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 MACAULAY'S ESSAY 
 
 LORD CLIVE 
 
 WITH AN HISTORICAL MAP, HISTORICAL NOTES, AND 
 A SKETCH OF MACAULAY'S LIFE 
 
 
 By D. H. M. 
 
 3 9^V9 /. 
 
 o>*;c 
 
 BOSTON, U.S.A. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY GINN & COMPANY 
 
 1891 
 

 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1890, by 
 
 GINN & COMPANY, 
 in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 
 
 All Rights Reserved. 
 
 Typography by J. S. Cushing & Co., Boston, U.S.A. 
 
 Presswork by Gjnn & Co., Boston, U.S.A. 
 
LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 Thomas Babington Macaulay was born at Rothley Temple, 
 Leicestershire, England, in 1800. He was the eldest son of 
 Zachary Macaulay, the eminent philanthropist whose labors did 
 so much toward securing the abolition of slavery in the British 
 West Indies. 
 
 Macaulay entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at eighteen. He 
 was "gulfed" in his examination in mathematics, but distinguished 
 himself in literary work. At twenty-six he was admitted to the 
 bar ; but law was not his vocation, and meanwhile he had made 
 himself famous in London society by his essay on Milton, contrib- 
 uted to the Edinburgh Review in 1825. 
 
 Zachary Macaulay had been a man of handsome property ; but 
 while his son was in college he met with heavy losses. Instead of 
 inheriting something of a fortune as he expected, young Macaulay 
 found himself poor. Nothing daunted by the prospect, he set 
 manfully to work not only to support himself, but to help lift the 
 burden of debt from his father's shoulders. It was a hard strug- 
 gle, and at one time he found himself so pinched for means that 
 he was obliged to sell his Cambridge gold medals to get money 
 enough to buy bread. 
 
 In 1830 Macaulay entered Parliament. His speeches gained 
 for him as much reputation as his essays. Gladstone, who sat 
 with him in the Parliament of 1832, says that when it was known 
 that Macaulay was " on his legs," there was a rush, and the empty 
 benches of the House were soon filled with eager listeners. 
 
 The brilliant young member for Calne was an ardent Whig, but 
 in all things thoroughly independent. He was no politician ; he 
 would not, nay, he could not, sell his soul for any mess of pecun- 
 
iv LORD M AC AULA Y. 
 
 iary or popular pottage. Later, when Edinburgh declined to re- 
 elect him because he had refused to sacrifice his convictions to 
 the excited prejudices of his constituents, he wrote to those who 
 had turned against him, " I shall always be proud to think that I 
 once enjoyed your favor ; but permit me to say, I shall remember 
 not less proudly how I risked and how I lost it." 
 
 Undoubtedly this very positiveness of conviction and of asser- 
 tion marked, in one way, a limitation of intellectual power. There 
 were no degrees of light and shade in his mental horizon. Lord 
 Melbourne once humorously hit off this defect by saying, '' I wish 
 I were as cock-sure of any one thing as Macaulay is of everything." 
 
 But perhaps the writer of the essays on Clive and Hastings had 
 a better right than most men to feel " cock-sure " about what he 
 knew. In his range of reading he seemed to grasp the substance 
 of whole pages almost at a glance, and he apparently never forgot 
 the minutest details of anything he thus stored up in his mar- 
 vellous memory. Thus Macaulay devoured volumes by scores. 
 While he was walking he was also reading ; and the story goes 
 that on one stretch of sixteen miles — from Piccadilly, through 
 Clapham to Greenwich — he went through with fourteen books of 
 the " Odyssey." At the end of such a " constitutional," he prob- 
 ably knew nothing of the streets and lanes he had passed through, 
 but then only think how intimately he had become acquainted 
 with the " much-contriving Ulysses." Out of these encyclopaedic 
 stores of knowledge he wrote. It was no more effort for him to 
 turn off ten or fifteen pages of an article for the Edinburgh be- 
 tween five o'clock in the morning and breakfast — the time when 
 he wrote most of his essays — than for a fountain to pour out 
 water. Meanwhile he kept himself young by uproarious frolics 
 with children. The house in Great Ormond Street was sometimes 
 filled with his young friends ; and when Macaulay, getting behind 
 the sofa, would build a den of newspapers, and creeping into it 
 would roar like a hungry Bengal tiger, the boys and girls fairly 
 shrieked with delight at the performance. 
 
 In 1834 Macaulay received an appointment on the Supreme 
 Council of India at a salary of ^10,000 a year. Lord Bentinck, 
 
LORD MACAULAY. V 
 
 then Governor- General, was a man of high, unselfish character, 
 and of broad political views. His object was to rule the country 
 not simply in the interest of a powerful commercial company, but 
 in the interest of the people themselves. In pursuance of this 
 purpose he labored not only for the material progress of India, 
 but for its intellectual and civil advancement. 
 
 In the new member of the Council Lord Bentinck found a man 
 after his own heart, one who was earnest, upright, able ; and when 
 the Governor-General went back to England in 1835, he had the 
 satisfaction of feeling that so far as Macaulay's influence could 
 go — and it was sure to go far — he might depend on know- 
 ing that his wise and comprehensive policy had a resolute and 
 fearless advocate. 
 
 During Macaulay's residence of between three and four years in 
 Calcutta he did excellent service in the direction of law reform 
 and of education. India to-day is reaping the harvest which his 
 intelligence sowed. 
 
 On his return to England Macaulay again entered Parliament, 
 and not long after he became a member of the Cabinet. His 
 fame was now established, and no great dinner party in the upper 
 circles of London society was complete without the presence of 
 this brilliant writer and talker. Before he left England some en- 
 vious people had accused him of talking too much on such occa- 
 sions, but "now," said Sydney Smith, "Macaulay has occasional 
 flashes of silence which make him perfectly delightful." 
 
 Macaulay never married, but seemed to live for his sisters, who 
 were very dear to him. In 1841, while residing in lodgings at the 
 " Albany," in the west end of London, he began the greatest of 
 his works — the "History of England." It was just before he 
 engaged on this that he wrote his famous essay on Clive — the 
 ripe fruit of his experiences and researches while in India. From 
 that time until his death, in 1859, he labored incessantly on what 
 was to be, after all, only a half-finished embodiment of his pur- 
 pose ; for his history instead of covering a century, or more, 
 barely covers fifteen years. Two years before the end came he 
 received a peerage, and became Baron Macaulay of Rothley ; but 
 
vi LORD M AC AULA Y. 
 
 his health had already begun to break, and he wrote some time 
 after, "In a week I have grown twenty years older." "Sitting 
 with his eyes fixed on death " he went on page by page or hne by 
 line according to his strength. He died, as it were, pen in hand, 
 seated in his arm-chair, surrounded by his favorite books, in the 
 library of his pleasant home, " Holly Lodge," London. In the 
 southern transept of Westminster Abbey, in the " Poets' Corner," 
 one sees at the foot of Addison's statue a plain gray slab set in 
 the pavement ; on it this name is cut, followed by this quotation 
 from Handel's noble hymn : — 
 
 Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay. 
 
 Born at Rothley Temple, Leicestershire, 
 
 October 25, 1800. 
 
 Died at Holly Lodge, Campden Hill, 
 
 December 28, 1859. 
 
 " His body is buried in peace, 
 but his name liveth for evermore." 
 
 D. H. M. 
 
LORD CLIVE. 
 
 We^ have always thought it strange, that while the history of 
 the Spanish empire in America is familiarly known to all the 
 nations of Europe, the great actions of our countrymen in the 
 East should, even among ourselves, excite little interest. Every 
 schoolboy knows who imprisoned Montezuma, and who strangled 
 Atahualpa. But we doubt whether one in ten, even among Eng- 
 lish gentlemen of highly cultivated minds, can tell who won the 
 battle of Buxar,^ who perpetrated the massacre of Patna,* whether 
 Surajah Dowlah^ ruled in Oude or in Travancore, or whether 
 Holkar^ was a Hindoo or a Mussulman. Yet the victories of 
 Cortes were gained over savages who had no letters, who were 
 
 1 " The Life of Robert Lord Clive ; collected from the Family Papers, com- 
 municated by the Earl of Powis." By Major-General Sir John Malcolm, K.C.B. 
 3 vols. 8vo. London : 1836. 
 
 2 From the Edinburgh Review, 1840. [The historical notes are confined to those 
 points on which information cannot be readily obtained by the student from ordinary 
 books of reference. The rhetorical notes, followed by the initials J. F. G., in 
 brackets, are by Prof. Genung of Amherst College, Mass. D. H. M.] 
 
 3 Buxar : a town of Bengal, Northeastern India, on the right bank of the Ganges. 
 Here, in 1764, the British general, Sir Hector Munro, gained a great victory over 
 the allied Indian forces of Meer Cossim, Nabob of Patna, and the Vizier of Oude. 
 
 * Patna : a city of Bengal, on the right bank of the Ganges. Here, and in the 
 vicinity, Meer Cossim, Nabob of Patna, while at war with the British, executed in 
 cold blood two hundred defenceless English prisoners. 
 
 5 Surajah Dowlah: Viceroy of Bengal (see page 32). The allusion to Oude 
 and Travancore is merely rhetorical, one representing the northern and the other 
 the southern extremity of India. 
 
 s Holkar : the family name of several chiefs of the Mahrattas, a powerful tribe 
 or confederacy which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries held possession of 
 an immense district in Central and Western India. The Mahrattas were Brahmans 
 in religion, and were noted for their courage and skill in war. Several of the Holkar 
 chiefs were formidable enemies of the English. 
 
2 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 ignorant of the use of metais/ who had not broken in a single 
 animal to labor, who wielded no better weapons than those which 
 could be made out of sticks, flints and fish-bones, who regard«li* 
 a horse-soldier as a monster, half man and half beast, who took a 
 harquebusier for a sorcerer, able to scatter the thunder and light- 
 ning of the skies. The people of India, when we subdued them, 
 were ten times as numerous as the Americans whom the Spaniards 
 vanquished, and were at the same time quite as highly civilized 
 as the victorious Spaniards. They had reared cities larger and 
 fairer than Saragossa or Toledo, and buildings more beautiful and 
 costly than the cathedral of Seville. They could show bankers 
 richer than the richest firms of Barcelona or Cadiz, viceroys 
 whose splendor far surpassed that of Ferdinand the Catholic, 
 myriads of cavalry and long trains of artillery which would have 
 astonished the Great Captain. It might have been expected, that 
 every Englishman who takes any interest in any part of history 
 would be curious to know how a handful of his countrymen, sep- 
 arated from their home by an immense 'ocean, subjugated, in the 
 course of a few years, one of the greatest empires in the world. 
 Yet, unless we greatly err, this subject is to most readers, not only 
 insipid, but positively distasteful. 
 
 Perhaps the fault lies partly with the historians. Mr. Mill's 
 book, though it has undoubtedly great and rare merit, is not suffi- 
 ciently animated and picturesque to attract those who read for 
 amusement. Orme, inferior to no English historian in style and 
 power of painting, is minute even to tediousness. In one volume 
 he allots, on an average, a closely printed quarto page to the 
 events of every forty-eight hours. The consequence is, that his 
 narrative, though one of the most authentic and one of the most 
 
 1 Ignorant of the use of metals : Macaulay wrote this essay more than half a 
 century ago ; and in this sentence, having a rhetorical motive for making the con- 
 trast as strong as possible between the American Indians and the civilized inhabi- 
 tants of India, he may have slightly exaggerated the case even as he knew it. Since 
 he wrote, however, the researches of historians have'proved that the Aztecs or Mexi- 
 cans were skilful workers in the precious metals ; and though iron was not known to 
 them, yet bronze was extensively used by them for both tools and weapons. See on 
 the Mexican civilization of that period the Encyclopcedia Britannica, article, Mexico. 
 
LORD CLIVE. 3 
 
 finely written in our language, has never been very popular, and 
 is now scarcely ever read. 
 
 We fear that the volumes before us will not much attract those 
 readers whom Orme and Mill have repelled. The materials placed 
 at the disposal of Sir John Malcolm by the late Lord Powis were 
 indeed of great value. But we cannot say that they have baen 
 very skilfully worked up. It would, however, be unjust to criticise 
 with severity a work which, if the author had lived to complete 
 and revise it, would probably have been improved by conden- 
 sation and by a better arrangement. We are the more disposed 
 to perform the pleasing duty of expressing our gratitude to the 
 noble family to which the public owes so much useful and curious 
 information. 
 
 The effect of the book, even when we make the largest allow- 
 ance for the partiality of those who have furnished and of those 
 who have digested the materials, is, on the whole, greatly to raise 
 the character of Lord Clive. We are far indeed from sympathiz- 
 ing with Sir John Malcolm, whose love passes the love of biog- 
 raphers,^ and who can sete nothing but wisdom and justice in the 
 actions of his idol. But we are at least equally far from concur- 
 ring in the severe judgment of Mr. Mill, who seems to us to show 
 less discrimination in his account of Clive than in any other part 
 of his valuable work. Clive, like most men who are born with 
 strong passions and tried by strong temptations, committed great 
 faults. But every person who takes a fair and enlightened view. 
 of his whole career must admit that our island, so fertile in heroes 
 and statesmen, has scarcely ever produced a man more truly great 
 either in arms or in council. 
 
 The Clives had been settled, ever since the twelfth century, on 
 an estate of no great value, near Market-Drayton in Shropshire. 
 In the reign of George the First this moderate but ancient inheri- 
 tance was possessed by Mr. Richard Clive, who seems to have 
 been a plain man of no great tact or capacity. He had been 
 bred to the law, and divided his time between professional busi- 
 
 1 Passes the love of biographers : this clause is an example of Macaulay's 
 fondness for Biblical diction. See 2 Samuel i. 26. [J. F. G.] 
 
4 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 ness and the avocations ^ of a small proprietor. He married a lady 
 from Manchester, of the name of Gaskill, and became the father 
 of a very numerous family. His eldest son, Robert, the founder 
 of the British empire in India, was born at the old seat of his 
 ancestors on the twenty-ninth of September, 1725. 
 
 Some lineaments of the character of the man were early dis- 
 cerned in the child. There remain letters written by his relations 
 when he was in his seventh year ; and from these letters it appears 
 that, even at that early age, his strong will and his fiery passions, 
 sustained by a constitutional intrepidity which sometimes seemed 
 hardly compatible with soundness of mind, had begun to cause 
 great uneasiness to his family. " Fighting," says one of his uncles, 
 " to which he is out of measure addicted, gives his temper such a 
 fierceness and imperiousness, that he flies out on every trifling 
 occasion." The old people of the neighborhood still remember 
 to have heard from their parents how Bob Clive climbed to the 
 top of the lofty steeple of Market-Drayton, and with what terror 
 the inhabitants saw him seated on a stone spout near the summit. 
 They also relate how he formed all the idle lads of the town into 
 a kind of predatory army, and compelled the shopkeepers to sub- 
 mit to a tribute of apples and halfpence, in consideration of 
 which he guaranteed the security of their windows. He was sent 
 from school to school, making very httle progress in his learning, 
 and gaining for himself everywhere the character of an exceedingly 
 naughty boy. One of his masters, it is said, was sagacious enough 
 to prophesy that the idle lad would make a great figure in the 
 world. But the general opinion seems to have been that poor 
 Robert was a dunce, if not a reprobate. His family expected 
 nothing good from such slender parts and such a headstrong 
 temper. It is not strange, therefore, that they gladly accepted 
 for him, when he was in his eighteenth year, a writership ^ in the 
 
 1 Avocations : this often misused word Macaulay here employs in its proper 
 sense to denote not one's principal occupation, but the subordinate or side pursuits 
 to which a person may occasionally devote himself. [J. F. G.] 
 
 2 Writership : the word is here used in the sense of a clerkship or book- 
 keeper's position. 
 
LORD CLIVE. 5 
 
 service of the East India Company, and shipped him off to make 
 a fortune or to die of a fever at Madras. 
 
 Far different were the prospects of Clive from those of the 
 youths whom the East India College now annually sends to the 
 Presidencies of our Asiatic empire. The Company '^ was then 
 purely a trading corporation. Its territory consisted of a few 
 square miles, for which rent was paid to the native governments. 
 Its troops were scarcely numerous enough to man the batteries of 
 three or four ill-constructed forts, which had been erected for the 
 protection of the warehouses. The natives, who composed a con- 
 siderable part of these little garrisons, had not yet been trained in 
 the discipline of Europe, and were armed, some with swords and 
 shields, some with bows and arrows. The business of the servant 
 of the Company was not, as now, to conduct the judicial, financial, 
 and diplomatic business of a great country, but to take stock, to 
 make advances to weavers, to ship cargoes, and, above all, to keep 
 an eye on private traders who dared to infringe the monopoly. 
 The younger clerks were so miserably paid that they could scarcely 
 subsist without incurring debt ; the elder enriched themselves by 
 trading on their own account ; and those who lived to rise to the 
 top of the service often accumulated considerable fortunes. 
 
 Madras, to which Clive had been appointed, was, at this time, 
 
 1 The Company : the English East India Company was incorporated in 1600. 
 Its original object was simply to obtain a part of the trade which the Portuguese and 
 the Dutch then exclusively possessed with that country. Later, the French estab- 
 lished themselves in India, and became the most formidable rivals of the English. 
 
 In 1639 the Company purchased five square miles of land at Madras and built 
 Fort St. George to protect that trading-post. In 1668 they obtained the island of 
 Bombay, which the Portuguese king had ceded to the British Crown as part of the 
 dower of the Princess Catherine of Braganza on her marriage to Charles II. In 
 1686 the Company bought Calcutta, then a petty village, and built Fort William 
 (1696) to protect it. 
 
 In 1689 the Company resolved to consolidate their power and to become, as they 
 said, "a nation in India"; but notwithstanding this resolution, nothing decisive 
 was done until Clive gained the battle of Plassey (to be described later) in 1757. 
 By that victory the British secured their first important territorial grasp on India. 
 Up to that date Madras, Calcutta, and Bombay had been the only points of note 
 held by the Company ; after that, their power gradually increased, until by 1856 they 
 had virtually obtained possession of the entire peninsula. 
 
6 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 perhaps, the first in importance of the Company's settlements. In 
 the preceding century Fort St. George had risen on a barren spot 
 beaten by a raging surf; and in the neighborhood a town, inhab- 
 ited by many thousands of natives, had sprung up, as towns spring 
 up in the East, with the rapidity of the prophet's gourd. There 
 were already in the suburbs many white villas, each surrounded 
 by its garden, whither the wealthy agents of the Company retired, 
 after the labors of the desk and the warehouse, to enjoy the cool 
 breeze which springs up at sunset from the Bay of Bengal. The 
 habits of these mercantile grandees appear to have been more 
 profuse, luxurious, and ostentatious, than those of the high judi- 
 cial and political functionaries who have succeeded them. But 
 comfort was far less understood. Many devices which now miti- 
 gate the heat of the chmate, preserve health, and prolong life, were 
 unknown. There was far less intercourse with Europe than at 
 present. The voyage by the Cape, which in our time has often 
 been performed within three months,^ was then very seldom 
 accomplished in six, and sometimes protracted to more than a 
 year. Consequently, the Anglo-Indian was then much more 
 estranged from his country, much more addicted to Oriental 
 usages, and much less fitted to mix in society after his return 
 to Europe, than the AngloTndian of the present day. 
 
 Within the fort and its precinct, the Enghsh exercised, by per- 
 mission of the native government, an extensive authority, such as 
 every great Indian land-owner exercised within his own domain. 
 But they had never dreamed of claiming independent power. 
 The surrounding country was ruled by the Nabob of the Carnatic, 
 a deputy of the Viceroy of the Deccan, commonly called the 
 Nizam, who was himself only a deputy of the mighty prince desig- 
 nated by our ancestors as the Great Mogul. Those names, once 
 so august and formidable, still remain. There is still a Nabob of 
 the Carnatic, who lives on a pension allowed to him by the Eng- 
 lish out of the revenues of the province which his ancestors ruled. 
 There is still a Nizam, whose capital is overawed by a British can- 
 
 1 Three months : the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 has greatly reduced 
 this time. 
 
LORD CLIVE. 7 
 
 tonment, and to whom a British resident gives, under the name of 
 advice, commands which are not to be disputed. There is still a 
 Mogul,^ who is permitted to play at holding courts, and receiving 
 petitions, but who has less power to help or hurt than the youngest 
 civil servant of the Company. 
 
 Clive's voyage was unusually tedious even for that age. The 
 ship remained some months at the Brazils, where the young 
 adventurer picked up some knowledge of Portuguese, and spent 
 all his pocket-money. He did not arrive in India till more than 
 a year after he had left England. His situation at Madras was 
 most painful. His funds were exhausted. His pay was. small. 
 He had contracted debts. He was wretchedly lodged, no small 
 calamity in a climate which can be made tolerable to an Euro- 
 pean only by spacious and well-placed apartments. He had been 
 furnished with letters of recommendation to a gentleman who 
 might have assisted him ; but when he landed at Fort St. George 
 he found that this gentleman had sailed for England. The lad's 
 shy and haughty disposition withheld him from introducing him- 
 self to strangers. He was several months in India before he be- 
 came acquainted with a single family. The climate affected his 
 health and spirits. His duties were of a kind ill suited to his 
 ardent and daring character. He pined for his home, and his 
 letters to his relations expressed his feelings in language softer and 
 more pensive than we should have expected either from the way- 
 wardness of his boyhood, or from the inflexible sternness of his 
 
 1 Still a Mogul : in 1857 the memorable Sepoy mutiny broke out in Bengal. 
 The chief cause of the insurrection appears to have been the belief of the natives 
 that the English intended to compel them to abandon their religion and to accept 
 Christianity. Added to this was the fact that a prediction had long been current 
 among them, that the East India Company would cease to rule on the hundredth 
 anniversary of the year in which Clive gained that famous victory at Plassey (1757), 
 which laid the foundation of British power in India. 
 
