by Tom Anderson
As is often the case, the truth lies between these two extremes. We should not, of course, forget Britain’s sheer good fortune after the initial shock of the French invasion; the death of Hoche at Fox’s hand, the takeover of the army by the monster Modigliani and the alienation of the English common people, whom Hoche might have wooed at least into neutrality, and of course the addition of the Duke of Mornington’s Irishmen and Alexander’s Americans[156] at a vital moment, leading to the turn of the tide. Yet nor should we entirely dismiss Churchill, for it seems clear that a lesser man (even a great political orator like Richard Burke) could not have rallied his people to resist at a time when, almost as one man, they reeled from the shattering of their certainty that their island was impregnable. It is worth noting that even Ulysses Green, one of Churchill’s harshest critics, grudgingly admitted that “…at the time, in truth, I doubt if any other could have saved us… while Parliament contains many clever men, some too clever for their own good… when Modigliani burned London, what we needed was a Captain who would never stop fighting, simply because he was too mule-headed, too stubborn, frankly too stupid for it to occur to him to do anything else…”
In the short term, then, Churchill’s ruthless attitudes may have helped Britain beat off an invasion, but problems arose when they continued not simply after the enemy had been expelled from the island, not only when the war was taken to the French upon the continent, but after the Battle of Paris and the Congress of Copenhagen. Fox’s time in power had been one of radical liberty and progressive administration; for all his errors, perhaps his greatest triumph was unwittingly creating something that approached that very state that Robespierre and Lisieux had claimed to rule. But in contrast the new ‘Protectorate’ was one of staunch conservatism and reactionary government, paranoia and authoritarianism. It is true, as many Churchill romanticists contend, that few of Fox’s reform laws were actually reversed (as had been the case, for example, with Cromwell’s reforms after the Restoration), but in truth this is largely because Churchill simply ignored them. For example, the Fox Reform Coalition government had thrown out the Septennial Act (1715) in favour of restoring the provisions of the Triennial Act (1694), thus requiring elections to be held every three years. However, a new British general election was not held until late 1813, more than seven years since Fox’s majority had been slightly increased in 1806.
For the intervening period, the rump Parliament of surviving MPs carried on, sometimes meeting in the ruins of the Palace of Westminster as it was rebuilt on neoclassical lines,[157] sometimes in Fort Rockingham near Doncaster as it had during the war, often in any number of town halls or disused corn exchanges along the Great North Road in between. A large number of seats lacked representation as their MPs had been killed in the burning of London – and naturally those MPs had tended to be some of the most radical, like Fox unable to believe that the French revolutionaries would do such a thing and therefore sticking around until the end. Parliament therefore both became more conservative by default and also more irrelevant, withering away in a manner that has been compared to that of the French Latin Republic’s National Legislative Assembly under Lisieux.
Under Churchill’s dominion, the south-eastern shires that had been a part of the abortive English Germanic Republic were placed under military government, as was the whole of Scotland (in theory; in practice this largely extended only to Edinburgh, Glasgow and a few Highland forts). There were reasons behind this heavy-handed act, however. The problems had begun in the winter of 1807 itself; not a harsh winter, fortunately, or the situation might have become even worse. A combination of factors served to present a daunting conundrum. The French had practiced la maraude, pillaged and burned to deny food to the advancing British and their allies later on, had driven away thousands of refugees fleeing the iron hand of Modigliani, and had simply killed many others whose lot in life was to sow and till the soil of England. The result was that almost a third of England was left with areas of burned-out farmland, crops rotting in their fields with no-one to harvest them, and other scenes that had not been seen since the Civil War of the seventeenth century. The result of that was that what had been the English Germanic Republic now starved.
