[Sidenote: 1745-1889—The Stuart charm]

But it is the curious characteristic of the ill-fated House of Stuart that, through all their misfortunes, through all their degradations, they have contrived to captivate the imagination and bewitch the hearts of many generations. The Stuart influence upon literature has been astonishing. No cause in the world has rallied to its side so many poets, named or nameless, has so profoundly attracted the writers and the readers of romance, has bitten more deeply {235} into popular fancy. Even in our own day, an English poet, Mr. Swinburne, who has not tuned much to thrones fallen or standing, has been inspired by the old Stuart frenzy to write one of the most valuable of all the wealth of ballads that have grown up around the Stuart name. In his "A Jacobite's Exile, 1746," Mr. Swinburne has summed up in lines of the most poignant and passionate pathos all the feeling of a gentleman of the North Country dwelling in exile for his king's sake. The emotion which finds such living voice in the contemporary poetry, in the ballads that men wrote and men sang, while the House of Stuart was still a reality, while there were still picturesque or semi-picturesque personages living in foreign courts and claiming the crown of England, finds no less living voice in the words written by a poet of to-day, though nearly a century has elapsed, since the hopes of the House of Stuart went out forever.

"We'll see nae mair the sea-banks fair, And the sweet, gray, gleaming sky, And the lordly strand of Northumberland, And the goodly towers thereby: And none shall know, but the winds that blow, The graves wherein we lie."

What was there, what is there, we may well ask, in that same House of Stuart, in that same Jacobite cause, which still quickens in this latter day a living passion and pathos, which can still inspire a poet of to-day with some of the finest verses he has ever written? It may be some consolation to the lingering adherents of the name, to those who wear oak-apple on May 29th, and who sigh because there is no "king over the water" who can come to "enjoy his own again"—it may be some consolation to them to think that if their cause can no longer stir the swords in men's hands, it can still guide their pens to as poetic purpose as it did in the years that followed the fatal Forty-five. It may console them too, perhaps, with a more ironical consolation, to know that the greatest enthusiast about {236} all things connected with the House of Stuart, the most eager collector of all Stuart relics, is the very sovereign who is the direct descendant of the Hanoverian electors against whom the clans were hurled at Sheriffmuir and at Culloden, the lady and queen whom it affords a harmless gratification to certain eccentric contemporary Jacobites to allude to as "the Princess Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha."

[Sidenote: 1745—Swift and Stella]

In the wild October of the wild year of the Forty-five a great spirit passed away under the most tragic conditions. While Scotland and England were raging for and against rebellion, the greatest mind of the age went grimly out in Ireland. On October 19, 1745, Jonathan Swift died. For years he had been but in a living death. Racked with pain, almost wholly bereft of reason, sometimes raging in fits of madness, he was a fearful sight to those who watched over him. When the end came it came quietly. He sank into sleep and did not wake any more. He was in his seventy-eighth year when he died. A dim stone upon the darkened wall of St. Patrick's Church in Dublin sums up, in words at once cruelly bitter and profoundly melancholy, the story of his life. That mouldering inscription, niched in high obscurity, which sometimes stray pilgrims from across the seas strain their sight to decipher in the gloom, is the self-uttered epitaph of Jonathan Swift. We may translate it thus into English: "Here resteth the body of Jonathan Swift, Dean of this Cathedral Church, where fierce indignation can lacerate his heart no longer. Go, traveller, imitate if thou canst a champion, strenuous to his uttermost, of liberty."

A little way apart, shadowed by his name in death no less than in life, lies Stella, the pale, dark-haired child whose wide eyes filled with love as they followed the poor and lonely scholar through stately Shene or the prim rococo epicureanism of Moor Park. She sleeps as she lived, at her master's feet. She dedicated all the days of her life to Swift with a devotion which is wellnigh without a parallel in the history of woman's love for man. Those {237} who stand awe-struck and reverential in the quiet presence of the dead may well feel troubled by a haunting influence in the twilight air of the place. It is the haunting influence of the secret of those two tortured lives, the secret that lies buried between their graves. One forgets for the moment Swift, the fierce fighting statesman, and thinks only of the lonely man who lived to lament for Stella.

There has hardly ever been in the world, or out of it, in the illimitable kingdoms of fancy, a more famous pair of lovers than these two. Leila and Majnun, Romeo and Juliet, Petrarch and Laura—repeat what names we may of famous lovers that the fancies of poets have ever adored by the Tigris, or the Avon, or in the shadows of Vaucluse, the names of Swift and Stella are found to appeal no less keenly to heart and brain, to the imagination and to pity. Happy they were not, and could not be. When we read of Swift and Stella the mind naturally turns to that luckless pair of lovers whom Dante saw in the third circle of hell, blown about forever on the racking wind, and finding comfort through the lapse of eternal twilight in the companionship of their common doom. They, too—Swift and Stella—seem driven by the pitiless wind of fate; they have fallen upon evil days; they are greatly gifted, noble, greatly unhappy; they are sustained by their strange, exquisite friendship, by the community of genius, by a tender affection which was out of tune with the time and with their troubled lives. So long as Stella lived Swift was never alone. When she died he was alone till the end. There is nothing in literature more profoundly melancholy than Swift's own eloquent tribute to the memory of his dead wife, written in a room to which he has removed so that he may not see the light burning in the church windows, where her last rites are being prepared. There is no greater and no sadder life in all the history of the last century. The man himself was described in the very hours when he was most famous, most courted, most flattered, as the most unhappy man on earth. Indeed he seems to have been most wretched; he certainly {238} darkened the lives of the two or three women who were so unfortunate as to love him. But we may forget the sadness of the personal life in the greatness of the public career. Swift was the ardent champion of every cause that touched him; the good friend of Ireland; he was always torn with "fierce indignation" against oppression and injustice. Thackeray, whose reading of the character of Swift is far too generally accepted, finds fault with the phrase, and blames somewhat bitterly the man who uses it, "as if," he says, "the wretch who lay under that stone waiting God's judgment had a right to be angry." But it was natural that Swift, scanning life from his own point of view, should feel a fierce indignation against wrong-doing, injustice, dishonesty. He was an erring man, but he had the right to be angry with crimes of which he could never be guilty. His ways were not always our ways, nor his thoughts our thoughts; but he walked his way, such as it was, courageously, and the temper of his thoughts was not unheroic. He was loyal to his leaders in adversity; he was true to friends who were sometimes untrue to him; his voice was always raised against oppression; he had the courage to speak up for Ireland and her liberties in some of the darkest days in our common history. To Thackeray he is only a "lonely guilty wretch," a bravo, and a bully—a man of genius, employing that genius for selfish or vindictive purpose. To soberer and more sympathetic judgment Thackeray's study of Swift is a cruel caricature. He may have been "miserrimus," but Grattan was right when he appealed long after to the "spirit of Swift" as the spirit of one in true sympathy with the expanding freedom of every people—a champion, strenuous to his uttermost, of liberty.



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CHAPTER XXXVII.

CHESTERFIELD IN DUBLIN CASTLE.

[Sidenote: 1746—Chesterfield in Dublin Castle]

The Jacobite rebellion had compelled the Government to withdraw some of their troops from the continent. France for a while was flattered and fluttered by a series of brisk successes which left almost the whole of the Austrian Netherlands in her possession at the end of the campaign of 1746. The battle of Lauffeld, near Maestricht, in Holland, in the summer of 1747, in which the allied Austrian, Dutch, and English armies were defeated, especially exhilarated the French Jacobites. The French were commanded by Marshal Saxe, the victor of Fontenoy. The English troops were under the command of Cumberland, and Lauffeld was therefore regarded by them as in some sort avenging Culloden. The victory was largely due at Lauffeld, as it had been at Fontenoy, to the desperate courage of the Irish Brigade, who, in the words of one of their enemies, "fought like devils," and actually came very near to capturing Cumberland himself. But the tide of victory soon turned for France on land and sea, and she became as anxious to make a peace as any other of the belligerent powers could be. The French were sick of the war. Henry Pelham was writing to the Duke of Cumberland to tell him that no more troops were to be had by England, and that, if they were to be had, there was no more money wherewith to pay them.

