CLIVE, ROBERT CLIVE, BARON the states man and general who founded the empire of British India, was born on Sept. 29, 1725, at Styche, the family estate, in the parish of Moreton Say, Market Drayton, Shropshire. The Clives, or Clyves, were one of the oldest families in the county of Shrop shire, having held the manor of that name in the reign of Henry II. One Clive was Irish chancellor of the exchequer under Henry VIII.; another was a member of the Long Parliament; Robert's father for many years represented Montgomeryshire in parlia ment.
Young Clive was the despair of his teachers. Sent from school to school, and for only a short time at the Merchant Taylors' school, he neglected his books for perilous adventures. But he could read Horace in after life ; and he must have laid in his youth the foundation of that clear and vigorous English style which marked all his despatches, and made Lord Chatham declare of one of his speeches in the House of Commons that it was the most elo quent he had ever heard. At 18 he was sent out to Madras as a "factor" or "writer" in the civil service of the East India Com pany. For the first two years of his residence he felt keenly the separation from home ; he was always breaking through the re straints imposed on young "writers" ; and he was rarely out of trouble with his fellows, with one of whom he f ought a duel. His one solace was found in the governor's library, where he sought to make up for past carelessness by a systematic course of study. He was just of age, when in 1746 Madras was forced to capitulate to Labourdonnais during the War of the Austrian Succession. The breach of that capitulation by Dupleix, then at the head of the French settlements in India, led Clive, with others, to escape from the town to the subordinate Fort St. David, some tom. to the south. There Clive obtained an ensign's commission.
At this time India was ready to become the prize of the first conqueror who combined administrative with military skill. For the 4o years since the death of the emperor Aurangzeb, the power of the Great Mogul had gradually fallen into the hands of his provincial viceroys or subadhars. The three greatest of these were the nawab of the Deccan, or south and central India, who ruled from Hyderabad, the nawab of Bengal, whose capital was Murshidabad, and the nawab or wazir of Oudh. The prize lay be tween Dupleix, who had the genius of an administrator, or rather intriguer, but was no soldier, and Clive, the first of a century's brilliant succession of those "soldier-politicals" to whom Great Britain owed the conquest and consolidation of India. Clive successively established British ascendancy against French in fluence in the three great provinces under these nawabs. But his merit lies especially in the ability and foresight with which he secured the richest of the three, Bengal. But Clive had hardly been able to commend himself to Maj. Stringer Lawrence, the commander of the British troops in Madras and the Deccan, by his courage and skill in several small engagements, when the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) forced him to return to his civil duties for a short time. An attack of fever which severely affected his spirits led him to visit Bengal. On his return he found a contest going on between two sets of rival claimants for the position of viceroy of the Deccan, and for that of nawab of the Carnatic, the greatest of the subordinate States under the Deccan. Dupleix, who took the part of the pretenders to power in both places, was carrying all before him. The British had been weakened by the withdrawal of a large force under Admiral Boscawen, and by the return home, on leave, of Maj. Lawrence. But that officer had appointed Clive commissary for the supply of the troops with pro visions, with the rank of captain. More than one disaster had taken place on a small scale, when Clive drew up a plan for divid ing the enemy's forces, and offered to carry it out himself. The pretender, Chandar Sahib, had been made Nawab of the Carnatic with Dupleix's assistance, while the British had taken up the cause of the more legitimate successor, Mohammed Ali. Chandar Sahib had left Arcot, the capital of the Carnatic, to reduce Trich inopoly, then held by a weak English battalion. Clive offered to attack Arcot in order to force Chandar Sahib to raise the siege of Trichinopoly. But Madras and Fort St. David could supply him with only 200 Europeans and 30o sepoys. Of the eight officers who led them, four were civilians like Clive himself, and six had never been in action. His force had but three field-pieces. The circumstance that Clive, at the head of this handful, had been seen marching during a storm of thunder and lightning, frightened the enemy into evacuating the fort, which the British at once began to strengthen against a siege. Clive treated the great population of the city with so much consideration that they helped him to make successful sallies against the enemy. As the days passed on, Chandar Sahib sent a large army under his son and his French supporters, who entered Arcot and closely besieged Clive in the citadel. The story of the gallant defence of the citadel and of the repulse of the enemy is told in Macaulay's famous essay on Clive.
