The Extra Girl: For the first heaven and the first earth were passed away.
- Thread starter Dr. Waterhouse
- Start date
So, August von Wettin, now Baron Greystoke.
He's a minor character who's kind of been blown about by the wind, thus far. He is a grandson of the Elector Friedrich's younger brother the Duke Johann. Johann's eldest son, Duke Johann Wilhelm (the Johannines get their collective name in the timeline not just because they are the sons of Johann but because they're all named Johann), marries Princess Anna of Denmark, and they have three sons. Frustrated by the Elector Alexander seizing part of the family's lands, curbing their privileges, and taking sides against them in the great religious struggle in Saxony in the last half of the sixteenth century, these sons of Johann Wilhelm go to the Netherlands following the assassination of William of Orange to fight on behalf of the Dutch against the Spanish. They do this partly as a rebuke of the Elector, who they see as their enemy, for his cowardice in refusing to offer more robust assistance to the Dutch. Now, while they are there they find out their cousin Frederick is also in the Netherlands and so they introduce themselves. During Frederick's stay in the Netherlands they fight alongside each other, and when he returns back to England they are on very good terms. Though one has died, the other two stay in the Netherlands to continue participating in the war. In the secret communications across the North Sea in the long run-up to Frederick's rebellion, he procures promises of help from August and his brother Joachim in exchange for well, all the obvious: wealth, land, titles. Joachim stays in the Netherlands because of the siege of Ostend, August comes over. But less because he tarried or is willfully late (as is strongly implied in the case of the Baron Mountjoy), than because of the nature of communications and of crossing the North Sea in the very early seventeenth century, he arrives after the first round of fighting is done. He is able to join Frederick's army only right before Sussex and Howard turn coat at Elstree. Frederick, both realizing he's one of the most experienced commanders in his service and wanting to help out one of his close few blood relatives, sends him off with Sidney to take the north.
At this point he's probably very definitely a fish out of water, with most of the English he knows learned from the battlefield. He's also substantially more grizzled than everyone around him, excepting maybe Mountjoy. Frederick and Sidney had brief turns of duty in the Netherlands or Ireland. At this point, August has been in military service close to twenty years.
But wait, you might say, they hate Alexander, and basically Frederick is only where he is because he's been taking Alexander's money all this time? Well, we all know how families work. Frederick is the one who speaks to the family you don't speak to, but also speaks to you.
He's a minor character who's kind of been blown about by the wind, thus far. He is a grandson of the Elector Friedrich's younger brother the Duke Johann. Johann's eldest son, Duke Johann Wilhelm (the Johannines get their collective name in the timeline not just because they are the sons of Johann but because they're all named Johann), marries Princess Anna of Denmark, and they have three sons. Frustrated by the Elector Alexander seizing part of the family's lands, curbing their privileges, and taking sides against them in the great religious struggle in Saxony in the last half of the sixteenth century, these sons of Johann Wilhelm go to the Netherlands following the assassination of William of Orange to fight on behalf of the Dutch against the Spanish. They do this partly as a rebuke of the Elector, who they see as their enemy, for his cowardice in refusing to offer more robust assistance to the Dutch. Now, while they are there they find out their cousin Frederick is also in the Netherlands and so they introduce themselves. During Frederick's stay in the Netherlands they fight alongside each other, and when he returns back to England they are on very good terms. Though one has died, the other two stay in the Netherlands to continue participating in the war. In the secret communications across the North Sea in the long run-up to Frederick's rebellion, he procures promises of help from August and his brother Joachim in exchange for well, all the obvious: wealth, land, titles. Joachim stays in the Netherlands because of the siege of Ostend, August comes over. But less because he tarried or is willfully late (as is strongly implied in the case of the Baron Mountjoy), than because of the nature of communications and of crossing the North Sea in the very early seventeenth century, he arrives after the first round of fighting is done. He is able to join Frederick's army only right before Sussex and Howard turn coat at Elstree. Frederick, both realizing he's one of the most experienced commanders in his service and wanting to help out one of his close few blood relatives, sends him off with Sidney to take the north.
