PRIMUS IN INDIS.
[Sidenote: 1743--Nucleus of the Anglo-Indian Empire]
Before the Jacobite rising had been put down, or the Pelhams absolutely
set up, England, without knowing it, had sent forth a new conqueror,
and might already have hailed the first promises of sway over one of
the most magnificent empires of the earth. The name of the new
conqueror was Robert Clive; the name of the magnificent empire was
India.
At that time the influence of England over India was small to
insignificance--a scrap of Bengal, the island and town of Bombay,
Madras, and a fort or two. The average Englishman's knowledge of India
was small even to non-existence. The few Englishmen who ever looked
with eyes of intelligent information upon that great tract of
territory, leaf-shaped, and labelled India on the maps, knew that the
English possessions therein were few and paltry. Three quite distinct
sections, called presidencies, each independent of the two others, and
all governed by a supreme authority whose offices were in Leadenhall
Street in London, represented the meagre nucleus of what was yet to be
the vast Anglo-Indian Empire. The first of these three presidencies
was the Bombay presidency, where the Indian Ocean washes the Malabar
coast. The second was in the Carnatic, on the eastern side of the
leaf, where the waters of the Bay of Bengal wash the Coromandel coast,
where the forts of St. George and St. David protected Madras and a
smaller settlement. The third presidency was up towards the north,
where the sacred Ganges, rushing through its many mouths to the sea,
floods the Hoogly. Here the town of Calcutta was growing up around
Fort William.
{254}
These three little presidencies, plying their poor trade, and depending
for defence upon their ill-disciplined native soldiers, the Sepahis,
whom we have come to call Sepoys, were all that had grown out of the
nearly two centuries of relations with the leaf-shaped Indian land
since first, in 1591, Captain Lancaster sailed the seas; since first
the East India Company sprang into existence. It was not an agreeable
two centuries for Englishmen who ever thought of India to read about.
Two centuries of squabblings and strugglings with Dutch settlers and
with Portuguese settlers, of desperate truckling to native princes. In
1664 the English East India Company found a rival more formidable than
the Dutch or the Portuguese in the French East India Company, which the
astuteness of Colbert set up at Pondicherry, and which throve with a
rapidity that quite eclipsed the poor progress of the English traders.
Even when, in 1708, the old East India Company united its fortunes with
the new Indian Company that had been formed, and thus converted one
rival into an ally, the superiority of the French remained uncontested,
and daily waxed greater and greater, until it began to seem as if, in
the words of Antony to Cleopatra, all the East should call her mistress.
[Sidenote: 1725-1743--The Clives of Market-Drayton]
Such was the condition of affairs in the year 1743, when the apparently
insignificant fact that a young gentleman of a ne'er-do-well
disposition, who seemed likely to come to a bad end in England, and who
was accordingly shipped off to India by his irritated relations,
altered and exalted the destinies not merely of a wealthy trading
company, but of the British Crown. In the market town of
Drayton-in-Hales, better known as Market-Drayton, in Shropshire, there
lived, in the reign of George the First, a Mr. Richard Clive--a man
whose comparatively meagre abilities were divided between the
profession of the law and the cares of a small and not very valuable
estate. In the little town on the river Tern, within sight of the old
church built by Stephen, whose architectural characteristics were then
happily unaltered by the hand of the {255} eighteenth century restorer,
the Clives had been born and given in marriage and died, and repeated
the round ever since the twelfth century. Mr. Richard Clive, in the
reign of George the First, married a Manchester lady named Gaskill, who
bore him many children of no note whatever, but who bore him one very
noteworthy child indeed, his eldest son Robert, on September 29th, in
the year 1725.
There was a time, a long time too, during which the worthy Mr. Richard
Clive persisted in regarding the birth of this eldest son as little
less than a curse. He could very well have said of Robert what the
Queen-mother says of Richard of Gloster, tetchy and wayward was his
infancy. Seldom was there born into the world a more stubborn-minded,
high-spirited boy. He may remind us a little of the young Mirabeau in
his strenuous impassioned youth; in the estimate which those nearest to
him, and most ignorant of him, formed of the young lion cub in the
domestic litter; in the strange promise which the great career
fulfilled. There was a kind of madness in the impish pranks which the
boy Clive played in Market-Drayton, scaring the timid and scandalizing
the respectable. He climbed to the top of the lofty steeple of that
church, which dated from the days of Stephen, and perched himself upon
a stone spout near the dizzy summit with a cool courage which Stephen
himself might have envied. He got round him from among the idle lads
of the town "a list of lawless resolutes," and, like David, made
himself a captain over them for the purpose of levying a kind of
guerilla warfare upon the shopkeepers of the little town, and making
them pay tribute for the sanctity of their windows. In fact, he
behaved as wildly as the wildest school-boy could behave--drifting from
school to school, to learn nothing from each new master, and only to
leave behind at each the record of an incorrigible reprobate. Nobody
seems to have discovered that there was anything of the man of genius
in the composition of the incorrigible reprobate, and so it came about
that the town of {256} Market-Drayton in general, and the respectable
family of the Clives in particular, breathed more freely when it was
known that young Robert was "bound to John Company"--that he had
accepted a writership in the East India Service, and had actually
sailed for Madras.
