by Craig Murray
He had become a regular guest at Holland House, the most celebrated salon of the age. Burnes had an attractive personality. ‘He was simple in his manners, and for the most part sprightly and friendly in conversation, with alternating fits of absence and abstraction,’36 during which his interlocutors might fancy him to be recollecting intrigue amongst the towering minarets of Bokhara, or planning the defence of India against the advancing Russians. His winning smile, good humour and reputation for daring meant that not only was he invited everywhere, he was invited back, which is much harder. In January 1835 he wrote to James Holland:
The Athenaeum Club has elected me over the heads of 1,130 candidates as a member on account, as they are pleased to say, of my ‘distinguished eminence’ […] you will judge of the Club when I name the first men I met – Hallam, Sir G Staunton, Sidney Smith, D’Israeli, Crawford of Java etc.
Burnes regularly met the President of the Board of Control and MP for Inverness, Sir Charles Grant.37 Grant admired Burnes and consulted him on questions of policy. He introduced him to the Prime Minister, Earl Grey. Burnes however found Grey focused on the Bosphorus to the exclusion of events further east.
Grant also showed Burnes reports on the situation in Kabul received, via Tehran, from Charles Masson, asking him their value; Burnes commended them. In February 1835 Grant and Burnes had lunch with Dr John McNeill, Secretary to the mission to Persia.38 The thirty-seven-year-old McNeill cultivated a tousled Byronic image. Alex had known him ten years earlier as surgeon with the Cutch Field Force. McNeill was now an accomplished diplomat and concerned at Russian incursions into and influence on Persia.
With Grant’s agreement, McNeill and Burnes petitioned William IV to give a royal pardon to Lewis/Masson for desertion, on the grounds of his utility as an intelligence agent in Kabul. This was granted, a very rare event – it was the only such pardon from William IV.
Burnes wrote regularly back to Pottinger, who informed Masson:
I have had several letters from Lieut Burnes lately and find he has an account of his Travels […] in the Press in three volumes. He has been received in ‘The most distinguished mansions in England’ and has had special interviews with the King, the Princess Victoria (Her Heiress Apparent) H.M. Ministers etc etc to give a verbal detail of his adventures! He has also been elected a member of several of the learned Societies and had been invited over to Paris to superintend a translation of his work […]39
Prostitution in 1830s London was open on a scale which it is hard for us now to imagine; and there was more of it than in any other European capital.40
It was now that Alexander met the only named woman we can associate with him romantically, a prostitute with the working name ‘Emma Graham’. He had real affection for her. Writing and rewriting his will in Kabul, after bequests to his family and school he remembered her:
I charge my father to find out a poor unfortunate misled girl whom I knew in London and give her £200. Captn. Oates late of our army knows her or if not his brother Charles Oates Esq. Barrister at Law both sons of Lady Oates of Mitcham, Surrey. The ‘nom de guerre’ of the poor demoiselle is ‘Emma Graham’ but this is not her real name. The mode of life will soon end her days but this legacy if she be spared must be paid. I have set my hand to this on the river Indus on the 12th day of June 1837 and he who doubts its authority and questions it on him rests the curse of a man no more.41
Burnes named his father James as executor, and it is to old James’ credit that he made no attempt to hush up this will. On the contrary, he took it to the highly respected masters of Montrose Academy, William Beattie and James Robertson, for them to attach an authentication of the handwriting before despatching it to the probate register, attested by James’ fellow on the magistrate’s bench, David Mackie.
Here again, we must avoid judging Alexander through the interposed prism of late Victorian morality. As William Dalrymple brilliantly put it, this is difficult because ‘It is as if the Victorians succeeded in colonising not only India but alas, more permanently, our Imaginations […]’42 Whatever had passed between Alexander and his ‘Emma’, he remained deeply attached to her, and was thinking about her sitting in his tent by the Indus. The strength of his threatened curse speaks of real passion. His realistic assessment of the life expectation of a prostitute is startling. As he wrote, he was indeed wondering if she were still alive.
