To Clive himself the result was an appointment as Governor-General over the whole of the Company’s territory in Bengal, and this virtually raised him to an authority higher than that of a throne, and, to his everlasting honour be it said, that in an age and country of almost universal corruption, he never abused it. Victory after victory in the field, and triumph after triumph in policy now followed fast upon each other, till French, Dutch, and native princes alike were crushed to impotence or reduced to grovelling submission, and the crowning victory of Chinsurah set the seal of absolute supremacy upon British rule in India. Three months after this Clive again came home, the possessor of fairly won wealth which was only exceeded by the magnitude of his fame, to be hailed as the greatest of British living Commanders, and to be rewarded, first with a place in the Irish, and then with one in the British Peerage. The story of his five years’ stay in England is not an edifying one. It is a story of wild extravagance, fierce and unworthy jealousies in the very councils of that Company to which he had given more lands and subjects than any European monarch possessed, and of general dissatisfaction and disillusion. But meanwhile the way to his last and perhaps his greatest triumph was being prepared for him. As year after year passed it became more and more plain that the empire he had created could not get on without him. The men put in authority after him by the Company had but one object in life and that was to “shake the Pagoda Tree.” In other words, to set prince against prince and state against state for the sole purpose of making money out of their differences, and generally to squeeze the utmost amount of gold out of the country in the shortest possible time. Corruption which scandalised even that corrupt age revelled in hitherto unheard-of excesses. Everything was neglected but money-making, and the lately-terrible English name was fast becoming a scoff and a by-word even to the plundered and the oppressed. So in the end Clive went out again, it being seen that he only could end a situation fast becoming impossible. But this time it was not to fight French, or Indian, or Dutchman, but his own countrymen, and to win in the Council Chamber a victory that was perhaps greater than any he had won on the battlefield. In eighteen months he did what he had said he would do, and replaced chaos with cosmos. It was a fitting climax to his life’s work, and yet such is the irony of Fate and the baseness of human nature that it also came near to proving his personal ruin.