The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (25 page)

Palmerston, the British Foreign Secretary, was incensed at this, and protested strongly to St Petersburg. He was beginning to wonder whether the redoubtable Mohammed AH, who had made friendly overtures to Britain, would not have been better on the Turkish throne than the supine Sultan. His humour was not improved by the Russian reply to his protest, which argued that they had merely done what Britain would have liked to have done, but had beaten her to the draw. This Palmerston dismissed as ‘flippant and impertinent’, although he knew it to be uncomfortably near the truth. It did little, however, to improve the rapidly deteriorating climate between the two powers. Concern over Russia’s long-term ambitions was intensified by the news that St Petersburg was greatly expanding its fleet, and the Royal Navy was accordingly enlarged to match this. Coming on top of Russia’s victories over Persia and Turkey in 1828 and 1829, and the secret deal over the Dardanelles, this did indeed seem ominous. In such an atmosphere, almost anything, however trivial, served the cause of the Russophobes.

Such was the mood when David Urquhart took up the cudgels on behalf of the Circassians. He had first established contact with their leaders in 1834 while dwelling in Constantinople, and paid a secret visit to their mountain strongholds, the first of his countrymen ever to do so. The Circassian chiefs, fearless but unsophisticated, were much impressed by this visitor from the great world outside who represented and spoke for – or so they assumed – a nation as powerful as Great Britain. He offered them much encouragement and advice, and they begged him to stay on and lead them in their struggle against the Russians. Urquhart refused, however, insisting that he could be of far more use to them in London. He returned home convinced that it was Britain’s moral duty to prevent the Russians from overrunning this small highland nation, which posed no threat to anyone and reminded him of his own native Scotland. It was strongly in her own interest, too, to help the Caucasian tribes to drive the Russians out of this vital bridgehead, from which Turkey, Persia and eventually India could be invaded. Not for nothing had one Russian general described the Caucasus as ‘the greatest fortress in the world.’

Urquhart kept his word to his friends, and a torrent of articles, pamphlets and news items began to pour from his pen propagating their cause and execrating all things Russian. The following year he published a book entitled
England and Russia,
in which he warned of Russia’s expansionist aims in the Near East and in Central Asia. Turkey, he forecast, would be the first to be swallowed up. ‘The whole Ottoman empire passes at once from us to her, by then our open foe,’ he wrote. ‘The force, the arms, the frontiers, the fortresses, the treasures and the ships of Turkey, now placed against Russia, will be placed against us – disciplined, combined and directed by her.’ Having absorbed Turkey, Russia would next subjugate Persia. The Persians were ‘a numerous, patient and warlike people, to be disciplined and moved by Russia without inconvenience or expense’. Urquhart had little doubt against whom they would be moved. With their fondness for plunder, the Persians would require little urging if India’s fabulous wealth were the prize held out to them.

Russia, he concluded, ‘chooses her own time . . . she cannot miscalculate on such a moment as this. Her whole mind, energies and resources are concentrated on it. She will be perfectly certain of success before she makes her move’. None of this was entirely original. Sir Robert Wilson had been the first to raise the spectre of the Ottoman Empire being overwhelmed by Russian armies, while the concept of St Petersburg using the Persians to invade India had been mooted by Kinneir seventeen years earlier. But much had changed since then. Urquhart’s warning came at a time when the Russians appeared to be on the move again. In addition to enlarging their fleet, they had greatly strengthened their hand in the Caucasus, the bridgehead from which any further advances into Turkey or Persia would almost certainly be launched. With Russophobia now at an all-time high, Urquhart found no shortage of people who were willing to listen to him.

Possessing such powerful friends as William IV, the Turkish Sultan and Lord Ponsonby, then British ambassador to Constantinople, it was no surprise when early in 1836 Urquhart was posted to the Turkish capital as First Secretary at the British Embassy. But Urquhart was not a man to allow his new diplomatic status to curb either his Russophobe activities or his support for the Circassian cause, and it was while he was serving at Constantinople that the celebrated, if now long forgotten, affair of the
Vixen
took place. At that time, although Circassia was far from subdued, the Russians claimed it as their sovereign territory, acquired by treaty from the Turks. On the pretext of isolating the region because of an outbreak of plague, they had imposed a strict naval blockade of its Black Sea coastline.

