Tudor bulls, meet 16th century German china shop.
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That map actually reflects the height of Austrian hegemony in Italy in teh 18th century. We'll see if it lasts...
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Edward VIII: An Appreciation, Part I
Few Brandon monarchs lived lives or left historical reputations as complex as Edward VIII. On one hand, he held the view that to reign as a king meant he was the guarantee of his subjects’ lives and property. If that meant journeying to the farthest reaches of the territories he ruled and throwing himself in front of a bullet to save a single man’s life so be it. On the other, it was clear the definition of property he was willing to defend included other human beings.
When that property had gone astray, he had few doubts about the rightfulness of returning it to its “true owner.” Thus few English kings are subject to the simultaneous and intense worship and derision Edward VIII is even today, and Adeline West’s assessment that there is no better way to discover the character of an Englishman than to ask him his feelings about that king stands as true today as it was eighty years ago.
Edward was born to Frederick, Duke of Suffolk and Lady Anne Howard in 1663, their first child. This was still early in the reign of his namesake Edward VII, and neither his father nor he was given much chance of ever succeeding to the throne. Prince Edward of Suffolk inherited the bluff athleticism that characterized so many of his forbears. In a previous generation he likely would have found his place on the tiltyard. As it was, he delighted in playing war, both with toy soldiers and with playmates on the rolling grounds of the Suffolk estate at Collyweston. Asides from the unexpected death of his younger brother and constant playmate Philip in 1669, until 1673 his early life was content. However, after the fateful death of his uncle Edward VII, his cousin Mary succeeded as queen and his father became heir apparent. Mary and Edward were close enough in ages that they played together as children, and in adulthood regarded each other more with the warmth of brother and sister than as cousins.
The death of Edward VII thus did not change the prince’s life by virtue of greater pressure coming from his education in the event he succeeded to the crown, nor by elevating a relation of whom he was personally jealous. Instead, it was the scrutiny Edward’s mother Anne Howard was exposed to that left a lasting mark on his life. In his childhood, Howard family history and her Catholic background was an object of little more than idle interest and conversation. Now, she was widely seen by more radical and paranoid elements in Protestant England as an enemy of the state working against the kingdom from within. The worst of the allegations against the Duchess of Suffolk were kept from Edward in the cocoon of Collyweston, yet overhearing his parents’ conversations and the servants’ whispers he inevitably understood his mother was being attacked. And due to the close affection with which the Suffolks raised their children, he took these attacks very personally.
As Mary’s reign continued, she and King Henry kept attempting to conceive an heir of her body, and those attempts kept resulting in tragic miscarriages. Thus the possibility that Mary would die and Frederick would succeed steadily increased. It’s attributable to the cordiality of the Brandon family in these decades that it was Mary herself and not Frederick who first broached the possibility of a prestigious foreign match for Prince Edward, and it was Frederick who sought to defer an answer. The diplomacy necessary for such a match was complicated by the torturous relationship of the Brandons to the other leading house of Protestant Europe, the Wettins of Saxony: no one wanted to repeat the German succession crisis of the 1650s by which Mary’s own father Edward VII was passed over for the imperial throne. Relations with the other great Protestant royal house, in Sweden, were little better.
Thus in 1686 the surprise election of the Hohenzollern Prince of Ansbach to the German imperial throne following the Catastrophe of Vienna and the death of Christian I offered to Mary’s ministers a unique opportunity. The new German Emperor, the old but redoubtable Frederick William, had a daughter who had just become of marriageable age. This suited Mary perfectly: a match that would both tie Germany more tightly to England and diminish the haughty Wettins within the state they had built. Thus it was she who began the fateful marriage negotiations with the new Emperor. Unfortunately though, tragedy struck both families: Mary’s awful assassination in 1687, followed by the Emperor’s death in battle in 1690, meant that when the contract for the match of Edward and Elizabeth was concluded it was not by his cousin and her father, but by his father and her brother.
Mary’s death darkened Edward’s spirit, as many biographers have pointed out. Some of this was attributable to his mourning of a close friend and relation, some of it was coming to experience directly the depths that hatred could drive humans to do, and some of it was the ensuing treatment of his mother, as London wags wasted no time connecting the new queen’s Howard name with Arundel Castle, the site of the late queen’s murder, and the shared Catholic religion of the Howards and Catherine Fitzgerald. The newly minted heir-apparent, now 24, was in society enough to now hear the worst of the allegations against his mother. Moreover, his pain was only intensified by the fact that his mother’s supposed plot to murder his beloved cousin had him as its beneficiary. Some wild-eyed radicals even wanted Edward excluded from the succession as a bastard.
From the time Mary II had first proposed her grandiose plan to plant an English army in western France, Prince Edward had volunteered, eager to put his childhood interest in warfare to adult use. It had been Mary who had refused him rather than his father, as much out of fondness for Edward as practical considerations with respect to the succession. With Mary dead however, and with him enduring the pain of speculation about his family and himself, Edward’s requests to go to France became more adamant. Finally in 1688 his father relented, and made Edward an aide and secretary to Philip Duke of Kent, the English general in France. Frederick II’s permission for Edward to go to France was as much a reprieve for his son as anything else, an opportunity for Edward to escape the gossip and conspiracy theories that were ruining his youth and win glory for himself. However, the father understood as well as the son that in light of these very questions military service would critically strengthen the legitimacy of Edward’s succession as a king of England.
For all that however, this was not a military commission of the type doled out by Louis XIV to feckless junior princes of the blood in which they felt entitled to overrule experienced military commanders. Instead, Frederick II made clear to both Philip of Kent and Edward that Edward was present only to serve and learn, and the first he heard of any disagreement between the two over the prosecution of the war would convince him only that the prince had risen so far above his role he would be recalled home immediately. Edward arrived in France in 1688 just after Kent’s army had laid siege to Le Mans, and Edward was at the general’s side through the difficult days late in the year as the duc de Luxembourg picked off vital English supply routes as one might cut the strand of a rope with scissors. Edward proved himself during these tense days as serious, competent and respectful.
Nevertheless, in one celebrated episode after a particularly difficult day in the field he sent Richmond Herald to Versailles under a flag of truce with a challenge to decide the war by a personal combat between himself and the Grand Dauphin. Not only had he no authority at all to issue the challenge, but as the Duke of Kent patiently explained, the Grand Dauphin was called Grand not as a display of respect but in recognition of his physical size, and was at least five inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than the wiry Edward. The next week he received back a letter written in the hand of Louis XIV making no mention of the challenge but courteously praising his valor, sent with the gift of a very fine hawk. Edward kept the letter on his person until the day he died.
By 1690 the English adventure in mainland France had ceased to be the fanciful recreation of medieval glory that it was intended to be, and was at serious risk of becoming a quagmire. Both Frederick II and Duke Philip would have preferred in the dangerous circumstances the English army found itself in for Edward to be sent back to England. Yet by virtue of the very peril the English army found itself in, the only truly dependable means to move supplies and information were airships running by night across the English Channel, hardly safe enough to transport the heir to the throne. As the situation became only more desperate, Edward found himself pressed personally into the fighting in the Battles of Domfront and Avranches. It was here he earned his personal reputation as a soldier and adopted the persona of the stern fighting man. Broadsheets in England carried word of his exploits, transforming the perception of him in the capital overnight. Fearing his capture, the King gave Edward the option of a return to England in advance of the rest of the army, in disguise and under the protection of a specially trained cadre of the King’s Spears. He refused, and instead left with the rest of the English army in the famous extraction from Mont St. Michel.
Edward was received warmly back in London, and the suspicions that had surrounded him previously melted away in light of his new reputation. He immediately requested to be sent back to continental Europe either at the head of an English army or in service of one of the other Allied Protestant monarchs. However in early 1691 the final agreement for his marriage to Elizabeth of Ansbach was reached. Despite all that would happen later, it cannot be stressed enough that his first meeting with the young German princess to whom he was betrothed went quite well. In Elizabeth’s bold demeanor and sharp wit he saw shadows of Mary. London did too, and especially given the capital’s coldness to Queen Anne, society was only too ready to worship at the feet of the new Princess of Wales, who was pretty, well-educated, the daughter of a bona fide emperor and a confirmed, in fact, zealous, Protestant.
Nonetheless, Edward was upset when he asked his father once again to be given an army and was instead put, as he described it, on “breeding detail.” Given the old family seat at Collyweston, which held such happy memories, Edward settled there with Elizabeth and for some years was happy there, if somewhat restless. In 1692 he was formally invested as Prince of Wales. Then in 1693 Elizabeth gave birth to their first son, also named Edward, who died after a month. The next year she gave birth to Mary. Then starting in 1696, Princess Elizabeth in consecutive years gave birth to Prince Frederick, Prince Richard, and Prince William. Frederick, always weak, died in 1698 while his mother was pregnant with Richard. This left the three legitimate children of Edward VIII who developed the characters with which we are all familiar: the withdrawn and shy Mary; Richard, worshipful of his father and desperate for his affection; and bookish, aloof William.
As Elizabeth never wasted the opportunity to explain later in her life, she and the Prince would have had more children but for the unexpected death of Frederick II and the Prince’s coronation as Edward VIII. Coming as it did amid the gathering storm of the Third General War in 1699, this was especially stressful for Edward, though in his early reign he showed himself to be energetic and conscientious, pursuing in his first year a complex reshuffling of the borders of England’s possessions in mainland North America. When in 1701 though the English Parliament, fearful of the cost of a new worldwide conflict, declined to declare war against France over the Spanish succession, the stage was set for what would be the most fateful decision of Edward VIII’s life. Edward had spent a full decade performing little more than what he regarded as glorified stud duty, and badly wanted to now to lead an army in the great European war that he believed would decide the question of French hegemony in Europe and cement his own historical reputation. But Parliament and an English public fatigued with war wanted no part of such a plan.
However, in the New World the previous year the Ausrissers, the bête noires of England’s southern colonies had killed Henry, king consort of England under Mary II and Duke of Gloucester. With respect to the Ausrissers the English public craved revenge, and so it was in the Kosulu and Santee colonies that Edward could have his war.
Wasting no time, Edward VIII appointed his trusted mentor the Duke of Kent as regent during his absence; raised an army of 5,000, to be augmented once he got there with levies from the colonists; and arranged transit for himself and his army to the New World. That he was also living behind his wife and three children, ages 7, 4 and 2, with no plans for an imminent return, seemed to scarcely register with him in his eagerness to find a battlefield. Many observers have been quick to attribute Edward’s eagerness to leave England in 1701 to the collapse of his marriage to Elizabeth of Ansbach, and no doubt her five pregnancies and sedentary life at Collyweston had left Elizabeth much changed from the girl who arrived in England in 1691. Yet the royal couple’s letters from the time shows Edward was still affectionate, if not passionate, and the two was bound together by all the shared emotions of those five births and two deaths they had shared as parents.
Once in Kosulu, the validity of Edward’s belief in his military talents became apparent. The English army trapped in France during the difficult years of 1688-91 had been a laboratory of military innovations and forced efficiencies. Sending supplies by airship, the early use of air-to-ground artillery, and even German style sky-jumping had been pioneered by an English force frequently surrounded and on the verge of extinction. In the months of his transatlantic journey, Edward planned the use of these and other innovations against the Ausrissers. He intended also to create a fleet of the highly versatile shallow-bottom vessels that had proved so effective in the previous general war, hoping to use them to transport his forces up-river to the Ausrisser home territory. The problem Edward faced in pursuing this notion was of course the impossibility of bringing such steamships across the Atlantic with him, and the paucity of resources with which to construct them in North America. Thus once he arrived in Virginia he immediately began work on constructing the necessary ships in the available shipyards of nearby colonies. This meant Edward was not able to begin his campaign against the Ausrissers in earnest until 1703.
That year, beginning from Port Brandon at the mouth of the Kosulu, King Edward traveled up its length, engaging Ausrisser war parties and destroying enemy settlements as he went. With the river low that year from dry weather, seventy miles short of his goal he was forced to beach his steamboats, leave a party to guard them and proceed further north along the river bank. Finally in mid-summer he reached Pasaiste. This collection of rude houses and a single rope ferry was perhaps second in symbolic importance only to Stonehouse itself to the Ausrissers: Pasaiste denoted the shallow place in the Kosulu that far upstream best for swimming or wading across, the location where most of the fleeing slaves who would become the Ausrissers had crossed, and the place where all those still enslaved in the colonies—of whatever provenance—knew to go if they broke free. Seizing and occupying Pasaiste, which Edward regarded as necessary to preventing the flow of slaves west of the river as well as securing the road to Stonehouse and final victory over the Ausrissers, was only too easy once he got there.
It would prove far harder to hold the position, fortify it and supply it as deep as he was in enemy country and as far as he was from the ports of Henryville and Port Brandon. Moreover, though the vast majority of the Ausrisser residents of Pasaiste melted into the woods at the king’s approach, preferring to harry the English at their leisure rather than defend even that fixed position, gradually the English began to accumulate prisoners. Earlier in the war while he was still in England, Edward had considered coexistence with the Ausrissers once they had been pacified, but the vehemence of their war-making, their refusal of his overtures of peace, and most importantly, their murder of his cousin King Henry, led Edward to believe that any type of free Ausrisser nation would be a threat to the colonies. Moreover, under English law the slaves who had originally fled to form the Ausrisssers were property.
Thus it stood to reason their children were property too. So Edward began perhaps the most morally troubling episode of his reign: consulting slave records from as long as a hundred years before, brought with the army in trunks for the purpose, trying to determine which planters were the “true owners” of which slaves by virtue of their parents. Worse still, in order to obtain the necessary information from the captives, they were tortured.
Even for the hardest men in the English army on the Kosulu that autumn, this was seen as demoralizing work. Yet by Christmas, several hundred Ausrisser prisoners had been sent east in chains, several dozen more having committed grisly suicides in their cells rather than submit to re-enslavement or the return to the condition of their grandparents. Some of the more carefree English cavalrymen looked upon the tasks of patrolling and capturing Ausrissers as the equivalent of hunting, and took to it for sport. These horrors were printed indelibly upon the Ausrisser imagination, and indeed upon that of the whole world: for centuries since artists like Goya, Picasso and Antonsen have used “the child hunts of Kosulu” as subject matter to capture the essence of injustice. There is no evidence however the king ever participated in such, or that he personally regarded it as sport.
At the time Edward VIII entered the colonial war, the main force of the Ausrissers were camped near Henryville, and though they had precious little means to stop sea traffic they had executed a rather effective siege against the town, severing it from the farmlands that were its economic lifeblood. Edward believed that his attack on Pasaiste, hundreds of miles west, would force the Ausrissers to break off their attack not just on Henryville but on all the plantations of Kosulu and Santee and double back to defend their home territory. In early 1704 though, reports reached him from Henryville of how wrong he had been: even in the face of airship attacks and the use of incendiary balloons, the Ausrissers had intensified their siege, developing new supply routes around the English lines and sending reinforcements in small parties.
Then on the night of June 20 a slave revolt within the walls of Henryville accomplished what the Ausrissers couldn’t. The rebels opened the town’s gates. The Ausrissers, enraged over Pasaiste and the “Restorations” of their countrymen to former masters, began slaughtering all the non-slave residents of the city, skinning many alive. Not only was Edward’s strategy shown to be an error, the carnage served as a reproof of his claim to be able to defend his subjects. Moreover, the Ausrissers’ bloodshed had its intended effect, making Henryville famous the world over. Edward understood now that if he did not recover Henryville and defeat the Ausrissers conclusively, it would seriously endanger not just the willingness of colonists to live in “the planter-lands” of the South, but to cross the Atlantic at all. Thus he began marching east as fast as possible, leaving behind only a token force to defend Pasaiste. In the absence of the English army though, holding Pasaiste against the resurgent Ausrissers became untenable after even a few weeks, and eventually the English abandoned the settlement entirely.
A return downriver would have been faster, but Edward hoped to block Ausrisser reinforcements from reaching Henryville as he marched due east. Such efforts however both slowed Edward’s advance and involved him in a never-ending series of skirmishes against the Ausrissers, who both knew the territory and had the advantage of not marching in formation. By the end of the campaigning season in 1705 he still had not made it back to Henryville, though at the Battle of Blackburn Hill in what was up to that point the largest massed battle in the Ausrisser War Henry defeated an army of 8,000 on its way to replenish the forces at Henryville and took 700 captives for “Restoration.” At this point, Edward’s original army—5,000 Englishmen supplemented by 7,000 colonists—was reduced to 6,600, with malarial and encephalitic fevers beating the Ausrissers as leading causes of death as the troops were forced to march endlessly through the swamplands of old Hafen. Edward himself was not immune, and for two weeks lay near death as he was carried feverish through the wilderness in a makeshift litter.
