The Union of Crowns: A Timeline
- Thread starter Sarthak
- Start date
That marriage looks interesting specially a Britanno-Swedish alliance will be a power house.
Also I think that the Medici will probably have a role in this TL although what it will be I am unsure.
Really curious as to how this 20 year war will play out and how large the change will be in the world.
Also I think that the Medici will probably have a role in this TL although what it will be I am unsure.
Really curious as to how this 20 year war will play out and how large the change will be in the world.
Well if it holds yes
The Tuscans in the 1600s were interesting people.......
Much like the 30 years war otl, it will have severe consequences
Thanks will edit
O Neil will probably become a rather prolific general when the war hits and I honestly doubt he will survive it either due to age or just something happens to him in the war.
Also Prince Henry might be a rather militant person in case he becomes a general, much to his father's dismay.
O'Neil is too old to be a on field commander by 1612. Though yes Prince Henry just might become a general.
Damn. Good Queen Anne’s body was barely even cold in the ground before her daughter was married off to the Swedish traitors 
Gregory XV actually saw little to no reason to interfere with marriage politics and let everyone do as they wished in that regards
Unfortunately.........yeah.Damn. Good Queen Anne’s body was barely even cold in the ground before her daughter was married off to the Swedish traitors
sorry yeah Paul V. He was more or less alright with James VI until he started to persecute Catholics in Ireland from 1607.
VVD0D95
Banned
Ahh okay abd of course given that janes has granted some tolerance for catholics that issue isn’t present here. Got you.
Yeah more or less. It is much like a Bohemia before 1618 analogue with Ireland within the Kingdom has been granted religious autonomy and freedom
comparatively the land given to the EIC is small, extremely small, however it is extremely strategic and a crucial first foothold in India, so yes, a good beginning for the EIC
Chapter 9: The Calm before Storm
The Union of Crowns
Chapter 9: The Calm before Storm
***
From The Union of Crowns by Robert William Johnson
“Perhaps the greatest fact about English and British colonization and its difference between their own style of colonization and the Spanish style of colonization was that the Anglos, Scots and Irishmen who settled down in the Americas were more individualist, and more democratic and more capitalistic than their Spanish counterparts. Britain liked to keep their colonies decentralized, to allow the colonies, who would know better about the local conditions, to do as they pleased, as long as they stood within British policy limits, however the Spanish liked to exercise total centralizing dominance over their colonies which forced many opportunities in Spanish hands to slip beneath their fingers.
A depiction of the Susquehannock
However the greatest defect of this decentralization was that often, colonies started wars with the natives and local colonies of other European powers on their own, dragging the motherland with them. One such war was the 1st Albionic-Susquehannock War. The first conflict between the Native Americans and the British colonizers. Led by popular and powerful admiral and colonizer, John Smith, the first contact that the Susquehannock and the British had was in 1608 when the Natives arrived at the outskirts of Anneville to trade with them. The Susquehannock had traded with French settlers in Canada and the Canadiens and as a result, the Susquehannock were well accustomed to trading with the so called White man. Indeed, the French had extensive trading contacts with the Susquehannock, with Samuel de Champlain, the man who would become the first governor of French Canada would write down in 1611 that the Susquehannock were frequent visitors of northern Canada and the French settlements.
Samuel de Champlain
The Susquehannock and the British lived together in peace and harmony more or less for the first few years of the colonization of Virginia [1] and the two sides traded with one another extensively. That was however not to last. Both sides were to blame for the conflict. Colonists often entered Native territory on purpose at times to forage for food when the territory they controlled did not render enough food for the settlements, angering the natives, and the natives also started to conduct raids inside the settlements which were harmful and deadly to the colonists. On the 18th of August 1613, the Colony of Virginia, which was basically just Anneville and the surrounding territories during this time, counter attacked against a raid from the Utchowig tribe of the Susquehannock and decided that compensation for the raids were needed. Led by Captain John Ratcliffe, around 30 colonists departed from Anneville in a small raiding maneuver and attacked the Utchowig’s settlements in the northern regions and demanded that the tribe give them compensation for the damages that they had made in the colony. The Utchowig appealed to the strongest warlord of the Susquehannock, a man named Wisck[2], who hailed from the Cepowig tribe. Wisck declared that the Utchowig had been in the right and that the British colonizers who not receive any sort of compensation.
