"Raja Sahib proceeded to invest the fort, which seemed quite incapable
of sustaining a siege. The walls were ruinous, the ditches dry, the
ramparts too narrow to admit the guns, and the battlements too low to
protect the soldiers. The little garrison had been greatly reduced by
casualties. It now consisted of 120 Europeans and 200 sepoys. Only
four officers were left, the stock of provisions was scanty, and the
commander who had to conduct the defence under circumstances so
discouraging was a young man of five and twenty, who had been bred as
a book-keeper. During fifty days the siege went on, and the young
captain maintained the defence with a firmness, vigilance and ability
which would have done honour to the oldest marshal in Europe. The
breach, however, increased day by day. Under such circumstances, any
troops so scantily provided with officers might have been expected to
show signs of insubordination; and the danger was peculiarly' great in
a force composed of men differing widely from each other in
extraction, colour, language, manners and religion. But the devotion
of the little band to its chief surpassed anything that is related of
the Tenth Legion of Caesar, or the Old Guard of Napoleon. The sepoys
came to Clive, not to complain of their scanty fare, but to propose
that all the grain should be given to the Europeans, who required more
nourishment than the natives of Asia. The thin gruel, they said, which
was strained away from the rice would suffice for themselves. History
contains no more touching instance of military fidelity, or of the
influence of a commanding mind. An attempt made by the governor of
Madras to relieve the place had failed; but there was hope from
another quarter. A body of 3000 Mahrattas, half soldiers, half
robbers, under the command of a chief named Murari Rao had been hired
to assist Mahommed Ali; but thinking the French power irresistible,
and the triumph of Chanda Sahib certain, they had hitherto remained
inactive on the frontiers of the Carnatic. The fame of the defence of
Arcot roused them from their torpor; Murari Rao declared that he had
never before believed that Englishmen could fight, but that he would
willingly help them since he saw that they had spirit to help
themselves. Raja Sahib learned that the Mahrattas were in motion, and
it was necessary for him to be expeditious. He first tried
negotiations--he offered large bribes to Clive, which were rejected
with scorn; he vowed that if his proposals were not accepted, he would
instantly storm the fort, and put every man in it to the sword. Clive
told him, in reply, with characteristic haughtiness, that his father
was a usurper, that his army was a rabble, and that he would do well
to think twice before he sent such poltroons into a breach defended by
English soldiers. Raja Sahib determined to storm the fort. The day was
well suited to a bold military enterprise. It was the great Mahommedan
festival, the Muharram, which is sacred to the memory of Husain, the
son of Ali. Clive had received secret intelligence of the design, had
made his arrangements, and, exhausted by fatigue, had thrown himself
on his bed. He was awakened by the alarm, and was instantly at his
post. The enemy advanced, driving before them elephants whose
foreheads were armed with iron plates. It was expected that the gates
would yield to the shock of these living battering-rams. But the huge
beasts no sooner felt the English musket balls than they turned round
and rushed furiously away, trampling on the multitude which had urged
them forward. A raft was launched on the water which filled one part
of the ditch. Clive perceiving that his gunners at that post did not
understand their business, took the management of a piece of artillery
himself, and cleared the raft in a few minutes. Where the moat was
dry, the assailants mounted with great boldness; but they were
received with a fire so heavy and so well directed, that it soon
quelled the courage even of fanaticism and of intoxication. The rear
ranks of the English kept the front ranks supplied with a constant
succession of loaded muskets, and every shot told on the living mass
below. The struggle lasted about an hour; 400 of the assailants fell;
the garrison lost only five or six men. The besieged passed an anxious
night, looking for a renewal of the attack. But when day broke, the
enemy were no more to be seen. They had retired, leaving to the
English several guns and a large quantity of ammunition."
In India, we might say in all history, there is no parallel to this
exploit of 1751 till we come to the siege of Lucknow in 1857. Clive, now
reinforced, followed up his advantage, and Major Lawrence returned in
time to carry the war to a successful issue. In 1754 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 English protege, Mahommed 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 successes in the northern districts, his efforts helped
to drive them from their settlements. The Treaty of Paris in 1763
formally confirmed Mahommed 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 twenty-seven who had done such deeds a
"heaven-born general," thus endorsing the generous appreciation of his
early commander, Major Lawrence. When the court of directors voted him a
sword worth L700, he refused to receive it unless Lawrence was similarly
honoured. He left Madras for home, after ten years' absence, early in
1753, but not before marrying Miss Margaret Maskelyne, the sister of a
friend, and of one who was afterwards well known as astronomer royal.
