Cinco de Mayo

[KingSweden24]

"...there are years, such as 1815, 1848 and 1867 that seem plainly as they are occurring to be the kinds of years that fundamentally reshape history; 1878 was another kind, one that can be seen as a profoundly important annum only in hindsight, with the seeds that are sown in history's fertile soil [1]..."

- XIXth: A Comprehensive History of the 1800s

[1] Love me some purple prose

 

[KingSweden24]

"...Pius IX would then pass a month later, leaving the two adversaries dead and the political situation in Italy unclear, bordering on potentially unstable. Upon receiving word of the pontiff's death from Malta, an anonymous cardinal in Rome was said to have quipped, in shockingly profane terms, "Vittorio Emanuele had to go to Hell before His Holiness would deign it time to allow himself to ascend to Heaven." [1]. Immediately, the question of the Maltese Thorn reared its head once again - would the next Pope be elected in Malta, as much of the ultramontanist bloc of cardinals who had joined Pius in exile preferred, or would the Roman Curia that had stayed in the Leonine City and worked for years to mend fences with the Italian Kingdom win out? The question had been addressed somewhat in the months before the Pontiff's passing, when it began to become clear he had little time left in this world, when a French delegation came to Malta to encourage the Church to consider returning to Rome, its proper seat, and accepting the Treaty of Privileges and Guarantees at long last.

The choice of successor to Pius IX made it clear that the Leonine Compromise would win out. Though the conclave was held on Malta - forever known as the Maltese Conclave in Church annals, the one and only - the cardinals selected the moderate camerlengo to Pius IX, Vincenzo Pecci, who had experience in the past as a diplomat and was viewed as the plain choice [2]. In the months ahead, Leo XIII, as he was known, would begin to work with the Italians to fully guarantee the Papal State rights within the Leonine City, and accepted the pressure of five powers to return to Rome - France and Austria, Catholic empires which wanted a solution to the problem and who underwrote the Leonine City's existence; Italy, which despite having a secular leftist government under Angelo Depretis in power wished the issue to go away so the constant feuding between liberals and conservatives in Parliament could end; Britain, where the Conservatives in power viewed the Maltese Thorn as a distraction to a number of more pressing foreign and domestic issues and the resurgent opposition Liberals were fiercely opposed to ultramontanism; and in Germany, where the Kulturkampf of Bismarck had turned the Bavarian and Wurttemburger bishops into ultramontanists and Berlin needed one less faultline between the dominant Prussian state and restive Catholic subjects..."

- Cross and Crown: The Legacy of the Papacy in the Time of the Nation State

[1] Yeah there's probably no way a cardinal would actually say this but whatever, I'm proud of myself for composing it
[2] Pecci's experience as camerlengo, age, diplomatic background and consensus stature makes him win out just like in OTL

 

[KingSweden24]

"...so when Luitpold greeted his second son, Leopold, and took him to Bangkok as part of the three-month overlap between the father-son Generalresident handover in Cambodia, it was the younger Bavarian royal's turn to be amazed at Siam's rapid progress. While no state in Asia could compare to what Japan accomplished under the Meiji Era - no other state was as urbanized and had had as long of a period of time connected to the Western world at a distance [1] - Siam's reforms in the 1870s only accelerated as the partnership between Leopold and Chulalongkorn deepened. As colonial conflicts in Asia loomed on the horizon, Germany's little outpost in the Far East became a bulwark for the Siamese crown to resist encroachment by France and Britain..."

- Siam in the Colonial Age

[1] We underrate Japan's advantages when we ask if other country's could "do a Meiji" on here, I think

(We're going to play some around-the-world catchup here in early 1878 as I dig into Part IV)

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the Queen, perhaps unlike the rest of Court, viewed the arrival of the USS Ohio as a potential opportunity. The Americans had skirmished with the Joseon Kingdom some decade earlier, but that was before the country had been partially opened by France and later Japan. The American expedition to Korea in 1878 wound up being a tremendous success while still deepening the political crisis in the country between the landed yangban who wanted to drive out all Western influence and the young progressive bloc swirling around the ambitious young Queen, with the indecisive Gojong stuck in the middle. On a tour of the countryside, the American Commander George Dewey [1] remarked on Korea's natural beauty and the kindness of her people, but also described the state as in a place of peril - torn between France's influence, China's formal suzerainty, and Japan's ambitions, as well as the goals and aspirations of the Queen and her bloc at court..."

- Queen Min (University of New South Wales, 1984)

[1] Fun little cameo

 

[KingSweden24]

"...public opinion, having been so strong against the Turks, now turned against Cabinet. Not even the aggressive response by the government against the IRB in the early phases of the Land War - posturing against the "Fenian hordes" had worked well for Carnarvon and his clique in the past - could rescue the government as the economy, already stagnant or in depression for nearly a decade, worsened again. The Great Strike of 1878, which involved shipbuilders as well as railroad workers and textile millers, ground Britain to a halt, and Franchisers marched on both Parliament and Buckingham Palace. Arthur suggested to his mother they evacuate to Balmoral, which they did by stagecoach in the dead of the night, as the British Army had to be deployed for the second time in a decade to London to keep the peace. It was at Balmoral that Arthur gave his mother the suggestion that would change history - a suggestion that she call Carnarvon to Scotland to meet privately, and there ask if he could still command the support of not only Parliament but indeed his own Cabinet.

