If the British had succeeded in liberating the Tsar’s subjects from bondage in Khiva, they had failed miserably in their efforts to free their own man from the clutches of the Emir of Bokhara. All their attempts, not to mention those of the Russians, the Turks and the rulers of Khiva and Khokand, to persuade Emir Nasrullah to let Colonel Charles Stoddart go had so far proved futile. By now this unfortunate officer had been held captive for the best part of two years. His day-to-day fortunes were seemingly determined by Nasrullah’s capricious moods, and by his current estimate of British power in Asia. Thus, when news of Kabul’s capitulation to the British reached him, Colonel Stoddart’s situation suddenly improved. Until then he had been kept at the bottom of a twenty-foot-deep pit, known locally as the ‘Black Hole’, which he shared with three common criminals and an assortment of vermin and other unpleasant creatures, and to which a rope was the sole means of access.
He was now hastily removed from here and instead placed under close house arrest in the home of the Emir’s chief of police. But his misfortunes were far from over, for the Emir showed no signs of allowing him to leave Bokhara. Quite why he was held in the first place is not absolutely clear, although there are several possible explanations. Inevitably, in a region where treachery was the norm, a rumour had preceded him warning that he was not an emissary at all but a British spy sent to prepare the way for the seizure of the Emir’s domains. If so, he had already seen too much to be allowed to return home. But there was another reason for his having incurred Nasrullah’s displeasure. On first arriving in Bokhara, on December 17, 1838, Stoddart had committed an extremely unfortunate gaffe. To the astonishment of the populace, he had ridden in full regimentals to the Emir’s palace to present his credentials, instead of respectfully dismounting, as was customary in Bokhara.
By ill chance, Nasrullah happened to be returning at that moment to his palace, and saw the colonel and his servants from across the city’s main square. Remaining in his saddle, in conformity with British military practice, Stoddart had saluted the Bokharan sovereign. Nasrullah, according to one source, ‘looked at him fixedly for some time, and then passed on without saying a word’. At Stoddart’s first audience with the Emir there had followed other misunderstandings, and in consequence he had found himself swiftly consigned to the rat-infested dungeon.
Some have blamed Stoddart himself for what happened, accusing him of arrogance and insensitivity, though this hardly justifies Nasrullah’s treatment of him. Unlike Burnes, the Pottingers and Rawlinson, Stoddart was unschooled in the sycophantic ways of oriental diplomacy. As a brother officer put it: ‘Stoddart was a mere soldier, a man of the greatest bravery and determination. To attack or defend a fortress, no better man could have been found. But for a diplomatic mission a man less adapted to the purpose could not readily have been met with.’ Indeed, much of the responsibility for his fate rests with those who chose him for this most delicate mission, notably Sir John McNeill in Teheran, himself a veteran of the game, and well versed in the strict etiquette of the East.
Although no longer subjected to the horrors of the Emir’s ‘Black Hole’, and enjoying the comparative comfort of house arrest, Stoddart had little reason to feel sanguine. His only hope, he realised, of being allowed to leave Bokhara lay in the advance of a British rescue expedition from Kabul. We know this from notes he managed to smuggle out to his family, which amazingly found their way to England. ‘My release’, he wrote in one of these, ‘will probably not take place until our forces have approached very near to Bokhara.’ But as the months passed, with no sign of a rescue operation, he must frequently have despaired. Only once, however, did his courage fail him. That was during his spell in the pit, when the official executioner had descended the rope with orders from the Emir to behead him there and then unless he embraced Islam. Stoddart had agreed, thereby saving his life, although when he was released from the pit into the custody of the chief of police he insisted that his conversion was invalid, having been made under extreme duress.
More than once the Emir had shown signs of wishing to come to an accommodation with the British against the Russians, and had even corresponded with Macnaghten in Kabul about it, thereby raising Stoddart’s hopes. But on learning of the disaster which had befallen the Russians on their way to Khiva, he had lost interest. He complained that the British notes appeared to have no mutlub (meaning), and in the end nothing came of them. When it became clear, moreover, that the British were not proposing to dispatch an expedition to Bokhara to try to free Stoddart, the colonel’s fortunes again took a turn for the worse. Twice he was thrown into prison, though not this time into the dreaded pit. Despite his deteriorating health, in his occasional letter home Stoddart continued to put a brave face on things. Eventually, he maintained, Nasrullah might come to realise that the British were his best protection against the Russians, who sooner or later would turn their attention to him. By being on the spot, Stoddart argued, he would be in a position to discuss terms, and perhaps even persuade the Emir to free his slaves, as he had heard that Shakespear had succeeded in doing in Khiva.
