TLIAW: The Unreformed Kingdom

[Thande]

I didn’t go straight back to the station, having a few hours to kill before my train back to London. I had been urged repeatedly by the Lady Mayoress to visit Newhall Hill, and I felt my trip would not be complete without it. I got lost a few times on the way, but finally I pushed past a group of teenagers—appropriately wearing the ubiquitous green shirts with the iconic silhouetted face of Neville Chamberlain in his beret—and found myself at my destination.

“Newhall Hill”, like say “Runnymede” here or “Fort Macon” at home, evokes not merely a place name but a whole turning point in history that has cast a long shadow before it. It was here that the Birmingham Political League, led by the middle-class banker Thomas Attwood, organised a meeting that Radical historians claim consisted of over 300,000 men and women, although official histories attempt to show a lower figure. Attwood was a man in the old peaceable tradition of Radicalism who rejected the bloody chaos of the French Revolution, which was still in living memory, as doomed to futility. He believed that the people of Birmingham and other oppressed Northern and Midland metropolei could obtain their rights and liberties by peaceful protest and campaigning.

He was, of course, wrong. Where his body is buried remains unclear, but the number of memorials to his execution across the city ensure his face stares down at you from what seems like every pub sign and every lamp-post. The Lady Mayoress of course had a huge painting of him in her office, and an enormous statue of him gazes down on Newhall Hill, standing in the very spot where he had addressed the crowd before the troops were sent in. Despite his martyrdom, Attwood did pave the way for the hard-won freedom of Birmingham that his successors have won by a bloodier path than he would have liked. In particular, he struck a great symbolic victory when his followers enacted his plan to crash the economy by all simultaneously withdrawing their savings in gold and causing a run on the Bank of England. As well as wiping out the fortunes of many of the upper-class speculating MPs who had dismissed calls for reform in Parliament, this also inadvertently weakened the pound and led to the acceleration of the Inflation Escalator that the latter-day Radicals had described to me, which would continue due to the German Wars. Ironically Attwood did indeed win greater representation for the middle and lower classes by his actions, albeit not by the way he intended.

When the establishment had not given up their grip on Birmingham and were trying hard to erase any sign of this proud history, Newhall Hill was at one point concreted over with anonymous apartments. However, the ruling Radicals have now restored it to the state it was in the early nineteenth century—though ironically the sheer number of statues and memorials, not only to Attwood but to many of his supporters who were also martyred—provide more of an impediment for anyone to march through the area than the concrete bollards of the old regime ever did.

With a thoughtful head and a heavy heart, I returned to NBS on a trolley and set off for London. And that was where the trouble started.

I’m not sure now what the problem was. According to some of my fellow passengers—who, typically of the Brits, woke up and became sociable once they had something mutual to complain about—it may have been Irish terrorist activity threatening the new line. Another theory was that a high priority carriage for a member of the Royal Family or one of the big landowners was coming through and we got shunted aside, though I don’t think that happens on the West Midlands Railway. Anyhow, we ended up being unceremoniously dumped on an old slow train that used the freight lines, and were then somehow diverted to Herefordshire. To add insult to injury, we were then told that the train would have to wait at Hereford Station for two hours while they reorganised the chaos of the network. I wouldn’t get back to London till 2 am at the earliest.

In a black mood, I dismissed the railway company’s hopeful compensatory offer of free cider and went to explore the town. I might have changed my mind if I’d known they meant hard cider. Sometimes it feels like us and the Brits are not so much united by a common language as separated by one.

Hey…that’s quite good, I should write that down.

Yeah, so, Hereford. Politically the borough is a Whig island in a Tory sea. It’s dominated by the Clive family, related to Clive of India, though that’s not necessarily something you’d want to trumpet nowadays considering what eventually came from what he did. Hereford itself is a small rural place, quite a contrast to the vast consolidation of Birmingham and its factory chimneys that turn so many of its people (or, indeed, citizens) the colour of the people the ancestral Clive spent his career fighting. Despite that, Hereford feels deprived in places, and certainly seems isolated. Children were pointing at our train as though it was unusual for one to arrive. I was told by the proprietor of the coffee-shop I tried that ‘They don’t need a gallows here, they just wait for the criminals to kill themselves out of boredom’. Or perhaps the Herefordians are just noted for black humour as well as cider.