Once more, Prince Arthur's prodigious diaries come in handy in the turbulent hours of 1878, when it seemed as if a Britain frustrated both at home and abroad. It is here that he suggests, 'I asked Mother to go a step further, to make a motion that would have been unthinkable but six months ago; to not merely entice Henry (Arthur was fond of using politicians' personal names) to step down, but to demand it and dismiss him if need be. It would be an overwhelming breach of Her Majesty's understood role in the modern age, but in a crisis, Britain looks to the Crown, and between the Cape, the Straits, Ireland and now the socialists who threaten to tear London to the ground, we are in a crisis and Britannia needs her Queen.' In the end, dismissing Carnarvon would not be necessary; the embattled Prime Minister, who had knifed two predecessors in the back to reach Downing Street and had turned the United Kingdom towards gruff, continental illiberalism, understood that to be sacked by the Monarchy would be a constitutional crisis from which the country would need decades to recover. Upon arriving in Scotland, he immediately agreed with Arthur's brusque suggestion that he no longer carried the confidence of Parliament (here Arthur, all of 27 years of age, recalls telling the man twenty years older than he, 'Get on with it, Henry! You haven't a bloody clue what you're doing, do you?') and tendered his resignation, dropping the writ for new elections. In one of his final acts as Prime Minister, before telegraphing his colleagues in London to announce the surprise elections, was to recommend to the Queen that she appoint his friend and confidant Salisbury to Downing Street in the event of a third successive Tory majority.

Salisbury would never have his chance to lead a Cabinet. [1] The 1878 campaign was a heated one, as the Great Strike ended with the hopes of a new day, and the threat of an even uglier descent into chaos should the Conservatives be returned hung over the tired and frustrated land. In the end, despite suffrage laws that still severely restricted the franchise to property owners and had not been updated in nearly half a century, the aggressive advocacy of the Liberals' semi-retired "Grand Old Man" in William Gladstone and optimism about a new day among the voting public led to a hammering of the Conservatives, who lost 80 seats and gave the Liberals the first majority government since Lord Russell's nearly fifteen years earlier. 1878 marked another watershed election - only in the most ardently Protestant strongholds in Ireland did Conservative candidates earn election, an even further fall than the 1873 polls, and most of the rest of Ireland was won by the Irish Parliamentary Party. Liberals dominated in the cities and swept Scotland's boroughs, and nearly did the same in Wales. With 341 seats in Parliament, the Liberals had earned a commanding position, albeit one in which they saw their position in Ireland nearly entirely obliterated save for a handful of boroughs. Despite his long friendship with Gladstone and eminent position in the House of Lords, the Liberal leader Earl Granville stood aside to allow Lord Hartington, the party's leader in the Commons, be Prime Minister, as he recommended in his meeting with Victoria and Arthur when he was called to meet with them the week of the election. Arthur, in his diary, remarked, 'No man can be more commended in this trying hour to stay his course. Granville, who would have made as fine a Prime Minister as Wellington or Peel, stated that this was a victory for the people, born out in the Commons, and the people's government should thus be led from the Commons.' So but hours later, Spencer Cavendish, the Lord Hartington [2], was called after his long spell leading the opposition to Carnarvon's ministry to Buckingham Palace to kiss hands, and thus end the decade-long succession of Tory governments at Downing Street..."

- The Lion of Edinburgh: Prince Arthur, the Empire and the Twilight of the Victorian Age

[1] Once again, an OTL leader exits stage right, so other more forgotten figures of history can have their day in the sun. A very different 19th century Britain without PMs Disraeli, Gladstone or Salisbury
[2] Could have been PM in OTL, but Gladstone always boxed him out

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the only crisis left to handle for the Sultan, now two years into what would be his 42 year reign - the second-longest behind only Suleiman the Magnificent - was the insurrectionists who had destabilized the Empire in the first place. In this capacity, he paired his progressive commitment to constitutional reform with his legendary ruthlessness. He had partnered with liberal reformists as Crown Prince, but Huseyin Pasha persuaded him - correctly, in all likelihood - that the Empire could not survive another close brush with a European power and only Russian incompetence and inability to press its considerable advantages had allowed the Ottoman Empire to escape. A nightmare scenario of the Porte and Sultans family fleeing to central Anatolia as a new Greek state on both sides of the Aegean was formed by the Great Powers weighed on him, and the Sultan set about on a new round of reforms in the wake of his Constitution.

The Constitution, toothless as it was, did little to prevent the new Parliament from quickly devolving into a nest of factions, and the Sultan-appointed Senate essentially replace the Porte as the Sultan's rubberstamp and a veto-point on too much change. The wave of repression that followed the Ottoman victory over Russia was quieter but in a way more pernicious than the ugly response to Bosnian and Bulgarian uprisings that had triggered the Eastern Crisis. The ranks of the secret police swelled and despite a liberal veneer - necessary to satisfy Istanbul's creditors in Paris and London - the Ottoman state was perhaps even more repressive in the years after the Treaty of Berlin than before. Villages were no longer massacred, but dissidents, their families and even friends were vanished in the night. Abdul Hamid made little distinction between Christian or Muslim in his persecutions - anyone suspected of "sedition or disloyalty to the Sultan and Ottoman Empire," as the law stated, was considered a traitor and "relocated." The secrecy of these matters was paramount - the Ottoman Empire had dug itself into debt and lost thousands, as well as de jure control over Serbia, Montenegro and Romania even in victory. There could not be another Eastern Crisis triggered by mass unrest.

For the most part, though, the Ottoman street was satisfied in the afterglow of their victory over Russia, allowing Abdul Hamid's quiet defanging of the intent of the 1876 Constitution. The Empire had defended itself and won tremendous victories, and was on the verge of a twenty year period of tremendous growth, particularly in Thrace and Bulgaria. This growth would trigger a major migration of peoples in the Balkans, a historic one, as Turks, Greeks and Arabs from Anatolia found their way to the emerging industrial centers of the Empire, and as the Muslim population grew and new arrivals displaced the old, hundreds of thousands of Bulgarians, Serbs, and Greeks would emigrate, often finding their way first to France, Austria or Germany before making their way to the New World instead..."

