EARLY YEARS
TOWARDS THE CLOSE OF THE year 1744 there landed at Madras, as writer in the service of the East India Company, a young Englishman just entering the twentieth year of his existence, named Robert Clive.
The earlier years of the life of this young man had not been promising. Born at Styche, near Market Drayton, in Shropshire, he had been sent, when three years old, to be cared for and educated at Manchester, by a gentleman who had married his mother’s sister, Mr. Bayley of Hope Hall. The reason for this arrangement, at an age so tender, is not known. One seeks for it in vain in the conduct and character of his parents; for although his father is described as irascible and violent, his mother was remarkable for her good sense and sweet temper. To her, Clive was wont to say, he owed more than to all his schools. But he could have seen but little of her in those early days, for his home was always with the Bayleys, even after the death of Mr. Bayley, and he was ever treated there with kindness and consideration. After one or two severe illnesses, which, it is said, affected his constitution in after life, the young Robert, still of tender years, was sent to Dr. Eaton’s private school at Lostocke in Cheshire: thence, at eleven, he was removed to Mr. Burslem’s at Market Drayton. With this gentleman he remained a few years, and was then sent to have a brief experience of a public school at Merchant Taylors’. Finally, he went to study at a private school kept by Mr. Sterling in Hertfordshire. There he remained until, in 1743, he was nominated to be a writer in the service of the East India Company.
The chief characteristics of Robert Clive at his several schools had been boldness and insubordination. He would not learn; he belonged to a ‘fighting caste’; he was the leader in all the broils and escapades of schoolboy life; the terror of the masters; the spoiled darling of his schoolmates. He learned, at all events, how to lead: for he was daring even to recklessness; never lost his head; was calmest when the danger was greatest; and displayed in a hundred ways his predilection for a career of action.
It is not surprising, then, that he showed the strongest aversion to devote himself to the study which would have qualified him to follow his father’s profession. A seat at an attorney’s desk, and the drudgery of an attorney’s life, were to him as distasteful as they proved to be, at a later period, to the eldest son of Isaac Disraeli. He would have a career which promised action. If such were not open to him in his native land, he would seek for it in other parts of the world. When, then, his father, who had some interest, and who had but small belief in his eldest son, procured for him the appointment of writer in the service of the East India Company, Robert Clive accepted it with avidity.
Probably if he had had the smallest idea of the nature of the duties which were associated with that office, he would have refused it with scorn. He panted, I have said, for a life of action: he accepted a career which was drudgery under a tropical sun, in its most uninteresting form. The Company in whose service he entered was simply a trading corporation. Its territory in India consisted of but a few square miles round the factories its agents had established, and for which they paid an annual rental to the native governments. They had but a small force, composed principally of the children of the soil, insufficiently armed, whose chief duties were escort duties and the manning of the ill-constructed forts which protected the Company’s warehouses. The idea of aggressive warfare had never entered the heads even of the boldest of the English agents. They recognized the native ruler of the province in which lay their factories as their overlord, and they were content to hold their lands from him on the condition of protection on his part, and of good behaviour and punctual payment of rent on their own. For the combative energies of a young man such as Robert Clive there was absolutely no field on Indian soil. The duties devolving on a writer were the duties of a clerk; to keep accounts; to take stock; to make advances; to ship cargoes; to see that no infringement of the Company’s monopoly should occur. He was poorly paid; his life was a life of dull routine; and, although after many years of toil the senior clerks were sometimes permitted to trade on their own account and thus to make large fortunes, the opportunity rarely came until after many years of continuous suffering, and then generally when the climate had exhausted the man’s energies.
To a young man of the nature of Robert Clive such a life could not be congenial. And, in fact, he hated it from the outset. He had left England early in 1743; his voyage had been long and tiring: the ship on which he sailed had put in at Rio, and was detained there nine months; it remained anchored for a shorter period in St. Simon’s Bay; and finally reached Madras only at the close of 1744. The delays thus occurring completely exhausted the funds of the young writer: he was forced to borrow at heavy interest from the captain: the friend at Madras, to whom he had letters of introduction, had quitted that place. The solitary compensating advantage was this, that his stay at Rio had enabled him to pick up a smattering of Portuguese.
