Look to the West: Definitive Version

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Look to the West

A Timeline




by Thomas W. Anderson, MSci, MA, BA (Cantab)












VOLUME ONE:
DIVERGE AND CONQUER











frederick.png


Here lies Fred,
Who was alive and is dead.

If it had been his father,
I would much rather;

If it had been his brother,
Still better than another;

If it had been his sister,
No one would have missed her;

If it had been the whole generation,
So much the better for the nation.

But as it's only Fred,
Who was alive and is dead,

Why there's no more to be said!


– Epigram of Prince Frederick Lewis of Wales (1707-1751), OTL​













Prologue: Across the Multiverse

18/04/2019. Temporary headquarters of TimeLine L Preliminary Exploration Team, location classified. Cpt. Christopher G. Nuttall, seconded from British SAS, commanding officer.

Addressed to Director Stephen Rogers of the Thande Institute, Cambridge, United Kingdom.


The team has completed the preliminary one-month survey of the world that the Institute has designated 'TimeLine L'. We are, of course, aware that this report will be the primary basis for the International Oversight Committee's decision on whether TimeLine L is worth further exploration. As of now, sir, I must confess that my own opinions are still divided on this issue.

Perhaps, as I and my team set down what we have learned, we will make our own decisions, just as you will. The information we have obtained from TimeLine L is primarily in the form of local history books, and we have tried to gain these from several different sources to avoid making mistakes based on national bias. We have also used those basic information gathering techniques from the contemporary populace as recommended by the Institute, without provoking undue suspicion.

As you will know, sir, identifying the point at which another history diverged from our own - the so-called Point of Divergence - is often not so easy as the films would have us believe. Even chaos theory cannot be relied upon: individuals may be born after the PoD with different genes due to effects of random chance, but their names, temperaments and even destinies may still be identical to that of our history.

A note on terminology. Our own world's history, also sometimes called "TimeLine A", shall in this report be contracted to 'Our TimeLine' or OTL for short, as is the Institute policy. Comparisons to OTL are inevitable as we study TimeLine L (henceforth abbreviated to TLL, or This TimeLine, TTL) but it is my opinion that they should not be taken too far.

Let me use an example from the history of my own country. A Scot from a timeline where Scotland remained independent might well look upon the United Kingdom of OTL as being an English Empire in Scotland. But an Englishman from that history might be similarly appalled at the UK, because change always goes both ways. This is a paradigm which is all over TTL, as you will soon see.

Enough beating about the bush. The jury is still out on the PoD, but Dr Lombardi has the strongest theory so far.

It all begins in the year 1727, at an event that Dr Pylos insists on referring to as the Coronation of the Hun, when the axis of history began to spin the world towards a different fate altogether...



Part #1: The Coronation of the Hun

From "Nasty, Brutish, and Short - the Reign of King George II of the Kingdom of Great Britain". (1985, Northfire Press, Durham).

On the eleventh of June, 1727, a man of sixty-seven years suffered a stroke and died. And, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the world would not have marked such an event. But when the man was the King of Great Britain, the King of Ireland and the Elector of Hanover (though he himself had claimed its unrecognised Kingship), things were different indeed.

Three days after the death of King George I, the Privy Council convened to proclaim George's only son, also named George, as King George II. Many had looked forward to this event with some degree of dread. As it would later become well known among the English, the Hanoverians had a tradition of violent disagreements between father and son. While he had been Prince of Wales, George had done everything he could to undermine the rule and policies of his father. It was no secret that he wished to replace the popular and skilful Robert Walpole, first among the King's Ministers, with Sir Spencer Compton, a nonentity. This would be George's revenge for Walpole, a former supporter of his as Prince of Wales, having eventually joined one of his father's governments.

In the event, and probably better for the sake of England, George was persuaded by his wife, Queen Caroline, that Walpole must stay. This guaranteed the rise of the Whig Party, to the extent that they would dominate Parliament for the forseeable future. It was no secret that George disliked England, with its meddling politicans interfering with the divine right of Kings, and always considered himself a Hanoverian and a European first. This was an advantage in some ways for Walpole, as it let him draw more of the King's powers to himself and Parliament - thus becoming the first true Prime Minister - but also alarmed him, for Walpole intended to keep the Kingdom out of damaging European wars, and George felt quite the opposite.

All of these issues would eventually return throughout George's short reign, but none of them would ever eclipse that which plagued him all his life, for his best efforts. The curse of the Hanoverians reared its head once more: just as George had detested his father, so his son, Prince Frederick, detested him.

For all the accusations that have been levelled at him in latter ages, and as he has been darkened by the shadows of his more illustrious descendants, George II was not stupid. Reckless, yes, and careless of privilege. But not stupid. He did not want to repeat the mistakes of history. He would not let his son gather support against him as he had to his father. And George II had an idea. Prince Frederick would go, not back to Hanover (which in George's mind, if not Frederick's, would be a blessing) but to the godforsaken ends of the Earth.

To England's Colonies...

His wife, Queen Caroline, dissuaded him of this reckless course also[1], and in the end George went to be coronated in Westminster Abbey, on October 4th 1727, with his son Frederick by his side.

The coronation would, perhaps, have been remembered in any case, for the noted Hanoverian composer Handel had been brought in to write numerous new pieces of music. Perhaps the best known is 'Zadok the Priest', which remains performed at many coronations throughout the English-speaking world today. But the music of Handel, and indeed all else, would be overshadowed by the events that meant this date would live in infamy.

A confusion over arrangements meant that Handel's superb pieces were nonetheless played in the wrong order, which led to considerable flusterment on the part of many churchmen. It was, in fact, a particularly loud and unexpected note in Handel's "Grand Instrumental Procession", coupled with perhaps a rumple in the blue carpet, which led to the King, on the way to his throne beside the Queen, to stumble and fall before the great dignitaries there to pay homage to him.

A deathly silence descended, and indeed it might have ended there, for the assembled Lords Spiritual and Temporal knew better than to incur any royal wrath at this injuncture. The incident, they thought, as the king picked himself up with as much dignity as possible, would never be mentioned again.

The young Prince Frederick, twenty years old and retaining much of his teenage precociousness to go with the Hanoverian hatred, did not so such restraint. He let out a single 'Ha!' of delighted laughter, and with it, changed the world forever.

George was furious. Immediately after the coronation was complete, he told the Queen that he had elected to return to his original plan. Caroline agreed, almost equally upset at the Prince's behaviour.

The paperwork caused by the incident was, as is recorded in Robert Walpole's memoirs, immense. Nonetheless: Prince Frederick was, as the eldest son of the King of England, rightfully the Duke of Cornwall, a title that could not be Attainted. George did everything else he could, though. Frederick was banished to the American Colonies, to Virginia, indeed to the new town that had been named for him: Fredericksburg. A title was invented for him as a sinecure, that of Lord Deputy of the Colonies. What was at the time the work of a few strokes of a clerk's pen, would eventually become very important indeed...

George, meanwhile, calmly foisted the title of Prince of Wales on his younger son William Augustus, already the Duke of Cumberland at the age of six. No secret was made of the fact that William was now George's heir, and upon George's death would be coronated William IV.

And Frederick looked to the west, and to the future.



[1] In OTL, it ended there.
 
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Part #2: A Town Fit For A King

From - "Yankee Fred: The Story of the first Prince of North America", by Professor Ranulph Thorpe, Oxford University Press, 1979:

The Royal Colony of Virginia had a rich and long history by colonial standards, and despite the long and often treacherous sea voyage from England, had remained surprisingly closely affected by home affairs since its inception (as a Company) in 1607. When Prince Frederick finally arrived there in 1728, having been delayed by just one of those voyages as well as a series of futile attempts to change his father's mind before being forced to depart, he found the colony a mass of contradictions. On the one hand, the Virginians were proud of their land's status as the "Old Dominion", the land where the faithful Royalist supporters of the Stuarts had fled during Cromwell's tyranny, and this had been recognised by Charles II upon the Restoration. On the other, Virginia's equally proud tradition of limited self-rule, through the House of Burgesses, owed a lot to Cromwell's dispatching of more independent-minded governors during his brief rule.

It was the latter, based in the new capital of Williamsburg, that was the greatest surprise to Frederick. His father, as is well known, cared little for England and less for her colonies, and had left their governance to his ministers. What would his reaction have been, the Prince must have thought, had he known that England's "perfidious parliament" had spawned another, across thousands of miles of ocean? Perhaps the thought of his father's expression cheered the Prince. Certainly, he seemed to recover fairly quickly from his initial gloom at being exiled.

Williamsburg was the first city in Britain's North American colonies, having received a royal charter in 1722. A far more pleasant place than the older, mosquito-infested Jamestown, the House of Burgesses had decamped there with some relief several years before. The House was subordinated to the Governor's Council, an upper house loosely analogous to the British House of Lords, and ultimately the Governor himself. The powers of the Governor over the House had been increased by James I and Charles I, but then decreased again by Cromwell's envoys. As was then common in the North American colonies, the appointed Governor (then George Hamilton, the First Earl of Orkney) never visited his constituents, any more than the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster was actually expected to be a Lancastrian anymore. The British political establishment saw no contradiction in this. Therefore, the real power lay in the hands of the Royal Lieutenant Governor, then known simply as William Gooch.

Gooch had taken over from his predecessor, Robert "King" Carter, only a year before, but was already making a name for himself with his energetic policies of promoting trade and encouraging westward settlement. Like his absentee superior Orkney, Gooch was a veteran of the First War of Supremacy[1], but he would eventually go on to fight in the Second[2]. People were already beginning to call him a worthy successor to the now retired Alexander Spotswood, unlike those that had gone between them.

Williamsburg would have been the obvious place for the exiled Prince to hold his court. After all, it was the home of the House of Burgesses and the capital of the Colony, and it was over these people - together with all the others in the Colonies - that Frederick was supposed to exercise his highly theoretical powers as the first Lord Deputy of the Colonies. It is surprising, therefore, that he instead elected to purchase an estate in the much newer town of Fredericksburg with the pension funds that his father had grudgingly allowed him.

To say Fredericksburg was new is an understatement. It had, in fact, only just been founded when the Prince groggily stepped off the deck of HMS Dartmouth at Williamsburg harbour (to be met by a puzzled crowd of local dignitaries). As noted above, travel between Britain and the Colonies was fraught with difficulties at the best of times and could take months, with the result that the stories of Frederick's disgrace had reached Virginia only in confused an incomplete forms. This was not helped by the fact that even the best-informed travellers from England had set off at a time when it still seemed as though King George might change his mind. Reports of the exile were dismissed as wild exaggerations. A possible future King of Great Britain and King of Ireland, here in Virginia? Surely not!

So it was that the new town on the Rappahannock River, though founded months after George's coronation and Frederick's disgrace, was still named for him as its fathers confidently believed he was still the Prince of Wales. It has borne that name ever since, for better or for worse. Frederick built himself a modest house with his pension on the new land. Of course, his choice of such accommodations may well have been influenced by his father's stinginess and the fact that Frederick needed permanent lodgings as soon as possible, and it is true that the house was much extended and grandified in later years. Nonetheless it endeared him, perhaps by accident, to the locals. The Virginians had grumbled for years about the overly extragavant Governor's House in Williamsburg, and Spotswood's own home in Germanna was nicknamed the 'Enchanted Castle'. They took great delight in discovering that a potential heir to the throne was living in humbler circumstances, making the self-righteous Governors seem stuffy by comparison. Frederick's house would eventually be nicknamed 'Little St. James', an epithet given by his supporters, who believed that he would one day reside in the real St. James' Palace in London as King of Great Britain and King of Ireland.

Frederick had other advantages. Though he had left Hanover at the age of seven, and did not identify with the German homeland as his father and grandfather did, German was nonetheless his birth tongue and he remained fluent in it. This was remarked upon by the colonists in general, who jokingly referred to him as the 'Third Wave of Germanna' - a reference to the fact that, not far from Fredericksburg, two groups of German religious refugees from the Rhineland and Palatinate had been allowed to settle in 1714 and 1717. The Germans were tolerated by the Virginians providing that they did not leave the boundaries of Spotsylvania County, named after Spotswood who had masterminded their settlement. But most English-speaking Virginians had little to do with their neighbours to the north, often seeing them merely as a useful barrier between them and the still-persistent Indian raids. Everyone remembered the massacre at the frontier town of Henricus many years before.

Frederick changed all that. He was one of the few notables in Virginia who spoke both English and German fluently, and though the Germanna settlers were mostly poor peasants (even by Virginian standards), he had quietly resolved to do anything he had to, to gain a shot at regaining his rightful place. So it was that it was Frederick, and a growing circle of admirers that included many of Virginia's notables, that began to break down the barriers between the Germanna and the English.

And he had no shortage of admirers. Many towns are named for royals, but few can boast that said royals actually live there. Little St. James was always busy with visitors, and Frederick's servants (mostly hired Germanna, eager to escape their often wretched agrarian Spotsylvanian existence) were called upon to produce many parties and banquets of state. For that was what they truly were. Frederick was holding court, more like a king of old, and it is in this only, perhaps, that Hanoverian taints of absolutist thinking crept in. Nonetheless, the Prince was perfectly aware that his position was tenuous and he could not afford to assume too many of his royal prerogatives. More by luck than judgement, he had begun to win the hearts of the people of Virginia, both common and noble. It opened a tiny window of hope that he could build a power base strong enough that he would one day to return to England in his rightful position as Prince of Wales, and then King.

Frederick's supporters thought that there was a better than even chance of him achieving this aim - if Prince William died without issue, then the succession would automatically revert to Frederick, for George II had no other male heirs and was not expected to produce any. So it was that ingratiating oneself with a man who was currently living humbly and wanting of favours, but might one day be one of the most powerful and wealthy men in the world, seemed like a very attractive proposition.

Before Frederick's exile, a number of North American colonials had been knighted and given titles by the Kings, but most of them immediately decamped to England in order to exercise their new influence in the Court of St. James. The Colonies lacked a native aristocracy, save perhaps Virginia with its old Company holdovers and its Planters. Just as Orkney never visited Virginia, most Governors treated their occupation as merely another title to go alongside their knighthoods and marquessates and earldoms. Once more, Frederick changed that.

London was still the place where a North American title-holder could exert the most influence and gather the most wealth, but many realised that they could gain favour with Frederick for future rewards with far less effort than they could gain favour with George for present ones. It was almost like a financial investment, literally in some cases. Frederick was soon involved with Gooch, and with the members of the House of Burgesses - including the by now venerable James Blair, the clergyman who had founded Williamsburg's William and Mary College, the second oldest university in the Americas. Frederick pledged, perhaps glibly at the time, to patronise the College if he ever became King. It was considered a wonder that the Prince could get on both with Blair and with the retired Spotswood (through his work with the Germanna), as in the prime of their careers they had been bitter political enemies.

Of course, Frederick did not lead a charmed life. He came close to losing everything he had built up more than once. Perhaps his greatest problem was also his greatest advantage: the fact that all but the titled Virginians were unaccustomed to meeting royalty. After he had made a few moves that were popular with the commoners, they began to see him as a paragon of kingly virtue, an image that came very close to being shattered in 1732, when he had at last began to feel that he was making a strong position for himself.

As well as mutual paternal dislike, Frederick inherited another of the Hanoverians' infamous habits - womanising. He was not such a terrible offender as his father, but nonetheless enjoyed a mistress or two. The problem was that the Virginian commoners, unlike their English contemporaries, had never experienced such royal depredations and, to put it mildly, did not recognise his Droit De Seigneur.

Things came to a head with a scandal in 1732 when Frederick was allegedly caught in bed with one Mildred Gregory by none other than Gooch himself, after the Governor had unwisely dashed into Little St. James' with an urgent political matter on which he thought Frederick's patronage would be of help. Here Frederick's at first accidental and then carefully cultivated informal style worked against him: his servants did not think to announce Gooch.

The Governor himself was persuaded to keep the matter secret - after all, Frederick's ruination would also destroy all the investments of favour made by Gooch and his fellow politicians - but it nonetheless leaked out. "They who have ears, let them hear," the Prince is thought to have ruefully quoted (in German). Mostly the story was dismissed as an attempt to blacken the Prince's name by those who retained a strong allegiance to George and thus Prince William. Only a few knew the truth of it. Unfortunately for Frederick, one of those few who found out was Augustine Washington, Mildred's sister. At the age of thirty-five, ten years older than Frederick, she had already outlived two husbands and had three daughters from her second marriage. As Gooch is reported to have remarked, "God only knows what he saw in her." Certainly, Frederick at first intended her to be merely another mistress. Augustine had other ideas.

The Washingtons were not rich, nor were they poor. Augustine owned a plantation at Popes Creek and was looking to expand. Royal patronage, even by the disgraced prince, would be useful, and he was persuaded by his new second wife Mary to cool down from his initial anger. Blackmail would be a more useful tool than simple revenge. However, he was still determined to see his little sister right, for Mildred had quietly informed him that she was pregnant.

With misgivings, Frederick agreed to meet the Washingtons at Little St. James' and was informed of Augustine's demands. The son of Lawrence Washington, a former burgess and sheriff, his family had come to Virginia after having their lands confiscated by Oliver Cromwell and failing to have them returned by the restored King Charles II. A great injustice, did the Prince not agree? The Prince did. Something that should surely be rectified, or at least compensated, if a more...reasonable Person should occupy the throne of England? Why, naturally.

It was the second part of Augustine's demands that appalled Frederick. It would be wrong to call the Washingtons simple, but they were stubborn colonial folk with a strong sense of Anglican morality. Frederick would have to do something about Mildred's pregnancy. Compensate her, leave her to raise an illegitimate royal son as so many Englishwomen had on his funds? No. Frederick was relieved, for despite his invieglement with the Virginian notables, his own funds remained limited. This relief did not last. No, he would not compensate Mildred. He would marry her.

Nothing the Prince could do could make Augustine budge. As well as fulfilling his sense of the correct restribution, he knew that this would be the ultimate way of forcing Frederick not to go back on any promises if he became King. Kings couldn't divorce, not without a host of scandals. Frederick protested that Mildred was an inappropriate wife, a widow with children from a previous marriage. That would not have been a problem if she had been titled, of course. Frederick had expected to be married off to a German princess, as George was already planning to do to Prince William. Well, Augustine pointed out, if he kept his promises, Mildred - and the rest of the family - would be titled.

Frederick was forced to bow to his logic, knowing that the Washingtons had connections and could easily ensure that the truth of the scandal got to prominent ears. That would finish him, unless he wanted to flee and try to start again somewhere else. He rejected that. After all, he had expected a loveless marriage anyway, and did it truly matter if it was to a common colonist rather than a German princess? All that mattered was that he would one day wear the crown, and who cared who sat beside him?

It is thus rather surprising that Frederick apparently did grow to possess some feelings for Mildred as the years went on, and in March 1733 she bore him a son, Prince George Augustine of Cornwall (called George FitzFrederick, in the illegitimate style, by the Williamite detractors who did not recognise the morganatic marriage). Nothing could have been calculated to make Frederick decide his marriage was, on balance, a good thing. It is thought that his choice of George for the name may even have been a deliberate swipe at his father's condemnation. On the other hand, some historians have argued that it has a rather different derivation. For, a month before the young prince's birth, Augustine Washington too had chosen to bestow the name upon his newborn son...




[1] The War of the Spanish Succession.

[2] The War of Jenkin's Ear/Austrian Succession.




Part #3: A Cornish Nasty for German George

From "A Political History of the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Peoples", volume III, published by Cambridge University Press, 1971

There had never been any question of Prince Frederick simply lying down and accepting his exile. It is debatable whether even George II truly thought that merely sending his elder son several thousand miles away would stop him interfering in British politics. Certainly, Frederick's absence from the British political scene lasted only a few years. Though his body might remain in Fredericksburg, his political will, through his supporters, continued to stretch all the way across the Atlantic to Westminster.

In this, Frederick had several advantages. Firstly, his acquaintance with Lieutenant Governor Gooch meant that he was well aware of the latter's new policies towards Virginia's vitally important tobacco crop, long before most other investors. The Tobacco Inspection Act of 1730 required Virginian tobacco planters to bring their crops to public warehouses, where it was inspected and stored. This reduced fraud and improved the quality of the overall crop, and within a few years, 'Virginian tobacco' was renowned throughout Europe as a superior blend, coming into great demand.

Frederick had gambled on Gooch's scheme not backfiring, and had invested a large part of his still quite meagre funds in the tobacco business. In this he was later helped by his connections with the Washingtons, and some believe that he first encountered Mildred Washington Lewis Gregory due to his inquiries into the important tobacco planting families. Frederick borrowed money from the richer burgesses he had become acquainted with, as well. He was able to pay it back within a few years, as his investments more than matured thanks to Gooch's policies. Frederick is thus almost unique in British history as a royal who made his own fortune. This too may arguably have endeared him to the colonists' frontier spirit.

By March 1734, Frederick felt his position - both financial and political - was now secure enough to return to his major mission in life. It had been more than six years since his exile, and he was determined that his father would not rest on his laurels for much longer. Firstly, he would need more influence, and he found a good excuse to go searching for it. He had been given the invented post of Lord Deputy of the Colonies when he had been exiled, a post which technically gave him powers over all the Colonial Governors. Frederick had never used this power, though, recognising that he would not be taken seriously. He had instead relied upon suggestion and persuasion to inviegle himself with Gooch and the House of Burgesses. But Virginia, though one of the most populous and important of the British colonies in North America, was not the only one. It was time for Frederick to spread his wings.

In March, Mildred was pregnant again (with a daughter, eventually named Mildred after herself) and Frederick took the opportunity to leave her behind in Fredericksburg with young George and most of the servants. He embarked on what he called his 'Grand Tour', spending slightly more than a year travelling around the Colonies and trying to make at least one appearance in each colonial capital. Stories of him had, of course, already spread throughout North America, and some of the dignitaries of the other Colonies had already come to visit him in Fredericksburg. These men, who included Lieutenant Governor Patrick Gordon of Pennsylvania (who was not merely a political supporter but had become a genuine friend to Frederick on his rare visits), agreed to find the Prince accommodations for his stay in return for his patronage.

Much has been written about Frederick's tour, not least by Frederick himself, though he restricted himself to short pamphlets. Most of these at first seemed innocuous, with titles such as Travels in the Woods of Penn's Land or Instructive Innovations of Our Colonial Cousins. However, they always had a hidden meaning that attacked George's policies and person. It has been suggested by many historians that Frederick's works were mostly ghost-written by North American writers, given that he had no history of authorship before his exile and the fact that the writings are almost universally pro-colonial. Frederick did develop a general liking for the land of his exile, but not the love of a native that the pamphlets profess.

It is instructive to contrast Frederick's two longest stays in his tour, in Pennsylvania (May - June 1734) and New York (July - August). In the first province, he was already friendly with the Lieutenant Governor, Patrick Gordon, and appeared as a supporter of him in Philadelphia. It was in Pennsylvania that Frederick was first introduced to the Indians as anything more than a vague threat on the horizon - Pennsylvania was looking to expand at the expense of its Lenape Indian neighbours, potentially ruining the relatively good relationship they had had with them in previous years. Frederick also met with Pennsylvania's German population, much larger than that of Virginia, and was again popular with they as well.

New York was different in almost every way. The Governor was William Cosby, a new and oppressive ruler who disliked Frederick and was fiercely loyal to George II. Thus it was that in New York, it was with Cosby's enemies, the so-called Morrisite Party, that Frederick met, and enjoyed popularity with the people of New York because of it. When Cosby had arrived two years earlier, he had demanded half the pay of the acting governor, Van Dam, and had then fired Chief Justice Lewis Morris when he had declared the demand illegal. Frederick promised the Morrisites that he would have Cosby thrown out and replaced with one of their own, perhaps Morris himself, if he ever became King. So it was that he achieved more influence with those peers who identified with the Morrisite cause.

It was also whilst in New York that Frederick became involved with John Peter Zenger, a German immigrant who printed the Morrisites’ political paper, the New York Weekly Journal. Cosby had attempted to close the paper down several times, as it attacked his policies - his failure to defend against Iroquois raids, his suspected rigging of elections, and his permission for French ships to illegally dock in New York harbour. Frederick had made it a policy of his own to use his German language skills to become friendly with important or powerful German-speakers in the Colonies. Zenger was not rich, but his role as mouthpiece of the Morrisites meant that he could be very useful to Frederick indeed. The Prince later embarrassed Cosby on his way back to Virginia in winter 1734 - the Governor had attempted to have the Journal burned and Zenger arrested for sedition. Frederick used his influence to have the case thrown out[1] and a frustrated Cosby died just one year later. However, this was not the end of New York's problems, as his successor George Clarke was also a member of the 'Court' or Tory Party and continued to interfere with Van Dam's policies.

Frederick actually met Indians for the first time in New York, meeting with a delegation from the Iroquois Confederacy (or Six Nations) along with several senior Morrisites. Although the Morrisites had attacked Cosby for failing to respond effectively to Iroquois raids, they also acknowledged that at least some of those raids had been the result of Cosby's clumsy attempts to appropriate lawful Iroquois land. Frederick's chief contribution to the meeting was when he noticed that the Indians seemed to dislike being referred to as Iroquois. Via an interpreter, he asked them about this.

The Iroquois replied that the name was, in fact, an insulting epithet given to them by their Huron enemies, and meant Black Snakes. Few Englishmen had ever bothered to learn their true name, which was Haudenosaunee.

Frederick, to everyone's surprise, seemed delighted at this and even clapped his hands when the words were translated for him. He explained to the puzzled Iroquois about his own people, the Deutsche, who had resigned themselves to being referred to as 'Germans' by the English, who in turn gave the name Dutch inaccurately to the Nederlanders.[2] "Perhaps it is too late to undo that injustice," the Prince commented, "but I, for one, shall call you by your true name." In fact, Frederick's German accent meant that he had trouble pronouncing the word Haudenosaunee, but the Indians seemed to appreciate him making the effort. Their meeting would have much more important consequences in years to come, but Frederick is believed to have started a fashion for referring to the Iroquois as Haudenosaunee or just Hauden/Howden for short.

The rest of Frederick's tours in North America are less important, although it is said that he firmly believed that there was no real difference between any of the New England states, and the story of his meeting the young Benjamin Franklin in Boston is almost certainly apocryphal, although the two of them did work together in later years. Frederick more or less managed to fulfil his own target of speaking in every Colonial capital.

Frederick also visited the territory of Nova Scotia, recently (re-)conquered by British and colonial forces during the First War of Supremacy[3] and still occupied by French Acadian settlers who had been forced to swear an oath to the crown, but with the proviso that they would not be called upon to fight either French or Indian forces. It is not known precisely what first gave Frederick a dislike of the Acadians - possibly simply that their oath made them loyal to George - but one of his pamphlets, entitled The Horse of Troy, stated that "What advantage do we gain by possessing a land whose men have no obligation to serve the same duties as our true colonists? Nova Scotia is a British colony in the same sense that the wearer of our Crown is the King of France." This being a jab at the British King's absurd holdover claim from the Hundred Years' War to be the King of France, which George II had not abolished. The Prince's low opinion of the Acadians' loyalty would also have serious repercussions in years to come.

Frederick returned home to Virginia in early 1735, having missed the birth of his daughter Caroline. He remained there for six months, continuing to build up his position, and then toured the southern colonies in a much shorter trip. In the Carolinas, an intrigued Frederick also met with representatives of the Cherokee Indians, who had just concluded a treaty in which they agreed to be a protectorate of George II and halt their raids on Carolina.[4] Frederick promised to respect this treaty if he ever became King, whilst also meeting with Governor Robert Johnson and Carolina's own band of German settlers. Like the Virginians, the Carolinians saw these Calvinist refugees as a useful first line of defence against Indian raids, but unlike the Virginians there were serious accusations of the religious differences with the Anglican Carolinians causing potential civil problems. It was a complex situation that Frederick realised could one day go up like a powder keg.

He also briefly visited the newly created Proprietory Colony of Georgia, only just split off from Carolina. Georgia also had its Indian problems, in this case with the Creeks. It is thought that Frederick took a dislike to Georgia simply because it was named for his father, although his later actions towards the colony were certainly much more a direct response to events and not due to his holding a grudge.

Frederick returned to Virginia in late 1735 and remained in Fredericksburg until the Second War of Supremacy[5]. However, he was already being informed of the havoc his work was wreaking for his father back in England.

The political situation in Frederick's time was quite different to that today[6]. By the English Constitution of 1688 - a document that was referred to almost as holy writ by all politicians - each county more-or-less democratically elected two MPs. The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge also elected two MPs each, and they had the most democratic system, with any matriculated Members of the University being able to vote. In addition to this, though, there were plenty of rotten boroughs and historical seats, meaning that tiny villages could elect more MPs than great towns. The most infamous example was Old Sarum, under the control of the Pitt family, which in the recent 1728 election had elected the candidate Colonel Harrison by a four to one margin - literally four votes to one. It would continue to return two MPs well into the nineteenth century, at one point ceasing to have any voters at all.

There was also the House of Lords, of course, which was to some extent influencable by the King as he created peerages. However, he also had to cope with the existing Lords created by his father or inherited from their predecessors, whose titles could only be Attainted in extraordinary circumstances.

Political parties meant little then. The old labels of Whig and Tory were still in use, but the official Tory party was a shattered rump at this point after supporting the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715. Governments were not formed of exclusively Whigs or Tories, but generally of Whigs and perhaps one or two Tories who happened to support the King. The opposition was made up of the majority of the Tories and plenty of rebel Whigs. Also, precisely how the labels Tory and Whig were applied was often a matter of opinion. This situation did not significantly change until the nineteenth century.

Thus more informal groupings and coalitions fulfilled the roles of true parties. The loyalist Whigs of Robert Walpole continued to dominate the Commons, although their majority was reduced in the 1734 General Election after Walpole's attempt to introduce an unpopular customs and excise tax. A far more serious threat to Walpole and George II materialised soon after. Walpole had many enemies, including William Pulteney and the young, up and coming William Pitt and George Grenville. Previously they had not worked together as a united opposition, but Prince Frederick's influence from across the waves began to consolidate them into a single movement which he called the Patriot Boys.[7] As their name suggested, one of the Patriot Boys' tactics was attacking Walpole's policy of avoiding wars in the interests of trade. Though European wars were indeed unpopular, and Walpole had been praised for preventing George II intervening in the War of the Polish Succession (1733), Frederick knew that colonial interests would be served by them.

As well as North American born and influenced peers and MPs - of which there were quite a few - Frederick had the advantage of being Duke of Cornwall. Cornwall was an oddity, possessing many historical anachronisms as a result of the 1688 Constitution. It elected no fewer than 22 MPs, more than any other county despite being one of the smallest and least populous, and most of these constituencies were under the direct control of the Duke of Cornwall. Frederick also possessed some seats in Wales that still saw him, not William, as their rightful Prince, and he had achieved some level of support from Scottish peers such as Orkney (the technical Governor of Virginia) and Bute. It was this coalition that led to Walpole's loyalists sourly labelling the Patriot Boys as "A band of Scotch, Welch, Dutchmen and Colonials who think they can rule England."

Frederick clawed back surprising support, but the Patriot Boys (led by the rebel Whig Pulteney) never came close to unseating Walpole's Government. Nonetheless, they caused headaches for his father and ensured that the people of England didn't forget their absentee Prince. Frederick's plan was going as well as could be expected, but everyone's plans were thrown out when an unthinkable event happened: Walpole supported a war.

And it was a war that began in North America...






[1] Thus, unlike OTL, there was no extended Zenger case. One consequence of that is that there was no precedent set on the matter of libel, i.e. that a statement is not libellous if it is true, as was the case in OTL.

[2] This rather anachronistic statement - many Englishmen of the time referred to all Germans as Dutch - has persuaded some historians that this story may be a fabrication.

[3] War of the Spanish Succession / Queen Anne's War.

[4] At this time, North Carolina had just been split off and the remainder was referred to simply as 'Carolina', as it was the part most Europeans thought of when they heard the name. It eventually became known as South Carolina. Carolina had been a royal colony for some years at this point, but North Carolina had only just finished its period of proprietory (Company) rule.

[5] The War of the Austrian Succession / Jenkins' Ear.

[6] Or today in OTL for that matter.

[7] Existed in OTL but purely as an English phenomenon.



Part #4: The "Yes, but we've changed our minds now" War

"European wars do not have to have causes or explanations. It is the rare European peaces which must be explained and annotated to show why they came about."

- Voltaire[1]​

*

From "A Guide to the Second War of Supremacy" by Dr James Foster, Oxford University Press:

Robert Walpole had made a career of keeping Britain out of damaging wars, but both that policy and, latterly, his career were coming to an end. Lord Cobham is known to have remarked that Walpole was 'destroyed by the two Fredericks', an apt observation. The exiled Prince Frederick's Patriot Boys had been assailing Walpole's Whigs for years, but what sent him on the final path to ruin were the whims of another Frederick. King Frederick II of Prussia.

The legal cause for the war had its roots in events of decades earlier. After the First War of Supremacy,[2] Spain had come under a Bourbon dynasty and the Austrian Hapsburg empire had benefited from sweeping up several former Spanish possessions. These included the formerly Spanish and now Austrian Netherlands, greatly desired by France. More importantly, Charles VI, the Holy Roman Emperor and Archduke of Austria, had no male heirs, possessing only a daughter, Maria Theresa. On his death, she would become Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, Archduchess of Austria, and Duchess of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla. The elective position of Holy Roman Emperor was separated from the Hapsburgs for the first time in centuries and awarded to her husband, Francis I the Duke of Lorraine.

Charles VI had been well aware that this would cause complications, and so he had made all the great powers agree to his Pragmatic Sanction of 1713, recognising Maria Theresa's inheritance. Unfortunately, Charles did not perhaps take enough lessons from history. The First War had also technically been unnecessary, as the fate of Spain had already been agreed some years earlier, but that didn't stop the European powers fighting over it anyway. The Second War was the same. As soon as Charles died in 1740, Maria Theresa ascended her thrones and most of the great powers decided that they'd had their fingers held behind their backs before. More to the point, Frederick II of Prussia pointed out that he had never been consulted on the Sanction in the first place, and suited actions to words by invading Austrian Silesia. France and Bavaria also decided to rescind their recognition of Maria Theresa's claim. By the attitudes of the time, it was thought that a mere woman would soon crumble beneath the pressure and the vast Hapsburg empire would be the allies' to dismember. Of course, it didn't work out quite like that.

Britain might never have got involved if the war had occurred in isolation: Walpole had already managed to dissuade George II from entering the War of the Polish Succession some years before. However, Britain was already engaged in a war from 1739 that eventually blended into the wider European war. This was originally called the War of Jenkins' Ear, and stemmed from the fact that, according to the 1729 Treaty of Seville, Britain was forbidden from trading with the Spanish colonies in America. The Spaniards were allowed by the Treaty to board and search British vessels in Spanish waters, but in 1731 a British captain, Robert Jenkins, claimed that a brutish Spanish officer had cut off his ear while performing the inspection. The rumour became reality when Jenkins exhibited his preserved and pickled ear to the House of Commons in 1738, and not even Walpole could restrain the outrage of the House. To much cheering, he finally gave in and declared war on Spain.

Britain's naval task force was commanded by Admiral Edward Vernon, known to his men as 'Old Grog'. Vernon's men and troops were often drawn from the Colonies, and included Lawrence Washington, Augustine Washington's eldest son by his first wife, as his Captain of Marines on his flagship. Vernon himself, though persuaded of Prince Frederick's qualities by Washington, remained personally loyal to George II and the Prince of Wales.

Vernon's first victory was in the first year of the war, when he captured the Spanish port of Porto Bello in Darien. His victory was so absolute that the Spanish changed their trading practices, no longer having a few very large and rich ports with enormous treasure fleets, instead splitting them between many smaller ports. Vernon briefly returned to England and was acclaimed by the English people for his victories, including the first ever performance of God Save King George (later God Save The King). However, the rest of the war went badly, with Vernon's attempted descent[3] of Cartagena-des-Indes in New Granada (1741) being embarrassingly repulsed by greatly outnumbered Spanish defenders under Sebastian de Eslava. 1742 saw Vernon occupy Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, temporarily renaming it Prince William's Bay[4], before being driven from Cuba by Spanish irregulars.

The Spanish did not fight a defensive war, either. A Spanish attack on Georgia in 1742 was repulsed at the Battle of Bloody Marsh, and the colonials attempted equally futile attacks on Spanish Florida at the same time. It was an indecisive war, one in which Vernon's early victory was eclipsed by his later defeats. Historically he is more remembered for the introduction of watered rum into the Royal Navy, affectionately nicknamed 'grog' in his memory. Lawrence Washington nevertheless remained an admirer of Vernon, and managed to persuade Prince Frederick not to launch savage attacks on him as a means of getting to his father.

It has been suggested that this otherwise desultory war was an awakening of national consciousness, for it was at this time that the term (North) American began to dominate over Colonial as a word to describe the British settlers in the Americas.

After 1742 the war merged into the greater European conflict when France joined Spain. It was at this time that Walpole's government first began exacting increased taxes on the Americans in order to pay for the war, a highly unpopular policy and one which Frederick, of course, capitalised upon. Frederick also witnessed one of the failed American attacks on San Agustin, Florida[5], although he did not participate, and it was here that he began to realise that these almost entirely colonial-based military ventures were creating a distinct American identity. This was a fact almost entirely missed by the British government.

In Europe, the war had spiralled out of control. France and Sweden had joined Prussia after Frederick's victory at Mollwitz in 1741, with France supporting Charles Albert of Bavaria's claims to Maria Theresa's titles. The alliance suffered a defeat when Russia knocked Sweden out of the war by 1743 and annexed most of Finland, though Russia withdrew from the war after this.

The Franco-Bavarian forces, under Marshal de Broglie and supported by Saxony, did not work at all well together. By the end of 1742 they had a tenuous grip on Bohemia, while Prussia controlled Silesia. The Peace of Breslau temporarily ended the Austrian-Prussian war, with Prussian Silesia acknowledged by Austria. Prince Charles of Lorraine's army was released by this peace and was able to mostly eject Broglie's forces from Bohemia. King Louis XV's ministers, realising they had an inadequate army in place, stripped more French forces from where they had been watching potentially hostile Hanover and threw them into the fight.

Britain's initial contributions were in the Mediterranean, where a British squadron forced French-allied Naples to keep its troops at home, and, due to some odd consequencies of the war declarations, Spain sent troops through France to fight Sardinia without Sardinia being at war with France.

1743 saw even greater losses for the French. Charles Albert had crowned himself Holy Roman Emperor in Prague, but now the Franco-Bavarians lost not only Prague but were also forced back through Bavaria as well, the Austrians augmented by enthusiastic Hungarian levies who supported Maria Theresa. It was at this point, with the Franco-Bavarians losing control of Germany, that George II went to the continent with Prince William and raised an army in Hanover. This would be a fateful decision for the future of Britain.

The Anglo-Hanoverian army, supported by the Austrians, met the French at the Battle of Dettingen on June 27th (by the Julian calendar which Britain still used). George, delegating his command to William, was outmanoeuvred by his superior French counterpart, the Duc de Noailles. However, the British still won the day, but at a terrible cost.

As George personally led his troops into battle on horseback, he was wounded in the shoulder by a French musket ball. The wound was not great, and George completed the battle with his shoulder bound up and Noailles forced to concede the field, withdrawing his army. It was at this point that Prince William became an admirer of Scotch troops, as the Royal Scotch Fusiliers had played an important role in the victory.

But George's wound became infected. Stricken by a fever, he died in Hanover on August 12th. Britain and the Colonies mourned when they heard the news, although Prince Frederick saw it as Step 1 for his return and is rumoured to have thrown a tasteless party.

The transition was surprisingly orderly. The new King William IV had always been George's favourite son and they thought much alike. After being defeated by Marshal Saxe at Fontenoy in 1745, William returned to Britain, putting down Charles Edward Stuart's Jacobite rebellion in 1745 with the Scotch troops he admired. George II's body was returned to England and buried in Westminster Abbey. The British army in Europe was delegated to other generals and continued to fight on alongside Charles of Austria. France entered the war directly, while fighting between Prussia and Austria over Silesia broke out once more. France abandoned Prussia and focused on the conquest of the Austrian Netherlands, which was a success. A complex conflict in Italy eventually left Austria as the dominant power in that theatre.

The war dragged on until October 1748. In India, it was known as the First Carnatic War, and French East India Company forces under Dupleix took Madras from their British counterparts. In the Colonies, though, American forces from New England successfully conquered the French fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island in 1745, a seemingly impossible task. And this time Frederick was there, fighting as a cavalryman and honourary lieutenant colonel. He did not seem bothered by the fact that his father had died in a similar role, rather noting with annoyance that he and William had won glory as a result of it. The operation was commanded by William Shirley, Governor of Massachusetts and another acquaintance of Frederick's. After fifty days of a land siege and far more of a naval blockade, the French surrendered. "This is a great Yankee victory," Frederick said, upon standing in the Catholic chapel of the fortress. The American operation had taken on the air of a crusade, and the troops took great delight on stripping the island of 'popery', particularly if it was gold and easy to carry.

The glory turned to disgust in 1748. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle was signed to end the war. It was almost a treaty of status quo ante bellum, save that Prussia retained Silesia - France withdrew from the Austrian Netherlands in an amazingly unpopular move (a common saying at the time in France was 'as stupid as the peace') and King William IV agreed to return Louisbourg to the French in return for Madras. The move was just as unpopular with the Yankees who had bled and died to take Louisbourg as it was with the French who had bled and died to take the southern Netherlands. But the difference was that the Colonies were thousands of miles away across the ocean, and had a leader.

For Prince Frederick saw that this was his moment. The return of Louisbourg, though sourest in New England, had been condemned by all throughout the Colonies. He was on good terms with most of the colonial governors and legislatures, and those that were not owed their allegiance to George II, not William. So it was that at Fredericksburg, on February 4th 1748, the twelve governors and many other important dignitaries met with Frederick and signed the Declaration of Right, recognising Frederick as the rightful heir to the throne and William's claim void. The Prince had come into his element.

And the War of the British Succession had begun.





[1] Not an OTL quote.

[2] War of the Spanish Succession.

[3] Eighteenth century term for an amphibious invasion.

[4] In OTL he named it Cumberland Bay, for the same person.

[5] Which in OTL of course became St Augustine.



Part #5: How I Killed My Brother

Yankee Doodle won his war
By treachery and trick'ry
Pushed over a Frog's nest
And called it a great vict'ry

Yankee Doodle, run and fly,
Yankee Doodle yellow,
Go back to your golden fields
And grow your baccy mellow.
[1]

- Song of the Williamite troops, to the tune of "Lucky Locket" ; author unknown​

*

From "The War of the British Succession", by Dr Colin FitzGeorge, Frederick College Press, 1987 :

The War is one of the greatest 'what if's of history, oft quoted by the writers of speculative romances as they consider the knife edge on which our world has walked since the beginning of time. It was viewed with delight by Britain's continental enemies, who were willing to jump on any chance to take the country down a peg or two. However, with the customary luck that has beheld the country for hundreds of years, no great invasion materialised. Most of the European powers were busy building up for the next war, for the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle had solved no-one's grievances - even in Britain was the only power to actually fight a civil war over it. France, Austria, Prussia and Russia were caught up in an arms race for when the peace inevitably failed, while Spain was focusing on rebuilding its fleet and improving its methods of trade after its losses at Edward Vernon's hand.

Britain was divided in its loyalties, America much less so. Generally speaking, those who were on top now owed it to the patronage of George II or William, and so inevitably supported William, while those who had much to gain supported Frederick. Few in the Colonies, save some of the colonial officials, owed much to George and still less to William. After a few arrests and more fleeing the country, America stood square behind Frederick, 'our prince'.

Frederick's bid to gain the crown would have been impossible without America's support, but would inevitably fail if that was all he had. Fortunately, Britain had many supporters of Frederick as well. The Cornish and many of the Welsh, of course, were under his control through the rotten boroughs. England, as usual, was the most fiercely divided, with the Patriot Boys and their allies supporting Frederick and the current government supporting George. The distribution of MPs meant that Northumbria and Yorkshire had the greatest overall number of Patriots outside the South, which could not be readily divided on geographic grounds. London above all often had loyalties divided even within its families.

The political situation in Britain had changed little after George's death at Dettingen. Walpole had already finally been forced to step down in 1742 and had by now passed away. He had been replaced by his old rivals the Earl of Wilmington (titular Prime Minister) and John Carteret (eminence grise). Wilmington, by then old and ill, had died soon after taking office, and had in turn been succeeded by the pro-peace Henry Pelham, who had misgivings (to say the least) about this new conflict following on the tails of the old.

The Opposition was led by the Patriots under William Pulteney, after the death of Lord Cobham earlier that year. Although still not having achieved anything near a majority, they were a thorn in the side of Pelham and William IV. Perhaps their most significant asset was the silver tongue of William Pitt, who made several highly calculated attacks on William and praising Frederick, without ever technically denying William's right to the throne. That would open him to prosecution under the Treason Act of 1702, for which the penalty if found guilty was death. Pitt and the other Patriots merely argued that the legality of George II's disowning of Frederick ought to be examined, "in view of the extraordinary circumstances in Parliament at the time". This was still enough for William to become nervous, though, and he forced a reluctant Pelham to arrest and imprison several prominent Patriot MPs. Pitt, Grenville and Pulteney were all imprisoned in the Tower of London, albeit in relatively luxurious conditions, just as Robert Walpole had thirty years earlier.

Nothing could have been calculated to stir the British people's sense of injustice, of course, and popular feeling began to turn against William and therefore towards Frederick. The worst part for William and Pelham was that the imprisonment didn't even have that much effect - by some means, perhaps a sympathiser in the guards, the three Patriot prisoners managed to continue getting writings and pamphlets out into London.

Both Frederick and William realised that the war and dispute could be ended at a single stroke: one of them had to die. William had not yet married, negotiations with various German princesses having been interrupted by the Second War of Supremacy, and had no blood heir. Frederick did have children, but by Mildred, claimant Duchess of Cornwall, and the Williamites did not recognise the marriage and hence the legitimacy of George. Realistically, either of them being killed would end the problem, because their supporters would then have the unpalatable choice of either cleaving to the other or trying to find another claimant, possibly from Europe, and having the headaches of George I all over again.

William was always the more martial of the two, courageous if somewhat lacking in tact, and decided that the best way to settle the dispute quickly was to simply sail a grand fleet to America and give battle. The provisions of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle were still up in the air thanks to Frederick's forces refusal to withdraw from Louisbourg, and so the French had in turn refused to return Madras to the British East India Company. William realised that if his fleet could take Louisbourg quickly, then it could be immediately handed back to France and settle the disputes. Frederick could then be tackled later, assuming that his Yankee forces did not break and shatter immediately (the British soldiers of the period had a poor opinion of American fighting strength).

The King needed an Admiral, of course. He is reported to have inquired into the disgraced and retired Vernon returning to duty, but Vernon refused and is thought to have issued a warning that the Americans might be tougher than was believed. (This is often considered by historians to be a direct reference to Lawrence Washington). If Vernon did give a warning, it was unheeded. The fleet was placed under the command of Vice-Admiral John Byng[2], who had previously served as Governor of Newfoundland and thus knew the waters William's forces would be travelling through. Perhaps William also thought Byng might be able to rally the relatively few permanent residents of Newfoundland to the Williamite cause. If so, it was an unfounded hope; Byng had only served as Governor for less than a year in 1742.

The fleet sailed in April 1749. Frederick, meanwhile, had divined his brother's purpose and had repaired and reinforced Louisbourg. He issued orders (conveyed by the Governors or Lieutenant Governors-in-residence) that if colonial forces met William's, they were first to appeal to their reason and not to fire first. This was looked on by contemporary commentators as a benevolent gesture, but may have been more calculating: Frederick was willing to do anything that might blacken William's image by forcing him to resort to violence first. By standing on the defensive, he had already made William paint himself as the aggressor.

It is at this point that the speculative romantics become most excited, pointing out that if the war had dragged on, Frederick might have been reduced to merely leader of some rebel confederation of the Colonies, or William's forces might have come into direct conflict with the Yankees and driven a wedge between the Colonies and the homeland. In practice, fortune smiled upon the fate of England. Helped along a little by Frederick's lack of scruples.

On his grand tour a few years earlier, Frederick had been most impressed by the use of rifles in America, a weapon still scorned by most British and all European troops as being ungentlemanly. Longarms were almost always used by common soldiers, they argued. It was fine for them to blast away in musket line, where no-one could tell whose ball hit what, but to use an accurate weapon like a rifle, where a target - which might be an officer on horseback - was deliberately lined up and shot? Unthinkably vulgar!

If Frederick had ever had any appreciation for this kind of view - and this is debatable - it was ground out of him by his exile. Both his relentless mission to return, and perhaps also the frontier pragmatism of the Americans around him, convinced him to resort to almost any means to get his throne back. This did not extend to actual assassination by any means that might paint him as a blackguard, though. It had to look like an accident.

So, the would-be King decided on a grand gamble. He knew, or at least had was fairly certain, that Frederick would make an attack on Louisbourg, perhaps after watering in Newfoundland. He set things into motion.

Frederick assembled a fleet of his own. It was made up largely of converted fishing boats, with one or two sympathetic Royal Navy ships with largely American crews. It would be no match for Admiral Byng's force, but that wasn't the point. Frederick also chose one particular ship, a simple Boston fisherman, for his task. Fortunately for him, its captain and crew volunteered for what could easily have been a suicide mission, and he promised to reward them if they succeeded. They took with them ten men, mostly New England huntsmen, whom had been the winners of a grand tournament organised by Frederick a few months before. The competition had been to find the best and most accurate riflemen in the Colonies.

It is thought that Frederick prevented Major (raised unofficially to Colonel by Frederick) Washington's volunteering to join the mission. Augustine Washington had died five years earlier, leaving Lawrence as his heir, and Frederick did not want Lawrence's death to provoke the remaining Washingtons to release their blackmail. Not at the moment of his triumph.

Frederick sent out many other fishermen, their presence not unusual at all at a time when the fine fishing waters off Newfoundland were actually contested in war between Britain and France, and these were assigned to search for the Williamite fleet. Byng's force was first sighted on August 14th, 1749 by Captain William Folger, a Nantucket whaler, who was later knighted by Frederick. Under orders, Frederick's fishermen in turn allowed themselves to be boarded by Byng's ships, and Folger even had an audience with Byng himself. The admiral wanted intelligence on Frederick's movements, and the men fed him mostly accurate reports about Frederick's reinforcement of Louisbourg. However, this only redoubled William's determination to take the fortress.

Byng's fleet arrived at Louisbourg on August 28th and immediately began shelling the fort from a safe distance. Louisbourg's guns, which had been brought back into action by American smiths, kept up a halfhearted return fire, and it seemed that the stories of American cowardice were true.

But the fort nonetheless raised two great flags, flags which had been sewn for Frederick by Boston weavers just weeks before. One was a great Union Jack, while the second was a new flag, a flag that had been designed by a committee of Frederick, the Washingtons and some others of his allies. It was based on the Blue Ensign, but had a great red cross like the White - the red cross on blue being derived from the Royal Colonial Arms of Virginia - and in its lower right quadrant bore the symbol of the Dukes of Cornwall. Frederick had calculated that carefully and, just as he expected, William was roused to see this vulgar spectacle. His brother came out on deck, visible at a distance by other 'innocent fishing boats', which signalled with flags. Now Frederick's plan went into gear.

Another fishing boat appeared, a swift sailor, from out of the open ocean. In fact it had taken a looping course. The ship flew a flag of white cross on blue, the French merchant colours. Once more, this was no surprise, for the French fishermen contested these waters often, and France and Britain were now at a (provisional) peace. The ship sailed very close to Byng's fleet, not altering its course, and Byng questioned William whether he wanted it stopped and searched. William's thoughts were entirely on retaking Louisbourg and, hence, forcing the French to cleave to the Treaty. Anything they could use as an excuse to continue to dither had to be avoided. He told Byng to ignore it. The admiral complied, for after all, it was obvious that the ship carried no cannon.

So it was, at a distance of perhaps two hundred yards from Byng's 80-gun flagship HMS Devonshire, that Frederick's crack Riflemen emerged from under cover, took careful aim on William in his prominent marshal's uniform, and fired.

Of the twelve shots fired, Byng's steward records in the log book that four hit the King - three in the torso and one to the head - and this fourth one meant he died instantly. The other eight embedded themselves in masts, wounded two midshipmen, and pierced a hole through Byng's hat without him even noticing until much later.

All attention aboard the Devonshire was on the prone figure of the king, blood and brain splashed everywhere "in a most vulgar spectacle", as Byng recorded in his diary. Other ships in the fleet attempted to give chase to the fisherman, but Frederick had chosen a fast ship and the Williamites were unprepared. Given enough time, of course, they would have caught up, but to the bemusement of Byng and his captains, two frigates also flying Royal Navy ensigns appeared seemingly out of nowhere and raked the fishermen with cannon fire, then boarded her and set her alight.

The field of battle was in total confusion, with Byng, not the most commanding of Britain's admirals, uncertain of what to do. As Frederick had planned, this gave him an opening. One of the frigates - the other quietly evacuating the "prisoners" to shore where they would blend in with Frederick's army - approached the Devonshire and flew the flag of truce. Not having any other options, Byng took it, and he met with Frederick, Colonel Washington and Governors Gooch and Van Dam of Virginia and New York, promoted to full Governorship by Frederick.

Between them, they hammered out a deal. Having witnessed a dastardly French attack on the person of the King, it fell to Frederick to take the crown and avenge his brother. Such was only proper, just as William himself had on the fields of Dettingen. Of course William had been the true King, 'had been' being the operative word. Frederick had never been in rebellion, his position had been...misrepresented.

History was rewritten in the admiral's cabin of HMS Devonshire, and Byng acknowledged King Frederick I of Great Britain and Ireland. After watering at less forbidding American ports, the fleet would return to England with Frederick and his senior allies at their head, and the King would be coronated. This was only proper. And of course there would be no question of returning Louisbourg to the enemy, not after an act of treachery against the laws of war like this, no? No.

Some commentators record that Frederick was a changed man after the meeting, for he came upon the body of his dead brother, mutilated by the accurate rifle fire of the Americans. The last time he had seen William had been in 1728, when his brother was merely seven. Ever since then, Frederick had always painted him as a small-scale copy of his father, and due as much hatred. But it is said that when he saw him like this, he saw the little boy he vaguely remembered, and broke down. Many say that his coldblooded acts of deception in gaining the throne haunted him for the rest of his life, a latter day Richard III, or perhaps Henry VII is a less damning comparison.

The fleet wintered in America, the tensions between the British and colonials evaporating as William's former sailors and soldiers revelled with their colonial cousins, celebrating the warmest Christmas that most of them had ever known. Something else spread throughout the Colonies, as well: the flag that Frederick had commissioned. Known then as the Patriotic Banner of the Colonies, it would eventually become known as the Jack and George (Union Jack and St. George's Cross), symbol of Britain's American colonies forevermore.

When the fleet finally sailed in March 1750, though, together with Frederick, his important allies and his family, his trials were not over. He had won the throne back from William, but there was still another contender in the ring. In Ireland, and the Highlands of Scotland, decision between William and Frederick had never been a question worth asking. For there was another.

The Jacobites were rising once again...



[1] The song may have been around as early as the 1740s in OTL. Note the last line is a reference to the now universal praise for Virginia tobacco thanks to William Gooch's policies.

[2] In OTL Byng is best known for being controversially court-martialled and executed by firing squad for his actions at the Battle of Malta, leading to Voltaire's satirical phrase "The English occasionally feel the need to execute an admiral, to encourage the others."



Part #6: The Glorious Revolution (Take Two)

O'er the seas and o'er the land
To Ireland, Cornwall and England
King Fred commands, and we obey,
Over the seas and far away...


- Colonial marching song from the War of the British Succession [1]​


From "The Prodigal Son: King Frederick I" by Arthur Yeo (1959, Oxford University Press)

When William left Britain in 1748, the Jacobites had only recently suffered a catastrophic defeat in Scotland at his own hands. Bonnie Prince Charlie's Highland rebellion, which had at first seemed so close to success, had been crushed by William's forces. Nonetheless, Charles Edward Stuart remained undaunted by the humiliating manner of his escape[1] and plotted a new rebellion whenever the time was ripe. Not even he, though, had expected that it would come so soon.

Charles was the charismatic son of James Francis Edward Stuart, son of James II and claimant King James VII and III of Great Britain and of Ireland. James had remained in France after the failure of his own attempted rebellion in 1709 - at the hands, incidentally, of Admiral Sir George Byng, father of the man who led William's fleet. The '45 had also failed, but its initial successes convinced Charles that victory would eventually be his. The Stuarts all continued to ignore the fact that they had almost zero support in England, even from Catholics, and what little sympathy they had from the Episcopalian movement in '45 would have been quenched by the failure of that rebellion. There remained a Jacobite circle in London which had contact with Charles at this time, but they were adamant that Charles would only be accepted by them if he converted to Anglicanism.

The Kingdom of France continued to give the Stuarts asylum, but treated their ambitions as, at best, a minor distraction to their English enemy which might benefit France a little, and at worse merely a quixotic fancy to add colour to the French court. Notably Louis XIV had even permitted James to be crowned King of England at his court in the traditional way, including the defunct claim to be King of France. The fact that the real King of France permitted a pretender to be crowned King of France in his presence demonstrates the lack of seriousness with which the French took the Stuarts.

However, the French had also discovered that Charles had a strong will as well as the charismatic presence that had let him rally so many Highlanders to his doomed cause. Notably, he maintained to the French that he would have the crowns of all three kingdoms (England, Scotland and Ireland) or none. He would not merely be a French puppet in Scotland or Ireland.[2]

When William left, Charles immediately began making more plans for another rising, despite some misgivings among his supporters. The French Foreign Minister, the Vicomte de Puisieulx, warned Charles that no French troops would be guaranteed, as Louis XV was concentrating on his domestic affairs and reworking his army for the next round of battle in Europe. Charles famously remarked with some venom: "Odds fish![4] Three times I have been promised armies of France and three times none have come! Now that the Viscount has told me in no uncertain terms that no men can come, it will not surprise me if a vast legion appears to support our cause!" [5]

Although Charles was not willing merely for his father to become King of Ireland, he was persuaded by his supporters that an Irish rebellion might be a more successful way of starting, as Scotland was still locked down quite tight by what remained of William’s army. Accordingly, the Stuarts chartered a fleet that sailed from Nantes in April 1749 (just as they had five years earlier) and landed troops at Limerick. Charles' ragbag army numbered about 20,000, including a number of French Celtic troops whom Louis XV had reluctantly, unofficially, released. These included portions of the French Royal Scots and Irish Brigades, some of whom had fought in the '45.

Limerick was chosen for a variety of reasons. It was an important city, it was isolated from the major British garrisons in Ireland, it remained poorly fortified, and most importantly, it had a special place in the hearts of Jacobites and especially their Irish supporters. It was at the Siege of Limerick in 1691 that James II had finally fled, beginning the Jacobite exile, and the ensuing Treaty of Limerick had guaranteed civil rights for Irish Catholics - which had then been ignored by successive hostile British Parliaments. Not for nothing was the Irish Brigades' battle cry "Remember Limerick and Saxon Perfidy!"

Despite Charles' somewhat disorganised army, Limerick was taken in a week-long siege from its complacent British defenders. The city retained a large Protestant Irish minority, many of whom suffered revenge attacks either by the Jacobites or by their Catholic neighbours.[6]

News of Limerick's capture spread like wildfire through Ireland and, in a somewhat slower and more confused manner, to Britain. By the time that Prime Minister Henry Pelham was certain that the reports were more than rumours, the Jacobites had already sailed a part of their force to take Cork as well, and the Catholic interior of the isle was beginning to rise in support.

Pelham had been chosen as Prime Minister specifically because he was almost a nonentity, able to smooth things over in the fiercely divided Parliament of the late 1740s.[7] Admirable a peacetime PM as he might be, he was sorely unsuited to this crisis. By January 1750, the Patriot opposition (those who had not been locked up by William) were proposing votes of no confidence almost continuously. These failed, primarily because the Whigs remained fiercely divided themselves and no-one could agree on a non-Patriot replacement, hence the Whigs continued to support Pelham and his brother, the Duke of Newcastle, who shared his power.

The news out of Ireland continued to be discouraging. Though the British troops marching to meet Charles' forces were generally superior in training and equipment, most of the Irish countryside was against them and they found they had to live off the (poor) land, among other problems. Whatever the issues, a Jacobite army under the ageing Lord George Murray comprehensively defeated a Government army under Sir Robert Rich when some of Rich's own Royal Irish defected, or at least refused to fight. The scandal almost brought down the Government, but Pelham continued to cling onto power, while somewhat exaggerated rumours of the Jacobites storming Dublin circulated. Ulster dissolved into vicious partisan warfare between Irish Catholics and Protestants, and the remaining Government forces were pulled back to Dublin. It seemed, just as it had in ages past, that English power in Ireland was about to be reduced to the 'Pale' once more.

More seriously, scattered but nonetheless existent Jacobite risings began to occur in the Highlands, though most were immediately crushed by the large number of British troops still stationed there. The only persistent and organised rising was that of Lord Cosmo Gordon. London was in a panic, just as it had been in 1745, and there were demands that troops be pulled back to defend the capital in case the Jacobites appeared from nowhere.

Most historians today believe that Charles' mission, despite its surprising early successes, was ultimately doomed, just as the '45 had been. However, any eventual Government response was as nothing to the spectacular events which actually occurred.

With a sense of timing that would be considered outlandish even in a work of literature, the fleet of King Frederick returned from the American colonies on June 4th, 1750, and landed in Ireland. Frederick had heard from the occasional Atlantic fisherman of the troubles and he sensed an opportunity for glory. The former Williamite army, combined with the American forces, landed at Cork and quickly overran the Jacobites, who had not had sufficient troops to defend every town they took. An initial attack by an army under Colonel Washington failed to take Limerick, though the town was later abandoned by the Jacobites anyway.

Some historians and alienists[8] have speculated that Frederick may have wanted a decisive Jacobite battle just to have another opportunity to match his brother's achievements... "his Culloden". He certainly had that. Frederick's force met up with one of the shattered Government armies at Wexford and then crushed Charles Edward Stuart's force near Kilkenny on September 1st, 1750. The "Remember Kilkenny!" would in future times be as much of a rallying cry for Irish Catholics as "Remember Limerick!" had been in this war.

There would be no escape for Charles Edward Stuart this time, ignoble or otherwise. He was hit by a musket ball at the moment when the battle turned to rout, just as he had been on the verge of rallying his troops with his famous charisma. His last words are reported to be "Now and forever, my Father is King!" The body was witnessed by Frederick and several of his generals, but vanished some time after the King ordered it to be taken back to London. It is thought that it was stolen by Irish Jacobites, and there remain reports today of a secret shrine in a cave somewhere near the battlefield at Kilkenny, although none of the many adventurers who have gone looking has ever found it.

James Francis Edward remained titular James III in France, but the death of Bonnie Prince Charlie effectively ended the Jacobite cause. James' second son Henry Benedict Stuart was a cardinal in the Catholic Church, and thus would both never produce an heir and would never be recognised by almost everyone in England and indeed Scotland. Also, France, Spain and the Papal States ceased their charade and did not recognise Henry as Henry IX on James' sorrowful death three years later. Within a decade or two, Jacobitism was just a romantic legend.

After his triumph in Ireland, Frederick withdrew his army - Irish Catholic partisan warfare would continue for some years - and sailed for Penzance. His army marched through Cornwall, and Frederick was greeted with cheers by men and women who had always held fast to their Duke throughout the hard years of George and William. He bestowed many more favours and promises, his army picked up a number of new recruits, camp followers and wives, and they marched eastward.

On November 15th, 1750, Frederick's army entered London. There was talk of forming a civil militia to repel them, but by now Pelham's government was as paralysed as it could be. Just as Frederick had hoped, instead his homecoming was as a second Glorious Revolution, with people in the street cheering his victorious troops, the Irish victory still fresh in everyone's mind. The Jack and George was seen, and remarked upon, and the image of Lawrence Washington and his volunteers marching on horseback through the streets of London, bearing the new flag, was immortalised in Gainsborough's Stout Colonials.

Frederick entered the House of Commons whilst it was still in session, as no King had since Charles I, and waited patiently with his troops while Pelham blustered. Meanwhile, Washington's volunteers freed Pitt, Grenville and Pulteney from the Tower, as well as less prominent Patriots from house arrest, and these MPs converged on the Palace of Westminster. When all were assembled, Frederick spoke:

"I find the Government of these islands has suffered somewhat drastically in the absence of a strong guiding hand. Therefore, I present my own. Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense!"

It is probably apocryphal that both Pelhams fainted at this...probably.

Frederick was crowned on Christmas Day, 1750, at Westminster Abbey, evoking the coronation of William the Conqueror almost seven centuries earlier. His disgrace had begun with a coronation, that of his father, and now it ended with one. And Frederick took note of the debts he owed, though in his own words he knew he could never repay them all. So it was that, after taking the coronation oath, he adopted a new title:

Frederick the First, by the Grace of God King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, Emperor of North America, Defender of the Faith, etc.

Frederick's first act as crowned King was to dissolve Parliament and call a general election, which the Patriots unsurprisingly won handily. In February 1751, William Pulteney became First Lord of the Treasury, with William Pitt as Secretary of State for the Southern Department and George Grenville as Secretary of State for the Northern Department. Among the new 'Patriotic Parliament' 's first bills to be passed were the infamous Act of Suppression, detailing new measures by which Ireland and the Scottish Highlands would be secured against further risings; the Act of Succession (1751) in which William was recognised as King William IV reigning 1743-1749, as Frederick had promised; and, perhaps most importantly for future generations, the Colonial Act (1751), in which the first seeds of federalism in Britain's North American colonies were laid, with the declaration of the Empire of North America.

Part of this Act was probably a calculated insult at the French and Spanish, as though the British colonies were very populous, they still only occupied the Cisappalachian region of the North American continent, whereas the French and Spanish claimed far more. Yet, as well as simply adding another title to that of the British monarch, the Act both increased the local powers of the elected American colonial assemblies - abolishing the post of Lieutenant Governor and forcing Governors to remain resident at their posts - and paved the way for a wider Parliamentary reform later on. Notably, with Frederick as King, the post of Lord Deputy of the Colonies was now vacant. Renamed Lord Deputy of North America, Frederick bestowed the post upon Lord Thomas Fairfax, the only British peer who had preferred to dwell in the Colonies even during William's reign, and an old acquaintance of the King's from his Virginian exile days.

Frederick liberally showered his American friends and supporters with peerages and jobs in thanks for their help returning him to his rightful place, and Lawrence Washington in particular was rewarded with the Washingtons' ancestral home, Sulgrave Manor, and a newly created peerage. It is said that Lawrence may have rejected Frederick's original choice of Marquess of Northampton, stating that, after all this time they had spent together, the King should understand his people more. There was a dead silence, among which Frederick's courtiers held their breath, and then the King grinned and agreed. So it was that Lawrence Washington was the first man to receive a hereditary peerage credited to a town outside England, Scotland or Ireland: he was made Sir Lawrence Washington, First Marquess of Fredericksburg.

The War of the British Succession was over. But the Age of Supremacy had just begun...



[1] The original Over the Hills and Far Away comes from the War of the Spanish Succession, aka the First War of Supremacy in OTL, and it has undergone many permutations for later wars in OTL, just as it has here in TTL.

[2] He escaped from Scotland, both in OTL and TTL, disguised as a lady's maid.

[3] In OTL Charles made this claim in 1759 after Choiseul approached him with a proposal to just make him King of Ireland, backed by a French invasion.

[4] This rather strange oath was a phrase of his great-uncle Charles II.

[5] Some French troops did support the '45, but they turned up late and in much smaller numbers than had been promised.

[6] As Terry Pratchett put it in OTL, "Remember the atrocity committed a long time ago which excuses the atrocity we're going to commit now! Hurrah!"

[7] In OTL, also TTL.

[8] Psychologists.




Interlude #1: The Age of Supremacy

INSTITUTE MISSION TAPE TRANSCRIPT 07/06/20: CLASSIFIED LEVEL EIGHT

Capt. Christopher Nuttall: Director, you may take issue with the means that this report has been constructed. I have been assured by Dr Pylos and Dr Lombardi that any other approach would be overly confusing. For clarification, I present their recommendations.

Dr Bruno Lombardi: Hello? Yes? Is this thing on? Thank you, Captain. Yes, indeed, it has been our understanding that-

Dr Thermos Pylos: -that the political and cultural landscape of the present day of TimeLine L is too alien, too different from our own world for a ready understanding, and that-

Dr Bruno Lombardi: -that incorrect snap judgements may be made if the mind is not prepared by tracing the changes in this world from their very beginning, and-

Capt. Christopher Nuttall: Gentlemen, could we get to the point?

Dr Bruno Lombardi: Of course.

Dr Thermos Pylos: Mm.

Dr Bruno Lombardi (after a pause) : Director, you may have been confused by the use of local terminology in a few cases.

Dr Thermos Pylos: To that end, we present this short excerpt from a book that I, personally, risked life and limb to get my hands on, for such works are restricted in the vicinity of-

Dr Bruno Lombardi: Yes, yes. The point is that the book is written from a different perspective to the British Whig histories we have previously drawn upon and thus may present a more balanced perspective.

Dr Thermos Pylos: I wouldn't say that - more imbalanced in a different direction...

Capt. Christopher Nuttall: Gentlemen?

Dr Bruno Lombardi (muttering) : Roll the tape.


*

“History is written by the victors.”

- George Spencer-Churchill V, On Empire (1947, Oxford University Press)​

*

From "Historiography: Overcoming a Barrier to Societal Unity" by Paolo Rodriguez (1962, Instituto Sanchez; English translation)

Wars of Supremacy. A concept developed by the English/West Indian Whig historian Thomas Maccauley as an underlying theme for the eighteenth century. Maccauley sought to place the largely meaningless clashes of that time into an ideological context, and emphasises the idea that the eighteenth century was effectively one long war with short breaks for regrouping. He did not class every eighteenth-century conflict as a War of Supremacy, however. Most notably, although Maccauley dates the start of his Age of Supremacy to 1688 with the flight of the Stuart dynasty from England, he does not consider the War of the Grand Alliance, of which that flight was a part, to be a War of Supremacy. Some successors in the same tradition, notably George Spencer-Churchill, have retroactively dubbed that conflict the 'Zeroth War of Supremacy'.

Maccauley and his successors defined a War of Supremacy as a global conflict, in which significant fighting occurred in at least three widely separated theatres. These are usually considered to be "Europe, the Americas, and India", although the latter is more negotiable. Supposedly the War of the Grand Alliance did not count, as while it had European and North American theatres, there was no conflict in India or another third area.

The term is often misunderstood. The "Supremacy" does not refer to military but cultural domination. It was a central thesis of Maccauley's that purely European conflicts usually had no long-standing impact, although his own narrow cultural background prevented him from following this through to its logical conclusion that the only solution was a correct Societal Unity.[1] Maccauley argued that only wider, colonial, Wars of Supremacy had long-term consequences. Many colonies trading around the world, their inhabitants speaking the language of their mother country and following their practices, would result in a very slow but sure cultural domination of the world by that country - in Maccauley's conception, which was contrary to the principles of Sanchez.

Similarly, the term 'Age of Supremacy' is misleading, as it refers to not a period in which one culture dominates the world, but a period in which the various cultures are contesting that domination. Age of War would be a more appropriate term.

Engaging in Wars of Supremacy might not bring gains in the short term, but looked at from the perspective of a historian, the victors in such wars would define not just what the future would look like, but how the inhabitants of that future would look back on their own history. Spencer-Churchill characterised this by the phrase "He who controls the present, controls the past."

From Maccauley's point of view, the victors of the Wars of Supremacy were England and to a lesser extent Spain, while the losers were France and Austria. Of course, any short-term impact of such wars will be negated in the long-run by the procedures of Unity.

Maccauley's definitions of the Wars of Supremacy and accompanying conflicts follow, with annotations for changes made by his successors.

1688-1697: The War of the Grand Alliance.
England, United Provinces of the Netherlands[2], the German Empire[3], Spain, Sweden and the Duchy of Savoy versus the First Kingdom of France and allied Scottish and Irish Jacobites. Indecisive result. Failed attempt by English colonists in North America to take French Quebec. Not considered to be a War of Supremacy by Maccauley but dubbed the 'Zeroth' by Spencer-Churchill.


1701-1714: The War of the Spanish Succession: The First War of Supremacy.
(Incorporating the Great Northern War between Sweden and the Ottoman Empire versus Russia, Saxony, Denmark-Norway and the Commonwealth, plus other German allies. )
Portugal, England/Great Britain, the German Empire, the United Provinces of the Netherlands and Spanish and Catalan Austriacistes versus Spain, the First Kingdom of France, and Wittelsbach Bavaria. Indecisive result in Europe, but Britain was ceded several parts of French Canada. It is this that appears to cause Mccauley to consider this a War of Supremacy, as there was no significant Indian theatre.

1733-1738: The War of the Polish Succession. Not a War of Supremacy, although it might well have been if George II's Britain had entered.

1740-1748: The War of the Austrian Succession: The Second War of Supremacy
Kingdom of Great Britain and Kingdom of Ireland, German Empire or Austria, United Provinces of the Netherlands, Saxony, Sardinia and Russia versus First Kingdom of France, Spain, Prussia, Wittelsbach Bavaria and the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily.
This is indisputably a War of Supremacy as it incorporated both a North American theatre (Britain occupied, among other places, Fort Louisbourg) and an Indian one (French East India Company took Fort St George). According to Mccauley's notions, this resulted in a supremacist cultural victory of Britain in part of North America, and France in the Carnatic region of India. However, as with most other Wars of Supremacy, the European result was indecisive.

1748-51: The War of the British Succession. Not a War of Supremacy.
Britons were divided between the claims of claimant Kings William IV, Frederick IV and James III. No other powers officially entered the conflict, although there was some unofficial French support of the Jacobites.


1755-1759: The War of the Diplomatic Revolution: The Third War of Supremacy.
Great Britain, Ireland, the Empire of North America, Hanover, Prussia and minor German states versus the First Kingdom of France, Austria, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Saxony, Sardinia, Naples and Sicily.
Note that these are the dates used by Mccauley, and in Europe the war is usually considered to end in 1761.
Result: Decisive British cultural supremacist victory in North America, minor French victory in India, dismemberment of Prussia and Poland in Europe.

1760-63: The First Platinean War Not a War of Supremacy, but set the stage for one.
Spain fought Portugal and Britain. Result: Spanish victory in South America but defeat in Europe.

1778-1785: The Second Platinean War : The Fourth War of Supremacy: Britain, Portugal and the UPSA fought Spain and France. UPSA victory in South America. Indecisive results in Europe. British victory in India.

1794-1800 and 1807-09: The Fifth and Sixth Wars of Supremacy. Maccauley did not consider the Jacobin Wars to be Wars of Supremacy; these have been added by later historians due to the revisionism of the period by the British government in order to justify the return of hostilities, and which merely typifies their futile struggle to delay the inevitable march of Unity with the false promises of nationalism.

*


Dr Bruno Lombardi: Now that the stage has been set, we can move on. We have established how things begun to change in TimeLine L.

Dr Thermos Pulos: The start was in North America, and in Britain. The ends...the ends would affect everything and everyone.







[1]You can't spot the ideology of the writer at all, can you?

[2] There is a historiographical reason why a twentieth century Societista writer does not refer to the seventeenth century version as the Dutch Republic.

[3] i.e. the Holy Roman Empire.




Part #7: The Peace, Such as it Is...

From - "The Reign of King Frederick I" by Dr Daniel Clarke (1975, Northampton Press)

Frederick had won back his throne by a combination of valour and base cunning. But, as Shakespeare had said so many years before, uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. Having returned to his position partially by treachery, Frederick remained somewhat paranoid towards usurpers for the rest of his life. Of course, not all of this was delusion. From a modern perspective looking back, we can see that after 1751 the Jacobites were shattered and would never threaten the House of Hanover again. But Frederick and his ministers were always wary of another attempt, and took steps in order to guard against it.

More steps were taken to reinforce the guard on the Scottish Highlands, with a new road network being built specifically in order to move troops around easily, building upon similar provisions enacted by Marshal Wade after the earlier '15 rising. Colonel Edward Braddock, a Scot who had previously fought with King William IV's army in the Netherlands during the Second War of Supremacy, was promoted to major-general and given extraordinary powers over the portions of Scotland that possessed Jacobite sympathies. He became known as The Tanner by the Jacobites, a reference to the fact that they had called William IV The Butcher - they claimed that William had slaughtered the Scots and now Braddock was turning their skin into clothes, i.e. turning Scotsmen into little Englishmen.

Ireland was arguably a more difficult problem. Perhaps fortunately for Frederick, the Lord Lieutenant at the time of the Jacobite rising - his enemy Lord Carteret - had died in the struggle. Frederick was persuaded by his ministers not to appoint a hardliner who would only encourage further rebellions. Instead, the Duke of Dorset - a man who had previously served as Lord Lieutenant before falling afoul of the Pelhams' government - was reappointed to the post. Frederick was content with stationing increased numbers of British, American and German troops there. Mostly Protestants, of course, and this too increased resentment against the mainly Catholic Irish population. Under the laws passed in 1716, the Catholics had been disenfranchised from voting for the Irish Parliament, so while that institution was broadly democratic (by the standards of the day), the majority of the population was not eligible to vote. The Irish Protestants, of course, were themselves seeking vengeance after the Jacobite depredations, and continued to elect hardliners.

Frederick was a more dynamic and active monarch than his father or brother had been, but for the most part continued to let Parliament run things, acknowledging the established system of government. He only directly intervened when Parliament attempted to pass laws on subjects close to his heart, primarily the American colonies, and though he had left them behind forever, the Americans esteemed his name once more when he shot down or watered down several unpopular Bills. Almost alone among British lawmakers, Frederick had something of an understanding of the American mind - and he was at the top.

It was his long period of exile in Virginia, along with his friendship with slaveholding families such as the Washingtons, which has resulted in his often-attacked - then and now - relaxed attitude to slavery. His son, actually born and raised in Virginia, was even worse. Abolitionists were not censured in Frederick's day, but nor were they taken seriously. Though America and the West Indies remained the most common destination for black African slaves, it was a fashion among British ladies of the day to have black slave manservants, raising them from children. For the vast majority of the voting population, slavery was such an integral part of their lives that they could not conceive why anyone would want to abolish it. For the present, abolitionism remained merely another high-minded dream of the intelligentsia, along with political reform and freedom of religion.

Frederick had made some progress on the latter issue, at least in some ways. Knowing the bad blood between the German Calvinists and English Anglicans in Carolina, he supported laws passed by Pulteney's Parliament which, while acknowledging the supremacy of the established Anglican Church, began to return rights to other Protestants. This was not controversial in the Colonies, where the Anglican Church continued to have little temporal power and had no state authority, but was considered very radical in Britain. Frederick and his government thus enjoyed strong support from German Calvinists and Lutherans as well as French Huguenots, most of them exiles from oppression on the continent. A more complex question approached with the rise of the Wesleyan Revival, commonly called Methodism, which had come onto the scene while Frederick was in America. The Methodists were evangelical, frightening the staid Anglican establishment with their fervour, and they were also supporters of abolitionism. It is thus unsurprising that Frederick compromised with the Church on this issue, and Methodists remained subject to relatively mild repression well into the nineteenth century. Of course, this only made the movement more popular, as the Church always thrives under persecution. The Acts of Toleration (1752 and 1757) enacted these provisions.

The one area in which Frederick was certainly not going to increase religious freedoms was the Catholic Question. Catholic emancipation remained a romantic cause among intellectuals (and, obviously, Catholics), but was deeply unpopular elsewhere. Popery continued to be seen as an insidious threat to the country that would take over if the merest concessions were made to it, much like many popular views towards Societism today. In Ireland, Scotland, England and America as well (most obviously Acadia), Catholics remained disenfranchised, were not permitted to become officers in the Army or Navy[1], and were technically forbidden from possessing weapons, although this was rarely enforced.

The continued hostile approach to popery was not merely a reaction to the Jacobites, but also related to Frederick's icy foreign policy towards France and Spain, which was reciprocated in full by Louis XV and Ferdinand VI. Spain at this time was recovering from the Second War of Supremacy using internal reforms enacted by its supremely capable chief minister, Zenón de Somodevilla y Bengoechea, Marquis of Ensenada. Ensenada also softened Spain's policy of Bourbon absolutism, making it more paternal towards the Spanish people.

France, on the other hand, remained true to the original form, and indeed Louis XV lacked anything analogous to a chief minister, perhaps the closest being his mistress the Marquise de Pompadour. Louis was a relatively peaceful man, and would have preferred to reform his existing 'perfect hexagonal kingdom' than to try and win more territory through war, but nonetheless events conspired to lead France to war again and again. Reform, too, was a lost cause; with the help of Pompadour, Louis unsuccessfully tried to impose taxes on France's privileged classes from the provincial estates. The aristocratic Parlement de Paris spoke out against these reforms, labelling itself the defender of the fundamental laws of the kingdom against the arbitrary whims of a monarch. Louis had remained popular with the common people for these attempts, until he had handed back the Austrian Netherlands at the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle: at the time, people said 'as stupid as the peace'.

One piece of territory France had taken had not been returned. Quite understandably, after Frederick's Britain refused to ratify the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (due to the requirement of returning Fort Louisbourg), the French had in turn refused to withdraw from Fort St. George in the city of Madras in India. This meant that the French East India Company dominated the Carnatic, at the expense of their British rivals (who were therefore one of the relatively few groups of powerful people in England to absolutely detest Frederick). Under the able leadership of their Governor-General, Joseph François Dupleix, the French continued to extend their influence throughout southern India.

The French had taken many Britons prisoner when they had taken Fort St. George, and they were not released for many years later. Technically, as Frederick had refused to sign the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, Britain and France were still at war, although during the period between the Second and Third Wars of Supremacy, this was typically reduced to scattered skirmishes in India and on the frontiers of the Colonies. The war did not begin again in earnest until the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756. As the British prisoners languished in French captivity, many died - some from disease, some shot while escaping, and one actually committed suicide. His name was Robert Clive.

The British East India Company remained in power further north, in their Presidencies of Bengal and Calcutta, though relations with the Nawab of Bengal, Ali Vardi Khan, were sometimes strained. On the other hand, the French had equal problems. Dupleix's attempt to capture the British Fort St David at Cuddalore in 1747 had failed due to an attack by the British-allied Nawab of the Carnatic, Anwarooddin Mohammed Khan. The French had eventually patched over relations with the Nawab, but a second attempt to take Cuddalore before the Second War of Supremacy ended also failed. Dupleix held a grudge against the Nawab ever since, and as the Nawab continued to favour the British after the war officially ended (thanks to the fact that they now had less influence in the area, and were thus less likely to usurp him if he aided them). Thus, from 1749 to 1754 - in the period between the wars - Dupleix aided the usurper Chanda Sahib against first Anwarooddin Mohammed Khan, and then his son Mohammed Ali, supported by the British. Chanda Sahib and the French won a great victory at the battle of Arcot[2]. After this, British influence in the Carnatic remained patchy, and then almost nonexistent after Fort St David was finally taken by the French in 1757. The BEIC resorted to building up a new army in Bengal and Calcutta, which only alarmed their patron, the Nawab of Bengal.

Back in Europe, things were moving apace. Lawrence Washington returned to the Colonies in 1754, despite being a member of the Privy Council and now possessing lands in Britain and the right to sit in the House of Lords. At the age of 34, he was promoted to Major-General and effectively headed all the colonial militias of Virginia. He left his younger brother and protégé, George Augustine Washington, in Britain to be educated by the same royal tutors as his one year younger namesake and lifelong friend, George Augustine of Wales, a.k.a. the future King George III.

The European situation was changing. Austria and Britain had mutually decided that their alliance was unprofitable - Maria Theresa had been furious at having to withdraw from Italian territories due to William IV's demands to meet the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, and the fact that Frederick's Britain had then gone on to ignore the treaty was merely the icing on the cake. Equally, Prussia was becoming a more receptive potential ally for Britain. An agreement signed by 'Les Deux Frédérics', as the French called them, in 1754, stated that in exchange for Prussian defence of Hanover, the British would not assist Austria in regaining Silesia. This was a notion of Pulteney's government; Frederick was unpopular in Hanover for not having a particular fondness for the land where he had been born. He only visited it once, in 1753. Voltaire aptly remarked that Frederick was 'an Englishman to the Germans, an American to the English, and a German to the Americans'.

Another war was not merely likely, but a certainly. Europe had only paused to gather its strength again for yet another struggle. Despite the shifting alliances, though, few would have suspected that things would change so radically. The Third War of Supremacy would be no futile, deadlocked European war. It would have consequences that would go all around the world...

Any number of causes could be named - skirmishes in the Colonies or India, incidents between British and French ships at sea - but what clinched it was the 'Diplomatic Revolution', in which France and Austria matched the Anglo-Prussian agreement by burying their differences and forming an alliance of their own. At the signing of the First Treaty of Versailles in 1756 - which formalised the Franco-Austrian alliance - King Frederick I declared war on France, and King Frederick II invaded Saxony.

Once more, the world was flung into the fire, and who would have predicted what would result?




[1]Technically, they had to take an oath against the Pope. In practice there were plenty of Catholic officers who lied through their teeth, but these tended to be the sorts of people who would not betray their country on the grounds of their religion anyway.

[2]Due to the absence of Robert Clive. Yes, no matter how 'Great Man Theory of History' it might sound, the battle was won in OTL because the young Ensign Clive led a diversionary attack of 300 men that drew part of Chanda Sahib's army away from the battlefield.





Part #8: To Add Something More To This Wonderful Year

Come cheer up my lads, it's to glory we steer
To add something more to this wonderful year!
To honour we call you, as freemen not slaves -
For who are so free as the sons of the waves?

Heart of oak are our ships, jolly tars are our men -
We always are ready - steady, boys, steady!
We'll fight and we'll conquer again and again!


- "Heart of Oak", words by David Garrick, music by William Boyce (OTL)​

*

From - "The War of the Diplomatic Revolution", by Arnold Claythorn (1987, Boston Harvard Press)

At first, the war appeared to be nothing more than another of the largely futile struggles that the European powers had engaged in throughout the eighteenth century, and indeed the seventeenth before it. But the War of the Diplomatic Revolution, as it was called at the time, was truly a War of Supremacy greater than any before or, perhaps, even since. George Spencer-Churchill dubbed it 'Worldwide War Number Zero' and this description is apt. Earlier and later conflicts would also have fronts outside Europe, but none would match the Third War. In Maccauley's terms, it had a greater impact on whose culture, whose language would grow to dominate the world than any other.

The war formally started upon the signing of the First Treaty of Versailles by Louis XV's France and Maria Theresa's Austria in May 1756. Frederick of Prussia's forces crossed into Saxony, and the state of chilly almost-war that had existed between Britain and France since 1751 was ignited into a full-blown conflict.

In this struggle, King Frederick I remained a dynamic leader, but suffered the loss of his wife Mildred in December 1756 and never truly recovered. Despite the fact that the marriage had initially been forced on him, despite himself, Frederick had grown to genuinely love his American bride and refused to listen to timid proposals from Parliament about the possibility of him marrying a German princess for a dynastic alliance. At the same time, and possibly for that reason, Frederick drifted apart from his eldest son, George Augustine the Prince of Wales. George was the first Hanoverian firstborn not to hate his father's guts, a fact which many ascribe to his American blood, but he nonetheless had many disagreements with his father. The most significant was the fact that he wanted to fight in the war, and in America, the land of his birth. Frederick refused him permission, and this at a time when George's friend George Washington was also returning to serve under his uncle Lawrence as a captain of the Virginia militia.

With a mule-headedness that he could only have inherited from his father, Prince George vanished in early 1757 and, despite the best efforts of Frederick's agents, could not be found. Of course, he had gone to the Colonies, and once there he too bought himself a captain's commission in the name of Ralph Robinson.[1]

George was not the only child that Mildred had borne Frederick; there was also the second son, Frederick William, the young Duke of York, and little Princess Mildred, still a child and an object of controversy among the princes of Europe, who couldn't work out whether marrying into the royal line of powerful Britain was worth overcoming their revulsion to her half-commoner background. Still, George was Frederick's favourite, and his disappearance on top of Mildred the elder's death pushed the King into a depression.

However, Frederick was fortunate enough to have extremely capable ministers. William Pulteney remained Prime Minister, while William Pitt effectively managed most of the conduct of the war from his position as Secretary of the State for the Southern Department - which gave him authority for dealings with France, the Mediterranean, India, and the North American colonies. Grenville moved up to become Chancellor of the Exchequer, leaving the less important Northern Department to Henry Fox. The latter had been in government under George II and William IV, and thus it took a lot for Frederick to let him return. However, Fox was a skilled speaker, able to hold his own against even Pitt. Unfortunately, the reason everyone knew this was because he had been a great enemy of Pitt in the days of George II. Thus, there was some chilly friction in the Cabinet, but at least Frederick had the ablest of ministers on all sides.

The fact that Fox, as Secretary of State for the Northern Department, had anything at all to do in the war, reflected the number of enemies lining up to take a potshot at Britain and Prussia - both of which had acquitted themselves well in the Second War of Supremacy, and thus needed taking down a peg or two. As well as the Franco-Austrian alliance and their chief German ally Saxony, both Sweden and Russia entered the war on the same side against Prussia. The Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, although neutral, was by this point suffering bureaucratic deadlock from its elective monarchy and recent wars, and allowed Russian troops to pass through its territory and attack the Prussians.

Against this mighty alliance stood only Britain, Prussia, and their dependencies - Ireland, Hanover, the new Empire of North America, and the minor German states of Hesse-Kassell and Brunswick. However, the Anglo-Prussian alliance embodied the two states with the greatest navy and army, respectively, in Europe. Britain had the advantage of being an island, and thus was only vulnerable to invasion if the inferior French navy managed to gain superiority in the Channel - quite unlikely. Prussia had no such guarantee, but nevertheless fought off simultaneous French, Austrian, Swedish and Russian invasions under the dynamic generalship of Frederick II. As Voltaire remarked, Prussia was an army that happened to possess a country, not the other way around.

Valour, revolutionary army drills and Frederick's leadership could not win the war alone for Prussia. The country was kept afloat by subsidies of five million pounds a year from Britain[2], jealously guarded by the thrifty Grenville and Pitt. Britain herself avoided continental conflict as much as possible thanks to the tactical doctrines of Pulteney and Pitt, which confined British land attacks to a series of descents[3] on the French coast, intending to tie up French troops without actually trying to seize or hold any territory. The one exception was the descent on the Isle d'Aix in September 1757, but the British rapidly found it was impossible to reinforce their occupying troops thanks to the shallow seas preventing any of their larger ships from approaching. The operation was an embarrassing washout, with Pitt being furious over the loss of a million pounds with nothing to show for it.

Frederick II, King in Prussia, continued to astound the world by defeating an Austrian army at Leuthen and a French one at Rossbach. Despite the fact that Maria Theresa had attempted to reform the Austrian army on Prussian lines, Frederick's forces continued to excel. However, the Austrians did manage to break Frederick's Siege of Prague in 1757.

The Mediterranean struggle focused on a French attack on Minorca (British since the First War of Supremacy) early in the war, in the year 1756. A British attempt under Admiral Edward Boscawen - a hero of Vernon's attack on Cartagena in the previous war - failed with a shocking defeat of the Royal Navy by the French fleet. Boscawen was disgraced, though he escaped a court-martial on the grounds that witnesses swore he had fought as hard as any man could be expected, and was sent off with a ragtag fleet to try and take the French sugar islands in the West Indies. Meanwhile, the British occupied France's colonies in Senegal, West Africa, in 1758.

The North American theatre was astonishing in its activity. From the farthest north of Canada to the balmy sugar islands of the West Indies, Briton and American fought Frenchman, while the Indians were divided, some owing allegiance to one side and others to the other. The French ostensibly laid claim to a vast territory called New France, from "Quebec" in Canada - one area which did have a large number of French settlers - throughout the entire Mississippi river, enforced by scattered fortresses, and down to La Nouvelle-Orléans at the swampy mouth of the river. The French Governor-Generals since 1749 had repeatedly tried to gain influence with the independent-minded Indian tribes of the Ohio Country, most of whom preferred to trade with the British. Despite the general lack of French success, this alarmed the Iroquois. Their leader, who went by the anglicised name 'Chief Hendrick', met with the then Governor of the Province of New York, the Duke of Portland (an appointment by Frederick), and appealed to the British to help block French expansion. Portland provisionally agreed to start trying to foil the French missions, though warned that for the moment the war must remain shadowy and unproveable. Frederick later concurred with his judgement when the matter came up.[4]

The Governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie[5], concurred and also worked to try and stop French expansion in the Ohio Country. American militiamen clashed with the French, and Indian allies on both sides. The French built forts in the land of Vandalia, claimed by Virginia, Fort Presque Isle and Fort Duquesne (named after the new Governor-General of New France, the Marquis de Duquesne). Dinwiddie attempted to take these forts in 1754, while Britain and France were technically at peace (although even more technically at war), but his attacks were repulsed.[6] The Ohio Company, later merged with several other ventures into the Grand Ohio Company, continued to thwart French ambitions in the region up until the outbreak of war.

British, American, German and Iroquois troops fought together against French, Hurons (the hereditary enemies of the Iroquois) and Algonquins. There were also some attacks from opportunistic members of the more independently-minded tribes, including the Lenape, the Susquehanna, and the Cherokee. As the British controlled Fort Louisbourg, the French would have found it very hard to reinforce their troops by sending ships down the St Lawrence. This is an entirely hypothetical question because the government of Louis XV, the Duc de Choiseul and the Marquise de Pompadour did not consider colonial conflicts to be that important and reserved troops for the European war. The French only did as well as they did in North America and India because they had some very able commanders capable of making a little go a long way. In North America, this was Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, while in India, Dupleix's star once again rose.

Montcalm's warfare in America was not unlike that of Frederick II in Europe; hopelessly outnumbered, he nonetheless astounded his foes by several early aggressive victories, but in the end the sheer numbers of his enemies wore him down. The French took several forts in New York in 1757, most notably Fort Frederick William, which eventually peacefully surrendered to Montcalm after its relief column failed to materialise. Montcalm was castigated for a 'massacre' of Britain's troops, which was in fact perpetrated by his Indian allies, whose own rules of war required plunder and slaves from defeated enemies and did not recognise the rules of European warfare. It is probable in reality that Montcalm attempted to stop the massacre, but did not have the capability.

The massacre did galvanise American public opinion against the French. Prior to this, New England in particular had been lukewarm towards the war. Notably, the Bostonian writer Ben Franklin - already famous for his Almanac - had created a political cartoon "UNITE, OR DIE", featuring a cut-up snake with the names of the colonies on each piece. At the time it was believed that a cut-up snake could come back to life if the pieces were rejoined. The cartoon captured the public imagination and Franklin is credited to the Empire of America being symbolised by a snake. Another interesting point is that in his cartoon, the New England colonies are represented as 'New England', not separately, reflecting Franklin's political beliefs that would become very important after the war.

The war in America was of course close to King Frederick's heart, and Pitt too thought it an important theatre. When Pulteney died in 1758, Pitt became Prime Minister (Fox taking over the Southern Department) and moved America up to top priority. Despite Montcalm's genius, Anglo-American and Iroquois armies, led by General James Wolfe ("he huffed and he puffed and he blew the French down") drove the French from vital strategic points such as Fort Niagara, and soon the French were fighting on their own soil, in Quebec. The cities of Quebec and Montreal fell in 1759, the Americans' Annus Mirabilis, and Montcalm was killed. British casualties in the operation were heavy, although Wolfe survived.[7] Most astonishingly of all, a Major Washington - the brother of General Lawrence Washington who commanded the American army now successfully driving the French from their Appalachian forts - came off the battlefield with a wounded comrade named Ralph Robinson, hit in the shoulder by a French musket ball. The world was astounded when this turned out to be none other than the Prince of Wales. Both Washington and the Prince had previously fought against the Hurons before being redeployed to Wolfe's army.

It was also at this time that the New Englanders perpetrated what later generations would call a 'racial purge'[8] against the Acadians in Nova Scotia. Refusing to fight the French and possibly even hindering the British forces stationed there, they were considered a threat. The British deported some of them back to France, but many of them - along with the Quebecois later on - fled to the remaining French holdouts on the Mississippi, swelling the population of Louisiana.

In India, the British East India Company had been building up a vast army in Calcutta with which to finally retake Madras from the French. This would have worked quite well, had it not been the fact that the Nawab of Bengal became convinced that the BEIC was plotting to seize his throne. Bengali forces took the British Fort William and the Nawab infamously locked hundreds of British troops in a tiny room, the 'Black Hole of Calcutta', in which most of them perished. Throughout the rest of the war, the British were forced to focus on fighting their former ally and reclaiming the territory they had already had. By 1759, the Nawab was dead and the BEIC had directly taken over Bengal through a half-dozen minor proxies, at the cost of the lives of many British (and Indian) troops. By contrast, the French under Dupleix had finally taken Cuddalore and Fort St David, and were beginning to expand their influence over the whole of South India - to the extent that it began to alarm Haidar Ali, effective King of Mysore. As well as grabbing back power in Bengal, the BEIC reverted to a more conservative policy, returning its focus to Bombay on the western coast and expanding power into the Peshwa-ruled hinterland. There were also suggestions that the BEIC ought to have another stab at trying to take the East Indies off the Dutch, which would cause friction later on.

Things began to turn against the Prussians in Europe in 1758 as the massive numerical advantage of Prussia's foes began to turn against Frederick. No amount of cash from Pitt could change that. The Austrians captured much of Prussia's artillery corps at the Battle of Hochkirk, and the next year - while it brought some miracles for the British, with the fall of Quebec, Montreal, Calcutta, Guadaloupe and the naval victory at Quiberon in just twelve months - was a disaster for the Prussians. Count Saltykov of Russia defeated one of Frederick's generals at Paltzig, while the Austrian General Daun forced an entire Prussian corps to surrender at Maxen. Furthermore, Hanover - whose army had been neglected by the policies of Frederick of England - failed to defeat a French invasion at Minden.

Even Pitt was beginning to consider a continental strategy at this point, as it seemed the only way to save Britain's European interests. At the Battle of Kunersdorf on 12th August, Frederick of Prussia stood his ground against a superior Austro-Russian force and watched as his army was annihilated. No longer caring for life, the King drew his epée and stood on a hill, determined to hold the line against the enemy all by himself or die trying. In the event, he died trying, although it is recorded that he slew an absurd number of Austrians and Russians before succumbing.[9]

Prussia literally collapsed without Frederick's leadership. The heir to the throne, Frederick William II, was only 15 years old and his father's brother and old sparring partner, Prince Henry, took over as regent. Henry was also a great general, but he believed the war was lost and Prussia would only lose more if it continued fighting. He made one direct plea to Pitt to send British forces directly to Prussia to fight, which was refused due to Swedish control of the Baltic and the French contesting Hanover. Henry approached the allies in November 1759 and sued for peace.

The peace was harsh, as might be expected. Silesia was returned to Austria, but also the southern half of Ducal Prussia was awarded to Poland-Lithuania (now firmly in the pocket of Tsaritsa Elizabeth's Russia) and the northern half to Sweden. Saxony received the Prussian enclave of Cottbus, plus the town of Liegnitz and the surrounding area. Prussia, in fact, was no longer worthy of the name, and Austria began to officially refer to it as the Electorate of Brandenburg again - though the Kings in Prussia, obviously, rejected this. France had been promised the Austrian Netherlands in exchange for her help, but in the event this failed to materialise (angering the people of France against Louis XV again). Prussia had been reduced from a major to a minor power again, while Russian influence in Poland was now contested only by Austria. And the Austrians were more concerned with exerting their will over a Holy Roman Empire that, with the dismemberment of Prussia, was now a lot easier to bring back under some semblance of imperial control.

Britain's own position was divided. King Frederick had fallen ill with a lung infection[10] and now rarely left St James' Palace, leaving Pitt to decide. The Prime Minister had already been on the verge of abandoning Prussia even before Frederick II's death. Now the only question was whether to continue with the war with France, given that it appeared that Portugal and Spain might enter the war sooner or later. Pitt decided to approach the French for a peace, and Choiseul was receptive.

The major provisions of the Treaty of Amsterdam (signed in the neutral United Netherlands) :
French control of Madras and Cuddalore to be recognised by Britain.
British control of Nova Scotia, Louisbourg, Quebec, Montreal and the Ohio Country to be recognised by France.
British control of Senegal to be recognised by France.
Hanover to be returned to Britain.
Guadaloupe to be returned to France.
The borders of French Louisiana to be defined and agreed upon.[11]
France recognises Frederick as legitimate King of Great Britain, and the status of the Empire of America.


Britain concluded a separate peace with Austria, Russia and Sweden, which she had barely fought against. The peace was honourable, and relatively amicable, though tensions remained over the French massacre at Fort Frederick William and the Acadian Expulsion by the British.

Frederick had demanded that Prince George return to answer for his crimes. The young prince did indeed return, along with Washington, in 1760 - by which time his father was on his deathbed with the infection. In a reportedly tearful scene, the King made up with his son before passing away. King Frederick I, King of Great Britain, King of Ireland, Elector of Hanover and Emperor of America, passed away on February 19th 1760. The nations mourned, the Colonies more than any other.

George Augustine became King George III. For the most part, he retained his father's ministers, but he nonetheless alarmed many British Parliamentarians. Far more so than his father had been, he was obsessed with American affairs, almost considered a colonial rustic ("Frontier George"[12]) and, while it would increase Parliament's powers to have a monarch disinterested in British affairs, George was no less dynamic and active a king than his father.

Which led to some problems later on. For the British dominions were at peace, and they had never been more warlike...


[1] The OTL version of George III used this as an alias for publishing pamphlets about agriculture and environmentalism.

[2] In OTL it was seven million. This Britain, lacking as many rich Indian possessions and therefore trade, has less to spare.

[3] Amphibious assaults.

[4] In OTL the Governor of New York was George Clinton, who as an ally of the Pelhams would never get near such a post under Frederick. Clinton failed to sufficiently reassure Hendrick and so the Covenant Chain between Britain and the Iroquois Confederacy was broken. In TTL the Anglo-Iroquois alliance remains fairly firm, and the Iroquois do not become divided in their allegiances.

[5] On the other hand I see no reason why Dinwiddie wouldn't get the job in TTL as well.

[6] George Washington is still in Britain in 1754 and is therefore not involved.

[7] In OTL Wolfe died of a combination of disease and wounds. The book from which this information comes does not see fit to inform us that one of the deaths was an obscure Royal Navy surveyor named James Cook.

[8] Ethnic cleansing.

[9] OTL Frederick was persuaded to retreat by a Captain Prittwitz and his cavalry squad, which didn't get through in TTL. Mind you, he considered suicide even after being rescued OTL as well.

[10] In OTL he died of this, years earlier in 1751, in combination with being hit on the head by a cricket ball, I kid you not.

[11] More or less the same as the Louisiana Territory Napoleon sold the US in OTL.

[12] In OTL our George III was nicknamed Farmer George.




Interlude #2: Away from the Wars

TimeLine L Expedition Mission Log

Dr Bruno Lombardi: However, it would be a mistake to assume that the eighteenth century of TimeLine L is one unrelenting series of wars.

Dr Thermos Pylos: How so?

L.: Er... (long pause) What I meant was, other things happened as well.

P.: Well, of course.

(Pause)

Capt. Christopher Nuttall:
Gentlemen, need I remind you that even the new disks have limited memory?

P.: (coughs) Err, yes. The eighteenth century was also noted for the rise of two closely related ideas, Linnaeanism and Racism...


*

It is not pleasing to me that I must place humans among the primates, but man is intimately familiar with himself. Let's not quibble over words. It will be the same to me whatever name is applied.

But I desperately seek from you and from the whole world a general difference between men and simians from the principles of Natural History. I certainly know of none. If only someone might tell me one! If I called man a simian or vice versa I would bring together all the theologians against me.

But perhaps I ought to, in accordance with the law of the discipline of Natural History.


- Karl von Linné, letter to Johann Georg Gmelin, dated February 1747​

*

Carolus Linnaeus - a great man of the sciences and incidentally also the creator of the second most destructive political ideology that has ever darkened the world. A fine example of why scientists should be on tap, not on top.

- George Spencer-Churchill, 1941 [1]​

*

From - "A Life in Life - the Biography of Carolus Linnaeus", by José Vivar (1971, Institut Sanchez) :

The man known to posterity as Karl von Linné or Carolus Linnaeus was born into a farming family in southern Sweden in 1707. It was an era in which Swedes did not commonly use surnames, and the surname Linnaeus was chosen by Carl's father when he went to university, being a Latinised form of the Swedish for 'lime-tree'. It would be an appropriate name for a man who would spend most of his life applying more concise names to every living thing in existence.

Linnaeus attended the University of Uppsala, and in 1732 received funding for a long-term botanical visit to Lapland in the frozen north. At this point, Sweden's economy was suffering, and one policy was the idea of finding valuable plants that would grow in cold Sweden, as the country lacked an East Indies trading company. Some wondered if strains of spice plants could be found that would grow in colder climes than their native ones. To do so, Swedes needed both to survey what currently grew in Lapland and also to make examinations of the economically valuable plants that grew elsewhere.[2] Linnaeus, as it turned out, achieved both in his lifetime.

His major early achievement was the creation of a new classification system that permitted plants to be classified by their flowers, and more specifically by the precise shapes of their stamens and pistils. In this he was influenced by Sebastien Vaillant's Sermo de Structura Florum, which he read in 1718. Linnaeus' approach was new in that it focused on sexual characteristics as a means of classification. This would have been vulgar enough only applied to plants, but it is genuinely accepted that Linnaeus had a cheerfully dirty mind and commonly applied Latin words for sexual organs even to asexual or unrelated organisms.[3]

Linnaeaus spent the years 1735-38 in the Netherlands, printing his seminal Systema Naturae, the first form of his system of classification. Linnaeus' approach was controversial as it ignored the Great Chain of Being and, almost as significantly, the approaches established by the Greek writers, who had based their groupings of organisms solely on gross external appearance. Linnaeus' approach focused more on shared ancestry (sex again...) and included data from dissections, comparing internal organs of animals as well as their outer appearance.

During this time, Linnaeus visited Britain and specifically Oxford University. He would return there again in the 1750s, after King Frederick had taken over. In 1737 Linnaeus was introduced to George Clifford, a wealthy Amsterdam banker who possessed a famous garden that included plants collected from all over the world, primarily via the Dutch trade from the East and West Indies. Linnaeus published the treatise Hortus Cliffortianus, a description of the plants in Clifford's garden. He also wrote a more general work, Classes Plantorum, which was published in Leiden in 1738. After that he returned to Sweden, marrying Sara Morea and helping to found the Royal Swedish Academy of the Sciences.

Linnaeus went on other field-trips around Sweden, helped inspire a younger generation of natural historians who made similarly extravagant trips around the world, and briefly returned to London in 1754, being presented to King Frederick. He met the by now ageing Stephen Hales, a great pioneer of plant and human physiology, and they discussed such matters as they applied to taxonomy. Perhaps his most significant meeting was with a young man, an English Dissenter named Joseph Priestley, who thanks to Frederick relaxing the restrictions on non-Anglicanism was now able to study natural history at the University of Cambridge.[4] Although Priestley was still a student, and the two of them met after he had attended a visiting lecture by Linnaeus, the young man nonetheless had a profound effect on the old Swede and persuaded him that his controversial ideas about humans being closely related to apes should not be silenced. Priestley cited the examples of Galileo, Copernicus and Paracelsus, and that the free thought of natural philosophy should not be constrained by the attitudes of the day.

It is perhaps the example of Copernicus that most appealed to Linnaeus, for he was careful to only produce his seminal Taxonomy of Man posthumously, in 1780. His work on humanity's possible relations with the animal world were taken up by later writers, including Priestley himself and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a French Enlightenment philosopher and anti-clericalist. For the moment, Linnaeus' human studies focused on less controversial subjects, and it was from this that the ideology known as Racialism or Racism sprung.

Linnaeus was the first to give humans a Latin name, Homo sapiens (Thinking Man). However, he also added four lower-level taxae to divide humanity into subspecies. These consisted of Americanus rubenscens, Red Americans (Indians), who were said to be stubborn and angered easily; Asiaticus fucus, Sallow Asians (Chinese), who were said to be avaricious and easily distracted; Africanus negreus, Black Africans, who were said to be lazy and negligent; and Europeus albescens, White Europeans, who were said to be gentle and inventive. Obviously, the principles of Societal Unity enlighten us that this was merely an artificial division imposed to prevent humanity reaching its destiny of togetherness, and furthermore that Linnaeus' classifications were clearly biased in favour of Europeans.

The system was attacked in his own lifetime for failing to provide a classification for Indians, Turks and Semites. There was also a debate as to whether Slavs were European or something else. This ultimately spawned the far narrower and more chauvinistic theory known as Nationalist Racism, which is a tool that has been used by the ruling elites in many nations, enemies of Societal Unity, to keep their peoples apart. Nationalist Racism began in France, and stemmed from the ideas of Voltaire and other Enlightenment writers[5] who refined Linnaeus' ideas to impose divisions within the European Race, broadly defined as Latins, Germans and Celts (also sometimes Slavs).

The movement was approved of by the French court and the mostly ethnically "Latin" Catholic Church, which made it harder later for the clergy to go against Linnaeus' ideas of humans being related to apes. The French Nationalist Racists considered the Latin subrace to be superior, citing the Roman Empire as an example of Latin civilisation when Celts and Germans had still been barbarians, and the idea that the Latins had held true to the Catholic Church while the Germans had fallen into Protestant heresy. Of course one objection was that the Roman Empire had fallen to German invasions, but the French argued that modern European states - most obviously their own - were the result of German peoples becoming 'Latinised' in their thought patterns and thus civilised. After all, did not the confederacy of German states call itself after the Latin Roman Empire?

The movement was ridiculed in the "German" Protestant countries, not least because Linnaeus, the man who had started it all, was one of the French's inferior "Germans". In Britain and many other places, a rival movement sprang up. It was led by a number of British intellectuals, including the Earl of Chesterfield, ironically a man who was on speaking terms with Voltaire and the two of them seemed to treat the whole nationalistic fervour whipped up by their words as a kind of private joke. Chesterfield also funded Dr Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language[6], and as a condition of such, asked him to choose a form of English spelling that was more 'Germanicised' and to take out French-sounding spellings. Johnson himself disliked the Nationalist Racist movement, but was willing to accommodate Chesterfield's whims if his Dictionary could be published (although he added some whimsical definitions mocking the movement throughout the Dictionary). The anti-French spelling movement was not very successful, the English language generally being quite resistant to prescription, but did manage to make some long-lasting changes – picquet and racquet became picket and racket, for example.[7]

Linnaeus' controversial ideas about humanity's relationship with the animal world would not become public knowledge until 1780, when they sparked an enormous debate. One consequence of this was that everyone was desperate to get hold of Linnaeus' writings in the original Swedish, which resulted in a temporary boom for other Swedish writers, who had previously languished from writing in a language which few non-Swedes understood. One of the more famous was an apothecary named Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who was able to alert the world of natural philosophy to his discovery of several new chemicals in the late 1770s. He developed the notion that the atmosphere was composed of a mixture of the lufts elluftium and illuftium, which was an important foundation for the later work of Priestley and Lavoisier, as well as making several more important discoveries.[8]

The controversy raged on throughout the wars of the latter eighteenth century, and in particular, the one that would produce an idea far more influential even than Linnaeanism...the idea of Jacobin Republicanism.








[1] The Linnaean quote is real, while the 'scientists on tap' quote is from Winston Churchill in OTL.

[2] This may sound ASB-ish, but in fact it's entirely OTL.

[3] Again this is OTL.

[4] In OTL Priestley trained as a dissenting clergyman and only later became primarily a natural philosopher, although he had always had that inclination. Frederick's reforms make it possible for him to pursue that path earlier on.

[5] OTL Voltaire was a slave owner and notably contemptuous of black Africans in his writings; this has not changed here.

[6] Samuel Johnson failed to gain Chesterfield's patronage for his dictionary in OTL and had to look elsewhere.

[7] There was a minor anti-French, anti-Latin spelling "Back to Anglo-Saxon" movement in this time of OTL, which is somewhat more influential in TTL. One impact is that in TTL's English, spellings like Almanack and Physick remain in use to the present day. One will notice that that means all the excerpts of the books in this report have been changed into modern OTL English spelling by Nuttall's team.

[8] These are oxygen and nitrogen respectively, worn down from the Swedish eldluft and illaluktandeluft, 'fire air' and 'foul air'. Scheele made all these discoveries in OTL, as well as an early means of pasteurisation, an easy way of making phosphorus matches, chlorine, barium, tungsten, manganese, molybdenum, citric acid, glycerol, prussic acid, hydrogen fluoride AND hydrogen sulfide! And yet he received credit for little of it in OTL due to his works being published in Swedish, a language which few non-Swedes spoke. Thanks to the Linnaean controversy, though, Swedish-speaking British and French intellectuals learn of his discoveries and they are not lost. Note that the term 'luft' is that used for gas in TTL - our word gas is a peculiar spelling of the Flemish word for chaos, and before the nineteenth century gases were referred to as 'airs' in OTL.
 

Thande

Donor
Part #9: Sowing The Seeds I

"When considering the systems of government prevalent in the eighteenth century, Bourbon France and Romanov Russia are often compared on the basis of their absolutism. This is a gross mistake. The Bourbons had sat down and decided that what France most needed was an absolute monarchy. To the Romanovs, on the other hand, it had simply never occurred that there could be any other state of affairs."

- George Spencer-Churchill, "A Century of War" (1941, Oxford University Press)


*

From - "The Storm Before The Storm - Conflicts of the 1760s" by Daniel Harkness (1938, Holyrood Publishing) :

It might be expected that, after the worldwide and destructive Third War of Supremacy (1756-9), the nations of Europe would take the opportunity to rest in a few years of peace, or at least take the time to lick their wounds. No such luck for the people, the soldiers, or even the nobles and politicians, many of whom would have preferred to avoid such conflicts. Events conspired against them. Cultures and ambitions continued to clash, fuelled by jockeying for trade and influence.

If war had been predicted, few would have forecast that it would involve no clash between Britain and France. Relations between the new George III and Louis XV remained cold, but both had their own reasons to avoid another war. George was attempting to come to terms with a duty that he had previously only thought of in a vague, theoretical way, and tried to master the British Parliamentary system without becoming a slave to it. Meanwhile, Louis XV was aware of the alarming state of France's finances[1], and knew that another great naval war with Britain would only make things worse. He appointed the Basque-born Étienne de Silhouette as Comptroller-General of Finances, a capable economist inspired by the English practices of mercantilism and capitalism. His attempts to raise more funds by taxing the rich were not a success, for the same reasons as Louis' more personal approach had failed earlier, but Silhouette did manage to cut corruption in the French East India Company and ensure that more of the funds raised from the rich East India trade went into the French national purse. Although this made him somewhat popular at home, Joseph François Dupleix famously sourly remarked that the 'Shadow of Silhouette' (L'ombre de Silhouette) was hanging over everything he did in India, and this phrase entered the French vocabulary.

As it turned out, Britain and France both became involved in wars, but in a peripheral capacity, and in separate conflicts which did not touch the other. The first of these wars had been brewing for a long time, and stemmed from the failure of the old Spanish-Portuguese Treaty of Torsedillas to define reasonable spheres of influence and colonisation in the New World. It had rapidly become obvious that the original meridian, based on incomplete information at the time, allotted far too little territory to Portugal. In 1748, the Spanish and Portuguese governments took advantage of the temporary environment of peace to sign the Treaty of Madrid (1750).

This, also known as the Treaty of Limits, acknowledged Torsedillas and all other former border treaties to be null and void. It defined the new 'line in the sand' to be the 46th Meridian. It also attempted to resolve a dispute over Colonia del Sacramento (Sacramento Colony), a Portuguese town on the northern bank of the Rio de la Plata (Eng.: River Plate or River of Silver) which had been founded almost a century before and had been contested by the Spanish ever since. The Treaty held that Portugal should cede Sacramento to Spain, and in return Spain would give up the lands of seven Jesuit missions known as San Miguel, Santos Angeles, San Lorenzo Martir, San Nicolas, San Juan Bautista, San Luis Gonzaga, and San Francisco de Borja. These were all located on the east side of the Uruguay River, which according to the treaty was now Portuguese territory.

Although the Treaty had been formed with the best of intentions to preventing further Spanish-Portuguese wars, it did not pay much attention to the facts on the ground, and required both the costly translation of the missions to the Spanish side, and also the forced movement of several thousand Guarani Indians, who did not see eye to eye with the proposal (to put it mildly). The Jesuits themselves agreed to move by 1754, but the Guarani refused and this sparked an unusual, quixotic war in which Spanish and Portuguese forces fought on the same side against the Indians. The Guarani were defeated, but it was a hollow victory, as the whole affair cast a shadow over the Spanish-Portuguese deals and relations were beginning to break down for other reasons.

King Joseph I of Portugal had helped initiate the Treaty negotiations in the first place when he succeeded to the throne in 1750, but his capable Prime Minister, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo[2] was now beginning to have second thoughts. This had been sparked by the fact that Spain's King Ferdinand had died in the interval and been replaced by the drastically different Charles III in 1761[3]. Charles brought back the disgraced Zenón de Somodevilla y Bengoechea, Marquis of Ensenada, as effective Prime Minister, and his highly francophile and anglophobe attitudes clashed with Portugal's priorities. Also, Charles was very much an enthusiast of Bourbon enlightened absolutism, while in Portugal Carvalho had spent much of his ministry crushing the power of the Portuguese ruling classes and adopting relatively egalitarian policies, including the abolition of slavery in the Portuguese colonies in India. He had also been praised for his handling of the destructive Lisbon earthquake of 1755.

With George III's Britain publicly declaring its condemnation of the Seven Missions conflict and racial purging (a somewhat ironic complaint given its own guilt in shifting the Acadians just a few years before), Hispano-Portuguese relations soured and, in 1763, another border incident resulted in the outbreak of war.

The First Platinean War (1763-7) was for the most part desultory, but had several important ramifications. The Spanish Army in South America performed admirably, not only quickly taking back the territory of the former missions, but pushing forward and occupying the entire Rio Grand de Sul[4] region by summer 1765. An attempted Spanish descent on Isla Santa Catarina in 1766, though, was defeated by an Anglo-Portuguese squadron under Admiral Augustus Keppel. Overall, though, things at first went well for the Spanish in South America.

The same was not true in other theatres. American troops invaded Florida in 1764 and took the last holdouts, in San Agustín, at the end of 1766. More worryingly, after two Spanish invasions of Portugal failed in 1763 and 1764, a British descent on La Corunna was combined with a successful Portuguese occupation of Galicia. The best of Spain's army was engaged in South America and, while what remained in Spain managed to defeat Anglo-Portuguese siege attempts of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz (1765 and 1766), the Portuguese could not be dislodged from Galicia. Charles III had counted on French support, which had not come for a variety of reasons: firstly because Louis XV was attempting to stay out of all but the most essential costly wars, and also because Spain was not the only ally pestering him for support (more on that later). So the Bourbon Family Compact was not honoured, and Spain came to terms on March 17th, 1767.

One apparently inconsequential footnote to the war was the British occupation of Buenos Aires, in Spanish Rio de la Plata, 1765-67. The Spanish national armies were still engaged in Rio Grande de Sul, and no reinforcements came from an increasingly desperate Spain. However, the local colonial peoples formed militias and, despite the regulations against Creoles bearing weapons, successfully inflicted an embarrassing defeat on the British forces, mostly Royal Marines, at the city of Rosario in summer 1766. Although the ill-prepared British were not entirely dislodged by the time peace was signed, it was a great embarrassment for the Royal Navy (for the British Army had not been involved) and necessitated the court-martial and then, controversially, execution by firing squad of Admiral Marriott Arbuthnot, the commanding officer.

Nonetheless, the war was overall an Anglo-Portuguese victory. Spain was forced to accept status quo ante bellum borders, minus Florida which was annexed to the Empire of America, and also open up its colonies to British trade, a highly unpopular move among businessmen in the colonies. The Marquis of Ensenada, guilty of the terrible crime of being right about France, was exiled to Spanish America. He eventually gravitated to Buenos Aires, where the people were furious about their great victory being ignored by Spain, by the fact that they had to return the conquered lands in Rio Grande de Sul to Portugal, and that the new British trade would undercut their livelihoods. Ensenada was good at working with discontent, and he had the example of Prince Frederick, of course...

Afterwards, Spain focused on internal reform under the restored prime minister Richard Wall, an Irish exile, while Carvalho remained prime minister of Portugal until the death of Joseph in 1769[5], upon which the King's daughter Queen Maria I sent him too into exile. Carvalho had brought Portugal kicking and screaming into the modern world, curbing the powers of the nobility, suppressing the Jesuits and bringing in greater religious freedoms. And, inevitably, the people hated him for it - although perhaps more so for the 'reign of terror' he had imposed in view of the attempts on the King's life.

Carvalho went to Brazil, and it is perhaps inevitable that he eventually met up with his old enemy Ensenada in Buenos Aires. But it should have been known by now that if two such keen political minds could be persuaded to work for the same cause, then the foundations of the world would tremble...


[1] Though somewhat less bad than OTL due to the increased French East India trade.

[2] Note that in TTL he doesn't become Marquis of Pombal.

[3] 1759 OTL.

[4] OTL modern Uruguay.

[5] 1779 OTL. He suffered from a wound of an earlier assassination attempt in 1758 and I think he could have gone at any time.




Part #10: Pole to Pole (and Lithuanian)

From - "Born Under A Squandering Tsar: Monarchy in 18th Century Russia" by Dr Andrew Sanderson (1948, Edinburgh Press):

Many in Europe had viewed with relief the aftermath of the Third War of Supremacy, in which Prussia had been reduced from a budding European Great Power down to a mere regional power. It was true that the Prussian army was still one of the best, if not the best, trained in Europe - but the losses of the war, both in men and land, coupled to the death of the charismatic Frederick II, meant that any Prussian revival would be a long hard road. Unless the Franco-Austrian alliance broke down, many commentators opined, it would be impossible.

Events intervened, though, as they often do. In 1762, Empress Elizabeth of Russia died and was succeeded by her nephew as Peter III, Emperor of All the Russias. Peter was a quixotic figure, which was worrying in a role that still maintained absolute power over the country. Having been born in the Germanies himself, he was an unashamed Germanophile and had particularly admired Frederick II before his death. Some Prussian commentators even sourly remarked that, if his aunt had had the decent to die a few years earlier, he would have made Russia switch sides in the Third War.[1]

Frederick had also been succeeded by his nephew, who how reigned as Frederick William II, King in Prussia. Young and inexperienced, he relied heavily on advisers, most of whom were the surviving generals who had served under his father. Some counselled that attempting to regain Silesia from Austria should be Prussia's first priority, but the Franco-Austrian alliance - coupled with the fact that George III's Britain currently had problems of its own to deal with and would not be too receptive to an alliance anyway - meant that for the forseeable future, it remained an impossible dream.

Poland had been ruled since the War of the Polish Succession (in the 1730s) by Augustus III, better known as Frederick Augustus II of Saxony. Augustus cared little for Poland proper, seeing it merely as a way of gathering more power to himself in Saxony. Geographically isolated, the vast Commonwealth became paralysed with an indifferent elected king and a nobility (szlachta) unwilling to part with any of their power.

Augustus died in 1765, leaving Saxony to his son Frederick Christian, but Augustus’ unpopularity in Poland meant he was not the natural successor. Stanisław Leszczyński, a Swedish-imposed king who had ruled for two periods in the 1710s and 1730s and had eventually become Duke of Lorraine, died mere months after Augustus. The Polish system was not based on heredity, and even if it had been, he had left only two daughters - the younger of whom was Louis XV's queen consort, Maria Leszczyńska. The throne remained empty, the opposing factions deadlocked, no king elected. Civil war openly broke out in July 1766, and it became obvious that the great powers neighbouring Poland would intervene.

Austria produced the Archduke Joseph Ferdinand, second son of Maria Theresa (and generally known as Archduke Ferdinand after his elder brother Ferdinand Francis ascended to the throne) as their candidate for King of Poland. Maria Theresa's armies occupied the Krakow region, preparing to take Warsaw and attempt to impose Austrian-backed rule on the country, just as Sweden had fifty years earlier. However, a deal between Frederick William of Prussia and Peter of Russia emerged in 1767, with both states declaring war on Austria - though mysteriously they did not produce a candidate of their own.

Commentators who had expected the Prussians to drive mulishly for Silesia again were left gaping as Frederick William's forces invaded Polish Royal Prussia and then retook the Polish-occupied southern half of Ducal Prussia that they had lost in the Third War of Supremacy. The Swedish-occupied northern half was left untouched; it later emerged that Peter had, somewhat controversially, bought Sweden's neutrality by promising them Courland. The Prussians met up with the Russians and, in a crushing series of victories at Warsaw, Poznan and Breslau (finally entering Silesia), the Austrians were driven from Poland. The Poles themselves typically fought on both sides, as well as some szlachta maintaining private armies manoeuvring for the establishment of some other candidate as king. There was no unified resistance until it was too late.

The Treaty of Stockholm (1771) declared that:
Austria was to retain Silesia and the Krakow region, but renounce any and all claims to the Polish throne.
Royal Prussia and formerly Polish Ducal Prussia were to be annexed to Prussia.
Sweden was to retain northern Ducal Prussia and be awarded Courland as well.
Some eastern vojvodships of Poland (those with a Ruthenian majority) were to be directly annexed to Russia.
The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was separated from the Commonwealth, with a Russian-imposed Grand Duke.
The remainder of Poland to be reorganised into a Kingdom of Poland in personal union with Prussia.
The territorial integrities of the resulting Polish and Lithuanian states to be guaranteed.


Peter appointed his son Paul, the Tsarevich, as Grand Duke of Lithuania. This post rapidly became accepted as the Russian equivalent to Britain's Prince of Wales or Spain's Prince of Asturias. There remained uprisings in the former Commonwealth against foreign occupiers, especially in the southeast where Polish lands had been directly annexed to Russia and the Orthodox religion imposed, but the situation eventually subsided to something not unlike how it had been during the reign of Augustus III. However, Frederick William was far more interested in his new (reduced) Polish domain than Augustus had been, to the extent that within a few years people spoke of "Prussia-Poland" or even "Brandenburg-Poland", as though Prussia described the whole area of both states.

Prussia had bounced back admirably from its humiliation, with Peter's alliance sometimes being called the 'Miracle of the House of Brandenburg'.[2] The Tsar's position was steadied at home, but a coup plot involving his strong-minded German wife Catherine emerged in 1772. Peter purged the Leib Guards, who had collaborated against him, and had Catherine exiled to the appropriately named Yekaterinburg, on the other side of the Urals.

Meanwhile, on the other side of Europe, a crisis of quite a different kind was taking shape...



[1] The Prussians were not being that serious, but in fact this happened in OTL - at least, Russia pulled out of the war, although it didn't switch sides, and the change was not Elizabeth dying earlier but the war lasting longer and Frederick surviving. This move made Peter very unpopular in Russia OTL as Russian troops had been occupying Berlin itself, and yet after the war Russia was not even invited to the negotiating table. Because of the lack of these events, in TTL Peter's position is a bit more assured.

[2] In OTL, this described Peter withdrawing Russia from the Seven Years' War.



Part #11: Don't Tread On Me

JOHN STUART, 3RD EARL OF BUTE (TORY, LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION): Can the noble lord deny that the colonials enjoy the same comforts, the same benefits as true Englishmen? Can he deny that they have been defended against the rapacities of the French and protected from piracy by the Navy? Then why can he not see that it is only just that they pay their fair share of tax?

CHARLES WATSON-WENTWORTH, 2ND MARQUESS OF ROCKINGHAM (WHIG PATRIOT, PRIME MINISTER AND FIRST LORD OF THE TREASURY): Indeed, sir, I cannot. But why, then, I ask the noble lord, must his reasoning go only one way? The colonials - the Americans - have not stood idly by why our valiant forces defend them. They have bled and died alongside what the noble lord calls true Englishmen. Why, then, are they denied the liberties that we all agree are the birthright of every true Englishman? Can the noble lord answer me that?