All this time the authorities in London and Calcutta had been wrestling with the problem of how to free their envoy from this monster’s grip. Originally Macnaghten had been in favour of sending a punitive force to Bokhara from Kabul, but Lord Auckland, the Governor-General, was opposed to British troops venturing any further into Central Asia. Moreover, antagonism towards the British, and their puppet ruler Shah Shujah, was beginning to grow in Afghanistan, and Macnaghten needed all the troops he had to contain possible trouble there. Nor was the Cabinet in London anxious to embark on any fresh adventures in Asia, already having enough on its hands there and elsewhere. In addition to its heavy commitment in Afghanistan, in China the first of the Opium Wars was well into its second year, while nearer to home there were serious troubles brewing with both France and the United States. The plight of a comparatively junior British officer in a remote town in Central Asia did not figure high on Palmerston’s list of priorities, although diplomatic efforts to secure his release continued through the good offices of the Turks and others, albeit unavailingly.
Stoddart’s friends protested that he had been callously abandoned by the British government to the caprices of an evil tyrant. Reports that he had been forced to renounce Christianity and embrace Islam caused particular outrage. But their demands for action went unheeded, and as the winter of 1841 – Stoddart’s third as Nasrullah’s prisoner – approached, his prospects looked bleak indeed. Then, in November of that year, something happened which was to bring him fresh hope. For there rode into Bokhara, on a one-man rescue mission, a fellow British officer and veteran of the Great Game, Captain Arthur Conolly.
Conolly had been travelling in Central Asia on official government business. It had long been his dream to reconcile and unite, under British protection, the three quarrelling khanates of Turkestan – Khiva, Bokhara and Khokand. Such an arrangement, he was convinced, would not only bring Christian civilisation to this barbaric region, but would also serve, together with a friendly Afghanistan, as a protective shield for northern India against Russian encroachments. The total abolition of slavery throughout Turkestan would remove any remaining pretexts for interference by St Petersburg. It seemed, on the face of it, an attractive idea, and Conolly found no shortage of backers, especially in London where few people had any real grasp of Central Asian politics. Members of the Board of Control were particularly attracted to his ideas for opening up the waters of the Oxus to steam navigation. Not only would the natives have the benefits of Christianity bestowed upon them, but they would also be able to buy British goods in their bazaars.
There were others, however, who strongly opposed Conolly’s grandiose scheme. Among them was Sir Alexander Burnes. From his own experience of dealing with Asian potentates, he saw little prospect of Conolly bringing about any kind of alliance between these three disputatious neighbours. And even if he were to succeed, Burnes asked, ‘is England to become security for barbarous hordes some thousands of miles from her frontier?’ Ultimately, Burnes insisted, Russia could only be restrained in Central Asia through London putting strong pressure on St Petersburg, and not by means of vague alliances with capricious and treacherous khans. For although Burnes belonged to the forward school, he was less of a hawk than many imagined, and considered the British presence in Afghanistan quite forward enough.
Conolly, however, was a man not easily deterred. Using his considerable powers of persuasion, he gradually overcame all opposition. At first the Governor-General, Lord Auckland, had been hesitant about letting him go, believing that the Khivan disaster had removed any immediate Russian threat in the region. He therefore saw no point in getting unnecessarily involved there, or in needlessly provoking St Petersburg into retaliatory action. However, in the face of powerful pressure from London, and from Macnaghten in Kabul, he finally agreed to the venture, though with one important proviso. Conolly was to urge the three khans to resolve their ancient differences and to unite against the Russians. He was to try to persuade them of the urgent need to abolish slavery and introduce other humanitarian reforms in order to remove any pretext for a Russian attack on them. But under no circumstances was he to offer them British protection or assistance against the Russians.
He left Kabul for Khiva on September 3, 1840, with a considerably reduced brief, but intent nonetheless on changing the course of Central Asian history. He was to have been accompanied by Henry Rawlinson, but at the last moment the latter was required elsewhere in Afghanistan, which, as it turned out, proved fortunate for him. Conolly’s journey to Khiva was uneventful, and he was well received by the Khan, who held the British in high regard following the visits of Abbott and Shakespear. But Conolly’s visionary proposals for a voluntary Central Asian federation, and far-reaching social reforms, found no favour with him. The Khan clearly had no wish for any sort of an alliance with either Bokhara or Khokand. He seemed, moreover, to have lost his earlier fears of the Russians sending another invasion force against him now that he had freed their slaves. Disappointed, Conolly proceeded to Khokand, where he was also well received. But here too he failed to interest the Khan in an alliance with either of his neighbours. Indeed, at that very moment, the Khan was about to go to war with the Emir of Bokhara.