We see him, at length arrived, entering upon those hard and uninteresting duties to undertake which he had refused a life of far less drudgery in England in a congenial climate and under a sun more to be desired than dreaded. Cast loose in the profession he had selected, separated from relatives and friends, he had no choice but to enter upon the work allotted to him. This he did sullenly and with no enthusiasm. How painful was even this perfunctory performance; how keenly he felt the degradation—for such he deemed it—may be judged from the fact recorded by his contemporaries and accepted by the world, that for a long time he held aloof from his companions and his superiors. These in their turn ceased after a time to notice a young man so resolute to shun them. And although with time came an approach to intercourse, there never was cordiality. It is doubtful, however, whether in this description there has not mingled more than a grain of exaggeration. We have been told of his wayward nature: we have read how he insulted a superior functionary, and when ordered by the Governor to apologize, complied with the worst possible grace: how, when the pacified superior, wishing to heal the breach, asked him to dinner, he refused with the words that although the Governor had ordered him to apologize, he did not command him to dine with him: how, one day, weary of his monotonous existence, and suffering from impecuniosity, he twice snapped a loaded pistol at his head; how, on both occasions, there was a misfire; how, shortly afterwards, a companion, entering the room, at Clive’s request pointed the pistol outside the window and pulled the trigger; how the powder ignited, and how then Clive, jumping to his feet, exclaimed, ‘I feel I am reserved for better things.’
These stories have been told with an iteration which would seem to stamp them as beyond contradiction. But the publication of Mr. Forrest’s records of the Madras Presidency (1890) presents a view altogether different. The reader must understand that the Board at Fort St. David—at that time the ruling Board in the Madras Presidency—is reporting, for transmission to Europe, an account of a complaint of assault made by the Rev. Mr. Fordyce against Clive.
It would appear from this that Mr. Fordyce was a coward and a bully, besides being in many other respects an utterly unfit member of society. It had come to Clive’s ears that this man had said of him, in the presence of others, that he, Clive, was a coward and a scoundrel; that the reverend gentleman had shaken his cane over him in the presence of Mr. Levy Moses; and had told Captain Cope that he would break every bone in his (Clive’s) skin. In his deposition Clive stated that these repeated abuses so irritated him, ‘that he could not forbear, on meeting Mr. Fordyce at Cuddalore, to reproach him with his behaviour, which, he told him, was so injurious he could bear it no longer, and thereupon struck him two or three times with his cane, which, at last Mr. Fordyce returned and then closed in with him, but that they were presently parted by Captain Lucas.’
The Board, in giving its judgement on the case, recapitulated the many offences committed by Mr. Fordyce, the great provocation he had given to Clive, and suspended him. With regard to Clive they recorded: ‘lest the same,’ the attack on Fordyce, ‘should be to Mr. Clive’s prejudice, we think it not improper to assure you that he is generally esteemed a very quiet person and no ways guilty of disturbances.’ It is to be inferred from this account that, far from deserving the character popularly assigned to him, Clive, in the third year of his residence in India, was regarded by his superiors as a very quiet member of society.
Still, neither the climate nor the profession suited him. ‘I have not enjoyed,’ he wrote to one of his cousins, ‘a happy day since I left my native country.’ In other letters he showed how he repented bitterly of having chosen a career so uncongenial. Gradually, however, he realized the folly of kicking against the pricks. He associated more freely with his colleagues, and when the Governor, Mr. Morse, sympathizing with the young man eating out his heart from ennui, opened to him the door of his considerable library, he found some relief to his sufferings. These, at last, had reached their term. Before Clive had exhausted all the books thus placed at his disposal, events occurred which speedily opened to him the career for which he had panted.