At this point he's probably very definitely a fish out of water, with most of the English he knows learned from the battlefield. He's also substantially more grizzled than everyone around him, excepting maybe Mountjoy. Frederick and Sidney had brief turns of duty in the Netherlands or Ireland. At this point, August has been in military service close to twenty years.
But wait, you might say, they hate Alexander, and basically Frederick is only where he is because he's been taking Alexander's money all this time? Well, we all know how families work. Frederick is the one who speaks to the family you don't speak to, but also speaks to you.
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Westminster Hall and New Palace Yard, Westminster, Wenceslas Hollar, 1647
Tortured Truths: Freedom of Worship in Frederick I's England
Jonathan Salumu
Normally, in circumstances like Frederick's (which, if we were of a delicate sensibility, we would call an usurpation), the new monarch immediately orders parliament into session to begin imposing the imprimatur of legality on all the illegality that was necessity to usher in the new age. For example, only three weeks passed from the time the crown was pulled from the bush in Bosworth field and placed atop Henry VII's head until the time he summoned the new parliament. But though Frederick badly needed what all kings do when they summon a parliament, money, he waited.
By far the most controversial and vexing issue that Frederick would have to contend with in the forthcoming parliament would be the recusancy laws, which he had at Elstree explicitly promised to address. Frederick had apparently previously won crucial support for his uprising from the Earl of Derby on the notion that he would move to lift the yoke from England's Catholics, and at the just-as-crucial moment at Elstree he had used it to swing Thomas Howard to his cause too. Whatever Frederick's underlying religious views, reneging on the promise would alienate a great many powerful and motivated people, and jeopardize his reign.
However, at the same time, 33 years had passed since Pope Pius V had issued his bull Regnans in excelsis. In it, the papacy had not just declared Elizabeth herself a heretic, it ended all duties and allegiances to her by her subjects, and in fact excommunicated all those loyal to her. Reaffirmed in the year of the Armada, the bull was widely interpreted as sanctioning her death. While of course the bull did not mention him by name, Frederick had of course understood that any Protestant ruler of England after Elizabeth, including of course himself, would inevitably be caught in the same crosshairs unless they took action.
Frederick, following almost all English Protestant opinion, felt he could not make England's recusancy laws more lenient so long as the Catholic Church denied the government's legitimacy and sought its overthrow. So, however praiseworthy and liberal his cousins' policies in Saxony may have seemed even then, unilateral action on the part of the king towards his Catholic subjects was unthinkble. And, Frederick was just as certain, the current situation could not continue, with a substantial minority of the population of the country being told they were going to hell merely for paying their taxes, obeying the law, and not bringing down the state.
So the course Frederick and Derby had worked out was to begin a negotiation with the papacy by which some kind of modus vivendi could be reached: the Holy See would no longer seek the deposition and delegitimation of the Protestant monarchs of England, and the rulers of England would cease depriving their Catholic subjects of life, freedom and property. Even in the Elstree Letter, which hit the English political establishment like a thunderstrike for its apparent radicalism, Frederick stopped short of advocating formal equality between Protestants and Catholics. If he had gone that far, he would most likely have been fighting wars against the likes of Philip Sidney rather than with him.
Of course, moving towards greater toleration had its supporters outside Roman Catholicism. It had always been one of the inducements to the movement against the recusancy laws that removing the burden of uniformity of worship in a national church would also be a boon to Puritans and other non-conformers of Protestant belief, too. And that had occasioned, even in Essex's Revolt, an alliance of the opposites between those who wanted freedom of observance for Catholics and those who wanted it for the preaching churches enthusiastic in their efforts to restore a primitive Christianity. So Frederick understood a coalition that would support reform, in Parliament and in the country, was possible. But he also understood the strong institutional opposition this reform would face from the institutional power of the Church of England, and for all those for whom, over the course of Elizabeth's long reign, support for the Established Church had become synonymous with English patriotism.