So far, as Burnes and others had warned, Conolly had achieved nothing beyond gathering useful intelligence on the latest political situation in Central Asia. Only one hope now remained of justifying his mission, and that was to secure the release of the unfortunate Stoddart. During his two-month stay in Khokand, Conolly had somehow managed to make contact with Stoddart, who was enjoying one of his spells of relative freedom. The latter sent him a message to say that the Emir would not be averse to his visiting Bokhara. ‘The favour of the Ameer’, he informed Conolly, ‘is increased in these days towards me. I believe you will be well treated here.’ They were fateful words. Little did Stoddart realise that he was being used by the wily Nasrullah to lure his fellow officer into a trap. For the Emir, whose spies had been following Conolly’s movements, was convinced that the Englishman was conspiring with his enemies, the khans of Khiva and Khokand, to have him overthrown.
In October 1841, despite warnings from both khans to keep well clear of Bokhara, Conolly set out for the holy city, 400 miles away to the south-west, convinced that he could use his formidable powers of persuasion on the Emir to obtain Stoddart’s freedom. It was a foolhardy venture, but Conolly, like most Great Game players, was not lacking in boldness or physical courage. There is another factor, impossible to ignore, which may have affected his judgement and led him to take an excessive risk. A few months before setting out on his journey, Conolly had been turned down for a rival by the woman he had dearly hoped to marry. He had been profoundly hurt by this, and it is possible that as a result he did not care too much whether he returned from his mission or not. Whatever the truth, he entered Bokhara on November 10, travelling via Tashkent so as to avoid being caught up in the war about to break out between the Emir and his neighbour.
Stoddart, pathetically thin after his months of privation, was overwhelmed at seeing Conolly. At first the Emir received the newcomer politely, but soon his mood began to change. This was apparently due to his failure to receive a reply to a friendly letter he had dispatched months earlier to Queen Victoria. This lapse he interpreted either as an intended slight, which caused him to lose face before his court officials, or as evidence that Stoddart and Conolly, who claimed to represent the Queen, were impostors and therefore, as he had suspected all along, spies. Neither was his mood improved when finally there arrived from Lord Palmerston (of whom he had naturally never heard) a note advising him that his letter had been passed to Calcutta for attention. To Nasrullah, who was under the firm belief that his kingdom was every bit as powerful as Great Britain, this appeared to be a deliberate snub. Had Stoddart and Conolly known that a second note, this time from the Governor-General, would soon be on its way, their sense of betrayal and abandonment by their superiors would have been complete. For this described them, inexplicably, not as British envoys but as ‘private travellers’, and demanded their immediate release. But when it eventually reached Nasrullah it was far too late to cause them any further harm. What finally sealed their fate was news reaching Bokhara from Kabul of a catastrophe which had befallen the British in Afghanistan.
Animosity towards the British in Shah Shujah’s newly restored capital had been building up for months, although they themselves had been slow to recognise it. As experienced political officers, Sir William Macnaghten and Sir Alexander Burnes should have been aware of what was going on in Afghan hearts and minds, but relations between the two men had become badly strained. Burnes was to describe himself in a letter to a friend as ‘a highly paid idler’, whose advice was never listened to by his chief. Macnaghten, moreover, had largely lost interest in his present task, for he was shortly due to leave Afghanistan to take up the much-coveted Governorship of Bombay, his reward for successfully placing the British puppet on the throne. The last thing he wished to admit was that anything was amiss. Burnes, waiting to take over from him, and in the meantime having little to do, was too busy enjoying himself to notice the warning signs.
He was not alone in this. Ever since their arrival in Kabul two years earlier, the British had been making themselves thoroughly at home there. Kabul’s exotic situation and invigorating climate had attracted the wives, and even the children, of British and Indian troops up from the hot and dusty plains of Hindustan. Every kind of entertainment was laid on, from cricket to concerts, steeplechasing to skating, with some of the Afghan upper classes joining in the fun. Much of what went on, particularly the womanising and drinking, was to cause great offence to the Muslim authorities and the devout majority. At the same time punitive action, often very severe, was taken against those tribes refusing to submit to Shujah’s (but effectively Macnaghten’s) rule, while others were bribed into submission with lavish helpings of gold, or ‘subsidies’ as they were officially termed. On November 3, 1840, realising that further resistance to the British was futile, Dost Mohammed had voluntarily surrendered to Macnaghten, and had been sent into exile in India. This had moved Macnaghten, impatient to begin his new job in Bombay, to report to Lord Auckland that Afghanistan – to use his own now celebrated phrase – was quiet ‘from Dan to Beersheba’. All things considered, he remarked to one of his staff, ‘the present tranquillity of this country is to my mind perfectly miraculous’.
