On the 17th June 1842 the unfortunate men were brought out to die. Stoddart, who had been forced to embrace Mohammedanism, was the first to suffer. When his head had been severed from his body the executioner paused, and Conolly had an offer made of life as the price of his apostasy. He scorned the bargain, and stretched out his neck to receive the fatal blow. This atrocious crime was never avenged by the country which had sent her sons forth to perish,[511] but for many years Bokhārā was a word full of evil associations in the English mind. It was undoubtedly prompted by the fiendish `Abd us-Samad, who lost no opportunity of gratifying his hatred of Europeans. Nor were Stoddart and Conolly Nasrullah’s only victims. A lust for blood seized him, and all who professed Christianity were proscribed. The missionary Wolff, who visited Bokhārā in 1844 in order to learn the two young officers’ fate, and if possible to procure their release, gives a list of seven Englishmen who were slaughtered at `Abd us-Samad’s instigation.[512] Nasrullah’s closing years were embittered by conspiracies amongst his nobles; and his successor Mozaffar ud-Dīn was strongly suspected of having incited one of those movements, which was put down with much bloodshed.[513] He was maddened, too, by the repeated failure of his attempts to reduce Shahrisabz. On his deathbed, in 1860, he learnt that that last stronghold of independence had fallen to his conquering arm. His last act was to order the execution of its chief, who was his brother-in-law, and all his children, and his own wife, whose only crime was her relationship to the rebel, beheaded in his presence.[514]