Clive Read online

  Clive’s life was to be surrounded by myths, and two were present even at his birth: that he came of humble stock; and that his formative years were spent in Shropshire. In fact the family, although by no means aristocratic, was from a respectable country gentry background. Not rich, the Clives were not poor. When only two years old the child ceased to live at Styche Hall, and was transferred to more comfortable and cosmopolitan surroundings.

  The Clive family was probably named after the village of Clive, north of Shrewsbury. Its origins are recorded as going back to at least the twelfth century, when Henry II, slayer of Thomas à Becket, was on the throne. In the 1500s Sir George Clive was a considerable government official, knighted for his service, while the boy’s grandfather, Robert Clive, was a noted and feared commander of the parliamentary forces in the following century.

  Almost certainly, Clive’s father, Richard, was fiercely committed to the anti-Jacobite, pro-parliament forces, and was committed to the Hanoverian king in later years, as were most, although by no means all, of the minor country gentry. Richard Clive was a man of unbendingly forceful views, stubborn, obstinate and probably a difficult father although – again contrary to legend, which has it that he was ashamed of his son in his teens – devoted to Robert in a kind of chivvying, hectoring fashion. He was also said to be irascible and fond of drink. Clive’s mother, on the other hand, was sensitive.

  In common with many poorer gentry, Richard found it difficult to stoop to the business of making money, something his limited circumstances made necessary. His income from renting land was a comfortable £500 a year, but he borrowed heavily on the estate to support his lifestyle and large family. He qualified as a lawyer, and moved to London to practise there when Clive was an infant.

  The boy was his firstborn. Before he was three he was taken under the guardianship of his mother’s sister, Elizabeth (born a Gaskell, of a respectable Manchester gentry family), and her husband, Daniel Bayley, who had only one son, while his father struggled to make ends meet in London. Contrary to myth again, Clive’s early years were happy and spoilt. Soon after his third birthday, he fell seriously ill with a fever but through tender nursing recovered and one day descended to the parlour talkative and ‘very merry and as good as it is possible’. The kindness of the household shines through: according to one account, his uncle remarked, ‘with reluctance Bob this afternoon suffered his Aunt Bay to go to chapel’.

  Clive as a young child was from the first a mixture of talkative precociousness, sensitivity and frequent alternation between cheerfulness and a fast and furious temper. He adored fighting and was very close to his cousin. At the age of six, his uncle commented with concern that ‘he is out of measure addicted to fighting’, which gave his temper ‘a fierceness and imperiousness that he flies out on every trifling occasion; for this reason I do what I can to suppress the hero that I may help forward the more valuable qualities of meekness, benevolence and patience’.

  The Bayleys’ house, Hope Hall, was more comfortable than Styche, and Manchester at that time was a very pleasant small town inhabited by ‘reserved and purse-proud’ people compared with the ‘free and open’ inhabitants of the nearby port of Liverpool. At the age of nine, tragedy struck: Clive’s surrogate mother, the gentle ‘Aunt May’ died, and his distraught uncle proved unable to look after the boy. Clive was sent for a while to his father’s small lodgings in London. Soon afterwards the family returned to Styche.

  * * *

  Clive now lived in less comfortable surroundings; his father was not rich, and the eldest boy had to share with several other children. The house was of no great size, although adequate: it was a small Elizabethan country house, set on a hill, with a central block and two modest timbered wings. This he shared, eventually, with no fewer than five girls (two of his sisters died in infancy), and a baby boy who was only two when he left home (one brother was born four years later and his four other brothers died in infancy).

  As the eldest, and only boy, in the household for most of his youth, he was almost certainly overindulged and surrounded by feminine influences, which helped further to develop his sensitive and egotistical nature. Yet from about this time can be dated his increasingly sullen and rebellious personality, which may have been prompted by the move from his doting uncle and aunt, where he was the centre of attention, to a household filled with others under the considerably less sentimental tutelage of his gruff and opinionated father. His mother, by contrast, appears to have been even-tempered and hard-working.

  Robert had spent the last two years in Manchester at a well-known prep school, Dr Eaton’s at Lostock in Cheshire, and on his return to Shropshire he went to the humbler Market Drayton grammar school. This was a comedown and may have contributed to his resentful attitude. He was an early rebel without a cause.

  There is no reason to disbelieve the popular local story that he led a gang from the school that threatened to smash local shop windows unless paid protection money, or that he climbed the church spire at Market Drayton, to the horror of a crowd of locals, and refused to climb down unless he was paid. At school he seems to have been bored and inattentive.

  His delinquency, combined with a modest improvement in the family fortunes, resolved Richard Clive to send him to Merchant Taylors’, a tough, minor public school in London. Again, his conduct and work there were far from impressive and it is possible he was even expelled to a kind of cross between a modern ‘crammer’ and technical college, at Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire, to acquire some skills useful in life.

  By the end of his schooling, although popular with his contemporaries, who looked upon him with fear and respect, he was dismissed by his teachers as little more than a rough-hewn country lad, with low to middling prospects in life. In addition, by his late teens, his temperamental but previously cheerful and egotistical personality had been hammered, probably by school life, into that of a rather shy, graceless young man of few words.

