Rulers of India: Lord Clive Part 1

Rulers of India: Lord Clive.

by George Bruce Malleson.

PREFACE

The following list represents the works of the last century which I have consulted to write this _Life of Lord Clive_:

Orme's _History of Indostan_ (original edition); _The Siyaru-l Muta-akherin_ of Ghulam Husain Khan (Review of Modern Times), translated copy; Cambridge's _War in India_ (containing the Journal of Stringer Lawrence); _The Memoir of Dupleix_ (in French); Grose's _Voyage to the East Indies_; Ive's _Voyage and Historical Narrative_; _Transactions in India from the commencement of the French War in 1756_ (published in 1786); Caraccioli's _Life of Lord Clive_; Vansittart's _Narrative of the Transactions in Bengal_; Ironside's _Narrative of the Military Transactions in Bengal in 1760-1_; Verelst's _English Government in Bengal_; some numbers of the _Asiatic Annual Register_; Kindersley's _Letters_; and Scrafton's _Letters_; and, for the earlier period--that displaying the period immediately preceding and following the dawn of genius--the recently written extracts from the Madras records by Mr. G. W. Forrest.

Of works of scarcely less value published during the present century, I have consulted the admirable volumes by Colonel Mark Wilks, which bring the _History of Southern India_ down to the storming of Seringapatam in 1799; _The Journal of Captain Dalton_, {6}one of the heroes of Trichinopoli, written at the period of Clive's early victories, but only given to the world, with a memoir of his career, in 1886; Lord Stanhope's _History of England_; Malcolm's _Life of Clive_; and above all, that mine of wealth to a searcher into the details of Clive's services in Bengal, Colonel Broome's _History of the Bengal Army_. Colonel Broome was my intimate and valued friend.

He knew more about the history of the rise of the English in India than any man I ever met. He had made the subject a life-study. He had read every tract, however old, every letter, however difficult to decipher, every record of the period up to and beyond the time of Job Charnock, and he was a past-master of his subject. He had collected an enormous ma.s.s of materials, the more bulky of which were dispersed at his untimely death. But I have seen and handled them, and I can state most positively, from my own knowledge, that every item of importance culled from them is contained in the admirable volume to which I have referred, and which was published in 1850. There is, alas, only that volume. Colonel Broome had set apart a vast ma.s.s of materials for his second, and had resolved to complete the work at Simla, to which place he was proceeding for the summer of, I think, 1870. But, in the course of transit, the box containing the materials was mysteriously spirited away, and I have not heard that it was ever found. From the nature of the doc.u.ments collected I cannot but regard the loss as irreparable.

G. B. MALLESON.

LORD CLIVE

CHAPTER I 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 Shrops.h.i.+re, 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 {10}there with kindness and consideration. After one or two severe illnesses, which, it is said, affected his const.i.tution in after life, the young Robert, still of tender years, was sent to Dr. Eaton's private school at Lostocke in Ches.h.i.+re: 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 Hertfords.h.i.+re. 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 {11}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 a.s.sociated 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 princ.i.p.ally 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 {12}the duties of a clerk; to keep accounts; to take stock; to make advances; to s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p on which he sailed had put in at Rio, and was detained there nine months; it remained anch.o.r.ed 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 {13}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, wis.h.i.+ng 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.'

{14}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 a.s.sault 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 {15}recorded: 'lest the same,' the attack on Fordyce, 'should be to Mr. Clive's prejudice, we think it not improper to a.s.sure 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 a.s.signed 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 p.r.i.c.ks. He a.s.sociated 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.

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CHAPTER II 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 Nadir Shah 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 Panipat completed the catastrophe, the anarchy was almost universal. Authority was to the strongest. The Sall.u.s.tian motto, 'Alieni appetens sui profusus,' was the rule of almost every n.o.ble; the agriculturists had everywhere abundant reason to realize 'that the buffalo was to the man who held the bludgeon.'[1]

[Footnote 1: The late Lord Lawrence used to tell me that when he was Acting Magistrate and Collector of Panipat 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.]

{17}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 Subahs, or provinces, of Southern India, he had placed them under one officer, to be nominated by the Court of Delhi, and to be called Subahdar, or chief of the province. As disorder spread after his death the Subahdars and inferior chiefs generally began to secure themselves in the provinces they administered. The invasion of Nadir Shah made the task generally easy. In the Deccan especially, Chin Kilich Khan, 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 t.i.tles of Nizam-ul-Mulk and Asaf Jah, took steps to make the Subahdars.h.i.+p 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 Nizam, with some additions; the country known as the 'Northern Circars'; and the Karnatik.

But the Karnatik was not immediately under the government of the Subahdar. It was a subordinate territory, entrusted to a Nawab, bounded to the north by the river Gundlakamma; on the west by the chain {18}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 Nawabs of the Karnatik 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 Kilich Khan, better known as Nizam-ul-Mulk, as I shall hereafter style him, the Nawab of the Karnatik, 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 Raja of Bisnagar a small grant of land, called {19}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 t.i.tle 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, princ.i.p.ally 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 {20}three hundred in number, and of these two-thirds were soldiers, but few of whom had seen a shot fired.[2]

[Footnote 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 Bij.a.pur 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 Pud.u.c.h.eri. 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 t.i.tle 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 {21}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 Hugli, in Bengal) it was in no way departed from. M. Dumas, however, almost immediately after his a.s.sumption 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 princ.i.p.als 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 a.s.sistance, 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.

{22}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.

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CHAPTER III HOW THE WAR IN THE KARNaTIK AFFECTED THE FRENCH AND ENGLISH SETTLEMENTS