Читать книгу Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850 - Maya Jasanoff, Maya Jasanoff - Страница 10

Many of those sitting in the audience of the Theatre Royal Haymarket in the spring of 1772 might have recognized a quite different image of Clive in Samuel Foote’s new satire, The Nabob. The play follows the adventures of Sir Matthew Mite, a nabob modeled on Robert Clive and his peers. Mite has returned from India glutted with wealth, and promptly tries to purchase the hand, and the status, of a neighboring baronet’s daughter. In one scene alone, he and his henchmen plot ways to increase their influence in East India Company elections; scheme about forcing an aristocrat to sell Mite his ancestral estate; and plan to rig two parliamentary seats for the pointedly named borough of Bribe’em. Another scene features Mite’s election to the Society of Antiquaries, a prestigious club of gentlemen connoisseurs, membership to which he has earned by presenting the society with a ludicrous assortment of artifacts, and delivering a learned discourse on Dick Whittington’s cat. This is an unlovely character. Yet for all that Clive might have cringed at the caricature, he would have been forced to empathize with his alter ego’s parting words: “Now-a-days, riches possess, at least, one magical power, that, being rightly dispensed, they closely conceal the source from whence they proceed.”⁶⁵

How successfully had Clive managed to “conceal” the dubious source of his own wealth, and assimilate himself into the British elite? In external respects, eminently so. By 1772, he was one of Britain’s richest men and a leading landowner. He controlled seven parliamentary seats. He played a major role in East India Company affairs. He had been ennobled and decorated with the Order of the Bath, and he consorted with some of the wealthiest and most powerful figures in the land. He divided his time between three substantial and fashionable houses, and was in the midst of building himself a veritable palace. He owned valuable paintings appreciated by connoisseurs. He was a household name.

But he was also a notorious one. For as Foote’s satire made clear, the more power and possessions Clive amassed, the more he seemed to embody everything that critics deplored about the East India Company and its Bengal empire: corrupt, unprincipled, unregulated, new. Clive became the focal point in a rising public outcry against Company rapacity. These challenges came to a head in 1772, when a parliamentary select committee was appointed to investigate the state of Company government in India. The inquiry was at one level a broad—and the first—appraisal of the Company’s transformed position in Bengal. At another level, it was a direct challenge to Robert Clive himself and to the legitimacy of his Indian actions and fortune.

The inquiry led to the passing of the Regulating Act of 1773, the first attempt to bring East India Company government under a measure of parliamentary control. The act also established a central administration for India, in the form of a governor-general and council, to be based in Calcutta. It did not, however, put an end to the continued perceptions that the East India Company government was corrupt and unprincipled. Challenges to Company rule arose just as quickly as the Company’s empire had, and would endure in some quarters just as long as the Company itself. The controversies of 1772-1773 foreshadowed the debates leading to the India Act of 1784, which established a formal supervisory body in Parliament to oversee East India Company affairs. Its ad hominem focus on Robert Clive also anticipated the theatrical attack on the East India Company empire that would unfold in 1788, with the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, governor of Bengal.

Openly charged in Parliament by his enemies with having “illegally acquired the sum of £234,000 to the dishonour and detriment of the State,” Clive found his mask of British gentility suddenly stripped away. He offered dramatic and moving testimony in his own defense: “Leave me my honour, take away my fortune,” he cried on the last day of the debate, the tears welling up in his eyes.⁶⁶ His eloquence worked. He emerged from the ordeal with both his honor and his fortune more or less intact. In late 1773, he set off on a long trip to Italy, as if making up for the Grand Tour he had never had, avidly collecting art along the way. But though he had been exonerated by Parliament, the strain of the past year’s events had taken its toll. The black clouds of depression began to thicken. His health deteriorated. The parliamentary inquiry led indirectly, many have said, to Clive’s untimely death.

