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  She had already been widowed twice, by Mr Templer and Mr Altham, and after Mr Watts had served his time she was to enjoy a fourth union with the Reverend William Johnson (known locally as the Reverend Tally-Ho), the Presidency chaplain. He eventually retired to England with a fortune but ‘Begum’ Johnson was really wedded to Calcutta and stayed behind, holding celebrated whist parties in Clive Street, the ever engaging topic of conversation in the city. She died in 1812, when she was eighty-seven, much loved, much spoken of and always absorbing; having grandmothered an English Prime Minister (the second Lord Liverpool) and having chosen her burial place at the invitation of an Indian Governor-General; it was almost alongside Job Charnock’s in St John’s churchyard and richly deserved by then.

  A little farther up-country, in his palace at Murshidabad, the Nawab of Bengal was dying. Mahabat Jang’s name meant terror of war, but he had been chiefly noted for a rule of some dignity and wisdom and for a singular aversion to the harem, having taken but one wife at a period when the Nawab of Oudh was said to accommodate 800 women in his quarters. He had no son, and when the throne became vacant in April 1756 it was occupied by his grandson Siraj-ud-Daula. He had certainly been spoilt as a child groomed for succession, and what followed after his enthronement at the age of twenty-five was doubtless an impulsive attempt to enrich himself quickly. He picked a quarrel with the Company and, with the first signs of monsoon in the sky, he marched on Calcutta with 30,000 foot, 20,000 horse, 400 trained elephants and 80 pieces of cannon. He also held Mr and Mrs Watts captive, for Kasimbazar had been taken en route without a fight, Ensign Elliott, in command, having shot himself in despair. This was the first British indignity in an episode which, wretched and heroic in turn, has been codified for ever as the Black Hole incident. It is a disputed story, but let us have it now in the standard version received from the man who comes best out of it, John Zephaniah Holwell.

  Calcutta, in 1756, was a decently held place but it was not heavily fortified. Fort William protected a number of warehouses on the river bank, it included a large tank of rainwater, it could be used as a refuge by the Europeans of the city, who were only a fraction of the 400,000 population. It had four bastions, with between eight and ten guns apiece, and curtain walls that were eighteen feet high but not four feet thick, and the whole enclosure was 210 yards by 120. Apart from this, Calcutta’s only defence was the unfinished Mahratta Ditch and for at least a couple of years there had been an anxious correspondence with London on this inadequate state of affairs. ‘When the Nawab’s intention of marching on Calcutta was known,’ writes Captain Grant, who was the Fort’s Adjutant-General, ‘it was felt time to inquire into the state of defence of a garrison neglected for so many years, and the managers of it lulled in so infatuate a security that every rupee expended in military service was esteemed so much loss to the Company.’ The defences, such as they were, had about 250 men manning them, of whom only sixty were Europeans; the rest, mainly Indo-Portuguese, were commonly referred to as ‘black Christians’. And only one officer, Captain Buchanan, had ever seen active service. To this uncertain collection of soldiers was now added a swiftly drummed up militia of perhaps 260, again mostly Armenians, Portuguese and ‘Slaves’.

  Grant says that the military wanted the European houses close to the Fort demolished, to allow a better field of fire, but their owners refused to hear of it, ‘not knowing whether the Company would reimburse them the money they cost’. Siraj-ud-Daula was now, on 16 June, approaching Dum Dum and the British set fire to the native bazaars in his path; when they found their own Indians plundering the ruins they beheaded them on the spot. And then, perhaps 2,500 strong, they took refuge in the Fort and locked the gates. They had been panic-stricken from the moment a threat had been rumoured but now they seem to have largely dissolved with fright. There was some stout fighting by the eastern battery and women busied themselves making cartridges, but by 19 June courage had oozed so fast that there was a rush to the boats anchored in the river. One of the first to take himself off was the Governor, Roger Drake, who was shamefacedly to explain later on that he had fallen asleep with exhaustion; on waking, and seeing boats preparing to sail in confusion, he had assumed all to be lost and so prudently but reluctantly joined the retreat.