 The mutiny was quelled, though at fearful loss of life on both sides ; but, singu- 
 larly enough, the dominion of the Company came to an end with the final suppres- 
 sion of the insurgents, for in 1858, Parliament transferred the entire administration 
 from the Company to the Crown. In 1877, Queen Victoria was proclaimed "Em- 
 press of India"; she, therefore, now holds the position formerly claimed by the 
 Great Mogul. 
 
8 LORD CLIVE 
 
 later years. " I have not enjoyed," says he, " one happy day 
 since I left my native country; " and again, "I must confess, at 
 intervals, when I think of my dear native England, it affects me 
 in a very particular manner. ... If I should be so far blest as to 
 revisit again my own country, but more especially Manchester, the 
 centre of all my wishes, all that I could hope or desire for would 
 be presented before me in one view." 
 
 One solace he found of the most respectable kind. The Gov- 
 ernor possessed a good library, and permitted Clive to have 
 access to it. The young man devoted much of his leisure to 
 reading, and acquired at this time almost all the knowledge of 
 books that he ever possessed. As a boy he had been too idle, as 
 a man he soon became too busy, for literary pursuits. 
 
 But neither climate nor poverty, neither studies nor the sorrows 
 of a home-sick exile, could tame the desperate audacity of his 
 spirit. He behaved to his official superiors as he had behaved 
 to his school-masters, and was several times in danger of losing 
 his situation. Twice, while residing in the Writers' Building, he 
 attempted to destroy himself; and twice the pistol which he 
 snapped at his own head failed to go off. This circumstance, it 
 is said, affected him as a similar escape affected Wallenstein. 
 After satisfying himself that the pistol was really well loaded, he 
 burst forth into an exclamation that surely he was reserved for 
 something great. 
 
 About this time an event which at first seemed likely to destroy 
 all his hopes in life suddenly opened before him a new path to 
 eminence. Europe had been, during some years, distracted by 
 the war of the Austrian Succession.^ George the Second was the 
 steady ally of Maria Theresa. The ' house of Bourbon took the 
 opposite side. Though England was even then the first of mari- 
 time powers, she was not, as she has since become, more than a 
 match on the sea for all the nations of the world together ; and 
 
 1 War of the Austrian Succession : this was a war (1740-1748) between Queen 
 Maria Theresa of Austria (supported by her alHes, England and Sardinia) and 
 Frederick of Prussia, who, with other princes, laid claim to portions of her 
 dominions. 
 
LORD CLIVE. 9 
 
 she found it difficult to maintain a contest against the united 
 navies of France and Spain. In the eastern seas France obtained 
 the ascendency. Labourdonnais, governor of Mauritius, a man of 
 eminent talents and virtues, conducted an expedition to the con- 
 tinent of India in spite of the opposition of the British fleet, 
 landed, assembled an army, appeared before Madras, and com- 
 pelled the town and fort to capitulate. The keys were delivered 
 up ; the French colors were displayed on Fort St. George ; and 
 the contents of the Company's warehouses were seized as prize of 
 war by the conquerors. It was stipulated by the capitulation that 
 the EngUsh inhabitants should be prisoners of war on parole, and 
 that the town should remain in the hands of the French till it 
 should be ransomed. Labourdonnais pledged his honor that only 
 a moderate ransom would be required. 
 
 But the success of Labourdonnais had awakened the jealousy 
 of his countryman, Dupleix, governor of Pondicherry. Dupleix, 
 moreover, had already begun to revolve gigantic schemes, with 
 which the restoration of Madras to the English was by no means 
 compatible. He declared that Labourdonnais had gone beyond 
 his powers ; that conquests made by the French arms on the con- 
 tinent of India were at the disposal of the governor of Pondi- 
 cherry alone, and that Madras should be razed to the ground. 
 Labourdonnais was compelled to yield. The anger which the 
 breach of the capitulation excited among the English, was in- 
 creased by the ungenerous manner in which Dupleix treated the 
 principal servants of the Company. The Governor and several 
 of the first gentlemen of Fort St. George were carried under a 
 guard to Pondicherry, and conducted through the town in a tri- 
 umphal procession, under the eyes of fifty thousand spectators. 
 It was with reason thought that this gross violation of public faith 
 absolved the inhabitants of Madras from the engagements into 
 which they had entered with Labourdonnais. Clive fled from the 
 town by night in the disguise of a Mussulman, and took refuge at 
 Fort St. David, one of the small English settlements subordinate 
 to Madras. 
 
 The circumstances in which he was now placed naturally led 
 
10 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 him to adopt a profession better suited to his reckless and intrepid 
 spirit than the business of examining packages and casting ac- 
 counts. He solicited and obtained an ensign's commission in the 
 service of the Company, and at twenty-one entered on his military 
 career. His personal courage, of which he had, while still a writer, 
 given signal proof by a desperate duel with a military bully, who 
 was the terror of Fort St. David, speedily made him conspicuous 
 even among hundreds of brave men. He soon began to show in 
 his new calling other qualities which had not before been discerned 
 in him, — ^ judgment, sagacity, deference to legitimate authority. 
 He distinguished himself highly in several operations against the 
 French, and was particularly noticed by Major Lawrence, who was 
 •then considered as the ablest British officer in India. 
 
 Clive had been only a few months in the army when intelligence 
 arrived that peace had been concluded between Great Britain and 
 France. Dupleix was in consequence compelled to restore Madras 
 to the English Company ; and the young ensign was at liberty to 
 resume his former business. He did indeed return for a short 
 time to his desk. He again quitted it in order to assist Major 
 Lawrence in some petty hostilities with the natives, and then again 
 returned to it. While he was thus wavering between a military 
 and a commercial life, events took place which decided his choice. 
 The politics of India assumed a new aspect. There was peace 
 between the English and French Crowns ; but there arose between 
 the English and French Companies trading to the East a war most 
 eventful and important, a war in which the prize was nothing less 
 than the magnificent inheritance of the house of Tamerlane. 
 
 The empire which Baber and his Moguls reared in the sixteenth 
 century was long one of the most extensive and splendid in the 
 world. In no European kingdom was so large a population sub- 
 ject to a single prince, or so large a revenue poured into the 
 Treasury. The beauty and magnificence of the buildings erected 
 by the sovereigns of Hindostan amazed even travellers who had 
 seen St. Peter's. The innumerable retinues and gorgeous decora- 
 tions which surrounded the throne of Delhi dazzled even eyes 
 which were accustomed to the pomp of Versailles. Some of the 
 
LOFD CLIVE. 11 
 
 great viceroys who held their posts by virtue of commissions from 
 the Mogul ruled as many subjects as the King of France or the 
 Emperor of Germany. Even the deputies of these deputies 
 'might well rank, as to extent of territory and amount of revenue, 
 with the Grand Duke of Tuscany or the Elector of Saxony. 
 
 There can be little doubt that this great empire, powerful and 
 prosperous as it appears on a superficial view, was yet, even in its 
 best days, far worse governed than the worst governed parts of 
 Europe now are. The administration was tainted with all the 
 vices of Oriental despotism, and with all the vices inseparable 
 from the domination of race over race. The conflicting preten- 
 sions of the princes of the royal house produced a long series of 
 crimes and public disasters. Ambitious lieutenants of the sover- 
 eign sometimes aspired to independence. Fierce tribes of Hindoos, 
 impatient of a foreign yoke, frequently withheld tribute, repelled 
 the armies of the government from the mountain fastnesses, and 
 poured down in arms on the cultivated plains. In spite, however, 
 of much constant maladministration, in spite of occasional con- 
 vulsions which shook the whole frame of society, this great mon- 
 arch}', on the whole, retained, during some generations, an outward 
 appearance of unity, majesty, and energy. But, throughout the 
 long reign of Aurungzebe, the state, notwithstanding all that the 
 vigor and policy of the prince could effect, was hastening to disso- 
 lution. After his death, which took place in the year 1707, the 
 ruin was fearfully rapid. Violent shocks from without co-operated 
 with an incurable decay which was fast proceeding within ; and in 
 a few years the empire had undergone utter decomposition. 
 
 The history of the successors of Theodosius bears no small 
 analogy to that of the successors of Aurungzebe. But perhaps 
 the fall of the Carlovingians furnishes the nearest parallel to the 
 fall of the Moguls. Charlemagne was scarcely interred when the 
 imbecility and the disputes of his descendants began to bring 
 contempt on themselves and destruction on their subjects. The 
 wide dominion of the Franks was severed into a thousand pieces. 
 Nothing more than a nominal dignity was left to the abject heirs 
 of an illustrious name, Charles the Bald, and Charles the Fat, and 
 
12 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 Charles the Simple. Fierce invaders, differing from each other in 
 race, language, and religion, flocked, as if by concert, from the 
 farthest corners of the earth, to plunder provinces which the gov- 
 ernment could no longer defend. The pirates of the Northern 
 Sea extended their ravages from the Elbe to the Pyrenees and at 
 length fixed their seat in the rich valley of the Seine. The 
 Hungarian,^ in whom the trembling monks fancied that they rec- 
 ognized the Gog or Magog ^ of prophecy, carried back the plunder 
 of the cities of Lombardy to the depths of the Pannonian forests. 
 The Saracen ruled in Sicily, desolated the fertile plains of Cam- 
 pania, and spread terror even to the walls of Rome. In the midst 
 of these sufferings, a great internal change passed upon the em- 
 pire. The corruption of death began to ferment into new forms 
 of life. While the great body, as a whole, was torpid and passive, 
 every separate member began to feel with a sense, and to move with 
 an energy all its own. Just here, in the most barren and dreary 
 tract of European history, all feudal privileges, all modern nobility, 
 take their source. It is to this point that we trace the power of 
 those princes who, nominally vassals, but really independent, long 
 governed, with the titles of dukes, marquesses, and counts, almost 
 every part of the dominions which had obeyed Charlemagne. 
 
 Such or nearly such was the change which passed on the 
 Mogul empire during the forty years which followed the death 
 of Aurungzebe. A succession of nominal sovereigns, sunk in 
 indolence and debauchery, sauntered away life in secluded palaces, 
 chewing bang, fondling concubines, and listening to buffoons. A 
 succession of ferocious invaders descended through the western 
 passes, to prey on the defenceless wealth of Hindostan. A Persian 
 conqueror crossed the Indus, marched through the gates of Delhi, 
 and bore away in triumph those treasures of which the magnifi- 
 
 1 The Hungarian : this appears to refer to Attila, the Hun, known and dreaded 
 as the " Scourge of God." In 432 he established himself in Pannonia, a part of 
 Hungary, and in 452 he entered and ravaged Northern Italy. 
 
 2 Gog and Magog : probably the tribes of Scythia. They were selected by the 
 prophet Ezekiel (see Ezekiel xxxviii.-xxxix., and compare Revelation xx. 8) "as 
 the symbol of earthly violence, arrayed against the people of God," but in the end 
 meeting with utter destruction. • 
 
LORD CLIVE. 13 
 
 cence had astounded Roe and Bernier, the Peacock Throne, on 
 which the richest jewels of Golconda had been disposed by the 
 most skilful hands of Europe, and the inestimable Mountain of 
 Light,^ which, after many strange vicissitudes, lately shone in 
 the bracelet of Runjeet Sing, and is now destined to adorn the 
 hideous idol of Orissa. The Afghan soon followed to complete 
 the work of devastation which the Persian had begun. The 
 warlike tribes of Rajpootana threw off the Mussulman yoke. A 
 band of mercenary soldiers occupied Rohilcund. The Seiks ruled 
 on the Indus. The Jauts spread dismay along the Jumna. The 
 highlands which border on the western sea-coast of India poured 
 forth a yet more formidable race, a race which was long the terror 
 of every native power, and which, after many desperate and 
 doubtful struggles, yielded only to the fortune and genius of Eng- 
 land. It was under the reign of Aurungzebe that this wild clan of 
 plunderers first descended from their mountains ; and soon after 
 his death, every corner of his wide empire learned to tremble at 
 the mighty name of the Mahrattas.^ Many fertile viceroyalties 
 were entirely subdued by them. Their dominions stretched across 
 the peninsula from sea to sea. Mahratta captains reigned at 
 Poonah, at Gualior, in Guzerat, in Berar, and in Tanjore. Nor 
 did they, though they had become great sovereigns, therefore 
 cease to be freebooters. They still retained the predatory habits 
 of their forefathers. Every region which was not subject to their 
 rule was wasted by their incursions. Wherever their kettledrums 
 were heard, the peasant threw his bag of rice on his shoulder, hid 
 his small savings in his girdle, and fled with his wife and children 
 to the mountains or the jungles, to the milder neighborhood of 
 the hyena and the tiger. Many provinces redeemed their harvests 
 by the payment of an annual ransom. Even the wretched phan- 
 tom who still bore the imperial title stooped to pay this ignominious 
 blackmail. The camp-fires of one rapacious leader were seen 
 
 1 Mountain of Light : the Kohinoor, a celebrated diamond of great size and 
 value. It passed into the hands of the British in 1849, and was presented to Queen 
 Victoria in 1850. 
 
 2 Mahrattas : see note on Holkar, p. i ; also see map. 
 
14 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 from the walls of the palace of Delhi. Another, at the head of his 
 innumerable cavalry, descended year after year on the rice-fields 
 of Bengal. Even the European factors trembled for their maga- 
 zines. Less than a hundred years ago, it was thought necessary 
 to fortify Calcutta against the horsemen of Berar, and the name 
 of the Mahratta ditch still preserves the memory of the danger. 
 
 Wherever the viceroys of the Mogul retained authority they 
 became sovereigns. They might still acknowledge in words the 
 superiority of the house of Tamerlane ; as a Count of Flanders 
 or a Duke of Burgundy might have acknowledged the superiority 
 of the most helpless driveller among the later Carlovingians. 
 They might occasionally send to their titular sovereign a compli- 
 mentary present, or solicit from him a title of honor. In truth, 
 however, they were no longer lieutenants removable at pleasure, 
 but independent hereditary princes. In this way originated those 
 great Mussulman houses which formerly ruled Bengal and the 
 Carnatic, and those which still, though in a state of vassalage, exer- 
 cise some of the powers of royalty at Lucknow and Hyderabad. 
 
 In what was this confusion to end ? Was the strife to continue 
 during centuries ? Was it to terminate in the rise of another great 
 monarchy? Was the Mussulman or the Mahratta to be the Lord 
 of India? Was another Baber to descend from the mountains, 
 and to lead the hardy tribes of Cabul and Chorasan against a 
 wealthier and less warlike race? None of these events seemed 
 improbable. But scarcely any man, however sagacious, would 
 have thought it possible that a trading company, separated from 
 India by fifteen thousand miles of sea, and possessing in India 
 only a few acres for purposes of commerce, would, in less than a 
 hundred years, spread its empire from Cape Comorin to the 
 eternal snow of the Himalayas ; would compel Mahratta and 
 Mohammedan to forget their mutual feuds in common sub- 
 jection; would tame down even those wild races which had 
 resisted the most powerful of the Moguls; and having united 
 under its laws a hundred millions of subjects, would carry its 
 victorious arms far to the east of the Burrampooter,' and far to 
 1 Burrampooter : now spelled Brahmapootra or Brahmaputra. 
 
LORD CLIVE. 15 
 
 the west of the Hydaspes, dictate terms of peace at the gates ot 
 Ava, and seat its vassal on the throne of Candahar. 
 
 The man who first saw that it was possible to found an European 
 empire on the ruins of the Mogul monarchy was Dupleix. His 
 restless, capacious and inventive mind had formed this scheme, 
 at a time when the ablest servants of the English Company were 
 busied only about invoices and bills of lading. Nor had he only 
 proposed to himself the end. He had also a just and distinct 
 view of the means by which it was to be attained. He clearly 
 saw that the greatest forces which the princes of India could 
 bring into the field would be no match for a small body of men 
 trained in the discipline, and guided by the tactics, of the West. 
 He saw also that the natives of India might, under European 
 commanders, be formed into armies, such as Saxe or Frederic 
 would be proud to command. He was perfectly aware that the 
 most easy and convenient way in which an European adventurer 
 could exercise sovereignty in India, was to govern the motions, 
 and to speak through the mouth of some glittering puppet dignified 
 by the title of Nabob or Nizam. The arts both of war and policy 
 which a few years later were employed with such signal success 
 by the EngHsh were first understood and practised by this ingeni- 
 ous and aspiring Frenchman. 
 
 The situation of India was such that scarcely any aggression 
 could be without a pretext either in the old laws or in recent 
 practice. All rights were in a state of utter uncertainty ; and the 
 Europeans who took part in the disputes of the natives con- 
 founded the confusion,^ by applying to Asiatic politics the public 
 law of the West, and analogies drawn from the feudal system. 
 If it was convenient to treat a Nabob as an independent prince 
 there was an excellent plea for doing so. He was independent 
 in fact. If it was convenient to treat him as a mere deputy of 
 the Court of Delhi, there was no difficulty; for he was so in 
 
 1 Confounded the confusion : it was Macaulay's custom, in writing, to adopt 
 phrases that had become well known in literature without enclosing them in quota- 
 tion marks, regarding them as common stock to be employed, or even varied, at 
 pleasure. For this phrase, see Milton, Par. Lost. ii. 996. [J. F. G.] 
 
16 LORD CLIVE 
 
 theory. If it was convenient to consider his office as an hereditary 
 dignity, or as a dignity held during hfe only, or as a dignity held 
 only during the good pleasure of the Mogul, arguments and prece- 
 dents might be found for every one of those views. The party 
 who had the heir of Baber in their hands represented him as the 
 undoubted, the legitimate, the absolute sovereign, whom all subor- 
 dinate authorities were bound to obey. The party against whom 
 his name was used did not want plausible pretexts for maintaining 
 that the empire was in fact dissolved, and that, though it might 
 be decent to treat the Mogul with respect, as a venerable relic of 
 an order of things which had passed away, it was absurd to regard 
 him as the real master of Hindostan. 
 
 In the year 1 748, died one of the most powerful of the new 
 masters of India, the great Nizam al Mulk, Viceroy of the Deccan. 
 His authority descended to his son, Nazir Jung. Of the provinces 
 subject to this high functionary, the Carnatic was the wealthiest 
 and the most extensive. It was governed by an ancient Nabob, 
 whose name the English corrupted into Anaverdy Khan. 
 
 But there were pretenders to the government both of the 
 viceroyalty and of the subordinate province. Mirzapha Jung, a 
 grandson of Nizam al Mulk, appeared as the competitor of Nazir 
 Jung. Chunda Sahib, son-in-law of a former Nabob of the Car- 
 natic, disputed the title of Anaverdy Khan. In the unsettled state 
 of Indian law it was easy for both Mirzapha Jung and Chunda 
 Sahib to make out something like a claim of right. In a society 
 altogether disorganized, they had no difficulty in finding greedy 
 adventurers to follow their standards. They united their interests, 
 invaded the Carnatic, and applied for assistance to the French 
 whose fame had been raised by their success against the English 
 in the recent war on the coast of Coromandel. 
 
 Nothing could have happened more pleasing to the subtile and 
 ambitious Dupleix. To make a Nabob of the Carnatic, to make 
 a Viceroy of the Deccan, to rule under their names the whole of 
 southern India ; this was indeed an attractive prospect. He allied 
 himself with the pretenders, and sent four hundred French soldiers, 
 and two thousand sepoys, disciplined after the European fashion, 
 
LORD CLIVE. 17 
 
 to the assistance of his confederates. A battle was fought. The 
 French distinguished themselves greatly. Anaverdy Khan was 
 defeated and slain. His son, Mohammed Ali, who was afterwards 
 well known in England as the Nabob of Arcot, and who owes to 
 the eloquence of Burke a most unenviable immortality, fled with 
 a scanty remnant of his army to Trichinopoly ; and the con- 
 querors became at once masters of almost every part of the 
 Carnatic. 
 
 This was but the beginning of the greatness of Dupleix. After 
 some months of fighting, negotiation, and intrigue, his ability and 
 good fortune seemed to have prevailed everywhere. Nazir Jung 
 perished by the hands of his own followers ; Mirzapha Jung was 
 master of the Deccan ; and the triumph of French arms and French 
 policy was complete. At Pondicherry all was exultation and fes- 
 tivity. Salutes were fired from the batteries, and Te Deum sung 
 in the churches. The new Nizam came thither to visit his allies ; 
 and the ceremony of his installation was performed there with 
 great pomp. Dupleix, dressed in the garb worn by Mohamme- 
 dans of the highest rank, entered the town in the same palanquin 
 with the Nizam, and, in the pageant which followed, took prece- 
 dence of all the court. He was declared Governor of India from 
 the river Kristna to Cape Comorin, a country about as large as 
 France, with authority superior even to that of Chunda Sahib. 
 He was intrusted with the command of seven thousand cavalry. 
 It was announced that no mint would be suffered to exist in the 
 Carnatic except that at Pondicherry. A large portion of the 
 treasures which former Viceroys of the Deccan had accumulated 
 found its way into the coffers of the French governor. It was 
 rumored that he had received two hundred thousand pounds ster- 
 ling in money, besides many valuable jewels. In fact, there could 
 scarcely be any limit to his gains. He now ruled thirty millions 
 of people with almost absolute power. No honor or emolument 
 could be obtained from the government but by his intervention. 
 No petition, unless signed by him, was perused by the Nizam. 
 
