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Three months after this great victory, Clive sailed for England. At home, honors
and rewards awaited him, not indeed equal to his claims or to his ambition, but
still such as, when his age, his rank in the army, and his original place in
society are considered, must be pronounced rare and splendid. He was raised to
the Irish peerage, and encouraged to expect an English title. George the Third,
who had just ascended the throne, received him with great distinction. The
ministers paid him marked attention; and Pitt, whose influence in the House of
Commons and in the country was unbounded, was eager to mark his regard for one
whose exploits had contributed so much to the luster of that memorable period.
The great orator had already in Parliament described Clive as a heaven-born
general, as a man who, bred to the labor of the desk, had displayed a military
genius which might excite the admiration of the King of Prussia. There were then
no reporters in the gallery; but these words, emphatically spoken by the first
statesman of the age, had passed from mouth to mouth, had been transmitted to
Clive in Bengal, and had greatly delighted and flattered him. Indeed, since the
death of Wolfe, Clive was the only English general of whom his countrymen had
much reason to be proud. The Duke of Cumberland had been generally unfortunate;
and his single victory, having been gained over his countrymen and used with
merciless severity, had been more fatal to his popularity than his many defeats.
Conway, versed in the learning of his profession, and personally courageous,
wanted vigor and capacity. Granby, honest, generous, and brave as a lion, had
neither science nor genius. Sackville, inferior in knowledge and abilities to
none of his contemporaries, had incurred, unjustly as we believe, the imputation
most fatal to the character of a soldier. It was under the command of a foreign
general that the British had triumphed at Minden and Warburg. The people
therefore, as was natural, greeted with pride and delight a captain of their
own, whose native courage and self-taught skill had placed him on a level with
the great tacticians of Germany.
The wealth of Clive was such as enabled him to vie with the first grandees of
England. There remains proof that he had remitted more than a hundred and eighty
thousand pounds through the Dutch East India Company, and more than forty
thousand pounds through the English Company. The amount which he had sent home
through private houses was also considerable. He had invested great sums in
jewels, then a very common mode of remittance from India. His purchases of
diamonds, at Madras alone, amounted to twenty-five thousand pounds. Besides a
great mass of ready money, he had his Indian estate, valued by himself at
twenty-seven thousand a year. His whole annual income, in the opinion of Sir
John Malcolm, who is desirous to state it as low as possible, exceeded forty
thousand pounds; and incomes of forty thousand pounds at the time of the
accession of George the Third were at least as rare as incomes of a hundred
thousand pounds now. We may safely affirm that no Englishman who started with
nothing has ever, in any line of life, created such a fortune at the early age
of thirty-four.
It would be unjust not to add that Clive made a creditable use of his riches. As
soon as the battle of Plassey had laid the foundation of his fortune, he sent
ten thousand pounds to his sisters, bestowed as much more on other poor friends
and relations, ordered his agent to pay eight hundred a year to his parents, and
to insist that they should keep a carriage, and settled five hundred a year on
his old commander Lawrence, whose means were very slender. The whole sum which
Clive expended in this manner may be calculated at fifty thousand pounds.
He now set himself to cultivate Parliamentary interest. His purchases of land
seem to have been made in a great measure with that view, and, after the general
election of 1761, he found himself in the House of Commons, at the head of a
body of dependants whose support must have been important to any administration.
In English politics, however, he did not take a prominent part. His first
attachments, as we have seen, were to Mr. Fox; at a later period he was
attracted by the genius and success of Mr. Pitt; but finally he connected
himself in the closest manner with George Grenville. Early in the session Of
1764, when the illegal and impolitic persecution of that worthless demagogue
Wilkes had strongly excited the public mind, the town was amused by an anecdote,
which we have seen in some unpublished memoirs of Horace Walpole. Old Mr.
Richard Clive, who, since his son's elevation, had been introduced into society
for which his former habits had not well fitted him, presented himself at the
levee. The King asked him where Lord Clive was. "He will be in town very soon,"
said the old gentleman, loud enough to be heard by the whole circle, "and then
your Majesty will have another vote."
But in truth all Clive's views were directed towards the country in which he had
so eminently distinguished himself as a soldier and a statesman; and it was by
considerations relating to India that his conduct as a public man in England was
regulated. The power of the Company, though an anomaly, is in our time, we are
firmly persuaded, a beneficial anomaly. In the time of Clive, it was not merely
an anomaly, but a nuisance. There was no Board of Control. The Directors were
for the most part mere traders, ignorant of general politics, ignorant of the
peculiarities of the empire which had strangely become subject to them. The
Court of Proprietors, wherever it chose to interfere, was able to have its way.
