The Battle of Plassey, 1757

The Victory That Won an Empire

Stuart Reid

• Publisher: Frontline Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781473885288
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Britain was rapidly emerging as the most powerful European nation, a position France long believed to be her own. Yet with France still commanding the largest continental army, Britain saw its best opportunities for expansion lay in the East. Yet, as Britains influence increased through its official trading arm, the East India Company, the ruler of Bengal, Nawab Siraj-ud-daulah, sought to drive the British out of the subcontinent and turned to France for help.The ensuing conflict saw intimate campaigns fought by captains and occasionally colonels and by small companies rather than big battalions. They were campaigns fought by individuals rather than anonymous masses; some were heroes, some were cowards and most of them were rogues on the make. The story is not only about Robert Clive, a clerk from Shropshire who became to all intents and purposes an emperor, but also about Eyre Coote an Irishman who fought with everyone he met, about Alexander Grant a Jacobite who first escaped from Culloden and then, Flashman-like was literally the last man into the last boat to escape Calcutta and the infamous Black Hole. The fighting culminated in Robert Clives astonishing victory at Plassey where just 3, 000 British and sepoy troops defeated Siraj-ud-Daulahs Franco-Bengali army of 18, 000 in the space of only forty minutes. The victory at Plassey in 1757 established Britain as the dominant force in India, the whole of which gradually come under British control and became the most prized possession in its empire. Few battles in history have ever had such profound consequences.

Chapter 1

Mercantile Soldiering

Originally chartered by Queen Elizabeth on 31 December 1600, the East India Company or ‘The United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies’, as it became in 1708, was certainly the first and arguably by far the most successful multinational trading corporation the world has ever seen. Within less than fifty years of the strange affair at Plassey related in these pages, the Company would not only be astonishingly wealthy but, under the direction of a government-appointed Board of Control, it would be unashamedly governing vast tracts of the Indian subcontinent as a sovereign state in all but name.

Yet, the Company, or at least its directors and shareholders meeting at the India House, their sprawling, and surprisingly ramshackle headquarters in London’s Leadenhall Street,1 never set out to be empire-builders, and indeed almost frantically tried to avoid it. On the contrary, in a proper pursuit of profit, the directors of the Company were ever anxious for nothing more than a ‘quiet trade’, undisturbed by alarums and ‘brabbles’. However, to their oft-expressed distress and occasional angry disapproval, the Company’s servants half a world and many months away from London, constantly fell foul of commercial rivals such as the Portuguese, the Dutch and latterly the French, and discovered a destructive talent for getting embroiled in local politics and thereby upsetting the local rulers, on whose goodwill that quiet trade ultimately depended. Conversely of course, many of those on the ground were wont to complain with good reason that many of the troubles could have been avoided, were it not for the interference of a board of directors in London, as ignorant of local conditions as they were ungrateful for the efforts of its servants!

India

The Company’s very earliest voyages at the beginning of the seventeenth century had been directed all the way to the South China Sea and to what is now the Indonesian Archipelago, primarily in search of nutmeg and other high-value spices. The trade was lucrative enough while it lasted but a murderous competition with the Dutch, who had got there first, eventually found the Company effectively forced out of the area. Instead the main focus of its activities soon shifted northwards to a far more broadly-based trade with the Indian subcontinent and a receptive Mughal Empire, which was at that time still strong enough to enforce some order amongst its often quarrelsome European guests, and keen to embrace a trade which brought the large quantities of silver needed to maintain its numerous armies.

There the East India Company dramatically expanded its commercial operations, quickly eclipsing the older Portuguese Estado da Índia by opening its own entrepots, first at Surat on the north-west coast, Masulipatnam on the east and the port of Hugli in Bengal. All three ports were already established and thriving as great trading centres long before the Europeans came, but for various reasons, by the beginning of the eighteenth century the Company had acquired three entirely new settlements of its own, dignified by the title of Presidencies and serving as regional headquarters for an increasing number of factories or trading stations planted all over the interior.2

