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Another excellent update, Tommy! The continued subservience of New Yorkshire is going to blow up spectacularly for Edinburgh if something doesn't happen soon, I sense. Unless you're going for a sort of War of 1812-style conflict in place of the War of Independence, in which case I really wouldn't want to be the prime minister who had to deal with that…
Speaking of which would it be at all possible to get a table of monarchs, stewards and prime ministers? It's something I'd be very interested in seeing if you ever had the time to spare.
Speaking of which would it be at all possible to get a table of monarchs, stewards and prime ministers? It's something I'd be very interested in seeing if you ever had the time to spare.
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The End of the Beginning
1806-1809
1806-1809
The great rebellion that began in the Vendee region of Western France, then a part of the Republic of Aquitaine, in early 1806 was not immediately successful. This great nationalist and monarchist revolt was set against the unerring power of the German war machine as well the supporters of the partially democratic Republican regimes established in the old lands of the French Kingdom. From its beginnings in 1806 through until 1809 the rebels only made very steady progress even as their numbers continued to grow exponentially.
All this changed at the Battle of Orleans near Paris. In June 1809 the rebels and the combined forces of the German occupation and their allies met in a tremendously significant set piece battle. The Germans had hoped that by pinning down the rebels in a fixed engagement they could turn the tide and restore order in Gallic lands. It was a hopeless miscalculation. Despite being outnumbered two to one the French rebels scored an incredible victory. Under brilliant military leadership the French forced the surrender of one of the highest ranking Generals in the German army and captured some 30,000 men. Better still, their victory allowed them to proceed into Paris two weeks later and with a stroke bring down the French Republic and leave the other pro-German Gallic Republics in total disarray. Proudly, the Kingdom of France and its ruler Charles XII were restored. Within months German power was challenged in the West by the defection of Spain to the Franco-British alliance and in the East by the Russian invasion of the Lithuanian Empire. The balance of power in Europe was shifting rapidly.
In North America, the rebel army of the American Patriots faced a string of key military reversals around the same time as their German allies were losing a grip of France. In 1807 one of the largest single armies the Patriots had formed during the war suffered a smarting reverse at the Battle of Mungo Valley in Central Virginia. The same year an effort to invade Nova Scotia and encourage an anti-British rebellion in the most placid of Scottish-American colonies failed spectacularly as the abortive Siege of Toronto had to be abandoned due to a break down in the supply chain and a substantial number of fighters were lost. Finally, in 1808 the Patriots’ most famed and skilled military leader – Georgia born James Haddow – was captured by Loyalists and summarily executed. The New Yorkshire rebellion appeared to be in trouble.
In South America the situation was very different for the Nationalists. The rebels in Darien scored a crushing military victory at the Battle of Arauca in 1810 which all but broke British power in the large colony. Henceforth Darien’s interior was essentially independent whilst the British continued to control most of the coastal regions. That same year agents of the revolt in Darien had passed through the mountains into Peru with the successful aim of encouraging a revolt there as well. To make matters worse, during this period Brazil, a large Kingdom that had drifted towards independence a century before following the British annexations of England, began to take an active interest in supporting anti-British forces throughout South America. It seemed the Brazilians were hopeful of gaining power and significance from the vacuum created by a British withdrawal from the continent.
The collapse of German power West of the Rhine and Alps sent shockwaves through Munich. It is said that it was news of the defeat at Orleans that led to the death of the elderly and respected Consul Wrangel. In reality he died a little more than a month after news reached the capital of the fall of Paris. However, his death paved the way for his co-Consul, Otto Himmel, to seize absolute power in Germany – purge the government of Wrangel’s traditionalist allies and establish himself as military dictator.
Himmel was convinced that the reason the war had turned against Germany was the loss of the radicalism of the 1790s and the German Republic’s gradual transformation into another conservative Empire. Seeking to capture that old spirit, Himmel reopened the revolution in Germany by calling for an ambitious programme of land reform involving state property seizures and redistributions alongside a major expansion of conscription. The Germanic Wars were far from over.
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Thanks AOK, and good questions!
This Scotland is predominantly Scots speaking with a language that will be mutually intelligible with English (perhaps English being regarded as a dialect of Scots !
