Stephen smiled along with the other adults watching the children, but inside he was seething. Bonfire Night was only the most visible reminder of that failed "counter revolution" back in the seventeenth century, but, even now in the twenty first, it still hurt.

As Stephen sipped his porter his mind wandered. He couldn't help imagining what the world would have been like if Charles had been restored to the throne. But that was just wishful thinking. In the real world, on 3rd September 1658, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England, had lain on his deathbed suffering from a strange "tertian ague". He had been ill for a long time and was failing fast, as was the Commonwealth. Royalists who had slowly been making accommodations with the Puritan regime "as a bulwark against further social revolution and as a dispenser of firm government" were beginning to talk of the restoration of the king.

But all things had changed on that fateful September's day. John Thurloe, Cromwell's secretary, discovered that there had been a longstanding and carefully executed plot. The Lord Protector was being poisoned. Acting just in time, Cromwell's life was saved. Dr. George Bate, Cromwell's physician, was arrested and put to the question. He named many Royalists still in England, two bishops, and implicated Charles Stuart the king in exile.

Settled in Paris, both Charles and his brother James had converted to Catholicism. This, along with the evidence of the plot, unleashed the New Model Army upon all opposition across England. Royalists, Catholics and social reformers were all put to the sword. The power of the Protectorate was increased and the landowners had received the "firm government" that they had called for.

Charles, with the support of The Sun King, Louis XIV, was crowned king of Scotland and Ireland and set up court in Edinburgh. Charles continued to claim England as his, and many people advised him to cross the border and march upon London, but he remained in Edinburgh Castle and the opportunity had been missed.

For years there was a "war without weapons". Puritan England made alliances with other Protestant countries and, as a response, Charles signed the Treaty of Calais, bringing him more active and tangible support from France and "shooting wars" became the order of the day.

Richard Cromwell, the Protector's eldest son, died of a fever while fighting Royalist forces in Ireland and so, when Oliver finally succumbed to the chronic weakness of his poison ravaged body, it was capable Henry Cromwell who became the new Protector.

Charles Stuart died with no legitimate heirs and so it was James who took to the throne. As James II (VII of Scotland) he continued the fight to regain England, but it was never to be. His son, Charles III, succeeded James; who, on marrying the daughter of Louis XIV, also became Charles X of France.

In England, Henry Cromwell's daughter married William of Orange and he became the new Protector, king in everything but name. He dedicated his life to maintaining order and fighting Catholicism. Original thinkers such as Newton were actively discouraged from questioning and the "Age of Unreason" took hold. Scientists and philosophers fled the repression, but found little to cheer them in France. The House of Stuart had no time for science; brooding over what might have been, hedonism and debauchery was all that interested them.

Over the next hundred years the boundaries of power became fixed, so that it seemed as if nothing could ever change. There had been a worrying time when, in 1789, a mob had stormed the Bastille and declared a Republic, but James IV responded quickly and ruthlessly and had retained his power as absolute monarch.

During the eighteenth century two other powers had risen to ascendancy. Portugal continued to increase its holdings; using the massive wealth of Brazil, she became the major European power in Africa and, while Spain held more land in South America, it was only under Portugal's hegemony. With the Hanoverian Protectorate focussing all of its attentions upon the European situation, Portugal also managed to take all of the Dutch possessions in the East Indies, stopping only at the borders of the Shogunate.

Japan had been lagging behind Europe in vitality and invention for centuries, locked in a series of bitter civil wars, but the arrival of the Portuguese had changed that. Building upon a strong alliance, the Shogunate had taken what they wanted of European ideas and forged them into a feudal technocracy. Actively encouraging scientific investigation, the nineteenth century became the Shogunate's, dubbed, in an ironic counterpoint to Europe, the "Age of Reason".....(cont)