This angered the colonists, and from a population of 3000 colonists in and around of Anneville, around 300 militiamen were raised by the colony and they attacked the settlement of Cepowig, which was the place for which the Cepowig tribe was named after. The Cepowig under Wisck fought back, and the colonists were routed at first, as they had poor understanding of the terrain and the Natives were fighting on home territory. However, the colonists were soon back and after the Battle of Cepowig on the 19th of September, 1612, the settlement was razed by colonists. The colonists then started to loot the settlement and then they turned to face the consequences of their actions. The Utchowig, Attaock, and Tsinigh tribes of the Susquehannock were all alarmed by this action of the Colonists and banded together in a confederacy to attack and defeat the colonists. The Colonists may have had the technology to defeat the natives, however the natives had their knowledge of the area, and the force of numbers on their side, and anyone with a proper brain could see what would happen if the colonists entered the fray of battle without proper thinking. So John Smith allied the colony with the Quadroque, a Susquehannock tribe which had a bone to pick with the Utchowig due to their disputed land territories of their tribes. Together they attacked the so called Susquehannock Confederacy after winter had passed on the 13th of February 1613 and defeated the Susquehannock Confederacy at the Battle of Susquehanna on the 27th of February, 1613. The Natives now saw that the colonists were not going to lose easily and they decided to cut their loses. Wisck approached Smith and Rattcliffe and sued for peace. On the 25th of March, 1613 the Treaty of Cepowig was signed between the colonists and the Susquehannock Confederacy, which under the stable hand of Wisck was seemingly becoming a permanently nation state entity.
Susquehannock warriors on the outskirts of Anneville during the war.
The treaty was lackluster compared to modern treaties ranging from twenty to fifty pages, and instead this treaty covered barely 2 pages. In it, the colonists got the compensation they asked for in return for granting the right of the natives to defend their land from any intruder from the colonists in a non-fatal manner. As a show of good faith, Wisck’s daughter, a ~20 year woman named Achonhaeffti was married to John Ratcliffe, the commander of the militiamen, as a measure of maintaining the newfound peace.
A depiction of Achonhaeffti
Before 1613, Englishmen and Scots and Irishmen who populated the colony didn’t marry native women due to the cultural arrogance that the northern Europeans had in regards to Native American culture during this time period, alongside the implacable conviction that for some reason the natives would be culturally assimilated in no time. Achonhaeffti found barriers to her peace offered marriage with Ratcliffe as the man refused to marry a ‘pagan’. Achonhaeffti subsequently converted to the Britannic Church and took the Anglicized name of Achonisia, though she continued to call herself Achonhaeffti in private and with family. Ratcliffe agreed to marry her after the conversion took place. The marriage of Ratcliffe and Achonhaeffti would prove to be an important marker in British colonial history. After this event most colonists would agree to marry native women if they converted to Christianity. The colonial holdings of Britain during the early 17th century had a lack of women and the intermarriage between the natives and colonists would give birth to a new intermixed race, which was termed by the colonists as ‘The Mixed’. The British would term them as the Mixtas. [3] In rare times, some colonial women too married converted native men, though in most occasions of these happenings, the native men often took the surname of their wife. The Susquehannock tribe would become the most intermixed tribe in colonial genetic history and the Mixtas represent a plural proportion of Anglo population in the New World even today (~15% – 25%). These Mixtas would go onto assimilate into British society though they retained enough of their native heritage to largely form a unique culture in and of themselves.” [4]
***
From The Stuart Age: The Golden Era of Britannia by John MacDonald
“It is perhaps important to note that James I had always been slightly sickly in nature, suffering from various diseases now and then. However the death of his wife the previous year, and the estranged relationship that he enjoyed with his eldest son, Henry Frederick had torn the man’s heart. He was criticized in court for the extravagance of his living style, and the parliament was always eager to join critics of the monarchy. At the age of 47, on March 4, 1613 James I of Great Britannia died. He had been suffering from dysentery and violent bouts of porphyria for some time and the exhaustion of these diseases in an era before modern medicine, could sometimes become fatal. This was the case for James I and he succumbed to these diseases, living behind a powerful kingdom that was partially of his own making.
