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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraphs

  BOOK ONE: BORN A SOLDIER, 1725–1756

  1. Burial at Dusk

  2. Rebel without a Cause

  3. Coromandel

  4. Dupleix

  5. The Return of the French

  6. Arcot

  7. The Chase

  8. The Siege of Trichinopoly

  9. The Fall of Dupleix

  10. Clive Superstar

  BOOK TWO: EMPEROR, 1756–1764

  11. Bengal

  12. The Black Hole

  13. To the Hugli

  14. The Battle of Calcutta

  15. The Deceivers

  16. Plassey

  17. The Nawab’s Baubles

  18. Emperor of Bengal

  19. The First Couple

  20. The Innocent

  BOOK THREE: STATESMAN, 1764–1771

  21. The Cesspit

  22. Statesman at Last

  23. The Plutocrat

  24. Typhoon

  BOOK FOUR: THE FALL, 1771–1774

  25. The Last Battle

  26. The Legacy

  Bibliography

  Index

  Also by Robert Harvey

  Copyright

  FOR ANTONELLA,

  ABDULLAH, BADIA,

  ABDULLILAH, AND HASEN

  Acknowledgements

  I owe a huge debt to a great many people who have assisted me in the preparation of the first major biography of Clive in two decades. Since boyhood I have been an admirer of Clive, and Macaulay’s famous Essay ignited a real admiration towards this extraordinary figure. Two books that came out in my youth, Mark Bence-Jones’s Clive of India and Michael Edwardes’s Plassey, rekindled my enthusiasm.

  Bence-Jones’s work, one of the two best biographies of Clive, is a masterpiece of scholarship and elegant writing, while Edwardes’s book is direct and militarily compelling, and to them I owe heartfelt thanks for indicating some of the direction that my research should follow – although in most cases the conclusions and judgments are very different from theirs and are no one’s responsibility but my own. Sir John Malcolm’s detailed Life of Lord Clive remains, of course, the most fruitful treasury of correspondence and papers, but the meticulously kept and helpful India Office library in London, the National Library of Wales, the National Army Museum in Chelsea, and other letters and documents still in private hands such as those provided by Christopher Stainforth provide a fertile field for original research. I am grateful to them all.

  I am also enormously indebted to the Earl and Countess of Plymouth, as well as Viscount and Lady Windsor, for their hospitality and help; likewise to Michael and the Hon Mrs Michael Woodbine Parish, Robin and the whole family, who quite apart from specific help, exposed one at an early age to the cheerful aura of a major Clive house; to the Rector of Moreton Saye; to Countess Bina Sella Di Monteluce, Deepak Vaidya and Indian friends too numerous to mention; to Peter Holt, a descendant of Clive’s and gifted chronicler of his travels; to Dr Martin Scurr, for his invaluable advice on Clive’s health; to Paul and Maureen Marriott, whose early enthusiasm for Clive always communicated itself to me as did that of Phyllis and Joce Humphreys for India; to Raleigh Trevelyan, whose advice and clear, penetrating insights into India are among the best there are; to Dr David Atterton, for his encouragement; to Lawrence James, whose tours de forces on the British Empire risk becoming definitive; to Andrew Williams, who knows India so well; to Dr Jonathan Wright of Christ Church, who steered me in one significant part of my research; and to Powys Castle, which contains many interesting relics of Clive. I also owe a huge debt to my former headmaster, Michael Phillips of Elston Hall, and my former Modern Tutor at Eton, John Peake, who instilled in me a passion for history.

  I am personally vastly indebted to my brilliant agent Gillon Aitken; to my enthusiastic and painstaking assistant, Jenny Thomas, and her historian husband Geoffrey; to my gifted and warmly encouraging editors Roland Philipps and Angela Herlihy; to my mother and sister, always founts of love and support; and above all, as always, to my darling Jane and Oliver, who have to endure the hard slog, moodiness and single-mindedness of a writer’s life, always restoring cheerfulness.

