The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia

by Peter Hopkirk

  Unlike senior government and Company officials in London, Wellesley himself did not lose too much sleep over Napoleon’s presence in Egypt. He was frankly far from convinced that it was possible to launch a successful invasion from there, whether by land or by sea. This, however, did not prevent him from turning the fears of those in London to his own advantage. A firm believer in forward policies, he was as keen to advance the Company’s frontiers in India as the directors were to keep them where they were. They simply wanted profits for their impatient shareholders, not costly territorial gains. As it was, the Company had found itself drawn reluctantly and expensively into the vacuum created by the disintegration of Mogul rule in India, and therefore increasingly involved in government and administration. Consequently, instead of being able to provide their shareholders with the annual dividend they had been guaranteed, the directors faced ever-mounting debts and the perpetual threat of bankruptcy. Fighting off an invasion, they knew, would be totally ruinous, even if successful, as little assistance could be expected from the government at home which was itself engaged in the life-and-death struggle with France.

  The crisis gave Wellesley the opportunity he needed, however. This was the excuse to crush and dispossess those native rulers who showed themselves to be friendly with the French, whose agents were still extremely active in India. But he was not to stop there. As he took full advantage of the free hand London was forced to give him to protect its valuable interests, large new areas of the country came under British control. Because his reports took so long to reach London, and anyway were always deliberately vague, Wellesley was able to continue these expropriations throughout his seven-year tenure as Governor-General. Thus, by the time of his recall in 1805, Company territory, its subsidiary states and regions partially controlled by it had expanded dramatically from the original three coastal presidencies of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay to include the greater part of India as we know it today. Only Sind, the Punjab and Kashmir still retained their independence.

  The initial impetus, or pretext, for this spectacular piece of empire-building had been provided by Napoleon’s precipitate move. Yet that threat, which had caused such panic in London, proved to be extremely short-lived. Making up for his failure to find and intercept the French armada before it reached Egypt, Admiral Horatio Nelson finally came upon it anchored in Aboukir Bay, east of Alexandria. There, on August 1, 1798, he trapped and destroyed it, only two vessels managing to escape. He thus cut Napoleon off from France, severing his supply lines, and leaving him to get his troops home as best he could. But if this defeat enabled Company chiefs in London to breathe again, the young Napoleon had far from abandoned his dream of driving the British out of India and building a great French empire in the East. Indeed, wholly undisturbed by his failure in Egypt, he was, on his return to France, to move from strength to strength with a succession of brilliant victories in Europe.

  Before embarking on these, however, he was to receive a startling proposition from St Petersburg. It came, early in 1801, from Tsar Paul I, Catherine the Great’s successor, and offered him the opportunity to avenge himself on the British and further his ambitions in the East. Paul, who shared his dislike of the British, had decided to revive the plan, which Catherine had turned down a decade earlier, for an invasion of India. It too involved a long advance southwards across Central Asia by Russian troops. But he had a better idea. It should be a combined attack by both Russia and France, which would make victory over the Company’s armies virtually certain. He put his grandiose plan secretly to Napoleon, whom he admired almost to the point of infatuation, and awaited his reply.

  Paul’s idea was for a force of 35,000 Cossacks to advance across Turkestan, recruiting the warlike Turcoman tribes there as it went with promises of unimaginable plunder if they helped to drive the British from India. At the same time a French army of similar size would descend the Danube, cross the Black Sea in Russian vessels, and continue by the same means via the Don, Volga and Caspian Sea to Astrabad, on the southeastern shore of the latter. Here they would rendezvous with the Cossacks before proceeding eastwards through Persia and Afghanistan to the River Indus. From there they would launch their massive onslaught together against the British. Paul had plotted their progress almost to the hour. It would take the French, he calculated, twenty days to reach the Black Sea. Fifty-five days later they would enter Persia with their Russian allies, while a further forty-five would see them on the Indus – just four months from start to finish. To try to win the sympathy and co-operation of the Persians and Afghans through whose territory they would pass, envoys would ride ahead explaining the reason for their coming. ‘The sufferings under which the population of India groans’, they would be told, ‘have inspired France and Russia with compassion’, and the two powers had united for the sole purpose of freeing India’s millions ‘from the tyrannical and barbarous yoke of the English’.

