GREAT GAME.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Collection of autograph letters and manuscript material concerning moves during the First Anglo-Afghan War. A carefully assembled collection of material connected to players in the "great game", including Colonel Stoddart and Captain Arthur Conolly, both famously beheaded at Bukhara, Major Henry Rawlinson, the political agent at Kandahar, and Captain Sir Alexander "Bukhara" Burns. The material, mounted on album leaves with accompanying newspaper clippings and other ephemera, is tied together by Connolly and Stoddart's dramatic death. Sent on a mission to secure an agreement of friendship between Britain and the Emir of Bukhara, in 1838 Stoddart was arrested by the emir on charges of spying and imprisoned. Conolly, the intelligence agent credited with coining the term "great game" in an 1840 letter to Rawlinson, arrived in Bukhara in late 1841 to negotiate his compatriot's release. Both men were killed in June 1842 and became household names back home.In the first two letters, Burns, writing about a year before he was killed by a mob in Kabul, shares his views with Rawlinson on the latest moves in the "great game". He writes of Stoddart's (short-lived) release from prison and of the importance of Conolly's current intelligence-gathering in Central Asia. Shah Shuja "is surrounded by a parcel of harpies", and Burns advises caution about the use of British troops to prop up the Shah's rule: "Nothing contributes so much to lower the King's power as the employment of our troops aga

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