The Project Gutenberg eBook, History of the War in Afghanistan, Vol. I (of 3), by Sir John William Kaye

HISTORY
OF
THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN.

By JOHN WILLIAM KAYE, F.R.S.

THIRD EDITION.

IN THREE VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

LONDON:
WM. H. ALLEN & CO., 13, WATERLOO PLACE,

Publishers to the India Office.
1874.

LONDON.
PRINTED BY W. CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET
AND CHARING CROSS.

Dedication.

IF PUBLIC CLAIMS ALONE WERE TO BE REGARDED, I KNOW NOT TO WHOM I COULD MORE FITLY INSCRIBE THESE VOLUMES, THAN TO THE OFFICERS OF A REGIMENT, ON THE ROLLS OF WHICH ARE THE NAMES OF POLLOCK, MACGREGOR, TODD, SHAKESPEAR, LAWRENCE, ABBOTT, ANDERSON, AND OTHERS, DISTINGUISHED IN THE ANNALS OF THE AFGHAN WAR; BUT IT IS IN GRATEFUL RECOLLECTION OF SOME OF THE HAPPIEST YEARS OF MY LIFE THAT I DEDICATE THESE VOLUMES TO THE

OFFICERS OF THE BENGAL ARTILLERY.

Bletchingley,

Oct. 30, 1851.

ADVERTISEMENT TO THIRD EDITION.

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The present Edition of the “History of the War in Afghanistan” is a reproduction of the three-volumed Edition of 1857, which was thoroughly revised, and much improved by the kindly aid of many of the chief actors in the scenes described. I do not think that I can make it any better.

Only one alleged error has been brought to my notice since the last Edition was published. It is stated, in Chapter IV., page 55, that “Mr. Harford Jones, a civil servant of the Company, who was made a Baronet for the occasion, was deputed to Teheran to negotiate with the Ministers of the Shah.” This was first published in 1851. After a lapse of twenty-three years, I have recently been informed by the son of Sir Harford Jones, that his father was not made a Baronet in consideration of prospective but of past services. It is certain that Mr. Harford Jones rendered good service to the East India Company, but it is equally certain that His Majesty’s Government were not very prodigal in their grants of honours to the Company’s servants. The Baronetcy was created in 1807, when the Persian Mission was under consideration; but I must admit that there is a difference between coincidences and consequences—and, therefore, as I cannot establish the fact stated, I am willing to withdraw the assertion of it, whatever may be my own convictions.

J. W. K.

Rose-Hill,

March 1874.

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION.

——◆——

The present Edition of the History of the War in Afghanistan has been thoroughly revised; and several alterations have been made, which I hope may be fairly regarded also as emendations. Some of the notes have been abridged; and others, when the importance of their subject-matter seemed to warrant it, have been incorporated with the text. I have freely and gratefully availed myself of such information and such suggestions as have been furnished to me by others since the first appearance of the Work, whilst my own more recent historical and biographical researches have enabled me to illustrate more fully in some places my original conceptions, and in others to modify or to correct them.

The material corrections, however, are not numerous. As almost every statement in the book was based upon copious documentary evidence, I have now, as regards my historical facts, very little to withdraw or to amend. I think I may, without unreasonable self-congratulation, assert that few works of contemporary history containing so large a body of facts have been so little questioned and controverted. The numerous communications, which I have received alike from friends and strangers, have contained little but confirmatory or illustrative matter; and, if they have cast any doubt upon the statements in the Work, it has been mainly on those advanced by the actors in the events described, and which therefore have appeared only in a dramatic sense in these pages. When, however, an opportunity has been afforded me of placing before the reader any new facts, or counter-statements, which may possibly cause him to modify his previous opinions, I have always turned them to account. As I have no other object than that of declaring the truth, I cannot but rejoice in every added means of contributing to its completeness.

In this present Edition, the History of the War in Afghanistan is divided into three Volumes. This is a change in the outer form of the Work, which may appear to be scarcely worthy of notice; but I believe it to be an improvement, and a suggestive one. I doubt whether there is a series of events in all history, which falls more naturally into three distinct groupes, giving the epic completeness of a beginning, a middle, and an end to the entire Work. It is true that some very generous and good-natured people have given me credit for the unity of design and of construction apparent in this; but in truth all the parts of the Work fell so naturally into their proper places, that there was little left for art to accomplish; and I am conscious that I owe to the nature of my subject the largest part of the praise which has been so encouragingly bestowed on myself.

I should have nothing more to say in this place, if I did not desire to express my gratitude to the friends who have taken an interest in this new edition of my History, and have aided me with verbal corrections of my text, or suggestions of greater moment. I might not please them by any more special recognition of their kindness; but there is one whom such praise and gratitude as mine can no longer reach, and whom I may therefore name without offence. Among others who were at the trouble to re-peruse this book, for the purpose of aiding its revision for the present edition, the appearance of which has been retarded by accidental circumstances, was the late Sir Robert Harry Inglis. I believe that this, which he assured me was a labour of love, was the last literary task which he ever set himself. His final list of corrigenda was sent to me, indeed, only a few days before the occurrence of that event which, although there be good and wise and genial men still among us, has left a gap in society, which cannot easily be filled by one so good, so wise, and so genial. Of all the privileges of literature, the greatest, perhaps, is that it makes for its followers kind and indulgent friends, who sometimes transfer to the writer the interest awakened by his book. I owe to this Work some cherished friendships; but none more cherished than that which has now become both a pleasing and a painful reminiscence.

London,

January, 1857.

PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION.

——◆——

Circumstances having placed at my disposal a number of very interesting and important letters and papers, illustrative of the History of the War in Afghanistan, I undertook to write this Work. There was nothing that peculiarly qualified me for the task, beyond the fact that I enjoyed the confidence of some of the chief actors in the events to be narrated, or—for death had been busy among those actors—their surviving relatives and friends. I had been in India, it is true, during the entire period of the War; but I never took even the humblest part in its stirring scenes, or visited the country in which they were enacted.

It was not, therefore, until I considered that no more competent person might be disposed to undertake the Work; that the materials placed in my hands might not in the same number and variety be placed in the hands of any other writer; and that those best qualified by a full knowledge of the subject to write the History of the War, were restrained by the obligations of official position from that fulness of revelation and freedom of discussion, which a work of this kind demands—that entered upon the perilous undertaking. The necessities of the subject have rendered the task peculiarly painful, and, but for the encouragement I have received in the progress of its execution, alike from strangers and from friends who have freely placed new materials in my hands, and expressed a lively interest in my labours, I might have shrunk from its completion. I now lay before the public the result of much anxious thought and laborious investigation, confident that, although the Work might have been done more ably, it could not have been performed more conscientiously, by another.

I have been walking, as it were, with a torch in my hand over a floor strewn thickly with gunpowder. There is the chance of an explosion at every step. I have been treading all along on dangerous ground. But if I cannot confidently state that I have asserted nothing which I cannot prove, I can declare my belief that, except upon what I had a right to consider as good and sufficient authority, I have advanced absolutely nothing. It will be seen how careful I have been to quote my authorities. Indeed, I have an uneasy misgiving in my mind that I have overburdened my Work with quotations from the letters and documents in my possession. But this has been done with design and deliberation. It was not sufficient to refer to these letters and documents, for they were singly accessible only to a few, and collectively, perhaps, to no one but myself. They have, therefore, been left to speak for themselves. What the Work has lost by this mode of treatment in compactness and continuity, it has gained in trustworthiness and authenticity. If the narrative be less animated, the history is more genuine. I have had to deal with unpublished materials, and to treat of very strange events; and I have not thought it sufficient to fuse these materials into my text, and to leave the reader to fix or not to fix his faith upon the unsupported assertions of an unknown writer.[1]

I would make another observation regarding the execution of this Work. The more notorious events of the War, which stand fully revealed in military despatches and published blue-books, have not been elaborated with the care, and expanded into the amplitude, which their importance may seem to demand. These Volumes may be thought, perhaps, rather deficient in respect of military details. Compelled to condense somewhere, I have purposely abstained from enlarging upon those events, which have already found fitting chroniclers. The military memoir-writers, each one on his own limited field, have arrayed before us all the strategical operations of the Campaign from the assemblage of Fane’s army in 1838, to the return of Pollock’s at the close of 1842; but the political history of the War has never been written. For information on many points of military interest, not sufficiently dwelt upon in these volumes, I would therefore refer the reader to the works of Havelock, Hough, Barr, Eyre, Stacy, Neill, and other soldierly writers. The progress of events in Upper Sindh after the capture of Khelat, I have not attempted to narrate. The military operations in that part of the country have found an intelligent annalist in Dr. Buist.

I need only now, after gratefully acknowledging my obligations to all who have aided me with original papers, or with information otherwise conveyed (and I have largely taxed the patience of many during the progress of this work), offer one more word of apology. I know that my scholarly Oriental friends will revolt against my spelling of Oriental names. I have only to bow beneath their correcting hand, and fling myself upon their mercy. I have written all the names in the old and vulgar manner, most familiar to the English eye, and, in pronunciation, to the English ear; and I believe that the majority of readers will thank me for the barbarism.

Bletchingley,

October, 1851.

CONTENTS.

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BOOK I.—INTRODUCTION.

[1800-1837.]

————

BOOK II.

[1835-1838.]

————

BOOK III.

[1838-1839.]

————

THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN.

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BOOK I.—INTRODUCTION.

[1800-1837.]

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CHAPTER I.

[1800-1801.]

Shah Zemaun and the Douranee Empire—Threatened Afghan Invasion—Malcolm’s First Mission to Persia—Country and People of Afghanistan—Fall of Zemaun Shah.

At the dawn of the present century, Zemaun Shah reigned over the Douranee Empire. The son of Timour Shah, and the grandson of the illustrious Ahmed Shah, he had sought, on the death of his father, the dangerous privilege of ruling a divided and tumultuous people. Attaining by intrigue and violence what did not rightfully descend to him by inheritance, he soon began to turn his thoughts towards foreign conquest, and to meditate the invasion of Hindostan. His talents were not equal to his ambition, and his success fell far short of the magnitude of his designs. There was too little security at home to ensure for him prosperity abroad. And so it happened, that he was continually marching an army upon the frontier, eager to extend the Douranee Empire to the banks of the Ganges; and continually retracing his steps in alarm, lest his own sovereignty should be wrested from him in his absence. For many years Zemaun Shah’s descent upon Hindostan kept the British Indian Empire in a chronic state of unrest. But he never advanced further than Lahore, and then was compelled precipitately to retire. Starvation threatened his troops; a brotherly usurper his throne; and he hastened back lest he should find Prince Mahmoud reigning at Caubul in his stead.

This was in 1797,[2] when Sir John Shore was Governor-General of India. We smile now at the alarm that was created along the whole line of country from the Attock to the Hooghly, by the rumoured approach of this formidable invader. But half a century ago, the English in India knew little of the resources of the Douranee Empire, of the national characteristics of the people, of the continually unsettled state of their political relations, or of the incompetency of the monarch himself to conduct any great enterprise. Distance and ignorance magnified the danger: but the apprehensions, which were then entertained, were not wholly groundless apprehensions. All the enemies of the British Empire in India had turned their eyes with malicious expectancy upon Caubul. Out of the rocky defiles of that romantic country were to stream the deliverers of Islam from the yoke of the usurping Franks. The blood of the Mahomedan princes of India was at fever heat. From northern Oude and from southern Mysore had gone forth invitations to the Afghan monarch. With large promises of aid, in money and in men, Vizier Ali and Tippoo Sultan had encouraged him to move down upon Hindostan at the head of an army of true believers. Others, with whom he could claim no community of creed, extended to him the hand of fellowship. The Rajah of Jyneghur offered him a lakh of rupees a day as soon as the grand army should enter his district.[3] We, who in these times trustingly contemplate the settled tranquillity of the north-western provinces of India, and remember Zemaun Shah only as the old blind pensioner of Loodhianah, can hardly estimate aright the real importance of the threatened movement, or appreciate the apprehensions which were felt by two governors-general of such different personal characters as Sir John Shore and Lord Wellesley.[4]

The new century had scarcely dawned upon the English in India, when the perils which seemed to threaten them from beyond the Indus began to assume a more complicated and perplexing character. The ambition of a semi-barbarous monarch and the inflammatory zeal of hordes of Mussulman fanatics, were sources of danger, which, however alarming, were at least plain and intelligible. But when it was suspected that there was intrigue of a more remote and insidious character to be combated—when intelligence, only too credible, of the active efforts of French diplomacy in Persia, reached the Calcutta Council-Chamber, and it was believed that the emissaries of Napoleon were endeavouring to cement alliances hostile to Great Britain in every quarter of the Eastern world, the position of affairs in Central Asia was regarded with increased anxiety, and their management demanded greater wisdom and address. It was now no longer a question of mere military defence against the inroads of a single invader. The repeated failures of Zemaun Shah had, in some degree, mitigated the alarm with which his movements were dimly traced in Hindostan. The Douranee monarch had lost something of his importance as an independent enemy; but as the willing agent of a hostile confederacy, he appeared a more formidable opponent, and might have become a more successful one. An offensive alliance between France, Persia, and Caubul, might have rendered the dangers, which once only seemed to threaten us from the north-west, at once real and imminent. To secure the friendship of Persia, therefore, was the great aim of the British Government. It was obvious that, whilst threatened with invasion from the west, Zemaun Shah could never conduct to a successful issue an expedition against Hindostan; and that so long as Persia remained true to Great Britain, there was nothing to be apprehended from French intrigue in the countries of Central Asia. It was determined, therefore, to despatch a mission to the Court of the Persian Shah, and Captain John Malcolm was selected to conduct it.

The choice could not have fallen on a fitter agent. In the fullest vigour of life, a young man, but not a young soldier—for, born in that year of heroes which witnessed the nativity of Wellington, of Napoleon, and of Mehemet Ali, he had entered the service of the Company at the early age of thirteen—Captain Malcolm brought to the difficult and responsible duties entrusted to him, extraordinary energy of mind and activity of body—talents of the most available and useful character—some experience of native courts and acquaintance with the Oriental languages. He had been successively military secretary to the commander-in-chief of Madras, town-major of Fort St. George, assistant to the Resident at Hyderabad, and commandant of the infantry of the Nizam’s contingent. When that army took the field in Mysore, and shared in the operations against Tippoo Sultan, Captain Malcolm accompanied it in the capacity of political agent, which was virtually the chief command of the force; and, after the reduction of Seringapatam and the death of Tippoo, was associated with General Wellesley, Colonel Close, and Captain Munro,[5] in the commission that was then appointed for the settlement of the Mysore country.

This was in 1799. In that same year he was selected by Lord Wellesley to fill the post of envoy to the Court of Persia. With such address had he acquitted himself in all his antecedent appointments; so great had been the knowledge of native character, the diplomatic tact, and the sound understanding he had evinced in all his negotiations; that at an age when the greater number of his contemporaries were in the discharge of no higher duties than those entailed by the command of a company of sepoys, Captain Malcolm was on his way to the presence of the great defender of Islamism, charged with one of the most important missions that has ever been despatched by the British-Indian Government to the Court of a native potentate.

The mission, says Captain Malcom, was “completely successful”—a declaration repeated more emphatically by Lord Wellesley.[6] But time and circumstance did more for us than diplomacy. It was the ostensible object of the mission to instigate the Shah of Persia to move an army upon Herat, and so to withdraw Shah Zemaun from his threatened invasion of Hindostan. But the move, which was to do so much for our security in India, had been made before the British ambassador appeared at the Persian Court; and the work, which was thus commenced by Futteh Ali, was completed by Prince Mahmoud.[7] “You may rest assured,” wrote Captain Malcolm, from Ispahan, in October, 1800, “that Zemaun Shah can do nothing in India before the setting in of the rains of 1801. He has not time, even if he had the power for such an attempt; and by the blessing of God he will for some years to come be too much engaged in this quarter to think of any other.”[8] But some years to come of empire he was not destined to see. Even as Malcolm wrote, the days of his sovereignty were numbered, and the bugbear of Afghan invasion was passing into tradition.

The envoy was empowered either to offer a subsidy of from three to four lakhs of rupees for a term of three years, or by a liberal distribution of presents to the king and his principal ministers, to bribe them into acquiescence. Malcolm chose the latter course. He threw about his largesses with an unstinting hand, and everything went smoothly with him. The farther he advanced into the interior, the greater was the attention shown to the Mission, for the greater was the renown of the liberality of the Christian Elchee. Every difficulty melted away beneath the magic touch of British gold.[9] There had been at the outset some trifling disputes about formalities—about titles and designations—but these were soon cleared away; and the serious business of the Mission proceeded in the midst of feasts and formalities to a satisfactory completion. A commercial and a political treaty were negotiated at Teheran by Malcolm and Hadjee Ibrahim; and the Shah stamped their validity by prefixing to each a firman, or mandate, under the royal seal, calling upon all the officers of the state to perform its prescribed conditions. Of all the terms proposed by the English envoy, but one was demurred to by the Persian Court. “And that even,” writing some years afterwards, he said, “was not rejected.”[10] This proposal related to the occupation by the English of the islands of Kishm, Angani, and Khargh (or Kharrack),[11] in the Persian Gulf, on the expediency of which, though much and ably controverted by others, Malcolm never ceased to expatiate so long as he had a hand in the game of Persian diplomacy.

This provision, which was to have been contained in the commercial treaty, was said to contemplate only commercial objects; but, there was to be a permission to fortify; and commerce, with an occasional permission of this kind, had made India a British dependency, and the Persians were not unreasonably jealous, therefore, of a commencement which might have had a similar end.

In February, 1801, Captain Malcolm reported that he had accomplished the object of his mission, and brought his labours to a close. “Whether with credit or not,” he added in a private letter, “it is the province of my superiors to judge. I can only say, in self-defence, that I have done as much as I was able; and no man can do more. I am far from admiring my own work, or considering it (as termed in one of the preambles) a beautiful image in the mirror of perpetuity. It is, on the contrary, I know, a very incorrect performance; and I can hope it to meet with a favourable consideration only on the grounds of the difficulties I had to encounter in a first negotiation with a government not two stages removed from a state of barbarism.”[12]

The political treaty, indeed, called for apology; but not on the grounds indicated in this deprecatory letter. It stipulated that if ever again the Douranee monarch should be induced to attempt the invasion of Hindostan, the King of Persia should be bound to lay waste, with a great army, the country of the Afghans; and conclude no peace with its ruler that was not accompanied with a solemn engagement to abstain from all aggressions upon the English. But it was remarkable chiefly for the bitterness with which it proscribed the French. “Should an army of the French nation,” it stated, “actuated by design and deceit, attempt to settle, with a view of establishing themselves on any of the islands or shores of Persia, a conjoint force shall be appointed by the two high contracting parties to act in co-operation, and to destroy and put an end to the foundation of their treason.” The firman prefixed to this treaty contained a passage addressed to the rulers and officers of the ports, sea-coasts, and islands of Fars and Koorgistan, saying, “Should ever any persons of the French nation attempt to pass your boundaries, or desire to establish themselves either on the shores or frontiers of the kingdom of Persia, you are at full liberty to disgrace and slay them.”[13] These proceedings have been severely censured by French writers, and even English politicians have declared them to be “an eternal disgrace to our Indian diplomacy.” But those were days when, even in India, men’s minds were unhinged and unsettled, and their ideas of right and wrong confounded by the monstrosities of the French revolution. It would be unjust to view these measures with the eyes of to-day, or to forget the desperate evils to which these desperate remedies were applied. It was conceived that there was a great and pressing danger, and Captain Malcolm was sent to combat it. But the treaty was never formally ratified; and the Persian Court practically ignored its obligations as soon as it was no longer convenient to observe them. The Embassy, however, was not a fruitless one, even if the only estimated produce were the stores of information it amassed.

Before the mission of Captain Malcolm to the West, but little was known in India, and nothing in Great Britain, about the Douranee Empire, the nature and extent of its resources, the quality of its soldiers, and the character of its ruler. The information which that officer acquired was not of a very alarming description. The Douranee Empire which has since been shorn of some of its fairest provinces, then consisted of Afghanistan, part of Khorassan, Cashmere, and the Derajat. The Sikh nation had not then acquired the strength which a few years later enabled it, under the military directorship of Runjeet Singh, to curb the pretensions and to mutilate the empire of its dominant neighbour. That empire extended from Herat in the west, to Cashmere in the east; from northern Balkh to southern Shikarpoor. Bounded on the north and east by immense mountain ranges, and on the south and west by vast tracts of sandy desert, it opposed to external hostility natural defences of a formidable character. The general aspect of the country was wild and forbidding; in the imagination of the people haunted by goules and genii; but not unvaried by spots of gentler beauty in the valleys and on the plains, where the fields were smiling with cultivation, and the husbandman might be seen busy at his work.

Few and far between as were the towns, the kingdom was thinly populated. The people were a race—or a group of races—of hardy, vigorous mountaineers. The physical character of the country had stamped itself on the moral conformation of its inhabitants. Brave, independent, but of a turbulent vindictive character, their very existence seemed to depend upon a constant succession of internal feuds. The wisest among them would probably have shaken their heads in negation of the adage-“Happy the country whose annals are a blank.” They knew no happiness in anything but strife. It was their delight to live in a state of chronic warfare. Among such a people civil war has a natural tendency to perpetuate itself. Blood is always crying aloud for blood. Revenge was a virtue among them; the heritage of retribution passed from father to son; and murder became a solemn duty. Living under a dry, clear, bracing climate, but one subject to considerable alternations of heat and cold, the people were strong and active; and as navigable rivers were wanting, and the precipitous nature of the country forbade the use of wheeled carriages, they were for the most part good horsemen, and lived much in the saddle. Early trained to the use of arms, compelled constantly to wear and often to use them in the ordinary intercourse of life, every man was more or less a soldier or a bandit. The very shepherds were men of strife. The pastoral and the predatory character were strangely blended; and the tented cantonments of the sheep-drivers often bristled into camps of war.

But there was a brighter side to the picture. Of a cheerful, lively disposition, seemingly but little in accordance with the outward gravity of their long beards and sober garments, they might be seen in their villages, at evening tide, playing or dancing like children in their village squares; or assembling in the Fakir’s gardens, to smoke and talk, retailing the news gathered in the shops, reciting stories, and singing their simple Afghan ballads, often expressive of that tender passion which, among them alone of all Oriental nations, is worthy of the name of love. Hospitable and generous, they entertained the stranger without stint, and even his deadliest enemy was safe beneath the Afghan’s roof. There was a simple courtesy in their manner which contrasted favourably with the polished insincerity of the Persians on one side, and the arrogant ferocity of the Rohillas on the other. Judged by the strict standard of a Christian people, they were not truthful in word or honest in deed, but, side by side with other Asiatic nations, their truthfulness and honesty were conspicuous. Kindly and considerate to their immediate dependents, the higher classes were followed with loyal zeal and served with devoted fidelity by the lower; and, perhaps, in no eastern country was less of tyranny exercised over either the slaves of the household or the inmates of the zenana. Unlettered were they, but not incurious; and although their more polished brethren of Persia looked upon them as the Bœotians of Central Asia, their Spartan simplicity and manliness more than compensated for the absence of the Attic wit and eloquence of their western neighbours.

Soldiers, husbandmen, and shepherds, they were described as the very antithesis of a nation of shopkeepers. The vocation of the tradesman they despised. To Taujiks, Hindoos, and other aliens, was the business of selling entrusted, except upon that large scale which entitled the dealer to be regarded as a merchant, and generally entailed upon him the necessities of a wandering and adventurous life. The principal commerce of the country was with the Persian and Russian states. In the bazaars of Herat, Candahar, and Caubul the manufactures of Ispahan, Yezd, and Cashan, the spices of India, and the broad-cloths of Russia, brought by Astrakan and Bokhara, found a ready market. Occasionally, when the settled state of the country gave encouragement to commercial enterprise, an adventurous merchant would make his way, through Dera from Bombay, with a cafila of British goods, for the scarlet cloths of England were in especial demand to deck the persons of the body servants of the king. The indigenous products of the country were few, but important; for the rich shawls of Cashmere and the gaudy chintzes of Mooltan, exported in large quantities, were in good repute all over the civilised world.[14] At Herat some velvets and taffetas of good quality were manufactured, but only for internal consumption; whilst the assafœtida of that place, the madder of Candahar, and the indigo of the Derajat,[15] found a market in the Persian cities, and the dried fruits of the country were in request in all neighbouring parts. These, a few other drugs of little note, and some iron from the Hindoo Koosh and the Solimanee range, formed the main staple of Afghan commerce. Between the large towns there was a constant interchange of commodities; and long cafilas, or caravans, were ever in motion, from east to west, and from north to south, toiling across the sandy plains or struggling through the precipitous defiles, exposed to the attacks of predatory tribes, who levied their contributions often not without strife and bloodshed.