The next year’s campaign season started with Edward’s long delayed effort to defeat the Ausrisser army outside Henryville. The great Ausrisser general who had led the entire Henryville campaign, Seafra Saloum, attempted a final ambush of the English army before it arrived at the gates of Henryville in the Wassamassaw fens. What Saloum did not expect was that in Edward’s long march east he had honed his use of scouts to detect such tactics, so that the English king knew the placement of the Ausrisser forces and was able to surprise them, rather than the other way around. Despite the element of surprise, the battle between Edward’s 5,000 Englishmen and Saloum’s 6,000 Ausrissers was hard-fought and close-run, but in the end the Ausrissers were overcome and Saloum was killed. This left only 2,000 people total within Henryville, mostly the former slaves. Perhaps only 300 Ausrisser soldiers were left, in a town whose defenses facing its natural harbor had already been decimated by attacks from both ships and the air. With ease, Edward was able to enter Henryville. It was now that Edward enacted one of the darker chapters of English military history: in reprisal for the previous massacre, Edward ordered in kind the execution of the Ausrissers and rebel slaves. Only the lives of 230 children and 210 adult women were spared, although they were all restored to their putative former owners.
For Edward though, his emotions on the recovery of Henryville were purely of triumph and redemption from the embarrassment of the Ausrissers’ seizure of the city. Through 1707, he was pre-occupied by efforts to stabilize the troubled colony and restore some kind of regular government. But in 1708 he once again started west for the Ausrisser homeland beyond the Kosulu, this time better integrating the use of airships for reconnaissance and a kind of primitive air cover. This campaign however was most notable for its greater savagery: in a medieval turn, when the two sides met in the Battle of Creek Field, neither took prisoners. This was his third consecutive victory in the New World, after Blackburn Hill and the Wassamassaw Fens. After four years of loathsome conditions and low morale, a sense of esprit de corps was beginning to emerge in the English army, centered on the person of the king and his willingness to share his soldiers’ privations, including sometimes lending his shoulder to push a stuck wagon.
This new confidence was smashed in February 1709. Edward used the relatively mild winter to begin early, thinking if he crossed the Kosulu early enough in the year he could capture Stonehouse, scatter and disorganize the Ausrissers, and leave an occupation force to pick through the remains before the year was out. This would free him to return to Europe to participate in the on-going war there, which England had entered after Edward’s departure for the New World due to the machinations of Philip Duke of Kent. He returned to Pasaiste, thinking it the most convenient crossing point for his army and hoping to use the recapture of the settlement to demoralize the Ausrissers.
Instead he found an army of 12,000 occupying a trench several miles long on the west riverbank. For three days his army attempted to cross the river, to no avail. Flanking maneuvers also failed when Edward discovered the Ausrissers had placed additional forces in the wings on the east bank. The Battle of the Kosulu was by far the worst performance of Edward VIII’s long military career: the army of 9,000, more than two-thirds of which were new arrivals from England, was reduced to 3,000 by the end of the engagement, while the Ausrissers lost little more than 2,000 of their total forces. Shortly afterward the king suffered the first of his legendary malarial relapses, and was now seen as likely to die.
It was John Earl of Gravesend, Edward’s lieutenant since the recapture of Henryville, who then made the difficult decision to remove the king by any means necessary from the battle zone before the Ausrissers could mount an offensive against the now smaller English force. The fastest and safest way to move the king were the steamboats that still waited on the Kosulu. Thus the decision was made for the King, Gravesend, Margaret Samuels and their children to depart by steamboat, along with enough soldiers to fully man the seven others and serve as a sufficient guard. The remainder of the army would remain on the Kosulu to guard against Ausrisser incursions. This of course presupposed the Ausrissers were a conventional army with a strategy that would be informed by geography and battlefield doctrine, which was far from the case. Instead a large force of Ausrissers diverted to pursue the sick king’s journey downriver, hoping to capture or kill him. Constantly on the harrowing journey downriver the steamboats faced gunmen placed on ridges or in trees, swimmers attempting to sneak on board, or irregulars trying to descend onto the boats’ decks or canopies from low-hanging branches over the water. Attrition among the guards was dire, and on one occasion Margaret Samuels herself, while pregnant with her fourth child, was shot in the hand by a sniper. After two weeks, Edward was finally back in the still barely-functioning Henryville. Gravesend, along with the colonial governor and other aides, advised Edward to return to England and see to his health. Tearfully, Margaret Samuels concurred. However, Edward would not be convinced, and with apparent sincerity determined that he would prefer to die finishing the war against the Ausrissers than admit defeat and return to the comfort of England.
Now came the famous intercession of the “three wise men.” Fathers Ignacio de Alconchel, Jorges Luiz de Valdeobispo, and Enrique de Gramenet presented themselves in Henryville with what they claimed were letters patent from the Judges of the Ausrissers setting forth the possibility of a peace through the mediation of the Catholic Church and empowering the said priests to negotiate on their behalf. The priests for their part, who were all also Dominican friars born in Spain who had come into contact with the Ausrissers through their mission work in Florida, proposed the recognition of the Kosulu as the boundary between the colony that had been just renamed Edwardsland in the king’s absence on one side, and Ausrisser territory on the other. Efforts by one side to free slaves on the other’s side of the river and of the other to recapture them, were to be abandoned. Edward adamantly refused, the intervening years since Henryville’s fall having only hardened his hatred of the Ausrissers.
But then he fell sick again. And once again the Earl of Gravesend intervened. Whether he really said the words attributed to him on the occasion we will never know, but certainly he moved expeditiously enough it cannot be imagined he wanted the king to have a second chance to say no. He accepted the treaty proposal, signed it by virtue of an emergency grant of power executed by the king’s own hand, and promptly loaded the king, Margaret Samuels and their children onto the first ship out of Henryville. It is worth noting that for his trouble Gravesend was banished from court on the royal party’s return to London in 1710, and the only post he ever received again was that of governor of faraway King Edward’s Island in the Indian Ocean, following the end of the Third General War. Of course it later became known that the three Dominicans had in fact forged their documents and had no authority to treat on behalf of the Ausrissers, but were merely acting to protect that nation from extinction. But the terms of the treaty held remarkably well, all the same.
We could not conclude our discussion of the king’s time in the New World without addressing what remains one of the most famous aspects of his life. Sometime during his winter spent at Pasaiste in the extreme west of what would shortly become Edwardsland, the king met Margaret Samuels, a nineteen year old member of the Catawba tribe. All we know about Margaret’s life before she met the king was that she was the daughter of a chief or some other high-ranking person, and that she was the only one of seven children in her family to survive a smallpox epidemic, and so was seen as somehow protected or especially fortunate. Numerous histories have repeated the spurious stories that she was “given” to the king by her father, but these accounts seem to have little more basis in reality than the authors’ lurid imaginations. In truth we have no direct knowledge of how their relationship began.
Nonetheless, on the march east to Henryville in 1706 she bore the king Joshua FitzRoy, followed the next year by Solomon. In 1709 she bore the king a stillborn daughter, and in 1710 bore him a third son, David, in Henryville while the king lay ill.
Just as we do not know the beginning of the relationship, we do not know the nature of the early commitments the king made to Margaret or her children. The earl of Gravesend’s letters from the period revealed he believed they were very close, but he still assumed that she would stay in the New World once the king’s great campaign against the Ausrissers was over. Margaret herself seemed to have no great desire to see England, or to advance the interests of her sons. Nonetheless, the king’s illness at the time of his return back to England convinced her that she and the children must go with him back to the country he ruled. No matter what Edward had told her about what awaited her in England, she could not have known what she was doing.
Meanwhile in England Elizabeth of Ansbach endured what she felt was the insult of not being chosen to be Regent with hurt dignity. Likewise, her offers of undertaking diplomatic work by corresponding to her brother the Emperor and the other Protestant rulers of Europe were delicately rejected by the Duke of Kent, who felt Elizabeth was too self-interested and frivolous to be trusted with such delicate work. This left Elizabeth, a figure of formidable willpower, with only the spheres of the court, the arts and the royal household in which to act. She immediately set out to set her stamp indelibly on each. Since their ascension in 1603 to the throne of England, the Brandons had maintained a court that was famously relaxed and informal. Elizabeth felt this inappropriate, and began gradually to introduce her own adaptions of the court ceremony of Versailles. The first dinner she gave, in 1703, at which she was supposed to sit, be served, and complete her meal before anyone else could eat, nearly resulted in a riot among the nobles at Whitehall. Immediately her popularity evaporated, and her personal style regarded as overbearing and suspiciously foreign. Efforts by Queen Anne to persuade her to change course were not taken well. At the same time, Elizabeth imagined herself a Maecenas, and began supporting various artists.
One of these, the playwright-cum-architect Sir John Vanbrugh, had as it turned out just finished work on his first design for a great English country house, that of Castle Sidney. The queen, who disdained Whitehall because of its urban location and felt the other accommodations for the royal family at Windsor, Richmond, Hampton Court, Westhorpe and Collyweston were either too cramped or too dated, immediately commissioned him with the task of designing a new and sufficiently grand and modern royal palace. Choosing the decrepit royal property at Woodstock to start from, their shared goal was not to build an English Versailles at which would reside the entire court, but a smaller yet no less grand retreat for the royal family and their guests. By 1706 Vanbrugh submitted his first plan, which was attacked in Parliament as wildly expensive even as the Queen thought it less than she hoped for. The next year he submitted an even grander version, with a chapel larger than some European cathedrals. Elizabeth, grudgingly, found it more to her liking. As to Parliament’s opposition to the new palace due to its expense, Elizabeth was astute enough to wait for events to shift matters in her favor before proceeding. She did not have to wait long. For in 1708 King Edward won the Battle of Creek Field, and Daniel Defoe began publishing his laudatory accounts of the king’s exploits in the New World. Given that the monarch was risking his life, languishing in illness, and suffering great privations in prosecuting the war against a hated enemy, concerns about the expense of Woodstock suddenly seemed churlish, and thus Parliament voted to fund the costs of building the lavish new palace.
When Edward finally landed in Bristol in November 1710 he had been away from England longer than any reigning king since Richard I. Initially, the greatest shock for the king was his reception: everywhere he went in the West Country during his first weeks back cheering mobs gathered. For someone accustomed to suspicions and slights from the English commons, this was a pleasant surprise. Eventually the king’s advisors realized that much of the fascination with him originated in the perception Defoe’s work had promoted of him as a hardy soldier of the frontier. Thus it was his own privy counselors who suggested for him the costume of buckskin and furs that would become so famous as he traveled back to Windsor, where he was scheduled to meet the Queen and their sons, and eventually London. A similar costume, a gown made of hides, was recommended for Margaret Samuels, but she refused, instead borrowing dresses from Lady Gravesend during the long trip back to London.
Edward's Queen, Elizabeth of Ansbach
Edward VIII: An Appreciation, Part I
Few Brandon monarchs lived lives or left historical reputations as complex as Edward VIII. On one hand, he held the view that to reign as a king meant he was the guarantee of his subjects’ lives and property. If that meant journeying to the farthest reaches of the territories he ruled and throwing himself in front of a bullet to save a single man’s life so be it. On the other, it was clear the definition of property he was willing to defend included other human beings.
When that property had gone astray, he had few doubts about the rightfulness of returning it to its “true owner.” Thus few English kings are subject to the simultaneous and intense worship and derision Edward VIII is even today, and Adeline West’s assessment that there is no better way to discover the character of an Englishman than to ask him his feelings about that king stands as true today as it was eighty years ago.
Edward was born to Frederick, Duke of Suffolk and Lady Anne Howard in 1663, their first child. This was still early in the reign of his namesake Edward VII, and neither his father nor he was given much chance of ever succeeding to the throne. Prince Edward of Suffolk inherited the bluff athleticism that characterized so many of his forbears. In a previous generation he likely would have found his place on the tiltyard. As it was, he delighted in playing war, both with toy soldiers and with playmates on the rolling grounds of the Suffolk estate at Collyweston. Asides from the unexpected death of his younger brother and constant playmate Philip in 1669, until 1673 his early life was content. However, after the fateful death of his uncle Edward VII, his cousin Mary succeeded as queen and his father became heir apparent. Mary and Edward were close enough in ages that they played together as children, and in adulthood regarded each other more with the warmth of brother and sister than as cousins.
The death of Edward VII thus did not change the prince’s life by virtue of greater pressure coming from his education in the event he succeeded to the crown, nor by elevating a relation of whom he was personally jealous. Instead, it was the scrutiny Edward’s mother Anne Howard was exposed to that left a lasting mark on his life. In his childhood, Howard family history and her Catholic background was an object of little more than idle interest and conversation. Now, she was widely seen by more radical and paranoid elements in Protestant England as an enemy of the state working against the kingdom from within. The worst of the allegations against the Duchess of Suffolk were kept from Edward in the cocoon of Collyweston, yet overhearing his parents’ conversations and the servants’ whispers he inevitably understood his mother was being attacked. And due to the close affection with which the Suffolks raised their children, he took these attacks very personally.
As Mary’s reign continued, she and King Henry kept attempting to conceive an heir of her body, and those attempts kept resulting in tragic miscarriages. Thus the possibility that Mary would die and Frederick would succeed steadily increased. It’s attributable to the cordiality of the Brandon family in these decades that it was Mary herself and not Frederick who first broached the possibility of a prestigious foreign match for Prince Edward, and it was Frederick who sought to defer an answer. The diplomacy necessary for such a match was complicated by the torturous relationship of the Brandons to the other leading house of Protestant Europe, the Wettins of Saxony: no one wanted to repeat the German succession crisis of the 1650s by which Mary’s own father Edward VII was passed over for the imperial throne. Relations with the other great Protestant royal house, in Sweden, were little better.
Thus in 1686 the surprise election of the Hohenzollern Prince of Ansbach to the German imperial throne following the Catastrophe of Vienna and the death of Christian I offered to Mary’s ministers a unique opportunity. The new German Emperor, the old but redoubtable Frederick William, had a daughter who had just become of marriageable age. This suited Mary perfectly: a match that would both tie Germany more tightly to England and diminish the haughty Wettins within the state they had built. Thus it was she who began the fateful marriage negotiations with the new Emperor. Unfortunately though, tragedy struck both families: Mary’s awful assassination in 1687, followed by the Emperor’s death in battle in 1690, meant that when the contract for the match of Edward and Elizabeth was concluded it was not by his cousin and her father, but by his father and her brother.
Mary’s death darkened Edward’s spirit, as many biographers have pointed out. Some of this was attributable to his mourning of a close friend and relation, some of it was coming to experience directly the depths that hatred could drive humans to do, and some of it was the ensuing treatment of his mother, as London wags wasted no time connecting the new queen’s Howard name with Arundel Castle, the site of the late queen’s murder, and the shared Catholic religion of the Howards and Catherine Fitzgerald. The newly minted heir-apparent, now 24, was in society enough to now hear the worst of the allegations against his mother. Moreover, his pain was only intensified by the fact that his mother’s supposed plot to murder his beloved cousin had him as its beneficiary. Some wild-eyed radicals even wanted Edward excluded from the succession as a bastard.
From the time Mary II had first proposed her grandiose plan to plant an English army in western France, Prince Edward had volunteered, eager to put his childhood interest in warfare to adult use. It had been Mary who had refused him rather than his father, as much out of fondness for Edward as practical considerations with respect to the succession. With Mary dead however, and with him enduring the pain of speculation about his family and himself, Edward’s requests to go to France became more adamant. Finally in 1688 his father relented, and made Edward an aide and secretary to Philip Duke of Kent, the English general in France. Frederick II’s permission for Edward to go to France was as much a reprieve for his son as anything else, an opportunity for Edward to escape the gossip and conspiracy theories that were ruining his youth and win glory for himself. However, the father understood as well as the son that in light of these very questions military service would critically strengthen the legitimacy of Edward’s succession as a king of England.
For all that however, this was not a military commission of the type doled out by Louis XIV to feckless junior princes of the blood in which they felt entitled to overrule experienced military commanders. Instead, Frederick II made clear to both Philip of Kent and Edward that Edward was present only to serve and learn, and the first he heard of any disagreement between the two over the prosecution of the war would convince him only that the prince had risen so far above his role he would be recalled home immediately. Edward arrived in France in 1688 just after Kent’s army had laid siege to Le Mans, and Edward was at the general’s side through the difficult days late in the year as the duc de Luxembourg picked off vital English supply routes as one might cut the strand of a rope with scissors. Edward proved himself during these tense days as serious, competent and respectful.
Nevertheless, in one celebrated episode after a particularly difficult day in the field he sent Richmond Herald to Versailles under a flag of truce with a challenge to decide the war by a personal combat between himself and the Grand Dauphin. Not only had he no authority at all to issue the challenge, but as the Duke of Kent patiently explained, the Grand Dauphin was called Grand not as a display of respect but in recognition of his physical size, and was at least five inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than the wiry Edward. The next week he received back a letter written in the hand of Louis XIV making no mention of the challenge but courteously praising his valor, sent with the gift of a very fine hawk. Edward kept the letter on his person until the day he died.