a Painting of Henry I of Britannia
Henry Frederick, just 19 and recently married, was proclaimed as King Henry I of Great Britannia, and though the new King hadn’t been close to his now late father, he ordered a week long mourning in the memory of him and declared that any vilifying sentence against the former king would be met with disastrous consequences. As was normal when a reigning monarch died, a new parliament was elected and convened and Henry I made his picks about the new positions in the British government known. Robert Cecil, the 1st Earl of Salisbury was to be promoted, and he became the Lord High Chancellor of Britannia, whilst Edward Conway, the 1st Viscount of Conway became the Secretary of the State. Edward Somerset, the 4th Earl of Worcester, and one of Henry I’s favorites in the government became the Lord Privy seal, whilst an opponent of his, Sir Humphrey May became the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Henry Montagu, the 1st Earl of Manchester, and a critic of the young king’s brash attitude also became the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Thomas Howard, the 14th Earl of Arundel became the secretary of state for England, whilst his father’s old favorite, Ludovic Stewart, the 2nd Duke of Lennox became the secretary of state for Scotland and his tutor, Hugh O’Neil, the Earl of Tyrone was appointed secretary of state for Ireland. Finally, William Douglas, a fierce critic of the union based in Scotland and a minor baron, was chosen as the Lord President of the Council.
The new Council.
This government was dubbed by Henry I as the ‘Governmental Council’ in line with the Monarch and the Parliament. The name that he applied would stick even until this day. [5] The appointment of several of his critics into the council surprised many but Henry I, despite all his rash and headstrong behavior knew that he was young, and not at all ready to govern the nation and neither was he ready to lead. Therefore his critics were chosen so that he hear proper truth regarding his action and try and improve upon them.
Despite this, Henry I was young and headstrong, and most of all he wanted the glory of war. He wanted a war so desperately that he asked Salisbury whether or not they could launch an expedition against the Habsburgs in the Low Countries in support of the Dutch, which would completely destroy the Truce that the Dutch had signed with the Spaniards some years before. Salisbury kindly and politely told his new King that the British economy was doing fine and would probably be able to withstand the strain of war, but the British had nowhere near the resources to create a fully functioning army that could be sent overseas. A few English and Scottish mercenaries were not armies. Henry I grumbled but he accepted the words of his old and wise Lord High Chancellor. Instead he turned to the Royal Navy. As an island nation, it was imperative for Britain to have a strong navy, but after 1588, the Royal Navy had been decaying and James I, who didn’t like navies all that well, had only continued its neglect. The once proud Royal Navy…….was a dump. It was weak and its paper strength was nowhere near the sad reality.
Henry I was furious.
King James, one of the warships commissioned by Henry I in the name of his father.
The Royal Navy underwent a massive corruption legislation in the latter half of 1613 and saw several inept commanders discharged from service. Under the brilliant financial heads of the Earl of Manchester and Richard Weston, money was raised to construct new better ships with more guns and firepower, and a massive corruption committee ousted several corrupt administrators and admirals within the Royal Navy. The Henry Charges as they would come to be known as would charge nearly 46 admirals, and over 280 administrators of the Royal Navy with corruption and nepotism and would see many of them discharged from service and a good few even arrested. It would prove the basis for the construction of the modern meaning of the Royal Navy as we know it.”
***
From Europe’s Tragedy: The Twenty Years War by Gustav de la Gardie
“When Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor, and head of the Austrian branch of the House of Habsburg, King of Bohemia and Hungary gazed down from the palace of Hradcany in Prague, he felt a rather light breeze of unease sweeping through his body. On one hand, the city was a city of high culture, intellectual ferment and political intrigue; on the other it was a breeding ground for heretics (in the eyes of Rudolf II) for men such as Giordano Bruno, alchemists such as John Dee etc. Equally the city was a thriving trade hub as the economic link between Austria, Hungary, Germany and Poland. Rudolf II would remark to his friend and aide, Cardinal Kesl that ‘Something is afoot in Prague. Something that will see Europe asunder.’