Political life in England had, during all this time, been passing through a very peculiar period of transition. When we speak of political life we are speaking merely of the life that went on in St. James's Palace, in the House of Lords, and in the House of Commons. The great bulk {240} of the middle classes, and the whole of the poorer classes all over Great Britain, may be practically counted out when we are making any estimate of the movement and forces in the political life of that time. The tendency, however, was even then towards a development of the popular principle. The House of Lords had ceased to rule; the Commons had not yet begun actually to govern. But the Commons had become by far the more important assembly of the two; and if the House of Commons did not govern yet, it was certain that the King and the Ministry could only govern in the end through the House of Commons. The sudden shuffle of the cards of fate which had withdrawn both Walpole and Pulteney at one and the same moment from their place of command at either side of the field, brought with it all the confusion of a Parliamentary transformation scene. Nothing could have been more strictly in the nature of the burlesque effects of a Christmas pantomime than Walpole and Pulteney shot up into the House of Lords, and Wilmington and Sandys set to carry on the government of the country.

[Sidenote: 1743—"The drunken Administration"]

Yet a little, and poor, harmless, useless Wilmington was dead. He died in July, 1743. Then came the troubling question, who is to be Prime-minister? The Ministerialists were broken into utter schism. The Pelhams, who had for some time been secretly backed up by Walpole's influence with the King, were struggling hard for power against Carteret, and against such strength as Pulteney, Earl of Bath, still possessed. Carteret had made himself impossible by the way in which he had conducted himself in the administration of foreign affairs. He had gone recklessly in for a thoroughly Hanoverian policy. He had made English interests entirely subservient to the interests of Hanover; or rather, indeed, to the King's personal ideas as to the interests of Hanover. Carteret had the weakness of many highly cultured and highly gifted men; he believed far too much in the supremacy of intellect and culture. The great rising wave of popular opinion was unnoticed by him. He did not see that {241} the transfer of power from the hereditary to the representative assembly must inevitably come to mean the transfer of power from the representatives to the represented. Carteret in his heart despised the people and all popular movements. Fancy being dictated to by persons who did not know Greek, who did not know German, who did not even know Latin and French! He was fully convinced for a while that with his gifts he could govern the people through the House of Commons and the House of Commons through the King. He was not really a man of much personal ambition, unless of such personal ambition as consists in the desire to make the most brilliant use of one's intellectual gifts. The effort to govern the House of Commons through the King interested him, and called all his dearest faculties into play. He scorned the ordinary crafts of party management. If he thought a man stupid he let the man know it. He was rude and overbearing to his colleagues; insulting to people, however well recommended, who came to him to solicit office or pension. All that sort of thing he despised, and he bluntly said as much. "Ego et rex meus" was his motto, as we may say it was the motto of Wolsey. Not Wolsey himself made a more complete failure. The King fought hard for Carteret; but the stars in their courses were fighting harder against him.

Carteret's term of office was familiarly known as "the drunken Administration." The nickname was doubtless due in part to Carteret's love of wine, which made him remarkable even in that day of wine-drinking statesmen. But the phrase had reference also to the intoxication of intellectual recklessness with which Carteret rushed at and rushed through his work. It was the intoxication of too confident and too self-conscious genius. Carteret was drunk with high spirits, and with the conviction that he could manage foreign affairs as nobody else could manage them. No doubt he knew far more about continental affairs than any of his English contemporaries; but he made the fatal mistake which other brilliant foreign {242} secretaries have made in their foreign policy: he took too little account of the English people and of prosaic public opinion at home. In happy intoxication of this kind he reeled and revelled along his political career like a man delighting in a wild ride after an exciting midnight orgy. He did not note the coming of the cold gray dawn, and of the day when his goings-on would become the wonder of respectable and commonplace observers.

The cold gray dawn came, however, and the day. The public opinion of the country could not be kept from observing and pronouncing on the doings of Carteret. Carteret felt sure that he was safe in the favor and the support of the King. He did not remember that the return of every cold gray dawn was telling more and more against him. The King, who, with all his vagaries and brutalities, had a considerable fund of common-sense, was beginning to see that, much as he liked Carteret personally, the time was fast approaching when Carteret would have to be thrown overboard. The day when the King could rule without the House of Commons was gone. The day when the House of Commons could rule without the Sovereign had not come.

In truth, the Patriots were now put at a sad disadvantage. It is a great triumph to overthrow a great Ministry, but the triumph often carries with it a responsibility which is too much for the victors to bear, and which turns them into the vanquished before long. So it fared with the Patriots. While they were in opposition they had promised, as Sallust says Catiline and his friends did, seas and mountains. Now the time had come to show what they really could do; and, behold, they could do nothing. An opposition has a safe time of it which, being directly adverse on some distinct question, principle, or policy to the party in power, it is able to say, "Let us come into office and we will do the very opposite; we will try to undo all that the present ministers have been doing," and is able to carry out the pledge. But the opposition to Walpole had lived and flourished by finding {243} fault with everything he did merely because it was he who did it, and with his way of doing everything merely because it was his way. Nothing can be easier than for a group of clever and unscrupulous men to make it hot for even the strongest minister if they will only adopt such a plan of action. This was the plan of action of the Patriots, and they carried it out boldly, thoroughly, brilliantly, and successfully. But now that they had come into office they found that they had not come into power. The claim to power had still to be earned for them by the success of their administration; and what was there for them to do? Nothing—positively nothing—but just what their defeated opponents had been trying to do. Hanoverian policy, Hanoverian subsidies, foreign soldiers, standing armies—these were the crimes for which Walpole's administration had been unsparingly assailed. But now came Carteret, and Carteret was on the whole rather more Hanoverian than the King himself. Pulteney? Why, such influence as Pulteney still had left was given to support Newcastle and Pelham, Walpole's own pupils and followers, in carrying out Carteret's Hanoverian policy.

[Sidenote: 1743—An irreparable mistake]

Carteret set up Lord Bath as leader of the Administration. The two Pelhams—the Duke of Newcastle and his brother, Henry Pelham—were tremendously strong in family influence, in money, in retainers, led-captains, and hangers-on of all kinds. Pulteney, who had always held a seat nominally in the Cabinet, although he had hitherto clung to his determination not to take office, now suddenly thought fit to change his mind. Probably he already regretted deeply the fatal mistake which had made him refuse to accept any office on the fall of Walpole. Perhaps he had fancied that the country and the Government never could get on without him, and that he would have been literally forced to withdraw his petulant self-denying ordinance. But the mistake was fatal, irreparable. The country did not insist on having him back at any price; the country did not seem to have been thinking about him at all. Now, when there seemed to be {244} something like a new opportunity opening for him on the death of Lord Wilmington, he had the weakness to consent to be put up as a candidate for the position of Prime-minister. The effort proved a failure. The Pelhams were not only powerful in themselves, but they were powerful also in the support of Walpole. Walpole still had great influence over the King, and he naturally threw all that influence into the scale of the men who represented his own policy, and not into the scale of those who represented the policy of his enemies. Walpole and the Pelhams carried the day; Henry Pelham became Prime-minister, and from that time the power of Carteret was gone. This was in 1743—we are now going back a little to take up threads which had to be dropped in order to deal with the events springing out of the continental war, and especially the rebellion in Scotland—and in November, 1744, Carteret was driven to resign his office. He had just become Earl Granville by the death of his mother, and was exiled to the House of Lords.

The King, however, still kept up his desire to get back Lord Granville and to get rid of the Pelhams. George had sense enough to despise the two brothers, and sense enough also to see when he could not do without them. During the February of 1746, while the Stuart rebellion was still aflame, a ministerial crisis came on. The Pelhams wished to bring Pitt into the Ministry; the King blankly refused. But the King did more than that: he began to negotiate privately with Lord Granville and Lord Bath. The Pelhams knew their strength. They at once threw up their offices; the whole Ministry resigned in a body. The King found that Carteret could not possibly form an administration which would have any support worth a moment's consideration in either House of Parliament. The fortunes of Charles Stuart were still looking bright in the north, and the King found himself without a Ministry. There was no course open to him but one, and that was to recognize the strength of the Pelhams and their followers, and to take back Newcastle and his {245} brother on any terms the conquerors might be pleased to dictate. The Pelhams came back to what might almost be called absolute power. The King was not likely soon again to trouble them with any hostile intervention. Thus these two men, one stupid beyond sounding, the other of only fair abilities, rising a little above mediocrity, had gone into battle with some of the greatest statesmen and orators of the age, and had come out victorious.