). However the Highlands and Western Isles are Gaelic speaking. Whilst we are perhaps getting a little ahead of ourselves looking towards independence movements in England there are a few big differences for this Anglo-Scottish relationship in comparison to the OTL one. England was conquered rather than achieving a peaceful Union. Whilst historically Scotland and England were both Protestant, in this time line Scotland is near 100% Protestant whilst England is religiously mixed but majority Catholic. However, Scottish Episcopalianism (the nation's leading faith) would perhaps be more similar to English Catholicism than OTL Scottish Presbyterianism and English Anglicanism. This England is also much larger in comparison to Scotland than OTL Scotland is to England, that changes the dynamic significantly.
At present though popular support for the British state remains high in both countries, although the above differences (amongst others) may make that relationship rather different to the historical one looking to the future.
The colonial population is probably more thinly spread than historically. Remember that Scotland colonised not just New Yorkshire (USA) but Nova Scotia (Canada) Mexico, California, Darien (Gran Colombia), the whole Caribbean and Peru. And thats just the Americas! There is also South Africa (without a historical Boer settler population, and colonised from an early stage), the East Indies, Australia and New Zealand. Even though rule in North America was up and running faster than historical, I'd assume that even if New Yorkshire could be equally as densely populated as historically, it would be unlikely to be more densenly populated with Scottish migrants going to a wider variety of locations.
I'm very confused
."We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
Hang together a little longer! The Steward cannot wield a tyrant's power forever against a patriotic people!I am interested to see how you write a United States that was aided and influenced by Germany instead of France. I'm guessing a lot more militarized and divided than in our timeline both because of Wrangel's influence and the divided loyalties between the two rebellions.
The German Revolution certainty had a much less radical-democratic sheen to it than the OTL French Revolution whilst having that example of how the Germans have organised their Republic could lead the Americans along a different path if they ever get the opportunity to think about what sort of state they want. Thats of course assuming they are victorious! (A big assumption to make!)
Indeed, I was definitely taking inspiration from the Peninsular War for that particular theatre of conflict.
It would be a fun one to give them a more in detail look it. But their main job it helping to reorganise the borders for Vicki
.I don't understand
.Funny you should ask, I've been keeping this updated since I finished Part One to help myself keep track:
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He was speaking of playing an AAR about Revolutionary Germany would be fun while I was saying the fun would be even more enhanced if the scenario was modded into March of the Eagles.
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McKarling... oh dogs.
What about remaining Native American populations? Serving the King and Country?
And shouldn't that gigantic Lithuania be able to deal with poor and tiny Russia with ease?
What about remaining Native American populations? Serving the King and Country?
And shouldn't that gigantic Lithuania be able to deal with poor and tiny Russia with ease?
I've always been a little confused by the McKarling thing. It pretty much translates to "Son of Karling" and Karling itself means "descended from Karl." So it comes out to be Son of the descendants of Karl.
The plant of rapid growth
1809-1812 in the Americas
1809-1812 in the Americas
At the end of 1808 the Patriot rebels of New Yorkshire were at something of a low ebb. Having suffered military defeats and the loss of their greatest military leader, James Haddow, morale was a concern and the British sensed opportunity. In the early summer of 1809 the British sought to deploy a large army West of the Appalachian Mountains for the first time in years, hoping to begin the restoration of order in the West. In pursuit of this goal some 12,000 British soldiers moved to pass through the Cherokee inhabited lands of upland Carolina.
What the British had not realised was that the Cherokee had recently and secretly switched from the pro-British Loyalist camp to that of the Patriots. The history of the relationship between the settlers and natives of New Yorkshire is amongst the worse in colonial history. For centuries there had been strong antipathies and innumerable military conflicts, inevitably ending in Native American defeat after defeat. Despite this the Indian tribes were usually able to preserve a degree of autonomy, even if they were forced to swear nominal allegiance to the local Scottish and later British authority and were often force to resettle on ever more marginal lands. This history of antipathy between settler and native, alongside a healthy helping of British gold, had largely kept the native tribes in the Loyalist camp since the outbreak of the Patriots’ rebellion. This solid alliance had ensured that the British had not even considered the changing of the Cherokee allegiance as a likely possibility, a foolhardy error. In truth the Cherokee had been bought over by outlandish Patriot promises of the creation of a large, totally autonomous, territory under their control, based around the Southern Appalachians and barred from white settlement in the event of New Yorkshire’s independence. It was an offer the Cherokee Chiefs couldn’t hope to resist.