 Mirzapha Jung survived his elevation only a few months. But 
 another prince of the same house was raised to the throne by 
 
18 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 French influence, and ratified all the promises of his predecessor. 
 Dupleix was now the greatest potentate in India. His country- 
 men boasted that his name was mentioned with awe even in the 
 chambers of the palace of Delhi. The native population looked 
 with amazement on the progress which, in the short space of four 
 years, an European adventurer had made towards dominion in 
 Asia. Nor was the vainglorious Frenchman content with the 
 reality of power. He loved to display his greatness with arrogant 
 ostentation before the eyes of his subjects and of his rivals. Near 
 the spot where his policy had obtained its chief triumph, by the 
 fall ®f Nazir Jung and the elevation of Mirzapha, he determined 
 to erect a column, on the four sides of which four pompous inscrip- 
 tions, in four languages, should proclaim his glory to all the 
 nations of the East. Medals stamped with emblems of his suc- 
 cesses were buried beneath the foundations of this stately pillar, 
 and round it arose a town bearing the haughty name of Dupleix 
 Fatihabad, which is, being interpreted, the City of the Victory of 
 Dupleix. 
 
 The Enghsh had made some feeble and irresolute attempts to 
 stop the rapid and brilliant career of the rival Company, and con- 
 tinued to recognize Mohammed Ali as Nabob of the Carnatic. 
 But the dominions of Mohammed Ali consisted of Trichinopoly 
 alone ; and Trichinopoly was now invested by Chunda Sahib and 
 his French auxiliaries. To raise the siege seemed impossible. 
 The small force which was then at Madras had no commander. 
 Major Lawrence had returned to England, and not a single officer 
 of established character remained in the settlement. The natives 
 had learned to look with contempt on the mighty nation which 
 was soon to conquer and to rule them. They had seen the French 
 colors flying on Fort St. George \ they had seen the chiefs of the 
 English factory ^ led in triumph through the streets of Pondieherry ; 
 they had seen the arms and counsels of Dupleix everpvhere suc- 
 cessful, while the opposition which the authorities of Madras had 
 made to his progress had served only to expose their own weak- 
 ness and to heighten his glory. At this moment the valor and 
 1 Factory : see note on p. 31. 
 
LORD CLIVE. 19 
 
 genius of an obscure English youth suddenly turned the tide of 
 fortune. 
 
 Clive was now twenty-five years old. After hesitating for some 
 time between a military and a commercial life, he had at length 
 been placed in a post which partook of both characters, — that of 
 commissary to the troops, with the rank of captain. The present 
 emergency called forth all his powers. He represented to his 
 superiors that unless some vigorous efforts were made Trichi- 
 nopoly would fall, the house of Anaverdy Khan would perish, and 
 the French would become the real masters of the whole peninsula 
 of India. It was absolutely necessary to strike some daring blow. 
 If an attack were made on Arcot, the capital of the Carnatic and 
 the favorite residence of the Nabobs, it was not impossible that 
 the siege of Trichinopoly would be raised. The heads of the 
 English settlement, now thoroughly alarmed by the success of 
 Dupleix, and apprehensive that, in the event of a new war between 
 France and Great Britain, Madras would be instantly taken and 
 destroyed, approved of Clive's plan, and intrusted the execution 
 of it to himself. The young captain was put at the head of two 
 hundred English soldiers, and three hundred sepoys, armed and 
 disciplined after the European fashion. Of the eight officers 
 who commanded this little force under him only two had ever 
 been in action, and four of the eight were factors of the com- 
 pany, whom Clive's example had induced to offer their services. 
 The weather was stormy, but Clive pushed on through thunder, 
 lightning, and rain to the gates of Arcot. The garrison, in a 
 panic, evacuated the fort, and the English entered it without a 
 blow. 
 
 But Clive well knew that he should not be suffered to retain 
 undisturbed possession of his conquest. He instantly began to 
 collect provisions, to throw up works, and to make preparations 
 for sustaining a siege. The garrison, which had fled at his ap- 
 proach, had now recovered from its dismay, and having been 
 swollen by large reinforcements from the neighborhood to a force 
 of three thousand men, encamped close to the town. At dead of 
 night, Clive marched out of the fort, attacked the camp by sur- 
 
20 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 prise, slew great numbers, dispersed the rest, and returned to his 
 quarters without having lost a single man. 
 
 The inteUigence of these events was soon carried to Chunda 
 Sahib, who, with his French allies, was besieging Trichinopoly. 
 He immediately detached four thousand men from his camp, and 
 sent them to Arcot. They were speedily joined by the remains 
 of the force which Clive had lately scattered. They were further 
 strengthened by two thousand, men from Vellore, and by a still 
 more important reinforcement of a hundred and fifty French sol- 
 diers whom Dupleix despatched from Pondicherry. The whole 
 of this army, amounting to about ten thousand men, was under 
 the command of Rajah Sahib, son of Chunda Sahib. 
 
 Rajah Sahib proceeded to invest the fort of Arcot, which seemed 
 quite incapable of sustaining a siege. The walls were ruinous, the 
 ditches dry, the ramparts too narrow to admit the guns, the bat- 
 tlements too low to protect the soldiers. The little garrison had 
 been greatly reduced by casualties. It now consisted of a hun- 
 dred and twenty Europeans and two hundred sepoys. Only four 
 officers were left ; the stock of provisions was scanty ; and the 
 commander, who had to conduct the defence under circumstances 
 so discouraging, was a young man of five and twenty, who had 
 been bred a book-keeper. 
 
 During fifty days the siege went on. During fifty days the 
 young captain maintained the defence with a firmness, vigilance, 
 and ability, which would have done honor to the oldest marshal 
 in Europe. The breach, however, increased day by day. The 
 garrison began to feel the pressure of hunger. Under such cir- 
 cumstances, any troops so scantily provided with officers might 
 have been expected to show signs of insubordination; and the 
 danger was peculiarly great in a force composed of men differing 
 widely from each other in extraction, color, language, manners, 
 and religion. But the devotion of the Uttle band to its chief sur- 
 passed anything that is related of the Tenth Legion of Caesar, or 
 of the Old Guard of Napoleon. The sepoys came to Clive, not 
 to complain of their scanty fare, but to propose that all the grain 
 should be given to the Europeans, who required more nourish- 
 
LORD CLIVE. 21 
 
 ment than the natives of Asia. The thin gruel, they said, which 
 was strained away from the rice, would suffice for themselves. 
 History contains no more touching instance of military fidelity, 
 or of the influence of a commanding mind. 
 
 An attempt made by the government of Madras to relieve the 
 place had failed. But there was hope from another quarter. A 
 body of six thousand Mahrattas, half soldiers, half robbers, under 
 the command of a chief named Morari Row, had been hired to 
 assist Mohammed Ah ; but thinking the French power irresistible, 
 and the triumph of Chunda Sahib certain, they had hitherto re- 
 mained inactive on the frontiers of the Carnatic. The fame of 
 the defence of Arcot roused them from their torpor. Morari 
 Row declared that he had never before believed that Englishmen 
 could fight, but that he would willingly help them since he saw 
 that they had spirit to help themselves. Rajah Sahib learned 
 that the Mahrattas were in motion. It was necessary for him to 
 be expeditious. He first tried negotiations. He offered large 
 bribes to Clive, which were rejected with scorn. He vowed that, 
 if his proposals were not accepted, he would instantly storm 
 the fort, and put every man in it to the sword. Clive told him 
 in reply, with characteristic haughtiness, that his father was an 
 usurper, that his army was a rabble, and that he would do well to 
 think twice before he sent such poltroons into a breach defended 
 by English soldiers. 
 
 Rajah Sahib determined to storm the fort. The day was well 
 suited to a bold military enterprise. It was the great Mohamme- 
 dan festival which is sacred to the memory of Hosein the son of 
 Ali. The history of Islam contains nothing more touching than 
 the event which gave rise to that solemnity. The mournful legend 
 relates how the chief of the Fatimites,^ when all his brave fol- 
 lowers had perished round him, drank his latest draught of water, 
 and uttered his latest prayer, how the assassins carried his head in 
 triumph, how the tyrant smote the lifeless lips with his staff, and 
 how a few old men recollected with tears that they had seen those 
 
 ^ Fatimites : descendants of Fatima, the daughter of Mohammed, and wife of 
 the Calif Ali. 
 
22 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 lips pressed to the lips of the prophet of God. After the lapse 
 of near twelve centuries, the recurrence of this solemn season 
 excites the fiercest and saddest emotions in the bosoms of the 
 devout Moslem of India. They work themselves up to such 
 agonies of rage and lamentation that some, it is said, have given 
 up the ghost from the mere effect of mental excitement. They 
 believe that whoever, during this festival, falls in arms against the 
 infidels, atones by his death for all the sins of his life, and passes 
 at once to the garden of the Houris. It was at this time that 
 Rajah Sahib determined to assault Arcot. Stimulating drugs were 
 employed to aid the effect of religious zeal, and the besiegers, 
 drunk with enthusiasm, drunk with bang, rushed furiously to the 
 attack. 
 
 Clive had received secret intelligence of the design, had made 
 his arrangements, and, exhausted by fatigue, had thrown himself 
 on his bed. He was awakened by the alarm, and was instantly at 
 his post. The enemy advanced, driving before them elephants 
 whose foreheads were armed with iron plates. It was expected 
 that the gates would yield to the shock of these living battering- 
 rams. But the huge beasts no sooner felt the English musket' 
 balls than they turned round, and rushed furiously away, trampHng 
 on the multitude which had urged them forward. A raft was 
 launched on the water which filled one part of the ditch. Clive, 
 perceiving that his gunners at that post did not understand their 
 business, took the management of a piece of artillery himself, and 
 cleared the raft in a few minutes. Where the moat was dry the 
 assailants mounted with great boldness ; but they were received 
 with a fire so heavy and so well directed, that it soon quelled the 
 courage even of fanaticism and of intgxication. The rear ranks 
 of the English kept the front ranks supplied with a constant suc- 
 cession of loaded muskets, and every shot told on the living mass 
 below. After three desperate onsets, the besiegers retired behind 
 the ditch. 
 
 The struggle lasted about an hour. Four hundred of the as- 
 sailants fell. The garrison lost only five or six men. The besieged 
 passed an anxious night, looking for a renewal of the attack. But 
 
LORD CLIVE. 23 
 
 when day broke, the enemy were no more to be seen. They had 
 retired, leaving to the EngUsh several guns and a large quantity of 
 ammunition. 
 
 The news was received at Fort St. George with transports of joy 
 and pride. Clive was justly regarded as a man equal to any com- 
 mand. Two hundred Enghsh soldiers and seven hundred sepoys 
 were sent to him, and with this force he instantly commenced 
 offensive operations. He took the fort of Timery, effected a 
 junction with a division of Morari Row's army, and hastened, by 
 forced marches, to attack Rajah Sahib, who was at the head of 
 about five thousand men, of whom three hundred were French. 
 The action was sharp ; but Clive gained a complete victory. The 
 military chest of Rajah Sahib fell into the hands of the conquerors. 
 Six hundred sepoys who had served in the enemy's army came 
 over to Clive's quarters and were taken into the British service. 
 Conjeveram surrendered without a blow. The governor of Arnee 
 deserted Chunda Sahib, and recognized the title of Mohammed 
 Ali. 
 
 Had the entire direction of the war been intrusted to Clive, it 
 would probably have been brought to a speedy close. But the 
 timidity and incapacity which appeared in all the movements of 
 the English, except where he was personally present, protracted 
 the struggle. The Mahrattas muttered that his soldiers were of 
 a different race from the British whom they found elsewhere. The 
 effect of this languor was that in no long time Rajah Sahib, at the 
 head of a considerable army, in which were four hundred French 
 troops, appeared almost under the guns of Fort St. George, and 
 laid waste the villas and gardens of the gentlemen of the English 
 settlement. But he was again encountered and defeated by Clive. 
 More than a hundred of the French were killed or taken, a loss 
 inore serious than that of thousands of natives. The victorious 
 army marched from the field of battle to Fort St. David. On the 
 road lay the City of the Victory of Dupleix, and the stately mon- 
 ument which was designed to commemorate the triumphs of France 
 in the East. Clive ordered both the city and the monument to 
 be razed to the ground. He was induced, we believe, to take 
 
24 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 this step, not by personal or national malevolence, but by a just 
 and profound policy. The town and its pompous name, the pillar 
 and its vaunting inscriptions, were among the devices by which 
 Dupleix had laid the public mind of India under a spell. This 
 spell it was Clive's business to break. The natives had been 
 taught that France was confessedly the first power in Europe, and 
 that the English did not presume to dispute her supremacy. No 
 measure could be more effectual for the removal of this delusion 
 than the public and solemn demolition of the French trophies. 
 
 The government of Madras, encouraged by these events, deter- 
 mined to send a strong detachment, under Clive, to reinforce the 
 garrison of Trichinopoly. But just at this conjuncture. Major 
 Lawrence arrived from England, and assumed the chief com- 
 mand. From the waywardness and impatience of control which 
 had characterized Clive, _ both at school and in the counting- 
 house, it might have been expected that he would not, after such 
 achievements, act with zeal and good humor in a subordinate 
 capacity. But Lawrence had early treated him with kindness ; 
 and it is bare justice to Clive to say that, proud and overbearing 
 as he was, kindness was never thrown away upon him. He cheer- 
 fully placed himself under the orders of his old friend, and exerted 
 himself as strenuously in the second post as he could have done 
 in the first. Lawrence well knew the value of such assistance. 
 Though himself gifted with no intellectual faculty higher than 
 plain good sense, he fully appreciated the powers of his brilliant 
 coadjutor. Though he had made a methodical study of military 
 tactics, and, like all men regularly bred to a profession, was dis- 
 posed to look with disdain on interlopers, he had yet liberality 
 enough to acknowledge that Clive was an exception to common 
 rules. " Some people," he wrote, " are pleased to term Captain 
 Clive fortunate and lucky ; but, in my opinion, from the knowl- 
 edge I have of the gentleman, he deserved and might expect from 
 his conduct everything as it fell out; — a man of an undaunted 
 resolution, of a cool temper, and of a presence of mind which 
 never left him in the greatest danger ; born a soldier ; for, without a 
 mihtary education of any sort, or much conversing with any of the 
 
LORD CLIVE. 25 
 
 profession, from his judgment and good sense, he led on an army 
 like an experienced ofificer and a brave soldier, with a prudence 
 that certainly warranted success." 
 
 The French had no commander to oppose to the two friends. 
 Dupleix, not inferior in talents for negotiation and intrigue to any 
 European who has borne a part in the revolutions of India, was 
 ill qualified to direct in person military operations. He had not 
 been bred a soldier, and had no inclination to become one. His 
 enemies accused him of personal cowardice ; and he defended 
 himself in a strain worthy of Captain Bobadil.^ He kept away 
 from shot, he said, because silence and tranquillity were propi- 
 tious to his genius, and he found it difficult to pursue his medita- 
 tions amidst the noise of fire-arms. He was thus under the 
 necessity of intrusting to others the execution of his great warhke 
 designs ; and he bitterly complained that he was ill served. He 
 had indeed been assisted by one officer of eminent merit, the cel- 
 ebrated Bussy. But Bussy had marched northward with the 
 Nizam, and was fully employed in looking after his own interests, 
 and those of France, at the court of that prince. Among the 
 officers who remained with Dupleix, there was not a single man 
 of capacity ; and many of them were boys, at whose ignorance 
 and folly the common soldiers laughed. 
 
 The English triumphed everywhere. The besiegers of Tri- 
 chinopoly were themselves besieged and compelled to capitulate. 
 Chunda Sahib fell into the hands of the Mahrattas, and was put 
 to death, at the instigation probably of his competitor, Moham- 
 med Ali. The spirit of Dupleix, however, was unconquerable, 
 and his resources inexhaustible. From his employers in Europe 
 he no longer received help or countenance. They condemned 
 his policy. They gave him no pecuniary assistance. They sent 
 him for troops only the sweepings of the galleys. Yet still he per- 
 sisted, intrigued, bribed, promised, lavished his private fortune, 
 strained his credit, procured new diplomas from Delhi, raised up 
 new enemies to the Government of Madras on every side, and 
 
 ^ Captain Bobadil : a blustering braggart in Ben Jonson's comedy, " Every 
 Man in his Humor." 
 
26 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 found tools even among the allies of the English Company. But 
 all was in vain. Slowly, but steadily, the power of Britain contin- 
 ued to increase, and that of France to decHne. 
 
 The health of Clive had never been good during his resi- 
 dence in India ; and his constitution was now so much impaired 
 that he determined to return to England. Before his departure 
 he undertook a service of considerable difficulty, and performed it 
 with his usual vigor and dexterity. The forts of Covelong and 
 Chingleput were occupied by French garrisons. It was deter- 
 mined to send a force against them. But the only force available 
 for this purpose was of such a description that no officer but Clive 
 would risk his reputation by commanding it. It consisted of five 
 hundred newly levied sepoys, and two hundred recruits who had 
 just landed from England, and who were the worst and lowest 
 wretches that the Company's crimps could pick up in the flash- 
 houses of London. Clive, ill and exhausted as he was, undertook 
 to make an army of this undisciplined rabble, and marched with 
 them to Covelong. A shot from the fort killed one of these extraor- 
 dinary soldiers ; on which all the rest faced about and ran away, 
 and it was with the greatest difficulty that Clive rallied them. On 
 another occasion, the noise of a gun terrified the sentinels so much 
 that one of them was found, some hours later, at the bottom of a 
 well. Clive gradually accustomed them to danger, and, by expos- 
 ing himself constantly in the most perilous situation, shamed them 
 into courage. He at length succeeded in forming a respectable 
 force out of his unpromising materials. Covelong fell. Clive 
 learned that a strong detachment was marching to relieve it from 
 Chingleput. He took measures to prevent the enemy from learn- 
 ing that they were too late, laid an ambuscade for them on the 
 road, killed a hundred of them with one fire, took three hundred 
 prisoners, pursued the fugitives to the gates of Chingleput, laid 
 siege instantly to that fastness, reputed one of th£ strongest in 
 India, made a breach, and was on the point of storming, when the 
 French commandant capitulated^ and retired with his men. 
 
 1 French commandant capitulated : Clive's victories at Arcot and Trichi- 
 nopoly — both within a radius of less than two hundred miles of Madras — had 
 
LORD CLIVE 27 
 
 Clive returned to Madras victorious, but in a state of health 
 which rendered it impossible for him to remain there long. He 
 married at this time a young lady of the name of Maskelyne, sister 
 of the eminent mathematician, who long held the post of Astron- 
 omer Royal. She is described as handsome and accompUshed ; 
 and her husband's letters, it is said, contain proofs that he was 
 devotedly attached to her. 
 
 Almost immediately after the marriage, Clive embarked with his 
 bride for England. He returned a very different person from the 
 poor slighted boy who had been sent out ten years before to seek 
 his fortune. He was only twenty-seven ; yet his country already 
 respected him as one of her first soldiers. There was then gen- 
 eral peace in Europe. The Carnatic was the only part of the 
 world where the English and French were in arms against each 
 other. The vast schemes of Dupleix had excited no small uneasi- 
 ness in the city of London ; and the rapid turn of fortune, which 
 was chiefly owing to the courage and talents of Clive, had been 
 hailed with great delight. The young captain was known at the 
 India House by the honorable nick- name of General Clive, and 
 was toasted by that appellation at the feasts of the Directors. On 
 his arrival in England, he found himself an object of general 
 interest and admiration. The East India Company thanked him 
 for his services in the warmest terms, and bestowed on him 
 a sword set with diamonds. With rare delicacy he refused to 
 receive this token of gratitude, unless a similar comphment were 
 paid to his friend and commander, Lawrence. 
 
 It may easily be supposed that Clive was most cordially wel- 
 comed home by his family, who were dehghted by his success, 
 though they seem to have been hardly able to comprehend how 
 their naughty idle Bobby had become so great a man. His 
 father had been singularly hard of belief. Not until the news of 
 the defence of Arcot arrived in England was the old gentleman 
 heard to growl out that, after all, the booby had something in him. 
 
 thwarted the French plans for getting possession of Southern India. Subsequent 
 English victories completely broke the French power in India, so that before the 
 close of 1761, it had practically become extinct. 
 
28 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 His expressions of approbation became stronger and stronger as 
 news arrived of one brilliant exploit after another : and he was at 
 length immoderately fond and proud of his son. 
 
 Clive's relations had very substantial reasons for rejoicing at 
 his return. Considerable sums of prize money had fallen to his 
 share ; and he had brought home a moderate fortune, part of 
 which he expended in extricating his father from pecuniary diffi- 
 culties, and in redeeming the family estate. The remainder he 
 appears to have dissipated in the course of about two years. He | 
 lived splendidly, dressed gayly even for those times, kept a ' 
 carriage and saddle horses, and, not content with these ways of 
 getting rid of his money, resorted to the most speedy and effect- 
 ual of all modes of evacuation, a contested election followed by 
 a petition. 
 