The career to which the young Clive was thus devoted did not, on the
face of it, appear to be especially brilliant. The voyage in itself,
to begin with, was a terrible business; a six months' voyage was then
regarded as an astonishingly quick passage, and in Clive's case the
voyage was longer even than usual. It was more than a year after he
left England before he arrived at Madras, as his ship had stayed for
some months at the Brazils. Clive arrived at Madras with no money,
with many debts, and with some facility in speaking Portuguese,
acquired during the delay in the Brazils. He had absolutely no friends
in India, and made no friends for many months after his arrival. It
would be hard to think of a more desolate position for a proud, shy,
high-spirited lad with a strong strain of melancholy in his
composition. We find him sighing for Manchester with all the profound
and pathetic longing which inspires the noble old English ballad of
"Farewell, Manchester." It is not easy for us of to-day, who associate
the name of Manchester with one of the greatest manufacturing towns in
the world, to appreciate to the full either the spirit of the old
ballad or the longing aspiration which Clive had to see again
Manchester, "the centre of all my wishes." But if he was homesick, if
he was lonely, if he was poor in pocket and weak in health, shadowed by
melancholy and saddened by exile, he never for a moment suffered his
pride to abate or his courage to sink. He treated his masters of the
East India Company with the same scornful spirit which he had of old
shown to the shopkeepers of Market-Drayton and the school-masters of
Shropshire.
In the wretched mood of mind and body that Clive owned during his early
days at Madras the constitutional melancholy asserted itself with
conquering force, and he {257} twice attempted his life. On each
occasion the pistol which he turned upon his desperate and disordered
brain missed fire. Yet Clive had meant most thoroughly and
consistently to kill himself. He did not, like Byron, discover, after
the attempt was made, that the weapon he had aimed at his life was not
loaded. Each time the pistol was properly charged and primed, and each
time it was the accident of the old flint-lock merely causing a flash
in the pan which saved his life. In a nature that is melancholy a
tinge of superstition is appropriate, and it is hardly surprising if
Clive saw in the successive chance a proof that he was not meant as yet
to perish by self-slaughter. "I must be destined for great things," he
thought, and he was right. Between that attempt at suicide and the
next lay long years of unexampled glory, lay the pomp of Oriental
courts and the glitter of Oriental warfare, lay the foundation and
establishment of that empire of India which is to-day one of the
greatest glories of the British Crown--an empire mightier, wealthier,
statelier than any which Aurungzebe swayed, and whose might and wealth
and state were mainly due to the courage and the genius of the lonely,
melancholy lad, the humble writer in the service of John Company, who
had endeavored in his solitude and his despair to end his young life at
the muzzle of his pistol.
[Sidenote: 1707--The fall of the House of Baber]
What was the condition of India at the time when Clive was making
unavailing efforts to cut short his career? The country itself was
given over to the wildest confusion. With the death of Aurungzebe, in
1707, the majestic empire of the House of Baber came to an end. The
empire of Alexander did not crumble more disastrously to pieces after
the death of the Macedonian prince than did the empire of the Moguls
fall to pieces after the death of Aurungzebe. The pitiable and
despicable successors of a great prince, worse than Sardanapalus, worse
than the degraded Caesars of the basest days of Byzantium, squandered
their unprofitable hours in shameful pleasure while the great empire
fell to pieces, trampled by the {258} conquering feet of Persian
princes, of Afghan invaders, of wild Mahratta chiefs. Between the
fierce invaders from the northern hills who ravaged, and levied
tribute, and established dominion of their own, and such still powerful
viceroys as held their own, and offered a nominal allegiance to the
Mogul line, the glory of the race of Tamerlane was dimmed indeed. It
occurred to one man, watching all the welter of the Indian world, where
Mussulman and Hindoo struggled for supremacy--it occurred to Dupleix
that in this struggle lay the opportunity for some European power--for
his European power--for France--to gain for herself, and for the daring
adventurer who should shape her Oriental policy, an influence hitherto
undreamed of by the statesmen of the West. It was not given to Dupleix
to guess that what he dreamed of and nearly accomplished was to be
carried out at last by Robert Clive.
