310 A HISTORY OF PERSIA. sion that even if he were to succeed in taking Herat, he would be unable to hold it, and that in that case it was his intention to give it to Kohendil Khan of Kandahar. The conversation terminated by the Shah's agreeing to fulfil the terms of the treaty drawn up by Mr. McNeill, provided that he could find a suitable pretext for raising the siege of Herat. He accordingly requested Mr. McNeill to address to him a letter threatening him with the anger of the British Government in case he should persist in his operations against the beleaguered city. In the formal representation which Mr. McNeill then addressed to the king, he embodied a statement of the other grounds on account of which his Government had to complain of Persia, in addition to the investment of the city of Prince Kamran. But in the course of two or three days, and after Mr. McNeill had been granted another private audience of his Persian Majesty, that Minister received a letter from the Persian foreign office, from which it appeared that the Shah had no longer any intention of availing himself of the pretext which he had sought from Mr. McNeill for raising the siege of Herat. It was also sufficiently apparent from this letter that the object of the Persian government was to obtain a large sum of money as the price of abandoning the enterprise against the city, or rather, that the Shah had been diverted from his previous intention to accommodate atters with Herat and to agree to Mr. McNeilTs demands, by the hopes held out to him by his advisers of their being able to extort from the English Minister a large pecuniary recompence for complying with those demands. Mr. McNeill, however, distinctly assured the Persian Ministers that the hope of extorting money from