- Exchange in the House of Lords, 5th October 1767, as reported in The Times

~~~

From - "The Making of a Nation", by Peter Arnold (1987, Harvard University Press) :

Many scholars have debated just when the awakening of a national consciousness can be said to have taken place in Britain's colonies on the North American continent. To be sure, there was some semblance of independence from the motherland almost since the colonies were founded: the isolation from England, the separation across a vast ocean, meant that this was unavoidable. When contact with the King was typically limited to him occasionally sending a new governor every few years and ultimately initiating some of the wars in which the colonials fought, the colonies were independent in name if not in fact. And they developed as such, creating their own means of governance, indeed effectively trialling many new ideas in different colonies. Many colonies had local parliaments elected on varying means, and, for reasons of historical accident, they lacked an established Church. Any attempt to impose Anglicanism on the colonies now would run into the problems of the numerous German Calvinists and Lutherans, to say nothing of the Presbyterian Scots and the (few) Catholics, who had settled there. Thus, America had always been a little different.

Prince Frederick's exile was an epiphany. The vast majority of the colonial Americans had never seen their monarch, even their future monarch, on anything except a coin or a print, much less in the flesh. When he was going up and down Cisappalachia, politicking with governors and occasionally solving disputes, suddenly the King was not just some vague figure over the horizon, but a man of flesh and blood who was at work in the world. It was, as the nineteenth-century commentator Thomas Hodges remarked dryly, as though America's Judaean concepts of monarchy had suddenly become those of Christendom.

Even after Frederick himself departed, the plans and promises he had set in motion meant that there were serious political upheavals. Tyrannical governors were no longer tolerated, and Frederick appointed more native-born Americans - for so they were now called - as governors. He was the first monarch to elevate significant numbers of Americans to the peerage, and many - including Lawrence Washington - elected not to take up their seats in the House of Lords, but to remain at home in the colonies where their titles at present meant little. It was an important message: Americans were not simply Englishmen who happened to be born abroad, and returned home when they became important and influential men. They identified more with their birthplace, the thin line of civilisation bordering the vast tracts of unexplored wilderness, than with the green fields and pleasant hills of England.

This awakening took some years in America, beginning in the 1730s and coming to a climax some thirty or forty years later. It took rather longer for most of the British to become aware of it, hence the relative surprise with which the Crisis of 1765 was held in many quarters.

It is impossible to cover all the aspects leading up to the situation, but the Crisis stemmed from the fact that the Third War of Supremacy had cost Britain dearly and, given that a great part of the war expenditure had been devoted to forcing the French from Quebec, many British politicians considered it only appropriate that the Americans should pay their fair share of the taxes levied to cover it. Furthermore, the colonies had always had extremely lenient tax regimes compared to the home country. That was one reason why the British colonies had grown in population so rapidly, while their French counterparts had floundered - French law was the same everywhere, so there was less reason for a Frenchman to move to a wild colony if he would have to pay the same taxes when he got there.

Nonetheless, it was clear that the situation was unsustainable. The Americans regardless were defiant on the subject, and a committee of their peers was formed to negotiate directly with the newly formed Department for Home and Colonial Affairs.[1] The committee was headed by Sir Benjamin Franklin, the celebrated natural philosopher and political writer who was respected on both sides of the Atlantic.[2] Franklin had, in recent years, provoked a stir in his native Massachusetts with the publishing of a short volume entitled Unite or Die: The Case For A New England Confederation. The title was a reference to his famous political cartoon representing the colonies as the parts of a snake that would have to come together to vanquish the French. Previously, the fiercely independent New England colonies had voiced much opposition to any sort of unified confederation, in particular James II's short-lived Dominion of New England that had also attempted to include New York.

But the situation had changed. In particular, there was a growing division between the colonies as a whole. They had originally been founded when the British believed that North America was much narrower than it is, and had envisaged there being only ten days' march between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Based on that assumption, the colonies' charters stated that their territory would go from the east coast westward until it reached the Pacific. As North America was wider than they had thought, this meant that if this was implemented, the British lands would look like a series of long stretched-out stripes stacked one on top of the other.

All fine and good; but, for the first time, the Third War of Supremacy meant that at least part of the dream could be realised. The French had been driven from Quebec, and more importantly from the point of view of the colonies, the Ohio Country, which was claimed under the old charters by Pennsylvania and Virginia. Similar claims were made by colonies further north and south, extending their theoretical borders westward into the wilderness that was now nominal British territory, though inhabited by many Indian nations. The problem was that some of the colonies were now surrounded on all sides by others, and simply had no westward frontier on the wilderness where they could expand. Maryland was one of them, as was South Carolina after the border had been fixed to leave no outlet north of Georgia, but New England was the worst. Rhode Island was unambiguously cut off, and some claims by New York might also cut off Masachusetts (except in their separated northern Maine territory) and Connecticut. Regardless of how much the New Englanders might dislike the idea of confederation, they began to realise that the alternative might be being reduced to small, plaintive, ignored voices in an Empire of North America that included vastly expanded colonies of Virginia, New York and Pennsylvania.

This was one of the problems. There were others. What to do with the Catholic French in Quebec, currently under the effective military dictatorship of James Wolfe[3], and certainly not an appropriate land for many of the principles of British government. What the rights of the Indians, both individual and states, should be (the Americans and some British armchair imperialists disagreed strongly on this). And, of course, the fact that 'representation' had become a clear, if vague, call in the colonies. If Americans were to pay taxes like Britons, then they ought to be able to vote like them, too.

The Americans might well have been doomed, had they not had the man at the top on their side. King George III had grown up in Virginia, indeed spoke with a rather strange hybrid German/Planter accent that was much ridiculed in continental Europe, and continued to defend the colonies' interests at court. Having said that, his quote "Born and raised in this country, I glory in the name of American" is most probably apocryphal.

The situation was not helped by the fact that, after the retirement of Fairfax in 1764, George had appointed the young but politically vigorous Lord William North[4] as Lord Deputy of North America. North had encouraged political debate on the subject and, in 1768, accepted a joint call from several significant American figures to call a new Albany Congress. The first, thirteen years before, had been called in the spirit of unity against the French and Indian enemies. Even then, Franklin had drafted an early plan of unifying the colonies under a strong executive, which had been largely ignored at the time, but had provoked further discussion.

Despite the long sea journey between Britain and America, some common interests began to emerge. George was helped in that, after Pitt died in 1766, he was replaced by the Marquess of Rockingham, a singularly capable manager of interests in the House and a steady hand at Government. Rockingham was, in particular, responsible for bringing Charles James Fox, third son of Henry and technically too young to be a Member, into the core of the Whigs. Fox was something of an enigma, being a political radical in almost every conceivable way, although he drew the line in some areas and criticised John Wilkes. Fox was a defender of colonial rights from the start, although he didn't get on with the King due to his staunch abolitionist views. This would cause problems later on.

By 1771, the North Commission, having exchanged members and had one or two die and be replaced, had settled on a rough arrangement that would eventually become the American Constitution of 1788 when ratified by all the colonies. The North Plan, as it was known, modified Franklin's original plan to take into account recent developments. Franklin had already acknowledged at the time that Delaware would have to be subsumed into another colony, as it practically was already, and he had not counted Georgia. This proved prophetic, as the young colonial administration faltered in the late 1760s and the territory was reabsorbed back into Carolina. However, the North Commission considerably expanded these ideas, and eventually developed the concept that became known as Five Confederations and One Empire.

Under this new and quite radical proposition, the original colonial charters would be modified and combined to produce five new units, all of which would have suitable outlets to the west for expansion into the new territories. The first of these was the Confederation of New England, formally formed in 1776 and incorporating Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Nova Scotia (ostensibly including Newfoundland) and New Hampshire. The North System was based on North America receiving a parliamentary voting system like Britain's, but due to the wildly varying sizes and populations of the colonies - far more so even than Britain's counties - standardised voting 'provinces' or 'shires' were created. Typically, small colonies like Rhode Island consisted of one province, while larger and more populous ones were divided into several. The old colonial borders were retained for other administrative and traditional purposes, though.

Other confederations were more typically dominated by one state: the Confederation of Pennsylvania (including Delaware and half of New Jersey), the Confederation of New York (including the other half of New Jersey), the Confederation of Virginia (including Maryland), and the Confederation of Carolina (including both Carolinas and Georgia). A sixth Confederation, Canada (Quebec), was also posited, although never implemented. The new reorganisation was not exactly universally popular throughout the colonies, many of whom had populations proud of their histories and distinctive identities, but it did provide for equal and fair westward settlement. Furthermore, George had taken a hard line towards the Indians. Over the next few years, Indian nations were either asked to formally become British protectorates or else remove to the west. Some of the larger Indian nations, including the Cherokee and the Iroquois (Howden), agreed to the protectorate status, while some of the others fought, including the Creek and the Lapute. After some vicious fighting, the American colonial troops won, somewhat reassessing British home opinions of how seriously they needed to treat the Indian nations.

Taxes in America remained generally lower than those at home, though no longer by an enormous margin.[5] The first elected Yankee Parliament (officially known as the Continental Parliament) met at 1788 in Fredericksburg, which had been separated from Virginia by royal edict and made a neutral zone for the parliament. It was opened by George III himself, on a state visit, and it was also in this year that the Constitution was finally ratified by the last of the Confederations, Carolina. The date had been chosen purposefully, one hundred years to the day after the Glorious Revolution had created Britain's own constitution, which had provided much of the groundwork for the American version.

Taken from George III's Opening of the First American Parliament, 1788:

Let this new dominion, this proud Empire, show itself to the world and stand proud beside the home nations! Let it fulfil its clear purpose and destiny in spreading the Protestant religion and the liberty of England from sea to shining sea! And let it be the home to my people, and my heirs, from now unto the ending of the world.

But while the American crisis had been neatly averted, the politics of Ben Franklin, Lord North and George III were scarcely the only reason. Something came about in the intervening years, something which both reminded the Americans why they still needed defending, and reminded the British why it was imperative that they should do right by their colonial cousins.

In the year 1779, a Peruvian shot a Spanish governor and set the world down a track that would lead to rack and ruin for centuries to come...




[1] In OTL the Northern and Southern Departments were eventually turned into the Department for Home Affairs and the Department for Foreign and Colonial Affairs. In TTL the colonies are a little nearer to the government's heart, and furthermore the change happened rather later in OTL, AFTER the American colonies had broken away.

[2] Ben Franklin is NOT the first American to be really notable in Europe OTL, not after the War of the British Succession. Hence he is accepted more readily and there are no silly disputes over the best shape for a lightning conductor, etc.

[3] Who didn't die in TTL.

[4] More or less the same as OTL's Frederick North, except that being born in 1732, in TTL he was named after the new Prince of Wales and not Frederick. It may be news to some OTL Americans that North was actually an astute and capable politician, though one who consistently put local interests above the whole. This is still true in OTL, only this time, being Lord Deputy of the Colonies, he's being narrow-minded on America's side.

[5] In OTL American taxes rocketed after independence, but by that point rights matched demands...the same is true here.




Part #12: Sowing the Seeds II

"Ideology, the most insidious of evils. Those who yearn for freedom and liberty will soon find themselves enslaved by Freedom and Liberty." - George Spencer-Churchill

*

From - "Rise of a Nation" by William Rogers (1928, Oxford University Press) :

The causes of the Andean Revolts are too complex to be completely considered, even if they were entirely known. However, certain broad strokes can be discerned:

Spain's approach to colonialism had always been quite different to that of Britain and France. Partly, of course, this was because Spain had been a colonial power for far longer, indeed it may not be an exaggeration to say that she was the first colonial power in history. Thus, the government of the Spanish colonies in the Americas could be said to still be firmly rooted in the institutions of the Middle Ages, even feudalism. A careful hierarchy was in place by which the peninsulares, or those born in the Iberian homeland, were ranked above those pure-blood Europeans born in the colonies, criollos, who were in turn ranked above the mixed-blood mestizos, and so on for the native amerindians and with the African negros at the bottom. People with one parent from either of two castes were slotted into one of several intricately constructed half-way stages.

This system, which now seems to alien to the European mind, was aided and abetted by the popularity of the Linnaean Racist system in the mid to late eighteenth century. Existing convention was thus backed up with natural philosophy, and many Spanish and peninsulare writers of the period expounded on the natural virtues of the Casta system. Perhaps as a result of this, this same period coincided with a national awakening among the criollos of Spanish America, particularly in the south where the system was most rigid. Pamphlets arguing against the system were widely distributed, despite official attempts to crackdown. It is quite probable that this movement was quietly masterminded by the exiled Marquis of Ensenada, from his estate in Buenos Aires. Ensenada almost certainly saw the Criollistas as merely a means to an end to his return to power in the Peninsula (ironically), but events escaped his control.

The criollos were arguably primed for rebellion by the 1770s, as the excesses of the Casta system were combined with punishing new taxes from Spain's government under Charles III and his new Italian-born prime minister, Bernardo Tanucci, who had formerly headed affairs in Spain's Neapolitan possession. Tanucci was also a fervent anti-clericalist and his government had masterminded the crackdown on the Jesuits in Spain. Despite Ensenada's own anti-clericalist streak, the Criollista movement was generally quite pro-Jesuit, and despite the official pronouncements of the Jesuit missions in New Spain being dissolved in the late 1760s, the 'black-robes' continued to operate fairly openly in the Viceroyalty of Peru and the Captaincy-General of Chile.[1] The Jesuits' Reductions had played a large part in expanding Spanish control in South America, and were seen by many as an integral part of the colonies' cultural identity. However, while the people remained broadly in favour of the Society itself, they were quick to settle the now vacated Jesuit lands. For example, in Nueva Espana the northern city of Los Angeles was founded at this time.

However, the spark of rebellion came not from the Criollistas, but from the Indians. José Gabriel Condorcanqui, great-grandson of Tupac Amaru the last Sapa Inca of the Tahuantinsuyo and vice-governor of the province of Cusco, repeatedly petitioned the authorities in Lima to improve the lot of the native peoples - in particular conditions in the mines and textile mills. However, indifference on the part of the peninsulare authorities combined with the fact that Criollistas from as far away as Buenos Aires were also continually making petititons at Lima at this time to ensure that Condorcanqui was repeatedly rebuffed.

In response, Condorcanqui returned to his Indian roots and took the name Tupac Amaru II, organising the first serious rebellion against the Spanish colonial authorities in two centuries. With the execution of the tyrannical Spanish governor Antonio de Arriaga in 1779, the Great Andean Rebellion began.

The colonial authorities hastily organised a militia under Tiburcio Landa, which was sent out to fortify the town of Sangara. However, Tupac Amaru's forces caught the few hundred volunteers on the road to the town[2] and decimated them, despite the rebels having a shortage of muskets and powder and relying largely on more archaic weapons such as slingshots. Furthermore, Tupac Amaru had access to a number of Indians and a few sympathetic criollos who had served with the Spanish Army in the First Platinean War in the 1760s, and arguably possessed more trained veterans than the authorities in Cusco.

On the advice of Tupac Amaru's wife and fellow commander, Micaela Bastidas, the rebel army successfully captured Cusco on Christmas Day 1780. Another militia force, this time sent by the government in Lima, suffered losses from the winter and failed to retake the town in February 1781. It was at this time that the rebellion truly began to reach Spanish and other European ears, as well as those within Britain's Empire of North America.

The rebellion also inspired others. In Upper Peru, the Aymara rebellion of Tomas Katari had actually begun slightly before Tupac Amaru's, but it was Tupac Amaru's successes that whipped Katari's into a real fervour. However, the Indian forces failed to take La Paz in 1781 and Katari's army retreated to Cusco, combining with Tupac Amaru's. Parts of Upper Peru remained under Spanish control throughout the war, although often reduced to the fortifiable cities.

The loss of face to Spain was tremendous and so in 1781 a force sent from the homeland was united with colonial armies in New Granada. The war did not go entirely the rebels' way, but the Spanish were nonetheless unable to achieve a decisive victory. However, it is likely that the rebellions would have eventually been crushed, had it not been for the interference of other states.

For more than a century, one of France's chief foreign policy ambitions was that Spain's rich empire in the Americas should be transferred to French control, perhaps via the kind of Bourbon union that the War of the Spanish Succession had prevented, but might eventually become possible as Spain waned and France waxed. Now the young King Louis XVI, having inherited a state that was shaky but recovering, buoyed by the riches brought in from the Indian trading empire of Dupleix (now under the rule of Governor-General Rochambeau), saw that chance slipping through his fingers. Despite warnings from his Swiss-born Comptroller-General of Finances, Jacques Necker, that France's treasury could not sustain another great war, Louis thought that the only option.

However, he had two possible approaches. Firstly, renew the Bourbon Family Compact, help Spain quell the rebellion, and use this as a foothold towards drawing the Spanish Empire towards France. Secondly, support the rebels against Spain and gain influence over any succeeding rebel state. Both of these involved sending French troops to Spanish America, and so this order was proclaimed long before the indecisive Louis had made any clear decision on which option was to be taken - or, for that matter, informed the Spaniards.

It is hopeful but possibly incorrect that the resulting comedy of errors can no longer take place in our time, with our photelegraphy[3] and other innovations in the area of communications. In any case, in 1782 a French fleet under the Duc de Noailles and Admiral de Grasse was sent out from Quiberon, with the intention of landing troops "in the Viceroyalty of Peru, and linking up with our allies", orders which were understandably ambiguous in just who those allies would be, but were rather less excusably ambiguous in just where in Peru this was supposed to be.

This meant that in August 1782, owing to what we nowadays would call crossed wires, the French expeditionary force was under the impression that Spain was the enemy and the Indian rebels should be supported (this being the favoured option before the fleet left, but the King had changed his mind), while Louis' ministers had concluded a new Family Compact with Charles III and the Spanish Government believed that the French were their allies. The results were predictable. Repeating the British attempt of a generation earlier, Admiral de Grasse's fleet sailed up the Rio de la Plata and took Buenos Aires as a blow against Spain - at the same time that the Spanish colonial authorities in the region were trumpeting the invented successes of their French allies against Tupac Amaru II. Rumours of the French ravaging Buenos Aires, inflated from a few scattered incidents, served to unite the entire Criollista movement against France and in alliance with the Indians. The whole of the Plate region, supported by the Captaincy-General of Chile from early 1783, rose in revolt.

The rebellion could perhaps have been contained, but Britain and Portugal entered the war on the side of the rebels. Portuguese support was largely clandestine, with war being undeclared on the Iberian frontier, and was secured in return for the rebels promising to make several border adjustments favourable to Brazil. A British-American force under Admiral Howe defeated de Grasse's fleet at the mouth of the River Plate, then landed an army commanded by the American General George Augustine Washington. While the people of the Plate were still suspicious of the British from their experiences in the last war, after the British participated in the rebel capture of Cordoba, they were accepted.

Although the French remained in control of the city of Buenos Aires until the end of the war, they were unable to break out of their initial pockets of control. A joint Franco-Spanish fleet was assembled at Cadiz in late 1783, with the intention of punching through the Royal Navy blockade of South America and landing reinforcements to support the Duc de Noailles' army, but another British fleet under Admiral Augustus Keppel met them off Cape Trafalgar. The combat was a shock defeat for the British; although the Franco-Spanish fleet slightly outnumbered the Royal Navy ships, the British were accustomed to being able to fight above their weight at sea. The combat exposed serious flaws in how the Royal Navy had been handled after the Third War of Supremacy, eventually leading to a great shipbuilding programme under the latter half of the Marquess of Rockingham's tenure as Prime Minister, but for the moment tempers were salved with the court-martial and disgrace of Keppel.

While Trafalgar was a British defeat, Keppel's forces had managed to sink several Franco-Spanish transports and the fleet was forced to return to Cadiz. Also, the shock victory had convinced Louis XVI that now was the time to seize control of the English Channel and invade Britain herself, something which France's strained treasury was simply not capable of funding. The French forces were still moving into position at the time of the Treaty of London in 1785.

The Spanish had finally achieved a decisive victory over Tupac Amaru at the recapture of Lima in 1784, but by now Criollista rebel control over La Plata and Chile was virtually uncontested, and a relief army prevented the Spanish from pressing further into the Indian-held lands. The surrender of La Paz and Havana in 1785 marked the end of the war and the punishing Treaty of London, whose provisions went:

Spain to acknowledge the loss of Cuba and Falkland's Islands to Britain and of the entire Viceroyalty of Peru and Captaincy-General of Chile.

France to cede the northern hinterlands of Louisiana to the Empire of North America (an Anglo-American siege of New Orleans in 1784 was successfully resisted by the French).

Some lands in Upper Peru and La Plata to be ceded to Portuguese Brazil by the rebel authorities, which would become the United Provinces of South America (not established until the Convention of Cordoba in 1790).

Thanks to a Quebecois rebellion in support of France (1784-5), a second Great Expulsion would see all French-speaking peoples in British North America deported to French Louisiana or France. Practically empty Canada was opened to settlement from New England; protests from the other Confederations saw the eventual Act of Settlement (1794), by which New England ceded its claimed westward territories back, in return for Canada being opened up to settlement and added to New England.

The Treaty would cause several headaches later on, but for the moment, to say it was a shock to Spain was an understatement. The lands of the Spanish Empire had been granted by God, and if He were to take them away...

Charles III had already been forced to flee the country once thanks to food riots in 1766. Now he fled again, as street riots ruled Madrid and Tanucci was killed by a mob. Controversially, Britain supported his return to Spain, believing that the alternative might be Louis achieving his Franco-Spanish Union after all. However, Charles was forced to adopt far more liberal methods of government under the supremely capable José Moñino y Redondo, conde de Floridablanca, who had previously been known for assisting with the expulsion of the Jesuits and the reformation of the Spanish educational system. Under his ministry, the powers of the Spanish Cortes were somewhat extended and the Audiencias in Nueva Espana and Nueva Granada were reformed, giving them more independence lest Spain lose the rest of its American empire.

The young UPSA was characterised from the start by radical ideas, although they expressed themselves in odd ways. Possessing a population that was almost entirely strongly Catholic, the country nonetheless made a break with Rome, beginning rather unofficially in the 1790s thanks to Spanish domination of the Papacy, and becoming legal after the Dissolution of St Peter in 1802. Jansenist ideals were revived and became associated with the intellectual classes. Many radicals from other nations whose ideas were suppressed at home moved there, including the British republicans Thomas Paine and Joseph Priestley.

Also, the country's population was boosted by deserters from Noailles' army, including Noailles' own son, who had fled after his father's disgrace and suicide, and a young captain named Jean-Charles Pichegru, who eventually became Marshal-General of the Fuerzas Armadas de los Provincias Unidas. From the start, the UPSA was known to be a place where the usual laws did not apply, and a place where oppressed groups might be able to settle. The Casta was abolished, and certain areas were set aside for Indian or other non-European settlement, while others were reorganised and exploited. From the beginning, the government was republican, its Cortes Nacionales modelled on the Dutch Staten-Generaal (it was the Dutch United Provinces, and their rebellion against Spain, from which the country's name had taken inspiration). A directly elected President-General was also created, although at the time the role was poorly defined.

In days to come, the UPSA would make the world change by its own efforts, but for now, the republican example - and the expenses suffered in an attempt to prevent it from happening - would have dark consequences for the Bourbon Kingdom of France...



[1] In TTL Spain hasn't established a separate Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata, so those lands are still part of the Viceroyalty of Peru and ruled from Lima.

[2] OTL, Tupac Amaru won a similarly crushing victory, but in Sangara itself. This required burning Landa's forces out of a fortified church, which was successfully spun by propagandistas into painting black Tupac Amaru's rebellion as anti-Christian, turning the majority of the people against him. In TTL this doesn't happen.

[3] Radio.



Part 13: Before the Storm

From - "Exploration and Discovery in the late 18th Century" (English translation) by Francois Laforce, Nouvelle Université de Nantes, 1961.

The modern student of history, being unavoidably ideologically driven in these trying times, must feel the temptation to regard the second half of the eighteenth century as merely a time in which two radical revolutions occurred that would change the world - that of the United Provinces and that of France. To do so is disingenuous and misleading. Many other important breakthroughs and changes proceeded which have had an equal effect on shaping the modern world. The case of the often overlooked[1] constitutional foundations of the Empire of North America is by now well publicised, but what of the voyages of exploration and discovery that opened up the world to new vistas, scarcely less than in earlier ages did the journeys of Columbus and Magellan?

The official 'discovery' of the sixth continent in 1788 is a case in point. In fact the land then known as New Holland was already well known on maps of the period, its barren northern coast having been mapped by the Dutch more than a century earlier, but dismissed as holding no interest. It took a Frenchman, though, Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, to discover the parts of 'New Holland' that were actually worth possessing. A remarkable Frenchman, indeed...

La Pérouse was already a respected naval war hero, which in pre-Bonaparte France were few and far between. He had defeated a British frigate in the West Indies during the Second Austrian War[2] and gone on to take part in the celebrated Franco-Spanish naval victory over Augustus Keppel's fleet at Cape Trafalgar in 1783. Having received a minor wound at that battle, La Pérouse did not take part in the rest of the conflict, though some writers of speculative romance[3] have argued that he might have turned the tide at later battles. It is debatable as to whether this is anything more than hero worship.

After the Treaty of London in 1785 and the end of the war, the chief issue at hand was the strain on the French treasury and the need for reform. However, La Pérouse succeeded in obtaining royal funding from Louis XVI on his voyage of discovery, which set out late in the year 1785. This consisted of his former task force from the war, four frigates led by his new flagship d'Estaing, named after the admiral who had commanded at Trafalgar, plus a single supply ship.

The intent of La Pérouse's voyage was to expand French knowledge of the Pacific, particularly the rich Asian markets, and perhaps to lay down trade. It certainly succeeded in the former aspect.

The fleet initially sailed to Buenos Aires, in which La Pérouse famously smoothed over relations between the newly independent state (not yet the UPSA) and France by throwing a grand banquet. Having made reports on the radical thoughts now sweeping the country's constitutional arguments - not dreaming of what effect these reports would have on his own mother country - La Pérouse proceeded around Cape Horn. He journeyed to the Galapagos Islands and Easter Island in 1786, making recommendations that they be suitable for whaling bases.

The d'Estaing's crew complement included one Pierre-Simon Laplace, a respected common-born natural philosopher who had elected to accompany this voyage in order to escape his angry peers at home, as well as the Catholic Church due to his controversial views. An astronomer, Laplace used the voyage to make the famous Laplacian Austral Catalogue of the stars of the southern night sky. He also collaborated with Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a former soldier who had recently published several works on the flora of France and accompanied the mission due to its opportunities for research. Lamarck and Laplace's Observations on the Fauna of the Iles Galapagos was a seminal work in the history of Linnaeanism[4] and is credited with bringing back the debate in France, whereas previously Voltaire and other writers had mainly focused on the related Racialism movement brought about by Linnaeus' works on humans.

La Pérouse was rebuffed from Japan thanks to the latter’s isolationist policies, and his expedition to China was also a failure, with the Qing government being itself wracked with an internal dispute at the time. However, his voyages through the East Indies resulted in long-lasting changes both for France and the world.

He rediscovered the islands then called New Zealand by the Dutch, who had dismissed them as inhabited by savage natives. La Pérouse, though, was able to establish mostly peaceful relations with the Mauré natives,[5] and popularised Autiaraux, the native name for the islands. La Pérouse's voyage was responsible for an increased interest in the outside world by the Mauré, in particular because La Pérouse had introduced them to gunpowder. Though the French left behind only a few muskets, the Mauré managed to produce (inferior) duplicates and ammunition within a few years. This briefly changed the tribal balance of the islands, with those tribes being first to adopt firearms and equip themselves with them achieving an early dominance. This meant that, by the time European powers became interested in colonialism for colonialism's sake (the mid-1800s), the Mauré were one of the few classically 'native' peoples well prepared to resist.

More famously, La Pérouse mapped the southern coast of New Holland, discovering the more fertile lands there and planting the settlement of Nouvelle Albi, named after his birthplace.[6] He returned to France in 1789, a France by that time seething with unrest, but was nonetheless able to obtain more funding and ships to expand the colony. La Pérouse left again for Nouvelle Holland, increasingly now called 'Terre de la Pérouse', mere months before the flames of revolution would ignite in 1794...




[1]Outside the English-speaking world, that is.

[2]La Guerre Deuxiéme d'Autriche - the French term for the Third War of Supremacy, roughly equivalent to the Seven Years' War in OTL.

[3]The term for AH in this world.

[4]Approximately, this means evolutionism.

[5]As the term is spelled in TTL, with French influence.

[6]Near the site of OTL Sydney.



Part #14: A Man, a Plan, a Han, - Japan!

"Writers of speculative romance seem to my mind overly enamoured with the Japanese islands. To presuppose that this cultural backwater could ever fancifully produce a great imperialising power, as they apparently see it, I believe speaks for itself in its absurdity."
- Dr Sanjaï Mathieu, Université de Trivandum (English translation)

*

From - "Russian Expansion in the East, Volume II" (Oxford University Press, 1987)

After the Treaty of Stockholm in 1771, a new paradigm for Central and Eastern Europe had been introduced. Austria had been excluded from Polish affairs, save Galicia and the city of Krakow (German, Krakau). The old Commonwealth, noted for its unique governmental structure but having become sluggish and a puppet for outside powers, was ended. Poland was brought into personal union with Prussia, while the Grand Duke of Lithuania became an ally of Russia, its Grand Duke being a hereditary post occupied by the current Russian Tsarevich, much like the Principality of Wales in Britain. Sweden had been neutralised during the war by being promised Courland and the retention of northern Ducal Prussia, including the city of Königsburg, and this was confirmed by the Treaty.

Some commentators had predicted that this state of affairs was shaky and would only last a few years, until the inevitable next war. But events conspired against them. Poland was certainly suspicious of the relationship with Prussia, given the two states' history, and there were several uprisings until the end of the century, mainly over the privileges of the Polish nobility (szlachta). The final settlement was for the most senior members of the szlachta to be given the same rights as Prussian nobility. However, the unusual system in pre-partition Poland had meant that many even relatively poor people had szlachta status: fully ten percent of the population, in fact. The vast majority of these were excluded by necessity from the upper classes of the combined states, and remained a disenfranchised and restless minority for years to come.

If anything, Lithuania seemed an even more volatile proposition. Commentators' general position was that the Lithuanians would sweat under Russian bull-in-a-china-shop demands for a few years, rise up, be crushed and the country finally be directly annexed to Russia. This was not an unreasonable suggestion, based on previous history, but it failed to take into account just how seriously the Russian Tsarevich Paul (Pavel) took his new job as Grand Duke Povilas of Lithuania. Although his relationship with his father Tsar Peter III was relatively good, he continued to defend independent Lithuanian interests, promoting the Lithuanian language against the formerly prevalent Polish without trying to impose the Russian language, and limiting the activities of the Orthodox Church there. The Lithuanian people were pleasantly surprised. There were still some uprisings, of course, but on the whole it seemed that against all the odds, a Russian ruler gave Lithuania more independence than a Polish (or foreign, in the last few years) one had.

One of the most important projects begun during the 1780s was the construction of a Lithuanian navy, known as the Patriotic Fleet. The Commonwealth had previously been too consumed by its own internal strife to construct a Baltic navy, and had suffered somewhat for being unable to intercept raids from Sweden or other Baltic naval powers. Although Russia and Prussia had successfully bought off Sweden in the War of the Polish Partition, both governments, and particularly the Russians, were quite certain that this state of affairs was not sustainable. In particular, the Russians still had their eyes on Finland, which would eventually necessitate another war with Sweden. Sweden already had one of the largest and most powerful Baltic fleets, and the Swedish possession of the shipyards at Königsburg and Libau would only make this worse. Unless the Russians wanted to try and fight a war with Swedish troops able to land near St Petersburg with impunity, it was time to rectify the situation.

While Tsar Peter's own shipyards were simply expanded and the existing Russian Baltic fleet renovated, the situation was more difficult for Grand Duke Paul. Lithuania had not had a history of shipbuilding for some years, although the territorial revisions at the Treaty of Stockholm had awarded her the valuable port of Memel, renamed Klaipeda in Lithuanian. While vulnerable to Swedish attack from both north and south, Paul decided to build up Klaipeda into a major shipbuilding centre in order to give Lithuania a Baltic fleet of her own. This was both to supplement the Russian force and to create a patriotic project (hence the name) that would both create new jobs and reinforce the idea that Lithuania was an ally of Russia, not merely a puppet.

Just as Peter the Great had when Russia had built her first navy, Paul decided to look to more established shipbuilders, the Dutch. Rather than going to the Netherlands himself as his great-grandfather had, Paul simply brought in Dutch (and other) shipwrights, builders and sailors to expand Klaipeda and train his Lithuanian volunteers in shipbuilding and naval affairs. This ambitious project was surprisingly successful, although the Dutch would regret it in years to come.

In the event, the much-anticipated Baltic war was postponed. In Sweden, the Cap party was enjoying a long period of dominance at the Riksdag, with the Hats' policy of anti-Russian alignment and war largely discredited. Austria suffered financial crises in the 1770s and 80s and, when she finally recovered a few years before the French Revolution, now had a government more interested in expanding influence in Italy than having another stab at Poland. Prussia remained too weak and too consumed with holding down Poland to make another attempt at recovering Silesia from Austria. Tsar Peter opposed a war with the Ottomans or the annexation of the Crimean Khanate. So, the catalysts of war lay largely silent for many years, and Russia and Lithuania were left with shiny new fleets and nothing to do with them.

Being Baltic forces, these consisted of a large number of galleys, though these were finally becoming obsolete, and a smaller number of high seas vessels. From around 1784, the Patriotic Fleet adopted a policy of sending the latter on voyages around European ports, both to give their sailors more experience and to 'fly the flag' for Lithuania. These voyages succeeded in broadly changing foreign impressions that Lithuania was a puppet state of Russia, but were also expensive.One mission in 1788 even reached the Empire of North America, and carried a Lithuanian ambassador to attend the opening of the first Continental Parliament by George III.

That ambassador was named Móric Benyovszky, who has gone down in history by the Russified form of his name, Moritz Benyovsky. His actual ethnic background is fiercely debated, with everyone from Germans to Poles to Czechs trying to claim him, but the scholarly opinion suggests he identified primarily as a Hungarian. This enigmatic character is one of the most colourful in Russian history. Initially fighting for the Commonwealth against the Prussians during the War of the Polish Partition - commanding one of the few Commonwealth forces to achieve any coherent success during that conflict - he escaped from the Prussians and settled in Lithuania in 1772. He joined the new Lithuanian army and rose rapidly to the rank of colonel thanks to both the ramshackle nature of the makeshift army and his educated background. Possibly he initially intended to use this position of power to turn the army against the Russians in an uprising, but he caught the eye of Grand Duke Paul. Benyovsky entered the Lithuanian government, going from acting Minister for War to Foreign Minister and then leading the 1788 expedition to the Empire of North America.

However, Benyovsky's greatest achievements were yet to come. Since the 1770s, Tsar Peter had become paranoid about equalling the achievements of his namesake, Peter the Great, and had decided that, like his grandfather, he must expand Russian power and control in the Far East. He balked at an ambitious invasion of Outer Manchuria drawn up by his generals: at the time, Qing China, though leaning towards a path of isolationism and decay, was still a formidable military power. Furthermore, such a plan would destroy the careful trade system with China that Russia had set up a century earlier at the Treaty of Nerchinsk: it could only lose trade. Peter instead decided on a course of action probably just as ambitious - to attempt to open up Japan, closed to trade for a hundred and fifty years.

An expedition from Yakutsk led by Pavel Lebedev-Lastoschkin had already failed to establish trade links with Japan in 1774. The Japanese in Edzo[1], the Matsumae Han, had received him favourably but simply stated that they did not have the authority from the Shogun to trade. Japanese trade was restricted to two southern ports, one of which traded with China and the other with the Netherlands, Nagasaki - which was inconveniently far away from any Russian holdings.

Lebedev's disappointing report spurred the Russian government on to other approaches. Grand Duke Paul agreed to contribute three Lithuanian ships, his best crews, to add to four Russian vessels. These would set out from the Baltic with the supplies needed to expand the port at Okhotsk, and then would carry diplomats from both countries to attempt to establish trade links both at Matsumae town in Edzo and, if necessary, in Nagasaki or in the capital Edo itself. As a logical progression from the Lithuanian flag-flying missions around Europe, the ships carried a fair number of elite troops with the intention of impressing the Japanese authorities. Peter took the opportunity to get rid of numerous Leib Guards whose competence was unquestioned but whom he thought, quite possibly accurately, still supported his exiled wife Catherine.

The Russian mission was put under the command of Adam Laxman, a Finnish-born officer who had formerly served in the Swedish navy (using foreign-born emissaries was surprisingly common in eighteenth-century Russia). The Lithuanian portion could have no other leader but Benyovsky, and Paul was quietly relieved to have the man safely a long way away. He was supremely capable but also quite volatile. As the Japanese would learn...

The missions set sail in 1792 and, with the assistance of hired Dutch navigators, made the first recorded Russian and Lithuanian rounding of the Cape of Good Hope and passage of the Malacca straits. This was a new approach to the previous overland attempts at establishing trade with the East, although scarcely less inconvenient. After observing Nagasaki from a distance in late 1794, they proceeded to Okhotsk and began building up the port as ordered. By this point, the First Jacobin War had broken out in Europe, but in faraway Okhotsk, this was not known about until it was almost over five years later.

Laxman was dutiful, but Benyovsky became impatient with the preliminaries and sailed directly to Edzo in 1795 in an attempt to establish a trade mission. Blown off course and with his men unfamiliar with the waters, they couldn't find Matsumae town and Benyovsky ended up meeting the indigenous Aynyu[2] people of the island. He did manage to establish trade with them, mainly raw materials and food for Russian manufactured goods, including firearms...



[1]This is the Russian name for Ezo (Hokkaido) and it is the name by which the island is commonly known to international audiences in TTL.

[2]Ainu


Interlude #3: Sometimes, All I Need Is The Air That I Breathe


TimeLine L Expedition Mission Log

Dr Thermos Pylos: It is at this point that we must once again turn away from the general political upheavals of this period-

Dr Bruno Lombardi: -to concentrate on the scientific developments at hand.

P.: Strictly speaking, shouldn't you say 'natural philosophical' developments?

L.: No, Thermo. The term 'scientist is anachronous at this time, but not 'scientific'.

P.: How curious! I had assumed-

Capt. Christopher Nuttall: Gentlemen?

P./L: Sorry.


*

Man now stands like the worker in the mill who begins to realise how his work, his machine, relates to and fits in with the whole process of manufacture, in that case. Our understanding of how the universe is made - and for what purpose - is for ever increasing. We can only hope that the Creator is happier to see us do so than the mill owners.

- Joseph Priestley, 1807

*

From - "A History of Air" by Daniel Johnson, Oxford University Press, 1966

The discovery of illuftium[1] by Carl Wilhelm Scheele in 1778 was enormously influential in how chemical theories developed from thereon. For some years, natural philosophers struggled with how to incorporate this new concept into the established phlogiston theory. As it was then seen, a burning object gave off phlogiston, which was visible as the flames themselves. Phlogiston's exact nature was imprecise and we should not confuse it with the modern conception of a substance with defined mass: that idea would have to wait for a few more years. Phlogiston was seen as more of a 'principle', like light and heat.

It fell to Joseph Priestley, a noted English Dissenting clergyman and political radical, to link the two ideas. Priestley drew heavily on the mid-century works of Stephen Hales, who published detailed accounts of the circulatory systems of plants and animals. As part of his conception of the Aerial Economy[2], Priestley developed the notion that air could be phlogisticated (by an item burning within it) or dephlogisticated. Dephlogisticated or 'fixed' air was vivifying when breathed. Priestley thus explained Hales' earlier observation that it was dangerous to breathe stale air: it was phlogisticated.

Scheele had made similar observations, and Priestley - who had learned Swedish due to youthful arguments about Linnaean Racialism - read his original works. Illuftium was identified with dephlogisticated air. But how did this relate directly to phlogiston?

Priestley made numerous experiments with sealed glass vessels. A mouse sealed in there alone would run out of air and die, but when a plant was also added, the mouse would live for much longer. Therefore, the plant was 'fixing' the stale air into the form that the mouse could breathe. But was the plant producing illuftium or absorbing phlogiston? It took Priestley some years, and several accidental observations, to realise that the answer was 'both'.

His work On the Nature of Phlogiston (1785) was controversial as it suggested that phlogiston, or phlogisticated air, was deadly to animal life - going against the largely philosophical arguments at the time. Priestley rapidly expanded the paradigm of the mouse and plant to envisage a great cycle of the world, with animals taking up illuftium and breathing out phlogiston, and plants taking up phlogiston and expelling illuftium. This, his 'Aerial Economy' (inspired in its terminology by Britain's eighteenth-century obsession with the stock market) purported to see a 'Necessary and Natural Union' between the different forms of life.

Priestley's major breakthrough at this stage was to use a burning glass,[3] then a new lab instrument, on a sample of calx of mercury.[4] He was able to reverse the combustion, leaving metallic mercury, and he proceeded to repeat this experiment with other calxes. At this same time, one of Priestley's lab assistants inadvertently performed the mouse-in-jar experiment when the jar was contaminated with a mixture of limestone powder and the caustic soda that Priestley used to clean his equipment. He discovered that the mouse lived for much longer than it should. After more experiments, Priestley eliminated the possibility that the chemical (soda lime) was giving off illuftium, and therefore it must instead be absorbing phlogiston. This was the first indication that the two processes could be decoupled, whereas before there was the possibility that phlogiston going from A to B was simply an artificial mathematical negative of illuftium going from B to A.

Priestley's discoveries were celebrated and debated both in Britain and on the continent, but it was at this time that French natural philosopher Charles-Augustin Coulomb threw a spanner in the works. Coulomb's major work was on quantifying things which had thought to be unquantifiable, for example human labour (slaves in the West Indies). To do this, he developed new ways of measurement, very precise torsion balances that let the tiny charge repulsion between two charged surfaces be measured in the form of a change in weight. While using this balance, Priestley's French rival Antoine Lavoisier discovered that after a substance was burned, the combined calxes actually GAINED weight, when they should have lost phlogiston.

Most of the contemporaries attempted to explain this by philosophical means, claiming that phlogiston was an abstract principle with negative or sub-air weight, but Priestley instead used his new theories to argue that phlogiston was simply lighter than illuftium, and the phlogiston given out by the burning substance was more than balanced by illuftium being absorbed. This was, in fact, inaccurate - phlogiston is heavier than illuftium, but there is less given out than illuftium absorbed. Priestley did not think in quantities and it fell to Lavoisier, with his Coulomb methods, to discover this later on. Between them, largely via a series of half-friendly, half-hostile letters, Priestley and Lavoisier developed the idea that animal life is fuelled by a very slow, controlled version of combustion, thus linking these new ideas to Priestley's earlier discovery of the Aerial Economy. This was not explicitly confirmed until the 1820s, when new techniques were developed.

Lavoisier and Priestley are both hotly debated by modern British and French scientists as the 'Father of Modern Chemistry'. It took, however, Priestley's successor Humphry Davy to work out the precise relationship between illuftium and phlogiston - that the act of burning incorporated illuftium into the substance that burnt, producing both the calx and phlogiston. Priestley did not need to know the exact nature of phlogiston in order to create a treatise on the Aerial Economy which found favour with King George III, a man who had grown up in rural Virginia and was choked by the smokes of industrial London.[5] Priestley argued that living in cities with their dephlogisticated air was bad for the human body and might even lead to a moral decline as the brains of men ceased to be fuelled correctly. He advocated the construction of many arboreal parks throughout towns in order to balance this out, and this was adopted by many British cities, most obviously London. As well as being chemically sensible, this was clearly also aesthetically pleasing.

Despite his good relationship with the King, Priestley's anarchist/republican leanings led to him being chased out of the country in 1791 by an angry mob, stoked by business interests Priestley had offended. He and his family emigrated to the United Provinces, which was experimenting with political liberalism, and Priestley took his final discovery with him: soda water, water impregnated with dephlogisticated air. Though the air itself might be harmful, water impregnated with the substance bubbled most delightfully and had medical applications. Thanks to Priestley, for the century to come it would be UPSA businesses that dominated the world soda water market, and all those that would be derived from it...

*

NOTE: This process illustrates what (in OTL) Thomas Kuhn describes as 'incommensurability' - scientific theories can never be directly compared, because what Newton called 'gravity', for example, is a different concept from what Einstein called 'gravity', using different units and underlying concepts. In OTL some theories are still in the abstract thought of as 'right' (Galileo's heliocentric solar system) even though they have very little in common with current theories (Galileo had perfectly circular orbits, and still had the fixed stars with the sun at the centre of the universe). Similarly, modern evolutionary theory is described as 'Darwinian', even though it has as little to do with Darwin as it has to do with Paley. In OTL phlogiston is described as an 'obsolete theory' but in TTL it has survived simply by changing what it means by phlogiston. Instead of an abstract concept, phlogiston has become a real substance - that which we call carbon dioxide.

If this sounds unlikely, you may be surprised to learn that exactly the same thing happened in OTL: - Scheele's work never spread, Lavoisier discovered oxygen, and regarded oxygen as an abstract principle, never identifying it with a specific element with weight and other defined properties. It was only his successors who changed the meaning of the term 'oxygen' so that it now means what it does today...so Lavoisier was 'right' in OTL and Priestley, with his phlogiston, was 'wrong'. If we just used the term phlogiston instead in OTL, then Priestley would be 'right' and Lavoisier would be 'wrong'. Such is science.







[1]Recall, oxygen.

[2]In OTL this is an archaic term specific to Priestley...in TTL it is still in use and means something like 'the carbon cycle'.

[3]Magnifying glass used with sunlight.

[4]"Calx of" is eighteenth century terminology for "oxide" and in TTL is still in use. A calx or oxide is what remains after a substance is burnt.

[5]In this respect TTL's George III is like OTL's.



Part #15: Two Great Men

"A disturbing number of the greatest Englishmen who ever lived were foreigners."​

- John Spencer-Churchill (in a speech from 1921)​

*

From - "England's Captain, France's Saviour" by Albert Harrison (Oxford University Press, 1940):

Having spent oceans of blood and failed to gain an inch of new territory in Europe in the 1740s and 50s - largely thanks to Louis XV's unpopular policies - it is perhaps appropriate that in the 1760s France gained considerable new lands with the death of only one man. When the Duke of Lorraine died without male heirs in 1765, his lands defaulted to France and were annexed to the Kingdom. These were the last remnants of the once-great state of Lotharingia, now reduced to a few scattered enclaves throughout the region. By assuming control over Lorraine, France completed the path that it had been originally set upon by Louis XIV, and now unquestionably dominated that region.

The impact upon history of the end of Lorraine was slight. Its only direct effect was to remove the Duke, a former King of Poland, from any consideration of restoration. This served to quicken the Russo-Prussian ambitions to divide the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the rest is history.

A far more influential acquisition by France was that of Corsica. The island was theoretically possessed by the Republic of Genoa, but in practice rebels had held the island since 1755. Corsica had become a republic in all but name, with the Virgin Mary as titular monarch of the presumed kingdom. Unlike the venerable republics of Genoa, Venice and the Netherlands, the new republic in Corsica was constructed on Enlightenment principles. Its leader was Filippo Antonio Pasquale de Paoli, who had served in the Neapolitan army and now commanded the rebel military forces as well as being effective head of state of the republic.

During the thirteen-year existence of the Republic, an Enlightenment constitution was drafted and the state received praise from contemporary thinkers such as Voltaire and Rousseau. James Boswell, a companion of Samuel Johnson, wrote an account of the Republic which made Paoli and the constitution famous or notorious throughout Europe in the 1760s. It was this account which helped inspire the revolution in La Plata twenty years later.

In 1767 the Genoese lost the island of Capraia to the Corsican republic and decided that they had little chance of ever subduing the rebels. Furthermore, the Genoese treasury was almost exhuasted. To that end, the Genoese signed the island over to France in exchange for financial reparations. The vast and experienced French army invaded in 1768. Paoli's republicans fought hard before being defeated in 1769. Paoli and numerous other republican leaders and soldiers fled to Britain, which was at the time thought of as the most liberal country in Europe. In the 1760s, radical republicans were treated as amusing and entertaining curiosities by the British government, which did not see them as a serious threat until later on, and the Corsican refugees formed a community in London not unlike the Huguenots before them.[1]

Among the Corsicans was Carlo Buonaparte, a young supporter of Paoli[2]. A law student prior to fleeing the island with his wife and two-year-old son Napoleone[3], he decided to complete his studies, switching to English law. Buonaparte converted to Anglicanism to escape the anti-Catholic laws and changed his name to the anglicised Charles Bone. He received his doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1774 and eventually became well-known for his skilful seeking of loopholes in the anti-Catholic laws, getting many English Catholics out of legal trouble. Very few knew that he was himself Catholic in origin, though many made accusations (without evidence).

Bone became an enemy of the ultra-Tory faction opposed to Catholic rights, then, but he was popular with radicals who supported Catholic emancipation, including Charles James Fox who became a close friend. Bone would eventually become an MP towards the end of the century.[4]

Though an interesting character in and of himself, Charles Bone is necessarily overshadowed by his eldest son, Napoleone, known as the "less foreign sounding" Leo. Charles enrolled his son as a midshipman in the Royal Navy at the age of thirteen, as was customary at the time[5] and served on HMS Ardent from 1777 onwards.[6] Mister Leo Bone passed his lieutenant's examination in Malta in 1783. He was transferred to HMS Raisonnable, during which time he served alongside the slightly senior Lieutenant Horatio Nelson.

The Raisonnable scored several victories against the French and Spanish in the Second Platinean War, and the British losses at Trafalgar meant that several new captaincies were open: thus first Nelson and then Bone were made master and commander, with Bone taking over the almost obsolete 28-gun frigate HMS Coventry in 1786. He was noted for a concentration on rapid gunnery and weight of fire, a strategy that he had developed in connexion with Nelson[7], and grew to command a great loyalty from his men. Boswell met him in 1788 and Bone makes a then-overlooked, but today well known, brief appearance in one of his accounts. Boswell described him as being the epitome of the Royal Navy commander whose men will follow him into the jaws of hell rather than face the shame of being left behind.

Bone was made post in 1791, taking command of the newly built frigate HMS Diamond - taking a great deal of his former crew with him, as the now outdated Coventry was paid off - and immediately making a name for himself with an action against Algerine pirates off Malta in 1793. But it would be with the coming of war in 1795 that Bone's story becomes one not merely of history, but of legend...

*

From - "John Company: The Life of Pitt of India" by James Rawlings (University of Edinburgh, 1974)

In 1760 or so the situation in India looked bleak for Britain. The great French victories of the 1740s had been built on in the 1750s, with the British East India Company failing to retake any of their former strongholds in the Carnatic, and finally losing Cuddalore. A betrayal by the Nawab of Bengal had resulted in much of the BEIC's effort being focused on fighting the Bengalis and installing a more pliable nawab. This was eventually accomplished, and Britain kept the rich trading post of Bombay on India's western coast, but the south and much of the interior was closed to British influence.

In the Mysore-Haidarabad Wars of the 1770s and 80s, it was clear that the British had far less influence with Haidarabad than the French did with Mysore. This war did, however, result in the Nizam withdrawing the Circars from French control and the BEIC moved in to defend them from any FEIC attempt to retake them. A French siege of Masoolipatam, the chief town in the region, failed in 1786.

It is worth noting that the conflicts between the FEIC and BEIC often had little or nothing to do with the wider wars between Britain and France in Europe and the New World, and when Britain and France were supposedly at peace with each other, fighting continued in India.

The FEIC remained under the able leadership of Joseph François Dupleix until his death in 1770. The post of gouverneur général was taken up by Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, who lacked Dupleix's unique genius but was nonetheless competent and dutifully became versed in Indian matters.[8] The BEIC struggled to find one equally capable who could lead them back to a position of power. They would not find him for some years.

William Pitt had been an able Prime Minister to King Frederick I for many years and had led Britain through the Third War of Supremacy, but he had never managed his finances very well and when he died, he left his family in debt. Furthermore, in order to retain his image as the Great Commoner, he had never taken a title, limiting the income of his eldest son John.[9] John decided that in order to restore the family finances, he would have to imitate his great-grandfather, Thomas "Diamond" Pitt, who had made his fortune from the diamond trade in India. The elder Pitt had eventually become Governor-General of Madras, now lost to the French, and had once saved it by buying out the Nawab of the Carnatic...

John Pitt enlisted in the East India Company in 1773 and travelled to India. He became a cornet of cavalry, just as his father had started, but saw rather more frontline combat. He achieved a colonelcy by 1786 and fought at the Siege of Masoolipatam against the French (as well as in many earlier conflicts with native states). Pitt received a wound to the leg at the siege from a French musket ball, ending his career on the front line as it forced him to walk with a cane, but by this time, at the age of 30, he had already made his fortune and paid off his family's debts. Nonetheless, Pitt had developed a love of India and chose to remain. He became Governor-General of the Presidency of Calcutta in 1790, and so was the pre-eminent British official in India at the time of the greatest, most unpredictable upheaval since the fall of the Mughal Empire...






[1]More or less as OTL, but there are more Corsican refugees than OTL. This is because the French forces in Corsica were led by a different general to the OTL Comte de Vaux, who used harsher measures against the populace suspected of collaboration with the rebels.

[2]In OTL Buonaparte verbally attacked the French invasion early on but later switched sides; here he stayed with the rebels, again because the French invaders were seen as more ruthless compared to OTL.

[3]Not OTL Napoleone Buonaparte, but his elder brother. In OTL he died young and our Napoleone was named for him. In TTL he survives, and is in some ways similar to our Napoleone, but not all.

[4]In OTL Carlo Buonaparte died in his early forties, but in TTL he is able to live a richer lifestyle, avoids disease and lives longer.

[5](This is true in both OTL and TTL). Interestingly in OTL even the Carlo Buonaparte who stayed in Corsica wanted to enrol the (younger) Napoleon in the RN at one point.

[6]In OTL HMS Ardent was captured by the French in 1779 during the American Revolutionary War, which doesn't happen in TTL.

[7]Ironically, in OTL Nelson's tactics at sea are quite similar to those of Napoleon on land: emphasis on artillery, using concentrated, well-trained forces driven by personal charisma to overcome much larger but poorly motivated enemies, and the like.

[8]In OTL, Rochambeau's opponent in the American Revolutionary War, Lord Cornwallis, became Governor-General of (British) India: in TTL the situation is reversed.

[9]OTL William Pitt's eldest son was also called John, but this John Pitt was born a few years earlier and has some characteristics of our William Pitt the Younger. We now see direct changes from the POD: in OTL, Pitt the Elder spent many years working with Prince Frederick and so, as Frederick was in America all those years in TTL, his life is one of the most immediately changed by the POD. Therefore, his children are also different.


Part #16: The Last Roundup

From - "In The Eleventh Hour: The 1780s" by Professor Andrew Colquhoun (1971, University of Edinburgh)

Bavarian Question. A diplomatic triumph for the then-Archduchy of Austria towards the end of the eighteenth century, which in other circumstances might have spiralled out of control into yet another war.

In 1783, the last Wittelsbach Elector of Bavaria, Maximilian III, died without issue.[1] The important Duchy of Bavaria defaulted to the Sulzbach line, specifically Charles Theodore, Elector of the Rhine Palatinate. Charles Theodore was uninterested in ruling Bavaria and negotiated a deal with Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand IV, who by this time had also succeeded his mother Maria Theresa to become Archduke of Austria and ruler of the associated Hapsburg lands. Adding Bavaria to the Hapsburg domains would firmly establish Austrian supremacy in the Empire and put an end to any ideas of Prussian revival after the downfall of Frederick II's ambitions. While Prussia had not made further attempts to displace Austria as supreme power within the German states since the Third War of Supremacy, the Austrian defeat by the Prusso-Russian alliance in the War of the Polish Partition had been an embarrassment.

Ironically enough, it was this very victory that hamstrung any Prussian attempt to respond to the Bavarian crisis. Prussia was bogged down in suppressing a rebellion by disenfranchised Polish szlachta and King Frederick William II was unwilling to risk the Prussian army to try and dissuade the Austrians by force. Ultimately this rebellion would have another negative effect on Prussia's fortunes, for Prince Henry was killed by Polish partisans on the way to command the army based in Warsaw, and so the inexperienced Frederick William II was left without his chief advisor. Prussian retribution for the attack was savage, further poisoning relations with their supposedly equal co-kingdom, and further distracting Prussian policy within the Empire.

The late Maximilian III's consort, Maria Anna Sophia of Saxony, having failed to receive Prussian backing, next attempted to use her influence in her native Saxony to bring that state into opposition with Austria's plans. Predictably the Elector of Saxony, Frederick Augustus III, refused. Saxony had grown considerably in power thanks to reaping the spoils of the Third War of Supremacy, but was in no state to face Austria alone. Furthermore - just as the negotiators who had ended the Third War of Supremacy had foreseen - many of Saxony's new territories existed purely at the sufferance of Austria, and the gains made in that war would rapidly be reversed if Saxony opposed Austria.

It is possible, of course, that France, Britain and Russia might also have seen fit to oppose the Austrian move, but all three were busy with their own conflicts - France and Britain with the Second Platinean War, Russia with preparations for the Baltic war with Sweden (that never, in the event, materialised). Therefore, Charles Theodore's deal went through with no attempts from the other powers to prevent it. As the rightful heir to the Duchy of Bavaria, he ceded it to the Austrian crown in exchange for the Austrian Netherlands, which were incorporated as the new Duchy of Flanders.[2]

Flanders was in personal union with Charles Theodore's original lands of the Rhine Palatinate, far separated by countless other German states, and Flanders herself was split in half by the prince-bishopric of Liège. Thus, the state could only function within the bounds of the Holy Roman Empire and on the Emperor's say-so, which suited Ferdinand IV down to the ground. Austria had had little real interest in the southern Netherlands since acquiring them from Spain in the War of the Spanish Succession, and providing they were denied to France, indifferent to their fate. The old Austro-Dutch treaties were renewed by Flanders, ensuring that the fortresses along the Flemish-French border were manned by Dutch troops.

Charles Theodore's new subjects had mixed feelings about him. Nearly all of them were happier to have a less distant ruler than Ferdinand IV, whose policies to centralise the Holy Roman Empire around Austria had left the southern Netherlands neglected and forgotten. Furthermore, Charles Theodore established a new academy of the sciences in the capital, Brussels, just as he had in the Palatinate years before. He was also a patron of the arts, promoting the works of Flemish artists, sculptors and composers in European nobility circles. However, some Flemings feared that, without the assured might of Austria directly behind them, the state would be easy pickings for the next time France decided to try a conquest, and who knew if the next Marshal Saxe would have his Louis XV to meekly trade it back again?

As for Bavaria itself, the Bavarian people rapidly grew to dislike Ferdinand IV's policies of centralisation, with Bavaria increasingly being treated as just another Austrian province. Some voices at the Emperor's court argued that the Bavarian army should be dismantled and incorporated directly into the Imperial forces, both to make matters more efficient and to make it more difficult for Bavaria to be detached again following a future Austrian defeat. In the event, though, these plans were not implemented, at least not in time to make any difference.

For a new power was arising in Europe. Unpredictably, inexorably, it would topple all the grand schemes and new orders of the nobility, leaving them to crash in flames. Everything it touched turned to dust.

In France, the Revolution had begun...



[1] In OTL he died in 1777.

[2] Of course the state also includes Wallonia, but Flanders was an accepted term for all OTL Belgium back then. Note that in OTL, Charles Theodore was only to cede some parts of Bavaria to Austria, but in TTL it is the entire Duchy.



Interlude 4: National Symbols

Dr Thermos Pylos: But before we depart for the first great tragedy of this world's history-

Dr Bruno Lombardi: -yes, we should cover one more area. Namely-

P.: -the national symbols of the Empire of North America-

L.: -lest these come as a surprise when we cover the entry of Imperial troops into-

Capt. Christopher Nuttall: Gentlemen?

P.: Er - yes. The national symbols of North America.


*

From "A History of North America" by Dr Paul Daycliffe (William and Mary, 1964)

The national symbols that we take for granted were not always with us, of course. It is probably true that the turkey would have come to symbolise North America even without its endorsement by Sir Benjamin Franklin, as it was thought of as a sign of the exotic and American in Europe long before that. Other symbols, however, could easily have been different.

There were many previous tunes associated with America long before an official national anthem was considered appropriate. "Hail, America"[1] served as a unifying national song for many years, though now it is forgotten save by patriotic orchestras. Each Confederation, and many provinces, also had their own songs and regiments called from these Confederations brought their music all over the world in the wars of the nineteenth century.

Furthermore, the Jack and George has not always been universally beloved by the people over whom it waves. Many in the northern Confederations objected to the clear Virginian influence behind the design, at least until the events of the 1840s altered the balance of power within the Empire. After the war, the Jack and George was, on the contrary, clung to as a memory of the national unity which now seemed to be slipping through Americans' fingers.

The maple remains a universally acknowledged symbol of North America, though this is sometimes objected to by Virginians (and Carolinians), as the tree does not grow in those Confederations. However, the maple is now inextricably linked with America in the minds of Europeans, and any attempts by those objectors to add southern trees such as the dogwood or palmetto are probably doomed to failure.

It is anachronistic, though, to claim that an American national identity existed before the end of the eighteenth century - just as it is anachronistic, in many ways, to claim a British one existed. It was in the crucible of a great war that the self-image of the two nations was fixed, a self-image that would persist long after the reality was different. The Jacobin Wars had a more obvious effect on France and continental Europe, but they also had profound consequences for Britain and the Empire of North America...

*

Excerpts from the Constitutional Acts of 1788

An Act Declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subjects of the Empire of North America, and the Manner of Government thereof.

WHEREAS in pursuance of His Majesty’s most gracious recommendation to the two Houses of Parliament in Great Britain, to consider of such measures as might best tend to strengthen and consolidate the connection between H.M.’s domains, the two Houses of the Parliament of Great Britain and the assembled delegates of the United American Assembly have severally agreed and resolved that, in order to promote and secure the essential interests of Great Britain and America, and to promote the Protestant religion and the liberties of England throughout the corners of H.M.’s domains, it will be advisable to concur in such measures as may best tend to allow H.M.’s subject within the Empire of North America coeval rights and liberties to those of his cousin residing in Great Britain, and on such terms and conditions, as may be established by the Acts of the respective Parliaments of Great Britain and of the Empire of North America.

And whereas, in furtherance of the said Resolution, both Houses of Parliament and the Assembly have likewise agreed upon certain Articles for effectuating and establishing the said purposes, in the tenor following:

Article First. That the said Empire of North America shall, upon the 1st day of January which shall be in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred eighty-eight, be recognized in law as a Dominion to which is granted the same Parliamentary rights as of Great Britain, or of Ireland, pursuant to the following terms and conditions…

Here follows the opening paragraphs of the American Constitution, whose drafting was approved by the above Act of the Westminster Parliament:






Constitution of the Empire of North America

We the appointed Representatives of the Subjects of His Imperial Majesty’s Empire of North America, in Order to form a more perfect Union, protect our Religion, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do propose this Constitution for the Empire of North America.

Bill of Rights

The following Declarations of the Rights and Liberties of all Royal subjects are made:

That the pretended power of suspending the laws, dispensing with laws, or the execution of laws by regal authority without consent of the Continental Parliament is illegal;

That levying money for or to the use of the Crown or by the Westminster Parliament by pretence of prerogative, without grant of the Continental Parliament, for longer time, or in other manner than the same is or shall be granted, is illegal;

That it is the right of the American subjects to petition the King-Emperor, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal;

That the raising or keeping a standing army within the Empire in time of peace, unless it be with consent of the Continental Parliament, is illegal;

That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law;

That election of members of the Continental Parliament ought to be free to all Protestant freeholders;

That the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in the Continental Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of the Continental Parliament;

That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted;

That jurors ought to be duly impanelled and returned, and jurors which pass upon men in trials for high treason ought to be freeholders;

That all grants and promises of fines and forfeitures of particular persons before conviction are illegal and void;

And that for redress of all grievances, and for the amending, strengthening and preserving of the laws, Continental Parliaments ought to be held not less than every four years.

Article First
That a Continental Parliament be formed, under the Acknowledged Precepts of the Westminster Parliament as Established in the Constitution of 1688, Suitably Amended for the Differing Conditions of Colonial Existence;

Article Second
That this aforesaid Continental Parliament shall consist of two Houses, of Lords Spiritual and Temporal and of Commons, and that the Former shall be appointed by His Majesty the King-Emperor or his invested Lord Deputy, and that the Latter shall be Elected subject to the following Terms and Conditions;

Article Third
That the Commoners, styled Members of the Continental Parliament, shall be elected by the Free Vote of all Protestant Freeholders with residence in the Empire of North America, that One Member shall be elected by each Province, and further, that Additional Members be elected by those Towns and Cities granted the status of Borough by His Majesty the King-Emperor…

*

The American Constitution is notable for being a 'test bed' for many policies advocated by British radicals for adoption within the Westminster Parliament; for example, the holding of Parliaments every four years rather than seven and the implicit lack of rotten boroughs. As the conservatives initially ignored the American project, this meant they were unable to respond some years later when the successful trialling of these policies in America resulted in the radicals, led by Charles James Fox, tabling them as amendments to the British Constitution in the opening years of the 19th century.

*

[1]Approximately Hail, Columbia, but Columbus has no favourable mythos in TTL's anglophone world.


Part #17: Beaucoup de bruit et de chaleur, et qui ne signifie rien.

From - "FRANCE'S TRAGEDY: A History of the Revolution" by A.J. Galtier (Université Royale de Nantes, 1973)

Many have tried to describe the causes of the Revolution in France (for so we must append it, the oft-quoted title of Jacobin Revolution applying properly only to the latter stages). Many, too, have attempted to provide a conclusive linear history[1] of events leading up to the fateful incidents.

In truth, none of these attempts can end in anything other than failure, for the simple reason that no-one alive knows everything. Nor, indeed, did any one man in 1794. What records were made in those heady and brutish days, were oft burned almost immediately by the next phase of the Revolution as it acquired its own momentum and sought to dissociate itself with all that had gone before. Indeed, what we do know is often derived more from visitors to France than from French writers. Those visitors, of course, can only have presented biased accounts thanks to the very reasons they were in France: either pro-Revolutionary accounts from sympathisers such as Thomas Paine, or anti-Revolutionary accounts from the more numerous visitors whose business and contacts depended on the ancien regime.

So it is that it presents a challenge to any historian to recount any sort of coherent record of those days of infamy, much less attempt to explain why they came about. The fact that so many writers have not let ignorance of the facts stand in the way of their theories is doubtless all to their credit, but here stands an account that tries to be as neutral as possible in this Fallen world.

Many have noted the fact that France, historically, was particularly prone to peasant revolts of all stripes. The Jacquerie of the fourteenth century is an exemplar, and one which - for reasons that will become clear - was oft compared to the early phase of the Revolution. Further revolts proceeded throughout French history. No European state entirely escaped these, but France has seemed particularly unlucky by chance or design. Some took the form of religious wars, resulting in the fateful flight of many Huguenots to Britain, but the majority were simple peasant revolts precipitated by famine. The policies of the King and the nobility-dominated Estates-General were blamed, whether by creating wars that resulted in the suffering of the people, or else simply drawing more riches to themselves at the expense of the peasantry.

The centralisation and Absolutist policies of the seventeenth and eighteenth century were in part an attempt to prevent this state of affairs. The original Jacquerie had been caused, in part, by an Estates-General that was paralysed between different interests. By effectively eliminating the Estates-General by simply never calling it, and centralising power in the hands of the King and his chief ministers, the French hoped to achieve a more coherent and equitable policy. The former goal was achieved, at least to some extent; the latter, however, only became harder to reach.

Louis XV's reign was one of paradoxes. The King was known to be a relative friend to France's poor, but his attempts at reform were continually blocked by the nobility and clergy who had the most to lose. While the Estates-General no longer met, the Estates-Provincial and the local Parlements conspired to provide the very roadblock to reform that the Absolutist thinkers had hoped to remove. This failure, coupled with his ill-judged return of the Austrian Netherlands after the Second War of Supremacy, served to make Louis XV a highly unpopular man at his death in 1772.

His successor, Louis XVI[2] at first seemed like an improvement. He was cultured and educated, disliking the usual 'kingly' pursuits of hunting and balls, and was also keenly interested in military affairs. He had previously fallen out with his father after making a rash charge at a battle during the Second War of Supremacy, and while he had been kept out of the front line since then, he had remained interested in the theory of war. When he became King of France and Navarre in 1772, Louis gave patronage to several writers advocating radical reforms to the army. He also revived the work on Nicholas-Joseph Cugnot's Fardier à vapeur, an early steam-tractor, which had previously been cancelled due to several accidents. In this way, then, all modern motor vehicles ultimately owe a debt to Louis (and Cugnot).

The reforms of the French army typically focused on the artillery, using newer breakthroughs in mathematics to improve accuracy. Cugnot's Fardier's primary use was also as an alternative means of towing artillery. Although this was generally more troublesome than using horses (particularly since the army's logistics were already in place to support horses, not steam wagons), some improvements in overall speed were noted when towing artillery on flat ground and good roads over long distances. Fardiers were later commonly used in the triumphal displays characteristic of the Republic between the wars, towing huge siege guns through the wider streets of the new Paris.

The French infantry benefited rather less from Louis' reforms, although Louis was persuaded to adopt the rifle on an experimental basis. Unlike Britain and the Empire of North America, no dedicated Rifle regiments were formed, but some elite skirmishers of conventional musket regiments were trained in the longer-ranged, more accurate weapon. This would be considered both a blessing and a curse by many in Europe, later on.

Unfortunately for Louis, the one war in which he led France into was something of a disaster. The Second Platinean War was, necessarily, fought mainly at sea, and he had neglected the French navy. Nonetheless, thanks to some excellent officers, mistakes by the British and the assistance of the Spanish fleet, victories were won at sea. However, the French army in the Plate was cut off from resupply and eventually was forced into a humiliating surrender. Many deserted and joined the Platinean republic, while others brought back new radical ideas, sowing the seeds for what was to follow.

Another contributor was the acquisition of Corsica, in the last years of Louis XV's reign. France might have obtained a strategically important island and gained more influence over Genoa, but the revolutionary ideas of the Corsican republic also filtered back to France.

There was no coherent response to Bourbon absolutism. Cartier has described the undercurrent of feeling in the early stages of the Revolution as a simple, unanimous, animalistic "NON!" The difference to the former revolts, all the way back to the Jacquerie, was that ideology was finally beginning to make itself known, albeit in a disjointed fashion. The Enlightenment ideals of Voltaire were intermixed with more radical notions from LaPlata and, especially, Corsica. Britain was seen variously, and simultaneously, as admirable democracy and perfidious reactionary. The same was true of the Empire of North America, though even revolutionary France suffered a certain chauvinism towards any ideas from the New World, notwithstanding the clear influence of the LaPlata revolt on French thinking.

Some Counter-Societist philosophers of the Russian school have described the notion that an initial, pure, proletarian rebellion must inevitably fall prey to what they describe as 'ideological poisoning'. The starving man in the street wants only to gorge himself, take back what he believes to be rightfully his, punish those who took it from him, and perhaps destroy the signs of the former state of affairs, taking delight in the animalistic notion of pure destruction. However, "then what?" The rule, throughout history (and particularly in England) is that the rebellion peters out and the ancien regime returns to power, savagely extinguishing any signs of the rebels. The printing press changed this to some extent, and the Enlightenment sealed it. Suddenly there were educated men who could ride the crest of a rebellion and steer it into a true revolution, remaking an entire state in their own image.

The most dangerous men in the world.

It is a question oft asked of the schoolroom tutor, to the extent that he finds it tiresome. "Why did the French people support a revolution that would end up being far more cruel to them than the ancien regime it replaced?" The tutor might be tempted simply to point out that such comments are easy to make with hindsight, and the French people had no such notion of the future, indeed how could they have had? The truth is somewhat more complex. The Revolution in France, more so than any since, is a clear example of a series of transformations. Each one seemed reasonable enough at the time, and yet to make the leap from the first to the last it seemed inconceivable that any sane man would choose to.

A humorous exercise in logic from England is illustrative. A piece of paper is an ink-lined plane; an inclined plane is a slope up; a slow pup is a lazy dog; Therefore: a piece of paper is a lazy dog. An absurd leap, yet each step makes sense. So too, the Revolution.

Early Revolutionary leaders were far more idealistic, the exemplar being the man who gave the early Revolution its name as the Second Jacquerie: Jacques Tisserant, known reverentially as "Le Diamant" for his image of incorruptibility. Tisserant was a labourer who worked variously for Parisian opticians and Flemish cartographers, but he gained an education of sorts and worked his way into a position of power. The skills he had learned resulted in the publication of the most celebrated document of the Revolution, though original copies are now very rare thanks to the later phases ordering them to be burnt. This was La Carte de la France.

Unlike the name suggests, it was not simply a map of France. Rather, it was a symbolic map, not unlike the humorous maps popular in the eighteenth century - the "Drunkard's Atlas", containing only those countries producing wine, and the "Map of Matrimony", describing the journey of man and woman through the lands of Happiness while avoiding the dark vistas of Loneliness.[3] It was the latter that most inspired Tisserant. Instead of the paths of lovers through time, he showed the path of France, describing that France under the ancien regime would eventually, inevitably, decline to the shadowy countries of Irrelevance and Tyranny. He presented a second path, a path of Reform and of Equity, which would restore France to its place as a proud nation and a happy people.

The Carte was banned by Louis XVI's ministers, probably their first wrongfooted step. Matters were not assisted by the Great Famine of 1789 and the rumours that a comet would strike France in 1791, which threw the peasantry into a panic. The Royal French East India Company continued to bring riches to the home country from its trading possessions in southern India, but these inevitably failed to trickle down to the lower classes. Revolution was in the air.

Le Diamant created a proletarian movement known as the Sans-Culottes, the Men Without Trousers, so called because they scorned the use of the fashionable knee-breeches of the upper classes. Sans-Culottes wore long pants instead, but Le Diamant was noted for wearing nothing below the waist at all, supposedly due to his commitment to equal treatment for all classes rather than simple revenge on the aristocrats. Equity! was always the battle cry of the Sans-Culottes.

Things came to a head in February 1794. Having had their petitions continuously rejected by the Estates-Provincial and the Parlements, the Sans-Culottes marched on the Palais de Versailles and demanded the restoration of the Estates-General, with a dramatic expansion of both the Estates' powers and the size of the Third Estate, making it more representative of the population of a whole of France. The march caught the palace guard by surprise, and many of the lower-born infantry sympathised. Le Diamant famously walked forward, alone, into their midst, and made a speech of which no full record survives, but is believed to contain the phrase "Will one man who grew up in a gutter shoot another on the whim of a man who cares not one jot for either of them?" and, more spuriously perhaps, "You wouldn't shoot a man not wearing pants, would you?"

It was not, as many feared in Europe, a bloody revolution. Louis XVI had been, deliberately to some extent, isolated from the news sweeping France by his ministers. He was surprised and willingly heard Le Diamant's grievances, agreeing to recall the Estates-General.

That was the beginning. It seemed so hopeful, and that is what the tutors must tell their schoolboys. It was that hope that makes its dashing so poignant, so terrible, so tragic.

The Tragedy of France.




[1]Timeline.

[2]Not 'our' Louis XVI, but Louis XV's son Louis-Ferdinand who in OTL died before his father, much like Prince Frederick in OTL in fact.

[3]Both of these are real OTL publications.​
 

Thande

Donor
Part #18: The Betrayal of the Revolution

From - "FRANCE'S TRAGEDY: A History of the Revolution" by A.J. Galtier (Université Royale de Nantes, 1973)

Who would have thought, as the question is oft asked, that such an auspicious beginning of the Reform of France - as it was, at first, so innocuously named - could have resulted in the bloodshed and misery that resulted?

Things happened one step at a time. As noted previously, every one of them seemed logical enough at the time, and yet...

In a tragic irony, the Revolution could never have got as far as it did without its charismatic, popular leader Jacques Tisserant, Le Diamant, and yet it was that popular support that was used to destroy everything Le Diamant stood for.

Le Diamant persuaded King Louis XVI to recall, for the first time in centuries, the Estates-General in February 1794. It was also at this time that, recognising the vast gulf between the Third Estate (around 25 million peasants and bourgeoisie) and the few hundred clergy and nobles in the Second and First, the number of representatives of the Third Estate were tripled. However, the Second and First Estates used every political trick they could find to reduce the impact of this.

Louis wished the Estates-General to focus on the tax reforms that his father had always failed to implement, but this was a forlorn hope. The Third Estate, revelling in its newfound power, sought to reorganise and strictly define its powers, a Constitutionalist faction growing as nebulous political parties began to form. The British Houses of Parliament - and often their more modernised counterpart in the Empire of North America - were initial inspirations in this period, and the Third Estate renamed itself the Communes (House of Commons).

While the Second and First Estates looked upon this development with some alarm, they nonetheless generally participated in and encouraged the Communes' internal debates, not least because it meant that Louis' tax plans were shelved, and it was the members of the Second and First Estates that would have the most to lose from those.

By July 1794, a consensus was reached that the existing mediaeval system was inadequate. Louis XVI had some misgivings, but Le Diamant's moderating influence again resulted in a compromise. The National Constitutional Convention of August-December 1794, somewhat inspired by that of the United Provinces of South America a few years earlier, abolished the Estates-General and created a new National Legislative Assembly to replace it. This was a unicameral chamber in which the First and Second Estate representatives were appointed, as were one-third of the Third Estate (Communes), but the other two-thirds would be elected by universal householder suffrage. Louis XVI's title was altered from King of France and Navarre to "King of the French People of the Latin Race". This was an early sign of the Linnaean Racialist policies which would later characterise the Revolutionary state.

The Constitution was unpopular with both supporters of Bourbon absolutism and with those in Provincial Estates (most notably Brittany, but also in généralities to the southeast such as Burgundy). The new centralised state took away a lot of the autonomy that these so-called Pays d'État had formerly enjoyed, and laid the foundations for the later insurrections.

Nevertheless, the Constitution was implemented, with the first elections due to take place in 1799, the NLA existing on a five-year term basis. At this point, it is worth examining foreign reactions to the Revolution thus far. Britain , North America and the UPSA all saw nothing but positive events - Charles James Fox went so far as to openly praise the Revolution as a repeat of Britain's Glorious Revolution of a century before. In fact, what criticism did exist in Britain was largely that of those who combined patriotism with intellectual musings on political systems - if constitutional parliamentary monarchy was really the motor that had driven Britain to successes in America and, to a lesser extent, India - then the last thing they wanted was the French getting hold of it!

In the event, that, at least, was not something that Britain had to worry about. Would it be that it could have been!

The more conservative nations of Europe, on the other hand - in particular absolutist and Catholic Austria and Spain - viewed these events with alarm. Spain, after all, also had a Bourbon king, and the last thing Charles IV wanted was for his own "mob" to get any funny ideas. Particularly considering that his predecessors had already been forced to flee into exile and return twice.

Once again, this worry was unfounded: the Spanish people remained reasonably francophobic and this would only intensify as time went on. And once again, would that this be the least of their worries!

The comte de Mirabeau, a moderate member of the First Estate, became Chief Minister and struggled to implement the new constitutional monarchy amid sniping from all sides. Conservative absolutists attacked the constitution, allied to the provincial interests, and on the other side a new radical force was growing. Aside, and apart from, Le Diamant's Sans-Culottes, the faction that would eventually be known as the Jacobins, after their political club, was created. These were not proletarians with legitimate grievances as the Sans-Culottes were; for the most part, they were bourgeoisie more interested in applying abstract Enlightenment concepts to the government of the state than they were in any real problems. In that, they were no different from any of the great statesmen who had served in Iberia and indeed France itself throughout the past century - but now that the old system had been overturned, there were no checks and balances to prevent them gaining absolute power.

Things came to a head on 2nd April, 1795, when the death of Mirabeau of natural causes paralysed the NLA and allowed the coherent Jacobin faction to gain momentum. The moderates, led by the Marquis de Condorcet, advocated that Louis XVI's Swiss-born finance minister Jacques Necker should replace Mirabeau as chief minister, while the Jacobins put forward the relatively unknown lawyer Jean-Baptiste Robespierre, of the Généralite of Lille. This was accompanied by savage attacks on Necker by the Linnaean Racialist faction within the Jacobins, who had begun to combine the existing French Enlightenment view of the superiority with the Latin race, with French nationalism as embodied in the French language. Either way, foreign-born officials were suspects. This was backed by an undercurrent of feeling in the more proletarian Sans-Culottes faction, though Le Diamant never spoke on the subject (and thus his supporters have ever since argued over it). It was particularly ironic given that one of the Jacobins' own leaders, Jean-Paul Marat, was also Swiss-born (though he took some pains to conceal this).

As the legitimate political debate degenerated into ever more savage verbal - and not just verbal - attacks, with rival political gangs fighting in the streets of Paris and a nervous Louis XVI ordering regiments to be recalled from the frontiers to Paris in an attempt to keep the peace. In practice this only resulted in the regiments being seen as tools of the king and resulted in numerous attacks on soldiers by the fierier political radicals. This rarely succeeded in accomplishing anything per se, but it significantly reduced the popularity of both the king and the army.

The atmosphere in Paris, indeed throughout much of France, was tense. Everyone knew that, metaphorically speaking, one dropped matchstick could ignite the country into the inferno of civil war. Even Charles James Fox began to moderate his praise of the revolution as reports of political violence in the cities of France crept out.

Despite being somewhat insulated from the events on the streets by what remained of the royal trappings, Louis XVI decided something must be done to relieve the tension. A figure that everyone could agree on must be made chief minister...a man who had become the national hero of France.

Jacques Tisserant.

It was after a month of unrest that, on the 3rd of May 1795, Louis XVI summoned Le Diamant into his presence to discuss the possibility. Unfortunately, the King was just enough insulated from what was going on for a fatal mistake to be made. Le Diamant arrived with four loyal Sans-Culottes armed with muskets as bodyguards, a common sight by now on the wartorn streets of Paris. The captain of the royal guard asked Louis if he wanted Le Diamant's guards to be disarmed, and Louis replied "Of course!"

But the Royal soldiers on the ground were nervous, after so many attacks, and demanded that Le Diamant's guards give up their weapons while they were still more than half a mile from the gates of the Palais de Versailles. The bodyguards refused, on the grounds that there was too much of a risk and that - frankly - they did not trust the royal soldiers with Le Diamant's life.

Le Diamant himself attempted to smooth things over, but it was already too late. As he and his bodyguards faced the soldiers and came to a halt, a crowd began to gather around them, made up mostly of Jacobin sympathisers. The crowd chanted anti-Royal slogans, jeered at the royal guards and, infamously, one voice suggested that Le Diamant was being taken away to be executed.

That ignited the tension. The bodyguards refused to leave Le Diamant's side or give up their weapons, the soldiers insisted, someone fired the first shot - quite possibly someone in the crowd - and all hell broke loose.

A few minutes later, seventeen men were dead. Among them was Le Diamant himself, the man who had led France's Revolution thus far, the man who had given it the momentum that would now be seized upon by others for their own ends.

Enough Jacobins had been present in that crowd, enough had escaped, for the "true" story to become official: Le Diamant had been murdered, on the King's orders, by Royal troops.

And France destroyed itself.


Part #19: Air and Fury

From - "FRANCE'S TRAGEDY: A History of the Revolution" by A.J. Galtier (Université Royale de Nantes, 1973)

It has often been suggested that the death of Le Diamant was the ultimate catalyst for the darkest phase of the Revolution and the rise of the Jacobins...while there is certainly some truth to this assertion, it is disingenuous to assume that these developments were inevitable. Indeed, to do so (in the fashion of the Montevideo school of Societist thought) leads to the dangerous intellectual fallacy of absolving those who committed atrocity of their crimes, as they were simply "a historical inevitability". Small comfort to the thousands who died with their lungs phlogisticated or their heads rolling on the ground...but I digress.

It is quite possible that, if the National Legislative Assembly had possessed more moderate and pragmatist members, the incident could have been smoothed over, even worked to a Liberal advantage by using it as an excuse to reduce royal powers further, towards a "British-style" (as it would have then been termed) constitutional monarchy.

But cooler heads did not prevail. Once more those of the Montevideo school would argue that the lack of such cooler heads is another historical inevitability, that Louis XVI[1] paid for the fact that he and his predecessors had allowed absolutism to continue so mercilessly for so long, putting off reform until it was required to avert economic collapse. If the Bourbons had reformed more gradually, the Societists argue, they might have eventually had a more moderate National Legislative Assembly and not suffered such terrible losses and tragedies. But to make such an argument is not to abrogate the NLA of its crimes.

Riding a wave of public anger at the death of Le Diamant, the Jacobins - already the largest faction within the NLA as a whole, if barely - seized the instruments of power. Their former candidate for chief minister, Jean-Baptiste Robespierre[2] began issuing orders as though he had indeed been approved by the King. Louis XVI was not a stupid man but once more he paid for being so insulated from real events. The King did not hear of the Jacobins' actions until fully two days after Le Diamant's body had hit the cobbles, and then waited three hours before issuing orders to the troops to keep the peace, agonising about whether it would inflame the situation. By then, it was too late.

A large percentage of the royal troops deserted, often defecting straight to the Jacobins. Many of them were Parisians who could not stand the shame of the people of Paris hurling jeers and stones at them and accusing them of murdering the popular Le Diamant. Thus the majority of the Gardes Françaises were lost. Others, those from the Gardes Suisses and regiments brought in from other provinces and generalities, simply retreated in the face of public anger, not having clear orders from royal authority as to whether they were supposed to fire on civilians or not. Paris was ruled by the mob, and the mob was controlled by Robespierre.

Yet many troops remained fiercely loyal to the King, even in the absence of coherent orders from His Most Christian Majesty. Several loyal companies of the Gardes Françaises were rallied together with outside troops by Phillipe Henri, the Marquis de Ségur, one of the Marshals of France and the only one present in Paris during the crisis of Le Diamant's death. Ségur believed that the chaos, along with the revolution as a whole, was a transient fad and could be weathered if the military would clamp down on strongpoints and stand fast as the waves of disorganised public opposition beat uselessly against them like water on cliffs. "What the shopkeeper or the farmer or the peasant wants more than anything is not liberty or rights or even riches, but simply the knowledge that tomorrow will be much like today."[3]

Unfortunately for Ségur, there were two fatal flaws to his plan. Firstly, since the logistics and communications apparatus had broken down along with the rest of military discipline across much of Paris, he was simply unaware that the vast majority of the forces stationed in Paris had deserted or defected. Either that, or else he dismissed such reports as Jacobin propaganda. Secondly, the mob he faced was not disorganised, but ideologically fed and led by the Jacobins. And, in a moment of irony, it was Ségur himself who would give the Jacobins the mythic image they needed to cement their hold on France...

Ségur realised that the most important point to be held in Paris, except the Palais de Versailles itself, was the Bastille Saint-Antoine. Originally built as a defensive fort, much like England's Tower of London it had gradually become both a prison and an arsenal. Thus, it was both a defensive position and an endless store of ammunition and supplies for any army that sought to hold it. In addition to this, the Bastille was seen in the popular imagination as a symbol of royal power, and so if Ségur's forces could hold the fort against Jacobin attacks, it would be a potent symbol that the monarchy would withstand the Revolution.

All of which was true, but it also meant that the reverse result would also create an equally potent symbol. And this was in fact what occurred.

Ségur's forces first moved into the the Bastille on the evening of the 4th of May 1795, quickly turning it back into a fortress. While industry and discipline held sway in the Bastille, at the same time most of the rest of the military forces in Paris were disintegrating, unbeknownst to Ségur. It was not until the afternoon of the 5th that Ségur heard that Versailles was threatened and considered sending forces to escort the King to the Bastille. By that point, the Jacobin-inspired mob had already managed to overwhelm the royal guard and seize the palace. What resulted was what a German writer described as "the New Barbarism", even though it would rapidly be overshadowed by later developments. The palace was ransacked, with countless valuable paintings and tapestries looted or destroyed, and soon the furniture of kings could be found in common houses and hovels scattered all over Paris.

The royal family themselves were not harmed. At this point the majority of the mob still had the inbuilt fear and respect for the royals, a relic of the ancien regime they had been raised under. The King in his person, as opposed to as a symbol of royal power, attracted more curiosity than hostility from the common people. They had captured the King and Queen, the Comte de Provence, the Duc d'Orleans and Maria Antonia of Austria (Marie-Antoinette), the wife of the Dauphin[4]. The Dauphin himself was not present, though; Louis, technically re-titled "Prince of Royal Blood of Latin France" by the NLA's early reforms, had been sent to Navarre for discussions as to whether Navarre would be directly incorporated into the new French state or would remain separate, perhaps with himself as its king.

The royal family was swiftly placed under arrest by Robespierre and the Jacobin-dominated NLA. At the same time, Robespierre's fiery lieutenant Georges Hébert ordered the expected attack on the Bastille by the mob, supported by those troops who had defected to the Jacobin side. Because they still wore the same uniforms as the loyalist troops on the other side, those troops discarded their shakoes and instead marched bare-headed or with cloth caps designed to represent the Phrygian cap of liberty. On this day, May 7th 1795 (or 18th Flóreal of the year -1 as it would later be known), the dreaded uniform of the Revolutionary soldier would start to come into being. Before the week (or décade for that matter) was out, it would be completed.

The first attack on the Bastille was, predictably, bloodily repulsed by Ségur's professional troops. Grapeshot ripped the still largely undisciplined mob to shreds. It is no exaggeration to say that the streets ran with blood like water, flooded even. After the first two frontal attacks were both reduced to bloody rags filling the streets around the Bastille, Ségur ordered his troops to hoist the royal flag, a white banner with the countless golden fleur-de-lys of France Ancient, to mock the Jacobins. Give up your futile struggle! was his message.

But the Jacobins did not give up. Their commanders knew that the revolutionary fervour of the people would eventually run out. To that end, on the 6th of May, yet another frontal attack was launched, with no further success, while sappers concealed themselves in the mess of bodies on the streets and used the distraction to plant gunpowder explosives beneath weak points of the Bastille wall. At midnight, when the majority of Ségur's garrison was asleep, the fuses were lit and the old fortifications relented to the modern techniques devised by Vauban and his successors.

Ségur's troops were still disciplined and immediately attempted to plug the gap, before being hit by grapeshot from guns that the Revolutionaries had brought up in the night. The mob cheered as the troops got a taste of their own medicine, and then charged through the breach.

Despite most of the troops being hastily awakened and the rest being killed by the grapeshot, the Revolutionaries still suffered heavy casualties. But by the time Ségur was apprised of the events, it was already too late to do anything about it. The old Marshal went down fighting, both of his pistols fired mere seconds before the butcher's knife of a Sans-Culotte sliced through his heart. In later times, Ségur would become a hero, a martyr, of French Royalism. For now, he would be used for the Jacobins' own purposes.

As the crowd cheered and looted the Bastille, releasing the few prisoners from the dark fort (the Jacobins immediately began to claim that it was this act of liberty that had motivated the attack, not getting hold of the arsenal there), one man, a soldier who had gone over to the Jacobins, came to the fore. His name is not recorded in history. Like Le Diamant, he became a legend, L'Épurateur , the Purifier, a name given to him by Robespierre. He had only defected the day before, but in that time his ears had been filled with the revolutionary message the Jacobins preached. There is no fierier zealot than a convert.

L'Épurateur was already covered in blood, like most of the survivors, from the battle. Now, he took out his sabre and cut the head from Ségur's corpse, working meticulously. He took the head to the largest flagpole, where his fellow Jacobins had brought down the Royal flag and had been about to tear it to pieces, but L'Épurateur shook his head. "Non." It was not enough for the flag simply to fall. The people must see what that flag had stood for.

He took the flag and smeared it all over with Ségur's blood, dying the pristine noble white with the shed blood of the people. Then he turned it upside down and it was raised once more, the fleur-de-lys turned over, the monarchy overthrown by the blood that had been shed by the revolutionary fighters.

And thus the symbols of the Revolution were complete. The crowds saw L'Épurateur standing on the battlements of the Bastille in the moonlight, the white parts of his blue uniform stained red by the blood of the battle, wearing the Phrygian cap, his white Bourbon cockade dyed bloodred, and the red flag flying above him.

Vive la Révolution!

Et mort au roi !





[1] Recall that this is not our Louis XVI but a slightly ATLised version of the man who in OTL died while he was still the Dauphin, the son of Louis XV.

[2] Not the same as OTL Maximilien Robespierre 'but worryingly similar'.

[3] Ségur channelling Lord Vetinari there...

[4] OTL Louis XVI, or his ATL "brother" equivalent.




Part #20: Cette obscurité glorieuse

From - "FRANCE'S TRAGEDY: A History of the Revolution" by A.J. Galtier (Université Royale de Nantes, 1973)

It all happened so rapidly. Indeed in many ways, for many years to come in France everything would seem to come in a rush. The new powerful men of France knew that their position was tenuous. They did not have the luxury of the Bourbon kings who had come before them, when it had taken centuries for discontent to coalesce into an organised and intellectual-backed revolution instead of ineffective peasant revolts. No; the Revolutionary genie was out of the bottle, and they risked it turning against them. The solution was to keep the people so occupied that they did not have the chance to do so.

Even as the royal family were placed in a mean common jail by the Jacobins, the NLA began to issue "reforms" at a bewildering rate. It was not merely a case that a man could wake up in a different state to the one that he had fallen asleep in; France changed by the hour. This also meant that foreign commentators in Madrid, London and Vienna barely had a chance to absorb the information of the earlier, more benign stages of the Revolution before the news of Le Diamant's death and what came after fell upon them. When moderate figures there were being assailed by the confusing shift of the Revolution, only two groups held firm - ultraconservatives who would always condemn anything associated with the Revolution no matter how reasonable, and radicals who would praise any such thing no matter how horrific. The Revolution was not merely the death of moderation in France, but elsewhere also.

The unknown soldier known as l'Épurateur was never seen again after that fateful night, when he raised the Bloody Flag above the Bastille. What happened to him has been the subject of many theories then and since. The most likely possibility is that he was simply killed later that night in the fighting still raging throughout Paris between the Jacobins and Sans-Culottes and the royalists. However, some have suggested that L'Épurateur simply faded into obscurity and died in a later battle. Most controversially the Royalist historian Pierre Beauchamp has claimed that l'Épurateur disowned his "drunken" antics on the Bastille and later returned to the Royalist side.

No-one will ever truly know, but Hébert, who had witnessed the event, was swift to capitalise on it. L'Épurateur became a mythic figure, emblematic of the new France[1] and thence a martyr, stabbed in the back by a Royalist assassin for his act of courage. A large number of French people, even some historians, still believe that l'Épurateur was purely an invention of Hébert and there was never such a living, breathing person. Whatever the truth, the Jacobins and their Sans-Culotte allies were driven to new strengths by the great symbol they had been gifted with.

By the hour and the day, the NLA was "reformed". Moderate 'Mirabeauistes'[2] still in favour of a constitutional monarchy were shouted down and even attacked in the street. Those genuine royalists among the Third Estate's deputies fled, or claimed a conversion to Jacobinism - L'Épurateur made this sufficiently plausible that a number of royalists either fearful of their lives, or believing that their cause was lost, were able to switch sides.

The deputies of the First and Second Estates were sidelined as those Estates were effectively disenfranchised, all in the name of liberty. In less than one week, all titles of the nobility were abolished, the Catholic Church was effectively "nationalised" and turned into an arm of the government, with priests having to swear allegiance to the Revolution, and land ownership was revoked. The Revolutionaries sought to usurp the Great Chain of Being itself, so that all men would be equal - and death to those that disagreed.

In those early, heady days, the revolution was pure, if nonetheless horrific. Slavery was abolished and women were emancipated, as defenders of Revolutionary thought have cited ever since (particularly those of the San Francisco school). Freedom of religion was guaranteed, which in Britain both intrigued the large Huguenot-descended population and was used by the Radical Party as an argument for Catholic emancipation at home.

Robespierre, still acting as de facto chief minister in a government that had imprisoned its own king, argued for "la rupture tranquille" (a clean break) with the past, adding "In ten years' time, we should not be able to recognise France". These two innocuous sentences would come to drip with blood in years to come...

The policy was implemented in numerous ways. Initially, the NLA severed all links with the Estates-General that had preceded it, incorporating or ejecting all the members of the First and Second Estates. The democratic constitution adopted the previous year was reformed entirely: democracy remained the central pillar of the constitution, although a quiet provision for the suspension of elections "in times of emergency" would cause troubles in years to come. In addition, the English-born radical Thomas Paine co-authored his "Declaration of Human Rights"[3] which would be the French constitution's answer to the English Bill of Rights. The Declaration embodied the rights to representation, to be tried by a jury of peers, and to freedom of worship.

At the same time, Jacobin thinkers were devising new ways of measuring the world, known as the Rational System.[4] Decimalisation was applied to measurements of length, weight, even time. A new calendar with purely descriptive titles of months was implemented. This is illustrative of another feature of the Revolution: while initially there was some identification with the Athenian democracy of the ancient world and therefore other classical culture, this was swiftly rejected by mainstream Jacobin opinion as characteristic of the aristocratic culture they sought to abolish.[5]

The NLA rejected a presidential system like that of the United Provinces, which was otherwise regarded as the only halfway pure republican influence in the world, with the Dutch, Genoese and Venetians being merely merchant oligarchies. The French people remained wary of concentrating all power in one man after their experiences with Bourbon absolutism. What emerged was closer to the British parliamentary system but perhaps also showed some influence from Rome, despite the supposed rejection of classicism. A three-man Consulate was elected by the NLA, which would collectively possess presidential powers but all three members must agree in order for decisions to take place. This was widely referred to as the Triumvirate in the English-speaking world.

Although the Consulate was intended to moderate and provide checks and balances on power, in practice the large radical Jacobin majority meant that Robespierre was able to manipulate the NLA into electing those of his choice: himself, of course, plus Hébert and Jean Marat. Other radical Jacobins remained in positions of power, such as Georges Danton and the then relatively obscure Jean de Lisieux. Moderate voices were shouted down. A Revolutionary Tribunal was established to try 'enemies of the revolution', a category which seemed to swell day by day in an attempt to implement Robespierre's "clean break" - and his paranoia at the revolutionary genie turning against him.

At the same time, voices in the NLA who supported Paine's Human Rights advocated that a more humane means of execution be devised, arguing that capital punishment should be seen mainly as a means of removing criminals from society rather than actually inflicting pain. Accordingly, breaking on the wheel and execution by axe and sword were both abolished. The invention of "Le Chirurgien" has never been accurately credited to any one man, although it clearly showed influence from existing 'humane gibbets' such as the Scottish Maiden. While similar devices had existed for a long time, they had never been used so extensively before. Le Chirurgien's first patients were minor nobility and royal ministers who had been unable to flee or convincingly convert to the revolutionary cause. On trumped-up charges, the king's own surgeon, Antoine Louis, was ironically among them.

However, another range of opinion in the NLA argued instead that there should be a "Scientific" method of execution. Hébert approved the creation of the "Chambre Phlogistique" (later “Phlogisticateur”), in which the corruption of the criminal would be visited back unto him by means of phlogisticated air. Thus the humanitarian work of Joseph Priestley on the Aerial Economy was turned to darkness, and the Revolution forced Antoine Lavoisier and his assistants to build the machine. It took the form of a large glass room, like a bottle, entirely airtight. Large enough for a human to stand inside. And then a powerful air-pump could be applied to remove all the air, or to be less "seventeenth-century", burning glasses would be directed on the Chambre. They could be used either to attempt to ignite the clothes of the victim, or merely to burn fuels placed inside, creating phlogiston with no need for a naked flame. Thus the hands-off means of execution was created, in which the sun itself made the killing blow instead of any human.

The first "criminal" to be subject to the Chambre was Citoyen Louis Capet, as the revolutionaries mockingly titled their former King. Louis XVI's quiet defence, self-delivered, remained a rallying cry to French Royalists ever afterwards. In its most momentous exchange, the fiery Danton accused "Capet" of treason against the state, and Louis simply quoted his great-great-grandfather in response: "I am the state."

It made no difference, of course. Louis XVI was led out to the first Chambre, in Paris' Place du Louis XV, now renamed Place de la Révolution. In a grim irony, the Chambre stood on a stage not far from where nobles and bourgeoisie had once watched convicted criminals being dismembered alive. The Revolutionaries were fortunate in that the 15th of May was a hot, sunny day. "Citoyen Capet" gave his last words, clearly inspired by those of Charles Stuart one and a half centuries earlier, at a time when the last Stuart heir would soon go to a Chambre himself, as a Catholic cardinal. "Remember this day," he said. "One day, not too long from now, you will look back on the darkest and hardest days of my reign with envy."

Prophetic words, but they made no impression on a crowd that was baying for blood. "Capet" was sealed inside the Chambre and the great burning glasses were directed against the sawdust piled on the floor of the glass room. The sun set the dust alight and smoke began to rise. Unlike later victims, "Capet" did not try to beat out the flames or otherwise prolong his death. Ten agonising minutes later, he succumbed to asphyxiation from the phlogisticated air.

And as the crowd cheered, the Chambre was opened, the smoke billowed out over the Place, and the glasses began to burn the corpse also, in its simple prisoner's garments. Royalists have claimed ever since that a white dove rose with that smoke, taking the king's blameless soul to heaven where he would look down on what became of his nation, and wept.

That night, Antoine Lavoisier took his own life, swallowing a fatal dose of an arsenic compound he was studying. But the Revolutionaries had enough clever artisans to duplicate the design now it had been built once.

The blades of the Chiurgiens hissed and the Chambres burned, and war rumbled on the horizon.







[1] i.e. roughly equivalent to Marianne, but a more martial and populist figure.

[2] More or less like OTL's Girondist faction but they're not so associated with the deputies of one region, hence the alternative name.

[3] The title is more influenced by French usage in TTL as it's more aimed at the French than at the English. This also sounds more modernistic of course.

[4] This is a bit like the OTL metric system, but is combined with other initiatives such as the republican calendar - it's more organised top-down than OTL and is seen as an all-or-nothing affair.

[5] Major difference to the OTL revolution, perhaps indicating the more continuing populist input by Le Diamant's supporters.




Part #21: L'Étrangerie

From - "Foreign Reactions to the Jacobin Revolution" (Dr Jacques Desaix, Université de Toulon) :

The Revolution in France can always only be truly understood in a wider European, even global, context. In the most obvious instance, the Revolution took much of its inspiration from other foreign republics derived partially from Enlightenment principles, such as Paoli's Corsica and the United Provinces. Both of these had had French troops serving against them at some point, and it is unsurprising that ideas were brought back to France. However, most writers focus on the intellectuals among those troops, primarily the officers, who wrote those ideas down and went on to organise the Armée de la République. While their influence is unchallenged, we cannot ignore the enlisted soldiers, either - had they not been exposed to an actual Enlightenment republic while serving in Corsica and South America, it is unlikely that there would have been such support for the Revolution in the Royal Army.

The Navy had always been less keen - after all, the French Navy's conduct in the Second Platinean War had firstly been at sea, away from the South American revolutionaries, and secondly the Navy had enjoyed several victories over the British under de Grasse and Picquet de la Motte. Unlike the Royal Army, humiliated by the surrender on the River Plate to U.P. and British forces, then, the Navy had little reason to resent the ancien régime and what it stood for. The Navy also had more obvious aristocrats in positions of power. This would have important consequences a little later on, but for now, let us return to the foreign reactions to the Revolution.

At first, perhaps unsurprisingly, the import of the Revolution was not completely understood in other European countries and Britain. The British in particular tended to view the Revolution as a logical consequence of the failure of Bourbon absolutism, and according to the Whig interpretation of history, France would now slide towards a constitutional monarchy of the British model. Indeed, British opposition to the Revolution in its earliest form was simply an alarmed national chauvinism that the French might acquire the same 'state of perfect government' as Britain was thought to enjoy under the 1688 settlement, with a comparable boost in military fortunes. In particular, Britain's large Huguenot-descended population wondered if the Revolution, with its attacks on Catholicism, would finally begin using the resource of French Protestants rather than condemning them. The quite different character of the Revolution would not become apparent to the British until mid-1795.

Spain, which accepted Louis the Dauphin into asylum after the execution of the French royal family, initially viewed the Revolution as just another peasant revolt. Spain herself had suffered similar outpourings of the popular will, mainly rooted in francophobia, against the attempts by her own Bourbon kings to introduce reforms or fashions perceived as French. Given that the French Revolution incorporated a certain element of ultra-Linnaean xenophobia and Racist nationalism, this was perhaps an understandable assumption. The Spanish government, led by Floridablanca (who had continued to serve under Charles IV's successor Philip VI[1]) believed the revolutionaries to be absent an ideology and that the "revolt" would soon be crushed. Floridablanca publicly condemned the violence; as a great supporter of liberal ideas himself, he argued that the Revolutionaries had squandered their capital and missed the chance for a stable constitutional monarchy by reverting to barbarism. In this, the official Spanish response was ironically not unlike the British, though approached from the other direction.

Austria was the greatest source of opposition to the Revolution from the start. This opposition stemmed from many roots: Ferdinand IV[2] ruled over a massive, mutli-ethnic empire and Linnaean Racist nationalism of the type growing in France could only undermine that; Marie-Antoinette, the Dauphin's consort, was Ferdinand IV's aunt Maria Antonia of Austria; and the Revolution's nationalisation of and attacks on the Catholic Church also sent shockwaves throughout the Holy Roman Empire. Great swathes of land were still under ecclesiastical authority, and the French idea of the Church becoming subordinate to the State would lead to chaos if it spread to the Empire, with every prince and duke and landgrave squabbling to carve up those Church lands. In summary, it was obvious from the start that it was in Austrian interests to oppose the Jacobin Revolution at every turn.

Speculative romantics[3] have suggested that, had Louis XVI called for Austrian military assistance at an earlier stage, the Revolution could have been crushed - though doubtless the resentment of a king kept in power by foreign forces would have continued to simmer. In any case the question is academic: insulated from current affairs by his entourage of hommes d'oui and the Palais de Versailles, Louis had been unaware of the scale of the situation until it was too late. Thus Ferdinand IV, though gathering an army, was unable to act until a suitable casus belli - the death by phlogistication of Marie-Antoinette on August 12th 1795. Then, an imperial proclamation was issued 'in support of the rightful King of France' - Austrian refusal to recognise the Revolutionary government meant that no declaration of war could be legally possible - and Austrian troops began to move into France from Baden and the Duchy of Flanders, first crossing the Rubicon (as latter historians would put it) on the 3rd of September.

Further abroad the French Revolution as yet had little effect. Russia would not hear of the full import of the Revolution until the end of that year, although by then it would lend a distinctive character to the Russian Civil War, already rumbling on the horizon as the aged Peter III, having survived innumerable assassination attempts, finally fell into a terminal decline.

Just as the UPSA had inspired the Jacobins, so the reverse now took place, with Jacobin ideas driving more radical notions in the UPSA. Egalitarian notions, which had originally mainly focused on equality between peninsulares and criollos, now began to spread to questioning the basis of the blood caste system as a whole. One import of much broader character was an increase in calls for the abolition of the slave trade and slavery itself, everywhere from the UPSA to the Empire of North America to Portugal to Britain. In practice, though, this probably harmed the abolitionist cause in the long run - as the greater excesses of the Revolutionaries became known, it was easy for those with vested interests in the slave trade to tar their opponents with the brush of Jacobinism.

And what of France herself? As the Jacobin-dominated NLA meeting in the old Palais de Tuileries continued to make ever more radical reforms and changes, these spread out across France in waves. Before people in Lyon or Bordeaux had even heard of Le Diamant's death, Louis XVI had gone to the chambre phlogistique, and similar situations prevailed in this age before rapid communication. It could have so easily slipped into chaos, and yet in an ultimate irony, the Jacobins were assisted by the very Bourbon absolutism they had overthrown. The centralisation of the French state, proceeding in several stages since the end of the Hundred Years' War and most prominently under Louis XIV, had focused power in Paris as much as the person of the king. Thus, what came out of Paris was generally accepted, no matter how shrill its tone. The exception was in those provinces which retained feudal privileges of autonomy, had held onto them stubbornly throughout centuries of centralisation, and weren't about to let go of them now. Brittany would be the exemplar, yet it would not become apparent for some time to come.

Realising the import of the Austrian invasion (together with some Spanish inroads, possibly aimed at trying to reclaim Navarre with the tacit consent of the Dauphin), the NLA immediately shifted to a war footing. The Consulate understood that an external war would give them carte blanche to push through further reforms and it would provide a rallying call for the French people. Though the Jacobins were still busy purging or attainting aristocrats from the Royal Army, vast numbers of Sans-Culottes (the so-called Légion du Diamant) volunteered as recruits. Thus the character of the Revolutionary Army, of overwhelming numbers but of poorly trained soldiers, came to pass.

Initially the old royal regimental flags were simply turned upside down. However, realising that the men needed a truly Revolutionary symbol to fight for (and it giving him an excuse for another attack on the symbols of the Church, as the old flags bore white crosses), Hébert designed a new series of regimental flags, based on squares of white cloth that were dyed reddish-brown. The legend was that the 'dye' was in fact the blood of executed nobles from the chirurgien and/or the blood of the martyrs before the Bastille, although historians have continued to debate whether this was really the case. The new flags bore simple designs, usually either one or more inverted fleur-de-lys to symbolise the downfall of the ancien régime, or else rerpresentations of Le Diamant or L'Épurateur. They also always bore words, usually illegible in battle, which spelled out Revolutionary slogans. Finally, a new finial, based on a representation of a Phrygian cap in bronze, was added.

The new colours were 'blessed' by NLA vote, and the Revolutionary armies marched forth to meet the Austrians for the first time. They wore the same uniform that L'Épurateur had 'created', albeit for the moment somewhat haphazardly adopted: the same blue and white uniforms as their Royal predecessors, but with all the white parts dyed red, and their shakoes replaced with a standardised Phrygian cap. They bore the white cockade of the Bourbons also dyed revolutionary red. It was not surprising that they soon received the nickname of Les bleus et les rouges (which became a nostalgic phrase after the blue parts of the uniform were changed to black under the later Administration).

Meanwhile, quite a different situation was occuring with the French Navy in Toulon, as a certain British captain named Leo Bone[4] would soon discover...



[1] Unlike OTL Carlos' eldest son Felipe is not mentally retarded and is thus not excluded from the succession (genetic lottery from butterflies). In character he is less assertive than his younger brother Charles, who is King of the Two Sicilies in TTL rather that Charles IV of Spain, and has left Floridablanca and his faction in charge of the government.

[2] Francis II died in infancy and so Leopold II's second son becomes Emperor.

[3] Alternate Historians.

[4] Recall, an anglicised version of Napoleone Buonaparte.

Part #22: The Making of a Legend

"...always be wary of telling lies, especially when they turn out to be the truth."

- Leo Bone, Captain, RN​

From - "The Man With Three Names - A Life and Times of Napoleone Buonaparte" (Dr Henri Pelletier, University of Nantes Press, 1962) :

The Toulon incident was at first overlooked in the broader chaos of the dawning wars of the Revolution, but from our perspective, with the benefit of sitting atop more than a century of comfortable distance from these events, it was as important as the Battle of Saint-Quentin or the Flight from Fleurus. It sealed the fate of naval affairs in Revolutionary France, leading to some obvious consequences and some that were anything but.

By the time of October 3rd 1795, when a small Royal Navy force under Captain Leo Bone ventured into the Rade d'Hyeres, several of those northern battles had already been won and lost. News of this filtered very sporadically down to Provence, though, which by now had broken with Paris. Ostensibly this break was due to the Jacobins' perversion of the Revolutionary sentiment, but if there had been any truth to this, in any case the Royalists soon seized power from the Mirabeauists. The bulk of the French Mediterranean fleet - which until the mid 18th century had been an entirely separate force from the blue-water navy - was in harbour at Toulon, and this gave whoever held Toulon a major bargaining chip.

The fleet in question was under the command of the Comte d'Estaing, Jean-Baptiste Charles Henri Hector. While d'Estaing had scored a rather filmish[1] if minor victory over the British at the Battle of Bermuda, during the Second Platinean War, he was an indecisive commander. In particular, at the present the revolution presented a dilemma to him. He had supported the reforms of the Diamant period, but had remained loyal to the Royal Family and was unable to countenance their executions. But, without any orders from above, he could not decide what course to take in this new, ugly era. His best hope was that the Dauphin would return from Spain with new orders.

At the same time, the Jacobins in Paris had heard of the breakaway of Toulon and Robespierre flew into a rage, ordering the raising of another new regiment, and its immediate dispatch to "purge" the city. This was not the wisest choice considering the rumours coming out of Flanders and Picardy of a general Austrian victory, but nonetheless the orders were obeyed. This reflects the centralisation of power in the Consulate even by this early stage, in which the NLA were dragged along. It was also the first use of conscription in the Revolutionary army, which had previously relied on the existing large Royalist armies (suitably 'purified') augmented by the volunteers of the Legion du Diamant.

Unsurprisingly, the resulting force was less than professional, but as usual with Revolutionary armies in this period, its overwhelming numbers were a quality of their own kind. The army was under the command of the attainted Comte de Custine, Adam Philippe, who had escaped the chirurgien or chambre phlogistique because Robespierre had taken a liking to him. More importantly, unlike the vast majority of the overpromoted Revolutionary generals at this point, Custine had genuine military experience, having served in the Platinean conflict. It was there, after Noailles' army had surrendered to the Platineans, that Custine had first become familiar with the revolutionary ideals that would soon sweep over his own country.

Thus, in Custine the army had a competent commander, but in practice his task was not unakin to herding cats. The vast number of Sans-Culotte volunteers and the new conscripts simply overwhelmed the existing logistical system, with the result that the army turned to "foraging" across the countryside - la maraude, as it was later infamously called. Custine's army was scarcely unique in this, and the resulting resentment by the French peasantry only served to justify Robespierre's paranoia that 'there is an enemy of the Revolution behind every door!'

The army reached Toulon on September 17th and Custine called a truce, meeting with d'Estaing on his flagship Améthyste. Custine defended the latest depradations of the Consulate and argued that d'Estaing's oaths were to France, not the royal family, and that France now needed his ships to safeguard the ideals of the Revolution.

If Custine had got there a week earlier, it is quite likely that the dithering d'Estaing would have been persuaded, but by now he had become emotionally invested in the defences of Toulon that he and the few royal officers in the town had been putting together. The town was quite a defensible position from the land, providing that the besieged town could be resupplied by sea. D'Estaing did just that, sending Custine back to his army with all the chivalry as though he were an enemy general which, d'Estaing slowly becan to realise, was in fact the case.

D'Estaing ordered that elements of the fleet make a voyage to Corsica and return with powder, shot, food and preferably some of the troops still stationed there. Those ships reappeared on the 1st of October, or some of them did: news of the Revolution was spreading throughout the lower decks, and some crews had successfully risen up in mutiny. D'Estaing was appalled to learn that some of his frigates had apparently taken up 'democratic piracy', while others had simply beached their vessels on Corsica and fled there. This is probably the means by which the news of the Revolution in turn spread to Corsica so rapidly.

While d'Estaing's gamble did little to relieve the Siege of Toulon, it did serve to intrigue a British captain named Leo Bone and his small force of HMS Diamond and two smaller frigates. Since being assigned to the Mediterranean, Bone had already unofficially visited Corsica several times, curious about the land of his birth he barely remembered. He justified these to the Board of the Admiralty as 'exploratory operations'.[2]

While there under an alias, he learned of d'Estaing's ships being present and even witnessed a shootout in Aiacciu between the officers and men of one of those ships, as Revolutionary sentiment grew too strong. Bone had of course heard of the Revolution by this point, but as with practically all Britons his information was sketchy and incomplete. Intrigued, he bought drinks for one of the less wounded Revolutionary crewmen and got a clearer account (at least, at first). He then supplemented this with an account from one of the officers of another ship, over a game of Vingt-et-un in an inn in Bastia.

By the time the remaining ships of d'Estaing returned, Bone had as clear a picture of the Revolution as anyone in Toulon, and this gave him an idea. An audacious, unimaginably brash idea, but one that suited the highly ambitious captain down to the ground. His father Charles Bone had passed on some of his political ideas, and the younger Bone wondered whether, on the back of triumphs at sea, he could enter Parliament and eventually become Prime Minister. The minister who finally presided over the passing of Catholic emancipation...that would be the way to make Charles proud.

So it was on 3rd October that Bone's trio of ships shadowed d'Estaing's back into the Rade d'Hyeres. By this point d'Estaing was despairing and barely acknowledged the foreign, possibly hostile ships. Custine's army had begun to overwhelm the fewer and scarcely more disciplined defenders of Toulon. However, the heart of the city was still held by the Royalists with resupply by d'Estaing's ships. Realising this, Custine found several good sites for his heavy artillery and, using the new Cugnot-wagons, towed them into position.

Bone claimed in later accounts to be unflustered by the guns apparently moving by themselves, though his subordinates at the time recorded that he was anything but. Many have ascribed his later opposition to steam power to the shock of this incident. In any case, slowly but steadily the guns rose to the summits of the hills and ridges that Custine and his artillery commander had chosen. Briefly they were hidden by clouds of steam, but then the Cugnot-wagons were dampened and the guns rotated. Then Custine spelt out a simple message on the ridge of l'Evescat in white shirts held down by stones, visible to everyone on the French ships who could read: SURRENDER OR DIE.

Not a minute later, the first guns began to fire, tearing through the ships at close range and wreaking horrible casualties. Custine had sited his guns well and d'Estaing's attempt to silence the guns by counterbattery fire failed. Soon there were more mutinies on nearby ships, with revolutionary crewmen hastily raising the red flag in a bid to escape. Other ships began to retreat and flee, abandoning Toulon. And, inevitably, d'Estaing was indecisive.

That indecision could have killed him, and perhaps France, but for the audacity of Leo Bone. He himself spoke fair French, his father having told him to 'know the enemy' and, inevitably in the national mix that was the average Royal Navy crew, he had several more fluent speakers. Bone seized the day and brought a boat out to the Améthyste, even while Custine's roundshot was splashing huge waterspouts up all around him. D'Estaing was startled out of his funk by the appearance of this rowing boat, flying a flag of truce, calmly appearing amid the destruction. He quickly received the short but energetic British captain, who told him in schoolboy French that the Dauphin had made a treaty on behalf of 'true France' with the British, and that the loyal French forces here were to retreat to a safe British port and await further orders.

D'Estaing must have realised that Bone's supposed "envoys from the Dauphin" (his French-speaking crewmen) were anything but, but at this stage he was willing to cling to any straw. Quickly, essentially just repeating what Bone 'advised' him to do, he ordered that the remaining ships were to rescue as many royalist fighters from Toulon as possible and then follow the Diamond into retreat. The coincidental name of the British ship resonated throughout the French crews, and soon there was the rumour that the Dauphin had accepted Le Diamant's reforms but continued to oppose the Consulate. This largely prevented any further mutinies. Two more ships were lost while evacuating men from Toulon - not least because women and civilians tried to pile on board - but a significant number of royalist troops, irregulars and ammunition were saved.

As the 3rd of October 1795 drew to a close, the remains of the Toulon Fleet followed HMS Diamond to Malta, even as the Revolutionary army of Custine finally fell upon the city as a whole and subjected it to what became a legendary night of rape and pillage. Custine's own attempts to hold back his disorganised army were ineffectual.

When news of the incident got back to Paris, some deputies wanted Custine's head, but Robespierre defended him once more. A large part of the fleet had been destroyed or captured, after all, and more importantly in Robespierre's estimation, Toulon had certainly been 'purified'.

Current historians put the figures at eight ships destroyed by Custine's artillery, six lost to mutiny between Corsica and Toulon (some of whom became pirates), eleven captured by the Revolutionaries...but twenty-two, including four first-rate ships of the line, were brought out of Toulon and followed Bone to the promised land.

But there was an unpleasant surprise for Leo Bone when they reached Malta. He had planned to keep up his audacious subterfuge and con d'Estaing into turning his ships over to the Royal Navy a bit at a time, resulting in the most bloodless addition to the fleet by capture in history. But now, he was learning, his lie had become the truth...



[1]Cinematic.

[2]18th/early 19th century euphemism for spying.




Part #23: History Repeats Itself

“Can it truly be conceived that this nation would take up arms against this new beacon of liberty, born of the tongue which gave us, via the bequest of de Montfort, our parlement?”

“I understand that the honourable gentleman has apparently failed to understand that the present unpleasantness in France has been an undermining of the aforesaid parlements. We should not seek to compare the acts of barbarism in the south to our own revolution, whereby we received our perfect Constitution by approval of the sitting Parliament. We should not imply any continuity between the lawful Estates of the King of France and this self-appointed ministry of murder.”

– Charles James Fox and Edmund Burke, debate in the British House of Commons on ‘Response to the Revolution in France’, July 30th 1795

*

From – “The Jacobin Wars” by E.G. Christie (Hetherington Publishing House, 1926)

The response of Great Britain and her sister nations to the Jacobin Revolution was always confused and divided, even from the start. The political landscape had by this point settled into a more or less stable pattern compared to the unrest of the mid-eighteenth century. The Parliament elected in 1791 reflected this. Political parties at the time were far more fluxional and notional than nowadays, but broad divisions can be discerned.

Officially, the party labels remained Whig and Tory, though the relevance of those names had ceased with the decisive final defeat of the Jacobites in the aftermath of the War of the British Succession. Only a small rump of declared Tories remained in Parliament, largely from Scottish constituencies. The vast majority of MPs claimed to be Whigs of some stripe or another, but it is a mistake to assume any kind of unity from this. Labels overlapped, but a continuity can be traced from the ministry of Pitt[1] (1758-1766) and the first Rockingham ministry (1766-1782) through to the government party of 1795, who were most commonly termed Liberal Whigs (or simply Liberals). Although competent and reasonably popular, Rockingham had been forced to resign in 1782 due to the Africa Bubble scandal[2]. His government had, however, survived almost intact and the inoffensive Duke of Portland[3] was appointed titular Prime Minister[4] while Edmund Burke, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, became the real power behind the throne.

The largest opposition party was that of Charles James Fox, usually referred to as the Radical Whigs or simply Radicals (although there were also unaffiliated, more extreme groups describing themselves as Radicals, who had no Parliamentary representation). The Radicals advocated the abolition of the slave trade, Catholic relief and Parliamentary reform; the third course was by far the most popular among other groups in Parliament and the general public. Prior to the Jacobin Revolution, the Radicals had pointed to the new system of parliament in the Empire of North America as a model for reform in Great Britain, as well as expressing admiration for the republican Cortes Nacionales of the UPSA. However, Fox’s support for the Jacobins typically broke any link in the public imagination between the Radicals and the Americans, who were later more identified with the Liberal Whigs of the government.

As well as these broad divisions, there was also the inevitable distinction between the Court and Country parties, the latter being MPs from rural constituencies and Lords from rural estate who would typically vote against any given ministry unless placated, usually by bribery. MPs elected from rotten boroughs were common, even among the Radicals who advocated the abolition of such boroughs. This perceived hypocrisy did nothing to help their cause.

The Revolutionary sentiment in France initially drew broad approval from the Parliament of Great Britain (in that of Ireland, as we shall see later, the situation was somewhat more complex). As news of Revolutionary atrocities filtered down, however, Parliamentary support fell away until only the core of Foxite Radicals was left, continuing to argue that any unfortunate incidents in Republican France were excusable compared to the centuries of absolutist repression that had precipitated them.

The Liberal government, however, turned against the Revolution. Edmund Burke drew a sharp line between the Whiggish conception of the growth of liberty across history and the Jacobins’ violent revolutions. He also rejected comparisons of republican France with republican South America, arguing that while both were born of war, the UPSA had never turned on its own people with such viciousness, not even those who had been Spanish loyalists.

Nonetheless, even the government was divided on the question of what the response of the Department for Foreign Affairs should be. The situation was not without precedent: when England had briefly become a republic in the previous century, several European powers had continued to recognise the Kingdom of England, even when it was reduced to merely the Isles of Scilly. Conservative Whigs and most Tories argued that Britain should recognise the Dauphin as King Louis XVII and that any French government formed without his approval should be considered illegal and to have no authority. Burke was leaning towards this view and it was likely that such an act would have been passed even in the absence of provocation from Republican France. In practice, however, the decision was made for him.

The Revolution had been accompanied by a general campaign of anti-foreigner violence on the part of the mob. This has been common to most proletarian revolutions throughout history (for example, the Peasants’ Revolt in England in 1381 was accompanied by attacks on Flemish weavers in London) but the Jacobin Revolution was the first to place such violence within a coherent ideological framework. This was prior to the publishing of de Lisieux’s seminal work Les Races, however, and thus cannot be understood through the usual prism which modern commentators associate with the Linnaean-Racialism of Revolutionary France. This is however beside the point. As well as attacks on foreign-born soldiers and merchants, an admixture of the anti-establishment tone of the Revolution meant that foreign dignitaries were not spared. Most ambassadors to France managed to escape the tides of violence, having seen what was coming, but the rose-tinted vision of the Revolution early on in the British Parliament had evidently spread to its representatives in Paris, and it was not until the phlogistication of Louis XVI that the British and American ambassadors attempted to leave.

(It should be noted at this juncture the remarkable nature of the presence of an American ambassador. This was a notion that had only arisen a few years previously, in 1790, as one of the earliest acts of the Parliament of North America. It had been a point of argument by the autonomist and radical Constitutional Party there that America should have equal representation overseas. In practice, both the North American and British parliaments watered down the proposals sufficiently that only those nations with colonies bordering North America were given American representatives – primarily France and Spain – and that these were officially referred to merely as consuls, although in practice they were commonly termed ambassadors. The American ‘ambassador’ in Paris at the time was Thomas Jefferson, a prominent member of the Constitutional Party whose appointment there had largely been a way that Lord Hamilton’s[5] moderate ministry could keep this brilliant orator safely a long way away. At the time there was debate, as part of the Irish parliamentary reform argument, that the Kingdom of Ireland should also appoint its own ambassadors, and it is interesting to speculate how different the Parliament of Ireland’s response might have been if a hypothetical ambassador had been present alongside Frederick Grenville and Thomas Jefferson).

It remains a sore point of debate even today whether the attack on Grenville and Jefferson was officially directed by any order from the NLA or whether it was a simple act of mob violence. In any case, even if the records had survived the de Lisieux era, it is not a distinction that is readily made. By this stage, and particularly later on, fear of the Consulate was such that any confident con man could gain anything he wanted by claiming authority from Robespierre. The new and frequently contradictory pronouncements coming out of the Tuileries daily only served to reinforce such an idea. In the end it is perhaps enough that the NLA did not denounce the attacks on the ambassadors, or even acknowledge them.

Grenville escaped with a severe bullet wound to his right arm, forcing its amputation while he lay in a fever, hiding out in Calais. However, he survived to give a moving if chilling testimony of events to the British Parliament in September. Jefferson was not so lucky: his own personal sympathies to the Revolutionary sentiment meant nothing to the mob, and his body was never found. When Thomas Paine attacked this monstrous act in the NLA, he was removed by the Consulate, imprisoned and then chirurgiend early in the following year. The Reign of Terror had begun in earnest.

This, accompanied by reports of several more minor attacks on British and American sailors in French ports fallen to the Revolutionaries, served to turn most of Parliamentary and public opinion in Great Britain against the Revolution. By mid-August the conservative option had won out, and Parliament officially recognised King Louis XVII and declared the Consulate and NLA illegal. On September 2nd, 1795, the British Parliament voted 385 to 164 in favour of a declaration of war on the Republic of the French People of the Latin Race—only just beating the NLA’s own declaration. By the time the news reached America in November, the story had if anything grown to more mythic proportions, and the Parliament of North America voted almost unanimously in favour of the war.

It would not be for many more months that the news reached other potential theatres, some of which would become highly important: India, the West Indies and La Perouse. But for the Consulate and the people of Republican France, Britain remained a distant noise. Though Spanish troops moved into Navarre, it was Austria that was the greatest threat to the Republic, and even now the ramshackle Revolutionary armies were moving to face the forces of Emperor Ferdinand IV…






[1]William Pitt the Elder; in TTL there is no William Pitt the Younger, so ‘Pitt’ is an unambiguous term for this writer.

[2]In OTL the Royal Africa Company (aka the African Company and the Royal African Company) was a chartered company that traded with West Africa, mainly in slaves, and repeatedly went bankrupt and had to be reformed. In TTL rather than several minor crashes and reforms, the Company’s stock inflated alarmingly in 1781 on rumours of a profitable reform and the resulting losses were comparable to the South Sea Bubble of sixty years before. The Marquess of Rockingham, as Prime Minister, was the effective scapegoat for the recriminations following this and was forced to resign. The Company itself was rebuilt from the groundwork up and turned over to two former BEIC directors, Arthur Filling and Thomas Space, of which more q.v.

[3] William Cavendish-Bentinck, 3rd Duke of Portland.

[4]At this point the title Prime Minister is still unofficial and largely mocking. Portland’s official title was First Lord of the Treasury. Typically in this era those Prime Ministers with real power also held the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer, effectively making them Lord High Treasurer; the fact that Portland did not is a sign that he was only the titular head of the government.

[5]Alexander Hamilton was made First Baron Hamilton by George III in 1785 during his tenure as Governor of the then-Province of New York, and by 1795 had become Lord President of the Imperial American Privy Council, the approximate equivalent post of Prime Minister in the Empire.


Part #24: A Revolutionary War

Wars are always good for science, and science is always good for wars.

- John Farman (OTL)​

*

From – “A Societist Study of Revolutions, Volume III” by Juan Lopez (1959, Instituto Sanchez; English translation)

Thinkers throughout the world, both Societist and nationalistically blinded, have debated the import of the Revolution in France almost since the day Le Diamant was killed. One particular topic of interest is the spread of the revolution, and what consequences the character of the revolution had on that spread.

It is unsurprising that it was the immediate neighbours of what was then only vaguely considered “France” who were first to experience Revolutionary ideals. The notions of the revolution spread by a variety of means, and depending on whether the speaker was a true believer or a person fleeing the perceived oppression of the revolution, would necessarily determine the character of the revolution envisaged by those who listened.

Furthermore, it is impossible to ignore, however much we might want to, the effects of the vile poison of Linnaean Racialism within the Revolution, here taking the form of Panlatinism. This variant, unlike many others, is now universally condemned even within the nationalistically blinded geographic regions. The Panlatinist character of the Revolution – or perhaps simply Latinist is a more accurate term in its early days, before the revolutionaries’ twisted notion of unionism took hold – further determined which states would be primarily exposed to revolutionary ideas.

Notably the Italies, Spain and Portugal were strongly evangelised to in the early days of the Revolution. The latter two regions of considered statehood easily cracked down on the scattered outbreaks of revolution within their own borders, aided by the fact that the strongly anti-Catholic character of the revolution turned large portions of their own devout populations against it. The Italies arguably had the same advantage but their own regions of considered statehood were too small and ineffective to present such a strong response. Thus, we may see the vindication of two Societist teachings: that the larger and more unified the state, the stronger it is – to infinity; and that an avowedly atheist universal movement will indeed successfully unite the world, but only against itself.

These teachings are arguably further supported by the eventual fates of the small republics in the Italies, notably the Latin Republic of Liguria (formerly Genoa) and the Latin Republic of Lucca (formerly Tuscany, after forcing Grand Duke Charles[1] to flee into exile). However, that is not a matter for this early history.

At this point we should consider the views of the Noveltist school of Reactionary thought among the Tory interpretation of history, no matter how repugnant we may find them for other reasons. The Noveltists argue from the results of the ‘revolutionary halo’, as they term it, that ultimately what many of the people of France and other revolutionary areas wanted was a sense of newness, toppling the old order, rather than any specific change.

The Noveltist writer Sir George Smith-Stanley pointed out that this may explain some of the otherwise inexplicable and nihilistic aspects of the revolution, changing not only those aspects of society which were objectively in need of reform (such as royal France using at least six different systems of measurement), but also petty and unimportant items simply for the sake of change. Smith-Stanley[2] argues that the fossilised Italies, like France itself, were ripe for the spirit of this revolution. Flanders, by contrast, had had a major change in its constitution and rule only recently and that this, together with the fact that Charles Theodore I was reasonably popular[3], explains why the revolution never got very far in Flanders. The Prince-Bishopric of Liège, however, saw what turned out to be a strategically important outbreak of revolution after the initial indecisive battles of late 1795, when revolutionary ideas had had a chance to leak in from France. The fact that Liège was francophone must also be considered.

Of course, we need not consider the alarming conclusions that Noveltist writers draw from their arguments, and the lavishing praise they and their Whig counterparts place upon the British parliamentary system as supposedly the most resistant to revolution.

Ultimately, however, the spread of the revolution cannot be fully understood, alas, by considering the vulgar results of the concomitant military action…

*

From – “Revolutionary Ideas in Warfare” by Peter William Courtenay, 4th Baron Congleton (Vandalia-shire, Virginia), 1925

While it should be obvious to any gentleman, I am forced to issue the disclaimer that an admiration for any Revolutionary idea in warfare does, clearly, not constitute an endorsement or admiration for Revolutionary ideas in general.



The Flemish War (1795-7) was indecisive in its early stages, but is notable for the use of several revolutionary tactics and weapons by the then-ramshackle French Republican Army. It can be argued that it was these novelties that allowed the French to hold off the more disciplined Austrians for long enough to ensure the eventual reorganisation of the army into a more effective fighting force.

The Austrian Army of Flanders was under the command of General Johannes Mozart[4], who understood that he was fighting an idea and that decisive tactical victories, to sap enemy morale, would be more important than attempting to destroy altogether the vast armies he was facing. This also meant it was rather difficult to predict the fighting strength of any given French force, as whether they were veterans or new recruits was often hard to discern until they were in combat. The new recruits, particularly the Legion du Diamant, were notoriously erratic and tended to fight quite acceptably when morale was high but otherwise were prone to desertion when they saw what war was truly like. Mozart’s strategy exploited this.

The situation in Lorraine was quite different, in which Austrian troops were welcomed as liberators by the population. Much like the people of Brittany and Navarre, the Lorrainers – whose former ducal lands had been added to the French crown only a few years before – didn’t like the sound of the rhetoric coming out of Paris, about one state, one racially and linguistically French state. However, the Lorraine front was relatively unimportant for the war as a whole and was fought almost exclusively with conventional methods. While the defence of the Col de Saverne by Colonel Ney may have been undoubtedly filmish[5] its tactics and weaponry were not revolutionary.

The French generals in the Flanders theatre were a motley crew of former royal officers and those who had risen to the top under the revolutionary reforms. Some of the latter were exceptional soldiers, while the vast majority were anything but. The most famous of the exceptional soldiers was Pierre Boulanger, who requires no introduction. It was Boulanger who was the first to realise the value of the revolutionary weapons already within the army’s arsenal, and to halt Mozart’s slow and steady advance through northern France.

Most French generals were sceptical of the Cugnot-wagon steam tractors that their artillery had been equipped with, back at the tail end of the royalist era. Many simply used them as they would horses, while complaining that finding coal was much more difficult than allowing horses to forage. Boulanger quickly saw, however, that the wagons could be started and stopped more rapidly than horses could be unlimbered and hitched up again to field pieces. The Cugnot-wagons could also typically tow pieces that would have required a full team of horses, although they needed time to build up a sufficient head of steam. Finally, the Cugnot-wagons were almost silent, save for the occasional whistle of escaping steam. Boulanger used all of these to his advantage at the decisive Battle of Lille (actually taking place some distance from the city).

Boulanger, along with other French generals, swiftly saw that the best thing to do with a large number of nervous but willing recruits was to make them attack in column. This exploited the fact that few needed to have good performance with a musket, as only those around the outside could actually fire, and the compact mass of men meant that none could flee in the heat of battle. Furthermore, it lent courage to them. It was not an attack of the column itself, but the psychological power of the vast mass of men heading towards the thin enemy lines, that lent the formation its usefulness. Furthermore, after a column had driven back the enemy a few times, its men had gained sufficiently in courage and morale that they could be trusted to deploy in line.

A column could be smashed easily enough by either enemy artillery or sufficiently well-trained and disciplined troops fighting in line. After a few reverses, Mozart was able to use these tactics to destroy most of a French army at Laon. Those Sans-Culottes who survived the artillery bombardment decided to stage a little revolution, execute their own general, elect a new one from among themselves, and flee. This story has been repeatedly told and exaggerated over the years, notably after being lampooned in several Gillray caricatures.

Boulanger finally met Mozart’s main force at Lille on November 4th, 1795, near the end of the campaigning season. So far, things had gone badly for the French. An attempted attack on the Dutch-staffed forts on the Flemish border had been repulsed, and the Austrians had managed to win three of Mozart’s desired decisive battles, Laon being the crowning glory. Another part of Mozart’s army was besieging nearby Maubeuge, demonstrating that its Vauban-era fortifications were now somewhat outdated, and unless Boulanger won this battle, the town would be forced to surrender.

Understanding the danger of a French relief of Maubeuge, Mozart took the greater part of his army to meet Boulanger’s some way east of Maubeuge, along the course of the Sambre and closer to Lille (hence the name of the battle). The Austrian army, which was in fact slightly numerically inferior to the French force, but had a larger percentage of veterans, encamped in a strong position and blocked Boulanger’s route, forcing him to make the attack.

Boulanger rapidly concocted a plan based on the fact that the battlefield was typically Low-Countries flat, and the Sambre was forded a short distance behind the Austrian lines. Guns placed on the far bank would be able to keep up a withering enfilading fire on the Austrian lines, and if the ford were defended by a force of veterans, it would be very difficult for the Austrians to attack the guns. The problem was that the ford was of course behind the enemy lines. But Boulanger had a way around that…

Both armies encamped for the night, and as was common had sentries out. Attacks at night were not unknown. But before the sun dipped below the horizon, Boulanger’s exploring officers told him that there was a small gap in the Austrian lines. There was no way that a regular artillery team could be sneaked through there, even under cover of darkness – but a Cugnot-wagon team, as quiet as the grave…?

The plan was audaciously risky in retrospect, and we can only wonder whether the then unreliable Cugnot fardiers à vapeur let off whistles of escaping steam. We can only conclude that the Austrian sentries had no notion what these sounds were, never having heard them before on a battlefield, and must have considered them to be the call of a strange bird or somesuch. Nonetheless, by dawn the French guns were assembled on the far bank, the veterans were arrayed on the ford, and the main force of Boulanger’s army attacked in column. Mozart arrayed his own troops in line to meet them, but then Boulanger played his trump card: unlike most French generals at the time, he had successfully scraped together a cavalry force. While his cavalry was undeniably inferior to the Austrians’, it fulfilled its requirement: the Austrian troops, seeing French cavalry about to attack, formed square. The dense formation made them invulnerable to cavalry attack, but sitting ducks for artillery bombardment. Which now commenced.

The battle lasted perhaps three hours, with Mozart soon realising the source of the roundshots murdering his men, and making two unsuccessful attempts to break the French veterans on the ford before giving up. The Austrian troops milled desperately between a line formation to escape the artillery and a square to defend against the French cavalry, with the result that all discipline was lost. Rather than see his army slaughtered, Mozart ordered a withdrawal, with his own cavalry covering the retreat and preventing the French cavalry from attacking. He lost perhaps a fifth of his troops, but knew that the real loss was far worse. The French could relieve Maubeuge, and more importantly they had a legend: a legend of victory.

And Joseph Cugnot himself, who had found himself locked up by the Revolutionaries along with most other scientists and engineers known to have worked for the ancien regime, was suddenly released and ordered to work with a much larger budget…



[1]OTL’s Archduke Charles of Austria and Count of Teschen – recall that all the Hapsburgs moved up one because OTL’s Francis II died in infancy.

[2]In common with most foreigners living in republics, both OTL and ATL, Lopez doesn’t realise that you’re supposed to refer to knights as ‘Sir Firstname’ even in a formal setting.

[3]Recall that the Hapsburgs managed, in TTL, to switch Bavaria for Flanders and Charles Theodore rules Flanders and the Palatinate. He is considerably more popular there than in Bavaria OTL, which he never really wanted to rule.

[4]Inspired by something in one of Boris Akunin’s books, I admit… :rolleyes:

[5]Cinematic.


Part #25: The Baltic Crisis

“Our victory is ultimately assured: though the nationalistically blinded powers may form temporary alliances and coalitions against us, history teaches us that all we have to do is survive, and they will eventually turn on and destroy each other for us.”

– Enrique Salvador Lopez, speech to the Global Assembly, 1957​

*

From – “A History of Scandinavia” by Adolf Ohlmarks:

The revival of Danish power in the late 18th century is a topic much debated among historians, both of the Baltic and elsewhere; but some conclusions may be drawn.

Certainly, a turning point most beloved of those speculative romantics (most often hailing from across the Øresund) who yearn for a less fortunate Denmark, was the death of Crown Prince Frederik, who would have succeeded King Christian VI as Frederik V, in a riding accident in 1743. Frederik was widely considered to be his father in miniature and his death resulted in the quickening of Christian VI’s own demise in 1745. This plunged Denmark into something of a governmental crisis in the middle of the Second War of Supremacy [War of the Austrian Succession], but this was not a great problem, as policy under Christian VI’s capable minister Adam Moltke was to carefully steer Denmark out of European wars. Although Sweden, Prussia and Russia were by that point engaged in war in Poland, Denmark remained in a state of careful armed neutrality.

Christian’s second son, of the same name, could not have been more different. Rejecting his father’s unpopular pietism and conservatism, Christian VII would go down in history as a dynamic and effective, if impulsive, ruler. He shocked the Christiansborg Palace court by summarily dismissing Moltke and several more of his father’s experienced ministers, bringing in his own untested favourites. There was method in his madness, however: he wished to bring about a radical shift in Danish foreign policy, and significant changes in domestic policy – and quite correctly suspected that Moltke would block him at every turn.

As a populist measure, Christian reversed his father’s introduction of adscription, serfdom by any other name. He then reconvened the Danish Diet, which had lain dormant for over a century since absolutism had come into fashion. Most biographers believe that Christian himself was, in fact, a believer in absolutism and he did not bring back the Diet for altruistic purposes. Its powers were severely limited and it was intended mainly as a foil for the powerful Danish aristocracy, which had to be curbed at every step for the King to remain an effective ruler. Poland-Lithuania was a damning example of what happened when this failed.

Christian VII’s other great early move was one which surprised commentators throughout Europe. Since the War of the British Succession and Great Britain’s Prince Frederick successfully retaking his throne from an American base, a new interest in the Americas had been sparked throughout many European courts. This encouraged the existing colonial powers to take more interest in their colonies – fatally in Spain’s case – and those without colonies to consider founding some, for prestige if no other reason. In practice, most of these schemes came to nothing, as the eastern coast of the Americas was by now almost completely settled by the Spanish, British and French, but eyebrows were nonetheless raised when Christian VII decided to sell Denmark’s own colonial possessions.

Denmark and her trading companies retained the profitable trading outposts in India, but the slave depots on the Gold Coast of Africa, along with the Virgin Islands in the West Indies with their plantations, were sold on to the Netherlands for a considerable sum. Christian and his ministers previously considered Courland, which was interested in regaining West Indian possessions after the loss of Tobago, but the somewhat impoverished Duchy was unable to match the Dutch bid. Abolitionists then and now praised Christian for this move, even though it was born purely of pragmatism.

Denmark’s North Atlantic possessions – Greenland, Iceland, and the Faeroes – were sold to Great Britain. Iceland had declined over the past few centuries since its mother country Norway had gone to the Danish crown, for the Icelandic exports of fish and wool were far less valuable to Denmark than they had been to Norway. Danish policy on protectionist trade and absolutism, removing the Icelanders’ cherished right to assembly, had also contributed to this decline. Britain, under King Frederick I and Prime Minister William Pulteney, annexed the Faeroes to the kingdom (being considered part of the Scottish islands) while the status of Iceland and Greenland remained constitutionally unclear for some years.

Iceland was eventually granted the status of a full kingdom, like Ireland and Hanover (the latter not being recognised by any other European state), and its parliament or ‘Thing’ was restored. The Icelandic economy somewhat recovered thanks to the free-trade policies of the British Whig governments, with Icelandic fish particularly being in demand in Ireland, though Iceland had problems with the North American market thanks to New England’s vast fleet of fishing boats. Greenland was the odd one out: under Christian VI it had been re-explored for the first time in an attempt to find the original settlements and convert the natives to Lutheranism. With the decline of Christian VI’s Pietism, this fell in priority and few in Denmark resisted the sale of Greenland to Britain. The British eventually transferred it to the Confederacy of New England, which established a few settlements. It was a Nantucketer explorer, George Folger, who gave the natives their modern name of ‘Enwickers’.[1]

These moves on Christian VII’s part were part of a grander strategy to focus Danish power in Europe and, more specifically, the Baltic. A Russo-Danish alliance against Sweden was his major goal, but this was not realised in Christian’s lifetime. The major problem was that Peter III of Russia was also one of the dukes of Holstein-Gottorp, a traditional Danish enemy and Swedish ally. However, it was apparent to many eyes that the current Prusso-Russian policy of buying Swedish neutrality with land was purely a stopgap measure and would have to be reversed eventually. Christian prepared Denmark to take advantage of that eventuality, building up and modernising a Baltic fleet of both galleys and line ships, while retaining his father’s policy of scrupulous neutrality with mainland European wars.

Christian was also Duke of Oldenburg, though much like his father’s the German state was low down on his list of priorities. Nonetheless, the greater focus on Denmark as a European power naturally meant that Oldenburg made a slightly larger intrusion on royal policy, which would be significant later on.

Christian VII died at the age of sixty-three in 1787, leaving behind a heavily armed state in which challengers to royal authority had been carefully twisted back onto themselves, with the Diet and the aristocracy squabbling among themselves. He had also restored some of the faith of the Danish peasantry in the monarchy, which had slipped under Christian VI’s adscription and Pietism. He was succeeded by his son, Johannes II, breaking the chain of alternating Frederiks and Christians, and named for the last Danish monarch to rule the Union of Kalmar...

*

“My people, before the new century is upon us, I shall make my namesake no more than a forgotten oriental soldier, we shall eclipse all his triumphs!”

– Aleksandr Grigorovich Potemkin, speech in Moscow’s Red Square, February 15th 1796​

*

From – “War on the Steppes” by Henry Abikoff (published by Royal Bostonian House, 1948)

The Russian Civil War was arguably preordained by Emperor Peter III’s decision in 1772 simply to exile his Empress Consort Catherine for masterminding an attempt on his life, rather than executing her. In retrospect this may have seemed a poor idea, but in practice it was unlikely that Peter would have been able to get away with such a deed. At this stage, Catherine was still very popular with the Russian public and it was all Peter dared to execute Grigory Orlov and those Leib Guards implicated in the conspiracy. Later, Catherine’s exile in Yekaterinburg meant that the fickle Muscovites and Petersburgers may have forgotten her, but Peter still did not act. It fit with his decision to release the deposed Emperor Ivan VI from prison, considering that this poor man who had been locked up and isolated since childhood was no threat. In that case, he turned out to be right, but in the other was anything but.

He was fortunate enough to outlive Catherine, who died in 1792, but she had put her twenty years of exile to good use. Catherine brought with her numerous favourites, and other Russian potentates found excuses to travel through the region. Ironically, Peter’s own interest in the colonisation of Siberia, and the Yakutsk-bound missions of Lebedev and Benyovsky, helped disguise the suspiciously increased traffic going eastward from European Russia. Catherine, who remained a powerful presence, took many lovers from among the Russian nobility and plotted a new way to unseat Peter. Several more assassination attempts failed, Peter having replaced the Leib Guards with new forces recruited from Prussia, but none were ever traced back to Catherine.

Catherine’s longest dalliance was with Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin, a Leib Guard who had escaped Peter’s purge and had been in on her coup attempt from the start. Potemkin, descended from a family of Muscovite diplomats, followed Catherine into exile and soon became the effective prime minister of Catherine’s Uralic domain. Potemkin played a double game, working his way back into St Petersburg under an assumed name and securing the responsibility for one of Peter’s colonisation projects. He proceeded to ensure that numerous settlers bound for Siberia were redirected to the environs of Yekaterinburg. Towards the end of Peter III’s life, it was questionable whether he truly ruled any of the Russian domains east of the Urals, such was Potemkin’s skill.

Potemkin himself died in 1791. He was far from Catherine’s only lover, as she had used her incomparable “charms” to secure the general Sergei Vasilievich Saltykov and many others also, but he was the only man to father children by her (including, some tongues wagged, Peter himself). Potemkin’s two sons by Catherine were Aleksandr, born 1773, and Ivan, born 1775. Though still in their teens throughout the 1780s and 90s, the boys proved to have inherited much of their parents’ ability – Aleksandr, Catherine’s ruthless ambition, and Ivan, Potemkin’s talent for organisation. After their parents’ deaths, Aleksandr effectively inherited Catherine’s position over many older men: the Urals had truly become a state.

Many people have pondered whether Peter III’s slow death from illness and old age in 1795 was, in fact, the result of a poison plot finally going right for Catherine’s forces. In truth this is probably unlikely – the Potemkin brothers were only twenty-two and twenty years old respectively, and it is likely they would have wanted to wait longer and build up more support, Aleksandr wanting to appear a more realistic contender for the crown. However, events forced their hands. Their father had set up an elaborate spy network, with the result that they learned of Peter’s death only days after Peter’s heir Paul, who was at this point Grand Duke of Lithuania.

The Lithuanian people and szlachta, on the most part fairly content with the status quo, were alarmed by this development and hushed discussions took place across the Grand Duchy. There was the possibility that Paul would continue as Grand Duke as he took the throne of Russia, neglecting Lithuania as so many other rulers with other domains had, or even create a Russo-Lithuanian union. While the szlachta believed this might be tolerable under Paul and his son Peter (Petras), who had grown up in Lithuania, Peter’s own heir would presumably be raised in Russia and it was probable that, a few decades down the line, a Russian Emperor would try to impose Orthodoxy and Russian law on Lithuania. To avoid this eventuality, the Lithuanians entered into secret talks with the Poles, who were plotting a revolt of their own as soon as Frederick William II of Prussia died. There was talk of restoring the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but there was always the nagging question “Then what?” A shaky, hastily restored Commonwealth could not resist counter-invasions by Prussia and Russia. The Poles argued for an alliance with Austria, but the Lithuanians were dubious about the prospect, and besides, Austria had had no compunctions about annexing Krakow after the War of the Polish Partition.

In the end, the talks broke down when Paul announced that he was stepping down as Grand Duke Povilas I, in favour of his eighteen-year-old son Peter as Grand Duke Petras I. This was met with much relief throughout Lithuania, as Petras had grown up there, spoke fluent Lithuanian and could be relied upon to defend the Grand Duchy’s interests against those of Russia. The Lithuanian szlachta quietly withdrew their support from the planning of the Polish rebellion, and historians have cited this as the moment when the idea of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth truly breathed its last.

Paul immediately left for St Petersburg and on January 1st 1796 (Russian calendar) was crowned Pavel I, Emperor of All the Russias and Duke of Holstein-Gottorp. His coronation celebrations, however, were interrupted by shocking reports from the east. The Potemkin brothers had assembled an army under General Saltykov and had marched on Moscow, taking the city and declaring it capital of Russia once more. Aleksandr was crowned Alexander I in St Basil’s Cathedral, and made the claim that Paul was illegitimate. In truth Paul’s own claim to the throne was somewhat shaky thanks to the meandering of the Romanov dynasty throughout the previous century. Despite Aleksandr and Ivan sharing a (German) mother with Paul, it was the boys who first founded the idea of Slavism in Russia. They used as propaganda the fact that there was not one drop of Slavic blood in Paul, and portrayed his supporters as a German conspiracy – a thread always guaranteed to resonate with the resentful Russian peasantry.

Of course, Paul was not willing to give up without a fight. He assembled his army, ironically under General Nikolai Saltykov, a distant relative of his opposite number, and marched to meet the Potemkin brothers’ forces at Smolensk.

The Russian Civil War had begun…


[1]The singular of Inuit is Inuk, which an Englishman or Nantucketer might spell Enwick, which sounds more like the name of a place, and so the mistaken belief arose that Enwick was a chief native town in Greenland and its inhabitants were called Enwickers – which was then generalised as the names of all Greenland natives.


Part #26: Devil’s Bargain

From – “A New History of the Low Countries” by Dr Jan van der Proost, English translation –

The winter of 1795 was a decisive moment in the history of the Jacobin Revolution and what it held for greater Europe. Many pro-Austrian commentators have presented the opening stages of the Flemish campaign as a series of victories for Ferdinand IV and conservative forces, but the truth is far from that rosy image. While the professional Austrian armies had indeed usually defeated the inexperienced and untried French conscripts at most engagements, they had failed to achieve a decisive battle of the type Mozart knew he needed, for purposes of morale. General Boulanger’s victory at Lille put paid to even a vague Austrian advance, and as the armies retired to winter quarters, the Austrians were left holding only scraps of northern France.

The Holy Roman Empire had lost its opportunity to strangle the revolution in its cradle. During that fateful winter, Pierre Boulanger was feted through the streets of Paris in recognition of his decisive victory – the first of any Revolutionary force, and now irretrievably linked with Cugnot’s steam technology in the public imagination – and the ideals of the Republic were consolidated. Failed generals were forced to resign, sometimes even executed, more often pensioned off, and the conscript armies were ruthlessly reorganised and trained according to Boulanger’s recommendations. The general was a new Revolutionary hero, an icon who joined Le Diamant and L'Épurateur in the pantheon (literally, under Hébert’s quasi-atheistic new pagan religion) as a symbol. The difference was, he was still alive and talking – and this presented a problem to the paranoid Robespierre, who saw everything as an attempt to undermine him. Not even an assassination of Boulanger and blaming it on the Austrians was politically possible at this stage.

In truth, Boulanger may actually have caused damage to the French war effort in some areas. He was, after all, of little military experience himself, being one of the Revolution’s children, a baker’s son risen to high command. He had a talent for warfare which, as many Revolutionary apologists have pointed out, would doubtless have never been allowed to surface under the ancien regime – but it was an savant’s talent, instinctive, difficult or impossible to teach to others. French tactics and infantry training techniques took on an almost artistic air that lent the Revolution some of its intellectual admirers abroad, but may have not been the best use of an inexperienced conscript army – at least not those with a charismatic figure like Boulanger at its head.

It is believed by some that Jean de Lisieux first met Boulanger on the direct orders of Robespierre. Lisieux was seen by Robespierre as his natural lieutenant, another as ‘Incorruptible’ as he, one who would send his own brother to the phlogisticateur if the purity of the Revolution demanded it. He was one of the few who Robespierre never saw as a threat to himself, ironically.

Lisieux and Boulanger first met with Cugnot himself in one of the taverns of Paris, away from the usual sounding boards of the Jacobin Club, and the three discussed their ideas for the use of Cugnot’s steam technologies. Lisieux realised how great a propaganda tool they could be if handled correctly, while Boulanger was interested in further military applications. Later they were joined by Robert Surcouf, one of France’s more brilliant sailors and a man who specialised in privateering. Surcouf recognised that France’s navy would always be a secondary force to its army, second in all considerations of training and funding whether under the ancien regime or the new Republic, and could thus never have much hope of defeating Britain’s Royal Navy even before the losses of the Marseilles and Quiberon mutinies. Therefore, he advocated the development of new tactics with small ships, and in discussion with the Boulanger-Cugnot-Lisieux triad, realised that the Cugnot steam technology could also be a new and unpredictable force at sea…

Much of the fate of the world was decided in those few, brief meetings. Boulanger was called away to his winter quarters in Saint-Quentin (soon to be renamed the more Revolutionarily proper Diamantbourg), a move welcomed by Robespierre. It emerged that Revolutionary ideas had been flowing across the border with Flanders even in the winter, brought by travellers, merchants and some French deserters. While the Flemings themselves remained fairly well-off, the Prince-Bishop of Liège played second fiddle to Charles Theodore, and francophone Liège was also more susceptible to French ideas straight from the horse’s mouth. Liège had also been a centre of French Enlightenment ideas in the decades preceding the Revolution, and so could be said to be ‘primed’ to follow France down the red path.

During the coldest and most deprived part of the winter, Revolutionary sentiment was ignited and the people rose up, overthrowing the Prince-Bishop and a popular council requested entry to the French Republic. This naturally provoked alarm in the Holy Roman Empire, and Mozart gave siege to Liège. The city held, but was already low on supplies and had been weakened by the damages of its private revolution. Boulanger’s deputy in Saint-Quentin, Thibault Leroux, immediately brought part of the French army out of winter quarters and marched to relieve the siege. The army was joined by Boulanger midway, the general perhaps forgetting about the cosy meetings he had taken part in in Paris.

Jean de Lisieux had not forgotten. It was at this time that he published La Vapeur est Républicaine (“Steam is Republican”), a pamphlet which used the Revolutionary ideology to promote Cugnot’s steam engines as being fundamentally Revolutionary in character. “The aristocrat…possesses a horse, and thus must possess the land and feed and servants to maintain that horse, and so the people know that he wishes to be known as rich and…superior…however, a Cugnot wagon cares not whether the man at the wheel was born in Versailles or the banlieue?” Thus, steam was ideologically correct, and steam was The Thing. In addition to Cugnot receiving additional funding, intrigued French and even foreign artisans and inventors begged apprenticeship, and soon many applications for steam engines were developed. Some of this got back, belatedly, to Britain and the Germanies, where steam engines existed but were still mainly used for stationary applications, such as pumping water out of mines. In Britain, the new applications were masterminded by James Watt and John Wilkinson, while the young Richard Trevithick remained in the mine, but began to wonder if the Cugnot wagon concept could also be applied to a mine wagon on rails…

But steam played little part in Boulanger’s relief of the Siege of Liège. In the end, the Austrian army, having outrun its supply lines, was forced to withdraw. Boulanger had scraped together some cavalry while in Paris – riding, of course, those very improper horses – and overcame his earlier problem, harrying Mozart as he retreated. The frustrated Austrian and Imperial forces, who had been hoping for plunder, pillaged the hinterland of the Prince-Bishopric as they withdrew, and continued doing so even after crossing into Flanders proper. Mozart may have been a fine general in many ways but he could not control his men’s marauding. It is ironic that at this stage such behaviour actually worked in favour of Revolutionary France.

Flanders began to seethe with resentment at the Imperial presence. Duke Charles Theodore and his chief minister, Emmanuel Grosch, were sensitive to these undercurrents and knew that their position was tenuous. Charles Theodore had only gained Flanders a few years before thanks to the Austrian land exchange, and while he was fairly well liked, the murmured incidents of Austrian pillaging and other destructive incidents served to remind people of his origins – installed by the Holy Roman Emperor. Ferdinand IV’s name was openly defamed in the street.

And yet the Flemings were not receptive to the Revolutionary ideals pouring over the border, at least not save a few francophones[1]. Perhaps it was simply the notion that one France is as bad as another, and memories of Marshal Saxe. Perhaps, as the Noveltist Tories in Britain argue, that Charles Theodore’s very sense of newness saved him from the Revolution, in contrast to the never-ending line of Louises in France. But for whatever reason, Charles Theodore knew he and his fragile young country were being squeezed in a vise. If the French won the spring campaign, all was lost. And if they lost, then Flanders would be forced to supply the vast Austrian army, which might spark public feeling into an attempted coup. The example of Liège was there, though its specific sentiments perhaps not widely shared.

Grosch had visited the battlefield of Liège and knew that Boulanger was honourable, whatever his proletarian origins. He advised Charles Theodore that here was a man they could negotiate with. Boulanger, for his part, was nervous. He was confident that his newly reformed French armies could blunt the spearhead of the Austrian advance, but for once the Austrians had managed to pull most of the powerful states within the Empire into the war. Conservatism had finally, shakily united Saxony and what was left of Brandenburg with the Austrians, who now also commanded the former Bavarian army, and Badenese and Württemberger forces were marching into Lorraine, despite now-General Ney’s best efforts. With the Austrians also allied with the Kingdom of Sardinia, France was fighting a war on too many fronts. They were only fortunate that the Spanish advance had glided to an unenthusiastic halt after the seizing of Navarre. Boulanger knew they needed to reduce the number of contact points with the enemy, to give France to expand its army and concentrate it where it was needed best. So Grosch’s proposal came heaven-sent to him, or whatever proper Revolutionaries were supposed to believe in this week.

The winter of 1795 also saw the development of many classically Revolutionary ideas, such as the decimalised calendar and Thouret’s departmental system, but the Boulanger-Grosch agreement was perhaps the most significant. Strangely, at first glance at least, Robespierre approved the deal. It may seem contradictory with his own ideas about spreading the Revolution, but he saw it as a way of undermining Boulanger – which, in the short term, it did…

The spring 1796 campaign included the deployment of a small number of British troops to Flanders under Prince Frederick the Prince of Wales, while both Britain and North America continued to raise and train new regiments for the coming war. Ironically perhaps, it was the Americans who had more skilled troops on hand, if not for this kind of warfare. Since 1759, America had fought several wars of expansion with the Indians on its borders: the Iroquois and the Cherokee had remained allied with the Empire, but the Lenapa, Creek and many others had been driven westward or even wiped out. Notably, the French-backed Huron were decisively smashed by an American army and only two remnant groups survived. One petitioned for entry into their old enemies the Iroquois Confederacy as a Seventh Nation, and was eventually accepted with reduced rights. The second fled westward, but remained a more coherent group than most, and would eventually cause problems for the Superians. But that is another aside.

In spring 1796, Mozart decided to leave a small besieging force at Liège and press on into France, trying once more for his decisive battle. The French remained spread out, forcing Mozart’s armies to match them, but Boulanger implemented a new strategy of pinprick raids by Cugnot artillery supported by cavalry. Mozart brought his army back together in reaction and was faced by a far larger French army under Boulanger at Cambrai. Mozart won a pyrrhic victory, proving that the old-fashioned Austrian deep line tactics could still triumph against the conscript columns and Cugnot artillery. However, the Austrian army had lost sufficient numbers and supplies that the cautious Mozart decided to retreat back to Flanders in order to bring up the numbers from newly arrived Bavarian troops. And this was when Grosch’s plan came into play.

Duke Charles Theodore, speaking in Brussels’ Grand Place to the people in the Revolutionary manner, made a public declaration of independence from the Holy Roman Empire. “The destiny of the Low Countries lies not with the Empire, nor with the Republic, but with our own path.” He barred the entry of armed forces loyal to either the Consulate or the Emperor to Flemish territory and those forces already there were asked to leave. It was a ridiculous boast in the abstract, for Flanders’ own army remained small, but Grosch’s trump card was a shock declaration of support for Charles Theodore from the Flemings’ traditional enemy, the Stadtholder-General of the United Netherlands, William V of Orange. William knew that, to the French Revolutionaries, oligarchic republics like his own (and Genoa was a telling example) were as bad as, if not worse than, the absolute monarchies. There was a strong undercurrent of Revolutionary sentiment among the Dutch, who typically did not equate this with French conquest as the Flemings did, and William was aware his position was tenuous.

Despite rivalries between the two halves of the Low Countries since the Eighty Years’ War, the Dutch already had some agreements with the Flemings, such as using their troops to man the border forts, and it was primarily Dutchmen who fired the warning shots to repel Mozart’s army when he attempted to retreat into Flanders. Likewise, the Dutch Navy – second in Europe only to Britain’s – offered to transport Prince Frederick’s untried little army back to Britain free of charge, and warned that any attempt to prosecute the war further would result in naval clashes. This was shamefacedly accepted by the Duke of Portland’s government, and was one reason behind its fall in July 1796.

The more important reason was that Edmund Burke had died the week before, and without his eminence grise, Portland had no hope of continuing to have the House’s confidence. Portland resigned, but George III asked the Marquess of Rockingham to form a new right-wing Whig government with court party support. Rockingham was still unpopular over the Africa Bubble scandal, but he was known to have experience as a wartime Prime Minister during the Second Platinean War, and was therefore broadly welcomed. The new Rockinghamite government advocated the prosecution of a naval war and supported rapproachment with the Dauphin’s exiled government. However, it shed supporters as the war went on with little progress in sight. One of them was Richard Burke, Edmund’s son,[2] who rejected the pragmatic Rockinghamite approach (“how can this situation benefit Britain?”) and essentially argued that an ideological problem (the French Revolution) required an ideological solution. It is notable that Burke, though considered too young to be a minister at the time, was commonly to be seen in Blanche’s, a new London club opened for exiled French royalists to congregate, speaking with the Dauphin himself…

As for Mozart’s army, after failing to force one of the Dutch border forts and being repulsed by French-held Liège, it was led on a long southern retreat down to the border of Trier, where the remnants of the army could finally cross back into the Empire. All along the way it was harried by French Cugnot-artillery, cavalry and even peasant partisans. Though Mozart had won a victory, by the time his tired army glimpsed Trier’s cathedral, it was a shadow of its former self. Meanwhile, the Bavarian army in Flanders had been defeated by the Dutch and turncoat Flemish and had also retreated into the Empire. Bavaria was still unenthusiastic about Austrian rule and its troops remained low on morale in such a conflict, in which their homeland was clearly not threatened (yet).

So it was that Grosch’s and Charles Theodore’s shocking gamble paid off, astonishing the world. By the Treaty of Liège, the Republic of France kept that city but Flanders took the northern hinterland, helping to join up Charles Theodore’s scattered territories. The Netherlands signed a formal treaty with Flanders on 4th August 1796, the treaty that became the Maastricht Pact. Some minor territorial exchanges were carried out for similar reasons, and the Dutch recognised the Flemish claim to Trier, which Charles Theodore could use to combine Flanders and his Palatinate into a single functioning state. In turn, Flemish forces helped crush an attempted Dutch revolution in Amsterdam and Den Haag around October 1796, with the result that William V kept his position as Stadtholder, and his head. The Dutch Navy continued to be enough warning to prevent Britain from intervening, while the Austrians soon had too much on their plate to pay back the Flemings for their betrayal…just as Boulanger had planned.


[1]NB in TTL Flanders is the name of what we would term all of Belgium, so ‘Flemings’ encompasses both what we would call Flemings and Walloons.

[2]In OTL Richard Burke failed to live up to his father’s talents, though he remained beloved and it was his early death that drove the elder Burke to his grave. In TTL he’s more of a clone of the elder.
 

Thande

Donor
Interlude #5: World News Roundup


Dr Bruno Lombardi: We now come to a stage where it is perhaps worth examining those divergences from our own timeline outside the Western world and those areas immediately affected by it.

Dr Thermos Pylos: You will understand that many of these changes may not be referenced in source material –

Dr Bruno Lombardi: A historian limited to his own timeline cannot write that a civil war hasn’t happened, for example.

Dr Thermos Pylos: Quite so.

Dr Bruno Lombardi: Therefore, though it is not a method which I personally favour, being open to misinterpretation and subjectional colouring –

Captain Christopher Nuttall: Gentlemen, please just get on with it.

Dr Thermos Pylos: Very well. Let us begin with the Middle East…

Captain Christopher Nuttall: Oh goody!

Dr Bruno Lombardi: Pardon?

Captain Christopher Nuttall: Nothing. I didn’t say anything.


*

Summary of Divergences, notes by Dr Bruno Lombardi:

Oman: As in OTL, Persia was driven from Oman in 1744 and Ahmed ibn Sayyid As-Sayyid was elected Imam. However, unlike OTL, the Qais branch of the As-Sayyid family was essentially strangled at birth…it remains unclear as to whether this was due to the deaths of important figures or simply historical ‘butterflies’ in schemes during the period of Ahmed As-Sayyid’s rule…however, what is clear is that the entire nation passed peacefully into the hands of Ahmed’s son Sayyid ibn Ahmed As-Sayyid and there was no division as OTL into Muscat and Oman. Two important consequences of this are that united Oman further cultivated its East African trading colonies relative to OTL, and that the port of Gwadar in Baluchistan was not ceded to the ruler of Muscat (as there was none) by the Khan of Kalat. This reduced Omani interest and influence in India relative to OTL…

Persia: Unlike OTL, Abol Fath Khan was a worthy successor to his father Karim Khan, and led Zand Persia in a successful crushing of the Qajar rebellion in Mazanderan – with the death of the Qajar leader Agha Mohammed Khan. The Zand dynasty continued to rule over an expanded but largely peaceful domain. The later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a golden age for Persia, as the Ottomans remained focused on Europe and Europeans penetrated far more slowly into the neighbouring Indian states relative to OTL. Abol Fath Khan maintained his father’s title of Vakilol Ro'aya, Advocate of the People, rather than Shah, although that remained in informal use.

As with Mysore (q.v.), Persia was one of the few non-European states to take an interest in the development of the French Revolution, and some Revolutionary ideas were experimented with. Mohammed ar-Ramadi, a merchant and natural philosopher at the royal court in Shiraz, developed a new decimalised system of measurements that managed to incorporate the customary units mentioned in the Koran, but fitted them into a more rational framework.[1]

Under the Zands, Persia retained greater territories in, and influence over the remainder of, Mesopotamia than the Ottomans relative to OTL. Some new European-inspired weapons and tactics were incorporated into the Persian army, though to a lesser extent than occurred in some of the states of India (who were witnessing the importance of those tactics themselves). Portugal remained Persia’s major European trading partner, and Portugal’s unofficial alignment with the United Provinces of South American meant that U.P. ships were soon commonly seen trading in Persian ports also. It was a U.P. navigator, José Rodriguez-Decampo, who made the first scientific survey and sounding of the Shatt al-Arab in 1803, under commission by Sadiq Khan.[2]


Japan: Is difficult to judge, as few records of the relevant period survive for comparison with OTL, for reasons that will become clear…

Corea: Remained isolationist until events in China meant that the status quo was no longer tenable – once more, records of the relevant period are sketchy. There appear to have been no significant changes in rulers or policy relative to OTL throughout much of the eighteenth century. This changed, however, in 1770… (q.v.)

China and Burma: During the reign of the Yongzheng Emperor, his favourite son, Hongli, the Prince Bao (who in OTL became the Qianlong Emperor) drowned in a river in 1733. This was a dramatic shock to both Yongzheng and Chinese political culture in general, as everyone had expected Hongli to become Emperor and he had been beloved of both Yongzheng and his predecessor, the illustrious Kangxi Emperor. Foul play by siblings was suspected, as Yongzheng had himself risen to his position by defeating his brothers and been frustrated in his ambitions ever since. Yongzheng fell into a long fevered illness as a result, but recovered and, unlike OTL, lived until 1754 rather than 1735. Possibly he realised that he needed to create a clear new line of succession before his death, else China fall back into a warlord period with no obvious candidate for Emperor.

Although suspicious that he had, in fact, been responsible for Hongli’s death, Yongzheng eventually settled on his elder brother Hongshi, favoured by Yongzheng’s minister Yinsi the Prince Lian. Hongshi adopted the name Prince Zhong, which evoked the idea that he would be a bridge between a glorious past and a glorious future. When Yongzheng did die, Hongshi/Zhong ascended to the Dragon Throne in a fairly peaceable manner, with only desultory attempts from other candidates. He took the era name Daguo or Great Nation, with overtones of a strong fortress. This reflected his policies as Son of Heaven: due to his father’s own lack of success in combating the Dzungars on the steppes, he decided that it was not possible for the Chinese army to beat the nomads on their own turf,[3] and instead adopted a more conservative, defensive policy. Daguo created what was known poetically as Xin Chengchang, the New Great Wall, on China’s eastern frontier with the Dzungars – in practice this was more of a series of fortified towns and military outpost than a ‘wall’ in the literal sense of the original. While Dzungaria proper was not brought under Chinese rule, the Dzungars were defeated twice during attempted invasions and eventually paid at least token homage to the Daguo Emperor.

During Daguo’s reign, the Dzungars seemed a decidedly minor threat compared to expansionist Konbaung Dynasty Burma, which successfully conquered the Mon kingdom of Pegu and the Siamese kingdom of Ayutthaya. Burmese power and influence was beginning to extend into Chinese areas, which was unacceptable. In the 1760s, General Myat Htun seized the capital Ava and attempted to establish a renewed Toungoo Dynasty, overthrowing King Naungdawgyi of the Konbaung. However, Naungdawgyi assembled his own army and gave siege. It was at this point that the British East India Company offered to support the royal forces in return for greater trading rights, and Naungdawgyi accepted.[4]

Myat Htun fled with his army when he heard of this, having learned of the power that the EIC could call upon during one of his western campaigns, and sought exile in China. The Daguo Emperor’s ministers realised that this could be used as a weapon against expansionist Burma, and sent Myat Htun back with a Qing army to “restore the native dynasty” – this being a little hypocritical considering the Qing’s own origins.

Naungdawgyi had ruled Burma unopposed, with extensive East India trade, from 1760 to 1768, when the Chinese invaded. By this point, only token EIC forces remained in Burma, and Naungdawgyi was defeated by the Qing.[5] The Kingdom crumbled after the Chinese took Ava and Myat Htun installed Mahadammayaza as restored Tougou Dynasty King. The new state, which extended little beyond Ava, was firmly in China’s pocket and closed to British trade, as were the “freed” states of Pegu and Ayutthaya. Naungdawgyi’s brother Minhkaung Nawrahta, the Viceroy of Tougou (the city, no present connection to the dynasty) established his own state, which continued trade with Britain and requested EIC assistance against further Chinese expansion. In truth, though, Daguo was content to have smashed any semblance of a united, powerful Burmese state, and did not seek further control among the remnants.

More importantly in the long run, Hsinbyushin, another brother of Naungdawgyi, fled south and west with much of what remained of the Burmese army, abandoning Ava. A charismatic leader, Hsinbyushin managed to inspire even this dispirited remnant to overrun and seize the kingdom of Arakan, which had already been weakened by several Burmese attempts in recent years. After defeating the Arakanese army, Hsinbyushin established his seat of power in the Arakanese capital Mraukou and continued to exercise control over the south and west of what had been the Burmese kingdom. During his reign the Arakanese language was suppressed in favour of Burman, and direct contact with the British in Bengal was made.

Having secured a position of power in the south and defended against the Dzungars in the east, China remained oblivious to what was happening on its northern frontier until 1799…



[1]Similar to the system used in the modern People’s Republic of China, in which traditional names for units are used but they correspond to new metric lengths.

[2]This Sadiq Khan is Abol Fath Khan’s son named for Karim Khan’s brother, who does not become Shah in TTL.

[3]Inaccurately, as the Qianlong Emperor’s forces managed it in OTL.

[4]In OTL the Burmese massacred some Britons in 1759 and the EIC, after briefly attempting to secure reparations and an apology and then continue trade, decided it wasn’t worth it, as they were no longer competing with the French for Burmese trade anyway. In TTL French power in India is anything but crushed, there was no massacre and the EIC greatly desires the superior trading position with Burma.

[5]In OTL Naungdawgyi died young and was succeeded by his brother Hsingbyushin, who successfully defeated several Chinese invasions with some able generals – as Naungdawgyi did not exactly inspire loyalty in OTL, with many more rebellions and breakaway generals than Hsingbyushin, I am assuming that any Burmese response to the Chinese invasion in TTL will be much less coherent and decisive, and the state will crumble rapidly.


Part #27: New Worlds

“…there is no better example than America, when one considers the notion that our actions have consequences far removed from the present. Groups have gone into that wilderness and been swallowed like a black star[1], only to re-emerge as strange tribes or nations centuries later. It is a furnace and a forge, which takes up raw material and spits it out against as strange tools indeed…”

– private journal of Prime Minister Henry Starling, on the election of Andrew Everett as President of Superia (1994)​

*

From - Annum Septentrionalium: A History of North America, by Paul Withers (1978) -

Although the Continental Parliament of the Empire of North America was not truly instated until 1788, it had been known by all that this was inevitable since the (oftsince exaggerated) protests of the 1760s and the Pitt Ministry in London had begun the constitutional process, despite opposition from the Tories. Indeed, it was Pitt’s position which had brought a large number of Radical Whigs into the succeeding First Rockingham Ministry, when (as a study of the second ministry will show) Rockingham was hardly a man to attract men of such political persuasion in the abstract.

The British Radicals approved of the Continental Parliament, both on principle and because it allowed them to ‘test’ more revolutionary political ideas which would never be accepted at home, at least not yet. In fact some British Radicals took the opportunity in the 1760s to move across the Atlantic and gain residency in American provinces so they might run as MCPs (or Parliamentarians as the preferred American phrase was). This did not meet with much success, however. The American people had been used to more minor parliamentary institutions, such as the Virginian House of Burgesses, for many years, and typically had a stronger preference for electing local men than the British, who were willing to tolerate absentee MPs providing they defended local interests. Only three of the hopeful Radical statesmen were elected, all of them in borough constituencies,[2] and the vast majority eventually returned home and re-engaged with British politics. It is interesting to speculate on the consequences if more of them had been elected, as the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was a time of conservatism in America and radicalism in Britain – it could easily have been reversed.

It is also, then, not a surprise that the Continental Parliament began business almost immediately, and outstanding issues considered universal by the confederations were dealt with first. While there was a general disagreement on how much power the federal Continental Parliament should have vis-à-vis the confederal assemblies (broadly speaking, the sentiment became less federal and more confederal as one moved south), some areas were considered important enough by all the confederacies to move on regardless of constitutional questions. Arguably, this set the scene for the general federal consensus that persisted for some decades, as this became ‘the way things are done, the way that we know works’. It is generally considered that the Constitutional Party would have been instituted a more confederal consensus stance if they had had a majority in the first parliament, but by the time they achieved power, moderate federalism had become the accepted status quo.

Some of the areas in which the Continental Parliament was most active in the early days were: transfer of control of all but military-based taxation from London to Fredericksburg; agreement on the settlement lines for the different Confederations and the territories assigned to the allied Indian nations (only the Iroquois were actually consulted on this); the issue of American stamps and the establishment of an Imperial Mint so that the American economy would not rely chiefly on Spanish dollars (the first gold ‘Emperors’, equivalent to Britain’s Sovereign, were minted in 1794) and, most significantly perhaps in the long run, the closing of all Confederate lands to transportation.

Britain had been using the American colonies as a dumping ground for convicts since time immemorial, a policy that was (understandably) rather unpopular with the colonists who had settled there by choice. In 1789 the Continental Parliament passed the Anti-Transportation Act, signed into law by Lord Deputy William North, which made transportation to the Empire illegal unless specific permission was granted by confederal legislatures (a sop to the more confederal sympathies in the Constitutionalist Party). The bill had been passed overwhelmingly, and North advised the King in a letter that American feeling on the issue was too strong to ignore. In this he was supported by Prince Frederick the Prince of Wales, who was touring the colonies at the time. George III and Edmund Burke (the real power behind the nominal Prime Minister Lord Portland) took this advice seriously and, despite strong protests from some landed interests at Westminster, an accompanying Anti-Transportation (North America) Act was far more narrowly passed by the Liberal Whig government. Transportation to Imperial lands became illegal, although it still continued to a lesser extent by privateering transporters who sold out their services to corrupt magistrates, usually in British seaports.

This arguably led to the creation of the American Preventive Cutter Service[3] in 1796 to take action against illegal transportation and smuggling, one of the two geneses of the Imperial Navy (see also: HMS Enterprize). The British had no intention of ceasing the highly effective punishment that transportation represented, so a new location for a penal colony was required. In reality several were used, and it is simply that Susan-Mary was the largest and most infamous.

Initially, it appeared Newfoundland would be the new choice. It was easily accessible from the Atlantic, was isolated and an island, thus making escape difficult, and the British interests who supported its use believed the existing population was too small to matter. However, this proved an incorrect assumption when, in 1803, the Newfoundland colonists petitioned to join the Confederation of New England as a province, disliking the establishment of the Cloudborough penal colony on the island’s northwest coast. Although arms were twisted and only the free-settled half of the island was actually accepted as a province, this effectively ended the use of the island as a dumping ground.

Some convicts were sent to West Africa, for which see The Space-Filling Empire for a more detailed history.

However, certainly the most infamous penal colony was that of Susan-Mary. At first its location may seem rather nonsensical, even paradoxical, and some have theorised that its choice was deliberately forced by idealistic parliamentary Radicals who wanted to discourage the practice of transportation by making it more difficult. In practice, however, it appears that this was primarily a Wolfeian policy[4]. As a result of the Treaty of London (1785) which ended the Second Platinean War, Britain and latterly the Empire had gained control over much of the hinterland of the former French Louisiana territory, though France had retained New Orleans and some of the surrounding lands. While the newly-won Louisiana territory was mostly unsettled, the northern lands around Lake Michigan had a sizeable French presence dating back to the seventeenth century. This was considered dangerous by both London and Fredericksburg; few doubted that yet another war with France was shortly around the corner (although few could have predicted the form it would take) and there was always the possibility that the French colonists centred around Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit might be able to stab the Empire in the back, particularly if they could threaten New Yorker traffic on the Great Lakes.

An agreement signed in 1794 killed two birds with one stone. The British would create a new penal colony out of Michigan and pursue Wolfeian policies there to ‘dilute out’, as it was euphemistically put, the French population. At the same time, New York and New England would create a Great Lakes Patrol which, though far less ambitious in scope than the later, Atlantic coastal American Preventive Cutter Service, would serve to prevent prisoner escape (at least by a water route) and guard against any attempt by the French colonists to build a fleet. In truth these ideas were largely borne of American paranoia, the remaining French being too few and in no position to threaten anyone, but it sold the idea to the American public.

The first survey of the region was conducted in 1796 by HMS Marlborough, whose crew included the naturalist Erasmus Darwin (jr.), who published a series of articles on the flora and fauna of the Great Lakes. The Marlborough’s Captain Paul Wilkinson recommended the use of the small French city of Sault-Ste-Marie as the centre of the new colony, rather than Fort Pontchartrain as had been initially assumed. Wilkinson argued that Pontchartrain was unsuitable for a variety of reasons and that the fort would have to be demolished or re-manned for safety. By contrast, Sault-Ste-Marie was a major population centre by Michiganian standards and most urgently required a ‘Wolfeian Dilution’.

The First Fleet of convicts left Britain on May 15th, 1801, and arrived at its destination (sailing up the St Lawrence) on November 12th. The early history of the colony has much been attested to in its harshness, of cruel treatment of both the British convicts and French colonists by the military regime in place there. The colony swiftly became a dumping ground for incompetent and cruel British military officers as much as it was for the convicts themselves. The official name of Marlborough Colony was soon forgotten, and it was a crude convict anglicisation of the French name…Sault-Ste-Marie becoming Soo San Maree and then Susan-Mary…that would be the name the colony would be known by in the eyes of history. A history written in letters of blood, a history that would play out while the eyes of the world, even the eyes of North America, were turned elsewhere…

[1]Alternative term for black hole from OTL, used as the primary one in TTL.

[2]The American electoral system is based on the British one here, with some refinements as it has been implemented from scratch rather than slowly developing over time. Each province or ‘shire’ within the confederations elect one MP, like the counties of England (sometimes rising to two MPs, or four for Yorkshire in England, depending on the population). In addition to this, any city recognised as a Borough by royal charter elects one or two MPs, again depending on population. So, for example, the Confederation of New England as of 1788 elects 8 MPs: one each for the provinces of Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, New Connecticut, South Massachusetts, North Massachusetts and New Scotland, and one more for the city of Boston, which is the only one with Borough status at that time.

[3]In OTL His Majesty’s Coast Guard was implemented under the name Preventive Water Guard in 1809, while the U.S. Coast Guard was created under the name Revenue Cutter Service in 1790. Here the usage is a hybrid of the two, particularly as the primary objective here is the prevention of smuggling and illegal transportation rather than enforcing tariff revenue as with the American version in OTL.

[4]A term based on the policies of the first Governor-General of Canada, James Wolfe, who in TTL did not die in the hour of his triumph. Wolfe oversaw the de-francisation of Québec (generally just called Canada in TTL), a policy which met with mixed feelings in British circles, outrage in France of course and approval in the Empire. By the 1790s, Québec City had been renamed Wolfesburg, while Montréal had been anglicised to Mount Royal, and the French colonial population had been outnumbered by immigrants from New England, it being agreed that the territory would eventually become a series of New Englander provinces. Many canadiens emigrated from Canada to Louisiana, the last French possession in continental North America, where they became the source of its ‘Canajun’ subculture.


Part #28: The Trident

La terreur n'est autre chose que la justice du Peuple.
Terror is nothing more than the People’s justice.

–Jean-Baptiste Robespierre​

*

From – “France Under the Consulate” by Étienne Jacquard, 1925:

Scholars debate upon when to say that Robespierre’s Reign of Terror truly began. Some date it truly from the start of the Consulate, when Robespierre became First Consul and cowed the National Legislative Assembly. However, though the chirurgien and the phlogisticateur were both in bloody action from that day, it is possible to argue that in the early days of Robespierre’s reign, such measures were at least aimed at men and women who had been privileged under the ancien régime, sometimes even having committed directly attributable crimes.

As 1795 wore on, though, and all such people were either executed or fled the country, any hope that the killing machines would slow proved a vain one. Robespierre believed first and foremost in the ‘purity’ of the Revolutionary French state. Though he supported the idea of exporting the revolution eventually, this would have to wait until France herself was free from any reactionary elements. Reactionary elements were essentially determined as those who did not agree with Robespierre.

March 1796 saw the events from which many historians draw the start of the Terror. A group of Parisian counter-revolutionaries, their cell having been discovered, were attacked by Sans-Culotte irregulars led by Georges Hébert himself, who took delight in personally supervising the destruction of churches and other symbols of the ancien régime by the mob. Notre Dame herself had been reduced to merely a warehouse for storing power and shot. Thus, when the counter-revolutionaries took refuge in one of Paris’ few surviving church buildings, Hébert was determined to see their defeat with his own eyes. He ordered them to be burned out. A mistake.

As soon as the first Sans-Culotte had dropped his smoking carcass[1] through the church window, it exploded. Hébert had been wrong – he and his men had already done this one, and the counter-revolutionaries had known it. They sacrificed their own lives to take the others with them, blowing the huge powder store that the Revolutionaries had kept here for dealing with just this sort of incident.

The explosion was sufficiently powerful to devastate a large chunk of the surrounding streets, with hurled fragments of statue and gargoyle landing as far away as Versailles. A fire started and destroyed perhaps one-sixth of the city before it was put out. Hébert himself, of course, and all the Sans-Culottes were virtually vaporised. Nothing was ever found, and when there is no body, anyone can claim to be acting in his name. That was as true under the Consulate, with its power concentrated in three men, as it had been under any decadent kingdom with pretenders to the throne, a point which many Royalist writers have made.

It never took much for Paris to erupt into mob violence, and the church explosion was a trigger. Counter-revolutionaries fought the new Garde Nationale, commanded by Jean de Lisieux, which absorbed or destroyed all remaining Parisian Sans-Culotte militias in the process. Lisieux was aided by his contacts in the “Boulangerie” or “Steam Circle”, as the group of technological and military thinkers working on Cugnot’s technology were known. Lisieux, who was known for his grandstanding, used some of the new Cugnot applications to the full. One of Cugnot’s latest works was a huge armoured steam-wagon with holes in the sides for musketeers within to shoot out. He called it “La Tortue”, the Tortoise. Experiments had shown it was too slow and cumbersome to be of much use in the field, but it worked well enough on the wider of Paris’ streets. After the Tortues had cleared the mob from the Champs-Élysées, Lisieux stood atop the flat roof of one of the Tortues and waved the Bloody Flag, accompanied by cheers from his followers.

The counter-revolutionary rising was short and rapidly cracked down on, but it had two important consequences. One was that Robespierre, having lost his chief lieutenant Hébert, degenerated further into paranoia. Of course, the fact that the counter-revolutionaries had come seemingly from nowhere only fed his belief that ‘impurity’ was lurking everywhere around. The second was that Jean de Lisieux was catapulted into a new position of power, effectively having assimilated the Paris mob into his Garde Nationale. He who controlled the mob ruled Paris, and Robespierre knew it.

Hébert was quickly declared dead by the National Legislative Assembly, although it did not stop some impostors making further comeback attempts – most celebrated of which was the case of Josué Dechardin, who fooled the people of distant Gascony that he was Hébert sent on a special mission for a full year, extracting money, women and privileges from the terrified Gascon locals, until the fate of the real Hébert was published and he high-tailed it out of town with the more portable part of Bordeaux’s treasury. This case too is often quoted by Royalist writers.

Robespierre unilaterally chose Lisieux as the new Consul, realising that he had no real choice lest he provoke the Paris mob. However, this enraged both the Mirabeauiste faction of the NLA, which still believed that the Revolution was a force for democracy, and Danton’s splinter faction of the majority Jacobins, as Danton had saw himself as the next Consul-in-line. Robespierre reacted predictably, hauling off about a third of the NLA to be summarily executed as enemies of the People, including Danton, and then reducing the suffrage to Sans-Culottes only[2]. Lisieux’s power grew, eclipsing the resentful third consul Jean Marat, and Robespierre continued to sign so many death warrants that he barely had enough time to consider any other state business. Part of this upsurge of the Terror was also an attempt to undermine Lisieux’s support, as Robespierre saw how powerful he was becoming, but this largely failed – not least because it was men loyal to Lisieux who actually ran the chirurgiens and phlogisticateurs. And while Robespierre was consumed with the Terror, Lisieux was quietly taking over much of the day-to-day state business…

*

From – “The Jacobin Wars – the Italo-German Front” by Joshua H. Calhoun (University of New York Press, 1946) -

The early stages of the Franco-Austrian war had been indecisive, with Boulanger stopping the Austrian thrust through Flanders first through battles and then through diplomacy. 1796 ended with no real change from 1794, with France holding a few towns in Savoy and Austria a few in Lorraine, but none of the decisive action that people had expected from either side. That now changed. Both sides had built up their forces and prepared for a war-winning action.

Ferdinand IV’s Austria focused on calling more German states to their side: the loss of Flanders had been a bitter betrayal after Austria had placed Charles Theodore on his throne. Saxony, the most powerful German state after Austria[3], entered the war when Flemish troops occupied Saxon Trier in what was called ‘Charles Theodore’s Road’, connecting Flanders with the Palatinate so that both could be held against attack. Sardinia was already at war with France, but had suffered losses in the 1796 campaigning season as the people of Genoa overthrew their ancient Republic and were occupied by French forces under General Lazare Hoche, giving France a dagger pointed at the heart of Piedmont.

France, meanwhile, focused on training their existing troops according to Boulanger’s ideas and in recruiting more men for the army and the Garde Nationale, whose secondary role was to repulse foreign invasions and organise resistance against occupiers. Ironically, Robespierre’s Terror actually helped recruitment, as young Frenchmen decided that they were less likely to be killed if they went to a foreign field and were shot at by Germans, as opposed to staying at home quietly and waiting for their name to come up on Robespierre’s list of enemies of the people. Technically conscription was already in force, but at this stage it was difficult to enforce outside the Ile-de-France where the Revolutionaries exerted absolute power. As before, their looser control over wider France was essentially a relic of the Bourbons’ centralising policies, in which it was customary to do whatever Paris said. The exception was western France, but the Revolutionaries did not realise that their power over those regions was only theoretical until later on…

During the winter of 1796, the “Boulangerie” became effectively France’s high command in all but name. Far from being disgraced as Robespierre had planned, Boulanger was now deciding the strategic battle plan for all France’s armies. His eventual plan for the 1797 campaigning season was called Poséidon. The code name was chosen to confuse British agents into thinking it was a naval plan, perhaps making them believe that Britain was in danger of being invaded (which, as over half the French fleet had been destroyed or gone over to the exiled Dauphin, was simply not the case). In truth the plan was so-named because of Poseidon’s trident: it was a three-bladed stroke.

Although modern writers think of Poséidon as being a great triumph of strategic thinking, in fact it was largely a compromise between conflicting interests. General Ney favoured a head-on blow against the Austrians in Lorraine, arguing that they had no other choice lest the Austrians break through, take Nancy and be in a position to march on Paris. General Hoche argued that they should build on his successes in Piedmont and attack the Austrians through Northern Italy and the Alps. In the end Boulanger, taking advantage of his army’s great numbers, decided to do both. The central stroke, at Switzerland, was a hasty late addition once French agents there reported the populace were ready to rise in the name of the Republic. This was, in fact, a complete fiction (possibly at Robespierre’s orders as he tried to undermine Lisieux’s plans) but Switzerland was unable to put up much resistance in the event.

Of course, the plan incorporated some of Cugnot’s new inventions, primarily improved steam artillery carriages: most of the more ambitious ones remained on the drawing board. However, in April 1797 Surcouf demonstrated the first steam-powered ship, an ugly-looking tug that wallowed drunkenly, low in the water. Its great strength was that it could tow larger ships far more effectively than the existing methods of letting down the small rowboats to tow or, on smaller frigates, using the emergency oars. Surcouf successfully towed the French frigate Cap-de-Mort from Toulon Harbour out into the Mediterranean and back on a calm day when no British ships were able to come near, demonstrating the fact that steam could free a ship from its reliance on the winds and tides. The Vápeur-Remorqueur saw a great deal of work in Cugnot’s secondary workshops around Toulon, with Surcouf and his engineers improving on the design, trying to make it suitable at first for the Mediterranean and then for the high seas. Surcouf also envisaged a Vápeur-Galère, a steam-galley which would have the same advantages as an ordinary war galley (freedom from the wind), but lacking oars would not have its fragility, and would be able to fight on the rough Atlantic seas…like La Manche for example.

For the moment, though, steam remained largely a tool of the artillery and occasionally self-propelled carriages for the Revolutionary elite and some generals in the field. They were far from stealthy, though, as the steam plumes were visible from miles away, especially on a cold day.

Another important innovation in the field of battle was the war-balloon, invented by Jean-Pierre Blanchard improving on early experiments by the Montgolfier brothers. France had already led the world in aeronautical experiments under the ancien regime, and this was continued under the Revolution – they smacked of the same revolutionary novelty as steam engines. Balloons were so far subject to the whim of the wind (although after Blanchard joined the ‘Boulangerie’ and after drinking most of a dead aristocrat’s confiscated wine-cellar, the innovators briefly planned to try and mount a steam engine on there) so they were typically fixed to the ground by ropes and observers were sent up before a battle to survey the land. Between battles the deflated balloons were carried on more Cugnot steam carriages. Some generals, including Boulanger’s deputy Thibault Leroux, tried keeping the balloon up there throughout the battle and having the observers signal down with flags, but the limited nature of what signals could be sent meant that this was not as useful as it might have been.

Leroux was given command of the thrust into Switzerland, the middle prong of Poséidon, while Ney took command of the left wing into Lorraine and Hoche into Savoy. 1797 was the year of breakthrough for the French. Mozart could have stopped them, perhaps, but he had been disgraced after Boulanger’s diplomatic coup and was cooling his heels from Vienna at the time, his command given to an inferior man.

Ney’s task was the most difficult, as the Austrians had concentrated their own forces, the Saxons and the Hessians on that front. Despite the French still possessing a slight numerical superiority, the Austrians beat Ney at the Battle of Saint-Dié and went on to occupy Nancy, as Ney had feared. However, France was saved when a messenger brought the word that Saxony had a new Elector who had changed policies, withdrawing from the war with France due to a war breaking out with Brandenburg, and the Saxon troops returned to Germany, leaving the Austrians outnumbered. The Austrians’ General, a native Lorrainer named Dagobert Sigmund von Wurmser, still might have had a reasonable chance at shattering the Republic if he marched on Paris. Yet he was cautious, and remained entrenched at Nancy, penetrating no further and waiting for reinforcements that did not come. Austria was too busy fighting on other fronts.

Leroux successfully smashed the Swiss militias and occupied the whole country by the end of 1797. A political plan by Robespierre and Lisieux meant that a new Swiss Republic was established under the leadership of an exiled Jean Marat, who had been sidelined by the other two Consuls. He was replaced by Boulanger, revealing firstly how the Constitution was now worth less than the paper it was written on – Boulanger was not even an elected deputy – and secondly how much influence Lisieux now wielded over Robespierre, who hated and feared Boulanger.

Hoche, displaying a brilliance that made him perhaps the finest of France’s generals, fought a celebrated campaign through Piedmont, at one point successfully dividing his own force to take on two different – and superior – Austrian armies closing on him at Vercelli from north and south. Hoche’s risky gamble blunted the nose of the two armies sufficiently for the northern one under the Hungarian General József Alvinczi to pause at Omegna, expecting Hoche’s small thrust to be the vanguard of his full army. Alvinczi prepared to give battle, while Hoche wheeled, recombined all his forces and then smashed the southern Austrian army of Paul Davidovich. Two months later, he finally met Alvinczi at Milan and won a less dramatic but no less convincing victory. By the end of the 1797 campaign season, Hoche had driven the Hapsburgs from much of Northern Italy. The autumn of 1797 saw a small thrust against Parma, successfully capturing the Spanish possession and striking a blow against a power that, so far, Revolutionary France had been forced to give ground to.

1797 ended with Austria having an army in a precarious but potential position in Nancy that might be the core for a march on Paris. Many speculative romantics have argued that if the Austrians had reinforced that army and attacked Paris, the Revolution would have crumbled, being so centralised. Who can say? As it was, Ferdinand IV was too concerned about the French gains in Switzerland and Italy, which put them uncomfortably close to Austria proper. The Emperor withdrew Wurmser’s army from Nancy and prepared to move against French-occupied Switzerland and Piedmont in 1798.

But 1798 was also the year in which any attempt by Ferdinand IV at a united German front crumbled irreparably…for it was the year when the Russian Civil War expanded to encompass all the Baltic states.



[1]A term meaning a burning sack of straw etc. used by sappers, not as in a corpse.

[2]May sound mad but also happened in OTL, all in the name of liberty.

[3]Recall that the Saxons have been expanding at the expense of Prussia due to the different outcome of wars in TTL.


Part #29: Furore Normannorum

From George Spencer-Churchill’s ‘A History of Modern Warfare, Vol. III’ (1953)

What is generally termed ‘the Baltic War’ of the late 1790s and early 1800s was in fact a convergence of several overlapping conflicts, even as the Baltic War itself overlapped with the wider Jacobin Wars by its effects on the Germanies. Most scholars would state that the core of the Baltic War was the Russian Civil War between Paul Romanov of Lithuania and the brothers Potemkin. But it was the entry of other nations into the war that changed the makeup of the conflict from Russian Civil War to the War of the Russian Succession, and that entry had its own deep roots, going back to the War of the Polish Partition or even before.

The situation set up by the Treaty of Stockholm (1771)[1] envisaged peace kept by a Russo-Prussian alliance that would dominate Eastern Europe, with Lithuania dynastically linked to Russia and Poland dismembered, with some parts annexed to Prussia and the the remainder placed in personal union with it. Swedish neutrality in the war had been bought by the cession of Courland to the Swedish monarchy and the guarantee of existing Swedish possessions in Northeast Prussia, Finland and Pomerania. However, at the time, most had imagined that a renewed war would come soon enough between the Russo-Prussian alliance and Sweden for control of the Baltic. Many speculative romantics [alternate historians] have considered the possibility, but in fact what occurred was far from that possibility. The casus belli persistently failed to materialise, as Sweden enjoyed a period of peaceful and prosperous rule under King Charles XIII[2] and the Cap Party. Prussia continued to look northward to the Baltic, but Russia was increasingly distracted by eastward expansion and the occasional skirmish with the Ottomans in Moldavia. For more than twenty years, the precarious situation set up by the Treaty held, longer than most of its own writers had thought possible.

It was in April 1796 (Russian calendar) that this status quo began to crumble. Though the eyes of the world were on Revolutionary France as it degenerated into a charnelhouse, not a few of those eyes kept flicking nervous glances back to Russia. Whether the Romanovs or Potemkins triumphed in the civil war would decide many nations’ policy towards Russia. Paul was known to favour a Baltic focus and was not particularly aggressive, while the Potemkins advocated the outright annexation of Lithuania as part of their propaganda against Paul. As if there could have been any more pressure upon the armies of both Generals Saltykov…

The armies of the two Russias met at Smolensk on April 14th, with Paul having beaten the Potemkins to the city and holding it against siege. However, the Potemkinite army had been reinforced by fresh troops raised in Moscow, and outnumbered the Romanovians by three to two. The Potemkins gave siege and, by using hot-shot artillery to set parts of the mostly wooden city on fire, forced Paul’s army to retreat. While the retreat was in good order, this was a huge blow to the Romanov army’s morale, and ricocheted around Europe. Statesmen began to plan for a Potemkin victory. This was not good news for Lithuania or the Ottoman Empire, but it was known that the Potemkins would probably have less of a Baltic focus than Peter and Paul had.

The Swedes knew that here was an opportunity to be seized, lest it slip by. Though Charles XIII was a well-liked and decent ruler, he had failed to produce an heir. Sweden had already gone through one unhappy period not long ago under a foreign (Hessian) king brought in, and any possible claims after Charles’ death were so tenuous that they would almost certainly result in a civil war – a civil war that the Danes and the Russians would doubtless intervene in and weaken the Swedish state.

Therefore, to buy time to sort out their dynastic crisis, the Riksdag moved to intervene in the Russian Civil War before the Russians could return the compliment. The aggressive Hat Party was returned to power for the first time since the 1760s, and the long-prepared Baltic fleet was assembled, both sailships and Baltic galleys.

Meanwhile, Paul’s retreating army was attacked by a secondary Potemkinite force led by General Suvorov[4] on May 14th, near Vitebsk. Suvorov employed aggressive and ground-breaking tactics which divided Paul’s force in three and then proceeded to virtually destroy one-third of the army while holding off the rest. It is possible that Suvorov could have broken Paul’s army altogether, but for the fact that he was killed at the height of the battle by a stray roundshot and his lieutenants were unable to maintain his intricate battleplan. The majority of Paul’s army escaped, and Nikolai Saltykov rallied sufficient forces to rout what remained of Suvorov’s smaller force, but the overall effect resounded clearly around Europe. As far as most people were concerned – including Russians – the Potemkins had won. St Petersburg remained in Romanov hands, but for how long?

The remainder of Paul’s army retreated to Vilnius, while the Potemkins set about consolidating their power. Alexander and Sergei Saltykov secured what remained of Smolensk and prepared a march on St Petersburg, while Ivan returned to Moscow and began a purge of the existing civil service, reversing many of Peter’s reforms. It was at this point that he was contacted by the Swedish consul, Ingvar Horn, who had a proposal…

To surprise from some quarters, the Potemkinite attack on St Petersburg, in August, failed. A Romanov army led by Mikhail Kamenski defeated Saltykov’s force near Novgorod; though it was not a convincing victory in and of itself, Kamenski attacked the Potemkinites’ siege train and successfully captured or spiked much of their siege artillery. Deprived of this, there was no chance that Saltykov could force the well-defended city, and after a brief, half-hearted siege, the Potemkinites retreated. By autumn 1796, the situation seemed to be going the way of the Potemkinites, with them holding almost all Russia by default – but the repulse from St Petersburg revealed that the Romanovs were still in the game.

The overall impression seen from abroad was that Russia was tearing itself apart, and showed no sign of stopping anytime soon. Policy in neighbouring countries was adjusted accordingly. The Ottoman Empire, under the rule of the cautious and philosophical Sultan Abdulhamid II[5] did not directly take a position on the war, but took the opportunity of a distracted and fragmented Russia to quietly re-exert more direct control over neighbouring provinces. Moldavia and Bessarabia, which had been unofficially going back and forth between Turkey and Russia for decades, were brought fully back under the rule of the Sublime Porte. Turkish troops were stationed in the Khanate of the Crimea to ‘discourage’ the state’s current alignment with Russia, and both the Ottomans and Zand Persia were able to expand their influence considerably into the Caucasus, with the Persians extending a protectorate over all Azerbaijan and the Ottomans to the border of Georgia.

Though the treaty was secretly signed in November 1796, after the defeat at St Petersburg had become apparent, it was not publicly announced until April 1797, when campaigning began in earnest again. The Kingdom of Sweden officially recognised Alexander Potemkin as legitimate Emperor of all the Russias, and Alexander, in turn, ceded various territories in Finland and Estonia to the Swedes. Alexander also legally annexed Lithuania to the Russian crown and then turned it over to Sweden, effectively allowing Sweden free reign to attack the Romanovs there.

Europe watched to see if Prussia would honour her unofficial alliance with Russia made by Peter III and Frederick William II by declaring war on Sweden. However, it was at about this time that Frederick William II himself died after a long illness, and even as his young son succeeded the throne as Frederick William III, the Poles took this as a signal to revolt. A rebellion led by the professional soldier Kazimierz Pulaski seized control of Warsaw and successfully defeated the first token attempt by Prussia to put down the revolt – which was far more serious than previous outbreaks had been. This encouraged the Poles to rise up in several other cities, with much of the interior of the rump Poland soon under patriotic control. Prussia was far from defeated, but it was clear that there was no way the Prussians would be directly intervening in the Baltic war anytime soon.

Denmark, though, was another matter. Christian VII had spent much of his life rebuilding Danish power in Europe, and now it was time to put that power to use. The Swedes could not be allowed to gain supremacy over the Baltic, as they doubtless would if Lithuania and Estonia succeeded to Swedish rule. Denmark declared war on Sweden and the Potemkins in May 1797, and it was at this point that the Russian Civil War became the Great Baltic War…



[1]See Part #10.

[2]In TTL this is Adolf Frederick’s son, rather than Gustav III

[3]Recall that the Potemkins’ army is led by Sergei Saltykov while Paul’s is led by a distant relative, Nikolai Saltykov.

[4]As there have been fewer Russo-Turkish and –Polish wars than OTL to distinguish himself in, Suvorov is not such a legendary figure, merely a competent general now approaching the end of his career.

[5]A son of Abdulhamid I. All Mustafa III’s sons predeceased Abdulhamid I so his own son inherited the sultanate.

Part #30: Indian Summer

You say that you are our father and I am your son...
...We will not be like Father and Son, but like Brothers.


– from the Iroquois-American Covenant Chain, signed in 1692 between the Iroquois Grand Council and representatives of the Province of New York​

*

From - Annum Septentrionalium: A History of North America, by Paul Withers (1978) -

Long before the founding of the Continental Parliament of North America, or even the Empire itself, what was generally known as the Indian Question had been hanging over the heads of its inhabitants. America was known to have produced great civilisations: no map of the New World was complete without illustrations of the great cities of Tenochtitlan and Cusco. But the British and German settlers who became Americans were not there to spread the Catholic faith and hunt for treasure as the Spanish conquistadores had been, those same Spaniards who now ruled in Tenochtitlan, renamed Ciudad Mejico (though the UPSA now controlled Cusco, through their Inca allies).

No, the Americans had come to grow tobacco, to escape religious persecution and, ultimately, to spread a belt of colonies across the continent to reach the Pacific and the rich trade that went with it. That goal had become increasingly harder as it emerged that the North American continent was much wider than it had at first been thought – when the colonies had first been laid down in the seventeenth century, most mapmakers had thought that the Pacific coast was only about a dozen days’ march to the west of the Atlantic coast. One relic of that belief was the fact that the colonies were entitled to strips of land going westward from their settlements on the east coast, which had intended to be neat rectangles but swiftly became ridiculous narrow stripes going across the larger continent. In the words of one contemporary historian, the colonies – and then the Confederations - had become like medieval villeins ploughing their little strips of private land. The solution was the same as it had been to that situation, too: land reform and common holdings.

This began with New England giving up its westward claims in exchange for Canada being opened up to New Englander settlement. The other Confederations, though, were forced to face the Indian Question. How were they to continue westward settlements when there were Indian tribes in the way, some of them quite advanced and allied to Britain, entirely capable of opposing that settlement with force?

The solutions adopted were different in different Confederations. Generally speaking, Carolina and New York were considered the most enlightened in their dealings with the Indians, probably because said Indians were among the most powerful of all those in North America – the Cherokee Nation and the Six Nations, the Iroquois or Haudenosaunee Confederacy, respectively. In both cases, dealings with the Indians were made on a discreet and quite respectful basis. The Confederal parliament of New York (still known as the Provincial Assembly for historical reasons) appointed a Special Commissioner for Indian Affairs, Albert Gallatin[1], who handled all direct negotiations with the Iroquois Grand Council. Gallatin was able to negotiate a relatively equitable settlement with the Iroquois, although he constantly butted heads with the Governor of New York, Aaron Burr, a confirmed Constitutionalist and political enemy of Lord Hamilton. The Constitutionalist Party generally favoured a more hawkish attitude to the Indians, as much of their support came from the ‘pro-settler vote’, while the ruling Patriots advocated a more measured response.

The ‘Gallatin Accord’, as it was known among Anglophones (otherwise, the ‘Renewal of the Covenant Chain’, after the original treaty signed between colonial New York and the Iroquois in 1692[2]), secured a path for westward expansion for New York, removing a strip of land from the south of the Confederacy in exchange for new Iroquois lands granted on the north side of the St Lawrence, in Niagara. This was supported by five of the six nations, the dissenters being the Seneca, who lost the most land, but were voted down at the Grand Council. The new lands were allocated between the Six accordingly, with the settlement being judged by the neutral Gallatin. And the Confederation of New York kept the rest of Niagara and was now capable of expanding into the Ohio Country, frustrating the ambitions of Pennsylvanians who wanted to establish ports on the shores of Lake Michigan…

Carolina had a more mixed history of Indian relations than New York’s century-old alliance with the Iroquois. The Carolinians had previously allied with the Yamasee tribe against the Tuscoara, successfully expelling the latter from the Carolinian hinterland in the 1710s (the Tuscoara then migrated north and became the Sixth Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy). The Cherokee entered the war on the side of Carolina in 1714, at the urging of two Carolinians who had no real backing from the colonial government to conduct negotiations, and helped defeat first the Tuscoara and then the Yuchi. When the Yamasee turned on the Carolinians afterwards, the Cherokee hedged their bets, theoretically remaining part of the pan-Indian alliance against the colonists, but deciding that the Carolinian militia was too strong to be worth challenging. The Cherokee were divided on whether to pursue an active alliance with the Carolinians against their traditional Creek enemies, but any doubts as to the power of Carolina were dismissed when the Carolinians defeated their former Yamasee allies and forced them to relocate to then-Spanish Florida, proceeding to settle their former lands.[3]

In the 1730s the Cherokee politically unified, with the pro-British Chief of Tellico, Moytoy II, becoming Emperor of the Cherokee Empire, recognising George II as Protector. British representation to the Cherokee was provided by Sir Alexander Cuming and then, after the War of the British Succession restored Prince Frederick to the throne, by his political ally Sir Michael McAllister. Carolinian treaties with the Cherokee for land were typically lower-scale than those conducted by New York with the Iroquois, largely because the Empire was at first a fairly ceremonial government, with many affairs still conducted on the township basis. Over time, though, this began to change.[4] Many Cherokee political leaders visited England, Moytoy’s envoys having signed the Treaty of Westminster with the British Government in 1730, and this was far from the last time. The state visits are thought to have impressed upon the Cherokee both the importance of an effective central executive, and the fact that a war with the Carolinian settlers might not stay restricted to America, as the colonies could call upon their distant motherland for more hardened soldiers if necessary.[5]

During the Third War of Supremacy, the Creek and Choctaw allied with the French in Louisiana against the Cherokee, their Chickasaw allies and the British/Americans. After the French were driven from all lands east of the Mississippi in 1759, the Creek and Choctaw alone were destroyed in a long ‘war to the knife’ that lasted well into the 1760s. Eventually the power of those two nations was broken as the Cherokee focused their warriors into cohesive armies, and the Carolinian militia was backed up by both British regulars and new regiments raised in America for the late war. The Tennessee War, as it was known (after the river and the Cherokee town of Tanasi on it) was the greatest shift in the Indian nations since the Tuscoara and Yamasee had been expelled, again by Carolinian and Cherokee power, a half-century before. The shattered remnants of the Creek fled westward and south into Florida, while almost nothing remained of the smaller Choctaw nation. The newly vacated lands were divided between the Cherokee (who had by this point practically absorbed the Chickasaw as a protectorate) and the Carolinian settlers in an equitable treaty signed by McAllister in 1766. As with the Iroquois, some existing Cherokee land was transferred to Carolinian in return for greater concessions elsewhere, allowing for Carolinian control of of the Gulf of Mexico coast. The Carolinians also claimed Florida, which had been won mainly by their troops during the campaign of 1766 against Spain in the First Platinean War, but the status of Florida remained up in the air for some years afterwards.

It was this feat, fighting alongside British soldiers and Indians alike, which earned Carolina its Confederal motto after 1788: FIDELIS ET VERAX, Faithful and True. When the American colonies were suffused by the ‘Summer of Discontent’ in the late 1760s and 1770s, when greater representation and less meddling from London were demanded, the Carolinas were the colonies who remained the most peaceful and loyal, with none of the radical mutterings that briefly emerged in New England and New York. This was rather ironic, considering the latter history of Carolina…

The other British colonies, and then Confederations, took a less enlightened view of Indian relations. Often ‘their’ Indian nations were less powerful, and also more prone to breaking treaties and raiding settled land, not least because they tended not to be politically unified and thus a treaty signed by one chief might not be upheld by another. The Pennsylvanian militia, backed up eventually by the Royal Pennsylvania Rifles and the King’s Own Philadelphian Dragoons, all but destroyed the Lenape people, while the Virginians bulldozed the Shawnee through both warfare and persistent settlement, just as they had to the Powhatan years before – the same ‘dilution’ policy that was pursued on an official level by the Empire against French colonists in Canada.

It soon became obvious to all well-informed Indians that the Empire was now powerful and populous enough to defeat any single Indian nation, even ones as great as the Iroquois and the Cherokee, and that began to inform Indian ideas of, for want of a better word, foreign policy…

*

Roots have spread out from the Tree of the Great Peace, one to the north, one to the east, one to the south and one to the west. The name of these roots is The Great White Roots and their nature is Peace and Strength.

If any man or any nation outside the Five Nations shall obey the laws of the Great Peace and make known their disposition to the Lords of the Confederacy, they may trace the Roots to the Tree, and if their minds are clean and they are obedient and promise to obey the wishes of the Confederate Council, they shall be welcomed to take shelter beneath the Tree of the Long Leaves.


– from the Gayanashagowa, the Great Law of Peace which forms the basis of the Constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy​

*

The Indians of America were much like the Indians of India in some ways: both of them conducted wars in alliance with France or Britain regardless of whether Britain and France themselves were at war at the time. President-Governor John Pitt of Calcutta once commented that ‘I have fought more French soldiers while our countries were at peace than I have when we were at war!’ Those soldiers were, legally, in the service of the Tippoo of Mysore (in Pitt’s case), or in America, allied to the Indian nations that the French supported there, such as the Ojibwa and the Algonquins.

So it was that, while the Tennessee War overlapped with the wider First Platinean War in the 1760s, the Ohio War overlapped with both the Second Platinean War in the 1780s and then the Jacobin Wars in the 1790s. The Ohio War was fought between an alliance of the Iroquois Confederacy on one side, backed up by New York and Pennsylvania, and the tribes who had formerly received French support – and still occupied the Ohio Country and the lands around the Great Lakes – on the other. The war was instrumental in establishing American control of the Great Lakes, allowing the formation of the Susan-Mary penal colony a few years later. The Ottawa tribe north of the St Lawrence survived but were forced to migrate westward, to the lands north of Lake Huron. The powerful Hurons, on the other hand, allied to the Lenape, were finally broken by their longstanding Iroquois enemies.[6]

The Hurons had dominated both the Ohio Country and parts of Canada for so long that their defeat and fragmentation was another major event in Indian politics. Pennsylvania and New York expanded and settled westward into the Ohio Country, while New York, the Iroquois and New England occupied the lands freed up in Canada. The Hurons lost their political unity and fragmented back into their constitutent nations, being a confederacy not unlike the Iroquois. What was left of the Arendarhonon and Attigneenongnahac nations moved westward and northward, where they would eventually join the Lakota Confederation of Seven Fires.[7] The Attignawantan nation migrated more to the west and south, eventually reaching the northern border of French Louisiana.[8] The possibility of the Attignawantan settling within French territory was rejected, as the displaced Canajuns from former French America had already resulted in the land becoming quite densely populated; however, the Attignawantan were permitted to settle north of the border and received French colonial assistance in return for providing a buffer state against other Indians. The Attignawantan were technically occupying British/Imperial land, but as almost no-one had even explored it yet, they had years in which to recover and rebuild their strength before any Virginian colonists arrived.

It was the final Huron nation, the Tahontaenrat, who were destined to make history, when under the visionary chief Rontondee (War Pole), they approached the Iroquois with a view to being accepted into the Confederacy. The Tahontaenrat had not been at the forefront of the recent fighting, but their lands were now subject to being swallowed up to Pennsylvanian settlement otherwise. The situation was not unprecedented. The Iroquois had previously absorbed a Huron people, the neutralist and separated Attawandaron, some years before – however, the Attawandaron were not acknowledged as a nation in the Confederacy. However, after the Tuscoara had been expelled from Carolina, the Iroquois had accepted them as the Sixth Nation, increased from the ancestral five, though the Tuscoara had fewer voting rights than them. After consideration, the Iroquois Grand Council agreed to accept the Tahontaenrat (and more importantly, their lands) into the Confederacy. Anything that would stave off the day when the Confederacy was surrounded by densely settled American country, forced back into the relationship of father and son rather than brothers…

*

THE SEVEN NATIONS OF THE IROQUOIS CONFEDERACY

(as of 1800)

SENECA or ONONDOWAHGAH, the People of the Great Hill

CAYUGA or GUYOHKOHNYOH, the People of the Great Swamp

ONONDAGA or ONUNDAGAONO, the People of the Hills

ONEIDA or ONAYOTEKAONO, the People of Upright Stone

MOHAWK or KANIENKEHAKA, the People of the Flint

TUSCOARA or SKARUHREH, the Shirt-wearing People

TAHONTAENRAT or SCAHENTOARRHONON, the People of the Deer​

[1]In OTL Gallatin, a Swiss-American, pursued the study of the Cherokee people after his retirement from politics, so the precedent is there.

[2]Because Prince Frederick stopped George Clinton becoming Governor of New York, the Covenant Chain wasn’t broken back in the 1750s like OTL, the Iroquois Confederacy didn’t fragment and all six nations remain firm allies of New York.

[3]All of this is OTL history (before the POD in 1727).

[4]In OTL centralisation stalled, British interest lapsed after Cuming’s mission, and the Cherokee fell out with the treaty-breaking governors of the Carolinas by the 1760s. TTL, Frederick’s American focus keeps the alliance strong and the Cherokee are more influenced by British and American ideas.

[5]Only the first visit happened in OTL.

[6]Note: Huron and Lenape are also called Wyandot and Delaware, respectively – the same peoples but given different names by English and French explorers.

[7]The easternmost of the Sioux states.

[8]Recall that this was reduced to only slightly more than the area of the modern state of Louisiana, as the British annexed the hinterland after the Second Platinean War.


Interlude #6: State of the Empire

A summary of the Continental Parliament of North America as of 1800, including the number of MPs elected by each Confederation.

Confederation of New England

Province of Connecticut: 2 MPs
Province of Rhode Island: 1 MP
Province of South Massachusetts: 2 MPs
Province of North Massachusetts: 1 MP
Province of New Hampshire: 1 MP
Province of New Connecticut: 1 MP
Province of New Scotland: 2 MPs
Province of Wolfe: 1 MP
Province of Mount Royal: 1 MP
Province of Newfoundland: 1 MP
Borough of Boston: 2 MPs

Total: 15 MPs

Confederation of New York

Province of Amsterdam: 2 MPs
Province of Albany: 2 MPs
Province of East Jersey: 1 MP
Province of Niagara: 1 MP
Province of Portland: 1 MP
Borough of New York: 2 MPs

Total: 9 MPs

Confederation of Pennsylvania

Province of Philadelphia: 2 MPs
Province of West Jersey: 1 MP
Province of Delaware: 1 MP
Province of Pittsylvania: 1 MP
Province of Ohio: 1 MP
Province of Chichago: 1 MP
Borough of Philadelphia: 2 MPs

Total: 9 MPs

Confederation of Virginia
Province of Richmond: 2 MPs
Province of Williamsburgh: 2 MPs
Province of Maryland: 2 MPs
Province of Vandalia: 1 MP
Province of Transylvania: 1 MP
Province of Washington: 1 MP
Borough of Richmond: 1 MP
Borough of Williamsburgh: 1 MP

Total: 11 MPs

Confederation of Carolina

Province of North Carolina: 2 MPs
Province of South Carolina: 2 MPs
Province of Georgia: 2 MPs
Province of West Florida: 1 MP
Province of East Florida: 1 MP
Province of Franklin: 1 MP
Province of Tennessee: 1 MP
Borough of Charleston: 1 MP

Total: 11 MPs

Total number of MPs in the Continental Parliament as of 1800 = 55

Breakdown:
33 Patriots (governing party, majority of 5)
18 Constitutionalists
4 Radicals

The American House of Lords has 26 members as of 1800, the majority of whom are either Patriots or crossbenchers.























Part #31: Enter the Bald Impostor

From George Spencer-Churchill’s ‘A History of Modern Warfare, Vol. III’ (1953)

The Great Baltic War was a milestone in many ways. It was the last war at sea to be fought primarily with oared galleys. It decided the fate of the governance of Russia, between European-looking progressives and and Asian-looking autocrats. It decided who would dominate Scandinavia out of Sweden and Denmark, both having risen from low points in the early 18th century to new zeniths of power at its end. And ultimately, perhaps, it decided the fate of the Ottoman Empire. The speculative romantics have often pointed out how different our world would be today if Emperor Peter III had simply executed Catherine on her coup attempt, rather than allowing her to plot and produce heirs (allegedly, at least) in Yekaterinburg. But the truth was that that would have been politically impossible. Throughout Peter’s reign, Catherine retained many supporters, indeed otherwise the brothers Potemkin, with their decidedly flimsy claim to the throne, would have got nowhere when they launched their bid.

Our tale so far stands at May 1797, when all the players in the war – save one – were committed. The brothers Potemkin had defeated Paul Romanov, though hardly decisively, at Smolensk and Vitebsk, and the Romanovians had retreated into Lithuania, which Paul had ruled as Grand Duke Povilas I for years and was now under the rule of his son Peter as Petras I. The Potemkinites held Moscow, Vitebsk and everything in between, though they had failed to take St Petersburg after their siege train was torn up by General Mikhail Kamenski. The Russian possessions in Ruthenia[1] had yet to be decided one way or the other, though it was assumed that they would eventually fall in line with whichever house could convincingly claim victory.

Sweden, seeing the Potemkinites on the up but not yet in place to win a decisive victory, declared war on the Romanovians and Lithuania. The Hat Party hoped to expand Sweden’s Baltic power and to subordinate or at least seriously weaken Russia, avoiding the nightmare of a war with both Russia and Denmark at the same time. However, this hope was dashed when Denmark proceeded to declare war in May. Prussia was busy putting down a Polish revolt which soon expanded into a wider war, and so was not directly involved with the Great Baltic War – contrary to all the Prusso-Russian friendship treaties of the mid-18th century.

So in May 1797 things looked bleak, though not yet hopeless, for the Romanovians. Peter and Paul raised a new army in Lithuania under General Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly, a Scottish-Lithuanian who had previously taken Russian service and fought the Turks. European commentators – or, at least, those not consumed with covering the far more urgent Jacobin Wars – compared the act to that of Maria Theresa raising Hungarian levies during the Second War of Supremacy, which had perhaps prevented Austria from going under in that war.

The war for control of the Baltic was now met in earnest. The vast bulk of the Royal Swedish Navy had been dispatched to defeat the smaller Lithuanian fleet and seize control of the Baltic ports, leaving Sweden herself with only secondary forces when Denmark unexpectedly declared war. The first victory in the naval war, therefore, was an easy one for the Romanovian allies, as the Danes defeated the Swedes at the Battle of Anholt (in reality taking place in the sea fairly distant from the island) and seizing control of the Kattegat. A second Swedish fleet remained in port at Malmö, their admiral being too canny to risk his small force in direct combat with the full power of the Royal Danish Navy, but by being able to sortie at any time, created headaches for the Danes’ plans to land troops in Scania across the Oresund. Despite an early dramatic victory, the Danes’ war plans stalled.

Meanwhile, on June 7th 1797 the Swedes made a descent[2] upon Klaipeda[3] in an attempt to seize the port and burn the Ducal Lithuanian Navy’s fleet in harbour. The Swedes’ descent in itself was remarkably successful, with Klaipeda being crushed between the marines from the north and the regular Swedish army moving in from Swedish Prussia to the south. The town was immediately renamed once more, to Karlsborg (after King Charles XIII). However, the Lithuanian fleet sortied under Admiral Vatsunyas Radziwiłł and escaped the ship-burners. The main Swedish fleet, led by Admiral Carl August Ehrensvärd in his flagship HMS Kristersson, were blockading the port, so it seemed as though the Lithuanians would be trapped.

Radziwiłł, however, proceeded to create a tactic which has been debated by naval historians ever since, and would come to greater prominence with the invention of the steam-galley by Surcouf and Cugnot a few years later in France. The admiral made the decision to sacrifice his slow-moving galleys that made up perhaps a quarter of the fleet, as they would be unable to keep up with the sailships anyway. The galleys, capable of moving independently without the wind, were used to hammer a gap in the Swedish line along an angle which the Lithuanians, sailing to the east away from Klaipeda, would be able to have the wind abaft the beam, while the Swedes would be forced to tack. Ehrensvärd had of course anticipated this and made his blockade strongest in that area, but Radziwiłł’s sacrifice of his galleys – which went down but took a number of Swedish men-o’-war with them – meant that the bulk of the Lithuanian fleet was able to escape.

Radziwiłł led the fleet to St Petersburg. Paul by now had heard of the heroic defence of the capital by Kamenski and had both promoted him and made Prince Alexander Kurakin, a long-held Petersburger ally and correspondent of his, the new Governor of the city. Paul’s emissaries, along with Kamenski and Kurakin, had succeeded in achieving total control over the Russian Navy in port there, purging all suspected Potemkin sympathisers. In truth the Petersburgers were quite disposed to be loyal to Paul in any case, having had the city’s importance increase further under Paul’s father Peter, who – like his namesake Peter the Great – wanted Russia to have a European face, and that face was St Petersburg. For much the same reason, the former capital Moscow tended to support the Potemkins even before they marched into the city.

Thus the initial engagements were somewhat misleading. The Danes had beaten the Swedes in home waters, but were unable to capitalise on that victory, while the Swedes had failed their objective of actually destroying the Lithuanian fleet, yet still had the immediate dominance they required to shift armies into their Baltic possessions. Troops flowed from Swedish Courland and Prussia, but rather than aiming straight for Vilnius, the Swedes instead turned northward in an attempt to regain Livonia, which they had lost to the Russians after the Treaty of Nystad in 1721. This, more than anything, illustrated how the Swedes did not so much favour the Potemkins or disfavour the Romanovs, as want to regain as much power over Russia by whatever means necessary.

It was also perhaps a mistake, giving the Lithuanians enough time to organise their new levies under Barclay and integrate them with the Russian remnant army led by Nikolai Saltykov. The Russo-Lithuanians defeated three Swedish armies in quick succession at Seinai, Alytus and Trakai, expelling the Swedes from the Trakų Vaivadija (Vojvodship of Trakai) but leaving them in undisputed control of Žemaičių seniūnija (the Eldership of Samogita), which lay between the Swedes’ holdings of Courland and Northeast Prussia. Nonetheless, this repulsion of the too-thinly-spread Swedish forces encouraged the Swedish army to focus on regaining Livonia rather than attacking Lithuania. The Swedes were unable to commit as many troops as they would have liked, as a large part of the army was either slowly pushing east from Finland or holding the frontier in the west against any Danish attack from Norway.

By August 1797 the war had almost stagnated, with the Romanovians having built up a new army but, with the Swedes hanging over their heads, unwilling to commit it to regaining most of Russia from the Potemkinites. Meanwhile, the Potemkinites were unwilling to move against Lithuania until they had taken St Petersburg, and were gearing up for another attempt. The war still hung in the balance, but what tilted it came not from any of the current players, but quite another source…

One interesting feature of Peter III’s reign was that, given his Germanophilia, he had encouraged the settlement of Germans in Russian territory. In some ways this was akin to how the British American colonists worked, accepting German refugees fleeing religious persecution but then promptly putting them down on a frontier between British (or in this case Russian) colonists and some dangerous natives. The Caucasus was a particularly common area for Germans, often Prussians, to migrate to (another common area was the Volga, where German farmers were used as a buffer against the eastern khanates).[4]

The story has been told so many times after the event that, by now, it can only be regarded as a legend. Nonetheless, the story goes that one of the German families who made the decision to move to the northern Caucasus were a Herr and Frau Kautzman, who made the journey early in Peter’s reign, in 1764. The Kautzmans had a child, a son, only months after settling on a farm near Stavropol. However, barely three years later, the farm was attacked by (as they thought at the time) nomads, and their son Heinrich vanished, presumably lost. The Kautzmans grieved for many years, but went on to have other children and vanished from history.

However, the attack on the farm had in fact been the work of rogue Don Cossacks, who supplemented their official employment with the Tsar with the occasional raid, particularly on the German settlers who often had no way to report the attacks. Peter III’s reign had been a relatively peaceful one, good for many Russians but not for the Cossack mercenaries. Heinrich had not been killed, but carried away by a Cossack who thought that the little boy ‘had spirit’ when he protested loudly in broken Russian about the Cossacks’ attack on the house and attempted to kick the Cossack in the ankle. That Cossack was named Yemelyan Ivanovich Pugachev, and he adopted the young Heinrich Kautzman.

Though the boy initially sulked and tried to escape, he was raised in the Cossack fashion, taking the second name Ivan after Pugachev’s father, and eventually fought beside them in wars against the Turks and (undeclared) conflicts with the Crimeans. Ivan née Heinrich became a huge, powerful figure who shaved his head in the Cossack fashion, yet his German blood still showed in his bright blue eyes, for which he was nicknamed ‘the Bald Impostor’. Under Peter III Pugachev rose to become leader of the Don Cossacks.

When the Civil War broke out, the people of southern Russia eventually hedged their bets, waiting to see which side would come out on top before backing it. Heinrich, however, advocated supporting Paul from the start, arguing that the Potemkins would do to the Don and Caucasus just what they had to Yekaterinburg, filling it full of their favourites and ending the (relative) peace between the peoples there. Pugachev agreed, but was unwilling to commit his forces just yet. Heinrich stormed off and journeyed south, perhaps in search of his real parents at last, though if so he never found them.

What he found instead was a man of fine Georgian dress, who despite his two bodyguards was being overpowered by a gang of Russian bandits. Heinrich went into action and sabred down three of the bandits in the Cossack fashion before the rest could even react, then fleeing. One of the Georgian bodyguards died of his wounds, but the other and his master survived, and introduced himself as Prince Piotr Bagration, a scion of the Georgians’ ancient and sprawling royal family. He had been sent to the north from King George XII, who had signed a treaty placing Georgia under Russian protection back in the 1780s, but yet now Georgia was threatened by Ottoman encroachment[5] and the Russians did nothing. Bagration had not even heard that Russia was deep in a civil war until a few days before.

His words gave Heinrich a wild idea, and he brought Bagration back to Pugachev. Together they hatched a plan, a plan not unlike the one that had been concocted in the court of King Charles XIII in Stockholm. They would assist one of the two sides, and be in a position to make the demands all of them shared at the end of it. The Ottomans were beginning to make threatening moves towards Georgia, but Abdulhamid II remained a cautious ruler and would not commit to a direct invasion. On Bagration’s advice, George XII thus agreed to all the Turks’ demands for vassalage at the time, committing the Georgian army to the north. The Georgians wintered in Rostov-on-Don, where they met up with Pugachev’s Cossack forces and Russian peasant levies who supported Paul. The new army was powerful, yet fragmented, and the Georgians would not submit to any other than Bagration, while the Cossacks said the same for Pugachev. In the end, then the solution was simple. The young Heinrich, the Bald Impostor, respected by all and yet not of any of the kindreds, led the army into battle.

In March 1798, Kiev fell to the new Romanovian army, followed by Voronezh and then Kazan in July, as Pugachev bit deeply into the heart of the Potemkinites’ natural territory. At the same time, the Russo-Lithuanian fleet met the Swedes at the Battle of the Irbe Strait, and won a Pyrrhic victory, defeating Ehrensvärd at the cost of most of their own ships. Nonetheless, this was the signal for the Danes to step up their own efforts. With no longer need to watch the Baltic for the return of the Swedes, the Danes left a squadron to bottle up the remaining Swedish naval forces in Malmö and deployed the rest of their fleet to a descent on Swedish Pomerania, conquering the German province and adding it to the Danish crown. The Swedes successfully defeated the small Danish force in Norway and besieged Christiania[6], but at this point the Danes finally made a landing in Scania. King Johannes II and the Diet proclaimed the return of the lands lost to Sweden in 1690 to Denmark, and the Swedes withdrew forces from Norway and Finland to prevent the Danes breaking out farther.

The Swedes continued to control Livonia, but their discomfiture elsewhere persuaded Paul to risk his Russo-Lithuanian army further east. Vitebsk was retaken in August against only a token Potemkinite force, but it was once more near the ruins of Smolensk that the main Potemkinite army met the Romanovians. The battle lasted three days, and was fiercer and more bloody than any other in that war. Finally, on the last day, the Potemkinites had broken the Romanovian line in two and a cavalry charge led by Alexander Potemkin himself had encircled Barclay’s command staff, when rumours came from the rear that the forces of the mysterious Bald Impostor had taken, and were sacking, Moscow. The rumours were exaggerated, though indeed the Cossack and Georgian forces were moving into the region around September. The rumours spread through the Potemkinite army and morale collapsed. Many of the Potemkins’ soldiers were Muscovites recruited there after their initial triumphant entry, and the knowledge that their city and families were under threat caused the whole of the Potemkins’ Muscovite-manned left wing collapsed. Barclay escaped, and the Lithuanians swept around and then it was the turn of Alexander to be trapped. Ivan Potemkin and Sergei Saltykov escaped with the bulk of the army, but the brash young claimant emperor was in enemy hands.

Paul’s decision has been cited by many as questionable, and perhaps not unlike his father’s to exile Catherine to Yekaterinburg, but rather than summarily executing Alexander Potemkin for treason, he offered him the Duchy of Courland if he would call off his forces. This was a rather ambitious offer, given that Courland had been Swedish before the war and was now deep in Swedish-controlled territory. Potemkin accepted, giving up his claim to the throne. It seems likely that at the time he viewed this as his only choice, and intended to go back on his word later, but that was unimportant.

By the early months of 1799, the Potemkinite army was shattered. Moscow indeed was held by the Bald Impostor’s forces, while Kamenski and Kurakin successfully held the Swedes and then threw them back into Finland, as forces were stripped from that army to hold back the Danes in Scania. Paul realised that the great strength of the Potemkins was in their partnership, and so separated the two, exiling Ivan and Sergei Saltykov to Yakutsk with the orders for them to develop the area as they had Yekaterinburg. Saltykov was originally planned to be executed, but the sentence was reduced to exile after his relative Nikolai Saltykov spoke in his defence to the Emperor. Paul re-entered Moscow himself in May 1799 and met with the Bald Impostor, who gave certain demands: liberty for the Cossacks, support for the Georgians against the Turks, and the emancipation of the serfs. Paul argued and negotiated for days, but in the end a settlement was hammered out. Otherwise, it was unspoken but known, the Bald Impostor would have held the city and fought Paul for it.

It was the end of 1799 before Sweden left the war, the Russo-Lithuanians having retaken Livonia and invading Courland and Swedish-Prussia. In truth Sweden was still in a relatively strong position, having held back the Danes and almost flung them back into the Baltic, but Stockholm was paralysed by a constitutional crisis. Charles XIII was assassinated by a madman on October 30th and he left no heir, threatening to plunge Sweden into a civil war or a war of succession. The Danish Diet entered into hurried, secret negotiations with the Swedish Riksdag, and a treaty was quickly agreed. The Swedes would accept Johannes II of Denmark as King, re-creating the Union of Kalmar. In exchange, the Danes would only annex the southern coast of Scania which was still most culturally Danish, and would ensure that the Swedes retained Finland (which the Russians were not yet in a position to invade). The Swedes had already lost Pomerania, Swedish Northeast Prussia and Courland, but this was the best settlement they would get while in such a weak constitutional position. The Riksdag agreed.

The Danes thus made peace with Sweden on December 4th, and warned the Russians that Sweden, and hence Finland, was now a direct possession of King Johannes II (as John IV of Sweden). The Russians were in no position to dispute this, and so the Treaty of Klaipeda (restored, of course, to Lithuania) ended the war on the last day of the 18th century, December 31st 1799 (Russian style) –


Courland to become an independent duchy once more, under Alexander Potemkin.

Swedish Northeast Prussia to be transferred to Lithuania (Prussia protested at this, seeing the territory as rightfully theirs, but was in no position to enforce this protest with arms).

Livonia remains an integral part of Russia.

Peter son of Paul is Grand Duke Petras I of Lithuania.

Paul is Emperor Paul I of Russia.

Johannes II of Denmark is also John IV of Sweden, including Finland.

Swedish Pomerania transferred to Denmark.

Emancipation of the serfs in Russia’s southern provinces only (later expanded in 1805 to include the provinces east of the Urals, to encourage settlement of the ‘Japan Road’)

Liberty for Cossacks, and the protectorate status of Georgia to be enforced.


So the Great Baltic War ended, and like all wars, sowed the seeds for the next.





[1]Ruthenia is the name commonly used in TTL for the Russian (and formerly Polish-Lithuanian, in the west) north of what we would call Ukraine. The south of OTL Ukraine is still the Khanate of Crimea and is thought of as an ‘Asian’ state.

[2]Contemporary term for an amphibious assault.

[3]Memel was transferred from Prussia to Lithuania (rather than Sweden, like the rest of Northeast Prussia) at the Treaty of Stockholm, and renamed Klaipeda.

[4]OTL Catherine the Great also did this, but I suspect Peter III’s well-recorded Germanophilia would result in an even greater scale of German immigration.

[5]OTL Qajar Persia was the main threat to Georgia in this era, but TTL Persia is still under the control of the Zands.

[6]Old name of Oslo.

Part #32: Three Lions and One Tiger

“Folly awaits the man who seeks to conquer the heart of India. Indeed, he should consider himself fortunate if India does not conquer his heart.”

– John Pitt, Governor-General of British India​

*

From “India in the Age of Revolution” by Dr Anders Ohlmarks (English translation)

Ever since the sixteenth century, India had been considered ‘elsewhere’ by European powers, more so even than the Americas. A war might be declared in Europe yet its participants amiably work alongside each other in India, or – more commonly – the reverse. Certainly, it was difficult to tell what constituted a war between Europeans in India, as the wars in question were usually, at least on some level, a conflict between rival Indian nations each backed by a European trading company.

Initially the Portuguese and Dutch had dominated the India trade, but by the eighteenth century they had been sidelined by the British and French. Just as they had in America, the two great powers of the century fought their Wars of Supremacy (as the English have it) in India, with the French generally allied to the Marathas and the Keralan states, and the British to the Nizam of Haidarabad, the Nawab of the Carnatic and the Nawab of Bengal. This situation changed as the century rolled on. First the French took Madras in the War of the Austrian Succession and proceeded to conquer British Cuddalore as well, reducing the Nawab of the Carnatic to a French puppet.

The French East India Company, under Dupleix and then Rochambeau, moved its headquarters from the old French trading post of Pondicherry to the far better equipped former British Fort St George at Madras. The British withdrew from southern India altogether, save for the Northern Circars (which they ran on behalf of the Nizam of Haidarabad) and fought a war against the treacherous Nawab of Bengal, eventually unseating him and replacing him with six invented principalities in the pocket of the Company. Aside from capturing French Chandranagore in the process (and thus ejecting French influence from Bengal) this had so consumed British efforts in India that the French had crept further ahead, despite the FEIC’s relative dearth of funding from Paris compared to the BEIC’s. Dupleix in particular was a genius at running colonies and trade agreements with no help whatsoever from home, and the systems he set up would go on to serve French India well.

By the 1780s, the Maratha Empire had collapsed after defeat by the Afghans and allied Indian Mussulmen in the 1760s, after the Marathas’ Rajasthani allies deserted them at the last minute at the Third Battle of Panipat. The Empire had been reorganised as a looser Confederacy, with the Peshwas losing their former power. French influence declined among the Marathas as their previously universal treaties and trade agreements were vetoed by the new local rulers. Instead, the French under Rochambeau focused on expanding their influence into southern India, cementing an alliance with the Kingdoms of Mysore, and Travancore. Travancore’s coastal neighbour Cochin allied with the British during the War of the Austrian Succession, and in the aftermath of the British defeat was largely absorbed by French-backed Mysore.

Mysore at that time was under the rule of the Hindoo Wodeyar dynasty, but during the 1760s a Mussulman soldier, Haidar Ali, rose to prominence after heroic deeds during the Mysorean invasion and conquest of Bangalore. Haidar Ali became effective chief minister of the King and soon usurped most of his power. He formed a strategic alliance with the French against British-backed Haidarabad, and went on to mostly win the Mysore-Haidarabad Wars of the 1770s and 80s. Mysore had become the most powerful state in India, with the Marathas decaying into ineffectiveness and Haidarabad on the back foot. Haidar Ali’s son Tippoo Sultan, who first rose to prominence as a general of the Mysorean army, was a remarkable visionary. Noting Travancore’s successful expulsion of the Dutch East India Company, he foresaw a time when India could be entirely free of the European trading companies – under Mysorean leadership, naturally. But the Tippoo ably understood the problems of ruling over Mysore’s new empire in southern India, with the mish-mash of peoples, languages and religions. Kerala alone included Portuguese Catholics, Jews, Thomasite Syrian Orthodox Christians and some Protestants in addition to the more common religions of southern India such as Sunni Islam, Hindooism and Jainism. To that end, the Tippoo (though a devout Mussulman himself) allowed the building of churches and Hindoo shrines in Mysorean cities.

The Tippoo was a realistic thinker and decided that the path to being free of European interference was to first assist the French in ejecting the British from southern India, and then to turn on them. It was hardly a remarkable event in India, which had weathered and absorbed countless waves of invaders since the time of Ashoka, turning them against each other. By 1790, he judged, the British had ceased to be a serious threat south of Masulipatam, and all that remained was to wait until the French became vulnerable. He did not have long to wait…

News of the French Revolution was slow to reach around the world, despite the importance of the event. The reason for this was chiefly that, thanks to Leo Bone’s trickery at Toulon and mutinies in Quiberon and Marseilles, most of the former Royal French Navy was out of the Revolutionary government’s hands. The government of the Marquess of Rockingham allowed the relatively large number of ships to dock in British ports, resulting in riots in Portsmouth and Chatham due to fights between British and French sailors who had been shooting at each other only about eight years previously. Therefore, the Rockingham ministry removed the French ships from the major English ports and instead commissioned the Royal Engineers to expand secondary ports, such as Liverpool, Kingston-upon-Hull and Lowestoft. This was a significant event in those towns’ histories, paving the way for their later importance as trading ports in the nineteenth century, and signs of it remain in the French names of some of the streets laid down at the time. Some of the French Royal Navy eventually removed to Louisiana, but the majority remained under the direct control of the Dauphin in London, who hoped that it might be used for a seaborne invasion to support a rising of royalists in France.

In any case, it meant that the Revolutionaries had few ships to spare and the British, with their great numerical superiority, were capable of blockading French ports. The Revolutionaries did send ships out to bring news of the Revolution to the French colonies, but few of these got through the blockade. Some did, but typically only after several years of unsuccessful attempts, after managing to leave while inclement weather disabled the British blockade. So it was that by the time L’Épurateur, a second-rate ship of the line of seventy guns (formerly the Bordeaux) reached Madras in May 1798, confused reports of the French Revolution had already been filtering through India for years. Some of these came from Zand Persia, which retained extensive trading links with much of India, and had enthusiastically embraced discussion of Revolutionary principles and adoption of some of them in a milder form. Other reports, usually rather biased, came from East Indiamen and Royal Naval ships calling in to Indian ports after hearing the news from Britain.

Therefore, when the Revolutionary envoy René Leclerc presented himself to Governor-General Rochambeau and demanded his oath to the Revolutionary government and to attaint himself of his countship, the Governor-General already knew something of what he spoke of. Enough, though it might come from British sources, to know that he wanted no truck with any of it. Quite apart from loyalty to the Crown and his own Catholicism, Rochambeau saw that Linnaean Racist ideas unleashed on India would make the storm of the old Goanese Inquisition look like an overcast evening. To that end, Rochambeau politely rejected Leclerc and had the frothing envoy dragged from his presence by Arcotian bodyguards.

Rochambeau, though, being a gentleman and not considering them a threat, did not impound Leclerc or L’Épurateur, which he would later regret. Whilst plotting how to have his revenge for the ‘infringement of his human rights’, as he termed it in his journal, Leclerc was approached by a messenger from Tippoo Sultan. The Tippoo had become intrigued by the tales of the French Revolution and wanted to know more, inviting L’Épurateur’s crew to Mysore. Leclerc agreed and the ship docked at the great port of Cochin, now controlled by Mysore.

Leclerc and his assistants were received at the court of the Tippoo in Mysore city by a salute of twenty rockets, which startled and astonished the French. Rockets were largely unknown as weapons in Europe at the time, but had been introduced to India by the Nawab of the Carnatic, and Tippoo Sultan had become enamoured of them while serving as a soldier. Therefore, just as Haidarabad was famous for its great artillery – the ‘Nizam’s Beautiful Daughters’ – Mysore was legendary for its rocket brigades, or cushoons. The rockets were greatly inaccurate, but fired in large numbers, and often equipped with either exploding tips or long knives attached to the head, which would scythe in a deadly fashion among massed infantry as the rocket spun drunkenly around in midair. Another use for rockets was to drop them in a confined space filled by the enemy, such as a breach in a wall, and they would bounce around off the walls trailing fire, burning the troops.

René Leclerc was a man who enthusiastically embraced the view of Lisieux, that Revolutionary political thought must go hand in hand with Revolutionary innovations in military technology and tactics, was greatly impressed by the rockets. In turn, he instructed the Tippoo in the details of the Revolution, and the Tippoo proved to already be better informed than most in India, having questioned traders and received copies of Revolutionary texts from Persia. The Tippoo’s family were of Persian blood and he still read Farsi as well as the Arabic which a devout Mussulman must.

The Tippoo, like the Zand Shahs, embraced some Revolutionary ideas, partly for genuinely idealistic reasons and partly to fit his own ends. Leclerc gave the Tippoo plenty of information about the FEIC which the Revolutionaries had derived from the archives in Paris, allowing the Mysoreans to exploit Rochambeau’s weaknesses, and also gave the Tippoo some Revolutionary innovations. These included Gribeauval artillery (actually invented some years before the Revolution, but associated with it in the public mind), the Cugnot steam wagon (an early model was carried along on L’Épurateur) and the standardised Moiselle Rifle that had been adopted by elite Tirailleur skirmishers under the late ancien regime and was now being revived thanks to Boulanger’s reforms de-emphasising that the army should be republican and treat all soldiers the same.[1]

Though the Tippoo preferred his rockets to even the efficient Gribeauval system, he enthusiastically adopted the steam wagon and the chirurgien, and had already been using rifles (of the more hand-made Indian type, used mainly for hunting) for years. The Tippoo organised a sharpshooting competition among his cushoons (regiments) and picked ‘those men with the Eye of the Tiger’ to form the core of his own Tirailleurs. The Tippoo had an obsession with the Tiger as a symbol of Mysorean power, India and himself. Leclerc made him an official Citizen of the French Republic.[2]

Leclerc stayed with the Tippoo for a year and a half. Then, in October 1799, the chance came that he had been waiting for. The King of Travancore, Dharma Raja Karthika Thirunal Rama Varma (known as Dharma Raja) died after a long reign and his seventeen-year-old son, Balarama Varma, became King. The Tippoo, who by this point had sidelined the Wodeyars and claimed royal power for himself, declared that Balarama Varma was too young and also illegitimate, claiming that Dharma Raja had been too old at the time to truly sire him. Flimsy though this claim was, it was largely just a casus belli. Travancore, alone, could not hope to resist Mysorean annexation, and then the Tippoo would rule unopposed over all of Kerala, as well as Bangalore and Mysore proper. Of course, Travancore had a treaty with the FEIC, who would be obliged to either turn on their former ally Mysore, or back down and demonstrate that the Tippoo was the real power there.

Which was exactly the confrontation that the Tippoo wanted. And Leclerc would sign up to anything that would hurt Rochambeau and the royalist FEIC, even if privately he worried what the Linnaean policies of the Revolutionary government towards a situation like this would be. Still, Robespierre was far away, and he wanted revenge on Rochambeau for his humiliation.

The plan of Leclerc and the Tippoo was put into place. It was an excellent plan, and by rights should have worked. The FEIC was not powerful enough, without support from Paris that would never come, to directly challenge Mysore. Rochambeau would have to back down before a power that was aligned with the Revolutionary government, which would be the start of an inevitably slide towards the Royalist Carnatic shifting to the Republicans as well. For the FEIC to triumph, it would have to be aided by other Indian great powers, and the only ones capable of doing so – now the Marathas were no longer an option – were the FEIC’s deadliest foes. It seemed an impossibility.

Unfortunately for the Tippoo, though, in Calcutta’s Fort William was a man whose most famous quote would one day be: “Impossible is only a word…”



[1]OTL the French did not much use the rifle and Napoleon in particular was opposed to it. TTL, thanks to the Americans using rifles so much and American troops serving in British armies elsewhere in the world, the French and the rest of Europe have decided that rifles may be the way forward after all.

[2]Unbelievably, this bit actually happened in OTL. People’s Republics run by absolute monarchs were not an invention of the Soviets.


Part #33: Alea iacta est

“The tactical doctrine of the Yapontsi[1]…a much neglected subject in western military schools…states that wars might be won by a Kantai Kessen, a single decisive engagement. In the real world, of course, the majority of conflicts do not work that way…but there is the well-known counter-example of Pierre Boulanger and the Rubicon Offensive…

- Peter William Courtenay, 4th Baron Congleton (Vandalia-shire, Virginia)​

*

From – “The Jacobin Wars – the Italo-German Front” by Joshua H. Calhoun (University of New York Press, 1946) -

The 1797 campaigning season had seen the launch of the Poséidon Offensive, the first real success by French Revolutionary troops in not only holding back their Austrian foe, but in putting the Austrians on the defensive. After the withdrawal of Wurmser’s army from Nancy, the Austrians held no French territory and were on the back foot in Italy and Switzerland. However, Wurmser’s dynamic thrust into Lorraine had blunted the left-hand prong of Poséidon. The French were much more successful in the centre, with Switzerland falling to Leroux’s army in days and Hoche’s brilliant outmanoeuvring of Alvinczi, no mean general himself, in the Italian campaign. As the troops retired to their winter quarters at Christmas 1797 (not that that existed in France thanks to Hébert’s promotion of deistic atheism), France was left in a better position than most of its generals had dared hope a year earlier.

However, a successful defence, even a proactive one, was not the same as a victory. In this Boulanger, Lisieux and Robespierre were, for once, in full agreement. The three Consuls agreed to continue to make the war against Austria the top priority, though Robespierre feared an invasion by Britain in the west. “Without a respectable fleet to shield us,” he wrote, “we run the risk of presenting our proud Republican face to the quailing Germans, while the mongrel shopkeepers stab us in our proud Republican arse.”

Nonetheless, even with conscription, French troops were too few to spare any reasonable number of serious soldiers for the west, not without impairing the war effort against Austria. Instead, Boulanger suggested that raw recruits be paraded through the western lands (as yet not yet reorganised into départements) and this show display hopefully put off any British spies, while also giving the troops some experience at battle-marching. Robespierre agreed, and thus signed up to a plan that, though sensible-sounding at the time, would eventually prove to be his downfall…

The Austrians were in even worse straits, however. Ever since Prussia had been damaged so badly in the Third War of Supremacy, the Holy Roman Emperors had become accustomed to resuming a fraction of their old authority within the boundaries of the Empire. There had been few wars between German states since the 1760s, and for this war against Revolutionary France – which had united Europe against it, at least in theory – the Austrians had marched to battle with the armies of the two most powerful German states, Brandenburg and Saxony, at their side.

But this did not last. Events spilling over from the Russian Civil War in the East served to break up the unity of the pan-German force, incidentally creating an exemplar that Sanchez would get so much mileage out of years later. Frederick William II of Prussia died merely two months before Frederick Christian II of Saxony,[2] but they were two extremely eventful months. The death of the King in Prussia[3] was the signal for a long planned for Polish uprising to begin, calling itself the Confederation of Lublin.[4] This was far better organised than the previous chaotic attempts which had been easily put down, even by a Prussian army that had found itself limited by treaties and the loss of land (and therefore soldier-producing families) to Austria and Sweden. The Poles seized control of Lublin, Warsaw and Bielsk within the first week of the rebellion and declared a restored Commonwealth of Poland. The absence of the modifier was significant, as the Lithuanian szlachta had refused to join with their former comrades in rebellion, although they certainly did not do anything to hinder them, either.

After some consultation among themselves, the Polish szlachta decided that electing a king from among their own number would not be a winning strategy. The Prussians were disorganised at the moment from their shift in kingship and the suddenness of the rebellion, but there were enough cool heads at the top of the Confederation to realise that, given time to reorganise and withdraw their troops from the pan-German anti-French force, they would easily crush the ragtag Polish soldiers. Therefore, the nascent new Poland required allies, and the best way to guarantee such allies was to offer them the kingship, which was not the position of absolute power it might be in other monarchies.

There were some suggestions of appealing to Emperor Ferdinand IV to either become King of Poland himself, in addition to his other titles, or send someone from one of the Hapsburg cadet lines. However, this seemed a questionable strategy, given that Ferdinand IV was determined to hold the pan-German alliance together and would not move against the Prussians. In any case, it was voted down when a far more attractive option presented itself. Frederick Christian I of Saxony had failed to be elected King of Poland on the death of his father, Frederick Augustus II, who had also been Augustus III of Poland. His own son Frederick Christian II had been an even less likely candidate for King of Poland had Poland still existed: he was concerned mainly with expanding Saxon power throughout all the Germanies, investing heavily in developing the western enclaves Saxony had acquired from Prussia after the Third War of Supremacy. This policy would prove to be of questionable value in the years immediately following.

Two months after the death of Frederick William II of Prussia, Frederick Christian II of Saxony died of an illness and without issue. The throne passed to his brother, who became Elector John George V. A more contrasting sibling it is hard to imagine. John George was both more dynamic than his brother and concerned with establishing Saxony as a power full stop, not merely one within the Holy Roman Empire. After all, Prussia had risen to such heights (before crashing down again) by building power in Poland, outside the borders of the Empire. When the newly-called Polish Sejm offered him the crown of Poland, barely after he had accepted that of Saxony, with the tendency for audacious gambling that would characterise him in later life, he immediately accepted.

The Saxon army was withdrawn almost at the same time as the Prussian messengers (who had had further to go) got through and recalled their own army to help put down the Polish rebellion. Ironically, the Saxons did not know why they had been recalled, and the Prussians had not yet heard that Saxony had declared war on Prussia, so the two armies camped together on the way back east before returning to their homeland and learning they were to fight each other. This rather surreal image has also been quoted by the disciples of Sanchez as support for their ideologies.

Losing one of their allies at such a critical time would have been bad for Austria; losing both was a disaster. Furthermore, the image of pan-German cooperation shattered along with it, and the more minor German states began to hesitate and pull back their own armies, alarmed at the prospect of a Prusso-Saxon war spilling over their own borders (as such wars invariably did). The withdrawal of the Hessian and Thuringian states was a domino effect, with each worrying about the armies of their neighbours being at home when they were still abroad. Soon, only the Austrian army and those of other Hapsburg-ruled and strongly tied states were in play – as well as those of the states directly threatened by the encroaching French. The Hanoverian army remained in place, on the direct orders of George III, but fought rather half-heartedly, more concerned about reports of Dutch and Danish activity worryingly close to their home electorate.

Thus, the Rubicon Offensive can be thought of as not merely a triumph for Revolutionary France but also a disaster for Austria, that was already unfolding before the first Revolutionary soldier walked out of his barracks in Spring 1798. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that, as with Poséidon (which the Allies had thought was a sea operation, presumably aimed at Britain), the code name fooled the Austrians, who thought that it must literally refer to a further French offensive in northern Italy, as Caesar’s had been. However, Boulanger (or more likely one of his subordinates, as he did not have a classical education) was simply referring to the idea of a single decisive throw. Rubicon was certainly that.

Aside from garrison troops, French forces were steadily withdrawn from Switzerland over the winter of 1797. Robespierre ordered the burning of the Habichtsburg, the ancestral Hapsburg castle in Aargau, as a symbolic spite to Ferdinand IV. The French were able to hold down the rebellious Swiss effectively enough, but gave ground to the Austrians when they attacked in the spring of 1798. However, even a small number of troops could slow down an enemy offensive in Switzerland’s Alpine terrain, and the Austrian advance was itself half-hearted. Hoping to match Wurmser’s success the previous year, the Austrians focused on Italy, believing it would be where the French massed their army. This miscalculation would cost them a lot.

The Austrian army in Italy was placed under the command of Archduke Ferdinand, a younger brother of Ferdinand IV’s who was also the Duke of Krakau (and hence the most likely candidate to be suggested as King of Poland if the Poles had succeeded in getting Austrian support for their rebellion). Ferdinand had not received his position purely through family connections; he was genuinely one of Austria’s best generals. He demonstrated this throughout the 1798 campaigning season as he fought Hoche’s mercurial brilliance with a more stolid, logistically-based but no less effective style. When Ferdinand led his army from Hapsburg Tyrol, through the Venetian Terraferma and into French-occupied Mantua and Milan, Hoche struggled to repel him. The French general had not expected such a large Austrian army so soon, and a third of his own force was away south, pacifying Spanish Parma.

Hoche, for one of the few times in his career, hesitated. There was the possibility of withdrawing his own forces to Parma in order to then give the Austrians battle with his full force, but that would put the French army in a sticky position. Hapsburg Tuscany lay to the south, a potential threat, and the Austrians could easily bottle him up in Parma and cut off the French army from its supply chain. Hoche decided against such a strategy. He sent messengers to his forces in Parma, telling them to regroup and then cause as much trouble for the Austrians as possible, then led his men on a retreat westward, back into French-occupied Piedmont. Hoche intended to resupply his army and hopefully rest his men in the newly set up Revolutionary depots at Turin, before the tired Austrians would then attack him on a battlefield of his own choosing – and lose.

All but the most disciplined armies find it difficult to sustain morale on a retreat, seeing the places they have already seen before, heading back the way they came. Hoche’s charisma helped to some extent, but his men almost mutinied nonetheless when his plan was scuppered. A second Austrian army under Wurmser came down over the Alps through Graubünden and blocked his retreat. Once more Hoche hesitated. Wurmser’s army could, in his estimation, be defeated, but to do so would give Ferdinand enough time to catch up.

He then considered turning south and heading for Genoa, but Ferdinand anticipated this and divided his army into two parts, the larger blocking the road south. Hoche seized even this tiny opportunity, though, turned around and attacked the smaller portion of Ferdinand’s army, the one that remained in pursuit. Despite the French’s troubled situation, Hoche’s audacious attack stunned the Austrians and Hoche managed to win a victory at Pavia, at the cost of a fifth of his army and half his artillery. The other half was abandoned days later to speed up the pace of the march, as Hoche’s wounded and tired men fled the other two Austrian armies.

Hoche found there was only one realistic destination his men could make while avoiding Hapsburg forces: Venice. Even the tired and wounded French easily defeated the inexperienced army of the Republic at Padua and then fell upon Venice the city. Such was the Rape of Venice, as is lamented in song. The relief of Hoche’s men at the end of the great race, at escaping their captors, was such that they gave themselves over to a spree of looting, rape and arson. It is certainly true that we only know what the original St Mark’s Square looked like from old illustrations…

The end of the Republic of Venice’s thousand-year history, significant though it was, was ultimately overshadowed by events further to the north. Ferdinand was preparing to besiege Hoche in Venice when an urgent recall came to him from Tyrol. Rubicon had not been aimed at Italy, after all, but through Lorraine…

The hammer blow that Boulanger assembled consisted of two great armies under Ney and Leroux, intended to sweep around to the north and south and pocket any Austrian defenders between them. The free city of Strassburg was taken in March and annexed to the French Latin Republic as Strasbourg; the Austrians were ejected from Haguenau mere days later. The rapidity of the French advance outdid even Hoche’s stunning manoeuvres in Italy, and illustrated two important innovations by the French Revolutionary Army: the Cugnot steam wagons for transport of artillery and important supplies, and also a slimmed-down supply chain, with troops encouraged to live off the land. This did not endear them to the locals, but meant they could move further and faster, not having to worry about outrunning their own rations.

On April 1st 1798, the northern army under Ney took Karlsruhe, capital of the Margraviate of Baden. The French advance had been so rapid that the Badenese army had literally been overtaken and the people of the city were unaware they were in danger until the first Bloody Flags were seen on the horizon. The Margrave and his family were captured by the French and, on Robespierre’s orders, publicly executed by chirurgien in the market square. The Schloss was then taken over by French troops and a military administration imposed. However, the bulk of the army was still moving forward. It was what the Germans would call Blitzkrieg, the War of Lightning. The name was so apt that the French soldiers soon adopted it themselves in translation, naming Boulanger’s mode of warfare the Guerre-éclair.

Ney’s forces were in Stuttgart a month later, though the Duke of Württemberg had the sense to flee before their advance. It was not a case of the French defeating the Austrian and local Swabian armies sent against them, but simply manoeuvring around them. The Austrians were forced to keep withdrawing as cities even deeper into the Germanies were threatened. In the few battles that took place, the Austrians were generally disorganised enough to suffer defeat. Also, as they were now out of the mountainous regions of Lorraine, the Cugnot steam-wagons could be used to full effect. The Austrian tactics of fighting in line collapsed when hit with the French columns and the steam artillery trundling along beside them, moving into positions where they could enfilade the thick Austrian lines. Battle after battle was lost for the Austrians as France focused her full might on this new breakthrough. The Austrian armies continued to reconquer France’s previous gains in Italy and Switzerland, but what was that compared to the double-edged sword driving straight for the heart of Germany?

As Ney’s army reached Franconia and brushed up against the neutral Palatinate, Boulanger ordered that the forces be divided, with Leroux continuing eastward and Ney’s army spreading out to hold down the vast swathe of territory that had been gained. An Austrian army was pocketed near Hechingen but managed to fight its way through Ney’s thinly spread forces to rejoin the rest of the Austrian force regrouping in Bavaria. This illustrated the effect of panic that made Guerre-éclair so effective – if the Austrians had continued fighting instead of retreating, Ney’s forces were too thinly spread to stop them, and all the French’s gains could have collapsed. But they did not, for the speed of the French advance meant that no-one would have been surprised to learn that Leroux was in Warsaw by next Sunday.

In truth, the French invasion slowed. Even with Boulanger’s ruthless approach to supply trains, Leroux was outrunning his essential supplies and ammunition, and also was away from the coal depots that had been set up to fuel his Cugnot-wagons. Germany’s own coal supplies mainly lay to the north, out of French reach for the moment, and so Leroux paused lest his army reach Vienna only to be without artillery. This was the moment in which the French invasion could have faltered, if the Austrians had delivered a decisive hammer blow to the French flank, now that there was only one French spear rather than two driving eastward. But the only Austrian general with the skill and temperament for that was Archduke Ferdinand, and he was still obliviously chasing Hoche around Italy.

After the fall of Ulm in July, Ferdinand IV desperately reinstated the formerly disgraced General Mozart as head of Austria’s armies, but by that point not even Mozart could entirely salvage the situation. Having stared at a map for an hour, Mozart simply told the Emperor pointedly that Vienna, perhaps, could be defended againstthe French onslaught – but only if they pulled everything back now.

Ferdinand IV was appalled by this pessimism on behalf of his Salzburger general, but a few days later was forced to agree. Davidovich had scraped an army together and attempted to blunt Leroux’s march at Burgau. The battle, fought on 2nd August, saw the almost total annihilation of the Austrian forces as Leroux used his Cugnot-artillery in Boulanger’s patent style, positioning them on flat ridges adjoining the battlefield and moving them around so as to direct plunging fire down onto Davidovich’s lines. Mozart warned that now the task was even greater. With a heavy heart, Ferdinand IV gave the order and then left for Regensburg, calling what would be the last Reichstag of the Holy Roman Empire…



[1]Japanese (the Russian name for Japanese)

[2]In TTL Frederick Christian I is succeeded by Frederick Christian II, an entirely different character to OTL’s Frederick Augustus III, and he dies notably younger, from disease, without issue.

[3]TTL the Hohenzollerns haven’t felt confident enough about their position since the 1760s to claim the title ‘King of Prussia’.

[4]Note that the fortress town of Bar, which gave its name to the OTL earlier Confederation of Bar, is now in Russia, as the Russians annexed the Ruthenian vojvodships of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth after the War of the Polish Partition.


Part #34: Eire and Water

“Just because a man is born in a stable does not make him the Lord.”

– Richard Wesley, 2nd Earl of Mornington​

*

From – “The Jacobin Wars” by E.G. Christie (Hetherington Publishing House, 1926)

Ireland. The Emerald Isle, Hibernia, the nation that had saved the English from the Vikings in the year 873 and had regretted it ever since. Though scenic, it had never been a particularly good place to live even before the anything-but-Glorious Revolution disenfranchised most of its population: wet, swampy, unable to support many people before the introduction of the potato. Ireland might be poetically green, but only because of all the rain. And since 1689, thunder and lightning had been added to that rain. Oh, the English had sought to expand power in Ireland ever sincec the Norman Conquest, but the rules of the game had changed since William III had become King of England. Once upon a time, to the English, Ireland had been that wild island full of cannibal barbarians, while now it was that desolate island full of priest-ridden traitors.

The intervening century had only served to deepen the divisions in Ireland between the relatively prosperous Protestants – concentrated in the old Plantations in Ulster – and the Catholics, who had been poor enough to begin with and suffered under a great deal of discriminatory laws. With each rising – Ireland had been a front in the Glorious Revolution and the Third Jacobite Rebellion – the situation got worse. Even when reform-minded Englishmen sought to end Catholic suffering in Ireland, they were angrily opposed by the Protestant Irish, who feared the fact that they were in a minority.

It was fairly obvious to any objective commentator what had to happen. The Catholic Irish would rise again at some point. The last Jacobite rebellion had been cut down in 1750, almost fifty years ago, allowing plenty of time for angry young men to grow up and for old men to forget the sorrows of what had followed the past risings. All they required was something to distract the British, and that something was the Jacobin Wars with France.

Except. And it was a big except. Many historians believe that the Catholics would have risen in their old manner, given a few more years as their organisations planned patiently, but…

Except the Protestants rebelled first.

On the face of it this was madness. Irish Protestants had a uniquely privileged position under the order imposed after the Williamite War and the following conflicts. They could both vote and serve in Parliament, enjoyed a disproportionate fraction of the island’s scant wealth, and could go off to Britain and have more distinguished political careers there – as many did, not least Edmund Burke. To do anything to jeopardise that, to bite the hand that fed them, was inconceivable. But then so were many things that spun off the jagged wheel of Revolution.

Many Protestant Irish, especially the most politically active Presbyterians in Ulster, resented the fact that their parliament had little power compared to the one in London, which could go head-to-head with the King and win (and often did). By contrast, the Lord Lieutenants in Dublin, though often quite competent men, remained in an old-boy’s-club network with the Irish parliamentarians and little ever really got accomplished. Those Protestants seeking reform initially cast themselves as Liberals, aping the moderate path that Burke had carved out in England (Burke himself speaking of the miserable situation of Irish politics, but not doing much himself about it). Many of them hesitated at the question of Catholic emancipation, though. Even the most open-minded Irish Protestants were concerned at the thought of being out-voted by at least three to one, by men they considered to be ill-educated, superstitious and priest-ridden. They could not be expected to understand modern enlightened politics.

The Revolution changed all that. France was undeniably a Catholic country and yet had launched the most radical political force ever witnessed in Europe. Revolutionary principles were far more popular in discussion in political circles in Scotland and Protestant Ireland than they were in England, not least because of the influence of Burke’s bald condemnation. Scotland had also suffered in the Jacobite Rebellions and had had a new road network built in King Frederick’s reign specifically to move British troops around more easily, putting down any future rebellions. However, these roads also meant that trade between Scottish cities picked up throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century, and by the late 1790s, Edinburgh and the newly industrialising Glasgow had as much of a trading class as London. And such men both have the money to exert a sizeable political influence as a whole, and are singularly hostile to anything that constitutes a change in policy, much less a revolution. It might endanger their profits, after all. So in Scotland French Revolutionary ideas remained just idle talk.

Not so Ireland. Despite the Third Jacobite Rebellion, British attempts to build a new road network there had stalled, partly because of the more difficult terrain and partly because of the intricate land-ownership laws that meant getting permission from fifty landlords to build a mile of road. Ireland remained a backwater relative to Britain, sleepy, impoverished, and with more grudges than you could shake the proverbial stick at. Ireland was ripe for revolution.

And yet among the Catholics who had the most grudges to hold, French ideas took little root. Partly it was simply that Protestant propaganda was not entirely a lie: many Catholics were illiterate and poorly-informed, and only heard about the Revolution through their village priests, who naturally took the Pope’s orders and condemned the Revolution. However, there were also plenty of Catholics well-informed enough to make their own decision, and the vast majority rejected the Revolution. No-one with anything more than the most desultory belief in his own identifier would be anything but horrified by the treatment of Catholicism under Hébert and Robespierre. The vast majority of Catholics who would ignore such things in favour of Revolutionary fervour had, naturally, already converted to Anglicanism in order to gain greater powers and freedoms. Those that were left mostly truly believed, and that was incompatible with the ruthlessness of the Jacobins.

So it was that while the nascent United Society of Equals was theoretically a joint Catholic, Presbyterian and Anglican organisation (ethnically speaking), the membership was made up almost entirely of Presbyterians and Anglicans. A few unorthodox Catholic priests and others did join up, but more for symbolic reasons than anything. The Society was led by Tom Russell,[1] who notably said that “Religion has led to so many divisions, so many wars, on our island this last century…the only solution for peace is to do away with it.” And like all atheist movements, they succeeded in uniting the isle – against themselves.

Although rumours of the USE were flying as early as 1795, they did not emerge truly until the summer of 1798. At that point, Robespierre in Paris was becoming increasingly paranoid about the possibility of a British invasion on the western coast of France, attacking the poorly defended lands while all France’s armies were committed to the invasion of Germany and Italy. As well as fatefully suggesting his strategy of marching raw recruits up and down the coast to persuade the British that there were troops there, Boulanger stated that the best way to avoid a British intervention would be to give les rosbifs something to chew on closer to home. A naval attack, even a feint, was simply impossible for what was left of the Republican French Navy, which would be annihilated in combat with the Royal Navy even if the Royal French Navy stood aside rather than fighting their former comrades. That left stirring up trouble.

Lisieux had been using the ‘Boulangerie’ to build an intelligence network separate to (and superior to, as it did not rely on flaming ideologues) Robespierre’s. He now learned of the activity of the Society, and how they wanted a united republican Ireland without state religion and fully independent of Britain, with a proper parliament. Robespierre signed up readily enough to the notion of spreading the revolution, his particular ambition, and was enthusiastic enough not to think to question where the information had come from.

Privately, though, Lisieux and Boulanger were certain that any rebellion launched by the Society would fail and they had no intention of supporting them any more than they had to. The important thing was that it would alarm the British and force them to divert troops to Ireland to put down the rebellion, discouraging or delaying any planned offensive moves. Support for the USE could be made with just a few smuggled shipments of weapons and propaganda pamphlets. Lisieux consulted the Boulangerie, and after patiently rejecting a helpful suggestion by Jean-Pierre Blanchard that they fly the supplies to Ireland in a fleet of balloons, secured the contacts they needed to effect the plan. It was almost impossible for French ships to sneak past the British blockade, at least in any numbers (isolated ships, as with L’Épurateur and Le Rédacteur, did manage to make it through on missions to the colonies).

Therefore, Lisieux co-opted Breton smugglers, little realising the import of his own actions at the time. But then how was he to know that one crate of pamphlets would be mistakenly left behind, opened by the Bretons’ curious relatives, and then taken to Nantes for translation as few of them spoke good French?

The Society was contacted and, in October 1798, an already planned rebellion was amplified by the French assistance. The French also sent some elite troops as a token help and General O’Neill, a politically suspect ancien regime Irish-exile general who had previously fought in Ireland during the Third Jacobite Rebellion. What the British later referred to as the Great Ulster Scare exploded into existence with the USE seizing control of much of Ulster and parts of Leinster in the early days of its action. The French documents had included plans for chirurgiens and they were put to work, executing British- and Irish Parliament-appointed officials all across the province. Belfast was made the capital of the new Revolutionary Irish Republic, but already USE forces were moving on Dublin. The relative speed of their offensive (and the fact that communications in Ireland rarely moved faster than an army) meant that a large number of Irish MPs and Lords were in session in Parliament when the city fell to the USE and the building was burned down – with the lawmakers still inside it.

The British garrisons in Dublin and Belfast both fought hard, but had been cut back severely in recent years as London had moved more troops back to the South Coast in fear of an invasion (the Admiralty’s estimates of Republican fleet strength were considerably exaggerated), and eventually succumbed to the USE. Worst of all, and widely reported by Liberal newspapers in England, was the fact that the USE fought harder and more skilfully than previous Irish rebellions. Why? Because so many of its members were veterans of Britain’s wars in India and America. Protestant Irish could serve in the British Army, after all. This wasn’t peasants with pitchforks territory anymore.

The problem for Britain was that news of the rebellion did not reach London until it had already exploded out of any ability to be contained. Also, naturally the news reports got longer with the telling. Before long men were seriously telling the ailing Marquess of Rockingham that Dublin had been burnt to the ground. And invariably confused reports led to anti-Catholic riots in London.

The British were in a quandary. By the time it became clear that the USE rebellion was too serious to ignore, they already held much of Ulster and Leinster, including the entire east coast. The old British strategy of working with the Protestant Irish and raising local militias could not succeed, partly because it was clear the Protestants could not longer be trusted, and partly because the main Protestant lands were already under USE control. Reports of the burning of churches of all denominations by the more radical wing of the USE served to inflame political passions in London. It was intolerable that Britain could allow French ideas to run riot over Ireland. Something had to be done, but what?

Rockingham’s government had been considering an invasion of northwest France since 1796, and when the tide of war turned against Austria, preparations were stepped up so that the invasion could be launched in time to relieve the pressure on Austria before it was too late. Robespierre’s paranoia had not been entirely unjustified. Now, though, Britain could hardly send those troops to France and ignore the rebels in Ireland, but sending a big part of the army over the Irish Sea would inevitably end up delaying the operation against France – possibly fatally for the Allies, given Austria’s rapidly deteriorating situation.

It was not an easy decision, but in the end Rockingham’s mind was made up by reports coming out of Galway. One of the few Irish parliamentarians who had not been present at the Battle of Dublin – and was thus still alive – was Richard Wesley, the second Earl of Mornington.[2] The Earl had fought in Bengal against Burmese-Arakan and in Haidarabad against Mysore, before returning to Ireland in 1793 on the death of his father and assuming the Earldom. Wesley was a hard-headed Anglican and ultra-conservative, who nonetheless believed that Catholics should have equal rights. He fiercely rejected anything that smacked of French republicanism, though, even if the USE hadn’t had him on its list of ‘to be executed’.

Wesley is widely credited with diffusing the situation in Limerick, always the city that had been most resentful under Protestant rule, and whose Catholic population was ready to take advantage of the USE in order to rise up, even if they did not agree with its aims. Wesley put on his old East India Company colonel’s uniform and ordered the British garrison to stand down and come out of their fortified places, then successfully bribed the city’s innkeepers into providing a week-long ‘celebration’. By the end of it, the British soldiers and the Protestant and Catholic townspeople were, if not old friends, good enough for government work. Wesley used similar tactics elsewhere and by the end of the year was effectively king of Munster, also providing a rallying point for the people of Galway. The half of Ireland not occupied by the USE looked to one of their last surviving Parliamentarians for leadership, and Wesley had already proved himself to be more than the usual corrupt old landowners who had dominated the Dublin Parliament before going up in smoke.

He was also a soldier, and a soldier of India no less, used to the idea that London ever providing British regulars to a trouble spot would be helpful but rather unlikely. Therefore, and in direct violation of the British Constitution (which banned Catholics from owning firearms), Wesley raised an army from the strange, ramshackle realm he effectively ruled, with his younger brothers as lieutenants. The British regulars already there, cut off from orders, he used as the core of his force, training new recruits. Both the Catholic and Protestant Irish grew to equally despise their British taskmasters, and shared hatred is always only one step away from comradeship. Perhaps Wesley even planned it that way.

So it was that when the USE went on the offensive again in early 1799, Wesley successfully held them back at Roscommon and the historically important Kilkenny, where Prince Frederick had defeated Bonnie Prince Charlie. He requested assistance from London, and Rockingham decided he could spare three regiments from the planned invasion of France – which had become unavoidable due to the Austrian collapse. As the Seigneur Offensive left Chatham, Portsmouth, Plymouth and Lowestoft, then, what Royal Navy ships remained were transporting those three regiments (the 23rd, the Royal Welch Fusiliers; the 58th (West Essex) Regiment of Foot[3], and the 79th (New York) Regiment of Foot). Ironically, no loyalist Irish units could be spared as they were all assigned to either the West Indies or the Mediterranean garrison at that time.

The Welsh, Essexmen and New Yorkers all landed at Limerick in March 1799 after a particularly choppy crossing, just as Prince Frederick had almost exactly fifty years earlier. By that point, Wesley’s forces were confident enough with their string of victories and fighting retreats against the USE that they were able to view the pale, seasick redcoats with an air of superiority and contempt. Yet they were soon grateful enough. The British and Americans had also brought food supplies, desperately needed given Wesley’s strategy of not living off the land in order to gain the favour of the people who lived there, and they brought artillery companies. Most of the Royal Irish Artillery, based in Dublin, had been captured by the USE when they took the city, and though the USE had few trained artillerymen to use the guns, Wesley’s army had had little choice but to retreat whenever they were confronted by artillery they could not reply to.

The two armies met in their first truly decisive engagement near Carlow in May. They were both heterogenous forces, and both had some men in red uniforms (the USE’s former soldiers had kept theirs) and some in civilian clothes. Therefore, they both adopted the old Civil War-era measure of wearing some brightly coloured token to identify them to their friends: the USE used an orange ribbon and Wesley’s army a blue. The use by the USE of orange (also used in their flag, based on the French Bloody Flag but orange rather than red and with an inverted Leinster harp rather than a fleur-de-lys) illustrates the Protestant majority that affected their thinking and traditions without them even realising it.

The USE forces fought hard, but Wesley’s new superiority in artillery was telling. The loyalist forces were not, perhaps, as effective as they might have been, however, as the British and American colonels of the three new regiments were all sceptical about treating Wesley – a former East India colonel, not even a proper one – as their general, and failed to take orders as automatically as they might have done. This perhaps contributed to the fact that a large part of the USE army was able to make a successful retreat under O’Neill. Still, the battle was remembered for the poetic way that the Royal Welch’s grenadier company marched stolidly into the face of withering USE fire, flanked by Wesley’s Irishmen, to the ironic strains of ‘British Grenadiers’.[4]

Though the Battle of Carlow was not as great a victory for the loyalists as it could have been, it effectively ended the USE’s winning streak and their supporters began to melt back into the woodwork as Wesley took Kildare and the West Essex, supported by Irish under Wesley’s younger brother George, secured Wicklow. In doing so they bypassed a small USE army in the south of Leinster, which congregated on Wexford and then dissolved in panic from the news from the north, most of its members eventually escaping to France or the UPSA.

The USE’s armies regrouped to defend Dublin, which was bloodily fought over throughout September as Wesley laid siege. In the end, the city’s walls were successfully escaladed by the New Yorkers, as is told in Tekakwitha’s epic True Liberty, with so many good men being shot down from their ladders by USE sharpshooters. Yet the New Yorkers did it, and one of their number – a certain James Roosevelt – had his revenge by gunning down General O’Neill with his Ferguson rifle.[5]

Wesley’s army was initially consumed by the usual rapine fervour for looting and burning that flows forth when an army takes a fiercely defended city (and after all, even his Irish troops were mostly recruited from distant Munster and Connaught) but they sobered when they saw the burned-out wreck that was all that remained of the Irish Parliament. Some men even swore that the horrible roast-pork smell of burnt human flesh clung to it forever.

The defeat of the USE did not come until Christmas, though Belfast was the last city they truly fought to defend. Wesley’s army was not so restrained this time and angry reports of rape and murder against the locals circulated throughout Britain and Ireland. Russell took poison rather than fall into British hands and be executed for treason. Many men of the USE escaped or faded back into Irish society as a whole. Being ‘accused of Equalitarian leanings’ was for time a witch-hunt accusation in Ireland, levelled against many inoffensive men against whom their accuser had a grudge.

The situation in Ireland did not stabilise for a long time. London, busy with the war with France, did not have much time to consider what to do next, and order and communications were not restored until mid-1800. By that point, of course, Wesley had his own ideas about the island’s future course…



[1]Note the pointed absence of Theobald Wolfe Tone, for which there is a reason…

[2]The Wellesleys were called Wesley before changing it to sound more English, which hasn’t happened in TTL. TTL’s Richard is essentially an amalgam of OTL’s Arthur and Richard.

[3]OTL all the regiments moved down two places after the British disbanded the two American regiments, the 50th and 51st, after the Seven Years’ War, i.e. the 58th became the 56th – TTL that hasn’t happened.

[4]In OTL the Royal Welch did this during the American Revolutionary War.

[5]The Ferguson breech-loading rifle has still been invented in TTL’s 1770s. Much like OTL, the British military establishment is still dubious about it, but it has enjoyed much popularity as a hunting weapon in the Empire of North America, and New York regiments in particular have adopted it as the weapon of choice for their Rifle skirmisher companies.


Part#35: The Empire Spreads Her Wings

“In 1751, we won our independence as the Empire. In 1788, we won the right to elect our own representatives to our own Parliament. But it was in 1796 that North America, her own house put in order, first began to reach out to the world…”

– introduction to a North American history textbook, 1892​

*

From "A History of North America" by Dr Paul Daycliffe (William and Mary, 1964):

In reaction to the mob attacks on the British and American ministers in Paris, on September 2nd, 1795, the British Parliament voted 385 to 164 in favour of a declaration of war against Revolutionary France. This was matched in November 14th by a vote of 46-9 in the Continental Parliament, which was particularly outraged by the treatment of Thomas Jefferson, and this swung over many Constitutionalists who would otherwise have sympathised with the motives of the Revolution.

Almost immediately thereafter, commentators in both countries began to consider by what mode the war against France would take. The Admiralty and Horse Guards had, of course, made considerable plans for a future war with France, as this seemed to be a rather predictable occurrence every two decades or so during the Age of Supremacy. However, such plans revolved around the geopolitical situation remaining more or less as it had been since the First War of Supremacy.[1] British European policy was largely aimed at attacking France via continental proxies such as Austria or Prussia, paid off with British funds and backed by British-controlled Hanover and British-influenced Brunswick. The main thrust of Britain’s own war effort would be outside Europe, taking more colonies from France (with the assistance of North America) and undermining French influence in independent states.

These plans all went up in smoke when the Burke Strategy, as it was later called, was implemented in 1795. Against the views of opportunists, who initially included the Prime Minister Lord Rockingham himself, Parliament voted not to take advantage of the French Revolution in order to sweep up French colonies around the world, but on the contrary to make sure as many of them as possible stayed French and declared loyalty to the Dauphin, now King Louis XVII in British eyes. This ideologically-based rather than opportunistic approach shocked the British public establishment and reflected the brief but intense feeling of outrage that the attacks on Jefferson and Grenville had caused. The French Republic was too dangerous to allow to exist, even if it had led to the downfall of Britain’s old enemy, the Bourbon monarchy. “Better the devil you know than the Jacobin you also know all too well,” as the Marquess of Bute[2] said in his famously mangled quote.

The new war plan resulted in much head-scratching at the Admiralty and Horse Guards, and not merely of the crusty conservatives who were unable to contemplate an alliance with any kind of France on principle. Britain’s strategy had always been primarily naval, and various mutinies and Leo Bone’s trick at Toulon meant that Revolutionary France was unlikely to attempt a naval invasion of Britain or any major sea operations at all. Additionally, with the Royal French Navy loyal to the Dauphin (Louis XVII), the combined forces easily had enough ships to blockade all the French ports and sweep the seas for any Revolutionary ships that did get out. This overwhelming superiority was, paradoxically, met with depression from the Royal Navy, whose captains disliked the prospect of a war filled with dull blockade and convoy duty and little chance of taking prizes.

The British Army, on the other hand, faced the opposite problem. It had always been very small by continental standards and rarely fought alone, always backed up by big forces from the German states. The Army was professional enough but lacked the European armies’ experience of fighting on modern battlefields – it was more used to lending a regiment or two to a skirmish in America, India or elsewhere, participating with local forces. And given the Armée républicaine françaises’s gradually increasing successes in the war with Austria, it looked as though the British Army would eventually have to send forces to assist the Austrians or even (as the war wore on) to prevent Hanover and the allied states from falling to French invasion.

The solution was to increase recruitment, which always caused headaches at Horse Guards. The British people remained violently opposed to the idea of a large standing army: memories of Cromwell ran deep. The creation of any standing army, except by the express consent of Parliament, was specifically forbidden in the British Constitution. Even considering the current situation, Horse Guards had to tread very carefully in a call for increased recruitment. It was true that the country was ripe to give up a larger number of suitable recruits than the past, though. Britain’s Army had always recruited down-on-their-luck petty criminals or simply those out of luck, and the burgeoning Industrial Revolution was producing plenty of those, as people moved to the industrialising cities to find jobs and often found poverty and starvation instead. Also, the Navy’s lack of need for recruitment above peace levels meant that the Naval press-gangs were not out, freeing up more men of the right age for army service instead. The recruiting sergeants spun tales of rich plunder to be had in the Germanies, and the young men signed up, apparently not wondering that if there was indeed such rich plunder, why the same sergeants were still sergeants.

Yet the numbers raised still did not come close to Horse Guards’ most conservative estimates for a force required to defend Hanover and support Austria. Reports of both Boulanger’s new tactics and the superiority of French artillery (both in the Gribeauval system and the Cugnot steam tractors) were at first exaggerated in Britain, and Horse Guards generally considered that the only immediate response would be to try and achieve numerical superiority over any French army faced in the field. Given the vastness of Boulanger’s conscript armies, this seemed futile, but of course instituting conscription in Britain would be seen as utter madness and would doubtless lead to the downfall of the Government.

Therefore, Horse Guards turned to rather unorthodox solutions. The organisation, originally very conservative (even compared to the Navy) had been severely purged by King Frederick after the Second Glorious Revolution[3] to weed out anyone who might 1) disagree with his right to the throne and 2) have the power to raise an army. An unintended consequence of this was that Horse Guards had become far more open to new ideas, particularly since Frederick had introduced a number of American military veterans to positions of power and this had continued, particularly since there were now a reasonable number of American regiments on the lists.

The Commander-in-Chief of the British Army at that point was Jeffrey Amherst, 1st Viscount Amherst.[4] Although a Kentish Man born and bred, he had served for most of his career in North America, fighting the French in the Third War of Supremacy under Wolfe, and had served as military governor of Michigan immediately after the war.[5] Amherst’s own detailed notes and explorations of the region were used extensively by the Michigan Commission, the body which planted what would become the Susan-Mary Penal Colony some years after Amherst’s death. Amherst was considered ‘more than half a Jonathon’ by some of the more fossilised parts of the Army bureaucracy (even though he himself was in his eighties), and had overseen several appointments of senior American officers to Horse Guards posts.

One of these was General Sir Fairfax Washington, second son of the by now deceased Lawrence Washington and brother of James Washington, 2nd Marquess of Fredericksburg.[6] Sir Fairfax had cut his military teeth as a young lieutenant of the Virginia militia in the Indian wars, then had served as a captain of the newly created 63rd (Virginia) Regiment of Foot, which had fought under his uncle General George Washington in the Plate during the Second Platinean War. He had risen to become colonel of the regiment, then had in 1791 become Master General of the Ordnance. Sir Fairfax’s tenure was noted for his support for Henry Shrapnel’s development of a case shot, a hollow cannonball filled with musket balls and gunpowder, which exploded in midair (in theory) and had the same bloody effect as canister on close-packed enemy troops, but at a much greater range. The Shrapnel case shot was later one of the British Army’s best weapons against the close-packed French columns they faced.

However, Sir Fairfax is best remembered for his participation in the recruitment crisis of 1795 and 1796. He suggested to Amherst that they increase recruitment in the Empire of North America, at which Amherst was sceptical: he pointed out that America’s open expanses of new land to be settled meant that there was less chance of producing the down-on-their-luck young men that the British Army relied on for its recruitment. Sir Fairfax countered that settlement had largely stalled in some of the Confederations, such as Carolina and New York, and even in those still opened up to settlement, not all young men could afford to buy their own land. The promise of plunder in a European war to finance their plans might be very attractive…

Amherst agreed and put the proposal to King George, who accepted readily. Parliament was less enthusiastic, though a majority favoured the proposals. However, Sir Fairfax realised that the practice of having to appeal to Parliament to raise each new regiment would hamstring and slow down the programme too much. Together with Amherst, and with Royal backing from the King, they launched the American Regiments Bill, which sought to transfer the responsibility for raising American regiments from Westminster to Fredericksburg. This was considered greatly controversial in the British political scene, but happily for Sir Fairfax, coincided with the reports of Boulanger’s shock defeat of Mozart in November. As usual a week is a long time in politics, and for that week the chattering classes were consumed with the certainty that the French Revolutionary forces would carry all before them and that the Hanoverian Dominions needed all the regiments they could get. It did not matter that in a week or two, when reports of Ney’s retreat from Lorraine emerged, they became equally certain that the French Revolutionary armies were doomed, because it was during that week that the American Regiments Act (1795) was passed.

The Act was somewhat watered down by the House of Lords, but passed in its original spirit. It was joined in February 1796 by the Shipping Act (1796) which, among other things, increased the power of American dockyards to build ships to a Royal Naval standard. However, the Admiralty remained unified and based in London, it being assumed at this point that any American contribution to the naval war effort would be minor and superfluous, given British and Royal French overwhelming numerical superiority.


