(This follows my previous entry on "Shropshire politics in the 18th century")
It has always been accepted by historians that the British
political scene changed after 1760. A young King, George III, came to the
throne, succeeding his elderly grandfather, George II, who neither liked nor
understood British Parliamentary politics and was always happier back home in
Hanover, in north-western Germany, where he actually spent half his reign. The
Jacobite challenge, which had dominated politics earlier in the century, was
now dead, and the old party labels of Whig and Tory now carried little meaning.
Party politics had actually been in a state of disintegration ever since the
death of the long-serving Prime Minister, Henry Pelham, in 1754, but for a
while this political meltdown was concealed by the outbreak of the Seven Years’
War with France in 1756 and the creation of a wartime coalition government
under the Duke of Newcastle, Pelham’s brother and now leader of the “Old Whigs”,
and William Pitt, whose whole appeal was cross-party, or indeed anti-party. By
the time of George III’s accession in 1760, the war was clearly being won, and
discussion now centred on how best to bring it to a close. Disagreements
between Pitt and Newcastle quickly surfaced, and the new King complicated
matters by his known dislike for both of them and his preference for his
former tutor, Lord Bute. The upshot was a decade of political chaos and weak,
short-lived governments. Pitt resigned in 1761 and Newcastle in 1762, leaving
Bute to be Prime Minister and push through a compromise peace treaty with
France. But he resigned next year, to be followed by George Grenville (1763-5),
Lord Rockingham (1765-6), William Pitt returning to office as Earl of Chatham
(1766-8) and the Duke of Grafton (1678-70). Stability was only restored under
Lord North (1770-82), who however presided over defeat at the hands of the
American colonists. (All this is covered in much more detail in my three earlier blog
entries on George III and Lord Bute). A far greater factor in Shropshire politics in the second half of the century was the return to his native county of Robert Clive.
Robert Clive, from Styche Hall in Shropshire, was born in
1725. As a teenager he was sent out to Madras as a “writer” (clerk) in the East
India Company at the princely sum of £5 a year. India in the 18th
century was a mysterious land, several months’ sailing time from Britain, to
which young men like Clive ventured to seek their fortunes. Many of them were
never heard of again, but a small number returned, perhaps suffering from strange diseases or addicted to opium, but possessed of enormous wealth, gained by means of
which it was best not to inquire. William Pitt’s grandfather, “Diamond” Pitt,
had been one of these.
British possessions in India at this time amounted to
little more than footholds around the three bases of Bombay, Madras and Calcutta,
where they warily faced the nearby bases of the French East India Company. Soon
after Clive’s arrival, the War of the Austrian Succession spread to India, and
he was able to demonstrate great military and diplomatic talents in repelling
the attempts of the French and their Indian allies to drive the British from Madras. It was the start
of the Clive legend.
In 1753 he married and returned to England, already a hero
and rich enough to stand for Parliament at Mitchell, a notoriously venal
“rotten borough” in Cornwall. There he spent £5,000 in a successful campaign to
win over the 55 voters of the constituency, only to have the result overturned
by a vote of the House of Commons on the grounds of corruption!
He returned to
India, where his reputation soared to new heights. He defeated the pro-French
forces at the battle of Plassey, regained Calcutta for the East India Company
and deposed the local Nawab (the representative of the Mughal Emperor in
Delhi), replacing him with his pro-British cousin. The British position in
Bengal (roughly equivalent to the modern Bangladesh) now looked secure, and
Clive returned home in 1760. He was hailed by William Pitt as a “heaven-born
general”.
Clive was now not
only a hero, but an extremely rich man: rewards given him by the new Nawab were
said to amount to £234,000. He began the rebuilding of his ancestral home at
Styche, and rented a country house at Condover, near Shrewsbury. He was
resolved to establish a base in Parliament, and formed an alliance in
Shropshire with Lord Powis. A general election was due in 1761. Clive’s father
Richard could expect to be returned unopposed for Montgomery, which was under
Powis’s control, and in Shrewsbury Robert Clive and the sitting M.P. Thomas
Hill were Powis’s preferred candidates.
The threat that Powis faced in1761 came not from new money
but something older. William Pulteney had led the opposition to Sir Robert
Walpole’s government for almost twenty years, but after the fall of his great enemy in 1742 he had proved a complete failure in government, accepted a
peerage as Earl of Bath and retired from active politics. By 1760 he was a very
rich man, and generally despised as a miser. He now re-entered the political
scene by establishing a link with Lord Bute, George III’s favourite, and using
this on behalf of his son, Lord Pulteney.
