Robert Clive arrived at Madras in 1743 at the age of 17, poor, awkward, and without connexions. In 1760 when he resigned the Company’s service he had by his exploits as a soldier and administrator assured its predominance in India over its European rivals, played a big part in consolidating its influence in the Carnatic, and laid the basis of its rule in Bengal. He had also made the first and greatest of the large private fortunes acquired by the Company’s servants in India, and his actions and example had set in train the events which were to lead to the gradual assumption by the state of responsibilities become too great for a trading company.
The chance to show his natural military skill was first given him by the struggles between the French and English Companies in the Carnatic—before 1749 as part of the war between England and France, after that, nominally at least, as allies of Indian rulers competing for power. His heroic defence of Arcot in 1751 and his share in the siege of Trichinopoly in 1752 won him a high military reputation, which his return to England in 1753, on grounds of health, enabled him to exploit. He had acquired by private trade, his military ‘batta’, and prize money, a moderate fortune which he used to establish his family in comfort, and he himself lived in some style. Though he had every intention of returning ultimately to India, in 1754 he stood for Mitchell on the Scawen interest (on which his cousin Edward Clive had sat 1741-51). He was returned but unseated on petition, 24 Mar. 1755, after long and exceedingly bitter wrangles in the House. A proposal that he should stand for Dover was not proceeded with.
His return to India in 1755 was owing to the imminence of war between Britain and France, and the knowledge that its outbreak would be followed by hostilities in India. Royal land and naval forces had already been sent to strengthen the Company’s arms; and the sudden assault on the Company’s factories and capture of Calcutta by Siraj-ud-daula, the new Nawab of Bengal, gave him the opportunities he needed. Placed by the Government of Fort St. George in command of a strong force to retrieve the situation in Bengal, he succeeded in recapturing Calcutta, bringing the Nawab to terms, and in seizing Chandernagore, the chief French stronghold in Bengal. Evidence that Siraj-ud-daula was intriguing with the French led him to foment a conspiracy to replace him by Mir Jafar, and on 23 June 1757 Clive routed Siraj-ud-daula’s forces at Plassey and recognized Mir Jafar as Nawab. In 1758 the council of the Bengal presidency invited Clive to act as governor, and in 1759 he broke the power of the Dutch Company in Bengal by defeating their forces near Chinsura.
Mir Jafar confirmed the Company’s rights in Bengal, and made lavish gifts to Clive and others concerned in the revolution. By the time Clive left India he had acquired a fortune of nearly £300,000, which he remitted to his attorneys in England,
In 1760 Clive left India, as he believed, for ever and had ambitious though ill-defined plans for his ‘future power’, his ‘future grandeur’
When in June 1759 Robert More, M.P. for Shrewsbury, declined to stand again at the general election, Clive’s candidature was declared by his father with the support of Lord Powis, leader of the Shropshire Whigs, and was endorsed by the corporation in spite of Lord Bath’s exertions on behalf of his son Lord Pulteney, heir presumptive to very considerable estates in Shropshire. For a year Bath persisted, but after Clive’s arrival in England Pulteney ‘had really no chance of success’,
Early in his parliamentary career Clive had taken as a maxim ‘No more struggles against the ministry; I choose to be with them’.
In returning to Bengal in 1764 as governor and commander-in-chief Clive was largely moved by the disputes in which he was involved, by the need to protect his wealth against his enemies, and one of the results of his return was his success in securing the continuation of the ‘jagir’ for twenty years. He brought some order into the disorganized civil and military administration of Bengal (at the cost of raising up against himself new and dangerous enemies in the Company, in particular the formidable Johnstone family), and, obtaining a grant from the Mogul of the ‘diwani’ or financial administration of Bengal, he set up the so-called dual system of government which remained in force until superseded by the early reforms of Warren Hastings. The new grant caused still further disorganization in the East India Company by leading to violent speculation in its funds, in which Clive took part through his attorneys.
With the Parliament of 1761 in its seventh year, Clive’s return to England in July 1767 produced a spate of election schemes: there seemed no need for him and his friends to hunt for boroughs—his fabulous wealth attracted offers from all over the country. A fortnight after his return he was invited to nominate one or two candidates for Colchester.
‘I have had three seats offered me for £7,000 which were engaged for Charles Townshend’, wrote George Clive on 1 Oct. (Townshend had died on 4 Sept.). Names were withheld for some time by the intermediaries: the manager was the notorious Theobald Taaffe,
On 26 Nov. Walsh wrote to Clive:
I imagine a perpetuity like mine at Pontefract will not be disagreeable to you. I am in close pursuit of one and for you, though it is a purchase I would like myself. Perfect secrecy on this head is necessary.
