I've always felt like that line rings uncomfortably true. Really, that entire episode.
TLIAW: The Unreformed Kingdom
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
I've always felt like that line rings uncomfortably true. Really, that entire episode.
And Schools, well, there's Eton, Harrow and some place near Winchester if you aren't too fussy.
So, Mystic Mogg remained just as inaccurate ITTL? And goodness gracious, the smugness of his son! I wanted to reach across the screen and slap him. Congratulations on a loathsome character brillantly depicted. You could feel the arrogance of the twit. And to think he is the modernizer among the Tories.
Decolonization seems to have turned into something very unpleasant in India, if not a bloodbath. And the offhand references to the lynchings in the South are downright chilling. The execution is likewise sickening (Want to see a hanging? There is a prog for that!). And the British have decided it's a good thing for ambassadors to have that kind of spectacle and the mobs they bring forth literally in front of their doorsteps? One could almost construe that as a barely veiled threat to tread carefully in diplomatic matters.
Before we go to Birmingham, is there a chance we might know how the royal family figures into politics? Have they coasted on in the late 18th century and early 19th century fashion or have they evolved into something akin to the OTL? Given the overall stasis of the political institutions and the importance of dynasties, I am thinking the former.
Oh, and nice cameo of the Uber protests. I suppose it would be foolish wishful thinking (Whiggish, you might say) to have trade unions coexist with the livery companies?
Decolonization seems to have turned into something very unpleasant in India, if not a bloodbath. And the offhand references to the lynchings in the South are downright chilling. The execution is likewise sickening (Want to see a hanging? There is a prog for that!). And the British have decided it's a good thing for ambassadors to have that kind of spectacle and the mobs they bring forth literally in front of their doorsteps? One could almost construe that as a barely veiled threat to tread carefully in diplomatic matters.
Before we go to Birmingham, is there a chance we might know how the royal family figures into politics? Have they coasted on in the late 18th century and early 19th century fashion or have they evolved into something akin to the OTL? Given the overall stasis of the political institutions and the importance of dynasties, I am thinking the former.
Oh, and nice cameo of the Uber protests. I suppose it would be foolish wishful thinking (Whiggish, you might say) to have trade unions coexist with the livery companies?
Thande
Donor
Don't worry, I have already planned a lot of the things you mention to come up in later updates (being as vague as possible to avoid spoilers!)
Also thanks for the comments everyone.
Now that my parents have gone home after meeting the future Out-Laws and In-Laws, I shall comment.
Firstly, this looks marvellous.
All sorts of wonderful little nods, especially the one to good old Eleven11. Thanks to a plaque at Winchester's Guildhall, I know that in TTL, I'd be five minutes and twelve seconds behind Greenwich, living in Hampshire as I do.
It's all very unsettling. Life carries on the same for most people, yet there are public hangings available on TTL's version of iPlayer, and the nomination seats remain unchecked. Sarnies are available at Hindell and Spencer, and a young lad with a Barnsley accent appears to be working in Westminster! I suspect that County Durham is tied up by the likes of the Marquis of Londonderry, unless the Prince Bishop is still pre-eminent. Brum should be interesting. I wonder what happened to that radical agitator Chamberlain?
Firstly, this looks marvellous.
All sorts of wonderful little nods, especially the one to good old Eleven11. Thanks to a plaque at Winchester's Guildhall, I know that in TTL, I'd be five minutes and twelve seconds behind Greenwich, living in Hampshire as I do.
It's all very unsettling. Life carries on the same for most people, yet there are public hangings available on TTL's version of iPlayer, and the nomination seats remain unchecked. Sarnies are available at Hindell and Spencer, and a young lad with a Barnsley accent appears to be working in Westminster! I suspect that County Durham is tied up by the likes of the Marquis of Londonderry, unless the Prince Bishop is still pre-eminent. Brum should be interesting. I wonder what happened to that radical agitator Chamberlain?
