For more than two centuries, what would have become the continental United States and Canada has been the North American Union, a self-governing dominion within the British Empire; Alaska remains under the rule of Russia while Hawaii is a British protectorate. The title of the novel refers to a fictional Gainsborough painting that commemorates the agreement between George Washington and King George III, which peacefully ended the American Revolution, implied to be the result of George Grenville never becoming Prime Minister. The painting itself has become a symbol of national unity.

Native Americans fared much better than in real-world history with tribes such as the Iroquois and the Cherokee managing to keep much of their land and have autonomy, their status comparable to that of the Princely States in British India.

As the North American Union remained in the British Empire following peaceful negotiation, the French Revolution was suppressed at the storming of the Bastille by troops under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte in the service of Louis XVI, thus preserving the Bourbon monarchy. By the twentieth century, France and Spain exist in a French-dominated personal union, the Holy Alliance, which controls most of Latin America and Northern Africa and is ruled over by François IV.

The abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833 included slaves in North America. The emancipated blacks prospered, gained education and experienced a rapid upward social mobility, becoming a mainly middle class community by the 20th century. Conversely, the Irish-American community remained a predominantly poor, working class population, subsisting on hard physical labor such as the coal mining on which the North American Union depended for its energy. This created a feeling of bitter jealousy among the Irish, and many of them came to support the Sons of Liberty, a terrorist organization that wants to see America become independent from the British Empire and promotes a blatantly racist and xenophobic ideology.

In the twentieth century, the empires of Great Britain, the Holy Alliance and Russia are the world's major powers, with the Austrian Empire being a European land-based middle power coveting Balkan territory and neither Germany nor Italy becoming unified nation-states.

As in the Mexican War of our history, the mid-nineteenth century saw Britain and the North American Union conquer a large portion of Nueva España (in this case, also including the Baja California peninsula) from the Holy Alliance. The city of Los Angeles was renamed New Liverpool and developed into one of the largest cities of the North American Union and the Province of Upper California.

Plot:

The Two Georges, being displayed in New Liverpool, is stolen while a crowd is distracted by the murder of 'Honest' Dick (a.k.a. 'Tricky' Dick), the Steamer King, a nationally known used car salesman. In its place is left a gramophone with a recording of the "Yankee Doodle," a notorious subversive song serving as the anthem of the Sons of Liberty.

Colonel Thomas Bushell of the Royal American Mounted Police leads the search for the painting, accompanied by its former curator (and his eventual love interest) Dr. Kathleen Flannery and Captain Samuel Stanley. Some days later, a ransom note is received from the Sons of Liberty. The Governor-General of the North American Union, Sir Martin Luther King, informs Bushell in confidence that the painting must be recovered before King-Emperor Charles III's state visit, or the government will have to pay the Sons' ransom demand of fifty million pounds.