He was made one of the Secretaries of State, and the Dublin Castle Administration went on its old familiar way. But there is even still among the Irish people a lingering tradition of the rule of Lord Chesterfield, and of the new system which he tried for a while to establish in the government of their island.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

PRIMUS IN INDIS.

BEFORE the Jacobite rising had been put down or the Pelhams absolutely set up, England, without knowing it, had sent forth a new conqueror, and might already have hailed the first promises of sway over one of the most magnificent empires of the earth. The name of the new conqueror was Robert Clive; the name of the magnificent empire was India.

At that time the influence of England over India was small to insignificance-a scrap of Bengal, the island and town of Bombay, Madras, and a fort or two. The average Englishman's knowledge of India was small even to non-existence. The few Englishmen who ever looked with eyes of intelligent information upon that great tract of territory, leafshaped, and labelled India on the maps, knew that the English possessions therein were few and paltry. Three quite distinct sections called presidencies, each independent of the two others, and all governed by a supreme authority whose offices were in Leadenhall Street in London, represented the meagre nucleus of what was yet to be the vast Anglo-Indian Empire. The first of these three presidencies was the Bombay

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presidency, where the Indian Ocean washes the Malabar coast. The second was in the Carnatic, on the eastern side of the leaf, where the waters of the Bay of Bengal wash the Coromandel coast, where the forts of St. George and St. David protected Madras and a smaller settlement. The third presidency was up towards the north, where the sacred Ganges, rushing through its many mouths to the sea, floods the Hooghley. Here the town of Calcutta was growing up around Fort William.

These three little presidencies, plying their poor trade, and depending for defence upon their illdisciplined native soldiers, the Sepahis, whom we have come to call Sepoys, were all that had grown out of the nearly two centuries of relations with the leafshaped Indian land since first, in 1591, Captain Lancaster sailed the seas; since first the East India

Company sprang into existence. It was not an agreeable two centuries for Englishmen who ever thought of India to read about. Two centuries of squabblings and strugglings with Dutch settlers and with Portuguese settlers, of desperate truckling to native princes. In 1664 the English East India Company found a rival more formidable than the Dutch or the Portuguese in the French East India Company, which the astuteness of Colbert set up at Pondicherry, and which throve with a rapidity that quite eclipsed the poor progress of the English traders. Even when, in 1708, the old East India Company united its fortunes with the new Indian Company that had been formed, and thus converted

1725-43. THE CLIVES OF MARKET DRAYTON. 339

one rival into an ally, the superiority of the French remained uncontested, and daily waxed greater and greater, until it began to seem as if, in the words of Antony to Cleopatra, all the East should call her mistress.

Such was the condition of affairs in the year 1743, when the apparently insignificant fact that a young gentleman of a ne'er-do-well disposition, who seemed likely to come to a bad end in England, and who was accordingly shipped off to India by his irritated relations, altered and exalted the destinies not merely of a wealthy trading company but of the British Crown. In the market town of Drayton-inHales, better known as Market Drayton, in Shropshire, there lived, in the reign of George the First, a Mr. Richard Clive-a man whose comparatively meagre abilities were divided between the profession of the law and the cares of a small and not very valuable estate. In the little town on the river Tern, within sight of the old church built by Stephen, whose architectural characteristics were then happily unaltered by the hand of the eighteenthcentury restorer, the Clives had been born and given in marriage and died, and repeated the round ever since the twelfth century. Mr. Richard Clive, in the reign of George the First, married a Manchester lady named Gaskill, who bore him many children of no note whatever, but who bore him one very noteworthy child indeed, his eldest son Robert, on September 29, in the year 1725.

There was a time, a long time too, during which

the worthy Mr. Richard Clive persisted in regarding the birth of this eldest son as little less than a curse. He could very well have said of Robert what the Queen-mother says of Richard of Gloster, tetchy and wayward was his infancy. Seldom was there born into the world a more stubborn-minded, highspirited boy. He may remind us a little of the young Mirabeau in his strenuous impassioned youth; in the estimate which those nearest to him, and most ignorant of him, formed of the young lion cub in the domestic litter; in the strange promise which the great career fulfilled. There was a kind of madness in the impish pranks which the boy Clive played in Market Drayton, scaring the timid and scandalising the respectable. He climbed to the top of the lofty steeple of that church, which dated from the days. of Stephen, and perched himself upon a stone spout near the dizzy summit with a cool courage which Stephen himself might have envied. He got round him from among the idle lads of the town a list of lawless resolutes,' and, like David, made himself a captain over them for the purpose of levying a kind of guerilla warfare upon the shopkeepers of the little town, and making them pay tribute for the sanctity of their windows. In fact he behaved as wildly as the wildest schoolboy could behave; drifting from school to school, to learn nothing from each new master, and only to leave behind at each the record of an incorrigible reprobate. Nobody seems to have discovered that there was anything of the man of genius in the composition of the incorrigible