Dennis Wheatley - The Rape Of Venice

This long period of strife and uncertainty had had a profound effect on the affairs of the Honourable East India Company. For a hundred and fifty years the Company had adhered to the Charter granted to it by Queen Elizabeth, in the heart of which stood the noble phrase, 'for the honour of this our realm of England as for the increase of our navigation and the advancement of trade…' The Company had never sought conquest and had resorted little to arms, except against its competitors: the Portuguese, Dutch and French; and its monopoly of the right to trade, which included China and the whole of South East Asia, had brought it enormous wealth. But with India divided into as many states as Europe, and a number of them ruled by treacherous warrior adventurers, the Company found itself compelled not only to wage minor wars in the protection of its interests, but, in certain cases, to protect them for the future by assuming permanent control over territories in which those interests lay.

Apart from outlying trading posts, these territories were three in number. The most important was in the most distant part of India: its extreme north-​eastern province of Bengal. In the wide mouth of the Hooghly river there the Portuguese had very early established a settlement, but in 1632 Shah Jahan had exterminated it and soon afterwards, the Dutch and English managed to get a foothold; although it was not until sixty years later the Company received permission to move its headquarters farther up the river to a little fishing village, later to become the great city of Calcutta.

In the hundred years that followed, the Company's Servants penetrated deep into the interior to the north-​west, through the rich provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Oudh up to Delhi and far beyond into the Punjab and Kashmir. The river of trade that flowed back had, by Roger's day, made Calcutta one of the great metropoli of India with its British residents and garrison already numbering several thousands.

The Company's next most important centre was at Madras, another small fishing village a thousand miles south-​west of Calcutta, on the Carnatic coast, at which in 1640 they had been given permission to erect a fort. From it they traded right up the east coast of India, across its tip through Mysore to the Malabar coast on the west, and up into the great province of Hyderabad, which occupied nearly the whole of the central part of Southern India.

Lastly, more than half way up the west coast, six hundred miles from Madras and over a thousand from Calcutta-​both across country as the crow flies-​lay the island of Bombay. It had come to the British crown as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza, and in 1667 King Charles II had leased it to the Company for £10 per annum. It was the finest natural harbour in India, no greater distance from London than Madras and a thousand miles nearer than Calcutta; but it had not developed to anything approaching the other two, the reason being that it was too far north to handle the Malabar coast trade and was cut off by difficult mountain country from the productive regions to the north and east. Nevertheless, it had grown into a considerable city and was a most valuable naval base.

The anarchy following the dissolution of the Mogul Empire had been further aggravated by the outbreak of war between Britain and France in 1743 over the question of the Austrian Succession. By this time the French, who had come later into the field than the Portuguese, Dutch and British, had also established powerful trading centres, notably at Chander-​nagore on the Hooghly and at Pondicherry, about a hundred miles south of Madras.

Pondicherry was the French headquarters and its able and energetic governor, the Marquis de Dupliex, promptly attempted to bring the whole of Southern India under French influence. He captured Madras and forced the remnant of the British community there to shut themselves up in Fort St. David. He then supported the claims of two pretenders to the thrones of Hyderabad and the Carnatic and ousted the pro-​British potentates who occupied them.

It was then that Robert, afterwards Lord, Clive had first made a name for himself. Originally a young writer to the Company, he had early transferred to a cadetship in its armed forces. By 1751 the British cause was in a parlous state. Mohammed Ali, whom they were supporting as the rightful ruler of the Carnatic, had been driven from his capital at Arcot and, heavily outnumbered, was besieged in Trichinopoly. Clive's force was so meagre that he could not possibly hope to defeat the besieging army. Instead, with the intention of drawing them off, he surprised and took Arcot, the capital newly won by the pretender.

This brilliant stroke succeeded. Mohammed Ali was saved from surrender and death by the pretender's hurriedly abandoning the siege and hastening back with his army to Arcot; but he now bottled Clive up in it. With only eight young officers, two hundred Europeans and six hundred Indian troops, Clive withstood for fifty days a siege and assaults by an army twenty thousand strong. At length a Maratha Prince, out of admiration for his bravery, brought an army to his assistance. Arcot was relieved and the Carnatic preserved as a sphere of British influence.

In Hyderabad, things went the other way. Dupliex's talented second-​in-​command, the Comte de Bussy, secured this vast central territory for the French and became, in effect, for several years, its ruler.

In 1754, peace in Europe brought peace in India. Dupliex was recalled and Clive went home. But the peace was only a very temporary one. In '56, the general war broke out again, and it was in that year that the young, dissolute and avaricious Nawab of Bengal, Surajah Dowlah, inspired by the French, made a treacherous surprise attack on Calcutta. The fortress was in an ill state of repair and the garrison below strength, but that hardly excuses the cowardly conduct of the governor who fled with his council to the ships in the harbour, leaving 146 Europeans to the mercy of the enemy. They were jammed into in old prison known as the Black Hole, and only 23 of them were still alive next morning.

In the meantime, Clive was on his way out again, now with full powers as the Company's General. The following January he took the field. With nine hundred British soldiers and fifteen hundred 'sepoys', as the European trained Indian troops were called, he recaptured Calcutta and repulsed the forty-​thousand-​strong army of Surajah Dowlah. In the spring, the French settlement of Chandernagore was captured and, in June, Clive again faced Surajah Dowlah's army at Plassey. The young Prince's contemptuous treatment of his nobles had made him many enemies at his own court, and his principal General, Mir Jafer, treacherously advised retreat. Clive then fell upon and routed Surajah Dowlah's army; he was murdered and Mir Jafer placed on his throne.

That was the end of French influence in Northern India and they were soon to lose their hold in the south. In January 1760, they were decisively defeated at Waniswash and a year later had to surrender Pondicherry. Meanwhile, a year earlier, Clive had defeated a powerful Dutch expedition, and when he left India no European power remained there capable of challenging British interests.

The Indian States were, however, far from permanently pacified, and in 1765 Clive was sent back for a further term of office. With a diplomacy equalling his military renown, he entered into treaties with numerous potentates, including the titular Emperor in Delhi, which gave the Company control of the state revenues in Bengal and Bihar, made it the virtual master of Oudh and the Carnatic, and gave it the trading rights in the Northern Circas, which had previously been enjoyed by the French.

There followed the events which for the whole of Roger's lifetime had caused an almost constant succession of heated debates in the British Parliament.