[Sidenote: 1746--La Bourdonnais]
The history of French empire in India contains two specially
illustrious names--the name of La Bourdonnais and the name of Dupleix.
The first had practically called into existence the two colonies of the
Ile de France and of Bourbon; the second had founded the town of
Chandernagor, in the bay of Bengal, and, as governor-general of the
French East India Company, had established himself at Pondicherry with
all the luxury and more than all the luxury of a veritable Oriental
prince. It may be that if these two men had been better able to agree
together the fortunes of the French nation in the Indies might have
been very different. But a blind and uncompromising jealousy divided
them. Whatever Dupleix did was wrong in the eyes of La Bourdonnais;
whatever La Bourdonnais did was wrong in the eyes of Dupleix; and
Dupleix was the stronger man of the two, and he finally triumphed for a
time. In the war that was raging La Bourdonnais saw his opportunity.
He determined to anticipate Dupleix in beginning hostilities against
the English in India. He set sail from the island of Bourbon with a
fleet of nine vessels which he had equipped, at his proper cost, and an
{259} army of some three thousand men, which included a large
proportion of negroes. After a successful engagement with the ships of
war under the command of Admiral Burnett, outside Madras, La
Bourdonnais disembarked, besieged Madras, and compelled the town to
capitulate. So far the star of La Bourdonnais was in the ascendent;
but the terms which he exacted from the conquered town were, by their
very moderation, the means of his undoing. With the keys of the
conquered town in his hand, with the French colors floating bravely
from Fort St. George, with all the stored wealth of the company as
spoils of war, La Bourdonnais thought that he might be not unlenient in
the terms he accorded to his enemies. He allowed the English
inhabitants of Madras to remain prisoners of war on parole, and
stipulated that the town should remain in his hands until the payment
of a ransom of some nine millions of francs.
The triumph of La Bourdonnais aroused, however, not the admiration but
the jealousy of Dupleix. Out of La Bourdonnais's very victory the
cunning of Dupleix discovered a means to humiliate his rival. The
vague schemes which he had formed for the authority of France, and for
his influence in India, did not at all jump with the restoration of
Madras, once conquered, to the English. He declared that La
Bourdonnais had gone beyond his powers; that terms to the vanquished on
Indian soil could be made by the Governor of Pondicherry and the
Governor of Pondicherry alone. He refused to ratify La Bourdonnais's
convention, and, instead, declared that the capitulation was at an end,
marched upon Madras, insisted upon the pillage and destruction of a
great portion of the town, arrested a large number of the leading
Englishmen, including the Governor of Fort St. George, and conveyed
them with all circumstances of public ignominy to Pondicherry. As for
La Bourdonnais, who had taken so gallant a step to secure French
supremacy in India, he was placed under arrest and sent to France,
where the Bastille awaited him; he had fallen before his vindictive
rival.
The inhabitants of Madras, smarting under what may {260} fairly be
called the treachery of Dupleix, considered rightly that they were no
longer bound by the convention with the luckless La Bourdonnais. One
at least of the inhabitants was a man not likely to be bound by the
mere letter of a convention which had already been broken in the
spirit. Clive disguised himself as a Mussulman--we may be permitted to
wonder how a man who to the end of his days remained eccentrically
ignorant of all Eastern languages accomplished this successfully--and,
escaping from Madras, made his way to Fort St. David. At Fort St.
David his military career began. The desperate courage which had
carried him to the top of the tower of Stephen's church, and which had
enabled him to overawe the "military bully who was the terror of Fort
St. David," now found its best vent in "welcoming the French," like the
hero of Burns's ballad, "at the sound of the drum." The peace which
was concluded between England and France sent Clive for a season,
however, back to the counting-house, and gave back Madras again to the
English company.
[Sidenote: 1748--The dream of Dupleix]
But the ambition of Dupleix was not a thing to be bounded by the
circumscription of war or peace between England and France. England
and France might be at peace, but there was no need that the English
East India Company and the French East India Company should be at peace
as well. The internal troubles of India afforded Dupleix the
opportunity he coveted of pushing his own fortunes, and doing his best
to drive the English traders out of the field. Unfortunately for him,
however, his opportunity was also the opportunity of the young writer
and ensign who had already won the admiration and the esteem of Major
Lawrence, then looked upon as the first English officer in India.
