The cocksure Hastings, with just 50 men, went to see the rajah and had him arrested. But the latter escaped, and laid siege to Hastings and his tiny band, now trapped in his palace. One man coolly bluffed his way out to the large British force that was waiting outside Benares, which attacked and defeated the rajah’s men. The relief of Benares followed; Hastings had obtained a further £200,000 for the Company’s coffers.
Hastings now moved his armies to Oudh where Shuja-ud-Daula had died. This formidable ruler had been succeeded by his son, Asaph-ud-Daula. Hastings first threatened the new ruler, then entered into an agreement to despoil Asaph and his grandmother, the Begum of Oudh, of their huge estates and fortunes. By thus stripping them of their money and confining them to the large palace at Fayzabad, Hastings secured another huge sum for the Company.
* * *
The contrast between Hastings and Clive could not have been starker. Hastings had immense achievements to his name – giving Bengal its first real British government, fending off a serious threat to British dominion in India through the combination of Hyder Ali and the French, sweeping away the practice of rule by surrogates in Bengal, pacifying the frontier provinces (although largely in order to exact money from them). Above all, he placed Bengal on a secure financial footing.
But he was cruel, rapacious, tough and relentless. Where Clive was romantic, intelligent, bold and visionary, Hastings was essentially a calculating and intelligent thug. Without him, Bengal could not have been consolidated for the British, nor Madras saved. He was, like Clive, incredibly popular among the Indian population in his lifetime, although not later.
Clive’s destiny had been to establish the empire through military victory and astute diplomacy. Hastings, the first real administrator of British India, succeeded through one act of ruthlessness and rapacity after another – although always acting on behalf of the Company rather than himself. No military commander, but a tough, tenacious, astute and unscrupulous governor, Hastings was the perfect successor to Clive. Clive created, magnificently; Hastings consolidated, often ruthlessly and squalidly. Yet the British were far from being the possessive imperialists of popular imagination. In 1825, just seven years after Hastings’s death, Charles Williams Wynn, president of the Board of Control, which now administered India in place of the Company, wrote to his friend Bishop Heber of Calcutta, querying ‘if it be desirable to retain the government of India till the day shall come when it may safely be left to itself. Whenever that day shall arrive, as come it will, though I think not in our time, I have no doubt that we should find India independent more beneficial to us than in her present state.’ This was a remarkable statement, coming 122 years before the end of the Raj, and in conformity with the enlightened and benevolent tradition begun by Clive during his last tour of duty.
* * *
Robert Clive should be judged by posterity on four levels: as a private individual; as a British politician; as a military leader; and as ruler and effective emperor of much of India.
As an individual, Clive emerges as overwhelming, larger than life, a swashbuckling, bubbling volcano of a man. From youthful awkwardness – yet displaying integrity, daring and courage even as a boy – by his twenties he had become overbearingly self-confident and generous, with a huge coterie of family and friends, self-indulgent, a fount of hospitality and a lover of the pleasures in life.
He was loyal to his friends and supporters, vindictive and petty towards his enemies. Incredibly tough and driving towards his subordinates when he needed to be, he was equally unsparing on himself – a man of colossal energy who through his own example brought out the best in people. Time and again he appeared to lapse into idle enjoyment of the good things in life, and time and again rose to a further challenge, fighting back with a spartan vigour and determination.
The driven, angry, idealistic Clive and the hedonistic, fun-loving man were all part of the same complex personality. His furious determination was leavened by his love of the good things in life; his seriousness was ameliorated by his sense of fun and pleasure. When well, he was unfailingly kind to those he loved, and towards his subordinates. He behaved with contempt and rebelliousness towards his superiors, with leadership and respect towards those beneath him, a mark of greatness.
His downside was his mania and depression – whether arising from temperament, illness or overwork – and the impact upon those closest to him. His rare acts of martial cruelty occurred when he was at his most vulnerable. Overpoweringly self-centred, self-publicising and self-justifying, sometimes whiningly sensitive, with a ferocious temper, yet often the most expansive and cheerful of men, he was capable of inspiring men on a Churchillian scale. Indeed, his look of pudgy determination and vulnerability bears an astonishing resemblance to Churchill’s.
* * *
To reach the top in British politics was probably Clive’s central ambition; at first India was just a staging post. Yet he made little impact on the House of Commons, failed to realise the need to secure patronage initially on his way to the top and, when he did, showed a remarkable capacity for backing the wrong horse or – endearingly – taking a stand on principle to the detriment of his own career.
He was too passionate and principled a man to climb to the top of the greasy pole of eighteenth-century British politics. His years of absolute power in India poorly prepared him for the necessary compromises and ingratiation necessary to achieve his ultimate goal.
Yet where the names of most eighteenth-century politicians are forgotten, his will live on for ever. India was to be the source of his greatness, and was his greatest obsession, yet for long he regarded it as a sideshow to his principal ambition. Perhaps because running Bengal was never the summit of his ambitions, as it might have been for a lesser man, he did the job extraordinarily well, being sometimes capricious, never despotic.