 At the time of the general election of 1754, the government 
 was in a very singular state. There was scarcely any formal oppo- 
 sition. The Jacobites had been cowed by the issue of the last 
 rebellion. The Tory party had fallen into utter contempt. It 
 had been deserted by all the men of talents who had belonged to 
 it, and had scarcely given a symptom of life during some years. 
 The small faction which had been held together by the influence 
 and promises of Prince Frederic, had been dispersed by his death. 
 Almost every pubhc man of distinguished talents in the kingdom, 
 whatever his early connections might have been, was in office, and 
 called himself a Whig. But this extraordinary appearance of 
 concord was quite delusive. The administration itself was dis- 
 tracted by bitter enmities and conflicting pretensions. The chief 
 object of its n^embers was to depress and supplant each other. 
 The prime minister, Newcastle, weak, timid, jealous, and perfidi- 
 ous, was at once detested and despised by some of the most 
 important members of his government, and by none more than by 
 Henry Fox, the Secretary at War. This able, daring, and ambitious 
 man seized every opportunity of crossing the First Lord of the 
 Treasury, from whom he well knew that he had little to dread and 
 little to hope ; for Newcastle was through hfe equally afraid of 
 breaking with men of parts and of promoting them. 
 
LORD CLIVE. 29 
 
 Newcastle had set his heart on returning two members for St. 
 Michael, one of those wretched Cornish boroughs^ which were 
 swept away by the Reform Act in 1832. He was opposed by 
 Lord Sandwich, whose influence had long been paramount there : 
 and Fox exerted himself strenuously in Sandwich's behalf. Clive, 
 who had been introduced to Fox, and very kindly received by 
 him, was brought forward on the Sandwich interest, and was 
 returned. But a petition was presented against the return, and 
 was backed by the whole influence of the Duke of Newcastle. 
 
 The case was heard, according to the usage of that time, before 
 a committee of the whole House. Questions respecting elections 
 were then considered merely as party questions. Judicial impar- 
 tiality was not even affected. Sir Robert Walpole was in the habit 
 of saying openly that, in election battles, there ought to be no 
 quarter. On the present occasion the excitement was great. The 
 matter really at issue was, not whether Clive had been properly or 
 improperly returned, but whether Newcastle or Fox was to be 
 master of the new House of Commons, and consequently first 
 minister. The contest was long and obstinate, and success seemed 
 to lean sometimes to one side and sometimes to the other. Fox 
 put forth all his rare powers of debate, beat half the lawyers in 
 the House at their own weapons, and carried division after divis- 
 ion^ against the whole influence of the Treasury. The committee 
 decided in Clive's favor. But when the resolution was reported 
 to the House, things took a different course. The remnant of the 
 Tory Opposition, contemptible as it was, had yet sufficient weight 
 to turn the scale between the nicely balanced parties of Newcastle 
 and Fox. Newcastle the Tories could only despise. Fox they 
 hated, as the boldest and most subtle politician and the ablest 
 
 1 Cornish boroughs : each of a number of petty villages in Cornwall formerly 
 sent one or more representatives to Parliament, while on the other hand, large 
 manufacturing towns which sprang up in Central and Northern England after the 
 introduction of steam, in 1765, were wholly destitute of representation. 
 
 This state of things was a fruitful cause of political corruption. The Reform 
 Act of 1832 swept away the so-called " rotten boroughs " of Cornwall and elsewhere, 
 and placed representation on a comparatively fair and sound basis. 
 
 2 Division : the separation of members of Parliament into sides, in order to 
 ascertain a vote. 
 
30 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 debater among the Whigs, as the steady friend of Walpole, as the 
 devoted adherent of the Duke of Cumberland. After wavering 
 till the last moment they determined to vote in a body with the 
 Prime Minister's friends. The consequence was that the House, 
 by a small majority, rescinded the decision of the committee, and 
 Clive was unseated. 
 
 Ejected from Parliament, and straitened in his means, he natu- 
 rally began to look again towards India. The Company and the 
 Government were eager to avail themselves of his services. A 
 treaty favorable to England had indeed been concluded in the 
 Carnatic. Dupleix had been superseded, and had returned with 
 the wreck of his immense fortune to Europe, where calumny and 
 chicanery soon hunted him to his grave. But many signs indicated 
 that a war between France and Great Britain was at hand ; and it 
 was therefore thought desirable to send an able commander to the 
 Company's settlements in India. The Directors appointed Clive 
 governor of Fort St. David. The King gave him the commission 
 of a lieutenant-colonel in the British army, and in 1755 he again 
 sailed for Asia. 
 
 The first service on which he was employed after his return to 
 the East was the reduction of the stronghold of Gheriah. This 
 fortress, built on a craggy promontory, and almost surrounded by 
 the ocean, was the den of a pirate named Angria, whose barks 
 had long been the terror of the Arabian Gulf Admiral Watson, 
 who commanded the English squadron in the Eastern seas, burned 
 Angria's fleet, while Clive attacked the fastness by land. The 
 place soon fell, and a booty of a hundred and fifty thousand 
 pounds sterling was divided among the conquerors. 
 
 After this exploit, Clive proceeded to his government of Fort 
 St. David. Before he had been there two months, he received 
 intelligence which called forth all the energy of his bold and active 
 mind. 
 
 Of the provinces which had been subject to the house of Tam- 
 erlane, the wealthiest was Bengal. No part of India possessed 
 such natural advantages both for agriculture and for commerce. 
 The Ganges, rushing through a hundred channels to the sea, has 
 
LORD CLIVE. 31 
 
 formed a vast plain of rich mould which, even under the tropical 
 sky, rivals the verdure of an Enghsh April. The rice fields yield 
 an increase such as is elsewhere unknown. Spices, sugar, vege- 
 table oils, are produced with marvellous exuberance. The rivers 
 afford an inexhaustible supply of fish. The desolate islands along 
 the sea-coast, overgrown by noxious vegetation, and swarming with 
 deer and tigers, supply the cultivated districts with abundance of 
 salt. The great stream which fertilizes the soil is, at the same 
 time, the chief highway of Eastern commerce. On its banks, 
 and on those of its tributary waters, are the'wealthiest marts, the 
 most splendid capitals, and the most sacred shrines of India. 
 The tyranny of man had for ages struggled in vain against the 
 overflowing bounty of nature. In spite of the Mussulman despot 
 and the Mahratta freebooter, Bengal was known through the East 
 as the garden of Eden, as the rich kingdom. Its population mul- 
 tiplied exceedingly. Distant provinces were nourished from the 
 overflowing of its granaries ; and the noble ladies of London and 
 Paris were clothed in the dehcate produce of its looms. The race 
 by whom this rich tract was peopled, enervated by a soft chmate 
 and accustomed to peaceful employments, bore the same relation 
 to other Asiatics which the Asiatics generally bear to the bold and 
 energetic children of Europe. The Castilians have a proverb, 
 that in Valencia the earth is water and the men women ; and the 
 description is at least equally applicable to the vast plain of the 
 Lower Ganges. Whatever the Bengalee does he does languidly. 
 His favorite pursuits are sedentary. He shrinks from bodily 
 exertion ; and, though voluble in dispute and singularly pertina- 
 cious in the war of chicane, he seldom engages in a personal con- 
 flict, and scarcely ever enlists as a soldier. We doubt whether 
 there be a hundred genuine Bengalees in the whole army of 
 the East India Company. There never, perhaps, existed a peo- 
 ple so thoroughly fitted by nature and by habit for a foreign 
 yoke. 
 
 The great commercial companies of Europe had long possessed 
 factories^ in Bengal. The French were settled, as they still are, at 
 i Factories : lortified trading-posts. 
 
32 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 Chandernagore ^ on the Hoogley. Higher up the stream the Dutch 
 traders held Chinsurah. Nearer to the sea, the Enghsh had built 
 Fort William. A church and ample warehouses rose in the vicin- 
 ity. A row of spacious houses, belonging to the chief factors of 
 the East India Company, lined the banks of the river ; and in the 
 neighborhood had sprung up a large and busy native town, where 
 some Hindoo merchants of great opulence had fixed their abode. 
 But the tract now covered by the palaces of Chowringhee con- 
 tained only a few miserable huts thatched with straw. A jungle, 
 abandoned to waterfawl and alligators, covered the site of the 
 present Citadel, and the Course,^ which is now daily crowded at 
 sunset with the gayest equipages of Calcutta. For the ground on 
 which the settlement stood, the EngUsh, like other great land- 
 holders, paid rent to the government ; and they were, like other 
 great landholders, permitted to exercise a certain jurisdiction 
 within their domain. 
 
 The great province of Bengal, together with Orissa and Behar,^ 
 had long been governed by a viceroy, whom the English called 
 Aliverdy Khan, and who, Hke the other viceroys of the Mogul, 
 had become virtually independent. He died in 1756, and the 
 sovereignty descended to his grandson, a youth under twenty years 
 of age, who bore the name of Surajah Dowlah. Oriental despots 
 are perhaps the worst class of human beings ; and this unhappy 
 boy was one of the worst specimens of his class. His understand- 
 ing was naturally feeble, and his temper naturally unamiable. His 
 education had been such as would have enervated even a vigorous 
 intellect, and perverted even a generous disposition. He was 
 unreasonable, because no one ever dared to reason with him, and 
 
 1 Chandernagore : this once famous town is twenty miles above Calcutta. The 
 French made a settlement at this point in 1673, and in the time of Dupleix it 
 carried on a considerable trade. It was taken by the English in 1757, and the 
 fortifications demolished, but in 1763 it was restored to the French. In 1794 it was 
 again captured by the English, and held until the peace of 1816, when it was again 
 restored to the French who still govern it. It is not a place of any commercial 
 importance. The principal French possessions in India are at Pondicherry. 
 
 2 The Course : a noted pleasure drive. 
 
 3 Bengal, Beliar, and Orissa ; in Northeastern India, with the district Chota 
 Nagpur, they constitute the province of Bengal. 
 
LORD CLIVE. 33 
 
 selfish, because he had never been made to feel himself dependent 
 on the good will of others. Early debauchery had unnerved his 
 body and his mind. He indulged immoderately in the use of 
 ardent spirits, which inflamed his weak brain almost to madness. 
 His chosen companions were flatterers sprung from the dregs of 
 the people, and recommended by nothing but buffoonery and 
 servility. It is said that he had arrived at that last stage of human 
 depravity, when cruelty becomes pleasing for its own sake, when 
 the sight of pain as pain, where no advantage is to be gained, no 
 ofi'ence punished, no danger averted, is an agreeable excitement. 
 It had early been his amusement to torture beasts and birds ; and 
 when he gjrew up, he enjoyed with still keener relish the misery of 
 his fellow-creatures. 
 
 From a child Surajah Dowlah had hated the EngHsh. It was 
 his whim to do so ; and his whims were never opposed. He had 
 also formed a very exaggerated notion of the wealth which might 
 be obtained by plundering them ; and his feeble and uncultivated 
 mind was incapable of perceiving that the riches of Calcutta, had 
 they been even greater than he imagined, would not compensate 
 him for what he must lose, if the European trade, of which Ben- 
 gal was the chief seat, should be driven by his violence to some 
 other quarter. Pretexts for a quarrel were readily found. The 
 English, in expectation of a war with France, had begun to fortify 
 their settlement without special permission from the Nabob, A 
 rich native, whom he longed to plunder, had taken refuge at Cal- 
 cutta, and had not been delivered up. On such grounds as these 
 Surajah Dowlah marched with a great army against Fort William. 
 
 The servants of the Company at Madras had been forced by 
 Dupleix to become statesmen and soldiers. Those in Bengal 
 were still mere traders, and were terrified and bewildered by the 
 approaching danger. The governor, who had heard much of 
 Surajah Dowlah's cruelty, was frightened out of his wits, jumped 
 into a boat and took refuge in the nearest ship. The military 
 commandant thought that he could not do better than follow so 
 good an example. The fort was taken after feeble resistance ; and 
 great numbers of the English fell into the hands of the conquerors. 
 
34 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 The Nabob seated himself with regal pomp in the principal hall 
 of the factory, and ordered Mr. Holvvell, the first in rank among 
 the prisoners, to be brought before him. His Highness talked 
 about the insolence of the English, and grumbled at the smallness 
 of the treasure which he had found ; but promised to spare their 
 lives, and retired to rest. 
 
 Then was committed that great crime, memorable for its sin- 
 gular atrocity, memorable for the terrible retribution by which it 
 was followed. The Enghsh captives were left at the mercy of the 
 guards, and the guards determined to secure them for the night in 
 the. prison of the garrison, a chamber known by the fearful name 
 of the Black Hole. Even for a single European malefactor, the 
 dungeon would, in such a climate, have been too close and narrow. 
 The space was only twenty feet square. The air-holes were small 
 and obstructed. It was the summer solstice, the season when the 
 fierce heat of Bengal can scarcely be rendered tolerable to natives 
 of England by lofty halls and by the constant waving of fans. 
 The number of the prisoners was one hundred and forty-six. 
 When they were ordered to enter the cell, they imagined the sol- 
 diers were joking ; and, being in high spirits on account of the 
 promise of the Nabob to spare their lives, they laughed and jested 
 at the absurdity of the notion. They soon discovered their mis- 
 take. They expostulated ; they entreated ; but in vain. The 
 guards threatened to cut down all who hesitated. The captives 
 were driven into the cell at the point of the sword, and the door 
 was instantly shut and locked upon them. 
 
 Nothing in history or fiction, not even the story which Ugolino ^ 
 told in the sea of everlasting ice, after he had wiped his bloody 
 lips on the scalp of his murderer, approaches the horrors which 
 were recounted by the few survivors of that night. They cried 
 for mercy. They strove to burst the door. Holvvell who, even in 
 that extremity, retained some presence of mind, offered large 
 bribes to the jailers. But the answer was that nothing could be 
 
 1 Ugolino : an Italian nobleman who was defeated by Archbishop Ruggieri in 
 the civil wars of the thirteenth century, cast into prison, and starved to death. Dante 
 represents Ugolino and Ruggieri frozen up together in a lake of ice in hell, and the 
 former devouring the head of the latter. 
 
LORD CIJVE. 35 
 
 done without the Nabob's orders, that the Nabob was asleep, and 
 that he would be angry if anybody woke him. Then the prison- 
 ers w^t mad with despair. They trampled each other down, 
 fought for the places at the windows, fought for the pittance of 
 water with which the cruel mercy of the murderers mocked their 
 agonies, raved, prayed, blasphemed, implored the guards to fire 
 among them. The jailers in the mean time held lights to the 
 bars, and shouted with laughter at the frantic struggles of their 
 victims. At length the tumult died away in low gaspings and 
 moanings. The day broke. The Nabob had slept off his debauch 
 and permitted the door to be opened. But it was some time be- 
 fore the soldiers could make a lane for the survivors, by piling up 
 on each side the heaps of corpses on which the burning climate 
 had already begun to do its loathsome work. When at length a 
 passage was made, twenty-three ghastly figures, such as their own 
 mothers would not have known, staggered one by one out of the 
 charnel-house. A pit was instantly dug. The dead bodies, a 
 hundred and twenty-three in number, were flung into it promis- 
 cuously and covered up. 
 
 But these things which, after the lapse of more than eighty 
 years, cannot be told or read without horror, awakened neither 
 remorse nor pity in the bosom of the savage Nabob. He inflicted 
 no punishment on the murderers. He showed no tenderness to 
 the survivors. Some of them indeed, from whom nothing was to 
 be got, were sufl"ered to depart; but those from whom it was 
 thought that anything could be extorted were treated with exe- 
 crable cruelty. Holwell, unable to walk, was carried before the 
 tyrant, who reproached him, threatened him, and sent him up the 
 country in irons, together with some other gentlemen who were 
 suspected of knowing more than they chose to tell about the 
 treasures of the Company. These persons, still bowed down by 
 the sufferings of that great agony, were lodged in miserable sheds, 
 and fed only with grain and water, till at length the intercessions 
 of the female relations of the Nabob procured their release. One 
 Englishwoman had survived that night. She was placed in the 
 harem of the Prince at Moorshedabad. 
 
36 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 Surajah Dowlah, in the mean time, sent letters to his nominal 
 sovereign at Delhi, describing the late conquest in the most pom- 
 pous language. He placed a garrison at Fort William, foiibade 
 Englishmen to dwell in the neighborhood, and directed that, in 
 memory of his great actions, Calcutta should thenceforward be 
 called Alinagore, that is to say, the Port of God. 
 
 In August the news of the fall of Calcutta reached Madras, 
 and excited the fiercest and bitterest resentment. The cry of 
 the whole settlement was for vengeance. Within forty-eight hours 
 after the arrival of the intelligence it was determined that an 
 expedition should be sent to the Hoogley, and that Clive should 
 be at the head of the land forces. The naval armament was 
 under the command of Admiral Watson. Nine hundred EngHsh 
 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 Lewis the Fifteenth or the Empress Maria 
 Theresa. In October the expedition sailed ; but it had to make 
 its way against adverse winds, and did not reach Bengal till 
 December. 
 
 The Nabob was revelling in fancied security at Moorshedabad. 
 He was so profoundly ignorant of the state of foreign countries 
 that he often used to say that there were not ten thousand men 
 in all Europe ; and it had never occurred to him as possible, that 
 the English would dare to invade his dominions. But, though 
 undisturbed by any fear of their military power, he began to miss 
 them greatly. His revenues fell off ; and his ministers succeeded 
 in making him understand that a ruler may sometimes find it 
 more profitable to protect traders in the open enjoyment of their 
 gains than to put them to the torture for the purpose of discover- 
 ing hidden chests of gold and jewels. He was already disposed 
 to permit the Company to resume its mercantile operations in 
 his country, when he received the news that an English armament 
 was in the Hoogley. He instantly ordered all his troops to assem- 
 ble at Moorshedabad, and marched towards Calcutta. 
 
 Clive had commenced operations with his usual vigor. He took 
 Budgebudge, routed the garrison of Fort William, recovered Cal- 
 
LORD CLIVE. 37 
 
 cutta, stormed and sacked Hoogley. The Nabob, already dis- 
 posed to make some concessions to the Enghsh, was confirmed in 
 his pacific disposition by these proofs of their power and spirit. 
 He accordingly made overtures to the chiefs of the invading 
 armament, and offered to restore the factory, and to give compen- 
 sation to those whom he had despoiled. 
 
 Clive's profession was war ; and he felt that there was something 
 discreditable in an accommodation with Surajah Dowlah. But 
 his power was limited. A committee, chiefly composed of servants 
 of the Company who had fled from Calcutta, had the principal 
 direction of affairs ; and these persons were eager to be restored 
 to their posts and compensated for their losses. The government 
 of Madras, apprised that war had commenced in Europe, and 
 apprehensive of an attack from the French, became impatient 
 for the return of the armament. The promises of the Nabob 
 were large, the chances of a contest doubtful ; and Clive consented 
 to treat, though he expressed his regret that things should not be 
 concluded in so glorious a manner as he could have wished. 
 
 With this negotiation commences a new chapter in the life of 
 Clive. Hitherto he had been merely a soldier carrying into effect, 
 with eminent ability and valor, the plans of others. Henceforth 
 he is to be chiefly regarded as a statesman ; and his military 
 movements are to be considered as subordinate to his political 
 designs. That in his new capacity he displayed great ability, and 
 obtained great success, is unquestionable. But it is also unques- 
 tionable that the transactions in which he now began to take a 
 part have left a stain on his moral character. 
 
 We can by no means agree with Sir John Malcom, who is obsti- 
 nately resolved to see nothing but honor and integrity in the con- 
 duct of his hero. But we can as httle agree with Mr. Mill, \vho 
 has gone so far as to say that Clive was a man " to whom decep- 
 tion, when it suited his purpose, never cost a pang." Clive seems 
 to us to have been constitutionally the very opposite of a knave, 
 bold even to temerity, sincere even to indiscretion, hearty in 
 friendship, open in enmity. Neither in his private life, nor in 
 those parts of his public life in which he had to do with his coun- 
 
38 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 trymen, do we find any signs of a propensity to cunning. On the 
 contrary, in all the disputes in which he was engaged as an Eng- 
 lishman against Englishmen, from his boxing- matches at school 
 to those stormy altercations at the India House and in Parliament 
 amidst which his later years were passed, his very faults were those 
 of a high and magnanimous spirit. The truth seems to have been 
 that he considered Oriental politics as a game in which nothing 
 was unfair. He knew that the standard of morality among the 
 natives of India differed widely from that established in England. 
 He knew that he had to deal with men destitute of what in 
 Europe is called honor, with men who would give any promise 
 without hesitation, and break any promise without shame, with 
 men who would unscrupulously employ corruption, perjury, for- 
 gery, to compass their ends. His letters show that the great 
 difference between Asiatic and European morality was constantly 
 in his thoughts. He seems to have imagined, most erroneously in 
 our opinion, that he could effect nothing against such adversaries, 
 if he was content to be bound by ties from which they were free, 
 if he went on telling truth, and hearing none, if he fulfilled, to his 
 own hurt, all his engagements with confederates who never kept 
 an engagement that was not to their advantage. Accordingly this 
 man, in the other parts of his life an honorable English gentleman 
 and a soldier, was no sooner matched against an Indian intriguer, 
 than he became himself an Indian intriguer, and descended, with- 
 out scruple, to falsehood, to hypocritical caresses, to the substitu- 
 tion of documents, and to the counterfeiting of hands. 
 
