Part 36 (2/2)
But the ghost of a grandmother thus raised proved a curse to the Peishwa, for Tara-Bhai, old as she was, did not lack energy or ambition, and at the time of Muzaffar-Jung's death in 1751, she had taken the opportunity of Bala-ji's absence in the south to meet and crush the combined advance of the French under General Bussy and the puppet they had instantly set up in Muzaffar's place, to proclaim her own story a pure fiction, put the pretended heir into chains, and a.s.sert herself Queen of the Mahrattas.
Truly the impossibility at this time of putting reliance on any one's word, the fluctuations of faith, the unforeseen, unexpected complications arising from the general fluidity of morals, makes history read like undigested melodrama.
Such, then, was India when England, all too tardily, found a champion in Robert Clive.
ROBERT CLIVE
A.D. 1751 TO A.D. 1757
Never was the strange susceptibility of India to the influence of personal vitality better exemplified than in the case of Robert Clive.
When, in 1751, he first emerged--a good head and shoulders taller than the general ruck of Anglo-Indians--from the troubled turmoil of conflicting interests, conflicting policies which characterised India in those days, Hindostan was on the point of yielding herself to France; when, in 1767, he finally left the land where he had laboured so long and so well, England was paramount over half the peninsula.
Never in the whole history of Britain was better work done for her prestige, her honour, _by one man_; and yet that one man died miserably from opium, administered wilfully by the sword-hand which had never failed his country; administered as the only escape from disgrace.
It will always be a question whether Clive was or was not guilty of the charges preferred against him. Those who really know the Indian mind, who fully realise the depth of the degeneracy into which that mind had fallen amongst the effete n.o.bility of the eighteenth century, may well hesitate before denying or affirming that guilt, knowing, as they must, how easy a thing is false testimony, understanding how skilfully an act, innocent enough in itself, may be garbled into positive crime.
Either way, this much may be said. The benefits he had conferred on his country were sufficient surely to have ensured him more sympathetic treatment at the hands of that country than he actually received.
But this is to antic.i.p.ate.
Clive was born--but what does it matter when, where, and how, a man of deeds comes into the world? All that is necessary is to say what he did. Clive, then, was a writer, or clerk, in the East Indian Company's service. It was not, apparently, a congenial employment. Quiet, reserved, somewhat stubborn, he led a very solitary life, knowing, he writes in one of his home letters, scarcely ”any one family in the place.” A friend tells a tale of him, characteristic, yet hardly sufficiently authenticated for history. He found young Clive sitting dejectedly at a table, on which lay a pistol. ”Fire that thing out of the window, will you?” said the lad, and watched. ”I suppose I must be good for something,” he remarked despondently, when the pistol went off, ”for I snapped it twice at my own head, and it missed fire both times.”
Whether true or not true, the lad of whom such a story could even have been told must have been something out of the common.
He was rather a tall English lad, silent, with a long nose and a pleasant smile. He was barely one-and-twenty when Dupleix took Madras, and for the first time he found himself a soldier. He returned to his writers.h.i.+p, however, for a time, but such a profession was manifestly impossible to his temperament--a temperament admirably ill.u.s.trated by the following story. He accused an officer of cheating at cards. A duel ensued, in which Clive, with first shot, missed; whereupon his adversary, holding his pistol to Clive's head, bade him beg his life.
This he did instantly with perfect coolness, but when asked also to retract his accusation, replied as calmly: ”Fire, and be d.a.m.ned to you! I said you cheated, and you did. I'll never pay you.”
The adversary, struck dumb by his--no doubt--righteous stubbornness, thereupon lowered his weapon.
Such was the young man who at six-and-twenty, in the absence on leave of Major Lawrence, set off as a captain to the relief of Trichinopoly with six hundred men. He was completely outcla.s.sed both in numbers and pecuniary resources, and feeling himself to be so, he returned to Fort St David and boldly proposed a complete _volte face_. The French were thoroughly engaged aiding their ally at Trichinopoly. If he and his small force made a detour to Arcot, the capital, they might find it unprepared. They did; Clive marched in, took possession of the fort before the very eyes of one hundred thousand astonished spectators, and finding over 50,000 worth of goods in the treasury, gave them back to their owners, and issued orders that not a thing in the town was to be touched; the result of such unusual consideration being that, when he finally had to defend his capture, not a soul in the town raised a hand against the strange young _sahib_ who seemed to have no fear, and certainly had no greed.