While the French still held Madras, before the Treaty of
Aix-la-Chapelle compelled the reluctant Dupleix to restore it to the
English, a military episode, which might almost be called an accident,
had helped to confirm enormously the influence of France in India. The
Nabob of {261} the Carnatic, offended by the action of the English
governor of Madras, who had omitted to send him those presents which
are essential to all stages of Oriental diplomacy, had practically
winked at the action of the more liberal-handed Dupleix in his movement
against Madras. When, too late, the Nabob heard of the fall of Madras,
he sent an army to recapture the town, and called upon the French
governor to surrender it. The governor was Duval D'Espremesnil, the
father of that mad D'Espremesnil who fuliginates through a portion of
the French Revolution. He refused to obey the Nabob, opened fire upon
his forces, and repulsed them. The repulse was followed a little later
by a vigorous attack of the French troops under Paradis, which smashed
the armament of the Nabob to pieces at St. Thome on November 4, 1746.
This victory gave the French a prestige of which Dupleix was the very
man to appreciate the full importance. When, in 1748, Nizam-Al-Mulk,
the Viceroy of the Deccan, died, there arose at once pretenders not
merely to the Deccan viceroyalty, but also to the government of the
Carnatic. The first was claimed by Mirzapha Jung; the second by Chunda
Sahib. Mirzapha Jung and Chunda Sahib, profoundly impressed by the
triumph of French arms two years earlier, appealed to Dupleix to help
them, joined their forces, and invaded the Carnatic.
Dupleix was not unwilling to listen to the appeal of the invaders. He
saw that the chance had arisen for him to constitute himself the
Warwick, the king-maker, of India. He lent all the force of his
European troops, of his native troops trained in the European fashion,
and of the prestige of France to the invaders. The old Nabob of the
Carnatic, Anaverdi Khan, was defeated and killed. His son fled with
his broken army to Trichinopoly, and the invaders nominally, and
Dupleix actually, reigned supreme in the Carnatic.
At that moment the sun of Dupleix's fortunes reached its zenith. He
was the chosen companion and confidant of the new Nizam of the Deccan;
he was made Governor {262} of India from the river Kristna to Cape
Comorin; he pomped it with more than Oriental splendor in the
pageantries of triumph at Pondicherry; he set up on the scene of his
victory a stately column, bearing in four languages inscriptions
celebrating his fame; he had treasure, power, and influence even to his
ambitious heart's content. When Mirzapha Jung died, shortly after his
accession to the government of the Deccan, Dupleix held equal influence
over his successor. He might well have believed that his glory was
complete, his plans perfected; he might well have believed that he
could afford to smile at the feeble efforts which the English made to
stay his progress.
[Sidenote: 1751--The defence of Arcot]
He soon ceased to smile. Clive, then five-and-twenty years old, urged
upon his superiors that Trichinopoly must soon fall before famine and
leaguer, that with the overthrow of the House of Anaverdi Khan the
power of the French over India would be established, and the power of
the English in India destroyed. The great deed to be done was to raise
the siege of Trichinopoly. This Clive coolly proposed to do by
effecting a counter-diversion in besieging Arcot, the favored home of
the Nabobs. With a little handful of an army--200 Europeans and 300
Sepoys--Clive marched through the wildest weather to Arcot, captured
it, and prepared to hold his conquest. We may perhaps here be
permitted to say that in using, as we shall continue to do, the old
familiar forms of spelling the names of Indian towns and of Indian
princes, we do so not in ignorance of the fact that in many, if not
most cases, they present but a very poor idea indeed of the actual
Oriental sounds and spelling. The modern writers on Indian history
adopt a new and more scientific spelling, which makes Arcot Arkat, and
Trichinopoly Trichinapalli. But, all things considered, it seems best
for the present to adhere to those old forms which have become, as it
were, portion and parcel of English history.
Chunda Sahib, who was besieging Trichinopoly, immediately despatched
4000 men against Arcot, which, {263} joining with the defeated garrison
and a few French, made up a muster of some 10,000 men under Rajah
Sahib, Chunda Sahib's son, against a garrison of little more than 300.
The defence of Arcot is one of the most brilliant episodes in history.
It reads rather like some of those desperate and heroic adventures in
which the fiction of the elder Dumas delighted than the sober chronicle
of recorded warfare. For fifty days the siege raged. For fifty days
Rajah Sahib did his best to take the town, and for fifty days Clive and
his little band of Europeans and Sepoys frustrated all his efforts.