 The negotiations between the English and the Nabob were 
 carried on chiefly by two agents, Mr. Watts, a servant of the 
 Com^jan)^, and a Bengalee of the name of Omichund. This Omi- 
 chund had been one of the wealthiest native merchants resident 
 at Calcutta, and had sustained great losses in consequence of the 
 Nabob's expedition against that place. In the course of his com- 
 mercial transactions, he had seen much of the English, and was 
 peculiarly qualified to serve as a medium of communication be- 
 tween them and a native court. He possessed great influence 
 with his own race, and had in large measure the Hindoo talents, 
 
LORD CLIVE. 39 
 
 quick observation, tact, dexterity, perseverance, and the Hitidoo 
 vices, servility, greediness, and treachery. 
 
 The Nabob behaved with all the faithlessness of an Indian 
 statesman, and with all the levity of a boy whose mind had been 
 enfeebled by power and self-indulgence. He promised, retracted, 
 hesitated, evaded. At one time he advanced with his army in 
 a threatening manner towards Calcutta ; but when he saw the 
 resolute front which the English presented, he fell back in alarm, 
 and consented to make peace with them on their own terms. The 
 treaty was no sooner concluded than he formed new designs 
 against them. He intrigued with the French authorities at Chan- 
 dernagore. He invited Bussy to march from the Deccan to the 
 Hoogley, and to drive the English out of Bengal. All this was 
 well known to Clive and Watson. They determined accordingly 
 to strike a decisive blow, and to attack Chandernagore, before the 
 force there could be strengthened by new arrivals, either from the 
 south of India, or from Europe. Watson directed the expedition 
 by water, Clive by land. The success of the combined movements 
 was rapid and complete. The fort, the garrison, the artillery, the 
 military stores, all fell into the hands of the English. Nearly five 
 hundred European troops were among the prisoners. 
 
 The Nabob had feared and hated the English, even while he 
 was still able to oppose to them their French rivals. The French 
 were now vanquished ; and he began to regard the Enghsh with 
 still greater fear and still greater hatred. His weak and unprinci- 
 pled mind oscillated between serviUty and insolence. One day he 
 sent a large sum to Calcutta, as part of the compensation due for 
 the wrongs which he had committed. The next day he sent a 
 present of jewels to Bussy, exhorting that distinguished officer to 
 hasten to protect Bengal '' against Clive, the daring in war, on 
 whom," says his Highness, " may all bad fortune attend." He 
 ordered his army to march against the English. He counter- 
 manded his orders. He tore Clive's letters. He then sent 
 answers in the most florid language of compliment. He ordered 
 Watts out of his presence and threatened to impale him. He 
 again sent for Watts, and begged pardon for the insult. In the 
 
40 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 m 
 
 mean time, his wretched maladministration, his folly, his dissolute 
 manners, and his love of the lowest company, had disgusted all 
 classes of his subjects, soldiers, traders, civil functionaries, the 
 proud and ostentatious Mohammedans, the timid, supple, parsi- 
 monious Hindoos. A formidable confederacy was formed against 
 him, in which were included RoyduUub, the minister of finance, 
 Meer Jafher, the principal commander of the troops, and Jugget 
 Seit, the richest banker in India. The plot was confided to the 
 English agents, and a communication was opened between the 
 malcontents at Moorshedabad and the committee at Calcutta. 
 
 In the committee there was much hesitation ; but Clive's voice 
 was given in favor of the conspirators, and his vigor and firmness 
 bore down all opposition. It was determined that the English 
 should lend their powerful assistance to depose Surajah Dowlah, 
 and to place Meer Jaffier on the throne of Bengal. In return, 
 Meer Jaffier promised ample compensation to the Company and 
 its servants, and a liberal donative to the army, the navy, and the 
 committee. The odious vices of Surajah Dowlah, the wrongs 
 which the English had suffered at his hands, the dangers to which 
 our trade must have been exposed, had he continued to reign, 
 appear to us fully to justify the resolution of deposing him. But 
 nothing can justify the dissimulation which Clive stooped to prac- 
 tise. He wrote to Surajah Dowlah in terms so affectionate that 
 they for a time lulled that weak prince into perfect security. The 
 same courier who carried this " soothing letter," as Clive calls it, 
 to the Nabob, carried to Mr. Watts a letter in the following terms : 
 "Tell Meer Jaffier to fear nothing. I will join him with five 
 thousand men who never turned their backs. Assure him I will 
 march night and day to his assistance, and stand by him as long 
 as I have a man left." 
 
 It was impossible that a plot which had so many ramifications 
 should long remain entirely concealed. Enough reached the ears 
 of the Nabob to arouse his suspicions. But he was soon quieted 
 by the fictions and artifices which the inventive genius of Omichund 
 produced with miraculous readiness. All was going well; the 
 plot was nearly ripe ; when Clive learned that Omichund was 
 
LORD CLIVE. 41 
 
 likely to play false. The artful Bengalee had been promised a 
 liberal compensation for all that he had lost at Calcutta. But this 
 .would not satisfy him. His services had been great. He held 
 the thread of the whole intrigue. By one word breathed in the 
 ear of Surajah Dowlah, he could undo all that he had done. The 
 lives of Watts, of Meer Jaffier, of all the conspirators, were at his 
 mercy ; and he determined to take advantage of his situation and 
 to make his own terms. He demanded three hundred thousand 
 pounds sterling as the price of his secrecy and of his assistance. 
 The committee, incensed by the treachery and appalled by the 
 danger, knew not what course to take. But Clive was more than 
 Omichund's match in Omichund's own arts. The man, he said, 
 was a villain. Any artifice which would defeat such knavery was 
 justifiable. The best course would be to promise what was asked. 
 Omichund would soon be at their mercy ; and then they might 
 punish him by withholding from him, not only the bribe which 
 he now demanded, but also the compensation which all the other 
 sufferers of Calcutta were to receive. 
 
 His advice was taken. But how was the wary and sagacious 
 Hindoo to be deceived ? He had demanded that an article 
 touching his claims should be inserted in the treaty between Meer 
 Jaffier and the English, and he would not be satisfied unless he 
 saw it with his own eyes. Clive had an expedient ready. Two 
 treaties were drawn up, one on white paper, the other on red, the 
 former real, the latter fictitious. In the former Omichund's name 
 was not mentioned ; the latter, which was to be shown to him, 
 contained a stipulation in his favor. 
 
 But another difficulty arose. Admiral Watson had scruples 
 against signing the red treaty. Omichund's vigilance and acute- 
 ness were such that the absence of so important a name would 
 probably awaken suspicions. But Clive was not a man to do any- 
 thing by halves. We almost blush to write it. He forged Admi- 
 ral Watson's name. 
 
 All was now ready for action. Mr. Watts fled secretly from 
 Moorshedabad. Clive put his troops in motion, and wrote to the 
 Nabob in a tone very different from that of his previous letters. 
 
42 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 He set forth all the wrongs which the British had suffered, offered 
 to submit the points in dispute to the arbitration of Meer Jaffier, 
 and concluded by announcing that, as the rains were about to set 
 in, he and his men would do themselves the honor of waiting o'n 
 his Highness for an answer. 
 
 Surajah Dowlah instantly assembled his whole force, and marched 
 to encounter the EngUsh. It had been agreed that Meer Jaffier 
 should separate himself from the Nabob, and carry over his 
 division to Clive. But, as the decisive moment approached, the 
 fears of the conspirator overpowered his ambition. Clive had 
 advanced to Cossimbuzar ; the Nabob lay with a mighty power a 
 few miles off at Plassey ; and still Meer Jafifier delayed to fulfil his 
 engagements, and returned evasive answers to the earnest remon- 
 strances of the English general. 
 
 Clive was in a painfully anxious situation. He could place no 
 confidence in the sincerity or in the courage of his confederate : 
 and whatever confidence he might place in his own military talents, 
 and in the valor and discipline of his troops, it was no light thing 
 to engage an army twenty times as numerous as his own. Before 
 him lay a river over which it was easy to advance, but over which, 
 if things went ill, not one of his little band would ever return. 
 On this occasion, for the first and for the last time, his dauntless 
 spirit, during a few hours, shrank from the fearful responsibility of 
 making a decision. He called a council of war. The majority 
 pronounced against fighting ; and Clive declared his concurrence 
 with the majority. Long afterwards, he said that he had neve 
 called but one council of war, and that, if he had taken the advice 
 of that council, the British would never have been masters of 
 Bengal. But scarcely had the meeting broke up when he was 
 himself again. He retired alone under the shade of some trees, 
 and passed near an hour there in thought. He came back deter- 
 mined to put everything to the hazard, and gave orders that all 
 should be in readiness for passing the river on the morrow. 
 
 The river was passed ; and, at the close of a toilsome day's 
 march, the army, long after sunset, took up its quarters in a grove 
 of mango trees near Plassey, within a mile of the enemy. Clive^ 
 
 4 
 
LORD CLIVE. 43 
 
 was unable to sleep ; he heard through the whole night the sound 
 of drums and cymbals from the vast camp of the Nabob. It is 
 not strange that even his stout heart should now and then have 
 sunk, when he reflected against what odds, and for what a prize, 
 he was in a few hours to contend. ^ 
 
 Nor was the rest of Surajah Dowlah more peaceful. His mind, 
 at once weak and stormy, was distracted by wild and horrible 
 apprehensions. Appalled by the greatness and nearness of the 
 crisis, distrusting his captains, dreading every one who approached 
 him, dreading to be left alone, he sat gloomily in his tent, haunted, 
 a Greek poet would have said, by the furies of those who had 
 cursed him with their last breath in the Black Hole. 
 
 The day broke, the day which was to decide the fate of India. 
 At sunrise, the army of the Nabob, pouring through many open- 
 ings of the camp, began to move towards the grove where the 
 English lay. Forty thousand infantry, armed with firelocks, pikes, 
 swords, bows and arrows, covered the plain. They were accom- 
 panied by fifty pieces of ordnance of the largest size, each tugged 
 by a long team of white oxen, and each pushed on from behind 
 by an elephant. Some smaller guns, under the direction of a few 
 French auxiUaries, were perhaps more formidable. The cavalry 
 were fifteen thousand, drawn, not from the effeminate population 
 of Bengal, but from the bolder race which .inhabits the northern 
 provinces ; and the practised eye of Clive could perceive that the 
 men and the horses were more powerful than those of the Carnatic. 
 The force which he had to oppose to this great multitude con- 
 sisted of only three thousand men. But of these nearly a thou- 
 sand were Enghsh ; and all were led by English officers, and 
 trained in the English discipline. Conspicuous in the ranks of 
 the little army were the men of the Thirty-Ninth Regiment, which 
 still bears on its colors, amidst many honorable additions won 
 under Wellington in Spain and Gascony, the name of Plassey, and 
 the proud motto. Primus in Indis. 
 
 The battle commenced with a cannonade in which the artillery 
 of the Nabob did scarcely any execution, while the few field- 
 pieces of the Enghsh produced great effect. Several of the most 
 
44 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 distinguished officers in Surajah Dovvlah's service fell. Disorder 
 began to spread through his ranks. His own terror increased 
 every moment. One of the conspirators urged on him the expedi- 
 ency of retreating. The insidious advice, agreeing as it did with 
 what his own terrors suggested, was readily received. He ordered 
 his army to fall back, and this order decided his fate. Clive 
 snatched the moment, and ordered his troops to advance. The 
 confused and dispirited multitude gave way before the onset of 
 disciphned valor. No mob attacked by regular soldiers was 
 ever more completely routed. The little band of Frenchmen, 
 who alone ventured to confront the English, were swept down the 
 stream of fugitives. In an hour the forces of Surajah Dowlah 
 were dispersed, never to reassemble. Only five hundred of the 
 vanquished were slain. But their camp, their guns, their baggage, 
 innumerable wagons, innumerable cattle, remained in the power 
 of the conquerors. With the loss of twenty-two soldiers killed 
 and fifty wounded, Clive had scattered an army of near sixty 
 thousand men, and subdued an empire larger and more populous 
 than Great Britain.^ 
 
 Meer Jaffier had given no assistance to the English during the 
 
 1 An empire larger tlian Great Britain : the battle of Plassey (1757) has been 
 rightly called one of " the decisive battles of the world," since it resulted in the per- 
 manent establishment of British dominion in India by the cession of Bengal, Behar, 
 and Orissa to the English in 1765, — a district comprising about 150,000 square 
 miles. To-day the English practically possess the entire peninsula, having an area 
 of almost a million and a half square miles — or equal to that of nearly half the 
 United States, exclusive of Alaska — and a population more than one-fifth that 
 of the globe. 
 
 The acquisition of this enormous territory may be conveniently divided into 
 three periods: 1. That of Lord Clive, who (1748-1765) may be said to have ex- 
 tended the British power, directly or indirectly, over the greater part of Eastern 
 India from Calcutta to Madras {see map, showing the acquisition of Bengal, Behar, 
 and Orissa, in 1765) ; 2. That of Lord Wellesley and Lord Hastings, who (1798- 
 1820) gained the central part of the country and the west ; 3. That of Lord Dal- 
 housie, who (1848-1856) consolidated these vast conquests, and extended the 
 British frontiers on the northwest to the river Indus. (See on these points Pro- 
 fessor Seeley's Lectures on the Expansion of England, Course II., Lecture' VI.) 
 
 Clive's conquest — Bengal —still remains the keystone of the whole empire, and 
 in the opinion of General Chesney, " it is even yet the one part of India which 
 would be worth retaining were the rest to go." 
 
LORD CLIVE. 45 
 
 action. But as soon as he saw that the fate of the day was de- 
 cided, he drew off his division of the army, and, when the battle 
 was over, sent his congratulations to his ally. The next morning 
 he repaired to the English quarters, not a little uneasy as to the 
 reception which awaited him there. He gave evident signs of 
 alarm when a guard was drawn out to receive him with the honors 
 due to his rank. But his apprehensions were speedily removed. 
 Clive came forward to meet him, embraced him, saluted him as 
 Nabob of the three great provinces of Bengal, Behar, and Orissa, 
 listened graciously to his apologies, and advised him to march 
 without delay to Moorshedabad. 
 
 Surajah Dowlah had fled from the field of battle with all the 
 speed with which a fleet camel could carry, him, and arrived at 
 Moorshedabad in little more than twenty-four hours. There he 
 called his councillors round him. The wisest advised him to put 
 himself into the hands of the English, from whom he had nothing 
 worse to fear than deposition and confinement. But he attributed 
 this suggestion to treachery. Others urged him to try the chance 
 of war again. He approved the advice, and issued orders accord- 
 ingly. But he wanted spirit to adhere even during one day to 
 a manly resolution. He learned that Meer Jaffier had arrived ; 
 and his terrors became insupportable. Disguised in a mean dress, 
 with a casket of jewels in his hand, he let himself down at night 
 from a window of his palace, and, accompanied by only two 
 attendants, embarked on the river for Patna. 
 
 In a few days Clive arrived at Moorshedabad, escorted by two 
 hundred English soldiers and three hundred sepoys. For his 
 residence had been assigned a palace which was surrounded by a 
 garden so spacious that all the troops who accompanied him could 
 conveniently encamp within it. The ceremony of the installation 
 of Meer Jaffier was instantly performed. Clive led the new 
 Nabob to the seat of honor, placed him on it, presented to him, 
 after the immemorial fashion of the East, an offering of gold, and 
 then, turning to the natives who filled the hall, congratulated them 
 on the good fortune which had freed them from a tyrant. He 
 was compelled on this occasion to use the services of an interpre- 
 
46 ■ LORD CLIVE. 
 
 ter ; for it is remarkable that, long as he resided in India, inti- 
 mately acquainted as he was with Indian politics and with the 
 Indian character, and adored as he was by his Indian soldiery, he 
 never learned to express himself with facility in any Indian lan- 
 guage. He is said indeed to have been sometimes under the 
 necessity of employing, in his intercourse with natives of India, 
 the smattering of Portuguese which he had acquired when a lad, in 
 Brazil. 
 
 The new sovereign was now called upon to fulfil the engage- 
 ments into which he had entered with his allies. A conference 
 was held at the house of Jugget Seit, the great banker, for the 
 purpose of making the necessary arrangements. Omichund came 
 thither, fully believing himself to stand high in the favor of Clive, 
 who, with dissimulation surpassing even the dissimulation of Ben- 
 gal, had up to that day treated him with undiminished kindness. 
 The white treaty was produced and read. Clive then turned to 
 Mr. Scrafton, one of the servants of the Company, and said in 
 English, " It is now time to undeceive Omichund." " Omi- 
 chund," said Mr. Scrafton in Hindostanee, "the red treaty is a 
 trick. You are to have nothing." Omichund fell back insensible 
 into the arms of his attendants. He revived ; but his mind was 
 irreparably ruined. Clive, who, though little troubled by scruples 
 of conscience in his dealings with Indian politicians, was not in- 
 human, seems to have been touched. He saw Omichund a few 
 days later, spoke to him kindly, advised him to make a pilgrimage 
 to one of the great temples of India, in the hope that change of 
 scene might restore his health, and was even disposed, notwith- 
 standing all that had passed, again to employ him in the public 
 service. But from the moment of that sudden shock, the unhappy 
 man sank gradually into idiocy. He who had formerly been dis- 
 tinguished for the strength of his understanding and the simplicity 
 of his habits, now squandered the remains of his fortune on 
 childish trinkets, and loved to exhibit himself dressed in rich gar- 
 ments, and hung with precious stones. In this abject state he 
 languished a few months, and then died. 
 
 We should not think it necessary to offer any remarks for the 
 
LORD CLIVE. 47 
 
 purpose of directing the judgment of our readers, with respect to 
 this transaction, had not Sir John Malcolm undertaken to defend 
 it in all its parts. He regrets, indeed, that it was necessary to 
 employ means so liable to abuse as forgery ; but he will not admit 
 that any blame attaches to those who deceived the deceiver. He 
 thinks that the English were not bound to keep faith with one 
 who kept no faith with them, and that, if they had fulfilled their 
 engagements with the wily Bengalee, so signal an example of suc- 
 cessful treason would have produced a crowd of imitators. Now, 
 we will not discuss this point on any rigid principles of moraUty. 
 Indeed, it is quite unnecessary to do so ; for, looking at the ques- 
 tion as a question of expediency ^ in the lowest sense of the word, 
 and using no arguments but such as Machiavelli- might have em- 
 ployed in his conferences with Borgia, we are convinced that 
 Clive was altogether in the wrong, and that he committed, not 
 merely a crime, but a blunder. That honesty is the best policy, 
 is a maxim which we firmly believe to be generally correct, even 
 with respect to the temporal interests of individuals ; but with 
 respect to societies, the rule is subject to still fewer exceptions, 
 and that for this reason, that the life of societies is longer than the 
 life of individuals. It is possible to mention men who have owed 
 great worldly prosperity to breaches of private faith ; but we 
 doubt whether it be possible to mention a state which has on the 
 whole been a gainer by a breach of public faith. The entire his- 
 tory of British India is an illustration of the great truth, that it is 
 not prudent to oppose perfidy to perfidy, and that the most effi- 
 cient weapon with which men can encounter falsehood is truth. 
 During a long course of years, the English rulers in India, sur- 
 rounded by alhes and enemies whom no engagement could bind, 
 have generally acted with sincerity and uprightness ; and the 
 
 1 A question of expediency : Macaulay was fond of arguing questions on the 
 lowest and most matter-of-fact motives ; implying thus that if his views were right 
 on such grounds, of course they were right on higher grounds. An instance of this 
 may be seen in his speech on the Copyright Bill. [ J. F. G.] 
 
 2 Machiavelli : an Italian statesman, whose reputation for the advocacy of 
 imscrupulous political methods has made him the type of expediency as opposed 
 to abstract right. 
 
48 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 event has proved that smcerity and uprightness are wisdom. Eng- 
 lish valor and English intelligence have done less to extend and 
 to preserve our Oriental empire than Enghsh veracity. All that 
 we could have gained by imitating the doublings, the evasions, 
 the fictions, the perjuries which have been employed against us is 
 as nothing, when compared with what we have gained by being 
 the one power in India on whose word reliance can be placed. 
 No oath which superstition can devise, no hostage however 
 precious, inspires a hundredth part of the confidence which is 
 produced by the " yea, yea/' and " nay, nay," -^ of a British envoy. 
 No fastness, however strong by art or nature, gives to its inmates 
 a security like that enjoyed by the chief who, passing through the 
 territories of powerful and deadly enemies, is armed with the 
 British guarantee. The mightiest princes of the East can scarcely, 
 by the offer of enormous usury, draw forth any portion of the 
 wealth which is concealed under the hearths of their subjects. 
 The British Government offers little more than four per cent. ; 
 and avarice hastens to bring forth tens of millions of rupees from 
 its most secret repositories. A hostile monarch may promise 
 mountains of gold to our sepoys, on condition that they will 
 desert the standard of the Company. The Company promises 
 only a moderate pension after a long service. But every sepoy 
 knows that the promise of the Company will be kept : he knows 
 that if he lives a hundred years his rice and salt are as secure as 
 the salary of the Governor-General : and he knows that there is 
 not another state in India which would not, in spite of the most 
 solemn vows, leave him to die of hunger in a ditch as soon as he 
 had ceased to be useful. The greatest advantage which a govern- 
 ment can possess is to be the one trustworthy government in the 
 midst of governments which nobody can trust. This advantage 
 we enjoy in Asia. Had we acted during the last two generations 
 on the principles which Sir John Malcolm appears to have consid- 
 ered as sound, had we as often as we had to deal with people like 
 Omichund, retaliated by lying and forging, and breaking faith, 
 
 1 " Yea, yea" and "nay, nay": Macaulay here employs Biblical idiom 
 again ; see Matthew v. 37, and note, p. 3. [J. F. G.] 
 
