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Updated: June 10, 2025
He showed, too, most convincingly, that a petition which the Company had presented to the House of Commons, deprecating any change in the existing system which should tend to diminish the authority of the Directors, was based on one great fallacy speaking, as it did, of the Company as one and indivisible, and unchanged in character, functions, and influence, down to the date of the last renewal of its charter, only five years previously; whereas the truth was, that in the one hundred years since Plassy the system had undergone as many changes as the English constitution between the Heptarchy and the reign of Queen Victoria.
Burke had perhaps a silent conviction that it would have been better for us and for India if Clive had succeeded in his attempt to blow out his own brains in the Madras counting-house, or if the battle of Plassy had been a decisive defeat instead of a decisive victory.
Clearly not a family of any very great pretensions a race for the most part of frugal, upright country gentlemen to be found, with scarcely an exception, on the side of political liberty, and of a Whiggish religion; men who had given their sons to die at Quebec, and Plassy, and Trafalgar, for the making of England's Empire; who would have voted with Fox, but that the terrors of Burke, and a dogged sense that the country must be carried on, drove them into supporting Pitt; who, at home, dispensed alternate justice and doles, and when their wives died put up inscriptions to them intended to bear witness at once to the Latinity of a Boyce's education, and the pious strength of his legitimate affections a tedious race perhaps and pig-headed, tyrannical too here and there, but on the whole honourable English stuff the stuff which has made, and still in new forms sustains, the fabric of a great state.
Although, judged by the standard of such great battles as the King of Prussia's, or the famous victories won by Marlborough over the French, this affair of Plassy may seem to be but a trifling skirmish, yet the country whose fate was decided upon that field, namely the Subahdarship of Bengal, Orissa, and Behar, is equal in magnitude to the whole of King Frederic's dominions.
I inquired, beginning to fear that Meer Jaffier was likely to prove a broken reed to lean upon. "I will join him as soon as the English troops come in sight of the city. Or if the Nabob keeps his army at Plassy, then I will join you as soon as the signal for battle is given.
The entire English force was over the ramparts together, the army which had marched out so gallantly against us that morning was suddenly become a mere herd, a wretched mob of fugitives crushing one another in their eagerness to escape from us, and we picked our way amid the plunder of Surajah Dowlah's rich pavilion, victors of Plassy, masters and law-givers of Indostan!
The Meer was just now arrived in Moorshedabad from Plassy, where he had been in command of one division of the Nabob's army, the remainder having before been taken from him and given to Roy Dullub.
Indeed, to Englishmen, who know with what mere handfuls of men our own generals have, at Plassy, at Assaye, at Meeanee, and other Indian battles, routed large hosts of Asiatics, the disparity of numbers that we read of in the victories won by the Macedonians over the Persians presents nothing incredible.
"A truce to paltering!" Miss Ogle cried. "That jewel was stolen from the temple at Moorshedabad, by the Earl of Eiran's grandfather, during the confusion necessarily attendant on the glorious battle of Plassy." She laid down the pistol, and resumed in milder tones: "From an age-long existence as the left eye of Ganesh it was thus converted into the loot of an invader.
But I think that is not a fault you are likely to fall into; indeed, I have heard that during your former residence there you fairly awed the Nabob; so I have good hope that you will do the same again. The moment you have secured the execution of the treaties it will be time to fly, and as soon as I hear you are safe I shall put my troops on the march to Plassy."
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