By 1690 the English adventure in mainland France had ceased to be the fanciful recreation of medieval glory that it was intended to be, and was at serious risk of becoming a quagmire. Both Frederick II and Duke Philip would have preferred in the dangerous circumstances the English army found itself in for Edward to be sent back to England. Yet by virtue of the very peril the English army found itself in, the only truly dependable means to move supplies and information were airships running by night across the English Channel, hardly safe enough to transport the heir to the throne. As the situation became only more desperate, Edward found himself pressed personally into the fighting in the Battles of Domfront and Avranches. It was here he earned his personal reputation as a soldier and adopted the persona of the stern fighting man. Broadsheets in England carried word of his exploits, transforming the perception of him in the capital overnight. Fearing his capture, the King gave Edward the option of a return to England in advance of the rest of the army, in disguise and under the protection of a specially trained cadre of the King’s Spears. He refused, and instead left with the rest of the English army in the famous extraction from Mont St. Michel.
Edward was received warmly back in London, and the suspicions that had surrounded him previously melted away in light of his new reputation. He immediately requested to be sent back to continental Europe either at the head of an English army or in service of one of the other Allied Protestant monarchs. However in early 1691 the final agreement for his marriage to Elizabeth of Ansbach was reached. Despite all that would happen later, it cannot be stressed enough that his first meeting with the young German princess to whom he was betrothed went quite well. In Elizabeth’s bold demeanor and sharp wit he saw shadows of Mary. London did too, and especially given the capital’s coldness to Queen Anne, society was only too ready to worship at the feet of the new Princess of Wales, who was pretty, well-educated, the daughter of a bona fide emperor and a confirmed, in fact, zealous, Protestant.
Nonetheless, Edward was upset when he asked his father once again to be given an army and was instead put, as he described it, on “breeding detail.” Given the old family seat at Collyweston, which held such happy memories, Edward settled there with Elizabeth and for some years was happy there, if somewhat restless. In 1692 he was formally invested as Prince of Wales. Then in 1693 Elizabeth gave birth to their first son, also named Edward, who died after a month. The next year she gave birth to Mary. Then starting in 1696, Princess Elizabeth in consecutive years gave birth to Prince Frederick, Prince Richard, and Prince William. Frederick, always weak, died in 1698 while his mother was pregnant with Richard. This left the three legitimate children of Edward VIII who developed the characters with which we are all familiar: the withdrawn and shy Mary; Richard, worshipful of his father and desperate for his affection; and bookish, aloof William.
As Elizabeth never wasted the opportunity to explain later in her life, she and the Prince would have had more children but for the unexpected death of Frederick II and the Prince’s coronation as Edward VIII. Coming as it did amid the gathering storm of the Third General War in 1699, this was especially stressful for Edward, though in his early reign he showed himself to be energetic and conscientious, pursuing in his first year a complex reshuffling of the borders of England’s possessions in mainland North America. When in 1701 though the English Parliament, fearful of the cost of a new worldwide conflict, declined to declare war against France over the Spanish succession, the stage was set for what would be the most fateful decision of Edward VIII’s life. Edward had spent a full decade performing little more than what he regarded as glorified stud duty, and badly wanted to now to lead an army in the great European war that he believed would decide the question of French hegemony in Europe and cement his own historical reputation. But Parliament and an English public fatigued with war wanted no part of such a plan.
However, in the New World the previous year the Ausrissers, the bête noires of England’s southern colonies had killed Henry, king consort of England under Mary II and Duke of Gloucester. With respect to the Ausrissers the English public craved revenge, and so it was in the Kosulu and Santee colonies that Edward could have his war.
Wasting no time, Edward VIII appointed his trusted mentor the Duke of Kent as regent during his absence; raised an army of 5,000, to be augmented once he got there with levies from the colonists; and arranged transit for himself and his army to the New World. That he was also living behind his wife and three children, ages 7, 4 and 2, with no plans for an imminent return, seemed to scarcely register with him in his eagerness to find a battlefield. Many observers have been quick to attribute Edward’s eagerness to leave England in 1701 to the collapse of his marriage to Elizabeth of Ansbach, and no doubt her five pregnancies and sedentary life at Collyweston had left Elizabeth much changed from the girl who arrived in England in 1691. Yet the royal couple’s letters from the time shows Edward was still affectionate, if not passionate, and the two was bound together by all the shared emotions of those five births and two deaths they had shared as parents.
Once in Kosulu, the validity of Edward’s belief in his military talents became apparent. The English army trapped in France during the difficult years of 1688-91 had been a laboratory of military innovations and forced efficiencies. Sending supplies by airship, the early use of air-to-ground artillery, and even German style sky-jumping had been pioneered by an English force frequently surrounded and on the verge of extinction. In the months of his transatlantic journey, Edward planned the use of these and other innovations against the Ausrissers. He intended also to create a fleet of the highly versatile shallow-bottom vessels that had proved so effective in the previous general war, hoping to use them to transport his forces up-river to the Ausrisser home territory. The problem Edward faced in pursuing this notion was of course the impossibility of bringing such steamships across the Atlantic with him, and the paucity of resources with which to construct them in North America. Thus once he arrived in Virginia he immediately began work on constructing the necessary ships in the available shipyards of nearby colonies. This meant Edward was not able to begin his campaign against the Ausrissers in earnest until 1703.
That year, beginning from Port Brandon at the mouth of the Kosulu, King Edward traveled up its length, engaging Ausrisser war parties and destroying enemy settlements as he went. With the river low that year from dry weather, seventy miles short of his goal he was forced to beach his steamboats, leave a party to guard them and proceed further north along the river bank. Finally in mid-summer he reached Pasaiste. This collection of rude houses and a single rope ferry was perhaps second in symbolic importance only to Stonehouse itself to the Ausrissers: Pasaiste denoted the shallow place in the Kosulu that far upstream best for swimming or wading across, the location where most of the fleeing slaves who would become the Ausrissers had crossed, and the place where all those still enslaved in the colonies—of whatever provenance—knew to go if they broke free. Seizing and occupying Pasaiste, which Edward regarded as necessary to preventing the flow of slaves west of the river as well as securing the road to Stonehouse and final victory over the Ausrissers, was only too easy once he got there.
It would prove far harder to hold the position, fortify it and supply it as deep as he was in enemy country and as far as he was from the ports of Henryville and Port Brandon. Moreover, though the vast majority of the Ausrisser residents of Pasaiste melted into the woods at the king’s approach, preferring to harry the English at their leisure rather than defend even that fixed position, gradually the English began to accumulate prisoners. Earlier in the war while he was still in England, Edward had considered coexistence with the Ausrissers once they had been pacified, but the vehemence of their war-making, their refusal of his overtures of peace, and most importantly, their murder of his cousin King Henry, led Edward to believe that any type of free Ausrisser nation would be a threat to the colonies. Moreover, under English law the slaves who had originally fled to form the Ausrisssers were property.
Thus it stood to reason their children were property too. So Edward began perhaps the most morally troubling episode of his reign: consulting slave records from as long as a hundred years before, brought with the army in trunks for the purpose, trying to determine which planters were the “true owners” of which slaves by virtue of their parents. Worse still, in order to obtain the necessary information from the captives, they were tortured.
Even for the hardest men in the English army on the Kosulu that autumn, this was seen as demoralizing work. Yet by Christmas, several hundred Ausrisser prisoners had been sent east in chains, several dozen more having committed grisly suicides in their cells rather than submit to re-enslavement or the return to the condition of their grandparents. Some of the more carefree English cavalrymen looked upon the tasks of patrolling and capturing Ausrissers as the equivalent of hunting, and took to it for sport. These horrors were printed indelibly upon the Ausrisser imagination, and indeed upon that of the whole world: for centuries since artists like Goya, Picasso and Antonsen have used “the child hunts of Kosulu” as subject matter to capture the essence of injustice. There is no evidence however the king ever participated in such, or that he personally regarded it as sport.
At the time Edward VIII entered the colonial war, the main force of the Ausrissers were camped near Henryville, and though they had precious little means to stop sea traffic they had executed a rather effective siege against the town, severing it from the farmlands that were its economic lifeblood. Edward believed that his attack on Pasaiste, hundreds of miles west, would force the Ausrissers to break off their attack not just on Henryville but on all the plantations of Kosulu and Santee and double back to defend their home territory. In early 1704 though, reports reached him from Henryville of how wrong he had been: even in the face of airship attacks and the use of incendiary balloons, the Ausrissers had intensified their siege, developing new supply routes around the English lines and sending reinforcements in small parties.
Then on the night of June 20 a slave revolt within the walls of Henryville accomplished what the Ausrissers couldn’t. The rebels opened the town’s gates. The Ausrissers, enraged over Pasaiste and the “Restorations” of their countrymen to former masters, began slaughtering all the non-slave residents of the city, skinning many alive. Not only was Edward’s strategy shown to be an error, the carnage served as a reproof of his claim to be able to defend his subjects. Moreover, the Ausrissers’ bloodshed had its intended effect, making Henryville famous the world over. Edward understood now that if he did not recover Henryville and defeat the Ausrissers conclusively, it would seriously endanger not just the willingness of colonists to live in “the planter-lands” of the South, but to cross the Atlantic at all. Thus he began marching east as fast as possible, leaving behind only a token force to defend Pasaiste. In the absence of the English army though, holding Pasaiste against the resurgent Ausrissers became untenable after even a few weeks, and eventually the English abandoned the settlement entirely.
A return downriver would have been faster, but Edward hoped to block Ausrisser reinforcements from reaching Henryville as he marched due east. Such efforts however both slowed Edward’s advance and involved him in a never-ending series of skirmishes against the Ausrissers, who both knew the territory and had the advantage of not marching in formation. By the end of the campaigning season in 1705 he still had not made it back to Henryville, though at the Battle of Blackburn Hill in what was up to that point the largest massed battle in the Ausrisser War Henry defeated an army of 8,000 on its way to replenish the forces at Henryville and took 700 captives for “Restoration.” At this point, Edward’s original army—5,000 Englishmen supplemented by 7,000 colonists—was reduced to 6,600, with malarial and encephalitic fevers beating the Ausrissers as leading causes of death as the troops were forced to march endlessly through the swamplands of old Hafen. Edward himself was not immune, and for two weeks lay near death as he was carried feverish through the wilderness in a makeshift litter.
The next year’s campaign season started with Edward’s long delayed effort to defeat the Ausrisser army outside Henryville. The great Ausrisser general who had led the entire Henryville campaign, Seafra Saloum, attempted a final ambush of the English army before it arrived at the gates of Henryville in the Wassamassaw fens. What Saloum did not expect was that in Edward’s long march east he had honed his use of scouts to detect such tactics, so that the English king knew the placement of the Ausrisser forces and was able to surprise them, rather than the other way around. Despite the element of surprise, the battle between Edward’s 5,000 Englishmen and Saloum’s 6,000 Ausrissers was hard-fought and close-run, but in the end the Ausrissers were overcome and Saloum was killed. This left only 2,000 people total within Henryville, mostly the former slaves. Perhaps only 300 Ausrisser soldiers were left, in a town whose defenses facing its natural harbor had already been decimated by attacks from both ships and the air. With ease, Edward was able to enter Henryville. It was now that Edward enacted one of the darker chapters of English military history: in reprisal for the previous massacre, Edward ordered in kind the execution of the Ausrissers and rebel slaves. Only the lives of 230 children and 210 adult women were spared, although they were all restored to their putative former owners.
For Edward though, his emotions on the recovery of Henryville were purely of triumph and redemption from the embarrassment of the Ausrissers’ seizure of the city. Through 1707, he was pre-occupied by efforts to stabilize the troubled colony and restore some kind of regular government. But in 1708 he once again started west for the Ausrisser homeland beyond the Kosulu, this time better integrating the use of airships for reconnaissance and a kind of primitive air cover. This campaign however was most notable for its greater savagery: in a medieval turn, when the two sides met in the Battle of Creek Field, neither took prisoners. This was his third consecutive victory in the New World, after Blackburn Hill and the Wassamassaw Fens. After four years of loathsome conditions and low morale, a sense of esprit de corps was beginning to emerge in the English army, centered on the person of the king and his willingness to share his soldiers’ privations, including sometimes lending his shoulder to push a stuck wagon.
This new confidence was smashed in February 1709. Edward used the relatively mild winter to begin early, thinking if he crossed the Kosulu early enough in the year he could capture Stonehouse, scatter and disorganize the Ausrissers, and leave an occupation force to pick through the remains before the year was out. This would free him to return to Europe to participate in the on-going war there, which England had entered after Edward’s departure for the New World due to the machinations of Philip Duke of Kent. He returned to Pasaiste, thinking it the most convenient crossing point for his army and hoping to use the recapture of the settlement to demoralize the Ausrissers.
Instead he found an army of 12,000 occupying a trench several miles long on the west riverbank. For three days his army attempted to cross the river, to no avail. Flanking maneuvers also failed when Edward discovered the Ausrissers had placed additional forces in the wings on the east bank. The Battle of the Kosulu was by far the worst performance of Edward VIII’s long military career: the army of 9,000, more than two-thirds of which were new arrivals from England, was reduced to 3,000 by the end of the engagement, while the Ausrissers lost little more than 2,000 of their total forces. Shortly afterward the king suffered the first of his legendary malarial relapses, and was now seen as likely to die.
It was John Earl of Gravesend, Edward’s lieutenant since the recapture of Henryville, who then made the difficult decision to remove the king by any means necessary from the battle zone before the Ausrissers could mount an offensive against the now smaller English force. The fastest and safest way to move the king were the steamboats that still waited on the Kosulu. Thus the decision was made for the King, Gravesend, Margaret Samuels and their children to depart by steamboat, along with enough soldiers to fully man the seven others and serve as a sufficient guard. The remainder of the army would remain on the Kosulu to guard against Ausrisser incursions. This of course presupposed the Ausrissers were a conventional army with a strategy that would be informed by geography and battlefield doctrine, which was far from the case. Instead a large force of Ausrissers diverted to pursue the sick king’s journey downriver, hoping to capture or kill him. Constantly on the harrowing journey downriver the steamboats faced gunmen placed on ridges or in trees, swimmers attempting to sneak on board, or irregulars trying to descend onto the boats’ decks or canopies from low-hanging branches over the water. Attrition among the guards was dire, and on one occasion Margaret Samuels herself, while pregnant with her fourth child, was shot in the hand by a sniper. After two weeks, Edward was finally back in the still barely-functioning Henryville. Gravesend, along with the colonial governor and other aides, advised Edward to return to England and see to his health. Tearfully, Margaret Samuels concurred. However, Edward would not be convinced, and with apparent sincerity determined that he would prefer to die finishing the war against the Ausrissers than admit defeat and return to the comfort of England.
Now came the famous intercession of the “three wise men.” Fathers Ignacio de Alconchel, Jorges Luiz de Valdeobispo, and Enrique de Gramenet presented themselves in Henryville with what they claimed were letters patent from the Judges of the Ausrissers setting forth the possibility of a peace through the mediation of the Catholic Church and empowering the said priests to negotiate on their behalf. The priests for their part, who were all also Dominican friars born in Spain who had come into contact with the Ausrissers through their mission work in Florida, proposed the recognition of the Kosulu as the boundary between the colony that had been just renamed Edwardsland in the king’s absence on one side, and Ausrisser territory on the other. Efforts by one side to free slaves on the other’s side of the river and of the other to recapture them, were to be abandoned. Edward adamantly refused, the intervening years since Henryville’s fall having only hardened his hatred of the Ausrissers.
But then he fell sick again. And once again the Earl of Gravesend intervened. Whether he really said the words attributed to him on the occasion we will never know, but certainly he moved expeditiously enough it cannot be imagined he wanted the king to have a second chance to say no. He accepted the treaty proposal, signed it by virtue of an emergency grant of power executed by the king’s own hand, and promptly loaded the king, Margaret Samuels and their children onto the first ship out of Henryville. It is worth noting that for his trouble Gravesend was banished from court on the royal party’s return to London in 1710, and the only post he ever received again was that of governor of faraway King Edward’s Island in the Indian Ocean, following the end of the Third General War. Of course it later became known that the three Dominicans had in fact forged their documents and had no authority to treat on behalf of the Ausrissers, but were merely acting to protect that nation from extinction. But the terms of the treaty held remarkably well, all the same.
We could not conclude our discussion of the king’s time in the New World without addressing what remains one of the most famous aspects of his life. Sometime during his winter spent at Pasaiste in the extreme west of what would shortly become Edwardsland, the king met Margaret Samuels, a nineteen year old member of the Catawba tribe. All we know about Margaret’s life before she met the king was that she was the daughter of a chief or some other high-ranking person, and that she was the only one of seven children in her family to survive a smallpox epidemic, and so was seen as somehow protected or especially fortunate. Numerous histories have repeated the spurious stories that she was “given” to the king by her father, but these accounts seem to have little more basis in reality than the authors’ lurid imaginations. In truth we have no direct knowledge of how their relationship began.