  All was very nearly lost, in fact, but Holwell was still standing by his militia and other Europeans had not yet quit; and the first thing they did after the indecent rush to safety was to secure the river gate to stop more desertion. This could be nothing more than a gesture, for the houses by the ramparts were now all on fire. There had been twenty-one vessels in the river when the siege began and several of them were still in sight, drifting while they watched the end of Calcutta. Holwell made signals for them to return and pick up those who remained, but not one vessel stirred in their direction. The humiliated bitterness of the British in India at this cowardice was to last a long time, and it is clearly reflected by the Calcutta raconteur Busteed, writing more than a century later. Drake had the hardihood to plead, that by bribes and threats he had tried to induce some boats which he passed on his way down to go back, but the native crews were afraid. As a survivor bitterly retorted, if he as President had hoisted his flag upon his vessel and led the way back, all would have followed him. But he showed no stomach for this, especially when the commander of his vessel did the reverse of advocating it by using, in Captain Grant’s hearing, the matchless argument that the attempt would indeed be attended with danger!!’ Two exclamation marks in 1882, and no wonder.

  And another exclamation mark at least implicit in what immediately followed. For the Nawab’s men now came swarming into the Fort by ladders over its walls and though they promptly relieved the survivors of their watches, their silver buckles and other valuables, they didn’t kill them. ‘It is right,’ says a slightly surprised Busteed, ‘to remember this unexpected forbearance.’ Instead, they lodged their captives in the Fort’s punishment cell on the Eastern wall, at ground level, with an open verandah between it and the parade ground. It had a small barred window and it had always been known as the Black Hole by soldiers. Holwell reckoned it was an 18 ft cube; at any rate, it was an impossible place to put 146 people on 20 June. The monsoon, late that year, didn’t start to fall until 21 June; the historic captivity was thus spent on what would be the hottest and sultriest night of 1756. There is no reason to suppose that what happened was due to anything more than thoughtless stupidity by Siraj-ud-Daula; it was, after all, a brutal age all round; the same week had seen these captives decapitating their own servants.

  What happened was ghastly and noble, according to Holwell. With bodies pressed unbearably close, people soon began to die, and two of the first to go were the Reverend Mr Bellamy and his son, the Lieutenant, hand in hand in a corner. With the floor soon strewn with corpses ‘my poor friend Mr Edward Eyre (Member of the Council) came staggering over the dead to me and, with his usual coolness and good nature, asked me how I did; but fell and expired before I had time to make him a reply’. Holwell did enough to live by sticking near the window whenever he was able and by sucking his shirt sleeve to relieve his thirst. When six o’clock in the morning came and the door of the Black Hole was opened, twenty-three people were still alive and one of them was Mrs Carey. Most of them were told to be out of town by sunset on pain of having noses and ears cut off if they stayed; and drums beat a message to all who could hear, that Calcutta should henceforth be known as Allinagore. Holwell and three others were held for over a fortnight in case they could lead the way to treasure. The survivors took off to the ships and were received with much care and attention by the Dutch settlers up at Chinsurah. And Holwell lived to be eighty-seven in England, where they called him Governor by courtesy (though he had briefly been a deputy Governor), having first put up in Calcutta a monument, at his own expense, to those who were in the Black Hole with him.

  This story is still circulated with his details in English history books, though there is reason to believe that some of it is fabricat
ion; that, at the most, sixty-four people went into the Black Hole with no Mrs Carey among them, and that twenty-one survived. Not that the legend is likely to be disturbed in Europe by reduced figures. Holwell’s monument having collapsed with neglect, Lord Curzon had another one built when he was Viceroy in the twentieth century. But today there is merely a tablet in an arch next to the General Post Office, which the visitor has difficulty in locating; it is surrounded by crowds of pavement tradesmen in lottery tickets, suspenders, sunglasses and ballpoint pens; and they grin and chant ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’ in the most mocking fashion.

  Six months later RobertClive, now returned from the acclamations of England, led a punitive expedition from Madras. He recaptured Calcutta without difficulty in one sortie at night and then went on, for he was conscious of a larger strategy, to take Chandernagore from the French. Siraj-ud-Daula now found himself enmeshed in intrigue, the British openly wringing concessions and compensations from him while covertly negotiating to replace him with his uncle, Mir Jafar. The cards were at least cleanly laid down on 23 June, 1757 at Plassey, twenty miles from Murshidabad. The monsoon damped down the Nawab’s ammunition, Clive’s soldiers did the rest, and Siraj-ud-Daula was led off to the provincial capital and assassination; after a seemly interval Clive followed and made a state entry into Murshidabad.