- The Hamidian Era: The Ottoman Empire 1876-1918

 

[KingSweden24]

“...his 2nd year in office saw the first major expansion of US territory in a decade, as Cox secured the Midway Archipelago in the Pacific as an American coaling station and the United States purchased the Danish West Indies entirely in the Saint Thomas Treaty.
It was also during 1878 that the relatively absentee President Hendricks continued to concede his influence to not just Speaker Marshall, a forgotten titan of the age, but also the young Congressman Bland, who became one of the most aggressive advocates for fully free silver in Congress. Perhaps his most prominent achievement besides the acquisition of new territories and harbors for the Navy was the appointment of Attorney General Phelps to the Supreme Court, a man now considered one of the titans of late 20th century law...”

- Hendricks: America’s 20th President

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the recriminations throughout government landed primarily on Grand Duke Nicholas, rather than the military establishment that had supplied its men single-shot rifles that were well over a decade outdated, mismatched clothing, insufficient food and tobacco, and had slow-rolled its mobilization out of hubris and contempt for the enemy. The Russian public seethed and found familiar targets for its anger - Poles, who seemed to be teetering on the cusp of another uprising as it appeared that the Bear may be critically wounded; and the Jews in the Pale of Settlement. Indeed, the four years after 1878 saw probably the worst pogroms of the 19th century [1], and the crackdown on the Polish intelligentsia to stave off another attempted uprising a year after the Treaty of Berlin led to the beginning of the mass wave of emigration from Russia to North America by Poles, Lithuanians, and Jews alike, one of the largest mass movements out of the Empire in history. That was all fine to the court in Moscow - more land for Russian settlers in fertile country, after all. But it did little to alleviate the structural issues that continued to plague the country, and Russia had now lost two wars to the Ottomans, driven itself further into debt, and was now more than ever the laughingstock of Europe. The Black Sea was still demilitarized, and the Ottoman Navy had proved it could and would defend those clauses of the Paris and Berlin treaties aggressively. The Romanians and Serbians, once thought to be future Russian vassals in the Balkans as Orthodox client states, had immediately been hooked into the spheres of influence of Germany and Vienna, respectively. The outright failure and continued national mismanagement by the Tsar and profligacy of the nobility at the expense of the national interest only deepened his feud with his son, already tense over Alexander's choice of wife [2]. And despite repression in the academy as liberals agitated more loudly than ever, out in the countryside the once-reformist Narodniki were radicalized by decades of repression and now the total failure of Russia's imperailist project. The foundation of Narodnaya Volya - People's Will - can be traced directly to the Disaster of Plevna [3]..."

- Alexander II, Tsar and Autocrat of Russia (University of Cambridge, 2001)

[1] A classically Eastern/Central European response to anything going wrong - target the Jews
[2] The father-son dynamic between Alexander II and his successor was really something. All his kids hated the man by the end of his life
[3] Of course we in OTL know this isn't true, since it was founded in 1879 despite a Russian victory, but the people in the world of Cinco de Mayo don't know that

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the anti-monarchist movement made itself known in a spectacular assassination attempt, choosing one of the most important days of all to spring their plan - the first communion of Crown Prince Luis Maximiliano, as the Imperial Family and many of the chief ministers emerged from the Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral, led by Archbishop Labastida himself. The site of the Zocalo for the attempt was important as it was the beating heart of the city and also where Miramon had cracked down so aggressively on protestors during the visit of Archduke Karl Ludwig in 1875. On that bright March morning only two weeks before Easter, gunshots rang out as assassins sprung from the otherwise cheering crowd. Maximilian was grazed, with only a minor cut on his left arm that healed within days; the Empress, Prince Jose Francisco and Princess Maria Carlota were all missed by wide margins. Two bodyguards were killed, and von Benedek had a bullet strike him in the chest and lodge in his lung; only the decision by the doctors not to attempt to remove it saved his life, and even then it forced his retirement and surely hastened his death two years later. The true tragedy of the morning though was the bullet that clipped the handsome 10-year old [1] Crown Prince in the face, costing him his left eye and leaving a scar that would run along the side of the future Emperor's [2] head, also mutilating his ear, for the rest of his life. Only the fortuitousness of luck changed the course of history that day, for had Luis Maximiliano perished, then surely the Empire would have died when his father passed several decades later [3] and it came time to elevate the severely mentally incompetent Jose Francisco to the throne. Empress Carlota's screams pierced the morning alongside the gunshots from the Imperial Guard, many of which hit stray attendees in the crowd. Many of "Zocalista" assassins were captured and immediately sent to the firing squad by an outraged Emperor.

That morning in 1878 would mark a major turning point for the formerly naive and laissez-faire Emperor. With the more strong-fisted Mejia in charge now, the angered Maximilian swore to stamp out republicanism permanently, and ordered the Rurales [4] to augment the Army's efforts to crush any sedition in the countryside, particularly the north and west where Diaz had held sway a decade earlier. The sudden show of force by the central government, combined with edicts later in 1878 by Maximilian both expanding the size of the already toothless rubberstamp Imperial Assembly while further curtailing its powers, thus further diluting the influence of tacitly friendly rural departments, angered many of the caudillos who both officially and unofficially governed provincial Mexico as personal fiefdoms..."

