Part #274: This Sceptr’d Isle
“ALL STATIONS WHITE GATE TO ALL STATIONS PRIORITY ABBEY ONE ABBEY.
IMPLEMENT SOUTHWARK-UXBRIDGE-EALING REPEAT ESS YOU EE FOR SUETONIUS PROTOCOL.
AUTHORISATION LEVEL
ARTHUR, REPEAT, AUTHORISATION ABBEY RAINHAM TYBURN HACKNEY UXBRIDGE RAINHAM.
ACKNOWLEDGE RECEIPT THEN IMPLEMENT IMMEDIATELY. DETAILS TO FOLLOW VIA AUTHORISED MEANS.
MESSAGE REPEATS...”
–part of a transmission to or from the English Security Directorate base at Snowdrop House, Croydon, intercepted and decrypted by Thande Institute personnel
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From: Motext Pages EX801C-K [retrieved 22/11/19].
Remarks: These pages are listed under “SAAX English History Revision”.
Extraneous advertising has been left intact.
English history is often a popular subject at Fundamental level.[1] You may have encountered this yourself earlier in your educational career. Young children, especially boys, love the tales of blood and thunder, heroes and warriors and gruesome executions, that constitute a large portion of your country’s earlier history. By contrast, more recent and contemporary history frequently finds deaf ears with that group unless skilfully taught. England was involved in the three major global conflicts of the twentieth century (discounting the Pandoric War as part of the twentieth), and typically the technical aspects of her military arsenal find their obsessives at a later age. Yet what of the so-called home front? The able teacher at fundamental level will frequently seek to contextualise study of the Black Twenties, the Sunrise War and the Last War of Supremacy by encouraging her or his pupils to seek out parents and grandparents who lived through those periods. A personal connection can make all the difference to what younger pupils will frequently perceive as rather dull social history, by contrast to those earlier periods of story and of song.
Yet now you are older, you should be able to perceive that from an adult perspective, things are rather different. To describe a historical period as ‘interesting’ is frequently a euphemism for describing how miserable it was to live through for our ancestors fortunate enough to do so. (Fortunate, because the alternative was not to live “through” it, as so many found their lives cut short). Here and now, you live in a country which has witnessed political stability and largely prosperous governance for over a century. This is a remarkable aberration on the historical record, one which we all sincerely hope will continue. Let the history books of our time have so little to say that it can be disposed of in a paragraph! Such seeming disappointment belies the fact that it is difficult to have anything to say about multiple generations growing up and living their lives to the full, not to be cut short by war or unrest.
Lest you accuse the writer of Sanchezista views for such a reflection(!) let us now consider what divides England from her neighbours, in particular those of continental Europe. The aberrant nature of the past century previously mentioned means that the state of modern England has certainly not filtered down to the bedrock of foreigners’ stereotypes of our nation. Stereotypes do shift over time; Germans, for example, are now perceived as more orderly and less argumentative than they were in the days of the Holy Roman Empire. Yet this takes many years, and the stereotypes invariably lag behind the reality. The French and many other nations remain sceptical of English cooking, for example, ignoring the fact that it has been enriched by Bengali Natalese and Guinean cuisine (among others) for over a century. Many still base their perceptions of England on the lean times of the major wars, or even on the period of nineteenth-century decline as a mere appendage of the ENA. First and foremost among these stereotypes, however, is the sense that England is an “ile de folie” (Isle of Madness), always three meals away from violent revolution. Such a view can still be seen today among authorised tourists and visitors, yet though it may offend us with how far removed it is from the modern England we live in, it is easy to see how the impression was established.
Indeed, the century and more of relative stability England has enjoyed is arguably the longest period she has had without a change of regime, enacted violently or otherwise. Formally we date the start of this period to 1902, the date of the repeal of the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland. As we shall see in this review, many rulers throughout history have attempted to unite the whole of the British Isles, or at least the whole of Great Britain, under a single regime. The two centuries between 1707 and 1902 represents the most successful attempt to do so, yet if its architects had imagined it would be an end to internal struggle, they were sorely mistaken. Let us go back to the beginning of written history in this island in order to contextualise our present, fortunate state and the period preceding it.
There was a Britain, as in the land of the Britons (of whom the modern Welsh, Cornish and Bretons in France are the last descendants) long before there was an England. The ancestors of the Anglo-Saxon folk were dwelling in what is now Jutland, Germany and Belgium in these early years, the first recorded attestation to their existence and location being in the “Germania” by the Roman historian Tacitus in about AD 100. Frequently it is only by reference to the writings of the civilised Mediterranean peoples of these times that we can uncover confirmed references to what were then considered barbarians, be they Britons or Anglo-Saxons. Archaeological inference does its best to fill in the gaps.
We must therefore look to the voyages of Pytheas, a Greek explorer from the Greek colony of Massalia (modern Marseilles in France) who was the first recorded Mediterranean to visit and explore the British Isles sometime in the fourth century BC. These would already have been vaguely known to the Greeks because of the tin trade; in the ancient world, Great Britain’s wealth lay in the tin mines of what would become Cornwall. Some have identified the British Isles with the legendary Greek ‘tin isles’ or Cassiterides (recorded by Herodotus in 430 BC) although this is not proven. Pytheas recorded names such as “Kantion” (which became today’s Kent) and the first record of the name ‘Britain’ itself, from a Welsh name meaning ‘Land of the Tattooed People’. This is the point at which any kind of rigorous history of the British Isles must commence, lest we fall into the trap (like Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century AD) of filling in gaps with whatever fantasies we desire. Yet gaps still certainly exist; it is a remarkable fact of the history of these islands that eras in which we can write with certainty and good evidence may precede eras which are nothing but guesswork.