  He now began to exact much more than retribution for the sack of Calcutta the year before. Within a month, a hundred boats were sent downstream to the British city, laden with 7,500,000 silver rupees; six weeks later another four million rupees went coasting into the Calcutta treasury, to be received with flags flying and bands blaring. This was the compensation money. Clive was no longer content with that. On behalf of the Company he annexed nearly nine hundred square miles of land south of Calcutta, known as the 24 Parganas; the Company now became the zamindars, the landlords, of this area but dive had been kingpin in the operation and he proceeded to take the king’s share of the rents. It was to yield him £30,000 a year till the day he died and a grudging Company had no option but to wait balefully for his funeral and a reversion of the annual windfall to Leadenhall Street. On top of this, Clive extracted a spot payment of £234,000 compensation for all the trouble he’d been put to in Bengal. Then he wrote to his old father in Shropshire, telling him to repair the family home and make ready a seat in Parliament.

  At Plassey, some historians suggest, Clive had laid the foundation stone of the British Empire in India. It is an arguable point What he certainly did was to start something inseparable from Empire and more sinister in itself. As Percival Spear says, ‘the financial bleeding of Bengal had begun’. The British had so far secured their position with varieties of trade, quiet and violent, fair and extortionate. Now they began to rob the bank. When Mir Kasim superseded Mir Jafar as Nawab in 1760, he was obliged to hand over £200,000 to the Council in Calcutta. When Mir Kasim was replaced three years later and a more obedient Mir Jafar was reincarnated, ‘presents’ were made in the following order; £530,000 to the Council, £300,000 to the Company and £250,000 to the military. And beneath these swelling patrons of Bengal, the smaller leeches began to hang on. The incoming independent merchants of Calcutta were now allowed to conduct their private trade duty-free and so undercut their Bengali competitors. With the military holding the whole countryside in submission and the Nawab merely an administrative puppet by kind permission of Clive’s troops, they could employ armed gangs to browbeat villagers and Nawabi officials alike into almost any terms they chose.

  It was the freest trade imaginable if you happened to be born on the right side of the counter and it both ruined Bengal and took the Company to the brink of bankruptcy. It became scandalous enough for a Burke to denounce it far away in a House of Commons. Here were not tradesmen, here were conquistadores; ‘animated with all the avarice of age and all the impetuosity of youth, they roll in one after another; wave after wave; and there is nothing before the eye of the native but an endless hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting.’ It became alarming enough, in certain quarters and in certain respects, for the Company to send Clive back to Calcutta as Governor in 1765, after five years at home spent acquiring the Barony of Plassey among other things. On the Company’s behalf this time, Clive accepted from the Emperor in Delhi the appointment of revenue minister for Bengal, Bihar and Orissa; an arrangement of mutual interest, for it ensured regular payments to both Delhi and Leadenhall Street which had been vanishing of late. Clive also began to impose strict instructions on Company servants. The size of ‘presents’ was now to be severely limited and private trade on the side was now out of the question. People henceforth must toe the Company line or be shipped back home. For a moment or two, Clive established order if not justice. Then he sailed for England for the last time, after a couple of years’ hectic work. He left behind him what had been an almost totally repugnant age, for which he was partly responsible. It is with relief that one can now see Warren Hastings resolutely moving into the wreckage of it.

  Descendant of a Norman invader, son of a Balliol vicar, nephew of a Customs man who got him into Westminster School, and ward of a Company Director who put him up for India, Hastings had been hunched over his Writer’s ledgers in Calcutta till 1752. He had then been posted as Mr Watts’ assistant in the factory at Kasimbazar. Siraj-ud-Daula’s men had caught him on the march to the Black Hole, and Hastings had been imprisoned in Murshidabad until a local Dutchman bailed him out. Hastings was back in Kasimbazar when Holwell and his three companions arrived in chains from Calcutta and he fled to the Dutch at Chinsurah. Here he found a wife who already had two daughters, for her husband had just been trampled to death in the Black Hole. This second marriage of hers was also to be sliced by tragedy and in it we begin to detect the streak of melancholy that is never far away from Warren Hastings afterwards. They have a son in 1757 and a daughter the next year, but she dies. Mrs Hastings herself dies in 1759 and within five years diphtheria has taken the son as well. Somehow Hastings survives it all. He marches as a volunteer in the army to recapture Calcutta. He returns to Kasimbazar and is happily in charge, making money on the side like everyone else, selling imported coffee on commission and dealing in salt. In 1761 he is brought to Calcutta as the Governor’s assistant, with a seat in Council, and George Vansittart is helping him to a government contract for the supply of transport bullocks. When he leaves for England in 1764, he has £30,000 invested in India. When, four years later, he sails for Madras to be second to the Governor there, he leaves a standing order with Messrs Warren of Cecil Street to be sent three chests of claret and one of hock each year.