Pulteney was
already M.P. for Old Sarum, the most notorious “rotten borough” in the country,
but now his ambitions were transferred to Shrewsbury. When in 1759 it became
known that Robert More, one of the sitting M.P.s, intended to retire, Bath approached
him to seek support, only to be rebuffed. The Mayor of Shrewsbury reported that
the town corporation was backing Thomas Hill and Robert Clive (who at this stage, it should be
noted, was still out in India), and that Pulteney could expect little support.
Pulteney’s next
move was extraordinary. He wrote to Pitt, offering to raise, at his own expense,
a regiment to serve in the war, with himself as Lieutenant-colonel! King George
II approved, naming the new regiment the “Royal Volunteers”. It was to be based
in Shrewsbury (where it would doubtless have been expected to help with
electioneering) and its officers were drawn from some of the most prominent
noble and political families in the country. The Duke of Newcastle, desperate to avoid a
confrontation with Powis, was thrown into a tizzy, but the electors of
Shrewsbury stood firm and in 1761 Pulteney withdrew from the contest and Hill
and Clive were returned unopposed. Instead Pulteney was elected for
Westminster, but sailed abroad with his new regiment and died of fever
in Madrid in early 1763, leaving Lord Bath (who had refused to give any
financial support to the new regiment!) without a son and heir.
Powis’s relationship with the new regime was uncertain. In 1761 he applied without success for Thomas Hill’s son
Noel to be appointed Gentleman-Usher to Queen Charlotte, George III’s teenage
bride. Then in March 1761, just days before the poll in Shrewsbury, he was
abruptly sacked as Lord-Lieutenant for Shropshire, and replaced by Lord Bath.
This was clearly done at the instigation of Bute. Two months later Newcastle
tried to soften the blow to Powis’s pride by having him appointed Comptroller of
the Royal Household and a Privy Councillor. Even so, the whole episode was a
sign of how Newcastle’s influence at court was slipping.
The Members of Parliament elected for Shropshire at the
1761 General
Election were as follows:-
for the County: Sir John Astley and Richard Lyster
for Shrewsbury: Thomas Hill and Robert Clive
for Ludlow: Edward Herbert and Henry Bridgman
for Bridgnorth: William Whitmore and John Grey
for Wenlock: Brooke Forester and Cecil Forester
for Bishop’s Castle: Francis Child and Peregrine Cust
In the summer of 1761 Robert Clive was ennobled as Baron
Clive of Plassey; but since this title was an Irish one, he was able to
continue to sit in the House of Commons.
The new Parliament did not meet until October, by which
time Pitt had resigned from the government. Newcastle, increasingly uneasy
about his own position, appealed to Powis and his “friends” for support. But when
Newcastle himself resigned in May 1762, he urged his supporters to remain in
office; advice which Powis was only too pleased to accept. But by the autumn
Newcastle was becoming alarmed at the peace terms that Bute and his envoy the
Duke of Bedford were negotiating with the French, and was thinking that he
ought to oppose them. He drew up lists of supporters and opponents: of the
Shropshire M.P.s, Whitmore, Bridgman, Herbert, Hill, Clive and the two
Foresters were rated as “friends”; Astley, Lyster, Grey, Child and Cust as
“opponents”. He now urged Powis to resign from his posts at court: Powis
blandly replying that he held them from the King, not from Newcastle! When the
peace terms finally came up for a Commons vote in December 1762, the opposition
was hopelessly disorganized, and of the Shropshire men only Whitmore, the two
Foresters and Clive (together with his father) voted against the government.
Bridgman was absent, but reckoned by the new regime to be unreliable, and was
sacked from his place on the government payroll in early 1763. Grey did not
vote either, but as a known government supporter he retained his salaried
sinecure. During the political chaos of the 1760s he loyally voted for whoever
was in power, as indeed he did throughout his Parliamentary career. Of the other
Shropshire M.P.s, Cust was the only one who spoke on behalf of the government
on this occasion. It is uncertain whether any of the others even voted!
Lord Bath died,
generally unlamented, in 1764, and Powis was then restored to his old position
as Lord-Lieutenant of Shropshire. The death of Bath’s only son had left him
without an heir. His will revealed wealth of well over a million pounds, but only a few legacies. A Pulteney did eventually represent Shrewsbury, though he was
only a Pulteney by inheritance: he was a Scottish lawyer named William
Johnstone, who had married the daughter of Bath’s cousin and changed his name.
After being defeated in a fierce contest at the 1768 General Election he was successful
next time round in 1775, and continued to represent Shrewsbury for the next
thirty years.
The East India Company proved wholly incapable of governing
the vast territory of Bengal, and in 1764 Clive was obliged to return there in an attempt to sort things out, before settling in England for good in
1767. His reforms were unable to prevent the appalling Bengal famine of
1769-70, when perhaps as many of a sixth of the population died. In 1773 Lord
North’s government passed a Regulating Act for India, which for the first time
brought British territories in India under the control of the Crown, with the
appointment of a Governor-General.
