Diverge and Conquer (Look to the West Book 1)

by Tom Anderson

  Meanwhile, down in Saint-Hilaire, the legend of Leo Bone was being quietly made, presently overshadowed by greater events, but that does not enter into this tale.

  Upon George III’s death, Prince Henry William, despite the reservations of large parts of British society, became King Henry IX. He was crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1799, as the war in France ground to a halt and the armies retreated to their winter quarters. It seemed symbolic that a new century would begin with Henry IX’s reign, for novelty abounded in the young, unexpected king’s ideas.

  Henry had always been aligned with Charles James Fox’s Radicals, and it was no surprise that he asked Fox to form a government on January 14th 1800. Fox achieved a narrow majority in the Commons, part of his support coming from reactionary Tories who wanted to see the war ended at any cost and ‘court party’ MPs in the pocket of whoever sat upon the throne. Fox naturally always struggled to get legislation past the Lords, however. Fox formed his “New Cabinet” and immediately sent out peace feelers to Lisieux’s new Administration.

  The positions of the two states bore certain parallels. Both thought they were in a weaker position than they were, but would not admit it. Lisieux was certain that if Boulanger had not achieved total victory now, he never would, not without the unavailable armies stuck in Germany and Italy, while the British could easily reinforce across the Channel. He also knew that the republics in Italy, Swabia and Switzerland were creations of Robespierre and might not support his new regime. The British, on the other hand, thought that they had only barely held on against Boulanger’s new machines of war, and it would take years of study in peacetime to figure out means of taking on the Revolutionary technology and tactics. “If the Jacobins throw us back into the sea, who is to say that Boulanger cannot conjure up a bridge of steam and send his troops into England?” wrote the Marquess of Stafford, a leading Tory thinker. He jested somewhat, but was in other ways remarkably prophetic. “We need time to understand that these new marvels are not magical but simply the product of man’s ingenuity…time which we will not have unless this war is brought to a close.”

  Therefore, when Fox’s government approached Lisieux’s, the Peace of Caen was signed only weeks later, on 4th March 1800. The shock of the abrupt end of the war resounded in the British media, but much less so in France. Lisieux had already taken control of the press and was forming it into the legendary propaganda machine it would become. The French papers said that Boulanger had thrown the English into the sea, and that the rebel areas would remain under special military administration until they were purified enough to be integrated back into the Republic. Until that time, the French people were forbidden to travel into those regions, lest they become ‘infected’ by impure ideas. Lisieux borrowed heavily from Robespierre’s language, but all of this was simply to conceal the fact that the areas were still held by rebels. As part of the peace treaty, Lisieux agreed to allow a rump Royal France consisting of Brittany and the Vendée, but no more. Louis XVII, appalled at the British betrayal under Fox, was forced to consent to this. He returned to Nantes and formed his capital there.

  No-one thought the Peace of Mayenne (as it was called) would last for long. For both sides, it was a time for rebuilding. Fox might be naïve enough to think the Republic could be courted, but the majority of commentators knew the war would begin again one day.

  For now, though, Britain returned to its domestic affairs and resumed putting down the last vestiges of the USE rebellion in Ireland, while the Republic turned its attention to Spain. This was the so-called Double Revolution, Lisieux coming to power in France and Henry IX and Fox in Britain. In North America, though, it is sometimes known as the Treble Revolution. American fervour for the war had died away slowly as Jefferson’s death had faded into memory, and Lisieux was now wise enough to publicly apologise for the incident, associating it with Robespierre’s dead regime. Some parts of the Empire, notably Carolina, disliked the alliance with Royal France as they presently coveted expansion into the remaining French colonies in America, which as yet remained loyal to the King. So, in July 1799, when a new general election was called, James Monroe’s Constitutionalist Party won a majority of seats in the Continental Parliament, unseating Lord Hamilton’s Patriots.

  The Lord Deputy, the Duke of Grafton, formally asked Monroe to form a government and Monroe became America’s third Lord President. He was the first not to to be a peer, refusing the offer of a title and preferring to focus on the Commons – like William Pitt, he believed that that was where power had shifted in this age. The Constitutionalists immediately formally ended the war with France, which had technically continued past the British peace due to Albert Gallatin, the American representative there, lacking the powers to sign the treaty. This was a problem which Monroe rectified with the upgrade of Gallatin’s status to Lord Representative; later, he replaced Gallatin with a political ally, James Madison. Gallatin returned to New York to continue his work with maintaining peace and cooperation with the Howden, while Madison almost became treated as an absentee member of Fox’s cabinet, his own radical-leaning sympathies lying well with the new British government’s.

