312 A HISTORY OF PERSIA. was engaged these considerations, coupled with the perseverance of the Persian government in its resolution to prevent any of its servants, excepting the prime minister and the deputy minister for foreign affairs, from holding any intercourse with the British Mission, deter- mined Mr. McNeill to demand leave to depart from the camp, and to proceed to the frontier of Turkey. The Shah still persevered in his policy of vacillation. He was unwilling to see the English Minister depart from his court, and he therefore made a pretence of disbe- lieving a fact so notorious as was the ill-treatment to which Mr. McNeill' s messenger had been subjected. Mr. McNeill was asked to prove the correctness of the statements he had advanced ; but this he could only do by Persian evidence, which it was of course vain to expect to obtain in a case where the Shah and his prime minister were amongst the delinquents. Mr. McNeill left the royal camp on the 7th of June for Meshed and Tehran. At Shahrood he received des- patches from England instructing him to place before the Shah the expression of the strongest disapproval of her Majesty's Government of the line of conduct his Majesty was pursuing towards Herat ; and he accord- ingly sent Colonel Stoddart back to the royal camp with instructions to deliver to the Shah a verbal message to the effect, that the enterprise in which his Majesty was engaged was looked upon by the Queen's Ministers as being undertaken in a spirit of hostility towards British India, and as being totally incompatible with the spirit and intention of the alliance which had been established between Great Britain and Persia. Colonel Stoddart was further directed to say that the Queen's Government
