the Heratees made a sortie, and committed great havoc among the Persians, who, it is said, lost several superior officers on the occasion. I have, &c. The Earl of Clarendon. RICH. W. STEVENS. No. 112.-Mr. Murray to the Earl of Clarendon.-(Rec. July 22.) (Extract.) Bagdad, June 21, 1856. I AM well aware that the Sadr Azim has endeavoured throughout to make the world believe that the whole of the difference between the Persian Court and this Mission was owing to the affair of Meerza Hashem Khan's wife. He well knew that such a scandal, however unfounded, would find a certain amount of credence, and provoke a certain amount of ridicule in Europe. He remembered the Eastern proverb, "Throw mud upon the wall, some of it will stick." He cared nothing for the scandal which he brought upon the Royal Harem, so long as he could succeed in his main object that of embroiling Her Majesty's Mission with the Shah. It was for that reason that he seized and imprisoned the Meerza's wife, instead of seizing the Meerza himself, who was daily passing and repassing from his own house to the Mission. Notwithstanding that I entered on the discharge of my duties with an earnest desire to be upon the best and most friendly terms with the Shah and his Minister, I found my intentions thwarted by the latter at the very threshold, by his forbidding persons of rank and in office from paying me those visits which they had habitually paid to my predecessors. I was to see with his eyes and to hear with his ears, and thus to be precluded from obtaining correct information as to what was going forward in the social and political world of Persia. Scarcely can it be necessary for me to recal to your Lordship's recollection the repeated slights and affronts, of greater and less. importance, which the Sadr offered to the Mission, and which are related in my public correspondence of last year. My servants were maltreated; the rights of British subjects invaded, and reparation was always refused or evaded; the Mission was, for the first time this century, refused admission to the national festival of the Tazieh, which, although justly designated in your Lordship's despatch as an "unmeaning ceremony," is, nevertheless, looked upon in quite a different light in Tehran, where there was not a Persian, either of the higher or lower class, who did not view it as a slight offered to, or a triumph gained over, the British Mission. Another step taken by the Sadr, was to rake up again the old affair of Prince Ferhad Meerza, which had already, once before, interrupted the amicable relations between the Persian Court and the British Mission. The Prince was living in retirement: I had not the slightest wish nor motive to moot the question of His Royal Highness's claims to our protection, and I only wished that the Persian Government should leave him quiet and unmolested in his own house. This did not suit the Sadr's views, who began to annoy and calumniate the Prince because he paid me two or three visits, and at length carried his persecution so far as to compel me to interfere. The Sadr almost pushed that affair to a rupture; but the firm attitude which I assumed, supported by your Lordship's despatches, compelled him to abandon that ground and wait for another opportunity, when he might hope to pick a quarrel on some question more advantageous to his purpose. My despatches, in the months of November and December of last year, reported to your Lordship in full all the proceedings of the Sadr in respect to the affair of Meerza Hashem Khan, and it is not now necessary for me to recapitulate their contents, further than to observe that I can confidently appeal to your Lordship, and ask whether my despatches to the Sadr were not couched in the usual language of diplomatic courtesy, and whether I ever mentioned the Shah in other terms than those becoming His Majesty's station? Your Lordship will also bear witness that the calumnies propagated against me, and included in official despatches addressed to me, both on the part of the Shah and his Minister, were couched in terms of coarse vituperation, unexampled in diplomatic correspondence; it would seem that the Persian Court had lost all sense of propriety and self-respect when the Shah could write with his own hand that, "until the Queen of England had apologized to him, he would not receive either me or any other British Minister." About the same time, a high command was given to a Prince of the blood, who, at a dinner given by Meerza Moossa, the Deputy Governor of Tehran, mentioned Her Majesty's name in language too indecorous to be repeated. Comparing the conduct of the Sadr with the animus by which he was evidently actuated, I should have been ashamed of myself had I consented to remain in Tehran without obtaining the reparation due for such repeated insults. I come now to consider the terms of reparation which I offered to the acceptance of the Persian Government. In demanding that the Meerza should be recognized as British Agent at Shiraz, I merely upheld the right of the Mission to avail itself of the services of any unemployed Persian, without asking the permission of the Persian Government-a right hitherto enjoyed undisputedly by the foreign Missions in Tehran; a right too, which must be maintained unless Her Majesty's Government are content that every Persian employé and servant of the Mission is to be a paid spy of the Persian Ministers. I proved that the Sadr's allegation of that individual being still in the Persian service and in the army list, was entirely unfounded; and I appointed him accordingly, under your Lordship's instructions. Then followed the seizure and imprisonment of the Meerza's wife; after he had vainly endeavoured to obtain her release, I applied officially that she should be restored to her husband, which was refused. It has been stated that the Mission was not justified in demanding the restoration of the Meerza's wife to her husband, as, according to the Moslem law, the Shah, being not only the Sovereign, but also the head of the Sheeah branch of Islam, could at his own pleasure separate man and wife without rendering account in any quarter. The Shah may, indeed, assume any power and silence any opposition by force in his own dominion; but without the consent of the parties he has no legal right whatever to separate man and wife, unless in cases of proved adultery, and in those it is always the sentence of the Mooshtehids (chiefs of religion), and not that of the Shah, which dissolves the bond. At the very time that I demanded the restitution of that lady to her husband, he had in his pocket, and produced to those who detained her, a sentence signed by two of the chief Mooshtehids, to the effect that her forcible detention from her husband, as well as all