The tin trade written of by Pytheas continued between the native British (or Welsh) kingdoms and continental peoples, including other Celts and people of different backgrounds. The Parisii tribe from Gaul (who gave their name to the modern French capital of Paris) represent the first (somewhat) recorded example of the many invasions of Great Britain by new peoples over time, taking over what is now the East Riding of Yorkshire. In 55 BC Julius Caesar, having conquered Gaul for the Roman Empire, also voyaged to Britain and made an unsuccessful attempt to conquer it as well. However, his appearance did establish economic links, and soon Rome became the chief player in the tin trade. It would not be until Emperor Claudius almost a century later that the Romans seriously attempted to make Britain part of the Empire, which was achieved despite the storied resistance of Boudicca, Queen of the Iceni tribe of what is now East Anglia.
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The Romans would rule ‘Britannia’ as a province[2] for about three and a half centuries before a phased withdrawal due to problems elsewhere. Yet this statement of apparent stability ignores the fact that Britannia was involved in the (many) civil wars and succession disputes that the Empire witnessed during this time, as well as battles on her borders. The Romans repeatedly attempted to conquer what is now Scotland and Northumberland, always failing to hold on to their conquests for more than a few decades at a time despite the building of the Antonine Wall. For fourteen years between 260 and 274 AD, Britannia (together with Gaul and Iberia for a time) were ruled by the rebel claimant emperor Postumus and his successors, in defiance of Emperor Gallienus in Rome. In 306 AD Constantine the Great was proclaimed Emperor whilst living in Britannia, at the city of Eboracum (modern York). It was here, in what was thought of as a backwater of the Empire, that the great tale began of the man who would establish his eastern capital at Constantinople (formerly Byzantium) to last a thousand years and be known simply as ‘the City’, whose reign was the beginning of Christianity becoming the dominant religion of Europe.
Constantine’s successor Constantine III would also proclaim himself Emperor in Britannia in 407 AD, but this was the end for the Romans in Britain. With the withdrawal of Roman military forces, the local Romanised Britons found themselves vulnerable. It was at this point that we transition from the relatively reputable scholarship of the Mediterranean civilisations to the realm of legend and myth. It does not help that many Britons naturally took their name from Constantine (“Custennin” in Welsh) and rulers with that name were frequently confused with one another by historians after the fact.
Attempting to reconstruct events in this era has been a challenge for historians old and new, with about the only extant primary source being St Gildas’ “De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae”, usually known as “On the Ruin of Britain”. Later chroniclers typically inflated vague references into coherent but largely fictional tales, much of which forms the basis for the modern Arthurian mythos. King Arthur, if he existed at all, was likely a ‘Sub-Roman’ leader of the Briton states resisting the Anglo-Saxons. A more historically attested example of such a leader is Ambrosius Aurelianus (Emrys Wledig in Welsh) whom Gildas records defeated the Anglo-Saxons. Why were the Anglo-Saxons there in the first place? According to many chronicles of both English and Welsh origins, the Anglo-Saxon mercenaries Hengest and Horsa were invited to bring their troops to Britain by the tyrannical usurper Vortigern. The purpose of this was to repel invaders, such as the Scots (coming from Ireland, then called Scotland) as Roman forces were no longer stationed in Britain. Hengest and Horsa allegedly decided this land was to their liking, and the Anglo-Saxons began conquering and settling the land from east to west. They named the native Britons “Wealas” (Welsh) meaning ‘foreigners’. The same root was used by other Germanic-speaking peoples to name regions such as Wallonia in France/Belgium and Wallachia in Romania. Legends from this period also suggest that the Welsh banner of a red dragon, and the Anglo-Saxon banner of a white dragon (used by the City of London even after the Norman Conquest, until its abolition by the Populists) stemmed from an alleged dream by the sorceror Merlin of two such dragons fighting.
Despite victories from Mons Badonicus in around 500 AD to Hatfield Chase in 633 AD,[3] the Welsh were slowly driven from east to west until they were left with only Wales, Cornwall and Strathclyde; the latter was conquered by the Kingdom of Alba (Scotland) in the eleventh century. Historians today debate whether this represented population movements or merely acculturation, and there is evidence of continued Welsh settlements in English-speaking lands. But the lands which had been taken from the Welsh states by the Anglo-Saxons were called ‘Lloegr’ or ‘the Lost Lands’ by the Welsh. The Anglo-Saxons, meanwhile, called them Englaland, later England. This name stemmed from one of the four peoples making up the Anglo-Saxons, the Angles (plural Engla) from the region of Angeln in Germany. The others were the Saxons from Saxony (by the old definition), Frisians from Frisia and Jutes from Jutland—the latter mostly restricted to Kent and the Isle of Wight. It remains unclear why the name came from the Angles, as the Saxons were much more numerous. Traces of both peoples’ names can be seen in county and regional names across modern England. The East Saxons, Middle Saxons and South Saxons established the counties of Essex, Middlesex and Sussex respectively; the name Wessex for the West Saxons is lost, as it grew to took in a much larger area. Meanwhile the Angles lent their name to East Anglia. Angles were also important in the northern parts of England and what is now south-eastern Scotland. It remains a Heritage Point of Controversy over whether the Scottish capital of Edinburgh began as an Anglish city (Edwin’s Burh). Prior to settlement by Angles, the region had been ruled by the Gododdin, a Welsh people; the modern Scottish identity typically focuses more on the Irish-derived western invaders’ kingdom of Dalriada.
