Soon after, Clive marched to attack Surajah Dowlah near Plassey. At sunrise on the morning of June 23, 1757, the army of the nabob, consisting of 40,000 infantry and 15,000 cavalry, supported by fifty pieces of heavy ordnance, advanced to attack the English army, which did not exceed three thousand men in all, and had for its artillery but a few field-pieces. But the nabob had no confidence in his army, nor his army in him; the battle was confined to a distant cannonade, in which the nabob's artillery was quite ineffective, while the English field-pieces did great execution. Surajah's terror became greater every moment, and led him to adopt the insidious advice of a traitor, Meer Jaffier, and order a retreat. Clive saw the movement, and the confusion it occasioned in the undisciplined hordes; he ordered his battalions to advance, and, in a moment, the hosts of the nabob became a mass of inextricable confusion. In less than an hour they were dispersed, never again to reassemble; though only five or six hundred fell; their camp, guns, baggage, with innumerable wagons and cattle, remained in the hands of the victors. With the loss of only 22 soldiers killed and 50 wounded, Clive had dispersed an army of 60,000 men, and conquered an empire larger and more populous than Great Britain. Surajah Dowlah fled from the field of battle to his capital, but, not deeming himself safe there, he tried to escape by the river to Patna. He was subsequently captured, and barbarously murdered by the son of Meer Jaffier. In the meantime Clive led Meer Jaffier in triumph to Moorshedabad, and installed him as nabob.
Immense sums of money were given to the servants of the company; Clive received for his share between two and three hundred thousand pounds. Nor was this all: Shah Alum, the son of the Emperor of Delhi, having invaded Bengal, Clive delivered Meer Jaffier from this formidable enemy, and was rewarded with the jaghire or estate of the lands south of Calcutta, for which the company were bound to pay the nabob a quit-rent of about thirty thousand pounds annually. But the gratitude of Meer Jaffier did not last long; weary of his dependence on the English, he sought an alliance with the Dutch, who had a factory at Chinsurah. The authorities of this place sent earnest letters to their countrymen in Batavia, urging them to take this opportunity of raising a rival power to the English in India, and their advice was taken. Seven large ships from Java, having on board 1,500 troops, appeared unexpectedly in the Hoogly. Though England was at peace with Holland, Clive resolved to attack them without delay. The ships were taken and the army routed. Chinsurah was invested by the conquerors, and was only spared on the condition that no fortifications should be built, and no soldiers raised, beyond those that were necessary for the police of the factories.
Three months afterward he returned to England, where he was received with a profusion of honors; he was raised to the Irish peerage, and promised an English title. George III., who had just ascended the throne, received him with marked distinction, and the leading statesmen of the day vied with each other in showing him attention. By judicious purchases of land he was enabled to acquire great parliamentary influence, and by large purchases of India stock he was enabled to form a strong party in the Court of Proprietors. The value of such support was soon shown; the Court of Directors, instigated by Mr. Sullivan, the personal enemy of Lord Clive, withheld the rent of the jaghire that he had received from Meer Jaffier, and it was necessary to institute a suit in chancery to enforce payment.
But Clive's greatest strength was derived from the misconduct of his successors in the government of Bengal. "Rapacity, luxury, and the spirit of insubordination," says a late writer, "spread from the civil service to the officers of the army, and from the officers to the soldiers. The evil continued to grow till every messroom became the seat of conspiracy and cabal, and till the Sepoys could only be kept in order by wholesale executions." Individuals were enriched, but the public treasury was empty, and the government had to face the dangers of disordered finances, when there was war on the frontiers and disaffection in the army. Under these circumstances it was generally felt that Clive alone could save the empire which he had founded.
Lord Clive felt the strength of his position. He refused to go to India so long as his enemies had preponderating power in the Court of Directors; an overwhelming majority of the proprietors seconded his wishes, and the Sullivan party, lately triumphant, was deprived of power. Having been nominated governor-general and commander-in-chief of the British possessions in Bengal he sailed for India, and reached Calcutta in May, 1765. He at once assembled the council, and announced his determination to enforce his two great reforms—the prohibition of receiving presents from the natives, and the prohibition of private trade by the servants of the Company. The whole settlement seemed to be set, as one man, against these measures; but Clive declared that if the functionaries in Calcutta refused obedience, he would send for some civil servants from Madras to aid him in conducting the administration. As he evinced the strength of his resolution by dismissing the most factious of his opponents, the rest became alarmed and submitted to what was inevitable.
Scarcely had the governor-general quelled the opposition of the civil service when he had to encounter a formidable mutiny of the officers of the army, occasioned by a diminution of their field allowances. Two hundred English officers engaged in a conspiracy to resign their commissions on the same day, believing that the governor-general would submit to any terms rather than see the army, on which the safety of the empire rested, left without commanders. They were mistaken in their calculations; Clive supplied their places from the officers round his person; he sent for others from Madras; he even gave commissions to some mercantile agents who offered their support at this time. Fortunately the soldiers, and particularly the Sepoys, over whom Clive had unbounded influence, remained steadfast in their allegiance. The leaders were arrested, tried, and dismissed from the service; the others, completely humbled, besought permission to withdraw their resignations, and Clive exhibited lenity to all, save those whom he regarded as the contrivers of the plot.
In his foreign policy he was equally successful. The Nabob of Oude, who had threatened invasion, sought for peace as soon as he heard of Clive's arrival in India; and the Emperor of Delhi executed a formal warrant, empowering the Company to collect and administer the revenues of Bengal, Bahar, and Oussa; that is, in fact, to exercise direct sovereignty over these provinces. Never had such a beneficial change been wrought in the short space of eighteen months. The governor-general set a noble example of obedience to his own regulations; he refused the brilliant presents offered him by the native princes, and when Meer Jaffier left him a legacy of sixty thousand pounds, he made the whole over to the Company, in trust, for the officers and soldiers invalided in their service.
At the close of January, 1767, the state of his health compelled Lord Clive to return to England. His reception at home was far from being gratifying; his old enemies in the India House, reinforced by those whose rapacity he had checked in Bengal, assailed him publicly and privately; the prejudices excited against those who had suddenly made large fortunes in India, were concentrated against him who was the highest, both in rank and fortune; while his ostentatious display of wealth and grandeur increased the unfavorable impression on the public mind. The dreadful famine which desolated Bengal in 1770, was, with strange perversity, attributed to Lord Clive's measures, and his parliamentary influence was greatly weakened by the death of George Grenville. Such was his position in the session of 1772, when the state of India was brought before Parliament, and all the evils of its condition made subjects of charge against the best of its rulers. Clive met the storm with firmness. Lord Chatham declared that the speech in which he vindicated himself at an early stage of the proceedings was one of the finest ever delivered in the House of Commons; his answers, when subjected to a rigid examination before a committee of inquiry, were equally remarkable for their boldness and candor. But there were some of his deeds which could not be justified, and a vote of moderate censure on his conduct was sanctioned by the House of Commons. This was a disgrace, for which the favor of his sovereign, though it never varied, afforded him no consolation; his constitution, already weakened by a tropical climate, began to give way; to soothe the pains of mind and body he had recourse to the treacherous aid of opium, which only aggravated both; at length, on November 22, 1774, he died by his own hand.
That Clive committed many faults cannot be denied; and it is not sufficient excuse to say that they were necessary to the founding of the British empire in India. But his second administration, the reforms he introduced into the government, and the system of wise policy which he established, may well atone for his errors; indeed, it has done so in India, where the natives not only respect his memory as a conqueror, but venerate it as a benefactor.[Back to Contents]