Back in England,
Clive bought properties at a dizzying rate. In Shropshire he bought the 6,000
acres of the Walcot estate, where the architect Sir William Chambers was hired
to build a new house. Next, he bought the house and estate of Oakley, near
Ludlow, from Lord Powis. In 1769 he paid the widow of the Duke of Newcastle
£25,000 for Claremont in Surrey, and called in “Capability” Brown to demolish
the old house and remodel the gardens. There were town houses in London and Bath
as well. He bought estates in Ireland too, one of which he renamed “Plassey” in
memory of his great victory in Bengal. He estimated his personal wealth at well over
half a million pounds.
Clive’s family
rose to wealth and prominence on his coat-tails. When the M.P. for Bishop’s
Castle, Francis Child, died young in 1763, the local landowner and former M.P.
Walter Waring attempted to make a comeback at the ensuing by-election (unwisely
rejecting Clive’s offer of £1,000 if he stood down), and was badly defeated by
Clive’s cousin George Clive, who then held the seat through to his death in
1779. A few years later Waring gave up the struggle and sold his estate to
Clive for £35,000, and with it all his influence in Bishop’s Castle. This
enabled Robert Clive’s younger brother, William, to become M.P. for the borough
from 1768 to 1770 and again from 1779 to 1820.
But Clive
proved less surefooted in Westminster politics; supporting at different times
Newcastle, Pitt, George Grenville and even the appalling Lord Sandwich. Lord North cannily bid for his support by having him made a Knight of the Bath and Lord-Lieutenant of Shropshire following the death of Lord Powis. This political unreliability was unhelpful to Clive because he always had his enemies in the
hierarchy of the East India Company, who sponsored vicious personal attacks on
him in the press. Oddly enough in our eyes, he was denounced not for his
rapacity towards the Indians but for misappropriating wealth which should by
rights have belonged to the Company. In 1773 there was an attempt to impeach him (that is, put
him on state trial before the House of Lords) which he managed to defeat with a
strong speech in his own defence. He was savagely attacked in the Commons by
John Burgoyne, that same General known as “Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne” who
achieved unwanted immortality by losing the crucial battle of Saratoga to the
American rebels in 1777.
Clive was far from being the only man to use his vast
Indian wealth to enter politics. By the 1780s there were a dozen of them in
Parliament, nicknamed the “Nabobs” (a corruption of the Indian title of Nawab). An example from Shropshire was
Sir George Pigot, a former Governor of Madras. He bought Sir John Astley’s
Patshill estate for £100,000 and entered Parliament for Bridgnorth in 1768. Like
Clive, he was rewarded with an Irish peerage, but his subsequent career was far
less successful. In 1775 he returned to Madras, but quarreled with local
Company officials and was arrested, dying in confinement two years later. His
younger brother Hugh, who was an Admiral, succeeded him as M.P. for Bridgnorth in 1778,
supporting the Rockingham Whigs.
The General Election held in the summer of 1774 saw Clive
in control of no fewer than seven Parliamentary seats, putting him on a par with
the greatest nobility in the country, but he did not enjoy his success for
long, because in November of that year he died at his house in London.
What followed has
never been adequately explained. There was no proper inquest; instead his body
was spirited back to his native Shropshire and hastily buried in an unmarked grave in
the little village church of Moreton Say. Why?
The usual account
says that Clive cut his own throat with a penknife. Throughout his life he had
exhibited signs of what would now be called a “manic-depressive personality”,
and it seems he was in a state of deep depression at the time. But contemporary newspapers attributed his death, rather vaguely, to “apoplexy”, and later
theories have suggested that he died of an overdose of opium, taken in an attempt to stave off the agonizing pains of gallstones. It is unlikely that the truth will
ever be known.
Moreton Say church today. It was rebuilt in the 1780s, and a small plaque to Clive was erected.
The Earl of Powis died in 1772, and was succeeded in the
title by his son Edward Herbert. But he died unmarried in 1801, and the estate
passed to his sister, Henrietta, who was married to Robert Clive’s eldest son
Edward (M.P. for Ludlow 1774-94). The families of Herbert and Clive were thus
united, and Edward Clive was duly created Earl of Powis in 1804. Edward’s younger brother Robert served as M.P. for Ludlow from 1794 to 1807. Both Ludlow and
Bishop’s Castle were rapidly becoming pocket boroughs of the family.
