This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  By now Britain fully understood the difficulties of controlling its foreign interests which were stretched from India to the Americas. This was all very new and quite a difficult day-to-day bureaucratic problem for the government. There was no great foreign policy, no great office of State with a century of expertise. Acquiring bits of the world was rather like a general taking a hill from the enemy and then asking: ‘Now what do I do with it? How do I hold on to it? What’s it for?’

  But these were the beginnings of the British Empire. And if there was to be an empire, there was an even greater need for foreign policy based beyond the traditional relations and animosities on the Continent of Europe. However, the monarch’s first interest was that he remained a German. Therefore, just as George I had done, George II was inclined to set off for war in Europe if he thought his Hanoverian interests were threatened. And he often believed they were. He was after all, a Continental European – his people would never be that in almost 300 years. The British were more interested in the commercial reach and grasp beyond the Continent. At the start of the seventeenth century, British trading distinctions shifted with the moves of the newly established East India Company into areas then occupied by the Dutch and to some extent the Portuguese and French. British alliances and interests in Europe had to be based on an understanding that trade was of fundamental interest to Britain. And even in the eighteenth century, there was the recognition of the importance of maintaining Europe as an alliance of independent states – a common eighteenth-century market, not a federation. That trade was everything gradually became clear as the imperial history of the British matured. The colonization that would eventually be known as the British Empire was almost entirely about trade, not about the desire to own territory and to rule for its own sake.

  India was a perfect example of this. The East India Company had attempted to get a foothold in the sub-continent at the start of the seventeenth century because there was much trade to be done. There were no ambitions to simply rule in the name of the monarch. When in 1600 the East India Company had been given a Royal Charter to trade, it was not a free pass to India and south-east Asia. No prince was to bend at the knee when the British ships arrived. The British, regarded by many in India certainly as not much more than a nation of offshore island fishermen, had to wait literally and metaphysically in line to get permission to open even the most rudimentary trading post. The Portuguese had been the major European trading nation in south-east Asia. But Portuguese influence was declining and the English East India Company believed it could replace the Iberian commercial managers. However, the Dutch were much stronger in what were called the East Indies, and they forced out the British. The British retreated to the Indian sub-continent but it was not until 1633 that the East India Company began to establish itself in Bengal. True, the British had to establish company armies to secure and maintain centres at Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. They had to fight for dominance over, for example, the French Compagnie des Indes at Pondicherry, south of Madras. Yet we might emphasize that although the two companies were rivals there’s little evidence, at this stage, that they were interested in gaining territory for imperial reasons. They were trading, not colonial, powers. They were also centuries’ old enemies on the battlefields of Europe. There was every reason for the bloody animosity to overcome the cautionary tales of the trading houses.

  In the past, when England and France had gone to war in Europe, traders in India maintained neutrality so that their main interest, trade, should not suffer. But with the arrival of a British naval squadron, apparently determined to undermine French shipping, the Governor of Pondicherry, Joseph Dupleix, decided to go on the offensive; although even then there was evidence that the French action was to protect their trading interests rather than simply to conquer territory. The call to British and French arms was inevitable. In English history, that conflict gave the nation yet another hero that it would later castigate as a result of his success. He would be known as Clive of India.

  Robert Clive (1725–74) was the son of a Shropshire squire with not much money. He was no great scholar and showed as much at the four schools he attended. Through family and friends he was given a job in London at the East India Company and at not quite nineteen, in 1744, was sent to Madras in India as a clerk. It was here that his depression and cries for help through failed suicides suggested nothing but misery and impending failure. Yet, exactly the opposite happened. His reputation was to be made and, very quickly and dramatically, he became a military commander of more than considerable talent. In 1746, two years before the European War of the Austrian Succession ended, the French took Madras. And Clive, then a twenty-one-year-old clerk in the East India Company, was one of the defenders who escaped from the city. After an unsuccessful coup in the Deccan and the successful placement of a puppet ruler by Dupleix, the British-preferred puppet, Muhammad Ali, had to escape for his life and was besieged at Trichinopoly. The events that followed sent Clive on a path to fame if not heroism.

  Clive had left his clerking duties and travelled on one expedition as the Commissary, the person in charge of victualling the army. This taught him, and very quickly, the need to understand the people of the main force, the Indians, and, most important, the logistics of keeping an army on the move and ready to fight. On his return, Clive volunteered for army service with the Company, without pay, but with the rank of captain. With most of the army preoccupied with the siege of Muhammad Ali, Clive’s offer was welcomed and shortly afterwards he led a detachment to Trichinopoly. It is very likely that he met Muhammad Ali and they talked over the way in which the siege might be lifted. An attack on the French at Trichinopoly would have been foolhardy. The plan was to attack the most important outpost of French and Indian interests, the centre of the Carnatic, Arcot, because it was all but undefended. With a relatively small force – 800 Indians and Europeans – and an attack-and-hold operation that lasted close on two months, Clive began to wear down the French and in doing so attracted Indian reinforcements that had more than likely been waiting to see what side would win before joining the battle. The detail of first the fall and then the defence of Arcot is full of episodes that point to fortune, incompetence, ill luck, and then good luck. For example, Abdul Codah Khan, the commander of the Indian sepoys, had been the only one to seriously attack Clive. But he was killed and his followers lost heart. If he hadn’t been killed the result might well have been different. Clive was also saved from a sniper’s musket ball by the quick thinking of a friend, who died for his pains.

