by Tom Anderson
Most historians today believe that Charles’ mission, despite its surprising early successes, was ultimately doomed, just as the ’45 had been. However, what response from Pelham’s tepid Government might have eventually materialised was as nothing to the spectacular events which actually occurred.
With a sense of timing that would be considered outlandish even in a work of literature, the fleet of King Frederick returned from the American colonies on June 4th, 1750, and landed in Ireland. Frederick had heard from the occasional Atlantic fisherman of the troubles and he sensed an opportunity for glory. The former Williamite army, combined with the American forces, landed at Cork and quickly overran the Jacobites, who lacked sufficient troops to defend every town they took. An initial attack by an army under Colonel Washington failed to take Limerick, though the town was later abandoned by the Jacobites anyway. The conflict had the result, whether intentional or not on Frederick’s part, of welding together the mutually suspicious Williamites and Americans into a single force united against a common foe—a model for what would occur later on with Britain and America themselves.
Some historians and alienists[31] have speculated that Frederick may have wanted a decisive Jacobite battle just to have another opportunity to match his brother’s achievements... “his Culloden”. He certainly had that. Frederick’s force met up with one of the shattered Government armies at Wexford and then crushed Charles Edward Stuart’s force near Kilkenny on September 1st, 1750. The “Remember Kilkenny!” would in the future be as much of a rallying cry for Irish Catholics as “Remember Limerick!” had been in this war.
There would be no escape for Charles Edward Stuart this time, ignoble or otherwise. He was hit by a musket ball at the moment when the battle turned to rout, just as he had been on the verge of rallying his troops with his famous charisma. His last words are reported to be “Now and forever, my Father is King!” The body was witnessed by Frederick and several of his generals, but vanished some time after the King ordered it to be taken back to London. It is thought that it was stolen by Irish Jacobites, and there remain legends today of a secret shrine in a cave somewhere near the battlefield at Kilkenny, although none of the many adventurers who have gone looking have ever found it.
James Francis Edward remained in France as the titular James III and VIII, but the death of Bonnie Prince Charlie effectively ended the Jacobite cause. James’ second son Henry Benedict Stuart was a cardinal in the Catholic Church, and thus would both never produce an heir and would never be recognised as King by almost everyone in England and indeed Scotland. Also, France, Spain and the Papal States ceased their charade and did not recognise Henry as Henry IX on James’ sorrowful death three years later. Within a decade or two, Jacobitism was just a romantic legend.
After his triumph in Ireland, Frederick withdrew his army—Irish Catholic partisan warfare would continue for some years—and sailed for Penzance. His army marched through Cornwall, and Frederick was greeted with cheers by men and women who had always held fast to their Duke throughout the hard years of George and William. He bestowed many more favours and promises, his army picked up a number of new recruits, camp followers and wives, and they marched eastward.
On November 15th, 1750, Frederick’s army entered London. There was talk from his remaining opponents of forming a civil militia to repel them, but by now Pelham’s government was as paralysed as it could be. Just as Frederick had hoped, instead his homecoming was as a second Glorious Revolution (as indeed it would be named in the history books), with people in the street cheering his victorious troops and the Irish victory still fresh in everyone’s minds. The Jack and George was flown, and remarked upon, and the image of Lawrence Washington and his volunteers marching on horseback through the streets of London, bearing the new flag, was immortalised in Gainsborough’s Stout Colonials.
Frederick entered the House of Commons whilst it was still in session, as no King had since Charles I, and waited patiently with his troops while Pelham blustered. Meanwhile, Washington’s volunteers freed Pitt, Grenville and Pulteney from the Tower, as well as less prominent Patriots from house arrest, and these MPs converged on the Palace of Westminster. When all were assembled, Frederick spoke:
“I find the Government of these islands has suffered somewhat drastically in the absence of a strong guiding hand. Therefore, I present my own. Honi soit qui mal y pense!”
It is probably apocryphal that both Pelhams fainted at this...probably.
Frederick was crowned on Christmas Day, 1750, at Westminster Abbey, evoking the coronation of William the Conqueror almost seven centuries earlier. His disgrace had begun with a coronation, that of his father, and now it ended with one. And Frederick took note of the debts he owed, though in his own words he knew he could never repay them all. So it was that, after taking the coronation oath, he adopted a new title:
Frederick the First, by the Grace of God King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, Emperor of North America, Defender of the Faith, etc.
Frederick’s first act as crowned King was to dissolve Parliament and call a general election, which the Patriots unsurprisingly won handily. In February 1751, William Pulteney became First Lord of the Treasury, with William Pitt as Secretary of State for the Southern Department and George Grenville as Secretary of State for the Northern Department. Among first bills to be passed by the new ‘Patriotic Parliament’ were the infamous Act of Suppression, detailing new measures by which Ireland and the Scottish Highlands would be secured against further risings; the Act of Succession (1751) in which William was recognised as King William IV reigning 1743-1749, as Frederick had promised; and, perhaps most importantly for future generations, the Colonial Act (1751), in which the first seeds of true self-government in Britain’s North American colonies were laid, with the declaration of the Empire of North America.