  Napoleon was unimpressed by Paul’s scheme. ‘Supposing the combined army be united at Astrabad,’ he asked him, ‘how do you propose that it should get to India, across a barren and almost savage country, a march of nearly 1,000 miles?’ The region he referred to, Paul wrote back, was neither barren nor savage. ‘It has long been traversed by open and spacious roads,’ he insisted. ‘Rivers water it at almost every step. There is no want of grass for fodder. Rice grows in abundance . . .’ From whom he obtained this highly coloured account of the grim tract of desert and mountain which they would have to negotiate before reaching their objective is not known, though he may simply have been carried away by his own enthusiasm. Paul concluded his letter with this exhortation to his hero: ‘The French and Russian armies are eager for glory. They are brave, patient and unwearied. Their courage, their perseverance and the wisdom of their commanders will enable them to surmount all obstacles.’ Napoleon remained unconvinced and declined Paul’s invitation to join him in the venture. However, as will be seen in due course, a not dissimilar scheme was already beginning to take shape in Napoleon’s own mind. Disappointed, but undeterred, Paul decided to go it alone.

  On January 24, 1801, Paul issued orders to the chief of the Don Cossacks to raise a large force of fighting men at the frontier town of Orenburg, and prepare to march on India. In the event, the number mustered was only 22,000, far short of that originally deemed necessary by Paul’s advisers for such an operation. Accompanied by artillery, they were to proceed via Khiva and Bokhara to the Indus, a journey which Paul calculated would take them three months. On reaching Khiva they were to free Russian subjects held in slavery there, and at Bokhara to do the same. Their main task, however, was to drive the British out of India, and bring it, together with its trade, under St Petersburg’s control. ‘You are to offer peace to all who are against the British,’ Paul ordered the Cossack leader, ‘and assure them of the friendship of Russia.’ He concluded with these words: ‘All the wealth of the Indies shall be your reward. Such an enterprise will cover you with immortal glory, secure you my goodwill, load you with riches, give an opening to our commerce, and strike the enemy a mortal blow.’

  It is quite evident that Paul and his advisers knew virtually nothing about the approach routes to India, or about the country itself and the British dispositions there. Paul frankly admitted as much in his written instructions to the expedition’s leader. ‘My maps’, he told him, ‘only go as far as Khiva and the River Oxus. Beyond these points it is your affair to gain information about the possessions of the English, and the condition of the native population subject to their rule.’ Paul advised him to send ahead scouts to reconnoitre the route and to ‘repair the roads’, though how he came to believe in the existence of the latter in this vast, desolate and largely uninhabited region he does not say. Finally, at the last minute, he dispatched to the Cossack chief ‘a new and detailed map of India’ which he had just managed to obtain, together with the promise of infantry support as soon as this could be spared.

  From all this it is clear that no serious thought or study had
been given to this wild adventure. It is equally clear, as Napoleon had almost certainly realised, that Paul, a lifelong manic-depressive, was rapidly losing his reason. But the dutiful Cossacks, who had spearheaded Russia’s conquest of Siberia and were soon to do the same in Central Asia, never thought to question the wisdom of the Tsar, least of all his sanity. Thus, ill-equipped and ill-provisioned for such a momentous undertaking, they rode out of Orenburg in the depths of winter and headed for distant Khiva, nearly 1,000 miles to the south. The going proved cruel, even for the hardened Cossacks. With great difficulty they got their artillery, 44,000 horses (for every man had a spare) and several weeks’ supply of food across the frozen Volga and struck into the snowy Kirghiz Steppe. Little is known about their journey, for the British only learned of it long afterwards, but in a month they had ridden nearly 400 miles, reaching a point just north of the Aral Sea.

