once proceeded to strengthen and victual as best he might, well
knowing that he would have to fight for what he had got. Presently the
panic-stricken garrison came back, and brought with it reinforcements
which gave it the respectable strength of three thousand men. In the
middle of the night on which they arrived and sat down before the
town to think matters over, Clive, without waiting to be besieged as
he should have done by all the rules of Eastern warfare, marched out,
caught them napping, cut them to pieces, and marched back again without
losing a man.
Naturally the news of such doings as this flew fast to Trichinopoly
and Pondicherry, and clearly something had to be done to crush this
insolent upstart before he gave any further trouble. To this end four
thousand men were sent by Chunda Sahib, under his son Rajah, and by the
time these reached the walls of the old fort they had been increased
by reinforcements to ten thousand, and had, moreover, been joined by
a detachment of a hundred and fifty French soldiers whom Dupleix had
dispatched in hot haste from Pondicherry.
As has been said, the place they had come to attack was a half-ruined
old fort, with dry ditches and hardly any defences worth serious
mention, and its garrison by this time consisted only of a hundred and
twenty Englishmen and two hundred Sepoys. Four of the eight officers
were dead, and the commander of what looked very like a forlorn hope
was an ex-quill-driver twenty-five years old.
And yet for fifty days and nights the besiegers hurled themselves in
vain against the rotten and crumbling battlements behind which that
dauntless handful of half-starved men had made up their minds either
to stand till help came, or to fall like the heroes that they were.
The confidence and affection which the gallant young commander inspired
in his men--European and native alike--during this terrible time is one
of the most splendid tributes to his fame. When there was nothing left
but rice to live and fight on, the very Sepoys came to him of their
own will to ask that all the grain should be given to the Europeans,
who wanted more nourishment than they did. As for them, they would
gladly be content with the water that it was boiled in! Men like this
are bad to beat, and so Rajah Sahib found in spite of all his enormous
advantages.
But the splendid defence of Arcot had by this time done something more
than hold the French and their allies in check. One Morari Row, the
chief of a body of six thousand Mahrattas--the bandit ancestors of some
of the finest soldiery that now fights under the flag of Britain--had
been hired to defend Mohammed Ali against his enemies, but so far,
instead of helping, he had been waiting to see which way the cat would
jump. His personal experience of the British had taught him that, if
they were not dogs or old women, they were seemingly only fit for the
bazaar and the counting-house, and certainly no worthy allies for
a race of warriors. But now the gallantry of Clive and his men was
ringing all through the Carnatic, and Morari swore by all his gods
that, since the English really could fight after all, and were able to
help themselves to such purpose, he hadn’t the slightest objection to
helping them.
Having decided this in his own prudent mind, he gave his warriors
orders to march, and no sooner did it transpire that their objective
was the sorely beleaguered fortress of Arcot than Rajah Sahib came
to the conclusion that he had got a harder nut between his teeth
than his jaws could crack, and so he made overtures of peace in the
true Oriental style--that is to say, he offered a huge bribe for an
unconditional surrender, and accompanied the offer with a threat of
general assault and subsequent extermination if the offer were refused.
The young quill-driver’s reply was characteristic.
“Tell Rajah Sahib,” he said to the envoy, “that I refuse his bribe with
as much scorn as I receive his threat. Tell him also that his master
and father is a usurper and his army a rabble, and bid him beware how
he brings them into a breach defended by English soldiers.”
Rajah Sahib declined the warning, and prepared for attack by making his
fanatic followers gloriously drunk with bhang and ether assorted drugs.
He also selected the day of a great Moslem festival for the assault,
and enlisted the services of some elephants, whose heads he covered
with spiked plates of iron, and these, when the attack was delivered,
were driven against the gates to act as living battering-rams.
But Clive had already foreseen that living battering-rams had the
disadvantage of working both ways, and so the elephants were received
with such a galling fire that, instead of charging the gates, they
turned round and made lanes through the army behind them with
distinctly demoralising effect.