Such was the not very flattering picture of the commercial wealth of the Douranee Empire, which was painted by Captain Malcolm’s informants. Nor was the military strength of the Empire set forth in any more striking colours. Distance and ignorance had vastly magnified the true proportions of that famous military power, which was to have overrun Hindostan, and driven the white men into the sea. The main strength of the Afghan army was in the Douranee horse. The Douranee tribes had been settled in Western Afghanistan by Nadir Shah. He had first conquered, then taken them into his service, and then parcelled out amongst them, as his military dependents, the lands which had before been held, by a motley race of native cultivators. It was the policy of Ahmed Shah and his successors—a policy which was subsequently reversed by the Barukzye sirdars—to aggrandise and elevate these powerful tribes, by heaping upon them privileges and immunities at the expense of their less favoured countrymen. Upon the misery and humiliation of others, the Douranee tribes throve and flourished. The chief offices of the state were divided amongst them; they held their lands exempt from taxation. The only demand made upon them, in return for the privileges they enjoyed, was that they should furnish a certain contingent of troops.[16] It was said to be the principle of the military tenure by which they held their lands, that for every plough used in cultivation[17] they should contribute a horseman for the service of the state. But it does not appear that the integrity of this system was long preserved. In a little time there ceased to be any just proportion between the ploughs and the horsemen; and it became difficult to account for the arbitrary manner in which each of the different Douranee clans furnished its respective quota of troops.[18]

In the time of Ahmed Shah the Douranee horsemen mustered about 6000 strong. The other western tribes and the Persian stipendiaries together reached about the same number. In the reign of Timour Shah, the army was computed at some 40,000 soldiers, almost entirely horsemen;[19] but no such force had served under Zemaun Shah, and they who had seen in 1799-1800, the muster of his troops near Caubul, and had access to the returns of the muster-masters, reported that he then assembled only some ten or twelve thousand men, and all, with the exception of a few Persian stipendiaries, in the immediate service of the Wuzeer, very miserably equipped. Even the Kuzzilbashes, when Shah Zemaun took the field in 1799, refused to accompany the projected expedition, on the plea that they wanted arms to fight their battles, and money to support their wives.

Fighting men, indeed, were never wanting in Afghanistan, but money was wanting to induce them to leave their homes. It was said that Shah Zemaun might, on any great national enterprise, have led 200,000 men into the field, if he had had money to pay them. But his entire revenues were not equal to the payment of a very much smaller force. He was continually being deserted by his soldiery, at critical times, for want of the sinews of war to retain them. The emptiness of his treasury, indeed, reduced him to all kinds of shifts and expedients, such as that of raising the value of the current coin of the realm. But no devices of this character could confer upon him a really formidable army. In one important branch he was miserably deficient. The Douranee artillery consisted of some twelve brass field-pieces and five hundred zumboorucks, or camel guns. Even these were miserably equipped; the camels wanted drivers, and the guns were often unserviceable. It was said by one who visited the encampment of the grand army, under Zemaun Shah, in 1799-1800, that there were not above 500 good horses in camp, and that these belonged principally to the King and the Wuzeer. The men were mounted for the most part on yaboos, or ponies, few of which, at a liberal valuation, were worth a hundred rupees.

Such was the army with which Zemaun Shah meditated the invasion of Hindostan. The personal character of the monarch was not more formidable than the army which he commanded. A scholar more than a soldier, very strict in the observances of his religion, and an assiduous reader of the Koran, his way of life, judged by the princely standard of Central Asia, was sufficiently moral and decorous. Humane and generous, of a gentle, plastic disposition; very prone to take for granted the truth of all that was told him; by no means remarkable for personal activity, and somewhat wanting in courage, he was designed by nature for a facile puppet in the hands of a crafty Wuzeer. And such was Zemaun Shah in the expert hands of Wuffadar Khan. It was reported of him that he took no active part in the management of public affairs; and that when it was politic that he should make a show of government and appear at Durbar, what he said was little more than a public recital of a lesson well learnt in private. He was, indeed, the mere mouth-piece of the minister—of a worse and more designing man. Content with the gilded externals of majesty, he went abroad sumptuously arrayed and magnificently attended; and mighty in all the state papers of the time was the name of Zemaun Shah. But it was shrewdly suspected that, had the state of his domestic relations and the military resources at his command enabled him to take the field, as the invader of Hindostan, a bribe any day offered to the Wuzeer might have broken up the Douranee army, and kept the invader quietly at home.

On the whole, he was a popular ruler. The cultivating classes were happy under his government. It recognised their claims to remuneration for whatever was taken from them for the service of the state, and no acts of fraud and oppression were ever committed in his name. The merchants and traders were secure under his rule. In the midst of much that was base and unworthy in the character and conduct of the minister, he had a reputation for fair dealing with these classes, and they looked up to him for protection. But far otherwise were his relations with the warlike tribes and the chief people of the empire. They were not without feelings of loyalty towards the king; but it was rather affection for his person, than satisfaction with the government of which he was the head. The grasping character of the minister, who engrossed to himself all the patronage of the state, rendered him, in spite of his courteous manners and affable demeanour, obnoxious to the principal Sirdars; and something of this disaffection began in time to be directed against the monarch himself, who had too long abandoned his own better nature to the sinister guidance of the unprincipled and unpopular Wuzeer.

Like many a monarch, abler and better than himself, Zemaun Shah had chosen his minister unwisely, and was undone by the choice. When he entrusted the affairs of his empire to the administration of Wuffadar Khan, he made the great mistake of his life. A base and designing man, without any of those commanding qualities which impart something of dignity and heroism to crime, the Wuzeer bent his sovereign, but could not bend circumstances to his will. The loyalty of the Douranee sirdars he could extinguish, but their power he could not break by his oppressions. Alarmed at their increasing influence, Wuffadar Khan sought to encompass them in the toils of destruction; but he destroyed himself and involved his sovereign in the ruin. Prince Mahmoud was in arms against his royal brother. Exasperated by the conduct of the minister, the Douranees threw all the weight of their influence into the scales in favour of the prince. The rebellion which they headed acquired strength and swelled into a revolution. And then began that great strife between the royal princes and the Douranee sirdars, which half a century of continued conflict, now witnessing the supremacy of the one, now of the other, has scarcely even yet extinguished.

The two principal clans or tribes of the Douranees were the Populzyes and the Barukzyes. The Suddozye, or Royal race, was one of the branches of the former. The Bamezye, in which the Wuzeership was vested, but not by inalienable right, was another branch of the same tribe. Second in influence to the Populzyes, and greater in extent, was the tribe of the Barukzyes. To this tribe belonged Futteh Khan. He was the son of Poyndah Khan, an able statesman and a gallant soldier, whose wisdom in council and experience in war had long sustained the tottering fortunes of Timour Shah. On the death of that feeble monarch he had supported the claims of Zemaun Shah. With as little wisdom as gratitude, that prince, it has been seen, suffered himself to be cajoled by a man of less honesty and less ability, and became a tool in the hands of Wuffadar Khan. The favourite of two monarchs was disgraced; and, from a powerful friend, became the resolute enemy of the reigning family. He conspired against the King and the Wuzeer; his designs were detected; and he perished miserably with his associates in the enterprise of treason.

Poyndah Khan died, leaving twenty-one sons, of whom Futteh Khan was the eldest. They are said, after the death of their father, to have stooped into a cloud of poverty and humiliation, and to have wandered about begging their bread. But their trials were only for a season. The Barukzye brothers soon emerged from the night of suffering that surrounded them. There was no power in the Douranee Empire which could successfully cope with these resolute, enterprising spirits. In Afghanistan revenge is a virtue. The sons of Poyndah Khan had the murder of their father to avenge; and they rested not till the bloody obligation had been faithfully fulfilled. Futteh Khan had fled into Persia, and there leagued himself with Prince Mahmoud. Repeated failure had extinguished the ambition of this restless prince. The accession of the Barukzye sirdar now inspired him with new courage. Upheld by the strong arm of the “king-maker,” he determined to strike another blow for the sovereignty of Caubul. With a few horsemen they entered Afghanistan, and, raising the standard of revolt, pushed on to unexpected conquest.

There were not many in Afghanistan, nor many among the disinterested lookers-on at that fraternal strife, who were inclined to jeopardise their character for sagacity by predicting the success of the prince. Everything, indeed, was against him. His treasury was always empty. His friends were not men of note. With the exception of the Barukzye sirdars,[20] no chiefs of influence espoused his cause. His followers were described to Captain Malcolm as men “of low condition and mean extraction.” But in spite of the slender support which he received, and the strenuous efforts which were made to destroy him, the successes which from time to time he achieved, seemed to show that there was some vitality in his cause. A divinity seemed to hedge him in, and to protect him from the knife of the assassin. He escaped as though by a miracle the snares of his enemies, and from every new deliverance seemed to gather something of prosperity and strength. It was after one of these marvellous escapes, when the weapons of the Kuzzilbashes[21] had fallen from their hands, palsied by the mysterious presence of the blood royal, that Candahar fell before the insurgents. With two or three thousand horsemen, Mahmoud invested the place for thirty-three days, at the end of which Futteh Khan, with a handful of resolute men, escaladed the fort near the Shikarpoor gate, and put the panic-struck garrison to flight. The Meer Akhoor, or Master of the Horse, fled for his life. The Shah-zadah Hyder sought sanctuary at the tomb of Ahmed Shah; and Prince Mahmoud became master of the place.

It is not a peculiarity of Eastern princes alone to shine with a brighter and steadier light in the hour of adversity than in the hour of success. The trials of prosperity were too great for Prince Mahmoud, as they have been for greater men; and he soon began to lose ground at Candahar. The marvel is, that his fortunes were not utterly marred by his own folly. It was only by the concurrence of greater folly elsewhere, that in this conjecture he was saved from ruin. His impolitic and haughty conduct towards the sirdars early demonstrated his unfitness for rule, and well-nigh precipitated the enterprise in which he was engaged into a sea of disastrous failure. There seemed, indeed, to be only one thing that could sustain him, and that one thing was wanting. He was as poor as he was unpopular. But the days of Shah Zemaun’s sovereignty were numbered, and no folly on the part of his antagonist could arrest the doom that was brooding over him.

At this time Zemaun Shah was on his way towards the borders of Hindostan. He had advanced as far as Peshawur, when intelligence of the fall of Candahar reached his camp. It was believed that he had little actual design of advancing beyond the Sutlej. Partly with a view of enforcing the payment of the Sindh tribute—partly to overawe the Sikhs, and partly to abstract his own army from the dangerous vicinity of Candahar and the corrupting influences to which in such a neighbourhood it was exposed, he had made this move to the southward. It was very obvious that, in such a condition of his own empire, all idea of invading Hindostan was utterly wild and chimerical. If such an idea had ever been formed, it was now speedily abandoned. All other considerations gave place to the one necessity of saving his kingdom from the grasp of his brother. He hastened back to Western Afghanistan; but an impolitic expedition under the prince Soojah-ool-Moolk, who was soon destined to play a conspicuous part in the great Central-Asian drama, had crippled his military resources, and when he retraced his steps, he found that the strength of Prince Mahmoud had increased as his own had diminished. He marched against the rebels only to be defeated. The main body of the royal troops was under the command of one Ahmed Khan, a chief of the Noorzye tribe. Watching his opportunity, Futteh Khan seized the person of the Sirdar’s brother, and threatened to destroy him if the chief refused to come over bodily with his troops and swell the ranks of the insurgents. The character of the Barukzye leader certified that this was no idle threat. Ahmed Khan, already wavering in his loyalty, for the conduct of the Wuzeer had alienated his heart from the royal cause, at once made his election. When the troops of Shah Zemaun came up with the advance of the rebel army, he joined the insurgent force. From that time the cause of the royalists became hopeless. Disaster followed disaster till its ruin was complete. The minister and his master fell into the hands of the enemy. Wuffadar Khan, with his brothers, was put to death. Death, too, awaited the king—but the man was suffered to live. They doomed him only to political extinction. There is a cruel, but a sure way of achieving this in all Mahomedan countries. Between a blind king and a dead king there is no political difference. The eyes of a conquered monarch are punctured with a lancet, and he de facto ceases to reign. They blinded Shah Zemaun, and cast him into prison; and the Douranee Empire owned Shah Mahmoud as its head.

So fell Zemaun Shah, the once dreaded Afghan monarch, whose threatened invasion of Hindostan had for years been a ghastly phantom haunting the Council-Chamber of the British-Indian Government. He survived the loss of his sight nearly half a century; and as the neglected pensioner of Loodhianah, to the very few who could rememberer the awe which his name once inspired, must have presented a curious spectacle of fallen greatness—an illustration of the mutability of human affairs scarcely paralleled in the history of the world. He died at last full of years, empty of honours, his death barely worth a newspaper-record or a paragraph in a state paper. Scarcely identified in men’s minds with the Zemaun Shah of the reigns of Sir John Shore and Lord Wellesley, he lived an appendage, alike in prosperity and adversity, to his younger brother, Soojah-ool-Moolk. That Soojah had once been reputed and described as an appendage to Shah Zemaun-“his constant companion at all times.” They soon came to change places, and in a country where fraternal strife is the rule and not the exception, it is worthy of record that those brothers were true to each other to the last.[22]

CHAPTER II.

[1801-1808.]

The Early Days of Soojah-ool-Moolk—Disastrous Commencement of his Career—Defeat of Shah Mahmoud—Reign of Shah Soojah—The Insurrection of Prince Kaysur—Tidings of the British Mission.

From the fall of Zemaun Shah we are to date the rise of Soojah-ool-Moolk. They were brothers by the same father and mother. At the time of the political extinction of the elder, the younger was about twenty years of age. He had taken no part in the government; was but lightly esteemed for courage; and had little place in the thoughts of the people, except as an appendage of the reigning monarch. In command of the royal troops, and in charge of the family and property of the king, whilst Zemaun Shah was striking a last blow for empire in the West, he had held his post at Peshawur. There he received the disastrous tidings of the fate that had descended upon his brother and his prince. He at once proclaimed himself king, began to levy troops, and in September, 1801, marched upon Caubul with an army of 10,000 men. Victorious at the outset, he did not improve his successes, and was eventually defeated by the Douranees under Futteh Khan. The destinies of princes were in the hands of the powerful Barukzye sirdar. His energies and his influence alone upheld the drooping sovereignty of Shah Mahmoud. Weak and unprincipled, indolent and rapacious, that prince had been raised to the throne by Futteh Khan; and, though it was not in the nature of things that a ruler so feeble and so corrupt should long retain his hold of the empire, for a while the strong hand of the minister sustained him in his place.

Soojah-ool-Moolk fled to the fastnesses of the Khybur Pass. In the winter of 1801 the Ghilzyes broke out into open rebellion against the Douranee power; but were defeated with great slaughter. The Douranees returned to Caubul, and erected from the heads of the conquered, a pyramid of human skulls. In the spring of the following year the same restless tribe was again in rebellion; and again the energies of Futteh Khan were put forth for the suppression of the dangerous spirit of Ghilzye revolt. In March, 1802, the insurgents were a second time chastised; and, it is said, on the same day, Soojah-ool-Moolk, who had raised an army in the Khybur and marched upon Peshawur, sustained a severe defeat at the hands of the Douranee garrison, and was driven back into the obscurity from which he had fruitlessly emerged.

Thus for a while was tranquillity restored to the Douranee Empire. Reading and conversing with learned men, and taking council with his military adherents, Soojah-ool-Moolk, from the time of his defeat, remained inactive in the Afreedi country. Even there the vigilant enmity of the Wuzeer tracked the unhappy prince. There was no security in such retirement. The shadow of Futteh Khan darkened his resting-place and disturbed his repose. He fled to Shawl; and there, in the depth of winter and on the verge of starvation, wandered about, making vain endeavours to subsist himself and a few followers by the sale of the royal jewels. Among a people little understanding the worth of such costly articles, purchasers were with difficulty to be found. In the extremity which then beset him he changed the character of the pedlar for that of the bandit, and levied money by plundering caravans, and giving notes of hand for the amount that he raised. In this manner he collected three lakhs of rupees, and was enabled to levy troops for an attack upon Candahar. But Providence did not smile upon his endeavours. He was again repulsed. Again was he involved in a great ruin; with little hope of extrication by the energy of his own struggles, or the inherent vitality of his cause.

But in the mean while the sovereignty of Shah Mahmoud was falling to pieces by itself. He had risen upon the weakness of his predecessor, and now by his own weakness was he to be cast down. What Shah Zemaun had done for him, was he now doing for Soojah-ool-Moolk. In the absence of Futteh Khan, the Kuzzilbashes were suffered to ride roughshod over the people. The excesses which they committed at Caubul, scattered the last remnant of popularity which still adhered to the person of the king. At last an open outbreak occurred between the Sheeas and the Soonees. The king identified himself with the former; some of his chief ministers with the latter. In this conjuncture Soojah-ool-Moolk was sent for to strengthen the hands of the Shah’s opponents. When he arrived, he found Caubul in a state of siege. Futteh Khan had by this time returned to aid the royal cause, but too late to regain the ground that had been lost in his absence. There was an engagement, which lasted from morning to evening prayer, and at the end of which Mahmoud was defeated. Futteh Khan fled. Soojah-ool-Moolk entered Caubul in triumph; and Mahmoud threw himself at his feet.[23] To him, who in the hour of victory had shown no mercy, mercy was shown in the hour of defeat. It is to the honour of Shah Soojah that he forbore to secure the future tranquillity of his empire, by committing the act of cruelty which had disgraced the accession of the now prostrate Mahmoud. The eyes of the fallen prince were spared: and years of continued intestine strife declared how impolitic was the act of mercy.

For from this time, throughout many years, the strife between the royal brothers was fierce and incessant. In his son Kamran, the ex-King Mahmoud found a willing ally and an active auxiliary. To the reigning monarch it was a period of endless inquietude. His resources were limited, and his qualities were of too negative a character to render him equal to the demands of such stirring times. He wanted vigour; he wanted activity; he wanted judgment; and above all, he wanted money. It is ever the fate of those who have risen, as Soojah rose to monarchy, to be dragged down by the weight of the obligations incurred and the promises made in the hour of adversity. The day of reckoning comes and the dangers of success are as great as the perils of failure. The Douranee monarch could not meet his engagements without weakening himself, by making large assignments upon the revenues of different provinces; and even then many interested friends were turned by disappointment into open enemies. This was one element of weakness. But the error of his life was committed when he failed to propitiate the loyalty of the great Barukzye, Futteh Khan. Upon the accession of Shah Soojah, that chief had been freely pardoned, and “allowed to salute the step of the throne.” But the king did not estimate the real value of the alliance, and, elevating his rival Akrum Khan, refused the moderate demands of the Barukzye chief. Disappointed and chagrined, Futteh Khan then deserted the royal standard. He chose his time wisely and well. The king had set out with an army to overawe Peshawur and Cashmere. When they had proceeded some way, Futteh Khan, who accompanied him, excused himself on the plea of some physical infirmity which disabled him from keeping pace with the royal cortège, and said that he would join the army, following it by easy stages. Thus, disguising his defection, he fell in the rear, and as the royal party advanced, returned to foment a rebellion.

In this distracted country there was at that time another aspirant to the throne. The son of Zemaun Shah, Prince Kaysur, had set up his claims to the sovereignty of Caubul. He had been appointed governor of Candahar by Shah Soojah; and probably would have been satisfied with this extent of power, if Futteh Khan had not incited him to revolt, and offered to aid him in his attempts upon the crown. The prince lent a willing ear to the charmings of the Sirdar; and so it happened that whilst Shah Soojah was amusing himself on the way to Peshawur-“enjoying the beautiful scenery and the diversion of hunting,”—his nephew and the Barukzye chief were raising a large army at Candahar, intent upon establishing, by force of arms, the claims of the family of his sightless brother.

This ill-omened intelligence brought the Shah back in haste to his capital, whence he soon marched towards Candahar to meet the advancing troops of the prince. And here again, to the treachery of his opponents, rather than to the valour of his own troops, the Shah owed his success. On the eve of the expected conflict, the son of Ahmed Khan, with other Douranee chiefs, deserted to the royal standard. Disheartened and dismayed, the prince broke up his army, and fled to Candahar. In the meanwhile, Shah Soojah returned to Caubul to find it occupied by an insurgent force. According to his own confession, he was employed for a month in repossessing himself of the capital. The insurgent prince and the Barukzye chief, during this time, had in some measure recovered themselves at Candahar, and the king marched again to the westward. Kaysur fled at his approach; and Futteh Khan betook himself to Herat, to offer his services to the son of his old master. The prince was brought back and conducted to the royal presence by Shah Zemaun and the Mooktor-ood-Dowlah, who besought the forgiveness of the king on the plea of the youth and inexperience of the offender, and the evil counsel of the Barukzye sirdar. Against his better judgment, Shah Soojah forgave him and restored him to the government of Candahar.[24]

The affairs of Candahar being thus settled for a time, Shah Soojah marched into Sindh to enforce the payment of tribute which had been due for some years to Caubul. He then returned to his capital, and after giving his troops a three months’ furlough, began to think of commencing operations against Kamran, who was again disturbing the country to the west. In the meanwhile, this prince had marched upon Candahar, and Kaysur had fled at his approach. This was the second time the two princes had met as enemies—the second time that the scale had been turned by the weight of the chief of the Barukzyes. On one occasion, Futteh Khan had invited Kamran to Candahar, and engaged to deliver up the city—then suddenly formed an alliance with Kaysur, and, sword in hand at the head of a small body of Douranees, driven back the prince with whom he had just before been in close alliance. Now he forsook the son of Shah Zemaun to unite himself with the heir of Mahmoud. Forgetful of past treachery, Kamran received the powerful Barukzye; and they marched together upon Candahar. Kaysur, as I have said, fled at his approach; and the insurgents took possession of the city. In the meanwhile, the Persians were advancing upon Herat, and Shah Soojah was moving up to Candahar. In this critical conjuncture, Kamran returned in alarm to the former place, and Kaysur joined the king at the latter. “We again,” says Shah Soojah, “gave him charge of Candahar, at the request of our queen-mother, and our brother, Shah Zemaun. On our return to Caubul, Akrum Khan and the other Khans petitioned us to pardon Futteh Khan, who was now reduced to poverty. We assented. He was then brought into the presence by Akrum Khan. We remained some time in Candahar, in the charge of which we left Prince Zemaun, and sent Kaysur to Caubul.”

Again was it in the power of Shah Soojah to conciliate the great Barukzye. Again was the opportunity lost. There was something in the temper of the monarch adverse to the formation of new, and the retention of old, friendships. Whilst Futteh Khan was again made to feel the impossibility of any lasting alliance with a prince who could not appreciate the value of his services, and who neither invited nor inspired confidence, the chain which bound the Mooktor-ood-Dowlah to the sovereign was gradually relaxing, and a new danger began to threaten the latter. When the Shah was absent in the Sindh territory, the minister flung himself into the arms of Prince Kaysur, and publicly proclaimed him king. The rebels moved down upon Peshawur, and took possession of the city. Shah Soojah immediately began to direct his operations against that place. It was on the 3rd of March, 1808, that the two armies came into collision. “The sun rising,” says Shah Soojah, who had halted for six days in the vicinity of Peshawur, hoping that the rebellious minister might perhaps repent, “we saw the opposite armies in battle-array. Khojan Mahommed Khan, with a few Khans, followers from Mooktor-ood-Dowlah’s army, did great deeds of valour, and at last dispersed our raw soldiers, leaving us alone in the field, protected by a few faithful Douranees. We still remained on our guard, when our attendants warned us of the approach of Khojan Mahommed Khan. We rushed on the traitor sword in hand, and cut through four of the iron plates of his cuirass. Our chief eunuch, Nekoo Khan, brought his horse and accoutrements. Mooktor-ood-Dowlah then attacked our force; but he and his whole race perished. Prince Kaysur fled to Caubul. We then marched in triumphant pomp to the Balla Hissar of Peshawur.” The gory head of the minister, borne aloft on a spear, and carried behind the conqueror, gave éclat to the procession, and declared the completeness of his victory.