He did it, some morbidly supposed, with a penknife. Others suspected a pistol, which he had tried twice before, in his early days in Madras, before concluding that fate was saving him for a grander future. The likeliest truth, or at any rate the least gruesome, was an overdose of laudanum, which Clive regularly quaffed to soothe his tortured stomach. Whatever the means, the end was the end. After a lifelong battle with depression, Robert Clive committed suicide in his house at Berkeley Square on November 22, 1774. He was buried quickly, silently, and secretly, in an unmarked grave in the parish church of tiny Moreton Say, in Shropshire. The mourners were few.⁶⁷

Clive’s eldest son, Edward, studying in Geneva after his time at Eton, was not among them. “Ned” came of age four months later as the heir of one of Britain’s richest men, and his inheritance was vast. There were all the estates and the political power that they conferred. There were the East India Company shares and the voice in Company administration those shares commanded. There were the several great houses—Claremont, still under construction, among them—and the quantities of art and fine furnishings that filled them. There was, of course, the title.

Among all the legacies that awaited the new Lord Clive when he returned to England from Geneva in 1777, there was one chest that had been specially set aside for him. In it, Edward found some of his father’s personal effects and valuables: a gold watch and buttons, topaz shoe buckles, a broken agate snuffbox. The chest also contained two of Clive’s dress swords and his complete costume as a Knight of the Bath, from its precious jeweled collar right down to the special ribbons for his shoes. Were these things—the props and furbelows of an English gentleman—the items Robert Clive had particularly wanted his son to have? But then Edward discovered the main contents of his father’s memorial chest: “Indian Curiosities.” Hundreds of them.⁶⁸

Going through the container must have been like unpacking a treasure chest. There were turban ornaments, jeweled bands with spiked brooches set with emeralds and diamonds. There were gorgeous hookahs encrusted with brilliant enamels, their ornamental snakes wrapped with gold wire, mouthpieces studded with gems. These were only the most obviously valuable objects. They might well have been given to Clive by his rich and powerful Indian associates, in keeping with ritualized conventions of diplomatic giftgiving. (And not exclusively, as Clive’s enemies would have charged, as shameless bribes.) Alongside these objects, Clive had also packed away various smaller accoutrements of his residence in India. Filigree boxes, silver bowls, golden scissors, betel-nutcrackers, ivory combs, brightly enameled bottles for rose water, and shallow jade bowls polished to a hard, glassy finish: the chest was stuffed full of the precious everyday objects of a privileged Mughal life. Unlike the ostentatiously splendid pieces, these were things Clive may very well have used and kept as personal effects. Somewhere in the chest, Edward even found his father’s set of ivory playing cards, painted with fairskinned princesses, and princes on elephant-back shooting tigers.

Then there were the weapons. Many European officers brought weapons back from India, not least because they had many opportunities to collect them. Besides, as a visit to any armory in the world will rapidly confirm, displaying an enemy’s weapons involves no small share of triumphalism. But Europeans collecting Indian weapons were not moved to do so only out of imperial arrogance. They were beautiful, these things, elegantly and richly decorated. They were also often technically sophisticated, and appealing because of fascinating workmanship and unusual design. And they were exotic, or so Edward must have thought when lifting a scimitar out of the chest, with its cruel, enchanted blade inscribed with verses from the Koran. There were steel daggers curving out of shining hard-stone hilts. There were matchlocks with barrels a yard long, inlaid with silver. There were battle-axes and spears of a kind long gone from European battlefields in this age of cannon and musket.⁶⁹ All these things were foreign to Edward. But to Robert, their collector, they would have been as familiar as the sword he hung at his hip—perhaps the part of India’s material culture that he, a soldier, would have known best.

In the chest of “Indian Curiosities,” Edward discovered another side of his father’s life, hidden as carefully as it was preserved. Curiosities was something of a misnomer. For these were not curiosities like the gifts Robert Clive had once delivered from the Mughal emperor to King George III, flashy diplomatic presents that would be seen and admired once, as exotic novelties, before being tossed into a storehouse and forgotten.⁷⁰ Nor were they curiosities like the miscellaneous objects, found and made, that filled up eighteenthcentury cabinets of curiosities, token emblems of distant parts. These objects were the record of Robert Clive’s Indian life: the things he had surrounded himself with, the things he had chosen to preserve as a collection. As Edward picked through the gifts, trophies, souvenirs, and ornaments that his father had so neatly kept for him, he handled the most intimate existing archive of Clive of India. Edward had never gone with Robert to India—they had lived in separate countries for nine years, and under the same roof for no more than five. In these objects, he was touching a father he barely knew.

