3

Sweeping With the Broom of Plunder

Siraj ud-Daula led his troops down to Calcutta at far greater speed than anyone imagined possible. Mughal armies were usually notoriously slow-moving, often managing no more than three miles a day; but Siraj urged his forces forward, making some 130 miles in ten days despite the drenching tropical heat of a Bengali June.

Governor Drake believed for several days after the fall of the Kasimbazar factory that the new Nawab was merely bluffing and would never dare to attack Fort William. So poor was his intelligence that he continued to think this even as Siraj’s forces were nearing his outer defences. Before the Company’s Council at Calcutta had managed even to discuss any coherent defence strategy, the first of Siraj’s troops were sighted on 13 June approaching the northern suburbs near Dumdum, and advancing steadily towards the Maratha Ditch.

Drake was not just incompetent, he was also deeply unpopular. According to William Tooke, one of the Calcutta civilians who volunteered to join the town militia, Drake was such a divisive figure that it was practically impossible for him to organise a coherent defence: ‘Mr Drake’s conduct of late years had without doubt been very blameable,’ he wrote, carrying on ‘that indiscreet (not to say any worse) affair with his sister, is a circumstance that can never be forgiven him; for the crime was not only itself bad, but after that, every man of character and good sense shunned and avoided him, which was the cause of his running after and keeping very indifferent company, and of committing a thousand little meannesses and low actions, far unbecoming any man, much more a Governour.’¹

Nor was Drake’s military commander, Colonel Minchin, any more reassuring. As one survivor later wrote, ‘Touching the military capacity of our commandant, I am a stranger. I can only say we were either unhappy in his keeping it to himself if he had any, as neither I, nor I believe anyone else, was witness to any part of his conduct that spoke or bore the appearance of his being the commanding military officer.’²

Watts estimated that Siraj was marching on Calcutta with a force of around 70,000. Against these Drake could field 265 uniformed Company troops and an armed but untrained militia of 250 civilians, a grand total of 515 men in arms.³ Of these ‘there were about 100 Armenians who were entirely useless, and then there was a number among the militia boys and slaves who were not capable of holding a musket, so that in fact our garrison did not consist of more than 250 fighting men, officers included’.⁴ In such a situation, grovelling apologies and negotiations would probably have been the wisest strategy. Instead, Drake began, belatedly, to build a series of batteries guarding the principal crossing places over the Maratha Ditch.

The idea of demolishing some of the buildings encroaching upon and overlooking the Fort was mooted, but quickly rejected. According to the account of Captain Grant, the Adjutant General, ‘Such was the levity of the times that severe measures were not esteemed necessary’:

Our Intelligence of the Nabob’s Motions, and numbers, was always very uncertain, and we could never be thoroughly persuaded that he would advance against our Batterys. The most we imagined was that he would form a Blockade and Cut off our Provision until we came to an accommodation …

So little credit was then given, and even to the very last day, that the Nabob would venture to attack us, that it occasion’d a general grumbling to leave any of the European Houses without [the outer perimeter of the defences]. And should it be proposed by any Person to demolish as many Houses as would be necessary to make the Fort defensible, his opinion would have been thought Ridiculous, even had there been sufficient time to execute such a work or powder sufficient to blow them up.⁵

The ‘levity of the times’ began to dissipate when Siraj ud-Daula arrived in person on 16 June and directed his heavy artillery to begin firing into the town. The first two attempts by Mughal forces to cross the Ditch were driven off with heavy casualties. But by evening, twenty of the defenders were dead and ‘just before dark, the whole body [of the Mughal advance guard had] inclined southward, and successfully crossed the Ditch that surrounds the Black Town, the extent of it being so great, and passable in all parts, that it was impossible to do anything to interrupt them’.⁶

The following day, the Black Town was comprehensively looted: ‘vast numbers entered our bounds, plundering and setting fire to every house, and by the evening the whole town was surrounded … Several thousands this night got into the great bazaar where they murdered every person they met and plundered and set fire to all the houses.’⁷ The garrison did not make the slightest effort to protect the Black Town or offer shelter in the fort to the terrified inhabitants. No wonder, then, that by the second day all the Indian support staff had defected, leaving the garrison without lascars to pull the guns, coolies to carry shot and powder, carpenters to build batteries and repair the gun carriages, or even cooks to feed the militia.

On the morning of the 18th, the Mughal advance was repulsed in tough house-to-house street fighting to the north of the Fort, but Siraj’s troops were still making steady progress advancing forward in the east. There, at 3 p.m., Company forces were impelled to retreat from their stronghold at the gaol, with heavy losses: ‘the small party bravely defended it for six hours, till most of the men being wounded, were obliged to retire.’ By the evening, the Mughals had also broken through the Company lines near the Great Tank. The northern and south-west batteries were now both in danger of being cut off and so were quickly abandoned. All Company forces were now compelled to withdraw to the inner line of defence, the Fort itself: ‘The next thing considered of was a disposition for the Defence of the Fort, which was all that was left us now to maintain,’ wrote Captain Grant.

Few expected that the Batterys would have been so suddenly quitted, and most people foresaw that the fall of them would be attended with fatal consequences. For the Enemy’s getting possession of the houses contiguous to the Fort and the Church would command the Bastions and Ramparts, so that it would be impossible to stand at the Guns, exposed to the small arms of such a multitude as would occupy those, especially as the parapets of the [Fort’s] bastions were very low, and the embrasures so wide that they hardly afforded any shelter. We had sandbags, which might in some measure supply this defect, but we were so abandon’d by all sorts of labourers that we could not get them carried upon the ramparts. And our Military and Militia were so harassed for want of rest and refreshment, that it was at first impossible to get them to do anything.⁸

A late-night Council of War established that there was a maximum of three days’ ammunition left, and that the soldiers were already exhausted and in many cases drunk: ‘Half our men in liquor, no supplies of provisions or water sent out, the drum beat to arms three different times on alarm of the enemy being under the walls, but hardly a man could be got up onto the ramparts.’⁹

‘Now for the first time we began to look upon ourselves in a dangerous way,’ wrote David Renny of the militia.

We were in a very distressed condition … It is almost impossible to conceive the confusion there was in the Fort there being at least two thousand women and children, nor was there any method to prevent these coming in as the military and militia declared they would not fight unless their families were admitted in the factory. The Enemy began now to fire warmly upon the Fort from all quarters. Our garrison began to murmur for want of provisions having not a single cook in the Fort, notwithstanding there had been several lodged there on purpose to dress their provisions. The whole Garrison was quite fatigued having been under arms great part of the preceding night. Many of the military and militia having got liquor begun to be very mutinous and under no command, having drawn bayonets on several of their officers.

It was now thought necessary to send our ladies on board some of the ships, which was accordingly done. About 12 o’clock [midnight] news was brought us that the Enemy were going to storm the Fort there being ladders preparing close under the range of godowns [warehouses] to the southward. Immediately every person repaired to the curtain [wall] where we heard them at work. Orders were now given to beat to arms but none of the Armenians or Portuguese appeared, having hid themselves in different parts of the Fort. We threw some hand Grenades down amongst the Enemy, which soon dislodged them.¹⁰

The following day, the 19th, resistance began to give way to outright panic. The Nawab’s principal general, Mir Jafar Ali Khan, pressed forward with his assault and by noon, when it became known there was only two days’ supply of ammunition left, the majority of the Council argued in favour of abandoning the Fort altogether and retreating to the ships anchored in the river. By 2 p.m., while the Council were still debating their plans for withdrawal, a cannonball burst through the Council Chamber and the meeting broke up ‘with the utmost clamour, confusion, tumult and perplexity’.¹¹ Morale had now hit rock bottom and despairing drunkenness had broken out everywhere. Soon after lunchtime, there began a chaotic evacuation.

As flights of fire arrows poured into the Fort and onto the shore, one ship, the Dodally, headed upriver without orders, to avoid catching fire. The other vessels began to do the same. Thinking the ships were departing without them, the waiting women and children took fright, ran out of the Fort and stampeded down to the shore in an attempt to board and save themselves. All the boats were filled to overcapacity and several capsized.

At that point, ‘many of the gentlemen on shore, who perhaps never dreamt of leaving the factory before everybody else did, immediately jumped into such boats as were at the factory and rowed to the ships. Among those who left the factory in this unaccountable manner were the Governor Mr Drake … [and] Commandant Minchin … This ill-judged circumstance occasioned all the uproar and misfortune which followed.’¹² Within an hour, all the ships had weighed anchor and began drifting slowly downstream towards the jungles of the Sunderbans, and the coast beyond.

‘Finding that matters went hard with him,’ wrote Ghulam Hussain Khan, ‘Mr Drake abandoned everything and fled, without so much as giving notice to his countrymen.’

