CLIVE, Robert (c.1610-97), of Styche, Moreton Say, Salop and Huxley, Waverton, Cheshire.

The Clives were seated at Clive in Shropshire and Huxley, Cheshire, by the second half of the twelfth century.13Salop Arch. Soc. Trans. xlix. 36-7; Ormerod, Cheshire, iii. 214. Styche, or the Styche, an estate at Moreton Corbet, was theirs by early Tudor times. Robert Clive’s grandfather, Sir George Clive of Huxley, married Susanna Copinger, of a Kent family, which made Robert Clive a cousin of Harbottle Grimston*. In 1636, Clive’s father, Ambrose, sold or mortgaged lands at Styche to Grimston, presumably to relieve the financial pressures he faced; there was no doubt that the Clives, though long settled and undoubtedly armigerous, were of lesser gentry status. Other Shropshire and Cheshire families that were related to the Clives included the Corbets of Moreton Corbet and the Breretons.14Coventry Docquets, 694; Salop Arch. Soc. Trans. xlix. 36-7. It was probably the Grimston, East Anglian, family connection that accounted for the exogamous element in the Clive marriages – Robert Clive’s mother was a Townshend of Norfolk – and indeed for more than one generation of Clives’ education.

Unusually for Salopians, both Ambrose and his son, Robert, were educated at Cambridge. Ambrose was briefly a fellow of St John’s and was ordained a deacon in the diocese of Lincoln in 1608.15Al. Cant. He is not known to have held a living, however, and may have abandoned thoughts of pursuing a career in the church or the universities on inheriting his estate, small though it probably was. After schooling in Shropshire, at Whitchurch grammar school, Robert Clive followed his father to Cambridge, initially to the college where Ambrose had been a fellow. In 1630, Robert forsook St John’s for the college of Harbottle Grimston: Emmanuel, noted for its puritan outlook. Also like his father, Robert Clive initially trained for a profession. At his chosen inn of court, both his sponsors or manucaptors, John Newton and William Jones, were of prominent Shropshire and Shrewsbury families.16LIL, Admiss. Bk. 6, f. 62v; Vis. Salop 1623 i. 28; ii. (Harl. Soc. xxix), 374-5. Clive stayed on at Lincoln’s Inn, not merely for the usual smattering of law suitable for a justice of the peace, but to read seriously for the bar, to which he was called in 1641. The investment by eldest sons of this family over two generations in training in the professions must strongly suggest a restricted estate or limited income, though neither of the Clives is known to have pursued his chosen calling much if at all after qualifying in it. As befitted one who was drawn to London during the law terms, Robert Clive played no recorded part in local government before the civil war. He is said to have married Mary Abyn, daughter of ‘Sir E. Abyn’, but as the latter cannot be identified the whole question of Clive’s marriage remains in doubt, and provides further material for the case that the Clives were, in gentry terms, more marginal than their ancient pedigree would suggest.17Trans. Salop. Arch. Soc. ser. 4, v. 59.

Clive’s movements during the first years of the civil war are obscure, but there can be little doubt that he was committed to the cause of Parliament from the first. He later described how between 1643 and 1646 he raised a troop of horse and later a regiment of foot, and this is borne out by other evidence. Clive was at Wem in December 1643, as captain of the horse regiment commanded by Thomas Mytton*, a rank he retained at least until February 1645, when he took part in the capture of Shrewsbury.18BHO, Cromwell Assoc. database. It was presumably his military career during this period that inspired lines in the doggerel royalists’ ‘Litany’

From Wem and from Wyche

And from Clive of the Styche

Good Lord, deliver us.19Trans. Salop. Arch. Soc. ser. 4, v. 58.

Clive was also involved in the fledgling parliamentarian administration in the county, based at Wem. He joined the Shropshire committee for the first time in June 1644, but it was not until the autumn of 1645 that his signature appeared regularly on committee orders. Before then he was presumably in the field in command of his regiment, and is known also to have been called on to attend Parliament on the committee’s behalf. In April 1645, Clive took to Speaker William Lenthall* a request for a considerable force to be sent to the county, to capitalise on the inroads being made by William Brereton* on local royalist strongholds.20Bodl. Tanner 60A, f. 52. In the autumn and winter of that year, Clive regularly joined with other committee leaders to keep Brereton informed of troop movements and the various excursions of Mytton. In most of these despatches, sent from their new headquarters at Shrewsbury, there was a slightly desperate note reflecting their sense of being beleaguered by the royalists. There was also an underlying tone of resentment when the committee’s own Shropshire-raised horse and foot were commandeered by Brereton for service elsewhere in the region.21Brereton Letter Bks. ii. 124, 143, 206-7, 222, 249, 279, 288, 299, 325-6, 353, 398-9, 413, 420-1, 441.

