It was impossible, however, that even the military establishment should long continue exempt from the vices which pervaded every other part of the government. Rapacity, luxury, and the spirit of insubordination spread from the civil service to the officers of the army, and from the officers to the soldiers. The evil continued to grow till every messroom became the seat of conspiracy and cabal, and till the sepoys could be kept in order only by wholesale executions. At length the state of things in Bengal began to excite uneasiness at home. A succession of revolutions, a disorganized administration; the natives pillaged, yet the Company not enriched; every fleet bringing back individuals able to purchase manors and to build stately dwellings, yet bringing back also alarming accounts of the financial prospects of the government; war on the frontier, disaffection in the army, the national character disgraced by excesses resembling those of Verres and Pizarro;-such was the spectacle which dismayed those who were conversant with Indian affairs. The general cry was, that Clive, and Clive alone, could save the empire which he had founded. This feeling manifested itself in the strongest manner at a very full General Court of Proprietors. Men of all parties, forgetting their feuds, and trembling for their dividends, exclaimed that Clive was the man whom the crisis required;-that the oppressive proceedings which had been adopted respecting his estate ought to be dropped, and that he ought to be entreated to return to India. Clive was on his voyage out. The English The Council met, and Clive stated to them his full determination to effect a thorough reform, and to use for that purpose the whole of the ample authority, civil and military, which had been confided to him. Johnstone, one of the boldest and worst men in the assembly, made some show of opposition. Clive interrupted him, and haughtily demanded whether he meant to question the power of the new government. Johnstone was cowed, and disclaimed any such intention. All the faces round the board grew long and pale; and not another syllable of dissent was uttered. Clive rose. As to his estate, he said, he would make such propositions to the Directors as would, he trusted, lead to an amicable settlement. But there was a still greater difficulty. It was proper to tell them that he never would undertake the government of Bengal while his enemy Sullivan was chairman of the Company. The tumult was violent. Sullivan could scarcely obtain a hearing. An over- Clive redeemed his pledge. He remained in whelming majority of the assembly was on India about a year and a half; and in that Clive's side. Sullivan wished to try the result short time effected one of the most extensive, of a ballot. But, by the by-laws of the Com-difficult, and salutary reforms that ever was pany, there can be no ballot except on a requi- accomplished by any statesman. This was sition signed by nine proprietors; and though the part of his life on which he afterwards hundreds were present, nine persons could not looked back with most pride. He had it in his be found to set their hands to such a requisi-power to triple his already splendid fortune, to tion. Clive was in consequence nominated Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the British possessions in Bengal. But he adhered to his declaration, and refused to enter on his office till the event of the next election of Directors should be known. The contest was obstinate, but Clive triumphed. Sullivan, lately absolute master of the India House, was within one vote of losing his own seat; and both the chairman and deputy-chairman were friends of the new governor. connive at abuses while pretending to remove them, to conciliate the good-will of all the English in Bengal, by giving up to their rapacity a helpless and timid race, who knew not where lay the island which sent forth their oppressors; and whose complaints had little chance of being heard across fifteen thousand miles of ocean. He knew that if he applied himself in earnest to the work of reformation, he should raise every bad passion in arms against him. He knew how unscrupulous, how implacable, would be the hatred of those Such were the circumstances under which ravenous adventurers, who, having counted on Lord Clive sailed for the third and last time to accumulating in a few months fortunes sufficient India. In May, 1765, he reached Calcutta, and to support peerages, should find all their hopes he found the whole machine of government frustrated. But he had chosen the good part; more fearful.y disorganized than he had anti-and he called up all the force of his mind for cipated. Meer Jallier, who had some time be- a battle far harder than that of Plassey. At fore lost his eldest son Meeran, had died while first success seemed hopeless; but very soon all obstacles began to bend before that iron gal. Clive saw clearly that it was absurd to courage and that vehement will. The receiv- give men power, and to expect that they would ing of presents from the natives was rigidly be content to live in penury He had justly prohibited. The private trade of the servants concluded that no reform could be effectual of the Company was put down. The whole which should not be coupled with a plan for settlement seemed to be set, as one man, liberally remunerating the civil servants of the against thes measures. But the inexorable Company. The Directors, he knew, were not governor declared that, if he could not find disposed to sanction any increase of the salasupport at Fort William, he would procure it ries out of their own treasury. The only elsewhere; and sent for some civil servants course which remained open to the governor, from Madras to assist him in carrying on the was one which exposed him to much misreadministration. The most factious of his op- presentation, but which we think him fully ponents he turned out of their offices. The rest justified in