He took shelter on board of a ship, and with a small number of friends and principal persons, he disappeared at once. Those who remained, finding themselves abandoned by their chief, concluded their case must be desperate, yet preferring death to life, they fought it out, until their powder and ball failing at last, they bravely drank up the bitter cup of death; some others, seized by the claws of destiny, were made prisoners.¹³

The remaining garrison hoped to escape on the Prince George, which was still anchored a little upriver. But early the following morning, the ship ran aground at low tide, and could not be budged. ‘Finding all Retreat cut off, the remaining defenders shut the Gates and were resolved to sell their lives as dear as they could, and fought like mad men.’¹⁴

Under the command of the Dublin-born John Zephaniah Holwell, the roughly 150 remaining members of the garrison who had failed to make their escape continued the resistance for one more morning. But the Mughal troops attacked fiercely and, just as Captain Grant had predicted, Mir Jafar sent his sharpshooters with their long-barrelled jezails onto the flat parapet of the church tower and the houses overlooking the ramparts, ‘which being loftier than the walls, and commanding all the bastions, galled us so badly with shot that no man could stand them, they killing or wounding all that appeared in sight, wounding most of our Officers, several of whom after dyed of wounds. The surviving officers were obliged to exert themselves, pistol in hand, to keep the soldiers to their quarters.’¹⁵

By mid-afternoon, many more of the defenders were dead, and those that lived were ‘exhausted of strength and vigour’. With only a hundred fighters left on the ramparts, ‘about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, the Enemy called out to us not to fire, in consequence to which Holwell shewed a flag of truce, and gave orders for the garrison not to fire’.

Upon which the Enemy in vast numbers came under our walls, and at once began to set fire to the windows and Gates of the Fort which were stopt up with bales of cotton and cloth, and began to break open the Fort Gate, scaling our walls on all sides. This put us in the utmost confusion, some opening the back gate and running into the river, others to take possession of a boat that lay ashore half afloat and half dry. It was so full in an instant that she could not be got off.¹⁶

Inside the Fort, Siraj’s forces were now beginning to loot: ‘The factory was in a few minutes filled with the enemy,’ recalled John Cook, ‘who without loss of time began plundering everything they could set their hands on; we were rifled of our watches, buckles, buttons &c but no farther violence used to our persons. The bales of broadcloth, chests of coral, plate and treasure laying in the apartments of the gentlemen who resided in the factory were broke open, and the Moors were wholly taken up in plundering.’¹⁷

That evening, having ‘swept the town of Calcutta with the broom of plunder’, Siraj ud-Daula was brought in his litter to visit his new possession.¹⁸ He held a durbar in the centre of the Fort where he announced that Calcutta was to be renamed Alinagar, after Imam Ali – appropriately for a prominent city in a Shia-ruled province. He then appointed one of his Hindu courtiers, Raja Manikchand, to be the Fort Keeper of Alinagar and ordered the demolition of Government House, whose beauty he admired, but considered it worthy to be ‘the dwelling of Princes rather than merchants’, apparently mistaking it for the private property of the detested Drake.¹⁹ ‘Siraj ud-Daula seemed astonished to find so small a garrison,’ remembered one of the prisoners, ‘and immediately enquired for Mr Drake, with whom he appeared much incensed. Mr Holwell was carried to him with his hands bound, and upon complaining of that usage, the Nabob gave orders for loosing his hands and assured him upon the faith of a soldier that not a hair of our heads should be hurt.’²⁰ He then offered thanksgiving prayers for his success in battle, and was carried out to his tents.

So far, the surrendered garrison had been treated unusually well by Mughal standards: there had been no immediate enslavement, no summary executions, no impaling, no beheading and no torture, all of which would have been, in the Mughal scheme of things, quite routine punishments for rebellious subjects. It was only after Siraj had left that things began to fall apart.

Many in the Company’s garrison were still blind drunk, and in the early evening one intoxicated soldier who was being stripped of his goods became incensed and promptly pulled out a pistol and shot his Mughal plunderer dead. Immediately the tone changed. All the survivors were herded into a tiny punishment cell, eighteen feet long by fourteen feet ten inches wide, with only one small window, little air and less water. The cell was known as the Black Hole. There, according to the Mughal chronicler Yusuf Ali Khan, the officers ‘confined nearly 100 Firangis who fell victim to the claws of fate on that day in a small room. As luck would have it, in the room where the Firangis were kept confined, all of them got suffocated and died.’²¹

The numbers are unclear, and much debated: Holwell, who wrote a highly coloured account of the Black Hole in 1758, and began the mythologising of the event, wrote that one woman and 145 Company men were shoved inside, of whom 123 died.²² This was clearly an exaggeration. The most painstaking recent survey of the evidence concludes 64 people entered the Black Hole and that 21 survived. Among the young men who did not come out was the nineteen-year-old Stair Dalrymple from North Berwick, who only two years earlier had been complaining of Calcutta’s cost of living and dreaming of becoming Governor.

Whatever the accurate figures, the event generated howls of righteous indignation for several generations among the British in India and 150 years later was still being taught in British schools as demonstrative of the essential barbarity of Indians and illustrative of why British rule was supposedly both necessary and justified. But at the time, the Black Hole was barely remarked upon in contemporary sources, and several detailed accounts, including that of Ghulam Hussain Khan, do not mention it at all. The Company had just lost its most lucrative trading station, and that, rather than the fate of its feckless garrison, was what really worried the Company authorities.²³

The full scale of the disaster represented by the fall of Calcutta became apparent in the weeks that followed.

Everyone soon realised that it changed almost everything: William Lindsay wrote to the future historian of the Company, Robert Orme, that it was ‘a scene of destruction and dissolution … and makes me tremble when I think of the consequences that it will be attended with, not only to every private Gentlemen in India but to the English nation in General. I hardly think all the force we have in India will be sufficient to resettle us here into any footing of security, we now being almost as much in want of everything as when we first settled here.’²⁴

It was not just a loss of lives and prestige, the trauma and the humiliation that horrified the Company authorities, it was above all an economic body blow for the EIC, which could only send its share price into a possibly terminal decline: ‘I would mention what the Company has lost by this melancholy affair,’ wrote Captain Renny. ‘But it is impossible, for though the present loss is immense, yet it will be still more in the consequences, if not immediately resettled.’

The cargoes now expected from England will remain unsold, the ships remain at a great expense of demurrage, the same will be repeated next season. The articles of saltpetre and raw silk which we cannot well be without must now be bought at a high price from the Dutch, French, Prussians and Danes, so must Dacca muslins … to the great loss of the revenue.

The different parts of India will also severely feel the loss of Calcutta, for if I am not mistaken the Coast of Coromandel and Malabar, the Gulf of Persia and Red Sea, nay even Manila, China and Coast of Affrica were obliged to Bengal for taking off their cotton, pepper, drugs, fruits, chank, cowrees, tin too &c: as on the other hand they were supplied from Bengal with what they could not well be without, such as raw silk and its various manufactures, opium, vast quantities of cotton cloth, rice, ginger, turmerick, long pepper &c. and all sorts of other goods.²⁵

News of the fall of Kasimbazar, and a first request for military assistance, reached Madras on 14 July. It was a full month later, on 16 August, that the news of Siraj ud-Daula’s successful attack on Fort William finally arrived. In normal circumstances, Madras would probably have sent a delegation to Murshidabad, negotiations would have taken place, apologies and assurances would have been issued, an indemnity would have been paid and trading would have carried on as before, to the benefit of both sides. But on this occasion, due not to good planning so much as chance, there was another option.

For, as fate would have it, Robert Clive and his three regiments of Royal Artillery had just arrived on the Coromandel Coast at Fort St David, south of Madras, aboard Admiral Watson’s flotilla of fully armed and battle-ready men-of-war. The force was intended to take on the French, not the Nawab of Bengal, and in the discussions that followed several members of Madras Council argued that the fleet should stay in the Coromandel and continue to guard against the French flotilla believed sent from Port Lorient. This was expected any day, along with news of the outbreak of war, and a strong case was made by several Council members that, having lost one major trading station, it would be an act of extreme carelessness on the part of the Company to risk losing a second.

Moreover, Admiral Watson, as a loyal servant of the Crown, initially saw his role to defend British national interests against the French, not to defend the Company’s economic interests from local potentates. But Clive was not going to miss his big chance, especially as he had just lost substantial sums invested both directly in Bengal and indirectly in Company stock. He forcefully, and ultimately successfully, argued for a more aggressive course of action, eventually winning over the other Council members, and persuading Watson to come with him, along with all four of his battleships and a frigate. Watson’s one insistence was to wait until the onset of the monsoon in early October, after which the French were less likely to risk sailing into open waters, and he would have several months’ grace in which to re-establish British interests in Bengal without leaving the Coromandel criminally undefended.²⁶

Within a few weeks, a triumphant Clive was able to write to his father: ‘This expedition, if attended by success, may enable me to do great things. It is by far the grandest of my undertakings. I go with great forces and great authority.’ His masters in Leadenhall Street he addressed in a rather more measured and less egotistical manner: ‘Honourable Gentlemen,’ he wrote. ‘From many hands you will hear of the capture of Calcutta by the Moors, and the chains of misfortunes which have happened to the Company in particular and to the nation in general.’

