New England Series
BOOK 1 – EMPIRE DAY
New York – July 1976 – in a World in which New England remains the sparkling jewel in the crown of the British Empire.
It is the day before Empire Day – 4th July – the day each year when the British Empire marks the brutal crushing of the rebellion dignified by the treachery of the fifty-six delegates to the Continental Congress who were so foolhardy as to sign the infamous Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on that day of infamy in 1776.
It is nearly two hundred years since George Washington was killed and his Continental Army was destroyed in the Battle of Long Island and now New England, that most quintessentially loyal and ‘English’ imperial fiefdom – at least in the original, or ‘First Thirteen’ colonies – is about to celebrate its devotion to the Crown and the Old Country, of which it still views, in the main, as the ‘mother country’.
Yet all is not roses. Since 1776 in a world of empires the British Empire has grown and prospered until now, it stands alone as the ultimate arbiter of global war and peace. The Royal Navy has enforced the global Pax Britannia for over a century since the World War of the 1860s established a lasting but increasingly tenuous ‘peace’ between the great powers.
Nonetheless, while elsewhere the Empire may be creaking at the seams, struggling to come to terms with a growing desire for self-determination; thus far the Pax Britannica has survived – buttressed by the commercial and industrial powerhouse of New England stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific North West – intact for all that barely a year goes by without the outbreak of another small, colonial war somewhere…
This said, the British ‘Imperial System’ 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 vast Canadian dominions and the twenty-nine old and recent colonies of the Commonwealth of New England for the best part of two centuries.
In Whitehall every British government in living memory has complacently based 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 that the sixteen ‘Johnny-come-lately’ new (that is, post-1776) colonies, protectorates, territories and possessions which comprise half the population and eight-tenths of the land area of New England, should ever have any say in their affairs!
New England is a part of England and always will be because, axiomatically, it will never unite in a continental union. Notwithstanding, in the British body politic the myths and legends of that first late eighteenth-century rebellion in the New World still
Empire Day might not have originally been conceived as a celebration of the saving of the first British Empire and but as time has gone by it has come to symbolise the one, ineluctable truth about the Empire: that New England is the rock upon which all else stands, an empire within an empire that is greater than the sum of all the other parts of the great imperium ruled from London.
In past times a troubling question has been whispered in the corridors of power in London: what would happen to the Empire – and the Pax Britannica – if the British hold on New England was ever to be loosened?
Generations of British politicians have always known that if the question was ever to be asked again in earnest it has but one answer.
If the New World ever discovers again a single voice supporting any kind of meaningful estrangement from the Old Country; it would surely be the end of the Empire…
Listen to the Empire Day audiobook sample:
Read by Andrew Calverley
BOOK 2 – TWO HUNDRED LOST YEARS
Isaac Fielding knows exactly where he stands: ‘Things were not looking good. Upon that at least, everybody could agree. The other thing that everybody seemed to agree about was that when, eventually, I had my day in court it was likely to be a short, bitter-sweet experience and that the main topic of discussion would be the manner of my subsequent execution…’
A year has passed since the Empire Day outrages of July 1976. Up until now the colonial administration and the government in the Old Country have controlled ‘the narrative’ and by and large kept the truth well and truly buried.
Unfortunately, police and judicial bungling in New England is threatening to undo Government House in Philadelphia’s good work. As always in the affairs of New
Isaac Fielding and his sons have yet to have their day in court; the Governor of New England has been put through the mill by Parliament and horror of horrors, copies of Two Hundred Lost Years, the thirty-year-old seditious epistle banned in the First Thirteen are flooding into North America courtesy of the free press back in the British Isles.
Notwithstanding the authorities might have arrested and already condemned the wrong men for the Empire Day atrocities….
Listen to the Two Hundred Lost Years audiobook sample:
Read by Andrew Calverley
BOOK 3 – TRAVELS THROUGH THE WIND
TO BE RELEASED: 18/3/19.
It is the late spring of 1978 in a world in which the American Revolution failed in 1776 after George Washington was killed and the Continental Army was destroyed at the Battle of Long Island.
The rumbling aftershocks of the Empire Day atrocities which reverberated through the pages of Two Hundred Lost Years are threatening to come to the boil.
While in Philadelphia the politics become ever more fractious in Spain the Royal Alcazar is a citadel besieged in a country which might as well still be stuck in the nineteenth century.
Preparations for war hamstrung by colonial politics begin to gather pace in New England in a climate where the Governor in his mansion and the government back in England continues to tiptoe around provocations in the Caribbean and the Borderlands of the South.
In Spain, Melody Danson and Henrietta De L’Isle have performed their role as distractions, adornments to a diplomatic mission whose only purpose is to delay the moment when the truth about the Empire Day attacks finally emerge. Because, when that day comes the road to war will suddenly confront the great European powers.
The Peace of Paris, the basis of the post-Great War of 1857-66 settlement, threatened by Anglo-German-Russia tensions is now hostage to the machinations of a Spanish Empire in its death throes and the failing health of Old Spain, ‘the sick man of Europe’.
The World in which England’s Georgian colonies in the Americas became the keystone of the British Empire – upon which it seemed the Sun could never set – is about to fray around the edges and our heroes and heroines are going to find themselves directly in the firing line!
Author’s note: the books of the New England series are written as episodes in a contiguous narrative arc. This book concludes not so much with overt cliff-hangers but with deliberate ‘unfinished business’ which will be picked up in Book 4 – REMEMBER BRAVE ACHILLES.
Listen to the Travels Through The Wind audiobook sample:
BOOK 4 – REMEMBER BRAVE ACHILLES
The British Empire has sleepwalked, unprepared into war with the Triple Alliance, the Spanish colonies of the Caribbean and Central America.
But this is not to be a war like those which have gone before it; wars decided by crushing British sea power and eventually, on land by the superiority of the logistics and tactics of relatively small colonial armies in the South Western badlands.
No, this time it is the enemy, the Triple Alliance of Nuevo Granada, Cuba and Santo Domingo, allied to a miscellany of old Spanish crown colonies ringing the Caribbean and the Gulf of Spain, which seizes the initiative and in the opening days of the war deliver a series of hammer blows.
It began with a sneak invasion of Jamaica, the key strategic British base in the Caribbean, and the ambush of the light cruiser Achilles in the Windward Passage.
‘Remember Brave Achilles’ becomes the call to arms.
Yet this is not a war to be fought just in the West Indies or down in the contested borderlands.
In Spain – wracked by civil war Melody Danson, Henrietta De L’Isle and the Manhattan Globe man Albert Stanton are on the run from the Inquisition.
On Little Inagua Island in the West Indies Surgeon Lieutenant Abe Lincoln and his navigator, Ted Forest of the Royal Naval Air Service, both wounded, must fight for survival.
At sea the Atlantic Fleet, on paper invincible, must suddenly come to terms with that most vile of weapons – banned by treaty with the German Empire a decade ago – submarines.
And while disaster beckons; still New England slumbers, and everybody knows that when it awakens, rudely as it must, that there will be all Hell to pay!
The New England Series continues next year with Book 5: George Washington’s Ghost, and Book 6: The Imperial Crisis.
Listen to the Remember Brave Achilles audiobook sample:
BOOK 5 – George Washington’s Ghost
Conventional wisdom is that if the Crown Colonies of the Commonwealth of New England ever unite in common purpose; then the Empire might fall.
That this might happen at the very moment that century-old post-war settlement of the Treaty of Paris is threatening to fall apart, had been the unimaginable nightmare of generations of European monarchs, politicians, diplomats and generals.
The unthinkable is happening.
Mexican troops are advancing through the South Western borderlands of New England; nothing can stop them.
At sea, the supposedly invincible Royal Navy has been driven from the Caribbean and the Gulf of Spain.
The handful of survivors of HMS Achilles are trapped in enemy territory.
The three brothers unwittingly caught up in the events of Empire Day, 1976, are swept along by the tide of events, while news of Melody Danson and Henrietta De L’Isle’s adventures in Spain momentarily distract a bewildered and increasingly uneasy, public in the old and the new worlds.
In apparent disarray in the Americas, at home in England, the Government is attempting to navigate the fallout from the death of the Kaiser, distracted from the problems across the Atlantic.
And then secrets more explosive than any of the weapons deployed in the war threatening to change the map of New England, burst in the midst of the crisis.
In a world threatening to dissolve into chaos; who can step from the shadows to save the day?
BOOK 6 – Imperial Crisis
The American Revolution failed; the Continental Army was destroyed at the Battle of Long Island in 1776 and ever since, New England has been the great engine and on occasions, arsenal of the British Empire.
The question is: is the Empire on which, literally, the Sun never sets which rules rather more than a quarter of the globe and well over a billion people, beginning to creak at the seams?
The Forces of the Triple Alliance led by the wily Felipe Santa Anna have conquered tens of thousands of square miles of the South West, and driven the supposedly invincible Royal Navy out of the Gulf of Spain and the Caribbean.
There is blood in the water and the sharks are circling, within and without the colonies of the New World. In a world of Empires, other pretenders sense opportunities, weaknesses and the machinery of geopolitical realpolitik begins to turn faster.
New England is stirring but will it unite behind the Crown or will other agendas, other tensions, other ancient fissures in the patina of Imperial power fracture first?
And wither travels the destiny of the veteran Texan cavalryman George Nathaniel Washington, the one New Englander capable of peering into Santa Anna’s mind?
BOOK 7 – The Lines of Laredo
What had seemed like just the latest border war with New England’s neighbours in the South West has broadened into a continental conflict with implications far beyond the cloistered enclave of the First Thirteen colonies.
As the machinations of great men play out in the British Isles, New England, Mexico City and back in Europe, the Fielding brothers, Melody Danson, George Washington and the Governor of New England find themselves moving through a world so changed in recent times that sometimes, they hardly recognise their own country any more.
Unsurprisingly, things are about to get more than a little uncomfortable for practically all our heroes…
BOOK 8 – The Halls of Montezuma
‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave; when first we practice to deceive…’
As the war rages in the New England South West and the Gulf of Spain, political machinations rock the East Coast colonies and far, far away the law of unintended consequences is about to bite the Empire upon which the Sun never sets with a cruel, and oddly, inevitable vengeance.
Trapped in the treacherous currents of the machinations of great men, as the tumultuous year of 1978 draws to a calamitous end, Melody Danson and her friends find themselves at the nexus of the gathering storm, fighting for their freedom as the tides of war eddy and flood.
In the world in which the American colonies never gained their independence, nothing is simple and the illusory peace of the last century is ever-more just a mirage, as every day another as piece by piece, the world settlement established after the terrible wars of the nineteenth century, crumbles…
And just when you think you see a pin-prick of light at the end the tunnel; too late you realise it is an express train thundering down the rails towards you!
BOOK 9 – Islands in the Stream
This is the 9th Book in the New England series set in an alternative universe in which George Washington was killed at the Battle of Long Island in 1776, and the American Revolution never happened!
***
The Prime Minister’s wife picked up the telephone and listened for some moments.
“Hector,” Emma Hamilton said with a horrible, sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, “we have a problem!”
Of this Emma was in no doubt. Learning that both Miles Dempsey, the Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Imperial Civil Service and the Minister of War – the post had been titled ‘Secretary of State for Imperial Defence’ for decades until the resumption of the war with the Triple Alliance in the summer – were up and about and the august members of the Committee for Imperial Defence, effectively the rest of the War Cabinet, had been mobilised in the middle of the night, something awful had, or was about to go wrong
We have a problem…
Hearing her say those terrifying words had an immediate, and electric effect on Emma’s husband of over thirty years.
The Prime Minister sat bolt upright and reached for the handset…
Having honestly believed that by dint of Machiavellian behind the scenes diplomacy and the fighting of what was supposed to be a ‘small’ regional war his Government had finally secured all its objectives in New England and contributed towards the creation of a new, hopefully more stable world order, could it be that fate is about to snatch disaster from the very jaws of victory?
“We have a problem…”
Four innocent enough words; the harbingers of a world about to be turned upside down in which our heroes will once again find themselves cast into the millstream of history.
BOOK 10 – The Gathering Place
The Gathering Place is the 10th book in the New England Series set in a universe in which George Washington died at the Battle of Long Island in 1776 and…the Revolutionary War was lost.
Now, two hundred years later the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, the Commonwealth of New England, for so long dominated by the historic First Thirteen colonies is finally about to span the whole North American continent.
The trouble is that although the War with the Triple Alliance has been won even as the guns on the Rio Grande fell silent, the Empire was confronted by an even greater existential crisis in the Pacific. The Battle of the Sandwich islands for command of the Pearl Lagoon might have halted the Japanese march in the Central Pacific but elsewhere, European hegemony in the Far East is everywhere in retreat.
In the Old Country the government is in disarray, a make-weight sits in Government House in Williamsburg while the appointment of a new Governor is awaited and all the while our heroes tip-toe through the gathering chaos of the new era, in which it seems nothing is quite what it seems.
From Whitehall to Philadelphia, to the Pearl Lagoon and the internecine machination of the Japanese Empire, the old world order is swirling around a New England itself on the cusp of a new revolution, changes nobody foresaw on the fateful eve of Empire Day 1976, when everything changed…
The only thing anybody can be sure of is that the roller-coaster ride is not going to get any smoother any time soon!
BOOK 11 – Rising Sun
Rising Sun is the 11th book in the New England Series set in a universe in which George Washington died at the Battle of Long Island in 1776 and…the Revolutionary War was lost…and the Britannia’s domain has literally been an empire on which the sun never sets for most of the last two hundred years!
The Russian foothold in the Alaskan lands has been vanquished, the war with the Triple Alliance is over, almost history; and ‘the West’, specifically the vast former Californian lands of the old Spanish empire of New Granada is a freshly annexed colony of New England. For the first time a native-born Viceroy is to be enthroned as the Governor of the Commonwealth, the war with the Mexicans is over and the conquest of North America from coast to gleaming coast is, after two centuries, complete.
Already the ‘no expense spared’, harum-scarum rush to colonise the West Coast Golden Gate province is under way.
But, of course, at the very moment the British Empire is on the cusp of its finest moment, an ungrateful world is intent on spoiling its party!
But little of this is obvious to Melody Danson and her new family as they begin a new life in Manhattan, or to Kate and Abe Lincoln looking forward to journeying west to a land of new hope and opportunity as the aftermath of the latest battles in the Pacific play out. Thousands of miles away, the dust from Operation Prestige has not, and is unlikely to settle any time soon and the law of unintended consequences has just, taken another unlikely twist!
In the Pacific the opposing navies have exchanged hammer blows but the strategic calculus remains unaltered; the Royal Navy remains outnumbered and on the defensive, faced now by an enemy slowly learning some of the lessons it learned at terrible cost in the Gulf of Spain a year ago. In the Central Pacific there is there an uneasy stand-off, elsewhere European hegemony in the Far East is everywhere in retreat while in the Old Country the government lurches from one crisis to another, its disarray a metaphor for the tensions that many fear will one day erode the Empire from within.
In New England it is the lull before the storm. The East Coast primacy of the First Thirteen, already diminished by the burgeoning powerhouse industry and commerce of the territories of the interior now filling the lands all the way to the Mississippi and beyond, unconstructed by the jurisprudence and the restraints to their trade and development that is so closely guarded by the Legislative Councils of the ‘old colonies’, is about to be rocked by the race to colonise the coast to the west of the Rockies and the Sierra Madre.
Nobody better understands the existential crisis that is slowly brewing in New England as its new Governor, former cavalryman and Texan rancher, George Nathaniel Washington but even he can not foresee the half of the surprises the future has in store for the vast, febrile commonwealth he now rules…
BOOK 12 – Golden Gate
Golden Gate is the 12th book in the New England Series set in a universe in which George Washington died at the Battle of Long Island in 1776 and…the Revolutionary War was lost.