To be honest, I think this world would be slightly too hidebound for Sir Humphrey.
Thande
Donor
Florida stayed Spanish for another generation or so here and retains a large Seminole population (I can't imagine why, the great man theory strikes again
) and is more analogous to somewhere like Cuba or Puerto Rico in character.edit: Oh wait, I think you meant how it's mentioned there is a Not-the-Confederacy as well. I may have to drop some hints.
Fun stuff.
If there is a Confederacy, it's _between_ the US and Florida. Although we could have the US hold onto a chunk of Florida in the peace treaty (the Brits may have helped the Confederacy survive, but not necessarily anywhere near enough for them to get their war aims), in which case it's a simple case of Dixie Irredenta backed terror, no need for wanked Seminoles (what have Seminoles have to do with Cuba? The indigenous population was entirely wiped out).
If there is a Confederacy, it's _between_ the US and Florida. Although we could have the US hold onto a chunk of Florida in the peace treaty (the Brits may have helped the Confederacy survive, but not necessarily anywhere near enough for them to get their war aims), in which case it's a simple case of Dixie Irredenta backed terror, no need for wanked Seminoles (what have Seminoles have to do with Cuba? The indigenous population was entirely wiped out).
Think you've got that in the wrong order. In a world that venerates tradition the idea that a relative upstart like Harrow would be able to overtake the very venerable Winchester College and the slightly less venerable but Royally favoured Eton strikes me as unlikely.
Sure, but who are these Floridian separatists? Just swamp the rebs with freed slaves, and give them lots of guns. If they're Seminoles, maybe, but there were only a few thousand of them even in the early 19th century. And sadly, I don't think you need to assume a great man of history to think that Americans would expel Native Americans...
This is a fun read, but unsurprisingly I find "grimdark Britain" more plausible than America.
I was just looking at the articles on some of the last Prince-Bishops, and I found this interesting passage
Of course I realised the Palatine was officially still around into the 19th century, but I always assumed the Prince Bishops had rather fallen into irrelevance by then. If there's any timeline where such a theocratic city-state was still around in 2015 then this is probably it...
I remain perplexed by the fact that Britain ever had a Palatine in it. Like, how did such a Holy Roman Imperial institution find its way into England?
'pon consideration, while I don't buy the bit about sending in the armed ex-slaves, it's certain that a North sans a South will be much less likely to buy into the Lost Cause thing or have any patience with Redeemer types. I imagine the diehards will be energetically encouraged to move, and white settlers from the north will fail to come to identify themselves with the Olde South. One way or another, US Florida would be de-dixiefied.
As for a more _Spanish_ Florida, I might point out that vile hive of bloody-handed secessionist violence where I live, nearly half-Hispanic New Mexico.
As for a more _Spanish_ Florida, I might point out that vile hive of bloody-handed secessionist violence where I live, nearly half-Hispanic New Mexico.
Wow. It's a while since I read The Town that was Murdered, but I seemed to Wilkinson mentioning strikes in that period and heaping scorn on the Londonderry mob, rather than the Bishop. Of course, the former was still politically powerful in the twentieth century, the latter, not so much. It also strikes me that I have only ever seen the phrase 'Dean and Chapter' used in connection to either a Cathedral, or that colliery North of Durham. I fear that the fact I never made the connection between the two occurrences is a damning commentary on my intellectual curiosity.
We had more than one. Cheshire was, but was generally held by the crown - see Richard II surrounding Parliament with 'Cheshire archers' and such tyrannical actions. And of course, there's always Lancashire. Beyond them, Edward IV was in the process of setting up Cumberland as a County Palatine for his little brother Gloucester, but died before anything came of it. Obviously, none of them are Ecclesiastical Palatine Counties, so it is slightly different.
I dunno. One of the things I think Turtledove got right is that John Brown is viewed as a hero in the USA in TL 191. (How you square that with their heavier than OTL racism in a world with a socialist party is left up to the reader).
We could be seeing a secession over tariffs, I suppose.