  I am very grateful to Mark Bence-Jones, Raleigh Trevelyan, Lawrence James and Peter Holt for permisson to quote from their books. For the picture credits I am grateful to the Oriental and India Office Collections, the National Trust and the Hon Mrs Michael Parish.

  ‘Am I not rather deserving of praise for the moderation which marked my proceedings? Consider the situation in which victory at Plassey had placed me. A great prince was dependent on my pleasure; an opulent city lay at my mercy; its richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles; I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone, piled on either hand with gold and jewels! Mr Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation!’

  Robert Clive

  ‘No oath which superstition can devise, no hostage however precious, inspires a hundredth part of the confidence which is produced by the “yea, yea,” and “nay, nay” of a British envoy.’

  Lord Macaulay, Essay on Clive

  ‘Whilst I could easily understand the reaction of a new generation to the imperial mystique … I knew that it had not all been hypocrisy, exploitation, lust and plunder, but that there had also been a degree of selflessness among a great many who had served in India and given their lives to it.’

  Raleigh Trevelyan, The Golden Oriole

  BOOK ONE

  BORN A SOLDIER, 1725–1756

  CHAPTER 1

  Burial at Dusk

  A moody, grey-grim, prematurely frosty evening in late November in the mid-eighteenth century, in one of the most obscure parts of central England. The buttress-hedged, snow-covered dirt-tracks are devoid of traffic, the window-coverings of the farmers’ and artisans’ cottages in place to keep in the warmth of the blazing, smoky fires and expel the ferocity of the cold. It is dusk, and the last light is fading. Anxious faces can be seen occasionally peeping from the windows. Ploughmen returning home, the odd venturesome older child, are outside, watching the road from the safety of thickets and copses of trees.

  Some noble carriages have already passed up to the church. Some of the more confident and wealthy members of the farming community have walked there to pay their last respects.

  Through the murk the sparking clatter of wheels on the rough stones of the lane can be heard approaching. The hidden watchers stiffen. Horses’ hooves pound into earshot; there is not one carriage, but several, as though a small army were riding into battle. Those farthest down the lane first witness the spectral procession through the dusk. A huge carriage, draped entirely in black, is at its head. The carriage denotes a man of immense power and wealth. Behind follows a succession of seven or eight carriages, the ones at the front equally splendid, funereal, spectral, the last bearing servants in livery.

  It is a terrifying sight for remote country folk, the passage of a black prince and his retainers to his funeral after nightfall. This was the burial, in Macaulay’s phrase, of a ‘great wicked lord who had ordered the walls around his house to be made so thick in order to keep out the devil’.

  * * *

  The thundering black carriages sped past the gawping onlookers like ghostly apparitions. Further on, they slowed and adopted a more respectful pace.
As the procession clattered along the road, through the encroaching darkness, the glint and polish of magnificent coaches and liverymen dressed in black must have seemed awesome to the silent, hidden watchers.

  Finally, the procession reached the very slight rise on which the then very humble church of Moreton Saye was perched, and the coaches disgorged their occupants, the women in the ample veils and black finery of loud mourning, the men stiffened in respect. The servants, with their black costumes and impassive faces, looked like the outriders of death. The huge wooden coffin was borne in, defying ecclesiastical regulations that burials must not take place after dusk.

  Gloom, sadness and secrecy pervaded. It was a burial in a hurry, and in shame; ostensibly that of a suicide who by canon law could not be buried in the consecrated ground of a graveyard, never mind in church itself. The funeral was solemn, subdued, punctuated by the sobbing of some of the women present and the silent grief of the men.

  When the coffin was laid in its vault, the secret, private mourners of the night departed in all their sepulchral finery. It was left to the gravediggers and stonemasons to cover the resting place, and then pave it over. No stone was erected over it, no tomb constructed, no memorial inscribed, no name carved. The floor was restored as it was, as though no one lay there.