The stubborn defence began to create allies. The fighting capacity of
the English had come to be regarded with great contempt by the native
races, but the contempt was now rapidly changing to admiration. Murari
Rao, the great Mahratta leader, who had been hired to assist the cause
of Mohammed Ali, but who had hitherto hung in idleness upon the
Carnatic frontier, convinced that the English must be defeated, now
declared that since he had learned that the "English could fight," he
was willing to fight for them, and with them, and prepared to move to
the assistance of Clive. Before they could arrive, Rajah Sahib made a
desperate last effort to capture Arcot, was completely defeated with
great loss, and withdrew from Arcot, leaving Clive and his little army
masters of the place.
Great was the glory of Clive in Fort St. George; but Clive was not
going to content himself with so much and no more. With an army
increased to nearly a thousand men, he assailed the enemy, defeated
Rajah Sahib once and again, and in his triumphal progress caused to be
razed to the ground the memorial city which the pride of Dupleix had
erected to his victory, and the vaunting monument which set forth in
four languages the glory of his deeds. The astonished Nabobs began for
the first time to understand that the glory of France was not
invincible, that a new star had arisen before which the star of Dupleix
must pale, and might vanish. The star of Clive continued to mount.
Though the arrival of Major Lawrence from {264} England took away from
his hands the chief command, he worked under Lawrence as gallantly as
when he was alone responsible for his desperate undertakings, and
success, as before, followed all the enterprises in which he was
concerned.
Trichinopoly was relieved; Chunda Sahib was captured by the Mahrattas
and put to death; Covelong and Chingkeput, two of the most important
French forts, were captured by Clive with an army as unpromising as
Falstaff's ragged regiment. At this point, and on the full tide of
victory, Clive's health broke down, and he was compelled to return to
England for change of climate. Before he left Madras he married Miss
Maskelyne. Never did a man return to his native land under more
auspicious conditions who had gone thence under conditions so
inauspicious. The bad boy of Market-Drayton was now the illustrious
and opulent soldier whom the gentlemen of the India House delighted to
salute as General Clive, and about whom it seemed as if it was
impossible for the nation to make too much ado.
[Sidenote: 1755--Back to India]
Clive was now seized with the ambition to play a part in home politics.
The general election of 1754 seemed to offer him a tempting opportunity
of entering Parliament. He came forward as one of the members for St.
Michael's in Cornwall, was opposed by Newcastle, and supported by
Sandwich and Fox, was returned, was petitioned against, and was
unseated on petition. To fight a parliamentary election in those days
meant the spending of a very great deal of money, and Clive, who had
squandered his well-earned fortune right and left since his return to
his native land, found himself, after he was unseated, in a decidedly
disagreeable position. His money was dwindling; his hope of political
triumphs had vanished into thin air; naturally enough, his thoughts
turned back to the India of his youth. The curious good-luck that
always attended upon him stood him in good stead here. If he had need
of the India of his youth, the India of his youth had need of him. If
France and England were not at {265} war, the rumor of war was busy
between them, and there was a desire for good leaders in the advancing
English colonies in India. Poor Dupleix was out of the way already.
The brilliant spirit whom Clive's genius had over-crowed had vanished
forever from the scenes of his triumphs and his humiliations. He had
suffered something of the same hard measure that he had himself meted
out to his colleague La Bourdonnais; he had been recalled in
comparative disgrace to France, with ruined fortunes and ruined hopes,
to die, a defeated and degraded man, the shadow of his own great name.
But the influence of France was not extinct in India; it might at any
moment reassert itself--at any moment come to the push of arms between
France and England in the East as well as in the West; and where could
the English look for so capable a leader of men as Clive? So it came
about that in the year 1755 Clive again sailed the seas for India,
under very different conditions from those under which he first
adventured for the East. Then he was an unknown, unappreciated
rapscallion of a lad, needy, homesick, desperate, and alone; now he was
going out as the Governor of Fort St. David, as lieutenant-colonel in
the British army, with a record of fame and fortune behind him. New
fame, new fortune, awaited him almost on the very moment of his arrival
in India. The pirate stronghold of Gheriah fell before him almost as
easily as if the place had been a new Jericho and Clive a second
Joshua. But there was greater work in store for him than the
destruction of pirate strongholds. Bengal became suddenly the theatre
of a terrible drama. Up to the year 1756 the tranquillity of the
English settlers and traders in Bengal had been undisturbed. Their
relations with the Nabob Ali Vardi Khan had been of the friendliest
kind, and the very friendliness of those relations had had the effect
of making the English residents in Bengal, like the native population,
men of a milder mould than those whom hard fortune had fashioned into
soldiers and statesmen at Madras. But in the year 1758 the Nabob Ali
Vardi Khan died, and was {266} succeeded by his grandson, Siraju'd
Daulah, infamous in English history as Surajah Dowlah.