The result of all this was that the British army was ambushed and mauled at the Battle of Shady Valley by the Cherokee, before the survivors could escape to the safety of Fort Charlotte to the South East Patriot forces had arrived to force their surrender. Weeks later the Patriots stormed Charlotte itself, the fortified town lacking a substantial garrison. The British were in disarray as the Patriots seized their opportunity to turn a defeat into a rout. Deploying substantial military forces to the South, their greatest success was in a remarkably successful black propaganda campaign. Recycling the abolitionist pronouncements of Whiggish ministers from Prime Minister Forster-Hayes’ now decade old government, the Patriots whipped up a panic over the safety of slavery as an institution and combining this with an upsurge in Nationalist sentiment convinced the bulk of the Southern plantation owners to finally throw their lot in with the rebellion. By 1811 Atlanta, Montgomery and Jackson had all fallen whilst most of the rural South of New Yorkshire had been irrevocably lost to the Patriots.
Things would only go from bad to worse. Although by 1811 both the sparsely populated West and the slave driving agricultural South appeared to be slipping out of Edinburgh’s grip, the more urbanised and prosperous North-East remained a Loyalist bastion. This was to be changed by the ambition of an American military commander named Billy Gregg. Born in rural Ulster to a family of paupers he had left for America to find a better life, despite successfully becoming a small holding farmer he was an eager Patriot from the beginning and was amongst the first to rebellion. Thereafter the Ulsterman of humble origins had rapidly risen through the ranks of the Patriot army and in the autumn of 1811 was given command of 9,000 men with the objective of holding back any British counter offensives from the North East. Instead, feeling emboldened by the disintegrating morale of Loyalist forces encountered in a number of small skirmishes, he moved to decisive battle and crushed a British army twice the size of his own at Harrisburg. Shortly thereafter, in November 1811, Gregg marched triumphantly into the city of Philadelphia – the third largest in New Yorkshire, and indeed the entire Americas, after Boston and New York and by far the greatest settlement ever to fall into Patriot hands. As a psychological blow to the enemies of the New Yorkshire’s independence, it was almost fatal.
In South America the situation was not quite so dire. From the turn of the century the Dutch colony of Argentina, encompassing the entire Southern cone of the American landmass, had been under British military occupation and remained almost entirely docile. However, by the 1810s events in North were finally starting to inspire a stirring amongst the Argentines. Reluctant to risk another rebellion in a colony they had little interest in, the British withdrew in 1810 – allowing for Argentine independence.
Further North, in Peru, the army of liberation – composed of a mixture of local Peruvians and Darienians come South to lead them advanced rapidly in the face of sparse British opposition. Feeling emboldened they began to besiege Lima, the colonial capital, at the beginning of 1811. This move was a catastrophic error for the rebellion. The arrival of British reinforcement in the Spring saw the besiegers forced into a pitched battle against a much superior enemy which they lost handily forcing them deep into the Andes.
Mexico had long been at the core of chain of largely loyal colonial territories in the Scottish America including California, the New Hebrides and Nova Scotia. Yet, this loyalty was becoming increasingly strained as the early 19th century wore on. Mexico, with its large peasant population, was regarded as an ideal recruiting ground for British armies combatting the rebellions in South and North America. The Mexicans were also expected to cope with a steady increasing tax burden to pay alongside its blood tribute to the motherland. The colony’s long term, and highly popular, governor Andrew Whitney had long been deeply frustrated by the increasingly worsening burden placed on Mexico by Edinburgh, but the final straw came in the final days of 1811, in the aftermath of the fall of Philadelphia. Just as Billy Gregg scored his famous victories in the North, the Patriots were moving to overwhelm the Mississippi Delta region in the South. Seeing their defence of the region hanging by a thread, the British demanded that Whitney deploy 7,000 men from the Mexican Militia, effectively the governor’s own private army for domestic use and paid for entirely by Mexico City, to relieve them. Enraged and emboldened by British defeats in New Yorkshire, Whitney moved to crown himself King Andrew I of Mexico – an ideologically rich declaration of independence.
Mexico’s rebellion was very different to those of New Yorkshire, Darien and Peru. Whilst in these territories revolts were began by small guerrilla armies, in Mexico the entire machinery of the colonial state and establishment separated itself from the British all at once. Whilst Andrew did face Loyalist military opposition, it was largely scattered, isolated and divided between squabbling rivals. With his new Kingdom relatively secure, Andrew had grand ambitions of expanding his power through an invasion of California – the slightly populated, and almost totally unguarded, colony on his North-Western frontier.