Last edited:
Thande
Donor
August 17th, 2015
The Brits boast that their West Midlands Railway is the fastest in Europe, a claim which would've held more weight with me if I hadn’t already seen the French say the same about La Centrale or the Prussians about the Berlin-to-Amsterdam Überlink. In any case the British claim ignores the glaring point that the reason why the West Midlands Railway is so fast is that it’s new, and that Birmingham had struggled for decades with no direct passenger rail link to London amid the freight trains. The reason for this is apparent from Birmingham’s folk reputation: growing up the name to me evoked a continuous urban war-zone like Juggernaut or Valparaíso. Precisely how much truth there is to this stereotype was one thing I wished to discover on my journey.
Fastest or not, the train was certainly fast enough. For most of the trip the countryside was a blur outside my comfortable second-class carriage, which blessedly was smoke-free; I understand that the Company’s latest Director is the cousin of a Whig politician whose chief rival made his money from trading in Virginian tobacco, and instituting smoke-free compartments is a petty dig of theirs at his profits. Of course they both claim it’s a sop to The Sex, as though these days the ladies aren’t lighting up themselves. Anyhow, it didn’t affect me, as I prefer to chew myself and there ain’t no law against that, as my grandfather used to say. No proper spittoons in this country outside the docks though, and the Brits give you such a look when you hit the general waste bin with pin-point accuracy. Maybe because given where the bin’s slot is next to your neighbour’s chair, a foul-up would have similar consequences as one would’ve for William Tell’s son.
What with that blur outside, for the most part I could only judge these new parts of England by a vague sense of changing colour and air: from the stale grey of London to the vibrant green of the countryside and then the choking black of the West Midlands conurbation. It only resolved itself into a coherent picture with our occasional stops at the major stations. In Nuneaton I noticed a statue of a man overlooking the station: I didn’t recognise the man, but I remembered the name from when Mr. Rees-Mogg had briefly mentioned it yesterday. Sir Robert Peel. The otherwise rather obscure and forgotten leader of the Tory Party who had kept the remains of that party together after Canning went over to the Whigs. Not terribly remarkable for anything other than that sense of dogged loyalty, Mr. Rees-Mogg informed me that the Whig-Canningite alliance ruled the country for so long that he never had a chance to be Prime Minister. He did start the trend towards organised constabularies when he was Home Secretary, I understand, but his early attempts were far too ambitious. However, he must have been MP for Warwickshire or something like that at some point, as there seemed to be a fair bit of local pride attached to that statue.
I didn’t have long to think about this, though, as before I knew where I was I had arrived at New Birmingham Station. Far from the older freight stations near the city’s industrial centres, NBS was deliberately given the almost Arcadian suburban setting of Sutton Coldfield, albeit towards the southern tip of that suburb. You then have to ride an omnibus or trolley to get into the city centre—so despite all that rhetoric about healing, the government still clearly has a vested interest in putting a price-tag on any Brummie rabble-rouser getting his way to London.
And Birmingham is about as far from London as you can get, almost its mirrored counterpart. The vast metropolis frowns under the shadow of industrial exploitation, figurative and literal. It reminds me of places like Pittsburgh and Milwaukee at home, but larger still. Birmingham has sprawled across county boundaries, eating numerous surrounding towns such as Dudley and Wolverhampton, and now has its eye on Coventry. But if it is perhaps the greatest centre of British industry, it is also the greatest centre of British Radicalism.
I was startled how much it seemed I had stepped into another country. The walls of terraced houses are openly decorated with murals of the Prime Minister, and countless other Whig and Tory magnates past and present, being bayoneted or stepped on by idealised figures of ‘the People’s Army’ and their leaders, the heroic Chamberlain family. One mural showed the figure of the younger Chamberlain son, Neville, as he raised his rifle in one hand and his list of demands in the other: the iconic words ‘I HAVE IN MY HAND A PIECE OF PAPER’ were stencilled below. The sea-green and mauve flag of liberty is seen as often as the Union Jack, if not more so. The constables’ helmets suspiciously resemble a Phrygian cap. All of this, of course, was hard-won by Birmingham’s people and their representatives, decades of fighting—sometimes low-level rioting, sometimes open civil war—before the establishment effectively retreated from the city altogether out of sheer exhaustion.