In India there is no parallel to the defence of the citadel of Arcot in 1751 till we come to the siege of Lucknow in 18J7. Clive, now reinforced, followed up his advantage, and Maj. Lawrence returned in time to carry the war to a successful issue. In the first of the Carnatic treaties was made provisionally, between T. Saunders, the company's resident at Madras, and M. Godeheu, the French commander, in which the British protege, Mohammed Ali, was virtually recognized as nawab, and both nations agreed to equalize their possessions. When war again broke out in 1756, and the French, during Clive's absence in Bengal, obtained suc cesses in the northern districts, his efforts helped to drive them from their settlements. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 formally con firmed Mohammed Ali in the position which Clive had won for him. Two years after, the Madras work of Clive was completed by a firman from the emperor of Delhi, recognizing the British possessions in southern India.
The siege of Arcot at once gave Clive a European reputation. Pitt pronounced the youth of 27 who had done such deeds a "heaven-born general." When the court of directors voted him a sword worth f 700, he refused to receive it unless Lawrence was similarly honoured. He left Madras for home, after ten years' absence, early in 1753. Before leaving India he married Margaret Maskelyne. The marriage was a happy one, and the scandalous stories of his private life spread later by his enemies are devoid of foundation. After he had been two years at home the state of affairs in India made the directors anxious for his return. He was sent out, in 1756, as governor of Fort St. David, with the reversion of the Government of Madras, and with the commission of Lieu tenant-colonel in the king's army. He took Bombay on his way, and there commanded the land force which captured Gheria, the stronghold of the Mahratta pirate, Angria. He took his seat as governor of Fort St. David on the day on which the nawab of Bengal captured Calcutta, and thither the Madras Government at once sent him, with Admiral Watson. He entered on the second period of his career.
Since, in Aug. 169o, Job Charnock had landed at the village of Sutanati with a guard of one officer and 3o men, the infant capital of Calcutta had become a rich centre of trade. The successive nawabs or viceroys of Bengal had been friendly to it, till, in 1756, Suraj-ud-Dowlah succeeded his uncle at Murshidabad. His prede cessor's financial minister had fled to Calcutta to escape the extor tion of the new nawab, and the English governor refused to de liver up the refugee. Enraged at this, Suraj-ud-Dowlah captured the old fort of Calcutta on June 20, and plundered it. Many of the English fled to ships and dropped down the river. The 146 who remained were forced into "the Black Hole" in the stifling heat of the sultriest period of the year. Only 23 came out alive. The fleet was as strong, for those days, as the land force was weak. Disembarking his troops some miles below the city, Clive marched through the jungles, where he lost his way owing to the treachery of his guides, but soon invested Fort William, while the fire of the ships reduced it, on Jan. 2, 1757. On Feb. 4, he defeated the whole army of the nawab, which had taken up a strong position just beyond what is now the most northerly suburb of Calcutta. The nawab hastened to conclude a treaty, under which favourable terms were conceded to the company's trade, the factories and plundered property were restored, and an English mint was estab lished. In the accompanying agreement, offensive and defensive, Clive appears under the name by which he was always known to the natives of India, Sabut Jung, or "the daring in war." With 60o British soldiers, Boo sepoys, seven field-pieces and Soo sailors to draw them, he had routed a force of 34,00o men with 4o pieces of heavy cannon and so elephants, and had seized a camp four miles id length.
In spite of his double defeat and the treaty which followed it, the madness of the nawab burst forth again. As England and France were once more at war, Clive sent the fleet up the river against Chandernagore, while he besieged it by land. After consent ing to the siege, the nawab sought to assist the French, but in vain. The capture of their principal settlement in India, next to Pon dicherry, which had fallen in the previous war, gave the com bined forces prize to the value of £130,000. The rule of Suraj-ud Dowlah became as intolerable to his own people as to the British. They formed a confederacy to depose him, at the head of which was Jafar Ali Khan, his commander-in-chief. Associating with himself Admiral Watson, Governor Drake and Mr. Watts, Clive made a treaty in which it was agreed to give the office of viceroy of Bengal, Behar and Orissa to Jafar, who was to pay a million sterling to the company for its losses in Calcutta and the cost of its troops, half a million to the British inhabitants of Calcutta, 1200,000 to the native inhabitants, and £70,000 to its Armenian merchants. Up to this point all is clear. Suraj-ud-Dowlah was hopeless as a ruler. His relations alike to his master, the merely titular emperor of Delhi, and to the people left the province open to the strongest. After "the Black Hole," the battle of Calcutta, and the treachery at Chandernagore, in spite of the treaty which followed that battle, the East India Company could treat the nawab only as an enemy. Clive, it is true, might have disregarded all native intrigue, marched on Murshidabad, and at once held the delta of the Ganges in the company's name. But the time was not ripe for this, and the consequences, with so small a force, might have been fatal. The idea of acting directly as rulers, or save under native charters and names, was not developed by events for half a century. The political morality of the time in Europe, as well as the comparative weakness of the company in India, led Clive not only to meet the dishonesty of his native associate by equal dishonesty, but to justify his conduct by the declaration, years after, in parliament, that he would do the same again. It became necessary to employ the richest Bengali trader, Omichund, as an agent between Jafar Ali and the British officials. Master of the secret of the confederacy against Suraj-ud-Dowlah, the Bengali threatened to betray it unless he was guaranteed, in the treaty itself, .1300,00o. To dupe the villain, who was really paid by both sides, a second, or fictitious treaty, was shown him with a clause to this effect. This Admiral Watson refused to sign; "but," Clive deposed to the House of Commons, "to the best of his remembrance, he gave the gentleman who carried it leave to sign his name upon it ; his lordship never made any secret of it ; he thinks it warrantable in such a case, and would do it again a hundred times; he had no interested motive in doing it, and did it with a design of disappointing the expectations of a rapa cious man." Such is Clive's own defence of the one act which, in a long career of abounding temptations, was of questionable honesty.