The Mexican invasion of California in early 1812 proved a total disaster. The colony was devoutly Loyalist, predominantly liberal and definitively opposed to Mexican rule. As the Mexicans moved to capture the South California town of Saint James an evangelising Presbyterian preacher named Lloyd Hume raised the townsfolk into an apocalyptic frenzy. With the British able to supply a substantial cache of arms but only a few hundred men in the face of a Mexican army thousands strong. Hume’s legendary call to arms saw nearly the entire population of the town – men, boys and women – arrange themselves in barricades to protect California from its would be conquerors. Incredibly, as the Mexicans attempted to storm Saint James, they were repulsed. Following this defeat the Mexicans retreated Northwards into the Mojave Desert. There, lacking in adequate maps or capable leadership, melted away in the face of large scale death and desertion. British rule in California had been saved!
Yet, for all the remarkable success of Saint James, by 1812 one of the largest Empires in world history, that of the Scottish Americas, was on the brink of total dissolution. All this just thirteen years on from the American Declaration of Independence on July 4th 1799.
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And you'll have to wait a little longer to see whats going down in Europe
.Gotcha now, certainly would! Germans have a stronger hand in this TL than French in OTL I think. No big Russia bear to worry about in the East, just cuddly Lithuania. Then again, France was probably a tougher nut to crack than Austria.
Your mention of the Indians gave me some inspiration for this update
.And the war between Lithuania and Russia will be dealt with in due time
.At first not much, but now quite a lot! Thats now four of seven main division of the Scottish Americas in open revolt !
I'll explain the origins of the McKarling thing in this timeline.
So, in the middle ages the Karlings are big all over Europe (as in most CKII games using the 867 start). They end up with the Irish crown and there over time their name is 'Gaelicised' to McKarling. Aside from the fact this is just adding ''son of'' to a foriegn surname (where the full translation isn't necessarily that obvious), son of the descendants of Karl sounds alright to me
;p. Who's that? Not familiar with the timeline
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Silly Cherokees, as if the Patriots would simply give them territory
I can see the Scottish Empire survive in New-Yorkshire, California, Missisipi and Nova Scotia but the Southern provinces seem to be lost forever. It's either the Scottish accept to lose one part or they will lose everything ...
I can see the Scottish Empire survive in New-Yorkshire, California, Missisipi and Nova Scotia but the Southern provinces seem to be lost forever. It's either the Scottish accept to lose one part or they will lose everything ...
Does Andrew I of Mexico have any ambition to messing around in European politics like a certain Brazilian Emperor did?
I suspect the Cherokee are going to really disappointed by the white man inevitably breaking another treaty.
Do the rebels in New Darien and New Yorkshire have any names for themselves as independent republics? Much like how Colombia was New Granada, Mexico New Spain, etc.
How ethnically mixed are the British colonies in the New World, by any chance?
I suspect the Cherokee are going to really disappointed by the white man inevitably breaking another treaty.
Do the rebels in New Darien and New Yorkshire have any names for themselves as independent republics? Much like how Colombia was New Granada, Mexico New Spain, etc.
How ethnically mixed are the British colonies in the New World, by any chance?
Bad move by the Cherokee
It doesn't seem like Andrew has any kids about to inherit European thrones
Who's that? Not familiar with the timeline
It's a pretty expansive alternate history where a deal is reached between the Brits and Americans, but Liseaux is the dictator of Revolutionary France who's borderline Nazi. Himmel is similar to him because they're both non Napoleonic dictators who are still threatening.
Trail of Tears incoming in 3...2...1...
This is some serious bullshit here tommy, you just cannot lose to AI like that in Paradox games.
And these southern plantation owners, now that they are in rebellion, who is going to buy their products with the Royal Navy still the largest force in the world? They are committing economic suicide.
This is some serious bullshit here tommy, you just cannot lose to AI like that in Paradox games.
And these southern plantation owners, now that they are in rebellion, who is going to buy their products with the Royal Navy still the largest force in the world? They are committing economic suicide.
From the look of things Nova Scotia seems to be the only colony not at risk of breaking away or captured. California will likely remain in Scottish hands, but only just. I can see Peru being kept, but only with military rule similar to that in Cuba or Haiti in our timeline. Mississippi is squeezed between Patriots in the east and Mexico in the west, so its likely lost. An invasion of the upper colonies of New Yorkshire seems already underway, so its also likely lost. Argentina, Mexico, South New Yorkshire, all of it already gone.
It will be bloody, but this seems to be the first destruction of Empire. Once its over, your domain will likely be way more stable without those low-intensity conflicts in the background.
It will be bloody, but this seems to be the first destruction of Empire. Once its over, your domain will likely be way more stable without those low-intensity conflicts in the background.