Sabres on the Steppes Read online

  They headed first for the city of Merv – the crossing point for so many caravan routes and the site of a large slave market. Conolly, whose Christian values were shocked by the way in which female slaves were herded into pens and handled by lascivious purchasers, was even more shocked when he found that the Khivan envoy – his ‘croney’ – was quietly buying up children in the market as a speculative investment. As soon as possible he moved on from Merv and headed towards Khiva.

  At Khiva he was received by a smiling and friendly khan, but he made no progress in trying to persuade him to enter into any confederation or even loose alliance with his neighbours in Khokand and Bokhara. The khan was feeling self-confident, having recently witnessed a Russian invasion force obliged to turn back without reaching his capital. As for the slave trade, the khan pointed out that he had freed those Russians who might have been a pretext for further incursions from the north, and the remaining traffic was a vital part of his state’s economy. Disappointed by this response, Conolly and his sizable party moved on across the steppes to Khokand.

  Here he fared no better. Far from wanting closer links with his neighbours, the Khan of Khokand was actually in the process of launching a military campaign against Bokhara. Conolly was concerned that he was to have very little to show for all his efforts. But while he was enjoying the hospitality of Khokand for two months, there was a development which was to set him off on unauthorized tracks.

  Colonel Stoddart in his detention in Bokhara was experiencing a period of enjoying the favours of his despotic host. And, being aware of Conolly’s relative proximity at Khokand, he managed to get letters smuggled out to him there. One of these actually contained an invitation from the emir to Conolly to visit him on his way back to India. Stoddart appeared to endorse the invitation, saying that he thought Conolly could expect to be well treated if he came. He mentioned this proposal to his host, the Khan of Khokand, but the latter warned him on no account to trust the Emir of Bokhara. The Khan of Khiva had earlier spoken in very similar terms, but Conolly was inclined to disregard these warnings: had not both khans shown a longstanding hostility towards their Bokharan counterpart, and was not Khokand even fighting with him at this very moment? Surely such negative advice was self-interested.

  Conolly was well aware that he had no official authority to go to Bokhara. Indeed, it had been made clear to him that this emirate was out of bounds: there were enough difficulties already with Stoddart’s detention there. But several considerations conspired to encourage Conolly to disregard his own authorities. First was his personal desire to have a solid achievement to report when he returned home, and so far he had singularly failed in this. Second was the encouragement he had had from Stoddart, and by extension from the emir himself, to extend his travels in that direction. And third was the nagging weight on Conolly’s conscience: Stoddart had been coerced into renouncing his Christian convictions, and surely it was Conolly’s divinely appointed role to rescue him from this lapse and see him accepted once more into the Christian fold. All these factors contributed to the decision of this hitherto well-disciplined soldier to fly in the face of his orders and undertake a venture that both he and his government were to regret.

  It was not easy to go from Khokand to Bokhara when the two states were at war with each other. But adopting a devious route he managed to arrive at the Bokharan frontier at the moment when the emir was returning from his campaign, and he succeeded in entering the city in November 1841 in the wake of the triumphal ruler. This was a much better start than Stoddart’s arrogant-seeming ride across the Registan square. He was installed in accommodation provided by the emir, where he and Stoddart were lodged together.

  During the weeks that followed, the emir received both Englishmen in audience on a number of occasions. Gradually his questions to his visitors became less friendly. Why had Conolly come here? Had he been plotting with the neighbouring khans against Bokhara? Was he reconnoitring a route for an invading army as the English had done in Afghanistan? Where were Conolly’s credentials? Why had no reply been received from Queen Victoria to the emir’s friendly letters? But what really tipped the emir’s sentiment against his English visitors was not so much the somewhat unsatisfactory replies to these questions but the fact that he was getting news from Afghanistan of a British defeat there. Indeed, the news was the worst possible as far as the visitors were concerned. The First Afghan War had been a disaster: the British protégé on the Afghan throne had been deposed; the British envoy to Kabul – Sir William Macnaghten – and Sir Alexander Burnes had both been murdered by the Afghans; General Elphinstone’s army was in full retreat and being decimated by the tribesmen in the passes; Britain – it seemed to the emir – was no longer a power to be feared in the region. By December he was becoming openly hostile to his two hostages.

  An incident then occurred which made matters worse. A Jewish visitor from Persia arrived with a packet of letters for Stoddart which he delivered to the emir’s vizier. The latter passed the letters to Stoddart with a request for a translation of them. They turned out to be a dispatch which had been sent some months before by Lord Palmerston – the British foreign secretary – acknowledging the receipt of the emir’s letter to Queen Victoria, but going on to say that this had been passed to the governor-general in India to deal with as he saw fit. Stoddart felt he could do nothing but forward an accurate translation to the emir, while putting the best gloss on it he could. This was not the response that the emir had expected: he felt that as a head of state – a state which he believed to be of equal standing with England – he should have been granted the dignity of a direct reply from Her Majesty.

