Worn out by anxiety and fatigue, he now returned to England. He had gone out ten years before, a friendless, wayward boy; he now returned, at the age of twenty-eight, to find himself greeted as one of Britain’s most famous soldiers. Naturally, his father and mother and the other members of his family were overjoyed to learn that naughty, idle Bobby had developed into a famous man, the theme of all tongues, honoured and praised by the greatest in the land. The East India Company thanked him for his services in the warmest terms, and offered him a sword set with diamonds. This he refused to accept unless a similar one was given to his friend and commander Lawrence. With his prize-money Clive helped to pay off some of his father’s debts, and to redeem the family estate. In 1755 Clive returned to India. He had only just arrived when terrible news reached him. Suraj-ud-Dowlah, the Nawab of Bengal, a fiend in human shape, whose amusement as a child was to torture beasts and birds, and his pastime as a man to watch the sufferings of his fellow-creatures, had attacked the British settlement at Calcutta, and had seized one hundred and forty-six Europeans. These he thrust into a chamber known as the “Black Hole.” It was eighteen feet by fourteen, and its cubical content was twenty feet square. When ordered to enter the cell the prisoners imagined that the soldiers were joking, and as the nawab had promised them their lives they laughed aloud at the absurdity of the idea that they could possibly exist during the stifling heat of a Bengal June night in such a confined space. They discovered their error when they were driven in at the point of the sword. The windows were small and barred, and soon the air was poisonous. The horrors that followed are almost too terrible to recount. The poor creatures cried for mercy, they strove to break in the door, they offered large bribes to their jailers; but all to no purpose. Nothing could be done without the nawab’s orders, and he was asleep and could not be awaked. Many went mad; they trampled each other down, and fought like wild beasts for places at the windows. The murderers outside mocked at their agonies, holding lights to the bars, and shouting with laughter as they beheld the struggles of their victims. When day broke and the doors were opened only twenty-three ghastly figures staggered out into the sunlight. A hundred and twenty-three corpses were flung promiscuously into a pit dug for the purpose. The rage and anger of the British in India can well be imagined. Clive hastened to Bengal to avenge the awful outrage. He had nine hundred Europeans and fifteen hundred Sepoys with which to oppose Suraj-ud-Dowlah’s huge army. After a short, sharp fight the enemy fled in confusion, leaving baggage, guns, and cattle in the hands of the victors. This battle of Plassey, fought on June 23, 1757, secured for the British the province of Bengal, the richest and most populous province of India.