The grandly named Commission for Continental Regiments was created by an act of the Continental Parliament in April 1796 and took up office in the Cornubia Palace, a building originally intended for King Frederick’s royal residency in America but in practice usually empty, as when the royals visited America they usually travelled between the colonies and stayed as the guests of the local nobles. The Palace was large enough to be filled out with several other newly created Continental Commissions (essentially the American version of departments of State) as the war wore on. In order that Westminster might be able to demand accountability of American actions, a further Act was passed in 1797 which saw a Special Commissioner for Home Affairs appointed, essentially an American minister to Britain in all but name, mirroring the Lord Deputy. The first of these was Albert Gallatin of New York, appointed by his key political ally Lord Hamilton the Lord President. As Gallatin's and Hamilton's great political enemy, Governor Aaron Burr of New York (and a noted anglophobe) remarked sourly, 'Well, he has managed to gain profitable relations with the savages of the forests and rivers to the west; now let him attempt it with those on the foggy island to the east.'

At the founding of the CCR, only eight American regiments actually existed: the 80th Royal Pennsylvania Rifles, the 14th King’s Own Philadelphian Dragoons, the 63rd (Virginia) Foot, the 79th (New York) Foot, the Royal American Company of Artillery (not numbered, and recruited from all over), the 84th (Carolina) Foot, the 78th New England Rifles, and the 83rd (New England) Foot. The first new regiment to be formed was the 99th (Pennsylvania) Foot, that Confederation originally having preferred to rely on its own militia than form a regiment of the Line, but the lessons learned from the Lenape War showing the folly of that approach. Five new regiments were formed between May 1796 and September 1798, when the ‘Seigneur Offensive’, the invasion of the western coast of France, was launched. The vast majority of their men were still green by that point, despite having been drilled by veteran American sergeants from the Second Platinean War. However, even those that were not fit to fight in France were still useful: assigned to the frontier forts, they filled the boots of the more competent troops who had originally been stuck there, freeing them up for France while still warning off Indian raids. Ironically, this was the same tactic, on Robespierre’s part, which was responsible for the immediate success of ‘Seigneur’…

The American regiments taking part in the invasion of France were the 80th, the 84th and the 78th Rifles, while the 79th New Yorkers were busy assisting Lord Mornington in quelling the USE rebellion in Ireland. Generally speaking, however, throughout the course of the war, the greatest contributions to the army came from New York and Carolina. These were the two Confederations least concerned with westward settlement, Carolina’s way mostly blocked by the Cherokee and Royal-French Louisiana, New York’s by the Great Lakes and the Iroquois. Pennsylvania was also a fairly large contributor but remained concerned with securing its newly won western lands from the Indians. Virginia and New England did contribute forces, but not in proportion to their population, and the reason for this was that they (specifically Boston and Norfolk) were centres for the new American shipbuilding programme permitted by the Shipping Act. Although the captains acceded through the usual precedence on the post-lists, the crews were often drawn locally, and thus fewer recruits were available for the Army regiments.

And of course it was one of the Boston dockyards that built the most famous American ship of them all, HIMS Enterprize



[1]War of the Spanish Succession.

[2]John Stuart, 4th Earl of Bute, 2nd Marquess of Bute (in TTL the 3rd Earl was made Marquess as he remained in opposition and never became the unpopular Prime Minister he was OTL).

[3]Frederick’s triumphant return in 1750.

[4]As in OTL, although OTL he was only a Baron.

[5]OTL Amherst was governor of Canada and then of Virginia – TTL Wolfe is governor of Canada and Virginia now gets native-born Americans appointed as governors.

[6]OTL, before his death from tuberculosis at a young age, Lawrence Washington had four children, none of which survived beyond youth, and TTL’s names are adapted from theirs.
 

Thande

Donor
Part #36: Cross of Fire, Heart of Blood

Dieu, et mon droit.”

– Louis XVII’s first words upon setting foot on the soil of Brittany​

*

From – “The Jacobin Wars” by E.G. Christie (Hetherington Publishing House, 1926)

Looking back on the issue, many historians have found it rather strange that the French Republican government under Robespierre had not foreseen the fact that Brittany and the Vendée would be trouble spots for the Revolution. Both areas had benefited under the same quirks of the ancien regime that the urbanite supporters of the Revolution had hated. In the words of Arthur Spencer, “no farmer has ever complained about a law that makes it more difficult for him to pay taxes to the government”. As a Duchy, Brittany continued to enjoy special privileges and autonomy under the Kingdom of France, including its own relatively powerful parlement.

The Vendée, though having no such special constitutional status, possessed a nobility that was more down-to-earth and less divided from commoners than that in Paris, and the excesses of the Revolution against the First Estate shocked Vendean public opinion. But it was those against the Second Estate that really clinched it. Perhaps because it had been a battleground between Protestant Huguenots and Catholics two centuries before, the Vendeans were some of the more fiercely devout Catholics in all France. Anti-clerical measures on the part of the Revolution – both relatively passive ones such as stopping clerical privileges, and active ones such as Hébert’s pogroms – served to further align Vendean feeling against the Republican government.

The strange part was that there was no rebellion for the first three years of the Republic’s existence. This was simply because, to oversimplify somewhat, no-one had ever been sent from Paris to check that the western provinces remained loyal to Paris. The idea that to possess the capital city is to possess the state was a cornerstone of Revolutionary thinking, and the Republicans’ possession of Paris did serve to turn much undecided French public opinion to their side in the early days. However, Brittany in particular had been largely unaffected even by the trend towards centralisation during the days of Bourbon absolutism. It was not a case of rebellion in the years between the King’s phlogistication and 1798: simply that Vendean and Breton officials ignored any pronouncements coming out of Paris. Even though Robespierre feared a British invasion of the western coast of France, the Republican government did not try to enforce its authority there simply because it was focused entirely on defeating Austria.

This changed in 1798. At a meeting between the three Consuls (Jean-Baptiste Robespierre, Pierre Boulanger and Jean de Lisieux) in Christmas 1797 (a.k.a. Chien Nivôse de l’an Deux), Robespierre voiced his fear of a British invasion, noting that no real troops could be spared from the planned invasion of Germany, the Rubicon Offensive. Boulanger had suggested that the Armée républicaine françaises (ARF) instead use the western coastlands as training ground for raw recruits, marching them up and down to provide a convincing military presence for any British spies. Robespierre had agreed, noting that this would also help extend governmental control into an area that had (vaguely) been reported to be…difficult.

Ironically, it was this move that first sparked rebellion in the west. The first French recruits left their barracks in March 1798, at around the same time as the launching of Rubicon in the east. Initially Boulanger’s plan worked, with overly nervous British agents reporting that the French were moving troops in to secure the west, and that the British government’s planned Seigneur Offensive would have to be cancelled. However, even as the doddering Marquess of Rockingham hesitated, things came to a head. The recruits were drawn from all over France, practically foreigners to many of the locals, and they were led by drill sergeants often considered too undisciplined to be serving against Austria. And one of the things the troops practiced was Boulanger’s strategy of living off the land…the result was a reign of terror against the local people, with looting and confiscation rife. The troops were used to a world, by now, where you could get away with anything if you could bluff the other person into thinking you had sanction from Robespierre. The Vendeans…were not.

Historians are divided on what incident first sparked off the Chouannerie, just as they are on the causes of the Jacobin Revolution. Many people have drawn attention to a particular crime, the rape of a mother superior, the burning down of a noble’s house with his family still inside, the desecration of a church. It is quite probable that we will never know for sure. What is known that, in an action similar to that of the Polish rebellion raging at the same time in Eastern Europe, many quietly organised rebel groups sprang into life on the same day: October 9th, the day of St Denis, patron saint of France. That day, Sarrasin Vendémiaire de l’an Trois, was also a day of celebration for the Republicans, at least before they heard about what was happening in the west. It was on this day that the French armies took Regensburg and the Holy Roman Empire breathed its last (details of which, see later chapters).

Yet victory in the east came together with crisis in the west. The rebels, who called themselves chouans after their owl-call recognition signal, conducted a surprisingly organised counter-revolutionary campaign in the first few days of their existence. Drunken recruits, fat from eating off the backs of the Vendean people, had their throats cut. Captured Republican officers were executed by the same chirurgiens they had unleashed on the local nobles. Bloody Flags were burned, Temples of Reason blown up. The white flag of the monarchy came up, and with it was another: a red cross and heart on a white field, accompanied with the words Dieu le Roi – the Holy Heart of the Vendée.[1] The people had issued a challenge to the Revolution, the first serious one it had had since Toulon.

The Vendeans were joined by the Bretons, who raised an army under Charles Armand Tuffin, the Marquis of Rouërie (or Rogery, as it was literally and amusingly translated by English journalists). Armand[2] was a veteran of the Second Platinean War[3] and was generally liked by the Breton people, who saw him as one of them. The Bretons added the Vendean heart to their own ermine flag and joined the Vendeans in their campaign against the terrorising troops. By November, the Revolutionary presence in the two provinces had been virtually wiped out. Royal France was no longer merely an outre-mer idea, a government in exile with some colonies. If l’état c’est moi, then Louis XVII was back.

The Chouannerie consumed the attention of both the British and French press in the winter of 1798, despite Robespierre’s attempts to gag the latter. Equally, both nations’ politicians began to demand intervention. In Westminster, when Charles James Fox attempted to condemn the Chouans for ‘backsliding against the cause of liberty’, he was booed down. It was at this point that Richard Burke, the still young son of Edmund, tabled his first Parliamentary motion by asking for British intervention on the side of the Chouans. Meanwhile in Paris, even the cowed rubber-stamp that Robespierre had reduced the National Legislative Assembly to nonetheless managed to pluck up the courage to insist on action.

It was not as though Robespierre himself disagreed, though. He had always considered Britain to be a dangerous enemy to have at your back, and now was a blatant opportunity for the British to attack. The Consuls recognised that this would have to be some sort of seaborne invasion, so one mode of action would be to attempt to intercept the British forces in the Channel (La Manche). However, when Lisieux asked Surcouf to consider a plan for such an eventuality, the pioneering sailor simply stared incredulously at him for half a minute before replying that it would be nothing more than a waste of lives. Republican France had only perhaps a third of the navy that pre-Revolutionary France had, and that of suspect loyalty and training. Too many good sailors had left with Leo Bone and joined the Dauphin in Britain. Surcouf suggested that either the Dutch or Spanish Navies could at least give the Royal Navy pause, though, if there were some way that they could be drawn into the war diplomatically.

This exchange is often used to illustrate the difference between Lisieux and Robespierre. Upon hearing this, and informing Surcouf that it was extremely unlikely that the services of the Dutch or Spanish could be acquired, Lisieux simply rejected the idea that the Republic could mount a serious challenge to Britain’s forces enroute. They would simply have to find a way to defeat them on land. Robespierre, however, dismissed this opinion (and indeed Lisieux had to talk him out of sentencing Surcouf to a summary trial and execution for faint-heartedness). Having been told by one sailor that it was impossible, Robespierre simply asked another and another until he got the right answer. This came from Charles Villeneuve, a character who was afterwards considered a lunatic by both French sides, but bizarrely was quite popular among the British, who have always appreciated a really dramatic futile gesture, and he was referred to respectfully in the British press as ‘Mr Newton’, the direct translation of his name.

Villeneuve argued that much of the Royal Navy was dispersed around the world and that the home fleet would lack experience (not being aware of the Royal Navy’s practice of rotating ships between fleets fairly often). More sensibly, he pointed out the example of the Battle of Trafalgar[4] in 1783: the British had lost to the Franco-Spanish forces, but had nonetheless achieved much of their objective (to stop the allies resupplying their forces in South America) as they had sunk many of the troop transport ships and forced others to turn back. Villeneuve suggested that the small French Republican Navy could force a similar Pyrrhic victory on the British invasion force here.

Aside from the questionable wisdom of a course of action that was assumed to end in the near-destruction of the French fleet even if it succeeded, Villeneuve’s plan fell short in other ways. Seigneur, as the British operation to cross the Channel and support the Chouans was called, was a far cry from the Second Platinean War operation. The Franco-Spanish in that conflict had been trying to support troops thousands of miles away, across a vast ocean. The Channel, no matter how much some among the British thought it was, was anything but. The French would have a very narrow window of opportunity to attack the British fleet, and furthermore if a British troopship was damaged, it might well be able to return to port, be repaired and out again within a day or two.

Nonetheless, Robespierre seized on the plan and ordered it approved. Lisieux reluctantly consented, but he and Boulanger privately assumed it was unlikely to work, and began withdrawing forces from Germany to build up new armies to use against the Chouans. This is sometimes cited by historians as being the reason behind Mozart’s victory at the Siege of Vienna in March 1799, but in truth the effects of the shift of troops did not really emerge until midsummer of that year. It was simply that Leroux’s army had finally outrun its supply lines, despite Ney’s efforts, and that the French Revolutionary armies’ tactic of living off the land did not work very well when it came to besieging a city for months (for more, see later chapters).

The British launched Seigneur in February. The political side of the plan was the brainchild of Richard Burke and the Dauphin, who had cooperated while the latter had been staying in London and raising support among French exiles there. Their political alliance and friendship meant that Louis XVII was exposed to the political system of the British Parliament, and recorded in his diary that it was: “…certainly not without its flaws…but, much like the table they keep, the constitution the British maintain is devoted to a solid, stodgy sense of stability…and in the aftermath of what we have witnessed, perhaps France needs such a monastic Diet for some time…”[5]

Seigneur was deployed from then four ports of Chatham, Portsmouth, Plymouth and Lowestoft. The first three consisted of mainly British troopships carrying British or American troops and supported by British warships, while the Lowestoft fleet was a motley collection of borrowed troopships (some of them converted former slave-ships, a fact which the Revolutionary propagandists had much fun with), carrying the Most Catholic and Christian Royal Army of the King[6] and supported by the French Royal Naval ships that Leo Bone had ‘rescued’ from Toulon. The French force was commanded by the indecisive Admiral the Comte d’Estaing and his more competent subordinate Captain Etienne Lucas. The British Channel Squadron was under the overall command of Admiral Sir William Byng, the son of John Byng the hero of the Second Glorious Revolution. Under that, the Plymouth fleet was commanded by Commodore Horatio Nelson, the Portsmouth fleet by Commodore Leo Bone, and the Chatham fleet by Rear-Admiral Adam Duncan, a senior veteran. Each force consisted of about a dozen ships of the line and twenty frigates, protecting around fifteen transports of various sizes carrying infantry, cavalry and artillery.

Against these four forces – which only represented part of Britain’s worldwide naval strength – Villeneuve had twenty ships of the line and eighteen frigates (most of the Republic’s frigates had already been sent off by Surcouf on raiding or messenger missions). The British were aware, by their spy network (augmented by the fact that the Dauphin could call upon secret loyalists in France) that Villeneuve was concentrating his forces in Dieppe in order to raid any Channel-crossing force. However, British opinions of Villeneuve’s capabilities were low. “The French spend more time repainting their ships than they do rolling out their guns,” sneered Commodore Nelson in his diary, a reference to the new red-and-black Revolutionary chequer pattern that the Republican Navy had adopted.[7] The British made no serious attempts to harry Villeneuve’s ships as they gathered from other French ports.

Seigneur was launched on 14th February, St Valentine’s Day. Villeneuve was kept well informed by his own intelligence network, a series of disguised fishing boats that communicated over the horizon using flags, and was informed of the launch bare hours later. He had more time to prepare because the British did not go straight across the Channel, instead forming up the four fleets to swing around Finisterre to the west and launch a concerted descent on Quiberon. Villeneuve launched on short notice: despite Nelson’s scepticism, he had drilled his men well and they fought as well as could be expected considering the disadvantages they faced. Villeneuve was determined to intercept one of the British fleets before they combined: like Hoche in Italy, he believed that success might be grasped if he could divide the enemy and hit each portion with his whole force.

The wind was with Villeneuve and one of his ships, the Égalité, sighted the Chatham fleet before Admiral Duncan had joined the others. It was just as possible that Villeneuve could have found the Royal French fleet that was travelling through the same waters, and some speculative romantics have considered the consequences of what might have happened if Villeneuve had managed to sink the Dauphin’s ship.

But no: Villeneuve attacked Duncan with the strategy he had developed. The French ships of the line formed the usual line against their British counterparts, tying them down, while the frigates ignored their British counterparts and engaged the transports directly, suffering damage as their did so. Villeneuve’s aggressive action was surprisingly successful: though the French lost eight ships of the line and ten frigates (to ten and three British, respectively), the French frigates managed to sink half the British transports before the others’ captains, deciding that their own escorts were not doing their job, gybed and returned to port. Villeneuve, his objective completed, ordered a withdrawal and regrouping. This required leaving some damaged French ships behind, but Duncan was unable to pursue. French gunnery tactics focused on attacking the masts, sails and rigging, with the result that many British ships were left only lightly damaged but disabled. Duncan’s remaining movement-capable forces, mostly frigates, were not enough to challenge even Villeneuve’s wounded fleet. Two frigates tried and were hulled at long range by French stern chasers before they could reply.

Villeneuve’s attack had been remarkably successful, though he had lost much of his own forces. Deciding that today was his day of luck, he decided to find another British force, but soon his scouts reported that the two remaining British fleets and the Royal French had successfully amalgamated off Portland and, having waited for a day for Duncan, had given up and set sail for Finisterre.

The French Admiral pursued, setting a course for destiny…



[1]Coeur sacré is commonly translated Sacred Heart in English, but I think Holy Heart is more accurate.

[2]I have referred to him as Armand as this is how most OTL Americans know him.

[3]In OTL he fought in the American Revolutionary War.

[4]Recall that in TTL, Trafalgar was a 1783 battle between the Franco-Spanish and British during the Second Platinean War, and the British lost.

[5]Note the pun.

[6]I know it sounds a bit redundant but this is based on the actual names of some OTL loyalist French armies.

[7]This is an irony because in OTL it was Nelson who popularised a (yellow and black) chequer pattern on royal Navy ships.


Part #37: And Charlemagne Wept

“The Holy Roman Empire is neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire”
– Voltaire​

*
From – “The Jacobin Wars – the Italo-German Front” by Joshua H. Calhoun (University of New York Press, 1946) -

Not since the Third War of Supremacy had Austrian forces been so dominated. Forty years later, history repeated itself as battle after battle went the way of the enemy. Thibault Leroux was no Frederick II of Prussia, but he did not need to be.[1] Unlike the Prussians, the French were not fighting with outnumbered forces against two or three powerful foes at once. With the increasing withdrawal of the German states’ armies to defend their own frontiers, the forces that Vienna could bring to bear were sloughing off thousands daily without ever meeting the enemy.

The chaos of the unilateral withdrawals also served to hurt the Austrian war effort, as Ferdinand IV’s ministers would assume a town defended by loyal Hessian or Saxon troops, only to learn days later that they had abandoned it to the French. Sometimes an Austrian army under a good commander would make a stand and hold back one of Leroux’s armies, only to have to withdraw anyway, as the French had almost surrounded them by occupying areas that had been abandoned by Austrian allies. Such was the terrible beauty of the War of Lightning strategy: the French’s rapid advance had been the cause of the withdrawals in the first place, as the German states looked nervously at the fate of Baden and Württemburg; and now those withdrawals only aided the speed of the French drive to the east. It was a vicious circle, ever decreasing in diameter, and Austria’s survival sat at its heart.

Only Brunswicker and Hanoverian troops, backed by token British forces, continued to fight on, but they were too small in number to provide much help to the Austrians. Matters worsened as the Second War of the Polish Succession heated up, threatening to spill over into states bordering Saxony and Prussia, and states such as Mecklenburg – which had previously left their armies in place, considering their home territories not threatened by the French – joined the general withdrawal. The pan-German alliance, the attempt to rebuild the Holy Empire in spirit as well as name, had crumbled long before the French reached Regensburg.

The total defeat of Davidovich at Burgau in August 1798 resounded throughout all of Germany. Davidovich’s army had been Austria’s last hope of stopping the French advance before it entered Bavaria – which was now part of Austria’s core territory, since the land exchange in 1783. The Bavarian army was as yet not integrated with its Austrian counterpart, and many Bavarians were unenthusiastic about being part of Austria. Ferdinand IV feared that the French might find willing collaborators in the country, which would be both a disaster for Austria in general and sound the death knell for his attempts to reunite Germany.[2] The current withdrawals were helping the French indirectly, but if Germans turned to the Revolution and fought other Germans, then all was lost.

Leroux’s advance stalled somewhat throughout September. The War of Lightning was not about taking and holding territory; that was the task of follow-up operations, such as those that Ney was now pursuing in Swabia, having made his base of operations at Stuttgart. No, the goal for Leroux was simply to remain on the offensive, aggressively attacking along a narrow axis of advance aimed at Regensburg, and then Vienna. The Revolutionary doctrine of to possess the capital is to possess the country was about to be tested.[3]

But Leroux realised that the Austrians would fight tooth and nail here, and if they remained on the defensive, the French could easily expend themselves and achieve nothing. Things were fragile. French victory rested on, not solid strength, but an idea, the idea among the Germans that their invincible armies could be anywhere, everywhere, and were backed up by a horde who devastated the countries in their wake. If Leroux was routed at Regensburg, that image would collapse. Ney’s position was still delicate, and if the Badenese and Württembergers rose up in combination with a renewed Austrian offensive, the French position in Germany could collapse. Determined to avoid that nightmare scenario, Leroux allowed the advance to slow while he built up his forces, waiting for the ammunition steam-wagons to catch up and for Ney to send reinforcements through.

This gave the Germans a few weeks to prepare. Mozart had been placed in command by Ferdinand IV, and he withdrew the majority of the Austrian armies to Lower Austria itself. Mozart, an insightful general, had discerned the French strategy of aiming at possession of the capital. Therefore, he reasoned, if the French could be defeated at Vienna then their whole plan would come apart and Austria might be saved. He knew that they would first aim for Regensburg, but believed that there was simply not enough time to reinforce the Holy Roman capital, and that to do so would only fruitlessly throw away men that woul be needed to defend Vienna. He authorised only a single army under Alvinczi as a delaying force, then began to bring in troops from all across the Empire.

Archduke Ferdinand’s army came up through the Brenner Pass, leaving a guard to prevent Hoche’s force from following. Using the Alpine terrain against the French just as Marat’s Swiss Republic forces had against them the previous year, the Austrians were able to wear down Hoche’s already depleted forces enough that even that dynamic general gave up and retreated to Venice. Officials and garrison troops sent from Paris were already converting Venetia into an integral part of Hoche’s invented Italian Republic, which also encompassed Piedmont, Modena, Parma, and Milan.

Also, echoing Maria Theresa’s efforts of fifty years before, Mozart called up levies from the Austrian possessions in the east: Hungarians, Croats and Transylvanians. An attempt to levy troops from Krakau failed, with the city practically in revolt due to the war in Poland next door. However, these forces served to bolster the Austrians massing in Lower Austria. Mozart ordered the building of new defensive fortifications, mostly makeshift, knowing that he had little time. Vienna had resisted two sieges from the Turks, from the east, but could it survive this outbreak of new barbarism from the west?

Meanwhile, Ferdinand IV arrived in Regensburg to address the Reichstag. The Emperor, it was universally agreed by eye-witnesses, was not a well man. He had spent the past three years pacing up and down the Schönbrunn Palace, being fed gradually worsening news from messengers from the front. Perhaps even more damaging to him than the stories of defeats and reversals were those that told him that he was betrayed, that his great dream to create a Holy Roman Empire worthy of the name was dead forever. He first began to visibly sicken upon hearing of Charles Theodore’s betrayal and non-aggression treaty with France, and had rapidly worsened after the successes of the Poséidon and Rubicon offensives.

Now, on October 9th, he addressed the Reichstag in the city hall of Regensburg, where it had been meeting permanently for the last century and a half. Representatives of all the German states were there, though most of those states had practically withdrawn unto themselves and now remained in isolation, hoping that the French would pass over them like the angel of death if they made no aggressive moves. The Reichstag was a strange organisation. Ever since it had settled down in Regensburg, it had become gradually more and more divorced from real events in wider Germany, and had produced an elite ruling class of politicians and civil servants who had more in common with each other than either had with the states they were supposed to be representing. Even now, the Saxon and Brandenburger (Prussian) representatives discussed matters cordially, while their homelands fought a vicious, bloody war over the fate of Poland. It had an air of unreality, otherworldliness, as though concerns of the outside world could never come here.

But that was a lie. Even as Ferdinand IV stood up to address the Reichstag, the first distant rumbles began to sound on the horizon. Not thunder, something far worse. Leroux was on the move, his Cugnot-propelled heavy artillery in the lead, blasting a path through Alvinczi’s lines west of the city.

Despite this distraction, Ferdinand IV commanded the whole attention of the Reichstag. His eyes wild and staring, dead with hopelessness, the Emperor gave his infamous Dissolution Speech, culminating in:

“We are betrayed. The Empire is no more. I have failed as Emperor, and let that name die with me. The French are coming, and you must look to yourselves…as you already have. No more shall come from Vienna. I am the new Romulus Augustulus, and behold, my Odoacer comes out of Gallia! It is finished. Go! Take your fools’ baubles, and beg the Lord for mercy!”

By the end of his speech, the Emperor was having to shout, both over the words of outrage from the Reichstag and the thunder of the French guns from outside, as Alvinczi’s army was crushed. Ferdinand IV became red in the face with the effort, after he had remained in the Schönbrunn Palace and weakened for so long, and bare seconds after getting out the word ‘mercy’, he collapsed. The Reichstag descended into chaos, and it did not take long for the rumour to emerge – the rumour that was the truth. Emperor Ferdinand IV, Joseph the Last, had died from a heart attack.

The Holy Roman Empire was unique in its own way. Though the Empire had been made hereditary centuries ago, Joseph’s heir the young Archduke Francis would only become King of the Romans on his death. It was required that the Council of Electors confirm him before he become Emperor Francis II, and now the Council of Electors fled from the Regensburg city hall, followed by the Council of Princes and the Council of Cities. Legend says, though it has not been backed up by any historian, that the first one out of the door was the representative of Charles Theodore of Flanders and the Palatinate, the first Prince-Elector to betray Joseph, and he was followed by those of the Margrave of Brandenburg and the Duke of Saxony. But all the participants fled the city. They had all heard of the rumours from the west, of how the wild Sans-Culottes troops would lock all the nobles of a town in the city hall and then burn it down, capering and whooping as the sick stink of burning flesh wafted over the countryside.

Once the Reichstag had fled, the collapse at Regensburg was swiftly precipitated. Although Alvinczi himself escaped with a portion of his army, the French rolled over the city and burned down the city hall, even though no-one remained within. Both the Protestant mayor of Regensburg and the Roman Catholic archbishop – Regensburg was technically five states in the Reichstag, with the Protestant Imperial City and the Catholic archbishopric and three monasteries – attempted to surrender the city to the French, only to be cut down by the raging Sans-Culottes. Despite Leroux’s efforts to moderate the slaughter, the French armies were out of control and the sack of the city culminated in a fire that destroyed large portions of it. The monasteries were ‘requisitioned’, with the monks thrown out and the buildings used as arsenals.

Leroux was furious, both because the sack had destroyed much of the supplies he had hoped to obtain from the city, and because he had lost much of his chance for gaining support from the people of Bavaria. He pressed on regardless, reassembling the army, bringing it back under control. Regensburg was possessed by the forces of Revolutionary France. All that remained now was to take Vienna.

And yet, on the same day, the Vendeans and Bretons rose up in the Chouannerie, and in the darkest hour of Germany, a faint hope began to bloom that the Revolution’s hellish triumphs would one day come to an end…






[1] NB in TTL he is not Frederick the Great, because Prussia lost the war badly in the end, despite his early victories.

[2]Since Prussia’s weakening relative to OTL, the Austrians have been pursuing a moderately successful policy of trying to rebuild German unity since the 1760s, which is now crumbling.

[3] Of course this is before the Chouannerie, which starts in October 1798.


Part #38: Confrontations

“The great Chinese writer Sun Tsuy[1] writes that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperilled in a hundred battles; whereas if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win only half the time. This is unsurprising, as any politicially aware individual will know that half the real enemies lie within…”

– General Pavel Alexandrovich Andreyev, 1924​

*

From – “The Sons of George III and I”, by Philip Hittle, University of Philadelphia Press (1948) –

After his father’s unconventional marriage, the British establishment was desperate to return to a policy of dynastic alliances with George III. British attempts to form alliances with the royal houses of Germany – marrying off daughters and granddaughters of George I to the rulers of Denmark, Prussia, the Netherlands and many more – had stalled with the Second Glorious Revolution, for Frederick I had become estranged from most of his sisters and aunts. British influence in the Germanies waned, and was only slightly restored when Frederick’s only daughter Princess Mildred was married to King Johannes II of Denmark.

From the perspective of the establishment, it would be better to walk before one could run. Hanover itself had grown gradually more distant from Britain over the years, the branches of the House of Hanover still living there mostly having preferred William IV to Frederick and being suspicious about the manner of his death. The governments of Rockingham and Portland (in truth, Burke) were determined to rebuild the bridge between Britain and Hanover, by ties of blood. To that end, George III married his cousin Princess Sophia of Hanover, the daughter of Frederick’s sister Princess Amelia Sophia.[2]

The marriage, though not as violent perhaps as that of his grandfather George II, was certainly loveless and it is generally acknowledged that George III maintained an American mistress. However, as it often paradoxically the case, it produced a large issue, whereas Frederick’s had only led to three surviving children – George III, Frederick William the Duke of York, and Princess Mildred, who became Queen of Denmark. George III, by contrast, was father to Prince Frederick George the Prince of Wales, his heir (born in 1765), Princess Carolina (born 1767), who became the Landgravine of Hesse-Kassel; then a gap due to two sons dying in infancy; then Princess Amelia (born 1770), who became the Duchess of Brunswick after marrying her cousin the Duke, sealing one of the rifts Frederick I had opened up; then Prince Henry William, the Duke of Cambridge (born 1771) and finally Princess Augusta (born 1772), who never married.

Prince Frederick George was a dashing and popular heir, generally agreed to embody many of the best traits of his namesake grandfather. He joined the British Army, serving in America against the Indians and then leading an army to Flanders during the early stages of the Jacobin Wars. Although that incident ended with an embarrassing withdrawal due to Charles Theodore’s declaration of neutrality, most men believed that Frederick William was a decent commander, and not so arrogant that he did not delegate to more experienced lieutenants. When he was placed in command of the Seigneur Offensive, the invasion of western France to support the Chouannerie in February 1799, these men included General Sir Ralph Abercromby, Colonel Sir Thomas Græme and Colonel Sir John Moore, resulting in the Register’s well-known cartoon depicting the French Revolutionaries fleeing from an army of men in full mediaeval battle-armour from the waist up, but kilts from the waist down, i.e., an Army of Scottish Knights.[3]

His younger brother Prince Henry William could not have been more of a contrast. An intellectual, he preferred discussing art over the dinner table to the foxhunt, and took a proactive part in political debates, somewhat alarming the establishment, which felt that royals doing so was in violation of the British Constitution. Like most of the descendants of Frederick I, he travelled extensively to the Empire of North America and liked the country – mainly for its fauna and flora, on such a larger scale than those of Europe. Henry William sponsored the further expeditions of Erasmus Darwin (II) to the Susan-Mary region, and patronised the creation of the Royal and Imperial Museum of Natural History when it was separated from the British Museum in 1793. But, unlike his father and grandfather, Henry William was horrified by what he saw of the institution of slavery in the American colonies, and wrote extensive pamphlets on the subject, irritating many established business interests who thought that royalty should be above such things. It was inevitable that Henry William should become part of the Radical-leaning Whig movement led by Charles James Fox, which sought extensive political reforms.

The majority of Britons, therefore, were considerably relieved when Prince Frederick’s wife Princess Charlotte of Ansbach conceived in the winter of 1798, just before Frederick left for France. Anything to avoid such a dangerous individual as Henry William sitting on the throne of Great Britain…

*

From – “The Jacobin Wars” by E.G. Christie (Hetherington Publishing House, 1926)

After Admiral Villeneuve’s effective if Pyrrhic victory at the Battle of Wight[4] the Frenchman was unsatisfied. He knew that he had to inflict as much damage as possible on the combined fleet, to sink as many troopships as he could: each would make the job of the overstretched French land armies just a little easier, and the Republic could afford to lose ships more than she could afford to lose soldiers, for the war would be won or lost on land. Villeneuve had a cold appreciation of all this, and was willing to give his life – and all those of his men, of course… - to ensure it.

To that end, Villeneuve paused only to make cursory repairs, to run up new sails and to swab out all of his guns. It was at this point that his ships of the line successfully sunk two pursuing frigates of Duncan at extreme range with their stern chasers, providing a boost of morale to the Republican sailors. Villeneuve seized the moment and sent out his famous message in flags: “Allons, enfants de la patrie! Qu'un sang impur colore la Manche du rouge républicain!

Possibly the message would have been more effective if the Revolutionary naval ministry had not changed the flag codes eight times in the past month in an attempt to find the most ‘rational’ one; as it was, only about half of Villeneuve’s ships worked it out, but it was nonetheless an historic moment. The Republican fleet pressed on westwards, but their damaged sails and hulls meant that they only slowly closed the distance with the combined Allied fleet, even though the latter was hampered by their sluggish transports.

The Allied fleet had formed up off Portsmouth the day before. It was organised to place the Royal French forces in the centre, with Nelson’s forces taking the van and Bone’s guarding the rear. The British were determined to protect the Royal French at all costs, being a valuable propaganda tool that turned this war ideological – liberal monarchists united against violent republicans – rather than being yet another futile round of Anglo-French war. The latter would be useless, as France had no possessions left that Britain wanted, save in India, and the results of wars in Europe had little impact on what happened in India. The French retained Louisiana and Haiti in the New World, but both possessed so many French colonists – Louisiana had been a sinkhole for all those the British had ejected from Acadia, Canada, the Ohio Country and Susan-Mary – that trying to assimilate them would be futile. In order for Britain to be able to achieve a continental victory, they had to have support from some of the people of France, and to do that they needed the King of France.

Villeneuve realised all this as much as the British. He received good intelligence from co-opted fishing boats that spied on the Allied fleet as it moved slowly around Finisterre. He correctly guessed that they were aiming at Quiberon – though it was still possessed fortifications held by besieged Republican troops, the British had previously fought there in 1759 and many of their older commanders would remember the layout of the bay from their service their as young midshipmen as lieutenants. So, for that matter, would the Royal French, many of whom had fought in the same battle on the opposite side. An advantage like that in intelligence could be significant.

The Republican Admiral decided, then, that the only target worth going for was the Dauphin’s ship, the Royal flagship – the Améthyste. Sacrificing all his ships in a quixotic attack would be worth it, because the death of the Dauphin should result in a collapse of any coherency among the Chouannerie and Britain losing the ideological character of its war. To that end, Villeneuve drew up an attack of startling aggressiveness, which featured a feint on Bone’s guarded transports followed by a rapid push through to attack the Améthyste when Bone broke away from the main fleet to form his line of battle. It would almost certainly result in the destruction of the Republican fleet, but if Louis XVII was cut in half by a cannonball then nothing else would matter. Villeneuve issued the orders. Blood would turn the Channel red indeed…

*

From - "The Man With Three Names - A Life and Times of Napoleone Buonaparte" (Dr Henri Pelletier, University of Nantes Press, 1962) :

Commodore Leo Bone had served in several actions after his great coup of ‘seizing’ the French fleet from Toulon. The Admiralty had moved him out of the Mediterranean, perhaps fearing the little man’s burning ambition – if he could con an entire fleet into leaving the Republicans, what more might his charisma do? Bone had served on dull blockade and convoy escort duty for years, but had successfully taken two Republican prizes that had been attempting to reach the West Indies, and the prize-money served to grease the rails of his ascent to commodore. He had left the Diamond, not without emotion for the tough little frigate that had been the scene of his greatest act of tactical audacity, and had been given the second-rate ship of the line HMS Lewisborough.[6]

Command of the rear of the Seigneur Offensive was his greatest responsibility yet. Like his friend Nelson (now in command of the first-rate HMS Mirabilis[7]), he had been chosen over the heads of many senior commanders because of his youth, vigour, and unorthodox tactical ideas. The strategy that Admiral Charles Villeneuve adopted against him at the Battle of Penmarc’h might have worked on one of the crusty, conservative British Admirals mostly now consigned to blockade and convoy escort duties, though it would still have cost him most of his ships. It would not work on Leo Bone.

When Villeneuve attacked Bone’s transports with his fleet’s bow chasers as a challenge, Bone did not form the line of battle as Villeneuve had expected. Instead, Bone told off his frigates and arranged them into lines of attack, a strategy which he had developed together with Nelson. Villeneuve initially assumed that the frigates were going to engage that part of his fleet attacking the transports, and thus ordered the rest to push through the remainder of Bone’s force and towards the Royal French.

However, when the Republicans (who had the wind gauge) advanced, Bone’s frigates snapped into their lines and drove a three-pronged thrust through the mass of Republican ships, blasting away with their broadsides almost below the waterline of Villeneuve’s first-rate monsters. The French guns were, as usual, elevated to target the masts and rigging of other ships of the line, and so the Republican response was ineffective. Only a few of Villeneuve’s ships reacted fast enough, and Bone lost just three frigates. The others turned, tacked and began attacking Villeneuve’s rear.

Villeneuve recognised Bone’s strategy too late, and saw that all he could do was to push through as fast as possible. However, he realised that Bone was the most dangerous man in the tactical sense, even if the Dauphin’s death was his strategic goal, and thus while the bulk of Villeneuve’s fleet was sent through to attack the Royal French, Villeneuve’s own flagship Egalité and one other first-rate, the Jacobin, targeted the Lewisborough and attempted to pound the smaller British ship to smithereens before Bone could react, trapping it in a crossfire.

Bone, however, trusted his captains, having drilled them beforehand, and thus saw he could use Villeneuve’s move against him. The Lewisborough hoisted her royals and her skys’ls and fled, using the southerly wind to cut around the main fleet and make for the French coast. Villeneuve knew that a man like Bone could not simply be making a cowardly run for it, and thus became convinced that it must be part of a grand strategy. As his frigates were now fully engaged with Bone’s remaining ships of the line and the Royal French – who put up a harder fight than Villeneuve had hoped – all Villeneuve had to pursue the Lewisborough with was the Egalité and the Jacobin. Making a snap decision, he ordered that the Jacobin pursue, while he drove the Egalité deeper into the battle and, even as his masts crumbled before the terrific hammering of both British and French gunnery, gave the order to engage the Améthyste at point-blank range, and to prepare a boarding party.

Leo Bone’s strategy had worked less well than he had hoped, but he had drawn off one Republican ship. In order to keep the pursuit, he ordered that sails be hauled down in time with the Jacobin’s volleys, as though they were being shot down. The Jacobin finally caught up off the Île de Yeu, about a day later, and the two engaged in a terrific battle. The Jacobin’s captain, François Barral, was a disciple of Surcouf and used an unorthodox strategy by French naval standards, hitting the Lewisborough with plunging shell fire from howitzers, not usually carried on board ship. Although Bone’s carronades smashed a hole in the side of the Jacobin at point-blank range and the Republican ship sank soon afterwards (though Barral and his officers escaped by boat), the damage was done. One of the Jacobin’s shells blasted the poop deck of the Lewisborough, and as well as killing twenty sailors and smashing all the windows in the officers’ cabins, the shockwave caused the planks of the hull to part near the keel. The Lewisborough began taking on water faster than the pumps could drive it out. Bone ordered that they drive for the French coast, hopefully to take some little-defended harbour and then lay up there and repair the damage. He considered throwing his guns overboard to save weight and thus buy them more time, as was Royal Naval practice; however, in the end he decided that they were not too far from the coast and that the guns might be needed later. Thus Leo Bone was saved from sinking into obscurity, and the slowly sinking Lewisborough sailed for Saint-Hilaire, and destiny…

Meanwhile, at the Battle of Quiberon (as the whole engagement was called), Villeneuve himself led the boarding party onto the Améthyste, realising that it was an all-or-nothing affair. Villeneuve himself shot Admiral d’Estaing as his opposite number rallied his sailors, but was then knocked unconscious by a blow to the head by Captain Lucas. When he awoke, it was in the Améthyste’s brig. He did not learn until later that his fleet had lost half its remaining strength before surrendering, and though several troopships had been sunk and Leo Bone had vanished, he had failed in his mission. The Dauphin lived; indeed, he came to visit him at one point, and Villeneuve’s later memoirs record his shock at the incident. Louis XVII was quite unlike what he had expected, having been influenced by Richard Burke’s ideas and already being liberal by French royal standards even before the Revolution. “Must Frenchman slay Frenchman in the name of liberty, while genuine tyrants profit from our division?” the Dauphin asked Villeneuve, and the admiral had no answer.

The Allied fleet attacked Quiberon, as had been planned. The Republicans still held the fortifications that the French had built on the peninsula after the British victory in 1759, and hot shot ripped through the Allied fleet, sinking ten British and French ships. But a swift action by British and American Marines, spearheaded by Lieutenant Alexander Cochrane[8], seized the fortress from the land side and the great guns fell silent. Cochrane was promoted to captain, as he had led the Forlorn Hope that escaladed the walls of the Quiberon fort. The British and Royal French finally fell on the city, the transports disgorging their troops and the Breton locals mostly welcoming them as liberators, at least before they drunk all the taverns dry. Louis XVII took his first steps on the soil of France for more than three years, and standing beside the Prince of Wales, spoke his famous words: “By God and my right, I reclaim my birthright.”

The war had entered quite a different phase…





[1]Russified transliteration of Sun Tzu.

[2]Who in OTL died without issue, but in TTL married within Hanover.

[3]In OTL the Daily Universal Register soon renamed itself The Times, which is what it remains to this day. In TTL it’s just been shortened to The Register.

[4]The name given to his engagement with Admiral Duncan, the Isle of Wight being the nearest point of land.

[5]“Onward, children of the Fatherland! May their impure blood turn the Channel a Republican red!” Of course, this evokes the Marseillaise, which was written in a modified form in TTL but has remained only a popular marching song, not an official anthem.

[6]Named for Prince Frederick’s victory over the French in 1759. Not the most politic name when escorting a fleet of allied French, of course.

[7]This is the ATL equivalent of HMS Victory, laid down in 1760. Both were named after 1759, the Annus Mirabilis, the Wonderful Year of Victories.

[8]Closer to OTL’s Thomas Cochrane, but has entered the Army rather than the Navy.


Part #39: This Means Nothing to Me, O Vienna

DREI HELDER; DREI RETTER; DREI MÄRTYRER.

- inscription on triple monument to Niklas Salm, Johann Sobieski and Wolfgang Mozart, Stephansplatz, Vienna​
[1]

*

From – “The Jacobin Wars – the Italo-German Front” by Joshua H. Calhoun (University of New York Press, 1946) -

Some contemporary commentators attributed the stalling of the French advance into Germany, after the battle of Regensburg in October 1798, to the fact that Robespierre ordered the withdrawal of forces from the German front in order to repel the Anglo-Royal French Seigneur offensive in February 1799. Even the disparity in dates suggests the unlikelihood of this oft-stated assumption. While it is true that the French armies in Italy and Germany did not receive many reinforcements after February – all new troops being diverted to the Vendean front – this did not take effect until the start of Spring 1799.

It is more accurate to say that the French armies in Germany had simply reached their limits. Leroux’s Guerre-éclair strategy had arguably been self-defeating by its own successes. The Revolutionary forces had, like Britain’s Duke of Marlborough and Frederick II of Prussia before them, proved capable of moving faster into Germany than the Austrians had thought possible. Yet, though their ‘maraude’ practices meant they could live off the land effectively without much of a supply train – at the expense of stirring up resentment among the locals against them – the French still needed a ready supply of powder, shot and cartridges to fight battles, and these could not be so easily stripped from occupied country. Ironically, the superiority of French Gribeauval artillery (coming mostly from ancien régime programmes originally, but the popular eye has always associated them with the Revolution) caused problems when maraudeurs tried to use captured Austrian ammunition to restock their supplies. The new French cannon had been built to a slightly different calibre to their Austrian counterparts, with the result that the Austrian roundshot were too large. Leroux found himself being forced to order the drilling out of several cannon in order to use the captured shot, and such thinned weapons had a tendency to burst after prolongued use, killing their crews.

And, though the conscripted French armies were larger than the forces the Austrians could bring to bear against them, they were of course greatly outnumbered by the increasingly resentful civilian population. There was a limit to how much territory the French could hold down with the number of men they had, especially when Leroux needed to retain a large enough fighting force to continue the offensive. While Ney successfully built his authority in Swabia, creating the puppet state La République Germanique Souabe (the Swabian Germanic Republic), Leroux was plagued continuously by bandits attacking his supply train even before the instigation of the formal Kleinkrieg. He was placed in a difficult quandary: if he stripped more troops from his van to guard his rear, he lessened his chances of victory in any engagement, but if he did nothing, then his larger van might not get the supplies it needed to fight at all.

The spring of 1799 arguably marks the start of a breakdown between the various Republics, though this was of course not formalised until the Double Revolution. Ney refused to send more forces out of Swabia to guard Leroux’s supply lines, claiming that his dispersed troops were already hard-pressed in preventing a rising by Württemberger irregulars (almost certainly an exaggeration). And away to the south in Italy, Hoche reacted unfavourably upon hearing that Robespierre had diverted his precious reinforcements away to the Vendean front. This meant that Hoche’s Army of Italy could not try to force the Brenner Pass against Archduke Ferdinand’s rearguard, and it also meant that a pre-emptive expedition against the Hapsburg forces in Tuscany would be too much of an overstretch. Hoche was often impulsive enough to order offensives against the odds, but even he could recognise the situation. Without reinforcements, he only had sufficient forces to hold down the large arc of territory he had conquered from Savoy to Venice. The Italian Latin Republic, which was largely synonymous with the person of Lazare Hoche, began to realise that it was on its own. Only the Swiss Republic, or at least the French army holding it down and Jean-Paul Marat, its exiled leader, remained fully linked to Paris.

This background serves to explain why Leroux’s advance after the Sack of Regensburg began to stumble. The French took far longer to advance the two hundred and fifty miles from Regensburg to Vienna than they had in their lightning push over the similar distance from Haguenau to Regensburg. Despite Leroux’s difficulties, General Mozart – now in supreme command of Austria’s armies, marshal in all but name – held firm and refused to authorise an attack on the army as it slowly ground closer to the capital. An independent Austrian army pushing down from the north under Quosdanovich gave battle at Linz, together with local militia forces who feared the same fate as their neighbours to the east, but despite holding a strongly defensive position, the Austrians were decisively defeated by Leroux’s force, which was comparable in number. Mozart’s caution, previously derided as cowardice by many armchair generals, suddenly seemed like the only course distinct from suicide.

Archduke Francis, now King of the Romans and uncrowned Holy Roman Emperor Francis II, supported Mozart wholeheartedly, believing the general to be Austria’s best hope at weathering the French attack. Francis’ support meant that many of Mozart’s more radical proposals were pushed through in time to do some good. Despite the many conflicts in Germany during the eighteenth century, Vienna itself had not been threatened since the Ottoman siege of 1683, and the two situations, more than a century apart, were painfully similar in many respects. Vienna’s fortifications were outdated and it sprawled comfortably beyond them, safe in the knowledge that it lay at the core of a vast and powerful Empire. The main city wall, the Linienwall, was almost a hundred years old and unsuited to face modern artillery. It was now faced by a war far more earnest and vicious than the usual territorial conflicts between the German states. In 1683 that had been a holy war between Christianity and Islam; in 1799 it was one between Christianity and the French’s deistic-atheism, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say between monarchism and republicanism. Either way, ideology and religion lent a sharper edge to the conflict. The horror stories coming out of Swabia and Bavaria reinforced the idea that this was all or nothing. If Mozart lost, the whole world as Germans knew it might fall with him.

So, Mozart’s ruthless ideas took shape. Taking inspiration from 1683, he had all the houses built outside the Linienwall razed, providing a plain suitable for an artillery killing field. New temporary forts with modern, Vaubanised star bastions, were constructed around the Linienwall. The hasty nature of these meant that they would probably not be as durable as Mozart would like, but he believed the important thing was to delay the French, rather than attempt to defeat them. “A siege can break the most invincible army,” he wrote in his diary. “Not merely roundshot and canister from our walls, but also sickness and starvation; they hurt the besiegers as much as, if not more, than the besieged. A Turkish army outnumbering the defenders twenty to one failed to take this city by siege. The French are far fewer in number. Let us hope and pray that the same strategy will be successful”.

Francis, meanwhile, made several public speeches to rally the people of Vienna. He was a skilled orator, more so than his father, and made the firm link in their minds between the Turkish sieges of 1529 and 1683 and the present invasion. “This is the third time the forces of barbarism have tried to topple civilisation,” he said. “This time, the barbarians come from the west rather than the east; but they shall be no more successful this time.”

Those confident words were not backed up by events, up until March 1799. Leroux’s army besieged the city starting from the third of that month, successfully repulsing attempts by Hungarian and Croatian cavalry to harry them as they dug in. Leroux was, like Boulanger, from a fairly humble background, and he invested direct command of the operation in the experienced Colonel Lucien Cougnon, an officer who had previously made sieges under the ancien régime. It bespoke of Cougnon’s value that he had managed to retain his position through the worst of Robespierre’s purges.

Cougnon’s approach was fairly straightforward; to demolish five of Mozart’s new forts, opening a gap large enough to bring the whole army through without its flanks being enfiladed, and then to make a frontal assault on the outdated Linienwall. He was confident that the modern French artillery could make sufficient breaches that the Austrians would be unable to effectively defend them all. Leroux endorsed the plan and the French steam-driven artillery began pounding Mozart’s forts from March 17th. The fragility of the hastily built fortifications swiftly proved itself, with two of the forts being battered down after only two days of bombardment. They were then taken by small forces of elite grenadiers without many losses on the French side. The mood in Vienna was one of a gloom of inevitability. Just as the Revolutionaries had defeated every general sent to stop them since Wurmser withdrew from Nancy, now Mozart too could not stop them.

Vienna was arguably saved by a night attack led by Istvan Mihály[2] on the 21st. The Hungarian cavalry under Mihály were this time able to break through the complacent French sentries and raid the artillery positioned against the three other forts Cougnon sought to destroy. The Hungarians wrought havoc before a counter-attack led personally by Leroux forced them to withdraw. Mihály had specifically equipped his men for sabotaging guns, and when the light of day dawned, Leroux found that – as well as a large number of his artillerymen being sabred down, some in their sleep – the vast majority of the guns had been spiked. Most of the damage was not irrepairable, as Mihály’s forces had had limited time and had wanted to remain stealthy, so could not try something more permanent and spectacular like forcing the guns to burst, but it would take time to repair – and those artillerymen could not be replaced. In one stroke, Austria’s forces had made their foe’s job significantly harder.

The two artillery companies directed against the now-destroyed forts had survived, and Cougnon redirected them against the remaining forts, while Leroux ordered repair work to commence. However, perhaps emboldened by the French setback, those three forts fought considerably harder and inflicted bloody casualties when they were stormed by Leroux’s grenadiers. The French lost several grenadier companies, significantly blunting what Cougnon had wanted to use as the vanguard for assaulting the breaches he planned to make in the Linienwall.

The forts were finally secured on April 2nd. Leroux ordered the advance and the remaining guns began pounding the Linienwall on April 6th. Cougnon’s prediction about the wall’s ineffectiveness had proved accurate, and several breaches were rapidly made. Mozart quickly made a decision. Just as Cougnon had thought, the breaches were too many to be defensible. Mozart gave the order that he had long dreaded: the bulk of the armies focused in Vienna were to sortie forth and engage Leroux’s army on the killing field cleared of houses, hopefully keeping the French in place where the guns on the Linienwall could continue to wreak casualties on them. Only a skeleton force was left defending the breaches. It was a desperate gamble, and a sign that Austria had truly reached the end of its tether.

The Battle of Vienna was epic, a defining moment in German history. The Austrians outnumbered the French by a little more than three to two, but Mozart had still yet to find an effective defence against the Revolutionary tactics introduced by Boulanger. Leroux, taking over command again from Cougnon as the siege shifted to a battle, hammered Mozart’s deep lines with his columns again and again, while the steam-driven Cugnot artillery trundled left and right across the treacherously flat killing field, enfilading the Austrian lines as quickly as they redeployed. Twenty-pound roundshot continued to plunge from the walls and kill dozens of Frenchmen in the compact columns at a time, but many of the Austrian guns were unseated by return fire from Leroux’s siege guns. If Mihály had not succeeded, the French would have been even more successful; as it was, Leroux was forced to divide his remaining artillery between enfilading the Austrian troops and unseating the guns on the Linienwall, with the result that neither task received as much focused bombardment as he would have liked.

Still, it seems clear that Mozart would have been defeated, had it not been for the Miracle on the Danube. As the sixth of April drew closer to night, with Mozart’s forces close to breaking, the people of Vienna heard the sound of a distant trumpet. Archduke Ferdinand and General Wurmser had returned from Italy, bringing their armies with them. Though the body of the Hapsburg armies were spread out along the road for miles behind, having made forced marches to return in time, Wurmser’s large force of Croatian cavalry marched in the vanguard of his army. Seeing the situation, the general immediately ordered that they charge the flank of the compact French army aimed at the Linienwall.

On the brink of victory, the French were nonetheless vulnerable. Mozart’s defence had been effective enough that Leroux had been forced to send forward some of the reserves guarding his flanks in order to keep up the pressure on the Austrian lines. He had gambled that the Austrians had already committed all their forces and they had no reserves with which to take advantage of this weakness. This had been an accurate guess…until now.

The Croats hit the French rear with such suddenness that the Revolutionaries – made up mostly of Sans-Culottes, enthusiastic but inexperienced about fighting in any manner beyond that which they had been taught – had no time to form square. Leroux hesitated, considering if there was any way the Croats could be repulsed without giving Mozart the breathing space to regroup. As he paused, a roundshot from the walls removed his head.

Without their commander, French morale crumbled. Cougnon took command and ordered a fighting retreat. He aimed the small force of Revolutionary cavalry straight at the centre of Mozart’s lines in an attempt to hold back the main Austrian army, then shifted his most experienced troops – ancien régime veterans – to face the Croats in square. The Sans-Culottes Revolutionary rabble were evacuated swiftly westward. A fire-breathing Jacobin, Major Fabien Lascelles, effectively seized command of those troops, the bulk of the French army.

Cougnon successfully repulsed the Croats and retreated after the Sans-Culottes. His quixotic cavalry attack, though of course demolished by the overwhelming numbers of the Austrian troops, was more successful than he had hoped; the cavalrymen, armed with rifles[3], managed to target and shoot down several Austrian officers in their prominent uniforms – including Wolfgang Mozart. The general sustained a wound in his shoulder which immediately took him out of the fighting. This meant that the Austrians held under cautious lieutenants, rather than pursuing – where they might have routed the disorganised French.

Vienna had repulsed its third siege, and the bulk of Ferdinand and Wurmser’s armies paraded through the Graben to cheers and fanfares when they arrived a week later. However, Mozart’s wound became gangrenous, and he died on the 21st. His last words, spoken to Francis, were reportedly (on speaking of his great public acclaim among the people for his victory) ‘It means nothing to me, O Vienna’. There is some evidence that Mozart believed he had only snatched victory from the jaws of defeat by an act of Providence, and went to his grave still believing he had somehow failed Austria. This belief was not shared by the Hapsburgs and their people, who erected many statues to the general over the years. A symphony by Beethoven, Vittoria, was dedicated to Mozart and largely drew on his actions in the Battle of Vienna, focusing on martial, clashing harmonies.[4]

It was a turning point. Vienna marked the most eastward advance of French Revolutionary armies. The army formerly belonging to Leroux retreated to Linz, at which point a brief civil war was fought, with the fanatical Lascelles (who despised all associated with the ancien régime, had Cougnon assassinated and then scattered his veteran troops. Lascelles further organised a retreat to Regensburg, his intention being to set up a Bavarian Germanic Republic. Cougnon’s troops remained as a coherent force under Major Phillipe Saint-Julien and turned northward, seizing the Bohemian town of Budweis[5] and establishing it as a minor military fiefdom, with only a passing sheen of Republican ideology. The Austrian failure to respond to this occupation is often cited as the reason behind the growth of the Bohemian national consciousness in the first part of the nineteenth century, just as the Spanish failure to respond to the British occupation of Buenos Aires in the First Platinean War had contributed to the idea of a Platinean national consciousness.

Austria had been set back on its heels, but the time was ripe for a counterattack. The country retained able generals such as Archduke Ferdinand, Wurmser and Alvinczi. Austria still had plenty of armies and could call upon more levies from Hungary or Croatia. The French occupation of Swabia was thin and new, that of Bavaria even more so. A decisive attack could shatter it and undo all the gains of the Rubicon Offensive.

But fate did not smile upon Vienna a second time. Since Hoche had sacked and occupied Venice, ending the ancient mercantile republic, the fate of the Venetian possessions in Dalmatia had been up in the air. The land was ethnically mostly Croatian, suggesting an Austrian claim, but this was opposed by the Ottoman Empire. November 1798 had seen the death of Sultan Abdulhamid II and he was succeeded by a dynamic nephew, who became Murad V. Murad and his vizier, Mehmed Ali Pasha, saw the fall of Venice as a significant opportunity. The Ottomans had focused on internal reorganisation under the cautious Abdulhamid’s reign, and response to the Russian Civil War had chiefly been the soft expansion of power, for example by increasing Ottoman influence in the Khanate of the Crimea, the Caucasus and the Romanian principalities, displacing the existing Russian puppets in those states’ governments. However, now Murad discerned that the Russians’ internal struggle meant that a war over Dalmatia would be restricted to conflict with the already weakened Austria. The Austrian ambassador to the Sublime Porte was summoned on 15th May 1799 and informed that a state of war now existed between Constantinople and Vienna. An Ottoman army under Damat Melek Pasha, a Bosniak, crossed over into the formerly Venetian Dalmatia on the 26th of May.

Francis was in an unenviable position. Without the legitimacy of confirmation by the Prince-Electors, he had diminished authority, and having defeated one great invasion, Austria now apparently faced a second – though the Ottomans’ declaration of war was largely a simple consequence of their desired annexation of Dalmatia. There were little signs that the Sublime Porte wished to attempt another invasion of the Hapsburg dominions themselves, but nonetheless Austria could hardly pursue an offensive war against the French occupying Swabia and Bavaria with the Turks sweeping up through the Balkans.

Thus history was decided. Austrian armies were shifted south to defend Hapsburg Croatia, while Lascelles was able to escape unharried to Regensburg, and the Cougnonistes to Budweis. The German front, which had been so bitterly fought for so long, descended into an almost sinister silence – at least until the beginning of the Kleinkrieg.

The situation in Paris was almost comically similar to that in Vienna. The great enemy had been defeated, but an older, more traditional one had reared its ugly head. General Boulanger wanted to lead the scraped-together Revolutionary armies personally against the British and Royal French, but Jean de Lisieux dissuaded him. He would be needed here, he claimed mysteriously…he did, however, ensure Boulanger arranged matters so that most of the troops going to the Chouan-held lands would be made up of Sans-Culotte volunteers.

The Spanish were also a worry. Spain had been one of the first monarchist powers to declare war after the phlogistication of Louis XVI, and had been the first port of call for the Dauphin when he fled the country. Yet the Spanish prosecution of the war had been unenthusiastic. King Philip VI had always tried to steer the country through a path of peace since the disastrous Second Platinean War, focusing on colonial reorganisation to prevent a second breakaway and reforming finances in the Peninsula. His chief minister, the able Conde de Floridablanca, had favoured such policies even before Philip became King, and together they had prevented Revolutionary ideas from gaining much purchase in Spain, even though the country had itself had several popular rebellions against the unpopular Charles III in recent history. Floridablanca’s propaganda emphasised the Revolution’s atheistic and French-supremacist principles, successfully inflaming popular (though not necessarily noble) opposition. After all, the rebellions against Charles III had partly been sparked by him being too close to France.

Therefore, in the five years since the start of the war, the Spanish armies had not advanced a great deal. Under the competent but overly cautious General Fernando de Cuesta[6], Spain occupied those regions of French territory (and Andorra) to which it had a historic claim, such as Rousillon (French Catalonia) and Labourd (a heavily Basque part of Aquitaine). The Spanish were sometimes welcomed as liberators, particularly in those lands which had been Spanish prior to the Franco-Spanish wars of the seventeenth century, but were more often sullenly opposed by the locals. Revolutionary sentiment in the southwest of France was only moderate, but the Spanish troops did not behave particularly well and it was obvious to everyone that Spain was there for realpolitick reasons rather than some sort of altruistic restoration of their fellow Bourbon monarchy. A march by Spanish troops to Paris was inconceivable, not necessarily because of the state of the Spanish Army (which was already undergoing reorganisation after the lessons of the Second Platinean War) but because the Cortes refused to release the funding. No-one forgot that the French Revolution had ultimately been sparked by the expenditure of a century of war emptying the French treasury. Spain’s economy was already shaky enough after the loss of a third of the New World empire without such risky military adventures.

The Spanish offensive did pick up after Hoche moved into Spanish Parma in October 1797 as part of his Italian campaign. Public outrage at news of French atrocities was enough to spur Floridablanca into recommending a new offensive, if only for the sake of appearances. Cuesta therefore attacked into Gascony, laying siege to Bordeaux in an operation supported by amphibious descents by the Spanish Navy – the Revolution’s lack of naval force meant that the Spanish could operate almost with impunity. However, the siege was broken in July 1798 when a small French force under Custine – the victor at Toulon – was augmented by local militiamen and managed to defeat Cuesta’s army, which was already suffering from disease. The Spanish retreated into Labourd, with the French pursuing, but a shock victory was won over Custine at the Battle of Bayonne, when an outnumbered portion of the Spanish army defeated the French. The Spanish were led by a young major of Irish descent, Joaquín Blake y Joyes, who would go on to have a very interesting career…

French attempts to drive the Spanish back any further failed, as the French armies facing the Spanish were simply too few with the demands of the Italian, German, and then Vendean fronts. However, the bloody nose at Bordeaux meant that Spanish policy reverted to a cautious consolidation of their historical claims. The final showdown there would have to wait until the fate of the Chouannerie was decided…




[1] “Three heroes, three saviours, three martyrs.” Count Niklas Salm and Johan Sobieski (King John III of Poland) were the most prominent commanders in the repulsions of the Turks from Vienna in 1529 and 1683 respectively.

[2] The grandson of Kováts Mihály (Michael de Kovats), who in OTL founded the United States Cavalry during the ARW. In TTL he remained loyal to the Hapsburgs all his life and his son and grandson (not born OTL) have followed him into the cavalry.

[3]Recall that the assassination of William IV by Frederick’s Americans sparked a new interest in the rifle as a weapon of war in Europe, and it is much more common in armies of the period in TTL than it was in OTL.

[4]More like the 1812 Overture than anything OTL’s Beethoven composed.

[5]The German name; České Budějovice in Czech.

[6]An ATL ‘brother’ of Gregorio García de Cuesta.


Part #40: The Double Revolution

From – “The Seigneur Offensive” by Philip Rathbone (Collins and Wilston of Albany, 1972)

Jean-Baptiste Robespierre had been paranoid about the prospect of a British invasion of western France for many months before the Seigneur offensive was actually launched. Although Robespierre had pushed hard for the prosecution of war against Austria, as the successes of the Poséidon and Rubicon offensives led French armies ever deeper into Germany and Italy, he began to fear the possibility of an underdefended France falling to attack from the west.

Other historians, more pro-Administration, have argued that Robespierre’s fear was not for the Republic but for his own position. Robespierre had masterminded the Terror for several years, and seemed unable to learn that it was impossible to kill all the enemies of the state (i.e., himself; Louis XIV would have approved), because every chirurgeoning or phlogistication only served to turn more people’s hearts against him. Enthusiasm for the Republic itself still ran high in France, but Robespierre was becoming an ever more isolated figure. His power was only the shadow of the tiger.[1] While he might be able to intimidate the masses, there remained men in France powerful enough to oppose him, men whose power lay in different arenas, who could not be cowed through the emasculated National Legislative Assembly. To keep those men on side, Robespierre had to continue the idea that French was perpetually under threat and that any word raised against his Terror was tantamount to collaboration. To that end, as Leroux, Ney and Hoche effectively removed the immediate threat from Austria, Robespierre’s propagandists talked up the threat from Spain. Some historians have even suggested that Robespierre deliberately permitted the Spanish to remain in possession of French land (until Bordeaux was attacked) in order to use that as part of his propaganda.

But the real threat to the Republic now came not from Spain, but from Britain – Britain and Royal French exiles joining up with the Chouan rebels in Brittany and the Vendée. After the defeat of Villeneuve, who had weakened the allied force, but not fatally so, the British took the Republican-held fortress of Quiberon and marched into Brittany with their Royal French allies at the head. The British commander, Frederick George the Prince of Wales, understood his own limitations as a battlefield general, but on the other hand was skilled as spinning the invasion as a liberation. He kept his men under control, ensuring the provosts made sure that they paid for everything they requisitioned from the locals, and hanged a couple of looters as an example. The Prince also sought out Catholic troops in his army and arranged them into small elite forces which he used when securing potentially sensitive sites, such as churches. Frederick was aware that the Chouannerie was partly ultra-Catholic in character, and knew that he had to make sure no accusations of Protestant atrocities were made. Technically, there should have been no Catholics in his army due to the Test Acts, but in practice there were always ways around these. In any case, the British opinion of Catholics was slowly improving as more accurate reports of Wesley’s successes in Ireland began to leak out. This did, however, alienate the Huguenots who had joined the British Army, who saw it as a disgusting suck-up to the same forces who had led to their ancestors fleeing the country a hundred years before. Brittany and the Vendée still had one of the largest Huguenot populations in France – perhaps why the Catholic majority was so fervent, with an opposition to press against – and many Huguenot-descended British officers wrote hotly on the Chouans’ treatment of French Protestants.

Of course, this was irrelevant in the face of the big picture. Everyone knew that the alliance was uneasy. England, and then Britain, had fought Bourbon France almost continuously for a hundred years, and had a long history of conflict stretching back before that. The alliance rested on the Royal French seeing the British as the lesser of two evils, and Britain putting one foot wrong could change their minds, reducing the war to another of the futile Anglo-French conflicts that had made the world ring like a bell so many times. Prince Frederick was willing to do anything to prevent that.

In Paris, Robespierre ordered the immediate assembly of new armies to ‘throw the English and the impure traitors back into the sea’. In a meeting with the two other Consuls, Boulanger opened his mouth to protest, only to find Lisieux’s foot pressing down on his. Lisieux quickly spoke up and said that of course it would be done.

Boulanger said nothing at the time, but after reading the operational plans that Lisieux drew up, he confronted his fellow Consul at the tavern which the ‘Boulangerie’ used as their usual meeting place. While Jean-Pierre Blanchard argued with Robert Surcouf about the possibility of flying balloons off the deck of a ship, Boulanger met Lisieux in an upper room. The exact content of the conversation is not known. Michel Chanson, Boulanger’s onetime adjutant, later claimed that the General confided in him the words that were spoken, though there is no way verify this allegation. According to Chanson, the conversation ran…

BOULANGER. Jean, my friend, are you mad?[2] I have read your orders. They are a recipe for slaughter, nothing less!

LISIEUX. You are right, of course. We could try to prevent Jean-Baptiste’s insane plans this time. We have succeeded before. But how long will it be before our constructive criticism becomes a sign that we are irredeemably ‘impure’ and ‘treacherous’ and we are looking at the inside of a phlogistication chamber?

BOULANGER. Jean – you cannot be saying this.

LISIEUX. Perhaps we may even share the same phlogistication chamber.

BOULANGER. You know that…that it is…it cannot be said!

LISIEUX. Precisely, old friend. It cannot be said. Friend Robespierre had spies everywhere. Is this the Republic we all sought to build when we pulled down the old regime? Is this liberty?

BOULANGER. I – I cannot say.

LISIEUX. You have commanded vast armies in the face of cannonballs flying everywhere, yet you fear to say it. Such is the hold his Terror has on all of us. We must break it, for the sake of France. If Jean-Baptiste continues in his destructive regime, men will begin to think of him and the Republic as one. Then when he falls – for he must, before he reduces himself to the last man in France, everyone else executed as ‘impure’ – the Republic will fall with him. We cannot allow that.

BOULANGER. (Long pause) No. We cannot…what do you intend to gain by this madness?

LISIEUX. You will note that the new armies are drawn largely from the remaining Sans-Culotte militias.

BOULANGER. Those not yet part of your Gardes Nationales, of course…ah. You seek to…?

LISIEUX. Quite so. A new era is about to dawn, Pierre. We do not belong in the shadows.

It is not the place of the author to speak of the plausibility of this account. In any case, Boulanger approved Lisieux’s plans, and new armies were formed up, drawn almost entirely from the Sans-Culottes and with inexperienced generals in command. They marched out of Paris in May 1799 and divided into two main forces, under Paul Vignon and Jacques Pallière. Vignon’s northern army assembled at Le Mans and then marched westward into Brittany, while Pallière’s southern force was sent on to Poitiers and then wheeled to enter the Vendée.

By the time the two Republican armies attacked, at the end of June, the British were well established. The remaining Republican holdouts at Lannion and Cherbourg were taken by British amphibious descents, securing control over all Brittany. A force moved into the Vendée under Sir Thomas Græme – though the politically aware Prince Frederick made sure to give it a Catholic and French vanguard – and cleared out the remaining Revolutionary strongholds that the Chouans had been unable to take, lacking artillery. All of the province of Brittany, and the western half of Poitou (which consisted of the Vendée) were now under Allied control. The Dauphin went to Nantes and was hailed as Louis XVII. He was blessed by the Bishop of Nantes (who had escaped the purge of the Second Estate) in his Cathedral, one step short of a full coronation. The two regions had almost no support for the Revolution, as those who had supported it had fled eastward when the Chouannerie threw out the Republican occupiers.

Against this background, the two Republican forces attacked. Vignon’s army met the main Anglo-French force, with Prince Frederick and Louis XVII present, near Laval. The Republicans were outnumbered and inexperienced, and were slaughtered by the Royalists and their British allies. Tellingly, the Republicans had also lacked any of the Cugnot toys that had been so useful against Austria. This was not because they did not exist. But Boulanger and Lisieux controlled their supply through the Boulangerie, and had ensured that none would be supplied. They wouldn’t want that large group of Sans-Culottes to win, after all…

The southern battle, at Cholet, was less decisive. Græme met Pallière with a force only two-thirds as large, and part of that made up of Royal French, less reliable without their King their to steady them. The fact that it was Frenchman fighting Frenchman was never far away from the minds of either side. Nonetheless, Lisieux and Boulanger had not failed there, either. Though Græme did not actually destroy Pallière’s army as Vignon’s was at Laval, Riflemen skirmishers attached to the 69th (South Lincolnshire) Foot did manage to kill Pallière himself. With little of a trained officer corps in command, the army simply disintegrated. The contrast with the orderly withdrawal of Leroux’s army from Vienna after his death is telling. Boulanger had ensured that the best of the Republic’s army had gone into Germany. He now deliberately sent its worst against the British.

Pallière’s army scattered over the countryside, some fleeing to Anjou and Aunice provinces. Their maraude only served to turn more undecided locals to the Royalist cause. In truth, though, a bigger surge of support was the two handy victories. The Republic, seemingly invincible for so long, now appeared anything but.

Which was, of course, exactly what Lisieux had wanted…

*

From – “The Double Revolution” by Daniel Dutourd (Université de Nantes Press, 1964) -

When the news of the defeats at Cholet and Laval, Paris began buzzing with discontent. It came on the back of the news of the defeat at Vienna. The Revolution was imperilled once again, and a scapegoat was needed, someone to be burned in L’Épurateur’s flame of liberty. Robespierre had had no trouble finding them in the past. Now, having left a trail of corpses longer than that of any king, he was struck down by his own success: with no credible political opponents left, only one man could be responsible for the defeats.

Traitor. Impure…

Paris had seen several uprisings in recent years, this one no less confused than those that had preceded it. Chroniclers report that, despite the purges after Hébert’s death, part of the uprising was Royalist and Catholic in character, spurred on by the Royal successes in the Vendée. More of it, though, was made up of Republicans who sought to overthrow Robespierre and elect a new leader – for at this point most of them still thought of elections.

Both risings were held back by Lisieux’s loyal Garde Nationale. Lisieux advised Robespierre that it would be best if he remained in a secure area until the rebellion was put down. Robespierre argued, saying that he would not be seen to be hiding from his enemies. Lisieux…insisted. And Boulanger ‘happened’ to recommend the old Château de Versailles, now long since looted-out and used for storage of ammunition and troops’ rations. Robespierre, realising he was being forced, attempted to call upon the Sans-Culottes, over whom he had always held supreme authority. His great political act had been to skilfully slip into the shoes of Le Diamant, a man who would almost certainly have found him repugnant if they had ever met, and control Le Diamant’s powerful supporters. Now, though, those supporters had been sent away: the competent to Germany, the incompetent to the west. Robespierre found himself without allies. He submitted.

The morning of July 31st, 1799 (Abricot Thermidor of the year 5) dawned with the news – not whispered, but shouted from the rooftops and trumpeted in the state-controlled newspapers – that Jean-Baptiste Robespierre was dead. He had hanged himself while hiding in Versailles, the editorials (controlled by Lisieux) said. The implication was clear, that Robespierre had begun to see himself as the very thing he had sought to destroy. A suicide note supposedly found on his body showed that he had literally signed his own death warrant, declaring himself an Enemy of the People, before summarily carrying out his own execution.

The vast majority of commentators, then and now, believe that Robespierre was murdered by Lisieux’s men and the death disguised as a suicide. Some modern revisionist historians have suggested that Robespierre’s suicide might in fact have been genuine – there had long been rumours that he kept a signed copy of his own death warrant about his person in case he ever found an impure thought entering his mind, and the depression on realising he had lost power might have pushed him over the edge. Whether Lisieux’s hand slayed him, though, it is definite that Lisieux had planned to do so, and whether Robespierre pre-empted him is unimportant.

Almost from the first day, proclamations began flying out. Lisieux had already been the Republic’s main writer of pamphlets and propagandists, and now he turned them out for himself. The ‘erring’ period of Robespierre was over, it said. The corrupt Consulate was dissolved and the National Legislative Assembly would convene after fresh elections to confirm a new constitution. Until that time, that constitution would take temporary effect. Who, exactly, had drawn up this constitution and when was never quite stated.

In any case, the constitution of the ‘Apricot Revolution’, as it was termed, reorganised the Republic considerably. Instead of a three-person Consulate, it saw a single ruler given the deliberately lowly-sounding title of ‘Administrateur’. The Republic was then divided into départements according to a system that had been drawn up by Jacques-Guillaume Thouret. Thouret, a Norman, was a great Rationalist who had been instrumental in the creation of the metric system. He was one of the few members of the National Legislative Assembly who had not been cowed by Robespierre. His new division of France ignored the existing provincial boundaries and, indeed, geography – he simply divided France into squares based on lines of latitude and longitude. These square départements were named after the Revolutionary calendar’s days – Paris was assigned as Abricot, of course… - and would each be ruled by a Modérateur, a theoretically locally-elected official somewhere between an old mayor and duke.

The Thouret plan was an attempt to balance the local privileges of the ancien régime, whose loss had been part of the reason behind the Breton rising, with the strongly centralised structure of the existing Republic. The Rationalist squares spoke of Lisieux’s philosophy that Revolutionary ideals could not be softened by compromise. “If we let the status quo affect our principles,” he wrote, “our principles will be worn down…but if we stand firm, we will sculpt the world until it is fit for the Revolutionary system.” Some less well educated Revolutionaries apparently thought this was literal, and there were rumours that Lisieux planned, after the conquest of Britain, to cut up the island and use its parts to build up all the partial départements along the coasts to perfect squares. Lisieux’s control of propaganda was such that an impression soon emerged that there was nothing he could not do.

Lisieux’s first act as Administrateur was to complete the crackdown on the Paris rising, now useless to him, by his loyal Garde Nationale. He then appointed Boulanger as First Marshal of the Army, a new post which would give the former general enough independence to form a more coherent response to the British invasion. Lisieux picked out those competent but awkward members of the NLA and other politicians – usually Robespierre loyalists – and made them Modérateurs of départements. This was central to Lisieux’s political philosophy. “The former regime,” he wrote, speaking of Robespierre, “thought that the wheels of revolution must be lubricated by the oil of sacrifice. Such a view ignores the fact that the ‘oil’ is in fact made of destroyed wheels. If it had been allowed to continue, soon we would have a great deal of oil and no wheels to lubricate…the correct view must be that men are a resource, just like wheat or iron or coal[3], and should not be wasted. It is a gross irresponsibility not to extract their usefulness, whatever the circumstances.”

These relatively mild words presaged a terror in some ways worse than Robespierre’s, but for now Lisieux remained focused on the British problem. In August, the main Anglo-French army invaded Normandy. Support for the Royalists was more lukewarm there, as Normandy had had no particular special status before the Revolution as Brittany had, but the majority of Normans saw which way the wind was blowing and supported the King. Lisieux demanded a response from Boulanger, knowing that many more Royal successes could tip the balance of the mood of Paris towards royalism. He, more than anyone, knew how fickle the mob could be, and how fragile his position was.

Boulanger was worried that his friend was heading towards becoming another Robespierre, with such demands, but agreed that something had to be done. He had assembled another army, one as capable as the ones operating in Germany, made up mostly of troops who should be going as reinforcements to Leroux and Hoche. Lacking an experienced command general, Boulanger went himself, in the face of Lisieux’s protests.

As Lisieux built his power in Paris, Boulanger’s army moved into Normandy, occupying Évreux and easily defeating a small Anglo-Royal French force that had been sent ahead. The bulk of the Allied army was in Caen, having taken the city from loyal Revolutionaries at the end of September. Boulanger fought another small, filmish [cinematic] action near the town of Lisieux, Jean de Lisieux’s home town – with which the propagandists, not least Lisieux himself, had much fun. Rather than trying to hold the damaged city against siege, the Prince of Wales ordered that the British army decamp and meet Boulanger on the field of battle. The British had not fought Cugnot engines before. They would soon find out what it was like, to their cost. Sir Ralph Abercromby held to traditional strategy of holding high ground and letting the enemy approach over a flat plain, a killing field. Just as Mozart had learned a few months before, this was not the winning tactic it had been before.

According to Michel Chanson, Boulanger called Caen ‘my second Lille’, referring to the victory he had won there, the first victory of the Jacobin Wars, by his use of the Cugnot-wagons. Now he had access to far more advanced Cugnot engines: Cugnot, Surcouf and the others had been working feverishly, spurred on by unlimited funding and the fear of failure.

Boulanger had many of the old-style wagons, essentially just steam-driven alternatives to the horse, which could tow guns into position and then unlimber to allow them to fire. But now he had what Cugnot called his char de tir, gun-chariot. These were larger, more cumbersome Cugnot-wagons that, rather than simply towing an ordinary gun, were actually built around large pieces of artillery (six- to twenty-four-pounders) and consisted of a large flatbed on tall wheels. Chars with trained crews could fire their gun whilst moving, a truly revolutionary development – though dealing with the recoil remained a problem, as the chars had a tendency to flip over. Cugnot’s experiments with rotating cannon had been disastrous; in order to take the recoil, the wheels had to be aligned with the axis of the gun, allowing the wagon to roll backwards. Thus, Boulanger’s chars had only fixed-focus guns, but it was enough.

It was the novelty, the unknown of the Republican weapons more than their effectiveness which intimidated the Allied forces. Abercromby remarked “Have the Jacobins placed mills on wheels?” The French bombardment was no greater than many the veteran British and Royal French troops had weathered before, but the fact that it came from moving cannon was unnerving. It also meant that the British artillery found it harder to reply to the guns. Abercromby ordered the cavalry to sweep in and take the chars, if they could. Boulanger was reliably informed of all this, as he had a Blanchard observation balloon floating over the battlefield and signalling to him by flags, giving him an intelligence advantage over his opponents.

The British and Royal French cavalry did succeed in destroying several of the chars, though they were hampered by the sheer size of them (“Like trying to sabre down sailors standing on the deck when you are on the pier below” recalled one cavalryman, a native of Portsmouth). More were immobilised by lucky shots from British galloper guns, one-pounder cannons that could be shifted around the battlefield even more rapidly by being hitched up to fast horses. The chars were fragile in places, in particular vulnerable to having their steam-boilers punctured by roundshot, which could potentially spray their crews with boiling water.

But Boulanger had anticipated this. Behind and among the chars rolled the tortues, the same vehicles Lisieux had used to crush the uprising after Hébert’s death. They were armoured carriages, somewhat inspired by those developed by the Bohemians during the Thirty Years’ War, but were driven by steam engines. Inside were troops with muskets and rifles firing through slits, protected by the armour from anything but a direct hit by a cannonball. The tortues were slow and cumbersome, of little use as a real weapon of war, but the Allied cavalry did not realise what they were until it was too late. Countless British and Royal French cavalrymen were volleyed down, the Republicans holding their fire until the last moment. Then, unable to reply to this unseen assault, the cavalry fled.

This started a panic through the Allied ranks. Men who would stolidly march against armies five times their size did not know how to react to these new terrors. Privates became newly nervous when they realised their sergeants and officers had no more idea of what was happening when they did.

The irony was that Boulanger’s vehicles could certainly not have climbed the high ground that Abercromby held. Yet the cautious Scottish general ordered a fighting retreat, while he worked out how to defeat the Republicans’ new war machines. Despite the anxiety in the ranks, the British and Royal French (the latter led by Colonel Grouchy, an exile ally of Louis XVII) made an orderly withdrawal from the ridge and retreated westward.

Boulanger could not believe his luck. His infantry, marching in columns behind the vehicles, quickly seized the ridge and then unlimbered their conventional artillery, those towed by horses capable of climbing the ridge. The Republicans directed a withering fire against the Allies as they withdrew, killing dozens of men with each plunging cannonball. If Boulanger had had cavalry of his own, the retreat might have become a rout – but the Revolution still had trouble recruiting trained horsemen, given its stance on aristocrats.

Nonetheless, the engagement might never have been so well known if one of the last cannonballs fired had not come down in the middle of the British command. Ironically, it was not the ball that killed him; it struck the ground before his horse, toppling it over on top of him, and broke his neck. In the confusion of the battle, few except General Abercromby and his aides noticed, but Prince Frederick George had just ignominiously died.

The incident would have shockwaves far greater than Boulanger’s successful repulsion of the Allies from Normandy. In Britain, King George collapsed upon being informed of his favourite son’s death, and fell into an illness from which he never recovered. This came at the worst possible time, as Britain entered a constitutional crisis. The Marquess of Rockingham’s government had shed support throughout the war, with the old marquess now holding only the slimmest majority in the Commons. Liberal and Radical Whigs who supported the Revolution found themselves strange bedfellows with conservative Tories who opposed the alliance with Catholic France, but nonetheless much of the Commons was united in opposition. The victories in France were swiftly followed by the defeat at Caen, and Rockingham worked frantically to prevent his government losing its majority. Too frantically; he worked himself to death, at a time when George III was beginning to lose lucidity, consumed by the death of his son.

London held its breath. The British Constitution relied on a balance of power between monarch and Parliament, but now Parliament had lost its Prime Minister and the King was in no state to perform his functions. There was talk of appointing a regent, but the authorisation for such an act would require a coherent government, which did not exist – and could not exist until a King or Regent asked someone to form one. The British political system was trapped in a vicious circle. The crisis was such that the previous topic of debate, whether Richard Wesley’s calls for Catholic emancipation in Ireland should be granted (opposed by the King, who saw it a violation of his coronation oath to defend the Protestant faith), was temporarily forgotten.

From the chaos, Charles James Fox emerged. Leader of the parliamentary Radical faction among the Whigs, and a strong supporter of Revolutionary ideals, he spoke in favour of Lisieux and said that the excesses of the Robespierre period were now over. “We have fought the tyranny of the Bourbons for decades,” he said in a speech to the divided Parliament. “Now shall we side with them against the liberty that we have been so rightfully proud of for so long? I say no!”

Fox’s radical wing would normally not have received much support, but he was one of the few great orators in Parliament after Rockingham’s death, and a natural leader. Liberal Whigs who had defected from Rockingham saw him as the lesser of two evils, and thought Tories despised him, their desire to end the war was such that they temporarily supported him. The Whigs struggled to find a credible candidate for prime minister to oppose Fox, but could not. Richard Burke was too young and too Liberal, though he fiercely opposed the French Revolution as his father had. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Thomas Townshend, was politically suited but lacked charisma, having failed to come out of Rockingham’s shadow. There was even talk about rallying around Frederick Grenville, the ambassador who had escaped from the Republican French mob (his American colleague Thomas Jefferson not being so fortunate) and was now an MP, as a leader. But though Grenville had both charisma and a burning desire to oppose the Republic, he could not match Fox’s oratory or easy political skill. Parliament remained paralysed, as news of further victories by Boulanger poured in.

The deadlock was broken on November 9th, coming on the same day as the news that Boulanger’s lightning advance into Brittany had been halted by the combined British and Royal French forces near Mayenne. Boulanger, like Leroux in Germany, had outrun his supply lines and his army had become too dispersed. For example, he no longer had access to observation balloons, their transports being too large and cumbersome to move at his army’s marching speed. The Royal French had scored a propaganda victory by managing to capture several of Boulanger’s steam engines, and the French columns had for the first time come up against well-drilled British infantry under Colonel Sir John Moore. British Riflemen picked off French officers as they tried to rally their men, and the machine-like volleying of the redcoats – twice as fast as any continental army, thanks to the British Army budgeting for them to train with real cartridges – had ground down the columns until even their well-trained soldiers turned and fled. It was far from a rout, but Boulanger was forced to retreat. The war remained to be decided. On that day, George III finally slipped from life. His last words were reported to be “I am and always will be a Virginian, and let no man speak ill of that.”

Meanwhile, down in Saint-Hilaire, the legend of Leo Bone was being quietly made, overshadowed by greater events, but that does not enter into our tale.

Upon George III’s death, the automatic succession laws kicked in and Prince Henry William, despite the reservations of large parts of British society, became King Henry IX. He was crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1799, as the war in France ground to a halt and the armies retreated to their winter quarters. It seemed symbolic that a new century would begin with Henry IX’s reign, for novelty abounded in the young, unexpected king’s ideas.

Henry had always been aligned with Charles James Fox’s Radicals, and it was no surprise that he asked Fox to form a government on January 14th 1800. Fox achieved a narrow majority in the Commons, part of his support coming from conservative Tories who wanted to see the war ended at any cost and ‘court party’ MPs in the pocket of whoever sat upon the throne, while he always struggled in the Lords. Fox formed his “New Cabinet” and immediately sent out peace feelers to Lisieux’s new Administration.

The positions of the two states were almost comically similar. Both thought they were in a weaker position than they were, but would not admit it. Lisieux was certain that if Boulanger had not achieved total victory now, he never would, not without the unavailable armies stuck in Germany and Italy, while the British could easily reinforce across the Channel. He also knew that the republics in Italy, Swabia and Switzerland were creations of Robespierre and might not support him. The British, on the other hand, thought that they had only barely held on against Boulanger’s new machines of war, and it would take years of study in peacetime to figure out means of taking on the Revolutionary technology and tactics. “If the Jacobins throw us back into the sea, who is to say that Boulanger cannot conjure up a bridge of steam and send his troops into England?” wrote the Marquess of Stafford, a leading Tory thinker. He jested somewhat, but was in other ways remarkably prophetic. “We need time to understand that these new marvels are not magical but simply the product of man’s ingenuity…time which we will not have unless this war is brought to a close.”

Therefore, when Fox’s government approached Lisieux’s, the Peace of Caen was signed only weeks later, on 4th March 1800. The shock of the end of the war resounded in Britain, but much less so in France. Lisieux had already taken control of the press and was forming it into the legendary propaganda machine it would become. The French papers said that Boulanger had thrown the English into the sea, and that the rebel areas would remain under special military administration until they were purified enough to be integrated back into the Republic. Until that time, the French people were forbidden to travel into those regions, lest they become ‘infected’ by impure ideas. Lisieux borrowed heavily from Robespierre’s language, but all of this was simply to conceal the fact that the areas were still rebel. As part of the peace treaty, Lisieux agreed to allow a rump Royal France consisting of Brittany and the Vendée, but no more. Louis XVII, appalled at the British betrayal, was forced to consent to this. He returned to Nantes and formed his capital there.

No-one thought the Peace of Mayenne (as it was called) would last for long. For both sides, it was a time for rebuilding. Fox might be naïve enough to think the Republic could be courted, but the majority of people knew the war would begin again one day.

For now, though, Britain returned to its domestic affairs and putting down the last vestiges of the USE rebellion in Ireland, while the Republic turned its attention to Spain. This was the Double Revolution, Lisieux coming to power in France and Henry IX and Fox in Britain. In North America, though, it is known as the Treble Revolution. American fervour for the war had died away slowly as Jefferson’s death had faded into the imagination, and Lisieux was wise enough to publicly apologise for the incident. Some parts of the Empire, notably Carolina, disliked the alliance with Royal France as they coveted expansion into the remaining French colonies in America, which as yet remained loyal to the King. So, in July 1799, when a new general election was called, James Monroe’s Constitutionalist Party won a majority of seats in the Continental Parliament, unseating Lord Hamilton’s Patriots.

The Lord Deputy, the Duke of Grafton, formally asked Monroe to form a government and Monroe became America’s third Lord President. He was the first not to in fact be a peer, refusing the offer and preferring to focus in the Commons – like William Pitt, he believed that that was where power had shifted in this age. The Constitutionalists immediately formally ended the war with France, which had technically continued past the British peace due to Albert Gallatin, the American representative there, lacking the powers to sign the treaty. This was a problem which Monroe rectified with the upgrade of Gallatin’s status to Lord Representative; later, he replaced Gallatin with a political ally, James Madison. Gallatin returned to New York to continue his work with maintaining peace and cooperation with the Iroquois, while Madison almost became a member of Fox’s cabinet, his own radical sympathies lying well with the new British government’s.

So four nations – Great Britain, Ireland, North America and France – had now been placed on wildly different courses. This did not mean, of course, that those courses would never again collide…





[1]The phrase ‘the emperor’s new clothes’ dates from a Hans Christian Andersen story published in 1837, long after the POD so therefore does not exist in TTL. The phrase ‘the shadow of the tiger’, meaning the same thing, comes from an animal story by Georges Gallet, a sort of French analogue of Rudyard Kipling who lived in Kérala, in which a crafty civet-cat intimidated a nest of snakes by simulating the shadow of a tiger, before one of the snakes saw through the illusion and ate him.

[2]Boulanger is using tu rather than vous, reflecting their close political relationship over the past few years.

[3]Lisieux’s naming of coal as a resource reflects how steam engines are growing in importance across the slowly industrialising republic. Of course, the fact that he was strongly involved in Cugnot’s operations means he is somewhat ahead of the rest of France in this respect.


Part #41: The Space-Filling Empire

Capt. Christopher Nuttall: As we move away from Europe for a moment, a brief note should be made that most African names have been altered to their OTL spellings to avoid confusion, though often different and less French-influenced transliterations are the norm in this timeline. (Pause) I apologise for the absence of Drs Pylos and Lombardi, but I fear they had a somewhat heated argument over the nature of Societist doctrine (indistinctly) where did I put those bandages?

*

“If you wish to win, first you must lose, and understand why you lost”

– Michael Olesogun, Prime Minister of West Africa (1942-1946)​


*

From “A History of West Africa” by Lancelot Grieves (1964, Mancunium House Publishing)

Prior to the Royal Africa Bubble scandal of 1782, West Africa was a largely unknown land to most Europeans. Many powers – England and then Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Denmark – had maintained trading posts along the coastline since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but there was little penetration into the interior. Those trading posts dealt in African commodities such as ivory, gold – and slaves. Slavery was, in fact, the major motor of trade with West Africa throughout most of the eighteenth century. A ‘triangular trade’ was practiced, with manufactured goods going from Europe to Africa, slaves from Africa to American colonies, and raw materials going from America to Europe. This status quo was not actively challenged until the second half of the eighteenth century.

Opposition to African slavery began as early as 1727,[1] when the Quaker Church of Great Britain (the Society of Friends) made it doctrine to oppose the practice. The Quakers in America took somewhat longer to cleave to this, perhaps because slavery was all around them and vital for the economy of areas of the colonies, but the movement was given a big boost when William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, had a change of heart and freed his slaves, thereafter supporting abolitionism. Court cases in the 1760s and 70s over slaves brought to Britain were reviewed in the House of Lords, and it was judged that the abolition of (white) slavery made in 1101 by the Normans continued to apply. Slavery itself was therefore illegal in Britain, and any slaves brought into the country automatically became freemen, although this was not necessarily enforced. The slave trade was, however, violently defended by established business interests in the face of opposition by a growing abolitionist movement.

Elsewhere in Europe, opposition to slavery was initially slow to arise. The biggest move in the arena outside Britain was in Denmark, when King Christian VII abolished the slave trade as part of his moves to withdraw Danish trade from Africa in order to focus on building power in the Baltic. By this point, the trade was becoming less profitable in any case, so Christian’s appealing to abolitionist sentiment was largely a calculated political move – but the fact that such a move was seen as holding any weight was an indication of how the subject was spreading through the intellectual classes in Europe. France and Portugal were the nations most hostile to the idea of abolishing slavery, both because their colonies depended heavily on the slave trade and because the French intellectual scene was dominated by pro-slavery thinkers such as Voltaire. Linnaean Racism, nowhere more enthusiastically embraced than France, also got in the way: it was easy to justify slavery on the grounds that Africans were incapable of success without white guidance. Of course, such theories were usually thought up by armchair philosophers who had not travelled to West Africa itself and found that slaves were bought by European traders from quite sophisticated native states…

The first nation in the world to abolish slavery was the proto-United Provinces of South America, in 1784. Though even the country’s name had not been thought of that point, the initially unofficial move was a ploy to gain wider support and an attempt to unite the people of Rio de la Plata behind the rebel government. Negro slaves were promised their freedom if they fought for the rebels. It fitted nicely into the general ideology of abolishing the casta system that powered the rebellion. Although after the war, the promises were not always entirely lived up to (if slavery in name was banned, indentured servitude often remained) it was an important exemplar for other countries.

The northern Confederations of the Empire of North America, and the colonies that had preceded them, drifted away from slavery throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The General Assembly of New England passed a law calling for the gradual abolition of slavery in 1789, with the result that no-one would be born into slavery after that date within the Confederal boundaries (although the living slaves were unaffected). Pennsylvania, initially more hostile to the idea, was gradually won over by the actions of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, backed by the influential Benjamin Franklin. In 1795 the Pennsylvanian Confederal Assembly narrowly passed a law which included manumission similar to New England’s, but – importantly for American history – also banned the transport of slaves into Pennsylvania. This meant it was almost impossible to import slaves into New York or New England from the southern Confederations, except by ship. New York itself still had long memories of the Negro Uprising of 1741 (which Prince Frederick had used in propaganda to attack Governor Cosby), but surrounded by “free” Confederations and with a growing abolitionist movement of its own, relented. The New York Assembly’s law, passed in 1803, was a watered-down version of the other confederations’ laws and did not apply to unincorporated territories or the Iroquois protectorate. However, it set another important precedent.

All of this background serves to explain why the West Africa trade was slowing down throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. America and the West Indies also, by now, had enough of a black population to produce enough slaves by natural breeding, largely making new imports uneconomical. The triangular trade was impaired by this bottleneck, and Britain’s Royal Africa Company was beset by economic difficulty, even though it itself had abandoned the slave trade after losing its monopoly in 1731. The last Director, David Andrews – who was later tried and sentenced to life imprisonment by the House of Lords – attempted to conceal the extent of the Company’s debts, with the result that the Bubble wiped thousands of pounds off the New Jonathan’s Stock Exchange when it broke in 1782. It was not, in fact, an economic bubble in the usual sense, but was so named because it reminded many commentators of the South Sea Bubble fifty years previously. That meltdown had paralysed the British government and led to the creation of the (still unofficial) office of Prime Minister. This one would be no less influential.

The Prime Minister, the Marquess of Rockingham, was forced to resign over the scandal (though he would later return upon the collapse of Portland’s government in the face of Robespierre’s France). The new government, led by the Duke of Portland but masterminded by Edmund Burke, immediately distanced itself from the failures of the previous Ministry and decided to reform the Company considerably.

The Royal Africa Company had had an unhappy history thus far. Quite apart from being an organisation founded to trade inhumanely in human lives, it had been set up by James, the Duke of York in the seventeenth century – the same man who had later become the definition of evil to all non-Jacobite Britons as James II. It had already had several minor collapses and reinstatements throughout the eighteenth century, suffering from the loss of its slave monopoly and then refocusing on the gold dust and ivory trade. It had also been officially renamed so many times that any number of the names were in common circulation, and considered interchangeable – the Royal Africa Company, the African Company, the Guinea Company, the Negroland Company, and many more.

The Company’s organisation was in a sad state, and the Portland Ministry decided that the best way to rejuvenate it would be to bring in talent from its far more successful sister organisation, the East India Company. Despite facing hard competition from its French rival, the EIC’s trade had brought great wealth to Britain, while the RAC was struggling even to keep itself afloat.

Thus, the new Board of Directors set up for the RAC was made up partly of men brought over from the EIC. The two most prominent – and famous – of these were Arthur Filling and Thomas Space, two junior EIC directors who could not have been more different. Filling was a dour Scotsman who had joined the Company’s military and served in the Indian wars, losing an eye during the war with the last Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daulah. He also had a keen acumen for business, and had found his way to his current position partly through careful investments with a fortune he had taken during the sack of Calcutta. Space, on the other hand, was an idealistic Englishman from a privileged background, who had joined the Company mainly in order to visit exotic climes and learn about new peoples and languages. He was a strong opponent of slavery, being a member of Frederick Wilberforce’s Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and importantly through that membership was on speaking terms with several of the most prominent among Britain’s West African community. These included Olaudah Equiano, an escaped slave who had become a respected writer. There was thus Anglo-African participation in the Company’s philosophy from the start.

The challenge facing Filling and Space, as well as the other directors, was vast. The Company had singularly failed to find a new profitable trade niche since the loss of its slavery monopoly, and it was competing with both independent British traders and other European outposts along the West African coast – the French and the Portuguese, the Danes and the Dutch, though the Danish outposts were gradually turned over to the Dutch thanks to Christian VII’s policies. After initially despairing of the difficulty of their task, Space claimed to have had a vision come to him in his sleep, along with a message: look to the east.

The implication was clear – after all, the Prime Minister had brought them in to make the RAC more like the EIC. And the EIC’s current success was based on a more interventionist strategy, pushing influence deep into the hinterland while accepting natives into positions within the Company. The EIC had not been much more than a trading company while it was limited to outposts on the fringes of the Mughal Empire, but now it was so much more. Could the RAC copy that success? There was only one way to find out.

The partnership of Filling and Space meant that the philosophy of the New Company was both profit-driven and yet possessing a moral aspect. After all, slavery was commonly practiced in the African states themselves, usually captives captured in war. “Once upon our time, our ancestors did the same,” Space wrote in a letter to Filling. “Your grandfather many times removed may have captured and enslaved mine…” a reference to the fact that Space was from Northumberland, and the Scottish slave raids into English territory during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. “Yet I can now be assured of even travelling to Edinburgh itself with no fear of being clapped in irons and forced to work the fields…do not our fellow human beings who happen to have been born in a distant land not deserve that same assurance?”

With that in mind, the New Company’s directors cooperated with a contemporary group, the African Association,[2] made up of natural philosophers and dedicated to the exploration of the West African interior. The Association included such luminaries as Joseph Banks, who had become famous publishing works on the fauna and flora of Canada, Newfoundland and the new western territories of the North American Empire[3]; John Ledyard, a New Englander who had joined the Association after failing to convince the British Government to finance a rival fur-trading company to oppose the Russians’ efforts in Alaska; and Daniel Houghton, a veteran and the group’s leader, who was determined to find the exact location of the fabled Malinese city of Timbucktoo. It was obvious to Filling that such men could be of use to a Company searching for a new area in which to trade. Banks could identify economically important plants and animals using Linnaean techniques, Ledyard could figure out how to market them, and Houghton could help explore the interior. In return, having Company-subsidised access to a new land was an enheartening prospect to them.

The Company also soon became caught up with the Colonisation Movement, a loose alliance of societies operating both in Britain and America, dedicated to re-settling black freemen in West Africa. The Movement’s motives ranged from the belief that blacks could never live a normal life surrounded by white society, the idea that blacks who had been raised in such a society could go on to ‘civilise’ the natives, and the notion that moving former slaves back across the Atlantic was a restitution for the horrors of the slave trade in the past. The Company was approached by Equiano, one of the few Africans actually involved in the Movement’s activities, with the idea of providing transport. This solved a problem Filling had noticed. His great idea was to change the direction of the triangular trade. Instead of raw materials going from America to Britain, they could go from Africa to Britain (once the Company located such materials that would be economically valuable). British goods could still be shipped profitably to America, as Britain had begun to industrialise but America, hampered by the vast distances between its cities, had lagged behind. The problem was that he needed some commodity to go from America to Africa to complete the triangle. Freed slaves paying their way to found new colonies filled that gap, as well as providing a pleasing symmetry for more idealistic individuals such as Thomas Space.

The Company had earned enough in its first five years’ worth of operations to sell off its outdated fleet – some of which were badly constructed former slaveships – and purchase new ships, often from the new dockyards in New England. The new fleet was more like the EIC’s East Indiamen, larger, more sturdy and with at least a desultory load of defensive armament. Like the EIC, the RAC did not so much have a trading fleet as a navy, suited to Filling and Space’s ambitions.

The RAC sent numerous expeditions into the African hinterland, many of which did not return or returned with fewer men, but a picture was gradually built up. Filling knew how valuable the EIC found those (usually white) men who had a clear and concise knowledge of Indian affairs, and was trying to build up a similar cadre for West Africa.

The hinterland of what Europeans called the Gold Coast was ruled by the Ashanti Empire, a powerful and increasingly centralising confederation. Ashanti was ruled from the city-state of Kumasi by the Ashantehene, or King of all Ashanti. Thomas Space, upon visiting the area himself and recording his thoughts, compared the system of government to that of England under the Anglo-Saxons: the King enjoyed considerable power, but was elected by a council of the powerful rather than automatically inheriting his post. The Ashanti used a crude form of bicameral legislature (or advisory board), with most of the power held by a gerontrocracy of the oldest and most powerful chiefs, but this was balanced by a second body, the Nmerante, made up of younger men. The King’s authority was symbolised by his throne, a golden stool said to have descended from the heavens to the founder of Ashanti, Osei Tutu I, and was partly religious in character. The Ashanti religion, which focused heavily on various taboos, infused government to the point where it could be called a theocracy. The current King at the time of the Company’s penetration was Otumfuo Nana Osei Kwame Panyin, who was seen as a stabilising influence after years of jockeying between the Oyoko Abohyen (his own) and the Beretuo dynasties. The Ashanti were the hereditary enemies of the Fanti Confederacy, another powerful state which already traded with Britain and the Netherlands. This was of interest to Filling, who knew from his EIC history that divisions and power struggles were open doors to have the boot of influence and trade wedged into them.

Further eastward, the area known as the Slave Coast was better known, due to the fact that its local states had extensive slave-trade contacts with the Europeans there. Settlements by Britain and the Netherlands were joined by the small outpost of Whydah, which had been a Prussian venture ceded to the Saxons after the Third War of Supremacy. The Saxons, with no interest in African trade, had let it lapse, and the Company unilaterally seized the settlement, despite protests from the Dutch (who’d had the same idea). Whydah had formerly been part of the Kingdom of Savi, which had been conquered by the Kingdom of Dahomey in 1727. Dahomey in turn though, despite being one of the most powerful and warlike states in the region, had been conquered and vassalised in 1730 by the cavalry-using Yoruba empire of Oyo. The Dahomeyans had lost the war despite their King Agadja having invested heavily in European firearms. Now, though, the country was chafing under being forced to pay tribute to Oyo, and it was obvious that breaking free was on the mind of the current King, Kpengla. Kpengla was interested in buying more modern flintlock muskets for his troops, recognising that Agadja’s failure had been partly due to having bought obsolete, unreliable matchlocks from the Danes. Filling could see another opportunity there – or two.

The Dahomeyan army included an elite corps of female warriors known as the ‘Amazons’ to Europeans, who made the connection with the Greek myth. The victory over Savi was considered to have been partly due to the shock deployment of the Amazons. The idea was exotic enough that, when the Company’s agents published articles about it in the Register, British intellectual interest in West Africa was sparked and even threatened to equal the orientalists fascinated by India and China. Dahomey also had an elective monarchy, though the King had to prove his descent from their legendary founder, but its voodoo religion required annual human sacrifices, and this pushed Space into describing the people as savages. It also explained why the Dahomeyans were so enthusiastic about selling even their own people into the slave trade, given that their culture meant they placed a low value on human life (or more accurately saw this world as only the surface of a much more fundamental one, and life or death was not a particularly important distinction). This did not stop Filling investing heavily in trade missions to the capital, Abomey, of course. On the other side of Oyo itself was Benin, barely yet breached by European traders but an important market in palm oil. The Company was ready to change that.

Further west, Britain’s acquisition of the French posts in Senegal after the Third War of Supremacy now paid dividends. Senegal had an existing colonial apparatus compared to the British one in Calcutta, with half-bloods (Métis, in French), filling many administrative positions and contributing largely to the area’s culture. The former French colony was centred around Fort St. Louis and the island of Gorée, both of which were considered part of the capital of Dakar. Gorée had previously been English, as well as Dutch, so while the French had held the area for about eighty years prior to losing it, in many way the change in ownership had been accepted with a shrug by the locals. However, it is unlikely that Britain would have been so successful in the transfer of power if she had not appointed John Graves Simcoe (later knighted) as Governor of the conquered territory after a period of mismanagement and corruption throughout the 1760s. Simcoe was a veteran of the Second Platinean War, who had observed the Platineans raising a regiment of freed black slaves and had even had his life saved by one such soldier. He thus had more enlightened views about what black Africans could achieve than many Britons or Americans.

Upon taking command in Dakar, Simcoe was quick to take action against corruption and root out several organisations still trading illegally with the French. Until the late 1780s, though, his grand designs could not be matched by reality, as he had little resources to work with. While Simcoe despised slavery, he recognised that Senegal’s economy was dependent on it and that taking direct action against it, with no thought for the consequences, might do more harm than good.

This changed when the new Royal Africa Company moved in to Dakar, which had been included in its revised charter. Simcoe was innately suspicious of all merchants and speculators, but the fact that the RAC did not deal in slaves made a favourable impression, and Arthur Filling discussed with him his plans for running British possessions in West Africa in a more East India-like manner. Simcoe, who had only served in America prior to this, was unaware of the details of this, and Filling spoke at length on the subject. It was the idea of sepoy regiments that stuck in Simcoe’s head, more even than Space’s plan to try and broaden Senegalese trade to the point where slavery might be wound down. This was the germ of what would become the Company’s African equivalent of sepoys, native troopers trained and equipped in the British fashion, intended to exert the Company’s will on, and in alliance with, native states. Although they were first raised by Simcoe in Senegal, the term that eventually stuck was ‘Jagun’, from the Yoruba word for a soldier, ologunomo ogunjagunjagun. This can perhaps be attributed to the fact that it sounds similar to jäger or ‘hunter’, the name used by various German armies for an elite skirmisher, and that the Company employed some German veterans from Hanover, Hesse and Brunswick to help train its sepoys.

Simcoe soon needed such troops, because Equiano and Space approached him with the idea of founding a black freedman colony in the region, to the south of Senegal proper. Simcoe agreed with the idea, partly because he thought such an example might eventually lead to a decline in slavery elsewhere in the region. Coastal land around St George’s Bay was purchased by the Company from the Kingdom of Koya, a local power that had had extensive diplomatic contacts with Britain and the French and recognised, from the changing of hands of Senegal, that Britain was now gaining supremacy in the region. Koya signed over the little-settled land in exchange for British help in a war against their neighbours, the Susu. Company troops, consisting largely of hired Hessian and Scottish mercenaries paired with Simcoe’s first cohort of native soldiers, assisted the Koya and forced a Susu defeat in a war which ended in 1793. Koya then vassalised Susu and thus gained overall from the deal, at least in the short term.

The new colony was supported by the Colonisation Movement, and was named Freedonia, with the inhabitants being known as Freedes and the adjective being Freedish.[4] The capital, overlooking St George’s Bay, was called Liberty.[5] The colonists who arrived in that first decade were a very diverse crew, from many places and many classes. Some were educated, such as Equiano, who became the first Lieutenant-Governor. There were many ‘Black Poor’, as the blacks of London who had become stranded there after being press-ganged into the Royal Navy were called, and some of them brought white English wives with them. Many freed blacks from the northern Confederations of North America, and the West Indies, came also. This vast range meant that mutual communication was often difficult, and a simplified version of English known as ‘Freedic’ or the ‘Tongue of Liberty’ became the common language.

Freedonia was at first under serious risk of attack from native powers – Koya and Susu were only two among many – and bandits, including slavers. Because of this, Equiano raised militia regiments from the colonists, sharing resources with Simcoe’s sepoys, and this was the start of a close cooperation between the Freedes and the Company. Filling had envisaged an EIC-like bureaucracy consisting of (visibly) natives who spoke English and understood British methods of government; the Freedes were a pool of just such people, and ones who passed on their ideas to genuine natives as the colony grew.

Yet all of what the Company achieved would have been impossible, or at least very difficult, without the work performed by James Edward Smith. Smith was a natural philosopher and Linnaean, who ignored Linnaeus’ racial theories and worked on what Linnaeus had seen as the far more important work, his classification of animals and plants. Originally Linnaeus’ intention had been to find economically important plants that could be grown back in Europe. In this he had never succeeded much himself, but Smith eventually did so. In this he was assisted by Alexander von Humboldt, a Dutch natural scientist of Prussian birth[6]. Humboldt originally approached the British after failing to sell his new idea to the Dutch, in 1800. While based in Africa, he had travelled to Dutch Suriname three years before and then made an expedition down into Platinean Peru. Humboldt’s writings are now keenly studied by those who can see, in his incidental descriptions of the country and its people, the seeds of resentment and rebellion against the regime in Cordova, which had taken power away from conservative Lima and ended its casta system.

But Humboldt was mainly interested in the fauna and flora of the region, and in particular the cinchona tree – the source of quinine or ‘Jesuit’s bark’, a remedy for malaria that had been known of since the seventeenth century, yet had not been widely adopted. “It almost goes without saying,” he wrote, “that among Protestant physicians, hatred of the Jesuits and religious intolerance lie at the bottom of the long conflict over the good or harm effected by Peruvian Bark.” Perhaps this, or simply the fact that it was such a pie-in-the-sky idea, led to the Dutch VOC rejecting his notion based on this. The RAC, however, had Smith, who listened to Humboldt’s idea and then recommended it to Filling and Space.

It was certainly a bold idea. Humboldt advocated the planting of new plantations of cinchona trees in West Africa, thus providing a ready supply of quinine to combat the endemic local malaria, which had so far killed many whites who settled and traded there – along with some of the re-settled blacks.[7] The prevalent theory that black resistance to malaria was intrinsic and not due simply to growing up in the region turned out to be wrong, which was serious, as part of the Company’s economic policy (rely on educated British black colonists as administrators) rested on it.

After some hesitation, Filling invested in the idea. A fleet of Company ships travelled to Peru in 1805 – just in time – and returned bearing transplanted trees, seeds and also a great deal of the dried bark itself. It returned at a crucial time, as the Company’s chief scout Daniel Houghton was dying of the disease. His dramatic cure by the bark, witnessed by the King of Dahomey (who he had been visiting at the time) served to convince the local Africans of quinine’s efficacy more easily than might otherwise have been expected.

The plantations were not all successful, but Smith and Humboldt used Linnaean principles to deduce the right climate, building variedly-heated sheds and considering which plants survived. The Company continued to import quinine from Peru for years afterwards before becoming self-sufficient, and malaria was far from the only deadly disease plaguing the region, but nonetheless, Humboldt’s cinchona plantations served to work a remarkable transformation on West Africa…










[1]Which is, of course, the year of this timeline’s POD.

[2]Founded 1788 OTL; I have butterflied it a little earlier to make this work.

[3]OTL of course he accompanied Cook to Australia. Banks’ work here is a bit less eye-catching so he’s not a Sir (yet).

[4]I know it sounds a bit mad, but these were actually terms considered for the USA in OTL, and given that Sierra Leone was originally called the Province of Freedom, I don’t think it’s that far a leap.

[5]Built on the site of OTL Freetown.

[6]Due to Prussia being reduced to a rump in TTL, Humboldt went to the Netherlands instead to get his university education, and then joined the Dutch East India Company in order to study new animals and plants in exotic climes.

[7]OTL, a British expedition in 1860 led by Clements Markham did the same for Ceylon/Sri Lanka, which is now a big producer of quinine.


Part #42: Jiyendo

From – “IMPERIUM ORIENTALE: The Rise of the Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company” by Brivibas Goštautas (Royal Livonian Press, 1956) :

An oft-stated apparent ‘historical paradox’ is that many of the strokes that led to Russian dominance in the East were made at a time when Russia herself was convulsed by civil war. In fact this simply illustrates that – even before the formal founding of the Company – the Pacific expansion was as remote and separated from St Petersburg as the British and French East India Companies were from London and Paris. Just as French East India remained loyal to the Dauphin even while there was no Royal France, the Russians and Lithuanians in the Far East continued with their operations without even knowing about the Russian Civil War until late 1798. This was probably just as well, as the First Fleet included a number of politically suspect Leib Guards who Peter III had deliberately exiled, suspecting them of supporting Catherine. Had news of the Civil War reached Okhotsk earlier, it is likely that the ‘Japanese venture’ would have torn itself apart. As it was, by the time any potential Potemkinites were aware of the situation further west, things were too hectic for any disunion to arise…

Let us recall that in early 1795, the mercurial Lithuanian expedition leader Moritz Benyovsky[1], impatient with Pavel Lebedev-Lastoschkin’s progress in expanding the Okhotsk colony, decided to unilaterally launch an expedition to Edzo[2] in order to establish trade relations with the Matsumae Han who ruled there. However, being unfamiliar with the waters, Benyovsky’s ships were blown off course in a storm and they landed in the north of the island, in the area still inhabited by the indigenous Aynyu people.

Benyovsky was adamant that the expedition sail again as soon as possible, but was beset by two problems: firstly, both his ships had been damaged by striking rocks off the coast and were taking on water, their pumps not capable of keeping the level steady for a long voyage; and secondly, they still had no clue where they were or how to get to Matsumae-town. At this point, Benyovsky’s second-in-command, Jonas Raudauskas, suggested that it might be best to return to Okhotsk for repairs and make a later attempt, as that was the port that the ships had the best chance of being able to find, and within the range that their leaking hulls permitted. Benyovsky vetoed this: according to his logbook, because he thought it would still be too far for the pumps to keep the ships afloat. In practice, almost all historians believe he rejected it simply because he was unwilling to swallow his pride and return to Lebedev with his tail between his legs.

Instead, Benyovsky ordered a landfall at the nearest natural harbour that could be found, and that the ships be beached for repairs. This was perhaps overly ambitious, particularly for the young and still fairly inexperienced Lithuanian navy, but the beaching operation was accomplished satisfactorily. However, Benyovsky’s carpenter, Antanas Vaitkus, claimed that the trees visible from the harbour were unsuitable for plankage. Benyovsky threw a fit and threatened to have Vaitkus hanged from the yardarm, but at that point was interrupted by Raudauskas informing him that the Aynyu natives had been sighted, watching the beached ships curiously from a distance.

Benyovsky was never one to miss an opportunity like this. Most captains would have assumed that any native activity was likely to be hostile, and prepared to defend their ships. Instead, he immediately ordered that both ships’ crews be scoured for any speakers of the Aynyu language. Two were found; a Nivkh and a Russian out of Yakutsk who had previously dealt with the Nivkhs.[3] Benyovsky sent them, along with his captain of marines, Ulrich von Münchhausen[4], to treat with the Aynyu.

The natives turned out to be surprisingly hospitable. Although conversation was slow and halting at first, Benyovsky himself learned the language quickly[5] and a relationship was soon established. The Aynyu contacted their chieftains and, in exchange for part of Benyovsky’s trade goods, agreed to find the appropriate timber Vaitkus required and bring it to the Lithuanians. Of course, Benyovsky’s trade goods had been intended for the Japanese, not tribal peoples like the Aynyu. European naval explorers who expected to encounter the latter commonly brought things like jewellery, fine steel blades and so forth. Benyovsky had planned to trade with the Japanese, an advanced and civilised people about which one fact in Russia was particularly known, via the Dutch: the Japanese had banned firearms back in the days of firelock muskets. Benyovsky had thought that they might change their mind when they saw the latest rifled products out of European gunsmiths. In the end, though, he mostly ended up trading them to Aynyu hunters…or at least they claimed to be hunters…

Of course, Benyovsky was not stupid. He realised that trading weapons to a people surrounding his stricken ships was not necessarily the best idea in the world. To that end, he tasked Münchhausen – who was quite an accomplished spy and tracker – to tail those Aynyu buying the most rifles and find out if they were planning an attack on the Lithuanian ships. What Münchhausen found, though, was even more extraordinary: the Aynyu were indeed planning an attack, but on someone else entirely.

It was not until one of Lebedev’s ships, the Zhemchug, finally found the beached Lithuanians six months later (still with no sign of the promised timber from the Aynyu) that Benyovsky learned the name of the place where his ships had landed – Shiretoko Hanto

*

The Aynyu rebellion of 1797 was an event difficult to predict.[6] Tension had certainly been rising for a long time, with the Matsumae Han slowly changing trade rules over time to favour Japanese interests over the Aynyu, and occasionally engaging in land displacement and resettlement. The Daimyo of Matsumae had begun to interpret his Shogunal grant for trade with the Aynyu as a license to rule over them. But the particular catalyst could have been anything. In this case, it was an accusation that the Japanese had attempted to deliberately poison Aynu chieftains at a trade meeting. Whether this claim had any accuracy to it was irrelevant: it was enough to unite many disparate Aynu tribes under a charismatic leader, who called himself Aynoyna, after the first man in the Aynu religious tradition.

It is likely that, without Benyovsky and Lebedev, the rebellion would have gone the same way as that of Shakushain a century earlier: the Aynyu might have scored some early victories, but as soon as they inflicted a serious defeat on the Matsumae, it would be enough to make the Shogunate concerned enough to send forces to restore order there. The Matsumae enjoyed many special privileges, such as being exempt from the sankin kotai[7], precisely because they were seen as no real threat to the Tokugawa.

This time, however, things were different. Some of the Aynyu – not many, but enough – were armed with European weapons. It was sufficient to result in the complete rolling-back of all Matsumae settlements north of the Ishikari plain. By 1799, the situation in Matsumae-town was of panic. The Daimyo of Matsumae decided to send a call for help to Edo, only to be assassinated by one of his lieutenants, who feared a purge like the one after the Shakushain Revolt – when, for a generation afterwards, the Tokugawa had imposed their own men on the Matsumae, throwing out all existing Matsumae ministers and generals. The Han descended into chaos, with only vague reports of the situation reaching Niphon.[8]

By 1800, things had stabilised, apparently. The new Daimyo, Matsumae Hidoshi – barely more than a boy – sent a representative to the newly rebuilt Shogunal palace in Edo, who reported that the situation was under control and the Aynyu had been defeated once again. Hidoshi apologised that he could not come himself at the present, as tradition demanded, as matters were still too volatile at home. Emperor Tenmei[9] and the Shogun, Tokugawa Iemochi[10], were relieved to hear the news, as the country was still recovering from a succession of natural disasters that had hit in 1772, including a great fire in Edo, destructive typhoons, volcanoes and earthquakes, and authorising a military expedition against the Aynyu would have made already strained finances creak alarmingly. Later Japanese chroniclers would record this as a warning or prophecy to both Court and Bakufu. If so, it was not heeded. Matsumae had always looked after itself, and no-one thought to send an envoy to check that the representative was telling the truth.

In reality, the Aynyu won – at least in the short term. It was likely that their dominance would not have lasted long, as their temporary, artificial unity began to break up as the tribes re-asserted themselves. But Benyovsky had had another of what Lebedev described sourly as ‘his great ideas, of which he has fifty in a day, perhaps three of which will not result in us being killed by the end of that day’. From his talks with the Aynyu, and later some Japanese as he visited the lands conquered by the Aynyu, Benyovsky had built up a picture of Japanese society – stratified and built strongly on tradition and history. He knew that, no matter how optimistic Lebedev might be, there was no way that the Shogun would permit Russian and Lithuanian trade through Edzo. It was simply against the rules.

That, of course, assumed that the Shogun knew about that trade…

The strategy Benyovsky adopted was similar to those sometimes used in Germany, Mughal India, the Ottoman Empire, and even his native Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth before its dissolution. If the system was just that stratified, the way to deal with it was not to try and work around it, but just to play it. The fact that most foreign trade was forbidden under the Tokugawa was irrelevant if the Japanese didn’t realise it was foreign trade.

Therefore, the Russo-Lithuanian forces co-opted the dead Matsumae Daimyo’s third son, Hidoshi, who had been dismissed from the succession in most Japanese’s minds as his elder brothers fought in the burning house of the Aynyu revolt. Münchhausen was made the boy’s bodyguard and filled him with tall tales of Europe, Russia and the adventures of himself and his father. It was obvious to the Shogun in Edo that such a young Daimyo must have a regent of some kind, but he never dreamed that it might be a round-eyed barbarian.

The Russians and Lithuanians, the latter now with repaired ships, descended upon Matsumae town in August 1799, just as the Aynyu had drawn off most of the Matsumae’s remaining army. Once upon a time, two hundred years before, Japan had had one of the largest and most powerful navies in the world, but under the Tokugawa sakoku system of isolationism, the very construction of oceangoing ships was forbidden. With no ships and no cannon – also banned – the Matsumae were effectively defenceless against the descent.

Led by Peter’s suspect Leib Guards, the Russo-Lithuanian forces took the city and broke into the castle, using European cannon taken from the Lithuanian ships to batter down the mediaeval walls. After a brief struggle which culminated in the deaths of the two elder Matsumae brothers, things were secured. Benyovsky’s wild gamble had worked, to Lebedev’s not-so-private amazement. Of course, things were helped by the fact that the Matsumae’s influential family surgeon, Sugimura Goro, had fallen from grace during the dead brothers’ power struggle and was willing to help Hidoshi and the Russians establish themselves in return for regaining his former prominence. It was primarily Sugimura who helped the Russians and Lithuanians first insinuate their way into Japanese society – a fact which means Yamato nationalists ever since have equated his name with Judas.

By 1801, then, when news of the now-finished Civil War was just breaking in Okhotsk, Benyovsky and Lebedev were finally established. Under the guise of internal Japanese trade quietly continuing with a Han that had always been a little…edgy, a little odd…and so it was not entirely a surprise to find some unusual new goods included there…Europeans other than the Dutch had finally broken into Tokugawa’s closed market. Sakoku had been breached.

Things were looking up for the venturers, at least for the present. But back in Okhotsk, people were getting careless. As soon as Emperor Paul heard of the successes, he sent more men and more supplies to expand the colony and the trade. The correct response, perhaps, but it meant a lot more trade going through the Amur region…a region whose precise status had been left carefully undefined for a long time, and a very good reason.

Japan had been a surprisingly easy nut to crack, though few men would have had the daring to accomplish it. China…China was a different story…










[1] Remember this is a Russified form of Móric Beňovský.

[2] Before the Meiji Restoration in OTL, Hokkaido was called Ezo (or Edzo in Russified form).

[3] The Nivkhs are the native people of Sakhalin, who before this point acted as intermediaries between the Russians, Japanese, Chinese and Aynyu (what little contact there was).

[4] Anglophones may not realise it, but Baron (Karl Friedrich Hieronymus) von Münchhausen was a real person, a German who was page to Anthony Ulrich, Regent of Russia, and then joined the Russian Army and served in the Russian Army. In TTL he has had a similar career, but also fought in the War of the Polish Partition and married a Lithuanian. His son (OTL he did not have children) Ulrich (named after his old master) has joined the Lithuanian navy as a marine.

[5] As he did Malagasy in OTL.

[6] OTL there was a more minor rebellion in 1789 – this, on the other hand, is as big as the 17th-century Shakushain’s Revolt.

[7] A system by which the Shogun essentially took members of the various Hans’ daimyo hostage in Edo, to guard against potential betrayal and factionalism.

[8] Niphon (not Nippon) is an archaic name for Honshu.

[9] In TTL Emperor Emperor Go-Momozono had a son, who became Emperor Tenmei, and did instead marry his daughter to a royal from a distant branch of the family (who in OTL became Emperor Kokaku). Tenmei’s name means ‘dawn’ and reflects a hope for a bright future after the disasters of the 1770s. A forlorn hope.

[10] Not the later OTL one – a butterflied ATL ‘brother’.


Part #43: Hounded by the Afghans

“I forget the throne of Delhi when I remember the mountain tops of my Afghan land. If I must choose between the world and you, I shall not hesitate to claim your barren deserts as my own.”

– Ahmad Shah Durrani​

*

From – “A History of Northern India”, by Philippe Desaix (1954) -

The eighteenth century was a turbulent time for warfare and politics, to the extent that some have theorised that worldwide crises might have been precipitated by unusual shifts in climate or the coronal energy from the sun. But this lies beyond the scope of the conventional historian’s work. Suffice to say that Europe was far from alone in seeing turmoil and rapid changes in that era, though in Europe the chaos of the eighteenth century soon faded into memory beside the viciousness of the early nineteenth.

Persia suffered a series of civil wars throughout the century. The long-standing Safavid dynasty was brought down by a weak Shah, Soltan Hossein, and invasions by rebellious Ghilzai Afghans out of Kandahar. The Ghilzais, led by Mir Mahmud Hotaki, killed Soltan Hossein’s brother the Persian governor of Kandahar and then attacked Persia proper in 1722. The Safavid response was muted, hampered by the fact that Soltan Hossein’s corrupt court did not see fit to inform him of the invasion until the capital, Isfahan, was already under siege. The Afghans starved the city out, deposed Soltan Hossein and forced him to crown Mir Mahmud as Shah of Persia.

However, the Persian armies did not recognise this coronation, and remained hostile to the Afghans. Soltain Hossein’s son, Tahmasp, fled to the Qajar tribe of the north and established a government-in-exile in Tabriz. He declared himself Shah and was recognised by the Ottoman Sultan, Ahmed III, and the Emperor of all the Russias, Peter the Great. The Ottomans and the Russians were both cheerfully using Persia’s difficulties to expand their own influence in disputed regions such as Mesopotamia and the Caucasus; however, both Constantinople and St Petersburg feared the other gaining too much influence over Persia as a whole, and so both backed Tahmasp as the rightful ruler.

Meanwhile, the Persian general Nadir Shah Afshar pretended to submit to the Afghan ruler of occupied Mashhad, Malek Mahmud, but then escaped and began building up his own army. Mashhad was a holy city and one of great symbolic importance to the Persian nation, so the Afghan occupation was more important than the city’s strategic value alone. Tahmasp II and the Qajar leader, Fath Ali Khan, asked Nadir Shah to join them. He agreed and soon halted the Afghan advance, then began to drive them back. He discovered that Fath Ali Khan was in treacherous contact with Malek Mahmud and revealed this to Tahmasp, who executed Fath Ali Khan and made Nadir chief of his army instead. He took the title ‘Tahmasp Qoli’ (servant of Tahmasp) and began increasing his personal power through his army command. His success in retaking Mashhad in 1726 made him a legendary figure, a Persian Alexander as many would later call him.

Nadir decided not to directly attack occupied Isfahan, but instead invaded Herat, which was controlled by the Abdali tribe of Afghans. He defeated them and many joined his army, adding valuable cavalry strength. The Abdalis assisted Nadir Shah in two epic victories against the new Ghilzai leader, Ashraf, who then fled and abandoned the city of Isfahan to the Persians in 1729. After Tahmasp made his triumphal entry into the city, Nadir then pursued Ashraf back into Khorasan. Ashraf was eventually murdered by some of his own soldiers.

The Ottomans’ gains during the civil war were largely undone by Nadir’s campaign in 1730, though he was hampered by a rebellion by the Abdalis, who briefly seized Isfahan and had to be put down. The Ottoman general Topaz Osman Pasha also foiled his plans at Baghdad, one of his few defeats. However, Nadir was now sufficiently powerful that he was able to force Tahmasp to advocate in favour of his baby son Abbas III, to whom Nadir became regent. In all but name, he had become Shah himself.

Nadir’s reign had considerable consequences for Persia itself, both his attempted reforms and his unashamed barbarism towards opposition – he idolised Tamerlane. After his assassination in 1747, Persia descended into a second civil war, a three-way conflict between the Qajars, Nadir’s nephew Adil Shah and a new Zand dynasty founded by Karim Khan. In the end, the Zands won, but by this time, much of Nadir’s territorial gains had been undone.[1]

But, in the long run, Nadir’s reign was perhaps even more influential for Afghanistan and the north of India. As part of his campaign against the Ghilzais, he conquered Kandahar in 1737 and founded a new city near it, named Nadirabad after himself – part of the Alexandrian legend. As part of this conquest, he freed numerous prisoners of the Ghilzais, important hostages from the ruling lines of the other Afghan tribes. Among these was Ahmad Khan Abdali and his brother Zulfikar Khan Abdali, sons of the Abdali chief. Nadir took a liking to Ahmad Khan, calling him ‘Dur-i-Durrani’ (“Pearl of Pearls”) and making him head of his Abdali cavalry.

Ahmad Khan then participated in Nadir Shah’s invasion of the Mughal Empire. That once-powerful state had declined since the days of Aurangzeb, and its current ruler, Mohammed Shah, was unable to prevent encroachments by the growing Maratha Empire from the south. Nadir continued his conquest of Afghanistan, taking Kabul and Ghazni, then – using the pretext of pursuing enemy Afghans over the border – conquered Lahore and crossed the Indus. With assistance from the Durranis, he defeated the Mughals at the Battle of Karnal in 1739. Mohammed Shah bought off Nadir’s army with almost his entire treasury; the Persians withdrew, but took with them the Peacock Throne, symbol of the Mughal Emperors, and the Koh-i-Noor and Darya-ye Noor diamonds, along with much other booty. Such was the loot, in fact, that Nadir was able to halt taxation in Persia for three years upon his triumphal return, increasing his popularity.

Upon Nadir’s assassination, Ahmad Khan accused Adil Shah of having a hand in his uncle’ murder, and withdrew his Abdali forces from the Persian army, fighting their way through Adil Shah’s forces back to Kandahar. The Abdali chiefs then called a Loya Jirga to choose a new leader in 1747; after nine days’ worth of indecisive squabbling – in which Ahmad Khan remained silent – Sabir Shah Abdali, a respected holy man, spoke up and declared that, despite his youth, Ahmad Khan was the only one he saw with the qualities to take up the burden of rule. The chiefs agreed and Ahmad Khan Abdali became Ahmad Shah Durrani, changing the name of the Abdali tribe to the Durranis in honour of Nadir’s nickname for him.

Under Ahmad Shah’s rule, the new Durranis immediately began consolidating their power over all Afghanistan. Ghazni was taken from the Ghilzais and Kabul from its own ruler. Not recognising any of the claimants as legitimate Shah of Persia, he did not limit his campaigns to Afghanistan, taking Herat and Mashhad in 1750-51. But the main force of his will was directed at India. Rather than his hero Nadir’s brief, Alexandrian push, Ahmad Shah was able to achieve lasting success against the still-divided Mughals. After three separate invasions of the Punjab, the Mughal Emperor, Ahmad Shah Bahadur, was forced to concede all of the Sindh and Kashmir, and most of the Punjab itself to Ahmad Shah.

Ahmad Shah was occupied for some years as the rebellious Sikhs of the Punjab rose up against his forces, ejecting them from Lahore briefly before Ahmad Shah returned with the bulk of the army to reconquer the city. In 1756, he attacked the Mughals once again and besieged Delhi, overthrowing Ahmad Shah Bahadur and installing a puppet emperor, Alamgir II. He married his second son Nadir to Alamgir’s daughter[2] to cement his control, and Nadir mostly remained in Delhi while his father continued to campaign with his elder son Timur.

Ahmad Shah and Timur returned to Afghanistan in 1757, pausing on the way back to sack the Sikh holy city of Amritsar and defile its Golden Temple, increasing the bitterness between Sikh and Afghan. Ahmad Shah did not remain in Afghanistan for long; the Indian situation soon began to fall apart, as the vigorous Maratha Empire continued to attack the Mughals and drove the Afghans out of the Punjab. Ahmad Shah returned and led his army to a crushing, epic victory at the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761, which saw the Marathas smashed so utterly that their empire broke apart into a loose, disunited confederacy. This bought time for the Mughals to reform and regroup; Ahmad Shah assisted his son Nadir in seizing control of the empire on the death of Alamgir. Nadir’s son Ibrahim Shah, out of Alamgir’s daughter, would have a legitimacy to rule the empire afterwards.

The Durranis controlled northern India, and the Marathas were too disunited to pose a serious threat again, but the Sikhs continued to stubbornly rebel every year or two, forcing Ahmad Shah to continuously return to India to put down their rebellions. The constant travel weakened his health and he died of cancer in 1773. Upon his death, his first son Timur brought most of the Durrani army back to Afghanistan and called a Loya Jirga which elected him new leader, while Nadir remained in Delhi and successfully put down an attempted rebellion led by the brilliant Mughal general Mirza Najaf Khan. After Nadir held on, Mirza Najaf retreated to Oudh, whose Nawab was married to his sister, and focused on reforming the Oudhi army. In doing so, he extensively studied the infantry tactics and technology of the British East India Company, which held Bengal and made Oudh a protectorate.

After a hesitation that could have turned into civil war, the sons of Ahmad Shah Durrani came to an agreement to divide their father’s empire. Both agreed that the sheer size of the Durrani state was too large and needed too much attention for any one man to rule. Timur took the Afghan territories – which were too threatened by a newly resurgent Zand Persia for him to worry about India anyway – and Nadir, of course, continued to rule from Delhi. Sindh and Rajputana went to Nadir, Kashmir to Timur. Neither could agree about the Punjab; in any case, the situation was taken out of their hands when the Sikhs rebelled once more in 1781 and neither Nadir nor Timur could spare the forces to put down the rebellion. An independent Sikh Confederacy sandwiched between the two halves of the Durrani Empire was thus quietly allowed to remain, so long as it did not attempt to expand.

The Durranis of Afghanistan lost some lands to the Zands, including Mashhad and Nishapur, but successfully retained Herat. However, Timur did subdue Kafiristan, an area which proved to be at least as troublesome as the Sikhs had been. Timur’s son Ahmad Shah (II) went on to conquer the northern part of Baluchistan.

But in India, the Durranis of Delhi (often known as the Neo-Moguls to European writers) began to reform and centralise the old empire, assisted by the fact that most of the Empire’s enemies were too busy fighting each other to threaten Nadir’s throne. His reign was focused on strengthening the power of the imperial institutions, knowing that new threats would soon arise.

And this was the situation that greeted the impact of the War of the Ferengi Alliance, as the combined forces of Britain, Royal France and Haidarabad marched upon Tippoo Sultan’s Mysore…




[1]Up till this point this is all OTL. In TTL the Zands won, or rather stayed dominant rather than briefly holding power and then being defeated by the Qajars.

[2]A POD. OTL, it was his first son, Timur. Both Timur and Nadir are different to OTL – Timur was a bit of a Richard Cromwell figure in OTL.
 

Thande

Donor
Part #44: I Really Love Your Tiger Light

“Tippoo Sultan…a perfect exemplar for demonstrating the fact that any atrocity is excusable by intellectual society, if it be hidden beneath a veneer of progressive thought.”

– George Spencer-Churchill​

*

From “India in the Age of Revolution” by Dr Anders Ohlmarks (English translation)

The scene was set for a confrontation.[1] The Tippoo Sultan, aided and abbetted by the Republican French mission led by René Leclerc, saw an opportunity in Travancore, as the old king died and was succeeded by his young son Balarama Varma. The Tippoo claimed the succession was illegitimate and invaded, ignoring the French East India Company’s treaty with the Kingdom of Travancore. On October 15th 1799 the Mysorean army, headed by the Tippoo’s new Cugnot-wagons (carrying his famed rockets) crossed over from Dindigool – which the Tippoo had conquered during one of the Mysore-Haidarabad Wars of the 1770s – and into Travancore.

Travancore was a small state, that had no real chance of defeating Mysore in the long run, but nonetheless had a capable army made up mostly of Hindoos of the Nayar martial caste. Unfortunately for the Travancoreans, the state was in such turmoil at the time that this army suffered from the lack of an effective chain of command, and thus did not delay the Mysorean onslaught as much as it might have done. Balarama Varma might be young, but he had already learned the ruthlessness any ruler in chaotic Kerala needed to control his fractious, divided subjects. Almost as soon as his accession to the throne, he had his father’s old Dalawa[2], Raja Kesavadas, assassinated. He then elevated his corrupt favourite, Jayanthan Sankaran Nampoothiri, to the position of Dalawa. Nampoothiri soon proved to be an unpopular minister, ordering the tahsildars[3] to exact illegal levels of taxes, most of which went into his own pocket. By extension, Balarama Varma himself became seen as ineffective and despotic in the eyes of the Travancorean people.

Thus there was plenty of division for Tippoo Sultan to exploit. Two powerful relatives of the murdered Raja Kesavadas, Chempakaraman Kumaran Pillai and Erayiman Pillai, had a grudge against both Balarama Varma and Nampoothiri. In addition to this, one of Nampoothiri’s own tahsildar, Velu Thampi, went rogue and fancied himself as a better Dalawa than his master. Travancore was already struggling with these problems even before the Mysoreans crossed the border.

The conquest of Mysore was thus brief. The panicky Balarama Varma sent his entire Nayar army out of the capital Trivandum. They were to to meet the Mysoreans at Colachel, site of the famous Travancorean victory over the Dutch East India Company in the 1740s, that had kept European influence out of Kerala for another two generations. This time, though, the Travancoreans were routed. The Tippoo’s army, swelled by levies from the lands acquired in the Mysore-Haidarabad wars, was large enough to defeat the Travancoreans by conventional combat. However, the screaming Mysorean rocket barrages, fired from carriages that moved without horses and belched clouds of steam, were enough to put the fear of God (or Allah) into even the most hardened Nayars. The remnants of the army, led by Krishna Pillai, withdrew to Nagercoil in the south, which had been bypassed by the Mysorean invasion, and fortified their position.

Meanwhile, the rebel tahsildar Velu Thampi had attacked undefended Trivandum, sufficiently intimidating Balarama Varma into forcing him to order the execution of Nampoothiri. Velu Thampi then became the new Dalawa, but did not have long to savour his position. The Mysoreans attacked Trivandum on December 3rd 1799, and the undefended city was swiftly surrendered by Velu Thampi, always quick to look after number one. Tippoo Sultan, who led his army personally, had Balarama Varma beheaded by a portable chirurgien that had been brought on campaign by René Leclerc. “It is gratifying to see the instrument of liberty dispose of tyrants so far from home,” Leclerc wrote in his diary, apparently without irony.

Although the Tippoo did not trust Velu Thampi, he left him as regional governor of Travancore, which was now directly annexed to Mysore as a province. The Tippoo’s ideas were indeed revolutionary; usually even the European trading companies tried to work within the established Mughal system, subverting rather than overturning it. But with one stroke, Tippoo Sultan overturned the long-standing Kingdom of Travancore, just as he had done to Cochin in 1789.

With the capture of Trivandum, the emissaries from the FEIC there – around fifty French factors led by Henri de La Tour d'Auvergne[4] – were turned over by Velu Thampi to the Tippoo. Leclerc, still smarting from his humiliation at Rochambeau’s hands, insisted that the FEIC men should be immediately chirurgiend as traitors. Instead, the Tippoo left them unharmed at first, but brought them back to Mysore and had them paraded triumphantly through the streets of Mysore city. The factors were then interrogated and some were indeed executed, mostly by being thrown to the Tippoo’s menagerie of tigers rather than by the chirurgien, a practice which Leclerc thought barbaric. D’Auvergne, to Leclerc’s outrage (being an aristocrat) was allowed to survive. After gleaning all he could from the defiant Company men, the Tippoo had them thrown in the dungeons of his fortress at Seringapatam, where several more died of ill-treatment.

Southern India now held its breath. The Tippoo, knowing that the FEIC could expect no help from home, had gambled with his audacious move. He hoped either to force Rochambeau to back down, or else to trigger a war which Mysore would win. The FEIC had plenty of firepower and sepoys in its Carnatic heartland, but Mysore’s expansion since the 1750s had eclipsed this, and the Tippoo’s enthusiasm for adopting European weapons had more than erased the technological disparity. He waited to see which way Rochambeau would jump, while readying his army for a second invasion if it came to war.

What did emerge was nothing that the Tippoo could have predicted. More emissaries than Leclerc had come from Europe, and not all of them served Republican France. Louis XVII realised that he had to ensure the loyalty of all his colonies lest they be subverted by Revolutionaries – which would be all the excuse Britain needed to move in and grab them for herself. A joint British and Royal French mission had thus been sent to Madras at about the same time as Leclerc and L’Épurateur. This mission, consisting of the three ships of the line Toulon, Fougueux and HMS Majestic, arrived at Madras barely a month after Leclerc was sent away, and later called in at Calcutta. They brought news of the formal alliance between Britain and the Bourbons (at this point, the situation was still confused enough that many thought the alliance really had been engineered by Captain Leo Bone).

Sir John Pitt, the Governor-General of British India, was in a quandary. His instincts told him that now was the time to hit the (Royal) French colonies and factories with everything he had, taking advantage of their weakness, isolation, and the Mysorean aggression. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” had always been the modus operandi in India, both among the European trading companies and the native country powers.

On the other hand…ever since Dupleix, the FEIC had been forced by necessity to fight on its own, with little support from an introverted Versailles disinterested in knowing where the money paying for its balls and banquets was coming from. The Tippoo’s subversion of the pattern of native alliances had undone some of the FEIC’s fighting strength, but not all. Pitt knew he could only get away with such a bald disobeying of orders if he delivered an indubitable triumph, and that was far from certain.

The Royal French would be an ally, then, but a decidedly subordinate one. Here was a chance for Britain to overturn the pattern of French dominance in southern India, not by outright conflict but by manipulation. How appropriate, given the region…

The “Pitt-Rochambeau Accord” is often cited (inaccurately) as the name of the general Anglo-Royal French alliance, demonstrating how significant it was. The meeting of the old French veteran and the young, vigorous Englishman at Cuddalore produced a general agreement. The British and French would cooperate against Mysore, with the results being divvied up between them. Haidarabad also entered the war, albeit unenthusiastically, based on the promise of the return of Mysorean-conquered territories such as Carnool and Guntoor. The Nizam of Haidarabad’s main contribution to the war effort was from his celebrated heavy artillery, the ‘Nizam’s beautiful daughters’.

When the Tippoo heard the news, he had the first three messengers thrown to his tigers, convinced they could only be enemy agents spreading amateurish fear-mongering. It was not until the British portion of the ‘Ferengi Alliance’ moved into Carnool that he realised the reports had been true. Meanwhile, French sepoys led by Rochambeau’s deputy, Colonel Julien de Champard, attacked Baba Mahal, another region that had only been conquered by Mysore during the recent wars. The French at first enjoyed remarkable success against the cursory Mysore troops stationed there, but the Tippoo then readied his army and shifted east into the country, meeting the French at Jalarpet. Once more the Tippoo’s blazing rockets worked their terrifying magic, backed up by his cavalry and sharpshooting riflemen, and the French retreated – though they were not routed.

A secondary, southern French army led by Jean-Paul du Tourd was more successful. Tourd’s force crossed from Tinnevelly into southern Travancore and attacked Nagercoil, defeating the besieging Mysorean army and allowing the remnants of the Travancorean army, led by Krishna Pillai, to escape. After securing their supply trains – armies in India were dependent on oxen above all else – the French and Travancoreans then moved north in June and July of 1800. The Tippoo had left only a small force garrisoning Trivandum, not expecting this, and Trivandum fell once again in August 1800. Velu Thampi attempted to flee but was cut down by a mob before any soldiers could even get there. Tourd and Krishna Pillai installed Chempakaraman Kumaran Pillai, a relative of the executed Raja Kesavedas, as Dalawa. The throne, however, remained empty – no-one from the former royal line survived, and this prove an increasingly knotty problem.

The French had engaged the Tippoo and neatly undone his provocative invasion – thus fulfilling their defensive pact with Travancore and increasing their popularity in southern India. It was the British, however, who delivered the real hammer blow. After reclaiming Carnool and Guntoor for the Nizam – Carnool went back to Haidarabad proper, while Guntoor was rejoined to the Circars that were Haidarabadi in name but administered by the BEIC – the British and Haidarabadi army moved into northern Mysore itself. After taking Kolar, the British met their first serious challenge with a Mysorean army led by Yaar Mohammed at Bangalore in August. Although the Tippoo had the majority of his kingdom’s forces with himself facing the French, Mysore was large enough to field enough troops to at least stand on the defensive against multiple enemies at once. The battle at Bangalore at first went badly for the British, with the Tippoo’s rockets wreaking as much havoc on the experienced veterans of the BEIC as they did on anyone.

What saved the day was that the Mysorean army included portions of unreliable infantry recruited from Malabar, which had only been conquered by Mysore a few years ago, and these broke when the British tried a desperate cavalry charge led by Major Henry Paget. This sufficiently rallied the morale of the British army in the face of the screaming rockets, and the loud booms of the Nizam’s artillery replying served to strengthen the hearts of both regular and sepoy troopers. Brilliantly executing a moving square in the face of the rocket bombardment – correctly calculating that the inaccurate rockets would be less effective against the packed square than conventional artillery was – the 77th Highlanders led the attack on the Mysorean lines. The Mysorean army crumbled in the face of the assault, Yaar Mohammed withdrawing with his remaining troops, and Bangalore fell to the BEIC.

Recognising that the British were now a more direct threat to his centre of power than the French, the Tippoo decided to cut his losses and retreat to Mysore city. His hope was to withstand a siege at his fortress city of Seringapatam, while the strange bedfellows of the Ferengi Alliance quarrelled with each other and their alignment crumbled. Furthermore, a long siege could be as weakening for the besiegers as it could the besieged, and Seringapatam was well equipped to withstand such.

However, the Tippoo had reckoned without the British and French having access to the Nizam’s beautiful daughters. The Mysorean army remained strong enough to turn north and engage the British at Charmapatna in September, forcing them back briefly, as Champard’s northern French army pushed westward in the face of retreating Mysorean opposition.

By the 14th of November 1800, the stage was set; the Mysoreans had abandoned the field, save for occasional raids, in favour of digging in at Seringapatam. The French successfully took Mysore city unopposed, while the British opened up the siege. Rockets and rifles from the walls cut bloodily into the British ranks, but those were swelled when they were joined by more French troops out of the Carnatic on 13th January. The Tippoo attempted to lure the allies into a trap, leaking information through spies that part of Seringapatam’s walls was weak and required rebuilding. In fact a second, stronger wall had already been built behind it, and the killing field between the two had been mined with gunpowder and more rockets, which would bounce around in the confined space and burn any Forlorn Hope to a crisp. A bloody nose, the Tippoo hoped, might weaken the Allies enough to force a retreat, or at least leave them more vulnerable to a sally from the gates.

After more than a month’s worth of siege, the Allies took the bait and battered down the weak wall with the guns of Haidarabad. The attack, which would be joint Anglo-French, was staged on 21st January 1801. The Tippoo waited near the trap, desiring to light the long fuse himself.

The attack went in at night, silently, with no preceding artillery barrage to give it away. The first Forlorn Hope was made up of the Scots from the 78th, the second by French soldiers of the FEIC. The space between the walls rapidly filled up with confused soldiers and sepoys, throwing burning carcasses around to light up the area, uncertain when confronted by the second wall before them. The Tippoo lit the fuse…and nothing happened.

Historians have mused on the question as to whether the Tippoo ever knew that he had been betrayed by his minister Mir Sadiq, who had dealed with the French in exchange for a powerful position in postwar Mysore. Mir Sadiq had sabotaged the trap by secretly having an underground channel dug from Seringapatam’s moat into the dead space between the walls, soaking the gunpowder and fuses with water. Only a few rockets went off, triggered by the burning carcasses rather than the Tippoo. Though slowed down by the second wall, the British and French brought this down with sappers and then clambered over the second breach. After that, it was city fighting.

Tippoo Sultan went down with a rifle in one hand and a sabre in the other, finally killed by French sepoy Ali Sayyid with a pistol. His heroic stand was immortalised in the poem Le Tigre by Besson, and was generally praised even by his enemies, who were more used to Indian rulers fleeing and switching sides in the noxious political climate of the time. His general Yaar Mohammed, consumed by guilt at his failure to protect his sovereign, fled north and eventually entered the court of the Durrani Mughal Emperor, incidentally bringing news of both the fall of Mysore and new European innovations to the north of India. Mir Sadiq was indeed rewarded with the chief ministry of (a much reduced) Kingdom of Mysore, and the French restored the former Hindoo Wodeyar dynasty – whose members the Tippoo had kept unharmed, though imprisoned, to avoid antagonising his own Hindoo populace – to the throne. Leclerc, on capture by the Royalists, turned his pistol on himself rather be humiliated by Rochambeau again.

What to do with the rest of the Mysorean empire, as Tippoo had predicted, antagonised the temporary Franco-British alliance. The French were unquestionably in the weaker position for the first time in fifty years, but were not so weak that they could be ignored or forced into a humiliating position. The situation was perhaps helped by the death of Rochambeau of natural causes in March 1801, not long after hearing of the victory at Seringapatam. As no new Governor-General could be appointed due to the hectic situation back in Europe, Champard took the position by default. He was assisted by Tourd and by Henri d'Auvergne, who had been freed from the Tippoo’s dungeons with his remaining men – weakened but alive. Champard was a vigorous negotiator capable of keeping up with Britain’s Pitt, and between them the two hashed out a treaty which was, if not equitable, at least stopped the two old enemies from decaying back into open warfare.

Based on this, France received Baba Mahal, Dindigool, Cochin and Travancore. As the latter two kingdoms had no royal claimants left, they were formally annexed to the dominions of the Nawab of Arcot, who by this point was merely a French client. D’Auvergne was appointed resident in both Cochin and Travancore, while Tourd was made resident of Mysore. Britain, in addition to having effective control over Guntoor as noted before, was awarded Coorg, Malabar and Mangalore. Parts of Malabar were taken over by the Dutch East India Company operating from Calicut as Mysorean power collapsed, and this was not seriously contested by the British. The idea behind Pitt’s strategy was to concede French control of southern India, but block off their direct land access to the north of India, allowing its untapped treasures to be the property of the BEIC alone.

One immediate impact from the War of the Ferengi Alliance was a new perception in Indian thought, that the French were pro-Hindoo and the British were pro-Mussulman. This was derived from the fact that the French had restored the Wodeyars, while the British worked closely with Haidarabad. Although based in little fact, it proved increasingly influential, and ultimately undermined the carefully neutral position that the two Companies had spent so long trying to protect, unlike their Portuguese counterpart with its active missionary activity. This went on to have interesting consequences with respect to European relations with the two major warring powers of northern India, the Durrani Neo-Mughal Empire and the Maratha Confederacy…








[1] See part#32, Three Lions and One Tiger, for a recap.

[2] Dalawa is the Keralan form of the title Dewan (Divan), which signifies ‘taxmaster’ in the original Persian/Mughal…however, in the Indian states of this era, it had taken on a greater significance, meaning something more like prime minister.

[3] District (tahsil) tax collectors.

[4] Third son of Godefroy Charles Henri de La Tour d'Auvergne, the 6th Duke of Bouillon. As the Duke died in the early stages of the Revolution and the Revolutionaries have killed his two elder sons, Henri is now the Duke, although neither he nor anyone else nearby knows this. He went east to seek his fortune after his father squandered a large part of the ancestral Bouillon fortune on entertainments for his mistress, thus following a similar career path to Britain’s John Pitt.


Part #45: Silver and Fire

From – “That Brief Interlude: The Americas between the wars” by Felipe de Herrera (English translation)

When the former Spanish colonies won their independence in 1785 (not to become the United Provinces of South America until the Convention of Cordoba five years later), most experienced commentators considered the situation to be unstable. The Spanish defeat had caused as many problems for Cordoba as it had for Madrid. The postwar United Provinces did not merely include those colonies which had risen in rebellion against Spain in the first place – the Plate, Chile and Upper Peru – but also occupied Lower Peru, whose population was strongly loyalist in character. Lima in particular, having been the capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru, resented being turned into a frontier backwater by the upstart Cordoba. The United Provinces helped maintain order by their alliances with the successful Indian states which had risen from the earlier phase of the rebellion: Tupac Amaru II’s Tahuantinsuyo, ruled from Cusco, and Tomas Katari’s Aymara, ruled from Chuqiyapu (La Paz). Three uprisings in Lima, mostly led by the Peninsulare elite, were crushed between 1785 and 1805 by U.P. and Indian soldiers, only increasing the local resentment every time, of course.

The United Provinces itself developed as a conservative republic on Dutch lines, quite naturally as the Constitution drawn up at the Convention of Cordoba had been largely inspired by the previous revolt of the Dutch United Provinces from Spain (hence the name of the country). In place of a Stadtholder, the U.P. Constitution created the office of a President-General. Like the Dutch Stadtholder, the U.P. President-General was elected for life, but the UPSA had a more democratic means of election which was not limited to a few powerful long-standing families.[1] This was primarily simply because the UPSA was frontier country rather than a European state, rather than due to any ideological stance. Also, in the colonial period the would-be United Provinces had been politically dominated by Peninsulares, those born in Spain, and thus the new nativist, Criollo-dominated regime installed by the revolution frowned upon recruiting from the former important families – though of course they could not afford to disenfranchise them altogether.

In any case many Peninsulare families fled the United Provinces of their own accord, particularly those whose businesses or political contacts were strongly tied to Spain and the Spanish Crown. Among them was Ambrosio O’Higgins, an Irish exile who had remained loyal to Spain in his capacity as commanding general of the force fighting against the Mapuche Indians in southern Chile. When his lieutenants approached him in 1783 and declared that the army would return to Santiago to fight against the Spaniards, whether O’Higgins wanted it or not, he swiftly made his escape. O’Higgins hid out in Valdivia for the remainder of the war, and then took ship under an assumed name after the Peace of London. He rejoined the Spanish Imperial Service in San Francisco (then a newly founded frontier town) and served in various capacities before being reassigned as field-marshal of the army of New Granada in 1792. O’Higgins’ background was in military engineering, which he combined with his experience fighting the Mapuche in unconventional combat, recognising that European-style warfare was of limited use in New Granada’s difficult terrain. To O’Higgins, only one enemy was possible, of course – the United Provinces who had set back his career and humiliated him by forcing him to hide in Valdivia for two years.

Based on these assumptions, he remodelled the army and militia of New Granada. Although many of the more traditionalist officers under his command were aghast at O’Higgins’ unconventional style, the Viceroy of New Granada, Antonio Caballero y Góngora, approved. Caballero had become Viceroy himself for his service in the 1780s when New Granada, like the Plate, had threatened to rise up in rebellion. The rebels, calling themselves Comuneros after the sixteenth-century Spanish people’s revolt, had been motivated by less dramatic circumstances than the Platineans – primarily it was a revolt by Criollos in response to increased taxation – but it had nonetheless threatened to result in the loss of all the Spanish colonies in South America. Caballero had successfully defused the situation with diplomacy, in a tried-and-tested method that had been used by many leaders throughout history to put down such mass revolts, such as the English Kings Richard II and Henry VIII. He persuaded the Audiencia to agree to all the rebels’ demands, wait for them to disperse and return to their homes, and then simply repudiate the agreement. Such a strategy worked because the Comuneros were by now too dispersed and confused to rise again effectively, and the loyalist forces were able to capture and execute the rebel leaders.

For this success, Caballero had eventually been elevated to Viceroy. He now suspected the United Provinces of fanning the remaining embers of Comunero sympathy in New Granada. The United Provinces had yet to develop formalised political parties, but there was a de facto divison in the Cortes Nacionales between those who believed that the UPSA had reached its natural borders – perhaps even exceeded them – and that they should focus in building a new national identity and developing the country, lest it fragment from being too diverse and unconnected; and those who, on the contrary, thought that the United Provinces’ liberty should be spread to all the Spanish-speaking peoples of the Americas, and perhaps even beyond. This spread of liberty would, naturally, be accomplished by the conquest and annexation of the remaining ‘unfree’ lands into the UPSA…the two unofficial groupings would eventually be the genesis of the Partido Amarillo and the Partido Colorado (the Yellow and Red Parties) respectively.

For now, the division between the future parties was held in abeyance by the President-General, Simón Riquelme de la Barrera Goycochea. Riquelme was a Chilean, descended from a family that had moved to Chile in the sixteenth century, and thus was arguably a perfect candidate to balance U.P. interests – the political culture at the time was dominated by Platineans, making a Chilean a neutral arbiter, and his provable ancestry meant that he suited the nativist sensibilities of the post-revolutionary United Provinces.[2] But Riquelme was in his seventies, and his death in 1794 – the year of the French Revolution – prompted a dramatic reshuffling of interests.

A new election in the Cortes Nacionales to appoint a new President-General provoked a more vicious contest than before: previously the Spanish had been a sufficient bogeyman to force all U.P. politicians to work together regardless of views. This was no longer the case. In the end, the Cortes narrowly declared for Miguel de Azcuénaga, a young hero of the never-ending battles with the Mapuche like Ambrosio O’Higgins before him. Unlike O’Higgins, Azcuénaga was a fervent United Provinces patriot, but he was politically conservative and did not support expansionism, for two reasons. Firstly, his experiences with the Mapuche and the Llano had persuaded him that the United Provinces needed to put their own house in order before adopting a foreign policy of any kind, never mind some hare-brained war of liberation to the north. Secondly, he argued that the United Provinces was presently in a very good position with respect to foreign relations. The UPSA enjoyed full free trade rights with both the Portuguese Empire and the British possessions, and this trade – particularly the renewed interest in Peruvian quinine provoked by Britain’s expansion into Guinea – supported an economic boom.

In his inaugural speech, Azcuénaga dismissed those who would throw away such a potential golden age for more resentful far-flung territories. “Have any of those deputies [who favour expansion] even visited Lima?” he asked rhetorically in a 1796 speech. “Imagine two, three, ten more Limas, scattered across northern provinces which suck in men and money like a drain, spitting out only trouble in return. That is what they would have – assuming of course we did not lose, stabbed in the back by restless natives, our fair ports bombarded once more, our precious and hard-won independence lost. Madness. Nothing less.” But he was increasingly a voice in the wilderness. As more news of the French Revolution filtered down with the trade from Europe, Azcuénaga’s enemies grew restless. Even Azcuénaga’s conservative supporters trumpeted the birth of liberty in one politically stagnant Catholic nation, with the obvious hope that Spain would soon follow. Some of the conservatives had schemes in mind just as crazy as their expansionist counterparts, imagining a huge commonwealth of Spanish-speaking republics in which Spain herself would be equal to the UPSA or what was presently the loyalist colonies.

The United Provinces also had a relatively large French-speaking population, originating from the troops of the Duc de Noailles from the Second Platinean War who had deserted in favour of building a better life in the UPSA. Among them was the Duc de Noailles’ own son Jean-Louis-Paul-François, who became a fervent believer in Platinean liberty. He gave up his own noble title – the dukedom passing to his younger brother Antoine in France, who would meet the phlogisticateur in 1799. Although initially serving as a soldier in the Fuerzas Armadas de los Provincias Unidas (the U.P. army), he swiftly turned back to his first love – chemistry – and worked alongside Joseph Priestley when he fled to the UPSA in 1796, condemned at home for supporting the French Revolution. Between them, they both put the UPSA on the map of science by making discoveries comparable with those of Davy in Britain (Republican France did not make many chemical discoveries in the 1790s, partly due to Lisieux’s focus on those sciences useful in war, partly because they kept executing their existing chemists). They also developed immense personal fortunes from Priestley’s invention of carbonated water – the secret remained safe for twenty years, at the end of which the UPSA had a secure position as the largest supplier. Noailles’ son Henri (Enrique) hit upon the idea of adding quinine to make a health tonic. This sold millions of bottles both in South America itself, and in the British, Dutch and Portuguese possessions in Africa and India. The quinine dependence also meant that the UPSA remained the sole supplier after the secret of carbonated water got out.

More importantly from a political point of view, there was Jean-Charles Pichegru, who had started out as a captain in the Duc de Noailles’ army. Like Noailles’ son, he had joined the Fuerzas Armadas after defecting, but unlike Noailles’ son he decided to stay there. He rose through the ranks until by 1798 he was the commanding general against the Mapuche, like Azcuénaga before him. Pichegru, like many of the French in the U.P., supported the French Revolution and by extension argued for military action to spread liberty further around the world, just as France was doing in the Germanies and Italy. Pichegru’s similar age and background to Azcuénaga gave him a certain authority, undermining Azcuénaga’s position when Pichegru opposed the conclusions Azcuénaga had drawn from the same service against the Indians. Pichegru became a deputy in 1799 without leaving the army, and supported Juan José Castelli, possibly the greatest orator in the Cortes and leader of the radical revolutionary expansionist party, usually called the Partido Solidaridad (Party of Solidarity, with France and other Revolutionary governments). Castelli argued that now was the time to strike, while the forces of reaction were on the back foot all over the world.

1801 came and the United Provinces held a general election. The French Revolution had caught the imagination of the population, both the liberal intellectuals drawn from Criollo and Peninsulare backgrounds, and the poor from what used to be the lower castas. The electorate returned a Cortes dominated by pro-revolutionary and expansionist deputies, many of whom looked to the Partido Solidaridad for leadership. However, this was not enough to reach the position that Castelli wanted. By the Cordoban Constitution, only the President-General had the power to declare war, and Presidents-General were elected for life. Azcuénaga was still a young man and there was no way to legally impeach him (such a provision would eventually be added to the Constitution by an amendment).

The assassination of Azcuénaga in February 1802 has been debated ever since its occurrence, hardly less hotly now than then. Many people believe that Azcuénaga was assassinated on Castelli’s orders, in order to force a new presidential election. On the other hand, the official explanation is not implausible, either – that Azcuénaga was shot by a Spanish loyalist from Lima. It could either have been a random attack or a deliberate attempt by the loyalist movements to put the expansionists in power – they, too, wanted war and the chance for liberation.

If so, it worked. The U.P. population was outraged by the audacity of the attack, and a new crackdown was launched in Peru. After a month of official mourning, a new presidential election was called. Castelli stood against Juan Andrés, a conservative deputy who was also a Jesuit.[3] Andrés received more votes than the political situation a few months ago had suggested, both due to sympathy with Azcuénaga’s views after his assassination and due to the remaining general respect for the Jesuits among the people of the UPSA, especially the lower classes. However, Castelli nonetheless won the contest by a significant margin, and was sworn in by the Archbishop of Cordoba[4] on 16th April 1802. He immediately began placing his own men into positions of power – Pichegru was made Marshal-General of the Fuerzas Armadas – and preparing the country for a war of liberation.

Meanwhile, in New Granada, Ambrosio O’Higgins had been made Viceroy in 1797 after the retirement of Caballero, and had received the title Marquis of Caracas from the Spanish Crown. He died in 1801, but his son Bernardo[5] was a colonel in the army and commanded some of the respect of his father. The younger O’Higgins was as certain as his father that it was only a matter of time before there was open war between the United Provinces and the Spanish Empire. All that was needed was a trigger to ignite the tension.

A trigger that would come, though neither side would realise it for a while, in 1804…


[1] The President-General is elected by the Cortes Nacionales, whose members were in turn elected by local constituencies. The suffrage is fairly democratic for the time, about the same as in the Empire of North America – the most important rebel issue was that Criollos would have the same rights as Peninsulares, with the old limpieza table abolished. However, blacks and full-blooded Indians tend to be denied the vote by default, at least at the moment, though this is not actually enshrined in law.

[2]OTL, Riquelme’s daughter Isabella gave birth to Ambrosio O’Higgins’ illegitimate son Bernardo, but in TTL they have never met, as Ambrosio O’Higgins did not take quite the same path in the Spanish Imperial Service.

[3]OTL Andrés was a compiler of European literature who settled in Naples after the Jesuits were expelled from Spain. TTL, he is more interested in collecting native American Indian mythology and folk tales, and moved to the UPSA instead.

[4]A note on religion in the UPSA. The UPSA is avowedly Catholic, but the Papacy is in the pocket of Spain and thus the Pope refuses to appoint or recognise the local bishops. For that reason, the UPSA has a national catholic church not unlike Henry VIII’s regime in England, which theoretically recognises the Pope’s authority but then ignores him. Jansenism has a significant and growing following in U.P. religious thinking.

[5]Not OTL’s Bernardo O’Higgins. Same name, but born by a legitimate marriage to a Peninsulare lady of Caracas.

Part #46: The Unsinkable Lusitania

“With the example of the Portuguese phoenix before us, it is small wonder that the gentlemen in question hold such theories; but we should be careful not to confuse human activity with natural processes, as the two run on decidedly different physical laws.”

– Frederick Paley, in a lecture attacking Catastrophism at the Royal Society (1825)​

*

From – “A History of Portugal” by Giuseppe Scappaticci, Royal Palermo Press (1942, English translation) –

In many ways, the Great Earthquake of 1755 was the central event in Portuguese history, more important, perhaps, even than the Reconquista. The earthquake came at a decisive moment, disastrously so in many ways. Among speculative romantics [alternate historians] hailing from that country, musing on the possibility of the earthquake never happening is by far the most common scenario for tales, no matter what our determinist geologists might say about the unlikelihood of such a notion. But this is forgiveable. The earthquake was one of the greatest in European history, reaching far beyond Portugal – where it did by far the most damage – to be felt as far away as Finland, to topple buildings in western Ireland. To a Europe that was catching its breath in the dark valley between the War of the Austrian Succession and the War of the Diplomatic Revolution, this natural disaster was unexpected and catastrophic.[1] Many pondered the possibility of it being a punishment from God for human activities, an idea that appeared (in a less coherent fashion) among Enlightenment thinkers’ circles as readily as it did those of priests and peasants.

Regardless of the cause, the earthquake devastated Portugal. King Joseph I and the royal family were fortunate enough to have been taking mass outside Lisbon when the earthquake struck, but witnessed the devastation that killed hundreds of thousands of people and destroyed countless artworks, libraries and examples of fine architecture. The quake did not spare Portugal’s other cities, though Lisbon was perhaps the hardest hit. Portuguese history itself was going up in smoke before the King’s eyes, and his own royal Ribeira Palace joined the list of buildings destroyed. It was a chaotic scene that could have destroyed a nation, particularly considering Spain was becoming more hostile over the unsatisfactory outcome to the Guarani War in South America. This would eventually lead to the First Platinean War just a few years later, illustrating how desperate Portugal’s situation could have been.

Fortuitously, Joseph I’s Prime Minister, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo[2] rose to the challenge of dealing with the earthquake: while many panicked or despaired, not least the royal family, he simply came out with his famous quote: “What to do now? Bury the dead and feed the living.” He organised rescue efforts and the construction of tent cities to house refugees, while also sending survey teams around the country to learn what the signs immediately preceding the earthquake had been. Troops from the Portuguese Army were called in to feed the people and keep the peace, publicly hanging looters so the rest got the message quickly. It was essential that such an event never be allowed to happen again: earthquakes might not be preventable as such, but their damage could be limited. Carvalho took a personal hand in the reconstruction of Lisbon, laying out buildings structured to better resist seismic shock, and wider streets than in the old city, the mottos. “One day they will seem small,” he said, presciently given the coming age of Cugnot steam wagons.

Carvalho had long opposed the entrenched powers of the Portuguese nobility, considering them reactionary, out-of-touch and ineffective. His masterful handling of the earthquake boosted his own popularity with the Portuguese people, as well as that of the King, and he used the opportunity to secure his hold on power. In 1758 a plot by the powerful Távora and Aveiro families against the King – possibly concocted by Carvalho himself, though scholars are divided – gave him the excuse to execute most of their members and annex their lands to the Crown. As well as eliminating his enemies, the Portuguese treasury needed every peso it could get. Carvalho’s rebuilding plans were grand and well-reasoned, but expensive.

The Prime Minister effectively ran the country, successfully leading the damaged country through the First Platinean War, until Joseph I’s death in 1769.[3] At this point, the crown passed to his eldest daughter, now Maria I, as queen regnant and co-monarch with her uncle and husband Peter III. One of Maria’s first acts was to remove Carvalho from his post and banish him from the country to Brazil, having singularly opposed his policies throughout his premiership.[4] Of course, Carvalho soon crossed into what was then the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru[5] and eventually joined political forces with his old sparring partner and fellow exile, the former Prime Minister of Spain the Marquis of Ensenada.

Although the two influential political thinkers died before the Second Platinean War, their writings and their making Buenos Aires a hotbed of radical thinking doubtless helped inspire the Platinean Revolution and the creation of the United Provinces of South America. That could be considered revenge on Ensenada’s part over Spain, but for Carvalho – for no matter how power-seeking he was, he remained a Portuguese patriot who wanted the best for his country – it was a last laugh. Under Maria and Peter, Portugal’s economy had slumped due to their appointments of incompetent favourites as ministers, and the recovery from the earthquake damage had stalled. But the creation of the UPSA, and Portugal’s role as undeclared ally during the war, meant that free trade was now opened up between the Portuguese colonies and the UPSA, just as it was between the UPSA and Britain. The Spanish-imposed trade monopoly in the Americas was crumbling rapidly. Brazil was now able to trade openly with the government in Cordoba, and the colony’s economy boomed. In addition, many Portuguese dispossessed by the earthquake damage (many were still living in temporary accommodations fifteen years later) took the opportunity to emigrate to Brazil, seeking their fortunes as news of new opportunities filtered across the Atlantic. Not all of those stories were true, and not all emigrants found restitution – but enough did to encourage yet more.

Portugal was rocked by the news of Peter III’s death in 1786 in a hunting “accident”, in which he was shot down in front of the Queen. Accusations of foul play were never proven, although a plot backed by the spiritual successors of Carvalho in the Portuguese court was suspected. In any case, the King’s death before her eyes sent the Queen into a manic depression from which she never recovered.[6] After a few months of deadlocked crisis in the Portuguese court, the Queen was declared unfit to rule and her son, Peter, Prince of Brazil[7] acceeded to the throne at the age of 25 as King Peter IV. The former Queen retired to a convent until her death in 1795.

In the first few months of Peter’s reign, a sour saying began circulating in conservative circles: “Are we certain that he is his father’s son, and not Carvalho’s?” Peter was a dynamic ruler who brought an air of hands-on determination to the Portuguese monarchy that it had not had for many years. He kept on the by now aged Prime Minister Martinho de Melo e Castro, one of his mother’s more reasonable choices for the job. Melo died two years later, but Peter’s freer hand gave him time to implement some of his more ambitious policies, which had been shot down by Queen Maria’s more conservative regime. Melo had grand ideas for Brazil as the jewel of the Portuguese Empire, using the new influx of colonists to develop and further colonise the land, building trade links with the new UPSA and blocking the Spanish out of most of South America. Peter granted him these policies if Melo would give him his support – by now quite strong in the court – for radical domestic upheavals.

After Melo’s death in 1788, Peter appointed his like-minded son Jaime as Viceroy of Brazil, to continue the development of the colony’s relations with the UPSA.[8] He worked with the Captain General of the frontier province of Rio Grande do Sul, Jorge de Sepúlveda, who had been exiled from Joseph I’s court for fighting a duel with the British ambassador years before. Sepúlveda knew the situation on the ground better than Melo the younger and was able to help turn the Viceroy’s dreams into reality; in return, Melo backed Sepúlveda’s policy of firmly enforcing the vaguely defined Brazilian/U.P. border and driving out any Indians who straddled the border – as well as increasing direct control over the border regions, this meant that trade between the UPSA and Brazil was more tightly controlled, and customs and taxation raised more funds for the treasury.

Peter then appointed the Duke of Cadaval, Nuno Caetano Álvares Pereira de Melo, as Prime Minister. Although a capable politician and astute at manipulating the court, in terms of ideas and policies Cadaval was a nonentity – which was exactly what Peter wanted. Murmured accusations of Bourbon-style absolutism came from the more conservative elements of the court (those that had survived Carvalho’s purges) as Peter centralised power and laid forth his policies. Melo and his son could have Brazil: it was the rest of the Portuguese colonial empire Peter was interested in.

Plenty of colonial enthusiasts in Portugal had torn their hair out after the earthquake and the damage it had cost, complaining that Portugal would spend the next hundred years trying to repair the damage, and missing countless opportunities for colonisation and trade to the east and south. The country had already suffered from one hiatus in its colonial programme, during the neglect of the personal union with Spain in the seventeenth century. A second could kill the empire, which was already struggling (along with its traditional rival, the Dutch) to keep up with the emerging powers of Britain and France. In particular, the Portuguese East India Company’s trading operations in India were being threatened by the constantly changing situation there, not least because of the actions of the increasingly bullish British and French East India Companies. Both seemed more interested in gaining a monopoly through force than in trade itself, these days.

But Peter argued that those pessimists had it the wrong way around. The damage to Lisbon and the other cities was indeed something that could take generations to rebuild and millions to finance. The response to that should not be to neglect the empire and focus on that rebuilding, but to the turn the empire into more of a cash generator and let the reconstruction handle itself. Furthermore, more developed colonies – as with Brazil – would let dispossessed people emigrate as colonists, relieving the housing pressures at home. Many people were sceptical of the young, vigorous king’s forceful dream, and a plot led by the Duchess of Lafões to have Peter assassinated, and return the mad Maria to the throne, was uncovered in 1789. Once more the taunt about Peter being Carvalho’s spiritual son went around, as the conspirators were mostly executed and had their lands seized by the crown. Power continued to centralise, but Peter took a leaf out of Christian VII of Denmark’s book and revived the Portuguese Cortes as a way of playing off the commoners against the nobles and the Church. This move is probably what saved his kingdom from much revolutionary sentiment in the late 1790s, an impressive achievement considering the fact that many people still lacked proper housing and recovery from the earthquake was still slow.

Peter appointed new viceroys and governors to the Portuguese colonies in Africa and India. Perhaps the most prominent of these was João Pareiras da Silva, called ‘the Portugee Pitt’ by English admirers, who was appointed governor of Goa and Viceroy of Portuguese India. Elsewhere too Peter’s investment (in the navy, the East India Company, and in colonial development) yielded results. The Portuguese were fortunate in that they made considerable financial gains off the back of other nations’ expansion – the British stabilising Guinea and the Dutch in the Cape meant that the Portuguese possessions at Bissau, Angola and Mozambique had new trade opportunities opened up to them. But Pareiras did not sit idle and wait for wealth to come to him – he went out and sought it.

The Portuguese in India had made much capital (political and literal) off their good relations with the Maratha Empire for the last century or so. Goanese soldiers and especially artillery were loaned to Indian princes in their own battles, and the Portuguese East India Company continued to dominate the trade of western India, their only serious rival the Dutch in Calicut. However, matters were changing. The decisive defeat of the Marathas by the Afghan Durranis at the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761 shattered the Maratha Empire into a looser Confederacy plagued with infighting. Furthermore, British and French incursions into the interior of India – culminating in the joint intervention into Mysore in 1801 – threatened to shake the Portuguese trading near-monopoly. Both Britain and France had large numbers of both European and sepoy troops on the ground, and the Portuguese could not back up their negotiating position without the same. Peter increased recruitment for the Army and introduced the policy of bringing Brazilian-recruited troops out of the country and deploying them into other theatres – probably inspired by the British use of American troops abroad in the War of the British Succession and thereafter.

Pareiras received the army he needed to enforce his will, and by 1794 the Portuguese were on firmer ground in India. The Marathas were disintegrating, Berar having become a British protectorate while the House of Scindia fought a bitter war for leadership over the remnants with the House of Holkar.[9] At this point Pareiras pulled off a diplomatic coup. The Peshwas, theoretically the leaders of the Empire, had been reduced to ruling the land of Konkan from their capital at Pune, not far from British (and once-Portuguese) Bombay. Furthermore, their power had been further reduced by a series of coups and assassinations from Ragunathrao, brother of the Peshwa to have been killed at Panipat and perpetual regent and attempted assassin towards his ruling nephews.

By the 1790s, the young Madhavarao Narayan, son of one of the nephews, was Peshwa, but all his matters of state were handled by his able chief minister, Nana Fadnavis. Respected by the leaders of the European trading companies, Fadnavis was the sole reason for the survival of the Peshwa’s domain in the face of pressure from all sides. His assassination in 1795 – coincidentally on the same day as Louis XV’s execution in Paris, and probably committed by former Ragunathrao supporters – triggered open warfare. Madhavarao struggled to hold on to his throne as a pretender, Raosaheb (claiming to be the son of Ragunathrao) arose in the east. With backing from the Nizam of Haidarabad, he marched on Pune. Madhavarao’s control over his army started to disintegrate without the authority of Fadnavis, and he abandoned the city, fleeding to Raigad near British Bombay. It was obviously his hope to appeal for help from the British, but the British Governor-General of Bombay was not the most capable of men and could not have helped him even if he was. In recent years, as military intervention became more important, Bombay had decidedly slipped down the ranks of importance among British Indian cities, for all the effort that had been put into acquriring it from the Portuguese in the first place a hundred and fifty years earlier. The Governor-General of Calcutta was already de facto ruler of all British India, a fact that would be formalised a few years later, and John Pitt was too busy with the events leading up to the War of the Ferengi Alliance to intervene in this dispute on the other side of the country.

However, Pareiras offered his services instead. The Portuguese continued to be viewed with more suspicion than the British and French in India thanks to their efforts with the Inquisition in earlier years, but the desperate Madhavarao was willing to take anything he could get. Knowing perfectly well what he was letting himself in for, he accepted.

The pretender Raosaheb, having sacked Pune, retreated from the city in the face of the Portuguese and Goanese army. A cautious and realistic general, he decided that the best way to defeat such a force was to starve it out. To that end, he ordered his own army to retreat to the fortress city of Gawhilghoor to the east, while maintaining a scorched-earth policy to try and deny the Portuguese provender. However, in the process he lost a large part of his own army, mercenaries who deserted once the chance of plunder was lost in the face of a siege.

Raosaheb’s strategy was sensible enough. Gawhilghoor was a legendary fortress in that part of India, thought to be impenetrable. Situated in the mountains north of the Deccan Plateau, it was known as the Fortress of the Skies and was defended both by strong walls and a ravine forming a natural defence between the walls. By this point Raosaheb’s army had shrunk to only around four thousand, but even that many men could hold the fortress against a much larger army.

It was difficult to bring the Goanese guns up the mountain to blow a breach in the walls, and they failed to make much impression once they were there. After a failed frontal assault against the main gate that suffered heavy casualties, Pareiras adopted a different approach. A second frontal attack was implemented by sepoys as a diversion, while his Portuguese soldiers stood by with ladders to attempt an escalade of the walls near the gatehouse. The daring plan was supported by Cazadores (Riflemen)[10] stationed higher on a mountain ledge, who could accurately shoot down enemy soldiers on the walls who would try to throw back the ladders and fight the escalading troops. In the event most records of the battle suggest it was the Cazadores who turned the tide, as otherwise Raosaheb’s men would have been able to defeat the escalade. With the accurate bullets raining down from above, though, the Marathas retreated and the Portuguese were able to capture the gatehouse, opening the door to their main army. The rebels were defeated, and Raosaheb brought back to Pune for a public execution.

The brief Peshwa’s War served to place Portugal in a firm position of influence over the Peshwa’s domains in Konkan, vassalising Madhavarao. Working on the British model, Pareiras appointed a ‘resident’ at Pune whose real job was to inform the Peshwa what foreign policy he should set if he knew what was good for him. Ironically enough this involved shutting out British Bombay to some trade, just under the level of provocation that would get the British angry enough to intervene. Although Peter IV pursued the renewal of the old Anglo-Portuguese Alliance in American and African waters, India – as always – was another question.

Similar Portuguese interventions took place elsewhere, with renewed tinkering in spheres of influence that had previously been tacitly ceded to the Dutch: Portuguese ambassadors were sent to the anti-Dutch Kingdom of Kandy that ruled the interior of Ceylon, and (with less success, due to the tight Dutch system of control) several Javanese states. These were mostly due to Pareiras’ influence: due to his victory at Gawhilghoor in 1796, he received greater favours, a vice-countship and more powers from the King. He sought to establish a single policy for all Portuguese colonial and imperial activity in the Indian Ocean, which he saw as his rightful domain.

Possibly Pareiras’ greatest achievement was his alliance with Zand Persia. The Zand dynasty had proved to be relatively non-belligerent by Persian standards, but wars persisted in coming their way. In particular, a near-continuous battle with the Durranis of Khorasan had persisted ever since Ahmad Shah Durrani’s death, in which by the 1790s the Persians were starting to gain the upper hand. The Persians were also concerned about the Ottomans, both as a source of direct aggression, that their activities in the Crimea might drag Russia into intervention (particularly given Persia had taken the opportunity of the Russian Civil War to annex all of Azerbaijan) and the fact that Ottoman, and Ottoman-backed Omani, trade usurped traditional Persian-influenced lands in East Africa. Zanzibar, the great trading city whose name was Persian for ‘land of the blacks’, had become first Portuguese and now Omani (since 1698). The Zands were better informed about European philosophies than most Persian dynasties, obvious given their interest in the French Revolution (whereas the Ottomans dismissed it as ‘a Christian affair’) and so it is perhaps not surprising that Advocate Ali Zand Shah[11] is known to have quoted ‘if you would seek peace, prepare for war’…

Historically Portuguse-Persian relations had been fairly hostile, but the more moderate Zands could recognise the importance of an alliance. The Zand leadership was tolerant enough to allow a few trade posts full of Catholics on the Persian coast – though the Persian people sometimes disagreed, persecuting their own Assyrian Christians in response – and, in exchange for this opening of trade, the Portuguese trained elements of the Persian army in European warfare, though other elements were kept traditional: the Zands were hedging their bets.

The full import of the Portuguese-Persian alliance, of course, would not come into play until the start of the Time of Troubles, after the early stages of the Jacobin Wars…




[1]A British historian would probably call these the Second and Third Wars of Supremacy. Recall that the War of the Diplomatic Revolution is the alternate (curtailed) Seven Years’ War.

[2]Remember he never becomes the Marquis of Pombal in TTL.

[3]Ten years earlier than OTL; as he died of the aftereffects of a wound from an old, failed assassination attempt, it’s reasonable that he could have died at any time from the stress of the earthquake, the rebuilding efforts and the Távora plot.

[4]Such as ejecting the Jesuits from Portugal and abolishing slavery in Portuguese India. OTL, ten years later, Maria just put Carvalho (Pombal) under house arrest; TTL she’s younger and more inexperienced, with different advisors, and sends him further away.

[5]TTL the Spanish never created a Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata, one reason why the people in the region are so resentful, and it’s all still part of the Viceroyalty of Peru up until the Second Platinean War.

[6]Maria was known as Maria the Mad in OTL and suffered the same syndrome some years later, in 1799. Some historians claim porphyria, but that’s their catch-all excuse for all royal madness.

[7]Maria’s children are different to OTL. The eldest, born in 1761, is Prince Peter (Pedro).

[8]Of course the in-timeline author cannot note this, but Jaime de Melo el Castro’s enlightened policies also help dampen the independence sentiment in Brazil at the time, although this is already different to OTL due to the fact that the great independence of the 1780s happened right next door, in Rio de la Plata, rather than up in North America – i.e. both the good and bad parts of the revolution are on display to the Brazilian people, rather than just rumours and propaganda. The UP revolution was clearly justified due to the mismanagement of Spanish rule and the French free rein over the land, but the Brazilians generally consider that they do not want to join the UPSA in breaking away without an equally good reason.

[9]The Scindias rule Gwalior and Ujjain, while the Holkars rule Indore and Malwa. The other Maratha states have their own ruling dynasties.

[10]Remember that most European states have experimented with rifles earlier, after the well-publicised incident of William IV of Great Britain’s assassination with the weapons.

[11]Recall that the Zands call their Shahs ‘Advocate of the People’ instead.

Part #47: Finisterre

“While we waited at the bottom of the world, someone turned it upside down…”

- Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse (private journal)​

*

From - "Exploration and Discovery in the late 18th Century" (English translation) by Francois Laforce, Nouvelle Université de Nantes, 1961.

We have already covered the first two voyages of La Pérouse. The first, led by his flagship d’Estaing and accompanied by four frigates and a supply ship, was an arguably successful mapping mission that dramatically expanded French knowledge of the Pacific region, at a time when British investment in South Sea exploration had reached a low ebb.[1] The second part of the mission, to establish new trade contacts, was less successful. Both Qing China and Japan were in highly isolationist moves and refused any attempts to expand trade.

Corea, under the ageing King Hyojang[2], was more open to trade than it had been in the past, but was more interested in an exchange of ideas than the bread-and-butter trade which was what the emptying French treasury of the 1780s desperately needed. Nonetheless, La Pérouse allowed his two chief natural philosophers, the astronomer Laplace and the natural historian Lamarck, as well as the other scientific gentlemen among his crew, to trade ideas with the Coreans. La Pérouse’s account of Corea was of great interest in Europe, which had been out of touch with the country since King Yeongjo cracked down on Catholic missionaries in the 1750s. The European reading audience discovered that Hyojang, on his accession in 1770, had reversed this decision and tolerated Catholicism. This was thought partly to be due to Hyojang’s favouring the Silhak Movement, a Neo-Confucian school of thought which sought reforms to the corrupt Corean system of government of the eighteenth century.

The leader of the current ‘Third Wave’ of the Silhak Movement was Jeong Yak-yong, who had written a manifesto (the Mongmin Shimsu) whilst under house arrest by Yeongjo for his Catholic beliefs and his controversial reform ideas. Jeong’s ideas are comparable with those taking shape at the same time in Zand Persia, that the state must be headed by a King, but that the rights of common people must be inalienable, and they must be given a voice in the running of the state. He also favoured a utilitarian approach to philosophy and technology, and poured scorn on the Corean status quo which saw more interest in obscure poetry and etymology than things which would actually be of use to Corea lifting itself out of its subordinate position to China – unlike most Corean political thinkers, Jeong did not believe this was an inevitability of history and geography.[3] Hyojang released Jeong from prison and used him as an advisor; he, and other prominent Silhak thinkers such as Pak Je-ga – who criticised the Chinese-style system of examination for civil service posts, arguing that this supposedly meritocratic approach had become corrupt and led to incompetents in positions of power – clashed with more traditional Confucianists in open debates in the court. The Silhak, although in the minority, won several political victories from the fact that their opponents had grown comfortable and complacent from having no opposition under Yeongjo’s authoritarian rule.

Like Zand ideas, Silhak writings were transmitted back to Europe (in this case via La Pérouse) and may have influenced the French Revolution, English Reformism, and other European radical movements of the period, much as the French Revolution influenced Persia in turn. The Coreans also acquired some European military technology from the French, primarily artillery, which in the eastern school of warfare was still held to be paramount. Although the Corean infantry would suffer from using outdated muskets for some years to come, this was nonetheless a significant advantage compared to other armies in the region – the Chinese having failed in their attempts to acquire superior European artillery from both the Swedes and the Russians.[4] Additionally, Jeong’s position of power, together with his former career masterminding the construction of fortresses for the Corean government (before converting to Catholicism and developing radical political ideas) meant that Hyojang embarked upon a campaign of fortress-building along the border with China and elsewhere. This was partly in key with the Silhak idea that Corea should be able to stand up to China one day, rather than forever being a vassal, and partly because Hyojang wanted a series of royal strongpoints that could be held against rebellious nobles who objected to Silhak action against their corruption, and granting more power to their peasants. However, the nobles and traditional Confucians retained enough power at court to successfully shoot down a Silhak plan to collectivise farming on a village basis.[5] They won some other victories, but the Silhak were more successful than most had predicted, and Jeong’s blend of Catholicism with Neo-Confucianism (inherited from the seventeenth-century missionary to China Matteo Ricci) became Corea’s most influential, if not most popular, religion/ideology.

Corea was, of course, only one of the places that La Pérouse visited on his first voyage. His ships explored the South Sea Islands, the Iles Galapogos (whose fauna Lamarck would use to argue for his ideas of spontaneous evolution), and the long-forgotten Dutch discovery of New Zealand, which the French renamed Autiaraux after the name given to it by its Mauré natives. La Pérouse’s supplying of some Mauré tribes with muskets in return for supplies dramatically upset the balance of power in Autiaraux for many years to come.

After exploring the unexpectedly fertile south coast of New Holland (as it was then called), the fleet returned to France in 1793. Despite the deepening economic crisis, La Pérouse and his scientific allies were so popular and influential that they received enough ships and funds to return to New Holland (or La Pérouse’s Land as it was renamed) and plant a colony. Possibly Louis XVI believed that such a colony would make a good prestige project to help re-inspire public faith in his government, replacing the losses in the wars in America. That proved to be inaccurate, but by the time the French Revolution broke out, the bigger fleet was already rounding the Cape.

The next six years have been celebrated in countless, mostly French-penned, novels and films. La Pérouse returned to the site he had named Albi after his hometown[6] and established a full-blown colony on the site of their former temporary camp. His scientific men – Lamarck and Laplace now joined by others such as Jacques-Julien Houtou de Labillardière, a botanist, and C.F Beautemps-Beaupré, a hydrographical engineer who mapped the approaches to Albi bay, and many others, in such detail that the colony suffered fewer accidents in that regard than any other colony in unknown lands in history. Lamarck was impatient to learn more about the fauna of the new continent (and Labillardière, of course, thought the same about the flora) and advocated that La Pérouse plant other outposts so that their hinterlands could be explored in detail, with the outposts as bases for resupply. La Pérouse was extremely doubtful about whether this was a good idea, only about eight months after Albi was established (as it was when Lamarck suggested it) but, on the other hand, his success in this country had been and would be partly due to what worth the natural philosophers could extract from it. He beat Lamarck’s ambitious ideas down to one further outpost colony, which Beautemps-Beaupré was asked to site. The engineer, after surveying several bays along the coast north of Albi, chose one whose country – and afterwards the city placed there – was named Bieraroun after the native name.[7]

The colony cities, Albi and smaller Bieraroun, came into existence with relatively large populations, not least because Louis XVI had taken a leaf out of Britain’s book and given La Pérouse all the most politically awkward people he could find, those he wanted to get rid of, as colonists. This meant that the colonist population was somewhat sullen and resentful, but La Pérouse was helped by the fact that the rather barren terrain behind the colonies, filled with natives (whom the French somewhat inaccurately called indiens[8]) who were not unreasonably resentful at all these mysterious white strangers appearing on their land. This meant the colonists had to stick together, no matter how awkward they were, or die.

They nearly died anyway. Lamarck had overestimated the farming potential of New Gascony[9] and the colonies proved unable to feed themselves. Trade with the Indiens proved unhelpful due to the wider difference in mindset than even that between Europeans and the Mauré, and also because the natives had little to trade. Only around Bieraroun was a lasting relationship achieved with the local Ouarandjeré people, although European diseases worked their toll even with that agreement.

To prevent starvation, La Pérouse decided to return to Autiaraux and trade with the Mauré for staple crops, and perhaps farming advice in these climes (although the climates of La Pérouse’s Land and Autiaraux proved different enough for this not to be of much use). At the same time, he sent his second-in-command, Captain Philippe Durand, with his Émeraude to try the same mission with the Dutch East India Company and the South Sea islands. Durand was arguably more successful in terms of getting food and local crop seeds with which to improve the colony’s supply situation, but La Pérouse’s voyage was, inevitably, more colourful.

Less than ten years since he had first visited Autiaraux, he returned to find that the Mauré iwi (tribe) he had traded with, the Egnaté Raucaoua[10], had been busy. They were part of a tribal confederacy or ouaca[11] with three other tribes, called the Tainui, and had taken the opportunity afforded by La Pérouse’s gifts to embark on an expansionist phase. The Tainui had managed to defeat the iwis of Tetaitocquerau[12], demolishing their pa fortresses after winning key open battles thanks to La Pérouse’s muskets. The Tainui control of Tetaitocquerau was particularly significant because, according to Mauré legend, it was where their race first arrived in the islands in a fleet from Polynesia, and possessed a certain mythic aspect. Both because of this, and simply because of the Tainui absorbing the iwis there, the inland Egnaté Touaritaux formed an alliance with the Egné Touaux of the eastern coast to resist the Tainui aggression.[13] By autumn 1795, when La Pérouse arrived, the Tainui offensive had largely petered out anyway, as they had run out of ammunition for their muskets.

La Pérouse’s return was welcomed by the Tainui, who had seen the advantages of trading with him before, and were willing to do so again – but this time with a little more cunning. The Tainui’s chief negotiator, Huiwai, offered as much supplies and expertise to La Pérouse as the Tainui could spare – if La Pérouse gave them not just more ammunition and weapons, but also the secret of how gunpowder was made. La Pérouse hesitated, knowing that the long-term impact of this would be great. He was persuaded not simply by necessity but also by Lamarck, who noted that this would be a useful example to study of how important such weapons were in deciding the balance between peoples, and how this fitted into Linnaean Racialism. La Pérouse was unmoved by this cold and cynical maneouvre, but Lamarck had a powerful position and so he agreed. In the coming years, the Tainui would resume their offensive, failing to conquer the Touaritaux-Touaux alliance, but did achieve domination over the Taranacquie[14] peoples of the south.

This meant that the Tainui-led ‘empire of the musket’ now extended over almost half of the Ile du Nord.[15] The other half consisted of the Touaritaux-Touaux alliance and the nonaligned iwis, most of whom began to side with the Touaritaux-Touaux. The latter managed to gain the secret of gunpowder from the Tainui by espionage around 1803, shifting the balance again. However the Tainui still had the advantage of having most of the muskets, Maori metallurgy not yet being up to making new guns. The main reason why the Tainui did not expand further was that their leadership had trouble holding down the resentful new peoples they had added to their domain, and guns made little difference to that, a point which Lamarck noted in his log. The new discoveries took a longer time to filter down to the Ile du Sud, which had a far smaller population and was dominated by the Quai Taioux[16]. Generally speaking, the stage was set for the two major power groups to divide the Ile du Nord between them; what would happen next was anyone’s guess.

La Pérouse’s (and Durand’s) assistance helped the colonies survive 1795 and 1796. It was at this point that the frigate Richelieu, attached to La Pérouse’s force, encountered its British counterpart, HMS Lively, while on a voyage of exploration around the barren north of La Pérouse’s Land and New Guinea. The British opened fire without warning, fortunately at long range. The Richelieu’s captain, Paul de Rossel, decided to flee as his men were unprepared and he had let fighting drills lapse due to the fleet’s exile at the end of the world. The Lively gave chase, but a lucky shot from one of the Richelieu’s stern guns brought down her foremast, and the Richelieu was able to hide in a sheltered New Guinea bay that de Rossel had just mapped before the Lively could catch sight of them again. A disappointed Captain Cooke[17] returned to Calcutta with a confused sighting of a French ship far from all regular shipping lanes.

Meanwhile de Rossel did the same to La Pérouse at Albi. La Pérouse held a meeting of his officers and the colonial leaders, along with the important natural philosophers. It was obvious that Britain and France had come to war in the time while La Pérouse’s men had been cut off down in the south. La Pérouse was in a quandary: he couldn’t find out exactly what was happening without sending a ship where it was vulnerable to being intercepted. He could send enough of his fleet to give any British attacker pause, but that would leave the colony underdefended. In the end he decided to send just one ship, the Émeraude under Captain Durand. The Émeraude never reached Madras, its intended destination. It is generally thought that the ship must have run aground in the Dutch East Indies, or been caught in a tropical storm, as no British records suggest it was ever intercepted by a Royal Naval vessel. In any case, this is considered one of the great ‘what ifs’ of speculative romantics, as Durand was perhaps the most fervent royalist and believer in absolutism among La Pérouse’s crew. If he had reached Madras and participated in the Pitt-Rochambeau accord, it is likely that the colony in La Pérouse’s Land would have looked towards Royal France. But it was not to be…

After the loss of the Émeraude, which of course he could not guess until two years had passed without word, La Pérouse insisted on waiting for definite confirmation the war was over before leaving. This came quite early, in March 1800, when the news was passed by a Dutch merchantman that the Richelieu encountered near Java. La Pérouse left most of his fleet to guard the colony, but took the D’Estaing and three frigates home to France. Lamarck and Laplace came also, both having made several copies of their work for each ship, to ensure that at least one reached France.

The four ships reached France in early November 1800. Again, history might have been different if they had landed in Nantes, which according to the official government line was a ‘special administrations area’ but was, in fact, the capital of Royal France. But La Pérouse landed in Bordeaux, held by the Republicans, and he and his men reported to Paris. They had heard confused rumours of the Revolution, mostly welcomed by La Pérouse’s left-leaning crew of idealists and philosophers. The wilder stories been dismissed as Royalist or British propaganda. They rapidly learned this was not the case when they reached Paris, and found – by the order of Jean de Lisieux, the Administrateur – the old streets being torn up one house at a time and replaced with wide boulevards in the neo-classical style. La Pérouse caused a stir, as no-one had openly declared a title of nobility for years. He was arrested and a court almost sent him to the phlogisticateur, but Lamarck spoke up for him and he was released. Lamarck in particular became a celebrity as his writings about the fauna of La Pérouse’s Land were incorporated into Lisieux’s theories of racial supremacy. Lamarck’s idea that the harsh environment of La Pérouse’s Land had bred the large number of dangerous (poisonous, venomous, etc.) animals and plants there, an early example of environmental breeding[18], was used by Lisieux to advocate a harsh training regime for French soldiers (and as an excuse to crack down domestically).

La Pérouse was forced to renounce his title, but we shall continue to call him that, as history does. Lisieux was undecided on what to do with the colony. What France needed was trade and money, just as she had twenty years before. La Pérouse’s Land could not supply that, and Autiaraux was not profitable enough for the commodities that would make money. France needed India, which she had lost to the Royalists, or the East Indies, which were Dutch. It was the latter which persuaded Surcouf, one of Lisieux’s inner circle, to suggest a new plan. Surcouf had become bored of his project to weaponise Cugnot’s steam engine on ships, and wanted to return to his privateering days. Although France was still at war with Spain and the Spanish fleet at this point, the specific situation meant that France could afford to spare some frigates for such a venture. Surcouf’s idea was to raid Dutch shipping from the East Indies under a neutral flag, or ‘pulling an Englishman’, as he called it (in reference to Francis Drake and the Spanish). If the Dutch protested, what could they do? Even with the Flemish alliance, the Stadtholder would be a fool to tangle with Revolutionary France in war, especially since his own position looked ever more precarious. Lisieux ordered his agents to stoke the fires of revolution in the Netherlands and Flanders as a distraction, then approved the plan. Surcouf, the natural philosophers, and a shaken La Pérouse returned to the fleet, expanded by seven new frigates and three ships of the line, and the fleet set off for La Pérouse’s Land to begin their new commerce raiding mission. They arrived in Albi in February 1802 to learn that the colony had suffered an Indien attack, but had successfully beaten the natives back.

Immediately after returning, La Pérouse took a sloop on a trading mission to the Mauré and never came back. What happened was never proven, but it is considered highly likely that he and his men, mostly the more Royalist in sympathy among the crew, sold their services to the Mauré in exchange for protection and a hiding place from the Republicans. La Pérouse had been profoundly affected by the terror of the phlogisticateur and wanted nothing more to do with Republican France. The fact that the Tainui did not make much headway against the eastern alliance, but both planted new colonies in the Ile du Sud using improved canoes with European designs, suggesting that La Pérouse’s men sought refuge with both Mauré powers…





[1]Partly a Great Man effect, as James Cook died at the Battle of Quebec, and partly a more general trend – the existence of America and the new Guinea project, plus the smaller and less profitable possessions in India compared to OTL, have expanded British exploration of other areas at the expense of the Pacific.

[2]This is not the same Hyojang as OTL. OTL’s Hyojang was King Yeongjo’s firstborn son, who died young in 1728 – and also in TTL, because this is too early for butterflies according to my conservative interpretation. This Hyojang is Yeongjo’s third son, named in honour of the first. The second son, Prince Sado, was disqualified and forced to commit suicide due to being mentally unstable and a murderer.

[3]All of this is OTL.

[4]This part is OTL.

[5]An OTL proposal by Jeong.

[6]OTL Sydney.

[7]This is the site of OTL Melbourne, in OTL not founded until many years later. Bieraroun is my French transliteration of Birrarung, which is the OTL English transliteration of the name for the place by the native Wurundjeri tribe (spelled Ouarandjeré by the French here).

[8]Don’t laugh, the Aborigines were called Indians for a while by the British colonists in OTL as well.

[9]French name for the whole fertile south coast of Australia. Essentially New South Wales.

[10]The Ngāti Raukawa in English transliteration.

[11] waka in English transliteration. It literally means ‘canoe’, reflecting the fact that the Maori confederacies basically existed as cooperative ventures to colonise new lands via canoe.

[12] Te Tai-tokerau in English transliteration; the Northland region of New Zealand.

[13] Ngāti Tūwharetoa and Ngai Tuhoe respectively in English transliteration.

[14]Taranaki in English transliteration.

[15]North Island; the French do not use the Maori term here as it would be rather awkward-sounding in French (Te Ika-a-Māui)

[16] Kāi Tahu.

[17] No, not that one, although it is an irony. This is John Cooke, or his analogue, who in OTL was killed at Trafalgar.

[18] Environmental breeding = natural selection.


Part #48: Old Delicious and the Awkward Squad

1. The Great Cleansing
2. The War of Lightning
3. To Hold the Heart


– chapter headings in A.V. de la Costa’s seminal The Pyrenean War (1924)​

*

From the above work:

April 1800, it can be argued, was perhaps one of the most decisive months – and this is one title hotly competed for – of the Jacobin Wars. March had seen peace between Britain and Republican France, with a rump Royal France in Brittany and the Vendée being tolerated (for the moment) by the new regime of ‘Administrateur’ Jean de Lisieux, whom the British satirical press immediately nicknamed Old Delicious. Lisieux was certainly unamused by this portrayal, although the authenticity of his alleged diary in which he makes chilling remarks on the subject has never been proven. However, his mention of the English Germanic Republic, in relation to which authorities would one day phlogisticate these violators of his human rights, has led most scholars to believe that the document is a forgery, unless Lisieux was uncharacteristically prophetic.

April saw what can, possibly, be termed the first cabinet meetings of Lisieux’s regime. In truth, though no-one in Republican France would dare make the comparison, they were more in the spirit of an absolute monarch consulting with advisors before making his own unilateral decision. What checks remained on Lisieux’s power remained not with any official elected body, but with the ‘Boulangerie’, the informal group of innovative thinkers who directed French military policy, and were increasingly taking over control of civil policy as well.
Thouret, who masterminded Lisieux’s scheme to cut up France into perfectly square départements each run by a (supposedly) elected Modérateur, swiftly became an integral part of the Boulangerie, and it was by this means that his Rationalist views became official policy.

Although Republican Paris had long since been putting out new ideas about metric measuring systems for length, distance and time, it was not until now that they were actually enforced. Draconian laws which punished people simply for saying the old names of the days of the week – which was often unavoidable even by the most strong-minded revolutionary, just out of habit – were enacted. It was all part of Lisieux’s general idea that the people must be treated harshly if the spirit of revolution were to remain pure – if compromise was attempted, that could only pollute the spirit and necessitate a second, bloodier corrective revolution. Lisieux believed in the value of human life, at least his definition thereof, and claimed never to permit legal punishments that would impair a felon’s ability to work afterwards. He believed that, if Robespierre had been allowed to continue with his endless purges of the ‘impure’, eventually France would have been an empty hexagon of untended land with one man at its centre – Robespierre – finally driving a knife into his own throat as he concluded that not even he lived up to his own ideals of purity. Lisieux, on the other hand, advocated the notion that revolutionary purity could be gained and lost – he rejected the former “original sin” approach, as it was nicknamed by some. Of course, in order to create revolutionary purity in the impure, methods somewhat…drastic were often required.

Initially, though, Lisieux’s focus was on France’s political and military situation rather than his own vision for what the Republic would become. Boulanger’s brilliant campaign in Normandy in 1799 had ended what could have been a Royalist counter-revolution. The Republicans had been unable to throw the Royalists into the sea, but the peace with Britain was nonetheless a chance that could not be missed. Lisieux was loathe to tolerate the claimant King sitting on Brittany and the Vendée, but recognised that for the moment there was no alternative. If he were to go back on his word and invade, once a new army was assembled, then the fragile Fox government in Britain would fall and be replaced by more warmongerers who would simply start the conflict again. No; he was convinced the correct approach was to allow the Fox government to settle in place, to attempt to drive a wedge between London and Nantes (the de facto capital of Royal France), and to undermine Royal French interests around the world with everything short of war. Not only was Royal France’s existence an affront to the Revolution – and the man who believed he personified it – but it gave credibility to the Royalist governors-general of French America and French India. Although Republicans had mostly failed to convince those lands to go over to the Republican line even when there had been no Royal France as such, the existence of Royal France certainly made that task much harder.

However, now the Royal Navy was no longer hostile, not there to swipe nine out of every ten ships with emissaries out of the ocean, and Paris could begin openly sending ships to stir up trouble for the Royalists in their colonies. Lisieux immediately began this with what few ships remained after Villeneuve’s Pyrrhic attacks on the ‘Seigneur’ fleets. Villeneuve himself was a difficult figure. The Royal French had traded him back in a prisoner exchange after the peace, and Republican opinion of the man was mixed. He had certainly fought bravely enough, but it was a question of whether the British ships he had sunk had significantly reduced the Anglo-Royal French invasion that eventually produced Royal France, enough to justify losing virtually the whole remaining Republican fleet. Lisieux’s private opinion was no, but recognising the man’s tarnished hero status, he sent him on a supposedly ‘flag-flying’ mission around the world, starting in August 1800 after the shipyards had turned out some more ships of the line. The Republicans also bought some frigates from the Russians and the Danes, who sold off parts of the Swedish fleet that had come into their hands after the end of the Baltic War. Lisieux was more willing to engage with ‘reactionary states’ than Robespierre had been, less afraid of being ‘contaminated’ by the contact. “Their fall is assured, so why should they not be permitted to grease the downward steps themselves?” he wrote.

In truth, of course, Villeneuve’s ‘flag-flying’ mission carried weapons, pamphlets and professional terrorists to be let loose on the Royalist regimes in the French colonies. His fleet’s first stop was the West Indies, and of that incident much more can be read in other scholarly works. [Or later chapters]

It is perhaps surprising that Villeneuve was ever allowed to return by the Royalists, but even at that early stage, one cannot underestimate the influence of one man who had been favourably impressed by Villeneuve, in the enduringly British manner of respect for an enemy – the inimitable Leo Bone…

*

From - "The Man With Three Names - A Life and Times of Napoleone Buonaparte" (Dr Henri Pelletier, University of Nantes Press, 1962) :

For Commodore Leo Bone, the aftermath of the Battle of Quiberon looked bleak. After having successfully drawn off the superior ship Jacobin, the two had fought near the Isle of Yeu and, though the Lewisborough had successfully sank its enemy with its carronades, the Lewisborough had taken enough damage that her pumps were unable to prevent the water rising in her well – her own doom was only a matter of time. With a heavy heart, and a fateful indecision over whether to throw the guns overboard for more speed – he decided against it – he set sail for the nearest land, which by this point was the Vendean coast, and trusted to luck and God that he and his men would get out of this alive. And if there were any rumours that the God ‘Old Boney’ prayed to preferred his worshippers to speak in Latin and work rosary beads, his men did not think less of him on that account. Thus was the charisma that this remarkable man held over his mostly English sailors, men from a nation whose hatred of Catholicism could sometimes be regarded as an integral part of the national identity.

The Lewisborough, very low in the water by this time, was successfully and professionally beached near the town of Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez, in the south of the Vendée. Bone’s carpenter and bosun looked at the damage to the stern and shook their heads. If the ship could be repaired – which was not a given, it could end up like another horrible old Lorient – it could only be done in a proper shipyard, Portsmouth or Chatham.[1] Bone’s heart sank, but he did not allow his face to show his dismay. Instead he rallied and roused his men, praising them for bringing the ship in safely. They were tired and miserable after this anticlimax to their battle, but Bone managed to keep them lively. He had a plan, a wild and dangerous plan – the kind of plan that he and his friend Horatio Nelson did best. A plan that could not only lead to their survival, but perhaps avoid the catastrophe they were facing. Bone knew that rescue was not unlikely sooner or later, but without a functional ship, he could end up on half-pay for years – especially since the Republican naval threat was obviously dying out there in Quiberon at that time – while his men would be even worse off, suddenly ashore with no trade to work. Again like Nelson, he knew the importance of working the media to his advantage, and decided that the only way to escape such an obscure fate was to achieve some sort of filmish [cinematic] victory. Given that he was a naval captain and his ship had just been hulled, it could be argued that this was perhaps a rather ambitious plan. But for Bone, it was hardly out of the ordinary.

The Lewisborough’s crew, under Bone’s directions, removed most of the guns from the ship by means of pulleys, singing The Drunken Sailor.[2] With the last ‘way, hay, up she rises’, Bone was no longer in quite such an impossible situation. The Lewisborough had been a sixty-five gun ship, which meant Bone now had the equivalent of a sizeable artillery brigade under his command, including carronades and howitzers. His men were unaccustomed to land warfare, of course, but could at least keep up a rapid rate of fire if they had a position to hold. It was a daring, almost insane plan, but Bone was quite certain that he had a destiny to fulfil, and it would not abandon him to die ignominiously in such an engagement. In this he was hardly unique – such men can, perhaps, be found three to a street – but his men believed in it too, and that made all the difference.

Bone’s first act was to bring his crew to Saint-Hilaire itself, led by his Marine company under Major Rupert FitzRoy[3] to discourage any opportunists who thought this strange artillery column looked vulnerable. The red-coated Marines bore American rifles and hard expressions: though this part of the Vendée had slipped into anarchy, no-one bothered Leo Bone’s men. Saint-Hilaire was sufficiently distant from the heart of the counter-revolution that while the local Royalists had defeated and overthrown their Republican rulers, the countryside retained some Republican sympathisers and these continued to strike as partisans or bandits. Saint-Hilaire was a city under virtual siege when Bone arrived. With the Royalist mayor killed by Republicans, and his unofficial successor a nonentity, there was a power vacuum – a vacuum which Leo Bone was only happy enough to fill.

He called himself ‘Napoléon Bonaparte’, in the French style, and was thankful that he had learned French at the school to which his father had sent him, even if he pronounced it atrociously. Before the people of Saint-Hilaire knew what was happening, Bone had virtually taken over the town, billeting his troops there and already preparing for drills. Some equipment and ammunition had been left on the beach, Bone lacking the men to carry it all, and he somehow dragooned the natives into assisting. By the third day, it was hard to remember that Saint-Hilaire had not always been the personal fiefdom of Leo Bone, or Napoléon Bonaparte. Either way, he had come a long way from the Napoleone Buonaparte, son of a minor Corsican noble, that he had been born as…

Lest the people of Saint-Hilaire think him some boorish warlord, Bone proved his right to act in such a way mere days later. He himself went out ‘hunting’ with FitzRoy’s men. FitzRoy was himself an avid foxhunter, a sport which Bone himself had never felt an attraction for, and proved his eye when he shot seven Republican partisans dead at long range, in the middle of supposed cover. That was only the start of it. The virtual war against the local sympathisers continued for three weeks: the final confrontation saw the rebels hole up in a local stately home, an eminently defendable position against infantry assault. Recognising this, Bone simply revealed his artillery and pounded the place to dust. Although upsetting some of the locals with this act of absent vandalism, generally speaking the people of Saint-Hilaire, indeed the whole southern Vendée, praised his name for acting against the Republicans.

Bone’s first victory against regular Republican troops, rather than partisans, came in August 1799. General Pallière’s army had been crushed, but not actually destroyed, by General Græme at Cholet. Some of the remnants of the leaderless army fled into Anjou, while others came into the southern Vendée, feeding themselves by their customary maraude. Recognising how unpopular this made them with the locals, Bone saw another opportunity to act. By this point he had recruited something of a small army from the local French, using his Marines as a hard core for training purposes. He took many men who wanted to fight the Republicans for Louis XVII, but were afraid of leaving their homes to fight elsewhere, and possibly leave their families vulnerable to attack. Bone built a locally-based army that fought for local concerns, albeit in the name of the new King.

After some early skirmishes, the Pallière remnant – their leader’s name is not by this point recorded – were pinned down west of La Roche-sur-Yon by Bone’s forces. Having trapped the disorganised Republicans between two inferior forces, but ones which could stand their ground, he then unleashed his artillery. His sailors had been training as much as they could, and by now they fought as well as any landsman in the role. The Republicans’ column tactics made them easy targets for artillery, even more so when they formed square – and Bone managed to scrape together enough cavalry from local sources to force them into that formation for defence. The army, now barely worthy of the name, was virtually annihilated, and the legend of Leo Bone grew. By now, he was in touch with important locals, men who could send his reports back to England to be published in the Gazette, so that all would know of his exploits. It was a tactic that had worked well for Julius Caesar millennia before, and it would work just as much for Leo Bone. Indeed, the popular adventures of the son were one reason why his father, the MP Charles Bone, was given a cabinet position (Paymaster of the Forces) by the Fox government at home.

In the latter stages of the war, Bone brought his new army north on the Dauphin’s request. While Boulanger conquered in Normandy, ‘General Bonaparte’ held Angers against one of Boulanger’s armies, using a convent for cover (and incidentally capitalising on the fury that the Republicans’ attacking of such a site roused in the conservative Vendeans). He made sure that this incident was just as publicised, in the French as well as the British media. When the war came to an end, the Dauphin sent for him and ennobled him, creating the Vicomté d’Angers. (The British satirical press inevitably dubbed him ‘General Angry’, after this, to go with his existing nickname of Old Boney). Bone’s ramshackle army was officially made a new Royalist regiment, the Régiment du Vendée du Sud, aka the South Vendeans in British sources.

Once more, his path resembled that of his old friend Horatio Nelson, and indeed the two met in a café in Nantes to discuss their futures together, once the peace was signed with the new Lisieux regime. Nelson spoke baldly of the lack of prospects in the postwar Royal Navy, of ships laid up, crews disbanded, officers stuck ashore on half-pay for years. Bone had similar thoughts. Both men, although they loved the sea, loved power even more. Both recognised that power was no longer to be found in the Royal Navy. Though Nelson had his Mirabilis still, and his rank, all that awaited him was a stuffy desk job with a guaranteed pension – something which some men would kill for, but which was unsuited to this strange and mercurial officer. Bone told his friend of his own intentions, to resign his commission in order to become an important person in this Royal France. He believed that the Royalists would eventually take back all of France, and thus becoming a big fish in a little pond at this point would pay high dividends later. Nelson considered this, before departing for his new Mediterranean command, thoughtful ramblings filling his diaries all the way to Malta…

*

From - “The Pyrenean War” by A.V. de la Costa (1924) :

…Lisieux’s problem was not control over France, which was rapidly becoming absolute, but control over France’s satellite states. Currently in existence were Ney’s Swabian Germanic Republic, Marat’s Swiss Republic (which did not fit neatly into one of Lisieux’s racial categories) and Hoche’s Italian Latin Republic. In addition to this, the deceased Leroux’s subordinate, Fabien Lascelles, had seized control of much of Leroux’s army and now claimed a Bavarian Germanic Republic ruled from Regensburg. Those who had opposed Lascelles, led by Phillipe St-Julien (and called the Cougnonistes after their first leader) were holed up in the Bohemian city of Budweis, but had made no attempt to set up a Bohemian republic. They struggled hard enough just to survive and beat off local militia attacks, Austria being unable to spare any regular troops for this theatre thanks to the Ottoman invasion of Dalmatia.

Most of these ‘republics’ were simply military dictatorships, whose role would be determined solely by the man in charge. Lascelles, of course, was a fanatical Robespierre supporter and immediately dismissed Lisieux’s regime as illegitimate and ‘crypto-Royalist’, then claimed his own supposed Bavarian Germanic Republic was the only remaining example of true revolutionary republicanism. To prove it, he immediately embarked on a Terror of purges quite equal to anything his hero Robespierre had ever done. Which would, of course, have quite infamous consequences, but that is outside the scope of this work.

Meanwhile, Ney – after some consideration – accepted Lisieux’s legitimacy. He had appointed himself First Consul of his Republic, and his second-in-command General Nicolas Ranier as the second, but made a local sympathiser, Christoph Friedrich von Schiller[4] as Third. Schiller, a man of the liberal Enlightenment both politically and artistically, had enjoyed patronage under the previous Duke before the current one, Karl II Ludwig, had succeeded and dismissed him from court. Ney also created a National Legislative Assembly of local Badenese, Württembergers and others: in reality it had little power, but its existence helped smooth and placate local opinion – an example much quoted by the later school of Tory Appeasement thought.

Hoche rejected Lisieux utterly, not on principle as Lascelles did, but because he saw this as his moment to achieve his own personal kingdom, fully independent from France. Although more of a megalomaniac than Ney, he also created new institutions in Italy, trying to centralise powers and to create an identity out of formerly disparate states. This would have important consequences later on.

Lisieux hesitated over what to do with the truculent republics. His Robespierriste leanings told him that conflicting Revolutionary messages must be purged to leave only the true one. On the other hand, he was loath to spill the blood of fellow Republicans, while reactionaries prospered from the dispute. While agonising over the question with the Boulangerie, it was decided for him. On hearing of Robespierre’s death, the Swiss rose up and overthrew Marat. It is said that the Consul of the Republic was assassinated out of the blue, as he was walking down the Aarstrasse of Bern with an armed guard, when two men in a nearby house threw a tin bath out of the upper window, which hit Marat a sharp blow on the head and plunged him into a coma from which he never awoke. The Swiss rising was well coordinated, with Republican troops being divided, isolated and hammered by Swiss irregulars. Confusion prevailed in the aftermath, though – the French had executed so many important men of the old Confederation, and the rebel leaders had no real vision for a Switzerland after the French. The united front swiftly collapsed.

This was, of course, a disaster for Lisieux – holding Switzerland was vital to the French position in Germany. It was, therefore, that he grudgingly accepted Boulanger’s advice to engage with Hoche. By the Treaty of Savoy, France, Swabia and Italy divided Switzerland between them roughly on linguistic lines (thanks to Lisieux’s racial policies). Hoche still refused to acknowledge Lisieux, but sent in his troops, and Lisieux bought his services for future operations with supplies and ammunition, treating him as a mercenary. The more loyal Ney was ordered to continue offensive operations against minor German states from his power base in Swabia. Although Ney was concerned about overstretch, as he struggled to administer German-speaking Switzerland as well as his existing lands, he obeyed. Franco-Swabian troops wheeled around the neutral Palatinate – Lisieux unwilling to venture war with Charles Theodore of Flanders – and overran much of Ansbach and Würzburger Mainz, before being halted by a joint Hessian-Würzburger army at Erbuch. Ney was forced to retreat from all Würzburger lands and signed the Treaty of Stuttgart in November 1801, which set down firm boundaries for the Swabian Republic. One consequence of this affair was that the Hessians and Würzburgers, along with Nassau, formed a united front in the ensuing chaos of the Mediatisation, in which they opposed the Dutch-Flemish and the Saxons and broadly supported the Hapsburgs.

With the situation stabilised in the Germanies, priority number one for France was Spain. Aside from Royal France, the only foreign troops still standing on French soil were Spanish. Although General Custine had ejected the Spanish General Cuesta (two similar names which have confused generations of schoolboys) from Bordeaux in 1799, the French army in the south had been too poorly supplied, too low priority, to beat the Spanish back any further. What reinforcements had been earmarked for it had instead gone to attack the British and Royal French as that front opened up. But now that theatre too was quiet, and the full might of Republican France was turned on the Spanish.

Lisieux let Boulanger mastermind the attacks, with some political provisos. Firstly, that what Sans-Culottes regiments remained in France (most were with Lascelles in Bavaria) should form the core of the attacks and be at the forefront. Secondly that new regiments from Sans-Culottes backgrounds should be raised, by deliberate skewing of the conscription process if necessary. Boulanger was too used to Lisieux by now to ask why. He defined his plan as having three broad stages: to cleanse the Spanish from France herself; to use the War of Lightning strategy once more in an invasion; and to hold Madrid, to bring Spain to terms. Both men were sceptical about the possibility of a Spanish Latin Republic, but Spain must be brought under some sort of control or influence if France was to prosper. Boulanger said that each point required one year’s campaign season.

Lisieux gave him everything he asked for. All the Republic’s best innovations, the Cugnot steam tractors, the chars and the tortues, balloons and vast conscript armies, were focused in the south, at Bordeaux and Montpellier. Both cities had been taken by the Spanish, only for them to be ejected. Yet the Spanish held on doggedly to the south of France throughout the campaign season of 1799. This only changed when Boulanger launched his offensive, in 1800.

Cuesta’s armies suffered three major defeats, at the Siege of Toulouse, the Battle of Pau and the Battle of Carcassonne (the latter actually fought quite a long distance away from the town of Carcassonne). The Spanish, like the British before them, struggled to counter the French’s revolutionary new war machines and tactics, and their morale was not high. The war aims of the conflict had always been vague – initially some sort of hotblooded revenge for the King’s execution and anti-Catholic policies, thrown into confusion by the establishment of Royal France and open negotiations with the Republicans; then an attempt to annex historically Spanish lands, confused and discredited as Cuesta tried to hold onto lands far beyond those with any possible claim.

There was no secret that King Philip VI was ill, though whether from a simple fever or syphilis depended on which faction at court you asked. His capable prime minister, the conde de Floridablanca, had died just two years before, and been succeeded by Francisco Saavedra de Sangronis, who had fought in the Second Platinean War[5] and been finance minister for some years, as well as serving as governor of several of the American possessions in turn. But Saavedra, though a worthy successor to Floridablanca, had only been in the job for two years, and only for six months before the King began to fall ill. His position at court looked ever shakier, and he was opposed by the Prince of Asturias, Charles, who had support from Saavedra’s political enemy, Miguel Pedro Alcántara Abarca de Bolea[6], the Count of Aranda. The situation was such that the Spanish government was paralysed and unable to respond as Boulanger and his lieutenants coolly rolled up Cuesta’s army in the autumn of 1800.

What would follow would determine the fates, not merely of France and Spain, but of the whole world…




[1] In OTL there was ‘the horrible old Leopard’, which was theoretically repaired after a major disaster but never regained her old maneouvrability, and every Royal Naval captain feared having to command her. ATL a ship in a similar situation was HMS Lorient (originally the French L’Órient, captured during the Second Platinean War).

[2] This sea shanty dates from long after the POD, and this version is not quite the same, but I think it quite likely that a similar one would develop. The same factors were there – the original, Irish tune, brought there by Irish sailors, and the suitability of the rhythm to the task of hoisting sails or yanking on ropes.

[3] Third son of the Duke of Grafton, the Lord Deputy for North America. Went into the Marines rather than the regular British Army partly because his American childhood friends regaled him with stories of the heroic Lawrence Washington (later Lord Fredericksburg) during the Second War of Supremacy.

[4] ATL ‘brother’ of OTL’s Friedrich Schiller, more of a political figure than OTL.

[5] OTL he fought in the American Revolutionary War.

[6] Unlike OTL, Pedro Pablo Alcántara Abarca de Bolea had a son.


Part #49: La Disparition de l’Espagne

Tall ships and tall Dons,
Three times three,
What brought they from the conquered land
To the New World over the Sea?
Five crowns and five kings
and one hope for the free.


– Johannes Reuel Tollkühn, Der Untergang von Spanien, 1941​

*

From - “The Pyrenean War” by A.V. de la Costa (1924) :

The campaign season of 1800 saw French forces push the Spanish armies back close to the border, although the only place the French actually crossed the border was at the far eastern end, taking Llançà in Catalonia. Although one of Boulanger’s armies attempted to force the pass of Col d’Ares, the Spanish successfully repulsed the attack. Although the armies of Generals Cuesta and Blake were pressed back against the Pyrenees, the Spanish entrenched themselves in defensive positions over the winter and prepared to fight off a French mass attack. Although the Spanish government remained paralysed due to Philip VI’s illness, there remained a general determination to keep hold of the formerly French Navarre, and the troop deployments reflected that.

The campaign of 1800 provided important lessons for the French side. Boulanger had lost most of his most skilled generals in the previous few years’ worth of fighting: Leroux had been slain before Vienna, Hoche had gone rogue, Ney was busy pacifying Swabia, Vignon and Pallière had been killed during the response to the Seigneur offensive. The war against Spain now demonstrated those commanders who deserved promotion, and Boulanger, as Marshal of the Republican Army, enacted such promotions and weeded out the less capable generals. In accordance with Lisieux’s “No wasteful killing” policy, less competent but loyal generals were usually relegated to garrison duty, although some of them ended up in more dangerous areas such as French-Switzerland or Swabia.

Some of the men Boulanger promoted are household names even to those ignorant of history: Claude Drouet, Etienne Devilliers, Olivier Bourcier. Some were from formerly aristocratic backgrounds, Lisieux being more amenable to accepting them than Robespierre had been, while others were commoners like Boulanger himself. While the Spanish dug in over the winter of 1800, Boulanger was, typically, planning a yet more ambitious offensive. It was at this time that Hoche began publishing self-aggrandising accounts of his own battles, easy considering the Italian university cities with their printing presses that he occupied. Lisieux quickly banned them in France, but Boulanger was able to obtain a copy illegally and spent some time studying them, reading between the biased lines to extract useful information. He travelled up and down the whole border, studying the problem his men had to face, and also read the accounts of the generals from the campaign of a century earlier, during the War of the Spanish Succession.

In January 1801, Boulanger returned to Paris to discuss the forthcoming campaign with Lisieux and the Boulangerie. He learned of the interest that the return of La Pérouse had sparked, and how Lisieux was writing propaganda day and night to incorporate Lamarck’s ideas of environmental breeding into Linnaean Racism. He was disappointed to learn that Vice-Admiral Surcouf was committed to privateering against the Dutch, but also found out that Surcouf had promoted one of his subordinates, Fabien Lepelley, to counter-admiral and had turned over control of the Cugnot ship project to him. Lepelley was just as enthusiastic as Surcouf for the new innovations, which suited Boulanger fine…

It was some time before Lisieux could spare a few hours to talk over the campaign. Michel Chanson, Boulanger’s adjutant, records that Boulanger spoke of Lisieux looking tired and having visibly aged. He cloistered himself in his room for hours at a time, continuously writing pamphlets and propaganda. He barely went out to look at the Republic he ruled, instead using his pen and ink to scratch at the paper as though gradually wearing down reality until it resembled what he believed it should look like.

Boulanger put forward his conclusions to Lisieux and the Boulangerie, as well as a few members of the National Legislative Assembly. He said that trying to force the Pyrenean passes would be unlikely to succeed. The Spanish were well entrenched, the passes were defended, and the terrain was difficult. Lisieux asked for the alternative, and Boulanger replied with Lisieux’s own maxim that to hold the heart – the capital – of a nation is to hold the whole nation. It did not matter how that heart was approached, only that it was held, and then everything else would collapse.

The Marshal outlined another strategy, pointing out the fact that the French held Llançà. Troops could be slowly moved down there to support the attack, he added. It did not matter that the Spanish held the Pyrenees if Madrid was conquered.

Georges Besoin, a member of the NLA, objected that to try and conquer Spain while Spanish forces still occupied French soil was the heart of foolhardiness. Lisieux did not uphold his point, recognising Boulanger’s argument that anything else Spain did would be irrelevant if Madrid was held. But Lisieux did argue that the Spanish were not fools, and that they would surely be shifting their own troops to drive the French out of Llançà. Boulanger agreed: his agents confirmed that the Spanish had moved an army under General Fernando Ballesteros to take back Llançà in the spring, an army that outnumbered the French occupiers three to one.

But that was all part of Boulanger’s strategy.

Drawing frantically on a new-fangled blackboard, Boulanger explained that he would assemble the bulk of his army in Leucate, then bring in a fleet from Toulon to transport them down to Spain. They would land in the Catalan town of Roses, on the southern side of the Cap de Creus, and thus trap Ballesteros’ army between two French forces, crushing it.

Quite understandably, Besoin was sceptical. “And what precisely is the Spanish Mediterranean Fleet, which thanks to d’Estaing’s treachery is several times the size of our own, doing in all this?” he asked sarcastically.

Boulanger smiled, and replied: “Lying in port, of course, for it is a windless day.”

Lisieux was the first to realise what Boulanger meant. Seeing an immediate application for one of his pet projects, he almost immediately approved the offensive, with one proviso. Boulanger wanted to make only desultory attacks against Cuesta and Blake’s armies in the Pyrenees, just enough to stop the Spanish shifting those troops away. Lisieux wanted a stronger attack, commanded by General Philippe Eustache and made up largely of Sans-Culotte levies. Eustache was himself of suspected loyalty, being a Jacobin fire-breather much like Lascelles in Bavaria, and a vocal supporter of Robespierre. But unlike Robespierre himself, Lisieux would not simply have him plucked from his command and phlogisticated. Every man that France had must be used to further her cause, though the means might vary…

The two offensives were termed Assaut-du-Sud and Tire-Bouchon (Southern Onslaught and Corkscrew) ; Lisieux’s military policies tended to increase paperwork and counter-espionage, hence the explosion of the use of code names. Assaut-du-Sud was launched under Eustache in March, taking back Tarbe and Montrejou before stalling. Eustache himself was killed by a Spanish counterattack from Lourdes, led by the vigorous Irishman Joaquin Blake, who successfully took back Tarbes shortly afterwards and threatened Pau. However, this only worked to the advantage of Boulanger’s strategy. The Spanish government, led erratically by Saavedra, was convinced that the French hammer blows would come in the west, and while they left Ballesteros’ army to threaten Llançà, it was not reinforced. At the same time, the French moved down enough forces overland until the French army in Llançà was of almost equal numbers to Ballesteros’, and it was placed under the command of Drouet.

In May, Ballesteros assaulted Llançà and pushed Drouet out, who then shifted his army to the west. Ballesteros pursued, leaving his army somewhat strung out behind him. On the 16th-19th, the calm days that they had been waiting for, Counter-Admiral Lepelley’s men struck. Just as Boulanger had planned, Surcouf and Cugnot’s ‘little toys’ pulled out of their port at Toulon and steamed southwards to Leucate, where Devilliers and Bourcier were waiting with the bulk of the army (including Cugnot-wagons and other innovations). The French fleet was impressive in its novelty and in its numbers. The transports tended to be merchant craft or converted warships, pulled by steam tugs, their useless masts torn out to provide more deck space. Surrounding them were Cugnot’s steam-galleys, some equipped with paddlewheels, others with screws – the argument over which method was more powerful had become heated enough down at the manufactory in Toulon to result in several yeux noirs. Also accompanying the French fleet were a number of conventional galleys, some dating from the pre-Revolutionary fleet, others bought from the Kingdom of Denmark after the conclusion of the Great Baltic War. French use of galleys had lapsed during Robespierre’s consulship thanks to the abolition of slavery, but Lisieux’s policies provided plenty of political prisoners to replace the former galley-slaves. Why simply execute such men, when they can still serve their country…

The French fleet was large enough to discourage casual attacks, but it was nonetheless met by a force of six startled Spanish galleys out of Cadaqués on the 18th. Although outnumbered, the Spanish were not struggling with the problems of new technology and inexperience as the French were, and managed to sink eight French ships and damage three others before succumbing to the French steam-galleys’ powerful bow chasers. Fortunately for the French, the Spanish galleys were prevented from drawing close enough to the converted transports to damage them and drown any troops – all the French losses were of their own galleys, steam and manual.

Lepelley dispatched one transport and escorts, under Bourcier, to take Cadaqués after the defeat of the galleys. Bourcier stormed the town and captured the two Spanish frigates and a brig that had been stationed there, helpless without wind. However, there was also an eighth galley, which made a desperate and quixotic attack on the French transport’s steam tug, the Palmipède.[1] The galley’s bow chaser fired a badly-timed blow as the Palmipède rose up on a crashing wave as the tide came in, meaning the cannonball only struck a glancing blow off the Palmipède’s screw, she being one of the screw-based steamers in the mixed fleet. To everyone’s astonishment, as they learned after the battle, the damaged screw actually performed better than it had before the attack – by chance, the cannonball had created something similar in shape to a modern propeller. Once demonstrated to Cugnot and Jouffroy in Toulon, this spelt the end for an intriguing ‘what-if’ of history, the romantic-looking but inefficient paddlewheel-based steamship. Screws immediately became dominant.

Meanwhile, the major force under Devilliers descended upon Roses and, as Boulanger had planned, Ballesteros’ army was crushed between the two French forces and forced to surrender. Immediately afterwards, Drouet attacked south into Catalonia, using the War of Lightning strategy pioneered by Boulanger and Leroux. Barcelona fell in August, the Spanish garrison there being surprised by the unexpected assault – Drouet had successfully outrun the news. All of Catalonia was in French hands by September, and Lisieux declared the annexation of the country to France – having been persuaded of the Catalans’ supposed French descent on linguistic grounds.

Madrid heard of the fall of Barcelona at about this time, but this was also the time when matters came to a head in the governmental crisis. Philip VI died on September 3rd, but by this point he had been driven insane by his disease, and his last words were a screaming declaration to disinherit his first son, Charles, Prince of Asturias. The King had become convinced that he had been poisoned by Charles’ favourite, the Duke of Aranda, and demanded Aranda’s execution before mercifully succumbing. The Kingdom was thus plunged into a constitutional crisis: Saavedra quickly issued declarations in the King’s name claiming the legality of Philip’s last order, while Aranda and the horrified Charles responded with legal judgements claiming the King had been insane and thus his orders should not be carried out. Saavedra quickly made an alliance with the Infante Philip, Philip’s second son, and ordered that he be crowned King of the Spains in order to ensure a strong, united government in order to repel the French.

A virtual civil war erupted in Madrid between the Felipistas and Carlistas, sourly remembered by the Spanish writer Félix Ximinez as ‘pausing in a burning house to fight over who shall rescue the silver’. The royal palace, built forty years before to replace one that had burned down, was promptly subjected to the indignity of history repeating itself. The loss of such a potent royal symbol undermined the credibility of the winner in the dispute, no matter who it was. In the end, by the end of November, the Felipistas and Saavedra had triumphed, while Aranda and the Carlistas, including Charles himself, fled to the northwest, where he still enjoyed the most popularity. The Carlista army, commanded by General Javier Castaños, went with him. José de Palafox, then a young lieutenant, was also a part of the Carlista force…

By the time Saavedra had seized power and Philip had been crowned as Philip VII, the French had overran all of Aragon and forced three more Spanish armies to surrender. Belatedly, Madrid ordered the withdrawal of Cuesta and Blake from the south of France, bringing their armies back over the Pyrenees, piecemeal, to protect Castile. However, Devilliers successfully led a force west from Catalonia that managed to seize three of the major passes, while Boulanger coordinated an attack by the remnants of Eustache’s Sans-Culottes to press the retreating army of Blake back against the mountains. A large Spanish Army was thus pounded to pieces a little at a time, the mountains meaning that it could not concentrate its forces against the French. Once more, the Republic’s Gribeauval artillery and the steam tractors that pulled it served it well. Cuesta’s army survived, but the bombastic Cuesta was by this point convinced that the ‘traitorous’ Carlistas were more of a threat than the French, ignored orders from Madrid and moved west to attack Asturias.

Thus it was that Spain was chronically underdefended in the campaign season of 1802. By this point France had moved almost her entire army into Aragon, which now swept westward along a broad front, with a single central spearhead aimed at Madrid. Although Spain retained some good generals fighting for Philip VII and Saavedra, she lacked the manpower to resist France’s giant conscript armies. There were moments of glory for Spain, such as the Felipista general Bernardo de Gálvez’s[2] epic victory at Granada, driving back a French force under Drouet that drastically outnumbered his own. But no matter how many songworthy individual actions the Spanish warriors accomplished, the march of the French columns westward was like an unstoppable tide. Madrid, damaged by years of civil war, was indefensible. Philip VII and Saavedra abandoned it for Cordoba, then Seville, and finally Cadiz as the French closed in towards the end of 1802. At the same time, Charles, Aranda and Castaños managed to defeat Cuesta, with the only real winner being the French. Navarre was finally swallowed up once more by the Republican armies, a fact that was celebrated with parades in Paris. Lisieux sensed the mood of euphoria and shifted his plans into high gear…

The scale of the Spanish defeat provoked alarm in many circles. The King of Naples and Sicily, Charles VIII and VI, was descended from Charles III of Spain and the struggles of his fellow Bourbons created further interest in Spain in the two Kingdoms, whose navy and even army was currently being reformed by a British ex-Admiral with an axe to grind, a man named Horatio Nelson. British political circles mumbled confusedly over the impact of the French victory, the Foxites cheering on the forces of radicalism as they overthrew another fossilised absolutist state, the Tories joining them due to the defeat of an old British enemy, while the moderate Burkeans reacted with alarm at the spread of the Revolution.

But perhaps the most significant response was in Lisbon. The Portuguese court was understandably alarmed at the rapid downfall of Spain and the thought that they could be next. Portugal and Republican France were not at war, but this had not stopped the French advance through Germany cutting across many neutral states and often executing their royal families. Although Portugal was no German statelet, and her army had undergone considerable reforms since the lessons of the First Platinean War with Spain, the prospect of a war with the whole might of France – and perhaps a co-opted Spain – was enough to make another Lisbon earthquake seem trivial by comparison.

But, of course, Portugal had King Peter IV, who did not let himself be daunted by such minor issues as the impending destruction of his country. He called his ministers and the Cortes, including his chief minister the Duke of Cadaval, to a meeting in January 1803 in order to discuss their response to the French invasion of Spain. There were several views expressed, including those who argued that the best response was to pursue a policy of highly visible neutrality and sign treaties with France, as Flanders had. Peter scoffed at that, calling those who held that view ‘tortoises’, who thought they were safe if they hid from the world inside their shells. No, the only solution was a pre-emptive attack.

The King’s ministers gaped at this, a piece of madness that seemed equal to anything his mother Maria had ever come out with. But Peter explained the method behind his shock pronouncement. If France co-opted Spain, they would have the same advantages that Spain always had in their wars with Portugal. But right now Spain was weak and reeling, struggling to respond. Now was the time for Portugal to occupy all the strongpoints first, and then hold them against any French attack, creating buffer zones against future attack.

Most of the King’s ministers still thought this was quite crazy, but a refinement to the plan by Cadaval convinced most of them. The Portuguese foreign ministry approached Charles, who was still hiding out in Asturias, and offered to recognise him as King if he would consent to giving Portugal free rein in Spain. After some agonising, Charles agreed. After the Portuguese envoy left, he turned to Aranda and started enthusiastically declaring his ideas for how they would retake Madrid with Portuguese help and drive out the French. Aranda shook his head sadly and said that it was impossible – Portugal would be crushed as easily as Spain had been, he said. No, Charles had done the right thing, undermined his brother, gained some legitimacy, but there was no victory to be had here. The only option was to flee the country, then return when the situation was different. The French had other enemies. They might withdraw their troops to the other end of Europe, and then it would be time to return in glory, just as King Sebastian of Portugal would according to the old legend.

Charles was doubtful of this, but his mind was changed in March 1803 when the French finally took Cadiz and Philip VII surrendered to them. To the surprise of some commentators, the French did not immediately execute Philip VII. Lisieux and Boulanger had already agreed that a Spanish Latin Republic was not likely at present, and would have to wait until later. Spain did not have many centralised institutions – remove the monarchy and it would fragment, and it would no longer be the case that to hold the capital was to hold the nation.

The revolution could wait.

The peace was not, in fact, all that punishing, at least on paper. France annexed all of the Basque lands, Catalonia, and a wide strip of territory in between, resulting in a definitive French control of the Pyrenees. Andorra was also abolished and annexed to France. France also took Minorca from Spain and turned it into a naval base for its new steam fleet. However, the deeper strictures of the peace were not written down. Philip VII was virtually reduced to a French puppet, Saavedra quietly met with a ‘Carlist assassin’ in the night, and it was French ‘advisors’ who really set Spanish policy.

In April, just after Saavedra’s assassination, Philip VII issued death warrants on all the other infantes of Spain, a clumsy French policy aimed at ensuring there were no other claimants. Many of the other four – Philip VI had produced six sons but no daughters – were already turning towards Charles after Philip VII’s humilitation, but now the Infantes Antonio, Ferdinand, John and Gabriel hastily high-tailed it for Asturias. By now, Charles recognised the truth of Aranda’s argument, as French and Felipist armies formed up to invade the Carlist-held lands. With a heavy heart, he gave the order.

Charles had nine ships of the Spanish Navy loyal to him waiting in Corunna. Portugal gave him several more in return for his blessing for their annexation of Galicia – not a policy he would have countenanced in any situation less desperate, of course. Sickened by the Portuguese taking advantage of his weak position, he later bitterly remarked ‘I am surprised Pedro did not ask for Torsedillas to be moved so that our rightful lands now extend from ten degrees west of Madrid to ten degrees east!’[3]

It is the nine Spanish ships that are remembered, though. On them, they carried the last hope for a free Spain, the five Infantes, including the man who claimed to be King Charles IV of Spain. But each and every one of those five Infantes would one day be a King in his own right. For the fleet of Spain fled westwards from the ruin of their nation, westwards along the path that Columbus had traced more than three hundred years before, into the lands of the Indies…



[1] Named after an earlier French attempt at a steamboat by Claude de Jouffroy. Jouffroy himself was imprisoned during Robespierre’s tenure, but was then released by Lisieux and is working with Cugnot in Toulon.

[2] TTL neither his father nor he became Viceroy of New Spain, and his career has mainly focused on European conflicts, except a brief foray into Peru during the Second Platinean War.

[3] Of course, the Spanish in this time use their own capital to define the meridian, like every other major power.









Part #50: A Vision of the World

The South Seas—the last unexplored frontier. This, then, will be the voyage of His Majesty’s Ship Enterprize. Our three-year mission: to explore strange new lands, to seek out new peoples and new kingdoms…to tread, bravely, where no Englishman, where no American, has set foot.”

– Captain the Honourable George North, private journal​

From – “A History of the Imperial Navy” by Sir Augustus Vanburen:

Many men have tried to claim a conclusive date for the foundation of the Imperial Navy. Few save the credulous and the schoolboy will attempt to claim that the Imperial Navy truly came into being only on the day when it was legally founded, in the fires of war of the Thirsty Thirties. Indeed, how could such an organisation have moved smoothly into action if it had not been acting independently for years before, waiting only for officialdom to catch up with reality (as is so often the case?)

No, the true date of the Imperial Navy’s genesis must lie by definition earlier. Some have given it, perhaps with some justification, as 1796, the year that the American Preventive Cutter Service was founded. They argue that this was the first truly American manifestation of the British naval service – certainly the first with ‘American’ in the title – and thus qualifies as the spiritual ancestor of the Imperial Navy. However, this assumption fails on two counts. The Preventive Cutter Service, though officially an Imperial[1] organisation, was in practice the responsibility of Confederal or even provincial authorities, and lacked any single unified military command. Its officers were not considered part of the Royal Navy, and with good reason: they were as to trained fighting sailors as militiamen were to regulars on land. This was not usually a problem, as the PCS’ main role was to deter smugglers and illegal transporters[2], but it certainly illustrates that the PCS cannot credibly be claimed to be a precursor to the Imperial Navy. Besides, ex-RN ships under American command had been stationed in provincial ports ever since the 1760s, though under not even a theoretical unified command, and the PCS simply represented a refinement of this.

It may be that we cannot, in fact, simply point to a single date at which the IN came into existence, but one highly iconic moment was certainly the launch of HMS Enterprize (later retroactively altered to HIMS). Some scholars have scoffed at the populist sentiment surrounding the ‘myth’ of the Enterprize, but to do so is to miss the point. We are not Rationalists and this is not a Rational world. It matters little that a thousand tiny changes in law and alterations in naval policy contributed far more to the foundation of the IN than did one ship. It is what people remember that defines our past, and by extension, our future.

Enterprize’s own history is certainly worth examining. The first HMS Enterprize was a captured French craft, and thence descends the name, as do so many with a rich, incongruously British, history. L’Entreprise, a sixth-rate jackass frigate, was taken from her French captain by HMS Tryton in 1705, during the First War of Supremacy.[3] Renamed HMS Enterprize, she only survived for two years under the command of Captain Paul before being wrecked off the English coast, but the Royal Navy, in its fickle way, remembered the name. In 1709, a newly constructed British frigate, a fifth-rate, was given the name Enterprize. And a legend began.

Three more Enterprizes followed, each with its own log of adventures as thick as that of any Royal Navy ship. One was a captured Spanish craft, while the other two were British-built. The fifth HMS Enterprize was one of the Rifleman class of 28-gun sixth-rate frigates[4] and fought in the Second Platinean War under Captain Humphry Pellew, a Cornishman.[5] This Enterprize fought in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1783 and acquitted herself well, to the extent that the Gazette decided to focus on Pellew’s crew’s heroism rather than dwelling on the overall embarrassing tactical defeat for the Royal Navy. After minor repairs at the Gosport Shipyard[6] in Virginia, Enterprize was then reassigned for escort convoy duty for the transports carrying American troops down to fight in the Plate. Pellew chafed at this inglorious duty, and was relieved in late 1784 when he was released for freelance commerce raiding. In the latter stages of the Second Platinean War, it is considered that Pellew and his crew wrought sufficient havoc on the Franco-Spanish attempts to reinforce their troops by convoy that they may have shortened the war by months. For better or for worse.

But Pellew’s Enterprize is of course best known for the Battle of Falkland’s Islands (known as Batalla de las Islas Malvinas in the UPSA). In February 1785, months before the war’s end, a Franco-Spanish force commanded by Admiral Pierre André de Suffren de Saint Tropez successfully trapped Pellew near the leeward shores of the islands. Refusing all calls to surrender, Pellew and his crew fought on, outnumbered, against two French ships of the line, a Spanish frigate and another Spanish ship of the line. In the end the Enterprize was sunk, but not before she took down both the Spanish frigate and the French flagship by an astonishingly foolhardy boarding action. Before being captured by the French marines, Pellew managed to shoot Suffren himself at long range with a rifled pistol, killing one of France’s most gifted admirals. Many speculative romantics of the French persuasion have mused on how things would have turned out differently later if Royal France had had a man of his calibre rather than the dithering d’Estaing.

A new Enterprize was not launched for a number of years. Perhaps the Royal Navy thought that the name was unlucky after the vessel’s destruction, or perhaps that Pellew’s gallant last stand was too legendary to live up to. In any case, the name disappeared from the Royal Navy lists for over a decade, not surfacing even in the frantic shipbuilding period of 1785-1794 as the RN struggled to recover from its shock defeats in the Second Platinean War.

In truth, the circumstances of the French Revolution and the loss of much of the former French fleet to the Dauphin meant that Britain and the RN had little to fear, navally, from the Latin Republic – in the short term at least. However, shipbuilding continued right up to the signing of the Treaty of Caen with Republican France after the Seigneur campaign. At this point, the new Fox ministry cancelled many of the shipbuilding contracts, alienating elements within the Royal Navy but saving considerable funds for a populist campaign of cutting taxes and reducing the national debt. This, however, opened up a vacuum in the Royal Navy’s distribution.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, it had become apparent to the Lords of the Admiralty that the Royal Navy had to become a truly global force. Traditionally, the RN’s role was to dominate the English Channel and, to a lesser extent, the Atlantic coastal waters of France, Spain, and the British Isles themselves. A safeguard against invasion by the continental powers with their huge armies, as it had been since before 1588. However, as the century wore on, it soon became evident that naval warfare was just as important in other theatres of the world, and the Wars of Supremacy necessitated a greater Royal Navy presence elsewhere. Furthermore, William Pitt’s policies of merely holding back France in Europe – by paying the Austrians and Prussians to do it for the British and Hanoverians – was based on the idea of seeking to win longer-term colonial victories over the French and the Spanish. In India of course this was ultimately unsuccessful[7], because the battles were mostly fought on land rather than sea, and the French presence there was largely self-sustaining. However, in North America a powerful British naval presence was necessary to prevent French raids and to protect the valuable colonies in the West Indies, as well as to take French and Spanish islands there from their owners.

Given the economic value of the West Indies, it is unsurprising that the first British naval force to be explicitly stationed somewhere other than Britain herself was the West Indian Squadron, based in Jamaica. The Squadron’s duties were multiple: to combat piracy, to defend the British plantations, to warn off the Spanish attempts to prevent British trade with their own colonies, and, in the event of war, to transport redcoats to the Spanish- and French-held islands in order to take them away.

The Treaty of Amsterdam, which ended the Third War of Supremacy in 1759, saw those same valuable islands (such as Guadaloupe) returned to France after having been British-occupied during the war. Yet this was not such an unpopular diplomatic decision as had King William IV’s to return Louisbourg at the end of the Second War of Supremacy (which was one of the catalysts for the War of the British Succession). Everyone understood that, ultimately, it mattered little if France possessed those sugar plantations, if Britain’s Navy could cut her off from them whenever it pleased. The Royal French Navy, though respectable, had no bases outside Europe and lacked the Royal Navy’s long-range power-projection capabilities.

The West Indian Squadron was boosted by the creation of the American Squadron in 1780, a response to Franco-Spanish activity near the American Atlantic seaboard at a time when most of the Royal Navy was engaged in the South Atlantic or guarding against invasion at home. The American Squadron was based at Williamsburgh, the capital of Virginia, and soon royal charters were granted to open up subsidiary bases and shipyards in Boston and Charleston. Lewisborough in New Scotland was also converted into a base.[8] Most importantly, American shipyards were in 1789 granted the right to build new warships for the RN as well as merchantmen. The Royal Navy even placed a permanent admiralty post in each base comparable to the big British base at Malta, capable of giving new (American) recruits officer training and setting lieutenancy examinations.

Ultimately, the purpose of this plan was to support the Royal Navy’s painful rebirth in the wake of the defeats in the Second Platinean War. Letting the Americans look after themselves meant that the RN could focus on its primary objective of defending Britain. With the advent of the Jacobin Wars, this policy was altered somewhat. American shipbuilding was increased, with the intention of withdrawing fleet elements from the West Indian and American Squadrons and adjoining them to the Mediterranean Squadron and the Channel Fleet. This dated from a time when it was considered likely that the whole French Royal Navy would turn its colours and join the Revolutionaries. Due to the time it took for orders to cross the Atlantic, the plan was obsoleted almost by the time the Americans were reading it, but like all plans in such a crusty and conservative organisation as the RN, it soon had a momentum all of its own. Thus it was that, despite the fact that no ships were in fact removed from the American and West Indian fleets, and peace was signed in 1800, the American shipyards were still going at full capacity as late as 1805. The Royal Navy would eventually come to be thankful for this, but at present it was largely a piece of politics on the part of the ruling Constitutionalist Party, which favoured a more independent American foreign policy and saw – with more perspicacity than usual – that the American Squadron might one day signify control as well as geography.

However, this meant that at present, the Americans had more ships than they knew what to do with. Fortuitously, this came at the same time as a deepening crisis. In 1799, another ‘Jenkin’s Ear’ incident startled newspapers in London and especially Fredericksburg, despite the ongoing war with the Republic. Despite being allies, or at least cobelligerents, Britain and Spain were clashing in the Oregon Country in the north-west of North America, south of the Russian outposts in Alaska.[9] A small colony of British adventurers led by John Goodman had colonised Noochaland[10] in order to set up a new fur trade. That was the primary source of Russian interest in Alaska, and Noochaland was just as rich in that regard. Goodman’s men traded with the native Noochanoolth and Salish Indians, mainly for food, in exchange for the usual European trade goods. Their furs were mainly sold on via the Pacific islands, in which Goodman had a number of connections, having traded at the court of King Kamehameha of Kohala, who was seeking to unite the Hawaiian Islands under his rule at the tim. Kamehameha essentially served as an intermediary for Goodman’s goods to be passed on to the other islands, and ultimately to Europeans (via the Dutch and Portuguese in the East Indies and the Spanish in the Philippines). This helped finance Kamehameha’s own wars of unification, leading to the creation of a single Kingdom of Hawaii by 1804, and also sparked renewed interest in the central to north Pacific among several states. Not all of them were European: down in Autiaraux, the Mauré began to look back at the islands from which they can originally came, and pondered…

But Goodman’s activities also alerted the Spanish. The Viceroy of New Spain, Martín de Gálvez, was alarmed by British interest in a territory which was claimed by Spain according to the old treaties, even if it had never been colonised. He sent a mission under Admiral Juan Esteban Rodriguez, which arrested Goodman and occupied his colony. The Spanish authorities had always had problems distinguishing between official British actions and those of individual British citizens, unsurprising considering the fact that the British government unofficially sanctioned a lot of privateers and secret missions against Spanish rule in the Americas. Thus, even as the Republican French fought both countries, a crisis grew in North America.

The Rockingham Ministry was unwilling to act too strongly against Spain at a time when both countries were aligned against the Republicans. Thus it ultimately fell to the Americans to stake their own claim to the region. Britain had records of Sir Francis Drake possibly exploring the same earlier in the 16th century, having named it New Albion, but a ship needed to be sent to examine the territory in order to plausibly confirm this. It was also diplomats acting on behalf of the Duke of Grafton and James Monroe who eventually secured Goodman’s release, negotiating directly with Martínez. This diplomatic traffic between Fredericksburg and Mexico City was a sign of things to come, with London and Madrid being only peripherally involved. Goodman was released, but the Spanish remained in occupation of Noochaland and warned that British interference would not be tolerated. In response, the Americans – with the tacit assent of London – launched the mission of HMS Enterprize.

This sixth Enterprize was an American-built ship, from the same shipyard which had repaired her predecessor. Her construction incorporated many new innovations which might not have been approved by the more conservative Royal Navy establishment back in Britain. A fifth-rate, 36-gun frigate, she incorporated four of the new short-range carronades as well as a new design of bow-chaser with a rifled barrel, developed by the American gunsmith James Murray-Pulteney, a relative of Patrick Ferguson of the breech-loading rifle. She carried a crew of 247 men, under the command of Captain the Honourable George North, second son of the late Lord North, the former Lord Deputy of North America. George North had mostly grown up in Fredericksburg and thought of himself as a Virginian, and the rest of his crew was also largely American, although like any Royal Navy crew it had its share of eclectic personnel. We know from the detailed records surrounding the voyage that the Enterprize carried a Malay, a Chinese, three Guineans, two black freedmen from Pennsylvania, thirty-nine Britons, three Frenchmen, two Spaniards, five Indians of the American variety and two of the Indian. The penultimate was perhaps the most significant. Among the five Indians was John Vann, the son of the influential Cherokee leader James Vann, who was himself a cousin of the current Cherokee Emperor Moytoy IV Attaculla and essentially the Emperor’s chief minister.[11] The elder Vann, who like many Cherokee leaders had part-European ancestry, wanted his son to see more of the world and to learn about naval practice. Also, just as the Americans had a secret motive for wanting to learn more about the Oregon country, so did Vann and the Emperor of the Cherokee…

The Enterprize left Gosport Yard in April 1801. She carried aboard her the naturalist Andrew Sibthorpe, a rival of Erasmus Darwin II who had achieved fame for his exploration of the flora and fauna of the Great Lakes a few years before. Sibthorpe was determined to find even more extraordinary creatures and plants to present to the Royal Society.

Captain North proposed a leisurely course that would allow the Enterprize to ‘fly the flag’ for America in various ports – contrary to regulations, along with the White Ensign she flew the Jack and George. To that end, the Enterprize sailed pointedly through the Spanish parts of the West Indies, pausing in Havana in order to take on supplies. Sibthorpe, a noted Linnaean, wrote much-debated musings on how the new Carolinian colonists of Cuba were treating both the black slaves and the established Spanish hierarchy there, and how this fitted into Racialist philosophy, if at all.

The Enterprize crossed the Atlantic to briefly call in on the trade posts of the newly reinvigorated Royal Africa Company, in which Sibthorpe met Joseph Banks and discussed the prospect of a truly universal system of classification. The ship then moved on, spent a week in the friendly port of Buenos Aires in the UPSA, and finally rounded the Horn through the Straits of Magellan. It was only on the return voyage, contrary to what many textbooks state, that the ship landed on Tierra del Fuego and Sibthorpe wrote about the natives.

Finally, the Enterprize sailed north through the Pacific. The hostile policies of the Spanish Empire meant that she could not call in at those ports enroute, but that was no great hardship for a vessel commanded by Nantucket whalers who knew these waters like the back of their hand. The Enterprize called in at Lahaina, the capital of what would become the Kingdom of Hawaii, in which North met Goodman, who had made his way here after finally being released by the Spanish. Goodman was notably and vocally disappointed by North’s refusal to give a definitive answer on whether Britain would stake a claim to the region and restore him to his colony. It is for that reason, many historians believe, that Goodman and his compatriots (not all of whom were British) gave up on attempting to gain British or American backing for their trade project, and instead turned their attention to other sponsors…


[1] ‘Imperial’ in this sense has a similar meaning to ‘federal’ in the OTL USA, i.e. a national organisation defined and controlled by the central government. The counterpart is ‘Confederal’, referring to issues controlled by the governments of the Five Confederations.

[2] Illegal transporters = people who smuggle transported British convicts into the Empire, which has been illegal since the 1780s. Paid for by corrupt British justices of the peace who pocket the money from the Crown set aside for paying for the convicts’ official transport to one of the authorised penal colonies.

[3] The War of the Spanish Succession. Identical to OTL of course because it is before the POD, but is usually referred to by this different name in TTL.

[4] OTL this class, or its close analogue, was named for the Enterprize herself. Butterflies have resulted in the names reshuffling. Rifleman here is a reference to the Americans’ famed skill with the rifled musket.

[5] ATL ‘cousin’ of Edward Pellew…approximately. Note the Cornish spelling of Humphry.

[6] In OTL this was later renamed the Norfolk Naval Shipyard. It was established in 1767 in both timelines.

[7] But not in OTL.

[8] The former Louisbourg. In TTL there is no Halifax, as the French abandoned any attempt to put bases in Nova Scotia (New Scotland) as the Americans have put more effort into holding and colonising it relative to OTL. Although parts of the naval base mentioned here are actually closer to the site of OTL Halifax, the whole area is referred to vaguely as ‘Lewisborough’ by the RN.

[9] Increased Russian interest in its far eastern possessions in general, due to Lebedev and Benyovsky, means that the small Alaskan outposts are considerably larger and more developed by this point than OTL.

[10] TTL’s name for Vancouver Island. Note that the Noochanoolth are only one of several tribes there, but as usual they were the first one to be met by Europeans (in this case Goodman) and so the whole place gets named for them.

[11] Recall in TTL that the British attempt to set up a single Cherokee Emperor and unify the tribes (in order to use them more effectively against the French and Spanish, and so treaties signed with a single leader are honoured) has been markedly more successful, due to colonial governments not changing policy so often. However, this is rather more London’s definition of success than Charleston’s, as the Carolinians would have preferred more disunited Indians that they could easily push aside in order to settle their lands. As it is, the fact that the Cherokee are much more united in TTL gives even the most fiery filibusterer pause.



Interlude #7: Chauvinism 101

Captain Christopher Nuttall: Now that you two have rejoined us, perhaps we may move on to other matters.

Dr Bruno Lombardi (somewhat indistinctly): Eb, bir. We have the shpecial rebort to considber…

Dr Thermos Pylos: It is simply an illustration of how relatively minor alterations to our own timeline may –

Dr Bruno Lombardi: - in fact truly result in bajor rebercussions a few years down de line…dough I disagree wid my colleague’s obinion of de so-called ‘butterfly ebbect’…

Dr Thermos Pylos: Be quiet, or I’ll break your nose again.

Captain Christopher Nuttall (pointedly): Gentlemen...

Dr Thermos Pylos: Very well. Let us consider the life of one General Anthony St. Leger…


*

From – “A History of Doncaster” by Dr Stephen Utterthwaite (1963):

Anthony St. Leger was an Irishman, born in County Kildare in 1731 to a family of old Anglo-Norman extraction. As the fourth son and freed from responsibilities of being heir to the family lands, or being expected to enter the Church, he chose to join the Army after his education at Eton School and Peterhouse College, Cambridge. Towards the end of his Cambridge tenure, in 1752, St. Leger witnessed a parade through the streets of the university city by some of the American troops who had recently been instrumental in restoring King Frederick to his rightful place on the throne of Great Britain.

The parade was led by Sir William Pepperrell Bt., a man of Massachussetts who had commanded the successful siege of Lewisborough (then Louisbourg, a French fortress) in the American theatre of the Second War of Supremacy. It was this victory that had invested Frederick with the tide of public feeling he needed to launch his bid for power, as the exiled prince had capitalised on American outrage when King William handed the fortress back to France at the Peace of Aix-la-Chappelle. Pepperrell had then fought in Ireland against the Jacobites, and was by 1752 one of the King’s most trusted confidantes.

Pepperrell’s teenage son, also called William,[1] was a colour ensign in the informal regiment, which would eventually become the 51st (Massachussetts) Foot.[2] As they paraded down Trumpington Street, Pepperrell the Younger tripped on a cobblestone and dropped the King’s Colour he had been carrying. The embarrassment at such a potent image of Frederick’s somewhat illegitimate taking of the throne could have been tremendous. It is not hard to consider how the story could have spread and become a rallying cry for Williamites and Jacobites alike.

But the flag was snatched from the air by one of the countless students lining the street, a certain Anthony St. Leger, and quickly handed back to Ensign Pepperrell as he recovered. With a nod of thanks at a crisis averted, the ensign began a friendship that would change history…

After the parade, St. Leger met with young William Pepperrell in the Eagle and Child pub on Bene’t Street, the ensign buying him a drink in thanks. This meeting developed into a wider conversation, with some of the older and more experienced officers in the regiment – whether American-, Irish- or British-born, they had all fought in America – joining in. They filled St. Leger’s head with tales of the extraordinary things to be seen in the New World, and while he had already been considering the Army as a career, this sealed his decision.

St. Leger signed up to the 51st a year later, not long before the regiment was due to be shipped back to America. The failure to ratify the Treaty of Aix-la-Chappelle had resulted in icy relations between London and Paris, and the Diplomatic Revolution with Austria was looming on the horizon. Everyone knew that another war was only a matter of time, and Anthony St. Leger did not want to miss it. He entered the regiment as an Ensign, but immediately bought himself a promotion to lieutenant with his share of the St. Leger land rents. By this point William Pepperrell the younger had also risen to that rank, and the two of them served under Captain Timothy Bush, a man of Connecticut and commander of the Light Company.[3]

The 51st fought in the Third War of Supremacy in America, taking considerable losses: Bush was killed in the Battle of Fort Niagara in 1759[4] and St. Leger was promoted to replace him. Pepperrell the younger was also promoted, commanding the Second Company. The war came to an end in that year with the capture of Quebec and the Treaty of Amsterdam, but peace did not remain for long. When the First Platinean War broke out in 1763, St. Leger and the rest of the 51st were sent to assist the Georgian militiamen and British regulars in the conquest of Florida. By this point he had married Caroline Phipps, the daughter of Sir Spencer Phipps, William Shirley’s lieutenant-governor in Massachussetts, and she was with child. The campaign itself went fairly smoothly, but yellow fever and malaria cut swathes through the army, and though St. Leger himself survived, his pregnant wife fell victim to the fever and died in 1764.

Distraught and possessed with an inchoate fury at the world, St. Leger threw himself into his work with a fey vigour. When he learned that the 51st were to remain in Florida on occupation duty, he transferred out of the regiment to the first one which he knew would be sent to a war theatre: the 33rd Regiment of Foot (1st West Riding of Yorkshire Regiment)[5]. The 33rd was a bit of an enigma: having fought hard and won a battle honour on the field at Dettingen, the battle where King George II had been killed and Prince William had found himself William IV, it was suspected of Williamite sympathies. On the other hand, it was too well-organised and professional for King Frederick to think about disbanding it lightly: it was known as ‘the Pattern’ among army reformers for its men’s discipline, a model regiment for the others to copy. These two features, political unreliability and battlefield strength, were doubtless the major factors that resulted in the 33rd being sent to fight on the Portuguese front in 1765.

St. Leger arrived too late to participate in the unsuccessful Siege of Ciudad Rodrigo, but fought at Badajoz the year later. Although that siege was also a failure for the Anglo-Portuguese forces, he distinguished himself, slaying seven Spanish cavalrymen from atop a heap of his dead privates, firing off their loaded muskets one at a time, before finally clubbing the last man to death with the butt of an unloaded musket. It was this act of mindless violence that seemed to bring St. Leger back to himself and burn away a little of his fey battle-madness. He fought more sobrely the year later in Galicia, being promoted to Major and third-in-command of the 33rd, which was reduced by battlefield casualties.

At the end of the war, a still saddened but thoughtful St. Leger returned to England with the 33rd. He could not bring himself to ever look upon America again, associating it with the bittersweet loss of his wife, and had no desire to go back to Ireland. Instead, he settled down in the 33rd’s own home territory, the West Riding of Yorkshire, and eventually bought the Park Hill Estate at Firbeck, near Rotherham. There, he retired from the Army and spent his half-pay on his new hobby, horse-breeding. Having mostly lost his appetite for blood after Badajoz, he found this a new obsession to throw himself into to recover from the pain of his wife’s death. Despite not starting from particularly strong financial territory, by 1770 or so St. Leger was renowned for breeding some of the fastest three-year-old colts in the riding, the county – perhaps even the country.

St. Leger was fortunate in retrospect that in the 1770s the Kingdom of Great Britain’s Prime Minister, Charles Watson-Wentworth the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, was himself a son of the southern West Riding, his family owning the Wentworth Woodhouse estate not far from St. Leger’s. Whenever he tore himself away from the Westminster political scene, Rockingham would return to his northern home, and was interested in horse racing. Yorkshire lacked its own major sweepstakes, but St. Leger was nonetheless making money travelling the country in order to show off his colts. He became known as the “Irish Magician”, with satirists in the Yorkshire newspapers presenting him as a fay capable of enchanting his horses with fairy powers.

Lord Rockingham met St. Leger in 1772 and persuaded him to stand for Parliament as a Patriot Whig. St. Leger’s money and popularity meant that he easily topped the vote and was elected MP for Pontefract in the 1774 general election. St. Leger supported the policies of the Rockinghamite government and was also an advocate of granting greater powers to the Empire of North America. He was one of several British parliamentarians to participate in the direct negotiations that followed the Troubles of the 1760s, but unlike the majority was a moderate rather than a radical. St. Leger was instrumental in convincing the Parliament of Great Britain that the New Englanders would accept a single unitary confderacy; most MPs had thought this was not an option after the failure of such a venture under James II a century before.

However, St. Leger was arguably even more influential for Parliament when he was outside it. In 1776 he, Rockingham, and several other Yorkshiremen of influence met in the upper room of the Red Lion pub in Doncaster and proposed a new Yorkshire racing stakes to be based in the town, for three-year-old colts. Named the Rockingham Stakes[6] after the man who financed it, the race attracted a great deal of interest from all over the country, and eventually even farther afield. One of St. Leger’s horses predictably won the first Stakes, but soon he was facing stiff competition from breeders from every part of Great Britain, along with Ireland, France, and in 1782 he was surprised to be visited by Colonel Sir William Pepperrell the Younger, his former colleague in the 51st. Pepperrell, whose father had died in the 1760s, was now head of the regiment and offered St. Leger the lieutenant-colonelcy.

Although Pepperrell had brought a horse of his own to enter, by the 1780s the initial spark of interest in the race had waned, and St. Leger was becoming bored. He had finally married again in 1779, to Emily Lennox, the daughter of the Duke of Richmond. The Duke shared much with St. Leger, being a former Colonel of the 33rd, a Rockinghamite in Parliament, and supporting the parliamentary rights of the American Imperials. Although Emily gave St. Leger an heir, Charles St. Leger, and cemented the alliance between the families, St. Leger never truly loved her and was unable to let go of his longing for Caroline Phipps. He therefore experienced tension at home. For this reason, he jumped at Pepperrell’s offer.

When the Second Platinean War broke out, the 51st was shipped to the Plate and fought under General Sir George Washington, later 1st Baron Washington. St. Leger distinguished himself once more, winning himself a knighthood, and, unlike some of the British officers of his age stationed there, had not fought in the Plate on the wrong side a generation earlier. For that reason, he was often chosen as a representative to the Platinean revolutionaries. Both on the battlefield and in Buenos Aires, he learned that the Platineans were also interested in horse breeding, at least as much as the Americans: like the Americans, they possessed a country with grassy plains on which cavalry was king and the natives were restless. Thus, it is perhaps inevitable that when the war ended, Sir Anthony St. Leger returned to Britain with a cometary trail of intrigued Platineans in tow.

The new bloodlines from South America breathed new life into the Rockingham Stakes, even though Lord Rockingham himself had since fallen from grace thanks to the Royal Africa Bubble, and the amounts staked on the races rose dramatically as the rich and powerful entered their own colts. St. Leger was made a baronet in 1786, in recognition of how his work had made the Doncastrian economy boom and put both the town and the West Riding on the map.

He died in 1789, but what he left behind would change the world. For among those rich and powerful were, of course, many politicians: Rockingham’s name and interest drew in even more than would have come simply for the Stakes themselves. This only intensified when the aged Rockingham was called back to be Prime Minister once more in 1796, and it was in the 1790s that the fear of invasion ran high once more among the British people. Even though Revolutionary France had lost most of her fleet, the fear remained: men worried that the fleets of the Netherlands or Spain could fall into French hands if those nations were defeated by French armies on land. The latter prophecy came true, at least in part, after Rockingham’s death and peace had been made under Charles James Fox. Though the peace remained, few doubted it would last forever, and the idea of the Spanish fleet bringing the hardened French Republican hordes to British shores was not an idea that bore thinking about.

Thus, slowly, quietly, the Government – not Fox himself, who saw Lisieux’s France through rose-tinted spectacles, but the moderate Whigs and hardline Tories who provided his majority – began to invest in a new Army depot in the southern part of the North of England, near the geographic centre of the country. On paper, at least, it was simply an Army depot. In reality, it had rather more buildings than a mere military base would require, rather more investment, more defences for a place in the middle of the country…

There was a reason for all of this, of course. No matter what Fox thought, a French invasion was a real possibility, one day sooner or later. And if the French landed, they might well succeed in taking London. And if they took London, then Parliament and the King would need a secure place to decamp to while they continued to prosecute the war effort. A place far from the coast, so that in the nightmare scenario of the French ruling the seas, they could not land troops directly. Not a major city, but one with excellent transport links for communicating with the armies. A place which plenty of MPs knew well enough from their excursions north for the sweepstakes…

Thus, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, the village of Finningley, a few miles from Doncaster and just over the border with Nottinghamshire, played host to the construction of Fort Rockingham, named for the former Prime Minister. A fort designed not merely for recruitment and supply, but to serve – in time of the nation’s greatest peril – as an alternative seat of government… [7]







[1] OTL Pepperrell did not marry or have any children. That he did in TTL can be considered a butterfly of Prince Frederick’s activities in America upsetting the OTL political and economic tides.

[2] Called ‘Pepperrell’s Regiment’, this existed in OTL in the Seven Years’ War, not being formed until a few years after this. Like the other American regiment, Shirley’s 50th, it lost many men in the Seven Years’ War and was disbanded afterwards, somewhat upsetting the Americans. In TTL the prestige is such (and the war is shorter) that the two regiments survived, but are eventually renamed after the regions in which they were raised (Massachussetts and New Hampshire) in line with the county system used in the rest of the British Army.

[3] An ancestor of the OTL Bush political family, who in TTL joined the army raised by Frederick to prosecute his return to Britain.

[4] OTL Pepperrell’s Regiment had mostly been killed or captured by the French in a separate battle at this point; TTL, of course, the pattern of warfare is somewhat shifted.

[5] It wasn’t officially linked to the West Riding until the 1780s, but the writer is being a little anachronistic. In any case, the 33rd recruited mainly from the region long before this was officially recognised.

[6] In OTL of course it was simply called the St. Leger; they wanted to name it after Rockingham, but he refused, saying that although he had funded it, it was St. Leger’s idea. In TTL Rockingham is still Prime Minister at this point (in OTL he was in opposition) so not calling it after him is not really an option, prestige-wise.

[7] In the OTL Napoleonic Wars, this was based at Weedon in Northamptonshire. The more northerly location essentially reflects the paranoia of British parliamentarians about the unknown capabilities of French wonder weapons and whether they could overrun the South of England faster than they think. Well, that and the title of this interlude.
 

Thande

Donor
VOLUME TWO:
UNCHARTED TERRITORY










newrevbase2_words.jpg




When I was a little boy,
I wondered ‘what is Revolution’?

For all the children in the park
spoke of nothing else.

I asked my father and he said
“Revolution is an affront to human nature, a challenge to God and Kings!”

I asked my mother and she said
“Revolution is a sad tale of blood and suffering.”

I asked my brother and he said
“Revolution is the glorious overthrow of everything in the world that oppresses us!”

I asked my sister and she said
“Revolution will set us free.”

I was very confused
so I got out the big dictionary from over the fireplace

And I looked it up.

It said:

Revolution. Noun.
‘To go round in circles’.”



– Anonymous​












Part #51: Viennese Waltz

Mediatisation. Reorganisation. Call it what you will. For those of us who still remember those times, no sweet-sounding word could ever justify it. The days when an insane Empire turned on itself and opened the doors to the most barbarous work of conquest and force since the death of Tamerlane. Did Leroux truly lose at the gates of Vienna? It might have been better for the Empire if he had won.

– Pascal Schmidt, in an 1829 speech​


From – “Austria in the Jacobin Wars” by V.A. Rostopshchin (English translation)

Austria’s position for the campaign season of 1800 was an unenviable one. The nineteenth century dawned inauspiciously for the Hapsburg monarchy, which had already seen so many ups and downs throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth. From the humiliation at the hands of the Swedes in the Thirty Years’ War, to the successes of the War of the Spanish Succession, to the rise of Prussia in the War of the Austrian Succession, to the collapse of Prussia and the temporary restoration of a Holy Roman Empire worthy of the name after the War of the Diplomatic Revolution – Austria’s fate seemed impossible to predict from one moment to the next, though of course it did not prevent commentators from trying.[1]

Even within the Jacobin Wars, Hapsburg fortunes had risen and fallen with dizzying speed. After the limited successes of Mozart and Wurmser in the opening phases of the war, the defeats in Italy by Hoche, and then the unexpected unleashing of the War of Lightning under Leroux and Ney, anything seemed possible. When Mozart, to the cost of his own life, managed to stop Leroux’s army before the gates of Vienna, he secured the survival of the Hapsburg monarchy if nothing else.

Some speculative romantics may have written reams on the subject of what might have happened if the claimant Emperor Francis II had turned the full force of his remaining armies on the disintegrating French position in Germany; but let us not indulge ourselves in the pursuit of the ‘what-if’, thankless as it so often is. In any case, regardless of how dark Austria’s position had been prior to the Battle of Vienna, Republican France was still a new and strange enemy to face. Turkey, though…existing as a bulwark against Turkey was in many ways Austria’s raison d’être. The Hapsburgs defined themselves by opposition to the Ottoman Empire: everything else, whether Protestant rebellions in the Thirty Years’ War or the rise of Jacobinism, no matter how objectively serious a threat to Austria, could only be perceived as a sideshow to the court in Vienna.

Thus, when Sultan Murad V and his Grand Vizier Mehmet Ali Pasha sent troops into Austrian-held Bosnia as a demonstration of Constantinople’s might, to warn the Austrians off interfering as the Ottomans occupied the former Venetian Dalmatian territories, Vienna predictably overreacted. Emperor Francis II proceeded to undermine his own claim to his title by concentrating his armies on repelling the Turks, sending only desultory forces after the retreating French – which was, to put it mildly, not a popular decision among the people of the southern German states.

After Leroux’s death, the French army had split into two factions – the main body under the crazed radical Jacobin Lascelles, who retreated to Regensburg and declared a Bavarian Germanic Republic with himself at its head, and a smaller faction, mostly professional soldiers whose service dated from the ancien régime, northwards into Bohemia. The latter, known as the Cougnonistes after its former leader, Colonel Cougnon (treacherously slain by Lascelles) was now led by Major St-Julien, who upgraded himself to general and took command of the army.

The Cougnonistes occupied the town of Budweis and ran it as their personal fief throughout the winter of 1799, subjecting the local Czechs and Germans to military rule. St-Julien recognised Lisieux’s new regime once word of it reached his ears, but the Cougnonistes were too isolated either to help Paris’ agenda or be helped by it. Thus St-Julien contented himself with raiding the Bohemian countryside to feed his men, at first convincing himself that he was helping the overall war effort by harming Hapsburg possessions, but soon becoming disinclined to participate in the war at all, an opinion shared by his men. Some took local wives and settled down, losing their fighting edge as discipline broke down.

Others continued to raid. The Bohemian peasantry were terrified of the Cougnonistes, who were liable to turn up without warning and requisition their year’s harvest, leaving them to starve. However, no Austrian troops were sent to Bohemia – those which Francis did send to the German front were mostly focused on liberating the occupied parts of the Archduchy of Austria. The Diet in Prague, concerned about what had happened repeatedly in the past in Bohemia when the people became angered, hastily assembled a Czech militia and attacked Budweis in May 1800. The attack failed. St-Julien’s troops might have lost some of their fighting fitness, but barely-trained militiamen were no match for them. The Bohemian regiments of the Austrian army, ironically, were at that moment fighting for their lives against the Turks in the defence of Sarajevo, and were in no position to even desert and return home.

In the wake of that defeat, the Diet convened once more to discuss their options. The debate was hampered by the lack of a strong central authority. Empress Maria Theresa had, in 1749, undertaken reforms that had merged the Bohemian Chancellery with that of the Archduchy of Austria, appealing to the Hapsburg centralising instincts that had repeatedly provoked Bohemia into rebellion since the sixteenth century. Although the Diet had been left in place, its authority had been sapped, and without any royal ministers in place, there was no single executive to make decisions.

Eventually the Diet rallied around Jan Miler (also known by the German name Johannes Müller), who advocated a policy of appeasement. Essentially St-Julien and his men were paid off to restrict themselves to Budweis and not to raid any Bohemian lands – the payments were dubbed ‘Frankgeld’ by the more intellectual side of the British satirical press. The agreement was made in July and after that time the Cougnonistes only raided lands outside the kingdom, especially Saxony, as the Saxon army was fully engaged in the Second War of the Polish Succession against Prussia and its border with Bohemia remained undefended. This situation would continue for several years. Eventually, the Cougnonistes’ early rapacity was forgotten by the Bohemians, who for long afterwards viewed St-Julien through romantic eyes, as his men’s Saxon plunder ultimately made Budweis very rich. In any case, from the beginning, the Bohemian people were more angry with Vienna for failing to defend them than with the French for attacking them in the first place.

To the south, Lascelles’ still-disorganised forces were driven back by an Austrian army under Wurmser towards the end of 1799. By the turn of the century, Wurmser had liberated the prince-bishopric of Salzburg, which had been occupied by the French during the war. Just as the moderate Leroux had been unable to restrain his men when it came to the taking of Regensburg, so here part of the city of Salzburg had been burnt and the prince-bishop had been publicly executed by the chirurgien. At this point came Emperor Francis’ second great mistake, if his failure to respond effectively to the Cougnonistes was his first. Although 1799 had been the year of Austria being saved from what looked like certain destruction, it had also been a year of defeats on almost all fronts. He had sent Archduke Ferdinand’s army straight to Zagreb, ignoring his uncle’s protests that his men needed time to rest, recruit and recuperate after their march from Italy, and the battered veterans had failed to stop the Turks from taking Sarajevo. Desperate to stop his rule crumbling at this crucial stage, Francis searched for any positive news he could use to boost public morale. As well as sending troops under General Quasdanovich to occupy the northern parts of the former Venetian Dalmatia (unopposed) which the Turks had not yet reached, Francis declared the annexation of Salzburg to the Archduchy of Austria, purporting this as some sort of territorial gain and therefore victory.

This was almost universally acknowledged as a dangerous mistake even then, and much more so in retrospect. Any gain Francis made by trumpeting this as a minor victory was outweighed a thousand times by the blow he had dealt to the Imperial system. It had been worrying enough for the countless small states that made up the Empire that the Hapsburgs had been on the back foot and unable to defend them against the French hordes. Now, it seemed that even the Imperials had turned against the system of peace and stability they had long protected. Showing their true features. And if not even the Emperor saw anything wrong with snatching minor states and adding them to his personal domain, why should anyone else bother with any moral qualms?

This was the beginning of what was later termed the Mediatisation of Germany, a curiously bloodless term for what amounted to the half-dozen or so most powerful states tearing into their weaker neighbours and conquering them, always claiming that they did it ‘only to help protect them’. In truth the mediatisation proceeded in lands far away from any possible threat from the French. The Dutch and Flemish, who had begun occupying neighbouring Hapsburg territories and Imperial free cities long before this time in order to prevent the French legally sending armies into the midst of their separated lands, began officially annexing them. Charles Theodore of Flanders and the Palatinate proclaimed a single united state (usually called Flanders, though it had a more complex title) that included the former territories of the prince-bishoprics of Liège and Trier and the Free City of Cologne. He titled himself King of this state, finally stripping away any acknowledgement of the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor.

His ally to the north, Stadtholder William V, approached John George V of Saxony with a proposal. The Saxons were still fighting tooth and nail with the Prussians at the time, while the armies of the Dutch Republic were poised to take over the Saxon possessions in the Rhineland.[2] The Saxons and Dutch avoided war by hammering out the Treaty of Minden, which was signed in August of 1800. This transferred East Frisia and Cleves, the two Saxon territories which the Dutch most coveted, to the United Netherlands as provinces. In exchange, the other Saxon territories of Minden, Lingen, Mark and Dortmund were left untouched. The treaty also divided the Rhineland into spheres of influence, with the Saxons having influence over the eastern independent territories of Paderborn, Lippe and Westphalia, while the Dutch extended their influence over Bistum, Osnabruck and Münster. These lands were not annexed, but they were intimidated into customs unions and other subservient policies.

The Treaty of Minden was strongly opposed by the ‘Mittelbund’, the alliance of the Hessian states, Nassau and Würzberg, which soon became a rallying call for other small states throughout the Germanies. Although the Mittelbund could not take any direct action against the Dutch and Flemish due to the fact that it was fighting against Ney’s armies at the time, its protests did attract new members, including Waldeck, Wittgen and Eichsfeld.

The Flemish and Dutch actions also alarmed Britain, or at least that small part of British political society that actually remembered that the crown possessions still included Hanover. With a Prime Minister who openly endorsed the French Revolution and a King who had never even been to Hanover, the prospects of gaining direct British help did not look bright for the electorate. George II, or perhaps William IV, had been the last king to really defend Hanoverian interests at the Court of St. James, and things had gone from bad to worse for Hanover since the Second Glorious Revolution. The defeat of Prussia, Britain’s ally, in the War of the Diplomatic Revolution had resulted in Hanover being partly occupied by French troops, and these were only ejected at the Peace of Amsterdam when Britain traded back the French West Indian possessions. Another attempted French invasion during the Second Platinean War only failed because of the general state of disorganisation at the French high command in that era. Hanover’s army and institutions had been neglected by Britain’s King and Parliament both, and it showed.

Thus it was that during the Jacobin Wars Hanover was essentially ruled in all but name by William FitzGeorge (or Wilhelm FitzGeorg as he was often known), the Duke of Cambridge. He was the son of George FitzGeorge, an illegitimate son of King George II by a Hanoverian mistress, and had followed his father in pursuing a career in the Hanoverian army, eventually rising to the rank of general. Neither he nor his father had ever seemed a likely enough candidate to the throne of Great Britain to be worthy of forming a Williamite resistance around after Frederick won the War of the British Succession. George FitzGeorge had been born while King George had been on one of his many campaigns in Germany, and neither he nor his son spoke English very well.

Nonetheless, when the Treaty of Minden was signed, the British government was sufficiently roused to adopt its usual policy in such times – find the strongest state in Germany and pay it to beat all the others up until Hanover’s position was secure. This was more problematic than usual, however, as the two choices of the past, Prussia and Austria, were both beset by increasing difficulties. Saxony was on the rise but was embroiled in a war, and of course the British could hardly appeal to the Dutch and Flemish to defend against themselves. Eventually Fox’s foreign secretary, Richard Sheridan, appealed to Denmark. The Danes were attractive to Britain for the same reason as Prussia had in the 1750s: they appeared to be rising to a position of prominence, having defeated Sweden and restored a Scandinavian union as well as gaining more territory in Germany. Denmark had transferred Swedish Pomerania to its own control and had, as part of the price for assisting Russia in the Great Baltic War, acquired control over all the dukedoms of Oldenburg. Oldenburg, though technically separate from the crown of Denmark, then achieved a status similar to that of Schleswig and Holstein within the Danish monarchy.

The British move was calculated, but Sheridan failed to realise that the Danes were out for territorial aggrandisement in Germany themselves. William FitzGeorge could have told him, but communications between he and the British government had been even frostier than usual since the Double Revolution. King Johannes II was concerned that his acquisition of Sweden might stir resentment in Schleswig and Holstein against being part of some primarily Scandinavian empire. Johannes and his government thus wanted to gain more German lands, not out of simple greed, but in order to try and balance the numbers of German-speakers with those of Scandinavian languages and prevent dissent. They were not concerns that would have occurred to many European monarchs even twenty years before, but the French Revolution had opened the Pandora’s box that was linguistic and ethnic nationalism, and now no-one could close it.

Thus, Copenhagen accepted London’s cavalry of St George[3], nodded and smiled, and then turned around and began threatening the Mecklenburgs. As well as the other reasons, the Danes coveted ever greater control over the Baltic. Ultimately Johannes’ vision was for the Russians to be excluded from it totally, even driven from St Petersburg, and the sea to become a ‘Danish lake’, even as the Mediterranean had once been a Roman lake. This somewhat crazy dream could only lie years in the future, but the acquisition of Mecklenburg’s coast was a first step.

The two Mecklenburg states – Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Mecklenburg-Strelitz – rejected the crude Danish demands in October 1800. The Mittelbund proclaimed its support of Mecklenburger territorial integrity, though it could do little in practice if Denmark invaded.

In the end, the crisis was resolved at the Conference of Hagenow, when the Saxons, Mecklenburgers and Danes reached an agreement, of which more is told elsewhere. But the Hanoverians were appalled at the backfire of Britain’s foreign policy, and in the end William FitzGeorge began acting wholly independently, without recourse to either the British Government or King Henry IX (Elector Heinrich I of Hanover). He formed his own defensive league, the Alliance of Hildesheim, named after that prince-bishopric in which the treaty was signed. The Alliance was composed of Hanover, Brunswick, Hildesheim, Bremen and the Schaumburgs, and was closely allied with the Mittelbund. If William had dared, he would probably have formally joined the electorate and its allies to that entity in the first place, for the alliance between Hanover and Hesse-Kassel went back a long way. The Alliance and the Mittelbund worked together to resist further encroachment by other powers, whether they be the Danes, the Dutch or the Flemish. The fact that most such powers (except the Austrians and Saxons) were primarily non-German and their capitals lay outside the boundary of the Empire tended to associate the Mittelbund-Alliance with German patriotism, and ultimately German unificationism. After all, Pascal Schmidt began his career as a soldier in the Hessian army.

It seems astonishing to us now that the Austrians virtually ignored these dramatic developments, focusing on the Balkan front. After the failures of the last part of 1799, the campaign season of 1800 saw the built-up Austrian armies repel Dalmat Melek Pasha’s forces from the siege of Zagreb, but the Turks were left in possession of Bosnia and the vast majority of Dalmatia. Only Istria remained out of Constantinople’s reach, and even that was contested instead by part of Lazare Hoche’s new Italian Patriotic Army.

For 1801, desperate to break the stalemate, Emperor Francis ordered General Alvinczi to shift his army to Transylvania and attack Wallachia over the border. At first this may seem a quixotic move, but it was calculated to try and drag Russia into the war. The Russians were still recovering from their recent civil war, but Francis guessed that no Russian tsar could resist the opportunity to sweep in and take back Bessarabia and Moldavia if the Austrians moved into Wallachia.

Unfortunately for the Austrians, Emperor Paul had already decided on a more leisurely strategy for regaining Russian power in the regions that Sultan Abdulhamid II had extended Turkish influence into during the Russian Civil War. He had concluded that open warfare at this stage would only undermine his rule. He needed some years to cement it first before attempting anything ambitious. The Turks, of course, did not know this (though they suspected) and thus Paul’s ministers were able to wring a number of concessions out of the Ottomans in exchange for remaining neutral. The chief of these was a withdrawal of Turkish troops and influence from Georgia: this act repaid Paul’s debt to Bagration. For the present the Russians conceded the Ottoman presence in Armenia and in the Khanate of the Crimea. That could wait for another day.

His plan having failed, 1801 ended badly for Emperor Francis. The Turkish armies had ground to a halt, but they had already taken more than Sultan Murad had expected. Alvinczi’s army had occupied the northern half of Wallachia, but Alexandru Morusi, the Prince of Wallachia and Moldavia, had raised an army and fought back with Turkish assistance.

And for the Germans living under the Bavarian Germanic Republic, the future looked bleak. Lascelles was a man whose conception of revolutionary thought had not got past the part about watering the soul with impure blood. The rapacities of the Cougnonistes were mild in comparison to what was inflicted and unleashed upon the people of Bavaria, the Upper Palatinate and those parts of the Archduchy of Austria which were still occupied by the French. Lascelles’ men murdered without compunction anyone suspected of having any noble blood – and in the Holy Roman Empire, scarce less than in Poland, that could be almost anyone. Desperate to escape such a fate themselves, the Germans turned on each other, claiming their neighbours were the illegitimate great-great-grandnephew of a ritter born in 1621. Some said (in hushed voices) that the drains of Munich saw more blood than water drain through them in those dark years. And Lascelles took racialist theories to even greater depths than Lisieux, who he rejected, arguing that the Germanic races were sub-human and it was the task of the Latins to reverse the mistakes of history (i.e. the Germanic invasions of the Roman Empire) and reduce them back to their ‘correct’ state of barbarism.

Such a murderous regime could not last forever, not even if its populace had been thoroughly cowed. Rebellion was inevitable.

And so we come to the man remembered by history, simply, as Der Führer…








[1] The Russian writer Rostopshchin, of course, does not use the English ‘war of supremacy’ terminology coined by George Spencer-Churchill.

[2] Acquired from Prussia after the War of the Diplomatic Revolution.

[3] A poetic term for the gold guineas that Britain supplied as payment to its continental allies, because the coins bore the image of St George slaying the dragon.

Part #52: The Arandite Plan

From – “And the Sun shall Rise in the West” by P. D. de Veers (1951):

When the man who was named – depending on whom you asked – the Infante Charles, King Charles IV of Spain, or Traitor – fled into the west from Corunna, his initial plans were relatively simple. As his chief minister Miguel Pedro Alcántara Abarca de Bolea, the Duke of Aranda, had advised him, there was the possibility of gathering forces in Spain’s New World colonies in order to attempt a reconquista at a later date. Trying to stand against the French at the present, it was clear, was suicide. Not only was Jean de Lisieux’s France a far greater military power than Spain – Spain, the old decaying former superpower halfway through military reforms and muddled all the more because of it – but only half of Spain, at best, would fight for Charles. Though pockets of Carlistas remained and some of these remnants allied with Portugal, the bulk of Spain supported the claimant King Philip VII, and French troops were there to make sure they stayed supporting him.

Some historians have claimed that Charles IV or Aranda had the same perceptive insight into Lisieux that is often attributed to Peter IV of Portugal. This is questionable. Peter’s information on Lisieux ultimately came from the Portuguese spy network in Paris, which was second to none – after all, Portugal, distant, not too powerful, and not really a traditional enemy of France, was low down on the list of the Garde Nationale’s list of countries to watch out for. While even skilful British or Austrian spies were uncovered and tortured by the Garde (along with many innocent Frenchmen and foreigners alike), the Portuguese were often capable of slipping by. Peter’s source is sometimes said to be François Bleuel, one of Lisieux’s secretaries, who was supposedly blackmailed by a Portuguese controller after his unnatural sexual activities were uncovered. This would have been a particularly deadly revelation in Lisieux’s France, in which anything that impeded reproduction of the pure Latin race required, in Lisieux’s bloodless term, revision.

Regardless of this, it seems doubtful that Peter would share much of his knowledge of Lisieux with Charles. The two never met, their emissaries spoke only briefly and Peter did not see Charles so much as an ally as an opportunity. Supporting the Carlistas in Spain would help provide a buffer against a French attack on Portugal, but it would also weaken Spain herself: both were in Portugal’s national interests.

So it seems to be simply a lucky accident that Charles’ plan was less hopeless than it at first seemed. It was not until September 1803, two months after Charles’ fleet sailed from Corunna, that Lisieux published his Nouvelle Carte in the wake of La Nuit Macabre. Charles could not have known that French interest in Iberia would not be permanent. Regardless of all this, his fleet arrived, at last, in the port of Veracruz in October. It had been a peaceful crossing and all the ships had remained together, yet morale had dropped into the bilges. The men knew that they were coming to Mexico not as conquistadors, as Cortes had almost three centuries earlier, but as the remnants of a defeated army.[1] Charles was well aware of this and did his best to counteract it: as soon as they had reached Veracruz and been welcomed by the local alcalde[2] he declared a day of feasting to celebrate their triumph over adversity, comparing it to the escape of Pelagius of Asturias from the Battle of Guadalete. This was the battle of unnumbered tears, the defeat of the Visigothic rulers of Spain and the death of King Roderick that had ushered in centuries of Muslim rule. Yet Pelagius had escaped, Charles reminded his men, founded a Christian kingdom in Asturias, and ultimately begun the long reconquista of Iberia.