SOUTHERN INDIA IN 1744
IT WILL CONTRIBUTE TO THE better understanding of the narrative of the events which plunged the English into war in 1745, if we take a bird’s-eye view of the peninsula generally, particularly of the southern portion, as it appeared in the year preceding.
Of India generally it is sufficient to say that from the year 1707, when the Emperor Aurangzeb died, authority had been relaxing to an extent which was rapidly bringing about the disruption of the bonds that held society together. The invasion of Nadír Sháh followed by the sack of Delhi in 1739 had given the Mughal dynasty a blow from which it never rallied. Thenceforward until 1761, when the third battle of Pánípat completed the catastrophe, the anarchy was almost universal. Authority was to the strongest. The Sallustian motto, ‘Alieni appetens sui profusus,’ was the rule of almost every noble; the agriculturists had everywhere abundant reason to realize ‘that the buffalo was to the man who held the bludgeon.’1
1 The late Lord Lawrence used to tell me that when he was Acting Magistrate and Collector of Pánípat in 1836, the natives were in the habit of describing the lawlessness of the period which ceased in 1818 by using the expressive phrase I have quoted.
The disorder had extended to the part of India south of the Vindhyan range which was then known under the comprehensive term of the Deccan. When Aurangzeb had conquered many Súbahs, or provinces, of Southern India, he had placed them under one officer, to be nominated by the Court of Delhi, and to be called Súbahdár, or chief of the province. As disorder spread after his death the Súbahdárs and inferior chiefs generally began to secure themselves in the provinces they administered. The invasion of Nadír Sháh made the task generally easy. In the Deccan especially, Chin Kílich Khán, the chief of a family which had served with consideration under Akbar and his successors, whose father had been a favourite of Aurangzeb, who had himself served under that sovereign, and who had obtained from the successors of Aurangzeb the titles of Nizám-ul-Múlk and Asaf Jáh, took steps to make the Súbahdárship of Southern India hereditary in his family. The territories comprehended under the term ‘Deccan’ did not, it must be understood, include the whole of Southern India. Mysore, Travancore, Cochin were independent. But they comprehended the whole of the territories known now as appertaining to the Nizám, with some additions; the country known as the ‘Northern Circárs’; and the Karnátik.
But the Karnátik was not immediately under the government of the Súbahdár. It was a subordinate territory, entrusted to a Nawáb, bounded to the north by the river Gundlakamma; on the west by the chain of mountains which separate it from Mysore; to the south by the possessions of the same kingdom (as it then was) and by Tanjore; to the east by the sea. I have not mentioned the kingdom of Trichinopoli to the south, for the Nawábs of the Karnátik claimed that as their own, and, as we shall see, had occupied the fortress of that name during the period, prior to 1744, of which I am writing.
It will be seen then, that, at this period, whilst the nominal ruler of the Deccan was Chin Kílich Khán, better known as Nizám-ul-Múlk, as I shall hereafter style him, the Nawáb of the Karnátik, who ruled the lands bordering on the sea, including the English settlement of Madras and the French settlement of Pondicherry, was a very powerful subordinate. The office he held had likewise come to be regarded as hereditary. And it was through the failure of the hereditary line, that the troubles came, which gave to Robert Clive the opportunity to develop the qualities which lay dormant within him.
Before I proceed to describe those events, it seems advisable to say a few words regarding the two settlements to which I have just referred; of the principles which actuated their chiefs; and of the causes which brought them into collision.
