Rulers of India: Lord Clive - George Bruce Malleson (novels in english txt) 📗

denounced him would have acted otherwise. Some writers have averred, and until recently it has been accepted, that the deceit drove Aminchand to madness. But inquiry has dissipated this fiction. He was, it is true, startled into insensibility by the discovery of the fact that he had been imposed upon, but, after visiting the shrine of a famous saint in Málwá, he returned to his business in Calcutta and prospered till his death. As to the other part of the same transaction, the signing of the name of Admiral Watson, Clive stated on oath, in his evidence before the House of Commons, that although the admiral had refused to sign the document, he had, to the best of his belief, permitted Mr. Lushington to affix his name; and certainly amongst those who benefited by the transaction was Admiral Watson himself, who, after the triumph of the conspirators, claimed even more than he received. But it was on these two points that the miscreants whom Clive, in his second administration, had driven from the posts they had sullied, and their allies, based a persecution which tortured the enfeebled frame of the conqueror.

Clive's real fault in the eyes of the leaders of the persecution was that he had become rich himself, and had prevented them from fattening on the plunder of the country he had conquered. To most men, in fact to all but a very few men, in England and in France, India was a terra incognita whither a certain few repaired young, and whence they returned, in the prime of their manhood, rich, and often with a great reputation. Why was it that such men were at once subjected to the vilest persecution? The fact that they were so is incontestable. Clive himself and Warren Hastings, whose reputation has recently been splendidly vindicated by two great Englishmen,1 are cases in point in England; Dupleix and La Bourdonnais and Lally, in France. It is the saddest of sad stories; the men who had rendered the most brilliant services to their respective countries finding their bitterest enemies often amongst the Ministers of the Crown. There is little to discriminate between the conduct of parliamentary England and despotic France except in the degree of misery and punishment to which they alike subjected the most illustrious of their countrymen who had served in India.

1 Sir Fitzjames Stephen in the case of Nanda-Kumár: Sir John Strachey in reference to the charges respecting Oudh and Rohilkhand.

To return. It will be remembered that in his second administration Clive had purified the Civil Service of Bengal. The corrupt men whom he had ejected had returned to England whilst he was still in India, the charges made against them accompanying or preceding them in the despatches transmitted to the Court of Directors. On receiving these despatches the Court, having taken the opinions of their own lawyers and of those of the Crown, resolved to bring the culprits to trial for having accepted presents from the natives after they had received the order from the Court making such acceptance penal. But the inculpated men were rich and they resolved to appeal from the Directors to the Proprietors. There had been a difference between these two bodies as to whether the annual dividends should be increased from ten, the amount recommended by the Court, to twelve and a half per cent. At the annual meeting the votes of the men dismissed by Clive enabled the Proprietors to carry their point. The corrupt clique utilized this victory by proposing and carrying a resolution that the prosecutions instituted against them should be dismissed. This was accordingly done.

Two months later, July 14, Clive landed in England. He was well received. The King and Queen admitted him to private audiences. The Court of Directors received him in full conclave, immediately after his reception by their Majesties, thanked him for his splendid achievements, and immediately convened a general Court to confirm the proposal that the jágír, granted him by Mír Jafar, should be confirmed to him for an additional ten years. This resolution was unanimously passed.

So far there was no sign of the coming storm. Not a sound of the distant hurricane had been wafted to the ears of Clive. He had returned as ambitious as he ever had been, resolved to devote to the service of his country the energies he had displayed in the East. Already he had made arrangements to secure seats for himself and for six of his relatives, when, to rest before the elections should take place, he started for Paris (January, 1768) with Lady Clive and a small party. He was very confident in the future. He had received personally the King's commands to lay before his Majesty his ideas of the Company's affairs both at home and abroad, with a promise of his Majesty's countenance and protection in anything he might attempt for the good of the nation and the Company. He had seen so much of what he called 'the ignorance and obstinacy' of the Court of Directors, who, he stated in a letter to his successor, Mr. Verelst, 'are universally despised and hated,' that he felt sure his would be the hand, in the coming meeting of the Court of Proprietors, to stay their fall or to renew their vitality. In a word, his confidence was never greater, never did he feel more assured regarding the future.

Yet, during this confidence of the soul, this longing for political warfare, his nearest friends could easily detect that he had not sufficiently recovered from the strain of his last three years in India. His body did not respond to the call of the ever active brain. His friends and his physicians urged him then to take a complete rest and holiday of fourteen to fifteen months in France. With difficulty they induced him to stay eight months. Then he returned to find that he and his six relatives had, in his absence, been elected Members of Parliament.