It has been suggested that the bold deployments of troops to the continent soon after London was retaken was as much a pragmatic decision as one born of strategy or hotheaded thoughts of revenge; the armies could simply not be fed if they remained, indeed nor could the survivors themselves. The famine was terrible, but was alleviated by swift and dictatorial commands from Churchill, thus cementing himself into an untouchable position as ‘father of the nation’, regardless of the debacle of his brainchild of sending Græme to Flanders. The north and west of England had a significant percentage of their harvests confiscated by army provosts and this transferred to the south and east, often arriving in huge caravan convoys of carriages stuffed with sacks of grain or flour – more usually the latter, as the officials realised that few working mills were left in the former Republic as well. Later caravans sometimes included repurposed ‘Whistler’ steam carriages whose engines could be modified on site to drive miniature millstones instead. The caravans were immortalised in works such as the painting The Saviours, or, How Little Separates Men From Beasts by Brian Munroe (1831), a somewhat idealised account of the hungry men and women of Essex scrambling to meet the convoy as it rolled to a halt, and the poem The Ride of the Reapers by Stanley Winston (1842), an epic covering the thoughts of the lead coachman as he watches the countryside shift from the green and pleasant land he loves to the burnt-out wreckage of the Republic.
Naturally, the farmers and millers of the north and west were rather… reluctant to part with the fruits of their labours for what was often nothing more than a state-signed IOU, and the situation quickly turned dirty. Gun ownership was a guaranteed right for all Protestant subjects of the crown of Great Britain, according to the Bill of Rights that formed the basis of the British Constitution, and few were more likely to keep a blunderbuss or shotgun handy than farmers. In response to this, armed marshals were deployed with the provosts, often from military backgrounds themselves. Some were soldiers who had served at the front only to be wounded, perhaps losing an arm or a leg, but still being serviceable enough to serve in this role; others, however, included those who had been dishonourably discharged and were prone to acting not dissimilarly to how the French had on la maraude. Indeed at this time the British Army relaxed its stance on crimes that formerly would have been punishable by hanging, using the same kind of utilitarian logic that Jean de Lisieux was famous for; at times like this, they simply could not afford to throw any man away when he could perform a useful task.
The inevitable result of all this were several ugly incidents both in the north and west among the farmers and millers, and in the south and east among the starving people who often disputed the rationing system or struggled with the ramshackle, thrown-together, often corrupt distribution network. By this point the focus of the war had shifted to France and the former Republic’s reconstruction was beginning to pick up, but a famine the following winter remained a significant possibility; Churchill reacted by organising a new brigade known officially as the Public Safety Constables or PSCs, popularly known as the “browncoats” for their eventually standardised uniform. The popular theory for this is that it was due to them being equipped with cast-off British Army redcoat uniforms whose cheap dye had darkened to a murky brown, but this has never been confirmed and it is possible that the alternative theory resting on the fact that the PSCs’ commander, James Conroy, had a brother-in-law who owned a dyestuffs factory in Birmingham, may have some truth to it.
In any case, the PSCs’ mandate soon expanded from simply safeguarding the food caravans to “keeping the public peace” and enforcing the Duke’s will. Some hoped for a relaxation of this regime when the boy king Frederick II returned from America in 1809, but Frederick William was only fifteen and soon confirmed Churchill as Regent and Lord Pr
otector. The boy would prove himself not to be weak-willed in later life, but at this stage trying to unseat Churchill would not only most probably have failed, but would have plunged the country into complete chaos. One is reminded of the famous retrospective judgement of Bonaparte in the 1872 play La Garde à la Loire, the words placed by playwright Michel Artois into the mouth of Barras: “Sometimes history needs a bastard”. The question was whether Britain would ever, could ever, be rid of hers.
Frederick, however, possibly exerted some influence along with Churchill’s second son Arthur, as both were enthusiasts for the cause of steam, an area which Churchill himself might be expected to be suspicious of by default – it being modern, radical, and associated with the French Revolutionaries. Frederick in particular had been inspired during the period in America that had ultimately saved his life. He had been invited to a celebration in Pittsborough at which an American inventor, Josiah Wheeler, had demonstrated his steam-driven plough. It had been an awkward prototype, prone to failure, but it had got the young Frederick thinking. While in the ENA he had seen chattel slavery, just like his father and grandfather. His grandfather – George III – had approved, or rather it had never occurred to him that there was anything there to criticise, while his father Henry IX had been appalled by the treatment of blacks by slaveholders. Frederick found he could see both sides of the issue, and in his own words (albeit later on), “no answers are to be found either in crude oppression or in bloody revolution, but by steering a compromise down the middle that, if it does not please everyone, at least it shall displease all men equally. And it must rely on new ways of thinking. France has shown us the way there, as in so many others.” He likely did not dream that the issue would form the greatest challenge of his time on the throne, one day. But that is a subject for a different treatise, I think you will agree.