adopting. He appropriated to the submitted to what was inevitable; and in a support of the service the monopoly of salt, very short time all resistance was quelled. which has formed, down to our own time, a principal head of Indian revenue; and he di But Clive was far too wise a man not to see that the recent abuses were partly to be ascrib-vided the proceeds according to a scale which ed to a cause which could not fail to produce seems to have been not unreasonably fixed. similar abuses as soon as the pressure of his He was in consequence accused by his enestrong hand was withdrawn. The Company mies, and has been accused by historians, of had followed a mistaken policy with respect to disobeying his instructions-of violating his the remuneration of its servants. The salaries promises of authorizing that very abuse were too low to afford even those indulgences which it was his especial mission to destroy, which are necessary to the health and comfort-namely, the trade of the Company's serof Europeans in a tropical climate. To lay by a rupee from such scanty pay was impossible. It could not be supposed that men of even average abilities would consent to pass the best years of life in exile, under a burning sun, for no other consideration than these stinted wages. It had accordingly been understood, from a very early period, that the Company's agents were at liberty to enrich themselves by their private trade. This practice had been seriously injurious to the commercial interests of the corporation. That very intelligent observer, Sir Thomas Roe, in the reign of James the First, strongly urged the Directors to apply a remedy to the abuse. "Absolutely prohibit the private trade," said he, "for your business will be better done. I know this is harsh. Men profess they come not for bare wages. But you will take away this plea if you give great wages to their content; and then you know what you part from." vants. But every discerning and impartial judge will admit, that there was really nothing in common between the system which he set up and that which he was sent to destroy. The monopoly of salt had been a source of revenue to the governments of India before Clive was born. It continued to be so long after his death. The civil servants were clearly entitled to a maintenance out of the revenue, and all that Clive did was to charge a particular portion of the revenue with their maintenance. He thus, while he put an end to the practices by which gigantic fortunes had been rapidly accumulated, gave to every British functionary employed in the East the means of slowly, but surely, acquiring a competence. Yet, such is the injustice of mankind, that none of those acts which are the real stains of his life, has drawn on him so much obloquy as this measure, which was in truth a reform necessary to the success of all his other reforms. In spite of this excellent advice the Company adhered to the old system, paid low sala- He had quelled the opposition of the civil ries, and connived at the by-gains of its ser- service: that of the army was more formidavants. The pay of a member of Council was ble. Some of the retrenchments which had only three hundred pounds a year. Yet it was been ordered by the Directors affected the innotorious that such a functionary could hardly terests of the military service; and a storm live in India for less than ten times that sum; arose, such as even Cæsar would not willingly and it could not be expected that he would be have faced. It was no light thing to encounter content to live even handsomely in India with- the resistance of those who held the power of out laying up something against the time of his the sword, in a country governed only by the return to England. This system, before the sword! Two hundred English officers engaged conquest of Bengal, might affect the amount of in a conspiracy against the government, and the dividends payable to the proprietors, but determined to resign their commissions on the could do little harm in any other way. But same day, not doubting that Clive would grant the Company was now a ruling body. Its ser- any terms rather than see the army, on which vants might still be called factors, junior mer-alone the British empire in the East rested, left chants, senior merchants. But they were in without commanders. They little knew the truth proconsuls, proprætors, procurators of unconquerable spirit with which they had to extensive regions. They had immense power. deal. Clive had still a few officers round his Their regular pay was universally admitted to person on whom he could rely. He sent to be insufficient. They were, by the ancient Fort St. George for a fresh supply. He gave usage of the service, and by the implied per- commissions even to mercantile agents wh mission of their employers, warranted in en- were disposed to support him at this crisis, riching themselves by indirect means; and and he sent orders that every officer who rethis had been the origin of the frightful oppres- signed should be instantly brought up to Cal· sion and corruption which had desolated Ben-cutta. The conspirators found that they VOL. III.