Читать книгу Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850 - Maya Jasanoff, Maya Jasanoff - Страница 9

The life of Robert Clive lends itself to telling as a parable about the founding of empire. More biographies have been written about him than about any other figure in the history of British India, if not, indeed, the British Empire. In the formulation of the early Victorian historian Thomas Macaulay, Clive’s history and the history of Company rule were effectively one and the same. “From his first visit to India,” Macaulay wrote, when Clive scored major victories over France in the Carnatic, “dates the renown of the English arms in the East.” “From Clive’s second visit to India”—Plassey—“dates the political ascendancy of the English in that country.” And “from Clive’s third visit to India,” Macaulay continued, when he received the grant of the diwani, “dates the purity of the administration of our Eastern empire.”³¹ This is the man known quite simply as “Clive of India,” great man of empire par excellence.

But Clive had been dead more than sixty years by the time the ardently imperialist Macaulay wrote this 1840 appreciation. In his own day, Clive had also seemed to personify Britain’s new Indian empire, but to considerably less welcome effect. Contemporary Britons saw Clive as the greatest in a growing band of “nabobs” (an Anglicized form of nawab) who were returning from Bengal flush with ill-gotten gains.³² While the nabobs fattened themselves on Bengal’s revenues, as many as one in three Bengalis may have starved to death in the famine of 1770—a terrible contrast that moved the architect Lancelot “Capability” Brown, seeing a chest of gold in Clive’s house, to wonder “how the conscience of the criminal [Clive] could suffer him to sleep with such an object so near to his bedchamber.”³³ Worst of all, the nabobs’ “Indian” corruption threatened to infect Britain itself. In Pitt the Elder’s resonant words, “The riches of Asia have been poured in upon us, and have brought with them not only Asiatic luxury, but Asiatic principles of government.”³⁴ Corrupt, corrupting, maybe even criminal: both Robert Clive and the empire he helped to build were perceived by many Britons as dubious at best. And if Clive of India’s overseas exploits offered a synopsis of the “rise” of British rule in Bengal, his career in Britain provided another, rather different perspective on the founding of Britain’s Asian empire. This other Clive, Clive of Britain, is rarely profiled, yet it was perhaps his truer face, creased with the tensions and insecurities of early Company rule.

Robert Clive was the first imperial collector of British India. He had assumed that mantle in Bengal, in a metaphoric sense, by acquiring territory and resources for the East India Company. He had also collected a tremendous fortune for himself. Clive returned to Britain after the battle of Plassey, the socialite Horace Walpole sniffed, “all over estates and diamonds.” Rumors of egg-size gems and chests of gold followed him through the capital.³⁵ In fact, “Mr. Clive,” as his wife, Margaret, called him (“I am trying to break myself of calling him Colonel”) had gotten £234,000 as a personal gift from Mir Jafar, as well as a valuable jagir, an annual pension of £27,000.³⁶ ( Jagirs were land grants awarded to Mughal officers, who received the land revenue as salary.) Ten years later, by his own meticulous calculations, Clive was worth more than half a million pounds—the equivalent of some £40 million now.³⁷ It was the first, and possibly the greatest, rags-to-riches story of the British Empire.

But it was in Britain that Robert Clive became an imperial collector of a type that would obtain for collectors across contexts and through generations—as indeed for the East India Company and Britain itself. He turned to collecting as a way to reinvent himself. Like most of those who sought careers on imperial frontiers, and like most imperial collectors, Clive, the son of a Shropshire lawyer, was an outsider to metropolitan power structures. He was provincial, middle class, and nouveau riche. As a collector he set out to make up for all that. With his Indian fortune, Clive systematically bought all the trappings of a British aristocrat: property, political power, great houses, fine art, stylish furnishings. Though his collecting agenda ranged from the abstract (power) to the particular (Old Master paintings), every acquisition was made in quest of the same glittering prize: a British peerage, and the social and dynastic security that came with it. Clive had scoffed at receiving the mere Irish barony of Plassey in 1761, which did not bring him a seat in the House of Lords. He wanted to be “an English Earl with a Blue Ribbon, instead of an Irish peer (with the promise of a Red one).”³⁸ It was, as one of his intimates put it, “the only object you have in life.”³⁹ To win social acceptance and political influence, to replace the nabob with a British aristocrat: these were Clive’s goals as a collector.