  Nevertheless it was clear that it was Clive’s determination and leadership that won the day. The French were defeated. Dupleix’s ambitions for French India were finished (and so was he) and Muhammad Ali was placed on the throne to, it was hoped, dance to Clive’s tune. Britain had a new military genius and in India the legend of British invincibility was born. Muhammad Ali gave him the title, Sabit Jang, which means ‘steady in war’. And when he was sent on other expeditions to take the French forts at Covelong and Chingleput, the legend grew. At Chingleput, his forces were raw recruits, ill-trained and with little courage under fire. Clive was seen standing in the vanguard of the action, quite exposed to enemy fire in an attempt, a successful one it seems, to shame his soldiers into action.

  Clive would have been inhuman had he not encouraged the myth. However, he was never again to have such a celebrated victory, and there is, in Clive’s story, a sense that he spent too much time trying to justify his image. There’s even evidence that this pressure, on a not always stable character, damaged his health.

  Shortly after his celebrated victory, Clive became quite ill. It was probably gallstones, but there are hints of fits of nervous or even manic depression. He was prescribed opium as a pain-killer and another legend, that he was an opium addict, grew up. The only firm evidence suggests he took opium when he was ill and at no other time. But the growing fame of Clive brought with it sufficient enemies to encourage such rumours.

  Just a fe
w days before sailing for home in 1753, Clive married Margaret Maskelyne; but his departure from India was not the high occasion it might have been because he was later accused of making too much money out of his exploits and of pocketing a percentage of the cost of keeping his soldiers and those he had rescued from French rule. If he was not always popular with the highest in the Madras administration, Clive was popular on his return to England. England needed a hero and Clive would do. But he was a hero to be kept at arm’s length and he even failed to get into Parliament when he stood for election in a rotten borough in Cornwall. Dejected, Clive had little opportunity that would satisfy him and was reasonably pleased when the East India Company asked him to serve as Deputy Governor of Fort St David, which was south of Madras, and had applied for a commission for him as a Lieutenant-Colonel of foot. In 1756, the throne of Calcutta was held by a young and vicious prince, the Nawab Siraj-ud-daula. He was hardly a household name in Britain, but he soon would be. It was at this time that the Black Hole of Calcutta took the lives of 123 Europeans, or so it was claimed.

  Until the nineteenth century a black hole was the common name for a military detention cell. The Black Hole of Calcutta was the detention cell in Fort William in Calcutta. Siraj-ud-daula marched on Calcutta – the traditional headquarters of the East India Company. The Governor, Roger Drake, was a weak, arrogant man with few diplomatic talents and an even smaller sense of military appreciation. When the garrison was besieged by Siraj-ud-daula, it was abandoned. The families, women and children, with Drake in the middle of them, took to ships in the river, leaving the rest of the garrison to the Nawab’s mercy. Many of them were shut up in the Black Hole, a room fourteen feet by eighteen feet wide. John Zephaniah Holwell, one of the survivors, wrote in his official report that out of 146 prisoners, 123 died. Holwell probably got it wrong – deliberately. It is possible that he dramatized the incident to foster the desire for revenge at home. Fewer than half the number Holwell claimed were in the Black Hole and perhaps forty or forty-five perished, suffocating during a hot, airless, Bengal night.

  Whatever the correct figure, the important fact was that this single event would destroy any lingering belief that the British could remain in India simply as innocent traders. Clive soundly beat the Nawab and his French allies at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. The British now occupied India. The age of British imperialism was dawning.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  1756–60

  In 1751, while Robert Clive was making a name for himself and the British in India, William Pitt, Pitt the Elder as he became known, was still wondering if he would ever become Prime Minister. His patron, the Prince of Wales, had died. The Prince favoured Pitt and the politician fancied that he would replace the Pelhams as leader of the government. The Prince’s father, however, George II, did not like Pitt. He regarded him as an enemy. After all, Pitt had made no secret of his contempt for Hanover and the way British men and finances were being used to protect the Electorate.

