Robert Clive

English soldier and administrator

• Born: September 29, 1725
• Birthplace: Styche, Shropshire, England
• Died: November 22, 1774
• Place of death: London, England

Clive’s military success against the French at Arcot and the Bengalese at Plassey, along with his rule over Bengal, created the basis for the vast British Empire in India in the eighteenth century.

Early Life

Robert Clive was born on his family’s estate in Shropshire. His father was a country squire by inheritance and a lawyer by profession. As the son of a gentleman, Clive received a public school education and entered boarding school at age twelve. His father, financially unsuccessful, either had little hope for his teenage son at home or considered him unsuited for the professions, and therefore sent young Clive abroad to make a fortune in the British East India Company. In 1744, at age eighteen, Clive became a clerk for the company, serving first in Madras, in southern India.

In the mid-eighteenth century, India was in turmoil. The Mughal Empire deteriorated after the death of Emperor Aurangzeb in 1707, and the internal anarchy, along with the presence of the French, made conditions difficult for the British East India Company. The French, trying to dominate southern India, were the immediate problem. During the War of Austrian Succession, in the 1740’s, fighting broke out between the French and British. Clive took advantage of the hostilities, quit his clerk’s position, and joined the military in 1745. Yet the French practiced Indian politics deftly and were formidable opponents. The French leader in India, Joseph-François Dupleix, learned that interference in the dynastic struggles of Indian states proved profitable. Siding with one candidate and supporting him with troops usually meant success for the French. The victorious Indian prince paid huge sums to Dupleix and the Compagnie Française des Indes (French East India Company). The British soon copied the French tactics and enhanced their military presence in India. The East India Company recruited Indian troops for a company army and a few years later used regular British army troops. By 1749, however, the troop total only reached three thousand. In the Carnatic, these British forces came into conflict with the French by supporting a rival candidate. The British suffered military reverses attributable to inexperience and weak officers. Clive seized this opportunity. Although taken prisoner in 1746, when the French took Madras, Clive escaped to Fort St. David. In 1747, he was promoted to the rank of ensign.

The War of Austrian Succession ended in 1748, but the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle did not stop the British-French rivalry in India. By then, precedents important to Clive’s career in India had been established. European powers interfered in the internal affairs of Indian states and backed up that interference with well-trained troops. In the Carnatic, the seat of French strength, Clive excelled as a military leader, and by 1749, he was made a lieutenant. His first important military success came in 1751 at Arcot, the capital of the Carnatic. The British needed relief at Trichinopoly and hence the British company sent twenty-five-year-old Clive to lead a diversionary force of five hundred men against Arcot. Taking it by surprise, he did not have to fire a shot, and he held it during a fifty-day siege. The following year, the French surrendered, and Clive installed the British candidate as ruler of the Carnatic. Success in the Carnatic proved that the British company could handle rough Indian politics and that Clive was a resourceful and decisive military leader. Arcot established his reputation of invincibility, so important later for intimidating his opposition. His quality of leadership was important for British success in India. Indians respected him as ruler and friend. Along with his legendary courage and valor, Clive also exhibited a darker side. Recklessly ambitious, hot-tempered, proud, and egotistical, Clive’s drive for power and wealth created enemies in the years ahead in India. His self-control and optimism were offset by moods of depression during which he became introverted, sullen, selfish, and unstable. Physically, he was not an imposing figure: He was of medium height, stout, and, as a result of heavy features, not a handsome man.

Fresh from the triumph in the Carnatic, Clive spent a three-year interval in England. In 1753, the same year he sailed for England, he married a woman whose family had East India Company connections. With his financial and military successes in India, he was elected in 1754 to Parliament after political intrigue and aristocratic infighting, only to be expelled by the Commons. Clive then set his eyes once again on India.

