'Your Excellency is aware of the warm interest taken by the British Government in all that concerns the honor, respectability and credit of this Government, and it is on this account I make you acquainted with a recent occurrence in Tabreez which perhaps has not been brought to Your Excellency's knowledge--The execution of the Pretender Bab in that city was accompanied by a circumstance which if published in the Gazettes of Europe would throw the utmost discredit on the Persian Ministers. After that person was put to death, his body by orders of the Vezeer.i.Nizam was thrown into the ditch of the town to be devoured by dogs, which actually happened--This act resembles the deeds of bye gone ages, and could not I believe now occur in any country between China and England--Feeling satisfied that it did not receive Your Excellency's sanction, and knowing what sentiments it would excite in Europe, I have thought it proper to write this friendly communication, not to let you remain in ignorance of the occurrence.'[4]
Palmerston wrote back on October 8th: '... Her Majesty's Government approve of your having called the attention of the Ameer-i-Nizam ... to the manner in which the corpse of the Pretender Bâb was treated after his execution at Tabreez.'[5]
On February 12th 1850, Lt.-Col. Sheil, back at his post in Ṭihrán after a long leave of absence, reported to Lord Palmerston:
'... a serious outbreak lately took place at Yezd, which however the Governor of that city with the assistance of the priesthood succeeded in quelling--
'The exciters of the insurrection were the partizans of the new Sect called Babee, who assembled in such numbers as to force the Governor to take refuge in the citadel, to which they laid siege--The Moollas conscious that the progress of Babeeism is the decay of their own supremacy determined to rescue the Governor, and summoning the populace in the name of religion to attack this new Sect of infidels, the Babees were overthrown and forced to take flight to the adjoining province of Kerman....
'The tenets of this new religion seem to be spreading in Persia--Bab the founder, a native of Sheeraz, who has assumed this fictitious name, is imprisoned in Azerbijan, but in every large town he has disciples, who with the fanaticism or fortitude so often seen among the adherents of new doctrines, are ready to meet death.... Bab declares himself to be Imam Mehdee, the last Imam, who disappeared from human sight but is to reappear on earth--His decrees supersede the Koran among his disciples, who not only revere him as the head of their faith, but also obey him as the temporal Sovereign of the world, to whom all other monarchs must submit--Besides this inconvenient doctrine, they have adopted other tenets pernicious to society....