Nonetheless, on the march east to Henryville in 1706 she bore the king Joshua FitzRoy, followed the next year by Solomon. In 1709 she bore the king a stillborn daughter, and in 1710 bore him a third son, David, in Henryville while the king lay ill.
Just as we do not know the beginning of the relationship, we do not know the nature of the early commitments the king made to Margaret or her children. The earl of Gravesend’s letters from the period revealed he believed they were very close, but he still assumed that she would stay in the New World once the king’s great campaign against the Ausrissers was over. Margaret herself seemed to have no great desire to see England, or to advance the interests of her sons. Nonetheless, the king’s illness at the time of his return back to England convinced her that she and the children must go with him back to the country he ruled. No matter what Edward had told her about what awaited her in England, she could not have known what she was doing.
Meanwhile in England Elizabeth of Ansbach endured what she felt was the insult of not being chosen to be Regent with hurt dignity. Likewise, her offers of undertaking diplomatic work by corresponding to her brother the Emperor and the other Protestant rulers of Europe were delicately rejected by the Duke of Kent, who felt Elizabeth was too self-interested and frivolous to be trusted with such delicate work. This left Elizabeth, a figure of formidable willpower, with only the spheres of the court, the arts and the royal household in which to act. She immediately set out to set her stamp indelibly on each. Since their ascension in 1603 to the throne of England, the Brandons had maintained a court that was famously relaxed and informal. Elizabeth felt this inappropriate, and began gradually to introduce her own adaptions of the court ceremony of Versailles. The first dinner she gave, in 1703, at which she was supposed to sit, be served, and complete her meal before anyone else could eat, nearly resulted in a riot among the nobles at Whitehall. Immediately her popularity evaporated, and her personal style regarded as overbearing and suspiciously foreign. Efforts by Queen Anne to persuade her to change course were not taken well. At the same time, Elizabeth imagined herself a Maecenas, and began supporting various artists.
One of these, the playwright-cum-architect Sir John Vanbrugh, had as it turned out just finished work on his first design for a great English country house, that of Castle Sidney. The queen, who disdained Whitehall because of its urban location and felt the other accommodations for the royal family at Windsor, Richmond, Hampton Court, Westhorpe and Collyweston were either too cramped or too dated, immediately commissioned him with the task of designing a new and sufficiently grand and modern royal palace. Choosing the decrepit royal property at Woodstock to start from, their shared goal was not to build an English Versailles at which would reside the entire court, but a smaller yet no less grand retreat for the royal family and their guests. By 1706 Vanbrugh submitted his first plan, which was attacked in Parliament as wildly expensive even as the Queen thought it less than she hoped for. The next year he submitted an even grander version, with a chapel larger than some European cathedrals. Elizabeth, grudgingly, found it more to her liking. As to Parliament’s opposition to the new palace due to its expense, Elizabeth was astute enough to wait for events to shift matters in her favor before proceeding. She did not have to wait long. For in 1708 King Edward won the Battle of Creek Field, and Daniel Defoe began publishing his laudatory accounts of the king’s exploits in the New World. Given that the monarch was risking his life, languishing in illness, and suffering great privations in prosecuting the war against a hated enemy, concerns about the expense of Woodstock suddenly seemed churlish, and thus Parliament voted to fund the costs of building the lavish new palace.
When Edward finally landed in Bristol in November 1710 he had been away from England longer than any reigning king since Richard I. Initially, the greatest shock for the king was his reception: everywhere he went in the West Country during his first weeks back cheering mobs gathered. For someone accustomed to suspicions and slights from the English commons, this was a pleasant surprise. Eventually the king’s advisors realized that much of the fascination with him originated in the perception Defoe’s work had promoted of him as a hardy soldier of the frontier. Thus it was his own privy counselors who suggested for him the costume of buckskin and furs that would become so famous as he traveled back to Windsor, where he was scheduled to meet the Queen and their sons, and eventually London. A similar costume, a gown made of hides, was recommended for Margaret Samuels, but she refused, instead borrowing dresses from Lady Gravesend during the long trip back to London.
Edward's Queen, Elizabeth of Ansbach
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So, with respect to the Austria Hungary issue, it might help to imagine Francis Rakoczi and a few thousand cavalrymen as his backup singers performing this atop Buda Castle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA4iX5D9Z64
Seriously, I'm almost inspired to make up an entire alternate set of lyrics.
But you're right that Italy has become the new theater for Austria ambitions (along with the Balkans). As things stand as of the Treaty of Rome, they've been able to see off the Spanish invasion of Sardinia, which they weren't able to do in our timeline.
But what I find to be the really interesting things with respect to Italy is actually not reflected in the map. Duke Cosimo's efforts to keep independence for Tuscany basically won out due to the Allied powers' desire to keep the Spanish and Austrians from gobbling up the smaller Italian states at the end of the Fourth General War. So Tuscany is now a republic.
The other interesting thing is that Venice is back in business in a big way, as Germany's essential partner in all things involving the Mediterranean. And if the Great Eastern Project works out, the Mediterranean going forward will look a lot more like the Mediterranean of the fifteenth century than our timeline's eighteenth. It's not going to be the trading backwater at all, it will be front and center, on one hand in commerce and economic development, on the other in imperialist skullduggery and some rather nasty wars.
In the long run, it's going to be interesting to see whether either the revived Venetian and Tuscan states become the core of a new Italian state rather than our timeline's Savoy/Kingdom of Sardinia, or whether the Italian "machine" of small states balancing each other out and frustrating the intrusions of the great powers continues to the present day.
Indeed. One factor that makes Austrian power so hard to measure in the timeline is that they are without Bohemia or Hungary or the Austrian Netherlands, so on their own they can't pull anywhere near the weight they could at an equivalent point in our timeline, even with Milan and Naples. At least they have the beginnings now of some sort of colonial situation now, though they're hardly the dominant player in the Great Eastern Project.
Faeelin
Banned
Well, the Netherlands were frankly a drag on them. But otherwise I agree with your point.
Excellent timeline, BTW. I'm loving the steampunk madness.
Predator II
Edward VIII: An Appreciation, Part II
There was no denying the decade apart had created a rift, both between king and queen, and father and children. While Elizabeth had been obsessing over the details of the public ceremony of her levee, Edward had fought a brutal war in the mud. And while she had overseen the start of work on one of the most opulent palaces in Europe, he had spent some nights where the clearings were too small to set up his pavilion sleeping beneath the stars. Beneath the shows for public consumption and Defoe’s mythology, Edward had changed, becoming a harder, coarser man than he had been before. His relationships with his sons were now perfunctory, their scientific and literary interests little more than an abstraction to him. With Elizabeth matters were far worse. She was now repugnant to him, and evading the court ceremonies she had so carefully erected became a game he played with relish. His great comforts during this difficult time were Margaret, Joshua, Solomon and David. He kept them at Richmond Palace, where there were ample grounds, a hunting park, and no sign of the Queen. There he would go to hunt with his sons, not par force in the style of a king of England but like a frontiersman in the lands of Hafen. With this “second family of England”, no expense was spared: he hired the best tutors and a household of servants for Margaret and his sons. Eventually, despite some absences by the king still to come, they would settle into perfect domesticity. The king’s preference for Margaret Samuels and her children was scarcely hidden, as was the rage and despair that it created in Elizabeth of Ansach and her sons and daughter.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that Edward did not wait long for his next chance to lead armies abroad, journeying to Portugal in 1711 to lead a planned invasion of Spain with Prince Eugene of Savoy, the great general of the Austrians. Edward believed that finally, he was about to be introduced to the glories of generalship on the European battlefield. Instead, it was his introduction to the vicissitudes of European power politics. Necessary for his partner Eugene to reach Portugal from Italy was the German Mediterranean fleet, newly replenished with the addition of new ships, propelled by a combination of sails and steam-powered screws. But while Edward was waiting for Eugene to arrive, word came that the German Empress Sophie, a figure in European politics whose capriciousness was already well known, had negotiated a separate peace with the French and Spanish crowns and was abandoning the Allies to win extensive new territories and save the cost of further war. This would leave Eugene and his army without a way to reach Portugal.
Hasty plans to transport as much as Eugene’s army as possible were now made, but late in 1711 Edward found his efforts hamstrung by a new problem. Portuguese, pro-Habsburg Spanish, and Austrian commanders and soldiers were refusing to serve in an army under the English king who they felt had waged war so cruelly against the Ausrissers in the Americas and enslaved fellow Christians. Edward’s response was to demand the Allies’ compliance, and threatened to make his own peace with the Bourbons on England’s behalf if he were passed over for generalship of the army. Eventually the Dutch stepped in to mediate, and after caucusing with all the parties they appealed to Edward to not sacrifice the great cause to his own self-regard. Thus ultimately Edward sailed back to England in humiliation so that Prince Eugene could lead the army alone, but abstained from making his own peace with France and Spain, a move which ultimately would have cost the Allies the war then and there.
For the next two years Edward was returned to his complex domestic life. There were inchoate plans to field another army in the United Provinces to apply pressure on the French in the north, but for a long time no action. The need for such became desperate following Prince Eugene’s defeat at Lleinida. Thus in the summer of 1713 Edward crossed the North Sea with a new army and landed in the United Provinces, where he was able to win an immediate and impressive victory at Kapellen, driving the French army from the vicinity of the Dutch capital of Antwerp. Beginning his campaign season early the next year, he won another victory at Keerbergen against the duc de Villeroi, forcing the French to decamp from the pivotal towns of Mechelen and Brussels. In both battles, Edward distinguished himself by his ability, hard-learned in his campaigns in North America, to view the battlefield as a three-dimensional space and make expert use of airships. Moreover, Edward’s good fortune was matched at the same time by Eugene’s in Spain, leading many observers to think that the long struggle of the remaining Allies might not be in vain after all.
In letters over the course of the campaign season, Queen Elizabeth had reminded Edward the princess and princes were nearing marrying age, and expressed her hope that all of them might find prestigious international matches. Edward normally was hardly predisposed to Elizabeth’s manipulations, but her efforts came at a point when Edward was increasingly fancying himself as a great player on the European stage, and there would be no better way of demonstrating this than royal matches for Richard, William and Mary. However, where Elizabeth intended to steer Edward was Wittenberg, and the Empress’s children. Edward though, still remembering the crisis over the Saxon succession under the Emperor Frederick, instead approached Sweden, destabilized by the long and expensive wars of Charles XII and facing its own possibly contested succession. Though Edward denied Charles XII what he wanted most, English intervention against Sweden’s arch-nemesis Russia, he arranged to marry the Prince of Wales to Charles’ formidable sister Ulrike Eleonora, and Mary the Princess Royal to Charles’s nephew, also Charles. Essentially this resolved the succession crisis for Charles by removing Ulrike Eleonora from Sweden and leaving the younger Charles to inherit, with Mary as his queen and Ulrike Eleonora as the eventual Queen of England.
At the start of 1715 however Edward found circumstances were shifting outside his control: a series of unexpected deaths in the House of Bourbon left Philip V of Spain the most obvious heir to Louis XIV, all previous agreements and claims he had made excluding himself from the French succession to the contrary. Then Louis XIV himself died, leading Philip V to advance his claim to the French throne. Worst of all in what was fast becoming a nightmare scenario for the Allies, in the battle of Guadalajara, Prince Eugene was slain and his army eliminated as an organized force, leaving Philip V an open road all the way to Paris. Edward’s bluff response—his famous boast that he would meet Philip V there—was in many ways his greatest moment, and the series of victories he had won in the Netherlands made it entirely possible that he might make it to Paris before Philip, and that if he did he might be able to meet Philip V in some final decisive battle and win. But once again the maneuvering of the other European monarchs upset matters.
For as soon as Louis XIV died Philip V dispatched his great minister Giulio Alberoni to Hamburg, where in negotiations hosted by the Germans he secured another separate peace by which the Dutch were peeled away by the Allies. An alliance to preserve the balance of power in Europe from a personal union of the French and Spanish thrones was only barely conceivable without the Germans. Without the Dutch as well, it was little more than a glorified Anglo-Austrian pact, wholly insufficient to the task.
For Edward, this was a moment of supreme humiliation, his chance of a great personal victory and the successful conclusion of the fifteen-year Third General War that had dominated his reign being snatched away by more political maneuverings. We will never know whether in his angry communications with the French crown in these days over England’s terms for an end to the war against France and Spain his threats to continue the war, alone if necessary, were a bluff. After several letters back-and-forth, Philip V chose to take no chances: with the exception of Saint-Dominique, he gave Edward VIII everything he wanted, including Chandernagore in India; Isle de France, which would be shortly renamed King Edward’s Island, in the Indian Ocean; Trinidad, in the Caribbean; Gibraltar, in the Mediterranean; and large concessions to English settlement in mainland North America the enforceability of which would be fought over for the next century. Thus Edward was permitted to leave northern France with terms that would permit him to claim victory at home, even though the Allies had failed in the main aim of the war and arguably Germany and the United Provinces had won still more in their treaties with the Bourbon monarchies.
Almost as an afterthought in this period Edward was able to negotiate another impressive marriage match for his children, this time between Prince William and the Grand Duchess Anna, elder surviving daughter of Tsar Peter of Russia. Negotiations for the marriage had originated in diplomatic contacts between the English and Russians following the Swedish matches of the previous year, to persuade Peter that England was not entering into an anti-Russian alliance. Moreover, to insure the news of the Russian match did not interfere with the marriage plans with the Swedes, Edward ordered it kept in strictest secrecy until after Mary was in Stockholm and Ulrike Eleonora was in London and both marriages sealed.
Thus Edward VIII returned to England in 1715 anticipating a welcome more joyous than he received five years before. Instead, he was met by the perfunctory ceremonies of a nation exhausted by almost thirty constant years of war at home and in the colonies; the sullen rage of an eldest son trapped in a marriage with a woman who openly reviled him as a non-entity and was openly meeting with lords and members of parliament in an effort to establish herself as an independent political power in the realm; and by the absence of the quiet daughter whose even demeanor had been the balm of the royal family, gone to her drunken husband in the Tre Kronor Palace in Stockholm. Despondent, Edward withdrew further into the comforts of his preferred spouse and family than he ever had before. No longer was there left any doubt which set of children he preferred.
In 1716 Elizabeth’s monumental palace at Woodstock, intended as the thanks of a grateful nation to its hero king, was completed, but Edward made it plain it was a home for Elizabeth and the princes, preferring instead to remain at Whitehall, where he could more closely attend to the business of state, and Richmond, where Margaret Samuels and Joshua, Solomon and David resided. The sting of what Elizabeth took as the king’s ingratitude to her efforts was a wound from which their marriage would never recover.
Edward worked diligently on restoring Edwardsland to some semblance of its prewar prosperity during these years. Though it would later be the cornerstone of what slender resume Edward VIII has as a defender of human equality, his decision during this period to open the colony to Jewish settlement rested on the necessity of finding someone to move into what was at the time the most dangerous country under European settlement in the world. That Jews, so widely discriminated against, or outright excluded, in most of Europe, would do so was the most important factor in Edward’s decision. However, as a secondary consideration, Edward believed that Protestant settlers would be too enticing a target for the Ausrissers to leave untouched, and Catholic settlers would be too predisposed to become allies with their co-religionists. Thus, for his purposes, European Jews were perfect.
But it was also during these years following the Third General War that Edward started what would become the central conflict of his latter reign. Henry Gloucester during his ill-fated time in the North American colonies hit upon the notion of “the Fourth Kingdom”, literally taking the scattered English colonies on the North American mainland and forging them into a single, diffuse entity with its own nobility and parliament. The taxes the parliament could levy would be used to pay for the ever-increasing cost of the colonies’ defense, without touching the purse of the English taxpayer. At the same time, because this would remove Westminster’s ability to set trade policy for the colonies it could mean losing English industries and merchants a valuable captive marketplace. Crucially, these ideas came as European economists were elaborating the theory that the trade added by the presence of foreign merchants to the colonies would be a greater boon to the colonies’ growth than it would be a curb on the home country’s own prosperity, and it was for this reason France and Spain were already relaxing their curbs on foreign trade in their territories outside Europe.
For Edward all these rationales were important and beneficial, but they paled next to what he saw as the virtues of the Fourth Kingdom to the monarchy. Eliminating the Palace of Westminster’s ability to legislate for North America would make the crown the common unifying institution governing England’s expanding empire. The English Parliament would be reduced almost to the level of a provincial body, beneath the aegis of an imperial king. Thus when the king proposed at the start of Parliament in 1718 his plan to reorganize the colonies, he met spirited opposition not just from the very commercial interests that had been the primary supporters of his war policies, but from knights of the shire and lords eager to preserve the prerogatives of Parliament within the state. Mockingly, opponents of the king’s plan proposed that perhaps France, still included in Edward’s kingdoms due to lingering claims for the lost conquests of Edward III and Henry V, should also get its own parliament.