That Court was more numerous, as well as more powerful, than at present; for
then every share of five hundred pounds conferred a vote. The meetings were
large, stormy, even riotous, the debates indecently virulent. All the turbulence
of a Westminster election, all the trickery and corruption of a Grampound
election, disgraced the proceedings of this assembly on questions of the most
solemn importance. Fictitious votes were manufactured on a gigantic scale. Clive
himself laid out a hundred thousand pounds in the purchase of stock, which he
then divided among nominal proprietors on whom he could depend, and whom he
brought down in his train to every discussion and every ballot. Others did the
same, though not to quite so enormous an extent.
The interest taken by the public of England in Indian questions was then far
greater than at present, and the reason is obvious. At present a writer enters
the service young; he climbs slowly; he is fortunate if, at forty-five, he can
return to his country with an annuity of a thousand a year, and with savings
amounting to thirty thousand pounds. A great quantity of wealth is made by
English functionaries in India; but no single functionary makes a very large
fortune, and what is made is slowly, hardly, and honestly earned. Only four or
five high political offices are reserved for public men from England. The
residencies, the secretaryships, the seats in the boards of revenue and in the
Sudder courts are all filled by men who have given the best years of life to the
service of the Company; nor can any talents however splendid or any connections
however powerful obtain those lucrative posts for any person who has not entered
by the regular door, and mounted by the regular gradations. Seventy years ago,
less money was brought home from the East than in our time. But it was divided
among a very much smaller number of persons, and immense sums were often
accumulated in a few months. Any Englishman, whatever his age might be, might
hope to be one of the lucky emigrants. If he made a good speech in Leadenhall
Street, or published a clever pamphlet in defense of the chairman, he might be
sent out in the Company's service, and might return in three or four years as
rich as Pigot or as Clive. Thus the India House was a lottery-office, which
invited everybody to take a chance, and held out ducal fortunes as the prizes
destined for the lucky few. As soon as it was known that there was a part of the
world where a lieutenant-colonel had one morning received as a present an estate
as large as that of the Earl of Bath or the Marquess of Rockingham, and where it
seemed that such a trifle as ten or twenty thousand pounds was to be had by any
British functionary for the asking, society began to exhibit all the symptoms of
the South Sea year, a feverish excitement, an ungovernable impatience to be
rich, a contempt for slow, sure, and moderate gains.
At the head of the preponderating party in the India House, had long stood a
powerful, able, and ambitious director of the name of Sulivan. He had conceived
a strong jealousy of Clive, and remembered with bitterness the audacity with
which the late governor of Bengal had repeatedly set at naught the authority of
the distant Directors of the Company. An apparent reconciliation took place
after Clive's arrival; but enmity remained deeply rooted in the hearts of both.
The whole body of Directors was then chosen annually. At the election of 1763,
Clive attempted to break down the power of the dominant faction. The contest was
carried on with a violence which he describes as tremendous. Sulivan was
victorious, and hastened to take his revenge. The grant of rent which Clive had
received from Meer Jaffier was, in the opinion of the best English lawyers,
valid. It had been made by exactly the same authority from which the Company had
received their chief possessions in Bengal, and the Company had long acquiesced
in it. The Directors, however, most unjustly determined to confiscate it, and
Clive was forced to file a bill in chancery against them.
But a great and sudden turn in affairs was at hand. Every ship from Bengal had
for some time brought alarming tidings. The internal misgovernment of the
province had reached such a point that it could go no further. What, indeed, was
to be expected from a body of public servants exposed to temptation such that,
as Clive once said, flesh and blood could not bear it, armed with irresistible
power, and responsible only to the corrupt, turbulent, distracted, ill-informed
Company, situated at such a distance that the average interval between the
sending of a dispatch and the receipt of an answer was above a year and a half?
Accordingly, during the five years which followed the departure of Clive from
Bengal, the misgovernment of the English was carried to a point such as seems
hardly compatible with the very existence of society. The Roman proconsul, who,
in a year or two, squeezed out of a province the means of rearing marble palaces
and baths on the shores of Campania, of drinking from amber, of feasting on
singing birds, of exhibiting armies of gladiators and flocks of camelopards; the
Spanish viceroy, who, leaving behind him the curses of Mexico or Lima, entered
Madrid with a long train of gilded coaches, and of sumpter-horses trapped and
shod with silver, were now outdone. Cruelty, indeed, properly so called, was not
among the vices of the servants of the Company. But cruelty itself could hardly
have produced greater evils than sprang from their unprincipled eagerness to be
rich. They pulled down their creature, Meer Jaffier. They set up in his place
another Nabob, named Meer Cossim. But Meer Cossim had parts and a will; and,
though sufficiently inclined to oppress his subjects himself, he could not bear
to see them ground to the dust by oppressions which yielded him no profit, nay,
which destroyed his revenue in the very source. The English accordingly pulled
down Meer Cossim, and set up Meer Jaffier again; and Meer Cossim, after
revenging himself by a massacre surpassing in atrocity that of the Black Hole,
fled to the dominions of the Nabob of Oude. At every one of these revolutions,
the new prince divided among his foreign masters whatever could be scraped
together in the treasury of his fallen predecessor. The immense population of
his dominions was given up as a prey to those who had made him a sovereign, and
who could unmake him. The servants of the Company obtained, not for their
employers, but for themselves, a monopoly of almost the whole internal trade.