Life’s Work

Robert Clive’s return to India marked the beginning of the most successful phase of his life. He returned in 1755 to Madras as deputy governor of Fort St. David and as a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Army. The next year, Clive was called on to improve the British position in Bengal, the real source of wealth in India. Calcutta also was a vital center for export trade. The key figure, the nawab of Bengal, had granted trade concessions to both the French and the British. These various forces all vied for greater control of the commerce in Bengal. In 1756, the nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-daula, attacked Calcutta, site of a British trading station, and the British surrendered to his force of fifty thousand men. After plundering the city, the nawab’s forces locked more than one hundred British prisoners in a cell designed only for a few. Their deaths were remembered as the infamous atrocity—the Black Hole of Calcutta.

The British East India Company responded by sending Clive with a force of twenty-four hundred troops, five men-of-war, and five transports. By January, 1757, he recaptured the city with little difficulty. For good measure, a French trading station was captured. After the fighting, the nawab made large concessions to the British, but despite his restoring and extending the company’s trading privileges in Bengal, Clive deviously schemed to undermine him. The nawab had been too inconsistent in his relations with the company and could not be trusted. To make the company’s position stronger for the future, Clive supported a rival to the throne, the old general Mir Jafar. To conduct the negotiations with Mir Jafar, Clive used an intermediary whom he promised rewards, but in the end Clive double-crossed his middleman by forging a treaty. Clive feared the consequences if the nawab uncovered the treachery, and therefore, secrecy was essential. Furthermore, Clive avoided future obligations to his negotiator with the forged treaty. Clive demonstrated his mastery of political intrigue in eighteenth century British India. He had sensed a weakness in Siraj-ud-daula, whom merchants and military officers increasingly distrusted, and he took advantage of it.

Clive completed his scheme against Siraj-ud-daula at the Battle of Plassey. On June 23, 1757, Clive led an army of eight hundred Europeans and twenty-two hundred Indians against the nawab’s Bengal army of more than sixty thousand. The nawab’s army folded against the company’s forces and his subjects deserted him. When Mir Jafar held back his forces, Siraj-ud-daula fled. Though Clive achieved victory virtually by default, and the outcome was never in doubt, the Battle of Plassey became the epic military triumph of his career.

The results were important for Clive and for the East India Company. On June 28, 1757, the company placed Mir Jafar on the throne as a mere puppet. The new nawab of Bengal reaffirmed privileges granted earlier by Siraj-ud-daula, made an alliance with the British, pledged to fight the French in Bengal, promised large compensations for the earlier loss of Calcutta, and paid huge sums to officials of the East India Company. Clive himself received œ234,000 in cash and rights to lucrative land rents. The company, because of Clive’s exploits, named him governor and commander in chief in Bengal.

In 1760, after one term as governor, Clive returned to England as a hero and a wealthy man. He purchased a controlling interest in the East India Company and in 1761 was elected to the House of Commons as a member from Shrewsbury. The following year, he was given an Irish peerage as Baron Clive of Plassey and in 1764 was made a Knight of the Bath.

In 1764, conditions so worsened in Bengal that the public demanded his return to India, and the next year his second governorship began. His method of ending the chaos was to strike at corruption. For internal trade, the company had tax exemptions, but company employees stretched it for private individual transactions. These individuals enriched themselves at company expense with tax-exempt trading, and politicians and shareholders became concerned. Clive had support within the company to end this wheeling and dealing. He restricted the size of gifts for political favors, regulated private trade, reduced company allowances, and ended the mutiny of officers. Although Clive initiated these reforms, the salaries for company employees remained low and private trading continued to be financially important for them.

Also during his second governorship, the company secured its position in Bengal. With the French threat practically gone, the company defeated an alliance of the nawab with the king of Oudh and the Mughal emperor at the Battle of Buxar, in 1764. Afterward, the company had the right to collect revenues for all of Bengal and had the power of administration over Bengal through its Indian agents. The company pensioned the nawab and paid off the Mughal emperor.

In January, 1767, Clive, then forty-one years old, his health broken, emotionally drained, left India for the last time for England. His retirement, however, ended in scandal. Parliament’s attitude turned against servants of the East India Company who had accumulated vast fortunes in India, especially since some of the money was spent to buy seats in Parliament. In the eighteenth century, success on the battlefield often brought financial rewards, and in that tradition the East India Company had permitted their officials to enrich themselves. Yet Clive’s fortune was enormous, despite the financial problems in Bengal. In 1772, the company faced bankruptcy, and committees of Parliament investigated his actions during his first governorship.

