Reliance on his staff had made him popular at the Admiralty, his previous job, but it proved disastrous when he moved to India. Here, sent to rule a world of which he was completely ignorant, he quickly fell into the hands of a group of bright but inexperienced and hawkishly Russophobic advisers led by William Macnaghten—the man who had covertly supported Shah Shuja’s 1834 expedition—and his two private secretaries, Henry Torrens and John Colvin.
