Diverge and Conquer (Look to the West Book 1)

by Tom Anderson

  Interlude #7: A Touch of Chauvinism

  Captain Christopher Nuttall: Now that you two have rejoined us, perhaps we may move on to other matters.

  Dr Bruno Lombardi (somewhat indistinctly): Eb, bir. We have the shpecial rebort to considber…

  Dr Theodoros Pylos: It is simply an illustration of how relatively minor alterations to our own timeline may –

  Dr Bruno Lombardi:—in fact truly result in bajor rebercussions a few years down de line…dough I disagree wid my colleague’s obinion of de so-called ‘butterfly ebbect’…

  Dr Theodoros Pylos: Be quiet, or I’ll break your nose again.

  Captain Christopher Nuttall (pointedly): Gentlemen...

  Dr Theodoros Pylos: Very well. Let us consider the life of one General Anthony St. Leger…

  *

  From: “A History of Doncaster” by Dr Stephen Utterthwaite (1963)—

  Anthony St. Leger was an Irishman, born in County Kildare in 1731 to an old family of Anglo-Norman extraction. As the fourth son and freed from responsibilities of being heir to the family lands, or being expected to enter the Church, he chose to join the Army after his education at Eton School and Peterhouse College, Cambridge. Towards the end of his Cambridge tenure, in 1752, St. Leger witnessed a parade through the streets of the university city by some of the American troops who had recently been instrumental in restoring King Frederick to his rightful place on the throne of Great Britain.

  The parade was led by Sir William Pepperrell, Bt., a man of Massachussetts who had commanded the successful siege of Lewisborough (then Louisbourg, a French fortress) in the American theatre of the Second War of Supremacy. It was this victory that had invested Frederick with the tide of public feeling he needed to launch his bid for power, as the exiled prince had capitalised on American outrage when King William handed the fortress back to France at the Peace of Aix-la-Chappelle. Pepperrell had then fought in Ireland against the Jacobites, and was by 1752 one of the King’s most trusted confidantes.

  Pepperrell’s teenage son, also called William,[303] was a colour ensign in the informal regiment, which would eventually become the 51st (Massachussetts) Foot.[304] As they paraded down Trumpington Street, Pepperrell the Younger tripped on a cobblestone and dropped the King’s Colour he had been carrying. The embarrassment at such a potent image to the King’s enemies, given Frederick’s questionably legitimate taking of the throne, could have been tremendous. It is not hard to consider how the story could have spread and become a rallying cry for Williamites and Jacobites alike.

  But the falling flag was snatched from the air by one of the countless students lining the street, a certain Anthony St. Leger, and quickly handed back to Ensign Pepperrell as he recovered. With a nod of thanks at a crisis averted, the ensign began a friendship that would change history…

  After the parade, St. Leger met with young William Pepperrell in the Eagle and Child pub on Bene’t Street, the ensign buying him a drink in thanks.[305] This meeting developed into a wider conversation, with some of the older and more experienced officers in the regiment joining in – whether American-, Irish- or British-born, they had all fought in America. They filled St. Leger’s head with tales of the extraordinary things to be seen in the New World, and while he had already been considering the Army as a career, this sealed his decision.

  St. Leger signed up to the 51st a year later, not long before the regiment was due to be shipped back to America. The failure to ratify the Treaty of Aix-la-Chappelle had resulted in icy relations between London and Paris, and the Diplomatic Revolution with Austria was looming on the horizon. Everyone knew that another war was only a matter of time, and Anthony St. Leger did not want to miss it. He entered the regiment as an Ensign, but immediately bought himself a promotion to lieutenant with his share of the St. Leger land rents. By this point William Pepperrell the younger had also risen to that rank, and the two of them served under Captain Timothy Bush, a man of Connecticut and commander of the Light Company.[306]

  The 51st fought in the Third War of Supremacy in America, taking considerable losses: Bush was killed in the Battle of Fort Niagara in 1759[307] and St. Leger was promoted to replace him. Pepperrell the younger was also promoted, commanding the Second Company. The war came to an end in that year with the capture of Quebec and the Treaty of Amsterdam, but peace did not endure for long. When the First Platinean War broke out in 1763, St. Leger and the rest of the 51st were sent to assist the Georgian militiamen and British regulars in the conquest of Florida. By this point St. Leger had married Caroline Phipps, the daughter of Sir Spencer Phipps, William Shirley’s lieutenant-governor in Massachussetts—and she was with child. The campaign itself went fairly smoothly, but yellow fever and malaria cut swathes through the army, and though St. Leger himself survived, his pregnant wife fell victim to the fever and died in 1764.

