The Late Sir W H MacNaughton, Political Service, c.1841 (colour litho)

‘The Late Sir W H MacNaughton [sic] BT, Political Service’, 1841 (c). Coloured lithograph after Lieutenant Vincent Eyre, Bengal Artillery, 1842 (c). Sir William Hay MacNaghten (1793-1841) went to Madras as a cadet in 1809, but in 1816 joined the Bengal Civil Service. In 1830 he was appointed political secretary to Lord William Bentinck, Governor General of India. He remained in this post when Bentinck’s successor, Lord Auckland, was appointed in 1836. MacNaghten was also made the Governor General of India’s envoy to Afghanistan. Convinced that Russian intentions on Afghanistan and India were dangerously real, he believed it necessary to place Afghanistan under British tutelage. MacNaghten was created a baronet in 1840 but was murdered on 23 December 1841. He was shot by Akbar Khan (son of the Emir Dost Mohammed who had been overthrown by the British) with a pistol with which he had presented him only the day before, and then hacked to pieces by fanatical Ghazis. The British garrison in Kabul was forced to surrender soon after. From ‘Portraits of the Kabul Prisoners’, a set of pre-publication coloured lithographs later published by John Murray in 1843. The artist’s original drawings were made during his captivity in Afghanistan after the Retreat from Kabul during the 1st Afghan War (1838-1842).