The other thing they seem to be noted for is animal husbandry. Whereas Birmingham has filled Newhall Hill with statues of its Radical Martyrs, the street before Hereford Town Hall is choked with statues and murals celebrating the breakthroughs over the years of selective breeding and modern eugenics on the region’s famous cattle and other agricultural products. Not sure about the four-legged cockerel and hen, though it did seem to simplify the menu at the Scottish fried chicken place next to the coffee-shop. And surely the size of those sheep in the pictures have to be hyperbole, they’d be as big as those Prussian recreational vehicle things they’ve started building recently.

Anyway, I passed my two hours in a state of more variation and less inebriation than my fellows, got back on the train and we headed back to London via a circuitous route. In the end we all got distracted from the interminable journey by helping a young farm hand from Lincolnshire who was anxious about getting home. I did try to tell him that the train hadn’t been going to Lincolnshire even before its diversion, but I’m not sure he understood.

Ah well. At least my appointment tomorrow is not until the afternoon. I am going to get my head down and sleep off that journey, with all its high and low points.

 

[CaliBoy1990]

​

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s that time once again, we’ve got—

What are you doing?

The whole bold text normal text thing, obviously—

Well we’re not doing that this time.

Spoilsport.

Ahem.

Foreword
As alternate historians we are used to the idea that things in history can be changed. It is easy to picture a different flag over a palace, a different head on a coin, a different name on an invention. Nonetheless even alternate historians often fall victim to the fallacy of ‘historical whiggism’—that there is an ineluctable drive for Progress that always takes one direction towards the sunlit uplands (which curiously always seems to resemble the current values in fashion in our own timeline) and while it may be delayed, it cannot be stopped. When a news story breaks of events supposedly representative of ‘backwards’ values, we bemoan the fact that this happened ‘in the twenty-first century!’—and ignore the fact that our forefathers said much the same when it happened in the twentieth, nineteenth and so on.

A fine illustration of this tendency can be seen by comparing editions of, for example, the Times Atlas of World History from different eras such as the 1970s, 1990s and today. The last page or so remain almost unchanged, making the same prediction of a world transformed by global capitalism, secularism and greater environmental awareness. Yet more pages are inserted before that with each edition, describing world-shattering changes such as the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of theocratic states and non-state actors. These changes add more and more contradiction to the final page, which is ultimately founded in futurist ‘progressive’ assumptions that predate them, until one day that conception will be thrown out altogether.

History is like evolution: it is not towards anything, but simply away from something. What path it takes is entirely up to us and the forces we set into motion. There are many things that seem ‘inevitable’ to us that would be baffling to inhabitants of other timelines—and vice versa. In our timeline there are many that see monarchism as an atavistic institution hanging on through life support in a few states, but is doomed to extinction within a generation. There are doubtless timelines out there where the same view is taken of that outdated, ridiculously flawed institution of government known as democracy, which began to be surpassed in the 1930s with its collapse in most European countries. To take another example, there were anti-vaccination campaigners 150 years ago; after the huge strides vaccination has made towards the elimination of global destructive diseases, there are still anti-vaccination campaigners today. This works both ways, too: social changes need not be required for scientific and technological breakthroughs—the Industrial Revolution was a cause of demands for such social changes, not a result of them.

History—and humanity—are not neat. Issues are rarely settled for good. Concepts cannot be deleted from our global consciousness as Orwell and his unironic imitators imagined they might. Equally, an apparently outdated practice may persist simply due to a lack of popular will to do otherwise. There are timelines where the idea of the United States still using a marginally amended version of its original 1789 constitution would be laughable, where the ancient republic of San Marino failing to join a united Italy would be absurd, where the continuing post-Cold War division of Korea would be inconsistent. Yet all of those things are true in our own timeline, and we accept them because that’s the way the world is. Nor is ‘progress’ one way even in our own timeline. Not so long ago, eugenics and Prohibition were considered progressive reforms part of the same package as votes for women, free education for all and improved sanitation. It is not always easy to predict which way the judgement of history will go.