  Distraught and possessed with an inchoate fury at the world and everything in it, St. Leger threw himself into his work with a fey vigour. When he learned that the 51st were to remain in Florida on occupation duty, he transferred out of the regiment to the first one he knew would be sent to a war theatre: the 33rd Regiment of Foot (1st West Riding of Yorkshire Regiment).[308] The 33rd was a bit of an enigma: having fought hard and won a battle honour on the field at Dettingen, the battle where King George II had been killed and Prince William had found himself William IV, it was suspected of Williamite sympathies by some. On the other hand, it was too well-organised and professional for King Frederick to think about disbanding it lightly: it was known as ‘the Pattern’ among army reformers for its men’s discipline, a model regiment for the others to copy. These two features, political unreliability and battlefield strength, were doubtless the major factors that resulted in the 33rd being sent to fight on the Portuguese front in 1765.

  St. Leger arrived too late to participate in the unsuccessful Siege of Ciudad Rodrigo, but fought at Badajoz the year later. Although that siege was also a failure for the Anglo-Portuguese forces, he distinguished himsel—slaying seven Spanish cavalrymen from atop a heap of his dead privates, firing off their loaded muskets one at a time, before finally clubbing the last man to death with the butt of an unloaded musket. It was this act of mindless violence that seemed to bring St. Leger back to himself and burn away a little of his fey battle-madness. He fought more sobrely the year later in Galicia, being promoted to Major and third-in-command of the 33rd, which had been reduced by battlefield casualties.

  At the end of the war, a still saddened but thoughtful St. Leger returned to England with the 33rd. He could not bring himself to ever look upon America again, associating it with the bittersweet loss of his wife, and had no desire to go back to Ireland. Instead, he settled down in the 33rd’s own home territory, the West Riding of Yorkshire, and eventually bought the Park Hill Estate at Firbeck, near Rotherham. There, he retired from the Army and spent his half-pay on his new hobby, horse-breeding. Having mostly lost his appetite for blood after Badajoz, he found this a new obsession to throw himself into to recover from the pain of his wife’s death. Despite not starting from particularly strong financial territory, by 1770 or so St. Leger was renowned for breeding some of the fastest three-year-old colts in the riding, the county – perhaps even the country.

  St. Leger was fortunate in retrospect that in the 1770s the Kingdom of Great Britain’s Prime Minister, Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, was himself a son of the southern West Riding—his family owning the Wentworth Woodhouse estate not far from St. Leger’s house. Whenever he tore himself away from the Westminster political scene, Rockingham would return to his northern home, and was interested in horse racing. Yorkshire lacked its own major sweepstakes, but St. Leger was nonetheless making money travelling the country in order to show off his colts. He became known as the “Irish Magician”, with satirists in the Yorkshire newspapers presenting him as a fay capable of enchanting his horses with fairy powers.

  Lord Rockingham met St. Leger in 1772 and persuaded him to s
tand for Parliament as a Patriot Whig. St. Leger’s money and popularity meant that he easily topped the vote and was elected MP for Pontefract in the 1774 general election. St. Leger supported the policies of the Rockinghamite government and was also an advocate of granting greater powers to the Empire of North America. He was one of several British parliamentarians to participate in the direct negotiations that followed the ‘Troubled Sixties’, but unlike the majority was a moderate rather than a radical. St. Leger was instrumental in convincing the Parliament of Great Britain that the New Englanders would accept a single unitary confderacy; most MPs had thought this was not an option after the failure of such a venture under James II a century before.

  However, St. Leger was arguably even more influential for Parliament when he was outside it. In 1776 he, Rockingham, and several other Yorkshiremen of influence met in the upper room of the Red Lion pub in Doncaster and proposed a new Yorkshire racing stakes to be based in the town, for three-year-old colts. Named the Rockingham Stakes[309] after the man who financed it, the race attracted a great deal of interest from all over the country, and eventually even farther afield. One of St. Leger’s own horses predictably won the first Stakes, but soon he was facing stiff competition from breeders from every part of Great Britain, along with Ireland, France, and beyond. In 1782 he was surprised to be visited by Colonel Sir William Pepperrell the Younger, his former colleague in the 51st. Pepperrell, whose father had died in the 1760s, was now head of the regiment and offered St. Leger the lieutenant-colonelcy.

  Although Pepperrell had brought a horse of his own to enter, by the 1780s the initial spark of interest in the race had waned, and St. Leger was becoming bored. He had finally married again in 1779, to Emily Lennox, the daughter of the Duke of Richmond. The Duke shared much with St. Leger, being a former Colonel of the 33rd, a Rockinghamite in Parliament, and supporting the parliamentary rights of the American Imperials. Although Emily gave St. Leger an heir, Charles St. Leger, and cemented the alliance between the families, St. Leger never truly loved her and was unable to let go of his longing for Caroline Phipps. He therefore experienced tension in his home life. For this reason, he jumped at Pepperrell’s offer.