Others likewise satirically hit upon the idea of requesting an elevation to the status of kingdom for the Isle of Man, or Berwick. This discourse did not sit well with Edward VIII, more of whose reign had been spent chasing enemies of the realm through mosquito-infested swamps than courting support for his policies from members of Parliament. Nonetheless, no mixture of promises and threats could win passage of his legislation.
It was likely as a consequence of Edward’s frustration and exhaustion with the Fourth Kingdom ordeal that in early January he suffered a serious recurrence of his malaria. Parliament, with some relief, named the Prince of Wales regent until such time as the king recovered. However, 1721 is more notable for the arrival of the French royal family-in-exile, the House of Orleans. Philippe duc d’Orleans, who was the King of France to those European states and persons who believed Louis XIV’s and Philip V’s promises that Philip of V would not succeed to the French throne should be binding, had languished in the courts of Baden, Bavaria and Ansbach since the end of the war. Now, finding his cause getting nowhere, he asked for permission to come to London and was given it by a courteous Prince Regent. At this point the family of Orleans also included his wife, Francoise Marie de Bourbon, a legitimized daughter of Louis XIV and the Madame de Montespan. Francoise Marie was a practiced intriguer of the highest order, and immediately began conspiring both to attach the putative French royal house to the Brandons however possible, and to provoke some war by which the man she called “the most puissant and war-like king ever to live” would return her husband’s crown to him. They were accompanied by their eldest daughter, Louise Elisabeth, the widow of the Duke of Berry and now a woman of questionable virtue; the charming, pretty and unmarried Louise Adelaide; Charlotte Aglae, headstrong and given to drawing room conspiracies much like her mother; Louis, the somewhat shy son and heir of the duke; the likewise retiring and neglected Louise Elisabeth the younger, still a child; the sweet-natured Philippine Elisabeth; and finally, Louise Diane, still only five years of age. A capital already tense from the enduring stalemate of Elizabeth of Ansbach and Margaret Samuels, their respective sons, and the now loudly unhappy Princess of Wales Ulrike Eleonora, London was now in Alexander Pope’s memorable phrase “a pot of designs, boiling ov’r”.
Thus Edward VIII emerged from his sickbed no longer the only king in his realm, a situation he could not have foreseen. The situation of course was even odder than that, given that while the monarchy of the Brandons was one of breezy informality and approachability for all of Queen Elizabeth’s efforts to change it, the Bourbons’ had calcified into the strictest ceremony. Even dispossessed of a kingdom and in another ruler’s palace, the putative royal family could not abrogate or amend the ceremony that in France had become synonymous with rule itself. The effect, lost on no one, was pure farce. The finances of the Pretender were also in a parlous condition on his arrival, and so in a novel solution to the predicament by November 1721 the average Londoner could pay for the opportunity to participate in the duke of Orleans’ levee as if he was a noble at Versailles, or participate in the royal banquet, which basically meant the privilege of watching Philip of Orleans eat.
Nonetheless, the House of Orleans managed to entertain impressively and creatively, and the Duchess of Orleans was soon the center of London society. Virtually all her events involved some new device to dangle the daughters of Orleans before the two English princes, their marriage and betrothal notwithstanding, the immediate result being the famous cartoon from the Patriotic Observer with a beleaguered Prince William forced to participate in a new Judgment of Paris among the Orleans’ daughters.
Of course, little did Madame d’Orleans know that the Prince of Wales for one was already attached even in addition to the Princess. Janet Pendleton, formerly Janet Kirk, of the Borders region of Scotland, was born in 1680, and had married a London jeweler in a love match. They had met by chance while he was on a trip to Edinburgh to try to satisfy the insatiable gem appetites of the Stuarts. Ten years later he was dead from cancer. He had been childless, and Mistress Pendleton inherited his prosperous business, which she managed with a well-honed sense of taste and a sharp business sense. Mr. Pendleton had won a much-coveted commission to make the Prince of Wales hat-pins. Apparently at some point in 1718 Mistress Pendleton had an appointment with the Prince of Wales to show him a selection of her best silver pins. The rest, as she explained to Vanbrugh in his sensational memoir of life among the Brandons, A Man Well Dispos’d, was that “sir, I showed him all I had, and that he bought.”
In 1721 their relationship was still secret from the public at large, although a widening circle among the royal family understood the situation. In fact, the reason their affair was publicized in 1723 was only to silence the growing suspicion that the reason the Prince of Wales had yet to produce a son in his marriage with Ulrike Eleonora was because of a disinterest in female company, or as it was put in the parlance of the time, that he was a better fit for the court of the first Emperor Frederick. Disastrously, the origin of these rumors was Ulrike Eleonora herself, eager to find some other reason than herself for the couple’s lack off children. Starting in 1721 she began complaining that she was still a virgin. No kind intercessions from William, no sympathetic conversations from Queen Elizabeth, and no threats from the king himself could get her to leave off such, until in 1722 Ulrike Eleonora was informally banished from court to Durham House, a royal residence in such disfavor it still had in its attics some of the furniture of Katherine of Aragon.
Thus the first marital scandal to break was not the Prince of Wales’ disaster but the younger prince’s. Essentially he had fallen into the snare laid by Madame Francoise Marie and fallen madly in love with the most glittering star among Philippe’s daughters, Louise Adelaide. Conveniently for Francoise Marie, Louise Adelaide shared his feelings. If Prince Richard’s dalliance was mature and frankly sexual, William’s was an adolescent passion of the type that is fed by social disapproval and the threat of separation. Thus after she had been in London for four months, and only two months after they admitted their love to each other, William confessed to his father in front of the rest of the family that he loved Louise Adelaide, and that the match with Grand Duchess Anna of Russia could not go forward because without Adelaide he was certain he would die. What the king had to say to that can be guessed. Nevertheless, William made it clear no amount of coercion, or even bodily duress, would change his mind. The king nonetheless refused to back down as well, leading to no end of the diplomatic awkwardness with a Russian ambassador eager to begin planning the proxy wedding. Matters came to a head in the affair of Prince William in 1723, when he successfully bribed the guards at Whitehall, supposedly for a night’s liberty, at the same time Louise Adelaide and Francoise Marie were waiting with a Roman Catholic priest in a chapel at the Cathedral of St. Edward the Confessor, the post-Reformation seat of Roman Catholicism in England. Agents of the king, alerted to such a possibility, stopped William just shy of the church door. Furious, the king that night banished William to his own splendid isolation at Collyweston, where he was placed under guard.
It was at the surreal height of this crisis that Edward had to travel to Mechelen to hold a summit with the Empress Sophie of Germany. Neither ruler had ever liked the other: Edward had once commented to the Earl of Gravesend that Sophie was “the most faithless whore in the world”; Sophie had likewise been liberal in sharing her view that Edward was a witless butcher who enjoyed war for its own sake. Sophie’s negotiation of a separate deal with the Bourbon powers in the Third General War, followed hard by her facilitation of a similar deal between them and the United Provinces, had hardly helped matters. However, now Sophie saw fit to notify Edward of her grand plans for the Orient, and to propose contingencies in the event the preoccupation of German forces in the East caused King Philip to attack. Edward took it all under advisement and made no commitments. The affair ended on a note of false cheer, leading Vanbrugh to observe as he saw the King Edward, Queen Elizabeth, the Empress Sophie, and the Emperor Alexander at table that “this was the summit of the two worst marriages in Europe.” To which Joseph Addison, overhearing him, replied “Hardly fair, sir. The Prince and Princess of Wales were left at home.”
Meanwhile, separation only strengthened William’s resolve, and the House of Orleans reported from its wing of Whitehall with less than convincing sincerity that Louise-Adelaide could not be persuaded to leave off the attachment either. Frustrated immensely now, Edward directed ultimatums to both sides of the relationship: William was to agree to marry Grand Duchess Anna immediately, and Philippe of Orleans was to find some suitable match for Louise Adelaide not among his sons, which he Edward VIII would gladly facilitate by generously providing a dowry. Otherwise, the House of Orleans could try their luck in Edinburgh. However, both William and Louise Adelaide proved intractable. The crisis was only broken when, partly due to stress from the ordeal, Philippe duke of Orleans died at Whitehall. Then, a few weeks later came the news that Edward’s daughter Mary, now queen of Sweden, died in childbirth in Stockholm. None of her pregnancies had produced children who had lived beyond a few weeks, and thus the King of Sweden was now a widower and Ulrike Eleonora, in her unhappy prison at Durham House, was still his heir apparent. Though far from the gentlest of men, Edward was not about to bully a grieving 21-year old who had just lost his beloved father, and so he let the threat to evict the Orleans drop.
Bizarrely however, the death of the beloved Mary worked to William’s benefit, as Charles XIII, now free to marry and still without an heir of his body, looked to the spurned Grand Duchess Anna to become his queen. The Russians, equally eager after the long years of equivocation from the English, wasted no time in concluding the deal and thus Peter the Great married his beloved daughter to his former archenemy’s heir. William now once again begged his father to permit him to marry freely. Sensing they were close to the end of the drama, Louise Adelaide—who had previously loved the Roman Church to the point of expressing an interest in taking holy orders and becoming a nun—even wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury expressing her willingness to convert to the Church of England if that would clear away the last hurdle.
Edward, now from vindictiveness as much as anything, refused to alter his position. Finally in mid-summer 1725, whether it was an innocent error, whether he played on their sympathies, or whether he successfully bribed them again, the guards at Collyweston permitted Prince William to slip their grasp again. Evidently there had been some type of planning, since William was able to meet Louise Adelaide in Kettering, where once again there was a Roman Catholic priest helpfully on hand to perform a marriage ceremony.
Edward now conceded the inevitable and refused to contest the legality of the marriage, though requiring the ceremony to be re-performed within the Church of England. He now resolved however to make good on his longstanding threat to William and exclude him from the succession. Moreover, he for the first time discussed the possibility of passing over the Prince of Wales as well. This would leave as the heir apparent Thomas Brandon, the 58 year old childless Duke of Clarence who was blind and now infirm. Second to him would be Margaret, the 59 year old Duchess of Huntly, a force to be reckoned with in the politics of her adopted Scotland. Margaret in turn had seven children, and it seemed entirely possible that if the English crown passed to the House of Huntly it could stay in that powerful and well-established family for a long while. For the English Parliament however, what it saw as the king’s meddling with the succession law was the last straw. In 1726 it started debating the possibility of requiring an Act of Parliament rather than a will to change the succession, thus ending the power of the king to treat the crown as devisable property. Considering the legitimacy of the Brandon family’s succession to the English crown in 1603 relied on the exclusion of the descendants of Margaret Tudor in Henry VIII’s will, the radical nature of this challenge to Edward’s authority could not be overestimated.
Suddenly the long-simmering family ordeal of the Brandons flowered into a full-blown constitutional crisis. Edward successfully averted the passage of an Act of Parliament codifying this principle, but the notion was still abroad that the succession might not be in his power to take away from his sons.
It was in this context that in 1727 Edward once again launched an effort to create the Fourth Kingdom, resolved once and for all to put Parliament in its place and avenge his earlier defeat. Parliament rejected his plan once again, as anticipated. It was then that Edward took the additional step and advanced the idea that the colonies had the right under natural law to create a new kingdom without the consent of Parliament, and that if they did so he would be glad to accept an offer of the crown of the new kingdom. The alarm in Parliament over this turn of events was palpable. Yet in the short term there was no way for Parliament to act to stop the various colonial legislatures from acting on the king’s call. The trickle began almost immediately: in 1728 Edwardsland, Maryland, Kennebec, Fredericksland and Queensland all acceded to the new kingdom, setting the stage for the other colonies to follow the next year. This erosion of its position, and the growing perception that the new kingdom was a fait accompli was what finally moved Parliament to act. Thus it enacted the Acts of Restatement, which purported to define rather than change certain boundaries to the power of the monarchy. Edward of course refused to countenance the new law, and the result was a stand-off between King and Parliament.
It is in this confrontation that the metaphor of the “mast of monarchy” entered the English political vernacular. Had Edward VIII been a child ruler, had he been a foreigner, had the ailments from which he suffered been psychological rather than physical, then quite likely Parliament could have won. But Edward VIII was an English king at the height of his faculties, who had led English armies abroad. From this point on the idea would gain credence that the political power of the monarchy depended on the character and career of the monarch in question: a new-comer to the throne green to rule could be easily rebuffed, whereas a war-horse or a respected humanitarian who had earned the trust of the nation could stretch his or her powers almost to the fullest breadth of the Tudors’. Of course this was not the final word in the development of the English constitutional monarchy, nor was it close. But it was the moment Parliament was checked in what it saw as the natural and inevitable growth of its prerogatives. Westminster mistook this for its moment to chastise the king by denying him funding to prosecute the Fourth General War until he recognized Parliament’s pre-eminence and end all talk of the Fourth Kingdom. Instead, he held strong and began digging deeply into royal accounts, rents, stipends, and various obscure revenues to fund the army. Royal residences were closed, servants were furloughed, and the vast army of lesser nobles who lived off the court were sent back to wherever they called home. Margaret Samuels sold her pearls. But Edward won this constitutional battle most decisively when the Whitehall-friendly paper The Patriotic Observer printed a letter from him asserting “how small a sacrifice it is to me, having shed blood for the country, to give now mere treasure, to see our great patriotic enterprise of the war through.” The next Sunday, he had the letter read from every pulpit in the Church of England. For a king who had never mastered the art of public speaking, and whose written communications had always tended toward the laconic, it was a masterstroke.
Of course Edward’s victory was not immediate: Parliament went on to pass early in 1729 a new Act of Succession, asserting for once and for all that it held the exclusive power to decide the succession of the English monarchy, and that the king by himself had no power to alter or change the rules of succession or make exceptions to it. Yet later in the year Parliamentary elections were held. The king endorsed a slate of candidates for every seat in the House of Commons, and bills were printed advertising his choices. The result was that two-thirds of the new Parliament of 1729 was pledged to oppose the Acts of Restatement and the new Act of Succession.
For Edward these results were a strong personal vindication. But in early 1730 he was still attempting to pass repeals of the “Hated Acts” when, overextended, he fell ill again with malarial fever and lay near death. Suddenly, the Parliament that had been so tame when Edward was in good health reverted to its older habits: with the Act of Succession still the law, influential members approached both the princes to sound them out as to the possibility of a trade by which one son or the other would get the crown in exchange for trading away some of the monarchy’s power to Parliament. The result seemed like an a passage from the Old Testament: Richard Prince of Wales, even presented with the possibility of a special bill in Parliament to end his marriage to the much-despised Ulrike Eleonora, permit him to marry Janet Pendleton and legitimize their children (they had two surviving daughters by this point) refused. William however was willing to accept what would have essentially been the creation of a full parliamentary democracy in which the English king’s powers would be as narrowly defined as those of the Swedish king under the “New Liberty” unfolding there. Thus when Edward finally recovered, he found Parliament moving forward rapidly to substitute William for Richard as the next king of England.
Edward took this as confirmation he had let matters get far out of hand with respect to his family: thus in 1731 he and Richard, the son the crisis had validated in his eyes, reached a remarkable compromise, by which Richard could succeed so long as he promised to cede no powers or prerogatives of the crown to Parliament, to permit Parliament any new role in deciding or regulating the succession, and to be crowned King not just of England, France and Ireland but the new Kingdom of America. Moreover, he could not set aside Ulrike Eleonora but permit her to become queen of England and if possible to beget an heir through her. By mutual agreement William and his descendants would be excluded from the succession. Considering the Duke of Clarence had died the previous year, Edward’s sister Margaret would inherit if Richard produced no heirs of his body. Through her children the House of Huntly would become the new royal family of England. As if to close the matter once and for all, at year’s end Edward denied William the title of duke customary to the adult sons of a king, and made him instead Earl of Anglesey, without even sufficient lands to sustain even an earl’s household. It was a calculatedly brutal insult that made William and Louise-Adelaide into objects of pity nationwide. Nonetheless, finally the long constitutional crisis was settled. In 1732, Parliament obediently repealed the Act of Restatement and the Act of Succession. And in 1733, Edward VIII suffered one final relapse into the fevers he had lived with on-and-off for almost thirty years and died.
It would be odd to end this review of the king's life without commenting at least a bit on the Fourth General War from 1725 to 1730, during which England’s great overarching aims during the Third General War were settled. When the war started with the Bourbon invasion of Sardinia Edward was quick to enter the conflict, and assented to the strategy proposed by the German Empress to carry the battle to the colonies, and only fighting to contain the French in the great European battlefields where they held the advantage. Perhaps a younger man would have argued once again to be given the general’s baton and enter the field, but arthritis and the threat of a renewed incidence of his periodically debilitating fever prevented it. Instead Edward stayed in London where he pursued his own constitutional and family struggles. Nonetheless, he prosecuted the war (when he was not sick) avidly through his ministers and generals, and when in the Treaty of Rome England emerged with its long-coveted prize of Cuba, it lent credence to his reputation as one of England’s great acquisitionist kings, though some would argue through the creation of his Kingdom of America that Edward had subtracted more from the realm than he could ever replace. In the end though, what counted most was that England’s long struggle to prevent the merger of the French and Spanish kingdoms, and thus the potential dawn of a universal monarchy in Europe, was ultimately won.
