The Rape of Venice (19 page)

The anarchy following the dissolution of the Mogul Empire had been further aggravated by the outbreak of war between Britain and France in 1743 over the question of the Austrian Succession. By this time the French, who had come later into
the field than the Portuguese, Dutch and British, had also established powerful trading centres, notably at Chandernagore on the Hooghly and at Pondicherry, about a hundred miles south of Madras.

Pondicherry was the French headquarters and its able and energetic governor, the Marquis de Dupliex, promptly attempted to bring the whole of Southern India under French influence. He captured Madras and forced the remnant of the British community there to shut themselves up in Fort St. David. He then supported the claims of two pretenders to the thrones of Hyderabad and the Carnatic and ousted the pro-British potentates who occupied them.

It was then that Robert, afterwards Lord, Clive had first made a name for himself. Originally a young writer to the Company, he had early transferred to a cadetship in its armed forces. By 1751 the British cause was in a parlous state. Mohammed Ali, whom they were supporting as the rightful ruler of the Carnatic, had been driven from his capital at Arcot and, heavily outnumbered, was besieged in Trichinopoly. Clive's force was so meagre that he could not possibly hope to defeat the besieging army. Instead, with the intention of drawing them off, he surprised and took Arcot, the capital newly won by the pretender.

This brilliant stroke succeeded. Mohammed Ali was saved from surrender and death by the pretender's hurriedly abandoning the siege and hastening back with his army to Arcot; but he now bottled Clive up in it. With only eight young officers, two hundred Europeans and six hundred Indian troops, Clive withstood for fifty days a siege and assaults by an army twenty thousand strong. At length a Maratha Prince, out of admiration for his bravery, brought an army to his assistance. Arcot was relieved and the Carnatic preserved as a sphere of British influence.

In Hyderabad, things went the other way. Dupliex's talented second-in-command, the Comte de Bussy, secured this vast central territory for the French and became, in effect, for several years, its ruler.

In 1754, peace in Europe brought peace in India. Dupliex was recalled and Clive went home. But the peace was only a very temporary one. In ‘56, the general war broke out again, and it was in that year that the young, dissolute and avaricious Nawab of Bengal, Surajah Dowlah, inspired by the French made a treacherous surprise attack on Calcutta. The fortress
was in an ill state of repair and the garrison below strength, but that hardly excuses the cowardly conduct of the governor who led with his council to the ships in the harbour, leaving 146 Europeans to the mercy of the enemy. They were jammed into in old prison known as the Black Hole, and only 23 of them were still alive next morning.

In the meantime, Clive was on his way out again, now with full powers as the Company's General. The following January he took the field. With nine hundred British soldiers and fifteen hundred ‘sepoys', as the European-trained Indian troops were called, he recaptured Calcutta and repulsed the forty-thousand-strong army of Surajah Dowlah. In the spring, the French settlement of Chandernagore was captured and, in June, Clive again faced Surajah Dowlah's army at Plassey. The young Prince's contemptuous treatment of his nobles had made him many enemies at his own court, and his principal General, Mir Jafer, treacherously advised retreat. Clive then fell upon and routed Surajah Dowlah's army; he was murdered and Mir Jafer placed on his throne.

That was the end of French influence in Northern India and they were soon to lose their hold in the south. In January 1760, they were decisively defeated at Waniswash and a year later had to surrender Pondicherry. Meanwhile, a year earlier, Clive had defeated a powerful Dutch expedition, and when he left India no European power remained there capable of challenging British interests.

The Indian States were, however, far from permanently pacified, and in 1765 Clive was sent back for a further term of office. With a diplomacy equalling his military renown, he entered into treaties with numerous potentates, including the titular Emperor in Delhi, which gave the Company control of the state revenues in Bengal and Bihar, made it the virtual master of Oudh and the Carnatic, and gave it the trading rights in the Northern Circas, which had previously been enjoyed by the French.

There followed the events which for the whole of Roger's lifetime had caused an almost constant succession of heated debates in the British Parliament.

