Some months before the directors sent the intelligence from Port Lorient to Calcutta, a young politician had been summoned to a meeting in the same East India House Council Chamber. Until a day earlier, this individual had been the MP for a Cornish constituency, a position from which he had just been summarily unseated due to alleged irregularities during the election. The directors did not hesitate to seize their chance. They summoned the thickset, laconic, but fiercely ambitious and unusually forceful young man, and then in formal Council presented Robert Clive with an offer of employment
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