Although later English rulers sought to conquer Wales, Cornwall and Scotland with varied success, in terms of cultural continuity no further dramatic shifts of the borders were achieved from then onwards. The borders were not strictly delineated, however, and there continued to be greater Welsh influence in what is now Liverpool, Lancashire, Cheshire, Shropshire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire. Cumbria (whose name comes from ‘Cymru’, the Welsh name for Wales) also had lasting influence and frequently went back and forth between England and Scotland later on. The area of lasting Welsh influence in England is today often called ‘Rheged’, although strictly that name historically referred only to a single kingdom in the northern part of the region.[4] Worcestershire and parts of Warwickshire are also sometimes included, due to their historic combination with Gloucestershire as the kingdom of Hwicce. Despite its vagueness, this influence is nonetheless highlighted as the historical origins of the east-west divide in England which would become highly important in later centuries.[5]
This is not to say that things were quiet. In this time England is popularly known as the ‘Heptarchy’ after the seven main English kingdoms: East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Mercia, Northumbria, Sussex and Wessex. No sooner had the Anglo-Saxon invaders converted to Christianity that they were faced with a new wave of pagan Germanic invaders—the Vikings as they are known today, though at the time they were typically referred to simply as Norsemen and Danes. The Vikings rapidly defeated and conquered the once-great kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia, bringing to an end the scholarly traditions of the Northumbrians and the economic innovations of the Mercians. Only Wessex, and the leadership of Alfred the Great, stood in their way. After his victory in the Battle of Edington in 878, England was divided between an expanded Wessex and the ‘Danelaw’ in the north-east. Years of Viking rule left a lasting cultural and linguistic divide between the north and south of England, which remains to this day.[6]
Both before and after the Viking conquest, multiple Anglo-Saxon kings had claimed to be ‘Bretwalda’ or ruler of all Britain, a title reflecting their subjugation of other Anglo-Saxon and Celtic monarchs. Such fealties never outlasted the death of the individual king, however. Identifying the first ‘real’ king of all the English is a troublesome task for pedants. Aethelstan,[7] grandson of Alfred, was first able to drive the Vikings from York, albeit only temporarily, after the Battle of Brunanburh in 937. England was then ruled by West Saxon monarchs until (after all that) being taken over by Danish kings in 1013-14 and 1016-1042. By this point, however, things were quite different, with the Danes having adopted Christianity and things assuming more the nature of a power struggle rather than a fight for cultural survival. The Danes had also separately established the Duchy of Normandy (land of the Northmen) in France. Normandy was already playing a role in English politics: King Aethelred the Unready fled there after the brief takeover by Sweyn Forkbeard, and married Emma of Normandy (who went on to marry Sweyn’s king Cnut or Canute after Aethelred’s death).
This represented a foot in the door which would ultimately lead to the Norman Conquest in 1066, after the last Anglo-Saxon King, Harold Godwinson, successfully defeated a Norwegian attack at the Battle of Stamford Bridge only to fall to William the Conqueror. The Normans, who had become acculturated and spoke a form of the French language, ruthlessly took over England, suppressed the Anglo-Saxon nobility and scholars, and set the country down a quite different path. The richness of the English language we speak today stems in part by the fact that often under Norman rule there was a French word for a privileged form and an Anglo-Saxon word for a peasant form. For example, in many languages (such as the French of France) typically the same word is used for an animal and its meat, e.g. “mouton” for sheep, cognate to ‘mutton’ in English. But in English we have both an Anglo-Saxon word for the animal (as used by the poor Anglo-Saxon shepherds out in the field) and a French-derived one for its meat (as used by the rich Norman nobles eating it).
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England had certainly been no stranger to civil wars under Anglo-Saxon rule, but the Normans brought her into a wider world of power struggles. For the next four centuries, the rulers of England would be more concerned with attempting to seize the throne of France (jealous of the kings they owned theoretical fealty to as Dukes of Normandy) than the welfare of England. Throughout this period there were also many purely internal power struggles, beginning with the probable assassination of William the Conqueror’s son and successor in 1100. ‘The Anarchy’ of the twelfth century was a struggle for the throne between Stephen of Blois and Matilda (Empress Maud), so long-running and bitter that it was dubbed the years ‘when Christ and his angels slept’.
Matilda’s second husband Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, was the father of England’s next dynasty, the Plantagenets or Angevins (meaning ‘of Anjou’). Internal unrest at this time, especially under the hapless King John Lackland, is recorded in the legends of Robin Hood. There was even a brief French invasion under Louis VIII of France, attempting to claim the throne. John was forced to sign Magna Carta, the Great Charter, with his rebellious barons. This is sometimes highlighted as the start of English liberty in its modern sense (for example, it is the origins of trial by jury) but perhaps a better choice is the later baronial rebellion against Henry III led by Simon de Montfort. Parliaments had already existed as gatherings, evolving from the ‘Curia Regis’ or royal court, but it was under de Montfort’s (temporary) government that royal power was first limited and the beginnings of the modern Parliament originated. He would later become particularly idolised in the Dawn of the Century era[8] when the new regime attacked the old Populist credo that true liberty had only begun with the violence of the Inglorious Revolution, instead drawing a line of steady progress from these ancestral events.
