The United Kingdom
Things have changed. You can see in in the fashions people are wearing—which we’d better talk about now, because when future K-graphists create period pieces set in the earliest years of the Charlottean/Second Napoleonic era, their costume departments are going to get it wrong. Armed with magazine illustrations, but no photographs, they’re going to depict all the men in London wearing the dramatically high-collared, wide-lapelled tailcoats made popular by Prince Consort Leopold and the women wearing flowing, pleated silk confections that grace and flatter the lines of a plus-size woman[1] but make a slender woman look like she’s being eaten by the drapes. And this is how a lot of people dress, because looking like you don’t need to worry about money—especially when you do—never quite goes out of style.
But the majority of the people you see on the street are wearing old clothes, many of them dating to the 1820s, all patched up and thimmoned into something that can be mistaken for respectable. This is especially true in Dublin, where the Duke of Wellington has been serving in Dublin Castle as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland for the past five years now, backed up by Chief Secretary for Ireland William Sharman Crawford and (though his duties are extremely limited and he spends the bulk of his time on schoolwork) Leopold Prince of Wales.
Once again, as with the Caroline affair and the Roman Catholic Relief Act, Wellington finds himself butting heads with people who are ideologically on his side. His biggest headache is the Tithe War, which for a moment there looked as though it really was going to become a civil war. Since Irish Catholics have stopped paying their tithes to the (Anglican) Church of Ireland, the Church enlisted the aid of the constabulary in going around seizing property by force. There were a dozen incidents of violence in 1830 and 1831, and in one of them—at Dunnamaggin in February of 1831—the constables lost. Twelve of them were killed, and the rest were injured or driven away.[2] Several people were arrested, but all the trials ended in hung juries. (It was very hard for the jurors to concentrate on the evidence with all the noise outside from the angry mobs consisting of their friends and neighbors.)
Archbishop of Canterbury William Howley has never been shy about stepping into politics, voicing opposition not only to the Roman Catholic Relief Act but (going so far out of his lane he was practically in oncoming traffic) the Great Reform Act. Having pissed off both the last PM and the current one, he decided it was time to call in all those favors he’d earned.
First he called upon the Duke of Wellington to use his famous martial prowess to enforce the Church’s rights in Ireland. Wellington—not a man who cares to admit his own helplessness in any matter—told him bluntly that the Church of Ireland has had almost three hundred years to bring the Irish around, and they shouldn’t come crying to him if they can’t get it done.
He next appealed to Queen Charlotte, reminding her of her coronation oath to defend the Church of England. Charlotte (whose grudge against him is far more personal than the Duke’s) replied, “What would you have me do, Your Grace? Abandon my other duties, take ship to Ireland and ride about the island plundering cattle in the Church’s name?”
Reluctantly, the bishops of the Church of Ireland decided to suspend collection of tithes from the unwilling until such time as Parliament would take action to guarantee their security. Parliament has had better things to do.
So has Wellington—on top of this mess, he’s been trying to encourage the railroad industry in Ireland. (If there’s another rebellion, he wants to be able to move troops in and squash it quickly.) This means dealing with a lot of landowners, many of whom of course are not in Ireland at all and aren’t good at responding to missives from Dublin Castle. But Wellington is nothing if not stubborn, and now there’s the beginnings of a railroad grid in County Dublin, northern County Down and southern County Antrim.[3]
The Duke’s other job has been preventing anything serious from happening between the Cub (a nickname which doesn’t really suit him any more, as he turned 17 a month ago and he’s over six feet tall) and Crawford’s 16-year-old daughter Mabel.[4] It will be a relief when the young prince joins the Army next year, and Wellington dares hope the young prince will prove halfway competent—certainly better than his maternal grandfather.
The UK is now five years into the reign of Queen Charlotte and the government of PM Grey. If the beginning of this era felt like Christmas morning for Radicals, the present feels more like Boxing Day—all the gifts have been given, and at least some of them are what they always wanted, but the world is starting to return to normal.
By any measure, Grey has gotten more things done in five years than Wellington did in seven. The Great Reform Act, the Municipal Corporations Act of 1834 which increased accountability and popular participation in local government, the Truck Act of 1830—these are systemic reforms whose effects people are only beginning to see. The repeal of the Newspaper and Stamp Duties Act was a blow for freedom of expression. And of course there’s the abolition of slavery in the Empire.
But the global recession is hitting Britain hard. In the 1832 elections, Grey’s government expanded its majority—you can read all about it in Charles Dickens’ articles in
The Mirror of Parliament—but there’s another round coming up next year and no one’s sure they’re going to do so well. For one thing, although property requirements have been lowered, they still exist, which means some people who were able to vote in ’32 won’t be able to vote in ’35.