After all, so deep were the misgivings exposed by the Elstree Letter that not only was Archbishop of Canterbury Richard Whitgift never persuaded to perform the coronation, he had never been willing to step foot in the same room as his new sovereign. Bishop of London Richard Bancroft had been only marginally more accommodating, and in the end Archbishop of York Matthew Hutton had been the one to place the State Imperial Crown on Frederick's head and annoint him with oil.
Moreover, Frederick knew asking Parliament to meddle with the Recusancy laws would be opening a Pandora's box even in the most stable of situations. Asking it to do so at the same time he was setting before it the legitimacy of his reign after a civil war against a Protestant monarch, seemed like sewing the wind to reap the whirlwind. If only he could offer Parliament something more than the mere hope that reform would produce some corresponding amelioration of the situation with the Catholic Church, he would have a stronger hand. In fact, what he needed was a bargain, with enforceable terms and conditions on both sides.
That was the reason Frederick dispatched Derby to France immediately upon his entrance into London. And it was the reason Frederick dared not call Parliament back until Derby returned, successful.
The Cardinal d'Ossat was the priest-advocate for France in the Holy See. It was he who had negotiated the complex set of arrangements by which Henri of Navarre, who had hitherto been a Calvinist, had become the king of a Catholic nation, and then by which that king had entered into an alliance with the Protestant (and thereby "heretic") kingdom of England, all with the Papacy's approval. Derby understood that to effectuate Frederick's plan, d'Ossat's support would be necessary. For this reason, Frederick had sent with Derby three letters: a personal appeal for Henri IV's good offices, a complete and very honest explanation of his full position to d'Ossat, and a less detailed, but more florid and aspirational, document directed to Pope Clement VIII.
Henri IV had been originally been a supporter of James's succession to the kingdom of England, but had soured on the prospect over time as he realized that the loss of the Auld Alliance would permanently reduce France's leverage with respect to England. So while he certainly was not ready to contribute help to either side of the War of the English Succession, he was far from unhappy to see that the first ambassador he received after the tussle of spring 1603 was from a King Frederick of England. Immediately, Henri saw how reducing the opprobrium heaped on England in the Catholic world would make his life easier, in that he would no longer be subject to censure for maintaining such close relations with it. It would make it easier for him to deal with England as a counterweight to Spain in the Netherlands and elsewhere.
And so, when he forwarded Derby on to d'Ossat, he quickly added his own letter of measured support for the king's initiative. Instead, it was in Rome where all the difficulty came. Not for nothing had Frederick chosen Derby, whose Catholicism had actually forced him into retirement from public life during Elizabeth's reign. He literally could go where anyone who had wholeheartedly embraced the Elizabethan Settlement could not, and address himself to the princes of the Church not as a heretic seeking compromise, but a believer seeking the relief of the burdens imposed on his fellow members of the Church, for which help he needed the assistance of that Church.
The problem Derby ran into in these efforts was not opposition on the substance. By late summer 1603 it was generally understood that Spain was not going to be able to conquer the Kingdom of England, nor was a Catholic monarch going to immediately succeed to the English throne. But neither could there be negotiation as such between the Papacy and the adherents of heresy, even if the heretic was a king, and even through the intermediary of a putative good Catholic like William Stanley, Earl of Derby.
This was not to say nothing could be done, but that the papacy had to be seen to be acting independently, rather than as one of the parties to a deal, and that nothing more formal in the way of a connection had been established between the Kingdom of England, still renegade and heretic, and the papacy. The Spanish cardinals of course took grave offense at the whole effort even in these terms, and there was a pitched battle in the Consistory. But by November the key language had been reached, and the pope issued his bull Cum magna misericordia, which asserted that if England would stop its killing of priests and persecution of believers, its kings should once again enjoy the obedience of their subjects. Crucial in this formulation is the "if", for Clement was careful not to specify that Frederick had taken such steps. In fact, the key phrasing translates as "if, and in so far as."