Finally, in his last years Margaret Samuels and “England's second family” became more than ever Edward’s great comfort. No longer the striking beauty she had been when she first stepped foot on the docks of Bristol, Margaret’s waist had expanded with her fondness for the English diet. Many who met her though commented on her great charisma, and how her eyes were always laughing, just as many observed how she supplemented her scant knowledge of etiquette and English custom with warmth and generosity, so that the capital brimmed with stories of her small kindnesses to servants and the poor. As to Joshua, Solomon and David, as they grew to adulthood with the knowledge they were their royal father’s favorites they set out to enjoy themselves with great enthusiasm. They raced horses down the Strand in the height of noon-day traffic, terrorizing pedestrians and upsetting carts. They eschewed wigs (following the custom of their father after his return from the New World) and wore their long straight black hair tied in the back, or loose. The combination of their father’s tall frame and broad shoulders and their mother’s delicate features made them all strikingly handsome, which they used to make a reputation for themselves as rakes nothing short of legendary, even by the standards of the libertinism of “Pox Cure Days.” There were no telling how many military officers, lawyers, and merchants found themselves confronted with newborns too dark-skinned to be credibly called their own with the royal brothers the reason why. As one wag put it, “they stirred liberally their cinnamon into the milk of London.” Most famously, however, the “Red FitzRoys” were great lovers of practical jokes. In 1730 a minor wit, George Stenham, mused in print about whether Margaret Samuels had ever partaken in cannibalism before she met King Edward. Several days after the piece was published in The Clarion Joshua, Solomon and David walked menacingly into the cocoa house where Stenham could usually be found, wrestled him down, bound him to a wooden pole, and walked out carrying it on their shoulders. Counter to Stenham’s expectations however, they bore him to Whitehall, where he was brought into the presence of the king and made to give a full apology for the offense he had done, both to the king and to Margaret Samuels.
At King Edward’s funeral, it was widely remarked that the Queen and the Earl of Anglesey were icily dispassionate, whereas Margaret Samuels was too stricken over the king’s death to attend at all, and the FitzRoys wept inconsolably, distressing the other mourners. It was the most disorderly funeral the Brandon family had held since that of the French queen, 200 years before. During the ensuing reign of Richard IV, the FitzRoys received large land grants in Edwardsland, where Joshua and Solomon returned in 1742, David having been killed in a duel in 1739. Their descendant FitzRoys live there today, no longer wealthy because of the dilution of the landholdings over many generations, but nonetheless numerous, civically active, and proud of their royal lineage. Margaret Samuels survived the king by less than a year. Neither Queen Elizabeth nor anyone else objected to her request that her remains be buried with his in the same tomb at Westminster Abbey.
The Palace of Woodstock, the monument to Edward VIII that he despised, as it appears today.
Edward VIII: An Appreciation, Part II
There was no denying the decade apart had created a rift, both between king and queen, and father and children. While Elizabeth had been obsessing over the details of the public ceremony of her levee, Edward had fought a brutal war in the mud. And while she had overseen the start of work on one of the most opulent palaces in Europe, he had spent some nights where the clearings were too small to set up his pavilion sleeping beneath the stars. Beneath the shows for public consumption and Defoe’s mythology, Edward had changed, becoming a harder, coarser man than he had been before. His relationships with his sons were now perfunctory, their scientific and literary interests little more than an abstraction to him. With Elizabeth matters were far worse. She was now repugnant to him, and evading the court ceremonies she had so carefully erected became a game he played with relish. His great comforts during this difficult time were Margaret, Joshua, Solomon and David. He kept them at Richmond Palace, where there were ample grounds, a hunting park, and no sign of the Queen. There he would go to hunt with his sons, not par force in the style of a king of England but like a frontiersman in the lands of Hafen. With this “second family of England”, no expense was spared: he hired the best tutors and a household of servants for Margaret and his sons. Eventually, despite some absences by the king still to come, they would settle into perfect domesticity. The king’s preference for Margaret Samuels and her children was scarcely hidden, as was the rage and despair that it created in Elizabeth of Ansach and her sons and daughter.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that Edward did not wait long for his next chance to lead armies abroad, journeying to Portugal in 1711 to lead a planned invasion of Spain with Prince Eugene of Savoy, the great general of the Austrians. Edward believed that finally, he was about to be introduced to the glories of generalship on the European battlefield. Instead, it was his introduction to the vicissitudes of European power politics. Necessary for his partner Eugene to reach Portugal from Italy was the German Mediterranean fleet, newly replenished with the addition of new ships, propelled by a combination of sails and steam-powered screws. But while Edward was waiting for Eugene to arrive, word came that the German Empress Sophie, a figure in European politics whose capriciousness was already well known, had negotiated a separate peace with the French and Spanish crowns and was abandoning the Allies to win extensive new territories and save the cost of further war. This would leave Eugene and his army without a way to reach Portugal.
Hasty plans to transport as much as Eugene’s army as possible were now made, but late in 1711 Edward found his efforts hamstrung by a new problem. Portuguese, pro-Habsburg Spanish, and Austrian commanders and soldiers were refusing to serve in an army under the English king who they felt had waged war so cruelly against the Ausrissers in the Americas and enslaved fellow Christians. Edward’s response was to demand the Allies’ compliance, and threatened to make his own peace with the Bourbons on England’s behalf if he were passed over for generalship of the army. Eventually the Dutch stepped in to mediate, and after caucusing with all the parties they appealed to Edward to not sacrifice the great cause to his own self-regard. Thus ultimately Edward sailed back to England in humiliation so that Prince Eugene could lead the army alone, but abstained from making his own peace with France and Spain, a move which ultimately would have cost the Allies the war then and there.
For the next two years Edward was returned to his complex domestic life. There were inchoate plans to field another army in the United Provinces to apply pressure on the French in the north, but for a long time no action. The need for such became desperate following Prince Eugene’s defeat at Lleinida. Thus in the summer of 1713 Edward crossed the North Sea with a new army and landed in the United Provinces, where he was able to win an immediate and impressive victory at Kapellen, driving the French army from the vicinity of the Dutch capital of Antwerp. Beginning his campaign season early the next year, he won another victory at Keerbergen against the duc de Villeroi, forcing the French to decamp from the pivotal towns of Mechelen and Brussels. In both battles, Edward distinguished himself by his ability, hard-learned in his campaigns in North America, to view the battlefield as a three-dimensional space and make expert use of airships. Moreover, Edward’s good fortune was matched at the same time by Eugene’s in Spain, leading many observers to think that the long struggle of the remaining Allies might not be in vain after all.
In letters over the course of the campaign season, Queen Elizabeth had reminded Edward the princess and princes were nearing marrying age, and expressed her hope that all of them might find prestigious international matches. Edward normally was hardly predisposed to Elizabeth’s manipulations, but her efforts came at a point when Edward was increasingly fancying himself as a great player on the European stage, and there would be no better way of demonstrating this than royal matches for Richard, William and Mary. However, where Elizabeth intended to steer Edward was Wittenberg, and the Empress’s children. Edward though, still remembering the crisis over the Saxon succession under the Emperor Frederick, instead approached Sweden, destabilized by the long and expensive wars of Charles XII and facing its own possibly contested succession. Though Edward denied Charles XII what he wanted most, English intervention against Sweden’s arch-nemesis Russia, he arranged to marry the Prince of Wales to Charles’ formidable sister Ulrike Eleonora, and Mary the Princess Royal to Charles’s nephew, also Charles. Essentially this resolved the succession crisis for Charles by removing Ulrike Eleonora from Sweden and leaving the younger Charles to inherit, with Mary as his queen and Ulrike Eleonora as the eventual Queen of England.
At the start of 1715 however Edward found circumstances were shifting outside his control: a series of unexpected deaths in the House of Bourbon left Philip V of Spain the most obvious heir to Louis XIV, all previous agreements and claims he had made excluding himself from the French succession to the contrary. Then Louis XIV himself died, leading Philip V to advance his claim to the French throne. Worst of all in what was fast becoming a nightmare scenario for the Allies, in the battle of Guadalajara, Prince Eugene was slain and his army eliminated as an organized force, leaving Philip V an open road all the way to Paris. Edward’s bluff response—his famous boast that he would meet Philip V there—was in many ways his greatest moment, and the series of victories he had won in the Netherlands made it entirely possible that he might make it to Paris before Philip, and that if he did he might be able to meet Philip V in some final decisive battle and win. But once again the maneuvering of the other European monarchs upset matters.
For as soon as Louis XIV died Philip V dispatched his great minister Giulio Alberoni to Hamburg, where in negotiations hosted by the Germans he secured another separate peace by which the Dutch were peeled away by the Allies. An alliance to preserve the balance of power in Europe from a personal union of the French and Spanish thrones was only barely conceivable without the Germans. Without the Dutch as well, it was little more than a glorified Anglo-Austrian pact, wholly insufficient to the task.
For Edward, this was a moment of supreme humiliation, his chance of a great personal victory and the successful conclusion of the fifteen-year Third General War that had dominated his reign being snatched away by more political maneuverings. We will never know whether in his angry communications with the French crown in these days over England’s terms for an end to the war against France and Spain his threats to continue the war, alone if necessary, were a bluff. After several letters back-and-forth, Philip V chose to take no chances: with the exception of Saint-Dominique, he gave Edward VIII everything he wanted, including Chandernagore in India; Isle de France, which would be shortly renamed King Edward’s Island, in the Indian Ocean; Trinidad, in the Caribbean; Gibraltar, in the Mediterranean; and large concessions to English settlement in mainland North America the enforceability of which would be fought over for the next century. Thus Edward was permitted to leave northern France with terms that would permit him to claim victory at home, even though the Allies had failed in the main aim of the war and arguably Germany and the United Provinces had won still more in their treaties with the Bourbon monarchies.
Almost as an afterthought in this period Edward was able to negotiate another impressive marriage match for his children, this time between Prince William and the Grand Duchess Anna, elder surviving daughter of Tsar Peter of Russia. Negotiations for the marriage had originated in diplomatic contacts between the English and Russians following the Swedish matches of the previous year, to persuade Peter that England was not entering into an anti-Russian alliance. Moreover, to insure the news of the Russian match did not interfere with the marriage plans with the Swedes, Edward ordered it kept in strictest secrecy until after Mary was in Stockholm and Ulrike Eleonora was in London and both marriages sealed.
Thus Edward VIII returned to England in 1715 anticipating a welcome more joyous than he received five years before. Instead, he was met by the perfunctory ceremonies of a nation exhausted by almost thirty constant years of war at home and in the colonies; the sullen rage of an eldest son trapped in a marriage with a woman who openly reviled him as a non-entity and was openly meeting with lords and members of parliament in an effort to establish herself as an independent political power in the realm; and by the absence of the quiet daughter whose even demeanor had been the balm of the royal family, gone to her drunken husband in the Tre Kronor Palace in Stockholm. Despondent, Edward withdrew further into the comforts of his preferred spouse and family than he ever had before. No longer was there left any doubt which set of children he preferred.
In 1716 Elizabeth’s monumental palace at Woodstock, intended as the thanks of a grateful nation to its hero king, was completed, but Edward made it plain it was a home for Elizabeth and the princes, preferring instead to remain at Whitehall, where he could more closely attend to the business of state, and Richmond, where Margaret Samuels and Joshua, Solomon and David resided. The sting of what Elizabeth took as the king’s ingratitude to her efforts was a wound from which their marriage would never recover.
Edward worked diligently on restoring Edwardsland to some semblance of its prewar prosperity during these years. Though it would later be the cornerstone of what slender resume Edward VIII has as a defender of human equality, his decision during this period to open the colony to Jewish settlement rested on the necessity of finding someone to move into what was at the time the most dangerous country under European settlement in the world. That Jews, so widely discriminated against, or outright excluded, in most of Europe, would do so was the most important factor in Edward’s decision. However, as a secondary consideration, Edward believed that Protestant settlers would be too enticing a target for the Ausrissers to leave untouched, and Catholic settlers would be too predisposed to become allies with their co-religionists. Thus, for his purposes, European Jews were perfect.
But it was also during these years following the Third General War that Edward started what would become the central conflict of his latter reign. Henry Gloucester during his ill-fated time in the North American colonies hit upon the notion of “the Fourth Kingdom”, literally taking the scattered English colonies on the North American mainland and forging them into a single, diffuse entity with its own nobility and parliament. The taxes the parliament could levy would be used to pay for the ever-increasing cost of the colonies’ defense, without touching the purse of the English taxpayer. At the same time, because this would remove Westminster’s ability to set trade policy for the colonies it could mean losing English industries and merchants a valuable captive marketplace. Crucially, these ideas came as European economists were elaborating the theory that the trade added by the presence of foreign merchants to the colonies would be a greater boon to the colonies’ growth than it would be a curb on the home country’s own prosperity, and it was for this reason France and Spain were already relaxing their curbs on foreign trade in their territories outside Europe.
For Edward all these rationales were important and beneficial, but they paled next to what he saw as the virtues of the Fourth Kingdom to the monarchy. Eliminating the Palace of Westminster’s ability to legislate for North America would make the crown the common unifying institution governing England’s expanding empire. The English Parliament would be reduced almost to the level of a provincial body, beneath the aegis of an imperial king. Thus when the king proposed at the start of Parliament in 1718 his plan to reorganize the colonies, he met spirited opposition not just from the very commercial interests that had been the primary supporters of his war policies, but from knights of the shire and lords eager to preserve the prerogatives of Parliament within the state. Mockingly, opponents of the king’s plan proposed that perhaps France, still included in Edward’s kingdoms due to lingering claims for the lost conquests of Edward III and Henry V, should also get its own parliament.
Others likewise satirically hit upon the idea of requesting an elevation to the status of kingdom for the Isle of Man, or Berwick. This discourse did not sit well with Edward VIII, more of whose reign had been spent chasing enemies of the realm through mosquito-infested swamps than courting support for his policies from members of Parliament. Nonetheless, no mixture of promises and threats could win passage of his legislation.
It was likely as a consequence of Edward’s frustration and exhaustion with the Fourth Kingdom ordeal that in early January he suffered a serious recurrence of his malaria. Parliament, with some relief, named the Prince of Wales regent until such time as the king recovered. However, 1721 is more notable for the arrival of the French royal family-in-exile, the House of Orleans. Philippe duc d’Orleans, who was the King of France to those European states and persons who believed Louis XIV’s and Philip V’s promises that Philip of V would not succeed to the French throne should be binding, had languished in the courts of Baden, Bavaria and Ansbach since the end of the war. Now, finding his cause getting nowhere, he asked for permission to come to London and was given it by a courteous Prince Regent. At this point the family of Orleans also included his wife, Francoise Marie de Bourbon, a legitimized daughter of Louis XIV and the Madame de Montespan. Francoise Marie was a practiced intriguer of the highest order, and immediately began conspiring both to attach the putative French royal house to the Brandons however possible, and to provoke some war by which the man she called “the most puissant and war-like king ever to live” would return her husband’s crown to him. They were accompanied by their eldest daughter, Louise Elisabeth, the widow of the Duke of Berry and now a woman of questionable virtue; the charming, pretty and unmarried Louise Adelaide; Charlotte Aglae, headstrong and given to drawing room conspiracies much like her mother; Louis, the somewhat shy son and heir of the duke; the likewise retiring and neglected Louise Elisabeth the younger, still a child; the sweet-natured Philippine Elisabeth; and finally, Louise Diane, still only five years of age. A capital already tense from the enduring stalemate of Elizabeth of Ansbach and Margaret Samuels, their respective sons, and the now loudly unhappy Princess of Wales Ulrike Eleonora, London was now in Alexander Pope’s memorable phrase “a pot of designs, boiling ov’r”.
Thus Edward VIII emerged from his sickbed no longer the only king in his realm, a situation he could not have foreseen. The situation of course was even odder than that, given that while the monarchy of the Brandons was one of breezy informality and approachability for all of Queen Elizabeth’s efforts to change it, the Bourbons’ had calcified into the strictest ceremony. Even dispossessed of a kingdom and in another ruler’s palace, the putative royal family could not abrogate or amend the ceremony that in France had become synonymous with rule itself. The effect, lost on no one, was pure farce. The finances of the Pretender were also in a parlous condition on his arrival, and so in a novel solution to the predicament by November 1721 the average Londoner could pay for the opportunity to participate in the duke of Orleans’ levee as if he was a noble at Versailles, or participate in the royal banquet, which basically meant the privilege of watching Philip of Orleans eat.