The biggest domestic thorn in the side of Gray’s government has been the Corn Law. Repealing it, as some Radicals and free-trade Tories want, would make life easier for the urban poor, but as it stands it makes life easier for the rural poor. Even after borough reform, there aren’t enough votes to change it.
Then there’s the New Poor Law, which was passed just last year—if it had come up this year, they might have thought twice about it.[5] This law (in accordance with the 1830s’ best economic theories, which are roughly on par with its best medical theories) was actually designed to make things worse, ensuring that workhouses will not be better than the poorest person’s house. Grey’s government may be liberal, but its constituency is middle-class. The poor are no one’s constituency, because—it bears repeating—they don’t have the vote… even though there are now more of them. Queen Charlotte can and does practice and advocate charity on their behalf, but that’s about it.
Some of the new poor are in Lancashire, where the cotton mills have been slowed down by Biddle’s cotton monopoly attempt, bringing many people who had little to begin with much closer to destitution. The
Manchester Champion has been a relentless advocate for the workers, but has directed most of its editorial anger at the United States.
And so, it seems, has everybody else in Britain. Not that the U.S. is the only country they’re angry at—alleged ally Spain is raising tariffs on products from all countries, but especially on British wool—but the rage against America is immense. To get the full unpleasantness of all this, let’s look at it from the point of view of a small, frail young American student. His name is Alexander Hamilton Stephens, and there’s a million things he’d rather be doing right now. He graduated from Franklin College in Georgia in 1832 at the top of his class, and moved on to Oxford to study the sciences, especially meteorology—but the storms he’s been seeing this year are not the kind he came to learn about.
Back in January, Home Secretary Brougham gave a speech in front of the Commons commemorating the life and death of a British sailor by the name of John Glasgow. It particularly emphasized his misfortune at the hands of the American authorities, and his choice to die fighting for his freedom rather than live as a slave, and to make the entire city of Savannah his personal funeral pyre, “like Samson destroying the ungodly with his final act.” Stephens knows this because the speech was reprinted in full in
The Times, which thanks to the railroad is now available in Oxford only a few hours after it hits the London streets. He gave it a hate-read, and was chilled at Brougham’s ability to elicit rage and loathing from his listeners toward his intended target without sounding angry or hateful himself.
This speech captured the attention of the British abolitionist movement, briefly drawing it away from Grey’s government. Although that government has pushed up the timetable for emancipation, the movement believes it’s still taking too long. Radical MP George Thompson has been getting impatient, and at one point the Prime Minister’s own son (serving as Undersecretary of State for War and the Colonies) threatened to resign his post if the timetable wasn’t pushed up again.[6] But since Brougham spoke, it’s harder to make the case that the problem is the government that’s trying to free enslaved people at whatever pace, rather than the government that tried to enslave a free person.
Even the Tories are angry. Black or white, they say, Glasgow was a British sailor, born on their sacred soil and serving in their semi-sacred merchant marine. He was
British. How dare those arrogant little colonial slaveocrats lay hands on him? They made such a to-do over impressment of American sailors back during the war, and now they do
this?
Stephens can’t believe these people actually mean what they say. Not only is he convinced in his bones of the superiority of the white race, he’s sure the British are convinced of it too. All this claiming of John Glasgow as
our black brother—he’s never heard the phrases “virtue signaling” or “performative wokeness,” but he’s definitely thinking the concepts.
So winter and spring were an awkward time to be an American in Oxford. Most British don’t seem to know or care about the differences between American states, but those who do… well, Stephens’ home state is Georgia. His fellow American students tried to be sympathetic, but a lot of them were from free states and feel like Stephens and his slave-state ilk were giving them all a bad name. He got very tired of people hearing his accent and accosting him to ask how many slaves his family has. (None. They sold the last of their slaves years ago so they could buy more books. They’re that sort of people.)
Speaking of literature, the magazines which were once the bookish Stephens’ delight have become unbearable to him—most of the best poets are Radicals, and every single one of them seems to want to compose the definitive epic on Glasgow’s heroic death. Stephens has retreated to the conservative publication
Fraser & Fraser’s Journal[7]. There he discovered the later parts of
Sartor Resartus, a philosophical treatise thinly disguised as a novel by Thomas Carlyle[8]. This was a source of solace, or at least distraction, to Stephens, mostly because the writing was so passionate. Yes, of course, from any standpoint within time the most important historical figures and the most dramatic and traumatic events are as transitory as cloud formations, vanishing like ghosts at dawn, whereas from outside time even the least of life’s ephemera stands eternal and imperishable as if frozen in crystal. These are not new ideas. Carlyle’s gift is to write about them like a man who
cares. Stephens kept getting the urge to read it out loud.[9] He’ll definitely be following this author in the future and recommending him to his friends back home.