The struggle with France and Clive's activities had changed the Company from a great organisation concerned only with trade to one also responsible for the administration of vast territories. The Company had not sought, and was actually averse to assuming, such responsibilities, and the majority of
its Servants were unsuited, by habits they had already acquired, to be trusted with such work.

Those habits arose from the fact that the Company paid its Servants hopelessly inadequate salaries, compensating them with the right to trade on their own account, and that in the East immemorial custom decreed that anyone who benefited from a transaction should give the other party to it a present. Mir Jafer, for example, on being placed by the British on the throne of Bengal, had distributed among Clive and his officers half-a-million pounds. Later Clive had been called to account by Parliament. His reaction had been to protest that he stood astonished that he had been content with such a modest sum, and Parliament, knowing the circumstances, unanimously acquitted him of having used his power to enrich himself unreasonably. But, now that the Servants of the Company; great and small, had become officials with such wide powers of patronage, they proceeded to use them most unscrupulously.

Stories came home to England of Indian merchants and land-owners being blackmailed and otherwise oppressed. Such tales were soon followed by an influx of middle-class and often vulgar Servants of the Company who had brought home fortunes, were termed in no friendly spirit ‘Nabobs', and whose ostentation gave considerable offence in the country areas where they bought properties from the worse-off of the old land-owning class. The misery of the Indian people had been further increased in 1770 by the most terrible famine on record, and hundreds of influential people in Britain were agitating for their interests to be protected.

This national outcry led to the Regulating Act of 1773, by which the Company's nominee for Governor-General had to be approved by Government and, although given authority over Madras and Bombay as well as Calcutta, his every act had to receive the sanction of a Council, a majority of whom could, if they disagreed with his policy, obstruct it with a veto. The Act also created a High Court of Justice to which Indians could appeal without fear that it would favour the Company, since its Judges were responsible only to the Home Government.

This was the first shackle put upon the complete independence of the Company, and it fell heaviest on Warren Hastings, whom they had appointed as Governor of Bengal the previous year. Hastings was a man of integrity, vision and vigour, but he was faced with the still unsettled state of India and the
competing ambitions of its many Princes.

The Marathas, who had combined under the Peshwa at Poona, were again in control in the north at Delhi. To the east of it an Afghan chief had usurped the throne of Rohilkhand and was threatening Oudh. In the west, owing to a trade route dispute, the Marathas were threatening Bombay. In the south Hyderabad had become hostile to the Company and the throne of Mysore had been seized by a Mohammedan adventurer named Hyder Ali, who threatened to, and later did, overrun the Carnatic.

The new Council consisted of five members: Hastings, who was its chairman, Barwell, a Senior Servant who understood the problems of the Company and so loyally supported Hastings, and three nominees of Parliament whose ignorance of India was such that, on landing in Calcutta, they thought that because the natives had bare feet it was because the Company had inflicted taxes so crushing upon them that they could no longer afford boots. Led by Philip Francis, the newcomers at once adopted a line of violent opposition to Hastings, and by their majority in Council consistently thwarted his attempts to bring order out of chaos.

For two years his position was made intolerable, then one of Francis's supporters died, giving Hastings control through his casting vote as chairman. But the bitter struggle continued for another four years until Francis, after having been wounded in a duel by Hastings, went home.

During those years Britain had become involved in war with her American Colonists, France, Holland and Spain, and once more events in Europe had their repercussions in India. Athough Britain's enemies could no longer put an army in the field there, they could still stimulate avaricious Princes to take up arms against the Company, and Hastings had to wage wars aganst the Marathas who menaced Bombay, the Rohillas in support of Britain's ally Oudh, and Hyder Ali the bold usurper of the throne of Mysore. With the aid of three fine soldiers. General Sir Eyre Coote and Colonels Goddard and Popham, all three wars were won, and by brilliant diplomacy Hastings secured the paramountcy of the Company over vast areas of India.

But the wars had to be paid for. The Company grudged every penny spent on military operations and, owing to many years of rapacity and mismanagement by its Servants, its funds had dwindled alarmingly. The war in America and Europe
had strained the resources of the Government at home to such a point that it could not afford to give help. So Hastings had to find the money himself. He found it in the only way possible for him: by withholding subsidies the Company had contracted to pay to certain potentates whose friendship was now doubtful, and by extracting great sums from the Indian allies whose territories he was protecting.