attempts to divorce her without his consent, were illegal acts. I come now to the demand which I made, that the Sadr Azim should come in person to the Mission to retract and withdraw the offensive and calumnious charges which he had brought against me. I believe it has been represented to your Lordship that such a proceeding would be compromising the dignity of the Vizirial office, and humiliating to the Persian Government. Independently of the general proposition, which applies in this instance both to the Shah and his Minister, that those who so far forget their own position as to condescend to detraction and calumny, cannot expect others to be tender of a dignity which they have themselves sacrificed, the reparation which I demanded was strictly based upon precedent at the Persian Court. Your Lordship will find on reference to Colonel Sheil's despatch of the 24th of April, 1850, that the late Ameer Nizam, the proudest and most powerful Vizier of modern times, came in person to the Mission to apologise to Her Majesty's Envoy for insults offered to Her Majesty's Consul at Tabreez. If Her Majesty's Mission demanded and received that reparation for affonts offered to a British Consul by the local Persian authorities, I consider that I was, à fortiori, entitled to demand it for insults offered directly to myself by the Prime Minister in person. It is a curious coincidence, my Lord, that the present Sadr, then occupying a subordinate situation, was mainly instrumental in inducing the Ameer Nizam to give the required satisfaction. In respect to the expressions used respecting me in the Shah's autograph letters, which were even more injurious and offensive than those used by the Sadr, I simply demanded that an officer of rank should be sent on the part of the Shah to withdraw the offensive documents and express regret that they should have been written under misapprehension. I believe this demand has been represented to your Lordship as compromising the Royal dignity. I cannot adopt this view, nor do I see how the Representative of a foreign Power could have demanded or accepted a smaller measure of reparation. Had I been disposed to expose the Shah to humiliation, I might have demanded an apology such as that made by His Majesty to Prince Dolgorouki in 1849, in full Divan, and in the presence of the British Mission and of all the Persian officials; and I demanded the smallest amount of reparation consistent with the honour of Her Majesty's Mission. It remains only to consider my demand that the Mollahs should come to the Mission and withdraw the calumnious and offensive paper to which their seals were affixed. This has been represented by the Sadr as impossible, as degrading to the sacred office they fill. We are told that no Mooshtehid can be expected to come to a Christian house, and many similar phrases. My Lord, the simple meaning of this tortuous and unsubstantial argument is that the Prime Minister of Persia is to be at liberty at any time to use the religious body as political instruments or propagators of his own falsehoods; through them, and under the ægis of their sanctity, he may calumniate a foreign Power, traduce its Mission, and insult its representative; when he wishes to use them as a tool, he obliges them to put their seals to any paper which he presents for their signature; not one in twenty has the courage to refuse, or even to inquire whether its contents are true or false. When reparation is demanded, the sacredness of their office is ostentatiously paraded, and the Sadr informs us that any apology or retraction on the part of that holy assemblage would be subversive of religion and of the state. Leaving this puerile subterfuge to be dealt with by your Lordship's discrimination, I thus conclude my review of the reparation which I demanded, and I fearlessly leave it to Her Majesty's Government to decide upon the justice of my demands. Since I left Tehran the disposition of the Persian Government towards England has been evinced in more ways than one: an expedition against Herat and Candalar has been organized and put in execution under the orders of the very Prince by whom Her Majesty's name was shamefully traduced; all the ports and provinces in the south of Persia have been placed in a posture of defence; France and The United States have both been invited to station a maritime force in the Gulf; the Consul's residence in Tehran has been beset day and night by spies, and no Persian is permitted to have any communication with him; pensions due to British subjects have been arbitrarily stopped; an officer in the Persian service, under British protection, going in full uniform to visit the Consul on the Queen's birthday, has been pelted in the public streets by the son of a Persian official of rank ;* and the Consul's Meerza has been dragged out of the Consulate, beaten in the streets, and forcibly drugged with opium by the servants of one of the chiefs of religion; while, to crown the whole, the Persian Government has published in the official "Gazette" of Tehran a long article calumniating the British Government, and abusing every single British Envoy who has had charge of the Mission for the last 30 years. Such, my Lord, has been the conduct of a Minister who owes his life and the post which he fills to that very Mission which he is endeavouring to vilify and degrade, and who now has the assurance to send his Russo-Armenian Secretary to Constantinople to assure Her Majesty's Ambassador of his constant friendship for England, and to persuade his Lordship that the rupture with the Mission was occasioned solely by a trifling misunderstanding about a Meerza and his wife. The Earl of Clarendon. CH. A. MURRAY. No. 113.-Consul Stevens to the Earl of Clarendon.-(Rec. July 24.) I HAVE the honour to acknowledge the receipt of your Lordship's despatch of the 15th May, informing me that Mr. Murray had been directed to proceed to Bagdad, and there await further orders; that I was nevertheless to remain at Tehran, but to have no communication whatever with the Persian Government on political matters, confining myself strictly to my Consular functions of protecting the trading interests of British subjects. I shall be careful to attend to this instruction, an unavoidable deviation from which, however, arising probably from Lord Stratford's ignorance of the instruction in question, occurred yesterday, as your Lordship will learn from the inclosed copy of a despatch this day addressed by me to his Excellency, in which I report what passed at an interview which I demanded of the Prime Minister, for the purpose of delivering, as Lord Stratford directed me to do, a letter to his Highness's address. I have, &c. The Earl of Clarendon. RICH. W. STEVENS. The Sadr Azim's Ferrash Bashee. |