Arms and the Man: Abd El-Kader

No more, thou lithe and long-winged hawk, of desert life for thee;
No more across the sultry sands shalt thou go swooping free...
(William Thackeray)

In 1856 the Emir Abd el-Kader decided to make a journey from his home in Damascus to Jerusalem. The Emir was France's former adversary in Algeria, a well-known figure in both the Arab world and Europe, who had been pardoned and released by Napoleon III while he was President of France. He was now on his honour never again to act against French interests, and had lived in Damascus with a numerous household since the previous year, on a substantial French pension of 100,000 francs per annum.

In Jerusalem he went to the Muslim holy places, and paid and received various calls, including one to the Turkish governor, though he upset the French Consul by failing to call on him. But the British Consul, James Finn, went to visit the Emir, and also contrived to be present at a formal inter- view at the governor's palace. Finn reported what he saw and heard:

The Emir returns to Damascus where he has taken up a more permanent abode, as we hear, one on an expensive scale. It was strange to sit in a small chamber and listen to a man of such manners and deportment alluding to events 'at the time when I was at war with the French'. I was hardly so well pleased at the Seraglio when he stated before the Pasha and Kadi that during his warfare he had obtained large supplies of arms and ammunition from the English. The French Dragoman was present of which perhaps he was not aware.

Abd el-Kader's revelation, or allegation, must have been disconcerting. It was certainly enough to have embarrassed a British diplomatic representative, Lord Palmerston was prime minister at that delicate moment in Anglo-French relations which followed the end of the Crimean War and the Congress of Paris. Though relations between France and Britain were strained, neither party would have wished anything to hint at the appearance of cracks in the united facade they presented to the Sublime Forte. But the Emir was referring to an earlier and different era, and the question must be asked, how much truth was there in what he said? We know that Britain never gave any official help or backing to Abd el-Kader in his days of power, much less in the later, fugitive years of his campaign against the French invasion, but perhaps there was no smoke without at least some trace of fire.

Abd el-Kader's old adversary, General Bugeaud, certainly had very real suspicions while the war in Algeria was still in progress. Bugeaud had been sent back to Algeria in February 1841, at the head of an army of 78,000 men, with the express aim of destroying Abd el-Kader's power; and he soon came to the conclusion that the supply of weapons of English manufacture reaching Abd el-Kader's forces was a major factor in maintaining the Emir's power. An angry report in the French newspaper Le Toulonnais accused Britain of giving money to Abd el-Kader's agents to help them buy arms in Gibraltar, and after reading this Bugeaud extracted some interesting information from a meeting with a young Arab officer taken prisoner.

Privately, Bugeaud reported his news to the minister of war:

This meeting was especially interesting as it concerned the arrangements between Abd el-Kader and the English. What would seem to confirm that these exist is the fact that all the rifles taken on the battle-field of the fourth of this month are of the Royal Ordnance of London. Do the factories of the Royal Ordnance of England supply arms for commerce? It seems I have heard this said... There could be reason to make representations to the British government.

Algiers fell to a French attack on July 5th, 1830. The French believed they should win international approval for the suppression of what they saw as a nest of Barbary pirates. But Britain was unhappy about the new French foothold on the Barbary Coast. Lord Aberdeen was foreign secretary at the time of the invasion and the Duke of Wellington was prime minister; and distrust of France was a guiding principle of the Duke of Wellington. The French expedition had been mounted by the ex-king, Charles X, and for some months Britain continued to assume that the new monarch, Louis-Philippe, would relinquish Algiers once the punitive expedition had served its purpose. As it became clear that the French were in North Africa to stay, Britain acquiesced. After November, under the administration of Earl Grey, when Lord Palmerston first became foreign secretary, Britain officially adopted a cautious attitude of non- interference over France's activities in North Africa. But the question must be whether Palmerston was entirely able to restrain himself from the temptation to indulge in clandestine support for France's enemies. Britain was determined to prevent French expansion into Morocco; and to hamper France's activities in North Africa, if that could be discreetly done, would certainly have suited Palmerston's plans.