- Maximilian of Mexico

[1] I think I had Luis Maximiliano born in 1868 but I'm not positive... 10 isn't too young for first communion is it?
[2] Bit of a flashforward
[3] Tee-hee not telling you exactly how many
[4] Here we're assuming Max eventually merges the Guardia Rural with his Resguardo. Besides, I like the name "rurales" better

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the announcement of the match between Napoleon IV and Infanta Maria del Pilar de Borbon in Paris - with the betrothed couple, her not even yet seventeen, announcing from the steps of the Tuileries their marriage to occur on her 18th birthday in a year's time [1] - was well received across France and indeed much of Europe, settling a domestic concern between Bonapartists and Legitimists by uniting the Bonaparte and Bourbon houses, the new France and the old, and leaving only the fairly miniscule Orleanist faction fuming. In Spain, however, Leopold took the news extremely poorly, for the future Empress's brother was the legitimate Bourbon pretender to his own throne. While Isabella had been unpopular and the Carlists a relatively minor nuisance outside of restive, non-Castilian speaking provinces, Infante Alfonso still had friends at court and was well known to desire a throne of his own, and now had France, a resurgent continental power, tacitly aligned with his claims via his sister's betrothal. At a meeting of the military general staff presided over by Serrano, General Weyler - the hero of the Carlist War - brusquely suggested eliminating yet another threat to Leopold's crown by having Alfonso assassinated the next time the pretender left France. It is rumored that this was the suggestion that got the famously gruff and hard-headed Weyler "exiled" to the Captaincy-General of the Canary Islands and later the Governor-General of the Philippines, where he would not cause political trouble by making such outlandish suggestions [2].

Though there was never any serious consideration of France backing Alfonso's claims with anything other than lip service, of course - Napoleon IV's ambitions lay beyond Europe and he aggressively curtailed the efforts of his ministers who sought confrontations with other continental powers, particularly Germany, and deployed diplomacy to rebuild France's stature at the table of Great Powers - fear of a French-backed Bourbon Restoration permeated Madrid's long-term thinking for decades thereafter, but never more fervently than in the years immediately before and after Napoleon IV's marriage to Maria del Pilar and the continued friendship between the exiled queen Isabella and the Dowager Empress Eugenie, who held considerable sway with her young and impressionable son. Leopold even told his son Wilhelm - who had yet to start going by his Spanish cognate Guillermo [3] - that he was pondering sending him to Germany along with Admiral Topete to negotiate a formal alliance with the German-Italian bloc [4] (a deliberation that when revealed would soon trigger a miniature constitutional and diplomatic crisis), and the fortificado program in the Pyrenees was intensified [5], as was naval spending and modernization, with Spanish shipyards filled to the brim by the early 1880s with orders for new, more modern vessels to counter the growing and burgeoning Marine Imperiale in the Mediterranean [6]..."

- The German on the Spanish Throne: The Reign of Leopold I

[1] Literally three days after Napoleon IV died in the Anglo-Zulu War in OTL
[2] Old Val seems to me like exactly the kind of guy who'd throw out ideas like this
[3] I just don't feel that "Guillermo" has the same royal sound as William or Wilhelm do. Since its such a definitively Germanic name, it doesn't quite have that same cachet in Romance languages. I might even have him take a different regnal name when Leopold (eventually) passes on, that's how much I don't like the idea of a Guillermo I of Spain haha
[4] I haven't gone this route yet because I feel it's a bit overdone with Leopold of Spain TLs
[5] The Pyrenees would be a nightmare for an invading army to try to cross already, and Spain's geography lends itself well to defenders (hence the difficulty of rooting out insurgencies throughout its history, including the Carlists in OTL and TTL). This program would make Spain virtually impossible to invade effectively overland from the east.
[6] Spain strikes me as an oceangoing nation with the domestic capacity to build a substantial naval heavy industry and not have to rely on British shipyards for vessels, it seems they were that way already OTL and obviously a more stable Spain that has a secure Caribbean presence, been through a debilitating civil war in the 1870s and multiple governments would continue on her path of naval investments...

 

[KingSweden24]

"...rugby's "invasion" of the continent was not a match between nations, such as England competing against Scotland or Wales in previous contests, but rather Oxford's champions traveling to France to play against the University of Paris's team. The game was still primarily amateur at this time, with feuds bubbling up between amateur supporters and small professional associations, most prominently Blackheath. The match between Oxford and the Sorbonne, however, became famous for other reasons, as it fell on the fateful day of June 2, 1878, when a gunshot rang out that changed the face of Europe..."

- The Early Years of the Gentleman's Game: Rugby in the 19th Century

(I should note I'm not huge into rugby but my plan here is to be sort of creative with this... and one of my big long-term ideas I've had since starting this project, indeed from an abandoned alternate history CSA victory novel I started years ago, relies on rugby having replaced American football in North America. We're about a century out from that, though haha)

 

[KingSweden24]

"...despite the near-miss when Emil Max Hödel fired his pistol at the 81-year old Kaiser on May 11, Wilhelm did not increase security for his open-carriage rides on the Unter den Linden. The crown prince and his wife were dining when the word reached them, less than a month later, that another attempt had been made on his father's life on the very same street, this time fired by a Dr. Karl Nobiling with a shotgun [1] from a window overlooking the route. The mortally-wounded [2] Wilhelm was rushed back to the Stadtschloss, where his age, poor health and the buckshot took him later in that evening.

As news of the assassination reverberated around Europe, June 2 would become an infamous day in Europe for the slaying of the Kaiser but also the first day of Frederick III's reign. As he clasped his father's hand as Wilhelm took his dying breath, he rose as Emperor of Germany. Bismarck took Frederick aside, and despite their differences, they embraced and wept. "Good luck, Your Majesty," the Iron Chancellor was said to have whispered to the new Kaiser before they kissed hands. The Wilhelmine age had ended - the age of the Consorts had begun..."