Clive began his program in the notoriously dirty pursuit of political power. In Clive’s day, well before the 1832 Reform Act, seats in Parliament were frequently filled by men with money, property, and connections. And though nabobs like Clive were singled out by critics for buying their way into Westminster, they were certainly not alone.⁴⁰ “Rotten boroughs,” sometimes with just a handful of constituents, would elect members of Parliament who had been essentially handpicked by local grandees; votes were often effectively purchased. Clive had made his first foray into politics as early as 1754, by standing for election as a protégé of the Earl of Sandwich in the rotten Cornish borough of Mitchell.⁴¹ After Plassey, Clive used his wealth to begin building up a parliamentary faction, or “party,” of his own. In 1761, he was elected as member for Shrewsbury and also managed to get seats for his father, Richard, and for his close friend John Walsh; two years later, his cousin George Clive was returned in a by-election. In 1768, he sponsored the election of three more close personal associates, thus making a parliamentary party of seven, which he maintained until his death.⁴²

Clive needed a foot in Parliament (or fourteen feet, as the case may be) in order to secure his Indian interests in general, and specifically to prevent his enemies—of which he had many—from moving to block him from accepting his jagir payments from Mir Jafar, which they considered a kickback. But this Westminster fiefdom—a sort of human collection—was also tied up in Clive’s perennial quest for a British peerage and a seat in the House of Lords. After the 1761 election, for example, he threw in his bloc of votes behind the Duke of Newcastle, a leading contender for prime minister, hoping to be rewarded for his loyalty with an earldom. Much to his chagrin, he received only the Irish peerage and the Order of the Bath. For the rest of his life, Clive remained convinced that by spending more money and cultivating more connections he could win the title he so craved.

The parliamentary seats were also related to another part of Clive’s empire-building: his accumulation of land. Land was the absolute foundation of power and prestige in Britain at the time. Clive knew it; so did generations of “gentlemanly capitalists,” who made fortunes in the City—often in imperial trade—and invested them in land.⁴³ Beginning in the mid-1750s, Clive began to stitch together a green quilt of property along the hills and ridges of his native Welsh borders, including the 6,000-acre estate of Walcot, which became the family’s favorite rural retreat, and Oakly Park, which he bought from the Earl of Powis. To his tens of thousands of acres in the border country, Clive joined the splendid Surrey estate of Claremont, in 1769.⁴⁴ Many of these estates effectively controlled parliamentary seats: Walcot came with two seats for nearby Bishop’s Castle; Oakly Park controlled the seat of Ludlow; another land purchase, Okehampton, brought Clive a seat in Devon.⁴⁵ But equally important, land bought status. Any reader of Jane Austen knows how precisely a man’s social value might be measured by his acreage. One social benefit of Clive’s purchases was to strengthen his relationship with the Earl of Powis, the leading peer of the borders region, and a political ally. First a patron, then a colleague and neighbor, the earl would posthumously become a relative of Clive’s. In 1784, Clive’s eldest son, Edward, married the earl’s daughter, Henrietta; and their son would go on to inherit the Powis title and estates. Thus, in the space of three generations, the Clive family moved from rural English gentry to established peers of the realm, successfully marrying imperial money to noble blood. The strategy had worked.

Of course, there was not much point in having so much land if one didn’t live on it in style. In London, the Clives established themselves in a handsome gray Palladian town house in up-and-coming Berkeley Square. They hired Britain’s premier architect, Sir William Chambers, to renovate the London house and their country house at Walcot. In fashionable Bath, where Clive often retired to take the waters for his troubled digestion (one of India’s less welcome gifts), he bought a grand mansion that had previously belonged to Pitt the Elder. But all these dwellings paled before Clive’s grandest estate of all, Claremont, in Surrey. Clive had bought it from the Duchess of Newcastle for £25,000 (bargaining her down from an asking price of £45,000)—about £2 million in today’s terms—and intended to make it his main country seat. (Had he received his coveted earldom, he would surely have taken the title Clive of Claremont.) Claremont truly was fit for a lord, with a distinguished house built in the reign of King George I, by Sir John Vanbrugh, and gardens laid out in the 1730s by the innovative William Kent.