So, how difficult is it to avert an inevitable, ineluctable tide of historical progress?

Perhaps easier than one might think...

Interesting idea.....I might stick around for this. (Although I will say one thing: I dunno about this whole "historical whiggism" thing, but it is certainly true that while progress can be delayed, or even temporarily reversed for a time, i.e. the Dark Ages in real history, it never truly permanently ends.)

I like the fact that you have noted the important historical role Andrew Jackson played in the development of American democracy, also the fact that eugenics and prohibition were considered progressive ideals. I remember when Ares visited me a time back making a comment to the effect that we like to divide history into good guys and bad guys, and that we consequently tend to see some people as "bringing in the future" and those who wish to "cling on to the past", and I said that Andrew Jackson was a good example of this. Everyone on this forum hates Andrew Jackson for pretty much justifiable reasons - ethnic cleansing. At the same time, however, every honest student of American history must acknowledge the tremendously important role Andrew Jackson played in the development of American democracy. When he started out, democracy was synonymous with mob rule, and indeed, the Founding Fathers had been extremely skeptical of the practice. By the time Andrew Jackson left office, there was universal white male suffrage, and the very idea of the popular mandate to govern was considered the only just basis of government.

We like our good guys to be thoroughly good, and we like our bad guys to be thoroughly bad. History, it appears, is never kind enough to provide us with such a clean narrative.

Erm, I'm afraid have to correct you(and Thande) on some things:

1. Although Prohibition was indeed fairly popular with progressives, here in the U.S., at least, they were actually somewhat divided in regards to eugenics, and some actually opposed it(at least racial eugenics, if not the whole thing).....not to mention that eugenics predated the Progressive Movement by some years.

2. Although it is true that a few founders were, in fact, genuinely skeptical of expanding the vote(James Madison comes to mind), the majority generally intended to allow for at least universal white male suffrage, if not that of all free men in the country. (although it can be admitted that political realities on the ground made the full implementation of this difficult for a time.)

So less democracy - greater floridity?

Fun, but I am skeptical that Jackson was so vital for the widening of the US vote - his loss would have delayed it, but stopped it? That's some serious great-man shit there. Comparing history to biology or geology forgets that rocks and plants lack opinions and the ability to organize: there were plenty of people more radical than the Virginia Planterocracy involved in the US revolution and its aftermath, and although OTL was largely a conservative victory (voting rights were often -narrowed- in the immediate post-revolution period) the logic of expanding the (white male) vote was there from the start: Kentucky abandoned property requirements for a vote as early as 1792. I'll admit there were reversals, but the US elites weren't really comparable to the entrenched British landowner class, and the weakly centralized government didn't really have the resources for oppression the British government had. A majority of US adult white males had the vote before Jackson was elected.

I can (just) believe in a Britain where the aristocracy still dominates, but the US by 2015 I suspect will be as OTL: dominated by cash.

Some truth here; for all this country's faults, there's no doubt that those initial Revolutionary ideals continued to survive.

(Of course, white male enfranchisement was often accompanied by black dis-enfranchisement, but that's another barrel of rotting fish).

And, mind you, this didn't have to happen nearly as much as it did IOTL.

It's not even like just his friends were advocates. It was a broad-based movement that had been on-going for decades and decades prior, having achieved substantial success and completion by the 1820's. Only a few hold-outs remained and it wouldn't be ambitious to guess that 90% of white adult males were qualified voters by 1820.

What was different with Jackson was his popularity and how that popularity was able to drive him to the Presidency against the wishes of the then existing Washington establishment for probably the first time. Then it was about his opening of Federal offices to anyone, rather than the circles of insiders who had previously dominated. Then it was about the broad array of policies he followed that were ostensibly all about the benefit of the common man.