Henry III’s son Edward I, known as Longshanks and the Hammer of the Scots, was responsible for the full conquest of Wales and its incorporation into the English crown. Despite the latter cognomen, he was unable to permanently secure an English-backed puppet king of the latter.
Plantagenet rule is regarded as having ended when Henry Bolingbroke seized the throne from the incumbent Richard II after the crisis of the fourteenth century (including the first phase of the Hundred Years’ War with France, the Black Death, the freeze of peasants’ wages, and the ensuing Peasants’ Revolt). Henry IV, as he became, was the son of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and a son of Edward III of England, and his cadet branch was known as the House of Lancaster. His son Henry V won a great victory over the French at Agincourt in 1415, but died only a few years later and all his conquests were lost under his incapable son Henry VI. The rival House of York, descended from a different son of Edward III, contested the claim over a series of civil wars known as the Wars of the Roses (in reference to the red rose of Lancashire and white rose of Yorkshire). Typically today these are portrayed as a struggle between the West and the North for control of the South, but this is based on working a misconception backwards from the end of the conflict. Regional loyalties to the two houses did not follow such predictable patterns, and geographic names can be misleading when they refer to noble titles. The belief arose because at the final clash of the conflict at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, the two sides were led by Richard III (who had grown up partly in Yorkshire and was very popular in the city of York itself) and Henry Tudor, later Henry VII after his victory, who was thoroughly Welsh and added the Welsh red dragon to the royal coat of arms. Henry’s claim to the throne was very tenuous and rebellions by false claimants occurred during his reign. However, he was regarded as a shrewd economic manager (financing the first English exploration of the Novamund in 1497, which rediscovered North America). After centuries of near-continuous wars in France and power struggles at home, it seemed that someone had finally stabilised England.
Henry VII’s son Henry VIII, however, was (somewhat understandably) obsessed with providing a stable succession, marrying six wives and breaking the link between the English Church and Rome in an attempt to secure a male heir. While religious divides had already existed, such as the pre-Protestant Lollard movement in the 1400s and 1500s, Henry’s explicit break with Rome ultimately provided more reasons for making future royal successions unstable. England repeatedly went back and forth between Protestantism and Catholicism as Henry’s three children succeeded to the throne in turn. Queen Elizabeth, the third child, possibly ordered the execution of the exiled Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, which together with piracy brought England to the brink of conquest by the powerful Catholic Spanish Empire under her widowed brother-in-law Philip II. The fact that Philip had previously been co-monarch with Elizabeth’s older sister Mary I led to the important precedent of Parliament limiting the power of a foreign ruler. The existence of a united Kingdom of Ireland in personal union with England (created, at least on paper, by Henry VIII) was also internationally recognised at this time.[9]
After Elizabeth died without an heir in 1603, the throne passed to the Scottish House of Stuart, and King James VI of Scots became James I of England. This therefore began the “status quo” as we know it today, of England and Scotland as two separate nations with their own Parliaments and policies but sharing a monarch. The historian Michael Calladine once described the ensuing three hundred years as ‘A long and bumpy road to get back to precisely where we started’. It is worth noting that King James himself did want deeper political union even at the time, but at that point the Scots were typically more enthusiastic about this than the English. James was subject to the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, attempting to blow up both him and Parliament; its defeat is celebrated throughout the English-speaking world on November 5th every year. It was also during his reign that the first permanent settlements were established in the Novamund, the beginnings of the ENA: Jamestown in Virginia and Plymouth in New England. The latter was founded by the Puritans, a group who felt that English Protestantism did not go far enough. When James was succeeded by his son Charles (after whom Carolina was named), the latter proved less open to compromise and more inclined to believe his own rhetoric about the divine right of kings. The very complex English Civil War (properly the Wars of the Three Kingdoms) ensued. During this period Charles generally enjoyed support from the people of the North and the West, while Parliament had the support of the wealthy South. The war ended with Charles defeated and executed; Parliament seized power as a republican Commonwealth dominated by the Puritan Oliver Cromwell as military dictator.
Charles’ son Charles II returned to the throne in 1660, more out of lack of English enthusiasm for any alternative after Cromwell’s death than any particular enthusiasm for him personally. He presided over the bawdy Restoration period as people recovered from the cold fundamentalism of the Interregnum. Charles II’s government treated everything done under the Commonwealth as null and void, and for many years attempts at reform to England’s mediaeval institutions were stymied by the Haraldsson’s Maxim-like comparison of all reformers to Cromwell. Throughout both the Interregnum and Restoration periods, England fought multiple wars with the rival naval power of the Dutch Republic.
Charles II died without an heir, and his Catholic brother James II (who, as Duke of York, had given his name to New York) was overthrown in the First Glorious Revolution. His daughter Mary II came to the throne together with William of Orange as William III, but once again no heir proceeded from either them or her sister Queen Anne. In order to prevent the exiled James and his Catholic descendants returning to power—the Jacobite cause—Parliament invited in the Guelph rulers of Hanover in the Holy Roman Empire, specifically the Elector who became George I. The Scottish Parliament was bribed into voting for a merger with England as the Kingdom of Great Britain, the Act of Union, which would persist for the next two centuries and was originally intended to avoid a separate Jacobite succession there. The Jacobites would launch three major rebellions in their name, in 1715, 1745 and 1749, before their final defeat. These merged into the broader power struggle with France commonly called the Wars of Supremacy, so called because they determined whose language and culture would go on to dominate North America and other regions. Throughout this period, Parliament grew in power and the institution then known as the Prime Minister was unofficially created. In the mid-eighteenth century, the exiled prince Frederick proclaimed his succession to the throne following his father’s death on the battlefield, returning with the help of American colonial troops in the Second Glorious Revolution. Under Frederick the various English colonies in North America became the ENA. For the next fifty years, however, the ENA would remain a subordinate partner to the Kingdom of Great Britain.
