The British now ruled an extensive empire from Canada to Bengal in eastern India. Durrani, shah of the Afghan empire, installed a Mughal puppet, Alam II, in Delhi, writing to the British conquistador, Lord Clive, ordering him to recognize his poodle emperor. In 1765, Clive returned as the first governor-general of Bengal. Clive had left General Hector Munro in command as Alam and an anti-British coalition challenged EIC power in Bengal. In October 1764, Munro crushed a sepoy mutiny. The British had early on adopted the Mughal punishment of firing rebels from cannon. ‘The upper part of the back is resting against the muzzle,’ observed a shocked officer. ‘When the gun is fired, the head is seen to go straight into the air forty feet, the arms fly off right and left, high up in the air, the legs drop to the ground … and the body is literally blown away.’ Munro executed twenty rebels in this way. Then he routed the Mughal army, killing 2,000 to his own losses of 289.
When Clive returned, he was happy to support the powerless emperor in return for Bengal. On 12 August 1765, he received a
DURRANI’S MAGGOTS: EMPIRE IN INDIA
‘Let’s destroy these people,’ ordered Durrani, ‘and enslave their women and children!’ The Afghans killed Sikh and non-Sikh in a frenzy before Durrani departed and galloped westwards to receive the tribute of the emir of Bukhara – his empire extended into today’s Uzbekistan. But the fifty-year-old Durrani was now sick, the Amritsar fragment having infected his face. In summer 1772, maggots infested his nose and nasopharynx, dropping into his mouth, until he could no longer speak or eat. The epigraph on his octagonal tomb in Kandahar claims that ‘the lion lay with the lamb’, such was the peace won by his greatness. Yet he spread little peace: he was a ferocious, peripatetic, poetry-writing conqueror who perpetrated atrocities in Punjab but also laid out the modern cities of Kabul and Kandahar and created a new country, where he is still known as
Back in London, Lord North now faced a crisis in Bengal where the EIC was going bankrupt, thanks to soaring military expenditure, as Bengals starved, thanks to EIC taxes. Clive and his fellow nabobs were already notorious for their fortunes. There had been talk of appointing Clive to command British troops in America, but all factions were uneasy about his methods and wealth. In 1772, he was attacked by political enemies in Parliament for his rapacity. ‘A great prince was dependent on my pleasure; an opulent city lay at my mercy … I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone, piled … with gold and jewels!’ he retorted. ‘Mr Chairman, I stand astonished at my own moderation.’ No one else was astonished by it. But when the nabob was exonerated by a parliamentary vote, George told North that even though ‘no one thinks his services greater than I do’ he was ‘amazed’ that the MPs’ judgement ‘seems to approve of Lord Clive’s rapine’.*
In 1773, North took government control of the EIC, appointing a governor-general and council: the effective rule of Bengal by the armed company had lasted little more than ten years. But he also faced a crisis in his other colonies, in America, and his solution linked the two. To help the EIC, he abolished duties on Indian tea exported to America, where the colonists objected to undercutting their own merchants. In November that year, Americans – wearing blackface and Mohawk headdresses – raided tea-bearing ships in Boston harbour. North overreacted by passing the so-called Coercive Acts and dispatching troops.
On a mountain top in rustic Virginia, Jefferson moved his wife Martha Jefferson into the Honeymoon Cottage, the small but finished wing of Monticello. Three years earlier, just after his election to the House of Burgesses, Thomas Jefferson had come to call on Martha Wayles Skelton, twenty-three years old and a widow. In January 1772, they married and, when her father died the next year, they inherited 11,000 acres heavily encumbered with debts, as well as 135 slaves, including Betty Hemings and her six children by Wayles. The youngest was a newborn baby, a daughter named Sally, who would play a special role in Jefferson’s life.
RADICALS: JEFFERSON AND THE HEMINGSES; THE ENGLISH QUEEN OF DENMARK AND THE DOCTOR’S FALL