This is not to say, as many of the aristocrats would doubtless claim, that Birmingham is a cultural wasteland. Its dirty streets are filled with theatres and art galleries amid the pubs and whorehouses (apparently there is a prog for finding those, too). Some of them are rather crude in tone, but others are far more elevated than some commentators might give credit for. I even saw one small Kinemahaus showing the Ford Brothers’ controversial arthouse film Power, which I understand has been banned in seven states back home. The Brummies are not a culturally illiterate folk, a point that was repeatedly impressed upon me when I travelled to the City Hall to meet my interviewees for the day.
Anthony Pakenham, 8th Earl of Longford, might seem a curious choice of leader for the British Radical Party. In fact he is far from the only member of the House of Lords to embrace an apparently self-destructive position. “The human race would be doomed if we were only all out for ourselves, as your Senator Runciman or that d***fool Spaniard Dr. Laxalt would have us believe!” Lord Longford smiles to soften his words. “Social justice is a goal that can be shared by anyone, regardless of where he finds himself under the current worthless social order. Or herself, am I right?”
A winsome nod from Birmingham’s first, and so far only, Lady Mayoress. “We know all too well it’s been a long hard road, and it’ll be a longer one before it’s done,” says Clare Short. Despite myself, I can’t help but find the Birmingham accent irritating. It’s as though all the tone and expression has been beaten out of it by all the long years of struggle, leaving it as a low monotone in which peculiar vowels occasionally loom up like icebergs about to sink the Olympic of my attention. “But we’ll get there. We’ve already come further than the Tories—yes, and the Whigs—would ever have liked.”
Short is quite correct, as I know from perusing my Vacher’s Guide. The Radical Party, once a rather irrelevant adjunct of the Whigs, have come into their own as a party for (in their own words) the ordinary people of the country. They have always been few in number, but today they control fully 75 seats in Parliament. Not enough to ever form a government, but enough to have influence, as Lord Longford described, recounting to me how the Radicals had prevented the Tories from abolishing the inflation escalator that determines the right to vote in the English shires. “They would have locked us in the same grotesque position as Scotland,” Longford says, his eyes burning with anger, “with less than fifteen percent of the population able to vote. Well, we showed them!”
I asked for more background information. Really I was leading up to asking them about foreign policy, but this seemed a good lead-in. “Where did the escalator come from, anyhow?”
“Well, that’s rather complicated,” said a new voice. Jeremiah Corbyn is one of the Radicals’ few MPs from southern England, representing Chippenham. Now ageing, he seems to have a perpetual scowl, though given his party’s problems that is perhaps forgiveable. “Suffice to say that when King Henry and his bastards put in the forty shilling property requirement in the fifteenth century, they didn’t foresee inflation, not like the Scots did. So the law still says you need forty shillings’ worth of property to vote in a county seat.”
“Even though, after all the inflation the pound suffered in the German Wars—” I said, nodding along.
“Exactly. Forty shillings now buys a pint of beer,” Corbyn said triumphantly, wagging a finger. “Meaning that anyone can afford that much property. Even our many poor citizens locked in horrendous conditions by vile landlords—” I boggled for a moment at his use of the word ‘citizens’, which I know is a dirty word in London, “—have taken advantage of schemes many great social warriors have implemented. Even owning a bit of land the size of an envelope gives them the right to vote now, no matter how the Tories keep trying to change the laws.”
“So almost everyone has the vote,” I said slowly.