  As a strong-willed, troublesome boy, the deceased had worshipped in this simple chapel, in the family pew. The ancient rough-hewn silver communion cup and fine wooden balcony, erected in 1634, offset the building’s rudeness. Fourteen years after the burial, in 1788, it was to be renovated in the Wren style into a respectable eighteenth-century edifice – by the standards of a provincial church. Nearly a hundred years later fine box pews were added. A tiny plaque was placed on the wall to the right facing the altar – not above the grave, but within the presbytery. It read: ‘Sacred to the Memory of Robert Lord Clive KB buried within the walls of this church. Primus in Indis.’ That is all the memorial that remains.

  This century, a parquet floor was laid by workmen who discovered bones about two-thirds of the way up the aisle on the right. It is believed they were Clive’s, and were laid to rest again. Yet this spectral apparition of the night, buried like Mozart in haste and secrecy (although, unlike the composer, at great expense), in an anonymous grave, was one of Britain’s greatest and richest sons, far more deserving of a tomb in Westminster Abbey than most that rest there.

  * * *

  The great crags and moss-coloured granite bleakness of mid Wales give way as they reach England to lower hills sliced by deep wooded trenches in the east, at last spending themselves in the gentler ridges and valleys of western Shropshire. There, two uplands stand out: the Stiperstones, a series of angular rocks supposed to have been a medieval gathering place for witches; and the pencil-precise escarpment of Wenlock Edge. Where these two meet overlooks a broad, fertile plain dominated by the small market town of Bishop’s Castle. On the English side of this there lies a valley dominated by a large, graceful, classical eighteenth-century country house set back behind a lake in extensive parkland.

  There, more than 220 years ago, as the November evening drew in while fires fought to keep at bay the encroaching winter cold, a man was seated alone, having taken his leave of his family for the day. He wore the dress of a very wealthy nobleman, the most expensive silk shirt, gold-embroidered coat and black waistcoat that money could buy. He was of middle height and medium build, with a face rendered haggard by sickness. The features were uneven: pinched, slightly skewed, bushy browed and large nosed, he was not a handsome man.

  But the stern expression, weathered and darkened by long exposure under a foreign sun, set him apart from the general run of wealthy country magnates. It was a proud, anguished face, the eyes decisive and piercing, the mouth curiously vulnerable, yet set in fierce determination. To modern eyes, the mixture of sensitivity and command conveyed by his portraits recalls that of Winston Churchill. He was about to turn 50. He remained possessed of the vigour of his prime. As so often these past months, he was silent and shrouded in his thoughts. None dared interrupt him.

  Few encountering this taciturn squire in the windy gloom of an English country evening would have suspected that he had once been a continental emperor, a man who had built up, from almost nothing, a dominion to rival those of Alexander the Great, Augustus Caesar, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. His achievement had been far greater than those of the Spanish conquistadors. He had overcome a people ten times as numerous as Cortés did in Mexico, confronting huge armies equipped with primitive artillery, firearms, horses and elephants belonging to one of the greatest and most advanced civilisations in the world. By contrast, the Aztecs had no firearms and regarded men on horseback as supernatural monsters.

  After securing a continent by the time he was only 35, this remarkable man had set down the administrative foundations of an empire that was to last two centuries. An even greater – although perhaps impossible – challenge beckoned. The government in London was considering appointing him to command the British forces resisting the uprising of the American colonists.

  No feat, it seemed, was beyond him. If anyone could save America for Britain, it was surely Robert Clive. That summer, the East India Company’s tea had been thrown into Boston Harbour. But with his withering perspicacity and realism, Clive believed that American independence was inevitable. Two years earlier he had written, with some exaggeration, ‘that the Americans will sooner or later master all the Spanish possessions and make Cape Horn the boundary of their empire is beyond a doubt’.

  Clive was a restless man, given to pacing up and down the magnificent drawing room, with its splendid ceilings, at Walcot. He gazed out as the light faded that autumn evening upon the spectre of the great oaks and ashes in the extensive parkland that fell away below the house as they shed the final glory of their red and brown leaves.