Christian of Anhalt.
Unfortunately for Europe, this foreshadowing would prove to be prophetic. Religious distrust between the Protestants and the Catholics ran extremely deep. Christian of Anhalt, for example, was the leading diplomatic monarch of the Protestant League and he unequivocally believed that a Papal-Habsburg conspiracy to eradicate Protestantism existed and as a result, the Protestant League would have to take several pre-emptive strikes against the Catholics to make sure that the Protestants had their rights and powers secured. Christian of Anhalt thus decided to make his protégé, Frederick V of the Palatinate, the face of Protestantism in the Holy Roman Empire, and training the young boy, began to involve himself in intrigues against the Habsburg Dynasty. Yet the war that Anhalt so desperately wanted never came to be, due to circumstances beyond his particular control. Henri IV’s assassination threw a spanner into his plans and the war he wanted was not going to come, at least for the time being.
Melchior Klesl, Bishop of Vienna
For the moment, however, the cause of peace did at least appear to have received a flip of sorts from a rather more unexpected quarter in the shape of Melchior Klesl, Bishop of Vienna, who had become Imperial Chancellor after Emperor Matthias’s election. Converting to Catholicism while a student at Vienna University, he had risen, as a result of Jesuit and Habsburg patronage and a silken tongue that was every bit as capable as his mind, to become Matthias’s counsellor-in chief. And in doing so, he had established an equally firm reputation as a clerical wheeler-dealer no less familiar with the teachings of Machiavelli than the precepts of the four evangelists. Yet in spite of his reputation as a man of few fixed principles and even fewer friends, it was Klesl’s pragmatism that now made him, arguably, the last best hope for peace, as he sought to arrest the drift towards confrontation by achieving a ‘composition’ of the contending religious factions, premised upon the dilution and transformation of both the Protestant Union and the Catholic League. For each alliance, as the bishop wisely appreciated, contained not only centrifugal forces, which might well be subtly exploited by skilful management, but also more moderate members who might easily be encouraged to co-operate with the right inducements.
The first priorities were to revive the traditional Imperial alliance with Catholic Mainz and Lutheran Saxony, thus restoring an important bridge across the religious divide, and then to convert the League into a wider non-confessional body under Imperial presidency which would include the Lutherans and thereby isolate the Palatinate, which under Anhalt, was becoming more and more belligerent as the days passed.
But even Klesl’s best efforts were only partially successful, for in August 1613 representatives of the Union had walked out of the Diet at Regensburg immediately after it opened when it became clear that, while some judicial reforms might be granted, their main demands regarding the abolition of the Reservatum Ecclesiasticum, the restoration of independence to Donauwörth, and the recognition of the religious liberty of Aachen – where in 1612, after several years of agitation supported by the Union, a Catholic magistracy installed by Spanish troops in 1598 had been overthrown – would not be met. And the bishop’s initial impact on the League became more pronounced still, after he had secured Austria’s admittance in 1613 and thereby prompted the withdrawal of Maximilian of Bavaria, who feared that this was indeed a prelude to the admittance of Lutherans.
Klesl’s worries grew bigger and bigger after his mixed attempts at reconciliation, when Mathias died on the 27th of December, 1613. The official reason given for the death was natural causes, however, Klesl knew better. Archduke Maximilian III of Austria, also known as Archduke Maximilian of Poland had poisoned the old emperor due to his rather pro-Protestant views. This allowed the door for Archduke Ferdinand of Styria to become Holy Roman Emperor. And as the electors began their journeys to Frankfurt for the new Imperial Election, tensions rose in Bohemia. Styria had been one of the most powerful strongholds of Protestantism in Upper Austria and Southern Germany but under the rule of Archduke Ferdinand, Protestantism had virtually been wiped off the map in that region of the Habsburg Monarchy. Many feared that Ferdinand would do the same in Bohemia and repeal the acts of tolerance in Bohemia, which was granted by Mathias and Rudolf II.
