The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (24 page)

Ali and Clive contrived a scheme to break the siege by hitting the nawab Chanda Sahib at Arcot, the capital of the Carnatic. The twenty-six-year-old Clive, raising troops at Fort St. David and Fort St. George, marched from Madras with an army of 200 Europeans and perhaps 300 to 500 sepoys. They were a ragamuffin bunch; their eight officers were men like Clive—civilians turned soldiers; only two or three had seen action. Clive set his men a terrific pace, for he hoped to surprise the Arcot garrison. He didn't do that, but his forced march through drenching thunderstorms convinced the nawab's army to flee. Clive's troops, they thought, must be supermen; Clive entered Arcot as a liberator.

Clive worked to stay on the good side of the city's inhabitants, but he and his men knew better than to trust to the goodwill of Arcot's people; they would surely turn from friend to foe if interest so dictated. The city appeared indefensible given the number of men he had, and it surely housed thousands of Chanda Sahib loyalists who might turn their hands to murder or insurrection. Still, Clive was resolved to hold it. He harried Chanda Sahib's men camped outside Arcot and did what he could to better supply and defend the city's fort. His manpower resources were dwindling, as he had to send troops back for the possible defense of Madras. He had no more than 320 effectives to hold the city.

On 23 September, an army of at least 10,000 men attacked Arcot, quickly breaching the crumbling city walls. Clive and his men held the fort in the city center; and while the enemy expected him to be cowed, Clive led his troopers charging to seize the enemy's big French guns. They failed but again stunned Chanda Sahib's men with their audacity. A lieutenant
stopped a sniper's bullet meant for Clive, and as the siege progressed, snipers riddled the parapets, slotting Clive's men but never striking home on Clive himself.

Heavy French artillery repeatedly reduced the walls to rubble; and just as repeatedly Clive's men shored them up. The besiegers had swelled to 15,000 men and planned to make their final attack on a Shia Muslim holy day. The vast, frenzied army came charging before dawn on 14 November, with giant iron-helmeted elephants ready to batter the walls. Clive directed musket fire that acted as mice among the pachyderms, scattering the elephants, and kept up waves of volleys that broke up Chanda Sahib's attacks. Frustrated, the enemy tried to reduce Arcot by bombarding it. The crash and rattle of artillery continued until two in the morning. When dawn arose, Clive's men stiffened for the next attack, but saw the field was deserted. Chanda Sahib's officers knew a British relief force and hostile Mahratta mercenaries were on their way.
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Clive had held the city for two and a half months, and withstood the full power of the besieging enemy for more than seven weeks. It was like the Battle of the Alamo (which of course had not yet happened)—except the defenders won.

The indefatigable Clive now took an army, including the Mahrattas, and harassed the retreating enemy. Always outnumbered, he nevertheless defeated Chanda Sahib's forces repeatedly, building a reputation as an invincible commander, and convincing Indian princes that it was better to be for Clive than against him. Muhammad Ali, still besieged at Trichinopoly, had seen his forces grow to 40,000 men in the wake of Clive's victories—they now outnumbered their besiegers. But no commander had stepped forward to attack the enemy. Clive arrived and changed all that, breaking the siege in April 1752, then penning Chanda Sahib's remaining troops on the island of Srirangam and compelling them to surrender in early June. Chanda Sahib was beheaded by his Indian enemies, and Britain's ally Muhammad Ali became nawab of the Carnatic.

Clive returned to civilian life and found himself a wealthy man; his earnings as a company steward and commissary officer had stacked up while he was in the field. Celebrated for courage and martial genius, and now with a fortune as well, he nevertheless did not settle down immediately. Indeed, he took a commission to fight the French again, which he did with his usual cool head and reckless courage, spurring on his green troops by constantly exposing himself to the enemy's fire—which continued to miss him.
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He returned victorious once more, married in February 1753, and embarked for England where he won election to Parliament at the age of twenty-eight.

The victory, however, was short-lived. Clive's election was affirmed by a Parliamentary committee as free from irregularities, but the prime minister, the Duke of Newcastle, and the opposition Tories voted against the committee and denied Clive his seat. Their common interest was keeping Clive's patron, James Fox, from becoming first minister of the Crown. Clive's political ambitions thwarted, his fortune dwindling faster than he expected, he accepted the Company's offer to return to India.

Nominally, Clive was deputy governor of Madras; more important, he was a lieutenant-colonel of the Company's armed forces. His goal was to absorb all of French India. His first adventure was reducing a pirate stronghold at Gheria.

In 1756, Clive was appointed commander of Fort St. David—it was here that he learned that Calcutta had been attacked by the despicable nawab of Bengal, whose lethal imprisonment of nearly a hundred and fifty Britons in the “Black Hole of Calcutta” was an outrage that had to be avenged—and Clive, naturally, was the man selected to do the avenging. He did so with his usual efficiency. In the words of Macaulay, “Nine hundred English infantry, fine troops and full of spirit, and fifteen hundred sepoys, composed the army which sailed to punish a Prince who had more subjects than Louis
the Fifteenth.”
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Macaulay gave a generous estimate of British strength; the troops available to Clive were cut by more than a third when some of the ships carrying them had to turn back in stormy seas. Nevertheless, Calcutta was abandoned at his approach—as was discovered when a drunken British sailor wandered out of camp and decided to breach the city walls. He chased off a handful of Muslim soldiers and declared, “The place is mine!”