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As well as driving the French from most of North America and Guinea but failing to budge them from India, as well as creating the United Provinces of South America (for better and for worse) the Wars of Supremacy also bankrupted France and led to the French Revolution. The heir to the throne was killed on the battlefield of the early Jacobin Wars, and Henry IX and the reformer Charles James Fox proved inadequate to face the shock invasion of Lisieux’s forces in 1807. Britain and her allies re-entered the war and the Republican French were ultimately defeated, yet Britain’s situation had changed altogether. The previous economic dominance of the South of England had been weakened, and under the new regime of the Duke of Marlborough, it was the West which grew wealthier on trade with the ENA. Scottish historiography implies a long history of mistreatment at English hands throughout the period of Union, but it is fair to say that under the last part of the Marlesburgensian regime was when Scotland became singled out for reasons other than Jacobite sympathies.
As every child learns in school, the dictatorship of Marlborough’s son Bloody Blandford would only be overthrown with the long years of fire and blood of the Inglorious Revolution. This was the British front of the Popular Wars. Although the West had grown wealthy under Marlborough, it had also developed extensive people’s movements such as trade unions in order to protect the rights of the workers there. We should be careful not to attribute a coherent Western identity to these groups, who went on to form the core of the Populist movement, as history shows us that there was a lack of solidarity between the movements in different cities and regions when not unified by a strong leader. However, a simplistic but widespread presentation of the conflict portrays the Southern nobility as backing Blandford to the end, the Western (and Birmingham) Populists and self-made men defeating them, and the Northern aristocracy opposing Blandford but receiving the same punishment as the Southerners afterwards. Stephen Watson-Wentworth and Hugh Percy are the archetypes of the latter.
The Populist government of strongman Llewelyn Thomas represented the most radical changes to England since the Norman Conquest, with the effective abolition of nobility and privilege in all but name—with the exception of the monarchy, which arguably gained power. Despite Frederick II having grown to manhood under the Duke of Marlborough, and being presented as King Runaway when he fled the country to avoid Blandford (to be briefly replaced by a pretender), he managed to secure the country for his heirs by his postbellum rule. In fact he was the longest-reigning monarch in English history (due to coming to the throne as a mere child), reigning though not ruling for an impressive sixty-eight years.
Llewelyn Thomas was seen through a double prism, as both a working-class hero but also a champion of Wales, historically having left the limelight since Henry VIII’s reforms in the 1530s—which had given legal equality to the Welsh and English people, but also attacked the Welsh language and legal system. Thomas appears to have regarded class solidarity as being more important than nationalism, and his example is important for the fact that Wales has remained a culturally distinct but politically integral part of England, retaining its cultural ties to the West of England and to Cornwall, rather than seeking to go it alone as Scotland has. (Of course, Scotland also spent much longer as a centralised independent nation before joining with England than Wales did).
It is important to understand that, though the Populists were paralysed after Thomas’ death in 1846 and never truly returned to government, for the next half-century England’s governance decidedly lay in his shadow. ‘The People’s Kingdom’ is used to refer to this whole period, not only the brief time of Populist rule. William Wyndham’s Regressives and Stephen Watson-Wentworth’s Moderates were, at the time, perceived as being controlled by the same aristocrats whom Thomas had humbled; but this is slightly misleading. Many men of aristocratic blood or material wealth had sold up and left the country altogether to escape Popuist land taxes and seizures, and these Exiles formed the basis for countless romantic adventure tales then and now. Stereotypically many of them became adventurers and explorers travelling to exotic climes; these certainly existed, but in reality many went for the more prosaic option of simply settling in the ENA (often near the Arc of Power region) and starting their family concerns over again. So those former aristocrats in the Regressives and Moderates represent those who had decided to stay and accept the new constitutional settlement. Their governance was obviously more friendly to wealth, privilege and tradition than that of Thomas had been, but fundamentally they were driven by fear that the populace might rise up if they went too far. The Moderates in particular, who racked up slightly more years in power than the Regressives and were generally considered to have greater popular support, were strongly influenced by the remnants of the old Phoenix Party of the Marleburgensians. Though less hostile to workers’ concerns, the Moderates shared the same connection to the industrial power and the seaports of the West. The cities of Liverpool and Bristol in particular had grown even wealthier and more important off the back of preferential trade with the ENA, while London and the east and south coasts suffered due to tariffs limiting trade with continental Europe.
The Regressives also enjoyed a number of terms in government under their five Presidents (including Hugh Grosvenor’s two unconnected terms separated by that of Moderate Kenneth Shaw). After Wyndham, the Regressives frequently paid only lip service to ‘the Way Back’ and often chased the Moderates in terms of policy in order to match what was perceived as the competitive political landscape. The governance of the Kingdom of the Britons was typically hampered by the fact that both parties usually lacked a majority, with the remaining seats occupied primarily by the two main former Populist factions as well as the growing Scottish Parliamentary Party of Donald Black. Though the Populists had not been a coherent whole for decades, the formal split came in 1872 when titular leader Matthias Richardson’s Temperance instincts led him to back female suffrage over protecting his party’s Lancastrian political machine.[10] The residual Richardsonian Populist core was thereafter often reduced to being a purely Temperance-focused parliamentary ally of either party in power, giving votes in return for increased restrictions on alcohol. From the fragments of the old party, a new party was formed under Bob Preston in 1874, which took its inspiration from the more radical Mentian parties of other countries and called itself the Mankind Party. The Mankind Party was characterised by a macho character, opposing female suffrage, and sometimes also by xenophobia (though this was not universal, and we must be careful not to rely on tainted sources).