Robert Clive devoted his life in Britain to concealing his questionable Indian career behind a British façade. Yet in death, his legacy to his son Edward served to emphasize just how entangled the Indian and British parts of his life had always been. Whether it was acquiring political power, estates, houses, or fine art, Clive used collecting to fashion his British persona as a plutocrat and a connoisseur. In this sense, he formed an emphatically British collection, consisting of objects and status symbols designed to win him a place in British elite society. Yet this was an inescapably Indian collection, too—at its most elementary, because it was bought with Indian money, but in inspiration also, because it was supposed to echo in Britain, as well as compensate for, the fame and power that Clive had earned in India. In his collections, as in so much else, Clive of India and Clive of Britain were one and the same.

Clive’s own collecting project, to use his imperial fortune to refashion himself, distilled the larger process in which he had also played his part: the East India Company’s acquisition of Indian resources, and attempt to shape a ruling image for itself. Robert Clive’s death coincided with the end of the first chapter in Britain’s Indian empire. The East India Company had begun to rule as well as ™ military and fiscal control were asserted; the seeds of British government were planted. Britons back home began to confront and come to terms with a new, and in many respects unwelcome, form of empire. This was no longer a principally Atlantic, maritime empire of settlement and trade. It now included large, populous territories in Asia, acquired by conquest. It took shape under the nominal aegis of an extant and legitimate indigenous power, the Mughal Empire. And it was enmeshed in global war and rivalry with France.

These were all to some extent the legacies of Robert Clive, overseas empire-builder. There would also be consequences of Clive’s more personal legacies. In 1804, Edward Clive fulfilled his father’s dearest ambition: he became an English earl. But there was to be another way in which Edward built on his father’s foundations—and another place for the Clives in this book. In 1798, Edward traveled to India himself and served for five years as governor of Madras. There, he and his own family became Indian collectors, acquiring Indian art and artifacts with an enthusiasm and purpose that Robert had invested in European objects instead. When Edward came into his inheritance he had no intention, and still less desire, of following Robert to India. But could it be that as he looked through his father’s Indian chest, the idea of going there first crossed his mind? Could it be that the end of one collector’s vision contained the beginning of another’s?

1I have drawn my account chiefly from Francis Parkman’s magisterial Montcalm and Wolfe (New York: Modern Library, 1999), pp. 398-414; and Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of the Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), pp. 344-62. Cf. Simon Schama, Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) (New York: Vintage, 1992), pp. 3-39, 66-70. The competing accounts of Wolfe ’s death are judiciously summed up in A. Doughty and G. W. Parmelee, The Siege of Quebec and the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, 6 vols. (Quebec: Dussault and Proulx, 1901), III, pp. 201-37. As Bruce Lenman observes, Parkman (like Benjamin West) played up the significance of the battle as part of a generally triumphalist, patriotic reading of the Seven Years War—an interpretation that endures. (Bruce Lenman, Britain’s Colonial Wars 1688-1783 [New York: Longman, 2001], pp. 153-55.)

2This was by no means the first time that Britain erupted in patriotic rejoicings around a broadly “imperial” victory: Admiral Vernon’s defeat of the Spanish at Portobello, in 1739, inspired a massive public outpouring. (Vernon was celebrated across the Atlantic, too, in the name of the Washington family manor, Mount Vernon.) But Wolfe ’s victory may have been all the more gripping as it was performed not by the beloved navy but by the much-maligned army. Stephen Brumwell, Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755-63 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 54-57; Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 140-65.

3Though Edward Penny’s 1763 version of the same scene—a composition bearing several similarities to West’s—also used modern dress. Schama, pp. 21-39.

4The 1929 Cambridge History of the British Empire divided its subject in these terms, for instance; “First” and “Second” are still often used as shorthand labels for the British Empire before and after the American Revolution. For reevaluations of this periodization, see P. J. Marshall, “The First British Empire,” and C. A. Bayly, “The Second British Empire,” in Robin Winks, ed., Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. V: Historiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 43-72.

5Though see Jean Meyer et al., Histoire de la France coloniale: Des origines à 1914 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1991) and Jean Martin, L’Empire renaissant 1789-1871 (Paris: Denoël, 1987) for an outline of key events of the period.