Cum magna misericordia did not even go so far as to address the morality of attempts to assassinate the king or otherwise do him violence by those not his subjects, but it did say that good Catholics could be his subjects and obey his laws. And Frederick did not even get so much as an answer to his letters from anyone but a very gregarious Henri IV of France. But Cum magna misericordia was enough that Frederick could wave it before Parliament, and say that some measure of toleration for Catholics would win for England peace and a respite after decades of strife. It was, William Stanley would later recall, the greatest moment of his life.
Of course there was something else in his choice of William Stanley for this mission, too. Frederick had not just sent Derby as his emissary on this mission as the Earl of Derby, or his close supporter and kinsman, or as a good Catholic. Frederick I as yet had no heirs of his body. He was not even married yet. He had legitimized the offspring of the Earl of Hertford, which had placed a Protestant heir before the Stanleys, but after Frederick, Lord Beauchamp and an as-yet childless William Seymour, the heir would be Anne Stanley, Derby's niece. That same Anne Stanley who was now apparently going to be Frederick's queen consort. And even if the Seymours inherited and not the Stanleys, then the queen consort would be Arabella Stuart, granddaughter of the fervently Catholic Duke of Lennox and Margaret Douglas.
It wasn't just that Clement and the Cardinal d'Ossat could see avenues for a restoration in England of the Catholic faith through Frederick's accession, Frederick was using Derby to advertize this possibility to them, so as to make them see stabilizing his reign and developing some accomodation with him as in their interest in this other sense. It was not just a way to reduce the level of violence and oppression being meted out to ordinary Catholic believers on a daily basis. It might lead in the future to new Catholic kings and queens of England.
Of course, one problem was that if the Papacy could see the significance of all these Catholic connections at the highest levels of the court now establishing itself in Whitehall, the leadership of the Church of England (like Whitgift and Bancroft) could too, and that would present a problem. Frederick Brandon had in his transformation into Frederick I presumed much loyalty based on his family. Not just his great-great grandfather Johann the Steadfast, or his great-uncle the Elector Friedrich IV, but his great-grandmother Katherine Parr, step-great-grandmother Katherine Willoughby, grandfather Henry IX, maternal grandparents and great-grandparents among the Seymours, all had been not merely Protestant but avid supporters of various schools of evangelical Christianity. It had took all of the bona fides accumulated over almost a century to win Frederick the throne, and were it not for that pedigree the mere suggestion of the sort of compromise the Elstree Letter announced would have disqualified him as a king in the eyes of many Protestants.
So as Derby traveled back to England, arriving at Windsor Castle just in time for the first Christmas of the new reign, he knew some further adjustment, or concession, to the king's great Protestant supporters would have to be made. He knew for a fact that Sidney had hoped his mission would fail, and that the alienation of England from Catholic Europe would permit him to wage a war of what he saw as nothing less than the true religion against the false one. But that still did not reduce Stanley's immense pleasure as he arrived, Cum magna misericordia in hand, and received his reward.
William Stanley, Earl of Derby, was made Duke of York, virtually the most august title the crown could bestow, senior as a name even to the other two dukedoms the crown had raised in this first year of its reign, Kent and Northumberland. With it, to Stanley's already enormous holdings were added swaths of the lands previously held by the Cecils, including Lord Burghley's pride and joy, his showpiece recreation of Richmond Palace, Burghley House. With this last piece in place, the Stanleys with their queen, their dukedom, and their placement high in the succession, were now the second family in the kingdom, outshining even the Sidneys, their prestige rivaling the Howards at their apogee under Henry VIII. But of course that very analogy suggests the delicacy of the position.
