Diverge and Conquer (Look to the West Book 1) Read online

  Look to the West

  A Counterfactual History

  by Dr Tom W. Anderson MA MSci (Cantab)

  First published by Sea Lion Press in 2016.

  This is a work of fiction. While ‘real-world’ characters may appear, the nature of the divergent story means any depictions herein are fictionalised and in no way an indication of real events. Above all, characterisations have been developed with the primary aim of telling a compelling story.

  Acknowledgements

  Many people have contributed towards making this book a reality. As always I must thank Tom Black of Sea Lion Press for getting the publication project off the ground, Jack Tindale for another excellent cover, and my family for their support. Over several years I have also enjoyed the support of countless forum beta readers, some of whom have contributed with graphics and occasionally text (Nick Bieter, “SimonBP”, “Nugax”, “Umbric Man”, and more). A special thanks must go out to Alex Richards, who has worked tirelessly to produce four excellent new maps to accompany this volume. My readers have also contributed constructive criticism over the years and some of them show a particular talent for pointing out when I have killed off the same General or Pope twice, sometimes in the same chapter (“Grand Prince Paul II”, “Finn”, “Admiral Matt” to name a few). And far too many readers to list have offered praise and encouragement to keep me going over the years, when far less ambitious projects might have been abandoned. Some of them have cameos in the timeline. You know who you are.

  Many writers of histories and historical fiction gave me inspiration for particular parts of the timeline: Frank McLynn, Gunther Rothenburg, Bernard Cornwell, William Hague, Patrick O’Brian, Jeremy Black to name a few. A final thanks must go to to both Tony Jones (of Monarchy World, Cliveless World, etc.) and Jared Kavanagh (of Decades of Darkness and Lands of Red and Gold), who both proved that an alternate history work of this scale was possible and set the gold standard of both quality and formatting.

  Foreword

  I first began working on Look to the West in 2006 and it finally makes its published debut one decade on. In that time it has grown from an idle attempt to produce an alternate history setting to a work that has now stretched to five volumes—of which is this only the first—and has a word count exceeding Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. “The tale grew in the telling” to quote J.R.R. Tolkien (some years after commenting that he expected his planned sequel to The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, to be shorter than it...)

  You may wish to know what inspired this project. At my school, the history curriculum rather oddly skipped almost directly from the English Civil War to the Victorian age and never discussed the intervening two centuries from around 1666 to 1866 or so. It was only years later that I learned that this was arguably the most influential age in history for building the world we see around us today. This may seem a strange claim considering the impact of later events such as the World Wars and the advent of electronics. Nonetheless, this period saw ‘the Second Hundred Years’ War’, over a century of on-again off-again conflict between Britain and France which ultimately determined the fact that the modern world speaks English rather than French; an ideological cold war between enlightened absolutism and parliamentary government quite as bitter as the twentieth-century one between communism and capitalism; breakthroughs in science and technology as diverse as the steam engine, the battery and the rifle; and a cultural flowering of art, music and literature that continues to enrich our world to this day. This was the age in which Europe began to see itself as not merely a collection of inadequate successor states to the Roman Empire but as the centre of global trade and civilisation—for better and for worse. It was a time both of the horrors of the slave trade and of enlightened writers who fought against it, a time of fortunes made in manufacturing which upset the established social order and of revolutions that bathed the streets in blood. It is not a time one would think advisable to pass over in any historical treatment attempting to explain the world in which we live today.

  It was also, of course, the age in which the American Revolution gave birth to a new power, causing shockwaves that continue to reverberate around the glove to this day. Not only was the United States of America a republic in an age mostly of kingdoms, it was the first power to be predominantly European descended yet based outside Europe; arguably the first major nation not to see its language as defining its identity (speaking English without being English); and the first country to attempt to govern such a huge but then-sparsely populated area by the means of constitutional federalism. This event was so significant that it has naturally been an area of much counterfactual speculation in history, if perhaps less well known to the general public than ‘the Nazis win’. What if the Revolution failed? What if it never happened in the first place?

  The American Revolution arouses such strong feelings that it is tricky to address such a scenario, however, with American depictions usually portraying any modern-day British America as ‘oppressed’ and just yearning to break free at any moment (for example, in Sliders); meanwhile the precise opposite is shown in Turtledove and Dreyfuss’ The Two Georges, which presents a British America that it not only positively utopian in many ways but also incongruously using modern British terms like lorry for truck, as though such differences in terminology did not abound in our own world’s later British colonies. Others have tackled the problem over the years with variations such as Sobel’s For Want of a Nail, describing a world including both a continuing British America and a breakaway United States founded by defeated revolutionaries.