Every breast seems filled with grief, horror and resentment … Upon this melancholy occasion, the Governour and Council thought proper to summon me to this place. As soon as an expedition was resolved upon, I offered my services which at last was accepted, and I am on the point of embarking on board His Majesty’s squadron with a fine body of Europeans, full of spirit and resentment for the insults and barbarities inflicted on so many British subjects. I flatter myself that this expedition will not end with the retaking of Calcutta only, and that the Company’s estate in these parts will be settled in a better and more lasting condition than ever.²⁷

The Select Committee at Madras also shared Clive’s ambitions: ‘The mere retaking of Calcutta should, we think, be by no means the end of the undertaking,’ they wrote to the directors in London in early October. ‘Not only should [the EIC’s Bengal] settlements and factories be restored, but all their privileges established in full, and ample reparation made for the loss they have lately sustained; otherwise we are of the opinion it would have been better that nothing had been attempted, than to have added the heavy charge of this armament to their former loss, without securing their colonies and trade from future insults and exactions.’²⁸

Two months were filled with detailed planning, refitting ships, loading cannon and preparing stores. The relief force consisting of 785 European troops, 940 sepoys and 300 marines, a greater naval and military force than had ever before been gathered together by the British in India, eventually set sail on 13 October. But the same strong monsoon winds that Watson knew would prevent the French from venturing out of port came close to sinking the entire expedition. As it was, the fleet was immediately scattered. Some ships were blown as far south as Sri Lanka, and even Watson’s flagship, the Kent, took six weeks to reach the point where Clive was able to see the waters of the Bay of Bengal take on the distinctive colour of Ganges silt.²⁹

It was not until 9 December that the first ships of the task force, taking advantage of low tides, turned into the Hughli. By this stage half of Clive’s soldiers had already succumbed to various diseases, including an outbreak of scurvy. Six days later, the Kent dropped anchor at Fulta, where the survivors of the Calcutta debacle had taken shelter on the edge of a malarial swamp, and where just under half of the ragged refugees had already died of fever and were now buried in the alluvial Sunderbans silt.³⁰

Two more of Watson’s ships turned up soon after; while waiting for the remaining two, the Marlborough and Cumberland, which carried the bulk of the expedition’s artillery and troops, Clive wrote to Raja Manikchand, the new Fort Keeper of Alinagar-Calcutta. He announced that he had come with a force of unprecedented size – ‘a larger military force than has ever appeared in Bengal’ and that ‘we are come to demand satisfaction’. But Clive’s threats had little effect. As Ghulam Hussain Khan commented, ‘the British were then known in Bengal only as merchants’, and no one at court ‘had any idea of the abilities of that nation in war, nor any idea of their many resources in a day of reverse’.³¹

With no reply forthcoming, and disease weakening his ranks by the day, on 27 December Clive’s expedition cast anchor and sailed slowly upriver, still two ships short. They glided silently past coconut groves and through tangled mangrove swamps thick with lotus leaves and full of huge bats and tigers. As they approached the first serious obstacle, the Fort of Budge Budge, whose heavy guns commanded a bend in the river, they disembarked the sepoys, who had a tough march of sixteen hours, wading sometimes breast-high through water, at other times stumbling through jungle or marshy paddy.³²

Towards sunset, as they drew near the Fort, Raja Manikchand sprung an ambush, appearing suddenly out of the jungle, attacking from an unexpected direction and achieving complete surprise. The confused skirmish lasted an hour, with high casualties on both sides. Clive was rattled, and was on the verge of ordering a retreat. But the rapid file firing of the army’s new Brown Bess muskets, supported by field artillery, worked its dark magic. As Clive’s nephew Edward Maskelyne recorded, the Mughals ‘were much alarmed at the smartness of our fire, and startled at the appearance of the cannon which they thought it impossible for us to have transported over the ground we had marched the preceding night. Their loss is computed at 200 killed and wounded, 4 Jemidars and 1 elephant killed, and their commander [Raja Manikchand] shot thro the turban.’³³

When Manikchand retired, Watson’s ships were free to unleash broadsides on the Fort, which quickly silenced the Mughal guns. As the troops were being unloaded to begin the ground attack, ‘one Strahan, a common sailor, belonging to the Kent’, having drunk too much rum, staggered up the bank, waded over the moat and ‘took into his head to scale a breach that had been made by the cannon of the ships’. Here he was confronted by the garrison, ‘at whom he flourished his cutlass, and fired his pistol. Then having given out three loud huzzas, he cried out, “The place is mine.”’ His comrades rushed to save him and the garrison quickly melted into the night.³⁴

The fleet then proceeded further up the river, and two more of Siraj’s forts were abandoned without a fight.

As dawn broke on 2 January 1757, the squadron came within sight of Fort William. The marines were landed and a single broadside unleashed on the defences. There was a brief exchange of fire, leaving nine men dead, before Manikchand again withdrew: ‘The senseless governor of the place,’ wrote Ghulam Hussain Khan, ‘intimidated by so much boldness, and not finding in himself courage enough to stand an engagement, thought it prudent to decline a nearer approach, and he fled with all his might. The English general [Clive], seeing the enemy disappearing, took possession of the factory and the fort, raised everywhere his victorious standards, and sent the refugee gentlemen, everyone to his ancient abode, and everyone to his own home.’³⁵

People waved. One man hung a Union Jack from a tree;³⁶ but as the sun rose, the full scale of the devastation became apparent: Government House, St Anne’s church and the grand mansions lining the river were all burned-out shells, rising jagged from the loot-littered riverfront like blackened, shattered teeth from a diseased gum. The wharves were derelict; inside the mansions, the gorgeous Georgian furniture, family paintings and even harpsichords had been burned as firewood where they stood in the middle of what had once been drawing rooms. A small mosque had been erected in the eastern curtain wall of the fort.³⁷

Nevertheless, by eight o’clock on the morning of 2 January 1757, this shattered and half-ruined Calcutta was back in the hands of the Company.

On 3 January, Clive declared war on Siraj ud-Daula in the name of the Company; Watson did the same in the name of the Crown. It was the first time that the EIC had ever formally declared war on an Indian prince: ‘The chess board of time presented a new game,’ noted Ghulam Husain Salim’s account, Riyazu-s-salatin.³⁸

Characteristically, Clive went straight onto the offensive. On 9 January, while the inhabitants repaired their homes, and the engineers began to rebuild the fortifications of Fort William, finally demolishing all the buildings which overlooked its walls, Clive and Watson set off in the Kent to attack Siraj ud-Daula’s principal port, Hughli Bandar, to exact a violent revenge for the destruction of Calcutta. On arrival, they raked the ghats of Hughli with grapeshot, then landed the grenadiers at four o’clock in the evening, seizing the area around the fort. At 2 a.m., under a full moon, they scaled the fortifications with siege ladders. Once inside, they made ‘themselves masters of the place, in less than an hour, with little or no loss, effecting a prodigious slaughter’ of the sleeping garrison. Then they set about looting and burning the port ‘the better to distress the enemy, the more to alarm the province, and to work upon Siraj’s governing passion, Fear. Orders were given for burning the houses, and for destroying, particularly, all the magazines on both sides of the river.’³⁹ Then looting parties fanned out, seizing weapons and burning several villages and their granaries as they went. By evening, they were back behind the walls of Fort William.

Two weeks later, on the 23rd, having gathered together another enormous army 60,000-strong, Siraj ud-Daula again descended on Calcutta. As before, he moved at speed. On 4 February, Clive was surprised by the news that Siraj and his forces were already camping in a pleasure garden on the northern outskirts of Calcutta, just to the north of the walls. Two senior Company negotiators were sent at his invitation to speak with him, but Siraj treated them ‘with such a Mixture of Haughtiness and Contempt, as gave little Hopes of their making any great progress in their Business’.⁴⁰ The men were invited to return the following day ‘to parley’, but did not do so, anticipating a trap. Instead, Clive again fell back on his favourite tactic from his Carnatic days: a surprise night attack.

Acting with his usual decisiveness, Clive ‘went immediately on board Admiral Watson’s ship, and represented to him the necessity of attacking the Nabob without delay; and desired the assistance of four or five hundred sailors, to carry the ammunition and draw the artillery; which he [Watson] assented to. The sailors were landed about one o’clock in the morning. About two, the troops were under arms, and about four they marched to the attack of the Nabob’s camp.’⁴¹

The new day, 5 February 1757, dawned with a thick, early morning winter fog billowing off the river. Silently, ‘we marched with 470 rank & file, 800 sepoys, 6 field pieces, 1 Howitzer & 70 of the train, besides a body of seamen, half of whom were employed in drawing the guns, whilst the other half bore arms,’ wrote Edward Maskelyne in his journal.