LORD CLIVE. 49 
 
 after their fashion, it is our firm behef that no courage or capacity 
 could have upheld our empire. 
 
 Sir John Malcolm admits that Clive's breach of faith could be 
 justified only by the strongest necessity. As we think that 
 breach of faith not only unnecessary, but most inexpedient, we 
 need hardly say that we altogether condemn it. 
 
 Omichund was not the only victim of the revolution. Surajah 
 Dowlah was taken a few days after his flight, and was brought 
 before Meer Jaffier. There he flung himself on the ground in 
 convulsions of fear, and with tears and loud cries implored the 
 mercy which he had never shown. Meer Jaffier hesitated ; but 
 his son Meeran, a youth of seventeen, who in feebleness of brain 
 and savageness of nature greatly resembled the wretched captive, 
 was implacable. Surajah Dowlah was led into a secret chamber, 
 to which in a short time the ministers of death were sent. In 
 this act the English bore no part ; and Meer Jaffier understood so 
 much of their feelings, that he thought it necessary to apologize 
 to them for having avenged them on their most malignant enemy. 
 
 The shower of wealth now fell copiously on the Company and 
 its servants. A sum of eight hundred thousand pounds sterling, 
 in coined silver, was sent down the river from Moorshedabad to 
 Fort William. The fleet which conveyed this treasure consisted 
 of more than a hundred boats, and performed its triumphal voy- 
 age with flags flying and music playing. Calcutta, which a few 
 months before had been desolate, was now more prosperous than 
 ever. Trade revived ; and the signs of affluence appeared in 
 every English house. As to Clive, there was no limit to his 
 acquisitions but his own moderation. The treasury of Bengal 
 was thrown open to him. There were piled up, after the usage 
 of Indian princes, immense masses of coin, among which might 
 not seldom be detected the florins and byzants with which, be- 
 fore any European ship had turned the Cape of Good Hope, 
 the Venetians purchased the stuffs and spices of -the East, Clive 
 walked between heaps of gold and silver, crowned with rubies 
 and diamonds, and was at liberty to help himself. He accepted 
 between two and three hundred thousand pounds. 
 
so LORD CLIVE. 
 
 The pecuniary transactions between Meer Jafifier and Clive 
 were sixteen years later condemned by the pubHc voice, and 
 severely criticised in Parliament. They are vehemently defended 
 by Sir John Malcolm. The accusers of the victorious general 
 represented his gains as the wages of corruption, or as plunder 
 extorted at the point of the sword from a helpless ally. The biog- 
 rapher, on the other hand, considers these great acquisitions as 
 free gifts, honorable alike to the donor and to the receiver, and 
 compares them to the rewards bestowed by foreign powers on 
 Marlborough, on Nelson, and on Wellington. It had always, he 
 says, been customary in the East to give and receive presents ; 
 and there was, as yet, no act of Parliament positively prohibiting 
 English functionaries in India from profiting by this Asiatic usage. 
 This reasoning, we own, does not quite satisfy us. We do not sus- 
 pect Clive of selling the interests of his employers or his country ; 
 but we cannot acquit him of having done what, if not in itself evil, 
 was yet of evil example. Nothing is more clear than that a gen- 
 eral ought to be the servant of his own government, and of no 
 other. It follows that whatever rewards he receives for his ser- 
 vices ought to be given either by his own government, or with the 
 full knowledge and approbation of his own government. This 
 rule ought to be strictly maintained even with respect to the 
 merest bauble, with respect to a cross, a medal, or a yard of 
 colored ribbon. But how can any government be well served, if 
 those who command its forces are at liberty, without its permis- 
 sion, without its privity, to accept princely fortunes from its allies ? 
 It is idle to say that there was then no Act of Parliament prohibit- 
 ing the practice of taking presents from Asiatic sovereigns. It is 
 not on the Act which was passed at a later period for the purpose 
 of preventing any such taking presents, but on grounds which 
 were valid before the Act was passed, on grounds of common law 
 and common sense, that we arraign the conduct of Clive. There 
 is no Act that we- know of, prohibiting the Secretary of State for 
 Foreign Affairs from being in the pay af continental powers, but 
 it is not the less true that a Secretary who should receive a secret 
 pension from France would grossly violate his duty, and would 
 
LORD CLIVE. 51 
 
 deserve severe punishment. Sir John Malcohxi compares the 
 conduct of CHve with that of the Duke of Welhngton. Suppose, 
 — and we beg pardon for putting such a supposition even for the 
 sake of argument, — that the Duke of Welhngton had, after the 
 campaign of 1815, and while he commanded the army of occupa- 
 tion in France, privately accepted two hundred thousand pounds 
 from Louis the Eighteenth, as a mark of gratitude for the great 
 services which his Grace had rendered to the House of Bourbon ; 
 what would be thought of such a transaction? Yet the statute- 
 book no more forbids the taking of presents in Europe now than 
 it forbade the taking of presents in Asia then. 
 
 At the same time, it must be admitted that in Clive's case, 
 there were many extenuating circumstances. He considered him- 
 self as the general, not of the Crown, but of the Company. The 
 Company had, by implication at least, authorized its agents to 
 enrich themselves by means of the hberality of the native princes, 
 and by other means still more objectionable. It was hardly to be 
 expected that the servant should entertain stricter notions of his 
 duty than were entertained by his masters. Though Chve did 
 not distinctly acquaint his employers with what had taken place 
 and request their sanction, he did not, on the other hand, by 
 studied concealment, show that he was conscious of having done 
 wrong. On the contrary, he avowed with the greatest openness 
 that the Nabob's bounty had raised him to affluence. Lastly, 
 though we think that he ought not in such a way to have taken 
 anything, we must admit that he deserves praise for having taken 
 so little. He accepted twenty lacs of rupees. It would have cost 
 him only a word to make the twenty forty. It was a very easy 
 exercise of virtue to declaim in England against Clive's rapacity ; 
 but not one in a hundred of his a;ccusers would have shown so 
 much self-command in the treasury of Moorshedabad. 
 
 Meer Jafifier could be upheld on the throne only by the hand 
 which had placed him upon it. He was not, indeed, a mere boy ; 
 nor had he been so unfortunate as to be born in the purple. He 
 was not therefore quite so imbecile or quite so depraved as his 
 predecessor had been. But he had none of the talents or virtues 
 
52 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 which his post required ; and his son and heir, Meeran, was another 
 Surajah Dowlah. Tlie recent revolution had unsettled the minds 
 of men. Many chiefs were in open insurrection against the new 
 Nabob. The viceroy of the rich and powerful province of Oude, 
 who, like the other viceroys of the Mogul, was now in truth an 
 independent sovereign, menaced Bengal with invasion. Nothing 
 but the talents and authority of Clive could support the tottering 
 government. While things were in this state a ship arrived with 
 despatches which had been written at the India House before the 
 news of the battle of Plassey had reached London. The Directors 
 had determined to place the English settlements in Bengal under 
 a government constituted in the most cumbrous and absurd man- 
 ner ; and, to make the matter worse, no place in the arrangement 
 was assigned to Chve. The persons who were selected to form 
 this new government, greatly to their honor, took on themselves 
 the responsibility of disobeying these preposterous orders, and 
 invited Clive to exercise the supreme authority. He consented ; 
 and it soon appeared that the servants of the Company had only 
 anticipated the wishes of their employers. The Directors, on 
 receiving news of Clive's brilUant success, instantly appointed him 
 governor of their possessions in Bengal, with the highest marks of 
 gratitude and esteem. His power was now boundless, and far 
 surpassed even that which Dupleix had attained in the south of 
 India. Meer Jaffier regarded him with slavish awe. On one 
 occasion, the Nabob spoke with severity to a native chief of high 
 rank, whose followers had been engaged in a brawl with some of 
 the Company's sepoys. " Are you yet to learn," he said, " who 
 that Colonel Clive is, and in what station God has placed him?" 
 The chief, who, as a famous jester and an old friend of Meer 
 Jafifier, could venture to take liberties, answered, " I affront the 
 Colonel ! I, who never get up in the morning without making 
 three low bows to his jackass ! " This was hardly an exaggera- 
 tion. Europeans and natives were alike at Clive's feet. The 
 English regarded him as the only man who could force Meer 
 Jaffier to keep his engagements with them. Meer Jafifier regarded 
 him as the only man who could protect the new dynasty against 
 turbulent subjects and encroaching neighbors. 
 
LORD CLIVE. 53 
 
 It is but justice to say that Clive used his power ably and vigor- 
 ously for the advantage of his country. He sent forth an expedi- 
 tion against the tract lying to the north of the Carnatic. In this 
 tract the French still had the ascendency ; and it was important 
 to dislodge them. The conduct of the enterprise was intrusted to 
 an officer of the name of Forde, who was then little known, but 
 in whom the keen eye of the governor had detected mihtary tal- 
 ents of a high order. The success of the expedition was rapid and 
 splendid. 
 
 While a considerable part of the army of Bengal was thus 
 engaged at a distance, a new and formidable danger menaced the 
 western frontier. The Great Mogul was a prisoner at Delhi in the 
 hands of a subject. His eldest son, named Shah Alum, destined 
 to be, during many years, the sport of adverse fortune, and to be 
 a tool in the hands, first of the Mahrattas, and then of the Eng- 
 lish, had fled from the palace of his father. His birth was still 
 revered in India. Some powerful princes, the Nabob of Oude in 
 particular, were inclined to favor him. Shah Alum found it easy 
 to draw to his standard great numbers of the military adventurers 
 with whom every part of the country swarmed. An army of forty 
 thousand men, of various races and religions, Mahrattas, Rohillas, 
 Jauts, and Afghans, was speedily assembled round him ; and he 
 formed the design of overthrowing the upstart whom the English 
 had elevated to a throne, and of estabhshing his own authority 
 throughout Bengal, Orissa, and Behar. 
 
 Meer Jaffier's terror was extreme ; and the only expedient 
 which occurred to him was to purchase, by the payment of a 
 large sum of money, an accommodation with Shah Alum. This 
 expedient had been repeatedly employed by those who, before 
 him, had ruled the rich and unwarlike provinces near the mouth 
 of the Ganges. But Clive treated the suggestion with a scorn 
 worthy of his strong sense and dauntless courage. '' If you do 
 this," he wrote, " you will have the Nabob of Oude, the Mahrattas, 
 and many more, come from all parts of the confines of your coun- 
 try, who will bully you out of money till you have none left in your 
 treasury. I beg your Excellency will rely on the fidelity of the 
 
54 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 English, and of those troops which are attached to you." He 
 wrote in a similar strain to the governor of Patna, a brave native 
 soldier whom he highly esteemed. " Come to no terms ; defend 
 your city to the last. Rest assured that the English are stanch 
 and firm friends, and that they never desert a cause in which they 
 have once taken a part." 
 
 He kept his word. Shah Alum had invested Patna, and was on 
 the point of proceeding to storm, when he learned that the Col- 
 onel was advancing by forced marches. The whole army which 
 was approaching consisted only of four hundred and fifty Euro- 
 peans and two thousand five hundred sepoys. But Clive and his 
 Englishmen were now objects of dread over all the East. As 
 soon as his advanced guard appeared, the besiegers fled before 
 him. A few French adventurers who were about the person of 
 the prince advised him to try the chance of battle ; but in vain. 
 In a few days this great army, which had been regarded with so 
 much uneasiness by the court of Moorshedabad, melted away 
 before the mere terror of the British name. 
 
 The conqueror returned in triumph to Fort WilUam, The joy 
 of Meer Jaffier was as unbounded as his fears had been, and led 
 him to bestow on his preserver a princely token of gratitude. 
 The quit-rent which the East India Company were bound to pay 
 to the Nabob for the extensive lands held by them to the south 
 of Calcutta amounted to near thirty thousand pounds sterling a 
 year. The whole of this splendid estate, sufficient to support 
 with dignity the highest rank of the British peerage, was now 
 conferred on Clive for life. 
 
 This present we think Clive was justified in accepting. It was 
 a present which, from its very nature, could be no secret. In 
 fact, the Company itself was his tenant, and, by its acquiescence, 
 signified its approbation of Meer Jaffier's grant. 
 
 But the gratitude of Meer Jaffier did not last long. He had for 
 some time felt that the powerful ally who had set him up might 
 pull him down, and had been looking round for support against 
 the formidable strength by which he had himself been hitherto 
 supported. He knew that it would be impossible to find among 
 
LORD CLIVE. ■ 55 
 
 the natives of India any force which would look the Colonel's 
 little army in the face. The French power in Bengal was extinct. 
 But the fame of the Dutch had anciently been great in the Eastern 
 seas ; and it was not yet distinctly known in Asia how much the 
 power of Holland had declined in Europe. Secret communica- 
 tions passed between the court of Moorshedabad and the Dutch 
 factory at Chinsurah ; and urgent letters were sent from Chinsurah, 
 exhorting the government of Batavia to fit out an expedition which 
 might balance the power of the English in Bengal. The authori- 
 ties of Batavia, eager to extend the influence of their country, and 
 still more eager to obtain for themselves a share of the wealth 
 which had recently raised so many English adventurers to opu- 
 lence, equipped a powerful armament. Seven large ships from 
 Java arrived unexpectedly in the Hoogley. The military force on 
 board amounted to fifteen hundred men, of whom about one-half 
 were Europeans. The enterprise was well timed. Clive had sent 
 such large detachments to oppose the French in the Carnatic that 
 his army was now inferior in number to. that of the Dutch. He 
 knew that Meer Jaffier secretly favored the invaders. He knew 
 that he took on himself a serious responsibility if he attacked the 
 forces of a friendly power ; that the English ministers could not 
 wish to see a war with Holland added to that in which they were 
 already engaged with France ; that they might disavow his acts ; 
 that they might punish him. He had recently remitted a great 
 part of his fortune to Europe, through the Dutch East India 
 Company ; and he had therefore a strong interest in avoiding any 
 quarrel. But he was satisfied that, if he suffered the Batavian 
 armament to pass up the river and to join the garrison of Chin- 
 surah, Meer Jaffier would throw himself into the arms of these 
 new allies, and that the English ascendency in Bengal would be 
 exposed to most serious danger. He took his resolution with 
 characteristic boldness, and was most ably seconded by his offi- 
 cers, particularly by Colonel Forde, to whom the most important 
 part of the operations was intrusted. The Dutch attempted to 
 force a passage. The Enghsh encountered them both by land and 
 water. -On both elements the enemy had a great superiority of 
 
56 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 force. On both they were signally defeated. Their ships were 
 taken. Their troops were put to a total rout. Almost all the 
 European soldiers, who constituted the main strength of the invad- 
 ing army, were killed or taken. The conquerors sat down before 
 Chinsurah ; and the chiefs of that settlement, now thoroughly 
 humbled, consented to the terms which Clive dictated. They 
 engaged to build no fortifications, and to raise no troops beyond a 
 small force necessary for the police of their factories ; and it was 
 distinctly provided that any violation of these covenants should be 
 punished with instant expulsion from Bengal. 
 
 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 inarked attention ; and 
 Pitt, whose influence in the House of Commons and in the coun- 
 try was unbounded, was eager to mark his regard for one whose 
 exploits had contributed so much to the lustre 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 gener- 
 
 1 No reporters in the gallery : not only were reporters then rigidly excluded from 
 the House of Parliament, but it was contrary to law for any one to publish a report 
 of a Parliamentary debate. These restrictions were not wholly removed until 1771. 
 
 2 Duke of Cumberland : he defeated the Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart, 
 grandson of James II., and his Scotch allies, at Culloden, Scotland, in I746. On 
 that occasion the Duke was guilty of great cruelty, and consequently became very 
 unpopular. 
 
LORD CLIVE. 57 
 
 ally 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 as brave as a 
 lion, had neither science nor genius. Sackville, inferior in knowl- 
 edge and abilities to none of his contemporaries, had incurred, 
 unjustly as we beheve, 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 re- 
 mitted 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 remit- 
 tance 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 afiirm 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 foun- 
 dation 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, 
 
58 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 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 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 dependents 
 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 impohtic persecution of that worthless demagogue Wilkes 
 had strongly excited the public mind, the town was amused by an ^ 
 anecdote, w^hich 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 formei 
 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 Lidia 
 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 Directory 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, 
 
 1 In our time : see note on Mogul, p. 7. 
 
LORD CLIVE. 59 
 
 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 Westmin- 
 ster election, all the trickery and corruption of a Grampound^ elec- 
 tion, 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 ques- 
 tions 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 coun- 
 try with an annuity of a thousand a year, and with savings amount- 
 ing 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 hon- 
 estly earned. Only four or five high political offices are reserved 
 for public men from England. The residences, 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 ser- 
 vice 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 EngUshman, 
 whatever his age might be, might hope to be one of the lucky 
 emigrants. If he made a good speech in Leadenhall Street,^ or 
 
 1 Grampound : a town of Cornwall which was disfranchised in 1821 on account 
 of its long-continued and notorious political corruption. See note on Cornish bor- 
 oughs, p. 29. 
 
 2 Sudder courts : the chief courts of justice at Calcutta. 
 
 3 Leadenhall Street : the East India Company's House was in Leadenhall 
 Street, London. 
 
60 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 published a clever pamphlet m defence 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 Chve, 
 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 EngUsh 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 
 
 1 South Sea year : in 1720 a frenzy of speculation in South Sea trading schemes 
 and in a multitude of other wild projects brought thousands to ruin in Great Britain. 
 
LORD CLIVE. 61 
 
 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 as 
 that, as Clive once said, flesh and blood could not bear it, armed 
 with irresistible power, and responsible only to the corrupt, turbu- 
 lent, distracted, ill-formed Company, situated at such a distance 
 that the average interval between the sending of a despatch and 
 the receipt of an answer was above a year and a half? Accord- 
 ingly, 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 him- 
 self, he could not bear to see them ground to the dust by oppres- 
 sions 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 atro- 
 city 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 
 1 Massacre : see note on Patna, p. i. 
 
62 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 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 dependents 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 hisj 
 master ; and his master was armed with all the power of the Cor 
 pany. Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Ca| 
 cutta, while thirty millions of human beings were reduced to tl 
 extremity of wretchedness. They had been accustomed to li\ 
 under tyranny, but never under tyranny like this. They foundi 
 the little finger of the Company thicker than the loins ^ of Surajahi 
 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 con- 
 front 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 traveller 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 
 
 1 Thicker than the loins : see i Kings xii. lo, and note, p. 3. [J. F. G.] 
 
LORD CLIVE. 63 
 
 in the school of Chve, still maintained the fame of their country. 
 " It must be acknowledged," says the Mussulman 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 mihtary 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 offi- 
 cers of the army, and from the officers to the soldiers. The evil 
 continued to grow till every mess-room became the seat of con- 
 spiracy 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 uneasi- 
 ness at home. A succession of revolutions ; a disorganized admin- 
 istration ; 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 govern- 
 ment ; 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 aU parties, forgetting 
 
64 LORD CUVE. 
 
 their feuds and trembling for their dividends, exclaimed that Clive 
 was the man whom the crisis required, that the oppressive pro- 
 ceedings 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 ami- 
 cable settlement. But there was a still greater difficulty. It was 
 proper to tell them that he never would undertake the govern- 
 ment 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 by-laws of the Company, there can be nd 
 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 Comman- 
 der-in-chief of the British possessions in Bengal. But he adherec 
 to his declaration, and refused to enter on his office till the eveni 
 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 owr 
 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 Ma}^, 1765, he reached Cal- 
 cutta ; 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 Cal- 
 cutta had already received from home strict orders not to accept 
 presents from the native princes. But, eager for gain, and un- 
 accustomed to respect the commands of their distant, ignorant, 
 and negligent masters, they again set up the throne of Bengal for 
 sale. About one hundred and forty thousand pounds sterling were 
 distributed among nine of the most powerful servants of the Com- 
 
LORD CLIVE. 65 
 
 pany; 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 dis- 
 play 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 deter- 
 mined to destroy these great and growing evils, or perish in the 
 attempt." 
 
 The Council met, and Clive stated to them his full determina- 
 tion 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 dis- 
 claimed any such intention. All the faces round the board grew 
 long and pale, and not another syllable of dissent was uttered. 
 
 . Chve 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 the 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 good-will 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. 
 
66 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 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 vehe- 
 ment 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 de- 
 clared 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 abiUties 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 
 
LORD CLIVE. 67 
 
 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 to 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 func- 
 tionary 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 con- 
 quest 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, propr^tors, 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 dis- 
 posed 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 had formed, 
 down to our own time, a principal head of the 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 
 
68 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 his instructions, of violating liis 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 im- 
 partial 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 governments of India before Clive was born. It cpn- 
 tinued 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 meas- 
 ure, which was in truth a reform necessary to the success of all 
 his other reforms. 
 
