Two Hundred Lost Years

by James Philip

  Poor daddy!

  He was worried sick about mother, he had been assailed by demonstrators wherever he went in England and last week a malignant coterie of his fellow peers of the realm had subjected him to a politely ferocious two-day long ‘interrogation’ in open session in Their Lordships’ House. In fact, it seemed that more than one ‘noble faction’ had wanted his head for allowing the Empire Day outrages to have happened in the first place, while others had vehemently decried the Getrennte Entwicklung legislation he was allegedly ‘rubber stamping in the First Thirteen’, mercilessly mocked the ‘old fuddy-duddy colonial regime in Philadelphia’, virtually accused him of overseeing a ‘police state’ in the twin colony of New York and Long Island and now, to cap it all, those nincompoops in Albany were belatedly, practically posthumously, bickering amongst themselves over apparent newly identified ‘deficiencies in the prosecution file’ vis-à-vis the infamous ‘Fielding Family’.

  It was really too much!

  Not for nothing had all subsequent Governors kept a portrait of Lord John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, who as Governor of Virginia, having been forced to flee from Williamsburg after the burning of Norfolk in January 1776, was only able to return after the destruction of the Revolutionary Continental Army on Long Island. Lord Dunmore’s experience in 1776 was a salutary lesson to them all. Adversity came and went; but the Empire prevailed through thick and thin.

  “Daddy,” Henrietta cooed soothingly, “you must…”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if the bloody papers are claiming I’m ‘hiding away’ out here when I ought to be in Philadelphia!”

  “You always bring mummy up here at this time of year. Everybody who is anybody gets out of the city in June and July,” she thought about it, “and August too, to get away from the heat and humidity. It is just that everybody’s a little excitable at the moment. Things will calm down.” Again, she paused for a moment of contemplation before adding, hopefully: “Eventually.”

  Her father had stopped pacing.

  She frowned at him.

  “Besides, you have to think about your old wounds and your blood pressure, daddy.”

  The Governor of New England opened his mouth to object but, knowing it was useless to argue, submitted to the inevitable and slumped into a chair across from his daughter. He stared out through the open veranda doors at the already sun-burned lawns and the trees beyond, unmoving in the still air.

  Henrietta well understood that the real root of her father’s unhappiness was her mother’s latest illness. In comparison his political woes were water off a veritable duck’s back. His entire life had been built around service, duty and his family and when he was in the public eye he always, unfailingly displayed a debonair, dignified sangfroid that was an object lesson in unruffled grace under pressure.

  One of her father’s old military acquaintances had told her the story of the torrid events of an afternoon somewhere on the North West Frontier (of India) when Papa was just a junior subaltern.

  ‘The column had been ambushed in a ravine while in open order,’ the visiting old soldier had guffawed. ‘There’s Philip, sitting on his horse in the middle of the fight with chaps diving for cover and he’s just looking around, a mildly vexed look on his face and he says to me: ‘Harry, old man. Aren’t we supposed to be dining with the Colonel tonight? We could be here all afternoon at this rate!’

  Apparently, ‘the chaps’, seeing their commanding officer coolly riding up and down among them soon ‘got organised’ and the ‘fellows with the machine guns hosed the tribesmen off the hillsides in short order. ‘Needless to say, we arrived back at HQ in good time to put on our best bib and tuckers to join the Colonel at the communal trough!’

  His daughter understood that the bedrock of her dear Papa’s career had been and always would be his unshakable, unwavering devotion to her mother. In aristocratic circles her parents’ love affair had been a cause celebre back in the day. Daddy, a gallant young Guards officer who had inherited his father’s ancient titles – and wealth – at the tender age of twenty-two had scandalised his family, and a broad swath of the peerage marrying Diana, the youngest daughter of Major General Sir Horace Carpenter, a relatively obscure Indian Army officer when the current Queen’s parents were under the impression that they had already ‘signed him up’ to marry their eldest daughter, Antoinette!

  Henrietta’s five senior siblings were now dutifully dispersed across the length and breadth of the Empire, true sons and daughters of Albion. Thus, she was the last unmarried daughter of one of the greatest love-matches of the 1940s. For reasons – she never understood – people blithely took it for granted that she was some kind of latter-day saint for having assumed, as a daughter in her ‘position’ used to be but no longer was, expected, her sick mother’s role as a hostess at functions, and as her father’s frequent companion on his travels effectively acting in the capacity of a confidential private secretary and unofficially, as his ‘fixer’ although, officially, Henrietta was still nominally attached – in the capacity of an unpaid intern - to the staff of Sir Henry Rawlinson, the Governor’s veteran, formidable Chief of Staff.

  Actually, she was having the time of her life!

  “I really do wish you’d have let me travel with you to London,” she sighed.

  “Then we’d both have been miserable and your mother would have been even lonelier,” her father retorted gently, “over the last fortnight.”

  They both knew that the press had started calling Henrietta ‘the Governor’s road manager’. She could see how that would sit uneasily with him; likewise, she fully appreciated that he had known his time in England would be a truly ‘bloody business’ and he had, as any father would, wanted to spare her that.

