Immediately on hearing of the danger Pottinger and Yar Mohammed had rushed to the spot. But when the vizier, whom no one had ever before accused of cowardice, saw how close the Persians were to storming the city his resolution failed him. He began to walk more slowly towards the breach, finally halting. Then, to Pottinger’s utter dismay, he sat down on the ground. The sight was not lost on the defenders who had seen him and Pottinger approaching. One by one those at the back began to sneak away on the pretence of carrying the wounded to safety. Pottinger knew that there was not a second to lose before the trickle became a flood and the defenders all took to their heels. By means of entreaties and taunts he managed to get Yar Mohammed to his feet again and impel him towards the parapet. For a moment disaster seemed to have been averted as the vizier roared at his men, in the name of Allah, to fight. This had always had magical results before, but this time they had seen his own hesitation. They wavered, and seeing this, his nerve again deserted him. He turned back, muttering that he was going to get help.
At this Pottinger lost his temper. Seizing Yar Mohammed by the arm, and loudly reviling him, he dragged him forward to the breach. The vizier called upon the defenders to fight to the death, but they continued to sneak away. What happened next was electrifying. ‘Seizing a large staff,’ Kaye tells us, ‘Yar Mohammed rushed like a madman upon the hindmost of the party, and drove them forward under a shower of heavy blows.’ Finding themselves with no other way of escape, and even more frightened of the vizier than of the enemy, the defenders ‘leapt wildly over the parapet, and rushed down the exterior slope upon the Persian stormers.’ Panicked by this violent onslaught, the attackers abandoned their position and fled. The immediate danger was over. Herat was saved – thanks, in Kaye’s words, ‘to the indomitable courage of Eldred Pottinger’.
When news of the subaltern’s role in Herat’s defence, and in foiling Russian designs, reached London and Calcutta, he was to receive similar acclaim to that showered upon Alexander Burnes on his return from Kabul and Bokhara five years earlier. Unlike Burnes, however, he was not there to receive it in person. For although the moment of greatest danger had passed, Simonich had not given up, and the siege was to drag on for another three months. Long afterwards Pottinger’s exploit was to be celebrated by Maud Diver, a romantic novelist, in The Hero of Herat, a bestseller in its day. But the ultimate compliment at the time came, ironically, from the Shah of Persia himself. Seeing Pottinger’s presence in Herat as the principal reason for his failure to bring Herat to its knees, he demanded that McNeill order the young officer to leave the city, in return for which he would be guaranteed safe passage through the Persian lines. McNeill pointed out, however, that Pottinger was not under his command, and that he was therefore in no position to issue such an order. Only Calcutta could do that. The Shah next tried the Heratis, declaring that he would not discuss an ending to the siege while Pottinger remained with them. This too failed, Yar Mohammed fearing that he might lose the invaluable Pottinger only to find that, on some spurious excuse, the siege was resumed.
Nonetheless, unknown to either Pottinger or the Shah, an end to the seeming stalemate was in sight. Alarmed by Vitkevich’s triumph in Kabul, and fearing a similar Russian gain at Herat, the British government had decided at last to act. The sending of a relief force across Afghanistan to the beleaguered city had been ruled out as too hazardous and too slow. Instead it was decided to dispatch a task-force to the Persian Gulf. Threatening the other end of the Shah’s domains while he was fully occupied in the East, might, it was thought, oblige him to release his grip on Herat. At the same time Palmerston stepped up the pressure on Nesselrode, the Russian Foreign Minister, to call a halt to Simonich’s highly irregular activities. Both moves were to produce swift and satisfying results.
On June 19, British troops landed unopposed on Kharg Island, at the head of the Gulf, just off the Persian coast. Wild rumours quickly began to spread inland that a massive British invasion force had landed on the coast and had begun to advance on the capital, capturing town after town as it proceeded. At the same time McNeill, who had by now returned to Teheran, sent one of his staff, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Stoddart, to the royal camp at Herat to warn the Shah of the grave consequences if he continued the siege. ‘The British Government’, McNeill’s note declared, ‘looks upon this enterprise in which your Majesty is engaged against the Afghans as being undertaken in a spirit of hostility towards British India.’ Officially informing him of the seizure of Kharg Island, the note went on to caution the Shah that Britain’s next move would be decided by what action he took over Herat. It advised him to have nothing more to do with ‘the bad counsel of the ill-disposed persons’ who had encouraged him to attack the city in the first place.