Part of this Act was probably a calculated insult at the French and Spanish, as while the British colonies were very populous, they still only occupied the Cisappalachian region of the North American continent, whereas the French and Spanish claimed far more. Yet, as well as simply adding another title to that of the British monarch, the Act both increased the local powers of the elected American colonial assemblies—abolishing the Lieutenant Governors and forcing Governors to remain resident at their posts—and paved the way for wider Parliamentary reform later on. Notably, with Frederick as King, the post of Lord Deputy of the Colonies was now vacant. Renamed Lord Deputy of North America, Frederick bestowed the post upon Lord Thomas Fairfax, the only British peer who had preferred to dwell in the Colonies even during William’s reign, and an old acquaintance of the King’s from his Virginian exile days.
The new King was not swift to punish members of the former regime for supporting his brother: after all, had he not retroactively acknowledged William as King? However, many members of the later Walpole and Pelham governments found themselves unaccountably shunned by society and Parliamentary appointments, several Establishment families taking multiple generations to regain their former status, and some never achieving it. One area in which there was decisive action concerned the Colonies, with for example the Carteret family being heavily pressured to cede the Granville District lands to the North Carolinian colonial government (though they retained many possessions and interests within it). Colonial towns named after men such as the Earl of Wilmington were also renamed: North Carolina’s Wilmington reverted to its old name of Newton and Delaware’s was renamed after William Pulteney.
Frederick meanwhile liberally showered his American friends and supporters with peerages and positions in thanks for their help returning him to his rightful place, and Lawrence Washington in particular was rewarded with the Washingtons’ ancestral English home, Sulgrave Manor, and a newly created peerage. It is said that Lawrence may have rejected Frederick’s original choice of peerage, the Marquessate of Northampton, stating that, after all this time they had spent together, the King should understand his people more. There was a dead silence
, among which Frederick’s courtiers held their breath, and then the King grinned and agreed. So it was that Lawrence Washington was the first man to receive a hereditary peerage credited to a town outside England, Scotland or Ireland: he was made Sir Lawrence Washington, First Marquess of Fredericksburg.
The War of the British Succession was over. But the Age of Supremacy had just begun...
MAP OF THE EMPIRE OF NORTH AMERICA IN 1751
Interlude #1: The Age of Supremacy
INSTITUTE MISSION TAPE TRANSCRIPT 07/06/2019: CLASSIFIED LEVEL EIGHT
Captain Christopher Nuttall: Director, you may take issue with the means that this report has been constructed. I have been assured by Dr Pylos and Dr Lombardi that any other approach would be overly confusing. For clarification, I present their recommendations.
Dr Bruno Lombardi: Hello? Yes? Is this thing on? Thank you, Captain. Yes, indeed, it has been our understanding that-
Dr Theodoros Pylos: -that the political and cultural landscape of the present day of TimeLine L is too alien, too different from our own world for a ready understanding, and that-
Lombardi: -that incorrect snap judgements may be made if the mind is not prepared by tracing the changes in this world from their very beginning, and-
Nuttall: Gentlemen, could we get to the point?
Lombardi: Of course.
Pylos: Mm.
(Pause)
Lombardi: Director, you may have been confused by the use of local terminology in a few cases.
Pylos: To that end, we present this short excerpt from a book that I, personally, risked life and limb to get my hands on, for such works would appear to be restricted in the vicinity of-
Lombardi: Yes, yes. I’m not convinced by that, I think you’ve misinterpeted—anyway. The point is that the book is written from a different perspective to the British Whig histories we have previously drawn upon and thus may present a more balanced perspective.
Pylos: I wouldn’t say that—more imbalanced in a different direction...
Nuttall: Gentlemen?
Lombardi (muttering): Roll the tape.
*
“History is written by the victors.”
- George Spencer-Churchill the Younger, On Empire (1947)
*
From—“Historiography: Overcoming a Barrier to Societal Unity” by Paolo Rodriguez of the Instituto Sanchez (originally published 1962—unauthorised English translation 1974):
Wars of Supremacy. A concept developed by the English/West Indian[32] Whig historian Thomas Macclesfield as an underlying theme for the eighteenth century. Macclesfield sought to place the largely meaningless clashes of that time into an ideological context, and emphasises the idea that the eighteenth century was effectively one long war with short breaks for regrouping. He did not class every eighteenth-century conflict as a War of Supremacy, however. Most notably, although Macclesfield dates the start of his Age of Supremacy to 1688 with the flight of the Stuart dynasty from England, he does not consider the War of the Grand Alliance, of which that flight was a part, to be a War of Supremacy. Some successors in the same tradition, notably George Spencer-Churchill the Younger, have retroactively dubbed that conflict the ‘Zeroth War of Supremacy’.