Chief among France's enemies in North Africa was Abd el-Kader. He was elected chief of a tribal confederation in western Algeria in November 1832, at the age of twenty-five. His evident charisma and ability soon brought him to the head of a wider Algerian movement, and he found himself engaged in a protracted and demanding war with the French. Help was forthcoming from the Sultan of Morocco, but it was as the war progressed and Abd el-Kader began to consolidate his support that he first made attempts to contact foreign powers, which he knew were not necessarily friendly with France. It was at this time that there were the first contacts between Abd el-Kader and Britain which fuelled Bugeaud's suspicions, and indeed gave rise to the popular view in France that Britain was on Abd el-Kader's side. The Algerian tribesmen were armed, but mostly with the traditional long guns, and their supplies were scarcely up to maintaining a long struggle. Abd el-Kader wanted modern weapons and guns.

The historian Raphael Danziger has commented that Abd el-Kader's approaches were evidence of his considerable and not especially surprising naivete in the ways of western diplomacy, but they were bold and pragmatic. In late 1835, when, remember, Abd el-Kader was only twenty-eight years old, he sent an emissary to see the British Consul at Tangier, Edward Drummond Hay, and to propose that Britain could be given any port at Abd el-Kader's disposal for its exclusive use, in exchange for the signature of a treaty. Abd el-Kader's aim was to import supplies in exchange for the goods he had to trade. Palmerston at the Foreign Office responded with the instruction that Drummond Hay should hold aloof from any such contacts, and should avoid becoming entangled in any way in the conflict between the French and the Arabs. In July 1836, Drummond Hay wrote to Lord Palmerston: 'I have ever and most carefully avoided mixing myself up in any way with disputes between the French and the Moors.'

As it became clear what a spirited resistance Abd el-Kader was putting up, the French began to doubt the desirability of pressing on with the conquest of the Algerian interior. In 1837 a partial solution was found in the Treaty of Tafna, signed in May that year by Abd el-Kader and Bugeaud, then the military commander in Oran, This ceded control of western Algeria to Abd eI-Kader, apart from the four ports of Oran, Arzew, Mostaganem, and Mazagran. An article of the treaty pre- scribed that Abd el-Kader should get such military supplies as he needed from French military sources, which undertook to provide what he needed. But Abd el-Kader, however, prudently went on looking for arms where he could find them, wisely avoiding putting himself in the hands of the French.

Though the British Foreign Office had warned its representatives in such vigorous terms against contact with Abd el-Kader it was nevertheless as soon as 1837, during the period of truce, that the first positive reports appear of arms of British origin in the hands of Abd el-Kader's men, as well as an indication of how they got there. In a report on Abd el-Kader's forces sent by Captain Daumas, a young Arabic- speaking officer deputed to act as consul to Abd el-Kader's court the Frenchman observes, 'in the cavalry there are many English carbines which have come from Morocco.' It is clear that Abd el-Kader was obtaining English weapons which were imported by way of Morocco and either supplied by the sultan or bought for the emir by his network of agents.

By June 1839 the French were beginning to become alarmed about the prevalence of English arms in Abd el-Kader's forces and concerned that the British government might he playing some part in providing them. The minister of war wrote to his colleague at the Ministry of' Foreign Affairs that the governor-general in Algiers, Marshal Valee;

was convinced that it is by way of Morocco that Abd el-Kader is in fact receiving the major part of the arms and munitions which are sent from abroad... From another point of' view, it would seem that these arms and munitions are of English manufacture: it even seems that the Emir carries on to this purpose a fairly lively correspondence with England. Marshal Valee has not, nor could he have, any material proof; but nevertheless he thinks that the King's government could make known to the English government that there is room for suspicion in this respect.

And an internal Ministry of Foreign Affairs minute comments: 'Examine if representations could be made on this subject to the English government, bearing in mind that English subjects enjoy complete liberty in commercial matters.'

It seems that no direct representations were in fact made at the time. Nonetheless it became abundantly clear to Britain's diplomatic representatives what the French suspicions were, and in December 1859, Palmerston decided to face the French down over the issue. In that month Lord Granville, the British ambassador in Paris was writing to Palmerston at the Foreign Office in terms which stand at the heart of the question and will bear extensive quotation:

The French Newspapers having industriously endeavoured to create an hostile feeling in France towards England by perseveringly maintaining that Her Majesty's Government or its Agents have excited Abdel Kader to make war upon the French in the Algerine Territory, and assertions having been made in Private Society at Paris that the French Government have proofs of the active interference of British Agents to promote that object, I this morning expressed to M. Soult my persuasion that if the French Government thought they had ground of' complaint against any Person in the service of H.M.G. it would fairly communicate to H.M. Government who were the Agents to whom this conduct was imputed and the information on which such information was founded. The Marshal replied that he had no complaint whatever to make against any British Agent, nor had any information been received by the French Government which could lead him to believe that Abdel Kader had been excited to war by any person connected with H.M. Government. The French Consul at Gibraltar had written that cases of Arms had been consigned to Merchants in that Place, which it was supposed were intended to be sent to Abdel Kader but nothing was more natural than that Individuals should engage in such a speculation.