Not everyone, however, was as easily persuaded as Macnaghten. Among the first to realise the mounting danger was Major Henry Rawlinson, who had very nearly accompanied Conolly to Bokhara, and who was now the political agent at Kandahar. ‘The feeling against us’, he warned in August 1841, ‘is daily on the increase and I apprehend a succession of disturbances . . . Their mullahs are preaching against us from one end of the country to the other.’ Another of Macnaghten’s politicals to sense this growing hostility was Eldred Pottinger, now a major and operating among the tribes to the north of Kabul. Their leaders, he reported, were preparing for a general uprising against Shah Shujah and the British. But Macnaghten, fearful lest Lord Auckland order him to stay on in Kabul, refused to listen to such forebodings. Both men, he persuaded himself, were merely being alarmist.
There were plenty of reasons for this antagonism towards the British and Shah Shujah. For one thing the presence of so many troops had hit the pockets of ordinary Afghans. Because of the increased demand for foodstuffs and other essentials, prices in the bazaar had soared, while taxes had risen sharply to pay for Shujah’s new administration, not to mention his lavish personal lifestyle. Moreover, the British showed no signs of leaving, despite earlier assurances. It looked more and more as though the occupation would be permanent, as indeed some of the British were beginning to think it would have to be if Shujah was to survive. Then there was the growing anger, especially in Kabul, over the pursuit and seduction of local women by the troops, particularly the officers. Some Afghan women even left their husbands to move in with wealthier and more generous lovers, while there was a regular traffic in women to the cantonments. Strong protests were made, but these were ignored. Murderous feelings towards the British possessed those who had been cuckolded – some of them men of considerable influence. ‘The Afghans’, Sir John Kaye, the historian, was to write, ‘are very jealous of the honour of their women, and there were things done in Caubul which covered them with shame and roused them to revenge . . . It went on until it became intolerable, and the injured then began to see that the only remedy was in their own hands.’ Nor did they have to wait for very long. All that was needed now was for someone to light the fuse.
The first signs of the coming explosion occurred on the evening of November 1, 1841, when Burnes was warned by his Kashmiri assistant and friend, the well-informed Mohan Lai, that an attempt was to be made on his life that night. It was Burnes whom many Afghans held responsible for bringing the British to Afghanistan, after first spying out the land under the pretence of friendship with Dost Mohammed. His blatant fraternisation with their womenfolk only served to deepen their hostility towards him. Burnes and several other officers were then living in a large and somewhat isolated house surrounded by a wall and courtyard in the heart of the old city. Because of its vulnerability to attack, he was urged by Mohan Lai to move to the safety of the cantonments, to the north of the city, where the British and Indian troops were quartered. Originally they had occupied the Bala Hissar fortress, but at the request of Shah Shujah, who wanted it to house his own troops and large household staff, Macnaghten had agreed to move the entire British force out of its walled security into hurriedly constructed cantonments. Confident that he could quell any trouble, Burnes eschewed his friend’s advice. He knew, moreover, that the British and Indian troops were less than two miles away. Nonetheless, he did ask for the sepoy guard on the house to be reinforced that night.
Meanwhile, not far away in the darkness, a mob was gathering. It was led by men of whom Burnes had made personal enemies. At first it consisted of only a handful of demonstrators, but the conspirators let it be known that the house next door to Burnes’s was the garrison treasury, in which was kept the soldiers’ pay and the gold used by Macnaghten for buying allies. In no time the numbers had swelled, and the crowd needed little urging to march on the infidels’ residence and surround it. At this point Burnes was still confident that he could talk the Afghans into dispersing, and he ordered his sepoy guards not to fire. As a precaution, however, he sent a runner to the cantonments to ask for immediate assistance. Then he went out on to the balcony and began trying to reason with the angry crowd in the street below.
When word of the danger facing Burnes and his companions reached Macnaghten, he immediately summoned his military advisers, and urgent discussions began as to how they should react. This soon developed into an argument between Macnaghten and the officer in command of his troops, General William Elphinstone. Macnaghten’s secretary, Captain George Lawrence, suggested dispatching a regiment of troops at the double to the old city to rescue Burnes, disperse the mob and seize the ringleaders while there was still time. But this was rejected out of hand. ‘My proposal was at once set down as one of pure insanity,’ wrote Lawrence afterwards. Macnaghten and Elphinstone continued to argue, while reports started to come in that the situation at Burnes’s house was rapidly deteriorating. The general, a sick and ageing man who should never have been in command of the troops, lacked the will or energy to take action, and could only come up with objections to the suggestions of others. Macnaghten was equally indecisive, being less concerned about rescuing Burnes than about the political consequences of using troops against the mob. Finally, however, it was agreed to send troops under a brigadier up to the Bala Hissar, and to decide there, in consultation with Shah Shujah, how best to deal with the demonstrators. There they learned that Shujah had already sent some of his own men into the city to try to disperse the rioters and rescue Burnes. Insisting that they were sufficient for the purpose, he refused to allow the British force to follow.