The oldest of these Presidencies was Madrasapatam, commonly rendered simply as Madras. It was no more than an insignificant fishing village on the east coast when it was purchased by the Company on 8 August 1639. At first sight, Madras was an odd spot for an international trading centre, for it was very awkwardly sited; in effect sitting on an open beach with no proper supply of fresh water and a great bar lying just offshore.3 This may have explained the cheerful readiness with which the local ruler had disposed of what was then a near-worthless asset, but it also meant that for the next two centuries and more rather than tie up at proper wharves to discharge or take on cargoes, or otherwise lie in a secure anchorage, shipping had to stand off the beach in good weather while everyone and everything was precariously ferried across the bar in small boats. In bad weather ships had to avoid it entirely. Yet astonishingly, Madras thrived. Soon the level of trade being carried on with the interior was such that despite this seemingly crippling disadvantage, Madras rose to pre-eminence amongst the Company’s other stations and, for most of the eighteenth century, it was to all intents and purposes its head office in India.

Next in order of importance came Bombay. Very largely confined at this time to a pestilential island on the west coast, it was once a Portuguese colony before reluctantly coming to the British Crown as a part of Queen Catherine of Braganza’s dowry. In contrast to Madras, it had a very good, well-sheltered harbour, but Catherine’s husband King Charles II, who was no fool and quick to recognise a liability when he saw one, very promptly sold it on to a curiously ungrateful Company. Although relatively convenient to the imperial capital of Delhi, as a commercial establishment it never attained as much importance as Madras, especially when it came to trade with the Indian interior. On the other hand, it was very well placed to tap into the considerable local shipping trade with Arabia and the Persian Gulf and the ‘country trade’ all the way up and down the west coast of India. Consequently, although provided with a proper garrison it found itself largely dependent for its security on a small Company-run naval squadron, popularly known as the Bombay Marine, which began as an ad hoc anti-piracy patrol and would eventually evolve into the present Indian Navy. Moreover, having no significant landward territories attaching to it at this time also meant that Bombay was frequently in the happy position of being able to lend some of its troops to assist the other two Presidencies in time of need.

The third and most recently-founded of the Presidencies was Calcutta. Away from the west coast shipping lanes, most commerce within India quite naturally flowed up and down the great rivers. Of these the mighty Ganges was obviously the most important and so the Company hastened to establish a factory at Hugli, a port in its delta which in turn lent its name to the lower part of a distributory of the Ganges really called the Bahgramiti river. From here, goods and specie were at first transhipped to and from Madras, but by 1676 the Bengal trade was substantial enough to justify turning the factory into a presidency, capable of dealing directly with England. So far so good, but as we shall see in the next chapter a combination of overweening arrogance and an unhappy involvement in local politics, culminating in an ill-fated attempt to seize the port of Chittagong on the other side of the Bay of Bengal, saw the Company effectively expelled from Bengal in 1685. Such was the value of the European trade, however, that having made its peace with the perpetually cash-strapped Mughal Emperor, Aurangzeb, the Company was welcomed back with open arms just five years later. Nevertheless, in the circumstances, a re-establishment of the Hugli factory was considered imprudent, and so instead the site chosen by the Company for its new operational base was a fishing village named Kalkata situated on the left or east bank of the Hoogli River, some distance downstream from the port itself.

The Military

To protect all of these settlements great and small, and more importantly the Company’s goods and treasure accumulated therein, some kind of security force was grudgingly acknowledged to be necessary. Yet anyone inclined to doubt the assertion that in the eighteenth century the East India Company still had no ambitions for territorial conquest in the Indian subcontinent, need look no further than the state of its ‘military’ companies immediately prior to the events about to unfold.

Whilst most of its soldiers were obviously employed as garrisons for the three principal settlements, the term companies was something of a misnomer for they were rarely if ever mustered as such, and instead small detachments, and even individual soldiers, were scattered up-country, providing security details for the factories and no doubt occasionally serving as armed bodyguards for the factors.

At Madras in 1721 there were just three such companies based in Fort St. George, and another at Fort St. David,4 near Cuddalore, mustering a total of 545 men of all ranks, of whom only 245 were Europeans and the rest Eurasians. In addition there was an even more motley band officially known as ‘the gunroom crew’, but which, according to the garrison paymaster in 1724, was ‘lookt on as a lodging workhouse to relieve poor sailors and at the same time be of use to the garrison’. What he neglected to add was, as it turned out in 1740, the fifty-six Europeans, fifty-two Eurasians and thirty lascars (native Indian labourers) then belonging to the gunroom crew were expected to look after some 200 guns of various calibres.