- Frederick and Victoria: Consorts of Germany

[1] Both of these events are entirely OTL, except...
[2] Here our butterfly flaps her wings

 

[KingSweden24]

"...whereas Lord Stanley was indecisive and terrified of his Cabinet, and Spencer Horatio Walpole was cynically jaded to the point of aloofness, it was Carnarvon's thirst for influence and power, efforts to push out competent rivals, and stubborn refusal to bend from his instincts even in the face of clear evidence his approach was doomed to failure that lends to his low esteem among historians, when ranked against other Prime Ministers of the 19th century. However, unlike many of his peers, Carnarvon had something of a second life in the last decade of his life (he would die only aged 57 in 1890). He scaled back his activities in the House of Lords after leaving Downing Street and would never again serve in an official government role; he declined the offer made to him by Queen Victoria to appoint him Governor-General of Canada, a country where he is still regarded highly for his role in Confederation and negotiating British Columbia's entry into the Dominion, and when the Tories briefly returned to power in the mid-1880s [1], he held no office. Instead, he made a tremendous impact with his funding of research into antiquities, a legacy continued on by his son, George Herbert, a financier who helped fund much of the excavation of Egypt's Valley of Kings [2]. Asked shortly before his death to reflect on his tumultuous - and in the eyes of his contemporaries, disastrous - premiership, Henry Herbert, the 4th Earl of Carnarvon, simply shrugged, puffed his cigar and remarked, "Well, we can't all be a Pitt or a Peel, now can we?"..."

- The Age of Questions: Britain in the Gauntlet of Change and Upheaval

[1] Flash-forward
[2] This is OTL factual

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the Liberal Cabinet that the Lord Hartington convened in the spring of 1878 was in many ways the great crop of the Liberal Party of the day. Gladstone was of course one of the grand voices of the party, but in his age and the polarized public opinion around him, Hartington feared giving him too great a platform from which to dominate government; it was thus that the Grand Old Man of the 1860s, who had lost two eminently winnable elections against the Tories (even in accounting for the restricted electorate pre-Reform Act), was made Lord President of the Council, an office that was treated as little more than a sinecure and was interpreted by the embittered Gladstone as such. It was Granville, the party's leader in the House of Lords, that the most important task of running the Foreign Office went. Hartington was convinced that in the last decade of Tory rule, Britain had squandered much of its global leadership role, especially with France and Germany's sudden rise as peer competitors on the continent. He also feared rising Anglophobia in the United States; Carnarvon's dedication to Canada, mixed with fishing and trade disputes lasting back years and memories of the Palmerston government's support for the Confederacy during the independence war, made repairing relations with the booming USA of paramount importance to the new Prime Minister [1]. The esteemed William Harcourt was dispatched to the Home Office, and as Chancellor of the Exchequer a role was found for Hugh Childers. It was a Cabinet led aggressively from the Commons, with an eye on the radical Liberals inspired by Gladstone and organized under the young National Liberal Foundation, led by former Birmingham Mayor Joseph Chamberlain. Hartington viewed Chamberlain warily, and was offended at the ambitious man's request for a Cabinet office, laced with the threat of running Radical candidates outside of the Liberal tent; Chamberlain received the Presidency of the Board of Trade [2], and his ally John Bright the Colonial Office, places where they would be satisfied yet also keep quiet and not bother the government. To oversee the restive Irish Question, with the Land War in full swing, where Hartington was torn in two directions by his sympathy for the impoverished Irishman with the political realities of the unpopularity of Fenianism in England and Wales, he dispatched his cousin Lord Spencer to be Lord Lieutenant, and appointed William Edward Forster to serve as Chief Secretary of Ireland [3]. Finally, to round out his Cabinet, he gave the Secretary of War position to his brother, Lord Frederick Cavendish [4], under the expectation that the younger Cavendish brother would be groomed for a Great Office in due time..."

- Hartington: Britain's First Modern Prime Minister

[1] I was originally going to make Gladstone the Foreign Secretary but realized that that would probably *not* be the most prudently diplomatic choice considering the man's lack of filter, strong opinions, and loud support of the Confederacy in the early 1860s
[2] As in OTL
[3] Those read in Irish history may know him instead as "Buckshot" Forster
[4] Also an important figure in Liberal relationship to Ireland IOTL, albeit for more tragic reasons

 

[KingSweden24]

"...by 1880, between population growth and immigration, Mexico's population was over 12 million, and would grow by nearly 20% over the next decade, driven by two factors: one, continued large scale immigration from Europe, particularly Catholic states to whom the state religion of Mexico appealed, and second, by its high birth rates and burgeoning economic stability. Even the 1882-84 Caudillo War did not displace Mexico's rapid rise.

Consider - the period between the declaration of the Empire in 1862 (it would take some time for Maximilian of Hapsburg-Lorraine to be coronated and feel truly comfortable in his new land, of course) to the outbreak of the Revolt of the Caudillos was the longest period of stability and prosperity in Mexican history up until that point. Silver mining became a commodity export that drove European (and, after French military presence in Mexico declined, American) investment in the 1860s, the Tehuantepec Railway gave the New World her most efficient connection between Atlantic and Pacific in the 1870s, and after a decade of small-scale exploitation, the sophistication of the oil industry burgeoned at the end of that decade and by 1890 Mexico had the second-largest oil industry in the world, behind only the United States (where Standard Oil's monopoly under John D. Rockefeller was only increasing). Mexico had limited power projection via her Navy but from the ports of Acapulco and Guaymas had a considerably more prominent Pacific squadron than the United States at this point and by the late 1880s was establishing a fairly robust trade network with the Far East thanks to her partnership with the Spanish via Manila.