At day break, we arrived close to the Nabobs camp before we were challenged, when we received a brisk fire, which was returned by our advance sepoys. The enemy retreated, and we pursued our march through their camp undisturbed till reaching the center of it. Here a body of 300 horses appeared in the fog within 10 yards of the battalion and we gave them two [volleys of] fire by platoons and such havock was made amongst them, that by all accounts not above 13 escaped. After this their whole army began to surround us in great bodies which obliged us to keep them at a distance by a constant fire of musquetry and artillery. We were full 2 hours in marching thro their camp, several charges being made on our rear by the horses; tho not with equal courage to their first.⁴²

By 11 a.m., Clive’s force had returned dispirited to the city, having lost nearly 150 men, including both Clive’s aide-de-camp and his secretary, both of whom were killed by his side: ‘It was the warmest service I ever yet was engaged in,’ Clive wrote to this father, ‘and the attack failed in its main object’ – capturing or killing the Nawab.⁴³ Clive was unsure whether the manoeuvre had been a success or a failure, but suspected the latter. Their guides had got lost in the fog and they had narrowly failed to attack the royal enclosure, shooting wildly into the gloom, unclear if they were hitting or missing their targets. They had also lost two cannon, which they had to leave behind, stuck in the mud of the Nawab’s camp. What they had no idea of was the terror they inspired in Siraj ud-Daula, who only narrowly escaped with his life. Around 1,500 of his Murshidabad infantry were not so lucky, nor were 600 cavalry and four elephants. Ghulam Hussain Khan related how the attack looked from the Mughal point of view: ‘They put out their boats about two in the morning,’ he wrote, ‘and rowed towards the extremity of the enemy camp, where they remained waiting during the latter part of the night.’

At about the dawn of day they landed at the back of the army, and entered the camp, where they leisurely commenced a hot fire, which being repeated by those in the boats, rendered musket balls as common as hail stones, so that vast numbers of men and horses, which happened to be exposed to it, were slain and wounded. Dost Mohammad Khan, who was not only the principal commander, but a man of great personal valour, and one of those most attached to Siraj ud-Daula, was wounded and disabled. Numbers of other officers underwent the same fate; and it is reported that the design was no less than to lay hold of Siraj himself, and to carry him away.

Luckily for him there fell such a foul fog and mist, of the kind called in Hindian a cohessa, and it occasioned such a darkness, that the two men [Clive and Siraj], though ever so close, could not distinguish each other. This darkness made them mistake their way, and missed Siraj ud-Daula’s private enclosure, so that this Prince narrowly escaped. It was observed of the English that they marched steadily, with order and deliberation, as if it had been a review day, firing endlessly on every side, until they arrived at the front of the camp, from whence they returned leisurely to their posts and fortified houses, without suffering the loss of a single man.⁴⁴

Quite unknown to Clive at the time, his night attack was in fact a decisive turning point. Terrified by the unexpected nature of the assault, Siraj struck camp and retreated ten miles that morning. The following day he sent an ambassador with proposals for peace. Even before the night attack, he had been aware of the damage done to the Bengal economy by the destruction of Calcutta, and he was prepared to be a little generous. But on 9 February he signed the Treaty of Alinagar, which granted almost all the Company’s main demands, restoring all the existing English privileges and freeing all English goods of taxes, as well as allowing the Company to keep their fortifications and establish a mint. His only insistence was that Drake be removed – ‘Tell Roger Drake’ not to ‘disturb our affairs’ – something the Company was more than happy to grant.⁴⁵

The following day, Siraj ud-Daula began his march back to Murshidabad, leaving Clive and Watson astonished at their own success. Clive was ready to return to Madras, having fulfilled all his war aims with minimum cost and casualties: as he wrote to his father on 23 February: ‘I expect to return very shortly to the coast, as all is over here.’⁴⁶

For his part, however, Watson reported to the Crown, not the Company, and for him things had just become a great deal more complicated.⁴⁷ A few days earlier, he had been officially notified of the outbreak of what future generations would call the Seven Years War. Around the world, from Quebec to the Senegal River, from Ohio to Hanover, Minorca to Cuba, hostilities were now finally breaking out between Britain and France in every imperial theatre. Watson’s instructions arrived in a packet from London, with an official copy of the declaration of war and a letter from the Admiralty directing ‘all officers under the King to distress the enemy as far as it is in their power’.⁴⁸

Watson was unequivocal about what he now needed to do: attack the French, wherever they were to be found. And in the case of Bengal, that meant starting by attacking the French colony of Chandernagar, twenty miles upstream.

Relations between the authorities in Chandernagar and Calcutta had always been surprisingly cordial: after the fall of Calcutta, the French in Chandernagar had been generously hospitable to the Company refugees as they fled Siraj ud-Daula, reserving their anger only for Drake and his Council: ‘Their shameful flight covers all Europeans with a disgrace which they will never wipe out in this count,’ wrote the French Governor, M. Renault. ‘Everyone curses, detests, abhors them … In short, whatever one may say, these gentlemen, especially Mr Drake, will never free themselves from such infamy, and Mr Drake will never deprive his nation of the right to hang him and all his Council.’⁴⁹

Given this, the French were quick to reach out to their British counterparts after the recapture of the city, seeking a local neutrality in case of the outbreak of war. Calcutta responded warmly, and negotiations began. It was Watson who broke them off on 6 March, just hours before the treaty of neutrality was to be signed. According to Jean Law, the Admiral took the stand ‘that the Chandernagar authorities were not empowered to make treaties, and therefore he had declined to sign the draft. The truth, however, was that on the very day fixed for the signing, the Admiral was informed that his two lost and long-awaited ships had arrived at the mouth of the Ganges, and it was this news that made him change his mind. The English army now set off to march towards Chandernagar, while the missing ships prepared to sail up the Ganges.’⁵⁰

On 8 March, Clive began his march at the head of a small army which had now swelled to 2,700. He took his time, taking three days to cover the twenty miles separating the two rival trading stations. Two days later, the Nawab wrote Clive a letter which the latter took as giving Siraj’s assent for an attack on the French. This was in return for an EIC promise of military assistance should Bengal be attacked by the Afghan monarch Ahmed Shah Durrani, who had just seized Delhi on the first of what were to be seventeen annual raids on north India, and who was said to be planning a looting expedition eastwards. By the 12th, Clive had encamped two miles from Chandernagar and called upon the French to surrender. The French declined to do so.

Chandernagar had, like Calcutta, recently outgrown all its rival settlements to become the prime French trading post in the East. Also like Calcutta, it was vulnerable to attack, less from the land, for its Fort d’Orléans, built on the principles of Sébastien de Vauban, was a much more impressive fortification than Fort William; but its defences against assaults from the river were far less formidable. Renault was aware of this, and as soon as war broke out he sank four ships and ran a boom and several chains around them to block the British warships from coming close to the vulnerable eastern face of his fort.

Early on the morning of 23 March, Clive stormed and took the principal French battery commanding the river. From that point on, Admiral Watson took over and it was to sea power, not Clive’s land forces, that most casualties fell. The French, who had only 700 men to defend their fort, fought bravely in their burning, disintegrating buildings, with no possibility of relief.

It was again Clive’s nephew who left the best record of the taking of Chandernagar in his journal: ‘The Kent & Tyger were all this time getting up the river,’ wrote Edward Maskelyne, ‘in the passage of which they were greatly retarded by the French having sunk four ships in the channel.’

This difficulty was at last removed [once the chains and booms had been cut away] & the two ships drew near the fort, but before they got within musquet shot, the French from 16 guns made great havoc. When the broadsides began to fire the enemy soon quitted their guns for they lost 150 officers in two hours, & the faces of two bastions were in the meantime brought to the ground, so that the Monsieurs hung out a flag & surrendered at discretion.

[Before they did so] the quarter-deck of the Kent was cleared of every man but the Admiral [Watson] & pilot, Captain Speke, and all the officers being killed or wounded, as were about 150 men in both ships. The Tyger suffered vastly in seamen & the Kent both in officers & sailors. Captain Speke has his leg sadly mauled & his son Billy has lost one of his with part of his thigh by the same shot. That charming young fellow Perreau was shot through the head, and Second Lieutenant Hayes lost his thigh and is since dead.

As we [land forces] were under cover of houses we suffered little, though we greatly incommoded the enemy in reverse by our shot and shells. It must be owned considering all things that the Messieurs made a good defence, though the Fort held out only 2 hours after the ships came before it.