[Sidenote: 1756--The Blackhole]
This creature, who incarnated in his own proper person all the worst
vices of the East, without apparently possessing any of the East's
redeeming virtues, cherished a very bitter hatred of the English.
Surajah Dowlah was unblessed with the faintest glimmerings of
statesmanship; it seemed to his enfeebled mind that it would be not
only a very good thing to drive the English out of Bengal, but that it
would be also an exceedingly easy thing to do. All he wanted, it
seemed to him, was a pretext, and to such a mind a pretext was readily
forthcoming. Had not the English dogs fortified their settlement
without his permission? Had they not afforded shelter to some victim
flying from his omnivorous rapacity? These were pretexts good enough
to serve the insane brain of Surajah Dowlah. He attacked Fort William
with an overwhelming force; the English traders, unwarlike, timorous,
and deserted by their leaders, made little or no resistance; the madman
had Fort William in his power, and used his power like a madman. The
memory of the Blackhole of Calcutta still remains a mark of horror and
of terror upon our annals of Indian empire. When Lord Macaulay,
eighty-four years after the event, penned his famous passage in which
he declared that nothing in history or in fiction, not even the story
which Ugolino told in the sea of everlasting ice, approached the
horrors of the Blackhole, he wrote before the worst horrors of Indian
history had yet become portion and parcel of our own history. But even
those who write to-day, more than a century and a quarter after that
time; those in whose minds the memories are fresh of the butcher's well
at Cawnpore and the massacre on the river-bank; those to whom the names
of Nana Sahib and Azimoolah Khan sound as horridly as the names of
fiends--even those can still think of the Blackhole as almost
incomparable in horror, and of Surajah Dowlah as among the worst of
Oriental murderers. It is true that certain efforts have been made to
reduce the {267} measure of Surajah Dowlah's guilt. Colonel Malleson,
than whom there is no fairer or abler Indian historian, thinks there
can be no doubt that Surajah Dowlah did not desire the death of his
English prisoners. Mr. Holwell, one of the few survivors of that awful
night, the man whose narrative thrilled and still thrills, horrified
and still horrifies, the civilized world, does give testimony that goes
towards clearing the character of Surajah Dowlah from direct complicity
in that terrible crime. "I had in all three interviews with him," he
wrote, "the last in Darbar before seven, when he repeated his
assurances to me, on the word of a soldier, that no harm should come to
us; and, indeed, I believe his orders were only general that we for
that night should be secured, and that what followed was the result of
revenge and resentment in the breasts of the lower jemidars to whose
custody we were delivered for the number of their order killed during
the siege." Yet these words do not go far to cleanse Surajah Dowlah's
memory. What had occurred? The English prisoners were brought before
the triumphant Nabob, bullied and insulted, and finally left in charge
of the Nabob's soldiery, while the Nabob himself retired to slumber.
The soldiery, whether prompted by revenge or mere merciless cruelty,
forced the prisoners, one hundred and forty-six in number, into the
garrison prison--a fearful place, only twenty feet square, known as the
Blackhole. The senses sicken in reading what happened after this
determination was carried out. The death-struggles of those unhappy
English people crowded in that narrow space, without air, in the
fearful summer heat, stir the profoundest pity, the profoundest
anguish. The Nabob's soldiers all through that fearful night revelled
in the sights and sounds that their victims' sufferings offered to them.
When the night did end and the awakened despot did allow the door of
the Blackhole to be opened, only twenty-three out of the hundred and
forty-six victims were alive. The hundred and twenty-three dead bodies
were hurriedly buried in a common pit.
{268}
It is simply impossible to exonerate Surajah Dowlah from the shame and
stain of that deed. The savage who passed "the word of a soldier" that
the lives of his prisoners should be spared took no precautions to
insure the carrying out of his promise. If, as Mr. Holwell says, the
lower jemidars were thirsting for revenge, then the Nabob, who gave his
prisoners over to the care of those jemidars, was directly responsible
for their deeds. Even in Surajah Dowlah's army there must have been
men, there must have been officers, to whom the tyrant, if he had
wished his prisoners to be well treated, could have intrusted them, in
the full confidence and certainty that his commands would be carried
out, and his humane wishes humanely interpreted. But even if by the
utmost straining we can in any degree acquit the Nabob of direct
personal responsibility before the act, his subsequent conduct involves
him in direct complicity, and forces upon him all the responsibility
and all the infamy. He did not punish the miscreants who forced their
victims into the Blackhole, and who gloated over their appalling
sufferings. He did not treat the survivors with ordinary humanity. He
was evidently convinced that he could deal with the wretched English as
he pleased, that their power in India was annihilated, that Surajah
Dowlah was among the mightiest princes of the earth.