In 1873 a general peace was agreed by the Powers. The following year young Mr. Pitt, who had recently become Prime Minister, put through Parliament his India Act. Its object was to put an end to corrupt and arbitrary administration by the Company's Servants. In effect, Parliament took over the responsibility for ruling all areas that were, or should come, under British control. An India Board was created with Dundas as its President, and for the future the Company was required to frame its policy, and nominate its senior Servants, in consultation with the Board. Thus after two hundred years the Company finally lost all power in India other than its trading monopoly.

In the teeth of extraordinary difficulties, Hastings had already introduced many of the reforms which were the object of Pitt's Bill. He was the best friend that the people of India ever had, and he laid the foundations for the just and honourable administration of the Indian Civil Service which, in the following century, did so much to develop the country and bring western civilisation to it.

But in 1784 he returned home to be met with ingratitude and obloquy. With almost unbelievable venom his old enemy Francis stirred up Parliament against him. He was made the scapegoat for his corrupt predecessors and colleagues, and impeached. Burke, the most brilliant orator of the day, had taken up the cause of the oppressed people of India and hurled invective at him. Fox and Sheridan resorted to every mean trick their excellent intelligences could devise to pull him down.

The trial dragged on for seven years. Every act of Hastings during his fourteen years of administration was gone into minutely in the hope of finding evidence of his corruption. The main charges concerned his conduct in connection with the Rohilla war, and the way in which he had raised money for that and other wars, particularly his extraction of a large sum from Chait Singh, the Rajah of Benares, and his attempts to secure from the Begums of Oudh a million pounds that these
two Princesses had been left by the late Nawab of that country. At last he was acquitted on all charges and, although his defence had cost him his fortune, the Company supported him in his old age. In 1813, at the age of 81, he was called on to give evidence before Parliament on a matter concerning India. The House then did him the honour of receiving him standing and bareheaded.

Hastings was succeeded by Lord Cornwallis, another honourable and intelligent Governor, who was also a fine soldier. He did much to strengthen and improve upon Hastings' wise measures for the administration of the British controlled territories; but, like his predecessor, he was not left to do so in peace. Hyder Ali's son, Tipoo Sahib, launched his warrior hordes from Mysore, first against his neighbours to the north, then against Travancore, a small state in the south-west which was in alliance with Britain. Cornwallis came to the rescue, Tipoo Sahib was defeated and compelled to surrender a great part of his territories.

In 1793 Cornwallis was succeeded by Sir John Shore, an able civilian who had been in the Company's service for a quarter of a century. Wars were still going on in the north and west. An Afghan adventurer seized the throne in Delhi, the Maratha Princes were fighting among themselves, and the Maharaja of Sindhia was involved in a long conflict with the Rajputs. But Sir John Shore was a man of peace and, as British territory was not actually threatened, he refused to allow himself to be drawn into any of these struggles.

That was still the situation in July 1796, so the company aboard the
Minerva
had every reason to hope that when they landed in Calcutta they would not be met with the news of any fresh alarms and excursions.

Clarissa played well the part assigned to her by Roger. Although like everyone else, she knew the main trend that events in India had taken, she lost no suitable opportunity when they met at meals of asking questions about Clive and Hastings, its more recent wars, Calcutta and Madras, its Princes and peoples, religions, jungles, animals and flowers.

Her principal informant was Mr. Sidney Winters. He was a big, paunchy man just on the right side of fifty. Most of his life had been spent in India and he was the senior partner of a Calcutta firm which, under the Company's licence, had grown and prospered with the years. His hair was grey, his face florid, and he carried his large stomach on two absurdly short legs;
but he had a pleasant disposition and, while not an educated man in the same sense as Sir Curtis Beaumont or Mr. Cruishank, there was nothing about India that he did not know. He delighted in drawing on this bottomless fund of knowledge for Clarissa and, as she was genuinely interested, at times she even made him come and sit with her up on deck, to the annoyance of the little group of beaux who constantly pursued her.