War was joined on both sides with little restraint and no mercy after the truce broke down in November 1839, and the military power of France inexorably ground Abd el-Kader down. One by one his towns and ports were captured, and the Emir's camp and headquarters was captured eventually in 1843. The Emir's support began to fall away as the dire consequences of standing by him were made clear to the population by the French forces, who behaved with increasing brutality. But the flow of arms to Abd eI-Kader, much of it of English origin, did not halt. Far from it: caravans continued to arrive from Morocco, and the French gave a strong warning to the sultan, though without spelling out what sanctions they might apply.

So far we have seen plenty of evidence that Abd el-Kader was well supplied with guns of English manufacture, but nothing to indicate that any of these might have been deliberately supplied by the British government. There are just three indications that things might not have been entirely what they seemed. The first occurs in a lengthy and indignant despatch from the French consul in Tangier to the Quai d'Orsay, of December 1839. The Moroccan customs, he writes:

have received on December 12 from Gibraltar four thousand bayonets, apparently brought from England at the request of the Sultan, and by the intermediary of the Consul General of Her Britannic Majesty, as that agent was summoned and in person attended the opening and checking of the boxes; an operation undertaken with much mystery, and of which I would no doubt not have been able to penetrate the secret without the exceptional initiative of my Jewish dragoman.

The second scrap of evidence occurs in May 1840, when Drummond Hay himself wrote a most unusual despatch to Lord Palmerston, acknowledging that he had received from the Foreign Office a letter 'acquainting me that certain ask spars for use of the Emperor of Morocco were about to be sent to Gibraltar by the Board of Ordnance.' And the third comes from Mogador, the modern Essaouiria, where in June 1840 the English consul, a Mr Willshire, who was also a merchant on his own account, took delivery of 500 English rifles for the sultan, which were commonly rumoured to be destined for Abd el-Kader.

These are only the most tenuous of indications that things might have been other than they officially appeared to be. But it is tempting to assume that the bayonets were for Abd el-Kader's use, as the sultan of Morocco had been sending military supplies on to him in such quantity. And as to the 'ash spars': what kind of ash spars would the Board of Ordnance send from London to Tangier for the use of the Sultan which were of such importance as to justify an exchange of correspondence of this kind? Would it be going too far to suppose that this might have been a consignment of guns? And was Mr Willshire acting as a merchant, or as a British representative? Could the answer to the question whether there was any British involvement with Abd el-Kader be that the British government, or at least Lord Palmerston, was in fact supplying weapons to the Sultan of Morocco, in the full knowledge that these supplies would be sent on to Algeria to be used against the French? At the very least, the British government knew that arms were finding their way from London to Abd el-Kader by way of Morocco as the result of private commerce, and no attempt was made, to halt or hinder the trade. We know from Kenneth Bourne's researches that in 1840 Palmerston had to be dissuaded by his colleagues from intervening more actively on Abd el-Kader's side, and at the election of the following year, he launched a violent attack on French policy in Algeria.

It should also be borne in mind that in 1849, when he was again foreign secretary, Palmerston arranged for weapons to be sent from Woolwich Arsenal to the insurgents in Sicily, and that this only became publicly known by the merest chance, when the arms contractor involved gossiped to John Delane, the editor of The Times, on a social occasion, What Palmerston failed to get away with in 1849 he could easily have carried off undetected ten years earlier. An insight into Palmerston's attitude at the time emerges from the reminiscence of a French translator, who remarks that at the time of the signature of the Convention for the Pacification of the Levant in July 1840 that Palmerston said to the Ottoman statesman Reshid Pasha that Algeria could be left to the French, 'who have nothing to gain there and everything to lose.'

In any case, Abd el-Kader began to try to establish direct relations with Britain after the war began again. In February 1840 he wrote to the British Crown, via the Consul in Tangier. In April Palmerston wrote to Drummond Hay:

I have 'received your confidential despatch inclosing a letter from Abd el- Kader to the Queen: and I have to tell you in reply that Her Majesty's Government feel a difficulty about answering that letter at the present moment, being apprehensive that any answer which might be given to it would be liable to be misinterpreted either by Abd el-Kader or by the French government, and as H.M. Government have no intention of taking any part in the contest now about to commence between those Parties, they think it most expedient to return no answer to the letter of the Emir. You may however if you have an opportunity of doing so give the Emir to understand that his letter has been received.