This was a bad beginning, but the end was worse. Clive acted not only
as general-in-command, but also as an ordinary gunner, and he seems,
moreover, to have pretty well filled all the posts between. He worked
as hard as any soldier or Sepoy of them all. There were more weapons
than men to use them, so the rear ranks loaded and primed the muskets,
and passed them up to the front as fast as they could be fired, and
Rajah Sahib speedily learnt what Clive had meant by a breach defended
by English soldiers, for the fire was so fast and fierce that the more
men that he sent into the breach the more stopped there--and that was
about all there was in it from his point of view.
Three times the onset was repeated, and three times the attacking
swarms were mown down by the leaden hail-storm that swept the breach,
and after the third time the Rajah and his merry men had had enough of
it and retreated to their lines.
[Illustration: INSTEAD OF CHARGING THEY TURNED ROUND AND MADE LANES
THROUGH THE ARMY BEHIND THEM.]
The night passed in anxious watching, every man in his place and every
gun loaded, but their last shot had been fired and the morning light
showed that Rajah Sahib and what was left of his army had found the
work too much highly seasoned for their taste; that they had just run
away, leaving all their guns, ammunition, and stores to be picked up by
the victors at their leisure.
Such was the forever memorable defence of Arcot, and such too was the
practical foundation of the British Empire in India. It was the work
of a hundred and twenty-five English soldiers and two hundred Sepoys,
inspired to heroism by a young man whom Fortune had suddenly plucked
out of the wrong place and set down in the right one.
Clive was by no means the man to look upon work as done because it
was well begun. The authorities at Fort St. George promptly sent him
two hundred more English soldiers and seven hundred Sepoys, and with
this force--which was quite a large army for him--he marched out to
join hands with Morari Row, attacked Rajah Sahib at the head of five
thousand men with a stiffening of three hundred French regulars, hit
him very hard, and generally convinced people that an Englishman worthy
of his name and race had at length taken matters in hand.
Unhappily, however, the English were not as strong in the
council-chamber as they were in the field, and while the authorities
were hesitating, Rajah Sahib and Dupleix retrieved their loss to such
purpose that a native army supported by four hundred French troops
marched almost up to the walls of Fort St. George and proceeded to
amuse themselves by laying the settlement waste, with the result that
Captain Clive had to come to the rescue, and the end was another
overwhelming defeat, during which about half of the French regulars
were either killed or taken prisoners.
This physical victory was followed by a moral one no less effective.
The vaingloriously-named City of the Victory of Dupleix, surmounted by
its magniloquently inscribed pillar, lay at Clive’s mercy and directly
in his path, and he promptly pulled the pillar down and wiped the city
off the face of the earth. He didn’t do this because he personally
disliked either Dupleix or his nation, but in doing it he showed
that he was statesman as well as soldier, for, as he well knew, the
destruction of the City of Victory was to the waiting and watching
millions of India the symbol of the destruction and discredit of the
French power, and the establishment and vindication of the British.
From that day to this Britain’s star in the East has been in the
ascendant and that of France on the decline.
How completely all this and what followed was the work of one man, and
one only is eloquently shown by the pronouncement of old Morari Row
to the effect that the English who followed Clive must be of quite
a different tribe or breed to those who followed anybody else, and
further by the fact that he inflicted two decisive defeats upon the
French at Covelong and Chingleput, with a force consisting of five
hundred raw Sepoy levies, and two hundred newly-imported scourings of
the London slums, who had so little of the soldier in them that when a
shot killed one in the first skirmish all the rest turned round and ran
away; while on another occasion the report of a cannon so frightened
the sentries that they all left their posts, and one of them was
discovered occupying a strategic position at the bottom of a well!
And yet Clive, somehow, made steady, disciplined soldiers out of this
miserable rabble, and, though at last he was so ill that he could
hardly stand, led them to victory and turned the French out of their
forts--which was perhaps a miracle even greater than the making of
Cromwell’s Ironsides.