Somewhat to his surprise Stoddart was cordially received by the Shah, whom he had believed to be still firmly under Count Simonich’s influence. He read aloud to the Shah the contents of McNeill’s note, translating it into Persian as he went along. When he came to the mention of ‘ill-disposed persons’, the Shah interrupted, asking: ‘The fact is that if I don’t leave Herat there will be war – is that not it?’ Stoddart replied that this was so. Dismissing Stoddart, the Shah told him that he would consider the British demands and give him an answer shortly. No one knows what transpired between the Shah and Count Simonich, although McNeill would dearly have liked to, but two days later Stoddart was summoned to the royal presence. ‘We consent to the whole of the demands of the British Government,’ the Shah told him. ‘We will not go to war. Had we known that our coming here might risk the loss of their friendship, we certainly would not have come at all.’
The Persians had climbed down completely, and the Russians had suffered an ignominious defeat. Gunboat diplomacy had triumphed where conventional diplomacy had failed. Reporting the dramatic turn of events to McNeill, Stoddart wrote: ‘I replied that I thanked God that his Majesty thus regarded the true interests of Persia.’ The Shah now gave orders for the siege to be lifted, and for his troops to prepare to return to Teheran. At 8 o’clock on the morning of September 9, Stoddart sent the following dispatch by special messenger to Sir John McNeill: ‘I have the honour to report that the Persian army has marched . . . and that His Majesty the Shah is about to mount.’ At 10.26 he added briefly: ‘The Shah has mounted his horse . . . and is gone.’
But there was more to come. All along Count Nesselrode had insisted that there was no Russian involvement in the siege, maintaining that Simonich had strict instructions to do all he could to dissuade the Shah from marching on Herat. He even offered to show the British ambassador, Lord Durham, the confidential book containing his instructions to Simonich. At first this had satisfied Palmerston, but by now it was embarrassingly obvious that he was being hoodwinked. Either Simonich had totally ignored his government’s instructions, or he had been told unofficially to disregard these for as long as he could get away with it, by which time, with luck, Herat would be safely in Persia’s compliant hands. The truth will probably never be known, and historians still ponder over it today. But whatever the truth, Palmerston was out for blood.
In London the Russian ambassador was summoned and informed that Count Simonich and Captain Vitkevich (who was still lurking in Afghanistan) were pursuing policies actively hostile to Britain which gravely threatened relations between the two governments. Palmerston demanded that the two men be recalled at once. Perhaps the Russians had gambled on the expectation that the British, as on earlier occasions, would do nothing. If so, this time they had badly miscalculated. Moreover, the evidence against Simonich was so damning that Tsar Nicholas had little choice but to accede to Britain’s demands. ‘We pushed Russia into a corner in the matter of Count Simonich,’ Palmerston told McNeill in triumph. ‘The Emperor has no other way out but to recall him and to acknowledge that Nesselrode made a whole string of untruthful declarations.’
Simonich, rather than Nesselrode, was made the scapegoat, however, being accused of exceeding his authority and ig
noring his instructions. Even if this was unfair, and he was simply obeying covert orders, he had failed to deliver Herat, despite the many months he had had at his disposal while St Petersburg played for time. Few tears were shed on his behalf by his British adversaries, moreover, for he had made himself extremely unpopular with McNeill and others with whom he had had dealings. It was felt that he had got no more than he deserved. But the fate which was to befall Captain Vitkevich, a much respected rival, gave no one any satisfaction.
Recalled from Afghanistan, he was ordered to proceed to St Petersburg, which he reached in the spring of 1839. Precisely what happened there remains a mystery. According to one account, based on contemporary Russian sources, he was warmly received by Count Nesselrode who congratulated him on displacing the British at Kabul. He was promised that his status as a Lithuanian aristocrat, removed when he was sent into exile as a youth, would be restored to him, and that he would be promoted and found a place in an elite regiment. But according to Kaye, who had access to British government intelligence from the Russian capital, the young officer had returned full of hopes only to be cold-shouldered by Nesselrode. The latter, anxious to dissociate himself from the whole affair, refused even to see him, declaring that he knew of no such Captain Vitkevich – ‘except for an adventurer of that name, who had been lately engaged in some unauthorised intrigues in Kabul and Kandahar.’