[Sidenote: 1743-1746—The "Broad-bottomed Ministry"]

Henry Pelham's administration was known by the slang nickname of the "Broad-bottomed Ministry." It is known by that nickname in history still; will doubtless always keep the title. The great overmastering passion of the Pelhams was the desire to keep office and power in their hands at any price. Of the two brothers Henry Pelham was by far the abler man. His idea was to get around him all the really capable administrators and debaters of every party, and thus make up a Ministry which should be all-powerful, and of which all the power should be in his hands. Like his brother, the Duke of Newcastle, he had a sort of half good-natured cynicism which never allowed him to doubt that if the offices were offered to the men, the men would on any conditions accept the offices. The events that he had lately seen had not induced him in any way to modify his opinion. He had heard Pitt thundering away against Carteret in exactly the same strain as Pitt and Carteret used to thunder against Walpole. He had heard Pitt denounce Carteret as "an execrable, a sole minister, who had ruined the British nation, and seemed to have drunk of the potion described in poetic fiction which made men forget their country." He had seen the policy of Walpole quietly carried out by the very men who had bellowed against Walpole, and had succeeded at last in driving him from office forever. He knew that no one now among those who used to call themselves "the Patriots" cared one straw whether Spain did or did not withdraw her claim to the Right of Search. His idea, therefore, was to get all the capable men of the various parties together, form them {246} into an administration, and leave them to enjoy their dignity and their emoluments while the King and he governed the country. It was in this spirit and with this purpose that he set himself to form the "Broad-bottomed Ministry." He was not, like his royal master, tormented or even embarrassed by personal dislikes; he would take into his Ministry any one who could be of the slightest use to him. He would have kept Lord Carteret if Carteret had not made himself impossible.

[Sidenote: 1745—The Chesterfield of Dublin Castle]

The time had already come when Chesterfield had to be taken into the Administration again. He had made himself so particularly disagreeable to the King when out of office, he had raked the Government, and even the Court, so hotly with satire and invective in the House of Lords, that George reluctantly admitted that it was better to try to live with such a man, seeing that it began to be impossible to live without him. So it was settled that some place should be found for Chesterfield, and at the same time it was very desirable that a place should be found which would not bring him much into personal association with the King. The condition of Continental Europe, the fluctuations of the war, suggested a natural opportunity for making use of Chesterfield's admitted genius for diplomacy, and accordingly he was sent back to his old quarters at the Hague. He rendered some good service there; and then suddenly the office of Viceroy of Ireland became vacant, and Chesterfield was called from the Hague and sent to Dublin Castle in 1745. He had known nothing of Ireland; he had never before been put in any position where his gift of governing could be tried. The gift of governing is of course something entirely different from the gift of managing diplomatic business; and Chesterfield had as yet had no chance of proving any capacity but that of a parliamentary orator and a diplomatist. "Administration," according to Aristotle, "shows the man." Every one remembers the superb and only too often quoted Latin sentence which tells of one who by the consent of all would have been declared capable {247} of ruling if only he had not ruled. Administration was to show the real Chesterfield. He was just the sort of person to whom one would have expected the Latin saying to apply. What a likely man, everybody might have said, to make a great administrator, if only he had not administered! Chesterfield's record, however, must be read the other way. If he had never had the chance of administering the affairs of Ireland, how should we ever have known that he had a genius for governing men?

For, in the minds of all who understand these times and those, Chesterfield's short season of rule in Ireland was by far the greatest period of his career. The Chesterfield of Dublin Castle was as high above the Chesterfield of the House of Lords as Goldsmith the poet is above Goldsmith the historian, or Blackstone the constitutional lawyer is above Blackstone the poet. Judging of Chesterfield's conduct in the Irish Viceroyalty by Chesterfield's past career, men would have been entitled to assume that his sympathies would go altogether with the governing race in Ireland. With them were the wealth, the rank, the fashion, the elegance, the refinement. With them was the easy-going profession of State religion—just the sort of thing that suited Chesterfield's ways. What sympathy could such a man as he have with the Celtic and Catholic Irishman? Why should he care to be popular with such a population? Even such gifted, and, on the whole, patriotic Protestants as Swift only sympathized with the Catholic Celts as an Englishman living in Virginia, in the old plantation days, might have sympathized with the population of negro slaves. Chesterfield might have entered on his formal task in the temper of graceful levity and high-bred languid indifference. He might have allowed the cultured and respectable gentlemen who were his permanent officials to manage things as they had long been doing before his time, pretty much in their own way. He might have given them politely to understand that so long as they spared him any trouble in his unthankful task he would back them up in anything they did. He {248} might have made it plain to the Protestant gentry and the Castle folk that his sympathies were all with them; that he desired only to mix with them; and that it really did not much matter what the outer population in Ireland thought of him or of them. Thus he would easily have become the darling of Dublin Castle; and to most Irish Viceroys the voice of Dublin Castle was the voice of Ireland; at all events, the only voice in Ireland to which they cared to listen.

[Sidenote: 1745—The state of Ireland]

What did Chesterfield find in Ireland when he came to undertake the task of government in Dublin Castle? He found a people oppressed almost beyond endurance by a cruel and barbarous system of penal laws directed against the profession and the practice of the faith to which they were passionately devoted. No people in the world's history, not even the Scottish Covenanters, were more absolutely absorbed by the zeal of their faith than the Irish Catholic Celts. The Penal Laws were devised and were being worked with the avowed intention of extirpating either the faith or the race—or, better still, the faith and the race. "The Irish," said Dr. Johnson, "bursting forth," as his biographer tells us, "with a generous indignation," "are in a most unnatural state, for we see there the minority prevailing over the majority. There is no instance, even in the ten persecutions, of such severity as that which the Protestants of Ireland have exercised against the Catholics." The Revolution, which had brought liberty of worship to England, had only brought harsher and more cruel repressive legislation against liberty of worship in Ireland. Where Chesterfield got the ideas which he carried out from the first in his government of Ireland it is hard to understand. He must have had that gift of spontaneous sympathy which is the very instinct of genius in the government of a people among whom one has not been born, among whom one has scarcely lived. His mind seems to have taken in at a glance the whole state of things. Talleyrand said of Alexander Hamilton, the great American statesman, that {249} he had "divined Europe." Chesterfield had apparently divined Ireland.

The twin curses of Ireland at the time were the Penal Laws and the corrupt administration of Dublin Castle. Chesterfield determined to strike a heavy blow at each of these evil things. He saw that the baneful class ascendency which was engendered by the Penal Laws was as bad in the end for the oppressors as for the oppressed. He saw that it was poisoning those who were administering it as well as those against whom it was administered. He could not abolish the Penal Laws or get them repealed. No man in his senses could have hoped to get the existing Parliament either of England or of Ireland to do anything then with the Penal Laws, except perhaps to try to make them a little more severe and more tormenting. Chesterfield did not waste a thought on any such device. He simply resolved that he would not put the Penal Laws into action. It has been said of Chesterfield's administration in Ireland that it was a policy which, with certain reservations, Burke himself might have originated and owned. Chesterfield took the government entirely into his own hands. He did his very best to suppress the jobbery which had become a tradition in the officialism of Dublin Castle. He established schools wherever he could. He tried to encourage and foster new branches of manufacture, and to give a free way to trade, and a stimulus to all industrial arts and crafts. He showed himself a strong man, determined to repress crime and outrage, but he showed himself also a just and a merciful man, determined not to create new crimes in the hope of repressing the old offences. The curse of Irish repressive government has always been its tendency to make fresh crimes, crimes unknown to the ordinary law. Chesterfield would have nothing of the kind. More than that, he would not recognize as offences the State-made crimes which so many of his predecessors had shown themselves ruthless in trying to repress. The confidence of the people began to revive under his rule. The Irish {250} Catholic began to find that although the Penal Laws still existed, in all their blood-thirsty and stupid clauses, he might profess and practise his religion without the slightest fear of the informer, the prison, the transport ship, or the hangman. Chesterfield asked for no additional troops from England. On the contrary, he sent away some of the soldiers in Ireland to help the cause of the empire on the Continent. He was buoyant with a well-grounded confidence; and there was something contagious in his fearless generosity and justice. The Irish people soon came to understand him, and almost to adore him. He was denounced, of course, by the alarmists and the cowards; by the Castle hacks and the furious anti-Catholic bigots. Chesterfield let them denounce as long and as loudly as seemed good to them. He never troubled himself about their wild alarms and their savage clamor.