In the 1770s Lord North managed to restore some political
stability. The General Election of 1774 passed with the rapidly deteriorating
situation in the American colonies attracting no attention whatsoever in the
vast majority of constituencies. But after the defeat at Saratoga and the entry
of France into the war early in 1778, disaster was clearly looming. There was a
revival of radical agitation for reform, and in the summer of 1780 came the
Gordon Riots in London; an anti-Catholic rampage where the government lost
control of its own capital city for an entire week.
The General
Election of 1780 was the closest for forty years. No 18th century
government was ever defeated at the polls, but Lord North’s ministry was left
on a knife-edge. Shropshire, however, seemed hardly affected at all. A Whitmore
still sat for Bridgnorth, a Forester for Wenlock, and Clives for Ludlow and
Bishop’s Castle. Henry Bridgman had switched from Ludlow to Wenlock in 1768.
The County was represented by two gentlemen with the name of Hill, who were in fact second cousins: Richard Hill was the son of Sir Rowland Hill of Hawkstone
in the north of the county, whereas Noel Hill was the son of Thomas Hill (born
Harwood - see my previous blog entry), and had succeeded his father as M.P. for Shrewsbury in 1768, and was
then returned unopposed for the County in 1774 and 1780. He was never known to
have spoken in the House of Commons.
Of the new names, Hugh Pigot was an Admiral who succeeded his elder brother Sir George as M.P. for Bridgnorth in 1778, supporting the Rockingham Whigs. Charlton Leighton was a
local landowner who had won at Shrewsbury in 1774 only to be unseated on
petition, but had been returned unopposed in 1780. Frederick Cornewall was
another local gentleman, whose father had married a Herbert girl and served
briefly as M.P. for Montgomery: he himself had represented Leominster before
being returned for Ludlow in 1780. He died in 1783. Henry Strachey had two separate spells
representing Bishop’s Castle, interspersed with other periods representing
Pontefract, Saltash and East Grinstead. He had begun his career as secretary to
Lord Clive, and was on his way to becoming a full-time civil servant in Parliament.
In February 1782, following the news of the surrender of General Cornwallis at Yorktown, there was a series of Parliamentary motions
criticizing Lord North’s government for its disastrous conduct of the American
war. The voting was extremely tight, but resulted in one of the very rare
instances in which an 18th century government was defeated in the House
of Commons and forced to resign.
The Shropshire
M.P.s were evenly split on the issue, and in contrast to their thin turnout in
1762, all of them voted, apart from Henry Bridgman of Wenlock who was absent
abroad. The Clive group, who now controlled the four Members for Ludlow and
Bishop’s Castle, solidly supported the government. Noel Hill and Richard Hill,
representing the County, voted with the opposition, as did Thomas Whitmore and
Hugh Pigot the Admiral and Nabob’s brother at Bridgnorth. At Wenlock, George
Forester was firmly anti-government; and so was Charlton Leighton at
Shrewsbury, whereas William Pulteney switched his vote from government to
opposition.
Lord North’s government resigned following these votes, to
be followed by almost two years of political chaos, with the short-lived
governments of Rockingham, Shelburne and Portland (the “Fox-North coalition”).
Finally in December 1783 King George III appointed William Pitt, son of the
great Lord Chatham, as Prime Minister at the age of just 24. Pitt was in a
hopeless minority in the Commons, and was kept going only by the support of the
King and his own determination. Then in the spring of 1784 he called a General
Election, less than four years after the previous one (which was unprecedented
in the 18th century), and won it with a large majority. Historians
have debated ever since whether this represented a genuine swing of popular
opinion, or whether it was achieved by the usual corrupt methods of the time. Pitt then remained in office till 1801.
Most of the
Shropshire M.P.s supported Pitt's government. Hugh Pigot, who did not, was defeated at
Bridgnorth in 1784; but he was notoriously a nouveau
riche incomer, not from one of the old-established local families. Otherwise the immediate changes were few. Henry
Bridgman’s son John changed his name to Simpson in 1785 after inheriting
property from an uncle, and under that name represented Wenlock in Parliament
from 1794 to 1820. Noel Hill, who had inherited the country house at Attingham, south-east of Shrewsbury. was given a peerage, with the title of Lord
Berwick. George Forester stood down at Wenlock, but then returned at a
by-election soon afterwards. John Kynaston, whose uncle Edward had represented
Bishop’s Castle back in the 1730s, was elected for the County. Gentlemen
with familiar names, Foresters and Whitmores and Clives, continued to serve as
M.P.s for Shropshire constituencies through into the nineteenth or even the
twentieth century.
The last word on Robert Clive, albeit an extremely biased one, should go to the great Victorian historian Lord Macaulay. He described Clive as "A great wicked lord who had ordered the walls around his house to be made so thick in order to keep out the devil".
