Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company (52 page)

Hostilities commenced immediately with an attack on the Nawab’s
port of Hughli, which was virtually sacked, plus preparations to engage the army of the Nawab himself, now marching for the second time on Calcutta. Clive drew up plans for a redesigned Fort William and for the demolition of all those grand houses, now sadly ransacked, which commanded it. There was, though, no time to put the Fort on a defensive footing and it was therefore decided to await the enemy in camp just to the north of the settlement.

Meanwhile negotiations of a sort were in progress. In the previous year, with the English at his mercy, Siraj had proposed terms whereby their trading privileges as per the 1717
farman
would be completely surrendered. This was, of course, totally unacceptable. But similarly the Select Committee now offered terms as extravagantly favourable as Siraj’s had been unfavourable. In addition to all the privileges included in the
farman,
many of which had never been conceded by the Nawabs, the Committee also demanded the right to coin its own rupees in Calcutta and to interpret
dastak
in its broadest possible connotation. Siraj ignored these suggestions; but when he next invited overtures, he found that the demands had been increased. It seemed clear that the Committee was determined on a trial of strength.

Nevertheless, the negotiations were still in progress when on 3 February the Nawab’s army began to file past Clive’s camp and set up its own on and within the eastern bounds of Calcutta. Why Clive did not attack as for two days the columns of horse and foot, elephants, oxen and artillery lumbered past his tent flaps is something of a mystery. Coote guessed there were 40,000 cavalry, 60,000 infantry and thirty cannon. Perhaps Clive simply did not know where to begin. With just 2000 foot, fourteen guns and no cavalry, it was essential to avoid galling and indecisive skirmishes. His preference, born of experience in the Carnatic, was always to strike hard and unexpectedly, often at night and usually against the enemy’s greatest concentration.

Such was precisely the intention when twenty-four hours later he did finally take the field. But a late start, plus heavy going across the paddies, meant that it was already daybreak when he reached the Nawab’s encampment near Chitpur. Obligingly a dense mist, not uncommon during the winter months, then blanketed his further movements and induced the sort of confusion in which European discipline showed to advantage. Pouring fire to left and right the British passed clean through the camp leaving more than a thousand dead in their wake. They missed, however, the Nawab’s headquarters and completely overshot their
intended line of retreat. Thus when the sun finally melted the dawn mist, they were still within range of the Nawab’s cannon and themselves suffered unacceptable losses – fifty-seven dead – before regaining the safety of the Maratha Ditch.

Clive dismissively called this action ‘a tour through the Nawab’s camp’. But he also admitted that it was ‘the warmest service I was ever yet engaged in’; in retrospect, and not excepting Plassey (his next engagement) it was the nearest thing to a battle that he ever fought in Bengal. Whether he had won it was not immediately clear. After all he had been compelled to retreat under heavy fire and had had to abandon some of his guns. Watson quickly warned the Nawab that it was simply by way of an appetizer; he urged Clive to deliver the full menu without delay. But Clive thought it had served its purpose, and the Nawab put the matter beyond doubt by withdrawing his forces to Murshidabad and hastily agreeing to whatever terms were dictated. These were as proposed before the action.

The Colonel’s reluctance to push his military advantage was informed by three considerations. Adding the wounded to the dead, he had lost over 200 men, a tenth of his entire force; he could not afford further such losses. Additionally, having reinstated the Company in Bengal and gained important new commercial rights, like the mint, he knew full well that the directors would not thank him for prolonging hostilities which, however successful, were costly and fatal to trade. A speedy resumption of trade in the Company’s most valuable market was more important even than the safety of Calcutta, for on it depended the profitability of the Company and the confidence of its shareholders. ‘If I had consulted the interest and reputation of a soldier’, Clive told Payne, the Company’s chairman, ‘the conclusion of this peace might easily have been suspended.’ But his ambition now soared beyond soldiering, at which he had never been more than an amateur. To his father he confided his real objective – ‘the Governor-Generalship of India…if such an appointment should be necessary’. In furtherance of this ambition he needed to impress the Court of Directors with his credentials as a peacemaker, as the man who not only recaptured Calcutta but also restored its trade.