But Clive’s first act as owner of Claremont was to tear the whole thing down. The building, he thought, was too damp. He summoned Capability Brown, Britain’s best landscape architect, to rebuild the property. A statement of work to be done in 1772 gives some impression of the degree of magnificence Clive sought:

Principal Floor…with very neat Mahogany Sashes, Best Plate Glass, Silk Lines, inside Shutters double hung, the mouldings of which…to be richly Carved, the Architraves, Base and Surbase mouldings also to be enrich’d with Carving…the Doors to be made of fine vaner’d Mahogany with the Mouldings to the Pannels enriched, Best Mortice Locks with ornamental furniture with rich Frizes and Cornices over each, the Chimney Peices to be made of rich Marbles finely Carved, Statuary Slabs, Black Marble Covings, and back Slips, and bright steel hearths.

For the “Eating Room,” Clive’s plans were especially grand. He commissioned a set of four history paintings from Benjamin West, each one to commemorate a different scene of his Indian achievements. To be sure, such splendor came at a price. A 1774 invoice from Capability Brown “for building the New House and other Works done at Claremont” billed Clive for almost £37,000, and still the house was not done—nor would it be when Clive died later that year.⁴⁶

As Claremont rose on its high foundation (to keep it above the damp), Clive turned his attention to a final area of acquisition. He began to collect fine art. Of all Clive’s many purchases, his art collection most transparently attested to his desire to cultivate an aristocratic persona. By the mideighteenth century, Old Master paintings and classical antiquities had become de rigueur props for British gentlemen. Privileged young men would start collecting on the Grand Tour, the long ramble around Europe’s cultural capitals that served as a sort of finishing school for the British male elite. The focal point of the Grand Tour was Rome, where the ancient and the Renaissance met. There, dozens of art dealers supplied “Grand Tourists” with everything they were expected to take home with them, from Mannerist paintings and Piranesi prints, to Etruscan pottery and Roman busts. Dozens more artists earned their livings by painting flattering Grand Tour portraits, the essential “I was there” record of the experience, in which Grand Tourists posed soulfully against backdrops of ruins, caressing antiquities in their hands.⁴⁷

A Grand Tour had been well beyond the reach of young Robert Clive, who had had neither the money nor the leisure to pursue one. He would discover the art and culture of the Continent only later in life, though he made sure to send his son Edward on a Grand Tour at the appropriate age. By the time Clive became interested in art, however, the opportunities to collect it in London itself were greater than ever before. In the decade from 1765 to 1774, more than ten thousand paintings were brought into Britain from the Continent, almost double the number imported during the (admittedly war-torn) decade before.⁴⁸ A testament to, and encouragement of, the widening market for continental paintings in Britain came in 1766, with the founding of Christie’s auction house. (Sotheby’s had been founded in 1744 but chiefly sold books.) Between 1710 and 1760 there were perhaps five to ten art auctions per year in all of London. Throughout the later eighteenth century, Christie’s alone held between half a dozen and a dozen major sales of European paintings annually.⁴⁹ Aristocrats, connoisseurs, and middling sorts alike came together in James Christie’s “Great Room” to gape at and bid on canvases by Europe’s most admired painters: Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorraine, Sebastien Bourdon, Guido Reni, Salvator Rosa, Peter Paul Rubens, David Teniers.

Robert Clive knew nothing about paintings, but he knew that they were things he ought to own. As he freely confessed, he “was no Judge of the Value or Excellence of Pictures and…left the Choice and Price of Pictures to others who understood them…” If paintings “fit for my Collection can be picked upon by Gentleman to be depended upon I have no Objection.”⁵⁰ In 1771, Clive called in several experts to advise him: Benjamin West, a Scottish connoisseur named William Patoun, and possibly his cousin Charles, who was a painter himself.⁵¹ Then, with the same blitzkrieg prodigality he invested in his lands, his houses, and his person (he ordered his shirts in batches of two hundred), Clive formed a major collection of Old Master paintings almost overnight.⁵² The record of Clive’s art purchases in the first half of 1771 alone is staggering. In February and March, he spent some £1,500 on paintings at Christie’s, either attending auctions himself or appointing agents to buy for him.⁵³ In May, he contracted to buy at least six canvases for £3,500 from the courtier and dealer Sir James Wright. He planned to spend a further £2,500 on paintings Benjamin West had picked out for him in Brussels.⁵⁴ “You will think me picture mad,” Clive wrote to his confidant Henry Strachey; he had bought some thirty paintings in four months.⁵⁵