One of the questions I drew up in starting my quest for Alexander was why he never married. He would have been expected to contract an engagement during his long leave in Britain; he now had brilliant prospects. He would have been a good catch in London or Edinburgh, and back home in Forfarshire they must have been hurling their daughters at him. One explanation might be his doomed love for ‘Emma Graham’.
Burnes’ social life in London obviously included a military circle. Apart from Captain Oates, it included Captain George Jacob, also back on leave. Burnes gave just a glimpse of their London life: ‘Now here is a dose of politics for you, as verbose as those I used to give you when we dined at the house in Waterloo Place, or when over a lobster at some of those brilliant society meetings in London.’43
Their round included the weekly meetings of the Raleigh Club,44 founded as an alternative to the Travellers for those at the cutting edge of exploration rather than administration. The Raleigh met in St James’s St, in a pub owned by the Willis family of the famous Assembly Rooms. The Thatched House was the venue of choice for start-up clubs. In 1834 it hosted a different club six days a week, including the Raleigh, United Services, Carlton and the Yacht Club (later the Royal Yacht Squadron). The Raleigh Club eventually merged into the Royal Geographical Society.
Burnes also mixed with a circle devoted to India. Mountstuart Elphinstone and Sir Alexander Johnstone, founder of the Royal Asiatic Society, hosted dinner parties for him.45 With Alexander now the Company’s hottest star, he had influence of which he could hardly have dreamed. It was now no problem for Alex to get Charlie a cadetship, at the late age of twenty-two.
Charlie reckoned the career prospects would be worth the ribbing from fellow cadets about his geriatric condition. He stayed with Alex and Davie in Woburn Place during his preparations, and Alex paid the money for his equipment. We can imagine the young Scottish brothers revelling in the possibilities of pre-Victorian London, where Alex was the toast of the town.
Burnes had several artefacts to display, not least his Bokhara gown and turban and a jewelled sword (perhaps the one given by Murad Ali he had not handed in to the Company). These items have disappeared. They were in the museum of the Royal Asiatic Society, but that collection was transferred to the Victoria and Albert Museum in the late nineteenth century. The V&A now have no record of anything connected with Alexander Burnes.
Another Burnes souvenir, a letter from Ranjit Singh on a long tissue embossed with small crosses of real gold, is preserved in the National Library of Scotland. Davie reported that he ‘had great difficulty getting it out of the hands of a lady to whom my brother had given a sight of it’.46 In the National Archives of India, their experts told me it was simply a form letter from Ranjit dismissing an unnamed Ambassador.
There were existing commercial links between Scotland and Central Asia. Burnes received a request from a Glasgow merchant named Simpson for a credit reference for Kohan Dil Khan of Kandahar. Kohan was seeking Rs30,000 of credit for goods. Burnes referred to Mohan Lal in Calcutta. Lal reported that Kohan was bankrupt, and had stolen money from Abdullah Khan Achakzai. Burnes reported this to Simpson, but added that if the payment were guaranteed by the Hindu Gangara banking house of Kandahar, as stated, then they were good for the money.47
This is a vital glimpse into trade with Central Asia; the Indian banking network was linked to the British credit system. Indigenous Indian banking links were part of the structure of Mughal civilisation and now facilitated sophisticated terms of trade between Britain and much of Asia. The family banking houses of Multan and Shikarpur had as many as 8,000 representati
ves spread throughout Central Asia and as far as Beijing, Tblisi, Astrakhan and Nizhni Novgorod.
On 16 July 1834 Burnes wrote to John Murray ‘I am very sorry that I will be prevented from dining with you tomorrow evening as I am obliged to leave tomorrow suddenly for Scotland.’48 James had recently arrived from India, and Alexander travelled with James, Charles and David up to Montrose. There, at a meeting of St Peter’s Lodge in August, James, David and Charles Burnes were all initiated into freemasonry, with Alexander present, under the chairmanship of their lawyer brother, Adam, who had replaced his father James as Master, the last looking on proudly.49 This was the last time Alex was to see Scotland.