  Having received this imagined insult, and having absorbed the bad news about the British defeat in Afghanistan, the emir now felt at liberty to treat his English visitors as prisoners of little consequence. At the next audience, he made a heavy-handed remark about Conolly’s gold watch, which resulted in his visitor feeling obliged to present it to the emir as a gift. But even that gesture failed to placate the vicious ruler. The next day they were arrested and imprisoned in a private jail, and Conolly’s numerous servants were also rounded up, and while some were released others were executed. The British hostages were left in no doubt about the psychopathic tendencies of their host.

  Deprived of news from Bokhara, and preoccupied with the appalling reports coming back from Afghanistan, the British authorities in India and London lost track of the fate of Stoddart and Conolly. The two Englishmen were being held in truly terrible conditions: hungry, clad in filthy rags, in vermin-infested cells, and suffering from tropical fevers. Those letters they endeavoured to get out by private messengers to Persia told a sorry tale of suffering. One such letter written by Conolly in March 1842 eventually surfaced and described their plight:

  This is the eighty-third day we have been denied the means of getting a change of linen from the rags and vermin that cover us [. . .] At first we viewed the emir’s conduct as perhaps dictated by mad caprice; but now, looking back upon the whole, we saw instead that it had been just the deliberate malice of a demon [. . .] But God is stronger than the devil himself, and can certainly release us from the hands of this fiend [. . .] We wear our English honesty and dignity to the last, within all the filth and misery that this monster may try to degrade us with [. . .] We hope that the British and Afghan Governments will treat him as an enemy; and this out of no feeling of revenge. [. . .] We hope and pray that God may forgive him his sins in the next world. [. . .] Stoddart and I will comfort each other in every way until we die.

  And die is what they did. Their last hope had been the intervention of the Russian diplomatic mission on their behalf. Although the Russians realized that the English emissaries were working to frustrate their territorial ambitions, and although Conolly had long ago outgrown his initial regard for the Russians as he became aware of their hostile ambitions in Central Asia, nonetheless the Russian mission used its best endeavours to keep in touch with the two English prison
ers and to indicate their concern about them. They recognized that Christians and Europeans had to stick together in the face of oriental brutality. But now the Russian mission were themselves withdrawing from Bokhara after the emir had insulted them by insisting they did business with his butler rather than with his vizier; so this last lifeline was lost.

  Ironically, it was confirmation of the Emir Nasrullah’s psychopathic tendencies that held out the last shred of hope for Stoddart and Conolly. The emir had embarked on yet another of his campaigns against his neighbour at Khokand, and reports reaching the prison at Bokhara indicated that this raid had been unusually successful; in fact, the emir had killed in cold blood not only the Khan of Khokand but also his son, his brother and his uncle. He was now returning in triumph once again to Bokhara, and Conolly hoped that his success might induce a more benevolent turn of mind towards his captives. But it was not to be.

  The only thing that might have saved them at this moment was a personal letter from Queen Victoria. Somewhat belatedly, consideration was finally being given in Westminster and Whitehall to drafting such a document, but meanwhile the only communication sent to the emir was an unhelpful dispatch from Lord Ellenborough (who had taken over from Lord Auckland as governor-general of India) describing the two Englishmen as innocent travellers and asking for their release. This probably arrived too late to be relevant, and in any case the emir did not even deign to answer a missive from someone who was not a fellow head of state.

  At some stage (probably in June 1842) the emir appeared to have decided that he had nothing to lose by disposing of his two hostages. Stoddart and Conolly were led out of their confinement and ordered to dig their own graves in a public place in the main square in front of the citadel while a large crowd looked on. Stoddart took the opportunity publicly to denounce the emir as a cruel despot; he was promptly beheaded by the public executioner. Conolly was now told that if he renounced his Christian faith his life would be spared. Even if it had not been for the disheartening example of Stoddart, who had converted under extreme pressure to Islam and had then been cruelly imprisoned and executed, there would have been no prospect of Conolly renouncing his Christianity. His faith was central to his whole life – to his motivation in coming to Bokhara in the first place and to his concept of his patriotism. He declared himself ready to die, and his head was struck off, joining Stoddart’s in the dust.

  It was a while before news of these deaths reached England. But a few months after these events a young Persian, who had at one time been employed by Conolly, arrived at Meshed and reported that he had been given a first-hand account of the Englishmen’s fate by one of the executioners himself. The truth of the story seemed far from certain, and eventually another Englishman – a clergyman called Dr Joseph Wolff – raised the necessary funds and set off alone to reach Bokhara and verify the details of what had happened. His is another story, and is the subject of a later chapter in this book.

  But even before the deaths were fully authenticated, the British and Indian governments were busy distancing themselves from the tragedy. Conolly had never been authorized to go to Bokhara, and now the authorities said that he had been expressly forbidden from doing so: ‘in all probability [Conolly] owes all his misfortunes to his direct transgression of that instruction’, it was declared. The Indian government stated that while it was prepared to meet some of the costs of the expedition – such as the wages of Conolly’s servants – for the journey as far as Khokand, it was not prepared to meet any costs for the subsequent unauthorized extension of the trip; indeed any such expenses would be chargeable to Captain Conolly if he were alive and to his estate if he were not. Public sentiment in England was more generous to Conolly than official comment: one fellow officer and friend declared that in previous reigns any such insult and harm inflicted on an Englishman would have been promptly avenged. But the country was still reeling under the disasters of the First Afghan War – an army of 16,000 men destroyed – and the fate of the two visitors to Bokhara was somewhat overshadowed.

