Diverge and Conquer by Tom Anderson

Author:Tom Anderson [Anderson, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SF, RO:SF
Publisher: Sea Lion Press
Published: 2016-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

It was not an easy decision, but in the end Rockingham’s mind was made up by reports coming out of Galway. One of the relatively few Irish parliamentarians who had not been present at the Battle of Dublin – and thus remained in the land of the living – was Richard Wesley, the second Earl of Mornington.[195] The Earl had fought in Bengal against Burmese-Arakan and in Haidarabad against Mysore, before returning to Ireland in 1793 on the death of his father and assuming the Earldom. Wesley was a hard-headed Anglican and ultra-reactionary, who nonetheless grudgingly accepted for purely pragmatic reasons that Catholics should have equal rights. He fiercely rejected anything that smacked of French republicanism, though, even if the USE had not prominently listed his name on their ever-growing list of planned chirurgien patients.

Wesley is widely credited with diffusing the situation in Limerick, always the city that had been most resentful under Protestant rule, and whose Catholic population was ready to take advantage of the USE in order to rise up, even if they did not agree with the rebels’ aims. Wesley donned his old East India Company colonel’s uniform and ordered the British garrison to stand down and come out of their fortified buildings, then successfully bribed the city’s innkeepers into providing a week-long ‘celebration’ with cheap drink. By the end of it, the British soldiers and the Protestant and Catholic townspeople were, if not quite old friends, close enough when faced with a common foe. Wesley used similar tactics elsewhere and by the end of the year was effectively king of Munster, also providing a rallying point for the people of Galway. The half of Ireland not occupied by the USE looked to one of their last surviving Parliamentarians for leadership, and Wesley had already proved himself to be more than the usual corrupt old landowners who had dominated the Dublin Parliament before going up in smoke.

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