Of course, that reconquista had taken seven hundred years. It was to be hoped that this one might be a little more rapid.

The alcalde of Veracruz was rather relieved when Charles declared his intention to go to the City of Mexico as soon as possible. As with all sailors released from routine and duty after a long voyage, the crews of Charles’ nine ships had wreaked havoc on Veracruz’s port districts and some way beyond. While Veracruz repaired itself, Charles and Aranda led their men on an overland march to the City. They marched at a leisurely pace, wanting for word of their coming to spread before they arrived. While they did so, and when they commandeered villages and towns to rest in along the way, Charles took counsel with Aranda and his brothers.

For all four of the other Infantes had thrown their lots in with Charles, some of them early on, others later when Philip declared all his brothers enemies of the state. Antonio, Ferdinand, John and Gabriel all had ideas of their own about what to do, and Charles knew he had to give them a voice in his notions if he were to retain their support. Possessing it would grant him a powerful tool of legitimacy against Philip, and besides, some of his brothers had talents worth having. Gabriel, despite being the youngest at the age of just twenty-six, had commanded troops during Cuesta’s abortive invasion of France and was an outspoken proponent of the slow and much-debated military reforms in Spain. Antonio had always had a grand if somewhat mad scheme for a great North African crusade, complete with plans from Ferdinand and Isabella’s book about how to rule over Morocco and Algiers by swamping them with Spanish settlers. It is suggested that he was inspired by the Anglo-American “policy of dilution” adopted in New Scotland and Canada. John was considered the best orator of the family, while Ferdinand was a quiet, hard-working prince who would probably have been better off if he had been born as a civil service bureaucrat.

However, none of the royals’ ideas could compare to those of the Duke of Aranda. His father had ultimately played a part in them, but Aranda took them further. Neither of the two had ever actually been to Spain’s colonies in the New World – those that had, like Saavedra, sometimes pointed out flaws in their plans for the region. But sometimes courageous plans born of ignorance of the facts can triumph over the predictions of the informed and the rational. If this were not the case, war and politics would have no excitement.

Charles’ host finally arrived in the City of Mexico in early December, as the people of the City celebrated the Feast of St Nicholas. Charles encamped his men outside the City and went in to meet the Viceroy, Martín de Gálvez. Gálvez was a competent administrator, but one who had gotten used to having his own way in a big part of the world due to being the uncontradictable lieutenant of an absolute monarch who was conveniently never there to watch what he was doing. The Viceroyalty of New Spain, as it was termed in those days, essentially also ruled over the captaincies-general of Guatemala, Yucatán, and the Philippines. It could be considered that Gálvez, despite being only a viceroy, was one of the more wide-ranging rulers in the world.

He was also one used to things staying the same and remaining in comfortable rows of figures. Gálvez had been credited for his cool-headed response to the encroachment of the British adventurer John Goodman in Spanish-claimed territory in Noochaland. As usual he had taken matters into his own hands, dispatching Admiral Rodriguez to arrest Goodman and negotiating directly with Fredericksburg without getting either London or Madrid directly involved. That coup had been four years ago and it had, most thought, ensured that Gálvez would remain in his position until his death.

Now, however, Gálvez’ comfortable world was crashing down around him. Charles, whom he acknowledged as the legitimate heir of Spain, had fled the country. The country was conquered in all but name. As with the rest of the Spanish Empire, the elite of the City of Mexico was composed chiefly of peninsulares, men born in the Peninsula[3], and this shock resounded throughout all Spanish America as soon as the news got out.

It was also heard far beyond, in America that had never been Spanish, and in America that had been Spanish until recently. In the latter, in particular, it was considered highly…interesting.

The Viceroy did not disagree with anything the man he acknowledged as his rightful King said. He concurred with the idea that Spain must be reconquered, and he accepted that it was a good idea to recruit a new army in the colonies. He assented that he would do everything in his power to aid this goal. He went on agreeing with everything right up until the moment when the King informed him that his office was to be abolished.

That got Gálvez’ attention. But before he could protest, the Duke of Aranda explained: this was a perfect time to reform the colonial administration, which was in many ways still stuck in the sixteenth century from which it had been born. The previous reforms after the Second Platinean War were too limited, too cautious. A bold plan was needed. And the scheme of the Duke of Aranda and his father – as it soon became known, the “Arandite Plan” – was that plan.

Hours later, the three of them emerged from the Palacio de Virrey[4] with the bolder strokes of the scheme agreed upon. In truth only Gálvez’ inherent cautious conservatism stopped him from endorsing the plan more wholeheartedly. After all, he would no longer be Viceroy under the new regime, but he would have a better title: that of Secretario Imperial de Estado de Nueva España

The plan was reworked upon consultation with the other Infantes and with certain important political and church figures from the colonies, in particular the Captains-General of the other lands ruled from the City. Some of the latter, in particular, were unhappy with Aranda’s ideas, but were placated with being given more impressive roles and titles in place of their existing ones. The Captain-General of the Philippines demanded a fuller status than his domain eventually received, to which Aranda replied sweetly that such status would be entirely forthcoming if only the captain-general agreed to dwell in Manila.

He withdrew his objection.

Though wild rumours spread throughout the viceroyalty of the earnest talks being held in the Palacio de Virrey, the people of the City were not informed of their content until December 26th, the Feast of St Stephen, which was ever afterwards the national day. On the day before, the people had celebrated Christmas, with King Charles taking Mass in the Cathedral Metripolitana in the Plaza de Armas, the main city square (Plaza Mayor). Now, a gathering of a more secular kind was held in the Plaza, though many eyewitnesses said afterwards that its undertones had such sacred moment in the history of the land that they might as well be religious.

A platform, in a part of the square later known as ‘the plinth’ (El Zócalo) was erected, and the Viceroy stood atop it with the King, the four Infantes and the Duke of Aranda. Before him stood the wealthy and important, yet beyond them were the great masses of the people, all eager to catch a glimpse of King Charles. It was the first time in history that a King of Spain had actually visited his New World possessions. The drastic circumstances of that visit were, at least temporarily, ignored.

Gálvez gave an introductory address that was not especially well-managed or –remembered, then gave way for King Charles, the Duke of Aranda and the Infante John, who spoke in turn. The words they said would have repercussions far beyond the Americans.

The Arandite Plan, which was given the name “Imperial Constitution”, was expounded to the people of the land which had, until that moment, been known as the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Yet that name had fallen out of popular use, forgotten as vague and undefined, and most of the people called their country Mexico.[5]

Now, King Charles declared the abolition of the Viceroyalty and all the Captaincies-General, and the people stared, as dumbstruck as Gálvez had been. The Infante John explained. He spoke of the great pride that the King held in his loyal Colonies, of the need to pull together in the great cause of liberating the motherland, and the bestowing of a blessing upon the New World in recognition of its faithfulness in the face of temptation. He compared the loyal colonies with the temptations of Christ, with the UPSA cast in the role of Satan, and then linked the UPSA ideologically to the Republican French who had conquered Spain. It was a masterful speech and touched most of those who heard it, raising their blood.

Aranda handled the details of the plan that had, in its basics, originated in his father’s head. A new state would emerge, an Empire of the Indies (later to become the Empire of New Spain out of common usage) which would cover all Spanish lands in the New World. This state would be held to be coeval with the Kingdom of Spain herself, or nearly so. In addition to his title of King of Spain, Charles took the title of Emperor of the Indies. So far, one might say that he was influenced mainly by Frederick of Britain.[6]

Yet he went further, pointing out that the new Empire was far too large for a single centralised administration to properly govern it all. Thus the Empire was divided into three parts: the Kingdom of Mexico, extending from the claimed lands in Noochaland down to San Cristobal; the Kingdom of Guatemala, from there to Panama and including the Philippines and the remains of the Spanish West Indies; and the Kingdom of New Granada, covering all the remaining loyal lands in South America. Charles appointed three of his brothers to be the first Kings of these new kingdoms: Antonio for Mexico, Ferdinand for Guatemala, and John for New Granada. Gabriel was left without a throne, but Charles declared him Generalissimo of the Nuevo Ejército, the ‘New Army’ which would retake Spain from the French using reformed training and new ideas.

It is difficult in retrospect to consider what the immediate response to the speeches were, given the mythic proportions that day has grown to in the New Spanish national consciousness. Indeed perhaps there were many who could not see what good the reforms did for them, and the conservatives who saw only dangerous change. Yet the people lifted their voices in acclamation: both those who loved their King for what he was, and the liberal forces who praised his reforms and feared the dark side of the popular revolution that would be the only other way to get a more equitable land to live in.

And so on that day, on December 26th 1803, the colonies of Spain in the “Indies” of Columbus ceased to exist. The empire had become its own Empire, with its own Emperor and kings, and made it clear that it owed no allegiance to the pretender sitting in Madrid with a French bayonet at his throat. God had granted the New World to Spain in gratitude for the Reconquista, it was said: now the New World would have to repay that debt by performing the Reconquista once more.

Indeed that prophecy was entirely true – but it was not the kind of Reconquista they were expecting…

As soon as the news reached Cordoba, plans were already being drawn up to take advantage of it. This was an opportunity which President-General Castelli had been dreaming of. The Partido Solidaridad’s dominance of the Cortes Nacionales was such that there would be no holding back. Castelli took time to prepare, of course, but on July 24th 1804, the United Provinces of South America declared war on the ‘unrecognised regime’ to her north.

It was time, as Castelli put it in a fiery speech, to free the brothers in bondage from the shackles of the King.

No-one could know the outcome of this clash between two very different ideologies for reforming the governance of the New World.

In a certain philosophical way, in the long run, they both won.

In the more immediate way that is of relevance to the people of the world, somebody lost.









[1] The use of “Mexico” here is somewhat of an anachronism by the author.

[2] Mayor.

[3] Though less so than OTL. Spain increased the powers of the Audiencias and relaxed the casta system after the Second Platinean War, essentially an appeasement to discourage still-loyal colonies from joining the UPSA in rebellion.

[4] OTL this is now the National Palace of Mexico. The present building dates from the 1690s.

[5] A bit of an exaggeration on the part of the author.

[6] But inaccurately – the Arandite Plan is one indeed drawn up by the Count of Aranda (who in our timeline did not have any children) in OTL.


Part #53: Three Stripes of Neapolitan

“Tactics? I say damn the tactics, sir! FULL SPEED AHEAD!”

- Admiral Horatio Nelson​

*

From – “MIDDLE SEA: A History of the Mediterranean – Volume VI: The Jacobin Wars” (Oxford University Press, 1976):

Horatio Nelson first came to Naples in 1789, when he was still first lieutenant of HMS Raisonnable – though he would soon be made post and given the new fourth-rate frigate Habana. The Raisonnable had been patrolling the Mediterranean, guarding British shipping around Malta from Algerine piracy and sending a signal to Britain’s then enemies, Bourbon France and Spain. Although the cause of the Platinean rebels had emerged triumphant from the Second Platinean War with British help, the shock defeat of the Royal Navy at Trafalgar by the Franco-Spanish fleet weighed heavily on everyone’s minds. The Portland-Burke Ministry had reacted by ordering fleets of new and improved ships from the shipyards of Chatham, Blackwall and Portsmouth, but for the present the Admiralty was determined to recover the honour of the Navy by waving the flag in the enemy’s face.

So it was that when the Raisonnable called into Naples the city on August 15th, politics was always present behind the appearances. The Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, ruled by Charles VI and VIII (the second son of Charles III of Spain)[1] were no less Bourbon than France or Spain. However, Naples had chosen to remain neutral in the recent conflicts – wisely considering how many times it had changed hands since the start of the century – and Sir Richard Hamilton, the British minister to the Neapolitan court, was doing his best to steer the kingdoms into a more anglophile policy. Splitting off Naples from France and Spain would be a British foreign policy coup and would significantly relieve the pressure on the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet. The loss of Minorca during the Third War of Supremacy was still acutely felt: Malta was now the RN’s only major base in the Mediterranean.

The task of Captain Robert Brathwaite was to use his ship of the line to impress upon the minds of the Neapolitans that Britain was still the predominant naval power. In this he was partially successful, but the Raisonnable had another effect: perceiving that Naples’ own navy was somewhat outdated and outclassed by the larger and heavier-gunned ships of Spain, Britain and France, King Charles decided to implement a naval renewal programme. In this he might have been unsuccessful, save for the fact that his formerly domineering wife, Maria Luisa of Parma, had died two years earlier.[2]

Charles was well aware that Naples did not have the resources or manpower to truly match the great powers’ navies, but his thought was that at least a few large sail ships of the line, as opposed to the present force which relied mainly on galleys, might be enough to persuade the great powers that attacking Naples was slightly more trouble than it was worth. He was determined to continue his policy of neutrality, safeguarding his throne from any future Austrian intervention – as had happened during the First War of Supremacy, and the kingdom had been an Imperial possession until the First War of the Polish Succession, twenty years later. By focusing solely on Italy, he hoped to advance foreign-policy goals that centred around minimising the influence of expansionist Piedmont, the transfer of Parma from Spain to Naples, and eventually ejecting the Hapsburgs from Tuscany. Of course, in the event all these plans were rudely defenestrated by the intervention of the French Revolution a few years later.

However, it was on this trip that Nelson first entered the city of Naples and encountered Sir John Acton. He was a fellow Englishman and a fellow sailor, but had spent most of his life fighting under the flags of France, Spain or Tuscany against the Barbary pirates. Acton had distinguished himself in an attack on Algiers in 1775 – though, as with all such successful attacks, the pirates seemed to rise from the ashes and resume their own raids a few years later. The operation had earned him a privileged place, and eventually Charles had tempted him away from Tuscany in order to engage in reorganising the Neapolitan navy. Nelson was at first repelled by the idea that such a fighting Englishman would spend his time with foreigners rather than serving his country in a time of war, but was soon won over by Acton’s tales of his battles and, in particular, his monologues on galley warfare. This was one area in particular in which Nelson had had problems since arriving in the Mediterranean, but based on Acton’s knowledge – conveyed over a table at a court dinner in the Caserta Palace – soon led to Lieutenant Nelson’s keen mind proposing new ideas and tactics to tackle the piracy. Acton was impressed, and attempted to lure Nelson away from the Royal Navy with promises of a highly paid career, but the stubborn patriot was offended and decamped from the city soon afterwards.

Nelson was soon to return though, initially in 1792 aboard his new command Habana. On this visit, as well as reaching a rapproachment with Acton – who was by now de facto prime minister under Charles – he became acquainted with Charles’ daughter Princess Carlotta, who remained unwed: her father was still considering his options in a diplomatic marriage. Just what passed between the princess and Nelson remains debated, but it is certain that she began to argue his corner in the court.

By the year 1800, in which Nelson resigned from the peacetime Royal Navy and finally came to Naples to take Acton up on his offer, the kingdom’s navy had been considerably improved. As well as the ships of the line that had been built, the fleet had been swelled by a number of galleys and galliots from the navy of the Republic of Venice, which had fled the rape of its home port and mostly ended up in Neapolitan Bari.[3] The Venetian commander, Admiral Grimani, had pledged the support of his ships to Naples if Charles promised to fight to liberate Venice. Although Charles liked to entertain the idea of doing so (and then, of course, keeping the Terrafirma on a tight lead as a puppet state) Naples was in no position to consider such a thing. Though still protected behind the Papal States and Tuscany at this point, the kingdom and its people knew their number was up. Lazare Hoche’s Italian Republic, after chasing the Austrian army of Archduke Ferdinand all the way to the Brenner Pass, had turned its attention once more to the south.

Grand Duke Carlo of Tuscany, in support of his fellow Hapsburgs, had sent an army that liberated Lucca, Modena and Mantua from Hoche’s rule while the latter’s army was engaged in the north. That could not be tolerated. Starting in August 1800, Hoche attacked the Tuscan-occupied regions and, by the end of the 1800 campaign season, had driven the Tuscans from them. However, in the process he had sustained considerable casualties, and thus 1801 was the first year to see newly raised Italian regiments fighting alongside his French veterans. The Italians bore a green version of the Bloody Flag with an inverted fasces, and soon the flag of the Italian Republic became a red-green vertical bicolour in recognition of this.

The Tuscans appealed for help from Naples, and Charles hesitated. On the one hand, fighting in someone else’s country was always better than fighting in your own, as would assuredly happen if Tuscany was conquered; on the other, the last thing he wanted was for his own army to become trapped and encircled in Tuscany, leaving Naples itself undefended.

In the end he chose the latter option, and Tuscany faced the Neapolitans alone. The Tuscans fought hard, knowing the fate of Piedmont and Venice, but in the end succumbed. By August 1801, Hoche was standing in the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence and being acknowledged as rightful ruler of Tuscany. The conquest of the southern half of the country followed more slowly, as the Tuscan army faced more and more of Hoche’s Italian recruits, who were green in more ways than one. Yet the idea of a united republican Italy was nonetheless a rallying cry, for all the darkness of Venice. The fact that Hoche had distanced himself from the excesses of Robespierre and Lisieux also helped. Girolamo Acciaioli, a veteran in Hoche’s Italian brigades, later reflected: “It was not truly for a cause that we fought, or at least none save the wide-eyed idealists. But nor was it for the cynical things, pay, loot, women. It was for Hoche. His charisma…it was like a shared delusion, you felt that you could march anywhere. To Calabria. To Paris. To the moon.”

By the start of 1802, the Tuscan army and their Grand Duke had retreated to the port of Follonica, and were pocketed there by Hoche’s Franco-Italian armies, which laid siege to the town. To their backs was the sea. The Tuscan fleet remained loyal and fought a pitched battle, the Battle of Elba, with Hoche’s own ships, which were mostly drawn from what had been the Republic of Genoa. The Tuscans emerged victorious, but it was a Pyrrhic victory, with too few undamaged ships to evacuate much of the trapped army.

It was at this point that Naples intervened, partly on Nelson’s insistence. His patronage by Princess Carlotta had helped him reach a high position in the court’s favour, and indeed it could be said that in truth the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily were now run by three Englishmen: Acton, Hamilton and Nelson. Native Neapolitan politicians, jealous of this favour, attempted to whip up popular sentiment against three foreign heretics being endowed with such power. In this, however, they were largely unsuccessful: Naples’ own political elite were mostly disciples of Bernardo Tanucci, strong Enlightenment anti-clericalists whose ideas were unpopular with the common people.

Nelson argued that the Tuscan army could supplement Neapolitan fighting force like the Venetian fleet had. Acton agreed and persuaded King Charles to authorise it. On 4th February 1802, the Neapolitan fleet under Nelson sailed unopposed into the battered harbours of Follonica and evacuated what remained of the Tuscan army, including Grand Duke Carlo. Hoche’s forces, who had half suspected something like this, tried to drive off Nelson’s force using shore batteries armed with hot shot. Although two Neapolitan galleys were burned, Nelson’s Siracusa was able to silence the batteries by a swift descent upon the cove and an attack by marines – one of Acton’s introductions to the Neapolitan navy which Nelson had then refined. The result was both that most of the Tuscan army was successfully brought back to Naples, and that Nelson’s reputation was cemented into popular imagination. His ego doubtless helped. Here was a man who could challenge Lazare Hoche on his own ground.

Uncharacteristically, Hoche used 1802 as an opportunity to ask for assistance from Paris. Although he still officially refused to recognise Lisieux’s regime, the Italian and French Republics had been growing closer together once more since the Treaty of Savoy and the partition of Switzerland. Hoche demanded new, trained French troops, arguing that he was expecting a renewed attack from Austria and needed additional troops to both defend against it and to hold down the rebellious countryside. Lisieux was suspicious of Hoche’s intentions, but recognised that a collapse of the Italian Republic would remove a useful buffer state for his plan to isolate France from the rest of Europe, and so sent Hoche perhaps a third of what he had asked for.

It transpired that Hoche had, of course, been lying through his teeth. Although an Austrian attack did come over the Brenner Pass in 1802, it was a decidedly half-hearted affair and easily beaten back by some of Hoche’s more experienced Italian troops. Just as well, for that was all that he had left in Tyrol. The bulk of his army, both his French veterans, his Italian recruits, and the new troops from Lisieux, was assembling in Tuscany.

Ready for a thrust against the Papal States.

The resulting war could fill a book by itself, for all its brevity; Rome burned in November. Hoche had surmised that his Italian troops might be reluctant to attack papal institutions, and so had requested troops from Lisieux. He knew – though he had not foreseen La Nuit Macabre – that Lisieux was trying to get rid of his Sans-Culottes, and thus the troops he had received were among the most fanatical Jacobins there were, on a part with Lascelles’ army in Bavaria. They would have no compunctions against attacking the Church; indeed, they would revel in it.

Hoche’s argument was perfectly accurate, but he had perhaps not thought through the consequences. Contrary to the usual more civilised way of war in verdant Italy, the new Jacobin troops practiced la maraude and terrorised the countryside. Churches and town halls were burnt, with priests and local mayors and nobles hanged or beheaded in the street.

In a move that has been later criticised, King Charles again hesitated and did not intervene in the war until Ancona and Civitavecchia had already been taken. Neapolitan-Tuscan forces marched to war in October, but it was already too late; by the time they entered Latina and glimpsed the spires of the Eternal City in the distance, they were on fire.

Indeed Hoche’s Jacobin horde had torched the city of Rome rather than attempting to besiege it. Hoche himself was, at the time, in Bologna, supervising the new Italian regiments coming down from the former Venetian Terrafirma, and did not witness the atrocities. It is certain that he would have been there if he could have been, for such a politically and strategically important phase of the war, but he had underestimated just how fast the Jacobins, using their War of Lightning doctrine, could go.

Facing the destruction of all he held dear, the aged Pope Benedict XV attempted to flee the city, but was recognised in the street. The Jacobins fought a pitched street battle in the burning ruins of Rome with the Swiss Guard, and finally emerged triumphant. Benedict XV was beheaded beneath the pillars of what was left of the Temple of Vespasian in the Forum, mere hours before that too crumbled before the flames sweeping through the city. Perhaps one-third of the College of Cardinals escaped the conflagration: the Church lost not only its leader, but a large part of its administrative apparatus. In the resulting confusion, Jansenist movements such as the one in the UPSA profited from the lack of a central directing voice.

Hoche was furious when he learned of the holocaust. Nothing could have been calculated better to provoke outrage against him from all Italians and Catholics, including those in his own army. Always paranoid, he even suspected Lisieux of having engineered this on purpose. Yet, though Hoche’s army was undoubtedly weakened by the defection or desertion of parts of his Italian regiments after the Rape of Rome, we should not thus undervalue the courage of the Neapolitan-Tuscan army. Starting with the Battle of Frosinone in February 1803, the Republican armies were halted, and then driven back. An attempt by Hoche himself to drive into Neapolitan territory was defeated at Teramo, though when the Neapolitan general attempted to press his advantage, Hoche successfully withdrew his army and held his position against attack at Ascoli Piceno. He remained perhaps the finest general of his generation, even when his political position was wobbling dangerously.

Nelson approved of Hoche’s difficulties, but now had a warning for the court in Caserta. He pointed out that the French had taken Minorca from Spain under the conditions of the Peace of Cadiz, and that the steam fleet of Admiral Lepelley was in dock at the base there. Though the Neapolitans were slowly grinding on in the north, their whole army (and that of Tuscany in exile) was committed. If the French used their steam navy to transfer troops from Spain and land in Calabria or descend on Salerno, the Neapolitans would have little to stand in their way.

Nelson further pointed out that there was a way around this. The French fleet at Minorca must be…neutralised.

On the face of it, it was an absurd suggestion, even for him. The Neapolitan fleet had so far managed to remain almost undamaged throughout the Wars, but despite Nelson’s training improving the standard of the crews, it could still not stand up to the revolutionary new tactics that the French’s steam engines allowed. He would not have wanted to try that with the finest crews of the Royal Navy itself.

However, Naples did have one advantage. While the French had used their fleet to bypass the Spanish and land troops in Catalonia, they had not pressed south along the coast. Thus the Spanish fleet in Valencia had survived, and elements of it had fled upon the signing of the Peace of Cadiz. Some ships belatedly went through the Pillars of Hercules and followed Infante Charles into American exile, but others came to fellow-Bourbon Naples. They were swiftly incorporated into Nelson’s navy, but one ship in particular had caught his eye. Her name was Cacafuego, a classically scatological Catalan name, and she was an experimental ship.[4] Her designer and captain, a Catalan who had served in the Portuguese East India Company, was named Josep Casanova i Llussà. He had been impressed by the use of war rockets by Mysore and Arcot, and upon returning home to Spain had petitioned the Spanish Admiralty to consider a new design of warship capable of firing rockets. Although the Spanish Admiralty was even more conservative than its British counterpart, Casanova was able to obtain some funding due to his family connections, and the result was the Cacafuego.

She was based on the design of a fifth-rate frigate, but with the mizzenmast removed to allow space for the launch assembly. This was a block of parallel iron tubes, made like thin cannon barrels, with the fuses attached to a complex system that Casanova had designed himself, allowing the rockets to be fired individually or together. The rocket storage and the launcher were mounted in a segregated area of the deck, surrounded by metal and asbestos for fire safety.[5] The ship retained a gun deck, and its conventional armament was chiefly carronades for short-range defence. The ship’s intended use meant that it should only be engaging the enemy at a very long distance, and such weapons would only be used if things went badly wrong.

Though Nelson was sceptical of new technology, he had been impressed when Casanova demonstrated the rockets against an old hulk in Salerno harbour; though erratic in flight, the very unpredictability of the rockets made them an effective terror weapon, and their gunpowder warheads meant they were incendiary against the sails and varnished wood of a ship’s deck – in a way which ordinary roundshot, except hot shot, was not.

The plan was almost outrageously bold – after all, Naples was not yet actually at war with France, though they were fighting French Jacobins under Lisieux’s command. It was eventually approved reluctantly by Charles for two reasons – Nelson having the favour of his daughter, and the rumour – helped along by the Englishman himself – that if he was not given approval, he would do it anyway.

On the night 15th of June 1803, most of the Neapolitan fleet approached the Balearic Islands. Though Nelson did not know it, the people there were generally Carlista in their sympathy and resented both Philip’s victory in the civil war and the presence of the French. In any case, this helped, for the Majorcan fishing boats that spotted the Neapolitans on the horizon were not too inclined to let the authorities know anything about it.

Thus it was that when the Cacafuego approached Mahon, site of the French naval base, the French remained blissfully unaware. Many of the steamships’ crews were ashore, enjoying the attractions of the island just as the British had a couple of generations before. Lepelley himself was in Ciutadella, on the other side of the island, for a romantic rendezvous. It was sloppy but understandable – the French had defeated Spain and scattered its fleet, and were no longer at war with Britain or Royal France. The Algerines would certainly not attack a harbour these days. Who did that leave?

It turned out that it left the Neapolitans. Nelson ordered the rockets fired after his jolly-boat scouts had confirmed the position of local landmarks: Nelson, with the command of geometry common to all British high-seas sailors, calculated the optimum position in his head based on Casanova’s information. Casanova himself personally lit the fuses, and the rockets screamed out into the night.

Perhaps a quarter of them exploded in midair – one dangerously close to the Cacafuego’s own sails – but the rest all hit somewhere near the harbour, and with the density of French ships there, ‘somewhere near the harbour’ was almost certain to be a target. Before they knew what was happening, the French were faced with whining bolts from heaven cascading down from above, striking their ships and setting them on fire.

Only a few crews were ready to respond. In any case, Nelson did not simply sit back and let them. Giving his famous command, he took the Siracusa into Mahon harbour itself and blasted broadsides into steamship after steamship – the small size of the Neapolitan frigate now helped it, for she did not tower uselessly over the steam-galleys as some of the Spanish ships of the line had. Nelson finally faced one of the steamships that had an alert crew and – after suffering the disablement of his left arm after a shard from a mast hit by a cannonball scored across it – led the boarding operation to take the ship. He had hoped to return it as a prize, but had no-one who understood how to operate the steam engines, and so scuttled the ship.

By the time the Neapolitan fleet – having suffered some losses, but not grievous ones – retreated from Mahon on the morning of the 16th, the position had radically changed. Admiral Lepelley’s invincible fleet was mostly lying on the bottom of the harbour, reduced to scorched timbers and melted boilers. French dominance of the Mediterranean was no longer assured.

Admiral Nelson was feted as a hero in Naples the city, and Acton pressed the conduct of the war against Hoche all the more earnestly, knowing there was no possibility of a stab in the back anymore.

Nelson had saved his adoptive country but, unbeknownst to him, he had doomed his own.





[1] In OTL, due to Charles III’s elder brother Philip being disqualified from the succession for being mentally disabled, Charles’ second son Charles became Charles IV of Spain, and his third son Ferdinand became Ferdinand III and IV of Naples and Sicily. In TTL, Philip is normal and became King Philip VI of Spain, while Charles became Charles VI and VIII of Naples and Sicily.

[2] Not until 1812 in OTL.

[3] The Venetian navy is somewhat larger than OTL’s, mainly due to butterflies.

[4] The name is usually rendered euphemistically into English as ‘Spitfire’. It actually means ‘Fire Shitter’.

[5] Though not widely used at this point except in mining, asbestos’ fire-retardant properties were already well known.


Part #54: Der Führer und der Kleinkrieg

From – “French Strategy in the Jacobin Wars” by Åke Comstedt (1974) -

In April of 1802, Jean de Lisieux wrote a monograph. This in itself was not a remarkable occurrence, for L’Administrateur spent most of his time writing monographs. When he was not writing himself, he was dictating to his most trusted secretaries, ever paranoid about the possibility of his words being intercepted and twisted between himself and his people. Given the tone of some of his later writings, some men suggested that Lisieux even wanted not to look upon his Republic until his declarations had converted it into the state he desired. A joke sprung up in some of the regiments – the ones farthest away from Paris and informers – to parody the old Catholic liturgy declaring Christ would come again at the end of the world, replacing his name with that of Lisieux. He was certainly rarely seen outside his own unprepossessing apartments, except on the occasions when he visited the National Legislative Assembly to perpetuate the illusion that that body still had any power.

But this monograph had a significance which outweighed most of Lisieux’s often nit-picking and self-contradictory pronouncements on the future of France. In it, he openly declared his intentions for foreign and domestic policy. The document became known as “the 25 Years paper” in reference to the most prominent date contained within it. Lisieux stated that, for the present, exporting the Revolution to other states was meaningless, counterproductive and indeed wasteful of human lives (for he always remained conscious of their value, albeit in a clinical and mathematical way). He wrote that it was absurd to do so when the Revolution had not yet produced the perfect state at home: “It is the role of the superior Latin race, and of the purest strain within that race – the French – to create the true Utopia. Only once this is complete may that Utopia be replicated elsewhere. It must also be adapted to the different and inferior characteristics of the other races upon which it is imposed. This cannot come until after the first and highest Republic has reached its truest and purest form.”

Lisieux was vague upon the subject of precisely how this truest Republic would come about, but he was clear on the requirements for this. To do so, he declared that France would require 25 years of peace to reorder herself. This would in turn require that France’s borders be secured beyond all possibility of incursion. So far, France had neutralised a number of its neighbouring regions – Spain, Swabia, and to some extent Piedmont, although Hoche could no longer be counted upon as an ally. The chief frontier that remained was that of Flanders, which had remained at peace with France since June of 1796. That had been a necessary strategy on the part of Pierre Boulanger to help preserve the young republic in its war with, at that point, practically all of Europe. Now, however, the situation had changed.

Flanders and her ally, the Dutch Republic, would not be a pushover. Not for nothing had royalist France tried and failed to conquer then-Spanish or Austrian Flanders multiple times throughout the last two centuries. And the French Republican fleet could not stand up to that of the Dutch. To that end, Lisieux pursued a strategy on several fronts. Surcouf took his frigates to La Pérouse’s Land and used it as a base to raid Dutch shipping as a privateer, attempting to goad the Dutch into a unilateral declaration of war on France. In 1800, Lisieux ordered Ney, in Swabia, to attack northwards in an attempt to establish a French presence in the Rhineland and Westphalia. The idea was to be able to invade the Dutch Republic from the east, thus avoiding both the Dutch system of flood-based defensive lines aimed at invaders from the south-west, and also war with Flanders. If the Dutch and the Flemings could be handled one at a time, the conquest would be much easier: and attacking the Flemings first would almost force a Dutch intervention on their side, whereas the reverse was not necessarily true.

Ney’s war was largely unsuccessful, securing Ansbach, Bayreuth and Nuremberg for the Swabian Germanic Republic by 1802, but ultimately failing to penetrate into the northern Rhineland and being held back by the Mainz Pact states, which eventually renamed themselves the Mittelbund or Central League. This consisted of all the various Hessian states, Würzburg and Nassau. Ney’s aggression had inadvertently triggered the formation of this alliance of small states, which provided a new rallying point for Germany in the face of French dominance, Prusso-Saxon conflict and Austrian incompetence and distraction.

The effects of the Mittelbund would not be glimpsed farther east for a while, though. For the present, Lisieux revised his plans and his “25 Years paper” instead favoured a strike from Bayreuth up through the weak and divided small Saxon duchies of Thuringia, ending up in Anhalt. Lisieux envisaged that this position could then be turned into either an encirclement of the Mittelbund, an eastward attack on the Dutch (who had occupied the imperial bishoprics between the Ems and the Weser as a pre-emptive move against the Hapsburgs, back in 1797) or an attack on Hanover if a casus belli was needed against Britain. The Republican army, and Marshal Boulanger in particular, viewed this plan with extreme scepticism. Lisieux would be sending French armies deep into territory with Saxony in the east and the Mittelbund in the west. A Prussian or Austrian revival could also not be ruled out at that stage, and sending troops through Bayreuth might bring France into conflict with Lascelles’ alleged Bavarian Germanic Republic in the Upper Palatinate – a move which Ney had so far carefully avoided. Although even at this stage Lisieux was beginning to turn into a similar figure as Robespierre, with few daring to publicly contradict him, Boulanger did manage to persuade the Administrateur that the plan was too ambitious and should at least be postponed. He noted that it would certainly require more troops than France had in the region. Lisieux responded to this by stepping up his timetable for the withdrawal of French troops from Spain, rather premature as in April 1802 they had not yet even entered Madrid and begun their occupation yet. It was this continuous urge to pull troops out and focus on Germany that dogged Republican France’s attempts to hold down Spain from the start.

Of course, there was also another frontier to consider, one which Lisieux almost deliberately forced himself to forget about most of the time. In the north-west of France, hanging insolently over Lisieux’s great Republic, was the restored remnant of the Bourbon monarchy, under the formally undeclared King Louis XVII. That would have to be dealt with eventually.

Problem: even under Charles James Fox, Britain would almost certainly respond with war if the Republic attacked Royal France. Britain, therefore, would also have to be neutralised, and that required considerable planning. This, however, was stepped up in priority after Horatio Nelson’s Neapolitan raid on Minorca in summer 1803. Lisieux and Boulanger were both landsmen by thinking and had not considered the frontiers of France that they could not control – those which looked out on the seas. Lisieux considered simply separating the coastlines of France from the Republic and turning them into a military regime, thus ensuring the Republic inside could remained unmolested. However, judging this to be an unacceptable solution – as it forced thousands of Frenchmen to live apart from their pure Republic – a different path was settled on.

Britain and Naples had both proved themselves to be capable of harrassing France from the sea. Therefore, both would have to be eliminated. And, Lisieux wrote secretly, Britain was an island. It was not like dealing with Austria or even Naples, which could be allowed to remain in a weakened state, as the French knew that they could easily send an army over land to kick them down again if they became belligerent. Britain could be defeated, yet La Manche would be a powerful guarantor against such a punitive expedition if she decided to break the terms of a treaty. Therefore, French troops must already be in Britain, as they were in Spain. Therefore, Britain must actually be conquered rather than merely neutralised by being forced to the negotiating table. Another headache, another grand aim which the Bourbons had tried and failed to do for centuries. But then the Republic was not the Bourbons…

*

From – “Herz aus Eisen: Der Führer” by Joachim Lübke (1959)

It is a strange and compelling fact that many national heroes were not, in fact, born in the nations that they eventually grew to symbolise. Simon de Montfort was no more English than Jean-Charles Pichegru was Meridian.[1] And then there is the man whom history knows as Der Führer: national hero of Bavaria, yet born in Austria.

There is no denying the fact, of course, that Michael Hiedler’s family was in origins a Bavarian one: the vast majority of Hiedlers (or Hittels, or Hitlers) can still be found around Munich. But as the third son in his family, Michael had not inherited much of his father’s wealth, and had thus sought his fortune elsewhere. He moved to Lower Austria in 1785 and married into money, then joined the Austrian army and served as a cavalryman in a desultory campaign against Wallachia in 1791. During that brief and pointless war he was wounded in the leg, giving him a slight limp, and commended for bravery in the face of the enemy. He was pensioned off and given the minor title of Edler von Strones, the name of a nearby village to his home arbitrarily being picked.

Hiedler lived comfortably and unremarkably enough for the next decade, fathering a son and daughter with his wife Maria Margaretha, and it seems likely that under other circumstances he would have been unremembered by history. Events conspired, however, to turn this man into the pivot of destiny – but at a terrible cost.

Bavaria and Lower Austria were overrun by the French army of Thibault Leroux in 1798 and 1799 as part of his War of Lightning strategy against the Austrians. Initially, the country around Strones, the Waldviertel, escaped much attention by the French, who were still focused on Vienna. Hiedler recorded in his diary that a French army was seen passing through the country, but at a distance from the village, heading for Vienna. Rumours of the rapacity of la maraude circulated, but Hiedler believed that the best way to escape such damage was to keep your head down and wait for the war to blow over.

It soon became apparent, however, that this was no ordinary war. Leroux was, at the last, defeated by Mozart before the gates of Vienna in April 1799, being killed in the process. His army broke up into two main factions: the Cougnonistes under St-Julien, who were mostly professional veterans of the ancien regime army, and who retreated into Bohemia to the north; and the larger group under Major Fabien Lascelles, who despite his low rank managed to dominate the troops. They were mostly Sans-Culotte conscripts, and Lascelles was a dynamic and manaiacal orator capable of whipping them up into an ideological frenzy. Lascelles drove off or killed all other surviving officers higher in rank than himself, then declared a Bavarian Germanic Republic and appointed himself as sole Consul. His bloodthirsty assistant and former sergeant, Nicolas Cavaignac, he appointed as Grand Marshal.

Lascelles’ Republic did not exist in any technical sense, but this was not to say that it was a paper tiger. Although the Austrians were mainly concerned with the new conflict with the Ottoman Empire that blew up in May, the new claimant Holy Roman Emperor Francis II did send some strikes into Lower Austria in an attempt to drive back Lascelles’ army, which was encamped on the Enns, near Admont. The outnumbered Austrians were bloodily repulsed: the French had regrouped and rallied around their new leader, and had regained their discipline. One Austrian officer later likened the Republic to one of the old nomad khanates that had once ruled over Asia (of whom the Khanate of the Crimea was the last remnant in Europe).[2] The army was the country, much as Voltaire had said about Prussia.

Of course, it was inconceivable that the French could be allowed simply to retain Lower Austria, and in October 1799 a new Austrian army was drawn up under General Giuseppe Bolognesi to drive Lascelles from spitting distance of Vienna. This also meant that the Austrian armies fighting desperately in Bosnia and on the Mureş lacked reinforcements, further hampering Francis’ erratic attempts to fight a war on two fronts. Bolognesi was, however, successful: Lascelles chose not to give battle against the more numerous Austrians, but initially retreated. In the process, his armies passed through the Waldviertel. As usual, they had their standing orders to practice la maraude to feed themselves, and Lascelles ordered them to stock up as much as possible due to the possible long retreat. Furthermore, he hoped to lay waste to Lower Austria’s food supplies and thus hamper Bolognesi’s pursuit, giving him time to set up a stronger defensive position elsewhere. This was considered by the Jacobin Sans-Culottes as a licence to let all hell break loose.

Michael Hiedler was one of thousands to suffer as a result of Lascelles’ bloody retreat through Lower Austria. However, his fate was particularly cruel. Using their War of Lightning rapid marching, the French fell on the Waldviertel so quickly that they were in and out inside a couple of hours. Hiedler was out riding, hunting to supplement his family’s table, for since Leroux’s army had been through marauding in the other direction, the harvest had been less than expected. He returned home with a brace of pheasants to find his house consumed by a funeral pyre of burning ashes and smoke. He dropped the birds in shock and attempted to force his way into the building, but it was already too late: the fires had done their worst.

There was one survivor, his servant Petra Schickelgruber. Her father, Johannes, was a blacksmith in the village of Strones. She had hidden in a cupboard in the scullery from the French soldiers who stormed the house looking for food and valuables. She later claimed that they had been led by the butcher Cavaignac himself, though that seems rather unlikely. The French had taken everything the Hiedlers owned that they could carry away: when Hiedler’s teenage son Johannes tried to stop them, they killed him – and then, out of revenge, raped and murdered his mother and sister. Setting the house on fire out of spite, they had fled not ten minutes before Michael Hiedler returned from his hunt.

Upon hearing the story from the scorched, shaking girl, Hiedler initially simply shut down, staring blankly at the burned wreckage of his house, his life. For hours he did so, until Schickelgruber came to her senses and led him, like a child, away by the hand. Down to Strones, though flames and smoke were rising there, too…

Schickelgruber had lost members of her family, too. Her father had been shot out of hand by a French grenadier who had broken into his smithy for any valuables. Her mother and siblings, though, had escaped by hiding. They did their best to care for Hiedler, who continued to remain silent, not talking, not eating, not drinking, just staring blindly at the world.

The next day, Bolognesi’s army marched through the town. The surviving people of the village, still in shock, darkly cheered them on, shouting in graphic terms what must be done to the French.

A week after that, Lascelles finally gave battle. He had not retreated as far as he had hoped – Bolognesi was well supplied, and Lascelles’ marauding strategy had not worked – but the French did find a good defensive position near Ischl. The Austrians attacked the French army in deep line, as was their wont, and the more aggressive-orientated strategies of the Sans-Culottes failed. Lascelles accepted defeat and retreated, but managed to hurt Bolognesi enough to slow the Austrian pursuit somewhat.

It was not until April 1800 that the two armies met again – this time at Rosenheim in Bavaria. This time, Lascelles’ troops won the day: they had acquired artillery from Bavarian depots, which put them on a level footing with the Austrians. Bolognesi retreated in good order to Reichenhall and sent word to Vienna, asking for more orders.

But Emperor Francis was displeased with the conduct of the war in other quarters. Lascelles was no longer in a position to threaten Vienna, and the core lands of Austria were safe. That was sufficient. Bavaria was not yet reclaimed, but then Bavaria had not been Hapsburg until 1783. It could wait. Yes, to the Hapsburg mind, the Turk was everything – everything. It was an attitude that had cost them before in the Germanies, but never, perhaps, as much as it did on this occasion.

When word of the Bolognesi campaign reached Strones, Petra Schickelgruber tentatively told Michael Hiedler. He had ceased his catatonic state, and would eat and drink, but continued to speak only in monosyllables and stare into space. Schickelgruber had been tending to him in this state for months. When she told him that the French had been driven out of Austria, she hoped that he would be satisfied with this victory.

But then something snapped inside Michael Hiedler. He rose to his feet in anger, and damned the Emperor “down to the deepest pit of hell!”

In shock, Schickelgruber stared as Hiedler went out into the village square, stood upon a makeshift podium, and began an angry, defamatory, amateur yet passionate speech that began with a tirade against Emperor Francis II – which attracted and shocked most of the village people. Hiedler went on to speak of his family’s deaths for the first time since the event, and added that right now the French would be doing the same thing to thousands more innocent Germans – that was the word he used, ‘Germans’ – across still-occupied Bavaria. Lascelles’ army was mostly intact – the same ‘bastards’ who had ravaged their town continued to do so with impunity elsewhere. Francis was satisfied with progress so far – ‘well I am NOT!’

He concluded by stating his own aims: ‘I will not be satisfied until we have marched all the way to Paris, strung up Robespierre’ (at this point the knowledge of Lisieux’s rule had yet to penetrate to Bavaria) ‘and hacked off the heads of every last stinking Frenchman in the world!’

The atmosphere was epic, the people drawn in by his fiery rhetoric, not that learned and polished in the college, but coming from the heart of an erratically educated and formerly unassuming man. His eyes, blank and unseeing for so long, suddenly seemed to pierce the hearts of men’s souls.

And at the last, Hiedler – in a shout that was more like a scream, coming straight from the heart that the French had torn apart – declared the battle cry that would be associated with him throughout all of history:

“If the cannon and the sword are too faint-hearted to do what must be done, then let it be WAR UNTO THE KNIFE!

And with that cry, the Kleinkrieg, the Little War, began.








[1] Meridian: from ‘America Meridionalis’, Latin name for South America – a common term for inhabitants of the UPSA.

[2] In OTL, of course, by this point the Crimean Khanate was gone.

Part #55: A Delicious Irony

From – “The Administration: Life and Death in Lisieux’s Republic” by Jean Daladier (1921)

The fallout from the Rape of Rome in November 1802 was both a problem and an opportunity for Jean de Lisieux. On the one hand, the action of radical Jacobin troops – which, everyone knew, had been loaned to Hoche by France – threatened to stir up resentment and even uprisings throughout France. It soon became apparent that the attempts by Robespierre and Hébert to suppress the Catholic Church had been much less successful than had first appeared. They might, perhaps, have taken on and defeated those who were willing to violently oppose the Revolution in all its aspects on the principle of their religion; but a much larger group had lain low and accepted the Revolution, despite (or because) the bloody reign of Robespierre, but now arose in anger over the crimes committed against the Papacy.

The actual rebellions were diffuse, disorganised and quite easily defeated by Lisieux’s Garde Nationale, which was loyal to him alone. But they nonetheless pointed to a strong Catholic undercurrent in French society that could not be undone in eight years of deistic-atheist rule. A problem for Lisieux, but also an opportunity. He had been plotting, ever since his street campaign in Paris to suppress the revolts after Hébert’s death in March 1796, to undermine the Sans-Culottes. Initially this had been because they were Robespierre’s base of support, and Lisieux – who had always coveted the supreme power – wanted to supplant them with his Garde Nationale, which had made their name in the same campaign. Now Robespierre was dead and Lisieux ruled the Latin Republic, but he continued to work against the Sans-Culottes. He was afraid of their independent spirit, seeking to personally control all agencies in France himself, and also their idolisation of Le Diamant. Though Le Diamant was long dead, his ideas lived on in his great work, La Carte de la France, which set forward a literal road map towards a free and equitable new French state.

Lisieux detested La Carte. It was everywhere, it was bound up with the symbolism of the heady days of the initial revolution, and he could not control it. Its ideas were somewhat incompatible with his own: when Le Diamant had drawn it up, of course, ideas for reform in France had still centred around a constitutional monarchy. Few had dreamed of a Republic, and the terminology in La Carte reflected this. Robespierre had managed to justify his hijacking of Le Diamant’s legacy by twisting the meaning of the map – he ever cast himself in the role of interpreter of Le Diamant’s dying wishes to the Sans-Culottes – but this did not appeal to Lisieux, who wanted everything to be set down unambiguously, clearly, and understood by everyone.[1] After all, if Robespierre could twist La Carte to make it closer to his aims, so could anyone.

Thus, Le Diamant and La Carte had to go, along with the Sans-Culottes, if France was to remain on the correct course. Besides, Lisieux did not like how La Carte enshrined such rights as regular elections and term limits for representatives. Again, Robespierre had got around that, partly by using the threat of war to justify his excesses, but Lisieux wanted it stricken permanently from the Republic’s constitution. He would need a long time in power to set France on the right path for his 25 Years’ Peace. Only, of course, so that a truly free and equitable state might result at the end. Naturally.

Lisieux surprised many commentators – though he had been planning this move for a long time – on the night of December 25th 1802, what had once been Christmas. Even as hymns rose into the night from the Vendée and Brittany, under their Royalist Catholic rule, though, the knives were being unsheathed in Paris. A chorus of an altogether different kind filled the air as Sans-Culotte leaders, many of them senior army officers, were assassinated throughout Paris, and, thanks to Lisieux’s new semaphore network,[2] many more were taken down almost simultaneously in other cities. The death toll for that night is unconfirmed, but J. J. Schröder places it at a conservative seventy-nine. Ever afterwards, it was known as La Nuit Macabre.

In the morning, Lisieux began issuing decrees in the form of direct pamphlets to the people of Paris, as was his wont – bypassing the toothless National Legislative Assembly. He finally launched the coup that he had been planning for almost a decade, declaring the Sans-Culottes to be persona non grata and their ‘organisation’ disbanded. Taking advantage of the Sans-Culottes’ confusion, deprived of most of their leaders, Lisieux’s Garde Nationale went to work. Some Sans-Culottes joined the Garde at musket-point, while the diehard radicals were battled in holdout actions by the Garde throughout Paris. There were far fewer of them than there had been just a few years ago: Lisieux’s plan, of using the Sans-Culottes as cannon fodder against Austria, Spain and Naples in order to thin their ranks and get them away from the centre of political power in France, had worked well. The Sans-Culottes fought more successfully outside Paris, which Lisieux ruled with an iron grip, but in the end were defeated. The republican civil war also served to distract attention from the slightly earlier risings of Catholics.

Some Sans-Culottes were captured alive, especially outside Paris, and were sent to Marseilles and Toulon. There, though Lisieux’s regime described their activities with a paragraph of euphemism in the official pamphlets, they were put to work as slave labour. Once upon a time, they might have become galley slaves, but no longer. Most of France’s remaining conventional galleys had been committed to the Spanish invasion, and were then lost in Nelson’s rocket attack on Minorca in June of 1803. All the new ships being built, with a great sense of urgency and hammering that resounded across the Mediterranean, were steamships. They did not need chained oarsmen, though they did need men to shovel the coal, which was almost as bad.

Mostly, though, the Sans-Culottes were employed in the shipyards, doing the simpler and more repetitive processes of shipbuilding. It was at this time that the great economist and scientist Phillipe de Coulomb[3] worked with the Boulangerie members on the project. Coulomb used his father’s works and principles to help determine the most efficient means of using unskilled workmen on a project. In doing so, he improved upon Adam Smith’s “Division of Labour” and developed process production.[4] It all sounds very bloodless set down in this manner, but the work of the effete and somewhat squeamish Coulomb was ultimately built on a mountain of men who had been worked to death, a horror as great as any African tale of the slave-days.[5]

What is also true is that the year between July 1803 and July 1804 was perhaps the most successful period of shipbuilding in French history, with countless new steam-galleys of the ‘Surcouf’ class being constructed. Their design had been much improved by Cugnot and Jouffroy over the earlier ones employed against Spain, and they were fitted with the new screw propeller, discovered by chance during the Battle of Cadaqués. The ‘Surcouf’ was a slim, narrow ship, compared by some to a Viking longboat rather than resembling a Mediterranean galley as the earlier designs had. In truth that description was not too far off. The ‘Surcouf’s were designed to be capable of traversing shallow water, including travelling upriver. They were designed around a single, large, forward-facing gun deck, with the intention that this could easily be swapped out and modified for different armaments.

The standard main armament of a ‘Surcouf’ was three super-heavy cannon, usually at least fifty-pounders, and five smaller cannonades for volley fire. This was derived from the manner in which Mediterranean galleys were armed. Unlike those, however, the ‘Surcouf’ had no oars blocking her flanks (or paddle-wheels, like some of the earlier steamers) and thus had room for a lateral armament as well. This was, however, usually an afterthought, consisting mainly of carronades for opportunistic attacks at point-blank range.

Other optional main armaments included, from the start, a mortar package designed to turn the ‘Surcouf’ into a bomb-ship,[6] as well as a shrapnel-lined powder magazine that could be fitted into the gun deck for the craft to be turned into an explosion ship. Admiral Lepelley commissioned research into investigating spar torpedoes to permit the use of a less drastic and suicidal means of ramming, but the initial results were disappointing, and spar torpedo technology would not be perfected until the late 1820s.

Later developments, which did not make their first appearance until the Conquerant offensive, included a gundeck lined with steel and asbestos, permitting the use of a forge to heat hot shot. Although hot-shot ships had been experimented with before by several navies, they had always been judged too dangerous, too likely to set fire themselves, to be of any use. The first navy that could use hot shot in the middle of a blue-water battle far from land forticiations would have a serious advantage. Another new weapon, designed according to plans sent by Leclerc out of Mysore, consisted of a rocket battery. This also required shielding the gundeck against fire, but was designed on Lepelley’s explicit orders. The Admiral was furious at Nelson’s audacious attack, and was determined to repay the Englishman in his own coin.

The ‘Surcouf’s were built on the blood of Sans-Culottes workers, but so was the Canal de l'Épurateur in which they swam. Lisieux ordered the completion, widening and deepening of the Canal de Bourgogne,[7] which had started construction in 1727 but remained unfinished eight decades later. Under Lisieux and the Boulangerie, the Canal reached its intended state at the end of 1804 (work had begun as early as 1800) albeit once more upon slave labour. The work on the canal was not merely to improve the transport of goods and troops within France, though that was certainly an aspect. The design of the ‘Surcouf’ meant that they could steam all the way through such a canal, as their Viking inspirations had once sailed up the Seine to burn Paris. And the Burgundy Canal, via the Yonne and Seine to the Saône and Rhône, ultimately connected the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. Suddenly, providing one possessed a fleet of warships capable of traversing the canal, the Pillars of Hercules no longer existed. British possession of Gibraltar meant nothing. Ships built in the Mediterranean ports could appear in the Atlantic without ever entering the Gulf of Lion. It was a novelty that other powers were slow to pick up on – to their cost.

Lisieux renamed the Burgundy Canal in honour of l'Épurateur, and for good reason. With his purge of the Sans-Culottes, he publicly disowned Le Diamant, and embarked on a surge of rewriting the history books – hence why our own handed-down knowledge of the 1794 revolutionary period is so sketchy, for Lisieux was very thorough when it came to controlling public perceptions. The Administration claimed that Le Diamant was a traitor and a faint-heart, a Royalist and a betrayer of the Revolution. This despite the fact that the Revolution was begun by Le Diamant. Lisieux got around that problem by inventing an earlier role for l'Épurateur, the half-mythical symbolic figure of France witnessed (or made up) by Hébert flying the first Bloody Flag over the Bastille. According to the new official version of history coming out of Paris, it was l'Épurateur who had started the Revolution, and Le Diamant had almost doomed it by surrendering to the King, who had betrayed him in turn and shot him (personally, if you believed some accounts).

It was not the first time that a new regime had attempted to rewrite history, but Lisieux was remarkably successful, at least in the short term. This was largely due to the semaphore system throughout France which allowed him to coordinate the activity of his agents and Móderateurs in the distant départements. This had first been set up in 1796 by Louis Chappe, who had successfully convinced the NLA (in which his brother was a member) of the virtues of a system that would allow Paris to know of the outcomes of battles against the Austrians before they happened. The initial semaphore tower lines were modest, mainly linking the Ile-de-France to the Flemish border and Alsace (for obvious reasons). Lisieux poured more money into the system after he became Administrator, by which time crude lines extended as far as Toulon and Bordeaux. Lisieux’s funding allowed Chappe to refine and improve the system, using shutterboxes rather than simple swinging arms in order to convey much more information and faster. This meant that even Lisieux’s pamphlets, once encrypted, could be transferred across France in the form of raw data flying through the air, then reconstituted in the départements and re-printed. This miracle of modern technology was praised by the Revolutionary poet Monteferrier, who said ‘behold, our nation is the first to truly live, for the blood of words and deeds runs in her veins of light’ (at night, lamps were hung from the arms and used to illuminate the shutterboxes). However, the semaphore system was viewed with fear in other countries. Some copied it, seeking the same advantages, but the semaphore also came to symbolise Lisieux’s will to centralise power and dominate all affairs throughout his country. Because of this, in liberty-obsessed Britain in particular, the semaphore was severely restricted by an Act of Parliament, and only a token network throughout the south coast was built. Britain would later come to regret this decision.[8]

In the ironic words of Robespierre himself, Lisieux sought a ‘clean break’ with the past. Having compromised with established interests for his first two or three years in power, he now rewrote history to claim he had turned against Robespierrism and the Sans-Culottes from the start. The word ‘Jacobin’ was removed from all records after Lisieux’s takeover in the Double Revolution, and after that was used to describe Robespierre’s rule only. As far as Lisieux was concerned, ‘Jacobin’ was dangerous. It described a political faction. The fact that a description was necessary meant that there must be more than one faction. And that was intolerable in his Republic.

Lisieux also changed the Republic’s position on the Church. Instead of the Catholic Church being publicly opposed, he instead altered policy towards religious tolerance, and permitted Catholic churches as readily as those surviving Temples of Reason of the cult of Hébert, with their statues of the Goddess of Atheism. All he asked was that all of them publicly display his portrait, and swear allegiance to him – him personally – before every sermon. Thus in one swoop Lisieux assuaged the angry Catholic interests over Rome, and extended his control yet further. As for Lisieux’s own beliefs, who can say? It is generally thought now that he was not a deistic-atheist like Hébert and Robespierre, and he was certainly no Christian. Perhaps it is fair to say that all that Jean de Lisieux really believed in was Jean de Lisieux.

And of course La Carte was banned. Lisieux eventually released his own version, but the original was publicly burned throughout France and few original copies survive. The dream of Le Diamant burned with them on that day, yet, in the end, it turned out to be a phoenix…






[1] This aspect of his personality can perhaps be held responsible for his strong support of the Rational measuring system, Thouret’s square départements, and his scheme for French spelling reform, which never really took off.

[2] See later.

[3] Son of Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, who in OTL did not marry. Coulomb the elder appeared in some previous posts about Linnaeus and Priestley.

[4] Essentially the assembly line…but as it’s coined earlier in OTL, it does not refer to quite the same thing, and tends to refer to less mechanised processes.

[5] This does not refer to African-blood slaves in the Americas (although it could), but to slave practices in Africa itself.

[6] A bomb-ship, or bomb vessel, is a ship designed to fire plunging mortar shot in order to bombard coastal fortifications or cities.

[7] Cue “Inevitable Canal of Burgundy” jokes…

[8] OTL, Revolutionary and Napoleonic France did have an extensive optical telegraph system; it is slightly more advanced here than OTL, as shutterboxes did not make an appearance until later (too late, really, as the electric telegraph was invented just a few years later and so they never caught on).


Part #56: Pin the Zion on the Eurasia

“Throughout history, many peoples, races and creeds have been persecuted; but few of them have defined themselves by that persecution.”

- Yakov Litvinov (1875)​

*

From – “WEST MEETS EAST: Russia in the reign of Paul I” by Alexei Petrovich Dalakhov, 1954

As the nineteenth century dawned, bloodily, across the world, Russia stood at a crossroads. She had emerged, against the odds, from her terrible civil war. The Romanovs had won, and Paul of Lithuania was Tsar. Yet this apparent triumph masked continuing deep divisions. Some of these are obvious when one considers the circumstances of Paul’s victory. The defeat of the Potemkinites and their Swedish allies were ultimately due to forces beyond Paul’s control, whether within or without Russia herself: the Danes and the Cossack revolt led by Heinz Kautzman, the ‘Bald Impostor’. In the long run, this could not be tolerated: the longstanding policy of autarchy and autocracy, inseparable from Russia’s role as the Third Rome and Heir of Byzantium, could not accommodate such forces.

Paul’s situation was made more problematic by the fact that the peace with the Potemkinites had been made on relatively good terms, and he was forced to treat the two brothers Potemkin and their allies quite well lest he risk alienating the areas of society that had supported them. These were quite diverse, reflecting the way in which the Potemkins had built up their coalition: a large part of the nobility, the Dvoryanstvo, had been aggravated by Peter III’s quixotic and Prussophile policies, or had been burned while playing the game at court (as indeed Potemkin the elder had) and been sent into disgrace and exile. Yet in their support of the Potemkinites they were joined by an equally significant portion of the serfs and peasantry, individually powerless, yet nonetheless a force to be reckoned with in terms of public opinion. The peasants resented the air of foreign rule that Peter’s tastes had suggested, along with his continuation of his namesake Peter the Great’s tendency to move Russia towards the West, introduce European practices and customs, and undermine the Orthodox Church’s more traditional powers. Autarch or not, no Russian Tsar could afford to ignore such a popular attitude, not when peasant revolts had unseated rulers before (and, indeed, had helped Paul himself to power, for many of the peasants had rallied to Kautzman).

The resulting Russian policy was very much a compromise between different interests. Paul could not appease the peasants by rolling back his father’s Germanophile policies, because that would alienate the Volga German colonists who followed Kautzman and his Cossacks. It was fortuitous that Revolutionary France provided a convenient bogeyman, ideologically inimical to Russian autarchy (yet, from the point of few of the peasant tilling the field, the two were little different). France was also conveniently far away, and despite French successes in Germany, it was unlikely that the Russians would actually have to fight her. This meant that Paul’s propagandists could paint France in whatever terms they liked, turning it into the cause of all the world’s ills, Tchernobog personified as a nation. It gave Paul a lever to appease the peasants’ anti-foreign agenda, and he first spoke out against and then actually legislated against the use of French as the first language of the Russian aristocracy, as had been the case since the days of Louis XIV, when France had been held to be the shining example of European civilisation and worthy of emulation. In fact most of Paul’s compromises gave the short end of the stick to the Dvoryanstvo, despite the power many of them held: the Tsar was no less petty than his father when it came to grievances, and many of the nobles had sided with the Potemkinites. Now Alexander Potemkin was Duke of Courland and his brother Ivan was safely a long way away supervising the development of Yakutia, Paul could take action against their supporters on at least an individual basis.

The slow removal of French as a fashionable language in Russia left a gulf that was sometimes filled by German, reflecting Paul following his father’s tastes and the power of Kautzman’s Volga Germans in Russia, but Paul also encouraged the widespread adoption of the Russian language itself. Previously scorned as the tongue of serfs, Russian was celebrated through poetry and plays funded by the Institute of Cultural Patriotism, set up by Paul in Moscow. His policy towards the former capital again spoke of rapproachment, for Moscow’s support of the Potemkinites had been born of a double resentment of Peter’s regime: the fact that St Petersburg had stolen Moscow’s place as centre of power, and the implications behind that fact, the idea that Moscow was a part of the old, Asian, Slavic Russia, to be discarded in favour of the new and shiny European Russia of St Petersburg. Paul rolled back these policies, even learning Russian himself, though many alleged that his own preferred tongue in private was Lithuanian.

The gradual introduction of freedom for serfs, starting in Ruthenia and the Caucasus and slowly spreading northwards, was met with alarm by the Russian nobles and landowners. Paul was not too happy about the idea himself, but it had been one of the requirements of Kautzman for his support, and it was essential to maintain the loyalty of the Cossacks. Although there were widespread complaints and mutterings about the emancipation, open violence did not break out until it spread as far as Voronezh in November 1803. There, nobles led by Count Kirill Klimentov refused the orders of the Tsar’s messenger and horsewhipped the man out of the city. The rebellion rapidly spread to other cities in the region.

It was met with alarm by Paul and his supporters, who had only just managed to stabilise the country, and was particularly a matter of concern for the Russian foreign ministry. Paul’s maverick foreign minister, Count Grigory Rostopshchin, had successfully bluffed the Ottomans into withdrawing their forces from Georgia a year earlier, fulfilling Paul’s debt of gratitude to Bagration and ensuring that Georgian forces would also remain on side. Yet this internal rebellion betrayed that move for the bluff it was, and in the Sublime Porte, the Sultan began to wonder if even that limited withdrawal had really been necessary. Russia continued to look weak, and the war with Austria would not last forever…

It was immediately obvious that the rebellion had to be nipped in the bud. In order to do so, Paul raised an army organised according to Kautzman’s carefully considered doctrine. He put non-Great Russian troops at the fore, including Volga Germans, Georgians, Cossacks and Lithuanians, and left the larger main Russian army as the reserve, without ever actually using those terms. The campaign was a tricky propaganda balancing act; Paul was somewhat justifiably paranoid about his Great Russian troops – led by aristocrat officers, of course – going over to the enemy’s side, yet the more reliable foreign soldiers could not be seen to have achieved the victory, lest this undermine his policy of proclaiming the superiority of Russian and Slavic culture. Kautzman’s strategy was to deliberately engage first with the foreign troops and then let the Russians sweep in and take all the glory. This met with success, cementing Kautzman’s strong position at the Russian court, and the rebels were defeated at Somovo in February 1804. The propaganda side of the operation was handled by Rostopshchin, who had a vested interest in its success, and though not up to the far more all-encompassing programmes of Lisieux in France, it did the trick. Voronezh was ‘liberated by Russian arms’, the serfs were emancipated, and Kirill Klimentov was executed in Red Square as Paul looked on.

The campaign had been well handled, and the perception of Russian weakness faded in the eyes of the Ottomans and others. However, Paul’s shaky coalition continued to grapple with further problems. Despite making an example of Klimentov and his supporters, class warfare continued to rage throughout Russia, particularly in the regions due to be emancipated in the near future.

Paul needed to unite all Russians of all classes, forge a distinct national identity to rally around, both for the strength of his own position and the success of his country. The Institute of Cultural Patriotism and its like could only do so much towards this goal. He needed an enemy that he could unite ‘both Russias’, Slavic and European, common and noble, against. Revolutionary France was too much of a paper tiger, already witnessing reversals against the Mittelbund at this time and unlikely to threaten Russia for the forseeable future. No; he needed a more immediate, more present enemy – and one which, unlike the Ottomans, could not fight back.

Fortunately for Paul, such an enemy existed, and indeed had been used for this purpose by many tsars before him. Yet what would result from Paul’s new strategy went far beyond what anyone could have predicted…

*

From – “Israel: Birth of a Nation” by Moshe Galentz (English translation, 1944)

Yitzhak Volynov was born the son of a jeweller in Krementchuk in 1787. His life is a lesson in the fact that history springs from nowhere, and the most unlikely figures can go on to have great roles. Yet remembrance is seldom for wholly sweet reasons, and Volynov would doubtless have given up his fame for a life less hard.

There was nothing particularly remarkable about the Volynovs. They were a typical family of Ashkenazim, albeit towards the eastern end of the Pale, and had a skilled trade handed down from father to son, in this case the cutting and shaping of gemstones. That naturally made them fairly rich, and the target of some envy, yet like all the Jews of the town, they lived in the cramped quarters of the ghetto and their entrance and exit to that quarter was strictly regulated. They spoke Russian as well as Yiddish, but they were a people apart, forever under suspicion.

Things were never very fine for the Jews of Russia, but matters got progressively worse as the eighteenth century wore on and gave way to the nineteenth. Krementchuk, like much of Ruthenia, supported Paul from the start in the Civil War, and that conflict did not touch the town. It was Kirill Klimentov’s rebellion, and Paul’s response to it, which set the town ablaze.

Krementchuk was occupied by Lithuanian troops before the local nobles could think about joining Klimentov, and sat out the remainder of the rebellion, yet those nobles continued to seethe, knowing that emancipation and the undermining of their powers and privileges could only be around the corner. But then Paul’s plan came into play. A distraction, an event that would prevent nobles and peasants from warring, at least for a while – perhaps long enough to reach a consensus on the matter of emancipation.

A pogrom against Russia’s Jews.

Special cadres of veteran Russian soldiers were raised in Moscow and spurred on by the Patriarch, to ignite violence across the country. It was the first time that such public feeling had been deliberately stoked in such a way, and perhaps reflects the lessons that other nations were learning from Jean de Lisieux, for the Russian campaign was just as universal as Lisieux’s overnight excision of Le Diamant from the history books. It was not so simultaneous, of course, but Russia was a much larger and less technologically advanced country, and as yet lacked any form of message system faster than a man on horseback.

The pogrom was rather successful from Tsar Paul’s point of view, at least at first. Both Russian nobles and peasants had reasons to dislike the Jews, for their wealth (some of them), their secrecy, their mere existence outside the normal run of being. Many saw the opportunity for plunder as the ghettoes were invaded, looted and burned, and the fighting over emancipation was momentarily abandoned. Young boys, whether from dacha or trushbyy, took up weapons and went into battle as though driving some new, alien invaders from the land, not turning around and attacking men, women and children who had lived alongside them for years.

All across Russia the pogrom had a severe effect on the economy, upsetting the industry of many towns in which the Jews had made a disproportionate contribution to skilled work, as they so often did. This was considered an acceptable cost for the brief period of fellow-feeling that had been achieved, a new Russian identity, Slavic, Orthodox, Eastern, yet not looking so backward that it would not reject new ideas. Paul’s plan had succeeded.

Yet in Krementchuk, events happened that would upset world history forever. Young Yitzhak Volynov, only eighteen and still learning his trade from his father, was caught up in the violence. Like many other young Jewish men, and against the advice of the elders to take refuge and hope it blew over, Volynov fought in the streets against the Russians and killed at least three boys of his own age. Eventually, though, he was overwhelmed by the sheer press, the madness of the crowd, baying for blood.

He was knocked out and awoke hours later, aching all over. What meagre possessions he had had on him had been stolen, and there was a nick at his throat where a rioter had thought to cut his throat when he was robbed, yet had evidently not looked to check he had done it properly. In the coming years, many Russians would curse that unknown knifeman for this negligence.

By that point it was dark and the ghetto was quiet once more. Slowly, he walked home. All around him were bodies, debris, battered homes, the remnants of furniture that had been carried out yet then judged too cumbersome to be worth stealing.

When he came to his house, he saw the whole street had been burned down. His mother, father and sister, all following the advice of the rabbi, had taken refuge – but the Russians had burned them to death in their home. The fire had probably not been started deliberately, for the looters would have wanted to steal the gold and jewels in the house – as it was, with the fire, the house had been left untouched.

Volynov stared at the catastrophe for minutes before falling to his knees and crying out to Adonai, like Job, for why this should happen to him.

And then, like Job – as he always maintained, right unto his death – to him Adonai replied.

Yitzhak Volynov got to his feet once more. He had fallen as a boy; he arose as a man, or something more than a man. His eyes were cold, all emotion burned from them. Heedless of his wounds, he climbed into the house. The remains of his family he gave a cursory burial, but he took all the gems, all the precious metals from the house that the looters had so unwisely missed. Then he went around the ghetto, talking to the survivors, some of them young men like himself who had managed to escape death by fighting with the Russians in the street. There was something in his new voice, his cold, hard voice, that made him impossible to refuse.

Volynov gathered them in a square that had not been a square until today – such a thing would be unknown in the press of the ghetto – it was empty because all that had stood there had been burned even more thoroughly than his house. And when they had gathered there, he turned to them and preached a great and fiery speech, which was not written down at the time, yet was preserved in oral history no less than the Torah itself had been.

The Job connection still dwelt in his mind, for he quoted that book: “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades? Can you loose the belt of Orion?” he asked, while sweeping his hand up to the sky. It was a cold, clear night, save where the smoke from the burning ghetto obscured the sky, and that constellation burned clear and bright in the blackness. “No,” he continued, “we cannot. But nor can the Tsar. He is but a mortal man, for all his earthly power, and all shall come to dust in the face of Adonai. Let us follow Moses, follow Ezra, and take our people out of this place unto a better land. Let us not wait, not care to ask his permission. He will let my people go, or he will suffer the consequences.”

It was a grand speech, and such was Volynov’s sudden presence, in one so young, that few questioned how on earth so few Jews could pull off such a strategy, when against them were thousands, millions of Russians. Yet almost all the surviving Jews of Krementchuk followed him. They marched across the countryside, living off the land as best they could, indeed like the Twelve Tribes wandering in the desert of the Sinai, but potato and cabbage was their manna. Volynov’s money allowed him to buy off numerous companies of mercenaries who made up the garrison troops in that area, and even hire some of them in turn to defend the Jews from roving Russians.

It did not take long before the word spread like wildfire, and by the time that great mass of tired, hungry people finally reached its destination, it had been joined by columns from several other Ruthenian towns – nor would that first migration be the last. Not everyone had made it, of course, and the surviving Jews of some towns had been trapped enroute and slaughtered by Cossacks - but thousands had, and now finally looked upon the Promised Land that Volynov had chosen.

He had known of it from his uncle, a trader. He knew that, for a time, the Russians had practically vassalised it; yet, with the weakness caused by the Civil War, it had once more fallen back into its old position as a close ally of the Ottoman Empire, enemy of Russia and friend of the Jews – or at least those Jews that were useful to it.

None of the Ottoman borders with Russia were close to Ruthenia, but this one was. On Febuary 5th 1807, the Jews crossed the Dnieper and into the Khanate of the Crimea. The reigning Khan, Devlet V of the House of Giray, viewed the influx of Jews as an advantage. He had long heard of their exodus as it approached, and had prepared his small and often embattled country for their entry. Crimea had always been an eclectic place, and despite the Russians’ temporary weakness, he was under no illusions that the Romanovs would not rest until his old realm, like all the other little khanates that had once ruled European Russia, was brought under their boot. Likewise he knew how Volynov and many others had fought hard to defend themselves. The Jews would be the ultimate fighters for Crimea, for if the Russians indeed won, they would be doomed: the best motivation possible to defend unto the death.

And despite their poverty from having fled from looting and stealing with very little, Devlet knew that many of Volynov’s Jews were skilled workers, and that skill they carried in their heads: it could not be stolen. Crimea’s economy was based on trade, and always had been, right from the start when it had been a Greek trading colony – when the Jews had still been in Israel, warring with Sennacherib of Assyria. These Jews could be useful indeed to him…

In the final assessment it is hard to say whether Devlet was right or not, and who ultimately benefited from this Third Exodus, the Crimeans or the Jews.

One thing can be certain, however: if it is uncertain who won, the Russians definitely lost.


Part #57: Go-Nanboku-cho

From – “IMPERIUM ORIENTALE: The Rise of the Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company” by Brivibas Goštautas (Royal Livonian Press, 1956) :

1805 saw the end of the golden period for Lebedev and Benyovsky. In those four years, ever since the conquest of Matsumae and the quiet infiltration of European trade into Japan’s Sakoku, its closed market, a great deal had happened in the outside world. The Jacobin Wars raged on in Europe, as Jean de Lisieux sought to redraw the map with blood as his ink. War too was ignited between the exiled Infantes of Spain and their republican rivals in the UPSA. Russia, however, backed away from the brink of war with the Ottoman Empire, focusing on repairing and reuniting herself after her punishing civil war. The Pacific venture, which had run merrily along in the background while Russian fought Russian – at the end of a very trade long route, with the nearest big Russian town being Yakutsk, Lebedev’s men had no choice but to be self-sufficient – presented certain opportunities to the newly confirmed Emperor Paul I.

The Tsar was placed in the unenviable position of having to neutralise his many remaining political enemies without taking actions so harsh or drastic that they might reignite the civil war. Just as the British had discovered, transportation was a useful compromise between inflammatory executions and inconclusive imprisonment. Paul used this method to exile both General Sergei Vasilievich Saltykov and Ivan Grigorevich Potemkin to Yakutia. This was quite a clever strategy, certainly compared with his father’s more short-range exile of his wife Catherine to Yekaterinburg, where she was still close enough to the beating heart of Russia to continue influencing many important Russians, sowing the seeds that would, after her death, grow into the Civil War. By contrast, Yakutia was so distant from Moscow and St Petersburg that there was no chance of staying part of court gossip – as Lebedev’s men had already discovered. Therefore, Potemkin had no choice but to use his formidable talents for organisation to help improve the colony as Paul wished, in the hope that the Tsar might eventually recognise his achievements and let him return to more hospitable climes. Paul had no such intentions for Saltykov, who had only escaped execution because of the plea of his relative Nikolai, who had fought on Paul’s side during the Civil War. As it turned out, though, it was just as well for Russia that Nikolai’s argument had convinced the young Emperor…

Saltykov and Potemkin were only two of the many former Potemkinite leaders – and not a few common soldiers of suspect background – who were sent to Yakutia. They swelled the Russian population of the region, probably doubling it in fact. Ivan Potemkin’s position was unofficial and subordinate to the formal governor-general of the Russian Far East, but he soon established himself in the administrative structure – such as it was. Some of his early innovations included a more consistent teaching of at least basic Russian to the local allies and subjects sometimes recruited as workers or soldiers: among them the Yakuts, the Nivkhs of Sakhalin, and of course the Aynyu of Edzo.[1] This meant that anyone, regardless of ethnicity, could be shifted from one part of the region to another without requiring interpreters, and also helped cement Russian cultural dominance at a time when this was a hot topic in European Russia. It is possible, of course, that this was part of Ivan’s attempt to impress the Tsar.

Some emancipated serfs also came to Yakutia of their own accord, though many did not come the whole way and instead settled around Krasnoyarsk or Irkutsk. Even these, though, arguably helped develop the Russian Far East in that their presence led to the expansion of those midway towns and thus the improvement of the roads linking them to Yakutsk to the east and Yekaterinburg to the west. Although the climate was considerably harsher than European Russia, the former serfs came because the region was declared free and farmland was doled out to those who moved there. Some of them doubtless regretted it when the Tsar was forced to expand emancipation to a wide area of European Russia also a few years later, although a steady trickle continued, enamoured with the idea of owning land even if it was rather less fertile than that which they had farmed as serfs.

The exact status of the Lebedev-Benyovsky venture also needed clarification. Up until this point, it had had a vague definition, partly under the auspices of the Russian government in the Far East, partly under the Lithuanian government, but largely independent. Paul therefore declared the “Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company” in 1802, modelled on the trading companies of other European powers such as the Dutch, the French and the British. The new Company had a broad umbrella and encompassed not only Lebedev and Benyovsky’s adventures in Yakutia and Edzo, but also the establishment by Aleksandr Baranov of a fur trading colony in Alyeska.[2] Although Benyovsky knew and respected Baranov, the two ventures were as yet not really that connected and continued to run their own affairs. Nonetheless, the Company charter – from both Paul and his son Peter in his role as the Grand Duke of Lithuania – granted legitimacy to what had previously been a mad scheme, and attracted more immigration and recruitment.

Of course, these processes were only just beginning by 1805, and still had a long way to run. There had nonetheless been some direct impacts. After visiting Edzo in 1803, Potemkin agreed to certain ideas of Benyovsky’s (while quietly ignoring the more far-fetched ones) in order to expand trade and stick the Russian boot in the Japanese door before it could close. In this Benyovsky was prophetic, although perhaps it could be said that his own actions brought about his prophecy.

The situation as it stood was always going to be unsustainable. Benyovsky had successfully infiltrated Japan by a combination of factors in one of those unlikely sequences of events that would sound implausible in a work of fiction, yet can be found in any history book. The conquest of Matsumae Han with the assistance of Aynyu rebels had been the easy part. The infinitely harder task was in keeping the knowledge of this conquest from the Japanese Court and Bakufu,[3] making them believe that the Matsumae had in fact defeated the Aynyu and the regent of the new young Daimyo, Matsumae Hidoshi, was in fact another Japanese and not Moritz Benyovsky. It is perhaps hard to believe that this situation persisted for even four years, but one must consider a number of factors that lay to Beyovsky’s advantage:

1. Matsumae was on the very frontiers of Japan, and its position meant that it was permitted certain privileges by the Shogun. The Han was of course permitted to trade with the Aynyu, whereas most Hans were forbidden foreign trade of any kind. It was exempt from the sankin kotai, a system that required other Hans to send members of the ruling house as hostages to the Bakufu in order to ensure their loyalty. It was assumed that the Matsumae were no threat to the Tokugawa. Ultimately, Matsumae’s distance and isolation meant that the Emperor and Shogun were used to having little contact with that Han: it was not as if the Russians and Lithuanians had tried to take over Koromo Han.

2. A century earlier, the Matsumae had been almost overwhelmed by an earlier Aynyu rebellion, the Shakushain Revolt. That had required imperial troops to put down, and this meant that Matsumae Han had lost its special privileges for a generation and been subject to imperial inspectors poking their noses in. Even those Matsumae who despised the Russian presence were thus hesitant to appeal to the Court or Bakufu as a means of throwing them out.

3. The Court and Bakufu themselves did not want to know. Emperor Tenmei was determined to see his reign as a bright new dawn after the disasters of the 1770s (tsunamis, earthquakes, economic meltdown) and suppressed reports of any negative news throughout his empire. This was not purely a propaganda exercise, as the Japanese people were inclined to view such disasters as omens against that Emperor’s reign. The Shogun, Tokugawa Iemochi, as usual kept his network of spies alert, but in that time was chiefly concerned with reports that the Satsuma Han – the large, rich, southern, and always independent-minded domain covering a large part of the island of Kiusiu[4] – was violating trade restrictions and becoming high-minded due to the fact that the Daimyo of Satsuma possessed a full kingdom, that of the Ryukyu islands, as his vassal. Thus the eyes of suspicion were turned to the south, not the north, and anomalous reports from Edzo were initially dismissed.

4. Benyovsky pursued a deliberate policy of secrecy and employed Sugimura Goro, the disgraced and vengeful family surgeon of the Matsumae, as his guide in Japanese affairs and effective viceroy of Edzo.

This policy thus succeeded for four years. Its end has two explanations, the romantic and the economic. As usual, the latter is more probably true, but it is the former which is remembered. The economic theory simply states that sufficient goods from Matsumae were being recognised as clearly of European manufacture for the Shogun to become suspicious regardless of the suborning of his local spies. This was doubtless achieved with the assistance of the Dutch, who were Japan’s only outlet to knowledge of the West – indeed Western science was known as Rangaku, or ‘Dutch learning’, in Japan. And the Dutch, though hamstrung by being limited to the artificial island of Deshima in Nagasaki Bay as a trade post, were nonetheless jealous of their monopoly on Western trade with Japan and were just as willing as the Japanese to help crack down on other Europeans who might violate Sakoku.

The romantic explanation ties into the economic. It states that, at last in 1805, the young Daimyo of Matsumae came to give homage to the Emperor as he should have done upon gaining his position. Hidoshi was no longer able to realistically claim the situation was still too unstable to make the journey, and so he did. He was accompanied by an ‘Aynyu servant’, who aroused much talk in each of the towns that Hidoshi and his entourage visited enroute to Kyoto. Few Japanese had ever actually seen an Aynyu, and to many – even the educated – all barbarians were the same, a reflection of the system of isolation. Thus it was that Hidoshi indeed gave homage to the Emperor in Kyoto, though Tenmei was by that point ailing from an illness, though he was not old. It would be in a few months’ time that Tenmei would be one of the few Japanese Emperors of this period not to be forced to abdicate or deposed: he would die whilst upon the Chrysanthemum Throne.

Hidoshi then left for Edo to establish relations with the Shogun. Even at this point it seems that the Russian venture might have escaped discovery. Tokugawa Iemochi remained concerned both with the intransigence of Satsuma and a problem of imperial succession. Emperor Tenmei’s son Crown Prince Yasuhito had…dangerous ideas. He was familiar both with Rangaku and with Chinese writings, and had developed a philosophy not unlike Bourbon absolutism, indeed possibly derived from it. He was dangerous enough for Tokugawa to consider assassination, but the fallout would be problematic. Despite his best efforts, Tenmei had no more sons, only five daughters. It might be possible for the Emperor to make a pragmatic sanction and adopt a male child from another branch of the imperial family as his son,[5] but this would first require that he had no sons of his own. Thus the business of diplomacy, the letter and the knife, went back and forth from Kyoto to Edo as the two leaders of Japan pondered the problem.

In the midst of all this came Daimyo Hidoshi and his Aynyu servant. Hidoshi met with Tokugawa and submitted to the Shogun as the system required, but it was at this point that things started to go awry. Tokugawa had a Dutch trader at the Bakufu. Bringing the Dutch out of Nagasaki was unorthodox and probably illegal, but the Shogun made his own law. The Dutchman, a trader named Pieter Roggeveen, had probably been invited there by Tokugawa so the Shogun’s agents could ask him about possible European influences on Crown Prince Yasuhito’s ideas. But this is supposition: no records survive of such subterfuge.

In any case, the Dutchman immediately recognised the ‘Aynyu servant’ of Hidoshi as a European – none other than Ulrich Münchhausen, Captain of Marines on the Lithuanian flagship Skalvis. Roggeveen spoke out, partly in surprise and partly in outrage, and knew that someone (presumably the Russians) had indeed suborned the Matsumae.

Tokugawa immediately ordered the arrest of Hidoshi and Münchhausen, regardless of the Daimyo’s protests and attempted explanations. While they were imprisoned, he questioned Roggeveen in more detail and ascertained the Dutchman’s conclusions. Matsumae must pay, he decided, and it would start with its Daimyo.

Unfortunately for Tokugawa, when he summoned the guard to bring back Hidoshi and Münchhausen in chains, they found the cells empty. In an act of unlikely courage worthy of any of his father’s tall tales, Münchhausen had broken the two of them out of the dungeons and fled. For all Tokugawa’s spies and soldiers, they were never found. It later emerged that Hidoshi commandeered a fishing boat in Edo harbour and Münchhausen threatened its crew until they sailed all the way back to Matsumae – an epic voyage later commemorated in the Russian epic opera Lodka (“The Boat”) by Konstantin Vereshchagin, which unusually includes some verses with Japanese lyrics.

Deprived of this prey, Tokugawa ordered the drawing up of a punishment army and the acquisition of sufficient ships to carry them across the Tsugaru Strait to Edzo. As usual, he raised a levy from each of the Hans, each contributing troops to the operation. However, Satsuma and a number of other Hans were rather late and sent fewer troops than their requirement. Tokugawa made a note to deal with this southern problem after he had crushed Matsumae and driven the barbarians out: after all, he would have an army ready to do it with.

Except, of course, it did not happen that way.

Most commentators have attributed the Russian victory to technological superiority, which is at best an oversimplification and at worst utter nonsense. Even with regards to the direct armed clashes, training played as big a part as the presence of firearms. The Japanese knew of muskets, but had deliberately banned them from the islands in the 17th century as part of the Sakoku policy, with the justification that the impersonal nature of firearms destroyed the honour and chivalry of the samurai. This was quite a reasonable claim, as guns indeed led to the end of the knight in Europe. But back when the early Tokugawa Shogunate had banned muskets, they had been imprecise, slow-loading matchlocks that could still be matched in destructive power by skilled longbowmen. Thus the ban had been realistic: it was possible to enforce it, defeating a small number of musket-armed men with the gunless regular army. However, the Russian infantry, though not the best-trained in the world, could fire one or two rounds a minute from comparatively far more accurate weapons – and a few of their elite snipers bore rifles, the very antithesis of a chivalrous view of warfare.[6]

The “Russian” force on Edzo of course included many others. There were many Lithuanians, and German mercenaries in the service of both Russians and Lithuanians, and there were Benyovsky’s Aynyu cadres (who were highly motivated to prevent Japanese rule coming over Edzo again), some of them trained in European warfare. There were even a few Matsumae sympathisers who took up arms against the Shogun’s army, either because they held grudges like Sugimura, or because they genuinely believed the Russians would be a lighter hand than Tokugawa’s.

However, if all or most of the large Japanese force had actually landed in Edzo, it is likely that the numerically inferior Russian force would still have been swept away, swamped by the horde of well-disciplined if technologically inferior soldiers. The Russians were saved by the same factor that had saved England from Spain in the sixteenth century, and Japan herself from the Mongols in the thirteenth: Edzo was an island. The strait of Tsugaru separated it from the island of Niphon[7] and this meant that the army needed a fleet to cross. Tokugawa assembled pressed boats from all over Japan, but these were mostly little ships, fishing craft and the like. After all, Japan had little need of trade ships or armed escorts for them.

This would have sufficed if the Strait had been uncontested; but it was not. Benyovsky learned from Sugimura’s agents in Niphon that the Shogun’s army was approaching the ports, and summoned all the warships that the Company had at its command – by this point, fourteen frigates and obsolete ships of the line, and perhaps twenty smaller brigs and sloops. It was a force that would have been wiped out even by Admiral Villeneuve’s battered Republican French sailfleet, yet to the Japanese it was death.

It is hard perhaps to explain the metamorphosis that those ships underwent in the Japanese consciousness. The inhabitants of Nagasaki had seen Dutch ships docked at Deshima and the occasional other European ship passing through, such as one of the expeditions of La Pérouse. They even made drawings of those ships and learned some theory of shipbuilding via Rangaku. Yet they were otherworldly, remote, barbarian affairs. Once upon a time – the Russians later tried to suppress knowledge of this – before the Tokugawa Shogunate, the Japanese had built quite serviceable galleons to Spanish plans and sailed them around the world, as well as smaller ocean-voyaging trade ships to travel throughout the East Indies. Now, though, that knowledge was long gone. Suddenly, those distant barbarian ships were wooden dragons blazing with fire and iron. Few living Japanese had ever seen a cannon fire. Many saw it on that day, but few of them were lived to tell the tale.

Of course, the Russians were still limited by their numbers. At least a quarter of the Japanese ships made it through the Russian blockade and landed their troops in Edzo. They even won some battles, especially against undisciplined Aynyu irregulars, and retook some towns for a while. Yet in the end the Russians carried the war. This was indeed partly due to their superiority in firearms, training and above all artillery (borrowed from one of the ships) but there was also a mundane factor at work. The Tokugawa Shogunate had kept the peace in Japan through political manipulation, assassination and repression for two centuries. The last major war in Japan had been the Shimabara Rebellion of the 1630s, which had come about in response to the creation of Sakoku itself. Thus it was that no matter how disciplined the Japanese armies were, no matter how many stories of heroic samurai their officers had been raised upon, they were a mass of green recruits. That factor would have been a great disadvantage even if they had had the same weapons as their enemies.

The Russians, by contrast, included not only veterans of the recent conflict on Edzo, but at least half a regiment’s worth of troops who had fought for years in the Russian Civil War on the side of the Potemkinites. Paul had exiled them to Yakutia, and Benyovsky had found a use for them. Destroying Japanese armies.

Many commentators, not least Benyovsky himself, wrote of that war. The impression one receives from reading their accounts is that the Japanese were very impressive fighters, strongly disciplined and motivated, and rarely surrendering, usually fighting to the death. Yet one cannot escape the fact that this history was written by the victors. The great army that Tokugawa had compiled had been almost completely annihilated: some volleyed down on Edzo, far more drowned in the Strait of Tsugaru. It was the greatest disaster in Japanese naval history since the Battle of Myeongnyang against the Coreans, two centuries before, when a Corean force outnumbered ten to one had wiped out a Japanese fleet. In fact the situations were similar: the Coreans had won partly because of the leadership of Admiral Yi Sun-sin and partly because of technological superiority, for their timberclad Panokseon ships had been impervious to the attacks of the Japanese Atakebunes.

And yet, many historically-aware Japanese writers pointed out acidly, that fleet at Myeongnyang would have stood a better chance against the Russians if it had somehow been brought to the here and now. After all, it had consisted of real warships, and they had been armed with cannon – which was more than one could say for anything Tokugawa could field.

The institution of Sakoku had been partly due to Japan’s defeat in the Imjin War with the Coreans and Chinese, not least due to that battle. Now it was openly asked whether that isolation had been the right course of action. Murmurs against Tokugawa spread throughout the islands, and nowhere were they stronger than Kiusiu, where the Satsuma fanned the flames. Sikoke[8] too came out as a hotbed of anti-Shogunate feeling, doubtless because its Hans had realised that Tokugawa must have little means of attacking any other island. More significantly, the Choshu Han of southern Niphon, another large and powerful Han, declared an alliance with the Satsuma. The Choshu had had a grudge against the Shogunate ever since a Shogun had deported them to their present remote domain from a previous position of power nearer the centre of Niphon.

These murmurs of discontent needed a cause to rally around, and they soon had one. Emperor Tenmei died – if one believes the poets, upon hearing the news of the disaster of the Tsugaru Straits. Tokugawa, struggling to cope with the repeated setbacks, immediately produced documents claiming that Tenmei had adopted Kojimo, a noble from one of the Sesshu Shinnoke (the Four Cadet Branches of the Imperial House of Japan) as his son on his deathbed. It is almost certain that this was falsified, but Kojimo was presented with the Three Sacred Treasures in Kyoto and thus coronated. However, from the start his reign was hollow. Two of his predecessor’s four chief ministers, his Naidaijin (Minister of the Centre) and Udaijin (Minister of the Right) refused to recognise Kojimo as emperor, and fled into the south.

Kojimo quickly installed new men in those posts, but his credibility took a blow when it transpired that Crown Prince Yasuhito was indeed claiming the Chrysanthemum Throne from exile in the south (having escaped the Shogun’s assassins) and was backed by the rebellious armies of Satsuma, Choshu, and others. They had sent few soldiers to turn the Strait of Tsugaru red with their blood, while Tokugawa’s allies had sent many. Thus, while the supporters of Yasuhito were outnumbered, they were able to hold their own against Kojimo and Tokugawa.

Therefore, Matsumae was forgotten. The Russians had sustained losses in the battles, but now they emerged in a strong position. Though the official trade routes to Japan were closed, the civil war meant that the Pacific Company was soon doing record business. After the defeat, all the Japanese factions wanted European firearms. The southern alliance soon found itself in control of Nagasaki and the Dutch learning that flowed through it, and – with that Japanese knack for duplication that has astonished many Europeans through the ages – were soon building their own advanced European muskets, if not necessarily always matching them with the appropriate training.

Deprived of this, the Shogun’s forces turned to the only alternative source they had, no matter how ironic it was: initially without Tokugawa’s knowledge, they purchased weapons and plans from Moritz Benyovsky.

So, while Japan tore itself apart and the Russians and Lithuanians grew fat on the proceeds, all seemed well for Benyovsky’s mad venture in the East. Yet Japan was one thing. China was quite another. And all those Russians settling in the Amur valley had been brought to the attention of the Guangzhong Emperor…









[1] Recall – the Ainu of Edo (Hokkaido), to use OTL spelling.

[2] Pretty much as OTL except Baranov started a few years earlier (1795 rather than 1799).

[3] Shogunate, or the Shogun’s ‘court’.

[4] Old spelling of Kyushu, retained in TTL.

[5] Indeed this happened in OTL a generation earlier, when Emperor Go-Momozono had no sons and adopted an heir descended from an earlier Emperor’s daughter. However, this did not happen in TTL as Go-Momozono had a son (Tenmei).

[6] Yet another legacy of European interest in rifles after Frederick’s use of them in the assassination of his brother back in 1749.

[7] Honshu – not to be confused with ‘Nippon’.

[8] Shikoku.


Part #58: The Sons of Inti

From – “The Third Platinean War” by Dr Thierry Gaston de Connarceux (1945 – English translation) :

On July 24th 1804, the Cortes Nacionales of the United Provinces of South America, incited by the governing Partido Solidaridad and President-General Juan José Castelli, declared war upon the Carlista regime in the City of Mexico. Castelli had always urged an expansionist policy, an attempt to spread the UPSA’s principles of republican liberty to the other Spanish colonies in South America, and the collapse of Spain presented a perfect opportunity. The exiled King Charles IV’s declaration of an Empire of the Indies muddied the waters more than Castelli had hoped, but nonetheless this was the best chance that the Meridians[1] would have.

This would not be a simple conflict. The chief front was between the northern edge of UP territory in what had once been the Viceroyalty of Peru, just north of Lima, and the new Kingdom of New Granada. Much of the territory near Lima was in fact the property of the restored Tahuantinsuya Empire, which by 1804 was ruled by Hipolito Condorcanqui, the son of Tupac Amaru II, under the name Tupac Amaru III. Although he was competent enough, this Inca lacked the fire of his father and did not have the steel to stand up to Castelli’s demands. Tupac Amaru II could, perhaps, have played New Granada off against the UPSA; but Tupac Amaru III acceded to everything Castelli wanted, and agreed to allow the UPSA to stage their invasion from Tahuantinsuya territory.

The invasion followed the declaration of war rather more rapidly than one might think, considering the difficulty of the terrain. This was expedited partly because the document was brought to Marshal-General Pichegru by sea for most of its journey and offloaded at Lima, but also because the bulk of the Fuerzas Armadas had already been concentrated in the northern provinces by the Partido Solidaridad government. They had known that this moment was coming ever since Spain fell to the French.

Thus the first Meridian troops crossed the debated border on September 3rd 1804 into the declared Kingdom of New Granada. The latter had not been idle, either. After the death of Viceroy Ambrosio O’Higgins in 1801, he had been succeeded by Manuel Mendinueta y Múzquiz, another former military man. Mendinueta’s chief experience had been in raising colonial militias to resist foreign encroachment and put down rebellions. He had served in Cuba in the 1780s, and although the island had eventually fallen to the British and Americans, the remnants of his militiamen continued to plague the Carolinian authorities there well into the nineteenth century. Since taking office as Viceroy in Santa Fe, he had raised further regiments of militia, initially with the object of finishing off the remnants of the Comunero rebels, the Meridians’ republican fellow travellers in New Granada. Mendinueta’s efforts not to rest on his laurels after the Comuneros’ initial defeat by Viceroy Caballero in the 1780s is the chief reason why the Comuneros were of much less assistance to the invading Meridians than Pichegru had hoped.

Mendinueta also confirmed his predecessor’s son Bernardo O’Higgins as a general commanding the regular army regiments stationed in the viceroyalty. Like many of the viceroys, he supported scientific exploration of the region’s flora and fauna, not least because of the Linnaean theories centring around those animals and plants that could be economically important. Chief among the natural philosophers working in New Granada was José Celestino Mutis, a Peninsulare and noted Linnaean who explored much of the New Granadine interior. Although he failed to find anything that would revolutionise the viceroyalty’s economy as Mendinueta had hoped, his expeditions incidentally made very detailed maps of previously unexplored regions. These would prove invaluable to the New Granadine authorities in the coming conflict, granting them a considerable intelligence advantage over the Meridians.

The rule of Mendinueta in New Granada was turned upside down in February of 1804 when the entourage of Infante John of Spain arrived in the port of Maracaibo. The Infante entered Santa Fe in April accompanied by mass processions (secretly arranged by his retainers who had gone ahead) and informed the thunderstruck Mendinueta that the Viceroyalty (and Viceroy) was abolished, and instead there was a new Kingdom of New Granada, part of the Empire of the Indies – and John was King. However, he then immediately reappointed Mendineuta to Secretary of the Council of State (i.e., prime minister) of the new Kingdom. Although John was only twenty-five years of age, his legendary oratory abilities helped win over not only the veteran Mendineuta but also the people of the capital city. His dissemination of Charles’ plans, including the setting up of a regional Cortes in Sante Fe and the sending of representatives to a centralised Grand Cortes in the City of Mexico, helped confuse the Meridians’ propaganda which itself called for similar reforms.

Nonetheless, when Pichegru’s armies hit New Granada in September, the young country was struck hard. The combined Fuerzas Armadas of the UPSA were both more numerous and better trained than anything the Kingdom could muster, even after Mendineuta’s militia reforms. Faced with a battle at Huánuco, General O’Higgins controversially chose to withdraw his inferior forces and concede the Pillco Valley to the Meridians. O’Higgins then converted his army mostly into small bands of mountain warriors designed to wear down the armies of Pichegru as they advanced northwards through the Andes and along the coast. He knew that the Meridians had to be held south of Trujillo, or they would be able to break out into the broad coastal plains of Piura and the northern remnants of Lower Peru – all that remained in Spanish hands after the Second Platinean War – would follow the rest of the old viceroyalty into Meridian shackles.

This tactic was initially fairly successful. Pichegru advanced at a relatively rapid northward pace, and by the winter of 1804 had captured the city of Caraz. The entirety of the Callejón de Huaylas, that great valley from Caraz to Lima, thus now lay in Meridian hands. However, at this point Pichegru was forced to halt. His large army had accordingly large logistical requirements, and the Lower Peruvian interior was too poor for French maraude tactics to work, even ignoring the fact that the Meridians were trying to portray this as a liberation. What supply trains did come up from Lima were often set upon by O’Higgins’ irregular bands; they enjoyed much more success in attacking the convoys than direct assaults on groups of Pichegru’s infantry.

Because of the problem of his starving men, Pichegru led the bulk of his army over the mountains to the coast, though they suffered losses from O’Higgins’ fighters due to having to split up into many small bands for the mountain passes. The settlements on the coast were mostly poor fishing villages, but Pichegru was able to obtain resupply from the UPSA by sea from Lima. The Meridian army thus escaped its logistical problem, at least temporarily, but O’Higgins took advantage of the fact that Pichegru had only left a few thousand men as the garrison of Caraz. O’Higgins reconstituted his army and attacked Caraz in Feburary of 1805, a surprise assault given that the weather was still inclement. Caraz was small enough that it offered little defensibility, and Pichegru’s garrison was half wiped out. The remaining troops retreated in good order to Yungay. O’Higgins thus regained his name in the court of King John in Santa Fe, where his previous retreat had led some to brand him as a coward.

Pichegru’s response to this was to send reinforcements to Yungay and thus repel O’Higgins’ follow-up assault in April. However, as he reconfigured his own forces for further operations in the mountains, he also sent his lieutenant Francisco Lopez y Lucía to request assistance from Tupac Amaru III. Pichegru had discerned the utility of O’Higgins’ irregular mountain troops and saw that the best way to fight against them was to recruit his own corps of Tahuantinsuya, who were even more skilled at mountain warfare than anyone O’Higgins could call upon. The campaign season of 1805 thus went rather worse for O’Higgins, with Caraz falling again in June and O’Higgins pushed back to the defence of Trujillo by September. There the two sides finally fought a pitched battle, which the outnumbered New Granadine forces lost. O’Higgins and about half of his surviving troops were evacuated by ship from Trujillo: the new navy of the Empire of the Indies had fought a battle against the U.P. Armada a month before off the coast at Paita, and thus the seas were not dominated by the Meridians so much as they were for the early part fo the war.

The Meridians thus broke out into the coastal plain as O’Higgins had feared, and the industrial production of quinine by the Noailles plantations ensured that Meridian troops retained an advantage as they laid claim to the tropical interior on the east side of the mountains. Although King John and his allies continued to amass new forces, it seemed as though the war was definitely going the Meridians’ way. And it seems quite likely that it would have ended in a U.P. victory, had it not been for the impatience of President-General Castelli.

Castelli was disappointed with progress so far. He had envisaged a dramatic fall of all that remained of Lower Peru within a single campaign season, the people rallying to the Meridian banner of liberty and thus forming new cadres as they marched on Santa Fe. As it was, it seemed as though the war would drag on for years and the UPSA would probably only obtain all of New Granada at best. That was insufficient: the Partido Solidaridad’s mission would not be complete until all of Spanish-speaking America was under republican rule. To that end, he prepared a knockout blow. The Armada de las Provincias Unidas was under the command of Admiral Gervasio Ramírez, who had been the most successful captain of the UPSA’s small experimental naval force during the Second Platinean War. Since independence, the Armada had expanded considerably, chiefly by the purchase of obsolete ships from European navies, but also by some limited native construction. It outnumbered the ships loyal to King-Emperor Charles in the City of Mexico, consisting of a hodgepodge of Carlista vessels from Spain and those that had been attached to the viceroyal squadrons, by two to one.

Despite the inconclusive action at Paita, Castelli was therefore convinced that the Meridians could dominate the seas, which meant an obvious solution to the war presented itself. A large army force, loaded onto commandeered merchant ships and protected by Ramírez’ Armada, could be landed at a Mexican port such as Acapulco and then march inland to take the City of Mexico. The whole new Empire of the Indies could thus be brought down in one blow, strangled in the cradle. This strategy showed obvious influence from those of Jean de Lisieux – ‘to hold the heart is to hold the nation’. Whether it would work in this case, given the highly decentralised nature of the new Empire, was a question raised in the Cortes Nacionales – including by some members of Castelli’s own Partido Solidaridad. But Castelli shouted them down and accused them of treachery. The plan would go ahead.

Even with the UPSA’s superiority in numbers, Castelli ordered that all available ships be seized to guarantee a large number of troops could be sent. As fate would have it, a young captain named Alejandro Mendez had a notion along those lines: he proposed that the Armada attack the pirates nesting in the Islas Malvinas and obtain their ships as transports. This idea appealed to Ramírez, who saw it as killing two birds with one stone. Ever since the Second Platinean War in the 1780s, the Islas Malvinas (originally claimed as part of the Viceroyalty of Peru)[2] had been claimed by Britain as a possession. The original intent of the Rockingham government had been to turn Falkland’s Islands, as the British called them, into a minor naval base in order to control the southern Atlantic trade routes. However, the initial survey missions sent there had concluded that the islands were too barren to make the expense worthwhile, and thus the islands had simply been left alone. Some politicians in the UPSA had talked about approaching Britain to purchase the islands, but nothing had so far materialised.

As it was, the uninhabited isles had become the haunt of pirates and privateers. A base at Port Louis (on East Falkland or Isla Soledad) was the chief town, a wretched hive of scum and villainy which was also used as a home port by some legitimate traders and fishermen. In particular, the whalers of Nantucket, an island part of the Confederation of New England, used Port Louis as a base for their excursions into the South Seas. Some of the pirates were from the UPSA themselves originally, while others were British or American and a smaller number were French or from the Spanish colonies. Like most pirate settlements – like those in the West Indies during the heyday of piracy before the British gained control of the Caribbean Sea – Port Louis was a ramshackle but arguably quite egalitarian assembly, with black Africans enjoying an equal status to whites, Indians and mestizos that they did not possess even in the UPSA itself.

Regardless, though the pirates rarely preyed upon U.P. shipping – not wanting to whack the beehive next door – it would be an obvious advantage to deal with them and in so doing gain more shipping for Castelli’s planned descent on Acapulco. To that end, Mendez was given the temporary rank of commodore and led a force of five ships up the Strait of San Carlos (or Falkland Sound as the British called it) for a descent upon the town.

Mendez’ ships – two ships of the line and three frigates – were quite sufficient to break through the pirates’ defences and land marines in the town, seizing it. Most importantly, though, they needed prize ships. Seven pirate or privateer vessels were taken, along with two Nantucket whalers. One of them was the Phoenix, commanded by Joseph Peirce. Peirce reacted with fury when the U.P. Marines boarded his ship and attempted to fight them off with a cutlass – he had his hand taken off for his pains. Perhaps in some other world ‘Peirce’s Hand’ would have become as famous as Jenkins’ Ear; but this was to prove a sideshow.

For some of the privateer craft escaped, and Mendez ordered his three frigates to pursue. Two of them, between them, captured another three pirate ships, all of them useful for Castelli’s plan. The third, however, was the Concepcíon, under the command of Captain Eduardo Alvarez.

Alvarez pursued a particularly large and promising-looking pirate craft – whose identity has never been proved – for a full day, until one of the South Atlantic mists had descended. His crew despaired that they had lost their quarry, but Alvarez stubbornly pressed on, until his hope seemed rewarded: a silhouette emerged from the mists, about the right size.

What happened next has been debated furiously by sailors, nationalists and academics alike for decades, but the facts are that the Concepcíon fired a warning shot, the other ship replied, and a full-scale battle emerged. But the larger frigate was victorious, brought down the enemy’s mainmast, and boarded her with her Marines. A bloody fight ensued.

It was not until the red mist had faded from the eyes of her crew that Alvarez and his men realised that the ‘privateer’ had not simply been flying the Blue Ensign as a false flag, as many ships even of legitimate navies did in that period as a ruse de guerre. They had, in fact, lost their quarry – and instead had found His Majesty’s Brig Cherry, fifty-two days out of Norfolk, Virginia, under the command of the American Lieutenant Jeremy Hayward, now ten minutes dead beneath the blade of a Meridian Marine.

Alvarez immediately saw the implications and did his best to cover the incident up, repainting the brig’s name, throwing those Americans and Britons who had surrendered overboard so that the story would not get out, hoping the Royal Navy would believe that the Cherry had simply foundered at sea. But it was not to be. The story got out, who knows how? Perhaps one of Alvarez’ men was haunted by the killing of the prisoners, turned to the bottle, and spoke.

What is known is that by January 1806, both Fredericksburg and London knew of the ‘Cherry Massacre’ and their people, outraged by the stories appearing in their newspapers, bayed for their governments to act…




[1] “Meridian”, derived from America Meridionalis (South America) is, by the 20th century, the most common demonym for someone from the UPSA in the English-speaking world. Technically the term Septentrian could be used analogously for someone from the Empire of North America, but most Anglophones simply say ‘American’.

[2] Recall in TTL that there never was a Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata, so ‘Viceroyalty of Peru’ included everything south of New Granada.



Part #59: Pope, Austrians and Neapolitans Knot…

“Four hundred years before Christ, the Gauls of Brennus decided it would be a good idea to invade Italy, then weak and divided. Within a few generations, their descendants would bitterly rue bringing themselves to the attention of the Romans as they united the peninsula into the foundations of the greatest empire of the classical world. This would not be the last time a great general made this mistake…”

- George Spencer-Churchill, Commentary on Gibbons’ “History of the Roman Empire” (1935)

*

From – “The Rise of Naples” by James Cuthbertson (1940) –

The winter of 1803 saw the total disintegration of Lazare Hoche’s position in central Italy. The fallout from the Rape of Rome can scarcely be exaggerated. In France, Lisieux used it as an excuse to launch La Nuit Macabre and thus redirect Catholic anger against his Jacobin political enemies, allowing him to consolidate the rule of his own personality cult. However, while Hoche had a far greater appreciation of military realities than Lisieux could ever hope to have (as the French Republican armies would later learn to their cost), equally he was a political amateur beside Lisieux’s skill. Though the troops that had torched Rome and killed the Pope had been French Jacobin volunteers, it was Lazare Hoche’s green and red banner of the Italian Latin Republic that became stained by that blood. The desertion of Hoche’s Italian volunteers began as soon as the news spread, and is doubtless partially responsible for his defeat at Teramo by the Neapolitan and exilic Tuscan army under Prince Mario Pignatelli Strongoli.

Hoche was able to limit the damage for a time by rallying his Italian levies with his personal charisma and blaming Lisieux. But this only worked so long as they were fighting and campaigning, and he could appear to his men on the battlefield. It certainly meant that he was able to hold the field of Ascoli Piceno against Pignatelli’s armies – which outnumbered his by two to one – to cover his retreat from Teramo. Hoche thus successfully retreated to Rome in the hope that he would be able to make suitable amends for the destruction in some symbolic act there. However, this plan backfired and many more of his men deserted when they saw that the rumours of destruction and horror, far from being exaggerated, were if anything euphemistic. Rome was a burnt, dead city inhabited only by the remnants of the poor. The nobles and churchmen had either fled the city or been summarily executed by the Jacobins. The effect was so damaging that Hoche was forced to move his camp yet again in November to Viterbo, even though this made him look indecisive and uncertain.

He left only a small garrison in Rome itself and they proved unreliable. Based on the urging of the “Unholy English Trinity” that the native Neapolitan politicians sourly (and accurately) accused of dominating the court – Admiral Horatio Nelson, Sir Richard Hamilton and Sir John Acton – King Charles of Naples and Sicily sent Pignatelli’s army to retake the city in March of 1804. This was not his only act, however. Throughout the winter, Charles and his ministers had been calculating how to use Hoche’s terrible faux pas to their advantage. Most of the cardinals who had fled the Rape of Rome – about a third of the College – came to Naples the city, and ultimately to the Caserta Palace, the royal court. The cardinals were led, unofficially, by one of the oldest of the survivors – the Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia and Velletri, aged seventy-nine and one of the highest-ranking Church officials to have survived the Jacobin holocaust. He was held in respect by most of the other cardinals who had lived and had sacrificed much of his family’s holdings in France by condemning the Revolution and supporting Benedict XV.

This cardinal thus had many qualities making him a suitable candidate to be elected as exilic Pope, despite the questions of the legality of such an action when the exact number of cardinals to have survived was unknown. But what immediately attracted attention was the fact that this cardinal was Henry Benedict Maria Clement Thomas Francis Xavier Stuart – and the controversy he provoked went on for even longer than his name.

The ‘English Trinity’ was understandably appalled by this, especially the nationalistic Nelson. The Jacobite pretenders had been the bogeyman to Britain for a hundred years and more. The death of Henry Benedict’s brother, Charles Edward, on the field of battle in Ireland in 1751, was still celebrated as a national holiday in many parts of Great Britain and Ireland. The unofficial British national anthem, God Save the King, was about the defeat of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715. In a country which defined itself by opposition to Catholicism and the Stuarts who had cleaved to the Romish church, making the claimant King Henry IX (doubly confusing now Britain had a Hanoverian Henry IX on the throne) into the Bishop of Rome was an act of base treachery and a Popish Plot of Satanic proportions.

However, it was much easier for the Englishmen to rave about the evils of the Jacobites when they were not there to argue their case, and even Nelson found it hard to condemn this gentle, clever old man who was nonetheless incandescent at the actions of the French in Rome and determined to achieve a suitable vengeance for the Church. Therefore, regardless of what the English thought, Henry Benedict Stuart was duly elected Pope by the conclave of the surviving Cardinals on November 17th 1803. He took the papal name Urban IX, not merely because it matched the number of his claimant royal name (as Nelson darkly suspected) but as a reference to one of the earlier holders of that name – Urban II. It was this predecessor who was on his mind as he released his first papal bull, in December.

This, without actually calling for a crusade (which would have been considered somewhat archaic in 1803) made reference to Urban II’s great speech which had ignited the First Crusade, including the phrase: ”The Lord beseeches you as Christ's heralds to publish this everywhere and to persuade all people of whatever rank, foot-soldiers and knights, poor and rich, to carry aid promptly to those Christians and to destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends. I say this to those who are present, it meant also for those who are absent.”

Yet Urban IX also moderated his message in a way Urban II had not. He made reference to the Prodigal Son and quoted Christ from the Gospel of Luke: “ Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.” His intention was partially political. He knew that Hoche would not be overthrown simply by introducing a fiery fervour into the Neapolitan and allied armies: in order to overcome that brilliant general and his run of luck, his own army would have to turn against him. Pope Urban thus pointed the finger at Hoche’s Italian-levied troops with one hand, accusing them of being complicit in horrors like the Rape of Rome, yet beckoned with the other and offered them forgiveness if they would turn against Hoche. Once more he quoted Scripture, this time the Book of Acts: “To open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me.

Urban’s bull was widely circulated throughout the whole of Italy, including those portions under Hoche’s rule, and this was largely facilitated by a movement begun by the maverick Calabrian cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo. Despite having entered the College by rather corrupt means and never actually having been ordained as a priest, Ruffo successfully organised a massive underground movement which undercut Hoche’s rule, passing copies of Urban’s bull through secret meetings in churches, homes and even the catacombs under the burnt wreck of Rome. In this Ruffo partially sought to use the Revolution’s methods against it, but whereas Revolutionary thought spread through intellectual salons, Ruffo’s counter-revolutionary ‘Army of the Faith’ did so through mostly through the gathering places of the poor. It also linked up with the Neapolitan Kleinkrieger[1] underground led by Michele Pezza, nicknamed Fra Diavolo (Brother Devil), assisting the Kleinkriegers with intelligence and helping them make hit-and-run raids on isolated Republican garrisons and supply trains. The rumours of the Kleinkriegers’ cruelty towards captured Republican soldiers helped accelerate the rate of the desertions Hoche was desperately trying to halt. However, this successful execution of a conspiracy to undermine and overthrow a state by the Romish church did nothing to calm the paranoia of Nelson, who saw the fears of political popery drilled into him since boyhood suddenly realised.

1804 marked the collapse of the Italian Latin Republic. It is unlikely that the Neapolitans and their allies alone could have rolled up Hoche’s domain, even with the serious problems he was suffering, but at this point the Austrians intervened. The war with the Ottoman Empire had gone badly, with Francis II’s gamble of attacking Wallachia in a bid to draw Russia into the war having fallen flat. Alexandru Morusi had successfully defended the Wallachian interior against General Alvinczi’s army and the Hungarian had been forced to command an embarrassing retreat over the Carpathians after being narrowly defeated north of Bucharest.

In 1802 the Austrians’ fortunes had gradually turned around, with Zagreb being defended by the army of General Pál Kray de Krajova et Topolya, another Hungarian, now in his sixties but still fighting the Turks as well as he had in his youth. Francis released Archduke Ferdinand’s army and the Ottomans were beaten back to the gates of Sarajevo, but there the Austrians outran their supply lines and were once more defeated in March 1803. Soon afterwards the Sublime Porte offered a peace treaty and Francis grudgingly accepted it, by now recognising that he could not continue to unnecessarily prolong a war against the Turks when vast swathes of Hapsburg territory to the west were under tyrannical republican occupation. The Treaty of Bucharest saw all the former Venetian possessions in Dalmatia, save a few islands in the north and the southern tip of the cape of Istria, going to the Ottomans; the paltry remains becoming Austrian. Also, the border in Bosnia was moved slightly northwards. The Ottomans handed over some of the islands they had obtained to the Republic of Ragusa, a small mercantile republic on Venetian lines in the south of Dalmatia that had been an Ottoman vassal for many years.

The effects of this Austro-Turkish War were manifold. In the Ottoman Empire there was a mood of national euphoria stoked by the court party of the Grand Vizier, Mehmet Ali Pasha, and exaggerated in order to brand his political enemies as unpatriotic traitors. The Ottoman navy, the Donanmasi, was somewhat expanded in order to cover the new coastal holdings on the Adriatic. However, the army ultimately suffered, having contracted victory disease from the campaign in Bosnia and victories that were more due to factors such as the generalship of Dalmat Melek Pasha, Austrian indecision and incompetence, and Turkish superiority of numbers than any broader quality. Thus the memories of this war were sufficient to set in a conservative culture, just as countless naval victories had done to the British Royal Navy, and vital reforms were delayed or dismissed. Sultan Murad V’s descendants would ultimately regret this victory.

The Austrians, on the other hand, were smarting from the defeat and their sense of triumph at the repulse of Leroux from Vienna had been tarnished. Francis II’s indecision did not help. Though he claimed the throne of the Holy Roman Empire his father had declared ended, he feared to strike directly into Bavaria in case this antagonised Lisieux, despite the fact that Lascelles had broken with Lisieux and the French armies in Swabia had begun to face defeats in the face of the Mittelbund. This ultimately served to irreparably damage Austrian influence in Germany, particularly given the atrocities committed by Lascelles’ troops in Bavaria while Francis dithered.

Italy was a different matter. Intervention there was strongly argued for by Archduke Ferdinand, and his influence at his nephew’s court served to ensure at least a token force was sent over the Alps in both 1802 and 1803 in an attempt to occupy Venice and ultimately relieve Hapsburg Tuscany. However, in both those years the Austrians were beaten back by Hoche’s troops holding the passes – mostly levied Italians, for at that point Hoche’s charisma served to rally many to his cause, and the Austrians were a traditional enemy anyway.

However, the situation had now changed. Besides, the Hapsburgs were suspicious of the rise of Naples. They had the Pope in their pocket – if Vienna recognised Urban IX as the Pope, and they could scarcely do otherwise without sparking damaging schisms and civil wars that would undermine Hapsburg authority – and they were achieving victories against Hoche. More to the point, they also had the support of the exiled governments of both Venice and Tuscany, and Tuscany was Hapsburg. Yet Grand Duke Carlo, quite understandably given Austria’s inaction, had thrown in his lot with the Bourbons of Naples and Sicily.

Thus if they did not act now, the Austrians ran the risk of losing their influence in Italy altogether. Swathes of formerly Hapsburg territory in the north of Italy were also under Hoche’s occupation, besides. To that end, Ferdinand led a much larger army, enhanced by the seasoned veterans of the war with Turkey, over the Alps in April 1804, and this time the passes were scarcely contested. Mountain warfare was brutal work, and most of the Italians still willing to serve Hoche were of the sort who fought as a lifestyle, for plunder and convenience. They would not die hard on cold stone for Hoche or his Republic. Only Hoche’s French troops, and the few Italians who were true believers in French Republicanism, fought hard – and died.

It was a fantastic turnaround in a matter of months. Hoche continued to fight brilliantly and won almost every battle he fought, but he could not be everywhere. Fra Diavolo’s Kleinkriegers undermined his army’s logistics wherever they could and ambushed sentry parties in the night, slitting their throats. Soon absolutely everything had to be guarded, and there simply weren’t enough men. With Naples surging up from the south, and the Austrians sweeping down through the Venetian Terrafirma, Hoche knew his days were numbered.

Rather than trying to fight on, he reassembled the French core of his army and his Italian true believers at Genoa in August 1804. By that point the Neapolitans had retaken all the former Papal States and Urban IX had been blessed in the ruins of the Basilica of St Peter, with King Charles vowing to rebuild the city even more glorious than before. The Austrians had conquered the Venetian Terrafirma (much to the alarm of the exilic Venetians in Naples), the Hapsburg holdings in Milan – Hoche’s former capital – and were threatening Parma, Mantua and Lucca. In France Lisieux, alarmed by all this, allowed Marshal Boulanger to personally lead an army into Piedmont and secure the territory as a buffer state for the French Latin Republic under military rule. Overly fearful as before, Emperor Francis forbade his uncle from carrying the fight into Piedmont. But Ferdinand was more interested in marching south, knowing the Italian Latin Republic was now dead and that the postwar borders might well be drawn on the battlefield now.

As it transpired, the armies met in March 1805 roughly at the point where the border was drawn at the Treaty of Rome in 1806. This was a line between Ancona in the east and Orbetello in the west, partitioning the former Papal States between the two new great powers in Italy, the Hapsburgs in the north and the Bourbons in the south. Pope Urban permitted the secularisation of much of the papal lands in a move that shocked many of the other cardinals, but he was used to trading his possessions in exchange for security, and now he had the possessions of a prince. The Papal territory was reduced to Lazio, with the Neapolitans also having possession over the ‘military frontier’ in the north. Sometimes the more minor states of Italy were resurrected, as in the case of Tuscany, but these were strongly vassalised to either of the two powers – Tuscany, despite being Hapsburg, was now Bourbon in all but name, and Carlo’s heir (the future Carlo II) hastily married Princess Carlotta of Naples in order to cement the alliance. It was a loveless marriage and there persisted a rumour for many years that the future Grand Duke of Tuscany, Carlo III, was in fact the son of Horatio Nelson. Venice was not restored, being amalgamated into the Hapsburg possessions in part as a recovery of loss of face after the Ottomans having annexed the Venetian coast of Dalmatia. The presence of the exiled Venetian fleet serving the Neapolitans thus promised to be a bone of contention between the two powers in the future.

But for now Hoche gathered the remnants of his forces in Genoa along with what was left of his fleet, and sailed to the port of Mataró, north of Barcelona, in Catalonia. There, he marched overland to Barcelona and offered his army to the French occupying forces there, gambling that Lisieux was – as always – planning a big push and would not let their previous disagreements stop him from obtaining more forces.

Lisieux bit the bullet and agreed, and Hoche’s armies were reintegrated into those of France in April 1805, with Hoche retaining his general’s rank and formally recognising Lisieux as Administrateur. Of course, in private Lisieux could not forgive Hoche’s betrayal. Yet according to his notions of the value of human life, it would be criminal to execute such a brilliant general who might still serve France well. To that end, Lisieux decided on a course of action not unlike that which he had used to wipe out the Jacobins – and which had, ultimately, led to this day.

Find an enemy to set Hoche against, one that he would inflict plenty of damage upon, but would probably be killed in the process. Maximum efficiency.

Lisieux’s plans moved ahead apace. But back in Naples, Horatio Nelson led the Neapolitan fleet – including the Cacafuego and its rockets – in pursuit of Hoche. Hoche was saved by a Mediterranean storm which interposed itself between his Genoese ships and Nelson’s mostly former Venetian ones. The storm delayed the Neapolitans sufficiently that they missed Hoche’s harbouring at Mataró. Nelson learned the Genoese ships were there and attacked by night, using the rockets once more as a prelude weapon to instil terror in his opponents, and taking many prizes. But Hoche’s forces were gone, marched overland to Barcelona, and soon would return over the Pyrenees to France.

Things had now changed. Naples had not, technically, ever been at war with France, though it had fought French Jacobins under Hoche’s command. Nelson, in his zealousness to prosecute the war against the fleeing Hoche, had attacked the French occupation troops in Catalonia. This served as an inspiration to Catalonia’s own Kleinkriegers, who had disliked Spanish rule but had an even more ingrained racial hatred of the French, and soon attacks all over the province were taking place.

The conservative King Charles was horrified and fearful at this escalation, but events were out of his hands. The Pope completely confused Nelson by praising his actions and suggesting another crusade was required to deliver Catalonia (maybe even all Spain!) out of French hands. It was a stupid, ridiculous plan considering Naples had only just escaped total annihilation due to Hoche’s miscalculation over Rome. It was absurdly audacious. Therefore, of course, it had Nelson’s unqualified support. And where the Romish Church and Englishmen agree, a mere king has little chance of stopping things.

Pignatelli’s army sailed for Spain in October 1805, at the same time when the Portuguese and their Carlista allies were beginning to turn the tide in the west…


[1] i.e., guerilla, partisan. Hiedler’s movement provides the most accepted name for it in TTL because it is most notorious.
 
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Thande

Donor
Part #60: Meanwhile in the Dementia of Spain…

“We are all shaped by the experiences of our childhood…truly, if I had not witnessed the events of those dark days in my own humble way, it would not be so clear to me – as it should be to all of you – how quixotic, how wasteful, how pointless it is to spend so many lives, stain our soil with a sea of blood, merely for an idea…

- Pablo Rodrigo Sanchez y Ruiz, 1828 speech in Madrid’s Plaza del Arrabal, shortly before being forced to flee from a stone-throwing mob​

*

From - “The Pyrenean War” by A.V. de la Costa (1924) :

With the surrender of Felipista Spain to the French in April 1803, the situation in the Peninsula had changed once more. The departure of the Infante Charles for the Americas, and his conniving with the Portuguese in order to give the latter free reign in Spain, lost him some of his supporters; however, pockets of Carlista sympathy remained throughout Spain, and – at least at first – the Carlistas were the natural first port of call for anyone driven to resentment by the French occupation.

In truth though, compared to their ravages in Germany, the French armies in the Peninsula were quite a light touch on the populace, save for their habit of “requisitioning” food supplies by stealing harvests. This was partly because the new generation of Republican generals active in Spain - Claude Drouet, Etienne Devilliers and Olivier Bourcier – had learned from the resentment and resistance provoked by the actions of Lascelles and his ilk, and also because Spain was a Latin country and thus not subject to most of Lisieux’s ideas of French racial supremacy. This had also been the case in Hoche’s Italian Latin Republic, though Hoche had been independent of Lisieux, until the ill-advised Jacobin attack on Rome.

The latter, which occurred shortly before the fall of Spain, provoked increased resentment against the French in conservative Catholic quarters of Spain, and the first Spanish ‘Kleinkriegers’, imitating Michael Hiedler’s resistance in Bavaria, began to appear. Rather than trying to defeat the Kleinkriegers, Drouet – who was the senior French officer and effective governor of occupied Spain – appeased their sympathisers by distancing Lisieux’s government from the action of the Jacobins, just as Lisieux himself did. Indeed Drouet went rather further than Lisieux did, openly sending his men to Catholic services (no matter that the few remaining radical deistic-atheists, after Lisieux’s purges, had to be sent there at bayonet-point) and trying to paint the French Republicans in the same light as the popular Enlightenment Spanish ministers of the last century: liberal, statist, anti-clericalist perhaps, but still Catholic.

In this he was moderately successful: although the French suffered Spanish Kleinkrieger attacks on their less well defended convoys and outposts throughout the occupation, the Spanish Kleinkriegers never found the same degree of popular support as their Italian or German counterparts, and never had the numbers or firepower to openly challenge French armies. Although Lisieux had his doubts about Drouet’s methods, the general got results and Lisieux, with his own interpretation of the value of human life, had to respect that.

Bourcier, who was commander of French forces in the west, was always the strongest proponent of war with Portugal. This was almost inevitable, as King Philip VII’s regime of course laid claim to all of Spain, including those areas currently under Portuguese occupation due to King Peter IV’s pre-emptive invasion. These consisted of Galicia, the strongpoint of Ciudad Rodrigo, and a few other towns along the border. Peter IV and his generals, the most senior of whom was Julio Vieira, saw control of the Hispano-Portuguese frontier as being based around the ‘Gates of Spain’, the two fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo in the north and Badajoz in the south. But though the (Carlista) commander of Ciudad Rodrigo had agreed to side with the Portuguese after Charles’ declaration, the general commanding the garrison of Badajoz was a different story.

This was General Mateo María Núñez y Blanco, who was from Galicia and refused to support the Portuguese after their occupation of his homeland, despite also being a Carlista. Therefore he turned Badajoz and its environs into his own personal domain. Aware of its importance as a strongpoint and fearful that Blanco might switch sides, the Portuguese tried to besiege Badajoz in the summer of 1803, but were predictably unsuccessful, just as they had been forty years earlier with British backing during the First Platinean War. Badajoz was one of the strongest fortress cities in the world, a series of overlapping bastions on the west side, the River Guadiana on the east, and the river crossing defended by Fort San Christoval. A very powerful and well-supplied army with extensive artillery and a willingness to take heavy casualties could have taken it. The Portuguese could not, and after failing to make a practicable breach in those heavy walls, gave up and retreated.

Meanwhile, King Philip VII moved his capital back from Cadiz to Madrid and, as has been mentioned elsewhere, his chief minister Saavedra was killed in the street, most probably on the orders of Drouet. Without a strong Spanish minister, the weak king became a puppet of the French. Although Drouet shared with Lisieux a love of peace and the idea that it was necessary for progress, he also appreciated Bourcier’s argument that Spain would forever seethe with resentment unless they found some enemy to unite the Spaniards against and, in so doing, forget the French. Portugal was the logical choice, given that the Portuguese had occupied Spanish land. Drouet hesitated for a while, but after an upsurge of Kleinkrieger attacks in the winter of 1803, consented.

The French drew up a plan of attack that Devilliers described as ‘French spearheads backed by Spanish shafts’, though in practice there were usually French detachments all throughout the armies to prevent desertion. Spain was hardly new to civil wars, and a hundred years earlier a French-backed king had split loyalties just as now, but rumours of Jacobin depredations like the Rape of Rome continued to inject religious and ideological reasons for soldiers to hesitate. Furthermore, most Spanish private soldiers were drawn from peasant stock, and (generally more accurate) stories about the French taking the harvest without pay, perhaps from their own families for all they knew, led to a singular lack of enthusiasm for any French-led operation among the Spanish army.

Drouet decided on a strategy which he called ‘Le Nouveau Poséidon’, inspired by the name of the three-pronged trident that had helped drive French forces deep into Austrian-allied territory in 1797. He concurred with Peter IV of Portugal about the importance of the Gates of Spain and the two southern prongs, under the command of Bourcier and Devilliers respectively, were aimed at taking Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz. The northern prong’s intention was to sweep west into Galicia and then south into Portugal. After some hesitation, Drouet decided to make an ideological point by giving command of this third force to a Spanish general, Fernando Ballesteros, who had been defeated by Drouet in Catalonia the previous year. Ballesteros was a firm Felipista and a man of honour, so Drouet was satisfied with his loyalty – though, of course, he put a French watchdog, a Colonel Dominique Lenoir, in his command staff.

The 1804 campaign season thus opened with the launch of Noveau Poséidon. Peter IV concentrated his army in the north, recognising that Portugal had no real fortress city there to hold as a strongpoint. When Ballesteros’ army arrived in Galicia in April, he found the remnants of General Cuesta’s army still battling the Portuguese around Ponferrado and Valdés. Cuesta had ignored orders from Philip VII to defend Spain against the French, intent on hunting down the Carlistas – now the Infantes had departed, he fought the Portuguese, but with an army dwindling from desertion: his soldiers were even more in the dark about what was happening back in Spain than anyone else, and feared the worst.

After a force of Ballesteros’ cavalry helped save save Cuesta from being surrounded by Vieira’s armies, Ballesteros ordered Cuesta to amalgamate their forces and come under his command, as he now outranked Cuesta. However, the older man refused to recognise the promotion. Under Lenoir’s urging, then, Ballesteros first had to fight Cuesta’s remaining loyalists and kill the other general in battle at Allande in June – buying the Portuguese valuable time to regroup their forces.

Further south, Badajoz held out as defiantly against Bourcier as it had against Vieira the year before. Treachery almost struck in Blanco’s command staff, but was firmly rooted out before a plot to open the doors of the fortress to the French could succeed. Bourcier attempted to make breaches to assault, but was hampered by a lack of artillery. Recognising that French steam weapons would be of more use in the war of maneouvre in Galicia than in the sieges, Drouet had given most of his stock to Ballesteros (or, in truth, Lenoir). That Franco-Spanish army, however, soon found themselves hampered by the mountainous terrain and the uncooperativity of the steam-waggons. The machines had to be taken apart, the parts moved west, ironically, in smaller horse-drawn carts, and then reassembled by a small number of overworked French engineers. Thus in the early part of the war, the Franco-Spanish realistically lacked the advantage of the French steam technology. Although Bourcier did have some more conventional Spanish artillery, problems with shot and powder convoys being raided by Kleinkriegers – the Madrid-Badajoz road passed through several areas of Carlista sympathy – meant that the siege kept starting and stopping.

A practicable breach was finally made in October, at which point the city was beginning to starve anyway, but it was relieved by a Portuguese attack sallying from Elvas which stormed Bourcier’s siege encampment and spiked many of his precious cannon. Though Bourcier soon rallied his own forces, he recognised the siege was now unpracticable and retreated to Mérida for the winter, demonstrating his undiminished skill in generalship by defeating an opportunistic Portuguese attack along the road at Talavera in November. In the aftermath, General Blanco considered honour satisfied and reluctantly agreed to work with the Portuguese, who strengthened their position in the south of Spain by taking Huelva.

The Portuguese had less success in Ciudad Rodrigo: it was both a smaller fortress than Badajoz and Devilliers had more cannon than Bourcier. Though the city fought hard, Devilliers made two breaches as early as June and Ciudad Rodrigo was stormed, not without moderate losses on the Franco-Spanish part, on the 24th. Ironically perhaps this served to meld the French and Spanish parts of Devilliers’ army into a single fighting force, a baptism of fire, and they were always the most effective and united of all the Franco-Spanish armies. However, any further advance into Portugal was halted by the presence of the Portuguese fortress city of Almeida on the other side of the border. As Peter IV had hoped, taking the Spanish fortresses meant that the Franco-Spanish first had to retake them before then facing the original Portuguese line of defence. Devilliers tried a second siege, but was unable to take the city before winter set in, and his troops retreated to Ciudad Rodrigo.

However, after the initial slowdown caused by facing Cuesta, Ballesteros’ army in Galicia succeeded in defeating Vieira’s at Lugo and Ourense in July and October respectively. The Franco-Spanish, scenting a Portuguese defeat, pursued Vieira’s retreating army all the way to Vigo, but arrived too late: Vieira’s forces were evacuated by sea by the Portuguese Navy, saving an army from destruction. Ballesteros and Lenoir complained to Drouet, who complained to Lisieux, about the lack of any French or indeed Spanish naval presence. But Lisieux refused to unveil the new French steam fleet under construction at Toulon, Marseilles and Bordeaux until the time was right, and had requisitioned much of the Felipista Spanish sail fleet for France. For what reason, only time would tell…but in the short run, it meant the Portuguese had an advantage that, realistically, they should never have had. Soon realising the enemy’s lack of naval forces, the reckless Peter IV reacted by ordering amphibious descents on Spanish coastal cities. In one particularly filmish [cinematic] strike in February 1805, a Portuguese squadron bombarded San Sebástian in the Basque lands – which, according to Lisieux’s redrawing of the borders, were now French – landed troops and stole the contents of the city’s mint. Lisieux angrily allowed parts of the Spanish fleet, often now led by a French-dominated officer corps, to defend against the Portuguese, but the damage was done.

1805 saw Ballesteros win important victories in Galicia and northern Portugal, defeating Vieira’s rebuilt army at Ponte de Lima and threatening Oporto by June. But on all other fronts the Franco-Spanish position began to collapse. Lisieux had always seen the Spanish front as a sideshow, and now that Spain was subdued, he cared little for Portugal, seeing their naval descents as pinpricks. Portugal might be dealt with in due course, but as a minor irritation. He knew the three countries that had to be taken out if France was to have her 25 years of unmolested peace, and that had to be the top priority. Drouet was always hampered by the fact that Lisieux kept trying to withdraw French troops from Spain virtually as soon as Philip VII had surrendered. Thus 1805 saw the collapse of what had been a fairly successful operation, with the Portuguese retaking Ciudad Rodrigo and open Carlista sympathies spreading everywhere. Drouet sought to regroup Bourcier’s and Devillier’s Lisieux-stripped armies into one strong force to strike Portugal in the south and roll the country up in cooperation with Ballesteros in the north, ignoring the fortress cities and accepting the ensuing logistics problems. This strategy might, perhaps, have worked; but at this point an unexpected player entered the fray.

In October 1805, capitalising on an earlier attack on Hoche’s exiled Genoese fleet in Mataró in June, Horatio Nelson and Prince Mario Pignatelli Strongoli landed in Valencia. Nelson commanded the Neapolitan fleet, reinforced by Venetian exiles, while Pignatelli led an army that, though it had a Neapolitan core, included Tuscans and members of the Papal States’ small army. Indeed, this was the first military force for centuries that could lay claim to the name Italian…and the world wondered…

Drouet was placed in an unenviable position. Lisieux remained unconvinced that Naples was a serious threat, any more than Portugal. Some biographers believe he was taking laudanum extensively at this point, though revisionist historians have castigated this as the usual popular hatred of L’Administrateur that prevents any objective analysis. In any case, it seems that Lisieux had become convinced that all the Latin countries would naturally fall into line as soon as he had defeated France’s last serious Germanic rivals. So Drouet received no more troops: indeed, the French withdrawal barely slowed.

And Naples was a problem. It was easy enough to rouse the Spanish people against a Portuguese enemy, especially one which had invaded pre-emptively – the two countries were traditional, historical rivals. Naples was different. It had been tied to Spain for hundreds of years, minus the brief interruption between the First War of Supremacy[1] and the First War of the Polish Succession.[2] It was ruled by Charles VIII and VI, uncle of both claimant Kings of Spain. Thus when Pignatelli captured Valencia and declared that Charles VIII of Naples, and Charles VI of Sicily, was also Charles IV of Spain,[3] it was taken seriously by more people than the French had expected.

Drouet saw the Neapolitans as a bigger threat than the Portuguese, and so stripped the western front for troops to throw against Pignatelli’s army, hoping to hurl them back into the Mediterranean Sea. But though the French won a tactical victory at Albacete in February 1806, and drove the Neapolitans back, it was a strategic loss. The Neapolitans had been successful enough to rouse the countryside in their favour, with their ‘English Generals’ being exotic rather than heretical. For Horatio Nelson and Sir John Acton, like Nelson’s friend Leo Bone before them, briefly discarded their navies to serve as land commanders under Pignatelli. Tuscany also contributed General Paolo Wiesenbach, the Tuscan-born son of a Hapsburg official recruited from Austria, and though the Neapolitan-led forces remained numerically inferior to the Franco-Spanish as a whole, the continuous pressure from the Portuguese in the west meant that Drouet could not concentrate his forces.

Ballesteros was driven from northern Portugal, after briefly taking Oporto, in March 1806. With assistance from the Portuguese Navy, Vieira then took Cadiz in an amphibious descent and further increased Portuguese influence throughout Spain. Recognising that his position was melting down, Drouet withdrew his remaining armies to Madrid, holding to the Revolutionary doctrine of ‘to hold the heart is to hold the nation’, sought to recruit more Spanish levies in the face of desertion to the Portuguese and especially the Neapolitans, and appealed to Lisieux for more troops.

But even in these straits, L’Administrateur did not listen. His plans were near fruition, and he would not be distracted by such petty complaints.






[1] The War of the Spanish Succession.

[2] In OTL, just the War of the Polish Succession.

[3] In OTL, of course, he was.


Interlude #8: Goede Hoop (by Nicksplace27)

From – “The History of Southern Africa: Volume II; 1600-1845” (Henry Watson; 1965)

The Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the United Dutch East India Company, had controlled the Cape since Jan van Riebeeck landed there in 1652. They settled in the Cape, fought and bartered with the Khoikhoi and early on it proved to be a profitable trading base. But by 1715, the Company stopped the colony's policy of open immigration, monopolised trade, and combined the administrative, legislative and judicial powers into one body. The leaders told the farmers what crops to grow, demanded a large percentage of every farmer's harvest, and frequently harassed the colonists. This tended to discourage further development of industry and enterprise. From these roots sprung a dislike of orderly government, and a libertarian view-point that has characterised the "Boers" or Dutch farmers for many generations.[1]

Despite these restrictions, the population in the lands under the rule of the Dutch East India Company expanded exponentially. The population grew from a paltry 3,000 Europeans in 1715 to over 35,000 Europeans in 1805 and was growing significantly. This encouraged the Governors to further restrict the Boers’ expansion.

Seeking largely to escape the oppression of the Company, the farmers trekked farther and farther from the seat of government. The Company, in order to control these emigrants, established a magistracy at Swellendam in 1745. However, this did not halt further emigration or hostility among those already in the countryside. By 1805, the heavily taxed Boers of the frontier districts, who furthermore received no protection against raids by their African neighbours, expelled the officials of the Dutch East India Company. The Boers established an independent government at Swellendam.

These revolutionaries founded what they called the Afrikaan Germanic Republic, influenced by the UPSA and Revolutionary France in their motives. However, they took an even harsher stance against the natives than the Company did, as most Boers held slaves at the time. They advocated expelling, murdering or enslaving all Khoikhoi from their Republic because of the damage they had done to their cattle farms. This policy was justified by the Boers as they were heavily influenced by the racialist philosophies of Sijbren Vorderman, founder of the Dutch school of Linnaean Racialism. The Boer government also established Afrikaans as their official language; the first time it was legitimately recognised as separate from Dutch. They attracted popular support among much of the Boer population and encouraged an independent spirit to protect their homeland by invading and driving out the Dutch East India Company. They began to form an army to besiege Kaapstad.

The leader of this Boer militia was a farmer named Hermanus Potgieter and by the time he had collected his army of over five thousand men, he had become the de facto leader of the AGR. In 1807, he led this army to take Kaapstad and remove the Company from power. After two weeks of marching and pillaging, the Boers reached the city of Kaapstad and surrounded the city, not allowing any shipments of food or water to go in or out. Potgieter wanted to starve the city into submission and force the Company to allow them independence. In fact, the leader of the militia did not know how fortunate his timing was. The Governor of the Cape Colony, Cornelisz Jacob van de Graaff, had just seen off the last Dutch ship in their normally heavy garrison because of the naval build up of that year.[2] Relief and a possible counterattack by DEIC troops would not come for over two months.

Graaff, in those trying weeks of siege, instituted an extremely draconian policy to ration food supplies and kill any living thing worth eating in order to survive. Of course, in keeping with his policy of cronyism and corruption, most of the food was reserved for himself, his friends and his troops. This only fueled the flames of discontent. By the end of the first month, food was running dangerously low for the citizens of Kaapstad and dissent was growing. The Governor was forced to imprison and torture anyone who advocated surrender, stating that most people here were likely to be massacred by the army outside if they did give in. Outside, the Boers themselves were subject to disease and low supplies as well. Near the end of the two months, Potgieter ordered a final full assault to take the city.

The weakened armies fought street to street inside Kaapstad and it seemed as though the Boers were inching their way toward capturing Graaff when the DEIC fleet arrived with massive reinforcements. They decisively routed the Boer armies within Kaapstad and regained control over the entire Colony. They captured Potgieter and hanged him, as well as convicted many other Boer leaders. They also established a permanent military presence at Swellendam, preventing any further Boer unrest. The dream of a free Boer state was dead for the moment, but it is interesting to wonder how an Afrikaan Germanic Republic in southern Africa would have developed independently. Boers even today regard Potgeiter as a hero and a martyr for Boer nationalism.

Surprisingly, Cape Colony experienced little loss in population and actually enjoyed a rapid growth in prosperity after the Boer Rebellion of 1807. This was mostly due to the massive reforms put into place following the Dutch East India Company’s investigation. The Dutch governor was removed from his post due to his draconian policies leading up to the rebellion and he was replaced by a more amicable governor who would remove many of the extraneous, arbitrary rules set in place by the previous administration. This caused many of the grievances that the Boers had with the government to dissipate for a time. The Cape also enjoyed a steady stream of immigrants from the Netherlands, but also increasingly from Flanders. The early 1810s also marked the first large Xhosa raids on Boer soil and the discovery of the Kingdom of the Sotho; further solidifying the ever-expanding Boers’ sense of nationalism and racial superiority. Nevertheless, the Cape colonists emerged from their time of troubles just as strong as they had entered it…

…While the Cape was experiencing much unrest and rebellion, the British became another force to be reckoned with in Southern Africa. This was the brainchild of the British East India Company, who after the Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1805 securing Dutch control of Cape Colony, needed a port in between the Company’s possessions in Bengal and the British hegemony in the Atlantic. After several surveying missions, they decided to send a mission to set up a trading base in the Natal. This region was originally discovered by the famous Portuguese explorer Vasco De Gama in 1497, but the Portuguese decided to put their bases further north, in Delgola Bay and the Zambezi River. Therefore the gap in between Cape Colony and Portuguese Mozambique became a prime location for a potential British settlement. With the Director of the BEIC’s approval, funding went out to settle Natal.

A fleet of five ships first landed in Natal Bay on November 16th, 1805, founding a port there. Another three ships landed St. Lucia Bay just three months later and founded another port. These centres of trade and shipping would prove to be very important, becoming some of the biggest BEIC bases on the Indian Ocean. By 1811 they were commanding over £1.2 million in trade in a single year (though of course the economic chaos of the 1810s makes it difficult to put a precise value on the pound of that time). The BEIC bases in Port Natal and Port St. Lucia were proving to be worth the investment and providing excellent competition to the Cape. But the largest problem the British faced was not a group of cattle herders or hunter-gatherers like the Dutch faced in the nomadic herdsman of the Khoikhoi, but a very large civilisation with remarkable organisation, the Matetwa Empire.

The Matetwa Empire was a confederation of many Nguni tribes, eventually numbering over 300,000 people, encompassing territory from the Limpopo River to the Maloti Mountains.[3] When the British began to open up diplomatic discourse, the king of the Matetwa received them on remarkably good terms. The king, named Dingiswayo, was in the process of reforming his Empire after his short exile in Mozambique taught him about European ways of organising their societies. The food the Portuguese were now trading with him allowed for an explosion in population. Because of these ideas and changes, he began to reform his army into a centralised command which would be headed up by his most trusted aide, Shaka.[4]

A newcomer to the Matetwa Empire, Shaka quickly advanced up the ranks and befriended the king. His reforms to the army only augmented Dingiswayo’s changes. Shaka introduced new weapon techniques, like the very long spears and large shields that are so iconic for the Matetwa culture today. These new battle tactics, organisation and weapons would be tested when Shaka ordered an invasion of the Swazi Kingdom and the Gaza Kingdom. After several battles using the hitherto unseen tactics of encirclement, Shaka captured and forcibly admitted the tribes into the Matetwa Empire. Dingiswayo used this war to his advantage and further consolidated the different tribes into a more homogenous structure. Ultimately, by 1810 the Matetwa Empire was the strongest native force in all of southern Africa.

Some of the most important information on the Matetwa was documented by the BEIC pioneer Thomas Grenville, who decided to lead an expedition up the Tugela River in central Natal in 1811. They wished to set up the first trading post in the hinterlands to trade with the Africans there and transfer the profits to the coast. They moved through the rock-filled river toward the Maloti Mountains in their now famous trek (depicted in the famous painting by Sir Winston Roberts in 1871), they were discovered by a Matetwa patrol. They escorted them to the royal Boma, where King Dingiswayo resided. Grenville managed to record everything from their voyage into the Matetwa Empire in a journal which was later published as a bestseller in both America and Britain.

The King received the men with great hospitality and treated them to a royal feast of what the King called Inkuku yasekya nama qeselengwane, roasted chicken with an African herb topping. The King also gave them Bjala bja setso, a tribally brewed corn beer which tasted quite dark and rich. The men also enjoyed watching a game of the now famous Matetwa Stick-fighting (Donga) competition, long before the art became so fashionable in Europe. Dingiswayo viewed the European displays of guns and other technology with respect rather than awe. Shaka, who was present at the Boma, remarked that while the firepower was quite impressive, his fastest regiment of men could rush up and kill them while they would be slowly reloading. Grenville’s men were similarly impressed by the organisation and civility of the Matetwa as well as the incredible power that King Dingiswayo commanded. But, as enlightened as the expedition was, they were reluctant to describe them as equals. Ultimately a treaty was signed allowing the British to claim the entire coastline of Natal up to the Maloti Mountains to border the Matetwa Empire.

Natal grew immensely during this time period as British East India Company authorities wanted to reinforce their holding and take advantage of the rich farmland secured for them. Between the first landings in 1805 and the expedition by Grenville in 1811, over five thousand British and American settlers came to the costal areas near Port Natal and Port St. Lucia. By that same year, the first feasible sugar plantations were being considered and because the British colonies in Africa (unlike the Dutch) had a strong Abolitionist streak, labourers would have to drawn elsewhere. The relative prosperity of the Matetwa Empire discouraged native labourers from coming to work on the plantations. The colonies in West Africa were under the control of the Royal Africa Company, which saw the BEIC as a rival and would not co-operate in any venture that might undermine its economic supremacy on the Dark Continent. This left the BEIC with only one option.

A new age dawned in Natal’s history as the first Bengali laborers stepped foot onto the white beaches of Africa…




[1] All of which happened in OTL, but when the British took over the Cape in 1801, they removed most of those policies, quieting most Boer discontent. ITTL, there is even more resentment with a permanent presence of the DEIC.

[2] More on this later…

[3] This is roughly half of Transvaal and Zululand without the coast in OTL. The Maloti Mountains are the OTL Drakensberg Mountains.

[4] Shaka is a much different person than OTL, albeit with some similarities. He does not have a close relationship with his former tribe of the Zulu. Shaka is still the military genius of OTL, but without the political ambition and paranoia that he exhibited in OTL. The Matetwa Empire was the OTL predecessor, but eventually dissolved into the Zulu Empire because of Shaka’s excessive purges. The resulting violence, called the mfecane today in OTL South Africa casued a lot of instability, restricting white settlement in Natal in OTL. In TTL, there is a consolidation of the Matetwa Empire, but with a relatively peaceful transition. Because of this, there could be far more British settlement in Natal this early on.

Part #61: British Isles Political Roundup

You must build the new House of Parliament on the river, so that the populace cannot exact their demands by sitting down round you.

- Richard Wesley, 1st Duke of Mornington[1]​

*

From “A History of Ireland” by E.J. Sheridan (1935) –

The defeat of the rebellion of the United Society of Equals (USE) in October 1799 was just the beginning of a new era for the Kingdom of Ireland. What resulted from the ashes of this civil war was considered greatly surprising at the time, and is arguably only the case because events conspired to hamstring conservative interests in both London and Dublin that would have preferred to crack down with an even more authoritarian constitution than that which the island was already ruled by. Primarily, of course, there was the fact that a majority of Irish statesmen – mostly deeply conservative Anglican peers – had been killed in the burning of the Irish Parliament by the USE in November 1798. Secondarily, Great Britain’s own political structure had undergone a shift no less dramatic, if less bloodily obtained. Tired of the increasing authoritarianism and paranoia that had persisted under the Rockinghamite ministry, which bled liberal Whigs at an alarming rate as the war with France raged on, the British people had conspired – despite the problems with their own electoral system, with its rotten boroughs and family party machines sewing up many seats – to elect the most reformist House of Commons in Parliamentary history. As may be covered elsewhere, the resulting Fox ministry had good reasons to support a liberalisation of the Irish political system.

Under the uncodified Irish constitution as it stood, all Irish Parliamentary legislation was ultimately subordinate to that of Westminster, as Irish bills were signed into law by virtue of the Great Seal of the Kingdom of Great Britain – which was held by the British Privy Council. This was known as Poyning’s Law and date from the late fifteenth century, as part of Henry VII’s attempt to bring Ireland under more direct control (which his son would further with his declaration of a Kingdom of Ireland). This meant that real power in Ireland usually rested with the Viceroy, the Lord Lieutenant, and the elected MPs had little power. In any case, the system by which they were elected – excluding the Catholic majority from either standing or voting, along with all non-Anglican Protestants such as the Presbyterians – meant that there was little connection between the wishes of the Irish people as a whole and the resulting legislation.

This changed with the USE rebellion. As well as the deaths of so many Irish MPs and Lords, the then-Lord Lieutenant, the Earl of Romney, had hanged himself after escaping from the conflagration in Dublin and realising that Westminster would blame the civil war on him. The post was seized almost by default by Richard Wesley, the Earl of Mornington, who had successfully commanded combined Irish loyalist, British, and American forces in the crushing of the rebellion. His de facto position of power was then recognised by the Foxite government in London in late 1800. Wesley[2] wanted primarily to rebuild Ireland in such a way that it would be stable and reliable, in his own words, not a perpetual distraction for a British government paranoid about invasion and sedition. A member of the ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ and devout Anglican himself, he was on record as saying that he disliked Catholicism (though not individual Catholics) but “It is better to let dissenters inside your house, as then they are less inclined to try and set it on fire.” Wesley’s policies formed the basis for a great deal of the case studies that underwrote the ideology of Tory Noveltism when it was coined later in the 19th century.

Thus, when Fox (and his sympathetic foreign minister, the Earl FitzWilliam) gave Wesley a free hand, he acted to institute a new Dublin Parliament. Fortuitously for the cause of reform in Ireland, the USE had attacked Dublin on a day when most of the minority of reformist Irish MPs (the “Patriots”), led by Henry Grattan, had walked out in protest at a bill that painted pro-Catholic reform as sympathetic to French Republicanism, even though the French Republicans were virulently anti-Catholic. Wesley thus asked Grattan to form a new temporary caretaker government, and used his conventional powers as Lord Lieutenant to institute reforms under which the next parliament would be elected – thus cleverly avoiding having to deal with another unreformed parliament first. This blatantly unconstitutional move sparked mass protests both in Ireland and in Britain,[3] but Wesley was able to maintain the peace in Ireland by virtue of having so many troops still present from the crushing of the rebellion. Using tactics he had learned while fighting in India, where consideration of the religious affiliation of troops and enemies was just as important as in Ireland, he tried to use American troops primarily to crack down on anti-reform protests of any type. The American contingent, the 79th (New York) Regiment of Foot, were commanded by General Benedict Arnold VI, who became friendly with Wesley despite his soldiers being continuously called out (much to the frustration of the Constitutionalist government of James Monroe back home, who wanted to recall them).[4] Wesley used the Americans because they had no single established church, and New York in particular was notoriously eclectic, thus preventing the stigma of a rebellion being crushed by ‘British’ or ‘Irish Papists’ or similar.

Unilaterally, Wesley abolished the Disenfranchising Act of 1728, which had set down in law that Catholics could not vote in Ireland. This did not mean that Catholics could stand as MPs, but it did mean that those among the Catholic population who fulfilled the property requirements[5] could vote for sympathetically-minded, reformist Protestant MPs – of which there were not a few. Despite further protests, the election went ahead in July 1801 and returned an Irish Parliament as reform-minded as the one in Westminster, though like Britain’s it still had a large number of strong-minded conservatives. The respected Grattan became leader by default as Wesley relinquished some of his powers, thus leading to the first creation of an Irish ‘prime minister’. From 1801 to 1808 (elections were held every seven years) the Parliament legislated continuously to rescind and abolish some of the anti-Catholic strictures that had been put in place in previous years. It was a ripe time for reform, as the British Government and the King both sympathised with at least limited compensation and were not as obstructive as would have been if this had come at an earlier time.[6]

In particular, the Grattan ministry ended restrictions on Catholic education (allowing education overseas, and for Catholics to study at Trinity College Dublin), inter-religious marriages, and the creation of a militia allowed the ownership of firearms by non-Anglicans, which was particularly controversial. Wesley’s response was typically acerbic – “If keeping guns out of the hands of Papists stops rebellions, what have we just been fighting?!” These issues conspired to make Wesley unpopular in Britain, which now faced uncomfortable questions about emancipating its own Catholics. Though Fox and the King still supported Wesley, an attempt to grant him a British peerage was struck down hard by protests in the British House of Lords, and Wesley had to be content with having his existing Irish one upgraded from Earl to Duke.

Inevitably the situation was not as sunny as some reformists have portrayed it. With his attempts to improve the Catholics’ situation, Wesley had deprived the Irish of a natural scapegoat, and Protestant dissenters such as Presbyterians (especially since Presbyterians had made up such a large percentage of the USE) often took their place. As far as the Constitution of 1802 was concerned, people in Ireland were either Anglican or Catholic, and that was that.

Events in Ireland were watched with interest elsewhere, but few realised how significant a part the island would play a few years down the line…

*

From: “Fatal Hesitation: The Foxite Ministry” by Sir Arthur Rumbelow (1912) -

With the death of the Marquess of Rockingham in November 1799, his Liberal government (now a misnomer) collapsed. The confusion that prevailed in Parliament for days, with the royal power also in a state of transfer from George III to Henry IX, mirrored the similar situation in France with Lisieux’s rise to power – the Double Revolution. However, by the end of January 1800, the situation had stabilised. Charles James Fox, leader of the Parliamentary Radicals and their sympathisers, became Prime Minister under the sympathetically reformist King Henry IX. According to his own notions that Republican France was still an improvement over the war-mongering and ideologically absolutist Bourbon Royalist France that the British had fought for so long, Fox abandoned Louis XVII and sought peace with Lisieux. In this he obtained surprisingly strong support from many factions in the divided Parliament. There were moderate Whigs who thought the war was a distraction from domestic business; ultra-conservative Tories who disliked the French Royalists even more than the Republicans; and a growing number of thoughtful men from all parties who recognised the important of the new military innovations that the French had introduced, and that Britain needed time to match them, breathing space.

Thus the Peace of Caen in March of that year was signed, and the war was over. What happened next was a great matter of parliamentary turbulence: Fox tried to introduce some of his pet plans for radical reform, such as the abolition of the slave trade, and was heavily defeated. Parliament had supported him in the attempt to obtain peace, but did not cleave to his agenda. With typical lack of compromise, Fox decided that the premiership was worthless if he could not pass the bills he wanted, and resigned to the King. Henry IX called a general election.

The result was greatly surprising, as candidates who publicly declared support for Mr Fox were returned in great numbers, though still far from a majority. Fox’s eloquence had intrigued enough Britons into wondering just what the rest of his plans were, and there is also the fact that a politically active generation was coming to fruition which had grown up with the Empire of North America’s more enlightened parliamentary strictures being accepted. The resulting parliament gave Foxites, Parliamentary Radicals and like-minded Whigs slightly more than a third of the seats, but given the controversial nature of the Foxites’ policy agenda, a minority government was not realistic. The reform agenda was saved by an agreement negotiated between Fox’s supporter Frederick Wilberforce and the second-largest cohesive faction in Parliament, the rump Liberal Whigs who had rallied around Richard Burke, son of Edmund Burke. Fox had previously been very friendly with the elder Burke before they split bitterly over the French Revolution. Now, Wilberforce secured a coalition deal which would grant them a majority over the divided opposition. Burke would be made both Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary, while Fox would remain Prime Minister, Wilberforce would be Lord President of the Council (and thus education minister) and Lord FitzWilliam would be made Foreign Secretary. This ‘Reform Coalition’, as it was dubbed, enabled Fox to get much of his legislation through the House of Commons, though it meant Burke had a perpetual veto. The House of Lords was more obstructionist, but the fact that the King sided with Fox meant that most of Fox’s agenda was eventually passed in the face of threats by Henry IX to ennoble enough like-minded men and sit them in the Lords. Ironically, this close political alliance of Prime Minister and King led some to cry that this was a return to the days of royal absolutism.

The chief reforms of the Foxite government were the abolition of the slave trade (1802), voting reform to reduce property requirements and increase the franchise (1804, taking it down to twenty shillings) and the establishment of the Borough Committee. This latter was a compromise, after Fox’s own starry-eyed dreams of universal suffrage were patiently shot down by Parliament. For centuries, England’s and then Great Britain’s electoral system had been plagued with the existence of rotten boroughs – places which had once been thriving towns and had been granted borough status by the King in order to elect MPs, but were now abandoned, shrunken places with only a few voters, who continued to send those MPs to Parliament and were readily susceptible to bribery. By contrast, the fact that new boroughs had not been created for a while meant that many large new towns such as Manchester did not directly elect any MPs, only contributing to the two MPs elected on the county list. This situation had been clearly absurd for a long time, but reform had been set back when Cromwell had abolished the rotten boroughs – and, of course, at the Restoration, anything Cromwell did was automatically wrong and had to be reversed.

Fox’s initial attempts to have the rotten boroughs abolished and then new ones enacted for the new towns failed. This was largely because he was talking about removing politicians from Parliament, some of whom were even on his own side.[7] The eventual compromise proposed by Burke was that the new Committee would study each borough in turn, and if it was found to be rotten, that borough would be transferred to a new town rather than abolished. That meant the standing MP would then represent, for example, Manchester instead of Old Sarum. This achieved cautious support, though the transferred MPs often then left Parliament anyway to go to their new constituency and set up a new party machine there to ensure their re-election. A surprising number of them succeeded.

This method of reform was slow and tentative, but ultimately achieved Fox’s stated aims. However, Fox’s enlightened attitudes to reform were matched by blindness in the face of French intentions. He was convinced that the aggressiveness under Robespierre of the French Republic were merely the remnants of Bourbon old guard officers up to their usual imperialism, and that now Lisieux was in charge the Republic had been purged of such notions. The war ministries ended up being dominated by the Liberal part of the Coalition, as the Foxites considered them unimportant, and the Secretary at War was Frederick Dundas, a Scottish politician and close ally of Burke. British experimentation with French military technology was ultimately the pet project of Dundas, though he was able to obtain limited support from Fox by putting it in terms of how innovative the French Republicans were. Burke and Dundas were also at the forefront of the naysayers in an issue that split the Coalition in 1803 after Nelson’s Neapolitan attack on the French fleet – Fox even wanted to brand the popular mercenary admiral a traitor, but was forced to backdown.

The establishment of Fort Rockingham near Doncaster was also the brainchild of Dundas, though he was supported by many of the conservative opposition. Few of even the most paranoid anti-Foxites, however, realised how significant this would be…












[1] A slightly modified OTL Arthur Wellesley quote.

[2] Properly he should be called Mornington, but in Anglophone sources in TTL he’s usually referred to as Wesley, as his title was in the peerage of Ireland and he did not obtain one in the British peerage.

[3] Though Britain’s OTL leader of anti-Catholic riots, the eccentric Lord George Gordon, has already moved on from this particular predilection in TTL.

[4] Benedict Arnold VI is the son in TTL of Benedict Arnold V (the one we all know), who in TTL was a distinguished American general in the Second Platinean War but not so famous or flashy as George Washington.

[5] In OTL, until the Great Reform Act, the chief requirement for voting in England and Wales was to own property equivalent in value to forty shillings. Note that this ignored inflation, so the number of voters expanded over time from when the limit was set in 1430. Scotland, by contrast, defined the value as forty shillings of the value when the act was enacted, thus keeping the number of voters roughly constant. Ireland also used this law – in OTL, when Catholic emancipation came in, it was raised to £10 in order to exclude more Catholics from voting.

[6] Which in OTL it did – most of these reforms were passed in the 1780s and 1790s, then often reversed after the United Irishmen rebellion and the Act of Union. In OTL the sequence of events was: Irish parliament votes in support of Americans during American War of Independence – British Government panics and starts supporting Irish reform, fearing a rebellion – Irish parliament reforms – Ireland rebels in 1798 – Britain takes back all powers in Act of Union. Here, the initial reforms don’t happen without the American War (and are also delayed due to the Irish Jacobite Rebellion of 1750 prejudicing people against a sympathetic view of the Irish) so instead they happen after the equivalent rebellion, not rescinded as a reaction to it.

[7] A surprising number of OTL British politicians who advocated parliamentary reform had themselves been elected by very corrupt means.


Part #62: The Monroe Doctrine

“To understand the character of American exceptionalism, one must look at the mother country. From the 1500s to the first decade of the nineteenth century, England and then Great Britain saw itself as being apart from Europe: her Navy, her ‘Wooden Walls’, meant that the narrow English Channel might as well have been a vast ocean, shielding her from any hostile invasion. England was splendidly isolated and, therefore, special. When English settlers came to America, they brought this attitude with them. Though what became the Empire of North America was not an island, was always vulnerable to attacks by native Indians or rival colonial powers, nonetheless the idea of the nation having a special, unique place in the world was retained. And it continued in America after events had led to its death in Britain…”

– From the introduction to A History of the North American Empire, edited by Pyotr Lomonosov, translated from Russian​

*

From – “The ENA in the Jacobin Wars” by Ralph Law (1963) -

When the American general election of 1799 returned a majority for the Constitutionalist Party led by James Monroe, this ended four years of Patriot rule and was in some ways seen as a referendum on Lord Hamilton’s handling of the war. The former Patriot ministry[1] had been unable to avoid being defined in terms of the war; Hamilton had only become Lord President two months before the news of Thomas Jefferson’s murder by the French Revolutionaries reached the ENA and led to the direct declaration of war on France. Furthermore, Hamilton had become Lord President in the wake of the death of the respected first Lord President George Augustine Washington, Viscount Washington, who had ruled as a crossbencher and above party identities. Although the later parties had slowly begun to coalesce during Washington’s ministry, the lines were not strictly drawn until his death and Hamilton’s rise to power. This meant that the Patriot party itself became strongly associated with the war in the public imagination.

Although there was little criticism of Hamilton’s handling of the war – reports of American troops serving in Ireland and France, liberally spiced with propaganda, remained popular items in American newspapers – an impression slowly developed that the Patriots were more concerned with European affairs than American ones. This was not entirely unjustified. Though Hamilton was not among them, much of the Patriots’ power base consisted of the rich and powerful who still saw themselves as half-British and did not fully embrace the new national identity that had dawned in the 1750s. Such men did not strongly distinguish between Britain and the ENA, and thus were seen as being too slavish towards what London wanted – “London” meaning of course the Parliament of Great Britain in Westminster, for the office of the King and Emperor was above all national concerns.

Lord Rockingham in particular, having politically fought for full American independence in the Troubles of the 1760s, became more conservative in his old age and did not endear himself to Hamilton’s government, in contrast to the more understanding relationship under the Portland ministry (which in reality was Edmund Burke’s). The situation was not helped by the fact that the two governments were convinced that the other automatically owed them on historical grounds: Rockingham thought that, having helped the Americans receive the right to manage their own affairs, they should repay that trust by automatically joining Britain in all suggested joint operations, while the Americans grumbled about Britain owing her freedom to their fathers and grandfathers serving Prince Frederick in the Second Glorious Revolution.

Relations became politically strained, although the relationship between British and American (and Irish) units in the field tended to be fairly cordial: a few more fossilised British officers held contempt for the colonial units, but these were few and far between thanks to the purges of the British Army after the Second Glorious Revolution. The shrewder among the British officer corps recognised that any reinforcements were desperately needed, given that the existing small volunteer army was trying to face down the French’s far larger conscript force with their new steam weapons. Furthermore, while American discipline remained slightly less than British standards (a relic of the fact that many of the regular army troops had formerly served in Confederate militias) the Americans avoided many of the problems Britain had encountered with using troops from the Germanies, such as the language gap and disagreements over the rules of war.

There was a strong sense that Fredericksburg, having fought hard in the 1760s to achieve a full measure of power, was now becoming subordinate to London again. This was a significant aspect of the Constitutionalists’ victory in the 1799 general election, but a larger one was the sense that the Patriots had been neglecting domestic affairs. In particular, the tensions with Spain in the Oregon country and Noochaland[2] were perceived as being mishandled by Hamilton’s foreign secretary, Samuel Ellery, who was rumoured to be a political appointment. His older brother William was an important figure (the de facto prime minister) of the New England Commission[3] and some newspaper editorials argued that the less-than-capable younger Ellery had been appointed in order to gain his brother’s assent on one of Hamilton’s bills to expand New England settlement in the former Canada. The bill had been popular with the common New England settlers themselves, but not so much with the great and the good of the Confederation, who believed that they would have problems enforcing their will (especially regarding taxation) north of the St Lawrence, hence the requirement of Ellery’s support.

Whether there was any truth to this accusation is now questionable, but the scandal broke only a month before the election and served to deliver a narrow majority to the Constitutionalists. Once the Lord Deputy (the Duke of Grafton) had sworn in James Monroe as Lord President, however, the Constitutionalists almost immediately faced problems. The party’s origins had been more diverse and mercurial than those of the Patriots, who could be described as the conservative forces of the powerful in America and in particular those who owed the strong position of they and their families to their support of Prince Frederick during the War of the British Succession. The Constitutionalists had formed simply as a bloc in opposition to the Patriots, but their broad support base began to show fracture lines as soon as the Patriots were relegated to the opposition benches of the Continental Parliament. The primary supporters of the Constitutionalists were lower-class Americans, in particular those who wanted to settle elsewhere and gain land for themselves and, incidentally, their country.[4]

However, a large section of Constitutionalist support came from the gentry of the southern Confederations (Virginia and Carolina) who were paranoid about the basis of their wealth – chattel slavery – being undone by high-minded northerners. Although Hamilton himself had enforced a ban on discussing slavery in Parliament[5] and his own opinion on the subject seemed ambivalent, the Patriot ministry had seen a general shift in attitudes in New England, Pennsylvania and even New York towards opposing slavery. The southerners pointed out that it was easy for the northerners to do so, given that the usual solution was shipping freed slaves over to Freedonia and there were not that many blacks in the north (except New York) to begin with. By contrast, they made up a large percentage of the whole population in the south, and quite apart from the end of slavery also ending the power base of the southern gentry, the consideration of trying to ship those thousands upon thousands back to Africa would be an astronomically expensive undertaking.

Despite this, the Constitutionalists also enjoyed support from a smaller faction (mostly northern) which was radical abolitionist and opposed the Patriots because they believed that true reform would be too slow and cumbersome with the Patriots’ conservative, old-boys’-network style, as well as Hamilton’s lukewarm attitudes on the topic. This had been an acceptable contradiction while the Constitutionalists were in opposition, but now they were in power, the strains became apparent. However, the party’s majority was too slim to shed either support base, even the more minor abolitionists, with the result that Monroe was forced to try and placate both. He therefore gave the position of Secretary of State for the Continental Department[6] to the abolitionist faction’s leader, the Pennsylvanian Benajmin Rush, while giving the equally important position of Foreign Secretary to the Carolinian Henry Charles Pinckney, a prominent member of the southern planter faction.

This balance of power persisted in its stability for surprisingly long, largely because of the uncomfortable virility of the opposition Patriots. Contrary to the Constitutionalists’ expectations, the Patriots remained under the leadership of Lord Hamilton, who shed Samuel Ellery rather than be tarred by the scandal and defeated an unofficial leadership challenge by Andrew Chase. Hamilton remained energetic as Leader of the Opposition, in particular criticising Monroe’s decision to refuse a peerage, thus making him the first Lord President who was not, in fact, a Lord. Hamilton painted this as a cynical decision on the part of Monroe to ape William Pitt with his ‘Great Commoner’ image, and contrasted this to the Constitutionalists’ large number of rich slaveholders (though Monroe himself had a relatively humble background). Partly out of fear of the Patriots being in a position to exploit any division, the Constitutionalists thus held together despite their ideological contradictions, at least long enough to force through new laws that all parts of the party agreed on.

Initially these simply extended, and made permanent, the institutions that Hamilton had brought in with the intention that they be temporary emergency measures to help with the war – the Commission for Continental Regiments was renamed the Continental War Office (CWO) and given the powers to raise yet more troops, and for domestic affairs as well as those in support of Britain in Europe. Equally, the American Commissioner to London had his office upgraded to that of Lord Representative, thus giving him the devolved authority to sign treaties on behalf of the Lord President. This measure was enacted in response to a public outcry when, in May 1800 (after peace between Britain and France) a canny French privateer took advantage of the fact that the peace had not yet been ratified by the ENA to capture an ENA cargo ship, the captain of which happened to be Elbridge Gerry Jr, son of the New England Patriot MCP. The name of the privateer was eventually leaked as Marcel Mandereaux, with the result that the New York Register coined the portmanteau “to gerrymander”, meaning to commit attacks after the official end of a war.[7]

The Constitutionalists enjoyed a decidedly mixed relationship with Britain; both Fox and the King concurred with some of the Constitutionalists’ reform ideas, but both were strongly opposed to furthering the institution of slavery. Most bills aimed at this were shot down by the Lord Deputy on the King’s orders. This served to weaken the power of the southern planter wing of the party and also stoked resentment of London’s interference in the southern Confederations. Ultimately it led to the definition of the Imperial and Confederal divide in Parliament. Originally the chief divide had been over how closely the ENA should be tied to Britain, but a consensus emerged after Hamilton’s ministry and a few early Monroe reforms. Now, the argument shifted to whether the most power should reside in the federal parliament in Fredericksburg (as the Imperials argued) or with the local assemblies in the Confederations (as the Confederates preferred). Because it was becoming evident that the Fredericksburg Continental Parliament was becoming increasingly abolitionist in sentiment (in a lukewarm sort of way) the southern planters began congregating around the Confederal viewpoint, while abolitionists began to see a strong central government as a way of forcing their views through regardless of objections further down. However, this would not fully develop for decades to come.

The fragile balance was altered by a series of events, beginning with the resolution of the Noochaland crisis in 1802 by Pinckney. This reversed the trend of decline in power for the planters and concerned the abolitionist wing of the party. Pinckney’s faction grew in power until the Cuba Question of 1803. Cuba had been effectively part of the ENA since the Second Platinean War, but now it was to be officially annexed to Carolina as a province and there was the question of whether a review should be held on the status of slavery in the island. This also spilled over into issues of whether anti-Catholic laws like those in Canada should be enacted, or whether this would offend the Spanish straight after the Noochaland dispute had been calmed, and whether the property ownership (including slaves) of the Spanish aristocracy there should be respected. The latter aspect served to divide the left wing of the Constitutionalists enough that the right was able to push through a pro-Carolinian version of the bill, but only with some backbench support from the Patriots. According to King Henry’s wishes, the Lord Deputy refused to grant Royal Assent to the bill – upon which Monroe unexpectedly resigned and called a general election, making it a referendum on the bill.

Even more unexpectedly, considering that Hamilton fought a strong campaign, the Constitutionalists were returned with an increased majority. This was just as well, because Rush resigned as Continental Secretary and withdrew his support from the party in the wake of the Lord Deputy being forced by popular acclamation to grant Royal Assent. The seceding MCPs formed the American Radical Party. Monroe retained enough MCPs to govern with a majority, though not much larger than the one he had previously enjoyed. From this moment on, the Constitutionalists’ formerly schizophrenic identity became more solid: southern, Confederal, anti-abolitionist. A conflict remained between settlers and planters, but this was more minor in character. To replace Rush, Monroe appointed another member of the planters’ now dominant faction, Thomas Heyward, who was known for a moment of heroism during the Second Platinean War in which he had defended an American regiment’s colour from a Spanish attack and lost an arm in the process.

The most significant foreign policy event of Monroe’s second ministry was the Haiti Affair. In 1800, Jean de Lisieux had been trying to get rid of Admiral de Villeneuve, who he despised but had become fairly popular for his courageous if only moderately successful attack on the British and Royal French fleets during the Seigneur Invasion. Villeneuve was sent on a flag-flying tour with what remained of the Republican sail-fleet. In February 1801 he called in at Norfolk, Virginia, in order to deliver a personal apology to the Continental Parliament and the people of Virginia for the murder of Thomas Jefferson: Villeneuve, it is recorded, made a surprising impression upon the crowds he addressed. Given that he was not known for being an especially complex man in terms of rhetoric, it seems likely that Villeneuve himself was truly remorseful about the incident, even though the apology itself had been a cynical ploy penned by Lisieux to try and quell the British and Americans while he dealt with European problems.

In July of that year, Villeneuve’s fleet visited Nouvelle-Orléans and presented an ultimatum by Lisieux to the Governor-General, Charles-Michéle Ledoux, to cleave to the Republican line or face the consequences. Ledoux, like Rochambeau before him, correctly interpreted this as an empty threat: even if Lisieux’s France had managed to scrape together enough ships to send an armed force to Louisiana, such an intervention into America’s backyard would certainly provoke at least a deep cooling of relations and possibly even a renewal of the war. Ledoux called Villeneuve’s bluff, though given the civilised manner in which the admiral had presented his threat, he was not subject to any of the humiliation that Robespierre’s envoys had suffered in India.

With a heavy heart, Villeneuve followed the secondary part of his mission. Ledoux had refused, so he was required to stir up the natives against him, just as Leclerc had with Mysore against Rochambeau. However, the fact that Ledoux’s diplomacy had resulted in a ring of friendly Indian tribes around Louisiana protecting it (in particular, from enterprising Carolinian settlers) made this task impossible. Villeneuve decided to take a different tack: the French colony in Santo Domingo and the surrounding islands was also technically part of New France (of which Louisiana was the last remnant) and he would still be fulfilling his orders if he armed the opposition there. This meant giving Republican muskets to black rebels, which hardly fitted Linnaean ideology, but Villeneuve was a pragmatic man. By the end of 1801, the pro-Republican rebels in Haiti – led by Vincent Ogé, a wealthy free black who had tried to reform the system from within before turning to violence – had received most of the weapons Villeneuve’s ships carried in their holds.

Villeneuve moved on by the beginning of 1802, returning to France in 1804 after a mission to La Pérouse’s Land, but the rebellion he had fanned the flames of continued to cause problems for Ledoux. The remnant of Royal France in Europe was far too busy with its own concerns to give orders on this question, leaving the Governor-General in the unenviable position of having to handle the situation himself. In 1803, Ogé’s rebels defeated a newly raised Louisianan army (including recruits from Ledoux’s Indian allies) at Roseaux, and by the end of 1804 had overrun the Spanish half of the island as well – by this point, of course, the Spanish colonies in the New World had formed the Empire of the Indies, which was itself too busy fighting a desperate war of survival with the UPSA to worry about a minor West Indian colony.

The inability of the Louisianans to crush the self-declared Haitian African Republic became a major concern in the halls of power in Fredericksburg. Many Carolinians had long wanted to conquer Louisiana and settle it, and saw this as a moment of weakness they could exploit. Cooler heads prevailed, however, recognising that while Ledoux could not fight a war on the end of a supply line, in Louisiana itself he and his predecessors had long been preparing for such an invasion. The ENA could certainly take the colony, but only with grievous losses – Ledoux had had several forts built, stronger and more permanent than the usual in the Americas, he had used his political skills to form alliances with the local Indians and arm them with modern weapons, and Nouvelle-Orléans had been reinforced against an amphibious descent (which the British had already tried once before without success). Essentially, while an ENA military operation would almost certainly succeed eventually, an unofficial Carolinian filibuster would not, and the other Confederations saw little reason to risk jeopardising the Empire’s diplomatic relationship with the two Frances (and Britain) over an annexation that would only benefit Carolina. Besides, Louisiana had acted as a drain for all the French colonies fleeing Anglo persecution in other parts of the former New France (Canada, Acadia, the Mississippi valley) and had absorbed enough people that it would now be a sullen and resentful acquisition, not easy to ‘dilute’ or acculturate. And indeed many of its people remembered well their parents’ hatred of the British and the Empire, and would not be obedient citizens to rule.

However, the idea of a radical black Republic was about as alarming to most Americans as it was to both sets of French – ironically, even the Freedish leaders condemned the Republic’s Robespierre-inspired institutions, while only Fox actually praised it. Something had to be done, and that something was the Treaty of Baton Rouge (1805). Another coup for Pinckney, this was signed between the ENA and Louisiana, and saw the following exchanges;

1. Louisiana abandons all sovereignty over Santo Domingo, which is now considered Imperial territory. (New Spanish assent was received informally and later added via amendment).

2. Otherwise, Louisiana’s territorial integrity is recognised and respected by the ENA;

3. The ENA’s Preventive Cutter Service will defend shipping from the remaining French/Louisianan islands such as Guadeloupe, in exchange for a share in the trade profits.

This was basically an acknowledgement by the Royal French and exilic Spanish of Imperial power over the whole West Indian Sea, which had become an American lake – at least for the present. And in August 1805, an American force – Carolinian-dominated, but including representatives from all the Confederations – landed on Santo Domingo and prepared to embark on one of the most controversial operations ever fought…








[1] As in Britain, the term ministry is used in the ENA to refer to a period of time in which a party is in power, where ‘administration’ is used in the OTL USA.

[2] Vancouver Island.

[3] The Confederate assembly of New England. Its name derives from a much earlier body active in the 1600s.

[4] There are two opposing effects at work here. Firstly, the Patriot government tended to frown on settlement beyond a few initiatives that could, in theory, be directly controlled by the government (such as Hamilton’s plan in Canada), fearful of losing control of their citizens. Secondly, however, there is the fact that the ENA does not have universal suffrage – like Britain in the period, voting requires proof of property ownership, although the limit in America is only 10s rather than 40s in Britain (prior to Fox’s reforms). One easy way to gain the right to vote is to win land and settle it. The result is that the speed of American settlement is about the same as OTL – but because there are more avenues to expand into (Canada, Cuba) the westward expansion is slower.

[5] As he did in OTL in one of the bodies he chaired.

[6] Or Continental Secretary; the American equivalent of Home Secretary.

[7] An illustration of how words can mean different things in different universes…


Part # 63: Borussia Delenda Est

“Ah, Prussia…what speculative romantic has not considered that tragedy? It runs against all narrative imperative, the plucky underdog being slapped down so many times by a conjunction of circumstances, only to rise again…and fail utterly. Some instinct tells us this should not be, and so we try to correct it, often in ever wilder and more desperately implausible fashion. A reminder that the ultimate reality is crueller than even the unthinking, uncaring morass that is the universe of the ultra-Jacobin…”

- Henri Poulet, forward to Hohenzollerns Triumphant, 1980​

*

From – “Breaking the Eagle’s Wings: Decline and Fall of the Holy Roman Empire (And What Came After)” by Dr Piet Nieuwenhuis (English translation, 1941)

It is debatable when the fate of Prussia was sealed. The eastern Hohenzollern state certainly bounced back from many previous blows that might have permanently devastated other kingdoms. In the Second and Third Wars of Supremacy, specifically the front known as the Silesian Wars, Prussia repeatedly attempted to take Silesia from Austria while knocking out Saxony, succeeding to some extent before ultimately failing. This failure was certainly not to to lack of force of arms, courage, or tactics: the Prussian army was justly acknowledged as the finest in Europe, and attempts by other states – German and otherwise – to emulate its practices had begun as early as the 1740s. Frederick II, Elector of Brandenburg and erstwhile King in Prussia,[1] was accurately recognised as both the chief architect of this success and a great battlefield general. His revolutionary tactics, principally the use of enfilading fire in artillery placement, defined European military thinking for a generation. Most importantly, they ensured that, for as long as Prussia’s enemies struggled to adapt to and copy such innovations, Prussia’s outnumbered army possessed what would in modern military jargon be known as a force multiplier.

And this was certainly something that Prussia required. Despite being, in the words of Voltaire, ‘an army which happens to possess a country’, the Prussians nonetheless commonly faced enemies which critically outmanned them. For example, in the Third War of Supremacy she faced France, Austria and Russia, three of the greatest powers of Europe, along with Saxony and other lesser states. Prussia’s only real ally was Britain, and Britain’s small army was concerned solely with repelling any attempted French invasion and fighting abroad in the Empire of North America, Africa and India. The British government, whose eminence grise was William Pitt, was firmly opposed to landing troops on the continent – whether to support the Prussians directly or land in France to distract the French from attacking Prussia.

What is miraculous is that Prussia held out for so long in that war. Frederick’s generalship and the Prussians’ ability to concentrate their small but powerful army as power at a point meant that they defeated numerically superior forces several times. Finally, at the Battle of Kunersdorf in 1759 – an Annus Mirabilis for Britain, but an Annus Horribilis for Prussia – a combined Austro-Russian force defeated Frederick. The elector, always something of a manic depressive, virtually committed suicide by failing to quit the field and was cut down by Austrian cavalry. In the wake of his death, his young son received the electorate as Frederick William II and Frederick’s brother Prince Henry acted as regent. The new regime immediately sought peace as the only option. The harshness of that peace stripped the Prussians of territory in the Germanies, chiefly going to Saxony – which at the time was seen as being in the pocket of the Hapsburgs and thus a safe way for the Holy Roman Emperor (then Francis I) to try and reassert Austria’s dominance over Germany without doing so in such a direct way as to encourage other states to band together against him. Most significantly, the original Prussian powerhouse of Ducal Prussia, outside the Holy Roman Empire’s borders, was divided between Sweden and Poland-Lithuania. The former rising star of European warfare was reduced to Brandenburg alone, and seemed finished.

However, careful diplomacy on the part of Frederick William II (helped by the existence of the Germanophile Peter III on the throne of Russia) slowly pushed Prussia back to a position of at least regional power. Rather than trying to regain territory in Germany, Frederick William’s policies focused on building power without. Thus in 1767, with Prussia’s army shrunken by the territorial losses (and thus a smaller population to conscript) but still trained to a peak of fighting fitness, the country joined Russia in the War of the Polish Partition and neatly defeated the Austrians, who were not joined by minor German allies for a conflict which only concerned issues outside the Empire’s borders. Austria was placated with Krakow and the Russians gained Ruthenia and placed the Tsarevich on the throne of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, but the Prussians were able to take back the Poles’ half of Ducal Prussia and force the resulting rump Poland into personal union. Although sometimes beset by rebellion, this acquisition helped build up Prussian power once more. Frederick William also annexed Poland’s Baltic coast to Prussia; although the Prussians lacked the spare funds to create much of a fleet, he correctly foresaw the coming of a Baltic confrontation involving Sweden, Russia and Denmark, and knew that simply possessing ports such as Danzig would be an important bargaining chip that might be rewarded with territorial revisions (such as Sweden returning northern Ducal Prussia) or alliance membership.

In the end Prussia proved to be a nonentity when the Great Baltic War came. The opponent she would face on land would not be Austria, but Saxony. In 1797 Frederick William II died, succeeded by his eponymous son, and the Poles used this opportunity of transition in government to launch their most well-coordinated rebellion yet, known as the Confederation of Lublin. The Polish rebels convened their Sejm – abolished by the Prussians – and elected the new Elector of Saxony, John George V, as their King. This was, of course, merely a formalisation of what had been accomplished in weeks of secretive negotiations with the Wettins, the Hapsburgs and all the other potential candidates who would bring significant military force to the table. John George V, widely viewed as a maverick compared to his staid brother and predecessor Frederick Christian II, seized the opportunity.

Both Prussia and Saxony withdrew their troops from the united German force that the Empire had painstakingly assembled – leading to a domino effect that would hamstring the Hapsburgs’ offensive against Republican France and help turn the tables in that war – and engaged each other in a war for both the status of Poland and the future of Germany. It was a battle to see which of the two states, by now about evenly matched as the Saxons copied Prussian practices with increasing competency and drew upon their new provinces for more levies, would be the dominant power in the Germany of tomorrow. The Hapsburgs had lost credibility. After a brief resurgence during Prussia’s period of humiliation, a brief attempt to at least symbolically reunite Germany under their rule, the Hapsburgs had ruined themselves in the eyes of German public opinion by choosing to fight the Turks over Bosnia and Dalmatia rather than try to throw the French – particularly Lascelles’ murderous regime in Bavaria – out of Germany. Ferdinand IV might have proclaimed the Empire dead in the Reichstag of Regensburg, but it was his successor Francis II who made that proclamation a reality. The Hapsburgs were gone, finished, no matter how much military power they might rebuild.

Equally, though, it was obvious that the French offensives of Lascelles and Ney were petering out. The future Germany would not be a Jacobin republic, or a collection of them, whose inhabitants were ruled by French overlords believing themselves to be racially superior. What the French had succeeded in doing was demonstrating that there were no more rules. What Frederick II of Prussia had tried to do and failed. Now it all came down to one war, one confrontation, one battle.

In truth the conflict was rather long and drawn-out, one of the most miserable and grinding wars of the whole Jacobin period, for all that it had scarcely any ideological component. On paper, the Prussians should have won. For all the Saxons’ attempts to catch up and increased levies, the Prussian army was still one of the best in Europe, and arguably it had been honed by continuous suppression activity against the endemic Polish rebels and outlaws. However, the Poles had judged rightly when they saw Frederick William III’s succession as an appropriate time to rebel en masse. The young elector had not had particularly good relations with his father, even by the standards of German royalty, and they had had differences of opinion over Poland. Rather ironically, Frederick William III had advocated a less confrontational policy, hoping to restore the Sejm (albeit as a rubber-stamp), allow the Polish language to be used officially and Poles to serve as officers in the Prussian army, and other concessions. It was his hope that this would discourage further Polish rebellions and allow Prussia to use Poland as a source of manpower and other resources rather than a distraction. This plan might possibly have worked if it could have been tried ten years earlier, but by this point the Poles had lost all faith in even a reformist Prussian regime. All Frederick William III’s political differences served to do was hamper the Prussian government as he fired his father’s experienced ministers and installed his own.

Furthermore, Frederick William’s belief in the important of Poland, the key to Prussia’s rebirth in his view, meant that the war was strategically mishandled. His grandfather Frederick II would have turned in his grave. Rather than focusing the Prussian army at a point to defeat enemies in term, troops were divided between fighting the Saxons and suppressing the Polish rebellion, and Prussia lacked enough forces to do both decisively at once. The Saxons were generally on the defensive and lost territory in a series of slow, grinding campaigns under the Prussian General Wilhelm Friedrich von Lützow, but not at a rate which significantly threatened Dresden or any key position. Simultaneously, the Poles were always defeated when they tried to stand against the Prussians in open combat, but there were insufficient Prussian troops deployed to completely suppress the rebellion when it devolved to kleinkrieger strategies, either.[2]

This state of affairs continued for three years, after which both sides were becoming exhausted. The Prussians were about to take Cottbus but their occupation forces had been driven out of Lodz by a Polish irregular army led by the soldier-leader of the Lublin Confederation, Kazimierz Pulaski. A state of irony prevailed, not lost on either side – their hopes for future dominance within Germany had been fixed upon the fact that the Hapsburgs had been seen to view a Turkish problem as more important than liberating Germany from the French, but now most Germans viewed the Prusso-Saxon conflict as just as much of an arrogant distraction. Meanwhile, the formation of the Mittelbund and the Alliance of Hildesheim suggested that the smaller German states were willing to band together against the French if none of the more powerful ones were willing. Saxony signed an agreement with the Mittelbund in 1800 which meant the latter recognised Saxon overlordship over Thuringia (whose patchwork of duchies mostly had rulers of Saxon descent) but this only emphasised the fact that Saxony could not simply order around the Mittelbund member states by superior force anymore. Dreams of German domination were dead or dying, and now this would simply be a fight to the death, the culmination of a conflict that stretched back fifty years and more. Only one state would survive, and the world wondered which it would be.

The war hung in the balance, a balance that was tilted by the Conference of Hagenow in October 1800. This was ultimately derived from the Danish King Johannes II’s ambitious plan to dominate the Baltic Sea, turning it into a ‘Danish Lake’ via possession of key seaports and coastlines. Having already acquired Oldenburg, the former Swedish Pomerania and Sweden itself, he then turned his attention to the two Mecklenburgs. The Mecklenburgs’ rulers rejected his government’s initial crude threats and were backed by Saxony. Hagenow resolved these differences, thanks to a brilliant piece of diplomacy by John George V’s foreign minister Gerhard von Stephanitz. In response, both the Danes and the two Mecklenburgs declared war on Prussia.

The Mecklenburgs’ military contribution was negligible and the Danish army was not particularly powerful, but once more Frederick William III’s enemies hit him with the same lessons he should have learned from his grandfather: power at a point. Specifically, what the Danes brought to the table was domination of the seas. The Prussians’ Baltic fleet was, as noted before, a joke, and the Danes swept it aside easily enough. The Danes made an amphibious descent on Danzig in April 1801, taking and holding the fortified seaport. Meanwhile, having secured Baltic dominance (at least so long as Russia and Lithuania remained neutral) the Danes also began transporting troops from Sweden. This was at least partly, perhaps even primarily, an internal political move: the Danish government was still nervous about Swedish rebellions and thought that removing trained troops from the country was an excellent idea. In the event, however, this worked quite well as a strategy – some of the Swedish soldiers had been fighting in nearby Lithuanian Prussia a few years before, and knew the local terrain well. The Swedes were essentially cut loose from resupply by the Danes, who saw this as a problem resolved. They generally failed in direct combat with the local Prussians, who were still well-led and disciplined, but many drove south in bands of variable integrity and joined up with the Polish rebels. The most famous of these Swedes who joined the Poles was, however, not a member of these often ragtag bands, but the commander of a Swedish force which managed to stand up to a (small) Prussian conventional army and defeat it in an aggressive action near Torun. Only later did he retreat in the face of overwhelming Prussian reinforcements and go to Warsaw, covered by Polish irregular horsemen.

His name was Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher.[3]

The Prussians did not immediately collapse, of course, but Frederick William III continued to divide his forces rather than seeking a decisive blow. He sent sufficient troops to bottle up the Danes in Danzig, for example, but not quite enough (or with the necessary siege artillery) to drive them out of the key port. And the siege was increasingly pointless as the Danes’ control of the Baltic meant they could easily resupply their troops in the city by sea. In fact by this point the Danish merchant navy had enough spare capacity to feed all the local Danzigers as well, discouraging much support for Prussia.

This lack of focus meant that the Saxons drove back von Lützow from the gates of Dresden in February 1801 and relieved Cottbus in October of that year. The twelve months that followed showed a general Prussian decline on all fronts. Recognising that the elector’s dithering policies had caused this – Prussia could probably have knocked out Saxony within a year if the army had focused on it and ignored the Polish rebellion, quashing it later – sedition and murmurs began to focus into the so-called Berlin Plot. Things came to a head in April 1802 when Lützow (having been shifted in command to the western front) failed to relieve the Saxon siege of Magdeburg, which subsequently surrendered. Lützow was called back to Berlin and severely reprimanded by the young and mercurial Frederick William III, who then attainted his peerage and warned him he was lucky not to be summarily executed. Incensed, for he knew that he had done everything he could at Magdeburg and had failed due to the elector’s sending pointless reinforcements to Danzig and Poland, Lützow joined the conspiracy.

The plotters struck in September with the news that all Prussian territory west of the Elbe had been lost to the allies. Worse, Lützow’s toadying replacement General Albrecht von Gessler had been attacked by the Saxons while trying to evacuate his army over the river near Wittenberge. That Prussian army had been virtually destroyed, pounded by Saxon artillery (ironically using the same enfilading tactics that Frederick II had developed) with its back to the river. Knowing that it was now or never, the plot came off. Frederick William III was shot while on parade, officially by ‘a misfiring cavalry carbine’. He was taken to his doctors by a group of ‘loyal’ retainers, who ensured he lived only long enough to name his six-year-old son Henry Frederick as his heir and Lützow as his regent (the latter name being somewhat scribbled on the letter patent, but of course the elector was dying, was he not?)

Unfortunately for the Berlin plotters, loyalists to Frederick William saw through this transparent ploy – it had been the plotters’ hope that the elector’s policies were sufficiently demonstrably destructive that no-one would oppose them, but that hope turned out to be vain. Though militarily a disaster, the elector’s moderately reformist policies had won him friends among the intelligentsia and certain parts of the Prussian nobility. The dead elector’s foreign minister Ludwig von Stülpnagel rallied his supporters, claimed the letter patent brandished by the plotters as a forgery, and demanded that Lützow surrender the child elector to his own regency. Chaos and civil war followed. The Berlin plotters had hoped for a smooth transition of power, and got anything but: the cursed luck of Prussia continued. Although the plotters had Lützow, Stülpnagel’s supporters managed to gain the loyalty of the local military forces and the plotters were forced to flee. Lützow initially hoped to go south and join up with his old army, which might support him, but in the event the plotters decided to go east and Lützow was forced to join them.

In March 1803, Prussia was on the brink of collapse. Stülpnagel’s regime ruled in Berlin, but Lützow and the other conspirators still had the child elector in their possession, and he ruled as Henry Frederick I from Königsberg. Although the Danes were in a position to threaten the city, they decided not to, reasoning that preserving the Prussian division and uncertainty was militarily more valuable. Probably accurately – although most of the Prussian armed forces remained loyal to Stülpnagel, there was enough hesitancy and knowledge of the respected Lützow being on the other side to begin to break down Prussian military discipline and unity. The tables were turned as the Saxons and Danes continued with the kind of training and tactics they had learned from the Prussians. Meanwhile, the Poles under Pulaski and Blücher continued to tie down Prussian forces in Poland – and Stülpnagel possessed no greater strategic command than the late elector had.

Prussia fought on longer than anyone had expected, just as the country had fifty years before. But eventually peace was reached when a secret Saxon diplomatic mission secured the support of the Lützow regime in Königsberg. This was done without the knowledge of either the Danes or Poles, who would certainly have objected, for it guaranteed that Lützow and his child elector would continue to rule all the Prussian lands outside the border of the Holy Roman Empire. This bought the neutrality of a large part of the Prussian army that had rallied to Lützow but was still fighting the Poles and their Swedish allies. The Danes were allowed to keep Danzig but they had hoped for much more.

This removal of a major front meant that the Poles were able to go on the offensive – not with any great degree of organisation but dividing what remained of the Prussian forces yet further. In April 1804, after seven years of war, Berlin fell and Stülpnagel surrendered. The world watched, wondering what peace would result.

The ensuing Treaty of Berlin was the most radical since the Treaty of Amsterdam that had wounded Prussia five decades ago, yet had not prevented the country making a comeback. This would made certain of matters. Prussia was dismembered, abolished. Well, Prussia remained, as in the territory east of the Holy Roman Empire – but the lands of the Prussian Hohenzollerns within that increasingly obsolete boundary were obliterated, divided, torn up in the kind of mediatisation that, on a smaller scale, would so enrage Pascal Schmidt and go on to inspire his followers.

The division was chiefly based on rivers. The lands east of the Elbe, including Magdeburg, were awarded to Saxony – John George V, recognising this was a large and important acquisition, made them an autonomous duchy and appointed a viceroy from the local population. The lands between the Elbe and the Oder, ruled from Berlin, were given to the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Christian Ludwig III, who declared himself Elector of East Brandenburg. The fact that the electoral titles were now practically meaningless and certainly not recognised by the Austrians was irrelevant – it was still thought of as a title worth possessing. Finally, the lands east of the Oder, but inside the Imperial border, were given to the Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Adolf Frederick V. The Danes, though they had failed to obtain much Prussian territory, were compromised by acquiring the entire former territories of those two Dukes, adding both Mecklenburgs to the emerging Danish empire and successfully counter-balancing the acquisition of Sweden with more German-speakers. This would go on to have interesting effects later on during the Popular Wars, indeed it is small exaggeration to say the seeds for that confusing period were laid by the Treaty of Berlin.

Stülpnagel survived and eventually managed to work his way back into the ministers appointed by Christian Ludwig. The remnant Hohenzollern Prussia outside the Imperial border continued under the rule of Henry Frederick I and regency of Lützow, now tired, worn, and permanently shut out from having any say in German affairs. History changed, and this Prussia focused on using what Baltic ports it retained to become a commercial trading power – the Saxons’ treaty having shut out the angry Poles from possessing any coastline. The war ended, John George V becoming John IV of Poland, and the greatest land exchange since the Peace of Westphalia having been accomplished.

And 1804 would be the year that the warring German powers lay back, licked their wounds, and belatedly began to notice events in the west…





[1] NB in TTL he is not ‘the Great’ due to his ultimate failure, and nor is he King of Prussia, because the Austrians were never in a sufficiently weak position for him to get away with declaring this.

[2] I.e. guerilla warfare.

[3] Yes, Blücher fighting against the Prussians. This is due to a vagary of how un-nationalistic armies tended to be in the 18th and early 19th centuries. In OTL, Blücher (who was born in Meckleburg-Schwerin, for a double irony) joined the Swedish Army at the age of sixteen and was campaigning in Prussia in 1761 when he was captured by the Prussians, impressed their commanding officer, and was allowed to join their army. The rest is history. But of course in TTL the equivalent war ended in 1759, so he went back to Sweden and continued fighting for the Swedish Army, by now being a general…


Part #64: Le Crabe ennemi géant

This royal throne of kings! This sceptered isle!

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war!

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands…

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm…this England!


– William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard II, 1597 (the version quoted is from The Definitive Shakspere, Imperial Press Portland, 1881)​

*

From – “The Latter Jacobin Wars” by James R.V. Donaghue, 1962:

August 16th 1805 would be a momentous day in European history, though this fact would remain unknown to the wider population for many years to come. Three months beforehand, Admiral Surcouf has returned to Bordeaux to public indifference – after all, as far as they knew, he had done nothing since the invention and testing of early steamships in the late 1790s. In private, however, Surcouf met with at least limited acclaim. At the end of 1800, the new Republican leader Jean de Lisieux had sent him to what was then still known chiefly as New Holland, taking a sizeable part of what was left of Republican France’s sail fleet to accompany La Pérouse back to the land he had discovered. La Pérouse, of course, promptly jumped ship from the expedition and fled to Autiaraux. But while this hampered the scientific missions that Lamarck had envisaged, it did little to alter the mission that Lisieux had entrusted to Surcouf. That would, in any case, require the establishment of new colonies in areas that La Pérouse had not explored in detail.

Ever since Boulanger had saved the Revolution in 1796 by negotiating the neutrality of the Duchy of Flanders, Lisieux had known that eventually France would be in a stronger position and be able to take the country. Its French-speaking population demanded that on ideological grounds, and his own vision for the stabilised, reforming Republic required buffer zones on all sides. The problem was the strong alliance between Flanders and the Dutch Republic. France might be able to launch a War of Lightning into Flanders easily enough, but Dutch support for the Flemings would result in such an assault bogging down rapidly. The Dutch were experts at using their homeland’s terrain – sometimes even flooding it themselves to create barriers – to form strongpoints and then holding them in the face of superior armies. Furthermore, the large and powerful Dutch Navy had been a near-match for the French Royal Navy even before the Revolution, never mind the much smaller force that the Republic could field. With the Dutch capable of raiding the French coast with impunity, the image Lisieux wished to project of a secure and peaceful interior would be shattered.

This problem had been obvious for years. The solution Lisieux had attempted in 1800 used Surcouf’s fleet, based in La Pérouse’s Land, to raid the rich Dutch shipping from the Dutch East Indies to the Cape Colony and on to the Netherlands itself. This achieved several goals. Firstly, it helped boost the Republican economy, by funnelling in trade goods that had been lost to Republican France after the French colonies declared for the King. Secondly, it increased the number of ships available to the Republican sail navy by means of prizes. Most of these were of course East Indiamen, cargo ships, but there were also a few real escort warships taken by overwhelming force and Surcouf’s own tactical skill. Thirdly, it also allowed Surcouf to raid Royal French shipping from French India in the knowledge that the Royal French could not afford to object. The intention with regards to the Dutch was more complex. Surcouf’s ships were careful to sail under a pirate flag, but it was obvious to everyone who they belonged to. Lisieux had hoped to intimidate the Dutch into doing one of two things: call him out and start a war, thus forcing the Flemings to participate or abandon their alliance, or else force the Dutch to retreat from their alliance with the Flemings.

In the event neither of these occurred. The Dutch East India Company managed with increasing escorts on their convoys for several years, but falling profit margins forced the direct intervention of the States-General. The Dutch Navy assembled a fleet at the Cape in late 1803 and then staged an attack on pirate bases. It was the same manner of idea as the international anti-piracy operations over the late 18th century, but with a more ambitious range: not Algiers or Tunis, but the far side of the world. The fleet, which was commanded by Admiral Willem van Heemskerk, staged attacks on other irritants to the VOC in the region, such as the Malay and Dayak pirate groups who had long since been paid by the Portuguese to raid their Dutch rivals, but it was clear who the primary target was.

Heemskerk attacked Saint-Malo in June 1804. This was the base which Surcouf had established in the western part of La Pérouse’s Land, to be a closer point to the Dutch trade routes.[1] The Dutch attempt was arguably successful: Surcouf himself was not present, and only a few of the French ships were stationed there at the time. Heemskerk destroyed those and burned the town. However, Surcouf soon returned and rebuilt the base from the ground up. The Dutch mission only achieved a short decrease in the pirate activity aimed at their fleets.

However, the Dutch had held firm, refusing to take Lisieux’s bait. They sent no direct complaint to Paris and equally they did not retreat from their pact with the Flemings. Indeed, now that the Dutch and Flemish were heavily involved with the complex mediatisations going on in Germany, shared interests continued to drive them closer together. This meant that, although Surcouf had successfully boosted the Republican economy and sail fleet by his actions, Lisieux’s wider strategic plan had failed. An alternative must be sought.

It was August 18th 1805 that Lisieux chose to reveal his new strategy to the Boulangerie, his cabal of advisors who had met less and less often since he had seized power as Administrator. Few openly dared contradict Lisieux anymore. Now, though, he needed all their talents for his plan. At this time, France’s position in Europe looked uncertain. The successes of a few years back had dissolved into reverses and chaos. Hoche’s Italian Latin Republic had collapsed, reduced to a rump Piedmontese state nominally led by Boulanger, while Hoche himself had ashamedly returned to Lisieux’s banner. Ney had enjoyed moderate success in Swabia, but the dream of all of Germany being converted into Germanic Republican puppet states of France, which had seemed so plausible when Leroux had stood before the gates of Vienna, now seemed a distant fantasy. French pressure on the small states of Germany had only resulted in them rallying around banners of resistance, whether those be of large powers like Saxony, alliances among themselves such as the Mittelbund, or partisan Kleinkrieg operations like those of Michael Hiedler. Ney had been forced to concede a situation where, though Germany was beset by chaos, France was shut out of most of the spoils. This also made Lisieux’s other anti-Dutch plan unworkable: the Administrator had hoped to control central Germany and use it as a base to attack the Netherlands from the east, a direction against which the traditional Dutch defensive lines were of little use.

Finally, the Iberian situation continued to deteriorate. The architect of this failure was unmistakably Lisieux himself: the Administrator had always seen the peninsular war as a sideshow, and had ruthlessly withdrawn troops from the theatre even before the fall of Madrid. Now, the French grip on Spain continued to slip, while the Portuguese successfully beat back attacks by reluctant Spanish armies marching behind an ever-dwindling number of French spearheads.

It would, perhaps, then be expected that Lisieux would shelve any plans for getting into future wars while current fronts simmered with reverses. But to suggest this is to ignore Lisieux’s mindset and his view of what constituted a victory for the Republic and the Revolution. Unlike Robespierre, he did not want to spread the Revolution. It was his opinion that attempting to establish revolutionary states elsewhere would be doomed to failure: first the ideological principles must be perfected in France, which would take years. Only then would a second round of expansion begin. Only then would he realise his vision of Europe, and then the world, divided not into ethnic republics but wider ethnic Democracies: the Latin Democracy, consisting of France, Spain and Italy; the Germanic Democracy, consisting of Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Britain; and so forth. First France must have peace, and that meant secured borders. Control of anywhere outside those borders was required only for militarised buffer zones. Thus, reversals far east and south of what constituted France were of greatly lesser priority than ensuring the security and stability of that France. And first and foremost, some French areas were not even under the Republic’s control – Flanders and, of course, Royal France.

For that reason, Lisieux outlined a plan of attack. This would require a large fleet, a fleet capable of going toe-to-toe with the Dutch – although this was made easier by the fact that the Dutch had sent a large part of their navy to the far east in an attempt to subdue Surcouf, and had not yet realised that Surcouf had returned to Europe with much of his own forces. Lisieux further added that this fleet would be primarily of steamcraft, trusting in the fact that the Dutch had never faced them and would be uncertain of what tactics to use. Although Nelson had burned most of Surcouf’s original steamships (much to the latter’s annoyance when he learned of this), the new programme of building that Admiral Lepelley had established meant that France was now equipped with technologically superior Surcouf-class steamcraft (Admiral Surcouf was rather more pleased to learn of that). These both incorporated lessons learned from the earlier models, such as propellor design, and also allowed for swappable main weapons and navigation of inland rivers by virtue of their shallow draught and narrow bows.

Lisieux explained the basics of his plan: the steamfleet would launch a surprise attack on the Netherlands, destroy the local Dutch fleet, and attempt to take Amsterdam by an amphibious descent, along with other key Dutch coastal cities. They would be backed up by troops in sail transports, including many of the Dutch East Indiamen that Surcouf had captured, for a delicious irony. At the same time, the main French Republican Army would attack Flanders by conventional means, surging over the border. Forcing the alliance to divide their forces should guarantee victory.

The Administrator added reluctantly that in order to ensure success, the entire available French army should be committed to the task. That meant that any operation against Royal France – and by extension her protector Britain – would have to wait. Boulanger, who had viewed Lisieux’s dismissal of the reverses on other fronts with worry, was at least relieved that the Administrator remained sufficiently in touch with reality to recognise this. Some biographers have argued that this relief was sufficient that Boulanger did not significantly object to the plan, and without him, it went ahead easily. Boulanger was one of the few men who still dared criticise Lisieux, and he was respected. It was generally thought among the military that if a plan was unworkable or suicidal, Boulanger would be able to talk Lisieux out of it. As it was, the strategy – which Lisieux dubbed Le Grand Crabe, evoking the vast pincer movement at its heart – went ahead.

Lisieux set a date of approximately eighteen months in the future and ordered a full war footing to commence. Troops were conscripted in a more systematic manner. New battalions were raised in the puppet republics and funnelled into France to form auxiliaries. Hoche in particular had brought a hard core of veteran Italian loyalists with him, and was placed in control of the army effort by Lisieux, as Boulanger was given responsibility for holding Piedmont against the Hapsburgs and trying to maintain control over Spain. Lisieux still distrusted Hoche, but recognised that his charisma and skill would be necessary for the task ahead.

The situation was complicated by the fact that the Dutch Stadtholder William V died in 1806 and was replaced by his son William VI, who tended towards a more placatory approach to France – not least because he was concerned about radical political factions in his own country and needed the help of Flemish and German mercenaries to keep them down. It was William VI who exiled the Dutch Linnaean thinker Sijbren Vorderman, who took up residence in Denmark, which was less paranoid about French ideas. William VI’s accession caused hesitation in the Boulangerie as Lisieux pondered if it might be possible to split the Netherlands away from Flanders after all. However, it soon became clear that William VI was largely beholden to the same States-General politicians who had backed his father, and so overall Dutch policy would not change. Le Grand Crabe resumed.

The year wore on, Iberia continuing to deteriorate but Boulanger holding his own in Piedmont, and the overthrow of the Bavarian Germanic Republic and the Budweis Clique were more blows for those in France who still wished to export the Revolution. Lisieux cared not. By January 1807, Le Grand Crabe was ready.

It is true that no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.[2] However, Le Grand Crabe would be one of those unhappy few not to survive contact with its own architects…



[1] Built on the site of OTL Albany.

[2] In LTTW, obviously, a different general came up with this quote to OTL…


Part #65: A Series of Unfortunate Events

“…in conclusion, this thesis argues that the Wars of Supremacy, in particular the third, were indeed the first global conflicts. If any had eyes to see them, the lessons were written there in letters of blood as surely as if they had been scratched into slates in an Eton classroom. In a global war, a battle, an incident, a confrontation elsewhere can drastically alter the strategic situation elsewhere. Particularly significant for the European statesman is the knowledge that a colonial war can have repercussions for the home country.

It is a lesson that was taken to heart on the Continent, where men knew well that a crisis in the Americas or the East Indies could lead to armies surging over the border at home. It was, however, ignored in Britain. The seas guarded the island and the Royal Navy’s proud wooden wall made that defence impregnable, ministers boasted. It gave our land far more freedom in dealing with distant colonial affairs than our rivals in Europe, and perhaps that is partly responsible for our greater successes throughout the eighteenth century.

And yet the lesson was still there to be learned. The War of the British Succession illustrated how an American disagreement could topple a king from his throne and lead to civil war breaking out across the Empire. That was the early 1750s. One might assume that the ministers of sixty years later had taken to heart their grandfathers’ experiences. But any man with a modicum of experience of the vagaries of human nature will know what his heart tells him: they were not. This mistake must not be repeated yet again…”

– George Spencer-Churchill, Supremacy: A Treatise on Global Warfare (1931)​

*

From: “Fatal Hesitation: The Foxite Ministry” by Sir Arthur Rumbelow (1912) -

The situation of the armed forces under Charles James Fox’s ministries has been argued in a circle for decades, indeed a century. The matter is not helped by the fact that so many records were lost in the subsequent unpleasantness and historians have found it hard to reconstruct the details of the period, particularly when so many of them have an axe to grind, being apologists for either the Royal Navy or for Fox himself.

Nevertheless, the third part of this volume shall attempt to set forth the most neutral reconstruction of the history of the British armed forces in the critical years between 1800 and 1807. It shall personally be considered a success if it manages to offend all sides equally.

Fox is sometimes painted as an absurdly naïve figure, ahead of his time in many ways perhaps yet somehow physically incapable of recognising Lisieux’s French Latin Republic, or indeed any ‘progressive’ state, such as the United Provinces, as an enemy. While there is certainly a grain of truth in this popular image, immortalised in a dozen Gillray caricatures, common sense would suggest that such a man could not possibly have remained Prime Minister for very long, particularly when his own agenda was so controversial. Fox had help, of course, but he was neither an imbecile nor, as an alternative interpretation popular in the ‘70s suggested, a puppet of Richard Burke. His judgement was often coloured and flawed by his all-or-nothing approach to politics, but his ultimate fate is more the result of a string of poor fortune than of grave miscalculation.

With hindsight, Burke himself is often painted as a visionary locked away into being a junior coalition partner by his youth and the political situation, and some have argued in all seriousness that if Burke had succeeded Fox as Prime Minister as late as the general election of 1806, Britain would have been in a surer position when the storm came. This is simply nonsense. While Burke and Fox often differed strongly in opinion, Burke was a part of the problem, as is attested to by many of the surviving records. While Fox’s notion of radical liberty was centred around change – often, many opposition MPs argued, change for the sake of change – Burke’s, like his father’s, looked back to the principles of the Constitution of 1689 and the First Glorious Revolution. Central to those principles, drawn up while the military dictatorship of Cromwell was in living memory, was the fact that a standing army was more trouble than it was worth. So the Fox Ministry saw cutbacks to the British Army, with several regiments losing their second battalion. Although this led to increased unemployment, it remained a broadly popular move among the people, as it reduced taxes slightly and assuaged grumbles directed at misbehaving soldiers at a time when Britain was at peace.

However, both Burke and Fox concurred that the armed forces needed modernisation. This was accepted even by many opposition conservatives. Not a few MPs who were sitting by 1804 or so had served in the army of the ill-fated Prince Frederick George during the Seigneur Offensive, and had experienced the Republican French steam war machines firsthand. It was clear that such technologies had to be matched by the British Army if they were to face the French again in the future – or, as Fox put it, if other armies were to duplicate them. Despite having quite a conservative military culture, Great Britain had led Europe in innovation throughout the first half of the eighteenth century before being decidedly overtaken by France under first Louis XVI and then Robespierre. She could not afford to fail to recognise this. She must catch up.

Thus it was that what additional funding the British Army received was mostly focused on copying French breakthroughs. The effort was assisted by the fact that the Army’s formerly conservative culture had been overthrown after the Second Glorious Revolution and Frederick I’s purge of Horse Guards. Reforms under the Commander-in-Chief in the 1790s Viscount Amherst, continued by his successor Sir Fairfax Washington, had already led to experimentation that would have been considered practically blasphemy before 1751. Though Washington fought bitterly against Fox’s cutbacks – he had risen to prominence after filling a previous recruitment deficit by giving the American executive power to raise its own regiments, and knew that cutting the number of British regiments now would invariably repeat the crisis in the future – he was pleased to support the steam projects.

The programme drew most of Britain’s talent in steam technology together, including James Watt and John Wilkinson, who had already studied the French breakthroughs in Paris before the first Jacobin war between Britain and France had broken out. Robert Fulton, rightfully recognised as first among the American steam innovators, also participated, though primarily in the naval side of matters (q.v.). It is likely that Richard Trevithick, the Cornishman whose work on Cugnot-engines had focused on using them to power mining wagons on rails, would have participated – but he had already left the country. Tired of the fact that the consensus was against vehicles on rails, as they would be useless outside the mining industry,[1] he had moved to a country where steam technology was still largely a rumour, and which had no preconceptions about the ‘right’ way to do things: Russia.

The Army’s steam project was based in northern Lancashire and Cumberland, working out of Carlisle Castle, which was the home garrison base of the 34th (Cumberland) Regiment of Foot. The site was chosen because it allowed early experimentation with the flatter terrain of Lancashire, followed by more realistic all-terrain testing with the moors and mountains of Cumberland. The project, which was generally known simply as ‘Whistler’ for matters of national security, benefited greatly from the espionage efforts of Sir Sidney Smith and his agency, known as ‘the Unnumbered’. This was a double reference to the fact that they were on the books as a numberless regiment of the Army, and that their agents were rumoured to be ‘everywhere, without number’.[2]

Although ‘Whistler’ was several years behind its French counterparts, the programme proceeded fairly smoothly throughout the first few years of the nineteenth century. The same could not be said for the naval side of the project. Unlike the Army, the Royal Navy had supported Frederick fully in the War of the British Succession thanks to Admiral Byng’s knowing which side of his bread was buttered. This meant the Navy had never been purged or reformed in the Second Glorious Revolution, and essentially not since the First Glorious Revolution. The conservative establishment led by the Admiral of the Fleet, Sir John Campbell, resisted any attempts that might violate the supremacy of sail. This was a popular position throughout the navy, as many captains were contemptuous of steamcraft. “They require no more training or mathematical skill to operate than a mill loom,” Captain Henry Philipson, son of a Lancastrian industrialist, commented in his journal. It apparently did not occur to Philipson that this might be an advantage. The situation was similar to that in the early 1500s, when early arquebuses and muskets, though individually less powerful than longbows, nonetheless began to dominate because they required a few days’ or weeks’ worth of training to operate rather than a lifetime.

The situation was exacerbated by the fact that the Burkean Secretary at War, Frederick Dundas, was at odds with the Foxite Paymaster of the Forces, Matthew Dalton. Dundas was sympathetic towards the Navy’s conservative views, while Dalton believed that steamcraft were an embodiment of personal liberty by their nature – as the French had – and argued that the Navy’s current leadership rejected them specifically because they were drawn from aristocratic stock. In truth both were partly right. The Royal Navy had always been the more prestigious of the two services, particularly since the British Army was thought to descend from the Civil War’s New Model Army – there was a reason why it had never been granted the prefix ‘Royal’ – and thus the great families more usually sent their sons to sea.

The result, like most compromises, pleased no-one. Navy cutbacks were politically a liability: the losses of the Second Platinean War had necessitated the Portland Ministry’s ship-building programme, and few were willing to risk a second humiliation. Dalton, however, argued (and not without reason) that Republican France’s navy remained only a fraction of the size of Britain’s, and now that much of the old Kingdom of France’s navy had been destroyed or defected to the Bourbon regime in the Vendée, the second largest navy in the world after Britain’s was that of the Dutch Republic – with which Britain enjoyed good relations. So, while actual cutbacks were not announced, Dalton sought to punish the recalcitrant Admiralty by denying orders for new ships. The result was that older and obsolete ships were broken up or sold off at their usual rate, with a far smaller trickle of newer ships to replace them. After four years of this standoff, Admiral Campbell died and was replaced by the slightly more flexible Sir Humphry Pellew, former captain of the Enterprize and one of the RN’s few heroes of the Second Platinean War. Pellew was able to chart a more acceptable course, commissioning a sister project to Whistler led by Fulton and based in Lowestoft, rather than one of the Royal Navy’s larger bases. The bulk of the Navy establishment remained hostile to the idea, but Pellew was able to secure more ship orders from Dalton and the size of the fleet began to recover.

Eighteen months into Admiral Pellew’s tenure, in January 1806, news of the the Cherry Massacre reached London. Fox’s own instincts were to try and play down the affair, reluctant to fight the UPSA, which he saw as waging a noble conflict against the Spanish Bourbon regime-in-exile in the northern Spanish colonies. However, Fox was outmanoeuvred by events. The news had reached Fredericksburg three months earlier and the results had been dramatic. The Lord President, James Monroe, had argued for an intervention and been supported by the Patriot opposition under Lord Hamilton, but the Constitutionalist Party had come apart under the pressure. Already having shed its left wing as the American Radical Party and now being dominated by rich slaveholders, the Constitutionalists were now forced to decide which was more important: the short-term advantage of assuaging the outraged American in the street baying for Meridian blood, or the longer-term important of serving their constitutents, many of whom were members of the settler movement and wanted the Empire of the Indies to collapse under Meridian assault so its northern lands could be seized by the Empire of North America for settlement. The Constitutionalist MCPs made their decisions, Monroe’s whips losing most of their authority over them, and voted in Monroe’s declaration of war bill. The bill passed, but only due to Patriot support: fully half of Monroe’s MCPs revolted, and the American Radical Party (which favoured the UPSA due to its opposition to slavery) also voted against the bill. The result was that Monroe, after a week of attempting to regain authority over his splintering party and failing, resigned as Lord President. The new Lord Deputy, Michael Burgoyne the 1st Earl of Exmouth, called a general election.

The second American election in three years took place, with the results being in by the 10th of November 1805. Back in 1803, Monroe had solved the Cuba Question by making the election a referendum on his performance, and had been returned to power. Now, if he had hoped to duplicate that feat, he failed. Hamilton was returned with a majority of nine.[3] Helped by a divided opposition, he continued Monroe’s plans for war with the UPSA and mobilised the American regiments that had been recruited for the first Jacobin War but had never had a chance to see action. The American Squadron, which had been blockading Haiti, was returned to its home ports in Charleston, Norfolk and Boston to prepare for the possibility of transporting a American force to South America: the question was whether the Empire of the Indies would be an ally or merely a cobelligerent. If the former, the fleet might round the Cape and deliver an army to Peru to assist General Bernardo O’Higgins’ Bourbon force, while if the latter it was likely that history would repeat itself for the third time and Americans would fight on the shores of the River Plate. The Third Platinean War had begun.

The events in America had serious repercussions in Britain. Realising that the still reasonably popular Monroe had lost his position through failing to maintain the unity of his party, Fox consulted his whips and was forced to admit that sentiment ran high for war with the UPSA. With a heavy heart, he assented, and Great Britain joined her former colonies in declaring war on the UPSA on January 18th 1806. For the sake of rapid response, a large part of the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Squadron was deployed to the Americas, with the garrison being stripped from Gibraltar and Malta to provide army reinforcement to the Marines. By this time it had become clear that it was the second of Hamilton’s possibilities that would be the case: relations between Fredericksburg and the City of Mexico were too frosty to contemplate a full alliance. The Anglo-American fleets rendezvoused at Falkland’s Islands – the place where this conflict had begun, and the place where Pellew had won his fame – and prepared for a showdown with what portion of the Meridian Armada had remained in home waters.

As the Third Platinean War began, however, the Haiti situation naturally deteriorated. American hopes for a speedy annexation and settlement of the island had been dashed. The problems were manifold. The black Haitian militias under Vincent Ogé continued to fight a Kleinkrieger campaign from the jungles after the Americans had driven them from the cities, and American tactics grew ever more brutal and controversial in attempts to suppress them. Furthermore, there was tension between the Carolinians and the troops from the other Confederations. The Carolinians had two motivations for the war: to use Haiti as a destination for white settlers as they had Cuba, and to prevent the creation of a free black republic that might conflict with the ideologies they espoused in order to justify the institution of slavery. The Virginians concurred with the second part of this, but not the first: it was obvious that the Carolinians intended sole domination of Haiti, arguing that this was only fair compensation from the fact that the American political establishment had decided against any attempt to settle or annex Louisiana, and therefore Carolina was blocked from westward settlement. The three northern Confederations, having abolished slavery (though fire-breathing abolitionism remained a minority view) saw no reason to have their sons die from disease and Ogé’s musket balls over this Godforsaken island. Friction had increased ever since the initial afterglow from the apparently easy conquest of the island in 1803 had worn off.

Great Britain had reasons to oppose the existence of a free Haiti as well. Although slavery had been confirmed as illegal in the country in various court cases in the 1760s and 1770s, and the slave trade had been abolished in 1802 in one of the chief achievements of the Reform Coalition, slavery was still legal in the British West Indies such as Jamaica and Bermuda. It was likely that the Carolinian political establishment eventually saw those islands as being amalgamated into the Confederation as well, which Britain opposed, but the problem was nonetheless the same: a free Haiti could touch off economically costly slave revolts elsewhere. Thus, although counter to the sensibilities of the Foxite ministry, a smaller Royal Navy force and three British regiments were sent to Haiti in July 1806 to try and take up the slack from the reduced numbers of Americans there. Hamilton also considered the friction between the Carolinians and the other Confederations, and created a novel plan: he refused the Carolinian Assembly’s request to send another regiment to Haiti. Although the Carolinians’ Speaker, James Rutledge, had concocted a clever solution to the obvious method of blocking this – sending them to the UPSA instead – he had argued that the bulk of the Marines on the American Squadron were Carolinian-recruited and thus asking the confederation to send more was asking too much – Hamilton instead sent the 101st West Carolina Regiment of Foot to Ireland for maneouvres. This meshed well with how Fox had sent two Irish regiments to the Mediterranean to replace the diminished garrisons at Gibraltar and Malta. At the time, it was a simple political trick by Hamilton: history would conspire to make it turn the nineteenth century upside down.

So, as the year 1807 dawned, Prime Minister Fox was reluctantly fighting two wars in the New World, the Third Platinean War and the ‘Haitian Ulcer’, as the British left-wing press sourly described it. The last thing the country needed was another European war as well, yet it seemed one was brewing. France was moving. It is simply propaganda to state that Fox was still blind to the danger of Lisieux. Indeed, ironically, he had turned against Lisieux for quite the wrong reasons, many believed. For example, he had regarded Lisieux’s decision to sell out Fabien Lascelles’ Bavarian Germanic Republic to the Austrians: if Fox was truly blind, he was blind only to the brutalities that so many had committed in the name of the Revolution. Furthermore, after the crisis of 1803 with Nelson’s attack on the French fleet at Minorca on behalf of Naples, Fox had realised that support for Lisieux could no longer be countenanced in a British political establishment that regarded Nelson as a hero – a hero who had abandoned his own country because it had shut the door of opportunity in his face.

Thus the mistakes and accidents of history that followed cannot be so simply dismissed. Reports circulated, via the Unnumbered and other agents working for the British, that the French shipbuilding effort in Toulon and Marseilles had accelerated yet further over the past few years, with steamcraft being built by the dozen, including those outfitted for use as transports. Why the Mediterranean? it was wondered. And they had their answer, of course. Lisieux had made it clear in his propaganda that he eventually wanted to reclaim at least all of the former possessions of Bourbon France – which of course meant that the Royalist regime in the Vendée was living on borrowed time, but also had unpleasant implications elsewhere. The Corsican Republic, a British ally, was a former French possession. Its president, Pasquale Paoli, had died in 1805 and he had been succeeded by Carlo Andrea Pozzo di Borgo, who was slightly more lukewarm towards Britain. Furthermore, Lisieux’s blasts after Nelson’s attack on Minorca had suggested that he wanted France to dominate the western Mediterranean. Hoche’s attempts to conquer Naples had failed spectacularly, but Lisieux would at least ensure that the Neapolitan fleet could not threaten France again. And to dominate the western Mediterranean, France would probably have to take British Malta, and maybe Gibraltar as well. It was possible, they had done it with Minorca years before after all. And Fox had stripped their garrisons for America…

Hence the quick supplementation of Malta and Gibraltar with an Irish regiment, the 18th Foot. Hence also the fact that Fox split the Home Fleet and sent half of it to serve as the new Mediterranean Squadron, while recalling escorts on East India Company convoys in order to rebuild the Home Fleet to strength. But that would take time, of course. And while the new Mediterranean Squadron under Admiral John Jervis docked at Bastia in Corsica and waited for a French steamfleet to pour forth from Marseilles and Toulon, the smaller Home Fleet under Admiral Michael Parker tried to maintain a watch on the Channel with its temporarily reduced numbers.

Then a second rumour arose, that the French were building a second fleet in their northern ports, a fleet that included many sail transports captured by Surcouf from the Dutch in his privateering campaigns. Whispers abounded that the French were preparing for an invasion of England herself, and with Fox having pared down the Home Fleet! But that was absurd, of course: even with steam technology, even half the Home Fleet outnumbered the French’s northern force considerably. The sheer size of the Royal Navy and the disparity of numbers could not be exaggerated. No; the French must have another target in mind. This was confirmed in March 1807, when Lisieux finally threw down his cards and launched ‘Le Grande Crabe’, declaring war on the Duchy of Flanders and the Republic of the United Netherlands. Marshal Boulanger once more accepted a field command, delegating his role in Piedmont to General Bourcier, late of the failing operations in Spain. Ten years ago, Boulanger had saved the Republic by negotiating a peace with the Flemings: now, he must break that peace. He knew the terrain, he had pioneered the use of the steam-wagons upon it. The glory of the Battle of Lille, which had catapulted him to a position of power, would shine forth once more. The Flemings and the Dutch would be crushed.

But the fight could easily bog down if the Dutch were allowed to support the Flemings and care not for their own defence. So the first wave of the French fleet left from Le Havre on March 17th, sailing east up the Channel. This wave included most of the remaining sail ships of the line and frigates that France possessed, under the command of the controversial Admiral Villeneuve. Its purpose was to engage the Dutch home fleet at the mouth of the Zuider Zee, destroy it if possible, and pave the way for French landings in the northern Netherlands. A second army had been prepared under Hoche for this purpose and was stationed at Dieppe, including Hoche’s last remaining hard core of Italian loyalists. Lisieux had chosen the mission carefully. There was a possibility that Hoche might be able to win real victories and act as a real left pincer for Le Grande Crabe. Alternatively, he might only hold down Dutch troops and force the Dutch to divert armies away from the Flemish front in order to crush him. Either were worthy goals as far as Lisieux was concerned: he kept Hoche around because he was probably the best general of the age, but never forgot his earlier betrayal.

Villeneuve’s fleet sailed to engage the Dutch. As always, the presence of a serious French force in the Channel necessitated a British shadow squadron. So Admiral Parker sent four of his ships of the line to follow Villeneuve, ensuring he had no ambitions on the British coast. After all, Villeneuve’s fleet included two transports, in the opportunistic hope that they might be able to land troops after defeating the Dutch. The Channel Fleet was thus reduced further, and the regiments stationed in the South of England were put on alert.

Of course there were no plans for an invasion of England. On the 20th of March, Villeneuve fought the Dutch fleet under Admiral Pieter van Carnbee and won a Pyrrhic victory: the Dutch had superior training but were surprised by the sudden French assault, fought with Villeneuve’s typical audacity. The French managed to land their troops on Texel and the other Frisian islands, deploying artillery in an attempt to control the approaches to the Zuider Zee and prevent any further Dutch ships from breaking out. However, too few of Villeneuve’s ships remained to press the advantage further. He sent a message to Calais via a disguised fishing boat with the news of his limited success, and the information that the Dutch were in no position to defend if Hoche’s army were now to be transported there.

And then, on the 22nd of March, the unpredictable Channel weather struck. The waters of La Manche were quite capable of being as hostile as those of the Southern Ocean if they felt like it, but now it was just the opposite: the waters were as flat as a pancake and undisturbed by the slightest breath of wind. Admiral Parker had his ships towed, mostly by rowboat but a few by steam tug, to the usual sheltering place in the South Kentish Downs, between the North and South Forelands – where, ironically, the Dutch had once ambushed a Spanish fleet during their long wars. Sail combat was hard to envisage in such weather.

The French, however, had a steam fleet. So, as the Boulangerie enthusiastically informed Lisieux, they could still send Hoche’s troops to the Netherlands. Surcouf’s captured sail transports could be towed by tugs. And this time the nosy anglais would be unable to shadow them as they invaded the Dutch, either. And the Dutch themselves lacked steam tugs, as far as was known, and so could not hope to reply even if they had left ships in reserve. Things were going according to plan, indeed better than had been hoped. The Flemings and Dutch, a problem to the Republic for ten years, would finally be crushed.

So…the Boulangerie ministers continued to fill the silence, did they have permission to tell Hoche and Admiral Surcouf they were authorised to launch?

And Lisieux…

Hesitated.




[1] Because no-one really considered the fact that you could lay rails cross-country as well. This is what happens when the car is effectively invented before the train…

[2] OTL Sir Sidney Smith was a British agent and spymaster, but no official intelligence agency would be set up for a hundred years. The difference reflects the Foxite government’s instincts towards bureaucracy.

[3] Remember that the Continental Parliament only has about sixty MCPs, so this is a working majority.





Part #66: L’Otarie

- Where does the Administrator of France keep his Army?
- Up his Sleevey!

– joke by the characters of Captain Michaels and Lieutenant Stephens, in the black comedy play I Think I Left The Gas On, 1958​

*

From: “Jean de Lisieux: Dark Fire” by François Garnier (1926)

The stage was set. The battle plan known as Le Grand Crabe had gone like clockwork – or a steam engine. Villeneuve had won an unconvincing but adequate victory over the Dutch Republic, and the second fleet of Surcouf was ready to escort Hoche’s army in its transports – ironically largely captured by Surcouf from the Dutch – to attack the Netherlands from the north. All was ready, and soon France’s list of serious enemies would shrink from two to one.

But then Jean de Lisieux hesitated.

The speculative romances would have us believe that all great world events come down to the toss of a coin, the drop of a pin, the want of a nail. Usually this is a conceit aimed at justifying the Whiggish ‘Central Character’ interpretation of history[1] and should not concern modern-thinking historians. However, there are exceptions that prove the rule, and this was certainly one of them.

Throughout his political career, Lisieux had wavered and veered between caution, slowly building up power or strategies or armies, and then launching audacious gambles with that buildup. It was, as one alienist[2] has suggested, as though his mind was a boiling pressure cooker of ideas, slowly building up as he struggled to guide his Republic to the true path that only he knew, then being released in a terrific blast aimed at his enemies.

If this was truly his mental state – there is scarcely a shortage of alienists, biographers and amateur pundits speculating on the subject – then it had served the Republic fairly well thus far. Notably, it had led to the doctrine of focusing on one enemy at a time, which had led to the initially highly successful lightning campaign against Spain. Indeed it was when Lisieux deviated from this kind of thinking, ordering Ney to try and keep up a constant pressure on what would become the Mittelbund, that the French ran into problems. So one might expect a triumph here.

But the problem was that Lisieux had already embarked on an audacious gamble with this plan to begin with. Boulanger’s conventional assault across the Flemish border was not enough: Villeneuve, Surcouf and Hoche had to strike at the Netherlands from the north, and that had been far from a guaranteed success, considering the strength of the Dutch Navy (which, fortunately for the French, was now dispersed).

That gamble had paid off…and suddenly Lisieux found himself feeling cheated, inadequate. Victory was not enough. The conquest of the Low Countries was not enough. The world was not enough.

Some have traced a genuine shift in Lisieux’s mental state to that moment, trying to explain his deviating from previous behaviour. But I follow von Klung’s view in arguing that in truth Lisieux made a slow and steady progression – just as he wanted his Republic to do so – from the charismatic mob leader who rode the Tortues to crush the Paris rising sparked by Hébert’s death in 1796, to the reclusive and paranoid all-controlling dictator who now sits, the silence slowly lengthening as tension mounts, at the head of a table and listens to the Boulangerie telling him of the successes of Villeneuve.

He sits there, his skin pale and his eyes red from months, years of sitting in basements and writing propaganda by candlelight, trying to remake France, the Republic, the world in his own image one pen-scratch at a time, and he sits in silence. The Boulangerie members exchange looks, very hesitantly, terrified he might call them on it. Lisieux had once pledged to end Robespierre’s policy of killing people out of hand for being ‘impure’. For the most part, he had kept that pledge…but some of the things Lisieux could find for ‘impure’ individuals to do would make them beg for Robespierre’s swift dispensal of justice in the form of phlogisticated air.

And finally he speaks. Not decisively, as some have portrayed it: the testaments of all three journals that have survived from the Boulangerie members are clear on that. Instead, he asks a question. Idly, as though it is a trivial and highly theoretical matter, a calculus problem perhaps.

“How large is Admiral Parker’s fleet?”

They were confused, but the Boulangerie was well-informed. Lisieux had insisted on that. Louis Chappe’s semaphore network had begun in the 1790s as a few early experimental towers connecting Paris to the then-front line (and now once more) on the Flemish border, but it had proved itself by communicating war information to French leaders far faster than any human messenger could. Indeed it had played its part in Lisieux’s rise to power, when he had hoarded its data and used it to prepare for events that no-one else yet knew had happened. It had meant he could lay his trap for Robespierre, knowing about British successes before anyone else did. Now, Chappe and his fellow long distance communication pioneers had benefited from a decade of investment from Paris, with the result that France had what was quite simply the strongest link between its capital and its distant provinces of any country in the world, including many smaller ones. That had worked well for Lisieux’s goals of centralisation and homogenisation to fit his mission. Now, it once more powered France’s war ambitions.

So they answered. It was six ships of the line, eight frigates, and a couple of brigs or gunboats from the coastal flotilla. Not very large. Smaller than a British Channel Fleet had been for years. Of course, that was a very temporary situation, it was only because a large part of the Royal Navy had been sent to the Americas and the Mediterranean, and Parker had detached part of his own fleet to shadow Villeneuve. Still, it was unlikely that Surcouf’s force could beat it under balanced conditions.

Lisieux asked a second question: “What does the weather hold?”

Another Revolutionary innovation. Louis Chappe had rigged his semaphore towers to transmit a local weather report along with each message. Originally this had simply been due to the fact that the towers had to prepare for darkening weather conditions by lighting the night-lamps on their signal paddles, but a bright spark had realised that it could be used for constructing weather maps across France. The great mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace had headed the effort to compile them, and now L’Académie de la Peuple published weekly maps showing the weather across France in symbols and Cocteau degrees.[3] It had not taken the Boulangerie long to work out that this also might be of use in war.

So, based on the latest projections, they answered: “Low wind strength for at least three days, perhaps a week.” Information the British did not have, though their savvier captains might hazard a guess.

Lisieux meditated on that for a moment. “Lepelley’s status?” he asked his third and final question.

For that one, the Boulangerie had to send a runner to L’Aiguille, the Needle, the largest semaphore tower in the world. It stood in the centre of Lisieux’s remodelled Paris, at the centre of the radial street network he had cut through the old higgledy-piggledy mediaeval city, on the Île de la Cité where the cathedral of Notre Dame had once stood. It was the central locus of the French semaphore network and a symbol of Lisieux’s power looming over the city.

The runner, whose name is not recorded, collected the latest report and returned it to his Administrator. One might perhaps expect Lisieux to be impatient: instead, most accounts say that he was calm, emotionless. He repeated the question.

The runner answered: Seventy percent of Lepelley’s ships had arrived.

Lisieux sat in silence for minutes more. Of all the men in France, only Pierre Boulanger would have dared interrupt his meditation, and Boulanger was away, leading the attack into Flanders, facing Charles Theodore’s armies with his patent steam-artillery tactics. If he had been there, if he had been consulted by semaphore even, things might have been different. But he was not.

And Lisieux spoke:

“Military conquest. It is a poor measure of the worth of a country, the purity and righteousness of its mode of governance, to my mind. Yet many disagree, and we cannot afford to ignore such things. What have we achieved in that field?” He ticked things off on his fingers. “We have conquered Spain. Louis XIV’s armies did that a century ago. We conquered most of Italy. So did Francis I. We have bogged down fighting wars in Germany, and I cannot name enough monarchs who managed that. Even the late and unlamented Louis XV managed to conquer the Low Countries, though he foolishly returned them at the peace, uncaring of the blood of the soldiers that had been shed to win them.

“I ask you, are we not greater than those kings? Are we not more enlightened than those monarchical regimes, the same ones that we rose up in triumph to overthrow thirteen years ago? Yet we have not surpassed their martial triumphs, and that is something that the world watches.

“There is one goal those kings never achieved. One that no Frenchman has ever achieved.[4] One which brought those kings’ dreams crashing down to earth perhaps even to a greater extent than their own corruption and hubris.

Perfidious Albion. The English sit on their island, protected by the Sleeve[5] and their navy, fat and content, knowing that no foe can ever harm them directly. They have the leisure to intervene in our affairs at will, and their goal is always to set us back, to maintain a balance of power, to prevent any country growing powerful enough to threaten them.

“Well they have failed. They just don’t know it yet. England must be dealt with if France is to reign supreme as the Ultimate Purity. England must be put to fire and the sword.

“We have the ships. We have the men. We have the weather. Fortes fortuna adiuvat. Let us seize the day, and end our problems forever! An end to Albion and her perfidy! An end! An end!”

*

From – “Ripublica Corsica” by Roland Bone, a fictionalised narrative account of Corsica in the Jacobin Wars, 1945 –

Admiral John Jervis frowned. Though under normal circumstances he did not think much of the local musicians, an unusually jaunty piece had just begun and he did not appreciate being interrupted. Furthermore, the blasted midshipman was impeding his view of the delightful and hopefully unattached Corsican lady in the third row. Jervis had been smiling a few moments before, reflecting that while he might not have a high opinion of the local talent when it came to music, the…other arts were a different matter entirely.

Now, though, it seemed business had overtaken him. He sighed, climbed to his feet, excused himself. Doubtless his absence would cause comment. He was the highest-ranking British officer in the Mediterranean, the commander of the Mediterranean Fleet in fact, and by making Corte his major port of call – an important part of shoring up relations between Britain and the Corsican Republic now that Paoli had died and Pozzo had taken power – he had become a central figure of society there. People would talk, he knew. No matter what that lieutenant on the Aegyptus who was too clever by half might say, Jervis was convinced that semaphore was not, in fact, the fastest way information could travel. The gossip of society ladies could put at least a distorted rumour from London to Edinburgh within what seemed like five minutes. And he knew that by leaving now, he had just started one.

Thus, once he was out in the corridor with the pale midshipman, he was all but ready to take it out on the boy. He restrained himself, though, reminding himself not to shoot the messenger. Now, if the lad had interrupted him on his own initiative and his message did not convey information of sufficient importance…Jervis let his face grow hard. He had never flinched from the use of harsh punishments such as flogging in order to maintain discipline. He did not enjoy ordering their use, as some sadistic captains might, but he believed that they had their place, and that place was separating the rigid, hierarchial civilised society of a Royal Navy ship from the anarchy of mutiny.

The boy – he couldn’t be more than twelve years old – saluted nervously and handed him the sealed envelope with a mumbled ‘Admiral’.

Jervis broke the seal, took out the letter and scanned it quickly. The handwriting he recognised: Jonathan Scott’s, the master and commander of the Neptune.

A prickle ran up his spine even before he digested the words. The Neptune, an inappropriately grand name for a glorified sloop, was acting as part of his spy network across the Med. Specifically, she was a base for the fishing boats – some disguised members of the Unnumbered, some genuine locals paid off for their information – whose job was to spy on the ports for any movements of ships.

He read the letter twice, three times, unable to believe what he was reading. It was simply impossible.

“Gone,” he said out loud, letting the letter drop to the ground, too flabberghasted to think about operational security, to remember that the boy was still there. “Admiral Lepelley’s force. The whole Toulon-Marseilles fleet. No one saw them leave…but they’re all gone.”

*

Farewell and adieu to you fine Spanish Ladies —
Farewell and adieu to you Ladies of Spain —
For we've received orders to sail for Old England
And perhaps we shall nevermore see you again.


*

From – “Blade to the Heart” by Michael Robertson, 1967:

The attack came without warning. No declaration of war. Nothing that would give Britain any chance to prepare. If she could possibly recall any of her fleets, the attempt would become impossible. Everything had to be risked, all gambled on one roll of the dice. If the plan, so new it lacked a name, succeeded, then any rancour from lack of following the rules of war would become moot. And if it failed, the reverse was also true…

Admiral Parker was not, as he has often been painted, an incompetent. While his ships were laid up in the South Kentish Downs, he sent out patrols to ensure the Channel was clear. He lacked steamcraft: the British had sent half their experimental fleet to Jervis in the Mediterranean as a counter to Lepelley’s steamfleet in harbour at Toulon, and the other half remained in harbour in Lowestoft. Besides, the British had yet to produce a really effective steam warship, unlike the French’s Surcouf-class steam-galleys. Instead their efforts had focused on building tugs capable of towing their conventional ships into battle, which given the sheer number of British sail warships made sense as a strategy.

So instead Parker sent sloops and brigs, small ships that could be rowed effectively when there was barely a ripple on the surface of the Channel, a mill-pond, a peace that so rarely came to those troubled waters.

It was not a peace that would last for long.

*

So we'll rant and we'll roar like true British Sailors,
We'll range and we'll roam over all the salt seas,
Until we strike soundings in the Channel of Old England —
From Ushant to Scilly ’tis thirty-five leagues.


*

Three o’clock on the 23rd of March, 1807. Six bells of the afternoon watch, in ship’s time. Approximately, of course: Britain had not yet implemented standardised time, lacking a huge semaphore network like France’s. There was only a cursory line of towers stretching across the south coast from Penzance to Dover. Supposedly there as a counter to a French invasion, but no-one believed that would ever come. The Navy instead used it for sending orders between Portsmouth and lesser naval bases, and many of the conniving deskbound admirals used it to shave many hours off sending messages to London and receiving them. Quite a lot of money had been made on the stock market and the races before the financiers cottoned on. At present, sailors had a bad odour among them, to the extent that the admirals had backed off for a while, and that one proposal of theirs – to shave even more time off by extending the network to London itself – had been shelved…

*

We hove our ship to when the wind was sou'west, boys,
We hove our ship to for to strike soundings clear,
Then we filled our main-tops'l and bore right away, boys,
And right up the Channel our course we did steer.


*

A sloop, HMS Sparrowhawk, raced back to the Downs, almost colliding with North Foreland as she did so. Her commander, Martin Booth, carried what might be the most important message in British history, and Admiral Parker received it with the same sense of helpless dread that Harold Godwinson might have done seven centuries before.

The French are coming.

Doubtless, the fleet of Admiral Surcouf was sailing up the Channel to reinforce Villeneuve’s fleet, of course. It must be part of the French operation against the Dutch Republic. Obviously.

But there were so many of them…

Booth, like most British sailors, had never actually seen French steam warships in action, and spoke frankly to Parker about the unsettling and unnatural way that the red-and-black-chequered galleys could move against the tide without wind or oars, their single chimney belching a plume of dark smoke that half-hid the ships behind. Only half-hid them, though. He counted dozens, along with three ships of the line and an unknown number of frigates. There might be other sail ships behind, but he wasn’t sure.

Parker stared at the written message, resisting the urge to put his head in his hands. He had to shadow this fleet. It was too big a risk. But with the Channel the way it was…

There was no choice. He ordered his ships to be towed down-Channel by their barges and longboats, an unpopular task. The French fleet must be met and its objectives ascertained.

*

The first land we make it is known as the Deadman,
Next Ram Head near Plymouth, Start, Portland and Wight;
We sailéd past Beachy, past Fairley and Dungeness,
And then bore away for the South Foreland Light.


*

Of course, Parker’s feet made very slow progress under human power, while the French’s steam engines – now perfected from years of experiments – drove them forward at a rate that almost overtook the Sparrowhawk. For that reason, Parker’s flagship Mirabilis[6] was only rounding the head of Dungeness when the lead ships of the French fleet, already passing Fairlight Cove, were spotted. Surcouf’s own flagship, the steam-galley L’Otarie, was still as far back as Beachy Head, the French fleet becoming strung-out due to the varying performance of the steam engines and their coaling crews, but he had been careful with his orders beforehand. Furthermore, the French steamships had improved their signal flag system using the breakthroughs in mathematical coding that had been developed for the Chappe semaphore network. Surcouf knew that the British had been sighted long before he could see them with his own telescope.

There was the possibility that the fleet could simply bypass the British without firing, of course, but that would make the second part of the plan problematic, and Lisieux had been very clear. Parker’s fleet must be neutralised. Still, Surcouf hesitated. He told the lead ships to throttle back and the fleet began to become more of a cohesive mass again. Parker’s fleet turned around, awkwardly, as French ships passed on either side and the British rowers groaned and looked enviously upon the French’s steam engines. The strange procession reached the cape of Dungeness again. Then it happened.

Sources are divided on what exactly occurred. Some argue that Parker finally spotted or identified Hoche’s troopships towards the back of the visible French formation and realised that this could only be an invasion aimed at England. Others, with perhaps more justification, believe that one of the French captains panicked or misinterpreted his orders. In any case, the first shot was soon eclipsed by the next fifty: all the crews on both sides were tense. The peace between Britain and France, over six years old, was finally shattered. Parker began roaring orders. Not without difficulty, the British rowboats turned their ships yet again and a line of battle began to form up. Mirabilis, however, stood aloof and let fly with her broadside at the approaching column of French ships.

That ship had the most powerful broadside of any British ship, and as British gunnery tended to be of a higher calibre than other navies’ due to the fact that the Royal Navy budgeted to train the crews with real shot and powder, the most powerful in the world. Her fifty portside guns of various weights fired almost as one, the recoil making even the massive Mirabilis visibly sway and yaw as the cannons shot back. Adding up the various thirty-two-pound, twenty-four-pound and twelve-pound shot she fired, it came to an incredible total of over one ton of screaming iron being hurled at her target. And it was at this point that Parker, and the Royal Navy, revealed that they had not entirely been conservative curmudgeons dismissing the way steam had changed naval war. Lessons had been learned from the confrontations between French steamcraft and the Spanish navy, in particular the way that tall ships of the line had trouble hitting the lower-slung steam galleys at close range. A bright young engineer named Cripps, a type which the Royal Navy had no shortage of, had developed a new kind of gun carriage that allowed not only gun elevation while permitting recoil, but also depression. Mirabilis, of course, as the flagship, was fully equipped with them and her crews were well drilled.

So it was that when Mirabilis fired, three French steamships practically disappeared, disintegrating as each was hit by a dozen huge cannonballs. Their steam boilers were punctured and spilled gouts of blinding white steam that both scalded half their crew to death and hid the battlefield as readily as powder smoke. La Vengeur du Peuple, just behind the three ships, sustained lesser damage, knocking down her auxiliary mast, while L’Enfant de Tonnerre, a little further behind, took just one cannonball, a small twelve-pounder. But, by one of those strange coincidences of war, that cannonball just happened to remove her captain’s head. His first officer, Philippe Desaix, quickly took over.

The other British ships, not all of which had the new gun carriages, met with less success. However, HMS Orion and HMS Sunderland successfully trapped the Vaisseau de la Vengeance, one of Surcouf’s few sail ships of the line (being towed into battle by a steam tug) and battered her with broadsides between them.

Nonetheless, the new steamcraft rapidly began to wreak a toll. Most were equipped with a few large forward cannon, like row-galleys in the Mediterranean, and once lined up on a target could put a forty-eight pound cannonball through any of the British ships below the waterline. Within a few minutes, two of Parker’s ships, Lancaster and Cerebus, were slowly sinking beneath the unnaturally still waters of the Channel.

It was becoming obvious that the British were outnumbered, outmaneouvred, and outmatched. Nonetheless Parker fought on, grimly realising that he could at least do as much damage to this terrifying French fleet as possible. Their numbers could not be too great…but what was this now? He clapped his telescope to his eye and swore. It was impossible! That many ships…Sir Sidney Smith was technically a naval man, and so his Unnumbered made sure their intelligence reports reached admirals more swiftly than anyone. He knew there could not have been that many ships in Le Havre. It was simply impossible, the harbour space did not exist…

As a lucky shot from the Vengeur removed the Mirabilis’ figurehead and scattered the entrails of an ensign across the deck, Parker fiddled with his telescope, struggling to focus. That ship…another cursed steamcraft…but the pennant, he recognised that!

But it was impossible.

Pennants could be faked, of course. Ships sailed under false colours all the time, though attacking under them was considered close to blasphemy. But for what reason would they fake it? And you couldn’t fake that huge, impossible second fleet following it.

Impossible, perhaps…but it would explain a lot.

Parker had seen the pennant of Admiral Lepelley, who – as he knew well – was stationed in the South of France, at Toulon, commanding a steamfleet which everyone suspected might be aimed at Corsica in the current uncertain climate. That was why Jervis was there with his fleet, to warn them off. Or perhaps it might go to Italy, or Spain…what it would not do is somehow show up in the Channel without at any point passing through the Straits of Gibraltar and thus being spotted by the Royal Navy.

But it had. Parker would never know why. It was a closely kept secret in France, barely suspected even among the Unnumbered. But Lisieux’s extensive canal-building project, turning the old Canal de Bourgogne into the Canal de l'Épurateur: completed, wider, deeper. The steam-galleys had a shallow draft. The Canal had made it possible to move them, and similar ships, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. From Marseilles and Toulon, up the Rhône to the Saône and then to the Yonne and finally the Seine, and the Seine spilled into the Atlantic near Le Havre. Suddenly, Britain’s grasp on Gibraltar, the Key to the Mediterranean, had been made superfluous. The fleet was here.

Parker knew all was lost. He detailed three brigs to try and escape to bring word to the Admiralty, knew it was a forlorn hope: rowers could not outrun steam. He cheered up his own men and they managed to pull the vast Mirabilis deeper into the French fleet. Through sheer weight of metal they managed to destroy two more steam-galleys, then a third, even as the Sunderland sank, holed below the waterline. Parker hoped to draw near to L’Otarie and kill Surcouf, even if Lepelley was already behind him on the Tyrannicide. Though the steam-galleys hammered the Mirabilis, her hull – tougher than usual for a British-built ship – and her sheer size defeated them. Where she was holed, her men worked the pumps furiously. She would sink eventually, doubtless, but she would take a terrific bite out of the French fleet before she died.

Then something unexpected happened, as often occurs in war.

L’Enfant de Tonnerre, one of the lead French ships, had lost her captain in the first seconds of the war. Now Commander Desaix was in command…and he was not ready. Rather than panicking, though, he settled into a calm, emotionless state, but cold fury burned in his heart. His older brother Jerome had died in Admiral Nelson’s Neapolitan attack on Minorca. Desaix had used his contacts to get assigned to L’Enfant de Tonnerre in particular for this reason. He had an acute sense of irony, and L’Enfant de Tonnerre was not a poetic name.

Now his dark dream had come true. He was in command, and if not Nelson himself, there was his old ship before him, sinking steamcraft with its skilfully depressed cannon.

It was time to get his own back.

With a cry of “Pour Jerome! Pour Minorca!”, Desaix ordered full speed ahead, the coalers shoveling on as fast as they could. He aimed the ship’s nose straight at the Mirabilis as though to ram her, and then ordered Lieutenant Vaisson to prepare to fire.

The Surcouf-class steam galley had been specifically designed so that its standard armament could be swapped out for other things, such as a mortar for turning it into a bomb-ship. L’Enfant de Tonnerre, however, was an experimental craft. The Republic was not too proud, after all, to learn from its mistakes, and throw them straight back in the enemy’s face.

Here was close enough, Desaix decided. After all, accuracy was not great in any case… “Tirez!” he cried, and Vaisson and his deputies lit the fuses.

As cannonballs from the Mirabilis crashed around them, as her nose turned the waters of the Channel white, as she raced towards her target…L’Enfant de Tonnerre fired.

*

Moving swiftly through the waters
Rockets screaming as she came
Sent old Mirabilis’ masts
Crashing down in sheets of flame
Oh a new dark day was dawning
And the miracles were gone
Frenchmen started cheering,
“Vive L’Enfant!”


*

Those rockets had wound a tortuous path over the years, scarcely less than the ones they traced through the air as they exploded almost randomly. From China to Bengal, from Bengal to Mysore, from Mysore to Spain, from Spain to Naples, from Naples to France. Each time, the former had used them in a war against the latter, and the latter had been sensible enough to try and duplicate the feat. Most had succeeded. Naples, with Nelson, certainly had.

Now it was known that France had, also.

The rockets did not sink Mirabilis. But they set her on fire. Her masts creaked and toppled, her furled sails, useless in the windless day, burning to dust. Her varnished deck sputtered with flames. Some of the braver pumpmen, perhaps, tried to put the flames out, but the screaming rockets made even seasoned sailors panic: they had faced mighty broadsides of roundshot, but this was a new and unknown foe.

According to many French observers, one rocket lanced an almost perfectly straight and true path from the great asbestos-lined drum installed in L’Enfant de Tonnerre’s bows, striking its target dead-on. The target happened to be Admiral Michael Parker. He simply vanished in a cloud of red, appropriately daubing French Revolutionary colours across Mirabilis’ deck.

The end was not long in coming. The pumps began to fail and the wounds inflicted by the other French ships told, water surging in. Yet the guns kept firing even as she sank, the gunners knowing there could be no escape in the middle of the battle, so determined to take as many of the enemy with them as they could. They were the best of the best, the cream of the Royal Navy, and they fought to the end. And, oddly, Mirabilis inflicted some of her most withering blows as she slowly disappeared beneath the beckoning waters of the Channel, her guns now able to fire horizontally at their targets. For example, one cannonball almost achieved Parker’s goal, missing Admiral Surcouf by a hair and slaying a lieutenant standing next to him instead.

Another small cluster of cannonballs struck what remained of L’Enfant de Tonnerre as she too slipped beneath the surface. Mirabilis had fired her last organised broadside almost simultaneously with the rocket attack. Captain Desaix, the rocketman Vaisson and her whole crew were dead. But in a way that only made her legend greater.

*

Cracking boilers, smashing timbers
Forty-pounders pierced the deck
And a French fleet lay in mourning
As they watched the sinking wreck
With the steam and smoke all clearing
Those foes their fates as one,
Slowly disappearing,
Adieu l’Enfant!


*

Admiral Surcouf watched Mirabilis sink. She was the last of the British ships.

Then he spoke.

“The way is open,” he said. “For the first time in a hundred years…the way is open.






[1] TTL’s name for the Great Man theory.

[2] Psychologist.

[3] The Cocteau temperature scale is a decimalised Revolutionary form of the Réaumur temperature scale, chosen because it is French in origin.

[4] Lisieux did not consider William the Conqueror and contemporary Normans to be French due to his views on race.

[5] La Manche, French name for the English Channel.

[6] HMS Mirabilis, you may recall, is the LTTW analogue of HMS Victory. Both were laid down in 1759 and named after that ‘Year of Victories’, the Annus Mirabilis. She was commanded by Horatio Nelson during the first Anglo-French period of the Jacobin Wars, but when he resigned to pursue his career as head of the Neapolitan navy, she eventually came into Parker’s hands. Like Victory in OTL, she is one of the largest ships in the world, a three-decker armed with one hundred guns.
 

Thande

Donor
Part #67: The Sound of Drums

“If you would seek the true terror in the night, throw away your library of thrillers and gothic romances and turn back to your childhood. There is no darkness quite so potent as that behind the apparently innocent nursery rhyme.”

– Norman Prendergast, forward to English Folklore, 1972​

*

From – “Albion’s Peril: The Invasion of England” by Sir Hubert Pendleton, 1951:

The impossible had happened.

Jean de Lisieux had gambled, and he had won. All that work, the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of républicaines[1], the countless political prisoners who had been worked to death as slaves, the expansion of the Burgundian Canal and the frantic construction programme to replace and improve the steamships destroyed by Nelson at Mahon – it had all been worth it. As Surcouf had said, “Let us be masters of the Channel for six hours and we are masters of the world.”[2] Now that mastery had been seized. The efforts of Admiral Parker had hurt Surcouf’s fleet, maybe hurt it enough to stop an invasion if it had been alone – but it was not. The canal system meant that the Mediterranean fleet of Lepelley could be transported across France to the Channel, and just that had happened. Even if Parker had not sent ships to shadow the much smaller force under Villeneuve assaulting the Dutch Republic, what was left of the temporarily understrength British Channel Fleet could not have stopped the French. A narrow opportunity had arisen and Lisieux had seized it with both hands.

Of course it was to be expected that the British would frantically start calling their fleets back at the speed of a messenger, so one might suppose that the French would land their troops immediately to avoid a latter interception. However, that part of the mission was the responsibility of Lazare Hoche. Hoche: mercurial, arrogant, opportunistic, with questionable loyalties – and perhaps the best general of his generation. And above all, reckless.

Hoche knew what his armies would face. Though an invasion of England had never been on the cards for the forseeable future, every general and admiral worth his rank in France had studied British defensive preparations. These had lagged behind during Fox’s ministry, cut back as part of the government’s grand programme to pay back the national debt,[3] which would ultimately be rendered moot. However, the British coast was scarcely undefended. Martello forts had been constructed to a modern design along the south coast by the Portland-Burke and Rockinghamite ministry, and generous Royal Ordnance policies ensured they were well equipped with powder and shot. Larger fortifications manned by regiments of line troops had been built or renewed, with Dover Castle being ringed by a new network of modern bastions and an elaborate underground barracks complex being constructed. A single line of semaphore towers linked the fortifications, far inferior to France’s Chappe network, but nonetheless meaning that an attack on the south coast would become known to Portsmouth within the hour, and to London within three or four, given time to send a messenger on a fast horse.

Thus an attack on the south coast was unlikely to succeed. The British forts would hamstring an attempt to break out into the interior, and the semaphore system meant that Britain could call out her garrisons, concentrate them into an army, and surround the French force. Though Britain’s army was small compared to the Continental standard, Hoche was limited by the capacity of his fleet and had only 60,000 men. Given time to assemble, British troops would outnumber his army and their performance in the war seven years before had proved that they could stand their ground against France’s finest.

Therefore, with a characteristic flash of strategic insight, Hoche tried a bluff. He landed 8,000 of his men on the Kentish coast between Dungeness and Folkestone, using his ships’ flat bottoms to take advantage of beach landings not accessible to sailships. These men were not chosen randomly: he picked the two Italian regiments that had remained loyal to him when his Republic collapsed in the wake of the Rape of Rome. Composed solely of hardbitten veterans who followed Hoche because of his charisma, not his cause, the two regiments were commanded by Brigade General Tomaso Modigliani. Modigliani was a Savoyard, one of the first Italian soldiers to join Hoche’s army after being captured in battle as a conscript. Seven years was a long time, and he had eventually become Hoche’s effective second-in-command. Hoche respected the man’s ingenuity and willingness to take risks, and also found his complete lack of moral compunction useful. There was a reason why Modigliani and his men had been unmoved by the Rape of Rome and the general despoilment of the central Italian countryside by Hoche’s hired Jacobin troops.

So, to that end, Hoche landed Modigliani’s men and added a token artillery force, ten twelve-pounder cannon mounted on Cugnot steam wagons. They had their orders. Not to strike the British fort at Shorncliffe[4] or the smaller fortifications dotted along the Kentish coast, but to surge forth into the interior, using the War of Lightning, aiming for Ashford, Maidstone and ultimately Chatham. Hoche understood something of the attitudes of the British Admiralty and knew that Chatham was their sacred cow, its famed impenetrability a measure of their prestige. The Admiralty had suffered badly in the fiasco of the Dutch raid on the Medway over a hundred years before, when the Dutch had burned an English fleet in dock and blew up both the forts supposed to be protecting it. Since then, Chatham had become increasingly fortified, even as the importance of the shipyards had grown.

But, of course, all Chatham’s defences were aimed at repelling an attack by sea, an enemy fleet sailing up the Medway or the Swale. A strike across land would not have been planned for, no-one could have predicted it – particularly when the defence of Chatham was masterminded by the Royal Navy, not the British Army. If Hoche had landed his entire army and marched it there, they could quite possibly take the forts from the south and then burn whatever ships were docked there. Hoche gambled that in the wake of Parker’s defeat, the Admiralty would jump to prevent a second disaster. Of course, he had not landed his whole army, but that was where Michel Sauvage came in. The little, quick-witted Gascon had been the Italian Latin Republic’s equivalent of Britain’s Sir Sidney Smith, serving Hoche capably in the capacity of spymaster. In no small part, it had been his work that had kept Italian Kleinkrieger activity to manageable levels, at least until the Rape of Rome. Now, he and his subordinates went to work, going ahead of Modigliani’s men, posing expertly as Englishmen, spreading rumours of their ferocity, their destructiveness – and their intended target.

Modigliani, on the other hand, had the job of trying to make it look as though his eight thousand men were almost ten times their number, Hoche’s entire force. He achieved this through a mixture of subterfuge – issuing fake regimental colours for a wide range of French regiments and having his men constantly exchange them – and brutality. The sleepy Kentish village of Lympne was the first British settlement to feel the bloody rampage of the revolutionary soldier, the dark fire that had stained Europe red from Portugal to Bohemia. On Modigliani’s orders, Lympne was burned to the ground, though the Italians were careful to let a small number of stunned villagers escape to tell the tale. Even as the Italians marched to the pace set by the War of Lightning doctrine, rumour nonetheless outran them. With this sudden stab of violent fury into the heart of Kent, the psyche of the locals was thrown back in confusion and horror. Yes, many of them knew about the fortifications on their coast, but no-one had ever seriously believed that they would be invaded, by the French or anyone else. Security from invasion was the hard bedrock of the English character, the idea that since 1066 the island had almost magically been protected from invasion. The legend of the Spanish Armada had sealed it into the public consciousness: God breathed and they were scattered.

Understandably, the shattering of that assumption resulted in chaos. Stories were panted out in frantic voices – and soon whizzing through the air via semaphore paddles – that told of a million Frenchmen rampaging across the Weald, each ten feet tall, with the horns and tail of a demon, and biting the head off an English baby with one hand even as they torched Canterbury Cathedral with the other. The sheer suddenness of the attack rocked the establishment to the core. Even those that would normally have had the sense to treat the stories as the hyperbole they obviously were began to panic. The situation was so unexpected, so unprecedented, that no-one knew what to believe. Most of those that remained calm did so because they were certain the story was a hoax.[5]

And so, just as Hoche had hoped, the official response was just as confused. Fox was predictably one of those who dismissed it out of hand when the story reached London, while Richard Burke frantically tried to assemble a straight consistent account of events from the messengers streaming into London. The only member of the Cabinet who took a measured approach to the news – to believe that an invasion had happened, but not on the scale that the stories suggested – was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Bone. He had lived through a French invasion of his own homeland, Corsica, and knew better than any Englishman what an invasion looked like. But Bone had only been in his post for two years, and he was unable to make his views heard.

The Admiralty’s news of the invasion was perhaps the best available in England at that point. This was partly due to the semaphore network, but also for a reason that no-one could have expected…

*

From ‘Naval Mythology of the British Isles’ by Dr Walter Walker, 1983

DRAKE’S DRUM. A snare drum which Sir Francis Drake carried with him in his voyages around the world. As he lay on his deathbed in the West Indies, he asked for the drum to be brought back to England. The legend which originally surrounded the drum was a variant of the classic ‘king under the mountain’ tale found elsewhere with King Arthur or, on the Continent, Barbarossa or Charlemagne: when England was threatened, if the drum was beaten, Drake would return from heaven with a fleet to defeat the invaders.

Strangely, this legend has little to do with the drum’s actual purported behaviour. Rather than being beaten by a drummer to summon Drake in time of peril, instead the drum beats itself when England is threatened, calling the nation to war. This has been reported by a great many people over the years, some of whom disassembled the drum to try and find out how it worked, to no avail. Some mysteries are better left unsolved.

A list of recorded events when the drum was heard to beat:

When the Mayflower left England in 1620 to found the American colonies;

At the exact moment when, thousands of miles westward, King William IV was assassinated by Prince Frederick’s American Riflemen in 1749;

As soon as Modigliani set foot on English soil at the French invasion of England in 1807……[6]

*

Reports of the drumbeat echoing through the halls of Buckland Abbey found their way swiftly to Plymouth, where the semaphore tower was soon clicking and clacking away, sending the news eastward to Portsmouth. The Admiral of the Fleet, James de Sausmarez (a Guernseyman) was a Royal Navy man, and thus prone to take superstition seriously. Thus orders were flying even before reports of the actual invasion began to flow westward from Folkestone. Sausmarez ordered the defences of Chatham put on high alert and the mobilisation of all gun hulks where possible. He also demanded additional troops from the British Army forts in Kent to protect Chatham from land. This put the forts’ commanders in a quandary: London was not part of the semaphore system, but it was close enough that it would be hard to justify not consulting with their superiors before following the Admiral’s wishes, particularly considering the bad blood between the services. Thus it was that the British Army’s response was, along with everything else, confused: some of the Kentish forts sent men to pursue Modigliani’s force, while others did not, believing that to do so would be to leave the coast defenceless from further French reinforcements. Altogether about an equal number of British soldiers marched as the Italians they were chasing, though Sauvage’s disinformation campaign meant that most of them though they were hugely outnumbered.

Soon Sausmarez’s second demand, in the form of a hastily scribbled fifth-hand note, had crossed the desk of the Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, Sir Thomas Cecil, the Duke of York…

*

Oh the Grand Old Duke of York
He had ten thousand men
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And he marched them down again.
And when they were up they were up,
And when they were down they were down,
And when they were only halfway up
They were neither up nor down.


*

Cecil was not the best man to be commanding the British Army. His presence in the post was an unintended consequence of a complicated series of political deals worked out by King Henry IX in an attempt to smooth the path of some of the more controversial legislation of the Fox ministry. The innately conservative House of Lords was always a problem, and King Henry had got around that by creating more like-minded peers. Cecil had already been Earl of Exeter, but he was now Duke of York as a corollary of his younger brother James becoming Viscount Chumleigh. This was only one of countless deals which Henry had made to increase the number of liberal peers, and now it would come back to haunt him. Under Fox the position of Commander-in-Chief had widely become seen as a sinecure, for war was not in the offing and besides, power was usually devolved to lesser officials such as the Master-General of the Ordnance. Except in unimaginable cases like the present one.

The Duke was not strictly incompetent, but he lacked experience and imagination in the field of war. He was a politician and a bureaucrat first and foremost. War was something that happened a long way away, causing displeasing numbers in a ledger due to its cost and then perhaps pleasing ones if it won new profitable colonies or trade rights. If one was hot-blooded enough, one might ride off to see it oneself, but that was strictly optional. Having a European army brought to home was new, incredible. So the Duke overreacted and trusted in Sausmarez’s judgement.

Accordingly, the garrison in Gravesend – including its artillery – was quickly ordered to march east to Chatham and protect the docks from the doubtless countless French hordes heading their way…

*

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream!


*

In reality of course there was no raid on Chatham. What ships were there in the dockyards, half-completed or damaged, hastily in the process of being crewed to try and scrape a new fleet together, were never threatened. All the men moved to defend the forts – not that they had got there in time – had nothing to defend against. The Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, responsible for the Kentish militia, wore himself out galloping up and down the North Downs, arranging a defence that was unneeded. All the chains stretched across the Medway and the Swale, the gun batteries, all wasted.

Meanwhile, slightly further north, the mouth of the Thames beckoned. Hoche enjoyed a reputation for audacity. It was time once more to show the world why.

*

Tilbury Fort had been built out of a confiscated monastery by Henry VIII’s men in 1539. It had been repeatedly modernised since then, while the other defences of the Thames had been allowed to fall into decay, including its sister fort across the river at Gravesend – a fort which was, in any case, now undermanned. Reports of the approach of the French were still confused, but Colonel Robert Saunders, the commander of the fort, knew that many steamships could only mean one thing. He ordered his gun crews to rig for battle, and they began heating hot shot. It was the great advantage that stationary gun emplacements had over ships – the latter could not heat shot safely on board, the fire risk being too great. And of course red-hot cannonballs were a very effective weapon for setting fire to masts and rigging. The steamships lacked these, but they were still wooden and vulnerable.

Saunders was correct up to a point. The fort’s thirty-eight-pounders destroyed no fewer than eleven of Hoche’s steamships, a grievous blow, and the guns mounted in the war hulks stationed across the Thames accounted for another three. The fort’s guns’ score was helped not only by hot shot, but also by Britain’s secret weapon, hail shot.[7] However, Hoche also had a trick or two up his sleeve: several of his steamcraft were bomb-ships fitted with the experimental protected mortars that meant they could safely heat and fire hot-shot in situ, replying to the fort’s barrage. And just while Saunders was coping with this shock, Hoche brought up La Tempête, the sister ship to the lost L’Enfant de Tonnere. The screeching rockets worked their magic once more, panicking British soldiers who would have coolly stood up to a much more dangerous volume of cannon fire, and the fort fell to a determined escalade by a thousand French elite troops who Hoche landed on the north bank – and, characteristically, led personally.

Tilbury Fort fell, though not without inflicting grievous losses on Hoche’s elite. Hoche himself suffered a broken arm and the loss of two fingers on his right hand, but impatiently insisted this be rapidly bound up so he could continue. He ordered those British troops who had surrendered be quietly executed – not to spread terror, as Modigliani did, but simply because the French were moving too rapidly to be encumbered with prisoners. Still, Hoche paused there for a brief moment. Though he had not witnessed it himself, he knew about the magic of L’Épurateur, the iconic scene which Hébert had spun into the rise to power of Robespierre and Lisieux had continued to draw upon. So he sought to repeat it, sending a signal to the people of England as assuredly as L’Épurateur had sent one to those of France, years before.

Hoche hauled down the Union Jack flying above the fort, not without help thanks to his arm, and hoisted two flags to replace it. At first they looked identical, both the Bloody Flag of the French Latin Republic.

But then a careful observer might note with mounting horror that the lower of the two flags bore the sign, not of a fleur-de-lys upside down, but three lions…and the motto, Hail the Revolution! Death to the King! was in said King’s own English.

By hoisting that flag, Hoche had declared his intentions. The English Germanic Republic was born.

And then, leaving a skeleton garrison in the Fort, Hoche returned to his fleet. Lepelley, a veteran of navigating the rivers and canals of France, guided them up the Thames, silencing the desultory defences further upriver, until they came to the first real barrier stretching across the Thames.

It was known as London Bridge.

Hoche signalled for La Tempête and the hot-shot bomb ships.

*

London Bridge is falling down,
Falling down, falling down,
London Bridge is falling down,
My fair lady.













[1] The Républicaine is the currency of the French Latin Republic.

[2] In OTL of course Napoleon said this.

[3] OTL, the British national debt spiralled out of control during the American Revolutionary War; William Pitt the Younger had an ambitious plan to pay it back by raising taxes, but the French Revolutionary Wars intervened and the debt continued to grow to its current level. In TTL, the lack of an American Revolutionary War means the debt is much smaller, and Fox can realistically consider trying to pay it back without squeezing the taxpayer too much.

[4] A new fort exists there, but unlike OTL it is not the revolutionary, ground-breaking Shorncliffe Redoubt. Sir John Moore survived the campaign in France seven years before but he has been developing new infantry tactics elsewhere, at Fort Pulteney in Gloucestershire.

[5] This is based on mainstream English attitudes to Napoleon’s planned 1803 invasion in OTL. Most of the population were convinced the very idea was so absurd that it couldn’t possibly be true. It didn’t help that a small minority did believe it, but came up with bizarre conspiracy theories about the French invading by balloon, spontaneously-dug Channel Tunnel and windmill-driven ships.

[6] The first of these is OTL. Other OTL reported instances of the drum sounding include when Nelson was made a freeman of Plymouth; when Napoleon was held prisoner in Plymouth harbour; the start of the First World War; when the Imperial German High Seas Fleet surrendered in 1918; and in the darkest hour of the Battle of Britain in 1940 when the RAF was losing to the Luftwaffe due to the Luftwaffe’s policy of targeting airfields, but on the night when the drum beat, the first German bomber accidentally bombed London, resulting in British retaliation on Berlin and Hitler shifting policy to city bombing, thus giving the RAF time to recover. There is also a legend that if the drum is ever removed from Buckland Abbey, Plymouth will fall. In the Second World War, the drum was indeed moved for safety, and Plymouth was devastated by a blitz not long afterwards. It was hastily moved back and nothing more happened for the remainder of the war.

[7] Hail shot is the name in TTL for case shot or the Shrapnel shell, the powerful British secret weapon invented by Lt. Shrapnel in OTL (and by a Captain Philips in TTL). It consists of a shell packed with musket balls, designed so it hits its target and then explodes, spraying musket balls everywhere in a devastating anti-infantry strike. In TTL as in OTL, Continental arsenals did not manage to duplicate it until years later.


Part #68: Gunpowder, Patriotism and Plot

From – “Albion’s Peril: The Invasion of England” by Sir Hubert Pendleton, 1951:

After London Bridge had been brought down by the French attack, Admirals Surcouf and Lepelley swiftly ran their ships aground on the northern bank of the Thames: witnesses said that the French steam-galleys, despite being reduced in numbers by Parker’s attack and the Tilbury Fort, seemed to fill the whole Pool of London. Certainly they covered it with a blanket of choking black smoke, presaging what was to come and unintentionally confusing reports of their arrival.

Eight hours earlier, the first messenger from the semaphore station at Dungeness had arrived in London, his horse dying under him, clutching the hastily scribbled code message beneath his arm. His name was John Belvoir, preserved in the hauntingly tragic English ballad The Ride of John Belvoir.

After a swift decoding at the Admiralty, the message had been forwarded straight to the Prime Minister, its shocking contents kept secret from the population at large…

*

From: “Fatal Hesitation: The Foxite Ministry” by Sir Arthur Rumbelow (1912) -

…History has perhaps been unkind to Fox when it has remembered his response to the Belvoir Document as confused disbelief. It is true that Fox had a rose-tinted vision of Lisieux’s French Latin Republic, but one must also make allowances for the fact that the attack had been so sudden, so swift, unannounced, destructive, incredible. Even the most cynical Prime Minister would have struggled to adapt to such circumstances.

Fox called an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss the matter at Number 10 Downing Street. Within ten minutes, both Richard Burke and Charles Bone had walked out in disgust, unsatisfied with Fox’s attitude that, at worst, they had to wait and see. Handing in their resignations of Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Chancellor of the Exchequer – swiftly followed by Burke’s friend Frederick Dundas as Secretary at War – they immediately went to Grenville’s[1] and formed a swift pact as a triumvirate. Previously, Bone had been at odds with Burke, the Corsican being more of a radical by nature and the two disagreeing over the place of the Anglican Church in British society – Burke cautiously supported Catholic emancipation but was adamant that the primacy of the Church of England should be maintained (also the King’s view) while Bone, like Fox, wanted full religious disestablishment. However, the circumstances meant that it was the things that united rather than divided them that came to the fore – their mutual mistrust of the French. Bone had already fled one French invasion of his original homeland – he would not see his adopted one face the same fate.

The trio broke their oath of secrecy and spread rumours of the Belvoir Document around Grenville’s, then split up and did the same at White’s to inform the conservative opposition and Macall’s to wider society.[2] An hour later, they rendezvoused at the Palace of Westminster to find both Houses stuffed with virtually all the MPs and peers who had been within range of the rumour – most of those present in London at the time – and a clamouring crowd filling Palace Yard outside. Some of the Foxite loyalist MPs instead left Grenville’s to go to Ten Downing Street, where they told the Prime Minister of what was going on.

The account of Matthew Dalton, the Paymaster General of the Forces, is the only one that survives. He records that Fox put his head in his hands and audibly groaned “as though, through this effusion, he excorcised the demon that would ever apologise and rationalise the actions of Monsieur Lisieux”. Then, with a dark new purpose in his eyes, Fox said that he would go to the Palace. The Home Secretary, Richard Sheridan, pointed out that the crowd outside blocked the way and suggested calling up troops from Horse Guards to clear the way. Fox gave him a furious look and launched into one of his typical bursts of brilliant oratory, of which sadly only Dalton’s half-remembered fragments are available to us: “would that man be a hypocrite, who would rail against the excesses of arbitrary power and the sellsword that vanquishes the frail flower of liberty in time of peace and plenty, yet would cower behind the redcoat at the first sign of opposition? No, sir!”

Fox, Dalton, a chastened Sheridan, and the other remaining Cabinet members thus went to the Palace with only their Parliamentary Private Secretaries. However, Fox first had a quiet moment alone with his housekeeper, the widow Pauline McGarrity, in which he spoke of certain new…arrangements that might prove necessary in view of the…present crisis. Purely coincidentally, of course, her brother Captain Patrick McGarrity was a member of the 90th (Royal County Down) Regiment of Foot and therefore happened to be presently assigned, with the rest of his men, to the Board of Ordnance’s headquarters – the Tower of London…

…after successfully negotiating through the crowd by climbing atop a literal soapbox and delivering a short speech that declared that all their questions would soon be answered, Fox and the Cabinet finally entered Parliament and found that the House of Commons’ crowd was rather less easy to dissuade. The level of shock in the rumours – which had inevitably become exaggerated even above the reality, with some claiming the French had conquered Scotland – was such that some peers even broke strict parliamentary protocol and came into the Commons to hear Fox’s response. The Strangers Gallery creaked beneath the weight of more peers and as many passing Londoners who had managed to get past Black Rod.

Fox stood at the dispatch box and visibly showed dismay as he found himself facing, not the usual notional opposition leader Sir Charles Drummond (in practice, the conservative opposition remained fragmented into several factions) but Richard Burke. “Let the right honourable gentleman speak!” Burke shouted, stilling the catcalls from the opposition backbenches – and the government’s.

The Prime Minister spoke. Again, sadly, no complete record of his speech survives, but all who witnessed it and spoke of it afterwards claim it was the finest example of even his rhetoric. Fox spoke plainly of the Belvoir Document and the other rumours that had reached London, candidly adding everything the government knew for sure about Admiral Parker’s defeat off Dungeness, and concluded with the following: “In my heart, I do not believe that the guardian of French liberty would consent to such a heinous act…” (murmurs of outrage rise from backbenches) “…but who knows what has happened in Paris? Men change, so do governments. Understand this only,” and his voice began to rise to a crescendo over the discontent, “if any among us truly believe that a French army marches towards us even now, then let that man take all he can carry and flee cravenly to his distant estate, or his bolt-hole in Yorkshire; I, for myself, will see things through to the end. If indeed, as some of the honourable gentlemen – hah, and the noble lords – see fit to claim in such admirably operatic tones – this crisis is due to my stewardship, then on my head be it. I shall not flee from the consequences.” He sat down.

Burke stood up. “And speaking for myself, let the right honourable gentleman know that I would sooner go down in history as a craven than be unremembered by virtue of the fact that all the history books have gone up in smoke. Absolute proof we have not, but the risk we cannot afford to take. Gentlemen, let us flee to our erstwhile Yorkshire bolt-hole, as the right honourable gentleman has seen fit to put it, before we may cease to be capable of movement in any direction, on account of being six feet beneath the earth.” He sat down.

Fox rose once more, swaying slightly where he stood, though whether it be from tiredness, emotion, or port, none can be certain. “And what of the people of London, of England, by whose will we stand here today? Shall they be abandoned to the honourable gentleman’s hypothetical Hunnish horde?”

Burke paraphrased scripture in response: “But when ye shall see the abomination of desolation, then let them that be in London flee to the mountains”.

The Prime Minister bowed his head, and the murmurs of discontent died away as every man in the Chamber strained his ears to hear his quiet coda:

“Then let it be so. Go, and be done with it. But I shall stay. If we must fall…then let us fall like men.”

*

From – “Albion’s Peril: The Invasion of England” by Sir Hubert Pendleton, 1951:

General Hoche immediately began unloading his troops from the fleet and assembling them by regiment. As terrified rumours spread throughout London and men fled in the chaos, Hoche identified the Tower of London as a primary target. Although out of use as a full-scale fortress, it was home to the Board of Ordnance and was well-equipped with cannon that the troops garrisoning it were even now quickly trying to put back into use. Already a few early balls had been sent flying in the direction of Lepelley and Surcouf’s fleet. Furthermore, Hoche’s advisor on English affairs James Ferguson – a member of the old French Irish Brigade who had managed to survive the Linnaean racial purges – told him of the legend that when the ravens of the Tower died, the Tower would crumble and the kingdom would fall. Hoche was well aware of the power of an image: one had worked against him in the Rape of Rome, after which he had studied the area obsessively and in particular the Revolutionary image of L’Épurateur atop the Bastille, which Lisieux had revived as part of his anti-Diamant cultural revolution. Now he foresaw one that he could grasp and use to his advantage.

However, taking the Tower would not expand his control of London, and Hoche knew that he had to advance while the British regiments stationed in the city were still knocked back on their heels from shock. He decided once more to hold to the French Revolutionary doctrine: To Hold the Heart. The bulk of the army he thus took under his own command and drove west through the City of London in the direction of Westminster. Meanwhile he put his deputy Brigade General Vincent Gabin in command of the second part, four regiments, whose role was to attack the Tower and…fulfil the prophecy.

Meanwhile, Hoche’s army marched in column down the streets of the City of London. It was large enough that it had to divide into regiments and march down parallel streets – Hoche, of course, ventured deepest northwards and then turned down Threadneedle Street…

*

From – “A History of London” by Francis Dalembord, 1935:

THREADNEEDLE STREET. (CITY OF LONDON). Originally home to the whorehouses of mediaeval London and called, with charming honesty, Gropecunte Lane. Renamed possibly in seventeenth century…mentioned by Dr Johnson to be ‘now home to a different and less agreeable profession, even more demanding of your purse and likelier still to harbour an unpleasant surprise for the unwary’…Bank of England located there since 1734…New Jonathan’s Stock Exchange, the largest stock exchange in the world in the 18th century, constructed 1748…

*

From – “Albion’s Peril: The Invasion of England” by Sir Hubert Pendleton, 1951:

…After the debacle in Italy, Hoche had decided against the use of terror tactics by default, and thus generally did not permit his men to rape, pillage or burn as they advanced (contary to popular belief)…the exception was as his lead regiment passed the Stock Exchange and the Bank of England at the top of Threadneedle Street, and were attacked by a partially organised mob of bankers armed with pistols and swords, determined to defend the sanctity of their temple to Mammon…

…irony was that Hoche would probably not even realised the value of the two buildings had the attack not taken place, having been separated from his advisor Ferguson by the press of the columns…

…after the lead steam-guns had swept the mob with canister and blood stained the marble steps of the Bank of England, Hoche told off one regiment under Lieutenant-Colonel Nicolas Réjane – from whom we receive the modern verb redgen, to steal or embezzle – and ordered him to sack the Bank and Stock Exchange. “What may be carried, let it be taken back to the fleet,” he ordered, “and what may not, let it be disposed of as best can.” The regiment he picked was, naturally, the most disciplined and ideologically fanatical of those he had to hand, as otherwise it would have degenerated into an orgy of personal theft. Réjane was canny enough to allow each man as much as he could fill his pockets with to keep for himself at the start.

Réjane’s regiment indeed opened the vaults of the Bank of England, removed as much gold as they could, threw the remainder in the Thames or to the crowds of incautious British civilians who had not fled their advance, and burned all the banknotes they could find, as well as the Stock Exchange’s books. In so doing they ruined not only the economy of London, but that of England. The banks of Scotland remained independent,[3] but the Scottish economy was also somewhat dependent on that of England. Great Britain as a whole had the largest economy in the world – emphasis on ‘had’. With the interconnected nature of global trade, Hoche and Réjane’s few hundred men had effectively triggered a worldwide recession. Everyone just didn’t know it yet…

…before leaving the City of London, Ferguson had caught up to Hoche and informed him of another legend…as a crowd of curious Londoners looked on in Cannon Street, Hoche approached the Stone of London…

*

From – “A History of London” by Francis Dalembord, 1935:

STONE OF LONDON. (CITY OF LONDON). AKA the Stone of Brutus. Located in Cannon Street.[4] According to legend, brought to Britain by Brutus of Troy, grandson of Aeneas, who gave his name to the island (Bruton -> Britain). The symbolic Heart of the City of London. In Roman Britannia all distances were measured from the Stone. Later in mediaeval times, all the roads of London radiated out from it. It was said that so long as the Stone is safe, so was the city, and he who strikes his sword against the Stone shall rule London…

*

From – “Albion’s Peril: The Invasion of England” by Sir Hubert Pendleton, 1951:

…Hoche’s Kligenthal blade struck sparks from the Stone, and one of the mythic moments he had so desired was within his grasp…

…the only real challenge to Hoche’s advance came as they marched through Cheapside and were attacked by the hastily assembled 19th Dragoon Guards. By definition, dragoons were supposed to be capable of fighting on foot, but Hoche was fortunate that this literal description had been dying out over the past few decades and Colonel Robert Burton, the Guards’ commanding officer, attempted to charge the French columns. On the field of battle, a column of marching infantry would be very vulnerable to cavalry hitting it in its flank, but in the hemmed-in streets this was not possible, and Burton found it akin to attacking a square with an almost infinitely deep side. The French raised their bayonets and fired their muskets, two or three rounds a minute, a well-oiled killing machine. The horses shied aside rather than charge the bayonets, but unlike an open battle, there was nowhere for them to go. Horses screamed and died, along with the men atop them, trampled by those behind or speared on the French bayonets. Burton’s own horse was killed even as he struggled to hold it on course, and the corpse struck the first line of French soldiers, hurling them aside. In a normal battle, that freak eventuality was about the only way cavalry could break a square. But here, the column went on and on, and behind that one line were a hundred more.

Burton died, and his major sounded the retreat. But, in an unintentional Cannae, a second Hoche regiment had heard the sounds of the fighting and had turned back, now marching up Cheapside. The 19th were trapped between the two approaching walls of death, and were wiped out to the last man and horse, their bloodied colours soon hanging upside-down beneath the red standards of the French…

…it was as Hoche was marching through Holborn that the infamous incident of Joseph Dashwood took place. Dashwood, the man who would be 16th Baron Despencer had the title not been attainted, was the son of Francis Dashwood, the founder of the Hellfire Club. That group had thrived in the mid-eighteenth century, based at the former Medmenham Abbey up the Thames, in which there had been dark rumours of pagan rites and black masses. It counted among its members Benjamin Franklin, from the ENA, John Wilkes and the Earl of Sandwich. Several politicians too radical even for Fox, like Wilkes, belonged to it. The original club had been closed down by an investigation under George III’s reign in 1765, the government bowing to pressure from the Lords Spiritual under their firebrand leader Michael Harworth, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, popularly known as ‘the Witchfinder General’. However, Dashwood the elder had swiftly recreated the club in London, bare streets away from St Paul’s Cathedral as an insult to the Church, and after his death his son had taken over its stewardship. If anything, the rumours had become even wilder, with talk of openly atheistic or Satanic practices along with the paganism…[5]

…Dashwood harboured a grudge against the Church and the Hellfire Club counted among its members those few men in London who would still support a French invasion, when even Fox had been forced to recognise the truth. He was delighted when he learned Hoche was leading the invasion and rode out to meet with the surprised General, who was astonished to learn that the very incident he had done his best to paper over – the Rape of Rome – was specifically what Dashwood admired him for. Dashwood struck a deal: he and his fellow members would help Fox, feeding him intelligence on what they could gather of troop movements through their political contacts, if Fox would allow them to have revenge on the Church by desecrating St Paul’s Cathedral with their own ceremonies. Hoche hesitated, then agreed: he feared a similar backlash in England as had taken place in the Catholic world following the Rape of Rome, but equally knew that these early hours of his invasion were vital and he needed every advantage he could get…

…Hoche’s spectacular victory at the Battle of Charing Cross against the assembled London regiments has partially been attributed to the information Dashwood had fed him…knowing the cavalry holding the right flank, the 15th King’s Hussars, were under the command of the young and headstrong Colonel the Lord John Noakes, Hoche took a leaf out of the book of that other great French invader of England and faked a rout and retreat. Upon the open fields of St James’ Park, the British commander Sir Augustine Molyneux (also the Commander-in-Chief at Horse Guards) hoped to give battle, thus granting more advantages to his cavalry-heavy forces. Hoche staged a brief attack, goading the enemy by waving the captured colours of the 19th, and then told his men to turn and run in loose order.

Molyneux was descended from Guillaume Desmolines, one of the Norman soldiers at Hastings who had turned and ran at William the Conqueror’s command to doom their English opponents, and he was no fool. But Noakes took the bait and charged after Hoche. His men sabred down a few fleeing Frenchmen, but then found themselves in the tight confines of Charing Cross and Hoche closed the trap. This time Cannae was planned ahead of time, and included steam-guns. After this destruction of a second cavalry regiment, Hoche advanced once more, and with the help of his artillery, rolled up Molyneux’s army as the Englishman struggled to reinforce his collapsed right flank. “It is like Caen,” Colonel Marcel Saissons, who had served on Boulanger’s campaign a decade before, remarked to Hoche. “These redcoats break and flee like any German or Spaniard, the only difference is that it is harder to see them bleed.”

Horse Guards Parade fell to the French, and Whitehall was opened up to them…

…meanwhile, General Gabin’s guns pounded away at the Tower of London, smashing down defences that had not been significantly updated since the Middle Ages – it had not been considered that London would ever be so threatened again. The moat, long since degraded into a choking morass of sewage, was easily bridged. A few cannonballs rained down from above as the Master General of Ordnance, General William Mayhew, struggled to turn his charge into a real fortress once more. The Tower was home to the London Menagerie and open to the public, for God’s sake! What was he supposed to do?...