After this the young man, having well earned a holiday, got married and
came home for his honeymoon. He was at once hailed as the saviour of
India--or at any rate of the East India Company, the directors of which
drained many a good bottle of port to the toast of “General” Clive; and
even his father half incredulously admitted that “after all it seemed
that the booby had something in him.”
But “the booby,” who had come back moderately rich, bore no malice,
and at once began to repair the evil of his youth by paying off all
the debts of his family. He then proceeded to waste his substance and
his time by getting into Parliament and getting turned out again on
petition, after which he very properly went back to India to do work
that parliamentary orators couldn’t do.
His first exploit was the reduction of the pirate stronghold of
Gheriah, which had long dominated the whole Arabian Gulf, the next
was the Avenging of one of the blackest crimes in history. There is
no need to tell of it here, for is not the story of the Black Hole of
Calcutta deep-graven in the memory of every man and woman, boy and
girl, of Anglo-Saxon blood? Forty-eight hours after the news reached
Madras Clive was given the command of nine hundred British infantry and
fifteen hundred Sepoys, and with this army, supported by a fleet under
Admiral Watson, he marched to the conquest of an empire half as large
as Europe.
Curiously enough, however, he began by treating with Surajah
Dowlah--the arch-criminal of the Black Hole--instead of crushing him,
and, more amazing still, during the course of the negotiations, he
deliberately forged Admiral Watson’s name to a treaty intended to
deceive an adherent whom he knew to have made terms with the other
side. It is the most inexplicable act in his career, and, being so, it
is only a waste of words to try and explain it away. He did it, and
there’s an end of it.
The next act in the now swiftly passing drama was the first and only
council of war that Clive ever held. It was the eve of Plassey, an
occasion ever memorable in the annals, not only of Britain but of the
whole Orient. He was on one bank of the river, Surajah Dowlah was on
the other with an army outnumbering his by twenty to one, splendidly
equipped, very strong in artillery, and, as usual, supported and
officered by the inevitable Frenchmen. The river was the Rubicon which
lay between Clive and the Empire of India--and for once in his life he
hesitated.
He called a council of war. It decided against crossing the river with
three thousand men in face of sixty thousand, and Clive endorsed the
verdict. Then he went apart under some palm trees and held another and
a wiser council with himself, and this council promptly and utterly
revoked the decision of the other.
The next morning the river was crossed and the next night the little
army encamped within a mile of the Nabob’s host. At sunrise the next
day Surajah Dowlah, who in the midst of his myriads had passed a night
haunted, as has been suggested, by the ghosts of the men and women who
perished in the Black Hole, sent forth his forty thousand infantry,
his fifteen thousand cavalry, his batteries of fifty guns, and his
iron-plated war-elephants to crush the invader once and for all, and on
they went like some huge tidal wave, roaring and rushing, to overwhelm
some little tree-clad island--and then, just as the human avalanche was
in mid-career, the despot weakling’s will wavered, or, more probably,
his mind broke down, and he gave the order to halt and retreat, almost
before a blow was struck.
It was the moment of grace for Clive and he seized it. The three
thousand charged the sixty thousand, and all of a sudden the impending
tragedy on which the fate of all India from the Himalayas to Cape
Comorin depended, was turned into a farce. Of the sixty thousand only
five hundred were slain; of the three thousand twenty-two were killed
and fifty wounded. The whole thing was over in an hour, and India was
won.
To Clive himself the result was an appointment as Governor-General over
the whole of the Company’s territory in Bengal, and this virtually
raised him to an authority higher than that of a throne, and, to his
everlasting honour be it said, that in an age and country of almost
universal corruption, he never abused it. Victory after victory in the
field, and triumph after triumph in policy now followed fast upon each
other, till French, Dutch, and native princes alike were crushed to
impotence or reduced to grovelling submission, and the crowning victory
of Chinsurah set the seal of absolute supremacy upon British rule in
India.
Three months after this Clive again came home, the possessor of fairly
won wealth which was only exceeded by the magnitude of his fame, to
be hailed as the greatest of British living Commanders, and to be
rewarded, first with a place in the Irish, and then with one in the
British Peerage.