Of course, it is important to remember that despite Mexico's success with silver, rail infrastructure, light industry and petroleum, it was still a profoundly unequal country economically, culturally and geographically. European immigrants were able to join the growing middle class with ease, while mestizo families were definitively a class below, to say nothing of indigenous persons. The country's forested, Maya-inhabited south and its vast, poor north along the border with the Confederacy had seen remarkably little improvement in their state of affairs despite the abolition of peonage and Mexico's celebrated economic vibrancy in this era; departments such as Sonora, Oaxaca, Chiapas, or Nayarit were the backbone of anti-monarchist and anti-industrialist sentiment in this time, where large hacendados and the Church dominated the populace like they always had. Far from the wide European-style boulevards of Mexico City and Guadalajara, and the teeming docks of Acapulco and Veracruz, was the other Mexico; where families had as many children as they could due to infant mortality, where they still sent their children to Catholic-operated schools, often Jesuit, rather than the secular gimnasias in the Altiplano where criollo and "continentale" families sent their children to be intellectually challenged and prepare for a life in the new Mexican bourgeoisie. It was in this fertile garden that the shoots of opposition to the Imperial government began to grow again, nearly twenty years after the defeat of the Republican armies and death of liberal leader Benito Juarez..."

- Socioeconomics in Mexico: A Study

EDIT: Based on my math regarding Mexico's population in a later update, I have retcon Mexico's population to be 12 million here rather than just 9. Whoops!

 

[KingSweden24]

"...Fritz's first task was to heal a grieving nation and present a front of stability to a wounded Germany. In that sense, it was business as usual - the Iron Chancellor chose the path forward and dedicated himself to it. Having already mulled ending the Kulturkampf, now the monarchy itself was in danger and Bismarck needed the support of all of Germany's conservatives, including the Catholic ones in the Center Party, to forge ahead. And so the Kulturkampf ended with a whimper, having brought South German Catholics into politics as a voting bloc and turned the country's bishops to the ultramontanist camp, complicating his foreign relations as negotiations over the Papacy's return to Rome threatened to plunge Italy into civil conflict. While this was of course a move that would be considered liberal by today's standards, it was in fact a concession Fritz was profoundly unhappy about. Famously anticlerical in his time, though that aspect of his personality is largely forgotten now, the new Kaiser had sought to break the influence of the Church in Germany even further. Bismarck's next move further ruined the strained relationship between Kaiser and Chancellor when he abolished the Socialist Party and passed a number of laws severely restricting socialist activity. Fritz was appalled, and Empress Victoria suggested he sack Bismarck as a show of strength. The move was well-received enough by the public, and the country was still reeling after the Old Kaiser's death; another crisis early in Frederick's reign was thus avoided, and their mutual grief eventually brought the frosty relationship between the two men to a begrudging understanding..."

- Frederick and Victoria: Consorts of Germany

 

[KingSweden24]

1878 Senate Elections

The erosion of the Republican Party continues, leaving only three members - two from Massachusetts, and Hannibal Hamlin from Maine - in its entire caucus, leaving it as a truly regional Upper New England party. A number of former Republicans are re-elected as Liberals as the collapse of the party in state legislatures is complete, and Liberals and Democrats trade a Senate seat apiece in Colorado and Pennsylvania as new legislatures are convened in each. The dominance of Democrats across much of the West is noticeable, besides the firmly anti-Democratic states of Iowa and Kansas; Liberals are beginning to make inroads elsewhere, though.

CA: John S. Hager (D) Re-Elected
CO: Jerome B. Chaffee (L) Retired; Nathaniel Hill (D) Elected (D Gain) [1]
CT: William Henry Barnum (L) Defeated; Orville Platt (L) Elected
IL: Richard Oglesby (R) Re-Elected as Liberal (L Gain)
IN: Daniel Voorhees (D) Re-Elected
IA: William Allison (L) Re-Elected
KS: John Ingalls (R) Re-Elected as Liberal (L Gain)
MD: George Dennis (D) Retired; James Black Groome (D) Elected
MO: David H. Armstrong (D) Appointed after death of predecessor; re-elected [2]
NV: John P. Jones (D) Re-Elected
NH: Bainbridge Wadleigh (L) Not Renominated; Henry Blair (L) Elected
NY: William Evarts (R) Retired; Wheeler Hazard Peckham (L) Elected (L Gain) [3]
OH: George Pendleton (D) Re-Elected
OH (s): Allen Thurman (D) Appointed to Supreme Court; Thomas Young (L) Appointed, Defeated for Election by George Hoadly (D)
OR: James Nesmith (D) Retired; James H. Slater (D) Elected
PA: Asa Packer (D) Retired; J. Donald Cameron (L) Elected (L Gain) [4]
VT: Justin Morrill (L) Re-Elected
WI: Matthew Carpenter (D) Re-Elected

1878 House Elections

Liberals do well in state legislatures around the country and gain a net of 23 seats in the US House of Representatives, about half each from Democrats and Republicans. The latter party is reduced to single digit members for the 46th Congress. The Democrats only barely keep their majority in Congress, with 143 seats. The improving economy under President Hendricks and continued siphoning of opposition votes with Republicans still fielding candidates across much of the Midwest gives Democrats openings in both Congress and state houses. Samuel Marshall is elected for a record fifth-straight term as Speaker of the House, and his sixth term as Speaker total, in his last Congress as Speaker.