…Gabin’s guns toppled the Byward Tower and the outer wall, then the Bell Tower and the Bloody Tower fell to their deadly modern fire…his men stormed the breaches, sustained losses from the brave but undermanned and undergunned Irishmen of the 90th Foot stationed there, and killed the ravens as Hoche had ordered…to be on the safe side, they also blew up the Tower themselves, firing the stocks of gunpowder and ammunition that the Ordnance held there…

…it was a surprise to Gabin’s men when the resulting explosion was rather less spectacular than one might have hoped, and half the White Tower remained standing…however, red-hot mortar fire from Surcouf’s bomb-ships soon dealt with that problem, and the whole of William the Conqueror’s fort broke and shattered before the might of a newer set of French invaders…

…Hoche was ready to march his men down Whitehall when a messenger boy came to him under a white flag of truce. The boy brought a message from Prime Minister Fox, offering to surrender London to Hoche if he would spare the city from the kind of destruction he had meted out on Rome. Hoche would have to come into Ten Downing Street under flag of truce to sign the treaty.

Once more, it seemed Hoche’s reputation for that incident worked for rather than against him. Hoche consulted with Ferguson and Dashwood. Ferguson warned it might be a trap. Dashwood, on the other hand, retorted that Fox was ‘soft’ enough – concerned for the people of London, as he had said in the Parliamentary speech whose rumours had already spread throughout the city – that it could be genuine.

Hoche considered. Obviously he wouldn’t stop with London, but if the locals would still obey Fox and he could take it without bloodshed, that would save his precious army some murderous urban fighting, and he would need every man he could get for the campaign deeper into England. How much did he need that clean victory? Was it worth the risk of a trap?

He asked Colonel Saissons whether the rider he had sent into Southwark had reported back. The rider had been sent to look for signs of Modigliani’s Italian army, which should be approaching London from the south.

Saissons replied he had, and there was no sign of Modigliani besides smoke on the horizon: a battle was being fought, a British army must have stood in Modigliani’s way. (The truth, as every schoolboy now knows, was very different).

That decided it – Hoche knew he had to keep up his momentum, and that meant the risk was worth it. Nonetheless, he took a sizeable ‘bodyguard’ with him – twenty elite riflemen, and he marched a regiment, the 56e Légère, down Whitehall under the white flag. The streets of Westminster, usually bustling with the business of government, were deserted and eerily silent save for the echoing drumbeat from the French drummer boys. Those whom Fox had named cravens had fled.

The 56e turned down Downing Street and Ferguson pointed out Number 10, which Hoche was surprised to see looked more or less like any other. Preceded by some of his twenty bodyguards, aware of the sense of unreality, Hoche knocked at the black door.

The door was open by Fox himself, his expression unreadable. “Let’s get this over with,” he said, in fluent French.

Hoche and Fox sat down across the huge oak table in the Cabinet Room and Fox brought out the hastily scribbled treaty and two pens. Hoche ordered Ferguson, the only one fluent in English, to check it, and it turned out be genuine. Ferguson was then sent back to the troops to tell Saissons that the offer was real. At which point our certain knowledge of what happened in that room naturally comes to an end, and all is speculation.

Perhaps the best known, if melodramatically unlikely, version is that of Williams and Stephen in their epic play The Last Days of Liberty

*

From – “The Last Days of Liberty” by Michael Williams and Ronald Stephen, 1881:

HOCHE (as he signs): So this is it. Your city is ours. How does this make you feel, Monsieur Renard?

FOX: I…feel…nothing, General.

HOCHE walks up to FOX’s own drinks cabinet, removes a bottle of port and slurps rudely from it.

HOCHE (proffering it): Would you care for a sip, Prime Minister? As this now belongs to me.

FOX: I…would not.

(pause)

FOX: A nice…cigar, on the other hand…

FOX takes out a cigar and lights it with a safety match.

HOCHE: You are not a man of strong humours, Prime Minister, if you can be so blasé about matters. I know that if British troops invaded Paris, I would not sit around smoking cigars. I would be out there, striking a blow for my country!

FOX: You sound almost disappointed. Would you have me light this treaty as well and burn it?

HOCHE: No. For that is what separates us.

FOX: Perhaps. As it is, you will never see British troops invading Paris, so the question is moot.

HOCHE (laughs): I am glad you have such a high opinion of our prospects, Prime Minister!

FOX: I…do not. Rest assured that British troops will one day march through Paris. And it will burn.

(pause)

HOCHE: …what?

FOX: It is simply certain that you shall not see it, General.

HOCHE follows FOX’s gaze – his eyes widen – FOX raises the cigar so the audience may see the cord trailing from it, across the floor and vanishing into the cellar – the sparks travelling along it –

HOCHE: Merde!

*

From – “A Short Guide to Revolutionary French Regiments” by Pascal Dobin:

56e Légère: Originating chiefly from Gascony, founded 1796 by Henri Aubert (exec. 1798 by Robespierre for allegedly harbouring dissidents); battle honours include Saint-Dié, Karlsruhe, Pau, and theoretically Charing Cross…regiment dissolved 1807 due to every soldier being killed in the detonation of the magazines concealed beneath Ten Downing Street…colours never recovered from rubble…







[1] OTL Brooks’s was the main Whig gentleman’s club, but as this was founded in 1764, the changes to TTL such as the political upheavals following the Second Glorious Revolution mean that matters have changed. Grenville’s club is still on Pall Mall, but is larger and essentially occupies the place of both Brook’s and Boodle’s.

[2] White’s club, founded in the 1690s by an Italian immigrant named Francesco Bianco (“Mr White” being the anglicised version of his name) is, in TTL as OTL, the primary Tory club. In TTL it has extended its membership to the more conservative Whigs who are in opposition as well. Macall’s is the TTL version of Almack’s (according to legend, founded by a Mr Macall who reversed the syllables to have a less Scottish-sounding name – in TTL he decides not to), which is one of the few clubs that allowed mixed membership, and is thus focused on social events like balls and masques.

[3] In OTL the reserves of Scottish and Irish banks were not tied to the Bank of England (as they are today, albeit only Northern Ireland) via deposits until the 1840s.

[4] OTL it was moved to St Swithin’s Church and then to Cannon Street Station.

[5] OTL the Hellfire Club was closed down under considerably different circumstances and its successors became more moderate (the Phoenix Room at Oxford is one of them). In TTL the fact that the Church is specifically involved drives the successor Club into even more radical territory instead.


Part #69: By Inferno’s Light

London’s burning, London’s burning,
Fetch the engines, fetch the engines,
Fire, fire! Fire, fire!
Pour on water! Pour on water!


– trad. English rhyme, dating from the First Great Fire of London (1666)​

*

From – “Albion’s Peril: The Invasion of England” by Sir Hubert Pendleton, 1951 (overly long asides have been excised)

The Second Great Fire of London was…perhaps an inevitable consequence of the violent removal of Hoche from the French chain of command…the manner of his death and the ensuing confusion combined with the frustration and desire for revenge of his subordinates…Colonel Saissons assumed command over the remains of Hoche’s primary force, but proved inadequate in the role, having been overshadowed by the dynamic and dictatorial general who had chosen him for second-in-command…Saissons hesitated and sent runners to contact Brigade General Gabin at the Tower, asking him to take command, which delayed matters…

The exact circumstances of how the fire began has been hotly debated. Some have argued that it was Fox’s own self-sacrifice that began the blaze, burning debris from Downing Street putting fire to neighbouring houses, while others have claimed that it was an act of revenge by Hoche’s troops for his death, pointing out similarities to acts in the Rape of Rome. Others still claim it was deliberate policy on the part of Saissons, or that it was the inadvertent result of a rocket fired by La Tempête or hot-shot fired by the bomb-ships. Whatever the cause, singular or multiple, it is certain that the blaze began before Gabin knew of Hoche’s death, though he may have heard the explosion and observed the resulting smoke cloud.

The fire was soon spreading and Gabin ordered the withdrawal of his forces from London, moving northwards toward Islington. Saissons dithered and ended up with his own troops stretched out in a long, badly-organised chain through several streets as they tried to join up with Gabin. In this state, they were vulnerable to attacks by enraged Londoners, including the first nascent British Kleinkriegers…

…of course the whole of this could have been avoided if Hoche had decided not to treat with Fox and had sent his troops in to arrest him. It can be suggested that this was because he did not have enough soldiers on the ground, as Modigliani’s Italians had yet to appear. Although some have tried to claim that the necessary following interpretation of events is simply British revanchist propaganda, a cooler-headed analysis by Lavochkin (Zhurnal Staryna, vol. 14, 1947) concluded that there is at least some validity to the traditional reasoning. The reasoning, of course, being that Britain was saved from total conquest and subjugation by the action of just three hundred men…

*

From – “The New Spartans”, play by John Armstrong Cleaver (1903), lines taken from film adaptation (1951) -

MAJOR JOHN ASHCROFT: Ready, men, we…(checks telescope) My God! There’s…there’s thousands of them…they’re all along the horizon…I…

SERGEANT PAUL BLOUNT: (in a stage whisper) With all due respect sir, if you don’t clam up from that kind of talk, I’ll cut your f—king head off.

ASHCROFT is silent, still gawping as he looks through the spyglass. BLOUNT turns and addresses the nervous-looking troops.

BLOUNT: All right men! There’s three hundred of us and looks like, sir?

ASHCROFT (pale): Five thousand, six?

BLOUNT: ‘Fousands of ‘em, lads! Know what that means!

CORPORAL MCGARRITY: Not fair odds, sir!

BLOUNT: Exactly, you damn Paddy traitor – there’s only twenty of them for each of us. Now you’re all just going to take your fair share and no fighting over it!

(Nervous laughter among troops)

BLOUNT: Come on, men. Those froggie b-st-rds are heading for God’s own London town his very self. You’re Fifty-Second, aren’t you? I didn’t pick up the bl—dy Buffs by accident did I?

(Troops laugh more raucously)

MCGARRITY: S-d the T-rds, bejasus! They can stop in Canterbury and beg confession from that d-mned papist they call Archbishop these days!

BLOUNT: D-mn right, Corporal. Men, half of you have got family on the River. Do you want these Jacobin blackguards raping and pillaging their way through London town?

(Men shout ‘NO!’)

BLOUNT: Can we kill them all before they do?

(Men shout ‘YES!’)

BLOUNT: F-ck off, of course we can’t. But we can damn well take down as many of them with us as we can. And every Godd-mn frog we put a ball in is one less frog who’ll try to rape your girl or slit your mother’s throat.

(Men look uncertain)

BLOUNT: I’m right sir, aren’t I?

ASHCROFT looks at him and swallows.

ASHCROFT: Of…of course Sergeant Blount is right, men! This is where we make a stand! This is where we draw the line! The die is cast, the Rubicon is crossed—

BLOUNT: Yes, sir, yes. Now shall we deploy in line?

ASHCROFT: --alea iacta est – what? Yes, yes, of course. (shouts to men) Do you want to live forever?!

(Men cheer and begin deploying into line – musket balls begin flying overhead)

ITALIAN TROOPS (distantly): Viva il Generale!

BLOUNT: Hear their froggie talk, men? Shut their mouths with your balls!

MCGARRITY: Um, sarge, you might want to rephrase that…

BLOUNT: Shut up, you d-mned mick! (to Men) PREEE-SENT!

ASHCROFT: Show them what the Fifty-Second are made of! Die well, men!

BLOUNT: And DIE HARD! (shouting) FIRE!

*

Excerpts from “Thermopylae-on-the-Downs”, poem by Sir George Tennyson, written in 1857 –

Frenchmen to the left of them,
Frenchmen to the right of them,
Frenchmen in front of them,
Volleyed and thundered,
Stormed at with blade and gun,
‘Tween the Downs ‘neath the sun,
In the Gates of London,
Stood the three hundred.

Pans flashing with each ball,
A red-coated solid wall,
Their bright colours would not fall,
While the world wondered.
Held through the powder-smoke,
Their line could not be broke,
Each bayonet stroke,
Shattered and sundered.

Steam gun roared in the night,
Shell turned the dark to light,
All that could end the fight,
Of the three hundred.
There they died hard and well,
There the great heroes fell,
There in the mouth of Hell,
While brash Hoche had blundered.

Oh what a stand they made!
Ne’er shall their glory fade!
Remember that stand they made!
Remember three hundred!


*

From – “Albion’s Peril: The Invasion of England” by Sir Hubert Pendleton, 1951:

The stand of Captain Ashcroft’s Men at the Battle of the North Downs is one of the most extraordinary tales of the Jacobin Wars, a conflict scarcely lacking in memorable stories. The courage of the three hundred (actually 317), a single company of the 52nd (West Kent) Regiment, ever after known as “The Diehards” for that very stand, is legendary and has formed a part of the British national mythos.[1] It was mere happenstance that they happened to be in the Valley of the Darent, the gap in the North Downs, when Modigliani approached it. They had fallen behind the main part of the 52nd as it moved, too slowly, to meet Modigliani in southern Kent, due to having to escort slow-moving supply carts. Their stand only worked, of course, because General Modigliani was using the War of Lightning strategy, having crossed Kent in less than two days, and had outrun even Cugnot steam-driven artillery.

Not only did the “New Spartans” possibly save Britain from conquest by delaying Modigliani from meeting up with Hoche, but they also demonstrated how to beat the War of Lightning. The strategy relied on marching columns of trained men who could be called upon to use their muskets when required but whose main form of attack was simply panicking the enemy by their numbers, solid mass, and precise discipline. It had worked on British troops before, during the Seigneur Offensive. But the Three Hundred had decided to make their stand and die there, most of them having families in London and preferring to kill as many “French” (being unaware Modigliani’s men were Italian) as possible, forcing Modigliani to pay heavily for their defeat, and thus reducing the number who could ravage London. They had nothing to lose, so they made their stand even in the face of overwhelming numbers, something which Modigliani’s troops had never been faced before. And this, combined with the speed of musketry of an elite British regiment like the 52nd – four rounds a minute – meant that even the veteran Italians broke and shattered against the killing wall.

Cavalry would have forced them to form square and made them easy targets for massed musket fire. But Modigliani had no cavalry. It had been judged too difficult to bring horses along for the invasion, taking up too much room. It had seemed a reasonable decision at the time, considering the small percentage of cavalry in the Republican Army and the fact that Boulanger would probably need it all for the invasion of Flanders, but now…

Modigliani had no choice but to wait for his artillery to catch up, but knew that time was of the essence and that if he did not keep moving, he could be trapped from behind by one of the slower-moving British regiments, such as the rest of the 52nd. So he continued hurling men into the meat grinder, lucky musket balls picking off a few of the Three Hundred with each pas-de-charge, but losing as many as five soldiers for every Briton killed. If his troops had indeed been, as the Three Hundred assumed, French, then they would probably have had the elite Tirailleur light company armed with rifles that could have picked off the musket-wielding British from outside their range. But Hoche had never got around to setting up an Italian Tirailleur corps, and so Modigliani was stuck.

Seven hours later, as it grew dark, the guns arrived and Modigliani quickly dealt with the vulnerable line of the two hundred-off remaining Diehards with canister. None were taken alive. The Italians were in no mood for mercy after their slaughter and the Kentish Men did not ask for it. The story only survives because Ashcroft had sent Baines, the drummer boy, to Sevenoakes to send a message on for reinforcements – which, with the meltdown elsewhere, never came.

Modigliani pressed on and his tired surviving men – perhaps six and a half thousand – finally beheld London.

And it was on fire.




[1] In OTL it was the 57th (Middlesex) Regiment of Foot which received the nickname thanks to a similar stand in Spain during the Peninsular War. In TTL the 57th are still the 59th due to two American regiments not being disbanded, and were not stationed in their native London at the time, being one of the regiments sent to fight the Meridians. This fact will obviously impinge heavily on their regimental image. (In OTL, the 52nd became the 50th and then became known as the Dirty Half-Hundred).


Part #70: In Sad Affliction’s Darksome Night

We have also granted to all freemen of our kingdom, for us and our heirs forever, all the underwritten liberties, to be had and held by them and their heirs, of us and our heirs forever.

– Clause 1, Magna Carta (1215)​

*
From – “Albion’s Peril: The Invasion of England” by Sir Hubert Pendleton, 1951:

The first of April, 1807, was one All Fools’ Day that threatened to make fools of all indeed. The fires of London guttered and smoked, but slowly burned out, quenched by tireless work by the fire brigades and Hoche’s remaining troops. Numerous Frenchmen had been caught up in the flames and burned to death, along with many more Londoners, but rather more of Hoche’s force had died in vicious back-alley battles with local mobs who accused them of starting the fire. Though he was not around to see it, once more Lazare Hoche was handed the blame for the rape of a city that he had not ordered.

By that day, General Modigliani had arrived and took control in his inimitable way, cracking down harshly on the London mobs. Soon a flayed bravo hung from every pub sign. Modigliani had had the foresight to bring dragoons along, true dragoons, cavalrymen who could still fight effectively as infantry. The vicissitudes of the plan to invade the Netherlands, then England, meant that bringing horses along had not been an option – but Modigliani had always been one to take la maraude a step further even than his French teachers. London held some of the finest stables in London, and not all of their occupants were now charred meat. Brigade General Gabin, technically Hoche’s slight superior and a Frenchman to boot, abandoned Linnaean Racism in the face of the situation and declared he was taking his troops outside London to press the conquest. The truth was simply that he was terrified of Modigliani’s reputation: though the burning of London had been none of his doing, it would scarcely be out of character.

It was, however, one of Modigliani’s cavalry groups rather than Gabin’s infantry that perpetrated the crime of the century. That ground has, of course, been trod over and over again for the past hundred and fifty years, with countless speculative romances pondering if only. Suffice to say that the primary reasons for the lateness of the Royal Family’s departure from St James’s Palace[1] were indecision on the part of the King, and the fact that the head of the Life Guards, Colonel Andrew Howrey, insisted on gathering a full escort before they retreated. The former was largely noble in intent, King Henry agonising about abandoning the people of London to the French onslaught and, to be fair, how it would appear if he were painted as a craven who bolted before the legions of the Administration. However, there was also the issue of Queen Diana,[2] who demanded that they make for Windsor and the hopeful safety of Windsor Castle, while all the envoys from Whitehall instead said that the King should join with the political and civil officials fleeing north along the Great North Road to Fort Rockingham.

The result was that the carriages had yet to leave St James’s as the catastrophic blast of Downing Street exploding echoed across London, and then the King decided to stay around to try and find out what had happened – what if the blast had been part of a battle, a French magazine going up? He did not want to be caught in flight if the French had been repulsed. On the other hand, he insisted that Queen Diana and Princess Augusta (four years old) continue on to Fort Rockingham, but the Queen repeated her pleas for Windsor, and in the end the rest of the Royal Family did not go either.

It was only when Colonel Howrey rode back to report the flames engulfing London that Henry was finally persuaded that it was time to go. All the same, he looked back all the way, tears streaming down his cheeks, as the dome of St Paul’s first blackened and then fell in on itself. “My London,” he said quietly to himself, “My London…oh, how I leave my London!”



…the damage to the wheel had been repaired quickly enough, but nonetheless the time had been lost, and at Enfield the King’s carriage was intercepted by a group of Modigliani’s dragoon outriders. The Life Guards fought hard and bravely, but the Italians outnumbered them (Howrey had never gained the reinforcements he wanted, the fires of London creating a mass confusion) and they all died then and there. All save Private Matthew Sedgwick, who would have not even gained a footnote in history were it not for the fact that some anonymous Italian dragoon misaimed his sabre and merely cuffed him with the guard, knocking out the young man. His body went unnoticed amid all the others, the blood on the road blurring all the red coats into one…

…the King’s carriage door was torn open by the dismounted dragoons. Before them sat King Henry IX of Great Britain and of Ireland, Emperor Henry I of North America, and Elector Heinrich I of Hanover. A young man, just thirty years old. Known for being a reformist, a radical even, a sympathiser with liberals, and thanks to his position on slavery, even a bleeding heart.

So it was all the more surprising when he shot the first dragoon in the head.

He shot the next five dragoons in the head as well.

King Henry was fortunate enough to possess one of the very first revolving pistols in all the kingdom, you see.

Unfortunately, there were still another twenty dragoons.

The Italian commanding officer, a Major Antonelli, arrested the King and his family. The King pleaded with him, though in a calm tone: “Do what you want with me. Have my head now, if you will – just let my wife and daughter go. She is not the heir to the throne. She is no threat to you.”

“I disagree,” Antonelli replied in heavily accented English, “and it is not the proper Republican way to dispense mob justice in the street,” he said without irony. “The procedures must be followed.”

The royal coach was turned around and escorted back to London. It is said, though there is no hard evidence to support the legend, that the whole cavalcade was surrounded by a continuous chorus of sighs and groans as it went back through Ipswich and then into Westminster. The people could see who the French had captured, but they were by now too afraid of Modigliani’s reprisals to respond.

Modigliani, unlike his subordinate, was all for a summary execution, but Gabin cautioned him, agreeing with Antonelli. Colonel Saissons, on the other hand, also demanded the King’s head to send a signal to the people of London, that this was the reward for Fox’s defiance.

A compromise was reached. A makeshift Republican people’s court was convened in the smoking ruins of St Paul’s Cathedral, headed by a sot of a judge who was a paid-up member of the Hellfire Club, and no friend of the Crown. It was a farce, of course, and the King did not even bother to defend himself. “Why should I strain myself concocting memorable rhetoric when you will not even write it down?” he said caustically – in a remark, ironically, that was recorded…

…a guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion, and on April 3rd the King, Queen and Princess Augusta, far too young to understand what was going on, were led out to the stage erected on the edge of Hyde Park, near the Cumberland Gate.[3] Upon it was no mere gibbet, nor indeed the headsman’s block, for Gabin had demanded a properly “scientific”, Republican, means of execution. And so it was. There might not have been room for horses on Surcouf’s and Lepelley’s fleet, but there had been room for a disassembled phlogisticateur chamber…

…the crowd was cowed by the second volley of musketry from Modigliani’s thugs, and the three royals were sealed inside the chamber. It was a cloudy day, and smoke was still hanging over the city, so Saissons volunteered to light the woodpile below the phlogisticateur. Smoke billowed inside the glass cylinder, and the terrible little cough of Princess Augusta echoed across the silent park. But not for long.

It was quick. Barely visible through the grey cloud, the Queen slumped even as she cried out for her daughter, and then there was only King Henry. He stood, just barely, his hands stretched out against the glass, slowly sliding down the inside of the chamber. And then, with the last of his strength – and proving that he kept his intellect to the end, he managed to scrawl something on the smoked-up glass with his hand. Backwards.

One word: REMEMBER.

And then the crowd charged…



…in the end only thirteen Franco-Italian soldiers died, next to over a hundred Londoners, but the value of the propaganda victory had been lost. The phlogisticateur had been thrown down and shattered as the mob surged over Modigliani’s musketmen, the bodies of the royals vanished. There would be none of the ritual desecration that Joseph Dashwood had called for.

What happened to the bodies is unknown. Some say the crowd threw them in the Serpentine to protect them from the French, others that they were stolen away and buried in common graves, but with Anglican sacrament. It is known, however, that Private Sedgwick was there in the crowd, having recovered and followed the cavalcade back to London, and he cut off the King’s finger with his sabre, still bearing its ring. He took this for his token, went out to steal a horse, and then began the most famous ride in British history…

*

From – “Kingdom of Great Britain Parliamentary and Constitutional Records – FRE.II VOL.I 1807-1808”

Fort Rockingham, April 6th. Yesterday in the Afternoon arrived a Messenger, with an Account, that our late most Gracious Sovereign King HENRY is removed by a violent death, in the 30th Year of His Age, and the 7th of His Reign: A Prince endowed with all Royal Virtues.

Upon the news of this melancholy event arriving at Doncaster, the surviving Lords of the Privy Council assembled yesterday at the Mansion-house, and gave orders for proclaiming his present Majesty:


We, therefore the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the Realm, being here Assisted with those of His late Majesty's Privy Council, the Noblemen, Judges, Knights, Lawyers, Gentlemen, Freeholders, Merchants, Citizens, Yeomen, Seamen, and other Freemen of England, Do according to our Allegiance and Covenant by these Presents, Heartily, Joyfully, and Unanimously, Acknowledge and Proclaim FREDERICK, Prince of Wales, next Heir to his Father King HENRY, the Ninth of his name, (whose late Murder, and all Consenters thereunto, We from our Souls Abominate) to be Hereditary Birth-Right, and Lawful Successor, rightful and undoubted King FREDERICK THE SECOND of Great Britain, France and Ireland, Emperor of North America, Defender of the Faith and so forth; and that We shall constantly and Sincerely in our several Places and Callings, Defend and Maintain his Royal and Imperial Person, Crown, and Dignity, with our Estates and Lives, against all Opposers, whom hereby We Declare to be Enemies to his Majesty and all his Dominions: In Testimony whereof, we have caused these to be Published throughout all Counties and Corporations of this Realm, The Seventh Day of April, in the First Year of his Majesty’s Reign.

Beseeching God, by whom Kings and Queens do Reign, to Bless the Royal Prince Frederick the Second with long and happy Years to Reign over us.

Given at the Court at the Doncaster Mansion-house, this Seventh Day of April, 1807.

GOD Save the KING.

*

Regency Act, 1807

WHEREAS in view of the present crisis and the absence and minority of HIS BRITANNIC MAJESTY, it is expedient to alter and amend the laws of regency of this Kingdom so as to bestow the full Powers of our LORD SOVEREIGN upon the COUNCIL OF REGENCY: Be it therefore enacted by the King's most Excellent Majesty, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the Authority of the same, that the COUNCIL OF REGENCY shall, in the sadly departed absence of all named candidatures for the position of Regent to the Crown, shall have full Authority to select an Individual for the aforesaid Position. This Authority shall stand until the happy Return of our Rightful MONARCH…

Signed into law by the Lord Chancellor with the King’s seal, according to dubious precedent.

*

Confirmation of Regency Act, 1807

WHEREAS the Council of REGENCY has declared its intention to appoint His Grace the Duke of Marlborough (in whose Wisdom and illustrious Virtues His Majesty and His People do entirely confide) to be Regent of this Kingdom during His Majesty's absence;" Be it enacted by the King's Most Excellent Majesty, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in Parliament assembled, and by the Authority of the same, that said Gentleman, His Grace the Duke of Marlborough, to be Regent of this Kingdom during His Absence, either by the Style of Guardian of the Realm of Great Britain, and His Majesty's Lieutenant within the same, or by any other Style or Title whatsoever, in evrey such Case Her Majesty shall, to all Intents and Purposes, be able and capable in Law to accept, hold, exercise and enjoy the said Office, and effectually to do and perform all Acts, Matters and Things belonging thereunto, in such Manner, and for such Time as His Majesty, by any Letters Patent or Commission to be passed for that Purpose under the Great Seal of Great Britain, shall respectively from Time to Time direct and ordain, without taking, making or subscribing any Oath or Oaths, Declaration or Declarations, or doing any other Act or Acts whatsoever, required by the Laws and Statutes of this Realm to qualify any other Person to accept, hold, exercise or enjoy the said Office; any Law or Statute to the contrary thereof in any wise notwithstanding.

*

An Act for the more effectually preventing Seditious Meetings and Assemblies (1807)

WHEREAS Assemblies of divers Persons, collected for the Purpose or under the Pretext of deliberating on Public Grievances, and of agreeing on Petititons, Complaints, Remonstances, Declarations, or other Addresses, to the King, or to both Houses, or either House of Parliament, have of late been made use of to serve the Ends of Seditious and Treacherous Persons, to the great Danger of the future of this Kingdom, and may become the Means of producing Confusion and Calamities in the Nation: Be it enacted by the King’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the Authority of the same, That no Meeting of any County, Riding, or Division called by the Lord Lieutenant, Custos Rotulorum, or Sheriff of such County; or a Meeting called by the Convener of any Country or Stewartry in that Part of Great Britain called Scotland; or a Meeting called by two or more Justices of the Peace……shall be holden, for the Purpose or on the Pretext of considering of or preparing any Petition, Complaint, Remonstance, or Declaration, or other Address to the King, or his Duly Appointed Regent, or to both Houses……

*

From “Pierre Boulanger: A Life” by Jean-Jacques Bonnaire (1942)

While the situation in England seesawed back and forth and the destiny of a nation would be decided, the Marshal was in his element. He had had his doubts about the Administrator’s plan, but now what was done was done, and he was required to perform one last task: to finish the job that he had started more than ten years earlier. Once, he had saved the Republic by buying the neutrality of Flanders: now, he would call in his debt.

Despite Lisieux’s failure to send the Surcouf/Lepelley fleet to follow up on Villeneuve’s initial landings on the Frisian islands, the ploy at the heart of Le Grand Crabe was still moderately successful: with Admiral Carnbee’s fleet sunk, the Dutch were fearful of the French penetrating the Zuider Zee and descending on Amsterdam, and thus held back much of their forces to protect their own homeland. The Flemings, the folk of the nation that Charles Theodore of the Palatinate had hammered out of pragmatism and bequeathed to his eponymous son, were almost on their own.

Boulanger pursued a typically daring and risky strategy. The Flemings, no fools, had spent their years of peace beefing up their border forts, which were still mostly staffed by Dutchmen. Therefore, Boulanger decided to try and bypass the forts altogether, not even leaving besieging forces to bottle up the Dutch, instead using escorts to directly defend his supply columns as they followed his troops. A speedy thrust, he decided, was more likely to deliver the results L’Admin needed than a slow and meticulous conquest. Besides, Boulanger feared that Lisieux had bitten off more than he could chew. With the situation deteriorating in Spain, Italy and Germany, not to mention the quixotic attack on Britain (to which he had reacted with frank disbelief when he heard of it), France could end up surrounded and outnumbered, just as she had been at the start of the Jacobin Wars. And so, then as now, he had to quickly knock out at least one of those enemies.

The Marshal attacked through the eastern end of Wallonia, via Charleroi, pushing back the disparate parts of Flemish forces that had yet to assemble, taking prisoners in the shock of the War of Lightning, trying to reduce the number of soldiers his men would eventually face. Opposing him was the Flemish general Steffen von Wrede, of Wuerttemberger extraction and with a deep grudge against the French.

Wrede decided to make his stand on a ridge near the village of La Belle Alliance, in the path of Boulanger’s axis of advance – some have suggested the choice was in part because of the name. It is not so silly a suggestion as it sounds, for Wrede’s chief problem was the fractiousness of his army. His force was approximately two-thirds Dutch-speaking (some of whom were from the Republic, others Flemings) and one-third French-speaking Walloons. The two did not get on particularly well at the best of times, and the lack of a common language seriously complicated orders and manoeuvres. Furthermore, there were plenty of whispers that the Walloons were ready to go over to the French, due to their common language and culture and the fact that they were typically given short shrift in Charles Theodore’s Greater Flanders, what with its decisive Germanic majority. Wrede initially intended to overcome this by dispersing his Walloon troops amid and among his more trustworthy Dutch and Flemings, but the language issue made it impossible to command such an army.

His response was to give the Walloons the all-important centre and remind everyone that if they started breaking, everyone would die. A risky strategy indeed: Boulanger himself would be proud. Unfortunately for Wrede, Boulanger also had plans, not all of them military. Lisieux’s extensive work on propaganda and means of disseminating it meant that Boulanger’s agents wrought a withering campaign against the Walloons in their tents in the three days before the battle, until several of the Walloon commanders stole away in secret to meet with Boulanger personally.

The result of this was that the Battle of La Belle Alliance was an anticlimax. When Boulanger sent his cavalry up the ridge, the Walloons holding the centre did not break into chaos, no…they turned in perfect order and began blasting away at their former allies, abetted by the French horse.

The Dutch-Flemish side did not go down without small victories, their own cavalry wreaking havoc on some of Boulanger’s columns, but by the end of the day the Marshal had won another crown of victory, a parallel to his defence of Lille so many years before. Then as now, trickery had beaten brute force, and the French took thirty thousand prisoners, so many that even Boulanger’s notoriously well-planned logistics struggled to cope with bringing them back behind the lines.

The road lay open to Brussels, and victory.




[1] OTL this was the primary residence of the British Royal Family until 1809, when it (ironically) largely burned down. Buckingham Palace here is (or rather was, before it burned down) still Buckingham House, home to the Duke of Buckingham’s family.

[2] Before she married Henry, Lady Diana Spencer. Yes, I know…but it was a very common female name for daughters of the Dukes of Marlborough. OTL, George IV’s proposal was turned down by yet another Lady Diana Spencer.

[3] In other words, at what became Speaker’s Corner in OTL.


Part #71: For Want Of A Burned House

“The fires of nationalism burn deep within us all. Statehood is the manifest right of every people, every race, every nation. Some have claimed that the Revolution invented nationalism, but that is as absurd as saying that Cugnot invented steam. He simply brought it to the forefront. Certainly, any view which claims that nationalism is an invention that can be suppressed is surely doomed to insignificance…”

Pascal Schmidt, The Inevitable Germany, 1832​

*

From “The Pyrenean War” by Afonso Vasco de la Costa (1889):

…by May 1806, it was clear that the French position in Iberia was untenable. The argument can certainly be made that if Jean de Lisieux had committed the necessary forces, Spain could have been held, despite the action of Spanish Kleinkriegers (or ‘guerillos’). However, matters were perpetually hampered by the fact that Lisieux had always seen the Spanish front as an irritating sideshow, evidenced by the fact that there had been no attempt to install a Spanish Latin Republic after the defeat of Philip VII. Lisieux viewed Spain as a mediaeval throwback and an embarrassment to the Latin Race, to be dealt with when time permitted: in his eyes Iberia had none of the promising nature of the artistic and industrial Padanian lands which Hoche had shaped into the Italian Latin Republic.

This was certainly a missed opportunity, and one that we can only thank God the Revolutionaries never acted upon. In the confusion and power vacuum after the death of Philip VI and the civil war, it is possible that a sufficiently light-handed version of French Republicanism could have received the support of the Spanish people, earning kudos from bringing an end to the infighting and lawlessness that prevailed due to the disputed succession. In practice, though, Lisieux was already withdrawing French troops from Spain even before Madrid fell in August 1802, sending them to be bogged down with Ney in Germany as that war escalated beyond all control. The French nonetheless had several advantages in Spain: the lack of a common rallying figure among the Spanish people thanks to the claimant Charles IV’s unpopular deal with the Portuguese; the entry of Naples’ Charles VIII and VI who, confusingly, also claimed to be Charles IV and had an equally questionable alliance with English commanders such as Nelson; and the fact that the French had several able generals and administrators, foremost among them Claude Drouet.

Drouet became governor-general of occupied Spain by default as the war wore on. The Nouveau Poséidon operation under Olivier Bourcier, Etienne Devilliers and the Spanish turncoat Ballesteros ultimately failed, despite a string of victories throughout 1804 and 1805. All that was necessary for the Portuguese was to hold on in the face of the Franco-Spanish advance and wait for Spanish Kleinkrieger activity to hamper and cut their enemies’ supply lines. When Naples entered the war in November 1805, King Peter IV of Portugal is attested to have jumped and punched the air. “We have them!” he cried, even though the Neapolitans would naturally become the rivals of the Portuguese in deciding the postwar fate of Spain.

Peter’s analysis proved correct: Drouet sallied forth with the French reserves (or what was left of them). 1806 opened with the Battle of Albacete, technically a tactical victory for Drouet over the Neapolitans under Pignatelli, yet a strategic failure: the Neapolitans were able to retreat, and their navy under Nelson continued to rule the Catalan coast, ensuring resupply. As 1806 wore on, the Franco-Spanish armies in Portugal reached the ends of their supply lines and were forced to retreat. General Bourcier was recalled to France in the wake of the debacle and reassigned to defending the remains of the Italian Latin Republic – known informally as the Piedmontese Latin Republic – against the encroaching Austrians. Faced with an impossible situation, Drouet withdrew all his French troops to Madrid. This is often portrayed as a foolish hope that the Revolutionary doctrine of ‘to hold the heart is to hold the country’ would be fulfilled; the truth is naturally more complex. Though Philip VII was a weak man, particularly without the Count of Aranda to advise him, there was nonetheless the distinct chance that he might sense French weakness and seek to raise a popular Spanish rebellion against the occupiers. So Drouet gambled that holding Philip VII hostage would cement French rule and perhaps give him a bargaining chip to play the Neapolitans and Portuguese off against each other.

In the end of course this proved to be a forlorn hope, but it was not Drouet’s major error. This was reassigning Ballesteros to the eastern front, in the hope that a Spanish general might be able to raise fervour among the locals into resisting the Neapolitan advance, while Devilliers continued to command the mostly Spanish armies on the western front against the Portuguese. However, an agent of General Pignatelli met with Ballesteros’ representatives and agreed with the general that the French were living on borrowed time and the choice for postwar Spain was to align with the Portuguese or the Neapolitans – and at least the Neapolitans were ruled by the Spanish Bourbons, Charles VI and VIII being the younger brother of the late Philip VI. Although the mercurial and ultra-conservative Ballesteros was loath to turn on Philip VII, he was aware that the king himself was toying with the idea of trying to overthrow the French by a popular revolt, and furthermore he had become very resentful of working with the republican French generals and their revolutionary ideas.

Thus in February 1807 Ballesteros switched sides and the French position crumbled altogether. In April, even as France was enjoying her moment of triumph in England, Madrid fell. Devilliers had managed to evacuate along the ‘French Road’ which the French had always kept defended, but most of Drouet’s army was pocketed by the Portuguese cutting the road to the north. The city fell to the combined Neapolitan and Portuguese armies, not without a great deal of damage. Drouet shot himself to avoid execution, but not before putting a bullet in King Philip VII’s skull as well.

And Ballesteros’ plans came to naught, for according to the Felipista line of succession the throne of Spain passed to Philip’s infant son, rather mercifully called Alfonso (it would have been cruel indeed for future history students if he had been another Charles!). And Alfonso, along with the rest of the surviving royal family, fell into the hands of General Vieira and the Portuguese.

The postwar settlement for Spain would not be settled on an international level until the Grand Concert of 1810, but things were finalised in practice by March 1808. In the Treaty of Madrid (called ‘Second Torsedillas’ by bitter Spanish nationalists), Spain, united into one kingdom since 1516, was divided once more into Castile and Aragon. The names were largely meaningless, however, since this new Aragon was far larger than the historical one, almost a third of the country. Aragon passed to Naples, and Charles VIII and VI briefly also became Charles IV until his death in 1811.[1] Castile was ruled by Alfonso XII, but in his infancy a regent was required, and that just happened to be King Peter IV of Portugal. The Portuguese casually stabbed their Carlista allies in the back, which seemed like a sensible if cold-blooded idea at a time when it appeared as though the United Provinces were about to conquer the Carlistas’ Empire of the Indies. The puppet regime in Madrid also meant the Portuguese were able to hold on to the parts of Spain they had directly annexed in the early part of the war, such as Galicia.

And that is the situation that Spain unhappily found herself in for the two decades separating the Jacobin Wars from the Popular Wars. But the modern reader, particularly the foreigner, may indeed think of all of this as merely a backdrop to the single most important event that stemmed from the French defeat and retreat in 1807…

*

From: “The Man and the Myth: Pablo Sanchez”, by Miguel Ayala:

There was a Catalan city called Cervera. It was a thousand years old, but had never grown very large. A century before, it had been destroyed in the First War of Supremacy and rebuilt, granted city status by Philip V in exchange for the Cerverans’ support during the war. A university had also been built. But it remained somewhat out of the way, a relatively sleepy place for a university town.

In 1796 a new correigdor or mayor[2] was appointed, and he was Francisco José Sanchez y Rodriguez. He was popular among the commoners of Cervera, though the upper and middle classes had their reservations. Sanchez was a Castilian, an outsider, who had moved into the area to expand his successful printing business. His ‘new-money’ status and pragmatic approach offended the local aristocracy, while the less fortunate viewed his background as being more sympathetic to them – as indeed was the case, to some extent – and were willing to look past the fact that he had been born in Castile, instead viewing this as meaning he would not be hamstrung by connections with powerful people in the area.

Sanchez largely delivered, improving the university and growing in popularity after exercising his devolved royal power and imprisoning two previously untouchable criminal leaders, cutting through the former web of deals and backhanders that had rendered Cervera so corrupt. It looked as though the correigdor would be fondly remembered in Cervera civic history, but would have no impact on the wider world beyond that.

Then in 1797 his wife Maria conceived a son, whom Sanchez named after his grandfather Pablo.

1797 was also the year Spain, theoretically at war with Revolutionary France since 1794, stepped up the desultory battles along the Pyrenees in response to General Hoche’s occupation of Parma in Italy. Records from this time are sketchy, but it is thought by the more balanced commentators that Sanchez encouraged the people of Cervera to support the war effort against such an unholy foe by any means they could.

It seemed, though, that this was largely theoretical. After an initial scare in the first few months of the war, it appeared that the vaunted power of the Revolution would not come to Spain, and Cervera would be spared the fires of war. Sanchez returned to his work in rooting out corruption, expanding his printing business and the university in the process, and also increasing the size of his family. The young Pablo soon had three sisters.

Then in 1800 General Boulanger began to drive back the Spanish armies, and 1801 brought the attack by Admiral Lepelley on the Catalan coast, landing troops to encircle the Spaniards led by General Ballesteros. Cervera was thus one of the first Spanish towns to come under occupation, beginning in October of that year, just after they had learned that Philip VI had died and a civil war had begun.

Sanchez knew the terrors that a French army could bring. The old scars of Cervera from a hundred years before spoke of them, and that had been a conflict largely devoid of ideological differences. He knew he had to do anything to prevent history repeating itself. So he went out to meet the local French garrison, led by Captain Jean Aumont, a rather lazy individual who had drawn garrison duty by default. Sanchez brought some of Cervera’s bakers and brewers with him, and soon the initially suspicious French had been softened by feasts and drunken revelry. In that moment of weakness, Sanchez bought Aumont’s support, promising to cooperate with the French and bring them more presents if they protected Cervera from any roving raiders or other French troops. Aumont agreed.

And so for the next few years Cervera was free from the terror that many Spanish towns and villages experienced in the civil war. Aumont and his subordinates fitted in convivially enough, though many in the town looked at their red-and-blue uniforms darkly and muttered to themselves. The fact that the French supported Philip VII rather than trying to set up a republic meant that Cervera at least gave them grudging acceptance, though.

It was in this atmosphere, peaceful yet tense, like the odd pressure in the calm before a storm, that Pablo Rodrigo Sanchez y Ruiz grew up. The boy had only been four when the French had come, and even in his youth his father remarked on how he was having problems trying to explain to Pablo who the French were and where they had come from. Aumont’s company was one of the more traditional-minded in the French Republican Army – doubtless why they were near the back – and there was a visible social division between those of educated middle class background and those conscripted from the dregs of society. The exact wording may be apocryphal, but in 1803 Pablo is thought to have said “Señor Aumont is more like you, Papa, than he is like Private Darrieux, or you are like the street ruffians here.” And thus a six-year-old childishly enunciated the ideology that would one day engulf the world in flames.

And then came 1807.

The French were in full retreat. Even little Cervera knew of the Neapolitan landings, these exotic Englishmen, and the Portuguese successes. By May the French were pouring even from Catalonia, and the rumour got out that Drouet had killed the King.

The Cerveran people, suppressed in their resentment of the French for so long, motivated partially by fear of being seen as collaborators, partially egged on by those who had lost power thanks to Sanchez, rose up, and Cervera once more burned. This time from within.

Aumont, recognising that a retreat would leave his men strung out and easy prey for Kleinkriegers, grimly decided to set up a defensive position in Sanchez’s big house and try to drive off the maddened townsfolk who now burned their once-hero in effigy. He hoped that they would calm down in the face of bullets and let the French withdraw.

And in so doing, he forgot the lessons of more than a decade before, the Bastille, and L’Épurateur.

Nothing stopped the fury of the mob. The house was taken, the French were bayoneted, and the losses of the townsfolk to the more professional French soldiers – though the latter’s training had suffered from the years of peace – only drove them to greater depths. Sanchez’s throat was slit in the main square, and his wife and daughters were shaved, branded and humiliated, then driven off into the mountains.

And what of his son?

Little Pablo hid in a cupboard and escaped in the confusion. Ten years old, what could he understand of all this? It seemed so meaningless. It wasn’t as though Aumont’s French had ever broken their side of the deal, had ever turned on them. Nor had they asked for unreasonable things, like the favours of the town’s daughters.

So why had the townspeople been angry enough to do such horrible things to his Mama, his Papa and his sisters?

Because the faraway Drouet had killed the equally faraway King Philip? A Frenchman had killed a Spaniard, and therefore all Spaniards must kill Frenchmen.

It was so…so meaningless…

Pablo Sanchez wandered aimlessly. He fell in, ironically, with a group of Kleinkriegers, who thought nothing of recruiting lost children to their cause. He even shot at and helped loot the corpses of a few retreating French soldiers, the last of the army to withdraw. Through it all, he was numb.

And then, a few years later, he snapped.




[1] The fact that they enumerated him from the kings of united Spain instead of going back to the Aragonese royal line emphasises the fact that this division of Spain is a legal fiction designed to disguise a carve-up.

[2] The situation is a little more complicated than that translation suggests, with corregidor or co-councillor being a personal representative of the King, only appointed to the larger cities, and in most cases having been replaced by an intendant by this point due to the reforms of the Spanish Bourbons – however, Cervera is sufficiently isolated for this reform never to have taken place.



Part #72: A More Perfect Union?

“…just as Pascal dubbed it in his great work, it was the Moment of Hope…all but the youngest of our comrades-in-arms remember that time, and the knowledge that there was the chance to grasp our birthright, to forever end the subjugation of our common land to the whims of foreign powers and the tyranny of our own petty rulers.

That chance was missed and the moment passed. Let us now grasp this second chance with all our might. It would be foolishly optimistic to expect a third.”

- Wilhelm Bruening, 1834 speech​

*

From – “Herz aus Eisen: Der Führer” by Joachim Lübke (1959)

…initial front of the Jacobin Wars, at least geographically, had been between France and Austria. The reasons were far deeper than the obvious casus belli, that the Revolutionary regime had phlogisticated Princess Marie-Antoinette to death, Maria Antonia of the House of Hapsburg. There was certainly widespread outrage both among the public and the ruling classes of Austria and to a lesser extent throughout the Empire, but colder and more pragmatic concerns underlay the war. France and Austria had been on-again off-again allies since the Diplomatic Revolution. The defeat of Prussia in the ensuing war had changed matters somewhat, as Austria no longer had a powerful enemy within the Empire, but this was followed by the Russian realignment under Peter III and Austria being snubbed in the War of the Polish Partition. Thus, though the Hapsburgs would have liked to limit French influence in the Empire, the French alliance was still vital in the face of growing Russian power to the east and the possibility of skirmishes with the Ottomans flaring up into something greater.

The Revolution had replaced Austria’s relatively reliable and ideologically consistent – Catholic, absolutist – ally with a radical and unknowable regime, and the Hapsburgs had seen a quick strike as necessary to restore the ancien regime before it could become established. However, when the Revolutionary army failed to collapse as badly as the Austrians had hoped, and competent generals such as Pierre Boulanger emerged from the woodwork, the conflict became a wretched slog with no prospects of quick victory. In 1796 it expanded in scope to Italy while at the same time closing in Flanders with Charles Theodore’s shift to neutrality, eliminating the most obvious axis of advance for the Austrians. This bought precious time for the Republic to consolidate its position and promote its proven officers.

1797 saw the launch of the Poséidon Offensive by France, which put Austria on the back foot in Italy but nonetheless concluded with an Austrian army encamped at Nancy and ready for a second thrust into the heart of France. 1798 however saw Austria hamstrung by events, with the Russian Civil War expanding into the Great Baltic War and thus leading both Saxony and Brandenburg to withdraw their armies from the war with France. Though the Austrians enjoyed limited successes under Archduke Ferdinand in Italy, their centre was annihilated when France launched the Rubicon Offensive and blew through Swabia. The shock execution of the Badenese ruling family and the effects of la maraude on the Swabian countryside led to many smaller German states in turn withdrawing their forces from the united effort out of paranoia of their homelands’ security, a chain reaction which soon made Austrian claims to Imperial unity a joke.

After the destruction of Regensburg and Ferdinand IV’s declaration of the end of the Holy Roman Empire, the French had been on the verge of taking Vienna in 1799 before being stopped at the gates by General Mozart and retreating. But though the leaderless French army fractured – a large Jacobin part under the firebrand Fabien Lascelles which created the tyrannical Bavarian Germanic Republic, and a smaller ‘Cougnoniste’ faction under Philippe St-Julien retreated north and wintered in the Bohemian city of Budweis. St-Julien had intended to attempt to return to France by 1800, but the new Lisieux Administration led him to concerns about officers of Robespierre’s regime being suspect, and besides, his men enjoyed being little tin gods ruling their own scrap of Bohemian countryside.

Austria was in a position to drive the French from Hapsburg land, but an attack by the Ottomans later on in 1799 led the inexperienced new Archduke (and claimant Emperor) Francis II to throw everything in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to absorb all of Venetian Dalmatia before the Ottomans could get there. The quixotic attack by Austria on Ottoman vassal Wallachia in 1801, combined with the failure to obtain Russia as an ally, meant that the Austro-Turkish War ground to a miserable halt in 1803, with Austria having lost some territory in the Balkans to Constantinople. Far more importantly, this perceived abandonment of responsibilities by the other German lands – particularly considering the effects of Lascelles’ terror in Bavaria – meant Austria had lost her once commanding position in what had once been the Holy Roman Empire.

After Ney had set up the Swabian Germanic Republic and France made more attempts to expand into Germany, instead groups of small states came together to form the military alliances known as the Mittelbund and the Hanoverian-dominated Alliance of Hildesheim. With tacit assistance from theoretically neutral Flanders and the Dutch Republic, the French advance was driven back and peace was had by the end of 1801. This had a powerful effect on German thinking, and encouraged others to fight back. As the French became distracted by events in Italy and Spain, and Lisieux’s plans shifted towards securing the Low Countries as a buffer zone, central Germany was pushed to the bottom of the priorities pile and German patriots had a chance to make their mark.

It was Michael Hiedler, Der Führer, who had begun the first Kleinkrieg in 1800. By 1802 and the abandonment of French expansion in Germany, his methods had already become renowned enough to be copied by Spanish fighters under French occupation. While Austria struggled with the Ottomans, Hiedler’s Kleinkriegers took encouragement from the Mittelbund’s defeat of Ney and stepped up their attacks on Lascelles’ fanatics. That conflict grew ever bloodier as Lascelles’ reprisals reached the stage of burning down an entire village because one Kleinkrieger, who had attacked French troops somewhere else entirely, was thought to have been born there. Perhaps. Come to think of it, maybe the informant had said it was that village over in the next valley…

Naturally, this draconian approach only encouraged more resistance, as it swiftly became apparent to even the most timid Bavarians that it was simply impossible to safely collaborate with the Bavarian Germanic Republic regime – if Lascelles didn’t randomly decide you were suspect and kill you, a Kleinkrieger would slit your throat, hack off your genitals, stuff them in your mouth, and then hang your corpse upside down off the nearest tree with a sign reading “VERRÄTER” around your neck. And as the fight became yet more bitter, it also seemed that it was impossible to simply sit quietly and hope you wouldn’t be noticed. In the face of Lisieux’s propaganda slowly disseminating across Europe, and particularly the aspect about execution being immoral due to the state having a responsibility to get all the work it could out of any citizen, Lascelles’ counter-rhetoric reached the heights of openly declaring that he intended eventually to euthanise any citizen of the Bavarian Germanic Republic who could not prove a Latin ancestry. Ultimately, though the Kleinkriegers were ragtag bands with little organisation, they could not have asked for a more self-defeating enemy.

At the end of 1803, even as Austria’s armies were disconsolately trudging home from the Balkans, the Kleinkriegers made their greatest coup yet: Nicolas Cavaignac, Lascelles’ brutish Grand Marshal and former sergeant, was killed. As part of one of Lascelles’ typical disproportionate retaliations for another Kleinkrieger attack, Cavaignac was assigned to take a thousand troops and lay waste to the town of Dachau. By this point of course the Bavarian civilians had become resigned to the fact that such attacks were commonplace, and as soon as French troops appeared on the horizon they would either try and make a hopeless stand – nonetheless still whittling away at Lascelles’ precious number of irreplaceable Frenchmen – or fleeing, despite Lascelles setting up cavalry patrols to run down anyone trying to leave his fiefdom.

So Cavaignac tried subtlety, saying that they were searching for a single individual, a Kleinkrieger, and that they would check all the men in the town against a description, and execute only those that matched it. Cavaignac’s soldiers herded them into the old Wittelsbach palace there, then promptly set it on fire and shot any Dachauer who tried to escape. With the menfolk thus disposed of, they set about the women and children in the way victorious armies always have throughout history. Lascelles didn’t mind, providing (he warned them) they made sure the girl was dead afterwards, as he didn’t want any filthy half-breed children toddling around his perfect Latin state.

And as the leader of the party, Cavaignac naturally got first dibs on Dachau’s prettiest girl. What happened next is uncertain and subject to Kleinkrieger romanticisation and propaganda, but apparently it turned out that the Kleinkrieger the French had been searching for was not, in fact, a man. She had carried a poisoned needle to commit suicide in cases just like this, but recognising Cavaignac, she elected to instead scratch him with it as he grabbed her. Though she met her fate at the hands of some other, anonymous French soldier, Cavaignac was dead within the hour and the Kleinkriegers had scored a huge victory, proving the French were not untouchable.

Throughout the latter part of 1803, and 1804, Austria could still perhaps have pulled something out of its collapsing public image if Francis II had sent troops to liberate Bavaria: with Lascelles’ men weakened by the Kleinkrieg, it would not have taken many. But he sent only a token force to push back the front, safeguarding Vienna, and refused pleas from Prague to return a Bohemian regiment to deal with the Cougnonistes extracting tribute from half the kingdom. It was understandable, perhaps, if Bavaria was not at the top of Austria’s list of priorities, only having been acquired by the Hapsburgs in 1783. But Bohemia…! Bohemia was the reason why the Archdukes of Austria also held a kingship. It was key to how the theoretically elected Emperor had become a hereditary Hapsburg role. And yet Francis II cared not, focusing purely on where he thought his armies could win dramatic victories to try and rally the nation (or rather the upper classes of Vienna, which was essentially his personal definition of the nation). And so the armies of the Hapsburg possessions focused their efforts on Italy, as Lazare Hoche committed his faux pas and his position disintegrated. That obtained a Hapsburg Kingdom of Italy by 1806…but at what cost elsewhere?

In 1804, frustrated with Vienna’s intransigence, the Bohemian Estates convened and appointed Jozef, Graf Radetzky von Radetz, a decorated colonel who had been wounded in the first year of the war and been forced to retire, as leader of a new militia regiment.[1] This would not perhaps have been so controversial if the Estates had not daringly done so with proclamatory language suggesting that this was declared with the plenipotentiary authority of the King of Bohemia, as though such authority resided in the Estates and the throne were empty. After all, it was whispered, with Ferdinand IV’s declaration of the end of the Empire and the turmoil and reorganisations in the west, who was to say Francis II had any claim to be king of a land he seemed determined to abandon?

Though the training regime was ramshackle and Francis’ press gangs had naturally taken many suitable recruits in the first place, Radetzky managed to whip up a halfway suitable regiment. Initially he focused on cavalry and used small raiding parties to attack Cougnoniste “tax collectors” as they extracted protection money from the lands around Budweis; when St-Julien assembled his troops and faced Radetzky directly, the Bohemian general decided this was too much of a risk and withdrew from the field of battle. Though he was much attacked for this decision, the following year (after another winter’s worth of training and recruitment) the Bohemians fell upon Budweis and liberated the town from the complacent Cougnonistes. St-Julien was taken to Prague and executed by a manner which is unrecorded, though the claim that he was taken to a tower of Prague Castle and defenestrated is almost certainly hyperbole.

At the same time, 1805 saw the disintegration of the Bavarian Germanic Republic, as Lascelles’ soldiers began to fear the Kleinkriegers more than vice-versa; they could not let their guard down for one moment, lest the local baker poison their rations or the barmaid take them to bed and slit their throats in the dead of night. In the face of this (entirely justified) paranoia, many French soldiers took to learning German as best they could and then deserting, hoping to make it out of the country before being discovered. Lascelles naturally declared that the deserters must have had bad Germanic blood. Many troops still rallied to him, though, seeking confidence in that hour of shadows even if it was the product of an addled mind.

By the autumn of that year, the Republic was essentially gone, with Lascelles having withdrawn his remaining loyalists to his capital at Eichstätt, a ghost city with most of its native population dead or fled. Lascelles devolved into paranoid muttering, being (as that wit Giovanni Tressino put it) a man whose only purpose in life was to make Jean de Lisieux look sane by comparison.

Finally the Kleinkriegers came out of the woodwork, and even as the Austrians sent some troops into eastern Bavaria, Hiedler launched a direct attack on Eichstätt. His numbers were such that not even Lascelles’ artillery could prevent Hiedler’s mass march[2] – ironically a tactical product of the early Revolution’s similarly untrained and undisciplined fighters – and though the French undoubtedly killed four or five Kleinkriegers for every one of their soldiers killed, Hiedler had ten.

Lascelles was found lying in a church which he had long since ordered converted to a Temple to Reason, having found an old cask of communion wine and got roaringly drunk before trying to shoot himself with a pistol and repeatedly missing. Hiedler was brought to him by the Kleinkrieger who found him, who assumed that Der Führer would want to dispatch the great murderer himself.

Hiedler gave him one look with those penetrating, implacable eyes of his, then pronounced: “You bring me here to ask me to do the petty chore of slaughtering an animal for the pot! Sir, do you believe me to be a common labourer? A cook? Let my wife do it.”

There was confusion over this, as Hiedler’s wife had of course died in the attack on his house at the start of the terror, and he had taken no other. Some thought that he had gone mad, or at least his madness had become apparent. But instead Hiedler fetched Petra Schickelgruber, the former maid who had been the only other survivor of his household and had become a Kleinkrieger beside him. Without a trace of compassion, she did as she asked him and slit Lascelles’ throat. According to accounts, the Frenchman was so dead drunk that he didn’t even resist.

It is almost certainly an exaggerated rumour that Hiedler actually went on to put Lascelles’ corpse in a pot, cook and eat it, as his rhetoric had suggested. It is only a question whether this story was told by his fanatical supporters as a positive or by his Austrian detractors as a negative. But it is true that Michael Hiedler married Petra Schickelgruber over the cooling remains of the tyrant of Bavaria, using the ring cut from his finger.

At least it was in a church…

*

From – “The Jacobin Wars – the Italo-German Front” by Joshua H. Calhoun (University of New York Press, 1946) -

1807: The Battle of La Belle Alliance and the Netherlando-Flemish defeat was a wake-up call to the German states. They had long assumed that attack from France could come only via Swabia or Italy: the Dutch-Flemish alliance had been thought strong enough to provide a barrier. Few knew the mind of Lisieux, though there were plenty of hints about his priorities in his endless pamphlets.

For all the hatred and bitterness of the past, there was still the possibility that Francis II’s Austria might belatedly rally the Germanies to its banner and proclaim the Empire lived on. And indeed there were some attempts to do this, but they were halfhearted and fruitless. Ultimately the problem lay in that Francis was convinced that he was already Emperor by right – no matter that he had never been elected – and there was no need to convince others of the fact, and indeed to suggest that it might be necessary was tantamount to being a traitor and revolutionary sympathiser. Besides, most of the Austrian armies were already engaged in what should have been non-war operations: occupying the restless new Kingdom of Italy, enforcing Francis’ authority on Bohemia after the controversial arrest of Count Radetzky, and trying to proclaim Hapsburg power over Bavaria when Hiedler’s Kleinkriegers had decided that if they could defeat one invading army, another from the land of backstabbing traitors would meet the same fate.

So it was that the other states and alliances of Germany saw their positions, and ultimately the gains they had made through mediatisation in the last few years, threatened. Accordingly, the Mittelbund and the Alliance of Hildesheim both declared war in support of Flanders and the Netherlands, sending troops to Brussels to hold the jittery capital against the advance of Boulanger’s army, which was helped by the limited sympathy of the local Walloons for their co-linguists’ cause. The fact that Lisieux’s propaganda could disseminate without translation over the border doubtless helped. Then as in 1796, Liège proved to be a radical hotspot and its people rose up and helped the invading French push out the Flemish garrison.

The Alliance of Hildesheim also had another reason for going to war, of course: Britain, ruled by a Hanoverian king (if in name only, for Henry IX cared no more for Hanover than had his father or grandfather) had been invaded. Hanoverian ruler William FitzGeorge, the Duke of Cambridge,[3] duly threw his weight behind hurting the French elsewhere. However, neither the Alliance nor the Mittelbund declared war on Swabia. The reasons for this were multitudinous: Swabia was closer by and a war would spill over into the Alliance and Mittelbund’s own lands rather than being fought at arm’s-length; Ney had been quietly rebuilding his forces since his defeat in 1802; and, furthermore, Ney’s moderate style of rule, incorporating popular local figures into government, meant that Swabia was in fact an important trading partner for the Mittelbund, despite the conflict a few years before. Ultimately not even war could stop the wheels of trade from turning for long.

Recognising this (and amid reports of the war in Britain taking a turn for the worse), Lisieux ordered Ney to attack the Mittelbund in the hope of drawing off enough Mittelbund forces to make Boulanger’s task easier in Flanders. Ney, reluctantly, did so, and thus things were set in motion. Lisieux, so insulated from reality by his own propaganda, had no inkling of what would come to pass. Ney, a keen student of the internal politics of the Germanies, had a little, though not even he could guess its full extent.

Denmark and Saxony had almost come to blows over the Second War of the Polish Succession, when both powerful states had been mediatising their way towards empire-building in the Germanies. Denmark had wanted the Mecklenburger coast, but the Mecklenburgs had appealed to Saxony for help and thus had aligned with John George V, now ruling Poland and with suzerainty over Thuringia along with a greatly expanded Saxony proper.

Saxony had had a good eighteenth century on the whole, profiting greatly by Prussia’s reverses in the Third War of Supremacy and becoming second power in the Empire after Austria, but up until that point, much of that had been blind luck. The Saxons had acquired all those former Prussian possessions not because they were strong, quite the opposite – Austria wanted them for itself, but this was politically impossible, and so they were handed over to what was considered to be a properly subordinate ally. But then Saxony had begun to stick up for itself more, be more of an equal to Brandenburg, and then the Second War of the Polish Succession had pulled both out of the war with France and set them to blows. Now, with Prussia on the edge of defeat, the Saxons began actively working towards moving their nation onto the path of supremacy.

John George V negotiated a masterstroke, heading off the Saxon-Danish confrontation by dividing Brandenburg between his own state and the Mecklenburgs, while Denmark received the Mecklenburger coast that Johannes II so wanted. So, if Saxony and Denmark were not quite allies, they were at least on passable terms. At the same time, Saxony had negotiated with the Netherlands for a land exchange which ultimately aligned the two in their mediatisation ambitions – something which had been part of the driving force behind the formation of the Mittelbund: Ney and the French were not the only invaders feared by the remaining small states.

Now, things had changed. The Netherlands were threatened, though Lisieux’s redirection of Hoche’s seaborne invasion to Britain meant that Villeneuve’s cursory landings on the Zuider Zee soon bogged down into miserable pockets of land and islands held by the French. The Mittelbund was invaded by Ney, and with most of its army in Flanders, it was questionable whether it could hold. And Hildesheim was also at war.

Ultimately the motivations of Denmark and Saxony were not for more territorial aggrandisement: both had already obtained large spheres of influence in the former Holy Roman Empire and both had competent monarchs who knew that the trick would be in holding it for the long term, in turning it into functioning, integral territories. And both decided that, in the wake of how Der Führer’s antics were turning philosophical discussions upside down from Flensburg to Tyrol, Germania was on the rise. The Empire might be dead, but the idea of Germany had never been stronger. Bohemians were inspired by the example of a Bavarian, while Hessians (including, of course, the young soldier Pascal Schmidt) fought in the defence of Flemings. There was a commonality there which had not existed a century before. Religious and linguistic distinctions had become secondary. Ironically, this was partly due to Austria’s efforts in the latter half of the eighteenth century to turn the Empire back into a serious political entity with itself at the head.

To that end, if Denmark and Saxony were going to hold onto their new German empires, a good start would be to look at Francis II’s Austria as an example of ‘How Not To Do It’. If the spirit of Germania was burning strongly in the hearts and minds of her people, then the ruler who bowed to that will would not be thought of as some foreigner – a particular concern for Johannes of Denmark.

And so, in October 1807, as events came to a head in Britain, Saxony and Denmark declared war on the French Latin Republic and the Swabian Germanic Republic.

It was a moment of German unity, a brief candle…Pascal Schmidt’s “Moment of Hope”.



[1] In OTL Radetz’s analogue was not wounded and became one of Austria’s greatest generals.

[2] Human wave attack.

[3] Note that he was given this title after Henry IX ascended to the throne, Prince Henry William being the previous Duke of Cambridge.


Part #73: « Impossible » n'est pas français!

From - "England's Captain, France's Saviour" by Albert Harrison (Oxford University Press, 1940):

The end of the first Anglo-French phase of the Jacobin Wars in 1800 led to many officers of the Royal Navy at a loose end. Though they were not so destitute as their men, who might wind up as hopeless drunks scraped off the cobbles of Portsmouth or Southend, it was nonetheless a crippling blow to be reduced to land duty and half-pay, particularly when many had hoped for a prolonged war and prize-money. Indeed there were not a few mutterings aimed at Leo Bone, the man who had ensured that the bulk of the ancien regime’s fleet had joined with the exiled Dauphin instead of being taken by the Republican regime of Robespierre. Most Royal Navy captains, thinking of themselves rather than of the big picture and confident they were capable of defeating the French at sea (regardless of what had happened during the Second Platinean War) were resentful that Bone had denied them all the rich prizes available by taking those ships in battle, from Admiral d’Estaing’s Améthyste on down.

This was of course not the primary reason why Leo Bone decided to resign from the Royal Navy at the close of the conflict, but it may have been a contributing factor. The cutbacks to the Navy with the ascent of the Fox Ministry and its policy of rapproachment with the new Lisieux regime in France meant that even such hard patriots as Bone’s friend Horatio Nelson handed in their commissions in search of work for other powers. The number of ships on the list had shrunk and the number of captaincies with it, meaning that an officer could spend decades as a master and commander impatiently waiting for his superiors to die of old age or disease. Peace was a bad time to be in the Royal Navy, and no less so than the False Peace, as the years between 1800 and 1807 were later known.

In November 1799, his ship HMS Lewisborough damaged in the Battle of Quiberon and shipwrecked on the coast of France, Leo Bone had pulled a victory out of certain defeat by taking his crew and guns ashore and forming them into an irregular artillery regiment. In cooperation with local Chouans[1] they defeated several small groups of Republican troops and then a larger army at Angers. The event was filmish[2] enough for Bone to find headlines in both British and Royal French newspapers – the fact that Bone, like his father, was a master manipulator probably helped. The result was that in the subdued victory parades of 1800 (Louis XVII still thought of the British as having abandoned him, not entirely without reason) Leo Bone was at the forefront, and the King awarded him the title of Viscount d’Angers and command of his former crew as the core of a regiment. Most of his crew stayed on, the prospects of the peacetime Royal Navy unappealing to them.

It was here that the real genius of Leo Bone came into action. Just as his friend Nelson did in Naples, he began to use the media skill of the Royal Navy captain – carefully manipulating his reports to dominate the latest issue of the Gazette and bring him to the attention of the Admirality, for instance – to enter politics. He corresponded regularly with his father in Britain as Charles Bone rose through the Fox Ministry to eventually become Chancellor of the Exchequer. Furthermore, for an artillery colonel supposedly on patrol he seemed to spend an awful lot of time in Nantes, Royal France’s de facto capital. And it was not long before his political skill led to him ingratiating himself with King Louis XVII.

The former Dauphin was at something of a loose end as far as his naval forces were concerned. Royal France still had a disproportionately large fleet, but most of the real leaders were gone: D’Estaing had been killed in the Battle of Quiberon and the other admirals were mostly aristocratic amateurs. In 1801 the King shocked his courtiers by essentially making Leo Bone his admiral-of-the-fleet, mumbling something about an outsider having a more balanced view. It was highly controversial among the Vendeans and Bretons who made up Royal France: Bone was an Anglo-Corsican, a nominal Protestant, and his father had fought against the French in Corsica years ago in what would nowadays be called a Kleinkrieg. It would scarcely have been more surprising if Louis had elected to appoint the corpse of Jean-Baptiste Robespierre to head his army.

However, Leo Bone was soon changing the minds of the conservative Catholics ashore, if not making many friends among the resentful Royal French captains. Unexpectedly he wanted to cut the size of the navy. The Republican French didn’t have a large enough fleet to blockade them, he explained to the King, and elsewise any future war between the Frances would be fought and won or lost on land. “There is a lesson in how I won my title,” he wrote in his memoirs, later on. “A ship of the line’s broadside throws as much metal as several battlefield artillery batteries, and there is nothing to stop those guns from being used for just that purpose.”

Cuts were made and Bone indeed redeployed several ships’ guns as land-based batteries, but some of the stripped ships were instead converted to merchantmen. This was the brainchild of Paul François Jean Nicolas, the Vicomte de Barras, a nobleman from Provence who had been at sea with the French East India Company when the Revolution broke out.[3] The King appointed Barras as his Comptroller-General and, unsurprisingly, his ideas for improving Royal France’s finances focused on its colonial possessions. Barras had visited Pondicherry since the Revolutionary Leclerc had rabble-roused and set Tippoo Sultan’s Mysore on Rochambeau, and he knew the provisions of the Pitt-Rochambeau Accord well. To that end, he suggested, the Royal French should take advantage of the loyalty of their trading colonies and the temporary lack of competition with Britain to step up the level of East Indian trade and bring Indian gold flooding into Louis’ treasury.

Although Surcouf’s pirate colony in La Pérouse’s Land raided the Royal French East Indiamen along with the Dutch, this strategy was broadly successful. Barras also wanted to use Louisiana, but with France’s former holdings in Africa taken over by Britain, there was now little to trade. An exchange of raw materials for manufactured goods was set up nonetheless. Barras approved of Governor-General Ledoux’s decision to hand over Haiti to the Americans in 1805, considering that despite its plantations, the island was more trouble than it was worth. The rich sugar plantations of Guadaloupe and Martinique – held on to grimly by the French through all the wars of the eighteenth century – would have to suffice.

After initially clashing with Barras, Bone formed a political alliance with him and the two united in forcing out some of the stodgier courtiers and favourites who surrounded Louis XVII. Partly this was out of raw ambition, but it was also out of a genuine sense of responsibility for the future of Royal France – and ensuring it would have a future. Barras was loyal to his King, while Bone wanted to preserve a state in which he could see himself gaining considerable power and simultaneously intensely disliked the Revolution. It was not for the same ideological reasons as people like his friend Nelson – Bone respected the British system of parliamentary democracy but did not think it was a magic cure-all the way many Englishmen did – but because Bone was a cynic who thought the Revolution was too idealistic to succeed, even in a tyrannical mockery like Robespierre’s or Lisieux’s regimes. “That it will collapse is certain,” he wrote. “The only questions are when, why and how. If we can discern those answers, and influence events so they are the answers we need, then France may not be doomed.”

Bone looked ahead to the future. Would the Republic collapse from within into several successor states, ending the idea of France? Would several Republican factions fight a civil war? Would France be subjugated by vengeful powers after Lisieux bit off more than he could chew and lost them the war – Spain, the Italies, the Germanies, even Britain? In his former life, Bone could have cared less, but now he had an emotional investment – one which grew markedly stronger when he married Jeanette Debauvais, a local girl, in 1802. His ultimate goal was ensuring that the King was restored to the head of all France, or at least as much of it as he could salvage. In Bone’s view, the Revolution was an unwelcome intrusion into history, something that could only hurt France. In a memorable choice of metaphor, an anti-Lisieux pamphlet he penned described his feelings as: “if the nations of Europe are a group of speakers, each trying to convince you that his way is right and he deserves the leadership of the group, then France has been afflicted with a plague that makes him vomit over the others. Yes, it may discomfit them for a moment, but will it endear him to the watching world over them in the long run?”

After getting his way with the navy, Bone surprised the angry French captains by turning away from it and arguing for another project from the King: border fortresses. The guns from the ships he had obtained, he said, would be more useful there than in flying batteries. “The war will come, and it will be won or lost on land,” he said. “If we are attacked, then we can expect another nation – Britain, Flanders, whomever – to intervene to preserve the balance of power and our legitimacy, lest our fleet fall into Lisieux’s grubby little hands. But if we are to take advantage of that aid, we must first survive. As we stand, Lisieux could easily take us in a knockout blow. We need ways to hold him off, to preserve a Royal France until he is defeated. Otherwise we will be lost to the Republic and our fleet and our colonies will be gobbled up by the powers in a feeding frenzy just like that taking place in Germany.” He referred to the mediatisation in strikingly similar terms to his contemporary, Pascal Schmidt.

By this point Bone was very much a favourite of the King’s. He had briefly aligned with a court faction, surprising everyone once more, to recommend that the King marry the daughter of the Duke of Rohan. This tied him more firmly to the lands of Royal France, rather than the more usual practice of marrying a foreign princess to try and build alliances: in Bone’s view this would simply invite an invasion by Lisieux before they were ready to resist him. For his part, the King (now in his fifties) still mourned for his wife Marie-Antoinette and their lost children, executed by the Republic, and would have preferred not to marry. But the needs of the state came first, and he needed an heir. Thus, the young Queen Hélène gave birth to a son in late 1804. In contrast to tradition, the King decided not to name him Louis, on the grounds that they would achieve nothing by blindly holding to everything the ancien regime stood for. “If the old ways always worked,” he argued, “we would not be in this unhappy situation to start with.” That was not a popular position to take with the conservative Vendeans, but nonetheless the baby was named Charles Louis Philippe, to become the future Charles X. The royal marriage was fairly unhappy, Hélène distressed by her moody, older suitor, but it had achieved its aims and that was what was important.

Fresh from this triumph, Bone – supported by Barras – was successful in obtaining royal permission for his fort-building programme. This he engaged in with such enthusiasm that his political enemies called him “Le petit Vauban”. In truth they had trouble coming up with nicknames that kept up with his meteoric career, as he shifted from one end of Royal French affairs to the other. It was about this time that his supporters started calling him by a Frenchified version of his original Corsican name – once Napoleone Buonaparte, then Leo Bone, he would now become Napoléon Bonaparte. The Man of Three Names was born.

What objections were raised to Bone’s fortification plan centred around the idea that this would spark tensions with Lisieux and lead to the feared invasion. Bone had argued that it was a risk they had to take, and there could never be a guarantee of safety if they did not take measures to prevent a swift conquest by the Republicans. In the event, the projected dangers did not occur, albeit for reasons neither Bone nor his enemies could have predicted. Lisieux had long since blocked anyone except army units from coming near to the border with Royal France out of his fiction that those provinces were “under military administration” and civilians should stay out lest they be contaminated by the remnants of revolutionary ideas. His propaganda was so detailed, however, that some commentators claim that he himself began to forget Royal France existed. In any case, he did not have informants in place and Bone’s forts were far enough behind the border for them not to be visible by the Republican patrols. Aside from a few rumours (and the unavoidable knowledge that the port cities’ walls were being strengthened) the Republic had little idea of what was going on.

By 1806 Bone had effectively become Louis XVII’s prime minister, a finger in every pie, whether it be the navy, the army, or the civilian administration. In view of his beliefs about having to change the old ways to prevent another Revolution, the King experimented with some moderate form of representation of the people, a Grand-Parlement as he termed it. Barras was the constitutional architect of this, but Bone also contributed, his father’s experience giving him some insight into what worked (and what didn’t) in the British model that they could import. The first trial elections, which worked under rules giving more votes to nobles and churchmen than those commoners who could vote (to compensate for the fact that there was now only one Estate) produced a predictably conservative assembly which nonetheless led to some strange results – for example, laws defending the status of the Breton language.

As is often the case, the Royal French had been waiting for the “inevitable” invasion by Lisieux for so long that when it finally came, in 1807, they were somewhat complacent. Simultaneously with Hoche’s attack on England and Boulanger’s on Flanders, General Devilliers, veteran of the Spanish campaign, led seven regiments to invade the rebel provinces to the west and finally bring them back under control. This was the final culmination of the Revolution, the entire reason behind why France’s borders had to be secured according to Lisieux’s plan. With this, all the French-speakers of Europe would be united as the perfect core of Lisieux’s great Latin Democracy that would rule the world by virtue of their racial superiority.

The invasion came as a sufficient shock, despite the Royal French having a better spy network in the Republic than vice-versa, that Devilliers eventually went unopposed and began to think that the Royalists would be a pushover. Then he ran into Bone’s fortresses. They were built on similar lines to those in Flanders, but more modern, and had to cover a smaller border, so there could be more of them. Devilliers examined whether he could bypass them, observed that the major roads were all covered by fire patterns and not even his steam tractor-pulled supply carts could make it over land. He knew that he had to destroy at least a few of those forts. So up came the steam artillery and the sieges began.

Devilliers had numbers, and Lisieux might send more. He might be able to bring Royal France down.

But the invasion had stalled. Royal France survived for the moment. And, as Bone had foreseen, that was all that mattered….in the long run.






[1] Royalist rebels.

[2] Cinematic.

[3] OTL Barras was indeed with the FEIC in India, but was captured during the Second Anglo-Mysore War (which was essentially the Indian front of the American Revolutionary War) and decided to return to France a few years later, eventually becoming the leader of the Revolutionary Directory. In TTL there is no war at that point and Barras remained with the FEIC, arising to a strong position under Rochambeau.


Part #74: To Loose the Fateful Lightning

“A common misconception is that the Royal Navy fought particularly fiercely in the Third Platinean War out of vengeance for what was happening to Great Britain while her defenders were caught engaged in a foreign war far away. This is nonsense, because the facts of the French invasion did not reach the fleet until the naval portions of the war were long over. Nonetheless, looking at events, it is easy to see how such a view arose…”

– Admiral Sir Brian Collingwood, Found Wanting? The Royal Navy, 1780-1810 (published in 1895)​

*

From – “The Third Platinean War” by Dr Thierry Gaston de Connarceux (1945 – English translation) :

The British fleet – or perhaps a better term in retrospect is Anglo-American, considering the makeup of much of its crews – that fought in the Third Platinean War was a hodgepodge thrown together from several fleets by the Admiral of the Fleet, Admiral Sir Humphry Pellew (who would die from a sudden illness months later, leading to Sausmarez taking his place). The bulk of the force was made up of the former American and Mediterranean Squadrons combined, while more minor flotillas were detached from the Home Fleet to take over their former duties – ultimately, of course, fatally weakening the remaining Home Fleet when the time came for Lisieux to launch his Great Crab.

There was a shortage of good commanders in the Royal Navy, the result of so many leaving the service after the accession of Fox as Prime Minister and the ensuing cutbacks. Consider the three British fleets that had participated in the Seigneur Offensive of 1799. Of their commanders, Admiral Duncan was dead and Commodores Nelson and Bone had both left for foreign service, Neapolitan and Royal French respectively. The overall commander of that force, Admiral Sir William Byng, was persuaded out of retirement to take command of the new fleet that would avenge the Cherry Massacre.

Byng was elderly but still had his wits about him, and scorning the stodgy conservatives who made up much of the Admiralty, promoted two relatively young post-captains to commodore with the help of two of his old friends, who agreed to withdraw from the service and free up the places necessary on the list. These two were John “Black Jack” Harrison, known for the fierce loyalty he paradoxically commanded from his men despite his filthy temper and insistence upon iron discipline, and Christopher “Yankee Chris” Perry, only the second American-born officer to achieve flag rank and the first to identify as American. Admiral Byng was careful to play up the participation of both sailors and troops from the Empire of North America in the venture: like all Royal Navy career men, he was a skilled publicist and knew the importance of presenting the facts properly in his dispatches. Admiral Pellew had informed him that the war was still somewhat controversial in the ENA (at least among the educated classes, if not the commoners outraged by the Cherry Massacre) and it was essential that “American” successes be promoted in order to make Imperial politicians latch onto them as something to be proud of. Otherwise, they risked a messy withdrawal and a breakdown of the joint command which the Royal Navy – in contrast to the Army – had always fought to maintain in the face of pressure to grant full autonomy to the American Squadron.

The Royal Navy task force assembled in Falkland’s Islands in April 1806, capturing the cursory Meridian garrison that was the legacy of the infamous Alejandro Mendez. Byng, who had shepherded countless troopships across the Atlantic and knew from the Battle of Wight how vulnerable they could be, decided that they could not be risked in open combat with the Meridians: it would be particularly painful in the papers if British and American redcoats had been transported for thousands of miles only to drown at the last hurdle. Besides, after the long journey many of the troops were suffering from the usual round of accidents, disease and malaise. To that end, Byng decided to disembark most of his troops on the Falklands and hide the troopships up the Choiseul Sound, detaching a few brigs and a frigate to guard them against opportunistic Meridian incursion. After this was accomplished, he then divided his fleet into three parts under Harrison, Perry and himself, and sent them “a-huntin’ for the silvermen” as the great Carolinian renaissance man, George Washington Allston, put it in his seminal Ballad of the Deeps, written in the style of an uneducated American sailor reminiscing about his experiences during the war.[1]

President-General Castelli’s plan to assemble a fleet and land troops in Mexico had not been halted due to the Cherry Incident sparking war with Britain and America; in many ways it had already gained its own momentum, and Castelli still held out hope that the situation could be resolved peacefully. Indeed there may have been some truth to this, but he made the mistake of negotiating solely with London, which put a substantial additional delay on the time it took for diplomatic packages to travel there and back. Perhaps Castelli thought Fox’s government would be more amenable to peace than the new Hamilton ministry in Fredericksburg, but it seems more likely that he simply enjoyed a contempt for the ENA, believing the Americans to be simple stooges and servants of the British, not unlike the Empire of the Indies he sought to destroy. This was a mistake.

Because of this, Byng’s triple force actually had some trouble in finding any Meridian ships to fight. Eventually a small flotilla of the U.P. Armada was sighted off the Valdes peninsula (enroute to rounding the Horn and joining up with Admiral Ramírez’s main fleet in the Pacific) and Admiral Perry successfully surrounded, trapped and pounded it using tactics clearly derived from study of Nelson and Bone’s earlier treatises – not that the stodgy Admiralty would admit it, of course. Byng could not have asked for a better headline: the Americans had won themselves a victory, and suddenly everyone in Fredericksburg was falling over themselves to praise Perry and his men, condemn the Meridians, and generally hope everyone forgot their earlier criticism of the war. This strengthened Hamilton’s position and (among other issues, including a minor financial scandal) led to James Madison resigning as Leader of the Opposition after only a few months. He was replaced by the redoubtable John Adair, one of the two MCPs for Transylvania, who fought to hold the Constitutionalist Party together in the wake of tensions over Carolina’s ambitions for Hispaniola and Great Britain’s refusal to countenance them.

After the initial victory at the Battle of Valdes in June 1806, Byng left Perry’s fleet on station to facilitate a mass landing of troops – now rested and trained for several months on the Falklands, albeit still mostly subsiding off ships’ stores thanks to the bleakness of those isles – up the River Plate. Perry chose to leave a significant garrison force on the Falklands, larger than the token ones that had been customary before (such as the Meridians’), which ultimately laid the foundations for the Fort Perry naval base and the ensuing long-lasting tensions with the UPSA.

Meanwhile, Byng and Harrison’s portions of the fleet rounded the Horn and went after the main U.P. Armada force. Ramírez had already successfully defeated the remaining New Spanish ships under Admiral Juan Patricio Ruiz y Díaz, the best commander the exilic Spaniards could field, at the Battle of Cocos in April of that year. Now, the New Spanish coastline defenseless, Ramírez escorted Castelli’s famous troopship force to land an army under General Hector Fernández, a native of Santiago de Chile. At the same time, Marshal Pichegru continued his slow but steady advance into New Granada as the outnumbered New Granadine commander, Bernardo O’Higgins, did his best to slow him down.

Approximately fifteen thousand troops were landed near Acapulco in the first wave (including Fernández) upon which Ramírez turned around and returned to Lima in order to pick up the next force assembling there. When he arrived in late August, it was to find that the army at Lima simply did not exist: it had been dispersed by regional commanders in panic after the news had spread like wildfire that a British fleet had burned the UPSA’s Pacific naval base at Valdivia and was now performing random amphibious descents up and down the coast, raiding villages and stirring up terror. This was a doctrine that had been developed for the war with Robespierre’s Republic but which had not been implemented at the time: a tactic for use against an enemy with little naval strength but a formidable army that made it hard to attack him directly. Spread the terror and it’ll force him to spread his army thin to try and defend against the arbitrary attacks, particularly if he commands a democratic state like the UPSA in which the will of the people is always at the back of his mind.

Ramírez realised that the only way to salvage the situation was to try and take on the Royal Navy himself and destroy Byng’s force or at least make it retreat. Though outnumbered, he recognised that the British were on the end of a very long supply line and if he wounded them sufficiently he would force them to round the Horn once more – a difficult prospect at the best of times – for resupply and repairs, buying time which might save the UPSA. To that end, Ramírez attacked Byng’s fleet in harbour at Valvidia in October, pulling off a surprise attack worthy of Horatio Nelson. Several British ships were sunk, including Byng’s flagship Royal Frederick (though the Admiral was evacuated by jolly-boat) but in the moment of Ramírez’s triumph, Black Jack Harrison’s fleet appeared on the horizon and the U.P. Armada was trapped between the two British forces and pounded to pieces, ending any chance of Fernández’s troops in Mexico being reinforced.

Meanwhile on the Atlantic coast, Perry achieved a landing of American troops under General Andrew Clinton, former deputy to Isaac Wayne II who felt that the fiasco in Haiti had to urgently be eclipsed by successes in this conflict for the American portions of the Army not to become embarrassed and mocked. Furthermore, he was treading in the footsteps of Mariott Arbuthnot and George Washington by leading troops to occupy the River Plate. It was to be hoped that he could imitate the latter, not the former.

Clinton’s task was certainly much more difficult than his predecessors; recognising the avenue of attack, the Meridians had built several large forts to guard the Plate from invasion, and Perry lost several ships in neutralising them, often by night descents led by Royal Marines. In fact, it is probable that the Americans could have been driven off by the Meridian defences were it not for the fact of the neutral Portuguese-Brazilian possession of the northern bank, allowing Perry to hug that in places and bypass Meridian forts. This obvious flaw led to much anger later on among the Meridians and the idea that possession of the entire River Plate basin was essential to preserve the nation.

The American troops began landing in September and had assembled completely by the end of October. Most of the UPSA’s Fuerzas Armadas had already been directed to either the war in Peru or the mission to Mexico, but Castelli ordered what regiments and militia remained to assemble in order to defend Buenos Aires. In November General Clinton attempted to attack Buenos Aires and was initially repulsed by the ramshackle Meridian troops led by General Miguel Bautista, ironically a Lower Peruvian by birth. As the Meridians celebrated their victory, however, Clinton decided that all was not lost. He encamped his troops on the delta of the Paraná River north of Buenos Aires and they wintered there. This combined with Perry’s dominance of the sea meant that Buenos Aires was virtually cut off from resupply, and by early 1807 the city was starving. Furthermore, drunk by their early victory, Castelli and the other political leaders had dismissed calls to evacuate the city by road as cowardice.

And it was then, even as the impossible news filtered down through the ranks that England was invaded, that the Third Platinean War was decided.






[1] Basically, think Rudyard Kipling.



Part #75: The Battle of Britain

“We shall not flag or fail. Nor shall we rush in as fools and throw away our liberty out of reasonless outrage, for that is the path of the enemy. My illustrious ancestor’s master King William once said that there is one way never to see the country come to ruin, and that is to die in the last ditch.

I, on the other hand, intend to make the Frenchman die in it.”

– John Spencer-Churchill, 5th Duke of Marlborough​

*

From – “Messiah or Monster? – The Life of John Spencer-Churchill” by Dr Rowland Patterson (Oxford University Press, 1961):

Students of the turbulent latter stages of the Jacobin Wars, whether inhabitants of our own island or the continent, often remark on the way that Churchill seemed to emerge from nowhere as the Kingdom’s saviour, at least according to the Whiggish view. True, as the great-great-grandson of John Churchill the First Duke of Marlborough, he came from a distinguished lineage, but one which had produced little of note since that great general of the First War of Supremacy.[1] When Churchill – then the Marquess of Blandford, while his father lived – was growing up in the 1770s and 80s, all the Marlboroughs possessed was Blenheim Palace and mounting debts from high living and foolish investments. His father, George Spencer the 4th Duke, proceeded to deepen the problem further when he lost a large sum in the Africa Bubble scandal that ultimately led to the (temporary) political downfall of the Marquess of Rockingham in 1782. Put under undue strain by the tough financial decisions following in order that the family might survive without being stripped to the bone, Spencer died just two years later, leaving John to inherit the dukedom – and all of its problems.

One of the new Duke’s first acts was to change his name to the double-barrelled Spencer-Churchill, evoking his famous ancestor, and “Churchill” is generally the name by which history has recorded him, much as the first Duke of Mornington is “Wesley”. Both of these remarkable men enjoyed considerable popularity with the common folk at the concomitant expense of being held under suspicion by their fellow peers, particularly those still in possession of intact fortunes, and the way they were known by their surnames reflects this populist touch.

It is also true that much of Churchill’s life was very much of the ordinary. In his youth he had particularly admired his ancestor the general, and entertained dreams of taking service – not with the British Army, for like many he misread the mood of the late 1780s as heralding an era of peace, with a France too bankrupt and exhausted to fund another great European war. Instead, the boy and young man envisaged himself becoming a mercenary in service of one of the German states, probably Saxony if Hanover remained tied to a British neutrality policy, for he saw the defeat of Prussia and the temporary return to Austrian hopes of making the Empire an entity worth the name once again as a Catholic threat to free Protestant nations.

This idealistic vision was shattered with his father’s death and Churchill, as his only son, being saddled with all the problems of his house. Although naturally such a figure as this man has had every aspect of his life scrutinised with eyes both learned and yet narrowed with bias, most commentators agree – however grudgingly – that Churchill managed the finances fairly well, not so much by his own ability as by knowing which men to pick as advisors. As Duke he also had the option of sitting in the House of Lords, which did not appeal to him, not being much of a political animal. However with the French Revolution of 1794, panic and paranoia among British society led to a general call for all conservative peers (the vast majority) to flock to Westminster in order to block any enterprisingly copycat legislation on behalf of the Portland-Burke Ministry – this being before Burke, surprising many of his like-minded colleagues, summarily rejected the principles of the Revolution.

Churchill was thus able to stay away from Parliament for several more years, before once again being called upon in 1799 by his political allies – many of whom were also men he had to keep friendly in order to arrange the financial deals he was working to dig himself out of debt – to try and bring down the Rockingham Ministry. As history records, this succeeded rather too well and Rockingham died from overwork while attempting to forestall such an attempt. Ironically this ultimately led to the premiership of Charles James Fox, a far more radical figure. This coupled to the accession of Prince Henry William as Henry IX, a like-minded king, meant Churchill did the closest that a peer could come to resigning his seat without an act of attainder, publicly swearing off all involvement with Parliament. “Any manner of government, any constitution knowing liberty of any kind that allows such men to achieve power is intolerable,” he wrote daringly, in a letter counter-signed by many other Tory peers. “What would our forefathers think of such men? What would King William think to know that his Protestant Religion and the Liberty of England were cast aside so scornfully by those who would shake the hands of enemies of the realm and then smile weakly as they instead grasped our throats? It is unconsciable. Therefore, I say to this institution, not goodbye, not farewell, and certainly not au revoir (as they would doubtless prefer), but simply: I am leaving, and I am not coming back.”

The Churchill Letter, as it has retrospectively been known (at the time it was chiefly attached to the more senior and prominent peer who delivered the letter, Andrew Percy the Duke of Northumberland) scandalised political circles at the time, in particular for the fact that ‘such men’ could be read not simply to refer to Fox and his political allies but also King Henry himself. Some of the peers who signed the letter later attempted to go back on their word when it slowly emerged that the Fox Ministry would not crash and burn as they had predicted, but would remain propped up by the progressive Liberal wing of the Whigs under Richard Burke as the Reform Coalition. Churchill, however, had no time for any of this and retired to Blenheim Palace, gradually improving his family’s situation for his children and occasionally issuing a political diatribe from his acid pen, usually under the pen name A Gentleman. Most commentators, however, knew exactly who the Gentleman was. Some moderate Liberals of Burke’s faction, halfway between Fox’s idealistic Radicals and curmudgeonly Tories and likeminded Whigs such as Churchill, spoke of the Gentleman as “England’s Lisieux”, and noted that, much like l’Administrateur, the Gentleman did not seem to realise that he could not change the nature of reality just by rewriting his version of events. “It matters little what the political ends of such a writer are: his method shows his madness,” said Frederick Dundas, and Charles Bone added “Both of them seem equally enthusiastic about the persecution of the Catholic faith.”

Thus Churchill vanished from history, until the time of crisis came with the invasion of England in 1807. By this point Churchill had mended as much of his financial troubles as he was likely to in his lifetime, had three sons, and in inspiring them with stories had begun to relive his own youthful ambitions, becoming Colonel of the Oxfordshire Yeomanry and cultivating friendships with the leaders of the local regular regiments. Unlike many peers leading yeoman units, who were generally convinced that they were all the next Alexander and the rules and regulations of the redcoats merely got in the way, Churchill was (uncharacteristically for him) quite humble and respectful of the regular army, if occasionally somewhat resentful at the fact that they had had the exotic adventures that he had always desired.

One important link he made was with Colonel Douglas Moore, commander of the 54th (Oxfordshire) Regiment of Foot, whose home depot was not far from Woodstock. At first the two might seem unlikely friends. Moore was the younger brother of Sir John Moore, a noted innovator in military tactics (while Churchill, though this is often overlooked by biographers, was at first crustily conservative in his military thinking, overly reliant on both textbooks and the now obsolete brilliance of the ancestor he hero-worshipped). He had also fought alongside Rochambeau’s Royal French in India, being present at the storming of Seringapatam in 1801, and inheriting his command of the regiment after the former colonel was killed by a Mysorean rocket in the battle. In contrast to Churchill’s reflexively anti-Papist attitudes, Moore argued that, in the face of the bravery he had witnessed from the Royal French, in the current world situation it was better for ‘all men of Christian character’ to hang together against ‘the heathen foe, the foremost personification of which is not the Hindoo, nor the Mussulman, nor even the Chinee, but rather the Jacobin’. “And his only begotten son, Mister Fox,” Churchill retorted, but nonetheless seemed thoughtful.

Around 1804 or so the friendship between the two, though definitely of the vitriolic and combative kind, was strong enough that Churchill decided to have his own yeomanry benefit from being trained alongside the 54th. There were naturally tensions over this, not least because no-one expected the yeomanry ever to actually be called out, particularly in sleepy Oxfordshire, and the men – mostly minor nobles and fifth sons doing it for a lark – resented being trained alongside the grizzled, tanned veterans of the 54th, many of whom still espoused the virtues of Indian cuisine and other such heathen notions. Churchill nonetheless put his foot down, revealing for perhaps the first time both his formidable temper and confrontational leadership style, and got his way. By 1807, the Oxfordshire Yeomanry was considered the finest in the country, to the extent that the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports himself travelled all the way to the county to observe Churchill’s methods in order to apply them to his own men. Sadly, the elderly Earl of Tankerville died not long after his return, and his replacement as Lord Warden was far less forward-thinking; if those ideas had been taken on board, it is certainly arguable that the Muster of the Ports might have been able to do more against Modigliani’s onslaught.

Even as 1807 dawned, Churchill – like the vast majority of his contemporaries – did not see a French invasion at all likely. Instead he encouraged such intensive militia training with the claim that England might face revolution from within, revolution which would have to be bloodily put down. “Some may believe that we lie safe from a Robespierre because a Lisieux sits in Ten Downing Street,” wrote A Concerned Gentleman, “but that makes Cromwellian acts more likely, not less.” It is certainly nothing more than the smoke and mirrors of Whiggish iconography to claim that Churchill really had any prophetic notion of a French invasion. It is only his response to this attack which is open to analysis.

When the shocking news came of the fall of London to the lightning attack, Churchill – like local peers and magnates all across the South of England – faced a terrible choice. Should they hold firm and fear that the French army – whose numbers were still unknown – would pick off each isolated, unorganised county yeomanry and local regiments one at a time? Or should they abandon their homes, their possessions, perhaps even their families and flee northward to Fort Rockingham, there to reconstitute the Government and make a more organised stand?

Churchill, it is said, spent no more than five minutes thought before concluding that the second choice was the right one – no, not the right one, but the only one. “We gain nothing to throw our lives away as such,” he told Moore, who was edging towards making a stand. “The French outnumber us. They are vile but that does not mean they cannot fight: your brother knows that all too well, sir. They will surround us, and they will kill us. Mayhaps, happily we shall kill some of them as well. It makes no difference. Enough will remain to swarm over our land and bring wrack and ruin. All that will result from a stand is perhaps an epic poem, and what worth is that if no civilised country remains that can read it?

“No, sir: we must make our stand elsewhere. The fate of this blessed plot stands upon a knife’s edge, and with it the fate of the world itself. To throw away our lives for nothing, when our few men might tip the balance of the greater army with which we must ultimately face the enemy would not simply be inglorious treachery to our happy nation, but to all that is good and civilised within the race of Man. If we are to do so, we should count ourself lucky if history merely forgets us, rather than reviling us as we would deserve.

“So, Colonel: what shall it be? As always, I await your command.”

Naturally, Moore was rather convinced by Churchill’s command of oratory, and no matter the controversy – no matter how betrayed Oxonians, after all this talk of how superb their defenders were, found themselves being abandoned and openly spat on the marching redcoats’ shoes in the street – no matter the cost, the 54th marched northwards, meeting the Great North Road and on to Doncaster. And with them came the Oxfordshire yeomanry, led by Churchill himself.

The decisive action meant that they happened to be the first major army group from the south to reach Fort Rockingham after those escorting the surviving parliamentarians. And thus the pivot of destiny turned on so small a thing…




From – “Albion’s Peril: The Invasion of England” by Sir Hubert Pendleton, 1951:

…constitutional situation after the Fall of London was highly unclear and unprecedented. With the death of the King, his heir safe and unambiguous but out of reach in the Empire of North America, and the death of the Prime Minister and much of Parliament, who exactly was leading what was left of the Kingdom of Great Britain was very much open to debate.

The provision of Fort Rockingham, and the fact that Richard Burke reached it within 48 hours of leaving London after using several teams of horses,[2] was probably responsible for the fact that the Kingdom did not immediately fragment or fall under a military dictatorship. Though only part of Parliament survived, enough elected MPs were around to provide at least the impression of a constitutionally appropriate government, and enough peers to make up a Privy Council – which, in situations such as this, received the devolved power of the monarch until he could be crowned.

Burke was an astute politician, but was woefully unsuited for such a direct leadership role: he could have quite happily have followed in his father’s footsteps and run a war a long way away with ships and funding European allies, but the idea of having Frenchmen on British soil, breathing down his neck, was simply one he found it difficult to wrap his head around. Much of the parliamentarians and other great men of the kingdom were in shock. Oh, the idea of a French invasion had been mooted and speculated about before, usually in concert with the Jacobites in the last century, but confronting the reality was very different. The usual rhetoric about standing tall on the impermeable island meant little when miles upon miles of British soil had already been given up to the terrifying enemy by default.

Into this argumentative power vacuum stepped the Duke of Marlborough, John Spencer-Churchill. Mutually disliked and shunned by Parliament during the Fox years, for better or for worse his dark predictions now seemed vindicated. Churchill stepped up to the wicket[3] and, by virtue of charisma and a new kind of political rhetoric, managed to convince enough people to restore the office of Regent and Lord Protector, and then installed himself in it. In the wake of the epic failure of Fox’s policy, an uncertain British people were willing to turn to any kind of government providing it was clear, definite and decisive. Churchill’s reactionary Toryism seemed as good as any.

The rump Parliament, usually meeting in Doncaster’s Mansion-house, naturally had a conservative bent as it was Fox’s allies who had mostly stayed behind in London, unable to countenance that such a French invasion was taking place. Although Burke became Prime Minister by default of a national government, his former Liberal bloc was diluted by the large number of Tories and conservative Whigs – in opposition for decades – to suddenly find themselves in possession of power. Furthermore, even the more liberal members of Parliament had been shocked by the invasion into hasty action, with the result that a generally authoritarian series of policies – usually intended to curb the kind of fragmentation that had been feared, along with ‘treasonous and collaborationist activities’ – were swiftly passed, followed by calls for all the army regiments in the Kingdom to leave their depots and reassemble in southern Yorkshire and northern Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, the region known in ancient times as Southumbria. Churchill’s plan was simple: he would gather together all the military force in Great Britain and then throw it at the French, trusting in the tactical skill of men like Douglas Moore to turn this basic strategy into a war-winning move. As before, his skill was not in being a great strategist himself, but in choosing men who were.

Burke considered Churchill’s plan to be an audaciously risky gamble, but reluctantly accepted that the alternative of sending troops out piecemeal would only result in them being annihilated one regiment at a time by the numerically superior French. Far more controversial was the fact that this effectively abandoned half of England to the French, leading to what is sometimes known as the Harrying of the South, as Modigliani’s men turned to la maraude in order to facilitate their advance north and west into the kingdom. In this dark period, though it lasted only a few months compared to the years of suffering much of Europe went through, English Kleinkriegers arose in imitation of their German, Spanish and Italian counterparts, making raids and attacks on Modigliani’s forces. In exchange, English towns and villages met with the same brutal treatment that had scarred Bavaria, though not even Modigliani ever matched Lascelles’ excesses.

Stories of the terror behind the enemy lines naturally provoked action. The Earl de la Warr, Michael Sackville-West, was roused as one half of the French force, led by General Gabin, advanced through Hertfordshire. De la Warr, like many in the nobility, was an alumnus of Cambridge University and found the thought of the French torching such a house of learning to be so ghastly that it was worth taking action over. As Colonel of the 14th (Bedfordshire) Regiment of Foot, he did exactly what Churchill had counselled against and threw the unprepared regiment into a defence of the city, even as the 30th (Cambridgeshire) themselves sullenly withdrew. Gabin’s army annihilated de la Warr’s at the Battle of Cambridge on May 18th and then indeed laid waste to the city, ironically being drawn to the place when the small, off the main roads university town would otherwise not have taken much notice. Though many records and valuable documents were destroyed, however, and the city looted, Cambridge escaped the kind of devastation de la Warr had feared: Gabin’s men were somewhat more disciplined than Modigliani’s (who were, meanwhile, out to the southeast burning Maidstone after routing the Duke of York’s circumvented force) and, being in the middle of the Fens, the city was too soggy to burn. From this we receive the modern phrase ‘to do a Delaware’, meaning of course to rush in out of emotion and in the end only quicken the fate you feared – an unflattering appellation which the eponymous province of the Confederation of Virginia has always understandably rather resented.

This incident prompted Sir Lyell Brotherford, the previously indecisive colonel of the 56th (West Norfolk) Regiment of Foot, to approach his patron the Bishop and Count Palatine of Ely (Philip Matthews) and inform him that he was withdrawing his troops to Fort Rockingham, as Churchill’s command declared. Matthews’ response was to calmly take out a pistol and shoot him dead. After Brotherford’s major was elevated in response to his superior’s “unfortunate fatal aneurysm”, Matthews ordered the dismantling of Cornelius Vermuyden’s works: fenlanders and soldiers worked alongside each other to block up the Bedford Rivers and disable the windmill pumps, leading to the rapid re-flooding of the Fens. This did untold economic damage and covered much reclaimed land, but also restored the boundaries of the Isle of Ely and provided the ultimate defence of the realm against Gabin’s French, who upon being confronted with this to the north and the equally impassable Norfolk Broads to the east, were forced to halt their advance and focus on securing Suffolk and Essex. Matthews’ unorthodox plan made him something of a cult hero and he was identified with the old Lincolnshire legend of the Tiddy Mun, the bog spirit who controlled the fens and had attacked the Dutch when they had drained them before…


From – “War in the Channel – How the War was Won” by Joseph K. van Staten (Royal New York Press, 1968)

The nature of the war changed when Admiral Jervis’ Mediterranean Fleet assembled at the Channel Islands and, in cooperation with elements of the Royal French Navy that Leo Bone had maintained, attacked the French steam fleet resupplying the invasion force in the Channel. The French had already suffered some losses after Admiral Parker’s four ships of the line had defeated Villeneuve off the coast of the Netherlands and returned to destroy several transports before being smashed to pieces by the huge bow guns of the Surcouf-class steam-galleys. Now, however, they faced a much larger fleet. For two days, the British and Royal French scoured the channel. Black Jack Jervis, always known for his temper, was now the spirit of rage incarnate out of shame and frustration that the Royal Navy had failed in England’s hour of need, and that fury drove him to give no quarter against the Republican French – not that any was asked for. The crux of this came when Jervis, in the face of shouted down protests from his helmsman, personally steered his flagship HMS Saturn to ram a damaged Republican steam-galley and crush the smaller ship under her keel, no matter what damage this did to the hull.

The tide changed again in favour of the Republicans with a lull in the wind on 2nd June and for a time the British and Royal French sail fleets were sitting ducks, with Jervis pacing in apoplectic rage with the knowledge that his second largest ship, Aegyptus, had been helplessly immobilised by the lack of wind as she was chewed to pieces by the steam-galleys’ guns. Then the French’s only remaining rocket-ship, La Tempête, returned from up the Thames to take on the Saturn as her sister ship had the Mirabilis.

But the allies were saved with the implausibly filmish appearance, finally sallying forth from Lowestoft after several initial problems and delays, of Britain’s own experimental steam-fleet. The Whistler ships were under the command of Commodore Frederick Keppel, grandson of the disgraced Admiral Augustus Keppel who had lost the Battle of Trafalgar in 1783, finally ready to restore his family’s honour. They were undeniably less advanced than the refined French Surcouf class, but the Republicans were now damaged and suffering from having been continuously in the choppy Channel (a far cry from the Mediterranean for which they had been designed) for months on end. Not a few ships had been lost simply to being overturned. Boilers had burst from long-term use. La Manche reared her treacherous head.

And so Keppel charged into battle and for the first time, the Republican French faced an enemy who had duplicated their innovations. Lepelley’s flagship L’Otarie was one of the first ships to succumb to the British – ironically simply from being boarded, in tactics not unlike those that had been used by the original galleys in classical antiquity. Admiral Fabien Lepelley died ignominiously on some anonymous Royal Marine’s bayonet, and with his loss the Republican fleet – highly dependent on its system of centralised orders from the flagship via flags and semaphore – came apart. Admiral Surcouf was also present, but on the edge of the battle, and made the decision to make a ‘tactical withdrawal’ when Keppel brought up HMS Dragon and it turned out that the Royal Navy had also observed their former captain Horatio Nelson’s use of the weapon in the attack on Mahon. The rocket attack not only fired two more Republican galleys but heralded the return of the wind, and with the sail fleets ready once more, the great fleet that had done the impossible and invaded Britain was virtually annihilated.

Surcouf, for his part, aped Leo Bone in fleeing the battle up the Solent while pursued by one of Keppel’s ships, HMS Magician. Surcouf maintained the tactical (if not strategic) skill which had made his legend and managed to sink the Magician, but not before suffering damage to his vessel Consul. Taking on water, again like Leo Bone he drove the ship upon Old Harry’s Rocks near Poole, then evacuated his men to the mainland. Given that this territory was never within the grasp of the English Germanic Republic, exactly how Surcouf managed to survive and later pop up again elsewhere is unknown – some have even suggested the Crimson Avenger as an explanation, and in truth the situation is inexplicable enough for even that to become plausible…


From – “Albion’s Peril: The Invasion of England” by Sir Hubert Pendleton, 1951:

…Churchill’s possibly hopeless mission was redefined in early June 1807, as the advance of the French Republican armies of the English Germanic Republic slowly ground to a halt from lack of resupply and struggling to hold down so much restive territory. The Republic at its maximum extent was thus bounded by the Fens in the north, northern East Anglia in the east, and a line drawn approximately from Bedford through Reading down to Chichester. Although the French sacked Portsmouth, their supply line were too long to hold onto the strategic port for long, and fortunately for Churchill’s reputation, they never managed to send more than the occasional questing raid in the direction of defenceless Oxford.

June however also brought rumours of a new army having landed at Liverpool and marching inland. Those fears were doubled when the rumours spoke of the army being not French, but Irish. The First Glorious Revolution, more than a century before, had been sparked partially thanks to rumours that the King had assembled an army of Papist Irish mercenaries and they were about to march on London. Now it seemed the reality was come.

At about this time, and perhaps it is no coincidence, Edinburgh rose up in the only real rebellion of the type Churchill had feared. Scotland’s radicals had always been sidelined, even during the Fox Ministry, and now saw this potentially fatal crippling of England as their moment to act. The short-lived Scottish Celtic Republic, essentially only ever consisting of the city and its environs, was a strange mishmash of the romantic traditionalists who had supported the Jacobites a couple of generations ago and radical extremists such as Thomas Muir, who ended up as Consul of the Republic for about three weeks before being hanged, drawn and quartered. Both sides seemed more concerned about Scottish independence and kicking England while she was down than any coherent ideology, but Churchill naturally painted them as dyed-in-the-wool atheist Jacobin baby-eating traitors, and – unwilling to spare regular line troops – unleashed his own elite Oxfordshire Yeomanry under the command of his eldest son Joshua, who rapidly earned the enmity of Scots and the nickname “Wullie IV come again”.[4]

However, now it seemed as though everything would become irrelevant thanks to this new Irish menace. Churchill hastily assembled the troops under his generals, and several regiments were already moving to take position on the strategic Emley Moor to block the attack from Liverpool (even as the men of northern Lincolnshire began to contemplate re-flooding the Isle of Axholme as their southern counterparts had with Ely) when a messenger arrived.

Not just a messenger – Douglas Moore laughed in surprised joy – but his brother Sir John Moore, smiling in triumph. Churchill was astounded and demanded an explanation.

It turned out that the army was indeed mostly Irish, and indeed partly Papist, but all of it was under the command of none other than Richard Wesley, Duke of Mornington and Lord Deputy of the Kingdom of Ireland. It was a testament to Wesley’s hardened skill in governance that he could afford to leave the kingdom as it was and withdraw almost all its troops to defend the nation in which she sat in – often unhappy – personal union. It was also, as the flabberghasted Churchill would later admit, the beginning of the end of Anglo-Irish (and Scots-Irish) enmity. In the face of what followed, what had come before seemed like minor squabbles, childish disputes, to be brushed over.

Furthermore, the Irish were not the only ones there. Wesley had brought with him the 79th (New York) Regiment of Foot, along with their legendary sharpshooter Captain James Roosevelt, and the newly-arrived 101st (West Carolina) Regiment of Foot under the controversial Colonel John Alexander, who even in 1807 raised eyebrows by having his slave Johnson follow him around on the battlefield and reload his hunting rifle for him as he picked off enemy officers. There were English regiments brought over from Ireland as well, but history sadly tends to forget them amid the drama of the moment.

In that instant of dire peril, when the fate of the Kingdom of Great Britain was held in the balance, her sister nations came to the rescue and the crown endured. That was not forgotten. Sometimes it was not remembered in the way that men on that day would have wanted, but it was not forgotten.

*

Did you think we’d leave you dying
When this crown should sit over three?
Cheer up, old motherland, the day’s not yet done
And by the night your people shall be free…


– “Three Nations”, original author unknown, version established by Andrew Morse, 1897​

*

From – “The Latter Jacobin Wars” by James R.V. Donaghue, 1962:

…the second half of 1807 saw the complete collapse of the short-lived English Germanic Republic as British, Irish and American troops united at Fort Rockingham in June as the Grand Army of the Kingdom and then proceeded to focus on taking back one county at a time, aided by the local Kleinkrieger movements. The names of the key battles are known to any schoolboy: the Relief of Bedford, the Battle of St Albans, the Descent on Harwich led by Major Alexander Cochrane and facilitated by Keppel’s steam fleet that led to the encirclement and destruction of General Gabin’s core force.

Modigliani proved a more dangerous foe, retreating to London while leaving much of Sussex and Surrey in ruins. Upon hearing the extent of the collapse on other fronts, he made the decision to try and commandeer boats and take them down the Thames to evacuate the key personnel in the army (i.e., himself) while the remainder fought to defend London.

The personalities collided in the Battle of Islington (November 5th) where General Saissons, with the remainder of the EGR’s coherent forces (harried and weakened by Kleinkrieger activity and stripped of the garrison forces that had been taken one at a time by the Grand Army) faced the Duke of Mornington’s mostly Irish and American troops, while Sir John Moore swept around in the west with the British troops to retake London from the rear and surround the French from the back. Knowing he was abandoned and betrayed, Saissons fought grimly to the death, knowing he would receive no quarter after what he had been part of. It is said by some admirers of revolutionary ideology that the French fought to the death, which is technically true, but rather avoids the point that they lacked any alternative: no Englishman, and few Irish or Americans, would accept any Republican Frenchman’s surrender after seeing what had become of London.

At the end, Saissons was taken alive and Wesley brought him to Hyde Park, where he elected to choose a method of execution that he had observed while fighting in India in his youth: Saissons was tied bodily across the muzzle of a loaded cannon and blown to smithereens. This was publicly observed by the terrorised, cowed remains of the population of London, who then began naming those members of the Hellfire Club and other collaborationist organisations who remained. Wesley, however, realising that there was no way of verifying their claims (but on the other hand he could not allow the possibility of letting such traitors go free) instead made them prisoners and eventually sent them to the Susan-Mary Penal Colony in America. “The honest Londoner can still make his way in life in such a place,” Wesley later explained his reasoning to Churchill, “while the decadent fifth son who associates with such abominable scum as Dashwood will likely find himself taking his own life after a few months in the open air, far away from cities and opiates.” Though poetic justice, this did not turn out to be entirely true…

…Modigliani’s fleet of little boats sailed past the ruins of the Tilbury Fort and out into the Thames Estuary, where they were surprised to meet a few of Keppel’s steamcraft…

…it is still said by Essexmen that, if you listen on a dark November night while anchored off the Isle of Canvey, you can still hear the tortured shrieks and Italian gibberish of Modigliani as he tries to break free from the icy embrace of Davy Jones…

From – “Albion’s Peril: The Invasion of England” by Sir Hubert Pendleton, 1951:

…by Christmas Day 1807, the English Germanic Republic was gone. No Frenchmen remained under arms in England, and if one believes contemporary commentators, no Frenchmen remained alive. For ceremony’s sake more than anything, Richard Burke and the rump Parliament returned to the unhappy ruins of London and staked their claim, then began trying to pick up the pieces. And the military junta really running things, led by by the duo of Marlborough and Mornington, Churchill and Wesley, turned their attention to other matters.

Albion’s peril was over. England had come the closest to destruction since her last incarnation had been destroyed in the Norman Conquest. But she had survived, just barely. And the Hanoverian crown had held her sister lands together. Now, united in arms against a common foe, they stood upon the cliffs of Dover and looked to the south.

The Duke of Marlborough was never much of one for quoting scripture, but at a Privy Council meeting on New Years’ Eve, he did mention Ezekiel 25:17 when Frederick Dundas formally tabled the matter of what must come next in this unexpected war. “I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes,” said Churchill, “and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them…”



[1] I.e. the War of the Spanish Succession.

[2] In OTL William Wilberforce pulled off this trick to get from London to York within 48 hours to attend an important abolitionist meeting.

[3] Note the collision of American colloquialism with British sport here.

[4] William IV, who was only the Duke of Cumberland in OTL – in both TLs, he was known for his savage putting down of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.
 

Thande

Donor
Part #76: The Turn of the Tide

From – “The Jacobin Wars” by E.G. Christie (Hetherington Publishing House, 1926)

Understanding the causes of the Revolution in France is often cited as one of the most challenging questions to the historian. However, it is readily arguable that understanding the causes of its end presents a no less difficult proposition. How did this unique creation of republican thought, a state which had been ruled by Jacobin revolutionaries for more than a decade – first the terror of Jean-Baptiste Robespierre, then the ideological rigidity of Jean de Lisieux – come to meet its downfall?

It is a problem made all the more obscure by the issue of geography. The multitudinous causes which led France down the dark path in the first place can, nonetheless, cite the compensation that at least all the immediate events of the Revolution took place within a few square miles, Paris and its environs. The collapse of Lisieux’s empire, however, was not decided or fought in any one field. From Doncaster to Cadiz, from Fredericksburg to Moscow, there was scarcely a corner of the globe that did not have its hand upon the flagpole atop the Bastille, hauling down the bloody red flag.

So let us lay the issue of chauvinism on the table and begin close to home. Let us consider the situation in our own island, shocked and smarting from the penetration of her alleged impregnability…

*

Still more majestic shalt thou rise,
More dreadful, from each foreign stroke;
As the loud blast that tears the skies,
Serves but to root thy native oak.


“Rule, Britannia!” (James Thomson and Thomas Arne, 1740)[1]​

From: “The Kingdom Strikes Back: Great Britain’s Return to the Jacobin Wars” by Andrew Johnson (1970) –

At the end of 1807, the armies of Great Britain had banished the Frenchman from her sceptered isle and the country stood at something of a loss; the idea of invasion had long been viewed an impossibility, and when it was raised the general assumption was that Britain must inevitably fall to a Continental army, far larger and generally more experienced than her own. The onus of defence had been placed entirely upon the Royal Navy, which in the hour of need – thanks more to Fox’s blindness and Lisieux’s Burgundian trickery than any fault of her own save complacency – had been found wanting. Yet the nation had not been trampled beneath the foreign boot. The French and their Italian allies had run out of steam, in the figurative if not literal sense; rather, they found for the first time a surfeit of the physical variety, given that their foe had also mated engine to cannon and carriage.

Heroism, courage and pure blind luck had saved the country. The question was what to do next. A time like this called for a decisive leader, and the Duke of Marlborough, John Spencer-Churchill, was all too ready to step into place. All had whispered of it in the privacy of their own homes – or, more likely, the spare bedroom of their Northumbrian second cousins’ homes, given how the chattering classes’ own homes were now mostly laid waste in the ruins of the Home Counties. All knew what must come. But only Churchill would come out and say it. Britain could not sit catching her breath. She must strike back, and hard, at a time when the fate of all Europe, perhaps the world, hung in the balance.

The chief question was precisely how this would be accomplished. Richard Burke and what was left of Parliament were mostly in favour of an invasion of Normandy, one of the regions gradually being stripped of garrison troops by Lisieux’s overambitious triple assault on Flanders, Britain and Royal France. Others, notably the Chancellor Charles Bone, argued for a renewal of the alliance with Royal France and sending troops to the front line there. Many, however, were opposed to this idea, considering the bridges had been burned and still being suspicious of what had, after all, been Britain’s mortal enemy for decades before the Revolution, the Bourbon regime. By force of will, it was Churchill who got his initial preference: sending troops to the Netherlands, together with those the Alliance of Hildesheim and the Mittelbund had already deployed, to face Boulanger.

The strategy made sense on several levels, for example the fact that the bulk of the Alliance consisted of Hanoverian troops and Hanover was dynastically tied to Britain, that Flanders was the front upon which the most French troops were deployed and thus could be said to be the pivot upon which the war would turn, and that Churchill was himself something of a Germanophile. However, he failed to take Boulanger’s generalship into account. In late January 1808, taking advantage of the Channel’s renewed domination by British and Royal French ships (the Royal Navy, partly because of this cobelligerency, were another faction in favour of a renewed alliance, but by this point their position was so discredited as to only harm the credibility of this idea) a force of 20,000 men under General Sir Thomas Græme – a veteran of the last war – were sent to the front. In a quixotic twist typical of Churchill, rather than being sent to Amsterdam so they could then be redeployed to the front line by the Dutch, they were landed behind enemy lines, at Ostende, with the idea of being able to hit the French in the rear.

However, Boulanger quickly reacted and split off a reserve corps under his deputy General Armand Poulenc to dispatch the British expeditionary force. Poulenc was slightly outnumbered; what happened next is of course subject to many differing interpretations coloured by national pride, but a common analysis is that the usual British discipline broke down in the face of finally facing the enemy who had tried to conquer the motherland, finally on their own turf (or at least Flanders, which seemed close enough). And of course Poulenc’s troops were some of the best the Republic had to offer. Græme’s force had been equipped with a full steam tractor corps to pull their artillery, and the ensuing series of battles illustrated that this alone was not enough to win victory. Poulenc fought brilliantly and, after a crushing defeat at Dixmuyden, Græme was forced to retreat. The British army escaped capture thanks to a daring withdrawal by sea from the port of Dunkerque, but pride had taken a heavy blow. Græme was briefly court-martialled in the manner of Admiral Keppel fifty years before, but this was swiftly dropped in the realisation that battered Britain needed all the generals she could get – and that Græme had counselled against that strategy from the start.

One might suppose this would cause the downfall of Churchill, but by this point he was too cemented in place, ruling over the burnt wreck of London and having risen to iconic, almost religious status in the minds of the liberated men and women of the Home Counties. Instead, Churchill finally bowed to the will of Bone’s faction. The evacuation from Dunkerque had been accomplished partly by the assistance of the Royal French, who had even lost a ship under fire from Poulenc’s guns. The decision to assist had been that of Counter-Admiral Jules Réage, a former political enemy of Leo Bone who nonetheless now aped his nemesis’ daring impulsiveness. Admiral Jervis noted that the evacuation would probably have been impossible without the Royal French, and doubts about the cooperation vanished. The troops that had been prepared to reinforce Græme instead went to Royal France, half landing at Nantes, the other hand behind enemy lines at Granville, in late February…

From - "England's Captain, France's Saviour" by Albert Harrison (Oxford University Press, 1940):

Leo Bone had become Napoléon Bonaparte, but he did not forget England. Though stridently leading Royal France through her time of trials, he nonetheless became ashen-faced in private at the news, slowly trickling in, of London falling to Modigliani’s brutal killers. “Even as one faces the enemy here, in one’s adopted homeland,” he wrote, “it is somehow unsettling to learn that the coffee-house in which one once debated politics with Mister Nelson is now a smoking ruin, that one’s father barely escaped with his life, that his beloved Cambridge stands threatened by the insane slaughterman that mockingly drapes himself in the absurdities of the red flag. My father always considered the confidence of the Englishman in the special nature of his homeland to be somewhat misplaced; now I finally understand why.”

Royal France would have to last a year before Britain came to her aid once more. General Devilliers’ seven regiments could not be matched man for man, and that meant sieges and carefully measured counter-attacks. The one advantage the Royal French had was that Devilliers seemed unlikely to get much in the way of reinforcements, given how Boulanger’s campaign in the Low Countries – despite its success – seemed to draw more and more of the French Republican Army into its maw. What with having to hold the line against the Austrians in the Piedmontese Latin Republic – which eventually collapsed in April 1806 after the Battle of Ciamberì, with General Bourcier withdrawing his troops to the Saône.[2] Even Lisieux was forced to recognise that this penetration into what was undeniably core French territory by Archduke Ferdinand could not be tolerated, and reinforcements intended for Devilliers (or, at first, Modigliani) were redispatched to hold the river against the Austrians. Bourcier briefly recovered his position by defeating General Alvinczi at Rives in July, but Piedmont was lost to the Austrians and their puppet Kingdom of Italy.

Bone’s Vauban-esque system of fortresses held back Devilliers for around six months, a remarkable effort aided by limited cavalry raids on Republican siege positions with the goal of spiking and destroying immobilised guns, and – a new variation necessitated by this modern war – blocking the vents of steam engines and leaving them to burst. The Royal French managed, in the process, to capture a few Republican steam tractors and guns, and proceeded to use them for propaganda purposes, mocking Lisieux’s still-celebrated 1795 pamphlet La Vapeur est Républicaine by daubing “Non, la Vapeur, c’est Royaliste!” along the sides of the guns along with King Louis XVII’s favoured new flag: a single golden fleur-de-lys in a blue circle on a white field. Louis, like most halfway competent monarchs of the period, had recognised the new fervour of nationalism that had been unleashed across Europe and knew that to crest that wave he must ride it out: thus, the vague mishmash of royalist symbols had been concentrated into a few as distinctive as the Republicans’ red flag. The white Bourbon cockade was reinvented as blue-gold-white, and the single fleur-de-lys defied the Jacobin’s inverted version. In heraldic circles it came to signify “France Ultramodern”.

Though Bone was key in saving the kingdom from total destruction, the contribution of the Vicomte de Barras should not be overlooked. Bone was the classically headstrong Royal Navy captain, always for staking everything on big, dramatic raids, and it was Barras who forced him to cool down and recognise that they had little to gain and everything to lose. Barras’ more restrained strategy meant that when Devilliers and his subordinates successfully predicted, trapped and destroyed a Royalist raid, it was not an immediate war-losing event. Furthermore, Barras masterminded Royal France’s supply system, ensuring that the scrap of a kingdom could continue to feed itself – then, after Devilliers finally broke through Bone’s line of fortresses in July 1807 and Republican troops began to pour into the interior, that her cities could be fed from abroad. Much of the merchant fleet of the Royal French East India Company was redeployed to bring in grain from Ireland, Portugal, Wales and western England. Though a system of rationing was necessary, Barras and his subordinates managed to keep the people well fed enough for the Republicans never to look like a better alternative for most.

There were, however, a few impressionable young minds who had grown to maturity during the seven years of peace and had become convinced that the horrors of Lisieux’s regime had been invented by their rulers as an excuse to tax them. In a few places, therefore, Devilliers was welcomed with relatively open arms. Now Devilliers was a veteran of Spain and a pragmatist; he was no Fabien Lascelles. To that end, he used the knowledge of the local fellow thinkers, or les collaborateurs as history has labelled them, to help feed his army and disarm a few more of Bone’s fortresses faster than he might otherwise have. Recognising that the outnumbered army could not hope to stand in the field against Devilliers, Bone withdrew it to several cities that had been fortified as a hedge against just this disaster. Now the second phase of his plan came into play. In private, he was despondent. He had always pinned his hopes on Britain to come to Royal France’s rescue, and his defensive strategies had been aimed at buying time until this could happen. But Britain herself was invaded and fighting for her life. Would he achieve anything in the long run, or just postpone the inevitable?

“It is always worth fighting to postpone the inevitable,” Bone wrote on the day the news arrived of the defeat of General Gabin in East Anglia, incidentally coining a catchphrase which would become almost the unofficial motto of Royal France. The official one, of course, would be the more pompous “La Nation, la Loi, le Roi”; Louis would duplicate every nationalistic aspect that the Republicans could field.[3]

Bone achieved the seemingly impossible feat of keeping the last shreds of Royal France on their feet for months more by taking advantage of the fact that the Royal French ruled the waves. He had fortified Nantes, Brest, St Malo, La Roche, and a half-dozen other cities. Devilliers, acting on the usual Revolutionary doctrine of ‘to hold the heart is to hold the nation’ would concentrate on the capital city, which was de facto Nantes, but he swiftly realised that he would do better to focus on the city from which King Louis, Bone and Barras were ruling the nation. At first this would also appear to be Nantes, but he heard that Bone had been sighted in Brest giving a rousing speech to the troops, so marched his army deep into Brittany to take this presupposed new capital. Enroute his train was raided mercilessly by both regular Royalist cavalry and irregular Chouan Kleinkriegers. Once he had arrived in late August 1807 and besieged the town, however, he found that Bone had instead been sighted in St Malo, and Barras in Quiberon. The Royalists’ strategy became apparent: with their control of the seas, they could keep shifting their key commanders from one city to the next, meaning there was no one target for Devilliers to focus on. In addition, Barras improved on Bone’s strategy by muddying the waters, hiring skilled actors and impersonators so that they could appear in more than one place at once and Devilliers would be unable to prove which was real.

It was this variation which perhaps saved Royal France, as Devilliers’ response to the cunning plan was to infiltrate assassins into the besieged cities in an attempt to deal with the problem directly: one such assassin successfully killed his target, who was, fortunately for the Royalists, an actor playing Leo Bone.[4] Barras also narrowly escaped poisoning, being brought back from the brink by skilled physician Dr Mathieu Dissard, who would later be rewarded with a duchy. In the meantime, Devilliers split his forces, attempting to beisiege several fortress cities at once – focusing on one or two, he found, meant that the others opened their gates and let their cavalry out to raid his camps once more, only to quickly retreat if he coalesced his army to face them. The general found himself increasingly frustrated by his own lack of cavalry, but Republican France still had a shortage of such soldiers, and those that did exist had mostly gone to the Flemish or Piedmontese fronts.

Thus in the following months, only three cities fell, most famously La Roche, which was not subject to the Bone-Barras strategy thanks to being landlocked. As Devilliers slowly ground the Royalists down through the winter of 1807, though, Britain finally re-entered the war. What followed had often been misrepresented as a feat of strategic insight on the part of Bone, Churchill, Wesley and many others; in fact it was achieved largely through fortune. To read many contrary accounts, one might presume the absurdity that the British had carefully sat down and assembled an alienistic cameo[5] of Etienne Devilliers, then based their strategy around it.

On February 28th 1808, five regiments under the Duke of Mornington, Richard Wesley, was landed near the village of Granville in Normandy, in territory which had been Republican ever since the brief British incursion there eight years before. Wesley’s force was about one-half British and one-half Irish or American, and proceeded to occupy much of western Normandy with little resistance, someone vindicating Burke’s theory that the area was underdefended thanks to being stripped of troops. When Devilliers heard of this, he decided that his was the only army within range capable of doing something about this – and, jealous of Boulanger’s reputation, wanted to duplicate the Marshal’s feat of throwing the Englishmen back into the sea. To that end, the siege parties on the Royal French cities were stripped to a minimum, the army re-assembled, and Devilliers marched north.

Two days later, the second British force under Sir John Moore landed at Nantes, being greeted with open arms by the desperate Royal French. Moore, naturally, had brought the products of Whistler with him, and the siege party at Nantes was rapidly crushed by the British forces, which were mostly drawn from England, Wales or Scotland. Some were from the counties that had been under Republican occupation – and those regiments had often not been present at the time, instead having returned home from elsewhere only in time to take part in this mission. They were not forgiving to those Republicans they captured.

On April 2nd, Wesley faced Devilliers’ slightly numerically superior forces at Laval, site of a Republican defeat to the British eight years earlier. Devilliers, once more mindful of his place in history, was determined to avenge that defeat – for all that it had been politically arranged by Lisieux in order to support his ascendancy. And the general achieved his victory, albeit a Pyrrhic one, forcing a British retreat from the field of battle. The conflict nonetheless saw several British successes, not all of them “British”: for example, a ridge was held by two rival Irish regiments, the 120th Duke of Leinster’s Own Volunteers (majority Catholic) and the much older 5th Irish Regiment (majority Protestant). The two fractious groups were held together by the example of the American Colonel John Alexander, whose 101st Carolinians held the ground in between the two. Alexander addressed the troops (who were catcalling at each other) and dryly quoted Benjamin Franklin’s infamous quip from the Troubles of the Sixties,[6] “If we don’t hang together, we shall most assuredly hang separately.”[7] They hung together, and did not break in the face of the French attacks.

At the same time, the 79th New Yorkers raised eyebrows across Europe; equipped to a man with the newest version of the Ferguson breech-loading rifle, they annihilated a veteran company of Devilliers’ Tirailleurs. Questions were swiftly asked about whether a breech-loading rifle really was just a toy for American hunters, and furthermore, whether the Revolution had a monopoly on war-changing inventions…

Nonetheless the British were being overwhelmed, and Wesley made the controversial decision to retreat. He had prepared for the possibility, and to Devilliers’ surprise retreated southwards, rather than heading for the sea as Græme had a few months before. The following weeks saw Wesley’s army retreating south and west at a steady pace, being constantly harried by Devilliers’ outriders (though once again the Frenchman was hampered by his lack of cavalry, a decision which perhaps Wesley took into account). Wesley, inspired by strategies he had learned in the confusing battles he had taken part in in the sweltering heat of India, decided to crack down harshly on men who raided the countryside for supplies and instead set up a much-lauded system by which the local peasants would always be paid for food that the British requisitioned, however forcefully.[8] This had the unintended effect of making the locals – most of which had lived under Republican rule for over a decade – make an unfavourable comparison when Devilliers’ pursuing army followed and practiced la maraude as usual…

Devilliers finally caught up with Wesley at Angers, site of Leo Bone’s famous battle, only to find that Leo Bone himself was there, along with Sir John Moore – the Royal French and their British allies had defeated most of the Republican siege garrisons, reassembled the Royal French army from its component parts, and now held the field. Devilliers, realising the trap he was caught in, attempted to retreat, but was killed by a bullet to the head from 350 yards away by James Roosevelt in that famed sniper’s most celebrated achievement. Roosevelt achieved the thought-to-be-impossible feat by lying down and holding the barrel of his specially modified Hall rifle[9] steady between his feet. It was certainly a case of, in the words of Philip Bulkely, “the shot heard ‘round the world”.

The loss of Devilliers’ leadership transformed what could have been a fighting retreat into a rout. The Republicans were trapped between Wesley’s army and the combined forces of Bone and Moore, resulting in the almost complete destruction of Devilliers’ army – though not without inflicting savage losses upon their enemy. Nonetheless, as the day of June 2nd 1808 dawned, the Republican forces in Royal France had been reduced to the few siege garrisons that had not been dealt with yet, and an avenue was open for the allies to drive into the Republic itself…

*

From – “King of the Middle Sea: Horatio Nelson” by César Cardini (1959, English translation)

There were many Royal Navy sailors in foreign service in 1807, many who had left the organisation after the False Peace of 1800 and the ensuing cuts by the Fox government. All of them, doubtless, felt some pang of guilt upon learning that the homeland they had left had suffered the impossibility of a French invasion, particularly given that the success of that invasion had hinged upon the failure of the Royal Navy. All of them must have asked: What if I had been there? Was there something I could have done to make a difference?

None could have felt it as strongly as Horatio Nelson. Upon hearing the news – ironically at a party in Salamanca to celebrate the fact that General Ballesteros had switched sides and the allies would soon march on Madrid – Nelson literally collapsed, consumed by a funk. It was fortunate that his Venetian steward, Niccolò Fubini, had known him long enough to swiftly locate a local coffee-house’s obscure supply of the tealeaf, not well prized in Spain, purchase it for an absurd amount and mix up the only elixir guaranteed to revive the Englishman.

This helped, but Nelson was only brought back to himself when Sir John Acton arrived and slapped some sense into him. “Look at you, sir!” the mercenary decried. “Old Delicious must laugh and slap his thighs with joy seeing you so discomfited! ‘Aha,’ he says, ‘one of my most valiant foes is laid useless! Many more of my rapists and murderers will go unpunished now!’ Is that really what you want, sir? Is it?”

Nelson rose to his feet, shaking with rage, and almost demanded a duel on the spot before calming down slightly. “And what have you to say, sir? Where were you when the Navy failed? Where was I?”

“We were here,” Acton replied softly, “hurting Lisieux, killing his men. Every Frenchman we kill here is one that cannot be sent to England to bespoil the isle. Don’t you see that?”

Nelson was silent for a moment. “I do,” he said eventually, “but it is not enough.”

“Then find something that is,” Acton replied, and swept out.

The admiral did so. He immediately resigned his (largely notional) commission from General Pignatelli’s army – with Ballesteros’ defection, the war was all but won anyway – returned to the Neapolitan Navy, which had largely been reduced to ferrying troops back and forth between Naples and Aragon – and by force of charisma took over a task force and brought it to Corsica. Remembering his friend Leo Bone’s achievements at the start of the war, when the Royal French fleet had been carried off and resulted in the achievement of so much, Nelson appealed to the President of the Corsican Republic, Carlo Andrea Pozzo di Borgo. The Republic had tried to retain its splendid aloofness, but the invasion of Britain had frightened everyone: it illustrated that steam could make supposedly impossible military actions practicable, and also threatened to bring down Corsica’s protector Britain.

Thus, even though Pozzo was less enthusiastic about the British alliance than his predecessor Pasquale Paoli, he agreed to formally bring Corsica into the war, knowing that the allies would need everything they had to bring Lisieux down, and if he could make a difference, there was no choice but to act or wait for the inevitable invasion. Corsica had been a part of France under the Bourbons, and thus must be somewhere on one of Lisieux’s lists of places to retake eventually. Nelson’s rhetoric combined with Pozzo’s own political instincts, and in April 1807 – even as Ferdinand won his victory over Bourcier at Ciamberì – the only other pre-war republic surviving in Europe (the other being the Netherlands, already at war with France) turned its guns on Lisieux. As Giovanni Tressini put it, the French had set out to bring republicanism to Europe, and so far had managed to destroy five of the continent’s republics and start wars with the other two.[10]

In July of that year, just as Bourcier had managed to stop Alvinczi at Rives, Nelson’s plan was enacted. Although John Jervis had already withdrawn the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Squadron from the island to return belatedly to the Channel, the Corsican Republic’s small local navy remained, and Nelson was able to command much of the Neapolitan fleet, still reinforced with Venetian exiles. This was used to transport a sizeable army – an eclectic mix of Neapolitans, men of northern Italy, Sicilians, Corsicans and even a few from the new Kingdom of Aragon – over the water. Nelson knew what he had to do – his friend had shown the way. On July 4th 1807, the combined forces descended upon Toulon…

The battle does not deserve to be one of Nelson’s better known, for it displayed little of his usual brilliant tactical insight, being a grim fight to the knife in which the Neapolitans and their allies suffered losses of almost a quarter, arguably all for the undying hatred of a man whose homeland had been violated and who suffered unending guilt over the fact that he had not been there to die in her defence. Nonetheless they emerged victorious. Toulon fell, bloodily, on July 29th and suddenly Bourcier’s recovery against the Austrians did not seem so important after all…

*

From – “The Jacobin Wars” by E.G. Christie (Hetherington Publishing House, 1926)

…but of course if one focuses solely on the activities of the British and their allies (as, sadly, many school syllabi do), one loses the importance of such activities when set against the backdrop, the context, of the arguably far larger and more decisive struggle in the east between the French Latin Republic and the emerging Concert of Germany…






[1] OTL and TTL; the butterflies by that point had not affected a song which had its roots in a poem written only three years after the POD (by Thomson himself). However, it is not as popular a patriotic hymn in TTL as OTL due to being associated with George II’s reign.

[2] Ciamberì is the Italian name for the city which in OTL, with Savoy becoming part of France in 1860, is known as Chambéry.

[3] A slogan used in the early revolutionary period of France in OTL (the Kingdom of the French) which still accepted the monarchy.

[4] Though, of course, generations of conspiracy theorists will swear otherwise.

[5] TTL-speak for psychological profile.

[6] The unrest in America in the 1760s, before the ENA was granted parliamentary representation.

[7] Of course in OTL this quote (or a very similar one) was made by Franklin during the American Revolution.

[8] His OTL counterpart the Duke of Wellington of course implemented a similar strategy in Spain, also inspired by Indian adventures in his youth.

[9] OTL John M. Hall developed an American breechloading rifle in 1819. His TTL counterpart, Paul Hall, is both born a few years earlier and has less far to go thanks to the prevalence of and improvement upon the Ferguson design.

[10] Switzerland, Genoa, Lucca, San Marino, Venice, the Netherlands and Corsica. Of course the pre-war republics tended to be oligarchic and bourgeois (except Corsica) and thus not necessarily ideologically aligned with the Jacobins, but Tressini’s goal here is wit rather than accuracy. Note he also neglects Ragusa, though it is debatable whether that would be considered “European” at the time.


Part #77: The Spirit of Germania

“From Schleswig to Sudtirol, from Dunkirk to Königsberg, from Nanzig to the Siebenbürgen: under one flag, one tongue, one nation under God, and death unto all who stand in our way, be he Frenchman or Pole or treacherous son of Germania!”

– Popular Wars rallying cry, 1835, based on the writings of Pascal Schmidt​

*

From – “The Jacobin Wars” by E.G. Christie (Hetherington Publishing House, 1926)

Just as modern scholars have an unfortunate tendency to ignore the latter stages of the Jacobin Wars in Iberia due to the conflict being overshadowed by the emergence of Pablo Sanchez, there is a parallel problem in English-speaking countries to treat the final, decisive years of the conflict in the Germanies as though they were merely a backdrop to the life story of Pascal Schmidt. Certainly, these are two men who, it has often been said, are almost perfect mirror images of each other from the perspective of history. Both were strongly affected by the ravages of the Revolutionary French, but they reacted to the war in diametrically opposed manners. They also remind us that so much of the world we know today was set into motion, ultimately, by something so minor as Louis XVI being unable to pay his bills…

*

From – “My Grand Tour” by the celebrated diarist John Byron III (1830) –

September 25th 1829. Arrived in Kassel after a frankly ghastly journey by means that, though quite acceptable to one’s grandfather, would certainly raise eyebrows in England these days. Hesse-Kassel is one of those distressingly common Continental statelets to attempt to brush over the unfortunate events of our youth (by which I refer to the depredations of Messieurs Robespierre et Lisieux, and not the incident at the Lamb and Flag on St Giles’ Street in ’05; and in any case, I deny any and all accusations aimed at my personage and would consider such allegations a matter of honour worthy of a duel. Except the ones about the stuffed pheasant and the highwayman’s daughter).

I digress. The Hessians do seem quite keen to emulate the Hapsburgs’ policy of simply pretending the Revolution never existed and excising all traces of it from daily life. In which case one is prompted to wonder if the dear Archduke Francis II misread his coronation oath to rule Österreich and instead believes he is honour-bound to behave like an Ostrich. Sadly such witticisms were of small comfort to me as I travelled, or should I say travailled, in the back of a horse-drawn carriage through the Mittelbund.

I confess that after such an experience I found myself quite lacking in good humour, and thus shall await the new dawn to explore this charming little city.

September 26th. Have recovered from my steam-free journey yesterday with the assistance of the innkeeper’s daughter, Fräulein M———, who enthralled me with her command of what she claimed was an Indian massage technique she had learned from a previous exotic visitor. Based on my experience, I believe that fair India is in need of a travelling writer quite soon…

After breaking my fast I learned that Pascal Schmidt was to give a speech before the Orangerie. If you have not heard the name of this celebrated orator, shame upon you, sir. ’Tis rare I meet a fellow diarist of my calibre, nay beyond, for while I may break false modesty for a moment to remark on how my works occasionally send the coffee-shops of the New City a-fluttering, I cannot in honesty claim that they have provoked murmurings among the higher echelons of several powers. Several powers immorally occupying one nation, if one is to take Herr Schmidt’s point of view.

He is indeed a powerful speaker, untrained, but somehow all the more forceful for that, not bothering to obey the rules for perhaps he was never taught them. The crowd did not listen in rapt silence, but shouted back encouragement and occasionally challenges, which he always deftly fielded. Having had experience with German mob leaders before, I was expecting him to turn them on the Jews or perhaps all foreigners in general, and was already hastily practicing my Swabian accent, but instead it was the rulers of the Mittelbund, and of the Germanies in general, that Schmidt attacked.

All around the crowd were soldiers, wearing the blue coats that many around the world have come to fear: the dread Hessian mercenaries, now in service to their own duke. Yet there was something unplaceably uncomfortable about the way they stood there. They did not want to be there. Some, I am certain, sympathised with Schmidt’s words.

I believe in time the Duke of Hesse-Kassel may regret hiring out his soldiers to the highest bidder. For perhaps, no matter what we of the cynical heart may hold true, there are things more valuable than gold…

*

From – “The War in the Low Countries” by P.J. Aldridge (1956) –


The Dutch defeat at La Belle Alliance in 1807 heralded the entry of the Mittelbund, and later Denmark and Saxony, into the war. In January 1808 the British under General Græme landed in Flanders before, of course, being cursorily driven back into the sea by General Poulenc. Some revisionist historians have, however, argued that even this easily dealt with pinprick may have had ramifications for the wider war, for it tied up Poulenc’s corps for a few weeks and bought the Dutch a little time before they faced the full might of Boulanger’s swarming horde.

The Dutch under Stadtholder William VI chose to use this time to implement a defensive strategy, which sparked controversy both at the time and for many years to come. The betrayal of General Wrede’s Walloons had rocked Amsterdam to its core, with the result that William became convinced that the Flemish alliance was too unsteady to trust. As Boulanger took Brussels in March and sent Charles Theodore fleeing to Heidelberg, William gave the order. The Dutch Water Line was fully mobilised for the first time since the 1670s. The sluices were opened, flooding a line that cut across the country from the Zuider Zee to the Waal, miles wide but bare feet deep. Too shallow to cross with boats, save the flat-bottomed barges that the Dutch defenders used themselves, yet too deep and muddy to cross with troops. All along it lay fortifications and traps designed to make mincemeat of invading troops. It was the Dutch Water Line that had stopped none other than Louis XIV in the Franco-Dutch War more than a century before, and it was the Dutch Water Line that now lay between Boulanger and the Dutch Republic’s economic heart.

The plan worked, to an extent. Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam, Leiden, The Hague: all the big Dutch cities lay behind the Line, untouchable. Boulanger, never one to give up easily, tested the Line repeatedly throughout 1808 as Poulenc’s troops rejoined his force. It was no use. For all the new tactics and technology the Revolution had to offer, they had no magical way of crossing.[1] The Dutch Army manned its barges and used them to deploy small forces to where they would be needed most, for example destroying lightly defended French supply caches near the front. Unable to move forward, unable to embark upon la maraude after they had stripped this country the first time, Boulanger’s army began to starve.

The Revolutionary doctrine said that to hold the heart was to hold the nation, yet the United Netherlands’ heart stood mockingly before the French, unreachable, impregnable. Ironically, the original form of Le Grand Crabe could have dealt with this, perhaps, taking Amsterdam from the sea. But Lisieux had redirected Surcouf’s ships and Lepelley’s to England, and now there was nothing left. Villeneuve’s fleet held on for reinforcements that never came, out of the French’s signal network, and was eventually defeated by Dutch reinforcements mobilised by the VOC in the Cape Colony and led by Admiral Willem Verdooren. The French soldiers camped miserably on Texel and the nearby islands surrendered soon afterwards, having been on half rations for months. The Stadtholder’s tactic had given up most of the country to the French, but had guarded the heart, and now the Dutch Army felt confident enough to redeploy some corps to the Ems in order to prevent the new German possessions from falling into Boulanger’s hands.

What protected the Dutch, however, rebounded upon the Flemings, who saw this as a slap in the face – for all that their own Walloons had been the cause of the defeat at La Belle Alliance. General Wrede, who had managed to escape the battle, tried to rally Flemish troops at Brussels but Charles Theodore II ordered him to withdraw with him to the Palatinate. Brussels had been bombarded by Louis XIV in that same war, and it had wrecked the city for generations: a second run-through could ruin Brussels forever. Charles Theodore’s actions were not viewed as being as harsh as William VI’s. An orator far greater than his competent but dull father, one who was willing to go far to defend the possessions that had fallen into his lap, the Duke addressed crowds and promised them that he would return, then counselled them to flee with him or to resist the French to their last breath after welcoming them in. Many still cursed him, but he had nonetheless caught the dramatic moment.

Brussels thus fell without a fight at the start of 1808. Boulanger initially ordered his troops to treat the locals fairly. However, this could only last for so long as the Dutch Water Line halted expansion and his troops, moving according to the Revolutionary doctrine of travelling lightly, were unable to feed themselves. Here, though, Boulanger was so alarmed at the prospect of losing hearts and minds that he could be found yelling at the semaphore balloon all day long, insisting that new supply routes be founded, talking back to Lisieux himself in a display that frightened many of his adjutants. It is debatable whether any of this helped: Brussels soon rapidly stopped seeing the French as benevolent overlords, though this was less so in Wallonia, where the occupiers were still close to the supply routes from France proper.

The Dutch partially redeemed themselves in Flemish eyes in July 1808 when a small naval force sailed from Scheveningen to Ostend and thus relieved, at least temporarily, the French siege of the fortress city of Bruges. The fact that the Dutch were willing to risk so many of their forces heralded something which Boulanger did not pick up on: the great general had made a mistake. He diverted Poulenc to throw renewed efforts into taking Bruges, aware of the consequences of appearing to stall, for all his earlier victories. Yet this took the pressure off eastward expansion, with the result that the Mittelbund relief army smashed into the French without warning in August and, by sheer force of numbers, forced them from the field at the Battles of Koblenz and Trier. Charles Theodore II was there on the battlefield with his own Palatine troops, and had his printing presses running full-time with propaganda pamphlets as though imitating Lisieux. He made an effort to try and kindle resistance to the French in occupied Flanders and engender support, which was somewhat successful.

Boulanger reordered his troops, seeking to concentrate them, knowing he would easily outnumber the Mittelbunders if he organised his soldiers properly. However, he did not recall Poulenc, believing that retreating from Bruges once more would be an irreparable sign of weakness, both in the eyes of the world and in the eyes of Lisieux. Boulanger’s lieutenant Henri Trenet managed to stop the Mittelbund general Konrad von Löwenstein at Adenau in October, but Wrede made a comeback at Mersch a few weeks later and drove back the French. Boulanger’s combined forces had now coalesced and he was ready to lead them from his forward command at St. Hubert, but then the winter set in and brought the armies to a halt.

It was at this point that Boulanger made what is often cited as the greatest mistake of his career. St. Hubert was isolated and his thousands of troops were soon hungry. Rather than retreating back into France – the nearby town of Sedan could probably have fed many of his men – Boulanger took a much more circuitous route back north to Brussels, miserable in the unusually cold winter. Some have cited the idea that an engineer voiced the idea that it might be possible to cross the frozen Dutch Water Line in winter, and Boulanger wanted to be close. More likely is the thought that, as ever concerned with appearances – and fearful of Lisieux finally, regretfully disposing of his oldest ally – the Marshal was just frightened of seeming to retreat once more. Brussels was a triumph, a conquest. He would rule the newly won lands from there. Of course, bringing the French troops there with their hungry mouths would only exacerbate Flemish resentment there…

The Mittelbunders pursued the French back through Luxemburg. It was not an organised chase, as many have depicted it – the Mittelbunders, though hardened from their struggles with Ney’s Swabia a few years before, were nonetheless far less capable of moving rapidly than the French. Nonetheless, there were a few isolated skirmishes in which small groups of French who had fallen behind were mercilessly annihilated, slowly reducing Boulanger’s pool of manpower. It was Brussels that turned the tide, though.

In late January, as the ice began to retreat, Wrede and Löwenstein seized their moment. The Mittelbunders attacked Brussels, taking advantage of the fact that the cold weather meant that many of Boulanger’s steam engines were failing to perform well. Boulanger was not a fool and tried to convert his artillery back over to conventional horsepower, but was hampered by the fact that his men had already eaten most of Brussels’ horses – and were making a good start on the cats and dogs, too. The Mittelbunders’ assault was not a triumph of siegecraft, not an elegant set-piece battle, but a grim slog through frozen streets and houses filled with sharpshooters, taking urban battles to a new level. The locals suffered miserably, though it is debatable, whether this was any worse than the artillery bombardment that Charles Theodore had feared.

It was in this battle that the fate of nations would be decided, in more ways than one…


From “Jean de Lisieux: My Part In His Downfall” by Pascal Schmidt (1827, translated from German) –

…February 3rd 1809, a date I shall remember forever. That miserable city had been my home for too long, yet though I cursed its name, I could not bring myself to hate its inhabitants. The Flemings were a sturdy, hearty folk, and though many in the regiment thought of them as aliens and saw no reason to sympathise with their plight, I knew differently.

My father, as I have said, worked for the Hessian College of Arms and through his work I knew much more of history than many of my fellows in the regiment. I knew Flanders lay within the boundaries of the old Empire not out of an accident of history, but as a part of the German nation. Rather the accident of history was the loss of the Dutch: did not their own anthem praise the German ancestry of William the Silent? But my pleas too often fell on deaf ears. The Mittelbund armies were a mass of intrigue and suspicion, filled with men who were too willing to look upon even the men of the next valley as foreigners. It is a wonder we ever managed to resist Ney. B------s though the French might be, they nonetheless understood the power of nationhood.

It was the Grote-Markt.[2] Silly really. One might think that an event of such import, hah, would have to take place in some little anonymous side street. But no. We held the old palace of the Duke of Brabant, while the French held the Town Hall. Both of them had been battered almost to ruins, for the Markt was large enough for us to use our artillery, which too often had lain unused thanks to the vicious street fighting. Arguably that helped us, though, as the French were the ones who had more artillery thanks to their doctrine. But they also had a well-nigh all-infantry army, while we had useless cavalry. Worthless horsemen, or rather, perfectly serviceable horses with worthless men on top. Worthless men who did nothing to prevent the infighting, even encouraged it. Worthless men who would rather fight to the death for their ownership of a tiny slice of the cake than admit that there was a whole cake at all. “Is not my slice all there is? Do not look at the others! They come from quite different gateaux!”

Hah, I have been counselled against colourful metaphors. They always confuse the printers and make them mix up all the letters! Never mind. Yes, it was the Markt, and I was in the palace, sniping with my rifle. I have heard it called a far from gentlemanly pursuit; well, as I have said, if being gentlemanly is acting like the ‘gentlemen’ I have encountered, this poor country does not need them! I do not care if you tar me with the red brush of the Revolution because of that – my words should be proof enough against that paint sticking to me.

The battle had stalled. Neither side had been able to bring up artillery for a while, and neither of us were able to force the other from their buildings. So we just waited for a stupid young soldier to show his head and then tried to take him before it was too late. Until just before luncheon – such as it was – when we were surprised to hear hoofs. We assumed it must be one of our useless cavalry forces, finally having got as far as streets where they might be of some good, but then why the urgency?

We caught sight of them a few seconds later. My friend Willi, who owned a spyglass, watched them. “Looks like two groups of ours chasing each other,” he said puzzledly, then frowned. “No, wait! Some of the first group have French trousers on…”

That in itself was nothing special, for every army in the field steals from the enemy. But few would risk the distinctive red trousers of the French, as it would immediately get him shot by panicky sentries. Which meant… “Frenchmen wearing our jackets,” I said. Perhaps it was, again, just them stealing from us, but what if it was a deliberate deception against the laws of war?

“Here they come!” said Willi, and we all readied our rifles. “Aim at the first ones only!” I said, and we aimed and fired as they cantered through the square.

The French in the Town Hall fired as well, and several figures fell to the cobblestones, both of the pursuers and the pursued. Then the survivors were galloping from the Markt, except…two, three of the French wearing our jackets peeled off and went back to one of the downed figures, crying “Général!” Of course we shot them down pretty quick as well.

“General?” Willi breathed. “That was one of their generals?”

We knew what to do. We were young, foolish, and convinced of our own invincibility, for all the counter-evidence we had seen so far. Soon we were running across the Markt, laughing as we dodged the fire from the French, yet it was not so bad as it might be: they had heard as well, and were pouring from the Town Hall to try and rescue their general. We were slightly ahead of them, though, and I forced them to take cover by shooting my rifle from the hip. It looked as though the French had only sent musketmen, as they used a smaller proportion of riflemen than us. That made sense, as it left their sharpshooters in the Town Hall to keep firing at us, but it meant they couldn’t reply very well to my fire on the ground. That bought us some time.

We quickly found three men who might fit the bill. No-one knew what the General looked like, or even which General it was. They all wore our Hessian jackets, but red French trousers, and all three had gold watches or some other expensive jewellery that marked them out as rich men. “I’ve got this one, you’ve got that one—” I began, and then Hermann fell dead as one of the French snipers shot him in the back. “And leave the third to me,” I said smoothly, grabbing something from my pack and stuffing it into the groaning bluecoat’s pocket.

We fled the field, losing two more men in the process, but finally arrived back at the palace with our two bodies. “Let’s find out who they are,” I told Willi, and we kicked them awake.

One started babbling in French for a while before realising where he was, then in slow baby-talked German managed: “I am General Armand Poulenc, an officer in the French Republican Army, and you have my parole,” accepting his capture.

The other mumbled something and then said he was Major Johann Grimm of the Hesse-Darmstadt army. His accent suggested he told the truth.

Willi looked disappointed. “You bag yourself a general, Pascal, and all I get is this bloody foreigner,” he said, kicking Grimm in the back. “And we’re not even allowed to loot this one, he’s on our side.”

Fury consumed me and I waved my bayonet under Willi’s nose. “He is no foreigner,” I said through my teeth, then helped Grimm to his feet. “This” is a foreigner,” I said, and through his protests, slit Poulenc’s throat.

Yes, that rumour is true. I do not deny it. My justification should be the same as the Carolinian’s, and if that is good enough for anyone, so should mine be. But of course the Carolinian was a gentleman…

Willi took a step back, uncomprehending. His actions were born of ignorance, not malice, I knew. He changed the subject: “What about that third one?”

Heinz, who had taken over Willi’s spyglass while we had been fighting, told us: “The Frenchies bagged it and took it in.”

“I wonder whether that one was a Frenchman or…one of ours,” Willi said hastily, seeing my expression.

“I hope it was a Frenchman, otherwise I shall feel quite guilty,” I said, and a moment later the phosphorus bomb I had planted in the man’s pocket ignited. Seconds after that, the Town Hall was on fire. Minutes later, we were storming it, and the battle for Brussels began to turn…

*

From – “The Jacobin Wars – the Italo-German Front” by Joshua H. Calhoun (University of New York Press, 1946) -

The Saxons and Danes entered the war in October 1807. Though sending some troops to assist the Mittelbund in Flanders, for the most part their main goal was in undercutting Austria now that Francis had finally turned his attention to the French-occupied German lands once more. There was a small possibility that Austria might be able to claw back its reputation that had suffered so much while Francis was consumed with the Ottomans and Italy, and Saxony and Denmark had too much to gain from the Hapsburgs remaining pariahs in German society. Therefore, Johannes II and John George V pre-empted the ageing General Kray by invading Swabia in November, not making much progress against Ney but nonetheless defining the assault as their affair and nothing to do with Austria. It is said that it was the news of this audacious coup that stopped Kray’s heart and meant Francis went flailing to find another general, most of his best either in Italy or trying to hold down Bavaria and Bohemia.

In the meantime, Ney faced off against the Saxon General Franz Wagner and the Danes’ Lars Nielsen, assisted by the Swedish rising star Gebhart Blücher. It was the latter who proved instrumental in discomfiting Ney, who still suffered somewhat from the Revolutionary problem of lacking horsemen, for all that his moderate rule in Swabia had led to better recruitment than in most places. The Swabian Germanic Republic resisted far superior Saxon-Danish forces for almost a year thanks to Ney’s brilliance, and it was not until September 1808 that the Saxons and Danes made a breakthrough at Ludwigsburg (or “Louisbourg-de-la Souabe” as it was officially known) and exposed Ney’s capital of Stuttgart.

Ney still had a small chance of being able to throw them out, for all that discontent with the war was rising throughout Swabia and Lisieux was breathing down his neck, but it became obvious that the Austrians were planning to use the Danes’ and Saxons’ lack of much progress as an excuse to enter the war and show them up: the biter bit. The Archduke Ferdinand had General Alvinczi stationed in Grigioni, in the former Italian-speaking Switzerland, and the Hungarian was poised to stab Ney in the back and take all the credit for his downfall.

Recognising this, the Saxons – notably without the knowledge of the Danes – secretly approached Ney with a deal. The Frenchman would be allowed to leave the country safely if he handed it over, intact, to the exiled Duke of Württemberg, Frederick IV. It had been his father Frederick III who had fled the country after hearing of the execution of the Badenese ruling family back in 1798, and had died in exile in Vienna in 1803. The new Duke was willing to forgive and forget to some extent, especially if it bagged his family the other small states that Ney had incorporated into his Swabian Germanic Republic, particularly Baden itself, Württemberg’s traditional rival.

Ney considered the offer, and finally accepted: “Let it be known,” he wrote, “that I do this not out of cowardice or betrayal of my principles, but because I know the Hapsburgs would put this new country we have built to fire and the sword, calling them ‘traitors’, and because I do not want my men to suffer.” Ney’s French troops, though removed from their privileged position, were permitted to stay in the Swabian army or to leave as they willed, providing they agreed not to fight the Saxons or Danes – but not, notably, the Austrians.

This diplomatic masterstroke came to light in November 1808. Francis II was furious, but there was little Austria could do if she did not wish to alienate the Germanies further. Duke Frederick became Frederick I of the new (or rather restored) Duchy of Swabia. It would not be for another five years that a “Michael Elchingener” would mysteriously emerge from nowhere to be appointed prime minister by the Duke. Many remarked on his resemblance to a certain earlier ruler…

Lisieux, in a fury, ordered an attack on the ‘traitors’, but by now France’s manpower was, at last, running dry. Facing Royal French and British incursions from the west, Neapolitans from the south, Austrians and Italians from the east, and with a collapsing position in the north, it could not be long before the Republic would start to totter…




[1] OTL the French General Pichegru had the bright idea of waiting until winter and crossing the Line when it was frozen. But TTL’s version of Pichegru is in command of the UPSA’s armies…

[2] The Grand Place, but the people of TTL have a certain disincentive to use the French name.



Part #78: Vive la Révolution

“I do not fear defeat. I do not rule it out, but I do not fear it. For if the French people of the superior Latin race indeed fail to triumph over our Germanic foes and their treacherous, hidebound Latin lackeys, then we have proved our own great truth wrong.

And if this is a world without that truth, I would sooner see the whole French nation burn with me than live in it.”

– published in The Lost Diaries of Jean de Lisieux in 1907, considered by most scholars to be a forgery​

*

From – “The Jacobin Wars” by E.G. Christie (Hetherington Publishing House, 1926)

The collapse of the French Latin Republic is a subject worthy of a book in itself. In it we see the grand strategy of the earlier conflicts – on both sides – fail and fade away, replaced by mindless brawling and human misery on a scale not seen since the Thirty Years’ War. Both sides knew what they were fighting for: no longer ideology, or king and country, or religion, but simple revenge and survival. For all Lisieux’s attempt to create a glass cage in which reality was defined solely by his propaganda on the semaphore network, the Republican French leadership knew what might come to pass if the country were to fall to the same enemies whom they had fought so bitterly for more than a decade. The Austrians and their allies would offer the Republic the same mercy that the Republic had offered the Germanies: none.

The conquest of Toulon in 1807 by Neapolitan and allied forces was the first death blow for the Republic, undoing in a single stroke Olivier Bourcier’s successes in holding back the Archduke Ferdinand in Piedmont. Outflanked, Bourcier fell back. Lisieux sent a reserve army under General Marceau in an attempt to support Bourcier in retaking the key port, but this only ended up stripping forces from Devilliers at a critical moment in the invasion of Royal France. It can be argued that this decision resulted in the survival of most Royal French besieged cities thanks to the Bone-Barras plan, allowing Britain’s relief force to throw back Devilliers and finally destroy his army in 1808. As we shall see, this means the further argument can be made that Lisieux inadvertently spared his country much suffering…

*

There are men coming down from the valleys,
There are tall ships lying off the coast.
And they carry the light,
In the dark of the night,
Like a whisper in the wind –
“Revolution!”
[1]

*

From – “The Jacobin Wars – the Italo-German Front” by Joshua H. Calhoun (University of New York Press, 1946) -

The time taken to assemble the reserve troops under Marceau meant that it was winter before an attempt could be made to take Toulon back. The headstrong Marceau, a former subcommander under General Drouet in Spain, sought to make besieging efforts nonetheless, seeing the conquest as an affront to the Republic. However, while the French were well supplied (being within their own country, not that this dissuaded them from la maraude) so were the Neapolitans and their allies in Toulon, for Nelson’s navy dominated the Mediterranean. A rash midwinter attack by Marceau was bloodily repulsed in January 1808, in which Nelson led troops from the fore and famously lost his ear to a wild bayonet stroke from a Republican soldier.

Had it been just a little closer and he had been killed, it is likely Marceau would have won anyway: the French came very close to breaking through the city’s defences, and it was the unflappable charisma of their maverick English leader which lent the Neapolitans their motivation to hold fast in the face of the attacks. For all that the now deceased King Charles had been sceptical about Nelson’s grand plans to take Aragon – and his son had similar thoughts about this strike – Nelson was inadvertently creating a new national identity for his men, one which transcended former divisions such as that between Naples proper and Sicily. It was based upon a sense of pride that Naples, formerly a weak power that had been tossed from power to power for centuries like the ball in a handball game,[2] had stood up to the French Republicans, repulsed them from their land and now sought to take the fight to the most powerful nation in all Europe. To be sure, luck had played a very large part in that survival and attack, the Rape of Rome and the collapse of Hoche’s support combined with the fact that at the time he had been estranged from Lisieux for example. But logic seldom has much to do with a national mythos. The Kingdom of Naples and Sicily was reborn in a new image, and it would be woe to those leaders who failed to appreciate this...

A second attempt by Marceau in March was if anything even more on the verge of success when a runner from Bourcier’s army arrived, telling the general that the Archduke Ferdinand had finally defeated Bourcier in an epic battle at Draguignan. The killing blow had been made by General Alvinczi in a triumph that would lead to his being placed in command of the later attempt to invade Ney’s Swabia from the former Switzerland, which of course in the event came to nothing. Foiled, and knowing that the Austro-Italians would easily be able to overrun his exhausted army if he continued with his siege attempts, Marceau sullenly retreated to Marseilles and the Republic suffered a great propaganda defeat…

*

It’s been so many years…
So many tears.
We have lost once before,
Now we’ll settle the score,
When our cannons will roar –
Revolution!


*

From: “The Kingdom Strikes Back: Great Britain’s Return to the Jacobin Wars” by Andrew Johnson (1970) –

After the victory at Angers in June 1808, the Republicans were swiftly cleared from the former territory of Royal France. But Royal France was under the command of Leo Bone (or Napoléone Bonaparte as he was professionally known in the country) and so of course that would not be enough. While the British and Royal French forces were somewhat exhausted after the destruction of Devilliers, Bone insisted on a continued offensive. By the winter of 1808, as the Republicans frantically scraped the bottom of their manpower battle to assemble a new army, the Royalists and their allies had taken the strategic town of Royan on the Gironde Estuary and had thrust a salient in the direction of Caen. The British commanders in particular (as opposed to the American and Irish) felt an urgent need to conquer Normandy and thus erase the issue caused by Wesley’s strategic retreat from Granville earlier in the campaign. One might expect that Lisieux’s propaganda would make much of that, but by this point it was so divorced from reality that to gloat over that retreat would have been to admit that British troops were in France, and that Royal France existed, and that Britain had not yet been conquered by Hoche. Which was unacceptable.

1809 saw the new French army under General Stéphane Pelletan, an overpromoted, overly-cautious commander, take a defensive posture against the Royalists and their allies. In part this was a move born of pragmatism and desperation, as Boulanger’s Grand Army had sapped the Republic of her remaining troops and there were simply too few men to try an offensive against the western foes, particularly given the Republic’s manpower-heavy tactics. This, though, was seen as a sign of weakness by the allied commanders, particularly Leo Bone of course. Furthermore, the British were now beginning to deploy their own steam vehicles from Project Whistler to Europe, lending a powerful psychological effect to the people in Republican lands that were conquered: they knew that what they had been told, about the Republican armies being innately technologically superior, was a lie: and if that was untruth, how could any of the proclamations issuing from their local semaphore tower could be trusted?

On a more prosaic level, Wesley’s determined campaign against thievery – in contrast to the Republican armies cheerfully practicing la maraude no less brutally on their own countryside as they did on other countries’ – lent the encroaching Allied armies a positive mystique in the eyes of many of the civilian populations they liberated. Of course the paintings of the victorious Royalists being welcomed with showers of lilies by formerly Republican villagers are largely propaganda, but the depth of feeling should not be underestimated. Lisieux’s own propaganda had backfired: his continuous painting of the enemy in dark but vague terms, while suppressing all real knowledge, had only made them seem like the attractive forbidden fruit to his Republic’s people. The armies of the Revolution no longer enjoyed the support of the people that Robespierre had talked about so much.

It has been debated whether the Royalists and their allies struck too hard and too fast and perhaps lost more men than they might have done, but nonetheless after a series of engagements in March and April, Pelletan’s army was shattered and the general was fleeing back to Paris…

*

Under cover of the darkness we will slip behind the lines,
And we will take the men who have stolen our land
For their years of domination
Hit them right between the eyes!


*

From: “Jean de Lisieux: Dark Fire” by François Garnier (1926)

…General Pelletan arrived in the city on May 4th of that year. It is, of course, not known for certain what his thoughts were, but most commentators believe that the inexperienced general was certain he would face a labour camp for his failures – or perhaps Lisieux might even break his usual rule against killing and send him to the chirurgeon or the phlogisticateur. Rather than being fearful, though, it appears Pelletan had resigned himself to his fate, and having decided he was doomed anyway, he decided to approach Lisieux directly to make his report.

By 1809 Lisieux had long since secluded himself in his offices, originally an anonymous house which had long since expanded through walls to fill several streets’ worth of former homes. However, they were all buildings that predated the Revolution. Ironically, this was one of the few parts of Paris which had not been razed and rebuilt from the ground up thanks to Lisieux’s insistent desire to remake the whole of France in his own image. Some other biographers have speculated on why that might be, such as Lisieux alienistically[3] considering his rule to be an abstract project and thus disliking being confronted with actual physical evidence of his decisions. For whatever the reason, Lisieux continued to hold court in his anonymous offices, disliking the idea of constructing any dedicated building for the Administrator of all France.

Lisieux held his fateful meeting with the Boulangerie in March 1807, the meeting which decided to turn Le Grand Crabe against Britain instead of the Dutch Republic and thus perhaps decided also the fate of the Republic. After that time, he was seen less and less even by his closest confidantes. Boulanger returned from the front in November to consult with him – and, it is rumoured, rant about the invasion of Britain, which he privately considered a nihilistic enterprise doomed from the start – and after that time the two old political allies became estranged. Lisieux had not addressed the National Legislative Assembly or the Council of Moderators since 1806 and their members continued to meet more out of habit than of any sense of political power.

The last meeting of Lisieux with what was left of the Boulangerie (lacking the member which gave it its name, as well as Surcouf and others) took place in January 1808, after which point the group split up to take on other roles, all part of the desperate attempt to prevent the Republic from collapsing. Little records survive from these secret meetings, but Boulanger’s adjutant Michel Chanson, attending in lieu of his superior, did note that Lisieux looked very pale and drawn, presumably due to never setting foot outside.

But now, for the first time since probably the meeting with Boulanger, a man actually sought out L’Administrateur. Upon arriving at the offices, he was treated with disbelief by the Republic’s civil servants, who all lived in fear of Lisieux: it was well known that he had once sent a secretary to one of the shipbuilding labour camps but improperly punctuating one of his directives. Eventually, though, Pelletan made himself clear and a senior adjutant, Gaspard Coureau, stood up and offered to take him to the man who ruled France.

The journey through the houses was circuitous, and Pelletan was astonished when they went underground: Coureau told him that Lisieux had been excavating catacombs since at least 1804, preferring to dwell underground away from the noise of the city.

At one point they met another courier (whose name is not recorded), bearing a sealed missive. Coureau recognised the seal. “This is for the general commanding the western front,” he said grimly, turning to Pelletan. “That’s you.”

Pelletan gulped, but then took the letter and read it.

After a moment he frowned in confusion. “This says I am to prioritise the siege of Nantes,” he said. “And it is addressed to Olivier.”

The men shared a moment of uncomfortable realisation, which none of them dared voice. Either L’Administrateur had become insane, or…?

Coureau noticed that the date had been carefully adjusted by a second hand, and decided it must be a recirculated older missive. “But why?” They continued on towards Lisieux.

They met another courier, this one with a message addressed to all occupation troops, which said that Lisieux had decided to step up the 25-year plan and all the puppet republics in the Germanies should be merged into a great Germanic Democracy, while all those in Italy should be joined to France as the Latin Democracy, which Spain would swiftly be added to. It mentioned places that had not been under French occupation for years.

This was even worse, but Pelletan swallowed and continued onwards.

Finally they found Lisieux’s office, in the deepest catacomb, dug and blasted by miners some years before. There was a door, with a letterbox, with a larger office outside constantly staffed by clerks who would take the directives he pushed through the door to the the big semaphore tower L’Aiguille to be sent throughout the Republican Empire.

Pelletan asked the clerks about the outdated letters, and the frightened men – most of them as pale from living underground as Lisieux was said to be – avoided his gaze and refused to speak for a long time, until one of them finally confessed under the threat of action by Coureau. Letters had stopped coming through the box some time ago, said the clerk. Out of fear that someone higher up would ask what was going on, and much too terrified to disturb Lisieux, they had simply started copying old orders and sending those out instead. The frightening thing, Pelletan realised, was that no-one had even noticed until now. France’s remaining armies were probably marching in the wrong direction, thrown off by far more than any clever plot by Britain’s Unnumbered spies could have concocted.

What had happened to Lisieux?

Of course everyone knows the popular theories. The poetic one suggested by Maria Pichegru in her work La République, in which Lisieux chokes on a fishbone and none of his clerks dare open his door to save him. The outlandish one advanced by Dr Lars Jenssen in which he suggests that Lisieux quietly slipped out of the city and left for America, to live out his life as a tyrannical schoolteacher named Pablo Juarez in the United Provinces. None of these theories seem to hold water, but even the most sceptical scholar is at a loss to devise one that actually explains the truth.

For the offices were empty. Lisieux was not there. There was no body, no remains, not even a note, and the clerks staffed the office twenty-four hours a day: they would have seen him leave. There was no secret passage, either. Pelletan was at as much of a loss then as we remain today, and all he could think of was the crushing realisation that the insane path that lay before the Republic, it turned out, had no-one at its head…

*

Light a fire,
Light a fire,
They will see through the world!


*

From – “La Chute: Fall of the Republic” by Dr Jules Perrault (1930)

…into this power vacuum, Olivier Bourcier emerged as an unlikely leader. Having observed the effects of both moderate and radical rule in Spain, the Germanies and Italy, Bourcier knew that the headless Republic must act fast if she was to escape being ground into the dirt for a thousand years by the vengeful Germans and Italians.

Supported by Pelletan, Bourcier convened the National Legislative Assembly. Though long since reduced to a talking shop, the NLA proved to harbour one or two decisive leaders who had slipped through the net of terror, and of these René Apollinaire rose to the forefront, endorsing Bourcier as First Consul. This shocking move, casually sweeping aside all Lisieux’s constitutional changes, harkened back to the early days of the Revolution. Some speculative romantics may suggest that if the Republic’s death could have somehow been staved off, it could perhaps have developed into a proto-Adamantine state by these means – but this seems unlikely.

Bourcier immediately seized command, using the remnants of his troops to crush Lisieux’s fanatically loyal Garde Nationale in the streets of Paris, resulting in a street battle rather symmetrically reminiscent of the one that had set Lisieux on the path to power in 1796. Then as before, Tortue steam-powered armoured wagons proved a useful weapon against the Garde’s fighters, and soon Bourcier held the heart, according to revolutionary doctrine. He did not, however, hold much else. By May 1809, though Boulanger still held a toehold of Flemish soil and his armies continued to defend northeastern France, the bulk of the Republic had fallen to foreign troops: British, American, Irish supported the Royalists in the west, the Austrians and Neapolitans in the south, the Concert of Germany in the east. Boulanger continued to enjoy quite solid support from the local Frenchmen, largely thanks to Francis II shooting himself in the foot in an attempt to make up for his earlier betrayal of Bavaria, quoting Scripture: “Give back to her as she has given! Pay her back double for what she has done! Mix her a double portion from her own cup!” In the face of such revanchist talk, the French were scarcely going to welcome the Austrians as liberators as they sometimes did the Royalists. Recognising this, the emerging Concert of Germany – the Dutch, Mittelbund and their allies – sought to distance themselves from the Austrians, widening a rift that would soon turn bitter.

Bourcier was a realistic man. He had served under Drouet in Spain, a man who had tried to work with the locals rather than against them, albeit not to the same extent as the now-treacherous Ney. He saw that the Republic was doomed. All that mattered now was whether France would survive, and that would take a courageous move: the move to act knowing that he might be reviled by generations to come.

On June 2nd 1809, Bourcier’s government sent a letter to the Allied troops advancing from the west, which was read by Leo Bone and Richard Wesley two days later: an offer of surrender, and an invitation for King Louis XVII to return to Paris and take up his rightful throne. It was a greater version of the coup Ney had pulled in Swabia to yank his country out from under Austrian retribution, and it was the Republic’s last chance.

When Leo Bone read the letter, he mused for a moment: “Horatio will be unhappy they do not pay more for their crimes,” he said, “but I have other loyalties now. I can only trust that history will see things my way.”

Then he turned to Wesley and offered the gruff Irishman a glass of wine, unable to resist a grin. “This does not change the fact, my friend, that after fifteen years of total war…we have won.”

Yet Bone’s words were of course premature.

For there was one throw of the dice left to come…



[1] All the song quotes in this part and the next two come from the continuous song cycle by Chris de Burgh, The Revolution / Light a Fire / Liberty.

[2] “Handball” is the name used in TTL for a sport codified in the mid-19th century in America which is somewhat reminiscent of a mixture between rugby, American football and Australian Rules football.

[3] Psychologically.


Part #79: The Last Gambit

Je reprends à présent la couronne qui me revient de droit, et sache, ô mon peuple, que désormais mon règne et celui de mes fils après le mien dureront jusquà la fin des temps; et sache aussi que le monde nous regarde, et quensemble nous veillerons à ce que les puissances ici-bas comprennent que, malgré les souffrances endurées au cours du long cauchemar de ces dernières années, malgré les ravages commis par les fauves et les insensés qui prétendaient parler au nom de ce même peuple quils décimaient, malgré tout ce que nous devrons reconstruire... le royaume sera toujours là.

- King Louis XVII of the Restored Kingdom of France, coronation speech [1]​


*

From – “A Disagreeable Interlude – the Aftermath of the Jacobin Wars in France” by Antoine Chabrol (1941):

On Leo Bone’s advice, King Louis accepted Bourcier’s offer and a message was sent via the Republican semaphore network – still functioning, thanks to the absence of Lisieux and his all-controlling domination of the system meaning no-one had sent any orders for it to be disabled as the enemy advanced – on June 5th 1809. Bourcier immediately brought the matter to the National Legislative Assembly and announced a secret vote, something which had not been practiced since the early days of the Revolution. Each deputy was free to vote with his conscience, and did not have to fear Lisieux’s clerks sifting through his records for signs of unreliability, for all that his vote had been effectively worthless for years.

The NLA was still quite revolutionary in character, for all that its more hotheaded elements had been weeded out over the years by slamming into the brick wall that had been Jean de Lisieux’s iron rule. It is unlikely that more than perhaps a third of its members genuinely thought bringing back the king would make things any better, particularly fearing revisionism and reprisals for everything that had happened since 1794. However, the NLA’s deputies were also canny enough to realise that the Republic was doomed and the idea of France itself was at risk if they continued to try and fight both the Royalists and their allies in the west and the less forgiving Germans and Italians in the east. The sole, slim hope for French survival was to surrender to one side and hope disagreements broke out among the fractious, largely notional coalition, sufficient to prevent any concerted effort at tearing France apart at a peace treaty.

Therefore, the NLA voted by 231 to 172 to approve Bourcier’s plan, officially reinstating the King. Charismatic deputy René Apollinaire also tabled a resolution calling for the people of France to require the King to approve an enlightened constitution before taking his throne, arguing that all their efforts and suffering would be for naught if matters simply reset to the Bourbon absolutism of 1793. In the end, although there was much sympathy for it, this motion was narrowly defeated when Bourcier appealed that, at present, France could not afford to set terms to her only hope for survival.

In truth King Louis would almost certainly have agreed to this. The King was a fairly modern thinker, indeed had been (by Bourbon standards) even while living as the Dauphin in the early 1790s. His sojourn in Great Britain prior to the Seigneur Offensive had also impressed upon him the idea that a Parliament could work to a monarch’s advantage and serve the stability of the state, not necessarily by actually doing anything but simply being there and thus sapping all but the most fervent revolutionaries of their cause by reminding them there was a slim but real chance they could achieve it through legitimate means. (Thus it has of course been argued that Louis was an early adopter of proto-Reactionism). Having experimented with the Grand-Parlement in Royal France, Louis was convinced that attempting to restore the absolutist system as it once had been would be making a fragile house of cards, ready to totter and fall once more at the slightest sign of discontent. Therefore, compromises were inevitable, for all that his ultraroyaliste supporters in the Vendée would rather have matters arranged so that every trace of the Revolution could be wiped and expunged from the planet altogether, page torn out of history.

Leo Bone, whose opinion was increasingly becoming scarcely less relevant to Royal French policy than the King’s, concurred for different reasons. A political conservative by default (being a classical Royal Navy man: if it isn’t broken, do not fix it) Bone nonetheless disliked the idea of Royal France that the ultraroyalistes espoused, not because it was tyrannical but because it was disorganised. Like the King and his fellow minister Barras, Bone was acutely aware of how powerful some of the ideas of the Revolution had been and how well they had served the ambitions of Robespierre and Lisieux: strong nationalism delivering a single, simple, national flag and anthem, everything set down in black and white, structured government rather than a mess of nepotism and arbitrary power. L’état, c’est moi could not continue, not when a French State had existed under the Republicans without the King. Indeed Le Diamant had the last laugh, for it was his take on the Sun King’s catchphrase, L’état c’est le people, that was bandied about for the first time since the 1790s.

Therefore, by the end of June fighting had effectively died down in the west. The armies of Royal France and her allies formed a large honour guard of around 50,000 which then marched on Paris, escorted by two smaller Republican forces made up of confused and terrified conscripts, the last scrapings of the barrel thanks to Lisieux’s ambitions having emptied France of her young fighting men. Few really knew what was going on, and for all Bourcier’s attempts at an information campaign, rumours spread wildly about the Allies coming to sack Paris and turn the City of Light’s name macabre by means of matches and pitch. However, the general was no Jean de Lisieux, and the semaphore network and its corollaries remained out of any central control: half the codes had been known solely to Lisieux and a few of his chosen secretaries anyway.

Thus Bourcier kept the peace not by informing Parisians of the situation but by putting even more troops on the streets. Lacking civil police after the destruction of Lisieux’s loyal Garde Nationale in the street fighting days earlier, the soldiers were among the few who knew something of what was to occur. One man who remembered the heady days of the Revolution after Hébert and L’Épurateur had stormed the Bastille noted wryly that the troops were a bizarre inversion of what he had seen at that time. Whereas then troops had haphazardly slathered their blue-and-white Bourbon uniforms with red dye to represent martyrs’ blood and produce the black-and-red associated with the Revolution, now soldiers wearing the long-since standardised uniform cut from black and red cloth hastily attached white Bourbon cockades to their Phrygian caps. Flags were an even greater problem, given how all symbols of Royalism had long since been erased from the city. The eventual compromise was simply to turn the Revolutionary Bloody Flag upside down, thus producing a single fleur-de-lys similar to the potent ‘France Ultramodern’ symbol Louis had adopted in Royal France. Another diarist records banners that had been cut up and stitched back together so that “Vive la Révolution et mort au roi” had become “Vive la [sic] roi et mort au [sic] Révolution!

The Allied troops entered the city on July 2nd, being welcomed by an uncertain display on the part of the Parisians, who were clearly even now debating between cheering and fleeing. The King and Leo Bone met with Bourcier and Apollinaire in the NLA building, and military commanders from the other Allies were invited to discussions the following day. It is instructive to look at how those men recorded their impressions of what they saw. General Græme for example had visited Paris as a young man on his Grand Tour before the war. “Either my memory has faded beyond all recognition, or this city has,” he wrote. “While we have all heard of L’Administrateur’s grand schemes, it is a shock quite beyond description when one recognises nothing of that great city of story and of song. L’Aguille rises atop the Île de la Cité where Notre Dame once provoked the envy of Europe. The Pont Neuf is torn down and a new, ugly bridge built a few dozen feet away for no other reason than to be different. New streets are carved through the beautiful heart of this ancient city like sword-cuts, and then buildings are slowly but relentlessly torn up and replaced with anonymous blocks with all the architectural sensibilities of the Picts.[2] His Most Christian Majesty might have agonised over the symbolism of entering Versailles, but Lisieux has taken that away from him. After Robespierre’s suspicious death there, the palace was torn down and replaced with a few streets of mean little houses. This is not Paris. It is a different city built upon the Seine, a city built by men so full of ambition that they lack any sense of imagination.”

General John Alexander,[3] with no such preconceptions, noted: “In England the people are understandably filled with hate for what the Republic has done to them, and seem to believe that every house here is filled with vicious ideologs who spend all their time plotting how to hurt others…the reality is very different. Gen. Bourcier is charming although he still seems in a state of shock. Most of the people of Paris share it. It’s as though Ol’ Delicious had them all entranced in some shared nightmare, and they’re just waking up. And everything’s so gray. Col. FitzGerald from the 5th Irish says it reminds him of the way the Jews live in the Russias, for all that these people are actually quite well fed and dressed. It’s that same climate of fear and hopelessness, he says. I don’t know about that, but I tell you what it reminds me of: white folks living with the mentality of niggers, and that ain’t right.”

Wesley, on the other hand, simply wrote an abrupt semaphore message to his wife: “My dearest Katherine – have arrived in capital – weather good – food terrible – Paris’ charms exaggerated.”

Paris indulged in subdued celebrations as the King was crowned by the Bishop of Nantes – soon to be made the first Archbishop of Paris since 1795 – in the square once called the Place de la Bastille, now known as the Place de l’Épurateur, and soon to be renamed once more as the Place du Ségur after the Royalist commander who had been martyred in the attack. The Bastille itself had stood as a burnt-out wreck during Robespierre’s reign, being left as a reminder of the Revolution’s bloody birth: Lisieux, less sentimental, had demolished it and built a blocky pedestal upon which was placed a statue of L’Épurateur holding his ragged Bloody Flag high. It had been part of his practice of using the cult of L’Épurateur to undermine the iconography of Le Diamant that had been a threat to his Administration. Now, the statue was rather embarrassing, but too large to demolish readily, so local organisers simply stripped him of his Bloody Flag and replaced it with a Royalist one, thus completing the ultimate irony.

There were at least three assassination attempts on the King, mostly by Garde Nationale fanatics who had escaped Bourcier’s sweeps, but these were all caught in time by the large number of soldiers on the streets – some of whom were now wearing the modified Bourbon uniform used in Royal France. One can only imagine the chaos that would have ensued if any of the assassins had been successful, both for Paris and for the world…

After King Louis’ coronation and his legendary speech, he more privately announced plans to establish a constitutional monarchy in France as a hedge against future disaster, and noted that this would be a difficult balancing act – trying to incorporate moderate former Republicans without either pandering to bloody enemies of civilisation or alienating the Vendean ultraroyalistes who had stuck by their King through thick and thin. However, he would have the advantage of Leo Bone, who was given the new post of formal Prime Minister – previously, like most European countries, the ancien regime had only had an informally predominant chief minister among several. Barras was made Comptroller-General of Finances, and thus given ‘the biggest headache in the world’, as he joked, of making sense of the Republic’s complex and drained treasury. “It is small wonder,” he added, “that problems arise when one considers that the Revolution was ultimately triggered by the absence of state funds, and its leaders then proceeded to spend those nonexistent state funds incessantly for the next fifteen years. I was always taught that negative numbers were purely a mathematical conceit, but evidently Messieurs Robespierre and Lisieux discovered a way to put them into practice.”

General unrest was unavoidable. There were a few small fires, hastily contained by the pompiers (who had become very good at preventing fires thanks to the inevitable accidents caused by Lisieux’s urban clearance over the years) and brawls, mostly started either by ultraroyaliste Royal French angry with the King being ‘soft’ on the Republicans, or English soldiers wanting revenge for the depredations of Modigliani. The peace was generally kept by the Americans and Irish, who were considered relatively neutral thanks to being exotic and too concerned with their own divisions, respectively.

All the same, as July wore on and the news reached the troops on the Eastern Front, it seemed as though the Restored Kingdom was shakily coming to life. The King continued to steer his perilous course between the extremes of mindless Royalist revisionism and surrender to the bloodier ideals of the Revolution, and Leo Bone (with the assistance of Royal French spymaster Philippe de Bougainville) constructed a network of informers throughout Paris to help stop trouble before it started. The NLA was reconstituted into the new Grand-Parlement and the Council of Moderateurs turned into a vaguely defined Estate Regionale, intended to be a sop to the Bretons’ fiery defence of their traditional autonomy in the fact of Bone’s broadly centralising agenda. It seemed as though the problems with reintegrating France would inevitably take second place to the issues arising in the east: would the German allies accept this restoration? Would they accept peace? At what cost? In particular the unpredictable Francis II of Austria, who would clearly like to see Paris burned to the ground. There were even murmurs of discontent back in London, as the city slowly rose once more from the ashes under Churchill’s domineering but decisive rule as Lord Protector, and the boy king Frederick II returned from America. Would Britain be drawn into a war against her former coalition allies in defence of a France made up mostly of the sort of people who had burned her capital? Freewheeling out of all control, still with many of the provisions of her constitution suspended, anything could happen in Britain if such an outrage were to be promulgated. Ironically, at a time when Louis XVII was seeking to bring British constitutionalism to France, Churchill’s heavy-handed approach was bringing French absolutism to Britain.

But, of course, even as the would-be opponents drew up in their lines and began to eye each other, events overtook them.

Like all the French troops in the east, Marshal Boulanger’s Grande Armée – still consisting of 80,000 men even after its losses in Flanders – received a semaphore message in late July about the quiet revolution in Paris and how the King had taken up his crown once more. The message, which had been composed after some consideration on the part of its writers, emphasised the fact that Louis was merciful and had already pardoned Bourcier for his actions during the Revolution and allowed him to keep his general’s rank. Boulanger read the message on the night of July 31st by flickering candlelight, as he sat tiredly in his tent after the battlefield of Cambrai and looked for the next strategic point he might find at which to delay the grinding advance of the armies of the emerging Concert of Germany…

*

From - LE SOLDAT: Pierre Boulanger, A Life by Michel Chanson, 1830[/i] –

I approached the Marshal at midnight, expecting as usual to have to persuade him to catch a few hours’ sleep in order to be his best in the morning. Although he had thrown back the Hessians and Hanoverians at Cambrai, it could not be long before the Germans attacked once more, and we needed our miracle worker to be there for us, not obsessing over what might have been. It was a new and unwelcome aspect to his character, but then, how often had the great Boulanger ever enjoyed anything other than strategic brilliance? The spectre of Brussels haunted us all, but none more so than our leader.

However, I found Pierre reading and re-reading a scrap of telegraph paper, his bloodshot eyes blank as though staring far away. Fearful, and noting it bore the mark designating it was for general distribution, I took the paper from his unresisting fingers. I wondered what might provoke such shock: I would have thought a death in the family, but Pierre had never married and his parents had died years before. There were those strange rumours from Paris of course, but—

I still remember the feeling that came over me when I looked at the paper and took in the fact that the usual stamp at the top was different. Someone at the office had turned it upside down, so the fleur-de-lys was now in its ancien position once more! My first thought was actually to laugh at the irony of the inept clerk and how someone paranoid like Robespierre would have had him shot for being ‘impure’. It never entered my wildest dreams that it might have been deliberate.

Then I actually read the semaphore note and found myself in the same position as the Marshal. I blinked, read and re-read it. It was impossible, a bizarre fantasy. L’Administrateur dead? No – not dead, but vanished? Bourcier having taken over? The King having returned?!

“This is ridiculous,” I said aloud.

“No,” said a husky voice, and I was shocked to find it was Pierre. “It is incredible. Yet it is true. A rider came up from Paris a few hours ago and confirmed it. A good man, a trustworthy on. The things in that message,” he tapped it with the captured Spanish Kleinkrieger’s dagger he used to open envelopes, “have happened.”

I remember shaking my head, trying to fit my mind around these impossibilities, not sure whether I even wanted to. “But…what are we to do?” I gabbled. “It talks of returning to Paris while they attempt to talk peace with the Germans! And if they do not succeed, we are to join up with the traitors and the English!” The very idea turned my stomach.

Pierre nodded, his cheeks hollow. This campaign had been hell on him; through his own inner taskmaster, he had suffered scarcely less than the privates harried by German horse on the long retreat. “It is madness.”

Then, to my astonishment, he opened his mouth and let out a croaking chuckle. “Madness…” he repeated slowly, and then abruptly leapt to his feet, in one second regaining all the energy and vitality that had fled him since the debacle of Brussels. He tossed the thin telegraph paper in the air, and with one stroke of his Spanish dagger, cleaved it in two. “This is FRANCE!”

He spun towards me and spoke in a manner more rapid-fire than any revolving pistol. I knew he was just sounding his thoughts of me, as he had so many times in the past, and I felt a faint glimmer of hope and excitement. The world had been turned upside down, but Marshal Boulanger was back.

“Michel,” he said, “we are both children of the Revolution, you and I.” He shook his head wearily as he thought back. “I was a baker’s son. Under the old regime, I would have died a baker. If I had joined King Louis’ army, I might have made sergeant if I was lucky.”

I nodded along, uncertain where he was going with this.

“And you, Michel,” he added. “You were what, a clerk?”

“In the Comptroller-General’s office,” I agreed. “Too junior for even Robespierre to put on a list, fortunately.”

The Marshal smiled weakly. “And isn’t that it,” he said. “Under the old regime, I would have had to bow and scrape to you, a lowly tradesman to a clerk of the state. But now I command all France’s armies, for better or for worse,” he turned bitter as Brussels reared its ugly head once more, “and you are my subordinate, because it turns out that I have a talent at this.”

He waved his dagger around to illustrate his comments, a little alarmingly. “That’s a talent I’d never have discovered, under the old regime.” He looked down for a moment. “How many lowly sons do you think never reached their full potential over the years? How many died doing the same as their fathers always did because there was nothing else they could do? For that matter, how many aristocrats spent their time in idle decadence when a talent might be concealed within? Think how many great generals drawn from the nobility served the kings of the past. And those aristocratic commanders who were useless – they would have had other talents hidden within, at a trade perhaps, the sort of thing nobles do not do under the old regime.”

He looked my way again. “They’re bringing it back, Michel,” he said bleakly. “They’re bringing it back, and now everyone will go back into their little box and be told to shut up and be happy while they clean up the mess.”

His words were powerful, but I shook my head slowly. “Bourcier has kept his job—” I began.

“Olivier!” Boulanger said in sudden fury, throwing down his dagger as I flinched. It stuck in the floor and vibrated for a moment with a metallic sound. “Olivier! The young colonel who I promoted for what he did on the drive to Vienna! And how does he repay me? With this!” He pounded his fist on the table. “Michel, I doubt they would grant me my life. I am too central to the legend. But even if they do, I would not take it. I will not cravenly take what I have gained and then allow them to put back the system so that all the bakers’ sons with a hidden talent who come after me will die poor and unhappy. To do that would be like the first Frankish warriors who came to our country, who fought and worked hard and gained positions of power for themselves, and then told their people that that was an end to that sort of thing, and from now on their sons would inherit it regardless of their merits.” He shook his head firmly. “I am not going to do that, Michel.”

I felt a thrill run down my spine, and I was unable to say whether it was apprehensive or hopeful. “Then what shall you do, Pierre? What shall we all do?”

The Marshal bent down and pulled his dagger from the floor, tossing it from hang to hand. “We shall do the only thing we can do in conscience, Pierre. I doubt we shall succeed, for even if we win now, we shall still face the Germans. But at least we shall persuade the world that the Revolution does not cravenly surrender. We can make a name for ourselves, encourage the next generation of oppressed poor to remember us. What we have done shall never be forgotten…

“And, if we must fall, we shall fall like MEN!”

The next day, the orders began flying. To their surprise, the armies were going into quick-march mode once more, as though we were practicing the War of Lightning. As indeed we were. But this time, the Marshal’s signature attack strategy would aim to take and hold the heart of a country none of us had ever thought we would need to invade.

France.




[1] Translation: Now I take up my rightful crown once more, and may you know, my people, that I shall reign here and my sons after me from now until the ending of the world; and know also that the world watches, and together we shall ensure that the powers of our time see one thing - that no matter what we have all suffered under the nightmare of the past few years, no matter how our nation has been ravaged by the hand of brutes and lunatics claiming to speak for the very people they murdered wholesale, no matter how much we have to rebuild...the Kingdom will always survive.

[2] In British usage of the time, 'Picts' essentially = 'cavemen'.

[3] Alexander was promoted thanks to his actions in the early stages of the return to the war in France. He is now supreme commander of all American troops there, mostly consisting of his own 101st Carolinians.

Part #80: For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee…

And if any man who would allow himself to believe that warfare is an acceptable manner of serving his country’s needs, or his own desires for power and ascendancy, let him be humbled by one word whispered into his ear: Paris.

– Michael Hutchinson MP, In Defence of the Council, speech at the Hyde Park Rally in Doncaster, 1829​

*

From – “A Glossary of Terms in Warfare” by Peter William Courtenay, 4th Baron Congleton (Vandalia-shire, Virginia), 1921

The War of the Nations: Commonly accepted term (coined by contemporary commentators) for the final stages of the Jacobin Wars, in which the tide of war had decisively turned against the French Latin Republic. Generally considered to date from the collapse of the English Germanic Republic at the end of 1807 until the Battle of Paris in 1809, although some Continental commentators instead choose a later starting date, working from the failure of Boulanger’s campaign in the Low Countries almost a year later.

Regardless of arguments over definitions, there is no doubt that this is an apt name. While the FLR had been continuously engaged with numerous powers since its inception, this was when countless nations piled onto Lisieux’s state, sensing weakness from the failures and desiring a piece of the peace (if one will forgive the crude wordplay) that was to be obtained when the smoke had cleared. Several of these powers had been at war with France earlier in the wars, while others joined for the first time. Dates of declaration of war can be found below.

Naples (Kingdoms of Naples, Sicily and Aragon), Castile, Portugal: N/A, already at war with France.

Austria and other Hapsburg possessions inc. Kingdom of Italy, Mittelbund, Alliance of Hildesheim, most remaining unaligned minor German states: N/A, already in continuous state of war with the French and their puppets, though more direct intervention commenced with the launch of Le Grand Crabe (q.v.)

Duchy of Flanders: March 17th 1807 (by default, due to invasion by Boulanger)

Republic of the United Netherlands: March 20th 1807 (by default, due to attack on Carnbee’s fleet by Villeneuve)

Kingdom of Great Britain: March 23rd 1807 (by default, due to invasion)

Kingdom of Ireland and Empire of North America: Not formally declared until late 1807, but considered retroactively to date to Britain’s. Irish and American troops were involved in the fighting long before official pronouncement due to contemporary communications delays.

Corsican Republic: April 12th 1807.

Electorate of Saxony (and de facto acquisitions): October 4th 1807.

Kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden: October 7th 1807.

Empire of All Russias and Grand Duchy of Lithuania: February 3rd 1809 (see Petersburg Colloquy).



Petersburg Colloquy. Informal name given to a meeting between Emperor of All Russias Paul I and his ministers and advisors in St Petersburg, late January 1809. The object of the meeting was to discuss the possibility of Russian intervention in the latter Jacobin Wars (the War of the Nations, q.v.) which had previously been impossible firstly because of the Russian Civil War and secondly because of the need to recover from said conflict, though at all times the country had remained steadfastly opposed to the French Republicans in terms of ideology and propaganda (e.g. Paul’s ban on Russian court French). At the time of the Colloquy, a large part of the Russian Army had already been committed either to sabre-rattling operations against the Ottomans and their Crimean vassal in the Caucasus and Ruthenia (respectively) along with of course the Great Eastern Adventure,[1] so it was unlikely Russia could provide that much of a force to the anti-Republican coalition.

However, while Marshal Saltykov pointed out that any intervention at this stage could only be minor, foreign minister Grigory Rostopshchin argued that the existence of such a contribution as a propaganda symbol would far outweigh its actual combat usefulness, and would send a message to the powers of Europe that Mother Russia had licked her wounds and could once more stretch out her hand to do the tsar’s bidding. Also, Heinz Kautzman (popularly known as “The Bald Impostor”) pointed out that Russia could not dare risk being left out of any peace negotiations lest she be sidelined in post-war European politics, and that the tsar’s steadfast condemnation of the Revolution would be made to sound hollow if the British and Royal French secured a mild, compromise peace. The fact that this argument was made months before Bourcier made his peace overture illustrates that Russian intelligence in France in this period was perhaps more extensive than it is often given credit for.

In the end, a decision was made; seven Russian regiments and three Lithuanian ones would be sent to France. Emperor Paul ruled out the obvious land route: he distrusted the new northern German polities, Austria remained theoretically hostile towards Russia and Francis II was mercurial and unpredictable, and besides, in the vast and multinational battles raging on the eastern front, it seemed likely that the token Russo-Lithuanian force would be lost and its exploits unreported upon. For that reason, the more audacious strategy of sending transports from Petersburg and Riga through the Baltic, the Skagerrak and the North Sea to land the troops directly in France was pursued. Though somewhat risky on the face of it, the Russians knew that the Republican French fleet had been almost completely destroyed. Also, an escort was provided by the Danes, who also contributed a few additional troops; Denmark had remained in the war largely simply to have a voice at the peace settlement, once her primary objective of ejecting French ambitions from the Germanies had been secured. Finally, in a gesture of reconciliation, Grand Duke Alexander Potemkin of Courland also scraped together a token regiment and a few ships to contribute.

This combined force traversed its sea route and landed its troops near Dieppe in June of 1809. Bare days later, Kautzman – who had chosen to command the force personally, believing Russia now stable and safe enough for his people to leave – learned of Bourcier’s peace offer. Urgent to ensure the Russians were blooded before the war could end, he immediately ordered a march on Paris, hoping to run into Republican units enroute…

*

From – “Knife’s Edge: The Republic, the Kingdom, and the Battle of Paris 1809” by Paul Ramsbottom, 1980:

On the 4th of August 1809, a quiet summer’s day, two of the greatest armies the world had ever seen clashed in an epic struggle to decide the fate of Europe. Few of the great wars have ended in such a fashion. The earlier Wars of Supremacy, for all that they contained many large battles, had a tendency to peter out for several years into inactivity before peace was reached by default. The Jacobin Wars, by contrast, ended with the single greatest battle of their course, eclipsing all earlier matches. Indeed the man in the street seems frequently only to know of this battle, greatly overrepresented as it is in film and other adaptations, and may be ignorant of all that came before, the war and the ideological conflict that set the stage for what some of our forefathers optimistically mistook to be the ‘end of history’.

On one side was all that remained of the Grande Armée de la République: eighty thousand strong, late of the campaign in Flanders, commanded by none other than Marshal Pierre Boulanger and his twelve generals, some recently promoted, universally known in the anglophone world as “the Baker’s Dozen”. Some neo-Jacobins have fallen upon the obvious comparison to Christ’s disciples and the subsequent messianic image attached to Boulanger has only been amplified by the account of Michel Chanson in Avant le Déluge. Chanson presented Boulanger’s last meeting with his generals on the day before the battle in terms clearly meant to evoke the Last Supper, doubtless being responsible for much of the mysticism surrounding the thirteen, not one of whom died of old age. Of course, Chanson’s account must be dismissed in a more cool-headed analysis of the pieces in play.[2]

On the other side were the combined forces known by that point as “The Western Allies”: twenty thousand Republican French loyal to Bourcier, twelve thousand Royal French, twelve thousand Britons, three thousand Irish and three thousand Americans. All in all, there were approximately 55,000; sorely outnumbered by Boulanger’s force, and lacking much of a defensive position. Paris was not a city designed to be defended easily, much less Lisieux’s reconstructed Paris which, it had always been assumed, would sit at the heart of a peaceful Latin Democracy forever. It was obvious that the only way the Allies would have any chance at all was if a strong and unified chain of command could be implemented, which immediately caused problems as the commanders struggled to organise in response to Boulanger’s approach. They knew of this only by the semaphore network; working to War of Lightning standards, Boulanger’s army moved swiftly and outran all but the fastest messengers. In order to permit such a rapid movement, Boulanger had left his supply train behind and allowed la maraude to be perpetrated on France herself. By the time the Grande Armée left the northeastern part of France it had controlled, Boulanger had made himself a very unpopular man with its people.

Of course to Boulanger himself this was unimportant: his goal was to destroy the Allies, to take Paris, and if nothing more were possible, at least to go down in flames and create a new Revolutionary symbol for the future. On the night before the battle which Chanson wrote about, General Trenet advocated a pause in their march, outlining a strategy by which the bulk of the army would engage the Allies while he took ten thousand and looped around to hit Paris from the rear, not giving the enemy any chance to fire the city, and then being able to surround them. Boulanger vetoed this. “We shall not gain victory by ‘tricks’,” declared the man who had once saved the nascent Republic by a rather underhanded deal with Charles Theodore. “All the world shall see us defeat the counter-revolutionaries and traitors on the fair field of battle. All shall see our system is superior. What follows after matters little.” Many biographers have tried to explain the change in character in the Marshal from pragmatic tactician to stubborn ideologue, but most broadly concur on the idea that Boulanger had been profoundly affected by his failure in Brussels and the ensuing retreat, and was determined to win one last victory by straightforward means. Whatever the reason, Trenet and his supporters amid the Dozen could not dissuade Boulanger.

In Paris, King Louis held an emergency meeting while the overall supreme commander was chosen. The King himself favoured Leo Bone, but this was objected to on multiple grounds. His naval background was held by some to be analogous to lack of experience, while some among the Royal French remained associated with political factions opposed to ‘le petit Vauban’ and instead advocated the veteran Royalist general Henri Grouchy as leader. However, Grouchy was unpopular among the Republicans of Bourcier, who muttered allegations of going against the laws of war during the late campaign in the Vendée. Of course the Republicans wanted Bourcier, but this was politically impossible. The British commander Sir John Moore was considered to be too closely aligned with the Royal French to be a neutral arbiter, while his lieutenant Thomas Græme had been associated with pamphlets condemning the Republican system very severely in the past. That left the Irish and Americans as obvious neutral choices, as being too obscure and exotic for any of the fractious Allies to get too excited about. The American commander John Alexander was too young and too recently promoted (and lingering prejudices about the Americas ran deep in both French forces, especially the Republicans) so the logical choice was the Duke of Mornington, Richard Wesley. He had experience in leading outnumbered forces during the rebellion of the United Society of Equals in Ireland, and he had experience of leading divided and diverse forces both in that war and in India.

Wesley had never commanded a battle on this scale, of course; but then, nor had anyone else. King Louis granted him the temporary rank of Marshal of France, matching Boulanger’s status and allowing him to give orders to both sets of French commanders. In a conference with the other generals, Wesley outlined the problem they faced: “Paris is not readily defensible. That is one. We cannot afford to abandon the city on tactical grounds lest the enemy win a punishing propaganda victory and cancel our earlier triumphs. That is two. Our only recourse is to give the Baker and his Dozen a damn’ good thrashing. That is three.”

Fortunately, Allied intelligence was good enough to discern that Boulanger’s rapid march showed no sign of slowing down as he neared the city, and thus the Marshal of the Republic must be planning a simple frontal assault. To that end, Wesley devised a strategy by means of consultation with the others, especially Grouchy and Bourcier. “Our objective is to hold them. We cannot hope to defeat a more numerous, veteran, homogenous army with a clear chain of command, even if it is tired from its late march. But we can hold them. Hold them, perhaps, until reinforcements arrive.” That was the key to the plan. Whereas before the British and Royal French had hurried to Paris to ensure the vengeful Germans did not get there first, now they pinned their hopes on reinforcements from the east. Responses to Boulanger’s turnaround were complex: in Flanders, the armies of the Mittelbund and the Alliance of Hildesheim began an immediate pursuit, though hampered due to being unable to match Boulanger’s speed. However, the Flemings and Dutch themselves mostly remained in place, struggling to rebuild their countries after the ravages of the Grande Armée. General von Wrede in particular was tasked with the military governorship of Flanders’ French-speaking region, Wallonia, which had largely been sympathetic to French rule, at least at first. In response to the repeated ‘betrayals’ of Liège since the 1790s, Duke Charles Theodore II ordered the formal dissolution of the archbishopric – which had remained de jure an independent entity within the Wittelsbach possessions – and its direct annexation into the Duchy, one of the most important mediatisations in the Germanies of this period.

The Danes and Saxons operating in Swabia also responded by sending armies towards Paris, though it was doubtful whether they could arrive in time to do any good. Recognising this, Saxon commander Franz Wagner sent his Polish flying cavalry, under the command of Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, in an advance attack in the hope that they might arrive in time to attack Boulanger’s flank. Meanwhile, the Hapsburgs seized this opportunity to achieve a more oblique objective. Still smarting over the failure of the scheme to attack Swabia, the Archduke Ferdinand ordered General Alvinczi to once more attack through Switzerland, but this time through the French-speaking regions and take Lorraine. Francis II remained paranoid about the Saxons and Danes using newly friendly Swabia as a base for further operations, and Lorraine was the obvious target for future expansion. Furthermore, as an ancestral possession of the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine, a definite claim could be made – for all that Alvinczi’s occupation extended well past the legal definitions of the Duchy. Meanwhile, the Neapolitans, Portuguese and their Spanish allies could not move fast enough to affect the outcome of the coming struggle, for all that it frustrated Horatio Nelson. “Damn that man,” he wrote, meaning Leo Bone, “for having the audacity to forever be at the centre of everything.”

Battle was joined on the morning of August 4th and continued the whole day. Wesley positioned his forces on the Montmartre Heights north of Paris proper, the only reasonably defensive position. It was a clever ploy, as even if Boulanger did choose to circumvent the massed Allied armies to take Paris after all, mortars positioned on Montmartre could easily shell Paris. Either way, Boulanger would have to destroy the Allied army.

Having studied Boulanger’s past battles, and more importantly receiving first-hand knowledge from both sides (Thomas Græme had faced Boulanger at the Battle of Caen ten years before, and Bourcier had served under him during the Poséidon campaign), Wesley deduced that the Marshal was likely to attack by massing his steam artillery at the fore and using this rolling bombardment to shock the Allies, then follow up with columns of Revolutionary infantry to rout the damaged armies. It was a strategy which had worked for him many times before, at Caen and other battles. But, Wesley declared, it would not work here, for one reason: never before had Boulanger faced an enemy who could reply in kind.

Though they had not played a major role in the campaign to this date (a fact worth remembering when one considers the exaggerated wonder weapon that steam tractors have often been painted as in accounts of this period) the British had brought their Project Whistler steam-tanks with them across the Channel, and the Royal French still had many Republican examples they had captured – as too, of course, did Bourcier. It is said by contemporary commentators that so much steam gushed into the cold morning air atop the Montmartre Heights that it was as though clouds were being born, and the enemy was as shrouded as if battle was already joined and powder smoke was everywhere.

When Boulanger attacked, sending General Cuvier forward with his force of steam artillery rolling inexorably forward, Wesley reacted initially with a tactic he had learned during his sojourn in India. A large force of galloper guns, small artillery pieces hitched to fast horses, was deployed on the right of the French axis of advance, moving even more swiftly than the larger steam guns, and proceeded to direct an enfilading fire against Cuvier that Frederick William II of Prussia, fifty years dead, would have been proud to see. Leading the gallopers was, of course, Leo Bone, never one to miss a chance for glory even if his own horsemanship was adequate at best. The scene was immortalised in Gaudan’s Charge of the Cannoneers, in which the steam gouting up from the Republican artillery serves to turn them into vague, nightmarish silhouettes in the grey gloom, in stark contrast to the colourful explosion of different uniforms and horses in the foreground.

The attack was only a pinprick, of course – the galloper guns were of small weight – but Boulanger’s steam artillery force did not, as some more modern commentators have sometimes mistakenly regarded it as, consist of protguns as we know them.[3] Though the guns could fire while moving, barely – the entire reason why Boulanger’s strategy of leading with them was so devastating, for the enemy could not easily reply and hit a moving target – they certainly could not turn, and the crews riding atop them were not protected. Now, flaws in the Republican plan became clear. The galloper guns were even more agile than the Republican steam guns, meaning that Bone could keep up a persistent, accurate hammering fire striking the advancing line. Even though the balls were generally only half- or one-pounders, lucky shots nonetheless damaged wheels or burst steam boilers or otherwise brought individual guns to a halt. Furthermore, Sir John Moore led out his experimental Rifle Dragoons and their accurate weapons picked off the steering crews of several guns, leading them to slew sideways and collide with others.

Although the bulk of the line of advance continued onwards, Boulanger realised that the gaps the Allies had inflicted meant that they could survive the onslaught, particularly since the steam-guns could not easily turn and close up as men could. For that reason, he told off his small, precious force of cavalry to take out Leo Bone’s galloper guns and ordered his rifle-wielding tirailleurs forward to contest the field with Moore. Meanwhile, the bulk of his army, the great mass of infantry, was ready to march over what the steam guns left behind.

The cavalry pursued Bone from the immediate field of battle, Bone ordering his own guns re-hitched rather than abandon them, even though this meant any chance of escape was nil. His reasoning became clear when he simply retreated to a slightly more rocky, defensible position and then ordered the guns unhitched once more. In the immortal line that has graced a half-dozen inaccurate film adaptations, he declared “Give them a whiff of grape!” and the galloper guns filled the air with canister shot. More than half of his crews died on cavalry sabre, and Bone himself suffered a wound to the calf which meant he always walked with a limp thereafter, but Boulanger’s cavalry force – and one of the Marshal’s strategic options – was annihilated. Bone was aided by the fact that the cavalry had been ordered to spike the guns as their first priority, rather than attacking their crews; however, this meant most of the galloper guns were also out of the fight. Now it turned into a brawl.

Wesley had arranged his forces on the Montmartre Heights in a formation which has been known ever after as Mornington’s Crescent, though as the Duke himself insisted ever afterwards, it was merely a modernised adaptation of Hannibal’s strategy at Cannae.[4] Most of the Royal French were stationed in the middle, with the Republican French divided into two and placed on their immediate flanks, and the other forces extending northwards into two horns that would stretch around Boulanger’s massed force as it marched onwards and surround it. Wesley was paranoid about the possibility of Boulanger cottoning onto this and changing his plans, but as the bulk of the Republican force was committed, the Duke slapped his thigh and declared: “Ha! Robespierre should have known better than to burn the books of classical history. We have him now.”

Boulanger’s fractured line of steam-guns continued their advance. As they neared the Allied line and began shelling it, Wesley deployed his own steam force, though he himself had always never cared much for the newfangled contraptions. Sir John Moore withdrew, conceding the field to the tirailleurs, in order to better support the Whistler guns he knew so well, under the command of the hastily promoted General David Daniels. The British weapons, supported by the French guns contributed by Bourcier and the Royalists’ captured stock, sought to attack Boulanger’s guns directly. Thus while Cuvier’s force mostly used howitzer plunging fire to attack the Allied infantry, the British in particular used solid shot and their secret hail-shot weapon, the former to smash the Republican guns by main force, the latter to kill their crews.[5] Nonetheless, if nothing else Boulanger still had plenty of conventional artillery to reply to the British effort with…but now he learned what it was like to try and hit a moving steam-propelled target from the other general’s perspective.

This was not, as some try and paint it, the first clash between steam-driven weapons of war and certainly not the first protgun battle. For a start, British Whistler vehicles had clashed with Modigliani’s few during the invasion of England. But this certainly eclipsed those earlier skirmishes. The Allies were demonstrating to the world the later well-established principle that first adopter frequently loses out in the long run: the inventor of a new war-winning technology is always hampered by the fact that they have grown used to being the only one to possess it, and often are stuck with early models while copycat foreigners have managed to correct the mistakes that have been uncovered through experience.

Nonetheless, the Allies were still outnumbered. Cuvier’s remaining guns hit the Allied lines and tore large swathes through them, yet the line had become too fractured by the Allied counterattack and the French columns behind the guns had themselves become confused, having to deal with or go around the British and Allied French’s own steam-guns. Furthermore, Bourcier ordered the deployment of the Tortue steam-wagons which Lisieux had once used to crush the uprising in Paris; stationed in the ‘horns’ of the Crescent with the Irish troops, the Tortues barged drunkenly through the middle of the marching Republican columns and wrought havoc with the French formation, their musketmen firing continuously from their firing slits. All were eventually destroyed or immobilised by Republican artillery or grenadiers, but not before killing several thousand Republican infantry and, more importantly, plunging their centre into chaos. Cuvier’s guns made their breaches in the Allied line, yet often the infantry were not there to support them, and the guns were surrounded and taken simply by Allied infantry climbing atop them. The initial thrust had stalled.

As the afternoon wore on, both sides’ steam vehicles were now mostly out of the fight, whether through battle damage, immobilisation or simply having had their boilers fail from the strenuous fighting, and it was reduced once more to eighteenth-century warfare. The Republican columns in their black and red uniforms, marching below their Bloody Flag colours, sent catcalls towards Bourcier’s troops, calling them cowards and traitors. It did not help that Bourcier’s army had not had time to be re-equipped with Royal French uniforms, and mostly wore the same black and red as Boulanger’s men, save going barehead thanks to having thrown away their Phrygian caps and lacking shakoes, and hastily wearing cockades of Bourbon white or sashes of Royal blue. Nonetheless, no matter what hope Trenet had voiced in his conferences with Boulanger before the battle, Bourcier’s men did not break and join the other side. This battle would be to the finish.

Boulanger suffered from the absence of cavalry now that Leo Bone had destroyed his small force, and Grouchy in particular performed several savage flying raids on the approaching columns, forcing them to form square to deflect his attacks and then quickly retreating as the Allied conventional artillery pounded the compressed squares, a tactic dating back decades. Without cavalry of his own, Boulanger could not reciprocate.

And yet it wasn’t enough. Numbers told. The Republicans ground inexorably onwards. Wesley’s Cannae-like horns tried to wrap around the back of the enemy formation, yet Boulanger had been canny enough to keep a five thousand strong force in reserve under Charles Guimard at his rear, ready to relieve the encircled Republicans at the right moment. When Boulanger finally realised Wesley’s plan, he believed that his army would soon break through the bulk of the Allied French force and overrun Paris anyway, by sheer weight of numbers. Nonetheless, it was dangerously unwise to tolerate this encirclement even for a short while – the men might grow doubtful and panicky – so via signal balloon, he ordered Guimard to strike at the Irish lines around the back under FitzGerald and smash through.

In the event, though, Guimard never arrived. It is doubtful whether Boulanger ever learned that a Russian force led by Heinz Kautzman, having marched all the way here from Dieppe by Moscow’s hellish copy of the War of Lightning, finally blundered into the Republican reserve and fell upon it. Quite apart from the main battle, visible only as rising powder smoke, the Russians, Lithuanians, Danes and Courlanders had finally found a Republican force to fight and, oblivious of the greater battle, the Bald Impostor crushed Guimard. The Russians and their allies were tired, but then so were the Republican French, and numbers told as decisively as they did on the main field of battle.

Then, just as it seemed the Republicans had finally massed enough organised columns to secure a breakout, Wesley – who stood right in their path – ordered the Wyverns forward.

The Wyverns were the last product of Project Whistler, large wooden constructions rolling slowly forward on steam-driven wheels. They were only barely moveable, just enough to bring them close to the enemy before the enemy could discern what they were…

The weapons they carried were rarely useful weapons of war. Yet as everyone from the Tippoo Sultan on down had learned over the years, their very unpredictability could make veteran troops, troops who would calmly march in the face of an objectively far more dangerous hail of artillery, turn and run.

The rockets screamed and whined as they hurtled into the air, their explosive warheads detonating above the Republican columns’ Phrygian cap-clad heads, or sometimes in the midst of the men, killing a dozen or so. One or two were even experimentally equipped with scaled-down hail shot, doing even more withering damage. Finally, even as the last rockets were fired, Wesley threw the last of his cavalry into the Republicans’ flanks and ordered his infantry to advance with bayonets. A cacophony of battle cries filled the air. The Royalists yelled “Montjoie St. Denis!” Bourcier’s former Republicans cried “Vive le Roi!”, sometimes after some hesitation. The Americans, Irish and the Scots and Welsh contingents of the British went for their usual cry of “Huzzah!” Some of the English, as well, particularly the northern English.

The southern English regiments surrounding Wesley, however, those whose home counties had suffered and burned under French Republicans, often while their own regiments were far away and unable to help, let out a war cry that had not been voiced by the English soldier in France since the Hundred Years’ War. “HAVOC!” they bellowed, to a man, somehow eclipsing the far more numerous allied French. “HAVOC!” The Hellequin was come once more, and just as his longbowman forefather had sought his vengeance upon France for the Norman Conquest, so now too did the musketman for Modigliani’s invasion.

And yet all of this would not have been enough – the Republicans could afford to lose a few columns, regroup and try again, with no more tricks left in the Allied arsenal – had it not been for the fact that Boulanger had been confident enough to lead this attack from near the front. With Trenet left in command of the battle as a whole, he was determined to break through and take Paris himself.

When he realised the attack was faltering in the face of the Wyvern rockets and the counter-attack, he prepared to retreat and regroup. But then he spotted something, or so Chanson records…the red light of the evening sun glinted off a golden crown amid the Allied generals in the middle of the line. King Louis was there.

(In fact he was not – Leo Bone and Olivier Bourcier, the latter ruefully acknowledging the former’s successful use of the tactic in the late campaign in the Vendée, had arranged a double to be there to rally the troops without the risk of the king actually being killed in battle, which the Britons in particular knew from their recent history was a very real possibility).

Boulanger became consumed by irrational rage, seeing the very embodiment of the ancien régime whose return he sought to prevent standing before him. And he forgot all he had learned of military strategy, all the wonderful tricks of warfare that had led to him being one of the few Revolutionary generals who enjoyed grudging respect even among the conservative powers of Europe, as his heart melted into white-hot fury and he ordered one last march.

Wesley saw that, despite this foolish decision, there was still a chance Boulanger could break through, and if even a few Republicans broke out and into Paris, that could be the end of all they had worked for. So the only option, as one commentator later recorded, was for the Duke to do something equally foolish. He rode out to meet Boulanger with his small force, both men being surrounded by few living men and plenty of groaning corpses on that hell of a battlefield. “You will face me, sir!” he said, drawing his sword. Wesley, the man who had always seen duelling as a tiresome and wasteful pursuit, who had successfully had it banned in Ireland under his tenure as Lord Deputy, now challenged the master of all that remained of the French Latin Republic upon the battlefield.

The Marshal looked at him, and his loyal musketmen raised their weapons to shoot down the Irishman, but Boulanger stayed their hands. “No.” No-one really knows why he did this. The biographer Paul Simons argues that what Boulanger always yearned for was acceptance by high society, for that would prove the Revolutionary system he had always fought for had succeeded. Perhaps. For whatever reason, Boulanger temporarily forgot the king he had seen and drew his own blade, a heavy cavalry sabre. Wesley leapt from his horse and the two of them drew together, a circle opening up around them as men ceased fighting to watch this extraordinary spectacle. Indeed the very battle, or at least its centre, began to grind to a halt as men turned to look. Among them of course were General Cuvier (who had escaped the destruction of his steam guns) and, for the Allies, Leo Bone and General Alexander. For the present, that circle of men did not fight, too consumed by what they saw before them, and inadvertently providing an inappropriate metaphor for generations of Societist “historians”.

The men duelled. It was not an aesthetically attractive or overly complex fight. Wesley had been trained in fencing; Boulanger had not, but was somewhat younger, stronger and had height and reach on the Irishman. Both were supremely experienced in unarmed combat, both believing in leading from the front as generals. Their swords crashed together once, twice, once more, neither man gaining an advantage. At one point Wesley stumbled and some commentators say that Boulanger allowed him to rise, but this is uncertain. First blood went to Wesley as he nicked Boulanger’s cheek on the backstroke, yet the Marshal ignored the bloody cut with stoicism as he sought to chip away at the Irishman’s defences.

Then, even as the sun began to dip below the horizon, red as the blood that soaked that battlefield, Boulanger triumphed. He took Wesley in the side, a glancing blow only, but one that distracted the Duke enough for him to let out a cry of pain and for the Frenchman to disarm him, twisting his own sabre out of his hand with a flick. Boulanger drew back his blade to land the killing blow—

And fell to the ground with an American Hall rifle bullet in his brain.

All heads snapped around as both sides cried out, and all eyes were upon John Alexander as he lowered his smoking weapon. Beside him, tactiturn as always, was his slave, Johnson, who had just reloaded the weapon for his master. The Carolinian stared at the outraged faces of the circle of men, his allies scarcely less than the enemy, and they found a cold, unapologetic look in his eyes.

Before the murmurs could turn to shouts of outrage and the killing could resume, Leo Bone took a step forward, as always immediately commanding attention by his sheer charisma. He helped the wounded Wesley back to the Allied lines, supporting him on his shoulder, as the Irishman glared at Alexander in hatred. Before Wesley could speak, though, Bone did: “General. Why did you so interrupt the duel, against all the laws of duelling?”

Alexander stepped forward and gave the circle a look of utter contempt. “Because duelling is how gentlemen resolve matters of honour, sir. Mister Boulanger,” he waved in the direction of the corpse, “threw away any chance he ever had to become a gentleman when he joined the cause of this odious revolution so many years ago. If one is to declare all nobility, and chivalry, and honour to be irrelevant, then that sword cuts both ways. He who lives by the sword,” and he drew his own, tossing it up into the air, “dies by the sword.” The blade, good Pittsburgh steel, pierced the French earth and for a moment gleamed in the evening sunlight as though it were Excalibur.

Adaptations of this battle often pretend that these words were enough to persuade everyone to stand down and peace to ensue. Of course it is never so simple. Students puzzled at the fact that the Russians obtained so much of their agenda at the Congress of Copenhagen should note that Kautzman’s force – by now having realised the extent of the battle – played a much larger role, by relieving the hard-pressed Irish “horns” at the rear of the battle and ensuring that the surrounded Republicans knew well that fighting further was hopeless. Boulanger could still have rallied them, but Boulanger was dead, and as news of his death spread through the army, General Trenet ordered the surrender.

And with that battle, in which a man of the inferior Scots Celtic race and another of the inferior black African race, both born and raised in the inferior environment of the Americas, slew the champion of the French Latin Republic and finally disproved Linnaean Racism, the Jacobin Wars finally came to an end.

*

Roll away the dawn,
Roll away the dawn and let me see,
The land of the free…
Has anything changed at all?

Sweet liberty,
Sweet liberty is in our hands…
It's part of the plan,
Or is it a state of mind?

Horses and men,
Horses and men are on the field,
They didn't yield.
Many have fallen here;

Never forget…
Never forget what they have done,
The time will come,
When it will change again.
Never forget!

Never forget…


[6]








[1] Will be covered in a future post.

[2] Academia in this world is no less vulnerable than our own to the automatic assumption that anything written more than about fifty years ago is obviously biased and cannot be taken seriously.

[3] “Protgun”, short for protected gun, is the TTL name for the fighting vehicle that will eventually emerge as something roughly analogous to a tank.

[4] I make no apologies for this pun.

[5] Hail shot = case shot, Shrapnel shell.

[6] Sweet Liberty by Chris de Burgh, last part of the “Revolution” cycle.
 

Thande

Donor
Part #81: To the Victor the Headaches

“Monsieur Lisieux would seek to arbitrarily carve up Europe into units based on the alleged blood kinship of its inhabitants, regardless of what all historical and legal precedent say, to speak nothing of simple convenience…”

Letter from a Concerned Gentleman #35, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough – published 1804, later mockingly quoted in The North Briton, 1810

*

From – Lines on a Map: The Congress of Copenhagen by Dr Andreas Goransson, 1969 (English translation) –

When it comes to considering the stability of the continent, indeed the world, towards wide-scale conflict, one should never underestimate the impact of a group of gentlemen sitting in a smoke-filled lounge and sharing port and cigars over idle conversation. One such gathering, in Paris in 1812, ensured that the citizens of Nouvelle Liège in New Gascony’s Rigaudeau Province do not live in Nieuw Holland – not by design, for the line was drawn long before the town was founded, but simply because an imperfection in a ruler led to the arbitrarily drawn border curving upwards for a bump several miles across.

Yet it is not to the Treaty of Paris that our view is drawn, of course, but to the much more significant Congress of Copenhagen. From November 1809 to March 1810, diplomats from all the nations of Europe slowly hammered together a compromise postwar settlement which satisfied no-one and ultimately laid the seeds for the Popular Wars a generation later. Nonetheless we should not judge these men too harshly. All of them by necessity must balance their nation’s own agenda with a desire to avoid a repeat of such a devastating war in the days to come. Some, such as French foreign minister François André de Quelen de la Vauguyon, were fighting for their country’s survival; others, primarily the various Germans, were fighting for revenge; still others, like Prince Dmitri Illarionovich Kutuzov of Russia, sought a way for their nation to take advantage of the disarray of others to break through into a new position of supremacy. The resulting clash of personalities and agendas was scarcely less epic than the war which had preceded it.

Rosenborg Castle was where King Johannes II of Denmark and IV of Sweden chose to entertain the foreign ministers of all Europe as they dickered. It would be hard to point to a country which was not represented there, from the distant Empire of North America to the vanished Republic of Venice. Even the Ottoman Empire sent an observer. All such men were the best their nation could find to put their case to their peers, and most went on to have successful political careers after the Congress.

The need for the Congress had become apparent before Marshal Boulanger’s body had cooled on the battlefield outside Paris. Not even during the Wars of Supremacy of the previous century had the de jure status of Europe been so open to debate, nor its de facto state of affairs so distant from the pre-war maps the generals had been working from for the past fifteen years of conflict. The situation must be resolved and a new post-war order drawn up. Inevitably, there would be winners and losers.

Vauguyon saw his task as ensuring the new and restored French Kingdom did not count itself among the latter, at least not more than could be avoided after succeeding a defeated war-mongering regime. Prior to the invasions of England and Flanders in 1807, most commentators had believed that if Lisieux had lost his wars, the result would be a slow grinding advance westward to Paris by the Germans and Italians, concluding with the total conquest of the former French Latin Republic and total chaos ensuing. However, Bourcier’s surrender of what remained of the FLR to King Louis had thrown a spanner in the works of all those wartime plans and projections. Royal France was no longer a remnant kingdom, to be kept afloat by Britain guaranteeing its colonies and trade. She controlled more than half the pre-war territory of the old Kingdom of France. The remainder was under the occupation of Austria and her new puppet Kingdom of Italy, the various northern German states and confederations, and Portuguese-backed Castile and Neapolitan-joined Aragon, who also squabbled about the division of the Pyrenean territory they had taken as a joint ramshackle force. Vauguyon knew that if all these nations surrounding and occupying parts of France could be persuaded to align and renew the war, they could still crush the restored Kingdom and make all their efforts over the years wasted. Therefore, he sought to ensure they would not align, and drove diplomatic wedges into any potential divisions he could find.

Firstly he made certain that France’s allies of Great Britain, Ireland and America would remain at her side. The British remained understandably angry about the devastatiton of southern England during the invasion, and now there was no Republic left to take their rage out on, questions would be asked about just how many Republicans had gone over to the Kingdom, and how many were guilty of helping plan the invasion. Furthermore, now the Kingdom of France existed once more, there was no real need for Britain not to pounce on French colonies around the world, colonies she had formerly guaranteed in order to keep Royal France a going concern with its own thriving trade economy, as having an alternative French government to support was vital to acting against the Republic. Now, though, the Republic was gone and Britain might choose to pay for the costly rebuilding of London and other damaged cities by snatching lucrative French possessions like Guadaloupe. Vauguyon dissuaded the British from this by offering his opposite number, Sir Frederick Windham, a deal: France would pay reparations that would be taken from a generous percentage of the profits she would raise from that same global trade. This way, Britain would profit from those colonies without having to expend the ships and men to take them or work the trade routes thereafter. This, combined with the return of Calais to the crown of Great Britain (the legal successor to the Kingdom of England that had lost it to the French in 1558) served to ensure that the government of Burke – and more importantly the regime of Churchill – would not turn against the Bourbons. Finally, France gave up her claim to Corsica and recognised Britain’s ally the Corsican Republic.

With this backing secured, Vauguyon then sought to drive a knife in a crack in the Germans to the east, which was not too difficult. The Hapsburgs were already divided from the northern Germans, who saw Francis II as having abandoned the Holy Roman Empire whose title he still claimed by pursuing war with the Turks while leaving Bavaria to burn under Lascelles. Meanwhile Francis refused to recognise all the territorial exchanges and mediatisations in the north of Germany, even while using French occupation as an excuse to annex Austria’s own ecclesiastical lands such as Salzburg.

Vauguyon approached Austria’s representative, Karl Franz von Stadion the Graf von Warthausen. While Francis II surrounded himself with sycophantic favourites, there were nonetheless some men of genuine ability in the court in Vienna, and Warthausen was one of them. He took a more moderate tone than his hot-headed Archduke, who still entertained ideas of making France pay in blood and fire for the actions of her late government. Warthausen was able to use both his own plenipotentiary authority, combined with Copenhagen’s distance from Vienna, to pursue his own course of action. It is testament to his abilities that he not only got away with it, but soon acceded to the office of Chancellor and, in his years of service, helped the fractious Hapsburg domains stay together until the Popular Wars came.

The thrust of Vauguyon’s argument was that, thanks to the Diplomatic Revolution of the last century, France and Austria had been allies as the two greatest conservative Catholic powers in Europe. For all Louis XVII’s reformist ideas, that alliance could come again. The late conflict was to be regretted, of course, but had not the Diplomatic Revolution come just after the Second War of Supremacy between France and Austria? Just as in that time, Vauguyon claimed a northern German common foe existed which the two must align against – not Prussia this time, but the whole mass of new states and confederations that had come into existence in response to the Republican invasion. To sweeten the pot, France would concede the existence of the oversized Lorraine that Austria had carved out of Alsace and Franche-Comté, and also ceded part of the eastern regions of the provinces of Dauphiné and Provence to the new Hapsburg Kingdom of Italy. While all this territory was already under Austrian occupation, the offer was nonetheless attractive to Warthausen. He knew that while Austria seemed quite strong at a casual glance, she was still having problems holding down Bohemia and especially Bavaria, and if a war came with one or more of the new northern German entities, it seemed likely that the rebels there would join the enemy. Also, despite everything, Francis II and much of the court in Vienna regarded retaking the lands lost to the Turks in the late war to be more important than punishing France or regaining supremacy in the Germanies.

For that reason, Warthausen also pursued an alliance with Russia. The Hapsburgs were willing to permit Russian possession of Wallachia and Moldavia (rather than annexing them to Hungary) in the event of Russian support in a revanchist war with Constantinople. Kutuzov for the Russians also saw this as desirable, as St Petersburg had its eye on regaining the influence over the Khanate of the Crimea they had lost during the civil war – perhaps outright annexation. Of course, Russia was currently aligned with Denmark, and Denmark was now part of the emerging north German party, but the alliance between St Petersburg and Copenhagen had been stretched to breaking point since Sweden’s surrender to Denmark at the end of the Great Baltic War had snatched Swedish Finland from the hands of the Russian armies ready to invade it. Furthermore, the Russians and Danes were now the two big powers of the Baltic, natural opponents, and Danish control of the Skagerrak meant that most of the Imperial Russian Navy could easily be bottled up in the Baltic.[1]

Thanks to this piece of diplomatic jiggery-pokery, a shaky axis of alignment emerged between Paris, Vienna and St Petersburg, backed by Britain and the other Hanoverian possessions – though Hanover itself and its Alliance of Hildesheim were noticeably sullen members. In exchange for his support, however, Kutuzov demanded his pound of flesh – in order to facilitate the Great Eastern Adventure and get around the Danes’ stranglehold on the entrance to the Baltic, the Imperial Russian Navy wanted a warm-water port. This was the brainchild of Admiral Evgeny Nikolaiyevich Vasiliev, a favourite of Emperor Paul’s and one of the masterminds behind the Adventure. Vauguyon and Windham pulled off a double stroke by also solving the issue of the dispute between Castile and Aragon over the Pyrenean land they had occupied. King Louis agreed to relinquish his title of King of Navarre, which the Kings of France had held since 1589, and a new Navarrese state was carved out of the disputed territory, with some of the presently occupied land being returned to France. This new Kingdom of Navarre was given the port of Bayonne and, of course, needed a Catholic monarch. Russia’s ally Lithuania supplied one in the form of Prince Adam Konstanty Czartoryski. And thus by a great deal of behind-the-scenes manoeuvring, Russia had her port. It was a compromise that didn’t quite please anyone, especially the new “Navarrese” who still regarded themselves as Frenchmen or Spaniards, but it guaranteed Russian support for the Vauguyon-Warthausen agenda. Besides, the Portuguese and Neapolitans backing Castile and Aragon breathed quiet sighs of relief, now knowing they would not have to go to war to defend their new puppets, and had a few less restless peasants to rule over.

Loose ends were tied up elsewhere. Switzerland’s partition was recognised by default, and supporters of the old Confederation found no friends at Copenhagen. Malta, made a British protectorate by default in 1784, was recognised as such by the other powers, with the formerly ruling Knights of St John continuing in a purely ceremonial role. Corsica’s independence was also conceded – the same nations who had balked at its seemingly radical republic in the 1750s now realised that compared to some alternatives, its largely conservative and Catholic constitution was quite acceptable. With the Kingdom of Italy recognised by the other powers, northern Italian states which had lost their independence, notably Venice, were left without a hope. Most of their exiles either returned home to take up office with the new Hapsburg kingdom, or else remained with Naples. The Venetian navy mostly did the latter, which combined with possession of Aragon meant that Naples was now in a position to dominate the western Mediterranean. However, the House of Savoy in exile in Sardinia was unable to regain its Piedmontese possessions at the Congress and was thus reduced to that island. King Charles Emmanuel V responded by turning Sardinia into a trading nation and playing off the British and Neapolitans against each other as each sought to find naval supremacy in the western Mediterranean.

Once France’s fate was agreed upon as survival with relatively minor concessions, however, a second issue consumed the Congress: the Imperial Question. The Austrians still insisted the Holy Roman Empire existed and its institutions should be restored, while the north Germans rejected this, being unwilling to surrender any of the gains in political power and sovereignty they had acquired during the war. No amount of French or Russian support for Austria could result in the Hapsburgs regaining any prestige in the lands north and west of Bavaria and Bohemia. Bad blood remained between the factions, with Francis having been scarcely less outraged than Lisieux at Ney’s betrayal and handing over of Swabia, while the north Germans saw Francis’ ensuing conquest of Lorraine – rather than trying to assist at the Battle of Paris – as a childish and paranoid gesture. Ultimately, the north Germans remained in an inferior position thanks to the fact that it had been the Russians, not them, who had saved the Allies at that battle, and that Vauguyon had reached out to the Austrians. Thus, despite their continuing mutual mistrust, they banded together as a trade unit and a loose defensive agreement against the Hapsburgs. 1811 would see the Treaty of Frankfurt and the formal declaration of the Concert of Germany. Francis of Austria would retaliate by the quixotic decree that he was stripping the various Electors of their titles and reassigning them to kingdoms within the Hapsburg domains, including Italy, most of which he himself held as a title. In response, a wave of self-promotions spread across Germany, with the rulers of Saxony, the two Brandenburgs and Flanders (and the Palatinate) declaring themselves Kings. The last electorate to follow suit was Hanover in 1817, delaying thanks to Britain’s temporary alignment with Austria.

And with that bitter divide in the Germanies still festering, with France having escaped far worse potential fates, and a general sigh of relief as her bleeding peoples settled down to rebuilding their shattered nations, Europe entered the period later known as the Watchful Peace.



[1] As the Black Sea is still an Ottoman lake in TTL, the only Russian ports are in the Baltic and the coast of the White Sea in the north.




Part #82: Tarnished Silver

“…the theme that naturally lends itself to the Third Platinean War is one of betrayal. The British and Americans felt betrayed by a traditional ally when the Meridians perpetrated the Cherry Incident…the British more so when the war drew away Royal Navy forces that ultimately permitted the invasion of Britain by the French. The Spanish in exile, the Empire of New Spain (or, as it was known at the time, the Empire of the Indies) felt betrayed that the Meridians had chosen to advocate their republican ideology rather than geographic patriotism and had not welcomed the exilic Empire as a fellow Hispanophone power based in the Americas…the indigenous peoples of South America felt betrayed by the course of the war…but of course the greatest betrayal of all was that felt by the people of the United Provinces themselves, and it is that betrayal whose repercussions still shake the world today…”

- Manuel Arturo Fajado, On War (English translation, 1933)​

*

From – “The Third Platinean War” by Dr Thierry Gaston de Connarceux (1945 – English translation) :

…the battle at Valvidia in October 1806 was the turning point for the war, though that was at first unclear. Admiral Ramírez had torn the heart out of Admiral Byng’s fleet only to be ambushed in turn by Admiral Harrison, leading to the destruction of the bulk of the Meridian Armada. Though the Anglo-Americans had lost almost a third of their forces, once the dust had settled it became clear that they now had an overwhelming advantage over the Meridians. Even more importantly, the army that General Hector Fernández had landed in Acapulco in July was now cut off from resupply.

Though history has judged him harshly, not least in his own homeland, Fernández was a thinking general and not a man to be blinded by orthodox tactical doctrine. Like most fighting men of the Americas, he had eagerly lapped up correspondence from Europe detailing the ongoing war there and the breakthroughs that were being made. Some did not apply to the Americas – steam technology was still a long way off, and besides, its applications to the mountainous theatres of the present war were unclear – but others could provide a definite edge.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Fernández was sceptical of the advantages of the Republican French approach of the mass march, the hammer blow of the column through the enemy lines and then driving through via the War of Lightning strategy to ‘hold the heart’, the enemy capital, after which it was assumed the enemy would crumble. Fernández verbally attacked this so-called Boulanger Doctrine’s proponents in the Meridian Army, pointing out that it had been devised by Frenchmen, who had overthrown a strongly centralised kingdom to replace it with an even more centralised republic. “It may indeed be the case that if one were to take Paris then the French state would disintegrate,” he wrote prophetically, “but it does not follow that the same notion may be applied to any capital of any kingdom.” The argument raged through the early 1800s at the Meridian Officers’ Academy at Valparaíso, with Fernández’s primary opponent of similar rank being General Luis Jaime Ayala Santa Cruz, who typified the more general current of francophilia running through the U.P. establishment at the time.

Ayala had pointed out that the Boulanger Doctrine had been successful in the defeat of Spain in 1802, only for Fernández to retort that Spain had already been weakened by the civil war between the Felipistas and Carlistas, and in any case the very existence of the Empire of the Indies in exile was against the Doctrine, which implied that all the forces of a nation would surrender themselves once the capital and the central institutions was held. Ayala countered that, as Madrid had already been burned and the Felipistas soon evacuated to Cadiz, the French conquest of the capital did not truly fulfil the Doctrine. Fernández then drew attention to the Rape of Rome, a perfect case of the Doctrine being applied with the capital of the Papal States being taken and its leader killed, yet the result had dramatically backfired – to which Ayala argued that the case was scarcely typical. The Pope’s murder had sent shockwaves through the UPSA, which remained strongly Catholic. Still, there had been a growing divide between the Spanish-influenced Vatican and the UPSA ever since the latter’s independence, and Jansenism had been growing there ever since. Ultimately, the heresy would profit from the Papacy’s difficulties, for though Henry Benedict Stuart was quick to become Pope Urban IX, the destruction of Rome and the Vatican’s infrastructure meant that Catholics across Europe, never mind the wider world, were cut off from Papal missives and other centralised control. Even those bishops in distant climes who simply tried to govern as they hoped the Pope might advise them to deal with global events, were he able, ultimately fell into Jansenist practices in theory. Ayala, of course, argued that this was a religious rather than national expression of the powerful effects of taking the capital and controlling or destroying its bureaucracy, while Fernández rejected such a view. The two generals were far from the only ones to debate the virtues and vices of French Republicanism in the UPSA prior to the war, but their dialogues are perhaps the most celebrated.

In any case, this is important in understanding the outcome of the war. Ayala was a natural member of the Partido Solidaridad, while Fernández tended towards the conservative opposition. While President-General Castelli naturally favoured Ayala for the invasion operation, Ayala had made political enemies inside the Partido Solidaridad for his outspoken support for closer ties with Portugal as a natural ally against the exilic Spaniards. The bulk of the Party saw Portugal as an enemy and her colony of Brazil as natural grounds for expansion: Portugal might have helped the UPSA gain independence, but now the Party was in control and no conservative monarchist power could be anything other than a foe, sooner or later. For that reason, somewhat paradoxically, Ayala was relegated to domestic operations (chiefly raising new regiments and organising the militias) while Fernández, an enemy of the Party altogether, was placed in command of the invasion of Mexico. Though he grudgingly admitted to Fernández’s tactical abilities (the general had first achieved fame as a young lieutenant in the Second Platinean War when he had taken a Spanish regimental colonel prisoner almost single-handedly), Castelli did insist on giving Fernández a watchdog in the form of Lieutenant-General Paolo Carlos Rojaz, who made Ayala look like a moderate in his devotion to French Republican principles.

This somewhat dysfunctional command team was given 15,000 troops in the first wave descending on Acapulco, after which the planned reinforcements could not arrive thanks to Ramírez’s fleet being sunk at Valvidia. Fernández’s initial reaction was one of caution. Though he had grudgingly agreed to a broadly Boulangerist strategy when planning the invasion, aiming at the City of Mexico, he now believed that, deprived of more than half the troops he had expected, this tactic would not work. Before, he would have had a chance to take and hold territory while driving at the heart, allowing a fall-back position if his troops were defeated before the City. Now, such a move would be an all-or-nothing gamble, and it would be safer to seek to establish control over Acapulco and its environs, creating a defensible base which could be enforced later when reinforcements could be brought.

Rojaz argued that there was little chance of reinforcements arriving for the remainder of the war, given how the Armada had been gutted and, even if it somewhat acquired more ships, the British and Americans still ruled the waves. While General Pichegru continued to enjoy successes against Bernardo O’Higgins in New Granada, the idea of bringing troops to Mexico overland after a successful conquest of Guatemala was no less absurd than it was pointless, given that the point of this attack was to attempt to force a collapse that would make that very conquest possible. Therefore, Rojaz said, the only choice was to take their gamble.

It is at this point, Fernández’s enemies have written in their histories, that the general dithered and lost the initiative, handing it to the exilic Spanish. This claim is worth examining in more detail. It is not to say that Fernández did nothing. As he had said, he took control of Acapulco – being greeted with flowers and parades by the locals, who knew which side their bread was buttered – and then sought to use this as a weapon against the Spanish. Fernández knew that Acapulco was the source of much of the former Viceroyalty of New Spain’s wealth, thanks to the Manila galleons sailing there from the Philippines bringing Asian products such as spices and porcelain. If he could hold the port, he could try and bankrupt the Spanish Infantes.

In November Fernández indeed captured one of the biannual Manila galleons via an ingenious strategy which relied upon making it appear everything was as normal until the ship was safely in dock and could be boarded. He claimed its valuable cargo for the UPSA and sent the ship south to Lima, with one of his own men in command and flying a false flag. At this point, however, the Infantes simply redirected future trade to Manzanillo and Fernández’s trump card had expired. Though the financial blow to the fledgeling Empire had been struck, it was not enough to bring it down. Rojaz won the argument and in Feburary the army marched once more on the City of Mexico. By this point, however, the Emperor Charles and his ministers had had time to plan a response…

Initially Fernández was somewhat surprised to find his army being once more welcomed as liberators in the towns of Chilpancingo and Iguala. Rojaz suggested the exiles must be ruling harshly, or else be weak enough that the local people were confident they would not win and thus sweep through to punish them for their welcome. Fernández was more sceptical, but was lulled into a false sense of security. They were helped along by the fact that the two generals had agreed to forego la maraude in favour of a slower and more traditional method of resupply, given the need for their small force to win hearts and minds.

Then, on April 1st, the Meridian army enjoyed a similar welcome in the city of Cuernavaca, sitting just south of the more mountainous terrain around the City of Mexico. The Meridians were treated to a feast by the locals…only to be awoken late that night to find that a good number of their men were sick, poisoned. Only a handful died, but most of the rest were in no shape to fight. Of course, hours later the Infante Antonio, self-styled King of Mexico, arrived with local general Joaquín de Iturbide and a force six thousand strong.

Despite their sickness and the surprise attack, the Meridians won the ensuing engagement. The bulk of the forces the Kingdom of Mexico could field had gone into the Nuevo Ejército and been sent to New Granada to assist O’Higgins along with the Infante Gabriel. Also, Rojaz and Fernández remained competent generals. Though the Mexicans were not annihilated, they were forced to retreat and rumours soon abounded that the City of Mexico was hastily being evacuated.

Recognising an opportunity might be slipping through their fingertips, Rojaz urged the Meridians on. Only a cursory attempt to punish the locals was made for time constraints, Cuernavaca being put to torch but the flames were hastily set and were extinguished as soon as the Meridians had left. Fernández allowed la maraude to commence to speed up their attack, acknowledging that the betrayal of the Cuernavacans revealed that they could no longer trust the locals.

On April 12th the Meridians, having climbed the mountains and descended into the Vale of Mexico, the land which the old Aztecs had named the Anahuac. They found a city in panic, still halfway through evacuation. The City of Mexico sat on an island in Lake Texcoco, joined to the mainland by only a handful of bridges, and the attempts had clearly swiftly bottlenecked.

Seizing the opportunity, Fernández had Rojaz take control of most of the bridges to prevent further people fleeing and then seized one to move the bulk of his army over, holding the heart after all. The Meridians marched to the old Palacio de Virrey (now the Emperor’s palace) off the Plaza de Armas, seeking to seize the exilic rulers if they still dwelt there, and control of the means of government if they did not.

It was at this point, according to the memoirs of Juan Julio Rivadeneira, the celebrated diarist and one of the few soldiers to escape the cataclysm thanks to his being a strong swimmer, that Fernández began to smell a rat: the city seemed rather quiet to say its evacuation had still been in a panicked, early stage, and there was no sign of any government personnel. It remains unclear if Fernández actually grew suspicious enough to order a retreat, but in any case it was too late: Emperor Charles’ chosen men lit off the gunpowder caches that had been concealed so many weeks before.

Only then was the scale of King Antonio’s plan grasped: the Mexicans had never intended to defend their capital, instead evacuating the bulk of its population beforehand and leaving only enough volunteers to grant the illusion of a city halfway through a confused attempt by its people to flee. The poisoning and attack at Cuernavaca had simply been to dissuade suspicions about the trap. Now it closed.

In ancient times the Aztecs had used light wooden bridges they could swing aside to turn Tenochtitlan into a fortress protected by Lake Texcoco as its moat. The Spanish-built bridges were far more sturdy, yet now gunpowder caches brought them crashing down into the waters of the lake. And while the Aztec plan had been to keep invaders out, Antonio’s strategy kept them in – while more caches exploded and set the city alight, the Meridian army trapped inside it.

The chosen men who had lit the fuses were all at least passable swimmers, knew the quickest route to the coast of the island, and dressed lightly. At least half of them made it out of the conflagration. The Meridians were…not so lucky. Many of their men were recruited from far inland provinces of the UPSA and had never seen large bodies of water before their voyage on the waves to Acapulco. Others were well acquainted enough, but panicked and were unable to find their way out of the burning city, while others still managed that but could not remove their heavy armour in time, and burned or sank. Only a handful of men survived, Rivadeneira among them. Both generals perished, possibly in the initial explosion beneath the Palacio de Virrey.

It is easy in retrospect to criticise them for failing to see their strategy, but it seemed an inexplicable act at the time in many ways. The City of Mexico was a hugely rich, storied place filled with grand houses and palaces built during an architectural craze in the latter half of the last century. To throw all that on the fire just to beat an army of fifteen thousand seemed madness, and from most points of view it was. Yet Antonio and Charles saw it as the only option to permit the continuance of their dynasty.

The failure of the invasion of Mexico meant that the UPSA’s chief attempt to quickly end the war had failed. Furthermore, it had been the acquisition of ships for it that had ultimately caused the Cherry Massacre, and now President-General Castelli found himself facing American troops under General Andrew Clinton marching up the River Plate and besieging Buenos Aires. As the city began to starve throughout early 1807, Castelli remained in the city rather than the capital of Cordoba and tried to rally the people against the British and Americans, promising a swift victory over the Spanish in New Granada. Pichegru indeed continued to advance against the retreating O’Higgins, yet the Meridian attack came to a halt in June 1807 when Pichegru finally reached the New Granadine capital of Santa Fe.

There, on June 13th, Pichegru besieged O’Higgins’ outnumbered forces in the city, yet O’Higgins held for a week, long enough for the Infante Gabriel’s Nuevo Ejército to arrive as relief. The “New Army” of the exilic Spaniards attacked Pichegru’s besieging forces and forced a narrow victory on the battlefield. Pichegru, from royalist French stock, did not much care for the Revolutionary doctrine and thus saw nothing amiss in withdrawing from Santa Fe in order to fight another day. The Meridians withdrew in good order to San Martín and attempts by the Spanish to harry their heels were beaten back.

At this point, things still narrowly favoured the Meridians. The Anglo-American blockade/siege of Buenos Aires still had a lot of holes in it, and rationing together with Castelli rallying the locals kept the major city afloat. Though the British and Americans continued to raid and burn coastal towns, attempts to hold territory were generally beaten back by General Ayala’s militiamen. Furthermore, Ayala came to the same conclusion as Rojaz and withdrew the troops that had been intended as reinforcements for Acapulco from Peru. Instead he used them to put out fires and stamp down when, for example, the British attempted a descent on Cape San Antonio as part of a strategy to outflank the Meridians holding Buenos Aires against them. Ayala threw the British back into the sea. At present, then, it seemed that at best the UPSA might still take New Granada, or at least half of it, and though its coastal ports had been damaged and its navy sunk, the country would leave the war at worst at a state of status quo ante bellum.

Then two hammer blows struck the Meridian cause, two blows which ultimately defined the country’s national character for years later, the characteristic uncharitably described as a victim mentality. For, indeed, everything seemed to go wrong all at once.

The first was more predictable. The city of Lima had always chafed under Meridian rule. The former capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru, Lima had resented this role being pulled out from under its feet and given to the young city of Cordoba when the Viceroyalty became independent as the United Provinces of South America. Furthermore, as a home for conservative political thinking and continued sympathy with the Spanish, Lima had been deliberately treated as a backwater, both in the early years of the UPSA but especially since the Partido Solidaridad came to power. Very minor uprisings had been dealt with over the years, helped by the fact that other inhabitants of Upper Peru – chiefly of course the Tahuantinsuya Indians – had a vested interest in keeping the land under UPSA control.

Things had changed. The exilic Spanish had been sending agents in for years trying to stoke a rebellion, yet while the people of Lima generally had a grudge against the UPSA, they were also laid-back and cynical about the possibility of any uprising doing better than those in the past. Paradoxically it was not any Spanish agent sneaking in via fishing boat which raised the eventual rebellion, but the Manila galleon that Fernández had captured and sent south. Rumours soon abounded of the galleon’s rich cargo – the UPSA had never made much of an inroad into Asian trade thanks to the Spanish managing to block them out – and a heist was staged while the galleon was taking on fresh water. That was not the remarkable part. The remarkable part was that the local mayor’s constables tracked Miguel García’s criminal gang to the warehouse where they had stashed the stolen goods, attacked them – and lost.

True, García’s thugs were tough, yet in the past, the U.P. authorities would simply have called in the troops in this situation. The fact that they were helpless sent an important message – the troops simply did not exist, having been stripped from the province by Ayala to drive off the British elsewhere. Therefore…

The rebellion ignited on August 2nd 1807, partly stoked by Spanish and British agents, partly a purely anarchic expression of public anger that was as much an excuse to loot and pillage as to strike against the Meridians. Regardless, by the sixth of that month the uprising was out of control. The authorities evacuated and hoped to use the Tahuantinsuya as shock troops to subdue the rebellion, but all the soldiers the Indians could spare had long since gone off to the north to support Pichegru in his mountain warfare. So Lima broke away, and two weeks later the fleet of Admiral “Yankee Chris” Perry landed an Anglo-American army in the rebellious province. Suddenly Pichegru was cut off in New Granada.

The second hammer blow finished matters. On August 26th, Portugal declared war on the UPSA. The causes of this shocking development remain debated – there is some evidence that British or Spanish spies had captured and leaked Partido Solidaridad documents calling for the conquest of Brazil. True or not, the deal was certainly sweetened by the Viceroyalty of New Granada adjusting its borders to favour Brazil in a promised treaty. Regardless of the cause, the missive was delivered by the Portuguese Ambassador in Cordoba and soon reached Castelli in Buenos Aires.

This changed everything. It was almost unnecessary for the Viceroyalty of Brazil[1] to actually do anything; it was enough to know that any attempt to prevent Buenos Aires from being surrounded was now doomed, and that all bets were off. Upon receiving the document, Castelli decided he must return to Cordoba, yet he had invested so much in standing with the slowly starving people of Buenos Aires that he felt he had to do it in secret. Whether his ensuing carriage crash was an accident or a conspiracy remains debated, but he was caught in the act and stoned to death by angry, betrayed porteños. The situation deteriorated, with Buenos Aires surrendering to the Americans on September 17th and, throughout the rest of that month and August, Pichegru being driven back through New Granada. The Frenchman found himself beset not simply by Gabriel’s Nuevo Ejército of similar numbers, but also Portuguese colonial forces out of Fort São Joaquim and Anglo-American forces having landed in Caracas. These mostly consisted of Virginian troops formerly in Haiti, Pennsylvanian regiments from the mainland ENA, and British West Indian regiments. The force was small, as most of the ENA’s forces were at that time being sent across the Atlantic to fight the French in Britain. Noentheless, it was enough. Pichegru found himself trapped between this hammer and the anvil of the Americans in Lower Peru, and in the end was forced to surrender to the Portuguese General Paulo Alfredo de Oliveira near San Francisco de Quito on Christmas Day 1807. By this point, though, things had already gone to hell closer to come.

The Anglo-Americans were held back from Cordoba thanks to General Ayala and his drawing together all remaining forces, yet the Cortes Nacionales was in a panic. The Partido Solidaridad was shedding deputies at an alarming rate, those who had joined the party out of pragmatism or personal ambition, recognising its meteoric rise, and in the volatile political environment the Party soon lost its majority. The conservative opposition banded together, calling itself Reagrupamiento por la Unión (“Rally for the Union”) and claiming that the UPSA could soon be wiped out if Party mismanagement continued. With no time to hold a new election for President-General and no constitutional guidelines present for how to select one in the absence of this, the Cortes eventually voted one of their own as leader in an attempt to calm the angry masses now running riot through the streets of Cordoba.

This was one of the Reagrupamiento’s leaders, Miguel Baquedano y Zebreros. Baquedano, a native of Santiago who had condemned the Party for “allowing” the attacks on his home city by the British, immediately consolidated power and cracked down on popular unrest. He issued a proclamation stating that he would hold power for a maximum of three years before calling new elections – setting a precent for the later Constitutional Convention – and sought terms with the enemy, believing that matters would only grow worse if the Portuguese were allowed to surge across the long border and take on the UPSA’s divided armies.

Baquedano and his negotiators sought to divide the allies from one another, never too difficult a task with such disparate and mutually suspicious nations as the British/Americans, Spanish and Portuguese. The Treaty of Rio de Janeiro, though condemned as punishing and inequitable by generations of Meridians, was nonetheless a lot less severe than it could have been. The Meridians were forced to concede the province of Upper Peru – including the Tahuantinsuya lands – to the Empire of the Indies, aka the Empire of New Spain. The new Kingdom of Peru was given the Infante Gabriel as its King and Lima as its capital, and Gabriel soon embarked on an attack on the restored Inca state in the mountains. By 1820 the Tahuantinsuya, lacking support from the UPSA, were conquered and their leaders fled to the Aymara state in Lower Peru, still under U.P. auspices.

The British were confirmed in their control of Falkland’s Islands, but besides that and some financial reparations and trade deals, the UPSA surrendered nothing. While the British remained furious that the war had drawn their forces away from the homeland and allowed the French invasion, Baquedano was capable of calling the Anglo-American bluff – Britain simply could not afford to spend much more time and money prosecuting the war when her economy had been destroyed by Lazare Hoche and she was concentrating on winning the war in Europe. Therefore, the British were successfully talked down from trying to claim the island of Tierra del Fuego as well, which would have given her control over the Straits of Magellan and Cape Horn. It was this demand, so alarming the Meridians, that led to the postwar ‘Scramble for Patagonia’ and of course the later events surrounding the island and its new inhabitants…

The Portuguese received several border adjustments in their favour, including most of the old Seven Missions territory which had ultimately stoked the First Platinean War and led to Meridian independence in the first place. Soon afterwards, the Viceroyalty of Brazil was granted greater autonomies by the Portuguese state, partly copying the British in America and the Spanish in the new Empire, and partly because Peter IV and his government wished to concentrate on colonial affairs elsewhere, continuing to pay the debt incurred by rebuilding Lisbon after the earthquake of the 1750s. As part of this, a Brazilian Cortes was created in Salvador – as with the Empire of New Spain, this was not the result of elections but simply consisted of the most powerful families in each province agreeing on who to send as a representative. Nonetheless, it allowed for more representation of the vast unitary Viceroyalty and also stood as a trial for instituting a similar system in Portugal herself, as the kingdom was beginning to move away from the kind of enlightened absolutism that Carvalho had preached.

The end of the war saw an economic depression in the UPSA. A new Constitutional Convention in Cordoba instituted the idea of the President-General running only for three-year terms rather than for life. A limit for the number of terms served was suggested but not for the moment incorporated. Baquedano, recognising his unpopularity for ending the war on such terms among the people (who generally did not grasp the subtlety that it could have been much worse) did not seek re-election. With the Partido Solidaridad now in disarray – by the time the election was held in 1810, there was no longer a Republican France to have solidarity with – Reagrupamiento candidates took most of the Cortes Nacionales seats and a Reagrupamiento man, the relatively young Roberto Mateovarón, won the Presidency-General.

As expected, the very loose conservative alliance that was the Reagrupiamiento soon fell apart without much serious opposition, and Mateovarón’s allies rallied the movement’s more coherent core as the Amarillo Party, so called after the yellow colour in the UPSA’s flag. The Amarillo Party’s policies called for national reawakening and settlement, not striking out for reflexive revanchism for reaching out to the country’s neighbours and trying to re-establish trade and prosperity rather than letting ideology dictate policy.

The rump of the Partido Solidaridad was reconstituted by General Ayala, now a deputy in the Cortes, as the Colorado Party, again taking its name from the red colour of the flag and opposing the Amarillo Party. The remainder of the deputies, chiefly moderates unwilling to join either side, were unofficially referred to as the Blanco Party after the third, white colour. However that term was never officially used, though by coincidence, it was chiefly from these undecideds that the UPSA’s own Adamantine Party arose some years later…







[1] OTL, the three colonial Portuguese States of Brasil, Maranhão and Grão-Pará were amalgamated into a single Viceroyalty in 1775; in TTL the same event takes place earlier, just after the First Platinean War in 1769, but for similar reasons.


Part #83: Hairline Cracks

“…the modern philosopher finds it easy to provide a lazily constructed challenge to any proposition by turning it on its head. Nonetheless, we should not therefore automatically dismiss any such counter-proposal, for occasionally their results are worthy of consideration.

An example: conventional wisdom and common sense would suggest that a period of prosperity and good governance is a good thing for a nation, and thus a period of division and dissatisfaction is a bad thing. Yet those taking a longer perspective may conclude that the latter is, if not desirable at the time, nonetheless necessary for a country to develop and adapt and change, lest it fall into stagnancy and decay.

Would Great Britain have launched her culture across a continent without the failures of James II to provoke the Glorious Revolution and a renaissance? Could France have steered a middle moderate path to prosperity if the Bourbons and the Republicans had not shown her the consequences of extremism in either political direction? But let us not be so euro-fixated. Let us turn our attention to China…”

– From Reflections on Hypercontemporism, by Dieter Böhner (1978)​

*

From: “Invasion, Consolidation, Degradation: The Qing Dynasty” by James P. Collingwood (1960) –

The Manchu invasion and conquest of China in the seventeenth century was an event which astonished the world. The dawning powers of Europe had grown used to the idea of the Ming Empire as a powerful alien civilisation and the source of exotic culture. Some scholars (see P. Woolney and A.V. de Lancie, Orientalist Letters, vol. 21, pp 1289-1301) contend that it was the destruction of the glories of the Ming, along with the contemporary slow decline of the Mughal Empire, which created the European worldview of the eighteenth century. No longer were the great empires of the east the object of European awe for their mysterious produce and intricate systems of governance. For all that Nadir Shah’s exploits briefly revived an Alexandrine fascination in Europe, the image of Asia as a whole went from being the home of vast, ancient civilisations to be admired, to the home of decadent and decaying oligarchies to be exploited. It is comparable to how West Africa’s cities of gold and powerful kings were forgotten by Europe after a Moroccan invasion smashed the Songhai Empire and reduced the region to petty feuding warlords and, in European eyes, of interest only as a source of slaves.

Yet, just as the Royal Africa Company slowly changed that image, China recovered to some extent after its reconstitution under Manchu emperors as the Qing dynasty.[1] The Taizu, Taizong and Shunzhi Emperors[2] crushed Ming restorationists, rebels and opportunists to consolidate their reign. Perhaps the greatest was the Revolt of the Three Feudatories, in which Wu Sangui – the Ming general who had treacherously let the Manchus through the Great Wall in the first place – turned on the Qing and proclaimed himself Emperor of a new Zhou dynasty. After his defeat, the Qing then turned their attention to the Ming-sympathising Kingdom of Tungning established on Taiwan by the Ming general Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong), eventually defeating and absorbing Taiwan by the end of the seventeenth century. These displays of vigour on the part of the conquerors demonstrated to the world that China was not about to collapse into anarchy, but had instead simply transitioned from one dynasty to the next. It was such that English travellers of the 1680s mildly referred simply to “the new Tartar regime in Peking”.

The Qing victories over such pretenders were such that subsequent Ming sympathisers kept their opposition to their Manchu overlords quiet and plotted in secret. One important organisation was the Tiandihui, the Heaven and Earth Society, better known today as the Sanhedui (Three Harmonies Society). This secret society was founded by men of Fujian Province and drew most of its support from southern China. European traders often called its members “the Chinese Freemasons”, though a better comparison might be the Jacobites in Great Britain in much the same time period.[3] Other anti-Qing organisations were more religious in sentiment, such as the White Lotus Society (Bailianjiao) which advocated a heterodox form of Buddhism and faced persecution by the more conservative Chinese dynasties. The White Lotus sect had been around for centuries, arising in the thirteenth century when the Mongols had ruled China as the Yuan dynasty, and had in fact been responsible for the ejection of the Yuan and the creation of the Ming dynasty. Thus the White Lotus were obvious sympathisers with Ming restorationism and enemies of this new barbarian horde to come off the steppes and dress itself in the trappings of civilisation. Again, like the Sanhedui, most of their support was in the south – though they enjoyed some presence throughout most of the empire.

Yet while the Qing Emperors prospered, such opposition languished and at times the various societies kept going more out of habit and tradition than for any serious attempt to stand against the ruling dynasty. The Shunzhi Emperor was followed by the great Kangxi Emperor, whose long reign was significant in restoring China’s image abroad. Kangxi defeated Peter the Great’s Russians in their attempt to expand into the Far East, delaying Russian expansionism for a century and establishing Chinese control over the Amur valley, along with favourable trade arrangements. It was he who defeated the Three Feudatories’ Revolt and quenched the last embers of Ming-restorationist and other native Han Chinese rebellions. More importantly in some ways, he won over the Chinese aristocracy by having a new dictionary drawn up and encouraging Chinese ways among the Manchu ruling classes. Just as had happened to the Jurchen Jin and the Mongol Yuan dynasties, Chinese culture insidiously reasserted itself and within a few generations, invaders would find they had forgotten who they once were…

The Kangxi Emperor was followed (by questionable constitutional arrangements)[4] by the Yongzheng Emperor, who enjoyed a reign of 42 years, not so long as his father’s, yet still sufficient for several major achievements.[5] Yongzheng continued the acculturation of the Manchus, drove the Dzungars from Tibet to quell the civil war there, and installed a Qing resident to extend Chinese control over that mountainous land. He sent armies to attempt to defeat the Dzungars in open combat and prevent them from raiding Xinjiang province, but these were defeated and the treasury was considerably depleted by their expeditions. His generals concluded that defeating the nomadic people on their own turf, where their tactics were superior, was impossible. For this reason, Yongzheng decided instead to pay the local Khalkha tribe to fight the Dzungars for him. More importantly, he considerably reformed the Keju, the system of imperial examinations by which Chinese civil servants (popularly called mandarins in Europe) achieved their ranks and positions. This had grown corrupt and untrustworthy thanks to the chaos of the previous century, but was now straightened out to a large extent. Taxation was also reformed, and save for the expenditures on the failed expeditions against the Dzungars, Yongzheng presided over an expansion in Chinese prosperity.

He was in turn succeeded by his son Hongshi as the Daguo Emperor, as former favourite Hongli had drowned under circumstances some consider to be suspicious.[6] The Daguo Emperor, concurring with his father’s judgement, chose to take a defensive approach against the Dzungars and took advantage of the rich treasury he had inherited by building a vast array of fortifications across Xinjiang, nicknamed the Xin Chengchang, the “New Great Wall”. Daguo’s major achievement was the expansion of Chinese power to the south. The kingdom of Burma, under the Konbaung dynasty of King Naungdawgyi, had successfully conquered Pegu and the Siamese kingdom of Ayutthaya, extending Burmese power alarmingly close to China.

The rogue Burmese general Myat Htun then overthrew Naungdawgyi and declared a new Toungoo dynasty, but Naungdawgyi threw him out of the capital Ava with help from the British East India Company in the 1760s. Myat Htun fled north and, backed by a Qing army, once more took Ava from Naungdawgyi, who was killed in the battle. His brother Hsinbyushin fled with his remaining loyalists and conquered Arakan, running it as a Burmese state in exile with backing from the BEIC. Myat Htun’s puppet king Mahadammayaza restored the Toungoo dynasty, yet the new kingdom was undoubtedly a Chinese vassal and lost control over much of its territory. Ayutthaya became a Chinese ally while the fragmented Burmese states of Pegu and Tougou[7] submitted to vassalage.

Building upon this success, Daguo then sent another army to assist the embattled emperor of Dai Viet, Le Cung Tong. Dai Viet was plagued by a civil war; the northern emperors had reigned in name only for centuries, power in practice in the hands of the powerful Trinh lords. Now, though, the Nguyen rulers of the south had taken Hanoi in an attempt to reunite the country. With Daguo’s assistance, Le Cung Tong’s forces defeated the Nguyens at Than Hoa in 1778.[8] Thus the Nguyens were pushed back into the south of Dai Viet (known in Europe as Cochin-China) and the northern remnant of Dai Viet (known as Tongking) became once more a Chinese vassal. Le Cung Tong’s son, Le Quy Tong, proved to be a man of ambition when in the 1780s he successfully played the Qing resident and the Trinh lords off each other and recouped some of the power the emperors had lost over the years.

Daguo’s reign came to an end with his death in 1787 and he was succeeded by his third son Yongli, who became the Guangzhong Emperor. Historians debate whether this was the point at which the rot set in. Much like his grandfather, Yongli’s naming as heir has been questioned, though by this point an attempt had been made to prevent succession disputes by having the Emperor write his choice down and have it sealed in the Forbidden City behind a tablet, only to be revealed upon his death, rather than being able to make deathbed changes as before.[9] In fact this may have counted against Daguo’s choice. Some speculate that Yongli had been a more promising candidate in his youth, and Daguo had hesitated to change the contents of the tablet lest he invalidate his own system and raise questions about tampering with the succession. Regardless, Yongli came to the Dragon Throne as Guangzhong and proceeded with standard Qing practice, either placing his brothers under house arrest or consigning them to minor constitutional roles to prevent disputes.

Guangzhong, “Bright Centre”, was aptly named. Whereas his father Daguo “Great Nation” had indeed presided over an expansion of the Chinese Empire, all Guangzhong was concerned about was the splendid nature of his court, which grew once more towards decadence and insularism. Yet the governance of China did not collapse. The reforms of his grandfather Yongzheng still operated, and the sanitised Keju examination system produced qualified men of the state to quietly run it regardless of a strong imperial policy. But deprived of new direction, the Empire rested on its laurels and concerned itself solely with internal affairs. This was also the start of what was euphemistically known among European traders as the Difficult Period. Formerly, thanks to agreements signed under the outward-looking Kangxi Emperor, trade had taken place between China and Europe at four open cities. Guangzhong restricted trade to just one, Guangzhou (Canton), and his officials then proceeded to slowly increase bureaucratic red tape to discourage trade even there.[10] The trade agreements with the Russians signed under Kangxi were also wound down, prompting anger in Peter III’s court and helping boost the fortunes of what would become the Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company. Though Russia still feared China’s military might and would not be the first to formally revoke the Treaty of Nerchinsk, she nonetheless decided that such revocations meant she would send more than minor outposts into the Amur valley – claimed but never settled by China – and give men like Lebedev and Benyovsky free rein in their schemes to open up the East. At a time when Neo-Confucianism elsewhere sought reforms, such as the Silhak school revolutionising Corea, China reverted to stodgy conservatism and the same idea that had killed Zheng He’s exploratory missions a quarter-millennium earlier: what lay outside the Middle Kingdom was by definition unworthy of its notice.

A political crisis was precipitated when the general Yu Wangshan – who insisted on going by his Manchu name of Fiyanggu – successfully defeated an invasion of the Burmese vassal states by revanchist Burmese-Arakan in 1789. Hsinbyushin had been succeeded by his son Avataya Min, who had hoped that with assistance and arms from their BEIC allies, the Konbaung dynasty could retake its old lands. He might well have been right, save for the fact that Yu Wangshan pulled off a brilliant defence of Ava using a small number of outnumbered Qing troops, with particular reliance on cavalry. With relief from Chinese-allied Ayutthaya, the Konbaung forces were forced to retreat to Arakan.

Though the fashion under Guangzhong was not to care too greatly about affairs around the periphery, the battle shot to public prominence as Yu was a major political figure, a Manchu traditionalist who argued against the cultural dilution the once-conquerors had endured since Kangxi’s policies had been enacted. He also suggested that a return to the old nomad ways was not only desirable but vital if China was not to slip back into decay as all the old dynasties had. Alone, Yu might be silenceable, but he was merely the tip of the iceberg for a powerful political faction at court, drawing on not only Manchus but any number of objectionists to current policy, including great families who had lost some influence after Yongzheng’s crusade against corruption. Weighing his options, knowing he dared not make this war hero a martyr to his political cause and stir up trouble, Guangzhong decided to exile him to the western frontier to hold the Xin Chengchang defences against the Dzungars. It was an obvious ploy, as the Dzungars were in decline and had not tried to raid Xinjiang or Tibet for over a decade, but nonetheless Yu was forced to withdraw from the court – allowing his influence there to fade away – and take up command in the city of Tulufan abutting the Wall.

Predictably, though, the greatest issue of Guangzhong’s reign was – once again – succession. Idolising the Kangxi Emperor as so many did, Guangzhong wished to emulate his great-grandfather and thus adopted his methods at the worst possible times. The Empress Xiao Fu Zheng gave him three sons and two daughters, and was pregnant with another child when Guangzhng grew dissatisfied with his eldest son Baoyu, then the heir by default and aged nineteen. Baoyu had become infamous for his immoral and boisterous lifestyle, embarrassing the upper classes of Beijing, and Guangzhong knew he must impress upon his son the importance of the imperial dignity. Guangzhong’s prime minister Zeng Xiang counselled that the boy be dispatched to the frontier to serve under a reliable general and thus have the carefree beaten out of him; Guangzhong, however, rejected this for two reasons. Firstly, he would automatically dismiss any solution involving the frontier, for he did not believe an emperor should concern himself with it; and secondly, it was not what Kangxi had done.

To that end, just as Kangxi had to his errant son Yinreng, Guangzhong had Baoyu formally stripped of his succession and confined. Further inspired by his grandfather Yongzheng’s ruthless treatment of his brothers after acceding to the throne, he had Baoyu expelled from the Aisin Gioro clan and dropped hints that he might have him made a eunuch to serve in the imperial records. Guangzhong intended this to shock his son back to sensibility and then restore him to his position a week later. Unfortunately, Baoyu was found to have hanged himself on the second day, succumbing to despair upon these pronouncements.

It is debatable whether the death of Baoyu himself would have been enough to precipitate the later events. It does not appear Guangzhong had been particularly close to his firstborn son. But he had enjoyed considerable love for the Empress Xiao Fu Zheng, and news of her son’s suicide led the Empress to suffer a miscarriage and lose her life in the process. This had a terrible effect upon Guangzhong, and from 1791 the Emperor withdrew into seclusion. Only his most trusted ministers were allowed to consult with him, and then only barely. Guangzhong would take no other wife, and it took years even to convince him to use concubines to ensure more imperial heirs, yet they gave birth to girls only. Rumours of a curse were whispered.

The Emperor’s two remaining sons were named Baoli and Baoyi. They were as different as night and day. Baoli was an adventurous soul who did not take readily to his lessons and had a vigorous, boisterous nature; speculation abounded that he might turn out like his older brother as he grew to the age when he became aware of women. Baoyi, on the other hand, was a quieter and more bookish boy who delighted scholars with his early interest in Confucian philsophy, even if one takes court obsequiousness in the records into account. Nonetheless, he was somewhat devoid of dynamism and there were concerns he could be manipulated by court factions if he became Emperor. Thus the question of which would be named heir by Guangzhong – for it seemed he would have no more sons – was of paramount importance.

In 1793 Baoli was twenty and had indeed fallen into the same kind of lifestyle as his dead brother. This time Guangzhong took Zeng Xiang’s advice, and had the boy assigned to Mongolia under General Tang Zhoushou. Little did the Emperor dream that mere months later Tang would be called to Xingjiang and would die from a stomach ulcer soon afterwards, placing the combined armies under the command of the politically dangerous Yu Wangshan. The Dzungars were finally collapsing, not thanks to the Chinese or their Khalkha allies, but by invasion from the west by the Kazakhs. Jangir Khan had reunited his people and sought to finish the job that Ablai Khan had started a generation before: driving the Dzungars to the east. The Dzungar hordes broke and shattered against the “New Great Wall”, and with nowhere to go, their nation disintegrated. Dzungar lands were now open to encroachment from all directions, and Yu was adamant that the Kazakhs not gain all the booty. Thus Qing armies moved westward, taking the settlements of Beshbalik and Kucha. Yu clashed with the Kazakhs a few times before seeking a truce with Jangir Khan, who had possessed limited contact with the Chinese state prior to the conflict.[11] A treaty border was established on relatively amiable grounds, and Yu proclaimed that the Kazakhs’ vigour in prosecuting the conflict was yet more proof of the essential purity of the horse nomads’ way of life, something the Manchu had lost.

That would be worrying enough for Guangzhong’s government, that the plan to exile Yu beyond influence had backfired, but it was nothing compared to the corollary. Baoli returned to Beijing in 1797 as a hero-worshipper of Yu and a true believer in his ideas about Manchu reversion to the old ways, even dressing in traditional costume in the Beijing streets to the shock of the upper classes. He also gave himself the Manchu name of Giocangga after the grandfather of Nurhaci. This scandalised Beijing society, yet Guangzhong hesitated to act. It seemed like everything he did to curb his sons’ excesses had the opposite effect, and he was terrified of losing another son if he be too strict, for only two heirs remained and he had certainly ensured that none of his own brothers live long enough to produce any. There was always the possibility of simply naming Baoyi as heir instead, yet the boy continued to be more a scholar and lacking the will needed to sit the Dragon Throne. Zeng Xiang is rumoured to have remarked that, would some divine agency have combined the two boys in one, a suitable heir might be had. In whispers, others went further and suggested that Baoyu would had been such an heir, had his father reacted less severely to curb his behaviour.

In this awkward political climate it is scarcely surprising that it took over a decade for the activity of the Russians and Lithuanians up in the Amur valley to come to the attention of the Qing leadership. Yet reports by occasional traders led to spies being deployed and finally in 1805 reports reached Beijing that, indeed, the Russians had been constructing forts and settlements in the valley in violation of the Treaty of Nerchinsk. (One border governor added in his missive, darkly, that one might have expected Corea, as a loyal vassal very close to the activity, to have alerted China before now).

These violations were nothing new, though they had rarely reached this scale – the Treaty of Nerchinsk’s different translations had always been ambiguous on the precise ownership of some of the northern regions. In the past, the Chinese response had been simply to send overwhelming troops, force the Russians to surrender, and then bring them south and force them to settle in China, forbidding them to leave. Thus Guangzhong once more looked to the past and, seeking to rid himself of the annoying general a second time, sent Yu Wangshan north.

Once more, Yu performed well and took most of the Russian forts after a three-month siege, only being unable to breach the coastal ones that could be resupplied by sea. Nonetheless he captured more than 30,000 of the Company’s men and the soldiers with them, and marched them back to Beijing towards the end of 1806. Among them was Pavel Lebedev-Lastoschkin, founder of the Company. A native of Yakutsk, he had always known the risks of settling the Amur valley, and now in his sixties, he marched fatalistically with the rest of the factors and guards that had been taken. Moritz Benyovsky, with his usual devil’s luck, had been in Japan at the time and escaped capture.

The Emperor reviewed the forced march of the captives through Beijing with some alarm, not having truly appreciated the extent of the Russian incursion. Because of this, although most of the captives were given the usual treatment of being made to settle in China and being forbidden to leave its borders, he put Lebedev himself – as the ringleader – on trial. He also had the Chinese Orthodox Church in Beijing, permitted nearly a century before by the treaties with Peter the Great, closed down. Actual war with Russia was unthinkable – to do so would be to acknowledge a barbarian people as possessing claims to civilisation – but it was obvious that this was more serious than previous violations of the treaties.

Lebedev was sentenced to execution, and Guangzhong further ordered that the act be performed by a member of his own Imperial Guards Brigade. This was the group responsible for protecting the Emperor and defending the Forbidden City, set up as a Manchu Banner[12] early in the Qing dynasty. Originally it had been composed solely of Manchus, which had made sense when the Qing had still been thought of primarily as a foreign dynasty and Han Chinese could never truly be trusted. However, Daguo had begun opening it up to others, and Guangzhong had gone further by actively trying to exclude Manchus – the traditionalist movement men such as Yu followed made him paranoid about their loyalties. However, reasoning that most Han Chinese could also never truly be independent of any of the court factions, Guangzhong appointed as many ethnic minority groups as he could to the Guard. Among them were Huihui Muslims from the south, Uighurs from the west, Coreans from the north…like many emperors throughout history, such as the Byzantines before him with their Varangian Guard, Guangzhong knew that the safest option was to use guards who would enjoy no support from, and be unable to blend into, the general populace if they betrayed him. For the execution, he ordered that one of his biggest, strongest guardsmen perform the task. He couldn’t remember the man’s name, but that scarcely mattered; it was probably unpronounceable anyway, such a red-haired barbarian.

In hindsight many modern scholars find it inconceivable that Guangzhong could possibly have forgotten that many of his Imperial Guard were drawn from Russians who had previously been captured in the Amur Valley as long ago as 1750, or their descendants. Yet even conceding the Emperor’s general lack of interest about affairs on the periphery of his Empire, it is also worth pointing out that merely because two men share a homeland does not necessarily mean they will share any sympathy.

But it was at this point that things went quite wrong for the Guangzhong Emperor, for it transpired that the would-be executioner was not just any Russian, but a Don Cossack named Kondraty Astakhov who had served under Captain Lebedev on his first, failed expedition to Japan back in the 1770s. As a young sailor, Astakhov had thought their mission doomed several times, when they had faced the terrifying Japanese wave known as the tsunami and thereafter, yet Lebedev had got them through and saved them all. Afterwards, while Lebedev had been pleading his case in Moscow for further missions, Astakhov had been holding the fort (literally) in the Amur valley and had been taken by the Chinese, along with several others among Lebdev’s old crew. Not a few of them had risen to positions alongside him in the Imperial Guard, and until now they had had any reason not to be loyal to the man who had elevated them such.

Until now.

The Guangzhong Emperor’s body, along with those of fifteen of his guards not of Russian descent, was discovered by an Imperial chamberlain early the next morning. Chaos reigned in Beijing as it became apparent that Lebedev and many more of the captives had been broken out of prison. Yet the Russians would not enjoy another miracle like the one that had taken Benyovsky out of Japanese captivity: General Yu, still in the city, led his troops and intercepted the fleeing refugees and treacherous guardsmen at Miyun, slaying them to the last man. Predictably, the probable heir Baoli went with him. Most of the captives still in the city were also killed out of hand by mobs as the people mourned their murdered emperor.

Yet even as the authorities struggled to quell the chaos caused by news of the Guangzhong’s death, it became obvious that the succession would have to be decided quickly lest a civil war be risked. Therefore, Zeng Xiang went to the Forbidden City and removed the tablet from its appointed place, withdrawing the papers from behind.

He read it, once, twice, three times, and then with ashen features presented it to the other senior ministers at court.

The papers were old, dusty, musty, fading. They had not been updated or changed for a very long time. Not since the 1780s.

Baoyu, long dead by suicide, was named heir. Guangzhong must have been so consumed by grief, so indecisive over which of his surviving sons to name heir, so paranoid about the idea of being disrespectful to the son whose death he had inadvertently engineered, to bring himself to draw up a new paper.

And that indecision now plunged China into the fire. The War of the Three Emperors had begun.







[1] Although I personally detest the pinyin system of Chinese transliteration and it isn’t used in this TL anyway (the preferred transliteration is about halfway between Wade-Giles and a Russified system), I’m using it just because it’s the most commonly used one nowadays and otherwise the casual reader might well not recognise the names.

[2] Taizu and Taizong are more commonly known by their Manchu names of Nurhaci and Huang Taiji.

[3] There is some debate as to when the Tiandihui was founded; modern scholars say the 1760s, but earlier sources tend to view them as dating from the reign of the Kangxi Emperor in the 1720s. Regardless, I think they would still form in TTL.

[4] There is speculation that Yongzheng doctored his father’s deathbed proclamation of succession to declare the fourth son (himself) as Emperor rather than the fourteenth, Kangxi’s favourite.

[5] Unlike OTL where he died in 1735 rather than 1754 – see Interlude #5.

[6] OTL Hongli became the Qianlong Emperor.

[7] Tougou, confusingly, has no connexion to the similarly named Toungoo.

[8] OTL, the Nguyens eventually rallied and defeated the Qing armies in a surprise seven-day Tet campaign. The Nguyens would go on to eventually unite the remaining factions as the new country of Viet Nam in 1802.

[9] This system was used in OTL after the Yongzheng dispute as well.

[10] OTL this happened earlier, under the Qianlong Emperor, and was spread out over a longer period of time.

[11] OTL the Chinese already had considerable influence over the Kazakhs at this point, although Ablai Khan tried to play them off against the Russians. TTL, as there was no Qianlong Emperor and no successful conquest of the Dzungars earlier on, contact between the Kazakhs and China is much more limited.

[12] Early on, the Manchu army was organised into Banner groups; these became more and more ceremonial as the Qing dynasty wore on.


Interlude #9: The Hamiltonian Operation (by Nicksplace27)

From “Bravery: A Portrait of Philip Hamilton” by Ngune Thomas

History has looked upon General Philip Hamilton quite favourably. He is now seen a hero in West African, American and Natalian history. But the General was an incredibly polarising figure in his time; he was despised by many in the Empire, but also was a saviour for more. Many accounts have been made of his personality and his achievements; some portray him in a very negative light while many display him as a messiah. Nevertheless, his true nature has been somewhat corrupted by the bias of those in history and this book seeks to correct the rumours and provide an account of his life with as much clarity as I, an admitted admirer, can give.

In order to properly examine this man’s long and storied career, we must begin in New York City in 1782, where Philip Hamilton was born to Lord Alexander Hamilton, 1st Baron Hamilton, and Angelica Shuyler Hamilton [1]. Philip’s father was one of the Empire of North America’s most promising politicians and was the leader of the newly codified Patriot Party. He adored his new son and took him under his wing. Alexander wanted to mould his offspring for the highest reaches of fame. Fame was something he had chased his whole life and he wanted his son to do the same.

This of course is not fame in the sense we know it today; according to Francis Bacon, the famous philosopher and organiser of knowledge, fame was inextricably linked with honour and a special kind of achievement. Winning fame, Bacon maintained, meant winning the praise of persons of judgment and quality. In Bacon’s Essays, which Hamilton as well as many of his contemporaries studied heavily, there is a five stage classification of fame. On the bottom rung were the fathers of the country, who ‘reign justly and make good times wherein they live’. Next came the champions of Empire, leaders who enlarge their country through conquest or defend her against invaders. Next came saviours of Empire, who deliver their country from the miseries of tyrants or chaos of civil wars. Next came the great lawgivers, such as Solon, Lycurgus and Justinian, who create great laws which govern their Empire well. Finally, at the summit, were founders of Empires, such as Cyrus of Persia and Julius Caesar. These stellar Heroes were both great generals and wise legislators.

In teaching the young Philip of the deeds of these great men, he also invoked a sense of the ENA’s British heritage and a duty to the King of Great Britain and Emperor of North America. Alexander taught him of the fame many of his compatriots had achieved. He taught him of the great victories achieved in India by Sir Eyre Coote, in crushing Siraj ud-Daulah in the heart of India, making Bengal fully British. As the young Philip would be put into bed at night, Alexander would tell him great swashbuckling stories of General Wolfe and his conquest of Canada, as well as the stories of King Arthur in ancient Britain. For Alexander and also for his son, these men achieved what few others had, great fame in the eyes of Britain. Alexander was thoroughly intoxicated by the idea of becoming an arbiter of destiny for the Empire of North America and he bestowed that duty to King and Empire onto his son.

The love of Empire suited Hamilton’s location well as the entire city of New York began to grow immensely; from around 25,000 in 1780 to over 70,000 in 1800. As a result of a reference in Lord Washington’s letter to his good friend King George, the people of New York fashioned their home as the "Empire City". The spirit of victory and imperialism consumed New York City as it became one of the ENA's largest commercial ports. Philip Hamilton grew up in the middle of this array of commercial and societal growth beneath the Jack and George. People from all around the world came to New York to settle and it became a massive mixture of different languages, nationalities and experiences. Europeans would marvel at the purely egalitarian city where racial and cultural differences seemed to take a backseat to commercial and societal needs. Hamilton, unlike many leaders of his time (especially the Linnaean influenced), saw little wrong with living among multitudinous peoples and races - but that did not dampen his American patriotism, rather, it reinforced it to know that here was one of the few places where such society was possible.

Alexander also began to teach Philip about the road to his own fame. Philip often envisioned and idealised his own father’s romanticised account of his life as a young boy. His father was born from nothing on the warm tropical sands of Nevis, sent to the City of New York with a hope that he could successful even with the odds set against him. He enrolled first in a preparatory school and then King’s College on a grant. He excelled at his studies with a propensity towards law, eventually making the bar of New York. He married the beautiful daughter of a rich aristocratic New York family and they bore a son. He would temporarily leave his new wife and child because of a call to arms. The cries of liberty were emanating from South America and Hamilton and his brethren in North America would heed that call. The stories of epic battles on the plains of the Platinean lands against the decadent papists in the French and Spanish armies were exhilarating and made his father into an idol. He fought alongside the greatest hero of America and the Empire, George Washington, and together they achieved victory after victory for liberty. Alexander Hamilton returned to New York a favourite son, a war hero and possessing a barony. The part that his father always emphasised in his story was that he was the child in the story. He was the direct descendant of this narrative, which gave Philip quite a sizable responsibility to uphold and further it.

Philip was thirteen years old when his father first ascended to the post of Lord President of the Colonies. His father’s career had already been meteoric and now he was one of youngest heads of government in the world. He reveled in teaching his son about being a statesman as he furthered the independent agenda of the Empire of North America. Unfortunately, Alexander could no longer spend all of his time in New York, but had to move permanently to Fredericksburg. Philip had to say goodbye to the place where he grew up and move to the central beating heart of the Empire.

His father had barely been in office for two months when news of the murder of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Grenville came pouring in and the outrage was immediate. Philip, as a youngster reaching adolescence, saw the fire in his father’s eyes igniting as the impetus for war was called and at once, he ordered a full-scale mobilisation. Philip was thrilled as the sheer drive and inner workings of the parliamentary process. The frantic pace and martial obsessiveness that his father pursued in this war would ultimately influence how Philip would act in his own administrative duties. His father introduced him to the greatest minds in America at this juncture in its history; Benjamin Rush, James Madison and William Franklin.

Philip, who was seventeen by 1799, began attending King’s College. It was his father’s alma mater and it seemed his future within the Confederation of New York was quite bright. But the Hamilton name and political reputation preceded the young man and naturally the Constitutionalist-sympathising students there would give him no end to criticism and argument, especially as the election heated up. While at the school, reports began to surface that Philip would argue and break into physical fights with political opponents who would antagonise him on the campus. In this respect, Philip acted just as his father would. Alexander, who nevertheless understood Philip’s sentiment, knew the boy would not have much of a future in the University if the kept up with that sort of behavior.

Ultimately, Alexander decided that if Philip really wanted to become a man, he would have to learn how to fight, explore and run a business. Recently, his political victories regarding the abolition of slavery in the New York had endeared him to several high ranking members of the Royal Africa Company. He admired their commercial and scientific achievements and knew that it would provide his son with valuable experience and an appreciation for the global possessions of the Crown that if one could never truly see if he only stayed in America. While he had not consulted Philip on the matter, the elder Hamilton decided it would be best for his son to accept a position as an agent for the Royal Africa Company.

When his father informed him that he would be leaving for Dakar, Philip was incensed. In his mind, he was needed now more than ever. His father needed all the help that he could get in the rough election coming up and Patriots needed to organise to defeat those detestable Constitutionalists. But Alexander knew better. His son’s brash and argumentative nature would become more and more of a liability in his public persona. He realised that his son could use a break from this charged political atmosphere so as to not cost him the election. This move however did not help him very much at all, as the Constitutionalists discerned that he cared more about the companies ultimately run from London than what America needed. But alas, his choice was final. Although there was quite a spat and some residual anger, Philip left on a ship headed for West Africa to begin his new career.

He arrived in Dakar as the nineteenth century dawned, as the RAC was opening new offices and augmenting their fleet. Hamilton took no time acquainting himself with the highest leaders of the RAC and he enjoyed somewhat of celebrity status there even early on. Thomas Space and Arthur Filling, the founders of the Company, took a liking to the young man and worked with him considerably. He would stay up into the early hours of the morning talking to Space of the merits of Hobbes and Locke, Socrates and Aristotle. They viewed the Foxite ministry’s accomplishments with great pride as their home country began to sow the seeds of liberty and heal the divisions of the past, unaware of the monumental events that would take place merely seven years later and what Fox’s appeasement would do to bring that about.

