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Interesting to see coalitions at work already. I have a feeling that the next few decades will prove rather heady days if the recent tension within Europe is anything to go by. It'll be very enjoyable to see how things unravel, I'm sure.
Hold on a second, is this a running gag that I'm not aware of?
Scotland's only real life colonial adventure - which ended in bankruptcy and the Act of Union 
. It's something we all learn about in school here, and maybe in the rest if the UK as well.
. It's something we all learn about in school here, and maybe in the rest if the UK as well.
So the race begin ...
Colonize this timeline's New England, just because.
Also, a RP question : You named the scottish rulers according to their english version. In a Scotland free of norman english influence, wouldn't they rather be in gaelic ?
Colonize this timeline's New England, just because
.Also, a RP question : You named the scottish rulers according to their english version. In a Scotland free of norman english influence, wouldn't they rather be in gaelic ?
I believe it's done out of convenience. I don't blame Tommy if he prefers to put the English version.
So the race begin ...
Colonize this timeline's New England, just because
Also, a RP question : You named the scottish rulers according to their english version. In a Scotland free of norman english influence, wouldn't they rather be in gaelic ?
Also, America, Florida.. sounds rather strange in that alternative world.
Could always be someone with the first name "Amerigo" or any variation of it, or maybe one of the fringe theories on the meaning of "America" is right after all? And perhaps one of the sailors on the trip was Spanish and called it "Florida"? I dunno.
I think the Gaelic/linguistic thing was mentioned somewhere in the CK2 Part One thread.
Well, right now, they should still think that "America" is just East Asia...
Only once somebody circumnavigates it to prove it's a whole new Continent should it actually get a new name. If it's named after the first person to sail around it, then hopefully it doesn't end up with a name like "Donaldia"
Only once somebody circumnavigates it to prove it's a whole new Continent should it actually get a new name. If it's named after the first person to sail around it, then hopefully it doesn't end up with a name like "Donaldia"
Duncan II MacGiric
Lived: 1486-1551
Head of House MacGiric: 1501-1551
King of Scotland: 1501-1551
Lived: 1486-1551
Head of House MacGiric: 1501-1551
King of Scotland: 1501-1551
The balance of power in 16th century Europe was defined by an almost symbiotic relationship between Scotland and France. After the break-up of the Franco-Irish union in the last years of the previous century, the Kingdom of Ireland became increasingly aloof from European power plays, whilst France flexed its muscles on the continent. Between 1502 and 1509 France and Scotland fought a large scale war against a coalition of Burgundy, Germany and the Byzantine Empire in an ultimately failed attempt to expand French power towards the Alps and Rhine – the two sides eventually agreeing a white peace. Then between 1510 and 1512 the French rode to Scotland’s assistance following a Scottish invasion of England (the English having once again attempted to break free of Scotland’s economic domination by expelling Scottish merchants) which triggered off a continental conflict. This time the ‘Auld Alliance’ was victorious. The axis of power established between Edinburgh and Paris would prove one of the most enduring, powerful and stable of the Early Modern era.
Across the Ocean, from the beginning of the century Scottish colonisation of the Americas quickly took off. During the 1500s, 10s and 20s the Gilchrist merchant family established what was almost a personal family fief. First establishing settlements on Newfoundland they later seized control of the Saint Lawrence River and areas of the North American mainland to the North, South and West of Newfoundland. Whilst paying relatively minimal dues to the crown, they were already making impressive profits through the various monopolies the crown had promised them in exchange for bankrolling the first trans-Atlantic expeditions. Unsurprisingly, as the Gilchrists’ financial rise off the backs of their American ventures continues, Scotland’s other mercantile establishments were eager to become involved. The first non-Gilchrist sponsored colony was established to the South at Boston in 1527 with other smaller colonies, independent of the Gilchrists established by various groups through the 1530s and 1540s as Scottish interests in the New World grew rapidly. The division between the Gilchrist controlled areas in the North and the smaller colonies to the South was eventually set in stone when the crown intervened in the increasingly hostile competition between the two colonial forms by dividing the Scots colonies between ‘Nova Scotia’, in which the Gilchrists enjoyed dominance in the North, and ‘New Yorkshire’, where the other colonies were free from the economic and political privileges of the Gilchrists, in the South.