6See Todd Porterfield, The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism 1798-1836 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998) for an excellent exposition of this theme in general, and the place of Egypt across regimes in particular.

7Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes, Contayning a History of the World…, 20 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1905), Part I, IV, pp. 334-39.

8William Foster, ed., The English Factories in India 1618-21 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), pp. viii, 38-40.

9Philip Lawson, The East India Company (London: Longman, 1993), p. 20.

10Alexander Hamilton, A New Account of the East Indies…, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1727), quoted in P. T. Nair, ed., Calcutta in the Eighteenth Century (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1984), p. 4.

11“A Voyage to Calcutta in 1761,” quoted in Nair, ed., p. 134. This writer reported that “Of 84 rank and file, which our company consisted of on our arrival, we had but 34 remaining in three months.” Captain Hamilton, visiting Calcutta in the first decade of the century, commented that 460 of 1,200 Europeans had been buried in four months.

12The poignant and tragic story of the dragoman, Étienne Roboly, can be followed in the archives of French consular correspondence, AN: AE B/I/109. The allegation that Roboly was in fact an Armenian, and had taken service with France without the sultan’s permission, does seem to have been justified; though his treatment was not, and indeed was one of the outrages later cited by French lobbyists to argue for an invasion of Egypt. It is not surprising that the dragoman—the quintessential man on the margins—was also a collector, desperate to send pieces of classical sculpture (and prove his loyalty?) to Louis XV.

13The Company’s late-seventeenth-century expansionism, promoted particularly by Sir Josiah Child and supported by James II, was mostly erased under the “trade to conquest” narrative that made Plassey the starting point of a newly militant era in Company history. For a detailed account of these earlier maneuvers, see Philip J. Stern, “ ‘One Body Corporate and Politick’: The Growth of the English East India Company-State in the Later Seventeenth Century” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2004).

14Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

15Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Penguin, 2001), p. 132.

16J. F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 253-81; Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab 1707-1748 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986). This period used to be characterized as one of “decline”; more recent interpretations have stressed that it was the very success of the old imperial system at promoting regional autonomy that led to its unraveling.

17Robert Orme, A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Hindoostan, 2 vols. (London, 1763-1778), II, p. 47.

18Michael Edwardes, Plassey: The Founding of an Empire (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1969), p. 65; Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World 1600-1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), pp. 255-56. The sensationalism was started by one of the survivors, John Zephaniah Holwell, A Genuine Narrative of the deplorable deaths of the English gentlemen, and others, who were suffocated in the Black-Hole in Fort-William, at Calcutta… (London, 1758). Holwell gives the—undoubtedly exaggerated—figure of 23 survivors, from a group of 146.

19Orme, II, pp. 127-35.

20Captain Edmund Maskelyne, “Journal of the Proceedings of the Troops Commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Robert Clive on the Expedition to Bengal,” OIOC: MSS Eur Orme 20, p. 35.

21“Letter from Mr. Watts to his father giving an account of events in Bengal from the treaty concluded with Seerajah Doulet on the 6th of February to August 13 [1757], including Changernagore, the battle of Plassey, etc.,” OIOC: MSS Eur Orme 20, p. 109. Orme gives rather higher numbers in his History, II, p. 173.

22On the conspiracy, see Edwardes, pp. 111-29; and Mark Bence-Jones, Clive of India (London: Constable, 1974), pp. 119-32.

23“Letter from Mr. Watts…,” p. 111.

24Orme, II, pp. 179-84.

25The last flowering of French activity in Indian courts was in the Punjab: Jean-Marie Lafont, La Présence française dans le royaume sikh du Penjab, 1822-1849 (Paris: École Française de l’Extrême Orient, 1992); Jean-Marie Lafont, French Administrators of Maharaja Ranjit Singh (New Delhi: National Book Shop, 1986).

26C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 47-52.

27John Splinter Stavorinus, quoted in Nair, ed., p. 163.

28Percival Spear, The Nabobs: A Study of the Social Life of the English in Eighteenth-Century India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998; 1st pub. 1932), p. 30.

29Mrs. Nathaniel Kindersley, quoted in Nair, ed., p. 145.