The west midlands association was not noted for the successful co-operation between its constituent parts, and Clive was caught between his regimental commander and the county committee. In February 1646, the committee was complaining of Mytton’s obstructiveness and his alleged attempts to blame the committee for ill-disciplined behaviour among the soldiers. These sentiments were wholly reciprocated by Mytton, who accused the committee of starving the troops of pay.22Bodl. Tanner 60B, ff. 444, 461. On Mytton’s analysis, the reasons for this friction lay in conflicting authority. He alleged that his original military commission was compromised by an additional ordinance procured by the Shropshire committee but managed by the committee at Coventry, the radical element in the west midlands association.23Bodl. Tanner 60B, f. 463. A further dimension to the unhappiness lay in the rivalry between the individual county officers and committees, compounded still further by the inability of the earl of Denbigh, as overall commander-in-chief, to command the respect of the radical elements. Colonel Peter Stepkin, a Staffordshire commander, called Clive ‘jackanapes’ during one fearsome outburst of resentment, and was even alleged to have kicked the Shropshire man.24CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 444-5.

At the same time as dealing with these enervating internal squabbles, the committee had to face a determined enemy. Clive was one of those who wrote to Lenthall to describe how the hanging of 13 Irish rebels was answered by Rupert with the execution of some of the committee’s soldiers, held captive by the prince. Incidents like these contributed further to the unrest among the Shropshire troops.25LJ vii. 305b. In August 1645 Clive was among the committeemen who reported the capture of Sir Thomas Whitmore I* near Bridgnorth. They were hopeful that royalist garrisons could be brought under the control of Parliament, but saw the unacceptable levels of plunder by soldiers as a threat to acceptance by the local population.26HMC Portland, i. 236. By April 1646, the committee was able to report a successful night assault on Bridgnorth, during which the royalist occupying garrison set fire to buildings in the town. Although the royalists were able to mount a brief defence from the castle, surrender articles were agreed on 26 April, with Clive, recently promoted to the rank of colonel, serving as one of the commissioners for Parliament.27Bodl. Tanner 59, ff. 10, 28; CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 422. The other two commissioners were Robert Charlton* and Andrew Lloyd*, all three stalwarts of the Shropshire committee and future Members of Parliament. Clive’s relations with Lloyd were close; in July 1646, he was a party to the marriage settlement for Lloyd’s son.28NLW, Aston Hall Deeds, 874, 2041.

Clive and Charlton were returned to Parliament for Bridgnorth around 8 June 1646, evidently on the strength of their authority as committeemen receiving the town’s surrender. There is no record of Clive’s appearance in the Commons before 24 September, when he was appointed to a committee to bring in an ordinance for settling the government of Cheshire.29CJ iv. 674b. He was accompanied on the committee by the eminent Shropshire politician, William Pierrepont, and from then until December he rarely appeared on a committee without support from one or other of the Shropshire Members, usually Humphrey Edwardes.30CJ iv. 678b, 681b, 690a, 701b; v. 6b, 7b, 11a. On 9 December, along with Robert Charlton, Walter Kyrle, William Crowther, Edward Harley and Edwardes himself, Herefordshire and Shropshire MPs all, he took the Covenant.31CJ v. 7b. In his early months in the House, Clive sat on a number of unremarkable committees involving personal petitions. The committee of 10 October on commissions to the major-generals, the rivals to the New Model army in some respects, was more sensitive politically. The continuing military career of Thomas Mytton was the obvious local Shropshire example to inspire Clive’s interest in the topic.32CJ iv. 690a.