[Sidenote: 1745-1746—Chesterfield's recall]

Probably no Irishman who ever lived was a more bitter and uncompromising enemy of English rule in Ireland than John Mitchel, the rebel of 1848. His opinion, therefore, is worth having as to the character of Chesterfield's rule in Dublin Castle. In his "History of Ireland," a book which might well be more often read in this country than it is, Mitchel says of Chesterfield: "Having satisfied himself that there was no insurrectionary movement in the country, and none likely to be, he was not to be moved from his tolerant courses by any complaints or remonstrances. Far from yielding to the feigned alarm of those who solicited him to raise new regiments, he sent four battalions of the soldiers then in Ireland to reinforce the Duke of Cumberland. He discouraged jobs, kept down expenses. . . . When some savage Ascendency Protestant would come to him with tales of alarm, he usually turned the conversation into a tone of light badinage which perplexed and baffled the man. One came to seriously put his lordship on his guard by acquainting him with the fact that his own coachman was in the habit of going to mass. 'Is it possible?' cried Chesterfield: 'then I will take care the fellow shall not drive me there.' A {251} courtier burst into his apartment one morning, while he was sipping his chocolate in bed, with the startling intelligence that the Papists were rising in Connaught. 'Ah,' he said, looking at his watch, ''tis nine o'clock—time for them to rise!' There was evidently no dealing with such a viceroy as this, who showed such insensibility to the perils of Protestantism and the evil designs of the dangerous Papists. Indeed he was seen to distinguish by his peculiar admiration a Papist beauty, Miss Ambrose, whom he declared to be the only 'dangerous Papist' he had met in Ireland." Chesterfield himself has left an exposition of his policy which we may well believe to be genuine. "I came determined," he wrote many years after, "to proscribe no set of persons whatever, and determined to be governed by none. Had the Papists made any attempt to put themselves above the law, I should have taken good care to have quelled them again. It was said that my lenity to the Papists had wrought no alteration either in their religious or their political sentiments. I did not expect that it would; but surely that was no reason for cruelty towards them."

[Sidenote: 1745-1746—Chesterfield's recall]

It is true that Lord Chesterfield's conduct in Ireland has been found fault with by no less devoted a friend of Ireland than Burke. In his letter to a peer of Ireland on the Penal Laws against the Irish Catholics, Burke says: "This man, while he was duping the credulity of Papists with fine words in private, and commending their good behavior during a rebellion in Great Britain—as it well deserved to be commended and rewarded—was capable of urging penal laws against them in a speech from the Throne, and of stimulating with provocatives the wearied and half-exhausted bigotry of the then Parliament of Ireland." But Burke was a man whose public virtue was too high and unbending to permit him to make allowance for the political arts and crafts of a Chesterfield. It is quite true that Chesterfield recommended in his speech that the Irish Parliament should inquire into the working of the Penal Laws in order to find out if they needed any {252} improvement. But this was a mere piece of stage-play to amuse and to beguile the stupidity and the bigotry of the Irish Parliament of those days. It was not a stroke of policy which a man like Burke would have condescended to or could have approved; but it must have greatly delighted the cynical humor of such a man as Chesterfield. At all events it is certain that during his administration Chesterfield succeeded in winning the confidence and the admiration of the Catholics of Ireland—that is to say, of five-sixths of the population of the country. He was very soon recalled; perhaps the King did not quite like his growing popularity in Ireland; and when he left Dublin he was escorted to the ship's side by an enthusiastic concourse of people, who pressed around him to the last and prayed of him to return soon to Ireland. Chesterfield did not return to Ireland. He was made one of the Secretaries of State, and the Dublin Castle administration went on its old familiar way. But there is even still among the Irish people a lingering tradition of the rule of Lord Chesterfield, and of the new system which he tried for a while to establish in the government of their island.



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CHAPTER XXXVIII.

PRIMUS IN INDIS.

[Sidenote: 1743—Nucleus of the Anglo-Indian Empire]

Before the Jacobite rising had been put down, or the Pelhams absolutely set up, England, without knowing it, had sent forth a new conqueror, and might already have hailed the first promises of sway over one of the most magnificent empires of the earth. The name of the new conqueror was Robert Clive; the name of the magnificent empire was India.

At that time the influence of England over India was small to insignificance—a scrap of Bengal, the island and town of Bombay, Madras, and a fort or two. The average Englishman's knowledge of India was small even to non-existence. The few Englishmen who ever looked with eyes of intelligent information upon that great tract of territory, leaf-shaped, and labelled India on the maps, knew that the English possessions therein were few and paltry. Three quite distinct sections, called presidencies, each independent of the two others, and all governed by a supreme authority whose offices were in Leadenhall Street in London, represented the meagre nucleus of what was yet to be the vast Anglo-Indian Empire. The first of these three presidencies was the Bombay presidency, where the Indian Ocean washes the Malabar coast. The second was in the Carnatic, on the eastern side of the leaf, where the waters of the Bay of Bengal wash the Coromandel coast, where the forts of St. George and St. David protected Madras and a smaller settlement. The third presidency was up towards the north, where the sacred Ganges, rushing through its many mouths to the sea, floods the Hoogly. Here the town of Calcutta was growing up around Fort William.

{254}

These three little presidencies, plying their poor trade, and depending for defence upon their ill-disciplined native soldiers, the Sepahis, whom we have come to call Sepoys, were all that had grown out of the nearly two centuries of relations with the leaf-shaped Indian land since first, in 1591, Captain Lancaster sailed the seas; since first the East India Company sprang into existence. It was not an agreeable two centuries for Englishmen who ever thought of India to read about. Two centuries of squabblings and strugglings with Dutch settlers and with Portuguese settlers, of desperate truckling to native princes. In 1664 the English East India Company found a rival more formidable than the Dutch or the Portuguese in the French East India Company, which the astuteness of Colbert set up at Pondicherry, and which throve with a rapidity that quite eclipsed the poor progress of the English traders. Even when, in 1708, the old East India Company united its fortunes with the new Indian Company that had been formed, and thus converted one rival into an ally, the superiority of the French remained uncontested, and daily waxed greater and greater, until it began to seem as if, in the words of Antony to Cleopatra, all the East should call her mistress.

[Sidenote: 1725-1743—The Clives of Market-Drayton]

Such was the condition of affairs in the year 1743, when the apparently insignificant fact that a young gentleman of a ne'er-do-well disposition, who seemed likely to come to a bad end in England, and who was accordingly shipped off to India by his irritated relations, altered and exalted the destinies not merely of a wealthy trading company, but of the British Crown. In the market town of Drayton-in-Hales, better known as Market-Drayton, in Shropshire, there lived, in the reign of George the First, a Mr. Richard Clive—a man whose comparatively meagre abilities were divided between the profession of the law and the cares of a small and not very valuable estate. In the little town on the river Tern, within sight of the old church built by Stephen, whose architectural characteristics were then happily unaltered by the hand of the {255} eighteenth century restorer, the Clives had been born and given in marriage and died, and repeated the round ever since the twelfth century. Mr. Richard Clive, in the reign of George the First, married a Manchester lady named Gaskill, who bore him many children of no note whatever, but who bore him one very noteworthy child indeed, his eldest son Robert, on September 29th, in the year 1725.

There was a time, a long time too, during which the worthy Mr. Richard Clive persisted in regarding the birth of this eldest son as little less than a curse. He could very well have said of Robert what the Queen-mother says of Richard of Gloster, tetchy and wayward was his infancy. Seldom was there born into the world a more stubborn-minded, high-spirited boy. He may remind us a little of the young Mirabeau in his strenuous impassioned youth; in the estimate which those nearest to him, and most ignorant of him, formed of the young lion cub in the domestic litter; in the strange promise which the great career fulfilled. There was a kind of madness in the impish pranks which the boy Clive played in Market-Drayton, scaring the timid and scandalizing the respectable. He climbed to the top of the lofty steeple of that church, which dated from the days of Stephen, and perched himself upon a stone spout near the dizzy summit with a cool courage which Stephen himself might have envied. He got round him from among the idle lads of the town "a list of lawless resolutes," and, like David, made himself a captain over them for the purpose of levying a kind of guerilla warfare upon the shopkeepers of the little town, and making them pay tribute for the sanctity of their windows. In fact, he behaved as wildly as the wildest school-boy could behave—drifting from school to school, to learn nothing from each new master, and only to leave behind at each the record of an incorrigible reprobate. Nobody seems to have discovered that there was anything of the man of genius in the composition of the incorrigible reprobate, and so it came about that the town of {256} Market-Drayton in general, and the respectable family of the Clives in particular, breathed more freely when it was known that young Robert was "bound to John Company"—that he had accepted a writership in the East India Service, and had actually sailed for Madras.