30Suresh Chandra Ghosh, The British in Bengal: A Study of the British Society and Life in the Late Eighteenth Century (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1998), pp. 96-109.

31T. B. Macaulay, Macaulay’s Essays on Clive and Hastings, ed. Charles Robert Gaston (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1910), pp. 89-90. The essay is a review of Sir John Malcolm’s three-volume hagiography, commissioned by Clive ’s son Edward, and Macaulay is here paraphrasing Malcolm.

32Philip Lawson and Jim Phillips, “ ‘Our Execrable Banditti’: Perceptions of Nabobs in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in Philip Lawson, A Taste for Empire and Glory: Studies in British Overseas Expansion (Aldershot: Variorum Collected Studies Series, 1997), XII, pp. 225-41.

33P. J. Marshall, Bengal the British Bridgehead (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 18; Macaulay, p. 78.

34Quoted in Lawson and Phillips, p. 238.

35For the Walpole quote and evocations of this splendid landing, see A. Mervyn Davies, Clive of Plassey (New York: Scribners, 1939), pp. 326-27, and Bence-Jones, pp. 188-89.

36Margaret Clive to John Carnac, May 6, 1761, OIOC: MSS Eur F 128/27.

37See Clive ’s financial journals from 1763 to 1774 in NLW: Robert Clive Papers, F2/1-14. For conversions from eighteenth-century pounds sterling to modern equivalents, I have used the multiplication factor of eighty suggested by Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 1990), p. xv.

38Robert Clive to Henry Vansittart, February 3, 1762, quoted in Lucy S. Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 86n.

39Henry Strachey to Robert Clive, February 8, 1774, quoted in Bence-Jones, p. 298.

40Of all Clive ’s activities in Britain, his political career is the only aspect that historians have chronicled in detail. See Sutherland, pp. 81-137; H. V. Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics, 1757-1773 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 169-86.

41He won narrowly at the polls, but lost on appeal—together with the £3,000 it cost him to run. The division list is given in Linda Colley, “The Mitchell election division, 24 March 1755,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research XLIX (1976): 80-107.

42L. B. Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1957), II, pp. 320-32, 352-63. Namier complained that “Clive ’s biographers follow him on his conquest of an empire in Asia, and do not dwell on his capture of a Parliamentary borough at home” (p. 352n). This oversight has been amply corrected by Philip Lawson and Bruce Lenman, “Robert Clive, The ‘Black Jagir’, and British Politics,” in Lawson, A Taste for Empire and Glory, XI. For a breakdown of nabob political factions, see James M. Holzman, “The Nabobs in England: A Study of the Returned Anglo-Indian, 1760-1785” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1926), pp. 103-16.

43P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688-2000 (New York: Longman, 2002), pp. 22-37.

44Bence-Jones, pp. 189, 203, 257, 265.

45Namier, II, pp. 293-97. Even in this age of rotten boroughs, Bishop’s Castle was “notoriously corrupt” (p. 304).

46NLW: Robert Clive Papers, EC2/1.

47Andrew Wilton and Ilaria Bignamini, eds., The Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1996). Something of the scale of the practice is captured by John Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy 1701-1800 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997).

48Iain Pears, The Discovery of Painting: The Growth of Interest in the Arts in England, 1680-1768 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 207-9.

49Ibid., pp. 101-2; Christie ’s statistics are based on my own tabulation.

50Robert Clive to Henry Strachey, May 15, 1771, OIOC: MSS Eur F 128/93.

51Robert Clive to Henry Strachey, May 15, 1771, OIOC: MSS Eur F 128/93. In one of Clive ’s several letters to Strachey of that day, he wonders “whether Chas. Clive could not be of some use in ascertaining the Value and Condition of Sir James Wright’s Pictures.”

52On Clive ’s wardrobe: Malcolm, II, pp. 181-83.

53According to the Christie ’s auctioneer’s books, Clive bought nine paintings for £362 4s. 6d. at the high-profile sale of a collection formed by the speculator Robert Ansell, on February 15-16. But the ledger of Clive ’s accountant shows a further payment of £1,086 15s. to “Mr. Christie for Pictures” on February 18, which means that the vast majority of Clive ’s acquisitions were made by others bidding on his behalf. West and Patoun were also present at the sale. (Christie ’s: Auctioneer’s Books, January-March 1771. NLW: Robert Clive Papers, F 12/11.)

