Britannia's Frontier

TTL will be about the Pilgrims being forced south by bad weather, rather than north. They end up inland and forging an alliance with the Cherokee.
 
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Actually, I think I'll do it about an alternate settlement of the East Coast by Britain, centred around the Mayflower Pilgrims reaching their true destination of Jamestown rather than Massachusetts.
 
The Pilgrims set off in the Mayflower with a Charter from the London Virginia Company that gave them the right to settle the mouth of the Hudson River, then under the nominal control of the Netherlands. Unfortunately for the Pilgrims, nature intervened.

A great storm pushed the ship further south than they had planned. Putting in at Jamestown to repair the rotting hull of the Mayflower, the poor weather continued. Eager to carry out their godly work, the Pilgrims paid a visit to the London Company's offices in Jamestown, where the traded in their charter to settle the Hudson for a charter to build a town inland, in the hinterland in the west.[1]

Unfortunately, the Pilgrims had not properly equipped themselves with farming equipment and none were experienced farmers. To even survive, they were forced to bring a multitude of settlers from Jamestown itself. This diluted the Puritan ideals of the Pilgrims. The prospective colony of Plymouth[2] got off to a poor start. Even with the Jamestowners, agriculture was poor, and disease was rife. Attacks from aggressive tribes wore away at the population, reducing them to 133.

Thankfully, the local Salaki[3] tribes were enemies of the tribes that attacked Plymouth. To spite their enemies, they helped the Pilgrims, showing them how to farm the land and hunt the animals that lived there. Unfortunately for the Salaki, smallpox killed off swathes of their population. Their salvation came in the Pilgrims. Seeing the suffering of the tribes who had saved them, they took in and cared for many Salaki. They were partly motivated by their godly mission, but in purely pragmatic terms, they hoped to harness the Salaki reputation as fine warriors.

[1]-OTL Tennessee
[2]-Can't think of a better name, but they're not on the coast so if anyone can think of a better name...
[3]-Cherokee. More based on what they call themselves, Tsalagi.
 
Get them out of Jamestown as soon as possible. Jamestown, with its bad water and mosquito-borne diseases, was a death pit that ate thousands of lives before its residents had enough sense to move to better land.
 
Before I do this update, remember first that my expertise isn't in this era, and second that this is only the bones of the TL.

As the reduced Cherokee tribes that had good relations with Plymouth and the Pilgrims gravitated toward the town, founding hamlets that the 'Fathers' came to govern, tobacco and sugar cultivation became more and more important. Indentured servants from Britain also increased the population of the new colony, and the clean water and air of the area meant that soon, Plymouth had a larger population than Jamestown.

Knowing a good thing when they saw it, the London Company transferred their headquarters to Plymouth and it became the capital of Virginia. The Fathers were given positions as de facto governors of the colony, and their governance ensured an amicable relationship with some Native groups.

The Fathers encouraged Puritan settlement from England and Presbyterian-Calvanist settlement from Scotland. They saw Plymouth, and by extension Virginia, as a great project to change the Church in the New World. Under James I, there was some restriction on the expansion of Puritanism but on the whole they thrived.

Elsewhere, much reduced settlement of New England meant that the Dutch largely laid claim to the land in the name of New Netherland.

By 1638, Virginia was booming, a true English success story. Or a British success story. I good proportion of the population were Scotsmen or Welshmen, exiled from their homeland for their differing religious views. Crypto-Catholic Charles enforced his newly Episcopal Anglicanism, and all difference was frowned upon.

Charles did not approve of the growth of Puritanism and radical Protestantism in Virginia, and tried to counter this with the creation of Avalon and Maryland. Both were meant as Catholic colonies, but only Maryland took off. Avalon became a busy fishing port but had little reason to become inflamed. Maryland bordered Puritan Virginia and Calvinist New Netherland and Catholicism became Maryland's defining feature.

The situation was not exactly idyllic in Virginia though. The religious exiles in Virginia usually had little experience of farming, especially not the kind practiced in the colonies. This required a steady stream of other settlers, who diluted the Father's Puritan dream. The Cherokee intervention had also dragged Virginia into the dark world of Native geopolitics, and a big chunk of the budget was swallowed up by having to defend against the enemies of the Cherokee.
 
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In 1622, two years after the Pilgrim's arrival in Virginia, Ferdinando Gorges and John Mason founded the Colony of Maine, as part of the territories of the Plymouth Council of New England. In 1629, each man took a section of the colony, Mason founding New Hampshire in the south and Gorges founding New Somersetshire in the north. Gorges encouraged Anglican settlement, and began to enforce a sort of crypto-feudal system to control his part of the colony. Mason was more traditional, but his method drew more settlers.