-43 2 F miscalculated. The governor was inexorable. | able and vigorous Mayors of the Palace-to The troops were steady. The sepoys, over Charles Martel and to Pepín. At one time whom Clive had always possessed extraordi-Clive had almost made up his mind to discard nary influence, stood by him with unshaken this phantom altogether; but he afterwards fidelity. The leaders in the plot were arrested, thought that it might be convenient still to use tried, and cashiered. The rest, humbled and the name of the Nabob, particularly in dealings dispirited, begged to be permitted to withdraw with other European nations. The French, the their resignations. Many of them declared Dutch, and the Danes, would, he conceived, their repentance even with tears. The younger submit far more readily to the authority of the offenders Clive treated with lenity. To the native prince, whom they had always been acringleaders he was inflexibly severe; but his customed to respect, than to that of a rival severity was pure from all taint of private ma- trading corporation. This policy may, at that levolence. While he sternly upheld the just time, have been judicious. But the pretence authority of his office, he passed by personal was soon found to be too flimsy to impose on insults and injuries with magnanimous disdain. anybody; and it was altogether laid aside. The One of the conspirators was accused of having heir of Meer Jaffier still resides at Moorshedaplanned the assassination of the governor; but bad, the ancient capital of his house, still bears Clive would not listen to the charge. "The the title of Nabob, is still accosted by the Engofficers," he said, "are Englishmen, not assas-lish as "Your Highness," and is still suffered sins." While he reformed the civil service and established his authority over the army, he was equally successful in his foreign policy. His landing on Eastern ground was the signal for immediate peace. The Nabob of Oude, with a large army, lay at that time on the frontier of Bahar. He had been joined by many Afghans and Mahrattas, and there was no small reason to expect a general coalition of all the native powers against the English. But the name of Clive quelled in an instant all opposition. The enemy implored peace in the humblest language, and submitted to such terms as the new governor chose to dictate. At the same time, the government of Bengal was placed on a new footing. The power of the English in that province had hitherto been altogether undefined. It was unknown to the ancient constitution of the empire, and it had been ascertained by no compact. It resembled the power which, in the last decrepitude of the western empire, was exercised over Italy by the great chiefs of foreign mercenaries, the Ricimers and the Odoacers, who put up and pulled down at their pleasure a succession of insignificant princes, dignified with the names of Cæsar and Augustus. But as in one case, so in the other, the warlike strangers at length found it expedient to give to a domination which had been established by arms alone, the sanction of law and ancient prescription. Theodoric thought it politic to obtain from the distant court of Byzantium a commission appointing him ruler of Italy; and Clive, in the same manner, applied to the court of Delhi for a formal grant of the powers of which he already possessed the reality. The Mogul was absolutely helpless; and, though he murmured, had reason to be well pleased that the English were disposed to give solid rupees, which he never could have extorted from them, in exchange for a few Persian characters which cost him nothing. A bargain was speedily struck; and the titular sovereign of Hindostan issued a warrant, empowering the Company to collect and administer the revenues of Bengal, Orissa, and Bahar. There was still a Nabob, who stood to the British authorities in the same relation in which the last drivelling Chilperics and Childerics of the Merovingian line stood to their to retain a portion of the regal state which surrounded his ancestors. A pension of a hundred and sixty thousand pounds a year is annually paid to him by the government. His carriage is surrounded by guards, and preceded by attendants with silver maces. His person and his dwelling are exempted from the ordinary authority of the ministers of justice. But he has not the smallest share of political power, and is, in fact, only a noble and wealthy subject of the Company. The It would have been easy for Clive, during his second administration in Bengal, to accumulate riches such as no subject in Europe possessed. He might, indeed, without subjecting the rich inhabitants of the province to any pressure beyond that to which their mildest rulers had accustomed them, have received presents to the amount of three hundred thousand pounds a year. The neighbouring princes would gladly have paid any price for his favour. But he appears to have strictly adhered to the rules which he laid down for the guidance of others. The Prince of Benares offered him diamonds of great value. Nabob of Oude pressed him to accept a large sum of money and a casket of costly jewels. Clive courteously, but peremptorily, refused; and it deserves notice that he made no merit of his refusal, and that the facts did not come to light till after his death. He kept an exact account of his salary, of his share of the profits accruing from the trade in salt, and of those presents, which, according to the fashion of the East, it would be churlish to refuse. Out of the sum arising from these resources, he defrayed the expenses of his situation. The surplus he divided among a few attached friends who had accompanied him to India. He always boasted, and as far as we can judge he boasted with truth, that his last administration diminished instead of increasing his fortune. One large sum indeed he accepted. Meer Jaffier had left him by will above sixty thou sand pounds sterling, in specie and jewels and the rules which had been recently laid down extended only to presents from the living and did not affect legacies from the dead. Clive took the money, but not for himself. He made the whole over to the Company, in trust for officers and soldiers invalided in their service The fund, which still bears his name, owes its origin to this princely donation. After a stay of eighteen months, the state of his health rendered it necessary for him to return to Europe. At the close of January, 1767, he quitted for the last time the country on whose destinies he had exercised so mighty an influence. from obscurity, that they had acquired great wealth, that they exhibited it insolently, that they spent it extravagantly, that they raised the price of every thing in their neighbour hood, from fresh eggs to rotten boroughs; that