Archduke Ferdinand
Ferdinand’s reign coupled with his chief advisor, Archduke Maximilian’s policies, would prove to be the spark that set Europe alight.” [6]
---
***
[1] – remember Virginia ittl is Maryland otl.
[2] – real dude
[3] – Latin for Mixed
[4] – I did my research from To Make Them Like Us: European-Indian Intermarriage in Seventeenth Century North America by Jennifer Agee Jones in which she writes that apparently the early colonists were so starved for women that they accepted marriage with the natives until James I/VI sent more women colonists in 1615. That momentum of marrying between the two sides is not lost ittl
[5] – governmental council becomes the equivalent of cabinet ittl.
[6] - information from Europe in Flames: Crisis of the Thirty Years War by John Matusiak.
***
Chapter 9: The Calm before Storm
***
From The Union of Crowns by Robert William Johnson
“Perhaps the greatest fact about English and British colonization and its difference between their own style of colonization and the Spanish style of colonization was that the Anglos, Scots and Irishmen who settled down in the Americas were more individualist, and more democratic and more capitalistic than their Spanish counterparts. Britain liked to keep their colonies decentralized, to allow the colonies, who would know better about the local conditions, to do as they pleased, as long as they stood within British policy limits, however the Spanish liked to exercise total centralizing dominance over their colonies which forced many opportunities in Spanish hands to slip beneath their fingers.
A depiction of the Susquehannock
However the greatest defect of this decentralization was that often, colonies started wars with the natives and local colonies of other European powers on their own, dragging the motherland with them. One such war was the 1st Albionic-Susquehannock War. The first conflict between the Native Americans and the British colonizers. Led by popular and powerful admiral and colonizer, John Smith, the first contact that the Susquehannock and the British had was in 1608 when the Natives arrived at the outskirts of Anneville to trade with them. The Susquehannock had traded with French settlers in Canada and the Canadiens and as a result, the Susquehannock were well accustomed to trading with the so called White man. Indeed, the French had extensive trading contacts with the Susquehannock, with Samuel de Champlain, the man who would become the first governor of French Canada would write down in 1611 that the Susquehannock were frequent visitors of northern Canada and the French settlements.
Samuel de Champlain
The Susquehannock and the British lived together in peace and harmony more or less for the first few years of the colonization of Virginia [1] and the two sides traded with one another extensively. That was however not to last. Both sides were to blame for the conflict. Colonists often entered Native territory on purpose at times to forage for food when the territory they controlled did not render enough food for the settlements, angering the natives, and the natives also started to conduct raids inside the settlements which were harmful and deadly to the colonists. On the 18th of August 1613, the Colony of Virginia, which was basically just Anneville and the surrounding territories during this time, counter attacked against a raid from the Utchowig tribe of the Susquehannock and decided that compensation for the raids were needed. Led by Captain John Ratcliffe, around 30 colonists departed from Anneville in a small raiding maneuver and attacked the Utchowig’s settlements in the northern regions and demanded that the tribe give them compensation for the damages that they had made in the colony. The Utchowig appealed to the strongest warlord of the Susquehannock, a man named Wisck[2], who hailed from the Cepowig tribe. Wisck declared that the Utchowig had been in the right and that the British colonizers who not receive any sort of compensation.