“Us of ‘the Sex’, too, since the property ownership laws were changed,” Short added, making air quotes with her fingers as she sarcastically used the aristocratic term. “Radical votes were crucial in bringing that forward, too, of course.” Though it couldn’t have passed if it hadn’t eventually won some support from Whigs henpecked by their politically active wives, I diplomatically did not mention.
“I see,” I said. “So…” I cast around to find a tactful way to broach the question, “if the poor can vote, why don’t you win more seats than you do?”
Corbyn rolled his eyes, but it was Longford who replied. “Because one doesn’t just have one vote,” he explained gently. “A rich man can buy an envelope of land in every county and vote in all of them. And he does.”
“Not to mention that only the counties work on that franchise,” said Corbyn. “The boroughs have all sorts of different schemes—if you pay a particular poll tax, if you’re a freeman of the city, which means the council effectively decides, then there are those where the council actually just does pick the MP themselves, and then there’s the potwallopers…”
“The whats?”
“You can vote if you have a fireplace, a cookpot and a door.” Corbyn shook his head. “It’s meant to be a legal description of being a householder, but we’ve had fun with that one…”
“How many times did we pass that door around among the voters?” Short added with a look of wistful memory.
“There are other reasons, of course,” Longford said, dragging the conversation back on track. “Anyone can vote, but voting here is not by the secret ballot, as it is in your United States.” I tried to correct him that it wasn’t the case in every state or consistently for every office, but he wouldn’t listen. “The Tories and the Whigs are forever giving us examples of supposed abuses in your country because of the ballot, calling it un-British. They know that if we had it here, all those poor oppressed workers would no longer have their landlords looking over their shoulder and they could vote with their hearts. It’s happened here in Birmingham since we drove them out.” Short looked proud.
Indeed, Birmingham’s four borough seats—very grudgingly awarded by the Whigs only a few decades ago—are some of the few solid Radical ones in the United Kingdom, with the Radicals even sometimes running unopposed. As Birmingham has sprawled across more and more of Staffordshire and Warwickshire, so too have these votes also bled into the county seats, with several of them going to the sea-green party. But besides a few other centres of support such as Sheffield and Manchester and a few popular locals outside the comfort zone like Corbyn, the party has found little traction. Half of its seats can be found in Ireland, where enough voters—‘lulos’, as they are known, due to being metaphorically orange on the outside and green on the inside—defy the wishes of their landlords to vote Radical instead. I asked why other industrial cities like Liverpool and Newcastle are less welcoming to the Radicals. “They already had borough seats before the Industrial Revolution,” Corbyn explained, “and went with the thirty pieces of silver baked into Canning’s loaf.”
“If we had enough Catholics in Liverpool make a false confession to Anglicanism like they do in Ireland to vote…” Short said doubtfully.
This started an argument about Ireland, a subject which I get the impression often overheats Radical meetings, with Short condemning Corbyn’s strange plan to segregate all the Protestant Ascendancy rulers into Ulster and then split it off from the other three provinces to let the Catholics rule themselves. I hastily diverted the discussion to foreign policy at last, and I can give some information on the off chance that the Radicals end up playing a part in the government elected here in two years when the seven-year parliamentary term expires. As I implied above, they have a very rose-tinted vision of the United States, which they often say they wish Britain was more like. They are however somewhat suspicious of free trade at times. Suffice to say that if President Taft attempts a free trade deal, he will get more support from Radicals because he is American than because of the deal. I noticed Longford even had a bust of George Washington and a framed Gillray print of King George III having a trouser accident in his office. Birmingham really is another world…
The Brits boast that their West Midlands Railway is the fastest in Europe, a claim which would've held more weight with me if I hadn’t already seen the French say the same about La Centrale or the Prussians about the Berlin-to-Amsterdam Überlink. In any case the British claim ignores the glaring point that the reason why the West Midlands Railway is so fast is that it’s new, and that Birmingham had struggled for decades with no direct passenger rail link to London amid the freight trains. The reason for this is apparent from Birmingham’s folk reputation: growing up the name to me evoked a continuous urban war-zone like Juggernaut or Valparaíso. Precisely how much truth there is to this stereotype was one thing I wished to discover on my journey.