their liveries outshone those of dukes, that their coaches were finer than that of the Lord Mayor, that the examples of their large and illgoverned households corrupted half the servants in the country; that some of them, with all their magnificence, could not catch the tone of good society, but, in spite of the stud and the crowd of menials, of the plate and the Dresden china, of the venison and the Burgundy, were still low men;-these were things which excited, both in the class from which they had sprung, and in that into which they attempted to force themselves, that bitter aversion which is the effect of mingled envy and contempt. But when it was also rumored that the fortune which had enabled its possessor to eclipse the Lord-Lieutenant on the race-ground, or to carry the county against the head of a house as old as "Domesday Book," had been accumulated by violating public faith-by deposing legitimate princes, by reducing whole provinces to beggary-all the higher and better as well as all the low and evil parts of hu His second return from Bengal was not, like his first, greeted by the acclamations of his Countrymen. Numerous causes were already at work which imbittered the remaining years of his life, and hurried him to an untimely grave. His old enemies at the India House were still powerful and active; and they had been reinforced by a large band of allies, whose violence far exceeded their own. The whole crew of pilferers and oppressors from whom he had rescued Bengal, persecuted him with the implacable rancour which belongs to such abject natures. Many of them even invested their property in India stock, merely that they might be better able to annoy the man whose firmness had set bounds to their rapacity. Lying newspapers were set up for no purpose but to abuse him; and the temper of the public mind was then such, that these arts, which under ordinary circumstances would have been ineffectual against truth and merit, pro-man nature, were stirred against the wretch duced an extraordinary impression. who had obtained, by guilt and dishonour, the riches which he now lavished with arrogant and inelegant profusion. The unfortunate Nabob seemed to be made up of those foibles against which comedy has pointed the most merciless ridicule, and of those crimes which have thrown the deepest gloom over tragedy The great events which had taken place in India had called into existence a new class of Englishmen, to whom their countrymen gave the name of Nabobs. These persons had generally sprung from families neither ancient nor opulent; they had generally been sent at an early age to the East; and they had thereof Turcaret and Nero, of Monsieur Jourdain acquired large fortunes, which they had brought and Richard the Third. A tempest of execraback to their native land. It was natural that, tion and derision, such as can be compared not having had much opportunity of mixing only to that outbreak of public feeling against with the best society, they should exhibit some the Puritans which took place at the time of of the awkwardness and some of the pomposity the Restoration, burst on the servants of the of upstarts. It was natural that, during their Company. The humane man was horrorsojourn in Asia, they should have acquired struck at the way in which they had got their some tastes and habits surprising, if not dis-money, the thrifty man at the way in which gusting, to persons who never had quitted Europe. It was natural that, having enjoyed great consideration in the East, they should not be disposed to sink into obscurity at home; and as they had money, and had not birth or high connection, it was natural that they should display a little obtrusively the advantage which they possessed. Wherever they settled there was a kind of feud between them and the old nobility and gentry, similar to that which raged in France between the farmer-general and the marquess. This enmity to the aristocracy long continued to distinguish the servants of the Company. More than twenty years after the time of which we are now speaking, Burke pronounced, that among the Jacobins might be reckoned "the East Indians almost to a man, who cannot bear to find that their present importance does not bear a proportion to their wealth." The Nabobs soon became a most unpopular class of men. Some of them had in the East displayed eminent talents, and rendered great services to the state; but at home their talents were not shown to advartage, and their services were little known. That they had sprung they spent it. The dilettante sneered at their want of taste. The maccaroni black-balled them as vulgar fellows. Writers the most unlike in sentiment and style-Methodists and libertines, philosophers and buffoons-were for once on the same side. It is hardly too much to say, that, during a space of about thirty years, the whole lighter literature of England was coloured by the feelings which we have described. Foote brought on the stage an Anglo-Indian chief, dissolute, ungenerous, and tyrannical, ashamed of the humbie friends of his youth, hating the aristocracy, yet childishly eager to be numbered among them, squandering his wealth on panders and flatterers, tricking out his chairmen with the most costly hot-house flowers, and astounding the ignorant with jargon about rupees, lacs, and jaghires. Mackenzie, with more delicate humour, depicted a plain country family, raised by the Indian acquisitions of one of its mem bers to sudden opulence, and exciting derision by an awkward' mimicry of the manners of the great. Cowper, in that lofty expostulation which glows with the very spirit of the He brew poets, placed the oppression of India fore grounds, was amazed to see in the house of his noble employer a chest which had once been filled with gold from the treasury of Moorshedabad; and could not understand how the conscience of the criminal suffered him to sleep with such an object so near to his bedchamber. The peasantry