46th Congress of the United States

Senate: 30D-20L-3R-1AM

President of the Senate: Samuel Cox (D)
Senate President pro tempore: Henry Mower Rice of Minnesota (D)

California
1. Newton Booth (A-M) (1875-)
3. John S. Hager (D) (1873-)

Colorado

2. Henry M. Teller (L) (1876-)
3. Nathaniel Hill (D) (1879-)

Connecticut
1. William W. Eaton (D) (1875-)
3. Orville Platt (L) (1879-)

Delaware
1. Thomas Bayard (D) (1869-)
2. Eli Saulsbury (D) (1871-)

Illinois
2. John Logan (L) (1871-)
3. Richard J. Oglesby (L) (1873-)

Indiana
1. Joseph E. McDonald (D) (1875-)
3. Daniel Voorhees (D) (1873-)

Iowa
2. Samuel Kirkwood (L) (1877-)
3. William Allison (L) (1873-)

Kansas
2. David P. Lowe (L) (1877-)
3. John Ingalls (L) (1873-)

Maine
1. Hannibal Hamlin (R) (1869-)
2. James G. Blaine (L) (1877-)

Maryland
1. William Pinkney Whyte (D) (1869-)
3. James Black Groome (D) (1879-)

Massachusetts
1. Henry Dawes (R) (1875-)
2. George Frisbie Hoar (R) (1877-)

Michigan
1. Isaac Christiancy (L) (1875-)
2. Byron G. Stout (D) (1865-)

Minnesota
1. Henry Mower Rice (D) (1858 -)
2. Henry Hastings Sibley (D) (1865-)

Missouri
1. Francis Cockrell (D) (1875-)
3. David H. Armstrong (D) (1877-)

Nebraska
1. Thomas Tipton (L) (1869-)
2. Experience Estabrook (D) (1871-)

Nevada
1. William Sharon (D) (1875-)
3. John P. Jones (D) (1873-)

New Hampshire
2. Aaron Cragin (L) (1865-)
3. Henry Blair (L) (1873-)

New Jersey
1. Theodore Fitz Randolph (D) (1875-)
2. John R. McPherson (D) (1871-)

New Mexico

1. William A. Pile (L) (1875-)
2. Samuel Beach Axtell (D) (1875-)

New York
1. Francis Kernan (D) (1875-)
3. Wheeler Hazard Peckham (L) (1879-)

Ohio
1. George Hoadly (D) (187
3. George Pendleton (D) (1873-)

Oregon
2. La Fayette Grover (D) (1871-)
3. James H. Slater (D) (1879-)

Pennsylvania
1. Charles Buckalew (D) (1863-)
3. J. Donald Cameron (L) (1879-)

Rhode Island
1. William Sprague (L) (1863-)
2. Henry B. Anthony (L) (1859-)

Vermont
1. George F. Edmunds (L) (1866-)
3. Justin Morrill (L) (1867-)

West Virginia
1. Joseph Sprigg (D) (1869-)
2. Henry Gassaway Davis (D) (1871-)

Wisconsin
1. James Rood Doolittle (D) (1857-)
3. Matthew Carpenter (D) (1873-)

House: 143D-128L-9R

Speaker of the House: Samuel Marshall of Illinois (D)

[1] Hill was a mining engineer active in the silver industry; he would not fit in well with the Liberals, who are fairly dedicated to the gold standard, compared to a much more silver-friendly Democratic Party in the Hendricks era. Thus, he makes more sense as a Democrat. I think I'll have Henry Teller from Colorado switch eventually, too.
[2] Seeing as George Vest served in the Confederate Congress, I doubt he's going to be a US Senator, ever, even with the Rapprochement Era and all
[3] More on this in a bit
[4] I'm figuring the fact that Asa Packer died a few months after this Congress was seated probably means he wasn't in great health

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the coronation of Friedrich III of Spain marked an occasion important enough for Serrano to travel to Berlin along with Leopold and Martinez-Campos. With Infante Guillermo (who strongly preferred being called Wilhelm, even in his new adoptive land) fostering with his Hohenzollern brethren in Germany and being privately tutored to maintain a connection to his ancestral home, it was also an opportunity for the King to visit his son. The coronation was a grand affair - all the important royalty of Europe was there. Umberto I of Italy came, despite having survived an assassination attempt just a week earlier; Prince Arthur of Great Britain represented his mother along with both Lord Hartington, his Prime Minister, and the Earl of Granville, Britain's canny foreign minister. Tsarevich Alexander came from Russia with Chancellor Gorchakov for his father was too terrified of leaving his country's soil for fear of assassination or a coup after the disastrous Bulgarian War; even Franz Joseph begrudgingly made the trip. Perhaps most importantly, the Young Eagle of France was there with his betrothed, Maria del Pilar, whose presence plainly discomfited Leopold to the point that Spain's king avoided being in the same room as Emperor Napoleon whenever possible.

The coronation feast, however, was the site of one of Spain's most legendary diplomatic mishaps, one which nearly triggered a war (though historians debate to this day how likely a conflict with France really was). Despite being only fourteen, the Infante had been drinking aggressively with Friedrich's sons, Princes Wilhelm and Heinrich [1], and revealed sometime in the evening to Martinez-Campos that the Germans were open to a formal alliance with Spain to contain France's continental and overseas ambitions, particularly now that Russia had revealed its military weakness in the recent conflict. Surrounded by France, Austria and Denmark (which had aggressively reformed its military, implemented mandatory conscription, and bought modern French weaponry in the past decade), and unsure of Italy's reliability, Germany viewed a Spanish partnership as ideal, especially with Spain's army being veteran in conflicts with the Confederacy and with the Carlist uprising. Martinez-Campos, himself having taken to drink to cope with his lame arm [2], later divulged this to a number of persons, almost gleeful and bragging.