Britain did not recognise this claim, but the government did not feel strongly enough about it to challenge Russia over the matter. Urquhart, however, was incensed by what he saw as Palmerston’s acquiescence in St Petersburg’s efforts to crush the gallant Circassians, as well as by his spinelessness in not challenging the blockade, which was aimed at keeping British goods, and possibly arms, out of the Caucasus. To force the issue, therefore, Urquhart persuaded a British shipping company to send one of its schooners, the
Vixen,
from Constantinople with a cargo of salt to the port of Sudjuk Kale, at the northern end of the Circassian coast. It was a deliberate act of provocation, intended to see how far the Russians were prepared to go to maintain their claim to Circassia. If the vessel was intercepted, Urquhart hoped that this would inflame public opinion at home and thus force the government to take direct action against the Russians to protect its merchant fleet. Such a move, necessitating the sending of British warships into the Black Sea, would also serve the purpose of challenging the new Russo-Turkish secret agreement over the Dardanelles. If, on the other hand, the Russians failed to seize the
Vixen,
then it showed that they could be forced to climb down if only one stood up to them. It would also show that supplies of arms for the beleaguered Circassians might be able to follow.

In November 1836, the
Vixen
left Constantinople and headed eastwards across the Black Sea. Her departure could hardly have escaped St Petersburg’s notice, for Urquhart’s newspaper contacts saw to it that this received widespread coverage. Urquhart and his co-conspirators, hawks to a man, clearly hoped that she would be intercepted. For they believed that only a showdown between London and St Petersburg could now halt Russian aggrandisement. Things got off to a promising start when the commander of a Russian brig arrested the vessel in the port of Sudjuk Kale, where she had been trading for two days. News of her seizure was promptly dispatched to London by British newspaper correspondents, mostly friends of Urquhart’s, based in Constantinople. As had been expected, the tidings aroused the wrath of press and public, although few Britons had even the haziest idea where Circassia was. The Russophobe newspapers, temporarily out of ammunition, rose predictably to Urquhart’s bait. While
The Times
chided the government for allowing the Russians to ‘scoff at the pusillanimity of England’, the
Edinburgh Review
examined the wider implications of the crisis. ‘The Circassians once subdued,’ it declared, ‘the Caucasus is open and Persia lies at St Petersburg’s mercy . . . Thus we shall see the frontier of Russia advanced at one stride 1,200 miles nearer our Indian frontier.’

Palmerston himself was no less angered by the illegal seizure of the British vessel, and a heated correspondence commenced with St Petersburg. The Foreign Secretary was equally annoyed with Urquhart and his Russophobe friends, whom he knew to be behind it all. He had tried to block Urquhart’s appointment to Constantinople, but it was no secret that this had had the King’s personal backing, and he had been overruled by his Cabinet colleagues. Now feeling thoroughly vindicated, he at once set about getting the offender recalled to London before he could do any more damage to Anglo-Russian relations. Meanwhile, in the Turkish capital, Urquhart and his friends eagerly awaited the British government’s response to the arrest and confiscation of the
Vixen.

It was around this time that the Russians began to claim that there were British agents operating among the Circassians, supplying them with arms, advising them and encouraging them to resist. Indeed, in addition to its cargo of salt, they alleged that the
Vixen
had been found to be carrying weapons intended for the rebellious tribesmen. So concerned were they about the possible effects of this on the course of the war, that the Russian commander issued a warning to the Circassians suspected of harbouring the foreigners in their mountain lairs. ‘The Englishmen in your midst’, he declared, ‘are merely unprincipled adventurers.’ They had come, not to help the Circassian cause, but to try to acquire Circassia for Britain. They should be seized forthwith and killed. The Circassians themselves, he said, would be wise to lay down their arms, for no country had ever waged war against Russia and won. ‘Are you not aware’, he asked them, ‘that were the heavens to fall, the Russians could prop them up with their bayonets?’ It was far better for the Caucasian tribes to be ruled by the Tsar than by the King of England. However, if they listened to the British and chose to resist, then it would not be the Russians’ fault if their valleys and homes were destroyed by fire and sword, and their mountains ‘trampled into dust’.