Jackson was the beneficiary of an ideological shift that occurred after the institutional shift.

Nevertheless, if Thande wants this to be less-than-serious, we shouldn't get in his way. Otherwise we'd be kill-joys

Perhaps so. After all, this site *is* about creativity more than anything else, amirite?

 

[Alex Richards]

Hereford cider, the Super Mumby excellent adventure, Sheep the size of VW camper vans... You're spoiling us with all the references here Thande.

Also, yikes economic warfare and priority trains for the gentry, what has the country come to?

 

[Thande]

Hereford cider, the Super Mumby excellent adventure, Sheep the size of VW camper vans... You're spoiling us with all the references here Thande.

Also, yikes economic warfare and priority trains for the gentry, what has the country come to?

Interestingly enough Attwood's run on the bank plan was OTL, though he never had to follow through with his threat because the Reform Act was passed. I wrote this in part because I was so taken by the idea while doing research, it seemed so original.

 

[CaliBoy1990]

Hereford cider, the Super Mumby excellent adventure, Sheep the size of VW camper vans... You're spoiling us with all the references here Thande.

Also, yikes economic warfare and priority trains for the gentry, what has the country come to?

Seconded, I'm liking the references, too, Thande.

 

[Geordie]

First, a minor nitpick.

Birmingham has sprawled across county boundaries, eating numerous surrounding towns such as Dudley and Warrington, and now has its eye on Coventry

Warrington? Is this an autocorrect - Walsall, or Warwick, perhaps - or is there one in the West Midlands too?

SNIP

Interesting stuff. Some grim political stuff, and we're clearly in a very odd place, but the references to Hereford, Cider, Super Mumby Excellent Adventures and the long departed Sheep Thread made me laugh out loud. I was surprised to see no mention of Chamberlains in Birmingham, but maybe the butterflies did for them?

Interestingly enough Attwood's run on the bank plan was OTL, though he never had to follow through with his threat because the Reform Act was passed. I wrote this in part because I was so taken by the idea while doing research, it seemed so original.

This is interesting. At the age of about ten, after a trip to Beamish where they explained the fact that notes began more as legal documents than real currency, using a white fiver for demonstration purposes, my little radical self concocted this plan. Sadly, only my best friend and my brother were up for joining me, and even I understood that the bank could probably find enough in the petty cash tin to deal with the collected might of three piggy banks. Nice to see somebody else had the plan, and marshalled the people necessary, at least in one TL.

 

[B_Munro]

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).

I'm afraid I'm going to be the cynic here, and say the reason he had as many admirers as he did OTL was because he was a romantic failure. If he'd actually managed to set off a large scale slave rebellion, with massacres, white wimmens in peril, etc., the abolitionists would have dropped him like a hot flaming potato, a flaming potato filled with acid, a flaming potato erupting with hot acid due to the heat of the flames with which the potato is flaming, etc.

We could be seeing a secession over tariffs, I suppose.

The sarcasm grows thick as sea poop, er, pea soup!

 

[Thande]

First, a minor nitpick.

Warrington? Is this an autocorrect - Walsall, or Warwick, perhaps - or is there one in the West Midlands too?

I always get that one wrong and am newly surprised every time I'm reminded Warrington is in Cheshire. (I meant Wolverhampton). Corrected.

This is interesting. At the age of about ten, after a trip to Beamish where they explained the fact that notes began more as legal documents than real currency, using a white fiver for demonstration purposes, my little radical self concocted this plan. Sadly, only my best friend and my brother were up for joining me, and even I understood that the bank could probably find enough in the petty cash tin to deal with the collected might of three piggy banks. Nice to see somebody else had the plan, and marshalled the people necessary, at least in one TL.

Heh, at least one other person had the idea then!

 

[Geordie]

I always get that one wrong and am newly surprised every time I'm reminded Warrington is in Cheshire. (I meant Wolverhampton). Corrected.

Ha! I did think about Wolverhampton, but thought "Nah, he can't possibly mean that."