  When the Second Platinean War broke out, the 51st was shipped to the Plate and fought under General Sir George Washington, later 1st Baron Washington. St. Leger distinguished himself once more, winning himself a knighthood, and, unlike some of the British officers of his age stationed there, had not fought in the Plate on the wrong side a generation earlier. For that reason, he was often chosen as a representative to the Platinean revolutionaries. Both on the battlefield and in Buenos Aires, he learned that the Platineans were also interested in horse breeding, at least as much as the Americans: like the Americans, they possessed a country with grassy plains on which cavalry was king and the natives were restless. Thus, it is perhaps inevitable that when the war ended, Sir Anthony St. Leger returned to Britain with a number of new horses and a cometary trail of intrigued proto-Meridians in tow.

  The new bloodlines from South America breathed new life into the Rockingham Stakes, even though Lord Rockingham himself had since fallen from grace thanks to the Africa Bubble scandal, and the amounts staked on the races rose dramatically as the rich and powerful entered their own colts. St. Leger was made a baronet in 1786, in recognition of how his work had made the Doncastrian economy boom and put both the town and the West Riding on the map.

  St. Leger died in 1789, but what he left behind would change the world. For among those rich and powerful were, of course, many politicians: Rockingham’s name and interest drew in even more than would have come simply for the Stakes themselves. This only intensified when the aged Rockingham was called back to be Prime Minister once more in 1796, and it was in the 1790s that the fear of invasion ran high once more among the British people. Even though Revolutionary France had lost most of her fleet, the fear remained: men worried that the fleets of the Netherlands or Spain could fall into French hands if those nations were defeated by French armies on land. The latter prophecy came true, at least in part, after Rockingham’s death and peace had been made under Charles James Fox. Though the peace remained, few doubted it would last forever, and the idea of the Spanish fleet bringing the hardened French Republican hordes to British shores was not an idea that bore thinking about.

  Thus, slowly, quietly, the Government – not Fox himself, who saw Lisieux’s France through rose-tinted spectacles, but the moderate Whigs and occasional hardline Tories who provided his majority – began to invest in a new Army depot in the southern part of the North of England, near the geographic centre of the country. On paper, at least, it was simply an Army depot. In reality, it had rather more buildings than a mere military base would require, rather more investment, more defences for a place in the middle of the country.

  There was a reason for all of this, of course. No matter what Fox thought, a French invasion was a real possibility, one day sooner or later. And if the French landed, they might well succeed in taking London. If they took London, then Parliament and the King would need a secure place to decamp to while they continued to prosecute the war effort. A place far from the coast, so that in the nightmare scenario of the French ruling the seas, they could not land troops directly. Not a major city, but one with excellent transport links for communicating with the armies. A place which plenty of MPs knew well enough from their excursions north for the sweepstakes.

  Thus, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, the village of Finningley, a few miles from Doncaster and just over the border with Nottinghamshire, played host to the construction of Fort Rockingham, named for the former Prime Minister. A fort designed not merely for recruitment and supply, but to serve – in time of the nation’s greatest peril – as an alternative seat of government... [310]

  Epilogue: End of the Beginning

  22/08/2019. 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:

  I hope that our initial coverage of ‘TimeLine L’ was of interest to you. I realise that it may be frustrating to consider events so far removed in the past when it is the situation here and now that the Institute will wish to hear of. I have expressed similar thoughts myself to Dr Pylos, Dr Lombardi and their colleagues, but they assure me that it is only in the context of this knowledge that we will be able to truly appreciate the underlying forces which have driven this world to the strange situation in which we now find it.

  For now at least things remain more or less recognisable as we leave you on the turn of the nineteenth century. But, my research team assures me, the seeds for what will come have already been sown. Just as we must look back centuries to see the ultimate causes of events in our own timeline like the World Wars, it seems that the beginnings of Societism and Diversitarianism stem from a time when history still seems not that far removed from our own.

  I hope you will accept my recommendation that we continue our coverage of this timeline’s background before moving to the contact phase. It is absolutely imperative that we do not put a foot wrong in making contact, as I’m sure you appreciate. Nor indeed should we countenance leaving this timeline altogether, as some have suggested. The opportunities here for the Institute are enormous.

  Inform Dr Pataki that we are observing all necessary precautions as it is, but if he really wishes to send us another shipment of radiation treatment tablets through the Portal then he is more than welcome. We are all fairly well versed at this point in the local version of what English has become, so there is no need for the new enhanced translator app Lieutenant McConnell referred to in his message.

  Thank you, sir, and we all hope to see our families again sooner or later. But the story of the world we find ourselves in is far from over.

  CAPTAIN
C. G. NUTTALL

  22nd AUGUST 2019

  L*****, K****** OF E******

  ‘TIMELINE L’

  TO BE CONTINUED

  in

  LOOK TO THE WEST

  VOLUME II

  “UNCHARTED TERRITORY”

  APPENDIX A: LISTS OF RULERS

  List of monarchs of the Kingdom of Great Britain (House of Hanover)

  1714-1727: George I

  1727-1743: George II

  1743-1749: William IV

  1749-1760: Frederick I

  1760-1799: George III

  1799-18??: Henry IX

  List of Prime Ministers of the Kingdom of Great Britain

  1721-1742: Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford (Whig)