With the revels of the Christmas season done, and the business of coronations and royal weddings accomplished the previous year, on January 21, 1604, the king summoned Parliament. In addition to the matter of ratifying the new reign and with it the most radical redisposition of titles and lands since 1485, and the recusancy question, there would be the long-deferred question of parliamentary anger over the grants of royal monopolies to favorites, which had led to high prices, low quality, and shortages, as the ability to flatter a queen had been no indicator of simple business competence.
With respect to the vexing religious question, Frederick proposed to repeal the Recusancy Act of 1558, the Religion Act of 1592 and the Popish Recusants Act of 1592. In order, the 1558 act made it the law to attend a Church of England service once a week and fined those who did not comply 12 cents (equal to three days' wages at the time) for each week. The Religion Act of 1592 augmented the 1558 act by imprisoning anyone over sixteen who failed to attend church, spoke out against the Established Church, denied royal authority on religion, or who attended unauthorized religious meetings. After three months' repeated violation, the individual would be exiled from England forever.
In the place of all this, Frederick proposed a new Religion Act: a person would pay a fine of 2 cents per head of anyone within their household who refused to attend church that week, which would be an onerous burden for most families, but which was certainly preferable to the penalties of prison or exile prescribed by the 1592 Act. There would be no crime of advocating for other religions, so long as one did not defame the king, his church or its tenets. Freedom of movement would be restored to Catholics, also reversing the 1592 act. But there would be a new ten percent tax on land and business rents that would have to be paid by anyone not attending church for ten weeks out of a calendar year for reasons other than disability.
And no one would be exempt, not the nobility, not anyone. As Frederick declaimed in his speech to Parliament, with gusto, that if even he should stay away from his chapel on a Sunday, he would pay his pennies. And if he were to run afoul of the law badly enough to miss ten Sundays, he would pay his tax. In Frederick's scheme, the small fines per head for absences on individual Sundays would go the Church of England, the taxes on rents would go to the Crown. And, he was happy to relate, he would use the money to pay for the war with Spain, "so that it could continue, absolute and without fail, to the victory."
The ten percent was derived from the biblical justification of the tax as a forced tithe. The idea was that whether or not they attended in person, the recusant owed the same tithes as everyone else to the Established Church (or its defender) and could not cheat the country of its due merely by staying home or attending other services. If the recusant refused to pay, or if they lied or underpaid, then if found guilty of having committed a fraud under the act they would lose all their property, which would not go to the crown but to the tenants as freehold. It was believed this would create an incentive to report noncompliance. The fines of 10 pounds for hiding or shielding recusants created by the 1592 act would be retained, but now applicable as well to those defrauding the crown by under-reporting their rents or falsely establishing a record of church attendance.
Finally, to make sure the new Religion Act did not run afoul of the pope and land matters back where they started, and to restrain overzealous local authorities, it did create positive rights among those recusants who paid the fines and taxes, including the right to not be killed, injured, or threatened on account of their non-attendance. Nor could they have their property confiscated. Neither could priests of the Catholic Church be killed, injured or threatened on account of their being priests. However, the act made clear that treasonous words or conduct by priests, by recusants, or by anyone else was not within its protection.
Even with the enormous countervailing penalty imposed by the new tax, the Religion Act was enormously controversial and many believed it would fail. To many Protestants after the ordeals of Elizabeth's reign, any retreat from the utmost efforts to suppress Catholicism was contemptible. Then the king signaled a compromise: he would give ground on the monopolies question if Parliament would pass the Religion Act. The compromise was quickly agreed to, and the Religion Act, followed by the Monopolies Act, which ended the practice outright, were both passed and made law.