Filling taught Hamilton about the fundamentals of business and allowed him to organise trading expeditions to several native civilisations on the interior. During his first few years working in the RAC, he traveled along the coast with Filling and his merchant ships, taking in exports. Ivory, gold dust and other valuable luxury items were traded at optimal prices and ultimately it was Hamilton’s skillful trade agreements and sometimes unscrupulous but effective market practices that flooded the RAC coffers with gold and kept the stockholders fat and happy. Hamilton’s economic genius, a product of his father’s teachings, made him one of Filling’s favorite junior lieutenants.

He also stayed for a while in Liberty City and met with Olaudah Equiano. In his first assignment in 1803, he had been appointed the liaison for defense of former New York and Pennsylvanian slaves settling in Freedonia. He tended to his job quite well there as he helped these fledgling communities of former posessions of New Yorkers found their new settlements and their new lives. His views on race were mixed at best but quite progressive at the time. While he respected and worked with the “civilised” blacks (ones who accepted British culture), he detested the native cultures in West Africa. While he was cordial in his official diplomatic state, he could be quite xenophobic at times by today’s standards.

In 1804 he was appointed to one of the Junior Lieutenancies to the Gold Coast region of West Africa and immediately took up residence in the British trading base at Cape Coast Castle. He was one of the youngest to take one of these positions in the company and no doubt his relationship with Filling and his name got him the job. Nevertheless, the administrative duties of trade and diplomatic duties suited Hamilton and it reminded him of his father’s term as he facilitated the transfer of goods to the RAC fleet from the hinterland and dealing with the natives in the Ashanti Empire. He reformed Cape Coast Castle from a beaten down and neglected slave castle to a well organised and powerful outpost of the Royal Africa Company.

Of all the men in West Africa that he became close to, by far his best friendship was with a young man named James Wayne, who was the second son of General Isaac Wayne II. They met in 1804 while in Cape Coast and immediately both of their stories fascinated each other. Wayne had sent his son to be tutored in surveying by their chief scout, Daniel Houghton. Hamilton and Wayne would share stories about their fathers’ accomplishments from the Second Platinean War. Houghton liked them both and ultimately they both became his pupils in the difficult skill of scouting and exploration. Before long, they made plans to explore the depths of West Africa.

But soon events would prove to change both Philip and James’ plans. Word of the Cherry Massacre had reached Dakar as well the American and British declarations of war against the UPSA. To the two young men, this was their chance to prove their worth on the battlefield. The stories of his father’s victories with General Washington there came rushing back into his mind and immediately he wanted to go and fight. He traveled with Wayne to Cape Coast where Admiral Sir William Byng’s combined fleet was stationed before traveling to Falkland’s Islands and going to war with the Meridans.

This certainly was different from the stories his father had told him but in his mind, with all of the recent events in the UPSA, they were not to be trusted. The radicals under President-General Castelli were a far cry from the liberty seeking men that had once fought alongside his father, at least in his mind. After all, one of the declarations of war came from his own father’s hand, so it was as direct of a blessing as there ever was one. Their tacit support of the Revolutionary French regime and their seemingly bloodthirsty pirate-like fleet, as the Cherry Massacre showed, made up Hamilton’s mind. He would go and fight.

Hamilton was never a navy man but after those several years of organising coastal defense forces and training native jagun[2] regiments in the Gold Coast, he was perfectly prepared to become a first sergeant and command a Royal Marine unit. Though Hamilton immediately transferred to the newly promoted American Admiral Perry’s flagship, it was during this trip that he really began to get a scope for how massive the British Crown’s possessions really were. In letters he wrote to his sisters back in New York, he mentioned how the regiment adjacent to his unit was made up mostly of men mainly from Yorkshire and Dover, while his own regiment had men from every confederation in the Empire from Newfoundland to Florida. He also grew closer to Wayne, who was going on this expedition for a similar reason.

Many have speculated on Hamilton’s personal proclivities and his relationship with James Wayne and use his letters as proof to claim their relationship went beyond that of friendship. The matter remains one of debate, with revisionist historians claiming Wayne played catamite to Hamilton, but this is strenuously rejected by the majority of scholars. Still, Hamilton and Wayne were inseparable friends from 1807 on.

The first true battle that Hamilton distinguished himself in was the Battle of Valdes in June 1806. Admiral Byng had a small Meridian flotilla surrounded and was punishing them into submission, but a small frigate escaped and Hamilton told Admiral Perry to follow him. While they kept pace with the Meridian’s escape, it looked unlikely that the admiral’s ship would be able to engage them on the broadside and the rest of the fleet was otherwise occupied. Hamilton and his contingent of Royal Marines decided to do something daring and when they were close enough, swung from the front of their ship and onto the rear of the Meridian ship. Hamilton and his thirty Royal Marines proceeded to battle the entire crew and Hamilton personally slew several Meridians before putting a bullet in the captain’s brain with the revolving pistol his father had given him. He had become quite adept at using it and a half dozen Meridians were now dead because of his newfound skill. He returned to Perry’s ship to accolades from all of the crew and the American Admiral took note of the daring and courageous young son of the leader of the Empire of North America.

After a few months spent in dock in Falkland’s Islands, Perry was now planning a landing on the Platinean coast ofin which Hamilton would play a large part. Hamilton could scarcely hide his excitement. After all, his father had been in his exact position twenty years before and his wealth and popularity had found its roots in those events. He set out and took part in capturing several Meridian forts and facilitating the landing of General George Clinton’s men to besiege Buenos Aires. As Hamilton was preparing for his greatest victory yet, word of Lisieux’s invasion of England reached him and the rest of the army.

It was simply unbelievable. The Channel in Hoche’s grasp? The King dead by Modigliani’s hand? The mother country held by its most corrosive enemies? In his blind disbelief, Hamilton no longer saw the Meridian soldiers as the yellow clad men defending their homeland. All he saw was Jacobins, clad in red and black chequered trousers and Phrygian caps, hoisting the blood-soaked flag and advancing inexorably onward. In this blind rage, he drew new strength to protect all that he held dear and to preserve the Empire from falling to republican scum as he and General Clinton set out to capture Buenos Aires.

Hamilton decided to take part in the descent on Cape San Antonio, which, if it had been successful, would have taken much of the region around Buenos Aires and might have destroyed the Meridian will to fight. But Hamilton and his commanding officer were not facing a ragtag militia band that could easily be swept aside but one of the most capable generals in the UPSA during that time period, Luis Ayala. The General possessed good battlefield intelligence and knew when and where the descent would take place. Imbued with this knowledge, Ayala proceeded to allow the Anglo-American Army to land as scheduled and encounter no opposition luring them inland; then he sprung his trap shut and surrounded the now helpless army. It seemed like General Ayala's greatest triumph in the conflict, one which could change the fate of the Third Platinean War. But the person who would take that victory from his grasp was the young and determined Philip Hamilton.

Hamilton was always the daring type and in this charged battlefield climate, he was no different even at his young age. Knowing that the encirclement mirrored the Battle of Cannae and would only result in defeat, he knew he needed a breakthrough. Luckily, Wayne sighted a weakness in the Meridian lines enveloping them and informed Hamilton on this new information. Hamilton, knowing there was little time to waste, called on several of his fellow American regiments to push forward and attack that weak point and if they broke through try to reach the sea only several miles away. Luckily for Hamilton, General Ayala was far on the other side of the encirclement and therefore unable to compensate quickly for this turn of events. Hamilton fueled as much by the drive to survive as his hatred of republicanism at this point, led the charge himself, throwing his unit and several others directly into the Meridian lines. He killed line after line of yellow clad soldiers before breaking free and opening up a direct line to the Atlantic. General Clinton was intensely relieved when he heard the encirclement had been broken and immediately ordered a full retreat. General Ayala, momentarily unaware of these developments, reacted with total shock upon seeing his prize begin to slip through his fingers. The Anglo-American army had escaped and as General Clinton and soon everyone not only on Falkland’s Islands but across the Crown’s possessions knew, it was all because of the daring of Philip Hamilton.

He and Wayne returned as heroes to Dakar in 1809 and proceeded to use their newfound influence to begin their expeditions they had planned together nearly a decade before. Unfortunately, the man who had taught both of them, Daniel Houghton, had passed away and they were both deeply saddened as any young student would mourn the passing of mentor. They also knew it was his wish that they continue his legacy and do everything they had planned and dreamed of together.

They travelled constantly on missions and became a staple for having some of the most successful trading and exploration excursions the company has ever had up to that point. They visited the Kingdom of Benin in 1810 and made the trek to Ubindu, Benin’s capital to speak with the Oba or King of Benin, Ogbebo about trade deals and establishing an RAC presence in the Blight of Benin. But this would not be an easy victory for Hamilton. The Oba was angry with the RAC because much of the wealth that had been built by Benin was based in slave trade and when the RAC changed its tone and developed a strong abolitionist streak, Benin’s coffers dried up. The Oba however, knew he was in a position of strength. He had one of the best trained and well equipped armies in Western Africa and could defend against any forceful foreign incursion. But Hamilton was there to make a deal and so he did. He decided to grant an exclusive Palm Oil monopoly on trade there and to reimburse the king for the RAC drying up of the slave trade, he decided to bring several RAC blacksmiths and teach the native kingdom how to create their own guns. This pleased Ogbebo greatly, as the only thing holding the Beninite army back was its reliance on imported weaponry. Wayne protested but Hamilton knew that if he wanted a lock on the lucrative Palm Oil monopoly, it was a concession he was willing to make. Some commentators have blamed Hamilton for the events that followed, but other cooler headed historians maintain that he could not have possibly have foreseen what would come about from this decision.

But their most famous exploit was the first European to visit the fabled city of Timbuktoo. Part of the original reason to found the RAC was to find this fabled city of gold, but it had proven to be a difficult city to not only find but enter. Merchants were sworn to secrecy and it being a sacred Muslim site, no Christian could ever enter the city gates. Still, after years of planning, Hamilton and Wayne decided to explore the interior and find it. They set off from Dakar in 1812 and took a small boat down the Gambia River then the bribed Muslim guides took them across the desert to Ludamar, where they fought several Moorish bands who were trying to capture slaves for trading with North African corsairs. Nevertheless, they journeyed on and by 1813; they became the first living Europeans to discover the Joliba River [3]. They soon built a small schooner which Hamilton named Angelica after his mother and they set off down river. They passed through amazing country, with massive herds of antelope and elephants feeding by the water as they passed. They came upon several settlements as they went. Hamilton knew if they were found at this point, they would be most likely killed. So they both disguised themselves as pilgrims and scholars from Morocco and soon the city of Timbuktoo was upon them.

The city was amazing, as his account in Travels to the Interior of Africa told: “The city sits upon three hills and alights in gold when the sun shines upon the city. It is walled on all sides and guarded by thousands of spearmen on horses. Three massive temples sit on the tops of each hill. The libraries and places of learning in this fabled city lie there as well, where many pilgrims and learned men from all over the world seek knowledge and profit. Now England and America may count themselves among the nations here. The foliage here is also incredible. Within the walls of the city, there is a large forest where a specially bred hard of elephants live. They supply the best ivory in all of Africa and the trees produce some of the sweetest fruit in the entire world. This forest seemed to go on for an eternity in the middle of the savanna and from it seems to spring all of the wealth of Timbuktoo…”

His peaceful and incredible visit to the city soon came to an end however. While they were examining a bazaar and betting on a camel race in the west side of the city, Wayne’s turban slipped off exposing his very European face and provoking much outrage from the patrons present. Several men drew their swords and tried to arrest the two adventurers to presumably be put to death. Hamilton had prepared for this sort of thing, however and as these men moved in to capture them, Hamilton picked the largest one and promptly pulled out his father’s revolving pistol and shot him directly in the face three times. Seeing the largest among them drop dead so suddenly, and the remarkable spectacle of a repeating firearm, certainly shocked the patrons and provided enough time for Hamilton and Wayne to get a running start. Soon, they gave chase and Hamilton needed to get out of the city. They headed south with the men close behind and for a time, it seemed like they would be apprehended. The ever resourceful Hamilton produced another pistol and neutralized one and then another as they were running, evoking the same skill he had in dispatching Meridian soldiers. They managed to escape the city barely and Hamilton had two horses waiting with all of their ‘borrowed’ goods; they took several ingots of gold, a few priceless pieces of ivory and several important manuscripts to prove their passage into the city.

They rode south though desert, savanna and jungle; stopping to forage and collect plant life. They ran dangerously low on supplies and it seemed like they would join the ranks of fallen explorers. But by a stroke of luck, they approached the city of Dumassi. There Hamilton saw a familiar face; one of the Ashanti ministers he had traded with nearly a decade beforehand. They embraced and the tired travelers were not only given food and supplies but were escorted through the Ashanti Empire to Cape Coast Castle, where they greeted an incredibly surprised RAC contingent in early 1815.

His glorious return and an account of his daring and heroic journey were published all over the world and instantly he became a household name everywhere in the Empire. The public loved the charismatic Hamilton, who was spitting image of his father, who was elevated to near-deity like reverence as an elder statesman. His son did not live in his father’s shadow and Philip in some ways eclipsed his father in fame they both were seeking ever since Alexander had spoken to young Philip back in Fredericksburg all those years ago.

His golden boy status did not hold true for his co-workers back in the Royal Africa Company. Many despised his status and the perks that went along with it. Filling and Space gave Hamilton all of the best assignments even before their victories against the Meridians and now they were literally worldwide celebrities. Many of the hostile British directors referred to them as the “Yankee Twins”. But their exploits were trumpeted beck in Britain and especially America where their popularity was astounding. Even though their contemporaries in Dakar despised those two, they could not brush them aside without drawing public outrage and subsequent shareholder losses from their respective home countries. But one unscrupulous director named Philip Lawrence gathered power off the hatred for Hamilton. He was quite power-hungry and would stop at nothing until he was the leader of the RAC. His exploits and failure’s have filled many history texts focusing on West Africa. His cutthroat business practices gained him a cadre of followers in Dakar and by 1814, he set out to control the RAC and get rid of Hamilton once and for all.

When Thomas Space passed away in 1816, Lawrence had already bought up incredible amounts of stock in the company itself through somewhat shady ends, using proxy buyers and diversifying his holdings amongst his supporters but gaining far more influence than anyone had before in the Company. So when the time came for Filling, who was at least 78 years old by this time, to name Space’s successor, Lawrence jumped at the chance. At the stockholder meeting, he had enough gall to stop Filling from appointing Hamilton as his successor by a majority of the voting members disagreeing with Filing’s decision. Many of the stockholder defections were unexpected by Filing and this turn of events shocked the man who had built the RAC from the ground up. Filing was powerless and deeply saddened with the loss of his best friend and control of his company all in the span of merely two weeks.

Lawrence knew the Hamilton question could not be ignored because of his popularity and many back in London were expecting Hamilton to be running the RAC now, not himself. So the ever cunning Lawrence decided to give him a seemingly impressive title; the supreme director of Southern African operations. But many in the company knew that it was farcical because there were two offices in all of Southern Africa, one in Port St. Lucia and one in Port Natal, each with a permanent employment of ten company men each.

Hamilton was devastated by this sinister turn of events, but he was ultimately powerless in this situation as well. He knew Lawrence had too much control of the stockholders in the RAC and he knew his biggest backers were either dead (Space) or soon to be retired (Filling) and while they taught him mush during his young years, they could not help him in this situation. He felt insulted and betrayed for all of the hard work that he had done for the Company.

Hamilton was so disgusted that he did not even visit Natal, since the job was so rudimentary and useless his deputy could easily perform the functions and he didn’t even think he would go ever; dismissing the job as merely a title without any power attached to it. At that point, he was correct. The British East India Company had controlled the new colony at Natal for the last ten years and it was doing very well under their jurisdiction while the RAC offices were manned by twenty other men and dealt with trade from Natal to West Africa, which was little to none back then.

He decided to travel back home to New York and to the place he grew up and knew as a child and where he was known and loved. His father was ailing and his mother was calling him back to the Hamilton lands in New York City. Hamilton had after all been keeping contacts in New York and putting much of his money into investments into an ambitious project to carve a canal through western New York, connecting the Great Lakes with the Hudson River. It was an ambitious project and since it passed directly through Hauden lands, someone who had experience making agreements with native powers was needed. Hamilton decided; he would leave Africa and return to New York after more than a decade and a half away. He did not know if he would ever return, but at the time he underestimated the allure of the majestic and mysterious Dark Continent that he had grown to love…

~


[1] In OTL, Alexander Hamilton married Elizabeth Shuyler and had Philip with her. ITTL, Hamilton marries her sister Angelica, who in OTL Alexander not only got along with better than he and Elizabeth but also were rumored to be having an affair together. ITTL, Hamilton would still want to marry into Shuyler money and prestige but seeing as they got along so well; I thought their marriage was fairly plausible.

[2] Recall “jagun” = West African equivalent of “sepoy”, from the Yoruba word for “soldier”.

[3] OTL Niger River.
Part #84: Antipodean Antics

“The ancients believed that a wall of fire stood on the equator, and the mysterious lands of the southern hemisphere could never be reached by humans. Now of course we know that to be untrue, yet sometimes it seems that a wall of a different kind indeed stands there, insulating us from the affairs of the nations above and beyond what might be expected even from the great distances. And it is perhaps this we have to thank for the circumstances of our founding…”

– M. Maurice de Chardeaux, Consul of the Adamantine Republic of Dufresnie, 1897​

*

From - "Exploration and Discovery in the late 18th Century" (English translation) by Francois Laforce, Nouvelle Université de Nantes, 1961.

La Pérouse’s Land had been largely forgotten by Europe during the Jacobin Wars, and particularly after 1805. It was in that year that Admiral Surcouf finally gave up his attempts to provoke the Dutch Republic into a war by raiding the shipping of the Dutch East India Company, and returned to France with much of his fleet. The previous year, the Dutch under Heemskerk had burned Surcouf’s new port of Saint-Malo,[1] but the French had already begun to repair the growing settlement. Saint-Malo had been constructed in a hurry, on the end of a long supply line, to be in a better position to raid the Dutch shipping, and was certainly unable to support itself. Surcouf and his lieutenant, Alain Bonnaire, who managed most of the affairs of the base itself, coped both by resupplying Saint-Malo from the main French settlement at Nouvelle Albi[2] and by trading with the ‘Indien’ natives. The race in the region called themselves the Noungare[3] and, although possessing some suspicions of the white newcomers, soon settled down to fairly amicable trade relations.

One chronicle of the earliest days comes from Piet Poortman, a sailor of the Dutch East India Company who had been captured by one of Surcouf’s earliest raids. Surcouf was generally unwilling to kill enemy captives out of hand, yet they could not be released, either, as the fact that these “privateers” raiding Dutch shipping must remain officially secret – the Stadtholder might be certain that they were backed by Lisieux, but he must not be allowed to gain any hard evidence of this. The solution was to put captives to work in Saint-Malo, developing the growing settlement. Poortman, a former non-commissioned officer, quickly proved himself capable as a junior administrator and was trusted sufficiently to fill that role. As Bonnaire privately remarked, men like Poortman were fortunate that Saint-Malo was being run by men like Surcouf, pragmatists, rather than the hardline Linnaeans who ruled in Albi under Lamarck and his imitators. Poortman kept a diary in his native language in which he records the often halting transactions between the French and the Noungare natives, remarking that one characteristic of the Noungare that their neighbouring races (such as the Angatoumé) found repellent was their proud certainty in their own cultural superiority over other Indiens, and thus it was small wonder that they and the French got along so well.

By 1806 Saint-Malo’s trade links with the natives were such that the town was growing more self-sufficent – though the departure of Surcouf back to France with much of the fleet and its personnel doubtless helped – and this was just as well, for Albi was falling into conflict with the Ouarandjeré people near Bieraroun, and that secondary settlement had been burned to the ground. Lamarck continued to overestimate the effects of his “scientific” approaches to farming in New Gascony around Albi, and the colony was beginning to starve. Furthermore, overzealous Linnaenism was alienating those few native races in the region, such as the Ourandjeré themselves, who had been friendly enough with the French to trade. An abortive mission to Autiaroux to try and re-establish links with the Mauré – trade which had saved the young colony once before, in 1795 – failed when both main Mauré factions, the Tainui and the Touaritaux-Touaux alliance, refused to treat with the Republicans. The Tainui were being assisted by the exiled La Pérouse, the Touaritaux-Touaux by La Pérouse’s former lieutenant Valéry Élouard (who along with some other officers had been tempted away from the original group of exiles) and both counselled their native associates to shut out the Jacobins. With Surcouf having withdrawn the vast majority of the colony’s armed forces, nor could Albi organise an expedition to take the Mauré’s harvests by force.

In the end, ironically, the colony was subject to a revolution in early 1808. Lamarck had died of a snakebite the year before while leading a botanical expedition into the Montes des Martyres (the modern Montes Vertes)[4] and the colony was under the command of acting Governor-General René Demoivre. Demoivre is remembered today chiefly by his damning epitaph by revolutionary leader Philippe Locard: “Though the old theory that the southern continent must be great enough to balance the landmasses of the north turned out to be untrue, at least one thing in the north had its equal counterpart in the south: General Lascelles”. More modern views suggest Demoivre’s policies were no worse than Lamarck’s, but the governor-general lacked the natural philosopher’s charisma and his increasingly ruthless approaches to rationing led to an uprising by the colony’s people, many of whom wished they had fled with La Pérouse when they had had the chance. Demoivre had his head cut off in the oldest Jacobin manner, with a knife, and most of the rest of the administrators were imprisoned. Locard took one of the few remaining ships and made contact with the Mauré once more; this time, La Pérouse agreed to help the Nouvelle-Albigensians. La Pérouse was by this point in his sixties and felt he was not long for this world in any case.

La Pérouse’s Land was completely forgotten at the Congress of Copenhagen in 1809/10 and its fate would not be settled until the separate Treaty of Blois in 1813. The matter was first raised in 1810 when Louis XVII and his government were considering which officials of the former Lisieux regime could be considered ‘pure’ enough, not implicated directly in activities considered unacceptable, to remain in their posts under the restored monarchy. One such man was Georges Galois, Lisieux’s colonial director – a surprisingly senior position for its occupant to be considered for retention, as most of them were immediate candidates for trial and punishment – but Galois had had little to do, as all Robespierre’s and Lisieux’s schemes to take control of the Royal French colonies had failed or backfired. With the exception of La Pérouse’s Land. Now, as he pleaded his case before the King and his ministers Bonaparte and Barras, Galois argued that France possessed a potentially great prize: though La Pérouse’s Land seemed largely barren and lacking much in the way of resources, merely by holding the continent, Lisieux’s regime had already proved that it was possible to exert control over other countries’ valuable East India trade routes. Furthermore, La Pérouse’s Land provided a useful base for launching more missions into the more lucrative South Sea Islands, much as the Dutch used the Cape Colony as a springboard for their missions into the East Indies and Ceylon.

Bonaparte in particular was enthusiastic about this idea – some biographers have suggested that, like Alexander the Great, he was always searching for more worlds to conquer – and later that year, the new Kingdom launched a small flotilla under Admiral André de Foix to reassert control over the southern colonies.

The new regime in Albi surrendered readily to Foix; though Locard’s revolutionaries had never had any specific ideological underpinnings, it was logical enough to reject Linnaean misrule by returning to the Bourbons. Saint-Malo was a different matter, putting up a serious fight, and Foix was unable to take the settlement with his small fleet. By this point, Europe had awakened to the situation and many were unwilling to let the Royal French just pick up the entire continent, concerned about what Surcouf had managed with his few settlements. The Dutch in particular objected for obvious reasons, and the British – who were feeling outmanoeuvred by Vauguyon’s antics at the Congress of Copenhagen – also demanded their pound of flesh. France was still in a weak enough position that Louis was forced to concede: the continent was divided into three, using the sort of ruler-straight lines that care not for what wars they might provoke a few generations later.

Approximately the northern third of the land (the maps of the time were still rather uncertain, complicating matters) was ceded to the Dutch, who referred to it as ‘Nieuw Holland’ in a pointed reminder that it had been they who had first mapped much of the southern land – just having managed to miss the parts even halfway welcoming to colonists. The British, meanwhile, were given Saint-Malo together with its corner of the continent, a strategically valuable position, yet one which essentially let the struggling French Kingdom throw the hot potato of Bonnaire’s resistance into Britain’s lap. All three powers immediately embarked on hurried mapping missions to establish sites for more settlements, enforcing their claims. This was observed with some scepticism by the man in the street, particularly those well-read ones who knew of the South Sea Bubble from nearly a century before: the powers were throwing everything into the new venture because it might yield dividends, years down the line, while back at home across a war-ravaged continent, men, women and children starved. Yet it was like a game of chicken, and none dared back down lest they show weakness.

The mapping missions took somewhat longer than anticipated, and the initial settlement programme lasted well into the 1820s: the French, after repairing Albi’s relations with the natives, rebuilt Bieraroun and then established the new colonies of Esperance[5] and Lousville Australe.[6] The Dutch scoured the more hostile northern coast before establishing a base they named Tasmanstad,[7] another pointed reference to the fact that this land had been explored by them long before the French had claimed it. The native Larrakians already had intermittent contact with the trepangers of Macassar in Celebes, a part of the East Indies already brought more or less under the control of the Dutch East India Company, and this contact meant they were better adapted to deal with a new set of visitors than the Indiens elsewhere. Notably, they reacted to Dutch attempts to conduct slave raids (trying to justify the colony’s expense to the East India Company’s directors by providing an export) by withdrawing into the interior. Tasmanstad survived only on subsidies.

The British, meanwhile, mounted an expedition in 1813 to take Saint-Malo. Given the parlous state of the British economy, they were supported by two American regiments from Virginia. The battle raged throughout the end of that year (the southern summer) but eventually Bonnaire was evicted. He and a few hardcore supporters fled into the Noungare lands, determined to carry on Kleinkrieger warfare against the new Anglo-American colonies. Saint-Malo was renamed New London and its environs the colonial province of New Kent, both in memory of Modigliani’s depredations. However, in recognition of the American contribution, in 1819 the northern part of the vast, notional claimed area was split off as the separate province of New Virginia. This was made more of a reality in 1823 when a cavalcade of Virginians rounded Cape Horn and established the new settlement of Norfolk as its capital.[8]

For the present, there seemed enough of this vast, empty continent for everyone. But then the same had once been said about the Americas…

*

It was in 1812 that Admiral Foix visited Autiaraux and met with La Pérouse. The old explorer was gratified to find that the kingdom had been restored at home and his attainted title was ready to be returned to him. Yet Foix had reached the islands at a critical time. The two Mauré factions, the Tainui and the Touaritaux-Touaux, had finally begun to heat up their conflict. The entirety of the Ile du Nord, the Tea Iqua-Amaué as the Mauré called it, was now either in one camp or the other, and both sides possessed muskets. More to the point, the battle tactics of the Mauré, though requiring modifications to incorporate the firearms, were both advanced and adaptable. The Touaritaux-Touaux-allied Valéry Élouard later wrote a treatise on the subject, comparing their defensive strategies prior to European contact with the motte-and-bailey fortifications that had prevailed in Europe about eight centuries before, and noting how advanced this was considering they were a people so isolated from outside contact. Élouard’s book is particularly noteworthy because, particularly given its source, it formed much of the vast intellectual broadside attacking Linnaean Racism that dominated European literature in the two decades of the Watchful Peace.

La Pérouse, now weary and wishing only to return home, met with Élouard neutrally and between them the two rivals arranged a temporary cessation of hostilities between the Mauré sides, allowing the French to return home. Though some Mauré leaders did not want to give up their European assistants, they were overruled by those who believed it was more important to maintain peaceful relations. La Pérouse’s last great act in the islands of Autiaraux before his return home on one of Foix’s ships was to give the speech known by the Mauré as the “Appeal to Accord”, on the neutral, sparsely inhabited mouth of the Eretaunga River.[9] La Pérouse appealed to representatives from both sides, declaring that Europe had forgotten their islands while consumed with its wars, yet soon the seafaring powers would once again turn their attention to Autiaraux, just as they had to La Pérouse’s Land, the continent that – for now – bore his name (the more politically neutral geographic name of ‘Antipodea’ would not come into use until the 1850s). He urged them to try and set aside their differences, lest they become so consumed by their own conflicts that they be easy pickings for any European colonisers. La Pérouse had spent long enough with these people, who had sheltered him in his hour of need, that he genuinely cared for their fate and would even defend them against Royal French colonisers, and some of that sincerity is said to have come through.

It is of course an absurd romanticisation to say that this speech alone was enough to prevent the Mauré conflicts degenerating into a broader, more damaging conflict. It seems that the Tainui had been thinking that way already. They possessed an expansionist streak, driven by the influential leader Ruatara of the Angapoué iwi from the north.[10] Although the Angapoué had been conquered and annexed into the Tainui confederation as one of the first targets of the new musket-wielding Tainui, Ruatara had proved savvy enough to ensure his people were treated fairly – and quietly obtain enough of the new weapons and a French renegade to show them how to maintain them. Over the past decade, the Angapoué had bounced back until they now had an almost dominant position within the greater Tainui alliance, not least because of their large numbers, more than any individual iwi within the original Tainui. Ruatara now believed the confederation served his people more than if they managed to break free from it and regained their independence, and thus fought to keep the unwieldy alliance together by giving it more targets for conquest to focus on. He concurred with La Pérouse that engaging in wide-scale battle with the equally armed and numerous Touaritaux-Touaux pact would only exhaust both sides and most likely cause them to break apart into individual iwis once more. Ruatara, like many at the time, took inspiration from the Mauré’s oral traditions, which stated that they were at heart one people, their divisions originally existing solely because they had come from the half-mythical homeland of Hawaiiki in different flotillas of canoes. He ultimately saw a united Autiaraux as his goal, a strong Autiaraux that could resist the second wave of Europeans that La Pérouse warned of, but attacking the Touaritaux-Touaux was not the way to do it.

Instead, the Tainui initially continued their colonisation of the Ile du Sud, the Teuaé Pounamou as his people named it, and the conquest of the Quai Taioux people there. But in the long run, he was more ambitious. Along with a few other open-minded chiefs, his inquiries of La Pérouse and his officers had not been restricted to muskets, gunpowder and other warfare-related topics. Ruatara had been curious about the techniques the French used to build their great ships, far larger than any war canoe.

After all, if a people could come one way across the great ocean, there was nothing to say they could not return…

*

Jean-François de Galaup returned to France in October 1814, having sickened on the voyage. Nonetheless, he was brought to Paris, where he remarked sadly upon what a decade of Lisieux had done to the streets of the old city he remembered, and King Louis XVII returned to him the title that had been taken from him. He was Comte de La Pérouse once more. And the King went further, founding the new – if notional – Duchy of New Gascony, and making La Pérouse its first Duc.

The great man died in a feverish sleep not three months later, to general mourning. A statue was unveiled not long afterwards – admittedly not least because the new government was looking for any excuse to tear down all the ones Lisieux had raised and replace them with more suitable ones. Nonetheless, La Pérouse remained one of the few men that all of France could look upon with admiration: the explorer who had opened up a whole new world, had tried to do his duty regardless of master, and who had, unbeknownst to all, unleashed a new power upon the world…





[1] Recall this is built on the site of OTL Albany.

[2] On the site of Sydney.

[3] Transliterated Noongar by the British in OTL.

[4] OTL’s Blue Mountains.

[5] Near OTL Newcastle (and confusingly not the OTL Esperance on the other side of the country).

[6] OTL Port Lincoln.

[7] Near OTL Darwin.

[8] On the site of Fremantle, the initial landing of the colonists who in OTL went on to found Perth.

[9] OTL Hutt River.

[10] That is, the Ngāpuhi; this is of course not OTL’s Ruatara, who was born long after the timeline’s POD, but his ATL cousin shares something of his innovative and open-minded outlook to European innovations.

Part #85: Natisk na Vostok

Wer wagt, gewinnt

– short form title of the memoirs of Ulrich Münchhausen, published posthumously in 1836​

Russia, historically, is not so much an Empire as an Argument.

– Dr Tarlach Óinseach, 1926​

*

From – “The Great Eastern Adventure” by Pavel Nikolaiyevich Khlebnikov (1972):

“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” wrote William Shakespeare in the late sixteenth century, speaking of a king from the early fifteenth. Words which truly know no nation, no era. Indeed they transcend even systems of government, for they may be applied to many an individual instead to don the Phrygian cap. It would, of course, be vulgar (and in violation of Haraldsson’s celebrated maxim) to bring up L’Inhumain at this point, and so I shall not.

No – instead we look to the head of Emperor Paul the First in the year of 1805. Certainly the Tsar had every right to be concerned. He had won back his throne from the Potemkinite rebels at the cost of numerous compromises with potential enemies. While the Klimentov rebellion had been successfully crushed two years before, and proletarian anger diverted into the Great Pogrom against the Jews soon afterwards, both were symptomatic of continuing pressure beneath the surface, slowly building. Russia, as ever, found herselves at the crossroads of West and East. Ever since Peter the Great, the Tsars and Tsaritsas had tried to bring Russia closer to the European, Western, civilised world. There were reasons for this beyond the simple chauvinism of the fact that most of the royals were themselves German in descent. Europe represented literacy, knowledge, rationalism, Enlightenment, while Russia was regarded by many as still being primarily an oriental, Asiatic power, doomed to superstition and credulousness. The tsars, and much of the upper classes (separated from their subjects by language, as the court speech was French) had sincerely believed that such a course would be of benefit to all the people of Russia, from the Emperor down to the lowest krestyanin.

Yet even with the broad acceptance of the autarkic, arbitrary power of the Imperial authority by the people, there had remained a stubbornness and resentment directed towards the attempts to bring European civilisation to Russia. The Germanophile Peter III had encouraged the settlement of Germans in the Empire, picking up many fleeing religious persecution in the Germanies. But while such settlers, often more skilled than their Russian counterparts, might serve a national agenda well, they only provoked resentment among the Russian people. It had been programmes such as this which had allowed Alexander Potemkin, a man with a hopelessly flimsy claim to the throne, nonetheless to paint Peter and his son Paul as “foreigners”, un-Russian, un-Slavic, seeking to remake the country in their own German image. Some have suggested that the upsurge in Slavic racialism in Russia in the late 1790s was both a mirroring of and a reaction to the French Revolution and the rise of Linnaean Racism therein. This is, however, an oversimplification; Russia had long since had its own Linnaean school of thought, probably even before France – Sweden, after all, was one of the few “European” countries with which Russia had close cultural contact.

While Alexander Potemkin had been defeated, Paul had been forced to respond to this angry popular feeling by making concessions to the idea of a Slavic identity. He had officially banned French as the court language (though of course this took several years to implement) and had scholars focusing on codifying a sufficiently ‘refined’ Russian grammar for official business. At the same time, though, he partially owed his victory (and later the quelling of the Klimentov rebellion) to Heinz Kautzman and others among the German settlers in Russia. Excessive anti-French propaganda and fanning the flames of anti-Semitic pogroms could only go so far to hide this contradiction. Beneath it all, the cultural war was still raging, if turned down to a low flame.

Paul’s own opinion was that the strategy of his fathers had been wrong: yes, Russia must become more enlightened and developed if she was to survive and prosper, but it had been wrong to hold up the notion of a European identity to society and declare “this is how you must be”. There were historical precedents, after all. The Old Believers had refused to follow Orthodox Church reforms more than a century before and there were still thousands of them around. No; rather than bringing Russia to Europe, Paul knew that Europe must be brought to Russia. The “European” identity must be redefined to include Russia while allowing for only minor alterations to the Russian character and culture. Once that was accomplished, osmosis would handle the rest. And the French Revolution provided an excellent opportunity, with a nation that was once the heart and wellspring of European enlightenment and culture replaced by what Edmund Burke termed “the new barbarism”. If one such dramatic change could be made to the definition of European, why not another in the opposite direction?

It is of course rather charitable to attribute such notions to Paul himself – while the Emperor knew the end result he wanted, and was a competent enough ruler, he was no great thinker. He did, however, employ ministers who were – foremost among them being Prince Arkady Evgenevich Voloshin, Minister for the Interior, who masterminded this scheme. It helped that Russia had favourable relationships with other nations considered already to lie within the European identity, such as Denmark or (to a lesser extent) Lithuania and Courland. Voloshin had printers disseminating propaganda that contrasted the ravages of the French Jacobins with the ‘slow yet steady progress’ of Russian society, highlighting the gradual emancipation of the serfs (and ignoring the fact that this had provoked the Klimentov rebellion and much muttering since then). The message was targeted primarily at the Germanies; Voloshin’s general strategy to stabilise his Emperor’s rule was to have Russian troops one day march through the German lands as part of a multi-national force and be accepted as liberators from French tyranny. Then, once Germans and Russians were united in mutual acceptance of the other’s culture and civilisation, that should break down the tensions which the relationships with Kautzman and other German-Russians caused among the former Potemkinite supporters.

Of course this scheme did not come off quite as its creators had planned. The first thing to go wrong was the death of Mehmet Ali Pasha, the Turkish Grand Vizier, in February 1806. Given the nature of Ottoman politics, it seems quite likely that he was poisoned, although this is not entirely certain. Mehmet Ali had secured a strong position for himself after the victories of the Austro-Turkish War, unassailable by conventional political means, and perhaps had been unwise enough to let his guard down.

Mehmet Ali’s former dominance of the court politics of the Sublime Porte meant that no opposition faction was strong enough to gain power without a period of bloody chaos and infighting, perhaps limited to a wave of assassinations and street fights in Constantinople, perhaps degenerating into civil war. To forestall such a crisis, Sultan Murad V quickly appointed Dalmat Melek Pasha, the heroic general of the Bosnian front, to the position of Grand Vizier. A Bosniak himself, Dalmat Melek was far from the first non-Turkish Ottoman to hold the position, yet his “rustic” ways alienated parts of the court. This was perhaps balanced by the support he gained from the Janissaries. Nonetheless, he soon proved as vigorous and ruthless in the political arena as on the battlefield.

Predictably, the former general’s own stance on foreign policy turned towards war. The relative powers of the grand vizier and the sultan had varied considerably from the reign of one sultan to the next, and under Murad V their influence was roughly equal. Dalmat Melek had been furious when the Ottoman government had agreed to withdraw their influence from the Georgian states in 1801 in exchange for buying Russian neutrality during the Austro-Turkish War. While he recognised the daunting prospect of fighting two enemies, at the time he had argued that Russia had only just emerged from her civil war, could not the face of even a cursory conflict with the Porte, and would have backed down if pressed. Whether that is true or not is questionable, but Dalmat Melek nonetheless advocated a confrontational policy with Russia, seeking both to regain influence over the Caucasus and also the Khanate of the Crimea. In the latter case, the Khanate had gone from being an Ottoman vassal to a Russian puppet after the Russo-Turkish War of 1771-1776, then shifted back in Constantinople’s direction during the Russian Civil War as the Ottomans extended their influence. However, Khan Devlet V had tried with limited success to play the two sides off each other in order to retain as much independence as his country, small and surrounded by two great powers, could. He desperately wanted to avoid another war; the new Jewish population of Crimea, having fled there after the Great Pogrom, concurred. Both knew that, despite the Black Sea being an Ottoman lake, it was likely that the Caucasus would be the primary front of the war and the Ottomans would be unable or unwilling to hold against a Russian invasion of the Khanate from Ruthenia. After all, they could always get the war-torn ruins of Crimea restored at the bargaining table after victory elsewhere – better, in fact, for the Porte, for that would mean they could install a far more pliable Khan than Devlet and fill the country with Ottoman settlers…

The Russians reacted to the new Ottoman aggression by massing troops in Ruthenia and the northern Caucasus. As before when quelling the Klimentov rebellion, Kautzman and his Germans were careful not to be at the spearhead, along with the Lithuanian contingent sent by Grand Duke Peter, Paul’s son. It was imperative for Voloshin’s cultural programme that the Russians be seen to get all the glory. And now war seemed inevitable. That was not so much a bad thing from Emperor Paul’s perspective. The country had sufficiently recovered from the damage it had suffered during the Civil War, a good war against the undeniably loathsome Turk now would help reunite the Empire’s fractured society, and the Russians had a decent shot at victory, rolling back the control that the Ottomans had gained during the Civil War. Neutral, knowledgeable commentators such as the Prussian observer and diarist Johannes Bachstein generally thought the two sides were about evenly matched: both had learned a lot in recent wars, though the Russians had taken more from those lessons (the Ottoman victory in the Austro-Turkish War had tended to wipe away any awkward questions about the circumstances leading up to it), the Russians were in a better strategic position for the initial attacks, but the Donanmasi, the Ottoman Navy, controlled the Black Sea. It is questionable which would have triumphed, though most modern scholars consider an Ottoman victory somewhat more likely, after an exhaustive slugging match which would have wrecked the Crimea and perhaps the Caucasus as well. As it is, we shall never know.

Even as newly conscripted Russian regiments assembled in Kiev and Rostov,[1] though, the crisis imploded, superseded by another. In April 1806, Shah-Advocate Ali Zand Shah of Persia died after succumbing to an infected insect bite. This came at the worst possible time for any attempt to reconcile to a peaceful solution in the ongoing Turco-Persian rancour over the matter of the Pirate Coast.[2] The Ottomans enjoyed at least nominal authority over the coastal emirates, and thus the Persians held Constantinople responsible for the increasing pirate attacks on Persian ships sailing from Bandar Abbas[3] to trade, primarily with Indian states, Oman and the Zanj lands in East Africa.[4] (In practice, it is possible that these attacks were sponsored by Oman rather than the Ottomans, fearful of the Persians usurping their African colonies).

In particular several influential Persian leaders expressed outrage at the attack of July 5th 1804, in which Arab pirates sailing from Abu Dhabi took, amid much bloodshed, a Persian ship carrying not trade cargo but peaceful hajjis on their way to Mecca. Among them was the third son of the Grand Vizier, Mirza Reza Khan Sadeghi. Mirza Reza demanded blood, but Ali Zand Shah attempted to resolve things. This was not merely due to his celebrated pacifism (at least by 18th century standards) but because he was concerned about the East Durrani Empire, which was once more eyeing the lands west of Herat that it had once possessed and then lost to the Zands. War on two fronts was the last thing Persia needed, particularly considering the simmering rebellions among the Turkmen in the north.[5]

However, Ali Zand Shah’s death meant his more hot-blooded son Zaki Mohammed Shah succeeded him as Shah-Advocate, and Zaki Mohammed concurred with Mirza Reza. Thus in October of that year, war was joined. The Persians attacked Mesopotamia and battled the Donanmasi in the Persian Gulf. Historically the Persians had never possessed much naval strength, and while this had slowly increased under the Zands, the Donanmasi and its Arab irregular allies far outmatched what Persia could field. Oman remained studiously neutral but privately took a pro-Ottoman stance, further closing the seas to Persia. However, with assistance from their Portuguese allies trickling in (sometimes taking the form of Portguese East India Company ships fighting under Persian flag) the Persians at least managed to prevent the Ottomans from sweeping them from the seas to the extent of being able to launch an amphibious descent.

In truth this was not needed. The Persian army was in the process of reorganisation, and things remained chaotic, for the army establishment was still divided over the merits of the European training methods and new breakthroughs in firearms that the Portuguese provided. Furthermore, for all its benefits, the period of peace that Ali Zand Shah had presided over also meant the Persians were less experienced than the Ottomans, their only real conflicts in recent history being with the Durranis and Turkmen rebels. Neither of those more irregular sets of warriors prepared them for facing disciplined, organised Ottoman troops.

Therefore the Turco-Persian War of 1806-09 ended in an Ottoman victory, helped along by Ali Zand Shah’s predictions coming true: the Durranis indeed sallied from Herat in an attempt to (re)take Nishapur and Mashhad. However, matters worsened when the Khan of Kalat also entered the war and besieged the key port of Jask, eventually taking it. Zaki Mohammed Shah submitted to a punishing peace, which involved ceding Azerbaijan,[6] Khuzestan and Ilam to the Ottomans. This put the Turks within spitting distance of a Caspian Sea coast, alarming the Russians. St Petersburg repeatedly considered intervening in the war. Although relations with Persia were correct at best, backing Shiraz[7] against Constantinople seemed the lesser of two evils, and would give the Russians a better chance of victory in the originally planned war. However, problems arose, primarily with spinning things: Voloshin had been ready to present a war for the defence of the motherland in the face of the heathen, a heady mix to make the people forget their former differences and unite in opposition. An opportunistic war of revenge amidst a diplomatic kerfuffle between Mohammedans was quite another kettle of fish, and ran the risk of spiralling out of control.

A more important reason why the Russians did not move was the course of events further west. Voloshin and Paul had indeed planned to intervene in the Jacobin Wars at some point, preferably after the French and their opponents had exhausted each other and the Russians could take all the glory. However, it seemed events had overtaken them. By late 1806 it seemed that the war was winding down to a stalemate: French reverses in Germany, Italy and Spain, yet the Republic clearly far from collapse. Alarmists in the Russian ministries advocated that intervention had to be made now, before it was too late and the ideological war petered out into an anticlimactic peace. Of course, this was before the “Le Grand Crabe” invasions of Flanders and Britain by France a few months later, which expanded the war once more and ultimately brought about the doom of the Republic, but as of yet even the plans for these remained unknown to St Petersburg. Thus Russia hesitated between two wars, only in the end to get involved in a third.

News reached St Petersburg in November of two important events on the heels of each other: Moritz Benyovsky’s triumphs against the Japanese and his successful inviegling of Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company trade into the ensuing civil war; and the death of Pavel Lebedev-Lastoschkin at the hands of the Chinese army amid that great Empire also succumbing to a war of succession. Although Paul had been a great supporter of the Lebedev-Benyovsky venture when he had sat the throne of Lithuania, this alarmed him. It was one thing to poke a stick into as distant and irrelevant a place as Japan, but China was another matter. Sino-Russian relations were vitally important to St Petersburg and wars had been fought before. On the other hand, it had been the Chinese who moved this time. In the past, Paul’s father Peter III and his predecessor Empress Elizabeth had reacted to Chinese sweeps of the Amur valley with ignored diplomatic protests at best, before waiting a few months and then quietly sending in more settlers beneath the languid gaze of the only intermittently interested Qing dynasty. But this was different, both in numbers and in reaction: the planned execution of Lebedev, and the fight to the death with the Chinese army outside Beijing, could not be ignored. Furthermore, Benyovsky’s successes in Japan, along with those of Boris Dmitrevich Leskov in Russian America,[8] convinced Paul that the potential trade wealth about to be unlocked in the East was sufficient to be worth fighting for. Even worth risking relations with China over – and besides, that horse had already bolted.

Therefore, in February 1807 – before the news of Le Grand Crabe reached St Petersburg – the Great Eastern Adventure was launched. This was one of the greatest projects in Russian history, and essentially represents the answer to the problem “how does one move 75,000 soldiers from A to B, where A is European Russia and B is the back of beyond near Yakutsk?” It was organised scientifically, placed under the command of the forward-thinking general Evgeny Serafimovich Kuleshov and backed up by a large number of theoreticians and experienced war organisers – most of them German or Italian exiles fleeing the conflicts raging across their homelands. Fortunately for them, the route between Moscow and Yakutsk had already been codified and expanded over the past two decades thanks to the activities of the Pacific Company and its predecessors, and now there was usually at least a beaten track every step of the way from Moscow to Nizhny Novgorod to Kazan to Perm to Yekaterinburg to Omsk to Tomsk to Krasnoyarsk and finally on to Yakutsk. Yet the movement of the odd caravan and escort company was far from what that route was now playing host to.

The largest problem was logistics, keeping such a large number of men fed and protecting them from the cold (the expedition set off in winter, despite the conditions, as that meant the more swampy regions along the way would be frozen and safe to move over). Despite the traditional Russian lackadaisical approach to such matters, believing the best solution to soldiers’ problems was to give them a damn good thrashing, under Kuleshov a more rational approach was taken, based in many ways on the works of Coulomb (not that the Russians would admit that for ideological reasons, of course). Everything was planned in advance, with caches of food and water being concealed by advance scouts to eke the men through the more barren parts of the vast route. It was a journey that few armies since that of the Mongol Khans had made, and they had not been encumbered with field artillery.

The fact that the Russians lost only six thousand men to the cold, starvation, disease and other problems on this epic trek is often cited as a triumph of strategic organisation. Though as one contemporary commentator waggishly put it, the Russian success could also be attributed to them examining the conduct of French (and other to a lesser extent) generals in the Jacobin Wars, especially the Spanish front, and labelling this “How Not To Do It”.

The Russian land army was supplemented by a Lithuanian force that went by sea, sailing around almost the entirety of the Old World to reach the Pacific Company’s area of operations. This, too, built upon the many voyages along this long, awkward route that had been made under the Company’s auspices; the Lithuanians had long since graduated from the experienced foreign navigators that Paul had hired when he was Grand Duke, and possessed a cadre of their own. Their fleet had also expanded, being part of a strategy by the Russians both to contest the Baltic with Denmark in the event the alliance ended (as historical inevitability suggested it must) and also to move into the Mediterranean or even the Indian Ocean to hit the Ottomans from several sides in the event of a war, particularly given that the Russians had no chance of challenging the Ottomans on the Black Sea, lacking the possession of any ports there. Now, though, it came in useful for what was swiftly – and, at first, pejoratively – dubbed the Great Eastern Adventure.

Thus it was that by 1808, when Russia finally did intervene in the Jacobin Wars, only a small force remained to be sent along with the Danes’ to France. It was only good fortune that saw the Russians and their allies play such a decisive role in the Battle of Paris that they obtained correspondingly great influence at the Congress of Copenhagen, indeed virtually gaining an Atlantic port in the form of Bayonne in the Kingdom of Navarre. All of which served the Tsar’s interests and ultimate goals, yet it seemed to Paul that even now any control he had ever had over Benyovsky’s venture, at the eastern end of his allegedly autocratic realm, had long since slipped away…





[1] That is, Rostov-na-Donu (Rostov-on-Don); the latter addendum was only added in 1806 in OTL, and never makes it in TTL.

[2] The modern United Arab Emirates.

[3] In OTL Bandar Abbas was under the control of Muscat from 1740 until the 19th century. In TTL Muscat is never separated from Oman.

[4] Zanj, “black” in Farsi, is a term used in Persia and the Arab world denoting East Africans and their land (as in “Zanzibar”, for example).

[5] Among them the Qajars who had by this point become the ruling dynasty in OTL.

[6] Recall the Persians took control over all Azerbaijan during the Russian Civil War – therefore they’re ceding all of it to the Ottomans now.

[7] Shiraz is the Persian capital under the Zands (and was in OTL).

[8] More on this later…


Part #86: How the West Was Wrangled Over

From – “Opening the Pacific” by Ranulph Hiscocks, 1978:

The voyage of the Enterprize possesses an importance to the American national myth which cannot be overstated, yet – despite the attempts of some revisionist scholars to suggest otherwise – was nonetheless a vital part of the overall scheme to open up the Pacific coast to claims and settlement. This is not, however, to ignore or underestimate the equally important efforts of the Morton and Lewis Expedition – or, indeed, the parallel efforts by other explorers whose exploits have, sadly, remained far more obscure.

The need for America to stake a claim stemmed from a variety of reasons. Some were almost three hundred years old: England’s stated aim in colonising the Atlantic seaboard was based on an inaccurate estimation that the Pacific coast of the continent lay only ten days’ march to the west, and therefore it would be realistic to have a transcontinental road as early as the 1600s and establish Pacific ports. This would then enable England to trade directly with the East Indies and China without having to round the Cape of Good Hope and make the long arduous route necessitated by the Ottoman stranglehold on Eastern trade. Ironically, if this had been the case, it seems likely that India would have been largely ignored by England and the other trading powers of the West; English interest in that land was originally sparked by the fact that Indian ports were natural stopover points on the way home the long way around from the East Indies, before the Dutch largely ejected the English from that region.

Other reasons were more recent. Interest in the Pacific coast had been reawakened after the Empire of North America had acquired the hinterland of French Louisiana after the Second Platinean War in the 1780s, and while national awakening delayed anything more than idle speculation in that direction for some years, nonetheless the idea of establishing American ports on the Pacific had ceased to be a mere pipe-dream. Furthermore, there was the issue of Russian and Spanish interest in the same region. Formally the Spaniards claimed the entire Pacific coast of North America, which already brought them into conflict with the Russians slowly working their way down from Alyeska into more temperate climes. Clashes between the two sides were as yet low-level, due to the enormous spaces of unsettled territory in between Vladizaladsk[1] and San Francisco. A more serious issue was that of British and American adventurers attempting to establish trade with the region – often coming into conflict with the East India Company in the process, due to their ultimate aim of providing an alternative trade route to the East – and conflict with the Spaniards heated up until exploding into the Noochaland Crisis of 1799. The Viceroy of New Spain, Martín de Gálvez, intervened when British adventurer John Goodman set up a trading colony on the island of Noochaland,[2] sending a force under Admiral Juan Esteban Rodriguez to arrest Goodman and occupy the island. This was the final straw for occidentalist interests in Fredericksburg, who – disappointed by the failure of London to offer anything more than a token protest, fearful of jeopardising the alliance with Spain against Robespierre’s Republic – organised and launched the mission of the Enterprize, as well as securing Goodman’s release.

When Captain North of the Enterprize met Goodman in Hawaii in 1802, the adventurer was disappointed by North’s failure to guarantee that Britain and the Empire would intervene to regain his colony by force. Goodman therefore disowned his home country and he and his remaining lieutenants initially struck out on their own. In cooperation with European mercenaries and other adventurers and explorers, they helped the native king Kamehameha unify the islands of Hawaii as a single state for the first time in 1804. After the end of the war, Goodman’s company had acquired several new recruits from the other foreign forces depleted in the fighting, as well as a few curious Hawaiians. This newly expanded organisation then offered their services to the newly formed Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company. The RLPC was at this point very busy as new funds and men from Tsar Paul flowed in and the complex Matsumae ruse began as they cemented control over Edzo, but Moritz Benyovsky was always eager to gain new allies. Given that Goodman and his men had helped unify Hawaii, Benyovsky initially tasked them with gaining influence for the Russian court in the new kingdom.

This proved easier than expected, as Kamehameha died of an illness in late 1805 and the country was initially plunged into a period of chaos and uncertainty, never having had a royal succession of this type before. In particular Kamehameha’s formidable Queen Kaahumanu attempted to seize power, or at least hold real power while their ten-year-old son served as her puppet. Also, Kaumualii, former King of the western islands of Kauai and Niihau prior to his defeat in the wars of unification, yet lived. He immediately rose in rebellion, seeking primarily to regain his independence, and secondarily – if the opportunity arose – to achieve the ultimate revenge by grabbing the unified throne that his old enemy had achieved. Along with Kaumualii, several other powerful nobles sought to place themselves on the throne in the power vacuum.

Into this chaos, John Goodman and his men returned and brought order. They were well known and trusted in Hawaii, especially since they now included several Hawaiian volunteers, and Goodman came with three small Lithuanian ships given to him by Benyovsky along with his own letter of marque. This allowed him to shift loyalist troops around the islands, along with his own elite fighters, and defeat Kaumualii in mid-1806. Most of the other claimants went back into the woodwork with this swift victory, and the young heir was crowned as King Kamehameha II at the end of the year. His mother the Queen appointed herself as Kuhina Nui or chief minister, a new position. Six months later, after a period of difficult relations with Goodman’s group, Queen Kaahumanu was killed in what was officially described as a tragic accident involving the bite of a poisonous spider. Kamehameha II then appointed a new Kuhina Nui, Paoa Kuhaulua – one of Goodman’s Hawaiian recruits from a few years before, who sometimes went by the European name Paul (or Pavel). The appointment of such a young man and not one from one of the great ruling families provoked some unrest, but Goodman’s men swiftly put this down. By 1808, the Hawaiian kingdom was at peace, and nothing more or less than the most distant vassal of the Tsar of All the Russias.

Meanwhile, the Enterprize explored the Pacific Northwest throughout 1803, being rebuffed from landing in Noochaland by Admiral Rodriguez. Smarting at this treatment by the Spaniards, and somewhat embarrassed by Goodman’s contempt for his lack of commitments at their earlier meeting, Captain North decided to send a statement to the Spaniards by establishing both a claim and a permanent presence. The operation, masterminded by his second-in-command Joseph Markham, saw the Enterprize map the coastline and find a suitable landing site which North named Golden Hind Bay.[3] Part of the original justification for the mission – and the Anglo-American repudiation of the Spanish claims – was the argument that Francis Drake had visited this region as early as the sixteenth century, and had named it New Albion. The exact location of the area Drake had written of remained a mystery, but this was unimportant. Furthermore, the fact that the current dispute was with Spain lent additional fuel to the idea of pushing this old claim, given that Drake was still something of a bogeyman in the Spanish lands. Therefore, rather than using the New Albion name itself, North dubbed the region Drakesland.

The Enterprize landed and the men constructed a rudimentary fort from the plentiful local timber, Markham being left in command. He named it Fort Washington, thus establishing a link between the old Drakeian claims and the modern Empire of North America. With him was John Vann, son of the Cherokee chief minister, whose role was to establish contact with the local Indians – one which served both the government’s purpose, and his own. It transpired that while there were many tribes in the region, there was a single trade language spoken by all – originating from the Chinook Confederacy to the south. Vann established an alliance with the Confederacy’s politically savvy chief, Comcomly, and at least correct relations with another important tribe, the Chopunnish.[4] This served the 31 colonists in good stead when they were attacked by the more belligerent Modoc tribe, with Vann managing to secure protection from the Chinook in exchange for various European trade goods. Notably, coming from an Indian background himself – albeit from a people whose way of life was more sophisticated, having possessed both the benefits and disadvantages of contact with whites for decades – Vann had a better insight into what the locals would want than most European traders. In particular, nautical items such as barometers were in high demand due to their aid in predicting the weather, though this innovation did not of course come without raising problematic religious issues among the natives. Nonetheless, the fort survived.

North and the Enterprize returned home to Norfolk in Virginia via Cape Horn in September 1804. The ship was greeted with enthusiasm by both Virginians and indeed all Americans. The naturalist Andrew Sibthorpe, who had been part of the voyage, immediately organised an exhibition, displaying the scientific specimens he had collected both from exotic Hawaii and the mysterious Northwest. Sibthorpe, a born showman scientist best known for his arguments that Linnaeanism should not be applied to humans, but equally should not be rejected for the natural world simply because it had been hijacked by megalomaniacs, thus played a big role in the cultural impact of the mission.

George North’s now deceased father had been the popular first Lord Deputy of the Empire after its acquisition of home rule, and he retained some political influence. Furthermore, the ruling Constitutionalist Party – just having been re-elected on their promise to annex Cuba to the Empire – had interests in both expanding American power and in confronting the newly established Empire of the Indies to the south. Lord President James Monroe believed that a firm blow might bring the rotten relic of Bourbon absolutism crashing down, and in any case, this confusing time was the right one to chance America’s hand in the west. An overland mission to relieve Fort Washington was required. Therefore, explorers Robert Morton and Henry Lewis were placed in command of a large expedition, including a band of 84 American soldiers – recruited from the backwoods frontier of Tennessee, Chichago and Washington Province – twelve slaves from Carolina and Virginia, four missionaries and one naturalist, whose name now perhaps overshadows those of even Morton and Lewis: Michael Weston.

The overland journey to Fort Washington was certainly not without incident. The expedition took advantage of the existing mapping of the Great Lakes by Captain Iain Taylor and Erasmus Darwin II a decade before, taking passage by ship to the penal colony of Susan-Mary before then setting off westwards. Both Lewis and Weston wrote of the appalling conditions in Susan-Mary at the back of beyond, and it is thought that this represents the only reliable account of the colony before it was swelled in the late 1800s and early 1810s by the vast number of suspected British collaborators with the invading French deported by the Churchill regime. From Susan-Mary, the expedition set out with the spring and soon encountered the Oceti Sakowin, the Confederation of Seven Council Fires. This powerful Indian nation, generally known by the racial term Sioux, ruled a large inland region and, more to the point, had been swelled several years before by the addition of two Huron tribes fleeing Anglo-Hauden victory in the Third War of Supremacy: the Arendarhonon and Attigneenongnahac. These Hurons naturally had carried a very negative impression of the British and Americans with them, with the result that those Sioux groups tended to be hostile to the expedition. The exception was with the southern tribes in the loose Confederation, the Isantee, who were facing attacks by the Ojibwa – another formerly French-allied tribe pushed westwards by the Anglo-American victory. Rather than assimilating into the Confederation, though, the Ojibwa had used the muskets they retained and their knowledge of European military tactics to achieve swingeing defeats on the Isantee, who far outnumbered them.

After weathering several attacks from the northern Sioux (the Lakota and Yanktonai), Morton decided that that route was unfeasible without an even larger armed escort, and on Lewis’ advice turned south. Although initially suspicious, the Isantee gave the expedition safe passage – and even assisted them – in exchange for muskets and training of their own to help hold against the Ojibwa. This initially produced a division between the Sioux, but eventually led to new ideas filtering northwards.

Having overcome their major obstacle, the expedition built a shelter and wintered east of the Falls of Despair,[5] as Weston acerbically dubbed a series of waterfalls which required arduous portage to circumvent. However, this was achieved in the spring and the mission pushed on. Initially heading in the wrong direction thanks to a faulty compass, the expedition was saved in an unlikely encounter with Shoshone Indians who had heard of Fort Washington by third-hand word of mouth.

The Morton and Lewis expedition reached Fort Washington on July 4th 1806, finding that the tiny colony had survived, albeit having lost seven men to disease, a Modoc attack and accidents. Nonetheless, Morton expressed his admiration of Commander Markham and presented him with his post-captain’s epaulette, which the expedition had carried on behalf of the Royal Navy “in the event of his survival” as Admiral “Black Jack” Jervis had sardonically put it.

Meanwhile, of course, the Third Platinean War had broken out, meaning the American plan to send a ship around the Horn to reinforce the colony could not be put into practice: the Horn was now hostile waters. However, a New Spanish envoy visited the fort and informed them (probably through gritted teeth) that, as a price for continued American involvement in the war against the UPSA, the new Hamilton ministry had demanded the New Spaniards surrender Noochaland to the Empire of North America. In any case, the Empire of the Indies could scarcely afford to waste an admiral, several ships and an occupying force on this island at the back of beyond when Meridian troops were landing in Mexico.

Thus, although lacking ships, the Fort Washington colonists constructed a crude sloop (with the help of the Chinook) and sailed to Noochaland to take formal possession of the island. As of yet there were too few men to actually occupy the small fort the Spaniards had built on the site of Goodman’s trading post, but Weston insisted on travelling there to take several specimens and consult with the native Noochanoolth and Salish, the Indians who Goodman had established relations with. Both had clashed with Rodriguez’ Spaniards and were relieved that “the British” were back, even without Goodman.

The colony continued for another year, with the destruction of the Meridian navy finally meaning that a ship could be spared to relieve the fort. In the event this was the Dauntless, detached from Commodore Christopher Perry’s squadron, and she arrived in September 1807. Her commander, Captain Harold Groves, was impressed with Fort Washington’s survival, yet the mood in the encampment was bleak: Weston had been bitten by a poisonous snake while on one of his expeditions in Noochaland, and had lain in a coma on the border between life and death for over a week, mumbling to himself in his deep sleep. Though Weston was not a particularly pleasant man, being sardonic in his humour, looking down on those less-educated (which in his opinion was everyone) and upsetting the men with his proud embrace of Robespierre’s deistic-atheism, he had nonetheless gained grudging respect thanks to his establishment of good relations with the peoples of Noochaland and his medical knowledge helping heal several fevers with local plants. But now, like the Christ he did not believe in, Weston could not help himself.

Groves decided to take Weston back with him in the hope that medical treatment might be found back home in the Empire. He also removed Markham – who was relieved by Groves’ own second-in-command, Thomas Hayward – and Morton, with Lewis agreeing to stay. For the present, with the Sioux problem, it seemed possible that the fort might be primarily dependent on resupply by sea for the foreseeable future.

A month after the Dauntless’ departure, Hayward and Lewis were visited by a surprising individual: John Goodman, now mapping the coast again for the Russian Empire. Goodman remarked cavalierly that he had established a small fort of his own further north, called Baranovsk after the retiring governor of Russian America.[6] Furthermore, he had re-established relations with the peoples of Noochaland himself, for the Tsar was very interested in expanding the fur trade…

The race for dominance of the West was joined in earnest, and the New Spaniards soon hit back for their humiliating surrender of Noochaland to the Americans. As soon as the Third Platinean War was over, the exiled King-Emperor Charles IV ordered the overall capital of the whole Empire moved to Veracruz while the destroyed City of Mexico was rebuilt. However, he also more controversially ordered the capital of the Viceroyalty of Mexico moved to the young, frontier town of San Francisco, something which alarmed the Mexican nobility. However, there was method in his madness: Charles and his brother King Antonio of Mexico intended the move as a means of focusing Mexican attention on the oft-neglected northern frontier, also the reason why responsibility for the Philippines and the remnants of the Spanish West Indies had been given to the Kingdom of Guatemala instead. With conflict over the Pacific coast heating up, in 1811 Antonio established the new fort of San Luis a relatively short distance south of Fort Washington.[7] The race was on. The Empire of the Indies (soon known as New Spain) had an advantage over the Russians and Americans: the region was much closer to their own centre of power. To encourage increased links between the new fort and long-settled Mexico, Antonio opened up Alta California for settlement with various economic incentives for Mexicans, and offers of cheap land for foreigners to settle there providing they converted to Catholicism. Something which would later come back to haunt the young Empire…

Yet what at first seemed like a footnote of history was taking place at the same time. Michael Weston’s fever worsened as the Dauntless rounded the Horn – at a time when the Meridians feared the British might press a claim to Tierra del Fuego as well as Falkland’s Islands – and then, suddenly, during a storm, it broke. The naturalist rose from his bed, went out onto the deck as the raging rain battered at him, and only the quick intervention of Morton and a passing sailor managed to restrain the man from hurling himself into the water. Weston let out an angry cry: “Why do you stop me? I know now! I know where we all must go! To the ends of the earth! The ends of the earth! I have seen it – foolish – waiting for the return of the Messiah – when it happened so long ago – innocence – must be – preserved…”

Or so Morton recorded it in his diary, dismissing the whole business as a fever dream. Though while Weston rapidly recovered, he did not forget what he had uttered. And the controversial sect known variously as the One True and Holy Church of the Contemporaneous Apostles, and the Moronites, was born…





[1] Vladizaladsk is TTL’s name for the city of Sitka or Novoarkhangelsk in Alaska.

[2] OTL Vancouver Island.

[3] OTL Eliott Bay.

[4] English name for the Nez Perce.

[5] Great Falls, Montana.

[6] Near the site of Vancouver.

[7] On the site of Portland; Fort Washington itself is on the site of Seattle.


Part #87: Maintain Your Raj

“India has saved European civilisation by her riches, and will, I trust, save her own by her restraint.”

John Pitt, Governor-General of the Honourable British East India Company​

*

From – “From Discord to Accord: Colonial policy in India after the Jacobin Wars” by P. W. de Lyons, 1959:

During the period of the Jacobin Wars, India had been a theatre often overlooked by the governments of the European powers, yet in an odd way perhaps the most decisive of them all. It is true to say that the only actual conflict in the region that can be considered a direct part of the Wars was the War of the Travancorean Succession (also called Tippoo Sultan’s War, the War of the Ferengi Alliance, and the Jacobin Incident) between 1799 and 1801, yet the influence of that conflict can scarcely be overstated. The war was marked by the Pitt-Rochambeau Accord of 1800, which arguably set the scene for Franco-British foreign relations in their nations’ respective colonies for the remainder of the Jacobin Wars.

It was here that it was formally laid down that, while it might seem a good policy in the short run for British forces to try and take French colonies to expand the Kingdom’s trade, this would eliminate any chance of Great Britain being able to align with Royal France – indeed it would probably eliminate the idea of a viable Royal France altogether – and thus reduce the Jacobin Wars to an endless, bitter cold war fought at sea with no prospects for peace in sight. Of course, in the case of India in particular there was another argument which did not apply so much to, say, French Louisiana (and thus perhaps accounting for the anger of some in the Empire of North America towards this policy when it was accepted in London as a global stance). This was simply that the French East India Company had always been neglected by Paris, even at the height of the Wars of Supremacy, and France had never sent as many of her own soldiers to fight for the Company and her allies as Britain had. The fact that the FEIC had nonetheless emerged from the wars as an equal to the BEIC suggested that any attempt by the BEIC to sweep down and quickly conquer FEIC possessions would not be so trivial a task as proponents of a confrontational approach suggested.

Nonetheless, the Travancorean War had presented an opportunity for this strategy to succeed, as the FEIC had been stricken by the betrayal of their chief ally the Kingdom of Mysore, with Tippoo Sultan formally siding with Robespierre’s Republic and using this as an excuse to break away and expand his own empire-building. There would never be a better time to hit the FEIC and try and absorb its lands, but Governor-General Pitt had rejected it. His reasons were diverse, and primary among them was the belief that the primary objective of any trading company was to ensure stability, to quash wars between natives rather than trying to profiteer off them, the idea that any gain from such conflicts was more than outweighed by the losses in trade incurred due to the ensuing chaos. Pitt craved a predictable system, like one of Mr Watt’s steam engines, a great trade machine clicking away and delivering a steady, slowly increasing stream of gold to Britain’s coffers.

More important than such ideological concerns, however, was the fact that to hit the FEIC would be to implicitly support Tippoo Sultan, and both Pitt and many of the BEIC’s Board of Directors were extremely wary of committing such an act. Tippoo Sultan had painted himself as a native champion (conveniently ignoring the fact that his own dynasty was Persian, and his father Haidar Ali had been a Moslem usurping a traditionally Hindoo state) and the BEIC had no desire to support the rise of a second Siraj ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal who had betrayed the Company and killed its soldiers in the Black Hole of Calcutta. The ensuing revenge, the sack of Bengal and its direct annexation had cost the Company victory in the Third War of Supremacy and left the French in undisputed control of the Carnatic. The BEIC’s beliefs towards the relative merits of the FEIC and a rogue, unrestrained Mysore being in control of the south of India were famously summarised by BEIC director James Pulteney Howlett as “better the frog you know than the tiger you don’t”.

Therefore it had been with BEIC and Haidarabad support that the FEIC had held against Tippoo Sultan, driven him back to Mysore-city and Seringapatam, and destroyed him. The aftermath of the war was dictated by the Pitt-Rochambeau Accord. The FEIC had to pay the BEIC for the use of its soldiers, and Haidarabad regained the lands that Mysore had taken from her in the last two Mysore-Haidarabad Wars in the 1780s and 90s, but the rump Mysore, now once more under its Hindoo Wodeyar dynasty, returned to French influence. Indeed, FEIC control increased, with the Wodeyar heir being a boy king and doing nothing without the consent of the French resident at his court in Mysore-city.

One unintended aftereffect of this settlement was that, in public opinion across India, the French became perceived as being pro-Hindoo and the British as pro-Moslem. In reality both Companies had tried hard not to seem religiously partisan, even attempting to stop Christian missionaries from their home countries from entering their lands lest their trade missions become seen as crusades. However, the French had saved Travancore – a state that, while it tolerated Moslems and Christians, was largely Hindoo and ruled by Hindoos – from the ravages of the Moslem conqueror Tippoo Sultan, and then had returned Mysore to its rightful Hindoo king. The British, on the other hand, were strongly aligned with the Moslem Nizam of Haidarabad, and their seat of power was in Calcutta in majority Moslem Bengal. This perceived partisanship began to hamper both Companies’ attempts to expand trade deeper into the interior after the end of the Travancorean War, and set the scene for the Maratha War.

At the same time, the Portuguese East India Company, revived by Peter IV as part of his policy of expanding colonial trade to pay for the reconstruction of Lisbon after the 1755 earthquake, was quietly making its own overtures to the Indian interior. Based in Goa, the PEIC had made its first decisive move with its intervention into the Maratha civil war of 1794 to 1796, backing the exiled Peshwa Madhavarao Narayan against the rebel claimant Raosaheb, who was backed by the Nizam of Haidarabad and, implicitly, the BEIC. With both those backers distracted by the Travancorean War, the much smaller Portuguese presence under General Pareiras succeeded in driving Raosaheb to the old Maratha fortress of Gawhilghoor and there defeating him. Now deprived of his able chief minister Fadnavis, whose assassination had triggered the civil war, Madhavarao was reduced to a Portuguese puppet. While the Peshwa of the Marathas now realistically ruled only the land of Konkan from his capital of Poona, he nonetheless commanded some diminished influence among the scattered remnants of the old Maratha Confederacy, their unity long since shattered by the Afghan armies of Ahmed Shah Durrani at the Battle of Panipat. The Portuguese had snapped up a rare prize. Ironically, their genuine tendency to act as agents of Christianity in India now worked for them, as at least they escaped being painted with a sectarian label as the British and French had.

The Maratha War had many causes, most of them (as Pitt later observed) native and beyond the control of any of the European powers. For a long time the fractious Maratha princes, primarily of the two great rival houses of Scindia and of Holkar, were forced to remain loosely aligned simply thanks to the threat of the Neo-Mogul Empire growing in power to their north. However, in 1809 the Padishah Nadir Shah Durrani died and chaos returned to the realm. Though Nadir had left an heir, Mohammed, a succession war nonetheless broke out. Relations between the two Durrani successor states had been cooling since the death of Timur Shah Durrani of the western, Afghan empire in 1803, and his headstrong son Ayub openly claimed that Mohammed had become Indianised and soft, forgetting his mountain origins and being an unworthy heir to Ahmad Shah Durrani.

In reality it is more probable that Ayub was concerned about the stability of his own realm. The West Durranis had taken advantage of the Turco-Persian War to try and retake their old possessions of Nishapur and Mashhad. Both had been held for a while, but only Nishapur had been retained at the peace: the Persians had conceded a punishing peace with the Ottomans in order to concentrate on securing their eastern frontier and even the tolerant Zand government was whipped up into a Shiite fury at the holy city of Mashhad being in the hands of the Afghans, both Sunni and barbarian. Ayub’s forces had been driven out, and the consolation prize of Nishapur was mitigated by the fact that Ayub’s vassal the Khan of Kalat had done rather better in the war, meaning Kalatis now openly questioned whether the West Durranis were such a force to be feared after all. Furthermore, the land of Kafiristan, historically and proudly the only non-Moslem land in Afghanistan until it was conquered by Timur, now rose in rebellion and other political forces were shifting closer to Ayub. A war to reunite the Durrani dominions was just what Ayub needed to unite the West Durranis behind him, and so the Afghans came down from their mountains to attack Delhi.

That war would not be as easy as Ayub had naively thought. Mohammed had indeed become Indianised, but the Neo-Mogul Empire had more in common with the old glory days before Aurangzeb than the later wreck that Ahmad Shah Durrani had, at last, conquered. Furthermore, Mohammed still commanded loyalty from his Afghan-descended cavalry, the so-called Pindarees, and overtures from Ayub for them to defect from their ‘effete’ ruler failed. Forces from both Durranis clashed in the field, most famously at Ajmir in Rajputana in 1811 – with the Hindoos of that state trying to rebel in the middle of the affair – and the only ones to gain were the enemies of the Durrani dynasty. The Sikh Confederacy, which had won itself limited autonomy after numerous ruinous wars against the Durranis, now declared itself a full Empire and elected noted general and Khalsa elder Kanwaljit Singh as its Maharajah. Kashmir also broke away from the West Durranis, already being their most westerly and isolated possession, declaring independence with the backing of the expansionist Gorkhas.

The long, ruinous war lasted until 1818, when Ayub and both his sons were poisoned by a Hindoo patriot of Rajputana and the already crumbling West Durrani side was shattered, the Afghans returning to their mountains and the unity that Ahmad Shah Abdali had built came crashing down. The Persians took advantage of Afghan division to retake Nishapur in 1820, bringing their frontiers up close to Herat, and also persuading the Khan of Kalat to switch his allegiance to the Zands, also returning the port of Jask he had taken in the Turco-Persian War. The Neo-Mogul Empire survived the war, putting down the Hindoo rebellions in Rajputana though being forced to concede full independence to the Sikhs, and the rule of Mohammed Shah II was secure.

The Durrani War, though, was only a sideshow from the point of view of the European powers in India. Its chief role was to distract the Neo-Moguls and therefore temporarily remove them as the main threat in the north of India. The Marathas therefore lost what unity they still had. Some of the Maratha rulers took direct advantage of the Neo-Moguls’ problems: for example, Syaji Rao Gaekwad, ruler of Gujarat from his capital of Baroda, supported the Hindoo rebels to the north in Rajputana – ultimately unsuccessfully, but considerably expanding his own influence and making some small gains in territory. However, most of the Marathas used the opportunity to return to their own squabbles, in particular that between the Scindias and the Holkars. Conflict broke out in 1812 over a fairly meaningless issue, the ownership of disputed lands in Berar – meaningless because the theoretically Maratha lands had been under Anglo-Haidarabad administration for years thanks to the weakness of the Confederacy.

Even then the war might have remained a local issue, were it not for a shift in the governance of the FEIC. When Rochambeau had died in 1801, he had been succeeded by his deputy Julien Champard – unofficially, as the state of affairs in Royal France meant that no orders were coming down from on high and the FEIC would probably have ignored them anyway, fighting for its survival. Champard had governed French India competently enough for almost a decade, sticking to the Pitt-Rochambeau Accord, attempting to manage the difficult balancing act of interests, and trying (without much success) to disassociate France from the champion-of-oppressed-Hindoos image she had dangerously acquired. In 1810, however, King Louis XVII’s chief of colonial affairs – the former Lisieux deputy Georges Galois – suggested that the kingdom should appoint a new governor-general to emphasise its return to the world stage. Accordingly, Champard was recalled and kicked upstairs to join Galois on a new oversight commission, while Louis XVII appointed Thierry de Missirien in his place.

Missirien was a minor Breton noble, a strong supporter of the King through all the difficult years, and had spent several years with the FEIC trading in the Carnatic before returning home to take up domestic affairs upon the death of his uncle while the heir was a minor. Nonetheless he was viewed as something of an outsider by the FEIC directors in Madras (which had displaced Pondicherry as the effective capital of French India, being larger and a more important port). Like Leo Bone, Missirien viewed the late Republic with an air of contemptuous dismissal: ‘the murderous, drunken rampages of insane neo-barbarians have contributed to harm the cause of civilisation even here, so far from home, even when the civilisation is oriental and alien. Now it is the task for men of sense and culture to patiently rebuild all they burned in their addled ravages, like those who must repair the damage after a retarded child is given a volley gun and set amongst the lord of the manor’s prized peacocks’. Missirien’s colourful language immediately made him the most quotable European official in India, if not the most serene.

Champard’s air of caution was replaced with a more dynamic approach. Missirien did not actively reject the Pitt-Rochambeau Accord but believed the time for actual cooperation was past. ‘We stood with other civilised men against a greater threat to all that it is to be humane; now, however, that threat is vanquished and we must turn to the earthier concerns of our pockets. Both France and Great Britain have been ruined by the war, and both need as much as they can grab from their East India trade to finance their rebirth. It is our duty as subjects of His Most Christian Majesty to ensure that we grab the biggest slice of the rare, exotically spiced cake that is this land’. When the Maratha conflict broke out, Missirien decided to openly support the Scindias in Gwalior over the Holkars in Indore. The Scindia realms bordered British Bengal, and Anglo-Maratha relations had never been more than correct at best. Missirien advocated this policy because it would both give the British something to think about close to home, and because it would expand French influence in a part of India far away from their current possessions. Furthermore, the Scindia army had been organised and trained by Benoît Leborgne, a French Savoyard adventurer, and Missirien established relations with Leborgne, appealing to his latent patriotism. On the face of it Leborgne might have been expected to have Revolutionary sympathies, being a humble shopkeeper’s son who had built himself a fortune and court position under Maharajah Tukajirao II Scindia. However, Leborgne had similar views to Missirien about what Lisieux’s man Leclerc had encouraged Tippoo Sultan to do, causing chaos and destruction across a land he loved, and thus agreed to side with the FEIC.

John Pitt remained Governor-General of the BEIC, but his own neutralist policies were challenged by this new French move, and now more headstrong BEIC directors encouraged him to react by backing the Holkars. After Maharajah Vitthojirao Holkar heavily lost the Battle of Sagar to the French-backed Scindias in June 1813, he agreed to accept British backing, also formally conceding Berar to the BEIC and Haidarabad. This technically removed the whole casus belli for the war, but it had only ever been an excuse for the Scindias and Holkars to struggle for dominance of the Marathas, now that the Peshwa was a simple Portuguese puppet. With British assistance, the Holkars held the Scindias through the winter of 1813 and then won the Battle of Mandla in February 1814, forcing the Scindias to retreat. However, the Holkars had been supported not only by the BEIC and by the Bhonsle Marathas of Nagpore, but also by Haidarabad forces fighting openly with their famous heavy artillery. This led the French to condemn Haidarabad and, acting on an over-eager French resident, the restored Kingdom of Mysore declared war on Haidarabad in May, eager to regain the territories it had lost thanks to Tippoo Sultan’s defeat. At the same time, the Portuguese held the Peshwa to neutrality; the new Portuguese Governor-General, Agostinho Variações da Silva, waited to see whether an opportunity would arise to enter the war on either side.

The war wore on with neither side gaining a major advantage, and while Britain extracted additional trade from Berar, Pitt noted gloomily that the costs of prosecuting the war outweighed such gains. While the Churchill regime at home remained fairly hands-off with respect to the BEIC – certainly more than Fox had been – a series of increasingly angry letters arrived by the slow route around the Dutch Cape, wanting to know why the BEIC was emptying its coffers to fund a pointless native war with little prospects of gaining advantage when Britons were starving in the street. However, it was not until the events of the summer of 1815 that the situation truly changed.

The Gorkhas had been vaguely known to the British for years by reputation: fearsome fighters from Outer Tibet, or Nepal as it was otherwise known, who sullenly bowed their heads in vassalage to the Qing Emperor of China since their defeat in a Tibetan war a couple of decades earlier. Now, though, with China breaking up thanks to her civil war and her troops withdrawn from the eastern frontier to fight for one side or another, the Gorkhas took the opportunity to break free. Led by Narayan Shah, they attacked the British vassals of Oudh and Boutan, demanding tribute and a shift of allegiance. This was a threat the BEIC could not afford to ignore lest it lose all authority, yet the Company could also not afford to fight a war on yet more fronts, for her vitally needed profits would go down the drain.

At the same time, the French suffered their own problems, with Moslems in the Carnatic and Kerala rising up and protesting against alleged discrimination in favour of Hindoos in the French colonial organisation, with some rebel leaders claiming that French Moslem sepoys’ muskets were greased with the fat of the abominable pig. The rebellions were put down, but not before one jihadist leader, Imam Mohammed Abbas, used his followers to torch a fleet of French East Indiamen in Trivandrum harbour, costing half a million livres. Missirien soon had angry letters of his own, and even threats of dismissal.

The Portuguese, meanwhile, slowly extended their own influence, using the Peshwa’s titular claim of rulership over all Marathas combined with weariness with the war to appeal to supporters of Scindia and Holkar. The Gaekwad of Gujarat was persuaded to pay lip service to the Peshwa in exchange for increased trade rights and Portuguese assistance against future Neo-Mogul attacks, strengthening Peshwa Madhavarao Narayan’s position and credibility. Their greatest triumph came when Maharajah Ranjit Singh, the Jat ruler of Bhurtpore, a fortress city close to the Scindias’ capital of Gwalior, agreed to formally accept the Peshwa’s suzerainty and stand against the ‘rebellious’ Scindias and Holkars. Just as the Durranis had rebuilt the shattered Mogul Empire according to their own needs, now the Portuguese did the same with the old unitary Maratha Empire.

It was becoming obvious that the situation was unsustainable, and Missirien agreed to meet with Pitt in Coorg, a British possession in Kerala surrounded by French-backed Mysore. Despite their former adversarial relationship, the two men hit it off well, and Missirien explained his change of stance with a typically overblown metaphor: ‘whereas before I spoke of cutting the largest slice of cake, I now realise that fighting over the knife only gets both of us hurt; instead, let us first decide who shall get which portions, and then let us work together to bake a larger cake’. A second meeting in Bombay saw the Portuguese governor-general, Variações, invited. It was there that the broad foundations of what became the International Oversight Board for East Indian Trade – commonly abbreviated to the Indian Board or the ‘Board of Concord’ – were laid. Both Britain and France withdrew from the Maratha War, forcing Haidarabad and Mysore to do the same (which required the ‘unfortunate death in a riding accident’ of the young and headstrong Nizam) and focused on their own problems. With help from Assam and Konbaung Burma, the British threw the Gorkhas out of Oudh, though many British generals wrote of how impressed they were with the Gorkhas’ soldiering. Even then the British proved incapable of ejecting the Gorkhas from Boutan, which became an accepted part of Nepal: in that mountainous terrain the Gorkhas were in their element. Britain conceded the loss in exchange for diplomatic and trade representation at the Gorkha capital of Kathmandu. It was there British agents learned that the Gorkhas, prior to their attack on India, had already (re-)conquered Tibet from the absentee Chinese.

Lacking European support, the Maratha War petered out in 1818 with no real changes, besides the weakening of both sides. Bhurtpore had been lost to the Peshwa, and Bundelkhund rose in rebellion against the Marathas, who had always been seen as foreign rulers, joining Berar as part of the network of British/Haidarabad vassals, somewhat balancing the loss of Boutan. The French crushed their Moslem rebellions and focused on repairing their sectarian image. The Portuguese continued to build their renewed Maratha state, setting their sights on eventually bringing the weakened Scindias and Holkars to heel, while nervously watching the Neo-Moguls to the north. At a meeting in Guntoor in 1819, the Indian Board took its first formal, constitutional meeting, unlike the unofficial ones beforehand. The Board consisted of three representatives each from the British and French East India Companies, two from the Portuguese, and one from the Danish Asiatic Company, which had undergone something of a revival with the accession of Frederick V to the throne in 1816. The Dutch were excluded for a variety of reasons, mostly to do with events surrounding Chinese affairs in the east in previous years.

The Board’s mission was to ensure peace and stability in India, trying to resolve differences between the Companies and the native rulers they backed, holding to Pitt and Missirien’s claims that any gains from war would be outweighed by the losses incurred in the process. From then on, the coffers of London, Paris and Lisbon began to overflow with trade gold. London began to rise from the ashes as Lisbon finished its own phoenix period, until King John VI could openly claim on the seventieth anniversary of the Lisbon earthquake in 1825 that the city was now greater than it had been before the disaster. And France, though still suffering from the losses of almost an entire generation of young men thrown into the fire from the wars of Robespierre and Lisieux, began to heal her wounds.

It was in 1821, in the midst of Britain’s struggling to deal with a crop failure in Bengal, that John Pitt, the architect of British India, finally succumbed to pneumonia. His last words are recorded variously as “My India! How I leave my India!”, as his successor would have to try and overcome the famine without his guidance, or alternatively “I think I could eat one of Bhalami’s lamb bhoonas”, in reference to a famous Calcuttan chef. Regardless of the truth of these claims, Pitt left shoes that would be very difficult to fill…
 

Thande

Donor
Part #88: Breaking the China

“I kept six honest serving-men,
They taught me all I knew;
Their names are Watt and Ouais and Waar
and Hao and Wen and Hu.”

– SERICA, The National Spirit of CHINA, from the light operetta The Orienteers, by J.B. Collins and Andrew Faircloth, 1899​

*

From “The War of the Three Emperors” by Giacomo Occhialini, 1956:

The death of the Guangzhong Emperor to a treacherous bodyguard, coupled with his failure to name an heir, triggered the descent of Qing China into the first full-scale war of succession for the throne in the dynasty’s history. While the Qing had certainly had succession disputes before, such as that between the sons of Hung Taiji, Hooge and Dorgon, these had always been resolved more or less peaceably by a striking combination of compromise and ruthlessness. While, for example, the Yongzheng Emperor had often been suspected of usurping the throne by backdoor manipulations, this accusation had certainly not been a cause for internal strife in the Empire: the fact that no outside opponent had ever capitalised on a Qing succession dispute illustrates the state’s skill in ensuring these did not proliferate into full-scale civil wars. Until now.

Both Guangzhong’s sons claimed the throne once the news of his failure to name an heir slipped out. The elder, Baoli, had been out of Beijing with his idol and mentor General Yu Wangshan, pursuing the fleeing Russian prisoners who had engineered the Emperor’s death and taking their revenge upon them. The younger, Baoyi, had remained in the Forbidden City along with the ageing but still powerful Prime Minister, Zeng Xiang. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say this arrangement was a good summary of what was to come.

Realising that Yu Wangshan’s army was superior to those decaying Green Standard Army[1] brigades still stationed in Beijing, and the fact that Yu and Baoli would return before siege preparations could commence, Zeng Xiang decided the only possibility was a temporary retreat. Baoyi and his household fled the city, regardless of the obvious negative implications, for the old southern capital of Nanjing. There he proclaimed himself the Chongqian Emperor, while Baoli’s army marched into an undefended Beijing to hear his own proclamation as the Yenzhang Emperor. Scattered battles along the Yellow River followed throughout 1807 as the two sides sent their summons to the imperial armies on the frontier, demanding obeisance from their generals. 1807 culminated with Yenzhang’s siege of Xi’an. At the end of three months, the city was relieved by Chongqian’s newly recruited troops from Chongqing, with the Green Standard forces within the city sallying forth to defeat Yenzhang’s men. Yenzhang, aided by General Yu, retreated in good order but did not surrender the northern bank of the Yellow River to Chongqian. By this point it was obvious to most spectators that this war would not be over quickly, save by the sudden death of one claimant or the other. Assassins flew back and forth almost as often as messengers, none of them finding their mark.

In the latter part of 1807 and throughout 1808, both sides’ messengers on the other hand did achieve their aims, communicating orders to the frontier armies to return to the interior of the vast Empire and fall upon the foul pretender. Broadly, Yenzhang benefited more from this. This is often simplistically represented in schoolbook histories as being the result of his Manchu romanticism rallying the Eight Banners to his cause. This is of course at best an oversimplification and at worst an outright untruth. Firstly, the Banners’ ethnic composition, though theoretically Manchu, was in practice something of a patchwork by this point of history. Furthermore, few Manchu bought into the rather naïve and nativist philosophy espoused by General Yu and his pupil the claimant Emperor. Most subscribed to the idea that Chinese civilisation was something to admire, emulate and insinuate into, not reject as soft and urbane.

Inevitably the real reasons behind Yenzhang enjoying such support are more complex. He was always more popular with the generals than with the rank and file. This was largely a result of the fact that the generals feared a continuance of, and intensification of, the Guangzhong Emperor’s policy of insularism and disengagement from the outside world under the Chongqian Emperor if the latter were to win the war. Confucianism was one thing, but Guangzhong’s lack of concern for his Empire’s frontiers – coupled to the fact that the weak-willed Chongqian was likely a puppet of the like-minded Zeng Xiang who had masterminded the implementation of Guangzhong’s policies – was a recipe for paving the way for territorial losses and even invasion. Those who had served with Yu in the west in particular feared the possibility of a unified Kazakh horde managing to break the New Great Wall. (As it happened, when Jangir Khan indeed took advantage of China’s civil war to attack in 1811, the Wall held; however, all the lands west of it that Yu had secured a few years earlier fell to the unified khanate). Thus most military thinkers favoured the more dynamic Yenzhang, who after all had served on the frontier himself, no matter his sillier ideas.

Of course those ideas did alienate most of the Han majority along with the other Chinese ethnic groups, however, and some Banners together with the virtual entirety of the Green Standard Army rallied to Chongqian. Chongqian reacted to his brother’s ideology by modelling his policies on those of the great Kanxi Emperor, his great-great-grandfather, no matter how unconvincing this was to those who knew how biddable Chongqian was. In particular, rather than appealing solely to Han in reaction to his brother’s Manchu supremacy, he once more proclaimed the tolerance of all groups under the Son of Heaven, including the Manchu themselves. While this seemed like a sensible policy at the time – no sense in antagonising groups such as the Hui or especially the Mongols, who might easily be driven to support Chongqian – in retrospect it is probable this was actually more damaging to his cause than the alternative, for reasons that will become clear…

*

From: “Rose of Syria Ascendant: A History of Modern Corea”, by Dr Carlos Coelho, 1933 –

The reign of King Hyojang[2] had been a tumultous time for the Kingdom of Corea. That, said the more conservative and paleo-Confucian nobility, was by definition a sign of failure. Or rather they whispered it; for Hyojang had not managed to steer the kingdom against their prevailing wind for thirty years without the proper application of ruthlessness. Furthermore, his decision to reverse his father’s persecution of Catholics had had an unexpected benefit: it turned out that Catholicism was much more widespread in Corea than its rulers had realised, and now every secret Catholic in a lowly occupation, serving nobles, had a vested interest in letting slip any overheard scandals to the agents of the man who protected their freedom. Thus Hyojang thoroughly cemented his grip on power, with the aid of his principal advisors, the great Silhak thinkers Jeong Yak-yong and Pak Je-ga. For a while the conservative forces put their hopes in Hyojang’s son Myeongjo – who disagreed with his father as much as Hyojang’s had with his – but his death by drowning in 1798 silenced that idea. Predictably, this death was considered suspicious both then and now, and many have suggested that Silhak agents of Jeong might have engineered the act. However, it seems equally likely that Myeongjo was dispatched by a secret Catholic servant acting alone, given that he made no secret of his desire to see the religion outlawed and its adherents executed.

Whatever the reason, Myeongjo’s death saddened his father, whatever their differences, and Hyojang died four years later in 1802. His second son Gwangjong acceded to the throne in his place. Some have called Gwangjong ‘like-minded’ to his father, but this description lacks clarity. One does not become only the third Corean king in history to receive the appellation “the Great” by slavishly following the example of one’s parent. Whereas Hyojang had only toyed with Silhak philosophy, using it more for pragmatism than his own personal beliefs, Gwangjong was a true believer. He had the harshest critics of Silhak and other paleo-Confucians imprisoned or even executed, and even experimented with the system of farm collectivisation that Jeong had espoused but never been able to get approved under his father – however, the results from this were decidedly mixed. Nonetheless, while Hyojang had tentatively outlined his ideas of a Corea that one day could stand against China rather than being forever its larger neighbour’s vassal, Gwangjong openly embraced the notion. He implemented Jeong’s vision for reforming the system of gwageo civil service examinations for the first time. While Hyojang’s reforms had helped remove corruption from the examinations – similar to those of the Yongzheng Emperor in China – it was Gwangjong who went further, adopting Jeong’s ideas of examinations focused more on pragmatism, technical subjects…and military theory.

From a lofty position of hindsight we can see that if the popular scientific romance theory of multiple possible histories is more than a dream, in ninety-nine out of a hundred possible worlds, Gwangjong would certainly not be called ‘the Great’ and might indeed have led Corea to its doom. The idea of being able to stand against the Qing was questionable at best; even if the Chinese state decayed into decadent corruption – which was far from assured – sheer numbers combined with outrage at such behaviour from one of the Empire’s most loyal vasssls would surely inevitably result in the eventual conquest of Corea. Indeed, if the Guangzhong Emperor had been a little less inward-looking, it is likely that Gwangjong’s peacetime moves alone would have alarmed the Qing court enough to start putting pressure on Seoul to reverse its dangerous course. But under the ‘Bright Centre’ and his failure to take much interest in his Empire’s frontiers, Corea was able to carry on regardless.

Nonetheless it seems very likely disaster would have come sooner or later, with Gwangjong’s relentless drive towards a confrontational position, had the Chinese civil war not intervened. As a result of this, for the first time in years aside from minor routine, messengers from the Qing court – from both Qing courts – arrived in Seoul, one from Beijing under Yenzhang and one from Nanjing under Chongqian. Both demanded the allegiance of China’s vassal. The question of which to support divided the Corean court along lines much more complex than those long drawn up around Gwangjong’s support for Silhak neo-Confucian thought and those who favoured the paleo-Confucian thought of his grandfather. The majority favoured the Nanjing government of Chongqian. They considered Yenzhang’s ideas to be repugnant. Furthermore, this support of Chongqian went across the great political divide: Silhak supporters liked the idea of an inwardly-turned government like Guangzhong’s continuing under Chongqian, allowing Corea to continue its own movement towards a more independent course, while the paleo-Confucian conservatives saw Chongqian as a continuation of the Chinese government they admired. Generally speaking the only reason for Coreans not to support Chongqian was out of fear of Yenzhang’s retaliation if the latter won the war, or even if he did not – for Yenzhang’s main power base was naturally Manchuria, looming over the Kingdom of Corea.

King Gwangjong had no such fears. He sent both messengers away unanswered, but a few months later launched an attack on Yenzhang’s troops in Manchuria. The Coreans were aided in the fact that most of the Manchu Banner soldiers stationed there had already been shifted south to face Chongqian’s Green Standard Army as Yenzhang altered his strategy and launched an attack on Kaifeng. This surge, which began in late 1808 and continued throughout 1809, had several aims. Kaifeng was a former capital and had symbolic value, and furthermore it and the neighbouring town of Zhengzhou had vast strategic importance. By seizing them, Yenzhang could block off the canals and the Yellow River supply route to Xi’an, starving the city he had failed to take by force. Furthermore, he would have an important stepping stone to moving against Nanjing itself. Of course Chongqian (or more likely Zeng Xiang) knew that perfectly well and therefore both sides concentrated their armies in Henan, pouring men into a meat grinder of a theatre of battle that, including civilians, is estimated to have claimed almost a million lives over the course of the war.

However, Gwangjong’s attack in early 1809 began to tip the balance of the war and it seemed that this would bring a southern victory for Chongqian’s forces sooner or later. The Corean army’s modernisation had been ahead of China’s for some decades now, primarily by acquiring modern artillery from La Pérouse’s exploration mission which had visited in 1791. This had not stopped there, however. After his father’s opening of the port of Pusan in 1794 to further European trade (mostly by the Dutch East India Company), additional weapons and, more importantly, information on more modern tactics and training were obtained. Although the Coreans were still equipped with rather outdated muskets, they still had a considerable qualitative advantage, man for man, over the Chinese. Furthermore, there had been very low-level contact with the Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company since at least 1803, with Moritz Benyovsky sending his lieutenant Adolfas Galdikas there to negotiate for direct trade. Even under Gwangjong, though, the Coreans had been cautious of this under even the ever-more wayward gaze of China, and the trade had been very quiet and secretive – with Corean porcelain being the main export in exchange for the European military secrets. And so the Russo-Lithuanians cheerfully let yet another group in the Far East gain considerable military power in exchange for short-term trade advantage…

…the invasion of Manchuria was slow and grinding but largely went the Coreans’ way, and for a time Chongqian thought his victory assured as Yenzhang faced an attack in his rear flank. Furthermore, this clearly showed that the Coreans were on his side, regardless of the fact that they had not directly replied to his messenger. And this assumption illustrates how conservative Yenzhang’s own thinking was, the same kind of worldview that Jeong railed against in Corea, the idea that Corea would always be China’s lapdog and nothing more…for sometimes the enemy of your enemy is just the enemy of your enemy.

It transpires, in fact, that amid the more conventional trappings of royalty in King Gwangjong’s bedroom in Gyeongbokgung Palace was a map. A modern map, made by European cartographic techniques, charting the entire Corean peninsula and its environs. A valuable strategic tool in itself, surely, considering the Chinese dismissal of such notions, yet to understand what came to follow, one must look more closely at the map (which is replicated on plate 4A of this work, and the original still survives in the Museum of Corean History in Pyongyang). One will notice the particular detail given to the interior and north of Manchuria, and the names painstakingly placed there, the names of towns that in many cases either then bore alternate names or no longer existed at all. That part of the map had been drawn up from very ancient Corean documents, in contrast to the modern techniques that the information had been fed into, and it depicted the territory of the Kingdom of Balhae. Many years before, in the tenth century in fact, a Corean state had ruled almost all of Manchuria.

It has often been observed by Orientalists that in many ways Corea can be said to be ‘more Chinese than China’, historically speaking: more Confucian, more inward-looking at times, more hiearchical, even fonder of obscure protocol and poetry. And this claim may also apply here. For while it is true that China, with its multitudinous dynasties and strong literary tradition, had a very long memory, so, too, did Corea…

*

From – “The Phoenix Men” by Karl Hofmann, 1948 –

In the 1680s, the Kangxi Emperor had decided to open four cities in the south of China to European trade, primarily Guangzhou, which was generally known to Europeans as Canton (due to a transliteration via Portuguese). For the next century, while the volume of trade remained frustratingly less than what the various European East India Companies would prefer, it remained a valuable concern. Chinese goods were always in demand in Europe (and eventually in the New World), with exotic silks and porcelain remaining objects of high fashion even after European technical skill eclipsed that of the Chinese in the case of the latter. And of course there was tea. The latter is often supposed to be behind the rise of the British East India Company towards dominance over the other EICs in the China trade, though the reality naturally involves other factors as well. One in particular was that, alone of her fellow nations, Britain – or rather the Empire of North America – had a trade good which the Chinese desired. This was the major problem besetting all European traders, as the conservative Chinese government and civil service were dismissive of European technical innovation and, while food was always in demand, it was too much of a bulk commodity to be very profitable. The only really reliable trade good to import to China was bullion, and countries such as France and Portugal fell behind in being able to afford to buy up the ingots in the first place – the former owing to her repeated wars and borrowing that ultimately culminated in the Revolution, the latter due to the economic crisis caused by the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755.

Therefore Britain and the Netherlands were the major contributors to the China trade, with France, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Denmark as minor players. However, things changed considerably in 1784 when the British first introduced their new wonder product: Appalachian ginseng.[3] The Chinese viewed this as a panacea in their traditional medicine, and the Appalachian version from the Empire of North America was far more potent than the variety that grew in China itself. This trade rapidly saw the British East India Company – its Chinese offices staffed with a disproportionate number of Americans – push the Dutch into the same second-league place as the other Europeans. No-one else had access to the commodity, and Britain’s friendly relationship with the newly independent United Provinces of South America meant that American trade ships could round the Horn and sail to China without fear. Things grew desperate enough among the others that in the early 1790s there were rumours of Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese ships from their East Indian possessions sailing under false flag to raid American trade convoys as pirates. Indeed, if the Jacobin Wars had not intervened, this might have been a catalyst for another War of Supremacy.

In any case however the explosion of trade alarmed the Chinese government even more than the other East India Companies. The Guangzhong Emperor came to the throne just three years after the introduction of ginseng and he saw this sudden increase in trade with the foreign barbarians as a sign of all that had gone wrong under his father’s government. Guangzhong, and his eventual Prime Minister Zeng Xiang, saw trade with Europeans as both demeaning (they should be expected to bring tribute to their superiors!) and ultimately a sign of weakness, for should the Middle Kingdom not be able to provide for herself? Perhaps these oft-painted portraits of blind arrogance are somewhat unfair, for it would be difficult for such men to be open-minded towards the possibility of equal exchange, given the culture they grew up in. Or maybe we should rather say that simply being reminded that there was an outside world made Guangzhong uncomfortable, and he would have been quite as discomfited if the Europeans had been bringing tribute.

Guangzhong could not take as direct action as he liked due to the fact that Canton traders had built up an important position of power and influence over the years. However, as the other three cities were less important, he had all of them closed to European trade over the years, and then beginning in around 1799, he began leaning on the traders, pressuring them to raise tax barriers and generally provide other disincentives for the Europeans to continue trading. Looking at the writings of his government in Beijing, it seems that the mandarins’ vague conception of the Europeans was as itinerant locusts who might go away if you ignored them pointedly enough.

This, of course, naturally infuriated the East India Companies further. The ginseng trade was particularly targeted, meaning that Britain’s advantage collapsed. At home, the stock exchanges of London and New York[4] trembled in response and there was talk of a total collapse of the China trade if Guangzhong continued further. It was around this time that some of the traders in Canton’s Thirteen Hongs (or Factories), the area outside the city walls where they as foreigners were permitted to live, first began to have major discussions across national lines about what to do about the issue. It was obvious to everyone that this was no longer a case of nation competing against nation, for no amount of bribes and influence and backstabbing could change the bluntness of the walls that Guangzhong was throwing down before them. Indeed most of the Chinese mandarins could barely distinguish between the different European powers to begin with. So it was that, while Europe was torn apart by the Jacobin Wars, the East India Companies’ top men in China played cards, smoked their cigars, and wondered whether they could do anything to change the situation if they worked together.

On the face of it, the answer seemed to be a definite no. Even if they could somehow obtain the backing of their home nations’ armed forces for a direct intervention (which was laughable), the sheer size and numbers involved in attacking China meant the operation would be doomed to failure. There could be no holding the Emperor hostage in exchange for the restoration of trade privileges.[5] The talk largely focused on whether it was enough to try and suborn local officials into looking the other way, and whether the Companies could try to set up illicit trading posts on unsettled islands, and how they would attract the customs of locals. None of these plans really came to anything, but they highlighted the emergence of several powerful, experienced traders among the so-called “Hongmen”, natural leaders in this odd little informal consortium that cared nothing for the bloody conflicts at home, or indeed in India. Among them were three destined to rise to a particular place in history.

Henry Watt was the third son of James Watt, the great British engineer who had been at the forefront of steam engine development in the mid-eighteenth century. Whereas his elder brothers had followed their father into the trade – and proved to be instrumental in the development of Project Whistler, ultimately perhaps saving Britain because of it – Henry had instead chosen to go into the exotic East India trade. He had served with distinction with the EIC in Bengal and Haidarabad, and now had spent eight years here, seeing the trade rise and fall. Furthermore, he was respected by the large and influential American contingent, having taken their side against interference from the Board of Directors, who were sometimes alarmed at the transatlantic influx into their tidy organisation.

Dirk de Waar was one of the Dutch East India Company’s most skilled operators when it came to negotiating with natives, having successfully managed the island of Dejima in Nagasaki bay for several years in the face of the political turmoil in Japan caused by tsunamis and, latterly, Moritz Benyovsky. Now he was here and turning those same skills to the equally inscrutable Chinese, and finding they were not quite as homogenous as they seemed at first glance.

Finally, Michel Ouais was a Royal French patriot, readier to condemn Robespierre and Lisieux than any of the Company men whose home countries had been invaded by them (“regardless of their ravages, sir, know that it is my nation that suffers the most”) and whose convoy system was instrumental in helping protect Royal French trade from Canton running into the interceptors under Surcouf from Antipodea that had been intended to disrupt it. His charisma was undoubtedly vital in ensuring that the odd little compact did not fall apart over anger at the (Republican) French over European affairs.

The other European trading nations were also part of the informal alliance, but became less important as time went on: the Swedes were of course merged into the Danish Asiatic Company, which had given up China as a lost cause and was taking more interest in India; the Spanish withdrew in the late 1800s due to disputes between the Kingdom of Castile and the Empire of New Spain over who was master of the colonies, which ultimately spiralled into the Philippine War of 1817-21; and the Portuguese were pouring most of their efforts into India due to their ambitious plan to seize influence over the entire Maratha nation by exploiting the Scindia-Holkar war. For that reason, it was the British (and Americans), French and Dutch (and eventually Flemings) who led the informal international effort into trying to reverse Guangzhong’s cuts on trade.

It was de Waar who first encountered the Sanhedui, the Heaven and Earth Society. The Europeans had heard vague rumours about the so-called “Chinese Freemasons” for years, but it was de Waar with his diplomatic skills who learned the root cause of all the secret rituals, the idea of Ming restorationism. Furthermore, he learned of just how far the Sanhedui extended up into Chinese society, especially in the south, and made contact with Hao Jicai, a senior local mandarin who turned out to be a member of the Sanhedui and a true believer in its cause. This was the kind of influence the Europeans needed – but it is doubtful whether de Waar or anyone else would, in their wildest dreams, guess how far that would take them…











[1] The Green Standard Army was a Qing Dynasty force consisting mainly of Han Chinese, descending from those Ming Dynasty armies that had surrendered to the Qing more than a century before (as opposed to the Eight Banners of Manchu). In OTL by this point in history it had seriously decayed; this is somewhat less true in TTL due to Yonzheng’s continuing reforms, but it seems likely that the sleepy capital garrison would have degraded regardless of other events.

[2] Not OTL’s Hyojang, who like OTL died young, but a third son (after the mad Prince Sado) who King Yeongjo didn’t have in OTL and named after his deceased first son. See Part #47 for more details.

[3] In OTL Appalachian ginseng was the major commodity of the ‘Old China Trade’ between the United States and Qing China. It allowed America to have a considerable trade without resorting to morally repugnant trade goods like opium, which in turn meant that America has some of the best diplomatic relations (such as they were) of any European or –derived power with China prior to its opening. In TTL, the BEIC (which includes American interests) has this advantage instead, and has more trade capital to further ginseng cultivation in the Empire.

[4] The New York Stock Exchange was formed in 1796 in response to the expansion of the American economy due to gearing up to assist Britain in the early stages of the Jacobin Wars. Unlike OTL its building is on Nassau Street rather than the neighbouring Wall Street.

[5] This is of course pretty much what happened in OTL during the Opium Wars – but that was both after a further four decades of decay, and besides this timeline has not seen the level of decay OTL saw under Qianlong and Jiaqing, either. Though diminished from her own self-image, China is not a trivial opponent.



Part #89: Building Babylon

From shore to shore the whole of the island is to be set as thick with
chimneys as the masts stand in the docks of Liverpool: and there shall
be no meadows in it; no trees; no gardens…. the smoke having
rendered the light of the sun unserviceable, you work always by the
light of your own gas: that no acre of English ground shall be without
its shaft and its engine…

– John Ruskin, The Two Paths, 1859 (OTL)​

*

From – “The Tortured Phoenix: Britain in the Marleburgensian Era” by P.C. O’Toole, 1958:

A nation whose transfer of power took place in a time of chaos and uncertainty often then faces a reactive imposition of authoritarian rule by those individuals who took power, both to consolidate their position and to assure the populace that that period of uncertainty is now past. Or as Philip Bulkeley (possessed of the benefit of hindsight) observed more succinctly, “out of the frying pan, into the gaol cell”. There are countless historical examples to illustrate this phenomenon, and perhaps the most obvious is that of the Revolutions in France: the initial overthrow of the monarchy which shook the world and left Jean-Baptiste Robespierre as unquestioned dictator, followed by the more conventional Double Revolution and the imposition of rule by Jean de Lisieux. However, as with many observations upon the Revolutionary period, the same can be applied just as appropriately to the Marleburgensian age[1] in the Kingdom of Great Britain, which of course ultimately owed its existence to that same Revolution.

The French invasion of 1807 and the deaths of both King and Prime Minister – together with a significant portion of Parliament and many important individuals involved in Church, State and Trade with the London holocaust – had virtually cut the head from the body of the kingdom, producing a power vacuum into which the Duke of Marlborough stepped. Master of a collapsing nation, lord of a burning house, aided by the frightened rump of Parliament, an empty throne and a mass of uncertain soldiers and yeomanry, Churchill turned the tide and hurled the French single-handedly into the Channel; or at least that is the romanticised version purveyed in some quarters. Others, of course, contend that Churchill was a monster, a radical dictator wearing the stuffy clothes of the establishment, a man who could have replaced his King’s Colour with a Bloody Flag and, lo and behold, become indistinguishable from the Lisieux he so hated.

As is often the case, the truth lies between these two extremes. We should not, of course, forget Britain’s sheer good fortune after the initial shock of the French invasion: the death of Hoche at Fox’s hand, the takeover of the army by the monster Modigliani and thus the alienation of the English people, whom Hoche might have wooed at least into neutrality, and of course the addition of the Duke of Mornington’s Irishmen and Alexander’s Americans[2] at a vital moment, leading to the turn of the tide. Yet nor should we entirely dismiss Churchill, for it seems clear that a lesser man – even a great political orator like Richard Burke – could not have rallied his people to resist at a time when, almost as one man, they reeled from the shattering of their certainty that their island was impregnable. It is worth noting that even Ulysses Green, one of Churchill’s harshest critics, grudgingly admitted that “…at the time, in truth, I doubt if any other could have saved us…while Parliament contains (amid many of the faults associated with such temperaments) many clever men, some too clever for their own good…when Modigliani burned London, what we needed was a Captain who would never stop fighting, simply because he was too mule-headed, too stubborn, frankly too stupid for it to occur to him to do anything else…”

In the short term, then, Churchill’s ruthless attitudes may have helped Britain beat off an invasion, but problems arose when they continued not simply after the enemy had been expelled from the island, not only when the war was taken to the French upon the continent, but after the Battle of Paris and the Congress of Copenhagen. If Fox’s time in power had been one of radical liberty and progressive administration – for all Fox’s errors, perhaps his greatest triumph was unwittingly creating something that approached that very state that Robespierre and Lisieux had claimed to rule – then the Protectorate was one of staunch conservatism and reactionary government, paranoia and authoritarianism. It is true, as many Churchill romanticists contend, that few of Fox’s reform laws were actually reversed (as had been the case, for example, with Cromwell’s reforms after the Restoration) but in truth this is largely because Churchill simply ignored them. For example, the Fox Reform Coalition government had thrown out the Septennial Act (1715) in favour of restoring the provisions of the Triennial Act (1694), thus requiring elections to be held every three years. However, a new British general election was not held until late 1813, more than seven years since Fox’s majority had been slightly increased in 1806.

For the intervening period, the rump Parliament of surviving MPs carried on, sometimes meeting in the ruins of the Palace of Westminster as it was rebuilt on neoclassical lines,[3] sometimes in Fort Rockingham near Doncaster as it had during the war, often in any number of town halls or disused corn exchanges along the Great North Road in between. A large number of seats lacked representation as their MPs had been killed in the burning of London – and naturally those MPs had tended to be some of the most radical, like Fox unable to believe that the French revolutionaries would do such a thing and therefore sticking around until the end. Parliament therefore both became more conservative by default and also more irrelevant, withering away in a manner that has been compared to that of the French Latin Republic’s National Legislative Assembly under Lisieux.

Under Churchill’s dominion, the south-eastern shires that had been a part of the abortive English Germanic Republic were placed under military government, as was the whole of Scotland (in theory; in practice this largely extended only to Edinburgh, Glasgow and their environs). There were reasons behind this heavy-handed act, however. The problems had begun in the winter of 1807 itself: not a harsh winter, fortunately, or the situation might have become even worse. A combination of factors served to present a daunting conundrum – the French had practiced la maraude, pillaged and burned to deny food to the advancing British and their allies later on, had driven away thousands of refugees fleeing the iron hand of Modigliani, and had simply killed many others whose lot in life was to sow and till the soil of England. The result was that almost a third of England was left with burned-out farmland, crops rotting in their fields with no-one to harvest them, and other scenes that had not been seen since the plague of the fourteenth century. And the result of that was that what had been the English Germanic Republic starved.

It has been suggested that the bold deployments of troops to the continent soon after London was retaken was as much a pragmatic decision as one born of strategy or hotheaded thoughts of revenge: the armies could simply not be fed, indeed nor could the survivors themselves. The famine was terrible, but was alleviated by swift and dictatorial commands from Churchill, thus cementing himself into an untouchable position as ‘father of the nation’, regardless of the debacle of his brainchild of sending Græme to Flanders. The north and west had a significant percentage of their harvests confiscated by army provosts and this transferred to the south and east, often arriving in huge caravan convoys of carriages stuffed with sacks of grain or flour (more usually the latter, as the officials realised that few working mills were left in the former Republic as well). The caravans were immortalised in works such as the painting The Saviours, or, How Little Separates Men From Beasts by Brian Munroe (1831), a somewhat idealised account of the hungry men and women of Essex scrambling to meet the convoy as it rolled to a halt, and the poem The Ride of the Reapers by Stanley Winston (1842) an epic covering the thoughts of the lead coachman as he watches the countryside shift from the green and pleasant land he loves to the burnt-out wreckage of the Republic.

Naturally, the farmers and millers of the north and west were rather…reluctant to part with the fruits of their labours for what was often nothing more than a state-signed IOU, and the situation quickly turned dirty. Gun ownership was a guaranteed right for all Protestant subjects of the crown of Great Britain, according to the Bill of Rights that formed the basis of the British Constitution, and few were more likely to keep a blunderbuss or shotgun handy than farmers. In response to this, armed marshals were deployed with the provosts, often from military backgrounds themselves. Some were soldiers who had served at the front only to be wounded, perhaps losing an arm or a leg, but still being serviceable enough to serve in this role; others, however, included those who had been dishonourably discharged and were prone to acting not dissimilarly to how the French had on la maraude. Indeed at this time the British Army relaxed its stance on crimes that formerly would have been punishable by hanging, using the same kind of utilitarian logic that Jean de Lisieux was famous for: at times like this, they simply could not afford to throw any man away when he could perform a useful task.

The inevitable result of all this were several ugly incidents both in the north and west among the farmers and millers, and in the south and east among the starving people who often disputed the rationing system or struggled with the ramshackle, thrown-together, often corrupt distribution network. By this point the focus of the war had shifted to France and the former Republic’s reconstruction was beginning to pick up, but a famine the following winter remained a significant possibility: Churchill reacted by organising a new brigade known officially as the Public Safety Constables or PSCs, popularly known as the “brownjackets” for their eventually standardised uniform. The popular theory for this is that it was due to them being equipped with cast-off British Army redcoat uniforms whose cheap dye had darkened to a murky brown, but this has never been confirmed and it is possible that the alternative theory resting on the fact that the PSCs’ commander, James Conroy, had a brother-in-law who owned a dyestuffs factory in Birmingham, may have some truth to it.

In any case, the PSCs’ mandate soon expanded from simply safeguarding the food caravans to “keeping the public peace” and enforcing the Duke’s will. Some hoped for a relaxation of this regime when the boy king Frederick II returned from America in 1809, but Frederick William was only fifteen and soon confirmed Churchill as Regent and Lord Protector: the boy would prove himself not to be weak-willed in later life, but at this stage trying to unseat Churchill would only most probably have failed, but would have plunged the country into complete chaos. One is reminded of the famous retrospective judgement of Bonaparte in the play La Garde à la Loire, the words placed by playwright Michel Artois into the mouth of Barras: “Sometimes history needs a bastard”. The question was whether Britain would ever, could ever, be rid of hers.

Frederick, however, possibly exerted some influence along with Churchill’s second son Arthur, as both were enthusiasts for the cause of steam, an area which Churchill himself might be expected to be suspicious of by default – it being modern, radical, and associated with the French Revolutionaries. Frederick in particular had been inspired during the period in America that had ultimately saved his life. He had been invited to a celebration in Pittsborough at which an American inventor, Josiah Wheeler, had demonstrated his steam-driven plough. It had been an awkward prototype, prone to failure, but it had got the young Frederick thinking. While in the ENA he had seen chattel slavery, just like his father and grandfather. His grandfather – George III – had approved, or rather it had never occurred to him that there was anything there to criticise, while his father Henry IX had been appalled by the treatment of blacks by slaveholders. Frederick found he could see both sides of the issue, and in his own words (albeit later on), “no answers are to be found either in crude oppression or in bloody revolution, but by steering a compromise down the middle that, if it does not please everyone, at least it shall displease all men equally. And it must rely on new ways of thinking. France has shown us the way there, as in so many others.” But that is a subject for a different treatise, I think you will agree.

The young king and Arthur were credited by the historian Gregory Strange-Pelham as being “responsible for Britain’s failure to uninvent the wheel” during the Marleburgensian period, a poetic exaggeration perhaps but certainly a claim worth examining in the face of the contrast, particularly the attempts by several states in the Germanies to paper over history by banning or heavily regulating steam engines.[4] Therefore under Churchill’s regime the Royal Committee for Transport and Freight Improvement was created (sometimes called “Britain’s Boulangerie”) whose core consisted of those who had previously worked on the Whistler project, such as James Watt, John Wilkinson and Robert Fulton. We should not of course forget the Committee’s other work, primarily expanding and improving Britain’s canal network (which naturally overlapped with the daunting task of once more draining The Fens, flooded by the Bishop and Count Palatine of Ely during the war to block the French advance). However certainly the RCTFI’s greatest work was in the field of steam, and by 1815 or so the horse-drawn convoys – already far fewer in number as the old fields were restored – had largely been supplanted by steam tractors hauling larger carriages. Of course the two areas are not entirely unrelated, as steam-driven narrowboats also began to compete with horse-drawn ones on the expanding canal network.

One immediate consequence of all this was a rising demand in coal, which was ultimately a self-feeding cycle, as steam technology continued to increase the capability and output of the coal mines in Yorkshire, Northumberland, Staffordshire and Glamorgan. At the same time, new textile mills were going up, primarily in Lancashire which had been the chief home for them even before the invasion, but also dotted across the southern counties to provide work for the dispossessed. Liverpool and Bristol both swelled, for much of Britain’s rebirth was thanks to supplies coming overseas from the Empire of North America and, to a lesser extent, the Kingdom of Ireland. Food from the latter in particular helped ameliorate the initial famines as the transport network was slowly set up, with vessels carrying Irish potatoes as a simple staple offloading just downriver of Tilbury, this being before the wreckage of Admiral Lepelley’s fleet had been removed from the Thames and thus the Pool of London was unnavigable. Some have accused Wellesley of selling crops that Ireland’s poor could not afford to spare, but the increased trade certainly wedded the two countries more closely together, served to expand the Irish ports of Dublin, Cork and even Belfast (Ulster not having seen much economic growth since the USE rebellion of the 1790s) as traffic filled the Irish Sea.

America on the other hand chiefly provided raw materials and the Imperial Bank of America helped underwrite Britain’s economy: the Bank of England had been destroyed, most of its records and reserves lost in the fire or to French pillagers, and the shaky New Royal Bank that had been chartered in Manchester survived from day to day solely because the European economies were scarcely less unstable at the time thanks to the ravages of the Jacobin Wars. The mills made use of American raw materials, primarily cotton, and then America was also one of their chief markets for the manufactured goods, chiefly textiles, coming out of Britain. Europe was also a target, the damages of the wars providing an open market for replacements, but this suffered from the fact that many who had lost their belongings had also lost any ability to pay for replacements. It was thanks to this close involvement of emerging industry that many industrialists, including John Wedgwood, William Grimshaw and Matthew Crompton, became members of Churchill’s informal ruling “cabal”.

The death of Sir Sidney Smith in 1811 meant that his men, the “Unnumbered” spies who had helped monitor the French, were left leaderless; Churchill gave them over to Conroy and they were soon amalgamated into the PSCs, being given the euphemistic name of “special constables”. The former Unnumbered were infiltrated into the public, rooting out illegal assemblies and those who tried to hide their belongings from the PSCs and provosts to avoid taxation. A scandal broke the year later when several high-ranking Scots among the Unnumbered were found to have betrayed the British authorities in Scotland, apparently sickened by the heavy-handed tactics of the military occupation in Edinburgh under the authority of Churchill’s son Joshua, the Marquess of Blandford. Brief disturbances shook Scotland and Churchill’s response was typically excessive, banning all kinds of public meetings and intensifying the army and PSC presence even more. The old informal village constabularies both in Scotland and England were supplanted by the PSCs, and when the satirical paper the North Briton heavily criticised both the decision and Churchill in general, its press was confiscated and its offices burnt down in an “apparently unrelated” act of arson.[5] What few London papers had survived for their presses to be refounded, notably The Register[6], quickly caught on and hastily adjusted their editorials to be unstinting praise for Churchill, swiftly becoming indistinguishable from the official Government paper The Star of Oxford.

At this time two new radical papers sprung up, both in the north of England where Churchill’s rule was least iron-handed. Our Friend in the North was a continuation of The North Briton based in Leeds (where it warred with the government-friendly The Sun of York) while a more famous publication, The Ringleader, was being created in Manchester, the new economic heart of Marleburgensian Britain. The Ringleader arguably survived because Conroy’s censors couldn’t quite be sure if it was subversive or not; it couched its articles in such obscure, poetic and allegorical language that, famously, even its own writers denied that they knew what they were writing about. The paper was framed in the form of a supposed diary-like record of the antics at a busy, chaotic circus (implied to be Britain herself) in which the titular Ringleader (Churchill) was a harassed figure trying desperately to keep control. Perhaps The Ringleader also survived because it was rarely directly critical of Churchill himself, more commonly issuing broadsides against his advisors, lieutenants and thuggish PSC men.

The election of 1813, interfered with considerably by the PSCs and especially their Unnumbered members (along with the captains of industry ordering their workers who to vote for) produced a solid majority of conservative and reactionary MPs, including more Tories than for years in the past. Richard Burke, protesting that Parliament had become powerless, had resigned the year before (but to little public attention thanks to Churchill’s control of the media) and Frederick Dundas had been titular Prime Minister. As Churchill was also a member of the House of Lords, he could technically be appointed Prime Minister himself, and now Parliament was more to his liking, he pressured Frederick II to do so. The nineteen-year-old king eventually succumbed and Churchill added another title to his list. Parliament was now allowed to grow in power once more and met at the New Palace of Westminster in all its shining white finery. This decision has been much analysed, of course, and many claim that it avoided a far worse catastrophe down the line; however, it is rather absurd to claim that this was Churchill’s intent at the time.

The Duke continued to consolidate his power over Britain, continuing to issue the occasional public letter (in the style of his old Letters from a Concerned Gentleman) decrying subversion and encouraging the kingdom to take heart, for Rebirth was coming: the Duke’s majority in Parliament was also known officially as the Rebirth Coalition, consisting mainly of Tories with some conservative Whigs. Charles Bone served as Leader of the Opposition for six months, using the position to criticise the PSCs’ reported anti-Catholic violence and prevention of Catholics and Nonconformists from voting, in violation of the reforms passed by the Foxite government. Bone died in the winter of 1813, officially of a heart attack (he was sixty-seven at the time) but some whispered reports that it had been triggered by an attack in the street by bullyboys working for the PSCs. In any case, a strongly worded diplomatic note was soon sent over the Channel via a fast boat linking the rapidly expanding semaphore networks of both Britain and France. Napoleon Bonaparte a.k.a. Leo Bone, secure in power almost equal to Churchill’s, was furious at the notion that foul play might have been involved at the death of his father, and when he attended his funeral in 1814, used his speech to harangue the great and the good of Whitehall for the actions his father had spoken of in Parliament. Of course not even Churchill could move against the effective master of France, and the diplomatic incident served to, in the words of Bulkeley, “chill the Channel ‘till it froze and you could walk over – but why would you want to?”

The situation was complicated by 1816, the Year Without a Summer[7] when widespread crop failures meant that the links with America and Ireland and the transport network suddenly became hugely important again, though those two nations suffered from their own problems as well. Redistribution and ruthless rationing, as even The Ringleader conceded, served to mean that the shaky phoenix of Great Britain managed to scrape by, and helped consolidate Churchill’s position once more. When Conroy died in 1819, run over by a steam carriage, Churchill gave his position to his son Joshua, who had risen from his position as tyrannical Governor-General of Scotland to become Secretary at War in his own father’s titular government, and effective plenipotentiary leader in the Lords (Conroy himself had served in that role in the Commons, soon replaced by one of Wedgwood’s innumerable relatives, Thomas Darwin). This left Joshua in effective command of both the regular Army and the PSCs, while Arthur headed up the RCTFI. His third son, George, on the other hand, shocked the nation by taking ship to the Empire of North America in 1813 (around the time of Charles Bone’s death) and then issuing polemics against his father and brothers from Philadelphia. In this he was backed by several important political figures in the Empire: Americans were deeply concerned by Churchill’s rule, and in particular the way he had hamstrung Frederick II, their Emperor and ultimate guarantor of American freedom. The Earl of Exmouth, an appointee of Henry IX, remained Lord Deputy of the ENA, but he was in his seventies and soon another would have to take his place – an appointee of Frederick II, which these days meant one of Churchill.

Yet for all the oppression and the tension inherent in Churchill’s government, Britain did begin to recover, her economy rebuilt by the trade thrown open to the Empire, Ireland and the possessions of the British East India Company, boosted by the tithes extracted from the French at the Congress of Copenhagen. The scars of the invasion slowly began to heal, London rose from the ashes, and (as Bulkeley, once more, noted) “one knows that one’s kingdom is once more in the land of the living when its people can speak of something besides hardship.”

In fact the problems would arise when Britain was on the cusp of regaining her pre-war prosperity: for it was then that she would question the need for the heavy-handed means that had brought her there…








[1] Marleburgensian = Latinised adjective of ‘Marlborough’, i.e. the period in which John Churchill the Duke of Marlborough was chief power in the land.

[2] John Alexander was not, in fact, in command of the American contingent at the time when they came to Britain, only being a colonel. The author has either ignored this due to the fact that Alexander is inextricably linked with the American participation in repelling the invasion in the public mind, or it is an actual mistake.

[3] In OTL when the Palace of Westminster was burned down in 1834, a neoclassical style was considered (at the time being popular, cf. the U.S. Capitol) but was rejected in favour of the present neo-Gothic building, as neoclassical style was too associated with republicanism. In TTL, with no United States and with the Revolutionary French less enamoured of aping Roman and Greek styles, this factor does not exist: expect the new Whitehall to look more like a cross between the government districts of OTL Washington DC and Paris than anything recognisable.

[4] As seen in Part #77, these states include most of the Mittelbund members and the Austrian Hapsburg dominions.

[5] In OTL the North Briton was founded by John Wilkes in mockery of The Briton an official government paper released by the Earl of Bute, then the Prime Minister under George III, referring to the fact that a politically-correct term for Scotland at the time was “North Britain” (to emphasise the unity of the Kingdom of Great Britain) and that Bute was Scottish. In TTL its foundation is similar, although Bute was only the Leader of the Opposition and The Briton was instead a Tory opposition paper.

[6] OTL’s Times.

[7] As in OTL; volcanic eruptions are not effected by butterflies a century or so old, or so I assume.


Part #90: Back in the U.P.S.A.

“It is simply a crime against mankind for the two great nations of the Americas to be at each others’ throats. Let us now move on from the past and remember our shared quest for liberty. Remember our shared heritage. A land divided against itself cannot stand, and for we men of freedom, this is our land.”

– Roberto Enrique Mateováron Domínguez,
inaugural speed at the Meridian Embassy in Fredericksburg, December 14th, 1813​

*

From – “Balancing on the Head of a Pin: The United Provinces in the Watchful Peace” by Juan Pablo Castillo y Franco (1939) –

Though many studies of the unrest and turmoil beneath the deceptive placidity of the period known as the Watchful Peace naturally tend to focus upon the nations of Europe, we should not forget that the name is equally applicable to other regions touched by the ravages of the Jacobin Wars and their peripheral fronts. Chief among these is of course the United Provinces of South America.

In the 1810s the UPSA stood at a crisis point in its national self-image. The Partido Solidaridad, aping the revolutionaries of France, had led the nation in an attempt to topple the exilic Empire of New Spain (or rather, as it was known at the time, the Empire of the Indies). The move had backfired badly, partially thanks to a failure on the part of the New Spanish to fold so easily, but primarily because reckless policy on the part of President-General Castelli led to the entry of the Hanoverian Dominions,[1] and ultimately the Portuguese Empire, into the war on the New Spanish side. Rather than swelling to encompass all the Hispanophone lands in the Americas as Castelli had envisaged, the United Provinces had been forced to surrender Peru to the New Spanish Empire and had humiliatingly lost control of her home waters to the Anglo-American Royal Navy. Castelli had been killed by a mob for his mismanagement of the war and his attempt to flee from Buenos Aires, and the republic had come close to falling altogether.

It had not come to that. New Spain remained weak and the Hanoverians were soon distracted by the invasion of Britain by Lisieux’s France, with the result that the UPSA was able to escape relatively lightly, save from the loss of Lower Peru and some minor border adjustments in favour of Portuguese Brazil, at the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro. With the Partido Solidaridad discredited, the country was initially dominated by the conservative Reagrupamiento por la Unión of Miguel Baquedano y Zebreros, which eventually evolved into the Amarillo Party. At the same time, the progressive remnants of the old Partido Solidaridad reformed into the Colorado Party, led by war hero Luis Jaime Ayala Santa Cruz.

Baquedano inadvertently set a precedent when he promised to step down after three years and not seek re-election, which would have been unlikely in any case as he was hated as the man who had sought peace, even though there had been little alternative. The Amarillo Party won the first postwar election in 1810 with Roberto Mateovarón, and proceeded to make significant changes to the constitution, formalising some of the temporary provisions of Baquedano’s premiership. Instead of being elected for life, the presidency-general was subject to re-election every three years, although no limit to the number of terms was laid down. Elections to the Cortes Nacionales were set at every four years rather than being called at the whim of the President-General. The first of these was held in 1811 and it returned a substantial majority for the Amarillo Party, although Ayala’s Colorado Party retained a significant proportion of seats. This Cortes had fewer independents, the so-called informal Blanco Party, as for the moment the country appeared to be heading towards a two-party system.

President-General Mateovarón faced serious challenges in his premiership, and it a measure of his success in dealing with them that it is he, not Simón Riquelme de la Barrera Goycochea[2] or Baquedano, who is usually considered the founding father of the UPSA. A well-known example is the problem of refugees from Lower Peru, who flooded into still-Meridian Upper Peru and Chile after the New Spanish took over the administration of their home province and proclaimed it the Kingdom of Peru under the Infante Gabriel, commander of the Nuevo Ejército (New Army). Upper Peru, and especially Lima, had always been a trouble spot for the Meridian government. Lima had been the largest city in the UPSA and the former capital of the old Viceroyalty of Peru that had preceded the republic,[3] and had never really come to turns with being subordinated to the rustic frontier town of Cordóba (as the Limeños thought of it). Furthermore, being home to a rich class of peninsulares, Lima’s political and economic culture was antithetical to the egalitarian model preached by the UPSA, particularly after the Partido Solidaridad took over. Thus it had been that a Limeño uprising had played a key role in New Spain’s victory, and now was the time for reprisal attacks against those progressive citizens of Lower Peru that had sided with the Meridian message. Liberal Bajaperuanos fled the new Kingdom in large numbers, joined by many Tahuantinsuya as the restored Inca Empire was crushed by the New Spanish by 1820. Most of the Tahuantinsuya preferred to dwell with their fellow natives in the Aymara Kingdom – where the Inca Tupac Amaru IV would also dwell in exile after the death of his father at the hands of the New Spanish in 1817 – but some joined the Bajaperuanos as they attempted to settle in Chile and Upper Peru.

While the UPSA was still relatively sparsely populated, this upset many of the locals, who were having a hard enough time feeding themselves given the ravages of the war, the fact that the farm labour force had been depleted by going off to soldier, and that the British had wrecked numerous seaports and destroyed or confiscated fishing boats. Riots soon broke out, and it was up to Mateovarón to solve the problem. He did so in a unique way that also addressed the issue of Patagonia – Britain had tried to claim Tierra del Fuego at the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro, but had backed down after her bluff had been called, and now the Meridians were paranoid about losing their strategically valuable control over Cape Horn and the Straits of Magellan. To that end, while the island itself remained undisturbed for the moment, Mateovarón had the Bajaperuano refugees relocated on government expense to Confluencia, the northernmost part of uncolonised Patagonia.[4]

After initial success from the scheme, both Mateovarón and his successors as President-General suggested new economic laws to the Cortes that would lower taxes in the frontier regions and provide other incentives to encourage people to settle there, similar to policies used by the various Confederations of the ENA in Canada and the Caribbean. Although some adventurers came from all across the UPSA, after those displaced from Lower Peru the largest group consisted of refugees from the lands that had been transferred to Portuguese Brazil at the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro. This group included many Guarani. The colonists often employed the Guarani and Tahuantinsuya in attempts to negotiate with the local Tehuelche tribes; while this might appear naïve or even insulting to modern eyes (of course the very distant groups of natives had no tongue in common) the fact that some visibly native Americans were comfortable living alongside and working with the Meridians did appear to reassure the Tehuelche. While there were some conflicts between natives and colonists, these were a far cry from the violent clashes with the expansionist Mapuche people seen in the far less successful attempts to expand into Araucanía.[5]

This tactic, a clear case of killing two birds with one stone, helped take the pressure off Meridian communities as the economy recovered. Mateovarón enjoyed considerable popularity, and surprised the nation by not seeking re-election when his term expired in 1813. Though Ayala put in a strong performance as the Colorado candidate in the resulting election and won a respectable vote share, there was little surprise when the new President-General turned out to be the Amarillo candidate, José Jaime Carriego López. Ayala’s failure resulted in him being kicked upstairs, and while continuing in name as leader and chairman of the Colorado Party, in practice he was reduced to a figurehead while younger men less associated with the toxic heritage of the Partido Solidaridad took over.

President-General Carriego could scarcely be anything other than a disappointment of some kind after the successes of Mateovarón’s premiership, but he nonetheless failed to live up even to lowered expectations. Whereas Mateovarón had been a moderate figure among the Amarillo Party, Carriego was more strongly conservative, objecting to several reforms the Partido Solidaridad had passed that Baquedano and Mateovarón had left in place. However, the Amarillo deputies in the Cortes were divided on these issues and, aside from a few minor laws, Carriego was unable to have the reforms reversed. In what is widely considered to be his best political move (though probably on the prompting of others) Carriego appointed the semi-retired, but still quite young, former President-General Mateovarón as Ambassador to the Empire of North America. The purpose of this was both pragmatic and symbolic: pragmatic, because the UPSA urgently needed to repair relations with the ENA after the disastrous Third Platinean War, and the skilled politician and orator Mateovarón would be the right man for the job; symbolic, because appointing their former head of state as ambassador to the ENA would be a conciliatory gesture and one which expressed how important the Meridians considered their links with the American Empire.

While Carriego’s rule went from bad to worse, Mateovarón was a great success as Ambassador. He had already learned fluent English, having a working knowledge while he was President-General and refining it while in “retirement”, and he used this to address a crowd of curious Fredericksburg dignitaries upon taking up his post, declaring that he thought it natural that the two freedom-loving nations of the Americas (a pointed jab at the Empire of New Spain) should look on each other as brothers. “And brothers may sometimes have disagreements, and even come to blows, but in the end they will always be of the same blood,” Mateovarón said. His speech, done in the Spanish style that seemed overly flamboyant to Anglophone ears, seemed to appeal to and appall roughly equal percentages of Americans, but his very presence sparked a renewal of debate about the ENA’s relations with the UPSA and the Empire of New Spain – which had been Mateovarón’s intention. He also laid a wreath for the crew of the Cherry on the tenth anniversary of the Massacre in 1815, giving a formal apology on the part of the UPSA, which further encouraged those political forces in Fredericksburg who felt that a rapproachment with the liberal UPSA would be a far more appropriate foreign policy than cosying up to absolutist Catholic nations like the Empire of New Spain.

At the same time, however, Carriego was hit by a serious scandal. In early 1815 it emerged that before the war he had participated in the illegal slave trade out of Lima. Initially the government tried to brush this over by saying it was all in the past, but they were made to look like fools when El Tribuno Meridiano, Cordóba’s biggest newspaper, broke the story that Carriego had continued his involvement even after the end of the war, and had been involved in the purchase and handover of South Sea Islander slaves via Valdivia as recently at 1812. The reconstruction of Valdivia, along with the other western ports attacked and burned by the Anglo-Americans during the war, was a project that naturally needed plenty of workers and didn’t ask too many questions about where it got them.

At this point we should perhaps digress to consider the state of slavery in the Americas at this time. The slave trade had been banned by the northern Confederations of the UPSA as attitudes changed there, then by Britain and her Royal Africa Company in 1802. Slavery itself was still legal in the Confederations of Virginia and Carolina, and Pennsylvania and New York’s system of manumission meant there were still plenty of blacks who remained enslaved in all but name. Slaves were also very common in French Louisiana, Portuguese Brazil, the West Indies, and of course the Empire of New Spain; France, Spain and Portugual had never seen any need to consider their slave trade.[6] The UPSA, as part of its own ideological agenda to attack the casta system, tended to take a more sceptical view of the institution. Even under the fairly conservative early rule of President-General Barrera, there was a policy of confiscating slaves and freeing them (though typically the freedmen were only considered to have a status suitable for menial labour). This began as more of a policy of attacking the rich, slave-holding peninsulares rather than for the good of the slaves themselves, and escalated under the Partido Solidaridad. Finally in 1804, not long before the start of the Third Platinean War, the Cortes Nacionales abolished slavery (the slave trade had been abolished as early as 1791). This was a move that stoked anger among the Limeños and arguably helped power the uprising there, but it also gave credence to the UPSA’s claims of egalitarianism and helped the Meridians gain some support from the locals in New Granada – not that this mattered in the long run. In any case, and particularly after the border adjustments of the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro, many black slaves fled across the border from Brazil and sought sanctuary in the UPSA. While the vast majority indeed went on to live as freemen – poor and of low social status, but free – a few were taken by slavers (sometimes in confidence tricks) and taken to projects requiring cheap labour, such as the port reconstructions. The anti-slavery laws had never been very enthusiastically enforced, with the result that many of the gleaming cities of Chile were ultimately built on the yoke stained with black blood. And indeed the reconstruction proceeded at such a pace that the conned refugees could not make up the whole work force, with the result that privateers such as the ones Carriego had helped finance instead raided the South Sea Islands[7] for workers.

This scandal helped highlight the issue of slavery and reminded many of how the laws were not being enforced. Carriego was forced by his own party into signing several laws which intensified the legal regime (made much easier by the lack of the conservative deputies from Lower Peru, many of whom had been secret slaveholders themselves). The Cortes election of 1815 saw the Amarillo Party lose control of the Cortes for the first time, and finally in 1816 Carriego committed political suicide when he insisted on trying to run again, only splitting the vote between himself and the Party at large’s preferred candidate, Alfredo Fernando Vallejo y García. The result was that the Colorado candidate, Pablo Portillo de Insaurralde, swept to power as the first progressive President-General since the collapse of the Partido Solidaridad.

Portillo was particularly well qualified to serve as a figure of reconciliation, considering the fact that despite his own progressive views, he had been fiercely opposed to the Partido Solidaridad in his youth, writing in the Bonaerense paper La Capital “our fathers fought a long, bitter war for freedom so that we would not be someone’s colony; now Señor Castelli would have us spread our legs and be reduced to the simpering handmaiden of the bloodstained France.” Portillo had sided with the Reagrupamiento after Castelli’s assassination, and while he joined the Colorado Party when Mateovarón took power, he had argued fiercely with Ayala and was only able to rise to a position of power when Ayala lost the election of 1813 and his frontline influence with it.

Now Portillo continued Mateovarón’s policies with a more radical slant to them, using the excuse of suppressing the South Seas slave trade to build up the Meridian Armada once more. The UPSA’s large number of immigrants fleeing the fall of Revolutionary France proved to be of use, with former Admiral Surcouf spearheading the project to equip the UPSA with steamcraft. It was the Meridians (admittedly, bare months before both France and the ENA matched the feat) who first constructed a steam-powered warship capable of making long-distance voyages across the open ocean like its sail rivals: the Pichegru in October 1818, named for the great French-born general who had died the year before at the age of fifty-seven.

And it was with this navy that the UPSA was able to make a careful intervention in the Philippine War of 1817-1821. Ever since Spain had been divided during and after the Jacobin Wars, there had always been three potential claimants to any item, institution or possession previously belonging to the unified Spanish Empire. While the Aragonese crown controlled by the Neapolitans was careful not to contest these, not wishing to attempt to project power beyond the Mediterranean, the exiled King-Emperor Charles IV in Veracruz clashed with his nephew Alfonso XII of Castile, or rather his regent Peter IV of Portugal. The issue that escalated into war was that of the ownership of the Philippines. When Charles had fled in exile to New Spain and invoked the Arandite Plan, he had folded the Captaincy-General of the Philippines into the Kingdom of Guatemala, while Alfonso continued to appoint a Captain-General from Madrid. The Filipino local administration fumbled on for a decade or so trying to please everyone, but in the end war came when the New Spanish ship Providencia – purchased, like most of the rebuilt New Spanish fleet, from the Dutch – bombarded Manila after an ultimatum to hand over the “false” Captain-General was refused.

The war rambled on in the background for four years, largely at arm’s-length, with the two sides clashing navally and fighting over the islands. There were also a few engagements in the Atlantic, with both sides making an abortive landing: the Castilians and Portuguese briefly took Mérida on the Yucatan Peninsula, and the New Spanish landed in Galicia, which provoked overly optimistic risings in some parts of Castile where people believed in the romantic image of the king returning from over the water. The New Spanish plan had been to try and retrieve the bells of Santiago de Compostela (now part of Portugal) which had always been a symbol of Spanish legitimacy, and had been stolen by the Moors during the Reconquista and won back at a heavy cost. The first part of the plan was a success, but the New Spanish raiders were intercepted while retreating to the coast and were forced to drop the bells in the Rio Tambre to prevent them being recovered by the Castilians. The bells were not found again until the 20th century, and it is arguable that the New Spanish did partly achieve their aims, as the copies made by the Portuguese were rightly viewed as illegitimate among the Castilian people.

While the New Spanish and Portuguese-Castilians fought mainly in the northern Philippine island of Luzon, the Muslim Moros of Mindanao took the opportunity to revolt against both sets of Spaniards, swiftly overrunning much of the south of the island under the auspices of the Sultan of Sulu, who also ruled most of the north of Borneo and the intervening islands, principally Jolo. It should be of no surprise to anyone that the Dutch were quietly supplying the Sultan with weapons to pass on to the rebelling Moros: the Portuguese and Dutch had been fighting in the background for dominance over the East Indies for centuries, and it was a battle that showed no signs of dying down anytime soon.

President-General Portillo was under some pressure to intervene on the side of the Castilians and use the fledgeling new Armada to help reconquer Lower Peru, but he refused, which blackened his name in some political circles. Portillo’s reasoning was that it would draw the UPSA into conflict not only with the New Spanish but also with the Dutch, who remained their undeclared allies for realpolitick reasons. Furthermore, while Mateovarón had helped improve relations with the Empire of North America, these days no-one could predict what Britain might do, dark and remote under the rule of Churchill. Portillo decided the hard-won prosperity they had rebuilt since the Third Platinean War was not worth risking, and the only intervention he made was to capture the disputed Columbus Archipelago[8] off the coast of Lower Peru, denying them to the New Spanish and building the small Fort Libertad there as a minor naval base.

It is interesting to consider whether this move would have significantly affected Portillo’s chances of re-election, but like Mateovarón he chose to step down after his first term, establishing a tradition that would eventually be codified in the Meridian Constitution. The following election of 1819 was won by Alfredo Vallejo, the Amarillo Party’s former candidate who had split the vote with Carriego. Vallejo swiftly proved a competent if not spectacular ruler, and in a similar manner to Mateovarón, Portillo was appointed Ambassador to Great Britain in an attempt to unravel that enigma. Portillo famously recorded this event in his diary as “I am still not entirely certain whether it is intended to be a reward or a punishment…”






[1] “The Hanoverian Dominions” is a common term, especially in the 20th century, used to collectively refer to Great Britain and the Empire of North America, and to a lesser extent Ireland, Iceland and Hanover itself. Note that the term “British Empire” would be viewed by the inhabitants of this timeline as crass, outdated and inaccurate, belonging solely to the period before 1751.

[2] The first President-General, who ruled from 1785 to 1794.

[3] Unlike OTL, there was never a Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata, and the whole of Spanish South America from Peru to Tierra del Fuego continued to be ruled as the Viceroyalty of Peru from Lima. This was one of the reasons behind building resentment against distant and ineffective rule in Chile and Platinea which contributed to the Meridian Revolution in the Second Platinean War.

[4] Approximately equivalent to the modern Argentine province of Neuquén.

[5] In OTL the Mapuche successfully resisted Tahuantinsuya (Inca), Spanish and Chilean attempts to colonise their territory (called Araucanía by the Spanish) from the fifteenth century to the late nineteenth, which is badass in anyone’s book. They also hampered Argentine and Chilean attempts to colonise Patagonia because they expanded into the territory themselves in the early 19th century and culturally converted many of the Tehuelche and other natives, presenting a stronger front against the two countries. In TTL, the colonisation of Patagonia at least on the Argentine (Platinean) side is much easier, because it is launched before the Mapuche have tried to expand eastwards. The Tehuelche also enjoyed good relations with the Welsh colonists of Patagonia in the 1860s of OTL, so it is not too unlikely that they would have been fairly amiable to Meridian colonists – at least at first, and particularly given there were other natives with them.

[6] OTL, the French Republic abolished slavery and the slave trade, but they were later restored by Napoleon. In TTL the Linnaean ideology of the French Latin Republic means that there would be no ideological incentive to attack the institution of black slavery – and besides, Lisieux would go on to enslave (white) political dissidents in the shipyards of Toulon and Marseilles in all but name.

[7] That is, the islands in the Pacific Ocean. An example of this kind of activity in OTL is the Peruvian raids on Easter Island in the 1860s, which ultimately wiped out what people they left through disease.

[8] That is, Archipiélago de Colón, the Spanish name for the Galapagos Islands.

Part #91: The South Rises Again

From – “The Phoenix Men” by Karl Hofmann, 1948 –

When Dirk de Waar first met Hao Jicai in 1806, the War of the Three Emperors had not yet begun. The Hongmen in their shared sympathy, regardless of national identification, groaned under the Guangzhong Emperor’s continual hardening of the trade barriers separating Qing China from Europe and the Americas. Yet mere weeks after that first, convivial meeting between the Dutch trader and the quietly Sanhedui-supporting mandarin, the news came to Guangzhou, or Canton as Waar knew it: Guangzhong was dead, assassinated!

The civil war initially benefited the European traders, at least a little, as at least it meant that the court in Beijing (and then Nanjing after the Chongqian Emperor and his eminence grise Zeng Xiang were driven out to the southern capital) was too distracted to enact even greater proscriptions. Furthermore there was a brief upsurge in interest in buying war supplies from the Europeans, and soon every trading company under the sun was shipping in powder, balls and firearms from Europe and the Americas in lieu of their usual cargoes of gold and silver bullion or Appalachian ginseng.

However, barely had this trade begun when in late 1809, the pressure briefly taken from his government by Corea’s entry into the war against his brother, the Chongqian Emperor felt able to issue decrees on issues of such low importance as China’s relations with the irrelevant outside world. More specifically, and under the influence of the more conservative mandarins in Nanjing (it is worth noting that Zeng Xiang seemed uncertain on the matter, but began to realise he had lost his position as sole influencer of the inexperienced Emperor), Chongqian declared that it was essential that China strengthen herself by more fully embracing the Confucian ideal, and from that righteous harmony would flow the natural success to be expected in the defeat of the vile northern usurper. What this meant when translated into everyday speech meant that all European trade would cease.

All of it. Right now.

Men like Hao knew what the results of this would be. For all Chongqian and his father Guangzhong’s attempts to limit the western trade, Guangzhou had grown enormously thanks to the exchanges with the men who called it Canton. The city’s monopoly on ginseng trade with the Americas, via the British East India Company, meant that Cantonese merchants could set their prices high and the rest of the Celestial Empire, desirous of the potent medicinal herb, would be forced to submit to them. It was inevitable that smuggling had become rife, especially in the other three cities formerly open to European trade under Yongzheng, and the authorities had reacted by instituting and enforcing the death penalty for any caught in the act. Under Chongqian, that was now clarified to death for both the Chinese perpetrators and their European accomplices – and soon it would apply to Company men as well as freelance smugglers.

The announcement provoked outrage around the tables of port and cigars at the Thirteen Hongs, as the Hongmen of the British, French and Dutch East India Companies played cards together with their more minor Spanish, Portuguese and Danish counterparts and pondered what their reaction should be. To be sure, Chinese Emperors’ declarations were often so deeply couched in metaphor that discerning the actual meaning was a task for a scholar, and the question on everyone’s lips was exactly how literally the Son of Heaven meant ‘all’ trade would cease.

They soon found out when a contingent of the Green Standard Army was deployed to Guangzhou in 1812 under Ji Liangtan…

*

From “The War of the Three Emperors” by Giacomo Occhialini, 1956:

…after Corea’s entry into the war in 1808, the Yenzhang Emperor’s position rapidly deteriorated. With the help of his mentor General Yu Wangshan, he had taken Beijing and, though repulsed from Xi’an, had slowly ground his way towards Kaifeng, Zhengzhou and the Yellow River itself, though the war had slowed to a crawl as Chongqian also funnelled his armies into Henan province. But he had kept the offensive and the initiative. Now the Coreans hit him where he was weak, and threatened to undermine his chief support base in Manchuria. Yenzhang was forced to redirect his forces to try and hold back the new enemy, but things went from bad to worse: the Coreans took the border city of Andong in late 1808. The name meant ‘Eastern Pacification’ and originally referred to a Chinese military triumph over the Coreans: now the city was renamed Seoseungri, ‘Western Victory’, in a taunt to Corea’s former masters.[1]

The Chongqian Emperor in the distant south might be too insulated from reality to recognise that this might just possibly suggest that Corea was acting independently rather than serving him, the rightful Son of Heaven, in its proper role as vassal kingdom. His older brother Yenzhang, though, was more of a realist (for all his questionable Manchu romanticism) and knew that Corea had to be quashed quickly. He turned an even greater part of his army against the small kingdom and even recalled General Yu to lead it into battle, giving the bloody Henan theatre over to his subordinate General Cao Qichang. With his forces reduced, all Cao could do was hold the White River line against the increasing numbers of Green Standard Army soldiers that Chongqian was able to send against him – and even that, it seemed, would soon be too much.

After his early successes against Chongqian’s forces, Yu was confident of success over the unruly Coreans. The reality was more mixed. As King Gwangjong surged his troops in 1809, with Corea’s southern garrisons being stripped bare, the Manchu city of Girin Ula[2] fell after a pitched battle to the Coreans. Gwangjong then publicly identified Girin Ula with the historical Balhae capital of Kungnaesong (questionable to say the least) and embarked upon another host of renamings for the lesser settlements conquered by his forces. The message was clear: Corea was here to stay.

Even given Yenzhang’s more limited numbers compared to his brother and his need to fight on two fronts, Yu’s army nonetheless outnumbered the Coreans by three to two, and were fighting in friendly country. Furthermore Yu was unquestionably a greater general than his mostly unimaginative Corean counterparts, though the latter were aided by European “advisors” including Russians and Lithuanians from the Pacific Company, and renegade French traders. Yet all Yu managed was to hold the Coreans back from any more eastern conquests – for the moment. As to the reasons why, we should be careful not to fall into the trap of taking retrospective Corean accounts too seriously: while the Corean soldiers indeed had superior European firearms and training compared to their Chinese counterparts (particularly important when it came to the matter of forming square in the face of Manchu cavalry), the difference was not so great to be decisive alone. With Corea still beset by philosophical divisions over King Gwangjong’s radical course, the armies of Corea were in a similar situation to those of Persia during the Turco-Persian War going on at the same time, half-reformed, half-conservative and often ineffective due to the combination. The fact that they did so well nonetheless says more about the cracks in the Manchu Banner forces of Yenzhang: the Persians lost to the Ottoman Empire, often painted as the backward-looking sick man of Europe, yet still in that period before the Time of Troubles quick to utilise its diverse forces to their maximum, and forever testing them in constant border wars on all sides with Europeans, Africans and Asians. China, on the other hand, had not known a proper war since the Dai Viet intervention of the 1770s, just continuous low-level rebellions against her foreign rulers, and both her armies[3] had fallen into disrepair after two generations of peace.

The Coreans were also aided by their use of war rockets, traditional in the kingdom and now enhanced thanks to knowledge, via Royal French traders, of the recent advances in the weapons in Mysore and latterly the European powers. While the Chinese sometimes used war rockets themselves and thus they were not the unfamiliar, alienistical [psychological] weapon they were against European armies, the Coreans’ tactic of deploying multiple rapid-firing batteries of the enhanced weapons nonetheless took their toll on tight Chinese formations.

Yenzhang could be forgiven for succumbing to despair at this point, as his brother’s armies began to throw General Cao back across the Yellow River and the burnt-out shell of Kaifeng, bloody from constant fighting, was liberated by the enemy General Liang Tianling. But he finally received one piece of good news. Both sides had sent their emissaries to the distant provinces in the first years of the conflict to claim the armies on the frontiers. Most of them had gone to Yenzhang thanks to his brother’s perceived weaknesses as far as maintaining the Middle Kingdom’s newly won borders were concerned. He had thought that all of them had entered the fray, but he had thought wrongly. Sun Yuanchang, the military governor of Shanguo,[4] finally managed to withdraw his forces from the distant frontier and rallied to Yenzhang’s banner. Sun realised that, rather than reporting directly to Beijing and then being fed into the meat grinder of the collapsing Henan front, he would serve his cause better by striking east and attacking the underdefended underbelly of Chongqian’s loyalists, their garrisons depleted by their Green Standard troops being thrown into that same grinder.

To that end, 1810 saw Sun’s army – including cadres of volunteers from the new southern provinces – strike through Yunnan into Siechuan and then march up the Yangtze, with all the ready supplies its river towns could provide for his troops. The Yangtze ultimately led to Nanjing, and Sun hoped he could drive Chongqian from his capital for a second time and fatally undermine his authority. The overall effects of Sun’s campaign would be quite different…

*

From – “The Phoenix Men” by Karl Hofmann, 1948 –

…the response from the Nanjing regime to General Sun’s Great Eastern March was typically sluggish…even the most able commanders could not hope to disengage a large part of their forces from the engagements in Henan, and that was without considering the fact that their recent success at Jining and the conquest of southern Shandong meant that withdrawing a victorious, advancing army in order to tackle what was possibly a phantom rumour, potentially slowing the main war to a crawl once more, could not seriously be countenanced…

…it was not until the fall of Wuchang[5] in the winter of 1810 that Chongqian and his ministers were forced to confront the reality of Sun’s stab in the back. Reluctantly, a portion of the Green Standard troops fresh from their bloody conquest of Jinan – so close to Beijing, and yet Wuchang was so close to Nanjing! – were recalled and sent to close off the Yangtze and form a defensive line centred on Anqing. At the same time, little realising the long-term import of their actions, the mandarins decided to withdraw the remaining garrison troops from the southern provinces of Fujian and Guangdong in order to use them to support the defensive army. That meant only the private armies of local mandarins and powerful businessmen remained in those provinces. The capital of Guangdong, of course, was Guangzhou – Canton – and the most powerful businessman in Canton was unquestionably the Hong trader Wu Bingjian, better known to Europeans by the nickname Hu Kwa, which he had chosen as it was easier for the westerners to pronounce.[6]

Hu was friendly with Henry Watt, one of the senior British Hongmen, and though their relationship had begun purely as business, their conversations invariably turned towards other matters. Hu had become fascinated by Watt’s tales of the steam engines that his father and brothers worked with. The part of him possessing the business acumen that had built his vast empire of wealth was shrewd enough to realise that such power sources could revolutionise manufacturing in China and, most importantly, mean he had to pay fewer workers to do the same tasks (it is worth noting that Hu made this realisation before the industrialisation of Britain in the Marleburgensian period). On the other hand, the more romantic part of him had perhaps an even more important role to play in the long run: initially Watt had nothing but his descriptions and crudely drawn diagrams to explain the steam technology to Hu, with the result that the trader seized upon the aspect of steam belching from the boiler like smoke. He thus made the perhaps inevitable comparison to dragons, possessing both great power and associated with heat and smoke. It was by this means that Hu would eventually calm the Chinese resistance to novelty when steam engines arrived on her shores: “The red-haired barbarian has fought a dragon of iron, and has defeated it, and now the dragon is enslaved in his forges and does his will. Do we lack such auspicity in this age that we may not achieve such feats, and more?”

For the moment, though, Hu’s chief role was in the private army he had built around a core of guards for his convoys and caravans. His dominant position among the traders of Canton and his close relationship with Governor Wen Mingxia meant that he possessed an enormous authority, and that came into play in 1811 and 1812 when General Sun’s army was repulsed by the combined Green Standard troops at Anqing. Sun realised that his riverine attack on Nanjing had failed, and therefore decided to withdraw to the southern provinces and raid them in such a way as to cut off their supplies to Nanjing, thus hopefully forcing Chongqian to split his forces once more, chasing down Sun and giving Yenzhang more time to throw back Chongqian’s stalled armies in Shandong.

To that end, Sun ordered his army to begin a deliberate reign of terror, reminiscent of the French maraude from European warfare, upon the underdefended provinces of Fujian and Guangdong. Stripped of their Green Standard troops, they had nothing to defend themselves with but the private armies of the mandarins and traders, and that was rarely enough. Sun burnt Jianning[7] in the winter of 1811 and sent splinter forces out to attack the coastal cities, Fuzhou being the first to feel his bite a month later. The so-called Black Army became feared in particular for Sun’s deliberate use of his Mon and Shan ‘barbarian’ troops in the vanguard: they had known warfare at the hands of brutal Avan oppressors and had learned to return the same treatment in kind. Fear and terror spread throughout the south of China, yet they were matched by anger: anger that Chongqian was allowing this to happen. And indeed the Emperor had called Sun’s bluff, leaving part of the defensive force to hold the line at Anqing and returning the rest to the Shandong front to resume pushing back Yenzhang’s army. In that it may have been the right strategic decision to make, for the time Sun had bought Yenzhang meant that he had been able to stabilise the Corean front and retrieve Yu for Shandong. Jinan was retaken by Yu in the early months of 1812: if Chongqian had not sent his troops to meet Yu’s advance, the Nanjing court might have lost all the gains they had made in Shandong thanks to the Corean attack.

Yet in the longer run it was a terrible decision, one that would change the fate of China forever.

For even as the anger spread throughout the southern provinces, something remarkable happened in Guangzhou. Sun, as usual, sent his side force to raid the city as he retreated south and eastwards towards Yunnan. But this small army, led by the Mon bannerman Dham Shoung, fell upon Guangzhou only to be bloodily repulsed by a ramshackle army consisting of Hu Kwa’s private army, the local forces of Governor Wen, the Marines belonging to all the local East India Companies, and any of the young men of the city who didn’t want to be burnt out or starved by the notorious Black Army. Furthermore they were armed with modern European firearms, a legacy of the fact that the EICs had ordered large numbers of weapons and ammunition when the war trade had begun, only for them then to sit around taking up space in the factory warehouses when Chongqian’s decree against trade had come down. Now they were put to use killing Mon warriors.

Dham Shouang retreated from the city and returned to a furious Sun fresh from the conquest of Shaoguan. Sun rebuked his lieutenant and knew that if his strategy was to bear fruit, if he was to force Chongqian to blink and split his forces, he could not afford the embarrassment of a defeat. He publicly proclaimed to his army and locals that Guangzhou would be rewarded for its arrogance by nothing less than total destruction, the ground would be sowed with salt, and no city would ever grow again. A story circulated, though its veracity is uncertain and it may be nothing more than Sanhedui propaganda, that the Emperor Chongqian clapped his hands with delight upon hearing this and told Zeng Xiang that “the fool thinks he hurts me, when all he does is solve the cursed barbarian problem once and for all! Surely Heaven shall smile upon us when all contagion with them is irrevocably removed.”

It was summer 1812 and the whole Black Army converged on Guangzhou, burning the towns and villages enroute. The ramshackle “Hong Army” was outnumbered, for all their weapons. The EICs’ East Indiamen trade ships had been stripped of their crews, who were now armed with muskets and rifles and helping to hold the line against the enemy. And it still wasn’t enough.

It was Michel Ouais who saved them, at the end of it all, when the Black Army was about to break through. Aping his idol Napoleon Bonaparte, the Royal Frenchman had spent the last two weeks feverishly removing as many guns as possible from the East Indiamen and training their gunners incessantly to fight on land as they did at sea. Most of the guns were sub-par cannonades, as they were taken from trade ships never intended to fire more than the occasional warning shot, but there were a few frigates out in the Peal River estuary with real weapons: long-range bow chasers, British carronades, even mortars from a rotting old Danish bomb-ship whose origins no-one could remember.

Of course, the Chinese were familiar with artillery (though the Mon and Shan mostly were not). But Chinese artillery had lagged behind its European counterpart for more than two hundred years – ever since the Qing conquest had stifled technological progress, in fact. Some Emperors, like Yongzheng, had recognised the fact and tried to procure more advanced European weapons from Sweden or Russia, but to no avail; and in a time when the Russians and Lithuanians seemed to be handing out military technologies in exchange for anything, China had been ruled by the inward-looking Guangzhong, missing its chance.

The result of this was that the Black Army was blasted back from the gates of Canton by Michel Ouais’ men. The carronades’ huge thirty-eight-pounder balls blew apart entire siege towers in one shot, the British hail shot [shrapnel shell] tore bloody holes six feet across in Sun’s formation, even the light carronades made the Chinese front line vanish in a red mist when Ouais waited until the last moment before giving them ‘a whiff of grape shot’.

But the most famous shot in the battle was undoubtedly that of a single Dutch chain shot, fired from a chaser in the midst of the action. The two balls, linked together by a chain, were designed to zip through the air in a naval battle and slice apart ropes and sails by the red-hot chain. In the event, that chain instead removed two heads: those of Sun Yuanchang and Dham Shouang.

Deprived of its leaders, the Black Army disintegrated. It was the mandarin Hao Jicai who suggested that the bedraggled Hongmen spare some of their forces to at least make a token effort to chase its remnants as they rampaged across Guangdong in their retreat: it was more than Emperor Chongqian had ever done. Hao was a member of the Sanhedui, and his actions were probably not made without calculation.

Chongqian was half-disappointed by the survival of Guangzhou, but glad that Sun’s army had been destroyed, allowing him to focus on Shandong: Jinan was about to fall once more to General Liang, and Yu and Cao were falling back. Soon his brother’s usurpation would end and Beijing would be his once more. So soon! All he had to do to satisfy his moral requirements was send a token troops down to Guangzhou to remind them pointedly of his decree and have all the Europeans – and anyone who had been illegally trading with them – exiled or executed.

It should be no surprise that the people of Guangdong were outraged at this action, sending troops long after they could have done any good against Sun, not to protect the cities or help them rebuild but to tell them off for consorting with Europeans – the very contact that had meant they had survived. Even in Guangzhou there were many who remained suspicious and sceptical of the red-haired barbarians from beyond the seas, but that was secondary. For his unforgiveable actions, the Emperor Chongqian had unquestionably lost the Mandate of Heaven.

The Green Standard troops he sent were allowed to march into the town square. Governor Wen heard Chongqian’s emissary give his ultimatum. And then he gave a single nod.

Michel Ouais’ cannon barked, once, and those neatly regimented soldiers were cut to bloody rags. Hu’s soldiers, now wearing some semblance of standardised uniforms, went out to bayonet any who still lived. Wen had rejected his Emperor, rebelled against him, and few in Guangdong or Fujian would criticise him for that.

The question arose, though, as to what would happen now. Henry Watt asked the Governor would he instead rally to Yenzhang’s cause.

Wen looked to Hu and both men answered in a negative, though in that flowery Chinese court language that meant it was hard for even an experienced individual like Waar to pick through and find the meaning. Yenzhang no more deserved their loyalty than Chongqian, for his absurd Manchu supremacist beliefs and the fact that he had been supported by the monster Sun.

Confused, Watt asked: “Then who is your Emperor?”

Hao Jicai came forth with Michel Ouais and Dirk de Waar, and they explained. Sanhedui sympathies had always been strong in the south. Even Governor Wen had some low-level connections. He even knew that his fellow Governor of Fuzhou, who had escaped the rape of that city by Sun and had now won respect from his people for tirelessly helping to rebuild and survive the winter, was a distant relative of the last Ming Emperor Zheng Chenggong, known as Koxinga in the West. Very distant; the Qing had been careful to weed out all possible direct descendants of the old dynasty, and Governor Zheng Kejing had only survived thanks to his political connections. Whether he still thought of himself as a member of that old house was unknown, but they could but ask…

And so it was in 1812, at what seemed to be Chongqian’s moment of triumph, as he threw Yenzhang’s armies across the White River and marched on Beijing, as the Coreans built up for another breakthrough in the north…in that moment, the south of China, bruised and bleeding, rose up in favour of neither he nor his brother. No Qing Emperor. No foreign Tartar warlord.

Hao Jicai, Prime Minister to the Son of Heaven the Dansheng Emperor, explained that once more Huaxia, the true China, the Han China, would be born into the world. And it would be ruled by the dynasty that at first was known as the Houming – the Later Ming – but, in a cruel irony, just as the Manchus’ Later Jin had become the more neutral Qing, it was decided that an all-new name was required.

Thus was born the Feng Dynasty, from the Chinese word for ‘phoenix’. And a civil war between two brothers, with an upstart king on the sidelines, suddenly became the War of the Three Emperors…







[1] Note in OTL Andong was renamed Dandong “Red East” by Communist China as the former name was ‘imperialist’. Interestingly from the author’s point of view, it is also the twin town of Doncaster.

[2] Modern Jilin, a Chinese transliteration of the Manchu name.

[3] i.e. the Han Chinese Green Standard Army and the Manchu Banners, although note the ethnic identification had become considerably blurred by this point.

[4] The areas China conquered from Konbaung Burma in 1769 and annexed to the Empire after carving the rest up into the puppet states of Toungoo Burma, Tougou and Pegu. Named for their dominant ethnic groups, the Mon in the north and the Shan in the east.

[5] Nowadays part of the conurbation known as Wuhan in modern China.

[6] Hu Kwa is the nickname of an OTL Hong trader (and survives as the name of a tea named for him), although the OTL version was somewhat younger: he inherited the name and business of his father, so this ATL ‘brother’ carries the same name and roughly the same wealth. According to some, he was the richest man in the world at the time.

[7] Modern Zhuzhou.


Part #92: Watching the Watchers

“When one looks upon the great march of popular discontent that threatens to overcome your government like a great wave crashing down to sweep away all traces of civilisation…do not stand in useless defiance as a Canutine figure…but rather use that wind to steer your ship of state to its destination, and let that fire burn itself out impotently…”

– a celebrated passage from In Hindsight, the memoirs of Ernest Lewis II, Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt (1840), often held up as a glorious example of mixed metaphors​

*

From: “From Enervation to Electrification: Europe in the Nineteenth Century”, by Jacques Demoivre, 1970:

The two decades separating the Jacobin Wars from the Popular Wars are generally known as the Watchful Peace, and it is an apt name. Not only in the manner originally meant, that is of the great powers looking suspiciously at France lest she show any sign of her former madness, but also a subtler meaning: countries watched each other, and they watched themselves, to see how that same madness had affected them. Choices were made, decisions were taken, and it can certainly be argued that what came to pass in those years of general peace had an even greater impact upon the destinies of nations than the turmoil of the war that preceded them.

Historiography tends to regard political reactions to the Jacobin period as breaking down into two wide paths, a gross and black-and-white view which is of course an oversimplification. On the one hand we have the conservative powers whose response was essentially to screw up their eyes and wish themselves into forgetting the Jacobin Wars had ever happened, in the hope that their people would do the same and go back to being well-behaved eighteenth-century peasants and bourgeosie. This view is often ridiculed in retrospect, perhaps with good reason, yet some countries managed to attempt such a response without concomitantly trying to ignore or erase any useful developments to come from the war. Castile and the Neapolitan Dominions can be argued to be among such nations, even Saxony, though she is normally placed in the other column. But then the other path regards countries which experimented with radical thought and embraced those same developments shunned by conservative powers such as Austria and the Mittelbund, both half hoping the old Holy Roman Empire could be brought back if you wished fervently enough. Radical thought should not be taken to mean progressivism, or cleaving to Jacobin ideas – save perhaps nationalism, that genie which could break an old empire…or build a new one.

In any case, Great Britain (perhaps inevitably) breaks all patterns by embracing both a political path more conservative, or perhaps reactionary in a better term, than anything she had known for decades, and also an industrialisation programme that could have come straight out of Lisieux’s 25 Year Plan. When semaphore towers went up across the island, following the same paths of roads widened and taggertified[1] to allow their use by steam carriages, they were directed by men who would be happy to see the voting franchise restricted and the rights of the old Constitution stamped into dust. This example illustrates how one needed not be a bloody-flag Jacobin to recognise the usefulness of Jacobin innovations such as the ubiquitisation of steam power and the use of a national optelegraph network.[2]

In Continental Europe things tended to be less complex. Archduke, “Emperor”, Francis II of Austria was the poster boy for mindless conservatism, denying and abjuring the use of steam engines or Optel towers, regarding them as necessarily leading to the radicalisation of political thought. This should not necessarily be dismissed, for while Francis was unquestionably a poor monarch, his views were shared by many of the more intelligent Hapsburg aristocrats who made up his government – even the Graf von Warthausen, the man who had masterminded the Congress of Copenhagen and went on to serve as Chancellor, thought there to be some truth to them. After all, many argued that the printing press had ultimately triggered the Reformation and all the chaos and war that came from it, and the situation was similar. Optel would allow rapid communication between dissident groups, and steam engines required detailed technical knowledge that could potentially place the security of the empire in the hands of rude artisans who might well sympathise with revolutionaries. There were vaguer and more esoteric criticisms of steam power, primarily the effects of the soot produced in the context of Joseph Priestley’s Aerial Economy theory,[3] but politics was at the core of these arguments.

The opposition of the leaders of the Mittelbund was less ideologically coherent, as indeed was the Mittelbund itself. Hesse-Darmstadt and Nassau had leaders of similar cast to Francis II, with wistful appreciation for the old Empire, resentment of their fellows within the Mittelbund, and even more so the way they had been shut out of the European diplomatic system by the Congress, forced into the Concert of Germany with powers like Saxony and Flanders – the very same powers they had originally formed alliances to oppose! Hesse-Kassel was slightly more rational while Duke William I still ruled, a pragmatist and Anglophile who pursued links with Hanover and allowed some among the famous Hessian mercenaries to experiment with steam tractors and tortues.[4] But William died in 1816 and his son Charles II proved to be of like mind to the other Mittelbund rulers, issuing proclamations against such technology and forcing those mercenary bands to either abandon its use – potentially making them very vulnerable if they were deployed against armies who did use it in the future – or leave the duchy. Many chose the latter, mostly going to the Alliance of Hildesheim, which was more amenable to such experimentation.

Flanders one might expect to be among the rejectionists, having suffered under French invasion in the latter parts of the war and having beaten the French back without such weapons of their own. However she soon became the heart of innovation and industrialisation in Europe, not so much through deliberate policy on the part of Charles Theodore II but through simple economics. The use of steam engines elsewhere naturally drove up the price of coal, and the Greater Flanders that had resulted from the Jacobin Wars now covered several large coalfields. Saxony and the Mittelbund also benefited from this, but in the Mittelbund’s case ideological opposition delayed matters and the usual result was that “foreign” companies (some from the other German states) usually ended up dominating the mineworks, provoking resentment from the locals against their rulers. And Austria’s own great coalfields remained restricted to the old methods, even pre-Jacobin steam engines usually smashed up by the Pferdschaft Bund, a group of bullyboys convinced that steam would steal their jobs (and given tacit support by the government). Most of the Austrian coalfields were in Bohemia and Silesia, meaning Pferdschafter violence against miners suspected of breaking Francis’ laws took on an unpleasant feel of regional persecution, particularly on the back of the arrest and execution of Count Radetzky by the Hapsburg government.

The Dutch also inherited coalfields from their Rhineland possessions, and Flemish industrialisation spilled over into the Republic, carrying with it the Optel network that helped link the two allies together. It was at this time that Standaard Nederlands, an attempt to create a single cohesive compromise between the various Dutch dialects of Flanders and the Republic, started to coalesce initially as a result of pidgin slang between the Optel operators. Looking at the linguistic influences upon SN is rather illuminating for consideration of the socio-political situation in the Low Countries at the time: the Flemish Dutch dialects practically equalled the Dutch Dutch ones in their level of contribution, the Low and High German dialects of the eastern regions taken during the Jacobin Wars also contributed, and the Walloons were pointedly ignored.

France, under the doctrines of King Louis XVII and his ministers, was swift to take advantage of her industrialisation under Lisieux. L’Aiguille was hastily rededicated as a church tower, the new Notre Dame, yet it still served as the hub for the network the Optel network that Louis Chappe had created. Thouret’s absurd system of perfectly square départements might have been thrown out and the old provinces restored, but they remained linked by wide, taggertified roads drawn out under rational doctrine, and steam carriages travelled those roads. France had scaled back her army as part of the provisions of Copenhagen, but that simply meant that a large number of steam tractors that had formerly pulled artillery were now pulling ploughs or passenger carriages. France, along with like-minded Swabia, was one of the bigger customers for the German coalfields. Swabia, run by the pragmatic Frederick IV, freely accepted many former Jacobin industrialists who had been put on hitlists in France as being too complicit in Lisieux’s crimes, and prospered as a result of it. The settlement of Ney’s former armies and their families in the countries helped create a unique identity, no longer fully German, nor yet French. This was only aided by the fact that half the new Swabia was former Swiss German lands, still a little bit different and resentful. Frederick had the most ambitious Optel network yet built, stretching up into the mountains to help try and unify his diverse country. Swiss rebel militiamen burned down many of the towers, yet as often as not it was clever Swiss artisans who built them back up again, and with the same hands that had made the old Confederation known for its clockwork. Soon southern Swabia became known as a home for innovation in the field of Optel. It was here that shutters first replaced semaphore arms in the late 1820s, and here that lamps were used to send messages by night, which would eventually have a huge impact on how economics worked in the Germanies and beyond.

While Francis II might be a rejectionist, his ageing uncle the Archduke Ferdinand was a more thoughtful soul, and as King Ferdinand I of Italy, he too saw Optel as a means to try and unify a diverse country, particularly problematic given Naples’ continuous attempts to pick apart the Kingdom through agents. Venice in particular was a hotbed of discontent, with Naples still having many Venetian exiles and ready to feed them to cause problems for their northern rival. Italy had also inherited some of the steam vehicles Lazare Hoche had used; while she lacked major coalfields herself, the fact that Francis had made Ferdinand’s son Archduke Leopold the Duke of Lorraine proved to be one of the few good moves that would-be emperor ever made. Lorraine controlled much of the Saar coalfield, and the territorial contiguity established by the Congress meant that a direct supply was possible, mostly by barges over Lake Geneva. When Ferdinand finally died in 1818, there were some rebellions against Hapsburg rule, mainly in Venice for obvious reasons, but they were muted by the fact that Ferdinand had been a decent ruler and many Italians feared direct rule by Francis. Instead, Leopold marched in with his Lorrainers, subdued the uprisings, and then asked Francis if he might succeed to the throne and also keep Lorraine, uniting them. Francis felt Leopold deserved Italy for his move, and in any case was disinterested in Italy, his political ambitions now turned to the south and east once more. He agreed, and a new industrial power was born.

Many engineers and master miners fled from the conservative powers in this period, mainly Austria and also the Mittelbund to a lesser extent. Many went to Saxony or Denmark, both interested in furthering the role for these new technologies in war. Denmark in particular was noted as the world leader in balloon development, soon becoming famed for the running series of balloon observers along the Øresund, rising on cables from stations on both the Sjaelland and Scanian coasts, watchful for any attack on Copenhagen. It was inevitable that this would be taken as primarily aimed at the Russians, Denmark’s great ally and yet now her only competitor for control of the Baltic – which meant she could not stay ally for very long.

Russia herself, while considered backwards by many, nonetheless was at the heart of a new kind of innovation that was dismissed in western Europe. Mine waggons generally ran on guide-rails, and had for years, when those waggons had been pulled by horses or driven by human strength. Now steam was coming in and rails were still used in mines, for the blasted surface was usually too uneven for free wheels. Yet to suggest that guide-rails might also be of use in long-range surface transport was dismissed as absurd. Why constrain oneself to a rigid network when one could hop into a steam carriage and drive wherever one pleased?

Some, mostly from mining engineer stock, nonetheless argued: because we can make it faster. The same reason that using Optel, where the messenger at the far end might still have to travel some miles to reach the intended recipient, is better than travelling all the way to the recipient yourself. Among such men was Vladimir Tarefikhov, a Russified form of his birth name: Richard Trevithick. The Cornish steam pioneer initially worked in industrialising Tsar Paul’s mines, taking advantage of the large number of freed former serfs who wanted a more modern, refined trade rather than being stuck on the fields for the rest of their lives. To be sure, the mines were often hellish and life might end in a painful instant if the use of black powder for blasting was misjudged, but they paid better than what farm serfs were used to and produced products that were becoming increasingly valuable throughout Europe – not only coal, but also iron ore and others. One of the biggest Russian coalfields was near Tula, a city known for its armaments industry and located about 180 versts south of Moscow. It was here that Tarefikhov settled in 1804 and soon rose to become a very important business magnate, being made a Rytsar (knight) in 1814.

He soon had the ears of many a Russian noble, and by 1816 was a favourite of Paul’s younger son Prince Theodore. It was at this point that Tarefikhov expostulated his ideas to bring the rails out from the mines and use them as a means to guide suitable steam-driven vehicles – perhaps a single tractor drawing a series of carriages – from town to town. Both industrial cargos and people, perhaps.

Theodore was initially sceptical, but a small-scale public demonstration in Tula’s town square convinced him the concept could work, and he sold it to his father the Emperor by appealing to Russian political theory: the European rulers might allow their subjects to wander wherever they pleased, but in Russia such movement would be under the tight control of the Autocrat. The carriages would go only where the rails went, and the Tsar would decide where the rails went. It was a fitting middle path, a very Russian ‘take a third option’ approach to the conundrum that had led Francis to stick his head down a hole. Russia’s Optel network, which ran in parallel to its eventualy railways and helped inform and guide their construction, was built with similar tight state control in mind. The first full-length railway in the world was built between Moscow and Tula (after several smaller demonstration railways) and opened in 1828 to the astonishment of the world…sadly for the sake of proponents of the railways cause, though, Europe would soon be distracted by the Popular Wars…






[1] In TTL tarmac was invented by a man named Taggert rather than Macadam.

[2] “Optelegraphy”, “Optel” for short, is a retroactive term to describe semaphore and similar mechanical telegraphy systems – obviously, it only showed up after the development of later more advanced communication systems to distinguish themselves from it, but the author here uses an anachronism for his modern readers.

[3] Recall this is basically an explanation of photosynthesis, but with some moral overtones about the dangers of depriving urban areas of dephlogisticated air/Elluftium (oxygen).

[4] Lisieux’s pseudo-armoured car, mainly used for urban crowd suppression.

Part #93: The Thais That Bind

“For better or for worse, the nations of Indochina and to a lesser extent the Nusantara[1] have always been defined in terms of their relationship with China. As the name implies, the region has historically been subject to cultural influence from the Indian empires as well as China, but the former lack the latter’s sense of cultural homogeneity, historical contiguity and linguistic consistency, meaning that China is where we should place our focus. China was never “the Other” to Indochina as, for example, the Ottoman Empire was to Christian Europe, something to define itself against: rather, the peoples of Indochina mostly saw China as an object of admiration and certainly did not consider themselves to be culturally closer to one another than they were to the Chinese. Indeed for much of its history Indochina can be said to have lain in the shadow of China, and here I advance the thesis that its peoples can only be truly understood by their actions in the brief periods in which that shadow has been absent…”

– conclusion to the introduction of On Asia by Pyotr Stepanovich Ostrakov, originally serialised in the journal The Muscovite Anti-Sanchezist from 1921 onwards​

*

From – “A History of the Thai Kingdoms” by Francois Montpelier, 1940:

As we have seen, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, Indochina’s history was defined by two earth-shattering interventions of Qing Chinese power. The first was that of 1768, when the Daguo Emperor sent a Chinese army to back up the exiled Burmese general Myat Htun’s attempt to topple the Konbaung dynasty and restore the previous Tougou dynasty. This was a decisive move which shattered the Burmese empire that King Naungdawgyi had been building and replaced it with a web of Chinese vassals and puppets. Ava, the core of Burman[2] power, was indeed returned to Tougou rule under Mahadammayaza, with Myat Htun as the power behind the throne, but Toungoo (ironically the city which had originally given its name to that dynasty, but several centuries of classically Indochinese shifting dynasties, capitals and states had eliminated that link) split off under Minhkaung Nawrahta, one of Nandawgyi’s brothers. After Nandawgyi’s death on the battlefield, Hsinbyushin, another brother, took most of the army of Ava and fled south and east to conquer the kingdom of Arakan. Arakan was swiftly taken and acculturated, eventually becoming a client state of the British East India Company in Bengal.

The rest of the former Burmese empire considered itself to be liberated states, whether it be the recent conquests such as the Kingdom of Ayutthaya or ones which had often been involved with Burma’s internal struggles, such as the Mon state of Pegu (also known as the Third Kingdom of Hanthawaddy).[3] The northern former territories of the empire were turned into an autonomous military frontier region of China under the name Shanguo, intended for basing armies for future interventions into western Indochina.[4] The Chinese military in Shanguo, whether Manchu Banners or Han Green Standard Army (and indeed mutual railing against the primitive conditions and regular combat against bandits tended to weld the two into a more cohesive group than elsewhere), tended to be of a fearsome standard, honed by frontier warfare. This was illustrated in 1789, more than two decades after the Konbaung retreat to Arakan, when Hsinbyushin’s successor Avataya Min invaded Ava with British East India Company support. Though the Chinese garrison had been neglected by the Guangzhong Emperor, the maverick general Yu Wangshan had defeated the Konbaung army. The Chinese were able to repel the revanchists and the previously neutral state of Toungoo was punished for its support of Avataya Min, having its ruler Shin Aung (the son of Minhkaung Nawrahta, and therefore Avataya Min’s cousin) toppled and replaced with a pliable nephew, Hkaung Shwe. China’s influence over western Indochina was firmly cemented.

The second great Qing intervention that defined the late eighteenth century was that in Dai Viet in the 1770s, culminating in the Battle of Than Hoa in 1778. The Chinese successfully restored the Emperor Le Cung Tong to control of northern Dai Viet (AKA Tonkin)[5] and kept the Nguyen Lords of the south at bay. Together with the Gorkha war of the 1780s, the Daguo Emperor’s reign was thus marked by three instances of China flexing her muscles and rattling her sabre, meaning that when nations bowed their heads in vassalage, the submission was real rather than theoretical. If they decided to argue, they would face an army.

It was under the rule of his son the Guangzhong Emperor that this state of affairs began to deteriorate, with frontier garrisons being depleted and the government drawing little distinction between genuine Chinese vassals such as Ava or Tonkin and any other country – as according to literalist Qing doctrine all the countries of the world were automatically tributaries of the Middle Kingdom. The frontiers remained quiet while the keg slowly filled with powder, but when the War of the Three Emperors broke out, it was the chance every revanchist had been waiting for.

However, we should not pretend that as the very moment that the Guangzhong Emperor expired, Avataya Min’s son Phaungasa Min immediately ordered another attack on Ava. The situation was complicated by the fact that the Chinese garrison in Shanguo was commanded by General Sun Yuanchang. Sun had replaced the controversial Yu Wangshan after his reassignment to the eastern frontier, and had served with distinction against the Gorkhas, certainly a respectable opponent. Though the army in Shanguo had been sapped of strength by Guangzhong’s policies, it was still numerous and strong enough for Phaungasa Min to hesitate, building up his forces all the time.

The situation changed in 1810, when Sun embarked on his Great Eastern March to lay waste to southern China in support of the claimant Chongqian Emperor. With him he brought his army and many irregulars drawn from the local Shan and Mon recruited from Pegu. The consequences of this were enormous for China, of course, but no less so for Indochina: for the first time in four decades, there were no significant Chinese military forces stationed in the region. Thus it was now that Phaungasa Min made his move, backed by mercenary armies drawn from Indian states, primarily Manipur. There was also some support from the British East India Company and its sepoys, but this would fall away within a few years as the BEIC was drawn into the Scindia-Holkar War and latterly the Gorkha invasion of India. It was at this time, in fact, that the Gorkhas broke free from vassalage, destroyed the small number of Chinese troops remaining in Tibet, and conquered the whole land for themselves, at least on paper. Rumours of atrocities committed by the strongly Hindoo Gorkhas against Buddhist monks and temples, not all of them exaggerations or fabrications, spread like wildfire through western China and its environs, which would also eventually lead to significant consequences for the War of the Three Emperors.[6]

With the withdrawal of Sun’s army, it seemed as though the days of China’s puppets were numbered. As Phaungasa Min’s armies advanced through the summer of 1811, Toungoo rose in revolution against Hkaung Shwe and sent many volunteers to join the returning Konbaung dynasty. Phaungasa Min then set his sights on the real prize: Ava. Yet all the players had overlooked something. Not all China’s allies in Indochina were pliable puppets. One had been ruled wisely, with good and foresighted governance, since its liberation in 1768.

Ayutthaya.

*

From – “Roar of the Elephant: A History of the Thais” by Canancaura Basquaran, 1954:

As with many or indeed most of the peoples of Indochina, defining the Thai race is a confusing and contradictory business. There are some scholars who will paint a broad swathe of the region and its neighbours with the Thai brush, while other more conservative colleagues restrict themselves to a much smaller area. Like most nations in Indochina, the Thais have been through many dynasties and states – and in Indochina those two terms are often synonymous, with a new capital, a new flag and so forth coming forth with each new ruling family. Before the Burmese conquest of the 1760s, there had been two main Thai kingdoms: Ayutthaya, based in the city of the same name, and Lanna, based in Chiangmai. Lanna had historically been a puppet of Burma, but had managed to break free some decades before. Then, though, the expansionist Konbaung toppled both kingdoms and sought to directly annex as much territory as they could.

With the Chinese support of Myat Htun’s rebellion, the Thais were liberated. The former king of Ayutthaya, Ekkathat, had died in the wars: something to which most Thais quietly breathed a sigh of relief, as the man had been divisive and incompetent, having taken the throne by subterfuge and fought against other claimants while the Burmese advanced. He was succeeded by his older brother Uthumphon, who had previously briefly ruled before becoming a monk, but was persuaded to return in Ayutthaya’s hour of need.[7] Uthumphon proved to be a more competent ruler, and was able to take advantage of the lack of political stability in Lanna by annexing the former kingdom to Ayutthaya. He now ruled over the majority of Thais united into one kingdom.

Uthumphon died in 1786 and was succeeded by his son Maha Ekatotaphak. It is now of course quite difficult to view this figure dispassionately, with the eyes of a historian. He has been elevated to the pedestal of demigod by Thai nationalism. Yet we must also seek to avoid the immediate and tiresome conclusion of the reflexive revisionist historian: that Maha Ekatotaphak must be an incompetent madman and mass murderer. In truth it would seem that Maha Ekatotaphak was an amiable ruler, a little too charismatic and popular to class as a nonentity, but certainly not a king one would usually earmark for greatness. The reason history has judged him well was his choice of advisors, in particular his defence minister Prachai Tangsopon. Ayutthaya had struggled for centuries with the problem of its feudal structure: she had previously suffered losses to the Burmese thanks to the fact that her militas had owed allegiance to mun nai (local lords) rather than the king. King Trailok had tried to abolish this system and unify matters in the sixteenth century, but Ayutthaya was still subject to the problem of her ministers and officials being rebellious, single-minded and drawn from the same hereditary families.

Prachai Tangsopon was a noble, but not from one of the important houses. There is some evidence that he was a royal bastard, a common source of generals to the Ayutthaya kingdom (and indeed elsewhere), which would have made him Maha Ekatotaphak’s half-brother and thus perhaps explaining their close bond. For whatever reason, Prachai was firmly wedded to the needs of Ayutthaya, the Thai nation, and his king, rather than being diverted by political jockeying as so many of his predecessors had been. This combined with cold competence meant that Ayutthaya rapidly developed to be more than just a Chinese puppet. She still enjoyed good relations with China and paid her tributes, but was beginning to stand on her own two feet. A new professional military, the Kongthap Bok (“Royal Army”) was created, though quietly and subtly so as to avoid antagonising the Chinese in Shanguo. Under Maha Ekatotaphak the kingdom also asserted more state control over trade, setting up stronger relationship with its neighbours. All of this was done with ready deniability, yet in hindsight it is easy to see the ultimate goal of Ayutthaya regaining full independence.

It is extremely questionable whether all of this could really have held off a Chinese army if Ayutthaya had turned against her overlords. Prachai ultimately sought to form an alliance with Ayutthaya’s neighbours before doing so, but it is doubtful whether they, more reliant on China, would have gone along with it. In any case it is a moot point. With the withdrawal of General Sun, Ayutthaya faced a crisis: the Konbaung army was surging back into old Burma. While it was unknown whether Phaungasa Min intended to push into Thai lands in this campaign, it seemed a foregone conclusion that this would follow at some point. Therefore, Prachai argued with his monarch, it was important that they take decisive – and pre-emptive – action.

The Threefold Harmonious Accord was sworn in 1812 in the fortress city of Lopburi, a former capital of Ayutthaya. To the meeting were invited representatives of all the friendly kingdoms in the region: Ava (even as its capital fell to the Konbaung army), Pegu, the Lao states of Vientiane, Luang Prabang and Tran Ninh – and Tonkin. The ‘Threefold’ in the name reflects historical hindsight: in retrospect it would be seen as a triple alliance between Ayutthaya, Pegu and Tonkin. The Lao statelets would soon be absorbed as puppets into Ayutthaya, while there was no saving Ava now. Nonetheless, Prachai’s plan worked to safeguard the allies: the Kongthap Bok was blooded in Pegu in 1813 as the Konbaung turned their attention to the south. Fighting continued along the frontier until 1815, when Phaungasa Min decided that pushing his exhausted men further risked losing his precious restored kingdom – particularly since, what with the Indian wars flaring up, support from the BEIC looked like an increasingly unlikely proposition. For that reason he retreated to Ava and spent the next few years instead contesting Shanguo with the remaining Shan militiamen. For the moment Pegu, defended by Thai arms, would retain its independence.

The Threefold Accord proved itself once more from 1814 onwards, when the Nguyen Lords of Cochinchina took advantage of chaos in China to launch a renewed attack on Tonkin. Once more Thai troops sallied forth to defend their allies, a policy which provoked mutterings among much of the Thai nobility. Prachai explained that it was better to fight in someone else’s country than wait a couple of years and then have to fight the same people in your own. Then he had them arrested on trumped-up charges and executed. The diplomatic skill he showed in the signing of the Accord was not duplicated with internal politics. In 1817 the fighting in Dai Viet died down, and Tonkin was as inextricably bound to Ayutthaya as Pegu…



…relations between Ayutthaya and the European powers had been fraught for the past few centuries. The year 1688 is best known for a revolution in which the people of a kingdom, incensed at their king being seen as a puppet of the French, turned against him. But do I speak of England? No, for the same thing was happening simultaneously on the other side of the world: the Thais overthrew King Narai on his deathbed for the king and his designated heir being too close to French and Greek traders. Ever since, Ayutthaya had been distinctly suspicious of Europeans. This policy was gradually opened up, however, in the reign of Maha Ekatotaphak. Full trade with great powers like Britain and France was still out of the question – hence why the British backed the Burmese against the Thais – but the Dutch, just as in Japan, managed to sidle around all the restrictions and maintain low-key trade through the port of Mergui.[8] The Dutch certainly played a role in Thai contact with the West, but in fact the most important Europeans in Ayutthaya at this point were Ulf Mikkelsen and Martin Holtved. The two Danes were former members of the Danish Asiatic Company, which had been scaled back thanks to Christian VII’s reforms and would not be revived until the end of the reign of Johannes II. Now ageing and unwilling to seek posts in rival nations’ trading companies, they instead took up residence in Mergui and, through their knowledge of backwater trade channels, helped Prachai equip the new Kongthap Bok with some European weapons, mostly artillery. The Danes’ skill is attested to the fact that some of these had in fact been BEIC weapons intended for the very Burmese that the Thais were fighting.

Given BEIC distraction at the time of the formation of the Threefold Accord thanks to the Indian wars, it would not be until the 1820s that knowledge of the tough new power in Indochina would enter the European consciousness. For it was at that time that Ayutthaya, which had been gradually pushing its way down the Malay Peninsula for years, resumed its task using its new army and military skill. The conquest of Kedah and Perak (1821-24) shocked the European trade establishment, not least because the Thais ejected the French East India Company from Penang in the process.[9] At the same time, the BEIC was realising that the Threefold Accord could pose a real threat to British Bengal, and even the restored Burmese kingdom might not be enough of a buffer state. The Europeans began to recognise that there was a new native power to be reckoned with, and they needed a name to describe it, always a difficult proposition in Indochina’s volatile environment for naming terminology. It is therefore highly illuminating when considering Ayutthaya’s dominant position within the Accord that the term popularised by the BEIC and brought home to Britain was “The Siamese Empire”…








[1] Indochina, properly, means all of mainland Southeast Asia, although in OTL this has become somewhat obscured by the fact that the French possessions in the region (modern Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) became known as “French Indochina”; while this was originally intended as meaning “the part of Indochina that is French”, over the years many people have mistook this as meaning that only Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are “Indochina”. Nusantara on the other hand is an Indonesian name to describe all the islands that make up modern Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste. The more usual term in English in OTL is “the Malay Archipelago” but this has not been adopted in TTL.

[2] A reminder: “Burmese” is a general term which can take in peoples such as the Mon, Karen and Shan, whereas “Burman” (nowadays normally called “Bamar”) refers to the specific ethnic group dominant in Burma. This dichtomy does not exist in Burmese itself, where the term “Myanmar” is used as a general term for all the ethnic groups and the nation. The fact that English has confused the two illustrates both how powerful the Burmans were within the whole of ‘Myanmar’ (which can be compared to modern confusions of ‘England’ with ‘Britain’ or ‘Holland’ with ‘the Netherlands’) and also the fact that the English-speaking history of ‘Myanmar’ has mainly unfolded through clashes between the British and the Burmans of Ava. In TTL the Burmans are allies of the BEIC rather than enemies but the close association delivers the same confusing terminology as OTL.

[3] Pegu is the city which is the capital of the state, but general naming terminology in Indochinese history has tended to ascribe the city name to the whole state. The reason for this is that often the “states” are actually just very long-lasting dynastic or regional factions all struggling for power in what is theoretically one nation: Europe’s late-period Holy Roman Empire is not a perfect analogy, but there are some similarities. And Pegu is also known as the Third Kingdom of Hanthawaddy because this is the second time it has been restored after being conquered by Ava.

[4] Shanguo has a double meaning in Chinese: it can either mean the straightforward “land of the Shan” or “kingdom of dust”; the latter can be interpreted either as a poetic summation of the Burmese defeat at Chinese hands, or else a disparaging term for the quality of the land.

[5] As with footnote 3, Dai Viet (modern Vietnam) had confusing naming terminology in the 17th-19th centuries. As far as its people were concerned, it was all one country, but was locked in a perpetual civil war between the Nguyen Lords of the south and the Trinh Lords of the north, with the largely powerless Le Emperors getting caught in the middle. Because of this division, Europeans thought of the two parts as two separate countries, which they named Tonkin in the north and Cochinchina in the south. (In OTL the definition “Cochinchina” was later restricted to the very southernmost part of Vietnam, with the rest of the south being called Annam, which is really one of the millions of names of all Vietnam).

[6] The Gorkhas (Gurkhas) did some of this during their OTL invasions of Tibet in 1788 and 1791. Their motivations in sacking Buddhist monasteries can be debated, much as with the Vikings raiding Christian monasteries a millennium earlier: there was probably some religious component, but mainly it was simply seeking loot. In OTL the Gorkhas were driven off by Chinese armies sent by the Qianlong Emperor, who had more of a vested interest in Tibet than the Chinese Emperors of TTL. This is not due to differences of personality, but simply because in TTL the Tibetans never rebelled and killed the Chinese Ambans (residents) in 1751. China did intervene to protect Tibet from the Gorkhas in the 1780s, but this was a much more minor affair than the OTL wars.

[7] OTL Uthumphon did cease being a monk twice, once in order to be king and then again to help fight in the war with the Burmese. It’s scarcely a stretch to imagine him doing it a third time.

[8] In OTL Mergui is now in Burma, a legacy of the 1760s wars going differently.

[9] OTL, all of the southern Malay peninsula (i.e., the western half of modern Malaysia) was British or British-influenced by this point, and the BEIC repelled Siamese attacks – Thai states had had ambitions on Perak and Kedah for more than a hundred years. The British dominance is due to the fact that spheres of influence had been delineated after the Napoleonic Wars; prior to this both British and Dutch outposts existed there. In TTL there has been no such agreement, meaning the British, Dutch and French all have outposts on the peninsula and the states there are divided in influence between the three. This makes Thai conquerors’ job a lot easier.


Interlude #10: Yes, But Is It Art?

Testing...testing...is this thing on?

Ah yes. (Indistinct static, as of a microphone being readjusted) Er...Lombardi here, Dr Bruno Lombardi, or are we supposed to use codenames in this outfit? I confess I usually leave all that stuff to Captain Nutcase...er...where’s the rewind on this thing... (Sound of tape fast-forwarding, followed by a mumble) You will remember nothing you heard... (Loudly) Hello New Cambridge, this is Dr Bruno Lombardi reporting, or you may call me Zorro the Gay Blade.

Captain Nuttall has asked me to record this short segment to explain why our data transmissions have slowed of late. As you may recall from the captain’s supplementary commentary[1] our team has been somewhat disadvantaged of late thanks to, ah, an unpleasant encounter or two with the locals – but of course that is difficult to explain in context while our compilation of this world’s history remains far removed from the present. Suffice to say that we have had to move our headquarters elsewhere lest the locals remove a quarter of our heads. (Pause) Must say, it’s fine to be able to issue such wonderful humour to a tape recorder rather than that dour Scotsman and that Greek bastard...errr... (Sound of tape fast-forwarding again)

In any case while we are halfway through moving, we naturally do not have access to the same libraries or books, and until contacts are re-established, the captain has asked me to compile what I can from what few books remain to us, most of which do not relate directly to the political or military history of TimeLine L. Nonetheless I suppose looking at social history may help illuminate how this world has diverged from our own, no matter what the Englishmen on the team say. Therefore I present the first edition of Zorro the Gay Blade’s Cultural Extravaganza. Ahem.


*

From – “Overview of European Development 1700-1900, Volume 3” by P.J. Hartley, 1940 –

The Watchful Peace is known as an era of cultural flowering in all areas of the arts, even in those countries which had descended towards authoritarian oppression of freedom of expression, such as Austria and Great Britain. This apparent paradox is resolvable if one considers the two decades of the Peace as a place in which all men would pause to catch their breath and allow their wounds to heal. Men in this case also meaning nations, notions, ideologies, and even women, as such great artistic luminaries as Madame Réjane and I. I. Ivanova demonstrate. The Peace, as Bulkeley once said, was exactly like the release valve on the steam engines which proliferated during its years, a time when all the bottled-up tensions and passions of the Jacobin Wars, now forbidden to express themselves through base conflict, now instead bled away in the form of a cultural flowering. It was as if a kettle had boiled and instead of emitting a simple whistle it had produced a symphony to bring tears to the eyes of Druschetzky himself.

Equally, of course, great wars by their very nature move men and ideas across continents, forcing them to flee their hometowns, conscripting them into armies, exposing them to those very horrors that often inspire the most poignant and moving pieces. The Jacobin Wars are no exception, indeed the effect was even more pronounced, for the conflict had itself been ignited over a clash of ideas. The core concepts of both the Revolution and its opponents would help inform the productions of the years following the conflict they had created...


From – “A Beginner’s Guide to European Architectural Styles from the Fall of Rome to the Present Day” by John Atkinson and Genevieve Delormé, 1970 –

The eighteenth century had been dominated by several schools of architecture, primarily the Versaillaise[2] which began in France in the twilight of Louis XIV’s reign. Characterised by the expression of rich decoration, gilding and the use of (then-expensive) mirrors, Versaillaise architecture was perfectly emblematic of the glories and excesses of the ancien régime. Throughout most of the eighteenth century, the whole of Europe culturally revolved around France, the legacy of the Sun King being an ironic model of Galilean heliocentrism.

Because it was France, and more specifically Paris, that began and defined cultural trends, the Versaillaise style naturally proliferated elsewhere, particularly in the Germanies and Russia. In Naples it displaced the existing Baroque school, which nonetheless held on in the northern Italies and in Spain, whose own Baroque style can be considered almost to be a separate mode altogether due to its deep-seeted Islamic influences. Only in Great Britain was Versaillaise definitively rejected thanks to the ideological conflict between the two countries over systems of government, the style being associated with the kind of absolutism that had been anathema to the British since the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the Glorious Revolution. Instead, as English Baroque faded away, Britain embraced the Classical Revival style, a transition heralded by Sir Christopher Wren’s daring design for St Paul’s Cathedral following the First Great Fire of London. Also known as Neoclassicism, this school sought to replicate the style and achievements of Greek and Roman architecture from the classical period, hence the name. While European architecture had always been somewhat informed by that of its civilisation’s cultural predecessors, the Neoclassicists emphasised those elements which stood in opposition to what they perceived as the gaudiness and excess of the Versaillaise, focusing on geometric aesthetics, plain, understated designs, and in particular the use of pillars dervied from both the Greek and Roman style. As many later critics observed, in many ways Neoclassicism was the dream of a Nostalgic,[3] attempting to replicate a style which had never truly existed: the spare plainness of Neoclassical buildings was inspired by the ruins of the former civilisations, whereas in antiquity they would have been brightly painted.

One trend which began during this period, though not reaching its peak for many years, was the Orientalist school, which took its inspiration from the exotic architecture of India and China. Initially considered daring and vulgar, it was initially associated primarily with Portugal and the Netherlands, although as the eastern trading interests of France, Britain and eventually Denmark became more prominent, it proliferated to other nations. Naming Orientalism a school is somewhat disingenuous as it was a grab-bag of influences from across a vast area of Asia, largely depending on which regions the country in question was trading – and therefore conducting improntu cultural exchange – with. For example, Bisgana Hindoo architecture was popular in France and Portugal due to their trade with the former Bisgana states.[4] In particular Bisgana temple pillars were adapted for European usage, their Hindoo designs being replaced with either Christian iconography (mainly in the case of the Portuguese) or icons of great contemporary heroes (in the case of the French) but with the overall Indian sculptural style being maintained. The British on the other hand were influenced by the Islamo-Indian mode common to Haidarabad and Bengal, which itself was largely derived from Persian influence. There was cross-pollination between this and Britain’s own Neoclassical style, which reached its climax with the rebuilding of London after the Second Great Fire. Just as Wren’s version of St Paul’s Cathedral had been shocking in its day for evoking an Orthodox church, Sir Ralph Reynolds’ replacement did the same for the fact that it resembled a Mogul mosque. However, as with the Neoclassical style, what would have been brightly coloured under the Muslims was left white and understated by the British.

Chinese influence also increased during the Watchful Peace thanks to the gates being thrown open to trade by the nascent Feng Dynasty. The Feng’s seat of power in Canton meant that Cantonese style predominated, and indeed the casual European student to this day has a tendency to forget the northern architectural schools of China. While in Denmark a craze for pagodas began around the time of the death of Johannes II, in Britain it was the tuloo of the Haccahans[5] that was introduced by the East India Company. The tuloo was a circular structure with only one entrance, designed to be defensibe and ultimately informed by the sensibilities of a people who had had a bloody history, and in the aftermath of the French invasion and under the Marleburgensian dictatorship, that was an attitude most Britons could well sympathise with. Larger ones were sometimes compared to the Norman motte-and-bailey castles that had dotted England seven centuries before.

Naturally, the Orientalist school reached its peak during the Watchful Peace, when it was the riches brought to Europe by the eastern trading companies that paid for the repairs to the ruinous damage wrought by the Jacobin Wars. Given the number of cities to be rebuilt, it is scarcely surprising that many surviving Orientalist buildings were constructed at this time. European interest in the exotic east was piqued not only by the opening of parts of China and Japan but out of an (entirely misplaced) popular romantic belief that those lands were free of the ideological bloody warfare that had wreaked havoc with their own countries. It is commonly thought that Pablo Sanchez’s own decision to join the Portuguese East India Company as a young clerk at this time was informed by this very perception.

The Jacobin Revolution brought its own architectural styles to France. Revolutionary architects such as Bruant and his pupil Perrault (who took over after his master was phlogisticated by the Robespierre regime) pioneered the Linnaean school, later renamed the Taxonomic Mode to avoid being tainted by association. The Taxonomic style sought to design each individual building according to its purpose and needs, and further to do the same to each room within. Just as Linnaeus argued that each creature was designed to fit its role in the broader design of creation, so the habitat of a human being should be designed to fit that human’s role in service of the state and the revolution. Although emblematic of the controlling nature of even the early French Latin Republic, it was nonetheless somewhat informed by the existing Versaillaise and Baroque styles and therefore retained decoration albeit of a more restrained kind. Further, such decorations and engravings were designed to evoke a building or a room’s purpose. Some of this arguably drew upon earlier ideas – the use of designs including dolphins, fish and shells for rooms intended for ablutions went back at least a hundred years earlier. The Taxonomic Mode was displaced by Utilitarianism when Lisieux seized power in the Double Revolution, and therefore escaped so many negative connotations, proving somewhat popular in post-war Iberia and Italy. In the more paranoid Austria and Russia, on the other hand, the formerly prevailing Versaillaise school was tainted by its association with the Taxonomic Mode rather than the other way around. Russia at this point adopted Neoslavicism, a movement playing to the nativist policies of Tsar Paul I due to the forces unleashed by the Russian Civil War, in which the traditional primitive architecture of pre-Christian Russia was revived and reconstructed in a modern style. Austria on the other hand clung to a mixture of Gothic Revival – a school which proved less popular in most other parts of Europe except Scandinavia[6] – and the Magyar School, which applied a similar approach as Neoslavicism to the traditional architecture of Hungary. “Emperor” Francis II is known to have vacillated over whether to condemn this, in the end deciding instead to support it as a way of spiting the northern German states which he saw as betrayers of the Holy Roman Empire. Arguably this decision significantly influenced the outcome of the Popular Wars in the Hapsburg lands.

The Utilitarian style which Lisieux favoured was influenced by Thouret’s ideas but mostly enacted by architects such as Deneuve and Queneau. As the name implied, the idea behind it was that buildings should have no extraneous decoration, no features that were not strictly necessary, no waste. Lisieux disapproved of imagination; it made it harder to adjust reality to the way it should be. Utilitarian architecture mostly used brickwork. Utilitarian buildings were often deliberately designed to be easy to demolish, the intention being that central city planning committees would plan out the entire lifespan of a building over say 50 years and not waste any resources making it last beyond that. There was an emphasis on squares and rectangles and sharp edges.[7] Utilitarian buildings were almost invariably ugly, although occasional examples of more inspired uses of the style survive, most notably L’Aiguille in Paris and many of the old Chappe Optel towers whose network it serviced. Most Utilitarian buildings were either demolished by counter-revolutionaries after the Restoration or decayed out of their own planned obsolescence, but Paris, which Lisieux had had his hands on for the longest and had always been at the core of his schemes, sustained a lasting mark from the style.

Royal France, cut off from all this, favoured nostalgic Versaillaise combined with strong Orientalist influence as trade funds from the Carnatic kept the statelet afloat, and it was this style which would define the Restoration period...


*

From – “From Rembrandt to Reiss: Painting Since the Seventeenth Century” by Dr. A.J. Anderson, 1949

...not an exaggeration to say that the two decades of the Watchful Peace are more cherished to the true patron than the five that preceded them...it is here that the sense of loss, of senselessness, of weariness evoked by the bloody conflict of an entire generation lost in sound and fury comes to life upon the canvas.

The period is dominated by the German Explosion, as regions formerly not at the forefront of the art were catapulted into the eye of the conoisseur. A two-part effect is necessary to explain this: firstly and most obviously, the Germanies took the brunt of the ruin and horror of the wars and thus the grief and anger of their people found its expression through art; secondly, the upheavals of the conflict caused many German artists to flee elsewhere. Many southern Germans of the craft came to Hanover or Saxony or Denmark, where they found employment initially doing work as mean as engravings for the ubiquitous propaganda leaflets. As the years passed and the war gave way to the Watchful Peace, however, many such men found themselves able to finally express the passions that the devastation had brought upon them.

Gerhardt Stauch first became a household name thanks to his The Tenth Circle (an allusion to Dante’s nine circles of Hell) in which he portrays via allegory and artistic licence the entirety of the German conflicts, from the Second War of the Polish Succession to the Great Baltic War to the French invasion, the rapacious reign of Lascelles and the Cougnonistes, Ney in Swabia, the formation of the Mittelbund, Boulanger’s attack on Flanders – all of it, all in one enormous oversized painting, exploding with violent colours. Appearing like chaos from a distance, a closer look reveals that each tiny figure is rendered in perfect detail, from Emperor Ferdinand stamping on his crown as his son Francis clutches at his own bare head in disbelief, to John George of Saxony and Frederick William III of Brandenburg strangling each other over an empty treasure chest labelled ‘Poland’ while a group of bloody-coated Frenchmen massacre their own people in the background, to Michael Hiedler shown as a wild barbarian stripped to the waste, bearing a great scimitar and surrounded by the butchered bodies of countless Frenchmen. The enormous painting initially provoked shock and controversy by the way it presented each and every person depicted as a demonic figure with distorted eyes, but this only served to increase its renown. After suffering numerous death threats Stauch eventually fled to the United Provinces where he continued his work, though he never matched The Tenth Circle’s height of genius. Nonetheless he is fondly remembered by the Meridians chiefly for his portrait of President-General Mateovarón.

Stauch was only one among many Germans to depict the narrative of the war, but more artists focused on specific incidents. The Death of Cavaignac is a graphic depiction of the end of Fabien Lascelles’ chief bully-boy by Bavarian artist Georg Kruger, which remains famous even among the historically ignorant for the titular figure’s wide, staring eyes filled with horrified realisation as the girl he seeks to rape slashes him with her poisoned needle, his recoil presented as the supine movement of a coward, his fellow rapists mere blurs and shadows around him symbolising the darkness of the Lascelles regime. A line popularised by Alan Carmain sums up the impact of the painting on public culture – “those eyes follow you into your nightmares”.

Italian and Spanish artists also depicted the devastations of their countries, but were more restrained by state control. For example, while Miguel Fidalgo is well known for The Cradle Robber, a piece showing the French General Drouet holding a pistol to the head of Philip VII to symbolise his absolute control over Spain (and perhaps to imply his suspected role in the king’s eventual death), it is less well known that originally in the background was a subtle hint to Fidalgo’s opinion of the Portuguese who now exercised equal influence over his country: where today there is a blank wall in the painting, originally there was the infant who would become Alfonso XII holding a toy to his head as though copying the gun on his father’s. The implication of course was that Peter IV of Portugal was no better than Drouet. The Portuguese authorities caught this and forced Fidalgo to repaint the picture, then kept him under house arrest for a decade afterwards.

Britain also produced many painters who depicted the French invasion of their country, but probably the best-known are by an artist who had already been active many years before, James Constable. His work Thermopylae, showing the suicidal actions of the 52nd West Kent upon the Downs, is thought to be the first to compare the sacrifice of those three hundred to the Spartan battle. Younger artists tended to be subject to more state censorship and produced less memorable work, including many rather vulgarly gory depictions that were used to illustrate many London memorials – the implication obviously being to remind the British people of what they had suffered, what Churchill had saved them from, and what they might suffer again if they thought to question his rule...


From – “Sculpture in the Nineteenth Century” by Ann Woodward, 1980:

...undoubtedly the best expression of the Watchful Peace period’s attempt to place the incidents of the last two decades into context was Global Revolution, the masterpiece of Anthony Beaumarchaise, who had lived through the entirety of the Revolutionary regimes in Paris, observing much of Lisieux’s schemes along the way. The title is a pun, as the work depicts both the world physically revolving and also the revolution Lisieux sought to bring to it. Rather than going with the Neoclassicist simplicity of much of his contemporaries, Beaumarchaise used intricate design and colour to get across his ideas. The globe of the world, five feet across, is half shown in the typically complex style of eighteenth-century maps, while the other half consists of a simple gridwork of black and white squares, filled in to vaguely suggest a squosaiced[8] version of the map of the world – a clear reference to Thouret’s perfectly square départments and the folk belief that Lisieux planned to physically change the world to be so neatly arranged.

Impressive as the globe is, it is but the pedestal for the statue of Lisieux himself, presented as human rather than demonic, yet his eyes are fixed with inhuman intent upon the pile of papers worked beautifully in marble that sits before him, ignoring the world he is changing, refusing to set eyes upon it until it has completely changed to the stark, hard-edged, black and white version he seeks to make. One hand goes to his side to clutch tightly at the belt of his breeches – which is often interpreted as an uncharacteristically vulgar attack suggesting Lisieux is breaking wind upon the world, but a more likely interpretation is that it represents Lisieux’s rejection and betrayal of the Sans-Culottes by showing him firmly holding on to his own trousers.

The work is impressive from the front, but one only realises its true meaning from the back, where Lisieux’s head and back end in an abrupt flat plane rather than competing themselves. Originally the sculpture was painted by Beaumarchaise’s friend Pierre Gaudin to resemble the opposing wall of the Nouvelle Salon[9], meaning if it was carefully aligned, Lisieux would seem to become invisible, obviously evoking his own mysterious disappeance. However since the sculpture was damaged in the bombing of 1962 this was lost and instead we are now presented by the blank marble itself. In a way this is even more thought-provoking as one is challenged by that blankness to try and explain just what went on in the head of L’Inhumaine...

*

From – “Music in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries” by Paul van der Groot, 1978 –

Under Lisieux the Revolutionary French cared little for music, with the rousing songs of the early Republic suppressed as supposedly being triggers for emotional excess. While they were maintained by Hoche’s Italy and to a lesser extent Ney’s Swabia and Lascelles’ Bavaria, the Jacobins left little direct musical legacy. However, the conflicts they unleashed inspired much indirectly. Friedrich Wilhelm Bach, Michel Auteil, Girolamo Maffei, Andrew Philips, many composers that remain household names drew their inspiration from the blood and fire and the clash of ideas that dominated Europe in this time.

Nonetheless, in hindsight among these composers one man stood out, one man whose remembrance of the Jacobin Wars traced a thread to the start of the next round of conflict, highlighting how the Popular Wars were sparked by disillusionment over how the Jacobin Wars had ended. That man was, of course, Wenzel Druschetzky, also known in his native Bohemian as Wenceslaus Druzheckj...[10]







[1] Although this is the first of several references Dr Lombardi makes to supplementary transmissions from Cpt. C. G. Nuttall (refer to file #25723-Charlie-Delta) no record of any such addendums to the TimeLine L data has been found in the archives of the Thande Institute. Investigations are ongoing.

[2] In-timeline name for Rococo. Although Rococo itself obviously predates the POD, the name itself only dates back to the 19th century in OTL and was first applied in a disparaging retrospective way. ‘Versaillaise’ as a name reflects the fact that the Palais de Versailles was perhaps the style’s most famous execution, as well as the more nostalgic attitude to it in TTL (not least due to Lisieux’s demolition of the Palais).

[3] In OTL ‘nostalgia’ was classed as a mental disorder until relatively recently, and in LTTW the word continues to carry that meaning – a disorder in which someone is obsessed with the past and cares nothing for the present.

[4] Bisgana is a Portuguese rendition of “Vijayanagara”, the Hindu empire which ruled southern India from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. Although the book here does not mention it due to its focus on Europe, Bisgana architecture itself underwent a revival in India due to the French’s tolerant attitude towards Hindus which led to them being placed at odds in the public imagination with the British who mainly ruled over Muslim states (see part #87). Prior to this Mughal and other Muslim rule had led to elements of Bisgana architecture being suppressed due to the fact that it commonly depicted living creatures, forbidden in Islam.

[5] In OTL’s transliteration, the Tulou of the Hakka people, or ‘Hakka Han’.

[6] Unlike OTL. The failure of Gothic Revival in TTL is largely due to the fact that Neoclassicism is not discredited in conservative eyes by being associated with the French Revolution and Napoleon (the “Empire Style”).

[7] Utilitarianism can be thought of as “Brutalism if it had been invented before the usage of concrete became popular”.

[8] “Pixellated”, in OTL terms.

[9] The Nouvelle Salon is Restoration France’s chief art museum – Lisieux had the Louvre demolished of course.

[10] Czech, or “Bohemian” in TTL, has a different transliteration scheme to OTL.


Part #94: In America

“Do we truly look to the mother country out of old loyalties, out of Christian compassion for the difficulties she faces – or do we look simply to avoid having to look at ourselves and our own problems?”

– The Rt. Hon. Matthew Quincy MCP IPC, 1814 speech​

*

From – “A Socio-Political History of North America” by Professor Andrew Faulkener, 1977 -

After Lord Hamilton’s victory in the election of 1805, the Empire was ruled by the Patriots for nine years. Hamilton won a victory with an increased majority in 1809[1] – unsurprising due to the war fervour and public outrage over both the Cherry Massacre and the French invasion of Britain. After the end of the war however questions arose as to whether the Patriots would be so successful in the next election. Hamilton was still thought of a war leader and there was speculation about whether he would be suited to the peace. The opposition Constitutionalists were not in a good position to challenge, however; after James Monroe stood down as leader in 1807, the leadership was eventually taken by default by Wade Hampton. Hampton was a prominent Carolinian politician who had been a minor war hero in the Second Platinean War, but what superficially looked like a positive in fact seriously undermined the party: Hampton still had strong sympathies with the Meridian people thanks to his experiences fighting by their side during the war, and his elder statesman status (by American standards – he was 55 when he became leader) meant he tended to turn a curmudgeonly deaf ear to those who warned that voicing such sentiments in public would not be a good idea. The American people still held a grudge over the Cherry Massacre and the ensuing Third Platinean War, and while Hampton’s party still enjoyed considerable popularity, the man himself did not. Nonetheless, no other Constitutionalist leaders dared unseat him: within the party society, he had strong backing from other Carolinian planters as well as those from Virginia. Hampton was the poster boy for the southern aristocracy, as well as those taking the pro- side in what was rapidly becoming the elephant in the room of American politics: slavery. Hampton owned over a thousand slaves on various plantations, having expanded his family’s existing fortunes through several astute land purchases.

Lord Hamilton suffered a minor heart attack in September 1811: ironically the news reached Africa mere days after his son Philip had set off in search of the legendary city of Timbuctoo. Although the Lord President made a full recovery, he decided to retire from frontline politics in view of the fact that his doctors advised the strain from his work might have put on his heart. The Patriots chose their Minister for Domestic Regiments,[2] Augustus Seymour of New York, to be his replacement. The Lord Deputy, the Earl of Exmouth, approved him with Crown authority, but Seymour then promptly asked Exmouth to dissolve Parliament and call an election. He wanted to ensure he was governing on his own mandate rather than that inherited from Hamilton, and also saw an opportunity to strike while the Constitutionalists were having problems with Wade Hampton’s Meridianophile beliefs.

Despite the divided Constitutionalists, the Patriots had been long enough in power that their majority was reduced to the smallest possible, just one MCP. However this was more secure than it may at first seem, as there were also seven members of the American Radical Party in Parliament who would more often vote with the Patriots than against them, and were strongly antagonised by the way that the planter aristocracy was taking over the Constitutionalist Party. Three of the Radical MCPs were former Constitutionalists themselves, dating from the time when the party was seen primarily as a vehicle for those supporting greater independence from Britain. They were angered by the way that, given how party interests were falling, it now seemed impossible for a man to both oppose slavery and yet be in favour of such a greater devolution of power. This was particularly crucial given the new Marleburgensian regime in Britain and the rumours that Churchill endorsed the use of (white) prisoner slave labour and had recalled Britain’s anti-slave trade patrols. It is debatable in fact whether this truly meant Churchill was in favour of slavery as an institution – his writings suggest he simply had no opinion on the subject, and the recall of the patrols is more likely to be a simple cost-cutting measure and a reflection on the idea that Britain had no money or men to spare for such high-minded moral crusades when her own people were starving. Nonetheless the perception presented in ARP propaganda was that ‘you can either stick with aristocratic and pro-slavery Churchill with the Patriots, or turn to our own aristocratic slave-holders with the Constitutionalists’. It is small wonder that 1811 was the Radicals’ best election result of the period.

To their credit, the Constitutionalist leadership did recognise the causes of their loss, and the planters were overcome long enough to unseat Wade Hampton. The Carolinian resigned as an MCP and, after toying with the idea of running for the Governorship of Carolina,[3] returned to his plantations and speculations, dying in 1832 as the richest man in the Empire.[4] Ironically in the mid to late 1810s his views suddenly became fashionable again as Meridian Ambassador Roberto Mateovarón helped repair relations between the opposite ends of the Americas, and Hampton would often invite Mateovarón to his mansion, Santee House in Charleston. Mateovarón had a profound effect on Hampton and, although the anti-slavery Meridian never convinced Hampton to change his views on the subject, he did introduce him to high culture and in his later years Hampton became a patron of the arts, paying for the construction of the Hampton Opera House in Charleston and the Grand Theatre in Raleigh. He also freed about one-fifth of his slaves upon his death, mostly his house-servants; many of these were promptly re-employed as freedmen by his heir, Wade Jr.

To return to the Constitionalist Party, the senior party members realised that nominating southern planters was not gaining them great appeal elsewhere. Several strategies over the next few years would be attempted to address this. For the present, it was decided that Virginia and Carolina, or at least their old Atlantic provinces, would vote Constitutionalist even if the party appointed Jean de Lisieux to be their leader, and therefore they could afford to be adventurous in order to gain appeal elsewhere. To that end, the party appointed Matthew Quincy, a New Englander from Massachusetts, as their leader. Quincy was from a legal background and had strong beliefs in the rights of the individual citizen; while he himself did not personally support slavery, he believed that the onus of whether it was morally repugnant or not should fall on each slaveholder (slaves themselves, of course, were not citizens). Quincy was strongly Anti-Papist due to the fact that his father had been killed by Canajun rebels during the Third Platinean War while he had been serving in the New England militia in Canada. This belief ran well in both his native New England and in the southern Confederations, particularly Carolina, which had its own problems with Catholics in the Floridas, Cuba and Hispaniola. He famously dismissed the American Radical Party as “a popish plot to destroy our government and leave us open to attack by hostile powers”, by which he clearly meant the Empire of New Spain and the French in Louisiana (promoted to a Grand Duchy in 1815, q.v.). His views on the UPSA were more noncommittal, thanks to a combination of Mateovarón’s efforts and the country’s loud Jansenism.

However in analysing the result of the election of 1814 we should not ignore the problems Seymour faced in his ministry. Hamilton had pledged considerable support to Britain as the country struggled to find its feet after the ravages of Hoche and Modigliani, with America sending food and gold bullion to help back up the New Royal Bank of Manchester, as well as holding debts in abeyance. This policy, after the initial burst of public generosity wore off, became increasingly unpopular among the American people, particularly thanks to the rumours of Churchill spending the money to arm his mobs of PSC bullyboys rather than to feed the hungry of Great Britain.[5] However Seymour and the Patriots could not easily pull out of such a policy: too many Patriot MCPs and Lords and their high-profile supporters were making money off the back of the American support to Britain. They could not risk alienating such powerful men and starting a party civil war. To that end, the Patriots limped on until the election of 1814, with Seymour struggling to find another issue that might distract the voters and failing. The only other looming issue was, as always, slavery – and bringing that up would be just as damaging to the Patriots, who had a fair number of unrepentant slaveholders among their supporters.

Therefore the 1814 poll saw a swing to the Constitutionalists away from both the Patriots and the Radicals, and the Constitutionalists came to power with a majority of three. No sooner had Quincy taken power as Lord President, however, that the rifts in his party became clear. His appointment had leader had drawn votes from his home province of South Massachusetts along with other parts of New England, which wanted him to take a stance against slavery; the Constitutionalist heartland of Atlantic Carolina and Virginia wanted him to take a stance in favour of slavery; and the western frontiersmen, who voted Constitutionalist as they were seen as the more hawkish party on defence, didn’t give two hoots about slavery but wanted more militiamen and regular army troops to protect them against Indians. It was the third cause Quincy seized upon, perhaps not surprisingly, and used it as an excuse to formally renamed the Ministry of Domestic Regiments as the Ministry of War, and then to commission three new American regiments without asking Britain. He used the scandal of the massacre of a party of settlers in Wisconsin Territory in late 1815 – following the path blazed by Morton and Lewis – to send in the troops. Most significantly the men, women and children had been killed by Attigneenongnahac Indians (normally abbreviated to Attignee) one of the French-allied Huron tribes that the Americans had fought against in the last century before they had been shattered with help from the Howden.[6] It had been known by those versed in frontier affairs that two such tribes, the Attignee and Arendarhonon (Arenda), had fled west and joined with the Confederacy of Seven Council Fires, generally known as the Sioux. However this was a shock to the average citizen uninterested in such details, and an ill-informed but strident movement arose to punish these old enemies for daring to transgress against the white man once more.

The reality was of course more complex: Morton and Lewis had helped secure their own passage by arming the Isantee, one of the southern Sioux groups, with muskets; this had helped them stand against the Ojibwa, another displaced former French-allied tribe who had been attempting to conquer them. It had also provoked a split in the Confederacy, with a conservative faction rejecting all the ways of the white man, including his fire-sticks; the Isantee naturally being in favour of the weapons that had saved them from destruction; and the Attignee and Arenda and the more open-minded northern Sioux wanting to try and assimilate the Ojibwa and achieve peace with them, knowing that the white man was coming and their only chance was to present a united front to him. The settlers from New York had been more caught in the crossfire than anything else, but that was unimportant: as with the Cherry Massacre, one blood-raising symbol could defeat a thousand inconvenient truths.

The Lakota War, as it was known, initially served to reunite Quincy’s party and indeed the nation in outrage. American regiments and militiamen were deployed and at first saw a string of victories against the divided and technologically inferior foe, though this disguised the fact that the direct attack had forced a political victory for the liberal faction in the Confederacy and, after suffering a defeat of their own from American troops who did not distinguish between Indian tribes, the Ojibwa ceased their conflict with the Isantee and joined the Confederacy themselves. In the winter of 1817 the whole conduct of the war changed, though the American troops shivering in their makeshift winter quarters did not yet realise it.

Back east Quincy had other problems. The election of 1817 returned him to power with his majority increased to five, reflecting the fading but still present public outrage over the Stewart massacre (as it was called after the leader of the settlers killed). However the ageing Lord Deputy died two days before the last votes were counted, with the result that Quincy could not receive royal assent yet. The constitutional crisis deepened, as the task of appointing a new Lord Deputy fell to King-Emperor Frederick II in London – which these days meant on Churchill’s say-so. Churchill was furious with Quincy for how the Lord President had slashed America’s assistance to Britain – money and goods still flowed, but debts were no longer written off and Quincy refused to supply Churchill with weapons or powder, ostensibly because of America’s need for them in its Indian conflicts but suspected to be because Quincy sympathised with the British people and was appalled by how Churchill had curtailed their liberty with his PSC squads. The Lord Deputy had royal authority to refuse to appoint the current leader of a party, forcing the biggest party to pick a different leader, and could refuse to sign parliamentary bills into law. This power had not been used since the founding of the Empire thanks to the Lords President having a good relationship with the Lords Deputy, but now...

The crisis lasted eight months, whipped into a fury by Churchill’s exilic third son George who had fled to the Empire four years before and acted with the American Radical Party to condemn his father’s excesses of power. George, along with Radical leader Henry Tappan, publicly declared that the Empire should ignore any Lord Deputy proposed by King Frederick as ‘being made under duress’. Churchill was naturally incensed at such insolence, yet could not truly afford to antagonise the Americans as Britain was still dependent on imports from the Empire. Still, it was not in his nature to budge on the issue, and the King-Emperor himself remained silent, afraid of tipping the balance by his word and potentially causing civil war within the Hanoverian Dominions.

The crisis was finally resolved by Richard Wesley, the Duke of Mornington and Lord Deputy of Ireland, who invoked an obscure legal interpretation of his powers: if he was the King’s representative in the Kingdom of Ireland, then it followed that he could serve in lieu of the King in any role requiring his approval – including the appointment of a Lord Deputy to America. This questionable idea presented, Wesley – a man quite equal to Churchill in sheer mule-headedness – proposed James Arthur Plunkett, the 8th Earl of Fingall. Fingall was certainly not a man Churchill would have chosen, being quite removed from what he thought of as respectable society and thus more or less guaranteed to be free from Churchill’s influence. However, he was also one of the few remaining Irish peers to be marked out in another way. He was a Catholic.

After a moment’s thought, this compromise was immediately endorsed by Churchill, who had an impish sense of humour that he rarely displayed in public. America would get a Lord Deputy free from his influence, but Churchill would still get to torment his enemy Quincy. Quincy himself was horrified of course, but had no way to block Fingall’s appointment: the American Radical Party, which had often spoken up for Catholic rights in Canada and the new southern provinces, were delighted, while many Constitutionalists were not exactly ecstatic but were willing to take any compromise that would end the grinding political stalemate. Furthermore, while Parliament had been suspended, things had turned sour out west. The Sioux had attacked the American forces in their bivouac in the spring of 1817, before the planned offensive had begun, and the remaining troops were forced to endure a grinding retreat to Chichago, constantly harried by Ojibwa and Attignee horsemen, which became known as the “Marsh of Icy Death” and was immortalised by Cagney in his 1820 painting American Niflheim. It was clear that new regiments needed to be called up to replace the men lost to the Indian attacks, yet that could not be authorised until the new Lord Deputy arrived to reopen Parliament, and the result was that the offensive did not resume until early 1818. By this point Quincy almost seemed an unelected leader, it had been so long since the election that had reconfirmed him as Lord President. He was detached from public opinion, floundering to cope with the distant war in the west on its long supply line. He was, in the words of one of his most steadfast critics, a political zambee.[7]

That critic was none other than John Alexander. The controversial veteran of the latter Jacobin Wars had returned to the Empire in 1812 and had served for two years holding down a desk job and training troops, but the death of his father to yellow fever in 1814 meant that he had taken over his estates. Simeon Alexander had not been from a rich family: like many Carolinians he was descended from Ulstermen, or ‘Scotch-Irish’ as the local term was: as fierily anti-Papist as Quincy and of a poor but proud background. Simeon had built his fortune from the ground up, partly through hard work and partly through marrying into money. He had bought large estates in Cuba and then Hispaniola and had had much more success than many other planters who attempted to expand into the new provinces of Carolina, but had worked himself to death, becoming vulnerable to the many tropical diseases there. His son John reluctantly resigned from his Army career and took over the plantations, soon bettering even his father’s record despite his lack of economic background. The former General naturally had a good mind for logistics after his experiences in Britain and France, and the latter had taught him that not all Papists were fire-breathing demons. This attitude convinced him to compromise with the Spanish and Mestizo kleinkriegers who often raided American plantations in Cuba from their strongholds in the interior. Despite being a firm believer in slavery himself, he even worked out extremely unofficial agreements with the black fighters of Hispaniola who had inflicted several gruesome attacks on white planters there. Alexander used the carrot and the stick, paying what he called ‘latter-day Danegeld’ to the kleinkriegers to avoid his land, then hitting them hard with his militia if they dared transgress anyway.

Alexander was a member of the Constitutionalist Party by default, but became a strong critic of Quincy during his second ministry. “This man who would have everything, be all things to all men and nothing,” wrote A Concerned D—n Commoner (an obvious reference to Churchill’s old alias) in the Charleston Gazette. “This man who would stir up old troubles in the Papists whilst trying to prosecute a war at arm’s length in the virgin West; this man who will run his bulls through our civilisation and leave us still treading in his excrescences for decades to come.” And that was one of Alexander’s more mild attacks. Initially content to remain a pundit, concerned solely with his family holdings, Alexander was convinced by senior Constitutionalists dissatisfied with Quincy to run for the Carolinian Assembly as a provincial Burgess in 1818.[8] Alexander soon found himself made Speaker[9] and used the position to propose continuous legislation with little purpose except to frustrate Quincy, mostly altering Carolinian Confederate laws to prevent Quincy’s new bills, regardless of content, from taking effect within the Confederation. This somewhat petty act helped lay the seeds for the rising issue of Confederate versus Imperial distribution of power.[10]

1818 was indeed an annus horribilis for Quincy. Besides Alexander proving to be a thorn in his side, the renewed army sortying from Chichago was well-nigh wiped out by the Sioux at the Battle of the Horns of the Bull in October. The army – this time with better provisions for logistics, knowing they would be bivouacing in enemy territory – inflicted several defeats on the Indians and chased the fleeing foe deeper into Wisconsin Territory until reaching the titular location of the battle. There they found what the commanding General, Vincent Walker, assumed to be an old French fort that the Indians had inherited, and laid siege. He only had small cannon, as it had not been known that the Sioux possessed such fortifications, but it was enough to chew a small breach in the walls. There were plenty of volunteers for the Forlorn Hope: muskets or no, the Indians could have no expertise in siege warfare. That arrogance was shattered – along with everything else – when the Forlorn Hope was hit with grapeshot and crude cannonballs soon began ploughing bloody tracks through the American troops, who found themselves unable to reply. Unbelievably, inconceivably, the Sioux had artillery. Very crude and primitive artillery by the modern standards of the British Army, but artillery nonetheless, and with their own small cannons’ ammunition expended against the fort, artillery the Americans could not reply to. A second retreat followed after Walker was killed by enemy musket fire. This one was in good order and shepherded by American cavalry, but it was nonetheless a retreat.

A round of finger-pointing ensued, with Robert Morton being descended upon by the authorities and somewhat absurdly accused of selling a fort and some heavy artillery to the Isantee along with muskets. Morton was exonerated when an investigative commission headed by Indian expert Lewis Thresher concluded that the knowledge of siege warfare had been communicated to the liberal movement within the Sioux by escaped prisoners from the neighbouring Susan-Mary penal colony. A comparison to how Le Pérouse’s men had so overturned the established tactical order in Autiaraux is inevitable. This scandal caused Susan-Mary to be taken direct control of by the Fredericksburg government, which replaced the system of lacklustre guards (many disgraced soldiers scarcely distinguishable from their charges) with American army troops, sent there for their first breath of frontier warfare. This scheme, which most histories ignore was in fact Quincy’s idea, was perhaps his most positive legacy given the effects it had on American troop training.

This loss of face for America produced a rash of poke-the-tottering-snake-with-a-stick moments among her enemies. Minor Canajun rebellions broke out in the countryside of New Britain territory, where the French Catholics had still not quite been diluted out by New England settlers. More serious uprisings occurred in Florida, Cuba and Hispaniola – in part crushed by none other than Alexander and his lieutenants, giving him even more political capital against Quincy. The Empire of New Spain, which had been annoyed at Quincy’s alarmist Anti-Papism for years, chose this moment to quietly drop most of the free-trade provisions it had been forced to adopt when America had come to its aid during the Third Platinean War. Louisiana equally quietly encouraged its Attignawantan allies to do a bit of low-level raiding of Carolina’s Arkensor province and western Osajee Territory. All of this culminated for a devastating loss for the Constitutionalists in the 1819 election, with the ‘Southron Movement’ led by Alexander and several planter aristocrats running ‘Constitutionalist Whig’ candidates against Quincy’s own men. This split the vote and caused Patriot victories even in Constitutionalist heartlands such as Vandalia, and the result was an unprecedented Patriot majority of 20.

The new Patriot government, led by Lord President Artemas Ward, took the decision of reinforcing Chichago while quietly sending a delegation led by Lewis Thresher, Henry Lewis and John Vann to negotiate with the Seven Fires Confederacy. It is likely the matter would have failed without Vann; during the late period of American weakness the Cherokee had chosen this moment to publicly let slip their intentions of forming a webwork of interconnected Indian states across America to preserve their cultural identity against the white man. Vann, who had already negotiated with the Indians of Drakesland, was able to explain to the Sioux that while they might have defeated the white man once, sooner or later his numbers would crush them unless they worked with him and preserved themselves within the system, as the Howden and the Cherokee had. The Sioux remained largely unconvinced, but at least agreed that they needed to buy time: despite American public perceptions, the two Imperial armies sent against them had badly weakened their forces - the 1820s were known among the Sioux as the Years of Tearful Silence for the number of young men who had died. To that end, they agreed to allow passage of white settlers along a corridor in the south of Wisconsin Territory, providing they did not attempt to settle within the Confederacy’s lands.

While this successful negotiation might nonetheless seem like an admission of weakness, Lord President Ward was able to cover it with triumphs elsewhere, such as the defeat of the rebellions and the formal handover of the American Squadron to Fredericksburg’s control from London. Britain’s treasury was too bare to resist this offer. Already having been staffed mainly by Americans since before the Third Platinean War, a nickname for the separate force was soon circulating, a nickname that would not become reality for some years to come: His Majesty’s Imperial Navy...






[1] American elections are organised under a modified form of the provisions of the Triennial Act of 1694, i.e. elections must be held every three years. In Great Britain this was later revised by the Septennial Act of 1716 (elections every seven years) as holding them every three years meant a near-continuous state of political campaigning and heightened partisanship known as the “Rage of Party” (modern Americans, stop if any of this sounds familiar). However, by the time of 1788 when the Continental Parliament was organised, people had largely forgotten about this and the provisions of the American Constitution were mainly drawn up by radicals who thought more frequent parliaments were a good thing. It is likely that this will be revised in America in the future as well. (In modern Britain Parliaments have since been limited to five-year terms). However because there tends to be a gap of about four months in between the dissolution of Parliament and the opening of a new one (a month’s campaigning and three months to collect and count the votes – remember this is the early 19th century) the space between elections can be somewhat longer than three years, and this is generally the case as American Lords President usually run their term right to the end to get as much work out of this truncated parliament as possible.

[2] A euphemistic term for defence minister; in theory the regiments raised in America on the authority of the Cornubia Palace are part of the British Army and therefore under the ultimate command of the Commander-in-Chief of the Forces in Horse Guards. In practice, of course, this is no longer true – particularly given the destruction of Horse Guards and limited Marleburgensian reconstruction only barely being able to impose its authority on the army in Britain, never mind anywhere else. However the Patriots thanks to their political background tend to at least throw bones to the illusion of a tighter relationship with the mother country than the Empire in fact has anymore.

[3] The Governors of the Confederations are elected figures who sign the legislation passed by the Confederate legislatures. This was enacted by the Constitution of 1788 and ultimately derives from the reforms of the 1750s, when Frederick I altered policy so the colonial governors would be drawn from the locals, rather than British politicians being appointed to the post and them then never visiting their charges and instead appointing local Lieutenant-Governors. As it is, the post of Lieutenant-Governor no longer exists, although it is common for the Governor to appoint a temporary Deputy Governor in case he is incapacitated.

[4] Wade Hampton died as the richest man in the USA in OTL.

[5] Largely groundless rumours. While Churchill certainly did use the PSCs to crush popular demonstrations, he did not support them over using money to buy food to feed the people, which he saw as a great moral crusade.

[6] Recall this is the in-timeline name for the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois.

[7] An alternative spelling of zombie.

[8] The Constitution of the Empire of North America devolves the decisions over how elections are organised to the Confederate assemblies to the individual confederations. Carolina has chosen a model with fixed five-year terms rather than one where the ruling party can call an election at any time.

[9] Unlike the Speaker in Westminster or the Continental Parliament, this is a post essentially equivalent to prime minister.

[10] Essentially similar to the Federalism vs States’ Rights debate in the USA in OTL.
 

Thande

Donor
Part #95: The Celestial Vampire

“What is a civil war? A conflict in which the right side always wins, of course, because only the side that won will survive to write the history books. Quite different is a mere rebellion, where there was never more than one side at all, and a few scattered murderous traitors upon the other. In contrast, therefore, to a war of secession, which is both the patriotic uprising of oppressed freedom-loving sons of the land, and also the shameful failure to crush the violent insurgency of a gang of treacherous rapine predators in human form who would tear a nation asunder for their own petty goals. At the same time.

Now, strangely enough, any given conflict may appear to be one of these three categories at first, but as time passes, its identity may shift, until one day what was a war of secession has become merely an extended civil war, and then as decades are folded into a vague gestalt by the fading of the popular memory, just a minor rebellion, not worthy of remembering. Perhaps it took longer than some to crush, but perhaps not, too; how many think to look in the history books? And how many who do think to consider that what they have read might not be the gospel truth from God Almighty on high? Not only among the proletariado, but including many of the burguesía and those higher still.

Small wonder that so many of the Divimpistas have taken advantage of this human attitude to rewrite history and even news of current events to reflect the version of the truth that they which to promote. One should not mistake this for necessarily a process in which a small ruling cabal knows the real truth and lies to its people to control them, as is sometimes grossly overstated by certain individuals. While there is some truth to this impression, often even the ruling classes truly believe their own version of the truth, and a thinking individual in the depths of despair might be tempted to consider the Abyssal philosophy that there is in fact no objective truth, only what men make for themselves. But I caution the reader to stand aside from such foolishness. An objective truth certainly exists, and on the Day of Unity all men will finally know it. But until that time, I must rebut the view of Sr. Solovera that we Men of Society must necessarily eschew this potent weapon of the Divimpistas. We cannot afford to disregard any weapon, whether it be physical, alienistical or otherwise, when we know that that weapon could make the difference between our bringing about the Day and our forces being crushed beneath the Divimpistas’ heel, as the world suffers another thousand years of the Long Night.

So, then, let us reconsider the portrayal of certain past conflicts...

– Dr Enrique Carrera Palma, writing in 1851​

*

From – “The Great Eastern Adventure” by Pavel Nikolaiyevich Khlebnikov (1972):

Depending on one’s point of view, the epic journey of the military expedition dubbed the Great Eastern Adventure was either a comedy of errors or a case of a series of unpredictable disasters being mitigated as competently as possible by a remarkably gifted command staff. As usual the truth lies somewhere in between, though many historians would consider the latter view to be closer to what really happened

The notion of shifting more than seventy thousand troops from the heart of Russia all the way to her distant Far Eastern possessions was radical enough, courageous enough (some might say ‘stupid enough’). Nonetheless it was not embarked upon as an unthinking folly, as foreign commentators might paint it. It is true that Emperor Paul and Prince Voloshin backed the plan at least partly because it got rid of the army that had been called to fight a war against the Ottomans had never materialised; those troops vanishing off to a distant clime where vague reports of great victories could easily be fabricated was infinitely preferable to sending the conscripts home to their villages to tell of how what had been painted as a vast crisis had petered out to nothing. The court knew their Aesop well enough to know that it would be very dangerous to let the Emperor be seen as the boy who cried wolf. Next time the peasants might not take the call to arms so seriously, and Russia could suffer because of it.

Despite this, much thought was put into the organisation of the expedition. In part the assignation of so many gifted thinkers to the command can also be partly attributed to the desire to get rid of them: the Russian Army was as crustily conservative by default as any other, and its generals were happy to send away those few among their number who loudly advocated for new ideas and reforms based on the events of the late war and the one still raging to the west. In overall command, then, was the scholar-general Evgeny Serafimovich Kuleshov: the nativist reforms and propaganda that the Emperor had embarked upon in response to the civil war meant that only a Muscovite could be considered for such a trumpeted position. Kuleshov had also commanded Kazanian Tartars in Russian service against the Kazakhs in the past, which provided at least a vague justification for an eastern post.

With Kuleshov came many German and Italian officers displaced by the Jacobin Wars who were eager to bring their own organisational skills to the army, but while the Emperor might favour them, he knew he could not be seen to do so due to the wave of nativist fervour he himself was attempting to ride rather than stand against. This was then an elegant way to dispose of men such as Vittorio Dragonetti, a Venetian exile who had spurned a Neapolitan offer of a command after the downfall of the Republic and had now found himself in Russia via, of all places, the Ottoman Empire. Dragonetti was an unashamed student of Jacobin thinking both political and military, believing in the old adage that the most important thing was to know the enemy. In this he was out of step with many not only in Russia but also in Germanies, his own native Italy, and beyond, who treated actual knowledge of the enemy as being analogous to a disease that would infect the naive scholar with the madness of Robespierre. Nonetheless Dragonetti now found himself in a position where there were no censors to make vague threats, and so was able to draw upon what he had learned, using the mathematical theorems developed by Coulomb to calculate the optimum options for the manner of the army’s travel.

Another scholar-soldier who rose to prominence was Ludwig von Lenbach, a Bavarian officer who had resigned his Austrian service in disgust after “Emperor” Francis’ failure to liberate his land from the rapacities of Lascelles, yet too alarmed by the brutality of “Der Führer” to openly side with Hiedler. Exile had proved the only option, and now Lenbach lived like a dead man walking, his wife dead at the hands of one of Lascelles’ butchers and his brother hanged like a dog by Hiedler’s Kleinkriegers for some imagined treason. He had nothing left to live for, and just as some men would hurl themselves carelessly into bloody battle to forget the ache within, Lenbach did the same with his own more scientific mode of warfare. He would pore over logistical figures by candlelight, performing calculations so continuously that meant he was promptly labelled “The Automaton” by his fellow officers, a reference to Wolfgang von Kempelen’s famous device.[1]

Throwing a group of such individuals together, many of them suffering from severe egotism and introversion,[2] was inevitably going to create some conflicts. Nonetheless, Kuleshov proved a sufficiently skilled and charismatic leader to knock heads together where necessary and keep the peace not only between his ‘nest of primo uomos’[3] but between them and the blunter, more traditional Russian officers who made up the majority of the command staff. They had quite enough problems to overcome without the late civil war breaking out again between them.

Fortunately, as Kuleshov himself planned, facing the hardships of the journey helped weld the disparate parts of his force into a coherent unit. Based on the rational approach taken by his scholars and the experience of his veterans, Kuleshov decided to take what at first seemed to be a quixotic if not suicidal route, on the most northern of the established routes and setting off in midwinter. However, there was method in his madness: not only did this mean his army was forced to face a common enemy earlier on, but it meant the swamps and rivers were frozen, making it much easier for the army to cross. It would have been different if it had been only a Pacific Company trade caravan, but the Eastern Adventure expedition was encumbered with field artillery and vast numbers of supply wagons.

Everything was planned down to the last detail, with the usual Russian lackadaisical approach to precise timing being whittled out of both officers and men by iron discipline. Supply rationing was strictly enforced, with those soldiers to be found guilty of corruption or of raiding the countryside being shot without trial. It was ruthless even by the standards of the Russian Army, but it worked: Kuleshov and his subordinates had successfully managed to create the opposite of a Jacobin maraude, an army which could be trusted to stand starving in front of a banquet and not touch one crumb. Well, an exaggeration perhaps, but it served them well in the long run. An increased vodka ration was used to reward a certain period of good conduct without infractions, providing a carrot beside the stick, though Lenbach despaired that the men had become so competitive that “they are in danger of killing themselves through the relentless pursuit of virtue!” In other words, they were drinking themselves to death thanks to their vastly increased vodka ration.

The expedition had always been troubled – any such great military endeavour is – but problems set in for real in November 1807, when they attempted to cross the Yenisei River only to discover that the fords were still uncrossable by their heavy artillery and wagons. Kuleshov considered his options, whether they might wait for a full freeze to set in, or attempt to winter in the town of Krasnoyarsk on the river for example. But Lenbach covered a slate with numbers and convinced the general that such schemes were impossible: the food rations they had taken on in Tomsk would inevitably rot or run out before conditions became good enough (and Lenbach had calculated it by individual item!) They could try, but Kuleshov would lose between 10% and 40% of his army to starvation and the loss of discipline succeeding that. “You might as well pick one men in ten, or more, and order them to drown themselves in the river now; it would save time,” Lenbach commented with typical bluntness.

Kuleshov revised his plans in response. With a heavy heart, the army turned and returned to Tomsk, wintering in that Siberian town that was already two centuries old. Tomsk was nonetheless not large enough to feed the army for more than a fortnight (as Lenbach explained with yet more chalked diagrams) so Kuleshov worked with the Governor to negotiate with the local natives for more supplies. However, as the Governor explained, Jangir Khan’s new Great Khanate now commanded at least nominal allegiance from all the local steppe peoples. While the army was indeed resupplied before setting out once more on a more southerly route, Kuleshov had also inadvertently brought his force to the attention of Jangir Khan.

Therefore, when the vanguard of the expeditionary force was travelling through Russian Khakassia, attempting to discern a possible route north of the Altai Mountains and south of the Yenisei watershed, it was intercepted by a small Kazakh horseback army led by Jangir Khan’s brother Abul and drawn chiefly from their own Middle Jüz.[4] The Kazakhs did not engage the Russians in hostility, but shadowed them for some nights and demonstrated their swiftness and maneouvrability as an all-nomad force, in contrast to the sluggishness of the Russian leviathan. After this pointed display, Abul approached the vanguard under parley and met with General Kuleshov. Kuleshov’s experience with the Kazakhs (albeit mostly with the Little Jüz to the west, who had been driven back by the Russians after raiding Russian towns a generation before) served him well, and he avoided faux pas that many in his shoes would have made. Abul said that Jangir might consider allowing the Russians through his own land, but it would require a Kurultai, a council of leaders and advisors, and it would take time to gather them. Kuleshov was well versed in this sort of thing: Russians had had to deal with what they saw as the tiresome Turkic and Mongol custom of consulting on everything since time immemorial, indeed the word had given rise to the Russian word kuterma, meaning ‘running pointlessly in circles’.

Kuleshov decided that getting Jangir on side was worth the wait, and arranged for Abul to send out messengers bringing supplies so that the army might wait on the border of Russian Khakassia and the lands now under Jangir’s control. In so doing, Kuleshov was forced to disperse the army somewhat, but was careful to ensure a chain of command and constant vigilance, wary of Kazakh treachery. Perhaps Abul did consider such a move – though he did not of course show it, he was naturally wary of such a large Russian army on his doorstep – but he paid close attention to Kuleshov’s moves and concluded that this army might be run in an unorthodox manner, but still one he recognised as tightly disciplined. It could not be taken on in small groups: Kuleshov had been careful to ensure a redundant system of horseback messengers between camps as a poor man’s Optel system. Certainly the Kazakhs could withdraw their aid and starve it out, but Abul appears to have concluded that while the Russians would eventually starve, they would probably go conquering in the process and smash the fragile unity his brother and father had worked so tirelessly to build.

So for that reason, when Jangir Khan and his subordinates trickled in throughout 1808, the ruler of the Kazakh hordes did not seek to destroy this alarming force of men of the west. Instead he sought to divert it; talks with Kuleshov reassured him that the Kazakhs were not the Russians’ target. Not this time at any rate. They seemed intent on poking their noses into the Chinese Empire. Jangir considered that somewhat foolhardy at first thought: no matter how fierce and powerful a nomad chieftain of the steppes was, he always owed homage to the Son of Heaven and his fabled realm. His own father Ablai Khan had submitted himself to the Daguo Emperor[5] in 1780 and saw no shame in such. Oh, the Dzungars might raid the Empire’s frontiers...yes, those Dzungars, the ones Jangir had such...plans for...but that was a different kettle of fish to the audacious schemes the Russians casually described.

Jangir had of course heard vague rumours of the civil war that was beginning to rage in the faraway heart of the Empire. He did not know enough to judge of their veracity, however. Foolish Chinese, to place such importance upon direct succession: true men picked among their blood relations and chose their successors based on merit, not accident of birth. He was only the third son of Ablai Khan, and Abul his elder, but both of them knew well enough that Jangir was a great leader while Abul was merely a competent commander and governor, and so there was no bad blood between them. Foolish Chinese...and the Russians were no better.

Now, the more detailed stories he heard from the Russians convinced him that war was really tearing apart the Empire in a way it had not since the Manchu invasion that the singers still spoke of in the clan gatherings, the invasion that had created the current regime. Well, if one bunch of so-called barbarian nomads could set themselves up as rulers of the high-and-mighty Chinese...!

Jangir dismissed the mad dream, but nonetheless saw the Russians as an opportunity rather than a problem, a sentiment echoed by General Kuleshov in his own journal. He discussed the idea of a combined attack on the ‘New Great Wall’ to break through into Chinese Turkestan, from which the Russians could then traverse the country to support their fellows. Kuleshov was doubtful, knowing from his Khakassian contacts that the network of fortresses making up the ‘wall’ approached European standards of defensibility and remained well-manned despite the civil war. It would be easy for the Russians to bog down there and be left to starve by the more nimble Kazakh armies.

Instead a different approach was hammered out over three months of shared campfires and surprising conviviality. The Kazakhs had had mostly good relations with the Russians for years, but it had never approached this level. Kazakh khans – or rather successful Kazakh khans – had been expert in playing the strong empires of Russia and China off one another, leaving them to lead their free nomad life in the middle. Now, though, China wobbled, and Jangir knew that if he was to follow his ambitious heart and take advantage of that giant’s stagger, he must first secure his flank against the Russians. To that end, Jangir and Kuleshov – at one point sending for the Governor of Tomsk to help back him up – reached an agreement to set provisional borders in the west and the Russians would not support any other nomads against the Kazakhs as they had in the past. In exchange, Jangir pledged both not to bring large armies near the Russian frontier. After all, they would be engaged elsewhere...

In the end Kuleshov let Jangir ‘borrow’ a small part of his army, including artillery and their skilled operators, to help him in his planned conquest of Dzungaria and attempt on the Great Wall. In return, the Kazakhs gave them safe passage, an escort of native guides, and routes for suitable passes through the Altai Mountains into Mongolia instead. Though a hard road, Kuleshov was convinced his ‘primo uomos’ could make it possible.

Jangir’s campaign is recorded in many more detailed works than this. Suffice to say that after calling up more armies from all three Jüz and the other nomad groups he had forced into submission, he attacked the remnant of the Dzungars – hammered between the Kazakh hammer and the Chinese anvil for years – and conquered them in 1809-10. He then turned his attention to the New Great Wall, but failed to breach it even with the help of the Russian artillerymen. He proved his ruthless but effective leadership, however, expertly manipulating tribal politics to ensure his most dangerous rivals among the Jüz were killed leading futile charges against the high walls of the Daguo Emperor’s fortresses. Though Jangir would not realise his dream of marching into China proper, he did succeed in destroying the Dzungars as a state and absorbing them into his own horde, a considerable triumph considering the Dzungars had once ruled half the area of the contemporary Chinese Empire. By the time he died in 1829, on the eve of the political earthquake that would change the world yet barely touch the Kazakh Khaganate, he left behind him a nomad state more unified and efficiently governed than any since the days of Timur the Lame, perhaps even the Mongol Khans themselves.

And it was to the cradle of those world-bestriding Khans that the Russians now came. By the end of 1809, Kuleshov had fought his way to the heart of the Mongol lands, his troops initially seeing off attacks by the local Oirat clans who, having ties with their Dzungar cousins, saw any ally of Jangir Khan as an enemy even without him invading their land. The Russians’ effective destruction of the Oirat armies – reflecting the fact that the discipline that had been instilled into the expeditionary army extended to warfare as well – made the Khalkhas who dominated further east decide to take a more tactful approach. The Mongols in general had lent a cautious support to the Yenzhang Emperor in the Chinese civil war, both due to the proximity of his power base and the fact that some of the more poetic-minded among them genuinely admired his romanticism of the nomadic past. However, for the most part the support they had sent had been token, mindful of the fact that Chongqian might well win and they did not want to be in the position of being painted as raging traitors. A few well-chosen heads here and there delivered to Chongqian when he triumphed could discreetly undo any damage caused by the lukewarm support for Yenzhang.

Now, though, the Mongols faced a threat in their own homeland, and Yenzhang certainly wasn’t in a position to help, being flanked by the attack of King Gwangjong’s Corean army as well as facing his brother to the south. Though still making much of their traditions as a proud warrior race, the Mongols were not stupid, and knew the Russians posed a potentially devastating threat. To that end, Khalka envoys were sent to approach the Russians to negotiate. Kuleshov agreed, not wanting to lose any more men to pointless battles enroute to their real destination. Of course, the Khalkhas added, any decision so important would require – cue groans from the Russians – a Kurultai.

Therefore the Russian army spent another three months stuck in the Chakhar region – Outer Mongolia still lacking many real cities – while petty-khans from all over the country joined them. Mongolia’s own royal dynasty had been smashed by the Manchus at the same time as their conquest of China, with the country now being theoretically ruled directly from Beijing. In practice, Outer Mongolia at least was more or less left to its own devices aside from imperial necessities such as taxation, but now the Mongols lacked a single ruler. However, they did have a single spiritual leader, the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu or Holy Venerable Lord who was believed to be the serial reincarnation of Taranatha, a Tibetan Lama who had founded the heretical Jonang faction in Buddhism. The Jonang had been wiped out by the orthodox Gelug in Tibet years before, helped by the Chinese and ultimately by the late Gorkha invasion that had inadvertently rooted out many hidden mountain monasteries, but they lingered on in Mongolia. The current Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, Luvsanchültimjigmed, was like his predecessor reincarnations – purely by an astonishing coincidence of course – a member of the Khalkha nobility and a direct descendant of Genghis Khan.[6]

Now the Mongols had been receiving envoys for a while from King Gwangjong urging them to join the fight and win their independence. They had treated them with contempt, of course: for historical reasons the Coreans were worthless in Mongol eyes. So they had backing from some Russians? So what? The Mongols knew of the Russians, scattered bands at the far end of their frontier, unworthy of notice, and the singers told of how the great khans of the past had beaten them in their own heartland as well.

Those stories took on a different colour when the Mongols faced a vast Russian army sitting in the middle of their country. Like Jangir Khan, but in an inferior negotiating position, the petty khans decided a discerning approach was required and hammered out an agreement with Kuleshov, Luvsanchültimjigmed, and those Corean envoys who had been allowed to stay around.

The Russians would be allowed through Mongol lands and even guided and resupplied by the Mongols, allowing them to burst through into Manchuria. Of course, the Chinese – either claimant emperor[7] – would not be pleased at such a move, to say the least.

But the Mongols believed this to be unimportant. They knew what the Chinese were facing, not only this western army, but that of Jangir Khan who they privately feared – yes, let him expend his strength against the New Great Wall. And even the hapless Coreans might defy all precedent and actually win something. Therefore, the Kurultai agreed that they could not be left behind in this war that was changing the world as they knew it. Of course, the Mongols were prone to disunion, and no single petty khan among them could command enough support to lead them, considering the problems of clans and tribes and blood feuds. But then there was the unifying force of religion...

In February 1810, the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu Luvsanchültimjigmed became the Bogd Khan, the first free Khagan of the Mongols since Ligdan Khan had been defeated by the Manchus almost two centuries before.[8] The reunited Mongols sought to gain control over Inner Mongolia, stripped of forces by Yenzhang in his increasingly desperate position, while the Russians finally marched into Manchuria.

Only to find that they were too late.

Oh, Benyovsky and his men hadn’t been overrun. They were fine. But someone else had reinforced them first...











[1] In OTL Wolfgang von Kempelen was the inventor of the Mechanical Turk, a hoax chess-playing ‘automaton’ that was in fact controlled from within by a hidden operator. In TTL he built a similar device, although butterflies mean it is not constructed with a Turkish theme and is also more capable than OTL’s, being able to fake other activities as well as chess-playing.

[2] In OTL we might say some of them were autistic, although the idea of such a specific mental condition as opposed to gradations does not exist in TTL.

[3] Primo Uomo is the male analogue of Prima Donna. Essentially the OTL analogy of Prima Donna = highstrung and egotistical is being applied earlier on (perhaps the use of the Italian term may be related to Dragonetti’s presence) but is being masculinised rather than left in its original form – even though the Primo Uomo does not have the same stereotyped reputation for being egotistical and unreasonable.

[4] The area of modern OTL Kazakhstan was in the late 18th and early 19th centuries divided into three separate ‘states’ known as the Great, Middle and Little Jüz. Whether these are best thought of as consisting of simply three groups of Kazakhs or of distinct ethnic groups is one of those questions that depends very much on who you ask.

[5] Ablai Khan did this in OTL to the Qianlong Emperor, who of course doesn’t exist in TTL. He was indeed a great ruler who united the three Kazakh Jüz and stood up to Catherine the Great. However, unlike TTL, he did not have a son of similar or greater abilities and ambitions.

[6] Although Luvsanchültimjigmed has the same name as the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu who lived at this time in OTL, he is not the same person. Unlike OTL, thanks to the lack of a Qianlong Emperor and the Daguo Emperor’s more discerning approach to the Dzungar threat, there was never a Mongol rebellion led by Chingünjav, and therefore there was never the imperial decree that Jebtsundamba Khutuktu reincarnations would from now on be only found in Tibet rather than being drawn from the Mongols themselves. Mongolia in TTL is therefore somewhat freer and less resentful of the Chinese than OTL, although there are always angry young men...

[7] The Feng uprising hasn’t started yet, so there are still only two claimant emperors.

[8] In OTL the Mongolians did this to their Jebtsundamba Khutuktu about a century later, in 1911, when they broke away from China. Bogd Khan is more of a title than a name, so is used in both cases.


Part #96: Nichibotsu

Note from Capt. Christopher Nuttall.

I have overruled Dr Pylos here in switching sources from Brivibas Goštautas to Ivan Gudenov. My reason for this is that Goštautas espouses various theories about the Japanese people in the second half of his book which are considered out of step with mainstream thought among most people living in TimeLine L. While Dr Pylos is almost certainly correct that Goštautas’ theories are much more likely to be true than said mainstream thought, I decided it would be misleading to present them here as this record is intended to be an explanation of how TimeLine L got to be as it is today, and therefore popular beliefs are more relevant than historical revisionism, even if it more likely to be grounded in reality. Furthermore, as both authors admit, the lack of records in this period mean that any history is more guesswork than would be preferred.

Therefore instead I present an extract from Gudenov’s more mainstream work, which as you will probably recognise displays a more prominent pro-Russian bias than Goštautas’.

The text follows this message.


*

THE BRINGER OF CHAOS
THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS
THE ONCOMING STORM


– disputed translation of the caption from a damaged Yapontsi[1] tapestry found in the ruins of Morioka in 1834. The identity of the demonic figure depicted is also debated, but the prevailing theory is that it is Moritz Benyovsky​

*

From – “Decline and Fall of the Yapontsi Empire” by Ivan Petrovich Gudenov, 1970) :

To say that 1806 was a tumultuous year for the Company would be a gross understatement. In China, the Guangzhong Emperor finally acted upon reports of deep Russian penetration into the Amur region, captured many settlers including Pavel Lebedev-Lastoshchkin himself, and was then the subject of the resulting assassination plot that plunged the empire into the War of the Three Emperors. Yet world-shattering though these events were, they were paralleled by another sequence of occurrences over the Corean Sea[2] in Old Japan. Ulrich Münchhausen, military right-hand man to Benyovsky, was subject to a wild escapade worthy of his father Karl’s tall tales when, whilst accompanying the young Daimyo Hidoshi of Matsumae to give homage to the Emperor Tenmei and Shogun Tokugawa Iemochi, he was recognised by the Dutch trader Pieter Roggeveen as a European and not an “Aynyu [Ainu] servant” as Hidoshi had claimed. One arrest, one prison break and one desperate boat escape later, the incensed Tokugawa ordered an attack on Edzo [Hokkaido] to punish the Matsumae’s treacherous collusion with foreign barbarians (for so he saw it, unaware or not willing to recognise that the Matsumae were essentially doing what they were told at Russo-Lithuanian gunpoint). Tokugawa’s anger stemmed as much from the fact that this Edzo business distracted him from what he considered to be the real danger on the horizon as the insolence of the Russians itself. The Shogun was becoming slowly convinced that the southern Daimyos of the islands of Sikoke [Shikoku] and Kiushiu [Kyushu], led by the ambitious Daimyo Shimazu Shinsuke[3], were plotting to undermine or even overthrow the Shogunate system. The Crown Prince, Yasuhito, had worrying ideas about absolutist philosophy that he had constructed both from his readings of his own country’s history and from accounts of Bourbon practices he found in the Rangaku (“Dutch Learning”) that trickled in through the Dutch settlement on Deshima in Nagasaki. His heroes were the Emperors of a millennium earlier, such as Mommu and Kammu, who had possessed a national army based on conscription under their own direct command and had not had to navigate a complex network of feudal overlords and samurai loyalties in order to obtain some troops. More to the point, they had also not had to deal with a Shogun who had grabbed most of the political power for himself…

This tied in with another implicit criticism of the Tokugawa Shogunate: the reason why those earlier Emperors had so sorely needed a national army was because they faced potent foes such as the Silla state in Corea, Tang dynasty China, and the Emishi people of northern Niphon [Honshu], who are speculated to be related to the Aynyu, though this is disputed.[4] The Shogunate had created an atmosphere of splendid isolation through their Sakoku policy of minimising trade and contact with the outside world, and it followed that if Yasuhito was so enthusiastic about having a standing army, it meant he was ready to overturn that policy and start poking around outside the Sunrise Land. Despite the aforementioned isolation, this can perhaps be attributed to the same wave of increased attention to European affairs that swept across all of Asia in the aftermath of the early stages of the French Revolution, from Persia to Mysore to Corea. Whatever its cause, Tokugawa was convinced that the southern Daimyos were conspiring with Yasuhito to impose a more unitary state and abolish or weaken the Shogunate – though naturally the southern Hans would retain their old autonomy, or strengthen it. Dutch learning was at the heart of this strategy, to the point where Tokugawa considered closing even Deshima. However, his meeting with Pieter Roggeveen – in which he quizzed the VOC trader about the potential European sources of Yasuhito’s ideas – convinced him that the Dutch were worth accommodating, being ready to bend any way to preserve their trade monopoly. Shamefully dishonourable even for red-headed barbarians, but useful. It was this meeting which led to Münchhausen’s unmasking, and therefore the pre-emptive conflict itself. Tokugawa remained suspicious about the southern Hans’ rather lukewarm response to Emperor Tenmei’s call for a great samurai army to take back Edzo and punish the treacherous Matsumae and gaidzin foreign barbarians[5].

Soon, however, it was apparent that matters were far more serious than any at the court could have dreamed. At the Battle of the Tsugaru Strait in April of that year, the Russians and their allies – Lithuanians, Nivkhs, Aynyu, Yakuts, and not a few turncoat Japanese – hurled the Shogun’s army back into the cold unforgiving waters of the strait that separated Niphon from Edzo. Even though many troops made it through the Russian naval blockade thanks to overwhelming numbers, they were nonetheless defeated by a combination of superior technology and discipline. That the Shogunate’s ban on firearms and heavy restrictions on sailing ships was now a terrible mistake was obvious to any Japanese with historical knowledge, and the poet Maruyama Kenji acidly remarked that the Japan of two hundred years earlier, with the cannon-armed fleet that had fought the Coreans in the Imjin War, would be better equipped to fight the Russians than what they were left with today. This was no exaggeration, and it along with other observations served to rally intellectual opinion against Sakoku and the Shogunate itself.

The matter spiralled out of control when the ill Emperor Tenmei died on hearing the news of the catastrophe and a confrontation between the two parties became imminent. Tokugawa, as blunt and ruthless as any of his forefathers, declared that the Emperor had adopted on his deathbed a distantly related noble named Kojimo as his heir. However, the Crown Prince rejected this, aided by the public defections of his father’s Ministers of the Right and Centre to his side, and was – as Tokugawa had feared – supported by the rebellious southern Hans led by Daimyo Shimazu Shinsuke of Satsuma. The island Hans of Sikoke and Kiushiu felt particularly secure in this blatant defiance of the once-omnipotent Shogun, as the Tsugaru incident demonstrated that a simple stretch of water could render the Shogunate utterly powerless. Yasuhito initially established his capital in Nagasaki, both because it was an important city already in the hands of his supporters, and because it symbolised his policies for openness and outside contact. It was, after all, through Nagasaki that the Dutch learning that had inspired him flowed. The Dutch themselves retained a cautious neutrality, being careful to use only terms such as “the Emperor” in their trade agreements, hedging their bets in case Togukawa won. Nonetheless, they did begin to sell European firearms and artillery to the Japanese, who attempted without success to duplicate the weapons, an act which their forefathers had once achieved. Once more the deleterious effects of Tokugawa rule upon the Yapontsi are illustrated; even when isolation and Sutcliffism[6] were recognised to be mistakes, they had already become so ingrained that the race no longer possessed the capacity to save itself.[7]

At this point we must acknowledge that any attempt to portray the Yapontsi civil war of this period is inevitably doomed. Despite its relatively recent timeframe, we probably know more about, for example, the battles between the Anglo-Saxons and the Celts in England during the so-called Dark Ages. The destruction wrought not primarily by this first round of warfare, but what came afterwards, meant that almost all records perished and what little survives is insufficient to judge whether it truly reflects reality or is a biased version designed to serve one side or the other: we do not possess enough corroboration or contradiction from other accounts to judge.

Having said that, certain broad strokes can be discerned. The most obvious is that both sides seem to have had a somewhat hapless war record. This is unsurprising considering the fact that the Japanese had not fought a war, even a civil war, in more than a century.[8] With both sides clinging to antiquated technologies and the corresponding tactics, even a small group armed with more advanced methodologies and weapons derived from Russia or the Dutch possessed a disproportionate advantage. Early in the conflict, several Han armies were virtually annihilated in isolated battles thanks to this, when there was no defined ‘frontier’ between the broad, vague claims of ‘the north supports the Shogun and the south supports the [rightful] Emperor’ and many Daimyos took the opportunity to use the crisis as an excuse to use their military force against those of their rival neighbours they held grudges against, something that they would never have been able to do if the Bakufu system was still functioning. It is worth noting however that even once the battle lines were more coherently drawn, relatively minor forces still inflicting swingeing losses upon their opponents through their adoption of European guns and tactics. It is interesting to reflect on how this among other factors led to changing view of the land then known as Japan became clear through European sources in the early nineteenth century. At the end of the eighteenth century, Japan was (a) a mysterious and exotic land, (b) known for its severe justice system and brutal sense of honour, but (c) a country whose civilisation, though alien in nature, was nonetheless undeniable and respected. It can be compared to how the Ottoman Empire was viewed in countries such as Britain and France, which lacked the same proximal perspective as Russia or Austria towards the Turk.

References to Japan in the European press are relatively few and far between thanks to the isolated nature of the country, but a trend is nonetheless visible: a people once mistakenly regarded as being on a similar level of civilisation to the Chinese, the Moguls or the Coreans were found to be inferior and largely incapable of adapting to the effects of European innovations in warfare, resulting in mass slaughters by those few who grasped their impact or, more usually, allied themselves with European groups acting as mercenaries. It is a particularly glaring contrast considering how other peoples formerly regarded as primitive and savage underwent the reverse transformation in the European view, such as the Mauré and the Matetwa, as despite their lack of much urbane civilisation they adapted far more rapidly to the changes wrought by the introduction of European warfare.[9]

The most dramatic of the early conflicts was what is often called the Edo Massacre among Yaponologists. As part of their many methods for exerting unitary control over the Daimyos, the Tokugawa Shoguns had instituted a practice called Sankin Kotai, by which most Daimyos were required to spend alternating years in Edo with the Shogun and in their usual seats. As well as encouraging the improvement and maintenance of roads and other services across the old empire, this was a means by which the Shogun would essentially hold half the country’s potential independence-minded leaders hostage at any one time. (Fortunately for the Company’s earlier deception, the Matsumae Han Daimyo was exempted from the practice as one of that clan’s many privileges). However, due to the lack of a national standing army, the Shogun could not directly threaten to destroy any Daimyo. Each was accompanied by a strong force of their own samurai as bodyguards (the number depending on the ranking of the Han, which depended on such factors as its rice paddy output and how closely its clan was related to the Tokugawa) meaning that the streets of Edo witnessed almost daily parades as the Daimyos showed off their strength to each other with the implicit meaning obvious. Therefore, no matter how powerful a Shogun might be, the post demanded skill in playing the Daimyos off against one another and having the ability to build a coalition against any one expressing thoughts of rebellion.

Tokugawa Iemochi was no more or less competent than the average Shogun, it appears, but the crisis that hit upon the death of Emperor Tenmei caught him somewhat flat-footed. Some of the Daimyos in Edo heard the news before others and their actions were diverse: some fled back to their Han seats, either due to supporting Yasuhito as Emperor or just out of (entirely justified) fear of what might happen next; some went south to directly give homage to Yasuhito; and some picked this moment to achieve political goals that had eluded them for years. This meant that by the time Tokugawa was in control again, several Daimyos had used their samurai to engineer the deaths of others. Of course, they explained to the Shogun, this was naturally because said Daimyos had publicly supported Yasuhito…

This destruction of several Han armies and the deaths of many Daimyos had numerous results. Firstly it meant that several Hans were now leaderless, defenceless, or both. Neither Tokugawa nor Yasuhito were shy about rallying as much personal power to themselves as they could, and both began enacting the practice known as Toritsubushi (“scrappage”) which was a proclamation that they had cancelled the succession of a new Daimyo to a Han and that Han reverted to the Emperor or Shogun either as Tenryo land (directly controlled by the Shogun) or for new division between his own loyal Daimyos. However this rapidly spiralled out of hand. Initially both leaders only used it for Hans which genuinely lacked any natural heirs due to their clan leadership being wiped out in the initial battles; soon, though (it is speculated though not confirmed that this began with Yasuhito issuing a proclamation about Aizu Han after the death of Matsudaira Kotaro in the Edo Massacre) they began proclaiming that any Han with a now deceased Daimyo whose heir went to the other leader for homage was now officially ‘empty’ and ready for division between their own cronies. This escalated out of control until both began claiming that even those Hans whose Daimyos had been in power for years were officially ‘vacant’ if they were supporting the other side: in other words, as far as southern Japan was concerned, the entire internal structure and leadership of northern Japan had been legally abolished, and vice versa. It would seem that even if the conflict had been resolved relatively quickly, such a move would inevitably have led to such internal discontent and strain that some sort of revolution would have resulted, though its nature cannot be speculated upon.

In any case the conflict was not resolved so quickly. After toying with declaring the abolition of the Bakufu altogether, Yasuhito was persuaded by his advisors that this was too radical a step and would alienate the few remaining Daimyo still sitting on the fence – mainly those that had been at their own seats when the crisis had broken out and were doing their best to avoid publicly supporting one side or the other until one seemed to be coming out on top, at which point they would of course claim they had been on their side all along. There were enough of these, including powerful Daimyo like Matsudaire Sadanori of the strategically vital Kuwana Domain, to convince Yasuhito to pay at least lip service to the existing institutions before he tried to enact any of his grand designs. To that end, Yasuhito appointed Shimazu Shinsuke as his Shogun, with considerably reduced powers (making it a position more akin to Prime Minister) but thus playing to Daimyo Shimazu’s own ambitions of power. However, it did somewhat alienate Yasuhito’s other powerful supporters such as Mori Nakito of Choshu Han and Asano Akirashita of Hiroshima Han, and probably accounted for a stumbling in the organisation of Yasuhito’s forces as these cracks were papered over. Yasuhito managed to mend the damage by assigning positions in the Eight Ministries to those Daimyo, but had to emphasise the idea that he was returning more power to them – under the Tokugawa, every government post preceding the Shogunate still existed, but had been progressively stripped of powers until it was no more than a sinecure under the system as it stood.

Both the Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company and the Dutch East India Company played important roles in the conflict, but both were cautious with their support for a variety of reasons. The Dutch were very hesitant about taking sides, aware that their monopoly might be endangered if the ‘wrong’ side won. Instinctively the VOC preferred Tokugawa’s side as supporting the status quo, but Nagasaki (a tenryo domain administrated by Tokugawa officials) swiftly became conquered by the southern coalition supporting Yasuhito. The Dutch did send Pieter Roggeveen to Edo to ask negotiate with Tokugawa – the idea being that they would temporarily withdraw from Deshima and lend the Shogun their support if he would open more new treaty trade ports – but this ended in near-catastrophe. Tokugawa was incensed by the very sight of Roggeveen, blaming him for the disaster in the Tsugaru Strait and the Emperor’s death that had precipitated this crisis, and particularly by the fact that Roggeveen must surely have reached Edo by ship and landing in a northern harbour, against all treaties. Roggeveen barely escaped arrest and execution, and brought back to Governor-General Hendrik de Klerk in Batavia the chilling postscript that Tokugawa had openly threatened to revoke the Dutch’s own trading privileges in Deshima. Much like the Guangzhong and Chongqian Emperors over in China, Tokugawa seemed to espouse the extremist paleo-Confucian view that if an isolationist policy failed, the reason for its failure must be because it was not isolationist enough.[10]

Therefore, the VOC chose to re-engage with Yasuhito through Nagasaki, a position decided by the Governor-General and the Council of the Indies unilaterally as, by this point, Admiral Villeneuve had begun his abortive attack on the Netherlands as part of the northern claw of Le Grand Crabe (the remainder of which, of course, later sent to attack Britain instead by Lisieux) and the Lords Seventeen had fled Amsterdam in anticipation of the descent which never arrived.[11] Although Yasuhito made no secret of his plans to open Japan in defiance of Sakoku and therefore end the Dutch monopoly, the VOC were able to negotiate for various continuing privileges. Besides, they would then be able to trade openly rather than just through Deshima, and their local expertise would give them a leg-up on their competitors from the East India Companies of Britain, France and Portugal when they arrived.

To that end, the Dutch funnelled European firearms, artillery and training to Yasuhito’s forces, though cautiously and not with the reckless abandon that many had thrown about, being aware that they did not want to arm Yasuhito to the point he could easily throw them out if he changed his mind. The Russians did the same in the north; although Moritz Benyovsky’s instinct was to agree to anything that would give them a short-term advantage in further infiltrating northern Japan, reasoning that this would ultimately put them in a better position later on, he was dissuaded by his advisors. Chief among these was Captain Daikokuya Kodayu, a Japanese sailor who had been shipwrecked in the Aleutian islands in the 1780s and had managed to reach the Russian mainland with the other members of his crew. After briefly residing in Yakutsk and Irkutsk, the rise of the Russo-Lithuanian Pacific venture meant that they had been in high demand, along with other Japanese exiles living in Russia (the first recorded such individual was a man named Dembei almost a century earlier) as translators and advisors. Daikokuya and his fellow crewmen had become bitter in their exile as the Tokugawa had refused to let them return to Japan thanks to Sakoku, and he like many of them had been baptised into Christianity. He therefore held a grudge against the Tokugawas and explained to Benyovsky that while Tokugawa Iemochi might agree to open northern treaty ports now, for short-term advantage, he would unquestionably close them again when he felt strong enough. The ideology was strong enough to make any negotiation impossible. Also, he contended that the Tokugawas would be less receptive to Russian offers of European weapons thanks to their reputation being tied up in policies such as the ban on firearms and building ships. By contrast Yasuhito’s supporters such as the Satsuma and Choshu had still been quietly operating small fleets and cannon (though now obsolete by European standards thanks to the enforced stasis) and would be much more receptive to Russian offers. Besides, an opened Japan would appeal more to the RPLC’s commercial ventures.

Benyovsky, typically, decided to have it both ways and began selling to both sides, though he did take Daikokuya’s counsel into account and sold to Tokugawa’s supporters secretly rather than trying to approach the Shogun directly. Benyovsky broadly agreed that a Japan under Yasuhito would be a good thing, but knew a weakened, exhausted Japan under Yasuhito would be even better: such had proved to be the case with the old Moguls and the Marathas in India with other European East India Companies. For that matter, while he might root for the southern court, Benyovsky saw no reason not to prolong the war and fill the Company’s coffers with Tokugawa’s gold as well.

However, perhaps the most significant of the RPLC’s interventions was masterminded by Ulrich von Münchhausen. Ever since the idea of the samurai code (busydo[12]) had become the norm in Japan, it had faced a problem. Samurai were supposed to be sworn to the death to a master, so what should they do if that master died? The code stated bluntly that they were meant to commit ritual suicide (Kharakyry[13]) but many balked from this, and the result was a great number of wandering warriors without masters, viewed as shamed by the majority of the populace. These were the original ronin, the old meaning of the word referring to such a shamed warrior without a master.[14] With the rise of the Tokugawa their numbers had proliferated thanks to the Shoguns confiscating various Hans during their ascendancy, with the result that ronin had been involved in some of the uprisings of the 1650s. This had forced even the intransigent Tokugawa to rethink their policies, and the official position of ronin had been somewhat relaxed, allowing samurai to transfer their allegiance to a new daimyo.

However, this state of affairs altered once more in 1782 as part of far-reaching reforms enacted by the Emperor Tenmei on his accession to the Chrysanthemum Throne. Tenmei was acutely aware that the 1770s had seen a series of disasters such as tsunamis and earthquakes that had both wrecked the Japanese economy and threatened public faith in the political system.[15] Therefore he, or rather the Shogun in his name, had implemented a series of ‘back to basics’ policy moves designed more to instil the idea that they were returning to a fabled golden age rather than actually solve the economic issues. Among these were several attempts to appeal to a popular fundamentalist interpretation of busydo, including a more literalist treatment of ronin. Once more their position was downgraded, and while a samurai might still transfer his loyalty to his daimyo’s successor, that was the only such move allowed and ultimately made them hostage to the whims of the Shogun: Tokugawa could easily simply refuse to accept homage from the new daimyo and then invoke toritsubushi on the Han, which would render all the loyal samurai as shamed ronin. This move was naturally unpopular with many, though few would come out and say it lest they be accused of failing to live up to the busydo code.

Still, the new stance would still have been workable if circumstances were normal – but they were anything but. With the mass issues of toritsubushi on both sides about practically every Han, it now became a matter of opinion whether a samurai had a master or not, and therefore whether he was shamed. Busydo was based on the idea that honour given to the Emperor and Shogun – and therefore certainly their identities – was absolute, which had certainly seemed a reasonable assumption at the time, but… The result was a vast army of angry ronin who weren’t even certain if they were ronin, but few were willing to take them on lest the wrong side win. Many resorted to the old ronin practice of forming bands that raided the countryside, and proved quite successful as most of the Han armies were rallying to their respective leader and left the Han domains themselves mostly unguarded.

But soon the term ‘army’ was not metaphorical. Münchhausen, advised by Daikokuya and Sugimura Goro, realised such a body of leaderless men would be a fine resource and the Company began reaching out to them under the slogan ‘a new way of the warrior, a new honour’. Although the old Japanese, being reared in a xenophobic environment, were not very open by nature to such foreign ideals, the ronin were desperate and recruitment was aided by the fact that many Japanese from Matsumae Han had been working with the Russians for some years already. Not always without rancour, but nonetheless demonstrating that simply working with ‘barbarians’ would not cause one to spontaneously catch fire as half the Tokugawa propaganda would have them believe. Besides, many of the ronin had had enough of the Tenmei stark interpretation of busydo, which being young men was the only one they knew. Into this vacuum, aided by his Japanese assistants, Münchhausen introduced new ideas which he had printed and distributed as a pamphlet: they focused on the idea that a warrior’s honour was personal, not reflected in how others viewed the warrior. He used many examples taken from his father’s own (questionable) tales of warfare, and many claim that it was the old Baron Karl’s entertaining adventures that first popularised the pamphlets and made audiences more receptive to the ideas surrounding them. Münchhausen argued that a warrior might perform actions that a casual observer might consider to be dishonourable but were in fact in accordance with his code, using the example of cutting down an unarmed old man in cold blood, before then telling the story again from the old man’s point of view and revealing that he was a sadistic murderer who had poisoned the well of the warrior’s village years before and was on the way to do it again to another village. This was only one of the many such parables he used, proving to be a match for his father in storytelling, and though the idea of ‘internal honour’ was so alien to the Japanese mentality, it nonetheless spread widely. Besides, many of the ronin could care less for Münchhausen’s ideas but he offered a place in a professional fighting force that removed them from their wretched existence, and that was enough.

Thus the word ‘ronin’ took on its modern term as the Yapontsi equivalent of ‘sepoy’ in India or ‘jagun’ in Guinea, a native soldier working for a European trading company. Münchhausen and other Russian and Lithuanian officers worked hard to overcome the tactical mindset that had been hammered into the ronin, the samurai ideal that favoured single combat and the sword and scorned fighting in the line and ranged weapons as dishonourable: but these were men still young and flexible, and many of them were survivors in armies that had been defeated early in the conflict. They knew all too well that this was real war, not the artificial state of Sakoku in which men had the leisure to fight one-on-one with weapons chosen for their poetic aesthetics. This was a war of survival, and though they still fought with their honour, it would be honour of a different kind, honour which did not shy away from the musket and the column. Not all the transfer of knowledge was one-way. Münchhausen was impressed with the Japanese’s swordplay and cavalry skills, and in European warfare of the early 19th century swords were a weapon that might be secondary but were certainly not obsolete. Japanese swords, properly called katana but often known in Europe as yaponski sablya, soon became popular conversation pieces for the intelligentsia of Moscow and St Petersburg.[16]

Other companies were also formed from Japanese commoners displaced by the fighting, generally more willing to serve under white officers. These included the Burakumin or untouchables, associated with tainted occupations such as slaughtering animals and undertaking, as well as peasants whose usual role was to work the rice paddies and others across the social spectrum. This created problems for the RPLC, as none of these groups would serve with each other, the samurai-derived ronin certainly would not be considered on the same level as the lower classes (indeed, formerly it had been perfectly legal for any samurai to execute on a whim any peasant he happened to feel offended by) and none would serve with the Aynyu. The result was a careful system of segregated companies possibly inspired by French practices in India. Ironically, history has grouped all of them vaguely under the name ronin, reflecting the mixing that came later on.

The ronin companies (in the modern sense of the word) answered directly to Benyovsky and Münchhausen, and hired out their services to daimyos rather than pledging allegiance to them. This new and (to many) unpleasant means of warfare rocked the social structure of old Japan even taking into account the existing shudders of the civil war, but nonetheless the ronin found it easy to find employment. Many daimyos employed them to wipe out the wild ronin bands still infesting their own Hans: while sometimes indeed this occurred, often the ronin were able to convince their wild comrades to join them. The result was that by 1809 the RPLC had access to a rather large army of ronin, though they were hampered by the fact that large parts of said army refused to be seen on the same battlefield as other parts. As a natural consequence of this – and Tokugawa’s fury over the existence of the bands and refusal to negotiate with the Russians – the ronin ended up in effective control of several of the northern leaderless Hans, particularly those just across the Tsugaru Strait from Edzo, such as Hirosaki and Kuroishi. Tokugawa could not afford to send any of his men to tackle such insolence at present, not when the two large and vaguely organised patched-together armies of the two sides were clashing on a broad front across the middle of Niphon, the battle lines now having been more or less drawn. Tokugawa in the north with his puppet emperor Kojimo possessed a numerical advantage in men, perhaps seven to five, but Yasuhito had Dutch aid and the small but useful naval forces possessed by Satsuma, which enabled him to land small parties of men in the north and raid Tokugawa’s undefended coastal cities, forcing Tokugawa to split his forces. The main object of the conflict for the present remained the cities of Yoshino and Nara (which were tenryo land and ruled directly by the Shogun, not part of a Han). Nara was one of the ancient capitals of Japan and, more importantly from Yasuhito’s perspective, Yoshino had been the capital used by the southern court in the earlier Northern and Southern Courts divided period, five centuries before, to which the current civil war was inevitably compared. And the southern court had eventually won. The symbolism of possessing the city was obvious, and thus while the war petered out into scattered skirmishes elsewhere along the front, the battle for Yoshino became a meat grinder and defined the war.