Fastest or not, the train was certainly fast enough. For most of the trip the countryside was a blur outside my comfortable second-class carriage, which blessedly was smoke-free; I understand that the Company’s latest Director is the cousin of a Whig politician whose chief rival made his money from trading in Virginian tobacco, and instituting smoke-free compartments is a petty dig of theirs at his profits. Of course they both claim it’s a sop to The Sex, as though these days the ladies aren’t lighting up themselves. Anyhow, it didn’t affect me, as I prefer to chew myself and there ain’t no law against that, as my grandfather used to say. No proper spittoons in this country outside the docks though, and the Brits give you such a look when you hit the general waste bin with pin-point accuracy. Maybe because given where the bin’s slot is next to your neighbour’s chair, a foul-up would have similar consequences as one would’ve for William Tell’s son.
What with that blur outside, for the most part I could only judge these new parts of England by a vague sense of changing colour and air: from the stale grey of London to the vibrant green of the countryside and then the choking black of the West Midlands conurbation. It only resolved itself into a coherent picture with our occasional stops at the major stations. In Nuneaton I noticed a statue of a man overlooking the station: I didn’t recognise the man, but I remembered the name from when Mr. Rees-Mogg had briefly mentioned it yesterday. Sir Robert Peel. The otherwise rather obscure and forgotten leader of the Tory Party who had kept the remains of that party together after Canning went over to the Whigs. Not terribly remarkable for anything other than that sense of dogged loyalty, Mr. Rees-Mogg informed me that the Whig-Canningite alliance ruled the country for so long that he never had a chance to be Prime Minister. He did start the trend towards organised constabularies when he was Home Secretary, I understand, but his early attempts were far too ambitious. However, he must have been MP for Warwickshire or something like that at some point, as there seemed to be a fair bit of local pride attached to that statue.
I didn’t have long to think about this, though, as before I knew where I was I had arrived at New Birmingham Station. Far from the older freight stations near the city’s industrial centres, NBS was deliberately given the almost Arcadian suburban setting of Sutton Coldfield, albeit towards the southern tip of that suburb. You then have to ride an omnibus or trolley to get into the city centre—so despite all that rhetoric about healing, the government still clearly has a vested interest in putting a price-tag on any Brummie rabble-rouser getting his way to London.
And Birmingham is about as far from London as you can get, almost its mirrored counterpart. The vast metropolis frowns under the shadow of industrial exploitation, figurative and literal. It reminds me of places like Pittsburgh and Milwaukee at home, but larger still. Birmingham has sprawled across county boundaries, eating numerous surrounding towns such as Dudley and Wolverhampton, and now has its eye on Coventry. But if it is perhaps the greatest centre of British industry, it is also the greatest centre of British Radicalism.
I was startled how much it seemed I had stepped into another country. The walls of terraced houses are openly decorated with murals of the Prime Minister, and countless other Whig and Tory magnates past and present, being bayoneted or stepped on by idealised figures of ‘the People’s Army’ and their leaders, the heroic Chamberlain family. One mural showed the figure of the younger Chamberlain son, Neville, as he raised his rifle in one hand and his list of demands in the other: the iconic words ‘I HAVE IN MY HAND A PIECE OF PAPER’ were stencilled below. The sea-green and mauve flag of liberty is seen as often as the Union Jack, if not more so. The constables’ helmets suspiciously resemble a Phrygian cap. All of this, of course, was hard-won by Birmingham’s people and their representatives, decades of fighting—sometimes low-level rioting, sometimes open civil war—before the establishment effectively retreated from the city altogether out of sheer exhaustion.