The whole hot season of 1757 was spent in these negotiations, till the middle of June, when Clive began his march from Chan dernagore, the British in boats, and the sepoys along the right bank of the Hugli. That river above Calcutta is, during the rainy season, fed by the overflow of the Ganges to the north through three streams, which in the hot months are nearly dry. On the left bank of the Bhagirathi, the most westerly of these, loom. above Chandernagore, stands Murshidabad, the capital of the Mogul viceroys of Bengal, and then so vast that Clive compared it to the London of his day. Some miles farther down is the field of Plassey, then an extensive grove of mango trees. On June 21, Clive arrived on the bank opposite Plassey, in the midst of that outburst of rain which ushers in the south-west monsoon of India. His whole army amounted to i,ioo Europeans and 2,100 native troops, with nine field-pieces. The nawab had drawn up 18,000 horse, 50,000 foot and 53 pieces of heavy ordnance, served by French artillerymen. For once in his career Clive hesitated, and called a council of 16 officers to decide, as he put it, "whether in our present situation, without assistance, and on our own bot tom, it would be prudent to attack the nawab, or whether we should wait till joined by some country power?" Clive himself headed the nine who voted for delay; Major (afterwards Sir) Eyre Coote led the seven who counselled immediate attack. But, either because his daring asserted itself, or because also, of a let ter that he received from Jafar Ali, as has been said, Clive was the first to change his mind and to communicate with Major Eyre Coote. One tradition, followed by Macaulay, represents him as spending an hour in thought under the shade of some trees, while he resolved the issues of what was to prove one of the deci sive battles of the world. Another, turned into verse by Sir Alfred Lyall, pictures his resolution as the result of a dream. However, that may be, he did well as a soldier to trust to the dash and even rashness that had gained Arcot and triumphed at Calcutta, and as a statesman, since retreat, or even delay, would have put back the conquest of India for years. When, after the heavy rain, the sun rose brightly on the 22nd, the 3,200 men and the nine guns crossed the river and took possession of the grove and its tanks of water, while Clive established his headquarters in a hunting lodge. On the 23rd the engagement took place and lasted the whole day. Except the 4o Frenchmen and the guns which they worked, the enemy did little to reply to the British cannonade which, with the 39th Regiment, scattered the host, inflicting on it a loss of Soo men. Clive restrained the ardour of Maj. Kilpatrick, for he trusted to Jafar Ali's abstinence, if not desertion to his ranks, and knew the importance of sparing his own small force. He lost hardly a white soldier; in all 22 sepoys were killed and 50 wounded. Suraj-ud-Dowlah fled from the field on a camel, secured what wealth he could, and came to an untimely end. Clive entered Murshidabad, and established Jafar Ali in the position which his descendants have since enjoyed, as pensioners, but have not in frequently abused. When taken through the treasury, amid a million and a half sterling's worth of rupees, gold and silver plate, jewels and rich goods, and besought to ask what he would, Clive was content with .116o.000, while half a million was distributed among the army and navy, both in addition to gifts of 124,000 to each member of the company's committee, and besides the public compensation stipulated for in the treaty. It was to this occasion that he referred in his defence before the House of Commons, when he declared that he marvelled at his moderation. He fol lowed a usage fully recognized by the company, although the fruitful source of future evils which he himself was again sent out to correct. The company itself acquired a revenue of .1ioo,000 a year, and a contribution towards its losses and military expendi• tore of a million and a half sterling. Jafar Ali afterwards pre sented Clive with the quit-rent of the company's lands in and around Calcutta, amounting to an annuity of £27,000 for life, and left him by will the sum of £70,000 which Clive devoted to the army.