He only emerged as one of the House of Commons’s finest orators when his back was to the wall during the Indian inquisition. He refused to compromise enough, or debase himself to the sordid world of politics; nor, either out of indolence or illness in later life, was he prepared to devote the time necessary to a successful political career. He never achieved an office of any kind in government. If he had devoted himself to a House of Commons life, he might have reached the top, but he had too much hauteur, too little application, and had succeeded in a far more challenging environment.
* * *
As a soldier, Clive has been denigrated by many military historians who, half-patronisingly, half-sneeringly, refer to him as one of the first great guerrilla leaders. If this is a swipe at his energy, his daring attacks where the enemy least expected them, or his ability to cross hundreds of miles of territory and to spur his men on at great speed, it is a flattering portrait by comparison with the staid, headquarters-bound commanders of his day. In the sense that Clive was an improviser, a man of huge skill in coping with adversity, capable of engaging the enemy on its own territory and seizing the initiative through forced marches behind enemy lines, he was indeed a guerrilla leader.
In the set-piece battles – whether defending Arcot, laying siege to Trichinopoly, or turning the tables at Kaveripak – he showed he was an entirely effective conventional commander – and perhaps more so because of his imagination and courage. Plassey itself was a masterful set-piece effort, overlooked at the time because the British appeared to win so easily. Yet the outcome was far from certain most of the day; but for Clive’s elaborate intrigues before the battle, it would certainly have been lost. Wellington’s victory at Waterloo is not deemed the less because he was supported by Blücher – like Mir Jafar, late in the battle, but at least not on the enemy side.
That victory at Plassey was won with so little carnage was a credit to Clive, and can hardly be held against him. His tactics on that occasion were a model of propriety and imagination. Clive never fought a truly bloody set-piece battle, which has damned him in the eyes of many of the more basic military historians; but that can hardly be held agains
t him. He secured his triumph through courage, intelligence and improvisation as much as sheer professionalism. His bravery, energy and leadership were of the very highest order.
He won a remarkable succession of victories and never lost a battle, although he had a few close calls, Plassey included. Even the initial farce of his expedition up the Hugli was soon replaced by the grudging admiration of his colleagues, as he succeeded, time and time again. As with Churchill, setbacks were simply a spur to success.
To dismiss the Indian armies he overwhelmed is unfair on both. He was far from certain at the time that his small force could prevail against such overwhelmingly superior ones often accompanied by contingents of well-trained and experienced European troops always sustained with modern cannon and guns. Unwieldy and ill-disciplined they might be; but, supported by French advice, troops and often artillery, they usually had a well-trained core far larger than Clive’s small forces. Hyder Ali was later to show that Indian armies could be extremely effective. Chanda Sahib and Siraj-ud-Daula were formidable adversaries.
Clive also fought against well-disciplined European armies – the French and the Dutch, usually in superior numbers – and he never lost a single battle to them either. Clive’s military career may be judged as one of the most effective in British history, whether judged by results, courage, imagination, leadership or tactical skill.
He was no good at shuffling flags about on maps back at headquarters or watching the progress of a battle from a hill in the distance. He was despised for being insufficiently aloof, too hotheaded, getting into the thick of battle too readily, as at Plassey; yet there is no sign that his forays into action warped his overall judgement. He was perfectly capable of restraint when the occasion demanded. He was one of the very greatest generals Britain has ever produced, the finest judge of the calculated risk.
* * *
Clive’s career as a ruler – an emperor, a dictator of his huge swathe of India with unparalleled powers – provides for an unambiguous judgement. It is here that his greatness, exceptional as he was in other fields, truly lies. The reckless young soldier showed a remarkable gravitas and sense of purpose when given responsibility for administering an empire and millions of subjects. Placed in charge of Bengal, he could have degenerated into a native ruler himself or simply plundered the country, as some of his successors did.
Instead, he was restrained, pursuing policies of divide and rule, governing through the local Moslem élite while encouraging their Hindu subordinates to keep them in a state of paralysis. He refused to stretch the boundaries of his Indian empire beyond what he believed to be controllable, in spite of intense pressure on him to do so. His governance was on the whole popular, fair and enlightened, resisting the excesses of his own financially rapacious, native-despising followers.
Clive’s humanity is reflected in the fact that he personally insisted on reviewing all capital cases under his jurisdiction; and that, as a nineteenth-century observer wrote, ‘in a lifetime spent among scenes of blood and suffering, he has never been accused of a single act of cruelty’.
In fact two actions of pure revenge were laid to his door: in each there was small loss of life. Both were dictated by the need to secure territory through military victory and discourage further insurrection by the local people – as well as, in the first case, to erase the esteem held by the French in southern India. The plundering of the villages showed a dark side to his nature, but occurred at a time when Clive was clearly in one of his most manic-depressive phases. This is not to excuse him, but to understand him.
It was during his last tour in Bengal that Clive laid the foundations for his claim to greatness and to be the initiator of all that was best about the British in India. He showed a Caesar’s unconcern for the unpopularity he attained among his fellow countrymen in the relentless pursuit of good government and the stamping out of malpractice and corruption. In so doing he laid the ethos of Indian colonial administration for two centuries to come.