  There’s another aspect to Pitt that’s sometimes overlooked. He was often quite ill. In the mid-eighteenth century, that was hardly unusual. A small gripe could easily turn into something far more complicated. Although medicine was advancing, quite rapidly in fact, Pitt and his fellow sufferers were two centuries away from small, white, cure-all tablets. And it wasn’t quite out of the question that, like many great men, Pitt’s illnesses were sometimes brought about by stress and a personality disorder. At different times, a cocktail of medical symptoms, including something described as ‘gout of the stomach’, baffled his doctors. He suffered fevers, nervous depression and insomnia. Perhaps, like Clive of India, Pitt was prone to manic depression.

  Henry Pelham, the Prime Minister, was quite different. He was solid. Sanity never deserted him, politically nor mentally. Pelham was described as an honest bore, by one observer. And, with his enormously rich brother, the Duke of Newcastle, Pelham balanced the very differing factions in the administration and Parliament. When Henry Pelham died in March 1754 George II is said to have remarked, ‘Now I shall have no more peace.’ That was because he knew the battle for political leadership would centre on William Pitt. Even when Henry Fox (1705–74), Pitt’s political rival, joined the Cabinet George understood that Pitt would forever be a political thorn that could never be pulled, particularly when Pitt made it clear that he believed that the government was doing more to defend George II’s Hanover than Britain’s real interests on the Continent. In truth, Britain’s interests – both political and commercial – could not be confined to Continental Europe. The gathering wealth in India through the East India Company, the increasing importance of the sugar islands of the Caribbean and the uncertain political ambitions of those in America tested Britain’s diplomatic and military acumen. America in particular presented a complex list of decisions to be made over territory and the right to rule that territory without offering some political say in return. In North America the issue was territory, not trade. In 1745 the Governor of Massachusetts and the British military commander in America was William Shirley. He wrote a letter to the Duke of Newcastle encouraging Britain’s control of Canada:

  Louisburg October 29

  I took the liberty to mention in a former Letter to your Grace, that I thought, if the Expedition against Cape Breton should succeed, a Spirit would immediately be rais’d in the Colonies for pushing the success as far as Canada; which observation I find was not ill-grounded; And I trouble your Grace with the repetition of it now, because the Reduction of that Country to the Obedience of his Majesty seems to be the most effectual means of securing to the Crown of Great Britain not only Nova Scotia, and this Acquisition, but the whole Northern Continent as far back as the French settlements on the River Mississippi, which are about 2000 miles distance from Canada, by making all the Indians inhabiting within that Tract (who are now chiefly in the French Interest) dependent upon the English; the immediate consequence of which would be throwing the whole fur trade, except such part of it as the French settlements in the Gulph and River of St Lawrence, and even the bank of Newfoundland, and securing the whole Codfishery to the English . . . which besides the Profits arising from that part which the French lately had of it amounting to near £1 million sterling, would be further Beneficial to the British subjects by the great consumption of Rum, and Cloathing [sic] necessary for the Men in carrying on Fishery, and the greater quantity of Shipping, small Craft and fishing Gear of all Sorts necessarily employed in it, which would in such Case be all British.

  Competition – political, military and commercial – with the French was a centuries-old concern for the British. Shirley’s letter reflects two great powers not vying for global superiority but for every advantage in the reachable world. North America was by then the most attractive proposition. It was vast, the riches were rumoured to be great and the territorial expansion seemingly endless.

  In truth, though, both the English and French knew that the real potential had to lie in the East. The English most certainly had been attracted to eastern trade for reasons other than spices and peppers, in themselves compelling reasons to trade. By this time, the mid-eighteenth century, the fascinations of eastern culture that intrigued European senses of history and grandeur, were centuries old, whereas America had been always seen as a land of opportunity for the individual but in no way a mysteriously sophisticated society. Savages and land were there to be conquered. Shirley’s letters to Newcastle reflected this reasoning. There were no princes and silken viziers to intrigue as there were in the near and far-eastern lands of Asia.

  By the second half of the eighteenth-century Britain had more than doubled its overseas trade largely because of exports to the American market that Shirley had been so keen to encourage. And this import and export trade even survived a decade of war. The British had broken France’s commercial grip on India and America. The Spanish (exhausted, said Shirley) had lost influence in the West Indies. By the 1750s, the British Merchant Fleet was more than half a million tons.
Twenty years later, it was 30 per cent bigger, a measure of the developing trade particularly with the growing population of the ‘Northern Continent’.

  At the start of the century there were about 300,000 settlers living in America. By the 1770s there were three million. And that increased population generated industry, including those needing imports. America wanted, for example, iron and wool. So the stagnant wool industry in Britain was revived and the young iron industry boomed. Then, in 1756, the uneasy peace in Europe slipped away. The diplomatic revolution that had set new allies against old friends now meant war. It was called the Seven Years War: Britain and Prussia against France, Russia, Austria, Sweden and Saxony. In truth, Britain hadn’t been at peace for some time. The War of Austrian Succession ended eight years earlier, but France and Britain had continued their conflicts in India and North America.