The mission, says Captain Malcom, was “completely successful”—a declaration repeated more emphatically by Lord Wellesley.[6] But time and circumstance did more for us than diplomacy. It was the ostensible object of the mission to instigate the Shah of Persia to move an army upon Herat, and so to withdraw Shah Zemaun from his threatened invasion of Hindostan. But the move, which was to do so much for our security in India, had been made before the British ambassador appeared at the Persian Court; and the work, which was thus commenced by Futteh Ali, was completed by Prince Mahmoud.[7] “You may rest assured,” wrote Captain Malcolm, from Ispahan, in October, 1800, “that Zemaun Shah can do nothing in India before the setting in of the rains of 1801. He has not time, even if he had the power for such an attempt; and by the blessing of God he will for some years to come be too much engaged in this quarter to think of any other.”[8] But some years to come of empire he was not destined to see. Even as Malcolm wrote, the days of his sovereignty were numbered, and the bugbear of Afghan invasion was passing into tradition. The envoy was empowered either to offer a subsidy of from three to four lakhs of rupees for a term of three years, or by a liberal distribution of presents to the king and his principal ministers, to bribe them into acquiescence. Malcolm chose the latter course. He threw about his largesses with an unstinting hand, and everything went smoothly with him. The farther he advanced into the interior, the greater was the attention shown to the Mission, for the greater was the renown of the liberality of the Christian _Elchee_. Every difficulty melted away beneath the magic touch of British gold.[9] There had been at the outset some trifling disputes about formalities—about titles and designations—but these were soon cleared away; and the serious business of the Mission proceeded in the midst of feasts and formalities to a satisfactory completion. A commercial and a political treaty were negotiated at Teheran by Malcolm and Hadjee Ibrahim; and the Shah stamped their validity by prefixing to each a firman, or mandate, under the royal seal, calling upon all the officers of the state to perform its prescribed conditions. Of all the terms proposed by the English envoy, but one was demurred to by the Persian Court. “And that even,” writing some years afterwards, he said, “was not rejected.”[10] This proposal related to the occupation by the English of the islands of Kishm, Angani, and Khargh (or Kharrack),[11] in the Persian Gulf, on the expediency of which, though much and ably controverted by others, Malcolm never ceased to expatiate so long as he had a hand in the game of Persian diplomacy.