In the days following the sudden death, aged 49, of Robert Clive – ‘Clive of India’ – on 22 November 1774, rumours as to how it had happened spread fast. Despite having previously received knowledge to the contrary, the writer Horace Walpole reported to the diplomat Sir Horace Mann that the leading theory was that Clive had cut his own throat. Lady Mary Coke recorded in her journal that Clive had ‘killed himself’. Such stories were not uncommon in cases of high-profile society deaths and soon references to Clive having died in this way began to surface in popular literature. In 1777 a scurrilous biography by Charles Carraccioli stated dramatically that Clive ‘was found weltering in his blood’ with a razor nearby. In May 1778 Town and Country Magazine imagined a conversation in the afterlife between Clive and Charles Yorke. Yorke was lord chancellor when he died suddenly in 1770 and his death was also described as a suicide by Walpole. Long regarded as such, it is now doubted.

It seems likely that the deaths of both men prompted the spread of rumour and gossip which used suicide, then socially unacceptable, as a way to malign them.

Clive’s public profile – underpinned by the victory at Plassey in 1757, which established the East India Company’s control of Bengal, and by his wealthy lifestyle and political influence – meant that he inevitably attracted speculation designed to discredit and scandalise him. In May 1773 parliamentary enquiries into his conduct in India and his acquisition of an enormous fortune had culminated in a House of Commons debate and, despite the fact that he had emerged from it with his wealth intact, the public distrust of returned ‘East Indians’ – or nabobs – like Clive, was widespread. In Clive’s case, suicide provided an opportunity to suggest guilt: that he had not escaped the enquiries unscathed and had indeed paid a price for the consequences of actions he could no longer bear to live with.

The idea of suicide became engrained in subsequent biographies of Clive, beginning with the work started, but not finished, by Sir John Malcolm and published in 1836, which suggested that a combination of pain and the effect of medicine ‘led to the melancholy event which ensued’. This continued with the lives published by G.R. Gleig (1848), who wrote ‘The world knows that he committed suicide’, G.B. Malleson (1882), Sir George Forrest (1918), A.M. Davies (1939) and Mark Bence-Jones (1974). The short biography by George Dunbar in 1936 is an exception. Percival Spear, writing in History Today in 1954, concluded that Clive ‘died by his own hand’. Other recent works continue to perpetuate this belief. As well as supporting an inaccurate, and indeed dramatic, picture of the last phase of Clive’s life these narratives were fuelled by dubious 19th-century accounts and doubtless influenced by a story, recounted in Malcolm’s biography, that Clive had attempted suicide as a young man by placing a pistol to his head and pulling the trigger twice.

That Clive’s life was dogged by ill health is well known. Instances of depression, nervous disorder and physical pain were evident in 1750 during his time in Madras and in 1766 during his second governorship of Bengal. He used opium for relief. His later life in England saw recurrences of an abdominal complaint and nervous exhaustion which required trips to Bath and Europe. In late 1773 he left for Italy and upon his return in May 1774 he appears to have been both mentally and physically well; he spent the summer and autumn in Shropshire, entertaining house guests. In October he was re-elected as an MP for Shrewsbury. In early November, however, he caught a bad cold which necessitated a visit to Bath. There was no improvement and on the 20th he was back at home in London at his Berkeley Square townhouse. What followed during the next two days is described in a letter written by Maria Ducarel, a family friend, to Philip Francis, a member of the Supreme Council in Bengal, about a month later. According to Ducarel, Clive was very unwell and his stomach caused him much discomfort. Against the advice of John Fothergill, a well-known physician, Clive took doses of opium and other medicines:

In short, he had all the restlessness of a dying man, and grew worse and worse till the next day at noon, when he was taken with an epileptic fit ... and expired immediately.

Newspaper reports support Ducarel’s account that Clive suffered a sudden fatal medical emergency, probably triggered by excessive use of medicine. Further proof of this is found in a letter from Robert Pardoe, an attorney at Lincoln’s Inn, to a friend in Clive’s home county of Shropshire. Fearful that false rumours would spread, Pardoe was adamant that Clive had died during a seizure and that he had experienced similar instances before.

Had Clive died by suicide an inquest would have been required: there is however no trace of any such occurrence among the archives of the Westminster coroner. Instead there is every indication that events following Clive’s death followed normal practice. The executors met the next day to read the will and agree funeral arrangements. The body was removed from Berkeley Square on 24 November and taken to Shropshire. The plans provided for a hearse and coaches to proceed from Clive’s ancestral home, Styche Hall, to the church at Moreton Say, with tenants in attendance, for the burial there at 12 noon on 30 November 1774. Armorial shields, drapes and streamers were placed in local churches. This evidence contradicts claims in biographies, designed to support the suicide theory, that Clive’s funeral was a rushed, secretive affair.

What seems clear is that a myth of suicide grew up so strongly around Clive that it led, in effect, to a conspiracy theory based around the idea that an act of felo de se had been covered up. It has become one of many defining elements in how Clive continues to be remembered; authors as recent as Maya Jasanoff (2005) and William Dalrymple (2019) have repeated it.

David Prior completed a University of Wales M.Phil. dissertation on Robert Clive and currently works at the Parliamentary Archives.