James Philip - Empire Day

However, the British Empire was different; it was bigger than the next two biggest put together, richer than any three or four of the others, better and more efficiently run, and square mile for square mile, much cheaper to maintain and therefore intrinsically more sustainable. All the other ‘empires’ had to bankrupt themselves and impoverish, to one degree or another, sections of their own populations to finance the armies required to hold down their far-flung lands; not the British, they had the Navy and, in most places, they let the locals get on with the business of business relatively unmolested. The steel mills of New England alone out-produced the entire German Empire, the cotton mills of England clothed half the World, five ships of every six built was constructed in British or American yards, the prairies of Canada and the crown territories beyond the Great Lakes supplied half the globe’s grain, Australasia a third of the meat on and off the hoof, a traveller could walk from Alexandria to the Cape of Good Hope without once stepping off British soil, and the oilfields of Persia and the East Indies kept the greatest navy ever to steam the seas under way.

But none of these things were the real keys to the greatness of the British Empire. The reason it had come out of the chasing pack and attained a position of such apparently impregnable dominance was very simple.

When push came to shove the British – well, mostly the English – were utterly ruthless.

If a thing needed to be done; it was done!

That was why nobody had been so stupid as to pick a stand-up fight with the British for over a hundred years; and the Pax Britannica was, to all intents, complete.

Wags in London Clubs and throughout that part of the global atlas painted forever Imperial pink, men winked and nudged each other and boasted that the only place the English had ever ‘given up on’ was Afghanistan; and that was only to give the Romanovs an itch that they could never scratch, let alone eradicate!

Just like the Emperor Hadrian back in the early years of the second century had decided that the Roman Empire was big enough as it was, the British had called time on the ‘era of expansion’ to secure the peace of Paris’ in 1865, and the World Order which had emerged from that congress had, more or less, guaranteed the peace ever since.

The so-called Imperial ‘compromise’ had only been so successful because all the other powers understood that whoever stepped out of line first would discover that…the British were absolutely ruthless!

Such was the perfectly constructed geopolitical strategic calculus which had governed the affairs of the World for over a century.

Lieutenant Adams’s closed her black notebook and fixed me with her blue-grey eyes.

“We will address the question of your loyalty to the Crown at another time, Professor. Right now, what is going to happen is that you are going to give me every possible assistance in my inquiries. Do we understand each other?”

My throat was dry, constricted.

For a moment I was afraid I was going to have a panic attack.

I glanced involuntarily towards the mirrored wall to my right.

Who was listening?

“Do we understand each other?” The woman repeated, sensing my momentary mental disintegration.

I nodded.

“Yes…”

HMS Lion, Upper Bay, New York

Eleanor, Duchess of Windsor, could not – try as she might – stop herself fussing around her husband. She had been fast asleep when the shots had been fired at the King and not known what all the excitement was about when the great ship had burst into life all around her. She had heard the news first from one of her junior ladies in waiting.

Lady Jane Dreyer-Main was the middle daughter of one of her friends at St Johns College where she had spent three blissful years after escaping Cheltenham Ladies College in 1938. Going up to Oxford had delayed the awful day her parents – dear people but so old fashioned about these things – attempted to marry her off to some hopeless dunce of ‘a similar or slightly elevated social standing’, so they were not saddled with her upkeep for the rest of her days.

But that was another story; that morning her lady in waiting, who was a new addition to the royal retinue and still feeling her feet in the role – basically, as her mistress’s appointment secretary, odd-job girl and her genteel gatekeeper – was flushed and very jumpy.

“His Majesty was walking and somebody fired at him from the Long Island side of the bay…”

Eleanor had not really been awake.

“What…”

“The King is all right! Oh, sorry, I should have said that first, I…”

The older woman had ended up having to comfort the frightened girl. Eleanor quickly discovered that her husband’s only injury was a knock to the brow incurred in the excitement as his bodyguards carried him out of harm’s way; and that he was presently being attended to by the battleship’s surgeon.

The telephone in her cabin rang. Lady Jane picked up. Apparently, HMS Lion’s Captain wanted to speak to her and put her mind at rest.

“Thank you, that will not be necessary. I shall dress and go to my husband in due course.”

No sooner had she put the phone down than Lady Jane blurted out that ‘one of the bodyguards was wounded!’

Although, mercifully, not seriously.

A bullet had grazed his right hip.

‘We,’ Bertie always insisted, ‘must be calm while all around us lose their heads, Ellie. That is our job. That is why we are the ones who live in the great palaces and are feted and acclaimed, and inevitably, sometimes abused, wherever we go.’

‘Rather like the boy left standing on the burning deck,’ she would observe and they would smile, one to the other because in this as in so many things they were of one mind.

Graceful as a swan outside; paddling like a lost duckling inside.

Bertie had burned practically all his bridges marrying a virtual commoner such as she. She was a Spencer, once upon a time her family had infiltrated the dynastic lines of half of Europe; however, those days were history, mostly pre-1860s and her father had hardly had the wherewithal to keep the family’s Northamptonshire pile at Althorp standing by the time she met her future husband.

Bertie had just refused a posting to the Royal Yacht at the time so he was in particularly bad odour with his father, who had been dead set on bringing him back into the regal fold. The upshot had been that Bertie found himself posted to the Hong Kong station for the next two years.

To Eleanor that first encounter had been a pleasant evening; and their subsequent dinner in London about a month later, equally ‘fun’. Prince Albert had behaved with the utmost decorum, been charming, amusing and kissed her hand as they parted that evening.

She had thought that was that until his first letter arrived.

‘Dear Miss Spencer,’ goodness, how sweetly formal that sounds now, ‘As I mentioned during our recent most convivial meetings it is my fate to be exiled to the East for a spell. Might I impose on you so as to make my time away more bearable?’

They must have written each other two or three hundred letters over the course of the next twenty-six months. For her part she had refused to discuss or to disclose the substance of her correspondence to her father or mother, and especially not her sisters, all of whom were the most terrible gossips. During that period, she had also turned down two proposals of marriage, including one from a prosperous Virginia planter twice her age visiting England looking for a wife, his first having perished without issue of some local malady. Eleanor’s mother had put the man up to it.