Clive was now seized with the ambition to play a part in home politics. The general election of 1754 seemed to offer him a tempting opportunity of entering Parliament. He came forward as one of the members for St. Michael's in Cornwall, was opposed by Newcastle, and supported by Sandwich and Fox, was returned, was petitioned against, and was unseated on petition. To fight a parliamentary election in those days meant the spending of a very great deal of money, and Clive, who had squandered his well-earned fortune right and left since his return to his native land, found himself, after he was unseated, in a decidedly disagreeable position. His money was dwindling; his hope of political triumphs had vanished into thin air; naturally enough, his thoughts turned back to the India of his youth. The curious good-luck that always attended upon him stood him in good stead here. If he had need of the India of his youth, the India of his youth had need of him. If France and England were not at {265} war, the rumor of war was busy between them, and there was a desire for good leaders in the advancing English colonies in India. Poor Dupleix was out of the way already. The brilliant spirit whom Clive's genius had over-crowed had vanished forever from the scenes of his triumphs and his humiliations. He had suffered something of the same hard measure that he had himself meted out to his colleague La Bourdonnais; he had been recalled in comparative disgrace to France, with ruined fortunes and ruined hopes, to die, a defeated and degraded man, the shadow of his own great name. But the influence of France was not extinct in India; it might at any moment reassert itself—at any moment come to the push of arms between France and England in the East as well as in the West; and where could the English look for so capable a leader of men as Clive? So it came about that in the year 1755 Clive again sailed the seas for India, under very different conditions from those under which he first adventured for the East. Then he was an unknown, unappreciated rapscallion of a lad, needy, homesick, desperate, and alone; now he was going out as the Governor of Fort St. David, as lieutenant-colonel in the British army, with a record of fame and fortune behind him. New fame, new fortune, awaited him almost on the very moment of his arrival in India. The pirate stronghold of Gheriah fell before him almost as easily as if the place had been a new Jericho and Clive a second Joshua. But there was greater work in store for him than the destruction of pirate strongholds. Bengal became suddenly the theatre of a terrible drama. Up to the year 1756 the tranquillity of the English settlers and traders in Bengal had been undisturbed. Their relations with the Nabob Ali Vardi Khan had been of the friendliest kind, and the very friendliness of those relations had had the effect of making the English residents in Bengal, like the native population, men of a milder mould than those whom hard fortune had fashioned into soldiers and statesmen at Madras. But in the year 1758 the Nabob Ali Vardi Khan died, and was {266} succeeded by his grandson, Siraju'd Daulah, infamous in English history as Surajah Dowlah.
[Sidenote: 1756—The Blackhole]
This creature, who incarnated in his own proper person all the worst vices of the East, without apparently possessing any of the East's redeeming virtues, cherished a very bitter hatred of the English. Surajah Dowlah was unblessed with the faintest glimmerings of statesmanship; it seemed to his enfeebled mind that it would be not only a very good thing to drive the English out of Bengal, but that it would be also an exceedingly easy thing to do. All he wanted, it seemed to him, was a pretext, and to such a mind a pretext was readily forthcoming. Had not the English dogs fortified their settlement without his permission? Had they not afforded shelter to some victim flying from his omnivorous rapacity? These were pretexts good enough to serve the insane brain of Surajah Dowlah. He attacked Fort William with an overwhelming force; the English traders, unwarlike, timorous, and deserted by their leaders, made little or no resistance; the madman had Fort William in his power, and used his power like a madman. The memory of the Blackhole of Calcutta still remains a mark of horror and of terror upon our annals of Indian empire. When Lord Macaulay, eighty-four years after the event, penned his famous passage in which he declared that nothing in history or in fiction, not even the story which Ugolino told in the sea of everlasting ice, approached the horrors of the Blackhole, he wrote before the worst horrors of Indian history had yet become portion and parcel of our own history. But even those who write to-day, more than a century and a quarter after that time; those in whose minds the memories are fresh of the butcher's well at Cawnpore and the massacre on the river-bank; those to whom the names of Nana Sahib and Azimoolah Khan sound as horridly as the names of fiends—even those can still think of the Blackhole as almost incomparable in horror, and of Surajah Dowlah as among