of Surrey looked with mysteri most in the list of those national crimes for which God had punished England with years of disastrous war, with discomfiture in her own seas, and with the loss of her transatlantic empire. If any of our readers will take the trouble to search in the dusty recesses of circulating libraries for some novel published sixty years ago, the chance is, that the villainous horror on the stately house that was rising or sub-villain of the story will prove to be a savage old Nabob, with an immense fortune, a tawny complexion, a bad liver, and a worse heart. at Claremont, and whispered that the great wicked lord had ordered the walls to be made so thick in order to keep out the devil, who would one day carry him away bodily. Among the gaping clowns who drank in this frightful story, was a worthless ugly lad of the name of Hunter, since widely known as William Huntingdon, S.S.; and the superstition which was strangely mingled with the knavery of that remarkable impostor, seems to have derived no small nutriment from the tales which he heard of the life and character of Clive.* Such, as far as we can now judge, was the feeling of the country respecting Nabobs in general. And Clive was eminently the Nabob -the ablest, the most celebrated, the highest in rank, the highest in fortune, of all the fraternity. His wealth was exhibited in a manner which could not fail to excite odium. He lived with great magnificence in Berkeley Square. He reared one palace in Shropshire, In the mean time, the impulse which Clive and another at Claremont. His parliamentary had given to the administration of Bengal, was influence might vie with that of the greatest constantly becoming fainter and fainter. His families. But in all this splendour and power, policy was to a great extent abandoned; the envy found something to sneer at. On some abuses which he had suppressed began to reof his relations, wealth and dignity seem to vive; and at length the evils which a bad have sate as awkwardly as on Mackenzie's government had engendered, were aggravated "Margery Mushroom." Nor was he himself, by one of those fearful visitations which the with all his great qualities, free from those best government cannot avert. In the summer weaknesses which the satirists of that age re- of 1770, the rains failed; the earth was parchpresented as characteristic of his whole class. ed up; the tanks were empty; the rivers shrank În the field, indeed, his habits were remarkably within their beds; a famine, such as is known simple. He was constantly on horseback, was only in countries where every household denever seen but in his uniform, never wore silk, pends for support on its own little patch of never entered a palanquin, and was content cultivation, filled the whole valley of the Ganges with the plainest fare. But when he was no with misery and death. Tender and delicate longer at the head of an army, he laid aside women, whose veils had never been lifted bethis Spartan temperance for the ostentatious fore the public gaze, came forth from the inner luxury of a Sybarite. Though his person was chambers in which Eastern jealousy had kept ungraceful, and though his harsh features were watch over their beauty, threw themselves on redeemed from vulgar ugliness only by their the earth before the passers-by, and with loud stern, dauntless, and commanding expression, wailings implored a handful of rice for their he was fond of rich and gay clothing, and re- children. The Hoogley every day rolled down plenished his wardrobe with absurd profusion. thousands of corpses close by the porticoes Sir John Malcolm gives us a letter worthy of and gardens of the English conquerors. The Sir Matthew Mite, in which Clive orders "two very streets of Calcutta were blocked up by hundred shirts, the best and finest that can be the dying and the dead. The lean and feeble got for love or money." A few follies of this survivors had not energy enough to bear the description, grossly exaggerated by report, pro- bodies of their kindred to the funeral pile or to duced an unfavourable impression on the pub- the holy river, or even to scare away the jack lic mind. But this was not the worst. Black als and vultures, who fed on human remains stories, of which the greater part were pure in the face of day. The extent of the mortality inventions, were circulated respecting his con- was never ascertained, but it was popularly duct in the East. He had to bear the whole reckoned by millions. This melancholy intelodium, not only of these bad acts to which heligence added to the excitement which already had once or twice stooped, but of all the bad acts of all the English in India-of bad acts committed when he was absent-nay, of bad acts which he had manfully opposed and severely punished. The very abuses against which he had waged an honest, resolute, and successful war, were laid to his account. He was, in fact, regarded as the personification of all the vices and weaknesses which the public, with or without reason, ascribed to the English adventurers in Asia. We have ourselves heard old men, who knew nothing of his history, but who still retained the prejudices conceived in their youth, talk of him as an incarnate fiend. Johnson always held this language. Brown, *See Huntingdon's Kingdom of Heaven taken by Thoin Clive employed to lay out his pleasure-Prayer, and his Letters. prevailed in England on Indian subjects. The proprietors of East India stock were uneasy about their dividends. All men of common humanity were touched by the calamities of our unhappy subjects, and indignation soon began to mingle itself with pity. It was rumoured that the Company's servants had created the famine by engrossing all the rice of the country; that they had sold grain for eight, ten, twelve times the price at which they had bought it; that one English functionary, who, the year before, was not worth one hundred guineas, had, during that season of mise. |