At the end of 1834 Alex was in Paris, where a French edition of his travels was already in preparation. It was a heady whirl of soirees: ‘time flies faster in this capital than ever I have found it’. However, he found time to do what British gentlemen always did in Paris ‘I have been living fast in every sense of the word.’ Life seemed truly charmed. With a small group of friends, he purchased a five-franc lottery ticket, which won; Burnes’ share was 2,700 francs! He expressed his determination to spend it all in Paris. Yet he still found time for the final corrections of his book.
On 1 January 1835 Burnes was guest of honour at a meeting of the Geographical Society in Paris attended by King Louis-Philippe. The following day, Louis dispatched Lord Brougham to bring Burnes to the palace to accept the Légion d’Honneur. Brougham arrived at Burnes’ lodgings just after Alex had left to return to London. The offer of the Légion d’Honneur caught up with him before he reached Calais, but he could not return as he had to go and see Charlie off to India.
In London Burnes remained in great social demand. He accepted a dinner invitation from John Murray on 30 May 1834, but declined invitations for 30 June, 17 July, 8 September, 8 December 1834 and 8 January 1835, all on grounds of prior engagement. On 28 January 1835 Murray finally received an acceptance: ‘I am disengaged on Saturday for a wonder.’50 And the very top of British society had not lost interest. Burnes wrote to Murray:
Would you do me the favour of causing the binder to make five free copies in the finest style of his heart as I find I must send them to the King and Duchess of Kent as well as Lord and Lady William Bentinck.51
Burnes’ celebrity meant a demand for anything in his name. Earlier work was recycled. For example, the reports and maps of Rajputana, Parkar and the Runn of Cutch, produced from his very first mission with James Holland, were dug out by the Court of Directors and presented to the Royal Geographical Society, which published.52
Before returning to India, he was invited by the Marquess of Lansdowne to Bowood House, for one of the great week-long country house parties of the Whig Ascendancy, held in Burnes’ honour. Whig Lords Russell, Brougham, Auckland, Morpeth and Howick were all there, plus the celebrated wit Sidney Smith.
It was a time of political crisis. There had been great expectations in the country of a reforming ministry following the widening of the parliamentary franchise and redistribution of seats in the Great Reform Act of 1832. But Grey’s administration had been paralysed by divisions over the established church in Ireland. Grey offered his resignation in July, and the King had asked Melbourne to try to form a ministry in alliance with the Conservatives. He declined, and until November 1834 the country lurched on without effective government. Then Robert Peel was recalled by the King to form a minority Conservative administration, which lasted 100 days before defeat at the ensuing general election.
House parties were where the deals were struck which made and broke ministries. In the 1830s, ‘politics in the post-reform decade are unintelligible except in terms of the religious animosities which divided British society’.53 The urbane Whigs were, by and large, on the anti-clerical side, which suited Burnes, who wrote: ‘No nation has as yet advanced without a freedom from priestcraft.’54 At a time of unusually fevered political in-fighting among the British ruling classes, the affairs of India were probably a pleasant digression for all at Bowood.
Burnes found himself seated on the sofa one Saturday afternoon, briefing the incoming Governor-General, the somewhat over-earnest Lord Auckland, whom Alex described as ‘a long, tall, gaunt man’.55 The experience gave him an excessively optimistic view of his future influence on policy, and his relationship with Auckland, now the time was coming for his return to India.
On 13 January 1835 at East India dock, Alex and Davie waved Charlie off. Alex and Charlie were reunited in an unexpected manner. Charlie had embarked on a traditional sailing ship. Alexander quit London on 5 April for Bombay to travel back in the new luxury available – from Falmouth to Egypt by steam packet, up the Nile, across Suez by land, and then a steam packet to Bombay.
It illustrates the massive difference that steam technology made, that Alex actually caught Charles, who had started eighty-two days earlier! Two hundred miles off the coast of Bombay, a boat from the sailing ship brought Charlie on board, and the brothers arrived together on 1 June 1835.