Significant in the new act was that the new tax was not a tax on income, in which costs, expenses or losses can be subtracted out. Instead, it was a ten percent tax on a set of gross receipts, which meant that a payor in a given year who faced unusual expenses or one-time losses could easily find themselves paying a tax with no money to live on, even to the point of losing all their lands. Derby had just been made one of the largest land-owners in the country, and as the nobility was exempt from nothing, not even his two pennies a week for his absence from church. He would henceforth either have to submit and attend regular Church of England services, pay a tenth of his annual gross receipts to the crown, or lose everything.
The new Duke of York could be forgiven at that moment if even he wondered if he wouldn't have been better off with King James.
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Peter Paul Rubens, Portrait of a Young Man as Henry, King of Scots
Glenda Johnson, The Birth of the Scottish Atlantic
"Kill the Bull-Calf, and Take the Heifer": A Foreword
The story of the struggle between king and prince begins the moment James' lifelong quest for the English throne ends.
The problem for the Earl of Mar in the summer of 1603 was not that negotiations between King James and the Constable of Castile were going poorly. It was that they were proceeding only too well. Queen Anne had always intensely resented the Earl of Mar having custody of Prince Henry Duke of Rothesay, and for whatever reason had long supported the idea of a match between the Scottish heir and one of the great Catholic royal powers. To call her wildly enthusiastic about the Constable of Castile's offer for Henry to be betrothed to a Spanish princess, and educated in Spain rather than Scotland, was an understatement. That it might lead to a turn in the war and win King James his second crown seemed only secondary. She became the duke of Frias's great champion in the court. As word spread at court of the negotiations with the Spanish, other influential enthusiasts for Catholicism and closer ties to the Catholic powers, like Lord Home, rallied to the cause.
Among the rare voices at court opposed was Ludovic Stuart, Duke of Lennox, who as a longtime advocate for France at court was opposed to a Spanish alliance. But of course even a figure in as high a favor as Lennox could only say so much against it, for as the reports from the armies in Northumberland became more dour, some grand gesture by Spain became the only hope for victory over Frederick Brandon, and no one at court wanted to be the one to tell the king to set that hope aside.
Which, after the Battle of the Bridges on the Tyne, there was precious little else to do. Whatever the appetite in the country for a war for the English throne had been previously, with the heavy losses in Northumberland and the humiliation of the Scottish earls, that was now gone. In fact, Velasco himself was surprised to find, after the crushing report of Lord Douglas (apparently the only reason the three earls were not taken captive was because certain of the English commanders feared Sidney would kill them if given too much of a chance), James was still eager to contemplate how Spain might intervene, with what quantities of forces, and where placed. The improbability of success itself seemed no object.
And so the Constable, understanding the evolving nature of the circumstances, saw what was being imagined as no longer a joint effort by James's English supporters, his Scottish subjects, and Spain, but probably just a Spanish invasion with token Scottish participation and no English help at all. So he began to talk in less definite terms about what Spain was willing to undertake on James's behalf. Even as James wanted more specifics, and greater commitment, the duke of Frias was giving him less.
At the same time, there was the matter that James did not have physical custody of Prince Henry, who had virtually since birth resided under the Earl of Mar's protection and custody at Stirling. Hoping actually to bring the interminable, seemingly pointless negotiations to an end as much as anything, the Constable indicated that the king in negotiating Prince Henry's marriage seemed to be making transactions with respect to a property he did not possess. Insulted, the king took his point literally.
One night in September, a body of men appeared at the gates of Stirling. They said they were from the king and were there to collect Prince Henry on his orders. Mar, knowing precisely the nature of the negotiations undertaken, refused them admittance on the notion they showed insufficient proof their mission had been authorized by James, and he did not want to surrender the young duke to strangers. Threats were passed back and forth on both sides, until one of the men were killed. Eventually they left, and Mar sprang into action.