The English had made a first settlement on the Coromandel coast in the year 1625 at a small place, some thirty-six miles to the south of Madras, known now as Armagon. Seven years later they obtained from the Rájá of Bisnagar a small grant of land, called by the natives Chennapatanam from the village contained thereon. They re-named the place Madras, and built there a fort round their storehouses which they named Fort St. George. In 1653 the Company in London raised the agency at Madras to the position and rank of a Presidency. Towards the end of the seventeenth century the establishment there counted a population of 300,000 souls. In 1744 the town consisted of three divisions: that to the south (the White Town) extending about four hundred yards in length from north to south, and about one hundred yards in breadth. There resided the Europeans, mainly English. They had there about fifty houses, two churches, one of them Catholic; likewise the residence of the chief of the factory. All these were within the enclosure called Fort St. George. That somewhat pompous title represented merely a slender wall, defended by four bastions and as many batteries, very slight and defective in their construction, and with no outworks to defend them. This division was generally known as the ‘White Town.’ To the north of it, and contiguous, was another division, much larger and worse fortified, principally tenanted by Armenian and Indian merchants, called the Black Town. Beyond this, again to the north, was a suburb, where the poorer natives resided. These three divisions formed Madras. There were likewise to the south, about a mile distant from the White Town, two other large villages, inhabited solely by natives; but these were not included within that term. The English at this period did not exceed three hundred in number, and of these two-thirds were soldiers, but few of whom had seen a shot fired.2
2 Vide Orme’s History of Indostan (Edition 1773), vol. i. p. 65.
The English colony in Madras was a trading colony. Not one of its members, up to this period, had the smallest thought of embroiling their presidency in the disputes which were frequent amongst the native chieftains. They wished to be let alone; to remain at peace; to conciliate friendship and goodwill. They were content to acknowledge the lords of the soil as their masters; to pay for the protection they enjoyed at their hands by a willing obedience; to ward off their anger by apologies and presents.
But there was a French colony also on the same coast, and in that a different policy had begun to prevail. In the year 1672 the King of Bíjapur had sold to some French traders, led by a very remarkable man, Francis Martin, a tract of land on the Coromandel coast, eighty-six miles to the south-south-west of Madras. On this tract, close to the sea, was a little village called by the natives Puducheri. This the French settlers enlarged and beautified, and made their chief place of residence and trade. By degrees the name was corrupted to Pondicherry, a title under which it became famous, and under which it is still known.
So long as M. Martin lived, the policy of the French settlers was similar to that of the English at Madras. Nor did it immediately change when Martin died (December 30, 1706). Up to 1735, when M. Benoit Dumas was appointed Governor-General of the French possessions in India (for they had besides possessions on the Malabar coast and at Chandranagar, on the Húglí, in Bengal) it was in no way departed from. M. Dumas, however, almost immediately after his assumption of office, adopted the policy of allying himself closely with native princes; of taking part in their wars; with the view of reaping therefrom territorial and pecuniary advantage. This policy, of which he was the inventor, was, we shall see, carried to the most extreme length by his successor, M. Dupleix.
It will clear the ground for the reader if we add that the prosperity of the rival settlements was greatly affected by the action of their respective principals in Europe. On this point all the advantages lay with the English. For, whilst the Company of the Indies at Paris, and, it must be added, the French Government likewise, starved their dependency in India, and supplied them with inefficient and often ill-timed assistance, the East India Company, and the Government of the King of England, made a far better provision for the necessities of Madras.
It must, however, in candour be admitted that at the outset the French were better supplied with men and money than the English. Until the importance of the quarrel was recognized in Europe it became then a contest between the natural qualities of the men on the spot—a test of the capabilities of the races they represented.
I turn now, after this brief explanation of the position in Southern India in 1744, to describe the causes which led to the catastrophe which supervened very shortly after the arrival in India of the hero of this history.
HOW THE WAR IN THE KARNÁTIK AFFECTED THE FRENCH AND ENGLISH SETTLEMENTS
THE TROUBLE CAME FROM THE Karnátik. The family of the chief who had held the position of Nawáb at the time of the death of Aurangzeb had adopted the new fashion, then becoming universal, of making the post hereditary in his family. Saádat-ullá Khán, the Nawáb in question, had himself been regularly appointed in 1710 by the court of Delhi. After a peaceful rule of twenty-two years he had died (1732) without issue, after having appointed his nephew, Dost Alí, to succeed him as Nawáb, the younger brother of Dost Alí, Bakar Alí, to be governor of the fort and district of Vellore; and Ghulám Husén, the nephew of his favourite wife, better known as Chánda Sáhib, to be Diwán, or prime minister, to his successor.