Clive was named to the important committee of privileges in December 1646, a body dominated by Sir Robert Harley and other Presbyterians. With other prominent figures from that faction – such as John Swynfen and Edward Massie – never far from his side during December and January, Clive involved himself in committees investigating first the alleged ill-conduct by another Member, Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire (17 Dec.) and then complaints before the House in general (31 Dec.).33CJ v. 17b, 35a. But on 5 January 1647, he himself was abused on the steps of the palace of Westminster, and found his case referred to a committee for complaints. The insult he endured was probably generated by Presbyterian-Independent rivalry, given the atmosphere prevalent at the time, as the king passed from the hands of his Scots captors into those of Parliament.34CJ v. 42b. The other committees which claimed Clive’s attendance in the early months of 1647 were also subject to partisan struggles for political supremacy: those on the regulating the governance of Oxford University (13 Jan.); on complaints against Edward Vaughan*, recently elected to the Commons for Montgomeryshire but long the subject of allegations about his political allegiance (17 Feb); and for an ordinance to prevent ‘malignant’ ministers from holding clerical livings and university fellowships (22 Mar.). The last was a large committee which gave plenty of scope for faction-fighting to be played out.35CJ v. 51b, 90a, 119b.

Military affairs figured significantly among Clive’s parliamentary interests in 1647. He sat on a committee (26 Mar.) to consider the petition of Major Alexander Tulidah, imprisoned without a hearing apparently merely for speaking critically of Parliament, another (27 Mar.) to receive a petition presented by the army to the parliamentary commissioners sent to placate it, and another on the London militia.36CJ v. 125b, 127b, 132b; J. Lilburne, Rash Oaths Unwarrantable (1647), 36-7 (E.393.29); Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 35-6. In all of these, he was almost certainly unsympathetic to the Independent-leaning New Modellers, more inclined to support the west midlands Presbyterian group led by Sir Robert Harley and his family. He sat on a number of committees with either Sir Robert or Edward Harley in the spring of 1647, and was named to the committee on the Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Shropshire elections (6 April), an offshoot of Harley’s privileges committee.37CJ v. 127b, 132b, 134a, 151b, 205a. Its Shropshire work would be to investigate the controversial election of Humphrey Edwardes. Clive’s religious outlook was apparently Presbyterian, as he was named an elder in the fourth Shropshire classis when lists were published in 1647.38Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, ii. 410.

As the conflict between Presbyterians and Independents deepened over approaches both to the army and to the king, Clive evidently decided that he had only limited stomach for political fighting in the Commons. He was named to committees on 10 June and 1 July, on Members who had taken up arms against Parliament and on a plan to force soldiers beyond the ‘lines of communication’ surrounding the capital. But on 16 July, he was given leave to go the country, and made no further appearance at Westminster until October, thus avoiding the Presbyterian-inspired ‘forcing of the Houses’ and the reactive entry by the army into London.39CJ v. 205a, 229a, 245b, 330a. Thereafter, his appearances in the House were fleeting. He was named to a committee on the sensitive topic of how to pay soldiers’ arrears of pay (22 Oct.), and on 23 December was required to bring in the assessment from Shropshire.40CJ v. 340a, 400b. Otherwise, there were reports of illness, the need to be in the country, and similar excuses.41CJ v. 330a, 373a, 523b.

An order to the Committee for Taking the Accounts of the Kingdom* of April 1648, that Clive’s military accounts should be made up and discharged, marked his return to parliamentary activity. His accounts were successfully audited and Clive was awarded £1,300 in public faith bills for his outlay on his troop and regiment: in January 1663 he had the bills by him still.42CJ v. 524a; E113/12 (Salop), answer of Robert Clive, 15 Jan. 1663. The order preceded the single example of Clive’s acting as a messenger to the Lords. On 24 April, he took up orders against free quarter and other offences of the military and on the need to suppress tumults. With them he carried a dismissive letter destined for the Scottish Parliament.43CJ v. 544a, b. Security matters were of concern to him: he was named to the committee to supervise management of the Tower of London (13 Apr.), and one set up to address the ominous reluctance of Kentishmen to support their own militia (20 Apr.).44CJ v. 529a, 538a. In June he was a natural candidate to lead the committees on the problems over wardship faced by his Shropshire county committee colleague, Robert Charlton*, but on 21 June he was again given leave to go home.45CJ v. 593b, 605a, 608b. Domestic security and control of the militia were preoccupations of Clive’s even after his return to Styche. On 15 July, writing apparently on his own initiative, he advised Speaker Lenthall that Shropshire was in danger of being lost to resurgent royalists. He believed that the key to local security lay in a properly-managed county militia, which at the time of his writing was in disarray, with no proper commander. His complaint against newcomers to the parliamentarian cause who had been promoted over the heads of those long committed betrays Clive’s social conservatism, although he managed to distance himself from local examples of those who had abandoned the cause of Parliament for that of the king. His involvement in discussions of security in the spring and summer of 1648 must be viewed against the background of the second civil war, and represent at least a partial detachment by Clive from his county committee colleagues.46HMC Portland, i. 484.