Alex wrote a vivid letter back to John Murray from the Nile. It had taken just over three weeks from Falmouth, and Burnes noted it as four weeks to the day since he left Murray in Albemarle Street. Egypt was no place to hang about:
I cannot believe myself so far distant from the salons of London but the moment I reached Alexandria the line of demarcation was too apparent, the translation from civilisation to barbarism was instantaneous and we received before quitting the steamer the astounding intelligence that 15,000 human beings had died of plague within these last three months.56
Burnes’ letter details his reaction to the landscapes they passed. He quotes Byron on the Tagus and Cintus mountains, references Don Quixote and Gil Blas, and evokes Seville, Toledo, Granada and Cadiz. ‘From Spain we crossed the Mediterranean and descried Africa in the lofty mountains of Atlas which still bear snow tho’ no longer the World.’ He ponders the fate of Carthage and the Pharos and library of Alexandria.
His reaction to history and landscape is quintessentially of his time and the Romantic movement. But he moved on seamlessly to contemporary politics. The great foreign policy question of the day was the threat posed to the Ottoman Empire by its over-mighty Egyptian Pasha, Mehmet Ali. Britain’s policy was to support Turkey, lest Russia, and perhaps Austria, should profit from Ottoman demise. The Russian angle was inextricably linked with encroachment towards India. The Turkish angle was complicated by Romantic and classicist inspired support for Greece. Burnes wrote that he did not entirely agree with the anti-Mehmet articles in the UK. Yes he was a tyrant, wrote Burnes, but judged by the standard of previous rulers of Egypt he was enlightened, while his major irrigation works on the Nile would be of great benefit to ordinary people. These opinions show Burnes not afraid to think contrary to received opinion.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Castles – and Knights Templar – in the Air
The persecution of the Templars in the fourteenth century does not close the history of the Order; for […] the Order was not annihilated […] there has been a succession of Knights Templars from the twelfth century down even to these days […] Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master at the time of the persecution, anticipating his own martyrdom, appointed as his successor […] Johannes Marcus Larmenius of Jerusalem, and from that time to the present there has been a regular and uninterrupted line of Grand Masters […] The charter of transmission, with the signatures of the various chiefs of the Temple, is still preserved at Paris, with the ancient statutes of the Order […]
In November 1309, John de Soleure, the Papal Legate, and William, Bishop of St. Andrews, held an Inquisitorial Court at the Abbey of Holyrood to investigate the charges against the Templars […] we are told by a learned French writer, that having deserted the Temple, they had ranged themselves under the banners of Robert Bruce, by whom they were formed into a new Order, the observances of which were based on those of the Templars, and became […] Scottish Free Masonry […]
Robert Bruce founded the Masonic
Order of Heredom de Kilwinning, after the Battle of Bannockburn, reserving to himself and his successors on the Throne of Scotland, the office and title of Grand Master.
Scottish tradition has, moreover, always been in favour of this origin […] there are even in our own days at Edinburgh, a few individuals claiming to be the representatives of the Royal Order established by Bruce, which […] still flourishes in France, where it was established by Charter from Scotland, and even by the Pretender himself, in the course of last century, and is now conferred as the highest and most distinguished grade of Masonry, sanctioned by the Grand Orient, under the title of the Rose Croix de Heredom de Kilwinning […]
the Prince Cambaceres, Arch-chancellor of the Empire, presided over it as Provincial Grand Master (the office of supreme head being inherent in the Crown of Scotland) for many years; and that he was succeeded in his dignity […] by the head of the illustrious family of Choiseul.1
The allegedly historical passages above were written by James Burnes, for private distribution to senior freemasons, while on sick leave in Edinburgh in 1837. A second edition was printed for public sale in 1840. It was this book that first popularised the notion of the survival of the Knights Templar in Scottish freemasonry and the Templar properties in the Lothians. He would have been surprised to know that these tales would generate an entire publishing and tourist industry six generations later. The alleged Templar derivation of freemasonry and Franco-Scottish aristocratic bloodlines are intrinsic to both The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code, two of the highest selling books in history.