They forced the natives to buy dear and to sell cheap. They insulted with
impunity the tribunals, the police, and the fiscal authorities of the country.
They covered with their protection a set of native dependants who ranged through
the provinces, spreading desolation and terror wherever they appeared. Every
servant of a British factor was armed with all the power of his master; and his
master was armed with all the power of the Company. Enormous fortunes were thus
rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while thirty millions of human beings were
reduced to the extremity of wretchedness. They had been accustomed to live under
tyranny, but never under tyranny like this. They found the little finger of the
Company thicker than the loins of Surajah Dowlah. Under their old masters they
had at least one resource: when the evil became insupportable, the people rose
and pulled down the government. But the English government was not to be so
shaken off. That government, oppressive as the most oppressive form of barbarian
despotism, was strong with all the strength of civilization. It resembled the
government of evil Genii, rather than the government of human tyrants. Even
despair could not inspire the soft Bengalee with courage to confront men of
English breed, the hereditary nobility of mankind, whose skill and valor had so
often triumphed in spite of tenfold odds. The unhappy race never attempted
resistance. Sometimes they submitted in patient misery. Sometimes they fled from
the white man, as their fathers had been used to fly from the Mahratta; and the
palanquin of the English traveler was often carried through silent villages and
towns, which the report of his approach had made desolate.
The foreign lords of Bengal were naturally objects of hatred to all the
neighboring powers; and to all the haughty race presented a dauntless front. The
English armies, everywhere outnumbered, were everywhere victorious. A succession
of commanders, formed in the school of Clive, still maintained the fame of their
country. "It must be acknowledged," says the Muscleman historian of those times,
"that this nation's presence of mind, firmness of temper, and undaunted bravery,
are past all question. They join the most resolute courage to the most cautious
prudence; nor have they their equals in the art of ranging themselves in battle
array and fighting in order. If to so many military qualifications they knew how
to join the arts of government, if they exerted as much ingenuity and solicitude
in relieving the people of God, as they do in whatever concerns their military
affairs, no nation in the world would be preferable to them, or worthier of
command. But the people under their dominion groan everywhere, and are reduced
to poverty and distress. Oh God! come to the assistance of thine afflicted
servants, and deliver them from the oppressions which they suffer."
It was impossible, however, that even the military establishment should long
continue exempt from the vices which pervaded every other part of the
government. Rapacity, luxury, and the spirit of insubordination spread from the
civil service to the officers of the army, and from the officers to the
soldiers. The evil continued to grow till every mess-room became the seat of
conspiracy and cabal, and till the sepoys could be kept in order only by
wholesale executions.
At length the state of things in Bengal began to excite uneasiness at home. A
succession of revolutions; a disorganized administration; the natives pillaged,
yet the Company not enriched; every fleet bringing back fortunate adventurers
who were able to purchase manors and to build stately dwellings, yet bringing
back also alarming accounts of the financial prospects of the government; war on
the frontiers; disaffection in the army; the national character disgraced by
excesses resembling those of Verres and Pizarro; such was the spectacle which
dismayed those who were conversant with Indian affairs. The general cry was that
Clive, and Clive alone, could save the empire which he had founded.
This feeling manifested itself in the strongest manner at a very full General
Court of Proprietors. Men of all parties, forgetting their feuds and trembling
for their dividends, exclaimed that Clive was the man whom the crisis required,
that the oppressive proceedings which had been adopted respecting his estate
ought to be dropped, and that he ought to be entreated to return to India.
Clive rose. As to his estate, he said, he would make such propositions to the
Directors, as would, he trusted, lead to an amicable settlement. But there was a
still greater difficulty. It was proper to tell them that he never would
undertake the government of Bengal while his enemy Sulivan was chairman of the
Company. The tumult was violent. Sulivan could scarcely obtain a hearing. An
overwhelming majority of the assembly was on Clive's side. Sulivan wished to try
the result of a ballot. But, according to the bye-laws of the Company, there can
be no ballot except on a requisition signed by nine proprietors; and, though
hundreds were present, nine persons could not be found to set their hands to
such a requisition.