Undaunted, Abd el-Kader then wrote again in April to 'The Minister of the Court of England', this time sending his letter to the Governor of Gibraltar. Once again, his proposal was a free port within his territory for the use of the English to buy 'corn, oxen, or other articles; and we to purchase of you all that we might be in want of.' The inflated idea the French gathered of the nature of these contacts can be gauged from the French consul in Tangier, who later heard rumours that Abd el- Kader's letter contained a demand for 'field artillery, rifles, gunpowder, and above all the immediate secondment of engineers and artillery officers.'

Abd el-Kader was soon to fall briefly into the hands of someone even more unreliable than his usual agents and intermediaries. The name of James Scott first occurs in a. note of September 1840 from Drummond Hay to his agent in Tetouan, James Butler:

I am given to understand that an Englishman, by name Scott, who has served as an officer in the late British Legion in Spain, quitted Madrid about the middle of last month, with the purpose of going to Gibraltar and of passing thence to this country and from the territory of Morocco into that of the Algerine Regency in order – as is supposed – to offer his services to the Ameer Abd el-Kader against the French...

Scott was indeed to succeed in making his way to Abd el-Kader, an adventure he relates in his rather well-written book, Journal of a Residence in the Esmailla of Abd el-Kader and of Travels in Morocco and Algiers, published in London in 1842. Over the following months, strenuous efforts were made by British officials to discover who he really was, and perhaps the most succinct account is given in a Foreign Office minute, based on the evidence of a Mr Roberts, a former mercenary colleague of the self-styled 'Colonel' Scott from the British Legion:

Scott entered the Legion as a private on its formation in 1835, in the 2nd Regiment, in which, being a dirty slovenly fellow, he was made Pioneer. In due time, however, he rose, by the fortune of War, to be 2nd Lieutenant in the 6th Regiment; in which capacity he was, for insolence towards his superior officers, brought before a court of inquiry. He was about to be brought to a court martial, when he broke from confinement and headed a gallant attack on the Carlists; in which affair he was wounded in the leg, which saved him from being brought before the court martial. Not long after this the Legion was disbanded: but Lieut. Scott hung for a time about San Sebastian, and he is subsequently believed to have entered the Spanish service. But... he never attained a higher rank than that of Lieutenant. Mr Roberts described him as a sharp but rough and uncultivated man; a cool hand, and not scrupulous. He bore a very indifferent character in the Legion.

Scott was just one of a little flock of adventurers and soldiers of fortune who tried to join Abd el-Kader by way of Morocco at this time. Those over whom Britain had any jurisdiction found themselves being turned back by Drummond Hay, who was reproved by Palmerston for his excessive zeal. Palmerston gave a further insight into his attitude when he wrote to Drummond Hay in April 1841:

Her Majesty's Government do not wish to interfere either way between the French and Abd el-Kader, but your proceedings in the case in question tend to create an impression that Her Majesty's Government take part with the French against Abd el-Kader, which is not the case.

Scott's account of his adventures is undoubtedly that of a braggart, but his dates and facts are verified to a surprising degree by the accounts of the anxious French and English officials who were doing their best to monitor his movements. Scott was in North Africa for eleven months, and was taken very seriously by Abd el-Kader, to whom he represented himself as having the ear of the British government. He brought letters from Abd el-Kader to England with him in 1842, and attempted to address the Foreign Office as Abd el-Kader's plenipotentiary. He had certainly given Abd el-Kader a false impression of Britain's interest, from what the emir wrote to Lord Aberdeen, who had once again become foreign secretary:

We have likewise learned that you were even so kind as to say that if Abd el- Kader wanted money, arms, or any other things, you would lend him or sell him all that he might be in want of.

Scott wrote to the British Foreign Office intermittently over the next few years, making ever wilder claims about his influence in North Africa, but though he tried unsuccessfully to re- turn to Algiers in 1843, he never again met Abd el-Kader.

