The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (36 page)

By now three vessels had been found to take Shakespear and his charges further up the coast, from where they continued overland to Orenburg. There, having shaved off his beard and exchanged native dress for European clothes, Shakespear was warmly received by General Perovsky, who thanked him profusely and immediately ordered the release of the 600 Khivans being held at Orenburg and Astrakhan. Not a man to overlook such an opportunity, Shakespear kept his eyes open for any signs of a second Russian expedition being mounted against Khiva. He was relieved to see none, although his hosts were careful to ensure that he observed as little of military value as possible while he was at Orenburg. On November 3, 1840, six months after setting out on his mission from Herat, Shakespear arrived in St Petersburg
en route
for London. There he was officially welcomed by Tsar Nicholas who formally thanked him for rescuing, at grave risk to his own life, so many Russian subjects from their heathen captors. It was no secret in court circles, however, that privately the Tsar was infuriated by the young British officer’s unsolicited but now widely publicised act. For just as Shakespear’s superiors had hoped, it effectively removed any excuse which St Petersburg might have had for advancing again on Khiva, seen by many strategists, both British and Russian, as one of the principal stepping-stones leading to India.

It is not surprising that Russian historians, whether Tsarist or Soviet, have ignored the role of Abbott and Shakespear in the freeing of the Khivan slaves. Their liberation by the Khan is attributed solely to his growing fear of Russian military strength, and the fright he received on learning of the first expedition launched against him. Russian historians, however, have had plenty to say about Abbott and Shakespear. Both, they claim, were British spies, sent into Central Asia as part of a grand design for paramountcy there at the expense of Russia, whose influence they aimed to destroy. The Afghan city of Herat, according to N. A. Khalfin, a leading Soviet authority on the Great Game era, was at that time ‘a nest of British agents’. It served as the controlling point, he argues, for ‘a wide network of British military-political sources of intelligence, and a system of communication for British agents.’ There was, of course, an element of truth in this, although he credits the British with being far better organised in Central Asia than they really were. Indeed, Macnaghten, Burnes, Todd and other politicals would have been surprised, not to say flattered, by this Russian view of their omniscience.

Like Abbott before him, Khalfin claims, Shakespear was sent to Khiva to reconnoitre routes and fortresses along the Russian frontier between Alexandrovsk and Orenburg. ‘As an excuse for entering Russia from Khiva,’ he declares, ‘Shakespear put forward the “necessity” of accompanying the Russian slaves. Taking advantage of the fact that the Khivan government was obliged by Russian pressure to free these prisoners, Shakespear travelled with them, passing himself off as their liberator.’ In order to be allowed to proceed to Orenburg – ‘the terminal point of his mission’ – he represented himself, like Abbott before him, as a mediator between the Khivans and the Russians. Aware that both officers were really there as spies, General Perovsky had them placed under strict surveillance until they were safely out of the country.

Khalfin further alleges that the British even had a spy network in Orenburg itself. This was centred, he tells us, on the mission station there of the British and Foreign Bible Society, which had changed its name in 1814 to the Russian Bible Society. Its purpose, he quotes an earlier historian as having discovered, was to engage in espionage and to establish relations with Khiva and Bokhara, if possible turning them against Russia. Shakespear, Khalfin claims, had orders to make contact with the missionaries of this station. In fact, he adds, what neither Shakespear nor his superiors appeared to realise was that the mission had already been closed down by the authorities. He concludes, however, that possibly ‘some remnants of the Society remained, and that it was these whom Shakespear was to enlist in subversive activities in Orenburg.’ Needless to say, neither Shakespear nor Abbott make any mention of the mission in their own narratives.

Khalfin’s claims are largely based on a cache of faded letters and other papers said to have been seized from the Turcomans in 1873, and to be found today in the Soviet Military Archives (file no. 6996). The letters, written between 1831 and 1838, together with the other papers, are believed by Khalfin to have belonged to Lieutenant Shakespear (although nowhere do they bear his name) which he somehow lost during his visit to Khiva. But as Colonel Geoffrey Wheeler, the British scholar who first reported Khalfin’s allegations in the
Central Asian Review
in 1958, points out: ‘It is difficult to believe that any responsible person would proceed on an allegedly secret mission to Central Asia carrying with him a collection of confidential letters, the latest of which had been written two years previously.’

The letters, which are unsigned and appear only to be copies, deal mainly with British policy – or naked ambition, as Khalfin sees it – in Central Asia. However, it is from the papers found with them, some of which bear the words ‘secret and confidential’, that the Russian scholar largely makes his deductions about the real purpose of Shakespear’s and Abbott’s missions. His article, which appeared in the Soviet journal
Istoriya
SSSR,
1958, No. 2, includes no facsimiles of these documents, and therefore, as Wheeler points out, cannot be verified. Nor, without access to the originals in the Soviet Military Archives, can the accuracy of the quotations, or Khalfin’s selection or use of them, be checked. If the papers and letters are what he claims, regardless of his interpretation of them, it is possible that they belonged to Abbott rather than Shakespear, and that they were taken from the former when he was attacked and robbed on his way to Alexandrovsk.

But whatever the Russians may have felt (and, apparently, still do feel) about Shakespear, his superiors were delighted by the way he had so skilfully spiked the Tsar’s guns by liberating his subjects. On his return to London he was to receive a wild and enthusiastic welcome reminiscent of that accorded to Alexander Burnes eight years earlier. Although still in his twenties, he was knighted and promoted by a jubilant Queen Victoria, who, only 21 herself, was already showing signs of Russophobia. As for the modest Abbott, who had paved the way for Shakespear’s feat, he was to receive scant recognition. His rewards were to come much later in his career, though. Not only was he knighted and made a general, but a garrison town – Abbottabad, today in northern Pakistan – was named after him.

All that lay far in the future, however. Both Shakespear and Abbott were now eager to get back to India, for during their long absence things had begun to go seriously wrong for the British in Central Asia.

·18·
Night of the Long Knives

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.