Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (21 page)

This was not Masson’s only anxiety. It was not just that Burnes’s behaviour lacked the ‘decorum . . . [with which] it was supposed that a British mission would be conducted’, he was worried by Burnes’s diplomatic instincts and feared that his manner with the Amir was too ‘compliant and obsequious’, that he was overdoing the flattery, ‘prefacing his remarks with Garib Nawaz, your humble petitioner’.
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Masson was also concerned that Burnes was encouraging the Amir to hope for the full restoration of Peshawar through British mediation, when it was still far from certain that Ranjit Singh would be at all amenable to this, or that Calcutta would be prepared to press him on that matter, or even that the young Ambassador had the authority to conduct such negotiations in the first place.

Nevertheless, only ten days after his arrival in Kabul, Burnes set out for a quick break in the Afghan countryside, full of optimism about his mission and in the highest spirits. ‘A vast vista of gardens extended for some thirty or forty miles in length terminated by the Hindoo Koosh, white with snow,’ he wrote happily from the Shomali Plain the following day, exhilarated to be travelling again in the landscape he loved. ‘Every hill with a southern aspect had a vineyard on it.’

More satisfying even than the landscape, or the prospects of a week’s rest in the Mughal Emperor Babur’s favourite pleasure resort at Istalif, was Burnes’s firm conviction that an anti-Russian alliance was all but in the bag. ‘Dost Mohammad Khan has fallen into all our views,’ he wrote to his brother-in-law from Istalif the following day.

Things now stand so that I think we are at the threshold of negotiations with King Ranjit, the basis of which will be his withdrawal from Peshawar and a Barakzai receiving it as a tributary of Lahore, the Chief of Kabul sending his son to ask pardon. Oh! What say you to this after all that has been urged [by Wade and Macnaghten] of Dost Mohammad Khan putting forth extravagant pretensions! Ranjit will accede to the plan, I am certain. I have, on behalf of the Government, agreed to stand as mediator between the parties, and Dost Mohammad has cut asunder all his connections with Persia and Russia and refused to receive the ambassadors from the Shah now at Kandahar.
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Burnes was not to know that, even as he wrote, several hundred miles to the south his mission was being sabotaged so as to make it almost impossible for him to reconcile the two warring partners. Still less was he to suspect as yet that the man who would effectively kill off his Embassy was the very same man who had despatched it, the new Governor General, Lord Auckland.

Around the same time as Burnes was writing in triumph from Istalif, and Vitkevitch and his Cossacks were cantering across the Afghan frontier south of Herat, a red cordon of ceremonial cavalry was lining up between the gates of Government House in Calcutta and the lapping waters of the riverfront ghats on the Hoogly.

Lord Auckland was about to leave Calcutta for his first trip outside Bengal. His imperial progress was planned to allow him to inspect the famine-struck plains of Hindustan, from the Kingdom of Avadh to the British-controlled North West Provinces. He was to travel first by a ‘flat’, a special viceregal barge pulled by a steamer, then at Benares to continue by road, in carriage and palanquin, and on elephant-back, up through the Punjab to the newly established hill station of Simla.

George Eden, Lord Auckland, was a clever and capable but somewhat complacent and detached Whig nobleman. He was of a delicate build, with a thin, boyish face, narrow lips and long, elegant fingers. A confirmed bachelor of fifty-one, but looking a decade younger, he made little secret of how bored he was with the bourgeois civil servants and obsequious Indian rajahs he was forced to mix with. Too diffident for politics in England, and a bad public speaker, he took the job of governor general as it was the best administrative job available for him, though he knew or cared little for Indian history or civilisation, and on arrival did remarkably little to illuminate himself about either.

