Page 165 - Life of Gertrude Bell

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which his Council was intended to exercise ... He sometimes
went to lengths which were almost unconstitutional.

The newspaper had put its linger on the difficulty which faced
successive Viceroys and their Residents in eastern territories.
Since the Government of India started to shed its authority —a
process which may be said to have begun even before the Council
of India, in the wake of Palmerston’s policy of thwarting Russian
and French ambitions by bolstering the Ottoman domains — it had
also shed its resolution. By the first decade of the twentieth
century the Viceroy and his Foreign Secretary were merely
cyphers of die Foreign Office in London, unable to act independ-
endy or directly in any of the territories over which they tradition­
ally held sway. What was worse, they were often unable —or
unwilling —to support their own men in die field, men whose
knowledge of the political and historical backgrounds of the
territories they administered or advised was usually immense. It
was in that atmosphere of conflict between two of the principal
departments of State in the Bridsh administration, the Foreign
and India Offices, that Gertrude began to become involved in
the politics of the Middle East. And it was in the shadow of
Grey’s determination to maintain the tottering empire of the
Turks that an angry and frustrated Captain Shakespear arrived
in London in June 1914. Less than twelve months before the
Foreign Secretary had stated Britain’s position in the clearest
terms. ‘The only policy to which we can become a party is one
directed to avoid the collapse and partition of Asiatic Turkey,’
he told the India Office. Sir Louis Mallet minuted his observation
while recording his chief’s remarks — ‘for another policy would
once again bring into question the possession of Constantinople,
and probably result in a European war’. When those notes were
made, Grey and Mallet knew perfectly well that war with Germany
was inevitable and that Turkey would assuredly join the Kaiser,
though on the resignation of Britain’s ambassador at Constanti­
nople, Sir Gerard Lowther, in 1913, Mallet himself rushed to the
Turkish capital in a last-minute attempt to foster the neutrality
of the Ottoman power. Meanwhile Sir T. W. Holderness, the
Permanent Under-Secretary at the India Office, told Mallet: ‘I
gather privately that FO are much frightened of Sir Percy Cox
and Captain Shakespear, whom they suspect of all sorts of
designs ... the point is not what Sir Percy Cox or Captain
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