Nonetheless, the House of Orleans managed to entertain impressively and creatively, and the Duchess of Orleans was soon the center of London society. Virtually all her events involved some new device to dangle the daughters of Orleans before the two English princes, their marriage and betrothal notwithstanding, the immediate result being the famous cartoon from the Patriotic Observer with a beleaguered Prince William forced to participate in a new Judgment of Paris among the Orleans’ daughters.
Of course, little did Madame d’Orleans know that the Prince of Wales for one was already attached even in addition to the Princess. Janet Pendleton, formerly Janet Kirk, of the Borders region of Scotland, was born in 1680, and had married a London jeweler in a love match. They had met by chance while he was on a trip to Edinburgh to try to satisfy the insatiable gem appetites of the Stuarts. Ten years later he was dead from cancer. He had been childless, and Mistress Pendleton inherited his prosperous business, which she managed with a well-honed sense of taste and a sharp business sense. Mr. Pendleton had won a much-coveted commission to make the Prince of Wales hat-pins. Apparently at some point in 1718 Mistress Pendleton had an appointment with the Prince of Wales to show him a selection of her best silver pins. The rest, as she explained to Vanbrugh in his sensational memoir of life among the Brandons, A Man Well Dispos’d, was that “sir, I showed him all I had, and that he bought.”
In 1721 their relationship was still secret from the public at large, although a widening circle among the royal family understood the situation. In fact, the reason their affair was publicized in 1723 was only to silence the growing suspicion that the reason the Prince of Wales had yet to produce a son in his marriage with Ulrike Eleonora was because of a disinterest in female company, or as it was put in the parlance of the time, that he was a better fit for the court of the first Emperor Frederick. Disastrously, the origin of these rumors was Ulrike Eleonora herself, eager to find some other reason than herself for the couple’s lack off children. Starting in 1721 she began complaining that she was still a virgin. No kind intercessions from William, no sympathetic conversations from Queen Elizabeth, and no threats from the king himself could get her to leave off such, until in 1722 Ulrike Eleonora was informally banished from court to Durham House, a royal residence in such disfavor it still had in its attics some of the furniture of Katherine of Aragon.
Thus the first marital scandal to break was not the Prince of Wales’ disaster but the younger prince’s. Essentially he had fallen into the snare laid by Madame Francoise Marie and fallen madly in love with the most glittering star among Philippe’s daughters, Louise Adelaide. Conveniently for Francoise Marie, Louise Adelaide shared his feelings. If Prince Richard’s dalliance was mature and frankly sexual, William’s was an adolescent passion of the type that is fed by social disapproval and the threat of separation. Thus after she had been in London for four months, and only two months after they admitted their love to each other, William confessed to his father in front of the rest of the family that he loved Louise Adelaide, and that the match with Grand Duchess Anna of Russia could not go forward because without Adelaide he was certain he would die. What the king had to say to that can be guessed. Nevertheless, William made it clear no amount of coercion, or even bodily duress, would change his mind. The king nonetheless refused to back down as well, leading to no end of the diplomatic awkwardness with a Russian ambassador eager to begin planning the proxy wedding. Matters came to a head in the affair of Prince William in 1723, when he successfully bribed the guards at Whitehall, supposedly for a night’s liberty, at the same time Louise Adelaide and Francoise Marie were waiting with a Roman Catholic priest in a chapel at the Cathedral of St. Edward the Confessor, the post-Reformation seat of Roman Catholicism in England. Agents of the king, alerted to such a possibility, stopped William just shy of the church door. Furious, the king that night banished William to his own splendid isolation at Collyweston, where he was placed under guard.
It was at the surreal height of this crisis that Edward had to travel to Mechelen to hold a summit with the Empress Sophie of Germany. Neither ruler had ever liked the other: Edward had once commented to the Earl of Gravesend that Sophie was “the most faithless whore in the world”; Sophie had likewise been liberal in sharing her view that Edward was a witless butcher who enjoyed war for its own sake. Sophie’s negotiation of a separate deal with the Bourbon powers in the Third General War, followed hard by her facilitation of a similar deal between them and the United Provinces, had hardly helped matters. However, now Sophie saw fit to notify Edward of her grand plans for the Orient, and to propose contingencies in the event the preoccupation of German forces in the East caused King Philip to attack. Edward took it all under advisement and made no commitments. The affair ended on a note of false cheer, leading Vanbrugh to observe as he saw the King Edward, Queen Elizabeth, the Empress Sophie, and the Emperor Alexander at table that “this was the summit of the two worst marriages in Europe.” To which Joseph Addison, overhearing him, replied “Hardly fair, sir. The Prince and Princess of Wales were left at home.”
Meanwhile, separation only strengthened William’s resolve, and the House of Orleans reported from its wing of Whitehall with less than convincing sincerity that Louise-Adelaide could not be persuaded to leave off the attachment either. Frustrated immensely now, Edward directed ultimatums to both sides of the relationship: William was to agree to marry Grand Duchess Anna immediately, and Philippe of Orleans was to find some suitable match for Louise Adelaide not among his sons, which he Edward VIII would gladly facilitate by generously providing a dowry. Otherwise, the House of Orleans could try their luck in Edinburgh. However, both William and Louise Adelaide proved intractable. The crisis was only broken when, partly due to stress from the ordeal, Philippe duke of Orleans died at Whitehall. Then, a few weeks later came the news that Edward’s daughter Mary, now queen of Sweden, died in childbirth in Stockholm. None of her pregnancies had produced children who had lived beyond a few weeks, and thus the King of Sweden was now a widower and Ulrike Eleonora, in her unhappy prison at Durham House, was still his heir apparent. Though far from the gentlest of men, Edward was not about to bully a grieving 21-year old who had just lost his beloved father, and so he let the threat to evict the Orleans drop.
Bizarrely however, the death of the beloved Mary worked to William’s benefit, as Charles XIII, now free to marry and still without an heir of his body, looked to the spurned Grand Duchess Anna to become his queen. The Russians, equally eager after the long years of equivocation from the English, wasted no time in concluding the deal and thus Peter the Great married his beloved daughter to his former archenemy’s heir. William now once again begged his father to permit him to marry freely. Sensing they were close to the end of the drama, Louise Adelaide—who had previously loved the Roman Church to the point of expressing an interest in taking holy orders and becoming a nun—even wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury expressing her willingness to convert to the Church of England if that would clear away the last hurdle.
Edward, now from vindictiveness as much as anything, refused to alter his position. Finally in mid-summer 1725, whether it was an innocent error, whether he played on their sympathies, or whether he successfully bribed them again, the guards at Collyweston permitted Prince William to slip their grasp again. Evidently there had been some type of planning, since William was able to meet Louise Adelaide in Kettering, where once again there was a Roman Catholic priest helpfully on hand to perform a marriage ceremony.
Edward now conceded the inevitable and refused to contest the legality of the marriage, though requiring the ceremony to be re-performed within the Church of England. He now resolved however to make good on his longstanding threat to William and exclude him from the succession. Moreover, he for the first time discussed the possibility of passing over the Prince of Wales as well. This would leave as the heir apparent Thomas Brandon, the 58 year old childless Duke of Clarence who was blind and now infirm. Second to him would be Margaret, the 59 year old Duchess of Huntly, a force to be reckoned with in the politics of her adopted Scotland. Margaret in turn had seven children, and it seemed entirely possible that if the English crown passed to the House of Huntly it could stay in that powerful and well-established family for a long while. For the English Parliament however, what it saw as the king’s meddling with the succession law was the last straw. In 1726 it started debating the possibility of requiring an Act of Parliament rather than a will to change the succession, thus ending the power of the king to treat the crown as devisable property. Considering the legitimacy of the Brandon family’s succession to the English crown in 1603 relied on the exclusion of the descendants of Margaret Tudor in Henry VIII’s will, the radical nature of this challenge to Edward’s authority could not be overestimated.
Suddenly the long-simmering family ordeal of the Brandons flowered into a full-blown constitutional crisis. Edward successfully averted the passage of an Act of Parliament codifying this principle, but the notion was still abroad that the succession might not be in his power to take away from his sons.
It was in this context that in 1727 Edward once again launched an effort to create the Fourth Kingdom, resolved once and for all to put Parliament in its place and avenge his earlier defeat. Parliament rejected his plan once again, as anticipated. It was then that Edward took the additional step and advanced the idea that the colonies had the right under natural law to create a new kingdom without the consent of Parliament, and that if they did so he would be glad to accept an offer of the crown of the new kingdom. The alarm in Parliament over this turn of events was palpable. Yet in the short term there was no way for Parliament to act to stop the various colonial legislatures from acting on the king’s call. The trickle began almost immediately: in 1728 Edwardsland, Maryland, Kennebec, Fredericksland and Queensland all acceded to the new kingdom, setting the stage for the other colonies to follow the next year. This erosion of its position, and the growing perception that the new kingdom was a fait accompli was what finally moved Parliament to act. Thus it enacted the Acts of Restatement, which purported to define rather than change certain boundaries to the power of the monarchy. Edward of course refused to countenance the new law, and the result was a stand-off between King and Parliament.
It is in this confrontation that the metaphor of the “mast of monarchy” entered the English political vernacular. Had Edward VIII been a child ruler, had he been a foreigner, had the ailments from which he suffered been psychological rather than physical, then quite likely Parliament could have won. But Edward VIII was an English king at the height of his faculties, who had led English armies abroad. From this point on the idea would gain credence that the political power of the monarchy depended on the character and career of the monarch in question: a new-comer to the throne green to rule could be easily rebuffed, whereas a war-horse or a respected humanitarian who had earned the trust of the nation could stretch his or her powers almost to the fullest breadth of the Tudors’. Of course this was not the final word in the development of the English constitutional monarchy, nor was it close. But it was the moment Parliament was checked in what it saw as the natural and inevitable growth of its prerogatives. Westminster mistook this for its moment to chastise the king by denying him funding to prosecute the Fourth General War until he recognized Parliament’s pre-eminence and end all talk of the Fourth Kingdom. Instead, he held strong and began digging deeply into royal accounts, rents, stipends, and various obscure revenues to fund the army. Royal residences were closed, servants were furloughed, and the vast army of lesser nobles who lived off the court were sent back to wherever they called home. Margaret Samuels sold her pearls. But Edward won this constitutional battle most decisively when the Whitehall-friendly paper The Patriotic Observer printed a letter from him asserting “how small a sacrifice it is to me, having shed blood for the country, to give now mere treasure, to see our great patriotic enterprise of the war through.” The next Sunday, he had the letter read from every pulpit in the Church of England. For a king who had never mastered the art of public speaking, and whose written communications had always tended toward the laconic, it was a masterstroke.
Of course Edward’s victory was not immediate: Parliament went on to pass early in 1729 a new Act of Succession, asserting for once and for all that it held the exclusive power to decide the succession of the English monarchy, and that the king by himself had no power to alter or change the rules of succession or make exceptions to it. Yet later in the year Parliamentary elections were held. The king endorsed a slate of candidates for every seat in the House of Commons, and bills were printed advertising his choices. The result was that two-thirds of the new Parliament of 1729 was pledged to oppose the Acts of Restatement and the new Act of Succession.
For Edward these results were a strong personal vindication. But in early 1730 he was still attempting to pass repeals of the “Hated Acts” when, overextended, he fell ill again with malarial fever and lay near death. Suddenly, the Parliament that had been so tame when Edward was in good health reverted to its older habits: with the Act of Succession still the law, influential members approached both the princes to sound them out as to the possibility of a trade by which one son or the other would get the crown in exchange for trading away some of the monarchy’s power to Parliament. The result seemed like an a passage from the Old Testament: Richard Prince of Wales, even presented with the possibility of a special bill in Parliament to end his marriage to the much-despised Ulrike Eleonora, permit him to marry Janet Pendleton and legitimize their children (they had two surviving daughters by this point) refused. William however was willing to accept what would have essentially been the creation of a full parliamentary democracy in which the English king’s powers would be as narrowly defined as those of the Swedish king under the “New Liberty” unfolding there. Thus when Edward finally recovered, he found Parliament moving forward rapidly to substitute William for Richard as the next king of England.
Edward took this as confirmation he had let matters get far out of hand with respect to his family: thus in 1731 he and Richard, the son the crisis had validated in his eyes, reached a remarkable compromise, by which Richard could succeed so long as he promised to cede no powers or prerogatives of the crown to Parliament, to permit Parliament any new role in deciding or regulating the succession, and to be crowned King not just of England, France and Ireland but the new Kingdom of America. Moreover, he could not set aside Ulrike Eleonora but permit her to become queen of England and if possible to beget an heir through her. By mutual agreement William and his descendants would be excluded from the succession. Considering the Duke of Clarence had died the previous year, Edward’s sister Margaret would inherit if Richard produced no heirs of his body. Through her children the House of Huntly would become the new royal family of England. As if to close the matter once and for all, at year’s end Edward denied William the title of duke customary to the adult sons of a king, and made him instead Earl of Anglesey, without even sufficient lands to sustain even an earl’s household. It was a calculatedly brutal insult that made William and Louise-Adelaide into objects of pity nationwide. Nonetheless, finally the long constitutional crisis was settled. In 1732, Parliament obediently repealed the Act of Restatement and the Act of Succession. And in 1733, Edward VIII suffered one final relapse into the fevers he had lived with on-and-off for almost thirty years and died.
It would be odd to end this review of the king's life without commenting at least a bit on the Fourth General War from 1725 to 1730, during which England’s great overarching aims during the Third General War were settled. When the war started with the Bourbon invasion of Sardinia Edward was quick to enter the conflict, and assented to the strategy proposed by the German Empress to carry the battle to the colonies, and only fighting to contain the French in the great European battlefields where they held the advantage. Perhaps a younger man would have argued once again to be given the general’s baton and enter the field, but arthritis and the threat of a renewed incidence of his periodically debilitating fever prevented it. Instead Edward stayed in London where he pursued his own constitutional and family struggles. Nonetheless, he prosecuted the war (when he was not sick) avidly through his ministers and generals, and when in the Treaty of Rome England emerged with its long-coveted prize of Cuba, it lent credence to his reputation as one of England’s great acquisitionist kings, though some would argue through the creation of his Kingdom of America that Edward had subtracted more from the realm than he could ever replace. In the end though, what counted most was that England’s long struggle to prevent the merger of the French and Spanish kingdoms, and thus the potential dawn of a universal monarchy in Europe, was ultimately won.
Finally, in his last years Margaret Samuels and “England's second family” became more than ever Edward’s great comfort. No longer the striking beauty she had been when she first stepped foot on the docks of Bristol, Margaret’s waist had expanded with her fondness for the English diet. Many who met her though commented on her great charisma, and how her eyes were always laughing, just as many observed how she supplemented her scant knowledge of etiquette and English custom with warmth and generosity, so that the capital brimmed with stories of her small kindnesses to servants and the poor. As to Joshua, Solomon and David, as they grew to adulthood with the knowledge they were their royal father’s favorites they set out to enjoy themselves with great enthusiasm. They raced horses down the Strand in the height of noon-day traffic, terrorizing pedestrians and upsetting carts. They eschewed wigs (following the custom of their father after his return from the New World) and wore their long straight black hair tied in the back, or loose. The combination of their father’s tall frame and broad shoulders and their mother’s delicate features made them all strikingly handsome, which they used to make a reputation for themselves as rakes nothing short of legendary, even by the standards of the libertinism of “Pox Cure Days.” There were no telling how many military officers, lawyers, and merchants found themselves confronted with newborns too dark-skinned to be credibly called their own with the royal brothers the reason why. As one wag put it, “they stirred liberally their cinnamon into the milk of London.” Most famously, however, the “Red FitzRoys” were great lovers of practical jokes. In 1730 a minor wit, George Stenham, mused in print about whether Margaret Samuels had ever partaken in cannibalism before she met King Edward. Several days after the piece was published in The Clarion Joshua, Solomon and David walked menacingly into the cocoa house where Stenham could usually be found, wrestled him down, bound him to a wooden pole, and walked out carrying it on their shoulders. Counter to Stenham’s expectations however, they bore him to Whitehall, where he was brought into the presence of the king and made to give a full apology for the offense he had done, both to the king and to Margaret Samuels.
At King Edward’s funeral, it was widely remarked that the Queen and the Earl of Anglesey were icily dispassionate, whereas Margaret Samuels was too stricken over the king’s death to attend at all, and the FitzRoys wept inconsolably, distressing the other mourners. It was the most disorderly funeral the Brandon family had held since that of the French queen, 200 years before. During the ensuing reign of Richard IV, the FitzRoys received large land grants in Edwardsland, where Joshua and Solomon returned in 1742, David having been killed in a duel in 1739. Their descendant FitzRoys live there today, no longer wealthy because of the dilution of the landholdings over many generations, but nonetheless numerous, civically active, and proud of their royal lineage. Margaret Samuels survived the king by less than a year. Neither Queen Elizabeth nor anyone else objected to her request that her remains be buried with his in the same tomb at Westminster Abbey.