All his correspondence proves him to have been a good husband and
father, at a time when society was far from pure, and scandal made havoc
of the highest reputations. In after days, when Clive's uprightness and
stern reform of the Company's civil and military services made him many
enemies, a biography of him appeared under the assumed name of _Charles
Carracioli, Gent._ All the evidence is against the probability of its
scandalous stories being true. Clive as a young man occasionally
indulged in loose or free talk among intimate friends, but beyond this
nothing has been proved to his detriment. 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 he received the commission of
lieutenant-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. In the distribution of prize money which
followed this expedition he showed no little self-denial. 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 August 1690, Job Charnock had landed at the village of
Sutanati with a guard of one officer and 30 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 predecessor's
financial minister had fled to Calcutta to escape the extortion of the
new nawab, and the English governor refused to deliver up the refugee.
Enraged at this, Suraj-ud-Dowlah captured the old fort of Calcutta on
the 20th of June, and plundered it of more than two millions sterling.
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 the
2nd of January 1757. On the 4th of February 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 established. 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." The hero of Arcot had, at Angria's stronghold, and now again under
the walls of Calcutta, established his reputation as the first captain
of the time. With 600 British soldiers, 800 sepoys, 7 field-pieces and
500 sailors to draw them, he had routed a force of 34,000 men with 40
pieces of heavy cannon, 50 elephants, and a camp that extended upwards
of four miles in length. His own account, in a letter to the archbishop
of Canterbury, gives a modest but vivid description of the battle, the
importance of which has been overshadowed by Plassey. 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 consenting to the siege, the nawab sought to assist the
French, but in vain. The capture of their principal settlement in India,
next to Pondicherry, which had fallen in the previous war, gave the
combined forces prize to the value of L130,000. 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, L200,000 to the native inhabitants, and
L70,000 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, L300,000. 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 deponed
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 rapacious 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 Chandernagore, 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, 100 m. 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, of which enough yet remains, in
spite of the changing course of the stream, to enable the visitor to
realize the scene. On the 21st of June 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 1100
Europeans and 2100 native troops, with 9 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 sixteen officers to decide, as he put it,
"whether in our present situation, without assistance, and on our own
bottom, 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 letter 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
decisive 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 civilization of
India for years. When, after the heavy rain, the sun rose brightly on
the 22nd, the 3200 men and the 9 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 40 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 500 men. Clive restrained the ardour of Major
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. His own account, written a month after the battle to the secret
committee of the court of directors, is not less unaffected than that in
which he had announced the defeat of the nawab at Calcutta.
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 ever
since enjoyed, as pensioners, but have not infrequently 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 L160,000, while half a million
was distributed among the army and navy, both in addition to gifts of
L24,000 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 sought rather
to increase the shares of the fleet and the troops at his own expense,
as he had done at Gheria, and did more than once afterwards, with prize
of war. What he did take from the grateful nawab for himself was less
than the circumstances justified from an Oriental point of view, was far
less than was pressed upon him, not only by Jafar Ali, but by the
hundreds of native nobles whose gifts Clive steadily refused, and was
openly acknowledged from the first. He followed 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 L100,000 a year, and a contribution towards its losses and
military expenditure of a million and a half sterling. Such was Jafar
Ali's gratitude to Clive that he afterwards presented him with the
quit-rent of the Company's lands in and around Calcutta, amounting to an
annuity of L27,000 for life, and left him by will the sum of L70,000,
which Clive devoted to the army.
While busy with the civil administration, the conqueror of Plassey
continued to follow up his military success. He sent Major Coote in
pursuit of the French almost as far as Benares. He despatched Colonel
Forde to Vizagapatam and the northern districts of Madras, where that
officer gained the battle of Condore, pronounced by Broome "one of the
most brilliant actions on military record." 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 conquest 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 organization and drill of the
sepoy army, after a European model, and enlisted into it many
Mahommedans of fine physique from upper India. He refortified Calcutta.