Reliance on his staff had made him popular at the Admiralty, his previous job, but it proved disastrous when he moved to India. Here, sent to rule a world of which he was completely ignorant, he quickly fell into the hands of a group of bright but inexperienced and hawkishly Russophobic advisers led by William Macnaghten – the man who had covertly supported Shah Shuja’s 1834 expedition – and his two private secretaries Henry Torrens and John Colvin. As one of the members of his council, Thoby Prinsep, put it, ‘Auckland was a good man of business, an assiduous reader of all papers, and very correct and careful in any of the drafts he approved and passed; but he was much wanting in promptness of decision, and had an overweening dread of responsibility which caused the instructions he gave to be so unsatisfactory that his agents had generally to decide for themselves what to do in any difficulty.’ Prinsep added, ‘He was considered to have yielded too much to his Private Secretary, John Colvin, who on occasions when the Governor General called his Members of Council into private consultation with himself, would take the whole initiative of discussion while his Lordship sat listening with his hands at the back of his head; and having thus so much thrown upon him he got the nickname of Lord Colvin among the younger Civil Servants.’
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On his leisurely journey ‘Up the Country’, Auckland was to be accompanied by his two waspish but adoring unmarried sisters, Emily and Fanny Eden, his pompous and pernickety Political Secretary, Macnaghten, and various other viceregal officials, attachés, wives and babies as well as Macnaghten’s notoriously bossy and demanding wife, Frances, and her entourage of a Persian cat, a rosy parakeet and five attending ayahs.

The morning of departure dawned clear and fresh, and the Macnaghtens’ friend Thomas Babington Macaulay got up early to come to see them off. Emily Eden noted in her diary – later to become one of the most celebrated travel accounts of the period – that the staff had laid on a ‘very pretty procession . . . two lines of troops led from the door of Government House to the River’.
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Only later that evening did she note the startling extent of the Governor General’s entourage: ‘We went down on our elephants to see the advance guard of the camp pass over,’ she wrote in a letter to her other sister in England. ‘It was a red Eastern sky, the beach of the river was deep sand, and the river was covered with low flat boats. Along the bank were tents, camel-trunks, the fires by which the natives were cooking, and in the boats and waiting for them were 850 camels, 140 elephants, several hundred horses, the Body Guard, the regiment that escorts us, and the camp followers. They are about 12,000 in all.’
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The scale of the Governor General’s establishment underlined the oddness of Auckland’s position. As his nephew and Military Secretary, Captain William Osborne, remarked, ‘Of all human conditions, perhaps the most brilliant and at the same time the most anomalous, is that of the Governor General of British India. A private English gentleman, and the servant of a joint stock company [that is, the East India Company], during the brief period of his government is the deputed sovereign of the greatest empire in the world; the ruler of a hundred million men. There is nothing in history analogous to this position . . .’
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Yet, for all the attendants, the spectacle, the beauty of the Ganges and the greenly tropical monsoon-washed Bengali countryside, it was not a very happy party. Emily had not wanted to come to India in the first place, feeling ‘a savage despair’ when she first set sail. She disliked her new home from the day her ship turned into the Hoogly from the Bay of Bengal and found itself becalmed. ‘I thought we should be coming home with our fortunes made by this time,’ she wrote in irritation even before sighting Calcutta, ‘but . . . at last, by dint of very great patience and very little wind, we have arrived . . . We are surrounded by boats manned by black people, who, by some strange inadvertence, have utterly forgotten to put on any clothes whatsoever.’
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Later she was horrified by the elaborate ceremonial and stiff formality of Government House, as well as by the number of attendants who followed her around, writing home about ‘the utter bewilderment in which I live . . . [it feels like] a constant theatrical representation going on around me . . .’
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Fanny, meanwhile, was already irritated by the Macnaghtens. In her diaries she depicts her brother’s bespectacled Political Secretary as a grating pedant, even by the standards of the British government in India. When Auckland asked the boat to stop at Buxar so he could jump ashore and take a look at the site of the battleground where the British had first defeated the Mughals, Macnaghten was reported by Emily to be ‘half mad . . . actually dancing about the deck with rage’ at the breach of protocol.
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‘Mr Torrens and Mr Macnaghten nearly fainted away on their deck because George ventured ashore after a bit of impromptu amusement,’ agreed Fanny. The following day in Ghazipur the Edens ‘gave another shock to Mr Macnaghten’s constitution by going ashore without a single aide-de-camp or any other badge of a Governor General about George. When we get to camp we mean to reform and behave better, though as it is, it seems to me that we are always going to be sailing about in a cloud of peacock’s feathers, silver sticks and golden umbrellas.’
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Emily conceded that Macnaghten, for all his pomposity, had a reputation as a clever aide, and refers to him as ‘
our
Lord Palmerston, a dry sensible man, who wears an enormous pair of blue spectacles . . . he speaks Persian rather more fluently than English; Arabic better than Persian; but for familiar conversation rather prefers Sanscrit’.
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Mrs Macnaghten meanwhile was busy trying to stop her Persian cat eating her parakeet – one ayah was employed solely to guard and feed the bird – while worrying about being robbed by footpads creeping aboard the boat during the night: ‘the previous year they broke into Mrs Macnaghten’s tent and stole all her clothes so that Macnaghten had to sew her up in a blanket and drive her to Benares for fresh things’.
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Fanny found the Macnaghtens especially insufferable during the formal durbars that were held intermittently along the banks of the Ganges:

The only amusing part of this business is the extreme gravity and emphasis with which Macnaghten translates every word that passes, never moving a muscle of his very unmovable countenance. ‘He says, my Lord, that your Lordship is his father and mother, his uncle and aunt, that you make his night and day, that he has no pillar to lean upon but you.’ All the attar of rose ceremonies he conducts with the same solemnity. I never saw a man more born for this business.

Later, during a visit to an elderly rani, ‘Macnaghten, in the most solemn manner, returned this answer: “The Rani, my Lord, says it is utterly impossible for her to express how inconceivably well she feels that your Lordship has entered her dwelling . . . she was feeling as a locust in the presence of an elephant . . .” Mrs Macnaghten, who does not in fact understand the language much, acts as interpreter [for Fanny and me]. O my dear, such a woman, she will be the death of me.’
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From the very beginning, Lord Auckland, his sisters and their guests suffered from an enervating imperial ennui born of a patronising – if mildly amused – disdain for the distant colony through which they were forced to pass. On the second day of the trip, Emily remarked that their guests ‘were all, like our noble selves, so much bored that they went to bed at eight’. As for her brother, ‘G is already bored to death,’ she wrote a week into the trip. ‘Disgust is turning him yellow.’
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‘We get on much slower than we expected,’ agreed Fanny, ‘and George, cut off from his papers and office-boxes and his “members in council” has a sort-of deposed Governor General feel which makes him impatient
?
.
. .?
He is growing rabid with his tent life, and scolds me every morning because the view is not prettier.’
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Only the prospect of some parties upstream cheered the sisters:
‘invitations to a ball have reached us from Brigadier Richards . . . I fancy this is the beginning of a constant course of dancing we are going through till we reach the Himalayas . . . I think it would be fitting if George would learn to walk through the minuet de la cour. Emily or I could take it in turns to follow with the reigning brigadier of the station . . .’ Meanwhile, there was trouble to deal with in the provision department: ‘General Casement and Mr Macnaghten came on board this evening. We think there is something wrong with the apple jelly they have had at breakfast. A mysterious allusion was made to it by Mr Macnaghten, which was hastily nipped in the bud by General Casement.’
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It was in the midst of such cares that Lord Auckland was forced to turn his attention to matters Afghan.

Afghanistan was a country Auckland knew or cared about even less than he knew or cared about India, and from the beginning he showed a marked antipathy to its most powerful ruler, Dost Mohammad Khan. Dost Mohammad, by contrast, had gone out of his way to court the new Governor General. As soon as he heard of Auckland’s arrival he had sent a letter telling him that ‘the field of my hopes which before had been chilled by the cold blast of wintry times, has by the happy timing of your Lordship’s arrival become the envy of the garden of paradise . . . I hope that your lordship will consider me and my country as your own.’
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He then came to the point, asking Auckland to intervene on his behalf with Ranjit Singh and to use his influence to retrieve Peshawar for Afghanistan, so bringing peace to the region.