  It was there one morning that one of the look-outs spotted in the distance a tiny figure against the snow. Minutes later a galloping horseman caught up with them. Utterly exhausted, he had ridden night and day to bring them the news. Tsar Paul, he told them breathlessly, was dead – assassinated. On March 23, at midnight, a group of court officials, alarmed at Paul’s worsening megalomania (he had shortly before ordered the arrest of the Tsarina and his son and heir Alexander), had entered his bedroom intending to force him to sign abdication papers. Paul had leapt from his bed and tried to escape by scrambling up the chimney, only to be dragged down by his feet. When he refused to sign the document, he was unceremoniously strangled. Alexander, strongly suspected of being privy to the plot, had been proclaimed Tsar the next day. Having no wish to be dragged into an unnecessary war with Britain because of a hair-brained scheme of his father’s, he had at once ordered the recall of the Cossacks.

  In dispatching a messenger to stop them at all costs, Alexander undoubtedly prevented a terrible catastrophe, for the 22,000 Cossacks were riding to almost certain death. Brave and disciplined though they were, it is unlikely that they could have got even half-way to the Indus before disaster struck. Already they were having difficulty in providing for themselves and their horses, and before long frost-bite and sickness would have begun to take their toll. Those who managed to survive these hazards had still to run the gauntlet of hostile Turcoman tribesmen waiting to fall upon anyone entering their domains, not to mention the armies of Khiva and Bokhara. If by a miracle any of them had come through all that alive, and ridden down through the passes to the first British outposts, then it was there that they would have had to face the most formidable foe of all – the well-trained, artillery-backed European and native regiments of the Company’s army. Thanks to Alexander’s promptness, however, they now turned back, just in time, thus living to fight another day.

  Wholly unaware of any of this, or of any malevolent intentions towards them by St Petersburg, the British in India were nonetheless becoming increasingly conscious of their vulnerability to outside attack. The more they extended their frontiers, the less well guarded these inevitably became. Although the immediate threat from Napoleon had receded, following his Egyptian setback, few doubted that sooner or later he would set his sights again on the East. Indeed, his agents were already rumoured to be active in Persia. Were that to fall under his influence, it would represent a far graver menace to India than his brief presence in Egypt had. Another potential aggressor was neighbouring Afghanistan, a warlike kingdom about which little was then known, except that in the past it had launched a number of devastating raids on India. Wellesley determined to neutralise both these threats with a single move.

  In the summer of 1800 there arrived at the royal court in Teheran a British diplomatic mission led by one of Wellesley’s ablest young officers, Captain John Malcolm. Commissioned at the age of only 13, and a fluent Persian speaker and brilliant horseman, he had been transferred to the Company’s political department after attracting the favourable attention of the Governor-General. Laden with lavish gifts, and accompanied by an impressive retinue of 500 men, including 100 Indian cavalry and infantry, and 300 servants and attendants, he reached the Persian capital after marching up from the Gulf. His instructions were to win the friendship of the Shah at any cost (buying it if necessary) and to get it in writing in the form of a defensive treaty. Its aims were to be twofold. First of all it was to include a guarantee that no Frenchman would be allowed to set foot in the Shah’s domains. Second, it was to contain an undertaking that the Shah would declare war on Afghanistan, a long-standing adversary of his, were it to make any hostile move against India. In return, were either the French or the Afghans to attack Persia, then the British would supply the Shah with the necessary ‘warlike stores’ to drive them out. In the event of a French invasion, moreover, the British would undertake to send him ships and troops as well. Put another way, they would be able to attack a French invasion force attempting to reach India across Persia both on the Shah’s territory and in his territorial waters.