In 1760, after four years of labour so incessant and results so
glorious, 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 formally 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 teeming 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 thirty-five years of age, Clive returned to England with a
fortune of at least L300,000 and the quit-rent of L27,000 a year, after
caring for the comfort of his parents and sisters, and giving Major
Lawrence, his old commanding officer, who had early encouraged his
military genius, L500 a year. The money had been honourably and publicly
acquired, with the approval of the Company. The amount might have been
four times what it was had Clive been either greedy after wealth or
ungenerous to the colleagues and the troops whom he led to victory. In
the five years of his conquests and administration in Bengal, the young
man had crowded together a succession of exploits which led Lord
Macaulay, in what that historian termed his "flashy" essay on the
subject, to compare him to Napoleon Bonaparte. But there was this
difference in Clive's favour, due not more to the circumstances of the
time than to the object of his policy--he gave peace, security,
prosperity and such liberty as the case allowed of to a people now
reckoned at nearly three hundred millions, who had for centuries been
the prey of oppression, while Napoleon's career of conquest was inspired
only by personal ambition, and the absolutism he established vanished
with his fall. During the three years that Clive remained in England he
sought a political position, chiefly that he might influence the course
of events in India, which he had left full of promise. He had been well
received at court, had been made Baron Clive of Plassey, in the peerage
of Ireland, had bought estates, and had got not only himself, but his
friends returned to the House of Commons after the fashion of the time.
Then it was that he set himself to reform the home system of the East
India Company, and began a bitter warfare with Mr 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 Mahommedans as Sumru), a Swiss mercenary
of his, to butcher the garrison of 150 English at Patna, and had
disappeared under the protection of his brother viceroy of Oudh. The
whole Company's service, civil and military, had become demoralized 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 the 3rd of May
1765 he landed at Calcutta to learn that Jafar Ali Khan had died,
leaving him personally L70,000, and had been succeeded by his son,
though not before the government had been further demoralized by taking
L100,000 as a gift from the new nawab; while Kasim Ali had induced 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 for the good of 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 from which the
mighty fabric of British India could afterwards steadily and
proportionally grow. Hence he returned 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
appears 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 the 12th of August, the place Benares, the throne an English
dining-table covered with embroidered cloth and surmounted by a chair in
Clive's tent. It is all pictured by a Mahommedan 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, yielding a revenue of four millions sterling. All
this had been accomplished by Clive in the few brief years since he had
avenged "the Black Hole" of Calcutta. This would be a small matter, or
might even be a cause of reproach, were it not that the Company's
undisputed sovereignty proved, after a sore period of transition, the
salvation of these millions. The lieutenant-governorship of Bengal since
Clive's time has grown so large and prosperous that in 1905 it was found
advisable to divide it into two separate provinces. But Clive, though
thus moderate and even generous to an extent which called forth the
astonishment of the natives, had all a statesman's foresight. On the
same date he obtained not only an imperial charter for the Company's
possession 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 the 27th of April 1768. Still so disproportionate did
the British force seem, not only to the number and strength of the
princes and people of India, but to the claims and ambition of French,
Dutch and Danish rivals, that Clive's last advice to the directors, as
he finally left India in 1767, was this: "We are sensible that, since
the acquisition of the dewany, the power formerly belonging to the
soubah of those provinces is totally, in fact, vested in the East India
Company. Nothing remains to him but the name and shadow of authority.
This name, however, this shadow, it is indispensably necessary we should
seem to venerate." On a wider arena, even that of the Great Mogul
himself, the shadow was kept up till it obliterated itself in the
massacre of English people in the Delhi palace in 1857; and Queen
Victoria was proclaimed, first, direct ruler on the 1st of November
1858, and then empress of India on the 1st of January 1877.
Having thus founded the empire of British India, Clive's painful duty
was to create a pure and strong administration, such as alone would
justify its possession by foreigners. The civil service was
de-orientalized by raising the miserable salaries which had tempted its
members to be corrupt, by forbidding the acceptance of gifts from
natives, and by exacting covenants under which participation in the
inland trade was stopped. Not less important were his military reforms.
With his usual tact and nerve 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. His reorganization of the army, on the lines of that which he
had begun after Plassey, and which was neglected during his second visit
to England, has since attracted the admiration of the ablest Indian
officers. He divided 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. It is sufficient to say that after the Mutiny the government
returned to his policy, and not a native gunner is now to be found in
the Indian army.