However, on one thing both versions do agree. Returning to his hotel shortly after visiting the Foreign Ministry, Vitkevich went up to his room and burned his papers, including all the intelligence he had brought back from Afghanistan. Then, after scribbling a brief letter of farewell to his friends, he blew out his brains with a pistol. The Great Game had claimed another victim. As had happened after Griboyedov’s violent death in Teheran ten years earlier, there were suspicions in St Petersburg that the British somehow had a hand in this too. But any such thoughts were quickly forgotten in the wake of the momentous events which were soon to rock Central Asia.
·15·
The Kingmakers
The British could congratulate themselves that this time they had come out on top. Vitkevich was dead, Simonich disgraced, Nesselrode outmanoeuvred, and Herat, the outermost bastion of India’s defences, saved from falling under Russia’s influence. When put to the test, moreover, Tsar Nicholas had shown no great inclination to rush to the assistance of the Shah. Having thus forced the Russians and Persians to back off, the British might have been well advised to leave it at that. But from the moment that Dost Mohammed spurned Lord Auckland’s ultimatum, and officially received Vitkevich, he was considered in London and Calcutta to have thrown in his lot with the Russians. With Herat then still under siege, and a British naval task-force on its way to the Gulf, Palmerston and Auckland were determined to settle the Afghan crisis once and for all. Despite the arguments of Burnes, now strongly supported by Sir John McNeill, that Dost Mohammed was still Britain’s best bet, it was decided that he must be forcibly removed from his throne and replaced by someone more compliant. But by whom?
Arthur Conolly favoured Kamran, who had shown himself to be hostile to both Tsar and Shah, and anxious to ally himself with Britain against Dost Mohammed and other claimants to the Afghan throne. However, there were other advisers closer to the Viceroy than Conolly, Burnes or McNeill. Foremost among these was William Macnaghten, Secretary to the Secret and Political Department in Calcutta. A brilliant orientalist, he was said to be as fluent in Persian, Arabic and Hindustani as in English. His views, moreover, carried immense weight, especially with Lord Auckland, whose sister, Emily Eden, once described him effusively as ‘our Lord Palmerston’. Macnaghten’s candidate for the Afghan throne was the exiled Shah Shujah, to whom he claimed it legitimately belonged. He put forward a plan whereby Ranjit Singh, who loathed Dost Mohammed, might be prevailed upon to use his powerful army of Sikhs to help Shah Shujah overthrow their mutual foe. In return for the recovery of his throne, Shujah would abandon all claims to Peshawar. By using an invasion force of Ranjit Singh’s troops and Shujah’s irregulars, Dost Mohammed could be toppled without British troops becoming involved.
Both Palmerston and Auckland were strongly attracted to this plan which got others to do their dirty work, much as the Russians were doing with the Persians over Herat. To replace one ruler with another among a people who had transferred their allegiance no fewer than eight times in less than half a century did not seem to be unduly problematical or perilous. Among those who favoured Macnaghten’s idea was Claude Wade, the Company’s respected political agent at Ludhiana, where Shujah was living, who was an expert on the intricate politics of Afghanistan and the Punjab. He and Macnaghten were therefore sent by Lord Auckland to Lahore to sound out Ranjit Singh and see whether his co-operation could be counted upon. At first he appeared enthusiastic about the plan. However, the wily old Sikh was far more aware than the British were of the perils of taking on the Afghans in their own mountainous domains, and soon he began to prevaricate and bargain. Gradually it became obvious to Auckland that he could not be relied upon to fulfil his expected role in Macnaghten’s grand design. The only sure way of removing Dost Mohammed, and putting Shujah on his throne, would be by using British troops.
Auckland, normally a cautious man, found himself under growing pressure from the hawks around him to do just that. One of their arguments was that if there was to be a war with the Persians over Herat – and the siege was still in progress at that time – then a British army in Afghanistan would be well placed to wrest it back if it fell, and to prevent any further advance towards India’s frontiers by the Shah’s troops. Auckland was finally persuaded. But even if Ranjit Singh would not send his own forces into Afghanistan, his blessing for the operation was vital if he and Shujah were to enjoy a stable relationship in future, and their two countries were to serve as a protecting shield for British India. The Sikh ruler, who knew that he lacked the strength to overthrow Dost Mohammed himself, was more than happy to go along with this. Not only would it cost him nothing (although Auckland still hoped that he would contribute troops to the expedition), but also Shujah would be signing away, once and for all, any Afghan claims to Peshawar. He had everything to gain and nothing to lose. Shujah, too, was delighted with the plan, for the British were at last doing what he had been begging them to do for years. In June 1838, a secret agreement was signed by Ranjit Singh, Shujah and Great Britain, swearing eternal friendship and giving approval to the plan. Auckland was now free to start preparing for the coming invasion.
