Honor of Lancaster: A Magna Mundi England AAR

coz1 said:

You handled the religious wars and all that surrounded them very well. I have always loved the sense of realism in this AAR and it's so nice to see another update. Excellent.

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Oh, trust me, the religious wars have only just begun! See chapter 10.

Vann the Red said:

How did the Anglo-Portuguese alliance weather the change of state religion IRL?

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I have no idea. It's not discussed much that I can find...anyone?

BBBD316 said:

Didn't Portugal side with the Castillians after your religion change?

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It did; Vann meant in real life. I have no idea why the Anglo-Portuguese alliance ended; according to the history files, though, it ended in 1701. Now that's good diplomacy!

King George left the throne to his son, who became George II. There is little written about the younger George, who has been relegated to trivia questions and counterfactual history in modern-day Britain. Ironically, George II was by all accounts a better man than his father, said to have been an intelligent, perceptive man who in another time would have made a good governor.


George II's brief reign gave him little opportunity to stand out from his father's shadow. Indeed, his reign was so short - a mere 414 days - that it was said that the elder George had pulled his son into the grave with him. It is unclear whether this legend was widespread before Shakespeare's "King George", but it certainly added to it. In what some have considered to be an ill-considered play, the bard of Avon wrote the history of the Tudor dynasty for his Lancastrian patron. Throughout the text, Shakespeare's style goes back and forth between caustic and apologetic, and some have disputed the authorship of this, his last play. Sadly, Shakespeare destroyed the play soon after its grand opening and no copies are existant.


George I's legacy to his son was not only the crown of the kingdom but also his many enemies. George II did what he could to reach out to them, but it was too little, too late. When Ansbach was conquered by Nuremberg in 1542, George sacked Bereford and hired the newly unemployed Horatio de Clifford to help restore his good name.


This act backfired on George, as it caused resentment towards the foreign favorite and resentment over Bereford's forced resignation. Despite this, it seemed that the young king would pull through and restore Britain's good name; scarcely a year later he was dead. Although the king's doctors believed him to have died of 'wasting sickness', many historians have put forward the theory that he was poisoned; certainly, the leeches employed by the doctors hastened his death. By March 11, 1543, the United Kingdoms was again without a direct heir to the throne.


Once again, a Lord Protector was appointed - this time, with a stronger council behind him. The eminent Percy, Duke of Cornwall was appointed Lord Protector by Parliament as a neutral party, while other notables of the Realm made up the other 11 spots on council, including the Duke of York, Duke of Lancashire, de Clifford and the dowager queen. As the most powerful men and women of the Realm, the council had conflicting opinions about everything. For nearly a year very little was accomplished, but soon factions began to solidify in the council. The Hawks were led by Percy, who called for Britain to be ready for war again soon, while the Doves were led by de Clifford, who believed that Britain needed to reach out to her neighbors to prevent another war. In the end, compromises were made that satisfied few and accomplished little.


The most famous such was a deal in which the Hawks agreed to iron out some long-standing conflicts with Britain's neighbors, and in return the Doves agreed to pass a bill to provide funding for much-needed improvements to the Royal Navy. As a result of the former, treaties were signed in 1544 with France and in 1545 with the Powhatan Indians, both the work of de Clifford. The treaty with the French especially went a long way to calm things down, but in the end was little more than symbolic. Opposition to real concessions from the council itself as well as from the French led to a watered-down treaty that did little more than recognize the de facto border between France and British Flanders. Similarly, the Royal Navy received barely enough funding to make repairs, let alone build its strength up to the levels demanded by the hawks. Percy did, however, win approval for the appointment of a new governor of New England: the 30-year-old Frederick Hawke, born in the colonies, notable at the time only for his innovative ideas on ship-building. Percy made him governor and gave him free reign to improve the Royal Navy there. In retrospect this was far-sighted of him, but it would take nearly two generations for Hawke's ideas to make their way back to London.

Lord Percy was an able student of men who could sense motives and negotiate alliances, and he reached out to different members of the council with different promises to entice them to work together. By the summer of 1544 he had built a more workable coalition of 7 members centered around himself and the Duke of Lancaster. With a simple majority he was able to pass through legislation and rule the country, and this caused no little grumbling from the old guard who felt slighted by the new balance of power - and worried that the crown would pass out of their control.


This fear was grounded in truth: from secret missives written in 1545 and 46, it is clear that Lancaster had been promised the throne for his family in return for his support. All the other members of Percy's coalition were similarly cajoled or outright bribed by the regent, leaving him in control - for a while.

Now in firm control of the council, the regent raised taxes nation-wide, appointing special King's Constables to ensure the money was properly recovered by the crown. The process proved to be far more expensive than anyone had imagined, and the crown was ironically forced to raise taxes in order to raise taxes. As inflation rose, the Highlanders revolted over the tax but the rebellion was quickly put down. By the end of 1545, however, the new tax system was in place and inflation under control once again. With a solvent treasury, Percy could hand over his responsibilities and crown a new king - but who?


The new king was to be George of Lancaster, a Lancastrian who could trace his lineage back to Henry VI. Raised on the continent, he brought back new ideas and fashions to London. A quiet man, George was said to be formal with his friends and eerily polite to his enemies. As a Protestant and an heir to the throne, he was a good choice - but not the only one. George's selection infuriated the Tudors, who began a rebellion in Ireland in 1546, but the deed was done and a Lancaster was crowned George III on September 18th. Sadly, this would only be the first of several reactions against the Lancaster restoration.