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, exceeded only by that which the malice of Sir
Philip Francis afterwards excited against Warren Hastings. 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 their opportunity. He
had, with consistent generosity, at once made over the legacy of L70,000
from the grateful Jafar Ali, as the capital of what has since been known
as "the Clive Fund," for the support of invalided European soldiers, 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. General 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, and that, as we have seen, without blot on the gift,
save in the matter of Omichund. The result, after the brilliant and
honourable defences of his career which will be found in Almon's
_Debates_ for 1773, was a compromise that saved England this time from
the dishonour which, when Warren Hastings had to run the gauntlet, put
it in the same category with France in the treatment of its public
benefactors abroad. On a division the House, by 155 to 95, carried the
motion that Lord Clive "did obtain and possess himself" of L234,000
during his first administration of Bengal; but, refusing to express 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 country." The one moral question, 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 twelve 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 accepting 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 the 22nd of November 1774 in his fiftieth year.
The portrait of Clive, by Dance, in the council chamber of Government
House, Calcutta, faithfully represents him. He was slightly above
middle-size, with a countenance rendered heavy and almost sad by a
natural fulness above the eyes. Reserved to the many, he was beloved by
his own family and friends. His encouragement of scientific undertakings
like Major James Rennell's surveys, and of philological researches like
Francis Gladwin's, gained him to two honorary distinctions of F.R.S. and
LL.D.
His son and successor Edward (1754-1839) was created earl of Powis in
1804, his wife being the sister and heiress of George Herbert, earl of
Powis (1755-1801). He is thus the ancestor of the later earls of Powis,
who took the name of Herbert instead of that of Clive in 1807.
See Sir A. J. Arbuthnot, _Lord Clive_ ("Builders of Great Britain"
series) (1899); Sir C. Wilson, _Lord Clive_ ("English Men of Action"
series) (1890); G. B. Malleson, _Lord Clive_ ("Rulers of India"
series) (1890); F. M. Holmes, _Four Heroes of India_ (1892); C.
Caraccioli, _Life of Lord Clive_(1775).
CLOACA, the Latin term given to the sewers laid to drain the low marshy
grounds between the hills of Rome. The most important, which drained the
forum, is known as the Cloaca Maxima and dates from the 6th century B.C.
This was 10 ft. 6 in. wide, 14 ft. high, and was vaulted with three
consecutive rings of voussoirs in stone, the floor being paved with
polygonal blocks of lava.
CLOCK. The measurement of time has always been based on the revolution
of the celestial bodies, and the period of the apparent revolution of
the sun, i.e. the interval between two consecutive crossings of a
meridian, has been the usual standard for a day. By the Egyptians the
day was divided into 24 hours of equal length. The Greeks adopted a
different system, dividing the day, i.e. the period from sunrise to
sunset, into 12 hours, and also the night. Whence it followed that it
was only at two periods in the year that the length of the hours during
the day and night were uniform (see CALENDAR). In consequence, those who
adopted the Greek system were obliged to furnish their water-clocks (see
CLEPSYDRA) with a compensating device so that the equal hours measured
by those clocks should be rendered unequal, according to the exigencies
of the season. The hours were divided into minutes and seconds, a system
derived from the sexagesimal notation which prevailed before the decimal
system was finally adopted. Our mode of computing time, and our angular
measure, are the only relics of this obsolete system.
The simplest measure of time is the revolution of the earth round its
axis, which so far as we know is uniform, perfectly regular, and has not
varied in speed during any period of human observation. The time of such
a revolution is called a sidereal day, and is divided into hours,
minutes and seconds. The period of rotation of the earth is practically
measured by observations of the fixed stars (see TIME), the period
between two successive transits of the same star across a meridian
constituting the sidereal day. But as the axis of the earth slowly
revolves round in a cone, whereby the phenomenon known as the precession
of the equinoxes is produced, it follows that the astronomical sidereal
day is not the true period of the earth's rotation on its axis, but
varies from it by less than a twenty millionth part, a fraction so small
as to be inappreciable. But the civil day depends not on the revolution
of the earth with regard to the stars, but on its revolution as compared
with the position of the sun. Therefore each civil day is on the average
longer than a sidereal one by nearly four minutes, or, to be exact, each
sidereal day is to an average civil day as .99727 to 1, and the sidereal
hour, minute and second are also shorter in like proportion. Hence a
sidereal clock has a shorter, quicker-moving pendulum than an ordinary
clock.
Ordinary civil time thus depends on the apparent revolution of the sun
round the earth. As, however, this is not uniform, it is needful for
practical convenience to give it an artificial uniformity. For this
purpose an imaginary sun, moving round the earth with the average
velocity of the real sun, and called the "mean" sun, is taken as the
measure of civil time. The day is divided into 24 hours, each hour into
60 minutes, and each minute into 60 seconds. After that the sexagesimal
division system is abandoned, and fractions of seconds are estimated in
decimals.