Bombay’s original garrison, on the other hand, had actually been four companies of regular infantry sent out by King Charles II in 1662, but most of them, alas, quickly succumbed to fevers long before both colony and surviving soldiers were transferred from the Crown to the East India Company. Thereafter the comparatively strong military establishment maintained on the island varied between four and eight infantry companies, largely comprised of Topasses or Eurasians. In a return of 1742, the soldiers at Bombay were reported to number a total of 1,593 men of all ranks – but of those only 346 were Europeans.

Similarly, by the mid-1750s there were in theory six companies of infantry in Bengal and one of artillery, but one of the companies had been sent to Madras and was never seen again, while the rest were chronically understrength, not least because during the wars with the French the authorities in Madras were all too often guilty of intercepting and skimming off recruits bound for Calcutta. Consequently, as late as February 1756 there were only a total of 647 European officers and soldiers in Bengal, although once again a surprisingly large number of the latter were actually Eurasians.5

This was largely because during much of the eighteenth century the Company was not allowed to openly beat up for military recruits within the British Isles in competition with the Regular Army. Consequently, it had to find its soldiers in strange and unusual places and often by dubious means. As to those sent out from England, they all too often turned out to be of dubious quality physically as well as morally – often being men who were too short or too weakly to be of interest to the Regulars. As late as 1787, it was complained that one recent draft from England included ‘broken gentlemen’ and half-pay officers, both from the army and the navy, made redundant by the ending of the American War. There was even a former clergyman amongst them, although the circumstances of his misfortune are unrecorded! Otherwise, the rest were the depressingly familiar collection of undersized or disabled men, foreigners, deserters, criminals and even a few sailors who had jumped ship once too often. ‘I did not think,’ protested Lord Cornwallis on looking them over, ‘that Britain could have furnished such a set of wretched objects.’6 In the circumstances, there was probably some justification for the apocryphal story of the complaint made to the Directors that whilst it was no doubt inevitable that some of the Company’s soldiers should be recruited in Newgate Gaol, trawling them from the Bedlam Mad House was going too far!

Consequently, many of the Company’s European recruits were in fact found locally in India itself. In the early days, the term Europeans was exercised very broadly and a fair number of them were enlisted from the inevitable floating population of ‘poor whites’ of various nationalities. In Bengal, for some reason, most of the genuine Europeans at first appear to have been Dutchmen. Most of those would desert during or after the siege of Calcutta in 1756 and instead enlist with the French. Ironically, however, after the British capture of Chandernagore in the following year a sizeable number of the defeated French were enlisted in their place. So-called Portuguese were also enlisted – although in this case the term was in reality a very common euphemism for Eurasians, ‘most of whom we are obliged to take tho’ good for little’. But at least, as the Directors approvingly noted, they were ‘cheaper by one half’ than Europeans.7 Later, in the ninteenth century, these cut-price Eurasian recruits would be rigidly segregated and often employed only as bandsmen, but in the early days this was rare, and while drummers appear to have normally been ‘black Portuguese’ or ‘blacks’, the rank and file were more generally found promiscuously mixed with Europeans.

Faced with the perennial difficulty of finding sufficient suitable recruits for its army, the Company even decided in 1751 to hire some Swiss mercenaries. In July of that year, a contract was signed with a military entrepreneur named Schaub for the provision of two companies, each comprising four officers, six sergeants, six corporals, a drum major and two drummers, and 120 soldiers. All of the officers and men were to be Protestants, and although the contract specified that they were to be raised in Zurich, Geneva and Basle, recruits from Alsace and Hanover were also to be accepted. Between 1751 and 1754, it seems that some 500 men were sent out, including artillerymen. Initially the Company agreed to maintain the traditional Swiss mercenary privileges in regard to discipline, drum calls and other practices. The contract or contracts appear to have lapsed in about 1754, although the Swiss companies maintained their identity for some time afterwards and one of them, commanded by a Captain Guapp, would fight at Plassey.

Nor, often enough, were their officers in much better shape and on the whole they were men who could not afford to purchase a commission in the Regular Army. In a letter written the night before his death at the storming of Conjeveram in 1759, Captain Robert Bannatyne wrote that, ‘My Father had no great Estate and dying whilst his Children were young you May guess Whether five of us did not find use for small inheritance’.8 As another bitterly put it, ‘we are not, generally speaking, men of interest, else we should not have preferred a service in which seniority [in other words length of service] gives command’.9 As with the rank and file, even some of the officers were men who had left their country for their country’s good. One notable example we shall meet shortly was Captain Alexander Grant, a Highland Jacobite who had been ‘out’ in the ’45 but afterwards arrived in India in 1747 as a lieutenant with one of Boscawen’s Independent Companies, where he took the opportunity to transfer to the Company’s service.