  So four nations – Great Britain, Ireland, North America and France – had now been placed on wildly different courses. This did not mean, of course, that those courses would never again collide…

  Chapter 41: The Space-Filling Empire

  Capt. Christopher Nuttall: As we move away from Europe for a moment, a brief note should be made that most African names have been altered to their OTL spellings to avoid confusion, though often different and less French-influenced transliterations are the norm in this timeline. (Pause) I apologise for the absence of Drs Pylos and Lombardi, but I fear they had a somewhat heated argument over the nature of Societist doctrine (indistinctly) where did I put those bandages?

  *

  “If you rise from defeat, licking your wounds, and resolve that you should have the victory next time—first you must understand why you lost”

  – Michael Olesogun, Prime Minister of Guinea (1942-1946)

  *

  From: “A History of West Africa” by Lancelot Grieves (1964, Mancunium House Publishing)–

  Prior to the Africa Bubble scandal of 1782, Guinea[230] was a largely unknown land to most Europeans. Many powers – England and then Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Denmark – had maintained trading posts along the coastline since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but there was little penetration into the interior. Those trading posts dealt in African commodities such as ivory, gold – and slaves. Slavery was, in fact, the major motor of Eruopean trade with Guinea throughout most of the eighteenth century. A ‘triangular trade’ was practiced, with manufactured goods going from Europe to Africa, slaves from Africa to American colonies, and raw materials going from America to Europe. This status quo was not actively challenged until the second half of the eighteenth century.

  Opposition to African slavery began as early as 1727, when the Quaker Church of Great Britain (the Society of Friends) made it doctrine to oppose the practice. The Quakers in America took somewhat longer to cleave to this, perhaps because slavery was all around them and vital for the economy of many areas of the colonies. The movement was nonetheless given a big boost when William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, had a change of heart and freed his slaves, thereafter supporting abolitionism. Court cases in the 1760s and 70s over American slaves brought to Britain were reviewed in the House of Lords, and it was judged that the abolition of (white) slavery made in 1101 by the Normans continued to apply. Slavery itself was therefore resolved to be illegal in Britain, and any slaves brought into the country legally automatically became freemen, although this was not necessarily de facto enforced. The slave trade was, however, violently defended by established business interests in the face of opposition by a growing abolitionist movement. The trade had made the fortunes of many nouveau riche families no less than the rise of industry, and was at the back of the
first economic boom in Liverpool and other ports on the west coast of Britain. Those who had benefited from it would not give it up without a fight.

  Elsewhere in Europe, opposition to slavery was initially slow to arise. The biggest move in the arena outside Britain was in Denmark, when King Christian VII abolished the slave trade as part of his moves to withdraw Danish trade from Africa in order to focus on building power in the Baltic. By this point, the trade was becoming less profitable in any case, so Christian’s appeal to abolitionist sentiment was largely a calculated political move – but the fact that such a move was seen as holding any weight, even to a minority of the court, was an indication of how the subject was spreading through the intellectual classes in Europe. France and Portugal were the nations most hostile to the idea of abolishing slavery, both because their colonies depended heavily on the slave trade and because the French intellectual scene was dominated by pro-slavery thinkers such as Voltaire. Linnaean Racism, nowhere more enthusiastically embraced than by French thinkers even before the Revolution, also got in the way: it was easy to justify slavery on the grounds that Africans were incapable of success without white guidance. Of course, such theories were usually thought up by armchair philosophers who had not travelled to Africa itself to discover found that slaves were bought by European traders from quite sophisticated native states…

  The first nation in the world to abolish slavery was the proto-United Provinces of South America, in 1784. Though even the country’s name had not been thought of that point, the initially unofficial move was a ploy to gain wider support and an attempt to unite the people of the former Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata behind the rebel government. Negro slaves were promised their freedom if they fought for the rebels. It fitted neatly into the general ideology of abolishing the casta system that powered the rebellion. Though after the war the promises were not always entirely lived up to (if slavery in name was banned, indentured servitude often remained) it was nonetheless an important exemplar for other countries.

  The northern Confederations of the Empire of North America, and the colonies that had preceded them, drifted away from slavery throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The General Assembly of New England passed a law calling for the gradual abolition of slavery in 1789, with the result that none would be born into slavery after that date within the Confederal boundaries (although the living slaves were unaffected). Pennsylvania, initially more hostile to the idea, was gradually won over by the actions of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, backed by the influential natural philosopher and writer Benjamin Franklin. In 1795 the Pennsylvanian Confederal Assembly narrowly passed a law which included manumission similar to New England’s, but – of huge significance for the course of American history – also banned the transport of new slaves into Pennsylvania. This meant it was almost impossible to import slaves into New York or New England from the southern Confederations, except by ship. New York itself still had long memories of the Negro Uprising of 1741 (which Prince Frederick had used in propaganda to attack Governor Cosby), but surrounded by “free” Confederations and with a growing abolitionist movement of its own, relented. The New York Assembly’s law, passed in 1803, was a watered-down version of the other confederations’ laws and did not apply to unincorporated territories or the Howden protectorate. However, it set another important precedent.

