Look to the West (prose)

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Look to the West

A Timeline

by the Hon. Thande

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 every British coronation in any Kingdom of the Union. 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 - CGN.


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 Morrisite's 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. CGN.

[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 - CGN.

[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, before anyone asks.
[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] Yes, 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 [0]​


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![3] 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!" [4]

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.[5]

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. [6] 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[7]. 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...



[0] 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.

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

[2] 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.

[3] This rather strange oath was a phrase of his great-uncle Charles II and I've appropriated it for him.

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

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

[6] In OTL, also TTL.

[7] Yes, that's his real name.

[8] Psychologists.




Interlude #1: The Age of Supremacy

INSTITUTE MISSION TAPE TRANSCRIPT 07/06/20: CLASSIFIED LEVEL THANDE MOST SECRET

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 1806-10: 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​

*

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 [0]​

*

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.[1] 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.[2]

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.[3] 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[4] 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[5], 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.[6]

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.[7]

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.








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

[1] This may sound ASBy or an idea that I've made up, but in fact it's entirely OTL.

[2] Again this is OTL.

[3] 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.

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

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

[6] 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.

[7] 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.

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 Melo 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 town of La Plata 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 Melo 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. Melo 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.

Melo 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 a candidate from one of the Hapsburg cadet lines and Maria Theresa's armies occupied the Krakow region, preparing to take Warsaw and attempt to impose the 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.​
 
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