The Palace of Woodstock, the monument to Edward VIII that he despised, as it appears today.
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There's actually going to be more of that in the next decade. To some extent the wars and their disruption of trade and finance had begun to retard the ability of the new technologies to penetrate the economy. In some ways we've reached some quiet seas in this point in the eighteenth century in terms of international conflict because the major players are all exhausted, but in others the real changes are only getting started, now that peace is back and innovations are going to start to spread.
I feel like the scientific and industrial developments in the timeline have been a slow build (For all those people wondering where the hell I was going with the devices to pump water out of flooded silver mines or the keeping of statistics as to what medical cures work and what don't, here we are). So hopefully it's not too much like magic. Some research into this has been very interesting actually, for instance when I looked into whether a penicillin-equivalent could have been developed to treat syphillis, I found first that the romany have used common mold to prevent infections in horses for centuries, and second that there were several medical doctors who reported success with molds and drugs and derived from mold long before the 1920s, but their work never achieved broad dissemination.
Hilariously, I was going to do this whole big thing with vaccinations, but then had to backtrack, not because it was impossible or premature, but because the actual Mary Wortley Montague beat me to it, and did what I was going to have a fictional doctor do several years before the timeline was going to address the matter.
So she, like John Locke and Isaac Newton, do their thing fairly much as they did in actual history, without my timeline commenting much on it.
Thanks.
That is really really thoughtful, and at some point I may ask to borrow a copy of that myself.
Thank you! It's great to have you back, especially since you've been supporting this project from the beginning.
I'm thinking my next post is going to be about the Ausrissers, and showing some of what we've seen going on between them and Edward from the other side, as well as fleshing out their politics and society a bit more than what we've seen. I think you'll like it.
Just one point: Mary Wortley Montague wasn't involved with vaccination IOTL. She brought back the practise of inoculation from the East. Unlike vaccination which uses relatively harmless cowpox virus to trigger an immune response, inoculation used pus from a human who had had a milder than average case of smallpox. Inoculation was safer than smallpox, but it wasn't really safe; about 2-3% of those inoculated died as compared to the 20-30% who died of the disease otherwise.
Awesome timeline, BTW. It brought me to this website.
Thanks. And with respect to MWM, I wasn't quite so sensitive to those distinctions as I was writing that comment as I should have been.
Pretty Vacant
Display • The Music Weekly • February 27, 2010
(Cont’d from page 39)
they say we just do it for the gin and the cunning, and they’re right. But the joke’s still on them, isn’t it? Because, you know, I got the gin and cunning to show for it.
You were the first raptor music group to go on tour in the RCR. What was it like, performing for the Ausrissers, and seeing that culture’s response to your music?
It was the most terrifying experience of my life. You have to understand this was back during the last General War, when for the first time in history the Ausrissers and the English were fighting on the same side. When our record company approached them about broadcast and import licensing and did not get turned down, we assumed it was because they were trying to make nice, now that we were all on the same side. A bit of cultural exchange, you see.
But then when the conversations became more detailed, we figured out quickly something else was up. Despite our expectations, the people in the government talking to us were actually interested in finding out what type of music we did—
They were worried you would have an effect on the morals of all those good Catholic boys and girls?
As it turns out yeah, but not the way you’d think. Because the more they found out about us, the better they liked us. We thought after a while they were enthusiastic about us because raptor music, with the strong martial rhythms, the electric guitars and violins, would be just the thing for their soldiers to listen to during wartime, going into battle. At least that’s what we thought when we got an appointment at the RCR Embassy in Paris (you know they still won’t open one in London?) with this official, who was—believe it or not—a Special Advisor to the Ministry of Preservation. What sane countries call the Ministry of Defense.
You and your raptor group had meetings with the Ausrisser Ministry of Defense?
Friend, that’s the least odd thing about this. We walk in to the office of this Special Advisor, and find out very quickly the Special Advisor’s title is actually Monsignor. Sometimes you have to just love the Ausrissers, man. Who else would put the Jesuits in charge of military intelligence.
Unbelievable.
And he starts reviewing right there in front of us our song lyrics, along with our stage costumes and disc art. I seriously thought he was about to launch into some kind of tirade. But then he made it plain to us we would have complete creative freedom so long as we were in the RCR, and that in fact if there was any ways we wanted to make our act more provocative we should feel free to do so.
Why would he say that? He had to know what he would be getting from a group whose shows had been stopped by the London City Guard four times.
It didn’t take us long to figure out where he was going: let’s say your country has this enemy, that your country has hated so long that that hatred is how it defines itself. And then you see some young men from that country who make a big show of themselves by being as offensive as possible, wearing scary clothes, singing about atrocities, doing outrageous stuff on stage. Do you censor that, or do you bring them to your country and subsidize them to show the degeneracy of this other society?
So they wanted us in English army uniforms, they wanted references to Satanism, they wanted simulated sex acts on stage, I think I was even offered a bonus if any of the implied sex acts were sodomy.
So you were making propaganda.
I was making £660,000 a show.
Anyway, we signed our contracts with the venues, the promoters, and weirdly enough the Ministry, and set off on our lovely little tour complete with props purchased in all the best sex shops of Hamburg. Our first performance though, to help generate publicity for everything that would follow, was going to be on what was at the time the highest rated Ausrisser imagebox program with live music, which was His Majesty Arsehorn XII’s Family Variety Hour.
Did I hear you right there?
Right as rain. They had a hell of a comedian doing his dirty best version of the old king. It was all very low, very broad stuff. When the real His Majesty died they even did a parody skit of the funeral in Westminster, with fart jokes. But the Ausrissers love that kind of thing. And words cannot even describe how awful the other musical acts were. Women in long sequined evening wear thirty years out of date singing songs about Jesus in which he could have been interchangeable with their father, brother or boyfriend. And there was plenty of that hideous twangy folk music about harvest-time dances, kind syndics and always being able to trust your priest, oh and waiting until marriage for the first kiss.
You must have been pretty shocking to that audience.
Well, first it was our turn to be shocked.
?
You’ll have to excuse me, but I need to go into some background here. Like I said, this was back during the war. Now, the Ausrissers were so close to the Poles their term for the Poles was not even ally: the Poles were always referred to as “our cousins of the faith.” The RCR was determined to not let Poland go down in the war for reasons that had nothing to do with geography or the balance of power or the stand against autocracy. So deep was that commitment that the governments agreed on the Great Evacuation, so that every troop ship carrying Ausrisser soldiers to Hamburg and Danzig brought Polish children back, so that they would be safe for the duration. I believe there was even a plan that if the worst was to happen the evacuees would be given land in the far south to settle permanently. Anyway, there was a whole cultural phenomenon around these Polish children and teenagers who were now coming to live with Ausrisser families.
Now, on this show, this His Majesty Arsehorn XII’s Family Variety Hour, this phenomenon showed in a series of skits they were doing, Ciaran and Casimira. They were both these teenagers, right, and Casimira was one of the evacuees, just arrived, and innocent of all things Skinner. And remember the level of entertainment this show trafficked in: so Casimira had comically huge teats, wore the most ridiculous peasant costume imaginable, and the actress who played her had an accent that made it plain she had never so much as actually met a real Pole. And Ciaran was the wily Ausrisser farm boy trying to get under Casimira’s skirts by helpfully answering all her questions about the strange country in which she found herself.
Okay.
So, we are standing in the wings, supposed to go on right after Ciaran and Casimira. And they are standing on stage in front of a full studio audience who were all just loving every minute of their banter. And I, with nothing better to do at the moment, decided to listen in.
[What follows is Gerrod doing his best imitation of the event, with appropriately reproduced horrible accents]
Casimira: Ciaran, what is that word you Ausrissers have—
Ciaran: Oh, we have more than just the one! Don’t believe what you hear on the EBC! (Audience laughs.)
Casimira: You know what I mean! That word you Ausrissers have for a man who won’t build his own house.
Ciaran: Why, Casimira, that’s a sitbackman. (Audience hisses.)
Casimira: Then what is the word you Ausrissers have for a man who won’t do his own fighting?
Ciaran: Why, Casimira, that’s simple! Our word for that kind of man is cut-up-into-pieces-and-thrown-in-the-river!
And I’m not exaggerating one bit, as he said the words the studio audience laughed so hard I felt the hall shake. Men were laughing so hard they were sobbing. I looked out into the audience and I saw small kids too, bouncing up and down in their seats, laughing. Then the transition music came on and it was our turn to take the stage. And I was standing there, in my leather pants, bare chest, with an obscenity scrawled across my forehead, and I felt suddenly, absolutely terrified of those people.
So I gather it did not go well?
Raptor music for those people is fucking superfluous to requirement. But I kept the money from the Ministry.
(Cont’d on page 70)
Display • The Music Weekly • February 27, 2010
(Cont’d from page 39)
they say we just do it for the gin and the cunning, and they’re right. But the joke’s still on them, isn’t it? Because, you know, I got the gin and cunning to show for it.
You were the first raptor music group to go on tour in the RCR. What was it like, performing for the Ausrissers, and seeing that culture’s response to your music?
It was the most terrifying experience of my life. You have to understand this was back during the last General War, when for the first time in history the Ausrissers and the English were fighting on the same side. When our record company approached them about broadcast and import licensing and did not get turned down, we assumed it was because they were trying to make nice, now that we were all on the same side. A bit of cultural exchange, you see.
But then when the conversations became more detailed, we figured out quickly something else was up. Despite our expectations, the people in the government talking to us were actually interested in finding out what type of music we did—
They were worried you would have an effect on the morals of all those good Catholic boys and girls?
As it turns out yeah, but not the way you’d think. Because the more they found out about us, the better they liked us. We thought after a while they were enthusiastic about us because raptor music, with the strong martial rhythms, the electric guitars and violins, would be just the thing for their soldiers to listen to during wartime, going into battle. At least that’s what we thought when we got an appointment at the RCR Embassy in Paris (you know they still won’t open one in London?) with this official, who was—believe it or not—a Special Advisor to the Ministry of Preservation. What sane countries call the Ministry of Defense.
You and your raptor group had meetings with the Ausrisser Ministry of Defense?
Friend, that’s the least odd thing about this. We walk in to the office of this Special Advisor, and find out very quickly the Special Advisor’s title is actually Monsignor. Sometimes you have to just love the Ausrissers, man. Who else would put the Jesuits in charge of military intelligence.
Unbelievable.
And he starts reviewing right there in front of us our song lyrics, along with our stage costumes and disc art. I seriously thought he was about to launch into some kind of tirade. But then he made it plain to us we would have complete creative freedom so long as we were in the RCR, and that in fact if there was any ways we wanted to make our act more provocative we should feel free to do so.
Why would he say that? He had to know what he would be getting from a group whose shows had been stopped by the London City Guard four times.
It didn’t take us long to figure out where he was going: let’s say your country has this enemy, that your country has hated so long that that hatred is how it defines itself. And then you see some young men from that country who make a big show of themselves by being as offensive as possible, wearing scary clothes, singing about atrocities, doing outrageous stuff on stage. Do you censor that, or do you bring them to your country and subsidize them to show the degeneracy of this other society?
So they wanted us in English army uniforms, they wanted references to Satanism, they wanted simulated sex acts on stage, I think I was even offered a bonus if any of the implied sex acts were sodomy.
So you were making propaganda.
I was making £660,000 a show.
Anyway, we signed our contracts with the venues, the promoters, and weirdly enough the Ministry, and set off on our lovely little tour complete with props purchased in all the best sex shops of Hamburg. Our first performance though, to help generate publicity for everything that would follow, was going to be on what was at the time the highest rated Ausrisser imagebox program with live music, which was His Majesty Arsehorn XII’s Family Variety Hour.
Did I hear you right there?
Right as rain. They had a hell of a comedian doing his dirty best version of the old king. It was all very low, very broad stuff. When the real His Majesty died they even did a parody skit of the funeral in Westminster, with fart jokes. But the Ausrissers love that kind of thing. And words cannot even describe how awful the other musical acts were. Women in long sequined evening wear thirty years out of date singing songs about Jesus in which he could have been interchangeable with their father, brother or boyfriend. And there was plenty of that hideous twangy folk music about harvest-time dances, kind syndics and always being able to trust your priest, oh and waiting until marriage for the first kiss.
You must have been pretty shocking to that audience.
Well, first it was our turn to be shocked.
?
You’ll have to excuse me, but I need to go into some background here. Like I said, this was back during the war. Now, the Ausrissers were so close to the Poles their term for the Poles was not even ally: the Poles were always referred to as “our cousins of the faith.” The RCR was determined to not let Poland go down in the war for reasons that had nothing to do with geography or the balance of power or the stand against autocracy. So deep was that commitment that the governments agreed on the Great Evacuation, so that every troop ship carrying Ausrisser soldiers to Hamburg and Danzig brought Polish children back, so that they would be safe for the duration. I believe there was even a plan that if the worst was to happen the evacuees would be given land in the far south to settle permanently. Anyway, there was a whole cultural phenomenon around these Polish children and teenagers who were now coming to live with Ausrisser families.
Now, on this show, this His Majesty Arsehorn XII’s Family Variety Hour, this phenomenon showed in a series of skits they were doing, Ciaran and Casimira. They were both these teenagers, right, and Casimira was one of the evacuees, just arrived, and innocent of all things Skinner. And remember the level of entertainment this show trafficked in: so Casimira had comically huge teats, wore the most ridiculous peasant costume imaginable, and the actress who played her had an accent that made it plain she had never so much as actually met a real Pole. And Ciaran was the wily Ausrisser farm boy trying to get under Casimira’s skirts by helpfully answering all her questions about the strange country in which she found herself.
Okay.
So, we are standing in the wings, supposed to go on right after Ciaran and Casimira. And they are standing on stage in front of a full studio audience who were all just loving every minute of their banter. And I, with nothing better to do at the moment, decided to listen in.
[What follows is Gerrod doing his best imitation of the event, with appropriately reproduced horrible accents]
Casimira: Ciaran, what is that word you Ausrissers have—
Ciaran: Oh, we have more than just the one! Don’t believe what you hear on the EBC! (Audience laughs.)
Casimira: You know what I mean! That word you Ausrissers have for a man who won’t build his own house.
Ciaran: Why, Casimira, that’s a sitbackman. (Audience hisses.)
Casimira: Then what is the word you Ausrissers have for a man who won’t do his own fighting?
Ciaran: Why, Casimira, that’s simple! Our word for that kind of man is cut-up-into-pieces-and-thrown-in-the-river!
And I’m not exaggerating one bit, as he said the words the studio audience laughed so hard I felt the hall shake. Men were laughing so hard they were sobbing. I looked out into the audience and I saw small kids too, bouncing up and down in their seats, laughing. Then the transition music came on and it was our turn to take the stage. And I was standing there, in my leather pants, bare chest, with an obscenity scrawled across my forehead, and I felt suddenly, absolutely terrified of those people.
So I gather it did not go well?
Raptor music for those people is fucking superfluous to requirement. But I kept the money from the Ministry.
(Cont’d on page 70)
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As long as Church and State are thoroughly mixed, so the aims of one are (close to being) the same as the other, a Jesuit would be a VERY good choice, actually.
I'm almost surprised that theyre surprised.
Precisely. Church and state are thoroughly intertwined. So much so that RCR, by the way (and here I'm letting go of a detail a bit before I thought I would), stands for the Republic of Christ the Redeemer.
Now to some extent maybe I'm guilty of bad storytelling here, because I'm using a conversation between two characters familiar with the historical and ideological furniture of a world to explain it to readers who are not. So things being said between them might be sounding more new than it would be if instead we as real people in the real world were discussing, oh, the role of the Gandhi family in Indian politics. That is something I, as a writer, need to work on. I feel it's one of the problems I run into consistently in trying to write framing sequences for the novel set in the alternate present: how do I make this stuff they're saying sound more everyday and nonchalant and still use that to do world-building work.
Now, the other way to think of this is that Gerrod is a jaded rock star with deplorable morals who doesn't think much of, or much about, religion. So the idea that Jesuits would be perfect for military intelligence doesn't cross his mind because he hasn't considered the intellectual discipline that characterizes the order.
Take your pick.
Now, I'm doing the finishing touches on a big piece on the Ausrissers that's going to really set down decisively what's going on with them in terms of internal politics and the evolution of their social institutions in the early decades of the eighteenth century (and even some stuff about what's happened to them since then). SPOILER ALERT: Some people are going to be cut into pieces and thrown in the river.
After that, there'll be some map updates so that we're all on the same page re 1730. But then before we go on through our forced march through time I want to address some selected corners of our alternate world. So, what do you want to know more about:
(A) New Angola
(B) Scotland
(C) The alternate English colonies of North America
(D) Poland
(E) India
(F) Polish India