This angered the colonists, and from a population of 3000 colonists in and around of Anneville, around 300 militiamen were raised by the colony and they attacked the settlement of Cepowig, which was the place for which the Cepowig tribe was named after. The Cepowig under Wisck fought back, and the colonists were routed at first, as they had poor understanding of the terrain and the Natives were fighting on home territory. However, the colonists were soon back and after the Battle of Cepowig on the 19th of September, 1612, the settlement was razed by colonists. The colonists then started to loot the settlement and then they turned to face the consequences of their actions. The Utchowig, Attaock, and Tsinigh tribes of the Susquehannock were all alarmed by this action of the Colonists and banded together in a confederacy to attack and defeat the colonists. The Colonists may have had the technology to defeat the natives, however the natives had their knowledge of the area, and the force of numbers on their side, and anyone with a proper brain could see what would happen if the colonists entered the fray of battle without proper thinking. So John Smith allied the colony with the Quadroque, a Susquehannock tribe which had a bone to pick with the Utchowig due to their disputed land territories of their tribes. Together they attacked the so called Susquehannock Confederacy after winter had passed on the 13th of February 1613 and defeated the Susquehannock Confederacy at the Battle of Susquehanna on the 27th of February, 1613. The Natives now saw that the colonists were not going to lose easily and they decided to cut their loses. Wisck approached Smith and Rattcliffe and sued for peace. On the 25th of March, 1613 the Treaty of Cepowig was signed between the colonists and the Susquehannock Confederacy, which under the stable hand of Wisck was seemingly becoming a permanently nation state entity.
Susquehannock warriors on the outskirts of Anneville during the war.
The treaty was lackluster compared to modern treaties ranging from twenty to fifty pages, and instead this treaty covered barely 2 pages. In it, the colonists got the compensation they asked for in return for granting the right of the natives to defend their land from any intruder from the colonists in a non-fatal manner. As a show of good faith, Wisck’s daughter, a ~20 year woman named Achonhaeffti was married to John Ratcliffe, the commander of the militiamen, as a measure of maintaining the newfound peace.
A depiction of Achonhaeffti
Before 1613, Englishmen and Scots and Irishmen who populated the colony didn’t marry native women due to the cultural arrogance that the northern Europeans had in regards to Native American culture during this time period, alongside the implacable conviction that for some reason the natives would be culturally assimilated in no time. Achonhaeffti found barriers to her peace offered marriage with Ratcliffe as the man refused to marry a ‘pagan’. Achonhaeffti subsequently converted to the Britannic Church and took the Anglicized name of Achonisia, though she continued to call herself Achonhaeffti in private and with family. Ratcliffe agreed to marry her after the conversion took place. The marriage of Ratcliffe and Achonhaeffti would prove to be an important marker in British colonial history. After this event most colonists would agree to marry native women if they converted to Christianity. The colonial holdings of Britain during the early 17th century had a lack of women and the intermarriage between the natives and colonists would give birth to a new intermixed race, which was termed by the colonists as ‘The Mixed’. The British would term them as the Mixtas. [3] In rare times, some colonial women too married converted native men, though in most occasions of these happenings, the native men often took the surname of their wife. The Susquehannock tribe would become the most intermixed tribe in colonial genetic history and the Mixtas represent a plural proportion of Anglo population in the New World even today (~15% – 25%). These Mixtas would go onto assimilate into British society though they retained enough of their native heritage to largely form a unique culture in and of themselves.” [4]
***
From The Stuart Age: The Golden Era of Britannia by John MacDonald
“It is perhaps important to note that James I had always been slightly sickly in nature, suffering from various diseases now and then. However the death of his wife the previous year, and the estranged relationship that he enjoyed with his eldest son, Henry Frederick had torn the man’s heart. He was criticized in court for the extravagance of his living style, and the parliament was always eager to join critics of the monarchy. At the age of 47, on March 4, 1613 James I of Great Britannia died. He had been suffering from dysentery and violent bouts of porphyria for some time and the exhaustion of these diseases in an era before modern medicine, could sometimes become fatal. This was the case for James I and he succumbed to these diseases, living behind a powerful kingdom that was partially of his own making.