Heh, at least one other person had the idea then!

Aye. It turns out that that same school friend, who I haven't seen for nearly a decade, replaced my Grandparent's boiler today. I shall have to try and pass a message on, saying we were not alone in our grand plan.

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

If the forty-shilling threshold has devalued that much, then wouldn't it be within most people's means to buy an envelope-size parcel of land in each county and multiply their votes? I assume that voting doesn't require physical presence at the polling place, or else the rich wouldn't be able to be everyplace at once on election day. Or does each county vote on a different day? That might explain why working-class people don't cast multiple votes, if doing so would require them to take a month or so off work.

 

[Sulemain]

If the forty-shilling threshold has devalued that much, then wouldn't it be within most people's means to buy an envelope-size parcel of land in each county and multiply their votes? I assume that voting doesn't require physical presence at the polling place, or else the rich wouldn't be able to be everyplace at once on election day. Or does each county vote on a different day? That might explain why working-class people don't cast multiple votes, if doing so would require them to take a month or so off work.

I'm getting the impression that the British ITTL are trying desperately not to admit they are living in the 21st Century.

Also, the narrator is Barrack Obama calling it now.

The Radical attitude towards the US is similar to the attitude the Liberals and the like held in the 19th Century.

I've just realised that this is a sort of "Age of Sail and Steam" Punk TL, with all that entails.

 

[B_Munro]

I'm getting the impression that the British ITTL are trying desperately not to admit they are living in the 21st Century.

Also, the narrator is Barrack Obama calling it now.

.

I don't think he'd refer to blacks in the Confederacy as "Hamites."

 

[Thoresby]

I don't think he'd refer to blacks in the Confederacy as "Hamites."

Or be welcomed in this rather racist Britain.

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

On India: since this is 1832-punk, did it remain under Company rule until its messy divorce?

 

[B_Munro]

Or be welcomed in this rather racist Britain.

Well, the British upper classes have usually been tolerant of dark-skinned foreigners as long as they have money, speak English well, and wear a good suit with an Eton tie. (Not sure if Yale would be an adequate substitute. )

 

[Thande]

August 18th, 2015

A good night’s sleep in my hotel’s luxurious Duke-sized bed (or whatever they call them here) was sufficient to restore my mood. I rose just before noon and enjoyed a late brunch in a French bistro in the appropriately named street of Petty France. Despite Mr. Rees-Mogg’s dismissal of his ‘xenophobic’ countrymen, French and Italian cooking seems quite popular on the street here. The British have even innovated by combining Italian fried fish with Belgian fried potatoes to make something they call ‘fish and chips’, which I am keen to sample later on.

The event I wished to attend did not take place until 2 pm, but fundamentally it was a part of a day-long celebration. The Lord Mayor’s Regatta is an annual event for London society, though at only 200 years old it is considerably younger than the better-known Lord Mayor’s Show in November. Things have changed over the years, of course; not only is the Thames filled with boats, but the skies above with balloons and aerocraft trailing coloured smoke. It doesn’t quite live up to the Fourth of July celebrations in Chicago, but it was still pretty impressive. People lined the streets and especially the bridges, clapping and cheering as much as they did that public execution the other day. The boats and planes, like the floats in the Lord Mayor’s Show, are mostly put on by the Livery Companies of the City of London. One big boat carries all the emblems of the guilds representing old, now vanished trades, which were abolished some years back: the Salters went out with refridgeration, the Bowyers and Fletchers rather overstayed their welcome but were eventually killed off by firearms, and so on. But they have been replaced in turn by new guilds as the world has changed: I saw the great black and white boat of the Worshipful Company of Constables, the red and blue one of the Worshipful Company of Subterranean Train Drivers, and so on. They were a reminder of the power wielded by the City of London and the man at its head—the man I would meet later that day.