[Sidenote: 1757--Plot and counterplot]
For six long months, for a fantastical half-year, Surajah Dowlah
revelled in the crazy dream of his own omnipotence. Then came
retribution, swift, successive, comprehensive. Clive was upon
him--Clive the unconquerable, sacking his towns, putting his garrisons
to the sword, recapturing those places from which Surajah Dowlah had
imagined that he had banished the Englishman forever. The news of the
tragedy of the Blackhole, and of the capture of Calcutta and Fort
William, had reached Madras in August, and the warlike community had
resolved upon prompt and speedy revenge. But it took time to raise the
expedition, took time to despatch the expedition. In October the army
of two thousand four hundred men, {269} of which nine hundred were
European troops, and fifteen hundred Sepoys, sailed for the Hoogly,
under Clive as military, and Admiral Watson as naval, commander.
Hostile winds delayed the armament until December, but when it did
reach its destination it carried all before it. The luck which always
attended upon Clive was still faithful to him. The Nabob, at the head
of his vast hordes, was soon as eager to come to terms with Clive at
the head of his little handful of men as he had before been eager to
obliterate the recollection of the Englishmen from the soil of Bengal.
He offered to treat with Clive; he was ready to make terms which from a
military point of view were satisfactory; he was evidently convinced
that he had underrated the power of England, and he was prepared to pay
a heavy penalty for his blunder.
We are now approaching that chapter of Clive's career which has served
his enemies with their readiest weapon, and has filled his admirers
with the deepest regret. The negotiations between Clive and Surajah
Dowlah were conducted on the part of all the Orientals concerned, from
Surajah Dowlah to Omichund, the wealthy Bengalee who played the part of
go-between, with an amount of treachery that has not been surpassed
even in the tortuous records of Oriental treachery. But unhappily the
treachery was not confined to the Oriental negotiators; not confined to
the wretched despot on the throne; not confined to Meer Jaffier, the
principal commander of his troops, who wanted the throne for himself;
not confined to the unscrupulous Omichund, who plotted with his left
hand against Surajah Dowlah, and with his right hand against the
English. Treachery as audacious, treachery more ingenious, treachery
more successful, was deliberately practised by Clive. The brilliant
and gallant soldier of fortune showed himself to be more than a match
for Oriental cunning in all the worst vices of a vicious Oriental
diplomacy. If Surajah Dowlah was unable to make up his miserable mind,
if he alternately promised and denied, cajoled and threatened, Clive,
on his side, while affecting to treat {270} with Surajah Dowlah, was
deliberately supporting the powerful conspiracy against Surajah Dowlah,
the object of which was to place Meer Jaffier on the throne. If
Omichund, with the keys of the conspiracy in his hand, threatened to
betray all to Surajah Dowlah unless he was promised the heaviest
hush-money, Clive on his side was perfectly ready to promise without
the remotest intention of paying. If Omichund, wary and suspicious,
was determined to have his bond in writing, Clive was quite ready to
meet him with a false and fraudulent bond. Clive professed to be
perfectly willing that in the secret treaty which was being drawn up
between the English and Meer Jaffier a clause should be inserted
promising the fulfilment of all Omichund's claims. But as Clive had
not the remotest intention of satisfying those claims, he composedly
prepared two treaties. One--the one by which he and Meer Jaffier were
to be bound--was written on white paper, and contained no allusion to
the avaricious Omichund. [Sidenote: 1757--The Red Treaty] Another, on
red paper, which was to be disregarded by the parties to the swindle,
contained a paragraph according to Omichund's heart's desire. Thus bad
begins, but worse remains behind. Clive, to his great astonishment,
found that Admiral Watson entertained different views from his about
the honor of an English soldier and gentleman. However convenient it
might be to bamboozle Omichund with a sham treaty, Admiral Watson
declined to be a party to the trick by signing his name to the
fraudulent document. Yet Admiral Watson's name was essential to the
success of the Red Treaty, and Clive showed that he was not a man to
stick at trifles. He wanted Admiral Watson's signature; he knew that
Omichund would want Admiral Watson's signature; he satisfied himself,
and he satisfied Omichund, by forging Admiral Watson's signature at the
bottom of the Red Treaty.
