Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850. Maya Jasanoff
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a synopsis of the “rise” of British rule in Bengal, his career in Britain provided another, rather different perspective on the founding of Britain’s Asian empire. This other Clive, Clive of Britain, is rarely profiled, yet it was perhaps his truer face, creased with the tensions and insecurities of early Company rule.
Robert Clive was the first imperial collector of British India. He had assumed that mantle in Bengal, in a metaphoric sense, by acquiring territory and resources for the East India Company. He had also collected a tremendous fortune for himself. Clive returned to Britain after the battle of Plassey, the socialite Horace Walpole sniffed, “all over estates and diamonds.” Rumors of egg-size gems and chests of gold followed him through the capital.35 In fact, “Mr. Clive,” as his wife, Margaret, called him (“I am trying to break myself of calling him Colonel”) had gotten £234,000 as a personal gift from Mir Jafar, as well as a valuable jagir, an annual pension of £27,000.36 ( Jagirs were land grants awarded to Mughal officers, who received the land revenue as salary.) Ten years later, by his own meticulous calculations, Clive was worth more than half a million pounds—the equivalent of some £40 million now.37 It was the first, and possibly the greatest, rags-to-riches story of the British Empire.
But it was in Britain that Robert Clive became an imperial collector of a type that would obtain for collectors across contexts and through generations—as indeed for the East India Company and Britain itself. He turned to collecting as a way to reinvent himself. Like most of those who sought careers on imperial frontiers, and like most imperial collectors, Clive, the son of a Shropshire lawyer, was an outsider to metropolitan power structures. He was provincial, middle class, and nouveau riche. As a collector he set out to make up for all that. With his Indian fortune, Clive systematically bought all the trappings of a British aristocrat: property, political power, great houses, fine art, stylish furnishings. Though his collecting agenda ranged from the abstract (power) to the particular (Old Master paintings), every acquisition was made in quest of the same glittering prize: a British peerage, and the social and dynastic security that came with it. Clive had scoffed at receiving the mere Irish barony of Plassey in 1761, which did not bring him a seat in the House of Lords. He wanted to be “an English Earl with a Blue Ribbon, instead of an Irish peer (with the promise of a Red one).”38 It was, as one of his intimates put it, “the only object you have in life.”39 To win social acceptance and political influence, to replace the nabob with a British aristocrat: these were Clive’s goals as a collector.
Clive began his program in the notoriously dirty pursuit of political power. In Clive’s day, well before the 1832 Reform Act, seats in Parliament were frequently filled by men with money, property, and connections. And though nabobs like Clive were singled out by critics for buying their way into Westminster, they were certainly not alone.40 “Rotten boroughs,” sometimes with just a handful of constituents, would elect members of Parliament who had been essentially handpicked by local grandees; votes were often effectively purchased. Clive had made his first foray into politics as early as 1754, by standing for election as a protégé of the Earl of Sandwich in the rotten Cornish borough of Mitchell.41 After Plassey, Clive used his wealth to begin building up a parliamentary faction, or “party,” of his own. In 1761, he was elected as member for Shrewsbury and also managed to get seats for his father, Richard, and for his close friend John Walsh; two years later, his cousin George Clive was returned in a by-election. In 1768, he sponsored the election of three more close personal associates, thus making a parliamentary party of seven, which he maintained until his death.42
Clive needed a foot in Parliament (or fourteen feet, as the case may be) in order to secure his Indian interests in general, and specifically to prevent his enemies—of which he had many—from moving to block him from accepting his jagir payments from Mir Jafar, which they considered a kickback. But this Westminster fiefdom—a sort of human collection—was also tied up in Clive’s perennial quest for a British peerage and a seat in the House of Lords. After the 1761 election, for example, he threw in his bloc of votes behind the Duke of Newcastle, a leading contender for prime minister, hoping to be rewarded for his loyalty with an earldom. Much to his chagrin, he received only the Irish peerage and the Order of the Bath. For the rest of his life, Clive remained convinced that by spending more money and cultivating more connections he could win the title he so craved.
The parliamentary seats were also related to another part of Clive’s empire-building: his accumulation of land. Land was the absolute foundation of power and prestige in Britain at the time. Clive knew it; so did generations of “gentlemanly capitalists,” who made fortunes in the City—often in imperial trade—and invested them in land.43 Beginning in the mid-1750s, Clive began to stitch together a green quilt of property along the hills and ridges of his native Welsh borders, including the 6,000-acre estate of Walcot, which became the family’s favorite rural retreat, and Oakly Park, which he bought from the Earl of Powis. To his tens of thousands of acres in the border country, Clive joined the splendid Surrey estate of Claremont, in 1769.44 Many of these estates effectively controlled parliamentary seats: Walcot came with two seats for nearby Bishop’s Castle; Oakly Park controlled the seat of Ludlow; another land purchase, Okehampton, brought Clive a seat in Devon.45 But equally important, land bought status. Any reader of Jane Austen knows how precisely a man’s social value might be measured by his acreage. One social benefit of Clive’s purchases was to strengthen his relationship with the Earl of Powis, the leading peer of the borders region, and a political ally. First a patron, then a colleague and neighbor, the earl would posthumously become a relative of Clive’s. In 1784, Clive’s eldest son, Edward, married the earl’s daughter, Henrietta; and their son would go on to inherit the Powis title and estates. Thus, in the space of three generations, the Clive family moved from rural English gentry to established peers of the realm, successfully marrying imperial money to noble blood. The strategy had worked.
Of course, there was not much point in having so much land if one didn’t live on it in style. In London, the Clives established themselves in a handsome gray Palladian town house in up-and-coming Berkeley Square. They hired Britain’s premier architect, Sir William Chambers, to renovate the London house and their country house at Walcot. In fashionable Bath, where Clive often retired to take the waters for his troubled digestion (one of India’s less welcome gifts), he bought a grand mansion that had previously belonged to Pitt the Elder. But all these dwellings paled before Clive’s grandest estate of all, Claremont, in Surrey. Clive had bought it from the Duchess of Newcastle for £25,000 (bargaining her down from an asking price of £45,000)—about £2 million in today’s terms—and intended to make it his main country seat. (Had he received his coveted earldom, he would surely have taken the title Clive of Claremont.) Claremont truly was fit for a lord, with a distinguished house built in the reign of King George I, by Sir John Vanbrugh, and gardens laid out in the 1730s by the innovative William Kent.
But Clive’s first act as owner of Claremont was to tear the whole thing down. The building, he thought, was too damp. He summoned Capability Brown, Britain’s best landscape architect, to rebuild the property. A statement of work to be done in 1772 gives some impression of the degree of magnificence Clive sought:
Principal Floor…with very neat Mahogany Sashes, Best Plate Glass, Silk Lines, inside Shutters double hung, the mouldings of which…to be richly Carved, the Architraves, Base and Surbase mouldings also to be enrich’d with Carving…the