But the third consideration may have been the most decisive. In the same letter he also told Payne that ‘the delay of a day or two [in concluding the treaty with Siraj] might have ruined the Company’s affairs by a junction of the Nabob [Nawab] with the French’. Throughout their year of troubles with Siraj the British had been anxiously watching their main
European rivals. Refugees from Kasimbazar and Calcutta had found a welcome sanctuary at French Chandernagar whose Councillors had refused to join Siraj on either of his marches against Calcutta. But neither had they joined the British in resisting Siraj. There were renegade Frenchmen in the Nawab’s army and French gunpowder had allegedly been used by the Nawab’s artillery.

The French maintained that they had scrupulously observed that old non-aggression pact between the two companies in Bengal; but this vague understanding was not such as someone bloodied in the campaigns of the Carnatic was likely to respect. Before leaving Madras Clive had made his intentions quite clear. He would ‘relieve the French of Chandernagar’ the moment word of a resumption of Anglo-French hostilities in Europe reached India. Rumours of just such an event had begun circulating in late 1756; they were duly confirmed at about the time of the Chitpur engagement when Commodore James, the hero of Suvarnadrug, made an unexpected appearance in the Hughli.

James, whose navigational skills stand comparison with his martial exploits, had conceived the idea of establishing a winter route between the west and east coasts of India, hitherto considered impossible because of the coastal winds, by sailing right round the Indian Ocean. Accordingly he had left Bombay heading south-west till ten degrees below the Equator, then bore east for Sumatra, and finally up the Malay peninsula. After ‘a feat unexampled in the navigation of those seas’ (C. R. Low) he delivered news of the outbreak in Europe of the Seven Years War. He also brought 500 welcome, if somewhat disorientated, Bombay troops. According to Ives, they ‘enabled us immediately to act offensively against the French’.

Although delighted, and perhaps indeed decided, by this unexpected reinforcement, Clive and Watson faced a number of problems. The French were pressing for a renewal of the old neutrality pact and in this they were half-heartedly supported by the Calcutta civil establishment and whole-heartedly by the Nawab. ‘If you are determined to besiege the French factories’, Siraj warned, ‘I shall be necessitated…to assist them with my troops.’ In effect the situation was precisely the same as that on the Coromandel coast at the beginning of the War of the Austrian Succession. Then the proximity of Barnett’s squadron had given Morse occasion to prevaricate over neutrality. Now the presence of Watson’s ships made the Bengal Committee prevaricate. The only difference – and it was a big one – was that on The Coast French shipping had been the
temptation; in Bengal it was Chandernagar, the principal French settlement.

Watson himself was the second problem. Chandernagar’s defences, like those of Gheriah and Baj-baj, cried out for the sort of cannonade which only his ships could deliver. It had to be a naval attack. Yet the Admiral was a real stickler for the niceties of engagement. As commander of a King’s fleet in time of war he was obliged to attack. Yet to do so on Bengali soil could be seen as flaunting the authority of the Moghul Empire, infringing the recently concluded treaty with the Nawab (which spoke vaguely of abjuring hostilities), and inviting the very conjunction of the French and the Nawab which Clive hoped to pre-empt.

On the whole then Watson seems to have preferred the idea of a neutrality pact; but here another problem arose. It transpired, although it should have been obvious from the start, that the French in Chandernagar could vouch only for their own neutrality, not that of Pondicherry nor, more crucially, that of de Bussy at Hyderabad. De Bussy was reportedly about to march on Bengal. He was coming to support the Nawab, said the French; against the Nawab, said the English. Either way, he was not going to observe any pact made by the subordinate councillors of Chandernagar. In an agony of indecision, Watson paced the poop of his flagship and invited guidance from the Select Committee. They stalled. A new approach was being made to the Nawab.