Prince Kaysur, after a single night spent at Caubul, fled into the hill country; but was brought back to the capital by the emissaries of the Shah. The experience of past treachery and past ingratitude had not hardened the monarch’s heart: and he again “pardoned the manifold offences of his nephew.” In the meanwhile Mahmoud, who had been joined by Futteh Khan, and had been endeavouring to raise the sinews of war by plundering caravans, obtained, by the usual process of treachery, possession of Candahar, and then marched upon Caubul. Shah Soojah went out to meet him, and Mahmoud, rendered hopeless by disaffection in his ranks, broke up his camp and fled. The king then turned his face towards the west, and ordered his camp to be pitched on the road to Herat. “Hearing of our approach,” he says, “our brother, Feroz-ood-Deen, then in charge of the fort of Herat, sent a petition, requesting our orders, proffering the tribute due, and offering to become security for Mahmoud’s future behaviour. The same blood flowed in our veins, and we ordered one lakh of rupees to be paid him yearly from the tribute of Sindh, and conferred on him the government of Herat.” This done, he proceeded to Caubul, and thence to Peshawur, where he “received petitions from the Khan of Bahwulpore and Moozuffur Khan, Suddozye, stating that ambassadors from the Company’s territories, by name Elphinstone and Strachey, had arrived, and requested orders.” “We wrote to the ambassadors,” says the Shah, “and ordered our chiefs to pay them every attention.”

The history of this mission will be embraced in a subsequent chapter. It is not without some misgivings that I have traced these early annals of the Douranee Empire.[25] But the chronicle is not without its uses. It illustrates, in a remarkable manner, both the general character of Afghan politics, and the extraordinary vicissitudes of the early career of the man whom thirty years afterwards the British raised from the dust of exile, and reseated on the throne of his fathers. The history of the Afghan monarchy is a history of a long series of revolutions. Seldom has the country rested from strife—seldom has the sword reposed in the scabbard. The temper of the people has never been attuned to peace. They are impatient of the restraints of a settled government, and are continually panting after change. Half-a-century of turbulance and anarchy has witnessed but little variation in the national character; and the Afghan of the present day is the same strange mixture of impetuosity and cunning—of boldness and treachery—of generosity and selfishness—of kindness and cruelty—as he was when Zemaun Shah haunted the Council-Chamber of Calcutta with a phantom of invasion, and the vision was all the more terrible because “the shape thereof” no one could discern.

CHAPTER III.

[1801-1808.]

France and Russia in the East—Death of Hadjee Khalil Khan—The Mission of Condolence—Aga Nebee Khan—Extension of Russian Dominion in the East—French Diplomacy in Persia—The pacification of Tilsit—Decline of French influence in Teheran.

The intestine wars, which rent and convulsed the Afghan Empire, were a source of acknowledged security to the British power in the East. From the time when in the first year of the present century Captain Malcolm dictated at the Court of Teheran the terms of that early treaty, which French writers freely condemn, and Englishmen are slow to vindicate, to the date of the romantic pacification of Tilsit, the politics of Central Asia excited little interest or alarm in the Council-Chamber of Calcutta. India had ceased to bestir itself about an Afghan invasion. Instead of a shadowy enemy from beyond the Indus, the British had now to face, on the banks of the Jumna, a real and formidable foe. The genius of the two Wellesleys was called into action to curb the insolence and crush the power of the Mahrattas; and whilst we were alternately fighting and negotiating with Scindiah and Holkar, we scarcely cared to ask who reigned in Afghanistan; or if accident made us acquainted with the progress of events, viewed with philosophic unconcern the vicissitudes of the Douranee Empire.

Engaged in the solution of more pressing political questions at home, Lord Wellesley and his immediate successors bestowed little thought upon the Persian alliance. Throughout the remaining years of that nobleman’s administration, one event alone occurred to rouse the Governor-General to a consideration of the temper of the Court of Teheran. That event filled him with apprehensions of danger preposterously incommensurate with its own importance, and ridiculously falsified by the result. An accident, and a very untoward one, it occurred at a time when the Indian Government had not yet recovered from the inquietude engendered by their disturbing dreams of French and Afghan invasion. The story may be briefly told. On the return of Captain Malcolm from Persia, one Hadjee Khalil Khan had been despatched to India to reciprocate assurances of friendship, and to ratify and interchange the treaty. The mission cost the Hadjee his life. He had not been long resident in Bombay,[26] when the Persian attendants of the ambassador and the detachment of Company’s sepoys forming his escort quarrelled with each other in the courtyard before his house, and came into deadly collision. The Hadjee went out to quell the riot, and was struck dead by a chance shot. The intelligence of this unhappy disaster was brought round to Calcutta by a king’s frigate. The sensation it created at the Presidency was intense. Every possible demonstration of sorrow was made by the Supreme Government. Minute guns were fired from the ramparts of Fort William. All levees and public dinners at Government-House were suspended. Distant stations caught the alarm from the Council-Chamber of Calcutta. The minor presidencies were scarcely less convulsed. Bombay having previously thrown itself into mourning, instructions for similar observances were sent round to Madras; and two days after the arrival of the Chiffone it was announced in the Gazette that Major Malcolm, who was at that time acting as private secretary to Lord Wellesley, had been directed to proceed to Bombay, for the purpose of communicating with the relations of the late Hadjee Khalil Khan, taking with him, as secretary, his young friend and relative, Lieutenant Pasley, who had accompanied him on his first mission to Persia. At the same time Mr. Lovett, a civilian of no long standing, was ordered to proceed immediately to Bushire, charged with an explanatory letter from Lord Wellesley to the Persian king, and instructed to offer such verbal explanations as might be called for by the outraged monarch. For some days nothing was thought of in Calcutta beyond the circle of this calamitous affair. In other directions a complete paralysis descended upon the Governor-General and his advisers. The paramount emergency bewildered the strongest understandings, and dismayed the stoutest hearts at the Presidency. And yet it was said, not long afterwards, by the minister of Shiraz, that “the English might kill ten ambassadors, if they would pay for them at the same rate.”

Major Malcolm left Calcutta on the 30th of August, and beating down the Bay of Bengal against the south-west monsoon, reached Masulipatam on the 19th of September. Taking dawk across the country, he spent a few days at Hyderabad in the Deccan, transacted some business there, and then pushed on to Bombay. Reaching that Presidency on the 10th of October, he flung himself into his work with characteristic energy and self-reliance. Mr. Lovett, who had none of his activity, followed slowly behind, and fell sick upon the road. Jonathan Duncan, the most benevolent of men, was at that time Governor of Bombay, and some members of the Persian embassy had presumed upon his good-nature to assume an arrogance of demeanour which it now became Malcolm’s duty to check. He soon reduced them to reason. Before the end of the month every difficulty had vanished. Many of the Persians were personally acquainted with the English diplomatist. All were acquainted with his character. But above all, it was known that he was the bearer of the public purse. He came to offer the mourners large presents and handsome pensions from the Supreme Government, and it is no matter of surprise, therefore, that he had soon, in his own words, “obtained from them a confidence which enabled him to set aside all intermediate agents, and consequently freed him from all intrigues.”[27]

It was arranged that the body of the deceased ambassador should be put on board at the end of October, and that, a day or two later, the vessel should set sail for the Persian Gulf. Mr. Pasley was directed to attend the Hadjee’s remains, and was charged with the immediate duties of the mission.[28] When the vessel reached Bushire, it was found that the death of the Hadjee had created little sensation in the Persian territories, and that before the intelligence was ten days old it had been well-nigh forgotten. The Resident at Bushire, a Persian of good family, naturalised in India, and employed by the Company—an astute diplomatist and a great liar—had thought it necessary to testify his zeal by circulating a false version of the circumstances attending the death of the Hadjee, and calumniating the memory of the deceased. There was no need, indeed, of this. The Persian Government seems to have regarded the death of the Hadjee with exemplary unconcern; and marvelled why the English should have made so great a stir about so small a matter. If a costly British mission could have been extracted out of the disaster, the Court would have been more than satisfied; whilst they who were most deeply interested in the event, moved by the same sacra fames, thought rather of turning it to profitable account than of bewailing the death of their relative and friend.

The brother-in-law of the late envoy lost no time in offering his services to fill the place of the deceased. The name of this man was Aga Nebee Khan. He was the son, by a second connexion, of the mistress of Mr. Douglas, chief of the Bussorah factory, and had been Mr. Jones’s moonshee, on a monthly salary of thirty rupees. The Hadjee himself had been a person of no consideration. Half-minister and half-merchant, he had thought more of trading upon his appointment than of advancing the interests of the state; and Nebee Khan, who had embarked with him in his commercial speculations, now lusted to succeed his murdered relative in his diplomatic office, as well as in the senior partnership of the mercantile concern. And he succeeded at last. It cost him time, and it cost him money to accomplish his purpose; but partly by bribery, partly by cajolery, he eventually secured the object of his ambition.[29] It was not, however, till three full years had passed away since the death of the Hadjee, that his brother-in-law reached Calcutta, “not exactly to fill his relative’s place, but to exercise the triple functions of minister, merchant, and claimant of blood-money, which he roundly assessed at twenty lakhs of rupees.”

And in those three years a great change had come over the Supreme Government of India. A long war, prosecuted with extraordinary vigour, had exhausted the financial resources of the state. The reign of India’s most magnificent satrap—the “sultanised” Governor-General—was at an end. A new ruler had been sent from England to carry out a new policy; and that policy was fatal to the pretensions of such a man as Nebee Khan.

He had fallen, indeed, upon evil times. Those were not days when moneyed compensations were likely to be granted even to ambassadors, or when there was any greater likelihood of an Indian statesman embarrassing himself with distant engagements which might compel him to advance an army into unknown regions, or send a fleet into foreign seas. So there was nothing but disappointment in store for Nebee Khan. In the month of October, 1805, the vessel bearing the ambassador sailed into the harbour of Bombay. He was welcomed with all the formalities befitting his station, and with every demonstration of respect. But a series of untoward circumstances, like those which, in the reign of our second James, delayed the public audience of Lord Castlemaine at Rome, postponed, for the space of many months, the reception of Nebee Khan at Calcutta. At length, on the 28th of April, 1806, the ceremony of presentation took place. Sir George Barlow was then at the head of the Indian Government. The Governor-General lined the public way with soldiers, and sent the leading officers of the state to conduct the merchant-minister to his presence. It was an imposing spectacle, and a solemn farce. The Persian elchee knew that he had come to Calcutta not to treat of politics, but of pice; and the English governor, while publicly honouring the Persian, secretly despised him as a sordid adventurer, and was bent upon baffling his schemes. At the private interviews which took place between the British functionaries and Nebee Khan, there was little mention of political affairs. There was a long outstanding money account between the parties, and the settlement of the account-current was the grand object of the mission. The Persian, who thought that he had only to ask, found that times had changed since the commencement of the century, and was overwhelmed with dismay when the British secretary demonstrated to him that he was a debtor to our government of more than a lakh of rupees. Satisfied with existing relations of friendship between Persia and Great Britain, and never at any time disposed to embarrass himself with unnecessary treaties, Barlow declined to enter into new political negotiations, or to satisfy the exorbitant personal claims of the representative of the Persian Court. Nebee Khan left Calcutta a disappointed man. The speculation had not answered. The investment had been a bad one. He had toiled for four long years; he had wasted his time and wasted his money only to be told at last, by an officious secretary, that he owed the British-Indian Government a lakh and seven thousand rupees. In January, 1807, carrying back a portfolio, not more full of political than his purse of financial results, the ambassador left Calcutta. Neither the merchant nor the minister had played a winning game. Compensation and treaties were alike refused him; and he went back with empty hands.

In the mean while, the French had succeeded in establishing their influence at the Court of Teheran.[30] They had long been pushing their intrigues in that quarter, and now at last were beginning to overcome the difficulties which had formerly beset them. The Malcolm treaty of 1800 bound the contracting parties to a defensive alliance against France; but the terms of the treaty had been scarcely adjusted, when French emissaries endeavoured to shake the fidelity of Persia by large offers of assistance. The offers were rejected. The French were told, in emphatic language, that “if Napoleon appeared in person at Teheran, he would be denied admission to the centre of the universe.” But, undaunted by these failures, they again returned to tempt the embarrassed Persians. Every year increased the difficulties of the Shah, and weakened his reliance on the British. He was beset with danger, and he wanted aid. The British-Indian Government was either too busy or too indifferent to aid him. The energetic liberality of the French contrasted favourably with our supineness; and before the year 1805 had worn to a close, Persia had sought the very alliance and asked the very aid, which before had been offered and rejected.

The assistance that was sought was assistance against Russia. In 1805, the Shah addressed a letter to Napoleon, then in the very zenith of his triumphant career, seeking the aid of the great western conqueror to stem the tide of Russian encroachment. For years had that formidable northern power been extending its conquests to the east-wards. Before the English trader had begun to organise armies in Hindostan, and to swallow up ancient principalities, the grand idea of founding an Eastern empire had been grasped by the capacious mind of Peter the Great. Over the space of a century, under emperors and empresses of varying shades of character, had the same undeviating course of aggressive policy been pursued by Russia towards her eastern neighbours. The country which lies between the Black Sea and the Caspian was the especial object of Muscovite ambition. A portion of it, occupied by a race of hardy, vigorous mountaineers, still defies the tyranny of the Czar, and still from time to time, as new efforts are made to subjugate it, new detachments of Russian troops are buried in its formidable defiles. But Georgia, after a series of wars, notorious for the magnitude of the atrocities which disgraced them, had been wrested from the Persians before the close of the last century, and in 1800 was formally incorporated with the Russian Empire by the Autocrat Paul.

These encroachments beyond the Caucasus brought Russia and Persia into a proximity as tempting to the one as it was perilous to the other. The first few years of the present century were years of incessant and sanguinary strife. In the Russian Governor-General, Zizianoff, were combined great personal energy and considerable military skill, with a certain ferocity of character which seldom allowed him to display much clemency towards the vanquished. A Georgian by extraction, and connected by marriage with the princes of that country, he never forgot the cruelties which had alienated for ever the hearts of the Georgian people from their old Mahomedan masters. The restless aggressive spirit of the great Muscovite power was fitly represented by this man. He was soon actively at work. He entered Daghistan—defeated the Lesghees with great slaughter—carried Ganja by assault, and massacred the garrison—a second time defeated the Lesghees, after a sanguinary engagement; and then returning to Tiflis, addressed the governors of Shamakhee, Sheesha, and other fortresses to the north of the Aras, threatening them with the fate of Ganja if they did not make instant submission in compliance with the orders of the Russian monarch, who had instructed him not to pause in his career of conquest until he had encamped his army on the borders of that river.

In the spring of 1804, Abbas Mirza, the heir-apparent to the throne of Persia, took the field at the head of a formidable army, and marched down upon Erivan, the capital of Armenia. The governor refused to abandon his charge, and when the prince prepared to attack him, called the Russian general to his aid. The result was fatal to the Persian cause. In the month of July, the army of the Crown-Prince of Persia and the Russian and Georgian force under Zizianoff, twice encountered each other, and twice the Persian army was driven back with terrible loss. On the second occasion the rout was complete. Abbas Mirza lost everything. Taking refuge in a small fort, he endeavoured to negotiate terms with Zizianoff; but the Russian general told him haughtily, that the orders of his sovereign were, that he should occupy all the country along the Aras River, from Erivan to the borders of the Caspian, and that he chafed under the instructions which confined his conquests to a limit so far within the boundaries of his own ambition.

The disasters of the heir-apparent brought the king himself into the field. Moving down with a large army to the succour of the prince, he again encountered the Russian forces, but only to see his troops sustain another defeat. Disheartened by these repeated failures, the Persians then changed their tactics, and adopting a more predatory style of warfare, harassed their northern enemy by cutting off his supplies. The year being then far advanced, Zizianoff drew off his forces, and prepared to prosecute the war with renewed energy in the following spring. That spring was his last. An act of the blackest treachery cut short his victorious career. He was conducting in person the siege of Badkoo, when the garrison, making overtures of capitulation, invited the Russian general to a conference for the settlement of the terms. He went unattended to a tent that had been pitched for his reception, and was deliberately set upon and slain by a party of assassins stationed there for the bloody purpose. The King of Persia, when the tidings reached him, grew wild with delight. In an ecstasy of joy he published an inflated proclamation, setting forth that he had achieved a great victory, and slain the celebrated Russian commander. But other thoughts soon forced themselves upon the king and his ministers. A black cloud was brooding over them—the retribution of an outraged nation. A signal chastisement was expected. New armies were looked for; new encroachments anticipated from the North; new forfeitures of dominion seemed inevitable—the righteous result of an act of such atrocious perfidy. Persia felt her weakness, and, in an extremity which seemed to threaten her very existence, trusted to foreign European aid to rescue her from the jaws of death.

It was at this time, when threatened with the vengeance of Russia, that the Persian Court addressed a letter to Napoleon, then in the full flush of unbroken success, seeking the aid of that powerful chief. It was at this time, too, that Aga Nebee Khan commenced his journey to India, and it is probable that if the Indian Government had shown any disposition to aid the Persian monarch in his efforts to repel the aggressions of the Muscovite, the French alliance would have been quietly but effectually relinquished. But the supineness of England was the opportunity of France. The Indian Government had left the settlement of the Persian question to the Cabinet of St. James’s, and the Cabinet had dawdled over it as a matter that might be left to take care of itself. In this extremity, the Persian monarch forgot the treaty with the British, or thought that the British, by deserting him in his need, had absolved him from all obligations to observe it, and openly flung himself into the arms of the very enemy which that treaty so truculently proscribed.

In the autumn of 1805, an accredited French agent arrived at Teheran. The result of the Indian mission was then unknown; and Colonel Romieu was received with that barren courtesy which almost amounts to discouragement. It would probably, too, have been so regarded by the French envoy, had not death cut short his diplomatic career, after a few days spent at Teheran, and a single audience of the king. But the following spring beamed more favourably on the diplomacy of France. The cold indifference of England had been ascertained beyond a doubt, and the danger of Russian aggressiveness, now sharpened by revenge, was becoming more and more imminent. All things conspired to favour the machinations of the French; and they seized the opportunity with vigour and address. Another envoy appeared upon the scene. Monsieur Jaubert was received with marked attention and respect. He came to pave the way for a splendid embassy, which Napoleon proposed to despatch to the Persian Court. Overjoyed at these assurances of friendship, the king eagerly grasped the proffered alliance. He was prepared to listen to any proposal, so that his new allies undertook to co-operate against his Russian enemies. He would join in an invasion of Hindostan, or, in concert with the French, amputate any given limb from the body of the Turkish Empire. There was much promise of aid on either side, and for a time French counsels were dominant at the Persian capital. Two years passed away, during which the emissaries of Napoleon, in spite of accidental hindrances, contrived to gain the confidence of the Court of Teheran. They declared that England was a fallen country—that although protected for a time by its insular position, it must fall a prey to the irresistible power of Napoleon—that, as nothing was to be expected from its friendship, nothing was to be apprehended from its enmity; and so, industriously propagating reports to our discredit, they established themselves on the ruins of British influence, and for a time their success was complete.

And so it happened, that when the British Governments in London and Calcutta awoke almost simultaneously to the necessity of “doing something,” they found a well-appointed French embassy established at Teheran, under General Gardanne, an officer of high reputation, whom even hostile diplomatists have delighted to commend; they found a numerous staff of officers,[31] civil and military, with engineers and artificers, prepared to instruct and drill the native troops, to cast cannon, and to strengthen the defences of the Persian cities; they found French agents, under the protection of duly constituted mehmendars, visiting Gombroon, Bushire, and other places, surveying the harbours of the gulf, and intriguing with the ambassadors of the Ameers of Sindh. And it was pretty well ascertained that the invasion of India by a French and Persian army was one of the objects of the treaty, which, soon after the arrival of Gardanne at Teheran, was sent home for the approval of Napoleon.

But a mighty change had, by this time, passed over the politics of Europe. It was in July, 1807, that on a raft floating upon the bosom of the River Niemen, near the city of Tilsit, in the kingdom of Prussia, the Emperor Alexander and Napoleon Buonaparte, after a brief and bloody campaign, embraced each other like brothers. In the short space of ten days, fifty thousand of the best French and Russian troops had been killed or disabled on the field of battle. Yet so little had been the vantage gained by either party, that it is even to this day a moot point in history, as it was in the contemporary records of the war, whether the first peaceful overture was made by the Russian monarch or the Corsican invader. Both powers eagerly embraced the opportunity of repose; and in a few days the scene was changed, as by magic, from one of sanguinary war and overwhelming misery to one of general cordiality and rejoicing. The French and Russian soldiers, who a few days before had broken each other’s ranks on the bloody plains of Eylau and Friedland, now feasted each other with overflowing hospitality, and toasted each other with noisy delight. Such, indeed, on both sides was the paroxysm of friendship, that they exchanged uniforms one with the other, and paraded the public streets of Tilsit in motley costume, as though the reign of international fraternity had commenced in that happy July. And whilst the followers of Alexander and Napoleon were abandoning themselves to convivial pleasures, and the social affections and kindly charities were in full play, those monarchs were spending quiet evenings together, discussing their future plans, and projecting joint schemes of conquest. It was then that they meditated the invasion of Hindostan by a confederate army uniting on the plains of Persia. Lucien Buonaparte, the brother of the newly-styled emperor, was destined for the Teheran mission; and no secret was made of the intention of the two great European potentates to commence, in the following spring, a hostile demonstration “contre les possessions de la Compagnie des Indes.”

But by this time both the British and the Indian Governments had awakened from the slumbers of indifference in which they had so long been lulled. They could no longer encourage theories of non-interference whilst the most formidable powers in Europe were pushing their conquests and insinuating their intrigues over the countries and into the courts of Asia. Lord Minto had succeeded Sir George Barlow as head of the Supreme Government of India. Naturally inclined, as he was instructed, to carry out a moderate policy, and to abstain as much as possible from entanglements with native rulers, he would fain have devoted himself to the details of domestic policy, and the replenishment of an exhausted exchequer. But the unsettled state of our European relations compelled him to look beyond the frontier. What he saw there roused him into action. It is observable that statesmen trained in the cabinets and courts of Europe have ever been more sensitively alive to the dangers of invasion from the North than those whose experience has been gathered in the fields of Indian diplomacy. Lord Wellesley and Lord Minto were ever tremulous with intense apprehension of danger from without, whilst Sir John Shore and Sir George Barlow possessed themselves in comparative confidence and tranquillity, and, if they were not wholly blind to the peril, at all events did not exaggerate it. There is a sense of security engendered by long habit and familiarity with apparent danger, which renders a man mistrustful of the reality of that which has so often been shown to be a counterfeit. The inexperience of English statesmen suddenly transplanted to a new sphere of action, often sees in the most ordinary political phenomena strange and alarming portents. It is easy to be wise after the event. We know now that India has never been in any real danger from French intrigue or French aggressiveness; but Lord Wellesley and Lord Minto saw with different eyes, and grappled the shadowy danger as though it were a substantial fact. In those days such extraordinary events were passing around us, that to assign the limits of political probability was beyond the reach of human wisdom. The attrition of great events had rubbed out the line which separates fact from fiction, and the march of a grand army under one of Napoleon’s marshals from the banks of the Seine to the banks of the Ganges did not seem a feat much above the level of the Corsican’s towering career.

Rightly understood, the alliance between the two great continental powers which seemed to threaten the destruction of the British Empire in the East, was a source of security to the latter. But in 1807 it was not so clearly seen that Persia was more easily to be conciliated by the enemies, than by the friends, of the Russian Autocrat—that the confederacy of Alexander and Napoleon was fatal to the Persian monarch’s cherished hopes of the restitution of Georgia, and the general retrogression of the Russian army; and that, therefore, there was little prospect of the permanency of French influence at the Court of Teheran. Forgetful as we were of this, the danger seemed imminent, and only to be met by the most active measures of defence. To baffle European intrigue, and to stem the tide of European invasion, it then appeared to the British Indian Government expedient to enlace in one great network of diplomacy all the states lying between the frontier of India and the eastern points of the Russian Empire. Since India had been threatened with invasion at the close of the last century, the Afghan power had by disruption ceased to be formidable. We had formerly endeavoured to protect ourselves against France on the one side, and Afghanistan on the other, by cementing a friendly alliance with Persia. It now became our policy, whilst endeavouring to re-establish our influence in that country, to prepare ourselves for its hostility, and to employ Afghanistan and Sindh as barriers against encroachments from the West; and at the same time to increase our security by enlisting against the French and Persian confederacy the friendly offices of the Sikhs. That strange new race of men had by this time erected a formidable power on the banks of the Sutlej, by the mutilation of the Douranee Empire; and it was seen at once that the friendship of a people occupying a tract of country so situated, and inspired with a strong hatred of the Mahomedan faith, must, in such a crisis as had now arrived, be an object of desirable attainment. Whilst, therefore, every effort was to be made to wean the Court of Teheran from the French alliance, preparations were commenced, in anticipation of the possible failure of the Persian mission, for the despatch of British embassies to the intervening countries.