The story of his five years’ stay in England is not an edifying one.
It is a story of wild extravagance, fierce and unworthy jealousies in
the very councils of that Company to which he had given more lands
and subjects than any European monarch possessed, and of general
dissatisfaction and disillusion.
But meanwhile the way to his last and perhaps his greatest triumph was
being prepared for him. As year after year passed it became more and
more plain that the empire he had created could not get on without him.
The men put in authority after him by the Company had but one object
in life and that was to “shake the Pagoda Tree.” In other words, to
set prince against prince and state against state for the sole purpose
of making money out of their differences, and generally to squeeze the
utmost amount of gold out of the country in the shortest possible time.
Corruption which scandalised even that corrupt age revelled in hitherto
unheard-of excesses. Everything was neglected but money-making, and the
lately-terrible English name was fast becoming a scoff and a by-word
even to the plundered and the oppressed. So in the end Clive went out
again, it being seen that he only could end a situation fast becoming
impossible.
But this time it was not to fight French, or Indian, or Dutchman, but
his own countrymen, and to win in the Council Chamber a victory that
was perhaps greater than any he had won on the battlefield. In eighteen
months he did what he had said he would do, and replaced chaos with
cosmos. It was a fitting climax to his life’s work, and yet such is the
irony of Fate and the baseness of human nature that it also came near
to proving his personal ruin.
He had fought and conquered the evil spirits of greed, corruption,
and private extortion, but he had not killed them. The hatred of
the evil-doer pursued him across the seas and roused up all the old
jealousies at home. On his first and second returns he had been hailed,
first as a man of the most brilliant promise and then as a man who had
splendidly fulfilled that promise. But now, in the country which he had
enriched by the addition of a whole empire no charge was so base that
it was not believed against him. He had put down the oppressor, the
extortioner, and the money-grubber, and he came back to his native land
to be arraigned before a committee of the House of Commons as all these
and something of a criminal to boot!
But with this third home-coming of his, his story as an Empire-Maker
ends. It is well to know that he came triumphantly out of all the
toils that his jealous and unworthy enemies had laid for him, and in
this he was happier than his great rival Dupleix, who sank through all
the gradations of poverty and misery into a nameless grave. But still
the work of his foes and that of the terrible Indian climate had
not been without effect. Crippled both in mind and body, he at last
sought refuge in opium from the tortures of the diseases which he had
contracted in the service of his country.
Time after time his genius blazed out again through the glooms that
were settling over his later days, and so great was the faith of the
Government in him that he was actually asked to go and do for North
America what he had done for India.
If the broken invalid of those days had been the same man as the
defender of Arcot and the victor of Plassey, the history of the
Anglo-Saxon race might well have been changed, for Robert Clive would
not only have been strong to crush the rebels, but also just and
generous to procure them afterwards those equal rights of citizenship
the denial of which split Anglo-Saxondom in two.
Of this, at least, we may be fairly certain: there would have been no
Bunker’s Hill and no Brandywine River save as geographical expressions,
and there would have been neither a Saratoga nor a Yorktown save as
towns and nothing more.
But this was not to be. Clive’s genius had given forth its last flash
and the eclipse had come. On November 22, 1774, some ten weeks after
the assembly of the Revolutionary Congress at Philadelphia, Robert,
Lord Clive, Baron of Plassey, and Conqueror of the domains of the great
Tamerlane, for the third time put a pistol to his head--and this time
it went off.
It was, as Macaulay says, an awful close to such a career, and yet,
after all, granted even everything that his worst enemies said against
him, Robert Clive had well and worthily earned a place in the front
rank of Britain’s Empire-Makers.
On Sir Thomas Wren’s tomb in St. Paul’s stands the Latin legend which
translated reads: “If you seek his monument look around you!” If a man
could be endowed with an infinite range of vision he might be placed on
the highest pinnacle of the Himalayas, and as he looked east and west
and south the same might be said to him as the epitaph of Robert Clive;
for all that he could see from the Arabian Gulf to the Bay of Bengal,
and from the Himalayan slopes to the coral reefs of Cape Comorin, would
be the monument of his eternal fame--and is there man born of woman who
could desire a worthier?