Following a strike by Liverpool dockyard workers in 1885, it appears that both of the duopoly parties began to regard the Mankind Party as a potential cause for alarm. In particular, President Foxbury of the ENA sent a strongly-worded communique to Hugh Grosvenor criticising the British government’s inability to ‘get this resolved’ after American steam freight companies protested to him. Judging by Foxbury’s euphemisms, and his own actions earlier as Governor of New York in the 1870s, such resolution would involve firing live ammunition at the strikers. Though both Foxbury and Grosvenor’s terms were soon over, the incident—together with the seizure of the “Lionheart” a year later[11]—permanently affected Anglo-American relations. These were only two examples of American arrogance towards the old mother country (more often under Supremacist rather than Liberal governments, but worsening after the succession of George IV to the throne).
The Moderates had also become aware of the so-called ‘Foxbury Lectelgram’ and the new President Cavendish was equally concerned about what the American government might do if the British labour movement proved so uncomfortably muscular again. It was at this time that the government’s agents—possibly on Cavendish’s orders, though this is unproven—began attempting to infiltrate the Mankind Party and seize controls of its internal elections. There were also plans to reform the police and institute a European-style armed Gendarmery to maintain public order, which in the event would not materialise until the Pandoric War.
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Throughout this time, though motivated by suppressing workers’ rights (albeit primarily to ward off the Americans than for its own sake) both Moderate and Regressive governments were quick to paint themselves in the continuing colours of the People’s Kingdom. Literally; when the Gendarmery finally materialised, it was as ‘mauvecoats’, an updated (and, to be fair, less sadistic) reflection of Blandford’s old browncoats, dyed in the colours of their Populist foes. It was a black irony that has helped inspired more than one historical theory of the cyclic nature of revolutions. Rhetoric continued to emphasise the constitutional continuity from Frederick II and Llewelyn Thomas, even as newspapers were censored and public societies infiltrated. The then Duke of York remained an important player and hero of the British (or at least the English) people, though he had resigned in protest as Regent after the “Lionheart” affair. His social gatherings in Kensington were home to many of the great and good of the kingdom—and therefore many spies.
When the Pandoric War broke out, the sinking of the British ship HMS “Conqueror” was one of the opening acts of the conflict. This unquestionably led to more British public support for the war, when otherwise enthusiasm for an American-led conflict would already have been low even before the losses of the conflict. In fact, this had led to conspiracy theories about the sinking, though most military historians agree it was genuine. Randolph Heriott, the incumbent Regressive President, initially attempted to conduct the war alone, with lukewarm support from the Moderates under Isaac Gaskell. Public support for the war rapidly waned due to a combination of rationing, rising food prices and reports of deaths overseas, with the victories of Admiral Owen Hughes being about the only thing that drew public acclaim (especially in his native Wales). The government was frequently critiqued by backbench Moderate Frederick Wells, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances in March 1899. However, by that point Heriott’s government had already fallen. The Duke of York, who had agreed to return as Regent due to the war in February 1897, discovered that troops had fired on anti-war protestors on Heriott’s orders in August of the same year. Heriott was forced to resign the next month due to public condemnation, but this led to a storm of intrigue which—thanks to numerous ‘conveniently’ missing files—continues to defy a full explanation to this day.
A joint Regressive-Moderate war government, like the one in the ENA, was formed; after failed attempts by both Gaskell and War Secretary Roderick Bartley to lead it, an arrangement was worked out, allegedly under the auspices of the Duke of York. Lee Clack, a working-class Burgess and leader among the Mankind Party, became a neutral leader acceptable to both sides. It remains unclear if the Duke did knowingly assent to this or if it was a claim after the fact. Regardless, it seems Clack was either a ‘useful idiot’ or perhaps even the result of the Moderates’ long-standing attempt to infiltrate the Mankind Party. The resulting regime secretly imprisoned the Duke in the New Tower in December 1897 while he was visiting MPs they had imprisoned there for ‘unpatriotic’ activities. For some time they managed to successfully conceal the fact by means of control of the newspapers (inventing fictional morale-building visits) and torturing the Duke to extract the childhood cypher he used for messages to his brother the Emperor. It remains unclear to this day whether any of this was motivated by genuine malice on the part of any of the (still largely shadowy) ringleaders of the invisible coup, or whether it was entirely made out of fear of an American reprisal if Britain was seen to be anything less than one hundred percent behind the war effort.