These dispositions were carried out. But they were by no means pleasing to the Súbahdár of the Deccan, the Nizám-ul-Múlk to whom the reader has been introduced. That eminent nobleman was not content that his subordinates should act as he was prepared to act himself. His sanction had not been obtained to the transaction. He used then his influence at Delhi to prevent the confirmation which, even in those disturbed times, every chieftain sought to obtain for every act of spoliation. For the moment he proceeded no further. He was content to leave Dost Alí in the position of a nobleman ruling without the authority of his liege lord, himself, or of the master of both, the court of Delhi.
Nizám-ul-Múlk had justly thought that time would avenge him. Four years after his accession, the death of the ruler of Trichinopoli induced Dost Alí to send an army under his son Safdar Alí and his Diwán Chánda Sáhib, to capture that fortress. Under the pretence of collecting revenue these two princes visited Madras and Pondicherry in their progress southwards, and at the latter place Chánda Sáhib entered into those intimate relations with the French which were to influence greatly the events which were to follow. They proceeded thence to Trichinopoli and took possession of the fortress, the widowed queen having, it is said, fallen in love with Chánda Sáhib. The latter remained there as governor, whilst Safdar Alí returned to his father at Arcot.
The new Diwán appointed in the place of Chánda Sáhib, Mír Ásad, began at once to insinuate charges of ambition against his predecessor, and expressed his opinion that Chánda Sáhib, once ruler of Trichinopoli, would not easily let go his hold. In this opinion he was supported by the Nawáb’s eldest son, Safdar Jang. Doubtless they were right, but their utterances, freely expressed, served only to put Chánda Sáhib on his guard; and he commenced to store the fortress with provisions.
The acquisition of Trichinopoli by the Nawáb of the Karnátik had served only to inflame the mind of his liege lord, Nizám-ul-Múlk, against him. For a time, however, the disorders in Northern India, the threatened invasion of Nadír Sháh, and, finally, that invasion, held his hand. At last, however, his wrath over-mastered his judgement, and, in 1739, at the very time when the invasion of Nadír Sháh was in full swing, he gave permission to the Maráthás to attack Trichinopoli. In May of the following year, 1740, consequently, a Maráthá army of 10,000 men, led by Raghují Bhonsla, entered the Karnátik, met the hurriedly raised force of Dost Alí at the Damalcherri Pass, defeated it with great slaughter, and took prisoner the Diwán, Mír Ásad. Dost Alí was among the slain. The victors, then, listening to the persuasions of their prisoner, the Diwán, agreed to quit the province on receiving a payment, at stated intervals, of a total sum of ten million of rupees. Safdar Alí was then proclaimed Nawáb at Arcot, and Chánda Sáhib proceeded thither to do him homage.
During the preceding two years the French governor of Pondicherry, M. Dumas, had so strengthened the fortifications of that town, that it had come to be regarded by the natives as impregnable. During the Maráthá invasion, then, Chánda Sáhib had sent thither his family, and his example had been followed by Safdar Alí. After the installation of the latter at Arcot, the two princes proceeded to visit the French governor, who gave them a magnificent reception. On leaving, Safdar Alí took with him his family, whilst Chánda Sáhib, still suspecting danger, directed his own wives to remain at Pondicherry until events should more clearly develop themselves.
He had not to wait long. Safdar Alí, jealous of his prosperity, had induced the Maráthás, never unwilling, to make a fresh incursion into the Karnátik, and to dispose of Chánda Sáhib. In December of the same year then, just four years before Clive landed in India, those warriors entered the province, so deceived Chánda Sáhib as to induce him to sell them the ample stores of grain he had collected, and, as soon as they had received them, laid siege to Trichinopoli. Chánda Sáhib sustained a siege of nearly three months with great resolution, but then, his remaining stores of grain having been exhausted, was forced to surrender (March 26, 1741). The Maráthás, having plundered the town, departed for Sátára, taking with them Chánda Sáhib in close custody, and leaving one of their most famous leaders, of whom we shall hear further, Morári Ráo, with 14,000 of their best troops, to guard the place, and to act as discretion or greed might suggest.