  Captain Arthur Conolly was an officer who started his professional life considerably in awe of tsarist Russia: he had been their guest; he was attracted by the courteous and gentlemanly behaviour of their officer caste; he was impressed by the military stamina of the Cossacks and their other military units; he was prejudiced in favour of any Christian – as opposed to Moslem or Hindu – society. But his attitude towards India’s northern and menacing neighbour underwent a radical change. After his long overland journey through Russia, the Caucasus, Persia and Afghanistan he became aware of just how real a threat Russia was to the British Raj in India, and he became disillusioned about the religious credentials of a country whose church was so far removed from the Anglican and Protestant values of Bishop Hever and Victorian England.

  Conolly felt he had a personal mission to identify this Russian threat, and he fulfilled this mission by spelling out the threat in the appendix to his travelogue, by trying to implement schemes to consolidate the khanates and emirates of Central Asia into a confederation to resist the southward advance of the tsar’s domains, and by attempting to rescue an Englishman who had been engaged in a similar mission to his own and who appeared to have been disowned or ignored by his compatriots. In these circumstances he decided to follow his conscience rather than his orders, his patriotic and religious principles rather than the cautious remit of his superiors. He did not complain when his maverick attitude led to his untimely and cruel death.

  Chapter 4

  David Urquhart and Edmund Spencer: The

  Aspiring Politician and His Disciple

  ‘What is morally wrong cannot be politically right.’

  – Donald Soper (1903–98)

  A biography of David Urquhart, written in 1920 by Gertrude Robinson, describes him as ‘a Victorian knight errant of justice and liberty’. It is ironic that, of all the British adventurers in the Caucasus in the early nineteenth century, we know more about Urquhart as a man than about any of the others, but less about what he did in Circassia than we do of his successors and disciples. His diplomatic and political careers are well documented, but he did not write at length about his Caucasian adventures as so many of his followers were to do.

  He was always destined to be an unusual character. He was born in 1805 on the family estate in the Scottish highlands, the son of a chieftain with a fierce loyalty to his clan, a characteristic which he was to recognize and admire among the highlanders of the Caucasian tribes. He was educated privately by tutors, as his mother took him around Europe to France, Switzerland and Italy, and then sent to a Benedictine college where he studied classical and modern languages from five a.m. until seven p.m. every day ‘and sometimes his anxiety is such that he gets up at 3 a.m. and studies’. At sixteen he matriculated at St John’s College, Oxford, but rather than complete his university course he joined the navy and later sailed in 1827 with Lord Cochrane on a mission to the newly liberated Greece.

  From Greece, Urquhart went on to Constantinople, where his knowledge of mineralogy (acquired by this ever-industrious student during his vacations from Oxford) brought him to the attention of the sultan, a contact that he was to develop to his advantage later. Meanwhile, he set off for home via Albania, a country notorious for being a nest of brigands and which was additionally – in 1830 – in the throes of revolution. On his return, he published his findings in a series of articles in the press, which in turn came to the attention of the sailor-king William IV. The king was greatly impressed by a young man of such obvious intelligence and enterprise, particularly as he knew Urquhart had, like himself, a naval background.

  But Urquhart’s real interest had been aroused not so much by Albania as by the Ottoman Empire centred on Constantinople. At the first opportunity he returned there and settled into a wholly Turkish environment, living in the Turkish quarter surrounded by Turkish friends and speaking Turkish all the time. His aim – an ambitious one for so young a man – was to extend the good relatio
ns he enjoyed with the sultan into good relations between the Ottoman and British empires; he even drafted a commercial treaty between the two powers. But while doing all this, he became increasingly convinced that the Russians were working assiduously behind the scenes to disrupt Turkish-British relations; in particular, he saw the Russian blockade of the Black Sea coast of Circassia (the northwest Caucasus) as an impediment to trade as well as an interference with the liberty of the Circassian peoples. Thus he applied for an official post in the British embassy at Constantinople, aspiring to become a diplomat. Apart from his local contacts, he had two considerable other assets for the job: he was a personal friend of Lord Ponsonby, the ambassador, and he had the support of King William IV in London. Lord Palmerston, who was the king’s foreign secretary, somewhat reluctantly agreed to this unorthodox appointment.

  Urquhart’s diplomatic career was not a success. He singularly failed to adapt his lifestyle to that of a member of a diplomatic mission, continuing to circulate exclusively with his Turkish friends, wearing Turkish dress and invariably eating Turkish food. Even the friendly Lord Ponsonby became exasperated by the behaviour of his young protégé. But already before he had arrived to take up his post, he was in trouble. It was discovered he had followed up a contact with the Turkish ambassador in Paris to pursue the idea of British warships passing through the Dardanelles; this he did entirely on his own initiative and with no authorization. Not surprisingly, Lord Palmerston told him off in no uncertain terms: ‘a private person may act on his own impulse, but a commissioned officer must wait till he is told to act’. This was a message that Urquhart was never to fully accept.