died a natural death, and there is one circumstance that looks very suspicious; he was put into his coffin a few hours after his death.’ The following day she wrote, ‘’Tis said now that ’tis certain Lord Clive kill’d himself, and the reason given for this unhappy action is the horror of his mind.’

  Lady Mary’s account of how Clive is supposed to have killed himself is especially graphic and revealing: ‘The method he took to deprive himself of life was, I believe, what nobody ever thought of before; he cut his throat with a little instrument that is bought at the stationers to scratch out anything upon paper; I don’t know what it is calld, but ’tis so small he must have been some time before he could affect his purpose, and must have been very determined to proceed when he was giving himself such terrible pain: reason there can be none for such action, but I wish to know what it was that could have given him so dreadful a thought.’

  A week later, Lady Mary had further details: ‘’Tis reported that Lady Clive was the first person who found her Lord weltering in his blood; ’tis no wonder the horror of the scene should have such an effect upon her spirits as to deprive her of her senses, and throw her with a fit, but ’tis fortunate she remained in it so long, that when she came out of it, her ideas were so confused with regard to that terrible scene, that she believed to have been a dream what was but too real, and spoke of the shocking dream she had had of her Lord. She was encouraged in this notion, and was told he was dead of an apoplectic fit.’ Lady Mary was intelligent, extremely well informed, and could hardly have made up so improbable an instrument of death.

  Most strikingly, though, her account ties in uncannily with one handed down by Jane Strachey, who was in the house at the time, to her son, Sir Henry Strachey, who in turn as an old man dictated an account to his nephew, amending it in his own hand:

  Lord Clive had long been ill – in a very nervous state – and had been warned by his physician against taking laudanum, but he would and did take it. Mr and Mrs Strachey and Miss Ducarel were at Lord Clive’s house in Berkeley Square. Lord Clive went out of the room, and not returning, Mr Strachey said to Lady Clive, ‘You had better go and see where my lord is.’ She went to look for him and at last, opening a door, found Lord Clive with his throat cut. She fainted, and servants came. Patty Ducarel got some of the blood on her hands and licked it off. After the event Mrs Strachey remembered having seen Lord Clive, when at her house some days before, take up a penknife from the inkstand, feel its edge, and then lay it down again.

  Sir Edward Strachey commented: ‘The family of Lord Clive were not unnaturally desirous that it should be believed that he died from an overdose of laudanum, taken under medical advice, rather than by the act of his own hand; and we suppose that it was out of respect for this still existing feeling of the family that Sir John Malcolm passed the matter over in silence in his Life of Lord Clive, written from the family papers.’

  Clive’s biographer Gleig, writing in the 1840s, is believed to have taken this account from another witness – presumably indirectly, since she can hardly have been still alive – Patty Ducarel: ‘Clive had great pain on the twenty-first, and was driven to take strong doses of opium for relief. This continued on the next day. At about noon or a little later, a lady who was on a visit at his house [Patty Ducarel] came into his room and said: “Lord Clive, I cannot find a good pen; will you be so good as to make me one.” “To be sure,” replied he, and, taking a penknife from his waistcoat pocket, he moved towards one of the windows and mended the pen. The lady took it back with thanks and left the room. Some time shortly afterwards a servant entered the room and found Clive dead. The weapon with which he killed himself was seen to be the same penknife.’

  Lord Stanhope, in his History of England, relates at second hand an account given by the Earl of Shelbourne which is remarkably similar, although different in important details: ‘It so chanced that a young lady, an attached friend of his [Clive’s] family was then upon a visit at his house in Berkeley Square, and sat writing a letter in one of its apartments. Seeing Lord Clive walk through she called him to come and mend her pen. Lord Clive obeyed her summons and, taking out his penknife, fulfilled her request; after which, passing on to another chamber, he turned the same knife against himself.’

  Two points stand out from this coincidence of reliab
le sources: first, there seems no reason why Jane Strachey, loyal to Clive, should invent the notion of suicide; much less why Patty Ducarel should do so. Second, it seems striking that no fewer than four reliable sources, two of which can be traced to first-hand witnesses, and two contemporary to Clive’s death, should concur on the extremely unusual alleged instrument of death.

  Suicide – in particular in this excruciatingly painful and bloody manner – helps to explain several of the mysteries surrounding the death: the absence of an official cause; the spiriting away of the body; the furtive burial; and the secret grave. If the family had initially sought to cover up the cause of death, it would obviously not have wanted it to be possible for Clive’s body to be seen or exhumed, to reveal so obvious a wound. Suicide was at the time a cause of deep shame, even repugnance. Dr Johnson was to reflect a general prejudice when he remarked that Clive ‘had acquired his fortune by such crimes, that his consciousness of them impelled him to cut his own throat’.

  A suicide could not be buried on consecrated ground; it is clear that Clive was buried on consecrated ground, almost certainly inside a church. The whereabouts of the grave might have been concealed because the burial had been in violation of canon law, to make it more difficult to give offence or for the bones to be removed; but again, this is unsatisfactory and implausible. Chaudhury is convinced that Clive committed suicide, and cites the fact that Lady Mary Coke played cards for three hours with Clive’s intimate, Lady Powis, on the day after the death. The subject was not mentioned, presumably out of delicacy. But that would have applied to any unexpected death, not just a suicide.

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  A third hypothesis must be examined: that he was killed by another person. The evidence for his death by overdose or suicide rests primarily on hearsay, handed down. There is not even that to support the theory that he was killed. But there is strong circumstantial evidence in its favour, and it does provide the only explanation of all the mysteries surrounding his death.