His return produced a renewal of the activity of his enemies. They filled London with stories of his rapacity. Sir Robert Fletcher, whose shameful conduct during the mutiny of the officers I have recorded, wrote against him a pamphlet which irritated him greatly. He was hardly to be prevented from answering it. There were other considerations which, at this time, affected his career. When the general election at which he and his friends were returned had taken place, the Ministry was presided over by the Duke of Grafton, Lord Chatham being Lord Privy Seal and Lord North Chancellor of the Exchequer. At the end of 1769 Chatham was forced by the state of his health, which had long been bad, to resign; and in the January of the year following, the Duke of Grafton resigned and was succeeded as First Lord of the Treasury by Lord North. Clive had not posed as a supporter of either of these administrations. He had declared himself to be a supporter of George Grenville, the head of the Grenville Whigs, who were then in opposition. It has been claimed2 for him that Clive declined to commit himself to any party of the Indian policy of which he was ignorant. But none of the members of Lord North's Cabinet knew anything of India, and if Clive, commanding seven votes, had been asked to join it, he might have educated his colleagues on the subject. An opportunity of following such a course seemed to occur when Mr. Wedderburn, an able lawyer and a personal ally of Clive, joined the North Ministry, but Clive remained staunch to the Grenville connexion, exercising but little influence, and exposed all the time to the bitter shafts of his enemies, which increased every day in intensity and venom. To make the situation still less endurable George Grenville died (November, 1770).

2 Malcolm's Clive.

Meanwhile affairs in India were not progressing satisfactorily. In Bengal, indeed, Mr. Verelst, acting on the lines laid down by Clive, had with the support of his colleagues succeeded in maintaining peace and prosperity. But in Madras, the incursions of Haidar Alí, an adventurer who by sheer ability and daring had climbed to the highest place in the kingdom of Mysore, had caused the English in that Presidency severe losses, and forced them to incur an expenditure which deprived the Proprietors of Indian Stock of all chance of dividends for some time to come. To meet this financial embarrassment the Crown and the Company could dream of no other device than the futile one of sending to India three commissioners, who, under the name of Supervisors, should have full power over all the other servants of the Company. They nominated accordingly Mr. Vansittart, who, from having been the warmest friend of Clive, had become his bitterest opponent; and who, but for the successful opposition of Clive and his friends, would have been appointed Governor in succession to Mr. Verelst. With him they associated Mr. Scrafton, an old and valued servant of the Company; and Colonel Forde, the conqueror of the Northern Sirkárs and of Biderra—both intimate friends and adherents of Clive. These gentlemen sailed in the Aurora frigate in the autumn of 1769. The Aurora reached the Cape in safety, but was never heard of after she had quitted Simon's Bay. It was supposed that she foundered at sea.

Some considerable time elapsed before it had been realized in England that the Supervisors had failed them, and that it would be necessary to take other measures to remedy existing evils. Meanwhile events had happened which increased the necessity for immediate and effective action. In 1770 the three provinces were visited by a famine exceeding in intensity all the famines of preceding ages. There had been, in years gone by, no beneficent strangers from the West to make, as in later years, provision for the occurrence of so great a calamity. The rains had failed; the water in the tanks had dried up; the rice-fields had become parched and dry. There were but few stores handy to enable the foreigner to disburse the necessary grain. It was the first famine-experience of the English, and they too had made no provision for it. The misery was terrible. The large centres of industry, the only places where there was a chance of obtaining food, became thronged with the dying and the dead. The rivers floating corpses to the sea became so tainted that the very fish ceased to be wholesome food. In summing up, two years later, the effects of the famine on the population, the Governor-General in Council declared that in some places one-half, and, on the whole, one-third of the inhabitants had been destroyed. It need scarcely be added that this terrible calamity affected the Proprietors of East India Stock in a manner, to them the most vital:—it destroyed their prospects of large dividends.

To remedy this evil the brains of the Court of Directors could devise no other scheme than that which the foundering of the Aurora had previously baffled: they would send out other Supervisors. But Lord North had taken the matter in hand. He brought in a bill providing for the constitution in Calcutta of a Supreme Court, to consist of a Chief Justice and three Puisné judges, appointed by the Crown; giving to the Governor of Bengal authority over the two other Presidencies, with the title of Governor-General, to be assisted and controlled by a Council of five members. The great blot of this bill was the clause which gave a controlling power to the Council. The Governor-General had in it but one vote, and in case of equality, a casting-vote. Mr. Warren Hastings who, twelve months before, had succeeded Mr. John Cartier3 as Governor, was appointed first Governor-General of India.

3 Mr. Cartier had succeeded Mr. Verelst in 1769.

The war with Haidar Alí and the famine in Bengal had brought India and Indian matters very prominently into the parliamentary discussions of 1771, 1772 and 1773,