News eventually leaked out within Britain itself, and public protests were fired upon by the new Gendarmes when they were rolled out in 1898. Colin Farmer, a loyal supporter of the Government, became disillusioned and horrified upon realising that the Gendarmes had used contaminated wooden riot bullets to deliberately infect protestors in Sheffield with fatal diseases, without strictly shooting them dead on the spot.[12] He was one of a number of fellow citizens to leak news of this and join the underground resistance. The latter was able to break the Duke out of the Tower in October 1898 and fled with him in exile to Belgium, though their activities were restricted by the Belgian government. Maximilian IV had potential uses for this man. Exiles, including Charles Grey, met up with the Duke and was able to smuggle him out of Belgium under Maximilian’s nose in disguise, crossing the border into France—just as Belgium joined the war—in February 1899.[13]
It was with French and Exile help that the Duke of York would launch the Third Glorious Revolution at the end of that year, with an expeditionary force sent under the command of the Duc de Choiseul. Historically, French backing had made the English people suspicious, so it is a measure of how degraded government control had grown (and how popular the Duke was) that the people rallied to him. The North and South of England both went over to the Duke, as did Scotland in return for a pre-arranged deal to dissolve the now greatly unpopular Act of Union. It was only in the West where any resistance took place, described by contemporaries as ‘loyalty to the Clack regime’, though by this point Clack himself had long disappeared.[14] Even this, however, soon collapsed when the Duke appointed Western figures to the goverment in order to safeguard Western economic interests—which would be threatened by an interruption of trade with the ENA and Ireland. In the event, this was not as severe as feared. Emperor George abdicated with remorse on hearing the news and the fate of his brother, and the new American President Faulkner treated England as no better or worse than any other trade partner of the ENA. Some tariffs were imposed due to Faulkner’s desires to protect American industry, but in a national sense these were more than countered by the implementation of freer trade with France and the rest of the Marseilles Protocol.
The nature of the old regime and how it had collapsed so bloodlessly (after a rather less than bloodless tenure in government) lent itself towards conspiracy, mystery and intrigue. So many had clearly been involved with supporting the abuses of the ‘People’s Kingdom’ as it was still mockingly dubbed; ‘People’s’ became seen as a meaningless or negative term, as in the description of the 1830s constitutional settlement as ‘The People’s Rules’, especially by those with rose-tinted ancestral memories of what had come before. If so many had backed the tyranny and now so many had come over to the side of the Duke (now crowned King Frederick III), then it seemed statistically certain that some of the loyal supporters now shaking his hand had once signed the warrant to have that hand attacked with thumbscrews in the Tower. Such a sense of seething intrigue and awkwardness embodied the early Dawn of the Century regime that became the England we know and love today.
In the middle of this century, Frederick III was sometimes portrayed as a benevolent dictator. Certainly, he was said to have exercised more personal power than any monarch had for at least a century, buoyed by his great popularity with the English and Scottish peoples. Frederick, however, saw it rather differently, as recounted in his diaries (only recently deciphered and published). He was not only deeply suspicious of many of his turncoat supporters (and fearful for the lives of his family and his genuine allies) but he was also fundamentally unhappy with how things had turned out. He had never wanted anything more than to topple those abusing their power and return to serving his brother. But he had been badly shaken by George’s refusal to disbelieve the messages he was supposedly receiving from him—and his dismissal of the genuine ones Frederick was able to send him from France. He had broken the link between Britain and her old colonies, broken Britain herself back into her component countries, and left her deeply in the pocket of an increasingly powerful and influential France. Rather than him abolishing the mauvecoat Gendarmes who had terrorised the nation, they had swapped their mauve uniforms for red ones and now claimed to work for him. He felt like a failure, and all around him were intriguing backstabbers.
Certainly, this was not an environment which many would have believed would be the genesis of the longest period of stability and prosperity in the history of England. When we look back on this history of more than two thousand years of civil war, revolution, anarchy and invasion, it is remarkable that Frederick and his supporters were able to establish a lasting regime. So what did he do right?
Unlike Scotland, which had effectively had a shadow government in waiting in the form of Alistair Black and the suppressed SPP, England had no obvious candidate for her reduced presidency. In the short term, John Percy was appointed to the role as a figurehead. The son of former Regent Hugh Percy, he had largely avoided politics and not become involved in recent history. At this point, it should be noted, there was considerable debate from Frederick’s Exile supporters about whether the Populist anti-nobility laws should be repealed. Many of their fathers and grandfathers had dreamed of one day returning in triumph to regain their lands, titles and privileges. Frederick, in the event, gave them some concessions but shied away from ‘burning the People’s Rules’ as some fanatics desired. The House of Lords was theoretically re-established, but more as a pressure group than an organ of government, being re-sited in the North (specifically York) where the dispossessed aristocracy was more popular. Titles also gained only a smidgen more legal status than they had possessed under the People’s Kingdom, in which essentially anyone could award themselves any title they had made up, but no-one else had to acknowledge it.
England’s finances were in bad shape when Frederick took over, with wartime debts racked up and the interruption of trade with America not helping. Something Frederick is often criticised for in hindsight is his decision to sell off a number of state assets to refuel the economy—though his critics rarely have an alternative plan. In particular, the Free Hospitals set up by the Populists, and maintained with variable competence by Moderate and Regressive governments ever since, were subjected to scrutiny. These, like many state institutions, had been home to considerable corruption and embezzlement under those governments. Frederick’s regime privatised the more successful hospitals as independent health concerns, continued to maintain a smaller number of middle-performing free hospitals for the poor, and shut down the worst performers. Some of these had been built into the former stately homes of dispossessed aristocrats, and a few ended up being returned to their heirs for a price—though fewer than popular history suggests. By contrast, Alistair Black’s Scottish government did maintain all the free hospitals in Scotland, which made them more popular, but also left Scotland in a bigger hole when the Panic of 1917 hit. While both England and Scotland received loans from France and were pulled deeper into France’s orbit (which England had almost escaped from after the French debacle in South America) Scotland’s poor finances meant that she was subject to much more French influence.
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Take off to another world!