  The Governor of New England tried to be severe. And failed. His youngest daughter always brought the sunshine into any room she graced.

  “I’m all right, honestly,” Henrietta assured him.

  “Um…” Her father shifted uncomfortably in his chair; not entirely on account of any of his old ‘war wounds’.

  While he was away in England the news had broken that the King’s third son – Prince James, Duke of Cumberland – had become engaged to the daughter of the Governor-General of Australia, like him a well-known leading equestrian.

  Not so long ago, there had been a time when both families had tacitly assumed that sooner or later Prince James and Henrietta would join their two houses in matrimony. They were of an age, childhood playmates and in their latter teens, sweethearts, or so it had seemed but then they had drifted apart, tantalisingly for their parents, while obviously remaining the very best of close friends. Now the flamboyant young sportsman prince, a captain in the Blues and Royals, was betrothed to another.

  “I confess, I thought you’d be, well,” he shrugged, “a little miffed?”

  “About James?” Henrietta smiled, coyly amused. “James wrote me a lovely letter and I sent him my heart-felt congratulations, daddy,” she reported, a little primly. “I’ve always hated horses, anyway. Oh, and you and mummy know full well that I don’t want to be anybody’s fairy princess. Thank you very much!”

  The Governor of New England breathed an involuntarily noisy sigh of relief.

  “So, you’re not at all upset?”

  “No, daddy.”

  Satisfied that she had put her father’s mind to rest on at least one matter, Henrietta moved on to the next item on the agenda.

  “This new delay in setting the trial dates in Albany is playing really badly with everybody from the republicans to the workers’ guilds to the religious fundamentalists. Conspiracy rumours are rife…”

  “That’s not what Sir Henry was cabling me in London?”

  His daughter gave him a long-suffering look that was the mirror image of the one his wife had been giving him whenever he was being thick-eared throughout their unnaturally happy thirty-seven years, eight months and some twenty-three, or twenty-four days – they had been married in England and the
time difference had always confused his calculations in their various overseas postings - of unblemished marital harmony.

  “Sir Henry does not believe in polling. I do, daddy. What happened last year hit all the wrong buttons. People are questioning the status quo. If ‘the people’ actually knew what they wanted the way things have been done in New England for generations would really be under threat by now. The Getrennte Entwicklung crowd are just the tip of the iceberg, a way for the religious fundamentalists to make their voice heard without directly challenging the idea of the Empire. Last year we were told that there was a massive anti-imperial, anti-monarchist plot – like a modern-day Guy Fawkes trying to blow up Parliament sort of thing – and now it may be that the Crown, in the shape of those dimwits in Albany, were so desperate to hang somebody, anybody, that last year they trumped up charges and gerrymandered the evidence in their enthusiasm to round up all the ‘likely suspects’!”

  Henrietta’s father pondered this and with a shake of the head said: “That’s putting it a bit strongly, my dear.”

  His daughter frowned.

  “Is it, daddy? Granted, the CSS and the police seem to have got the main plotters. Or rather, the handful of surviving plotters but there is no evidence of a colony-wide conspiracy and most of the people we originally locked up – many of whom were detained illegally, by the way – were unfortunate, completely innocent bystanders who were caught up in the atrocities, literally in the wrong place at the wrong time, who were as horrified and terrified by what they witnessed as everybody else.”

  The Governor groaned wearily.

  Not the least vexing interview during his time in London had been his ‘audience’ with the Foreign and Colonial Secretary, an old school friend from their days together at Harrow, whom nowadays, was as troubled as he was by the problematic trend of recent global events.

  ‘All is not sunshine and roses,’ Sir George Walpole, who always claimed not to be, even distantly, related to the eighteenth-century Prime Minister of that name, had observed as they considered the worries which beset their respective fiefdoms.

  The Foreign and Colonial Secretary had spent his middle years – the happiest of his life - in the tranquil backwaters of academia, only for his long idyll to be rudely interrupted by a Royal summons to form an ‘emergency administration’ back in the crisis years of the early sixties – after the assassination in Dublin of the old King on Empire Day 1962 - before he had, wisely, stepped aside in favour of men with ‘a better grasp of domestic political realities and a sounder base within the Whig Party’. Governments came and went and this was his third stint at the FCO.

  ‘Since the seventeen-hundreds, in a world of empires the British Empire has prospered until today, we stand alone as the ultimate arbiter of global war and peace, largely thanks to the primacy of the Royal Navy. Thankfully, there has been no general war between the great powers since the 1860s possibly, although I am dubious about that, because of the Pax Britannica which emerged from that dreadful conflict in which we, the British, were not to put too fine a point on it, the last ones standing thereby establishing a lasting but increasingly tenuous peace between the great powers.’

  George Walpole had not been giving De L’Isle any kind of wigging, for he was the most courteous and civil of men. He was simply thinking aloud upon a conundrum which had troubled him and the majority of his predecessors for the last hundred years.

