=--"The Corbet Arms," etc.
=Alternative Route.=--None.
In the parish of Moreton Say, 3 miles west of Market Drayton, is Styche
Hall, the birthplace of Robert Clive. The family of Clive took their
name from the little town of Clive in Cheshire, removing to Styche when
the heiress of the latter place married James Clive in the reign of
Henry VI. Robert Clive, the hero of Plassey, born in 1725, was educated
for a few years at Market Drayton before he went to the Merchant
Taylors' School. His father not being at all wealthy, Clive accepted a
writership in the East India Company and went out to Madras, but soon
changed his post for a commission in the army. After a brilliant career
in India, which he won for the English, raising them from the position
of mere traders to be the rulers of an Eastern Empire, he returned to
England in 1767. Worn out by the persecutions of his enemies, he died by
his own hand in 1774, when only in his forty-ninth year. "Great in
council, great in war, great in his exploits, which were many, and great
in his faults, which were few," Sir Charles Wilson says, "Clive will
ever be remembered as the man who laid deeply the foundations of our
Indian Empire, and who, in a time of national despondency, restored the
tarnished honour of the British arms."
The parish church of Moreton Say contains Clive's tomb besides other old
monuments dating from 1600, though the church itself is chiefly
eighteenth-century work. Market Drayton, sometimes thought to be the
Roman Mediolanum, still has a few timbered houses, but its church has
been much restored.
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