The young king and Arthur were credited by the historian Gregory Strange-Pelham as being “responsible for Britain’s failure to uninvent the wheel” during the Marleburgensian period. A poetic exaggeration perhaps but certainly a claim worth examining in the face of the contrast, particularly the attempts by several states in the Germanies to paper over history by banning or heavily regulating steam engines.[158] Therefore under Churchill’s regime the Royal Committee for Transport and Freight Improvement was created (sometimes called “Britain’s Boulangerie”) whose core consisted of those who had previously worked on the Whistler project, such as James Watt, John Wilkinson and Robert Fulton. We should not of course forget the Committee’s other work, primarily expanding and improving Britain’s canal network (which naturally overlapped with the daunting task of once more draining The Fens, flooded by the Bishop and Count Palatine of Ely during the war to block the French advance). However certainly the RCTFI’s greatest work was in the field of steam, and by 1815 or so the horse-drawn convoys – already far fewer in number as the old fields were restored – had largely been supplanted by steam tractors hauling larger carriages. The two areas are not entirely unrelated, as steam-driven narrowboats also began to compete with horse-drawn ones on the expanding canal network.
One immediate consequence of all this was a rising demand in coal, which was ultimately a self-feeding cycle, as steam technology continued to increase the capability and output of the coal mines in Yorkshire, Northumberland, Staffordshire and Glamorgan. At the same time, new textile mills were going up, primarily in Lancashire – which had been the chief home for them even before the invasion – but also dotted across the southern counties to provide work for the dispossessed. Liverpool and Bristol both swelled, for much of Britain’s rebirth was thanks to supplies coming overseas from the Empire of North America and, to a lesser extent, the Kingdom of Ireland. Food from the latter in particular helped ameliorate the initial famines as the transport network was slowly set up, with vessels carrying Irish potatoes as a simple staple offloading just downriver of Tilbury. This was before the wreckage of Admiral Lepelley’s fleet had been removed from the Thames, and thus the Pool of London was still unnavigable. Some have accused Lord Mornington of selling crops that Ireland’s poor could not afford to spare, but the increased trade certainly wedded the two countries more closely together, serving to expand the Irish ports of Dublin, Cork and even Belfast (Ulster not having seen much economic growth since the USE rebellion of the 1790s) as traffic filled the Irish Sea.
America on the other hand chiefly provided raw materials, and the Imperial Bank of America helped underwrite Britain’s economy; the Bank of England had been destroyed, most of its records and reserves lost in the fire or to French pillagers, and the shaky New Royal Bank that had been chartered in Manchester survived from day to day solely because the European economies were scarcely less unstable at the time thanks to the ravages of the Jacobin Wars. The mills made use of American raw materials, primarily cotton and timber, and then America was also one of their chief markets for the manufactured goods, chiefly textiles, coming out of Britain. Europe was also a target, the damages of the wars providing an open market for replacements, but this suffered from the fact that many who had lost their belongings had also lost any ability to pay for replacements. It was thanks to this close involvement of emerging industry that many industrialists, including John Wedgwood, William Grimshaw and Matthew Crompton, became members of Churchill’s informal ruling “cabal”.
