“ Still so disproportionate did the British force seem, not only to the number and strength of the princes and people of India, but to the claims and ambition of French, Dutch and Danish rivals, that Clive’s last advice to the directors, as he finally left India in 1767, was this: “We are sensible that, since the acquisition of the dewany, the power formerly belonging to the soubah of those provinces is totally, in fact, vested in the East India Company. Nothing remains to him but the name and shadow of authority. ”

“ The pretender, Chanda 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, Mahommed Ali. Chanda Sahib had left Arcot, the capital of the Carnatic, to reduce Trichinopoly, then held by a weak English battalion. Clive offered to attack Arcot in order to force Chanda 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. ”

“ 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 Bengali trader, Omichund, as an agent between Jafar Ali and the British officials. Master of the secret of the confederacy against Suraj-ud-Dowlah, the Bengali threatened to betray it unless he was guaranteed, in the treaty itself, £300,000. ”

“ On the 3rd of May 1765 he landed at Calcutta to learn that Jafar Ali Khan had died, leaving him personally £70,000, and had been succeeded by his son, though not before the government had been further demoralized by taking £100,000 as a gift from the new nawab; while Kasim Ali had induced not only the viceroy of Oudh, but the emperor of Delhi himself, to invade Behar. After the first mutiny in the Bengal army, which was suppressed by blowing the sepoy ringleader from a gun, Major Munro, “the Napier of those times,” scattered the united armies on the hard-fought field of Buxar. ”

“ 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 Murshidabad, and the nawab or wazir 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 Great Britain owes the conquest and consolidation of its greatest dependency. ”

“ Some miles farther down is the field of Plassey, 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 of June Clive arrived on the bank opposite Plassey, 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 9 field-pieces. The nawab had drawn up 18,000 horse, 50,000 foot and 53 pieces of heavy ordnance, served by French artillerymen. ”

“ In the accompanying agreement, offensive and defensive, Clive appears under the name by which he was always known to 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. ”

“ 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, Gent. All the evidence is against the probability of its scandalous stories being true. Clive as a young man occasionally indulged in 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 sought rather to increase the shares of the fleet and the troops at his own expense, as he had done at Gheria, and did more than once afterwards, with prize of war. What he did take from the grateful nawab for himself was less than the circumstances justified from an Oriental point of view, was far less than was pressed upon him, not only by Jafar Ali, but by the hundreds of native nobles whose gifts Clive steadily refused, and was openly acknowledged from the first. ”

“ 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 Murshidabad, and established Jafar Ali in the position which his descendants have ever since enjoyed, as pensioners, but have not infrequently abused. ”

“ The sepoys came to Clive, not to complain of their scanty fare, but to propose that all the grain should be given to the Europeans, who required more nourishment than the natives of Asia. The thin gruel, they said, which was strained away from the rice would suffice for themselves. History contains no more touching instance of military fidelity, or of the influence of a commanding mind. An attempt made by the governor of Madras to relieve the place had failed ”

“ They formed a confederacy to depose him, at the head of which was Jafar 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 viceroy of Bengal, Behar and Orissa to Jafar, 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 British inhabitants of Calcutta, £200,000 to the native inhabitants, and £70,000 to its Armenian merchants. ”

“ 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. ”