Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

Such was the forever memorable defence of Arcot, and such too was the practical foundation of the British Empire in India. It was the work of a hundred and twenty-five English soldiers and two hundred Sepoys, inspired to heroism by a young man whom Fortune had suddenly plucked out of the wrong place and set down in the right one.

Clive was by no means the man to look upon work as done because it was well begun. The authorities at Fort St. George promptly sent him two hundred more English soldiers and seven hundred Sepoys, and with this force—which was quite a large army for him—he marched out to join hands with Morari Row, attacked Rajah Sahib at the head of five thousand men with a stiffening of three hundred French regulars, hit him very hard, and generally convinced people that an Englishman worthy of his name and race had at length taken matters in hand.

Unhappily, however, the English were not as strong in the council-chamber as they were in the field, and while the authorities were hesitating, Rajah Sahib and Dupleix retrieved their loss to such purpose that a native army supported by four hundred French troops marched almost up to the walls of Fort St. George and proceeded to amuse themselves by laying the settlement waste, with the result that Captain Clive had to come to the rescue, and the end was another overwhelming defeat, during which about half of the French regulars were either killed or taken prisoners.

This physical victory was followed by a moral one no less effective. The vaingloriously-named City of the Victory of Dupleix, surmounted by its magniloquently inscribed pillar, lay at Clive’s mercy and directly in his path, and he promptly pulled the pillar down and wiped the city off the face of the earth. He didn’t do this because he personally disliked either Dupleix or his nation, but in doing it he showed that he was statesman as well as soldier, for, as he well knew, the destruction of the City of Victory was to the waiting and watching millions of India the symbol of the destruction and discredit of the French power, and the establishment and vindication of the British. From that day to this Britain’s star in the East has been in the ascendant and that of France on the decline.

How completely all this and what followed was the work of one man, and one only is eloquently shown by the pronouncement of old Morari Row to the effect that the English who followed Clive must be of quite a different tribe or breed to those who followed anybody else, and further by the fact that he inflicted two decisive defeats upon the French at Covelong and Chingleput, with a force consisting of five hundred raw Sepoy levies, and two hundred newly-imported scourings of the London slums, who had so little of the soldier in them that when a shot killed one in the first skirmish all the rest turned round and ran away; while on another occasion the report of a cannon so frightened the sentries that they all left their posts, and one of them was discovered occupying a strategic position at the bottom of a well!

And yet Clive, somehow, made steady, disciplined soldiers out of this miserable rabble, and, though at last he was so ill that he could hardly stand, led them to victory and turned the French out of their forts—which was perhaps a miracle even greater than the making of Cromwell’s Ironsides.

After this the young man, having well earned a holiday, got married and came home for his honeymoon. He was at once hailed as the saviour of India—or at any rate of the East India Company, the directors of which drained many a good bottle of port to the toast of “General” Clive; and even his father half incredulously admitted that “after all it seemed that the booby had something in him.”

But “the booby,” who had come back moderately rich, bore no malice, and at once began to repair the evil of his youth by paying off all the debts of his family. He then proceeded to waste his substance and his time by getting into Parliament and getting turned out again on petition, after which he very properly went back to India to do work that parliamentary orators couldn’t do.

His first exploit was the reduction of the pirate stronghold of Gheriah, which had long dominated the whole Arabian Gulf, the next was the Avenging of one of the blackest crimes in history. There is no need to tell of it here, for is not the story of the Black Hole of Calcutta deep-graven in the memory of every man and woman, boy and girl, of Anglo-Saxon blood? Forty-eight hours after the news reached Madras Clive was given the command of nine hundred British infantry and fifteen hundred Sepoys, and with this army, supported by a fleet under Admiral Watson, he marched to the conquest of an empire half as large as Europe.

Curiously enough, however, he began by treating with Surajah Dowlah—the arch-criminal of the Black Hole—instead of crushing him, and, more amazing still, during the course of the negotiations, he deliberately forged Admiral Watson’s name to a treaty intended to deceive an adherent whom he knew to have made terms with the other side. It is the most inexplicable act in his career, and, being so, it is only a waste of words to try and explain it away. He did it, and there’s an end of it.