As these numbers suggest, Clive’s purchases were not cheap. At a time when certainly no more than one in ten paintings sold at auction cost more than £40, two of the ten paintings Clive personally bought at Christie’s in 1771 cost nearly that, and three others considerably more, notably a landscape by Salvator Rosa, “clear and beautiful, touched with great spirits and freedom, and one of the most transparent and brilliant that any where can be found,” for which Clive paid almost £100.⁵⁶ Some of Clive’s most treasured and valuable acquisitions, such as a pair of seascapes by Claude Joseph Vernet, set him back the stratospheric sum of £455 2s. 7d.⁵⁷ This was a drop in the bucket for a man whose total wealth in 1771 and 1772 ran to well over £600,000.⁵⁸ The real issue was what his extravagance showed the outside world. As a piece of pure, pricey conspicuous consumption, Clive’s art collection delivered the strongest evidence yet of his social ambitions. Horace Walpole, always armed with a put-down, sneered at the “learned patrons of taste, the Czarina, Lord Clive, or some Nabob,” who were completely ignorant about the real value of art.⁵⁹ (A fine comment coming from Walpole, considering that “the Czarina” Catherine the Great was soon to acquire most of his father Robert’s Old Master collection, considered the finest in Britain, for the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.)⁶⁰ But to Clive, it was hardly of consequence whether or not he liked the art himself.⁶¹ What mattered most was that his collection be admired by connoisseurs, and “seen to great advantage” at Berkeley Square or Claremont.⁶²

Clive’s Old Masters put the finishing touches on the aristocratic profile he had worked so hard to cultivate. As a collector of art, he acted out the role he had defined for himself by “collecting” parliamentary power, estates, and houses. Buying up intangible commodities such as these may not usually be characterized as “collecting” in the way that buying up paintings is. (Typically, accumulating power and property gets called empire-building instead.) But the motives—and the money—behind all Clive’s various kinds of acquisitions were identical. His art collection simply captured in miniature his systematic collection of everything else that a British aristocrat should have, from status symbols to raw power. Call it a collection, call it an empire: it was effectively both, amassed in his search for a place among Britain’s ruling elite.

What did this self-made creation, Clive of Britain, look like? Clive’s aristocratic ambitions are captured in a little-known portrait, painted in 1764, shortly before he sailed to India for his third and final time. The portraitist was his cousin Charles Clive, an artist much less famous (and less talented) than the fashionable society painters Clive usually patronized. Nevertheless, the image Charles produced was every bit as flattering as Robert could have wished.⁶³ Clive stands out from the murky canvas in vivid scarlet, larger than life. (Scarlet, the hue of military uniforms, was definitely his color, and he had himself painted in uniform by some of Britain’s leading artists, such as Thomas Gainsborough and Nathaniel Dance.) But this scarlet is no soldier’s coat. It is the ruby velvet of a baron’s robes, trimmed with ermine, cuffed with brocade, garlanded with gold braid. Nor is there any of Clive’s usual military swagger. He poses instead with the mincing elegance of a nobleman. That is because he is one, ennobled in 1761 as Baron Clive of Plassey. On the table next to him sits his coronet.

A further curious detail pulls together this image of aristocracy. Hanging over Clive’s shoulder on the wall behind him is a profile of Mir Jafar, his Bengal ally. What accounts for this portrait within a portrait? Nothing is known about the circumstances in which this canvas was produced, but a letter from Clive’s wife,Margaret, of February 1764—about the time the work must have been painted—suggests that it may actually have been intended for Mir Jafar, a “Present as a mark of our lasting Sense of his Favors.”⁶⁴ (The exchange of portraits between rulers was a common means of cementing alliances.) Perhaps this picture was a celebration of a remarkable symbiosis. Clive made him, and he made Clive: nawab and baron, transcontinental peers.

Portraits are revealing documents of the sitter’s self-image. This was Clive as he wanted people to see him: stately, prestigious, powerful, noble. The soldier is entirely absent; he has been absorbed into the aristocrat. But portraits are also often deceiving, and this was no exception. Clive’s peerage was of course an Irish one, not the English one he craved, a slight he railed against to the end of his days. Furthermore, his association with Mir Jafar, far from crowning his achievements, cast a black shadow over them in the minds of many of his contemporaries. So if this painting broadcasts an image of Clive as he wished to be seen, it also contains allusions to the very sources of insecurity that propelled his refashioning in the first place. Would Clive of Britain be able to efface the darker image of that other empire-builder, Clive of India?