New England 10 - The Gathering Place, page 1
James Philip
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THE GATHERING
PLACE
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The New England Series – Book 10
Copyright © James P. Coldham writing as James Philip 2022.
All rights reserved.
Cover concept by James Philip
Graphic Design by Beastleigh Web Design
THE NEW ENGLAND SERIES
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BOOK 1: EMPIRE DAY
BOOK 2: TWO HUNDRED LOST YEARS
BOOK 3: TRAVELS THROUGH THE WIND
Book 4: Remember Brave Achilles
BOOK 5: GEORGE WASHINGTON’S GHOST
BOOK 6: THE IMPERIAL CRISIS
BOOK 7: THE LINES OF LAREDO
BOOK 8: THE HALLS OF MONTEZUMA
BOOK 9: ISLANDS IN THE STREAM
BOOK 10: THE GATHERING PLACE
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Available in 2023
Book 11: RISING SUN
Book 12: GOLDEN GATE
Book 13: MANIFEST DESTINY
Details of all my books and future release dates will appear first on my web site
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www.jamesphilip.co.uk
Contents
PROLOGUE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Epilogue
Author’s Endnote
Other Books by James Philip
THE
GATHERING PLACE
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The New England Series – Book 10
A.D. 1979
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PROLOGUE
Chapter 1
The war with the so-called Triple Alliance, nominally the Mexican Republic, Cuba, Hispaniola-Santo Domingo, Colombia, Venezuela, all within living memory former Spanish colonies, and miscellaneous neo-Catholic zealots – donning the mantle and channelling the craven blood lust and debauchery of crusaders of past ages – drawn from most of the other countries ringing the Caribbean, had not ended cleanly by the end of 1978. To the contrary, much of the region was still in a positively ungodly mess.
That said, there was a ceasefire on the line of the Rio Grande between Mexican and Imperial forces, and it was soon to become apparent that the Mexicans were reconciled to the British annexation of the whole of Alto California, possibly the biggest land grab in the Empire’s history, notwithstanding Clive’s activities in the Indian sub-continent in the eighteenth century. The key thing was that the principal protagonists, the British and the Mexicans had agreed to stop trying to annihilate each other on the battlefield, and within days, both sides had sweetened what they hoped might one day be a genuine ‘peace process’ by the swift commencement of wholesale prisoner exchanges (numerically, greatly in the Mexican favour by a factor of over ten to one) even though there was little prospect of a meeting of minds between any of the other combatant nations and the British Empire.
Thus, the broader war in the Gulf of Spain was over, Empire forces soon occupied Havana and Guantanamo, imprisoning the whole Cuban government and a goodly number of Cardinals to boot, not to mention harrying and pillaging to such an extent that large areas of the Cuban hinterland were soon in open revolt against their heretic occupiers. Almost incidentally, farther east, both Hispaniola and Santo Domingo were obdurately refusing to submit – the latter for some months - vehemently refusing entreaties to attend talks about talks to come to the peace table but otherwise helpless in the face of the Empire’s now crushing sea and air power.
Elsewhere, insurrection and state-sponsored piracy had closed down the largest oil refinery in Latin America at Curacao, in the southern Caribbean, and the mainly Protestant British colonies and dependencies from Jamaica to Guyana and the Windward Islands remained under threat from their ‘defeated’ Catholic neighbours until the rehabilitation of Old Spain into the community of European nations and the conclusion of the peace treaties of the early 1980s.
But in early 1979, Central America and the Caribbean were a mess; the sort of mess that nobody forgets in a hurry and generations later, is still remarked upon in the history books.
Coming in the immediate aftermath of the war the Philadelphia bombings turned the mood of many New Englanders virulently anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic. This was hardly surprising, the Philadelphia outrages had claimed over two thousand lives, including those of the Governor of New England, his wife, their youngest daughter, hundreds of military personnel and other public servants, and some fifteen hundred Philadelphians whose only crime was to have been going about their normal, lawful daily business in the streets of the capital of the Commonwealth of New England. If by comparison, the reverberations from the attempted assassination of the King on Empire Day 1976 had been slow-burning and only eventually profound; the shock waves from the Philadelphia ‘outrage’ had been immediately, viscerally felt throughout New England and across the other side of the Atlantic in the United Kingdom, compelling the government to respond with what can only be described as savage alacrity.
Within days the Empire had severed all diplomatic relations and imposed brutal trade sanctions not just on Old Spain but on the majority of its far-flung colonies. Unsurprisingly, this soon had catastrophic consequences for the government in Madrid and more than one already teetering regime abroad. The ‘sanctions’ which remained in place for most of the following year more closely resembled a total wartime naval blockade and was, with the benefit of hindsight, the final death-knell of the Spanish Empire. Meanwhile, in New England, anybody - especially if they had the misfortune to live in the First Thirteen – of Spanish descent or readily identifiable links to, or with any part of the Catholic world was overnight, liable to internment without trial; albeit the most Draconian regulations passed by the enraged Colonial Legislatures of Virginia, New Jersey and North but not South Carolina were to be struck down within days of his appointment, by the new Governor of the Commonwealth of New England in April 1979 on the grounds that such powers were ultimately reserved to his office – not to the majority of Crown Colonies, anywhere in the world - subject to the will of the Imperial Parliament in Whitehall.
Significantly, in only one sphere was business as usual briefly, for about twenty-four hours suspended, and that was in respect of the Armistice talks ongoing between the Supreme Commander of all Imperial Forces in the Gulf of Spain Theatre of Operations, General George Washington, and his opposite number, Mexican Minister of Defence and C-in-C by acclamation of the Triple Alliance Felipe de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón at Laredo. If anything, events in distant Philadelphia and subsequently, in the Pacific wonderfully concentrated minds, and speeded the resolution of what might have been a stand-off that conceivably, could otherwise have persisted to this day!
More than one monarch, president or prime minister has observed that ‘there is nothing quite like a crisis to hasten a previously stalled negotiation to a mutually satisfactory conclusion.’
Anecdotally, the key moment in the three weeks of negotiations which resulted in the wide-ranging, and to everybody’s astonishment, the remarkably comprehensive Anglo-Mexican Non-Aggression and Mutual Co-operation Treaty – the heads of agreement to which were initialled, with almost indecent haste in early February 1979 - was when Washington put it to Santa Anna that: ‘Right now, given the situation with the Japanese, if you offered the English unconditional freedom of passage for goods and supplies across Mexico from the Gulf of Spain to the Pacific, they’d bite your hand off!’
Washington was of course, a Texan rancher and a native New Englander (as well as an English officer and gentleman) and fully aware that although the imperial capital, London, was a long way away from the New England South West, military considerations were king in his deliberations with Santa Anna. He saw clearly the ramifications for the Americas of the then developing war in the Pacific, that the world was becoming a very small place and that without a lasting peace with the Mexicans, there could be no rapid, wholesale exploitation of the recently annexed lands of the West Coast. Presciently, it was during the peace talks that he and his old friend first seriously discussed the prospects of a canal linking the Caribbean with the Pacific, ei
The two men, who would become ever closer friends in the following years, had shaken on ‘the deal’, enshrined the promise of ‘the canal’ across the Central American isthmus in the Armistice, and set about selling both the peace and the great, unifying engineering project to their principals at home that same day.
Often forgotten nowadays, the aftershocks of the war with the fast maturing, democratic Mexican Republic, were to exert a minor but nonetheless significant influence not only on imperial politics but on the empire’s military machine in 1979 and the following year. In that seemingly endless period before the great engine of the New England industrial behemoth fully geared up for war, the ships, aircraft and soldiers ‘tidying up’ the ‘mess in the Caribbean’ were badly needed elsewhere, hamstringing imperial planners seeking to ‘hold the line’ in India, the Pacific, and the Mediterranean without weakening, for a moment, the forces guaranteeing the peace in Europe – depending upon which source one trusts – for some twelve to eighteen critical months after the Japanese attack on the Pearl Lagoon, effectively meaning that at the outset, imperial arms could do little other than to delay, or ‘inconvenience’ the unstoppable onward march of the Empire of Japan’s conquests in the Pacific and South East Asia. Thus, the lens of hindsight sometimes makes it far too easy to view the war with the Triple Alliance as a relatively minor exercise, a mere consolidation which hardly justifies all the pages in the history books. But then there is the ‘great man school of history’ not to mention the ‘cock-up theory of events’, and I have always subscribed to the latter.
The ‘great man’ perspective tends to ignore the fact that history is very, very complicated, which explains why our leaders invariably make a mess of things, albeit not always for the wrong reasons. There was an awful lot going on in the winter of 1978-79; I should know, I inadvertently found myself in the crosshairs of the rather blurred, telescopic sights of that history!
Perhaps, a better long-term perspective on what popular historians now call ‘Santa Anna’s War’ is that it was an honourable draw in which, ultimately, both sides got pretty much what they wanted. The Empire consolidated its hold over all of North America; the Mexicans fought a ‘good war’ which consolidated their new-found democracy, fixed its northern boundaries for the first time in its post-European conquest history and led to a raft of hugely beneficial – to both parties - economic and military treaties with its ‘old enemy’, which were to light a fire under its still relatively moribund industrial base.
For the British Empire, at the outset the war had been a not so minor disaster; putting it ‘on the back foot’ to use a sporting analogy, leaving the Royal Navy, somewhat battered and worse for wear at a moment when it was in a period of tactical, technological and ship-building transition, with its main strength deployed in the wrong – the Atlantic – ocean at exactly the worst possible time when the massed scouts and bombers of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s elite Kido Butai (Mobile Strike Force) appeared over Oahu, and across the Western Pacific and South East Asia tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers were invading centuries-old European colonies.
Hindsight is a marvellous, deceptive thing. So much of what is obvious to us now is opaque at the time. What becomes history to people of later generations is a bewildering melange of apparently random events to those unfortunate enough to actually have to live through them. Looking back; we have the priceless advantage of knowing what happened next. For the men in the ships during the savage battles for the Sandwich Islands in December 1978, for the traumatised troops in Indochina and Malaya, the routed Spanish native levees in the Philippine lands, or the helpless Dutch settler militias on Borneo, the Japanese onslaught must have, at times, seemed like a tsunami of woe, as if they were drowning in the tide of what we now, at a safe distance, complacently regard as ‘just’ history.
Very few of them would have realised – how on earth could they have realised? – that they were being swept along in a river of happenstance born out of a Machiavellian, century-old colonial hypothesis first articulated by the British Government’s Official Historian of the Great War, the renowned Oxford historian Sir William Joachim Shute-Goschen, writing in his later years when he was the magisterial, legendarily eccentric Master of Balliol College.
Dear old Bill JSG postulated that: ‘The fundamental dilemma underlying New England policy, is that the matter of continental suzerainty is irresolvable while the Spanish Question hangs over North America. Further, until this matter has been addressed no threat facing the Empire has such malign potential to undermine the Pax Britannia as the prospect of a re-invigorated Japanese, Chinese [sic] or Russian Empire equipped with the full panoply of weapons of European industrial society, asserting what it believes to be its manifest destiny in the Pacific.’
Nobody took this at all seriously at the time; not even the small number of academics who actually read this, or any of the increasingly bellicose and incoherent writings JSG produced in his latter, declining years.
The baffling thing is that it was none other than Sir George Walpole the man whom depending upon one’s take on these things either ‘broke’ or ‘re-made’ the world in the 1960s and 1970s, a man who had made his name in academia long before he first dabbled in the murky waters of politics for his definitive two-volume biography of Shute-Goschen in the 1950s – in which he documented his subject’s long, slow drift into senility - and was, despite being intimately acquainted, some might say ‘obsessed’ with the meandering geopolitical machinations of the mind of Shute-Goschen, who was so fatally seduced by the thinking of the man. A man that in his dotage in the years after he left office, he was to shamelessly, proudly declare to have been his intellectual well spring.
To digress for a moment. Let me declare my colours right here and now. Like many others who were victims of Walpole’s mistakes – which were too numerous to even begin to catalogue – I think the word ‘abdicated’ rather than ‘resigned’ best describes his departure from the great offices of state in 1978, significantly just before the fabric of the international order he had constructed in the previous fifteen years imploded.
The problem, which you would think any fool – but not Sir George Walpole - would have worked out for himself years in advance was that in the winter of 1978-79, granted the war with the Triple Alliance had supposedly resolved the Spanish Question, was that New England to the west of the Mississippi, much of the Great Plains, the Rockies, the Sierra Madre and the West Coast remained a largely empty canvas as yet physically unconnected – by road, rail or canal - not just to the rest of the world but to all intents, to the rest of New England too.
Thinking about it, you would have thought that the one thing other, obviously keener students of dear old Bill Goschen would have cautioned the movers and shakers of the Empire not to do – but which George Walpole completely ignored - until many, many years after the aforementioned ‘Question’ was well and truly settled; and after the West Coast had had time to develop into a thriving industrial and commercial colossus efficiently interconnected with the rest of the continent, was to by default, or by careless deed, to allow the Empire to get sucked into an all-out war with the most avowedly militaristic nation on the planet in the Pacific!
Which, of course, was precisely what happened in December 1978. Unfortunately, it soon transpired that Sir George Walpole’s master plan had, for New England but one singular objective. He was like a chess player so preoccupied with achieving ‘check’ that he forgot to look two, three or four moves beyond that transitory minor victory. To be fair; Shute-Goschen had recognised that while the achievement of ‘continental suzerainty from gleaming coast to gleaming coast’ would, in the long-term engender ‘strategic impregnability to the Empire’s North American holdings’ it would, in the short- to middle-term, perhaps up to a quarter-of-a-century, by dint of the ‘prodigious expenditure of resources and the consequent dislocation of industry, transport and populations’ inevitably required ‘weaken and possibly, discombobulate the popular politics of New England in ways which are very hard to predict.’ In other words, New England and the wider global Empire would be more, not less vulnerable in the years following the conquest of the West!