‘Perhaps you will hear of few instances where two ships have met with greater damage than the Kent and Tyger in this engagement,’ wrote one of the surviving sailors. ‘We have never yet obtained a victory at so dear a rate.’⁵¹

The destruction within the Fort was every bit as severe as that on deck. By sunset, all five of the French 24-pounder guns had been blasted off their mounts, ‘the walls of d’Orléans were in ruins, the gunners almost all killed, and the men were being shot down by musketeers from the roofs of neighbouring houses and the tops of the masts and rigging of the ships. In a single day’s fighting, the French lost two Captains and two hundred men killed and wounded.’⁵²

The capture of Chandernagar was a body blow to the entire French presence in India. As Jean Law noted, ‘with the fall of Chandernagar, the gate to the entire country was thrown open to the English, a gate that opened onto the road of glory and riches. By the same event, the principal place of commerce of the French Company, the sole port where our ships could shelter, was now closed for a long time. A flourishing colony was destroyed and many honest people in French India were ruined. Indeed, I saw myself ruined.’⁵³

While the battle was taking place, Siraj ud-Daula remained in an agony of indecision: wishing to help the French against the British, but not daring to give the Company any excuse to break their treaty with him. At one point he sent a relief force towards Chandernagar, hesitated, and then withdrew it. A day later, making the best of a fait accompli, he sent a message to Clive telling of his ‘inexpressible pleasure’ at his victory. With the message he sent a present.

‘Now taking the cotton wool of recklessness from the ear,’ recorded the Riyazu-s-salatin, the young Nawab tried to win the friendship of Clive with a gift of two leopards ‘extremely good at catching deer’. But it was now much too late. ‘For the arrow of fate cannot be parried by the shield of effort once God’s decree has already passed another way.’⁵⁴

As April drew to a close, Clive and Watson began to pack up and prepare their troops to leave Bengal for the Coromandel, nervous at how long they had left Madras undefended and open to a French attack. There the whole Bengal campaign would have ended, but for the hatred and disgust now felt for Siraj ud-Daula by his own court, and especially Bengal’s all-powerful dynasty of bankers, the Jagat Seths.

Siraj ud-Daula’s flight from Calcutta after Clive’s night attack, followed by the humiliation of the Treaty of Alinagar, had broken the spell of fear with which Siraj had kept his court cowed. He had alienated many of his grandfather’s old military commanders, particularly the veteran general Mir Jafar Ali Khan, an Arab soldier of fortune originally from the Shia shrine town of Najaf in modern Iraq. Mir Jafar had played his part in many of Aliverdi’s most crucial victories against the Marathas, and had most recently led the successful attack on Calcutta. But having taken the town and defeated the Company in battle, he had then been sidelined, and the governorship given instead to a Hindu rival, Raja Manikchand. He and his brothers-in-arms from the Maratha Wars, ‘commanders of merit, as well as of old standing, all deserving the utmost regard, were tired of living under such an administration,’ wrote Ghulam Hussain Khan, ‘and wished no better than to be rid of such a government by Siraj ud-Daula’s death’.

So that whenever they chanced to perceive any appearance of discontent anywhere, or any hatred against the government, they would send secret messages to the party, with exhortations to contrive some mode of deliverance, under promise of their being most heartily supported. Mir Jafar Khan, as the most considerable and the most injured of the malcontents, was the foremost amongst them. Jagat Seth had secretly promised to support him vigorously; and they formed together a confederacy … Other disaffected grandees joined together in the scheme of overthrowing Siraj ud-Daula, whose character of ferocity and thoughtlessness kept them in continual alarms, and whose fecklessness of temper made them tremble.⁵⁵

The plotters’ first plan had been to support Aliverdi Khan’s daughter, Ghasiti Begum, but Siraj had moved so quickly against her at his succession that that plan had never got off the ground. A second scheme had revolved around supporting Siraj’s cousin, Shaukat Jung of Purnea, ‘a subahdar to the taste of Jagat Seth and the chief Moors and Rajas’, but the latter had proved even less dependable than Siraj.⁵⁶ He went into battle against his psychotic cousin in such a cloud of opium that he was ‘incapable of holding up his head’ or to do more ‘than listen to the songs of his women … so alighted from his elephant … and was totally out of his senses when a musquet-ball, lodging into his forehead, made him return his soul to its maker’.⁵⁷

Only now that Clive had demonstrated his military capacity in taking back Calcutta, then seizing Chandernagar, did the plotters decide to reach out to the Company as a third option, hoping to harness the EIC’s military forces for their own ends. William Watts, who had just returned to the looted English factory of Kasimbazar under the terms of the Treaty of Alinagar, was the first to hear these murmurs of discontent. From the EIC’s factory on the southern edge of Murshidabad he became aware of the mutterings of the disaffected nobles at court and hints of a possible coup, so he sent his Armenian agent, Khwaja Petrus Aratoon, to investigate. The answer came back that Mir Jafar, in his position as paymaster of the Bengal army, was prepared to offer the Company the vast sum of 2.5 crore^* rupees if they would help him remove the Nawab. Further investigation revealed that the scheme had wide backing among the nobility but that Mir Jafar, an uneducated general with no talent in politics, was simply a front for the real force behind the coup – the Jagat Seth bankers. ‘They are, I can confirm, the originators of the revolution,’ wrote Jean Law many months later. ‘Without them the English would never have carried out what they have. The cause of the English had become that of the Seths.’⁵⁸

Watts passed on the offer to Clive, who was still encamped outside Chandernagar and who had also, quite independently, begun to hear rumblings about a possible palace revolution. On 30 April 1757, Clive first mentioned in writing the scheme with which his name would henceforth be for ever associated. Writing to the Governor of Madras, he observed that Siraj ud-Daula was behaving in an even more violent way than usual – ‘twice a week he threatens to impale Mr. Watts … in short he is a compound of everything that is bad, keeps company with none but his menial servants, and is universally hated and despised.’

This induces me to acquaint you that there is a conspiracy carrying on against him by several of the great men, at the head of whom is Jagat Seth himself. I have been applied to for assistance, and every advantage promised that the Company can wish. The Committee are of the opinion that it should be given as soon as the Nabob is secured. For my part, I am persuaded that there can be neither peace nor security while such a monster reigns.

Mr Watts is at Murshidabad and has many meetings with the great men. He desires that our proposals may be sent, and that they only wait for them to put everything into execution; so that you may very shortly expect to hear of a Revolution which will put an end to all French expectations of ever settling in this country again …⁵⁹

The bankers and merchants of Bengal who sustained Siraj ud-Daula’s regime had finally turned against him and united with the disaffected parts of his own military; now they sought to bring in the mercenary troops of the East India Company to help depose him. This was something quite new in Indian history: a group of Indian financiers plotting with an international trading corporation to use its own private security force to overthrow a regime they saw threatening the income they earned from trade.⁶⁰ This was not part of any imperial masterplan. In fact, the EIC men on the ground were ignoring their strict instructions from London, which were only to repulse French attacks and avoid potentially ruinous wars with their Mughal hosts. But seeing opportunities for personal enrichment as well as political and economic gain for the Company, they dressed up the conspiracy in colours that they knew would appeal to their masters and presented the coup as if it were primarily aimed at excluding the French from Bengal for ever.^*

By 1 May, a Secret Committee made up of senior Company officials in Bengal formally resolved to join the conspiracy: ‘The Committee were unanimously of the opinion that there could be no dependence on this Nabob’s word, honour and friendship, and that a revolution in the Government would be extremely for the advantage of the Company’s affairs.’⁶¹

The Secret Committee then began to haggle over their terms of service, again using Khwaja Petrus as the intermediary for their coded correspondence. Before long, Mir Jafar and the Jagat Seths had significantly raised their offer, and were now promising the participants Rs28 million, or £3 million sterling – the entire annual revenue of Bengal – for their help overthrowing Siraj, and a further Rs110,000 a month to pay for Company troops. In addition, the EIC was to get zamindari – landholding – rights near Calcutta, a mint in the town and confirmation of duty-free trade. By 19 May, in addition to this offer, Mir Jafar conceded to pay the EIC a further enormous sum – £1 million^* – as compensation for the loss of Calcutta and another half a million as compensation to its European inhabitants.⁶²

On 4 June a final deal was agreed. That evening, Khwaja Petrus obtained for Watts a covered harem palanquin ‘such as the Moor women are carryed in, which is inviolable, for without previous knowledge of the deceit no one dare look into it’.⁶³ Within this, the Englishman was carried into Mir Jafar’s house to get the signatures of the old general and his son Miran, and to take their formal oath on the Quran to fulfil their part of the treaty obligations.⁶⁴ On 11 June, the signed document was back in Calcutta with the Select Committee, who then countersigned it. The next evening, pretending to set off on a hunting expedition, Watts and his men decamped from Kasimbazar and made their escape through the night, down the road to Chandernagar.

On 13 June 1757, a year to the day since Siraj had begun his attack on Calcutta, Clive sent an ultimatum to Siraj ud-Daula accusing him of breaking the terms of the Treaty of Alinagar. That same day, with a small army of 800 Europeans, 2,200 south Indian sepoys and only eight cannon, he began the historic march towards Plassey.