VIII
_WARREN HASTINGS_,
_THE FIRST UNCROWNED KING OF INDIA_
VIII
WARREN HASTINGS
Both in point of time and personal capacity, Warren Hastings, first
Governor-General of the British Empire in India, was the successor
of Robert, Lord Clive. At the same time it may be as well to point
out in this connection that there might be more literal correctness
in describing Warren Hastings as an Empire-Preserver rather than an
Empire-Maker.
It was the victor of Plassey who rough-hewed the stones upon which the
now gorgeous fabric of our Indian Empire stands. It was Hastings who,
in spite of stupendous difficulties, took those stones and laid them
down according to that plan which he had formed, and which has been
followed in the main by all who have added to the structure.
As was said in other words of William of Orange, one of the greatest
claims that the great Governor has to the interest and admiration of
those who have a share in the splendid inheritance that he built
up, lies in the fact that he did his work in the face of everlasting
hindrances and in the midst of perpetual embarrassments, which must
infallibly have discouraged and bewildered any but a man upon whom the
gods had set the stamp of greatness, and, in their own way, crowned
him one of the kings of men. In short, like the grandson of William
the Silent, Warren Hastings was first and foremost an overcomer of
difficulties.
Great and splendid and enduring as his work undoubtedly was, it would
not, after all, have been very difficult to do if he had just been left
to do it--not helped, because he wasn’t the kind of man who wanted
help, but just left alone. Instead of this, however, as though it were
not enough that his work of organising and consolidating what the
sword of Clive had won, and combating the infinity of complications
arising out of the rivalry of a dozen warring native potentates, he
was purposely surrounded in his own council-chamber by unscrupulous
enemies of his own blood and country, whose only title to historical
recognition is now the infamy that they have earned by failing to
prevent the doing of that work which Warren Hastings saw had got to be
done, and which he, with an inflexible heroism, decided to do in spite
of everything that his enemies, white or brown, Mohammedan, Hindoo or
British, could do to cripple him.
Sir Alfred Lyall, his most recent biographer, has very happily said of
him that “perhaps no man of undisputed genius ever inherited less in
mind or money from his parents or owed them fewer obligations of any
kind.” His father, Pynaston Hastings, was the vagrant ne’er-do-well son
of a fine old family. He married when only fifteen without any means or
prospect of supporting a family. Warren was the second son. His father
was only seventeen at his birth, and his mother died a few days later.
As soon as he was old enough Pynaston took holy orders, married again,
obtained a living in the West Indies, and there died, leaving his son
to be put into a charity school by his grandfather.
This is not much for a father to do for a son, but there was something
else that Pynaston Hastings did which was of very great consequence,
though in the nature of the case no credit is due to him for it.
He transmitted to him the blood of a long line of ancestors, which
stretched away back through one of the followers of William the Norman
to the days of those old pirate kings of the Northland who, as I have
pointed out before, were none the worse fathers of Empire-Makers
because they were pirates as well.
One of his ancestors, John Hastings, Lord of the Manors of
Yelford-Hastings in Oxfordshire, and of Dalesford in Worcestershire,
lost about half of his worldly goods, including the plate that he
sent to be coined at the Oxford Mint, in helping Charles Stuart to
fight the great Oliver, and afterwards spent most of the remainder in
buying his peace from the Parliament. It was on the ancient estate of
Dalesford, long before sold to the stranger and the alien, that Warren
Hastings was born, some two hundred years later, practically a pauper
and almost an outcast, under the shadow of his ancestral home.
When he came to reasoning years he made a boyish resolve, challenging
fate with all the splendid insolence of a seven-year-old dreamer, that
some day he would make his fortune and buy the old place back--which
in due course he did, although in those days his prospect of doing so
was about as small as it was of reigning over the millions of subjects
whose descendants to-day revere his memory almost as that of one of
their own demigods.