The result of this was that, by 1810, Japan had almost resigned itself to division, though the war would drag on for another decade on and off before the death of Tokugawa Iemochi would mean a de facto ceasfire. This in turn meant that the RPLC was firmly ensconsed and its near-direct control of northern Niphon meant its core holdings in Edzo were definitely safe. However, by this point the Company had bigger problems: Lebedev’s arrest and death and the Three Emperors’ War over the water. The Company men in the Amur region were under the command of Adam Laxman, the Finn who had been one of the first to explore Japanese waters under Russian auspices. Laxman had managed them well through the early years of the war, as the two Qing Chinese claimants battered at each other and could spare little attention for the north, but in response to the crisis Ivan Potemkin in Yakutsk had decided to impose more direct control and went to the Amur with his own troops under the command of the exiled General Sergei Saltykov, former Potemkinite commander in the Russian Civil War. The Russians had been deeply involved in the Coreans’ declaration of war in 1808 which had further served to buy them time, but though King Gwangjong’s men fought valiantly they were nonetheless severely outnumbered by the Yenzhang Emperor’s troops. At first Yenzhang could spare little of his attention for that front thanks to the fact that most of his armies were engaged in facing his brother’s, but he nonetheless seethed at Gwangjong’s impudence. He could not afford to let the Coreans continue audaciously taking Manchurian towns and then renaming them according to Gwangjong’s irredentist claims. It gibed with his own Manchu-golden-age ideals, both personally and as an affront to the image he projected. Therefore at the first opportunity, Corea must be crushed, forced back into its proper vassal position, and then have its own armies appropriated and thrown into the battles raging in Shandong province. To Yenzhang this was the perfect solution, as even if Corea remained rebellious he would force its armies to die weakening his brother, meaning he could leave his northern border undefended once again for the moment.

All Yenzhang lacked was an opportunity, something that would force his brother Chongqian to hesitate in the south and give him time to redeploy his own troops against Corea. He found this in General Sun’s Great Eastern March: by raiding Chongqian’s southern provinces, the Yenzhang-loyal general would force Chongqian to slacken off in Shandong and assemble an army to hunt Sun’s troops. This would provide the time Yenzhang needed to crush Corea before turning around again to finally defeat Chongqian.

It did not turn out like that, of course, for several reasons. Firstly, Chongqian did not react as strongly as Yenzhang had hoped, only sending troops once Sun’s rampages became uncomfortably close with their attack on Wuchang. Secondly, Corea was not such an easy nut to crack as Yenzhang had hoped. When he hurled his armies and his favourite general, Yu Wangshan, against the Corean troops, they slowed their advance and halted it but could not drive it back. In despair at this and the fact that his brother’s troops were still advancing, Yenzhang recalled Yu and the attempt at retaking Corea ground to a halt. In fairness to Yenzhang, there was something he could not have taken into account. Beginning with the Battle of Niuzhuang[17] in December 1810, a new force fought alongside the Coreans as they once more began to advance into Yenzhang’s territory: a Russian force, consisting not only of Russian troops and those drawn from its allies and subjects such as the Lithuanians and Yakuts, but also a great many Japanese ronin who had agreed to travel over the water now that their own civil war, winding down, had fewer offers of employment for mercenaries. The Russians, quite by happenstance it seems, had found a powerful weapon: the Japanese were considered notorious pirates in China, though they had not been active for many years thanks to the Sakoku policy – but this only made them more terrifying in the popular imagination, bogeymen used to scare children, untempered by real experience. Stories abound, perhaps exaggerated, of Chinese armies who simply fled or surrendered on hearing the Russians had Japanese soldiers.

The other side of the coin was that the Coreans defined their national character by wars against the Japanese and were aghast at the Russians’ use of them, but Gwangjong and his ministers were astute enough to know that their audacious attack on Manchuria needed all the help it could get. In a treaty negotiated by Benyovsky and Potemkin for the Russians and Gwangjong’s ministers (many of whom were associated with the Neo-Confucian movement), the two sides agreed to divide Manchuria, with the Russians gaining everything north of the Amur/Songhua river system and the Coreans gaining the south; this deprived the Russians of a southern port, but Benyovsky pointed out that they now had access to ports in Edzo (and new ones could be built) and there was the possibility of leasing one from the Coreans after Gwangjong’s irredentist fervour had died down. As for the fate of the interior of Manchuria, well, that depended on the fortune of war…

And of course it was against a Russian-Corean force that July 1813 that Yenzhang’s leadership finally came to an end. The Second Battle of Ningyuan was so named for a reason, even though in reality naming it after the nearby town of Xingcheng would be more logical. The first battle, in 1626, was one of the last hurrahs of the native Ming dynasty against the Manchu conquerors under Nurhaci, and now it lent its name to another battle in which the man who idolised Nurhaci was at last toppled. Precisely what occurred is uncertain. At the time of the battle, Beijing was falling to Chongqian’s armies under General Liang, yet Yenzhang and General Yu were in the north once more, being overwhelmed on all sides, having gambled that Chongqian must surely respond to the uprising in the south that would become the Feng dynasty, yet having underestimated his brother’s single-mindedness. In any case the remnant of Yenzhang’s armies – still formidable, even with defections as Chongqian’s victory became assured – faced a vast Russian army, for the Great Eastern Adventurers of General Kuleshov had finally arrived, backed by smaller forces from the armies he had already faced: the Coreans and the RPLC. Thanks to the large sizes of the Chinese armies fighting in the war, this was the first time that Yenzhang found himself outnumbered by a northern force. Nonetheless the battle could have been winnable, but the Emperor was wounded – the conventional story states that it was by a Ronin sharpshooter with a Lithuanian rifle, quite the opposite of conventional busydo – and the resulting uncertainty in the troops meant the army lost all morale. General Yu’s leadership prevented a complete collapse and rout but he led the army westward, knowing the position was lost in the north but intending to fight on from the western provinces, which generally supported Yenzhang thanks to Chongqian’s disdain for the frontier.

What happened next remains uncertain. Yenzhang may have died right there on the battlefield, or from the rapid retreat, or from his wound festering over time: that remains unclear. An outside possibility is that what Yu claimed was actually true, that the Emperor lived on, though now preferring never to leave his covered jiao.[18] Two years later, after Yu had established the exilic capital at Yunnanfu[19] in the southwest, it was claimed that Yenzhang had fathered a son and proclaimed him his heir. Six months after that, Yenzhang apparently finally died and was buried with as much honour as the pissant exiles could manage – though strangely at no point in all this was he ever visible to the public eye. When the boy did grow up, many noted – though few dared mention – how he bore more of a resemblance to Yu Wangshan than the Yenzhang Emperor…





[1] I.e., Japanese. The term ‘Japanese’ does exist in LTTW and would be recognised but is considered an archaicism, like someone in the present of OTL referring to Thailand as ‘Siam’.

[2] OTL’s Sea of Japan.

[3] In OTL at this point the Daimyo was Shimazu Narioki, but by this point the butterflies genetic and otherwise mean that the man in question shares little with the OTL figure, and for example is a few years younger.

[4] It’s disputed even in OTL, so imagine how much more it is in LTTW thanks to a combination of records being destroyed and any archaeological analysis being politicised to reflect a pro-Aynyu point of view…

[5] Occasionally one sees the different spellings, as here with gaidzin for gaijin, which reflects the fact that in TTL these words were transliterated into English via the Russian Cyrillic alphabet.

[6] Luddism.

[7] This sentence is a combination of exaggeration and outright lies – see Nuttall’s disclaimer.

[8] Arguably the same applies to the Coreans, of course, but the writer would be careful not to say so.

[9] Mostly nonsense, but by the point the book was published most people do genuinely believe the Yapontsi, or rather the ‘old Japanese’, to be a people intrinsically incapable of adapting to change – a far cry from views of them in OTL.

[10] This sort of fanatical devotion to an ideological, theory-based political position in the face of reality is, of course, quite unlike anything you might see in the contemporary politics of OTL…

[11] The Lords Seventeen (Heeren XVII) were the governing board of the Dutch East India Company, although by this point most of the power was delegated to the Governor-General.

[12] Bushido in OTL, another example of Russian transliteration creeping in.

[13] Russified form of hara-kiri, the old name in the West for the practice (and still used in OTL Russia) whereas nowadays it is more commonly known as seppuku.

[14] Which is what it still means in OTL. In fact even earlier the term ronin referred to serfs who had fled their master’s land (hence originally being particularly insulting when applied to upper-class samurai).

[15] The disasters are OTL, though the response isn’t.

[16] ‘Katana’ is actually just the Japanese word for any sword, but in TTL as in OTL it has come to refer specifically to Japanese sabres.

[17] Modern OTL Yingkou.

[18] Sedan chair.

[19] Modern OTL Kunming.

Part #97: The Root of All Evil

“Currency is...a shared delusion in the minds of all men, a necessary delusion if civilised society were not to fall...yet so many lives, so many cities and kingdoms and nations, ultimately depend on hoping that no man ever stops to wonder why he values discs of a shiny yellow metal so highly...”

- Giovanni Tressino, writing in 1818; later quoted by Manfred Kugelheim in an 1840 speech​

*

From – “An Economic History of the World, 1700-1900” by Arnold J. Walborough, New York Institute of Monetary Forecasting (1958):

The dawn of the nineteenth century saw two events which, in combination, transformed the global economy – indeed, made the economy more truly global than it had ever known. The first, most obviously perhaps, was the Jacobin Wars. The terrible conflict redrew the map of Europe both literally and figuratively, toppling whole kingdoms, extinguishing royal families, rewarding those who learned to ride the wave like a Gavajian crestman.[1] From a monetary standpoint it also had an effect on European economies more profound even than the Wars of Supremacy that had emptied France’s treasury and driven her to revolution in the first place. The very fact that France was running on unloaded,[2] led by two successive fanatical regimes that believed that they could ordain events without any regard for logistics or economics, meant that the entire continental system was turned upside down. Germany suffered terribly from the ravages of the Jacobin armies across her lands, with the accompanying destruction of the mines and manufacturing towns that gave her her wealth. Italy shared such misery to a lesser extent, and while Spain escaped most such vindictive and arguably deliberate damage, she nonetheless was hamstrung in the Watchful Peace by being divided and essentially ruled by two other powers which deliberately wanted to keep her weak and dependent on them, and did not particularly desire an economic recovery. Most importantly of all, the fact that her American empire was now a separate and hostile entity meant that the regular flow of treasure fleets from the New World dried up, meaning that even if Spain had remained intact, the way her economy had worked for three centuries had been abruptly obsoleted.

Yet as Anglophones the greatest effect of the wars that springs to mind is of course the invasion of England and the ensuing Marleburgensian period. Though England suffered the Jacobin presence for far less time than her continental counterparts (as citizens of said counterparts were apt to remind her in later times), she had been attacked by the monstrous Modigliani, who used terror as a deliberate weapon. What the French could not hold, they destroyed. England lost her capital and chief port in the Second Fire of London, along with the gold reserves of the Bank of England which had mostly been cast into the Thames when the French realised they would be unable to hold the city or evacuate. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Churchill’s men found it rather easy to gain volunteers to clear the Thames of the sunken ships that blocked the Pool of London; most of them surreptitiously spent half the time dredging the river looking for the gold instead, but little was recovered (although their efforts did produce numerous archaeological artefacts which formed the core of the new collection of the resurrected British Museum).

The resulting collapse of the British economy – even collapse is too mild a term, perhaps ‘suddenly vanishing from the face of the earth’ would be more appropriate – sent shockwaves across the world and sent the economies of Britain’s chief trading partners in Europe (the Scandinavian kingdoms, the Low Countries, and the Mediterranean states) into recession. Paradoxically, in the immediate aftermath of the Congress of Copenhagen when peace had broken out, many of those countries embarked on huge military projects just to create employment for the jobless mobs roaming the streets of their cities. A popular object of such moves was, naturally, the adoption of steam engines for both land and sea warfare, as this had proven so decisive in the wars. This proliferation also meant that the use of steam vehicles for civilian purposes (admittedly, only very rich civilians to begin with) accelerated in turn.

France was arguably in the same position as Britain, yet benefited that her own economy had essentially been cast aside and defaulted on with the Revolution in 1794, which meant she had had nearly two decades to reorganise her own economy to deal with the situation. The Republic had run austerely on the plunder of la maraude for years, hampered by the fact that few countries were willing to trade with her, while Royal France had benefited from the continuous influx of trade goods from the French East India Company. While the stipulations of the Congress of Copenhagen meant that a tithe of these riches were diverted to Britain in reparations - a situation which arguably benefited Britain more than actually taking the French colonies by force as she had threatened, not entirely credibly, to do – the riches of the Indies nonetheless helped lift the restored kingdom out of the poverty of the Revolutionary days and doubtless cemented the popularity of the monarchy.

But then France was hardly alone in being strengthened by her trade with the mystic East. The second of the two events which rocked the early nineteenth century was the opening of the Orient to trade for the first time, something which Europeans had been attempting since Columbus’ time (indeed, Columbus had been part of such attempts, and had blundered into America quite by accident). A series of events caused by blundering Russians and the filmishly implausible adventures of Moritz Benyovsky meant that China and Yapon were both shattered, while Corea had been strengthened and was cautiously open to limited trade. In the south of China, the burgeoning Feng Dynasty had come about through European assistance and repaid that by opening itself to trade, something that benefited the cash-strapped coffers of the still very informal empire as much as it did the Europeans, no matter how counter it was to the usual Confucian protectionist sensibilities of the East. The Dutch and Portuguese continued to struggle over the Nusantara, but elsewhere European trade companies began to form accords such as the East Indian Board and the Phoenix Men.[3] There was a general, informal, quiet gentleman’s agreement that everyone needed to fund the reconstruction of their home countries through trade, and to actively compete or stir up native enemies against each other that might wreck the whole system was simply not worth the risk. There was another informal understanding that if anyone did try it, the other companies would gang up on them and shut them out (as indeed happened with the Dutch in India).[4]

Because of this new state of harmony, for the first time in decades, convoys of East Indiamen flowed in peace from China and India to the Western world, free of harassment by hostile men-o’-war. Of European origin, at least. Piracy remained a problem, and in 1817 the Treaty of Milan established an International Counter-Piracy Agency (ICPA), a joint council based in the city of Genoa which would carry representation from all concerned naval powers. By mutual agreement the ICPA would then second vessels from different navies and assemble mixed fleets to suppress pirates, the combined force being a guarantor that no one nation could then unilaterally seize the pirates’ former base as a colony.[5] While the results of this were predictably often difficult due to language problems, divergent interests and lingering dislikes over the late wars, it proved more important when anti-piracy operations were extended from their original intended field – the Mediterranean, against the Barbary pirates – to a worldwide agency, tackling pirate groups from the East Indies. In 1821 an ICPA task force consisting of Danish, Italian and Russian ships (the chosen national contributors tended to be deliberately sent to areas where their home nations had no trade interests to avoid a conflict of interest) pursued a group of Malay pirates into the Gulf of Siam and blundered into a conflict with the small naval forces of the Siamese Empire (which, ironically, had mainly had an anti-pirate role themselves). A minor war was fought over the next two years before the establishment of full diplomatic relations led to peace and an agreement that the Thais and their allies[6] would police their own waters and the ICPA would not violate them. Naturally, this has been rather twisted by the Siamese into a national story of how they heroically fought off all the nations of the West all at once, which is technically correct, even if each nation only sent one or two ships. The conflict also led to a considerable expansion in Siamese shipbuilding, though this had already picked up due to the enemy Burmans of Ava starting to operate a fleet.[7]

The ICPA’s fierce actions against the Barbary pirates, such as the bombardment and burning of Algiers by a joint Neapolitan-French force in 1818, served to draw protest from the Ottoman Empire which was at least the nominal suzerain of the princes of the Barbary States. However by that point the Empire was on the brink of its Time of Troubles and the ICPA was never threatened with anything more cutting than a strongly worded note. At the same time the ICPA served to resolve a minor diplomatic crisis in the Mediterranean: Great Britain had occupied Malta during the Jacobin Wars at the same time as Corsica, seizing the opportunity to supposedly ‘defend these isles from Republican aggression’. While that was certainly true for Corsica and the Corsican people welcomed the English presence, the Maltese saw this as simply an excuse for an invasion to take their strategically located islands. The British did maintain the Knights of St John as the rulers of Malta and merely made them a protectorate, but nonetheless kept them on a short lead and this hamstrung the Knights as an anti-piracy force in the Mediterranean, leading to an explosion in Barbary activity.[8] Other nations were naturally angry with the British for this. The ICPA managed to find a compromise solution, making Malta its main forward base and thus effectively neutralising and internationalising the islands while at the same time they remained a nominal British protectorate, saving British face.

...

The deaths of two monarchs had important ramifications for the East India trade. King Johannes II and IV of Denmark-Sweden passed away in 1813 at the age of sixty-three, having presided over the restoration of a Scandinavian union and the expansion of Danish control into northern Germany. He was survived by his widow the Queen, Mildred of Great Britain, who had used her influence at court to help bring Denmark into the war against Lisieux towards the end and also to try and support Britain in her recovery. Her son the new King, who became Valdemar V and II, informed his mother that that keyed well with his own policy ideas, but it would have to be a two-way trade. Valdemar had inherited a good position in Europe from his father, but disagreed with his grandfather Christian VII’s belief that overseas colonies were an unnecessary extravagance and only invited conflicts. The Danish Asiatic Company had been allowed to dwindle under the reigns of Christian and Johannes, and were now the smallest of the various European trading companies in the East. Valdemar wanted to benefit from the opening of Eastern trade that was just starting to go to bat[9] as he began his reign. To do this, he used his contacts with Great Britain through his mother (the great-aunt of the boy king Frederick II) to establish an agreement that the British East India Company would provide assistance to the Danes in the East in exchange for Denmark providing tax breaks to Britons attempting to re-establish their country’s home trade in European waters. It helped that the Danes now controlled much of the old Hanseatic League which would give the English a gateway to broader continental trade.

The Churchill regime agreed to this, and Valdemar had the Danish Asiatic Company amalgamated with the Swedish East India Company, which had been attempting to trade with the East without establishing many permanent trade outposts for a century.[10] This approach meant that they had lost a disproportionate number of ships compared to other companies. Valdemar’s approach meant that the Swedes’ ships augmented the flagging Danish trade fleet while the Swedes could now use the Danes’ own outposts in Christiansnagore,[11] Tranquebar[12] and Calicut. As part of the agreement with Britain, the Danish factory at Balasore was also turned over to the BEIC.

The rejuvenated joint Company – known simply as the Danish Asiatic Company until the Arandite reforms of the Popular Wars – also expanded further east, establishing a strong interest in Feng China. The actions of the valiant Danish captain Arne Rasmussen in the taking of Hainan from the pro-Qing warlord Jiang Xiameng helped create a name for the Company at the table of the Phoenix Men, and when the Rogue Isles were divided into European trade bases at the Treaty of Tayoan,[13] half of Hainan went to Denmark.

However, there was no getting away from the fact that rounding the Cape of Good Hope was a daunting proposition for any nation engaging in trade with the East, and while some preferred to instead round the Horn and cross the Pacific, the African route remained the primary one. Most European trading nations began establishing new settlements around southern Africa to help resupply their ships enroute and provide ports in a storm: the fact that half of them were still indulging in the slave trade doubtless also helped. Some countries already had suitable outposts: the Dutch had the Cape Colony, of course, over which the Dutch East India Company assumed more direct control after the failed rebellion of Hermanus Potgieter’s Boers – driving many of his former supporters into a northern voyage (“trek”) into the interior to establish a new free settlement. Portugal had Angola and Mozambique, and under the new King John (João) VI (the second of the new monarchs who had a great effect upon Eastern trade) began to explore further into their interior. Britain had established her own outpost at Natal, which had strong links with the British East India Company’s holdings in India proper and a large percentage of its population consisted of Bengalis who had come over to work as labourers. France lacked any continental possessions, but the Mascarene Islands[14] served equally well in their stead.

As more countries expanded their trade, new outposts sprung up. The Russian explorer Vladimir Lisyansky[15] rediscovered in 1819 a suitable location for a port in the otherwise barren coast of southwestern Africa, a bay which the fifteenth-century Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias had called “O Golfo de Santa Maria da Conceição”.[16] As this was little known, Lisyansky renamed the area Zaliv Pavlovka (the Gulf of Paul) after the Tsar. In the end the Russian government was too publicly committed to the overland route to the east to make establishing an outpost politically possible, but as with Navarre worked through their Lithuanian allies. The hastily founded Grand Ducal Lithuanian African Company, a subsidiary of the RLPC, instead established the town of Pavlovsk-na-Baravakhul (Paul’s Town on the Bravahul[17]) which proved to be a useful stopover point for Russian and Lithuanian ships, but also soon developed a reputation as a hellish outpost at the end of the world. Suffice to say that now that Siberia was a relatively populous and flourishing part of the Empire, the Tsar now had a new place to send undesirables...

King Valdemar of Denmark-Sweden saw that Denmark required her own outpost to facilitate her increased Eastern trade, and the Danish explorer and adventurer Malthe Conrad Bruun[18] was placed in charge of the project. In 1820, after a voyage of discovery around the Cape, Bruun presented his findings to the court and recommended the establishment of a settlement on the island of Madagascar, which had had limited European contact for years (mostly from the French, who had attempted to set up several colonies over the years but never seen sufficient return on trade versus problems to maintain them). While previous colonists such as the French and the former Pirate Utopia of Libertalia had seen trouble with warfare from the native tribes, Bruun reported that the tribes appeared to have exhausted themselves for the moment from overly violent internecine warfare – “not unlike ourselves,” he commented whimsically in his report. To that end, and given that the Danes’ primary aim was a stopover point rather than a trade outpost, he recommended the Danes repair the old French outpost at Fort Dauphin[19] and use it for that purpose.

After some consideration, the King’s council and the Diet of Denmark agreed to the plan. The Swedish Riksdag felt aggrieved that it had not been consulted, considering most of the ships and men Bruun would be using for his colonisation plan were of Swedish origin. This was only one of the many aggrievances that would contribute to the events that hit Scandinavia during the Popular Wars. The plan went ahead and, despite many setbacks, the fort was established by 1823 and renamed Johanneshavn after the king’s father. It was a drain on Danish finances as the natives proved to be not quite as quiescent as Bruun had optimistically hoped, but it did help the Danish Asiatic Company in its rejuvenated quest for eastern trade.

...

At the same time as the European powers became invested in the East via the African route, the powers of America – though not so hurt in the wars that they urgently required the trade funds – began to look to the west. The Empire of North America mostly worked with its British partners in India and especially China, where the Americans enjoyed an important position due to being the source of the Appalachian ginseng that was a vital trade good in China. The Empire of New Spain was rebuffed from its early attempts after being defeated by the Portuguese and Castilians in the Philippine War, and instead began to back the Dutch against the Portuguese in exchange for a cut of the Dutch profits. It found itself a strange bedfellow with its enemy the United Provinces of South America, which was equally opposed to the Portuguese thanks to their stab in the back during the Third Platinean War and persisting land disputes with Portuguese Brazil, which would contribute to later events.

Furthermore, the Dutch were also supported by their allies to the south, the Flemings; Charles Theodore II resurrected the former Ostend Company, a Flemish trading venture that had been briefly instituted when the region was under Austrian rule, and the new company’s men – drawn from Charles Theodore’s possessions in Germany as well as old Flanders – helped expand Dutch control across the Nusantara by working with the VOC. It was in Indochina, however, that the Flemings decided to become rather foolhardy, though the impacts of that would not make themselves clear for some time to come.

The Meridians, however, also explored the South Seas more thoroughly with their own navy as they slowly rebuilt from the disasters of the Third Platinean War, helped by having the naval-sympathetic General Pichegru who was kicked upstairs to be Head of the Fuerzas Armadas during the presidency of José Jaime Carriego López. This meant that as the Meridians explored the South Sea islands, they became the second Western power, after the French, to land in Autiaraux and engage in trade with the Mauré...










[1] I.e., a Hawaiian surfer. The term ‘Hawaii’ is in use together with the Russified form ‘Gavaji’ or ‘Gavayi’ in TTL, and which one is used depends on the political affiliations of the writer and whether he is bothering to use terms more popular at different times when writing about the past or not.

[2] We would say ‘running on empty’, the term in TTL reflects the early predominance of solid fuel in vehicles.

[3] This is either an inappropriate choice of words on the part of the author or else a misunderstanding on his part – the Phoenix Men refers to the cabal that launched the Feng dynasty and consisted of both Chinese and European traders. If anything, it would refer more to the Chinese than the Europeans, and certainly it wasn’t a union only of European traders as he appears to suggest.

[4] Again this is at best an oversimplification – while the Dutch were unpopular with the other trading companies in India for a perceived interventionist streak (having nothing to lose as they had only a few minor trading posts in continental India, as opposed to their possession of Ceylon) they were excluded before the Indian Board was set up, not after it had been established.

[5] The ICPA is essentially a more ambitious and organised form of the agreements in OTL that existed in informal anti-pirate coalitions both in the Barbary Wars of the late 18th century and later in the form of resolutions at the Congress of Vienna and the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle after the Napoleonic Wars.

[6] The terms ‘Siamese’ and ‘Thai’ are no longer synonymous in TTL due to a drift in meaning. Thais, from Ayutthaya, are only the biggest and most important part of the multiracial Empire of Siam. Again, the author is being anachronistic here, though.

[7] In OTL at this point the Burmans operated a small fleet of ships mainly for transporting troops up and down the Irrawaddy River; in TTL they instead have acquired a small blue-water navy via their contacts with the British East India Company (the Irrawaddy Delta remains under the control of independent Pegu).

[8] In OTL this also happened due to Napoleon’s conquest of the islands (which were later conquered in turn by Britain).

[9] We would say ‘to kick off’.

[10] In OTL the Swedish East India Company finally became defunct in 1813.

[11] Modern OTL Serampore. In OTL it was named ‘Frederiksnagore’ after Frederick V, who died young in OTL and the throne instead passed to his brother Christian VII.

[12] Modern OTL Tharangambadi.

[13] Modern OTL Tainan, Taiwan.

[14] The Mascarene Islands consist chiefly of Île de France and Île Bourbon (modern OTL Mauritius and Réunion respectively).

[15] An ATL cousin of OTL’s Yuri Lisyansky, a Ukrainian-Russian explorer who was part of the first Russian expedition to circumnavigate the world in 1803-6, and defeated the Tlingit Indians at the Battle of Sitka in 1804. In TTL the Tlingit have not turned on the Aleksandr Baranov’s Russian colony in Alyeska (yet) due to the increased number of Russians present thanks to the investment in the RLPC.

[16] Modern OTL Walvis Bay.

[17] The Bravahul is the only river in modern Namibia noted on 18th century maps, and appears to be identified with the modern-named Kuiseb River which flows into Walvis Bay.

[18] In OTL Bruun ran afoul of new strict censorship laws in 1799 and fled to France, where he became a famous geographer and journalist under the Frenchified name Conrad Malte-Brun. In TTL he has become an active explorer rather than solely a geographer and scientist and remains on good terms with the Danish crown.

[19] Modern OTL Tôlanaro. Madagascar in TTL is considerably worse off than OTL because Moric Benyovsky (or as he is generally spelled in OTL, Móric Benyovszky) never came there and united the island. The great Madagascan native king who built upon Benyovsky’s efforts to establish a united kingdom, Andrianampoinimerina, has also been butterflied away (or more probably died young, but it’s impossible to say), and the result is that the tribes have just exhausted themselves in a round of internecine warfare).

Part #98: Lighting the Fuse

Note from Capt. Christopher Nuttall.

My apologies for the delay in our last transmission, sir. Events have been...shall we say, hectic. My addendum containing further details shall follow the transmission of this segment of our research.[1] Now we have fully shifted working operations to our new site, hopefully further delays should be kept to a minimum.

The text follows this message.


*

“The Whig historians of the last two centuries have perpetuated a view of history which can be compared to an ancient Mauré canoe voyaging across the South Sea by navigating from one island to the next, with each island being a Historical Event, each native chief ruling over it being a Great Man...

...no, on reflection, for a Mauré canoe could nonetheless choose which island to navigate to. No, the Whiggish history suggests a single straight road in which the mobile[2] of the world travels, occasionally being reloaded by black-faced Great Men in their coveralls, and if any one of these reloadings – these Historical Events – fails to happen, then the engine will sputter and the mobile will crash. A Whig historian can seem as deterministic as a devout Calvinist...

...in truth it is provable that history is not pre-set on such a path. We might take one of the Whigs’ Great Men, Frederick Paley, and presuppose that without such a man the Principle of Earthly Correction would never have rationalised evolution. Yet to do so is to ignore the fact that the French naturalist Étienne Dutourd concocted an almost identical hypothesis mere months behind Paley, and entirely coincidentally. If Paley had not lived to make his theory, another would have done. But perhaps in a different manner, and the world is not restricted to any such singular, dull path. No, our mobile does not stand upon a road, but in the middle of a vast park, many parts of it unkempt and mysterious, some swampy and boggy that threaten to draw the mobile down into their cold embrace, others bright and sunny and uplifting. And it is entirely our choice which way it travels, which places it visits. And there is no need for reloading. Regardless of what we do, that mobile will keep rolling along...

– Ezra Theodore Sprague, A Scientific Manifesto for Speculative Romances (1940)​

*

From - "The Man With Three Names - A Life and Times of Napoleone Buonaparte" (Dr Henri Pelletier, University of Nantes Press, 1962) :

To understand the France in which Leo Bone, or rather “Napoleon Bonaparte” made the latter part of his career, one must realise that the supposed European peace was in reality anything but. Appearances might deceive the casual observer, but all with the most rudimentary knowledge of domestic and international politics knew that the supposed calm waters of the Watchful Peace had simply had a thin layer of oil poured on them.

And it would take just one spark to set it alight once more.

Every man (and woman) of substance in Europe knew this, and also knew that it was in no-one’s interest to disturb such a fragile peace. Governments, companies, the Church – everyone was still reeling from the shock of the French Revolution and the horrors of the Jacobin Wars, and everyone remained uncertain of where to go from here. It was not, as the ultraroyalistes in France and Francis II in Austria believed, that the Revolution could simply be squashed back into its cursed bottle, the clock of the world turned back, its bloodied page torn out of history. There could be no return to the cyclical Wars of Supremacy that had characterised the eighteenth century. Things had changed forever, and – though at first this was less obvious – not solely for the European powers. Furthermore, it was clear to all that the Jacobin Wars had not ended on an especially decisive note. Inevitably, there had been back-room deals and agreements and truces with people who the ultraroyalistes would have preferred to see ground to dust. Though the conservative powers of Europe had triumphed, even those that had been more liberal before the war drifting into that same reactionary orbit, they had failed to come up with a satisfactory answer to the questions the Revolution had posed. That meant pressure built up beneath the stifling blanket of peace that the Congress of Copenhagen had thrown down, like unto one of the steam engines whose adoption characterised the Watchful Peace,[3] and one day the whole system would inevitably burst.

Therefore many countries had governments that in less tense times would not have been tolerated by the bourgeoisie and nobility were allowed to remain in power as of sheer fear of the uncertainty that might replace them. Nations such as Denmark and Portugal, which had overseen liberalising measures in the previous century, now saw their parliamentary assemblies calcifying into paralysis, their members leery of disturbing the status quo. France was an exception to this. Louis XVII’s Grande-Parlement – still located in Nantes, as indeed was the King as often as possible (few men loved the grey utilitarian spiderweb that was the Paris that Jean de Lisieux had built) – was proving to be a great success, if a somewhat chaotic one. Louis’ great achievement had been to engage with the concerns that had provoked the Revolution while rejecting the monsters it had produced. This may seem rather obvious in retrospect, but was shocking to much of Europe, especially ultraconservative states such as Austria and the Mittelbund.

The Grande-Parlement had therefore been designed to address some of the issues raised in the early days of the Revolution (it is therefore sometimes termed ‘Proto-Adamantine’ by scholars in retrospect) but in so doing reject the solutions that the Republic had devised – which had soon been simply ignored by Robespierre and Lisieux in any case. The Parlement was unicameral, integrating the former Three Estates, and was a compromise between the demands of the nobility and clergy – who were in a strong negotiating position, considering how they had stuck with Louis in Royal France through thick and thin – and of the common people, or those few of them who both still had a political thought in their heads and had somehow managed to avoid Robespierre’s chirurgeons and Lisieux’s slave labour gangs. To that end, nobles elected nobles, clergy elected clergy, and commoners elected commoners on a local constituency basis loosely inspired by Britain’s, and (although this would never be admitted, of course) organised according to the Republican Thouret département grid rather than the old provinces. This combined with the Chappe Optel system meant that France had the most functional representative system of government in the world – the UPSA’s was more liberal and egalitarian, but it took weeks to collect all the votes. Ironically, this system which Lisieux had originally designed vaguely for the purpose of elections before he unaccountably forgot all about such silly concerns now fulfilled its original purpose for Lisieux’s ultimate foe.

Once a Grande-Parlement was elected, the noble and clerical deputies were each assigned a plural vote each so that, when the numbers were counted up, the former First and Second Estates would collectively possess exactly fifty percent of the votes in the Parlement, with the more numerous commoner deputies (each having one vote each) making up the rest. This system was considered to be a reasonable balance between dictatorship by either the nobility and clergy (as had been under the ancien régime) or by the common folk (as had been under the Republic).


Although the King initially urged a government of national reconciliation, by late 1811 political parties had inevitably begun to form. The old ultraroyalistes, drawing their support mostly from the plural-voting deputies, mostly collected under the banner of the Parti royaliste or Parti blanche, so called because of their use of Bourbon white as their identifying colour. They wore the old white Bourbon cockade rather than the blue-white-yellow one that had come in with Louis’s liberal reforms to Royal France, making no secret of their desire to try and return matters to the old status quo. The undoubted leader of the Whites was Louis Henri d’Aumont, Duc d’Aumont. The Duke was a young man, only in his thirties, who had mercifully been visiting Vienna while his father Louis Alexandre had perished in the Phlogisticateur, much of his family with him, as his ancestral house, the Hôtel d'Aumont, burned. Though Louis Henri did not see it as merciful. He was understandably perpetually bitter and unforgiving about the actions of the Revolutionaries, believing (unlike many nobles) that while men such as Le Diamant had indeed had legitimate complaints about the ancien régime, the crimes of the Jacobins far outweighed such matters and the only sensible course of action was to wipe all traces of the Revolution away forever. It drove the man mad to have to work with former servants of the Republic, a madness that in other men might have led to violence or suicide, but drove the Duke instead to heights of caustic parliamentary rhetoric.

In this he was opposed by the leader of the party at the other end of the spectrum, the Parti de la Liberté or Parti rouge. This was led by Olivier Bourcier, the man who had finally decided to switch sides at the end of the war. History has generally judged Bourcier fairly, a man who believed it better to compromise his principles given the mysterious vanishing of his Administrateur than to fight futilely on to the end and only pile more casualties on both sides of the ledger, weakening France further. Better half a loaf than no bread, a somewhat liberalised France than no France at all. Nonetheless Bourcier was driven to equal fury by Aumont, who called him ‘double traitor’ for his actions and suggested he was only out for himself. In an earlier time this might have resulted in a duel, but the example of the Carolinian tended to dissuade men of such unequal social station from engaging in such pursuits. The Reds used their position in the Grande-Parlement – drawn, unsurprisingly, mostly from the single-voting common deputies – to try and fight for further reforms and liberalisations.

Into the middle of this mess were a group of deputies both noble and common who were simply tired of the constant sniping, the desires to apparently re-fight the late war, to weaken France with a violent round of civil unrest. These men drew their ideological inspiration chiefly from the liberal King himself – in such manner they were ironically more royalist than the absolutist Parti royaliste. They called themselves officially the Parti modéré but tended to be known as Les Bleus thanks to their use of blue as a colour, it being argued that this was the most prominent addition to the new national flag King Louis had introduced and therefore being emblematic of the middle-of-the-road course he desired.

Heading up this party was – who else? – the former Vicomte d’Angers, now the Duc d’Angers after his actions in the latter part of the war: Napoleon Bonaparte. With him was Paul Vicomte de Barras, his right-hand man and the Comptroller-General of Royal France. The two men had forged a strong political alliance and something of a friendship thanks to their work together in Royal France during the war, and shared a disgust with both the Jacobins they had fought and the ultraroyalistes who had hindered them with their incompetence and bleatings over principle. “It used to be enemies afore us and enemies behind,” Bonaparte once dryly remarked. “Now they instead sit on either side of us. This is called progress.”

Both Bonaparte and Barras were noblemen, but both were the type of noblemen who could command the loyalty of commoners even in post-revolutionary France, when such loyalty had to be earned instead of just expected. While Bonaparte was ultimately from an upper-class Corsican family, the way his father had fled the country for Britain and both father and son had worked their way up from humble refugees to some of the highest positions in the land was a success story that could inspire even the lowliest peasant or worker. And Bonaparte had earned his title, too, won it in battle, not inherited it from an ancestor who had won a battle five centuries before. Barras, though having been born into privilege, had nonetheless fought in India and made his money from working the Indian trade, rather than simply inheriting it. And Barras was a clever man and a skilful political operator, while Bonaparte used the same attributes that had made him such a remarkable battlefield commander: his charisma, his decisiveness, his personal connection with each and every one of his men. Between them, then, they carved out an appreciable slice of the Grande-Parlement.

The Blues were nonetheless the smallest of the three main parties. However, Bonaparte was able to remain effective prime minister by means of careful manipulation and the fact that the French were still getting used to the largely British-derived electoral system that Louis XVII had introduced. Party discipline was lax and both Bourcier and Aumont preferred to spend their time sniping at each other and sticking stubbornly to their guns than actually trying to form a government: neither the Whites nor Reds possessed enough deputies to gain a majority. Therefore, assisted by the fact that he was the King’s favourite, Bonaparte was able to tempt a certain number of deputies from both Whites and Reds to crossing the floor to his Blues to help shore up his initial position. He was still far from a majority, so adopted the position of doing deals (usually via Barras) with specific groups from either party. Many deputies were growing tired of their leaders’ inability to compromise and therefore supported Bonaparte’s Blues on a case-by-case basis. By the end of 1812, Aumont and Bourcier had realised they were becoming increasingly isolated and stopped reflexively voting against every measure Bonaparte tabled. Instead they also began engaging in the process, Bourcier even trying to build a coalition of his own and steal Bonaparte’s thunder – but it was far too late. Bonaparte was careful not to side more with one of the two other parties than the other, biasing one bill to receive Red support, the next to receive White. The result was rather schizophrenic, with the French state being successively liberalised and then illiberalised on an almost alternating basis. Nonetheless, it let Bonaparte slip through the provisions he himself wanted, boosting the powers of the Prime Minister and making the position official, as well as continuing France’s researches into steam engines so that she did not fall behind her neighbours, and rebuilding the fleet. Barras continued to speak for colonial interests and was responsible for the (initially somewhat disastrous) appointment of Thierry de Missirien as Governor-General of French India.

This system, known retrospectively as l’équilibre politique, persisted until the Great Crisis of 1814. However we should not ignore the effects of the death of Bonaparte’s father Charles in London in the winter 1813, said to be from a heart attack but in reality quite possibly instigated by the Duke of Marlborough’s PSC brawlers. Barras recorded in his diary that Bonaparte froze up in a manner he had never seen when he read the message that had come in over the Optel network straight from Calais. The man who had calmly faced down Marshal Boulanger’s line of steam artillery at the Battle of Paris – no, had led his tiny galloper guns against them to blast brazenly in their flanks! – that man was gone, for a little while at least, and in his place was the son of a father, a father who he had always measured himself against and was now gone.

According to Barras, Bonaparte’s first words after reading the message – minutes later, as he screwed up the paper in his hand, were: “I will kill that bastard. So help me God, I will kill him. No! I should assemble the fleet and sail up the Thames like old Delicious did! Give him the shock of his life, let him wake up and find his nice new shiny palace is under my guns! That’ll learn him! That’ll learn him!

In the event Barras was able to calm the Prime Minister down – just – and a month later Bonaparte attended his father’s funeral in London, restricting himself to a certain acid quip as he concluded his own memorial: “I would like to thank all you gentlemen for your attendance...along with Mr. Churchill.” This nonetheless chilled diplomatic relations between the two powers to the point that it was said that the Channel might have frozen over.[4]

While Bonaparte was out of the country, things moved apace with both Reds and Whites struggling to build temporary coalitions. Barras attempted to hold the Blues together with moderate success, but lacked Bonaparte’s charisma. He held quiet negotiations with both party leaders, and then went to King Louis to ask him to dissolve the Grande-Parlement and call a new election, hoping the result would be a more workable makeup.

The King agreed, though Barras records that even he seemed a little nervous about performing such an action with Bonaparte out of the country. “It was at this point,” Barras writes portentously, “that the scales fell from my eyes and I truly saw what my friend had become, by tireless work and the skills of a leader: the pivot, the axis about which all France rotated, who outshone the sun of Louis XIV, who stood taller than L’Aiguille itself. And I thought upon it...and I feared.”

*

...the Grande-Parlement was dissolved on April 13th, one day before Bonaparte was due to return to Paris. King Louis, feeling the need to rally his people in the wake of the awkward deadlocks of the last few years, then elected to give a speech in the Place de la Loi (the former Place de la Révolution) in order to remind them of the system and importance of voting.

On his way to the Place, a figure leapt out from the crowd and, even as it was cut down by the King’s royal guards, managed to fire a single pistol shot through the window of his carriage. The King was hit in the shoulder in what might have been an almost trivial wound, would it not have been for the fact that the bullet unluckily pierced an artery. Louis XVII, lapsing into delirium, was rushed to L’Hôpital Royale (the former Institut National des Études Linnéens) but was dead before reaching the doctors, and it is doubtful they could have done much in any case. His last words are apocryphally recorded as either “Jacques, now at last I understand” or “Don’t let it end this way, Leo...”

*

...chaos and confusion immediately broke out, with the identity of the hooded assassin becoming a hot topic and the Optel system meaning that rumour outstripped fact even faster than usual. The assassin was Pierre Boulanger, having survived his fatal duel on the field of Paris. No, it was Lazare Hoche, who had outran the flames of perdition that Charles James Fox had unleashed upon him. No, it was the real heir to the throne, and Louis had always been an impostor! And, inevitably, it was Jean de Lisieux, having finally popped up after his mysterious disappearance more than five years previously. Ironically, that might actually have been one of the more plausible examples.

The truth was naturally more prosaic. The assassin was a young woman who had still been a child when Paris fell and still believed the propaganda that the Lisieux machine had drilled into her. What had pushed her over the edge, though, was her father’s death a few days previously thanks to what he blamed on the King’s taxes driving them to poverty. She had given her body to a soldier, then slit his throat and taken his pistol. She had no skill with weapons and it was only terrible ill luck that had led her to strike a fatal wound upon the King.

Naturally, in the absence of any concrete information (not that that would truly have made a difference) Paris descended into chaos and mobs roamed the streets beating up anyone of the opposite political persuasion. The Reds naturally caught most of the backblast, culminating in an attack on Olivier Bourcier’s steam-carriage as he attempted to flee the city in a manner ironically similar to that which so many nobles had when Bourcier had been just one of the angry young Sans-Culottes leading them to the Phlogisticateur, back in 1795. Almost twenty years later, mob rule prevailed and Bourcier was summarily hanged in the street, though not before taking six of his attackers with him...

*

...the decapitation of the Red party served to temporarily placate the mob or at least drive it into confusion, with the Red-aligned gangs striking out randomly in revenge attacks but failing to achieve any lasting damage. In this moment of relative calm, the Duc d’Aumont sought to secure the young Dauphin Prince Charles Louis Philippe and his mother Queen Hélène. Secure him against attacks by the mob, of course. The fact that Aumont would then be in a position to act as regent, with effective royal authority – ‘pulling a Churchill’ as it would later become known – was of course purely incidental.

However, the royal family was now ensconsed in a secret hiding place, an understandable precaution that the King had enacted soon after his return to the city. As parts of Lisieux’s dreary Paris burned unmourned around them, the Whites sought the location of the royals they had sworn to protect. Only one man in Paris would know...

*

...on the 15th, one day late as the fires still raged, the prodigal son returned. He did not come alone. Having heard of the crisis via the Optel network barely after he had disembarked in Calais, Bonaparte had assembled a small army of local regiments and militia and – crucially – twelve of France’s remaining Tortue armoured steam-wagons. With the words “Let the city be cleansed of those animals and their filth,” he led his force in a coordinated pattern through the streets, firing over men’s heads to drive them indoors, and if that would not do it, there was always his famous ‘whiff of grapeshot’ from the battle that had been fought not so far from here. Bonaparte was a hard, hard man and would not shrink at spilling civilian blood in order to preserve the peace he had fought so hard to win.

Alone, against a determined and well-led mob, Bonaparte’s force would have been laughably small and would have inevitably failed. However there was not one single mob, but rather vague groups loyal to all sides and others just in it for violence and looting. Twenty years earlier the Revolution had focused such public anger and greed into a single cause, but now there was no Le Diamant, no L’Épurateur, no Robespierre, no Hébert. Ah, Hébert. Yes, it had been to crush the uprising after Hébert’s death that Lisieux had first driven his Tortues through the streets of Paris, had first made his name and achieved his dominance. And Lisieux had, with typical foresight, designed the wide avenues of his new Rational Paris to better accommodate such vehicles for just such a role. After all, who could say when another irrational reactionary revolt would require smashing down?

In the end all it took were a few bloody incidents with gangs too stupid to take cover and the word was spreading desperately across Paris. Soon the grey and dreary City of Light was once more silent, though at least the blood on the streets lent a little colour to Lisieux’s design...

*

...Bonaparte, who of course also knew the secret hiding place, went alone to the anonymous little Taxonomic house on the Rue des Martyrs. There had been a few more Martyrs on the Rue, he sardonically noted (or so the biopic Monsieur l’Os would have us believe). Bonaparte knocked and entered.

Inside he found Aumont and two of his fellow Parti Royaliste deputies together with six soldiers of the elite Tirailleurs. From the ceiling came sounds indicating that the remains of the Royal Family were indeed present, though fearful.

“So you grace ourselves with your presence,” Aumont said (sneered, l’Os has it). “I am pleased to inform you that the situation is under control and your assistance is not required.”

“Hmm,” Bonaparte said in that French that was never quite accurate, always carried a hint of an accent. “An interesting definition of ‘under control’. The city was in flames.”

“Was?” Aumont said, then added: “So it has passed. Good.”

“The mob is not a tide to subside by itself!” Bonaparte said harshly. “I crushed it with my own hands, and may I be damned if those faces don’t haunt my dreams ever after, but I damn well did it. And you? What do you have under control?”

“The Dauphin is safe,” Aumont said stiffly, “that is all that truly matters.”

“Ah,” said Bonaparte. “To hold the heart is to hold the nation. How Jacobin of you.”

Aumont started in disgust. “Be careful with that pretty mouth of yours, Monsieur,” he warned. “This is no time for your games.”

“No,” Bonaparte agreed, “but perhaps you would be so good as to let me know just how you located the Royal Family.”

“Ah,” Aumont said, “now that is an interesting tale...”

It was said to be one of the few times Bonaparte was ever taken aback. The curtain parted and Barras came in, not meeting his friend’s gaze.

There was a moment of silence, and then Bonaparte spoke, two words. “Paul. Pourquoi?

Barras did not answer for another long moment, then just as Aumont was about to intervene he spoke. “I know what you did, Leo. You saved the city. I knew you would, even though we haven’t heard anything here, but I can guess. You took up some Tortues and drove them through the streets, didn’t you?”

“You know me well, old friend,” Bonaparte said tightly.

“Yes...I have indeed been your friend, and always shall be, Leo, which made what I had to do all the harder.” Barras finally met his gaze. “France cannot afford another Lisieux.”

Bonaparte recoiled. “Surely you cannot mean—”

“You have good intentions. So did the Jacobins—” Aumont’s lip curled at that, “—and so did Marlborough. It makes no difference. If one man has that much power—”

“Not for my own sake. Because it is needed to save the country.”

“And when will you give it up and go to retire like Cincinnatus?”

Bonaparte paused. “When the country is secure.”

Merde. You know all too well that a country can never be truly secure. I won’t allow you to become a Dictateur, Leo. With His Christian Majesty dead and Dauphin Charles a minor, we will need a Regent. I don’t want you to be France’s Marlborough.”

Bonaparte clenched his fists, then unclenched them. “If I were Marlborough, I would not have come here alone and unarmed,” he said softly. “So what now?”

“Now we strike a deal—” Barras began.

“Yes,” Aumont interrupted, “a deal which will end in you walking off in disgust, then turning to shoot with a concealed pistol, but fortuitously my brave men will take you down before you can fire.”

The tirailleurs’ rifles lifted, all pointed at Bonaparte’s chest.

There was a moment of dead silence as Barras stared at Aumont in horror. Then Bonaparte burst out laughing.

He laughed loud and long, as Aumont looked at him in irritation. “Do not think my threat idle,” the Duc said. “I regret it deeply, for I respect you for everything you have done for France, regardless of your foreign birth – but Monsieur Barras is right about you grubbing power for yourself.”

“And what would you do, Your Grace?” Bonaparte said sarcastically.

“I would not compromise with the Jacobin scum who murdered my family,” Aumont said acidly.

“I see,” Bonaparte said. “Well, there is one thing you have overlooked, Your Grace.”

“Yes?” Aumont said impatiently. Barras’ eyes widened, then he covered them.

“It is a fine piece of entrapment indeed you have placed me in. But you neglect to realise that while you have been here cowering and plotting to take over the burnt-out wreck of the France you care so little for – while the homes of the common folk have been in flames – I have been saving this city. In particular I was there when we retook Le Marais...the Rue des Épiciers to be specific. Do you know, Your Grace, that the inhabitants had barricaded themselves in their homes? So many of their men, you see, happen to work in a particular trade which requires them to be away from home, and so the wives and children were alone and defenceless before that raging mob. Had we not come to break up that mob with our steam and steel, they would have died...but not quickly. Raped, throat slit, jewellery torn from their bodies—”

“Yes, yes,” Aumont said. “Enough of your disgusting tales. The common folk will always suffer in these crises. It is their lot, and it is their own fault for rallying to these insane mobs. The husbands of those women were probably out doing a bit of raping of their own, just like in the Revolution! I do not care to consider the morals of such a lowly crew.”

“I see,” Bonaparte. “Then I would give you one piece of free advice, Aumont—” The Duc bristled at such familiar talk, “—and that is if one is to attempt to entrap Napoleone Buonaparte, Leo Bone, Napoleon Bonaparte, the one thing you should never do—”

Bonaparte gave a simple hand signal, and the six soldiers turned as once, with precise military drill, and suddenly the six Tirailleur rifles were aimed at Aumont and his cronies.

“What is this—” Aumont began, outraged.

“—is try to trap him with warriors,” Bonaparte said contemptuously. “Next time try some hired thugs, Aumont. No morals, no loyalties. Some of those you were so dismissive of. Here is another piece of free advice: do not confuse them with the fine, elite Tirailleurs of the Eleventh Division, the men I was so proud to fight alongside at the Battle of Paris. The men who happen to be recruited from the streets around the Rue des Épiciers in the district of Le Marais. The men whose wives I was proud to save, to repay my debt for when they saved my life on that battlefield.”

Aumont’s eyes widened, but as he opened his mouth to reply, those eyes rolled up into his head and he slumped. Behind him stood Barras with a copy of the Holy Bible bound in leather with lead clasps. He wordlessly looked at Bonaparte, and nodded.

Few words had to pass between those men. “You know why? You know why I did it? Both this and...before?”

“I will always remember. But this cannot stand. You must go.”

Barras nodded. “Where?”

“The same place as Aumont.” Barras paled, Bonaparte smiled. “No, no. Aumont is a bile-filled arrogant enculé but in his heart he does want to serve France. He’d just be better serving it in a place far away from any Jacobins. A place that never had any Jacobins.”

Barras nodded again. “I see. So this is your solution to the matter we discussed—”

“In England they have a saying; to kill two birds with one stone. You will have certain compensations, as will Aumont. But do not try to flee or double-cross me again, or I swear to God I will tell the Dauphin to bring the Phlogisticateur out again and I will see you burn.”

Barras paled. In that moment he knew that he had been right, that Bonaparte could be more than Richelieu, than Louis XIV, than Charlemagne himself – and he also knew that nothing he could have done could have prevented it. He was lucky indeed to have escaped with his life, even if it was to such a distant and miserable place as...


*

From – “The Exiliad: A Brief History of the Empire of New Spain” by Pavel Matin, 1969 –

The Spanish had always been concerned at the way that French Louisiana had repeatedly encroached westwards, partly due to territorial losses to the Empire of North America and her Cherokee allies, but mostly due to the fact that the French colony’s population had swelled from the influx of Canajuns from Quebec. This had accelerated further with some French Royalists fleeing there from the Revolution later on, with the result that by default Louisiana had almost swallowed the Viceroyalty of New Spain’s old Province of Texas. Viceroy Martín de Gálvez fumed and war might have broken out, had not the fall of Spain, the establishment of the Empire of the Indies and the Third Platinean War intervened. By the time that was all over, the Empire was too weak to consider such a conflict and the French were too firmly ensconsed. In 1814 insult was added to injury when the new French government led by Regent Napoleon Bonaparte issued a royal proclamation taking the extraordinary step of making the colony of Louisiana a Grand Duchy. The unusually high rank, it became clear, was because its assigned Grand Duke was the celebrated Louis Henri d’Aumont and only a promotion to Grand Duke would have been appropriate. With him came Paul Barras, former Comptroller-General but apparently no longer the flavour of the month. Between them they set out to reform the colony that had been led fairly well through the Jacobin Wars by Charles-Michéle Ledoux (who had conveniently died two weeks before Aumont arrived, avoiding any awkwardness) and ensure it could stand against any attack by the Empire of North America (particularly Carolinian or Cherokee freebooters[5]) or the Empire of New Spain.

Facing this, rather than attempting to reclaim the Texan land, Emperor Charles decided to consider the root causes that had led to the French being able to plant themselves there and then take action to prevent them. It became clear that the colonisation of Texas had begun to slacken off in the latter half of the eighteenth century and had not been appropriately maintained,[6] meaning the French had been able to start settling across the debatable border in the almost deserted province and before the Spanish could react, the country was effectively lost. Charles had already begun programmes to colonise New California and Far California to ensure a presence in the Oregon region disputed with the Russians and Americans, but now realised that more colonists should be directed to the remnant of the Texas province (which was eventually, quietly split between New Mexico, Coahuila and New Santander provinces). The problem arose because the western Texan land was not particularly desirable and New Spain had strict rules about only allowing Catholic settlement. Fortunately for Charles, though tragically for so many, an event a few years later served to help him out in that regard...

*

From – “A History of the British Isles”, by John Kligenheim-Smith (1971) –

The exact causes behind the Great Famine of 1822 are still debated, and are confused by the fact that it came relatively soon after other disasters such as the Year Without A Summer and the resulting crop failures. However the Great Famine was unlike that incident and the food shortages of the 1740s, both of which were caused by climatic conditions. The primary cause appears to have been a new strain of potato blight which – rather ironically given its later effects – appears to have originated in the Vale of Mexico in the 1810s before spreading to the Empire of North America (in particular harming New York and Pennsylvania’s farmers, and perhaps contributing to the radical realignment of the latter’s politics a few years later). The blight then spread across the Atlantic and infected all of Europe in a cataclysm that in some regions killed many more than the Jacobin Wars had. On the Continent the areas worst affected included the Kingdom of Flanders, Poland and the Duchy of Prussia, as they relied most strongly on potatoes as a staple crop. Flanders received much assistance from their Dutch ally, with the Dutch themselves suffering a more minor failure but swiftly roping in the VOC to begin bringing in food from the Mediterranean, including the Ottoman Empire and Naples. This was copied by other European powers, including (most controversially) Portugal, which suffered almost no crop losses due to its different staples but cheerfully bought and sold food to other countries for an outrageous profit.

It is no small exaggeration to say that the effects of the Famine strongly affected the politics to come. The difference between the rich and poor – the latter much more reliant on potatoes – was emphasised, opening old wounds from the Jacobin Revolutionary period. The poor of the Dutch Republic resented the rich nobles who got first pick of the emergency supplies coming in, whereas the poor of Flanders were less resentful due to the fact that Charles Theodore II set an example of public austerity and forced his own ramshackle collection of nobles to follow suit. The Poles’ opinion of their personal union partner Saxony went down due to a perceived (and partly accurate) impression that the Saxons were doing nothing to help the starving people of the restored Kingdom. Northern Swabia also suffered to a smaller extent and Michael Elchingener helped set up new mountain routes to allow trading for food with Italy via the former Switzerland. Finally, Denmark made a point of assisting Sweden even though she herself was suffering from the famine.

However, the area hit hardest by the famine was undoubtedly the British Isles, and in particular Ireland and the Scottish Highlands. Both regions were relatively bleak and barren, with poor farmland that had consigned their inhabitants to a miserable (or rather, even more miserable) existence before the introduction of the potato by Sir Walter Raleigh almost three centuries before. The miracle crop had allowed the population of Ireland in particular to rapidly increase, with the vulnerability that it had become very dependent on it.

Therefore when the blight hit and rendered as much as 30% of the potato harvest inedible, Ireland was thrown into chaos.[7] The Parliament of Ireland, led by John Ponsonby since the death of Henry Grattan in 1816, began passing panicked legislation to try and help, but the fact that the famine was so universal meant that this soon devolved into crisis and bickering.

Into this void, inevitably, stepped the Lord Deputy, Richard Wesley, Lord Mornington. He had been an aloof and patrician figure since the Churchill regime over in Great Britain began its descent into authoritarianism, but his lack of intervention in Irish politics had been taken as a testament that the Parliament was functioning properly. Now he acted, directly approaching the British government for the help Ireland so sorely needed. England had suffered slightly, but possessed sufficient variety in staple crops that she was far better off than most countries.

Wesley’s request caused a rumpus in the Palace of Westminster – the new one, that is, a cold marble palace of Neoclassical architecture with a few daring flourishes evocative of Persian art. Parliament by this point was mostly a talking shop due to Churchill’s amassing power, but MPs were swift to give toadying speeches hoping to grab the Lord Protector’s attention. Many of the hard-line Tories who made up the core of Churchill’s Rebirth Coalition began emphasising how much the Irish deserved it, as a punishment from God for their popery, witness how fair England had escaped the famine. Surely the proper thing would be to leave them to die, etc. Some even began quoting Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, unaware of the irony intended.

This situation ended when Churchill appeared in the House of Lords one chilly Monday morning – quite an unusual occasion as he preferred to rule from the new Prime Ministerial residence, Downing House as part of the Whitehall Forum – stared down the bickering ministers, and addressed them.

He spoke of how he had thought the situation in Britain was lost, more than a decade before, when reports had come of Irish troops landing in Liverpool to back up the French invasion. He spoke of how he had been astonished to meet Sir John Moore and the Duke of Mornington, to find that the Irish army was loyal, ready to defend the kingdom that had hurt her smaller sister so many times, not always intentionally perhaps, but nonetheless. He spoke of how Ireland, along with the Empire of North America, had faithfully sent along food supplies in what he called the Darkest Hour, after the French had been expelled but the fields were burning and the displaced English starving. Even through the Year Without A Summer the convoys had continued.

Churchill, in a fiery moment that is probably single-handedly responsible for half his modern apologists, bellowed “And if any man disagrees that in return for that loyalty we owe nothing less than to devote all that we have, to work with all our blood and toil and tears and sweat until we are worthy once again to look the Irishman in the face, yes even the papist, and say ‘when we needed a helper, you were there; and like the Good Samaritan your faith was not misplaced’ – THEN LET THAT MAN FACE ME NOW!” and Churchill drew his sword, a shocked murmur sweeping the chamber, for that was and always had been illegal within the Palace.

The speech, and its more practiced repetitions, is widely considered to be some of Churchill’s greatest oratory, and his comparison to the Good Samaritan came back time and time again. This was small surprise, as the parable fit perfectly: Ireland was looked down upon by Britain, as the Samaritans had been by the Jews, yet it was also its neighbour, as Jesus had said: Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves? And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.

Of course, even with Churchill bullying the country into sending all the food she could spare across the Irish Sea, many still died of malnutrition and starvation. Many more took the decision to leave the country, and of this latter group, most were Catholics who yearned for something more than the mild tolerance Wesley had achieved. The New World beckoned for the adventuresome, and with the Empire of North America even more hostile to Catholics than Britain, the choices were obvious. In the years after the Great Famine, Irish immigration would flood into the Grand Duchy of Louisiana, the Empire of the Indies and the United Provinces of South America.

Therefore, while the Famine is remembered in Scotland as a crime de guerre in which Churchill and his thrice-damned son left the Highland Crofters to starve, in Ireland it is remembered as the second act in the reconciliation between the Emerald Isle and her larger neighbour: still a tragedy, of course, but nonetheless a time when the flower of hope was one plant that suffered no blight.

*

From – “The Exiliad: A Brief History of the Empire of New Spain” by Pavel Matin, 1969 –

...soon, though, it was not Irish immigration to the former eastern Texas that consumed the attention of Emperor Charles. Matters further west had come to a head.

In 1818, the explorer Miguel Juan Díaz y Franco was part of an effort organised by King Antonio of Mexico to explore the upper reaches of the Río de los Americanos (American River) in New California. This was in turn only part of a wider operation to map the previously largely unknown country, both to secure the coast against Russian and American colonisation and also to enforce the Empire of New Spain’s will over all its claimed territory. To do so they would need to attract colonists, which meant they had to map the good arable farmland.

Díaz succeeded rather better than King Antonio had expected. While crossing the river he found reflective yellow flakes were left on his boots, and to his surprise they remained shiny even after the water had dried. When he returned to San Francisco, the rapidly growing new capital of Mexico, he had an apothecary perform some tests – after which point his attempts to keep the discovery secret were futile.

Gold had been found in New California.[8] What the native Indians would call the Golden Plague had broken out – and who could say where it would end...?








[1] No such addendum is found in the mission records, although this is more likely due to it being ‘accidentally’ shredded just prior to its mandatory declassification under the Freedom of Information Act, than actually being missing from the original transmission. Such incidents have proved to be depressingly common at the Thande Institute.

[2] Modern car.

[3] This was a contemporary observation by Philip Bulkeley, as previously quoted in Interlude #10 by P.J. Hartley, but Pelletier (writing for a French audience less informed about British authors) does not appear to feel the need to clarify that he did not coin it himself.

[4] Again, a Bulkeley quote...

[5] ‘Freebooter’ is the term usually used in TTL (the OTL term ‘filibuster’ which is preferred in America is actually the same word, just run through Dutch, Spanish and English transliterations).

[6] This happened in OTL as well, and is ultimately responsible for Texas’ colonisation by Americans.

[7] Ireland is getting off a lot better than OTL. This is because butterflies mean that the blight is hitting earlier and is a weaker strain. Irish potatoes were still of more varieties even a few years before the 1840s in OTL, meaning the vulnerability to the blight of the fact that the strains were limited is reduced. Also, increased trade with England and America means more varieties of potatoes have been introduced, sometimes by accident. In OTL as much as 80% of the harvest failed, with catastrophic consequences.

[8] Twenty years earlier than OTL, due to A) the earlier Russian and American exploration of the Oregon Country spurring the Spanish to invoke their claims, B) the fact that the Empire of New Spain is a unitary and relatively stable entity, unlike OTL’s Mexico which was still in its war of independence at this point and rather fragile, and C) the fact that Charles controversially moved the capital of Mexico to San Francisco after the burning of the City of Mexico in order to deliver the northward focus he wanted. He got it. And he’ll soon regret it.


Part #99: Mehmedic Mutination

“I once met a travelling gentleman – or at least a gentleman who could sufficiently produce the impression of having travelled to be treated as such, and truly is there any difference save to the philosophers? – who claimed to me that the Grand Turk regards himself as the natural successor to the old Greek Emperors of Constantinople. A claim that would be disputed, doubtless, by the Czar among others; yet to judge by the confused state of the accounts (if one is to dignify them with that name) in the papers of recent events in the East, it would appear that the Grand Signor indeed possesses at least one piece of evidence to back up his assertion: his Empire is truly byzantine.”

- Giovanni Tressino, 1829[1]​

*

From – “The Time of Troubles: A History of the Ottoman Empire, 1816-1841” by Giuseppe Guiccardini (1956):

Any history of the Ottoman state must begin with the acknowledgement that attempting to pin down the truth, to paraphrase Dr Jonathan Brewer in Sublime Porte and Ridiculous Retorts, is akin not only to attempting to find a needle in a haystack, but then being asked what colour was the shirt it was used to sew. In all of modern historical scholarship, only two fields spring to mind which require even greater guesswork: early Jacobin France and pre-Russian Yapon. In both cases, destruction of primary sources (systematically and deliberately by the Administration in the first case, accidentally by fire and war in the second) necessarily require one to rely on imperfect secondary sources, tainted by ignorance and █ █ █ █ █, in an attempt to reconstruct the truth. Or at least a picture of something that might pass for the truth in a dim light, as Brewer added whimsically.[2]

But to return from such digressions—the problem of understanding the Time of Troubles, as the period we shall examine has become known as (in imitation of its Russian prototype), is ultimately the lack of reliable sources. The Ottoman account naturally lauds the victors and has made all efforts to expunge any records giving different perspectives. Even those which survive are invariably as biased in the opposite direction to the official account. Things are hampered further by the tendency towards poetic and ambiguous language among the most senior (and therefore most well informed and qualified to give an account of events) officials in that period.

Yet if we must – if not quite dismiss Ottoman sources, then at least weigh them with a pinch of salt – then what of Europe? As every schoolboy knows, Europe in this period was undergoing a massive growth in communications thanks to the innovations that the Jacobin Wars had produced, from Optel networks to broader literacy and interest in current events. It was a golden age for newspapers, which underwent an economic ascent[3] despite widespread █ █ █ █ █ by the authoritarian regimes that so characterised the Watchful Peace.[4] Yet even in places where a free press flourished, accounts of Ottoman affairs are usually suspect. At best they tend to be coloured with ignorance due to the complexity of affairs at the Topkapi Palace even for those experienced in diplomatic affairs, which journalists usually were (and are) not. Often matters are made worse by how the Ottomans were (and are!) regarded through the prism of European worldviews. The Ottoman political and military systems were naturally influenced by the ultimate Asian steppe origins of the Turks who formed the core of the Empire’s society, while the religion of Islam and even practices inherited from the Byzantines served to create a structure that defied easy comprehension by Europeans. For example, succession to the Sultanate, though specific practices varied over time, was always in stark contrast to the systems employed both in Europe and even in other ‘alien’ and poorly understood states such as China.

In the sixteenth century, the established practice had been for the reigning Sultan to appoint his sons as governors of various provinces of the Empire, then upon his death for them to race back to Constantinople and, if necessary, fight each other until the strongest prevailed. Europeans regarded such a system as incomprehensibly barbaric, essentially regularly scheduling civil wars. Later the Ottomans experimented with the system due to concerns raised over the female members of the royal family (in particular the Valide Sultan or Queen Mother, who was often a foreigner) having too much influence over the court. A system of agnatic seniority was adopted, where the oldest male member of the House of Osmanli was Sultan: therefore, a Sultan on his deathbed was often succeeded by his younger brother or nephew rather than his son. For a time it was common practice for a Sultan to have his male relations (even his sons) strangled to stabilise his position: however, this naturally almost caused the extinction of the House of Osmanli more than once, and instead the slightly more humane approach was taken of imprisoning possible claimants in the Kafes or ‘cage’, a luxurious but isolated set of apartments within the Topkapi Palace. This isolation, though good for the stability of the reigning Sultan, often led to the male heirs developing alienistical [psychological] problems which in turn had begun to cause serious issues for the Empire by the start of the Time of Troubles.[5] Although condemnable in itself in some ways, the Kafes isolation was often misrepresented in European sources as being that of a barbaric prison cell, casting further Western scorn on the Ottoman political system. It is perhaps worth noting that a Cytherean[6] argument is often made at this point that European opposition to Ottoman practices was more founded in resentment of the high (if unofficial) position of women in the Ottoman court, but that discussion is beyond the scope of this work (Harem of Power by Judith A. Flanigan is an excellent introduction to the subject).

Islam did not help the situation, particularly in states such as Russia, Austria and to some extent the Italian states, which saw the Turk as their blood enemy and inevitably saw events in the Empire through that lens of bias. What really complicates the matter, however, is the sense in much of Europe (though often for different reasons in the East than the West) that the Ottoman Empire was failing when to any objective eye it was not. This view was taken at the most astonishing times, recited by otherwise reliable commentators at times as absurd as the mid-sixteenth century when the Empire was at the height of its power, or just before the invasion of Austria in the 1680s and the near-conquest of Vienna by Ottoman troops, or immediately afterwards. Nor is the attitude limited to those accounts from the countries with a historical enmity to the Turk. It is easy to find talk by English traders of the early seventeenth century of how the Sublime Porte is lapsing into stagnation and decay and will surely fall soon, never mind that forces under Ottoman auspices had occupied an island only twelve miles off the coast of England![7] It is startling how the Dutchman or the Portugee of the same period will praise to the high heavens African and Asian empires which are no longer remembered even as a footnote in most histories, yet are equally dismissive of the Grand Signor’s empire.

What is behind this attitude? In part it is merely a development of the holdover ideas of Christian Europe in the Dark Ages and the age of the Crusades: Muslims are ‘the Other’ against which Christian Europe defines itself. Yet this alone cannot justify the perpetual belief that the Ottoman state was ever on the verge of collapse: the Christians of Spain certainly had no such far-fetched notion about their Ummayid and Almoravid enemies, and the same is true of the Crusader states’ regard for Saladin. No; alien Ottoman practices, and European lack of understanding, must also be taken into account. In particular to European eyes the court looked perpetually unstable, with Grand Viziers rarely lasting a year in the job. The position of the Sultan himself in terms of power vacillated wildly from absolute monarch to powerless puppet and back again, depending on the individual, and just who he was a puppet of also varied.

Most significantly of all, there were the Janissaries. The Janissaries were at the heart of European revulsion towards the Turk, being originally Christian boys taken from their families and raised into Islam, and by the eighteenth century had also come to embody conservatism in the Ottoman state. As the scientific and technological advances of the period reinvented warfare (and indeed peacetime practices) elsewhere, the Ottoman Empire was perpetually held back by the quiet stranglehold of reactionary influence the Janissaries possessed, having graduated from elite bodyguard corps to mainstream army to decadent ruling class. Instead of being recruited young and put through strong physical training as before, the Janissaries soon automatically succeeded to their fathers in the corps and many of them never saw battle. Murmurs of military or political reform from any sector of the government were met with ruthless action: the Bosporus swallowed a lot of bodies. There was talk that even the Sultan himself was afraid of being overthrown if he made any moves in that direction.[8]

At the end of the eighteenth century and the dawn of the nineteenth, while Europe and indeed the world beyond was shaken to its foundations by the ignition of revolutionary fervour, the Ottomans – with a lazy sense of historical inevitability, perhaps, given their aforementioned tendency towards apparent contrariness – were shifting towards a more conservative settlement. The primary cause of all this was the fact that the Janissaries and other political reactionaries could point to great recent victories under the current system, so why was change needed? Let us consider those victories in turn.

Firstly, we must understand that the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century had been a very mixed period of military history for the Ottomans. Only the Turks’ intervention in the Great Northern War in 1710 had returned a decisive victory for Constantinople, regaining the fortress city of Azov (which often changed hands) and forcing the Russians to demolish several of their own fortresses. Most conflicts after that, however, ended in defeat for the Ottomans: rarely swingeing or inflicting mortal wounds, but nonetheless highly unsatisfactory outcomes for the Porte. In 1716 the Ottomans attacked Austria after Austria threatened war due to the Ottomans retaking the Morea from the Venetians, but in the end the Austrians won the day, taking control of the Banat of Temesvar and pushing the Turks south of the Danube. In 1735 the Ottomans faced both Russians and Austrians together, fighting well and actually regaining land from Austria in the Balkans, but losing Azov to the Russians. At the same time more mixed results were seen in ongoing conflicts with the Persians, with Nadir Shah wreaking havoc in Mesopotamia but failing to consolidate any real lasting gains. Most significantly, the Crimean War of 1773-7, sparked by Ottoman-backed Crimean raids on Russian farmlands, was the most decisive blow to fall and ripped the Crimean Khanate from the Ottomans’ orbit, instead creating a Russian puppet.[9]

However, the next twenty years were a time of relative peace for the Empire, with Europe consumed with its own wars and Persia emerging from its civil war to create the liberal Zand state. When the Russian Civil War came about in 1796, Sultan Abdulhamid II took advantage of the confusion to quietly re-extend Ottoman influence into the Crimea and the Caucasus, and it was at this point that Azov – vacated by Russian troops – was demolished by undercover Janissaries in Khan Devlet IV’s soldiers’ raiment. The cautious Abdulhamid did not believe the Ottomans could hold the city without provoking an eventual war, and was concerned by what at the time looked like rising Austrian power, with Ferdinand IV’s temporary success in partially reuniting the Holy Roman Empire behind him. Abdulhamid had no desire to fight another two-front war with both Austria and Russia, and therefore limited his moves, not formally declaring war on either Russian claimant court and keeping Constantinople’s influence in the Crimea fairly low-key (though no less real). Later, after his death, the Sultan’s instincts were proved essentially correct when the Ottomans bought Russian neutrality during the Austro-Turkish War by conceding part of their zone of influence in the Caucasus alone: trying to hold Azov would have made war unavoidable.

It was that Austro-Turkish War, from 1799 to 1803, which ultimately created the conditions that let to the Time of Troubles – paradoxically, as that war was a great victory for the Ottomans. Led by the Bosniak general Dalmat Melek Pasha, the armies of Sultan Murad V stabbed Austria in the back just after General Mozart had thrown back Ledoux’s armies from Vienna. The Ottomans obtained their cited war aims of acquiring nearly all the former Venetian territories in Dalmatia, taking advantage of the Republican French’s abolition of the Porte’s old naval foe, the Venetian Republic. In addition to this, they were able to reverse some of the Austrians’ territorial gains in the last century in the Balkans.

This victory was followed by another, the Turco-Persian War of 1806-09. Persia was faced with a two-front war, with the Durrani Empire of the Afghans and the Khanate of Kalat both taking advantage of the conflict to strike in the east, and the Ottomans won control of Ilam and Khuzestan along the border with Persia, along with control of the Azeri lands which Persia had originally obtained from Russia during the Russian Civil War. Dalmat Melek Pasha was elevated to Grand Vizier in 1806 and proved extraordinarily resilient to court intrigue. Most Grand Viziers lasted mere months, some managing a few years – Dalmat lasted a full decade, one of the longest-serving in Ottoman history, and when his death came in 1816 it was of natural causes – ‘practically unprecedented’, The Ringleader (inaccurately) described it. His strength of position was due to his being backed to the hilt by the Janissaries, with the other potential candidates for viziership all being considered less conservative than Dalmat. Furthermore, he was relatively well liked by the people for his military victories and reasonably acceptable tax regime, meaning there were fewer conspirators to unseat him and fewer candidates for them to rally around. Of course, there was always the potential for the Sultan or other members of the imperial court to dismiss him, but Dalmat proved equal to that challenge.

Murad V, his great ally as Sultan, is thought to have died of natural courses in 1811, though this is not entirely certain. It was not unprecedented, however, the agnatic seniority succession system meaning many sultans were old men by the time they ascended to the sultanate. He was succeded by his younger brothers Osman IV (1811-1812) and Mahmud II (1812), neither of whom approved of Dalmat, and both of whom were mysteriously found to have accidentally brutally slit their throats while shaving. The next sultan was a nephew, Ahmed IV, who sensibly decided to sit quietly and let the Vizier take care of matters of state. It helped that he was one of those whom the Kafes had driven to an alienistical condition – ‘mad’ was rejected by contemporary commentators, but certainly very silent and biddable. Although some of the stories may be attributed to idle rumour or tales told in retrospect, there is a broad agreement that he never obtained anything more than a story from the members of his Harem. Most tales also concur that he was not a paederast, as some have thought, but rather an Eislerian.[10] Whatever the truth of the matter, the Janissary-backed Dalmat cemented his iron grip over the Ottoman state, and while he was not a bad ruler in many ways, his monopolisation of power meant that the opposition that had previously burned itself out in successive minor coups and intrigue now built up like steam in a pressure cooker. Pieter de Greef, in The Imaginary Continent, makes the point that, despite the Ottoman government dismissing the ideological questions unleashed by the Jacobin Wars as ‘a Christian affair’, it had nonetheless found itself in a similar situation to states such as Austria and Great Britain: a coherent and absolutely ruling reactionary, authoritarian regime that could do nothing but polarise politics and force all opposition forces to coalesce into a single, dangerous whole.

That whole was composed of elements that indeed had little in common with each other. It included those interested in political liberal reform for its own sake, usually influenced by Zand Persian ideas (doubtless helped by the annexation of Khuzestan and Ilam) and therefore having its strongest position in Mesopotamia: this group was known as the Azadis (“Freedomites”) and illegally circulated pamphlets printed from portable printing presses. One of their most significant thinkers used the pen name Ibn Warraq (“son of a printer”), a traditional pseudonym for dissident Muslim writers afraid of reprisals. Although most Azadis were Iraqis, the Grand Vizier’s spies suggested that an analysis of Ibn Warraq’s writings implied he was an upper-class Ottoman Turk, a worrying sign.

Further east, almost the opposite criticism was levelled by the Wahhabis, regressive puritan followers of the Nejdi Arab scholar Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab. Wahhab had built up a following among the tribes of the Nejd, led by the ruling Saud family of the town of Diriyah. While Wahhab himself had died a few years before, the fanatical fervour of his followers was inexorably drawn to the Empire, and what they argued was the Sultans making a mockery of the caliphal office and appointing imams based on political corruption rather than due Islamic process.[11]

Even more easterly, Egypt slumbered under the Mamelukes.[12] The Wali, Ibrahim Bey, was ageing and beset by troubles, with the Funj Sultanate of Sennar under the uncomfortably vigorous Sultan Unsa IV snapping at Egypt’s holdings in Nubia[13] and political problems closer to home. Although Europe would not make a concerted effort against Barbary piracy until the formation of the ICPA in 1817, there were concerns in Cairo that the Mediterranean was becoming an increasingly unfriendly place. The establishment of new countries such as the Republic of Corsica, the Kingdom of Aragon and the Republic (later Kingdom) of Italy during the Jacobin Wars, together with the destruction of Venice and the dispersal of its navy, created a fertile, chaotic ground for pirates operating out of the Deylicate of Algiers. The Dey, Baba Ismail Pasha, had been appointed by the last Grand Vizier before Dalmat Melek Pasha, Mehmed Ali Pasha, and regarded himself as a political enemy of Dalmat. To that end, he deliberately backed the Barbary pirates to raid European shipping, hoping to spark a war that would force Constantinople to be drawn in and create the political circumstances under which Dalmat might fall. In that he was unsuccessful, as while the Europeans indeed eventually took action against the pirates, it would not come to pass until Dalmat was already dead and the Time of Troubles had come.

The Mamelukes were nervous about being caught up in the middle of such a contest of wills between the Dey and the Vizier, and two political factions were generated, each broadly in support of Baba or Dalmat – though this is a slight simplification, as the ‘supporters’ of Baba were usually more inclined to pursue Egyptian autonomy or even independence alongside Algiers, rather than backing Baba to overthrow Dalmat within the structure of the Ottoman Empire.[14]

Finally there were those, mostly in Anatolia and some in European Turkey, who cared little for political liberty or Islamic purity but demanded military reforms based on stark realism: it was obvious that the Jacobin Wars had unleashed new weapons and tactics upon the world, and unless the Ottomans adapted, they would be devastated in any future war with a power that had learned its lessons. Certainly, the Austrians were just as resistant to change (which helped Dalmat’s supporters at court) but the Russians seemed far too intrigued by steam engines. This group was perhaps the least coherent and organised of the opposition to Dalmat, but it was also the most numerous, most significant, and closest to home. Some of its figures were too senior for Dalmat to have easily...removed, and instead he appointed them as officials to far-flung parts of the Empire. Two figures among the many who took this route should be highlighted. One was an Albanian named Esad Ali Bey, who was sent to Oman to act as court resident: the Ottomans had extended considerable influence into Oman during and after the Turco-Persian War, helping to draw the Sultanate into Constantinople’s orbit. He immediately became known for writing a widely-praised sefaretname (a genre of Ottoman literature consisting of a journal written by an ambassador about the foreign land he was sent to) which meant his name was ever mentioned at court, much to Dalmat’s discomfort.

The second was a more mysterious figure. His ancestry is uncertain, and though both Greeks and Armenians have attempted to claim him, in reality it seems most likely that he was a simple Ottoman Turk from Constantinople. He was young, but had powerful relatives and protectors, so Dalmat sent him to Egypt in an obviously sabotaged attempt to enforce Ottoman power in the uncertain climate there.

His name was Abdul Hadi Bey.

*

The death of Dalmat Melek Pasha in 1816 threw the Empire into a power struggle as it had rarely known in the past. The Grand Vizier had dominated politics at the court for so long that opposition forces were sluggish to respond, and confusion and terror reigned as the Janissaries tried to launch a pre-emptive coup against any reformist attempt to take the vizierate. Sultan Ahmed IV was assassinated in the street in a shocking incident whose circumstances are obscure. Various reformist groups have been implicated, but it has also been suggested that some Janissaries or other reactionaries did the deed, even though it may seem against their best interests: by this point the old guard was so paranoid that even the harmless, pliable Ahmed might seem a potential risk.

If there is any truth to that idea, it seems likely that they were young, headstrong and not close to the core Janissary leadership which communicated through the Sufi Order of the Bektashi Brotherhood, a mystical and heterodox society at the heart of their society. In any case, Constantinople was plunged into chaos. With no Sultan and no Grand Vizier, terror reigned. Dalmat’s absolutist rule meant that there were no conceivable candidates to take over the vizierate nearby. The Janissary Agha (chief), Kara Suleyman Pasha, attempted to seize the post despite his lack of charisma and brutal unpopularity with the people (Dalmat had used him as the Timothy in his Him-and-me strategy).[15] At the same time, the next heir to the throne, Mahmud III, was brought out of the Kafes despite being completely mad and suicidal. It speaks of the situation in the City that even though Mahmud III continually did his best to cut his wrist with any sharp object within reach, he still lasted three days longer than Kara Suleyman Pasha, brought down by a mob yelling Wahhabi slogans that overcame his bodyguard of lax Janissaries.

The next Sultan in line, Murad VI, was no fool. A relatively young man, the nephew of Ahmed IV, he left the Kafes and then pulled off a daring escape with the assistance of the influence of the women at court. The Janissaries, their own leadership in flux, went through two more Sultans before they found a sufficiently pliable boy, the claimant Mehmed V, to take the throne. A Janissary leader, Alemdar Huseyin Mustafa Pasha, managed to get himself proclaimed Grand Vizier and then issued proclamations that the so-called Murad VI must be hunted down and imprisoned again, so that the rule of the rightful Sultan Mehmed would not be afflicted. This was met with bafflement by many who could see that Mehmed couldn’t even rule Constantinople, never mind the Empire. The Empire whose component parts all boasted their own anti-establishment movements that had simmered resentfully under Dalmat’s long rule, and now exploded into life.

What transpired next was in many ways a precursor to the Popular Wars that would soon strike Europe, as Mikhail Leonov notes in his Riding the Storm. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire into a many-sided civil war was complicated, defied description and understanding even to its contemporaries both within and without, and its result seemed unknowable. What seems certain is that if one were to approach a Turk of 1817 or so with the knowledge of how it did turn out, he would very likely laugh at you...

*

Note from Capt. Christopher Nuttall.

I regret to report that the above transmission was sent without my knowledge by Drs Lombardi and Pylos in direct contravention of my orders. I fear our precautions are now made worthless and we may have made ourselves known...

Sir, I am requesting a Code Delta. It is my judgement that it is required and I will take full responsibility if a court of inquiry decides otherwise.

Sir, please. Those two don’t know what they’re getting us into. Maybe they know up here, but not, not...really. I don’t want to end up like what happened to Davydov’s squad.

I’m sorry sir, that was unprofessional...sending transmission now—









[1] Tressino’s pun is more witty in its context than it may sound to a modern resident of OTL, as the term ‘Byzantine Empire’ for the Eastern Roman Empire was still only bandied about by scholars, and the most common term for it in the West was the somewhat inaccurate “Greek Empire”.

[2] Note from Dr Bruno Lombardi: the obliterated word appears to have been blacked out by censors, which has been a problem with our recent acquisitions due to [CLASSIFIED BY THANDE INSTITUTE; SECURITY CLEARANCE LEVEL SIX REQUIRED]. Attempted reconstruction by Dr Pylos and myself recovered that the obliterated word began and ended with a lowercase letter N, i.e. ‘n———n’. Dr Pylos hypothesises, measuring the font, that the removed word was ‘nationalism’, which keys well with the other censorship we have seen.

[3] The terms ‘ascent’ and ‘descent’ are preferred in TTL to OTL’s ‘boom and bust’.

[4] Dr Pylos reports that the censored word appears to be – somewhat absurdly and recursively – ‘censorship’.

[5] In OTL this continued throughout the nineteenth century, with predictably disastrous results.

[6] The term used in TTL for feminist.

[7] Lundy. Although it is somewhat debatable whether the forces in question (Barbary pirates out of Algiers) can be said to be ‘Ottoman’, the writer here invokes the benefit of the doubt to support his point.

[8] In OTL the Janissaries indeed overthrew the reformist Sultan Selim III in 1807. They had previously overthrown Mustafa II and Ahmed III a century before.

[9] The situation was different in OTL as Catherine was Empress of Russia and Poland’s partition was very different. However, a war was also instigated around this time which resulted in similar results – though the Crimea was later annexed, in violation of the original treaty, by Russia in 1783.

[10] The term used in TTL for an asexual person.

[11] This all happened in OTL as well in the early to mid 18th century. In OTL the Ottomans (mostly Muhammad Ali’s Egyptians) destroyed the Saudi state in the 1810s.

[12] A very significant change to OTL is that Ali Bey Al-Kabir was never Mameluke ruler of Egypt and never rebelled agianst the Ottomans in the 1760s, and also that there was no French expedition to Egypt. Therefore Egypt is still under the eighteenth century system of being nominally under Mameluke rule (but in practice an integral part of the Empire) and the Ottomans have not significantly interfered with it. Also, the Rosetta Stone was never discovered and hieroglyphics remain a mystery, meaning Egyptology is less popular in the nineteenth century.

[13] In OTL Sennar was conquered by Muhammed Ali’s son Ismail in 1821.

[14] Without the disastrous failed attempt in the 1760s that happened in OTL, there is more appetite in Egypt for attempting to regain the independence that the Mamelukes lost to the Ottomans centuries before.

[15] The term in TTL meaning ‘good cop, bad cop’.


Part #100: ___NO TITLE ENTERED___

#########said that the most dangerous men in the world are those who create great ideas. In fact I would say that the most dangerous men who, by some devilry, may reduce reality to ideas, and then persuade others that this lie is the truth...

– George Spen###########925 speech.​

*

From – “Pablo Sanchez: A New Life”, by Raoul ############# 2003) –

As I have stated (probably with little need) throughout ###### attempting to provide a historically accurate account of the life of Pablo Rodrigo Sanchez y Ruiz is a task that might charitably be described as ‘completely impossible’. I do not speak merely of the efforts of censorship on the part of the members of the Assembly of Sovereign Nations, whether state-mandated or otherwise, which have made it increasingly difficult to build up a picture of the father of Societism anything other than the incarnation of Lucifer the peoples of the world now regard him as. Of course, nor was Sanchez the messianic figure the Combine painted him as. He was a man. No more, no less. A good or evil man? Can the life of any man be reduced to such simple categories, particularly when one factors in what was done in his name after his death? I say not. Let us cast aside the vitriol of mainstream thought and instead attempt a humanistic analysis of the man who defined a century which dawned long after he died.

############### birthplace in Cervera, in Catalonia.[N] His father, ############# 1807 ######### collaborator and his entire family were killed by the townsfolk – save Pablo himself of course. As a ten-year-old he was recruited by a band of Spanish Kleinkriegers as a drummer boy and ###### The next years are obscure, and of course in the middle of the nineteenth century, many grey-haired frauds were ready to step forward and claim that they had been Sanchez’s good friend and taught him all he knew, to the point that the actual record – what little of it even existed in the first place, for who cared about a drummer boy in a ragged band of Kleinkriegers not even significant enough to earn a song or painting – has been covered over by layer upon layer of lies. It is known that that Kleinkrieger band was folded into a regular Aragonese regiment by the Neapolitans after the partition of Spain in 1808, but ############# and under those circumstances it is perhaps not surprising that Sanchez jumped ship. A poor choice of metaphor, perhaps, given what happened next.

Sanchez next surfaces in Castile in 1815, working as a minor clerk in a bank in Santander. As a mayor’s son in Cervera he would presumably have received a good basic education, and there are vague unconfirmed reports that he expressed interest in the revolutionary ‘new science’ that the French officers he was friendly with would occasionally expound upon, but there is still a gap here: he lost his family and was pulled into a Kleinkrieger group at the age of ten. ############### without further education. There is a much less reliable (but widely believed by my predecessors as biographers) report that Sanchez had previously worked in Saragossa as an adolescent after leaving the Aragonese army, with the obvious implication that he might have learned something from the university students there he would presumably have come into contact with.[N] This is very much guesswork, however, and should not be regarded as canonical history.

####### exacerbated by the fact that Sanchez himself was always vague about his early years. Some have claimed this was an attempt to cover up a dark secret (making a pact with the Devil if you believe the Tsar’s propagandists) but I believe that it was simply an aspect of the man he was. Sanchez did not set pen to paper to write anything more profound than a ship’s inventory before he was thirty: frustratingly, there are no (genuine) contemporary diaries or personal musings of any of the events that he would later recount in his major works. And in those works they serve purely as examples, in which Sanchez himself is at best reduced to a colourless narrator who observes the incidents without becoming involved in them – which seems rather unlikely based on what we know about his character in later life. ######################## quite simply believed that he himself was of no interest, and by the time he was writing, his head was too filled with ideas, like a bubbling coffee-pot, to concern himself with clearing up his own origins.

In any case, a (slightly) more coherent record of Sanchez’s life begins with his decision to join the Portuguese East India Company in 1817 at the age of twenty. Once more, how he got from Santander to Lisbon is unclear, but he appears to have been working as a bank clerk once more before joining the Company. ############ have suggested that it was this background in finance that discouraged Sanchez from making any sort of commentary on economics in the otherwise bold and radical strokes of his later writings which sought to completely turn the world upside down (and did, if not perhaps in the way he intended). It does appear odd that at a time when the merits of the gold and silver standards were being debated and concerns over whether finance should serve the state, the rich or the people as a whole would spark some of the more minor elements of the Popular Wars, Sanchez remained silent. ############# rather black humour to suggest that his work there convinced him that there was one area, perhaps, where mankind could never come to an agreement.

##### reasons for joining the Company, though much speculated upon, have never been satisfactorily explained, and I am forced to resort to the very dull standard justification that he did it to escape the black memories of his past, his parents’ murder and the rough life he had endured with the Kleinkriegers. Whether he sought the exotic locales that he would voyage to is a more problematic question, and highlights the fact that any attempt to acquire a biographical portrait of a historical individual is usually hampered by the simplification that a man never changes throughout life. ###### indeed a reason then what happened to Sanchez might be considered an even more profound change than is already recognised, but ## unclear.

Whatever his reasons, Sanchez joined the Company and after eighteen months continuing to work in his clerical role in one of the Company offices in Lisbon, boarded the East Indiaman Centauro, bound for Goa via Brazil. What few reports from his supervisors which have not been wildly distorted by one side or the other ########## but unimaginative’. It was a time of great expansion for the Portuguese in India, with the Maratha War weakening the two great Maratha houses of Scindia and Holkar and allowing the Portuguese-backed puppet Peshwa to assert more authority over the Confederacy.[N] ########### ‘Indian Board’ was founded[N] and its early meetings would have some influence on Sanchez’s life.

It is known that the Centauro, thanks to bad weather in the Bay of Biscay, stopped in Dakar in order to purchase more canvas to repair a sail (returning to Portugal would probably have been easier, but the Centauro’s cocky captain, Fernão de Sintra, saw such an action as returning with his tail between his legs and sought an alternative that would preserve his pride. On such petty decisions does the world turn). Due to his position, Sanchez was drafted in by the ship’s quartermaster to help negotiate for the canvas needed. Sintra had hoped to obtain what he needed from Portuguese Cachau further south, ####################### Sanchez found himself negotiating with blacks from the Freedonia Colony.[N] He found that the Freedonians viewed him with deep suspicion, as they did all Spaniards and Portuguese, and after asking what by report are questions of quite child-like innocence, one of the Freedonian merchants – a man named Jonathan Quimbo – told him about the slave trade.

Some have suggested that it was at this moment that ######## but I would argue that, while the incident was obviously of great importance and quoted prominently by Sanchez in Unity Through Society, he did not truly recognise the import of it until the contrast of the later Brazilian affair. It is also worth noting that some scholars have pointed out that Sanchez may have witnessed an unusually rosy treatment of blacks ############## height of the Dahomey Revolt against the Oyo Empire, when the British Royal Africa Company was recruiting many more jagun[N] and in particular was allowing educated blacks from Freedonia to serve as officers in its army. ##### else only exaggeration.

The Centauro, equipped with new (and rather overpriced) sails, then sailed on to Brazil. In support of my point above, there is no record of Sanchez having been unusually thoughtful on this voyage, whereas the diary of Second Lieutenant Duarte Álvares (one of the most precious sources for any biographer of Sanchez) does make two mentions of him seeming ‘not himself’ on the outbound voyage to Goa afterwards. ########################## beneath our consideration.

Initially the Centauro went into port at Porto dos Casais in what was then the south of Brazil.[N] In the event the unrest there meant that Captain Sintra had to offload his cargo of manufactured goods further south, in Montevideo. ########################viduals have cited this as ‘evidence of chronological confusion’ due to the fact that King John VI would not ascend the throne of Portugal until 1821 and would not embark on his policy of “Rédea do Rei” until the year after. Such ############## that the southern provinces of Portuguese Brazil were already restless even before John abolished the Cortes in Bahia. The Cortes’ representation moderated the southerners’ distaste for the way they were disadvantaged within the Viceroyalty by high internal trade tariffs, but it was not the cure-all some have sugge##########

######uncertain whether Sanchez was influenced by the issues plaguing Porto dos Casais, but Montevideo was certainly a turning point in his life. The Centauro was stuck there for a full month while Sintra attempted hopefully to get something approaching the original price for his cargo, and while Sanchez was naturally involved in these talks with local merchants, he had plenty of time to himself to explore the city.

Montevideo ######### turning point. Contested between Spain and Portugal in the years before the Second Platinean War, the Meridians had been content to leave it in Portuguese hands. At the same time the realities of geography and trade meant that Montevideo was tied culturally and economically much closer to Buenos Aires across the River Plate than it was to Bahia, or even to Porto dos Casais. It was here that Sanchez meant a living example of those ties, the Meridian businessman Luis Carlos Cruz.

########## still at an early point in his career, but nontheless far outclassed the penniless clerk Sanchez, and thus one can only speculate on ##################################################################################################################### but in fact Cruz was there as an agent for the Priestley Tonic Company, now run by the son of José Priestley, Juan Miguel Priestley.[N] The phlogisticated water had found such a market in Brazil that it remained a valuable product even when the Jacobin Wars had torn up the trade to rich Europeans that had previously dominated Priestley’s business. However ################################################# that Cruz expressed his distaste for the institution of slavery and explained that it was illegal (though not always enforced) in the United Provinces. While Montevideo cleaved to Meridian practices in many ways and there was widespread thought within the city’s intellectual community (which had ultimately been sparked by Carvalho’s brief residency there years before[N]) it was still a part of Brazil, and slave ownership on the part of many locals was open#######################################################################despite Cruz’s admonitions, Sanchez indeed inquired of one slaveholder of his opinion of the institution and, perhaps by chance, got not an unthinking individual who took the system for granted but an intellectual who proceeded to lecture him on Linnaean Racialist theory.

The man (whose nam######rded) opined on the subject that while the Jacobins had obviously got many things wrong (such as seeking to overthrow a king), he feared that they might discredit by association the obvious truth of the Linnaean theory, and went on to list evidence for the innate superiority of the white European race, and the superiority of the Latin group within it. It was at this point that Cruz (a mestizo) punched the man out and a bar brawl erupted#########################################################################################reeing the man, Sanchez discovered what he would later write in Unity: “Education obviously makes a difference, but in raw fundamentals there was little to separate#########################uimbo who lectured me on this vile practice months earlier. Many of the slaves were dull-witted, of course, just as there are many dull-witted white men on any street who deserve their low station, or an even lower one...but many more were###########hold their own with any European philosopher.”

For now Sanchez did not share his thoughts. Perhaps it was the shared blood that meant that he and Cruz became lifelong friends, and wrote to each other even when Sanchez was far away (sadly, all of Sanchez’s letters and nearly all of Cruz’s are lost). The Centauro departed and Sanchez got a brief glimpse of the ‘vile practice’ once more in Portuguese Mozambique, and later remarked on the paradox that the local colonial governors would sometimes commit to the same kind of arguments############n Montevideo, yet would at the same time trade quite happily with the native Matetwa Empire and recognised its notables as men of rank. “It seems the humanity or lack thereof of the black African is variable dependent on ################### wryly remarked.

Then, finally, the Centauro proceeded to Goa and Sanchez spent eight largely uneventful years working for the Company in the city, slowly rising through the ranks. Twice he was brought out by senior Company men who wanted his ready command of figures to help them negotiate with Maratha notables, and Sanchez ########################## curse the brown man in private, yet recognise him as the equal of a prince in public.” It was the time of the foundation of the Indian Board and this example of co-operation between the rival European Companies also had an influ##############################such meeting he occasioned to meet Matthew Castleton, a British Company factor and amateur linguist who explained Sir Arthur Sawbridge’s theory that there was an ancestral link between Sanskrit and the ancient European languages such as Greek and Latin. Again##############cannot be discounted.

These events are studied in more detail in Chapter################## omplete our brief study of Sanchez’s early life and travels, we must finally turn to his next posting with the Company – Portguese North Formosa. It was here, and more specifically in China proper, that Sanchez would finally reach the conclusions that would one day set the world aligh

[GARBLED SOUND]

[END TRANSMISSION]















*

REPORT CLASSIFIED THANDE MOST SECRET

INSTITUTE DIRECTOR’S EYES ONLY

Recorded 07/08/2015, Thande Institute, Cambridge

Dr Rogers—

The above transmission was the last recorded from Captain Nuttall’s team prior to the link going dead. As you are well aware, under Institute lockdown protocols, the relevant Portal was then immediately closed until an assessment could be made of the potential problem.

I fear that it may be greater even than we had anticipated. My colleague Dr Cassimaty and I have attempted to recover as much of the corrupted datafile as we could: through reconstruction we believe that it was transmitted imperfectly with limited encryption, as though in an emergency. Where we were unable to make any satisfactory reconstruction, the symbols ############ are used to represent static.

The recording contains no specific commentary from Captain Nuttall, Dr Pylos, Dr Lombardi or the other four members of his team (who, it is worth noting, generally remained silent for previous recordings in any case). There is no footnote log unlike the other recordings: although footnote placeholders were entered, they link to nothing.

Based on the recent transmissions, Dr Cassimaty speculates that the team may have aroused suspicion amid the locals through their acquisition of books considered subversive in their locality in TimeLine L, such as the one whose extract forms the basis for this very transmission. I have no opinion on such speculation. However, Dr Cassimaty also pointed out that due to the design of the Institute recording devices (reverse-engineered from TimeLine C technology as you will recall, sir) the garbled sound at the end may contain some of the ambient noise surrounding the recorder before the transmission was dumped, which might hold a clue to events on the other side.

Bearing in mind that our attempted reconstruction in this case is far more hypothetical and speculative, I transcribe it below.


##################################ere! They’re he########

#############ecautions! Couldn’t possib#############you########hideout#######ibrary#####

#######police#################Oxford#######evacuate####datadump###################distress call########

No##############no time############send send######door####bar######

[SOUND OF GUNSHOT]

[TRANSMISSION ABRUPTLY ENDS]

I consulted with Captain MacCaulay and, though I cannot speak for the captain’s expertise with firearms, he claimed that the shot does not match any of the weapons or calibres that were supplied as standard to Captain Nuttall’s team. With less certainty he suggests that it may be a calibre not even found in our own world, with obvious implications.

I await your response, sir.

DR DAVID WOSTYN

THANDE INSTITUTE, COMPARATIVE INTERPRETATION DIVISION

(CONTRIBUTION FROM UNIVERSITY OF PARIS, FRANCE, EUROPEAN UNION)
 

Thande

Donor
Look to the West


A Timeline

by Thomas W. Anderson, MSci, MA, BA (Cantab)







VOLUME THREE:
THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN








lttw_flag_4.jpg



Actioni contrariam semper et æqualem esse reactionem.

”To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.”


– Sir Isaac Newton, Principia Mathematica, 1687​









.

Interlogue: No Matter Where You Go, There You Are.

Taken from the official diary of Captain Ben MacCaulay, Thande Institute, seconded from Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry under the provisions of the Convention of Krakow (2006) establishing the Global Crosstime Commission.

Note that under the conditions of the same treaty, the material contained herein is classified as THANDE MOST SECRET.


08/08/2015

Much chaos at the Institute today thanks to the unfortunate disappearance of Capt. Nuttall and company. Was called to a crisis meeting chaired by the Director himself [Stephen Rogers] and with more brass than I can remember seeing in one place since the war. The scientists ended up in the hot seat though. That French guy Wostyn seemed to be the only one who knew what the hell was going on. Talked about how he’d recovered the last transmission from Nuttall’s group. I had to stand up at one part and confirm what I’d told him about the gunshot. That Belgian general, Thyssen, kept getting awkward over it. I just kept telling them I wasn’t 100% confident but I was pretty certain that wasn’t the characteristic report of any of the weapons Nuttall’s men took with them and it seemed likely that they were from TimeLine L itself.

I noticed actually that Wostyn kept calling it ‘LTTW’ instead of TimeLine L. It was that Australian, Cassimaty, who explained that one though when General Jacobs from the Pentagon asked about it. Apparently that’s what Nuttall’s crew—mostly Lombardi—ended up calling it more often in their reports. I don’t think anyone actually knew what it stood for though. “L-Timeline something something”, I guess?

Speaking of Lom. he seems to be a friend of Wostyn’s and Wos. was very insistent about mounting a rescue mission. Not saying anyone was opposed exactly but there was caution with the others. I think this is the first time one of our teams has, presumably, been found out by locals without us deliberately revealing it? Of course we don’t know exactly what’s happened, Nutt. and crew could have been captured by the authorities—worst case scenario I would say—but it might just have been a bunch of criminals or something. From what I got from Wos. the current situation on the ground in L is fraught enough that either is plausible. Unfortunately Lom. and company seem to have spent more time sending stuff about L’s history than current affairs. Lom. claimed that it would be impossible to appreciate the current situation there without the history which I guess is fair enough but we could have used a bit more info.

Was a bit surprised when SR [Stephen Rogers] asked me to lead the second team. Haven’t had any connection with L aside from helping Wos. out with the firearms report. SR said I’d done good in K to explain to the brass why me. I guess that’s true but the situations were hardly comparable, K wasn’t anything like as dangerous as this. Oh and speaking of other TLs—some people were suggesting Nutt. wasn’t sound, mainly the Russian guy—Petrovich I think his name was? And yeah we had to have the files out and all those weird paranoiac things about Muslims Nutt. came out with sometimes. It was SR himself who had to explain about what happened in J about the business with the Ottoman Caliph and Nutt. being trapped in the dungeons for a month...don’t know the guy well but pretty certain that’d be enough to drive anyone around the bend a bit. Mind you sometimes I think you need to be a bit mad to work at the Institute...but anyway. Jacobs—no I tell a lie it was Lalloch from the Brit. MoD who said it—he suggested Nutt. would be better off than some if they had got captured then. Wos. said that Lom. had been with Nutt. that time around and had bust them out of prison. Lalloch asked Wos. if he thought Lom. could do the same this time. Wos. said he doubted it, Lom.’s method had involved seducing the Caliph’s harem. Don’t see that happening in L’s Kingdom of England.

OK, so we leave in three days. Getting to know the team which includes Wos. and Cassimaty as scientific officers—I suppose they’ve ended up being briefed on this more than anyone and SR doesn’t want too much knowledge about this one to get out in case it embarrasses us. Four soldiers beside me as before, got to work them into a unit as quick as possible in case we need to pull off a rescue. Of course everyone was saying that if the locals in L really have found out who we are...based on the reports from Pylos (the other scientist with Nutt.) Wostyn reckoned that the locals either have the tech to make Portals or are pretty close...the local theories apparently disfavour them finding it out themselves (just as happened here) but if they learn about our Portals they could duplicate them with their own technology...bit worrying to say the least. I think this is the first time since the war that a technologically equal, roughly, timeline stands a chance of being able to intrude into ours on their own terms.

So Jacobs suggested we go from somewhere outside Cambridge and SR agreed. Of course all the treaty paperwork means we can’t go from just anywhere. But the Brit. government is behind us and offered anywhere in the UK...so based on Pylos’ info again Wostyn found somewhere suitable...it’s in the UK in OTL but is part of a separate and rather less nasty government in L so we would be able to find our feet before we try and find out what happened to Nutt. and company.

So, three days and then it’s off to Belfast...

Part #101: The Definition of Other

Report: 13/08/2015 (OTL Calendar)

Captain B. MacCaulay:SIR— To confirm our preliminary report, we have successfully gone to earth in the Belfast of TimeLine L. As predicted by Dr Wostyn based on the information from Captain Nuttall’s team, the city is one of the largest in the Kingdom of Ireland and religious tensions are considerably less than OTL. I would say it’s more like French and English speaking Canadians, there’s some ribbing and the Protestants seem to be constantly threatening to secede but in practice they just get given some privileges and shut up. Also it looks like the Irish Gaelic language isn’t in use here—

Dr. D. Wostyn: Actually I managed to find a book that mentioned the subject, Captain, and the language is totally extinct. Some people have tried to reconstruct it like Cornish in OTL but—

MacCaulay: Not important right now, Doctor. As I was saying, the only language spoken here is the local dialect of English. The accent is somewhat similar to OTL’s Ulster but different. Lieutenant McConnell thinks he can adapt his own natural accent to blend in which should be necessary for us to find out more information about Captain Nuttall’s team and their fate.

Wostyn: I should point out that England and Ireland don’t see eye to eye on everything however at the moment which may cause problems. At least that’s the way it looks.

MacCaulay: We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. In the meantime we’ve managed to go to earth in a couple of first-floor flats next door to a public library. Dr Wostyn’s already taken out several books.

Wostyn: That’s right. Fortunately Ireland doesn’t seem to be xenophobic and they can’t tell my accent from whatever a French one sounds like in this timeline. The hardest part is the vocabulary but then being foreign gives you a free pass for that as well.

MacCaulay: It’s reading the spelling that I can’t do. But I guess we have to. Now while Lieutenant McConnell and I proceed with figuring out just what happened to Captain Nuttall’s team, Dr Wostyn has agreed to pick up where Dr Lombardi took off on digitising local books.

Wostyn: Yes, the library’s very helpful in that regard. Now we’re here though I realise what Bruno meant about having to know the history to understand how things work in contemporary society, and we’ll need that for when we go after Bruno and the others. So I’ll end up digitising quite a lot of different works.

MacCaulay: That’s it for me sir, back to work now and I’ll leave you with Dr Wostyn. MacCaulay out.

Wostyn: Right...bien. Now as a test I’m going to run some passages from this first book through the digitiser. It’s called... “A Historickal Dicktionary of Politickal Terminolojy and Disckourz.” Needless to say I will be editing the digitiser feed to OTL spelling to make things easier for the Institute’s analysts, and I appreciate better now just what Bruno and the others had to go through before. Now, let’s begin...


*

Regressive, Regressivism. Broadly, any political movement which idealises and romanticises the past, typically prior to some negative event such as a war, and seeks to return matters as much as possible to their state before that event. The term is believed to have been coined in France by René, Comte de Champagne, in an 1817 letter addressed to his nephew Philippe (and heir, as both the Comte’s sons had died in the Jacobin Wars and his brother, Philippe’s father, had been executed by phlogistication in the early days of the Revolution). René commented that the young Philippe, born in 1802, could not truly appreciate ‘la douceur de vivre’ (“the sweetness of living”) of those who remembered the time before the Revolution. He then went on to say ‘O, if only there were some marvellous conveyance, perhaps of the steam devices of which the Jacobins and their stooges [referring to Bonaparte’s Parti Modéré] are so enamoured, that might regress us to that glorious age: a regressive engine, if you will’. The French phrase he coined, machine regressife is remarkable for inspiring not only a political movement but also a genre of scientific romance, the so-called “Chrono-Voyage” in which such devices are used to allow protagonists to travel backwards—and, eventually, forwards—in time. While the Comte was a member of the doradic Parti Royaliste, which we would now call a regressive party, it was in Britain during the Marleburgensian Period that the term became popularised. While William Wyndham was not the first there to use the term, he made it his own. Wyndham’s anti-Churchill faction was originally known as the Old Contrarians and later as the New Tories, but after the Inglorious Revolution formed the core of the new Regressive Party that would be a major force in British politics for the rest of the century. The use of the term there popularised it across the world. SEE ALSO: Progressivism, Retrogradualism.

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Progressive, Progressivism. Any political movement that seeks reform and to further existing trends of reform (the precise nature of such reforms are not specified, but are often Mentian in nature). It usually also carries connotations of an embrace of the future and a disregard for the past and tradition. Scattered uses of the term are found before it becoming a major accepted form towards the end of the first half of the nineteenth century, when it was popularised by its use in opposition to the term Regressivism (q.v.). SEE ALSO: Mentianism.

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Doradism. SEE: Metallic Spectrum.

*

Reactivism: A political ideology created in Britain by John Greville, a political thinker originally a junior minister of the Phoenix Party government who renounced his allegiance shortly after the death of Churchill the elder and therefore was allowed to remain in exile, although he never returned to government. Greville, a conservative and doradist, viewed the Inglorious Revolution as a catastrophe but acknowledged that it had been precipitated by authoritarian misrule under the Phoenix Party (and its precursor the Rebirth Coalition). In the aftermath of the Popular Wars, drawing upon examples from the earlier Jacobin Revolution in France, contemporary events and much older history, Greville argued that progressive or cobrist ideas (which he viewed as negative) generally had little reception among an apathetic public unless oppression from above led the public to reflexively side with anyone speaking out against the ruling regime.

Greville’s On Revolution is considered even by his detractors to be one of the finest treatises on the subject of armed revolt to governance: his A Reactive Solution produced more mixed reactions to put it mildly. Greville’s original Reactivist treatise states that a government that wishes to enforce conservative and anti-Mentian ideals should use as light a hand as possible (which ties in with doradist economic thinking) and should tolerate protests and assembly. Greville argued that such events are like safety valves letting off steam from an engine and stopping them up will simply cause it to eventually explode. For this reason he is sometimes compared to the French medical pioneer Claude Toussaint, his contemporary, whose core tenet was that simply treating the symptoms of a disease might not solve the underlying problem and might even worsen it, particularly in reference to fever. Greville’s Reactivism is so called because it advocates using such protests to gauge public support for what he terms ‘a small Radical minority that even the most perfect earthly state can never hope to totally eradicate’. When public support is strong, the state should react—give in and enact some reforms to placate the public—until that public support falls away and the ‘Radical minority’ is left a lone voice crying in the wilderness wants more. Greville claimed that such an approach would ‘preserve the maximum of the desired practices possible, let us say eighty percent over a period of a century’, whereas ‘cracking down with violence and paranoia at the slightest hint of protest’ would have a ‘fifty-fifty chance of eventually triggering a revolution that would sweep away one hundred percent of the ruling regime’s practices’.

Greville’s theory was hotly debated in his lifetime but mostly not implemented until after his death by doradist parties in various countries—while born of doradism, it is worth pointing out that Reactivist practices have also been used by authoritarian cobrist governments as well to suppress counter-revolutions. Today Reactivism consists of two warring strands, the legacy of a high-profile split in the late 19th century. The split was over how to deal with Greville’s permanent ‘small Radical minority’. Fabian Reactivism is named after the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus, whose tactics against the invading Carthaginians focused on retreating and making hit-and-run raids against the enemy rather than facing them head-on—by doing so he was able to defeat a tactically superior opponent by means of gradual attrition. Similarly Fabian Reactivism argues that the best approach to reducing activity from the ‘Radical minority’ is for a government to drag its feet as much as possible, forcing progressives to fight for every step of the way for a reform, to try and instil a negative impression and discourage them from trying it too often: perhaps reducing the progressive fight for just their most cherished reforms and thus sweeping the others aside as ‘unrealistic to try for at this time’.

In opposition, Continuity Reactivism argues that such an approach misses the whole point of Greville’s thesis and is only more likely to irritate the public and drive more of them into the arms of the ‘Radical minority’. ‘Continuers’, as adherents of the ideology are generally known, instead state that the best way to cement doradist ideals is to give ground willingly to the ‘Radical minority’ when they have public backing, but when the public are contented and disinclined to cleave to the ‘Radical minority’, to then pursue regressive policies aimed at undoing those reforms. Continuers are often ridiculed thanks to some early high-profile cases of adherent governments undoing the reforms in a manner that made it obvious what they were doing and upsetting a much larger portion of the public (those with a political memory longer than months, that is) than they had intended. However the modern Continuer realises that it is perfectly possible to pursue counter-reforms in a manner that makes it appear to build upon the existing reform rather than reversing it as is the intention. The conflict between Fabians and Continuers persists to this day and shows no sign of going away: indeed, like many blood feuds inside a political ideology, it is often felt more bitterly than any conflict between Reactivists and progressives. There are cases of coalition governments falling apart due to two parties each cleaving to a different strand of Reactivist thought refusing to cooperate.

*

Mentianism: A full description of this cobrist ideology is beyond the scope of this book, but broadly speaking Mentianism is the modern English name for the philosophy whose adherents were originally known as “Neo-Levellers” and were an important faction behind the Inglorious Revolution. Originating in what was then Austrian Bohemia and spreading across the mining and industrial areas of Europe (and eventually beyond), Mentianism started out as a struggle for workers’ rights by the formation of cooperatives and ‘popular guilds’ (as opposed to the old medieval guilds which were usually controlled by the rich). Later on, sympathetic political philosophers such as August Hartmann and Gerard Deligne helped organise Neo-Leveller goals into formalised treatises. Mentianism is so called after an English corruption of the German word mensch, meaning ‘man’ or more properly ‘human’ as unlike the English term it unabiguously refers to both genders. There have been some attempts to retitle it ‘Humanism’ for an English-speaking audience, but these have generally failed both due to the potential for confusion with the literary term and also because ‘Mentianism’ has carried through the connotation in German for mensch to refer not simply to a human but to one possessing positive qualities and also emphasising those unique qualities that all humans have, distinguishing them from animals. Mentianism draws attention to the fact that all humans have potential to do great things, citing examples of those who have risen up from low origins to do so, and arguing against the then-popular view that such examples did not signify isolated happenstance lower-class individuals who happened to be able to intellectually compete with the upper classes.

Instead Mentianism advocated the idea that those individuals happened to be the only ones who through particular determination or just good fortune happened to have the opportunity to draw themselves out of their low station. In fact everyone had the potential towards greatness. Pointing out the great achievements in literature, science, architecture and so forth of those few examples, Hartmann in his famous pamphlet Gemeinsinn (“Common Sense”) suggested his readers imagine just how much richer, more wondrous, and happier a place the world would be if every single human being had the opportunity to fulfil their potential. Deligne on the other hand concentrated on the idea that every human had the potential to excel in a particular field, and being stuck in a peasant lifestyle meant that uncounted millions had unknowingly lived the tragic life of never having the opportunity to pursue their own field of genius, be it in art or engineering or warfare. Deligne went on to state that even the upper classes could achieve more than they currently did under Mentian principles, pointing out that upper-class children were just as automatically trapped in an occupation as their peasant subjects: “The heir to the local baron has the potential locked inside him to invent new methods of farming that could feed all the starving children of the nearby city, or perhaps to devise wondrous new steam devices to triple and quadruple our industrial production once again, or even for a field that he himself will invent. But he will never do any of those things because all he is allowed to do is rule—and even if he has the free time to pursue a hobby, many of those things are frowned upon as ‘ungentlemanly’.”

Although Mentianism was theoretically gender neutral from the start, much internal conflict in the often fractious movement has been over whether women should break from traditional roles, whether they should follow a husband as he pursues his own potential, whether they should have the right to pursue their own potential in a field in their own right, and so on. Nowadays Cythereanism is most commonly associated with Mentianism but that was not always the case, and in the late nineteenth century it was common for Cythereans to publicly clash with Mentian groups who tended to be dominated by local industrial workers with traditional attitudes towards women.

Mentianism has been viewed as a significant threat by doradist political forces and even some cobrists who believe that the Mentians go too far and endanger more moderate doradist principles. It is common for doradists and others to accuse Mentians of being closet Societists (SEE ALSO: Societism) due to the transnational nature of the early history of the movement and some of its factions being anti-racialist. Naturally Mentians tend to hit back at such accusations, calling them absurd considering the Societist enshrinement of the same class hierarchy that the Mentians view as the ‘yoke holding back the human race from enlightenment’. And indeed Mentians often tend to produce some of the most fiercely anti-Societist governments.

*

Metallic Spectrum. From Spanish Espectro Metálicos, a term coined by the New Granadine writer Rodrigo Campos in his 1839 work Política (simply ‘Politics’). Campos however merely recognised and recorded the pre-existing use of terms in Meridian politics, which by this point were spreading into the Empire of New Spain, Old Brazil and elsewhere, and organised them in a format with definitions. The three main terms in English are Doradism, Argentism and Cobrism, derived from the Spanish words for gold, silver and copper. Together they describe points on a ‘spectrum’ of political thought, so called because the terms were originally colours. The terms are derived from Meridian politics in the Watchful Peace and Popular Wars period. The UPSA had two main political parties, the conservative Amarillo (Yellow) Party and the radical Colorado (Red) Party. The Colorados had originally taken their colour from that of the precursor Solidarity Party, which had in turn been inspired by the Jacobin regime in France and its Bloody Flag. The Amarillos embraced yellow as their colour as it was the major colour of the Meridian flag and therefore emphasised the fact that they were a home-grown movement in contrast to the foreign-inspired Solidarity Party. The Colorados therefore changed the symbolism of their own colour, pointing out that the Meridian flag also used red as one of its colours. Unaligned deputies in the Cortes Nacionales, who sometimes acted as a single voting bloc, were unofficially known as the ‘Blanco (White) Party’ as white was the third colour of the Meridian flag.

The Metallic Spectrum originates from political discourse during the presidency-general of Roberto Mateovarón, when deputies sometimes crossed party lines over particular political issues. With the old enmities fading after the retirement of Ayala from frontline politics in 1813 and the more moderate Portillo rising to lead the country as the Colorados’ first president-general, party lines became less tribal and more issue-based. For that reason political commentators needed terms to describe ideals and ideology independent of party identity. It is uncertain just who had the idea to convert the colours of the flag to analogous metals, but that was the terminology that caught on. Yellow became gold, white became silver and red became copper; this also had the bonus of carrying the connotation of ‘common copper’ versus ‘high-class gold’ for the egalitarian Colorados and elitist Amarillos. Argentism is sometimes confused with Adamantianism (q.v.) but Argentism properly describes moderate ideals held for their own sake, whereas Adamantianism emphasises moderation as a pragmatic approach to stabilise a nation while working towards more cobrist ideals.

*

Societism: This

*

Dr D. Wostyn: Ah...my apologies. The digitiser’s battery ran down. I’ve been charging it with the solar charger for the past few hours and now I can record this short snippet....unfortunately I can’t go back and view the file now so I’m not sure where it cut off the digitising of the book...hope you can make sense to it, and we should be able to work out a better approach to this soon. Wostyn out.




Part #102: Turkish Alight

Dr D. Wostyn: Testing...testing...is this thing on?

Good...good. I don’t need to repeat what Captain MacCaulay has doubtless already reported to you, gentlemen...suffice to say that it looks as though we’re in for the long haul. On the bright side, I’ve managed to obtain sufficient books that I can properly carry on Bruno’s work covering this timeline’s history, and fortunately Ireland has a much less repressive censorship policy so we shouldn’t run into some of the problems they had. Rather than waste any more time I’ll beging digitising now. Wostyn out.


*

“The Book of Genesis teaches us that men were made from clay. In this modern world Mr. Paley and his supporters may dispute a literal interpretation of these passages, but there is nonetheless an important truth there. For we indeed are all men of clay, with the trials of our lives and the crises we must endure standing for the oven that bakes us. When subjected to that heat, some crack, break and shatter.

Others simply grow harder.”

—The Revd Dr James Heseltine, writing in 1842​

*

From – “Riding the Storm” by Mikhail Leonov (1951) –

In order to understand the Popular Wars we must first be clear that they are not, as they are often presented, a purely European phenomenon. They were one of the first global political phenomena, but manifested themselves in different ways outside Europe. Some aftereffects, such as the Great Jihad in India, did not appear until long after the wars elsewhere had concluded. Others did not take the form of violent revolution at all, as in the ENA. Perhaps the most tantalising to classify of all events related to the Popular Wars is the Ottoman Time of Troubles, for this precedes them.

Some have argued that the Time of Troubles should be regarded as calling back to the Jacobin Revolution rather than forward to the Popular Wars, but those events are not at all similar. The Jacobins represented an intellectual anti-establishment elite riding the cusp of public anger due to the incompetence of the royal government and a perception that it had failed, in particular thanks to the martyrdom of Le Diamant. Their movement, though at first based on ragged and sometimes regional concerns, swiftly became united and centralised until under Lisieux it almost seemed as though centralisation was the be-all and end-all of Revolutionary ideals. The Time of Troubles was very different, even though it took place in an empire whose capital of Constantinople was even more regarded as the central key to the state as Paris was to France. The Time of Troubles represents a wide range of movements based on disaffection and resentment towards Dalmat Melek Pasha’s dictatorial rule as Grand Vizier, but those movements tended to be regionally based—though they usually had some sort of representation in Constantinople thanks to its endless diversity. They shared nothing but the fact that they all opposed Dalmat. After Dalmat’s death in 1816, then, any semblance of cooperation or unity between these factions evaporated and it was a free-for-all of a civil war. Furthermore, the ‘other side’ was scarcely any more unified: Dalmat had kept the Janissaries and other conservatives in line, but now there were divisions between the elderly Bektashi Brotherhood leadership in Constantinople, the younger Janissaries (who tended to be both headstrong and puritan, rejecting their fathers’ Sufi heterodoxy and being subject to the same regressive influences as the Wahhabis in Arabia) and the large and significant faction generally known as the Bosniak Party. Dalmat Melek Pasha had been a Bosniak himself and had tended to favour his fellow countrymen when it came to promoting officials to positions of power. The Bosniaks as a whole had grown used to this sponsorship and favoured position during Dalmat’s unprecedentedly long tenure as Vizier and were willing to fight anyone and everyone to ensure that the next Vizier was also a Bosniak who would continue Dalmat’s policies.

Trying to draw geographic lines of control at any point in the Time of Troubles is an exercise doomed to failure. Records are sketchy, allegiances shifted rapidly, and inevitably we must confront the point famously raised by Thomas Reader in his Between the Worlds: “truth ceases to have any meaning east of Cyprus”.[1] In this context the relevance is that all the faction leaders in the civil war—insofar as much as you can define them that distinctly—found that any pasha of an eyalet[2] who pledged allegiance to them today would go back to doing nothing as soon as their army pulled out, and give the same cheerful, supportive welcome to any other faction’s army that arrived. While popular anger was everywhere, many among the ruling classes tended to be weary of the conflict from the beginning: perhaps because they had grown rather fond of the peace and prosperity under Dalmat and didn’t want to see it shattered. Even before it became urgent to achieve strong leadership again for the Empire thanks to later events, there was a general consensus that whoever won the civil war had better win it as fast and decisively as possible to avoid destroying the achievements of that peace.

That, of course, was not to be.

European narratives of the Time of Troubles typically focus on the involvement of European powers in the conflict, but the civil war proceeded for two years (1816-1818) before this occurred. The general presentation of this sequence of events in most works implies that the Europeans were waiting to see if the civil war would become longer and more destructive than most (as it did) before intervening. But this seems unlikely given the popular belief (whether true or not) that the Turks were on their last legs anyway[3] and any war against them would be a walkover even if the Ottomans were politically united. A likelier theory is that intervention was delayed by the negotiations of the potential anti-Turkish powers among themselves to divide up their prospective acquisitions from the Empire, a procedure which naturally dragged on for as long and achieved about as much as the civil war itself. Although Francis II and Paul were able to come to at least a limited agreement (which swiftly broke down once intervention had actually begun), Russo-Persian negotiations went nowhere. Russian accounts of the conflict typically portray the Persians as intransigent Orientals, but in truth it seems that if anything the Russian negotiators were the ones who failed to compromise on any demand. Shah-Advocate Zaki Mohammed Shah of Persia, as a hot-blooded youth, had presided over the disastrous defeat of the Turco-Persian War a decade earlier. Now he was older and wiser and knew that the Ottomans’ internal conflict gave the Persians an opportunity to regain their lost lands. But he also wanted to pursue an alliance with the Russians for two reasons. Firstly, because it would obviously make the war easier and allow the Persians to gain more than if they worked alone—perhaps even gain territory above and beyond what the Ottomans had taken from them—and secondly because he was concerned about the level of influence that Portugal was gaining over the country. The Shah-Advocate’s new Grand Vizier, Nader Sadeq Khan Zand (a distant relation) was particularly adamant about the subject. The two men agreed that Persia needed European allies to remain abreast of a time of rapid change in the world, which the Zand dynasty had always appreciated (and arguably had even helped instigate in some respects). However they were also wary of relying too much on a single ally. Persia remained well cognisant of events in India, particularly the way that the Peshwa of the Marathas had become a Portuguese cat’s-paw and with him Portugal had gained influence over the shattered remnants of the Maratha Confederacy—still a rich prize. Zaki Mohammed had no intention of becoming such a puppet and Nader Sadeq believed the best way to avoid it was to gain additional European allies and then play them off one another. Russia was a somewhat unusual choice given its often antagonistic relationship with Persia in the past, but Nader Sadeq argued that a settlement with Russia would not only help the Persians against the Ottomans, but also help them defend their own vassal states (and perhaps eventually even their core territories) in Central Asia against the uncomfortably vigorous new Kazakh empire of Jangir Khan. Furthermore, the north of Persia remained vulnerable to revolts of the Qajar tribe based there which had fought the Zand in the past, and which the Russians could conceivably arm if they regained a border with the Persians. Hence it was best to try and establish friendly relations.

In any case these desires came to naught. The Russians demanded all of the Ottomans’ territories in the Caucasus as a prerequisite for any deal. Persia viewed the Azeri lands as a natural part of their own possessions and refused to countenance this. Persia had expanded its influence in the Caucasus during Russia’s own civil war years before only to lose those lands to the Ottomans in the Turco-Persian War, and while the loss of Ilam and Khuzestan near Mesopotamia was considered more humiliating and more of a casus belli, the Persians were unwilling to meekly give up any claim to their former lands in the Caucasus and leave the Russians breathing down their necks. For that reason, the attempt at Russo-Persian cooperation fell apart. So we see how a failure of mutual respect between two very different nations ensured that their mutual foe, an avowedly multi-ethnic state, did not suffer so badly as it might have done.[4]

Within the Ottoman Empire, the initial chief conflict was within the Janissary factions, as their main regional-based opponents focused on consolidating their own power bases. In Arabia, the Wahhabis commanded the creation of a mighty new jihadi army that would take back the Empire for traditionalist Islam, the same force that more than one thousand years earlier had once hurled the Byzantines from Egypt and the Levant forever. And indeed the preaching of the Wahhabi imams and the rhetoric of their Saudi political allies tended to compare the Ottoman Empire to the Byzantines, claiming with the Janissary leadership consumed by heterodoxy and the presence of many Christians in positions of authority, the Ottomans were no better than the ancient enemy of the early Muslims. Of course, it also helped that they were harking back to times when Islam had been almost synonymous with Arab power and Arabs had ruled all Islamic states unopposed: the appeal of the Saudis was as much ethno-nationalistic as religious.

In Iraq the liberal Azadis or ‘Freedomists’ led by “Ibn Warraq” (an alias, meaning ‘printer’s son’, used by many Muslim reformists over the years) overthrew the pasha of Baghdad and established their own power base, while nervously looking over their shoulder as the Persian army geared up. The Shah-Advocate had rejected the argument by some conservative interests in Persia that the failure of the partly Portuguese-reformed Persian army during the Turco-Persian War meant that European innovation should be dismissed. Zaki Mohammed, or rather Nader Sadeq for the most part, had realised that the reason behind the failure was precisely because the reform was still in progress, the army had not yet adapted to its new role, and often the Persians had had to fight with a mixture of reformed and non-reformed regiments. Chaos seemed rather inevitable. But a decade later, the vast majority of the Persian army had been reformed under a system that represented a hybrid of European tactical ideas with new Persian ones better suited for the kind of battlefields that the Shah’s men would face. And the Azadis were well informed enough to know that that army would soon be heading their way.

In Oman, the Ottoman Ambassador (and old political enemy of Dalmat Melek Pasha) Esad Ali Bey was plotting. Oman was an independent Sultanate, not part of the Ottoman Empire, but it had grown increasingly subject to Ottoman influence over the last few years. On the face of it, this might lead one to believe that the Omanis desired Ottoman weakness due to civil war to reduce that dependence. However, the reality was very different. Sultan Sayyid bin Salim as-Sayyid was aware of the Wahhabi movement out in the emptiness of Arabia and was deeply afraid that any Saudi-led revolt would inevitably cast its attention eventually upon Oman. The sultanate had its own puritan forces railing against the kind of decadence that the prosperity of successful trade with Africa and India brought. Sayyid was convinced that it would not take much for the same people who cheered him in the streets to cheer just as loudly for his execution at Saudi hands and replacement with a more suitably puritan ruler. Maybe not even another member of the House of Sayyid...some of the Wahhabi clerics were making uncomfortable noises about theocracies ruled by Islamic judges (i.e., themselves). Though the Saudis were unlikely to support such a state, it was enough to convince Sayyid that he had to do everything he could to shore up the Ottomans and crush the Wahhabis.

Esad Ali Bey therefore advocated an audacious strategy. Knowing that the Omanis had access not merely to a large trade fleet but also had influence over the pirates of the Pirate Coast (which they of course denied to any angry Persians), he pointed out that while the Sultan’s army was small, this mobility meant that it could be deployed far afield. Specifically, they could round Arabia, enter the Red Sea and then place an army somewhere strategic. Either they could try to join up with whatever forces were in Egypt, or they could choose the other coast and try to take the holy cities of Islam, holding them against the Wahhabis and using the authority stemming from possession of Mecca and Medina to discourage support of the Wahhabis among the people. After considerable deliberation and being warned off the idea by most of his ministers, Sultan Sayyid agreed to the plan. The Omanis deployed their forces in 1818 to round the Arabian Peninsula by sea. As for their decision on reaching the Red Sea, that was left up to ascertaining events on the ground.

Said events moved ahead apace. In Egypt, the Mamelukes were restless and saw the collapse of central power in the Empire as an opportunity to regain their independence. Opposing them were the Ottoman loyalists led by one man: Abdul Hadi Pasha. Abdul Hadi had achieved widespread recognition and respect among the Egyptian public since his arrival in Cairo as wali for his actions against corruption and the defence of minorities. He was viewed as being harsh but fair, and potentially a far more capable ruler than the lackadaisical Mamelukes, who naturally feared him because of this. Egypt was theoretically under the rule of the Ottoman-appointed wali, but in practice throughout the eighteenth century the Mamelukes had clawed back power through the offices of Sheikh al-Balad and Amir al-Hajj. Initially these were often held by members of the opposing Fiqari and Qassimi factions, but later on the factions were reconciled and Mameluke power had grown to the point that they were contemplating declaring full independence from Constantinople. The chaos after Dalmat’s death gave them the perfect opportunity to strike. Led by Sheikh al-Balad Ibrahim Bey and Amir al-Hajj Daher Bey, the Mamelukes were on the march once again.

War was effectively declared when Daher sent assassins to kill Abdul Hadi, even though Ibrahim would not formally proclaim the full independence of the Sultanate of Egypt until several days later. Abdul Hadi escaped the assassination attempt, gathered his loyalists, and in what on paper seems like a coup against himself seized control of Cairo. The Mamelukes attempted an opportunistic attack, were repulsed, and retreated to Alexandria. For over a year the Mamelukes battled with Abdul Hadi’s loyalists for control of Lower Egypt, with Abdul Hadi emerging triumphant. With the key cities of Lower Egypt in loyalist hands, Ibrahim Bey decided to look for foreign assistance. He sent emissaries to the Dey of Algiers, Baba Ismail Pasha, as well as the Sultan of Sennar, Unsa IV. Baba Ismail, a political foe of Dalmat Melek Pasha, had been plotting for years about ways to return to power in the Empire, and had been trying to incite a war that would topple Dalmat by unleashing Barbary pirates on European shipping in the Mediterranean and hoping Constantinople would be held responsible. Now with the outbreak of chaos he was trying to portray himself as a uniting figure, with a vague plan of forming a great fleet and sailing grandly into Constantinople as its natural ruler. Egypt would be a great help in that if he could help the Mamelukes defeat Abdul Hadi. Sennar on the other hand under Unsa’s rule had defeated Mameluke forces years earlier and expanded its control in Nubia at the expense of Egypt: Unsa desired to split Egypt off from the vast resources of the Ottoman Empire that could potentially crush his kingdom[5] and backing the independence-minded Mamelukes appealed to him.

These alliances may have made sense in Ibrahim Bey’s head but Abdul Hadi proved a skilful propagandist. The Azadis of Egypt, with their access to printing presses and experience of making political pamphlets, rallied to him for reasons that did not become clear until later and this allowed him to continuously issue damning condemnations of the Mamelukes’ alliances. He argued that their plans proved that their claims of a strong independent Egypt were false: they were starting to become dependent on foreign powers even before seizing power. It helped that Sennar was the traditional enemy and he was able to portray the Mamelukes as amoral and unprincipled, willing to sell out for any advantage. This helped alienate Egypt’s Wahhabis from them, an important faction whom Daher Bey had been attempting to court.

It was at this point that it becomes inappropriate to refer to Abdul Hadi’s opponents as ‘the Mamelukes’. Their foreign alliance schemes proved so unpopular that soon Daher Bey was unconvincingly denying them in counter-propaganda and their position was becoming untenable. The hope was that the Algerians would arrive with a fleet to rescue them with reinforcements, but that hope was dashed in 1818 when the European International Counter-Piracy Agency attacked and destroyed Algiers, burning its fleet and killing Dey Baba Ismail as they did. With popular uprisings against them in their remaining cities of Lower Egypt, the Mameluke leadership retreated down the Nile to Keft[6] and joined up with Unsa IV’s Sennari army , hoping to march northward again.

Abdul Hadi Pasha’s men came south to meet them, and it was at this point that the wali received an emissary who informed him that an Omani fleet and embarked army was parked offshore in the Red Sea, with a parley from Sultan Sayyid and their leader, Esad Ali Bey (the onetime ambassador had somehow taken control over the army that was his brainchild). Immediately realising the strategic value of this, Abdul Hadi met with more emissaries from Esad Ali and the two conceived a plan. Thus it was that at the Battle of Dendera, initially evenly matched forces of Ottoman loyalists and Mameluke-Sennari allied troops met in combat, only for the latter to be routed after the unexpected appearance of the Omanis attacking from the rear. Having planned for facing Mameluke cavalry, the Omanis were able to swiftly overcome them and soon both Daher Bey and Ibrahim Bey were killed, their bodyguards overwhelmed. The Sennari infantry, which was shielded from the force of the Omani attack by the bulk of the Mameluke force, was able to reform in good order and under the command of Sultan Unsa himself retreated southwards to their homeland, using anti-cavalry formations to successfully fend off Ottoman or Omani attacks. Sennar would remain strong to fight another day, but the Mameluke independence movement was crushed and the remaining Mamelukes, decapitated of their political leadership, mostly rallied to Abdul Hadi’s banner.

That night over a campfire, Esad Ali pledged allegiance to his opposite number as prospective Grand Vizier before sharing with him his plans to take Mecca and Medina and hold them against the Wahhabis. And Abdul Hadi pondered the idea, the axis of history turning on his decision, while thousands of miles away the armies of three great empires prepared to cross the border of the chaos that had once been a fourth...








[1]Whether there’s any truth to this or it’s just European chauvinism towards different cultures is open to debate.

[2]Basically governor of a province, although inevitably the Ottoman system is a bit more complicated than that would imply.

[3]Which Europeans have a tendency to believe even at the most absurd times, see part #99.

[4]Leonov is allowing himself to get on his soapbox a bit here.

[5]And indeed did in OTL.

[6] Modern Qift.


Part #103: The Shining City on a Hill

Dr D. Wostyn: I believe I have now ascertained just why Bruno mainly digitised short snippets of books. I don’t know why, but running larger portions of the same book through the digitiser seems to cause the software to crash. It seems all right if you keep switching from one book to another every few pages, though. So I will give it a bit of this next book to chew on...I got quite a few from the political history section in the library.

*

From – “New World: A Political History of the Americas and their Peoples” by Sir Liam O’Leary (1960) –

Although the Empire of North America is nowadays thought of as synonymous with the practice of multi-party representative democracy and coalition-building government, this was not always the case. The ENA has gone through several party regimes, from no organised parties to one-and-a-half to two to two-and-a-half to many. The characteristics of these regimes (sometimes referred to as ‘Political Systems’ by the Americans—not to be confused with the actual constitutional methods of governance) are here briefly described.

Colonial Period (1607-1748). Initially the American colonies of England, and later Great Britain, had almost no oversight from home and were free to develop a diversity of methods of governance, usually somewhat inspired by the Parliament of their homeland but often incorporating unorthodox and radical new innovations. In New England, the Colony of Connecticut (the precursor to the modern Province of Connecticut) was one of the first English-speaking institutions to create a written constitution of sorts, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, which guaranteed the rights of all free men to elect their own magistrates. It is worth noting that this predates the English Bill of Rights that forms the basis of the British Constitution by fifty years.

The Province of Maryland (the name of the separate colonial entity, not to be confused with the Province of Maryland that forms part of Virginia) equally proved fore-sighted when its General Assembly passed laws that treated all Trinitarian Christians equally under law, healing rifts between Anglicans and Catholics. However this law was thrown out at the time of the First Glorious Revolution in England and would not be restored for many years.

Virginia’s House of Burgesses was one of the most influential bodies upon the later constitutional makeup of America, partly due to its association with Prince Frederick. It was also the first unicameral parliament in an English-speaking governmental entity, with the debatable exception of the pre-Union Parliament of Scotland. Early on in its history in the 1620s, it set an important precedent for American law by granting the same ‘rights as Englishmen’ to settlers from the German-speaking lands.

Pennsylvania created an unorthodox type of bicameral assembly, where a 72-man Council proposed legislation and a General Assembly of 500 approved it, rather than the other way around. According to the founding Quaker principles of the colony, religious toleration was implemented. Unusually Pennsylvania’s constitution, the Frame of Government, instituted universal freeman suffrage.

New York was the last of the English colonies in America to gain its own assembly in the colonial period. The New York parliament was a more traditional bicameral setup, with an upper house (the Executive Council) and a lower house (the New York Assembly). As a former Dutch possession with many Dutch inhabitants, New York also gave the same rights to all its Christian inhabitants regardless of creed.

Carolina was originally a proprietory colony ruled by Lords Proprietors. In 1729 it was divided into two colonies, North and South Carolina, each of which had a General Assembly. When the Confederation of Carolina was created as part of the North Commission’s constitutional recommendations for the reform of the Empire, these were re-amalgamated.

Throughout all the colonies, there was no real party identity. Whig and Tory, borrowed from the home country, were occasionally used, but had even less intrinsic meaning than in England and Britain. They were often as not simply labels to mean ‘Faction A and Faction B’ which no connexion for specific policies, ideologies or loyalties of the factions. A more commonly used set of terminology was ‘Court Party and Country Party’. The Court Party referred to the established interests associated with the capital and (lieutenant-)governor of a colony, while the Country Party meant everyone else. This was to be considerably shaken up after the exile of Frederick I and the ensuing events.

Early Empire Period (1748-1788). After the declaration of an Empire of North America by the exiled Frederick I in 1748[1] initially the colonies’ system of goverment was barely changed, save for the fact that colonial governors were expected to go to their posts across the Atlantic rather than sending lieutenant-governors to do it, and that more colonial governors were themselves drawn from American stock. The post of lieutenant-governor, which had once been the most important in the colonies, dwindled to becoming a vestigial appendage whose only usual role was to temporarily take over if the governor died, became incapacitated or resigned for other reasons, until London could appoint a new governor. In practice the British government often allowed the lieutenant-governor to succeed to his post and then choose his own new lieutenant-governor – which normally could only be from among locals. This meant that by 1770 or so all the colonial governors were American-born and had been picked for the job by other Americans, setting the stage for the later post of elected governor.

While in terms of structure the colonial legislatures were not directly affected, the effect on their makeup was tumultuous. Frederick’s return to power had largely been the result of gaining support among disaffected Americans—the Country Parties in other words, meaning that the former Court Parties had largely been displaced. The Court Parties had naturally contained many aristocratic and powerful men, meaning that the opposition to government in the colonies, disorganised as it was, was nonetheless more potent than one might otherwise have expected. It was in this climate that party names first vaguely took hold among Americans. The term Patriot originally meant a supporter of Prince Frederick, and it had started in Britain before making its way across the Atlantic. In Britain it described a faction of the Whigs, but in America ‘Patriot’ was often regarded as being synonymous with ‘Tory’, as Tory was generally used to describe someone close to the (in this case exilic) crown. The Patriots, who went on to be the ENA’s oldest organised political party, therefore began as an eclectic mix and in reality this has never truly changed. They were made up of many upper-class politicians and businessmen who had seen which way the wind was blowing when Frederick I began his undercover campaign to be restored to his throne, but they also had support from a large part of the lower classes who liked Frederick and liked the idea of having a king who had lived beside them. This was generally the most true of lower-class Americans who lived along the eastern seaboard as it was in this area that Frederick had lived and travelled as Lord Deputy. Further west, lower-class Americans were less likely to have such beliefs. The former Court Party members thrown out by Frederick’s movement coalesced around such people and formed the first crude opposition to the Patriots, which were generally just known by such vague names as ‘Oppositionists’ or ‘Western Whigs’ to balance the Patriots being known as Tories.

The Oppositionists’ first ideology beyond being sore losers was to embrace the Troubled Sixties: for that reason they were also often called Troublemakers. After the Third War of Supremacy and the triumphs of the Empire over the French in Canada, an undercurrent of public feeling arose, beginning in 1765. In the wake of its victory, London had seen fit to raise the taxes of its colonial subjects, reasoning that as the Americans shared in the spoils of war, so too they should share in its cost. This was however an unwelcome shock to the Americans, who had grown use to a very lightly taxed regime, and caused public unrest such as the so-called Hartford Tea Revolt in 1767 and the Pittsburgh Whiskey Riots of 1768, protesting about the raised taxes on the respective products. The Oppositionists helped ride a tide of public anger and, borrowing a phrase from New York’s constitution, argued that there should be ‘no taxation without representation’. The Patriot response to this was to form the Franklin Committee, so named after its leader Sir Benjamin Franklin, in order to approach London’s Department for Home and Colonial Affairs for direct negotiations. Thanks to a sympathetic King George III and a reformist Prime Minister (the Marquess of Rockingham) the committee was received well and a new commission was drawn up incorporating important figures from both the British government and the Imperial colonies. This was in turn called the North Commission after its leader Lord North.

It was the North Commission, acting primarily on suggestions made by Franklin, that drew up the new plan of Imperial governance known as Five Confederations and One Empire. This set up the idea of a single central Imperial assembly, the Continental Parliament, and to reorganise the twelve existing colonies into five Confederations of comparable population. This was generally regarded as a victory for the Oppositionists, who had advocated a local assembly with the power to tax under London’s ultimate auspices, whereas the Patriots had mostly favoured the idea of the colonies electing MPs and sending them to London as part of an expanded British Parliament. The North Commission’s plan was used to draw up the Constitution of the Empire of North America, which the Oppositionists therefore largely took credit for and used for their new name: the Constitutionalist Party. However, the New England colonies disliked the plan due to the fact that they would be amalgamated into a single Confederation. While the colonies eventually grudgingly went along with it, this helps explain why the the Constitutionalists found it hard to get elected in New England ever afterwards.

Constitutional Period: Two-Party System (1788-1803). Initially it seemed obvious that, like her home country, the ENA should have a basic two-party system with each party—the Patriots and Constitutionalists—consisting of a broad church of interests. This period lasted from the first opening of the Continental Parliament in 1788 until the formation of the American Radical Party in 1803.

The first Continental Parliament was led by George Washington[2] as Lord President, a notable general who had recently become a war hero through his service in the Second Platinean War. Almost as importantly, he was a childhood friend of the King and thus could be expected to be able to go over the heads of the British Government if they started trying to force legislation on the ENA. Washington governed as a cross-bencher, professing a personal dislike of political parties. In practice his presidency was made up mostly of Patriots, the party that his father and uncle had arguably helped create with their support of the exiled Frederick. It was Washington’s name and his widely respected governance that helped the Patriots claw back some of their reputation after their perceived defeat to the Constitutionalists over the creation of the Parliament itself. When he retired in 1795 to public acclaim and a generous pension, he was succeeded to the by Lord (Alexander) Hamilton who led an unabashedly Patriot presidency. Hamilton represented a threshold for the Patriots in many ways. Born a bastard in the British West Indies and having worked his way up from a poor background, his succession to the second highest office in the land[3] and an eventual peerage helped establish both for the Patriots and for the ENA in general that the traditional impediments for high office no longer applied. It has been argued (for example by Wolfenburg in New World of Difference) that Hamilton by his very existence embodied the moderate progressivism of the Americas in stark contrast to the violent revolution in France that he was swiftly forced to respond to.

It was during Hamilton’s first four-year presidency that the Constitutionalists invented the novel post of Official Opposition Leader, a position that had occasionally been suggested in the British Parliament but had rarely proved lasting.[4] The Opposition Leader was regarded as the Lord President-in-waiting if his party were to win more seats at the next election. The first Opposition Leader was James Monroe, whose lively exchanges with Lord Hamilton helped set the tone for how business in the Continental Parliament would be conducted.[5] When the Constitutionalists won the election of 1799 after the Ellery scandal, Monroe became Lord President and set another precedent by turning down a peerage due to his own Mentian principles.[6]

Monroe’s presidency helped define the ideological governing principles of the Constitutionalist Party ever after—for better and for worse. Being descended from the Oppositionist Party, a hodgepodge of varied interests all opposed to the Patriots for different reasons, on actually gaining Imperial power for the first time the Constitutionalists found it hard to adapt. It was only Monroe’s able governance—he compared keeping the party fixed on a programme of legislation to be akin to herding cats—that ensued they remained in power for as long as they did. Monroe’s refusal of a peerage helped instil the idea that the Constitutionalists were the party of the poor, common free man and his fight for his rights: this was often identified with the western frontiersman struggling to win his own land, as people found this image more romantic and sympathetic than the urban poor along the eastern seaboard. On the other hand, the Constitutionalists also became viewed as a southern party, with many of their most important MCPs—and financial backers—being from Virginia or Carolina.

The problematic issue for Monroe was that his party included both such southern planters (who of course were slaveowners) such as Henry Charles Pinckney and also radical abolitionists led by Ben Rush. This particular division, constantly talked about in the papers, arguably helped elevate slavery to a political issue when before most Americans had regarded it as a matter for personal conscience. Monroe managed to paper over the cracks by appointing Pinckney Foreign Secretary and Rush Continental Secretary, giving them what were considered to be the two most important and roughly equal cabinet posts. With the Patriots remaining strong and united under Hamilton, the Constitutionalists were intimidated into holding together until Pinckney won acclaim due to solving the Noochaland Crisis in 1802 and this emboldened the planters’ faction to push for the full annexation of formerly Spanish Cuba into the Confederation of Carolina. The situation is more complicated than the straightforward racialistic issue it is often portrayed as. While the southern Constitutionalists wanted to pass some anti-Catholic laws for commoners, they were willing to give the Spanish aristocrats in Cuba full ‘rights as Englishmen’ and, crucially, allow them to retain possession of their slaves. While there was some abolitionist sentiment in the Patriots, the particular strength of opposition to the Cuba Annexation Bill came not from concern for blacks but out of outrage from the powerful New England group within the Patriots which brought with it New England’s particular hatred of and distaste for Catholics.[7]

In the end the bill passed but the Lord Deputy refused to grant Royal Assent. Monroe instead asked him to call an election, which he used as a referendum on the bill, and surprisingly the Constitutionalists won again, despite Rush breaking away to form the American Radical Party. The Cuba Question was solved with annexation, but the two-party system in America was ended.

Two-and-a-half-Party Politics (1803-1819). The formation of the American Radical Party in 1803 was the first glimmer of what would become the ENA’s celebrated multi-party system. Benjamin Rush and his supporters’ new party consisted of a coalition of many former Constitutionalists from the northern Confederations, like Rush himself, together with some former Patriots who regarded their own party as being too aristocratic and out-of-touch. The party was generally referred to by its full name or by the acronym ‘ARP’ rather than as ‘the Radicals’. The reason for this was that in the ENA ‘the Radicals’ tended to have connotations of referring to the British Radicals who had come over in 1788 and attempted—usually without success—to get elected to the new Continental Parliament to push for new reforms as an example to home, and were viewed as comic figures by American theatre. It also had connotations of Charles James Fox’s Radical-led government in Britain, which was not very popular with Americans, perceived as interfering too much in issues like the Cuba Question. For that reason Rush and his supporters were careful to always use the qualifier ‘American’. While the ARP was best known for its abolitionism, it also advocated causes like extending voting rights to all free men, the abolition of the American peerage, and removing all religious qualifications for voting or holding office. The ARP tried to appeal to the western frontiersmen, using propaganda that pointed out that the Constitutionalists were growing dominated by the same southern planters who many of the settlers had fled west to escape, but their early efforts were largely unsuccessful. In the minds of too many settlers, the ARP simply represented an ivory tower filled with urbanite intellectuals who embraced half-baked causes. Anti-ARP propaganda by the two big parties often associated them with political positions then considered to be ludicrous, such as votes for women (which the ARP did not advocate). After Rush’s death in 1813, New Yorker Henry Tappan took over the party leadership.

Throughout this period the Constitutionalist struggled to keep their appeal across the whole Empire rather than being pigeonholed as the party of southerners and the rich. Monroe’s presidency ultimately did not fall due to the ARP or the issues it raised, but because of the Cherry Massacre and the Constitutionalists’ inability to agree to a decision: most were outraged over the attack, but a few were too sympathetic to the UPSA to condemn it outright (not least because they saw the Meridians’ attacks on the Empire of New Spain as being likely to collapse it and allow their own freebooters to grab territories for themselves). Monroe only passed a war bill with the support of the Patriot Opposition, leading to his resignation, a new election and Hamilton’s return to power.

Although the Constitutionalists were not especially tarred with the brush of failure over the Cherry Massacre, they found it difficult to compete in the northern Confederations after Monroe’s departure in 1807. The party became led by Wade Hampton, a rich southern planter who was a reasonable capable political operator but synonymous with every stereotype of the only people that the Constitutionalists cared about anymore. In 1811 Hamilton had a heart attack scare and stepped down, being succeeded by his Treasury Minister, Augustus Seymour. Against Hamilton and Seymour, the Hampton-led Constitutionalists progressively lost three elections, while the ARP built up its support. The ARP benefited considerably from the fact that under the British-derived political system of the ENA, some constituencies were allocated two MPs with both the winner and runner-up of the popular vote gaining a seat. This meant that the ARP picked up a number of seats while under a strict first-past-the-post system it would have struggled to gain more than one or two.

After the 1811 election, which the Patriots won by just one seat, the Constitutionalist leadership decided they had to broaden their appeal by appointing a northern MCP to replace Hampton as their leader. They found that man in Matthew Quincy, MCP for South Massachusetts-Second[8], noncommittal on slavery and a fiery anti-Catholic. The Quincy-led Constitutionalists beat Seymour’s Patriots in 1814, beginning their second and final period in government as a united party. Quincy stoked controversy by cutting aid to Great Britain and then seeking to unite his party by seizing upon the cause of the western frontiersmen, renaming the Ministry for Domestic Regiments to the full-blown Ministry for War and embarking on the Lakota War against the natives. He also presided over the Crisis of 1817, with the death of the Lord Deputy and many Americans’ refusal to accept any replacement appointment made by Frederick II under Churchill’s duress. In the event a compromise saw an Irish Catholic Lord Deputy appointed, much to Quincy’s horror. The disastrous results of the Lakota War coupled to Quincy’s anti-Catholic sentiments stirring up trouble in Canada and the Caribbean led Jacobin Wars hero John Alexander to challenge Quincy’s leadership. In the 1819 election the Constitutionalists were crushed, with the Patriots obtaining a huge majority of 20. Alexander’s ‘Southron Movement’ faction ran ‘Constitutionalist Whig’ candidates against Quincy’s official Constitutionalists, often splitting the vote and letting the Patriots through. The new Patriot Lord President Artemas Ward found his job made considerably easier by a divided opposition. The era of two-and-a-half party politics was over.

First Multi-party System (1819-1832). From the ashes of the Constitutionalists rose two new parties. Initially there was talk of trying to hold the party together, but too much finger-pointing curtailed that ambition. Quincy had lost his seat at the election (both South Massachusetts seats going to Patriots) and the Quincyite Constitutionalists were leaderless. Alexander’s Southron Movement was ostensibly founded on toleration of Catholics and government non-interference. This would later be clarified to ‘Confederalism’, meaning the idea that the Confederations’ governments should have greater authority than the Imperial government in Fredericksburg—a cause which had been mooted before in the past by the Constitutionalists. However, it was obvious that the real cause behind what would become known as the Whig Party was the preservation and expansion of the slavery-based economic system of Carolina and Virginia.

In order to understand what happened next to the remaining Quincyite Constitutionalists we must first understand events in the Confederate assemblies of the Five Confederations. The American Constitution had been vague on how the Confederate assemblies would be organised, leaving that decision up to the Confederations themselves. The result was an eclectic mix derived from the pre-existing colonial assemblies. Some assemblies allowed for a third tier of government in provinces—this tended to be the case in areas that had been separate colonies before the institution of Five Confederations, such as in North and South Carolina within Carolina, Maryland within Virginia, Delaware within Pennsylvania and Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Hampshire within New England.[9] Importantly, the parties on the Confederation level did not always correspond to those on the Imperial level. For example, New England, which had never elected many Constitutionalists even at Imperial level, had a three-party system in its General Court: the Patriots, the Radicals and the Salem Movement, a fiery anti-Catholic and expansionist group that had essentially acted as the New England wing of the Constitutionalists for the period of Matthew Quincy’s leadership of that party. The Patriots usually won the largest number of seats but not a majority, meaning they governed as part of a coalition either with the Radicals or the Salem Movement. Because the goals of those two parties vis-a-vis Catholic rights were inverted, this meant that New England had a lot of erratic policies passed over the years. In 1819 New England was regarded as being the second most progressive of the Confederations in suffrage, after Pennsylvania: it had universal householder suffrage for all white Protestants.

New York, Virginia and Carolina all had property qualifications on voting, although they were far more lenient than in Britain and often amounted to owning a house in any case. Pennsylvania however had continued its practice of universal white male suffrage, and thus it was no surprise that Pennsylvania was a Radical stronghold. In the Pennsylvanian Council and General Assembly, the Radicals held a strong position but still could not realistically gain control of the government. The Pennsylvanian Patriots held power almost exclusively while the Pennsylvanian Constitutionalists—who had little in common with the party on a national level even before 1819—held the balance. It was the Pennsylvanian Constitutionalist leader on the Confederate level, Ralph Purdon, who helped bring about the transformation of the remnants of the Imperial-level party into a new force. In late 1819, prior to the Pennsylvanian election of that year, Purdon announced the formation of a new party, to be known as the Frontier Party. Purdon was obviously trying to ensure that what was left of the Constitutionalists set themselves as appealing to a demographic he regarded as expanding in the future rather than being tied to slaveholders as with the Whig faction.

However, Purdon’s name did not catch on: like many other names for political parties, the one which eventually stuck came from an act of satirical mockery. As part of his election campaign, Purdon took part in a debate with Pennsylvanian Radical leader Joseph Baldwin and Patriot leader (and current Speaker[10]) Philip Price. The debate was organised by the Philadelphia Daily Gazette, one of the principal newspapers in the Confederation. Price lost no time in attacking Purdon by associating him with both Quincy and slaveholders. Purdon tried to deflect attention by repeatedly saying “We are neutral on that issue” when Price demanded Purdon commit to a position on slavery, knowing that Purdon was personally opposed but did not want potential western settler voters to view him as a fire-breathing abolitionist and closet urbanite Radical. Purdon’s comment was picked up in a series of editorial cartoons in the Gazette, which had Purdon saying he was neutral on many more issues, from the sublime to the ridiculous (an invasion of the ENA, Lord President Artemas Ward declaring he was a tree, Purdon himself being tortured by the ‘Straight Answer Society of Pittsburgh’). If the cartoons had been meant to mock Purdon, however, they largely failed, only ensuring that Purdon’s “catchphrase” was circulated throughout the Confederation and with it greater knowledge of the man himself. It did however ensure that Purdon’s optimistic label of ‘Frontier Party’ got nowhere: from now until the end of time, they would be the Neutral Party.

The election produced a hung General Assembly for the first time, though the Patriots continued to narrowly hold the Council. It was expected that the Patriots would try to form a coalition with either the Radicals or the ‘Neutrals’. However, Purdon’s deputy in the ‘Neutrals’, Phineas Jenks, had a deep-seated connection with the Radicals due to having professionally known the old imperial-level Radical leader (and fellow Pennsylvanian) Benjamin Rush. Purdon was able to use Jenks as a negotiator to forge a coalition between the Neutrals and Radicals, forcing the Patriots out of power for the first time in Pennsylvania. And across the country, the remnant of the Quincyite Constitutionalists embraced the new name and leadership. For the next decade or so, the ENA would have a four-party system: the Patriots, Whigs, Radicals and Neutrals, though the latter two generally cooperated on a national level as they did in Pennsylvania. It was a system that would last until the Popular Wars came to America...






[1] This is a bit debatable. The Declaration of Right signed by colonial lieutenant-governors and other American bigwigs in 1748 simply stated that Frederick was the rightful king of Great Britain and Ireland. While it was implicit that part of this bargain would be Frederick winning the colonies more self-rule and prestige, he did not explicitly proclaim an Empire of North America until his coronation in 1750.

[2] Strictly speaking this should be Lord Washington, as he was made 1st Baron Washington by George III. However, as with some other historical figures in TTL such as the Duke of Marlborough and the Duke of Mornington, he is usually referred to by his surname (as with Churchill and Wesley). An OTL comparable example is Pitt the Elder, who is usually referred to as such except in political circles which sometimes give him his correct name of (Lord) Chatham.

[3] The Lord Deputy is considered the highest office, although this is a bit misleading because by convention the Lord Deputy is always a British noble appointed by the King, so an American couldn’t aspire to it anyway.

[4] The post of Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition would not become a constant and recognised position until the mid-19th century in OTL.

[5] Hamilton was a lord and Monroe a commoner, but the American Continental Parliament was organised a bit differently to Britain’s: people holding noble titles could still run for and win seats in the Commons. Technically Hamilton, as both MCP for Albany Province and Baron Hamilton, could have voted in both the Commons and Lords—but this was frowned upon.

[6] Obviously the term is being used anachronistically here as the Mentian Movement wouldn’t begin until after Monroe’s death. What the author means is that Monroe was opposed to peerages because he viewed them as contradicting the idea that all free men should be equal.

[7] Some of this is historical, but it’s substantially more the case than OTL because New England has annexed Canada and is used to troublesome revolts from the local French Catholics—those that haven’t removed themselves to Louisiana or been racially purged.

[8] I.e. he was runner-up in the popular vote for the constituency of South Massachusetts and therefore got its second seat.

[9] But not Massachusetts because the Boston-based General Court of New England, the Confederation of New England’s Confederate assembly, is basically the old General Court of Massachusetts expanded to subsume the other provinces within the Confederation.

[10] As in most modern American state assemblies, the ENA Confederate assemblies have carried over the idea that the Speaker is essentially the prime minister, rather than being the neutral oversight position it is in Westminster systems. However Pennsylvania’s odd backwards bicameral system means this is a bit more complicated than usual.

Part #104: China Will Grow Larger

Dr D. Wostyn: As you will doubtless have heard from Captain MacCaulay, our work proceeds steadily but frustratingly slowly. I fear for Bruno and the others, but there is little that can be done. So I might as well allow myself the small indulgence of switching to my own favourite topic when choosing the next volume to digitise an extract from...

*

From: “Discord, Division and Divergence: China, 1813-1863” by V. V. Feofilaktov (1951)

China in the Watchful Peace is a complex topic to understand. Firstly of course we must realise that in a very real sense, ‘the Watchful Peace’ was not an event that directly applied to China. The Jacobin French had never succeeded in penetrating their piratical activities out of La Pérouse’s Land into Chinese waters, and the pre-existing French factories in Guangzhou (as it was then known)[1] remained under the control of the (Royal) French East India Company. Therefore if the European war never impinged upon China, nor did the peace; yet this is also not entirely true. In an age of postwar exhaustion and austerity, many European leaders followed the example that the Portuguese had set under Peter IV and invested what capital they had in their East Indian trade. The hope, largely justified, was that an increase in the volume of trade would lead to industrial development and jobs in Europe. On some level it is also true to say that the ruling classes buried themselves in exotica to distract themselves from the faded, ashen glories of their own civilisation.

The trade in this period was highly unusual in many ways. Traditionally, the desirable trade goods of the East in Europe had been spices and other luxury goods, and in the case of China also silk and porcelain. In exchange for this, Europeans had mainly brought precious metals: ingots of silver and gold remained the only trade good China would accept for a long time, with a few rare exceptions such as the American ginseng that led to increasing Hanoverian dominance of portions of the China trade in the years before the War of the Three Emperors.[2] This had remained more or less constant for centuries, with India and China being reliable sinks for gold, and this was ultimately the source of the fact that gold was considered to have an intrinsic and unsinkable monetary value from which the value of all other goods was defined.[3]

Now, however, things changed. Many European countries had lost part or all of their gold reserves in the course of the Jacobin Wars. France, of course, had started the war almost bankrupt; that had been the major cause of her Revolution. Britain’s gold reserve had ended up in the Thames courtesy of General Modigliani and only a small part could be recovered. The German and Italian states were ravaged by war, with Saxony, Austria and Naples all holding the largest reserves due to successfully preventing their capitals from falling to enemy attack. Though Castile retained most of Spain’s old gold reserves, the regular treasure fleets from the former Spanish America had naturally dried up after the formation of the Empire of New Spain[4] and its rule by a regime hostile to that in Castile (or Aragon). New Spain’s new major trade partners were the Empire of North America and, despite their enmity, the UPSA, and both were hungry for gold themselves. The ENA in particular bought up large quantities of gold under its periods of Patriot rule in order to back up their newly independent currency, the Imperial. The Imperial was originally based on the Spanish dollar, then the most popular currency to use in the ENA, so the exchange with New Spain was obvious.[5] What was less obvious was the fact that the Imperial soon began to displace the pound sterling in Britain due to the New Royal Bank of Manchester lacking gold reserves to back the pound. Eventually the Marleburgensian regime gave up and switched over to minting its own Imperials, which were referred to as ‘Royals’ as a nod to the way that joint Anglo-American concerns were often termed ‘Royal and Imperial’. This exchange, known as “The Tail Wagging the Dog” in economic circles, might have been humiliating for Britain’s national image but allowed the kingdom to buy more gold from the ENA in order to build up its own reserves again. The introduction of the Imperial (as the Royal) also allowed the New Royal Mint based in Liverpool the opportunity to rationalise aspects of the British currency: the Royal was divided into ten florins or one thousand farthings.[6]

The upshot of all this was that suddenly gold was in demand in Europe, and at the same time China, if not India, had less of a demand for precious metals than before. The creation of the nascent Feng Dynasty in the south had important consequences for the China trade. The Sanhedui conspirators who founded the Feng Dynasty had received help from European traders in return for the promise to undo the isolationist and paleo-Confucian policies of the Guangzhong and Chongqian Emperors and open up more cities for European trade. This policy of opening up to Europe (if reluctantly at times) came hand in hand with accepting European innovations that the Qing had dismissed—and often doing so because the Qing had dismissed them. One aspect of this was that there was suddenly a vast market in experienced European troops to help train, drill and act as officers to the Feng’s rather ragtag gang of rebels that constituted their army. And, of course, with the end of the Jacobin Wars in Europe, there was a surfeit of such veterans around. With payment mainly coming in the form of gold, this meant that the same gold that European traders had been painstakingly bringing to China for the past three hundred years from Africa or America now started making its way to Europe to replenish gold reserves.

One question that many students find difficult to understand is why the Chongqian Emperor did not take immediate action against the Feng rebels. Those students can at least take comfort from the fact that Chongqian’s own brother Yenzhang thought exactly the same thing: his strategy in the Three Emperors’ War had largely been predicated on the assumption that General Sun’s Great Eastern March raiding southern China would force Chongqian to split his armies and send forces south to drive Sun away. Instead Chongqian had sent only token forces, which in the long run provoked the public anger that fuelled the rise of the Feng rebellion in the south, but also ensured that Yenzhang would be trapped between the undiminished forces of Chongqian and the Russo-Korean armies of the north. When the Second Battle of Ningyuan ended Yenzhang’s reign in 1813 (unless, of course, one believes the official account of Yu Wangshan dictated from Zhenjing)[7] only two of the Three Emperors of the titular war remained: the Qing Emperor Chongqian in Beijing and the Feng Emperor Dansheng in Guangzhou—soon renamed Hanjing.[8]

What would happen next in the conflict dividing China? As with the Jacobin Wars in Europe, the predominant mood was one of exhaustion. Though the Three Emperors’ War had only lasted seven years compared to the Jacobin Wars’ sixteen, the conflict had ripped the country apart, demolished many of the old certainties, and turned brother against brother. Furthermore, both remaining Emperors had little to call on in the way of fighting force. As metnioned above, the Feng had had to build an army from scratch and it was still very much in the preliminary stages. The Qing were better off, at least having the core of a trained military, but they had their own problems. The Chongqian Emperor felt he had to respond to his brother Yenzhang’s Manchu romanticism, believing (accurately) that it had played some part in the Han-nativist revolt in the south—for a very long time, Chongqian did not recognise the true scale of the Feng rising and that it was not simply another minor peasant revolt. There was also the need to purge the army of supporters of his brother: the war had gone on long enough and become bitter enough that it was not realistic to accept defeated enemies back into the fold. At the same time, Chongqian was acutely aware that he could not afford to change things too much, relying on conservative thought for much of his support.

The result of this was the Movement to Restore Harmony, a term sometimes applied more broadly to the wider political programme of the Chongqian Emperor but more accurately solely describing his military policy. The old division between the Han-recruited Green Standard Army and the Manchu/Mongol-recruited Eight Banners was abolished. Chongqian hesitated over whether to allow the Eight Banners to continue in a purely ceremonial capacity, but was persuaded otherwise by his General Liang Tianling. Liang had become one of the most celebrated generals of the Three Emperors’ War, though in practice this meant he was one of the least spectacular failures who happened to still be alive.[9] His moment of triumph had been the retaking of Beijing from Yenzhang’s forces even as Yenzhang himself fell at Second Ningyuan. This meant that with the death of Chongqian’s former Prime Minister Zeng Xiang—probably the single biggest blow to the fragile new northern Qing state—Liang slipped into the role of the Emperor’s most significant advisor. Indeed with Chongqian’s devotion to the arts and distaste for worldly concerns, it is fair to say that it was Liang who truly ran the empire. And Liang, though not quite as ignorant of the import of the Feng as Chongqian, nonetheless regarded them as a problem that would solve itself. Liang believed that the Feng leadership would have to sell itself out so much to the foreign barbarians that the common folk would soon view them as having lost the Mandate of Heaven, and a few years down the line the Qing could march there and be welcomed as liberators as the people rose up.

However, Liang had a particular distaste for the Mongols, something which biographers have traced back to a brawl with an Eight Banner Mongol soldier in his youth. He advised Chongqian that the betrayal of the Mongols only compounded the treachery of his brother, and that the Eight Banners had grown corrupt enough that they must be entirely abolished. Therefore this was done, and in the future Manchu soldiers would be either incorporated into the Green Standard Army or, increasingly, dismissed as untrustworthy. Chongqian matched this policy with a cultural edict. In the past the Qing aristocracy had always had Manchu names beside their Han ones, even if few spoke the Manchurian language these days. Chongqian banned the use of Manchu names and the use of the language in public, repudiating the foundations of the Qing dynasty and even going as far as to have history books rewritten to paint Nurhaci as an ethnic Han renegade who simply used Manchu soldiers—which would also give Chongqian himself ethnic Han credentials. This policy was at the heart of the Qing view on how to deal with the Coreans and Russians to the north. Chongqian still half regarded the Coreans as acting as his loyal vassal in their attacks on Yenzhang, even though those better informed knew that King Gwangjong sought to achieve full independence. In the end Chongqian ‘allowed’ the Coreans to remain in ‘temporary’ control of Manchuria, publicly declaring “let our vassals have the task of punishing that treacherous folk and policing their miserable land. What need have civilised folk for it anyway?” It remains unclear whether this was putting a public face on a realist policy that recognised the Coreans were in too strong a position to easily dislodge, or whether Chongqian genuinely believed it. In any case, the Coreans did not push their luck: after defeating Yenzhang on the battlefield, they withdrew to the north and allowed the Liaodong Peninsula to serve as their extreme border. While publicly the Qing intended to reclaim those lands eventually, there remained a confusion in the ruling classes over whether they would actually have to fight for them or just ask the Coreans to return them like good little vassals.

Liang advised Chongqian that the Qing had to continue their reconquest, allowing them to keep their momentum and eventually restore their rule to All-Under-Heaven. Chongqian initially wanted to pursue the remnants of his brother’s army which now mostly held the east and southeast. However Liang argued that they were little threat and the terrain they held would be difficult to fight over. Instead he advised that the Mongol traitors must be dealt with first. This idea rapidly found support at court, as the Mongol Bogd Khan had not only seized control of Mongolia proper but his irregular but enthusiastic armies had also encroached into Inner Mongolia, and his raiders were only 600 li north of Beijing.[10] The so-called Bogd Khan must be taught a lesson, and it would be a baptism of fire for the newly-reorganised Green Standard Army.

General Liang, who led the campaign personally, viewed it as being a relatively easy war and a good test for the army if they were later to go after the Yenzhang loyalist remnant and eventually restore order to the south. The reality was rather different. While the existing Mongol armies of Bogd Khan were largely untrained and unskilled, Chongqian’s ethnic policies drove many Eight Banner veterans previously loyal to either himself or Yenzhang to join the Bogd Khan. The Green Standard Army, though improved in many ways by its experience in the long Three Emperors’ War, was unused to holding the battlefield without the elite Eight Banner troops and it took a long time for the new system to operate correctly in battle—particularly when it came to coordinating infantry with the new cavalry corps. The Mongols also acquired some European weaponry, mostly artillery, from the Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company which helped them hold off larger Chinese armies.

Nonetheless the result of the war was never in doubt. The first formal clash of the Reclamation War was in August 1814; by 1816, the Mongols had been driven back into Mongolia proper. The more difficult terrain and the fact that the local people were Mongols themselves meant that the progress of the Qing forces then slowed down. The nomadic nature of the Mongols, though somewhat reduced from their heyday, also made things more problematic as there were few cities that the Qing could take as strategic points and for dramatic victories. It was not until 1819 that the Bogd Khan was slain on the battlefield and the short-lived Khalkha-dominated Mongol state collapsed. Mongolia was reincorporated into the Qing Empire, except for the mountainous west of the country. That region was dominated by the remnants of the Oirat clans whose raiders had been given a bloody nose by General Kuleshov’s Russians in 1808. The Oirats had gone along with the Khalkha-dominated Mongol independence movement while it had lasted, but now seeking protection against the vengeful Chinese, they turned to the power of Jangir Khan and were incorporated into the Kazakh Khaganate. For now, publicly satisfied with their Mongolian conquests and privately alarmed with the state of their army, the Qing allowed the Kazakhs their expansion.

The Qing campaign against the Mongols bought the Feng Dynasty valuable time to consolidate and organise. The Feng leadership were fully aware of the idea that Liang advocated, that they would grow so dependent on European help that they would be regarded with contempt by their own people. To help try and prevent this, in 1815 the Feng enacted a formalised trade policy that attempted to please everyone. The Feng opened up several cities for trade, predominantly their capital Hanjing and their second city of Fuzhou. However, they imposed a restriction on when and where Europeans could live. Europeans were allowed to trade in the city by day, but a night curfew was imposed by which those Europeans would either have to return to their ships, or to a specific factory complex known as the ‘Outsiders’ Village’ built outside the city walls. More than one Outsiders’ Village was built for the largest cities of Hanjing and Fuzhou. As before, while there were some Villages that were the sole property of one country’s trading company, the norm was for multiple countries to cooperate. The Feng insisted on the Villages being surrounded by walls with few gates, ostensibly to protect them from bandits. In practice this was to keep the Europeans away from the people and so Feng watchmen could keep an eye on the gates to ensure Europeans weren’t breaking curfew.

Though it might sound restrictive, this policy was far, far more trade-friendly than how things had been under the Qing dynasty, and Europeans were satisfied with it. One unintended effect of the Outsiders’ Village system was upon the impressionable youths of southern China. With the Europeans as exotic and their homes as hidden and intriguing—and especially with their parents constantly warning them of the foreign devils’ avaricious ways—finding a way to sneak into the Outsiders’ Village became the number one aim of any rebellious Chinese youth. Not only did this quite inadvertently make the next generation more friendly towards the Europeans than either the Qing or Feng had expected, but it also led to the creation of what some have considered to be an entirely new ethnic group. Some of those Chinese youths who succeeded in sneaking into the Outsiders’ Villages were discovered, publicly humiliated and disowned by their families. But not a few European traders—legend has it that the first was Dirk de Waar himself—realised that these boys could be very useful working for them as translators while not expressing any loyalty to the society that had shunned them. And thus was born the first of the Gwayese,[11] Chinese traders serving in the European trade companies, as the name originally meant: it would not be primarily applied to half-Chinese, half-European individuals until some years later...











[1] A bit debatable; the city we call Canton or Guangzhou actually had no official name at the time. ‘Guangzhou’ essentially just means ‘provincial capital of Guangdong’. It is applied anachronistically here to imply the contemporary name, but inaccurately, much as some people draw a distinction between ‘Constantinople’ under the Byzantines and ‘Istanbul’ under the Ottomans when both names were used by both groups.

[2] ‘Hanoverian’ in this sense means ‘British and/or American’ – the ‘Hanoverian Dominions’ is phrase commonly used to refer to all the countries ruled by, at this point, Frederick II: Great Britain, North America, Ireland, Iceland...and, oh yes, Hanover.

[3] In OTL China and India’s appetite for gold did not dry up until the era of the Great Depression, and the vanishing of what had been regarded almost as an immutable force of nature contributed considerably to economists’ inability to cope with the depression and the failure of the Gold Standard.

[4] Which was called the Empire of the Indies at this point, of course, but as mentioned before the author can’t quite get his contemporary names right.

[5] Which is also why the OTL American currency is called the dollar.

[6] A pre-reform florin is worth two shillings. The Royal florin isn’t, but the name is used because it was associated with being worth one-tenth of a pound (20 shillings). A pre-reform farthing is worth 1/960 of a pound (1/4 of a penny, and there are 240 pennies to a pound) so this is also used for a unit worth 1/1000 of a Royal due to the similarity. OTL there were some proposals to introduce a unit called the mill for 1/1000 during a Victorian attempt at decimalisation which ultimately came to nothing.

[7] This is actually not as clear-cut as the author assumes here. While it is very unlikely that Yenzhang truly fathered a son and heir as Yu would claim in exile in Zhenjing, it is far from certain that Yenzhang actually died on the battlefield, though he probably did not live as long as Yu claimed. See Part #96 for more details. ‘Zhenjing’, incidentally, is the name Yu has called his exilic capital as a warlord in the southwest: it was formerly called Yunnanfu and in OTL it is now called Kunming. The name Zhenjing means ‘true capital’.

[8] See above re. the name Guangzhou. The name Hanjing refers to this being the capital of the Han people, the Feng rebellion being nativist and anti-Manchu in character. ‘Southern Capital’ would probably have been better, but this name was already taken by Nanjing.

[9] Most probably authorial bias; Liang was only competent as a general but he certainly wasn’t a disaster.

[10] The li is a traditional Chinese unit of measurement that has varied in length over time. Under the Qing dynasty a li was about 645 metres or 2115 feet.

[11] This is derived from the Chinese word gui, meaning either ‘ghost’ or ‘European’—therefore being a highly appropriate name to call one of their own who was both disowned and regarded as the equivalent of being deceased, and also who had gone to join the Europeans.


Part #105: Diamonds Are Forever

Dr D. Wostyn: Ben—I mean, Captain MacCaulay—has reminded me that these introductions, however short, nonetheless take up some of our broadcast bandwidth each day and are somewhat superfluous given his own reports. Therefore I shall refrain from giving them in the future unless further clarification of historical data is required. Wostyn out.

*

“If the Near East and India gave birth to all the world’s great religions, then you, fair Corsica, share a similar distinction in the field of political ideology. An island small you may be, yet you have given birth to ideas that have changed the world, not once but several times...”

—Georges Gallet, 1846​

*

From – “MIDDLE SEA: A History of the Mediterranean – Volume VII: The Watchful Peace and the Popular Wars” (Oxford University Press, 1978):

On some level, regardless of the wider conflicts that dominated the region, the history of the Mediterranean region in the latter half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth revolves around the axis of Corsica. The island, long ruled by the Republic of Genoa, finally broke free in 1755 after many earlier rebellions. Under the leadership of Pasquale Paoli, the Corsicans formed a new Republic: not one of the medieaval oligarchies like Venice or indeed Genoa itself, but the first Republic built on the principles of the Enlightenment. The Corsican Republic was laid out according to a constitution that would later be amended, but from the start contained details of the unusual mixture of radical ideas that would make it so influential and inspirational to other movements. The Republic made the Virgin Mary ceremonial head of state, recognising the place of the Catholic Church, but power rested in the President of the Diet. The members of the Diet were elected by the people and the President elected in a separate popular election which might have inspired the Presidency-General system in the UPSA.[1] The President was also Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces and the chief justice, but the Diet delegates also retained considerable power. What made the Republic particularly remarkable was that it had the most wide-ranging suffrage in the world at the time of its formation. Universal suffrage was implemented from the start, with all men over 25 having the vote. There is some controversy over whether Corsica’s other famous early achievement was truly in place from the start or whether at first it only applied to local elections for the Podestà (city magistrate); however, in reputation at least, Corsica has always been known as the place where female suffrage began. To that end it has an iconic place in the ideological mythology of the Cythereans as well as so many other groups.

At first the republican rebels only held the countryside while the Genoese still held the coastal cities, including the largest city of Ajaccio; to that end, the Republic was based in the inland city of Corte. As well as the Diet being based there, according to Enlightenment principles a university was also chartered there. While the University of Corte had a few false starts, it went on to be one of the most famous educational institutions in the world, principally because—again—it was the first university to admit women, albeit only for certain specialist subjects, in 1821.

The Genoese continued to suffer reversals throughout the 1750s and 60s, distracted by the Wars of Supremacy squeezing the trade that was their lifeblood, with Corsica increasingly being seen as an unprofitable running sore. In 1764 the last cities were taken and the Genoese expelled from the island altogether, but it was not until three years later when the Corsicans manned a makeshift navy and seized the island of Capraia—which had been Genoese since the sixteenth century—that the Gran Consiglio of Genoa could see the writing on the wall. To that end, Genoa sold the island to the Kingdom of France, which embarked on a campaign against the Republic. At least Genoa won back Capraia for the moment, while France invaded Corsica in 1768 and had completed the conquest of much of the island within a year—though, again, Paoli’s republican rebels continued to hold the interior and kept up a Kleinkrieg against the occupiers.[2] Although France had a much larger and better trained military than Genoa, she found the island no easier to completely subdue and found that Paoli’s republican ideals filtered back to France through the soldiers stationed there. Thus Corsica, along with the UPSA later on, was the major source of radical ideas circulating through France and in particular the military: greatly important, for if the French regiments had remained unquestionably loyal to the King, the Revolution would have been impossible.

The French occupation of Corsica, though brief from the perspective of history, left several significant effects upon the island. The man history knows as Charles Bone, who had been Paoli’s secretary during the Republic, fled the island for Britain along with the rest of his family, then known as the ‘Buonapartes’. Who can guess how history might have played out if Bone had decided to stay and his son Leo had grown up in Corsica? Perhaps he would have been a great president or war leader of the Republic: still, it is hard to see how he could have matched the epic achievements of the man we know not only to have scored victories for Britain but to have dominated and reformed France.

And of course it was through this man that Corsica regained her independence. When the Revolution came to France in 1794, the ideals that had been born in Corsica were expanded and taken to extremes by the Jacobins. The city of Toulon was held by the Royalist Admiral d’Estaing, who sent part of his fleet to Corsica to bring back supplies to help the city hold out against the Revolutionary army of General Custine. But the knowledge of where they were going sparked Revolutionary sentiment among the crews of those ships, and many mutinied. Some turned to ‘Democratic Piracy’ and were still randomly raiding any nation’s ships in the name of the Revolution as late as 1800, but the majority beached their craft on Corsica and deserted. With them they brought news of the Revolution, and it was while indulging in an ‘exploratory action’[3] of his old homeland that Captain Leo Bone observed the start of a complicated three-way conflict between the Revolutionary mutineers, the loyalists among the French stationed in Ajaccio, and Paoli’s old republicans who took advantage of the chaos to return from the interior and try to reclaim the island.

Bone, of course, used the knowledge from his observations to pull off his famously audacious gamble in persuading Admiral d’Estaing to come over to the British with his fleet, pre-empting the actual alliance between Britain and the royalist remnants. He also achieved contact with the ageing Paoli, using their familial connection to help achieve his goals. The Royal Navy, which now thought Bone could do no wrong, backed up Paoli’s men and helped them seize the island again, while at the same time declaring a protectorate over Malta. While Malta would eventually be handed over to the International Counter-Piracy Agency by bankrupt Britain in 1817, the Corsican Republic would continue to allow British ships to operate from its ports for the forseeable future: she became Britain’s biggest naval base in the Mediterranean.

The restored Republic weathered the Jacobin Wars well. When the Royal Navy sold off large numbers of its ships after Charles James Fox came to power in 1800, the Diet voted to buy three fifth- and sixth-rate frigates to form the core of a proper navy. She was also able to attract numerous ex-Royal Navy sailors who had been paid off. There are even unconfirmed claims that President Paoli hoped to tempt Leo Bone into becoming Admiral of the Fleet for his ancestral homeland, though of course in the event Bone was catapulted into a position of power in France instead. Those first three ships were named Presidente, Salvi Regina and Republica, and the Corsicans quickly threw them into action against Algerine pirates, building up experience and letting their foreign advisors become integrated with their inexperienced native sailors. Corsica would later become an important contributor to the ICPA.

Corsica’s willingness to fight and alliance with Britain helped protect them during the wars. Lisieux had little interest in the island, except in that it could be the source of conflicting ideology, but that was what mass control of all forms of media was for preventing, was it not? In any case, Nelson’s destruction of the French fleet at Minorca in 1803 torpedoed any serious Republican French presence in the Mediterranean until the days of Le Grand Crabe. Corsica’s apparently charmed existence met with natural resentment from other countries, and propaganda from the Hapsburgs in particular claimed that the island republic was deliberately allowed its independence by the Republican French, painting them as both inspiration for and collaborators with the Jacobins, and complicit in all their crimes de guerre. The Corsicans’ concern over this only increased when the former Italian Latin Republic fell into Hapsburg hands in the latter stages of the Jacobin Wars and became the Kingdom of Italy. With the Hapsburgs now in control of the old territory of Genoa, there was always the possibility that King Ferdinand could decide to stake a claim on Corsica, and Britain by now was too weak and self-absorbed to be relied upon if it came to war. In order to combat the Hapsburg threat, the Corsicans pursued alliances with foes of the Hapsburgs like the Sardinians, the Neapolitans and, more theoretically, the Concert of Germany. It was the first of these that proved the most complex of the relationships.

Sardinia had had a somewhat complicated history. In the early Middle Ages it had been ruled by small native kingdoms, the giudicari or ‘judicaries’, so called because they were descended from Byzantine judges who had seized control over the island after the Empire pulled out in the ninth century. Though several Italian republics including Genoa and Pisa had minor possessions in the island, it was these giudicari that dominated into the 1400s. Sardinia was gradually conquered by Aragon after the Pope proclaimed a “Kingdom of Sardinia and Corsica” under Aragonese rule in 1297. (It is worth noting that Corsica was never actually part of this kingdom except on paper, but the historical precedent became important later). Aragon entered personal union with Castile in 1469, forming what is generally known as Spain, although the two would not be formally subsumed into one state until much later. In 1506 Spain, and therefore Sardinia, became a Hapsburg possession; the island was considered to remain with the Spanish Hapsburgs after the abdication of Charles V split the Hapsburg dominions into Spanish and Austrian portions. However, with the extinction of the Spanish Hapsburgs and the War of the Spanish Succession ending with a Bourbon on the Spanish throne, Sardinia was transferred to the Austrian Hapsburgs as part of the Treaty of Utrecht that ended the war in 1713. By this point Sardinia had acquired something of a reputation as being the possession nobody wanted, being viewed as poor, plague-ridden and backward.

As another consequence of the War of the Spanish Succession, the Duke of Savoy Victor Amadeus II had received Sicily, which as a kingdom elevated him to kingly rank as he desired. But this situation did not last long: during the War of the Quadruple Alliance soon afterwards, the Austrians were able to threaten Victor Amadeus into swapping Sardinia for Sicily in exchange for their help against the Spanish (who, incidentally, were also invading Sardinia in the course of the war). Victor Amadeus tried to wriggle out of this promise later on, but in the end Savoy was forced to yield Sicily and take on Sardinia. Not that the Hapsburg possession of Sicily lasted long, either: soon Sicily and Naples would be under Spanish Bourbon rule after the War of the Austrian Succession.

Therefore Sardinia had a recent history of being treated as a particularly low-grade bargaining chip in the Wars of Supremacy. Things changed however with the Jacobin Wars. France invaded and conquered the House of Savoy’s continental possessions, and King Charles Emmanuel IV managed to escape to Sardinia. He ruled in exile from the capital of Cagliari.[4] Being realistic, Charles Emmanuel knew there was no way to reclaim Piedmont himself with the meagre resources he had, and also knew that the best way to regain it would be to support the winning side as much as he could and position himself to claim that a Piedmont under his rule would make a useful buffer state.[5] Like the Corsicans to his north, he mostly supported the British naval forces in the Mediterranean, and also the Neapolitans to some extent. However in the end Britain was severely weakened by the French invasion of 1807 and was in no position to make claims at the Congress of Copenhagen of this type, and Naples though more sympathetic was also unable to dislodge the Hapsburgs from Piedmont as part of their Kingdom of Italy. So the House of Savoy was reduced to this single, poor island that nobody wanted.

Charles Emmanuel IV died in 1814 (some say of a broken heart) and was succeeded by his son Victor Felix I.[6] While Charles Emmanuel had been a realist, Victor Felix was less so. Named optimistically—‘lucky triumph’—he constantly had the humiliation of his House in mind and his passion was intriguing in Continental politics, trying to find a place for the House of Savoy to wedge its boot into the door. His own disdain for his poor island kingdom was no secret, provoking resentment among the Sardinian people that did not go unnoted by their Corsican neighbours.

And it was also in this time that Corsica had its most celebrated visitor...

*

From – “Great Political Figures of the Last Three Centuries” by Michael P. Lamb (1987) –

Henri Phillipe de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon (a.k.a. ‘Henri Rouvroy’), 1761-1827.[7] One of the most influential figures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though he lived much of his life in the eighteenth. Born into an aristocratic French family, a younger branch of the Dukes of Saint-Simon, he was a true Renaissance man as well as a Revolutionary one, conceiving grand schemes such as the Nicaragua Canal a century[8] before their construction. He appears to have embraced radical ideas from a young age, though perhaps a better word is ‘outrageous’. In his twenties, against the wishes of his family, he signed up for the French army and served as an ensign and lieutenant in the Duke of Noailles’ army in the Second Platinean War. Rouvroy was part of the French army in Buenos Aires to surrender at the end of the war, and it is believed that he considered staying there, having become excited by the republican ideals of the new nation. However he decided to return to France and became part of various radical clubs. He enthusiastically embraced the Revolution in 1794, and it is here that his part in later history would be defined.

Rouvroy witnessed Le Diamant speaking and even his death in the confusion of the mob as panicky soldiers and Sans-Culottes opened fire. According to Rouvroy’s account, which is disputed, Le Diamant was actually shot by someone in the crowd; however, Rouvroy himself acknowledged that he was towards the back of the rambunctious crowd and could not see very clearly. Rouvroy disowned his aristocratic background and joined the Jacobins, becoming a member of the National Legislative Assembly. Somehow he managed to survive Robespierre’s early purges and, still hungry for adventure, joined General Hoche’s campaign in Italy. Because of this, he was out of the country when the Double Revolution meant Lisieux took over, and stayed with Hoche in the Italian Latin Republic. Lisieux viewed Rouvroy as a potential threat: he was intent on rewriting the history of the early Revolution to minimise the role of Le Diamant, and he did not need any inconvenient witnesses about. He had managed to track down most of those who still lived who had been there that day and had them dealt with, but Rouvroy was a high-profile irritant. It appears that Rouvroy went to his death unaware that Lisieux had paid for assassins to remove him while in Italy—an unusual move for Lisieux who usually viewed death as a crass waste, and showing how much Lisieux feared his existence. Rouvroy survived the assassination attempts, which he was convinced were all attacks on someone else, such as Hoche: his natural humility comes through in all his writings.

Rouvroy first became disillusioned with the Revolution after witnessing the Rape of Rome. Though only a lapsed Catholic himself, he had seen enough of Le Diamant’s speeches to know that the great man himself would have been horrified at these actions against the Pope and the people of Rome. He would later write: “This simple truth, of seeing the Sans-Culottes rampage over the city like a latter-day version of Alaric’s Goths[9] and knowing that the man whose name they chanted would have turned away from them in shame, revealed to me how insidious matters can be when the adherents of an idea take it to a place without control. It came to me then that all the abuses we had seen under the ancien regime, all the corruption of the nobles and the priests, was one and the same as what I now saw: ideas for ruling that had been good and honest to begin with, but had been twisted and corrupted by fallible men. I realised that we had thrown the baby out with the bathwater, dismissing things such as religion and alienating their adherents when we were just as guilty of using our beliefs as a means to an end and committing grievous crimes in the process.”

This revelation would go on to inform Rouvroy’s later works. In the short term, however, he remained with Hoche when the general was forced to return to France after the Hapsburgs and Neapolitans rolled up his Republic. Though Lisieux reluctantly accepted Hoche back, Rouvroy was quickly clapped in irons. It is uncertain why Lisieux did not just kill him at this stage: some biographers suggest that Lisieux believed in some mystical manner that the reason why his earlier assassins had failed was precisely because he had stepped away from his usual doctrine of the sanctity of life, and therefore he must appease whatever gods he believed in. This is debatable, but what is known is that Rouvroy was enslaved as part of a work gang constructing more Surcouf-class steam-galleys in Toulon. The work was deliberately hard and designed ultimately to kill its workers after extracting every last bit of use the Administration could get from them, but Rouvroy still had his spirit and grimly survived. He was nonetheless at the end of his tether when Nelson’s Corsican-Neapolitan forces attacked Toulon in 1807 and he, along with the rest of the surviving slaves, were set free. It was here that he encountered Corsicans for the first time, as he would later recount.

Due to the chaos in France, Rouvroy initially went to Naples and lived under an assumed name, at one point going to Rome and going through the first confession since he was a young man, speaking of his part in the burning of the city several years before. It is, however, apocryphal that the priest that heard his confession was the future Pope Innocent XIV. Rouvroy returned to France in 1810, racing to Paris where General Boulanger faced the allied forces, including the turncoat republicans under Bourcier, in the last great battle of the Jacobin Wars. “It is well that I did not arrive until the matter was decided,” he wrote in his diary, “as I still am uncertain which side I would have joined.” In the aftermath of the battle and the foundation of the new Kingdom, Rouvroy joined Bourcier’s parti de la liberté, commonly known as the Rouges, and was soon elected to the Grand-Parlement as a deputy. Rouvroy both admired and despised Bonaparte, rapidly becoming frustrated with Bonaparte’s ability to govern as Prime Minister despite his parti modéré (or Bleus) not even being the largest party in the Hemicycle.[10] Rouvroy advocated to Bourcier that they seize on particular issues to try and divide Bonaparte’s Bleus in the hope of building their own power. Bourcier, however, said that doing so ran the risk of a large part of the Bleus joining with the parti royaliste or Blancs to keep the Rouges out. Better for the Rouges to bide their time and build their power within Bonaparte’s system, Bourcier said.

Naturally, the dynamic Rouvroy felt stifled under this and had several public disagreements with Bourcier, alienating parts of the Rouge party. In the end Rouvroy decided he had better take some time away from the Parlement to allow tempers to cool. He took advantage of the fact that Bonaparte was going to Britain in 1813 for his father’s funeral, and seized this time to go on his own foreign trip, which he called “A pilgrimage to the cradle of republicanism”. He was going to Greece.

In 1813 Rouvroy was fifty-two years old, and British diarist and poet John Byron III (q.v.) was only 26. Nonetheless the two of them got along like a house on fire when they met in Athens in early 1814. Both men had come with similar aims, though Byron was more interested in the architecture and art (and the women...) then politics. And both left in disappointment. It was the calm before the storm, with people across the Ottoman Empire (accurately) feeling that all hell would break loose as soon as Dalmat Melek Pasha died. Byron and Rouvroy witnessed several early riots and risings by angry Greeks in their time in the region and were not impressed. “It is the firmly held belief of romantics in our nation, and many others, that the people of Greece under the Turkish yoke are the same noble masters of the arts and the sciences who lived before Christ and inspired our own civilisation. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. The current inhabitants of the region we name Greece are nothing more than another gang of Slavic savages, quite interchangeable with the Servs or the Bulgars,” Byron wrote scathingly; some have suggested his particular distaste for the Greeks may have been due to contracting gonorrhea from a lady of Lepanto. Rouvroy was similar in his views: “He who goes on a pilgrimage for republicanism would be wise to avoid its cradle, for the baby was long ago thrown out and all that remains are his filthy couches-culottes,” he wrote. Both men published well-received books describing their travels that went on to have what scholars agree to be a significant impact on popular European views of the Ottoman Time of Troubles a few years later. Not everything the two writers said was negative: both expressed admiration for the Albanian highlanders who the local Ottoman authorities deployed to crush the local rioters. Byron compared them to the highlanders from the Scotland of his childhood, right down to their choice of kilts as battle dress: savage and uncouth but fine, uncorruptible warriors.[11]

It is believed that his friendship with Byron led Rouvroy to improve his writing style, becoming more amenable and engrossing for the casual reader, which doubtless helped his later career. Byron also may have inspired Rouvroy’s mild anti-industrialism, with Byron having left Britain partly because he was in trouble for defending John Sutcliffe’s machine-breakers in the face of the Churchill regime’s authoritarian response.[12] Rouvroy would mainly express this in later life through his wandering, almost poetic interludes praising the rural beauty of the Corsican countryside.

Rouvroy returned to France after hearing of the assassination of King Louis XVII. By the time he arrived, of course, everything had died down. Bourcier had been hanged by the mob from a gas-light, Bonaparte had seized power as Regent over the young King Charles X, and Aumont and Barras had been exiled to Louisiana. Essentially all the political parties had been decapitated. Rouvroy seized the opportunity to try and become leader of the chaos that had been the Rouge Party.

There was no formal procedure for electing a leader, so Rouvroy invented one and it was approved. However, in the actual contest, Rouvroy faced Pierre Artaud. Artaud had been a close ally of Bourcier, a former Sans-Culottes organiser, and was a nasty piece of work in the same vein as the late General Lascelles. Though everyone could see that Artaud would be a disaster as leader, he was able to intimidate enough Rouge deputies into supporting him and Rouvroy lost the vote. He swiftly left the country again—whether out of disgust or out of fear that Artaud wouldn’t stop there is unknown—and Artaud predictably led the Rouges to disorganisation and the electoral wilderness while Bonaparte reigned supreme.

Rouvroy decided his next—and last, as it turned out—exile would be in what he dubbed the cradle of the modern republic, Corsica. He instantly fell in love with the island and its quiet radicalism. By this point women were unambiguously permitted to vote in Diet and Presidential elections and Rouvroy was fascinated by a point that no Jacobin had ever thought to raise. Only a few of his works can really be said to be Cytherean in nature but he did have some influence over the movement when it rose to prominence.

But, of course, Rouvroy is best known for being the founder of Adamantianism. He was first inspired to write his greatest work when speaking to two Frenchmen of a similar age, both of whom were mutineers who had escaped Admiral d’Estaing’s fleet for the island back in 1795 and had lived here ever since. They reflected to him that they had only heard about the Revolution by report in the first place, neither of them really knew anything about Le Diamant or its origins, and now few people remained who knew anything at all, what with Lisieux’s largely successful extirpation of all records about the man. Rouvroy became depressed and then decided to dedicate the remainder of his life to ensuring at least one personal record existed. He wrote numerous books about the history of the Revolution, but of course his best-known work is the book generally known by the short form of its Latin title: Cor Adamantis, or Heart of Diamond. This was primarily intended as a rough biography of Le Diamant, or at least Rouvroy’s reminiscences of the man. Though Rouvroy knew little and his painstaking research revealed little more, the work is nonetheless still considered to be the best of what few sources exist on that enigmatic, inadvertent architect of the modern world.

Almost by accident while writing the book, Rouvroy ended up discussing the political views he himself had grown to have over the years. He wrote of his horror at the Rape of Rome and his disgust at how authoritarian regimes as in Austria and Britain had used the excesses of the Revolution as an excuse to clamp down and sweep away what reforms had been made under Enlightenment liberals. “Do not look to the France of the past for a model of republicanism,” he wrote. “Look to the UPSA, yes; but also look to Corsica. Here a republican system has been maintained for more than half a century, with none of the excess we have known to our regret. For all this people’s reputation for vendetta, no Corsican President ever ordered the building of a phlogisticateur with which to murder his people on a whim. No-one ever burned a church simply because it was a church, and because of that, the small deistic-atheist minority can raise a Temple to Reason without much fear of the same happening in kind. Many of the people here are Jansenists now, and it is a faith I find myself increasingly drawn to: preserving the core precepts of Christianity brought down through the ages, but dismissive of the temporal power of a prince in Rome.[13] At its heart, this is a manner of government where laws are enacted not for the sake of fulfilling some ideological goal, but because there is a general agreement that they are needed to improve the lives of all. It is, I feel, a manner of government that Le Diamant would have looked upon and smiled in approval.”

Rouvroy was by this point already acknowledged as the greatest authority on Le Diamant, and this bold claim held more water than it would have if made by any other author. After being asked by philosophers to expand on his political views—in his twilight years Rouvroy also took on a position at the University of Corte lecturing on political philosophy—Rouvroy wrote several more works on the subject, and it is from these that the ideology he created was defined. Its name, however, came from that first book: Adamantianism, or the Adamantine Way: the way Le Diamant would have wanted it. Adamantianism, like any other ideology, has of course had many schisms and disagremeents and different schools of thought over the years. However, its core precepts have not changed. Adamantianism stands for government of moderation, government of principle, government of pragmatism. It stands for consensus where possible and gentlemanly disagreement where not. It seeks the pursuit of progressive goals from within the system: Rouvroy criticised previous attempts at reform from below as being at one or the other extreme of a scale. “The peasant revolters of the past took the king’s word on trust and then happily returned to their farms to be slaughtered; the revolutionaries of the present day want to kill every man who has ever had pretensions to any class above the lowest of the low. Let the reformers of the lower class confront the ruling elite, within the system wherever possible but outside it if not, and let them wield an iron fist in a velvet glove: do not threaten the elite without cause, but let them know that they face consequences if they dismiss such protests.”

The clarifications expressed in the later works have helped define modern Adamantianism more precisely. Though Rouvroy was a republican all his life, he wrote that it was better to achieve progressive goals for the lower classes within a constitutional monarchy than to seek its overthrow by violent revolution that had the change of producing a tyrant like Lisieux. He believed republics were always preferable to monarchies, but not at the cost of an ocean of blood, and wrote that ‘Adamantianism’ was compatible with constitutional monarchy: indeed, Le Diamant had sought reform by that means. Rouvroy attempted to replicate Le Diamant’s original “La Carte” from memory – which Lisieux had tried, mostly with success, to have every copy destroyed and altered forgeries produced to confuse the matter. He also made his own version to better fit a modern and worldwide vision, applicable to any country rather than just France. Rouvroy’s Carte set out the goals of any Adamantine movement in order, starting with seeking a representative, elected assembly, then seeking to expand its powers, then enacting laws to better the lot of the poor, and so on.

Rouvroy died even as the Popular Wars broke out, but while Adamantianism would be an important factor within that conflict, it would continue to be one of the most influential ideologies in the world to the present day.












[1] And in OTL the Presidency of the USA.

[2] The term is, obviously, used anachronistically, much as one might hear the actions of Americans during the American Revolutionary War described as ‘guerilla warfare’ in OTL.

[3] I.e. espionage.

[4] Also happened in OTL during the Napoleonic Wars.

[5] Also happened in OTL, but successfully.

[6] OTL, Charles Emmanuel IV had no children and, after the death of his wife in 1802, he abdicated the throne and was succeeded by his brother as Victor Emmanuel I. In TTL though his political fortunes are less fortunate his personal ones are more so.

[7] An ATL brother of OTL’s Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon. Born some years after the POD, so not the same person, but had the same parents and upbringing so is somewhat comparable. Note that in OTL he abbreviated his name to ‘Henri de Saint-Simon’ – the different contraction he chooses here reflects different usage on the part of the different Revolution here.

[8] AH Cliché #12403523, check.

[9] Who sacked Rome in AD 410.

[10] Like OTL, the French Grand-Parlement is based on a hemicycle rather than opposing benches as in the Westminster system. Unlike OTL, what we would call the political right sits on the left of the hemicycle and vice-versa, but right and left are not used as political terms in TTL anyway.

[11] OTL’s Byron made this same observation, and it is responsible for Albanian national dress having been somewhat hijacked by Greece in OTL.

[12] John Sutcliffe is the TTL equivalent of Ned Ludd (if he existed) and Luddite machine-breakers in TTL are referred to as Sutcliffists. OTL’s Byron also defended the Luddites. Rouvroy’s position here is very different to that of the OTL Saint-Simon, who enthusiastically endorsed the idea of an industrial civilisation built on scientific principles.

[13] This is a slightly milder version of OTL Saint-Simon’s views on Christianity: he advocated the dismissal of all structure and a return to a personal relationship with God.
 

Thande

Donor
Part #106: To Grasp the Sun

“The United Provinces had a hectic Watchful Peace in which events led to some of the most radical political reforms of its history. And yet one cannot help note that the UPSA subsequently came out on top of the Popular Wars, to a greater extent even than France or Russia. These two facts are not unlinked: when the Wars swept the world, reformers in the UPSA were already sated with their recent progress and did not join the tide. So it was that the Meridians were able to steer the rising tide to their own purposes; indeed, some have expressed the belief that it was the Sun of Cordoba that caused that very tide...”

– J. X. Moreau, writing in 1892​

*

From – “The Americas in the Watchful Peace” by Andrew Kelvin (1922) –

Defeat in the Third Platinean War and the loss of Peru led to a period of navel-gazing in the UPSA as fingers were pointed and blame was bestowed. Most of this was naturally aimed at the Solidarity Party for having incited the war, though there is some truth to the argument that progressivism as a whole in the UPSA was wrongly blamed. The claim can be made that President-General Castelli was the main actor in the Meridians’ expansionist policy against the fledgeling Empire of New Spain.[1] By this line of argument, Castelli’s death at the hands of a mob in Buenos Aires in 1807 meant that angry Meridian public opinion after the war lacked a suitable target to bestow blame for the war and decent men within the Solidarity Party unjustly suffered. Of course, no war can ever be a one-man operation, not even in an absolute monarchy; the fact that the UPSA under Castelli had headed in that direction is a reason to condemn the Solidarity Party, not absolve it.

Naturally reaction in the aftermath of the war, initially expressed through the Rally for the Union group before it shed moderate oppositionists to become the Amarillo Party, sought to undo moves made by Castelli regardless of their objective worth or otherwise. For example, the Presidency-General was considerably hamstrung to the advantage of the Cortes Nacionales; it can be argued that it was this, more than the political fault lines caused by the war, which led to the formation of more organised and partisan political parties in the Cortes. This in turn meant that more of a hierarchy was formed within parties. The position of ‘President of the Cortes’ (usually referred to as Prime Minister in English to avoid confusion) as leader of the largest party informally came about during the rule of President-General Baquedano (1807-1810) but would not become formally recognised until the Crisis of 1822. In turn, the leader of the second largest party became known as the ‘President of Asturias’: this rather obscure title is derived from a piece of political satire aimed at then Colorado Party leader Luis Jaime Ayala. The satirical piece, published in the Amarillo-leaning magazine La Lupa de Cordoba,[2] attacked Ayala based on his connexion to the late Castelli and suggested that, like Castelli, Ayala sought to become absolute monarch in all but name albeit through republican means. As he saw himself as ‘next in line to the throne’ at the next election, then, he was dubbed the ‘Prince of Asturias’, the title held by the Spanish heir to the throne. The reasons behind the nickname faded away but, even after Ayala lost the 1813 election and resigned as party leader, the Colorado Party kept the title as an ironic joke, eventually altering it slightly to ‘President of Asturias’ to synchronise with the majority leader’s title.

More seriously, the reaction against Castelli’s centralisation of power also struck at the previous arrangement whereby the President-General was elected for life. Baquedano pledged to step down after three years, which he did, and in a Cincinnatian step decided not to seek re-election. While this was a noble step which doubtless helped the stability of the recovering nation in the short term, there is no denying the fact that it caused headaches in the longer term. Three years, though not formally recognised in the Meridian Constitution until the rule of President-General Carriego in 1815,[3] was arguably not long enough for a President-General to get much business done, especially in the early nineteenth century when communications, outside a few areas such as France, remained so slow that it took a long time for the consequences of any policy to become clear. President-General Mateováron, though agreed by most scholars to be one of the greatest Presidents-General of the UPSA, set a somewhat dangerous precedent when, like Baquedano, he decided not to seek a second term. This meant that it was widely expected that all Presidents-General would only seek a single term and tacitly endorse their successor (who was generally either the party leader in the Cortes, or another party heavyweight endorsed by that leader) at the next election. This pattern was broken when President-General Carriego sought re-election, prompting the heir apparent Alfredo Vallejo to also stand out of fury at what he regarded as his right being taken from him: the vote was split and the Colorado Party returned to power under Pablo Portillo. Ironically this was probably healthy in the long term, as it meant postwar Meridian politics would be more balanced than they might otherwise have been.

Portillo was also regarded as mainly a good president-general and followed precedent by resigning after one term. He was succeeded by Vallejo, who won the 1819 election largely thanks to a lacklustre Colorado candidate, Juan Sotomayor: Sotomayor had been a decent “President of Asturias” but fell to pieces in debates with Vallejo and this was widely reported by the ever-growing Meridian media; ironically, it was under the Colorado President-General Portillo that the UPSA had begun to implement its own fledgeling Optel network, which did not help his own party in the event. The aftermath of the election was bitter on the Colorado side. In the Cortes, the Colorados had taken control as the majority party for the first time (unless one counted the period of Solidarity Party rule) and the new ‘President of Asturias’, Ricardo Portales, had become ‘President of the Cortes’; the Asturian title was subsequently informally accepted by Amarillo minority leader Raúl Fuente, ensuring its survival.[4] This meant that the new government was the first period of coparticipación (“Coparticipation” in English usage), referring to systems where the legislative body is held by a different party to the directly elected executive leader.[5] This was itself significant for the future political development of the country, but the fact that the Colorados had been triumphant in every theatre but the presidency-general led to much finger-pointing at Sotomayor. It was openly suggested that Portillo should have defied precedent and stood again. As it was, Vallejo sent him away to be ambassador to Great Britain with the objective of trying to repair Anglo-Meridian relations the way fellow ex-president-general turned ambassador Roberto Mateováron had already done in Fredericksburg. There were murmurs that Vallejo’s ulterior motive was that he would stand little chance if he faced Portillo in an election again: Portillo might be able to get away with standing for two non-consecutive terms, after all. Public opinion was positive, especially when Vallejo’s government was somewhat hit by scandals (though not to the extent of the last Amarillo President-General, José Jaime Carriego, with his connection to slavers being exposed).

Portillo arguably had an even more difficult task as ambassador to the Court of St James’s than Mateováron did to the Court of Cornubia.[6] In 1819 Great Britain had reached the point where sufficient recovery from the devastating French invasion of 1807 had come about that the populace were now beginning to chafe under the brutal means by which that recovery had come about. Portillo, who had always admired British liberalism, was shocked by the new London that confronted him when he arrived to take up his post. His confidential letters to Vallejo were serialised after his death (and when the Inglorious Revolution had made the matter moot). He wrote: “I have never seen this city as it was before the war and the fire...but I am well acquainted with those who have, and they confirm that the picture in my mind, though idealised perhaps, is at least somewhat rooted in temporal reality. This New London, this Phoenix the LP[7] is so proud of, is like a polished statue where the old was a living creature...the marble glory of the Palace of Westminster, surpassing its Greek inspirations and mocking them in its hubris...the barbaric lines of St Paul’s[8]...they defy the existence of the hungry, miserable poor of this country that once made the world tremble with a word...I find myself wondering, as I see the juxtaposition of this inequality and arbitrary rule with the clicking and clacking semaphore towers and the hissing steam carriages, if I in truth have been made ambassador not to England but to some nightmarish combination of the worst traits of both the Bourbon and Jacobin incarnations of France.

Despite his obvious personal revulsion for the Marleburgensian regime, Portillo did his job well and helped heal Anglo-Meridian relations. He was assisted in this by the Great Famine of 1822, an event which made him somewhat change his opinion of Churchill when the Lord Protector faced down his own party to ensure that aid went to Ireland.[9] Portillo saw an opportunity here: many Irishmen were fleeing the country due to the failure of the potato crop, and Churchill’s policy helped provide them with means to do so. While the Lord Protector did mean his rhetoric about Great Britain paying her war debt to the Irish, he was also a traditionalist and thought that anything that meant fewer Catholics in the British Isles was a good thing. Many Irish Catholics went to the Empire of New Spain, or the Grand Duchy of Louisiana, but a significant number went for the UPSA, helped along by Portillo. Furthermore, many Irish Protestants also found the UPSA an attractive destination—they were still viewed with suspicion by their fellow anti-Catholic Protestants in both Britain and the ENA due to their involvement with the USE rebellion in 1798. While the UPSA was predominantly Jansenist Catholic, it was officially a secular state and accepted Protestant immigrants, though they often faced informal discrimination. The famine in central and eastern Europe also affected immigration patterns, with Catholic Poles going to both New Spain and the UPSA, and Protestant Prussians and Brandenburgers mostly going to the ENA, where they were dubbed the ‘Fourth Wave of Germanna’.[10]

In his tenure as President-General Portillo, like his predecessors and successors, had been concerned about the UPSA maintaining its claims over Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, given rumours that the British had considered demanding the region as part of the peace following the Third Platinean War. The obvious answer was to flood the area with settlers, but despite tax breaks and other incentives, few Meridians had wanted to take the risk of attacks by Mapuche natives. Some of the settlers sent had in fact been natives themselves, Tahuantinsuya and Guarani displaced by Meridian territorial losses to New Spain and Portuguese Brazil in the Third Platinean War, and they mostly got on with the more amiable Tehuelche locals in eastern Patagonia. Still, more needed to be done, and Portillo seized the opportunity. He concocted a scheme, approved by Vallejo who shared his political rival’s views on the imperative to secure Patagonia, which gave immigrants guaranteed land in the region. This was enthusiastically seized upon by the Irishmen and Poles, who often ended up being ripped off in the process with poor farmland but nonetheless proved determined—and reliably Catholic—settlers.

A more controversial move Portillo made in the same area was recorded in an 1823 letter: “Met a madman named Weston today. Cultist of some variety, claims to have had revelation from an angel. Has quite a few followers though: I suppose in the despair of modern Britain any sort of candle flame must draw moths. Believes that his people must go ‘to the ends of the earth’ and claims to have had his revelation in a fever (YES) while rounding the Horn in 1811.[11] It did not take much to persuade him that ‘the ends of the earth’ means Tierra del Fuego and he and his followers seem enthusiastic about the prospect of moving to that Godforsaken place.You will ask me whether I think they would be loyal and reliable citizens. My answer is ‘of course not’, but at least their presence should discourage Britain or another power from claiming the island: I don’t think anyone would want to have to deal with these lunatics on a regular basis.” The Moronites’ heterodoxy provoked much muttering among Amarillo-leaning papers in Cordoba, but Vallejo approved the move nonetheless. The first boatload of Moronites arrived in 1825, much to the surprise of the primitive native Fuegians. Weston himself died of a fever (ironically) only months after his people arrived on the bleak isle, but his successor William Frobisher made the claim that the Fuegians represented the last remaining ‘innocent, unspoilt, unfallen’ humans on the globe, the last remnant of Eden, and were the reason why they had been called to the island. The befuddled Fuegians were therefore elevated to a high position by the Moronites, and some say even worshipped in a way. Their primitive way of life led to the traditional Moronite eschewing of modern technology, although some have argued this began in Britain as a rejection of Marleburgensian industry, a part of the wider Sutcliffist movement. It remains unclear whether the Fuegians are also the origin of the Moronites’...unorthodox sexual practices or whether this is unrelated.[12] European diseases decimated the Fuegians, but their elevation by the Moronites ensured the survival of their language and culture and the eventual recovery of their population, especially since the Moronites initially forbade intermarrying between their ‘fallen’ selves and the ‘unfallen’ Fuegians.

Meanwhile, President-General Vallejo was pursuing his own magnum opus: a normalisation of relations with New Spain, and in particular with the royal Peruvian government in Lima. Vallejo attempted to secure a return to at least limited autonomy of the Tahuantinsuya people in Peru, who had suffered under the brutal suppression campaigns of the Kingdom of Peru. His diplomatic outreach earned him enemies within both major parties, accusing him of selling out to what many still openly called a lost province to be reclaimed in the future. However, though initially rebuffed, Vallejo’s initiative met with real results on the part of King Gabriel’s government, which was more aware than the imperial government in the City of Mexico[13] of the need for trade links with the UPSA. Furthermore Gabriel, who had previously headed the New Spanish army, was acutely aware that New Spain would have to ensure Meridian neutrality if she ever hoped to fulfil her stated aim of regaining and reuniting Old Spain for her rightful king. Progress was being made but talks were still going slowly in 1822 when Vallejo found his short three-year term coming to an end.

Vallejo hesitated. He knew that his party’s favoured candidate for the presidency-general, ‘President of Asturias’ Raúl Fuente, was another lacklustre legislative man in the same mould as the Colorado candidate Vallejo himself had defeated three years before, Juan Sotomayor. In Vallejo’s opinion Fuente was unlikely to win against likely Colorado candidate Ricardo Portales (the President of the Cortes, who was popular and credited to some extent with the party’s seizure of control of the Cortes in 1819). And Vallejo knew that Portales would end the negotiations with Peru, having blasted the initiative eloquently from the Cortes and even threatening to shut down the government if it continued. As it was, the presidential election came up before that threat could be tested, but Vallejo nonetheless knew that all his work would be for nothing if the Colorados won the election. He himself, in contrast to Fuente, was still reasonably popular...

Vallejo must have known that his move would stoke accusations of hypocrisy after he himself, in 1816, had condemned Carriego’s attempt to run again, cheating himself out of what he regarded as his right, and standing independently only to split the vote and let Portillo in. But it seems he was genuinely willing to sacrifice his reputation for a chance at ensuring the negotiations with Peru could continue. He announced he was standing for re-election. Shockwaves rippled through the Cortes and the Meridian media, with everyone turning to see what the response of Portales would be.

But Portales never learned that Vallejo was standing. It did not come out until two days later—time which Vallejo used to organise a team of assistants to help put out propaganda to shoot down objections—that Portales was dead. Hurrying back to Cordoba via Buenos Aires from his native Valdivia for the reopening of the Cortes and the election season, he broke his neck when he slipped off the gangplank of his ship in Buenos Aires harbour. Suddenly deprived of their designated candidate, the Colorados were in disarray and Vallejo’s move looked less suicidal.

Matters came to a head, however. The Colorado Party’s deputies were unable to elect a new leader, who by convention would be their candidate unless he himself then put forward another person. They remained deadlocked between Miguel Aznar, the sitting finance minister who (with a more realistic view of the trade issues with New Spain than most) was considerably more moderate on the Peru talks than most of the party, and Charles Pichegru, the defence minister and general who had commanded the unsuccessful campaign in Peru. While he had spent some time in the political wilderness and was now in his sixties, Pichegru was the one man the Party could trust would make no concessions whatsoever against the idea of the UPSA regaining Peru one day.

Aznar was eventually elected by a very narrow margin after the remaining minor candidates withdrew, but Pichegru insisted he would still stand on an independent Colorado ticket, calling Aznar a ‘sell-out’. Aznar in turn blasted Pichegru for his French birth and Jacobin sympathies, claiming that a President-General Pichegru would lead to the UPSA becoming a pariah state. The civil war in the Colorado Party naturally helped Vallejo, to the point that some Colorado deputies openly called for asking Portillo to return from Britain to stand as a compromise candidate, even though this would leave them open to the same accusations of violating the one-term convention as Vallejo.

However, Vallejo had problems of his own. Fuente, though perhaps not the best campaigner, was just as infuriated by Vallejo’s decision as Vallejo had been at Carriego six years before. History repeated itself and Fuente also stood as an independent Amarillo candidate. Finally, the normally silent independent, argentist deputies in the Cortes—sometimes misleadingly referred to as the Blanco Party, although they had no uniting principles—stepped in when Felipe Riquelme, a distant relative of the UPSA’s very first President-General, who was regarded as a nonpartisan and universally admired figure, declared his intention to stand as an independent candidate. Riquelme was well regarded not simply for his ancestry but for his reputation for condemning corruption in the Cortes and interrogating government ministers when his position outside party politics meant it unlikely he would directly gain from such practices: he was a man of principle, a populist in some ways.

Thus, despite lacking a party organisation to support him, Riquelme rapidly became one of the frontrunners in the unprecedentedly five-cornered election of 1822. In the end, though, the surge of voters disgusted with the party sniping was not quite enough. The popular vote results of the 1822 presidential election were as follows:

Alfredo Vallejo (Official Amarillo[14]) – 29%

Felipe Riquelme (Independent) – 24%

Miguel Aznar (Official Colorado) – 23%

Charles Pichegru (Independent Colorado) – 13%

Raúl Fuente (Independent Amarillo) – 10%

Other (spoiled ballots etc) – 1%

Therefore according to the existing constitutional arrangements, Vallejo was re-elected as President-General despite winning less than a third of the popular vote.

Vallejo’s second term was naturally an unpleasant time in Meridian politics. In 1823 the Colorados retained their control of the Cortes, though they lost a few seats, more to independent ‘Blanco’ candidates riding Riquelme’s coat-tails than to the Amarillos. Vallejo managed to see through his life’s work with the normalisation of relations with New Spain, which would serve the UPSA well in the immediate future; but his reputation was forever ruined and he was viewed as barely legitimate thanks to the circumstances of his re-election. The incident ironically prompted something of a consensus in both parties that reform was needed to prevent this happening again. The passing of constitutional amendments dominated the Cortes, to the point where it was like a second constitutional convention and Vallejo was forced to sign amendments into law if only because otherwise none of his own legislation would get anywhere near the legislature: he had become an enemy of his own party.

The chief subst ance of the amendments was that the President-General was formally and legally restricted to a single term without re-election, consecutively or otherwise. However, recognising that the current three-year term was not long enough, this was doubled to six years. It is suspected that this was chosen because no-one wanted future presidents-general to rule for a shorter period of time than Vallejo.

The Colorado Party, with backing from the publicly influential Riquelme, was able to secure the institution of universal suffrage, finally throwing out the UPSA’s (low) property qualification for voting. The Amarillo Party went along with this because they calculated that the rising numbers of conservative-minded poor immigrants from Europe thanks to the potato famine would balance the new poor voters who would probably vote Colorado. Also, the Amarillos’ efforts in Peru to improve the rights of the remaining Tahuantinsuya under New Spanish rule helped them win the important native vote for the next few elections. In 1825 the first presidential election held under the new rules returned a Colorado President-General, but more narrowly than some had expected, with the Amarillos managing to fight competitively under the new rules and put Vallejo behind them. It was this Colorado President-General, Upper Peruvian-born Sebastián Velasco, who would find himself at the helm of the United Provinces during one of the most hectic and yet glorious times the country would ever see...









[1] As in some other texts, this ignores for clarity the fact that the ENS was mostly referred to as the Empire of the Indies until the 1820s.

[2] “The Magnifying Glass of Cordoba”. A double pun: a magnifying glass implies examining politics closely, but ‘of Cordoba’ (the magazine was actually published in Buenos Aires) suggested comparison with the Sun of Cordoba, leading to the idea that the Lupa was using its magnifying glass to focus the rays of the sun on politicians and burn them with its satire. The Sun of Cordoba, incidentally, is similar to the OTL symbol on the Argentine and Uruguayan flags. In OTL it is uncertain whether this is derived from a French Revolutionary symbol or (the preferred, nativist version of events) from the symbol of the Inca god Inti. In TTL it seems the latter version of events is true although there is also the suggestion that it originates from the sun coming out from behind the clouds on that fateful day in 1767 when Admiral Arbuthnot withdrew his forces from then-Spanish Buenos Aires under pressure from local militiamen, a defining moment in the Meridians’ national identity. The Sun of Cordoba is a symbol of the UPSA (as well as the flaming torch of liberty) and carries connotations of being a populist emblem, hence the magazine suggesting that it is public scrutiny that will supply the sunlight rays for its burning glass.

[3] Because Carriego was something of a disaster as President-General and the Cortes wanted to make sure he didn’t just ignore precedent and refuse to hold an election. This belief was probably well placed, as Carriego did ignore another precedent by seeking re-election, and proceeded to lose badly. See Part #90.

[4] This text does not mention it, but the Cortes is elected every four years; 1819 happened to be a year when the triennial election of the presidency-general synched up with the quadrennial election to the Cortes and the two were held at the same time. This practice was also adopted in the aftermath of the Third Platinean War – previously the President-General, like the monarch he replaced in royalist systems, had the power to dissolve the Cortes and call new elections whenever he wanted.

[5] OTL this is known in France as ‘cohabitation’. Oddly enough the USA does not appear to have a name for it, despite it being an important political principle there as well.

[6] The Court of Cornubia is the formal name of the imperial government of the ENA, due to it theoretically being based in the Cornubia Palace in Fredericksburg, which was built as a residence for the Emperor of North America. In practice when the Emperor does visit he tends to stay with nobles in their own town-houses, meaning the largely empty Palace was eventually repurposed as the headquarters of the American Ministry of War. However, the name remains regardless (after all, ‘Court of St James’s’ has in OTL despite the Royal Family not living there since 1809). The name Cornubia is a Latin form of Cornwall, referring to the title Duke of Cornwall which Frederick I retained after being removed from the principality of Wales as part of his exile.

[7] Lord Protector, i.e. Churchill. He technically ceased to be Lord Protector and Regent in 1815 when King Frederick II reached his majority, but everyone—including Churchill himself—continues to casually use the terms as well as Prime Minister to describe him.

[8] St Paul’s was rebuilt in an Orientalist style by Sir Ralph Reynolds, the result somewhat resembling a Mogul mosque, except with less colour and decoration. Portillo, being from the Americas, is somewhat more shocked by and xenophobic of suddenly coming across Orientalist styles, which had slowly become mainstream across Europe since they arose in Royal France in the middle of the Jacobin Wars.

[9] See Part #98.

[10] The two OTL Waves of Germanna were in 1714 and 1717, consisting of religious refugees from Rhineland and the Palatinate who settled in colonial Virginia. In TTL Prince Frederick’s exile in 1727 was jokingly referred to as the Third Wave of Germanna; the importance of the exile to America’s national story means that the phrase has remained in common parlance, hence its use now (it was not revived in OTL to describe nineteenth century waves of German immigration to the USA, by contrast).

[11] See Part #86.

[12] This is NOT a reference to polygamy.

[13] The New Spanish imperial government returned from Veracruz to a rebuilt Mexico City in 1821; this will be covered in more detail in subsequent post.

[14] He claims, by default, although most Amarillo deputies actually supported Fuente.

Part #107: Dark Continent

"We are men, not women.
Those coming back from war without having conquered must die.
If we beat a retreat our life is at the king's mercy.
Whatever town is to be attacked we must overcome it or we bury ourselves in its ruins.
Ghezo is the king of kings.
As long as he lives we have nothing to fear."


– Battle creed of the Amazons of Dahomey in the Dahomey War of Independence, 1812​

*

“The real chains are those in the mind.”

– Gideon Angudo, 1828​

*

From “A History of West Africa” by Lancelot Grieves (1964, Mancunium House Publishing) –

Founded more than a decade prior to the Jacobin Wars, the Royal Africa Company would paradoxically see considerable success from the deleterious effects of that bloody conflict and its aftermath throughout the following Watchful Peace. The Company enjoyed a sometimes difficult but always close relationship with the Crown Colony of Freedonia, the difficulty stemming from the different priorities of a freed-slave colony and a company seeking to make a profit, yet the closeness from the acknowledgement on both sides that they depended on one another. Aiding the relationship in the early years was the fact that Thomas Space, one of the two most prominent members of the Company’s Board of Directors together with Arthur Filling, was a fervent, idealistic abolitionist. Initially, under the Rockingham ministry, Britain treated Freedonia as a geographically separated part of the Dakar colony she had acquired from France in the Third War of Supremacy, with the (white) Governor of Dakar appointing a Lieutenant-Governor to rule over Freedonia. The selection of freed slave Olaudah Equiano to be the first Lieutenant-Governor of Freedonia in 1793 would set a precedent whereby the occupant of such a post would always be black; however this did not solve all the problems surrounding the issue. Freedonia was a complicated melting pot in which groups from different backgrounds tended to factionalise. There were the natives, of course, who had never left Africa and were largely treated as an underclass; the British Black Poor, mostly from London, who had not been enslaved but had been stuck in low-paying jobs; the American blacks from the northern Confederations who had been freed by emancipation legislation and were therefore willing to give the ENA thebenefit of the doubt; and those who had escaped by force from the unrepentantly slave-holding southern Confederations (and New York) and were not.

Matters were even more complex than that, however, for there was a division between those few who had lived in Africa, been enslaved in the ENA or the West Indies and then been freed or escaped—such as Equiano himself—and the larger number of former slaves who had been born into slavery and had never seen Africa before now. The latter were the most disinclined to treat the natives well, especially considering the unwelcome revelation that African rulers were even more amenable to the idea of slavery than the American politicians they had left behind.

When Charles James Fox became Prime Minister after the Double Revolution in 1800, the Royal Africa Company was reformed. Fox had much more success in this field than his attempts to place more control over the East India Company, which met with a combination of failure and the acknowledgement that, even before the French invasion of Britain and the ensuing collapse, London could no longer claim much authority over the EIC, which was operating autonomously.[1] Fox had a much more positive opinion of the RAC and his policy reflected that. He appointed abolitionist Patrick Petty as the new Governor of Dakar. The Lieutenant-Governor of Freedonia was upgraded to a full Governor and, in developments parallel to those in the ENA, a practice grew up where the Governor chose his own deputy who then succeeded him after his retirement or death. Equiano chose Julius Soubise as Lieutenant-Governor and therefore his successor. Soubise, born in the West Indies, had been taken to Britain and freed as a child, and had been a famed figure in the fashionable scene during the 1760s and 1770s; however, he had been inspired by both black British composer Ignatius Sancho and the Meridian Revolution to devote himself to more enlightened pursuits.[2] Soubise built his reputation in Freedonia—a difficult prospect considering the number of ex-American slaves who regarded Soubise’s privileged background with resentment—by essentially acting as Equiano’s foreign minister, creating good working relationships with the native rulers whose territory bordered Freedonia and also with the Company’s Board. This improved his standing to the point that his succession when Equiano died in 1804 was not seriously protested, but some resentment continued, particularly from the escaped-slave group. Prominent among their leaders was Habakkuk Turner, an escaped slave from Virginia, who condemned Soubise for continuing to host outrageously decadent parties at his mansion in Liberty, and for spending Freedonia’s limited treasury on what Turner described as fripperies while many of the Freedish poor suffered in the harsh conditions of the country. In order to shore up his position, Soubise eventually appointed Turner as his Lieutenant-Governor.

The Royal Africa Company worked well under Fox’s policies, successfully banning the slave trade from its ports in 1802 along with Britain herself. However, the slave trade continued via the Dutch and Portuguese ports along the Slave Coast.[3] From around 1805 onwards, and particularly after the French invasion of Britain meant that even the relatively light control of London vanished, a practice grew up where the more fire-breathing young men of Freedonia—typically drawn from the escaped American slave group—would man their own ships and act as pirates (or privateers, depending on one’s point of view) to attack Dutch and Portuguese slave ships crossing the Atlantic. Freedonia’s own ports were well positioned to make this possible. Governor Soubise frowned on the practice, anxious not to antagonise other powers and particularly when Britain was in no position to intervene, but he never took serious action to stop it. This might simply be because he did not wish to become a figure of hatred for the radical faction, but is most probably because the ‘abolitionist piracy’ benefited Freedonia considerably. It was a regular supply of both new ships and new citizens. Soubise instituted a practice where by the slaves rescued in such a way would work for the Freedish government for six months before being given full freedom—not in particularly harsh jobs and certainly far milder than they would have faced if they had reached their destination, but essentially to ‘pay for themselves’ as it funded further piratical operations. They would then become full citizens and, given that they came there empty-handed, often enlisted in either the Freedish militia or the Company’s Jagun army as an easy way to keep themselves fed.[4]

It was around this time that the evangelical preacher Gabriel Brown, a runaway slave from Carolina, began preaching his ‘Freedom Theology’ that would transform Africa. Just as the earlier British and American abolitionist movement, Brown drew upon Christian doctrine for his sermons but mixed it with radical new political ideas, ones which smacked of Jacobinism in some ways. While Brown was as adamant as most American ex-slaves to see slaveholders in America punished, his own particular cause célébre was to see an end to African rulers who fed the slave trade with captured prisoners or indeed with their own people. And by ‘an end’, he had similar things in mind to Robespierre. Born in America, Brown had built up Africa to be a paradisical place in his head and was deeply shocked and disappointed by the fact that most Africans seemed to see nothing wrong with the practice of slavery. Brown’s Freedom Theology found a receptive audience among the rescued slaves of the militia and Jaguns, with the result that native rulers across West Africa soon found a particular fear of the men in British red who marched and fought with a precision and discipline rarely seen in the region.

The RAC benefited considerably from the Jacobin Wars. The alignment of Royal France with Britain came with numerous conditions on Britain’s part that the French royalists, in a position of weakness, had to agree to and among these was the abandonment of any claims to Dakar, which the French had hoped to regain during the Third Platinean War. The French East India Company reluctantly agreed and this meant that French ships were soon trading out of RAC ports. There were some tensions with Freedonia due to the fact that slavery was still practiced in the French colonies (and the Haitian rebellion was a particularly potent issue) but the Royal French no longer participated in the slave trade itself due to simply having lost all their ports, so that at least was not an issue. Also, and particularly after peace broke out with the Double Revolution, many Frenchmen who had formerly worked in colonial Dakar decided to return there and work for the RAC. The most famous Frenchman who worked for the RAC, though, was one who had never been to Africa before: the geographer and explorer Pierre Jacotin, who had fled the Revolution due to disagreements with Thouret about the divisions of France.[5] Beginning in 1803, Jacotin embarked on a detailed geographic study of the whole of the lands the Company ruled and traded with, working with independent explorers such as Philip Hamilton to fill in the detail of the interior of Africa. This was a very important piece of work, as Africa was the most unknown of all the continents—not for nothing was it called the Dark Continent—and most European maps for centuries had filled in the interior with a mess of guesswork, inventing mountain ranges and great lakes to try and account for the river mouths they knew of from mapping the coast. Jacotin’s work would bring an end to romantic inventions like Lake Sudan and the Mountains of Kongo.

The RAC nonetheless faced the problem that the Board of Directors was dominated by Filling and Space and the two men were ageing. Jockeying for position followed, but was put on hold by the Dahomey War of Independence in 1812. The Kingdom of Dahomey had been placed in the economic orbit of the Oyo Empire since its defeat in a series of seven wars between 1728 and 1748. Dahomey had had firearms and fixed fortifications, but had been overcome nonetheless, and had been forced ever since to pay an annual tribute of its sons and daughters to the Alaafin (emperor) of Oyo, in the grim knowledge that they would end up being enslaved or put to death in religious ceremonies. The might of the Oyo army was feared throughout all of Guinea. But Dahomey never gave up its desire to regain its independence. Her soldiers fought alongside Oyo’s in a victorious war against the Ashanti Empire in the 1760s which set the border between the two empires, and in so doing she learned more about Oyo tactics—and how to counter them.[6] Both Dahomey and fellow Oyo subject kingdom Benin would be open to the RAC’s offers of trade towards it, and quietly focused on modernising their armies. Ghezo became Ahosu (king) of Dahomey in 1809 and particularly emphasised the practice, even having his soldiers train alongside the Jaguns of the Company. Then in 1812 Alaafin Makua died in a suspected poisoning and battle lines were drawn up over his heirs, with fighting breaking out in the streets of the imperial capital of Oyo. Ahosu Ghezo seized the opportunity and sent his armies against the Yoruba.[7] With additional weapons and training from the RAC, the Dahomey regulars defeated the Yoruba in a series of battles, though the Yoruba continued to hold their own. The Dahomey regulars were however overshadowed by the Dahomey Amazons, the elite women warriors who fought fanatically for their king and made a considerable impression on European observers. The Amazons forever imprinted themselves on the British consciousness in particular, with stories of the exciting conflict in exotic Africa being popular in the postwar misery of Marlesburgensian Britain, and would be a major talking point within the Cytherean movement some years later. Generally speaking Cythereans argued that the Amazons proved that women could serve equally to men in even such a martial pursuit as soldiery, while the opposing Areians claimed that the high place given to women by Dahomey was simply one more piece of evidence that it was a savage chiefdom. Certainly the fact that Dahomey enthusiastically practiced human sacrifice as part of its native religion did not help the Cythereans’ argument.

Dahomey’s successes encouraged Benin to revolt as well and soon Oyo was surrounded. The interregnum was ended with Adelu seizing the throne as Alaafin, but was unable to do more than to hold on to Oyo’s third subject kingdom of Nupe. This was considered far the most important, however, as centuries before the Yoruba had been conquered by the Nupe and the Oyo dynasty had returned from exile in Borgu to restore their empire and subjugate the Nupe in turn. The war lasted less than a year and Oyo had been reduced to a shadow of its former self. Furthermore, both Dahomey and Benin had lucrative new contracts with the RAC, while the formerly difficult Oyo remnant was also forced to concede them. The negotiations over this were masterminded by one of the RAC’s younger directors, Philip Lawrence, who had conceived a particular dislike of Philip Hamilton for the latter’s American background and high-flying status. It was no secret that Space wished Hamilton to be promoted to the Board and even to be his designated successor. However, Lawrence used his own supporters in Dakar to buy up enough of the RAC’s stock through third parties that by the time Space died in 1816, Lawrence was able to veto Hamilton’s promotion to the Board and, with the retirement of Filling soon afterwards, Lawrence became the dominant figure on the Board. Hamilton was given a position of ‘supreme director of southern operations’ as a sop by Lawrence, but this was a basically meaningless sinecure as the EIC mostly controlled operations in Natal anyway. Hamilton returned to America in disgust.[8] Ironically, if he had stayed for a few more years, he could have been in a far more important position as the Company’s control extended into regions Lawrence had designated as ‘southern’.

The importance of malaria to Guinea was never in doubt. It limited the extent to which Europeans could settle the region and while the natives were more resistant to it, no-one was immune. Theories at the time were rather primitive, and while some had suggested a connexion to mosquito bites, there was insufficient evidence for this to be considered a mainstream theory. Based on Linnaean racial theories before the latter were largely discredited in British eyes by the Jacobin Wars, some had thought that all blacks would have this increased resistance to malaria, even those born in America as slaves, but Freedonia’s bloody early history emphatically demonstrated that this was not the case. James Edward Smith and Alexander von Humboldt, traditional Linnaeans (who would soon begin insistently referring to themselves as ‘Taxonomists’ to avoid the association with the Jacobins) were instrumental in demonstrating that quinine, derived from the Peruvian cinchona tree, was a workable treatment for malaria—something that had previously been rejected in English-speaking countries due to the fact that the belief stemmed from Jesuit studies and the popular hatred of the Jesuits. Starting in 1805 the RAC organised trade with then-Meridian Peru to gain both quinine itself and cinchona plants in an attempt to establish a new population of the trees in Guinea itself. The quinine proved a great success, with the Ahosu of Dahomey being an early convert after observing the substance curing the RAC’s chief scout Daniel Houghton of malaria. The cinchona however proved frustratingly difficult to grow in Guinea, and the intervention of the Third Platinean War only made it more urgent that a native population of the tree be established as trade was cut off.

In the aftermath of the war, Peru now passed to the Empire of New Spain. While this should have been advantageous for the RAC as New Spain had been Britain’s ally or at least cobelligerent in the conflict, in practice things became more difficult than before. The Spanish had always been uncomfortable with the idea of free trade in their colonies (as in the case of Jenkins’ Ear) and this had not changed. However the RAC also found an unlikely ally in the place of the UPSA, and more specifically the Solar Society of Cordoba.[9] One of the Society’s members was the Linnaean (or Taxonomist) Hugo Barrio. A native of Peru himself, who fled south after New Spain took over, he recognised the difficulty the UPSA faced now its supply of quinine had largely been cut off, and proposed a joint venture with the RAC. Barrio had a clearer idea of why cinchona was so difficult to grow in Guinea, and working with Humboldt, demonstrated this in 1813. Barrio had repurposed, of all things, a Republican French phlogisticateur for the purpose. While the most common use of phlogisticateurs was to execute by the inhalation of phlogisticated air (i.e. phlogelluft[10]) in the course of their construction French engineers had also discovered that they could be used for different scientific purposes. The work that had gone into building completely air-tight, large-scale glass vessels meant that the phlogisticateurs could be attached to powerful air pumps and used as large vacuum chambers, something that would help revolutionise (no pun intended) certain sciences in France during the Watchful Peace. Barrio on the other hand demonstrated how air pressure was crucical to the cinchona tree’s growth by successfully growing the tree inside the modified phlogisticateur, with air pressure lowered to the levels typical of the Peruvian highlands, and contrasted this with the imperfect growth of a control-experiment tree grown under normal Guinean climatic conditions.

Of course even the phlogisticateurs would not allow large-scale cultivation of cinchona, the air pump and glass chamber apparatus being prohibitively expensive, but it did demonstrate what the Company had to look for: they had to establish plantations in highlands. No suitable terrain could be found in the regions the Company or Freedonia currently worked with, but Pierre Jacotin came to the rescue in 1815 when his mapping operations went further afield and discovered suitable highlands in Biafra,[11] far south of current Company lands. After seizing control of the Board in 1816, Philip Lawrence was an early convert to the scheme proposed by Jacotin, Humboldt and Barrio, and so it was that a nominally British company presided over an operation conceived by a Frenchman, a Dutchman[12] and a Meridian. The RAC was growing rich in the Watchful Peace, with the African gold trade swelling in importance as Britain and other countries struggled to rebuild their gold reserves, sometimes supplemented by the rise in the diamond trade. Nonetheless, Lawrence was unwilling to commit the resources necessary by the Company alone, meaning the project became a joint venture. The “Biafra Cinchona Company” was floated with the RAC’s Board possessing a 50% stake, a 30% stake going to Meridian government investors and the rest being sold off as shares at the stock exchanges in Buenos Aires, New York and Manchester. With the loss of Peru, the Meridians were keen to see an alternative supply of quinine established with their own money sunk into it.

In order to establish their plantations, the Company needed control over the Biafran coast, which was dominated by the trade port of Moneba.[13] Initially Lawrence’s men attempted to negotiate with the local king, Abel,[14] but the Dualan ruler refused to countenance the Company moving in. Rumours of the Freedish opposition to slavery had spread and Abel, whose prosperity came entirely from selling slaves to Portuguese and Dutch slavers, thought it was all a cover to stop him from participating in the trade. After Lawrence received their reports, he was enraged at the thought that “some native Negro nabob thinks he can defy the Company!” and decided that Abel would have to be removed. But how?

Events played into Lawrence’s hands. In Freedonia, Governor Soubise had been attacked for failing to do enough during the Dahomey War, or so his detractors claimed. Soubise eventually chose to retire—he was after all in his sixties—but rather than hand his position over to Daniel Turner, opted to introduce a method for electing the Governor directly, again anticipating events in America. He accurately calculated that Turner’s radicals could not realistically criticise this due to their own political views. Soubise hoped that the American ex-slaves were disliked enough by the natives that Turner could not be elected. However, in the event the vote was split between several anti-Turner candidates and Turner was elected to the Governorate, provoking many predictions of strife between the new radical Freedish leadership and the Company.

Lawrence, in what depending on whom one asks was either his greatest moment of brilliance or of utter bloodless cynicism, sent an emissary to Turner and offered him the opportunity to overthrow a major native slave trader. Of course, the Company did not want the slave-trading leadership in countries like Dahomey or Oyo overthrown, not when they had expended so much in the way of funds in getting them on side for the gold trade. The operation was therefore a distraction from those issues. Turner was suspicious but his own supporters, including the fanatical Brownites, insisted on seizing the opportunity once Lawrence’s men quietly leaked the offer.

Therefore, in 1818 the Freedes used their armada of mostly ex-Dutch and –Portuguese ships to storm Moneba and seize control of the country, publicly executing Abel and many other prominent figures important in the slave trade. Then, while the Freedes struggled to keep control of the Dualans, the RAC was able to gain access to the Biafran highlands and the Biafra Cinchona Company went into operation...

Of course this act was viewed with shock by the Dutch and Portuguese, who had much to lose in the slave trade being cut off and protested vigorously to London, Dakar and anywhere else they felt like, but to no avail. In the end the Dutch began looking at other regions for drawing slaves from, such as the Cape and the South Seas, while the Portuguese—who knew there must be something in the area the RAC wanted even if they did not yet know what—chose this time to renew their old alliance with the native Kongo Empire and to help build it back up to its former glories. The Portuguese act was, of course, one with a hidden agenda: after observing the problems the Freedes had with the resentful Dualans, the Portuguese hoped to use the Kongolese and their charismatic King Henrique III as a nativist rallying point to encourage the Dualans to throw off their ‘foreign’ rulers.

However in order to accomplish this the Portguese drew upon considerable resources from Brazil, not simply funds but also skilled workers in order to develop new trade ports in the Kongo Empire and other concerns. And, though not the largest factor involved, this act would have considerable unforeseen consequences in times to come...





[1] This also happened with the OTL Fox.

[2] OTL Soubise fled Britain after an apparently untrue rape accusation in 1777 and went to British India, where he founded a riding school in Calcutta. Sancho had attempted to persuade him to moderate his foppish lifestyle, but failed in OTL.

[3] Recall that Denmark sold her ports to the Netherlands under Christian VII, and the Dutch also acquired Prussia’s ports after the Third War of Supremacy, meaning the ‘big three’ in trade from West Africa are Britain, the Netherlands and Portugal.

[4] ‘Jagun’ is the RAC’s equivalent term for ‘sepoy’, meaning a native soldier, deriving from a Yoruba word for warrior.

[5] OTL Jacotin served with Napoleon in Egypt and mapped the country.

[6] All of this is OTL.

[7] OTL a Dahomey king called Ghezo (not related to TTL’s figure) also managed to break free from Oyo domination a few years after this point. However, he did it defensively, by building up his army and then refusing to pay tribute, forcing the Oyo to come to him and then beating them. In TTL the king has a more favourable situation, with RAC backing and a developing chaotic situation in Oyo.

[8] See Interlude #9.

[9] Founded by Joseph Priestley after being chased out of Britain, the Solar Society is a pun on the Lunar Society of Birmingham, the gathering of scientific intellectuals that Priestley had been a member of, as well as a reference to the ‘Sun of Cordoba’, a symbol of the UPSA.

[10] Carbon dioxide. “Phlogisticated air” is the term used by Barrio and his contemporaries, while “phlogelluft” is what it is called in the present day of TTL.

[11] Actually talking about modern Cameroon, but the names were applied vaguely at the time, especially by Europeans.

[12] Humboldt is considered a Dutchman in TTL as he got his education in the Netherlands after Prussia’s defeat in the Third War of Supremacy.

[13] Its name as known to Europeans of the time, as it was originally called “Moneba’s Town” after a local chieftain and slave trader. Its actual native name is unknown. In OTL it would later become Cameroons Town and then Duala, capital of the modern Republic of Cameroon.

[14] His name is actually “Ewonde a Bele”, meaning Ewonde son of Bele, but Europeans at the time tended to conflate these names into one shortened version that sounded like a European name.


Part #108: Carving the Turkey

“The Turk is moved to cruelty in part through his own weakness, the jealous knowledge that he cannot stand up to the superior Christian powers driving him to persecute the oppressed peoples under his yoke. But let them know that this yoke will soon be broken, and soon the Hagia Sophia will ring to the sound of Christmas hymns once more. Turkey is the bird that bears its name, and we shall wring its neck!”

—Marshal Prince Pavel Vasilivich Dolgurokov, addressing Russian troops in Kharkov, 1818​

“Some turkey. Some neck!”

—Giovanni Tressino, 1828​
[1]

*

From – “The Watchful Peace and its Blind Wars” by Peter J. Kendrick (1956)—

The precise definition of the term “Time of Troubles” is a headache at the best of times. Firstly there is the question of which nation’s Time one is referring to, which the phrase being applied to Russia and the Ottomans most significantly as well as to more ambiguous cases such as the Byzantine Empire. Then there is drawing attention to the chronological bounds of such a time. To take the example of the Ottomans—for it is this Time we are examining—some entirely equate the Time of Troubles to the period of external conflict generally known by names along the lines of “the Great Turkish War” among the aggressor nations. However this is to miss the point. Those aggressors, primarily Russia, Persia and the Hapsburg Dominions, would not have become involved in such a war if the Ottoman Empire was not already fractured and weakened by its internal strife and civil war, which of course also persisted after the foreign phase of the war was over. The most conventional definition of the term, then, begins the period with the death of Dalmat Melek Pasha in 1816 and ends with the second fall of Constantinople in 1823. Even then, though, the division of the former Ottoman dominions under two (albeit unequal) factions persisted for many years afterwards, continuing to blur the issue.

Therefore, let us step aside from such definitions and instead look at the conflict in a more thematic way. The ‘Great Turkish War’ was itself a paradoxical conflict. All three main aggressor nations were traditional enemies of the Turks, but their concerted assault was the ironic result of excellent Turkish foreign and military policy in the latter half of the eighteenth century. By the 1750s the Ottoman Empire had been largely written off in fashionable European circles as yesterday’s news, an anachronous mediaeval state whose existence only continued because it served the interests of more powerful European nations, principally France. However, since that time (and admittedly more by luck than judgement) the Sublime Porte had found itself ruled by a succession of reasonably competent Sultans and Grand Viziers. These men forged a foreign policy that was independent of the Ottomans’ European allies but was careful and realistic, working within the bounds the Ottomans faced in the modern world with the rise of Russia and the Hapsburgs.

This policy served to limit the Turks’ reverses and eventually to turn them around. The Russo-Turkish War of 1771-1776 saw the Khanate of the Crimea stripped from Constantinople’s orbit and lodged into St Petersburg’s, but Russian influence did not prove to be entrenched. A quarter of a century later the Turks would take advantage of Russia’s civil war to reassert their influence in the Crimea and to expand their holdings in the Caucasus. As part of the measured nature of this policy, the Ottomans would later concede Russian influence in Kartli, the dominant Georgian state, in exchange for tacit Russian recognition of their successes elsewhere. While the policy was subtle in this area, with regards to the Austrians it was blunt and based on sheer military force, taking advantage of the French Republican invasion of both the Germanies and Italies to move into the formerly Venetian territories in Dalmatia. When Austria attempted to intervene, trying to fight a war on two fronts (and an ill-judged attempt at flanking the Ottomans by invading Wallachia) resulted in minor Austrian territorial losses in the Balkans and general humilitation. This was followed by the Turco-Persian War of 1806-09, when Persian aggression under an inexperienced Shah-Advocate and the murder of Persian hajjis by Turkish-backed Omani pirates resulted in the loss of Khuzestan, Arabistan and Azerbaijan to the Ottomans as well as problems in the east with the Durranis.

This string of victories, culminating in the supreme rule of Dalmat Melek Pasha as Grand Vizier, was arguably fatal to the Turks precisely because it lent them too much self-confidence. The fact that the Ottomans had defeated a supposedly ‘reformed’ Persian army (in fact in an awkward position halfway through reforming) and held out against Austrians and Turks led to the widespread belief, especially among the Janissaries who were prone to military conservatism anyway, that the Ottoman Empire was still militarily strong and no changes were needed to respond to new military innovations in the Jacobin Wars. The term ‘victory disease’ did not yet exist, but is an apt description. The true rottenness in the state of Turkey, however, was not strictly military but political: Dalmat Melek Pasha’s dominance of the state, his reluctance to let any obvious successor remain around for long lest he get any ideas about bumping up said succession, and the weakened role of the Sultan. This truly came about following the death of Murad V in 1811 and the rapid assassination of the next two Sultans in line until Dalmat found a sufficiently pliable figurehead. It would become obvious that as soon as Dalmat died, chaos was inevitable due to the lack of leadership at either the sultanate or the vizierate and the ensuing factionalisation at lower levels of politics and in the provinces. And when this indeed proved to be the case, the arguably successful foreign policy of Dalmat and his predecessors meant that the Ottomans had racked up a list of three angry neighbours who were more than willing to avenge their former losses by kicking the empire while it was weakened.

Ultimately the Ottomans were helped by the fact that cooperation between their three foes was somewhere between limited and negative, especially between the Russians and Persians due to their disagreements over Azerbaijan: much of the region had been taken by Persia from Russia during the Russian Civil War, the Ottomans had taken both this part and the pre-existing Persian Azerbaijan in the Turco-Persian War, and now both St Petersburg and Shiraz wanted to draw their own lines of division through it. Collaboration between St Petersburg and Vienna was initially more promising but soon broke down as the realities of the war itself sunk in.

While Abdul Hadi Pasha went from a minor provincial posting in Egypt to uniting the country under himself, while the Wahhabis dominated the deserts of Arabia, while the Azadis rose to prominence in Mesopotamia,[2] Turkey proper was dominated by three factions, at least two of which were considered political ‘insiders’. Initially after the first confused period following Dalmat’s death in 1816, the division was as follows. Constantinople itself, and not much else, was under the titular rule of the amiable Sultan Mehmed V, the result of the actual heir Murad VI having fled the city and all the candidates in between having been killed as unsuitable. Real power was held by the Janissary Alemdar Huseyin Mustafa Pasha, who had seized power in a coup largely through being the last man standing after fighting in the city and the assassination of Kara Suleyman Pasha, the Janissary Agha (leader) who had initially tried to rule as Grand Vizier.[3] Huseyin Mustafa’s rule was viewed with scepticism even by people in Constantinople and served to firmly discredit the Jacobin notion that ‘he who holds the heart [capital city] holds the nation’, at least as far as the Ottomans were concerned. Not that the Turks’ previous civil wars exactly favoured it, either. However, this disconnection between the Topkapi Palace and the wider Empire helped provoke the factionalisation that ensued and the state commonly associated with the Time of Troubles. There was no strong leadership at the centre, not even an unpopular dictatorship that would collectively unite the provinces against it: instead there was weakness, lack of credibility and the rise of separate feuding factions based on geography and ideology, each of them seeking the throne or at least short-term advantage.

At first there were probably more than two other main factions in Turkey proper—records, naturally, are scarce and fragmented—but certainly by 1817 things had stabilised to two main challengers for Constantinople. The first was the so-called Shadow Faction, named after the Sultan’s caliphal title “Shadow of God on Earth” and meant to emphasise their piety. The Shadows were a reaction against the unpopular heterodox beliefs and secret societies of the Janissaries (though, being pragmatic, they quietly recruited some high-ranking Janissaries to serve as generals). These initial beliefs focusing on reasonable reforms and a purification of state Islam would become more extreme as the war wore on, perhaps ultimately due to influence from the Wahhabis as their ideas were spread further by the movement of people in the conflict. The Shadows’ main base of power was in central Anatolia, with the movement being formally proclaimed in Angora and later moving their capital to Bursa after western Anatolia was rolled up from the command of local factions or pashas ostensibly loyal to Huseyin Mustafa’s Constantinople. Parts of eastern Anatolia resisted the Shadows, primarily due to large Christian minorities concerned that the Shadows’ pious beliefs and talk of ‘purity’ in rhetoric would translate to a return to forced conversions or worse. These regions initially formally pledged allegiance to Huseyin Mustafa’s faction, and were sometimes called the ‘Horizon Faction’ in oppposition to the Shadows: “Lord of the Horizons” being a similarly poetic but explicitly more secular title of the Sultan.

The third faction was generally known as the “Balkan Party” and was dominated by Bosniaks, Albanians, and other Balkan Muslims (as well as some Christians and other minorities). The Balkan Party was essentially a grouping of all the demographics who had done well, either personally or generally, under the rule of Dalmat Melek Pasha and wished to continue it under their rule. Their message, though fundamentally self-interested, became more powerful as the war wore on and the common people in the empire were wistful for the peaceful days of Dalmat’s rule.

Neither the Shadows nor the Balkan Party produced sultans of their own. There were attempts to find Murad VI, but these were unsuccessful. It appears that the Shadows and possibly also the Balkan Party attempted to have actors play a fake claimant to the throne, but this idea was abandoned. The decision appears to have been that if Mehmed V was such an acceptable figurehead to Huseyin Mustafa, he would serve either faction just as well.

It was obvious to all the factions that the Russians, Austrians and Persians were gearing up for an invasion to take advantage of the civil war, and that in order to preserve the empire it would be best for the civil war to be over quickly and decisively. However, this recognition did not translate to reality. The Balkan Party was most concerned about an attack for obvious reasons: their power base was in the line of fire. It seems that at least the Balkan Party and probably the other factions had reasonable notions of where the attacks would come, bar one or two unexpected fronts in the event. The Austrians would seek to avenge their earlier defeat by attacking in the Balkans, the Russians had their eye on the Khanate of the Crimea, and the Persians wanted to retake their lost territories in Mesopotamia. Other areas such as the Caucasus and the Danubian Principalities were more debatable.

In the end the Balkan Party decided to consolidate around their capital at Edirne and sit out the siege of Constantinople while the Shadows attacked, possessing large numbers of infantry but little of the artillery needed to crack the impressive walls of what might be the world’s most frequently besieged city. That artillery was mostly in the hands of the Balkan Party, having been assigned to the frontier. The Shadows to their credit recognised this and attempted to negotiate, offering to combine the factions, but to no avail. At the same time, Khan Devlet V of the Crimea was naturally even more concerned about Ottoman weakness, knowing that it was only Turkish power that stood between him and a Russian invasion. In the past western powers might have intervened in order to check Russian influence, but there was no chance of this. The two most likely candidates from the past were Great Britain and the Ottomans’ traditional ally, France. But Great Britain was weakened and withdrawn into isolation, while France both had to tread carefully lest it be accused of falling into its old bad militarist habits and also wished to preserve its diplomatic alliance with Austria. Ultimately neither could afford to intervene in the conflict.

Therefore, recognising that a quick end to the civil war would also benefit his position, Devlet sent negotiators to speak to both the Balkan Party and the Shadows, but remained ambiguous on his true position: some suggested that he was simply hedging his bets in case one faction suddenly became dominant. A common sardonic comment was that Devlet completely ignored Huseyin Mustafa in his ivory tower: while Constantinople did hold firmly, no-one took him seriously as a faction in his own right despite actually occupying the Sublime Porte.

The siege of Constantinople would not be settled until 1818, at roughly the same time that the three aggressor powers finally launched their invasions. Having managed to breach the walls sufficiently at last, the Shadows launched their assault and had men storming the breeches and fighting in the streets immediately within. With no-one in Constantinople enthusiastic about Huseyin Mustafa, and only resisting up to now out of cosmopolitan fears of the purist beliefs the Shadows were rumoured to have, it seemed that soon the fighting would peter out in order to preserve the city. However, at this point a fleet intervened, sailing up the Bosphorus and bombarding the Shadow encampment before landing its own troops to split the Shadow forces in two and take their city invaders in the rear. The ships were those of the Khanate of the Crimea, and the troops were those of the Balkan Party, having embarked at the port of Varna after Devlet V finally chose which horse to back, the Russians breathing down his neck. The attack had a devastating effect on the Shadows not so much because of the number of infantry it killed, which was relatively few, but because a lucky shell happened to plunge amid where several of the Shadow leaders were overseeing the battle and killed them all. Only two significant Shadow leaders remained, and both were Janissary generals who had been observing the battle closer in while leading troops, which ironically had proved the less dangerous position. But these generals had only been suffered in their position thanks to the existing leadership and were viewed with suspicion by many of the more pious volunteers that made up the army. While second-tier Shadow political and military leaders remained in Bursa and Angora and would attempt to rally the faction around them, in the short term there was chaos and an army that disintegrated, parts of it going over to the Balkan Party or elsewhere.

With the retreat of the Shadows, the Balkan Party took Constantinople and had Huseyin Mustafa publicly executed to much rejoicing. Sultan Mehmed V was indeed allowed to continue in his role and the rebuilding of the city’s defences began swiftly: everyone knew what was coming.

Indeed the attacks on all fronts began. Of the three aggressors, arguably the most dangerous was Russia, having enthusiastically embraced the technological fruits of the Jacobin Wars and then married steam-artillery to their tried and tested strategy of mass conscript armies. However the Russians suffered from indecision over which front to prioritise on. Tsar Paul was aware that the lack of many victories against the Turks in his father’s reign had been part of the motivation behind the Potemkinite faction in the Russian Civil War two decades earlier, and had no intention of repeating that mistake. Instead he overcompensated, demanding progress on all three fronts: Crimea, the Caucasus, and Moldavia. While Russia’s armies were strong and recovery from the Civil War was complete, this was asking too much. The three forces were under the command of, respectively, Prince Dolgurokov, Dmitri Arakcheyev, and Heinz Kautzman—the old warhorse, still an influence at court, coming back for one last battle. In the end it was Dolgurokov, probably the most conventional and least inspired of the military commanders, who ended up with the highest priority front more by accident than design. The Crimean Khanate was, at first, rolled up with relative ease by the Russians and by the turn of 1819 Khan Devlet’s domain had been reduced to just the Crimean peninsula itself. Devlet desperately attempted to use his fleet once more, asking for reinforcements from Constantinople, but the Balkan Party’s self-interest came first and their top priority was to resist the Austrian invasion of Bosnia, which we will come to in a moment.

Kautzman in Moldavia was beset by shortages due to a relatively long supply line (or rather the fact that any supplies going through Ruthenia tended to go to Dolgurokov rather than himself) and bogged down as he faced the armies of the Danubian Principalities, led by Prince Stephanos Ypsilanti. The fact that they were fighting a Greek and an Orthodox Christian who was nonetheless loyal to Constantinople led to blistering propaganda attacks from the Russians which slammed not only Ypsilanti himself but all his countrymen, accusing them of betraying the Byzantine Empire that Russia claimed spiritual succession from. When Servian [Serb] revolts broke out in 1819 the Russians were quick to contrast their fellow Slavs’ devotion to opposing the Ottomans with the Greeks’ supposed collaboration. Ypsilanti’s eventual retreat through the year was not thanks to any war of words from Russia but because Kautzman received reinforcements from unexpected sources, with Russia’s allies and vassals throughout Europe weighing in. Grand Duke Peter of Lithuania sent an army, King Adam of Navarre sent a token force, and Duke Alexander Potemkin of Courland even came himself at the head of a small but well-equipped force. The sight of Tsar Paul’s former foe in the Civil War fighting alongside his troops was celebrated in the Russian press and widely viewed as helping to heal old wounds.

In the Caucasus, Marshal Dmitri Arakcheyev initially found himself beset by headaches due both to the terrain he was expected to conquer and some of the allies he was expected to do it with. Although Russia’s longstanding alliance with Kartli helped them—Paul’s old ally Prince Piotr Bagration raised an army of volunteers to assist with mountain warfare—the Russians were hampered by the fact that many of the Caucasian peoples preferred Ottoman overlordship to Russian. This was particularly true of the Muslim Azeris, who kept up a fight on their northern frontier while retreating in the south, essentially conceding their country to Persia rather than have it fall into Russian hands. Arakcheyev’s fortunes changed—though he never would have thought it at first—with the arrival of Colonel Arkady Pavlovich in 1819. Pavlovich, a subordinate of General Kuleshov, had arrived from the Russian Far East with some men to assist the Tsar in his war against the Turk. Arakcheyev was understandably dismissive at first, as Pavlovich had naturally only brought a small number of soldiers over the vast distance from the East, and half of them were slant-eyed foreigners! It would take further reversals for Arakcheyev to take Pavlovich’s proposals seriously. Pavlovich explained that the men were ronin, Yapontsi soldiers left masterless thanks to the chaos in Yapon and the deaths of many daimyo there. But though ronin of every stripe had proved very useful to Russia in her scuffles with the Qing Chinese, these men were particularly special. They were of an order of fighters particularly skilled in what the Russians called maskirovka, blending into the environment. They were exceptional assassins who made the shadows their own.

They were nindzya...











[1] Almost certainly an apocryphal pair of quotes invented after the fact, at least the last sentence of Dolgurokov’s and all of Tressino’s: in Russian and Italian the words for turkey the bird are not the same as Turkey the country, so the pun only works in English, which presumably neither of them would have used.

[2] See part #102.

[3] See part #99.


Interlude #11: Spark to a Flame

Dr D. Wostyn: Apologies for interjecting once more, but I felt I should explain the content of this transmission. As you will know from his own reports, Captain MacCaulay and Lieutenant McConnell think they have ascertained that, if they survived the initial confrontation, Captain Nuttall’s team should still be alive. The English regime, while fond of police brutality, is scrupulous about the death penalty and only applies it in the case of particularly publicly reviled serial killers, making a point of executing them in public. If the Nuttall team have been mistaken for spies—and let’s face it, that’s always what seems to happen—then they should be kept alive for interrogation, and while I don’t think this timeline’s England would exactly qualify for the Charter on Human Rights, their idea of ‘persuasion’ is fortunately predicated on the rather sensible idea, in my opinion, that straightforward torture never yields the right answers. However, the contacts Lieutenant McConnell has established have suggested that they might be subject to some sort of electroshock treatment that is apparently designed to loosen a person’s inhibitions not to talk while keeping them lucid, unlike for example drugging them. As far as I know that is pseudoscience, but it did bring to mind something Dr Cassimaty mentioned to me before. A lot of people, myself included, back at Cambridge have wondered in the past why the Nuttall team’s description of the contemporary timeline seemed to paint a picture of a world roughly equivalent in technological development to our own. Why this would be when the Nuttall transmissions mentioned several areas that got a leg-up compared to our timeline, such as pneumatic chemistry and application of steam engines. Well, I have been cobbling together some information on the subject from the library books and I present it here. Suffice to say that while some areas might have become more advanced than our timeline, others were retarded—and the most obvious of these to my eye is electricity. Wostyn out.

*

From: “Taming the Lightning: A History of Electricity” by Dr John V. Patterson (1990) –

The popular view of the history of electricity is that it takes two primary phases separated by the dry period between around 1770 and 1826. Those six decades are held to be a period in which natural philosophers were distracted by other issues such as the refinement of phlogiston theory, pneumatics, steam engines, and, of course, the great Jacobin Wars and their aftermath. The conventional view often argues that this period of dearth was needed to excise the memories of the former electrical age, which is often presented as one of ignorant superstition, conflated all the way back to the mystics of Ancient Greece who first discovered the phenomenon of electricity, and only then could the new rational electricians[1] of the nineteenth century discover channel electricity[2] and bring the world to a new enlightened age. And, yes, the metaphors are often that blatant.

The truth, as I hope to illuminate you (I will stop the metaphors now) is rather more complex. Electrical research never ceased in the sixty years of dearth, as the people of the Americas well remember. The rational electricians of the 1830s and beyond owe more to their predecessors than they would care to admit, and this connection was only preserved thanks to the more respectable place electricity retained in the Americas than in Europe. Chief among the reasons for this is Sir Benjamin Franklin, the great American constitutional father who first rose to fame as a natural philosopher. In Europe Franklin is best remembered for solving the problem of the Leyden Jar and his part in the dualist vs. monist debate over the nature of electric charge.[3] However in the ENA he is patriotically defended as the man who really performed the famous Nollet kite experiment. As before, the reality is more complicated: Franklin did propose this experiment while visiting the French court and then proceeded to perform it himself on his return to the ENA, but Nollet was the first to actually perform the experiment at Marly. Travel time and lack of long range communications at the time meant that Franklin was regarded as the author of the breakthrough in America and Nollet in Europe.[4]

Jean Antoine Nollet, like his rival Franklin, is an interesting and compelling figure. A priest by profession, he studied under the great early eighteenth century French electricians Charles du Fay and René de Réaumur and was often considered to be France’s leading expert on electricity. In his lifetime he was most praised for his efforts in standardising the teaching of the sciences and engineering, whether in France or in Turin at the court of the Duke of Savoy. Today he is remembered chiefly as the ‘Father of Electricity’, yet this title is dripping with irony, for Nollet more than anyone else served to bring on the six years of ‘darkness’ in the field.

Nollet was a firm believer in the scientific method and adamant about the importance of rational experimentation. This was reflected by some British electrical thinkers of the time who were acutely aware that electricians were a large heterogenous group that ranged from rationalists like Nollet and Franklin all the way down to charlatans who used electrical tricks to put on a magic show for the public, and said public often did not discriminate. Serious natural philosophers were upset about the idea of being grouped with such men, of whom there were many. Electrical tricks were very popular in the early to middle part of the eighteenth century, ranging from simple shocks to chains of people transmitting a shock to ladies giving their husbands or paramours an electrified kiss to French ultraroyalistes electrifying the crown on a bust or portrait of the King to fry any republican who might dare to remove it.[5] These tricks did, of course, all use classical electricity as it was the only type then known. In order to produce their shocks they employed the electrical machine.

The electrical machine ultimately stemmed from arguably the most important piece of scientific equipment to be developed in the seventeenth century: Robert Boyle’s air-pump. Based on improving the work of Otto von Guericke, a Saxon[6] inventor, Boyle’s pump allowed the air to be removed from a glass globe, allowing items placed in the resulting vacuum to be observed. The air-pump not only deflated the prevailing Aristotelian notion that vacuums were impossible, but arguably paved the way for phlogiston theory by demonstrating that animals and plants both die when air is removed. By placing a ringing bell in the globe, researchers were also able to prove that sound does not travel in a vacuum. The contribution of the air-pump to the understanding of physics is difficult to overstate and it deserves a central place in the narrative of the Scientific Renaissance.[7] But the air-pump also had the unexpected effect of catalysing research into electricity, previously only thought of as an intriguing but baffling phenomenon first noted by the Ancient Greeks and with little more understanding present thousands of years later. It had been noticed for a long time that unearthly lights flickered in the top of a barometer when the mercury retreated, and the nature of this space had been debated by natural philosophers. Boyle’s air-pump proved it was a vacuum, and inquiry into the nature of the glow then began.

It was Francis Hauksbee, a colleague and assistant of Sir Isaac Newton, who sought insight into the phenomenon. Fascinated by artificial light of all kinds, he also studied phosphorescent glows, but soon found that it was possible to produce a glow like those seen in the barometers by rubbing two ‘electric’ objects[8] together within the vacuum of the air-pump. Hauksbee then devised a machine, the first electric machine, which produced a more reliable version of this same buildup of charge using wheel-driven friction. He did not carry his studies further after encountering contradictory results, but the electric machine would be seized upon by Stephen Gray, a Canterbury silk dyer by profession who worked his way up from his disrespected background in trade to become a Fellow of the Royal Society. Gray was both a respected researcher and one of the showmen whom men like Nollet would later detest, wowing the public with electric tricks that helped him build funds and awareness for his research. From then on, electric machines proliferated, capable of giving increasingly large jolts of classical [static] electricity to a growing queue of intrigued nobles.

The second great breakthrough in electrical studies was the invention of the Leyden Jar in 1745 by Pieter van Musschenbroek; it was named after Musschenbroek’s home city by Nollet and the name caught on. While charge-stores[9] had existed before the Leyden Jar, the Jar was the first truly reliable version and easy to employ and standardise. A Leyden Jar could store electricity produced by an electrical machine and then deliver it in a shock a considerable period later without much loss of intensity, as researchers discovered. However, the Jar also contradicted the theories of the time. It was Ben Franklin who would prove that the electric charge was stored in the glass of the jar rather than the water within as others had assumed. This also led him to develop his monist theory that there was only a single kind of electrical fluid, with a surfeit and deficit (Franklin was inspired by his financial background) rather than two kinds as had previously been thought. This became something of a philosophical cold war between France and the English-speaking countries for some years until Franklin’s views prevailed. Leyden Jars proved very useful for electrical research, and they were often linked in groups for a greater charge, known as ‘batteries’ in imitation of the name for a group of artillery cannon.[10]

Electrical medicine was also a growing idea, and it was mostly in this area that it was difficult to tell charlatan from serious researcher. Electrical machines and Leyden Jars were used to deliver shocks to treat almost any ailment, from rheumatism to asthma. The most success was seen in pain relief and restoring formerly paralysed limbs, but even then the benefits of electrical treatment, after the initial blush of the fad had worn off, were troublingly debatable. Now we can understand this through the fact that the eighteenth century had not yet classified diseases as we do and therefore researchers failed to notice that the same symptoms could represent different underlying disorders. At the time, though, it led to much unpleasant sniping all around as electricians accused one another of faking their results. It was this that was ultimately the death knell for the first age of electricity in Europe, as Nollet went to Switzerland specifically to dismiss the successes of some Swiss electric treatment specialists, having failed to replicate their achievements himself and acting out of spite.[11]

Electricity remained healthier in Britain for a while, but suffered the loss of Joseph Priestley, who despite being better known for his work on phlogiston was also a keen electrician. Priestley brought his work to the United Provinces when he went into exile and continued it there, thus setting up the UPSA as the second place in the Americas where electricity remained a serious subject during the long period of dearth. In 1792, the year after his exile, he would be joined by his colleague Henry Cavendish. Cavendish was a brilliant scientist but suffered from severe introversion and shyness, being barely capable of sharing the room with another human being, especially a woman. He overcame this problem several times nonetheless to present discoveries at the Royal Society. Though his achievements in pneumatic chemistry were great—for example, he discovered aquaform [hydrogen] together with Lavoisier, and was the first to calculate the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere—Cavendish was best known for his work on animal electricity. When the electric eel was first reported from South America in 1770, Cavendish worked on the similar European fish, the torpedo, which also produced electric shocks. Using Leyden Jars inside a leather mock-up fish, he was able to duplicate the effect. This was of great interest to the scientific community: just as Franklin had proved that lightning and artificially created electricity were the same phenomena, Cavendish had shown that manmade electricity was the same as that produced by an animal. The implications of this were, however, unpopular, as it denigrated the divine by suggesting that man could create a machine that replicated aspects of a living creature.[12] This was far from a new idea at the time—Erasmus Darwin I was one of the first to suggest that electricity could be used to resurrect the dead, for instance[13]—but Cavendish’s shyness meant he was less able to defend his views than his fellows, and after a failed arson attempt on his London house he chose to join Priestley in exile.

Cavendish along with Priestley became a founder member of the Solar Society of Buenos Aires, a southern hemisphere counterpart of the Lunar Society of Birmingham Priestley had once attended. Priestley largely took the ageing Cavendish under his arm, using the profits of his pneumatic water business to purchase a large house and laboratory for Cavendish and ensure he never had to speak to anyone. Cavendish saw a late bloom in his research and, as well as discovering several pneumatic phenomena that helped Priestley’s business, he delighted in being able to continue his work on the torpedo, now being able to work on the South American electric eel that had first inspired his experiments.[14] But Britain had lost another electrician, and like Priestley his fleeing the country was often considered tantamount to an admission that he held treasonous views, further serving to poison the climate against electrical research by association. Cavendish died in 1807.

Though Nollet had already helped discredit electricity in France, it was Jean-Paul Marat of Revolutionary fame who was the final nail in the coffin. Already a respected scientist and doctor before the French Revolution, he was bitter about rejection by the Royal Academy of Sciences on account of his background and viewed electrical research as a symbol of everything wrong about the ancien regime: a bourgeois affectation founded in superstition rather than rational scientific inquiry.[15] Furthermore, electricity was becoming anathema to the anti-clericalists who would help form much of the weight behind the Revolution. While some religious groups condemned electric research as blasphemous thanks to the concerns behind Cavendish and Darwin’s views that it violated the vitalist principle,[16] others embraced the idea that electricity offered an insight into spirituality. One example of such groups was the Hutchinsonians in Britain, the followers of the Yorkshire lay reader John Hutchinson. The Hutchinsonians held to a syncretic view of spirituality which combined traditional Christianity with recent scientific discoveries, recognising the Copernican system of the heavens and using it to attribute exceptional qualities to the Sun. They argued that the Sun was the source of all the Earth’s energy in various forms such as heat, light and electrical fire, and further argued that the Holy Spirit was a spiritual analogue to these fires. Some of their detractors even accused them of believing the Sun was God, although this is a pejorative simplification.[17] While ultimately founded in the same rationalist attitude as other movements of the time, groups like the Hutchinsonians tended to drive anti-clericalists away from electricity, which they had formerly embraced as a symbol of new learning.

Marat’s views held sway in Robespierre’s French Latin Republic and books on electricity were often burned alongside Bibles and pro-royalist political texts. Contrary to popular belief, Jean de Lisieux on the other hand held different views. Having successfully argued in La Vapeur est Républicaine that steam power could be used to destroy the boundaries between classes by removing the wealth needed to support horse-based travel, Lisieux pondered the idea of electricity holding a similar secret. He was particularly intrigued by the same electric glows that Hauksbee had first demonstrated, and wrote a letter to Louis Chappe suggesting that electricity might be able to provide a source of artificial light for running the Optel[18] network. Chappe did experiment with electric machines (along with more disastrous tests using Electride Lamps[19]) but without success. Lisieux’s brief contribution to electrical research is thus largely forgotten, which is just as well, as discrediting by association could have aborted the later Electrical Renaissance.

Electrical medicine went underground in Italy in this period. The respected heart specialist Luigi Galvani secretly experimented with electrical machines, believing that a strong electric shock could restart a stopped heart. While he did not see conclusive proof of this in his lifetime, he paved the way for later restorative electrification techniques.[20] Galvani is something of a bogeyman for Neo-Franciscans[21] thanks to the extraordinary number of animals he vivisected in order to observe their hearts in motion. As well as electric shocks, he studied the effects of various drugs on the heart and published a celebrated work in which he advocated the use of foxglove extracts (digitalin) to treat heart conditions.[22] While certainly worthy of respect as a scientist, Galvani is best known as an Italian national hero for refusing to sign an oath of allegiance to Hoche’s Italian Latin Republic and being imprisoned, dying of pneumonia in jail.[23] His nephew and fellow electrician Giovanni Aldini, who also worked at the University of Bologna, promptly fled into exile and eventually took up a position at the Russian court. There he was introduced to Vladimir Tarefikhov’s steam engines and first had the notion of using steam power to drive a much larger electrical machine, with the intention of using it to produce shocks large enough to achieve his uncle’s dream of heart resuscitation—and perhaps even resurrection.[24]

Another Italian whose interest in electricity would be unknown until much later was Alessandro Volta, who did collaborate with the Hoche regime and worked with Coulomb the Younger on his studies on quantifying human endurance at Lisieux’s shipyards in Toulon. After the war, Volta would be executed by the Hapsburg Italian government for his part in the programme. Volta’s electrical experiments were unknown until years later, when it was discovered that he had invented an electrically-triggered system for igniting multiple rockets with a single synchronised spark, eliminating the problem of having to light multiple tapers at once.[25]

Electricity’s supposed six decades of darkness were, then, clearly illuminated by at least occasional sparks. But despite the more favourable climate towards electrical research in the Americas, it would again be in Europe when the lights were turned on again and the Electrical Renaissance began. In 1826, a Fleming engineer named Johan Buysse was working for one of the local ironmongery companies in Liége that had sprung up thanks to the expansion of the coal mining industry in Flanders with the introduction of steam engine pumps. Buysse was trying to find new ways of layering other metals on iron and steel in an attempt to prevent corrosion. He would not be successful in this aim, but by serendipity would discover something far greater. Like many experimenters, Buysse had a habit of filling his home with his equipment. One of his failed experiments, a steel plate half-coated in a layer of zinc, happened to be lying around and his wife Ingrid used it as a surface on which to slice the citrus fruits she had bought at the market (believed to be an import of the Gulf Fruit Company). She used a silver knife for the purpose and suffered an electric shock as the flesh of a lemon contacted both metals at once. Buysse quickly recognised the phenomenon, shocked himself to confirm it, and then (recognising his background would not allow him to understand the causes behind it) approached Jacob Luns, a scientist at the University of Leiden in the Dutch Republic. Luns became greatly excited by the discovery and in 1827 they co-authored a publication named Acidic Electrics that described the phenomenon.

The Popular Wars then intervened, and it was not for another decade that scientific attention was able to coalesce sufficiently to truly understand Buysse’s discover of what we now call channel [current] electricity. But with the benefit of hindsight we can see that his wife’s accident has truly changed the world...







[1] ‘Electrician’ was in OTL a phrase used in the eighteenth century to describe electrical scientists/natural philosophers who held demonstrations of electrical technology for research purposes. It did not take on its modern meaning until much later. In LTTW it keeps its older meaning.

[2] ‘Channel electricity’ = current electricity in OTL terminology. ‘Classical electricity’ = static electricity.

[3] Franklin actually invented the term ‘electric charge’ in both OTL and TTL, albeit by accident. It comes from the fact that he described Leyden Jars as being ‘filled’ with electricity by analogy to filling a glass with wine, and this is known as ‘charging your glass’. Prior to this, electric charge was known as ‘electric virtue’ (although, of course, researchers of the time meant something slightly different by it due to their different theoretical models).

[4] The events are OTL, except that Nollet was not involved in the Marly experiment in OTL. His big name being attached to it here helps ensure the Marly test is more widely known and thus Franklin’s version of events does not predominate so much.

[5] All OTL examples of the use of electricity in the eighteenth century.

[6] The author makes an anachronous mistake. At the time, Magdeburg was the capital of its own archbishopric inside the Holy Roman Empire. It later became part of Prussia (where it stayed in OTL until the end of the Second World War) and in LTTW the area became Saxon as a result of the German mediatisations during the Jacobin Wars.

[7] OTL known by historiographers as the Scientific Revolution, the seventeenth-century period that included Boyle’s air-pump, Copernicus and Galileo’s heliocentrism, and Newton’s gravity.

[8] In pre-current/channel electricity terminology, ‘electrics’ are insulators (because they hold a static charge) and ‘non-electrics’ are conductors, because they don’t. The latter terminology is also used in LTTW because it dates from the mid-eighteenth century, originally referring to the fact that a conductor would be used to deliver the static discharge from an electric machine.

[9] OTL ‘capacitor’, formerly ‘condenser’.

[10] This means that the word battery to refer to a piece of electrical equipment is considerably older than what we would consider ‘a battery’, i.e. a Voltaic cell.

[11] OTL.

[12] Also OTL.

[13] Which it is believe he suggested to Mary Shelley, hence Frankenstein.

[14] This also means that many of Cavendish’s experiments which remained secret in OTL due to his shyness are released through Priestley. One of these is what in OTL is called Coulomb’s Law, which describes the interaction between electrically charged particles according to an inverse square law. This is just as well as Coulomb in TTL is more interested in quantifying measures of human work and other utilitarian pursuits. It’s worth noting that the law is almost begging to be discovered, though, as researchers throughout the century pondered the idea of Newton’s inverse square law of gravitational attraction having a counterpart in the field of electricity to help rationalise it.

[15] OTL’s Marat had similar views on electricity.

[16] I.e. that life contains a special principle from God that separates it from crude matter.

[17] Also OTL.

[18] The term is used anachronistically. Optel for optical telegraphy obviously did not come in as a phrase until there was a non-optical version of telegraphy to compare it to.

[19] Despite the confusingly similar name, Electride Lamps have nothing to do with electricity. The OTL term is ‘limelight’ or ‘calcium light’, based on burning quicklime (calcium oxide, or electride calx in LTTW). Very bright but have a tendency to get out of control and burn buildings down. The phenomenon was only discovered in the 1820s in OTL but here is around twenty years earlier thanks to the Chappe brothers having endless funding from Lisieux to explore new semaphore possibilities.

[20] Restorative electrification = OTL defibrillation.

[21] Animal rights supporters.

[22] OTL this was discovered around the same time by the Scottish botanist William Withering, who in TTL has concentrated more on his Linnaean pursuits thanks to the more significant place for Linnaeanism (or “Taxonomy” as its supporters are increasingly having to call it) in TTL after the interest-stoking controversy over Linnaeus’ views of human evolution. Galvani in OTL of course is known for his frog experiments in an attempt to prove the existence of animal electricity. In TTL the decay of interest in and respect for electrical experiments means he must keep these underground while publicly continuing his studies of anatomy (he trained as an anatomist in OTL and published some works on the kidney). The upshot of this is that he never has the OTL accident where he noticed a frog’s leg would twitch when touched with two different metals even without an electric charge being supplied.

[23] Similarly, OTL’s Galvani refused to sign such an oath to Napoleon’s Kingdom of Italy, and though he was not imprisoned, he was forbidden from lecturing and thus died in poverty.

[24] OTL Aldini went to Britain instead and would attempt to revive executed prisoners with a Voltaic pile.

[25] OTL Volta invented a remote-controlled pistol similar to this concept, although he is of course best known for the Voltaic pile—which in TTL with no Galvani frog experiment and electricity not in favour, he never creates.

Chapter #109: Hungary Hungary Hapsburgs

“We shall admonish the world with our inexactitude.”

—Prince Philipp zu Schwarzenberg, speaking of Francis II’s declaration of war against the Ottoman Empire in which he spoke of ‘reclaiming rightful territories’ and the resulting fear among the Concert of Germany, 1818​

*

From—“Exploding the Myths: A New Approach to the Hapsburg Dominions in the Watchful Peace”, by Andries van Colijn ,1954—

Studies of the Hapsburg Dominions (or, as they were commonly if imperfectly referred to, Austria) during the period between the Jacobin Wars and the Popular Wars have generally been hampered by the divisive and poisonous common view of Francis II, the man who until his dying day proclaimed himself to be the Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation. A consensus is clear: Francis was an idiotic, stubborn ruler who was the best argument against hereditary monarchy since England’s Charles I, and his intransigence held the Hapsburg Dominions back years and ultimately crippled them.

It would be rash to claim that this view is based entirely on falsehood. Certainly, Francis II failed to see many things coming, such as the importance of the new technological breakthroughs in the fields of transport, industry and communications stemming from the Jacobin Wars, or the fact that his uncompromising stance against the Concert of Germany would only drive those states closer together in opposition against him. And it is also true that his views were overly founded in naive romanticism. An alienistic cameo [psychological portrait] of the man would conclude that this was due to the fact that he had always expected to receive the imperial crown upon his father’s death, and found it cruelly snatched from his hands by his father’s dissolution of the Empire before the Reichstag in Regensburg and the ensuing French invasion. For the rest of his life, it is argued, Francis was forever chasing his childhood dream and unwilling to countenance that the world had changed, as though he could force the Revolution and the Jacobin Wars to undo themselves simply through sheer bloody-mindedness. But this is not the only explanation.

Contrary to popular belief, at least in private and in his letters, Francis did acknowledge at least some of the changes to the way the world worked as a result of the Jacobin Wars—usually in a negative light, but nonetheless. His policy towards Germany and the Empire seems to have been founded in the idea that his father was maddened with grief when he dissolved the Empire and his words should not have been taken to heart. The French invasion, the so-called Rubicon Offensive, had ultimately been halted by General Mozart before Vienna; Francis argued that his father and the Reichstag members had all been convinced it was simply unstoppable. Just as Austria had salvaged herself from both a French invasion and a Turkish war, Francis believed that the ancient Empire should not be so readily tossed aside. He also blamed the French’s penetration, not without justice, on the Saxons’ and Prussians’ withdrawal from the Imperial coalition due to the Second War of the Polish Succession. “To let the imperial idea vanish from the world,” he wrote, “is to commit the heinous act of rewarding those traitors for their self-interested act, to pile on yet more blood money after they not only escaped the Jacobin attack but were able to overcome their smaller neighbours and incorporate them.[1] Under the empire, right meant more than might; now, the law of the jungle as returned.”[2]

There is justice in Francis’ anger at Saxony and given later events it seems clear that many other Concert members had similar ideas about the actions of John George V. In fact it is unlikely the Concert could have held together without the threat of the Hapsburgs pumping out Francis’ diatribes and the fact that Saxony’s geographic position meant that it could present itself as a shield against Austrian attack. While Denmark, the Flemings and Dutch and the Hanoverians all remained suspicious of Saxony, this propaganda helped the Saxons draw a closer relationship to Swabia and the Mittelbund. Those two powers were themselves emblematic of the failure of Francis’ policy during the war. Swabia existed in its current form out of fear of what fate Francis had claimed would await collaborators—which, given the moderate regime of Ney, had meant practically everyone—and had instead surrendered to the Saxons. The Mittelbund had been a banding together of small states centred on the Hessian states and Nassau whose raison d’etre had been to defend the imperial system in the face of exactly the kind of mediatisation that Francis railed against from Saxony and the two Low Country powers. But Francis’ failure to reach out to them, combined with anger over Austria’s absorption in its Turkish conflict and lack of contribution to the war against Ney’s Swabian Germanic Republic, meant that the Mittelbund had become a reluctant but solid member of the Concert. It did not help that the Austrians had taken advantage of the chaos to mediatise their own ecclesiastical states, such as Salzburg, which made Francis look like a hypocrite.