This is not to say, as many of the aristocrats would doubtless claim, that Birmingham is a cultural wasteland. Its dirty streets are filled with theatres and art galleries amid the pubs and whorehouses (apparently there is a prog for finding those, too). Some of them are rather crude in tone, but others are far more elevated than some commentators might give credit for. I even saw one small Kinemahaus showing the Ford Brothers’ controversial arthouse film Power, which I understand has been banned in seven states back home. The Brummies are not a culturally illiterate folk, a point that was repeatedly impressed upon me when I travelled to the City Hall to meet my interviewees for the day.
Anthony Pakenham, 8th Earl of Longford, might seem a curious choice of leader for the British Radical Party. In fact he is far from the only member of the House of Lords to embrace an apparently self-destructive position. “The human race would be doomed if we were only all out for ourselves, as your Senator Runciman or that d***fool Spaniard Dr. Laxalt would have us believe!” Lord Longford smiles to soften his words. “Social justice is a goal that can be shared by anyone, regardless of where he finds himself under the current worthless social order. Or herself, am I right?”
A winsome nod from Birmingham’s first, and so far only, Lady Mayoress. “We know all too well it’s been a long hard road, and it’ll be a longer one before it’s done,” says Clare Short. Despite myself, I can’t help but find the Birmingham accent irritating. It’s as though all the tone and expression has been beaten out of it by all the long years of struggle, leaving it as a low monotone in which peculiar vowels occasionally loom up like icebergs about to sink the Olympic of my attention. “But we’ll get there. We’ve already come further than the Tories—yes, and the Whigs—would ever have liked.”
Short is quite correct, as I know from perusing my Vacher’s Guide. The Radical Party, once a rather irrelevant adjunct of the Whigs, have come into their own as a party for (in their own words) the ordinary people of the country. They have always been few in number, but today they control fully 75 seats in Parliament. Not enough to ever form a government, but enough to have influence, as Lord Longford described, recounting to me how the Radicals had prevented the Tories from abolishing the inflation escalator that determines the right to vote in the English shires. “They would have locked us in the same grotesque position as Scotland,” Longford says, his eyes burning with anger, “with less than fifteen percent of the population able to vote. Well, we showed them!”
I asked for more background information. Really I was leading up to asking them about foreign policy, but this seemed a good lead-in. “Where did the escalator come from, anyhow?”
“Well, that’s rather complicated,” said a new voice. Jeremiah Corbyn is one of the Radicals’ few MPs from southern England, representing Chippenham. Now ageing, he seems to have a perpetual scowl, though given his party’s problems that is perhaps forgiveable. “Suffice to say that when King Henry and his bastards put in the forty shilling property requirement in the fifteenth century, they didn’t foresee inflation, not like the Scots did. So the law still says you need forty shillings’ worth of property to vote in a county seat.”
“Even though, after all the inflation the pound suffered in the German Wars—” I said, nodding along.
“Exactly. Forty shillings now buys a pint of beer,” Corbyn said triumphantly, wagging a finger. “Meaning that anyone can afford that much property. Even our many poor citizens locked in horrendous conditions by vile landlords—” I boggled for a moment at his use of the word ‘citizens’, which I know is a dirty word in London, “—have taken advantage of schemes many great social warriors have implemented. Even owning a bit of land the size of an envelope gives them the right to vote now, no matter how the Tories keep trying to change the laws.”
“So almost everyone has the vote,” I said slowly.
“Us of ‘the Sex’, too, since the property ownership laws were changed,” Short added, making air quotes with her fingers as she sarcastically used the aristocratic term. “Radical votes were crucial in bringing that forward, too, of course.” Though it couldn’t have passed if it hadn’t eventually won some support from Whigs henpecked by their politically active wives, I diplomatically did not mention.
“I see,” I said. “So…” I cast around to find a tactful way to broach the question, “if the poor can vote, why don’t you win more seats than you do?”
Corbyn rolled his eyes, but it was Longford who replied. “Because one doesn’t just have one vote,” he explained gently. “A rich man can buy an envelope of land in every county and vote in all of them. And he does.”