 He had quelled the opposition of the civil service ; 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 i 
 to resign their commissions on the same day, not doubting thatj 
 Clive would grant any terms rather than see the army, on which! 
 alone the British empire in the East rested, left without command- 
 ers. They little knew the unconquerable spirit with which theyj 
 had to deal. Clive had still a few officers round his person onl 
 whom he could rely. He sent to Fort St. George for a freshi 
 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.^ 
 
LORD CLIVE. 69 
 
 The governor was inexorable. The troops were steady. The 
 sepoys, over whom CUve had ahvays possessed extraordinary influ- 
 ence, stood by him with unshaken fideUty. 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 mag- 
 nanimous disdain. One of the conspirators was accused of having 
 planned the assassination of the governor ; but Clive would not lis- 
 ten 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 Behar. 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. 
 
 At the same time, the government of Bengal was placed on a new 
 footing. The power of the Enghsh in that province had hitherto 
 been altogether undefined. It was unknown to the ancient con- 
 stitution of the empire, and it had been ascertained by no com- 
 pact. It resembled the power which, in the last decrepitude of 
 the Western Empire, was exercised over Italy by the great chiefs 
 of foreign mercenaries, the Ricimers and the Odoacers, who put 
 up and pulled down at their pleasure a succession of insignificant 
 princes, dignified with the names of Csesar and Augustus. But as 
 
 1 Lenity : this simple and well-derived word ought to be noticed here, as much 
 better than the clumsy word ' leniency,' which in newspaper English has largely 
 come to take its place. [ J. F. G.] 
 
70 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 in Italy, so in India, the warlike strangers at length found it expe- 
 dient to give to a domination which had been established by arms 
 the sanction of law and ancient prescription. Theodoric thought 
 it politic to obtain from the distant court of Byzantium a com- 
 mission appointing him ruler of Italy; and Clive, in the same 
 manner, apphed to the Court of Delhi for a formal grant of the 
 powers of which he already possessed the reahty. The Mogul 
 was absolutely helpless ; and, though he murmured, had reason to 
 be well pleased that the English were disposed to give solid 
 rupees, which he never could have extorted from them, in exchange 
 for a few Persian characters ^ which cost him nothing. A bargain 
 was speedily struck ; and the titular sovereign of Hindostan issued 
 a warrant, empowering the Company to collect and administer the 
 revenues of Bengal, Orissa, and Behar. 
 
 There was still a Nabob, who stood to the British authorities in 
 the same relation in which the last drivelling Chilperics and Chil- 
 derics of the Merovingian line stood to their able and vigorous 
 Mayors of the Palace, to Charles Martel and to Pepin. At one 
 time Clive had almost made up his mind to discard this phantom 
 altogether ; but he afterwards thought it might be convenient still 
 to use the name of Nabob, particularly in deahngs with other 
 European nations. The French, the Dutch, and the Danes, would, 
 he conceived, submit far more readily to the authority of the 
 native Prince, whom they had always been accustomed to respect, 
 than to that of a rival trading corporation. This policy may, at 
 that time, have been judicious. But the pretence was soon found 
 to be too flimsy to impose on anybody ; and it was altogether laid 
 aside. The heir of Meer Jaffier still resides at Moorshedabad, the 
 
 1 Persian characters : the warrant given by the Mogul, and which under the 
 circumstances was only a formality, was written in the Persian language. By it 
 the company obtained a revenue of nearly ^^4,000,000, out of which they bound 
 themselves to pay to the Mogul and to the Nabob an annual income amounting to 
 about ;^75o,ooo. The treaty concluding this momentous transaction was signed at 
 Benares, and, as a Mohammedan writer of that time complains, was "finished in 
 less time than would have been taken in the sale of a jackass." Two parties at 
 least were entirely satisfied with the bargain : the East India Company henceforth 
 felt pretty sure of a full treasury, and the Nabob wrote to Clive, " Thank God, I 
 shall now have as many dancing-girls as I please." 
 
LORD CLIVE. 71 
 
 ancient capital of his house, still bears the title of Nabob, is still 
 accosted by the English as "Your Highness," and is still suffered 
 to retain a portion of the regal state which surrounded his ances- 
 tors. A pension of a hundred and sixty thousand pounds a year 
 is annually paid to him by the government. His carriage is sur- 
 rounded by guards, and preceded by attendants with silver maces. 
 His person and his dwelling are exempted from the ordinary 
 authority of the ministers of justice. But he has not the smallest 
 share of political power, and is, in fact, only a noble and wealthy 
 subject of the Company. 
 
 It would have been easy for Clive, during his second adminis- 
 tration in Bengal, to accumulate riches, such as no subject in 
 Europe possessed. He might, indeed, without subjecting the rich 
 inhabitants of the province to any pressure beyond that to which 
 their mildest rulers had accustomed them, have received presents 
 to the amount of three hundred thousand pounds a year. The 
 neighboring princes would gladly have paid any price for his favor. 
 But he appears to have strictly adhered to the rules which he had 
 laid down for the guidance of others. The Rajah of Benares 
 offered him diamonds of great value. The Nabob of Oude pressed 
 him to accept a large sum of money, and a casket of costly jewels. 
 Clive courteously but peremptorily refused : and it should be 
 observed that he made no merit of his refusal, and that the facts 
 did not come to light till after his death. He kept an exact 
 account of his salary, of his share of the profits accruing from 
 the trade in salt, and of those presents which, according to the 
 fashion of the East, it would be churlish to refuse. Out of the 
 sum arising from these resources he defrayed the expenses of his 
 situation. The surplus he divided among a few attached friends 
 who had accompanied him to India. He always boasted, and, as 
 far as we can judge, he boasted with truth, that his last adminis- 
 tration diminished instead of increasing his fortune. 
 
 One large sum indeed he accepted. Meer Jaffier had left him 
 by will above sixty thousand pounds sterling in specie and jewels : 
 and the rules which had been recently laid down extended only to 
 presents from the living, and did not affect legacies from the dead. 
 
72 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 Clive took the money, but not for himself. He made the whole 
 over to the Company, in trust for officers and soldiers invalided in 
 their service. The fund which still bears his name, owes its origin 
 to this princely donation. After a stay of eighteen months, the 
 state of his health made it necessary for him to return to Europe. 
 At the close of January, 1767, he quitted for the last time the 
 country, on whose destinies he had exercised so mighty an influ- 
 ence. 
 
 His second return from Bengal was not, hke his first, greeted 
 by the acclamations of his countrymen. Numerous causes were 
 already at work which embittered the remaining years of his life, 
 and hurried him to an untimely grave. His old enemies at the 
 India House were still powerful and active ; and they had been 
 reinforced by a large band of allies, whose violence far exceeded 
 their own. The whole crew of pilferers and oppressors from whom 
 he had rescued Bengal persecuted him with the implacable rancor 
 which belongs to such abject natures. Many of them even in- 
 vested their property in India stock, merely that they might be 
 better able to annoy the man whose firmness had set bounds to 
 their rapacity. Lying newspapers were set up for no purpose but 
 to abuse him ; and the temper of the public mind was then such, 
 that these arts, which under ordinary circumstances would have 
 been ineffectual against truth and merit, produced an extraordinary 
 impression. 
 
 The great events which had taken place in India had called 
 into existence a new class of EngUshmen, to whom their country- 
 men gave the name of Nabobs. These persons had generally 
 sprung from famiUes neither ancient nor opulent ; they had gen- 
 erally been sent at an early age to the East ; and they had there 
 acquired large fortunes, which they had brought back to their 
 native land. It was natural that, not having much opportunity of 
 mixing with the best society, they should exhibit some of the 
 awkwardness and some of the pomposity of upstarts. It was 
 natural that, during their sojourn in Asia, they should have ac- 
 quired some tastes and habits surprising, if not disgusting, to .per- 
 sons who had never quitted Europe. It was natural that, having 
 
LORD CLIVE. 73 
 
 enjoyed great consideration in the East, they should not be dis- 
 posed to sink into obscurity at home ; and as they had money, 
 and had not birth or high connection, it was natural that they 
 should display a little obtrusively the single advantage that they 
 possessed. Wherever they settled there was a kind of feud be- 
 tween them and the old nobility and gentry, similar to that which 
 raged in France between the farmer-general ^ and the marquess. 
 This enmity to the aristocracy long continued to distinguish the 
 servants of the Company. More than twenty years after the time 
 of which we are now speaking, Burke pronounced that among the 
 Jacobins might be reckoned " the East Indians almost to a man, 
 who cannot bear to find that their present importance does not 
 bear a proportion to their wealth." 
 
 The Nabobs soon became a most unpopular class of men. 
 Some of them had in the East displayed eminent talents, and 
 rendered great services to the state ; but at home their talents 
 were not shown to advantage, and their services were little known. 
 That they had sprung from obscurity, that they had acquired great 
 wealth, that they exhibited it insolently, that they spent it extrava- 
 gantly, that they raised the price of everything in their neighbor- 
 hood, from fresh eggs to rotten boroughs,^ that their liveries out- 
 shone those of dukes, that their coaches were finer than that of 
 the Lord Mayor, that the examples of their large and ill-governed 
 households corrupted half the servants of the country, that some 
 of them, with all their magnificence, could not catch the tone of 
 good society, but, in spite of the stud and the crowd of menials, 
 of the plate and the Dresden china, of the venison and the Bur- 
 gundy, were still low men ; these were things which excited, both 
 in the class from which they had sprung and in the class in which 
 they attempted to force themselves, the bitter aversion which is 
 the effect of mingled envy and contempt. But when it was also 
 rumored that the fortune which had enabled its possessor to 
 
 1 Farmer -general : one of a privileged class which collected the taxes in France ; 
 thereby acquiring enormous wealth through oppression and extortion. The fanner- 
 generals were plebeians by birth, and were regarded by the nobility with hatred and 
 contempt. 
 
 2 Botteu boroughs : see note on Cornwall boroughs, p. 29. 
 
74 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 eclipse the Lord Lieutenant on tlie race-ground, or to carry the 
 county against the head of a house as old as Domesday Book/ 
 had been accumulated by violating public faith, by deposing legiti- 
 mate princes, by reducing whole provinces to beggary, all the 
 higher and better as well as all the low and evil parts of human 
 nature were stirred against the wretch who had obtained by guilt 
 and dishonor the riches which he now lavished with arrogant and 
 inelegant profusion. The unfortunate Nabob seemed to be made 
 up of those foibles against which comedy has pointed the most 
 merciless ridicule, and of those crimes which have thrown the 
 deepest gloom over tragedy, of Turcaret ' and Nero, of Monsieur 
 Jourdain ^ and Richard the Third. A tempest of execration and 
 derision, such as can be compared only to that outbreak of public 
 feeling against the Puritans which took place at the time of the 
 Restoration, burst on the servants of the Company. The humane 
 man was horror-struck at the way in which they had got their 
 money, the thrifty man at the way in which they spent it. The 
 Dilettante sneered at their want of taste. The Macaroni* black- 
 balled them as vulgar fellows. Writers the most unlike in senti- 
 ment and style, Methodists and libertines, philosophers and buf- 
 foons, were for once on the same side. It is hardly too much to 
 say that, during a space of about thirty years, the whole lighter 
 literature of England was colored by the feelings which we have 
 described. Foote brought on the stage an Anglo-Indian chief, 
 dissolute, ungenerous, and tyrannical, ashamed of the humble 
 friends of his youth, hating the aristocracy, yet childishly eager 
 to be numbered among them, squandering his wealth on panders 
 and flatterers, tricking out his chairmen^ with the most costly 
 
 1 Domesday Book : a survey and census of England completed by William the 
 Conqueror in 1086. 
 
 2 Turcaret: a character in Le Sage's comedy of " Turcaret " ; a ' n ignorant, 
 ill-mannered, and purse-proud through suddenly acquired wealth. 
 
 3 Monsieur Jourdain: the hero of Mohere's comedy, "Le Bourgeois Gentil- 
 homme " ; a retired tradesman with much money and few brains, who makes him- 
 self ridiculous by his attempts to buy culture and accomplishments. 
 
 4 Macaroni : London " swells " and fops of the eighteenth century. 
 
 5 Chairmen : the men who carried a sedan-chair. These chairs, theri in 
 common use, were the predecessors of the modern cabs. 
 
LORD CLIVE. 75 
 
 hot-house flowers, and astounding the ignorant with jargon about 
 rupees, lacs, and jaghires. Mackenzie, with more deUcate humor, 
 depicted a plain country family raised by the Indian acquisitions 
 of one of its members to sudden opulence, and exciting deriaion 
 by an awkward mimicry of the manners of the great. Cowper in 
 that lofty expostulation^ which glows with the very spirit of the 
 Hebrew poets, placed the oppression of India foremost in the list 
 of those national crimes for which God had punished England 
 with years of disastrous war, with discomfiture in her own seas, and 
 with the loss of her transatlantic empire. If any of our readers 
 will take the trouble to search in the dusty recesses of circulating 
 libraries for some novel pubhshed sixty years ago, the chance is 
 that the villain or sub-villain of the story will prove to be a savage 
 old Nabob, with an immense fortune, a tawny complexion, a bad 
 liver, and a worse heart. 
 
 Such, as far as we can now judge, was the feehng of the country 
 respecting Nabobs in general. And Clive was eminently the 
 Nabob, the ablest, the most celebrated, the highest in rank, the 
 highest in fortune, of all the fraternity. His wealth was exhibited 
 in a manner which could not fail to excite odium. He lived with 
 great magnificence in Berkeley Square.^ He reared one place in 
 Shropshire^ and another at Claremont.* His parliamentary influ- 
 ence might vie with that of the greatest families. But in all this 
 splendor and power envy found something to sneer at. On some 
 of his relations wealth and dignity seem to have sat as awkwardly 
 as on Mackenzie's Margery Mushroom.^ Nor was he himself, 
 with all his great qualities, free from those weaknesses which ihe 
 satirists of that age represented as characteristic of his whole 
 class. In the field, indeed, his habits were remarkably simple. 
 
 1 Expos'i': ation: see Cowper's poem "Expostulation," especially lines 364- 
 375- [J-J G.] 
 
 2 Berlt«Iey Square : an aristocratic square at the West End, London. 
 
 3 Shropshire : near Market Drayton, in Shropshire. 
 
 * Claremont : in Surrey, about fifteen miles from London. 
 
 5 Margery Mushroom : an assumed name under which Mackenzie wrote in 
 a serial entitled " The Lounger." The character is sufficiently indicated by the 
 name. [J. F. G.] 
 
76 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 He was constantly on horseback, was never seen but in his uniform, 
 never wore silk, never entered a palanquin, and was content with 
 the plainest fare. But when he was no longer at the head of an 
 army, he laid aside this Spartan temperance for the ostentatious 
 luxury of a Sybarite. Though his person was ungraceful, and 
 though his harsh features were redeemed from vulgar ugliness only 
 by their stern, dauntless, and commanding expression, he was 
 fond of rich and gay clothing, and replenished his wardrobe with 
 absurd profusion. Sir John Malcolm gives us a letter worthy of 
 Sir Matthew Mite,^ in which Clive orders " two hundred shirts, the 
 best and finest that can be got for love or money." A few folhes 
 of this description, grossly exaggerated by report, produced an 
 unfavorable impression on the public mind. But this was not 
 the worst. Black stories, of which the greater part were pure 
 inventions, were circulated touching his conduct in the East. He 
 had to bear the whole odium, not only of those bad acts to which 
 he had once or twice stooped, but of all the bad acts of all the 
 English in India, of bad acts committed when he was absent, nay, 
 of bad acts which he had manfully opposed and severely punished. 
 The very abuses against which he had waged an honest, resolute, 
 and successful war, were laid to his account. He was, in fact, 
 regarded as the personification of all the vices and weaknesses 
 which the public, with or without reason, ascribed to the English 
 adventurers in Asia. We have ourselves heard old men, who 
 knew nothing of his history, but who still retained the prejudices 
 conceived in their youth, talk of him as an incarnate fiend. John- 
 son always held this language. Brown, whom Clive employed to 
 lay out his pleasure grounds, was amazed to see in the house of 
 his noble employer a chest which had once been filled with gold 
 from the treasury of Moorshedabad, and could not understand 
 how the conscience of the criminal could suffer him to sleep with 
 such an object so near to his bed-chamber. The peasantry of. 
 Surrey looked with mysterious horror on the stately house which 
 
 1 Sir Matthew Mite: a noted character — a returned East-India merchant — in 
 Foote's play of the " Nabob." In his essay on " History " Macaulay refers to him 
 as having made a large but useless collection of turnpike tickets. [ J. F. G.] 
 
LORD CLIVE. 77 
 
 was rising at Claremont, and whispered that the great wicked lord 
 had ordered the walls to be made so thick in order to keep out 
 the devil, who would one day carry him away bodily. Among 
 the gaping clowns who drank in this frightful story was a worthless 
 ugly lad of the name of Hunt, since widely known as William 
 Huntington, S. S.^ ; and the superstition which was strangely 
 mingled with the knavery of that remarkable impostor seems to 
 have derived no small nutriment from the tales which he heard of 
 the life and character cf Clive. 
 
 In the mean time, the impulse which Clive had given to the 
 administration of Bengal was constantly becoming fainter and 
 fainter. His policy was to a great extent abandoned ; the abuses 
 which he had suppressed began to revive ; and at length the evils 
 which a bad government had engendered were aggravated by one 
 of those fearful visitations which the best government cannot avert. 
 In the summer of 1770, the rains failed; the earth was parched 
 up ; the tanks were empty ; the rivers shrank within their beds ; 
 and a famine, such as is known only in countries where every 
 household depends for support on its own little patch of cultiva- 
 tion, filled the whole valley of the Ganges with misery and death. 
 Tender and delicate women, whose veils had never been lifted 
 before the public gaze, came forth from the inner chambers in 
 which Eastern jealousy had kept watch over their beauty, threw 
 themselves on the earth before the passers-by, and, with loud 
 wailing, implored a handful of rice for their children. The Hoog- 
 ley every day rolled down thousands of corpses close to the por- 
 ticos and gardens of the English conquerors. The very streets of 
 Calcutta were blocked up by the dying and the dead. The lean 
 and feeble survivors had not energy enough to bear the bodies of 
 their kindred to the funeral pile or the holy river, or even to scare 
 away the jackals and vultures, that fed on human remains in the 
 'face of day. The extent of the mortality was never ascertained ; 
 but it was popularly reckoned by millions. This melancholy intel- 
 
 1 William Huntington, S. S. : an eccentric character, half genius and half 
 charlatan. He became a Methodist minister, and gave himself the title of S. S., or 
 Sinner Saved. 
 
78 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 ligence added to the excitement which already prevailed in Eng> 
 land on Indian subjects. The proprietors of East India stock 
 were uneasy about their dividends. All men of common humanity 
 were touched by the calamities of our unhappy subjects; and 
 indignation soon began to mingle itself with pity. It was rumored 
 that the Company's servants had created the famine by engrossing 
 all the rice of the country ; that they had sold grain for eight, ten, 
 twelve times the price at which they had bought itj that one Eng- 
 lish functionary who, the year before, was not worth a hundred 
 guineas, had, during that season of misery, remitted sixty thousand 
 pounds to London. These charges we beheve to have been un- 
 founded. That servants of the Company had ventured, since 
 Clive's departure, to deal in rice, is probable. That, if they dealt 
 in rice, they must have gained by the scarcity, is certain. But 
 there is no reason for thinking that they either produced or 
 aggravated an evil which physical causes sufficiently explain. The 
 outcry which was raised against them on this occasion was, we 
 suspect, as absurd as the imputations which, in times of dearth at 
 home, were once thrown by statesmen and judges, and are still 
 thrown by two or three old women, on the corn-factors. It was, 
 however, so loud and so general that it appears to have imposed 
 even on an intellect raised so high above vulgar prejudices as that 
 of Adam Smith. ^ What was still more extraordinary, these unhappyJ 
 events greatly increased the unpopularity of Lord Clive. He had - 
 been some years in England when the famine took place. None 
 of his acts had the smallest tendency to produce such a calamity. 
 If the servants of the company had traded in rice, they had done 
 so in direct contravention of the rule which he had laid down, and, 
 while in power, had resolutely enforced. But, in the eyes of his 
 countrymen, he was, as we have said, the Nabob, the Anglo-Indian 
 character personified ; and, while he was building and planting in 
 Surrey, he was held responsible for all the effects of a dry season 
 in Bengal. 
 
 ParHament had hitherto bestowed very little attention on our 
 
 1 Adam Smith: see " Wealth of Nations," Book IV. chap. V., Digression on 
 the Corn Laws. 
 
LORD CLIVE. 79 
 
 Eastern possessions. Since the death of George the Second, a 
 rapid succession of weak administrations, each of which was in 
 turn flattered and betrayed by the Court, had held the semblance 
 of power. Intrigues in the palace, riots in the capital, and insur- 
 rectionary movements in the American colonies, had left the 
 advisers of the crown little leisure to study Indian politics. When 
 they did interfere, their interference was feeble and irresolute. 
 Lord Chatham indeed, during the short period of his ascendency 
 in the councils of George the Third, had meditated a bold attack 
 on the Company. But his plans were rendered abortive by the 
 strange malady which about that time began to overcloud his 
 splendid genius. 
 