Macclesfield and his successors defined a War of Supremacy as a global conflict, in which significant fighting occurred in at least three widely separated theatres. These are usually considered to be “Europe, the Americas, and India”, although the latter is more negotiable. Supposedly the War of the Grand Alliance did not count, as while it had European and North American theatres, there was no conflict in India or another third area.
The term is often misunderstood. The ‘Supremacy’ does not refer to military but cultural domination. It was a central thesis of Macclesfield’s that purely European conflicts usually had no long-standing impact, although his own narrow cultural background prevented him from following this through to its logical conclusion that the only solution was correct Societal Unity. Macclesfield argued that only wider, colonial, Wars of Supremacy had long-term consequences. Many colonies trading around the world, their inhabitants speaking the language of their mother country and following their practices, would result in a very slow but sure cultural domination of the world by that country—in Macclesfield’s conception, which was contrary to the ineluctable principles of Sanchez.
Similarly, the term ‘Age of Supremacy’ is misleading, as it refers to not a period in which one culture dominates the world, but a period in which the various cultures are contesting that domination. Age of War for Supremacy would be a more appropriate term.
Engaging in Wars of Supremacy might not bring gains in the short term, but looked at from the perspective of a historian, the victors in such wars would define not just what the future would look like, but how the inhabitants of that future would look back on their own history. George Spencer-Churchill the Younger has characterised this by the phrase “He who controls the present, defines the past.”
From Macclesfield’s point of view, the victors of the Wars of Supremacy were England and to a lesser extent Spain, while the losers were France and Austria. Of course, any short-term impact of such wars will be negated in the long-run by the ineluctable march to Societal Unity.
Macclesfield’s definitions of the Wars of Supremacy and accompanying conflicts follow, with annotations for changes made by his successors.
1688-1697: The War of the Grand Alliance.
England, United Provinces of the Netherlands, the First German Empire,[33] Spain, Sweden and the Duchy of Savoy versus the First Kingdom of France and allied Scottish and Irish Jacobites. Indecisive result. Failed attempt by English colonists in North America to take French Quebec. Not considered to be a War of Supremacy by Macclesfield but dubbed the ‘Zeroth’ by George Spencer-Churchill the Younger.
1701-1714: The War of the Spanish Succession: The First War of Supremacy.
(Incorporating the Great Northern War between Sweden and the Ottoman Empire versus Russia, Saxony, Denmark-Norway and the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, plus other German allies.)
Portugal, England/Great Britain, the German Empire, the United Provinces of the Netherlands and Spanish and Catalan Austriacistes versus Spain, the First Kingdom of France, and Wittelsbach Bavaria. Indecisive result in Europe, but Britain was ceded several parts of French Canada. It is this that appears to cause Macclesfield to consider this a War of Supremacy, as there was no significant Indian theatre.
1733-1738: The War of the Polish Succession. Not a War of Supremacy, although it might well have been if George II’s Britain had entered.
1740-1748: The War of the Austrian Succession: The Second War of Supremacy
Kingdom of Great Britain and Kingdom of Ireland, German Empire or Austria, United Provinces of the Netherlands, Saxony, Piedmont-Sardinia and Russia versus First Kingdom of France, Spain, Prussia, Wittelsbach Bavaria and the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily.
This is indisputably a War of Supremacy as it incorporated both a North American theatre (Britain occupied, among other places, Fort Louisbourg) and an Indian one (the French East India Company took Fort St George). According to Macclesfield’s notions, this resulted in a supremacist cultural victory of Britain in part of North America, and France in the Carnatic region of India. However, as with most other Wars of Supremacy, the European result was indecisive.
1748-51: The War of the British Succession. Not a War of Supremacy .Britons were divided between the claims of claimant Kings William IV, Frederick IV and James III. No other powers officially entered the conflict, although there was some unofficial French support of the Jacobites.
1755-1759: The War of the Diplomatic Revolution: The Third War of Supremacy.[34]
Great Britain, Ireland, the Empire of North America, Hanover, Prussia and minor German states versus the First Kingdom of France, Austria, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Saxony, Piedmont-Sardinia, Naples and Sicily.
Note that these are the dates used by Macclesfield, and in Contin
ental Europe the war is usually considered to end in 1761.
Result: Decisive British cultural supremacist victory in North America, minor French victory in India, dismemberment of Prussia and Poland in Europe.
Note that only these first three Wars of Supremacy have had this name accepted as their predominant or defining label in those parts of the Unliberated Zones that currently use English as their primary dialect. The remaining wars Macclesfield labelled are more debated by other historians and are certainly not primarily known by that name.
1760-63: The First Platinean War: Not a War of Supremacy, but set the stage for one.
Spain fought Portugal and Britain. Result: Spanish victory in South America but defeat in Europe.
1778-1785: The Second Platinean War : The Fourth War of Supremacy: Britain, Portugal and the UPSA fought Spain and France. UPSA victory in South America. Indecisive results in Europe. British victory in India.