  And now, in 1772, at the age of thirty-nine, he returns to Bengal as Governor. He has not been entirely free from the spirit of the times so far and he will not be able to change that spirit very much during the thirteen years of his rule in Calcutta. He can be seen, indeed, as a man who continues to make privately the most of his public opportunities. In his first year as Governor he ships fifty chests of opium on his own account. He has Spanish dollars invested in the China market. In 1776 he clears £25,000 in England from the sale of diamonds. He can be caught accepting a suspicious £15,000 from one of Mir Jafar’s wives, the Munny Begum, who was an ex-dancing girl from Agra sophisticated enough to smoke the hookah and to talk non-stop to visiting Englishmen from behind her scarlet purdah.

  Nevertheless, a new morality begins to creep into Bengal with the accession of Warren Hastings. It is not merely that he is generous as well as acquisitive, though he paid a pension to Mrs Hastings ‘Goanese maid until she died long after leaving the family service, and he slipped the Reverend Tally-Ho Johnson £100 when marriage to the redoubtable ‘Begum’ loomed, and when he heard that his uncle’s illegitimate daughter was to marry he sent £600 and enough to set her up with a nursery school in Chelsea; such liberality was not uncommon among gentlemen of means. The morality of Hastings is more subtle and complex than
that. He says, ‘as to my friends, I shall be glad to serve them, but as to my friends’ friends I neither can nor will serve them’. And he seems to prove it. He only once wilfully abused his power, and even at this lowest point, when he brought the forger Nuncomar to trial and death, the most obvious thing about him was that he had been goaded beyond reason.

  Hastings returned to Bengal two years after a famine there had wiped out maybe a third of the inhabitants. Calcutta had only just been described as a straggling village of mud-houses, with the whole ground south of Chandpal Ghat thickly covered with jungle. The ramparts of the old Fort William were crumbling, with huge gaps in them like the one left when Siraj-ud-Daula blew up St Anne’s. But there was still some life in the old fort, such as the circulating library and a so-called chapel next to the ruined Black Hole, available for worship on Sundays, used for the sorting of piece-goods on weekdays. Christians otherwise took themselves to premises next door to Selby’s gambling club, where the red mission church of the Danish preacher Kiernander stood; having lately lost his wife, he now drove around Calcutta in a four-in-hand and gave banquets and ogled two distinctly fat and reputedly rich ladies in his congregation.

  His was not by any means the highest living in the place. It would scarcely match the scale of the local Commander-in-Chief, Sir Robert Baker, who ran a private trade in saltpetre and opium. Or of Richard Barwell, that stereotype of a rising breed of men, the British Nabobs. The son of an ex-Governor who was now a Director of the Company in London, his reputation in Calcutta ran in several directions at once. He was the outstanding flicker of bread pellets across the dinner tables of the community, able to snuff out a candle at four yards, when pellet-flicking was an esteemed amusement; it went on for years until someone flicked someone else once too often, was flattened with a side of mutton, challenged to a duel and all but killed. Barwell was also known as a man who would gamble on anything and though he seems more often than not to have lost heavily, he eventually went home with enough money to buy an estate at Stanstead in Sussex and a Parliamentary seat at St Ives. His ambition in chief had been to get rich quickly and he could hardly go wrong, gambling debts notwithstanding, with a father in Leadenhall Street and a sister Mary also in London to watch stock prices and elections and to inform him where to lay his commercial and social bets in Calcutta. He had a liking for Locke and Dryden. But mostly he enjoyed the company of others, whether this meant flicking bread pellets with them, playing cards with them or dancing with them.