The career to which the young Clive was thus devoted did not, on the face of it, appear to be especially brilliant. The voyage in itself, to begin with, was a terrible business; a six months' voyage was then regarded as an astonishingly quick passage, and in Clive's case the voyage was longer even than usual. It was more than a year after he left England before he arrived at Madras, as his ship had stayed for some months at the Brazils. Clive arrived at Madras with no money, with many debts, and with some facility in speaking Portuguese, acquired during the delay in the Brazils. He had absolutely no friends in India, and made no friends for many months after his arrival. It would be hard to think of a more desolate position for a proud, shy, high-spirited lad with a strong strain of melancholy in his composition. We find him sighing for Manchester with all the profound and pathetic longing which inspires the noble old English ballad of "Farewell, Manchester." It is not easy for us of to-day, who associate the name of Manchester with one of the greatest manufacturing towns in the world, to appreciate to the full either the spirit of the old ballad or the longing aspiration which Clive had to see again Manchester, "the centre of all my wishes." But if he was homesick, if he was lonely, if he was poor in pocket and weak in health, shadowed by melancholy and saddened by exile, he never for a moment suffered his pride to abate or his courage to sink. He treated his masters of the East India Company with the same scornful spirit which he had of old shown to the shopkeepers of Market-Drayton and the school-masters of Shropshire.

In the wretched mood of mind and body that Clive owned during his early days at Madras the constitutional melancholy asserted itself with conquering force, and he {257} twice attempted his life. On each occasion the pistol which he turned upon his desperate and disordered brain missed fire. Yet Clive had meant most thoroughly and consistently to kill himself. He did not, like Byron, discover, after the attempt was made, that the weapon he had aimed at his life was not loaded. Each time the pistol was properly charged and primed, and each time it was the accident of the old flint-lock merely causing a flash in the pan which saved his life. In a nature that is melancholy a tinge of superstition is appropriate, and it is hardly surprising if Clive saw in the successive chance a proof that he was not meant as yet to perish by self-slaughter. "I must be destined for great things," he thought, and he was right. Between that attempt at suicide and the next lay long years of unexampled glory, lay the pomp of Oriental courts and the glitter of Oriental warfare, lay the foundation and establishment of that empire of India which is to-day one of the greatest glories of the British Crown—an empire mightier, wealthier, statelier than any which Aurungzebe swayed, and whose might and wealth and state were mainly due to the courage and the genius of the lonely, melancholy lad, the humble writer in the service of John Company, who had endeavored in his solitude and his despair to end his young life at the muzzle of his pistol.

[Sidenote: 1707—The fall of the House of Baber]

What was the condition of India at the time when Clive was making unavailing efforts to cut short his career? The country itself was given over to the wildest confusion. With the death of Aurungzebe, in 1707, the majestic empire of the House of Baber came to an end. The empire of Alexander did not crumble more disastrously to pieces after the death of the Macedonian prince than did the empire of the Moguls fall to pieces after the death of Aurungzebe. The pitiable and despicable successors of a great prince, worse than Sardanapalus, worse than the degraded Caesars of the basest days of Byzantium, squandered their unprofitable hours in shameful pleasure while the great empire fell to pieces, trampled by the {258} conquering feet of Persian princes, of Afghan invaders, of wild Mahratta chiefs. Between the fierce invaders from the northern hills who ravaged, and levied tribute, and established dominion of their own, and such still powerful viceroys as held their own, and offered a nominal allegiance to the Mogul line, the glory of the race of Tamerlane was dimmed indeed. It occurred to one man, watching all the welter of the Indian world, where Mussulman and Hindoo struggled for supremacy—it occurred to Dupleix that in this struggle lay the opportunity for some European power—for his European power—for France—to gain for herself, and for the daring adventurer who should shape her Oriental policy, an influence hitherto undreamed of by the statesmen of the West. It was not given to Dupleix to guess that what he dreamed of and nearly accomplished was to be carried out at last by Robert Clive.

[Sidenote: 1746—La Bourdonnais]

The history of French empire in India contains two specially illustrious names—the name of La Bourdonnais and the name of Dupleix. The first had practically called into existence the two colonies of the Ile de France and of Bourbon; the second had founded the town of Chandernagor, in the bay of Bengal, and, as governor-general of the French East India Company, had established himself at Pondicherry with all the luxury and more than all the luxury of a veritable Oriental prince. It may be that if these two men had been better able to agree together the fortunes of the French nation in the Indies might have been very different. But a blind and uncompromising jealousy divided them. Whatever Dupleix did was wrong in the eyes of La Bourdonnais; whatever La Bourdonnais did was wrong in the eyes of Dupleix; and Dupleix was the stronger man of the two, and he finally triumphed for a time. In the war that was raging La Bourdonnais saw his opportunity. He determined to anticipate Dupleix in beginning hostilities against the English in India. He set sail from the island of Bourbon with a fleet of nine vessels which he had equipped, at his proper cost, and an {259} army of some three thousand men, which included a large proportion of negroes. After a successful engagement with the ships of war under the command of Admiral Burnett, outside Madras, La Bourdonnais disembarked, besieged Madras, and compelled the town to capitulate. So far the star of La Bourdonnais was in the ascendent; but the terms which he exacted from the conquered town were, by their very moderation, the means of his undoing. With the keys of the conquered town in his hand, with the French colors floating bravely from Fort St. George, with all the stored wealth of the company as spoils of war, La Bourdonnais thought that he might be not unlenient in the terms he accorded to his enemies. He allowed the English inhabitants of Madras to remain prisoners of war on parole, and stipulated that the town should remain in his hands until the payment of a ransom of some nine millions of francs.

The triumph of La Bourdonnais aroused, however, not the admiration but the jealousy of Dupleix. Out of La Bourdonnais's very victory the cunning of Dupleix discovered a means to humiliate his rival. The vague schemes which he had formed for the authority of France, and for his influence in India, did not at all jump with the restoration of Madras, once conquered, to the English. He declared that La Bourdonnais had gone beyond his powers; that terms to the vanquished on Indian soil could be made by the Governor of Pondicherry and the Governor of Pondicherry alone. He refused to ratify La Bourdonnais's convention, and, instead, declared that the capitulation was at an end, marched upon Madras, insisted upon the pillage and destruction of a great portion of the town, arrested a large number of the leading Englishmen, including the Governor of Fort St. George, and conveyed them with all circumstances of public ignominy to Pondicherry. As for La Bourdonnais, who had taken so gallant a step to secure French supremacy in India, he was placed under arrest and sent to France, where the Bastille awaited him; he had fallen before his vindictive rival.

The inhabitants of Madras, smarting under what may {260} fairly be called the treachery of Dupleix, considered rightly that they were no longer bound by the convention with the luckless La Bourdonnais. One at least of the inhabitants was a man not likely to be bound by the mere letter of a convention which had already been broken in the spirit. Clive disguised himself as a Mussulman—we may be permitted to wonder how a man who to the end of his days remained eccentrically ignorant of all Eastern languages accomplished this successfully—and, escaping from Madras, made his way to Fort St. David. At Fort St. David his military career began. The desperate courage which had carried him to the top of the tower of Stephen's church, and which had enabled him to overawe the "military bully who was the terror of Fort St. David," now found its best vent in "welcoming the French," like the hero of Burns's ballad, "at the sound of the drum." The peace which was concluded between England and France sent Clive for a season, however, back to the counting-house, and gave back Madras again to the English company.

[Sidenote: 1748—The dream of Dupleix]

But the ambition of Dupleix was not a thing to be bounded by the circumscription of war or peace between England and France. England and France might be at peace, but there was no need that the English East India Company and the French East India Company should be at peace as well. The internal troubles of India afforded Dupleix the opportunity he coveted of pushing his own fortunes, and doing his best to drive the English traders out of the field. Unfortunately for him, however, his opportunity was also the opportunity of the young writer and ensign who had already won the admiration and the esteem of Major Lawrence, then looked upon as the first English officer in India.