The road from Calcutta to Murshidabad passes through a great planisphere of flat, green floodplains and rice paddy whose abundant soils and huge skies stretch out towards the marshy Sunderbans, the Ganges delta and the Bay of Bengal to the south – a great green Eden of water and vegetation. Amid these wetlands, bullocks plough the rich mud of the rice fields and villagers herd their goats and ducks along high raised embankments. Reed-thatched Bengali cottages are surrounded by clumps of young green bamboo and groves of giant banyans, through which evening clouds of parakeets whirr and screech.

In the pre-monsoon heat Clive marched his sepoys along a shaded embankment which led through this vast patchwork of wetlands: muddy paddy of half-harvested rice on one side gave way to others where the young green seedlings had just been transplanted into shimmering squares in the flooded fields. Through all this ran the main waterway of the Bhagirathi on which a small flotilla of wood and bamboo boats – it was now too shallow for Watson’s battleships – sailed level with the land forces, providing transport for some of the officers of the European troops, and supplies of food and ammunition for all.

After all the frantic activity and communication of the previous week, as Clive marched north he began to be increasingly nervous about the ominous silence from the plotters. On 15 June, Clive wrote to reassure the Jagat Seths that he remained committed to the terms they had agreed:

As the Nabob has so long delayed the execution of the treaty with the English I am therefore come this way in order to see the articles fulfilled. I hear there are great disturbances in the city. I hope my arrival will put a happy end to them, we are as one, and I shall always listen to your advice. I am now at Culna, and hope to be at Agoa Diep in two days; be assured you may remain in the utmost safety in the city, and that my army shall act in the same manner they have hitherto done, and not plunder the least thing whatever.⁶⁵

He received no reply.

The next day, he wrote again, this time to Mir Jafar: ‘I am arrived at Tantesaul near Pattlee. I am in expectation of your news, and shall enter into any measures you desire. Let me hear from you twice a day. I shall not stir from Pattlee till I have news from you.’⁶⁶ Again there was no reply. Clive was now becoming suspicious: ‘I am arrived at Pattlee with all my forces,’ he wrote on the 17th, ‘and am very much surprised at not hearing from you. I expect that on the receipt of this you will acquaint me fully with your intentions.’⁶⁷

Despite the silence, he sent a platoon north on the 18th, with orders to take the fort of Katwa, which was seized without opposition. It was here that Mir Jafar was supposed to join the Company forces, but there was no sign of their supposed ally. That afternoon, Clive had a rare crisis of confidence: ‘I am really at a loss how to act at the present situation of our affairs,’ he wrote back to the Select Committee in Calcutta,

especially should I receive confirmation by letter of Mir Jafar’s resolution to stand neuter [i.e. not engage in the forthcoming battle]. The Nabob’s forces at present are said not to exceed 8,000 but a compliance with their demands may easily increase them. If we attack them it must be entrenched and ourselves without any assistance. In this place a repulse must be fateful; on the contrary success may give the greatest advantage … I beg you will let me have your sentiments how I ought to act at this critical juncture.⁶⁸

Late that night Clive received from Mir Jafar a short and rather ambiguous note: ‘On the news of your coming the Nabob was much intimidated and requested at such a juncture that I would stand his friend. On my part, agreeable to the circumstances of the times, I thought it advisable to acquiesce with his request, but what we have agreed on must be done. I have fixed the first day of the moon for my march. God willing I shall arrive.’⁶⁹ Clive was initially so relieved to hear anything from Mir Jafar that he replied, more fulsomely than the letter merited: ‘I have received your letter which has given me the utmost satisfaction after the great pain I have suffered by your silence.’

I have sent a party to possess themselves of Katwa town and fort, and shall move with my whole army there tomorrow. I believe I shall march from thence the next day, and hope to be at Moncurra in 2 days, but my motions will in a great measure depend on the advice I receive from you. Write me what you intend to do, and what is proper for me to do. On mutual intelligence depends the success of our affairs, so write me daily and fully. If I meet the Nabob’s army what part will you act and how am I to act. This you may be assured of: that I will attack the Nabob within 24 hours after I come in sight of his army. Of all things take care of yourself that you be not arrested by treachery before my arrival.⁷⁰

But the following morning, having reread Mir Jafar’s letter, Clive again grew increasingly convinced he was walking into a trap, and wrote angrily to his self-professed ally: ‘It gives me great concern that in an affair of so much consequence, to yourself in particular, that you do not exert yourself more.’

So long as I have been on my march you have not given me the least information what measures it is necessary for me to take, nor do I know what is going forward at Murshidabad. Surely it is in your power to send me news daily. It must be more difficult for me to procure trusty messengers than you. However the bearer of this is a sensible, intelligent man, and in whom I have great confidence. Let me know your sentiments freely by him; I shall wait here till I have proper encouragement to proceed. I think it absolutely necessary you should join my army as soon as possible. Consider the Nabob will increase in strength dayly. Come over to me at Plassey or any other place you judge proper with what force you have – even a thousand horse will be sufficient, and I’ll engage to march immediately with you to Murshidabad. I prefer conquering by open force.⁷¹

On 21 June, Clive called a Council of War to decide whether to continue with the campaign. They were now just one day’s march from the mango plantations of Plassey where Siraj ud-Daula’s army, swollen to 50,000, had safely entrenched themselves. When Clive presented all his intelligence to his military council, his colleagues voted strongly against continuing the campaign. Clive spent the night racked with indecision, but on waking decided to press on regardless. Shortly after this, a short message arrived from Mir Jafar, apparently saying that he was committing himself to action: ‘When you come near, I shall be able to join you.’

To this Clive replied tersely, ‘I am determined to risque everything on your account, though you will not exert yourself.’

I shall be on the other side of the river this evening. If you will join me at Plassey, I will march half way to meet you, then the whole Nabob’s army will know I fight for you. Give me leave to call to your mind how much your own glory and safety depends upon it, be assured if you do this, you will be Subah [Governor] of these provinces, but, if you cannot go even this length to assist us, I call God to witness the fault is not mine, and I must desire your consent for concluding a peace with the Nabob.⁷²

At six o’clock that evening, having received another brief and ambiguous letter, he wrote again: ‘Upon receiving your letter I am come to a resolution to proceed immediately to Plassey. I am impatient for an answer to my letter.’⁷³

Clive then ordered his forces forward. The sepoys marched into the increasingly liquid waterscape where islands of land appeared to float amid network of streams and rivers and fish-filled, lily-littered pukhur ponds. Towards evening, rising from these ripples, the troops spied several raised mounds encircled with windbreaks of palm, clumps of bamboo and tall flowering grasses. On one stood a small wattle village, with its bullock carts and haystacks, and several spreading banyan trees. To the other side, enclosed within a meandering oxbow of the Hughli River, rose the small brick hunting lodge belonging to the Nawab of Murshidabad, named after the distinctively orange-flowered grove of palash trees which overlooked it. It was here, at Plassey, in the dark, about 1 a.m., that Clive took shelter from a pre-monsoon downpour. His damp troops were less lucky and camped under the shelter of the thickly planted mango orchards behind his house.

Night passed and morning broke with no further word from Mir Jafar. At 7 a.m., an anxious Clive wrote threateningly to the general saying that he would make up with Siraj ud-Daula if Mir Jafar continued to do nothing and remain silent: ‘Whatever could be done by me I have done,’ he wrote. ‘I can do no more. If you will come to Dandpore, I’ll march from Plassey to meet you. But if you won’t comply with this, pardon me, I shall make it up with the Nabob.’⁷⁴ Such an eventuality was, however, becoming less and less plausible by the minute, as the Nawab’s forces, in all their magnificent tens of thousands, emerged from their entrenchment, and began to encircle the small Company army with a force that outnumbered them by at least twenty to one.

The storm the night before had cleared the air, and the morning of 22 June dawned bright, clear and sunny. Clive decided to climb onto the flat roof of the hunting lodge to get a better impression of what he had taken on. What he saw took him aback: ‘What with the number of elephants, all covered in scarlet embroidery; their horses with their drawn swords glittering in the sun; their heavy cannon drawn by vast trains of oxen; and their standards flying, they made a pompous and fabulous sight.’

In all, Clive estimated that the Nawab had gathered 35,000 infantry, 15,000 cavalry and fifty-three pieces of heavy artillery which was superintended by a team of French experts. With its back to the bends of the Hughli, there was by 8 a.m. no exit for Clive’s troops. Whether Mir Jafar lived up to his promises or not, there was now no realistic option but to fight.