 At length, in 1772, it was generally felt that Parliament could 
 no longer neglect the affairs of India. The Government was 
 stronger than any which had held power since the breach between 
 Mr. Pitt and the great Whig connection in 1761. No pressing 
 question of domestic or European poUcy required the attention 
 of public men. There was a short and delusive lull between two 
 tempests. The excitement produced by the Middlesex election' 
 was over ; the discontents of America did not yet threaten civil 
 war ; financial difficulties of the Company brought on a crisis ; 
 the Ministers were forced to take up the subject ; and the whole 
 storm, which had long been gathering, now broke at once on the 
 head of Clive. 
 
 His situation was indeed singularly unfortunate. He was hated 
 throughout the country, hated at the India House, hated, above 
 all, by those wealthy and powerful servants of the Company, 
 whose rapacity and tyranny he had withstood. He had to bear 
 the double odium of his bad and of his good actions, of every 
 Indian abuse and of every Indian reform. The state of the poHt- 
 ical world was such that he could count on the support of no 
 
 1 Middlesex Election : in 1769 the notorious Jolin Wilkes was elected to the 
 House of Commons by the county of Middlesex. The House refused to receive 
 him ; the Middlesex electors insisted that they had the constitutional right to send a 
 member of their choice to Parliament. After a hot struggle the House finally con- 
 ceded the right, thus establishing a principle of the highest importance. 
 
80 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 powerful connection. The party to which he had belonged, tha,t 
 of George Grenville, had been hostile to the Government, and yet 
 had never cordially united with the other sections of the Oppo- 
 sition, with the httle band which still followed the fortunes of Lord 
 Chatham, or with the large and respectable body of which Lord 
 Rockingham was the acknowledged leader. George Grenville was 
 now dead : his followers were scattered ; and Clive, unconnected 
 with any of the powerful factions which divided the Parliament, 
 could reckon only on the votes of those members who were re- 
 turned by himself. His enemies, particularly those who were the 
 enemies of his virtues, were unscrupulous, ferocious, implacable. 
 Their malevolence aimed at nothing less than the utter ruin of his 
 fame and fortune. They wished to see him expelled from Parha- 
 ment, to see his spurs chopped off,^ to see his estate confiscated ; 
 and it may be doubted whether even such a result as this would 
 have quenched their thirst for revenge. 
 
 Clive's parliamentary tactics resembled his military tactics. 
 Deserted, surrounded, outnumbered, and with everything at stake, 
 he did not even deign to stand on the defensive, but pushed 
 boldly forward to the attack. At an early stage of the discussions 
 on Indian affairs he rose, and in a long and elaborate speech vin- 
 dicated himself from a large part of the accusations which had 
 been brought against him. He is said to have produced a great 
 impression on his audience. Lord Chatham, who, now the ghost 
 of his former self, loved to haunt the scene of his glory, was that 
 night under the gallery of the House of Commons, and declared 
 that he had never heard a finer speech. It was subsequently 
 printed under Clive's direction, and, when the fullest allowance 
 has been made for the assistance which he may have obtained 
 from literary friends, proves him to have possessed, not merely 
 strong sense and manly spirit, but talents both for disquisition and 
 declamation which assiduous culture might have improved into 
 the highest excellence. He confined his defence on this occasion 
 
 1 Spurs chopped off : Clive had been created a Knight of the Bath ; to chop 
 off his spurs, the insignia of knighthood, was to degrade and expel him from the 
 order. 
 
LORD CLIVE. 81 
 
 to the measures of his last administration, and succeeded so far 
 that his enemies thenceforth thought it expedient to direct their 
 attacks chiefly against the earher part of his Ufe. 
 
 The earlier part of his hfe unfortunately presented some assail- 
 able points to their hostility. A committee was chosen by ballot 
 to inquire into the affairs of India ; and by this committee the 
 whole history of that great revolution which threw down Surajah 
 Dowlah and raised Meer Jafifier was sifted with malignant care. 
 Clive was subjected to the most unsparing examination and cross- 
 examination, and afterwards bitterly complained that he, the 
 Baron of Plassey, had been treated like a sheep-stealer. The 
 boldness and ingenuousness of his replies would alone suffice to 
 show how alien from his nature were the frauds to which, in the 
 course of his Eastern negotiations, he had sometimes descended. 
 He avowed the arts which he had employed to deceive Omi- 
 chund, and resolutely said that he was not ashamed of them, and 
 that, in the same circumstances, he would again act in the same 
 manner. He admitted that he had received immense sums from 
 Meer Jafifier ; but he denied that, in doing so, he had violated 
 any obligation of morality or honor. He laid claim, on the con- 
 trary, and not without some reason, to the praise of eminent dis- 
 interestedness. He described in vivid language the situation in 
 which his victory had placed him ; great princes dependent on 
 his pleasure ; an opulent city afraid of being given up to plunder ; 
 wealthy bankers bidding against each other for his smiles ; vaults 
 piled with gold and jewels thrown open to him alone. " By God, 
 Mr. Chairman," he exclaimed, " at this moment I stand astonished 
 at my own moderation." 
 
 The inquiry was so extensive that the House rose before it had 
 been completed. It was continued in the following session. 
 When at length the committee had concluded its labors, enlight- 
 ened and impartial men had little difficulty in making up their 
 minds as to the result. It was clear that Clive had been guilty of 
 some acts which it is impossible to vindicate without attacking the 
 authority of all the most sacred laws which regulate the inter- 
 course of individuals and of states. But it was equally clear that 
 
82 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 he had displayed great talents, and even great virtues ; that he 
 had rendered eminent services both to his country and to the 
 people of India ; and that it was in truth not for his dealings with 
 Meer Jaffier, nor for the fraud which he had practised on Omi- 
 chund, but for his determined resistance to avarice and tyranny, 
 that he was now called in question. 
 
 Ordinary criminal justice knows nothing of set-off. The great- 
 est desert cannot be pleaded in answer to a charge of the slightest 
 transgression. If a man has sold beer on Sunday morning, it is 
 no defence that he has saved the life of a fellow-cre' '-ire at the 
 risk of his own. If he has harnessed a Newfoundland dog to his 
 little child's carriage, it is no defence that he was wounded at 
 Waterloo. But it is not in this way that we ought to deal with 
 men who, raised far above ordinary restraints, and tried by far 
 more than ordinary temptations, are entitled to a more than or- 
 dinary measure of indulgence. Such men should be judged by 
 their contemporaries as they will be judged by posterity. Their 
 bad actions ought not indeed to be called good : but their good 
 and bad actions ought to be fairly weighed ; and if on the whole 
 the good preponderate, the sentence ought to be one, not merely 
 of acquittal, but of approbation. Not a single great ruler in his- 
 tory can be absolved by a judge who fixes his eye inexorably on 
 one or two unjustifiable acts. Bruce the deliverer of Scotland, 
 Maurice the deliverer of Germany, Wilhara the deliverer of 
 Holland, his great descendant the deliverer of England,^ Murray the 
 good regent, Cosmo ^ the father of his country, Henry the Fourth 
 of France, Peter the Great of Russia, how would the best of them 
 pass such a scrutiny ? History takes wider views ; and the best 
 tribunal for great political cases is the tribunal which anticipates 
 the verdict of history. 
 
 Reasonable and moderate men of all parties felt this in Clive's 
 case. They could not pronounce him blameless ; but they were 
 not disposed to abandon him to that low-minded and rancorous 
 
 1 The deliverer of England: M^'ilHam III. who became king by the Revolu- 
 tion of 1688, which drove James II. from the throne. 
 
 2 Cosmo : Cosmo de Medici (the elder). 
 
LORD CLIVE. S3 
 
 pack who had run him down and were eager to worry him to 
 death. Lord North, though not very friendly to him, was not 
 disposed to go to extremities against him. While the inquiry was 
 still in progress, Clive, who had some years before been created 
 a Knight of the Bath, was installed with great pomp in Henry the 
 Seventh's Chapel.^ He was soon after appointed Lord Lieutenant 
 of Shropshire. When he kissed hands,^ George the Third, who 
 had always been partial to him, admitted him to a private audi- 
 ence, talked to him half an hour on Indian politics, and was visibly 
 affected w^-^n the persecuted general spoke of his services and of 
 the way in which they had been requited. 
 
 At length the charges came in a definite form before the House 
 of Commons. Burgoyne,^ chairman of the committee, a man of 
 wit, fashion, and honor, an agreeable dramatic writer, an officer 
 whose courage was never questioned, and whose skill was at that 
 time highly esteemed, appeared as the accuser. The members of 
 the administration took different sides ; for in that age all ques- 
 tions were open questions, except such as were brought forward 
 by the Government, or such as imphed some censure on the Gov- 
 ernment. Thurlow, the Attorney General, was among the assail- 
 ants. Wedderburne, the Solicitor General, strongly attached to 
 Clive, defended his friend with extraordinary force of argument 
 and language. It is a curious circumstance that, some years later, 
 Thurlow was the most conspicuous champion of Warren Hastings', 
 while Wedderburne was among the most unrelenting persecutors 
 of that great though not faultless statesman. Clive spoke in his 
 own defence, at less length and with less art than in the preceding 
 year, with much energy and pathos. He recounted his great 
 actions and his wrongs : and, after bidding his hearers remember, 
 that they were about to decide not only on his honor but their 
 own, he retired from the House. 
 
 1 Henry the Seventh's Chapel : part of Westminster Abbey. 
 
 2 Kissed hands : i.e., kissed the king's hands on taking office. 
 
 3 Burgoyne : this was that General Burgoyne who figured so conspicuously and 
 disastrously at the battle of Saratoga in the American Revolution. He made a 
 violent attack on Clive, and proposed the principle afterward adopted, that the 
 East India Company should be placed under the control of Parliament. 
 
84 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 The Commons resolved that acquisitions made by the arms of 
 the State belong to the State alone, and that it is illegal in the 
 servants of the State to appropriate such acquisitions to them- 
 selves. They resolved that this wholesome rule appeared to have 
 been systematically violated by the EngUsh functionaries in Bengal. 
 On a subsequent day they went a step farther, and resolved that 
 Clive had, by means of the power which he possessed as com- 
 mander of the British forces in India, obtained large sums from 
 Meer Jafifier. Here the Commons stopped. They had voted the 
 major and minor of Burgoyne's syllogism ; ^ but they shrank from 
 ^drawing the logical conclusion. When it was moved that Lord 
 Clive had abused his powers, and set an evil example to the ser- 
 vants of the public, the previous question was put and carried. 
 At length, long after the sun had risen on an animated debate, 
 VVedderburne moved that Lord Clive had at the same time ren- 
 dered great and meritorious services to his country ; and this 
 motion passed without a division. 
 
 The result of this memorable inquiry appears to us, on the 
 whole, honorable to the justice, moderation, and discernment of 
 the Commons. They had indeed no great temptation to do 
 wrong. They would have been very bad judges of an accusation 
 brought against Jenkinson or against Wilkes. But the question 
 respecting Clive was not a party question ; and the House accord- 
 iiigly acted with the good sense and good feeling which may 
 always be expected from an assembly of English gentlemen not 
 blinded by faction. 
 
 The equitable and temperate proceedings of the British Parlia- 
 ment were set off to the greatest advantage by a foil. The 
 wretched government of Lewis the Fifteenth had murdered, 
 directly or indirectly, almost every Frenchman who had served his 
 
 1 The major and minor of Burgoyne's syllogism : Macaulay was fond of 
 analyzing measures and arguments, especially such as he was refuting, by the 
 formal terms of logic. Here the syllogism is:- Major premise — it is illegal in the 
 servants of the State to appropriate to themselves acquisitions made by the arms of 
 the State (resolve voted) ; minor premise — Clive has, by the arms of England, 
 obtained large sums from Meer Jaffier (resolve voted); conclusion — hence, — 
 but the conclusion was evaded by moving the previous question. [ J. F. G.] 
 
LORD CLIVE. 85 
 
 country with distinction in tiie East. Labourdonnais was flung 
 into the Bastile, and after years of suffering left it only to die. 
 Dupleix, stripped of his immense fortune, and broken-hearted by 
 humiliating attendance in ante-chambers, sank into an obscure 
 grave. Lally was dragged to the common place of execution with 
 a gag between his lips. The Commons of England, on the other 
 hand, treated their living captain with that discriminating justice 
 which is seldom shown except to the dead. They laid down 
 sound general principles ; they delicately pointed out where he 
 had deviated from those principles ; and they tempered the gentle 
 censure with liberal eulogy. The contrast struck Voltaire, always 
 partial to England, and always eager to expose the abuses of the 
 Parhaments of France. Indeed he seems, at this time, to have 
 meditated a history of the conquest of Bengal. He mentioned his 
 design to Dr. Moore when that amusing writer visited him at 
 Ferney. Wedderburne took great interest in the matter, and 
 pressed Clive to furnish materials. Had the plan been carried 
 into execution, we have no doubt that Voltaire would have pro- 
 duced a book containing ^ much lively and picturesque narrative, 
 many just and humane sentiments poignantly expressed, many 
 grotesque blunders, many sneers at the Mosaic chronology, much 
 scandal about the Catholic missionaries, and much sublime theo- 
 philanthropy, stolen from the New Testament, and put into the 
 mouths of virtuous and philosophical Brahmins. 
 
 Clive was now secure in the enjoyment of his fortune and his 
 honors. He was surrounded by attached friends and relations ; 
 and he had not yet passed the season of vigorous bodily and 
 mental exertion. But clouds had long been gathering over his 
 mind, and now settled on it in thick darkness. 'From early youth 
 he had been subject to fits of that strange melancholy "which 
 rejoiceth exceedingly and is glad when it can find the grave." ^ 
 While still a writer at Madras, he had twice attempted to destroy 
 himself. Business and prosperity had produced a salutary effect 
 
 1 Containing', etc. : the following are characteristics of Voltaire's general style, 
 which Macaulay here takes occasion delicately to satirize. [ J. F. G.] 
 
 2 See Job iii. 22. 
 
86 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 on his spirits. In India, wliile he was occupied by great affairs, 
 in England, while wealth and rank had still the charm of novelty, 
 he had borne up against his constitutional misery ; but he had 
 now nothing to do and nothing to wish for. His active spirit in 
 an inactive situation drooped and withered like a plant in an un- 
 congenial air. The malignity with which his enemies had pursued 
 him, the indignity with which he had been treated by the com- 
 mittee, the censure, lenient as it was, which the House of Commons 
 had pronounced, the knowledge that he was regarded by a large 
 portion of his countrymen as a cruel and perfidious tyrant, all con- 
 curred to irritate and depress him. In the mean time his temper 
 was tried by acute physical suffering. During his long residence 
 in tropical climates, he had contracted several painful distempers. 
 In order to obtain ease he called in the help of opium ; and he 
 was gradually enslaved by this treacherous ally. To the last, how- 
 ever, his genius occasionally flashed through the gloom. It was 
 said that he would sometimes, after sitting silent and torpid for 
 hours, rouse himself to the discussion of some great question, 
 would display in full vigor all the talents of the soldier and 
 the statesman, and would then sink back into his melancholy 
 repose. 
 
 The disputes with America had now become so serious that an 
 appeal to the sword seemed inevitable ; and the Ministers were 
 desirous to avail themselves of the services of Clive. Had he still 
 been what he was when he raised the siege of Patna, and annihi- 
 lated the Dutch army and navy at the mouth of the Ganges, it is 
 not improbable that the resistance of the Colonists would have 
 been put down, and that the inevitable separation would have been 
 deferred for a few years. But it was too late. His strong mind 
 was fast sinking under many kinds of suffering. On the twenty- 
 second of November, 1 7 74, he died by his own hand. He had 
 just completed his forty-ninth year. 
 
 In the awful close of so much prosperity and glory, the vulgar 
 saw only a confirmation of all their prejudices ; and some men of 
 real piety and genius so far forgot the maxims both of religion and 
 of philosophy as confidently to ascribe the mournful event to the 
 
LORD CLIVE. S7 
 
 just vengeance of God, and to the horrors of an evil conscience. 
 It is with very different feelings that we contemplate the spec- 
 tacle of a great mind ruined by the weariness of satiety, by 
 the pangs of wounded honor, by fatal diseases, and more fatal 
 remedies. 
 
 Clive committed great faults ; and we have not attempted to 
 disguise them. But his faults, when weighed against his merits, 
 and viewed in connection with his temptations, do not appear to 
 us to deprive him of his right to an honorable place in the estima- 
 tion of posterity. 
 
 From his first visit to India dates the renown of the Enghsh 
 arms in the East. Till he appeared, his countrymen were despised 
 as mere pedlers, while the French were revered as people formed 
 for victory and command. His courage and capacity dissolved 
 the charm. With the defence of Arcot commences that long 
 series of Oriental triumphs which closes with the fall of Ghizni.^ 
 Nor must we forget that he was only twenty-five years old when 
 he approved himself ripe for military command. This is a rare 
 if not a singular distinction. It is true that Alexander, Condd, 
 and Charles the Twelfth won great battles at a still earlier age ; 
 but those princes were surrounded by veteran generals of distin- 
 guished skill, to whose suggestions must be attributed the victories 
 of the Granicus, of Rocroi, and of Narva. Clive, an inexperi- 
 enced youth, had yet more experience than any of those who 
 served under him. He had to form himself, to form his officers, 
 and to form his army. The only man, as far as we recollect, who 
 at an equally early age ever gave equal proof of' talents for war, 
 was Napoleon Bonaparte. 
 
 From Clive's second visit to India dates the political ascendency 
 of the English in that country. His dexterity and resolution real- 
 ized, in the course of a few months, more than all the gorgeous 
 
 ^ Ghizni : a town of Afghanistan ; it was stormed and taken by the English in 
 1839, not long before Macaulay finished this essay. The object of the English in 
 the Afghan War was to maintain Afghanistan as a barrier between Russia and 
 India. The Afghan monarchy, though nominally independent, owes its power, in 
 large measure, to its recognition by the British government. 
 
88 LORD CLIVE. 
 
 visions which had floated before the imagination of Dupleix. Such 
 an extent of cultivated territory, such an amount of revenue, such 
 a multitude of subjects, was never added to the dominion of Rome 
 by the most successful proconsul. Nor were such wealthy spoils 
 ever borne under arches of triumph, down the Sacred Way, and 
 through the crowded Forum, to the threshold of Tarpeian Jove. 
 The fame of those who subdued Antiochus and Tigranes grows 
 dim when compared with the splendor of the exploits which the 
 young English adventurer achieved at the head of an army not 
 equal in numbers to one-half of a Roman legion. 
 
 From Clive's third visit to India dates the purity of our Eastern 
 empire. AVhen he landed in Calcutta in 1765, Bengal was re- 
 garded as a place to which Englishmen were sent only to get rich, 
 by any means, in the shortest possible time. He first made daunt- 
 less and unsparing war on that gigantic system of oppression, ex- 
 tortion, and corruption. In that war he manfully put to hazard 
 his ease, his fame, and his splendid fortune. The same sense of 
 justice which forbids us to conceal or extenuate the faults of his 
 earlier days compels us to admit that those faults were nobly 
 repaired. If the reproach of the Company and of its servants 
 has been taken away, if in India the yoke of foreign masters, 
 elsewhere the heaviest of all yokes, has been found hghter than 
 that of any native dynasty, if to that gang of public robbers, which 
 formerly spread terror through the whole plain of Bengal, has suc- 
 ceeded a body of functionaries not more highly distinguished by 
 ability and dihgence than by integrity, disinterestedness, and public 
 spirit, if we now see such men as Munro, Elphinstone, and Met- 
 calfe, after leading victorious armies, after making and deposing 
 kings, return, proud of their honorable poverty, from a land which 
 once held out to every greedy factor the hope of boundless wealth, 
 the praise is in no small measure due to Clive. His name stands 
 high on the roll of conquerors. But it is found in a better list, in 
 the list of those who have done and suffered much for the happi- 
 ness of mankind. To the warrior, history will assign a place in 
 the same rank with LucuUus and Trajan. Nor will she deny to 
 the reformer a share of that veneration with which France cher- 
 
LORD CLIVE. 89 
 
 ished the memory of Turgot, and with which the latest genera- 
 tions of Hindoos will contemplate the statue of Lord William 
 Bentinck.^ 
 
 ^ Bentinck : Lord William Bentinck, governor-general of India (1828-1835), 
 was in office when Macaulay began his work in India as one of the members of 
 the Supreme Council. A bronze statue in Calcutta, commemorating Lord Bent- 
 inck's administration, bears an inscription written by Macaulay, in which the his- 
 torian justly affirms of that eminent statesman that he " never forgot that the end 
 of government is the welfare of the governed." 
 
 In fact, Lord Bentinck took the first decided step toward the inauguration of 
 the policy, now firmly established by the British crown, which endeavors to rule 
 India in the interests of India. 
 
 Since the dissolution of the Company in 1858 the progress made in that empire 
 has been immense. To-day nearly twenty thousand miles of railway, supplemented 
 by over thirty thousand miles of telegraph lines, connect the chief cities of India 
 with each other. Steamboats ply on the principal rivers, and vast systems of roads 
 and canals, built by the government, have greatly extended trade and commerce. 
 This material advance has been accompanied by a steady increase in educational 
 interest, and there are now over one hundred and thirty thousand public schools in 
 India in addition to three universities and many normal schools and colleges. The 
 latest statistics show that there are also more than three hundred newspapers in 
 regular circulation, and that about nine thousand books and other publications are 
 issued annually.