  The Shah was delighted by the persuasive Malcolm, who was exceptionally adept at oriental flattery, and even more pleased with the sumptuous gifts he bore, each carefully chosen to appeal to Persian cupidity. These included richly chased guns and pistols, jewelled watches and other instruments, powerful telescopes and huge gilded mirrors for the Shah’s palace. To help smooth the way there were also generous gifts for his senior officials. By the time Malcolm left Teheran for the coast in January 1801, amid much pomp and panoply and protestations of undying friendship, he had obtained, in writing, all the undertakings he had come for. Two treaties, one political and the other commercial, were signed by Malcolm and the Shah’s chief minister on behalf of their respective governments. However, as these were never formally ratified, there was some doubt in London as to just how binding they were. This legalistic nicety, while lost on the Persians, suited the British. For his part, except for the sumptuous presents, the Shah had got little or nothing in return for his own solemn undertakings, as he would shortly discover.

  Not long after the British mission’s departure from Persia, something occurred on the Shah’s northern frontier which gave him good reason – or so he believed – to congratulate himself on having acquired such a powerful ally and protector. He began to feel threatened, not by Napoleon or the Afghans, but by aggressive Russian moves in the Caucasus, that wild and mountainous region where his and the Tsar’s empires met. In September 1801, Tsar Alexander annexed the ancient and independent kingdom of Georgia, which Persia regarded as lying within its own sphere of influence, a move which brought Russian troops rather too close to Teheran for the Shah’s comfort. But although Persian feelings ran high, actual hostilities did not break out between the two powers until June 1804, when the Russians thrust even further south, laying siege to Erivan, the capital of Armenia, a Christian possession of the Shah’s.

  The latter sent urgent pleas to the British, reminding them of the treaty they had signed, in which they agreed to help him if he was attacked. But things had changed since then. Britain and Russia were now allies against the growing menace of Napoleon in Europe. In 1802, after overthrowing the five-man Directory, which had ruled France since the Revolution, Napoleon had appointed himself First Consul, and two years later crowned himself Emperor. He was now at the height of his power, and it was clear that he would not be content until the whole of Europe lay at his feet. The British therefore chose to ignore the Shah’s call for help against the Russians. As it happened, they were quite within their rights, for Malcolm’s treaty made no mention of Russia, only of France and Afghanistan. The Persians were deeply affronted though, seeing this as a betrayal in their hour of need by a people they believed to be their ally. Whatever the rights and wrongs of it, their apparent abandonment of the Shah was very shortly to cost the British dear.

  Early in 1804, informed of what had happened by his agents, Napoleon approached the Shah, offering to help him drive back the Russians in return for the use of Persia as a land-bridge for a French invasion of Ind
ia. At first the Shah demurred, for he had not given up hope of the British, who were nearer at hand, coming to his assistance, and he therefore played for time with Napoleon’s envoys. But when it became clear that no help would come from Calcutta or London, he signed a treaty with Napoleon, on May 4, 1807, in which he agreed to sever all political and commercial relations with Britain, declare war on her, and allow French troops the right of passage to India. At the same time he agreed to receive a large military and diplomatic mission, commanded by a general, which among other things would reorganise and train his army along modern European lines. Officially this was to enable him to win back territories which he had lost to the Russians, but there seemed little doubt to those responsible for the defence of India that Napoleon intended to include the reinvigorated Persian troops in his designs against them.

  It was a brilliant coup by Napoleon, but worse was to follow. In the summer of 1807, after subduing Austria and Prussia, he defeated the Russians at Friedland, forcing them to sue for peace and to join his so-called Continental System, the blockade aimed at bringing Britain to her knees. The peace talks took place at Tilsit, amid great secrecy, aboard a giant raft decked with flags moored in the middle of the River Niemen. This curious choice of venue was to ensure that the two emperors were not overheard, especially by the British, who were known to have spies everywhere. Despite this precaution, however, the British secret service, which had an annual vote of £170,000, devoted principally to bribery, appears to have smuggled its own man on board – a disaffected Russian nobleman who sat hidden beneath the barge, his legs dangling in the water, listening to every word.