anticipated. From the Crown there was no immediate recognition; from the Court of Directors, a hostile section of which held the supremacy, he received worse than neglect. Almost their first act was to dispute his right to the jágír which Mír Jafar had bestowed upon him[1]. From the general public there was no demonstration. Clive felt that in England as in India he would have to fight his way upwards.
His health was not very good. He suffered from rheumatism, which had assailed him in Bengal, and which bore a strong resemblance to rheumatic gout. Scarcely had he recovered from this malady when he was assailed by the insidious disease which, afterwards, but rarely left him. This caused a depression of spirits which gradually wore out his body. As a boy he had suffered at intervals from similar attacks. They increased now in intensity, baffling the physicians who attended him. He bore up bravely, however, and pushed forward with his wonted energy the ambitious plans he had formed in the intervals of quiet and repose.
At the age of thirty-five, with an enormous fortune, great ambition, and sanguine hopes for the future, Clive trusted that the illness he suffered from would eventually yield to treatment, and he entered on his campaign in England with the confidence in himself which had been one secret of his success in India. He had hoped, on his arrival, to have been at once raised to the House of Peers. But the honours of the
- ↑ See p. 123.