The duty of negotiating with the Sikh ruler was entrusted to Mr. Metcalfe, a civil servant of the Company, who subsequently rose to the highest place in the government of India, and consummated a life of public utility in a new sphere of action, as Governor-General of our North American colonies. Mr. Elphinstone, another civil servant of the Company, who still lives, amidst the fair hills of Surrey, to look back with pride and contentment upon a career little less distinguished than that of his contemporary, was selected to conduct the embassy to the Court of the Douranee monarch. Captain Seton had been previously despatched to Sindh; and Colonel Malcolm, who was at that time Resident at Mysore, was now again ordered to proceed to the Persian Court, charged with duties which had been rendered doubly difficult by our own supineness, and the contrasted activity of our more restless Gallic neighbours.

CHAPTER IV.

[1808-1809.]

The Second Mission to Persia—Malcolm’s Visit to Bushire—Failure of the Embassy—His Return to Calcutta—Mission of Sir Harford Jones—His Progress and Success.

When, in the spring of 1808, Colonel Malcolm a second time steered his course towards the Persian Gulf, another British diplomatist had started, from another point, upon the same mission. Moved as it were by one common impulse, the Cabinet of England and the Supreme Council of India had determined each to despatch an embassy to the Court of Teheran. A curious and unseemly spectacle was then presented to the eyes of the world. Two missions, in spirit scarcely less antagonistic than if they had been despatched by contending powers, started for the Persian Court; the one from London—the other from Calcutta. The Court of St. James’s had proposed to assist Persia by mediating with St. Petersburgh, and Mr. Harford Jones, a civil servant of the Company, who was made a baronet for the occasion, was deputed to Teheran to negotiate with the ministers of the Shah. It was originally intended that he should proceed to Persia, taking the Russian capital in his route; but the pacification of Tilsit caused a departure from this design, and Sir Harford Jones sailed for Bombay with the mission on board one of his Majesty’s ships. He reached that port in the month of April, 1808, just as the embassy under Brigadier-General Malcolm, despatched by the Governor-General to the Court of Teheran, was putting out to sea on its way to the Persian Gulf.[32]

Sir Harford Jones, therefore, rested at Bombay, awaiting the result of Malcolm’s proceedings. On the 10th of May, the latter reached Bushire, and on the 18th wrote to Sir George Barlow, who had succeeded to the governorship of Madras, “I have not only received the most uncommon attention from all here, but learnt from the best authority that the accounts of my mission have been received with the greatest satisfaction at Court. The great progress which the French have made and are daily making here satisfied me of the necessity of bringing matters to an early issue. I have a chance of complete victory. I shall, at all events, ascertain exactly how we stand, and know what we ought to do; and if I do not awaken the Persian Court from their delusion, I shall at least excite the jealousy of their new friends. I send Captain Pasley off to-morrow for Court—ostensibly, with a letter for the king; but he has secret instructions, and will be able to make important observations. He is charged with a full declaration of my sentiments and instructions in an official form, and you will, I think, when you see that declaration of the whole proceeding, think it calculated for the object. I have endeavoured to combine moderation with spirit, and to inform the Persian Court, in language that cannot irritate, of all the danger of their French connexion. Captain Pasley will reach Court on the 20th of June, and on the 15th of July I may expect to be able to give you some satisfactory account of his success.”[33]

But in this he was over-sanguine. The French envoy had established himself too securely at Teheran to be driven thence by the appearance of Malcolm at Bushire. A little too impetuous, perhaps—a little too dictatorial, that energetic military diplomatist commenced at the wrong end of his work. He erred in dictating to the Persian Court the dismissal of the French embassy as a preliminary to further negotiations, when in reality it was the end and object of his negotiations. He erred in blurting out all his designs, in unfolding the scheme of policy he intended to adopt, and so committing himself to a line of conduct which after-events might have rendered it expedient to modify or reject. He erred in using the language of intimidation at a time when he should have sought to inspire confidence and diffuse good-will among the officers of the Persian Court. These may not have been the causes of his want of success; but it is certain that he was completely unsuccessful. The large promises and the prompt movements of the French contrasted favourably with our more scanty offers and more dilatory action; and although Malcolm now came laden with presents, and intending to pave his way to the Persian capital with gold, the British mission was received with frigid indifference, if not with absolute disrespect. The despatch of Captain Pasley to the capital was negatived by the Persian Government. His progress was arrested at Shiraz; and there, at that provincial town, whilst a French and a Russian agent were basking in the royal sunshine at Teheran, and were entertained as guests of the prime minister, the representative of Great Britain was told that he must conduct his negotiations and content himself with the countenance of lesser dignitaries of state. Persian officers were instructed to amuse the British envoys, and to gain time. “The earnest desire of the king,” wrote the prime minister to Nussur-ood-Dowlah, at Shiraz, “is to procrastinate, and to avoid all decided measures. You must, therefore, amuse General Malcolm by offering your assistance;” and in this and other letters the local officers at Shiraz were instructed by every means in their power to detain Captain Pasley at that place; but he had departed before they were received, or it is difficult to say in what manner the imperial mandate might not have been obeyed.[34] “A consideration of all these things,” wrote Captain Pasley to Government, “induces me to conclude that the subsisting alliance between the Government of France and Persia is more intimate than we have yet imagined—that its nature is more actively and decidedly hostile to our interests than has hitherto been suspected, and that the reliance of the king on the promises and assurances of the French agents must be founded on better grounds than have yet come to our knowledge.”[35]

Chafed and indignant at the conduct of the Persian Court, General Malcolm at once came to the determination to return immediately to Calcutta, and to report to the Supreme Government the mortifying result of his mission. On the 12th of July he sailed from Bushire, leaving the charge of the embassy in the hands of Captain Pasley, who remained at his post only to be insulted, and at last narrowly escaped being made prisoner by a precipitate retreat from the Persian dominions.[36] The failure of the mission, indeed, was complete. Persia continued to make professions of friendship to the British Government; but it was obvious that at that moment neither British diplomacy nor British gold, which was liberally offered, could make any way against the dominant influence of the French mission. Napoleon’s officers were drilling the Persian army, casting cannon, and strengthening the Persian fortresses by the application, for the first time, to their barbaric defences, of that science which the French engineers had learnt in such perfection from the lessons of Vauban and Cormontagne.

Of the wisdom of Malcolm’s abrupt departure from Bushire, different opinions may be entertained. On the day after he embarked for Calcutta, one of the most sagacious men then in India was seated at his writing-table discoursing, for Malcolm’s especial benefit, on the advantages of delay. “As to the real question,” wrote Sir James Mackintosh to the Brigadier-General, “which you have to decide in the cabinet council of your own understanding, whether delay in Persia be necessarily and universally against the interests of Great Britain, it is a question on which you have infinitely greater means of correct decision than I can pretend to, even if I were foolish enough, on such matters, to aspire to any rivalship with a man of your tried and exercised sagacity. I should just venture in general to observe, that delay is commonly the interest of the power which is on the defensive. As long as the delay lasts, it answers the purpose of victory, which, in that case, is only preservation. It wears out the spirit of enterprise necessary for assailants, especially such as embark in very distant and perilous attempts. It familiarises those who are to be attacked with the danger, and allows the first panic time to subside. It affords a chance that circumstances may become more favourable; and to those who have nothing else in their favour, it leaves at least the ‘chapter of accidents.’”[37] The ‘chapter of accidents’ is everything in Oriental diplomacy. Malcolm, too impetuous to profit by it, left his successor to reap the harvest of altered circumstances. Sir Harford Jones, who had been waiting his opportunity at Bombay, entered the arena of diplomacy a few months later than Malcolm, and his progress was a long ovation. It was the ‘chapter of accidents’ that secured his success.

On the first receipt of intelligence of General Malcolm’s withdrawal, Lord Minto despatched a letter to Sir Harford Jones, urging him to proceed to Persia with the least possible delay. But he very soon revoked those orders, and addressed to the English envoy stringent communications, desiring him to remain at Bombay.[38] Malcolm had reached Calcutta in the interval; and set forth, in strong colours, the nature of the influence that had been opposed to his advance, and mapped out a plan of action which, in his estimation, it would now be expedient to adopt. Lord Minto appears to have fallen readily into the views of the military diplomatist; but he failed altogether to cut short the career of Sir Harford Jones. Letters travelled slowly in those days; and before the missive of the Governor-General, ordering his detention, had reached Bombay, the vessel which was to bear the representative of the Court of London to the Persian Gulf had shaken out its sails to the wind.

On the 14th of October the Mission reached Bushire. Sir Harford Jones set about his work earnestly and conscientiously. He had difficulties to contend against of no common order, and it must be admitted that he faced them manfully. He found the Persian authorities but too well disposed to arrogance and insolence; and he met their pompous impertinence with a blustering bravery, which may have been wanting in dignity, but was not without effect. He bullied and blasphemed, and, after a series of not very becoming scenes, made his way to Teheran, where he was graciously received by the Shah. The ‘chapter of accidents’ had worked mightily in his favour. The reign of Gallic influence was at an end. Our enemies had overreached themselves, and been caught in their own toils. Before Napoleon and the Czar had thrown themselves into each other’s arms at Tilsit, it had been the policy of the French to persuade the Persian Court that the aggressive designs of Russia could be successfully counteracted only by a power at enmity with that state; and now Napoleon boasted that he and the Emperor were “invariablement unis pour la paix comme pour la guerre.”

Skilfully taking advantage of this, Sir Harford Jones ever as he advanced inculcated the doctrine which had emanated in the first instance from the French embassy, and found every one he addressed most willing to accept it. There was, fortunately for us, a galling fact ever present to the minds of the Persian ministers to convince them of the truth of the assertion that it was not by the friends, but by the enemies of Russia that their interests were to be best promoted. The French had undertaken to secure the evacuation of Georgia; but still the Russian eagles were planted on Georgian soil. The star of Napoleon’s destiny was no longer on the ascendant. The “Sepoy General,” whom he had once derided, was tearing his battalions to pieces in the Spanish peninsula. Moreover, the French had lost ground at Teheran, in their personal as in their political relations. They had not accommodated themselves to the manners of the Persian Court, nor conciliated, by a courteous and considerate demeanour, the good-will of their new allies. They were many degrees less popular than the English, and their influence melted away at the approach of the British envoy. The Shah, too, had by this time, not improbably, become suspicious of the designs of the French. It was urged with some force that if the French invaded India they would not leave Persia alone. Mahomed Shereef Khan, who was sent by Nussur-oolah-Khan to General Malcolm just before his departure from Bushire, to repeat the friendly assurances of the Persian Government, very sagaciously observed, “If the French march an army to India, will they not make themselves masters of Persia as a necessary prelude to further conquests, and who is to oppose them after they have been received as friends? But our king,” continued the old man, “dreams of the Russians. He sees them in Aderbijan, and within a short distance of the capital, and, despairing of his own strength, he is ready to make any sacrifice to obtain a temporary relief from his excessive fear. In short,” he concluded, whilst strong emotion proved his sincerity, “affairs have come to that state that I thank my God I am an old man, and have a chance of dying before I see the disgrace and ruin of my country.”[39] Had Malcolm remained a little longer at Bushire, he would have seen all these dreams of French assistance pass away from the imaginations of the Persian Court, and might, under the force of altered circumstances, have carried everything before him.

When Sir Harford Jones reached the Persian capital, General Gardanne had withdrawn; and there was little difficulty in arranging preliminaries of a treaty satisfactory alike to the Courts of Teheran and St. James’s. The work was not done in a very seemly manner; but it was not less serviceable when done, for the manner of its doing. Perhaps there is not another such chapter as this in the entire history of English diplomacy. Jones had left Bombay under the impression that he was acting in accordance with the wishes of Lord Minto; but he had not been long in Persia before he found that the Indian Government were bent upon suspending his operations, and, failing in this, were resolute to thwart him at every turn. They dishonoured his bills and ignored his proceedings. A totally opposite course of policy had been determined upon in the Council-Chamber of Calcutta. The proceedings of Brigadier Malcolm at Bushire had not been viewed with unmixed approbation by Lord Minto and his council; but he was the employé of the Indian Government; they had confidence in the general soundness of his views; and they felt that in the maintenance of their dignity it was expedient to support him. In no very conciliatory mood of mind had that eager, energetic officer returned to Calcutta. Chewing the cud of bitter fancies as he sailed up the Bay of Bengal, he prepared a plan for the intimidation of Persia, and was prepared with all the details of it when, on the 22nd of August, he disembarked at Calcutta. There was no unwillingness in the Council-Chamber to endorse his schemes. It was agreed that an armament should be fitted out to take possession of Karrack, an island in the Persian Gulf, or, in the delicate language of diplomacy, “to form an establishment” there, as “a central position equally well adapted so obstruct the designs of France against India, as to assist the King of Persia (in the event of a renewal of the alliance) against his European enemies.”

These measures were described as “entirely defensive, and intended even to be amicable.” The command of the force was of course conferred on Brigadier Malcolm. “I am vested,” he wrote to his friends at Madras, “with supreme military and political authority and control in the Gulf, to which, however threatening appearances may be, I proceed with that species of hope which fills the mind of a man who sees a great and unexpected opportunity afforded him of proving the extent of his devotion to the country.”[40] It was to be a very pretty little army, with a compact little staff, all the details of which, even to the allowances of its members, were soon drawn up and recorded. An engineer officer was called in and consulted about the plan of a fort, with a house for the commandant, quarters for the officers, barracks for the men, a magazine to contain five hundred barrels of gunpowder, and everything else complete. The activity of the Brigadier himself at this time was truly surprising. He drew up elaborate papers of instructions to himself, to be adopted by the Governor-General. One of these, covering twenty-six sheets of foolscap, so bewildered Lord Minto in his pleasant country retreat at Barrackpore, that he could come to no other conclusion about it than that the greater part had better be omitted. Every conceivable contingency that could arise out of the movements of France or Russia, or dispensations of Providence in Persia, was contemplated and discussed, and instructions were sought or suggested; but a new series of contingencies occurred to the Brigadier after he had embarked, and a new shower of ifs was poured forth from the Sand-heads still further to perplex the government. Lord Minto had by this time fully made up his mind that the French were coming; wrote of it, not as a possible event, but as a question merely of time; and contemplated the probability of contending in Turkey for the sovereignty of Hindostan.[41] But the French had too much work to do in Europe to trouble themselves about operations in the remote Asiatic world.

At the beginning of October, Malcolm started for Bombay, from which Presidency the details of his army were to be drawn. But before the vessel on which he had embarked had steered into the black water, he was recalled, in consequence of the receipt of intelligence of Sir Harford Jones’s intended departure for Bushire. This was, doubtless, very perplexing; but Malcolm did not despair. “I am this instant,” he wrote, on the 5th of October, “recalled to Calcutta in consequence of advices from Sir Harford, stating his intention of leaving Bombay on the 11th of September. As it appears possible that he may not be ready to sail before the 13th, he will, I think, receive a letter from this government of the 22nd, desiring him to stay; and if that has the effect of stopping him, the letter of the Supreme Government, dated the 29th, will probably put an end to the mission.”[42] Vain hope! Sir Harford Jones was at that time not many days’ sail from Bushire; and before Malcolm finally quitted Calcutta, had started fairly on his race to Teheran.

The Supreme Government now more urgently than before addressed instructions to the nominee of the British Cabinet, ordering him to retire from Persia. The Council were all agreed upon the subject. Mr. Lumsden and Mr. Colebrooke, who were Members of Council at the time, expressed themselves even more strongly on the subject than the Governor-General. All were certain that Sir Harford Jones must either fail signally, or disgrace and embarrass the government by a delusive success. He might be repulsed at Bushire—or baffled at Shiraz—or drawn into a treaty favourable to the French. In any case, it was assumed that he was sure to bring discredit on the British Government and the East India Company. Without asserting that the conduct of the Persian Court had been such as to call for a declaration of war from the rulers of British India, it was contended, and not, perhaps, without some show of reason, that any advances made at such a time would compromise its dignity, and that the attitude to be assumed should be rather one of reserve than of solicitation. Both parties were in an embarrassing position. Whilst Lord Minto was writing letters to Sir Harford Jones, telling him that if he did not immediately close his mission, all his proceedings would be publicly repudiated,[43] Sir Harford Jones, as representative of the sovereign, was repudiating the proceedings of the Supreme Government of India, and offering to answer with his fortune and his life for any hostile proceedings on the part of the British, not provoked by the Persians themselves. The government did its best to disgrace Sir Harford Jones by dishonouring his bills and ignoring his proceedings; and Sir Harford Jones lowered the character of the Indian Government by declaring that it had no authority to revoke his measures or to nullify his engagements with the Persian Court.

In the mean while, Brigadier Malcolm had sailed down the Bay of Bengal, and reached Bombay by the first day of December. His instructions had preceded him; a select force of some two thousand men was ready to receive his orders; and by the 18th of January the expedition was prepared, at all points, to take ship for the Gulf, to pounce upon Karrack, and to strike a great panic into the rebellious heart of the Persian nation. “But,” says Malcolm, in one of his voluminous narratives, “the accounts I heard of the great change caused in the affairs of Europe by the general insurrection of Spain, and the consequent improbability of Buonaparte making an early attack upon India, combined with the advance of Sir Harford Jones into Persia, led me to suspend the sailing of the expedition. My conduct on that occasion was honoured by approbation, and the expedition countermanded.” But though the military expedition was countermanded, the Mission was not. Malcolm, confident that the proceedings of such a man as Jones, for whom he entertained the profoundest possible contempt, could be attended only with disastrous failure, determined to proceed to Persia, in spite of the civilian’s accounts of his favourable reception. “I have private accounts from Bushire,” he wrote on Christmas-eve, “which state that Sir Harford Jones is, or pretends to be, completely confident of a success which every child with him sees is unattainable through the means he uses. His friends now believe he will go on in spite of any orders he may receive from the Governor-General. I mean to go on too (there is, indeed, nothing in these despatches that can stop me for a moment), so we shall have a fine mess (as the sailors say) in the Gulf.”[44] Such, indeed, was the feeling between the two diplomatists, and so little was it disguised, that the Shah, perceiving plainly the true state of the case, abused Malcolm before Jones, and Jones before Malcolm, as the best means, in his opinion, of ingratiating himself with them both.

In March, 1809, the preliminary treaty was interchanged, on the part of their respective sovereigns, by Sir Harford Jones and Meerza Sheffee. No treaty before or since was ever interchanged under such extraordinary and unbecoming circumstances. Meerze Sheffee, the prime minister of Persia, was an old and infirm man. His age and rank among his own people had given him a sort of license to speak with an amount of freedom such as is not tolerated among Europeans in social, much less in diplomatic converse. There was an intentional indefiniteness in one of the articles of the treaty, which was to be referred to the British Government for specific adjustment, and Meerza Sheffee, not understanding or approving of this, blurted out that the British envoy designed to “cheat” him. The figure used in the Persian language is gross and offensive, and the word I have employed but faintly expresses the force of the insult. Jones had not patience to bear it. He started up, seized the counterpart treaty lying signed on the carpet before him, gave it to Mr. Morier, and then turning to the astonished Wuzeer, told him that he was a stupid old blockhead to dare to use such words to the representative of the King of England, and that nothing but respect for the Persian monarch restrained him from knocking out the old man’s brains against the wall. “Suiting the action to the word, I then,” says Jones, in his own narrative of his mission, “pushed him with a slight degree of violence against the wall which was behind him, kicked over the candles on the floor, left the room in darkness, and rode home without any one of the Persians daring to impede my passage.” It is not surprising that, after such a scene as this, the Persians should have shaken their heads, and said, “By Allah! this Feringhee is either drunk or mad.”

But, in spite of this and other untoward occurrences, the preliminary treaty was duly interchanged. It bears date the 12th of March, 1809. By this treaty, the Shah of Persia, declaring all other engagements void, covenanting “not to permit any European force whatever to pass through Persia, either towards India, or towards the ports of that country.” He further undertook, in the event of the British dominions in India being attacked or invaded by the Afghans or any other power, “to afford a force for the protection of the said dominions.” On the part of the British Government, it was stipulated that, in case any European force had invaded, or should invade, the territories of the King of Persia, his Britannic Majesty should afford to the Shah a force, or, in lieu of it, a subsidy, with warlike ammunition, “such as guns, muskets, &c., and officers, to the amount that might be to the advantage of both parties, for the expulsion of the force so invading.” The general provisions of the treaty were included in this, but the anticipated arrival of Brigadier Malcolm with a military expedition in the Persian Gulf rendered it necessary that certain specific articles should be inserted with especial reference to this movement. It was provided that the force should on no account possess itself of Karrack or any other places in the Persian Gulf; but that, unless required by the Governor-General for the defence of India, it should be held at the disposal of the Persian shah, the Shah undertaking to receive it in a friendly manner, and to direct his governors to supply it with provisions “at the fair prices of the day.” This preliminary treaty was conveyed by Mr. Morier, accompanied by a Persian ambassador, to England, where it was duly ratified and exchanged; and Sir Harford Jones was confirmed in the post of Resident Minister at the Court of Teheran.

The success of Sir Harford Jones embarrassed the British-Indian Government even more than did the apprehension of his failure. Lord Minto and his councillors were sorely perplexed. It was desirable, as they all acknowledged, that the engagements entered into by the representative of the Court of England should be completed; but it was not desirable that the Indian Government should be degraded in the eyes of the Persian Court. Between their anxiety to accept the thing done and to disgrace the doer, they were thrown into a state of ludicrous embarrassment.[45] The resolution, however, at which they arrived was, under all the circumstances of the case, as reasonable as could be expected. It was determined to accept Sir Harford Jones’s treaty, and to leave the dignity of the British-Indian Government to be vindicated on a future occasion. Perhaps it would have been even better quietly to have lived down the slight; for it cost a large sum of money to satisfy the British-Indian Government that it had re-established its name at the Court of the Persian, and confounded the malignity of Jones.[46]

This is a curious chapter of diplomatic history. It is one, too, which has evoked from the partisans of both parties an extraordinary amount of bitterness. It hardly comes within the proper compass of this history to narrate the incidents of the ambassadorial war, still less to comment upon them. But it may be briefly remarked that all parties were wrong. Mistakes were unquestionably committed by Malcolm, by Jones, and by the Indian Government. There was an old feud between the two former, which certainly did not tend to smooth down the difficulties which had arisen; and the Government of India was not very patient of the home-born interference with what it conceived to be its rightful diplomatic prerogative. Jones, though receiving his credentials from the Crown, was placed in subordination to the local government, and ought to have obeyed its mandates. That he would have done so, had he received instructions to withdraw before he had fairly entered upon his work, it is only just to assume; but having once made his appearance in Persia as the representative of his sovereign, he thought that he could not abandon his mission under orders from the Indian Government without lowering the dignity of the Crown.

He did not commence his expedition to Persia until some time after Malcolm had retired; and when he went at last, it was under urgent solicitations from the Governor-General to proceed there without delay. He cannot, therefore, be charged with indelicacy or precipitancy. He went only when the coast was clear. That he succeeded better than Malcolm must be attributed mainly to the “chapter of accidents,” for he was a man of vastly inferior parts. Malcolm says that it was owing to his measures that Jones was enabled to advance—that the rumour of his military preparations overawed the Persian Court—and that all the rest was done by bribery. That there was at that time little hope of any mission succeeding without bribery, no man knew better than Malcolm.[47] But Malcolm could not bribe his way to Teheran in the spring, because the French were then dominant at Court. Had he waited till the autumn, the road would have been lubricated for him. One thing at least is certain. Nothing could have been more fortunate than the miscarriage of Malcolm’s military expedition. It would have embarrassed our future proceedings, and entailed a large waste of public money. As to the question of prerogative, it would be little use to discuss it. It has been settled long ago. The Crown ministers have taken into their own hands the appointment of our Persian ambassadors, and the conduct of all subsequent negotiations with the Persian Court. Henceforth we shall have to regard the relations subsisting between Persia and Great Britain as affairs beyond the control of the East India Company and their representatives, and to look upon the ministers of the Crown as responsible for all that we have to contemplate in that quarter of the world.[48]

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Note to New Edition (1856).—The arguments with which Malcolm supported the proposal for the occupation of the island of Karrack, may be advantageously given in this place, as they are set forth in his own words in his “Life and Correspondence”:—

First. That in the event of an attempt to invade India being made by an European State, it was impossible to place any dependence on the efforts of the King of Persia or the Pacha of Baghdad, unless we possessed the immediate power of punishing their hostility and treachery.