54Robert Clive to Henry Strachey, May 15, 1771, OIOC: MSS Eur F 128/93.

55Robert Clive to Henry Strachey, May 16, 1771, OIOC: MSS Eur F 128/93.

56“A Capital and Valuable Collection of Italian, Flemish, and Dutch Pictures, Fine Bronzes, etc. Collected by A Gentleman [i.e., Peter Demasso] Well known to the Vertu, for his Knowledge, and refined Taste,” Christie ’s, March 8-9, 1771. Before 1760, according to Pears, well under 5 percent of paintings sold for more than £40 (p. 216).

57Clive ’s accounts show a payment in this amount to “H. Hoare Esqr. Cost and Charges of 2 Pictures by Vernet” on June 16, 1773. NLW: Robert Clive Papers, H9/7.

58Bence-Jones, pp. 295-96. Some of these purchases, at Christie ’s and elsewhere, can be traced in the cash books of Clive ’s accountant, Edward Crisp. The last volume lists “Customs and Charges on 2 Pictures and 4 Cases of Figures and Marbles,” acquired on Clive ’s trip to Italy in 1774 (NLW: Robert Clive Papers, H9/9). On his visit to Florence that year, Clive met Johan Zoffany, who said Clive wanted “a picture similar to what I am now painting of the Tribuna, but poor man, he could not go to the expense” (Ingamells, p. 221).

59Quoted in Bence-Jones, p. 266. He notes that the £507 3s. Clive paid for the Claude “was not excessive considering that Claude was then the highest-priced painter on the English market,” which may be true, but it certainly would have made the painting one of the most expensive on the London art market in a decade.

60J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole, 2 vols. (London: Cresset Press, 1956-60), II, pp. 85-87.

61Though in a rare moment of aesthetic judgment, he pronounced Vernet “the most delightful Landscape Painter I ever saw.” Robert Clive to Henry Strachey, October 6, 1771, OIOC: MSS Eur F 128/93.

62Robert Clive to Henry Strachey, May 26, 1771, OIOC: MSS Eur F 128/93. Connoisseurs disagreed over the merits of some of his pictures; see Bence-Jones, pp. 265-66.

63The portrait stayed in the Clive family until 1929, when the Earl of Powis presented it to the Corporation of Shrewsbury; it is currently on display in Powis Castle. I am grateful to Margaret Gray of the National Trust for this information.

64“Had it been in my Power, I should e ’en now have sent Meer Jaffier a present of a well drawn Picture of Lord Clive…I have not had it my Power to get my Lord’s Picture drawn any thing like him in London, but at Bath there is a man who takes the most surprizing Likenesses, and to whom my Lord has long promised me to sit, when next he has opportunity…Gratitude induced us to think of sending the old Nabob this Present as a mark of our lasting Sense of his Favors.” Margaret Clive to John Carnac, February 27, 1764, OIOC: MSS Eur F128/27.

65Samuel Foote, The Works, with Remarks and an Essay by Jon Bee (1830), 3 vols. (New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1974), III, pp. 215-17, 222-26, 236. In this connection the best example to cite from Clive ’s career would be the establishment of the Lord Clive Fund, a charity for disabled Company soldiers and widows. Clive founded the trust with a suspect legacy of £70,000, left to him by Mir Jafar.

66Bence-Jones, pp. 285, 287.

67For the deaths of Clive, and a perverse suggestion that he may have been murdered, see Robert Harvey, Clive: The Life and Death of a British Emperor (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1998), pp. 367-76.

68Clive ’s will specifies that certain items be kept for Edward. I have drawn this, and what follows, from the inventories in NLW: Clive Papers, T4/1. The “Indian Curiosities” were inventoried on March 17, 1775, and valued at £1,154.

69Some of Robert Clive ’s Indian objects have been definitively identified in the Powis Castle collection. See Mildred Archer, Christopher Rowell, and Robert Skelton, Treasures from India: The Clive Collection at Powis Castle (New York: Meredith Press, 1990).

70Bence-Jones, p. 243; Robert Clive to George Grenville, July 21, 1767, NLW: Robert Clive Papers, CR4/1.