New England (3)

It is the late spring of 1978 in a world in which the American Revolution failed in 1776 after George Washington was killed and the Continental Army was destroyed at the Battle of Long Island. The rumbling aftershocks of the Empire Day atrocities which reverberated through the pages of Two Hundred Lost Years are threatening to come to the boil. While in Philadelphia the politics become ever more fractious in Spain the Royal Alcazar is a citadel besieged in a country which might as well still be stuck in the nineteenth century. Preparations for war hamstrung by colonial politics begin to gather pace in New England in a climate where the Governor in his mansion and the government back in England continues to tiptoe around provocations in the Caribbean and the Borderlands of the South. In Spain, Melody Danson and Henrietta De L’Isle have performed their role as distractions, adornments to a diplomatic mission whose only purpose is to delay the moment when the truth about the Empire Day attacks finally emerge. Because, when that day comes the road to war will suddenly confront the great European powers. The Peace of Paris, the basis of the post-Great War of 1857-66 settlement, threatened by Anglo-German-Russia tensions is now hostage to the machinations of a Spanish Empire in its death throes and the failing health of Old Spain, ‘the sick man of Europe’. Brothers Abe and Alex Fielding find themselves making ready for war. Melody and Henrietta discover unlikely friends in the Mountains of Madrid. Journalist Albert Stanton of the Manhattan Globe unwittingly stumbles into a war zone. The Governor of the Commonwealth of New England and his political masters in England wrestle with a crisis they saw coming years ago but can do little or nothing to avert. The World in which England’s Georgian colonies in the Americas became the keystone of the British Empire◦– upon which it seemed the Sun could never set◦– is about to fray around the edges and our heroes and heroines are going to find themselves directly in the firing line!

New York – July 1976 – in a World in which New England remains the sparkling jewel in the crown of the British Empire. It is the day before Empire Day – 4th July – the day each year when the British Empire marks the brutal crushing of the rebellion dignified by the treachery of the fifty-six delegates to the Continental Congress who were so foolhardy as to sign the infamous Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on that day of infamy in 1776. It is nearly two hundred years since George Washington was killed and his Continental Army was destroyed in the Battle of Long Island and now New England, that most quintessentially loyal and ‘English’ imperial fiefdom – at least in the original, or ‘First Thirteen’ colonies – is about to celebrate its devotion to the Crown and the Old Country, of which it still views, in the main, as the ‘mother country’. Yet all is not roses. Since 1776 in a world of empires the British Empire has grown and prospered until now, it stands alone as the ultimate arbiter of global war and peace. The Royal Navy has enforced the global Pax Britannia for over a century since the World War of the 1860s established a lasting but increasingly tenuous ‘peace’ between the great powers. Nonetheless, while elsewhere the Empire may be creaking at the seams, struggling to come to terms with a growing desire for self-determination; thus far the Pax Britannica has survived – buttressed by the commercial and industrial powerhouse of New England stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific North West – intact for all that barely a year goes by without the outbreak of another small, colonial war somewhere… This said, the British ‘Imperial System’ remains the envy of its friends and enemies alike and nowhere has it been so successful as in North America, where peace and prosperity has ruled in the vast Canadian dominions and the twenty-nine old and recent colonies of the Commonwealth of New England for the best part of two centuries. In Whitehall every British government in living memory has complacently based its ‘American Policy’ on the one immutable, unchanging fact of New England politics; that the First Thirteen colonies will never agree with each other about anything, let alone that the sixteen ‘Johnny-come-lately’ new (that is, post-1776) colonies, protectorates, territories and possessions which comprise half the population and eight-tenths of the land area of New England, should ever have any say in their affairs! New England is a part of England and always will be because, axiomatically, it will never unite in a continental union. Notwithstanding, in the British body politic the myths and legends of that first late eighteenth-century rebellion in the New World still touches a raw nerve in the old country, much as in former epochs memories of Jacobin revolts, Oliver Cromwell and the Civil War still harry old deep-seated scars in the national psyche. Empire Day might not have originally been conceived as a celebration of the saving of the first British Empire and but as time has gone by it has come to symbolise the one, ineluctable truth about the Empire: that New England is the rock upon which all else stands, an empire within an empire that is greater than the sum of all the other parts of the great imperium ruled from London. In past times a troubling question has been whispered in the corridors of power in London: what would happen to the Empire – and the Pax Britannica – if the British hold on New England was ever to be loosened? Generations of British politicians have always known that if the question was ever to be asked again in earnest it has but one answer. If the New World ever discovers again a single voice supporting any kind of meaningful estrangement from the Old Country; it would surely be the end of the Empire… Coming soon: Book 2 – Two Hundred Lost Years; and Book 3 – Travels Through the Wind.

The British Empire has sleepwalked, unprepared into war with the Triple Alliance, the Spanish colonies of the Caribbean and Central America.

But this is not to be a war like those which have gone before it; wars decided by crushing British sea power and eventually, on land by the superiority of the logistics and tactics of relatively small colonial armies in the South Western badlands.

No, this time it is the enemy, the Triple Alliance of Nuevo Granada, Cuba and Santo Domingo, allied to a miscellany of old Spanish crown colonies ringing the Caribbean and the Gulf of Spain, which seizes the initiative and in the opening days of the war deliver a series of hammer blows.

It began with a sneak invasion of Jamaica, the key strategic British base in the Caribbean, and the ambush of the light cruiser Achilles in the Windward Passage.

‘Remember Brave Achilles’ becomes the call to arms.

Yet this is not a war to be fought just in the West Indies or down in the contested borderlands.

In Spain – wracked by civil war Melody Danson, Henrietta De L’Isle and the Manhattan Globe man Albert Stanton are on the run from the Inquisition.

On Little Inagua Island in the West Indies Surgeon Lieutenant Abe Lincoln and his navigator, Ted Forest of the Royal Naval Air Service, both wounded, must fight for survival.

At sea the Atlantic Fleet, on paper invincible, must suddenly come to terms with that most vile of weapons – banned by treaty with the German Empire a decade ago – submarines. And while disaster beckons; still New England slumbers, and everybody knows that when it awakens, rudely as it must, that there will be all Hell to pay!

The New England Series continues next year with st, and .