While the French still held Madras, before the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle compelled the reluctant Dupleix to restore it to the English, a military episode, which might almost be called an accident, had helped to confirm enormously the influence of France in India. The Nabob of {261} the Carnatic, offended by the action of the English governor of Madras, who had omitted to send him those presents which are essential to all stages of Oriental diplomacy, had practically winked at the action of the more liberal-handed Dupleix in his movement against Madras. When, too late, the Nabob heard of the fall of Madras, he sent an army to recapture the town, and called upon the French governor to surrender it. The governor was Duval D'Espremesnil, the father of that mad D'Espremesnil who fuliginates through a portion of the French Revolution. He refused to obey the Nabob, opened fire upon his forces, and repulsed them. The repulse was followed a little later by a vigorous attack of the French troops under Paradis, which smashed the armament of the Nabob to pieces at St. Thome on November 4, 1746. This victory gave the French a prestige of which Dupleix was the very man to appreciate the full importance. When, in 1748, Nizam-Al-Mulk, the Viceroy of the Deccan, died, there arose at once pretenders not merely to the Deccan viceroyalty, but also to the government of the Carnatic. The first was claimed by Mirzapha Jung; the second by Chunda Sahib. Mirzapha Jung and Chunda Sahib, profoundly impressed by the triumph of French arms two years earlier, appealed to Dupleix to help them, joined their forces, and invaded the Carnatic.

Dupleix was not unwilling to listen to the appeal of the invaders. He saw that the chance had arisen for him to constitute himself the Warwick, the king-maker, of India. He lent all the force of his European troops, of his native troops trained in the European fashion, and of the prestige of France to the invaders. The old Nabob of the Carnatic, Anaverdi Khan, was defeated and killed. His son fled with his broken army to Trichinopoly, and the invaders nominally, and Dupleix actually, reigned supreme in the Carnatic.

At that moment the sun of Dupleix's fortunes reached its zenith. He was the chosen companion and confidant of the new Nizam of the Deccan; he was made Governor {262} of India from the river Kristna to Cape Comorin; he pomped it with more than Oriental splendor in the pageantries of triumph at Pondicherry; he set up on the scene of his victory a stately column, bearing in four languages inscriptions celebrating his fame; he had treasure, power, and influence even to his ambitious heart's content. When Mirzapha Jung died, shortly after his accession to the government of the Deccan, Dupleix held equal influence over his successor. He might well have believed that his glory was complete, his plans perfected; he might well have believed that he could afford to smile at the feeble efforts which the English made to stay his progress.

[Sidenote: 1751—The defence of Arcot]

He soon ceased to smile. Clive, then five-and-twenty years old, urged upon his superiors that Trichinopoly must soon fall before famine and leaguer, that with the overthrow of the House of Anaverdi Khan the power of the French over India would be established, and the power of the English in India destroyed. The great deed to be done was to raise the siege of Trichinopoly. This Clive coolly proposed to do by effecting a counter-diversion in besieging Arcot, the favored home of the Nabobs. With a little handful of an army—200 Europeans and 300 Sepoys—Clive marched through the wildest weather to Arcot, captured it, and prepared to hold his conquest. We may perhaps here be permitted to say that in using, as we shall continue to do, the old familiar forms of spelling the names of Indian towns and of Indian princes, we do so not in ignorance of the fact that in many, if not most cases, they present but a very poor idea indeed of the actual Oriental sounds and spelling. The modern writers on Indian history adopt a new and more scientific spelling, which makes Arcot Arkat, and Trichinopoly Trichinapalli. But, all things considered, it seems best for the present to adhere to those old forms which have become, as it were, portion and parcel of English history.

Chunda Sahib, who was besieging Trichinopoly, immediately despatched 4000 men against Arcot, which, {263} joining with the defeated garrison and a few French, made up a muster of some 10,000 men under Rajah Sahib, Chunda Sahib's son, against a garrison of little more than 300. The defence of Arcot is one of the most brilliant episodes in history. It reads rather like some of those desperate and heroic adventures in which the fiction of the elder Dumas delighted than the sober chronicle of recorded warfare. For fifty days the siege raged. For fifty days Rajah Sahib did his best to take the town, and for fifty days Clive and his little band of Europeans and Sepoys frustrated all his efforts. The stubborn defence began to create allies. The fighting capacity of the English had come to be regarded with great contempt by the native races, but the contempt was now rapidly changing to admiration. Murari Rao, the great Mahratta leader, who had been hired to assist the cause of Mohammed Ali, but who had hitherto hung in idleness upon the Carnatic frontier, convinced that the English must be defeated, now declared that since he had learned that the "English could fight," he was willing to fight for them, and with them, and prepared to move to the assistance of Clive. Before they could arrive, Rajah Sahib made a desperate last effort to capture Arcot, was completely defeated with great loss, and withdrew from Arcot, leaving Clive and his little army masters of the place.

Great was the glory of Clive in Fort St. George; but Clive was not going to content himself with so much and no more. With an army increased to nearly a thousand men, he assailed the enemy, defeated Rajah Sahib once and again, and in his triumphal progress caused to be razed to the ground the memorial city which the pride of Dupleix had erected to his victory, and the vaunting monument which set forth in four languages the glory of his deeds. The astonished Nabobs began for the first time to understand that the glory of France was not invincible, that a new star had arisen before which the star of Dupleix must pale, and might vanish. The star of Clive continued to mount. Though the arrival of Major Lawrence from {264} England took away from his hands the chief command, he worked under Lawrence as gallantly as when he was alone responsible for his desperate undertakings, and success, as before, followed all the enterprises in which he was concerned.

Trichinopoly was relieved; Chunda Sahib was captured by the Mahrattas and put to death; Covelong and Chingkeput, two of the most important French forts, were captured by Clive with an army as unpromising as Falstaff's ragged regiment. At this point, and on the full tide of victory, Clive's health broke down, and he was compelled to return to England for change of climate. Before he left Madras he married Miss Maskelyne. Never did a man return to his native land under more auspicious conditions who had gone thence under conditions so inauspicious. The bad boy of Market-Drayton was now the illustrious and opulent soldier whom the gentlemen of the India House delighted to salute as General Clive, and about whom it seemed as if it was impossible for the nation to make too much ado.

[Sidenote: 1755—Back to India]

Clive was now seized with the ambition to play a part in home politics. The general election of 1754 seemed to offer him a tempting opportunity of entering Parliament. He came forward as one of the members for St. Michael's in Cornwall, was opposed by Newcastle, and supported by Sandwich and Fox, was returned, was petitioned against, and was unseated on petition. To fight a parliamentary election in those days meant the spending of a very great deal of money, and Clive, who had squandered his well-earned fortune right and left since his return to his native land, found himself, after he was unseated, in a decidedly disagreeable position. His money was dwindling; his hope of political triumphs had vanished into thin air; naturally enough, his thoughts turned back to the India of his youth. The curious good-luck that always attended upon him stood him in good stead here. If he had need of the India of his youth, the India of his youth had need of him. If France and England were not at {265} war, the rumor of war was busy between them, and there was a desire for good leaders in the advancing English colonies in India. Poor Dupleix was out of the way already. The brilliant spirit whom Clive's genius had over-crowed had vanished forever from the scenes of his triumphs and his humiliations. He had suffered something of the same hard measure that he had himself meted out to his colleague La Bourdonnais; he had been recalled in comparative disgrace to France, with ruined fortunes and ruined hopes, to die, a defeated and degraded man, the shadow of his own great name. But the influence of France was not extinct in India; it might at any moment reassert itself—at any moment come to the push of arms between France and England in the East as well as in the West; and where could the English look for so capable a leader of men as Clive? So it came about that in the year 1755 Clive again sailed the seas for India, under very different conditions from those under which he first adventured for the East. Then he was an unknown, unappreciated rapscallion of a lad, needy, homesick, desperate, and alone; now he was going out as the Governor of Fort St. David, as lieutenant-colonel in the British army, with a record of fame and fortune behind him. New fame, new fortune, awaited him almost on the very moment of his arrival in India. The pirate stronghold of Gheriah fell before him almost as easily as if the place had been a new Jericho and Clive a second Joshua. But there was greater work in store for him than the destruction of pirate strongholds. Bengal became suddenly the theatre of a terrible drama. Up to the year 1756 the tranquillity of the English settlers and traders in Bengal had been undisturbed. Their relations with the Nabob Ali Vardi Khan had been of the friendliest kind, and the very friendliness of those relations had had the effect of making the English residents in Bengal, like the native population, men of a milder mould than those whom hard fortune had fashioned into soldiers and statesmen at Madras. But in the year 1758 the Nabob Ali Vardi Khan died, and was {266} succeeded by his grandson, Siraju'd Daulah, infamous in English history as Surajah Dowlah.