As it was these policies only served to increase Saxony’s dominance within the Concert (the usual translation, although the actual German term was Deutsche Koalition). Chief among these was economic. Prior to the dissolution of the Empire, most German states had used local currencies pegged to the Konventionsthaler (Convention Dollar) which had been set up in 1754. With the effective political and economic separation of Austria from the Concert (to some extent; obviously some trade carried on, but was impaired by high tariffs that caused economic decay in border regions such as Silesia) a new currency was required. The Flemings adopted the Dutch Guilder, which given Amsterdam’s position as the biggest financial centre in Europe (after the destruction of the City of London during the Jacobin Wars) was a strong currency. It was, however, viewed with some scepticism elsewhere in the Concert, and it was the Koalitionsthaler (Concert Dollar) that would become the most widespread currency. This was based on the Saxon dollar, itself worth three-quarters of a Convention Dollar, and after its adoption in the Saxon lands began to spread elsewhere, coupled with the lowering of trade barriers. By 1827 the Zollverein, the Saxon-backed customs union consisted of Saxony itself, Swabia, the Brandenburgs, the Alliance of Hildesheim (which by now was almost synonymous with Hanover) and the Mittelbund. Only the Low Countries stubbornly stuck to the Dutch guilder as an alternative currency. Even the Danish possessions in Germany moved to adopt the Koalitionsthaler, despite the rivalry between Copenhagen and Dresden over influence in the Brandenburgs. Poland also followed suit due to its personal union with Saxony; where its zloty had previously been pegged to eight Konventionsthalers, it was now pegged to eleven Koalitionsthalers. This was accompanied by the lowering of trade barriers, although Poland was not a formal member of the Zollverein. In the ultimate humiliation, even the Prussian remnant was forced to join in due to its own thaler’s dependence on the Polish zloty. Only the Hapsburg Dominions were left using the old Konventionsthaler.

The Hapsburgs retaliated to this currency warfare more gradually. Internal trade barriers would not entirely be lowered until after the Popular Wars. However, the Konventionsthaler was also introduced in the Kingdom of Italy in an attempt to tie the Hapsburg possessions more closely together. This was logical enough considering the basis for the previous currencies in the region (the Venetian lira and the Sardinian lira among others) had been destroyed, but grumbling among the populace was sparked when the separate Hapsburg possession of Tuscany followed suit, abandoning its own strong lira and leading to economic strife.

*

One thing that always defined Francis II’s divisive reign was his very Hapsburg attitude that opposing the Turk should always be the first priority of foreign policy. This had cost him much prestige in the former Empire when he had essentially ignored the French continuing to rampage through central Germany, including Hapsburg Bavaria, so long as Vienna was safe and there was the invading Turk to deal with. In the end, aided by the absence of Russia from the conflict (still recovering from its Civil War) the Ottomans were able to defeat the Hapsburgs and secure their war aims of taking the former Venetian Dalmatian coast and achieving some minor adjustments to their favour in Bosnia and Croatia. This defeat haunted Francis II for the next decade and so, much to his detractors’ obtuse pleasure, he regarded the key point of Austrian foreign policy following the end of the Jacobin Wars was to prepare for the day when the Turk would be humiliated in turn. The Concert of Germany was ignored, with the unspoken policy that the German states had acted like naughty children and would be expected to come crawling back to Vienna to beg forgiveness. Surprising some, Francis even did not take too hostile a policy towards containing France, accepting that the Battle of Paris proved that the current regime could be trusted to safeguard against a return to Jacobinism. His then foreign minister, Count Warthausen, had taken this to its logical conclusion by accepting Vauguyon’s offer for a return to the pre-war Franco-Austrian alliance.[3]

By 1818, Warthausen was now Chancellor[4] and, with the Turks consumed by their Time of Troubles, Francis knew it was time for revenge at last. Whether Francis’ foreign policy helped or hindered the Austrians in the conflict is a controversial issue. The French alignment deprived the Ottomans of their traditional ally, but it is debatable whether the French could have intervened under any circumstances, given the suspicion of the Watchful Peace directed at them over any potential military adventures. Austria’s close relationship with Russia helped build a coordinated war effort in the early stages of the conflict, but this soon broke down. Some have suggested that the antagonism between the Concert and Austria meant that Francis left a hostile enemy at his back when he emptied Bavaria and Bohemia of troops to send to the Balkans, and that Saxony could have invaded those regions. But this is to view with the benefit of hindsight, coloured by later events. At the time, Bohemia was quiescent and Bavaria relatively so (but not for nothing was it known by Austrian soldiers as ‘Blutendes Bayern’ – “Bleeding Bavaria”) with the uprisings during and after the Jacobin Wars forgotten for the moment. Indeed, it was the removal of Hapsburg military power from the regions for the war in the Balkans that would allow the flames to be fanned back to their former fury and beyond. But that lay in the future.

Francis had learned from his earlier mistakes. He recognised that the attempted invasion of Wallachia during the Austro-Turkish War of 1799-1803 had been an expensive distraction. Instead, he saw a swift strike into Bosnia and a push all the way down the Adriatic coastline as the best strategy. Unlike the Russians he had no particular romantic ambitions of taking Constantinople, except as a way to hurt the Ottomans, and viewed that idea even given the Turks’ current problems as unrealistic. In a symbolic moment, the army was led by General Alvinczi, the Hungarian nobleman who had originally led the disastrous attempted invasion of Wallachia during the last war before redeeming himself through the conquest of Lorraine. Under Alvinczi were many younger commanders, often having risen through the ranks as a result of the invasion of Italy in 1804, who would win glory in the upcoming struggle. After making his famous irredentist speech in Vienna (making the Concert nervous and prompting Foreign Minister Prince Schwarzenberg’s famous unhelpful quip) the Hapsburg armies crossed the Sava River and attacked Bosnia.

What happened next was rather unexpected. Ultimately the Hapsburgs fell victim to precisely the same kind of obsession with one front that had alienated them from the German states by obsessing over the Turkish invasion years before. Now, however, it was the other way around. The so-called Balkan Party had won control of Constantinople, driving the rival Shadow faction to Bursa. Without Hapsburg intervention it is likely that the Balkan Party would have continued to win victories against the Shadows, who were exhausted after their long siege of the City. But the Bosniak-dominated nature of the Balkan Party meant that a Hapsburg attack on their homeland led to a disproportionate transfer of all their military force to that front. Thus, though the Hapsburgs were only facing one faction in the Ottoman civil war, they found themselves fought to a standstill. As they did, the Shadows regrouped, prolonging the civil war, helped by the fact that the Balkan Party-supporting regions in the north-east of the country were falling victim to attack by the Russians through the Caucasus.

As 1819 dawned, General Alvinczi saw the focus on one front by the enemy, though he could not explain it. It was a suggestion by a subordinate general, Kaspar Kálnoky, who with the typical Hapsburg ethnic mix was a Moravian from a Transylvanian-Hungarian noble family, that changed the picture. Kálnoky suggested an attack on Belgrade from the Banat, claiming that his spies reported that the Servs were ready to rise up. Alvinczi knew that doing so would go against the spirit of his orders from Francis, who viewed the failure of the last war as the result of trying to spread forces too thinly across several frontiers against the Turks. Furthermore, he himself had been involved in the last such attempt, the flanking attack through Wallachia during the 1799 war. If he acceded to Kálnoky’s idea and it failed, he could easily be painted as a stubbornly stupid old general who had re-made his old mistakes, and it could cost him his career—or his head. But if it succeeded...

Alvinczi was not known for his lack of courage or audacity. In the next campaign season, the bulk of the Hapsburg armies continued their slow, grinding push through Bosnia as the Balkan Party’s Janissaries met them head-on, but Kálnoky led a smaller force to the east, crossing the confluence of the Danube and the Sava to the White City, to Beograd: to Belgrade.

Kálnoky’s informants turned out to be as good as their word. The Servs had become steadily more infuriated by the increasingly free hand the Janissaries were allowed in the Belgrade Pashaluk under Dalmat Melek Pasha’s dictatorial regime as Grand Vizier. Nationalist portrayals have tended to exaggerate Servian national feeling over the previous years: for much of the time, the Servs were fairly amiable towards Ottoman rule. But their former privileges had been revoked and Belgrade had been allowed to fall into decay. Furthermore, angry memories of the last time the Austrians had ruled the area, from 1718 to 1739 before pulling out as part of a treaty arrangement, had faded.[5] With the civil war wracking the Ottoman Empire, Servian patriots were more willing to believe the Turks could be driven out forever, and therefore not have to worry about eventual penalties for having supported the Hapsburgs.

Therefore, Kálnoky’s army found plenty of collaborators as it invaded Ottoman Servia. Though Bosnia continued to hold strongly, the Balkan Party’s focus on that front (and, indeed, it lacked the troops to cover any other) meant the Hapsburgs had broken through. The Balkan Party, fearing being flanked, was forced to reluctantly pull back, abandoning much of Bosnia to Alvinczi. Sarajevo was finally retaken at the end of 1819, while Francis himself came to Belgrade and proclaimed the Electorate of Servia, which would lie in personal union with the Electorate of Krakau in which his brother Charles ruled.[6] The Servs were pleased with the title, less so with an absentee (and Catholic) monarch.

The Austrian advance might have continued were it not for the success of the Russians in Moldavia. Not only was the famous Kautzman fighting there, but so too were Russia’s allies. At the fall of Jassy in November 1819, Duke Alexander of Courland led a forlorn hope of troops into a breach and, despite taking a bullet wound to the shoulder, single-handedly healed the remaining divisions of the Russian Civil War he had instigated a generation before. The Austrians were alarmed by the Russians’ rapid advance and in particular the way that St Petersburg was suddenly cagey about keeping to the exact terms of their war coordination agreement, by which the Danubian Principalities would be split so Russia gained Moldavia and Austria gained Wallachia. Austria coveted Dobruja, the Black Sea coastal region east of Wallachia (and historically a part of it, though it had been under direct Ottoman rule for centuries). Dobruja held the mouths of the Danube, which would allow Austria to have a Black Sea fleet and establish new trade networks through her domains, which the Danube curled through like a highway. Besides, Russia’s success in Crimea (though she had bogged down on the peninsula itself thanks to the raising of the famed Masada Legion) meant she would almost certainly be able to build such a fleet herself after the war, meaning the Black Sea would no longer be a Turkish lake. Russian control over the mouths of the Danube and Constantia as well would mean the Black Sea went straight from being a Turkish lake to a Russian one. And that, as far as Vienna was concerned, was unacceptable.

Therefore, even as Francis tried to pretend the attack on Servia was what he had intended all along, Alvinczi found history repeating itself as his armies refocused on an eastward axis of advance, moving into Wallachia to deny it to the Russians. This allowed the Balkan Party to rebuild their forces and hold against further moves into Bosnia or Kosovo.[7] The Shadows might have seized the opportunity to try and take Constantinople once more, were it not for the fact that the Russians and Persians were now in danger of threatening their territories in Anatolia. Distraction on all fronts continued to make the war confused and prolonged, a foreshadowing of what was to come in another decade’s time.

Wallachia, and Dobruja, did fall to the Austrians, much to Russian displeasure and the dissolution of their already shaky coordination agreement. Unlike the Servs, the Orthodox Wallachians—partly due to having perceived continued loyalties to the Turks, and partly to placate the always touchy Hungarians—were annexed to the Kingdom of Hungary instead of being given their own political entity. Needless to say, this stored up trouble for future years. The Prince of Wallachia and Moldavia, Stephanos Ypsilanti, found himself surrounded by advancing Austrian and Russian armies and decided discretion was the better part of battle. Accompanied by other members of his Phanariot Greek[8] court, Ypsilanti escaped—not to the Empire via the Black Sea, but north, smuggled through Russian lands, to the Kingdom of Poland. The Poles were historically sympathetic to the Ottomans, and more to the point their ties to Saxony made them participate in its anti-Hapsburg foreign policy. Giving asylum to an enemy prince was a calculated move. However, it provoked more anger in St Petersburg than Vienna; the Russians had been blasted Ypsilanti with anti-Greek propaganda in an effort to trigger a nativist uprising from the Moldavians for years. Russia, which had more or less resigned itself to any ambitions on Poland since the War of the Polish Partition, suddenly took on a more sinister cast in the eyes of Warsaw. This probably contributed to the Saxon-sceptic feelings that were on the rise in Polish political culture at this time—Poland had danced to Saxony’s tune for no real gain and potential great loss. However, it is certainly true that the biggest factor in the Polish Question of the 1820s was not the Ypsilanti incident, but the Great Famine of 1822 and the perceived failure of Saxony to help out the kingdom they shared a monarch with.

While Austria had cut off Russia’s advance by driving to the Black Sea coastline, she had once again spread herself too thinly. The Balkan Party Turks were certainly too weak to push her back again, but further advancement proved slow and grinding. When the war petered out in 1822 (again, partially as a result of the aforementioned famine) the Austrian Hapsburgs’ war gains consisted of most of Dalmatia, northern Bosnia including Sarajevo, Servia, Wallachia and Dobruja—impressive enough, but most modern historians believe they could easily have been more successful. These gains placated the Hungarians and Croats, but provoked anger in the German-speaking parts of the empire as public opinion muttered against Francis II, carrying the undercurrent of “he said all the things we did to alienate the Concert was out of concentrating on the Turk, he’s had fifteen years, and all he achieves is this?”

Yet not all the Hapsburgs revolved around Vienna. When Archduke Ferdinand became King Ferdinand I of Italy, he was careful to try and pursue independent policies for his newly created kingdom, ensuring it would not be seen as just another appendage of the sprawling Hapsburg dominions. He had arguably been successful, with only minor rebellions following his death in 1818—doubtless helped by the fact that Francis would not spare Austrian (therefore foreign) troops to put down those rebels due to his focus on the Turks. Therefore, it was Duke Leopold of Lorraine, Ferdinand’s son, who returned from Strassburg to put down the rebels and take control of the country.[9] Leopold believed even more strongly than his father in the need to give Italy its own distinct identity and policy, and therefore was at first sceptical about the idea of adding Italy’s strength to the war. The idea of intervening navally by landing on the Dalmatian coast was attractive, but Leopold dismissed a proposed descent on the Republic of Ragusa using the new fleet that had been built in Venice. He wished to pursue policy that would benefit Italy, not Francis. Italy would not join the war until 1820, spurred on by two events. Firstly, Italy’s great rivals the Neapolitans also intervened in the conflict by a descent—which they claimed to be a ‘police action on behalf of the ICPA’—against the city of Tunis. Soon, predictably, the Neapolitans’ ‘temporary occupation’ turned into a full-fledged conquest. Sicilian rulers had often had ambitions on the region and, with the Turks embroiled in a civil war and Algiers’ destruction by the ICPA, they saw their chance. With Charles VII, IX and V[10] given to rhetoric about a new Roman Empire defeating a new Carthage, Hapsburg Italy was understandably alarmed.

This turned out to be misplaced. Horatio Nelson, the Grand Old Englishman of the Neapolitan state, died in 1819 at the age of 71 and in the resulting power vacuum, the Neapolitan court became too confused for several years to pose a threat to anyone, while Tunis rapidly turned out to be more of an ulcer than a prized jewel. Nonetheless, it was the first factor spurring the Italians to also intervene in the Turkish civil war. The second was the uprising of the Greeks, beginning in late 1819. The Greeks of Greece proper were quite unlike the privileged Phanariots of the Ottoman upper classes. In Britain and France opinions of them were still defined by the popular works of John Byron and Henri Rouvroy, which dismissed the Greeks as savages unworthy of the same name as Alexander, Plato or Aristotle.[11] In Russia, despite the commonality of Orthodox worship and the Russians constructing their national mythology around Byzantium, the hateful propaganda directed against Prince Ypsilanti and his Phanariot clique did not lend itself well to a turnaround to support a Greek rebellion. Besides, lacking any presence on the Black Sea and bottled up in Moldavia by the Austrians, there was no way the Russians could intervene.[12] The Austrians also could not intervene, separated from Greece by Bosniaks, Albanians and Bulgarians, who all (lukewarmly in the last case) supported the Balkan Party.

Therefore it fell to the new Italian fleet to take advantage of the rebellion, which was sparked primarily by heavy taxes levied by the Balkan Party to pay for their desperate defensive war, coupled to rumours of the Janissary-controlled faction extending the privileges of the Janissaries. Commanded by Admiral Enrico Mazzini, a Genoese, the fleet’s sailors were made up largely of either Genoese or Venetian men, and the fact that the two former rivals fought side by side was considered symbolic of the unity Hapsburg rule had brought to Italy. The fleet cleared what remained of the Turks’ naval forces from the region (most of which had been destroyed by battles between the Balkan Party and the Shadows) and sailed up the Gulf of Lepanto. There the Second Battle of Lepanto was fought against the Ottomans, and the Italians emerged victorious.[13] When rumours of the victory leaked out, further Greek rebellions exploded, their flames fanned by hope. Once again, it was the 1822 famine that led to fighting dragging to a halt as both sides were more interested in filling their bellies than in killing their enemies. The eventual result was that the Morea Peninsula was torn away from the Ottoman Empire, just as it had been under Venetian rule before 1714. The other Greek-populated lands to the north remained part of the Balkan Party-ruled Ottoman Empire, and later the Janissary Sultanate.

The Venetians had never been viewed as competent rulers by the Greeks in their periods of ruling over the Morea, and there was some suspicion of the new Italian rulers (many of whom were Venetians themselves). For this reason, Leopold took the fateful decision to create a new kingdom with a new ruler. His younger brother Joseph was just reaching the age of majority. Recognising that trying to rule both Italy and Lorraine was awkward and alienating Strassburg, Leopold had intended to make his brother Duke of Lorraine. But now Joseph clamoured for the royal dignity, and was willing to convert to Orthodoxy to assuage his new subjects. So it was that Joseph took up his rule as King of Greece from his seat in Nafplion, the old Venetian fortified capital that would now be rebuilt. Hapsburg power was extended into another region. Yet just as with the time of Charles V, the Hapsburg Empire was now widespread enough that no single man could claim to rule it all, and Francis II would learn that not all the Hapsburg-ruled nations would share the same fate...









[1] In this case, of course, he’s only talking about Saxony, not Prussia.

[2] These idioms are translated into modern English.

[3] See Part #81.

[4] Chancellor of State. In TTL the Austrians have not adopted the avowedly prime ministerial post of Minister-President as they did OTL. Instead they have given the position of Chancellor of State progressively more powers and responsibilities until he acts like a Minister-President would in OTL.

[5] OTL the Austrians also ruled the region 1789-91 during the Serb revolt of that time, but that didn’t happen in TTL.

[6] Francis had stripped the German states of their electoral votes and re-awarded them to parts of the Hapsburg empire, even those which were not within the former HRE. Which he would be constitutionally unable to do, but nobody is really paying attention to that anymore.

[7] The historic region named Kosovo at this time was much larger than the modern disputed state, and essentially means the whole area of southern Serbia and Macedonia.

[8] Greeks from the Greek Quarter of Constantinople, called Phanar. Often employed as administrators by the Ottomans, and particularly in the Danubian Principalities in the eighteenth century, where it was more common to see a Phanariot prince than a local Romanian one.

[9] See Part #92.

[10] That is, King Charles VII of Naples, IX of Sicily, and V of Aragon (actually of Spain, but highlighting just how slapdash the division of Spain was, they just count from the Spanish regnal numbers).

[11] See Part #105.

[12] In OTL of course the Russians had had a Black Sea presence for quite a while thanks to Catherine’s annexation of the Khanate of the Crimea.

[13] Strictly speaking, this is the Fourth Battle of Lepanto. However, the Hapsburgs are obviously attempting to evoke the 1571 Battle of Lepanto, the most decisive victory of the Catholic Holy League over the Ottomans, in which the Holy League armada was commanded by the Hapsburg prince Don John of Austria.


Part 110: Empire of a Thousand Tears

“As the Good Book says, love thy neighbour; but be wary if thy brother loves thy neighbour even more.”

—American proverb, attributed to Jethro Carter (1795-1866)​

*

From: “The Americas in the Watchful Peace” by I. I. Denisov (1960)—

...need not concern ourselves with that here. Let us turn instead to the matter of the Empire of New Spain, or as it was also known at the time, the Empire of the Indies.

The Empire was founded in exile by the Infante Charles, eldest son of King Charles III of Spain, and four of his five brothers. Spain was being invaded by the Republican French and, though she had held her own for some years, a combination of a focus on that front by new leader Jean de Lisieux and a civil war meant that she soon fell. Charles III’s deathbed words—more of a scream in fact—were that he had been poisoned by the Infante Charles’ favourite Miguel Pedro Alcántara Abarca de Bolea the Count of Aranda, and that Charles should be disinherited in favour of the second son Philip. Yet there was ambiguity over whether the King’s words should be considered lucid, as the manner of his death had been through a fever. That was enough for Spain to break apart along political lines, with Charles and Aranda on one side—soon joined by the remaining Infantes, Anthony, Ferdinand, John and Gabriel—and Philip and his own favourite Francisco Saavedra de Sangronis on the other.[1]

The resulting scuffle between the ‘Carlistas’ and ‘Felipistas’, as the two sides were dubbed, served only to fatally weaken Spain at the worst possible moment as the Jacobins under Marshal Boulanger swarmed over the Pyrenees. In the end the French conquered Spain, subordinated ‘Philip VII’ to their will, and under Aranda’s advice the Carlistas commandeered a fleet and sailed into the west.[2] Resistance to the French in Spain then passed to Portugal and, later, Naples; though Spanish Kleinkriegers certainly played an important role in the eventual driving of the French from the country, their efforts were disorganised and local in nature, and at first at least tended to accept Portuguese or Neapolitan overlordship, with little loyalty to the vanished Carlistas or the collaborationist Felipistas. It is worth remembering that at this point it had only been around a century since the current Bourbon ruling house of Spain had been installed in the First War of Supremacy,[3] and its roots did not go deep. Spain was therefore divided once more into Castile and Aragon (although, technically, the two had never been politically united in the way England and Scotland, for instance, had been). Castile was placed under the rule of the boy king Alfonso XII, son of the murdered Philip VII, who was a puppet of the Portuguese King Peter IV, while Aragon was placed into personal union with Naples and Sicily.[4]

King Charles VI and VIII of Naples and Sicily thus also briefly became King Charles IV of Aragon before his death in 1811, after which he was succeeded by Gennaro I. The use of a new regnal name, though not without precedent among Neapolitan nobility, helped simplify matters and avoid the potential for confusion with the fact that the exiled Emperor of New Spain also claimed to be Charles IV. Naples-Sicily-Aragon, largely under the influence of its “Unholy Trinity” of Englishmen (Horatio Nelson, Richard Hamilton and John Acton) who dominated the court, also adopted several unitary policies intended to bring the constituents of the Neapolitan Bourbon possessions closer together. While they remained formally separate kingdoms, trade barriers were lowered, laws were standardised to some extent, a common currency (the Neapolitan piastra, although Spanish dollars remained concurrently in use in Aragon) and a single flag was used. For all these reasons, and because the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily had informally been known before the war as “The Two Sicilies”,[5] Naples-Sicily-Aragon was sometimes known as the Kingdom of the Three Sicilies.

The division of Spain, recognised by the European powers at the Congress of Copenhagen, dashed the hopes of the Infantes for a quick triumphant return. But they had had business of their own. The Count of Aranda—swiftly elevated to Duke—was the exponent of a new model of government that had originally been devised by his father, Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea the 10th Count.[6] The ‘Arandite Plan’, as it was later known, would be one of the most influential innovations in monarchical government structure since the Renaissance. The Arandas, father and son, had devised their ideas in response to the Second Platinean War and the hard-won independence of the UPSA, as well as through observation of the Empire of North America. The Arandas argued that New World colonies had now grown too large, populous and self-contained to be treated as distant outposts or integral parts of the home country. They required devolved government of a type that would bind the people to their rulers in the same manner it did back in Europe. Aranda the Younger argued that the ENA was not a perfect model of government because it ultimately relied on an appointed Governor-General as head of state. He claimed that the ENA only remained so loyal to Great Britain because of the example of Prince Frederick living among the Americans, and as soon as the events of the 1740s passed from living memory, the ENA would start to grow restless, indeed saying this was already happening with the fractiousness between the Monroe and Fox Ministries across the Atlantic. Aranda’s thesis on this score remains furiously debated, but is difficult to consider as events, in the form of Le Grand Crabe, intervened and ensured that the Anglo-American relationship would in any case be utterly transformed beyond all recognition.

In any case, the Arandite Plan instead proposed giving each large colony not simply a Governor or Viceroy of some variety, as was the usual case under the Spanish Empire, but a full, hereditary monarch who would be able to establish the same relationship with his people as the King of Spain did with those in the Peninsula. In order to hold the Empire together, the King of Spain would be elevated to Emperor and would have both direct authority over Spain proper and higher authority over the lesser kings, controlling their foreign policy while their domestic policy remained their own. It is generally accepted that the Infante Charles had wanted to implement the plan on succeeding to the throne of Spain, and that his father Charles III had been sceptical of diluting his authority, perhaps influencing his distrust of Aranda. Now the Infantes were in exile, the Arandite Plan was fully implemented, with Charles becoming Emperor over a Spanish America divided into three kingdoms—Mexico, Guatemala and New Granada—and each assigned a king, Anthony, Ferdinand and John respectively. The fourth brother, Gabriel, was placed in charge of forming a new army, which soon became greatly important as the Solidaridad Party-led UPSA attacked. As every schoolchild knows, the Cherry Massacre and other events ensured that the UPSA, against the odds, lost the war and lost Lower Peru to the Empire, along with some border territory to the Portuguese in Brazil.

Lower Peru was reformed into a Kingdom (often simply just called ‘Peru’, presumably because before the UPSA’s independence the Viceroyalty of Peru had covered the whole of the area and it was intended to imply an irredentist claim on the whole UPSA) and Gabriel became its king. While he embarked on bloody suppression campaigns of the Tahuantinsuya autonomous native state within Lower Peru, he was more cautious towards the people of the kingdom proper. He reinstated slavery, it is true, but under the Meridians the ban on slavery had barely been enforced in Peru, with its large population of rich slaveholders: the UPSA only grew strongly abolitionist after the loss of Peru by its nature removed dissenting pro-slavery voices. What surprised the Meridians, and somewhat appalled the rich Peruvians who had patiently been waiting more than twenty years for Spain to reclaim them, was that Gabriel was carefully vague on the issue of the Casta system. He did not formally accept the Meridians’ total abolition of the Casta divisions, but he ensured that Criollos used to enjoying the same rights as Peninsulares were unofficially allowed to continue to enjoy them. Gabriel was aware that to rule the country he needed the hearts and minds of all the important individuals, not just the minority of rich Peninsulares.

Throughout the rest of the Empire of New Spain, the new model of government was applied with at least an attempt at consistency. Aranda and the local liberals wanted some form of limited parliamentary representation. The Emperor Charles was not so keen, but decided to adopt a system that would give his brothers the headaches and prevent any interference with his own prerogative—or, less cynically, we can say that he believed the people should have a say in local domestic affairs but not in matters of foreign policy and war. A memorandum found in the diaries of the Emperor’s Criollo favourite Juan Joaquín de Iturbide supports this: “Ignore the people utterly and you will fall. My father should have learned this with the bread riots and the fiasco over the French fashions. But you cannot listen to them about everything, they cannot be allowed to rule a nation. France has ultimately survived because two evil men in succession seized control as dictators. If she had truly been governed by some revolutionary committee, she would have fallen long before she could think to invade us. The people will want to spend zero in taxes on the military until war comes, and then they will blame you for not having any soldiers. They cannot be entrusted with such matters.” The authenticity of this note remains hotly debated among scholars.

As the term “Cortes” had become somewhat tainted by association with the UPSA’s Cortes Nacionales, the term “Congreso” was used for the three new parliaments, which initially were set up in the capitals of the three kingdoms: San Francisco for Mexico, Léon for Guatemala and Santa Fe for New Granada. (Peru was not granted a Congreso due to concerns over how voting would work thanks to Gabriel’s ambiguity over the Casta system). Initially the plan was to restrict voting to Peninsulares, but it rapidly became obvious that this was unsustainable thanks to the separation between the Empire and Spain herself. The system eventually adopted granted the vote automatically to all Peninsulares and then also to Criollos who passed a property qualification. The electorates were thus small, and the resulting Congresos were typical of such limited-franchise assemblies, with little formalised partisanship as almost all the deputies were rich gentlemen. Nonetheless, this move did somewhat smooth the reform of New Spain, and reform was certainly needed—not simply out of the aims of the Arandite Plan, but because the world had changed.

The purpose of Spanish America, ever since Hernan Cortés proclaimed that he and his men suffered from a rare disease of the heart that could be cured only with gold, was to generate wealth. Treasure ship convoys crossed the Atlantic, carrying a seemingly inexhaustible supply of precious metals, perpetually tempting targets for pirates and privateers for centuries. In the sixteenth century, Sir Francis Drake had captured a ship off Lima carrying twenty-five thousand dollars[7] of Peruvian gold, yet that was just a drop in the ocean. Now, though, Spain was held by hostile powers and there was nowhere for the treasure fleets to go. The economy of the two Spanish states was necessarily affected by this sudden cutoff, but this was somewhat masked by the fact that, in the gold-poor environment of Europe in the Watchful Peace, other countries urgently wished to buy Castilian gold in order to rebuild their own stocks, especially Britain. Nonetheless, the Portuguese influence over Castile meant that these sales were generally conducted in such a way to benefit Portugal all the more, which stoked resentment among the Castilians.

New Spain, whose government was initially led by the Duke of Aranda and later by Bernardo O’Higgins (despite the latter’s chequered performance as a general in the Thrid Platinean War) had to reform to survive in this new world. This became particularly acute after she lost the Philippine War of 1817-21 with Castile and Portugal, meaning the Philippines were separated from Spanish America and ruled as a separate colony by Castile—which in practice meant by Portugal.[8] The war had also seen the New Spaniards raid Castile and Galicia (now Portuguese) in order to gauge support for them; unfortunately, this somewhat backfired when risings were promptly bloodily put down by the Castilian and Portuguese authorities. The New Spaniards did manage to retrieve the symbolic bells of the Church of Santiago de Compostela, but were forced to abandon them in the Rio Tambre while fleeing the Portuguese.[9]

It is generally considered to be the loss of this war which prompted a realignment of priorities in the Empire. Formerly she had been hostile to the UPSA and standoffish to the Empire of North America and the Grand Duchy of Louisiana, particularly since the latter’s settlers had encroached on her territory. Now it became clear that she could not afford to treat her neighbours as enemies, not when the Congress authority in Europe meant that by default she was regarded as a pretender and a pariah. The new O’Higgins ministry saw a more open-handed approach to the other nations of the Americas. It also helped that, thanks to the Portuguese’s role in the Third Platinean War, Portugal was now a common enemy of both the UPSA and New Spain. To quote Bulkeley, “when it comes to bringing together two mortal enemies, there is nothing—absolutely nothing in the world—no diplomatic initiative, no friendship between rulers, no religious conversion—that can possibly compare to the effects of a third party muscling in on their private enmity.” The rejoinder to the Societists is obvious.

1821 was also the year that New Spain’s capitals were shuffled. Fourteen years of painstaking rebuilding, off and on in the difficult conditions of the Vale of Mexico, ended with the final reconstruction of the City of Mexico, now a new city purpose-built as the capital of the Empire. The architecture of the government buildings was enormously symbolic and widely praised. Much of it was neo-Baroque, intended to evoke the lost Spain over the sea, but this was seamlessly blended with examples of native architecture, drawing attention to the way the Arandite Plan was intended to draw the component parts of the Empire closer together. Furthermore, the native architecture was not simply that of the Aztecs who had once occupied this site with their capital of Tenochtitlan, but of the pyramids of the Mayans of Guatemala, the palafitos of the peoples of New Granada, and the terraces of the Tahuantinsuya of Peru (even as Gabriel suppressed them). The disparate styles, taken from an area wider than the whole of Europe, were employed skilfully when they could easily have clashed. The most important architect involved in the project was, ironically, Portuguese—João de Sequeira.

The imperial court therefore moved from Veracruz to Mexico City. However, the governance of the Kingdom of Mexico had been in question for a while. The intention of governing the country from the distant northern outpost of San Francisco had been a deliberate attempt to shift the centre of gravity of the kingdom northwards and bring more settlers to California, the disputed Oregon Country and Texas. But San Francisco was nothing more than an outpost and King Ferdinand had struggled to govern from it. In practice, he had appointed a rather miserable viceroy and had governed either from Veracruz along with his brother, or increasingly living in the City of Mexico as it was rebuilt, helping to supervise the operation. The Mexican Congreso also met in Veracruz rather than San Francisco, and this was formalised when the Emperor moved to Mexico City. Veracruz became the new capital of Mexico. Ferdinand was acutely aware, though, of the importance of bringing settlers to the north, even more than before as gold had been found in California in 1818 and unauthorised foreign prospectors were flocking there.[10] Therefore he created a formal captaincy-general of California and appointed a full captain-general and government to rule autonomously in San Francisco, with the responsibility for managing the gold boom.

This decision has been much analysed and criticised. Some criticism, one feels, is simply aesthetic—the fact that Ferdinand had spoilt the neat two-level Arandite system by reinstating some of the confusing multiple levels of government of the old Spanish America. But on the other hand, Ferdinand did recognise that the situation in the California needed close attention, so his move may have delayed later events rather than hastening them.

On a third hand, of course, it also meant he was the first person to formally delineate the provinces of Old, New and California as possessing a common identity distinct of that from Mexico...

*

From: “An Economic History of the New World”, by Pablo V. de Almeida, 1920—

The claim for the world’s first non-national pseudopuissant corporation is a much disputed one.[11] If we may ignore the more ancient and fanciful suggestions, there are two main candidates: Priestley Aerated Water (PAW) of South America and the Tropical Fruit Company (TFC) of North America.[12] Both companies have a chequered history. PAW certainly predates TFC by some years, but took longer to reach the height of its power. Let us examine the origins of TFC.

Ultimately TFC originates from the consequences of political developments in three countries: the Empire of New Spain, the Empire of North America, and sandwiched between them the Grand Duchy of Louisiana. The latter enjoyed new and more organised leadership from 1814 onwards, as the pair of exiled coup planners the Duke of Aumont and the Vicomte de Barras were installed as Grand Duke and prime minister respectively. Both men, especially Barras, threw themselves into their work out of fear of Bonaparte and bitterness of their failure to stop him. Their chief goal was economic development. Louisiana was an oddity of history, the leftovers of British racial purging of the former French colonies in Acadia and Canada. She was made up of a combination of white French settlers who had originally come to New Orleans, the same such settlers from Canada and Acadia, or from Saint-Dominique [Haiti] or other places in the French West Indies (of which now only Guadaloupe and Martinique survived), French-supporting Indians who had settled within her borders such as the Attignawantan,[13] white Catholic settlers who immigrated there from other parts of Europe, and of course black slaves. Many had lived there all their lives, others had been brought out of French Saint-Dominique by French planters fleeing the revolutionaries. The economy of Louisiana was based largely on sugar plantations, with fisheries being a secondary aspect, and slavery was considered an economic necessity. It was thus that in 1685, King Louis XIV had issued the ‘Code Noir’, a decree defining proper colonial practices with an emphasis on slavery.

The Code Noir was retained with some minor modifications into Louisiana’s new status as a Grand Duchy, and had its part to play in TFC’s story. Although brutal by today’s standards, compared to the arbitrary practices used in the slave-holding parts of the ENA it was positively progressive. The Code enshrined the idea that slaves were community property, and while a master was permitted to beat his slave in punishment as he would his child, serious abuse or mistreatment would result in criminal proceedings—whereas in Virginia and Carolina the law regarded slaves as the personal property of the master to do with as he wished. The Code Noir also criminalised the practice of raping female slaves or using them as concubines, forbade the marriage of slaves without the slaves’ own consent, and made it the master’s responsibility to feed all their slaves, even those who could not work due to illness or age. The fines exacted on the masters went two-thirds to the government and one-third to the nearest hospital, therefore representing the first recorded state-provided health service in the Americas.

The TFC’s story really begins with the political realignment in the ENA following the election of 1819 and the breakup of the Constitutionalist Party. Celebrated war hero and planter in Cuba, John Alexander, led the southern faction as the Whigs, while the Quincyite remnant became the Neutrals. This had significant, unintended effects on the politics of Virginia and Carolina. Virginia, the so-called Old Dominion, had been at the heart of Prince Frederick’s plan to reclaim his throne and could be considered the epicentre of the original Patriot movement. Therefore, even when the Patriots came to be mainly seen as a northern-interests party, there was a hard core of Virginians, including influential aristocrats, who remained Patriots out of tradition. In Carolina, on the other hand, it had been the Constitutionalists who dominated the slaveholding aristocracy and the few Patriots represented an awkward choice by settlers in places like Arkensor and Cuba who didn’t want to vote Constitutionalist but were repelled by the American Radical Party.

This changed with the split of the Constitutionalists into the Whigs and Neutrals. While the Patriots benefited in the short term, their vote in the southern Confederations vanished. The planters could vote Whig, the settlers and commoners could vote Neutral, and the small number of progressives and abolitionists could vote Radical: the Patriots, whose electoral position had always been one of comfortable, vague Toryism, no longer had any appeal. The 1819 election had seen Artemas Ward Jr.’s Patriots elected with a relatively huge majority of 20, but 1822 would be a different story. In this time, both the Whig and Neutral leaders (John Alexander and Sir Robert Johnson respectively) strove to define their new parties’ identities beyond stereotype—rich slaveholding planters and wild lawless frontiersmen respectively. The Neutrals moved close to the Radicals, building on the relationship they had established in Pennsylvania, with the idea that the two would form an electoral pact—the Neutrals would run candidates in the rural constituencies and the Radicals in the urban ones. One sticking point was the matter of slavery, which grew to be a significant question across American politics at the time. The Radicals saw its abolition as their raison d’etre, while the Neutrals were—well—neutral on the subject, and keen not to alienate any of their minor-slaveholder constituents. The policy eventually put forward was ultimately the brainchild of Stephen Bartlett, Radical MCP for New Hampshire-Second. Inspired by the traditional town meetings of his native New England, where the entire population of a town would congregate to vote on a proposal, he suggested the same notion for entire provinces, Confederations, or even the Empire itself.

The Radicals and Neutrals fixed Bartlett’s proposal on a ‘Confederate Meeting’ which would see the question of whether to ban slavery put to the entire electorate of each Confederation. This was intended both to appease some of the more wavering Neutrals and as a slap in the face to the Whigs, who made much of their commitment to ‘Confederate Supremacy’, arguing that the confederations’ governments should enjoy more power than the imperial government. Therefore, the two parties agreed on a pledge that if serving together in government, they would propose such Meetings to the remaining slave-holding Confederations. Alexander and the Whigs condemned this as unconstitutional, a question that posed considerable headaches for the American Law Lords considering the vagueness of the Constitution on the issue of just what prerogatives the confederate governments had.

The Whigs sought to broaden their appeal in different ways. Much of Carolina’s population came from fiery anti-Catholic Scots or Ulster Scots, but the absorption of Florida, Cuba and Hispaniola led Alexander to spearhead an initially unpopular new position. Having successfully campaigned for the right of Spanish aristocrats in Cuba to keep their land and slaves in exchange for swearing a loyalty oath, Alexander further argued in favour of greater rights for Catholics and even perhaps Catholic emancipation. This position sent shockwaves through the American political establishment, where the latter had long assumed to be one of the Radicals’ ivory-tower ideas. Needless to say, the Salem Movement in New England promptly denounced Alexander as the devil, but few in New England voted Whig anyway. There was further method in Alexander’s madness as he argued for closer ties with New Spain and Louisiana, while the Radical-Neutrals favoured a more pro-UPSA position. In the end the 1822 election delivered a significant blow to the Patriots, with the party losing almost all their seats in the southern Confederations and the Radicals and Neutrals making important gains—but the Whigs also did well, dominating Carolina and winning most seats in Virginia.

The result was America’s first hung parliament, and the country was in uncharted territory: though the Continental Parliament was ultimately based on Britain’s, politics in Britain were as yet far less partisan and this idea had not really arisen. In the end inspiration was taken from the situation in Pennsylvania and it became clear that an alliance must be forged between the reduced Patriots and either the Radical-Neutrals or the Whigs. Artemas Ward Jr. resigned, with the party leadership passing (by the old boys’ network rather than a formal election) to Josiah Crane (West Jersey-First). Crane then negotiated with both parties. Through means many have called controversial, it was the Whigs who became the Patriots’ coalition partners. This is, however, perhaps inevitable; the Patriots were no longer competitive in the south, but the Radical-Neutrals had become their main foe in the northern three Confederations. A Patriot-Radical-Neutral coalition would therefore have excluded the south from almost any representation. The matter nonetheless produced immediate fallout, with Radical and Neutral-supporting newspapers lambasting the ‘corrupt bargain’. Under the informal agreement, the Whigs would support the Patriots’ general legislative programme in exchange for not standing in the way of pro-Catholic and pro-free trade moves on a Confederal level and recognising slavery as a southern institution. The latter also developed into the institution of an American version of Louisiana’s Code Noir, which Alexander admired, simply translated as the Black Code, which somewhat improved the lives of slaves and avoided the problem of what to do with mixed-race children by criminalising interracial copulation.

The Patriot-Whig coalition, sometimes called Blue-Red after the party colours, proved reasonably stable but provoked anger not only within the ENA but also abroad. Freedonia was disgusted. One Freedish artist, Pueblo Jonas, famously painted In Memorium, an image of a gravestone bearing the words “AMERICAN LIBERTY: 1751-1822”. But if trade with the Royal Africa Company grew more strained, with New Spain and Louisiana it boomed, with trade barriers that the Spaniards had always been reluctant to lower finally being fully removed. It was in this economic climate that new companies grow, and TFC was simply the most successful of them.

Simeon Wragg had been one of the American soldiers who had conquered Florida in 1764. Settling there afterwards, he owned a cattle plantation near the land eventually given over to the Seminoles as part of the Cherokee Empire. Through this proximity his son, Jehoshaphat Wragg, became noted for his close contacts and good relations with the Indians, sometimes being called in to settle disputes. His fame and wealth grew, his farming diversifying. Jehoshaphat had three sons of his own who, continuing the Biblical theme, he named Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. Abednego Wragg, the youngest, went off to join the Church where he comes little further into this story, save for some correspondence with Macallister. Shadrach, as the eldest, inherited his father’s wealth and land. Meshach decided to join the army, and fought in the Seigneur Offensive, being slightly wounded in the shoulder in Normandy in 1799. He recovered from a serious fever and was invalided home. Shadrach was initially concerned, as his brother had changed in temperament from his experiences and he was worried he might be resentful of Shadrach’s ownership of the family property. But Meshach Wragg did not covet his brother’s ox (literally) and after his recovery swiftly became bored. He became an adventurer, at one point even considering joining the Morton and Lewis expedition. Instead, though, he spent some time with the Cherokee, following in his father’s footsteps, and travelled throughout Louisiana, the West Indies and Mexico. He seemed to have a talent for ending up in the most unlikely scrapes, such as being present in Hispaniola during the revolution AND in Mexico City during the burning; his memoirs would be published some years later and described as being ‘in the Munchhausen tradition’.

After the Third Platinean War, Meshach Wragg returned home once more, buzzing with ideas. The brothers knew from their friendship with Colm Macallister, a Linnaean researcher formerly of Ulster who had studied at William and Mary College, that the southern Confederations had serious problems with crop failures and low yields. Meshach, having picked up a little Linnaean training himself, had recognised several potential crops that could do well on Virginian and Carolinian plantations—which were often dependent solely on tobacco and, to a lesser extent, cotton.[14] Since the cutoff of the slave trade, Virginian planters in particular seemed to concern more of their time selling slaves to one another than what they did with said slaves once they had them.

The Wraggs—and Macallister—changed all that. Bringing Macallister and others with him on a return tour of the relevant areas, they brought back (among other products) peanut pods from New Orleans[15] and tropical fruit from Mexico and Guatemala, from which the company got its name. Both were cultivated successfully, primarily peanuts in Georgia and West Florida and fruit in East Florida. Macallister, along with other scientists, showed that the cultivation of peanuts in a crop-rotation system with cotton would reinvigorate soil that had previously given lamentable yields of cotton.[16] The Wragg family fortunes boomed just in time for the liberalisation of trade under the Patriot-Whig government, and fully free trade opened up with New Spain and Louisiana as well as Europe (which was always hungry for exotic foods). TFC was incorporated and floated on the New York Stock Exchange in 1823, and the rest is history.

TFC has had its fair share of morally questionable moments, like most companies. Yet it is most often attacked for the—perhaps inadvertent—role it played in the development of ideological views that would cause endless problems throughout the world. Ultimately stemming from Macallister’s published observations on the slave plantations used by TFC for its peanut production, The Burden was published in 1824 and sparked immediate controversy. Its cover depicted a representation of Christian from The Pilgrim’s Progress bowed under the weight of his titular Burden, but Christian was a generic white man and the Burden was shown as a generic black slave, his eyes closed and his mouth an O of snores. The book was the first scientific defence of slavery, based on a new approach to Linnaean Racism. It criticised the French Jacobins for their beliefs about the superiority of one white race over the other, and it also condemned Linnaeus himself for placing the white race too obviously over the yellow, red and black. “It should be obvious to any man who has visited the Cherokee Empire that those people are just as much human beings as you or I. They have been disadvantaged by the lottery of history, just as the Welch and Irish were before them, but there is nothing intrinsically superior about the Anglo-Saxon race, or else there would be no Scotch[17] identity left. And of course they keep Negroes just as satisfactorily as any white man. The yellow man is more mysterious, but to-day we see him grasp the future and throw off his foreign Tartar oppressors in the south of his country, and one may even occasionally see him on the decks of ships at New York or Philadelphia. Is this a man of inferior quality as Linnaeus alleges? Surely not! His own lack of participation in the Burden is only thanks to the fact that he has not had an opportunity to do so, being too concerned with release from his own bondage: and what is a blessed state of affairs for a Negro is a monstrous torment for a human being, be he white, red or yellow.

This small extract gives a flavour of the content. The Burden claimed that blacks were an intrinsically inferior people not merely to whites, but to all other the peoples of the world, arguing them to be a separate subspecies while elevating Orientals and native American Indians to the same level as whites—at the time, the second part was often the more controversial. This came on the back of the publishing of Erasmus Darwin III’s theory that primates such as the chimpanzee represented a ruined, decayed form of man[18] and The Burden used this to claim that Negroes were a halfway stage, half-men on the way to animalistic ruination, and only the institution of slavery under a benevolent human (i.e., white) master could prevent them from slipping further. After all, why else were chimpanzees found only in Africa?

In the past The Burden might have remained a local phenomenon, but the existence of Freedonia prompted many counterblasts from the educated blacks of that colony, with Jethro Carter describing the pamphlets and letters criss-crossing the Atlantic as ‘a war of words’. Many accused Macallister himself of writing it, which he always denied, though he undoubtedly supplied some scientific material. It did not come out until 1828 that the true author was Andrew Eveleigh, a rice planter from South Province, Carolina.[19]

This was a rather unfortunate time for him to be unmasked. For by this point he had already become leader of the Whig Party. And thus it was that the ENA would not be spared the Popular Wars...





[1] See Part #48.

[2] See Part #49.

[3] I.e. the War of the Spanish Succession.

[4] See Part #71.

[5] OTL, the entity formally known as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies did not exist until after the Napoleonic Wars, when it was agreed at the Congress of Vienna that the two kingdoms would be permanently joined into one unit. However, the nickname was used years before that, as early as the mid-eighteenth century, and survives in TTL. Compare, for example, how James I and VI, an enthusiast for the idea of an Anglo-Scottish union, sometimes called himself ‘monarch of Great Britain’, even though in actuality he was simply King of England and Scotland in a personal union.

[6] Historical, and did devise the plan recounted here, but in OTL had no sons.

[7] Spanish dollars, that is. In OTL money of 2011, about 7 million British pounds or 11.4 million US dollars.

[8] Prior to this the Philippines were ruled as a captaincy-general from Mexico City, and after the implementation of the Arandite Plan, as a part of the Kingdom of Guatemala.

[9] See Part #90.

[10] See Part #98.

[11] Pseudopuissant corporation = megacorp. Basically, the term means any corporate entity that has powers on the same level as a nation state. ‘Non-national’ to exclude things like the East India Companies.

[12] If you think it’s unlikely that PAW would still bear Priestley’s name after two hundred years...in OTL, Priestley sold his soda water idea to a German named Johann Jacob Schweppe.

[13] The Attignawantan, a Huron tribe, actually settled north of the border of French Louisiana, but it is here counted as part of the same entity.

[14] Unlike OTL, cotton has remained only one of several significant crops, with none of the OTL cotton boom of this period. This is because the cotton gin (or as it is known in TTL, the cotton-thresher) has not yet been invented in TTL.

[15] 1870s OTL.

[16] OTL this would be demonstrated by George Washington Carver some decades later.

[17] Scotch and Welch were generally used in this period rather than Scottish and Welsh.

[18] OTL theory, though by someone else.

[19] I.e. OTL South Carolina. Still technically called South Carolina Province, Confederation of Carolina, but this redundancy has led Carolinians to shorten it to ‘South Province’. Rice was a major crop in OTL South Carolina up until the cotton gin brought the cotton boom, and it has continued in TTL.
 

Thande

Donor
Part #111: Liberty’s Backup Plan

“What were the causes of the late conflicts? Doubtless savants will expend oceans of ink in arguing about such things in the years to come. For myself it is clear. Before half the men who fought each other were born, the plan for these wars might as well have been pencilled on the back of the Treaty of Copenhagen.”

—Gilbert Buckingham, 1841​

*

From: “The People’s Warriors: Understanding the Popular Wars, from their Foundations to their Aftershocks” by Peter Allington (1970)—

The Popular Wars are a notoriously complex subject to understand for any student of history. Even such complicated areas as the causes of the Jacobin Revolution in France pale into comparison beside them. After all, though the causes of that Revolution may have been diverse, the consequences were not. The Jacobin Wars began with a radical revolution in one of the most powerful states in Europe, upsetting the network of alliances that (imperfectly) preserved the peace. Ultimately, they can therefore be summarised as a single radical state attempting to preserve and export its own ideology, even as that ideology changed from popular liberty to Linnaean Racialism to the personality cult of Jean de Lisieux. The war had two sides: Jacobin France and a loose assortment of conservative and reactionary European powers. There was some diversity in the case of Great Britain, itself dabbling in radical politics (but within the existing system) but this was ultimately extinguished by the French invasion of 1807 and the imposition of the Marleburgensian regime. Beyond that there is little complexity to speak of.

The same cannot be said of the Popular Wars. Firstly, radical ideology was born in multiple places almost simultaneously. Secondly, the conservative regimes not only fought the radicals but also each other as they sought to take advantage of the revolutions weakening their enemies: there was none of the solidarity that characterised the Jacobin Wars (save for high profile examples like the Second War of the Polish Succession). And thirdly, there was no single overarching ideology connecting to disparate revolutionary groups. They were linked by a broad sense of dissatisfaction with the settlement at the Congress of Copenhagen in 1810, which had been born more of exhaustion than any defensibility of the new alliance system. However, that dissatisfaction could be nationalist—people angry at the division of their country or its incorporation into another—or radical—people angry at social inequality and illiberalism in their country’s political system—or, often, a combination of the two. There was little to no connexion between the groups, which has not prevented commentators both then and now from dismissively dubbing them all with a single label as though they represented a unified force. At the time, that label was most commonly “the Democrats”. But that term has, since the 1830s, softened from its original connotation of ‘supporters of mob rule’ to suggest supporters of a representative, liberal political system. In order to get around that, some Regressivist historians have altered the term to “the Ochlocrats”, a term that emphasises the idea of mob rule. However, not least because it is difficult to spell and pronounce, this has largely not caught on. Today, by far the most common misleadingly dismissive term to describe the radical movements in the Popular Wars is, of course, “the Populists”.

Yet if are not to fall into the trap of treating the groups as a unified movement, how then can we hope to understand the conflict? The answer, of course, is to turn to each group in turn, and to recall that most of them had their origins years before the conflict actually broke out: a casual observer, both of history texts and indeed some individuals at the time, is easily left with the false impression that the Populist groups flashed into existence out of nowhere.

For the English-speaking author, the two fronts of the Popular Wars that would appear to have the most personal importance are the Inglorious Revolution in Great Britain and the Virginia Crisis in the ENA. Let us turn to the first of these. It is certainly true that the Populist groups involved in the Inglorious Revolution were diverse, including the Sutfliffists,[1] machine-breakers who destroyed industrial engines that workers accused of making them unemployed by making their jobs unnecessary; the Army of Grace, a militant group which had formed in response to the persecution of the Wesleyan Church and other Nonconformists,[2] and Y Lleng Ddraig Goch (the Red Dragon Legion), a Welsh cultural revival group whose support came from proto-Mentian organisation of the miners and steelworkers of southern Wales. However, the predominant group is, of course, the Runnymede Movement.

The exact origins of the Movement are open to much debate, although it is worth giving the orthodox historiographic view. The question of when the Movement started is a very open one: the name is of course a reference to Ki ng John signing the Magna Carta at the meadow of Runnymede in 1215.[3] The Movement also sought a “People’s Constitution”, arguing that the current British Constitution of 1689, for all the praise it had received over the years, had not prevented Churchill’s takeover and dominance of the political system. Another inspiration was Wat Tyler’s Peasant Revolt from 1381, although it is worth remembering that this association was mostly drawn by the Runnymede Movement’s enemies. However, if we draw the line at a reasonable place, the real origins of the Movement lie in the United Provinces of South America in the year 1814. The UPSA was often regarded as a fount of liberty, strange as the idea may seem to we moderns, but the way in which one of its citizens inspired the Runnymede Movement is certainly an unexpected one.

Agustín Jiménez was a young chemist who worked for the Priestley Aereated Water company in Buenos Aires. Although he was one among many, his later fame means he has been singled out as the archetypal example of a new kind of scientific researcher who came to the fore in the early nineteenth century. Whereas before such men had either been rich themselves, had a rich patron, or occasionally in some countries (such as France) been funded by the state, men like Jiménez lived in a world where companies had grown large and rich enough that they could afford to fund their own scientific research. In Britain, WedgwoodDarwin[4] researched new types of pottery manufacture and dyestuffs, as well as funding expeditions to Feng China in order to exploit the new trade relations established and find ways to duplicate Chinese techniques, as an expanded supply of genuine Oriental porcelain was a threat to the domestic production that had grown up in Britain during the isolationist rule of the Qing. In America, TFC funded Linnaean approaches to improving the transplant and yield of new tropical fruit to American plantations in the Floridas, while in Africa the RAC did the same with cinchona. It is the latter case that is most relevant to Jiménez and PAW’s work.

Much of PAW was forced to evacuate from Buenos Aires thanks to the besiegement by Anglo-American forces during the Third Platinean War. This was a blessing in diguise, as scattering PAW workers to Cordoba and elsewhere meant the company established temporary new factories that they were later able to expand into new facilities after their original headquarters in Buenos Aires was restored to them. The end of the war also brought new challenges for PAW. Juan Miguel Priestley was aware that the company needed to diversify, and a suitable problem for their chemical expertise to tackle was that provoked by the loss of Lower Peru to the Empire of New Spain during the Third Platinean War. The UPSA had lost most of her cinchona plantations and, due to the lack of trade between the UPSA and the new Kingdom of Peru until years later, shortages were rife. PAW set to work attempting to discern the chemical structure of quinine and replicating it synthetically. In this they were inspired by the work of the Flemish chemist Robert Solvay,[5] who in 1812 had successfully synthesised urea from inorganic chemicals, making him the first person to synthetically create what had been thought of as a natural product.[6] This had the effect of stirring up the Vitalist controversy once more, as it appeared to explode the Vitalist idea that natural products possessed a ‘vital principle’ from God which made them a distinct class of substances from artificial compounds.[7] Other scientists who opposed Vitalism were eager to come up with more examples, and this doubtless was a partial inspiration for Jiménez, who some years later would be a prominent Meridian supporter of Paley’s environmental breeding hypothesis.[8]

Priestley’s directive to attempt to duplicate quinine synthetically thus dovetailed neatly with Jiménez’s motivations and his hard work and insights swiftly rocketed him to the top of the project. In 1814 Jiménez attempted the synthesis whose products would make his name—even though it was a gross failure to synthesise quinine, and this would not be achieved for another century.[9] Vaguely aware from the primitive analytical techniques of the day that quinine included an illuftobenjin motif,[10] Jiménez tried dephlogisticating [oxidising] pure illuftobenjin to see if he would produce something close to quinine. He did not. The illuftobenjin reacted with various impurities in his flask to make a mixture of intractable compounds.[11] While attempting to clean the flask, he discovered that the products dissolved in alcohol to give a vivid purple colour. Showing this to Priestley, the latter realised that the compound (actually later discovered to be a mixture of several compounds) could be of great use to the dyestuff industry and a potential source of profits. Knowing the current craze for twitting the Vitalists by synthesising natural products, Priestley allowed Jiménez to name the compound “tyrine”, claiming it was the same as the famous Tyrian Purple dye extracted from Mediterranean sea snails. This was not actually true, of course, but the controversy sparked by it worked as free advertising.[12]

PAW scaled up production and performed some limited tests with clothing, which showed that the dye was stable to sunlight without fading (more than other dyes), that it was cheaper to make on a large scale than the extraction of natural dyes, and that people went crazy for the new colour. Previously the expense of Tyrian Purple meant that only the rich had been able to afford it, indeed that was precisely why the Roman and Byzantine Emperors had worn it. In a way, even before its adoption by the Runnymede Movement, the association of tyrine with radical movements—saying that ‘every man is now a king’—was inevitable.

Textile production in the UPSA was not enormous, so PAW approached the British, whose industrial textile manufacturing was now larger than the rest of Europe’s put together. PAW gave up the British patent to a consortium of WedgwoodDarwin and United Cromford Manufactories, the country’s largest textile company.[13] In exchange, the two British companies agreed to pay for the construction of a PAW aereated water plant in Bath (previously the manner of Joseph Priestley’s exit from Britain had meant PAW were unable to officially trade there) and to build textile factories on the British industrial model in the UPSA, with operation to be shared by PAW and the British firms. This move arguably did more than even Roberto Mateováron’s later mission as ambassador in London to help repair Anglo-Meridian relations damaged by the Third Platinean War.

Tyrine dye proved wildly popular in Great Britain, with WedgwoodDarwin using it on its porcelain and pottery and UCM, more ubiquitously, as a clothing dye. Fuelled by the Vitalist controversy and the shock of relatively poor people being able to wear purple clothes, the tyrine craze spread across Britain, Ireland and later the European continent, with UCM buying up more mills in an effort to stay ahead of demand. PAW itself meanwhile supplied tyrine-dyed clothes to both the UPSA and later the ENA, building new textile factories in New York in the 1820s.

It was no surprise, then, that tyrine would come to symbolise a populist, radical position. However, the well-known symbol of the Runnymede Movement—the so-called “Asterisk of Liberty”, ✳—also drew on another source. The potato famine in Ireland in 1822 famously led to Churchill declaring British support for the neighbour who had helped her in the French invasion of 1807, and much aid crossed the Irish Sea. In order to coordinate this, several organisations were set up. One of the non-governmental entities involved was the Anglo-Irish Friendship Society, which continued after the famine was over, helping to promote tolerance of the Irish living in Britain. It is rather ironic that an organisation that Churchill approved of inadvertently inspired the one that would bring an end to the Marleburgensian period in Britain.

In imitation of the Union Jack, the Anglo-Irish Friendship Society devised a flag that consisted of the Cross of St George for England superimposed on the Cross of St Patrick for Ireland. In order to avoid the question of precedence, neither cross was given a white border, so the flag appeared to be a red asterisk on white. Across the central bar of the cross, the society often stitched a slogan in white such as “TOGETHER” or “TO PAY OUR DEBTS”. Occasionally a variant that included the cross of St Andrew for Scotland was seen,[14] but this was much rarer as the effects of the famine in Scotland meant that Scots were hardly going to be donating to Ireland.

It is unclear exactly how the Runnymede Movement copied the flag. A cartoon in The Ringleader from January 1826 shows a Runnymede marcher waving what looks like the Society flag while a small boy behind him calls out, the caption reading Urchin: “Oi, mister, yer flag’s gone all bruised!”. Although the print is of course in black and white, this would appear to imply that even at this early stage, the Runnymede Movement’s flag—a copy of the Anglo-Irish Friendship Society’s but in purple tyrine dyed cloth rather than red—was in use. Variations, of course, soon sprang up, including some where the St George’s cross part was emphasised and the St Patrick’s cross diagonals were reduced to a decorative component. The most popular, however, stemmed from the fact that the movement was often driven underground and, in the dark days before the Inglorious Revolution, they did not have the time to stitch a flag together. Instead tyrine dye was simply smeared on a white flag to suggest the shape of the two superimposed crosses, and thence we gain the symbol of nineteenth-century Britain: the Asterisk of Liberty...


runnymede_2.jpg








[1] Much like OTL Luddites, but more widespread due to the greater industrialisation and poverty of Britain under the Churchill regime.

[2] The Methodists formed much like OTL, but are known primarily as the Wesleyans rather than the OTL label which started out as a pejorative term. Prior to the Jacobin Wars they were more accepted in Britain due to the fact that there was no American Revolution—the popularity of John Wesley’s ideas in America led to British Methodists being accused of being closet republicans and traitors during the OTL Napoleonic Wars; here Wesleyan doctrine is still popular in the ENA but this is not seen as a bad thing in Britain. However, after the USE rebellion in Ireland in 1798, the Wesleyans and other Nonconformists (British non-Anglican Protestants) were tarred with the same brush as the Irish Presbyterians and discriminated against. This has intensified since Catholic emancipation under Fox, as now fire-breathing Anglicans turn to Nonconformists as a new target for persecution.

[3] Actually, John Lackland sealed the charter, as like most monarchs of the period he was illiterate, but only the most pedantic historians remember this.

[4] The author anachronistically uses a later name of the company, which was at the time (OTL and TTL) just called “the Wedgwood Company”. In OTL it is now formally called Josiah Wedgwood and Sons.

[5] Member of the same family as OTL’s Ernest Solvay, but of the generation before.

[6] In OTL this was achieved by the German chemist Friedrich Wöhler in 1828.

[7] Of course, though long since disproven, this idea continues to influence the modern world of OTL, whether it be the now purely arbitrary distinction between the disciplines of organic and inorganic chemistry or the general public’s firm conviction that ‘natural = better’, an irrational belief which chemical companies of course exploit in their advertising campaigns.

[8] I.e. the theory of natural selection, more or less.

[9] OTL the artificial synthesis of quinine was achieved in 1944, but we still have not discovered a synthetic process efficient or economically viable enough to replace cinchona harvesting. Of course, by now we also have many other more effective anti-malarial drugs than quinine.

[10] Illuftobenjin = aniline. Illuftium is the Swedish-derived term in TTL for nitrogen (due to Carl Wilhelm Scheele) and benjin is the term for benzene, being a slightly alternate abbreviation for the mixture of natural products from which benzene is extracted, gum benzoin (or benjamin). This is itself derived from the bark of various trees in Southeast Asia. Aniline, also called azobenzene in OTL, is essentially a nitrogen atom (in the form of an amine group) attached to a benzene ring.

[11] “Intractable compounds” is a chemists’ euphemism for “sticky black sludge on the bottom of the flask”.

[12] The dye in question is better known in OTL as Mauvine, but “Tyrian Purple” was also a (probably deliberate) misnomer used for it in OTL. Mauvine was discovered in OTL in 1856 by the British chemist William Henry Perkin at the age of 18 according to the same sequence of events as in TTL. The reason why the discovery is earlier in TTL is for several reasons, but primarily it is because the efficacy of quinine was universally recognised earlier on, and the loss of Lower Peru to protectionist New Spain in the Third Platinean War means that many people who had been used to exports from the UPSA now need a new supply. Therefore here Jiménez’s attempts to synthesise quinine are economically driven, while Perkin’s attempt was purely an academic exercise given to him by his professor, August Wilhelm von Hofmann, as the latter had claimed in a paper that the artificial synthesis of quinine should be theoretically possible.

[13] Cromford being the factory founded by Richard Arkwright the (plagiarising) inventor of the water frame loom. Under Churchill’s RCTFI system, Arkwright’s heirs were able to take over several other textile mills to dominate the textiles industry in Derbyshire; there are more mills in Yorkshire and Lancashire than in Derbyshire, but they are typically each privately owned rather than forming part of a company.

[14] I.e. not unlike the OTL Union Jack.


Part #112: Don’t Forget Poland

“The ultimate inspiration for Kyugiyn theatre.”

– Historian Jan Colijn summarises the Polish Question from 1890[1]​

*

From – “The Watchful Peace and its Blind Wars” by Peter J. Kendrick (1956)—

The Polish Question, like many historical events, had its ultimate causes in events that had taken place years, decades, even centuries before. However, the catalyst for what ultimately awoke the discontentment leading to the Question was, as is well known, the Great Famine of 1822 and the response to it (or lack thereof) by authority. The Kingdom of Poland had subsisted quite contentedly in personal union with Saxony—first the Electorate and later the self-declared Kingdom—since John George V had defeated Frederick William III and freed Poland from her domination by the Prussians. As with the earlier period of Saxon personal union, Poland had been rather neglected by the Saxon monarch, but at least at first the Poles were more than willing to accept John George’s hands-off approach when taken against the Prussian iron heel. The Sejm was restored along with the traditional freedoms of the state and, from 1804 to 1822, Poland went along with Saxon policies.

The Famine changed all that. Poland had effectively joined the Saxon-led Zollverein by lowering its trade barriers, and this policy hit the country hard when the potato blight caused food shortages. This, coupled with a perceived lack of action or compassion on the part of the Dresden government, caused Polish hearts to harden towards Saxony. Only nobles could vote for the Sejm, but Poland’s rather vague definition of ‘noble’ meant that this was more than 10% of the population, and a good number of those voters were themselves relatively poor farmers who had suffered directly as a result of the famine. This meant that Poles were no longer as ready to go along with Dresden’s say-so on policy. (Of course, whether the Saxon response was actually objectively insufficient remains a hotly debated matter, one which the Assembly of Sovereign Nations has seen fit to designate a Heritage Point of Controversy).

Matters came to a head, however, when John George’s eldest son and heir, Augustus Frederick, publicly announced his intent to convert to Lutheranism in 1824. A word of explanation is perhaps warranted here. Saxony had enthusiastically converted, electoral family and all, from Roman Catholicism to Lutheranism during the Reformation, and the vast majority of Saxons were still Lutherans—all the more so given the formerly Prussian territories she had absorbed throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, the Elector Frederick Augustus I had converted back to Catholicism at the turn of the eighteenth century, partially out of personal beliefs and partially in order to be elected King of Poland. Since that time, the House of Wettin had returned to Catholicism, although paradoxically Saxon law was still fairly intolerant of any Catholics other than those that lived in Dresden Castle. Now, though, Augustus Frederick—his name almost an appropriate inversion of that of his ancestor—wished to return once again to Lutheranism, and just as before his reasons were both personal and pragmatic. While Saxony proper had long since resigned itself to the idea of being a mostly Lutheran realm ruled by a Catholic monarch, the new territories had not, and their people were often resentful of the fact that John George V was a Catholic. Augustus Frederick could better rule them as a Lutheran himself. However, his new faith disqualified him from being King of Poland. Not only was Poland a devoutly Catholic country, but its people naturally associated the idea of Lutheran rule with the period of oppression by the Hohenzollerns.

Of course, John George had more than one son: he had three, and the younger brothers—Xavier Albert and Frederick Christian—remained devout Catholics themselves. Indeed the idea of Poland electing Xavier as King upon John George’s death had a certain attractiveness to it; the Poles would retain the dynastic link to Saxony that might help them if their other neighbours threatened war again, but would have a resident monarch in Warsaw ready to give his full attention to running their country. And of course, history would have been quite different if this solution had been chosen. Indeed, it seems that every potential candidate for the Polish throne except the one who eventually obtained it went on to play an important role in the Popular Wars—and can we be certain that the victor would not have, had matters proceeded differently?

But this is a fruitless endeavour. Suffice to say that the uncertainty over Augustus Frederick being disqualified from the succession opened the floodgates for every Envoy[2] with an axe to grind about succession to the throne. Besides the major issues of the famine and Augustus Frederick’s religion, there were other reasons for the Poles to dislike an automatic succession to another Saxon ruler, such as the fact that the increased freedom of movement of people thanks to the Zollverein meant there was a greater appreciation of the lack of tolerance of Catholics in Saxony as well as the fact that the Saxon government—royal and otherwise—tended to focus its sights on the Concert of Germany rather than eastern Europe. Therefore, murmurs of discontent soon arose. It seems likely that a lot of the dissenters would have been happy enough with a King Xavier in the end, they simply wanted to ensure that the Saxons did not take their succession to the Polish throne (which was, after all, elected) for granted. However, if this was their intention, it backfired in the long run.

In 1825 John George was on his deathbed and the Sejm drafted a declaration which praised the king for his acts in freeing them from the Prussians years before, but warned that the Sejm would enforce its constitutional right to elect the next king of Poland free of prejudice for or against any candidate. It is worth noting that the Sejm, which had once been noted for its practice of consensus voting which required the unanimous consent for any law to pass, had reformed to the point where most votes were now held under ordinary majority rules.[3] Whether this applied to the Election Sejm, the special at-large Sejm summoned for a vote to elect the new King, was a matter which had remained purely theoretical up until now; disagreements between the factions meant that a compromise was reached and the Sejm voted that an Election Sejm would not have to produce a unanimous vote, but a candidate would have to be elected by at least 66% of the Sejm voters in order to become King.[4]

The so-called “Polish Letter” sparked outrage in Dresden when it arrived, largely due to the unfortunate coincidence of its announcement the day after John George passed away. While the soon-to-be Augustus II Frederick had more or less written off the idea of his succession to Poland as a lost cause, he was nonetheless infuriated by the language used by the Sejm and the response by Dresden was similarly hot-blooded, putting forward Xavier as candidate in a declaration that reprimanded the Poles for betraying the state that had freed them from Prussian oppression, and only sparked more bad blood on both sides.

The controversy opened up the electoral field wider and the ‘Polish Question’ truly took shape. The Hapsburgs, flush from their successes against the Ottoman Empire, nominated the Archduke Charles (who was already ruler of Krakau, the fragment of Poland Austria had obtained as a figleaf during the War of the Polish Partition) as their candidate for Polish king. The Poles were wary, though. Francis II’s reputation led them to believe that a Hapsburg ruler would less likely protect them from wars as drag them into them. Other possibilities lay to the west. Peter of Lithuania did not apply himself and seek to reunite Poland-Lithuania, being an Orthodox Christian, but he did suggest the idea of a Catholic Lithuanian noble seeking the Polish throne, just as Prince Adam Czartoryski had in Navarre. Naturally the general consensus in suspicious Poland was to view this as a Russian plot. Henry Frederick of Prussia even boldly declared his own candidacy, to which few could keep a straight face.

After a few exploratory ballots of the Election Sejm, it became obvious to the Interrex, the Archbishop of Gniezno,[5] that the voters were sceptical about all the main candidates, alarmed at the rhetoric that was being fired back and forth between them—particularly between the Hapsburgs and Saxons—and the idea that choosing any of them could kick off a Third War of the Polish Succession. Therefore the best way out was to find a neutral candidate who would be acceptable, or at least equally unacceptable, to all of Poland’s powerful neighbours. The possibility of a Polish noble sitting the throne was mooted as an obvious exercise of the nativist sentiment that had sprung up over the public blaming the Saxons’ devotion to the Concert of Germany over Poland’s problems. But the last time a Pole had sat the throne, it had been Stanisław Leszczyński, and that had ended with the First War of the Polish Succession. Furthermore, additional soundings taken among the szlachta strongly implied that there was no candidate who would be sufficiently neutral and acceptable to all the internal Polish factions, due to the intense politicised squabbling between the major noble families that had become the norm with an absentee king.

Therefore the Interrex looked to find a minor European state with a Catholic ruler who could be persuaded to take on the Polish throne and would be equally acceptable to Poland’s neighbours. Germany was the first thought, but most of the Catholic rulers had either been killed or reduced to subordinate rulers within a wider domain thanks to the Jacobin Wars. Then Italy was turned to. Two Catholic rulers still sat minor thrones that they would most probably be willing to give up for the chance to be King of Poland: Duke Rainaldo IV of Lucca and King Victor Felix I of Sardinia. Both were bitter about their losses at the Congress of Copenhagen—Modena for the former, Piedmont for the latter. If the Interrex had made a different decision, the later events of the Popular Wars would have been very different indeed. But in the end the Primate plumped for the Duke of Lucca, who was proposed to the Election Sejm and elected with 71% of the szlachta vote. To Poland’s relief, their choice was met with nothing more than grumblings from the Hapsburgs, Saxons and Lithuanians, and the brief moment of war fervour died down. Duke Rainaldo appointed Paolo Geminiani (a Luccan political leader and distant relative of the composer Francesco Geminiani) as viceroy of Lucca in his absence and was soon crowned King of Poland in Warsaw. As his Luccan regnal name had no ready equivalent in Polish, he was crowned under the name Kazimierz (Casimir) V and his new people soon warmed to him as he made an effort to learn the Polish language.

Poland had managed to erratically steer her ship of state once more between Scylla and Charybdis. This royal settlement ensured that, while the Popular Wars would indeed come to Poland, in them she would possess the upper hand...

*

From: “Germany, 1648—1900” by Raffaelo Mastroianni, 1941:

Saxony’s position within the Watchful Peace is usually described in terms of her insidiously sliding her tentacles throughout the Concert of Germany, rising to be the dominant power within and presaging the events of the Popular Wars. Yet we should not ignore internal events in the shaky new kingdom. After all, she had annexed vast new territories throughout the preceding century—doubling her population—and without internal reform it seems rather unlikely that she could have even survived the Popular Wars, far less come out of them on top.

Political reforms under John George were fairly minor, with the country remaining an absolute monarchy, although the powers of the Chancellor were expanded to approach those of a prime minister, and the internal divisions and government of the kingdom were rationalised based on her new boundaries. The idea of a parliament would not be mooted until Augustus II Frederick ascended the throne in September 1825 and would not actually be implemented until after the beginning of the Popular Wars. Nonetheless, Augustus’ flirtation with the idea of reform was sufficient to placate the kinds of intellectuals who would otherwise have fed into Populist aggression. As the crown prince, he had somewhat scandalously been a patron of the Deutsche Jugend (Young Germans), a youth movement sweeping the Concert and beyond which called for political reform. Historians remain divided on whether the Young Germans can be characterised as an element of the wider Schmidtist movement that were co-opted by the House of Wettin, or whether they represent an independent force and one which might in fact have been set in motion by powerful interests in Dresden. The latter possibility was famously expounded upon by Schmidtist leader Wilhelm Brüning in an 1828 speech (prior to his ‘Damascene conversion’) when he dismissed the Young Germans as a “Rattenfänger Revolte”. (The Rattenfänger is the original German name for the mediaeval legendary figure referred to as the Pied Piper in English translations; Brüning’s point was that the revolutionaries were being ‘led along’ by an external hand rather than a spontaneous revolt on their own auspices). The term found its way into English as the contracted ‘rat-revolt’, which is customarily used in current political jargon to describe such a supposedly spontaneous public movement but one secretly orchestrated behind the scenes by established interests, though the English abbreviation has led to the derivation being forgotten.[6]

In any case, many have argued that other organisations in Saxony—the Gesellschaft der Radikalen (Society of Radicals) for instance—better represented wider Schmidtist and reformist thought, and those were indeed persecuted. Nonetheless the impression of at least vague openness to reform permeated August’s early period as King of Saxony and helped fuel the meteoric rise of both man and state. We also cannot underestimate the effects of Saxony’s rising educated classes and cultural presence. Saxony had already possessed the University of Leipzig, the oldest in Germany, and had acquired the town of Halle and its more modern-minded university from Prussia in the Third War of Supremacy. Cross-pollination between the two led to Saxon higher education becoming some of the best in the German-speaking lands (though, as before, in school-level mass education the Austrians were recognised as the leaders not only in the Germanies but in Europe). A major driver in this was one of Saxony’s most famous sons, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe was a polymath who applied his philosophical theorising to subjects as diverse as painting, political governance and scientific theory. He was also an accomplished poet and author in his own right. As well as helping further modernise education within Saxony, Goethe had a significant influence on politics by adopting what some have referred to as a “Bonapartist” or “dorado-Adamantine” approach: a conservative reformism still informed by the ideals of the Enlightenment, favouring liberty but sceptical of the masses to govern. Arguably this moderate approach helped Saxony better withstand and capitalise on the winds of change of the Popular Wars than the hard-doradist authoritarian defiance of her rival to the south.

In cultural terms, Saxony experienced something of a flowering in the Popular Wars. Partly this was because she was one of the less damaged of the German states and thus attracted a number of artists and composers purely by default, with both Dresden and the two major university towns enjoying an enriched cultural atmosphere. Dresden had once been noted for its impressive Baroque architecture and it now underwent something of a Baroque Revival, despite that style being only a few decades out of date. The reasons behind this, it is speculated, are related to the craze for Orientalism in Western Europe and, more significantly, in the maritime powers that were exposed to such Eastern architecture by their newly expanded trade with India, China and Japan. The Saxons, being an inland power not directly affected by the new trade, headed an architectural backlash which idealised Baroque as ‘the’ native style of western Europe, dismissing neo-classical Greek architecture along with Orientalist ideas and even the Versaillaise school—which makes more sense if one believes the Sauvagiste theory that the Versaillaise school was itself influenced by Chinese art.[7] For the same reason, neo-Gothic architecture saw some interest in Saxony (and the Hapsburg lands) whereas in most of Europe it failed to catch on.

Thus with this quixotic mixture of modern reformism among the youth, reactionary nostalgic cultural ideas and a moderate political culture, Saxony met the challenges that would soon plunge Europe into the fire once more...










[1] Kyugiyn theatre is a type of opera in which the main, serious and dramatic piece is preceded by an unrelated short farcical comedy using the same actors, somewhat analogous to how cinemas in OTL formerly showed comedy shorts before the main feature. Colijn is of course being facetious, but it is unlikely that he or anyone else knows the real origin of Kyugiyn—it’s actually a Japanese theatre style called kyogen which has obviously made its way to Europe via Russia, hence the new transliteration. The main difference between the original Japanese form and the later Russian derivative is that the Japanese version interspersed the dramatic play with comedy sketches rather than having an entire short comedy play at the beginning.

[2] The Polish Sejm consists of a lower house called the House of Envoys, made up of representatives elected by local assemblies (sejmiks) of provincial nobles and sent to Warsaw, and an upper house called the Senate made up mostly of bishops and provincial governors. It was usually described as a three-estate parliament, with the third estate being the king (this idea was also applied by some 18th century political theoreticians to the British system of government).

[3] OTL the Sejm abolished this under the liberal constitution of 1791, which of course ultimately alarmed Prussia and Russia enough to trigger the Second Partition of Poland. TTL the Sejm was abolished during the period of Poland’s personal union with Prussia and restored after the Second War of the Polish Succession; liberalisation has proceeded more gradually than OTL.

[4] Whereas the General Sejm (just called the ‘Sejm’ here) was an ordinary elected parliament, the Election Sejm was a literal gathering together of all the voters who could make it, sometimes as many as a hundred thousand, to elect the new king.

[5] As the name implies, the Interrex is the official who exercises the authority of the King when the throne is empty, and in Poland this is traditionally always the Archbishop of Gniezno, as he is also the Primate of Poland. (Under the British system by contrast the Interrex powers are vested collectively in the Privy Council rather than in a single person).

[6] In other words, this is like OTL’s term “astroturfing” to describe a faked “grassroots” movement (both these terms, fairly obviously, come from American politics).

[7] Recall that Versaillaise is TTL’s name for what we call Rococo. In OTL the idea that Rococo was influenced by Chinese porcelain and paintings is not very controversial. It’s more so in TTL because it doesn’t appear to fit well into the general historical narrative (i.e. the idea that China mostly remained closed to trade until the coming of the Feng Dynasty and the resulting architectural impact via the Orientalist School during the Watchful Peace).


Part #113: All Turk and No Giray

“Judah is gone into captivity because of affliction, and because of great servitude: she dwelleth among the heathen, she findeth no rest: all her persecutors overtook her between the straits.”

– Lamentations 1:3 (King James Version)​

*

From – “The Watchful Peace and its Blind Wars” by Peter J. Kendrick (1956)—

The potato famine of 1822 brought much of the conflicts raging around the Ottoman Time of Troubles to a halt, whether temporarily or permanently. Undoubtedly the participant most affected was the Hapsburg empire, and in particular Bohemia (including Silesia) which had a strong dependence on the potato as its staple: as with Poland’s attitude to Saxony, those regions gained a new enmity towards Vienna, but intensified by the perception that Francis II cared more about his war than about feeding his people. It is debatable just how great a role the famine had in bringing Austrian participation in the war to a close, as conflict had been petering out for some months before that. Though frustrated by determined resistance by the Balkan Party in Bosnia, Austria could be satisfied by a considerable territorial expansion. Francis II in particular was pleased with the conquest of Wallachia, which undid the embarrassing failure of the campaign there during the Austro-Turkish War of a generation before, in the early days of his leadership. Furthermore, Hapsburg possession of Wallachia was strategically important for a variety of reasons. Aside from a small part which lay within Swabia, the entirety of the River Danube now lay within the borders of the Hapsburg monarchy: something which would have important consequences for those lands’ later history, but in the short term led to a new conduit of trade and communication across half of Europe. Francis could boast that his dominions stretched a mari usque ad mare,[1] with the Hapsburgs holding contiguous territory from the Black Sea to the Adriatic—and, if you included Italy, the Tyrrhenian. Together with the gradual relaxation of internal tariffs within the Hapsburg lands during the Watchful Peace, this had the potential to transform the region through trade, although much of the effects would not make themselves visible early enough to be credited to Francis’ regime.

The Hapsburgs’ possession of Wallachia also had the important consequence of blocking their uneasy ally Russia from further direct expansion into the Balkans. Orthodox Russia was the most obvious champion of the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, but the Hapsburgs reaching out to Wallachia, Serbia and Greece helped alter this. While Francis remained resolute in his own muscular Catholicism, the reality on the ground by Austrian administrators was a self-interested tolerance of the Orthodox natives. This was particularly noticeable in Wallachia where the military governor, General Erwin zu Hardegg, attracted controversy for placing soldiers outside Orthodox cathedrals to protect them from attacks by recent Hungarian Catholic immigrants. The actions of men like Hardegg helped create a situation where even the Phanariot Greeks from Moldavia, now under Russian rule, fled to Wallachia. Of course, this was helped by the fact that the Russians were using the Phanariots as a scapegoat for their own military reversals in the early part of the war.

Matters in Bosnia were more complex and defined partially by the hard fighting that had taken place there during the war, with many of the occupying soldiers having lost comrades in the bitter conflict (and had been denied plunder by the static front) and were inclined to take it out on the natives. Whether there was a deliberate racial purging of the Muslim Bosniaks from Sarajevo remains a matter of controversy: some argue that the Bosniaks fled of their own accord thanks to pogroms by the Catholics and Orthodox, both native and new colonists. Of course, this is scarcely any better. A much larger Muslim population remained in the rural parts of Austrian Bosnia, reflecting the hands-off, out-of-sight-out-of-mind approach that characterised Austrian rule of her new acquisitions. It can be debated whether this was pragmatic tolerance, incompetence, or some mixture of the two. Some have argued that the initial military governor, General Istvan Somogyi, adopted a soft touch due to previously having been stationed in Bavaria and believing the last thing the Hapsburg empire needed was another such ‘bleeding ulcer’. But this may be arguing from hindsight...

*

From: “Third Rome: A History of Russia” by Jan van der Bilt, 1982—

Though Austria may have left the war against the Ottomans after 1822—and, by her victories in Wallachia, cut off Russia from further progress on that front—Paul I’s empire remained in the fight on the two remaining fronts. The steady continuation of the war hid rumblings closer to home: the potato famine bit hard in Russia as well, and it has been argued that the quick redeployment of the former Moldavian front army elsewhere was as much to prevent its soldiers from being a drain on Russian food supplies as because they were needed as reinforcements. Matters were particularly bitter on the Crimean front, where the Crimeans had been reduced to the peninsula itself and Prince Dolgurokov’s army had taken the continental part of the Khanate. But, fearing rumours of the prince’s bloody rhetoric, many of the Crimean farmers had fled to the peninsula and left their crops to rot in their fields. This together with the potato blight meant that both the Russian army and the Crimeans went hungry, though the Russians’ lack of any naval presence on the Black Sea[2] meant that seaborne trade and fishing could continue from ports such as Aqyar.[3] It was in the bitter winter of 1822 that the Masada Legion was formed.

It should be obvious that the name was only applied in retrospect: as heroic a last stand as the original Masada was, no man would name his Kleinkriegers after a last stand in which the fighters committed suicide rather than surrender. The Jewish fighters of the Legion more commonly drew upon the name and imagery of the Maccabees, the rebel army that had overthrown the Seleucid rulers of Judah in the second century BC after the Seleucid King Antiochus IV Epiphanes outlawed Jewish religious practices. Regardless of whom they chose to emulate, the Legion was one of the first explicitly Jewish organisations established in the modern age, helping set the symbols used by later imitators. The Legion was led by David Levitin under the overall political leadership of Yitzhak Volynov, the man who had inspired many of the Jews of Russia previously to decamp for Crimea. Volynov gave many fiery speeches encouraging both his co-religionists and their Crimean Muslim allies. It was their close cooperation with the Crimeans that led the Legion to initially use similar symbols—as well, perhaps, as the simple pragmatic issue that it avoided confusion in a battle situation. The Crimean Khanate by this point had adapted a flag consisting of three unequal horizontal stripes of red, sky-blue and red: sky-blue was the traditional colour of the Turkic peoples from Central Asia. Atop the central stripe in yellow was the Crimean Tatars’ Tamga (clan symbol), which somewhat resembled a Latin letter M with additional branches. Initially the Jews adopted a flag which was identical save that it replaced the Tamga with a menorah, which was after all a fairly similar-looking symbol, save that it had more tines—and was upside-down. Unfortunately the idea of an inverted symbol being used to symbolise rejection, derived from the flags of the Jacobin revolutionary republics, had by now reached Crimea and this was hastily changed to avoid offending the Crimeans. Instead a yellow Star of David was used, a symbol which had previously been adopted by some Jewish groups in Germany after being permitted their own flag.

The remaining three years it took the Russians to conquer the Crimean peninsula, by virtue of sheer bloody-mindedness on Prince Dolgurokov’s part and a willingness to “build a bridge to Bagcasaray[4] out of the bodies of his soldiers”, according to the acid tongue of Prince Theodore,[5] need not be dwelt on. The fighting rocked back and forth several times, and more than once it seemed likely that the Russians would abandon the front and settle for a neutralised rump Khanate covering only the peninsula. But in 1824 a seaborne descent was finally achieved and, despite staunch resistance by the Tatars and Jews, the Russians overwhelmed the peninsula.

Khan Devlet V, the man whohad made the gamble of supporting the Balkan Party in the hope of quickly regaining a reliable Ottoman ally, was distraught. He had done his best, and the Balkan Party continued to hold the vital region of the Empire from which they took their nickname, but they remained too weak to hold off a Russian invasion. Contrary to popular narrative, Ferid Naili Pasha (the Balkan Party’s effective leader) did send some reinforcements to the Crimeans in at least a token gesture, which did delay the Russians somewhat. But in the end the numbers told. Khan Devlet sent away his son and heir (also named Devlet) to the Balkan Party-ruled part of the Ottoman Empire to grow up in exile, but remained with his people in a last stand—though Volynov attempted to dissuade him. Devlet V was killed while leading a cavalry counterattack against a group of Cossacks outside the old capital of Qirim in 1825. The Russians claimed victory soon afterwards, though at court in St Petersburg, Prince Dolgurokov’s political enemies including Kautzman and Prince Theodore cast scorn upon his bloody triumph.

That night, according to legend, Volynov and Levitin met with selected leaders of their people—Russian Jews as well as Krymchaks and Karaites[6]—and organised the Legion as a Kleinkrieger group, drawing upon the ‘rulebook’ that Michael Hiedler had produced by example in his long years of resistance first to General Lascelles and then to the Austrians. Levitin was the first, however, to formally develop the Tribal System.[7] Loosely inspired by the ancient Jewish tribes, this involved dividing the Kleinkrieger leaders into twelve groups (deliberately not on ethnic grounds; each contained a mixture of Russian Jews and Krymchaks or Karaites). Each small group of leaders would then recruit agents among the Jews of Crimea and use them as informants and, when the time came, as Kleinkriegers in an uprising. While Crimean Muslims might also be involved, they would be kept away from the core of each Tribe, and importantly each Tribe would keep its secrets from each other, ensuring that one leader being captured by the Russians would not reveal all of them. Levitin and Volynov themselves deliberately were careful not to know more than they had to.

Thus it was that, almost by whimsy, they laid the foundations for a later legend...

*

From – “The Time of Troubles: A History of the Ottoman Empire, 1816-1841” by Giuseppe Guiccardini (1956):

After Moldavia proved abortive and Crimea ended in a bloody mess, the Russians’ third front in exploiting the Ottoman Time of Troubles was in the Caucasus. From 1819 onwards this was led by Dmitri Arakcheyev and his subordinates Arkady Pavlovich and Prince Piotr Bagration. The Russians were generally helped by the Georgians, and in return in 1821 the Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti was expanded into a newly proclaimed Kingdom of Georgia. From his existing capital of Telavi, King George XIV now ruled a kingdom stretching to the Black Sea, bound into treaty as a Russian ally but nonetheless possessing considerable autonomy. It was the presence of the reunited Georgians as resolute Russian allies and competent mountain fighters that hampered Persian efforts to expand into the Caucasus beyond the Azeri lands and focused them further south, for which q.v.

Elsewhere, the Russians struggled. Attempts to establish a vassal Armenian kingdom in the same manner as the Georgian one failed, with most Armenians being loyal to the Ottomans and those who did favour the Russians never being present in a sufficient majority to make a state workable. Much has been made of Pavlovich’s use of nindzya assassins from Yapon. The exotic nature of this unusual warrior cult, particularly given the obscure and mysterious reputation of their homeland, led to a fascination both at the Russian court at the time and recently revived by the historical film Katana. However, for all the colour that the nindzya lend to the Caucasian campaign, most historians now agree that their efforsts actually hurt Russian war objectives. Pavlovich used his nindzya primarily to assassinate local Ottoman leaders both political and military so that the Russians would face a more disorganised opponent. This was true to some extent and doubtless played a role in the Russian siege and conquest of Artvin in 1824. However, it was born of an ignorance of the delicacies of the political situation in the Empire. The local governors and militia opposing the Russians had been loyal to the Balkan Party, possessing a large component consisting of Christians and other minorities who were fearful of some of the Turkish- and Islamic-exceptionalist rhetoric of the Shadow Faction that ruled the interior of Anatolia. The actions of the nindzya, though creating something of the fearful reputation that Pavlovich had wanted among the various Ottoman factions, also eliminated this factor and all the remaining Ottoman forces in the north-east of the country now fell by default under the control of the Shadow Faction. The Russians therefore now faced a more organised opponent, the Shadows having recovered from their earlier decapitation and now being led by Bozoklu Ali Pasha. Due to this factor, together with rebellions among many of their new Muslim subjects further north in the Caucasus (thought partly to be due to backing by the spiteful Persians), further Russian expansion crumbled and the Empire exited the war in a rather precarious position, with the territory she had won south of the new Georgian Kingdom and its mountains being rather indefensible...

*

With Persian expansion in the Caucasus largely frustrated by the Russians, Zaki Mohammed Shah directed most of his country’s attention to Mesopotamia. In particular, a ceremonial target for Persia was the Shi’ite holy city of Najaf; however, Najaf lay in the western part of the country and so would not be an immediate objective. The Persian army, reorganised and trained to European standards by the Portuguese, was instead directed at Baghdad and Basra. In consultation with his advisors, Zaki Mohammed Shah decided that attempting to annex the whole region would not result in lasting control, and instead to create a puppet state of Mesopotamia after retaking the lands in Arabistan Persia had lost in the Turco-Persian War. Mesopotamia had a Shi’ite minority[8] that the Persians could co-opt as a ruling class and was not under the control of any of the powerful factions in the Ottoman civil war, making it appear to be easy pickings. But events intervened.

When issues surrounding the Ottoman civil war were discussed in Europe or Persia, even the most informed commentators were barely aware of Abdul Hadi Pasha’s forces. Having united Egypt under his control with the help of the Omanis, the former wali was far from the key Ottoman power bases in the Balkans and Anatolia, and for now his attention was fixed on the Arabian Peninsula. In 1819 Esad Ali Bey, the leader of the Omani contingent, performed his component of a careful pincer strategy aimed at driving the Saudi family and their Wahhabist allies from a position of power. From Egyptian ports, the Omani fleet crossed the Red Sea and landed forces which took possession of the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Esad Ali was helped in his task by the fact that the Sharif of Mecca, Abdullah bin Masud, was a theological opponent of the Wahhabis and eager to embrace any ally that would keep his charges out of the grasp of the Saudis’ attempt to create a Wahhabist Arab state. Abdul Hadi’s strategy was to present the Saudis with an act of defiance that they could not afford to ignore. Faisal bin Saud, the Saudi leader, had been planning a campaign to take control of Karbala, which would doubtless have crushed Mesopotamia between the Saudi hammer and Persian anvil to destroy Ottoman power in the region. However, with the ignorable Sharif replaced with Esad Ali Bey’s forced in the Hedjaz, the Saudis were forced to drive this challenger from the Arabian Peninsula. This was, of course, just what Abdul Hadi had planned, and in 1820 as the Saudis marched on Mecca, Abdul Hadi’s army came down from the north and took control of the Saudi capital of Diriyah. This challenge to the Saudis’ legitimacy forced Faisal to turn around once more and split his forces, which combined with superior generalship on the part of Esad Ali and Abdul Hadi led to a series of battles that destroyed much of the Saudi army and discredited Wahhabism in the northern part of the peninsula. After Faisal was killed on the battlefield, his son Aziz bin Faisal bin Saud fled to the southern city of Jizan, from which the family would eventually rebuild its fortune in quite a different direction.

The Arabian campaign lasted until 1820, at which point Abdul Hadi reaped the rewards of his victories over the Saudis. Ibrahim Salim Pasha, governor of the Eyalet of Syria, went over to Abdul Hadi’s side from his previous policy of cautious support for the Shadow Faction. It is thought that Ibrahim Salim’s decision was not solely that he recognised which way the fortunes of war were blowing, but also because of pressure from the minorities under his rule, having seen the Balkan Party loyalists in the north-east overthrown by the Russians and also that Abdul Hadi was an enemy of another group of Muslim-supremacists, the Wahhabist Arabs. It is thought that the “Three Faiths Under One Flag” banner was first designed at this point in Palestine by enthusiasts for Abdul Hadi, consisting of a red vertical stripe at the hoist bearing the traditional crescent of Constantinople and three horizontal stripes of green, yellow and blue for Muslims, Jews and Christians. (This colours are possibly derived from the millet-based merchant ensigns flown by Ottoman ships; a fourth colour used is black for Albanians, which were not distinguished from other Muslims in the ‘Three Faiths’ banner).

At this point, Abdul Hadi received a communication from the Azadi leader, the so-called “Ibn Warraq”, asking them to meet at Damascus (a choice of location which has led to endless possible book titles recounting the meeting). Esad Ali and his other lieutenants counselled against it, but Abdul Hadi went willingly and returned with “Ibn Warraq”, revealing to them why the Azadis in Egypt had joined him earlier on: “Ibn Warraq” was the pen name for Abdul Hadi’s brother, Said Mehmed Pasha. With this revelation, the entire balance of power throughout the thrashing Ottoman Empire was altered...











[1] From the Latin translation of Psalm 72:8—“Et dominabitur a mari usque ad mare, et a flumine usque ad terminos terrae”, meaning “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth”. Also the origins of the OTL American phrase “from sea to shining sea”.

[2] After all, until this war, Russia in TTL had no Black Sea coastline.

[3] OTL Sevastopol.

[4] The capital of the Crimean Khanate. In OTL now spelled Bakhchisaray.

[5] Tsar Paul’s second son, younger brother of Grand Duke Peter of Lithuania.

[6] Turkic peoples who followed Judaism as a faith rather than being part of a Jewish ethnic identity, and already formed a minority in the Crimea before the Russian Jews’ exodus there.

[7] OTL: cell system.

[8] Modern Iraq has a Shi’ite majority, but this is a result of a series of conversions of whole tribes in the south in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which is still going on as of the 1820s.


Part #114: John Dies At The End

From – “The Americas in the Watchful Peace” by Andrew Kelvin (1922) –

Political developments in the Empire of North America in the 1820s are dominated by the rise of the First Multi-party System. The situation is often misunderstood, doubtless because few foresaw the consequences of events at the time. Originally a loose two-party system—the Patriots and Constitutionalists—the ENA entered uncharted territory when the latter of the two parties fragmented twice, first producing the American Radical Party as an offshoot and secondly breaking in half to form the Whigs and Neutrals. This breakup led to a certain misplaced triumphalism in the Patriot Party, which the results of the 1819 election did nothing to dissuade, the Patriots winning a record majority. Yet this view was fundamentally based upon a fallacy. The Patriots did so well in 1819 due to a variety of factors: Constitutionalist Lord President Matthew Quincy’s leadership had been discredited by the Crisis of 1817[1]; the Lakota War had ended in embarrassment and disarray; and, most importantly, the two factions of the Constitutionalists led by Quincy and John Alexander ran candidates against each other, leading to four-way contests that inevitably favoured the Patriots with their reliable core voters. Though Artemas Ward Jr. is usually regarded as a decent Lord President, he and his government failed to see how fragile their triumph was. During this Tenth Continental Parliament, the new parties consolidated themselves, with the Radicals pursuing an alliance with the western populist faction of the Constitutionalists (the so-called Neutrals) while the southern aristocratic faction, known as the Whigs, built up its support base in Virginia and Carolina.[2]

The Patriots persisted in viewing the situation as “We remain one large party, the other large party has split into three small ones, therefore we have won the historical argument”. This missed the obvious corollary of “So, then what?” Besides, the argument was factually incorrect in any case. The Patriots’ ideology had gone from the decisive “We are supporters of Prince Frederick” to the vague “We favour the retention of ties with Great Britain” to the meaningless “We are the Patriots”. The issue of ties with Great Britain, already becoming largely theoretical due to America’s increasing autonomy, was decisively settled by the Crisis of 1817. At the time it was seen as the death knell for Quincy’s Constitutionalists, but its real victim was those who initially seemed to benefit from its effects—the Patriots. If America could and would stand up to a questionable British ruler over the issue of the appointment of the Lord Deputy, Britain by definition no longer had any veto or say over American affairs. The Emperor was still a concern, but at the time Frederick II was considered to be Churchill’s puppet. And the Parliament in Westminster was so far removed from its pre-invasion counterpart that the question of its members passing laws that would affect the ENA was now moot. Therefore, the Patriots no longer had even the vaguest underlying ideology behind their party identity. The Constitutionalists had indeed split, but they had split ultimately because they had begun as a broad church composed of many factions which opposed the Patriots often for contradictory reasons: one Constitutionalist faction might hold the Patriots to be too anti-Catholic, for example, while another might hold them to be too pro-Catholic. While the Patriots’ ideological stance turned to mush, the now separated former Constitutionalist factions refined theirs to an extent previously unseen in an English-speaking country. The Radicals appealed to reformists and intellectuals, the Neutrals to populists and expansionists, the Whigs to aristocrats and slaveholders. The Patriots had no particular constituency to draw upon save those based purely on identity politics: I vote Patriot because my father voted Patriot. Their election campaigns were old-fashioned, unable to stand up to the new hard-edged debates that characterised the new political system, and tended to focus on a message of stability and a record of good governance. While this was a message the voters wanted to hear in 1819 due to Quincy’s disastrous presidency, it did little to persuade many to turn out for the polls three years later for more of the same.

For these reasons and more, the Patriots remained the largest party in 1822 but lost their majority, presenting Americans with an unprecedented hung parliament. In Britain before the invasion it had been the norm for party identity to be vague and Prime Ministers not necessarily being able to summon a formal majority, but things were different in the new party-polarised America and this was uncharted territory. It is generally thought that Artemas Ward’s decision to immediately resign may have played a role in the fact that the Patriots turned to the Whigs rather than Radical-Neutrals to build a governing coalition. In his retirement writings, Ward seems to have a clearer idea of the strength of the Radical-Neutral alliance which rebuffed attempts by the Patriots to draw the Neutrals away from the Radicals, whom they were uncomfortable sharing a platform with. It remains a matter of debate, however, about whether Ward was any more foresighted than his successor as Patriot leader, Josiah Crane, when it comes to the seeing the potential of the Whigs. Crane seems to have been convinced that the Whigs would only remain an aristocratic southern-interests party whose electoral role was to attempt to force a hung parliament, then join a governing coalition with the price of passing pro-slavery legislation. According to a dubious account by Roderick Klein, the secretary to Crane’s Treasury Minister Solomon Carter, Crane believed that the Whigs would ultimately burn themselves out as an electoral force, that “Alexander’s men would meet with Frustration by the good folk of the South due to their stymying of the political Process, and eventually would turn either to Mr Boyd’s Party [i.e., the Neutrals] or to Ourselves”. Crane forecast that America would eventually resume a two-party system, with the Radical-Neutrals reclaiming the Constitutionalist mantle to oppose the Patriots, and that the current multi-party system was a passing phase. This reflects the (rather unwarranted) assumptions based on British political orthodoxy to which many American politicians at the time still held.

Crane’s position is more defensible than it appears to us with the benefit of hindsight, as indeed if left to many of its members, the Whigs would have remained a regionalist and single-issue party happy to alienate any voter who wasn’t a rich southern slaveholder. However, its Parliamentary party consisted largely of the best and brightest followers of Alexander as well as the man himself, and contrary to Crane’s predictions, the Whigs soon began to exploit their position as the junior partner in the ruling coalition. A detailed record of their programme is beyond the scope of this book, but certain key points may be covered. Crane had offered two Privy Council seats to the Whigs as part of the coalition arrangement, with Benjamin Harrison VII becoming Under-Secretary of State to the Treasury (a position usually referred to as Deputy Treasury Minister) and Crane initially offering the position of Secretary at War to Alexander. After all, the man was a celebrated veteran and Crane had no particular qualms about denying that office to his own party, predicting (accurately, for once) that there would be no war involving the ENA during the three years of the Eleventh Continental Parliament. However, Alexander refused and instead took the more junior role of Under-Secretary for Continental Affairs, a department run by Patriot grandee Sir Errol Washington.

Alexander’s apparently quixotic move soon made more sense and was the first clue that the retired general was as tactical in his politics as he had been on the battlefield. Washington, it transpired, was a political amateur and a drunk who had gained his position thanks to his family name and the endemic old-boys’ network in the Patriot Party. Alexander was happy to keep him whiling away the hours in his club while quietly transferring much of the business of the department to his own desk. Alexander’s chief goals, at least initially, were the creation of new borough constituencies, in particular for Havana and St. Dominic.[3] Several others ensued, and while there was some (justified) criticism that Alexander was favouring Whig-voting regions in the south, many others were created in what were probably Radical- or Patriot-voting areas. Additionally, Alexander spearheaded the implementation of the accession of the first new provincial constituency in the west since Quincy’s presidency: understandably, the Patriots had been reluctant to create seats that would almost certainly vote for their political opponents. 1823 brought the Treaty of Nashborough between the Grand Duchy of Louisiana and the Confederation of Carolina, negotiated by the Vicomte de Barras and Carolinian Speaker Joel Adams III. This settled the border between the two entities and their Indian neighbours: much of the Attignawantan-populated land now formally became a protectorate of Louisiana, while a western tongue of Louisiana territory was ceded to Carolina’s Osajee Territory. This rapproachment and definition of the border allowed a new province to be carved out of Osajee Territory, being given the name Gualpa after a local river.[4] While new provinces were not created from Virginia’s Ugapa Territory or Pennsylvania’s Othark Territory (which were still sparsely populated, St. Lewis, Shippingport and Chichago were all created as boroughs. In what appeared to be throwing a bone to the Patriots, Alexander also had Wolfesburg and Mount Royal in New England created as boroughs, sparking controversy in the Confederation.

Alexander’s other chief cause was that of Catholic rights, and it was through this cause that he was able to transform the Whigs to a party with national appeal. It has remained hotly debated through the decades whether Alexander was a true believer or simply saw the issue as a potentially useful political tactic. Most evidence suggests the former, however, with Alexander—being from one of Carolina’s many fierily anti-Papist Ulster Protestant families—having had something of a Damascene experience while fighting alongside Royal French and Irish Catholic soldiers in the latter stages of the Jacobin Wars. Often cited is his diary entry of 13th April 1809, at the height of the fighting against Pelletan in western France prior to the Republican collapse: “It is a strange and unsettling Experience for one raised to believe that the Popish Legion is made up of devils in Human Visage to discover that they are Men like any other. Johnson in brawl once again; 15 lashes only under the Circumstances.” The casual mention of his slave is indicative that whatever lesson Alexander may have learned, it certainly did not occur to him to apply it also to Negroes.

If the Patriots underestimated Alexander, so too did the Radicals. Eric Mullenburgh, who had taken over the party after Henry Tappan’s retirement in 1820, viewed Alexander’s position with scorn and as a transparent electoral ploy. “When the poor God-fearing people of America who face Injustice and Tyranny at the hands of the mob for the Crime of holding to Romish practices view this act by Mr. Alexander, I for one have a high enough opinion of their Sensibilities to recognise an attempt to cynically Usurp a Cause for which we have Fought since Time Immemorial.” Yet Mullenburgh found it hard to sustain this position. Catholic emancipation had always been a sticking point for the Radicals’ alliance with the Neutrals: after all, the Neutrals were ultimately descended from the Constitutionalist remnant that had held to Matthew Quincy, meaning they possessed a minority of embarrassing fiery anti-Papists. Neutral leader Derek Boyd attempted to mitigate the worst by expelling such critics as Arundel Ogilvy, but Boyd was unwilling to take too strong a position lest his party be cast as just an annex to the Radicals, something which brought to mind the quote by Ralph Purdon which had inadvertently named the party. Once more, ‘we are neutral on that issue’. The result was that the Radicals unwillingly surrendered the initiative to the Whigs, while the vigorous Ogilvy promptly joined New England’s Salem Movement and sought to create a parliamentary version. The Movement had elected a few New England MCPs to the Continental Parliament as Independents, but Ogilvy created the structure and organisation needed to formalise a parliamentary party under the name Trust Party—a reference to the Orange Order motto “In God is my Trust”. Therefore the First Multi-party system gained a small fifth party.

The creation of the Trust Party helped formalise the debate and assisted the pro-Catholic parties by presenting an image of religious extremism as bad if not worse than the accusations they made of said Catholics. It was at this point that it became recognised that Lord President Crane and the Patriots had effectively lost control of Parliamentary business. The Catholic Question was not one that the Patriots wanted raised, with most of the party’s membership being against Catholic emancipation for traditional reasons but uncomfortable with being associated with extremists like the Trust Party. Crane made his position worse by an unguarded complaint at the Lewisborough Club in Fredericksburg that the Lord Deputy, being a Catholic himself, was deliberately favouring Alexander’s campaign in an unconstitutional manner. The word was leaked, splashed all over most of the Empire’s papers, and when Crane next had to meet the Earl of Fingall, the latter was unamused. This incident ensured that if Lord Fingall had not favoured Alexander in the past, he certainly would in the future.

In 1824, two years into the parliament, Alexander finally tabled the motion, going against an informal agreement with the Patriots. Attendance in Parliament was relatively low that day, though the Trust Party was (justifiably) sufficiently paranoid about Alexander’s intentions to be present. The Whigs turned out in force to vote yes, while the surprised Patriots rallied under the most senior figure present, Solomon Carter, to vote no. Mullenburgh, though annoyed by Alexander’s shenanigans, was not so spiteful as to miss an opportunity for a key Radical cause, and urged his members and the Neutrals (Boyd was not present) to vote yes.

The Catholic Relief Act of 1824 squeaked through by three votes. The Whigs, whipped by Alexander’s leadership into strong unitary action despite the misgivings of some of their members, voted unanimously in favour. The four Trust MCPs naturally voted against equally unanimously. The Radical-Neutrals mostly voted in favour, with a couple of Neutrals voting against and several more abstaining. The Patriots split, with most following Carter but a few favouring emancipation or abstaining, perhaps due to a perception that public attitudes had largely changed.

Whatever the reason, the version of events that was widely believed was that the Patriots were not so much reactionary as disorganised and watery. The Salem Movement raised a protest in New England and even an all-out revolt in western South Massachusetts, which remained simmering for years due to the confederal government not having the authority to deploy troops and the imperial government in no position to grant it. Crane was furious by Alexander’s actions and promptly broke the coalition, seeking to regain some degree of initiative and leadership. He, along with much of the political scene of America, was however caught flat-footed when Alexander announced his resignation from Parliament.[5] The former general explained himself in an open letter published in the Fredericksburg Cornubian: “I entered Parliament to achieve two matters—to topple an incompetent government that was endangering the American people, and to redress some injustices against that great people. With both matters resolved, I can once again return with satisfaction to my island Abode.” Some at the time referred to this as a Cincinnatian act, although Alexander would make a return to politics a few years later on the Confederal level.

The Whigs, now divorced from the government, required a new leader and according to Alexander’s wishes, the leader was elected by a show of hands by the party’s MCPs. This delivered the heir apparent, Benjamin Harrison VII, to the position, with a few votes going to up-and-coming talents (and rivals) Andrew Eveleigh and Albert Sinclair. Mindful of this, Harrison gave both of them important defined speaking roles in Parliament, with Sinclair speaking on domestic (Continental) issues and Eveleigh on foreign policy. This can be argued to be the ultimate origins of the Critical Cabinet[6] in American politics.

Crane faced a situation going from bad to worse, though most commentators agree he considerably worsened it himself due to his decision not to call a fresh election on losing his majority. If an election had been called in 1824, the Patriots would have lost seats but might still have remained the largest party and, due to the incompatibility between the Radical-Neutrals’ and Whigs’ basic positions, would by parliamentary arithmetic necessarily be part of a new coalition government. As it was, though, Crane was convinced that this would be a sign of weakness and muddled on with a minority government, trying to introduce new legislation without success and attempting to restore a firm position and guiding ideology to the Patriots. To this end he returned to the Patriots’ original key position and advocated a normalisation of relations with Great Britain, arguing that the ENA needed to cooperate with her mother country more on a range of issues, and in particular that this would be a far more equitable and reasonable trade relationship than the Whigs’ proposed relaxation of trade barriers with New Spain and Louisiana or the Radical-Neutrals’ with the UPSA. This idea caught the public imagination briefly, with the Patriots’ best weapon of romantic aspiration and remembrance of the ENA’s origins playing well with many. But it came at exactly the wrong time. Though the news would not reach American shores for a month due to the vagaries of crossing the Atlantic in those days, Crane’s big idea was based on an assumption that had just become obsolete...

*

From – “The British Revolutions, from Cromwell to Cranbourne” by Paul Babbington, 1988:

As Rebecca Ackerley once opined, the problem of John Spencer-Churchill will be with us until the end of time because he had the gross impudence to fail to be present for the truly testing times. As it is, a majority claiming Churchill was a monster will forever be at war with a minority defending him as a heroic saviour, and an even smaller minority that admits that there may be something in between. If the Marleburgensian era had ended with that man, we would know one way or the other; but we cannot.

Churchill’s rule in Great Britain can broadly be defined by a bizarre mixture of traditional ultra-Tory social conservatism with an almost Jacobin enthusiasm for modern technology and industry. Churchill was a man who, while he left Charles James Fox’s reforms in place and famously defended mostly-Catholic Ireland during the potato famine of 1822, was still fundamentally sceptical of the idea of broadening the voting franchise and favoured a paternalistic, aristocratic form of government. His error was the idea that this form of government was the natural one in Britain and any move towards a more egalitarian model was the work of either Jacobinical tendencies or else the kind of idealistic nonsense of the Fox government that had doomed Britain. It remains unclear whether Churchill truly romanticised the Britain of his childhood as a state under High Tory rule, as some of his Letters From A Concerned Gentleman suggest, or whether this was simply propaganda and his true belief was a recognition that matters had been moving in a cobrist direction under Patriot and Liberal Whigs even before Fox, but that this had been done in the face of what the British people wanted and needed. Or perhaps he recognised that liberal reforms had been popular, but saw the wreck of a country he seized control over as a crucial opportunity to remake it in his own image.

Whatever his reasoning, the facts are clear enough. Churchill practiced ends-justify-the-means government, creating institutions like the PSC “browncoats” initially to help organise the distribution of food around the country, and the RCTFI to facilitate improvements to canals and roads to make that possible. For a British people that had suffered, particularly the southern English, under the scorched-earth tactics of Modigliani, Churchill’s policies were welcome relief. The reconstruction of London and the development of northern cities and new ports to help replace those institutions destroyed were also ironically removed from Churchill’s sedate High Toryism, illustrating the complexity of the man and the difficulty of defining him. Another much-debated issue is Churchill’s attitude to Parliament. Under his rule parliaments were allowed to run to the end of their seven-year term under the Septennial Act, initially losing power while Churchill was Lord Protector and then regaining it when he became Prime Minister in 1813. Much of the parliamentary remnant that had evacuated to Fort Rockingham in 1807 became the core of Churchill’s “Reform Coalition”, consisting of a mixture of Tories and Liberal Whigs. The Radical Whigs and Radicals that made up Fox’s faction had mostly died in the London inferno, hampering cobrist forces in Britain to put up an electoral resistance. Therefore the opposition was largely tame throughout much of Churchill’s rule, either due to inexperience or consisting of Liberals who had broken with the Coalition for whatever reason. For this reason, the key opposition figure was not a Radical but a Tory: William Wyndham.

Wyndham’s particular dislike of Churchill came from the fact that his cousin Sir Frederick Windham (who spelled his surname differently) had, while serving Churchill as Foreign Secretary, first become disillusioned due to Churchill’s isolationism and then died of pneumonia in the bitter winter of 1816, the Summerless Year. The evidence suggests that, unlike the case of Charles Bone three years before, there was no question of foul play on Churchill’s part—but one can forgive Wyndham for paranoia given Churchill’s amalgamation of the Unnumbered spies into the PSCs as so-called ‘special constables’ and the way they served him as his professional network of movers and shakers. As many historians have found, it is frustratingly difficult to definitively pin any one case on the Specials, but there is a suspicious correlation between, for example, labour leaders raising protests against new canal improvements or factories that endangered their livelihoods, and said leaders mysteriously getting drunk and falling onto ships bound for the penal colonies or, occasionally, into the canals themselves. There are some claims that the quiet transportation policy was Churchill’s and the murders were enacted by his less discriminating bullyboy lieutenants. Chief among these was his son Joshua, who initially served as effective military governor of Scotland and received the epithet Butcher Blandford for his brutal suppression of the former Scottish Celtic Republic and anyone else he happened to lay his eyes upon. A simple but descriptive act of satire was the act of ‘artistic vandalism’ committed by Alistair Douglas in 1814 after the curfew laws Joshua had enacted put him out of work as an engraver. Douglas intercepted a new portrait of Joshua, cut out the head from it and pasted it over the head of William IV on an old portrait that had been diplomatically placed in a storeroom at Holyrood Palace after the War of the British Succession. The original was pasted halfway up the wall of St Giles’ Cathedral thanks to a steeplejack friend of Douglas’, and Joshua’s troops, unable to imitate the climb, were forced to destroy it (in full public view) by using their rifles to shoot it to pieces, effectively forming a firing squad for their own commander. This brilliant piece of satire led to many imitations, with etchings of both the modified portrait and the ‘firing squad’ doing the rounds. This came to a head three months later when Joshua, fuming at his mockery and the inability of the Specials to find the man responsible, ordered the twelfth-century cathedral demolished. “When next they say ‘an insulting device was attached to Edinburgh’s Cathedral, the other shall reply ‘What cathedral?’” he confided to his brother Arthur.

This horrifying act was viewed by even Churchill as going too far and, as angry uprisings broke out across parts of Scotland, Joshua was quietly kicked upstairs by being given the largely cursory post of Secretary at War. He was replaced as governor of Scotland by Iain Græme, nephew of the Jacobin Wars general Thomas Græme, who as a Scot himself managed to subdue the uprisings by reversing some of the Marquess’ more draconian policies and using the browncoats in a carefully measured fashion only against the worst rebels. This minor act of relief served to render Scotland quiescent again, but it is unsurprising that immigrants continued to flee the country throughout the Marleburgensian period, both Catholic Highlanders and Protestant Lowlanders. The Empire of North America and the UPSA were both popular destination targets, but the largest group went to New Kent in British Antipodea: the government wanted to move colonists out there (even considering making it a penal colony at one point, as the French had done with the Ile du Dufresne[7]) but eventually just offering virtually free tickets for low-standard sea voyages there instead. Some have compared this to a sort of voluntary transportation; in any case, it is the reason why the inhabitants of the city of New London in New Kent speak with a thoroughly inappropriate Scottish burr.

While the disorganised Radicals railed ineffectually against Joshua’s activities, Wyndham’s independent Tories focused on the industrial development of the country under the RCTFI, how it was being forced on people, and accusations that corporate interests (predominantly the Wedgwood-Darwins and James Watt and Robert Fulton’s steam engine companies) were amassing great wealth while the majority of Britons continued to suffer economic deprivation from the collapse of the Bank of England and the loss of its gold reserves. Wyndham successfully usurped the agrarian ideals of the High Tories that Churchill himself seemed to have abandoned and spoke with great rhetorical skill about the skies turning to black and England to hell. He often carried around a singed copy of Lisieux’s 1795 pamphlet La Vapeur est Républicaine to hammer home his point that Churchill could be as bad as the enemy he had helped throw out of Britain.

Despite the deprivation and oppression, though, Churchill’s Britain was at least slowly growing more prosperous once again, and new opportunities were everywhere with both the industrial development across the country and the expansion of northern cities such as Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield. The wrack of Cambridge meant that Oxford was now the only university in England, and Churchill overruled the latter by both funding the restoration of Cambridge and creating several new universities, even restoring Northampton and repealing the original decree.[8] The New Cambridge—often given that appelation—had little in common with the old, and soon became the effective leader of the ‘New Colleges’, which embraced earthier subjects like mathematics, technology and the sciences, leaving dusty Oxford as the sole authority on more traditional subjects like the arts and divinity.

Nonetheless opposition remained ever simmering, with the press tightly controlled and anti-government publications either cloaked in satire (The Ringleader) or banned and circulated illegally (Our Friend in the North). Rumours of the increased political freedoms enjoyed by France and Ireland circulated, along with developments in the Empire of North America. Throughout the 1810s and well into the 1820s, most Britons were content with the restrictions of Churchill’s rule in exchange for the slow but sure recovery from the wars they enjoyed. As more of them were able to feed their families, however, immediate problems faded away and the discontent grew. It is unclear how long it would have taken for popular opposition to become critical if Churchill had remained in power. But all we can do is recount the real events.

In October 1825, with parliament prorogued, Churchill returned to his family home of Blenheim Palace for the winter, with his two remaining sons (George having famously departed for America where he became a critic of his father) planning to join him. On the morning of October 31st, he failed to emerge for breakfast and, after a hurried consultation, his household staff broke down the door to his apartment. Therein they were shocked to find their employer slumped in his favourite chair, blood and bone and brain splattered across its back and a discharged pistol lying at his feet.

Precisely what occurred is a riddle of the ages that almost matches that of the fate of Jean de Lisieux. There is the possibility, of course, that Churchill committed suicide, but there is little evidence that he had any particular leanings in that direction: while the family has a history of depression, he never showed any sign of it. He may simply have been excellent at hiding his weaknesses, like any politician. However, his staff attested that they had never seen the pistol before, supporting the idea that Churchill was killed by an interloper who then threw the pistol at his feet and escaped through a window whose lock was found to be damaged (but, of course, the latter could be a coincidence). The real question was the identity of the killer. When Joshua arrived an hour later to learn that he was no longer Marquess of Blandford but now Duke of Marlborough, he immediately circulated through the browncoats—which he had risen to command in 1819—that his father had been slain by a Radical Jacobin. Though obviously invented by Joshua for his political ends, this is a possibility. Others include a raging madman, a Sutcliffist, a High Tory supporter of Wyndham’s ilk, an assassin sent by Bonaparte...the list goes on.

Probably the best known (if least likely) version of events is that given in Hugh Truffley’s 1923 play The Exit, famously filmed in 1972 under the title “The Death of Churchill”. Truffley has the interloper break in and be confronted by Churchill. The interloper’s intentions are unclear and his dialogue gives several conflicting impressions, essentially allowing for all the political options plus that of a random madman or even an interrupted burglar. In the play, Churchill invites the interloper to sit in a neighbouring chair and they discuss Churchill’s rule. Churchill has an epiphany when the interloper’s talk of the suffering of the British people comes home to him and he nearly commits suicide with a (different) gun, but by this time Churchill has managed to convince the interloper in turn, and the interloper talks him out of it. They share an emotional scene, and then the interloper decides to leave. As he gets up, he accidentally drops his pistol and it discharges, shooting Churchill fatally through the head and causing him to topple back into his chair. The interloper, clearly shocked and suicidal himself but armed only with a single-shot pistol, flees and the staff soon arrive. A particular act of brilliance is the stage direction that the unnamed interloper be played by the same actor as Joshua Churchill who arrives at the end, referencing the theory that the ruthless Butcher Blandford had his own father assassinated due to increasing bad blood between them. However there is also the interpretation that there was no interloper and the figure from the play represents the actualisation of Churchill’s own thoughts of doubt and despair. If the play can be criticised, it is on the grounds that it, or rather the better-known film adaptation, has inspired endless further conspiracy theories on the part of the public—which gives one trepidation given Hugh Longton’s upcoming biopic of Jean de Lisieux, The Inhuman.

Regardless of the precise circumstances of Churchill’s death, that it was a tragedy is inarguable even by the Duke’s greatest critics. For when Joshua Spencer-Churchill claimed the mantle of Prime Minister in his father’s stead, he would send the country spiralling into an abyss at the bottom of which lay the Popular Wars...

*

From – “The Americas in the Watchful Peace” by Andrew Kelvin (1922) –

...death of Churchill and the brutal coup led by his son made Crane’s supposed new direction for the Patriots a mockery of itself, and combined with a scandal surrounding the sale of peerages for the Continental House of Lords served to turn the Patriot vote from shrinking to all-out collapse. When the election was called by necessity in November 1825, the results went beyond what anyone had expected in their wildest dreams. The Patriots dropped from being the largest party to the third largest, losing swathes of their traditional heartland seats. Virginia, where the Patriots had begun, now had hardly any Patriot representation. The Neutrals took over the role of opposition to the dominant Whigs in the southern Confederations, while the Radicals swept much of Pennsylvania and New England. New York, land of Hamilton, returned most of the Patriots’ MCPs, while New England was the most bizarre mix yet. The Trust Party took two more seats, sapping the Patriot vote further, while unexpectedly several seats—including the new boroughs of Mount Royal and Wolfeston—went to the Whigs, the latter having broken out of their niche. Against Mullenburgh’s claims, the new Catholic voters had gone over to the party that had finally given them their right to vote, rather than the one that had tried for years and failed.

The new parliament was also hung, but the Whigs were now the largest party and not too many seats short of a majority. The Radical-Neutrals were the official opposition. The Patriots, already reduced to a third party, promptly imploded due to Crane’s refusal to step down and the lack of any formal procedure to remove him. A small faction keeping the now century-old party name remained around Crane, more often referred to as the ‘Craneites’, while two larger ones centred around the pragmatic Solomon Carter and the new MCP Philip Hamilton. Though not political by nature, the former RAC director stepped up due to anxious Patriots hoping that his father’s star lustre would rub off. The “Hamiltonite” and “Carterite” Patriots might have held together as a rump party, but for the fact that Carter joined his party in a coalition to the Whigs, reversing the former situation, as part of a deal with Benjamin Harrison to ensure a Whig majority. One of the first laws they passed—heavily criticised by the Radical-Neutrals—was the Quinquennial Act 1826, which extended American Parliaments from a three-year term to a five. Harrison claimed the three-year term had been the influence of British Radicals (which it had), did not work in practice as elections came too swiftly for enough business to be done, and that now America stood proudly apart from her (swiftly crashing) motherland, she should do things her own way. For that reason, the next election would be held not in 1828, but in 1831. And that changes everything...






[1] When the Lord Deputy died, Americans were concerned about Churchill’s influence over his potential successor, and the compromise was an Irish Catholic peer to the horror of the strongly anti-Catholic Quincy. See Part #94.

[2] See Part #103.

[3] Anglicised form of Santo Domingo in Hispaniola.

[4] Gualpa being an alternative native name for the Canadian River. The Carolinians probably decided the latter would be too confusing, particularly given the presence of Canajun exiles in Louisiana. (It’s believed by most in OTL that the name Canadian River actually has nothing to do with Canada and is a purely coincidental spelling of either a native or a Spanish name).

[5] In Britain it is technically impossible to resign as an MP, and in order to do so one must apply for an obscure Crown office, as it is constitutionally required for anyone serving in such a role to vacate their seat. The reason behind this is because MPs were originally unpaid and the role was sometimes resented as a duty by men who could be making their fortune outside the House. In the Empire of North America, MCPs are paid a small salary, there are fewer seats locked up by political families, and a formal resignation procedure was built into the constitution as one of the many British Radical proposals to make their way in.

[6] OTL “shadow cabinet”.

[7] Tasmania.
 

Thande

Donor
[8] Northampton University was established in 1261. The then monarch, Henry III, closed it a few years later and even signed a Royal Decree forbidding the creation of a university in Northampton into perpetuity—the result of pressure from Cambridge and Oxford to retain their duopoly. While new colleges would be built there in the 20th century, this decree meant that students in Northampton had to have their exam papers sent to Cambridge to be marked and their degrees were formally issued by the University of Leicester. The royal decree was not repealed until 2005.


Part #115: C’est la vie

“L’HOMME DE LA MANCHE”

– caption to a famous 1819 political cartoon in the French satirical paper Notre ami, Monsieur Loyal.[1] The cartoon depicts Napoleone Bonaparte as a horsed Don Quixote (the ‘Man of La Mancha’) looking in horror into a looking-glass, his reflection being a nightmarish Death-like figure bearing a resemblance to Churchill. Adolphe Réage appears as Bonaparte’s Sancho Panza, while his own dark reflection is Conroy. The whole is a pun on the French name for the English Channel, “La Manche”, with the implication being that the political situation in Britain is a dark reflection of that in France. It gave rise to the literary concept known as the ‘Channel Mirror’, describing a twisted version of our own world or people in it.[2]​

*

From—“From Sargon to Sanchez: A History of Government” by Romain Ledoyen, 1950:

The Bonapartian period is more or less synonymous with the Watchful Peace, and with good reason: it was the careful stewardship of France by the man once known as “Leo Bone” that ensured that foreign eyes remained fixed and watering on her but never found any excuse to renew their owners’ grievances. And, whether by accident or design, seldom turned inwards to observe the swelling origins of the real issues that would ignite the Popular Wars.

As often remarked upon by commentators at the time, Bonaparte’s rule—particularly after the King’s assassination and the Paris Riots of 1814—can be considered something of a parallel to that of the Marleburgensians in Britain, particularly the elder. Both men were giant figures on their national stage, both were able to reconstruct parliamentary governance to suit their goals, and both had boy kings who were being raised according to their own wishes. The similarity was more apparent, of course, before it turned out that those goals were quite different in nature.

The Grand-Parlement of France was King Louis XVII’s brainchild, but the new institution created in Paris after the war bore little in common with the more ramshackle body that had met in Nantes when the Jacobins had ruled much of France and only Brittany and the Vendée held out as a Royalist remnant. In many ways it was more comparable to the National Legislative Assembly that had been founded in the early, ‘Mirabeauiste’, days of the Revolution, down to meeting in the same building. Like the NLA, the Grand-Parlement was based on taking the original Three Estates of nobility, churchmen and commoners and merging them into one unicameral body, with 25% of the seats going automatically to the first two estates and the remainder being elected. The franchise in France was based on a low property requirement, similar to that in the ENA, which in practice meant householder suffrage. Some Rouge Party members grumbled that this compromise was a retrograde step compared to the universal suffrage that the NLA under the Jacobins had possessed: but, of course, this objection was rather theoretical as under Robespierre and Lisieux the NLA had unaccountably never managed to hold an actual election. To the Blancs by contrast the whole thing was alarmingly democratic.

Bonaparte’s Bleu Party built its position around the argentus,[3] claiming descent from the Mirabeauiste period of constitutional monarchy. In practice there were sops to both the cobrists and doradists. Elections were organised according to Lisieux’s Thouret system of perfectly square départements with local móderateurs as enforcing agents of the central government, although this system was adjusted over time. At the same time there was much celebration of the Chouan imagery of Royal France. When Bonaparte decided to standardise French measurements, he threw out the old Jacobin Rational system and instead simply abolished the various French provincial definitions of measurements, imposing a single opinion—not that of Paris, but of the Vendée. This therefore became known as the ‘Vendean System’ and was adopted by Spain, Portugal, the Three Sicilies and eventually the Hapsburg dominions. Saxony, lacking such political reasons to disown decimalisation, adopted a system drawn up at the University of Wittenberg in the 1810s. ‘Wittenberger Measurements’ were adopted throughout the Concert of Germany as part of the standardisation drive there, also making their way into Poland and Scandinavia, though not being universally adopted. Great Britain, Russia and the Ottoman Empire stuck to their own traditional systems of measurements, and at least in the former two cases the fact that new industries were springing up in this period meant that those measurements would be fixed in place by the necessity of precisely engineered tools and engines.

Following the death of Olivier Bourcier in 1814 and the ascension of the Sans-Culotte thug Pierre Artaud to lead the Rouge Party, cobrism in France entered a confused and unhappy period. Artaud mixed extreme positions with connections with organised crime, making it difficult for the party to break away from an unelectable position. This meant the Bleus were able to extend their support deeply into the poorer voting demographics, which by right should have gone to the Rouges. Bonaparte’s policy in this period was generally to talk up the Rouges as a much bigger threat than they actually were while ignoring the Blancs, who posed a larger threat in reality. This tended to focus press and coffee-house debate on a battle that would always be a foregone conclusion as long as Artaud headed the Rouges, while caricaturing the Blancs as a group of extreme-doradist sticks-in-the-mud regarded more as comical figures than threatening ones.

The Blancs, too, had been decapitated thanks to the exile of Louis Henri d’Aumont as Grand Duke of Louisiana. This was only the most high profile example of Bonaparte’s practice, probably inspired by Britain’s penal colonies in America, of getting rid of unwanted political figures by means of transportation. The majority of these were, of course, hardcore Jacobins left over from the period of Lisieux’s rule, though there were a few Blanc extremists as well. From 1810 to 1814, with Bourcier putting a reasonable face on the Rouges and being the man who had led a Jacobin army over to the other side, the general practice was one of amnesty towards former Lisieux supporters. The events of 1814 led to a more uncompromising approach and transportation accelerated. Initially, French Antipodea was a popular choice of destination, based on the logic that it was as far away as possible and could always use more colonists. However, this practice was protested by the Governor-General, François Girardot, who wrote back to Paris that the Sans-Culottes were stirring up trouble among the other colonists and causing problems for the authorities by starting Linnaean Racist-inspired fights with the black natives and the visiting Mauré. Girardot responded by creating the penal colony of Paloua, known popularly as “Désperance”, on the Isle of Dufresne and sending all the troublemakers there.[4]

At the same time, the British were having problems with the remnants of the former Surcouf privateers led by Alain Bonnaire, who acted as Kleinkriegers in the Noungare lands in the interior of New Kent and even raided New London, the former Saint-Malo. After a decade of this, the British Governor George Mansfield finally organised a punitive expedition into the interior with the help of American troops. The privateers had established a base at the former Indien[5] settlement of Narogne[6] which they named ‘Fort Surcouf’ in memory of their vanished leader. There is some speculation that Surcouf himself, now an Admiral in the service of the UPSA, was involved with running weapons and supplies to the Kleinkriegers, as otherwise it is questionable whether they would have been able to survive alone in the harsh Antipodean interior. However, this was partially explained by the fact that Bonnaire’s men, never the most doctrinaire of Jacobins, had fallen in with the Noungare natives and learned from them, as well as vice-versa. Though the “Battle of Narogne” in 1819 was an unfair fight between a reasonably well-equipped Anglo-American force and a Kleinkrieger one lacking many working muskets or much ammunition, the British were surprised to face Noungare warriors equipped with spears whose steel blades had clearly been made with European metallurgy. The battle was bloodier than expected, and though Narogne was taken and proved to be a very useful waypoint between New London and Norfolk,[7] the natives continued Kleinkrieger resistance for decades. While defeated, they still possess a proud national heritage of colonial resistance—and more than a few still show lighter than average skin and European features, indicating that not all of Bonnaire’s men perished in the battle. There are even claims that Noungare religion, otherwise similar in its pantheistic nature to other Indien beliefs, was significantly influenced by the privateers’ vague mix of lapsed Catholicism and deistic-atheism; Dr Paul Symmonds has advanced the theory that the Noungare’s “devil beyond the water” is a reference to Jean de Lisieux.

With Antipodea out, and in particular after the flood of new transportation cases after 1814, Bonaparte decided to look elsewhere. He considered dumping them on d’Aumont and his former friend Barras in Louisiana but decided against it, considering the colony a worthy investment not worth risking in this way. Instead they were sent to Cayenne in South America, which besides the sugar islands of Guadaloupe and Martinique was the only other remaining French colony in the region. Among them were such figures as Lisieux’s former secretaries François Bleuel and Auguste Queneau, the Sans-Culotte leader Denis Radiguet and even women such as Marie Marceau, the latter being an actress accused of having been involved in Lisieux’s propaganda enterprises. Transportation as a practice made use of a fleet which was the brainchild of Foreign Minister François Vauguyon: having held on to Guadeloupe and Martinique at the Congress of Copenhagen by promising Britain a steady percentage of the trade profits, he was then able to use this as an excuse to resume shipbuilding without riling up the paranoid Congress powers. Of course, this was restricted to building lightly armed freighters, but they let France continue the innovations into new naval technologies begun during the Republic.

Some technologies’ centres drifted outside France. Steam engines were explored in many countries, with Saxony and Flanders joining the already established Britain, and work by Dr Maximilian von Lengefeld at the University of Halle in collaboration with engineers helped establish Saxony in particular as a centre of advanced theoretical work in the field. At the same time, of course, landlocked Saxony could scarcely explore naval applications and in this field France, Britain, the ENA and the UPSA remained at the forefront. Another technology from the Revolutionary period, the Optel semaphore, was even more divisive, being banned in Austria and the Mittelbund but widely embraced elsewhere: the Dutch, Flemings and Saxons all made use of it to hold their newly expanded domains together. While France’s network continued to serve Bonaparte well and Britain’s was modelled on it, the most advanced work in the field moved to Swabia, where clockmakers inherited from the former Switzerland brought their mechanical expertise to improving on the Chappe brothers’ work. Swabia introduces Optel semaphores that worked on a 3X3 shutterbox system rather than the previous French 2X2, dramatically improving the transmission bandwidth for information. More importantly, the husband and wife team of Franz and Marthe Künzler invented mechanisms that allowed Optel operators to transcribe information far more quickly. While night-time service remained in its infancy with the use of dangerous electride lamps,[8] Optel was linking Europe in a new way that shaped the destinies of nations in an age of heady ideas.

The Blanc Party, being opposed by default to these innovations, rallied in response and recovered from d’Aumont’s departure more rapidly than the Rouges did from Bourcier’s death. After a period of some years without a clear leader and a succession of placeholders, Émile Perrier emerged to transform the party. Perrier was unlike the usual Blanc parlementaire.[9] The Blancs possessed a certain guaranteed strength in the Grand-Parlement as the 25% reserved for the first two estates naturally nearly all cleaved to the party standing for aristocratic interests, Catholicism and the ancien régime. There were a few exceptions, idealist radicals such as the now departed Henri Rouvroy and some who admired Bonaparte on a personal level; in fact the latter was a big part of the Bleus’ political dominance. There were plenty of Vendeans who by default should have opposed Bonaparte: his own religion was questionable, having converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism for reasons as political as those that had made his father do it the other way around; he had opened up the country again to Huguenots, many of whom now fled the Britain their forefathers had immigrated to due to the Marleburgensian regime and returned to their ancestral home; he had betrayed the hopes of the Royal French that the ancien régime could be restored unchanged by compromising with new ideas. Yet those Vendeans remembered Bonaparte—or rather Leo Bone—from his action at Angers when it seemed as though Royal France would be overwhelmed, and having built him up as a saviour continued to vote for his party even in the face of its divergent policies.

Perrier was not one of the aristocrats, though. From a moderately well-off but decidedly middle-class family from Provence, he originally joined the Blancs in his own words because: “Bonaparte must be opposed, and the Rouges are a spent force”. Having built up political alliances among initially suspicious First Estaters, Perrier is generally considered to have ascended to the (informal) party leadership around 1819. He opposed Bonaparte’s centralisation of power and generated new causes to help broaden the appeal of the Blancs, while kicking as many aristocrats as he dared to the backbenches and staffing the frontbench with Blancs who had also been elected in their own right.[10] This helped make the Blancs a more credible force. Perrier effectively cut out the dismal Rouges’ feet from under them by championing the cause of “the poor farmer facing choking regulation from the central government and the encroachment of manufacturing”. The picture of agrarian ideal he painted, though ultimately derived from the Physiocratic ideas of the ancien régime, resonated well with a people cautiously facing a country in which smoke-spewing industry seemed to be proliferating. He also defended the traditional rights of the provinces in the face of Bonaparte’s centralisation and standardisation. At the same time Perrier criticised the Franco-Austrian alliance and advocated the country reaching out to the emerging powers of the Concert of Germany. “An alliance with the madman Francis leaves us shackled to a corpse” was his oft-quoted opinion of Vauguyon’s policy. Because of this, Bonaparte—wishing to remain aloof as much as possible to emphasise his unique position (and the fact that he could not match Perrier’s wit when speaking French)—used Vauguyon as his attack dog in the Parlement to answer Perrier. Vauguyon was indeed a match for Perrier and was also the longest-serving member of Bonaparte’s government. In part this was due to the two men getting on well, but it was also because by leaving Vauguyon—a key architect of the Congress of Copenhagen—in place, Bonaparte could realistically claim that France remained in its stable peace-loving state. On the other hand, Bonaparte went through comptrollers-general[11] like water, regularly firing them to assuage the public whenever there was an embarrassing scandal.

Elections to the Grand-Parlement were initially held on a biennial basis, extended in 1820 to a quadriennial one. The 1824 election, a decade after the riots that had created the current political situation, was a wake-up call. The Bleus barely held on to power, indicative of French public fatigue with Bonaparte’s rule, though anecdotal evidence suggests they still supported him personally. The Blancs were left in a much stronger position, vindicating Perrier’s policy direction and staving off criticism from the First Estaters—as well as adding more elected Blancs to the mix. The Rouges were almost annihilated, and it was this that led Jacques Drouet to pay Artaud a visit. Drouet, the younger brother of the Republican general who had ruled Spain, was quietly furious that Artaud had squandered public goodwill for the cobrist cause when Bourcier had worked so hard to ensure it would not be forever discredited through association with Lisieux. According to popular account, Drouet challenged Artaud to a duel in his office. Artaud glanced significantly at the curtains on either side of the room and asked Drouet for his choice of weapons. Drouet replied “Pistols”, drew one, and then proceeded to shoot both curtains in one swift movement—killing the bodyguards hidden behind them—before putting two more shots through Artaud’s head before he could draw his own concealed weapon. This dramatic act served to popularise the work of the Flemish gunsmith Maurice Bergmann, who had improved upon existing revolving-pistol technology and successfully married it to the new Gâchette (English: “compression-lock”) firing system developed by the Saxon chemist Erich Lindemann. No longer limited by the tendency of revolving flintlocks to jam and fail, revolving-pistols (soon contracted to ‘revolvers’) capable of five, six or more shots were soon popularised across Europe and beyond, swiftly making their way into the arsenals of colonial companies and independent explorers where they proved highly useful on the frontier. Drouet himself brought the gun to Cayenne when he turned himself in to the authorities and was transported, having achieved his goal by freeing the Rouges from their despot.

It took some time for the Rouges to recover, but the new parliamentary terms meant that they had four years, after all. After a formal election, André Malraux became leader of the party and soon began to invigorate its fortunes. Malraux was young enough to have been barely an adult during Lisieux’s rule, and thus escaped all the bad blood that had been built up. Bonaparte found his dominance of the government was slipping away, with the renewed Rouges eating away at his cobrist supporters and Perrier’s Blancs continuing to try and force their way in from the doradist side. But after almost fifteen years of rule, Bonaparte was tired. He had just turned sixty, had always had several health problems, and after overseeing the young king’s ascent to his majority—which he reached in 1825—he was ready to retire. But Bonaparte still did not trust the Rouges or Blancs with power and sought to give his own party a new leader that would help it escape the fatigue the public obviously had with his long rule. This quest soon sparked a break between himself and Vauguyon, who had seen himself as the heir apparent for some time, had worked hard in the Parlement to face down the Perrier threat, and was now hurt by the idea that he was too close to Bonaparte to work as a fresh face for leader. Matters became worse thanks to the rumour that Bonaparte was considering handing his position to one of his sons, making the premiership dynastic. Bonaparte had had three children with his Breton wife Cécile: Charles, Louis and Horatie, named for his father, King Louis and his great friend Horatio Nelson. Charles was old enough for this to be a realistic possibility, but he was determined to escape his father’s shadow and had remained carefully apolitical, pursuing a military career. Louis was too young, still studying for his degree in the new field of ‘applied sciences’ at the University of Nantes. Ironically it was his daughter Horatie who would go on to have the biggest influence on French politics after her father, but at present she was still in her teens.

There was no truth to the rumour—Bonaparte wanted an entirely fresh face, someone unconnected with himself—but it was enough to drive Vauguyon into a fit of jealousy. He had always been concerned that Barras had been right about Bonaparte’s ambitions to found an absolute-ruling dynasty of his own, and now let out these suspicions in an angry argument with Bonaparte over the dinner table. Words were said that could not be taken back, and Vauguyon resigned as foreign minister before he could be fired. He crossed from the Bleus to the Blancs, where his own personal convictions would have placed him long before had he not acted in what he saw as France’s best interests and out of admiration for Bonaparte. Perrier, much to the irritation of the First Estaters, welcomed his old verbal sparring partner and made him his spokesman on foreign policy issues.

The remainder of that parliamentary term was one of a slow-motion disaster for Bonaparte. With the loss of Vauguyon and no obvious successor, he was forced to remain in power and relied upon fellow older men as allies, in contrast to the young and vigorous Perrier and Malraux. Taking over as foreign minister was Adolphe Réage, the nephew of the Admiral Réage who had once been a political enemy of Bonaparte in Royal France before eventually going over to his side. Réage was competent enough, but did not have Vauguyon’s gift for discourse and was attacked by the irredentist Malraux for “remaining in alliance with the one power that is the most repressive and backwards in Europe, the one power that remains chiefly in occupation of rightful French land”. The Hapsburg alliance had already grown more controversial since the Austro-Italian intervention in the Ottoman Time of Troubles, with France standing by while the Hapsburgs gained greatly at the expense of a traditional ally, potentially upsetting the balance of power in Europe. Vauguyon had weathered those accusations just as Bonaparte (and a succession of Comptrollers-General) had weathered the famine of 1822. But with the government slipping from one scandal to the next, the Bleus entered the 1828 election feeling as fatigued with their own rule as the public was.

The election, while not so dramatic as some expected, was the first real test of the French parliamentary system. The Blancs gained greatly, almost achieving a majority in their own right. The Rouges also recovered their fortunes, although still winning less than a quarter of the seats. The Bleus suffered considerable losses. Bonaparte held his own seat at Angers comfortably enough but still with a smaller majority than ever before—as Vicomte Angers he was entitled to sit in the Parlement anyway as a member of the First Estate, but had always chosen to stand for an elected seat to improve his legitimacy. This practice was emulated by Perrier, with some of his elected frontbenchers also being aristocrats. Bonaparte gave an emotional speech before the building in which he resigned as leader of the party and from the Parlement, retiring to his country seat at Angers—though in practice still often appearing at his town-house in Paris. The Bleu leadership initially passed to Réage, who held the party together while more promising young men came into view. Réage adopted a policy of limited and conditional support for the Blanc government in order to keep the Rouges from gaining too much influence.

One slightly unexpected consequence of Perrier’s leadership was the invention of the ‘Drapeau Parlementaire’. This tricolour flag, inspiring countless variations the world over, has its origins in a philosophical dispute about the nature of government in France. The Rouges obviously drew their origins from Jacobin rule, while the Bleus as mentioned before claimed to be the ideological descendants of the Mirabeauistes of the early revolution—which, given the structure of the Parlement Bonaparte had helped create, was a defensible claim. There is an apocryphal story that a farmer in the Languedoc hit his head and suffered amnesia, losing all his memories after 1794, and was distressed to learn that France had gone through years of revolution, bloody warfare and rebuilding only to now possess a system of government pretty much the same as it had had during the Mirabeauiste period. The Blancs were characterised as the party of absolutism. Perrier, recognising this was unpopular, sought to break out from this description by pointing to the role of the Paris Parlement during the ancien régime—while the Estates-General had not been called since the time of Louis XIV, the Paris Parlement had often acted in the role of a national assembly. Dominated by aristocratic interests, this body had played a large role in holding back the reforms Louis XV and XVI had attempted that might have staved off the Revolution, and had been an early victim of Robespierre’s bloody reforms. The Blancs claimed that the Grand-Parlement could be considered simply a refinement of the old Paris Parlement that included representation from the rest of the country. From this argument stemmed the idea that the flag of Paris should also be the flag of the Parlement.

But the flag of Paris was a vertical bicolour of blue and red, thus rendering Perrier’s argument somewhat absurd considering the flag seemed to represent every party except his own. To that end, Blanc activists added a white stripe. Paintings and caricatures from the period indicate there was initially some confusion about where to add the stripe, with some images showing flags with the white stripe separating the blue from the red in the middle.[12] This would make more sense given heraldic rules, but the version that caught on was intended to represent the way the parties sat in the Hemicycle when viewed by the President[13] at the front—white on the left, blue in the middle and red on the right. This flag proved very popular and vertical tricolours soon spread as a defining symbol of parliamentary governance, with the colours shifting depending on local parties’ use. A more universal variant appeared in the UPSA, with red in the middle and yellow on white on either side (the exact order not being settled until its use by revolutionaries during the Popular Wars). The shade of blue in the French version was also lightened to match that used by the Bleu Party officially. For this reason, there was something of a backlash among Rouges that the French national flag contained white, blue and gold (which was held to stand for the King) but no red. And, of course, the apparently harmless addition of a red border to the French flag a few years later became a minor but still significant cause of the Popular Wars in Europe...













[1] The French term for circus ringleader, illustrating that this paper was inspired by Britain’s The Ringleader. Note that in OTL the situation was reversed—Britain’s Punch was inspired by France’s Le Charivari.

[2] I.e. a mirror universe.

[3] The political centre.

[4] Tasmania.

[5] Aborigine.

[6] OTL anglicised as ‘Narrogin’.

[7] OTL Albany and Perth respectively.

[8] Limelight.

[9] Members of the Grand-Parlement are called both deputies and parlementaires, depending on who you ask. The NLA under Lisieux was made up of deputies, while the old Paris Parliament of the ancien régime was made up of parlementaires, hence it becomes a political issue.

[10] The French Grand-Parlement is organised on a hemicycle, so ‘backbench’ and ‘frontbench’ aren’t literally applied, they’re ‘translated metaphors’ for those used to Westminster systems.

[11] Finance ministers.

[12] The origin of the OTL French flag, earlier on in OTL, except that the white represented the King himself rather than a royalist political force.

[13] The President of the Grand-Parlement is a similar post to that of Speaker in Britain’s parliament, but is more explicitly intended to be a stand-in for the King.


Interlude #12: Heaven and Earth

“Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? Or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons? Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? Canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?”

—Job 38:31-3​
[1]

*

From: “An Introduction to the Planets” by Patrick Caldwell, 1980—[/RIGHT]

In understanding the history of astronomy we must know that, like all the sciences, its fame and celebrity in the world has had its ebbs and flows over the centuries. In ancient times he with knowledge of the heavens commanded immediate respect due to widespread belief in astrology. While, alas, this superstition is not yet entirely eradicated, in the modern world it dwells in the shadow of scientific astronomy like an embarrassing senile uncle. In a historical context, however, it is often difficult to separate the two: good, reliable observations, data as worthy as that collected to-day if one takes into account the more limited technology of the time, were often nonetheless collected for the purpose of superstitious auguries to ancient monarchs. A convenient though sometimes arbitrary date for the division between astrology and astronomy (often also cited for the division between alchemy and chemistry) is that of the Scientific Revolution of the early seventeenth century. Astronomy shot to prominence as perhaps the most dramatic battleground of that intellectual struggle.

The Scientific Revolution is often misunderstood as a conflict of science against religion, largely because of the attitude of the (Roman) Catholic Church of the period.[2] In fact the Scientific Revolution is better described as a conflict of science against science, which interacted with a parallel conflict of religion against religion: the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. To fully understand this we must go back yet further to the twelfth century, when—thanks to the scribes of Muslim Spain—knowledge of the ancient Greek writers and philosophers re-entered the knowledge of Christian Europe and the ‘Dark Ages’ came to an end. In retrospect many have suggested that this rediscovery, which at the time and later was generally thought of as a bountiful act restoring the superior knowledge of the ancients, may in fact have been a curse. The Romish church initially condemned the Greek writings when they first appeared and were discussed at the University of Paris, but within twenty years had diametrically reversed its position and now accepted Greek scientific and philosophical views, incorporating them into its dogma. In the terminology developed by Thomas Aquinas, the Greek philosophers were adopted into mediaeval Christian society as “virtuous pagans”, men who had lived as admirably as possible taking into account the fact that they could never have heard the Gospel. In the desperate urge of mediaeval Christians to adopt the Greeks as the founders of an ancient European civilisation, one which gave them a historical legitimacy setting them above their Muslim foes—who, at the time, generally constituted a superior civilisation—philosophical theory was integrated into religious dogma in a blatant act of heterodoxy. The superiority of the ancients seemed unquestionable, and contemporary empiricists like the monk Roger Bacon saw their work suppressed.

Thus it was that a few centuries later, faced with the observations of Copernicus and Galileo that, contrary to the accepted Aristotelian geocentric model, the Earth orbits the Sun, the Romish church found itself forced to defend the Greek ideas that it had originally accepted only reluctantly. By bringing scientific theory into the realm of religion, the Church now faced the problem that the same claims of infallibility that could be reasonably be applied to theological doctrine were now being tested in a sphere where they should never have been applied in the first place. By contrast Catholic doctrine itself was entirely compatible with heliocentrism, providing one interpreted a couple of Biblical passages about ‘the sun standing still’ in a sufficiently poetic way. The religious wars of the period fuelled this division, with Protestant thinkers adopting heliocentrism purely because the Romish church opposed it, when in fact the Protestant in the street was on average more prone to geocentrist ideas than his Catholic counterpart. The Church found itself forever tarred with the brush of anti-scientific anti-intellectualism, when its crime had in fact been an over-enthusiastic acceptance of what an earlier generation of scientists had claimed. The Romish Church would not formally concede to heliocentrism until the nineteenth century, long after its Jansenist breakaway groups had done so.

Copernicus’ heliocentrism had been essentially founded on a basic Occam’s razor[3] principle: the solar system would consist of a far simpler and more elegant series of orbits without all the epicycles and corrections necessary to account for planets apparently switching directions in retrograde motion as they supposedly orbited the Earth. In fact, he argued, this retrograde motion was simply because the Earth overtook them in its own orbit. Galileo’s claims on the other hand were based more on hard observations: he had discovered the four largest (or ‘Galilean’) moons of Jupiter, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, and found that they orbited Jupiter itself. This was the first direct evidence of bodies in the solar system that definitively did not orbit the Earth, and therefore called into question the assumption that the Earth must be the centre of the universe. The precise controversy around Galileo was not, as is often assumed, the idea that the Earth orbits the Sun, but that the Earth moves at all, with Aristotelian dogma stating that the Earth stands still at the centre of the universe and every other object rotates around it. Though Galileo was imprisoned and forced to recant, his work inspired others across Europe, and a few years later the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens discovered Saturn’s largest moon, Athena.[4]

Johannes Kepler, a German contemporary of Galileo, had theorised that the orbits of the planets were elliptical rather than circular as Plato had claimed, another blow to the ‘geometrically perfect, clockwork universe’ of the Greeks. This observation was explained at the end of the seventeenth century by Isaac Newton, whose theory of gravitation was regarded as an almost magical breakthrough by the scientists of the period, quantifying the motion of the heavens. In this it came in parallel to other mathematical theories of the Scientific Revolution such as Boyle’s gas law and Hooke’s law of elasticity. For the first time, phenomena that had been regarded as beyond human understanding had been put into neat stacks of numbers: in the words of the Bard, the universe had been bounded in a nutshell. Kepler’s elliptical orbits, Galileo’s and Huygens’ satellites, Boyle and Otto Guernicke using their air-pumps to produce the vacuum that Aristotle denied could exist—all of these revolutionaries brought down the ancien régime of unquestioning belief in the superiority of ancient knowledge over modern enquiry.

Astronomy largely faded from prominence for some decades following this, with the occasional oasis in the desert such as Edmond Halley recognising the recurrence of comets, most prominently the one that bears his name. This started something of a cometary craze, with astronomers combing the night sky, cataloguing it in more detail than ever before, and travelling into the southern hemisphere to observe the alien constellations there. In the process of looking for comets (and finding many), other objects were also uncovered: many new novae, first recognised by Tycho Brahe in the sixteenth century, though their nature remained unknown, and also nebulae—which, at the time, was a term covering both classical nebulae and galaxies, the latter not yet being understood to be separate and more distant phenomena (except, strangely enough, by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who correctly recognised them as this). Though the nature of our own galaxy was therefore also not well understood—today of course we can look at other spiral galaxies in order to better understand out own—there were already attempts to map the shape of the Milky Way. Probably the most successful of these was the accomplishment of a man most people know as a composer rather than an astronomer, William Herschel, and his sister Caroline.[5] In the late eighteenth century Herschel built up a map of the galaxy which, though barely recognisable to those of us used to the spiral picture of today, represented a great leap forward. However, Herschel’s astronomical career was ultimately cut short when he caught a fever in 1784 whilst on a mission in the South Seas, attempting to follow up on observations made on Henry Anson’s 1769 expedition to observe the transit of Venus.[6]

To we moderns, with the benefit of hindsight, the most important discovery of this period was probably the discovery of paraerythric light[7] by Giuseppe Piazzi[8] in 1791. While studying sunspots, Piazzi tested various filters over his telescope lens to see which gave the clearest image when he projected the image of the Sun on a screen. He was surprised to find a large amount of ambient heat when using a red filter. Studying this phenomenon, he used a large prism to separate light into its Newtonian spectrum and held a thermometer through each colour of light. He was surprised to find that the temperature was hottest when he held it above the red edge of the spectrum, and theorised—controversially at the time—that there was an additional invisible colour to the spectrum beyond red which carried heat instead of light, dubbing it ‘paraerythric light’.[9] His ideas were viewed with scepticism at the time and their importance would not be realised until years after his death: in his lifetime Piazzi was better known for supervising the definitive ‘Palermo Catalogue’ of the night sky and discovering two comets.

So without the benefit of hindsight, what was the most important discovery of the time? Unquestionably this was Charles Messier’s discover of the seventh planet in 1794.[10] This revived some of the old controversy-seeking spirit of the Scientific Revolution, exploding the Greek view that the heavens conformed to the auspicious number seven thanks to the presence of seven major objects in the night sky—the Sun, the Moon, and the five planets of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The new planet’s importance was widely recognised, but there were endless disagreements over what it should be named. Coming in the year of the French Revolution, the planet was initially dubbed ‘L’Étoile du Diamant’ by the revolutionary government in memory of their martyred inspiration. Unsurprisingly this was not adopted by the anti-Revolutionary alliance, who most commonly called it ‘Messier’ after its discovery, particularly after Messier went to the phlogisticateur in 1798 and was thus safely free from association with the Jacobin regime. The ‘Diamond Star’ name fell out of favour in France herself after the Double Revolution, with Lisieux attempting to wipe all references to Le Diamant from history: under the Administration, the planet was simply called Planet Six.

It would not be until after the Congress of Copenhagen, more than sixteen years after its first discovery, that a name was agreed on. ‘Messier’ had fallen out of favour in preference for a mythological name fitting the established pattern, and after suggestions such as Apollo, Uranus and Neptune were rejected, astronomers agreed on the name Dionysus. By this point two of the planet’s moons had also been discovered, and were dubbed Oenopion and Staphylus[11] after two of Dionysus’ children. But a few years later in 1821, the Russian astronomer Yakov Struve[12] published observations of deviations from Dionysus’ orbit strongly indicating an eighth planet with an even more distant orbit, whose gravity was causing the Dionysian deviations. Due to a slight mistranslation in his treatise, the French copy of Struve’s work once referred to gravity as ‘love’, which was taken up by the astronomical community in a poetic fashion—Dionysus’ unseen partner was therefore dubbed Ariadne after the mythological figure’s consort, though it would not be discovered for almost thirty years more.

It was also in this period that the sub-planets were discovered, the first by the Dutch astronomer Arjen Roelofs in 1808 and with three more by several collaborating groups in the Italies and the Germanies. There was, again, disagreement over whether these objects should be classed as full planets or not: unsurprisingly, the French (who already had a new planet to their name) said they shouldn’t and the Germans and Italians said they should. In the end the French view won out, though it took decades. An easier question was what these objects should be named. Some argued that mythological names should again be applied, with the names of more minor Roman or Greek gos to fit the fact that these objects were smaller than the established planets. However, the system eventually adopted was that suggested by the British astronomer Charles Henry Addington, who tended to the French view that these were a different class of objects, and should therefore possess a different naming system: if the full planets used the names of gods from Greco-Roman mythology, then the sub-planets should use the names of mortals. This was further refined by the idea that sub-planets found between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter (as all those thus far discovered had been) should be named ‘Trojans’[13] and take the names of figures from the Trojan War, while other periods could be designated for future classes of sub-planets—though these would not be found for many years to come. The four first sub-planets were therefore dubbed Agamemnon, Odysseus, Hector and Achilles.[14]

While astronomy had certainly risen again to challenge old assumptions as it had before, however, in the period of the Watchful Peace and the Popular Wars it was usurped in its leading role by a different science indeed...

*

From: “A History of the Natural Sciences” by Robert Levaughn (1972)—

Frederick Paley was not the sort of young man who seemed likely to change the world. Indeed, most of his contemporaries at Oxford in the 1800s viewed him as being the sort to forever remain in his father’s shadow. William Paley was one of the greatest theologians and philosophers of the eighteenth century, a man who did not flinch from controversy. His works were many and his causes numerous, from the abolition of slavery to criticism of English property law. It was the latter that most commonly landed him in hot water with authority and ensued he would never rise to the position of bishop, with even King George III dismissive of his views—which admittedly included rather extreme ideas for the time such as defending the ‘right of the poor to steal’ if the state did not act to curb the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the rich few by means of taxation.[15] It is surprising indeed that he found the time to marry and have a son at all.[16]

Frederick Paley, born in 1784, initially quarrelled with his father in his teenage years but later grew a grudging respect for the old man, recognising that they shared a single-mindedness and tendency towards austerity rather than allowing it to put them at odds. The younger Paley initially intended to study a subject far removed from his father’s, though this was rather difficult considering the number of pies William had his fingers in. In the end he fell into rather similar areas, studying divinity and natural history at Oxford and graduating only months before John Churchill would lead the city’s yeomen into the north to take part in the events that would cement his rule over the country in the face of the French invasion. His father having died a few years before, Paley the younger inherited some of the wealth he had acquired in later life, mostly from admiring churchmen: for, above all his other achievements, Paley the elder had been one of the world’s greatest Christian apologists. His great work, Natural Theology, was an argument for the existence of God from first principles, and is most famous for its ‘watch metaphor’—the idea that if one happens to find a pocket-watch on a hillside, observing that it uses intricate technology to perform a function, one can conclude that there must be an intelligent designer somewhere who had built it. By comparing Nature, and primarily the anatomy of living things, to the watch, Paley the elder therefore argued that the mere existence of life as we know it was proof of an intelligent Creator. This view was much debated by the more anticlerical-minded intellectuals of the eighteenth century, but was accepted not only by Christians but also by deists who rejected Christian doctrine but nonetheless held to the existence of an (unknown) God and Creator.

Though reasonably well off, Paley the younger nonetheless lived in Marleburgensian Britain, with all the tendency towards utilitarianism that that implies, and was initially unable to put his education to much use. However, in 1812 he accepted an invitation to come and lecture at the Royal French Academy of the Sciences in Paris, where he formed friendships with many French colleagues, most famously Georges Audouin. In 1815 Audouin came to him with a proposal that, it was rumoured, came straight from Bonaparte himself. Having fought so hard to keep hold of most of her colonial empire during the Jacobin Wars, the French government now sought better ways to exploit it. In other words, she needed men trained in Linnaean methods to travel to her colonies—principally the still largely-unknown Antipodea—and determine which crops of those colonies might be usefully transplanted to France or to other colonies, and vice versa. But France could not set up an avowedly Linnaean expedition, not when the word was so associated with her Racist Republican past, or there would be an outcry across Europe and the alliance with Austria could be damaged or even broken. Therefore the operation would be conducted through euphemism, and it would be politically helpful to have a foreigner formally leading the mission. Paley accepted, and the voyage—aboard the ship Aigle, commanded by Captain Émile Rameau—began in April 1817.

One could fill numerous books with accounts of that voyage, as Paley and Audouin indeed did so. The journey was an adventure even aside from its impact in science, with Rameau almost instigating a war between France and the Netherlands (twice), Audouin helping to foil an early opium-running attempt in Hanjing (years before the Opium Scandal broke fully upon the world stage) and the tale of the Aigle’s visit to Gavaji [Hawaii] in 1818, which ends with the almost comical escapade of half the crew desperately outrunning a gang of cannibals to get to a friendly Russian fort. But there is no doubt that the most significant actions of the voyage took place in Antipodea.

Paley is often mistakenly described as ‘the father of evolution’. Of course nothing could be farther from the truth. Evolution, the idea that one species could transform into another (although, of course, Paley himself would not put it that way) was a very old idea and had been fairly mainstream for generations. Erasmus Darwin I and II had been proponents of the theory, as had the French Republican Lamarck, whose work on Antipodea Paley and Audouin studied in order to support their own. Paley’s genius was in providing a theoretical mechanism by which evolution might take place: the Theory of Environmental Breeding.

It can be argued that it was on ly here and now that such a theory could be conceived—whether because of the new and alien flora and fauna of Antipodea now being available for study, or because it came on the back of the Agricultural Revolution of the eighteenth century and the great advances made in selective breeding of farm animals. Whether this is true or not is up for debate, but it certainly informed Paley’s hypotheses. While he and Audouin studied the question of why it was so difficult to introduce one crop to a new setting, Paley advanced the idea that a plant, or any living thing, will adapt over generations to fit its environment, and on being introduced to a new environment will of course be less well suited to it than the life already present there, which will out-compete it in the struggle for sunlight, water and other necessities. Audouin asked how could this adaptation take place? When speaking of selective breeding, there is always an active intervention by the farmer, choosing which characteristics he wants and then mating the appropriate males and females to bring out those characteristics. What agency performs this function in nature?

It was here, though it took years, that Paley conceived the idea of environmental breeding: plants and animals selectively breed themselves due to the simple observation that an individual better suited to its environment than its cohorts has a better chance of surviving to breed, and so over time this will select for those traits in the same way that the active intervention of a farmer would. Paley later expanded the theory, in 1823 publishing On the Abolition of Species, in which he criticised the Linnaean idea of species and claimed that all life represented a continuum, with different ‘breeds’ representing incremental steps between ‘species’: “The only difference between two breeds of dog and between either and a cat is one of degree, or number of generations”. This work is often compared to Pablo Sanchez’s political trilogy from a few years later—naturally, usually by those opposing Paley and invoking Haraldsson’s Maxim. Both men were arguing that something normally accepted as a solid reality is in fact just a human philosophical construct. Paley’s work was supported by his observations both in Antipodea (where he criticised the view that Antipodean life was so different from that of the Old and New World that it could have been a separate Creation, pointing out the core similarities) and in China, where he wrote of the Chinese’s achievements in goldfish breeding and how fish drastically different from their ancestors had been bred for over generations, suggesting how new species could arise. He countered the argument that the definition of species was based on the idea that two members of a same species could always conceive a fertile child by pointing to rare examples of two different species doing so, such as fertile mules.

On the return of the voyage to France, controversy was sparked everywhere by the new theory, and in particular Audouin’s suggestion that Paley’s theory could provide a theoretical underpinning for Linnaeus’ claim that mankind represented a more advanced form of ape, environmentally-bred to fit a civilised lifestyle. This idea has remained controversial ever after, not least because it has often been appropriated by Racialists—which began with the ‘Burdenists’ in the ENA a few years after Paley’s publication, who claimed that black Africans were intrinsically inferior because they lived in the same environment as apes and were therefore closer in nature to them, whereas other races represented superior development to adapt to ‘civilised’ environments. It is worth noting that the idea that men and apes were related was far from new, predating even Linnaeus: but most had argued that apes represented a degraded form of men rather than men an advanced form of ape.

The initial controversy over Paley’s theory, and still the main one in some countries, was whether it represented heresy for contradicting the Biblical account of Creation. Paley himself remained as fervent a Christian as his father, and dismissed these fundamentalist claims by saying that Genesis represented a metaphorical rather than literal account of Creation—later Paleyites would point to the fact that the way in which different types of creatures are listed in the book fitted the hypothesised order in which they evolved according to theory. When some accused him of dishonouring his father’s name, he laughed and replied: “Dishonoured? I have completed it. My father saw the watch and conceived there must be a watchmaker; so there is, and I have discovered his workbench and his tools.” This did not, of course, stop anti-clericalists and outright Atheists from adopting Paleyite evolution as a tool for attacking religion, but this, along with literalist criticism, has ever remained a bit of extremist background noise in the main debate over evolution.

This, of course, is the debate between catastrophism and gradualism. Even though the original question that prompted the divide has long since been solved, the precise meaning of the words have moved on and the division remains—which perhaps says more about science than is comfortable. Catastrophism ultimately stems from a criticism advanced by Erasmus Darwin III and his younger brother Francis at a debate at the Royal Society in 1825. The Darwins were not opposed to the idea of evolution per se, but objected to Paleyite ‘environmental breeding’ on the grounds that the timescale required would be far longer than the age of the Earth. Few held to Ussher’s famous notion (based on calculating the generations of the Bible) that the Earth was less than six thousand years old, but the educated view was that it was not more than perhaps one hundred million—which the Darwins claimed was insufficient time for environmental breeding to take place. The supporters of environmental breeding split in response to this. Sir Andrew Black advanced the basic idea that would become catastrophism: the notion that environmental breeding accelerates in response to a great cataclysm that has wiped part of the planet clean of life, as life rushes to fill the gap, and several such responses could cause ‘leapfrogging’ that would allow development to take place within a shorter period of time. By analogy he spoke of how saplings rush to fill the up the space when a great tree falls, each competing for the newly revealed sunlight. It was argued that volcanic eruptions and earthquakes could be causes of such cataclysms (sub-planetary impacts not then having been conceived) and that the Biblical Deluge might represent an oral account of such a disaster.

Paley rejected such views and instead claimed that the Earth must be far older than thought, though as this was before the discovery of pseudometallising behaviour[17] he could offer no reason why this might be. For this reason, though Paley’s theory as a whole was widely accepted, his interpretation of the timescale was not, and were labelled ‘gradualism’. The two interpretations of Paleyite thought have warred ever since. At the time, Paley’s main argument against the Darwins (who accepted Black’s ideas and became the main standard bearers of catastrophism) was that they were trying to apply human behaviour to Nature, which he viewed as an arrogance in believing that man’s rules applied to God. At one point he claimed that they were influenced by London having been razed by the French only to rise around them once again. Another famous form of the same argument he made was: “With the example of the Portuguese phoenix before us, it is small wonder that the gentlemen in question hold such theories; but we should be careful not to confuse human activity with natural processes, as the two run on decidedly different physical laws.” He was referring to Portugal’s rise again to become a great power after suffering reversals in the seventeenth century and the great earthquake of 1755.

Of course, a few years later Paley might well have considered that he could have chosen a better example...














[1] More specifically from the 1769 edition of the King James Bible.

[2] There is a reason why a writer in 1980 feels the need to add the qualifier in parantheses, anachronistic though it would be for the time.

[3] The phrase predates the POD of this timeline; it is named for the mathematician William of Occam, who lived in the fourteenth century.

[4] Although Huygens discovered the moon we call Titan, it wasn’t named for another two hundred years, and this has therefore been butterflied. The name ‘Titan’ is the class of Greek gods to which Cronus (Saturn) belonged, whereas ‘Athena’ was Cronus’ daughter. ‘Minerva’, its Roman equivalent, would be more consistent, but such things rarely apply to astronomical naming.

[5] OTL of course it’s the other way around.

[6] OTL the latter mission was of course made by Captain James Cook, who in TTL died at the Battle of Quebec in 1759. Henry Anson is an ATL son of Admiral George Anson who circumnavigated the globe in 1740-44, fighting the French and the Spanish as he went. OTL Anson never had children; TTL he found the time when he was in a period of disgrace after the Second Glorious Revolution for being too closely associated with George II’s regime. His son Henry, unsurprisingly given these circumstances, is much more cautious and less prone to adventure than James Cook, and therefore never went anywhere near Australia.

[7] Greek ‘beyond the red’, OTL ‘infra-red’.

[8] OTL discoverer of Ceres. He was actually born in Lombardy, but did his most famous work (OTL and TTL) at Palermo in Sicily and Naples the city.

[9] OTL infra-red light was discovered under similar circumstances by Herschel in 1800.

[10] OTL Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781.

[11] OTL Titania and Oberon respectively.

[12] Actually the German-born Jacob Struve, but in Paul’s Russia it pays to Russify your name.

[13] OTL, by coincidence, the ‘Trojans and Greeks’ are particular groups of asteroids that share an orbit with Jupiter, rather than those between Jupiter and Mars.

[14] OTL: Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta respectively.

[15] All this is OTL.

[16] And in OTL he didn’t.

[17] Radioactivity.













Part #116: The Last Hurrah

“Today’s triumph sows the seeds for tomorrow’s tragedy”

—Yapontsi proverb​
[1]

*

From—“A History of the Near and Middle East, Volume VIII, Part 3: The Ottoman Time of Troubles” by John Chauncey Parker (1970)—

In understanding the Persian intervention in the Time of Troubles, and the consequences it would have for both powers and beyond, it is important to recognise that what at first glance might look like an overwhelming Persian victory is in reality anything but. Persia certainly profited by its intervention, recovering the lands in Arabistan that the Ottomans had taken during the Turco-Persian War of 1806-09 and most of Azerbaijan even before one considers those gains in terms of influence rather than annexation. But in many ways the result represents a squandered opportunity, something quietly recognised by the Zand court at the time, even as they trumpted their triumphs to the heavens and urged their people to celebrate. The Time of Troubles was a peculiar period of Ottoman weakness of the kind that might come once every two or three centuries, and the Persians could have taken advantage of their divided, factional neighbour to a far greater extent than they did. It is true that some speculation on this matter by Persian nationalists has been overly fanciful, such as the suggestion by Dr Darius Sadeghi (A. J.-N. Jour. Lev. Stud., vol. 23, 1964[2]) that Persia could have pushed her borders as far as the Mediterranean Sea and reclaimed the lands of the Levant which no Persian emperor had ruled since Khosrau II of the pre-Islamic Sassanid dynasty. This seems rather unlikely even if chance had weighed more heavily in favour of Shah-Advocate Zaki Mohammed Shah and his Grand Vizier Nader Sadeq Khan Zand. But it is true that the gains that Persia made were relatively modest compared to the scale of the opportunity the country was gifted. It can, however, be argued (M. M. Muhammad, Trans. As. Soc. Const. (L.-R.), vol. 56, 1951[3]) that a more dramatic addition of territory to the Zands’ empire could potentially have been biting off more than they could chew and would have destabilised the country at a critical time. But there is no profit in what-ifs.

Part of Persia’s failings can be attributed to an inability to stick to a single objective besides that which everyone agreed on—reclaiming the territories lost in the Turco-Persian War. It is fair to say that this stage, in particular the occupation of Arabistan, was indeed carried out in a far more capable and organised manner than what would come later. Unlike the Turco-Persian War, in which the Persian army had still been transitioning from an obsolete Asian force wedded to the past to a more advanced, Portuguese-trained modern army approaching European standards and had suffered many problems of organisation and logistics as a consequence, the Persian forces had been homogenised in terms of equipment, composition and tactical doctrine. The Shah-Advocate, like many of his house, was a moderniser and had taken advantage of the finger-pointing over the failures of the Turco-Persian War to clear out the generals still stubbornly sticking to outdated military doctrines and promote younger officers. In this respect the army was much more capable. However, the Shah-Advocate’s actions had also separated it from the Persian aristocracy and court politics to a greater degree, which meant that internal politics swiftly developed within the army, with various factions each hoping to draw the attention of Shiraz[4] by their acts of heroism and military triumph. At first these tendencies remained suppressed, differences put aside due to an almost universally held conviction that retaking Arabistan must be priority number one. However, once this was accomplished—and particularly thanks to the unfortunate death of General Mirza Hossein from an infected wound. Hossein had been a useful figure, bridging the old guard and the new and helping to manage the political differences within the army. Though no particular talent as a battlefield general, when removed his value as a keystone holding the army together became apparent.

Still, the Persians had the advantage. The civil war in the Ottoman Empire was dominated by three factions in the Balkans and Anatolia, one in Egypt and one in Arabia. The Levant and Mesopotamia possessed little in the way of organised military forces, these generally rallying to one of the factions or another, and the Balkan Party and Shadow Faction pulling all the men that would follow their banner from the region to the main fronts in Europe and the Caucasus. There was little to stop the Persians from simply marching through Mesopotamia save the disorganised militiamen of the Azadis or ‘Freedomites’: in 1819 the southern city of Basra fell almost without a fight. With further Persian expansion in Azerbaijan blocked by the uncooperative Russians, in 1820 the Shah-Advocate turned all his army’s attention on Mesopotamia, with the intention of creating an independent emirate centred on the Shi’ite holy city of Najaf. This would require taking the effective Mesopotamian capital of Baghdad, a city which had once been considered the very centre of Islamic political power and scholarship, although invasions and distant rulers had reduced it to a dusty memory of its former self. Nonetheless, Baghdad was the key to Mesopotamia and the coup of obtaining rule over Najaf for the Persians (or rather their planned vassal state).

Unfortunately for the Persians, two key things went wrong at this point. One of them could have been prevented by the actions of the Persian government, the other could not. The first was the landing of the Portuguese East India Company—under the command of royal forces thanks to John VI and the ‘Aveiro Doctrine’, meaning it was not only the Persians who suffered from fractiousness and conniving in their military—at Couaite.[5] Part of the secret treaty the Shah-Advocate had signed in 1816 with the Portuguese Governor-General of Goa, Vitorino de Souza, handed over this key port to the PEIC for future trade in the Persian Gulf. However, it had been assumed on both sides that the Portuguese would not take possession of Couaite until after the war was over, as too close cooperation with Christian armed traders would probably damage the image of the Persians in the eyes of the local Shi’ite Muslims who might otherwise look on them as liberators—as, indeed, it did. The Portuguese moving in earlier can be attributed to the centralising Aveiro Doctrine, which had placed command of the Portuguese contribution to the anti-Ottoman intervention in the person of Admiral Orlando Coutinho rather than de Souza. Coutinho was a fairly skilled military commander, as his actions later on in the Popular Wars would prove, but had no experience in the East and was hopelessly out of his depth in a way that de Souza would not, being forced to rely on advisors. The result was that the ruling Al-Sabah clan in Couaite withdrew before the Portuguese invaders and rallied to the cause of the Azadis, supplementing them with men, money (acquired through Couaite’s trade fleet) and influence. This was a serious stumbling block to the Persians and more than negated the Grand Vizier’s propaganda campaign, which had used printing presses to turn out pro-Persian broadsheets in Arabic and employed agents to display them throughout towns in Mesopotamia. Nader Sadeq’s work is, in retrospect, widely praised as one of the first recognisably modern propaganda campaigns, but at the time the Portuguese’s actions ensured it was largely ineffective. The Persians even found the people of Basra turning against them, who had previously regarded their occupiers either with support or indifference.

Nonetheless the overwhelming Persian military force still told, and the army marched inexorably towards Baghdad. This is when their second piece of bad luck came into play. Abdul Hadi Pasha, the former wali of Egypt who had successfully united Egypt, Arabia and the Levant under his rule, now joined with the Azadis, who it turned out were led by his brother, the propagandist who used the pseudonym “Ibn Warraq”. It remains somewhat controversial whether Abdul Hadi’s decision to risk his army by meeting the Persians in battle was entirely his own. In Constantinople, where despite some degree of liberalisation the man is still almost deified, it is politically unwise to suggest his decisions could have been anything other than perfect. However there remains a persistent rumour that Abdul Hadi wished to take his forces to Anatolia in an attempt to defeat the other Ottoman factions, take Constantinople and thus reunite the Empire before facing the Persians, letting them have Mesopotamia for the present. According to this account, Ibn Warraq persuaded his brother that unless they used their forces to at least make a stand at Baghdad, the Azadis and the Ottoman people would dismiss them as no less self-interested than the other factions. Whatever the background to the decision, in March 1820 Abdul Hadi’s forces assembled at the city—whose people welcomed then, by now the rumour mill having exaggerated the Persians’ deal with the Portuguese into suggesting that the Shah-Advocate had converted to Christianity and proclaimed a crusade against Islam. In July the Persians attacked, and the Siege of Baghdad was joined.

Baghdad was a city that had been besieged many times before and was well equipped to be defended. The siege lasted eighteen months, a struggle between a less well armed and organised but supremely motivated and united through blood on one side of the walls, and a better armed and organised but fractious and somewhat inexperienced force on the other. Military historians disagree on how close the Persians came to victory. Some suggest that the city was never in danger of falling except perhaps through being starved out. Others contend that the breaches opened in the walls by General Ardeshir Gholami in November 1820 came close, but fell short when his Goanese cannon were sabotaged by Azadi infiltrators.

But though Abdul Hadi’s forces suffered in the siege, it is clear in retrospect that by accident or design it was the right decision for them to make. By fighting alongside the Baghdadis, it elevated his forces to a position at least equal in respect to that of the Balkan Party in terms of the Ottoman public eye—and the Balkan Party could be accused of only fighting to defend the region from which most of its members came, whereas Abdul Hadi and his leadership were not Mesopotamian. During this period the Shadow Faction was largely discredited as it was mostly seen as fighting other Ottomans rather than the invaders (though in reality Shadow troops did see some action against the Russians in Trebizond and arguably reduced the Russian advance). More to the point, while Abdul Hadi’s forces suffered no more than piecemeal losses to disease and the occasional Persian attack, the Shadows and Balkan Party were killing each other and weakening each others’ positions, changing the balance of power within the shattered empire.

The Persians’ eventual withdrawal from the city is often mistakenly regarded as an effect of the same potato famine that led to the Austrian and Russian interventions in the Time of Troubles petering out. This is, however, untrue: the Persian withdrawal began before the famine spread to Persia, and in any case the potato was a far less important staple crop to the Persians. The real causes were several: disease spreading throughout the armies encamped about Baghdad (some speculate deliberate contamination of water supplies by the Azadis) argument between political factions in the army and in Shiraz leading to a loss of spirit by the Persian troops, and the collapse of the Durrani Empire in the middle of the war, which led to a distracting additional front as Persia sought to capitalise on the downfall of a second neighbour. Once more, Persia certainly benefited from this, retaking Herat and Nishapur and vassalising the Khanate of Kalat, but this was also an admission that the operations in Mesopotamia were going nowhere. There was an attempt in early 1821 to bypass the besieged city and strike out for Najaf directly, Abdul Hadi’s forces safely bottled inside Baghdad, but this failed due to the Persians underestimating the level of anti-Persian feeling and Azadi infiltration among the locals, with even Shi’ites now generally opposed. General Amir Moderi’s march to and from Najaf among Kleinkrieger activity and locals removing their herds and burning their crops to starve his army was commemorated in The Retreat from Najaf by Alireza Tabrizi in 1853. This epic poem poignantly depicts the feeling of despair that Moderi’s men must have felt on their long retreat, feeling unable to trust any food or water they encountered lest it be poisoned by Azadis, their general in a fever and dying as they approached Basra only to find it in flames, its people in rebellion.

The revolt in Basra was unsuccessful. The Persians withdrew all their forces to the city, crushed the rebels and succeeded in carving out the Emirate they had desired, but it was a pale shadow of what had been planned: not an Emirate of Najaf, but an Emirate of Basra. While they did succeed in finding a sufficiently pliable Al-Sabah cousin to sit the makeshift throne, it was obvious to everyone that real power rested in the resident appointed by the Shah-Advocate. The first of these was none other than Nader Sadeq himself, supposedly to reward the Grand Vizier with his own achievement. In reality, of course, this represented a quiet acknowledgement of the failures of his policy. A new Grand Vizier, Hassan Kashfi, was appointed and pursued a policy of stabilising the frontier—seeking peace in all but name, as there remained no official Ottoman authority to negotiate with.

Persia’s entry into the strife consuming both the Ottoman and Durrani Empires therefore represents a case of missed opportunities stemming from an inability to focus on one target or front and splitting forces among several. This was recognised a few years later, when the death of Jangir Khan and the ensuing crisis in the Kazakh Khaganate led to a much more cautious Persian response—ironic, considering at this point a full-blooded intervention from Shiraz could have broken the fledgeling Khaganate before Jangir’s son succeeded in reuniting the factions and ensuring that Persia would continue to face a dangerous foe to her north.

A side front of Persia’s intervention should not be ignored. While it stripped troops from other fronts and therefore can be regarded as one of the objects of criticism mentioned above, it played an important role both in the expansion of Persian trade and the increasingly fractured relationship between Shiraz and Goa—or, as it was presented under the Aveiro Doctrine, Shiraz and Lisbon. This was the intervention against Oman. This is often presented, anachronistically, as revenge on the part of Shiraz for Abdul Hadi’s successful defence of Baghdad, given that one of Abdul Hadi’s key lieutenants was the former Ottoman resident in Oman, Esad Ali Bey, who had helped Abdul Hadi’s rise to power by providing him with an Omani fleet. This is, of course, nonsense. If there was a component of revenge to the Persians’ actions, it was because Omani pirate attacks on Persian hajjis had been the casus belli of the Turco-Persian War. But in reality the action can be justified in cold logic alone—by possessing Oman or at least influence over her, the Persians could claim control of all trade in the Persian Gulf.

The Portuguese somewhat redeemed themselves by providing the ships for this, Persia never having been a major maritime nation. The army that descended upon Oman was mostly Persian, but with a significant contribution from the Portuguese and their East India Company, including Marathi sepoys—needless to say, careful management was needed considering many such sepoys were Hindoos who had cut their military teeth fighting Muslim invaders. Perhaps surprisingly given the comedy of errors in other parts of the conflict, there were relatively little such incidents. The army landed in August 1822, aided by the fact that Esad Ali Bey’s removal of the fleet left the country vulnerable to invasion—ironic when his intention had been to end the Ottoman civil war swiftly enough for a new Ottoman leadership to defend Oman. The capital of Muscat was taken by the end of the year. Sultan Sayyid fled to the interior city of Nizwa and his supporters continued a Kleinkrieger war from there for decades to come. The more hardline Ibadi Islam of Nizwa influenced Sayyid’s supporters, changing the political and religious balance of the Arabian Peninsula just as had the defeat of the Wahhabis by Abdul Hadi. The Persians, electing not to try and annex the land over the water, installed a distant cousin of Sayyid as a puppet Sultan of Muscat, taking the name Sultan Bakarat bin Hamad al-Sayyid. As well as this rump Sultanate of Muscat being a Persian vassal and open to Portuguese trade, its overseas trade colonies were ceded to Portugal: this resulted in the Portuguese gaining control of the key African trade post of the island of Zanzibar and the surrounding Zanguebar coast. Despite this, many Persians ended up in the region due to working for the PEIC, resulting in a distinct Persian influence on the peoples of the area.

It was this, the apparent heights of Portuguese colonial triumph, which led to disagreements between the Persians and Portuguese that left their alliance largely broken. The issue was the island of Bahrain. Bahrain had gone back and forth between Oman and Persia several times over the centuries (the island suffering quite a lot in the process) but in the sixteenth century it had been Portuguese, and Admiral Coutinho (on John VI’s orders) used this rather dubious claim to demand the island be ‘returned’ to Portugal. Naturally the Persians refused. Bahrain was ruled by the Al-Makhdur family, who had pledged allegiance to the Zands ever since the 1760s, and the Persians would not sell out a loyal ally in such a way.[6] It has been suggested that this move was spearheaded by the new Grand Vizier Hassan Kashfi to make his name and score a propaganda victory against Mesopotamian Arabs claiming that the Persians were puppets of the Portuguese. It worked to some extent if this was the intent, but also seriously poisoned relationships between the two powers. Of course, Admiral Coutinho could have taken the island by force given his naval superiority, but was wary of exceeding the remit of his orders after the Variações case of a few years before, and backed down before the Persians.

And what of Abdul Hadi Pasha? He had made his name by his steadfast defence of Baghdad and had successfully kept most of Mesopotamia out of Persian hands. That counted for a lot. In 1823, supplemented with Azadi volunteers from Mesopotamia and the Levant, his army finally moved north. Esad Ali Bey did not go with him, feeling guilty over the fate of Oman. He returned to Egypt and acted as Abdul Hadi’s viceroy, giving the Omani fleet still based there a choice for their future. Given that the Persian-backed Sultanate of Muscat controlled the coastline, most of the Omani captains decided to stay with Abdul Hadi and formed the core of his Mediterranean navy—in terms of personnel, not ships, as the fleet was still based in the Red Sea and there was as yet no canal linking the two.

In the mid-1820s the Time of Troubles entered a new phase. The Russians, Austrians and Persians had all taken their pound of flesh from the fractured empire, but staunch resistance by Abdul Hadi and the Balkan Party had reduced that to less than it might have been. The Shadow Faction, struggling without many clear leaders and regarded by the people as opportunists, withered and died as it was faced with attacks on both sides. Abdul Hadi took Angora in 1824, while the weakened Balkan Party drove the Shadows from Bursa. The Sultan Murad VI, who had fled Constantinople at the start of the conflict, re-emerged from hiding and endorsed Abdul Hadi. The Shadow Faction is generally considered to have collapsed in any meaningful sense by the end of 1825, and now the only remaining sides in the long civil war were the Balkan Party and Abdul Hadi Pasha’s forces. Both were now well experienced and Europe watched, looking for a knock-out blow.

None came, of course, because both sides were also exhausted. Abdul Hadi did successfully lead his troops in a series of battles against the Balkan Party, mainly led by their general Yunus Musa Pasha, throughout the mid-1820s and in 1828 Bursa finally fell to his forces. But over a decade of war had passed and though Abdul Hadi was still popular with his men, there was little enthusiasm for further fighting. Abdul Hadi encouraged them with the idea that one last strike at Constantinople would topple the Balkan Party, but a siege joined from 1829-30 was not successful, and while Abdul Hadi retained his political power he recognised that there was little point in continuing the conflict. The same was true of the Balkan Party leader Ferid Naili Pasha, and from 1830—at a time when much of the rest of the world was charging into war—an uneasy peace settled between the two Ottoman factions. The divide fell neatly between Europe and Asia. Abdul Hadi Pasha’s men ruled all that remained of the Ottoman Empire in Asia and Africa under Sultan Murad VI in Bursa, while the Balkan Party ruled Europe (including Cyprus) under Sultan Mehmed V in Constantinople. Despite the disparity in terms of land area between the two groups and the fact that Murad VI was the rightful heir, the nations of Europe at this point mostly regarded the Balkan Party and Mehmed V as the legitimate Ottoman government: it was the one they mostly dealt with due to proximity, and it possessed Constantinople. The name “Janissary Sultanate” to describe the Balkan Party regime is an anachronistic one and only dates from the 1860s, long after the Time of Troubles was over. But for now it still had another decade to run...

*

From – “A History of Portugal” by Giuseppe Scappaticci, Royal Palermo Press (1942)

Pride comes before a fall. Every period of ascendancy of a nation is followed by a comeuppance. Great Britain won the Wars of Supremacy of the eighteenth century only to fall into deprivation and dictatorship in the nineteenth. Tragedy follows triumph. And so we turn to Portugal...

*
From: “The People’s Warriors: Understanding the Popular Wars, from their Foundations to their Aftershocks” by Peter Allington (1970)—

Possibly the biggest misconception about the Popular Wars is that they were not foreseen. It is common to imagine that the absolute monarchs and dictators who fell in the struggle mistakenly believed that their people loved them utterly and that nothing of this nature could ever befall them. For the most part, at least, this was not true. From the Congress of Copenhagen onwards, it was obvious to everyone with eyes to see that the settlement in Europe, born of exhaustion and opportunism, could not be preserved forever, and that the Jacobin Wars had ended in a fashion that did not provide any sense of conclusion or closure to the issues that had ignited them. It is fair to say, in the words of Rathbone (1897) that the Watchful Peace represents the Allies of the Jacobin Wars taking the Pandora’s Box of popular revolution and then putting aside their differences to all sit on top of it to jam the lid down like that of an uncooperative suitcase. Where Rathbone fails is in the assumption that those crowned heads truly believed that they could suppress the revolutionary box forever by their weight. Pressure indeed built up within to eventually explode and unleash another round of revolutions: but almost everyone realised this. The Watchful Peace was given that name for a reason, with every ruler looking out for the first signs of such an outbreak. Some, it is true, prepared to a greater degree than others, successfully appeasing their own people in advance with liberal concessions—Saxony being the obvious example. But when one considers which countries did benefit from the Popular Wars, which existing regimes managed to stay in power and cover themselves with glory, it is not such foresightedness that can be held responsible for this.

Indeed, the countries and regimes which benefited did so precisely because they were so distant, in both geographic terms and in terms of information exchange through trade and language, that it gave their rulers sufficient time to observe the dawning revolution elsewhere and prepare—if, that is, they recognised the signs. And in fairness it is more understandable than many authors presume that many of them did not. The reason for this, and the reason why the Popular Wars seem to have been such an unexpected surprise across Europe and the world, is simply because they did not start in any of the trouble spots that had long since been predicted for the theatre of revolution.

Not in France, the most obvious choice, thanks to a Jacobin resurgence. Not Germany, where the nationalist writings of Schmidt, the Mentian movement, discontent in the Hapsburg empire and the oligarchic rule of the Dutch States-General constantly simmered to threaten the status quo. Not Italy, where the crude carve-up of the country in the Jacobin Wars and the crisis of Papal power might spark a dozen causes. Not Great Britain, where the brutal and arbitrary rule of Joshua Churchill brought tensions to the boil. Not poor divided Spain, its people often reduced to second class citizens by their Portuguese or Neapolitan masters, yearning for their king over the water. Not Russia, beset with the political conflict of Slavic nativism versus European modernism. Not Scandinavia, where Sweden’s problems and Denmark’s diverse bag of German possessions were a problem that the existing political structure could not hope to solve.

No, when the Popular Wars finally came, it was from an angle that none had predicted, none had considered. And yet that can, in fact, be criticised, for the spark that exploded a revolutionary wave that would consume the world could, in some ways, be predicted. Unsurprisingly, the spark, the revolution, the war took its inspiration from the two great popular revolutions that had already shaken the world. So, too, would this one.

And it began in Brazil.
 

Thande

Donor
[1] Actually made up by Russian salesmen hawking ‘ethnic’ Japanese art, but never mind.

[2] Abbreviation for “The Authorised Joint-National Journal of Levantine Studies”.

[3] Abbreviation for “Transactions of the Asian Society of Constantinople (Linguistically-Restricted)”.

[4] The capital of Persia under the Zands.

[5] A Lusitanised version of “Kuwait”. Kuwait City existed at this point as a thriving trade port whose political status was ambiguous, ruled by Emirs of the Al-Sabah clan but making it deliberately unclear whether it was an Ottoman protectorate or not.

[6] OTL the Al-Makhdurs were overthrown in the 1780s by the Al-Khalifas, who are still the rulers of OTL modern Bahrain (at time of writing...) but in TTL this didn’t happen and the Al-Makhdurs still control Bahrain.


Part #117: The End Begins

“Isn’t it always some damnfool thing in South America that starts these wars?”

– Last words attributed to Augustus von Saxe-Weimar, hearing of the start of the Last War of Supremacy on his deathbed, 1990​

*

From – “Adieu and Farewell: Iberia and the Axis of History” by Hugo Isley (1970)

When did the Popular Wars begin?

When did they end?

These questions are, in truth, impossible to answer—and that applies to every war, every period of peace, every cultural and artistic age, every epoch in history. When Paley criticised the concept of distinct species as an artificial human label on the peaks of what really consisted of a series of gradations, he might as well have been talking about historical ‘ages’. It is often said that the cultural eighteenth century began in 1688 with the First Glorious Revolution and ended in 1794 with the French Revolution,[1] for example. We can point to a series of classically chosen events that suggest the beginning of the period we label the Popular Wars, but this ignores the fact that those events themselves have their roots in earlier events, events belonging to an earlier arbitrarily-drawn period, and to fail to appreciate those earlier events is to imperfectly understand their consequences. And, of course, this argument can be extended recursively back to the dawn of human history. Ultimately the seeds of the Popular Wars were sown by the Jacobin Wars, and the seeds of the Jacobin Wars were sown by the Second Platinean War, and the seeds of the Second Platinean War were sown by the Third War of Supremacy and the First Platinean War...

But such philosophy is fruitless. Let us simply accept that our choice of particular events to define the Popular Wars is fairly arbitrary, and bear this insight in mind while we nonetheless turn to them once again as old friends.

The usual dates given for the start and end of the Popular Wars are 1829-1834. Again, this is arguable, for certain important and relevant events (the start of Joshua Churchill’s reign of terror and the Flight of the King in Great Britain, for example) predate this range of dates. If we must choose an arbitrary beginning which takes in the key events leading up to the outbreak of open war and revolution, let us choose 1826. But we must immediately break this promise by going back yet further, for the most important event of 1826 rests on yet earlier events set in motion. Now do you understand?

It was in 1814 that Bonaparte, having obtained almost absolute control over France after the assassination of Louis XVII and the departure of the other two parties’ political leaders (one to Louisiana and the other to a different plane altogether) began a policy of transporting political prisoners to French Guyana. This somewhat random-seeming choice was due to Foreign Minister Vauguyon realising that a relatively distant transportation destination would give France an excuse to build more ships without the more paranoid European powers crying a military buildup. And, of course, in the event of war returning to Europe, those ships would be built in such a manner to allow ready conversion for military purposes. French Antipodea was another destination of choice, but the colonial Governor-General François Girardot was strongly opposed to the idea, with the Jacobins he was saddled with stirring up trouble among the settler colonists, and Girardot was eventually able to make the French government reconsider. The Jacobins he already had were dumped at Paloua on the Ile du Dufresne, where they would play their own part in the history of the world in years to come.

The Governor of French Guyana on the other hand, Joseph Carpentier, Comte de Toulouse, was a different kettle of fish. Carpentier was the grandson of Henri Carpentier, a physician who had relieved Louis XVI from an (unspecified) illness several decades before and had been rewarded with a title, one of ancient provenance but extinct until its revival. The matter had been met with some controversy both then and more recently, with Dr Carpentier being almost entirely common by blood (a few nobles’ bastards in his recent ancestry notwithstanding) and, while the doctor’s university education made him at least refined enough to fit the role, his son and grandson were considered wastrels living off their inheritance and glorying in the privileges granted to them as nobles by the state. Royalists considered them a source of embarrassment and there remains an apocryphal story that the Duke of Berry, on hearing that Alain Carpentier had arrived in Nantes after escaping the Jacobin mob in 1796, commented “All the men we lost to the airs, the flames and the blades, and he survives? Surely the Almighty has truly deserted France!” Unfortunately for Berry and the Blancs, Carpentier managed to slightly distinguish himself leading a cavalry squadron at Caen in 1799 (largely through being in the right place at the right time) and thus won himself and his drunkard son at least a surly acceptance from the Royal French court. Nonetheless when the position of Governor of French Guyana became vacant in 1819, the French government had a shortlist of one: a position that looked respectable on paper but actually consisted of sending the uncouth embarrassment of Joseph Carpentier to a disease-ridden swamp on the other side of the world? It was perfect.

Carpentier was corrupt in a rather dangerous manner. French Guyana was certainly a miserable enough place and it had become customary for the Governor to have a large illegal stake in the slave-worked plantations there, if only to give him some motivation to actually do his job. However, excessive greed proved his downfall, compounded by changing economic circumstances in the world. French Guyana’s plantations mainly grew sugar, but while a valuable trade good the colony was far from its only source in that part of the world. What changed matters was the tide of Orientalism sweeping Europe during the Watchful Peace. Just as Indian architecture and clothing became a popular fad in Great Britain, France and Portugal, so too did Indian cookery. There was an even greater demand for spices than the past, and there was a certain cross-pollination of New World spices making their way to India (as indeed had started three centuries before under the Portuguese). The upshot of all this was that American chili peppers became a particularly valuable trade good. The Empire of New Spain famously recognised this in 1821 with the chartering of the Atlantic Pepper Company, which sold (mostly) Mexican and Guatemalan peppers to (mostly) Great Britain, Ireland and France. There was also some local trade to the Empire of North America, but for the most part the Americans remained wedded to traditional British tastes, not being a major part of the Indian trade exchange (however, Chinese cookery began to infiltrate at least the coastal cities). This desire for hot spices on the part of European trading nations also led to the Aceh War of 1824-6, in which the Dutch East India Company attempted to take over the small Nusantaran[2] sultanate of Aceh, which produced a vast proportion of the world’s black pepper. The Dutch attempt failed, partly due to strong resistance on the part of the Acehnese and also because the Portuguese, as part of their policy to hold back Dutch expansion in the Nusantara and establish trade treaties with native states on a more equal level, armed the Acehnese. However the Portuguese activity was not so strident as it had been during the Philippine War, partly due to the distraction of Portugal’s involvement in the Ottoman Time of Troubles, and the disasters about to befall both Portugal and the Dutch Republic meant that Aceh would eventually fall into the orbit of the Siamese Empire instead.

Governor Carpentier, observing this European hunger for peppers, expanded the cultivation of the Cayenne pepper in plantations around the capital city that gave the pepper its name. Either by accident or design, Carpentier’s move was particularly apposite given that the discerning upper classes in Britain, France and Portugal had now reached the point where they learned the names and tastes of specific pepper varieties, and these names often came by geographic identifier, such as the Veracruz pepper.[3] The Cayenne pepper successfully filled a gap in the market, and the plantations made money both for France and for Carpentier. But he wanted more. More plantations, more slaves...there was room along the temperate coastal plain for expansion, and Paris certainly would not object to more profits, but there was a problem. The inhabited temperate strip had its back to the impenetrable rainforests of Guyana, and filling said rainforests were groups of Maroons—escaped slaves who had formed their own society—and natives. Both would raid unprotected plantations to discourage expansion, to free slaves (or to take them for their own) and to seize any other valuables. Carpentier lacked a supply of guards and overseers that would prevent this, and certainly it was not terribly easy to find volunteers considering the hellish reputation of the Guyana colony. The Grand Duke of Louisiana flatly turned him down. It was in 1822 that Carpentier hit upon his great idea. The political prisoners that Paris were sending him had been interned in bleak prison colonies on the ironically named Iles du Salut (Isles of Salvation) off the coast of French Guyana. They took up valuable guards that Carpentier could re-purpose for his expansion plans. Should he quietly strip them from the islands and put them to work on the mainland, leaving the prisoners to fend for themselves and risk escapes?

No. Why stop there?

Carpentier’s reasoning in recruiting the political prisoners as overseers and guards was that no-one was less likely to sympathise with a potential slave revolt or Maroon or native raid than hardcore Linnaean Racists like most of the Jacobin prisoners he went on to employ. This was reasonable enough as far as it went, and for a time his policy seemed surprisingly successful. The Jacobins were relieved enough to escape the islands to agree to the proposal, save a few truly hardcore cases who were left to starve alone on the isles. A conspiracy emerged among them, but it was a conspiracy that served Carpentier’s aims: led by Lisieux’s former secretary Auguste Queneau, the Jacobins planned to lie low and continue serving in their current roles, but gradually taking over the administration of the colony and turning Carpentier into a figurehead. This was fine with Carpentier himself, who watched his profits grow as he did less and less work, and the former propaganda actress Marie Marceau became his mistress. The colony expanded, Cayenne pepper cultivation increased, and the Jacobins helped fight off the Maroon and native raids. After a particularly bloody repulse of a Maroon group from a new series of plantations established around Kourou, Carpentier even agreed to let the Jacobins carry loaded muskets at all times.

Such a description leads the uninformed reader to assume that the Jacobins chose their moment, rose up against Carpentier, brutally executed him as was their wont, and began a new reign of terror. This is not the case. Under the newly expanded regime, the colony was relatively pleasant for anyone who wasn’t a slave, with new luxuries becoming available as investment from Paris poured in and Carpentier creamed his share off the top and shared it with his lieutenants. Carpentier’s absurd scheme was actually working, with the Jacobins content to enjoy their increased power and freedom from the shadows—for now, at least.

The end of the so-called “Phantom Republic” came from elsewhere. Grand Duke Aumont was becoming increasingly frustrated with the success of Carpentier, an old political foe of his. Furthermore he was suspicious at the increasingly high numbers of replacement slaves Carpentier was requesting, especially when he learned from his spies that this was being supplemented by an illegal series of imports from the ENA and Portuguese Brazil. Aumont was convinced (wrongly) that Carpentier was suffering slave revolts or escapes and thought that by exposing slapdash governance he could have the man disgraced. In reality of course this was due to the harsh treatment of the slaves at the hands of the Jacobins meaning that deaths had skyrocketed. In particular the former Sans-Culotte colonel Denis Radiguet was largely responsible for this. He would encourage and rile up his overseer ‘troops’ in the same manner as he had before leading the columns into battle, using the same kind of fiery approach that had led to the Rape of Rome. He would talk of the superiority of the white race, the Latin race within that and the French race within that, and that slavery was too kind a fate for blacks and natives. He would particularly talk with scorn of the UPSA and their (relatively) fair treatment of mestizos and other racial admixtures. Radiguet was prone to the same wild flights of fantasy as the French Republican leaders of a generation before that he had served, recalling for instance Lisieux’s plan to reclaim land from the French coastline (with the help of vast quantities of rock and soil taken from the to-be-pillaged British Isles) in order to make the country more angular and orderly to fit his maps of perfectly square départements.[4] Radiguet’s plan was similarly ambitious: “We shall multiply until we have enough armed white Frenchmen to stand in a ring around the coastline of this vast diseased continent. Then we shall set fire to the forests that cover the interior, burn them until the flames and the phlogisticated air choke the undeserved life from the scum that inhabit them, whether they be black, red or polluted white, and if any try to run from the forest we shall slay them. Only then, when all save we ourselves are dead, can this continent be redeemed.” It is debatable whether even an uneducated and hot-blooded fighter like Radiguet actually meant this literally (though if he did not, it has not stopped the quote being unearthed and bandied about with terrifying earnestness by the Diversitarian Powers in respect to the regime now occupying South America). Whatever Radiguet’s views, though, some of his simple-minded men took him at face value, attempting to start fires in the forests and deliberately trying to work their slaves to death to remove another undeserved life from the world.

The Carpentier of a decade ago might have noticed this and perhaps even taken action to fix it, but now, engorged on his wealth and relative luxury amid the misery, all the Governor cared for was the famously (and doubtless exaggerated) diverse array of sexual gymnastics that Mam’zelle Marceau practiced upon him. So it was that the problem remained and worsened, and Aumont made up his mind to send an unannounced mission to expose Carpentier’s incompetence (though of a different type than he imagined). He decided to send his own chief minister, the Vicomte de Barras, to lead the mission. Barras had just turned seventy and agreed to the scheme providing the Duke would not make him Governor of Guyana in Carpentier’s stead. Aumont agreed to let Barras retire, where he could live under decent circumstances in Nouvelle-Orléans even if he could never return to France.

In March 1826, therefore, Barras’ ship (the portentously-named L’Avant-garde[5]) arrived unannounced in Cayenne. The more recognisable Jacobins were in the practice of going into hiding whenever a trade ship docked. Now they panicked, but still managed to go under cover. A slightly hungover Carpentier went to meet Barras, and for the next day showed the elderly but still savvy politician around some parts of the colony, incoherently explaining that the slaves were sufficiently docile and the natives and Maroons quiescent that he could get away with such a small number of guards and overseers. Barras seemed to accept all of Carpentier’s claims and returned to Cayenne, shaking his hand before he stepped back onto his ship.

And as he did, he whispered “I decided to call in at the Iles du Salut on the way here, Monsieur le Gouverneur. I have also recognised at least three of their mysteriously vanished inhabitants among your staff.”

Carpentier promptly panicked and shoved Barras back off the edge of the dock where he fell into the river before being shot by Radiguet, who emerged from hiding. Captain Ayrault of L’Avant-garde (having been briefed by Barras) immediately brought out his Marines on deck, who riddled the dozy Carpentier with rifle balls and wounded Radiguet in the shoulder. The Jacobins, however, had prepared for this day—though they had assumed it would only be a trade ship that they could claim had been lost in a storm, not a man-o’-war. Nonetheless they were ready. Jacobin fighters grabbed carcasses[6] and hurled them on deck, a practice that would have been useless had the ship not been immobilised by the dock. Though many Jacobins (including François Bleuel, another former secretary of Lisieux) were slain by the Marines in the process, the carcasses successfully set L’Avant-garde alight, quickly burning up its sails and rigging and burning through to its magazine. Radiguet, driven slightly mad(der) by the pain of his wound, babbled as his comrades dragged him to safety: “Today we shall strike a blow that will be heard in Paris! And the lickspittles of the king shall tremble!

He exaggerated, slightly. When L’Avant-garde blew up, however, it hurled blazing splinters that slew many of the Marines and sailors fleeing her explosion and threatened to set fire to Cayenne. Those that had managed to escape were killed in brutal street fighting by the Jacobins. With the death of Carpentier, Queneau managed to convince the remaining legitimate guards and overseers to follow his lead. The Cayennaise Republic was no longer secret, but it seemed that Nouvelle-Orléans would not hear of its existence for a little longer—dead men tell no tales.

This was incorrect. Unbeknownst to the Jacobins (or even Barras), Captain Ayrault had sent his longboat further up the coast to conduct additional observations, in case Carpentier was hiding something from Barras and then bringing it out again after he had moved on. In fact this was the case, but Ayrault’s men failed to recognise the Jacobins for what they were. The longboat was returning to Cayenne when its commander, Lieutenant Gérard Janquin, saw his ship catch fire and explode. Shaken, he decided to make for Paramaribo. Two men died on a voyage longer than the longboat was intended for, but they reached the city and the Dutch authorities—concerned about the possibility of a slave revolt, which as far as Janquin knew was what they had seen—agreed to send them on to Nouvelle-Orléans...while, of course, mobilising themselves in case they found an excuse to push the frontier between Dutch and French Guyana a little more to the west.

Because there were no firsthand accounts of exactly what happened between Barras and Carpentier, this means that the above is reconstructed from later, somewhat garbled accounts. Because of this, there are rumours that Barras confronted Carpentier with evidence of the Jacobins earlier and offered to cut him a deal, but the Jacobins learned of this and killed Carpentier before he could succumb—according to one version, by having his throat cut by Mam’zelle Marceau while he slept. Suffice to say that we will never truly be sure.

It was the misconception of a slave revolt that meant that Radiguet’s prediction of a blow heard around the world would not come to pass. It was not until the return of a ship from the squadron Aumont sent two months later to restore rule in Cayenne that he knew that the nature of the revolt was Jacobin. And this was mid-1826, at the time of the momentous election that finally threw Bonaparte’s Bleus out of power in Paris and brought the Blancs to power: the news was heard but mostly dismissed as a wild rumour, and Rouge leader Émile Perrier even accused the Blancs of inventing such ridiculous propaganda to try and stir up old memories of Jacobin oppression and its association with the Rouges in the public imagination. Aumont was concerned, but few truly thought this half-baked scheme in some Godforsaken penal colony would amount to anything.

And it didn’t. Unlike a certain other couple of half-baked schemes in Godforsaken penal colonies, the Cayennaise Republic ended with a whimper. Aumont’s troops fought the Jacobins and crushed them, killing their leader Queneau. It was Radiguet, by now recovered from his wound, who assumed the leadership and told his men to retreat. Somewhat bizarrely, Radiguet also freed all the slaves he could find. “Just as their race has ever caused mischief and trouble for ours through all of history, now they shall provide chaos to cover our escape,” he explained. He regretted this later when some of the slaves found their way into Maroon groups and gave them descriptions of the Jacobins as individuals to particularly hunt for, which might later have inspired Radiguet’s reputation for killing all slaves and slaveholders on sight. In the short term, however, it worked: the remaining Cayennaise revolutionaries escaped the French troops who regained control of Guyana—but a Guyana subject to a scorched-earth policy by the Jacobins, now as burnt and blackened as one’s mouth felt after eating some of its peppers. The riches of the Carpentier period would not be matched again, as Europe’s tastes changed and Cayenne peppers found their way into New Spanish plantations.

Exactly what happened next is, as before, unclear due to the lack of direct accounts. Rumours circulate of quarrels among the Jacobins and factions striking out on their own, of groups living like white version of the Maroons in the jungles and being their bitter foes. One popular rumour (sometimes considered to have been started by the Empress of Austria, or perhaps her confidante Madame Perrut) was that Marie Marceau had taken all the women of the group deep into the rainforests surrounding the Amazon river and had founded a truly ‘Amazonian Republic’ like that of Greek myth. But this can be chalked up to wishful thinking on the part of early Cythereans.

The Jacobins of Cayenne did not re-enter history until two years later, when the rumour spread across northern Brazil of an armed group of white men in the jungle attacking villages and plantations. Their most spectacular attack was on a plantation outside the city of Belém do Para, in which local authorities found a series of slave huts where all their inhabitants had had their throats cut, apparently without a struggle. The precise circumstances of what otherwise would be considered a typical frontier ghost story are uncertain, and in fact it is not even known for sure that it was Radiguet’s men responsible, though it seems likely. The matter led to a panic among slaves and slaveholders (the sugar planter and his family had also been murdered, albeit more messily, and his house burgled) in which the original incident was blown out of all proportion. Rumour followed panicked rumour and soon many Brazilians had the impression that there was a vast army of mad killers filling the jungle, ready to leap out the moment one had one’s back turned and slit one’s throat. The actual origins of Radiguet’s group was lost or forgotten: many Brazilians seemed to lose the idea that they were Jacobins, while others thought they were a lost French Republican army from twenty years ago that Lisieux had lost in the Brazilian jungles on a whim—according to some of the more sophisticated rumours, one had had sent to aid the UPSA during the Third Platinean War. Some even suggested darkly that the army consisted of Lisieux’s own elite bodyguard and the man himself was leading it, explaining his mysterious disappearance near the end of the Jacobin Wars.

All of this was meaningless. It is entirely possible that the sequence of events that began the Popular Wars could have been inspired by different precursor events—in fact they may have been. It was not widely known that it had been the activities of a neo-Jacobin group that had started the rumours until some years after the Popular Wars had ended, and given its suspiciously apposite symmetry concerning the previous war, bookending the Watchful Peace, some have suggested that historians seized upon Radiguet’s group and exaggerated their importance to tell a better story.

This is not the place for such debates. Suffice to say that, whatever its inspiration, northern Brazil suffered a panic similar to that that had consumed France before her Revolution, though rather than a cometary impact the cause was a mysterious gang of mad killers melting into the shadows. Planters demanded protection both for themselves and their livelihood (in the form of bought and sold human lives). A decade before they could have petitioned the Brazilian Cortes in Salvador for soldiers to protect them. Perhaps those soldiers would have marched up and down the streets of Belém, Recife, Olinda and the other cities of the Panic. Perhaps merely being visible could have been enough to calm the rumours.

But this was John VI’s Brazil, the Brazil of the Aveiro Doctrine. So there was no longer a Cortes, no longer any soldiers, and no outlet for the panic.

No outlet, that is...save rebellion.




[1] OTL of course this claim is made for the period 1688-1789.

[2] Recall that TTL tends to use ‘Nusantara’ rather than ‘Malay Archipelago’ as the preferred term.

[3] The name in TTL for what we call jalapeños. So called in TTL because they were first cultivated in Veracruz.

[4] As mentioned in part #40 this supposed plan of Lisieux’s is actually a propaganda myth, but this writer hasn’t realised that.

[5] French for ‘Vanguard’.

[6] Not as in dead bodies; ‘carcass’ is a contemporary term for a type of incendiary weapon. Some were in the form of shells fired from cannons, while others were simple bundles of oiled cloth hurled by soldiers to light their way when making night assaults on fortresses. This is the latter type.


Part #118: Brazil: Nuts

“True success leads to the accumulation of enemies. This cannot be avoided. Preserving that success is a matter of ensuring those enemies never collaborate.”

—The Rt. Hon. Stephen Cavendish KS PC, writing in 1847​

*

From—“A History of South America, from Pizarro to Paraíso” by E. B. Righthaven (1961)—

The early period of the Brazilian War is known by the Portuguese term Escalada (Escalation) for good reasons. It was a case of a situation that could have been salvaged and peace preserved—as indeed it had before, for rebellions in Brazil were nothing new—if matters had been a little different. Much blame naturally falls upon John VI of Portugal and his chief minister the Duke of Aveiro. Not all of this is undeserved, but the two certainly do not merit the level of castigation they receive in popular history. In viewing the history of Portugal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the impression one receives is that the country enjoyed a spectacular run of good luck in the former century and the first part of the latter, but that winning streak ran out around the time John VI took the throne. Again, this is in part accountable to the fact that the new king found it hard to escape from the long shadow cast by his father, Peter IV, the man many called Pedro o Grande—Peter the Great. John was determined to make his own mark on Portuguese policy and not simply continue the direction set by his father: not all his ideas were flawed, but it is fair to say that often he took a new course simply because it was counter to those of his father and his ministers—which John dismissed as ‘the cabal of timid old men’. He spent the early part of his reign fighting to escape their influence.

Nor was John’s reign one of unmitigated disaster, as a reading of official histories might leave one with the impression of. The Portuguese intervention in the Ottoman Time of Troubles, though marked by the start of a breakdown in the Perso-Portuguese relationship (it can be argued that this was an inevitable consequence of Persia stretching her muscles) was a success, winning Portugal the key port of Couaite and ownership of the former Omani trading empire based out of Zanzibar. In a single conflict, Portugal dramatically increased her already strong position in Africa. The King and his Hapsburg wife, Anna Maria—daughter of Ferdinand of Italy and older sister of the new King Leopold—were popular among the Portuguese people, who like their monarch had grown restless of the court domination of Peter IV’s long-standing ministers and favourites. In the early part of his reign, Peter had won favour from the people for resurrecting the Cortes and using it as a counterweight to the restless nobility, the latter turning more quiescent after the crushing of the plot against Peter led by the Duchess of Lafões.[1] The King and his favoured political factions retained this support as they led Portugal successfully into battle against the Republican French and came out of the Jacobin Wars stronger than ever before. Peter had resurrected the old Portuguese East India Company and granted it more independence from the crown, being rewarded with an increase in Indian trade that helped pay for the reconstruction of Lisbon, still suffering from the aftereffects of the 1755 earthquake. Emboldened by this, the PEIC—not always with strict royal approval—had thrown itself into a more concerted opposition to the Dutch in the East Indies,[2] a region where the Dutch East India Company (VOC) had generally dominated since the period of the Iberian Union between Portugal and Spain in the seventeenth century. The PEIC adopted a policy of supporting native states against the encroaching VOC in exchange for favourable trade agreements on something closer to equal terms. Their greatest success was with the Sultanate of Mataram, which successfully frustrated Dutch ambitions to conquer the whole island of Java.

Yet though this paid dividends for the Portuguese crown, John’s apprehension towards the autonomy of the PEIC are entirely understandable. Indeed, another country’s chartered company having such autonomy played a large role in the Escalada itself. There was a gentleman’s agreement between the trading powers that conflicts in India and the East Indies did not ‘count’ and would not be followed up by a formal declaration of war and fighting in Europe. Nonetheless there were tensions over just how far this could be pushed, and the Philippine War of 1817-21 (the last war of Peter IV) was a wake-up call. The Castilians, supported by their Portuguese masters, warred with the Empire of New Spain over the Philippines. They were eventually victorious, but the conflict exposed certain concerns. The Dutch had armed the Muslim Moros of Mindanao, who took advantage of the conflict to free more parts of the island from Spanish rule (whether Castilian or New Spanish) under the auspices of the Sultan of Sulu. There were reports from Portuguese captains that there had been standoffs between Dutch and Portuguese ships that could have turned into outright shooting matches, together with the potential involvement of the Castilians, the New Spanish and the UPSA. A European war could potentially have broken out, and John VI was acutely aware that in the climate of the Watchful Peace, whomever fired off the next major European war would be looked upon as a pariah.

Thus, John’s policies on ascending the throne were not solely ideological or a reaction to his father, as is often claimed, but also a response to the problems he saw looming for his country. What has lent support to the former view is that Peter IV died a month before the end of the Philippine War, meaning that we cannot be certain that he would not have taken a similar approach to John if he had lived to assess the consequences of the war. But this is fruitless.

John’s chief favourite, and if anything the man more often painted as the villain than he, was Jorge de Lencastre, 9th Duke of Aveiro. He was the scion of the Portuguese branch of the House of Lancaster, which along with the equally powerful Távoras had found itself afouled of a scheme to overthrow King Joseph I in 1758. Prime Minister Carvalho had had much of both families executed, a point so convenient to him from the point of view of getting rid of political enemies that some accused him of having engineered the plot himself. The dukedom of Aveiro had been attainted, paving the way for King Peter’s dominance over the nobility. The mass executions meant that the claim to the title passed to obscure side branches of the family, where it eventually found Jorge, three generations removed from the last Duke.

Normally, of course, a scion of a disgraced and treacherous noble family would never have found himself anywhere near the royal house. However, happenstance conspired in Lencastre’s favour. In 1804, at the height of the fighting between the Franco-Spanish and the Portuguese during the Jacobin Wars, General Drouet—frustrated that Lisieux would not give him the troops he needed to overwhelm the Portuguese—sent assassins to try and kill Peter IV in his sleep when the king visited the fortress city of Elvas. The assassins were skilled enough to overcome Peter’s bodyguards, but the king was saved when Lencastre, a young lieutenant in an artillery company quartered nearby, raised the alarm and slew one of the Frenchmen himself. In view of this great act, Peter somewhat controversially returned the peerage to the young noble and, after the war, the restored Duke of Aveiro was a confidante to Peter’s son John, a few years younger.

Aveiro had political opinions that had formed during the Jacobin Wars. These are generally termed the “Aveiro Doctrine” in opposition to the Aranda Doctrine or Arandite Plan that played a large role in colonial politics in this period. Aveiro had naturally had close encounters with the Republican French during the war in the Iberian Peninsula and contrasted their strong fighting spirit, even when ignored and abandoned by Lisieux, with the reluctance and poor motivations of their Spanish allies. This led Aveiro to argue for a more meritocratic approach to choosing military officers and ministers—unsurprising given his background as a junior officer held back by his family’s past—but more importantly to analyse the idea of the ‘national spirit’ that the Republican French had displayed. Unlike many contemporaries (in particular the Hapsburgs under Francis II) Aveiro believed that such a vigorous spirit could be obtained without seriously compromising the aspects of the ancien régime which the Portuguese establishment held dear, and indeed that achieving such was vital for the survival of the Portguese Empire. The biggest influence on his writings seems not to have been the Republican French, however, but rather the Empire of North America. In 1808 and 1809 Aveiro served as part of a Portuguese delegation sent to Great Britain in order to re-establish diplomatic relations after the Portuguese Ambassador had died in the wrack of London in 1807—Aveiro’s presence on the mission seems to have been the result of Peter IV bowing to pressure from some of his advisors to send him away from John, though this appears to have backfired and been the source of John’s dislike of Peter’s ministers. Aveiro, like many others to observe the miserable situation in Britain, was shocked, but took different lessons from what he saw than other commentators. He wrote of seeing American troops in Britain: “They are friendly with the English,[3] they mix with the English, but they are not English: they will deny it if you press them. There are few peninsulares, or what one would call them—insulares?—among them and they have no particular rights.[4] Some of them are descended from colonists from the Germanies or elsewhere and have no English ancestors to their knowledge at all: some are even proud of it. But they all speak English, sometimes with an odd accent. It is extraordinary, but I believe I am seeing a de-coupling of language from nation, and race from nation. It is certainly a challenge of sorts to the Jacobin Linnaean-Racist ideal, though not a welcome one. For I foresee that though the Americans have dutifully gone to war to help their English mother country this time, they feel no obligation to do so—and in the future they may refuse. Is this what their King Frederick wanted when he made them an Empire? Is this what their King George wanted when he gave them their own Parliament?

Aveiro feared that granting the Americans self-government had begun a slippery slope to total separation of the mother country from her former colonies, and that the same could happen with Portugal and Brazil. Indeed a similar pattern had been taking place since Peter IV ascended the throne. In 1788 he had made Jaime de Melo el Castro Viceroy of Brazil with extended powers, and Melo had made an attempt to try and give a united government to the colony, which was really a collection of separately founded colonies which often had little in common besides mutual jealousy. This was supplemented in 1813 after the end of the Third Platinean War and the expansion of Brazilian territory at the expense of the UPSA, when Peter created a Brazilian Cortes in Bahia[5] to try and give Brazil more of a single identity and responsible government. In part his actions were motivated by a disinterest in Brazil, as he wanted his reign to focus on the expansion of Portuguese trade in the East. But Aveiro was alarmed by this course of events, which seemed to him to mirror what had taken place in the Empire of North America. “Portugal had a happier war than England, but if, God forbid, Drouet had burned Lisbon as Hoche burned London,[6] would we have seen soldiers from Brazil on our streets acting in the same way? Calling themselves ‘Brazilians’ not Portuguese, seeing us an alien folk whom they merely happen to be politically aligned with—for the moment?

In truth, probably not. But what about the next war, or the one after that? Omne regnum divisum contra se desolatur et omnis civitas vel domus divisa contra se non stabit.[7] We have ears, let us hear.”


John VI struggled to overcome the politically entrenched ministers of his father for some years after becoming king in 1821, and it was not until 1826 that Aveiro became chief minister. But his ideas had had some time to propagate. In 1823 the Brazilian Cortes was abolished and the powers of the Viceroy severely scaled back. The Portuguese East India Company was also tamed, with authorisation through Lisbon becoming the norm. Some PEIC officials complained that it was impossible to do business when the round trip back to Portugal took months and now it was required for matters they had previously had authority to undertake themselves. But Aveiro foresaw that communications was changing with the rise of Optel semaphore, and one oft-forgotten aspect of his period of power is that he oversaw the development of Portugal’s first full-scale Optel network (previously the country had only had small, half-hearted efforts). Indeed if Aveiro had had a little more time, he had plans to expand the network into Castile—and who knows what a difference this might have made to the events shortly to take place there? Aveiro was greatly impressed by the advances made by engineers in France and Swabia, and wrote admiringly of the Pont Aérien de la Manche, the Channel Skybridge. This triumph of Optel technology, first demonstrated in 1823 and beginning regular service in 1828, was the result of a convergence between two technologies that rose to prominence under the French Republicans: Optel semaphore and balloons. The latter had not seen as much prominent use, largely because Lisieux was sceptical of a mode of transport where the applications of his favoured steam engine seemed questionable. (In fact L’Inhumaine was wrong—steam engines in steerables[8] were demonstrated as early as 1836[9]). Despite, or perhaps because of this, there was a mania for balloons in many countries during the Watchful Peace, even those that opposed other technical innovations of the period such as Austria. Steerables were considerably improved from the early models that had existed before the war, using a combination of sails and human-powered propellers to travel at a leisurely but nonetheless controlled pace. In Britain these were seized upon by the Churchill regime as a means for providing a new kind of reconnaissance and observation of the landscape for industrial and agricultural developments—and, under Joshua Churchill, to spy for potential rebel strongholds. In France however they became combined with Optel, and the Skybridge was the great culmination of this. Scaled-down Optel shutterboxes were installed on large balloons which were anchored to large buoys in the English Channel, allowing the British Optel network to be directly connected to its French counterpart. Soon messages could be transmitted from Toulon to Edinburgh in mere hours. The Skybridge was of course subject to considerable teething troubles at first, but it nonetheless told Aveiro that soon communications difficulties could be a thing of the past, making his dream of a unitary Portuguese state across the globe much more possible. However, he was ahead of his time, a judgement that should not be taken as a compliment.

The precise origins of the northern Brazil slave rebellions of 1828 remain debated, with a popular but fanciful view being that they were ultimately inspired by paranoia about a mythical group of Jacobin killers, the remnants of an obscure prisoner revolt in then-French Guyana.[10] Really however Brazil had been prone to slave revolts and occasionally attempts at liberal revolutions for decades if not centuries. These tended to be limited to a particular area, however; though the liberals in question often envisaged a politically united Brazil, this was an aspiration rather than a reality, and tends to explain why the earlier revolts were so readily crushed. But nor were the revolts of this Brazilian War any serious attempt at establishing a unitary independent Brazil, as we shall see: claims often made in that direction may serve Diversitarian propaganda needs but are scarcely rooted in reality.

What distinguishes the revolt of 1828 in Recife and Olinda was the lack of a swift response. The absence of the Cortes, a strong Viceroy or much of the old colonial apparatus was apparent. However this cannot solely be blamed on the Aveiro Doctrine: it is simply the case that the importance of the revolt was at first underestimated. Slaves had apparently been entrusted with too much freedom, and sometimes even issued with weapons, over a panic about attack from the jungle interior—whether by Maroons, natives or even the mythical lost legion of Lisieux. Rebellion was rather inevitable under such circumstances and chaos reigned in the two cities. The involvement of a white/crioulo liberal element is often debated but has been obscured by later circumstances. It is true that the Pernambuco region was beset by problems that had led to local opposition to government either in Brazil or Portugal: the sugar production that had supported the local economy for so long was becoming less profitable, for one thing. It is sometimes also cited that the people of Pernambuco had expelled the Dutch from Brazil by their own insurrection, leading to a comparison to how a Meridian national identity was born from the people of Platinea fighting alone to expel the British in the First Platinean War. However this is a rather questionable comparison considering the incident in question in Pernambuco had happened generations before, in the seventeenth century.

For whatever reason, control was lost in Pernambuco. In what was an illustration of just how difficult ruling over Brazil was, word reached Lisbon around the same time it reached Bahia. The Viceroy, the Marquess of Abrantes, hesitated. Knowing the penalties that had faced other Portuguese colonial administrators for overstepping their bounds under the Aveiro Doctrine, and lacking much military force at his disposal due to its centralisation and concentration in Portugal, he simply sent a superfluous ship to alert Lisbon, which arrived after King John had already sent a fleet and soldiers to suppress the rebellion. The episode made the Marquess, and the whole new colonial system, open to much mockery among the colonial elites in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, as well as farther afield.

Despite this, John’s fleet would probably have successfully put down the rebellion (indeed, in a strict sense, it did) had it not been for a certain enemy of Portugal not using the Aveiro Doctrine. In Paramaribo the Governor of Dutch Guyana, Hendrik van Nieuwenhuizen, sensed weakness. He acted in the name of the Director-General of the Dutch West India Company (GWC) and had authority over all the Dutch posessions in the West Indies—which had expanded in the eighteenth century to include the former Danish West Indian islands.[11] Van Nieuwenhuizen was a former VOC man, having been shifted sideways due to coming out on the losing side of a political struggle with other VOC heavyweights in Batavia. Paramaribo had been viewed as a sleepy reassignment post where he could be left to rot, but like many VOC men van Nieuwenhuizen was ambitious and a gambler. He also continued acting as though he was in the East Indies, where conflicts between European powers, at least on a low level, did not propagate to the rest of the world. Finally, he overestimated the chaos wrought by the revolts in Pernambuco, perhaps due to personal involvement with the desultory affair in French Guyana two years earlier that some claim was an inspiration for the panic in northern Brazil.

Ultimately van Nieuwenhuizen believed that the Portuguese had shown a weak flank, and it was time to take advantage. The city of Belém, though affected by the panic, had not succumbed to a slave revolt and had little chance of joining a liberal revolution against Lisbon, either—indeed it was the closest part of Brazil to Portugal both geographically and politically, and the place (ironically) where the Aveiro Doctrine made the most sense. It took less time to travel from Belém to Lisbon than it did from Belém to Bahia or Rio. Belém remained loyal...but it was vulnerable. Dutch Guyana did not share a border with Portuguese Guyana (as the northern reaches of Brazil were then known) due to the French, but the revolt there meant that French intervention was unlikely. Therefore, van Nieuwenhuizen gathered his colonial forces and descended on Belém. The city was almost undefended, with resistance from the local militia being desultory—perhaps because the Dutch were initially mistaken for Portuguese reinforcements. São José de Macapá, an isolated outpost on the other side of the mouth of the Amazon, surrendered without a fight when it became obvious that no such reinforcements were coming to aid them. In a stroke, van Nieuwenhuizen had taken back a big part of the Brazilian territory that the Dutch had taken from the Portuguese in the seventeenth century, and was in a position to threaten São Luís further along the coast, which had succumbed to the slave revolts and general rebellion. Van Nieuwenhuizen believed the Portuguese would be able to restore order in Pernambuco itself, but his quick action would mean the Dutch would be able to gain considerable advantage elsewhere and undermine their old trading enemies once again. He was still thinking like a VOC man in the East Indies, and had no notion of the horror his actions would provoke back in Amsterdam.

A single Portuguese corvette, sent west along the coast to assess the situation in the vast province of Grão-Pará, encountered one of van Nieuwenhuizen’s GWC frigates and was fired upon. The corvette, named the Centaure, managed to escape and alert the main expeditionary force, which was commanded by Admiral Saldanha. Saldanha immediately sent a ship back to Lisbon with the news and ordered his force, which had managed to recapture Recife and restore order, to stand on the defensive. The fact that this halted their campaign against Olinda was reported and misunderstood further sound, with rumours propagating that rebels or revolting slaves (or both) had fought the Portuguese to a standstill. This encouraged groups that resented Portuguese rule or the Aveiro Doctrine, though for now they gathered their weapons and waited for further developments.

In Lisbon, van Nieuwenhuizen’s actions were viewed with outrage, the Portuguese considering the Americas not to fall under the same category as the East Indies: war in America was war everywhere, just as it had been in the First Platinean War. A furious King John, viewing the Dutch as having attacked without a declaration of war, ordered his remaining naval forces to attack the Dutch national fleet in European waters. Admiral Ferreira led his fleet into the so-called Second Battle of Flushing, with the Portuguese striking a numerically superior Dutch fleet still scrambling for line of battle as it had been in dock at the naval base on the island. The Portuguese pulled off a Pyrrhic victory, suffering considerable losses but inflicting more in kind. The Dutch were still unaware of van Nieuwenhuizen’s activities, or at least the scale of them, and treated the battle with moral outrage as an unprovoked attack in home waters without a declaration of war. The States-General soon remedied the situation, and though the new young Statdholder William VII had his reservations about charging headlong into a new European war, popular outrage was such that there was no real choice in the matter.

Europe collectively held its breath, and those leaders with eyes to see took note of what they saw, and began planning. For the Watchful Peace had come to an end, and the Popular Wars—though that aspect of their nature was yet to come—had begun.




[1] See Part #46.

[2] I.e. the Nusantara—which name is used depends on if the writer is bothering to consider contemporary usage or is writing for a modern audience.

[3] Like many Continental writers, Aveiro is not great on the whole distinguishing England from Britain thing.

[4] I.e. people born in Britain. Aveiro is thinking of Latin America, where the Casta system (until the UPSA came along) elevated peninsulares, people born in the Iberian peninsula, over people of wholly white descent but who were born in America, criollos (Spanish) or crioulos (Portuguese).

[5] Cidade de São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos. Abbreviated to either Bahia or Salvador depending on whom you ask. See Part #82.

[6] Actually it was Modigliani who burned London, Hoche already having been killed by this point, but this is not widely known.

[7] Latin: “Every kingdom divided against itself shall be made desolate: and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.” (Matthew 12:25).

[8] The term in TTL for airship or other steerable balloon craft, hence the name. A translation of the French ‘dirigible’.

[9] 1852 OTL.

[10] This writer obviously disagrees with the previous one about its significance.

[11] Thanks to Christian VII of Denmark. Note that the GWC is still around in TTL because there was no American Revolutionary War and thus no Fourth Anglo-Dutch War.
 

Thande

Donor
Interlude #13: Guns and Ammo

“It seems there persists a field of patient industry and rational science whose ultimate goal is to attempt to remove the last iota of glory or personal heroism from the art of warfare.”

–Simon Carruthers, Regressive Knight of Nottinghamshire, in an 1872 speech to the Combined House​

*

From – “Sharper Sticks: A History of Advancement in Warfare” by William Peter Courtenay, 5th Baron Congleton, 1952 –

The century separating around 1740 from 1840 is often pointed to as one of a revolutionary period in warfare. This may be overstated. Of course such a span of time is bound to lead to considerable changes in methods of war, particularly when combined with significant changes in society and advancements in the sciences. However, it is fair to say that certain technologies and tactics, either unprecedented or little known prior to this period, did rise to prominence. One should not mistake this statement for a claim that all the paraphernalia of war advanced in a neat Whiggish progression, synchronised and coordinated to some cosmic clock. Periods of open war, naturally, led to changes as particular weapons and strategies were tested in the ultimate manner. New such items that appeared to be particularly devastating and dice-loading[1] enjoyed a spurt of popularity, proliferation and frantic duplication in other countries. Other new ideas, and occasionally old established ones, were perceived as failing to live up to their promise and were abandoned and forgotten. Appearance and perception are the key words here: what generals, soldiers and politicians believe about their weapons and strategies tends not to agree with a rational analysis with the benefit of hindsight. But rational analysts writing a century later do not get to decide how history should have gone, so away with them.

While perhaps the most obvious impact upon the art of war was that of new technologies such as the steam engine, other significant changes came from the sudden popularity of weapons that had been known for many years before but had never caught on. The clear winner among these is the rifle. The notion that a rifled barrel could cause a bullet (or rather ball) to spin and thus fly farther and more accurately was far from new. Rifles first appeared in Europe in the mid-fifteenth century and had been used as hunting weapons for years. The reasons they initially failed to catch on among armies were diverse: muzzle-loading meant rifles were much more awkward to load, with the ball catching on the grooves in the barrel, and more difficult to clean than smoothbore muskets; soldiers required considerable training to use them compared to the simple, mechanical rote of volleying musket fire; the rifle did not fit well into standard military doctrine which emphasised the role of short-range musket volleys and massed troops. Perhaps most importantly, the rifle was an uncomfortable objection to the refined image of warfare, where either men were killed anonymously by clouds of musket balls or in honourable close-arms combat with the blade. A sharpshooter with a rifle could deliberately target any man he chose in an approaching enemy column and pick him off—even the officers. This turned the relatively impersonal nature of infantry warfare into something much more like targeted murder, as well as raising the awkward social issues about common soldiers killing aristocratic officers.

For these reasons rifles were seldom deployed in mass European warfare up until the second half of the eighteenth century. Sharpshooters were sometimes equipped with rifles (often they were deliberately recruited from hunters who used the weapons in their civilian lives) but until this period sharpshooters and other skirmishers were not considered especially important to warfare. It was considered an article of faith that while sometimes useful, skirmishers ultimately could not decide a battle because they could not stand up to mass infantry or cavalry attacks, and should therefore not consume too much of a general’s attention. It was not until the Kleinkriegers of the Jacobin Wars that, essentially, a force of skirmishers drove a conventional army out of a country.

This was changed by the War of the British Succession, a conflict that barely deserves the name given that the initial disagreement was solved by four rifle bullets at long range. The high-profile assassination of William IV of Great Britain as he stood on the deck of HMS Devonshire set the tongues of the chattering classes of Europe wagging with scandal. Frederick I arose to his throne on the backs of rude colonials who did not, it seemed, respect the rules of warfare. Many European rulers publicly condemned the action while privately organising riflemen of their own. This was a slow process from around 1752 to the outbreak of the Jacobin Wars in 1794, and some countries abandoned the idea once again, such as the Spanish, the Russians and the Piedmontese. Others, however, refined tactics and doctrine to emphasise the importance of rifle-wielding sharpshooters. The British created regiments for Riflemen, while the (ancien régime) French and the Saxons attached them to normal musket-using infantry regiments as specialised companies. The Austrians traditionally drew skirmishers from the Grenzers, Balkan (mostly Croatian) militiamen who spent half the year as farmers and the other half manning the Military Frontier against Ottoman incursions. General Austrian military views said that the Grenzers were elite skirmishers but less capable as line infantry, and as skirmishers had been less prestigious they were often slighted. The War of the British Succession changed that, and now Grenzers were armed with rifles and enjoyed a better opinion in the public eye. Over time they were gradually converted from mass militia into a smaller group of full-time elite sharpshooters, particularly after the Ottoman Time of Troubles when the former Austrian Military Frontier was now many miles behind the new border with the reduced Ottoman Empire.

The additional importance attached to riflemen and skirmishers in general meant that greater attention was paid to camouflage. Contrary to popular opinion (particularly in the former UPSA, which had folktales mocking the British and Americans for wearing bright red coats when they landed there in the First Platinean War) the idea of camouflage was well known in this period. It was simply that camouflage was pointless for mass-musket tactics as one could scarcely mistake a vast line or column of men blazing away with their weapons for anything else, even if they were shrouded in a cloud of impenetrable powder smoke (smokeless gunpowder not being invented until many years later). Bright colours such as red (Britain and America), blue (France and Prussia) or white (Saxony and Austria) were preferred because it made it easier for the troops to distinguish each other in this literal ‘fog of war’. But skirmish tactics with riflemen were different, when concealing the troops and allowing them to snipe at distant columns became important. For that reason, although outright camouflage patterns were not yet developed, skirmishers were given different uniforms with more subdued colours and discreet caps rather than tall shakoes or tricorn hats. Colours used for skirmishers in this period include green (Britain and America), brown (Portugal), dark grey (Saxony) and grey-blue (Austria). Ironically when Russia did get around to adopting riflemen, her soldiers already wore green uniforms so no change or delineation was necessary. It says something about the more prestigious position that rifle skirmishers had by this point attained in European society, however, that nonetheless the Russians did adopt a slightly different uniform for their riflemen so they could stand out from the line troops.

An important question that was consuming European military minds in the years before the Popular Wars was if, and if so when, armies should go over to an ‘all-rifle’ model. Rifle reloading was becoming more and more rapid and easy, an important breakthrough being the development of the Ferguson breech-loading rifle in America in the 1770s. It took several decades for breech-loading to be adopted in Europe: just as before, it was a dramatic moment and the ensuing scandal that helped popularise the new innovation, when John Alexander shot down General Boulanger on the field of the Battle of Paris with his Hall rifle (an improved model). Breech-loading rifles were swiftly adopted, with Saxony and Portugal being particularly noted as embracing them. It was the Saxon military thinker Georg von Heygendorff who, noting the significantly improved performance of riflemen equipped with breechloaders, first controversially suggested that the smoothbore musket and conventional mass fire tactics might finally be approaching obsolescence. He was of course castigated for this, but had the opportunity to prove his point during the Popular Wars. All-rifle armies would not become the norm until the late 1840s.

While the Austrians were slower to adopt rifles than some countries, they took a particular pride in the weapon—many of the earliest European rifles having come from the Hapsburg lands centuries before. One peculiar innovation adopted by the Hapsburgs before and during the Jacobin Wars was the first true repeating rifle. This was the Repetierwindbüchse, literally ‘repeating wind rifle’ in German. Invented by the Tyrolean clockmaker Bartholomäus Girandoni, the wind rifle was capable of firing up to 22 rounds, remarkable in an era when even a six-round revolving pistol was still a malfunctioning curiosity. The weapon proved devastatingly effective in the hands of skirmishers, but being a complex piece of machinery was prone to breaking down. It also required an enormous level of pumping with a hand-pump beforehand to build up the air pressure which could not realistically be attempted in the middle of a battle.[2] The wind rifle nonetheless survived, being talked up by Austrian propaganda as a similar high-technology weapon to challenge the French’s mastery of steam engines, and was refined and improved over time. A significant breakthrough in the field came from a Bohemian, a fellow clockmaker named Wenzel Linck, who miniaturised Girandoni’s design to an oversized pistol that fired smaller rounds. He gave the so-called ‘Linck gun’ a shorter barrel, leading to some saying that he had missed the point of a rifle as the weapon now had a much shorter range. However it could be pumped up faster and more easily than Girandoni’s weapon and could also be fired more rapidly, meaning a single soldier could spray a cloud of small but deadly balls in seconds. Linck presented the weapon as a way of compressing an entire company of soldiers with muskets into one man: this was an exaggeration but the Linck gun was nonetheless particularly effective for skirmishers creeping up on an enemy position and then conducting a surprise attack while grossly outnumbered.[3] It was also somewhat popular with cavalrymen as it allowed them to fire randomly while charging at close range and being fairly assured of hitting something, weakening the enemy they were about to collide with. Some have exaggerated the importance of the Linck gun, suggesting that if the Austrians had had sufficient ammunition (the gun’s calibre was an awkward halfway house and finding ammunition was difficult) it would have made all the difference to the Popular Wars. Nonetheless the various wind rifles from this period illustrate that the idea that Francis II ruled over an unashamedly technophobic, Sutcliffist empire is rather misleading. However, proposals that steam engines be used to pump up wind rifles got nowhere.

Artillery was another field to see considerable advancement in this period. There were early attempts at combining it with the previous topic by creating rifled cannon, but these generally came to nothing and rifled cannon would not be popularised until a few decades later. Artillery was enhanced by the much-copied French Gribeauval system, which brought in new manufacturing methods and simplified the range of artillery in use to a few calibres, making resupply much easier. Most guns still fell into the main categories of long-guns (or just ‘cannon’), howitzers and mortars. Long-guns were what the modern generally pictures when he thinks of the weapons of the past, cannon that normally fired either solid shot (‘cannonballs’) or, at close range, canister shot—tin cans filled with musket balls that spread out from the barrel of the gun to bloodily obliterate any massed infantry within a short range. Howitzers hurled shells up into the air to plunge down amid enemy troops and explode. Several different shell types were employed, from straightforward explosive types filled with gunpowder (which a brave man could prevent from detonating if there was time to find and snuff out the fuse) to incendiary carcass shells to the hail shot developed by Shrapnel and Phillips.[4] The hail shot contained gunpowder surrounded by musket balls, essentially acting as though one could drop a cannon about to fire canister into the middle of the enemy from a long distance away. The weapon was murderously effective and remained Britain’s secret weapon for some years before it was duplicated by the French in the 1820s and soon proliferated. Mortars were pot-shaped weapons that hurled shells on ballistic trajectories, working as siege weapons against stationary targets rather than on a battlefield against moving troops.

At sea, most ships used mostly long-guns: most weapons would be intended for fairly short-range broadsides and distributed along the port and starboard gundecks, while particularly long-range and accurate weapons would be placed at the bow and stern as ‘chasers’ for when the ship was pursuing or being pursued. Carronades, initially adopted by the Royal Navy and later spreading to other fleets, were short-range guns hurling particularly heavy shot. Known as ‘smashers’ they were particularly devastating for breaking large holes in the sides of enemy ships. Canister was also used at sea to sweep enemy decks free of men and provide covering fire for boarding actions. Seaborne cannon also had specialised ammunition to snap ropes and damage sails in order to disable enemy ships, such as bar shot (two small cannonballs joined by an iron bar) or chain shot (the same, but with a chain). Bomb-ships, craft designed for bombarding enemy coastal fortifications, carried mortars. Rocket-ships were also adopted in this period, but though initially regarded as a dice-loading new weapon rapidly fell back into sharing a role with bomb-ships as occasionally used, sometimes useful but unprestigious auxiliaries. Though they had played a dramatic role in Nelson’s attack on the French fleet in the Balearic islands and the French invasion of England, rocket-ships’ impact decreased over time as the novelty and terror of their attack faded, with sailors becoming more used to the screaming rockets and learning that they were usually less effective than conventional cannon fire. Rockets were still useful as incendiary weapons, but generally only against land targets as most military ships began to adopt the French practice of adding fire-retardants such as asbestos to the (normally inflammable) varnish used to treat the ships’ hulls and decks. Of course ships were not totally protected from fire and sails and ropes remained vulnerable, but this nonetheless reduced the effectiveness of such attacks. It would not be for many years that the deleterious effects of asbestos dust were known, but ‘sailor’s lung’ would be a mysterious complaint for decades before this revelation. It more or less replaced scurvy as a topic for naval medical debate, the latter finally having succumbed to medical opinion uniting on providing citrus fruits as a supply of antiscorbutic acid.[5]

The distinction between oceanic and riverine navies[6] existed before the Jacobin Wars, but particularly came to the fore during that conflict. Oceanic navies, emphasising sail as the main mode of power, were not significantly changed by the wars, whereas riverine navies were transformed beyond all recognition. The early French steamships were called ‘steam-galleys’ for a reason: they replaced the old galleys of the Mediterranean and the Baltic which were worked by manpower (and, traditionally and still in the case of the Ottoman and Algerine craft, by slave power). They had similar capabilities, being able to outmanoeuvre sailships meant for oceanic combat in the Mediterranean but being incapable of crossing the open ocean. Like traditional galleys, steam-galleys were usually equipped with only a few weapons, but particularly powerful ones, such as oversized cannon. Unlike traditional galleys, however, there was no need for these weapons to be aimed solely forward, as the sides of the ships were not blocked by oars.[7] For this reason some steam-galleys were equipped with rotating cannon, almost early turrets, which were also driven by the main steam engine. This allowed them a much greater field of fire than many ships at the time. The fact that the steam-galleys were low in the water also made them difficult targets for larger sailships, and depressable cannon were another innovation to come out of the Jacobin Wars to solve this problem. Other steam-galleys were used as mobile platforms for firing hot shot, with cannonballs being heated until red hot and then fired at the enemy to start fires. Hot shot was a common weapon for fixed coastal fortifications but had been considered too dangerous to use on board ships, with too much risk of self-immolation. Steam-galleys made this possible using a combination of the new French fireproofing techniques and using the steam engine rather than a furnace to heat the cannonballs, making it a wet heat. This led to considerable horror stories of scalded sailors and did not entirely prevent some such craft from catching fire, but made the technique acceptably safe. Later, sail-using bomb-ships from oceanic navies were also equipped with the technology. Steam engines were adopted in an inconsistent fashion by oceanic navies, usually as an alternative to being towed by a pilot steamship for movement in harbours or by rowboats for emergencies. At this point they were not seen as anything other than a troublesome auxiliary propulsion. The idea of using steam for oceangoing craft remained somewhat radical, and often unwelcome in conservative Admiralty circles. The centre of innovation in this area was in the UPSA, and as of yet the norm was still building oceangoing steam tugs and using them to tow conventional sailships into battle in a way that the wind would make impossible.

Combat sailships remained divided into categories based on number of guns, ‘first-rater’, ‘second-rater’ and so on, with a broader division being between ships of the line of battle (abbreviated to ‘ships of the line’ and later ‘lineships’[8]) and frigates. Ships of the line, as the name implies, were used to make up the line of battle in mass actions. They were large and heavily armed, slow and majestic. Frigates on the other hand were smaller, swifter and more maneouvrable, sometimes being involved in mass battles but intended for smaller actions, raiding enemy commerce and taking on enemy frigates, often acting alone or in small groups. Brigs and corvettes were smaller classes of ship but with the same general philosophy involved.

Probably the most dramatic new technology to come out of the Jacobin Wars (although it began years before) was the use of steam engines on the battlefield. Their importance was exaggerated both at the time and in hindsight. Boulanger’s great victory at Lille in 1795, which created the myth, took advantage of the fact that his Austrian opponents had no familiarity with the Cugnot steam-tractors. They were able to move into position by darkness precisely because the Austrians had not planned for such a capability, and some Austrian troops broke in panic at seeing what they could not comprehend, guns being towed by carriages moving without horses. In terms of actual capabilities, early Cugnot steam-tractors were probably inferior to conventional horse teams. Indeed there are those historians who will sneer, in all seriousness, that France would have been better served not by pursuing war steam at all and redirecting her resources to more conventional ends. Such individuals pull off the remarkable feat of being less romantic and less human than Jean de Lisieux, for it was the latter’s particular obsession with steam engines as serving a republican aim, combine with Boulanger’s great victory, that led to a French focus upon the technology and the creation of the ‘Boulangerie’. Years of investment and work gave birth not only to the steam-galleys discussed above but also to much more capable battlefield steam weapons. Artillery tractors evolved, going from pulling quiescent guns to pushing them in such a manner that they could be operated (albeit more slowly) by artillerymen as they moved. As well as giving the French a considerable advantage in artillery duels by offering a moving target, this new innovation continued to unnerve enemy troops, even those who knew what steam engines were. Boulanger’s great tactical innovation was in leading with these artillery and his infantry marching in column behind them: if an enemy was found that stood up to the guns, the guns would slow, allow the infantry to overtake them and perform a mass-march[9] to overwhelm the foe.

Protguns, as we know them, did not exist during the Jacobin Wars, no matter how fanciful and carried-away some illustrators have become. The idea of protecting mobile artillery with armour had not yet emerged—or perhaps it is fairer to say that the idea would be dismissed, as it would weigh down the vehicles too much and slow them, probably actually making them more rather than less vulnerable targets. Sharpshooters therefore were a potent counter to Boulanger’s self-propelled artillery, able to shoot artillerymen off the raised platform on which the gun sat atop the tractor, and this helped to further the adoption of riflemen across Europe. Boulanger and other French generals retaliated by having sharpshooters of their own stationed with the artillerymen atop the tractor, which (along with the development of more powerful engines meaning heavier artillery could be propelled) led to the development of larger tractors.

Protcars on the other hand did exist in a crude form, as Lisieux’s famous “Tortoise” demonstrates. Though the idea was far from new—the Hussites had used protected carts centuries before—the vehicle made a dramatic entrance on the scene. The Tortoise was not generally used much on the battlefield. Being enclosed and heavy it generally had a bumpier ride than artillery tractors and all it could do was bring a handful of men safely from one place to another and allow them to shoot out of gunports on the sides. Tortoises were occasionally driven into enemy formations in the hope of breaking them, but any formations who remained steady against steam-guns generally stood up to the Tortoise as well. The vehicle was slow-moving due to its armour, meaning it could be destroyed by cannon, by damaging its wheels, or (in the case of some daredevils) by flinging grenades through the gunports and blowing it up from inside. Some have suggested that the Tortoise could have been a more effective weapon of war if the French had been equipped with repeaters like the Austrian wind-rifles, but there is no way for us to know.

Where the Tortoise made its mark was in crowd control, driving down the streets of Paris and allowing soldiers and police to pick off rioters and rebels with impunity. This tactic was used in 1796 by Lisieux, who rode its success to power, in 1809 by Bourcier when Lisieux vanished, and by Bonaparte in 1814 to restore control during the Great Crisis of that year. The vehicle was adopted by other countries, proving particularly popular in Great Britain. It was the ultimate source of the civilian steam-cars which began to appear as the nineteenth century dawned, prestigious to own even if hot, uncomfortable and with awkward suspension—a field which saw considerable earnest interest by the sore-bottomed classes. This also limited many steam vehicles to good roads. Some suggested that the issue could be avoided by using rail carriages, as had already been adopted in mines, but this was widely ridiculed in Britain and France. Maurice Dupuit (who just happened to run Dupuit and Lesueur, one of the premier steam-carriage builders of the 1810s and 20s) memorably dismissed the idea based on the fact that iron rails would grow and shrink with the heat and cold of the day and night, saying that what worked over a short distance in a perpetually cold and dark mine would soon break and shatter if spread over the countryside in the real world. Other objections were based on the large scale of laying out rail tracks, which some called impossible, and politically or philosophically there were many who accused railway advocates of supporting a tyrannical or absolutist government, in which no man would be free to choose where he wanted to go as could the steam-car driver on the open road. Though now considered to be a prominent example of ‘it will never catch on’, there may be a little truth to the last one, as early railway development in Britain was closely associated with the centralisation of the Churchill regimes, and was particularly opposed by the Regressive Party in the years after the Inglorious Revolution for that very reason. Railway development, despite scepticism, had finally begun in the late 1820s in France and some parts of the Germanies, but the leader in the field remained Russia with its enthusiasm for Tarefikhov’s work.

Another area to consider in this brief overview is that of ballooning. Balloons in the modern sense date from the end of the ancien régime in France and, like other new technologies, were enthusiastically adopted by the French Revolutionaries. They were less associated with major victories than steam engines, although they played a role in some battles by providing observation of the battlefield from above. The importance of balloons was increased by two significant innovations: the first being the Optel semaphore system, which with some adaptation allowed balloon observers to relay complex reports to the ground, and the second being the invention of steerable balloons. Unlike some other technologies associated with the Jacobins, balloons were enthusiastically adopted across Europe (and beyond) during the Watchful Peace, being used for scientific observations and the sort of faddish thrill ride for the rich that electric shock had been a generation before. The use of balloons at sea was still very experimental, though the ‘Mad Lapp’, Lars Rasmussen (a Lapp orphan raised by the Danish explorer Thomas Rasmussen and his wife) had proposed a very large purpose-built ship to which a balloon could be anchored, acting as a communications centre in battle or to supplement coastal observations in exploration. By 1828, when the Popular Wars broke out, he had somehow obtained funding from the Danish court to pursue his plans.

Finally, though not a weapon of war in a strict sense, the proliferation of Optel semaphore had an impact on warfare that cannot be underestimated. In the areas in which the system was deployed, wild rumours no longer outran official reports of the results of battles. Orders could be relayed much more rapidly by generals and their political masters, for better or for worse. And in many ways this can be argued to have decided the outcome of more than one of the fateful battles of the Popular Wars...






[1] We would say ‘game-changing’.

[2] For these reasons, in OTL the Windbüchse was abandoned during the Napoleonic Wars. Its other main claim to fame from OTL is being used by the Lewis and Clark expedition.

[3] Essentially, it’s a sort of steampunk submachine gun.

[4] OTL known as case shot.

[5] OTL this term was contracted to ‘ascorbic acid’, i.e. Vitamin C.

[6] We would say ‘blue-water’ and ‘brown-water’ navies respectively.

[7] Recall that all steamers in LTTW are screw-propeller types due to the early discovery that this was superior to paddlewheels, so there are no paddlewheels to block the sides of the ships either.

[8] OTL the abbreviation became ‘battleships’.

[9] Human wave attack.











Part #119: The Escalation

“He who gambles with an empire as his stake has already lost!”

—Giovanni Tressino, 1828​

*

From: “Blood Gold: Trade Wars and their Victors” by Adolphe Büchner, 1964—

The Brazilian War can be considered the last act of the great trade conflict between the Dutch and the Portuguese which had existed, on and off, since the turn of the seventeenth century. In this conflict the Portuguese had initially emerged as the victor in South America and in Africa, while the Dutch dominated the East Indies and East Asia. India was contested between the two, with the French and the British later moving in as major powers in their own right. Both countries experienced some decline due to the rise of these new trade powers in the eighteenth century,[1] but both adapted to their more modest position while continuing to compete for trade. The Dutch acquired new possessions in Africa and the West Indies in the mid-eighteenth century due to Christian VII of Denmark selling those parts of his own trade empire, while the Portuguese sought to pay for the rebuilding of their capital after the earthquake of 1755 by expanding their own trade. This partially took the form of establishing good trade relations with the UPSA (and covertly aiding the new country in its birth) while creating a new Portuguese East India Company and granting it additional autonomy to pursue its business in the East. This led to Portugal’s profitable (at least in the short term) alignment with Persia, it acquiring considerable influence over the Maratha states in India, and most relevantly for this discussion, it going head-to-head with the Dutch over the East Indies and supporting anti-Dutch independent states, most notably the Sultanate of Mataram. This low-level warfare was a partial inspiration for the Aveiro Doctrine, which sought to throttle back on this level of autonomy lest it spiral into all-out war—not that misplaced an idea, as it was similar Dutch trade autonomy which eventually did ignite such a war. Portugal’s influence over Castile after Spain was divided also meant that Portugal could effectively take advantage of those parts of the former Spanish empire that it could defend from New Spanish attempts to take control—which essentially meant the Philippines and more minor Pacific island possessions.

While Portugal’s strong position in India meant it played a key role in the setting up of the India Board, the Dutch were excluded (partly due to Portuguese pressure) and their possession of Ceylon—at least most of the island, the interior still occasionally resisting under the native Kingdom of Kandy—and some minor continental trade outposts were not regulated by the Board. The Dutch played a much more muscular role in China, where Dirk de Waar was one of the six ‘Phoenix Men’ who helped forge the Feng Dynasty and its more trade-friendly policies. However, all good things must come to an end. In 1824 the Feng authorities protested to the European trade authorities that, contrary to the treaty agreements signed, opium was being smuggled illegally into the country. The Feng warned the Europeans to crack down on unauthorised trade, and that if any country’s trade company was found to be directly involved, they would either be excluded from the China trade or at least face ruinous tariffs.

It seems likely that both the French and the British were quietly involved in this trade, with their Indian possessions being a source of opium, and the Portuguese may have been implicated as well. Although the Feng were much more open to a wider variety of trade goods than their Qing precursors, the main products there was a Chinese market for remained precious metals—which were now too much in demand in Europe to be a profitable trade good—ginseng, and opium. The Feng authorities were not, as is sometimes suggested, necessarily acting out of some sense of moral outrage and purity about their citizens drugging themselves up—rather, if opium was going to be sold in China, they wanted there to be a government monopoly with appropriate taxation. In any case, having gauged how serious the Chinese were, the European powers publicly produced some ‘renegade’ smugglers, handed them over to the Feng authorities for punishment, and began policing the coast more effectively lest any actual independent traders try opium smuggling. The European trading companies were quite as appreciative of a monopoly as the Feng, after all, and had no desire to be implicated by a circumstantial connection of a truly independent smuggler happening to be from one of their countries. This was also the point when the Feng began to construct an organised navy for coastal patrol, due to (justified) suspicion that the Europeans could not be trusted to police these things themselves.

It was therefore the Feng who discovered in 1827 that the Dutch, though making the same public protestations and arrests as the other Europeans, had quietly continued practicing the opium trade with the help of subterfuge, bribed customs officials and false flag operations. The VOC naturally continued to protest they had no connexion with the captured opium smugglers, but the evidence was mounting and the other European traders, alarmed at the fact that they could face attacks against all their people through association with the Dutch, quickly cleaved to the Chinese’s side. Some, of course, were more than happy to do so, such as the Portuguese. This affair actually predates Van Nieuwenhuizen’s attack on Belém which started the Brazilian War in a meaningful sense, but soon tied into it. The Feng authorities imposed the tariffs they had threatened and additionally ordered the Dutch to vacate their colony on southern Formosa. Notably, and perhaps intentionally, the Flemish Ostend Company—which had quietly been buying its way into the Chinese trade market—was not affected despite the close cooperation of the Dutch and Flemings in Eastern trade. Therefore some Dutch traders simply turned their coats, joined the Flemings and kept trading at the old rates.

It was the expulsion of the Dutch from Formosa that led to a drawing of battle lines. In some ways it was a replaying of events from almost two centuries before, when Ming loyalists under Koxinga had expelled the Dutch from their colony on the island. But the Feng, though taking inspiration from the Ming, were in no position to match Koxinga’s feat. Their navy was still rudimentary and riverine, and besides they were still engaged in the rather more important business of the so-called Anqing Incident (sometimes grandly but misleadingly referred to as the ‘Zeroth Riverine War’) with the Qing remnant to their north. Enforcing the diktat of the Dansheng Emperor would fall to the other Europeans, who were more than willing to do so—especially the Portuguese. The Governor of Portuguese Formosa, Fernão Laginha, was canny enough to realise that the British, French and Danes would not tolerate him simply declaring that Dutch Formosa should be annexed by Portugal. Therefore, in a sop to the idea of retaining a balance of power, he instead said that based on historical precedent it should go to Castile. It was true that Spain had indeed possessed Formosa in the seventeenth century before the Dutch drove them out. In practice of course these days Castilian possession of somewhere was essentially the same as Portuguese possession of that place, but after the cession of a small part of the current Dutch territory to the neighbouring British, the other trade powers were satisfied. The Dutch, of course, were not, and Governor Hendrik Cuypers insisted that he would not withdraw from the island unless the Feng would send an envoy with a written order in the Emperor’s own hand. Buying time, he later advocated that if the Dutch must leave the island then their land should go to another trading power which had no presence on the islands—such as Flanders. In this he turned the Portuguese’s own tactic against them, but the suggestion is still rather ironic considering the later history of Cuypers and the VOC.

Thus it is rather difficult to say if it was the news reaching East Asia that open war had broken out between the Netherlands and Portugal that led to the conflict turning bloody there as well, or whether Laginha had already been planning his attack and this was simply the icing on the cake. Whatever the reason, the Portuguese and Castilians attacked Dutch Formosa and, with tacit support from the British, began to roll up their colony. In a surreal moment, trading continued uninterrupted in the Chinese mainland ports due to the Feng enforcing peace there. Cuypers and his men fought for a time, but thanks to Feng restrictions they had not the fortifications that the Dutch had built there two centuries before, and by the end of the year they had withdrawn, the remaining Dutchmen leaving in a fleet bound for Batavia.

In Batavia they found chaos. The Dutch, deprived of a large part of their home fleet by the Portuguese attack on Flushing, had sent out orders that their eastern fleets should send a large portion of their ships home to protect the Republic, but use them to raid any Portuguese ports and colonies on the way. Of course the Portuguese were also rather lacking in ships in home waters due to being engaged in Brazil and their victory at Flushing being rather Pyrrhic, but the Dutch hoped to strike in Europe. With the death of the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies that month, Cuypers was the highest ranking VOC officer in Batavia and became acting Governor-General. He ordered the remaining VOC forces to raid Portuguese possessions in Timor and elsewhere. The Sultan of Mataram, Amangkurat V, responded to ultimatums from Cuypers by publicly disowning the Portuguese and expelling his Portuguese advisors and residents, declaring neutrality in the war between the two European powers. Amangkurat was wise enough to realise that now was not the time to fight—but, perhaps, after the Dutch and Portuguese had weakened one another...

Meanwhile the Dutch fulfilled their orders, with the VOC fleets assembling at the Cape Colony and raiding Portuguese possessions in Angola and Mozambique. Their most celebrated attack was the raid on Zanzibar of April 14th 1829, in which the Portuguese’s shiny new possession was bombarded and burned by Dutch bomb-ships. It is the devastation of this attack, and the fact that the Portuguese would bring in Persian workers to help restore the island, that would lead to an enduring Persian influence in Zanzibar and the neighbouring coast, eventually eclipsing that of the Portuguese themselves.

The Governor of the Cape Colony, Adriaan Rhenius, was somewhat concerned with how the news of the war was impinging on his people. Although many of the Vordermanites who had seized control of the colony during the Jacobin Wars had fled to the north—the so-called ‘Boertrekkers’—a radical influence remained in Cape politics, and anything that weakened the authority of the colonial government might persuade them to rise up. However he was unable to reason with Admiral Willem Zoutman, who took many of the ships stationed at the Cape with him. Zoutman split off approximately one-quarter of his ships under Rear-Admiral[2] de Vries and ordered his subordinate to Guyana, while Zoutman and the remainder of the fleet would make for Europe according to his orders. De Vries sent brigs to scout out the Portuguese positions in Brazil and found that while Recife and Olinda were strongly held, they had only just restored order to São Luís. De Vries launched a surprise attack using overwhelming force, sank the Portuguese ships stationed there and seized the city—which had previously been chaotic, possibly controlled by revolting slaves—for the Dutch. He then sent ships to contact Van Nieuwenhuizen in order to coordinate their approach...

*

From: “Smoking Gun: The Brazilian War” by Gustav Pettersson, 1974—

Portuguese paralysis in the early part of the Brazilian War is somewhat understandable considering the corner the country had been backed into. Nonetheless the actions of the UPSA and the Empire of New Spain may seem slightly odd to a casual student of history. In order to understand the circumstances behind the Meridian Realignment it is instructive to study the political magazines that appeared in the UPSA during the Watchful Peace. For a brief recap, the UPSA’s national image had been inspired by the heroic resistance of colonists, abandoned by the mother country, to Anglo-American invasion during the First Platinean War (1763-1767). In the Second Platinean War (1779-1785) those colonists, outraged by the actions of French troops supposedly acting as Spain’s allies in crushing a Tahuantinsuya revolt,[3] fought off the French and declared independence, eventually taking the name ‘United Provinces of South America’. Britain aided them in their fight, while Portugal remained neutral on paper but in practice also assisted the colonists in exchange for the Meridians taking a more favourable approach to Portuguese/Spanish border disputes in South America.

The Third Platinean War (1804-1808) was a challenge to the UPSA’s ascent. Led by a radical President-General who had come to power in part due to the questionable death of his predecessor, the UPSA sought to spread its revolution to the newly established Empire of New Spain. The ruling Partido Solidaridad believed that New Spain was a ramshackle construction that would collapse if the Meridians kicked the door in, allowing the UPSA to gain control over the remainder of the former Spanish America, or at least part of it. The actual outcome was that the UPSA lost control of Lower Peru, suffered border adjustments in favour of Brazil, and its Tahuantinsuya allies faced persecution by the New Spanish. In order to understand the apparently paradoxical attitudes of the Meridian ruling classes to this defeat during the Watchful Peace, one must realise that the outcome of the war was not down to the initial fight that President-General Castelli had picked. The Boulangiste idea of sending an army to seize the capital of New Spain (the City of Mexico) by sea had always been fanciful, and it is perhaps not unsurprising that General Fernández failed—though the spectacular and self-destructive means by which the New Spanish defeated him would be much harder to predict. Yet this alone would not result in a defeat for the UPSA. General Pichegru fought hard in Upper Peru and, absent any other interventions, even Fernández’s defeat would perhaps have given the UPSA a small border expansion at the expense of New Granada.

However, the Cherry Massacre in the Falkland Islands drew the ENA and Great Britain into the war, and by this point the UPSA had little hope of escaping with status quo ante bellum. Meridian attitudes to these three enemies after the war were resentful but, aside from the usual fire-breathers, not marked by tremendous hatred or desire for revenge. Castelli, killed by a mob, was a scapegoat for all parts of the political spectrum. The Colorado Party castigated him for having provoked a war with New Spain, claiming that the country was unstable and its parts would have eventually joined the UPSA of their own accord. The Amarillo Party blamed him for the Cherry Massacre, destroying the good relationship the UPSA had had with the English-speaking world since its inception. In both cases the Meridian people recognised the UPSA had been the aggressor. America retained a certain Meridio-phobic minority as a result of the war, while Great Britain—which had suffered French invasion due to being unprotected as her navy had been sent to fight the Meridians—was more accepting of a new accord. Somewhat unusually for such wars, both countries had suffered badly and both acknowledged the war had been caused by a stupid mistake.

Thus, while the Meridians certainly harboured a certain resentment for the British, Americans and especially the New Spanish, they reserved their real hatred for the fourth enemy of the Third Platinean War. The Portuguese had entered the conflict towards the end, finally forcing the Meridians to submit and obtaining favourable border corrections in return for a very small contribution to the war—even their allies resented them for this. The Meridians perceived the Portuguese action as one of deliberate national humiliation. Furthermore, it was clear that the reasons that had led to Portuguese alignment initially for the UPSA (during the Second Platinean War) and later against it (during the Third) were entirely self-interested. While the British and Americans had often professed an admiration for Meridian fighting spirit, learning and institutions even when they were on the other side, the Portuguese had always viewed the UPSA with suspicion. In part the Enlightenment ideas of the Meridian Revolution had come from the exiled Portuguese Prime Minister Carvalho, who had lived in South America with his former Spanish sparring partner, the Marquis of Ensenada. The city of Montevideo sat on the northern bank of the River Plate across from Buenos Aires, and political ideas circulated back and forth between the two cities along with other trade. The Portuguese were always afraid that revolution would take hold in their own South American possessions, particularly in Montevideo and its Cisplatina province, given that both retained substantial Spanish-speaking populations from the period of dispute. They had taken an opportunity to weaken the UPSA, but for this backstabbing move they earned themselves undying enmity from all sectors of the Meridian populace. There is an apocryphal quote from President-General Portillo, when asked by the Cortes Nacionales about why he would not lead the UPSA into the Philippine War to oppose the New Spanish, answered that because doing so would put them on the same side as the Portuguese. An exaggeration, doubtless, but the sentiment is still clear.

Meridian rapproachment with the Empire of New Spain began under Portillo but reached its climax under President-General Vallejo. It was therefore a bipartisan effort, as Portillo was Colorado and Vallejo was Amarillo. Vallejo made himself very unpopular for breaking precedent and standing for re-election, but he did so because he wanted to see his diplomatic efforts through to the end. He was helped by the fact that the New Spanish King of Lower Peru, Gabriel, was a thoughtful and intelligent young man who recognised the realities of his position. He was careful not to roll back the more egalitarian laws that Lower Peru had enjoyed under Meridian rule—much to the disgust of many rich conservatives who had hoped for a Regressive monarch.[4] While he initially persecuted the Tahuantinsuya, Vallejo’s engagement led to a more equitable treatment of the natives. The Tahuantinsuya were still not permitted to show allegiance to their Inca (who now was living in exile in the Aymara Kingdom within the UPSA) but were accorded more civil rights. Gabriel also did not legalise slavery again, although he did retain the lax enforcement of the ban that had been the norm in the UPSA before President-General Carriego’s slave trade scandal and the hardening of abolitionist attitudes. While much of the New Spanish aristocracy remained contemptuous and fearful of the UPSA, Gabriel’s influence with his older brothers meant that the republic was not seen automatically as an enemy. And if not so, then perhaps...

*

From—“A History of Film: The 1960s” by Alfredo Parra (1981)

A MEETING AT LIMA (1964). Third remake of the classic historical story. Some consider this version (chiefly filmed in Scotland, although Pérousie was used to double for the Peruvian coast in exterior shots) to be a reaction to the extreme Diversitarian propaganda message of the Russian film The Man Who Never Was (1962) which seemed to state that even the act of friendship across national borders would lead to mental illness. A Meeting at Lima, by contrast, takes the well-known story and uses it as a subtle critique of such blunt approaches. The Meridian negotiator Felipe Riquelme (Ricardo Flores, in what some consider to be his finest performance) seeks to unite with his suspicious New Spanish counterpart Jorge Aguilar, Duke of Veracruz (Cristián Cabrera), by saying that by showing that their two countries’ are not solely defined by their opposition in the past, they only strengthen and solidify their different identities. The film ends on a hopeful note, with Riquelme looking out over Lima after the treaty is signed and reflecting that the UPSA has had its ups and downs, but as long as men and women remember its national spirit, it can never truly die. A Meeting at Lima was well received by critics, although taking considerable liberties with the historical record—for example, the Dutch ‘negotiator’ Laurens Speelman (Colin Gregson) was actually just a local Dutch trader who offered advice on what he thought his government would do, and there was no official Dutch input into the treaty. Given that there can be no version of this story entirely free from contemporary prejudice, however, these objections are lacking. A Meeting at Lima was voted third greatest film of the decade by the Film Institute of Salamanca in 1971.

*

From: “Smoking Gun: The Brazilian War” by Gustav Pettersson, 1974—

...President-General Sebastián Velasco, halfway through the six-year term that he was the first President-General to enjoy under the new constitution, faced considerable criticism from his own Colorado Party during the early part of the Brazilian War. As soon as (exaggerated) rumours of the Portuguese expeditionary force bogging down in northern Brazil were heard, pro-Meridian liberals in Montevideo and Rio Grande began agitating for an uprising to overthrow Portuguese rule. Meridian egalitarianism and republicanism had oft been admired by sympathisers in those cities, and isolated protests soon escalated into revolutionary marches. The Portuguese colonial troops stationed in Cisplatina and Rio Grande do Sul provinces fought a losing battle to maintain control. In Cordoba, the Colorado Party insisted that the country should move to support their brothers across the River Plate and declare war on Portugal.

But Velasco refused. He was accused of vacillation, dithering and cowardice by his own party, but these were untrue accusations. Velasco simply said that there would be a time for such a move and it was not yet reached. He seemed mostly concerned with negotiations with the New Spanish in Lima, a mission to which he had appointed the high-profile Blanco deputy (and former presidential candidate) Felipe Riquelme. The Colorados accused him of caring only about trade when their fellow revolutionaries were dying on the streets of Montevideo and Rio Grande. The situation only worsened in March 1829 when the real subject of Riquelme’s negotiations was leaked. The Colorado Party leadership was outraged by the idea of cooperation with the New Spanish and the President of the Cortes, Enrique López, publicly withdrew the support his party from Velasco.

Velasco however still enjoyed his own power base within the Cortes. When he announced the declaration of war against Portugal in April in cooperation with the New Spanish, he broke his supporters away from the official Colorado Party leadership, consisting of around 40% of the party. At the same time he appealed to the unaligned Blancos through his cooperation with Riquelme and reached out to the ‘President of Asturias’ (opposition leader in the Cortes), Rámon Almada. Almada agreed to temporarily support the President-General’s agenda for the good of the nation, but many of the more conservative Amarillo deputies disagreed and broke away from their own party. Velasco was thus left shoring up a coalition supporting him on the argentist centre of the political spectrum. Initially this was simply known by informal terms like ‘Velasco’s Coalition’, but it would go on to change the Meridian political system forever in the form of the Adamantine Party...









[1] Which was more pronounced in OTL due to the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War and Portuguese involvement in the Seven Years’ War.

[2] The Dutch rank is “Schout bij Nacht”.

[3] It’s actually rather more complex than that due to the ambiguity over exactly what approach the French had decided to take, see part #12.

[4] The term here being used anachronistically, it would not strictly be used in a political context until after the Popular Wars.


Part #120: Oranges are Not the Only Rulers

“At the end of the day, the only real winners in any war are crows and ravens.”

—Pablo Sanchez, 1847​

*

From “The Forging of Nations: The Popular Wars and their Legacy” by Alan Pressman (1965)—

The Brazilian War ostensibly began as a conflict between two old enemies, the Dutch and the Portuguese. However, both in public perceptions of the war and, to some extent, reality, one is forced to confront the idea that both sides managed to lose. The Dutch lost in home waters and the Portuguese lost overseas, yet neither loss seems to be paired with a lasting victory for either side. In order to better understand these circumstances, vital as they were in igniting the Popular Wars across Europe, we must delve deeper into the specifics involved.

It is important to understand that the Brazilian War did not ‘create’ the Popular Wars. The Popular Wars represent the final eruption of social pressure built up over twenty years of Watchful Peace, an enforced European system that almost everyone found unacceptable but had come into being after the sheer exhaustion of the Jacobin Wars. A new generation of angry young men (and not a few women) was growing up, a generation to home Jean-Baptiste Robespierre, Pierre Boulanger and Jean de Lisieux were nothing more than names. They knew nothing of the horrors of war and revolution—and many of their elders who did have personal experience of those things nonetheless saw them as a worthwhile price to pay to overcome the injustices they saw within the system of government they lived under. What the Brazilian War did was to show weakness in two (or three, depending on one’s perspective) such states and encourage those would-be revolutionaries that their time was now. Indeed the Populists, as we now name them, saw enough early success to inspire their fellows in other countries not directly touched by the Brazilian War, and the rest is history.

With their main fleet sunk at Flushing by the Portuguese, the Dutch had assembled a second navy cobbled together from the ships of the VOC in the east. This fleet, commanded by Admiral Zoutman, successfully raided the Portuguese possessions around the Indian Ocean while stripping much of the Dutch’s own forces in the region to do it. A portion of the fleet was redirected to Brazil under de Vries, where it linked up with Van Nieuwenhuizen—the effective instigator of the war—drove the Portuguese from São Luís and prevented them from further westward reconquest from the firmly held northern cities of Recife and Olinda. In any case the Portuguese forces soon found themselves with bigger problems on their hands. To the south, the Cisplatine and Riograndense Republics arose, the peoples of the cities of Montevideo and Rio Grande rising against the—now few—Portuguese troops in garrison there. After a period of delay, as President-General Velasco obtained his alliance with the New Spanish at the Treaty of Lima, the United Provinces of South America entered the war in support of the revolutionaries that their own ideas had inspired. The Portuguese paused their operations in the north and shifted more troops southwards, massing at Rio de Janeiro—which remained loyal, although the hinterland of Minas Gerais also rose in revolt. The precise nature of the rebellion in Minas Gerais is unclear and not many eyewitness accounts have survived. It seems probable that, regardless of what happened later on, initially it was a straightforward anti-authoritarian revolt complaining about taxation and poor working conditions in the mines that gave the province its name, and lacked the particular solidarity with Meridian ideas that the Cisplatine and Riograndense Republics had been founded upon.

Although the Portuguese had a fair number of troops to call upon, they suffered from Meridian domination of the waters. The Meridian Armada guarded the mouth of the River Plate from any attempts at incursion: the UPSA would not suffer the attacks via that mouth that she had faced in the three Platinean Wars.[1] Never again would Portuguese possession of the northern bank of the River Plate compromise Meridian power and territorial integrity. When Meridian troops landed in Montevideo, they were greeted as liberators, the people cheering in the streets and flying the Meridian flag alongside the flag of their own revolution, drawing upon similar colours and concepts as its inspiration. Yet while the Meridian Armada would play a major role in the conflict, it was their Riverine navy that was decisive in the quick collapse of Portuguese power in Cisplatina and Rio Grande. The Meridians had been enthusiastic steam-engineers during the Watchful Peace. Their relaxed economic approach and egalitarianism made the country a place where men could make their fortunes in new industries. One such man was a Neapolitan immigrant, Enrico Morelli. Arriving in the country shortly after the Third Platinean War, he worked for several of the Meridian industrialists building textile factories on the British model, drawing upon the wool both from the UPSA’s own farms and also that traded to them by Portuguese in less-industrialised Brazil. Once he had amassed a small fortune, he struck out himself in 1817 with a steamboat venture. Morelli was not the first man to focus on using steam solely for riverine barges: Burgoyne in Britain and de Clerck in Flanders predate him, to name two. Nonetheless his business went from strength to strength, with his steamboats enhancing trade all up the River Plate, through the canals that his fellow industrialists were constructing—and up the Uruguay River to trade with the Brazilians. Where trade barges could go, so could riverine warships. And the Meridian Armada had not failed to take notice of Morelli’s successes. When the Meridians sent their steamcraft up the Uruguay River to take control of the Cisplatine interior, they were guided by Morelli’s own boatmen in ill-fitting naval uniform, men who knew the river as well as the few Portuguese who remained to defend it.

But while the Portuguese underwent reversals in Brazil, their fortunes faired better closer to home—for the moment. Admiral Zoutman’s main Dutch force was rounding Guinea and heading for Europe—and the Portuguese knew about it. A Portuguese trader in Dakar, selling manufactured goods to the Royal Africa Company, received intelligence of the approaching fleet (slowed by Zoutman assembling the force and then directing de Vries’ portion to Brazil) and promptly fled to bring the news to Lisbon. The trader was a fast clipper ship and made it to Portugal several days ahead of the Dutch. The Portuguese, though not as quick to embrace the innovations of the age as some nations, had invested in an excellent Optel semaphore network—they would be foolish to do anything else, as the nascent form of the technology had helped them repel Drouet’s French during the Iberian phase of the Jacobin Wars. A small army with good communications could hold off a big army without them, rushing troops to wherever they were needed along the border.

Thus the Portuguese court soon knew of the approaching Dutch. The trader, Filipe Cunhal, knew something of the size of the fleet—he overestimated, not knowing that de Vries had taken part of the force to South America. John VI asked the Duke of Aveiro and his other ministers for their advice. They replied that the remaining Portuguese home fleet could defeat such a Dutch force, but it would be a Pyrrhic victory, and since New Spain had entered the war, John feared a second attempt at landing troops in the Peninsula to take the Castilian throne.[2] Portugal would need a fleet to ward off any attempt. The New Spanish Armada was not very large and could be held back by what ships Portugal possessed—but not if the Dutch decimated those ships first.

The solution (as it seemed) came from Aveiro himself. He had been working with the Castilian regime and the Portuguese ‘advisors’ who still held Alfonso XII in thrall, having raised him from a child. At present Castile had remained neutral in the conflict, but the entry of New Spain (and the UPSA!) into the war would justify her entry, and Alfonso did whatever the Portuguese told him to do. Though the Castilian Armada had been reduced in size by the Philippine War, enough ships remained in port at Cadiz to play a significant part. Aveiro had been planning to send the Castilian ships to Brazil to aid the Portuguese forces, but now a different role suggested itself. The Castilian fleet could be used to destroy the Dutch and remove them from the equation, thus leaving the Portuguese unharmed and able to guard against any New Spanish invasion. King John approved the plan. A small Portuguese force went along with the Castilians, including special weapons created by the Portuguese inventor Estêvão Marques. The real reason the Portuguese were there, of course, was to ensure the Castilians did not get any funny ideas about avoiding giving battle to an enemy that, after all, had very little to do with them.

September 15th 1829 saw the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, one of many naval battles to have been fought some distance away from that Portuguese promontory. The Castilians and Portuguese had a particular advantage: the Dutch were becalmed, an unusual instance in that part of the Atlantic. Their paralysis would last only hours, but it gave Estêvão Marques the chance to try his new weapons. Marques’ chief innovation was the development of steam tugs that, unlike the earlier models used by the French, were capable of towing anything up to the size of a ship of the line even on the open ocean without capsizing. The tugs were usually themselves towed behind the larger ships, but now they went into action. The Portuguese warships lowered their own sails. Some were equipped to heat hot-shot, while others possessed long-guns with rifled barrels, taking many minutes to reload but capable of accurately firing at far greater range than most. Using their steam tows, the Portuguese were able to approach the massed Dutch ships at angles that made return fire difficult, raking their bows with broadsides and flinging the occasional hot shot into their midst, setting light to rigging and sails. The Dutch did their best to fight back, but by the time the wind returned, the Portuguese had sank thirteen Dutch ships for only three of their own lost.

With the wind once again in play, the battle’s second phase took place. The Portuguese withdrew and the Castilians fought more conventionally, now slightly outnumbering the Dutch thanks to Marques’ successes. The Castilian commander, Fernando Díaz, was a brave man and a respected commander. Zoutman was also a skilled commander, but possessed a very different force. The Castilians were organised, well supplied and used to fighting as one force, but inexperienced. The Dutch had just fought their way all the way from Batavia, but were an awkward coalition of captains used to operating more independently in the service of the VOC. The two joined in battle and, as the sun sank below the horizon, the Castilians emerged triumphant. Once again the victory was Pyrrhic: nineteen Castilian ships and ten Portuguese returned to port, while twelve Dutch ships managed to escape. The majority of both fleets joined the bones of their grandfathers on the sea bed.

In the short run, the Battle of Cape St Vincent appeared to help the Portuguese cause, or at least hurt the Dutch one. Stadtholder William VII was young, inexperienced, and embattled. He relied too strongly on one Oren Scherman, a member of the States-General so dominant within the Council of Ministers that he was effectively Prime Minister in all but name—an office repellent to many Dutch constitutionalists, who prized the more committee style of government that their Republic had prospered under. Furthermore, though undoubtedly clever, Scherman was hugely unpopular with the Dutch people, something which the sheltered William VII did not truly appreciate until it was too late. There were dark rumours about certain...proclivities he enjoyed which always ended in shallow graves, and whether those graves contained women, children or animals depended on who was whispering the rumour. It is difficult now to conclude whether there was really anything to these rumours or whether they were born from public dissatisfaction with Scherman’s arbitrary rule in the name of the Stadtholder, though some have produced letters from other members of the Council of Ministers suggesting that at least some of the darker suggestions were true.

The Dutch Republic had survived multiple attempts to overthrow it. Born in the fire of the Eighty Years’ War, the Republic had resisted invasion from without and revolution from within. In the early part of the Jacobin Wars, the so-called ‘Patriots’—democrats inspired by both the Meridians and the early phase of the French Revolution—had been crushed with Fleming assistance. The Jacobin Wars had brought the Dutch and Flemings closer together, from traditional enemies to close allies. Later, when Lisieux had invaded Flanders as the opening of the War of the Nations, the Dutch had come to Flanders’ aid, even as they themselves faced sporadic attempts at revolution by the Vordermanites. A certain supra-national image of sorts had been created in those days, when the Walloons had turned against the Flemings and Dutch at the Battle of La Belle Alliance, and the French had been driven from Brussels with help from the German states. The Vordermanites might have been bloodily suppressed and their writings banned, Sijbren Vorderman might have died in exile in Denmark, but nonetheless they had the last laugh. A sense of Germanic fellow feeling had settled over the Low Countries, in which the Latin Walloons were viewed with suspicion as traitors and discriminated against in law, their language and customs suppressed. The Flemings and Dutch participated in the Concert of Germany, though suspicious about Saxon intentions, and appeared to have successfully integrated the German states that they had overrun in the early part of the Jacobin Wars ‘for their own protection’. In reality, while the Flemings—ruled by Palatine Wittelsbachs—did mostly achieve this, discontent continued to rumble in the former German states now part of the United Netherlands. Representation in the States-General was less freely granted than to the equivalent institution in Brussels, and while places like Cleves, East Frisia and Munster might elect their own States-Provincial on the Dutch model, in practice these entities were treated with scorn by the high and the mighty in Amsterdam. Furthermore, these states lay near to the Mittelbund, some bordering it, and their peoples became swept into the Schmidtist fever sweeping the region. But this would come later.

When the few remaining ships from Zoutman’s fleet found themselves in Flushing, the news spread like wildfire. Scherman only poured oil on the flames when he tried to suppress the news and make it a criminal offence to repeat it: a foolish thing to do in an age of semaphore, particularly when many used cryptograms that made it almost impossible to trace who was sending a message. The breaking point came when the Nederlands Dagblad, a respected newspaper published in Rotterdam and circulating throughout the country,[3] openly published the news, defying Scherman’s demand by printing it in the form “many telegraphers throughout the country are discussing...” rather than claiming it as reality. Of course the difference was purely philosophical. Scherman sent his private army of bullyboys to have the Dagblad stopped, but guildsmen turned out to defend the presses, an oil lamp was knocked over in the struggle and the newspaper’s offices burned down, taking a significant part of the city with them. Public anger, blaming this on Scherman, soon spread. There were many in the Netherlands, Vordermanites and Adamantine Rouvroyistes both, who seized upon the widespread fury for their own purposes. Wild rumours spread, such as the VOC really having more ships in reserve but caring more about their profits than about the Dutch people they ostensibly served. One of the rumours, about Van Nieuwenhuizen having started the war, was true—but it blended in with the others seamlessly. An opportunistic Portuguese raid or two on the now almost defenceless Dutch coastline did not help.

Desperate for his position, William VII appealed for help from the King of Flanders, Maximilian II Charles.[4] But Maximilian was not as ready to give it as had been his father and brother. Never particularly wanting the throne, he had hoped to be a great war leader in the service of his older brother, helping to cement the ramshackle state that his father had created. He viewed the Dutch as opportunists, and never forgot that for decades they had prevented the Flemings—whether under Spanish or Austrian rule—from taking their own place among the world’s trading powers by closing the Dutch-controlled mouth of the Scheldt to prevent access to Flanders’ principal port of Antwerp. While the Dutch had not sought to do so since the Jacobin Wars, and had allowed Charles Theodore II to re-found the Ostend Company, Maximilian believed that they sought to control the Ostend Company and fold it into the VOC. The Dutch sought to suppress all trade competition and to leave the Flemings dependent on their navy the next time there was a war. Scherman had even increased taxes on the Scheldt with the obvious implication of warning the Flemings that he had his boot on their necks. And Maximilian, a hard man who had fought at the Battle of La Belle Alliance, was unwilling to accept that.

Maximilian told William that he would help him suppress the rebellion, on two conditions: dismiss Scherman, and seek a peace with honour with Portugal, for he would not commit Flanders to enter the Brazilian War directly. William initially said no, unwilling to contemplate such an idea, but after some agonising and discussions with his other advisors, agreed. A mistake. By now Scherman had extended his tentacles throughout the Council and the Estates-General, and at least three of the men William talked to immediately turned around and told Scherman. Scherman, convinced he could crush the rebellion single-handedly and viewing the stadtholder with scorn, spread a story that William was ill and bedbound, while in reality having him imprisoned. The real story soon came out, of course, and men burned Scherman in effigy in the streets, calling him “the Dutch Joshua Churchill”.

It was on October 16th 1829 that the Popular Wars can truly be said to have begun, for it was then that a state army crossed a border not to suppress a popular uprising, but to aid it. The army was that of Flanders, and the border was that which she shared with the dying Dutch Republic. A fuse lit thousands of miles away in Brazil had found its first powder keg...



















[1] A bit anachronistic, as the UPSA didn’t exist at the time of the First Platinean War.

[2] The New Spanish previously tried this during the Philippine War (1817-21).

[3] Aided by the fact that the Dutch have been promoting a standardised version of the Dutch language for use in their semaphore network for some years now, and it is widely known (and another cause of resentment among the former German provinces).

[4] The regnal numbers of Flanders are counted from the rulers of the Rhine Palatinate, which had already had one Maximilian. Maximilian II is the younger brother of Charles Theodore II, who died childless in 1827.
 
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