The move was a massive diplomatic faux pas, not only due to its setting - at Friedrich's own coronation, thus embarassing a relative of Leopold - but also that the European alliances were, in the more gentlemanly and discreet concert of powers in the 1870s, meant to be confidential, understood to exist quietly rather than overtly. Here then was Spain's most powerful military commander loudly asserting that Spain would be partnering with Germany against France, due to Napoleon's betrothal to the Bourbon pretender's sister (Don Alfonso had, of course, not traveled to Berlin as it would have been a profound insult to Leopold for him to attend). The Berlin Affair, as it came to be known, outraged the French press and effectively killed any chance of an informal alliance with Germany as well, isolating Spain diplomatically. Leopold was humiliated and immediately sacked Martinez-Campos, dispatching him to be Spain's minister to Chile (where only two years later he would redeem himself by helping mediate the War of the Pacific), and revealed the King's direct interference in foreign policy - for though Spain's constitution did not quite depoliticize the monarchy in the way, for instance, Britain's did, Leopold's role was meant to be symbolic and ceremonial, and not carry nearly the same power as other sovereigns. With the King now having circumvented the Foreign Ministry and attempted to create a defensive alliance without consulting his more cautious government, Serrano would return to not only a diplomatic crisis, but a constitutional one as well.

The public, however, seemed to care little - the Berlin Affair never damaged Leopold's standing with contemporary Spaniards who still adored him as the hero who crushed the Carlists, kept the Caribbean provinces in the fold and had delivered a decade of stability to the country that had allowed it a burgeoning industrial revolution, particularly in the area of shipbuilding where it sat globally only behind Britain and France in tonnage produced for both naval and merchant marine craft (by 1885 Spain would have the world's third-largest navy) [3]. However, with the information that Spain was willing to partner with Germany to go to war if necessary to prevent a Bourbon Restoration in Madrid, the Young Eagle and his grizzled advisors Bazaine and MacMahon found themselves in a difficult position - how to navigate this insult without triggering a war with Spain?"


- Old Bull: Francisco Serrano and Modern Spain

[1] Certainly royals know how to party, especially Germans amirite??
[2] Recall he lost use of his left arm in an assassination attempt during the Carlist uprising
[3] The US is still playing catchup, even with the 1869 Naval Act. It was really, really behind on shipbuilding in the 19th century outside of the New England whaling industry, from what I've gleaned

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the battle-lines of the 1880s were more sharply drawn as it became clear that the Democrats were still unsure what they indeed represented. They were the party of the small farmer, even though farm states like Kansas and Iowa aggressively resisted them; they were the party of the working man, even as Democratic governors still called out state militias to crush labor strikes; they were the party of free silver, even as Northeastern Democrats known as "Bourbons" aligned more with the growing Liberals in support for harder currency. To say nothing of splits on questions such as tariff and appointments policy, where some Democrats yearned for free trade and well-greased patronage machines, while others - in particularly the ever-changing President Hendricks [1] - were sympathetic to arguments that the relatively high tariffs in place protected industry and that "appointments by merit," as championed by the Hoffman wing of the party, would help Democrats defeat Liberals on their main issue, public corruption and expenditures.

Indeed it says much of the brewing civil war within the Democratic Party between her reactionaries, led by the George Pendletons and Thomas Bayards of the world, and her younger, reform-minded members, that one can trace the party's future alignment with the labor movement to the debates of the Hoffman/Hendricks era, where the Old Hickory Party dominated postbellum American politics. It was not unlike, in some ways, the burgeoning debate within Britain's Conservatives on the other side of the Atlantic following their ouster from power in 1878. As the Republican foe collapsed - by 1879 there were only twelve total left in Congress, all from New England, and their presence in state legislatures was similarly diminished as they became little other than another left-wing protest party like the Anti-Monopolists or Greenbackers - the Liberals emerged as a genuine threat to Democratic dominance. The Liberal message was consistent: both Republican and Democratic administrations were corrupt, were machines to distribute patronage, and - as the party shifted away from reformist Tildenism to more muscular, power-seeking Blainism with the emergence of Senator James Gillespie Blaine of Maine [2] as its most prominent public voice - arrayed against the interests of America's hardworking Protestant majority in favor of blacks and socialists (in the case of Republicans) or Irishmen and Catholics in general (in the case of Democrats)..."

- The Shadow of the Hickory Tree: The Reinvention of the Postbellum Democratic Party

[1] Minor retcon - after it was pointed out to me by @LordVorKon that it didn't really make sense, Hendricks ending homesteading didn't happen. Forget that that was written however many posts ago
[2] Blaine, not exactly a stranger to corruption IOTL of course, was also famously and virulently anti-Catholic. I believe this would be much more of a trend in TTL USA, seeing as Reconstruction/Civil War questions are no longer super pertinent in the political discourse and aren't what divide the major parties

 

[KingSweden24]

"...despite Frere's recall to London, the disastrous Basuto War had only strengthened the Free Republics as well as Zululand and effectively ended the Confederation Scheme forever, and British South Africa was weary and politically polarized. Tensions between Anglo and Afrikaner residents continued to rise, and the government of Saul Solomon [1], while liberal and committed to good native relations, was unable to stave off the broader cultural forces that seemed to demand the Dutch-descended Cape Afrikaners choose between their unique heritage and loyalty to the Empire. While the new Colonial Secretary John Bright cared little for South Africa beyond straightforward objectives passed down from the Prime Minister's office such as "don't start unnecessary, poorly-planned colonial wars or impose schemes upon localities without a plan in place," there was still tension with the Anglo political class in Cape Town that viewed Boers as illiterate barbarians nearly as savage as the Natives, and the Dutch-descended who had lived in South Africa for generations. It was in the aftermath of Frere's stormy tenure as High Commissioner that the attempt to full Anglicize British South Africa and erase Dutch cultural influence began, a universal Afrikaner identity began to emerge, that many of the Cape Afrikaners began to reconsider their disinterest in partnership with the Boer Republics, and that South African society began to polarize..."

- The Land of Plenty: Southern Africa in the 19th Century

[1] Rather than Sprigg, who was generally a disaster

(Someone with knowledge of South African history is more than welcome to correct me on the evolution of Cape Dutch identity vis a vis the Boers. I have some ideas here for the long term, we'll see how they go...)