At eight a cannonade began and after losing thirty sepoys Clive withdrew his men to shelter under the muddy riverbank bounding the mango grove. There was now a real danger of encirclement. One officer recorded Clive as saying, ‘We must make the best fight we can during the day, and at night sling our muskets over our shoulders and march back to Calcutta. Most of the officers were as doubtful of success as himself.’⁷⁵ ‘They approached at pace,’ wrote Clive in his official report, ‘and by eight began the attack with a number of heavy cannon, supported by their whole army.’

They continued to play on us very briskly for Several Hours, during which our situation was of the utmost service to us, being lodg’d in a large Grove, surrounded by good mud Banks. To succeed in an attempt [at seizing] their cannon was next to impossible, as they were planted in a manner round us, and at a considerable distance from each other, we therefore remained quiet in our post, in expectation at best of a successful attack upon their camp during the night.⁷⁶

Then, towards noon, the skies began to darken, thunder boomed and a torrential monsoon storm broke over the battlefield, soaking the men and turning the ground instantly into a muddy swamp. The Company troops made sure to keep their powder and fuses dry under tarpaulins; but the Mughals did not. Within ten minutes of the commencement of the downpour, and by the time Clive had reappeared on the roof of the hunting lodge having changed into a dry uniform, all Siraj’s guns had fallen completely silent.

Imagining that the Company’s guns would also be disabled, the Nawab’s cavalry commander, Mir Madan, gave the order to advance, and 5,000 of his elite Afghan horse charged forward to the Company’s right: ‘the fire of battle and slaughter, that had hitherto been kept alive under a heap of embers, now blazed out into flames,’ wrote Ghulam Hussain Khan.

But as the nation of Hat-wearers have no equals in the art of firing their artillery and musquetry, with both order and rapidity, there commenced such an incessant rain of balls and bullets, and such a hot-endless firing, that the spectators themselves were amazed and confounded; and those in the battle had their hearing deafened by the continual thunder, and their eyesight dimmed by the endless flashing of the execution.⁷⁷

Among those killed was Mir Madan himself, ‘who made great efforts to push to the front, but was hit by a cannon ball in his stomach and died’.⁷⁸ ‘At the sight of this, the aspect of Siraj ud-Daula’s army changed and the artillerymen with the corpse of Mir Madan moved into the tents. It was midday when the people in the tents fled, and gradually the soldiers also began to take to their heels.’⁷⁹ At this point, Clive’s deputy, Major Kilpatrick, seeing several Mughal batteries being abandoned, in defiance of orders and without permission, advanced to hold the abandoned positions. Clive sent angry messages forward, threatening to arrest Kilpatrick for insubordination; but the act of disobedience won the battle. This was the point, according to Edward Maskelyne, that the tide began to turn: ‘Perceiving that many of the enemy were returning to their camp, we thought it a proper opportunity to seize one of the eminences from which the enemy guns had much annoyed us in the morning.’

Accordingly, the Grenadiers of the first battalion with 2 field pieces and a body of sepoys supported by 4 platoons and 2 field pieces from the 2nd Battalion were order’d to take possession of it, which accordingly they did. Their success encouraged us to take possession of another advanc’d post, within 300 yards of the entrance to the enemy’s camp …⁸⁰

A huge contingent of Mughal cavalry on the left then began to move away down to the banks of the Hughli and left the fighting. This, it turned out, was Mir Jafar, withdrawing just as he had promised. Following his lead, all the Murshidabad forces were now beginning to fall back. What started as an orderly retreat soon turned into a stampede. Large bodies of Mughal infantry now began to flee: ‘On this, a general rout ensued,’ wrote Clive in his initial report, which still survives in the National Archives of India, ‘and we pursued the enemy six miles, passing upwards 40 pieces of cannon they had abandoned, with an infinite number of hackeries and carriages filled with baggage of all kind.’

Siraj ud-Daula escaped on a camel, and reaching Murshidabad early the next morning, despatched away what jewels and treasure he conveniently could, and he himself followed at midnight, with only two or three attendants. It is computed there were kill’d of the enemy about 500. Our loss amounted to just 22 killed, and fifty wounded.⁸¹

The following morning, 24 June, Clive scribbled a strikingly insincere note to Mir Jafar: ‘I congratulate you on the victory which is yours not mine,’ he wrote. ‘I should be glad you would join me with the utmost expedition. We propose marching for now to complete conquest that God has blessed us with, and I hope to have the honor of proclaiming you Nabob.’⁸²

Later that morning, a nervous and tired-looking Mir Jafar presented himself at the English camp, and when the guard turned out in his honour he started back in fear. He was only reassured when he was escorted to Clive’s tent and was embraced by the colonel, who saluted him as the new Governor of Bengal. Clive was not planning any treachery: ever the pragmatist, his need to install and use Mir Jafar as his puppet overruled the anger he had felt over the past week. He then advised Mir Jafar to hasten to Murshidabad and secure the capital, accompanied by Watts, who was told to keep an eye on the treasury. Clive followed at a distance with the main army, taking three days to cover the fifty miles to Murshidabad, passing along roads filled with abandoned cannon, broken carriages and the bloated corpses of men and horses.

Clive had been due to enter the city on the 27th, but was warned by the Jagat Seths that an assassination plot was being planned. So it was only on 29 June that Clive was finally escorted into Murshidabad by Mir Jafar. Preceded by music, drums and colours, and escorted by a guard of 500 soldiers, they entered together as conquerors. Mir Jafar was handed by Clive onto the masnad, the throne platform, and saluted by him as Governor. He then stated publicly, and possibly sincerely, that the Company would not interfere with his government, but ‘attend solely to commerce’.⁸³ The elderly general ‘took quiet possession of the Palace and Treasures and was immediately acknowledged Nabob’.

The pair then went straight to pay their respects to the man who had put both where they were now: Mahtab Rai Jagat Seth. ‘I had a great deal of conversation’ with the great banker, Clive recorded, ‘As he is a person of the greatest property and influence in the three subas [provinces – Bengal, Orissa and Bihar] and of no inconsiderable weight at the Mughal court, it was natural to determine on him as the properest person to settle the affairs of that government. Accordingly, when the new Nawab returned my visit this morning, I recommended him to consult Jagat Seth on all occasions, which he readily assented to.’⁸⁴

As it turned out, the Jagat Seth’s goodwill was immediately necessary. There was only about Rs1.5 crore in the treasury – much less than expected, and if Clive and the Company were to be paid their full commission it would have to be through a loan brokered by the great bankers. Clive’s personal share of the prize money was valued at £234,000, as well as a jagir, a landed estate worth an annual payment of £27,000.^* At thirty-three, Clive was suddenly about to become one of the wealthiest men in Europe – but only if the money was actually paid. There followed several tense days. Clive was clearly anxious that Mir Jafar would default on his promises and that again he was in danger of being double-crossed by the old general. Like two gangsters after a heist, Mir Jafar and Clive watched each other uneasily, while the Jagat Seth searched for money: ‘Whenever I write to your excellency by the way of complaint, it gives me infinite concern,’ wrote Clive to Mir Jafar a week later,

and more especially so when it is upon a subject in which I think the English interest suffers. This I am certain of: that anything wrong is foreign to your principles, and the natural goodness of your heart, and if anything be amiss, it must be owing to your ministers. But it is now several days that Mr Watts and Walsh have attended at the treasury to see what was agreed upon between your excellency and the English in presence of Jagat Seth and by his mediation put in execution. But their attendance has been to no manner of purpose, and without your excellency coming to some resolution as to what is to be paid in plate, what in cloth and what in jewels, and give absolute orders to your servants to begin, nothing will be done.

I am very anxious to see the money matters finished, for while they remain otherwise your enemies and mine will always from self-interested principles be endeavouring to create disputes and differences between us, which can only afford pleasure and hope to our enemies. But the English interest and yours is but one, and we must rise or fall together.

Clive characteristically concluded the letter with what could be read as a veiled threat: ‘If any accident should happen to you, which God forbid, there will be an end of the English Company. I chose to send your Excellency my thoughts in writing, the subject were of too tender a nature for me to discourse only by word of mouth.’⁸⁵

While Clive waited anxiously for his payment, ‘on the insistence of Jagat Seth’ Mir Jafar’s son, Miran, was scouring Bengal for the fugitive Siraj ud-Daula who had fled the capital, heading upstream ‘dressed in mean dress … attended only by his favourite concubine and eunuch’. Ghulam Hussain Khan wrote how, after Plassey, Siraj ‘finding himself alone in the palace for a whole day, without a single friend to unbosom his mind with, and without a single companion to speak to, took a desperate resolution.’