Secondly. That the States of Persia, Eastern Turkey, and Arabia were, from their actual condition, to be considered less in the light of regular Governments than as countries full of combustible materials, which any nation whose interests it promoted, might throw into a flame.

Thirdly. That though the French and Russians might, no doubt, in their advance, easily conquer those States, in the event of their opposing their progress, it was their obvious policy to avoid any contest with the inhabitants of the country through which they passed, as such must, in its progress, inevitably diminish the resources of those countries, and thereby increase the difficulty of supporting their armies—which difficulty formed the chief, if not the sole, obstacle to their advance.

Fourthly. That though it was not to be conceived that the King of Persia or Pacha of Baghdad would willingly allow any European army to pass through his country, but there was every ground to expect that the fear of a greater evil was likely not only to make these rulers observe a neutrality, but to dispose them to aid the execution of a plan which they could not resist, and make them desire to indemnify themselves for submission to a power they dreaded by agreeing to share in the plunder of weaker States—a line of policy to which it was too obvious they would be united, and to which their fear, weakness, and avarice made it probable that they would accede.

Fifthly. That under a contemplation of such occurrences, it appeared of ultimate importance that the English Government should instantly possess itself of means to throw those States that favoured the approach of its enemies, into complete confusion and destruction, in order that it might, by diminishing their resources, increase the principal natural obstacle that opposed the advance of an European army, and this system, when that Government had once established a firm footing and a position situated on the confines of Persia and Turkey, it could easily pursue, with a very moderate force, and without any great risk or expenditure.

Sixthly. That with an established footing in the Gulf of Persia, which must soon become the emporium of our commerce, the seat of our political negotiations, and a dépôt for our military stores, we should be able to establish a local influence and strength that would not only exclude other European nations from that quarter, but enable us to carry on negotiations and military operations with honour and security to any extent we desired; whereas, without it, we must continue at the mercy of the fluctuating policy of unsteady, impotent, and faithless Courts, adopting expensive and useless measures of defence at every uncertain alarm, and being ultimately obliged either to abandon the scene altogether, or, when danger actually came, to incur the most desperate hazard of complete failure by sending a military expedition which must trust for its subsistence and safety, to States who were known, not only from the individual character of their rulers, but from their actual condition and character, to be undeserving of a moment’s confidence.

Seventhly. That there was great danger in any delay, as the plan recommended could only be expected to be beneficial if adopted when there was a time to mature it and to organise all our means of defence before the enemy were too far advanced; otherwise that momentary irritation which must be excited by its adoption, would only add to the many other advantages which our want of foresight and attention to our interests in that quarter had already given to our enemies.

CHAPTER V.

[1808-1809.]

The Missions to Lahore and Caubul—The Aggressions of Runjeet Singh—Mr. Metcalfe at Umritsur—Treaty of 1809—Mr. Elphinstone’s Mission—Arrival at Peshawur—Reception by Shah Soojah—Withdrawal of the Mission—Negotiations with the Ameers of Sindh.

It was while Sir Harford Jones was making his way from Bombay to Bushire, in the months of September and October, 1808, that the Missions to Caubul and Lahore set out for their respective destinations. Since the time when the rumoured approach of an army of invasion under Zemaun Shah had troubled the hearts of the English in India, the might of the Douranee rulers had been gradually declining, as a new power, threatening the integrity of the Afghan dominions, swelled into bulk and significance, and spread itself over the country between the Sutlej and the Indus. It was no longer possible to regard with indifference the growth of this new empire. We had supplanted the Mahrattas on the banks of the Jumna, and brought ourselves into proximity with the Sikhs. A group of petty principalities were being rapidly consolidated into a great empire by the strong hand and capacious intellect of Runjeet Singh, and it had become apparent to the British that thenceforth, for good or for evil, the will of the Sikh ruler must exercise an influence over the councils of the rulers of Hindostan.

It was part of Lord Minto’s policy at this time, as we have seen, to include the Lahore chief in the great Anti-Gallican confederacy with which he had determined to frustrate the magnificent designs of Napoleon. But the posture of affairs on our northern frontier was such as to occasion some embarassment in the Council-Chamber of Calcutta. The military power of the Sikh rajah had been put forth, with almost unvarying success, for the subjection of the petty principalities within his reach; and now it appeared that he was desirous of reducing to a state of vassalage all the chiefs holding the tract of country which lies between the Sutlej and the Jumna. There was much in this to perplex and embarrass Lord Minto and his colleagues. It was desirable, above all things, to maintain a friendly power beyond the frontier; but whether this were to be done by supporting the Sikh chiefs in the Cis-Sutlej territories, even at the risk of actual hostilities with Runjeet Singh, or whether, on the other hand, it were expedient to sacrifice the petty chieftains to Runjeet’s ambition, and enter into an offensive and defensive alliance against the Persians and the French with that prince, were questions which agitated the minds of our Indian statesmen, and found no very satisfactory solution in the elaborate minutes which they provoked. Lord Minto, whilst expressing his natural inclination to assist a weak country against the usurpation of a powerful neighbour, and fully recognising the principle of non-interference, so consistently inculcated by the Government at home, maintained that the emergency of the case was such as to justify a departure from ordinary rules of conduct, and a violation of general maxims of policy. The defence of India against the dangers of French invasion was stated to be the most pressing object of attention, and entitled to most weight in the deliberations of the state; but it was doubted whether the alliance with Runjeet Singh would effectually secure that desirable end,[49] whilst it was certain that the gradual extension of his dominions would be permanently injurious to British interests in the East. It was desirable, in a word, to secure his alliance and to check his presumption at the same time. Any act of hostility and discourtesy on our part might throw him into the arms of Holkar and Scindiah, and other native princes; and a confederacy might be formed against us, that would disturb the peace of India for years. Starting, however, with the assumption that the French were undeniably about to invade Hindostan, it was contended by the Governor-General, that whilst the native princes would be inclined to wait the coming of the great western liberator, it was our policy to husband our strength for the grand struggle with our terrible European opponent. “We are, in reality,” wrote Lord Minto, “only waiting on both sides for a more convenient time to strike. We know that Holkar and Scindiah, the Rajah of Bhurtpore, and probably other chiefs, have taken their part, and are sharpening their weapons in expectation of a concerted signal.”

Thus, oscillating between two courses of policy, and considering the question solely as one of expediency—that kind of expediency, however, to which something of dignity is imparted by a great national crisis, real or supposed—the Governor-General at last came to favour an opinion that sound policy dictated a strenuous effort on the part of the British Government to curb the aggressive spirit of the Sikh conqueror, and to set a limit to his dominions. It was seriously debated by Lord Minto whether Runjeet should not at once be deprived of all power to work us mischief; but the recollection of the advantages of maintaining, if possible, a longer peace, and of the non-interference system so strenuously enforced upon him by the home authorities, suggested the expediency of following a more cautious line of policy, and merely simulating, in the first instance, an intention to oppose a hostile front to the aggressiveness of the Sikhs. “If it were not found expedient,” wrote Lord Minto, “ultimately to pursue or to favour these views, the apprehension alone of so great danger brought home to him, may be expected to render Runjeet Singh more subservient to our wishes than any concessions or compliances will ever make him.”

In this conjuncture the Governor-General, harassed and perplexed by doubts, was fortunate in the personal character of the officer to whom had been entrusted the conduct of the mission to the Sikh ruler. Mr. Charles Metcalfe had early recommended himself to the favourable consideration of Lord Wellesley, who was never slow to recognise in the junior officers of the state the promise of future eminence.[50] He had been but a short time in the service, when the Governor-General placed him in his own Office—that best nursery of Indian statesmen—and he soon confirmed the expectations that had been formed of his judgment and intelligence by proving himself, in the camp of the Commander-in-Chief, and at the Court of Delhi, an officer of equal courage and sagacity. The estimate which Lord Wellesley had formed of his talents was accepted by Lord Minto; and in the whole range of the civil service—a service never wanting in administrative and diplomatic ability of the highest order—it is probable that he could not now have found a fitter agent to carry out his policy at Lahore.

On the 1st of September, 1808, Mr. Metcalfe crossed the Sutlej, and on the 11th of the same month met the Sikh ruler at Kussoor. The conduct of the Rajah was arbitrary and capricious. At one time courteous and friendly, at another querulous and arrogant, he now seemed disposed to enter into our views and to aid our designs; and then, complaining bitterly of the interference of the British Government, insisted on his right to occupy the country beyond the Jumna. Nor did he confine his opposition to mere verbal argument, for whilst the British envoy was still in his camp, he set out to illustrate his views by crossing the river, seizing Furreedkote and Umballah, and otherwise overawing the petty Sikh chiefs between the Sutlej and the Jumna.[51]

On the receipt of this intelligence by the Calcutta Council, it was debated whether it would be expedient to adopt the more dignified course of ordering Mr. Metcalfe to withdraw at once from the Sikh camp, and, regarding the conduct of Runjeet Singh as an outrage against the British Government, to take measures at once to chastise him;—whether, as recommended by Mr. Edmonstone, who always brought a sound judgment to bear upon such questions, and whose opinions were seldom disregarded by the Governor-General, to limit the negotiations with Runjeet Singh to defensive measures against the French, leaving the question of the subjugation of the Cis-Sutlej states for future adjustment;—or whether it would not be more prudent to direct Mr. Metcalfe to encumber himself as little as possible with engagements of any kind—to adopt a cautious and temporising line of policy, so as to admit of frequent references to Calcutta in the course of his negotiations, and to wait for anything that might chance to be written down in our favour in that great “chapter of accidents,” which so often enabled us to solve the most perplexing questions, and to overcome the most pressing difficulties.[52]

This was the course finally adopted. On one point, however, the tone of Government was decided. Runjeet Singh had required the British Government to pledge itself not to interfere with his aggressions against Caubul; and Mr. Metcalfe was now informed, that “were the Rajah to conclude engagements with the British Government in the true spirit of unanimity and confidence, we could not accede to any proposition upon the part of Caubul injurious to his interests: uncombined with such engagements, that question (of his aggressions against the Caubul territories) cannot possibly form an article of agreement between this government and the Rajah of Lahore; and on this ground the discussion of it may be properly rejected. At the same time, if the occasion should arise, you may inform the Rajah that Mr. Elphinstone is not authorised to conclude with the State of Caubul any engagements injurious to his interests. You will be careful, however, as you have hitherto been, to avoid any pledge on the part of government which might preclude any future engagements with the State of Caubul on that subject.” And whilst Mr. Metcalfe was carrying out this temporising policy inculcated by the Calcutta council, troops were pushed forward to the frontier to watch the movements of the Punjabee chief. A body of King’s and Company’s troops, under General St. Leger, and another under Colonel Ochterlony, composed entirely of native regiments, were posted in the neighbourhood of Loodhianah, ready, at a moment’s notice, to take the field against the followers of Nanuk. Vested with political authority, the latter officer, on the 9th of February, 1809, issued a proclamation calling upon the Sikh ruler to withdraw his troops to the further side of the Sutlej, and placing all the Cis-Sutlej principalities under the protection of the British Government. It was plain that we were no longer to be tampered with, and that there was nothing left to Runjeet Singh but to yield a reluctant compliance to our terms.

Up to this time the primary object of the British Government had been the establishment of such an alliance with the rulers of the Punjab, as might ensure a strenuous conjoint opposition to an European army advancing from the West. But those were days when a constant succession of great changes in the European world necessarily induced a shifting policy on the part of our Indian statesmen. It was difficult to keep pace with the mutations which were passing over the political horizon—difficult to keep a distant mission supplied with instructions which were not likely to become totally useless before they could be brought into effective operation. With Mr. Metcalfe at Umritsur it was comparatively easy to communicate. He had been ordered to temporise—to do nothing in a hurry; and he had succeeded so well as to protract his negotiations until the spring of 1809. The delay was most advantageous to British interests. The “chapter of accidents” worked mightily in our favour. The war with Napoleon had now been carried into the Spanish peninsula, and it demanded all the energies of the Emperor to maintain his position in Europe. The necessity of anti-Gallican alliances in India became less and less urgent. The value of Sikh friendship dwindled rapidly down, and the pretensions of the Sikh ruler naturally descended with it. The sight of a formidable British force on the frontier—the intelligence of the European successes of the great “Sepoy General” who, a few years before, on the plains of Berar, had given the Mahrattas a foretaste of the quality of his military skill[53]—the declining influence of the French in Central Asia,—and more than all, perhaps, the wonderful firmness and courage of the young English diplomatist—suggested to the wily Sikh Rajah the expediency of ceasing to tamper with us, and of forming at once a friendly alliance with the British.[54] He was now in a temper to accede to the terms proposed to him by the British diplomatist; and accordingly, on the 25th of April, 1809, a treaty was executed by Runjeet Singh in person, and by Mr. Metcalfe on the part of the British Government, in which there was no more mention of the French than if the eagles of Napoleon had never threatened the eastern world. It was stipulated that the Rajah should retain possession of the territories to the north of the Sutlej, but should abstain from all encroachments on the possessions or rights of the chiefs on the left bank of the river. This limitation was merely a prospective one. It had been intended to deprive Runjeet of the tracts of country which he had previously occupied to the south of the Sutlej; and the rough draft of the treaty contained, as a part of the first article as it now stands, the words, “And on the other hand, the Rajah renounces all claim to sovereignty over the Sikh chiefs to the southward of that river, and all right of interference in their affairs;”[55] but this passage had been subsequently erased by Lord Minto, and Runjeet Singh was now left in possession of the tracts he had originally occupied, though restrained from all further encroachments. The Sikh chiefs between the Sutlej and the Jumna, not already under the yoke of Runjeet Singh, were taken under British protection, and on the 5th of May a proclamation was issued declaring the nature of the connection which was thenceforth to exist between them and the dominant power on the south of the Jumna.

In the meanwhile, Mr. Elphinstone’s Mission was making its way to the Court of Shah Soojah-ool-Moolk. The envoy had been originally instructed that he was empowered to receive from the King of Caubul proposals having for their basis the employment of the power and resources of that state against the advance of any European army. He was authorised to express a conviction, as regarded offensive operations, that in the event of Persia being found decidedly confederated with the French in their projected expedition to India, the British Government “would not hesitate to adopt any plan of hostility against Persia consonant to the views of the King of Caubul.” But he was cautioned against entering into any permanent arrangement, or pledging his government to any ulterior line of conduct. Everything was to be limited to the occasion. It was to be the policy of the envoy rather to draw the Court of Caubul into solicitations to the British Government, than to make any spontaneous offers of assistance. And he was instructed especially to impress upon the mind of the King, that both as regarded security from without, and the internal safety and tranquillity of his own dominions, it was above all things the interest of the Douranee monarch to break up the alliance existing between the Court of Teheran and those of St. Petersburgh and Paris.

But this alliance was already in a state of dissolution. The spring of 1809 brought, as we have seen, glad tidings from Europe to the Anglo-Indian capital, and all fear of a French invasion passed away from the minds of our rulers. Whilst Mr. Metcalfe was bringing to a conclusion, irrespective of all reference to the French, his long-pending negotiations with Lahore, Mr. Elphinstone was instructed[56] that the important events which had occurred in Europe would necessarily induce a modification of the course of policy to be pursued at the Court of Caubul. He was told that it was no longer necessary to entertain a thought of offensive operations against Persia, but that the British Government would accede to engagements of a nature purely defensive against that state, should such a stipulation appear to be an object of solicitude to the Afghan monarch. This was merely stated as an admissible course. The Governor-General declared that he would wish, if possible, to avoid contracting even defensive engagements with the Court of Caubul; and added, “Should the contracting those engagements be absolutely required by the King, the eventual aid to be afforded by us ought to be limited to supplies of arms, ordnance, and military stores, rather than of troops.”[57]

The Mission proceeded through Bekanier, Bahwulpore,[58] and Mooltan; and ever as they went the most marked civility was shown to the British ambassadors. But one thing was wanting to render the feeling towards them a pervading sentiment of universal respect. They had not long crossed the frontier before they discovered that a more liberal display of the facial characteristics of manhood would elevate them greatly in the eyes of a people who are uniformly bearded and moustached.[59] Our officers have ever since carefully abstained from incurring this reproach; and it may be doubted whether, ever again, any hint will be required to stimulate them to encourage an Asiatic development of hair on the lower part of the face.

I do not intend to trace the progress of the Mission. The story has been told with historical fidelity and graphic distinctness in a book which is still, after the lapse of nearly forty years, the delight of Anglo-Indian readers, and which future generations of writers and cadets will turn to with undiminished interest. On the 25th of February, the Mission entered Peshawur. Crowds of wondering inhabitants came out to gaze at the representatives of the nation which had reduced the great Mogul to a shadow, and seated itself on the throne of Tippoo. Pushing forward with the outstretched neck of eager curiosity, they blocked up the public ways. The royal body-guards rode among the foot passengers; lashed at them with their whips; tilted with their lances at grave spectators sitting quietly in their own balconies; and cleared the way as best they could. But fast as they dispersed the thronging multitude, it closed again around the novel cavalcade. Through this motley crowd of excited inhabitants, the British Mission was with difficulty conducted to a house prepared for them by royal mandate. Seated on rich carpets, fed with sweetmeats, and regaled with sherbet, every attention was paid to the European strangers. The hospitality of the King was profuse. His fortunes were then at a low ebb; but he sent provisions to the Mission for two thousand men, with food for beasts of burden in proportion, and was with difficulty persuaded to adopt a less costly method of testifying his regal cordiality and respect.

Some dispute about forms of presentation delayed the reception of the English ambassadors. But in a few days everything was arranged for the grand ceremonial to take place on the 5th of March. When the eventful day arrived, they found the King, with that love of outward pomp which clung to him to the last, sitting on a gilded throne, crowned, plumed, and arrayed in costly apparel. The royal person was a blaze of jewellery, conspicuous among which the mighty diamond, the Koh-i-noor, destined in after days to undergo such romantic vicissitudes, glittered in a gorgeous bracelet upon the arm of the Shah. Welcoming the English gentlemen with a graceful cordiality, he expressed a hope that the King of England and all the English nation were well, presented the officers of the embassy with dresses of honour, and then, dismissing all but Mr. Elphinstone and his secretary, proceeded to the business of the interview. Listening attentively to all that was advanced by the British envoy, he professed himself eager to accede to his proposals, and declared that England and Caubul were designed by the Creator to be united by bonds of everlasting friendship. The presents which Mr. Elphinstone had taken with him to Afghanistan were curious and costly; and now that they were exposed to the view of the Shah, he turned upon them a face scintillating with pleasure, and eagerly expressed his delight. His attendants, with a cupidity that there was no attempt to conceal, laid their rapacious hands upon everything that came in their way, and scrambled for the articles which were not especially appropriated by their royal master. Thirty years afterwards, the memory of these splendid gifts raised longing expectations in the minds of the courtiers of Caubul, and caused bitter disappointment and disgust, when Captain Burnes appeared with his pins and needles, and little articles of hardware, such as would have disgraced the wallet of a pedlar of low repute.[60]

At subsequent interviews the impression made by the Shah upon the minds of the English diplomatists was of a description very favourable to the character of the Afghan ruler. Mr. Elphinstone was surprised to find that the Douranee monarch had so much of the “manners of a gentleman,” and that he could be affable and dignified at the same time. But he had much domestic care to distract him at this epoch, and could not fix his mind intently on foreign politics. His country was in a most unsettled condition. His throne seemed to totter under him. He was endeavouring to collect an army, and was projecting a great military expedition. He hoped to see more of the English gentlemen, he said, in more prosperous times. At present, the best advice that he could give them was that they should retire beyond the frontier. So on the 14th of June the Mission turned its back upon Peshawur, and set out for the provinces of Hindostan.[61]

Three days after the Mission commenced its homeward journey, the treaty which had been arranged by Mr. Elphinstone was formally signed at Calcutta by Lord Minto. The first article set out with a mis-statement, to the effect that the French and Persians had entered into a confederacy against the State of Caubul. The two contracting parties bound themselves to take active measures to repel this confederacy, the British “holding themselves liable to afford the expenses necessary for the above-mentioned service, to the extent of their ability.” The remaining article decreed eternal friendship between the two States: “The veil of separation shall be lifted up from between them; and they shall in no manner interfere in each other’s countries; and the King of Caubul shall permit no individual of the French to enter his territories.” Three months before these articles were signed Sir Harford Jones had entered into a preliminary treaty with the Persian Court, stipulating that in case of war between Persia and Afghanistan, his Majesty the King of Great Britain should not take any part therein, unless at the desire of both parties. The confederacy of the French and Persians had been entirely broken up, and all the essentials of the Caubul treaty rendered utterly null and useless.

But before this rapid sketch of the diplomacy of 1808-9 is brought to a close, some mention must be made of another subordinate measure of defence against the possibility of a foreign invasion. The low countries lying on the banks of the river Indus, from its junction with the Punjabee tributaries to the sea, were known as Upper and Lower Sindh. The people inhabiting the former were for the most part Beloochees—a warlike and turbulent race, of far greater physical power and mental energy than their feeble, degraded neighbours, the Sindhians, who occupied the country from Shikarpoor to the mouths of the Indus. The nominal rulers of these provinces were the Talpoor Ameers, but they were either tributary to, or actually dependent upon the Court of Caubul. The dependence, however, was in effect but scantily acknowledged. Often was the tribute to be extracted only by the approach of an army sent for its collection by the Douranee monarch. There was constant strife, indeed, between Sindh and Caubul—the one ever plotting to cast off its allegiance, and the other ever putting forth its strength more closely to rivet the chains.

In July, 1808, Captain Seton was despatched by the Bombay Government to the Court of the Ameers at Hyderabad. Misunderstanding and exceeding his instructions, he hastily executed a treaty with the State of Sindh, imposing, generally and unconditionally, upon each party an obligation to furnish military aid on the requisition of the other. The mind of the envoy was heavy with thoughts of a French invasion, which seem to have excluded all considerations of internal warfare and intrigue in Central Asia. But the Ameers were at that time intent upon emancipating themselves from the yoke of Caubul, and Captain Seton found that he had committed the British Government to assist the tributary State of Sindh against the Lord Paramount of the country, thereby placing us in direct hostility with the very power whose good offices we were so anxious to conciliate. There was, indeed, a Persian ambassador at that very time resident at the Sindh capital, charged with overtures for the formation of a close alliance between Persia and Sindh subversive of the tributary relations of the latter to the State of Caubul.[62] He was acting, too, as the secret agent of the French; and the Ameers made no secret of the fact, that but for the friendly overtures of the British they would have allied themselves with the Persians and French. They now grasped at the proffered connexion with the Indian Government, believing, or professing to believe, that it entitled them to assistance against the State of Caubul, and industriously propagated a report of the military strength which they had thus acquired. The danger of all this was obvious.[63] Captain Seton’s treaty was accordingly ignored; and Mr. Elphinstone was instructed that, in the event of Shah Soojah remonstrating against Captain Seton’s treaty, he might, without hesitation, apprise the Court of Caubul that the engagements entered into were “totally unauthorised and contrary to the terms of the instructions given him;” and that, in consequence of these errors, Captain Seton had been officially recalled, and another envoy despatched to Sindh to negotiate the terms of a new treaty.

