Notes towards an alternate history: Clive of India
What if Clive had missed again?
What I like about Clive
Is that he is no longer alive.
There is a great deal to be said
For being dead.
•E.C. Bentley, Biography for Beginners (1905)
In his youth, sometime around 1960, Garrett Trapnell decided to kill himself. He placed a pistol against his heart, but then reconsidered, deciding he did not deserve a quick death, and shot himself in the stomach. A quick trip to the hospital, and Trapnell survived, to become Canada’s most notorious bank robber and hijacker. He died in prison, and much of his term was spent in solitary confinement after an escape attempt that involved coercing a helicopter to land in the prison yard to pick him up.
That last part is irrelevant, just interesting; the point is that killing a person, even one’s own self, can be difficult, and many people who try do not succeed. A lot of things can go wrong. The German general Ludwig Beck, after failing to assassinate Hitler, was given a few moments alone with a pistol, and he only managed to shoot himself sideways through both eyes—his second failure that day. (The Nazis finished him off, of course).
Almost exactly two hundred years before General Beck, a young Robert Clive, then a low-level agent of the British East India Company, in a fit of despair, put a gun to his head. The gun misfired once, twice, and then Clive tossed the gun away (figuratively), exclaiming, “Well, I am reserved for something!” He went on to conquer India, more or less single-handedly. Thirty years later he successfully slit his own throat and died.
Conquering a subcontinent far from home is understandably not the kind of thing we want to celebrate nowadays, but it is absolutely the kind of thing people wanted to celebrate in the past. The 1784 edition of the Biographia Britannica effused, “Like the first of the Cæsars, the talents of other men could add nothing to the reach of his genius, or the correctness of his judgment.” Pitt the Elder called him “a heaven-born General, who…surpassed all the officers of his time.” Lord Macaulay, who is comparatively sober when it comes to Clive, or at least not blind to his faults, nevertheless opines that “our [i.e. his] island, so fertile in heroes and statesmen, has scarcely ever produced a man more truly great either in arms or in council.” Whatever you think about conquerers, or even about warriors in general, it’s hard to claim that Clive wasn’t good at his job. Plenty of people were trying to conquer India in the mid eighteenth century, and no one else succeeded.
And that’s important because shortly before Clive killed himself the British government, irritated by the Boston Tea Party and general colonial malfeasance, invited Clive to take over the supreme command of the British forces in America.
Well, maybe they did. There’s no record of the offer earlier than the 1784 Biographia Britannica, a decade after the fact (for that matter, there’s no record of the early suicide attempt until nearly a century after, in Malcolm’s (cited) biography). But maybes have never stopped me from feigning insane certainty. Let’s say it’s all true, and that first Clive tried and failed to kill himself, then he tried and succeeded.
You can’t really switch the two events, of course, because if he succeeded the first time he could hardly have made a second attempt. If he succeeded the first time, India probably would have ended up British anyway; possibly French; probably not Portuguese; just possibly still Mughal, which would mean, eventually, Russian.
But if he failed in his second attempt, too…
Clive’s reason for turning down the North American command, assuming he did, was (the BB tells us) “on account of the ill fate of his health.” Poor health may have been the reason for his suicide as well. But people get better; not from slashing their throat and dying, but from the gastrointestinal ailments that Clive suffered under. If in 1774 Clive had taken to his trusty pistol instead of his knife, he may have decided once again that he was reserved for something. Boots back on, Clive. Time to accept the leadership position.
Biographer Mark Bence-Jones suggests that Clive turned the N. Am. job down because he knew he was not up to the task, and also because he had already in 1772—before most people were taking Colonial agitation seriously—prophesied in his notes the inevitable independence of the Americans. But if defeating the Americans was, as Edmund Burke declared, impossible—well, Clive, that heaven-born general, belongs to that select corps of men who have achieved the impossible. For single-handed conquest, only Pizarro bests Clive. “A great prince was dependent on my pleasure,” Clive testified in Parliament about his time In India; “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! Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation!” All of that, except the moderation, sounds like Pizarro, too. A career in the wilds of the New World could be the final jewel in Clive’s diadem.
Imagine Washington facing not fellow Freemason and eventual loser Charles Cornwallis but the guy BB can compare to no one but Julius Caesar. Imagine the American Revolution downgraded to Rebellion. The rest fills in itself.
(“I am reserved”: John Malcolm, The Life of Robert Lord Clive, Collected from the Family Papers, Communicated by the Earl of Powis (John Murray, 1836) p. 44; Andrew Kipis, Biographia Britannica vol. 3 (John Rivington, 1784) p. 663; Pitt: ib.; Macaulay: Alphonso G. Newcomer, ed., Macaulay’s Essays on Clive and Hastings (Scott, Foresman, 1909) p. 41; maybe they did: v. Mark Bence-Jones, Clive of India (St. Martin’s. 1974) pp. 296 & 15; BB p. 662; Bence-Jones p. 296 ; Burke: quoted in “What if General Howe had defeated Washington ‘at the Brunx’?”; “a great prince”: quoted in John Watney, Clive of India (Saxon House, 1974) p. 204.)