For all the talk of new frontiers, and new riches, this period was primarily one of acute crisis for Scotland. Financially, Duncan II spent most of his reign on the brink of bankruptcy – the crown only being saved from defaulting on its debts in the mid-1540s by the plundering of England. From the end of the 15th century the Scottish crown had been struggling with a precarious financial situation, this was significantly aggravated by Duncan’s propensity to wage long and expensive wars on the continent on one hand and the King’s fascination with transforming Scotland into the greatest maritime power on earth.
During the latter 15th century, and then again during the wars of 1502-1512, the Royal Navy had performed very poorly. After 1512 Duncan II became obsessed with constructing a vast, state of the art, fleet with which he could successfully project Scottish power across Northern and Western Europe. This, unsurprisingly, was a very expensive process. In an attempt to balance the books, Duncan fell under the sway of a cabal of radical reformers associated with the mercantilist wing of Scotland’s merchant community. Increasing the level of taxation across the board, the reformers also instituted heavy tariffs on foreign goods, placed restrictions on foreign merchants almost totally blocking them from any involved in trans-Atlantic trade and introduced a wide variety of charges designed to extract funds from every level of economic activity in Scotland. It was a bold project, and ultimately a disaster.
The new exactions placed upon the peasantry by both the state and landowners triggered an epidemic of popular violence which reached its pinnacle during the late 1510s and 1520s. This violence ranged from riots, the hanging of tax collectors through to full blown rebellions – notably the Midlands Peasants’ Revolt of 1523-25 which ravaged a large part of the Anglo-Scots borderlands and a Highland Revolt in 1524-27. Across Scottish society corruption ran wild and instability crippled the Kingdom, significantly, at court, Duncan II saw the crown’s financial situation worsen considerably.
In 1526 the mercantilists fell suddenly from grace as Duncan II turned back towards a traditionalist noble clique. Whilst the traditionalists blamed the country’s woes on upstart commoners rising above their station, they struggled to find a credible solution to either the crown’s financial difficulties or the increasingly strained relationship between the different parts of Scottish society. Despite the shift in political power back in favour of the aristocracy, the new regime found itself incapable of reversing the Kingdom’s problems. Another expensive war, in which Scotland’s new fleet proved itself second to none, against Aquitaine and Germany between 1530 and 1535 only made the situation worse.
The height of Scotland’s 16th century woes was not reached until after the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in 1532 with transformed the religious life of Northern Europe. The Reformation began in the Dutch speaking cities of Amsterdam (in Frisia) and Utrecht (ruled by Scotland). Here the religious non-conformism of the Scottophone merchants combined with native disgust at the state of the Catholic Church to produce a group of prominent religious reformers. When the respected reforming preacher Robin van Zee was excommunicated from the Church following the publication of an infamous Thesis that called for radical structural change to the Church, a new religious movement was born in Amsterdam. Within a short period the Bible had been translated into both Dutch and Scots, benefitting from the backing of the King of Frisia and widespread enthusiasm across the Dutch nobility, merchant community and most of the clergy, the ‘Protestants’ came to control the Church in both the Kingdom of Frisia and the Scottish ruled enclaves of Utrecht and Ostfriesland.
Within a very short period of time the torch of religious rebellion spread across the Northern European trading routes to both the Kingdom of Scotland itself and the Baltic. Within Scotland Protestantism quickly became the faith of the non-conformist post-Fraticelli reformers within the Church as well the greater part of the merchant community. From there Protestantism percolated into the wider community, converting nobles, peasants and townsfolk towards its message. By the early 1540s the Eastern shoreline of the Kingdom, from the Humber to the Highlands, as well as the area around South Wales and Bristol, were predominantly Protestant whilst the rest of the country remained, majority Catholic.
In Scotland the religious schism caused blind panic at court. Duncan II was personally a proudly devout Catholic, even being named Defender of Faith by the Pope; he had strong contacts in Rome and believed passionately in the unity of Christendom. He also saw the Protestants as a dangerous threat to Scotland’s social stability – believing that, following in the Medieval Fraticelli tradition, they would soon make attempts to overturn the social order. The King’s solution was to attempt to throttle Protestantism in Scotland before it could become too powerful. In 1539 a series of laws were issued which outlawed a number of Protestant practises including the translation of the Bible into Scots (or Dutch), the denial of transubstantiation and ‘defamation of the Church’. When Scottish officials attempted to implement these laws in Utrecht the city raised the flag of revolt – expelling Edinburgh’s officials and, with the support of the Frisians – declaring itself a ‘Free City’. With Ostfriesland being occupied by Protestant rebels shortly thereafter, Scotland’s latest round of religious warfare had begun.