With news of his riches from Bengal in the press, the public and Parliament questioned whether Clive had swindled the company. Committees in Parliament questioned his actions in Bengal from 1757 to 1760, and their reports generally condemned Clive’s actions. Prominent members of Parliament such as Lord Chatham and Colonel John Burgoyne joined in the assault, and Parliament also passed resolutions critical of private individuals acquiring during wartime vast fortunes that should have gone to the state. Although references to Clive’s character were deleted from the resolutions, the huge sum he received as commander in chief in Bengal was included, a mild censure in itself. As to the charges of corruption, Clive defended himself by pointing to his moderation, given the temptation of vast riches at his disposal. Still a member of the Commons with a strong following in that body, Clive survived the attack from Parliament. There was no criminal prosecution, and in 1773, Parliament concluded the proceedings by passing a resolution praising his great service to his country.

Nevertheless, Clive’s life ended on a tragic note. In London, on November 22, 1774, at the age of forty-nine, he committed suicide as a result of his poor health and the strain of defending himself before Parliament.

Significance

Both hero and villain, Robert Clive was a man of contrasts; he deserves both recognition and condemnation. His leadership in Bengal provided the basis for the enormous British colonial empire. His service in India included victories over both French and Indian challenges. Clive’s contribution to Arcot and Plassey was probably a combination of military genius and good fortune.

The tragic aspect of Clive’s life reflected the moral deficiencies of his time. His recklessness and opportunism were acceptable for the mid-eighteenth century British Empire. Unfortunately for Clive, the British attitude toward empire changed in the late eighteenth century from an emphasis on acquisition and trade to reasonable administration of colonies. The British at home and in India were sensitive to morality in Indian affairs. Clive had been caught in the transition. New laws affecting India illustrated the new mood. In 1773, Parliament passed laws regulating the finances of the East India Company and creating a new constitution for it. To prevent future scandals, the company paid higher salaries to its servants. Clive’s misfortune led to this first attempt by the Crown to control the East India Company’s rule of India.

Bibliography

Davies, A. Mervyn. Clive of Plassey. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939. A generally critical biography of Clive. The author attributes Clive’s military successes not to genius but to luck. Comprehensive in its coverage of Clive’s career in India.

Edwardes, Michael. The Battle of Plassey and the Conquest of Bengal. New York: Macmillan, 1963. Focuses on Clive’s victory in 1757. Edwardes covers more of the political intrigue surrounding the battle than the actual battle itself. Plassey is seen as decisive for British and Indian history.

Harvey, Robert. Clive: The Life and Death of a British Emperor. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2000. Popular biography recounts the story of Clive’s life, without offering new information or the Indian perspective of events. However, the book provides an introduction for readers who want a general overview of Clive’s life.

Huttenback, Robert A. The British Imperial Experience. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. A solid analysis of various topics associated with the full span of the British Empire, geographically and chronologically. The first chapter includes an excellent assessment of Clive.

Lawson, Philip. The East India Company: A History. London: Longman, 1993. This study of the company includes information about Clive’s role in the company and in India and his political legacy.

Lloyd, T. O. The British Empire, 1558-1983. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. One of few excellent narrative histories of the British Empire from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century. Scholarly and thorough, the work provides proper background for an evaluation of Clive, although it is short on analysis.

Marshall, P. J. East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. A close look at the private side of British expansion in India. Focuses on the small British communities in eighteenth century Bengal and on East India Company employees.

Mason, Philip. The Men Who Ruled India. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1954. Begins with the founding of the East India Company in 1600 and continues through the Sepoy mutiny in 1858. Combines history with biography and is favorable to the English in India.

Sutherland, Lucy Stuart. The East India Company in Eighteenth Century Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1952. Based on company records and massive private correspondence, a comprehensive and scholarly examination of the company in the context of the times. Looks at Westminster politics and company actions in East India.