[Sidenote: 1756—The Blackhole]

This creature, who incarnated in his own proper person all the worst vices of the East, without apparently possessing any of the East's redeeming virtues, cherished a very bitter hatred of the English. Surajah Dowlah was unblessed with the faintest glimmerings of statesmanship; it seemed to his enfeebled mind that it would be not only a very good thing to drive the English out of Bengal, but that it would be also an exceedingly easy thing to do. All he wanted, it seemed to him, was a pretext, and to such a mind a pretext was readily forthcoming. Had not the English dogs fortified their settlement without his permission? Had they not afforded shelter to some victim flying from his omnivorous rapacity? These were pretexts good enough to serve the insane brain of Surajah Dowlah. He attacked Fort William with an overwhelming force; the English traders, unwarlike, timorous, and deserted by their leaders, made little or no resistance; the madman had Fort William in his power, and used his power like a madman. The memory of the Blackhole of Calcutta still remains a mark of horror and of terror upon our annals of Indian empire. When Lord Macaulay, eighty-four years after the event, penned his famous passage in which he declared that nothing in history or in fiction, not even the story which Ugolino told in the sea of everlasting ice, approached the horrors of the Blackhole, he wrote before the worst horrors of Indian history had yet become portion and parcel of our own history. But even those who write to-day, more than a century and a quarter after that time; those in whose minds the memories are fresh of the butcher's well at Cawnpore and the massacre on the river-bank; those to whom the names of Nana Sahib and Azimoolah Khan sound as horridly as the names of fiends—even those can still think of the Blackhole as almost incomparable in horror, and of Surajah Dowlah as among the worst of Oriental murderers. It is true that certain efforts have been made to reduce the {267} measure of Surajah Dowlah's guilt. Colonel Malleson, than whom there is no fairer or abler Indian historian, thinks there can be no doubt that Surajah Dowlah did not desire the death of his English prisoners. Mr. Holwell, one of the few survivors of that awful night, the man whose narrative thrilled and still thrills, horrified and still horrifies, the civilized world, does give testimony that goes towards clearing the character of Surajah Dowlah from direct complicity in that terrible crime. "I had in all three interviews with him," he wrote, "the last in Darbar before seven, when he repeated his assurances to me, on the word of a soldier, that no harm should come to us; and, indeed, I believe his orders were only general that we for that night should be secured, and that what followed was the result of revenge and resentment in the breasts of the lower jemidars to whose custody we were delivered for the number of their order killed during the siege." Yet these words do not go far to cleanse Surajah Dowlah's memory. What had occurred? The English prisoners were brought before the triumphant Nabob, bullied and insulted, and finally left in charge of the Nabob's soldiery, while the Nabob himself retired to slumber. The soldiery, whether prompted by revenge or mere merciless cruelty, forced the prisoners, one hundred and forty-six in number, into the garrison prison—a fearful place, only twenty feet square, known as the Blackhole. The senses sicken in reading what happened after this determination was carried out. The death-struggles of those unhappy English people crowded in that narrow space, without air, in the fearful summer heat, stir the profoundest pity, the profoundest anguish. The Nabob's soldiers all through that fearful night revelled in the sights and sounds that their victims' sufferings offered to them.

When the night did end and the awakened despot did allow the door of the Blackhole to be opened, only twenty-three out of the hundred and forty-six victims were alive. The hundred and twenty-three dead bodies were hurriedly buried in a common pit.

{268}

It is simply impossible to exonerate Surajah Dowlah from the shame and stain of that deed. The savage who passed "the word of a soldier" that the lives of his prisoners should be spared took no precautions to insure the carrying out of his promise. If, as Mr. Holwell says, the lower jemidars were thirsting for revenge, then the Nabob, who gave his prisoners over to the care of those jemidars, was directly responsible for their deeds. Even in Surajah Dowlah's army there must have been men, there must have been officers, to whom the tyrant, if he had wished his prisoners to be well treated, could have intrusted them, in the full confidence and certainty that his commands would be carried out, and his humane wishes humanely interpreted. But even if by the utmost straining we can in any degree acquit the Nabob of direct personal responsibility before the act, his subsequent conduct involves him in direct complicity, and forces upon him all the responsibility and all the infamy. He did not punish the miscreants who forced their victims into the Blackhole, and who gloated over their appalling sufferings. He did not treat the survivors with ordinary humanity. He was evidently convinced that he could deal with the wretched English as he pleased, that their power in India was annihilated, that Surajah Dowlah was among the mightiest princes of the earth.

[Sidenote: 1757—Plot and counterplot]

For six long months, for a fantastical half-year, Surajah Dowlah revelled in the crazy dream of his own omnipotence. Then came retribution, swift, successive, comprehensive. Clive was upon him—Clive the unconquerable, sacking his towns, putting his garrisons to the sword, recapturing those places from which Surajah Dowlah had imagined that he had banished the Englishman forever. The news of the tragedy of the Blackhole, and of the capture of Calcutta and Fort William, had reached Madras in August, and the warlike community had resolved upon prompt and speedy revenge. But it took time to raise the expedition, took time to despatch the expedition. In October the army of two thousand four hundred men, {269} of which nine hundred were European troops, and fifteen hundred Sepoys, sailed for the Hoogly, under Clive as military, and Admiral Watson as naval, commander. Hostile winds delayed the armament until December, but when it did reach its destination it carried all before it. The luck which always attended upon Clive was still faithful to him. The Nabob, at the head of his vast hordes, was soon as eager to come to terms with Clive at the head of his little handful of men as he had before been eager to obliterate the recollection of the Englishmen from the soil of Bengal. He offered to treat with Clive; he was ready to make terms which from a military point of view were satisfactory; he was evidently convinced that he had underrated the power of England, and he was prepared to pay a heavy penalty for his blunder.

We are now approaching that chapter of Clive's career which has served his enemies with their readiest weapon, and has filled his admirers with the deepest regret. The negotiations between Clive and Surajah Dowlah were conducted on the part of all the Orientals concerned, from Surajah Dowlah to Omichund, the wealthy Bengalee who played the part of go-between, with an amount of treachery that has not been surpassed even in the tortuous records of Oriental treachery. But unhappily the treachery was not confined to the Oriental negotiators; not confined to the wretched despot on the throne; not confined to Meer Jaffier, the principal commander of his troops, who wanted the throne for himself; not confined to the unscrupulous Omichund, who plotted with his left hand against Surajah Dowlah, and with his right hand against the English. Treachery as audacious, treachery more ingenious, treachery more successful, was deliberately practised by Clive. The brilliant and gallant soldier of fortune showed himself to be more than a match for Oriental cunning in all the worst vices of a vicious Oriental diplomacy. If Surajah Dowlah was unable to make up his miserable mind, if he alternately promised and denied, cajoled and threatened, Clive, on his side, while affecting to treat {270} with Surajah Dowlah, was deliberately supporting the powerful conspiracy against Surajah Dowlah, the object of which was to place Meer Jaffier on the throne. If Omichund, with the keys of the conspiracy in his hand, threatened to betray all to Surajah Dowlah unless he was promised the heaviest hush-money, Clive on his side was perfectly ready to promise without the remotest intention of paying. If Omichund, wary and suspicious, was determined to have his bond in writing, Clive was quite ready to meet him with a false and fraudulent bond. Clive professed to be perfectly willing that in the secret treaty which was being drawn up between the English and Meer Jaffier a clause should be inserted promising the fulfilment of all Omichund's claims. But as Clive had not the remotest intention of satisfying those claims, he composedly prepared two treaties. One—the one by which he and Meer Jaffier were to be bound—was written on white paper, and contained no allusion to the avaricious Omichund. [Sidenote: 1757—The Red Treaty] Another, on red paper, which was to be disregarded by the parties to the swindle, contained a paragraph according to Omichund's heart's desire. Thus bad begins, but worse remains behind. Clive, to his great astonishment, found that Admiral Watson entertained different views from his about the honor of an English soldier and gentleman. However convenient it might be to bamboozle Omichund with a sham treaty, Admiral Watson declined to be a party to the trick by signing his name to the fraudulent document. Yet Admiral Watson's name was essential to the success of the Red Treaty, and Clive showed that he was not a man to stick at trifles. He wanted Admiral Watson's signature; he knew that Omichund would want Admiral Watson's signature; he satisfied himself, and he satisfied Omichund, by forging Admiral Watson's signature at the bottom of the Red Treaty.