It is simply impossible to imagine any defence of Clive's conduct in
this most disgraceful business. The best that can be said for him is
that the whole process of the {271} treason was so infamous, the
fabrication of the Red Treaty so revolting a piece of duplicity, that
the forging of Admiral Watson's name does not materially add to the
darkness of the complete transaction. Nothing can palliate Clive's
conduct. It may, indeed, be said that as civilized troops after long
engagements in petty wars with savage races lose that morale and
discipline which come from contests with their military peers, so minds
steeped in the degrading atmosphere of Oriental diplomacy become
inevitably corrupted, and lose the fine distinction between right and
wrong. But so specious a piece of special pleading cannot serve
Clive's turn. English diplomacy at home and abroad has always, with
the rarest exceptions, plumed itself on its truthfulness, and has often
been successful by reason of that very truthfulness. The practically
unanimous condemnation which Clive's countrymen then and since have
passed upon his action with regard to the Red Treaty is the best answer
to all such pitiful prevarications.
However, Clive did prepare a sham treaty, did forge Admiral Watson's
name, did fool Omichund to the top of his bent. Omichund being thus
cunningly bought over, Clive prepared for action, flung defiance at
Surajah Dowlah, and marched against him. On June 23, 1757, the fate of
England in India was decided by the famous battle of Plassey, or, as it
should be more correctly called, Palasi.
Plassey was a great victory. Yet, in the words of the conspirator in
Ben Jonson's "Catiline," it was but "a cast at dice in Fortune's hand"
that it might have been a great defeat, Clive was astonishingly,
grotesquely out-numbered. The legendary deeds of chivalrous paladins
who at the head of a little body of knights sweep away whole hosts of
paynims at Saragossa or Roncesvalles were rivalled by Clive's audacity
in opposing his few regiments to the swollen armament of the Nabob.
Moreover, Meer Jaffier, whose alliance with the English, whose treason
to Surajah Dowlah, was an important part of the scheme, {272} was not
to be counted upon. He hesitated, unwilling to fling his fortunes into
the English scale before he was convinced that the English were certain
of success, although he was himself one of the most important factors
in the possibility of that success. But the greatest danger that
threatened the English arms was, curiously enough, due to Clive
himself. On the eve of Plassey he held a council of war at which it
was discussed whether they should fight at once or postpone fighting to
what might seem a more seasonable opportunity. Clive at this council
departed from his usual custom. He gave his own vote first, and he
voted against taking any immediate action. Naturally enough, the
majority of the council of war voted with Clive, in spite of the
strenuous opposition of Major Eyre Coote and a small minority. By a
majority of thirteen to seven it was resolved not to fight.
It is needless to speculate on what would have been the fortunes of the
English in Bengal if that vote had settled the question. Luckily,
Clive was a man of genius, and was not either afraid to admit that he
had made a mistake, or to change his mind. A short period of solitary
reflection convinced him that he and the majority were wrong, and that
Eyre Coote and the minority were right. He informed Eyre Coote of his
new decision, gave the necessary orders, and the next day the battle of
Plassey was fought and won.
It is not necessary here to go into the details of that momentous day.
The desperate courage, daring, and skill of the English troops carried
all before them; their cannonade scattered death and confusion into the
Nabob's ranks. Within an hour an army of sixty thousand men was
defeated, with astonishingly slight loss to the victors; Surajah
Dowlah, abandoned at the judicious moment by one traitor, Meer Jaffier,
was flying for his life in obedience to the insidious counsels of
another traitor, Rajah Dulab Ram. From that hour Bengal became part of
the English empire.
{273}
The fate of the different actors on the Indian side was soon decided.
Meer Jaffier was duly invested with the Nabob's authority over Bengal,
Behar, and Orissa; Omichund, on learning the shameful trick of the Red
Treaty, went mad and died mad; Surajah Dowlah was soon captured and
promptly killed by Meer Jaffier: the Blackhole was avenged.
[Sidenote: 1757--The conqueror returns]
Clive had now reached the pinnacle of his greatness. Victor of
Plassey, Governor of Bengal, he remained in India for three more
resplendent years; he added to the number of his conquests by defeating
the great enterprise of Shah Alum against Meer Jaffier, and shattered
the Dutch descent upon the Hoogly--a descent secretly favored by the
ever-treacherous Meer Jaffier--both on land and sea. Then, with laurel
victory upon his sword, and smooth success strewn before his feet,
Clive resolved to return again to England. He sailed from India, full
of honors, in 1760, the year in which George the Second died. When he
arrived in England George the Third was king. Here for the moment we
must leave him, the greatest living soldier of his country, with a
career of practically unbroken glory behind him. He had reached his
apogee. We shall meet with him again under less happy conditions, when
the sun of Plassey had begun to set.
{274}