The agent then appointed was Mr. N. H. Smith, who had been filling, with credit to himself, the office of Resident at Bushire. He was instructed to annul the former treaty, and to “endeavour to establish such an intercourse with the chiefs of Sindh as would afford the means of watching and counteracting the intrigues of the French in that and the neighbouring States.” It was no easy thing to establish on a secure basis friendly relations with so many different powers, if not at open war with one another, in that antagonistic state of conflicting interests which rendered each principality eager to obtain the assistance of the British to promote some hostile design against its neighbour. But partly by open promises, and partly by disguised threats, our agents at this time succeeded in casting one great network of diplomacy over all the states from the Jumna to the Caspian Sea. The Ameers of Sindh coveted nothing so much as assistance against the Douranee monarch. The British envoy was instructed to refuse all promises of assistance, but to hint at the possibility of assistance being given to the paramount State in the event of the tributary exhibiting any hostility to the British Government. It was distinctly stated that the object of Mr. Elphinstone’s Mission to Caubul was exclusively connected with the apprehended invasion of the Persians and the French; that the affairs of Sindh would not be touched upon by the Caubul embassy, and that, therefore, the affairs of Caubul could not with propriety be discussed by the ambassador to Sindh; and it was adroitly added, that the relations between Caubul and Sindh could only be taken into consideration by the British Government in the event of the latter state exhibiting a decided disposition to encourage and assist the projects of our enemies.

Nor was this the only use made of the conflicting claims of Caubul and Sindh. It happened, as has been said, that Persia had been intriguing with the Ameers, and had promised to assist them in the efforts to cast off the Douranee yoke. The French had favoured and assisted these intrigues; and Mr. Elphinstone was accordingly instructed to instigate the resentment of the Afghan monarch against the French and Persian allies, and to demonstrate to him that the very integrity of his empire was threatened by the confederacy. It was the policy of the British-Indian Government to keep Sindh in check by hinting at the possibility of British assistance rendered to Caubul for its coercion; and, at the same time, to alarm Caubul by demonstrating the probability of Sindh being assisted by Persia to shake off the Douranee yoke. Operating upon the fears of both parties, our diplomatists found little difficulty in bringing their negotiations to a successful termination. The Ameers of Sindh entered readily into engagements of general amity, and especially stipulated never to allow the tribe of the French to settle in their country. But before these treaties were executed, France had ceased to be formidable, and Persia had become a friend. The Sindh and Caubul treaties were directed against exigencies which had ceased to exist; but they were not without their uses. If the embassies resulted in nothing else, they gave birth to two standard works on the countries to which they were despatched; and brought prominently before the World the names of two servants of the Company, who have lived to occupy no small space in the world’s regard, and to prove themselves as well fitted, by nature and education, to act history as to write it.[64]

CHAPTER VI.

[1809-1816]

The Mid-Career of Shah Soojah—His Wanderings and Misfortunes—Captivity in Cashmere—Imprisonment at Lahore—Robbery of the Koh-i-noor—Reception of the Shah by the Rajah of Kistawar—His Escape to the British Territories.

Before Mr. Elphinstone’s Mission had cleared the limits of the Douranee Empire, Shah Soojah had given battle to his enemies, and been disastrously defeated. The month of June, 1809, had not worn to a close, before it was evident that his cause was hopeless. Still he did not abandon the contest. Despatching his Zenana, with which was his blind brother, to Rawul Pindee, he made new efforts to splinter up his broken fortunes. But sustaining several defeats, and narrowly escaping, on more than one occasion, with his life, he desisted for a time from operations, of which every new struggle demonstrated more painfully the utter fruitlessness. He wanted military genius, and he wanted the art to inspire confidence and to win affection. Deserted by the chiefs and the people, he withdrew beyond the frontier, and there entered upon new preparations for the renewal of the contest under circumstances more favourable to success. Entertaining and drilling troops, he spent a year at Rawul Pindee. Some defections from his brother’s party inspiring him with new hopes, he marched thence to Peshawur, and took possession of the Balla Hissar, or royal fortress. But here the treachery of his friends was likely to have proved more fatal to him than the malice of his enemies. The chiefs on whom he most relied were bribed over by the Governor of Cashmere to seize the person of the King. Persuading him, before he commenced the expedition to Caubul, to send out the horses of his troopers to graze in the neighbouring villages, and thus stripping him of his only defence, they escaladed the Balla Hissar, seized the royal person, and carried the unfortunate monarch to the valley of Cashmere. Here he was offered his release at the price of the Koh-i-noor; but he refused to surrender this magnificent appendage to the Crown of Caubul, and rescued it from the hands of one plunderer only to suffer it to fall into the grip of another.

It was in 1812 that Shah Soojah was carried off a prisoner to Cashmere. He appears to have remained there about a year, and, during that time, to have been treated with little kindness and respect. Mahmoud was then in comparative quiet and security at Caubul, and, in his good fortune, seems to have regarded with compassion the fate of his unhappy brother. “When Shah Mahmoud heard of the way in which we were treated,” writes the royal autobiographer, “the latent feelings of fraternal affection were aroused within him, and he immediately sent a force into the Barukzye country. After plundering the whole tribe of Atta Mahmoud Khan, he carried men, women, and children into captivity. Finding that this had not the desired effect, viz., our release from bondage, he sent a force to Cashmere, under Futteh Khan.” Atta Mahmoud advanced to give him battle; but his followers deserted to the standard of the Barukzye Wuzeer, and he fled homewards to Cashmere. Here, threatened by Futteh Khan, he implored the assistance of his captive. “Seeing his escape could not be effected without our aid, he came,” says Shah Soojah, “to our place of confinement, bare-headed, with the Koran in one hand, a naked sword in the other, and a rope about his neck, and requested our forgiveness for the sake of the sacred volume.” The Shah, who, according to his own statements, was never wanting in that most kingly quality of forgiveness, forgave him on his own account, and recommended him to make submission to Futteh Khan. The Wuzeer was advancing upon Cashmere from one direction, and the Sikhs from another; and it was plain that the rebellious Nazim had nothing before him but to submit.

I wish to believe Shah Soojah’s history of the amiable fraternal impulses which dictated the expedition to Cashmere. But it is difficult to entertain a conviction that it was not directed towards other objects than the release of the exiled monarch. The result was, that Atta Mahmoud, the rebellious Nazim, made submission to Futteh Khan;—that Mokhum Chund, the leader of the Sikh expedition, met the Douranee minister about the same time, and that both recommended Shah Soojah to proceed on a visit to Runjeet Singh.[65] The Maharajah, it soon became very clear, coveted the possession of the great Douranee diamond. On the second day after Shah Soojah entered Lahore, he was waited on by an emissary from Runjeet, who demanded the jewel in the name of his master. The fugitive monarch asked for time to consider the request, and hinted that, after he had partaken of Runjeet’s hospitality, he might be in a temper to grant it. On the following day, the same messenger presented himself again, and received a similar reply. Runjeet Singh was in no mood to brook this delay. Determined to possess himself of the Koh-i-noor, he now resorted to other measures to extort it from the luckless owner. “We then,” says Shah Soojah, “experienced privations of the necessaries of life, and sentinels were placed over our dwelling. A month passed in this way. Confidential servants of Runjeet Singh then waited on us, and inquired if we wanted ready cash, and would enter into an agreement and treaty for the above-mentioned jewel. We answered in the affirmative, and next day, Ram Singh brought 40,000 or 50,000 rupees, and asked again for the Koh-i-noor, which we promised to procure when some treaty was agreed upon. Two days after this, Runjeet Singh came in person, and, after friendly protestations, he stained a paper with safflower, and swearing by the Grunth of Baba Nanuck and his own sword, he wrote the following security and compact:—That he delivered over the provinces of Kote Cumaleeh, Jung Shawl, and Khuleh Noor, to us and our heirs for ever; also offering assistance in troops and treasure for the purpose of again recovering our throne. We also agreed, if we should ever ascend the throne, to consider Runjeet Singh always in the light of an ally. He then proposed himself that we should exchange turbans, which is among the Sikhs a pledge of eternal friendship, and we then gave him the Koh-i-noor.”

Having thus obtained possession of the great diamond, Runjeet Singh, who at no time of his life had very high ideas of honour, was unwilling to give up the jagheer which he had promised as the price of it. Whilst Shah Soojah was still thinking over the non-performance of the contract, Runjeet invited him to accompany an expedition which was proceeding under the Maharajah to Peshawur, and held out to him hopes of the recovery of his lost dominions. The Shah joined Runjeet at Rotas, and they proceeded together to Rawul Pindee. There the Maharajah, seeing little chance of success, abandoned the expedition, and, according to the account given by Shah Soojah, desired him to proceed onward in the company of Ram Singh. Left alone with that chief, he was shamelessly plundered by robbers of higher note than the Sikh chiefs would willingly admit. All thought of proceeding to Peshawur was now abandoned, and, accompanied by Ram Singh and the heir-apparent, Shah Soojah returned to Lahore.

At the capital his property was not more secure than on the line of march. There was something yet left to be plundered, and the plunderers were of still higher rank. Runjeet Singh stripped the wretched monarch of everything that was worth taking, and “even after this,” says Shah Soojah, “he did not perform one of his promises.” Instead of bestowing new favours upon the man who had yielded up his treasures so unsparingly, the Maharajah began to heap new indignities upon him. Spies were set over him, and guards surrounded his dwelling. Five months passed in this way; and as time advanced, the condition of the wretched Douranee Prince became more hopeless; his escape from this wretched thraldom more to be coveted, and yet more difficult to encompass. He remembered the friendly overtures of the British Government, and sighed for a peaceful asylum under the shelter of the wings of the great power beyond the Sutlej. “We thought,” he says, “of the proffered friendship of the British Government, and hoped for an asylum in Loodhianah. Several Mussulmans and Hindoos had formerly offered their services, and we now engaged them and purchased several of the covered hackeries of the country. Every stratagem was defeated by the spies, until at last we found that Abdool Hussan had disclosed our plans to Runjeet Singh. At last, being hopeless, we called Abdool Hussan and Moollah Jaffier into the presence, and after offering them bribes, and giving expectations of reward, we bought them to our purpose; and the members of the seraglio, with their attendants, all dressed in the costume of the country, found a safe conveyance in the hackeries above mentioned to the cantonments of Loodhianah. When we received accounts of their safe arrival, we gave sincere thanks to Almighty God!”

But his own escape was yet to be effected. Outwitted to this extent, Runjeet Singh redoubled his precautions, and in no very conciliatory mood of mind hemmed in the ex-King with guards, and watched him day and night with the keenest vigilance. “Seven ranges of guards,” says the royal autobiographer, “were put upon our person, and armed men with lighted torches watched our bed. When we went as far as the banks of the river at night, the sentinels upon the ramparts lighted flambeaux until we returned. Several months passed in this manner, and our own attendants were with difficulty allowed to come into the presence. No relief was left but that of our holy religion, and God alone could give us assistance.” And assistance was given, in the shape of unwonted resolution and ingenuity. In this critical hour the resources of the Shah seem to have developed themselves in an unexampled manner. He foiled all Runjeet’s efforts to secure his prisoner, and baffled the vigilance of his guards. A few faithful attendants aided his endeavours, and he escaped from the cruel walls of Lahore. “We ordered,” he says, “the roof of the apartment containing our camp equipage to be opened, so as to admit of a person passing through; apertures were formed by mining through seven other chambers to the outside of the building.” Everything being thus prepared, the unhappy King disguised himself as a mendicant, and leaving one of his attendants to simulate the royal person on his bed, crept through the fissures in the walls, escaped with two followers into the street, and emerged thence through the main sewer which ran beneath the city wall.

Outside Lahore he was joined by his remaining followers. He had been thinking, in confinement, of the blessings of a safe retreat at Loodhianah; but no sooner did he find himself abroad than he courted new adventures, and meditated new enterprises. Instead of hastening to the British provinces, he turned his face towards the hills of Jummoo. Wandering about in this direction without seemingly any fixed object, he received friendly overtures from the Rajah of Kistawar, and was easily persuaded to enter his dominions.

The Rajah went out to meet him, loaded him with kindness, conducted him to his capital, and made the kingly fugitive happy with rich gifts and public honours. Offering up sacrifices, and distributing large sums of money in honour of his royal guest, the Rajah spared nothing that could soothe the grief or pamper the vanity of the exiled monarch. But the novelty of this pleasant hospitality soon began to wear away, and the restless wanderer sighed for a life of more enterprise and excitement. “Tired of an idle life,” he says, “we laid plans for an attack on Cashmere.” The Rajah of Kistawar was well pleased with the project, and placed his troops and his treasury at the command of his royal guest. The Shah himself, though robbed of all his jewels, had a lakh of rupees remaining at Lahore, but as soon as he began to possess himself of it, the Maharajah stretched out his hand, and swept it into his own treasury. Nothing daunted by this accident, the Kistawar chief, who was “ready to sacrifice his territory for the weal” of the Shah, freely supplied the sinews of war; troops were levied, and operations commenced.

But it was not written in the Shah’s book of life that his enterprises should result in anything but failure. The outset of the expedition was marked by some temporary successes; but it closed in disaster and defeat. The Shah’s levies charged the stockaded positions of the enemy sword in hand, and were pushing into the heart of the country, when the same inexorable enemy that has baffled the efforts of the greatest European states raised its barriers against the advance of the invading army. “We were only three coss,” relates Shah Soojah, “from Azim Khan’s camp, with the picturesque city of Cashmere full in view, when the snow began again to fall, and the storm continued with violence, and without intermission, for two days. Our Hindostanees were benumbed with a cold unfelt in their sultry regions; the road to our rear was blocked up with snow, and the supplies still far distant. For three days our troops were almost famished, and many Hindostanees died. We could not advance, and retreat was hazardous. Many lost their hands and feet from being frost-bitten, before we determined to retreat.”

These calamities, which seemed to strengthen the devotion of the Rajah of Kistawar to the unfortunate Shah, and which were borne by him with the most manly fortitude, sobered the fugitive Afghan monarch, and made him again turn his thoughts longingly towards a tranquil asylum in the Company’s dominions. At the earnest request of his new friend, he remained during nine months beneath the hospitable roof of the Rajah, and then prepared for a journey to Loodhianah.[66] Avoiding the Lahore territory, lest he should fall into the hands of Runjeet Singh, willing rather to encounter the eternal snows of the hill regions than his ruthless enemies on the plains, he tracked along the inhospitable mountains of Thibet, where for days and days no signs of human life or vegetation appeared to cheer his heart and encourage his efforts. “The depth of the eternal snows,” he says, “was immense. Underneath the large bodies of ice the mountain torrents had formed themselves channels. The five rivers watering the Punjaub have their rise here from fountains amid the snows of ages. We passed mountains, the snows of which varied in colour, and at last reached the confines of Thibet, after experiencing the extremes of cold, hunger, and fatigue.”

His trials were not yet over. He had still to encounter dangers and difficulties among the hill tribes. The people of Kulloo insulted and ill-treated him; but the Rajah came to his relief, and, after a few days of onward travelling, to the inexpressible joy of the fugitive monarch the red houses of the British residents at one of our hill stations appeared in sight. “Our cares and fatigues were now,” says the Shah, “forgotten, and giving thanks to Almighty God, who, having freed us from the hands of our enemies, and led us through the snows and over the trackless mountains, had now safely conducted us to the land of friends, we passed a night, for the first time, with comfort and without dread. Signs of civilisation showed themselves as we proceeded, and we soon entered a fine broad road. A chuprassie from Captain Ross attended us; the hill ranas paid us every attention; and we soon reached Loodhianah, where we found our family treated with marked respect, and enjoying every comfort after their perilous march from Lahore.”

It was in the month of September, 1816, that Shah Soojah joined his family at Loodhianah. He sought a resting-place, and he found one in the British dominions. Two years of quietude and peace were his. But quietude and peace are afflictions grievous and intolerable to an Afghan nature. The Shah gratefully acknowledged the friendly hospitality of the British, but the burden of a life of inactivity was not to be borne. The Douranee Empire was still rent by intestine convulsions. The Barukzye sirdars were dominant at Caubul; but their sovereignty was threatened by Shah Mahmoud and the Princes of Herat, and not, at that time, professing to conquer for themselves, for the spirit of legitimacy was not extinct in Afghanistan, they looked abroad for a royal puppet, and found one at Loodhianah. Azim Khan invited Shah Soojah to re-assert his claims to the throne; and the Shah, weary of repose, unwarned by past experience, flung himself into this new enterprise, only to add another to that long list of failures which it took nearly a quarter of a century more to render complete.

CHAPTER VII.

[1816-1837.]

Dost Mahomed and the Barukzyes—Early days of Dost Mahomed—The fall of Futteh Khan—Defeat of Shah Mahmoud—Supremacy of the Barukzyes—Position of the Empire—Dost Mahomed at Caubul—Expedition of Shah Soojah—His Defeat—Capture of Peshawur by the Sikhs.

Among the twenty brothers of Futteh Khan was one many years his junior, whose infancy was wholly disregarded by the great Barukzye Sirdar. The son of a woman of the Kuzzilbash tribe, looked down upon by the high-bred Douranee ladies of his father’s household, the boy had begun life in the degrading office of a sweeper at the sacred cenotaph of Lamech.[67] Permitted, at a later period, to hold a menial office about the person of the powerful Wuzeer, he served the great man with water, or bore his pipe; was very zealous in his ministrations; kept long and painful vigils; saw everything, heard everything in silence; bided his time patiently, and when the hour came, trod the stage of active life as no irresolute novice. A stripling of fourteen, in the crowded streets of Peshawur in broad day, as the buyers and the sellers thronged the thoroughfares of the city, he slew one of the enemies of Futteh Khan, and galloped home to report the achievement to the Wuzeer. From that time his rise was rapid. The neglected younger brother of Futteh Khan became the favourite of the powerful chief, and following the fortunes of the warlike minister, soon took his place among the chivalry of the Douranee Empire.

The name of this young warrior was Dost Mahomed Khan. Nature seems to have designed him for a hero of the true Afghan stamp and character. Of a graceful person, a prepossessing countenance, a bold frank manner, he was outwardly endowed with all those gifts which most inspire confidence and attract affection; whilst undoubted courage, enterprise, activity, somewhat of the recklessness and unscrupulousness of his race, combined with a more than common measure of intelligence and sagacity, gave him a command over his fellows and a mastery over circumstances, which raised him at length to the chief seat in the empire. His youth was stained with many crimes, which he lived to deplore. It is the glory of Dost Mahomed that in the vigour of his years he looked back with contrition upon the excesses of his early life, and lived down many of the besetting infirmities which had overshadowed the dawn of his career. The waste of a deserted childhood and the deficiencies of a neglected education he struggled manfully to remedy and repair. At the zenith of his reputation there was not, perhaps, in all Central Asia a chief so remarkable for the exercise of self-discipline and self-control; but he emerged out of a cloudy morn of vice, and sunk into a gloomy night of folly.

As the lieutenant of his able and powerful brother, the young Dost Mahomed Khan displayed in all the contests which rent the Douranee Empire a daring and heroic spirit, and considerable military address. Early acquiring the power of handling large bodies of troops, he was regarded, whilst yet scarcely a man, as a dashing, fearless soldier, and a leader of good repute. But, in those early days, his scruples were few; his excesses were many. It was one of those excesses, it is supposed, which cost the life of Futteh Khan, and built up his own reputation on the ruin of his distinguished brother.

It was shortly after the retirement of Shah Soojah to the British possessions that Futteh Khan set out, at the head of an army, to the western boundary of Afghanistan. Persia had long been encroaching upon the limits of the Douranee Empire, and it was now to stem the tide of Kujjar invasion that the Afghan Wuzeer set out for Khorassan. At this time he was the virtual ruler of the country. Weak, indolent, and debauched, Shah Mahmoud, retaining the name and the pomp of royalty, had yielded the actual government of the country into the hands of Futteh Khan and his brothers. The Princes of the blood royal quailed before the Barukzye Sirdars. Ferooz-ood-Deen, brother of the reigning monarch, was at that time governor of Herat. Whether actuated by motives of personal resentment or ambition, or instigated by Shah Mahmoud himself, Futteh Khan determined to turn the Persian expedition to other account, and to throw Herat into the hands of the Barukzyes. The execution of this design was entrusted to Dost Mahomed. He entered Herat with his Kohistanee followers as a friend; and when the chiefs of the city were beyond its gates, in attendance upon the Wuzeer, with characteristic Afghan treachery and violence he massacred the palace guards, seized the person of the Prince, spoiled the treasury, and violated the harem. Setting the crown upon this last act of violence, he tore the jewelled waistband from the person of the royal wife of one of the royal Princes.[68] The outraged lady is said to have sent her profaned garment to Prince Kamran, and to have drawn from him an oath that he would avenge the injury. He was true to his vow. The blow was struck; but it fell not on the perpetrator of the outrage: it fell upon Futteh Khan.

Dost Mahomed had fled for safety to Cashmere. The Wuzeer, returning from the Persian expedition, fell into the hands of Prince Kamran, who punctured his eyes with the point of a dagger.[69] What followed is well known. Enraged by so gross an outrage on a member of the Suddozye family, alarmed at the growing power of the Barukzyes, and further irritated by the resolute refusal of Futteh Khan to betray his brothers, who had effected their escape from Herat, Kamran and his father, Shah Mahmoud, agreed to put their noble prisoner to death. They were then on their way from Candahar to Caubul. The ex-minister was brought into their presence, and again called upon to write to his brothers, ordering them to surrender themselves to the Shah. Again he refused, alleging that he was but a poor blind captive; that his career was run; that he had no longer any influence; and that he could not consent to betray his brethren. Exasperated by the resolute bearing of his prisoner, Mahmoud Shah ordered the unfortunate minister—the king-maker to whom he owed his crown—to be put to death before him; and there, in the presence of the feeble father and the cruel son, Futteh Khan was by the attendant courtiers literally hacked to pieces. His nose, ears, and lips were cut off; his fingers severed from his hands, his hands from his arms, his arms from his body. Limb followed limb, and long was the horrid butchery continued before the life of the victim was extinct. Futteh Khan raised no cry, offered no prayer for mercy. His fortitude was unshaken to the last. He died as he had lived, the bravest and most resolute of men—like his noble father, a victim to the perfidy and ingratitude of princes. The murder of Poyndah Khan shook the Suddozye dynasty to its base. The assassination of Futteh Khan soon made it a heap of ruins.[70]

From this time, the rise of Dost Mahomed was rapid. He had the blood of kindred to avenge. The cruelty and ingratitude of Mahmoud and his son were now to be signally punished by the brother of the illustrious sufferer. Azim Khan, who ruled in Cashmere, counselled a course of forbearance; but Dost Mahomed indignantly rejected the proposal; and declaring that it would be an eternal disgrace to the Barukzyes not to chastise the murderers of their chief, swore that he would march upon Caubul, at the head of an army of retribution. Inclined neither to enter personally upon so perilous an undertaking, nor to appear, in such a juncture, wholly supine, Azim Khan presented his brother with three or four lakhs of rupees to defray the charges of the expedition—a sum which was exhausted long before the Sirdar neared Caubul. But in spite of every obstacle, Dost Mahomed reached Koord-Caubul, two marches from the capital, and there encamped his army.

The youthful son of Kamran, Prince Jehangire, was then the nominal ruler of Caubul. But the actual administration of affairs was in the hands of Atta Mahomed. A Sirdar of the Bamezye tribe, a man of considerable ability, but no match for Dost Mahomed, he was now guilty of the grand error of underrating such an adversary. He had acted a conspicuous part in the recent intestine struggles between the Suddozye brothers; but he had no love for the royal family—none for the Barukzyes. He it was who had instigated Kamran to the cruel murder of Futteh Khan, and had with his own hands commenced the inhuman butchery. Now to advance ambitious projects of his own, he was ready to betray his masters. Simulating a friendship which he did not feel, he leagued himself with their enemies, and covenanted to betray the capital into the hands of the Barukzye Sirdars. But Dost Mahomed and his brethren had not forgotten the terrible tragedy which had cut short the great career of the chief of their tribe. In a garden-house which had once belonged to the murdered minister, they met Atta Mahomed, there to complete the covenant for the surrender of the city. A signal was given, when one—the youngest—of the brothers rushed upon the Bamezye chief, threw him to the ground, and subjected him to the cruel process which had preceded the murder of Futteh Khan. They spared his life; but sent him blind and helpless into the world, with the mark of Barukzye vengeance upon zhim—an object less of compassion than of scorn.

