Robert Clive at Plassey 1757: Forged Signature, Red Treaty and Dry Powder

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Robert Clive made his name in 1751 at Arcot, capital of the Carnatic, where in his mid-twenties he seized the town with 280 Europeans and 300 sepoys to draw French-backed forces away from a besieged British ally. Trapped in a crumbling fort, he refused a bribe to surrender, and when the attackers drove iron-plated elephants at the gates, musket volleys panicked the animals into trampling their own infantry. In 1756 the young Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah, took Calcutta, and Clive sailed north with Admiral Charles Watson. He retook the city in early 1757, then on his own authority attacked the French at Chandernagore and ignored orders from Madras to return south.

Clive plotted with the army paymaster Mir Jafar and the Jagat Seth bankers to replace the Nawab. When the merchant Omichund demanded three million rupees for silence, Clive drew up a fake red treaty promising the money and a real white treaty that left him out, and forged Watson's signature when the admiral refused to sign. At Plassey in June 1757, about 3,100 men behind mud walls in a mango grove faced some 50,000 troops, 40 cannon and war elephants. A downpour soaked the Nawab's powder while the British covered theirs, and Mir Jafar's troops held back. Clive became one of Europe's richest men and Baron Clive of Plassey.

• At a council of war at Katwa, Clive first voted against fighting, then changed his mind after an hour alone.
• Mir Madan, the Nawab's loyal general, assumed the British guns were wet, charged, and was mortally wounded by grapeshot.
• Major Kilpatrick advanced without orders; Clive rebuked him, then led the final push himself.
• The British lost about 22 men, and Clive extracted well over 2.75 million pounds from the Bengal treasury.
• Before Parliament in 1773, Clive defended the forgery as an act of true policy and justice.