Another, larger pro-Tudor rebellion occurred on the continent, where the Tudor cousin ruling the Burgundian possessions of the crown rose in open rebellion, claiming that the lands belonged to the Tudor family that had conquered them, not to the crown itself. George III ended the crisis through negotiation, granting titles and lands to several Tudor scions in return for recognizing his right to rule. This proved to be a harbinger of things to come; although his Lord Protector had been a Hawk, George himself turned out to be a Dove. At the time there was great criticism of him for his 'limp-wristed' rule - but never after his death - but there was also sound reason behind it: just across the channel, France had gained the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, and no fewer than sixty thousand French troops guarded the border with Brittany and Flanders jealously. If it came to war, Britain would lose - and that was true whether the war was with France or the smallest member of the empire. Britain had to look beyond Europe for its fortune, and it did.

In the Americas things were heating up. Despite the treaty of 1545, the Powhatan Indians continued to raid the British settlements along the coast, both from the forest and by sea. Despite warnings from Britain, Powhatan raiders continued to strike year after year. In response, George III ordered governor Hawke to sign treaties with the natives recognizing their ancestral lands as theirs. This policy bore fruit when, in 1549, the colony of Yamanasee began experiencing a great deal of trade with the natives from across the Eastern Woodlands, helping to enrich the colonists considerably. George used this additional income to commission the HMS Guernsey and other ships to fill the gaps in the royal navy and to further explore Barbados.


Sadly, the raids in the north continued, and in 1556 even George had had enough. The British declared war and by November had forced the Powhatan to the negotiating table, seizing Powhatan lands to prevent them from launching raids. The Huron continued to fight a few more months, but by the end of winter even they had had enough. With the expanding British presence, the natives were no longer necessary to survival, or even useful as allies; more and more they were becoming not just superfluous, but unwelcome. It was a sign of things to come when, in 1556, the British founded a new colony in Manhattan, they did not consult the natives first. Together with Conoy, the northern colonies were named Nova Scotia after the northernmost kingdom of the isles. This proved a mistake; the natives were not insignficant, and they proved that shortly.

The Lenape and Massacheuset Indians who lived near the new colony of Nova Scotia found the British presence there intolerable. British colonists were said to seek out Massacheset women as their brides - to put it politely - and additional tensions arose over trade, ownership of land and religion. In 1558 the Massacheuset rose up and attacked the British settlements in what historians now call King George's War. The troops in Nova Scotia were overwhelmed by the enemy and only troops ferried in from New England prevented a complete massacre of the colony. These reinforcements turned the tide and within a few months the war was over - and the whole coast in Britain's hands.


Although the British were quick to point to the superiority of their soldiers, the truth was simpler: hunter-gatherer societies were unable to continue fighting all year round the way that sedentiary societies could. When autumn came, they had to return to their families and prepare for winter or risk the whole tribe starving. On the other hand, although the British were able to exploit this weakness to wrest treaty after treaty from the Indians, the natives continued to attack British settlements. The natives would remain a powerful force in the Americas until the 17th century.

Despite its importance to the history of the United States, the wars in New England were unimportant to the crown. King George had been raised in Protestant Germany, then brought home to England after George I died and it was considered safe for a Lancaster heir to return. His ideas on religion were markedly different from many Briton's, and he deemed his role as head of the church to be vital. As early as 1552 he made it his policy to cast out heresy and papism from Britain and lavished Percy's hard-won treasury on subsidizing the evangelization of the United Kingdoms.

He had the most success in Brittany, where some half the population converted away from Rome, but less so in other areas, notably Scotland, which continued to resist conversion. His holy task took on a new urgency in 1556 when the Council of Trent finally agreed on church doctrine and began a Counter-Reformation in Catholic Europe. His efforts came to naught, however, against the stubbornness of the Scottish Catholic church. If conversions continued at their rate, it would take more than the king's lifetime to bring unity to the British church - and that was unacceptable to him.


It was thus regretfully but sternly that George III instituted a royal inquisition in 1559, placing the Duke of Lancaster in charge of enforcing the state church. The inquisition gave Papists a single choice: Convert or Die! Catholic priests were rounded up and executed while Catholic nobles had their titles stripped from them. As panic ensued, whole areas rose up in protest. It could not have helped that that autumn was a very poor harvest; some eight thousand Catholic farmers rose up in rebellion in East Anglia. George showed his steel - and earned his nickname 'Bloody George' - by sending the army to massacre them.


By the end of the year large areas of the country had converted under this threat, but the country was shaky at best. In 1560 the Duke of Lancaster was assassinated by Catholics, and George III had the assassins and their entire families hung. This did little to calm things down, but George did not back down from his self-imposed quest.


Seeing the Kingdoms divided and close to civil war, Catholic Aragon took advantage of the situation to declare war in April 1560, assembling an anti-British alliance that included Portugal, Sicily, Avignon and Navarra. With foreign support, British Catholics rose up in arms that August, beginning the bloody English War of Religion.

The United Kingdoms at a Glance in 1560​

Treasury: 162 million ducats
Estimated GDP: 1116 million ducats
Standing Army: 45,000 Maurician infantry and 14,000 knights
Reserves: 20,000
Royal Navy: 15 caravels, 1 barque and 5 flytes
Prestige: 1st highest (86.5)
Reputation: Tarnished (4.45/18)

Just as a side note: with this ninth chapter published, there are only three chapters remaining in the Lancaster story! The plan was to play until the Lancasters had been in power for two centuries - no longer.

stnylan said:

Just read through. A very interesting AAR dharper, particularly interesting to see your religious events in action.

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High praise, coming from you.

In many ways, this was the first time I'd gotten to experience my own religious events in context, rather than in testing, so it was eye-opening for me, too!

Fulcrumvale said:

English War of Religion


Oh *explitives*

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You said it!

...If this game has taught me anything, it's that negative stability is the kiss of death in Magna Mundi. Both times I went below 0 stability I was hit by some sort of civil war or worse - for the rest of the game I was very careful about not letting my stability drop!