Clive was in consequence nominated Governor and Commander-in-chief of the
British possessions in Bengal. But he adhered to his declaration, and refused to
enter on his office till the event of the next election of Directors should be
known. The contest was obstinate; but Clive triumphed. Sulivan, lately absolute
master of the India House, was within a vote of losing his own seat; and both
the chairman and the deputy-chairman were friends of the new governor.
Such were the circumstances under which Lord Clive sailed for the third and last
time to India. In May 1765, he reached Calcutta; and he found the whole machine
of government even more fearfully disorganized than he had anticipated. Meer
Jaffier, who had some time before lost his eldest son Meeran, had died while
Clive was on his voyage out. The English functionaries at Calcutta had already
received from home strict orders not to accept presents from the native princes.
But, eager for gain, and unaccustomed to respect the commands of their distant,
ignorant, and negligent masters, they again set up the throne of Bengal to sale.
About one hundred and forty thousand pounds sterling was distributed among nine
of the most powerful servants of the Company; and, in consideration of this
bribe, an infant son of the deceased Nabob was placed on the seat of his father.
The news of the ignominious bargain met Clive on his arrival. In a private
letter, written immediately after his landing, to an intimate friend, he poured
out his feelings in language, which, proceeding from a man so daring, so
resolute, and so little given to theatrical display of sentiment, seems to us
singularly touching. "Alas!" he says, "how is the English name sunk! I could not
avoid paying the tribute of a few tears to the departed and lost fame of the
British nation--irrecoverably so, I fear. However, I do declare, by that great
Being who is the searcher of all hearts, and to whom we must be accountable if
there be a hereafter, that I am come out with a mind superior to all corruption,
and that I am determined to destroy these great and growing evils, or perish in
the attempt."
The Council met, and Clive stated to them his full determination to make a
thorough reform, and to use for that purpose the whole of the ample authority,
civil and military, which had been confided to him. Johnstone, one of the
boldest and worst men in the assembly, made some show of opposition. Clive
interrupted him, and haughtily demanded whether he meant to question the power
of the new government. Johnstone was cowed, and disclaimed any such intention.
All the faces round the board grew long and pale; and not another syllable of
dissent was uttered.
Clive redeemed his pledge. He remained in India about a year and a half; and in
that short time effected one of the most extensive, difficult, and salutary
reforms that ever was accomplished by any statesman. This was the part of his
life on which he afterwards looked back with most pride. He had it in his power
to triple his already splendid fortune; to connive at abuses while pretending to
remove them; to conciliate the goodwill of all the English in Bengal, by giving
up to their rapacity a helpless and timid race, who knew not where lay the
island which sent forth their oppressors, and whose complaints had little chance
of being heard across fifteen thousand miles of ocean. He knew that if he
applied himself in earnest to the work of reformation, he should raise every bad
passion in arms against him. He knew how unscrupulous, how implacable, would be
the hatred of those ravenous adventurers who, having counted on accumulating in
a few months fortunes sufficient to support peerages, should find all their
hopes frustrated. But he had chosen the good part; and he called up all the
force of his mind for a battle far harder than that of Plassey. At first success
seemed hopeless; but soon all obstacles began to bend before that iron courage
and that vehement will. The receiving of presents from the natives was rigidly
prohibited. The private trade of the servants of the Company was put down. The
whole settlement seemed to be set, as one man, against these measures. But the
inexorable governor declared that, if he could not find support at Fort William,
he would procure it elsewhere, and sent for some civil servants from Madras to
assist him in carrying on the administration. The most factious of his opponents
he turned out of their offices. The rest submitted to what was inevitable; and
in a very short time all resistance was quelled.
But Clive was far too wise a man not to see that the recent abuses were partly
to be ascribed to a cause which could not fail to produce similar abuses, as
soon as the pressure of his strong hand was withdrawn. The Company had followed
a mistaken policy with respect to the remuneration of its servants. The salaries
were too low to afford even those indulgences which are necessary to the health
and comfort of Europeans in a tropical climate. To lay by a rupee from such
scanty pay was impossible. It could not be supposed that men of even average
abilities would consent to pass the best years of life in exile, under a burning
sun, for no other consideration than these stinted wages. It had accordingly
been understood, from a very early period, that the Company's agents were at
liberty to enrich themselves by their private trade. This practice had been
seriously injurious to the commercial interests of the corporation. That very
intelligent observer, Sir Thomas Roe, in the reign of James the First, strongly
urged the Directors to apply a remedy to the abuse. "Absolutely prohibit the
private trade," said he; "for your business will be better done. I know this is
harsh. Men profess they come not for bare wages. But you will take away this
plea if you give great wages to their content; and then you know what you part
from."