A clock consists of a train of wheels, actuated by a spring or weight,
and provided with a governing device which so regulates the speed as to
render it uniform. It also has a mechanism by which it strikes the hours
on a bell or gong (cp. Fr. _cloche_, Ger. _Glocke_, a bell; Dutch
_klok_, bell, clock), whereas, strictly, a _timepiece_ does not strike,
but simply shows the time.
The earliest clocks seem to have come into use in Europe during the 13th
century. For although there is evidence that they may have been invented
some centuries sooner, yet until that date they were probably only
curiosities. The first form they took was that of the balance clock, the
invention of which is ascribed, but on very insufficient grounds, to
Pope Silvester II. in A.D. 996. A clock was put up in a former clock
tower at Westminster with some great bells in 1288, out of a fine
imposed on a chief-justice who had offended the government, and the
motto _Discite justitiam, moniti_, inscribed upon it. The bells were
sold, or rather, it is said, gambled away, by Henry VIII. In 1292 a
clock in Canterbury cathedral is mentioned as costing L30, and another
at St Albans, by R. Wallingford, the abbot in 1326, is said to have been
such as there was not in all Europe, showing various astronomical
phenomena. A description of one in Dover Castle with the date 1348 on it
was published by Admiral W.H. Smyth (1788-1865) in 1851, and the clock
itself was exhibited going, in the Scientific Exhibition of 1876. A very
similar one, made by Henry de Vick for the French king Charles V. in
1379 was much like the common clocks of the 18th century, except that it
had a vibrating balance instead of a pendulum. The works of one of these
old clocks still exist in a going condition at the Victoria and Albert
Museum. It came from Wells cathedral, having previously been at
Glastonbury abbey.
[Illustration: FIG. 1.--Verge Escapement.]
These old clocks had what is called a verge escapement, and a balance.
The train of wheels ended with a crown wheel, that is, a wheel serrated
with teeth like those of a saw, placed parallel with its axis (fig. 1).
These teeth, D, engaged with pallets CB, CA, mounted on a verge or staff
placed parallel to the face of the crown wheel. As the crown wheel was
turned round the teeth pushed the pallets alternately until one or the
other slid past a tooth, and thus let the crown wheel rotate. When one
pallet had slipped over a tooth, the other pallet caught a corresponding
tooth on the opposite side of the wheel. The verge was terminated by a
balance rod placed at right angles to it with a ball at each end. It is
evident that when the force of any tooth on the crown wheel began to act
on a pallet, it communicated motion to the balance and thus caused it to
rotate. This motion would of course be accelerated, not uniformly, but
according to some law dependent on the shape of the teeth and pallets.
When the motion had reached its maximum, the tooth slipped past the
pallet. The other pallet now engaged another tooth on the opposite side
of the wheel. The motion of the balls, however, went on and they
continued to swing round, but this time they were opposed by the
pressure of the tooth. For a time they overcame that pressure, and drove
the tooth back, causing a recoil. As, however, every motion if subjected
to an adverse acceleration (i.e. a retardation) must come to rest, the
balls stopped, and then the tooth, which had been forced to recoil,
advanced in its turn, and the swing was repeated. The arrangement was
thus very like a huge watch balance wheel in which the driving weight
acted in a very irregular manner, not only as a driving force, but also
as a regulating spring. The going of such clocks was influenced greatly
by friction and by the oil on the parts, and never could be
satisfactory, for the time varied with every variation in the swing of
the balls, and this again with every variation of the effective driving
force.
[Illustration: FIG. 2.--Galileo's Escapement.]
The first great step in the improvement of the balance clock was a very
simple one. In the 17th century Galileo had discovered the isochronism
of the pendulum, but he made no practical use of it, except by the
invention of a little instrument for enabling doctors to count their
patients' pulse-beats. His son, however, is supposed to have applied the
pendulum to clocks. There is at the Victoria and Albert Museum a copy of
an early clock, said to be Galileo's, in which the pins on a rotating
wheel kick a pendulum outwards, remaining locked after having done so
till the pendulum returns and unlocks the next pin, which then
administers another kick to the pendulum (fig. 2). The interest of the
specimen is that it contains the germ of the chronometer escapement and
free pendulum, which is possibly destined to be the escapement of the
future.