Although during the 1540s the spread of Protestantism in Scotland began to slow down, the religious movement continued to gain new adherents as it spread wider and deeper into Scottish society. The response of Duncan and his regime was to intensify their suppression of the movement – executing high profile Protestant preachers across the Kingdom. On St Andrews Day, 1547, the Bishop of Edinburgh became the first top ranking clergyman in Scotland to openly adopt Protestantism. Quickly the Bishop was arrested and then publically burnt at the stake. Then, all hell broke loose.
The St Andrews Day massacre remains, to this day, one of the most infamous moments in Scottish history, and in the history of the Reformation. Following the execution of the Bishop, the overwhelmingly Protestant city of Edinburgh erupted into violence as mobs attacked and killed Catholics across the city. Duncan II, alongside the entire royal court, fled the city, leaving a political vacuum in the capital. As the dust settled upon Edinburgh on December 1st a group of city fathers took extraordinary action as, mirroring the actions of Gilbert the Liberator over a century before, they convened Parliament in the absence of the King, and indeed most of the Parliamentarians. There the city fathers denounced Duncan II as a tyrant, claiming to employ the same authority that Duncan’s illustrious ancestor had when bringing down the last MacDrostan, Edinburgh’s city fathers declared war on their King. Scotland had been sucked into religious civil war.
As Scotland descended into its most destructive conflict since the Second Fraticelli Wars of the 13th and 14th centuries, the King’s authority started to erode rapidly. From Edinburgh, the capital’s burghers built up a powerful rebel coalition that was able to establish control over the Lothians, Fife, Angus and Perthshire whilst appealing to the Clansmen of the Highlands and attacking the royalist bastions of Aberdeenshire. Elsewhere, from 1548 the Count of York, Richard Maud, led a major revolt in Yorkshire and Lancashire – establishing an alternate, Protestant, Archbishop of York as a means of providing further legitimacy to the rebels. Finally, there were a series of risings in the Protestant lands around the Bristol Channel, on a similar basis to the popular revolts of the 1510s and 20s, which had limited success and cohesion.
As the Protestants continued to make important gains, a division started to emerge within the Royalist camp between those who advocated the total destruction of the Protestant enemy and others who hoped to bring an end to the war and attempt to heal the wounds of conflict.
King Duncan II, until the end, was very much a hardliner. However, his death paved the way for a potential change of course. Duncan III, the Duncan II’s grandson, was a legitimised bastard with an uneasy relationship with the arch-traditionalists within the Catholic camp. There were whispers that whilst he favoured some sort of reconciliation, the hardliners wished to replace him with his uncle Duke Malcolm of Galloway. In 1551, after four years of war, Scotland’s future was filled with uncertainty.
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For now, we will stick with North America. Although in the final decade of Duncan II's reign the first non-Scottish New World colonies started to be establish in the Caribbean
. Apologies for the lack of maps - for some reason I took almost no pics of the New world during this reign.Well, you weren't wrong about things starting to unravel!
It would be hilarious if England ends up colonising there
It would be deliciously appropriate
.So the race begin ...
Colonize this timeline's New England, just because
Also, a RP question : You named the scottish rulers according to their english version. In a Scotland free of norman english influence, wouldn't they rather be in gaelic ?
I think you mean New Yorkshire!
In the previous part we had discussions about this. Basically, as in RL, Scotland starts in the Middle Ages divided amongst various cultural groups with Gaelic speakers strong in the North and West. As in RL they are pushed out by a more dominant Scots culture which shares a lot with the English. ITL 'Scots' is the main culture of Lowland Scotland, Northern England and Wales and would be pretty similar to modern English just with a bit more Scottish flair.
This too!
I know, but for most areas I will use OTL names for sake of ease. But we will get things like Canada being Nova Scotia and New Yorkshire replacing the New England etc.
I'll keep it with the easy option for America. But as in OTL - we could have had a map maker called Amerigo giving his name to the continent.
In this time line they set off from Greenland looking for a new land mass rather than from Europe looking for East Asia. No pear shaped world theories here
.I'm sticking with America rather than Donaldia or Gilchristia
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What foresight they had!
Great to see another update, Tommy.
Just read the first few updates. I'll be following along to see the development of Scotland. I was also wondering if you will be posting a table of content.
Scotland's monarchs really need to get a "How to be Religiously Tolerant for Dummies" book.
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Ah, fun times indeed. Soon, both camps will be claiming that the ghost of Maid Madeline stands with them. Executions galore, I would hope
Executions galore, I would hope