While busy with the civil administration, the conqueror of Plassey followed up his military success. He sent Maj. Coote in pursuit of the French almost as far as Benares. He despatched Col. Forde to Vizagapatam and the northern districts of Madras, where that officer gained the battle of Condore. He came into direct contact, for the first time, with the Great Mogul himself, an event which resulted in the most important consequences during the third period of his career. Shah Alam, when shahzada, or heir apparent, quarrelled with his father, Alam Gir II., the emperor, and united with the viceroys of Oudh and Allahabad for the con quest of Bengal. He advanced as far as Patna, which he besieged with 40,000 men. Jafar Ali, in terror, sent his son to its relief, and implored the aid of Clive. Major Caillaud defeated the prince's army and dispersed it. Finally, at this period, Clive repelled the aggression of the Dutch, and avenged the massacre of Amboyna, on that occasion when he wrote his famous letter, "Dear Forde, fight them immediately ; I will send you the order of council to morrow." Meanwhile he never ceased to improve the organiza tion and drill of the sepoy army, after a European model, and enlisted into it many Mohammedans of fine physique from upper India. He ref ortified Calcutta. In 176o, after four years of inces sant labour his health gave way and he returned to England. "It appeared," wrote a contemporary on the spot, "as if the soul was departing from the Government of Bengal." He had been form ally made governor of Bengal by the court of directors at a time when his nominal superiors in Madras sought to recall him to their help there. But he had discerned the importance of the province even during his first visit to its rich delta, mighty rivers and teem ing population. It should be noticed, also, that he had the kingly gift of selecting the ablest subordinates, for even thus early he had discovered the ability of young Warren Hastings, destined to be his great successor, and, a year after Plassey, made him resident at the nawab's court.
In 1760, at 35 years of age, Clive returned to England with a fortune of at least £300,000 and the quit-rent of £27,000 a year, after caring for the comfort of his parents and sisters, and giving Maj. Lawrence, his old commanding officer, 1500 a year. The money had been honourably and publicly acquired, with the ap proval of the company. The amount might have been four times what it was had Clive been either greedy after wealth or ungen erous to the colleagues and the troops whom he led to victory. He was well received at court, was made Baron Clive of Plassey, in the peerage of Ireland, bought estates, and got not only himself, but his friends returned to the House of Commons after the fash ion of the time. He then set himself to reform the home system of the East India Company, and began a bitter warfare with Sulivan, chairman of the court of directors, whom in the end he defeated. In this he was aided by the news of reverses in Bengal. Vansittart, his successor, having no great influence over Jafar Ali Khan, had put Kasim Ali Khan, the son-in-law, in his place in consideration of certain payments to the English officials. After a brief tenure Kasim Ali had fled, had ordered Walter Reinhardt (known to the Mohammedans as Sumru), a Swiss mercenary of his, to butcher the garrison of 15o English at Patna, and had dis appeared under the protection of his brother viceroy of Oudh. The whole company's service, civil and military, had become de moralized by gifts, and by the monopoly of the inland as well as export trade, to such an extent that the natives were pauperized, and the company was plundered of the revenues which Clive had acquired for them. The court of proprietors, accordingly, who elected the directors, forced them, in spite of Sulivan, to hurry out Lord Clive to Bengal with the double powers of governor and commander-in-chief.