The attitude of the new British administration is interestingly set out in a letter of Lord Aberdeen of January 1842, soon after he took office. Writing to Lord Cowley in Paris, he says, apropos of a conversation he had had with the French ambassador in Paris;

I never said that I had now no objection to make to the establishment of the French in Algiers, but that I had now no observation to make on the subject, and that it was my intention to be silent... It does not follow, however, that objections, although not expressed, may not be entertained.

Abd el-Kader's position worsened as the war went on, and, most importantly, his relationship with the Sultan of Morocco deteriorated. The end of Moroccan support for Abd el-Kader came in August 1844, when the Moroccan and French armies actually did come into direct conflict, and Bugeaud inflicted a crushing defeat on the Moroccans at the Battle of Isly. After his defeat the sultan had no further interest in channelling English arms to Abd eI-Kader, and by November was issuing orders that Abd el-Kader was to be repelled from the Moroccan frontier, or imprisoned if caught. The result was that during the next three years, until Abd el-Kader's surrender to the French forces under General Lamoriciere in December 1847, Abd el-Kader was reduced more and more to the condition of a fugitive. There was a last devious contact between a messenger of Abd el-Kader's and John Drummond Hay, who had succeeded his father as Consul in Tangier, in November 1847 when Palmerston was again foreign secretary. There was no British response.

After his surrender, Abd el-Kader was imprisoned in France until the end of 1852, first at Toulon and Pau, but mainly at the Chateau d'Amboise. His eventual pardon and release by Louis-Napoleon came after his last important contact with the British. Though Louis-Napoleon had already been moved by the argument that Abd el-Kader had been betrayed by the Republic, after the Orleanists had taken his surrender on the understanding he would be allowed to leave Algeria and go to the East, he did not at first act to set him free. But a strong plea was made on Abd el-Kader's behalf by the English aristocrat, former diplomat and politician, the Marquess of Londonderry, the late Viscount Castlereagh's younger half-brother, who came to see Abd el-Kader at Amboise and spoke to Louis-Napoleon on his behalf. Lord Londonderry was an elderly but vigorous man of seventy-four by this time, who had always taken a strong interest in foreign affairs, and his interest seems to have been entirely philanthropic. However, his interest in Abd el-Kader can probably be traced back to a visit he and Lady Londonderry paid to Spain and Portugal in 1839, when they crossed to Gibraltar and then to Tangier, where they were guests of Edward Drummond Hay and made a rather daring trip into the interior. This, of course, was at the time when Abd el-Kader was a focus of interest in Tangier, and the Londonderrys must have heard a great deal about him. In 1852 Lord Londonderry expressed his astonishment that, 'in these days of advancing civilisations, this bold, courageous and intrepid old warrior should be much longer retained in close custody by such a powerful nation as France.' It is interesting that he should perceive Abd el-Kader as an 'old warrior', as the emir was only forty- four. Londonderry's intervention turned the scales, and Abd el-Kader was released, first to go to Bursa in Asia Minor, and later to Damascus.

In Damascus in 1860, Abd el-Kader played a spectacular part in saving many Christians from being massacred by the Muslim population, and attention was focussed on him in England as well as elsewhere in Europe. There was talk of his having a political future in Syria, and it seems that Napoleon III considered the idea of sponsoring him as the ruler of a Syria detached from the Ottoman Empire and friendly toward Europe. These were never more than wildly speculative plans, however, and nothing was to come of them. But Abd el-Kader was now a great celebrity. He visited Europe in 1865, was widely feted in Paris, where there were rumours, which came to nothing, that Napoleon III was going to offer him the viceroyalty of Algeria; and on August 1st, 1865, he began his first and only visit to London. He was widely entertained, and the idea was mooted that he should meet Queen Victoria. A Foreign Office official wrote to the foreign secretary, Lord John Russell,

I suppose it is hopeless to attempt to induce the Queen to see Abd el-Kader; but it would certainly be politic of her to do so, for who can say whether he may not have a great destiny to work out in the East; if not in Algeria.

In reality, Abd el-Kader had no further destiny to work out. But he continued to have contacts with Englishmen throughout his life. In Damascus, in his later years, Abd el-Kader was befriended by the Burtons, while Richard Burton was consul, and many English visitors called on him, but though he was well known in Damascus, and a public figure, he was no longer of international importance. It was increasingly hard to remember that in his great days when he was France's ferocious adversary in Algeria, his activities were also of very real concern to Britain's foreign policy.

John King is a writer and broadcaster who freelances for the BBC Arabic Service and is the author of The Making of Modern Jordan (Unwin Hyman).