VII
LORD CLIVE,
QUILL-DRIVER AND CONQUEROR
VII
LORD CLIVE
It is one of the distinctions of Robert Clive to be at once the model of all bad boys and the forlorn hope of their despairing fathers. He was probably the very worst boy that ever became a really great man. Of his early youth there is absolutely nothing good to be said, saving only the fact that he was possessed of that brute, bulldog courage which thousands of English boys, whose names have never been heard beyond their native towns, have possessed in common with him.
He was idle, passionate, aggressive, not over truthful, and of a distinctly turbulent, not to say piratical disposition. For instance, he had not reached his teens before he established a sort of juvenile reign of terror in the sleepy old town of Market Drayton, which had at once the misfortune and the honour of being his birthplace.
Even the school-books have not omitted to tell us how the boy became the father of the future pirate and Empire-Maker, by organising the kindred spirits of the town into a buccaneering band, as captain of which he levied blackmail in the shape of nuts, apples, sweetmeats, and even coin of the realm on the shopkeepers.
If the tribute were punctually paid, well and good; but if one rebelled or defaulted, the odds were that he very soon had a heavy bill to pay for window-repairing, or else there would be sudden deaths in his fowl-house, or, peradventure, his errand-boy, if not an accomplice of the gang, would return prematurely from his rounds with his goods missing and undelivered, and his person in a somewhat battered and dishevelled condition.
The most respectable feat that he appears to have accomplished in these days would, after all, appear to be the climbing of the lofty church steeple, and his enjoyment on that dizzy eminence of the horror and consternation of the townsfolk. This feat was, in its way, as characteristic of the man that was to be as was his first essay in world-piracy, for later on we shall see how he reached a far more dizzy eminence than this and kept his head as few others would have done.
His school life appears to have been as unsatisfactory as his home life. He was sent to academy after academy, and at each, ushers and pedagogues struggled with him in vain—although of itself this fact was not greatly to his discredit, since the methods of alleged education in the first half of the eighteenth century were even more unnatural than they are now. Still, the fact remains that he was a hopeless dunce, self-willed and idle, and of an unlovable disposition, redeemed only by the one good quality of intrepid pluck.
One of his uncles, in a family letter, says, semi-prophetically of him: “Fighting, to which he is out of measure addicted, gives his temper such a fierceness and imperiousness that it flies out on every trifling occasion.”