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By Root 1145 0

honours, of course, installing him in the Order of the Bath and making him a lord lieutenant, but the mood was changing. Apart from snobbish resentment of the nabobs (and Clive was the biggest nabob of all) there were mounting ethical anxieties: precisely how had this great wealth been acquired when there were stories of appalling famines among ordinary Indians in which, it was reported, ‘the living were feeding on the dead’? The British upper classes could contain their distaste for new money as long as they were being cut in on any profits to be had, but when Company shares fell (long after Clive had liquidated much of his holding, of course) those who had borrowed to invest turned on him in fury. In the House of Commons, ‘Gentleman Johnny’ Burgoyne claimed that all land seized by British subjects belonged to the Crown, that Clive had certainly had no excuse for accepting massive personal payments and that the forging of Admiral Watson’s signature was outrageous. India was the worst example of oppression in history. ‘We have had in India revolution upon revolution,’ he declared, ‘extortion upon extortion.’ But Clive was insouciant. Called to explain himself he remarked that ‘an opulent city lay at my mercy; its richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles; I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone, piled on either hand with gold and jewels … Mr Chairman,’ he sighed, ‘at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation.’

In November 1774 Baron Clive of Plassey – now aged forty-nine – was playing cards with friends at his house in Berkeley Square when he left the table and did not return. His health had been bad for some time; what had seemed an especially unshakeable cold refused to go away and instead became so bad that he was able to relieve the discomfort only with the use of opium – a habit he had acquired in India. Perhaps the drug killed him – it seems to fit the spirit of post-imperial times to believe in some sort of just deserts, although rumours at the time said he left the room to stick a penknife into his throat. They buried him in the little redbrick church at Moreton Say in Shropshire, beneath a plaque inscribed with the words ‘Primus in Indis’. Disgusted by England’s readiness to genuflect before wealth and power, the radical Thomas Paine danced on his grave. ‘Lord Clive is himself a treatise upon vanity, printed in a golden type. The most unlettered clown writes explanatory notes thereon, and reads them to his children.’

The parliamentary investigations into Clive’s behaviour in India of course exonerated him. He had appealed to MPs’ fellow-feeling with the words ‘leave me my honour, take away my fortune’. They certainly left him the latter. His role in establishing British rule in India can hardly be exaggerated. Had he not taken ship, perhaps someone else of similar avarice and equally steady nerve – of one nationality or another – would have emerged in his place. But it was Clive who was there, Clive who gave the Company its commanding presence and Clive whose reputation lives with the shame of events like the famine his administrative system exacerbated.

The sheer scale of the East India Company’s operations meant it was now impossible for the pretence to be maintained that it was a mere trading enterprise. In 1773 British parliamentary legislation decreed that a governor general for Bengal, to be advised by a Council, should be appointed by the British government. The first man to hold the post was Warren Hastings, an earnest, slightly shy and comparatively sophisticated son of an impoverished Cotswold clergyman. From an early age he yearned to recover the family estate at Daylesford, and everyone knew that if you wanted to make a lot of money quickly, the best thing to do was to join the East India Company. Clive was a trader turned warrior. Hastings was a trader turned bureaucrat. Appointed to extinguish corruption and reform the administration of justice in Calcutta at the same time as sorting out the Company finances, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. For