And the name of that ‘perpetuity’ nowhere appears.
Walsh also backed the schemes which Chase Price was pressing on Clive. These, as Price proved by returning Carnac for Leominster and himself for Radnorshire,
In the end, besides defending his own seat at Shrewsbury, Clive actively engaged in two contests only: he supported the candidature of his brother-in-law Edmund Maskelyne at Cricklade, which was, however, abandoned a few days before the poll;
In March 1768, paying £43,000, Walsh bought for Clive V. Morris’s Usk estate in Monmouthshire which carried considerable influence in the by-election of July 1771 but would not have sufficed to establish a new interest in the county. Some time after 1768 Clive bought Thomas Pitt’s Okehampton estate, and returned in 1774 Wedderburn for the seat it carried (it was sold in 1778 to Lord Spencer); and further Oakley Park from Lord Powis with electoral influence at Ludlow. This is about the sum total of the parliamentary interests he acquired.
The personal friendship and trust which grew up between him and George Grenville after his return to England, and his annoyance with the Government over its East Indian policy led Clive into the parliamentary Opposition with which, by 1769, he was fully identified. On 9 May 1769 he was present at the dinner of Opposition Members at the Thatched House Tavern. When Alexander Wedderburn had to give up his seat at Richmond on account of the active part he took on the Middlesex election, Clive let Grenville know that he would return him for Bishop’s Castle,
The death of Grenville on 13 Nov. 1770 left Clive without a leader, but though Grenville’s followers, including Wedderburn (with whom Clive’s relations had become increasingly close), soon made their terms with Administration, he himself received coldly tentative approaches made by the North Administration through Wedderburn in 1771. It was the events of 1772 that brought him into their fold. His new enemies in the Company joined with his old ones had for some time been encouraging attacks in the press against him and attributing to his second government of Bengal the economic and administrative disorders that continued to mount there. Early in 1772 the court of directors took up at their demand some charges against him. During a debate in the Commons, 30 Mar. 1772, Clive took the offensive and defended himself against these charges while vigorously attacking his opponents and the court of directors. The result was the setting up of a select committee of the House under the chairmanship of Colonel Burgoyne of which Clive and Henry Strachey were members but which, under the influence of Clive’s enemies, began an investigation of his Indian career and that of other Company servants who had worked with him. The investigation, which threatened the confiscation of almost the whole of his fortune, aroused widespread and hostile interest. In the circumstances the value of good relations with the ministry became obvious, and in September 1772 Clive’s appointment as lord lieutenant of Shropshire was generally and correctly taken as an indication that they had come to terms.
For the few remaining months of his life Clive continued to support Administration though he by no means fully approved of the Regulating Act, and his influence and that of his circle in indoctrinating with their views on East India matters Philip Francis, appointed under the Act a member of the governor-general’s council, may be said to have played a part in making the working of the Act impossible. Besides Clive’s immediate followers certain ‘nabobs’ and others concerned with him in East India affairs tended to vote with him, but their numbers were not large. In 1774 Strachey considered the second seat at Worcester, in which Thomas Bates Rous had in 1773 tried to succeed Henry Crabb Boulton, as ‘a great part of our parliamentary weight’, and feared its loss when Rous’s election being voided on petition, he refused for the moment to stand again, especially if ‘Mr. Walsh should determine not to stand at the next election’.
The only object you have in life [an English peerage] must be pushed for by weight at the next general election. It will certainly be the last effort, and most probably will succeed at that period.
But by this time Clive’s health and spirits were undermined by anxiety and the excessive medical use of opium. His death on 22 Nov. 1774, before the new Parliament met, was by his own hand.
Clive’s achievements in India were those of a soldier and man of action; his successes as an administrator were due rather to daemonic energy and force of character than to grasp of long-range policy, but his part in the creation of British India was a great one. Ruthless and self-seeking, autocratic and violent, but capable of great exertion and fearless courage when set on a task, and of steady loyalty to those who befriended or served him, his qualities were more suited for the troubled scene in India in which he rose to fame, than to the political world of 18th century England. To this temperamental difficulties were added, moreover, the suspicions stimulated by his sudden and doubtfully gained wealth, and the enmities which he had aroused during his Indian career and in the Company after his return. For these reasons his part in the politics of the East India Company was on the whole damaging rather than useful, and in national politics his considerable talents and influence were confined almost wholly to the negative purpose of protecting his own position.