And he can hardly wait to go back home, because it turns out the months when everybody was badgering him about slavery were the good part of the year. Now, people are angrier than ever at Americans, and this time it’s about… MONEY. Specifically it’s about all those securities that, as it turns out, weren’t. It seems like everyone in Oxford either lost a lot of money on state bonds or canal shares or knows someone who did. American bonds in particular were popular in Britain because they had a much higher rate of return than British bonds (“had” being the key word).
And the bonds are what everyone’s so bitter about. In the first place, the worst of the stock collapse was more than a year ago. (And not everyone lost out on it. Two years ago, Charles Babbage and a few of his friends got some money together and used it as collateral to borrow canal shares valued at £13,700, and then sold them as a package for an even £15,000. Six months later, they repurchased that package for £5,000 and returned the shares to the original owners—still in mint condition, gilt edges and everything. No one knows who was the brains behind this bit of short-selling, but Henry Brougham spent the next few weeks looking more than usually smug.) In the second place, wise investors know that getting mad because your stocks collapsed is like losing money at the track and blaming the horses. But a bond is a
promise. America is breaking a lot of promises right now—and not just to Indians anymore.
Whitehall isn’t making any particular effort to stir the pot here. As Lord Palmerston said, people who buy foreign bonds “do so at their own risk and must suffer the consequences.”[10] But there’s a sense in Britain that the Americans are doing this just because they can, because with the aid of British loans they’ve grown big and strong enough that it isn’t worth going to war to make some investors whole. Stephens himself has not grown big and strong, and suddenly men twice his size (and women about a third again his size) are grabbing him by the patched and threadbare lapels of his one cold-weather coat and demanding to know what he personally did with their father’s pension. All he can think at times like this is
if I’d gone into law, I could be in Milledgeville starting my own practice right now.[11]
Between the stress, the English weather and his own not-so-great physical constitution, Stephens has fallen ill, and his fellow students don’t want to catch whatever it is he has. So his only companion this Christmas is an American visitor, Henry Lee IV (known to those who will admit to being his friends as “Black-Horse Harry”) who’s living in Oxford working on a history book.
This is an odd pairing. Technically they’re both Southern gentlemen and men of letters, but in addition to being a full quarter of a century older, Lee is a man who grew up with everything Stephens dreams of in life—strength, health, respect, good connections, enough money to have both books
and slaves—and threw a lot of it away in various scandals. That’s how he ended up in Britain. And until recently he paid his expenses by selling Virginia state bonds, so he’s one of the people who should be catching all the flak Stephens is getting.
But they can commiserate over how the British are treating Americans. Clubs in London have turned respectable American gentlemen away at the door, and they’ve also turned away Henry Lee IV. And what really makes him angry is that Virginia’s bonds are being devalued along with those of all the other states. Okay, so a few no-account places like Mississippi have defaulted, but this is Virginia we’re talking about. The home of Washington and Jefferson, of the Randolphs and Carters and his own renowned ancestors, would never repudiate a debt! Her very tobacco, wine and opium are fragrant with honor! How can the British not know this? (Stephens has little to contribute to this part of the conversation. Georgia was one of the defaulting states. Having your main port burn to the ground will do that.)
Moving away from these two privileged-but-not-feeling-it men, there’s a larger debate going on in Britain over what America’s failures mean. The Tories are saying it proves that a country really does need kings and queens and titles of nobility. To them, what’s missing from the Americans is a capacity for shame based on personal ideals, an instinctive sense among the people in charge that breaking your word and swindling others out of their money is
actually bad. (As Croker put it, “The Americans have truly taken the
u out of
honour.”) They’re also saying it proves that a government based entirely on majority support will always choose the path of immediate gratification, no matter where it leads.
This is making life harder for Radicals, who’d gotten used to waging a war of ideas against unarmed opponents. One more thing to blame on the Americans. They’re not just crooks and slavers—as the world’s proving ground for democratic principles, they’re a
disappointment.
[1] As you’ve probably guessed, the model for womanhood in this era is Charlotte herself. She happens to be on the heavy side, more because of genetics and multiple pregnancies than any excess of diet—she’s making a conscious effort not to end up like her morbidly obese father.
[2] Something similar happened at Carrickshock IOTL.
[3] This is a little further along than Irish railroads were IOTL.
[4] Not OTL’s Mabel Sharman Crawford, who was born in 1820.
[5] It did pass this year IOTL.
[6] He did resign over this issue in 1834 IOTL.
[7]
Fraser’s Magazine IOTL
[8] Which was published in
Fraser’s at this time IOTL
[9] IOTL and ITTL, Carlyle himself often did (very) dramatic readings of his work when he was on tour.
[10] He said this IOTL.
[11] He did set up his practice at about this time IOTL.