While a considerable part of the army of Bengal was thus engaged at a distance, a new and formidable danger menaced the western frontier.  The Great Mogul was a prisoner at Delhi in the hands of a subject.  His eldest son, named Shah Alum, destined to be, during many years, the sport of adverse fortune, and to be a tool in the hands, first of the Mahrattas, and then of the English, had fled from the palace of his father.  His birth was still revered in India.  Some powerful princes, the Nabob of Oude in particular, were inclined to favour him.  Shah Alum found it easy to draw to his standard great numbers of the military adventurers with whom every part of the country swarmed.  An army of forty thousand men, of various races and religions, Mahrattas, Rohillas, Jauts, and Afghans, were speedily assembled round him; and he formed the design of overthrowing the upstart whom the English had elevated to a throne, and of establishing his own authority throughout Bengal, Orissa, and Bahar.

Meer Jaffier’s terror was extreme; and the only expedient which occurred to him was to purchase, by the payment of a large sum of money, an accommodation with Shah Alum.  This expedient had been repeatedly employed by those who, before him, had ruled the rich and unwarlike provinces near the mouth of the Ganges.  But Clive treated the suggestion with a scorn worthy of his strong sense and dauntless courage.  “If you do this,” he wrote, “you will have the Nabob of Oude, the Mahrattas, and many more, come from all parts of the confines of your country, who will bully you out of money till you have none left in your treasury.  I beg your Excellency will rely on the fidelity of the English, and of those troops which are attached to you.”  He wrote in a similar strain to the governor of Patna, a brave native soldier whom he highly esteemed.  “Come to no terms; defend your city to the last.  Rest assured that the English are staunch and firm friends, and that they never desert a cause in which they have once taken a part.”

He kept his word.  Shah Alum had invested Patna, and was on the point of proceeding to storm, when he learned that the Colonel was advancing by forced marches.  The whole army which was approaching consisted of only four hundred and fifty Europeans and two thousand five hundred sepoys.  But Clive and his Englishmen were now objects of dread over all the East.  As soon as his advance guard appeared, the besiegers fled before him.  A few French adventurers who were about the person of the prince advised him to try the chance of battle; but in vain.  In a few days this great army, which had been regarded with so much uneasiness by the court of Moorshedabad, melted away before the mere terror of the British name.

The conqueror returned in triumph to Fort William.  The joy of Meer Jaffier was as unbounded as his fears had been, and led him to bestow on his preserver a princely token of gratitude.  The quit-rent which the East India Company were bound to pay to the Nabob for the extensive lands held by them to the south of Calcutta amounted to near thirty thousand pounds sterling a year.  The whole of this splendid estate, sufficient to support with dignity the highest rank of the British peerage, was now conferred on Clive for life.