Free Calcutta by Geoffrey Moorhouse

was how they tended to see Indian famines in Leadenhall Street. By 1772 the Com pany was in such straits that it went to the Bank of England for a loan, which was turned down. So it asked the Government for £ 1 million, and the money was advanced at the cost of a Regulating Act the following year. From now on, the Company’s dividend was limited to six per cent until the loan was repaid, and surplus receipts went to the Exchequer, with all accounts and correspondence submitted to Parliament. A Supreme Court was created for Bengal. Above all, a royal Governor-General was to sit in Calcutta from now on, with obscure but tacit authority over Madras and Bombay, and the first one was to be Warren Hastings at a salary of £ 25,000 a year. If Robert Clive had indeed laid the foundation stone of British India at Plassey, Lord North had just raised the scaffolding in London.
    Hastings was to rule with a Council of four Members (at £ 10,000 apiece), each with a vote equal to his own, and this was to bedevil all he tried to do until a Member died and tipped the balance. One of the new Members was already in Calcutta, locally born and bred, and he was Richard Barwell. Two others, General Clavering and Colonel Monson, were powerfully connected at home; Clavering, indeed, was not only to be second to the Governor-General and Commander-in-Chief, but he was George III’s private choice to succeed Hastings as soon as possible ; and Monson’s wife, the Lady Anne, was the great- granddaughter of Charles II. Then there was Philip Francis. He was the son of a chaplain to the Fox family and he had been a War Office clerk. He was also almost certainly (though it was never proved) the Junius whose scurrilous attacks on public figures made vivid reading in the Publick Advertiser at the time. He was engaging, he had soft hands, women liked him, and he was to leave his wife and children behind in England because he thought, among other things, that Betsy was not intellectually up to the company he was now about to keep. When the Indian appointment came up he had been unemployed for a year, some piece of patronage having broken down, so he set off for Shropshire and within a couple of months had the dive family utterly charmed. And his future was secured. Doubtless he had told them, as he was to tell others later, that he thought the Government of Bengal ‘the first situation in the world attainable by a subject’.
    In April 1774 this bundle of rulers sailed in the East Indiaman Ashburnham, in consort with another vessel, the Anson. That contained the new judges, led by Chief Justice-elect Sir Elijah Impey. He had been at Westminster with Hastings, in company with William Cowper, Edward Gibbon and a brace of future Prime Ministers (Shelburne and Portland). He was to stay healthy in the taxing climate of Bengal by making sure that his court always rose for the day at one o’clock and by taking regular holidays by the sea, either at Chittagong or at nearby Beercool , where the beach was ‘totally free from sharks and other noxious animals except crabs’. He was also to complain bitterlybefore long that he had not been able to lay up more than £ 3,000 a year since coming to Calcutta.
    On 19 October the new men disembarked at Chandpal Ghat at noon exactly, which Francis thought ‘a comfortable season for establishing the etiquette of precedency’. This was scarcely done to the satisfaction of General Clavering, for one. A royal salute of twenty-one guns from Fort William had confidently been expected but a mere seventeen salvoes were ordered instead. Worse, there were no guards, no person to receive the gentlemen or to show the way, no state. Just awful heat and confusion, not an attempt at regularity, and a Governor-General who only put down his work when his colleagues and judges were on the doorstep of his house. ‘But surely‚’ remarked a member of the entourage , ‘Mr Hastings might have put on a ruffled shirt.’ It was a bad start to