Palmerston had in the meantime alerted the British ambassador in St Petersburg to the proposed operation. ‘Auckland’, he informed him, ‘has been told to take Afghanistan in hand and make it a British dependency . . . We have long declined to meddle with the Afghans, but if the Russians try to make them Russian we must take care that they become British.’ On October 1, Auckland issued the so-called Simla Manifesto in which he made public Britain’s intention of forcibly removing Dost Mohammed from the throne and replacing him with Shujah. In justification of this, Dost Mohammed was portrayed as an untrustworthy villain who had driven a patient British government to act thus, and Shujah as a loyal friend and rightful owner of the throne. ‘After much time spent by Captain Burnes in fruitless negotiation at Cabool,’ Auckland declared, ‘it appeared that Dost Mohammed Khan . . . avowed schemes of aggrandizement and ambition injurious to the security and peace of the frontiers of India; and that he openly threatened, in furtherance of those schemes, to call in every foreign aid which he could command.’ So long as Dost Mohammed remained in power in Kabul, he went on, there was no hope ‘that the tranquillity of our neighbourhood would be secured, or that the interests of our Indian empire would be preserved inviolate’.
Although it was obvious to whom he was referring, Auckland carefully avoided any mention of the Russians, for he was about to embark on the very kind of foreign adventure of which Britain was accusing Tsar Nicholas. At the same time the Viceroy announced the names of the politica
l officers who would be accompanying the expedition. Macnaghten, who received a knighthood, was appointed as Britain’s envoy to the proposed new royal court at Kabul, with Alexander Burnes as his deputy and adviser. Burnes, although privately dismayed by the plan to overthrow his old friend, was nonetheless ambitious enough to acquiesce rather than resign. Not only was he promoted to lieutenant-colonel, but he was also given something which he had never dreamed of. In a letter complimenting him on his valuable services, Auckland suggested that he take another look at the envelope. Rescuing it from the waste-paper basket, Burnes saw to his astonishment that it was addressed to Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Alexander Burnes, Kt. Another appointment was that of Lieutenant Eldred Pottinger, then still beleaguered in Herat, who was to become one of Macnaghten’s four political assistants.
Colonel Charles Stoddart of McNeill’s staff, who at that moment was at the Shah’s camp at Herat, was to be dispatched to Bokhara to reassure the Emir that he had nothing to fear from the British attack on his southern neighbour, and to try to persuade him to release his Russian slaves so as to remove any excuse for an attack on him by St Petersburg. Stoddart was also authorised to hold out the prospect of a treaty of friendship between Britain and Bokhara. His mission, like so much else that was to follow, was destined to go tragically wrong. However, as we have already seen, in the autumn of 1838 things were suddenly looking very rosy for the British. The news had just come through from Herat that the Persians and their Russian advisers had abandoned the siege and departed.
The question immediately arose of whether the expedition should be called off, since the danger had greatly receded. Much bitter wrangling ensued at home and in India, with many arguing that it was now no longer necessary to unseat Dost Mohammed. To occupy Afghanistan would not only be prohibitively expensive, and leave India’s other frontiers ill-guarded, but it would also push the Persians even further into the welcoming arms of the Russians. The Duke of Wellington for one was strongly against it, warning that where the military successes ended the political difficulties would begin. But for Palmerston and Auckland, with the bit now firmly between their teeth and the army ready to march, there could be no turning back at this late stage. Moreover, with anti-Russian feeling running at near hysteria point in Britain and India, the coming adventure enjoyed immense popular support. It certainly had that of The Times, which thundered: ‘From the frontiers of Hungary to the heart of Burmah and Nepaul . . . the Russian fiend has been haunting and troubling the human race, and diligently perpetrating his malignant frauds . . . to the vexation of this industrious and essentially pacific empire.’
The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia Page 21