  My own personal view is that by the time the American Revolutionary War broke out, the situation was already fundamentally unsalvageable. Britain could have won militarily, but it is doubtful whether the colonies could ever have been meaningfully governable again without a cost in military commitments holding the rebels down that Parliament would have been reluctant to countenance. While nothing is impossible, I therefore decided that it was more interesting to explore a world where the Revolution had been averted before it began. I see the major cause of the Revolution as being that the American Colonies had simply become used to being left alone and managing their own affairs for years, and it was when Westminster tried to take more of a direct hand in governance there from the end of the Seven Years’ War that the resentment began. Specific policies, the so-called Intolerable Acts, were certainly unpopular—but it was more the principle that Westminster was interfering at all. Yet it is absurd to posit a world where Westminster is simply not allowed to govern colonial America—then it might as well be independent in the first place. Therefore, any movement bringing Britain and America closer together must begin in the colonies. And I began to think about a certain prince, neglected by history, who lived in this time before his untimely death by a cricket ball...

  Look to the West begins with American affairs, but it does not end there. The world is a complex place and I have tried not to neglect any corner of it as the tale has grown. The eighteenth century was a melting pot of ideas, many of which could have developed any number of different ways in This Timeline (TTL) to Our Timeline (OTL). I trust that you will find this work not only to be an entertaining work of fiction, but also one that both informs you about peculiar and improbable corners of world history and one which makes you think about how things could have gone differently.

  “As it’s only Fred who was alive and is dead, why, there’s no more to be said.” Or is there?

  Dr Tom Anderson

  Doncaster, United Kingdom

  January 2016

  VOLUME ONE:

  DIVERGE AND CONQUER

  Here lies Fred,<
br />
  Who was alive and is dead.

  If it had been his father,

  I would much rather;

  If it had been his brother,

  Still better than another;

  If it had been his sister,

  No one would have missed her;

  If it had been the whole generation,

  So much the better for the nation.

  But as it’s only Fred,

  Who was alive and is dead,

  Why there’s no more to be said!

  – Epigram of Prince Frederick Lewis of Wales (1707-1751), OTL

  Prologue: Across the Multiverse

  18/04/2019. Temporary headquarters of TimeLine L Preliminary Exploration Team, location classified. Captain Christopher G. Nuttall, seconded from British SAS, commanding officer.

  Addressed to Director Stephen Rogers of the Thande Institute for Crosstime Exploration, Cambridge, United Kingdom.

  Director Rogers:

  My team has completed the preliminary one-month survey of the alternate Earth that the Institute has designated ‘TimeLine L’. We are, of course, aware that this report will be the primary basis for the International Oversight Committee for Crosstime Exploration’s decision on whether TimeLine L is worthy of further expeditions being dispatched. As of now, sir, I must confess that my own opinions are still divided on this issue.

  Perhaps, as I and my team set down what we have learned, we will make our own decisions, just as you will. The information we have obtained from TimeLine L is primarily in the form of extracts taken from history books, and we have tried to gain these from several different sources to avoid making mistakes based on national bias. As you will see, sir, this has not always been easy. Wherever possible, we have annotated the extracts with the titles of the books in question, their authors, and the dates published. We have also used those basic information gathering techniques as recommended by the Institute, attempting to casually question the contemporary populace in a manner that does not provoke undue suspicion.

  Identifying the point at which another history diverged from our own—the so-called Point of Divergence—is often not so easy as the training films would have us believe. Even chaos theory cannot be relied upon: individuals may be born after the PoD with a different combination of genes due to effects of random chance, but they are nonetheless born to the same parents as their ‘counterparts’ from our timeline. Therefore, their names, temperaments and even destinies may still seem hauntingly familiar to that of the history we are familiar with. Or they may have subtle, unexpected differences. It is only another generation after the PoD, when those people grow up to marry different spouses and have children, that unambiguous and radical differences are typically seen.

  A note on terminology. Our own world’s history, also sometimes called “TimeLine A”, shall in this report be contracted to ‘Our TimeLine’ or OTL for short, as is the Institute policy. Comparisons to OTL are inevitable as we study TimeLine L (henceforth referred to as This TimeLine, TTL) but it is my opinion that they should not be taken too far.

  Let me use an example from the history of my own country. A Scot from a timeline where Scotland remained independent might well look upon the United Kingdom of OTL as being an English Empire in Scotland. But an Englishman from a history without a United Kingdom might not consider OTL to be an improvement, because change always goes both ways and many of the things he considers emblematic of the England he knows will also be gone. This ‘grass is always greener’ paradigm is all over TTL, as you will soon see.

  Enough beating about the bush. The jury is still out on the PoD, but Dr Lombardi has the strongest theory so far.

  It all begins in the year 1727, at an event that Dr Pylos insists on referring to as the Coronation of the Hun, when the axis of history began to spin the world towards a different fate altogether...