The seizure of the Balla Hissar was now speedily effected. The Shah-zadah was surrounded by treachery. Young and beautiful, he was the delight of the women of Caubul; but he had few friends among the chivalry of the empire. Too weak to distinguish the true from the false, he was easily betrayed. Persuaded to withdraw himself into the upper citadel, he left the lower fortress at the mercy of Dost Mahomed. The Sirdar made the most of the opportunity; ran a mine under the upper works, and blew up a portion of them. Death stared the Shah-zadah in the face. The women of Caubul offered up prayers for the safety of the beautiful Prince. The night was dark; the rain descended in torrents. To remain in the citadel was to court destruction. Under cover of the pitchy darkness, it was possible that he might effect his escape. Attended by a few followers, he made the effort, and succeeded. He fled to Ghuzni, and was saved.

Dost Mahomed was now in possession of Caubul. But threatened from two different quarters, his tenure was most insecure. Shah Mahmoud and Prince Kamran were marching down from Herat, and Azim Khan was coming from Cashmere to assert his claims, as the representative of the Barukzye family. But the spirit of legitimacy was not wholly extinct in Afghanistan. The Barukzyes did not profess to conquer for themselves. It was necessary to put forward some scion of the royal family, and to fight and conquer in his name. Dost Mahomed proclaimed Sultan Ali, whilst Azim Khan invited Shah Soojah to emerge from the obscurity of Loodhianah and re-assert his claims to the throne.[71]

Weary of retirement and inactivity, the Shah consented, and an expedition was planned. But the covenant was but of short duration. The contracting parties fell out upon the road, and, instead of fighting a common enemy, got up a battle among themselves. The Shah, who never lived to grow wiser, gave himself such airs, and asserted such ridiculous pretentions, that Azim Khan deserted his new master, and let loose his troops upon the royal cortège. Defeated in the conflict which ensued,[72] Shah Soojah fled to the Khybur hills, and thence betook himself to Sindh. Another puppet being called for, Prince Ayoob, for want of a better, was elevated to that dignity, and the new friends set out for Caubul.

In the meanwhile the royal army, which had marched from Herat under Shah Mahmoud and Prince Kamran approached the capital of Afghanistan. Unprepared to receive so formidable an enemy, weak in numbers, and ill-supplied with money and materials, Dost Mahomed could not, with any hope of success, have given battle to Mahmoud’s forces. The danger was imminent. The royal troops were within six miles of the capital. Dost Mahomed and his followers prepared for flight. With the bridles of their horses in their hands, they stood waiting the approach of the enemy. But their fears were groundless. A flight ensued; but it was not Dost Mahomed’s, but Mahmoud’s army that fled. At the very threshold of victory, the Suddozye Prince, either believing that there was treachery in his ranks, or apprehending that the Barukzyes would seize Herat in his absence, turned suddenly back, and flung himself into the arms of defeat.

The Barukzyes were now dominant throughout Afghanistan. The sovereignty, indeed, of Azim Khan’s puppet, Ayoob, was proclaimed; but, Herat alone excepted, the country was in reality parcelled out among the Barukzye brothers. By them the superior claims of Azim Khan were generally acknowledged. Caubul, therefore, fell to his share. Dost Mahomed took possession of Ghuzni. Pur Dil Khan, Kohan Dil Khan, and their brothers, occupied Candahar. Jubbar Khan, a brother of Dost Mahomed, was put in charge of the Ghilji country. Sultan Mahomed and his brothers succeeded to the government of Peshawur, and the Shah-zadah Sultan Ali, Dost Mahomed’s puppet, sunk quietly into the insignificance of private life.

But this did not last long. Shah Soojah had begun again to dream of sovereignty. He was organising an army at Shikarpoor. Against this force marched Azim Khan, accompanied by the new King, Ayoob. Recalled to the capital by the intrigues of Dost Mahomed, and delayed by one of those complicated plots which display at once the recklessness and the treachery of the Afghan character,[73] the Wuzeer was compelled for a while to postpone the southern expedition. The internal strife subsided, the march was renewned, and Azim Khan moved down on Shikarpoor. But the army of Shah Soojah melted away at his approach.

Then Azim Khan planned an expedition against the Sikhs. He had no fear of Runjeet Singh, whom he had once beaten in battle. Dost Mahomed accompanied his brother, and they marched upon the frontier, by Jellalabad and the Karapa Pass. But the watchful eye of Runjeet was upon them, and he at once took measures for their discomfiture. He well knew the character of the Barukzye brothers—knew them to be avaricious, ambitious, treacherous; the hand of each against his brethren. He thought bribery better than battle, and sent agents to tamper with Sultan Mahomed and the other Peshawur chiefs. Hoping to be enabled, in the end, to throw off the supremacy of Azim Khan, they gladly listened to his overtures. Dost Mahomed received intelligence of the plot, and signified his willingness to join the confederacy. His offer was accepted. This important accession to his party communicated new courage to Runjeet Singh. Everything was soon in train. Azim Khan was at Minchini with his treasure and his Harem, neither of which, in so troubled a state of affairs, could he venture to abandon. Sultan Mahomed wrote to him from the Sikh camp that there was a design upon both. The intelligence filled the Sirdar with grief and consternation. He beheld plainly the treachery of his brothers, shed many bitter tears, looked with fear and trembling into the future; saw disgrace on one side, the sacrifice of his armies and treasure on the other; now resolved to march down upon the enemy, now to break up his encampment and retire. Night closed in upon him whilst in this state of painful agitation and perplexity. Rumours of a disastrous something soon spread through the whole camp. What it was, few could declare beyond the Sirdar’s own tent; but his followers lost confidence in their chief. They knew that some evil had befallen him; that he had lost heart; that his spirit was broken. The nameless fear seized upon the whole army, and morning dawned upon the wreck of a once formidable force. His troops had deserted him, and he prepared to follow, with his treasure and his Harem, to Jellalabad. Runjeet Singh entered Peshawur in triumph; but thought it more prudent to divide the territory between Dost Mahomed and Sultan Mahomed, than to occupy it on his own account, and rule in his own name. The division was accordingly made. In the mean while Azim Khan, disappointed and broken-spirited, was seized with a violent disorder, the effect of anxiety and sorrow, and never quitted the bed of sickness until he was carried to the tomb.[74]

This was in 1823. The death of Azim Khan precipitated the downfal of the Suddozye monarchy, and raised Dost Mahomed to the chief seat in the Douranee Empire. The last wretched remnant of legitimacy was now about to perish by the innate force of its own corruption. The royal puppet, Ayoob, and his son attempted to seize the property of the deceased minister. Tidings of this design reached Candahar, and Shere Dil Khan, with a party of Barukzye adherents, hastened to Caubul to rescue the wealth of his brother and to chastise the spoliators. The Prince was murdered in the presence of his father, and the unhappy King carried off a prisoner to that ill-omened garden-house of Futteh Khan, which had witnessed the destruction of another who had done still fouler wrong to the great Barukzye brotherhood.[75]

In the mean while, Habib-oolah-Khan, son of Azim Khan, had succeeded nominally to the power possessed by his deceased parent. But he had inherited none of the late minister’s intellect and energy, and none of his personal influence. Beside the deathbed of his father he had been entrusted to the guidance of Jubbar Khan, but he had not the good sense to perceive the advantages of such a connexion. He plunged into a slough of dissipation, and, when he needed advice, betook himself to the counsels of men little better and wiser than himself. The ablest of his advisers was Ameen-oolah-Khan, the Loghur chief—known to a later generation of Englishmen as “the infamous Ameen-oolah.” This man’s support was worth retaining; but Habib-oolah, having deprived Jubbar Khan of his government, attempted to destroy Ameen-oolah-Khan; and thus, with the most consummate address, paved the way to his own destruction. Dost Mahomed, ever on the alert, appeared on the stage at the fitting moment. Alone, he had not sufficient resources to compete with the son of Azim Khan; but the Newab speedily joined him; and soon afterwards, in the midst of an engagement in the near neighbourhood of Caubul, the troops of Ameen-oolah-Khan went over bodily to Dost Mahomed; and the son of Azim Khan sought safety within the walls of the Balla Hissar.

Dost Mahomed, having occupied the city, invested the citadel, and would, in all probability, have carried everything before him, if the Candahar chiefs, alarmed by the successes of their brother, and dreading the growth of a power which threatened their own extinction, had not moved out to the ostensible assistance of their nephew. Dost Mahomed retreated into the Kohistan, but the unfortunate Habib-oolah soon found that he had gained nothing by such an alliance. His uncles enticed him to a meeting outside the city, seized him, carried him off to the Loghur country; then took possession of the Balla Hissar, and appropriated all his treasure. Dost Mahomed, however, was soon in arms again, and the Peshawur brothers were before Caubul. The affairs of the empire were then thrown into a state of terrible confusion. The Barukzye brothers were all fighting among themselves for the largest share of sovereignty; but it is said that “their followers have been engaged in deadly strife when the rival leaders were sitting together over a plate of cherries.” To this fraternal cherry-eating, it would appear that Dost Mahomed was not admitted.[76] Sitting over their fruit, his brothers came to the determination of alluring him to an interview, and then either blinding or murdering him. The plot was laid; everything was arranged for the destruction of the Sirdar; but Hadjee Khan Kakur, who subsequently distinguished himself as a traitor of no slight accomplishments, having discovered in time that Dost Mahomed was backed by the strongest party in Caubul, gave him a significant hint, at the proper moment, and the Sirdar escaped with his life. After a few more fraternal schemes of mutual extermination, the brothers entered into a compact by which the government of Ghuzni and the Kohistan was secured to Dost Mahomed, whilst Sultan Mahomed of Peshawur succeeded to the sovereignty of Caubul.

The truce was but of short duration. Shere Dil Khan, the most influential of the Candahar brothers, died. A dangerous rival was thus swept away from the path of Dost Mahomed. The Kuzzilbashes, soon afterwards, gave in their adherence to him; and thus aided, he felt himself in a position to strike another blow for the recovery of Caubul. Sultan Mahomed had done nothing to strengthen himself at the capital. Summoned either to surrender or to defend himself, he deemed it more prudent to negotiate. Consenting to retire on Peshawur, he marched out of one gate of Caubul whilst Dost Mahomed marched in at another, and the followers of the latter shouted out a derisive adieu to the departing chief.

From this time (1826) to the day on which his followers deserted him at Urghandi, after the capture of Ghuzni by the British troops, Dost Mahomed was supreme at Caubul. His brothers saw that it was useless to contest the supremacy; and at last they acknowledged the unequalled power of one whom they had once slighted and despised. And now was it that Dost Mahomed began fully to understand the responsibilities of high command, and the obligations of a ruler both to himself and his subjects. He had hitherto lived the life of a dissolute soldier. His education had been neglected, and in his very boyhood he had been thrown in the way of pollution of the foulest kind. From his youth he had been greatly addicted to wine, and was often to be seen in public reeling along in a state of degrading intoxication, or scarcely able to keep his place in the saddle. All this was now to be reformed. He taught himself to read and to write, accomplishments which he had before, if at all, scantily possessed. He studied the Koran, abandoned the use of strong liquors, became scrupulously abstemious, plain in his attire, assiduous in his attention to business, urbane, and courteous to all. He made a public acknowledgment of his past errors and a profession of reformation, and did not belie by his life the promises which he openly made.[77]

It is not to be questioned that there was, at this time, in the conduct of Dost Mahomed, as a ruler, much that may be regarded with admiration and respect even by Christian men. Success did not disturb the balance of his mind, nor power harden his heart. Simple in his habits, and remarkably affable in his manner, he was accessible to the meanest of his subjects. Ever ready to listen to their complaints and to redress their grievances, he seldom rode abroad without being accosted in the public streets or highways by citizen or by peasant waiting to lay before the Sirdar a history of his grievances or his sufferings, and to ask for assistance or redress. And he never passed the petitioner—never rode on, but would rein in his horse, listen patiently to the complaints of the meanest of his subjects, and give directions to his attendants to take the necessary steps to render justice to the injured, or to alleviate the sufferings of the distressed. Such was his love of equity, indeed, that people asked, “Is Dost Mahomed dead that there is no justice?”

He is even said, by those who knew him well, to have been kindly and humane—an assertion which many who have read the history of his early career will receive with an incredulous smile. But no one who fairly estimates the character of Afghan history and Afghan morals, and the necessities, personal and political, of all who take part in such stirring scenes, can fail to perceive that his vices were rather the growth of circumstances than of any extraordinary badness of heart. Dost Mahomed was not by nature cruel; but once embarked in the strife of Afghan politics, a man must fight it out or die. Every man’s hand is against him, and he must turn his hand against every man. There is no middle course open to him. If he would save himself, he must cast his scruples to the winds. Even when seated most securely on the musnud, an Afghan ruler must commit many acts abhorrent to our ideas of humanity. He must rule with vigour, or not at all. That Dost Mahomed, during the twelve years of supremacy which he enjoyed at Caubul, often resorted, for the due maintenance of his power, to measures of severity incompatible with the character of a humane ruler, is only to say that for twelve years he retained his place at the head of affairs. Such rigour is inseparable from the government of such a people. We cannot rein wild horses with silken braids.

Upon one particular phase of Barukzye policy it is necessary to speak more in detail. Under the Suddozye Kings, pampered and privileged, the Douranee tribes had waxed arrogant and overbearing, and had, in time, erected themselves into a power capable of shaping the destinies of the empire. With one hand they held down the people, and with the other menaced the throne. Their sudden change of fortune seems to have unhinged and excited them. Bearing their new honours with little meekness, and exercising their new powers with little moderation, they revenged their past sufferings on the unhappy people whom they had supplanted, and, partly by fraud, partly by extortion, stripped the native cultivators of the last remnant of property left to them on the new allocation of the lands. In the revolutions which had rent the country throughout the early years of the century, it had been the weight of Douranee influence which had ever turned the scale. They held, indeed, the crown at their disposal, and, seeking their own aggrandisement, were sure to array themselves on the side of the prince who was most liberal of his promises to the tribes. The danger of nourishing such a power as this was not overlooked by the sagacious minds of the Barukzye rulers. They saw clearly the policy of treading down the Douranees, and soon began to execute it.

In the revolution which had overthrown the Suddozye dynasty, the tribes had taken no active part, and the Barukzye Sirdars had risen to power neither by their aid nor in spite of their opposition. A long succession of sanguinary civil wars, which had deprived them, one by one, of the leaders to whom they looked for guidance and support, had so enfeeble and prostrated them, that but a remnant of their former power was left. No immediate apprehension of danger from such a source darkened the dawn of the Barukzye brethren’s career. But to be cast down was not to be broken—to be enfeebled was not to be extinct. There was too much elasticity and vitality in the order for such accidents as this to subject it to more than temporary decline. The Douranees were still a privileged class; still were they fattening upon the immunities granted them by the Suddozye Kings. To curtail these privileges and immunities would be to strike at the source of their dominant influence and commanding strength; and the Barukzye Sirdars, less chivalrous than wise, determined to strike the blow, whilst the Douranees, crippled and exhausted, had little power to resist the attack. Even then they did not venture openly and directly to assail the privileges of the tribes by imposing an assessment on their lands in lieu of the obligation to supply horsemen for the service of the state—an obligation which had for some time past been practically relaxed—but they began cautiously and insidiously to introduce “the small end of the wedge,” by taxing the Ryots, or Humsayehs of the Douranees, whose various services, not only as cultivators but as artificers, had rendered them in the estimation of their powerful masters a valuable kind of property, to be protected from foreign tyranny that they might better bear their burdens at home. These taxes were enforced with a rigour intended to offend the Douranee chiefs; but the trials to which they were then subjected but faintly foreshadowed the greater trials to come.

Little by little, the Barukzye Sirdars began to attach such vexatious conditions to the privileges of the Douranees—so to make them run the gauntlet of all kinds of exactions short of the direct assessment of their lands—that in time, harassed, oppressed, impoverished by these more irregular imposts, and anticipating every day the development of some new form of tyranny and extortion, they were glad to exchange them for an assessment of a more fixed and definite character. From a minute detail of the measures adopted by the Barukzye Sirdars, with the double object of raising revenue and breaking down the remaining strength of the Douranees, the reader would turn away with weariness and impatience; but this matter of Douranee taxation has too much to do with the after-history of the war in Afghanistan, for me to pass it by without at least this slight recognition of its importance.

In the heyday of their prosperity, the Douranees had been too arrogant and unscrupulous to claim from us commiseration in the hour of their decline. The Barukzye Sirdars held them down with a strong hand; and the policy was at least successful. It was mainly the humiliation of these once dominant tribes that secured to Dost Mahomed and his brothers so many years of comparative security and rest. Slight disorders, such as are inseparable from the constitution of Afghan society—a rebellion in one part of the country, the necessity of coercing a recusant governor in another—occasionally distracted the mind of the Sirdar from the civil administration of Caubul. But it was not until the year 1834 that he was called upon to face a more pressing danger, and to prepare himself for a more vigorous contest. The exiled Suddozye Prince, Shah Soojah, weary again of inactivity, and undaunted by past failure, was about to make another effort to re-establish himself in the Douranee Empire; and, with this object, was organising an army in Sindh.

Had there been any sort of unanimity among the Barukzye brothers, this invasion might have been laughed to scorn; but Dost Mahomed felt that there was treachery within, no less than hostility without, and that the open enemy was not more dangerous than the concealed one. Jubbar Khan, Zemaun Khan, and others, were known to be intriguing with the Shah. The Newab, indeed, had gone so far as to assure Dost Mahomed that it was useless to oppose the Suddozye invasion, as Soojah-ool-Moolk was assisted by the British Government, and would certainly be victorious. He implored the Sirdar to pause before he brought down upon himself certain destruction, alleging that it would be better to make terms with the Shah—to secure something rather than to lose everything. But Dost Mahomed knew his man—knew that Jubbar Khan had thrown himself into the arms of the Suddozye, laughed significantly, and said, “Lala, it will be time enough to talk about terms when I have been beaten.” This was unanswerable. The Newab retired; and preparations for war were carried on with renewed activity.

In the mean while, Shah Soojah was girding himself up for the coming struggle with the Barukzye Sirdars. In 1831 he had sought the assistance of Runjeet Singh towards the recovery of his lost dominions; but the Maharajah had set such an extravagant price upon his alliance, that the negotiations fell to the ground without any results.[78] The language of the Sikh ruler had been insolent and dictatorial. He had treated the Shah as a fallen prince, and endeavoured, in the event of his restoration, to reduce him to a state of vassalage so complete, that even the prostrate Suddozye resented the humiliating attempt. The idea of making another effort to regain his lost dominions had, however, taken such shape in his mind, that it was not to be lightly abandoned. But empires are not to be won without money, and the Shah was lamentably poor. Jewels he had to the value of two or three lakhs of rupees; and he was eager to pledge them. But the up-country bankers were slow to make the required advances. “If 1000 rupees be required,” said the Shah, “these persons will ask a pledge in property of a lakh of rupees.” From the obdurate bankers he turned, in his distress, to the British Government; but the British Government was equally obdurate.

In vain the exiled Shah pleaded that the people of Afghanistan were anxious for his arrival; and that those of Khorassan would flock to his standard and acknowledge no other chief. In vain he declared that the Barukzye Sirdars were “not people around whom the Afghans would rally”—that they had no authority beyond the streets and bazaars of Caubul, and no power to resist an enemy advancing from the northward. Neither up-country bankers nor British functionaries would advance him the requisite funds. “My impatience,” he said, “exceeds all bounds; and if I can raise a loan of two or three lakhs of rupees from any banker, I entertain every expectation that, with the favour of God, my object will be accomplished.” But although the Persians were at that time pushing their conquests in Khorassan, and the Shah continued to declare that the Douranee, Ghilzye, and other tribes, were sighing for his advent, which was to relieve them from the tyranny and oppression of the Barukzyes, and to secure them against foreign invasion, Lord William Bentinck, too intent upon domestic reforms to busy himself with schemes of distant defence, quietly smiled down the solicitations of the Shah, and told him to do what he liked on his own account, but that the British Government would not help him to do it. “My friend,” he wrote, “I deem it my duty to apprise you distinctly, that the British Government religiously abstains from intermeddling with the affairs of its neighbours when this can be avoided. Your Majesty is, of course, master of your own actions; but to afford you assistance for the purpose which you have in contemplation, would not consist with that neutrality which on such occasions is the rule of guidance adopted by the British Government.” But, in spite of these discouragements, before the year 1832 had worn to a close, Shah Soojah “had resolved on quitting his asylum at Loodhianah for the purpose of making another attempt to regain his throne.”

The British agent on the north-western frontier, Captain Wade, officially reported this to Mr. Macnaghten, who then held the office of Political Secretary; and with the announcement went a request, on the part of the Shah, for three months of his stipend in advance. The request, at a later period, rose to a six months’ advance; and a compromise was eventually effected for four. So, with 16,000 rupees extracted as a forestalment of the allowance granted to his family in his absence, he set out for the re-conquest of the Douranee Empire.

On the 28th of January, 1833, he quitted his residence at Loodhianah, and endeavouring, as he went, to raise money and to enlist troops for his projected expedition, moved his camp slowly to Bahwulpore, and thence, across the Indus, to Shikarpoor, where he had determined to rendezvous.

But having thus entered the territory of the Ameers of Sindh as a friend, he did not quit it before he had shown his quality as an enemy, by fighting a hard battle with the Sindhians, and effectually beating them. The pecuniary demands which he had made upon them they had resisted; and the Shah having a considerable army at his command, deeply interested in the event, thought fit to enforce obedience. Early in January, 1834, an engagement took place near Rori, and the pride of the Ameers having been humbled by defeat, they consented to the terms he demanded, and acknowledged the supremacy of the Shah.[79]

Having arranged this matter to his satisfaction, Shah Soojah marched upon Candahar, and in the early summer was before the walls of the city. He invested the place, and endeavoured ineffectually to carry it by assault. The Candahar chiefs held out with much resolution, but it was not until the arrival of Dost Mahomed from Caubul that a general action was risked. The Sirdar lost no time in commencing the attack. Akbar Khan, the chief’s son, who, at a later period, stood out so prominently from the canvas of his country’s history, was at the head of the Barukzye horse; Abdul Samat Khan[80] commanded the foot. No great amount of military skill appears to have been displayed on either side. Akbar Khan’s horsemen charged the enemy with a dashing gallantry worthy of their impetuous leader; but a battalion of the Shah’s troops, under an Indo-Briton, named Campbell, fought with such uncommon energy, that at one time the forces of the Barukzye chiefs were driven back, and victory appeared to be in the reach of the Shah. But Dost Mahomed, who had intently watched the conflict, and kept a handful of chosen troops in reserve, now let them slip, rallied the battalions which were falling back, called upon Akbar Khan to make one more struggle, and, well responded to by his gallant son, rolled back the tide of victory. Shah Soojah, who on the first appearance of Dost Mahomed had lost all heart, and actually given orders to prepare for flight, called out in his desperation to Campbell, “Chupao-chupao,”[81] then ordered his elephant to be wheeled round, and turned his back upon the field of battle. His irresolution and the unsteadfastness of the Douranees proved fatal to his cause.

The Douranee tribes had looked upon the advance of the King with evident satisfaction. Trodden down and crushed as they had been by the Barukzyes, they would have rejoiced in the success of the royal cause. But they had not the power to secure it. Depressed and enfeebled by long years of tyranny, they brought only the shadow of their former selves to the standard of the Suddozye monarch. Without horses, without arms, without discipline, without heart to sustain them upon any great enterprise, and without leaders to inspire them with the courage they lacked themselves, the Douranees went into the field a feeble, broken-spirited rabble. Had they been assured of the success of the enterprise, they would at least have assumed a bold front, and flung all their influence, such as it was, into the scales on the side of the returned Suddozye; but remembering the iron rule and the unsparing vengeance of the Barukzye Sirdars, they dreaded the consequences of failure, and when the crisis arrived, either stood aloof from the contest, or shamefully apostatised at the last.

The few, indeed, who really joined the royal standard contrived to defeat the enterprise; for whilst the Shah’s Hindostanees were engaging the enemy in front, the Douranees, moved by an irrepressible avidity for plunder, fell upon the baggage in the rear, and created such a panic in the ranks that the whole army turned and fled. It was not possible to rally them. The battle was lost. The Barukzye troops pushed forward. Campbell, who had fallen like a brave man, covered with wounds, was taken prisoner, with others of the Shah’s principal officers; and all the guns, stores, and camp-equippage of the Suddozye Prince fell into the hands of the victors. The scenes of plunder and carnage which ensued are said to have been terrible. The Shah fled to Furrah, and thence by the route of Seistan and Shorawuk to Kelat. The Candahar chiefs urged the pursuit of the fugitive, but Dost Mahomed opposed the measure, and the unfortunate Prince was suffered to escape.