a Painting of Henry I of Britannia
Henry Frederick, just 19 and recently married, was proclaimed as King Henry I of Great Britannia, and though the new King hadn’t been close to his now late father, he ordered a week long mourning in the memory of him and declared that any vilifying sentence against the former king would be met with disastrous consequences. As was normal when a reigning monarch died, a new parliament was elected and convened and Henry I made his picks about the new positions in the British government known. Robert Cecil, the 1st Earl of Salisbury was to be promoted, and he became the Lord High Chancellor of Britannia, whilst Edward Conway, the 1st Viscount of Conway became the Secretary of the State. Edward Somerset, the 4th Earl of Worcester, and one of Henry I’s favorites in the government became the Lord Privy seal, whilst an opponent of his, Sir Humphrey May became the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Henry Montagu, the 1st Earl of Manchester, and a critic of the young king’s brash attitude also became the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Thomas Howard, the 14th Earl of Arundel became the secretary of state for England, whilst his father’s old favorite, Ludovic Stewart, the 2nd Duke of Lennox became the secretary of state for Scotland and his tutor, Hugh O’Neil, the Earl of Tyrone was appointed secretary of state for Ireland. Finally, William Douglas, a fierce critic of the union based in Scotland and a minor baron, was chosen as the Lord President of the Council.
The new Council.
This government was dubbed by Henry I as the ‘Governmental Council’ in line with the Monarch and the Parliament. The name that he applied would stick even until this day. [5] The appointment of several of his critics into the council surprised many but Henry I, despite all his rash and headstrong behavior knew that he was young, and not at all ready to govern the nation and neither was he ready to lead. Therefore his critics were chosen so that he hear proper truth regarding his action and try and improve upon them.
Despite this, Henry I was young and headstrong, and most of all he wanted the glory of war. He wanted a war so desperately that he asked Salisbury whether or not they could launch an expedition against the Habsburgs in the Low Countries in support of the Dutch, which would completely destroy the Truce that the Dutch had signed with the Spaniards some years before. Salisbury kindly and politely told his new King that the British economy was doing fine and would probably be able to withstand the strain of war, but the British had nowhere near the resources to create a fully functioning army that could be sent overseas. A few English and Scottish mercenaries were not armies. Henry I grumbled but he accepted the words of his old and wise Lord High Chancellor. Instead he turned to the Royal Navy. As an island nation, it was imperative for Britain to have a strong navy, but after 1588, the Royal Navy had been decaying and James I, who didn’t like navies all that well, had only continued its neglect. The once proud Royal Navy…….was a dump. It was weak and its paper strength was nowhere near the sad reality.
Henry I was furious.
King James, one of the warships commissioned by Henry I in the name of his father.
The Royal Navy underwent a massive corruption legislation in the latter half of 1613 and saw several inept commanders discharged from service. Under the brilliant financial heads of the Earl of Manchester and Richard Weston, money was raised to construct new better ships with more guns and firepower, and a massive corruption committee ousted several corrupt administrators and admirals within the Royal Navy. The Henry Charges as they would come to be known as would charge nearly 46 admirals, and over 280 administrators of the Royal Navy with corruption and nepotism and would see many of them discharged from service and a good few even arrested. It would prove the basis for the construction of the modern meaning of the Royal Navy as we know it.”
***
From Europe’s Tragedy: The Twenty Years War by Gustav de la Gardie
“When Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor, and head of the Austrian branch of the House of Habsburg, King of Bohemia and Hungary gazed down from the palace of Hradcany in Prague, he felt a rather light breeze of unease sweeping through his body. On one hand, the city was a city of high culture, intellectual ferment and political intrigue; on the other it was a breeding ground for heretics (in the eyes of Rudolf II) for men such as Giordano Bruno, alchemists such as John Dee etc. Equally the city was a thriving trade hub as the economic link between Austria, Hungary, Germany and Poland. Rudolf II would remark to his friend and aide, Cardinal Kesl that ‘Something is afoot in Prague. Something that will see Europe asunder.’
Christian of Anhalt.
Unfortunately for Europe, this foreshadowing would prove to be prophetic. Religious distrust between the Protestants and the Catholics ran extremely deep. Christian of Anhalt, for example, was the leading diplomatic monarch of the Protestant League and he unequivocally believed that a Papal-Habsburg conspiracy to eradicate Protestantism existed and as a result, the Protestant League would have to take several pre-emptive strikes against the Catholics to make sure that the Protestants had their rights and powers secured. Christian of Anhalt thus decided to make his protégé, Frederick V of the Palatinate, the face of Protestantism in the Holy Roman Empire, and training the young boy, began to involve himself in intrigues against the Habsburg Dynasty. Yet the war that Anhalt so desperately wanted never came to be, due to circumstances beyond his particular control. Henri IV’s assassination threw a spanner into his plans and the war he wanted was not going to come, at least for the time being.