By 1 November, Clive had returned to London, to be named to a committee formed to reap financially the new crop of delinquents flung up in Essex by the second civil war, and on the 25th of that month he was asked to bring in taxes from Shropshire.47CJ vi. 67a, 88a. He must have left the capital again soon afterwards, because he figures neither in the lists of those Members secluded or imprisoned by the army, nor among those who remained in Parliament, during the purge of early December. As far as the new republican government was concerned, it was a question of waiting to see how Clive would play his hand. He was not named to assessment committees early in 1649, probably because he stayed away from Westminster and made no immediate effort to conform by registering a dissent from the vote of 5 December (to continue negotiations with the king) that had precipitated the purge. He was still active in the Shropshire committee in January 1649, but not demonstrably after the execution of the king on the 30th. He eventually registered his dissent on 19 February 1649, but this proved no real indication of his allegiance, any more than would his acceptance in June 1649 of £55 as part of his arrears of pay as a soldier.48PA, Ms CJ xxxiii, p. 715; Salop Archives, BB/C/8/1/3; SP28/134/13 f. 485. In August, the council of state received a more emphatic answer from Clive. He had organised a crowd to disrupt and harass a troop led by Lumley Thelwall* on its way to Ireland. Thelwall’s men were reported to have been abused for acting against Parliament, which suggests that Clive was acting in the interests of what he conceived as the ‘Presbyterian’, pre-purge Parliament, but after the Restoration he himself asserted that he was acting for the royalist cause.49CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 282; E113/12 (Salop), answer of Robert Clive, 15 Jan. 1663. Clive was imprisoned as a result of this episode – ‘many times’ according to his own later testimony – and his case came before the council of state in October, but with an inconclusive outcome.50CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 347, 360, 362, 364, 372, 374, 546; CJ vi. 291b.

Clive was thereafter persona non grata to the government of the commonwealth, but was admitted to the commission of the peace under the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell*. He was well enough thought of, indeed, to be made one of Major-general James Berry’s* commissioners, who publicised their clampdown on Shropshire alehouses in January 1656.51The Publick Intelligencer no. 16 (14-21 Jan. 1656), 252-3 (E.491.16). This period of rehabilitation was brief and limited. Clive was named to no other local commissions, and lost his place on the bench probably in 1657, although he was apparently addressed in a circular letter to magistrates of June 1658.52CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 76. He experienced a further short period of rehabilitation again in 1660, before the monarchy was restored, but he never overcame the suspicions of the government of Charles II. Clive protected the Presbyterian rector of Whitchurch, Thomas Porter, after his ejection from that living.53J.B. Blakeway, Sheriffs of Shropshire (Shrewsbury, 1831), 140; Calamy Revised, 396. In January 1663, he was made to account for himself at Shrewsbury before commissioners from the exchequer, when he asserted that the disturbances he led in Shropshire in 1649 had been inspired by loyalty to the then Charles Stuart, king of the Scots, but it must have been an unconvincing performance.54E113/12 (Salop), answer of Robert Clive, 15 Jan. 1663. In August 1665, in a round-up of former parliamentarians in Shropshire, inspired by Francis, 2nd Lord Newport, Clive’s name appeared on a warrant for arrest.55Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. ser. 4, i. 315. Thereafter, Clive devoted himself to ensuring that his estate at Styche descended to his heirs, and kept mostly out of public life.56Salop Archives, 5981/B/1/22, 80, 84, 85. His exclusion or abstention was broken briefly in 1673 when he was unexpectedly pricked sheriff. In 1683, he was noted by the Shrewsbury quarter sessions grand jury as ‘disaffected’, and subsequently found himself presented at the peculiar court of St Mary’s, Shrewsbury, for not taking the sacrament.57Salop Archives, P257/W/5/4/-; P257/W/3/4/7a. He died in 1697, and was buried at Moreton Say on 16 November.58Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. ser. 4, v. 59. No descendant of his sat in Parliament until 1741, but his celebrated great-great-grandson, Robert Clive, Clive of India, first entered the Commons in 1754.59HP Commons 1715-1754; HP Commons 1754-1790.