Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

The next act in the now swiftly passing drama was the first and only council of war that Clive ever held. It was the eve of Plassey, an occasion ever memorable in the annals, not only of Britain but of the whole Orient. He was on one bank of the river, Surajah Dowlah was on the other with an army outnumbering his by twenty to one, splendidly equipped, very strong in artillery, and, as usual, supported and officered by the inevitable Frenchmen. The river was the Rubicon which lay between Clive and the Empire of India—and for once in his life he hesitated.

He called a council of war. It decided against crossing the river with three thousand men in face of sixty thousand, and Clive endorsed the verdict. Then he went apart under some palm trees and held another and a wiser council with himself, and this council promptly and utterly revoked the decision of the other.

The next morning the river was crossed and the next night the little army encamped within a mile of the Nabob’s host. At sunrise the next day Surajah Dowlah, who in the midst of his myriads had passed a night haunted, as has been suggested, by the ghosts of the men and women who perished in the Black Hole, sent forth his forty thousand infantry, his fifteen thousand cavalry, his batteries of fifty guns, and his iron-plated war-elephants to crush the invader once and for all, and on they went like some huge tidal wave, roaring and rushing, to overwhelm some little tree-clad island—and then, just as the human avalanche was in mid-career, the despot weakling’s will wavered, or, more probably, his mind broke down, and he gave the order to halt and retreat, almost before a blow was struck.

It was the moment of grace for Clive and he seized it. The three thousand charged the sixty thousand, and all of a sudden the impending tragedy on which the fate of all India from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin depended, was turned into a farce. Of the sixty thousand only five hundred were slain; of the three thousand twenty-two were killed and fifty wounded. The whole thing was over in an hour, and India was won.

To Clive himself the result was an appointment as Governor-General over the whole of the Company’s territory in Bengal, and this virtually raised him to an authority higher than that of a throne, and, to his everlasting honour be it said, that in an age and country of almost universal corruption, he never abused it. Victory after victory in the field, and triumph after triumph in policy now followed fast upon each other, till French, Dutch, and native princes alike were crushed to impotence or reduced to grovelling submission, and the crowning victory of Chinsurah set the seal of absolute supremacy upon British rule in India.

Three months after this Clive again came home, the possessor of fairly won wealth which was only exceeded by the magnitude of his fame, to be hailed as the greatest of British living Commanders, and to be rewarded, first with a place in the Irish, and then with one in the British Peerage.

The story of his five years’ stay in England is not an edifying one. It is a story of wild extravagance, fierce and unworthy jealousies in the very councils of that Company to which he had given more lands and subjects than any European monarch possessed, and of general dissatisfaction and disillusion.

But meanwhile the way to his last and perhaps his greatest triumph was being prepared for him. As year after year passed it became more and more plain that the empire he had created could not get on without him. The men put in authority after him by the Company had but one object in life and that was to “shake the Pagoda Tree.” In other words, to set prince against prince and state against state for the sole purpose of making money out of their differences, and generally to squeeze the utmost amount of gold out of the country in the shortest possible time.

Corruption which scandalised even that corrupt age revelled in hitherto unheard-of excesses. Everything was neglected but money-making, and the lately-terrible English name was fast becoming a scoff and a by-word even to the plundered and the oppressed. So in the end Clive went out again, it being seen that he only could end a situation fast becoming impossible.

But this time it was not to fight French, or Indian, or Dutchman, but his own countrymen, and to win in the Council Chamber a victory that was perhaps greater than any he had won on the battlefield. In eighteen months he did what he had said he would do, and replaced chaos with cosmos. It was a fitting climax to his life’s work, and yet such is the irony of Fate and the baseness of human nature that it also came near to proving his personal ruin.