Melchior Klesl, Bishop of Vienna
For the moment, however, the cause of peace did at least appear to have received a flip of sorts from a rather more unexpected quarter in the shape of Melchior Klesl, Bishop of Vienna, who had become Imperial Chancellor after Emperor Matthias’s election. Converting to Catholicism while a student at Vienna University, he had risen, as a result of Jesuit and Habsburg patronage and a silken tongue that was every bit as capable as his mind, to become Matthias’s counsellor-in chief. And in doing so, he had established an equally firm reputation as a clerical wheeler-dealer no less familiar with the teachings of Machiavelli than the precepts of the four evangelists. Yet in spite of his reputation as a man of few fixed principles and even fewer friends, it was Klesl’s pragmatism that now made him, arguably, the last best hope for peace, as he sought to arrest the drift towards confrontation by achieving a ‘composition’ of the contending religious factions, premised upon the dilution and transformation of both the Protestant Union and the Catholic League. For each alliance, as the bishop wisely appreciated, contained not only centrifugal forces, which might well be subtly exploited by skilful management, but also more moderate members who might easily be encouraged to co-operate with the right inducements.
The first priorities were to revive the traditional Imperial alliance with Catholic Mainz and Lutheran Saxony, thus restoring an important bridge across the religious divide, and then to convert the League into a wider non-confessional body under Imperial presidency which would include the Lutherans and thereby isolate the Palatinate, which under Anhalt, was becoming more and more belligerent as the days passed.
But even Klesl’s best efforts were only partially successful, for in August 1613 representatives of the Union had walked out of the Diet at Regensburg immediately after it opened when it became clear that, while some judicial reforms might be granted, their main demands regarding the abolition of the Reservatum Ecclesiasticum, the restoration of independence to Donauwörth, and the recognition of the religious liberty of Aachen – where in 1612, after several years of agitation supported by the Union, a Catholic magistracy installed by Spanish troops in 1598 had been overthrown – would not be met. And the bishop’s initial impact on the League became more pronounced still, after he had secured Austria’s admittance in 1613 and thereby prompted the withdrawal of Maximilian of Bavaria, who feared that this was indeed a prelude to the admittance of Lutherans.
Klesl’s worries grew bigger and bigger after his mixed attempts at reconciliation, when Mathias died on the 27th of December, 1613. The official reason given for the death was natural causes, however, Klesl knew better. Archduke Maximilian III of Austria, also known as Archduke Maximilian of Poland had poisoned the old emperor due to his rather pro-Protestant views. This allowed the door for Archduke Ferdinand of Styria to become Holy Roman Emperor. And as the electors began their journeys to Frankfurt for the new Imperial Election, tensions rose in Bohemia. Styria had been one of the most powerful strongholds of Protestantism in Upper Austria and Southern Germany but under the rule of Archduke Ferdinand, Protestantism had virtually been wiped off the map in that region of the Habsburg Monarchy. Many feared that Ferdinand would do the same in Bohemia and repeal the acts of tolerance in Bohemia, which was granted by Mathias and Rudolf II.
Archduke Ferdinand
Ferdinand’s reign coupled with his chief advisor, Archduke Maximilian’s policies, would prove to be the spark that set Europe alight.” [6]
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[1] – remember Virginia ittl is Maryland otl.
[2] – real dude
[3] – Latin for Mixed
[4] – I did my research from To Make Them Like Us: European-Indian Intermarriage in Seventeenth Century North America by Jennifer Agee Jones in which she writes that apparently the early colonists were so starved for women that they accepted marriage with the natives until James I/VI sent more women colonists in 1615. That momentum of marrying between the two sides is not lost ittl
[5] – governmental council becomes the equivalent of cabinet ittl.
[6] - information from Europe in Flames: Crisis of the Thirty Years War by John Matusiak.
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