The events I have recorded had encouraged among the nobles of the province a spirit of disorder in sympathy with the times. No man felt quite safe. Safdar Alí himself, but half reassured, sent for safety his family to the custody of the English at Madras, whilst, quitting the comparatively defenceless Arcot, he took up his abode in the strong fortress of Vellore. There his treasures had been stored, and there Murtizá Alí, who had married his sister, was governor. This man was treacherous, cowardly, and very ambitious. No sooner had he understood that his relationship by marriage did not shield him from the payment of money due to the Nawáb, than he proceeded to debauch the army, and to enlist on his side the neighbouring nobles. He then poisoned his brother-in-law. The poison not taking immediate effect, he persuaded a Patán to stab the Nawáb to the heart. He then declared himself Nawáb.
He was proclaimed alike at Vellore and Arcot. But his usurpation did not last long. Even in those days there was a public conscience, and the murder he had committed had been too brutal not to arouse indignation. The army rose against him. Fearing for his life, he disguised himself in woman’s clothes, and escaped to Vellore.
On the flight of Murtizá Alí becoming known the army proclaimed Saiyud Muhammad Khán, the son of Safdar Alí, then residing at Madras under the protection of the English, to be Nawáb. The young prince and his mother were at once removed to the fort of Wandiwash, the ruler of which had married his father’s sister.
It was this moment that Nizám-ul-Múlk chose as the time to intervene. Entering Arcot at the head of a large army (March, 1743) he completely pacified the province; then, marching on Trichinopoli, compelled the Maráthás to yield it and to evacuate the Karnátik. Possessing himself of the person of the newly proclaimed Nawáb, whom he declined to recognize, he proclaimed his own commander-in-chief, Khojá Abdullah, to be Nawáb of the Karnátik, and then returned to Golconda.
Unfortunately for the peace of the province Khojá Abdullah, a strong man, never took up the government of the Karnátik. He had returned with his master to Golconda, and had made there his preparations to set out. On the very morning which he had chosen for that purpose he was found dead in his bed. It was clear that he had been poisoned. Suspicion fell at once upon the nobleman who had originally been an urgent candidate for the office, and who now obtained it. He was an experienced soldier of good family, whose name was Anwar-ud-dín.
Nizám-ul-Múlk knew that the appointment would not be popular in the province so long as there should remain alive any member of the family of Saádat-ullá. He had therefore announced that the appointment of Anwar-ud-dín was provisional, and that the young prince, Saiyud Muhammad, already proclaimed Nawáb, should succeed to that post on his arriving at the age of manhood, remaining during the interval under the guardianship of Anwar-ud-dín, to be by him instructed in the art of governing. Anwar-ud-dín promised to carry out the will of his liege lord, and on his arrival in the Karnátik, assigned to the young prince the fort of Arcot, with a sufficient retinue of Patán soldiers. There the boy remained, treated with the deference due to his position.
But he was doomed. A few weeks after his arrival at Arcot it devolved upon him to preside at the wedding of one of his near relations. Amongst those who came to the ceremony was the murderer of his father, Murtizá Alí, laden with presents for the bridegroom. Strange as it may seem, the murderer was courteously received. But shortly after his entrance within the fort an unseemly disturbance was created by the disorderly entrance into the presence of thirteen Patán soldiers, who insolently demanded payment of the arrears they alleged to be due to them. With some difficulty they were forcibly ejected. But in the evening, as Anwar-ud-dín approached, attended by his courtiers and preceded by his guards, these thirteen Patáns managed to mingle with the latter, and one of them, rushing towards the daïs on which was the chair occupied by the young prince, ascended the steps leading to it, and, in a supplicatory attitude, made as though he would throw himself at his feet and demand pardon for the offence of the morning. But instead of this he plunged his dagger, which he had concealed on his person, into the prince’s heart. He was almost instantly cut down by the attendants. The confusion was extreme. Suddenly it was