“Not to mention that only the counties work on that franchise,” said Corbyn. “The boroughs have all sorts of different schemes—if you pay a particular poll tax, if you’re a freeman of the city, which means the council effectively decides, then there are those where the council actually just does pick the MP themselves, and then there’s the potwallopers…”
“The whats?”
“You can vote if you have a fireplace, a cookpot and a door.” Corbyn shook his head. “It’s meant to be a legal description of being a householder, but we’ve had fun with that one…”
“How many times did we pass that door around among the voters?” Short added with a look of wistful memory.
“There are other reasons, of course,” Longford said, dragging the conversation back on track. “Anyone can vote, but voting here is not by the secret ballot, as it is in your United States.” I tried to correct him that it wasn’t the case in every state or consistently for every office, but he wouldn’t listen. “The Tories and the Whigs are forever giving us examples of supposed abuses in your country because of the ballot, calling it un-British. They know that if we had it here, all those poor oppressed workers would no longer have their landlords looking over their shoulder and they could vote with their hearts. It’s happened here in Birmingham since we drove them out.” Short looked proud.
Indeed, Birmingham’s four borough seats—very grudgingly awarded by the Whigs only a few decades ago—are some of the few solid Radical ones in the United Kingdom, with the Radicals even sometimes running unopposed. As Birmingham has sprawled across more and more of Staffordshire and Warwickshire, so too have these votes also bled into the county seats, with several of them going to the sea-green party. But besides a few other centres of support such as Sheffield and Manchester and a few popular locals outside the comfort zone like Corbyn, the party has found little traction. Half of its seats can be found in Ireland, where enough voters—‘lulos’, as they are known, due to being metaphorically orange on the outside and green on the inside—defy the wishes of their landlords to vote Radical instead. I asked why other industrial cities like Liverpool and Newcastle are less welcoming to the Radicals. “They already had borough seats before the Industrial Revolution,” Corbyn explained, “and went with the thirty pieces of silver baked into Canning’s loaf.”
“If we had enough Catholics in Liverpool make a false confession to Anglicanism like they do in Ireland to vote…” Short said doubtfully.
This started an argument about Ireland, a subject which I get the impression often overheats Radical meetings, with Short condemning Corbyn’s strange plan to segregate all the Protestant Ascendancy rulers into Ulster and then split it off from the other three provinces to let the Catholics rule themselves. I hastily diverted the discussion to foreign policy at last, and I can give some information on the off chance that the Radicals end up playing a part in the government elected here in two years when the seven-year parliamentary term expires. As I implied above, they have a very rose-tinted vision of the United States, which they often say they wish Britain was more like. They are however somewhat suspicious of free trade at times. Suffice to say that if President Taft attempts a free trade deal, he will get more support from Radicals because he is American than because of the deal. I noticed Longford even had a bust of George Washington and a framed Gillray print of King George III having a trouser accident in his office. Birmingham really is another world…
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Oh, dear Lords... Catholic Emancipation has never come to pass... Though a bit intrigued that the Radicals aren't more pro-free trade. What would Bright and Cobden think?
Naturally, Jeremiah Corbyn is against a united Ireland because in OTL he is in favour of a united Ireland.
All in all, really did like the whole chapters as indeed I am very fond of 18th and 19th century electoral qualification requirement and the shenanigans involved in finding loopholes around them.
Naturally, Jeremiah Corbyn is against a united Ireland because in OTL he is in favour of a united Ireland.
All in all, really did like the whole chapters as indeed I am very fond of 18th and 19th century electoral qualification requirement and the shenanigans involved in finding loopholes around them.
I love how Peel is a byword for unambitious loyalty if he is remembered at all by the Tories rather than his controversial legacy as the man who broke the party twice in OTL. No Catholic Emancipation though? Damn. I would have thought that was impossible to avoid without huge problems in Ireland, even more so than OTL. Though that is the point of this TLIAW.
The past is an alien country, they say. This word is too.
The past is an alien country, they say. This word is too.