Meanwhile the plight of Burnes had become critical as he tried in vain to make himself heard by the screaming mob below. With him were two other officers – his young brother Charles, an Indian Army subaltern who had come up to stay with him in Kabul, and Major William Broadfoot, his political assistant. Sir John Kaye was to write afterwards: ‘It was obvious now that nothing was to be done by expostulation – nothing by forbearance. The violence of the mob was increasing. That which at first had been an insignificant crowd had now become a great multitude. The treasury of the Shah’s paymasters was before them, and hundreds who had no wrongs, and no political animosity to vent, rushed to the spot hungering after the spoil which lay so temptingly at hand.’ Yet despite the increasing fury of the mob, Burnes continued to order his sepoys to hold their fire, in the belief that help must very soon arrive.
By now some of the bolder demonstrators had entered the compound and succeeded in setting fire to the stables. They next turned their attention to the house. Then came a single shot from the crowd. Major Broadfoot, standing beside Burnes and his brother on the balcony, clutched at his chest and fell. Hastily his two companions dragged him inside, only to find that he was dead. Burnes returned to the balcony in a last attempt to save the situation, shouting down to the mob that he would give them large sums of money if they would disperse. The demonstrators knew, however, that they had no need to bargain. The British gold would very soon be theirs anyway. Realising that no relief was coming, Burnes at last ordered the sepoys to fire on the mob. But, like everything else that had happened so far, it was too late. By now the house itself was ablaze, and the crowd was rampaging across the compound, ignoring the bullets and making for the entrance. It was clear to Burnes and his brother that their last moment had come. Charles decided to fight his way out through the mob.
Watching in horror from a nearby rooftop, but powerless to do anything, was Mohan Lai, whose warning Burnes had ignored. ‘Lieutenant Charles Burnes’, he wrote afterwards, ‘then came out into the garden and killed about six persons before he was cut to pieces.’ Sir Alexander Burnes’s own death he did not witness, for some of the mob then turned towards the house on whose roof he was hiding, forcing him to flee. But he was told later by the servants that when Burnes finally emerged to face the mob he had tied a black cloth over his eyes so as not to see from where the blows came. Seconds later he was dead, wrote Burnes’s friend, ‘cut to pieces by the furious mob’. Inevitably, without reliable eye-witnesses, there are several versions of Burnes’s death. According to one of these, a traitor managed to gain access to the house and, under Koranic oath, persuade Burnes that if he disguised himself in native dress he personally would lead him to safety through the crowd. Realising that he had nothing to lose, Burnes agreed. But the moment he stepped out of the house, the man denounced him to the mob. ‘This’, he screamed in triumph, ‘is Alexander Burnes.’ A frenzied mullah then struck the first blow, and moments later Burnes was on the ground, being hacked to death by the long murderous knives of the Afghans.
Another version maintains that Burnes’s servants offered to carry him through the crowd wrapped up in a tent, as though they were bearing plunder, like so many others that night, but that he had refused. Whatever the truth about his last moments in this city he had once so loved, it appears that one of his old Afghan friends remained loyal to him to the last. According to Kaye, after the mob had moved on to plunder the treasury, a man named Naib Sheriff retrieved his badly mutilated body, together with that of his brother, and buried them both in the garden of the smoke-blackened residence. Major Broadfoot, Kaye records, was less fortunate, for ‘the dogs of the city devoured his remains’.
All this had been allowed to happen just half an hour’s march from where 4,500 British and Indian troops were quartered, and rather less from the Bala Hissar, where the British-led rescue party was standing by, awaiting orders. For reasons which are unclear, although the clamour and the firing could be heard quite distinctly from the cantonments, those orders were never given. Indeed, in the end the rescue party was employed, not to save Burnes and his companions, but to cover the inglorious retreat of Shujah’s irregulars, of whom the angry mob had made short work. Yet seldom could a tragedy have been so easily averted. As one young officer noted in his journal: ‘When 300 men would have been sufficient in the morning to have quelled the disturbance, 3,000 would not have been adequate in the afternoon.’
But it was far from over yet. Worse – much worse – was to follow.