As the Russians were to discover during the next quarter of a century or more, it would take more than bombast to intimidate the Circassians, who continued to resist long after the other Caucasian peoples had submitted. But on one point the general was right. There were indeed Englishmen living with the Circassians at that moment. One, James Longworth, was a special correspondent of
The Times,
a newspaper sympathetic to the Circassian cause, who had come to see how they were faring in their David and Goliath struggle with the Russians. His companion, James Bell, was also a Circassian sympathiser. Indeed it was he, perhaps unwisely, who had lent the
Vixen
to further their cause. Encouraged by Urquhart, he had run the Russian gauntlet like Longworth in order to witness the war and to try to keep it in the headlines at home. He was also anxious to discover what had happened to his vessel and its cargo, and to endeavour to recover them.

During the months they were to spend with the
mujahedin,
living under the very noses of the Russians, the two men learned of the extraordinary veneration felt by the Circassians for ‘Dauod Bey’, as David Urquhart was known to them. When, more than two years earlier, he had landed on their shores he had found them divided and disorganised. He at once set about forming a central authority to organise and coordinate their resistance. He also wrote for them a formal declaration of independence, which he ensured was widely publicised in Europe. For their part, Longworth and Bell were able to offer the Circassians encouragement and advice while they and their hosts awaited news of the British government’s response to the seizure of the
Vixen,
and St Petersburg’s claim to Circassia. In the meantime they were able to observe some of the fighting, and Longworth to report on its progress to his newspaper, thus helping to keep the Circassian cause in the public eye.

At first, when the fighting had been confined to the frontier region, the Russians had used their Cossack cavalry to try to crush resistance. But with centuries of mountain and forest warfare behind them, and an intimate knowledge of the terrain, the Circassians had shown themselves to be more than a match for the Russians. They were also better mounted and armed than the Cossacks, and quite as skilled and ferocious in combat. The result was that the Russian commanders had to think again. Their next move was to use infantry supported by artillery, with Cossack cavalry to guard their flanks. In this way they were able to advance cautiously into hostile territory, destroying villages and crops as they went.

After disastrous attempts to break the Russian squares, during which, Longworth recounts, ‘the best and the bravest of the warriors fell victim to their own rashness’, the Circassians likewise changed their tactics. Instead of attempting to meet the Russians head on, they learned to steer them into skilfully laid ambushes and traps, striking from nowhere on their swift mounts and vanishing as quickly. The Russians next introduced grape-shot, an early form of shrapnel. ‘Their guns,’ one Circassian complained to Longworth, ‘instead of sending a single ball which came whistling over our heads . . . now vomit ten thousand of them at the very least which come tearing and smashing everything about us.’ If only the British would provide them with such weapons, he pleaded, then the Russian troops ‘would be no more able to keep their ranks than we are, and, being once dispersed, our cavalry would play the devil with them as before.’

Resistance in the Caucasus, the Englishmen learned, was not confined to Circassia. Across the mountains to the east, on the Caspian side of the Caucasus, a similar struggle was going on against the Russians in Daghestah. This was led by a Muslim divine of extraordinary charisma and genius at guerilla tactics called Shamyl. However, because of Daghestan’s remoteness, and the fact that there was no Urquhart to publicise it, or Longworth to report it, this war went virtually unnoticed in Europe. But if the British had not yet heard of Shamyl, the Tsar’s generals certainly had, for none of the usual tactics appeared to work against him. More than twenty years of incessant warfare lay ahead before Shamyl was defeated, and a further five before the Circassian tribes were finally overrun. The campaign was to prove extremely costly to the Russians, in both money and lives, but it was to inspire some of their greatest writers and poets, including Tolstoy, Pushkin and Lermontov. All that was still far off at the time of which we are writing, however, as Longworth and Bell awaited word from London on the outcome of the
Vixen
affair.