  Nature put on its finest display of colour as death approached and the skeletons of the winter trees beckoned. To Clive the approach of English winter, the receding light of evening along the Welsh borders, the pervasive grey skies, green parkland and damp meadows seemed very different to the heat and dust of southern India. Yet there was a touch of Bengal here, in the subtle play of light through cloud and suffocating greenery. Only the chill in the air was in cold contrast to the suffocating humidity of the Ganges basin.

  He was proud of his huge estate at Walcot. He had bought the estate from Charles Walcot, a young MP, heir to a deeply indebted father, for the staggering price of some £90,000 ten years before. Unusually – for Clive, impoverished in youth, was careful with his money – he had got the worse of the deal. In the ten years he had owned it he had employed Sir William Chambers, one of the most celebrated architects of his generation, to enlarge it, adding a simple yet impressive Doric portico to the east front, to create a new entrance; the previous one had been on the north side. Elegant sash windows were introduced; and the ceilings of the main rooms had been decorated with friezes of bows and arrows as well as musical instruments.

  An exotic lake was laid out in the formal gardens he had designed. Behind Walcot, Clive had begun an extensive arboretum as a gift to posterity which he relished planning and walking about in. The house was large, yet its design was classical simplicity itself: the new porch gave on to a beautifully proportioned hall with a magnificent staircase. To the left the drawing room beckoned, to the right the dining room. Outside, no excessive fripperies or adornments spoilt the symmetry of the façade. Built to human proportions, Walcot was light, straightforward and comfortable, set under a hill that dominated the surrounding landscape. The tiny hamlet of Lydbury North, mostly lived in by estate workers, trailed wisps of chimney smoke across the centre of this vast panorama.

  It was one of three great houses, and a number of smaller ones, owned by one of the first men in English history who had risen from genteel poverty to awesome wealth through his own efforts without benefit of inheritance or royal patronage. Clive was by now certainly one of the richest men
in England, with a fortune estimated conservatively at £1 million (around £400 million at today’s prices).

  Clive was to be reviled and sneered at for his nouveau riche love of ostentation and luxury. Yet his taste in houses could hardly be described as loud or vulgar. While no expense was spared on the interiors – yet for the most part they were within the bounds of good taste – his residences were more notable for subdued charm and elegance along classical lines than showiness.

  Claremont, when completed, was compact, beautifully proportioned, ostentatious only in its enormous columns. Walcot, much older, was more streamlined still. Oakly, more modest, was full of charm. His Berkeley Square house was no palace, but the dwelling of a London gentleman. When he refurbished Styche Hall, his ancestral home, he did so with restraint, turning a very unassuming Elizabethan country pile into a fine Georgian one.

  It was in October 1774, as he had helped to direct major alterations to Oakly in a downpour by a steep slope overlooking the swollen River Teme, that he had caught a bad cold and catarrh, precipitating an attack of his old illness, which in turn seems to have rendered Clive’s sensitive mind defenseless. An intellect that was usually courageous, optimistic and creative in outlook was now at the mercy of every demon of regret and disappointment throughout an extraordinary life. Here, in his last evening in Walcot, they would have come rushing at him like the dancing patterns of the shadows from the flames of the great fire on the hearth.

  CHAPTER 2

  Rebel without a Cause

  Robert Clive was born in an unmemorable house, Styche Hall, near the village of Moreton Saye close to the town of Market Drayton some 25 miles east of Walcot and 35 miles from Oakly in his beloved Shropshire on 29 September 1725.

  Shropshire is one of England’s loveliest counties, a concentration of lush green farmland through which little lanes wind like streams up to unexpected, remote, solitary farms and hamlets. Unlike the western part of the county, where Clive was to live later, his birthplace was in one of the flatter parts of the country, characterised by occasional slight rises in an area crisscrossed by hedges and fields.