Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/402

354 Sind, and to the Shah of Persia, who was just then overawed by the combined preponderance of France and Russia.

Now that Napoleon had become Alexander's intimate friend and ally, the Persian king knew what to expect from French mediation, so he turned for protection to the English. At Teheran a treaty was settled, after much dispute and various misunderstandings (for the English envoy from Calcutta was superseded by another envoy from London), engaging England to subsidize Persia in the event of unprovoked aggression upon her. From Lahore the mission withdrew when, after some negotiations, it was discovered that Ranjit Singh claimed recognition of his sovereignty over territory south of the Sutlaj River. At Peshawar Mountstuart Elphinstone, the envoy to Afghanistan, found the whole country distracted by civil war. The Afghan king, Shah Shuja', was barely holding on to the skirts of his kingdom; the Durrani monarchy, attacked on the west by Persia and hard pushed on the east by the Sikhs, was already breaking up again into separate chief ships. Elphinstone's negotiations were cut short by the defeat of Shah Shuja', who fled into exile, to be restored thirty years later by an ill-fated expedition that eventually cost the English an army and the king his life.

But all these schemes for establishing close alliances and barrier treaties with Afghanistan, the Panjab, and Sind were dropped or postponed as the tide of events again began to turn westward. The Spanish