CLIVE’S recall to India in 1756, just three years after he had returned home to England to launch a surely glittering Parliamentary career, confirmed that the Company could hardly manage Bengal without him. Another two-year spell in England as MP for Salop brought a knighthood and a peerage from an appreciative King George III,* but ended in 1763 when Clive was once again sent out to calm Bengal.
But the respect he enjoyed in India, as both administrator and commander, was not shared at Westminster. After retiring to England in 1767 he was surprised to find himself accused of corruption, despite facing criticism in India for trying to rein in Company malpractice.* A Parliamentary inquiry acquitted him in 1773, but ordered the Company’s operations to be thoroughly overhauled.*
Clive’s career as a leading British statesman ideally placed to reform London’s controversial Indian policy now stalled, and before he could regain its momentum, he died at home in London on November 22nd, 1774, aged forty-nine.*
The peerage was Irish, which under Parliamentary rules meant that Baron Clive of Plassey, as he was now styled, was still able to take up his seat in the House of Commons.
After victory over the Nawab of Bengal at The Battle of Plassey in 1757, Clive did not (as is so often stated) ransack the Treasury. He was escorted to the Treasury by officials now serving the new Nawab, Clive’s ally Mir Jafar, and invited to help himself. Clive later told Parliament that given the temptation his restraint had been remarkable. ‘To the victor belong the spoils’ was recognised practice in India and in Europe, from Elizabethan hero Sir Francis Drake to Admiral Croft in Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Indeed, Clive’s fortune was not as great as it might have been: in 1755, a chest of £33,000 of his gold went down with the ‘Dodington’ near Port Elizabeth.
Similarly, Adam Smith blamed Company policy, which stifled freedom of trade in favour of high taxes and over-regulation, for turning a food shortage caused by severe drought into an entirely avoidable famine in 1769, two years after Clive had retired. See An Avoidable Tragedy and The Great Bengal Famine.
It is often stated as settled fact that Clive took his own life. He suffered from depression and from an extremely painful gallstone problem for which he had been prescribed the dangerous and highly addictive analgesic opium, but there was no inquest, so we do not actually know how he died.