the worst of Oriental murderers. It is true that certain efforts have been made to reduce the {267} measure of Surajah Dowlah's guilt. Colonel Malleson, than whom there is no fairer or abler Indian historian, thinks there can be no doubt that Surajah Dowlah did not desire the death of his English prisoners. Mr. Holwell, one of the few survivors of that awful night, the man whose narrative thrilled and still thrills, horrified and still horrifies, the civilized world, does give testimony that goes towards clearing the character of Surajah Dowlah from direct complicity in that terrible crime. "I had in all three interviews with him," he wrote, "the last in Darbar before seven, when he repeated his assurances to me, on the word of a soldier, that no harm should come to us; and, indeed, I believe his orders were only general that we for that night should be secured, and that what followed was the result of revenge and resentment in the breasts of the lower jemidars to whose custody we were delivered for the number of their order killed during the siege." Yet these words do not go far to cleanse Surajah Dowlah's memory. What had occurred? The English prisoners were brought before the triumphant Nabob, bullied and insulted, and finally left in charge of the Nabob's soldiery, while the Nabob himself retired to slumber. The soldiery, whether prompted by revenge or mere merciless cruelty, forced the prisoners, one hundred and forty-six in number, into the garrison prison—a fearful place, only twenty feet square, known as the Blackhole. The senses sicken in reading what happened after this determination was carried out. The death-struggles of those unhappy English people crowded in that narrow space, without air, in the fearful summer heat, stir the profoundest pity, the profoundest anguish. The Nabob's soldiers all through that fearful night revelled in the sights and sounds that their victims' sufferings offered to them.
When the night did end and the awakened despot did allow the door of the Blackhole to be opened, only twenty-three out of the hundred and forty-six victims were alive. The hundred and twenty-three dead bodies were hurriedly buried in a common pit.
{268}
It is simply impossible to exonerate Surajah Dowlah from the shame and stain of that deed. The savage who passed "the word of a soldier" that the lives of his prisoners should be spared took no precautions to insure the carrying out of his promise. If, as Mr. Holwell says, the lower jemidars were thirsting for revenge, then the Nabob, who gave his prisoners over to the care of those jemidars, was directly responsible for their deeds. Even in Surajah Dowlah's army there must have been men, there must have been officers, to whom the tyrant, if he had wished his prisoners to be well treated, could have intrusted them, in the full confidence and certainty that his commands would be carried out, and his humane wishes humanely interpreted. But even if by the utmost straining we can in any degree acquit the Nabob of direct personal responsibility before the act, his subsequent conduct involves him in direct complicity, and forces upon him all the responsibility and all the infamy. He did not punish the miscreants who forced their victims into the Blackhole, and who gloated over their appalling sufferings. He did not treat the survivors with ordinary humanity. He was evidently convinced that he could deal with the wretched English as he pleased, that their power in India was annihilated, that Surajah Dowlah was among the mightiest princes of the earth.
[Sidenote: 1757—Plot and counterplot]
For six long months, for a fantastical half-year, Surajah Dowlah revelled in the crazy dream of his own omnipotence. Then came retribution, swift, successive, comprehensive. Clive was upon him—Clive the unconquerable, sacking his towns, putting his garrisons to the sword, recapturing those places from which Surajah Dowlah had imagined that he had banished the Englishman forever. The news of the tragedy of the Blackhole, and of the capture of Calcutta and Fort William, had reached Madras in August, and the warlike community had resolved upon prompt and speedy revenge. But it took time to raise the expedition, took time to despatch the expedition. In October the army of two thousand four hundred men, {269} of which nine hundred were European troops, and fifteen hundred Sepoys, sailed for the Hoogly, under Clive as military, and Admiral Watson as naval, commander. Hostile winds delayed the armament until December, but when it did reach its destination it carried all before it. The luck which always attended upon Clive was still faithful to him. The Nabob, at the head of his vast hordes, was soon as eager to come to terms with Clive at the head of his little handful of men as he had before been eager to obliterate the recollection of the Englishmen from the soil of Bengal. He offered to treat with Clive; he was ready to make terms which from a military point of view were satisfactory; he was evidently convinced that he had underrated the power of England, and he was prepared to pay a heavy penalty for his blunder.