The Exhibition of the Future – Southwark Royal Hall!
Page AD111U
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There were some reforms to government. The franchise was reformed, with the marriage and age requirements for women abolished, so now all subjects of 21 or over could cast a vote. The electoral system for the House of Knights was changed to a list-based percentage representation system, which in practice often let Frederick fob off his Exile supporters with a cushy guaranteed seat in the North Riding or Hertfordshire. The first new, chaotic election was held in 1901, with elections in England and Scotland already treated as separate, and the new Parliament’s first act being to separate the kingdoms. As far as Frederick’s support in the English Parliament was concerned —the old parties had cast off their clothes. Percy claimed to be an Independent, but Frederick’s messy coalition of supporters described themselves (after rejecting names like Patriots and Cornubians as evoking ties to the unpopular ENA) simply as Anglians. What was meant to be a unifying name (reflecting the departure of Scotland and rejection of the ENA) proved to alarm the Welsh contingent in Parliament. There were rumours that Wales might seek separation from England as well.
This crisis point was defused in 1906 when Frederick played a master stroke. Percy retired, and was replaced by none other than Owen Hughes (Owain ap Hughes), the Welsh admiral who had fought so well for both Britain and the ENA during the Pandoric War. He had been briefly imprisoned by the Americans over suspected loyalties in 1900, before being released (after mass public protests in the ENA) then leaving the Navy and retiring to Wales. Hughes was a romantic enthusiast for Welsh culture as well as an unquestionable war hero, and a man respected by both the English and the Americans. He was not necessarily gifted as a political administrator (rather than charismatic leader) but that could be delegated. It was under Hughes that relations were finally normalised between England and the ENA. Treaties signed under Faulkner were abided by under Gedney and Tayloe. Ultimately, French military power was a guarantor against America attempting to reclaim her motherland by force—and, perhaps, vice versa. Though money was tight, Frederick and Hughes did attempt to build up the English armed forces. The Royal Navy was naturally prioritised under Hughes, but the Army was also expanded. The Populist constitutional restrictions on its size were relaxed, though in practice this largely consisted of converting most of the old ‘Landborne Marines’ into regular army regiments. (This was not without controversy; in seeking to abolish old traditions, naturally the Populists had inadvertently created some new ones after a few years down the line. In practice some Landborne Marines were maintained just to continue that tradition).
Hughes continued as President for a decade, then being replaced with his competent Finance Minister Jeremy Merrick. The timing was unfortunate for Merrick, as the Panic of 1917 blew up after a few months in the role. His handling of the crisis was praised in hindsight, especially compared to other countries, but criticism at the time led to the first really organised opposition parties to the Anglians (also called the Royalists or the King’s Party). Frederick was aware it was dangerous to tie himself to one party over another, and began inviting the leaders of the new small opposition parties to public events as well. These included the Democratic Party and the Trade Union Alliance, both fledgling attempts to rebuild working-class representation after the debacle of Lee Clack and the infiltrated Mankind Party. While Merrick’s management of the Panic was praised, it was undoubtedly the work of a man who cared more about numbers on a graph than the individual lives whose fate he was deciding, and both the DP and the TUA found a gap in the political market.
Merrick stepped down in 1921, the crisis having passed. Following a ballot of the large but shrinking number of Anglian Burgesses and Knights, two more expected candidates were passed over in favour of a dark horse victory. The presidency would come to an Exile, a man whom as a young man had been an adventurer and fighter for many causes before turning to help the Duke as a loyal supporter. Now he was older, seasoned, a man of the North, but frequently present at London soirees accompanied by his glamorous Chinese wife Amy.
Charles Grey would be the man to shepherd England through the Black Twenties.
[1]
(Annotation) We speculate from contextual clues elsewhere that this is a regime of school education in England which covers roughly the years between ages 4 and 14, and is sometimes further subdivided. Historically as an institution it probably reflects an earlier period in which compulsory education for all children ended at 14, which does not appear to still be the case in the allohistorical England of today.
[2] Strictly more than one, but this is a brief summary.
[3] The latter is not strictly a pure win by the Welsh against the English; it was the victory of a combined Welsh and Mercian force against the Northumbrians.
[4] This is an allohistorical use of the term.
[5] The aspect of English historiography is not found in OTL, which tends to focus more on the north-south divide in England if considering such regional concerns at all. As the reader will see, historians in TTL have joined together several only vaguely connected factors to create the idea of a ‘Cymru-Rheged exceptionalism’ within the broader continuity of England (including Wales).
[6] The north-south divide is not ignored in TTL, but it is frequently treated as ‘Yorkshire, Northumberland and maybe Lincolnshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire vs. everyone else excluding the West, or Rheged’, with Lancashire being counted as part of ‘the West’ rather than ‘the North’. This is therefore more of a three-polar conception of England, with the South and the West jockeying for supremacy and the North usually left worse off.
[7] This should really be Æthelstan, but again, the Motext can’t handle the ash character.
[8] Referring to the period following the Third Glorious Revolution, i.e. the early 20th century.
[9] This history has not discussed the earlier Anglo-Norman settlements and conquests in Ireland as they are considered relatively tangential from a modern English perspective (never having been politically united with Ireland or had her politics dominated by the Irish Question); one might as well bring up Norman involvement with Sicily or Antioch.
[10] See Part #208 in Volume V.
[11] See Part #220 in Volume V.
[12] See Part #242 in Volume VI.
[13] See Part #244 in Volume VI.
[14] See Part #250 in Volume VI.