In 1624, a small fishing village was established at Cape Ann, also be the Plymouth Council. To run the village and its environs, a subsidiary Dorchester Company was founded. The colony, although founded by a Puritan minister, proved to be an unattractive site for Puritans who preferred to go to warmer climes in Virginia. Instead, it became home to many Anglicans, who moved there at the auspices of William Laud, who hoped to counterbalance the rise of Catholicism and radical Protestantism in America. Dorchester took over much of the remaining north and east of the Massachusetts area.

South of these provinces, was the New Haven Colony. Fervently Puritan, they developed a less than pleasant reputation amongst the moderate colonies. There were frequent skirmishes between the Haveners and their Dutch neighbours. They had an attitude to the Natives which largely explained the lack of trouble from the Natives in the region. There were barely any left.

British America was a cooking pot of religious turmoil, much like Britain herself. And in 1641, it was going to overflow...

alternate british american colonies.png
 
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In 1641, the greatest political crisis in British history broke out. A civil war of epic proportions that killed up to a third of Britain's manfolk and spread wherever Britons lay thick on the ground. Including America.

Maine, Dorchester and Newfoundland were secular colonies, and their legislatures cared little for what denomination you were from, and thus were largely ignored by Charles I's crypto-Catholic government.

Maryland and Avalon benefited to a large extent from Charles I's 'reforms'. Both received more funding and more settlers, mostly from Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, though Anglican settlement was encouraged. Avalon remained mostly secular, as its cold climate encouraged only tough, hardy settlers who could tolerate a life on the edge of nature.

Virginia and New Haven however, found funding from England was cut, and settlers diverted to other colonies. Their Puritan ideals did not fit into Charles's view of what England and her other territories were to become. The position of the Fathers in Virginian government was cut out, and they were replaced with more manageable Anglican rulers. And Maryland was awarded a large claim area into what was traditionally Virgina. New Haven was small enough to be ignored, and was unpopular enough with its neighbours for shunning to be carried out fairly easily.

Many Puritans fled to New Netherland in this dark age of religious persecution. The Dutch benefited from this wave of immigration and was able to expand their colony to a great extent, cutting of the two blocks of British settlement.

But this was all about to change. In 1641, the English Civil War started. Precipitated by rebellion in Scotland, civil war engulfed the British Isles. And it wasn't long before it reached the shores of America.

The New England colonies formed a neutral block, though a newly aggressive New Haven to a certain extent pushed them into the Royalist camp. The Newfoundland colonies and Maryland were resolutely Royalist, while Virginia and New Haven were just as vehemently Parliamentarian.

The War in America was fought primarily along the Maryland-Virginia border. In England, the Royalists were fighting a losing battle, but in America, they went from success to success. With New England neutral, and Newfoundland secure, the Royalists were able to attack Parliamentarian colonies with impunity. The famous Avalon corsairs wer the subject of the recent film, Pirates of Avalon: For God and King.

But with the execution of the King in 1649, Cromwell and his New Model Army soon consolidated the Isles under the rule of an increasingly powerful military dictatorship. Soon, Cromwell would be sent to America, to quell the continuing war and bring peace and a new Puritan order to the colonies.

Landing in Virginia, he marched his army and the Plymouth Militia on Maryland. Tales of what happened in Maryland are told and retold today, and are the subject of continued scrutiny today. Though the massacres were certainly not on the scale of Ireland, the extent of Cromwell's violence and ruthlessness are still villified there today.

Seeing which way the war was going, New England declared on the side of Parliament, and a fleet sent north. Newfoundland turned on its sister colony and Cromwell meant to seize the dreaded Corsairs and their ill-gotten booty. The subject of conspiracy theories to this day, he never found the Corsair fleet, or a single coin of their allegedly vast treasure. It is thought that the Corsairs escaped into the icy wastes in northern French America, and there perished.

Cromwell returned to England in 1653, to find a failing administration. Using his troops to disband it, it wasn't long before he was military dictator and king in all but name. He renamed Maryland, calling it New Cambridgeshire, after his home county.
 
Rule of the Commonwealth

Oliver Cromwell ruled as Lord Protector of England and achieved a lot. A new Puritan order was set out and Catholics were put in their place. A sort of millenial fever overtook the country and a wild energy seized the nation that would never be equalled for over a hundred years. Vast changes were made to all aspects of government.