But young Clive had a Herculean task before him. With a mere handful of men--three hundred and twenty in all--he had to defend a ruinous, ill-constructed fort one mile in circ.u.mference--ditch choked, parapets too narrow for artillery--from the determined onslaught of ten thousand men. And he did so defend it. Despite failures due to inexperience, rebuffs due to rashness, despite hair's-breadth personal escapes, due to reckless, almost criminal courage, he won through to the end. There is something impish and boyish about the record of these six weeks' siege. How, more out of sheer bravado than anything else, the garrison crowned a ruined tower on the ramparts with earth, hoisted thereto an enormous old seventy-two-pounder cannon which had belonged to Aurungzebe! How they turned it on the palace which rose high above the intervening houses, and letting drive with thirty-two pounds of their best powder, sent the ball right through the palace, greatly to the alarm of the enemy's staff, which was quartered there!
How once a day they fired off the old cannon, until on the fourth day it burst and nearly killed the gunners!
All this, and the thrilling story of the mason who--luckily for the garrison--knew of the secret aqueduct constructed so as to drain the fort of water, and stopped it up ere it could be used, would make a fine chapter for a boy's book of adventure. Here it is enough to record that on the 14th November, after a desperate and futile a.s.sault, the enemy--French allies and all--withdrew, and Clive found himself free to follow on their heels to Vellore, where he succeeded in giving those of them who were sufficiently brave to stand, a most satisfactory beating; in consequence of which numbers of the beaten sepoys, with the quick Oriental eye for vitality, deserted their colours. Clive enlisted six hundred of the best armed, and returned to Madras, where he was received with acclaim, for victory was then a new sensation to the Anglo-Indian. A month or two afterwards, however, he was out again on the war-path, giving the French-supported army of Chanda-Sahib a good drubbing at Cauvery-pak. Whilst out, he received an urgent summons to go back to the Presidency town. Major Lawrence was returning from leave, and would resume command.
Despite the urgency, he found time, nevertheless, on his way back to go round by a certain town which Dupleix, in the first pride of victory, had founded under the name of Dupleix-Fattehabad, to commemorate--what surely had been better forgotten--his terrible act of treachery towards Nasir-Jung in the matter of the ratified but delayed treaty which cost the latter his life. And here, with the same reckless hardihood which had characterised the whole campaign, he paused--though in the midst of an enemy's country--to batter to pieces the pretentious flamboyant column on which Dupleix had recorded his conquest in French, Persian, Mahratti, Hindi.
One can picture the scene, and one's heart warms to the English boy who watched with glee the hacking and hewing, while the natives stood by, their sympathy going forth inevitably to the strong young arm.
Three days afterwards Clive gave up his command, and here his first campaign ends. It was very straightforward, very clear; but what followed was complicated--very!
Trichinopoly was still besieged: the French backing Chanda-Sahib, who claimed it as Nawab of the Carnatic; the English backing Mahomed-Ali, who held it as Nawab of Arcot. To the support of the latter Major Lawrence led his mercenaries, and for a time the siege was raised. By this time, however, the Directors in London were becoming restive over hostilities which interfered with the commerce of the Company. In order to bring the struggle for supremacy to a head, Clive proposed a division of forces, south and north. Whether he was actuated in making this bold proposal by any hope of getting a command over the heads of his seniors or not, certain it is that after agreeing to the proposal, Major Lawrence found it impossible to keep to seniority. The natives flatly refused to go north unless Clive led them.
Here, again, the personal equation--the only thing that has ever counted in India--stepped in. It was a genuine tribute to Clive's possession of that greatest attribute of a good general--_fortunae_. It heartened him up, and he instantly began a second campaign of success, driving Dupleix to despair, since after every petty victory some of the beaten sepoys, following fortune, invariably deserted to the English side. Clive's army, in fact, was a s...o...b..ll. It increased in size as it went, and after the big fight at Samiaveram, was joined by no less than two thousand horse and fifteen hundred sepoys. But the young man, for all his gloomy face, his silence, his stubbornness, had a curiously sympathetic personality to the natives. When Seringham was taken, and a thousand Rajputs shut themselves up in the celebrated paG.o.da swearing death ere it should be defiled, Clive ”did not think it necessary to disturb them,” but at Covelong he drove the frightened recruits back to battle at the point of the sword. After taking Chingleput, the campaign came to an abrupt conclusion. Clive, falling sick, had leave to go to England. This was in 1752.
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