If Watson’s dilemma was the result of scruple, the same could not be said of Siraj’s predicament. Before his treaty with the British had been signed, he had awarded to the French all the concessions contained in it, thus for the first time giving the
Compagnie
a chance of trading on equal terms with the Company. Nothing could have been more provocative. At one fell swoop, the French had acquired all those privileges so painfully negotiated by Surman and so doggedly pursued by his successors. The British naturally assumed that this generosity presaged some secret understanding between Chandernagar and Murshidabad; yet the French, in spite of vigorous lobbying, failed to persuade the Nawab to declare himself. Possibly he was too anxious about de Bussy’s intentions. More probably he was worried about the effect on the British. Agent Watts was back at his post in Murshidabad and busily intriguing to bring all possible pressure to bear. Even Watson weighed in with a couple of resounding letters demanding of the luckless Nawab full implementation of the treaty, failing which ‘I will kindle such a flame in your country as all the water in the Ganges will not be able to extinguish.’

But the final straw seems to have been the news of quite a different threat – not the first and by no means the last – from the other end of Siraj’s domain. Afghan troops, having sacked Delhi, were said to be advancing on Bihar, presumably to extort from Siraj some of that £85 million in his treasury. Although this particular attack never materialized, it seemed real enough at the time. Siraj ordered his own troops to advance to Patna and asked Clive to come to his aid. He was given to understand that the British would happily oblige but for the danger of leaving Calcutta exposed to the French. It was under these circumstances that Siraj wrote, or possibly someone forged, a note of sibylline opacity (and lavish punctuation) which the British chose to interpret as a
carte blanche
to attack Chandernagar.

You have understanding and generosity [went the note]; if your enemy, with an upright heart, claims your protection, you will give him his life; but then you must be well satisfied of the innocence of his intentions; if not, whatever you think right, that do.

Only one steeped in Oriental intrigue and conversant with the finer points of diplomatic utterance could possibly have seen in this an invitation to make war on the French. Perhaps the whole episode goes to show how adept the Company’s servants were becoming in these deep arts. In the course of a few weeks, they had turned Siraj from enemy into accomplice. Having master-minded a policy revolution, why not a palace revolution?

First, though, Chandernagar. In anticipation, Clive had already taken his troops across the Hughli. On 13 March 1757 he attacked and easily overran the suburbs, losing just one man in the process. The French had sensibly elected to make their stand within ‘Fort d’Orléans’ which bore much the same relationship to Chandernagar as Fort William to Calcutta. There they were safe until Watson began his bombardment on what Ives calls ‘the
glorious
morning’ of 23 March. Although it lasted for only three hours the engagement deserves that ‘glorious’ tag as one of the hottest and, as battles go, one of the most exciting ever staged.

Fifty miles from the open sea and twenty above Calcutta, the river is here about a quarter of a mile wide. Watson’s plan was to engage the fort’s whole waterfront with his three largest ships, the sixty-gun
Tiger,
the seventy-gun
Kent,
and the fifty-gun
Salisbury
drawn up in line astern. There had been grave doubts about whether such large ships could operate so far upriver; and there were further doubts about whether they
could dodge the numerous vessels sunk by the French to prevent their closing. By dint of careful reconnaissance, the three warships negotiated these difficulties and amid heavy fire from the fort’s guns, including many 32-pounders, they manoeuvred into position. By now the tide, which had facilitated their approach, had turned. The
Tiger
took up position just fifty yards from the north bastion but the
Kent,
which was supposed to engage the middle of the curtain wall, drifted downstream to a position opposite the south bastion, thus elbowing the
Salisbury
out of the action.

‘The fire now became general on both sides and was kept up with extraordinary spirit’, writes Surgeon Ives who was soon busy attending to the casualties. Broadside and at stone’s throw range, the two tiers of the ships’ guns could scarcely miss, while from the tops of the rigging the marines poured small-arms fire on to the ramparts. Musket balls that passed over and into the walls of the Governor’s house in the centre of the fort were found to have been ‘beaten as flat as a half-crown’ by the impact. But, unlike Gheriah, Chandernagar boasted European artillery and European gunners. The rigging of the
Kent
was shot away in its entirety and her hull holed in 138 places; some of the French shells passed clean through one side and out the other; at one point she appeared to be ablaze and half the crew took to the boats only to be shamed into returning. Out of the
Kent’s
total complement of about 200, thirty-seven were killed and seventy-four wounded including all but one of the officers. The ship was a write-off. Although the
Tiger
fared less badly, her casualties were also appalling and ‘almost equalled those of the
Kent’.