  Styche Hall offered no prospect of providing a living from the land: and Richard Clive, while constantly chiding him for his defects, nevertheless wanted him to get the best out of life. Rebellious as he was, Clive seems to have been in awe of his father and determined to please him throughout life; the old man’s personality must have been overwhelming to the teenager.

  * * *

  The Britain into which Robert Clive was born was by any standards on the threshold of a golden age that was to last some two centuries. For a millennium the country had been a marginal player on the European stage. For all its qualities, the middle-sized land mass off the shores of Europe had had only a peripheral impact on the mainstream of continental politics: no great religious, political, cultural or artistic movements had washed over from Britain to affect the swirl of European civilisation.

  Rather the reverse: Britain’s culture, borrowed from ancient Rome and Italy, and to a lesser extent France and Spain, was essentially second-hand. Its only significant religious movement had emerged from a schism born of a king’s desire for a second wife. Its very people were European cast-offs – Iberians and Celts, in the distant past; Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes and Normans more recently. The Normans had imbued it with its first serious post-Roman cultural heritage, before the country had plunged into an obscurantist power struggle between kings and nobles which preceded an even more arcane series of dynastic wars.

  When dynastic cohesion, renaissance splendour and, at last, real cultural achievement – in literature – belatedly flowered in the sixteenth century, England still appeared to be a somewhat backward European cousin. Only with its extraordinary political leaps from absolutist monarchy to parliamentary republic, military dictatorship, back to shortlived absolutism and then forward to constitutional monarchy did the country suddenly steal a huge march on its superficially more dazzling continental rivals.

  Political absolutism and centralism clung on through most of Europe long after the societies beneath them had begun to bubble with social transformation. In Britain, for a
variety of reasons, the political development which was to permit religious tolerance (at least by comparison with everywhere else), participation, free expression and the blowing off of steam among the newly emergent classes was in place before they had even emerged.

  Instead of social change becoming dammed behind an absolutist system, and then spectacularly overwhelming it, transformation flowed smoothly into already constructed channels. Better still, that very grudging individualism, pragmatism, resistance to central control and suspicion of dogma which rendered absolutism so short-lived in Britain helped to nourish traditions which encouraged an astounding growth of science, literature, criticism and scepticism that were to underpin the industrial revolution a century later.

  Clive was born into a country that was already the most politically sophisticated in Europe; which was among the most effective militarily; and whose economy was beginning to take off. Culturally and even perhaps economically India’s inferior, Britain was politically and constitutionally several centuries more advanced. Little more than two decades before Clive was born, Britain attained dynastic stability under a family whose direct descendants are still sitting on the throne today. Under the constitutional settlement the power of the monarch was subordinated not to a handful of powerful nobles, but to a mixture of aristocracy, country gentry and middle-class merchants and professionals. Just ten years before Clive’s birth and twenty years afterwards there occurred the last armed challenges to an edifice that has now stood the test of three centuries.

  Britain in 1725 was a country at constitutional peace with itself for the first time in its history. More: it was a culture teeming with opportunity, change and innovation. The eighteenth century has been viewed as a kind of decadent, languid interlude between the civil wars and revolutions of the seventeenth century and the industrialisation and modernisation of the Victorian era. This is entirely wrong: every major social change usually ascribed to the nineteenth century in fact had its origins in the eighteenth; and they began because of a unique coincidence of social, economic, intellectual and artistic development that made the century a joy for many to live in.

  Even beneath the surface of the continent’s apparently static absolute monarchies, change was stirring: it was the failure of those monarchies to adapt that brought about their downfall. In British politics the essential changes had already taken place in the seventeenth century that provided the stable foundations for a much more far-reaching transformation of society.

  It was a good time, too, to live in because at least until the last decade of the century the darker aspects of industrialisation were not to blight the land or its people. On the whole, living standards for the poor were to rise steadily from a low base throughout the century. Only in the nineteenth century did conditions start to deteriorate once more under the impact of rapid population growth and breakneck industrialisation.

  Gentility, the rule of law, domestic peace, unprecedented prosperity, social change without massive upheaval, a sense of noblesse oblige, vigorous political, intellectual and artistic life largely uninhibited by state intimidation or the inanities of mass culture a century later – all these were to combine to make the period Clive grew up in one of the most attractive of social environments, before or since. England was prosperous, and at peace. While monarchy and aristocracy presided, the country was in fact governed by the middle classes. The Clives were deeply representative of the higher reaches of these. What this held out for the boy was the prospect of a life of peace, independence and comfort – though not luxury – and opportunity.

  * * *

  When Clive was less than two years old, George II, amiable, shrewd, German-speaking and more concerned with the fate of Hanover than that of England, came to the throne and embodied the new political continuity by retaining, instead of, as was customary, dismissing, his father’s prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, a skilful, manipulative and corrupt provincial politician whose chief goal was to entrench the dynasty and who had himself emerged from the ranks of the country gentry to supplant the Whig grandees of the age before him.