What he had done for Madras, what he had accomplished for Bengal proper, and what he had effected in reforming the company itself, he was now to complete in less than two years, in this the third period of his career, by putting his country politically in the place of the emperor of Delhi, and preventing for ever the possibility of the corruption to which the British in India had been driven by an evil system. On May 3, 1765, he landed at Calcutta to learn that Jafar Ali Khan had died, leaving him per sonally £70,000, and had been succeeded by his son, though not before the Government had been further demoralized by taking f t oo,000 as a gift from the new nawab; while Kasim Ali had in duced not only the viceroy of Oudh, but the emperor of Delhi himself, to invade Behar. After the first mutiny in the Bengal army, which was suppressed by blowing the sepoy ringleader from a gun, Major Munro, "the Napier of those times," scattered the united armies on the hard-fought field of Buxar. The emperor, Shah Alam, detached himself from the league, while the Oudh viceroy threw himself on the mercy of the British. Clive had now an opportunity of repeating in Hindustan, or Upper India, what he had accomplished in Bengal. He might have secured what are now called the United Provinces, and have rendered unnecessary the campaigns of Wellesley and Lake. But he had other work in the consolidation of rich Bengal itself, making it a base for the development of the mighty fabric of British India. Hence he re turned to the Oudh viceroy all his territory save the provinces of Allahabad and Kora, which he made over to the weak emperor. But from that emperor he secured the most important document in the whole of British history in India up to that time, which ap pears in the records as "firmaund from the King Shah Aalum, granting the dewany of Bengal, Behar and Orissa to the company, 1765." The date was Aug. 12, the place, Benares, the throne an English dining-table covered with embroidered cloth and sur mounted by a chair in Clive's tent. It is all pictured by a Mo hammedan contemporary, who indignantly exclaims that so great a "transaction was done and finished in less time than would have been taken up in the sale of a jackass." By this deed the company became the real sovereign rulers of thirty millions of people, yield ing a revenue of four millions sterling. On the same date Clive obtained not only an imperial charter for the company's posses sion in the Carnatic also, thus completing the work he began at Arcot, but a third firman for the highest of all the lieutenancies of the empire, that of the Deccan itself. This fact is mentioned in a letter from the secret committee of the court of directors to the Madras government, dated April 27, 1768.
Having thus founded the empire of British India, Clive sought to reform the administration. The civil service was de-oriental ized by raising the miserable salaries which had tempted its mem bers to be corrupt, by forbidding the acceptance of gifts from na tives, and by exacting covenants under which participation in the inland trade was stopped. Not less important were his military reforms. He put down a mutiny of the English officers, who chose to resent the veto against receiving presents and the reduction of batta at a time when two Mahratta armies were marching on Bengal. He reorganized the army, dividing the whole into three brigades, so as to make each a complete force, in itself equal to any single native army that could be brought against it. He had not enough British artillerymen, however, and would not make the mistake of his successors, who trained natives to work the guns, which were turned against the British with such effect in 1857.
Clive's final return to England, a poorer man than he went out, in spite of still more tremendous temptations, was the signal for an outburst of his personal enemies. Every civilian whose illicit gains he had cut off, every officer whose conspiracy he had foiled, every proprietor or director, like Sulivan, whose selfish schemes he had thwarted, now sought his opportunity. Clive had, with con sistent generosity, at once made over the legacy of £70,000 from the grateful Jafar Ali, as the capital of what has since been known as "the Clive Fund," for the support of invalided European sol diers, as well as officers, and their widows, and the company had allowed 8% on the sum for an object which it was otherwise bound to meet. Gen. John Burgoyne, of Saratoga memory, did his best to induce the House of Commons, in which Lord Clive was now member for Shrewsbury, to impeach the man who gave his country an empire, and the people of that empire peace and justice. The result, after the brilliant and honourable defences of his career which will be found in Almon's Debates for 1773, was a compromise. On a division the House, by 155 to 95, carried the motion that Lord Clive "did obtain and possess himself" of 00o during his first administration of Bengal; but, refusing to ex press an opinion on the fact, it passed unanimously the second motion, at five in the morning, "that Robert, Lord Clive, did at the same time render great and meritorious services to his coun try." The one questionable transaction in all that brilliant and tempted life—the Omichund treaty—was not touched.
Only one who can personally understand what Clive's power and services had been will rightly realize the effect on him, though in the prime of life, of the discussions through which he had been dragged. In the greatest of his speeches, in reply to Lord North, he said—"My situation, sir, has not been an easy one for these 12 months past, and though my conscience could never accuse me, yet I felt for my friends who were involved in the same censure as myself . . . I have been examined by the select committee more like a sheep-stealer than a member of this House." Fully accept ing that statement, and believing him to have been purer than his accusers in spite of temptations unknown to them, we see in Clive's end the result merely of physical suffering, of chronic disease which opium failed to abate, while the worry and chagrin caused by his enemies gave it full scope. This great man, who did more for his country than any soldier till Wellington, and more for the people and princes of India than any statesman in history, died by his own hand on Nov. 22, in his 5oth year.
His son Edward (1754-1839) became Earl of Powis in 1804. See C. Caraccioli, Life of Lord Clive (i775) ; G. B. Malleson, Lord Clive ("Rulers of India" series) (189o) ; Sir C. Wilson, Lord Clive ("English Men of Action" series) (189o) ; F. M. Holmes,, Four Heroes of India (1892) ; Sir A. J. Arbuthnot, Lord Clive ("Builders of Great Britain" series) (1899).