The Catholic colonies of New Cambridgshire and Avalon were severely restrained, and virtually put under the governance of neighbouring colonies. New England and Newfoundland who were either neutral or worse during the civil war were also restrained, New Haven becoming the virtual metropole of the Northern English colonies. This intense reign would breed resentment, but it would acclimatise Americans to intense rule from the mother country.

The Netherlands and England agreed at least one border in their colonies, leading to a period of reconciliation between the two, often fractious, countries. The Dutch consolidated this large area, and agreed to respect the current borders of all English colonies.

The Commonwealth was generally benign, though its religious intolerance and its radical politics alienated much of Europe. The New Model Army seized Dunkerque in a war with France, and enraged the Spanish and French through botched expansion in the Caribbean.

When Cromwell died in 1658, his son Richard took the reigns of power, and tried to guide England as well as his father had. Unforunately, he proved poor, and handed over to a trusted lieutenant, George Monck.

Monck is considered the last Lord Protector of England. He maintained a secret correspondence with the errant King Charles II in France, and laid the ground for a successful and peaceful restoration of the Stuart monarchy.

Most of the oppressive Puritan legislation like the bans on Christmas and May Poles were removed, though there was little effort to restore a more bicameral legislature. Monck secured an alliance with the Dutch against Spain and France and spearheaded a reconciliation with the Catholic powers. The New England colonies were freed from New Haven, and New Cambridgshire was freed from Virginia.

Charles II returned to England in 1664, and joined Parliament, simply as 'Charles Stuart'. Monck had Charles elevated to Co-Protector, and the two ruled in a diarchy until Monck's death in 1670. Charles then became sole Lord Protector, though only for two weeks, as Parliament agreed to elevate him to King, and restore the monarchy.
 
Reign of Charles II

Charles II is known today as the 'Merry Monarch'. He took little interest in ruling, leaving his capable ministers and the administration constructed by Monck to govern. But he pulled Britain into a rennaisance in art, architecture, science and geography. Particularly active in Scotland and Ireland, he did more than any previous monarch to try and pull the threads of his three kingdoms into his vision of a single United Kingdom.

Perhaps just as important was his reinvigoration of the proprietoral colonial tradition. Maine was allowed to expand its border and two more shires were added. New Cambridgeshire returned to being Maryland, and most importantly, the charter for Carolina was commissioned. Named after his father, and carved out of Virginia and the nascent English claim in the south, Carolina would become the primary cause of the future Anglo-Spaniard Wars.

Charles attempted to reconcile the often chafing religious divisions in his territories, trying to invest in Ireland to reduce tensions between the Plantation Protesteants and the Catholics to little avail. The experiment had its greatest success in America, where he managed to heal the divisions between Puritans and Anglicans, though the attitude towards Catholics remained tense.

Despite the general relief throughout England and the other territroies after the Puritan experiment, there was still deep tensions, especially the return to absolutism at the end of his reign.
 
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Anglo-Spanish Wars

After the formation and settlement of Carolina, Spain and England came into conflict over the area, specifically Florida and the Gulf Coast. Three Anglo-Spanish Wars followed, with varying success.

The wars started at the behest of James, Duke of York, though a Catholic was more than willing to glorify England, and England's allies the Dutch would be more than willing to help them fight the Spanish. The two first Anglo-Spanish Wars ended in a rough status quo.

The Third would be different. England convinced France to side with them, promising them more land in Spanish America, and cessions of claims in the north. The Spanish were comprehensively defeated, and England's claims seized. Two new colonies were carved out of the two Spanish colonies of East and West Florida. The colonies of New York based around East Florida, and Pennstria around West Florida. New York developed into a wealthy colony, under James's patronage and became another secular colony like Carolina. Pennstria was leased to the Penn family and became a Quaker colony around the Mississippi.
 
Dutch Acadia

Shortly after the Anglo-Spanish Wars, the tenuous Franco-Dutch Alliance fell apart. While England organised its colonies and sat back to reap the rewards, France and Holland went to war. One of the only results of the war was the Dutch occupation of French Acadie. A cold, sparsely populated colony, it had a French population who had lived there for generations. The Dutch seized the colony and consolidated it under their control, and forced themselves to the Great Lakes. French domination in Canada and Ohio had been critically damaged and agreed to an end to the fighting. England recognised the new Dutch conquests and the New England charter was altered to take this into account. The focus of English and later British colonisation of North America was shifted toward the south, not the north, permanently.
 
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