He could have joined in the excesses or he could have simply sat on his hands; he did neither. He attacked the abuses of his fellow-countrymen with the same vigour as he had fought to conquer the Carnatic and Bengal years before. He was utterly unafraid of the consequences – in the event, a ferocious campaign against him that was almost to destroy his reputation, fortune and freedom.
Clive established the legal basis of the Indian empire, as well as defensible borders for his conquests, and put into place the beginnings of modern administration there by eliminating the old anomaly that the Company’s servants were both administrators and profiteers. Henceforth, they were to be paid civil servants.
Finally, with audacity and strength of character, he crushed an officers’ revolt against him through bravery alone, establishing the supremacy of the civilian over the military authority – even though much of his own rule in Bengal had been based on the reverse. He then displayed the magnanimity towards his opponents of a truly ‘big’ man. No leader is more impressive than when he moves against his own friends and companions in defence of good government; he suffered appallingly from the backlash later.
* * *
So to the verdict of history, the charges laid against him in his own lifetime, fuelled by high-minded Victorians and twentieth-century anti-colonialists. Was his life not one colossal morality tale of pride, greed and vainglory finally getting its come-uppance? Was he not the high priest of one of the most evil chapters – imperialism – in British history?
The detailed allegations against Clive were examined in his interrogation before the House of Commons and, as concluded already, he must be exonerated of all but the extent of his accumulation of wealth, which at the time was not considered excessive, certainly for a man who had become ruler of a fabulous empire, either in Indian or British terms. Only his acquisition and dogged pursuit of the jagir must be laid against him as an act of greed and misjudgement.
In Clive’s time no one thought it strange that a European should seek to enlarge his country’s territorial dominion or his own wealth through conquest. This was impossible in Europe because of the existence of strong rival military powers; the further parts of the world therefore beckoned. By modern standards this ethos was cruel and amoral; but it was the measure of a man’s success at the time.
The India that Clive conquered was itself under the despotic foreign rule of the Mogul princes – although the empire itself had broken up. In many respects the Hindu upper class – although caste-conscious beyond belief and hardly kind to those below – regarded British rule as no worse, or better, than Mogul rule. Clive surely cannot be faulted for not having foreseen the anti-colonial backlash of the twentieth century.
Moreover, in that he was one of the very few that sought at once to control the excesses of economic colonialism, he was well in advance of his time. For there were to be good things about empire, as well as bad: the dedication of many civil servants to good government; the attempts to control the greed of traders and settlers; the efforts to improve conditions and educate the people. All these were later developments; but Clive – first trader himself, then soldier, then reforming administrator – took the first steps.
The hidden tragedy of his death – perhaps more understandable today in an age where human psychology is better understood and people more forgiving – has also served to obscure the fact that Robert Clive, Primus in Indis, was one of the most remarkable, fascinating, humane – for his age – far-seeing and spectacularly achieving men that these islands have ever produced. He deserves to take his place alongside Drake, Cromwell, Marlborough, Nelson, Wellington and Churchill.
* * *
He lies today in an unmarked, unknown grave within the walls of an obscure church in a village barely worthy of the description, Moreton Saye, reached by tiny lanes near the nondescript town of Market Drayton in eastern Shropshire. Those abandoned bones beneath the parquet floor returned to that remote hamlet from an adventure beyond every schoolboy’s dream: daring escape fr
om the French, the brilliant seizure of a citadel from behind the enemy’s back, the defence of that fortress for nearly two months against overwhelming odds in what was perhaps the greatest siege in British military history, a series of barely believable battles against huge odds and the brutal reduction of a colossal army at Trichinopoly.
These Boys’ Own achievements were exceeded by a tale out of Rider Haggard – of how one man with a tiny army tricked his overwhelming opponents into dividing themselves, won a battle with only a handful killed, installed a monarch, beheld a treasure the like of which few have ever seen, and departed downriver with a large part of it. Over the next few years he ruled over a colossal country as dictator, emperor and military chief, securing its boundaries and founding its administration. Later, he returned in person to quell abuses and a mutiny among his own supporters.
Only a handful of men in world history have done so much – Alexander the Great, Tamerlane, Napoleon. Few authors of fiction would have the imagination to encompass such an adventure. Whatever the judgement, the achievement is undisputed. He rests, anonymously, in well-deserved peace after labours of a Herculean kind.
Bibliography
Abdul Majed Khan, The Transition in Bengal. Cambridge 1969.
Bence-Jones, Mark, Clive of India, London 1974.
‘Bengal, Past and Present’, Journal of the Calcutta Historical Society, various.
Cambridge, R. O., Account of the War in India. Dublin, 1761.
Caraccioli, Charles, Life of Robert, Lord Clive. London 1777.
Carnac, Major John, Letters in the British Library.
Chaudhury, N. W., Clive of India. London, 1975.
Clive, Robert, Lord, Clive collection on loan at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth.
Letter to the Proprietors of the East India Stock. London 1764.
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