  ‘New England is not like other Crown Colonies or Dominions. I speak not of its complexities nor of its innate contradictions; one could say the same of India,’ he had mused, ‘but rather, insofar as its political temper. While elsewhere – I think we may be honest about this between ourselves - the Empire may be creaking at the seams and its disparate peoples struggling to come to terms with a nascent desire for self-determination; thus far the Pax Britannica has survived buttressed in no small measure by the vast commercial and industrial powerhouse of New England stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific North West. Frankly, without New England it would be very hard to view the Empire as a going concern and even those idiots in Parliament, leastways, in the dark solitude of the night, understand as much!’

  De L’Isle had made to speak, his old friend had held up a hand and smiled.

  ‘You’ve done a marvellous job damping down the tensions with New Spain in the South West but we both know that sooner or later the hotheads in Mexico, or the Border Colonies, or in Havana or Santa Domingo will do something stupid and then we shall be at daggers drawn with the Spanish in the Caribbean and the Central Americas.’

  ‘Oh,’ the Governor of New England had objected mildly, ‘I think we are a long way from that at present, thank god.’

  In the immediate aftermath of the Empire Day atrocities last year the nightmare scenario had been that compelling evidence might emerge, uncontrolled into the public realm that ‘Spanish interests’ or ‘sympathisers’ had been involved in the outrages. Thus far, those rumours had been kept under wraps, thank God!

  But if and when that proof ever emerged to the contrary…

  ‘I pray that you are right, Philip.’ The Foreign and Colonial Secretary had sipped his cup of tea as each man had given the other space in which to compose his thoughts. ‘That said,’ he had continued, ‘the British Imperial System undoubtedly 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 Canadian dominions and the twenty-nine old and new colonies, dependencies and protectorates of the Commonwealth of New England for the best part of two centuries. In a funny sort of way, I think the real problems may lie nearer to home.’

  De L’Isle had taken this opportunity to attempt to lighten the tone of the discussion.

  ‘Now you’ve lost me, George. You know how all this FCO sophistry baffles we old soldiers!’

  His friend had laughed softly.

  ‘Forgive me,’ George Walpole had apologised. ‘For a long time, it has seemed to me that too many imperial problems are actually Whitehall problems. We tend too easily to rest on our laurels and assume that we can, Canute-like, hold back the tide of history. Nothing is forever…’

  De L’Isle had guffawed.

  ‘In the end we are all dead, old man,’ he had countered dryly.

  ‘Dammit, I wish I could get out to Philadelphia more often,’ the Foreign and Colonial Secretary had declared wistfully. ‘You can’t know how good it is to speak to a fellow like you about these things. Those idiots in the House of Lords haven’t got a clue about the real world beyond their clubs and the other side of the walls of their country estates!’

  The old friends had lapsed into silence for a minute or so.

  ‘You and I both know,” George Walpole had continued, “that every Government in living memory has founded 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 concede that the sixteen ‘Johnny-come-lately’ new, that is, post-1776 colonies, protectorates, territories and possessions which comprise over half the population and over eight-tenths of the land area of New England, should ever have any say in their affairs! It is this fact which has convinced the British body politic that New England is part and parcel of old England and will be for all time because, axiomatically, it will never unite in any kind of continental union. Complacently, this allows us to duck the big question: what would happen to the Empire – and the Pax Britannica – if our hold on New England was ever to be loosened? 1776 still touches a raw nerve in the FCO because generations of my predecessors have always feared the emergence of some unexpected common touchstone around which the colonies might eventually unite. Any historian worth his salt will tell you that back in 1776 it was a damnably close-run thing. Who knows what would have happened if that rascal Washington had managed to save the bulk of his army at the Battle of Long Island?’

  Wisely, the Governor of New England had not elected
to debate historical counter-factuals with a man who was universally acknowledged to be one of the pre-eminent imperial historians of the twentieth century.

  ‘The potential for last year’s Empire Day atrocities to become a touchstone, a litmus test of the latent groundswell for self-determination in North America cannot be underestimated, Philip,’ the Foreign and Colonial Secretary had averred with quiet intensity. ‘The outrage was of such proportions that it questions the real strength of the Imperium. Bizarrely, we can neither afford to show weakness or a surfeit of, shall we say, overkill, in the way we deal with the terrorists responsible. We must carry the peoples of New England with us and try at all costs to avoid inflaming tempers. The whole affair is a cause celebre around which dissidents might easily come together. And then what? A second Boston Tea Party?’

  Both men had agreed that these were dangerous times.

  If New England ever discovered again the single voice it had briefly discovered in 1776 that voice might eventually lead to an estrangement from the Old Country; and that would surely be the end of the Empire...

  De L’Isle snapped out of his reverie.

  He was not about to burden his daughter with his darkling premonitions.

  “Um… You really ought to consider a career in the law, my dear.”

  “I’m trying to be serious, father!”

  The Governor of New England pursed his lips.

  His daughter was going to have to work a little harder tolerating fools gladly if she was to pursue a career in the law or politics, the two things she had studied at Cambridge before re-joining her parents – much to their surprise and no little joy – in New England nearly three years ago.

  “I know you are,” he said, emolliently. “I should have let you come to England with me. I might not have made such a fool of myself had I had your counsel to,” he shrugged, “rely on, and as you, young people say, to ‘ground’ me. I lost my temper with too many people and that was unforgivable.”