Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850. Maya Jasanoff
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and Nathaniel Dance.) But this scarlet is no soldier’s coat. It is the ruby velvet of a baron’s robes, trimmed with ermine, cuffed with brocade, garlanded with gold braid. Nor is there any of Clive’s usual military swagger. He poses instead with the mincing elegance of a nobleman. That is because he is one, ennobled in 1761 as Baron Clive of Plassey. On the table next to him sits his coronet.
A further curious detail pulls together this image of aristocracy. Hanging over Clive’s shoulder on the wall behind him is a profile of Mir Jafar, his Bengal ally. What accounts for this portrait within a portrait? Nothing is known about the circumstances in which this canvas was produced, but a letter from Clive’s wife,Margaret, of February 1764—about the time the work must have been painted—suggests that it may actually have been intended for Mir Jafar, a “Present as a mark of our lasting Sense of his Favors.”64 (The exchange of portraits between rulers was a common means of cementing alliances.) Perhaps this picture was a celebration of a remarkable symbiosis. Clive made him, and he made Clive: nawab and baron, transcontinental peers.
Portraits are revealing documents of the sitter’s self-image. This was Clive as he wanted people to see him: stately, prestigious, powerful, noble. The soldier is entirely absent; he has been absorbed into the aristocrat. But portraits are also often deceiving, and this was no exception. Clive’s peerage was of course an Irish one, not the English one he craved, a slight he railed against to the end of his days. Furthermore, his association with Mir Jafar, far from crowning his achievements, cast a black shadow over them in the minds of many of his contemporaries. So if this painting broadcasts an image of Clive as he wished to be seen, it also contains allusions to the very sources of insecurity that propelled his refashioning in the first place. Would Clive of Britain be able to efface the darker image of that other empire-builder, Clive of India?
Many of those sitting in the audience of the Theatre Royal Haymarket in the spring of 1772 might have recognized a quite different image of Clive in Samuel Foote’s new satire, The Nabob. The play follows the adventures of Sir Matthew Mite, a nabob modeled on Robert Clive and his peers. Mite has returned from India glutted with wealth, and promptly tries to purchase the hand, and the status, of a neighboring baronet’s daughter. In one scene alone, he and his henchmen plot ways to increase their influence in East India Company elections; scheme about forcing an aristocrat to sell Mite his ancestral estate; and plan to rig two parliamentary seats for the pointedly named borough of Bribe’em. Another scene features Mite’s election to the Society of Antiquaries, a prestigious club of gentlemen connoisseurs, membership to which he has earned by presenting the society with a ludicrous assortment of artifacts, and delivering a learned discourse on Dick Whittington’s cat. This is an unlovely character. Yet for all that Clive might have cringed at the caricature, he would have been forced to empathize with his alter ego’s parting words: “Now-a-days, riches possess, at least, one magical power, that, being rightly dispensed, they closely conceal the source from whence they proceed.”65
How successfully had Clive managed to “conceal” the dubious source of his own wealth, and assimilate himself into the British elite? In external respects, eminently so. By 1772, he was one of Britain’s richest men and a leading landowner. He controlled seven parliamentary seats. He played a major role in East India Company affairs. He had been ennobled and decorated with the Order of the Bath, and he consorted with some of the wealthiest and most powerful figures in the land. He divided his time between three substantial and fashionable houses, and was in the midst of building himself a veritable palace. He owned valuable paintings appreciated by connoisseurs. He was a household name.
But he was also a notorious one. For as Foote’s satire made clear, the more power and possessions Clive amassed, the more he seemed to embody everything that critics deplored about the East India Company and its Bengal empire: corrupt, unprincipled, unregulated, new. Clive became the focal point in a rising public outcry against Company rapacity. These challenges came to a head in 1772, when a parliamentary select committee was appointed to investigate the state of Company government in India. The inquiry was at one level a broad—and the first—appraisal of the Company’s transformed position in Bengal. At another level, it was a direct challenge to Robert Clive himself and to the legitimacy of his Indian actions and fortune.
The inquiry led to the passing of the Regulating Act of 1773, the first attempt to bring East India Company government under a measure of parliamentary control. The act also established a central administration for India, in the form of a governor-general and council, to be based in Calcutta. It did not, however, put an end to the continued perceptions that the East India Company government was corrupt and unprincipled. Challenges to Company rule arose just as quickly as the Company’s empire had, and would endure in some quarters just as long as the Company itself. The controversies of 1772-1773 foreshadowed the debates leading to the India Act of 1784, which established a formal supervisory body in Parliament to oversee East India Company affairs. Its ad hominem focus on Robert Clive also anticipated the theatrical attack on the East India Company empire that would unfold in 1788, with the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, governor of Bengal.
Openly charged in Parliament by his enemies with having “illegally acquired the sum of £234,000 to the dishonour and detriment of the State,” Clive found his mask of British gentility suddenly stripped away. He offered dramatic and moving testimony in his own defense: “Leave me my honour, take away my fortune,” he cried on the last day of the debate, the tears welling up in his eyes.66 His eloquence worked. He emerged from the ordeal with both his honor and his fortune more or less intact. In late 1773, he set off on a long trip to Italy, as if making up for the Grand Tour he had never had, avidly collecting art along the way. But though he had been exonerated by Parliament, the strain of the past year’s events had taken its toll. The black clouds of depression began to thicken. His health deteriorated. The parliamentary inquiry led indirectly, many have said, to Clive’s untimely death.
He did it, some morbidly supposed, with a penknife. Others suspected a pistol, which he had tried twice before, in his early days in Madras, before concluding that fate was saving him for a grander future. The likeliest truth, or at any rate the least gruesome, was an overdose of laudanum, which Clive regularly quaffed to soothe his tortured stomach. Whatever the means, the end was the end. After a lifelong battle with depression, Robert Clive committed suicide in his house at Berkeley Square on November 22, 1774. He was buried quickly, silently, and secretly, in an unmarked grave in the parish church of tiny Moreton Say, in Shropshire. The mourners were few.67
Clive’s eldest son, Edward, studying in Geneva after his time at Eton, was not among them. “Ned” came of age four months later as the heir of one of Britain’s richest men, and his inheritance was vast. There were all the estates and the political power that they conferred. There were the East India Company shares and the voice in Company administration those shares commanded. There were the several great houses—Claremont, still under construction, among them—and the quantities of art and fine furnishings that filled them. There was, of course, the title.
Among all the legacies that awaited the new Lord Clive when he returned to England from Geneva in 1777, there was one chest that had been specially set aside for him. In it, Edward found some of his father’s personal effects and valuables: a gold watch and buttons, topaz shoe buckles, a broken agate snuffbox. The chest also contained two of Clive’s dress swords and his complete costume as a Knight of the Bath, from its precious jeweled collar right down to the special ribbons for his shoes. Were these things—the props and furbelows of an English gentleman—the items Robert Clive had particularly wanted his son to have? But then Edward discovered the main contents of his father’s memorial chest: “Indian Curiosities.” Hundreds of them.68