The largest of all the boats belonged to that man, but the eyes of the people on the bridge were fixed elsewhere, on the speedboat that raced ahead of it, painted bright red and yellow. A cable was slung behind the boat and a figure trailed in the water at its end, raising a bright white wake. “They should put a real criminal on the end, not that b***** mannequin,” snorted one of my fellow spectators: I almost craned my neck to see if it was my friend from the execution. Regardless of his bloodthirsty desires, I know that, just as with burning the Guy on the bonfire, the ceremonial reenactment of the Drowning of Napoleon is only ever done with a dummy. Albeit these days an increasingly realistic one, produced by the company in Leeds that makes training dummies for the Royal College of Surgeons to practice on. I have read that in reality Napoleon Bonaparte was not the midget he is depicted as in British propaganda cartoons, but that image has so displaced the reality that a true-to-life dummy would probably be the subject of complaints it was too tall.

“It was too good for him,” sniffed a more middle-class spectator. “Those letters they found of his about paying to assassinate the Duke, and then he gets shot down on the battlefield at the moment of victory—that man was a petty little sore loser, like any playground bully.” I ventured the opinion of many historians that the Duke’s death had been a random fluke and had no connection to the letters in question. “Well, they would say that in America, wouldn’t they,” he said scornfully, “you were on his side.” I inched away from the man.

It was indeed something of a turnaround from the previous gentlemanly exile L’Émpereur had had, but I suppose the British population were baying for blood after the beloved Duke’s death, and wouldn’t accept the possibility of a second escape. And even Mr. Rees-Mogg thinks Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister at the time, was too extreme. It probably started a dangerous precedent of the establishment bowing to public pressure on such matters, though.

Such gloomy thoughts aside, the flotilla was soon past, and as the crowd began to break up—past the enterprising snack sellers as usual, who were making a tidy profit off bottled water on this hot day—I made my way towards the Guildhall. I had caught a glimpse of the controversial Lord Mayor waving his hat atop his big boat, but he somehow still beat me there and was atop the stage bedecked with flags and microphones, as was the foreign visitor that had been rumoured.

“Cripes! Blimey! Good heavens! Hello, good folk of London, er, and morally ambiguous folk as well!” Uproarious good-natured laughter at the only slightly accented, Oxford-educated English of the white-haired loon. “I thank each and every one of you for the warm welcome you have given me, er, and you do know I tell the Grand Mufti not to keep calling you a nest of infidels in a city of sin. I tell him, it only encourages them!” More laughter. “And I would like to express my own thanks to the Right Honourable Lord Mayor for inviting me to once again visit the country in which I spent my exilic youth and make this charity appeal. Make no mistake, the weapons and supplies you help us with will see us retaking Constantinople one day—and then the Grand Mufti can complain about our own city of sin!”

I had heard about the velocipede-riding Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire before, but I had dismissed the reports about Iskander Kemal Pasha as exaggerations. Evidently I was wrong. The Lord Mayor gave him a handshake which Iskander Kemal threatened to turn into a hug, but was stopped by the Mayor’s legendary death glare. The two are hardly peas from the same pod. But Iskander Kemal nonetheless represents a key ally of the rabble-rousing foreign type the Lord Mayor and his predecessor have attempted to recruit, effectively giving the City its own foreign policy independent from that of the government. There is already talk of Aleida Guevara’s revolution in the Argentine Confederation having been financed by City money thanks to the Lord Mayor’s intervention. One can see why he makes Parliament nervous.

And this is the man that, for a few brief minutes amid his busy schedule, I am to meet.

 

[Whanztastic]

It doesn’t quite live up to the Fourth of July celebrations in Chicago, but it was still pretty impressive.

Damn right. That was almost too much fun.

 

[Sulemain]

The conspiracy about The City of London in OTL seem to be the real deal ITTL.

 

[Makemakean]

Ah! I was wondering how Boris Johnson would be worked into this story seeing he is a descendant of a liberal Turkish politician. And you got it all properly well done! The Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire!

Still, I'm a little annoyed that you got the same idea I had a while back. I was going to have an Ottoman bee wax merchant named Barış Kemal figure in that-thing-I'm-working-on...

 

[Utgard96]

I think you may have misplaced the accent in l'Empéreur.