  Chapter #1: The Coronation of the Hun

  From: “Nasty, Brutish, and Short—the Reign of King George II of the Kingdom of Great Britain” by Peter Daniels (1985)—

  On the eleventh day of June in the Year of Our Lord 1727, a man of sixty-seven years suffered a stroke and died. And, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the world would not have marked such an event. But when the man was the King of Great Britain, the King of Ireland and the Elector of Hanover, things were different indeed.

  King George I’s reign had been important both for symbolic and practical reasons. The accession of a foreign monarch by virtue of his Protestantism and by the will of Parliament had firmly established the anti-absolutist values of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the ensuing British Constitution, as well as the triumph of the Whig Party over their Tory rivals. Furthermore, George’s reign—with his limited command of English and disinterest in British affairs—had allowed Parliament to grow in supremacy. The South Sea Bubble economic scandal of 1720 had resulted in the resignation of most of the Cabinet, allowing the untainted Sir Robert Walpole to assume more power than any individual Minister had ever had before. Later generations would call him the first true Prime Minister, though in his lifetime it remained a disparaging term. In 1727, Walpole sought to continue a policy of steering the Kingdom of Great Britain through peaceful economic prosperity, avoiding entanglement in European wars. But now this policy was called into question.

  Three days after the death of King George I, the Accession Council convened to proclaim George’s only son, also named George, as King George II. Many had anticipated this event with some degree of dread. As had become well known among the English, the Hanoverians had a tradition of violent disagreements between father and son. While he had been Prince of Wales, the younger George had done everything he could to undermine the rule and policies of his father. It was no secret that he wished to replace the popular and skilful Walpole with Sir Spencer Compton, a nonentity. This would be George’s revenge for the treachery of Walpole, who had formerly been part of the Prince of Wales’ faction before abandoning to joint a government loyal to the King.

  In the event, and probably better for the sake of England, George was persuaded by his wife, Queen Caroline, that Walpole must stay. This guaranteed the continuing rise of the Whig Party, to the extent that they would dominate Parliament for the foreseeable future. The old divisions between Whig and Tory were largely abandoned, as the Tories became a useless rump unable to win power: from now on, the true contest would merely be between different factions of the Whigs.

  It was no secret that George II disliked England, with its meddling politicans interfering with the divine right of Kings, and like his father always considered himself a German first. This was an advantage in some ways for Walpole, as it let him draw more of the King’s powers to himself and Parliament, but also alarmed him: Walpole intended to continue to keep the Kingdom out of damaging European wars, and George felt quite the opposite.

  All of these issues would eventually return throughout George’s short reign, but none of them would ever eclipse the one which plagued him all his life, for his best efforts. The curse of the Hanoverians reared its head once more: just as George had detested his father, so his son, Prince Frederick Lewis, detested him.

  For all the accusations that have been levelled at him in latter ages, and as he has been darkened by the shadows of some of his more illustrious descendants, George II was not stupid. Reckless, yes, and careless of privilege, but not stupid. He did not want to repeat the mistakes of history. He would not let his son gather political support against him and be the same thorn in his side that he had been to his own father. So George II had an idea. Prince Frederick would go, not back to Hanover (which in George’s mind, if perhaps not Frederick’s, would be a blessing) but to the godforsaken ends of the Earth.

  To England’s Colonies...

  His wife, Queen Caroline, dissuaded him of this reckless course also, and in the end George went to be coronated in Westminster Abbey, on October 4th 1727, with his son Frederick by his side.[1]

  The coronation would, perhaps, have b
een well remembered in any case, for the noted Hanoverian composer Handel had been brought in to write numerous new pieces of music. Perhaps the best known is ‘Zadok the Priest’, which remains performed at many coronations throughout the English-speaking world today. But the music of Handel, and indeed all else, would be overshadowed by the events that meant this date would live in infamy.

  A confusion over arrangements meant that Handel’s superb pieces were nonetheless played in the wrong order, which led to many of the churchmen becoming panicked and flustered. It was, in fact, a particularly loud and unexpected note in Handel’s “Grand Instrumental Procession”, coupled with perhaps a rumple in the blue carpet, which led to the King, on the way to his throne beside the Queen, to stumble and fall before the great dignitaries there to pay homage to him.[2]

  A deathly silence descended, and indeed it might have ended there, for the assembled Lords Spiritual and Temporal knew better than to incur any royal wrath at this injuncture. The incident, they thought, as the king picked himself up with as much dignity as possible, would never be mentioned again.

  The young Prince Frederick, twenty years old and retaining much of his teenage precociousness to go with the traditional Hanoverian inter-generational hatred, did not show so such restraint. He let out a single ‘Ha!’ of delighted laughter, and with it, changed the world forever.