George Washington's Ghost

The war was barely a month old and already it seemed if not yet certain, then at least possible that centuries-old British suzerainty over its island empire in the West Indies was collapsing, like dominoes…

The car ground to a halt.

The King snapped out of his introspection.

Guessing as much, his wife half-smiled.

“I think we’ve arrived, Bertie,” the Queen murmured.

Chapter 4

Monday 24th April

William Penn House, Philadelphia

It was election time in the late spring in the Crown Colony of Virginia but not in Pennsylvania. Throughout the First Thirteen and their laggardly Johnny-com-lately, and depending on how one counted these things also Vermont and Maine fellow ‘founding’ colonies of North America – there was constant argument about who was first and last and suchlike in olden times – making up the ‘historic’ East Coast-New England Commonwealth, there was absolutely no consensus as to which was the best time of year for elections, or for that matter, much else. Which was probably why each individual colony so resented it when London, or its representative, the Governor of New England, in Philadelphia, sought to inflict unifying political and administrative protocols and standards.

Granted, these days, more or less everybody grudgingly agreed that whether they liked it or not, there were certain advantages to having a uniform Commonwealth railway gauge, Brunel’s so-called ‘standard-medium-permanent way’, uniform systems of measurement, the ‘Imperial’ system of feet, inches and yards, etcetera, weights and underlying commonalities in jurisprudence, and so forth.

Unfortunately, where there had always been violently articulated divergence, was on the subject of rates and the appropriateness of local and commonwealth-wide taxation. This was hardly odd because although each colony claimed to have its own ‘take’ on the subject – none of them liked paying it (tax, that was), with some claiming Biblical justifications – in general, and as it was key to the whole topic, upon how exactly war should be waged on the shores, and upon the seas around, New England in particular.

Which, counter-intuitively, was why the Chairman of the Virginia Colonial Legislative Council, Roger Emerson Lee III, presently the Director of the Organisation of the Chairmen – there were no women, nor had there ever been – of the sovereign Colonial Legislative Councils of the First Thirteen, plus Maine and Vermont, had come to Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania, to make the opening set-piece speech of his campaign to be re-elected to the VCLC back in Richmond approximately six weeks hence. Just turned fifty-seven years old, handsome in that traditional fleshy Virginian planter fashion, and scion of one of the five wealthiest ‘old’ dynasties in New England, he was vain, thin-skinned and unfussy about detail, or for that matter about letting the truth get in the way of a handy epithet, and operated as a rule, as if he had a God-given entitlement to do… well, pretty much whatever he wanted to do, whenever he wanted to do it.

Again, counter-intuitively, in recent years people tended to remark that his was never a thing which had served him as favourably as by rights it ought, with the vapid society women who tended to flutter around the sons of old money in in either Virginia, or the seat of imperial power in Philadelphia, for although he had had many mistresses, nowadays they circled, ever-ready to hand a juicy new barb to journalists and the great man’s political opponents.

Lately, those numerous opponents had observed, perceptively, that the key thing which best characterised the inner man was that with the coming of the war, Roger Lee saw only opportunity. Opportunities to smite his enemies, to aggrandise himself with fat new military contracts and to paint himself as the great national leader he but hardly anybody else, had always believed himself to be. Now, as the recently anointed Director of the Organisation of Chairmen of the Colonial Legislatures of the Fifteen – which had never been a constitutionally recognised position – which made him the spokesman for his fellow Chairman of the Chairman bar one – Florida – of the Crown Colonies that actually mattered, he was convinced he was finally making progress!

That day, his audience was a select one.