As we shall shortly see, this reliance on seniority meant that when hostilities commenced in the 1740s, some of the Company’s officers were very old indeed in years, but not alas, in rank or ability. Indeed it could hardly be otherwise given the Directors’ peevish opposition to granting anyone a higher commission than that of a lieutenant before the reforms of 1748. Even then, whilst the rank of captain afterwards became more common, the responsibilities piled upon officers were still rarely consistent with their small rewards. Just as lieutenants were commanding companies prior to 1748, afterwards it was not uncommon to find captains leading battalions, and majors, although existing, were decidedly rare. Pay was chronically low and, notoriously, officers were forced to rely on a wide and varied collection of allowances (and private trade) in order to make ends meet.

All in all, therefore, when our story opens, the Company’s soldiers, both officers and men, were in reality no more than a dubious rabble of second-rate armed security guards, probably little removed in character and effectiveness from those euphemistically-titled ‘security contractors’ seemingly so ubiquitous in the present day. They were adequate enough to protect godowns or warehouses from pilfering and to present a suitable show when required, but not surprisingly all too many of them were at first found to be wanting when calamity fell and proper soldiering was the order of the day.

War in the Carnatic

At first, no matter the wars raging in Europe during the long years of Louis XIV – the Sun King – both British and French traders in India had recognised the dangers of engaging in national conflicts when there was no good reason to do so. This was partly a matter of a sensible recognition that it was bad for business and partly because in any case the Great Moghul forbade Europeans from disturbing the peace of his dominions in the name of whatever might be going on at the other side of the world. In 1744, therefore, when the governor of the French settlement of Pondicherry, Joseph-François Dupleix, learned that war had again broken out in Europe between Britain and France, he courteously wrote to Nicholas Morse, his British counterpart 100 miles away in Madras, suggesting that in accordance with past practice, neither party should engage in hostilities ‘east of the Cape’.10 With equal courtesy, Morse responded that he would be happy to concur, but as a mere servant of the East India Company he obviously had no authority over any of his sovereign’s officers who might happen by. In this, Morse was equivocating for he knew perfectly well that the Royal Navy was already on its way to seize Pondicherry. Whether or not this was discreetly conveyed to Dupleix, or whether he was more than capable of reading between the lines, the Frenchman immediately appealed for the protection of the Nawab or imperial viceroy of the Carnatic, a gentleman named Anwar-ud-din. The Nawab, equally concerned to maintain a quiet and profitable trade, promptly responded by reminding both parties that it was strictly forbidden to undertake hostilities anywhere within the Emperor’s dominions.

At this stage in the game, Mughal authority was still something to be respected. Commodore Curtis Barnet of the Royal Navy might indeed have been instructed to fight the French, but he was not authorised to start a war with the Mughal Empire. Pondicherry was therefore safe for the moment, but on the other hand French shipping on the high seas was still a different matter entirely. The patriotic zeal of eighteenth-century naval officers was deliberately encouraged and sustained by the prize money awarded for captured enemy ships, and Barnet found the Indian Ocean to be a very happy hunting ground indeed. A number of ships belonging to the French Compagnie des Indes, and of course their valuable cargoes, were very quickly snapped up, and this provocation goaded Dupleix into marching against the East India Company’s Fort St. David, which lay a tempting 14 miles south of Pondicherry. He might easily have carried the place out of hand but fortunately the Royal Navy turned up in time to save the day. This time it was Morse who appealed to the Nawab and no doubt derived a smug satisfaction from Anwar-ud-din’s repeated injunction in the name of the Emperor, forbidding the Europeans to disturb the peace. The French, for the moment at least, wer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Mercantile Soldiering
• Chapter 2 Calcutta
• Chapter 3 Into the Black Hole
• Chapter 4 To Fulta and Back Again
• Chapter 5 Drums along the Hoogli
• Chapter 6 The Battle of Plassey
• Epilogue: Patna
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Plate section