Books: Prelude to Suicide

CLIVE OF PLASSEY —A. Mervyn Davies — Scribner ($3.75). Most people remember Robert, Lord Clive as a figure in Henty’s With Clive In India. There was little else to read about him until last week A. Mervyn Davies, onetime British diplomat and author of Warren Hastings filled the gap with a solid, non-spark, thoroughly readable, 522-page biography, Clive of Plassey.

When Robert Clive reached Madras one nightfall in 1744 after a 15-month voyage from London, he found India a “battered caravanserai.” Its warring kinglets misruled some 90 distinct peoples whose languages were Babel. Its climate was hotter than its curry. Its diseases were “consumptions, fluxes, fevers, cholera, scurvy, berbers (a kind of paralysis), smallpox, gout, the stone, prickly heat, tetters or worms.”

Clive rose from a penniless, friendless and unfriendly clerk of the East India Company to a military hero. Arcot and Plassey were his smashing victories. At Arcot, Clive’s little army of 500 defeated an opposing army of 10,000. At Plassey, Clive’s 3,200 men routed 50,000. William Pitt described him in Parliament as “the heaven-born general.”

Author Davies rates Clive’s military audacity higher than his strategy, denies that Plassey was the decisive battle many have called it. He does not deny Clive repaid himself handsomely for his trouble. First fruits of Plassey for Clive were $1,170,000. Clive’s fortune when he returned to England shortly after was estimated at $6,000,000, one of the largest in the country. His wife’s jewels were valued at $100,000 “at the very least.” One Indian prince granted Clive $150,000 a year. Said witty Horace Walpole: “If a beggar asks charity, he says: ‘Friend, I have no small brilliants about me.'” The cost of living, Walpole added, rose immediately when Clive returned. Not everybody was amused. Investigated by Parliament, Clive defended his greed: “Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation! . . . an opulent city lay at my mercy; its richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles : I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone, piled on either hand with gold and jewels!” Charges of corruption against him were dismissed, but on Nov. 22, 1774, worn out by struggle, ill will and ill health. Clive cut his throat.