It is simply impossible to imagine any defence of Clive's conduct in this most disgraceful business. The best that can be said for him is that the whole process of the {271} treason was so infamous, the fabrication of the Red Treaty so revolting a piece of duplicity, that the forging of Admiral Watson's name does not materially add to the darkness of the complete transaction. Nothing can palliate Clive's conduct. It may, indeed, be said that as civilized troops after long engagements in petty wars with savage races lose that morale and discipline which come from contests with their military peers, so minds steeped in the degrading atmosphere of Oriental diplomacy become inevitably corrupted, and lose the fine distinction between right and wrong. But so specious a piece of special pleading cannot serve Clive's turn. English diplomacy at home and abroad has always, with the rarest exceptions, plumed itself on its truthfulness, and has often been successful by reason of that very truthfulness. The practically unanimous condemnation which Clive's countrymen then and since have passed upon his action with regard to the Red Treaty is the best answer to all such pitiful prevarications.

However, Clive did prepare a sham treaty, did forge Admiral Watson's name, did fool Omichund to the top of his bent. Omichund being thus cunningly bought over, Clive prepared for action, flung defiance at Surajah Dowlah, and marched against him. On June 23, 1757, the fate of England in India was decided by the famous battle of Plassey, or, as it should be more correctly called, Palasi.

Plassey was a great victory. Yet, in the words of the conspirator in Ben Jonson's "Catiline," it was but "a cast at dice in Fortune's hand" that it might have been a great defeat, Clive was astonishingly, grotesquely out-numbered. The legendary deeds of chivalrous paladins who at the head of a little body of knights sweep away whole hosts of paynims at Saragossa or Roncesvalles were rivalled by Clive's audacity in opposing his few regiments to the swollen armament of the Nabob. Moreover, Meer Jaffier, whose alliance with the English, whose treason to Surajah Dowlah, was an important part of the scheme, {272} was not to be counted upon. He hesitated, unwilling to fling his fortunes into the English scale before he was convinced that the English were certain of success, although he was himself one of the most important factors in the possibility of that success. But the greatest danger that threatened the English arms was, curiously enough, due to Clive himself. On the eve of Plassey he held a council of war at which it was discussed whether they should fight at once or postpone fighting to what might seem a more seasonable opportunity. Clive at this council departed from his usual custom. He gave his own vote first, and he voted against taking any immediate action. Naturally enough, the majority of the council of war voted with Clive, in spite of the strenuous opposition of Major Eyre Coote and a small minority. By a majority of thirteen to seven it was resolved not to fight.

It is needless to speculate on what would have been the fortunes of the English in Bengal if that vote had settled the question. Luckily, Clive was a man of genius, and was not either afraid to admit that he had made a mistake, or to change his mind. A short period of solitary reflection convinced him that he and the majority were wrong, and that Eyre Coote and the minority were right. He informed Eyre Coote of his new decision, gave the necessary orders, and the next day the battle of Plassey was fought and won.

It is not necessary here to go into the details of that momentous day. The desperate courage, daring, and skill of the English troops carried all before them; their cannonade scattered death and confusion into the Nabob's ranks. Within an hour an army of sixty thousand men was defeated, with astonishingly slight loss to the victors; Surajah Dowlah, abandoned at the judicious moment by one traitor, Meer Jaffier, was flying for his life in obedience to the insidious counsels of another traitor, Rajah Dulab Ram. From that hour Bengal became part of the English empire.

{273}

The fate of the different actors on the Indian side was soon decided. Meer Jaffier was duly invested with the Nabob's authority over Bengal, Behar, and Orissa; Omichund, on learning the shameful trick of the Red Treaty, went mad and died mad; Surajah Dowlah was soon captured and promptly killed by Meer Jaffier: the Blackhole was avenged.

[Sidenote: 1757—The conqueror returns]

Clive had now reached the pinnacle of his greatness. Victor of Plassey, Governor of Bengal, he remained in India for three more resplendent years; he added to the number of his conquests by defeating the great enterprise of Shah Alum against Meer Jaffier, and shattered the Dutch descent upon the Hoogly—a descent secretly favored by the ever-treacherous Meer Jaffier—both on land and sea. Then, with laurel victory upon his sword, and smooth success strewn before his feet, Clive resolved to return again to England. He sailed from India, full of honors, in 1760, the year in which George the Second died. When he arrived in England George the Third was king. Here for the moment we must leave him, the greatest living soldier of his country, with a career of practically unbroken glory behind him. He had reached his apogee. We shall meet with him again under less happy conditions, when the sun of Plassey had begun to set.



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CHAPTER XXXIX.

CHANGES.

[Sidenote: 1751—"Give us back our eleven days"]

Meanwhile some changes were taking place in political affairs at home which were full of importance to the coming time. William Pitt had taken office; not, indeed, an office important enough for his genius, but still one which gave him an opportunity of making his power felt. The King still detested him; all the more, perhaps, because it was now becoming more and more evident that the King would have to reckon with him as Prime-minister before very long. The stately form of Pitt was, indeed, already throwing a gigantic shadow before it. Henry Fox, too, was beginning to show himself an administrator and a debater, and, it may be added, a political intriguer, of all but consummate ability. Murray was beginning to be recognized as a great advocate, and even a great man. Lyttelton was still making brilliant way in politics, but was even yet hovering somewhat uncertain between politics and literature, destined in the end to become another illustration of the career marred for both fields by the effort to work in both fields. On the other hand, Chesterfield had given up office. He had had a dispute with his colleagues when he was strongly in favor of making a peace, and they would not have it, and he left them to go their own way. He refused the title of duke which the King offered him. He withdrew for the remainder of his years to private life, saying: "I have been behind the scenes both of pleasure and business; I have seen all the coarse pulleys and dirty ropes which exhibit and move all the gaudy machines; and I have seen and smelt the tallow candles which illuminate the whole {275} decoration to the astonishment and admiration of the ignorant multitude." He seldom spoke in Parliament afterwards; he was growing deaf and weary. In 1751 he broke silence, and with success, when he delivered his celebrated speech on the reform of the calendar. He was "coached," as we should say now, by two able mathematicians, the Earl of Macclesfield and Mr. Bradley. The ignorant portion of the public were greatly excited by what they considered the loss of eleven days, and were strongly opposed to the whole scheme. Years later, when Mr. Bradley was sinking under mortal disease, many people ascribed his sufferings to a judgment from Heaven for having taken part in that "impious undertaking."

The "impious undertaking" was a very needed scientific reform in the calendar, which had long before been adopted in some other countries. Julius Caesar was the first great regulator of the calendar; his work in that way was not the least wonderful of his achievements. The calculations of his astronomers, however, were discovered in much later times to be "out" by eleven minutes in each year. When Pope Gregory the Thirteenth came to the throne of the papacy, in 1572, he found that the eleven minutes had grown by mere process of time to eleven days. He started a new reform of the calendar, which was adopted at once in Italy, Spain, and Portugal. It gradually commended itself to France and Germany, and it was adopted by Denmark and Sweden in 1700. England only came into line with the reform of the calendar in 1751. The Act of Parliament which sanctioned the change brought in the use of the words "new style" and "old style." Only Russia and Greece now of European countries cling to the old style. But the new style, as we have said, was bitterly resented by the mob in England, and every one remembers Hogarth's picture of the patriot drunk in the gutter with his banner near him bearing the inscription, "Give us back our eleven days."

Chesterfield laughed at the success of his speech on the {276} reform of the calendar, and made little of it. Perhaps he helped thus to explain the comparative failure of his whole career. Life was to him too much of a gibe and a sarcasm, and life will not be taken on those terms.

Lord Chesterfield was then out of the running, and Lord Granville's active career had closed. The men of the older school had had their day; the new men had pushed them from their stools. The age of Walpole is closed. The age of Chatham is about to open.

[Sidenote: 1751—Fred's epitaphs]

Early in the year 1751 death removed one of the elements of discord from the family circle of George the Second. The end had come for Frederick, Prince of Wales. The long, unnatural struggle was brought very suddenly to a close. On the 12th of March, 1751, the prince, who had been suffering from pleurisy, went to the House of Lords, and caught a chill which brought on a relapse. "Je sens la mort," he cried out on the 20th of March, and the princess, hearing the cry, ran towards him, and found that he was indeed dead. The general feeling of the country was perhaps not unfairly represented in the famous epigram which became the talk of the town: