But for the elimination of a substantial part of the Royal bloodline that day he, George would never have been King. His sister, The Princess Royal, Her Royal Highness Princess Sophia, Duchess of Cornwall, and his three brothers: Albert the Duke of Northumberland, and Charles Duke of York had perished with Teddy, still at that time the titular Prince of Wales and Monarch uncrowned in Dublin sixteen years ago. Since both of Teddy’s sons had died in the 1950s without male issue – one in a car crash and the other in mysterious circumstances in Paris, found dead in a high-class prostitute’s apartment, at the time a thing hugely obfuscated and publicly announced as a ‘tragic death by an unsuspected congenital heart condition’ – and Albert and Charles only had the five surviving daughters between them, the ‘family firm’ had therefore, passed into George’s hands.
By then he had attained the rank of Post Captain and was in command of HMS Lion, at the time the Navy’s newest, most formidable big-gun capital ship.
Oh, happy days…
He squeezed his wife’s hand gently.
“Honestly, I have no idea what this is all about, my dear,” he confessed. It bothered him that his ministers saw fit to drag him out into the wilds of Kent when it would have been much more convenient for all concerned to have convened in London, either at Downing Street or St James’s Palace, prior to setting out for Berlin for the funeral rites of the old Kaiser.
“It’s odd that Sir Hector insisted on Penshurst Place?” Eleanor mused, thinking out aloud.
“Well,” her husband shrugged, “on the bright side, I suppose we won’t have to get up so damned early tomorrow morning to catch the boat ferry to France!”
Eleanor smiled.
She was the one who had trouble rising at the crack of dawn.
They could have flown to Berlin for the funeral but travelling across France and Germany by train had about it a more dignified, regal ambiance; not to mention being a great deal more comfortable than flying, even if Imperial Airways had suggested transporting the British Party directly to Berlin by seaplane, landing on one of the many lakes and waterways of the German capital.
The Kaiser had finally expired last Wednesday.
Already the German Electors – perhaps the most unholy and mendacious college of ‘voters’ since the days of the Medici – were gathering in Saxony, presumably sharpening their knives in preparation for the conclave which would crown the next Emperor as soon as possible after the old one was safely in the ground. Or in the case of Kaiser Wilhelm III, concreted into his sarcophagus in the Imperial Mausoleum just off the Unter den Linden.
“Presumably, the whole cast of characters will be at Penshurst?” Eleanor prompted.
“Yes, I should imagine so.”
In fact, notwithstanding it had brought the Royal Household’s travel arrangements forward a day at literally a couple of hours’ notice, it made a lot of sense to get everybody together before setting off for Germany: the Prime Minister, the Foreign and Colonial Secretary, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, the First Sea Lord and their senior staffers. There had been some discussion about whether the Prince of Wales, William, Duke of Cornwall, the King and Queen’s thirty-four-year-old eldest son, should also be in the ‘Berlin party’ but in the end it had been decided not to call him back from South Africa, where he and his wife, Louisa, Duchess of Fermanagh and Mourne, were in the middle of what was, by all accounts, a marvellously well-received tour. At the last-minute Prince James, Duke of Cumberland and his new wife, the vivacious New-England born Olympian horsewoman, Hannah de Chateau Thierry, now the Duchess of Herefordshire – presently in England before James re-joined his regiment in Australasia – had volunteered to step into the breach to ‘beef up the numbers’ of the party and to fly to Germany in advance to ‘prepare the ground’.
James, the King and Queen’s twenty-seven-year-old third son, had always been the apple of his parents’ eyes; although not their favourite offspring, that was a thing they had both assiduously avoided even at the peril of being overly hard on the boy in his youth. This was not to say that last year they had not been somewhat taken aback by his request for their blessing to marry Hannah de Chateau Thierry. So ‘taken aback’ that they had briefly discussed vetoing the match before coming to their senses. James had, morally, if not in strictly contractual terms because there had never been any kind of firm ‘understanding’ between the families, reneged on his obligations to his childhood sweetheart, Henrietta De L’Isle, to marry the step-daughter of the current Governor-General of Australia.
When their son had broken the news to them neither the King nor the Queen had, literally, known what to say, or which way to look. Philip and Elizabeth De L’Isle were among their oldest, closest friends. It had been awful until first Henrietta, and then Elizabeth, had written to them to put their fears to rest.
Dear Uncle Bertie and Aunt Eleanor, Henrietta had written, I know you will be angry with Jamie. Please don’t be. He and I will always be the best of friends, like always, very much like brother and sister; perhaps, we ought to have said more at the time but we agreed a little while ago that marriage was not for us. Well, not to each other although obviously, I would have been honoured to be connected so intimately to the Royal ‘firm’. Jamie was as relieved to be released from our teenage ‘arrangement’ as I was! I dashed off a letter congratulating Jamie the moment I heard the news. I wish him all the happiness in the world…
Thinking about Henrietta’s letter suddenly dragged the King’s thoughts back to the trials and tribulations her father, the Governor of New England, was presently enduring.
The whole Gulf of Spain, the Caribbean and thousands of square miles of the southern and south western Borderlands of New England with New Spain seemed to be on fire. News of one setback – no, call a thing by its real name ‘defeat’ – after another had rained upon the heads of his Government in London and his Administration in Philadelphia.
The more sensationalist of the newspapers spoke of New Orleans and the Mississippi being threatened; of Royal Naval forces badly mauled and thrown back in disarray; and of open revolt in several of the First Thirteen colonies, of panic buying emptying the shelves of shops, demonstrations on the streets and of sporadic outbreaks of ‘low-intensity’ rioting.
Fortunately, the Empire Broadcasting Corporation took a more level-headed, balanced approach to these things mitigating against the need for heavy-handed censorship – a thing the King deplored, mainly because it seemed to him to be nearly always counter-productive – at home, or throughout the Empire. Censorship was, however, a thing under constant review and when the news of the latest ‘setback’ – well, disaster if one was being frank about it – became widely known, everybody in the Royal Party accepted that the Government might have no alternative but to clamp down hard.
There had been a great battle in the waters south of, and within Mobile Bay, east of the Mississippi Delta, where the damaged battlecruiser HMS Indomitable and several of her escorting destroyers had sought shelter awaiting the arrival of the cruiser Devonshire and her consorts, before making joint passage to the east and hopefully, finding sanctuary in Atlantic waters.