In spite of this excellent advice, the Company adhered the old system, paid low
salaries, and connived at the indirect gains of the agents. The pay of a member
of Council was only three hundred pounds a year. Yet it was notorious that such
a functionary could not live in India for less than ten times that sum; and it
could not be, expected that he would be content to live even handsomely in India
without laying up something against the time of his return to England. This
system, before the conquest of Bengal, might affect the amount of the dividends
payable to the proprietors, but could do little harm in any other way. But the
Company was now a ruling body. Its servants might still be called factors,
junior merchants, senior merchants. But they were in truth proconsuls,
proprietors, procurators, of extensive, regions. They had immense power. Their
regular pay was universally admitted to be insufficient. They were, by the
ancient usage of the service, and by the implied permission of their employers,
warranted in enriching themselves by indirect means; and this had been the
origin of the frightful oppression and corruption which had desolated Bengal.
Clive saw clearly that it was absurd to give men power, and to require them to
live in penury. He justly concluded that no reform could be effectual which
should not be coupled with a plan for liberally remunerating the civil servants
of the Company. The Directors, he knew, were not disposed to sanction any
increase of the salaries out of their own treasury. The only course which
remained open to the governor was one which exposed him to much
misrepresentation, but which we think him fully justified in adopting. He
appropriated to the support of the service the monopoly of salt, which has
formed, down to our own time, a principal head of Indian revenue; and he divided
the proceeds according to a scale which seems to have been not unreasonably
fixed. He was in consequence accused by his enemies, and has been accused by
historians, of disobeying his instructions, of violating his promises, of
authorizing that very abuse which it was his special mission to destroy, namely,
the trade of the Company's servants. But every discerning and impartial judge
will admit, that there was really nothing in common between the system which he
set up and that which he was sent to destroy. The monopoly of salt had been a
source of revenue to the Government of India before Clive was born. It continued
to be so long after his death. The civil servants were clearly entitled to a
maintenance out of the revenue; and all that Clive did was to charge a
particular portion of the revenue with their maintenance. He thus, while he put
an end to the practices by which gigantic fortunes had been rapidly accumulated,
gave to every British functionary employed in the East the means of slowly, but
surely, acquiring a competence. Yet, such is the injustice of mankind, that none
of those acts which are the real stains of his life has drawn on him so much
obloquy as this measure, which was in truth a reform necessary to the success of
all his other reforms.
He had quelled the opposition of the civil servants: that of the army was more
formidable. Some of the retrenchments which had been ordered by the Directors
affected the interests of the military service; and a storm arose, such as even
Caesar would not willingly have faced. It was no light thing to encounter the
resistance of those who held the power of the sword, in a country governed only
by the sword. Two hundred English officers engaged in a conspiracy against the
government, and determined to resign their commissions on the same day, not
doubting that Clive would grant any terms, rather than see the army, on which
alone the British empire in the East rested, left without commanders. They
little knew the unconquerable spirit with which they had to deal. Clive had
still a few officers round his person on whom he could rely. He sent to Fort St
George for a fresh supply. He gave commissions even to mercantile agents who
were disposed to support him at this crisis; and he sent orders that every
officer who resigned should be instantly brought up to Calcutta. The
conspirators found that they had miscalculated. The governor was inexorable. The
troops were steady. The sepoys, over whom Clive had always possessed
extraordinary influence, stood by him with unshaken fidelity. The leaders in the
plot were arrested, tried, and cashiered. The rest, humbled and dispirited,
begged to be permitted to withdraw their resignations. Many of them declared
their repentance even with tears. The younger offenders Clive treated with
lenity. To the ringleaders he was inflexibly severe; but his severity was pure
from all taint of private malevolence. While he sternly upheld the just
authority of his office, he passed by personal insults and injuries with
magnanimous disdain. One of the conspirators was accused of having planned the
assassination of the governor; but Clive would not listen to the charge. "The
officers," he said, "are Englishmen, not assassins."
While he reformed the civil service and established his authority over the army,
he was equally successful in his foreign policy. His landing on Indian ground
was the signal for immediate peace. The Nabob of Oude, with a large army, lay at
that time on the frontier of Bahar. He had been joined by many Afghans and
Mahrattas, and there was no small reason to expect a general coalition of all
the native powers against the English. But the name of Clive quelled in an
instant all opposition. The enemy implored peace in the humblest language, and
submitted to such terms as the new governor chose to dictate.
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