But delivering Calcutta from the notorious Nawab Siraj-ad-daula was not enough to restore British prestige and preserve the company's position. Clive saw that what was required—and what was possible—was the annexation of Bengal; and it was to that task that he set himself. The first step was the destruction of the nawab's army, which was achieved at the Battle of Plassey (23 June 1757) where Clive and 3,000 men routed the more than 50,000 troops of the nawab.

The campaign continued as France, providentially, was at war with England and had allied itself with the nawab, which gave Clive every pretext he needed to fight both. The Company's navy took the lead against the French Bengalese city of Chandernagore, which Clive besieged from the landward side. It fell to the British on 23 March 1757.

But it was not purely force of arms that defeated the nawab; Clive also engaged in a diplomatic conspiracy, supporting a coup against the nawab and deceiving a greedy, two-faced wealthy Bengali merchant who had tried to play both sides and threatened to reveal the plot unless he was given five percent of the nawab's treasury. With an entirely clear conscience, Clive went to the extent of drawing up a fake treaty and forging a signature on it to fool the merchant. The coup was successful, and the merchant, when he discovered that his dreams of avarice had been foiled, lost his mind and become a pathetic simpleton (at least according to Lord Macaulay). Some of Clive's biographers (like Macaulay) condemn Clive for his diplomatic duplicity, accusing him, in essence, of going native rather than upholding British standards—and indeed, years later Clive would face parliamentary questions over his conduct; there was always strong suspicion in Parliament against nabobs, whom it was assumed had cut corners to achieve their riches. Of course, Clive has had his defenders, both at the time and later among some of his biographers (like Robert Harvey). Clive did not interfere when the former nawab was put to death, and he accepted a fortune as a gift from the new nawab—and while this too has come under scrutiny, Clive could have demanded much more; as an employee of the British East India Company there were no bars to his seeking profit from princes. The company, meanwhile, made him governor of Bengal, a country of 40 million people.

For three years he drove himself hard, reinforcing his conquests, dispatching subordinates to smash French or Dutch upstarts, militarily defending the cowardly, corrupt, and conniving new nawab of Bengal against all rivals (while not backing him too much, knowing how conniving he was), and solidifying Britain's hold on most of India. It was demanding work, but financially rewarding. When he returned to England in 1760, Clive was an extraordinarily wealthy man.

In India, he was regarded as an invincible soldier and an authoritative lawgiver. In England, while he entered Parliament (and eventually became Baron Clive of Plassey), he proved inept as a politician (the cynicism he learned in Indian politics being readily ridiculed as lack of principle) and was quickly dismissed as a typical nabob—all new wealth and no finer qualities. It seems poor recompense for a man who had been inarguably heroic in his battles in India; but he also feuded with the directors of the East India Company, which made him appear a man primarily motivated by pecuniary self-interest, though this was not true. Clive was generous with his family, he purchased estates, but for all the wealth he obtained, it seems clear that wealth itself was never his object. Clive was driven much more by a yearning after greatness, for himself and for his country.

How valuable he was in India became manifest after his departure. Muslims and Hindus who had accepted Clive as a disinterested lawgiver were
appalled by the new administration of Henry Vansittart, which seemed driven by greed and was utterly incompetent at keeping the balances of power Clive had maintained between rival Indian rulers. The result was insurrection, mutiny, and war; and while British arms won the day as usual, there was only one man who could restore the political order of Bengal: Clive.

Winning his power struggle against the chairman of the company, Clive returned to India in 1765 as governor with full power to restore the Pax Britannica, root out corruption, and revive the Company's fortunes. All this he did with an ardor as if to prove that he was an idealist after all and devoted to the honor of England. He received from the Mughal of India official title for Britain's holdings on the subcontinent, he reformed the civil service, and he restructured the army. In 1757, with British India furbished and solidified, he returned to England.

But after every such whirlwind of activity Clive paid a price. For all his cool-headedness in battle, his clear-sighted ability to navigate Indian politics, the forcible energies of his personality—once he was expended, he collapsed into depression of a deep and shocking sort, worsened by occasional recurrences of malaria. Though reunited with his wife, and blessed with a happy marriage, Clive found England a gloomy place. In India, he was the man who would be king; in England he was a second-rater: useful abroad, but otherwise a trumped-up parvenu. Indeed, his enemies in the Company and in parliament conspired to portray Clive as avaricious, plundering, and worthy of censure, and used an outbreak of famine in Bengal (caused by drought) as an excuse to excoriate him. In 1772, he took to the floor of the House of Commons to defend himself and did so with an outburst of oratory that astonished his listeners (for he was not known as a speaker). A parliamentary committee investigated him, and during the investigation he made his most famous statement about the riches that had been held out before him after the Battle of Plassey: “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. By God, Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation.”
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His final appeal to the House was “leave me my honour, take away my fortune!”
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Clive was vindicated by parliamentary vote in 1773, but only after the most dreadful attacks had been made upon him.