We are now approaching that chapter of Clive's career which has served his enemies with their readiest weapon, and has filled his admirers with the deepest regret. The negotiations between Clive and Surajah Dowlah were conducted on the part of all the Orientals concerned, from Surajah Dowlah to Omichund, the wealthy Bengalee who played the part of go-between, with an amount of treachery that has not been surpassed even in the tortuous records of Oriental treachery. But unhappily the treachery was not confined to the Oriental negotiators; not confined to the wretched despot on the throne; not confined to Meer Jaffier, the principal commander of his troops, who wanted the throne for himself; not confined to the unscrupulous Omichund, who plotted with his left hand against Surajah Dowlah, and with his right hand against the English. Treachery as audacious, treachery more ingenious, treachery more successful, was deliberately practised by Clive. The brilliant and gallant soldier of fortune showed himself to be more than a match for Oriental cunning in all the worst vices of a vicious Oriental diplomacy. If Surajah Dowlah was unable to make up his miserable mind, if he alternately promised and denied, cajoled and threatened, Clive, on his side, while affecting to treat {270} with Surajah Dowlah, was deliberately supporting the powerful conspiracy against Surajah Dowlah, the object of which was to place Meer Jaffier on the throne. If Omichund, with the keys of the conspiracy in his hand, threatened to betray all to Surajah Dowlah unless he was promised the heaviest hush-money, Clive on his side was perfectly ready to promise without the remotest intention of paying. If Omichund, wary and suspicious, was determined to have his bond in writing, Clive was quite ready to meet him with a false and fraudulent bond. Clive professed to be perfectly willing that in the secret treaty which was being drawn up between the English and Meer Jaffier a clause should be inserted promising the fulfilment of all Omichund's claims. But as Clive had not the remotest intention of satisfying those claims, he composedly prepared two treaties. One—the one by which he and Meer Jaffier were to be bound—was written on white paper, and contained no allusion to the avaricious Omichund. [Sidenote: 1757—The Red Treaty] Another, on red paper, which was to be disregarded by the parties to the swindle, contained a paragraph according to Omichund's heart's desire. Thus bad begins, but worse remains behind. Clive, to his great astonishment, found that Admiral Watson entertained different views from his about the honor of an English soldier and gentleman. However convenient it might be to bamboozle Omichund with a sham treaty, Admiral Watson declined to be a party to the trick by signing his name to the fraudulent document. Yet Admiral Watson's name was essential to the success of the Red Treaty, and Clive showed that he was not a man to stick at trifles. He wanted Admiral Watson's signature; he knew that Omichund would want Admiral Watson's signature; he satisfied himself, and he satisfied Omichund, by forging Admiral Watson's signature at the bottom of the Red Treaty.
It is simply impossible to imagine any defence of Clive's conduct in this most disgraceful business. The best that can be said for him is that the whole process of the {271} treason was so infamous, the fabrication of the Red Treaty so revolting a piece of duplicity, that the forging of Admiral Watson's name does not materially add to the darkness of the complete transaction. Nothing can palliate Clive's conduct. It may, indeed, be said that as civilized troops after long engagements in petty wars with savage races lose that morale and discipline which come from contests with their military peers, so minds steeped in the degrading atmosphere of Oriental diplomacy become inevitably corrupted, and lose the fine distinction between right and wrong. But so specious a piece of special pleading cannot serve Clive's turn. English diplomacy at home and abroad has always, with the rarest exceptions, plumed itself on its truthfulness, and has often been successful by reason of that very truthfulness. The practically unanimous condemnation which Clive's countrymen then and since have passed upon his action with regard to the Red Treaty is the best answer to all such pitiful prevarications.