Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

But, bright as his fortune was to be, he appears just now to have been doing very little to deserve it. Macaulay tells us, in that brilliant essay of his, that he behaved just as badly to his official superiors as he had done to his schoolmasters, and came several times very near to being dismissed, and at length, so heavily did sickness of body and weariness of soul lie upon him, that twice in quick succession he attempted to blow his brains out, and twice the pistol missed fire.

If those had been the days of central-fire, self-cocking revolvers, instead of flint-lock pistols, the history of Asia would have been changed, and what is now our Indian Empire would probably have been a French possession.

It will be necessary just here to quote a little history with a view to seeing how matters stood in India at the time when Clive, as it is said, flung away the second useless pistol, and, like Wallenstein, exclaimed that after all he must have been born for something great.

The map of India then was very different to what it is now. There was no red about it at all. In the East, France was practically mistress of the seas, whatever she might be elsewhere. The British flag only flew over one spot, and that only by sufferance. This was the little trading settlement of Madras, which was rented from the Nabob of the Carnatic, who was only the deputy of the deputy of the once mighty prince whom Europe knew vaguely as the Great Mogul.

Fort St. George and Fort St. David were mere parodies of military stations, and the nucleus of the army which was to conquer the whole Peninsula consisted chiefly of half-trained natives, miscellaneously armed with bows and arrows, swords and bucklers, and here and there a firelock. On the other hand, France possessed the Island of Mauritius and the town and district of Pondicherry, the former governed by Labourdonnais and the latter by Dupleix, both men of great capacity and still greater ambition.

France and England were just then at war in Europe, and Labourdonnais thought it a good time to crush English trade in India while it was yet in its infancy, so, in spite of all the British East Indian fleet could do to stop him, he appeared with his ships off Madras, landed a large body of troops, forced Fort St. George to surrender, and hoisted the French flag on its battlements.

Happily, this roused the jealousy of Dupleix. Labourdonnais had pledged his honour that Madras should be restored on the payment of a moderate ransom. Dupleix, who had already dreamt of being sole master of India, was determined that it should be wiped off the map altogether, so he accused his fellow Governor of trespassing on his preserves, and in the end succeeded in annulling his conditions and marching the Governor of Fort St. George, with the principal servants of the Company, in triumph off to Pondicherry.

Unfortunately for him, there was one whom he did not take, not a principal servant by any means, only an insignificant, underpaid quill-driver, who had slipped out of the town disguised as a Mussulman, and yet Dupleix would have made a very good bargain if he could have exchanged all his other prisoners of war for him.

Clive reached Fort St. David, a dependency of Fort St. George, in safety, and there, taking advantage of the anger roused by this gross breach of faith, he exchanged the pen for the sword, and the writer became an ensign in the East India Company’s army, such as it was.

Scarcely, however, had he done so than peace was made in Europe, and therefore in India. Clive, no doubt in great disgust, was sent back to his desk, but, happily for him and the British Empire, not for long. Fortunately, too, submarine telegraphs had not been invented then, and India was almost always a year behind Europe, so Governor Dupleix made up his mind to have a war on his own account, and the prize of this war was to be, as Macaulay puts it, “nothing less than the magnificent inheritance of the House of Tamerlane.”