  All of this background serves to explain why the African slave trade was slowing down throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. America and the West Indies also, by now, had enough of a black population to hypothetically sustain a future pool of slaves, largely making new imports uneconomical for the slaveholders. The triangular trade was impaired by this bottleneck, and Britain’s Royal Africa Company was beset by economic difficulty, though the company itself had formally abandoned the slave trade after losing its monopoly in 1731. The last Director, David Andrews – who was later tried and sentenced to life imprisonment by the House of Lords – attempted to conceal the extent of the Company’s debts, with the result that the Bubble wiped thousands of pounds off the New Jonathan’s Stock Exchange when it broke in 1782. It was not, in fact, an economic bubble in the usual sense, but was so named because it reminded many commentators of the South Sea Bubble fifty years before. That meltdown had paralysed the British government and led to the creation of the (still unofficial) office of Prime Minister. This one would be no less influential.

  The Prime Minister, the Marquess of Rockingham, was forced to resign over the scandal (though he would later return upon the collapse of Portland’s government in the face of the threat of Robespierre’s France). The new government, led by the Duke of Portland but masterminded by Edmund Burke, immediately distanced itself from the failures of the previous Ministry and decided to reform the Company considerably.

  The Royal Africa Company had had an unhappy history thus far. Quite apart from being an organisation founded to trade inhumanely in human lives, it had been set up by James, the Duke of York in the seventeenth century – the same man who had later become the definition of evil to many non-Jacobite Britons as King James II. The Company had already survived several minor collapses and reinstatements throughout the eighteenth century, suffering from the loss of its slave monopoly and then refocusing on the gold dust and ivory trade. It had also been officially renamed so many times that any number of the names were in common circulation, and considered interchangeable – the Royal Africa Company, the African Company, the Guinea Company, the Negroland Company, and many more.

  The Company’s organisation was in a sad state, and the Portland Ministry decided that the best way to rejuvenate it would be to bring in talent from its far more successful sister organisation, the British East India Company. Despite facing hard competition from its French rival, the BEIC’s trade had brought great wealth to Britain, while the RAC was struggling even to keep itself afloat.

  Thus, the new Board of Directors set up for the RAC was made up partly of men brought over from the BEIC. The two most prominent – and famous – of these were Arthur Filling and Thomas Space, two junior EIC directors who could not have been more different. Filling was a dour Scotsman who had joined the Company’s military and served in the Indian wars, losing an eye during the war with the last Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daulah. He also had a keen acumen for business, and had found his way to his current position partly through careful investments with a small fortune he had taken during the sack of Calcutta. Space, on the other hand, was an idealistic Englishman from a privileged background, who had joined the Company mainly in order to visit exotic climes and learn about new peoples and languages. He was a strong opponent of slavery, being a member of Frederick Wilberforce’s Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and importantly through that membership was on speaking terms with several of the most prominent among Britain’s West African community. These included Olaudah Equiano, an escaped slave who had become a respected writer. There was thus Anglo-African participation in the Company’s philosophy from the start, interest having been sparked among the several thousand ‘Black Poor’ inhabitants of London.

  The challenge facing Filling and Space, as well as the other directors, was vast. The Company had singularly failed to find a new profitable trade niche since the loss of its slavery monopoly, and it was competing with both independent British traders and other European outposts along the West African coast – the French and the Portuguese, the Danes and the Dutch, though the Danish outposts were gradually turned over to the Dutch thanks to Christian VII’s policies. After initially despairing of the difficulty of their task, Space claimed to have had a vision come to him in his sleep, along with a message: look to the east.

  The implication was clear – after all, the Prime Minister had brought them in to make the RAC more like the BEIC. And the BEIC’s current success was based on a more interventionist strategy, pushing influence deep into the hinterland while accepting natives into positions within the Company. The BEIC had not been much m
ore than a trading company while it was limited to outposts on the fringes of the Mughal Empire, but now it was so much more. Could the RAC copy that success? There was only one way to find out.

  The partnership of Filling and Space meant that the dual philosophy of the New Company was both profit-driven and yet possessed a moral aspect. After all, slavery was commonly practiced in the African states themselves, usually taking the form of enslaving war captives. “Once upon our time, our ancestors did the same,” Space wrote in a letter to Filling. “Your grandfather many times removed may have captured and enslaved mine…” a reference to the fact that Space was from Northumberland, and that the Scots had practiced slave raids into English territory (and vice versa) during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. “Yet I can now be assured of even travelling to Edinburgh itself with no fear of being clapped in irons and forced to work the fields…do not our fellow human beings who happen to have been born in a distant land not deserve that same assurance?”