At this time India was ready to become the prize of the first conqueror who to the dash of the soldier added the skill of the administrator. For the forty years since the death of the Emperor Λurungzebe, the power of the Great Mogul had gradually fallen into the hands of his provincial viceroys or soubadars. The three greatest of these were the nawab of the Deccan, or South and Central India, who ruled from Hyderabad, the nawab of Bengal, whose capital was Moorshedabad, and the nawab or vizier of Oudh. The prize lay between Dupleix, who had the genius of an administrator, or rather intriguer, but was no soldier, and Clive, the first of a century’s brilliant succession of those “soldier-politicals,” as they are called in the East, to whom, ending with Sir Henry Lawrence, Great Britain owes the conquest and consolidation of its greatest deperdency. Clive successively established British ascend-encyaganist French influence in the three great provinces under these nawabs. But his merit lies especially in the ability and foresight with which he secured for his country, and for the good of the natives, the richest of the three, Bengal. First, as to Madras and the Deccan, Clive had hardly been able to commend himself to Major Stringer Lawrence, the commander of the British troops, by his courage and skill in several small engagements, when the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle forced him to return to his civil duties for a short time. An attack of the malady which so severely affected his spirits led him to visit Bengal, where he was soon to distinguish himself. On his return he found a contest going on between two sets of rival claimants for the position of viceroy of the Deccan, and for that of nawab of the Carnatic, the greatest of the subordinate states under the Deccan. Dupleix, who took the part of the pretenders to power in both places, was carrying all before him. The British had been weakened by the withdrawal of a large force under Admiral Boscawen, and by the return home, on leave, of Major Lawrence. But that officer had appointed Clive commissary for the supply of the troops with provisions, with the rank of captain. More than one disaster had taken place on a small scale, when Clive drew up a plan for dividing the enemy’s forces, and offered to carry it out himself. The pretender, Chunda Sahib, had been made nawab of the Carnatic with Dupleix’s assistance, while the British had taken up the cause of the more legitimate successor, Mahomed Ali, Chunda Sahib had left Arcot, the capital of the Carnatic, to reduce Trichinopoly, then held by a weak English battalion. Clive offered to attack Arcot that he might force Chunda Sahib to raise the siege of Trichinopoly. But Madras and Fort St David could supply him with only 200 Europeans and 300 sepoys. Of the eight officers who led them, four were civilians like Clive himself, and six had never been in action. His force had but three field-pieces. The circumstance that Clive, at the head of this handful, had been seen marching during a storm of thunder and lightning, led the enemy to evacuate the fort, which the British at once began to strengthen against a siege. Clive treated the great population of the city with so much consideration that they helped him, not only to fortify his position, but to make successful sallies against the enemy. As the days passed on, Chunda Sahib sent a large army under his son and his French supporters, who entered Arcot and closely besieged Clive in the citadel. An attempt to relieve him from Madras was defeated. Meanwhile the news of the marvellous defence of the English reached the Mahratta allies of Mahomed Ali, who advanced to Clive’s rescue. This led the enemy to redouble their exertions, but in vain. After for fifty days besieging the fort, and offering large sums to Clive to capitulate, they retired from Arcot. The brave garrison had been so reduced by the gradual failure of provisions that the sepoys offered to be content with the thin gruel which resulted from the boiling of the rice, leaving the grain to their European comrades. Of the 200 Europeans 45 had been killed, and of the 300 sepoys 30 had fallen, while few of the survivors had escaped wounds. In India, we might say in all history, there is no parallel to this exploit of 1751 till we come to the siege of Lucknow in 1857. Clive, now reinforced, followed up his advantage, and Major Lawrence returned in time to carry the war to a successful issue. In 1754 the first of our Carnatic treaties was made provisionally, between Mr T. Saunders, the Company’s resident at Madras, and Μ. Godeheu, the French commander, in which the English protégé, Mahomed Ali, was virtually recognized as nawab, and both nations agreed to equalize their possessions. When war again broke out in 1756, and the French, during Clive’s absence in Bengal, obtained successes in the northern districts, his efforts helped to drive them from their settlements. The lreaty of Paris in 1763 formally confirmed Mahomed Ali in the position which Clive had won for him. Two years after, the Madras work of Clive was completed by a firmaun from the emperor of Delhi, recognizing the British possessions in Southern India.

