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Rh in 1765, when he returned to Bengal, a new deed was issued, confirming the unconditional jágír to Lord Clive for ten years, with reversion afterwards to the Company in perpetuity. This deed, having received the Delhi emperor's sanction on the 12th August, 1765, gave absolute validity to the original jágír grant in favour of Lord Clive. It transferred eventually to the Company the Twenty-four Parganás as a perpetual property, based upon a jágír grant. The annual sum of Rs. 222,958, the amount at which the land- rent was assessed when first made over to the Company in 1757, was paid to Lord Clive from 1765 until his death in 1774, when the whole proprietary right reverted to the Company.

Clive, First Governor of Bengal, 1758.—In 1758, Clive was appointed by the Court of Directors the first Governor of all the Company's settlements in Bengal. Two powers threatened hostilities. On the north-west, the Sháhzáda or imperial prince, afterwards the Emperor Sháh Alam, with a mixed army of Afgháns and Maráthás, and supported by the Nawáb Wazír of Oudh, was advancing his own claims to the Province of Bengal. In the south, the influence of the French under Lally and Bussy was overshadowing the British at Madras. The name of Clive exercised a decisive effect in both directions. Our Nawdb of Bengal, Mír Jáfar, was anxious to buy off the Sháhzáda, who had already invested Patná. But Clive marched in person to the rescue, with an army of only 450 Europeans and 2500 sepoys, and the Mughal army dispersed without striking a blow. In the same year, Clive despatched a force southwards under Colonel Forde, which recaptured Masulipatam on the Madras coast from the French, and permanently established British influence in the Northern Circars, and at the Nizám's court of Haidarábád in Southern India. Clive next attacked the Dutch, the only other European nation who might yet prove a rival to the English. He defeated them both by land and water; and their settlement at Chinsurah existed thenceforth only on sufferance.

Mismanagement, 1760-1764.—From 1760 to 1765, Clive was in England. He had left no system of government in Bengal, but merely the tradition that unlimited sums of money might be extracted from the natives by the terror of the English