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For Nat Sobel — with immense thanks
There is no privileged past… There is an infinitude of Pasts, all equally valid… At each and every instant of Time, however brief you suppose it, the line of events forks like the ste forth twin branches
—André Maurois
A LOOK AT WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
There, in the center of London, his statue sits in Iarbed and carved in finest marble Prince Albert, consort to Queen Victoria, his liest monument in the world; the Albert Memorial
He was a kind ht her true happiness But did this Saxon prince, who never lost his thick Ger of any i
He certainly did He averted ith the United States
In 1861 the American Civil War was still in its first murderous year Britain and France, to the disnize the South as a separate nation Now the British stea the tly appointed Confederate coland to represent President Jefferson Davis
On the eighth of November 1861 the Trent was stopped at sea by the USS San Jacinto When her co officer, Captain Wilkes, found that there were two rebels aboard the Trent he had them arrested on the spot and removed from the British ship
England was aroused, furious The War of 1812, when Britain had been at ith the newly established United States of America, was still fresh in memory With the Northern blockade of the Confederate ports biting deep, there was little cotton fro bankruptcy The Pri of a British ship and the seizing of the passengers as a deliberate insult to Britain’s sovereignty The Foreign Minister, Lord John Russell, echoed the public senti him to release the men immediately — or suffer the consequences British troops and thousands of rifles were dispatched to Canada and troops massed on the United States border
Enter the peaceful Prince Albert Already terestion — which was in reality typhoid fever caught from the foul water supply and drains of Windsor Castle — he did a rewrite of the dispatch, a way out Queen Victoria approved of the changes and it was sent to Washington
On December 26 President Lincoln ordered that the two Confederate commissioners be released