Ihe siege of Arcot at once gave Clive a European reputation. Pitt pronounced the youth of twenty-seven who had done such deeds a “heaven-born general,” thus endorsing the generous appreciation of his early commander, Major Lawrence. When the Court of Directors voted him a sword worth £700, he refused to receive it unless Lawrence was similarly honoured. He left Madras for home, after ten years absence, early in 1753, but not before marrying Miss Margaret Maskelyne, the sister of a friend, and of one who was afterwards well known as astronomer royal. All his correspondence proves him to have been a good husband and father, at a time when society was far from pure, and scandal made havoc of the highest reputations. In after days, when Clive’s uprightness and stern reform of the Company’s civil and military services made him many enemies, a biography of him appeared under the assumed name of Charles Carracioli, Cent. All the evidence is against the probability of its scandalous stories being true. Clive’s early life seems occasionally to have led him to yield to one of the vices of his time, loose or free talk among intimate friends, but beyond this nothing has been proved to his detriment. After he had been two years at home the state of affairs in India made the directors anxious for his return. He was sent out, in 1756, as governor of Fort St David, with the reversion of the government of Madia”, and he received the commission of lieutenant-colonel in the king’s army. He took Bombay on his way, and there commanded the land force which captured Gheriah, the stronghold of the Màhratta pirate, Angria. In the distribution of prize money which followed this expedition he showed no little self-denial. He took his seat as govern< r of Fort St David on the day on which the nawab of Bengrl captured Calcutta. Thither the Madras Government at once sent him, along with Admiral Watson. He entered on the second period of his career.

Since, in August 1690, Job Charnock had landed at the village of Chuttanutti with a guard of one officer and 30 men, the infant capital of Calcutta had become a rich centre of trade. The successive nawabs or viceroys of Bengal had been friendly to it, till, in 1756, Suraj-ud-Dowlan succeeded his uncle at Moorshedabad. His predecessor’s financial minister had fled to Calcutta to escape the extortion of the new nawab, and the English governor refused to deliver up the refugee. Enraged at this, Suraj-ud-Dowlah captured the old fort of Calcutta on the 5th August, and plundered it of more than two millions sterling. Many of the English fled to the ships and dropped down the river. The 146 who remained, were forced into “the Black Hole” in the stifling heat of the sultriest period of the year. Only 23 came out alive. The fleet was as strong, for those days, as the land force was weak. Disembarking his troops some miles below the city, Clive marched through the jungles, where he lost bis way owing to the treachery of his guides, but soon invested Fort William, while the fire of the ships reduced it, on the 2d January 1757. On the 4th February he defeated the whole army of the nawab, which had taken up a strong position just beyond what is now the most northerly suburb of Calcutta. The nawab hastened to conclude a treaty, under which favourable terms were conceded to the Company’s trade, the factories and plundered property were restored, and an English mint was established. In the accompanying agreement, offensive and defensive, Clive appears under the name by which he was always known tj the natives of India, Sabut Jung, or the daring in war. The hero of Arcot had, at Angria’s stronghold, and now again under the walls of Calcutta, established his reputation as the first captain of the time. With 600 British soldiers, 800 sepoys, 7 field-pieces and 500 sailors to draw them, he had routed a force of 34,000 men with 40 pieces of heavy cannon, 50 elephants, and a camp that extended upwards of four miles in length. His own account, in a letter to the archbishop of Canterbury, gives a modest but vivid description of the battle, the importance of which has been overshadowed by Plassy. In spite of his double defeat and the treaty which followed it, the madness of the nawab burst forth again. As England and France were once more at war, Clive sent the fleet up the river against Chandernagore, while he besieged it by land. After consenting to the siege, the nawab sought to assist the French, but in vain. The capture of their principal settlement in India, next to Pondicherry, which had fallen in the previous war, gave the combined forces prize to the value of £130,000. The rule of Suraj-ud-Dowdah became as intolerable to his own people as to the English. They formed a confederacy to depose him, at the head of which was Jafíìer Ali Khan, his commander-in-chief. Associating with himself Admiral Watson, Governor Drake, and Mr Watts, Clive made a treaty in which it was agreed to give the office of souba, or viceroy of Bengal, Behar, and Orissa, to Jaffier, who was to pay a million sterling to the Company for its losses in Calcutta and the cost of its troops, half a million to the English inhabitants of Calcutta, £200,000 to the native inhabitants, and £70,000 to its Armenian merchants. Up to this point all is clear. Suraj-ud-Dυwlah was hopeless as a ruler. His relations alike to his master, the merely titular emperor of Delhi, and to the people left the province open to the strongest. After “the Black Hole,” the battle of Calcutta, and the treachery at