The King’s old uniforms still fitted him, although a little snugly of late. His father and brothers had fleshed out from high living in middle age, in the process becoming the subject of numerous bucolic cartoons and endless ribaldry among the peoples of the Empire. That was the trouble with his family; it had grown fat on the prerogatives and privileges of the Monarchy and it was hardly surprising that at the time of his accession the whole institution was threatening to become an impotent fig leaf for the largesse and the indolence of the political classes in the second half of the twentieth century.
It had taken over ten minutes to proclaim his full titles upon his Coronation in Westminster Abbey. His father had still styled himself ‘Emperor of India’!
Imperatoris India…
He had put a stop to that nonsense the day after the Coronation!
George V, Dei Gratia Britanniarum Regnorumque Suorum Ceterorum Rex, Consortionis Populorum Princeps, Fidei Defensor was more than a mouthful as it was!
Unfortunately, he could do little about actually still being King Emperor even though the political classes had been talking about Indian independence for decades.
He was still quite proud about the Consortionis Populorum Princeps honorific; pretending that the Crown Dominions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand were, in effect, imperial fiefdoms governed wholly from London had been a gratuitous misrepresentation of the true state of affairs for over fifty years.
If only some similar enlightened state of affairs existed in New England!
Not that there was the remotest prospect that the twenty-nine fiercely independent, constantly disputatious crown colonies, dependent territories, protectorates and provinces of the North American continent filling the vast hinterland from coast to coast, and north to south between Canada and the lands of the Empire of New Spain, were ever going to unite, or form any kind of union, commonwealth let alone nation in his, or he suspected, sadly, in his lifetimes or that of his children or grandchildren.
Perversely, in fact, it was the very ‘independence’ – particularly of the First Thirteen colonies, each from each other – which ensured the continuing allegiance of all the other North American territories. Nobody wanted to be ruled by ‘those bloody Virginians’, or Bostonians, or by those Connecticut and Rhode Island puritans, or by those planters in the Carolinas, or by the conniving merchants and bankers in New York, et al. And as for all those industrialists in Pennsylvania, the Ohio Territory and the former Indian country provinces south of the Great Lakes – Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan and the South Algonquin Territory – well, what business did people like that have dictating to the East Coast? Nobody imagined that the vast tracts of the once French Illinois-Louisiana lands, the roadless counties and shires of the great prairies at the heart of the continent, still separated, fragmented by the hunting grounds of the ancient tribes despite the railways now connecting the Oregon and Vancouver territories to the Dakotas, and thence to the rest of the continent, wanted any part of any kind of union with the ‘English’ colonies in the east; they had far more in common with their Canadian neighbours. It was only the south western border outlying territories and proto-colonies, particularly those whose boundaries abutted with the unmarked, barely mapped and forever contested limits of Spanish Alta California, Nuevo Mexico, Coahuila and West Texas, which had never stopped demanding ‘strength in unity’.
Soon after his accession, his ministers had tried to persuade the King to marry off his youngest daughter, Caroline, to the heir to the Spanish thrown. He had put his foot down; there would be no more ‘royal weddings’ of that kind. Little good had such ‘arranged’ matches done his family; all that conniving and Machiavellian manoeuvring back in the eighteenth and nineteenth century had resulted in the war to end all wars a little over a hundred years ago!
The King flicked his cigarette butt over the side of the ship.
Lion had led her three fifty thousand-ton sisters through the narrows – Hell’s Gate in olden times – into the Upper Bay at dawn and now the 5th Battle Squadron was anchored in line ahead in the main channel with Bucking Island and Bedford Island to port and Governor’s Island to the starboard, with the bows of the four castles of steel pointing straight up the Hudson River.
As the early morning haze cleared the King gazed thoughtfully at HMS Princess Royal, and behind her the Queen Elizabeth – ships named respectively for his elder sister Margaret Rose and for his mother – and the Tiger, returning for the first time to the waters into which she had been launched over two decades ago.
To the east, hidden by the urban and industrial sprawl at least two great new vessels were under construction in the Brooklyn Admiralty Dockyard at Wallabout Bay; but not armour-encased fast battleships like the ‘Big Cats’ and her sisters of the Lion class. No, the future lay, it seemed in the air now that all the great powers had agreed to scrap their undersea fleets.
Or rather, to build no more of the infernal craft!
The King loathed politics.
The ‘Submarine Treaty’ crisis had almost caused a general world war just two years into his reign. The Germans and their fair-weather allies, Japan, feeling that their ‘imperial rights’ had been frustrated for too long had never really wanted to go to war with the British Empire but when the Russians had decided – for reasons nobody could explain – to use the age-old chaos in China to seize a ‘buffer zone’ in Manchuria and blundered into a confrontation with the Japanese the British Government – His Government – had started issuing ultimatums right left and centre!
Nonetheless, as His Prime Minister – he had had six thus far in his reign – had complacently assured him back in 1965, ‘every cloud has a silver lining’.
International diplomacy was about understanding what the other fellow actually wanted. Invariably, to get to the nub of the matter one had to discard practically everything everybody actually said!
The Germans wanted the international status of their ‘possessions’ and ‘concessions’ in Africa ‘clarified’, specifically their right to hold and administer the mostly desert province of South West Africa and one or two territories on the shore of the Indian Ocean, while the Japanese wanted to be left to get on with whatever they were up to in China. Luckily for all concerned by then the Russians just wanted the war with the Japanese to stop.
In any event, the King had travelled to Berlin and Moscow and behind the scenes finessed the bare bones of a quid pro quo in which the British Empire underwrote ‘adjustments to the colonial governance of regions in southern Africa’ and in league with the Germans quietly mediated a cessation of hostilities in the Far East; and with a collective sigh of relief the British Empire had not got into a ruinously expensive new undersea arms race.
Even though he was the captain of a battleship at the time the King had been utterly unaware of the momentous, literally earth-shaking scientific advances preoccupying his ministers and his superiors at the Admiralty back in 1962.
Of course, within a year of his accession the genie had been well and truly out of the bottle but at the time he had been utterly flabbergasted to learn that Pandora’s Box was about to be flung open!
The atomic age had been about to dawn.
City destroying bombs the size of a small dinghy!
Limitless peaceful power supplies!
Submarines the size of battleships which could steam around the globe underwater ten times without needing to refuel…
The idea of having one’s cities demolished by a single aircraft carrying a single bomb was bad enough; the idea of submarines so formidable that all existing surface navies would become obsolete in less than a generation had horrified the Admiralty, and axiomatically, the King’s ministers. It was one thing to get involved in an arm’s race one could win; another entirely, getting into one everybody understood nobody ever win.