The death of Sir Sidney Smith in 1811 meant that his men, the “Unnumbered” spies who had helped monitor the French, were left leaderless; Churchill gave them over to Conroy and they were soon amalgamated into the PSCs, being given the euphemistic name of “special constables”. The former Unnumbered were infiltrated into the public, rooting out illegal assemblies and those who tried to hide their belongings from the PSCs and provosts to avoid taxation. A scandal broke the year later when several high-ranking Scots among the Unnumbered were found to have betrayed the British authorities in Scotland, apparently sickened by the heavy-handed tactics of the military occupation in Edinburgh under the authority of Churchill’s son Joshua, the Marquess of Blandford. Brief disturbances shook Scotland and Churchill’s response was typically excessive, banning all kinds of public meetings and intensifying the army and PSC presence even more. The old informal village constabularies both in Scotland and England were supplanted by the PSCs, and when the satirical paper the North Briton heavily criticised both the decision and Churchill in general, its press was confiscated and its offices burnt down in an “apparently unrelated” act of arson.[159] What few London papers had survived for their presses to be refounded, notably The Register [OTL’s The Times], quickly caught on and hastily adjusted their editorials to be unstinting praise for Churchill, swiftly becoming indistinguishable from the official Government paper The Star of Oxford.
At this time two new radical papers sprung up, both in the north of England where Churchill’s rule was least iron-handed. Our Friend in the North was a continuation of The North Briton based in Leeds (where it warred with the government-friendly The Sun of York) while a more famous publication, The Ringleader, was being created in Manchester, the new economic heart of Marleburgensian Britain. The Ringleader arguably survived because Conroy’s censors couldn’t quite be sure if it was subversive or not; it couched its articles in such obscure, poetic and allegorical language that, famously, even its own writers denied that they knew what they were writing about. The paper was framed in the form of a supposed diary-like record of the antics at a busy, chaotic circus (implied to be Britain herself) in which the titular Ringleader (Churchill) was a harassed figure trying desperately to keep control. Perhaps The Ringleader also survived because it was rarely directly critical of Churchill himself, more commonly issuing broadsides against his advisors, lieutenants and thuggish PSC men.
The election of 1813, interfered with considerably by the PSC browncoats and especially their Unnumbered members (along with the captains of industry ordering their workers who to vote for), produced a solid majority of conservative and reactionary MPs, including more
Tories than for years in the past. Richard Burke, protesting that Parliament had become powerless, had resigned the year before (but to little public attention thanks to Churchill’s control of the press) and Frederick Dundas had become titular Prime Minister. As Churchill was also a member of the House of Lords, he could technically be appointed Prime Minister himself, and now Parliament was more to his liking, he pressured Frederick II to do so. The nineteen-year-old king eventually succumbed and Churchill added another title to his list. Parliament was now allowed to grow in power once more, and met at the New Palace of Westminster in all its shining marble finery. This decision to take the premiership has been much analysed, of course, and many claim that it avoided a far worse catastrophe down the line; however, it is rather absurd to claim that this was Churchill’s intent at the time.
The Duke continued to consolidate his power over Britain, continuing to issue the occasional public letter (in the style of his old Letters from a Concerned Gentleman) decrying subversion and encouraging the kingdom to take heart, for Rebirth was coming. The Duke’s majority in Parliament was also known officially as the Rebirth Coalition, consisting mainly of Tories with some conservative Whigs. Charles Bone served as Leader of the Opposition for six months, using the position to criticise the PSCs’ reported anti-Catholic violence and prevention of Catholics and Nonconformists from voting, in violation of the reforms passed by the Foxite government. Bone died in the winter of 1813, officially of a heart attack (he was sixty-seven at the time), but there were some whispered reports that it had been triggered by an attack in the street by bullyboys working for the PSCs. In any case, a strongly worded diplomatic note was soon sent over the Channel via a fast boat linking the rapidly expanding semaphore networks of both Britain and France (this was before the Channel Skybridge). Napoleon Bonaparte a.k.a. Leo Bone, secure in a position power almost equal to Churchill’s, was furious at the notion that foul play might have been involved at the death of his father. When he attended his funeral in 1814, he used his eulogy to harangue the great and the good of Whitehall for the actions his father had spoken of in Parliament. Of course not even Churchill could move against the effective master of France, and the diplomatic incident served to, in the words of Bulkeley, “chill the Channel ‘till it froze and you could walk over – but why would you want to?”