It is Empire Day, Sunday 8th July 1979.
And the Golden Gate Project, the iconic totem of the new imperial regime in Government House, Philadelphia, is under attack, an attack that for all its supposed technological battlefield mastery, nobody in the British Empire saw coming and the consequences might be incalculable.
Things had seemed to be going so well! The Russian foothold in the Alaskan lands has been vanquished, the war with the Triple Alliance is over, almost history; and ‘the West’, specifically the vast former Californian lands of the old Spanish empire of New Granada is a freshly annexed colony of New England. In the Pacific, there is a stalemate; the Japanese tiger has been caged and in the coming year the expectation is that the fruits of ongoing massive mobilisation of the British Empire will see great new sea and air fleets drive the enemy all the way back into his fortress Home Islands.
Significantly, for the first time a native-born Viceroy has been enthroned as the Governor of the Commonwealth of new England, the war with the Mexicans is over and the conquest of North America from coast to gleaming coast is, after two centuries, complete, sparking a ‘no expense spared’, harum-scarum rush to colonise the new West Coast Golden Gate province.
However, not even New England’s new Governor, former cavalryman and Texan rancher, George Nathaniel Washington can imagine the half of the surprises the immediate future has in store for the vast, febrile continental empire he now rules.
On the East Coast Melody has embarked on her new – to her surprise, married – life in Manhattan, while Abe and Kate Lincoln and their inseparable friend, Ted Forest have begun to settle into their new surroundings in Alto California.
And now, events are about to take yet another seismic turn. The war with the Empire of Japan which had seemed to be so far, far away across the vast tracts of the greatest ocean on the planet is about to flare anew and afterwards, none of our heroes lives will be the same again.
This time the Imperial Japanese Navy has succeeded in springing a likely devastating assault on the Empire upon which the sun literally never sets; the battle for the Golden Gate is under way.
Is there anything the unprepared, under-strength defenders can do to avert a potentially war-losing blow to the prestige of the British Empire?
And what does fate hold for Abe, Kate, ted Forest, their friends and comrades in the face of the coming firestorm.
And in the East, what price the survival of the Washington Administration as the Pax Britannica’s enemies strike a devastating surprise blow on of all days, Empire Day?
BOOK 13 – Manifest Destiny
George Washington was cut down by a canon ball fired from the gun of British frigate at the Battle of Long Island in August 1776, his Continental Army was destroyed by William Howe’s Hessians, and the rebellion by the Congress of the thirteen colonies of new England was ruthlessly quashed in the winter of 1776-77.
It is July 1980 and North America, the Canadian Lands and New England to their south, are jewels in the crown of the British Empire. Once before, over a hundred years ago, it had been the arsenal of the powers resisting the onslaught of – at one time or another, singly and in combination – the German, the Russian and the Ottoman Empires in the great War of the 1860s. Now, New England is an industrial juggernaut unleashed in a new war in the Pacific against a Japanese aggressor which threatened to carry all before it and succeeded in mounting a devastating raid on the Imperial foothold on the West Coast, San Francisco.
But that was then, and this is now.
The British Empire is mobilising to fight a war in the Pacific that nobody saw coming which has already claimed thousands of lives and threatens to turn global geopolitical shibboleths on their heads.
New England, now in a race to colonise every corner of the North American continent at breakneck speed with war huge new industries springing up literally from coast to coast, is undergoing changes unimaginable in the two centuries since its one, failed rebellion in 1776.
Our cast of characters is caught up in the flood tide of change as the cauldron of war and the great migrations transform the jewel in the crown of the Empire upon which the sun has literally not set in living memory.
The primacy of the old New England, the comfortable world of the First Thirteen colonies is being challenged as never before by the industrial complexes of the interior and the questioning of attitudes, and legacy laws which date back to the seventeenth century.
In the Pacific naval battle groups begin to roam the outer reaches of the brutally won Co-Prosperity Zone and the reality of the tsunami of fire and steel that is about to fall upon his Empire, weighs upon Emperor Hiroaki almost as heavily as the fanatical determination of his military to continue the fight at any cost up to, and including the utter obliteration of the Home Islands and its one hundred million people.
