Blind Date
After two punishing years rising to the top of the East India Company’s armed forces in India, Robert Clive could not spare the time to go courting.
1752
King George II 1727-1760
After two punishing years rising to the top of the East India Company’s armed forces in India, Robert Clive could not spare the time to go courting.
1752
King George II 1727-1760
By the end of March 1752, Robert Clive was lonely and exhausted. He had almost single-handedly relieved the fortress at Arcot from a French siege, and then captured two French forts at the head of a band of five hundred raw recruits no other officer would agree to command. As he listened to his friend Edmund Maskelyne reading snatches of his letters from home, a resolution formed in his breast.
BEFORE the middle of the last century,* Mr Maskelyne,* brother of Dr Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer-Royal, went as a cadet to India, where he became acquainted with Mr Clive, afterwards Lord Clive.* The acquaintance ripened into intimate friendship, and led to constant association.
There hung up in Mr Maskelyne’s room several portraits; among others a miniature, which attracted Clive’s frequent attention. One day, after the English mail had arrived, Clive asked Maskelyne if he had received any English letters, adding, “We have been very much misunderstood at home, and much censured in London circles.”* Maskelyne replied that he had, and read to his friend a letter he then held in his hand.
A day or two after, Clive came back to ask to have the letter read to him again.
“Who is the writer?” enquired Clive.
* This was written in 1873. The events described here took place towards the end of March 1752.
* Edmund Maskelyne (1728-1775). He was the elder brother of the Rev Dr Nevil Maskelyne (1732-1811), who was the fifth Astronomer Royal, an office he held from 1765 to 1811.
* See Clive of India.
* India was the battleground between the Kingdom of France and the Kingdom of Great Britain, at a time when tensions in North America between the two colonial powers were about to erupt into The Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). Each had its own East India Company, vying with the other for the status as preferred trade partner of the Mughal Emperors of India, and with it supremacy in Europe and North America. Every victory and every defeat was, therefore, subject to intense scrutiny, and there was considerable criticism of the British East India Company’s management. By the closing weeks of March 1752, Clive was feeling both exhausted and unappreciated, and he longed for moral support. For Clive’s recent activities, see The Siege of Arcot and Courage Under Fire.