Lovable enigma
Jan Morris
Clive of India Mark Bence-Jones (Constable £3.95) Robert Clive is distinctly dead, deader than most of our national heroes, and nearly as dead as all the lesser celebrities of the Raj — the Ochterlonys and the Eyre Cootes, the Stracheys and the Lawrences, Hugh Gough in his white "fighting coat" and poor old Elphinstone of Kabul — dead, buried and almost forgotten, every one, disregarded in the text-books of comprehensive schools, and abandoned by a folk-lore that prefers Jack the Ripper or Georgie Best. Thirty years ago, when I was young, Clive was living still. He was a presence in the land, vague bui potent. There was a film about him, I think. Tourists recognised his statue outside the India Office. Babies were christened with his surname, and Powys Castle was regularly shown to passers-by, inaccurately as it turns out, as his family seat. He was pictured on equal terms with Milton and Isaac Newton in Arthur Mee's Book of the Flag. Could there have been a 'Clive of India' March? Was there not an eponymous railway engine? Yet I was ashamed to find, when the book arrived for review, that Clive was pretty dead even for me, a dedicated aficionado of Empire. What I knew about his Indian adventures could have covered a couple of pages in a pot-boiler, and as to his private life, his parliamentary career, the look and sense of him, I found I knew no more about him than I knew about Moore of Corunna, say, or Admiral Sturdee. I have not read The Book of the Flag lately, and it is a long time since I spotted "Clive of India" (4-6-0) streaming by on the Shrewsbury line.
I cannot be alone in this ignorance. In this century, I learn from Mr Bence-Jones's bibliography, there have been only three previous biographies of Clive — none at all since 1939: for all too many of us, I suspect, our familiarity with him is limited to Philip Woodruffe's fine but brief account in The Men Who Ruled India. Warren Hastings has done rather better, perhaps because there are to his story parallels that apply more directly to our own times: but the exotic gasconading of Robert Clive, the colonial self-aggrandisement, the dubious collusions with princes of the East, the pride and the posturings of Empire — all these find no analogies today, and read like a fairy-tale out of the past, remote and irrelevant.
Mr Bence-Jones treats it so. His book is perfectly detached, almost aloof. He knows that men behave differently in different ages, and that the most the honest historian can do, when it comes to moral reflections, is to report the attitudes of a man's contemporaries. In the long story of the British Empire many men did things their descendants would now deplore, but they were not wicked in their own times, and their consciences were often clearer, perhaps, than those of their retrospective critics — who, smugly from their library chairs, freely cast doubts, as critics will, upon decisions reached in danger or distress, or judgements passed in extremity.
Clive was thought by many of his contemporaries to be a wicked man. So vast was the fortune he amassed in India, so pragmatic and Opportunist his nature, that he could hardly escape calumny and bitter gossip. He was the archetypal Nabob, the most ostentatious of nouveaux-riches, the modest Shropshire squire enriched beyond the dreams of developers by peculations in the Orient. Legends of double-dealing hung always around his name. Even his triumphs were held against him — Pitt's famous eulogy, "the Heaven-born general", became very nearly a national joke, and parody overtook his own most famous phrase, in which, describing himself standing at the door of the Nawab of Arcot's treasure-house, he declared himself to be "astonished at my own moderation."
What kind of man does he seem to us, now that Mr Bence-Jones, with the advantages of hindsight, the resources of new material, and the fairness of a gentle mind, gives us at last a balanced portrait? In many ways surprisingly petty. Though the material stakes were vast, and though Clive's activities in India laid the foundations of an Empire that would permanently change the world, still it all sounds surprisingly parochial. Cliques and jealousies tangled the affairs of the East India Company. dive's celebrated battles were often little more than skirmishes. Plassey was a very long way from Waterloo, Dupleix a very minor Napoleon, Clive for that matter, a miniscule Wellington. The wars against the French were sideshows: the wars against the
Indians were fought for mingy reasons of trade and personal profit.
At home, too, though Macaulay said of Clive that Britain had "scarcely ever produced a man more truly great either in arms or, in council", the impression we get now is less one of grandeur than of fretfulness. Clive was a suspicious and unforgiving person, always in argument. The boldness of his public image, the aura of power and command, masked a nervous and mercurial temperament, which descended sometimes into hysterics, and ended in a squalid lavatory suicide — still something of a mystery, though Mr BenceJones thinks the evidence conclusive. Clive was habitually and querulously in pain from his diseased abdomen, and was lacking in assurance from the start ("I have not enjoyed one happy day since I left my native country", he wrote from Madras aged twenty). Even his squat plain face looks less masterly than calculating.
There is an enigma here. As Mr Bence-Jones says, Clive really did possess a remarkable power: the power "to get things done, and to inspire others to give of their best." He may not have been among the greatest of our heroes, but he evidently had the gift of inspiration. He could not only win battles, he could govern alien provinces too, starting from scratch. His marriage was idyllically happy, and if he sustained enmities all through his life, he maintained friendships too. I never thought that I would put down a biography of Robert Clive thinking what a likeable, even what a lovable fellow he must have been: but so it proves. He seized the main chance with panache if not always with probity. He could command a woman's love through thick and thin. His genius was fallible indeed, but it was evidently fascinating.
Nobody could have written the book better than Mr Bence-Jones. He knows India well, he has a gift for visual description and a halfironic taste for the splendours of the old Raj, and he has made this work as readable as it is authoritative. I would feel myself impertinent to offer a word of hostile criticism, except to suggest that either the frontispiece, or the picture 'opposite page 254, must be printed back-to-front. Even Clive and Shah Alam can't have it both ways.
Jan Morris has recently written Conundrum, a selective autobiography.
Previous page