The tide of war, at first flowing irresistibly in the Japanese favour; has turned but what will be the cost for our heroes (and villains) in the coming days and now that New England, a continental engine of war, the arsenal of the Empire is reaching peak production, what price its continuing fealty to a Crown thousands of miles away across storm-tossed oceans?
Truly, the ultimate test of a society, of a way of life is war.
BOOK 14 – Tom Paine’s Bones
Tom Paine’s Bones is the fourteenth book in the New England Series set in an alternative timeline in which George Washington’s Continental Army was wiped out at the Battle of Long Island in 1776, the American Revolution failed and North America in the latter half of the 20th Century is still part of the British Empire….
In the war in the Pacific the Royal Navy has turned the tide and now Imperial forces have begun the long, bloody island-hopping advance upon the Japanese Home Islands.
Back in New England the wars with the Mexicans and the Japanese have spurred a massive industrial awakening and a fear of ‘enemies within’ conspiring to steal the technologies behind the ‘wonder’ weapons with which the Empire is fighting.
Kate Lincoln and the Fielding brothers are in England, Tom Paine has fallen on his feet in Philadelphia – around them the cozy imperial status quo of the last century is visibly crumbling and nobody knows quite how things, anything will turn out.
And in the Crown Colony of New England, Melody, having been in at the conception of a legal case that has the potential to drive a coach and horses through two hundred years of colonial law, is about to embark upon a new career: in politics.
In the Sandwich Islands a new pro-consul, Lord Clive has been installed to rule over the new Empire of the Western Pacific that will exist as Imperial forces sweep towards Tokyo.
And all this as the Japanese, as their footholds in the Marianas are burned and blasted into oblivion prepare for one last desperate throw of the dice.
But not before the murky double-dealing by the agents of the old Spanish Empire that sowed the seeds for the War in the Gulf of Spain resurface, and out of a clear blue sky, Melody’s past comes back to bite her.
With a vengeance!
BOOK 15 – The Divine Wind
The Divine Wind is the fifteenth book in the New England Series set in an alternative timeline in which George Washington’s Continental Army was wiped out at the Battle of Long Island in 1776, the American Revolution failed and New England in the latter half of the 20th Century is still part of the British Empire….
In the Pacific the Royal Navy has turned the tide but the bloody battle for the Marianas rages unabated.
In Japan, confronted by the might of the global British Empire mobilising for total war, the Emperor and his military men begin to consider the unthinkable.
In New England – a great sleeping giant for so long – the West and the entirety of the North American continent is finally opening up as it factories and resources fuel the war effort.
In England the government wrestles with the question of how to subdue the Empire of Japan without destabilising the existing world order at the very time the march of technology is accelerating change in every sphere of life.
One prime minister if preoccupied with waging war; one of his predecessors is intent on making mischief and plotting his comeback.
And what of Kate Lincoln, newly widowed? She and her children are in England with Abe’s two surviving brothers; her hopes set upon a new life far, far away from the maelstrom of war and the prejudice that had blighted her life in New England.
What of Melody dipping her toe in local colonial politics, and what of her husband, Paul, his career seemingly ended by the lies of a traitor?
And how will the injustice of Sam and Amelia Henry’s potentially ruinous legal suit against predatory real estate developers in the Crown Colony of Virginia, resolve itself before the House of Lords in England in a test of the legality of 300-year-old racist statutes still influencing the lives of modern New Englanders, and potentially, peoples all around the Empire?
All the while, back in the Pacific the fleet gathers, growing by the day, bolstered by massive shipbuilding programs commenced at the outset of the Mexican War.
The Divine Wind is about to blow against the forces of the Empire upon which the Sun never sets; and when it does how will the British react?
As each side gathers its strength for what both know will be the final battle; who will strike first?
And finally, what secret can a tropical island relegated to the backwaters of the war hold> A secret that might one day turn the lives of more than one of our characters upside down?