  Under Walpole’s skilful stewardship, the king was a figurehead. George II spent long periods in Hanover and was treated with open contempt in the gutter press. His sexual habits and temper were mocked. In the winter of 1736, when he nearly died in a storm travelling from Hanover to London, no one seemed to care. The British were committed to the Protestant succession, not to the king himself.

  Walpole’s chief opponent, the brilliant Lord Bolingbroke, was hopelessly outmanoeuvred. Only in 1742, the very year that the 17-year-old Clive set sail for India, was Walpole deposed in the wake of a general election result which was seen as censuring him for his conduct of the war with Spain. A prime minister had for the first time been held accountable to his middle-class electorate. The bourgeois-mannered king and his bourgeois-born minister ruled a country where political power was for the first time decisively in the hands of the middle classes.

  No class was more socially conscious, as the literature of the time, which reached its apogee in Jane Austen, was to show. The historian Paul Langford writes:

  The stratification of the middle class was almost infinite, corresponding as it did to the innumerable gradations of income and snobbery on which contemporary analysts frequently commented. But this was true of all classes. The acrimony invested in trivial quarrels between different ranks of the peerage, for instance in the periodic disputes as to the precise status of Irish peers in England, matched any of the petty social wars which social satirists recorded among the nouveaux riches. It may also be doubted whether any class had a stronger sense of its own importance than the respectable artisans and small farmers who dreaded nothing more than descent into the ranks of the truly poor.

  The dominance of the middle class was undeniable: compared to an aristocracy of around 2,000 families, there were about 40,000 upper-middle-class families earning more than £200 a year (£40,000 at today’s values), about 85,000 in the middle earning more than £80 a year (£16,000) and 155,000 lower-middle-class families earning some £50 a year (£10,000). Beneath them were 425,000 families who earned more than £25 a year (£5,000). Below that were some 72,000 families on the lowest incomes, although rarely at starvation levels. The Clives were comfortable members of the upper middle class.

  * * *

  The career alternatives, for a boy of limited academic calibre, seemed to be a job with one of the merchant houses of London or – far more romantic – one with the East India Company overseas. The Company was by that stage a major power in the city. It alone accounted for around a fifth of Britain’s overseas trade and controlled the three most prosperous English settlements in the globe – Bombay, on the west coast of India, and Calcutta and Madras on the east. It occupied a position of responsibility and closeness to government second only to that of the Bank of England. The yearly value of calico, chintz hangings and bedspreads, silks, china and tea imported by the company averaged £1 million. In 1744 the Company even lent the government a similar sum.

  Richard Clive knew one of the directors, an exalted connection; and at the age of 17, the tough, unruly wide boy of Market Drayton had the humbling experience of attending an interview at the Company’s formidable headquarters in Leadenhall Street, where he passed muster as a ‘writer’ – a clerk, to be sent to Madras. The appointment was in fact highly prestigious, in one of Britain’s most powerful commercial organisations, however lowly the actual first foot on the ladder.

  Emerging from his successful interview into the bustling, cramped streets of what was essentially still a medieval city, Clive felt a surge of youthful exuberance and anticipation. He strolled through the labyrinthine passages, dodging the livestock destined for the city slaughterhouses and the cattle markets, negotiating the cracked and potholed paving stones, reeling from the stench of sewage and rubbish that oozed down a channel in the middle of the road, avoiding the water cascading from the spouts of the gutters above and ducking under the d
angerous street and house signs that jutted out from the side.

  Clive was on the threshold not just of the great adventure of adulthood but of a lengthy overseas journey: soon he would be away from the tranquillity of a Shropshire market town, the disciplinary drudgery of Merchant Taylors’, even the tumult of London to a life several thousand miles away that he could only imagine, in a land that boasted a civilisation of great antiquity, wealth and barbarism.

  Three months later, Clive said goodbye to his gruff, self-possessed father, doting mother and clutch of younger sisters, who, such were mortality rates overseas, feared they might never see him again, and left for London to embark on the great adventure of his life. How great no one could possibly have foreseen. The tall, thin young man, with his plain clothes, anxious yet determined expression, dark heavy brow, large nose, sensitive and determined mouth and piercing but vulnerable and intelligent eyes climbed from East India Dock aboard the Winchester, one of the biggest and most modern ships of the Company, a 500-tonner that seemed capable of withstanding the worst the oceans could inflict.

  Clive’s mood was a mixture of youthful defiance, pugnacity, apprehension and pride at having joined the world of men in such an adventurous and important fashion. As a writer, however young, he was one of the Company’s anointed, treated with respect by the crew, expected to do no work aboard. The thrill of being aboard such a splendidly streamlined barque, with its mighty sails billowing above, at the head of a small convoy as it progressed down the Channel, invigorated a soul long repressed by the smallness of Market Drayton.

  The voyage was due to last six months; yet youth, enthusiasm and the spirit of adventure kept at bay the bitter cold on deck at the beginning of the voyage, the stench of his cramped quarters below deck, the tedium of life aboard. The sea, while often choppy, was rarely heavy and, after the initial thrill of passing from the Thames into the Channel and from there into the Atlantic, hardly alarmed someone of Robert’s restless temperament.