In the dead of night he put Lutf un-Nissa, his consort, and a number of favourites into covered carriages and covered chairs, loaded them with as much gold and as many jewels as they could contain, and taking with him a number of elephants with his best baggage and furniture, he quitted his palace at three in the morning, and fled … He went to Bagvangolah, where he immediately embarked on several boats, which are at all times kept ready in that station …

[Two days later] this unfortunate Prince, already overtaken by the claws of destiny, was arrived at the shore opposite Rajmahal, where he landed for about one hour, with intention only to dress up some khichri [kedgeree – rice and lentils] for himself and his daughter and women, not one of whom had tasted food for three days and nights. It happened that a fakir resided in that neighbourhood. This man, whom he had disobliged and oppressed during his days in power, rejoiced at this fair opportunity of glutting his resentment, and of enjoying revenge. He expressed a pleasure at his arrival; and taking a busy part in preparing some victuals for him, he meanwhile sent an express over the water, to give information to the prince’s enemies, who were rummaging heaven and earth to find him out.

Immediately on the advice of Shah Dana – for this was the fakir’s name, Mir Qasim [the son-in-law of Mir Jafar] crossed the water, and having got Siraj ud-Daula surrounded with his armed men, they had the pleasure of becoming master of his person, as well as his family and jewels … The Prince now became a prisoner and was brought back to Murshidabad … in a wretched condition.

One Mahmedy Beg accepted the commission [to kill Siraj] and two or three hours after the fugitive’s arrival, he set out to despatch him. Siraj ud-Daula had no sooner cast his eyes on that miscreant, than he asked whether he was not come to kill him? And the other having answered in the affirmative, the unfortunate prince, on this confession, despaired of his life.

He humbled himself before the Author of all Mercies, asked pardon for his past conduct, and turning to his murderer asked, ‘They are not then satisfied with my being willing to retire into some corner, there to end my days with a pension? He had time to say no more; for at this words the butcher smote him repeatedly with his sabre; and some strokes falling on that beauteous face of his, so renowned over Bengal for its regularity and sweetness, the prince sunk to the ground, fell on his face and returned his soul to its maker; and emerged out of this valley of miseries, by wading through his own blood. His body was hacked to pieces, and by strokes without number, and the mangled carcase being thrown across the back of an elephant, was carried throughout the city.⁸⁶

Siraj ud-Daula was only twenty-five years old. Shortly afterwards, Miran wiped out all the women of the house of Aliverdi Khan: ‘Around seventy innocent Begums were rowed out to a lonely place into the centre of the Hooghly and their boat sunk.’ The rest were poisoned. These bodies were brought together with those which were washed ashore and were buried together in a long line of sepulchres beside the old patriarch in the shady garden of Khushbagh, just across the Hughli from the small market town that today is all that is left of Murshidabad.

One woman, however, was spared. Both Miran and his father asked for the hand of the famously beautiful Lutf un-Nissa. ‘But she declined and sent this reply: “having ridden an elephant before, I cannot now agree to ride an ass.”’⁸⁷

The same day that the remains of Siraj ud-Daula were paraded through the streets, 7 July, exactly 200 days since the task force had set off up the Hughli to Fulta, Clive finally got his hands on his money. It was one of the largest corporate windfalls in history – in modern terms around £232 million, of which £22 million was reserved for Clive. He immediately despatched his winnings downstream to Calcutta.

‘The first fruit of our success was the receipt of Rs75 lakh, nearly a million sterling,^* which the Souba paid and was laid on board 200 boats, part of the fleet which attended us in our march up, escorted by a detachment from the army,’ wrote Luke Scrafton, one of Clive’s assistants.

As soon as they entered the great river, they were joined by the boats of the squadron, and all together formed a fleet of three hundred boats, with music playing, drums beating, the colours flying, and exhibited to the French and Dutch, whose settlements they passed, a scene far different from what they beheld a year before, when the Nabob’s fleet and army passed them, with the captive English, and all the wealth and plunder of Calcutta. Which scene gave them more pleasure, I will not presume to decide.

Clive’s winnings in 1757 was a story of personal enrichment very much in the spirit of the Caribbean privateers who had first founded the Company 157 years earlier: it was all about private fortunes for the officers and dividends for the Company, about treasure rather than glory, plunder rather than power. Yet this was only the beginning: in total around £1,238,575 was given by Mir Jafar to the Company and its servants, which included at least £170,000 personally for Clive. In all, perhaps £2.5 million was given to the Company by the Murshidabad Nawabs in the eight years between 1757 and 1765 as ‘political gifts’. Clive himself estimated the total payments as closer to ‘three million sterling’.^*88

Clive wrote to his father as he escorted his loot down the Bhagirathi, telling him that he had brought about ‘a Revolution scarcely to be parallel’d in History’.⁸⁹ It was a characteristically immodest claim; but he was not far wrong. The changes he had effected were permanent and profound. This was the moment a commercial corporation first acquired real and tangible political power.⁹⁰ It was at Plassey that the Company had triumphantly asserted itself as a strong military force within the Mughal Empire. The Marathas who had terrorised and looted Bengal in the 1740s were remembered as cruel and violent. The Company’s plunder of the same region a decade later was more orderly and methodical, but its greed was arguably deadlier because it was more skilful and relentless and, above all, more permanent.⁹¹

It initiated a period of unbounded looting and asset-stripping by the Company which the British themselves described as ‘the shaking of the pagoda tree’.⁹² From this point, the nature of British trade changed: £6 million^** had been sent out in the first half of the century, but very little silver bullion was sent out after 1757. Bengal, the sink into which foreign bullion disappeared before 1757, became, after Plassey, the treasure trove from which vast amounts of wealth were drained without any prospect of return.

Bengal had always produced the biggest and most easily collected revenue surplus in the Mughal Empire. Plassey allowed the EIC to begin seizing much of that surplus – a piece of financial happenchance that would provide for the Company the resources it would need to defeat a succession of rivals until they finally seized the Mughal capital of Delhi itself in 1803. The Company was now no longer simply one of a number of European trading companies competing for Indian markets and products. Rather, it found that it had become a kingmaker and an autonomous power in its own right. It was not just that the East India Company had assisted in a palace coup for which it had been very well paid. With this victory, the whole balance of power in India had now shifted.

The British had become the dominant military and political force in Bengal. They now suspected that if they grew their army sufficiently they could probably seize any part of the country they took a fancy to, and rule it either directly or through a pliant puppet. Moreover, many Indians were beginning to understand this, too, meaning that the Company would become the focus for the attentions of all the dethroned, dispossessed and dissatisfied rulers, leading to a kaleidoscope of perpetually reforming and dissolving alliances that occurred from this point and which offered the region little prospect of peace or stability.

Indeed, the most immediate effect of Clive’s palace coup was to destabilise Bengal. Three months later, in September, Clive had to return to Murshidabad to try and sort out a growing chaos there. Exactions by the Company, gathering arrears of pay of Mir Jafar’s troops, military paralysis in the face of rebellions and punitive expeditions using Company sepoys created a growing vortex of violence and unrest. It was becoming abundantly clear that Mir Jafar was not up to the job, and that however many members of Siraj ud-Daula’s regime he and Miran purged, there could be little legitimacy for this general who had had his own Nawab murdered and who now sat in what one Company observer called ‘a throne warm with the blood of his Lord’.⁹³

From now on there would be a slow drift to the Company of troopers, merchants, bankers and civil servants, leaving the Nawabs with nothing more than the shadow of their former grandeur. Clive and his colleagues had intended to do little more than re-establish British trade on a favourable footing and to ensure the accession of a more friendly Nawab. But what they had in fact done was fatally and permanently to undermine the authority of the Nawabs, bringing chaos to what had been up to that point the most peaceful and profitable part of the old Mughal Empire.⁹⁴

* A crore equals 10 million, £325 million today.

* This is a crucial point. In as far as the EIC, in the shape of its directors, officials and most shareholders, had a corporate will at all, it was for trade yielding maximum profits and a large and steady dividend for themselves and their investors. Since the later seventeenth century, as Philip Stern shows, they certainly welcomed the application of Indian revenues to boosting their commercial capital and, of course, they later enthusiastically welcomed the Bengal revenues secured by Clive. But the directors consistently abhorred ambitious plans of conquest, which they feared would get out of control and overwhelm them with debt. For this reason the great schemes of conquest of the EIC in India very rarely originated in Leadenhall Street. Instead, what conquering, looting and plundering took place was almost always initiated by senior Company individuals on the spot, who were effectively outside metropolitan control, and influenced by a variety of motives ranging from greed, naked acquisitiveness and the urge to get rich quick, to a desire for national reputation and a wish to outflank the French and frustrate their Indian ambitions. This was true throughout the period, as much for Clive and Hastings as for Cornwallis and Wellesley.

* The modern equivalences of these sums are: £3 million = £315 million; Rs110,000 = £1,430,000; £1 million = £105 million.

* The modern equivalences of these sums are: Rs1.5 crore = about £200 million; £234,000 = almost £25 million; £27,000 = almost £3 million.

* £100 million today.

* The modern equivalences of these sums are: £1,238,575 = around £130 million; £170,000 = almost £18 million; £2.5 million = £260 million; £3 million = over £300 million.

** £630 million today.