But scarcely had the Sirdar returned to Caubul when he found himself compelled to prepare for a new and more formidable enterprise. Runjeet Singh was in possession of Peshawur. The treachery of Sultan Mahomed Khan and his brothers had rebounded upon themselves, and they had lost the province which had been the object of so much intrigue and contention. In their anxiety to destroy Dost Mahomed, they opened a communication with the Sikhs, who advanced to Peshawur ostensibly as friends, and then took possession of the city.[82] Sultan Mahomed Khan ignominiously fled. The Sikh army under Hurree Singh consisted only of 9000 men, and had the Afghans been commanded by a competent leader they might have driven back a far stronger force, and retained possession of the place. The Peshawur chiefs were everlastingly disgraced, and Peshawur lost to the Afghans for ever.

But Dost Mahomed could not submit patiently to this. Exasperated against Runjeet Singh, and indignant at the fatuous conduct of his brothers, he determined on declaring a religious war against the Sikhs, and began with characteristic energy to organise a force sufficiently strong to wrest Peshawur from the hands of the usurpers. To strengthen his influence he assumed, at this time, the title of Ameer-al-Mominin (commander of the faithful[83]), and exerted himself to inflame the breasts of his followers with that burning Mahomedan zeal which has so often impelled the disciples of the Prophet to deeds of the most consummate daring and most heroic self-abandonment. Money was now to be obtained, and to obtain it much extortion was, doubtless, practised. An Afghan chief has a rude and somewhat arbitrary manner of levying rates and taxes. Dost Mahomed made no exception in his conduct to “the good old rule,” which had so long, in critical conjunctures, been observed in that part of the world. He took all that he could get, raised a very respectable force, coined money in his own name, and then prepared for battle.

At the head of an imposing array of fighting men, the Ameer marched out of Caubul. He had judged wisely. The declaration of war against the infidel—war proclaimed in the name of the Prophet—had brought thousands to his banner; and ever as he marched the great stream of humanity seemed to swell and swell, as new tributaries came pouring in from every part, and the thousands became tens of thousands. From the Kohistan, from the hills beyond, from the regions of the Hindoo-Koosh, from the remoter fastnesses of Toorkistan, multitudes of various tribes and denominations, moved by various impulses, but all noisily boasting their true Mahomedan zeal, came flocking in to the Ameer’s standard. Ghilzyes and Kohistanees, sleek Kuzzilbashes and rugged Oosbegs, horsemen and foot-men, all who could wield a sword or lift a matchlock, obeyed the call in the name of the Prophet. “Savages from the remotest recesses of the mountainous districts,” wrote one, who saw this strange congeries of Mussulman humanity,[84] “who were dignified with the profession of the Mahomedan faith, many of them giants in form and strength, promiscuously armed with sword and shield, bows and arrows, matchlocks, rifles, spears and blunderbusses, concentrated themselves around the standard of religion, and were prepared to slay, plunder, and destroy, for the sake of God and the Prophet, the unenlighted infidels of the Punjab.”

The Mussulman force reached Peshawur. The brave heart of Runjeet Singh quailed before this immense assemblage, and he at once determined not to meet it openly in the field. There was in his camp a man named Harlan, an American adventurer, now a doctor and now a general, who was ready to take any kind of service with any one disposed to pay him, and to do any kind of work at the instance of his master.[85] Clever and unscrupulous, he was a fit agent to do the Maharajah’s bidding. Runjeet despatched him as an envoy to the Afghan camp. He went ostensibly to negotiate with Dost Mahomed; in reality to corrupt his supporters. “On the occasion,” he says, with as little sense of shame as though he had been performing an exploit of the highest merit, “of Dost Mahomed’s visit to Peshawur, which occurred during the period of my service with Runjeet Singh, I was despatched by the Prince as ambassador to the Ameer. I divided his brothers against him, exciting their jealousy of his growing power, and exasperating the family feuds with which, from my previous acquaintance, I was familiar, and stirred up the feudal lords of his durbar, with the prospects of pecuniary advantages. I induced his brother, Sultan Mahomed Khan, the lately deposed chief of Peshawur, with 10,000 retainers, to withdraw suddenly from his camp about nightfall. The chief accompanied me towards the Sikh camp, whilst his followers fled to their mountain fastnesses. So large a body retiring from the Ameer’s control, in opposition to his will and without previous intimation, threw the general camp into inextricable confusion, which terminated in the clandestine rout of his forces, without beat of drum, or sound of bugle, or the trumpet’s blast, in the quiet stillness of midnight. At daybreak no vestige of the Afghan camp was seen, where six hours before 50,000 men and 10,000 horses, with all the busy host of attendants, were rife with the tumult of wild emotion.”[86]

Thus was this great expedition, so promising at the outset, brought prematurely to a disastrous close. Treachery broke up, in a single night, a vast army which Runjeet Singh had contemplated with dismay. The Ameer, with the débris of his force, preserving his guns, but sacrificing much of his camp-equipage, fell back upon Caubul, reseated himself quietly in the Balla Hissar, and, in bitterness of spirit, declaiming against the emptiness of military renown, plunged deeply into the study of the Koran.

From this pleasant abstraction from warlike pursuits, the Ameer was, after a time, aroused by a well grounded report to the effect that Sultan Mahomed had been again intriguing with the Sikhs, and that a plan had been arranged for the passage of a Punjabee force through the Khybur Pass, with the ultimate intention of moving upon Caubul. An expedition was accordingly fitted out, in the spring of 1837; but the Ameer, having sufficient confidence in his sons Afzul Khan and Mahomed Abkar, sent the Sirdars in charge of the troops with Meerza Samad Khan, his minister, as their adviser. The Afghan forces laid siege to Jumrood, and on the 30th of April Hurree Singh came from Peshawur to its relief. An action took place, in which both the young Sirdars greatly distinguished themselves, and Shumshoodeen Khan’s conduct was equally conspicuous. The Sikh chieftain, Hurree Singh, was slain, and his disheartened troops fell back and entrenched themselves under the walls of Jumrood. Akbar Khan proposed to follow up the victory by dashing on to Peshawur; but the Meerza, who, according to Mr. Masson, had, during the action, “secreted himself in some cave or sheltered recess, where, in despair, he sobbed, beat his breast, tore his beard, and knocked his head upon the ground,” now made his appearance, declaring that his prayers had been accepted, and “entreated the boasting young man to be satisfied with what he had done.” The advice was sufficiently sound, whatever may have been the motives which dictated it. Strong Sikh reinforcements soon appeared in sight, and the Afghan army was compelled to retire. The battle of Jumrood was long a theme of national exultation. Akbar Khan plumed himself greatly on the victory, and was unwilling to share the honours of the day with his less boastful brother. But it was not a very glorious achievement, and it may be doubted whether Afzul Khan did not really distinguish himself even more than his associate. In one respect, however, it was a heavy blow to the Maharajah. Runjeet Singh had lost one of his best officers and dearest friends. The death of Hurree Singh was never forgotten or forgiven.

The loss of Peshawur rankled deeply in the mind of Dost Mahomed. The empire of Ahmed Shah had been rapidly falling to pieces beneath the heavy blows of the Sikh spoliator. The wealthy provinces of Cashmere and Mooltan had been wrested from the Douranees in the time of the Suddozye Princes, and now the same unsparing hand had amputated another tract of country, to the humiliation of the Barukzye Sirdars. The Ameer, in bitterness of spirit, bewailed the loss of territory, and burned to resent the affront. In spite, however, of the boasted victory of Jumrood, he had little inclination to endeavour to wrest the lost territory, by force of arms, from the grasp of the Sikh usurpers. Mistrusting his own strength, in this conjuncture he turned his thoughts towards foreign aid. Willing to form almost any alliance so long as this great end was to be gained, he now looked towards Persia for assistance, and now invited the friendly aid of the British. It was in the autumn of this year, 1837, that two events, which mightily affected the future destinies of Dost Mahomed, were canvassed in the bazaars of Caubul. A British emissary was about to arrive at the Afghan capital; and a Persian army was advancing upon the Afghan frontier. Before the first snows had fallen, Captain Burnes was residing at Caubul, and Mahomed Shah was laying siege to Herat.[87]

CHAPTER VIII.

[1810-1837.]

Later Events in Persia—The Treaty of Goolistan—Arrival of Sir Gore Ouseley—Mr. Morier and Mr. Ellis—The Definitive Treaty—The War of 1826-27—The Treaty of Toorkomanchai—Death of Futteh Ali Shah—Accession of Mahomed Shah—His Projects of Ambition—The Expedition against Herat.

It is necessary now to revert, for a little space, to the progress of affairs in Western Asia. Whilst the Suddozye Princes in Afghanistan had been gradually relaxing their hold of the Douranee Empire, Persia had been still struggling against Russian encroachment—still entangled in the meshes of a long and harassing war. Though enfeebled by the paramount necessity of concentrating the resources of the empire on the great European contest, which demanded the assertion of all her military strength, the aggressive tendencies of the great northern power were not to be entirely controlled. Little could she think of remote acquisitions of territory in Georgia, whilst the eagles of Napoleon were threatening her very existence at the gates of Moscow itself. Still with little intermission, up to the year 1813, the war dragged languidly on. Then the good offices of Great Britain were successfully employed for the re-establishment of friendly relations between the two contending powers;[88] and a treaty, known as the treaty of Goolistan, was negotiated between them. By this treaty Persia ceded to Russia all her acquisitions on the south of the Caucasus, and agreed to maintain no naval force on the Caspian sea; whilst Russia entered into a vague engagement to support, in the event of a disputed succession, the claims of the heir-apparent against all competitors for the throne.

During these wars, which were carried on with varying success, the Persian troops upon more than one occasion had been led to the charge by English officers of approved gallantry and skill. Accompanying General Malcolm to Persia in 1810, they were retained in the country by Sir Harford Jones; and were very soon busily employed in drilling and disciplining the infantry and artillery of the Persian Prince.[89] Of these officers, the most conspicuous were Captain Christie and Lieutenant Lindsay, who led into the field the battalions which they had instructed, and more than once turned the tide of victory against their formidable European opponents.[90]

In the mean while, Sir Harford Jones had been succeeded in the Persian embassy by Sir Gore Ouseley, who in the summer of 1811 reached Teheran in the character of Ambassador Extraordinary from the King of England. The preliminary treaty which Jones had negotiated, was now to be wrought into a definitive one. It was somewhat modified in the process. The new treaty was more liberal than the old. In the preliminary articles relating to the subsidy, it had been set down that the amount should be regulated in the definitive treaty; but it was understood between the British and the Persian plenipotentiary, that the amount was on no account to exceed 160,000 tomauns, and that the manner in which it was to be afforded should be left to the discretion of the British Government. But in the definitive treaty the amount was fixed at 200,000 tomauns (or about 150,000l.); and a special article was introduced, setting forth that “since it is the custom of Persia to pay her troops six months in advance, the English ambassador shall do all in his power to pay the subsidy granted in lieu of troops, in as early instalments as may be convenient and practicable,”—a pleasant fiction, of which it has been said, with truth, that it might “well be taken for a burlesque.”

On the 14th of March, 1812, this treaty was signed by Sir Gore Ouseley, Mahomed Shefi, and Mahomed Hassan; and a week afterwards, the British ambassador wrote to inform the Court of Directors of the East India Company that “the good effects of the definitive treaty, and the proofs of the confidence with which it has inspired the Shah, are already manifest.” The Persian monarch, having declared his fixed determination to strengthen Abbas Meerza to the utmost of his ability, by raising for him a disciplined army of 50,000 men, requested Sir Gore Ouseley to obtain for him, with the utmost possible despatch, 30,000 stands of English muskets and accoutrements, the price of which was to be deducted from the subsidy. “The Shah,” wrote the envoy, “has further promised me, that this large deduction from the subsidy shall be made up, through me, to Abbas Meerza’s army from the royal coffers, so that we may congratulate ourselves on having worked a wonderful (and, by many, unexpected) alteration in the Shah’s general sentiments.”[91]

Sir Gore Ouseley returned to England, leaving his secretary, Mr. Morier, in charge of the Mission; but before the treaty was finally accepted, it was modified by the British Government, and Mr. Henry Ellis was despatched to Persia, in 1814, to negotiate these alterations at the Persian Court. A comparison of the treaty, signed by Sir Gore Ouseley, with that which was subsequently accepted, will show that the alterations, which were very considerable in respect of words, were less so in respect of substance. The most important conditions of the treaty are to be found in both documents. But the progress of events had rendered it necessary to expunge certain passages from the treaty negotiated by Sir Gore Ouseley. For example, the 7th article of that treaty provided, that “should the King of Persia form magazines of materials for ship-building on the coast of the Caspian Sea, and resolve to establish a naval force, the King of England shall grant permission to naval officers, seamen, shipwrights, carpenters, &c., to proceed to Persia from London and Bombay, and to enter the service of the King of Persia—the pay of such officers, artificers, &c., shall be given by his Persian Majesty at the rates which may be agreed upon with the English ambassador.”[92] But by the treaty of Goolistan, Persia engaged not to maintain a naval force on the Caspian. The article, therefore, was necessarily expunged.

On the 25th of November, the definitive treaty, which was finally accepted, was concluded at Teheran by Messrs. Morier and Ellis. It was declared to be strictly defensive. The plan of defence thus marked out was more extensive than practicable. It bound the Persian Government to engage “not to allow any European army to enter the Persian territory, nor to proceed towards India, nor to any of the ports of that country; and also to engage not to allow any individuals of such European nations, entertaining a design of invading India, or being at enmity with Great Britain, whatever, to enter Persia.” “Should any European powers,” it was added, “wish to invade India by the road of Khorassan, Tartaristan, Bokhara, Samarcand, or other routes, his Persian Majesty engages to induce the kings and governors of those countries to oppose such invasion as much as is in his power, either by the fear of his arms or by conciliatory measures.” In the third article it is laid down, that “the limits of the territories of the two states of Russia and Persia shall be determined according to the admission of Great Britain, Persia, and Russia”—a stipulation of an extraordinary and, perhaps, unexampled character, inasmuch as Russia had not consented to this mode of adjudication. The eighth and ninth articles related to Afghanistan, and are contained in the following words:

VIII. “Should the Afghans be at war with the British nation, his Persian Majesty engages to send an army against them, in such manner, and of such force, as may be concerted with the English Government. The expenses of such an army shall be defrayed by the British Government, in such manner as may be agreed upon at the period of its being required.”

IX. “If war should be declared between the Afghans and Persians, the English Government shall not interfere with either party, unless their mediation to effect a peace shall be solicited by both parties.”[93]

One more clause of the definitive treaty calls for notice in this place. In Article VI., it is covenanted that “should any European power be engaged in war with Persia, when at peace with England, his Britannic Majesty engages to use his best endeavours to bring Persia and such European power to a friendly understanding.” “If however,” it is added, “his Majesty’s cordial interference should fail of success, England shall still, if required, in conformity with the stipulations in the preceding articles, send a force from India, or, in lieu thereof, pay an annual subsidy (200,000 tomauns) for the support of a Persian army, so long as a war in the supposed case shall continue, and until Persia shall make peace with such nation.” By this article we, in effect, pledged ourselves to support Persia in her wars with Russia, even though we should be at peace with the latter state. By the convention of Goolistan, it is true that amicable relations had been re-established between the Russian and Persian Governments; but these relations were likely at any time to be interrupted; and it was not difficult to perceive, that, before long, the aggressive policy of Russia would again bring that state into collision with its Persian neighbour. The article, in reality, exposed us at least to the probability of a war with Russia; and laid down the doctrine that every future aggression of the latter against the dominions of the Persian Shah was to be regarded in the light of a hostile demonstration against our Indian possessions.

For some time there was little to disturb the even current of affairs, or to change the character of our relations towards the Persian state. It was the policy of Great Britain, by strengthening the military resources of the country, to render Persia an insurmountable barrier against the invasion of India by any European army. But by this time France had ceased to be formidable; and what was ostensibly defence against the powers of Europe, was, in reality, defence against the ambition of the Czar. It is doubtful, however, how far our policy was successful. We supplied the Persian army with English arms and English discipline; our officers drilled the native troops after the newest European fashions, and for some time the Crown Prince, Abbas Meerza, was delighted with his new plaything. But the best-informed authorities concur in opinion that the experiment was a failure; and that the real military strength of the empire was not augmented by this infusion of English discipline into the raw material of the Persian army.[94] It has been said, indeed, and with undeniable truth, by one who was himself for many years among the instructors of the Persian army, that “when Persia again came into collision with Russia in 1826, her means and power as a military nation were positively inferior to those which she possessed at the close of her former struggle.”

From the date of the convention of Goolistan, up to the year 1826, there was at least an outward observance of peace between the Russian and Persian states. The peace, however, was but a hollow one, destined soon to be broken. The irritation of a disputed boundary had ever since the ratification of the treaty of Goolistan kept the two states in a restless, unsettled condition of ill-disguised animosity; and now it broke out at last into acts of mutual defiance. It is hard to say whether Russia or Persia struck the first unpardonable blow. The conduct of the former had been insolent and offensive—designed perhaps to goad the weaker state into open resentment, and to furnish a pretext for new wars, to be followed by new acquisitions of Eastern territory. Both parties were prepared, by a long series of mutual provocations, for the now inevitable contest. It needed very little to bring them into open collision.

In Georgia there had been frightful misrule. The officers of the Christian government had wantonly and insanely outraged the religious feelings of its Mussulman subjects; and now an outburst of fierce Mahomedan zeal in the adjoining kingdom declared how dangerous had been the interference. The Moollahs of Persia rose as one man. Under pain of everlasting infamy and everlasting perdition, they called upon the Shah to resent the insults which had been put upon their religion. The mosques rang with excited appeals to the feelings of all true believers; and every effort was made by the excited ecclesiastics to stimulate the temporal authorities to the declaration of a holy war.

The King, however, shrank from the contest. He had no ambition to face again in the field the formidable European enemy who had so often scattered the flower of the Persian army, and trodden over the necks of the vanquished to the acquisition of new dominions. But the importunity of the Moollahs was not to be withstood. He pledged himself that if Gokchah—one of the disputed tracts of country occupied by the Russians—were not restored, he would declare war against the Muscovite power. Convinced that the Russian Government would yield this strip of land, acquired as it was without justice, and retained without profit, the Shah believed that the condition was, in effect, an evasion of the pledge. The error was soon manifest. It was not in the nature of Russia to yield an inch of country righteously or unrighteously acquired—profitably or unprofitably retained. Gokchah was not restored. The Moollahs became more and more clamorous. The Shah was threatened with the forfeiture of all claims to paradisaical bliss: and the war was commenced.

Excited by the appeals of the Moollahs, the Persians flung themselves into the contest with all the ardour and ferocity of men burning to wipe out in the blood of their enemies the insults and indignities that had been heaped upon them. They rose up and massacred all the isolated Russian garrisons and outposts in their reach. Abbas Meerza took the field at the head of an army of 40,000 men; and at the opening of the campaign the disputed territory of Gokchah, with Balikloo and Aberan, were recovered by their old masters.

These successes, however, were but short-lived. The son of the Prince Royal, Mahomed Meerza, a youth more impetuous than skilful in the field, soon plunged the divisions he commanded into a sea of overwhelming disaster. The Prince himself, not more fortunate, was in the same month of September, 1826, beaten by the Russian General, Paskewitch, in open battle, with a loss of 1200 men. The war was resumed in the following spring, and continued throughout the year with varying success; but the close of it witnessed the triumph of the Russians. Erivan and Tabreez fell into their hands.[95] Enfeebled and dispirited, the Persians shrunk from the continuance of the struggle. The intervention of Great Britain was gladly accepted, and Persia submitted to the terms of a humiliating peace.

After some protracted negotiations, a new treaty, superseding that of Goolistan, was signed at Toorkomanchai, in February, 1828, by General Paskewitch and Abbas Meerza. By this treaty, Persia ceded to the Czar the Khanates of Erivan and Nakhichevan; and consented to the recognition of the line of frontier dictated by the Russian Government. The frontier line between the two empires, laid down in the fourth article of the treaty, commenced at the first of the Ottoman States nearest to the little Ararat mountain, which it crossed to the south of the Lower Karasson, following the course of that river till it falls into the Araxes opposite Sherour, and then extending along the latter river as far as Abbas-Abad.[96] The line of frontier then followed the course of the Araxes to a point twenty-one wersts beyond the ford of Ledl-boulak, when it struck off in a straight line drawn across the plain of Moghan, to the bed of the river Bolgaron, twenty-one wersts above the point of confluence of the two Rivers Adinabazar and Sarakamyshe; then passing over the summit of Ojilkoir and other mountains, it extended to the source of the River Atara, and followed the stream until it falls into the Caspian Sea.

Such was the boundary laid down in the treaty of Toorkomanchai. The other articles granted an indemnity to Russia of eighty millions of roubles for the expenses of the war—yielded to that state the sole right of having armed vessels on the Caspian—recognised the inheritance of Abbas Meerza—and granted an amnesty to the inhabitants of Aderbijan. To Persia this treaty was deeply humiliating; but the manifestoes of the Emperor, with characteristic mendacity, boasted of its moderation, and declared that its ends were merely the preservation of peace and the promotion of commerce. “For us,” it was said, “one of the principal results of this peace consists in the security which it gives to one part of our frontiers. It is solely in this light that we consider the utility of the new countries which Russia has just acquired. Every part of our conquests that did not tend to this end was restored by our orders, as soon as the conditions of the treaty were published. Other essential advantages result from the stipulations in favour of commerce, the free development of which we have always considered as one of the most influential causes of industry, and at the same time as the true guarantee of solid peace, founded on an entire reciprocity of wants and interests.”

The hypocrisy of all this is too transparent to call for comment. Russia had thus extended her frontier largely to the eastward; and England had not interfered to prevent the completion of an act, by which it has been said that Persia was “delivered, bound hand and foot, to the Court of St. Petersburgh.”[97] How far the British Government was bound to assist Persia in the war of 1826-27, still remains an open question. The treaty of Teheran pledged Great Britain, in the event of a war between Persia and any European State, either to send an army from India to assist the Shah, or to grant an annual subsidy of 200,000 tomauns during the continuance of the war; but this article was saddled with the condition that the war was to be one in nowise provoked by any act of Persian aggression. A question, therefore, arose, as to whether the war of 1826-27 was provoked by the aggressions of Persia or of Russia. Each party pronounced the other the aggressor. The Persian Government maintained that the unjust and violent occupation of Gokchah by a Russian force furnished a legitimate casus belli; but the Russian manifestoes declared that, “in the midst of friendly negotiations, and when positive assurances gave us the hope of preserving the relations of good neighbourhood with Persia, the tranquillity of our people was disturbed on the frontiers of the Caucasus, and a sudden invasion violated the territory of the Emperor in contempt of solemn treaties.” Russian statesmen have never been wanting in ability to make the worse appear the better reason. Whatever overt acts may have been committed, it is certain that the real provocation came not from the Mahomedan, but from the Christian State.[98] The backwardness of England at such a time was of dubious honesty, as it doubtless was of dubious expediency. A more forward policy might have been more successful. Had Russia been as well disposed to neutrality as Great Britain, it would have been to the advantage of the latter to maintain the most friendly relations with the Muscovite State; but the unscrupulousness of Russia placed England at a disadvantage. The game was one in which the more honourable player was sure to be foully beaten. Russia made new acquisitions of Eastern territory, and England remained a passive spectator of the spoliation.

It is doubtful whether our statesmen were ever satisfied that, in refusing the subsidy and hesitating to mediate, they acted up to the spirit of the treaty of Teheran.[99] Certain it is, that the claim of the Persian Government, at this time, awakened our British diplomatists to a re-consideration of those subsidy articles which had involved, and might again involve us in difficulties, not only of an embarrassing, but of a somewhat discreditable, character. It was desirable to get rid of these perplexing stipulations. The time was opportune; the occasion was at hand. The large indemnity insisted upon by Russia drove the Persian financiers to extremities, and reduced them to all kinds of petty shifts to meet the extortionate demand. In this conjucture, England, like an expert money-lender, was ready to take advantage of the embarrassments of the Persian State, and to make its own terms with the impoverished creditor of the unyielding Muscovite. The bargain was struck. Sir John Macdonald, on the part of the British Government, passed a bond to the Shah for 250,000 tomauns as the price of the amendment of the subsidy articles, and subsequently obtained the required erasures by the payment of four-fifths of the amount.