Chandernagore in spite of the treaty which followed that battle, the East India Company could treat the nawab only as an enemy. Clive, it is true, might have disregarded all native intrigue, marched on Moorshedabad, and at once held the delta of the Ganges in the Company’s name. But the time was not ripe for this, and the consequences, with so small a force, might have been fatal. The idea of acting directly as rulers, or save under native charters and names, was not developed by events for half a century. The political morality of the time in Europe, as well as the comparative weakness of the Company in India, led Clive not only to meet the dishonesty of his native associate by equal dishonesty, but to justify his conduct by the declaration, years after, in Parliament, that he would do the same again. It became necessary to employ the richest Bengalee trader, Omichund, as an agent between Jaffier Ali and the English officials. Master of the secret of the confederacy against Suraj-ud-Dowlah, the Bengalee threatened to betray it unless he was guaranteed, in the treaty itself, £300,000. To dupe the villain, who was really paid by both sides, a second, or fictitious treaty, was shown him with a clause to this effect. This Admiral Watson refused to sign; “but,” Clive deponed to the House of Commons, “to the best of his remembrance, he gave the gentleman who carried it leave to sign his name upon it; his lordship never made any secret of it; he thinks it warrantable in such a case, and would do it again a hundred times; he had no interested motive in doing it, and did it with a design of disappointing the expectations of a rapacious man.” Such is Clive’s own defence of the one act which, in a long career of abounding temptations, stains his public life. °

The whole hot season of 1757 was spent in these negotiations, till the middle of June, when Clive began his march from Chandernagore, the British in boats, and the sepoys along the right bank of the Hooghly. That river, above Calcutta is, during the rainy season, fed by the overflow of the Ganges to the north through three streams, which in the hot months are nearly dry. On the left bank of the Bhagarutti, the most westerly of these, 100 miles above Chandernagore, stands Moorshedabad, the capital of the Mogul viceroys of Bengal, and then so vast that Clive compared it to the London of his day. Some miles farther down is the field of Plassy, then an extensive grove of mango trees, of which enough yet remains, in spite of the changing course of the stream, to enable the visitor to realize the scene. On the 21st June Clive arrived on the bank opposite Plassy, in the midst of that outburst of rain which ushers in the south-west monsoon of India. His whole army amounted to 1100 Europeans and 2100 native troops, with 10 field-pieces. The nawab had drawn up 18,000 horse, 50,000 foot, and 53 pieces of heavy ordnance, served by French artillerymen. For once in his career Clive hesitated, and called a council of sixteen officers to decide, as he put it, “whether in our present situation, without assistance, and on our own bottom, it would be prudent to attack the nawab, or whether wo should wait till joined by some country power ì” Clive himself headed the nine who voted for delay; Major (afterwards Sir) Eyre Coote, led the seven who counselled immediate attack. But, either because his daring asserted itself, or because, also, of a letter that he received from Jaffier Ali, as has been said, Clive was the first to change his mind and to communicate with Major Eyre Coote. One tradition, followed by Macaulay, represents him as spending an hour in thought under the shade of some trees, while he resolved the issues of what was to prove one of the decisive battles of the world. Another, turned into verse by an Anglo-Indian poet, pictures his resolution as the result of a dream. However that may be, he didwell as a soldier to trust to the dash and even rashness that had gained Arcot and triumphed at Calcutta, and as a statesman, since retreat, or even delay, would have put back the civilization of India for years. When, after the heavy rain, the sun rose brightly on the 22d, the 3200 men and the six guns crossed the river and took possession of the grove and its tanks of water, while Clive established his headquarters in a hunting lodge. On the 23d the engagement took place and lasted the whole day. Except the 40 Frenchmen and the guns which they worked, the enemy did little to reply to the British cannonade which, with the 39th Regiment, scattered the host, inflicting on it a loss of 500 men. Clive restrained the ardour of Major Kirkpatrick, for he trusted to Jaffier Ali’s abstinence, if not desertion to his ranks, and knew the importance of sparing his own small force. He lost hardly a white soldier; in all 22 sepoys were killed and 50 wounded. His own account, written a month after the battle to the secret committee of the court of directors, is not less unaffected than that in which he had announced the defeat of the nawab at Calcutta. Suraj-ud-Dowlah fled from the field on a camel, secured what wealth he could, and came to an untimely end. Clive entered Moorshedabad, and established Jaffier Ali in the position which his descendants have ever since enjoyed, as pensioners, but have not unfrequently abused. When taken through the treasury, amid a million and a half sterling’s worth of rupees, gold and silver plate, jewels, and rich goods, and besought to ask what he would, Clive was content with £160,000, while half a million...