The Constable of Castile's presence in Edinburgh had been known, and had made the leading members of the Protestant nobility and the Kirk deeply anxious. It had been assumed by the wider public that James was negotiating with the Spanish for help securing the English throne. But what was not common knowledge that James had been negotiating to give Scotland a Spanish queen who would remain in the Catholic faith once in the country. Nor was it widely known that this plan called for Prince Henry to be taken out of the country and raised in Spain, assumably as a Catholic himself. The Earl of Mar, fearing he had little time before the king sent a larger force to fetch the Duke of Rothesay from Stirling, now publicized everything.
The resulting Protestant outrage was immediate and overwhelming. The court had to withdraw from Holyrood on account the former priory was so poorly defensible against the angry townspeople of Edinburgh. James was roundly condemned in the pulpits of the kirk, and some went so far as to begin toying with Buchanan's notions of a Christian republic. And the next armed force to appear at Stirling did not belong to James, but to the Earls of Morton and Moray, who with Mar swore an oath before the nine-year-old Prince Henry they would not permit him to be taken from the countr,y and would lay down their lives to protect his person, his right to the succession and his continued presence within Scotland.
It was widely believed that these three "lords-protector" wanted to depose James VI, replace him with Henry, and govern as Henry's regents. At this point, the war in England had depleted not just James's prestige in the country, but his treasury, and the numbers of faithful men he and the lords most faithful to him in his "Spanish course" could call on. Even James's previous, albeit fitful and inconsistent, efforts to impose Protestantism on the Scottish nobility had left the lords he would be dependent on in an armed struggle to keep the Scottish throne ambivalent towards him. For a moment, it seemed his removal was entirely possible.
It was at this moment Ludovic Stuart, Duke of Lennox intervened, offering his mediation between the "lords-protector" and the king. At his suggestion, they reduced their demands to writing. In their view, King James would have to (1) send away the Constable of Castile; (2) abjure any effort to secure for Scotland a treaty whereby Prince Henry would leave the country, for any period, for any reason; (3) reject any effort to secure for Scotland a queen from Spain; (4) grant the Earl of Mar irrevocable custody of Prince Henry, Duke of Rothesay until his majority; (5) abstain from committing any more of the Scottish treasury to his efforts to win the English crown; and (6) perfect the titles of the Earl of Moray and remove any bars on their inheritability.
These six articles were submitted to King James at Falkland Palace on October 6, 1603. Knowing the alternative was civil war or worse, James relented. The Articles were bitterly humiliating, but they kept him his throne.
After the Falkland Articles, there was a studied effort to return matters in Scotland to something as much like the state of affairs before Queen Elizabeth's death as possible. James had of course dealt with much worse personal difficulty and disappointment than any of this, and he responded to these circumstances with poise and good cheer. But the failed plan of a Spanish marriage for Prince Henry had shifted the nation's attention to what and who would come after James, and there it stayed.
Following the death of the infant Charles in 1603, and the failure of Queen Anne to produce any more surviving children in the years after, Prince Henry was the obvious successor, and he was now showing himself to be hale, assertive, and if anything, strongly opinionated. Although at this point to the extent these opinions were his own, or his "protectors"', is anyone's guess. More and more, it became understood Prince Henry was aligned with the Kirk and the Protestant lords, moreso than even his father had ever been.
This created immense discomfort among the leading Catholic lords of the Highlands, who were at the moment riding high in royal favor both because of their active participation in the effort to win the king his English crown, and because James was no longer positioning himself as the successor to an avidly Protestant monarch like Elizabeth. To them the accession of Henry seemed to promise a return to the bad old days following the Spanish Blanks fiasco, when James was exiling them and blowing up their castles.
The answer for them became the Princess Elizabeth. Raised by the Lord and Lady Livingstone, the only other surviving child of James and Anne was pretty, spirited, and sheltered from political discord. Increasingly though, she was the center of intrigue. For in the absence of her brother (for whatever reason) she would be the heir, and whereas Mary Queen of Scots had been haughty and self-directed, and hence unwilling when the time came to give a husband the crown matrimonial, it was imagined, perhaps even fantasized, the Princess Elizabeth would be sweet and pliable, ready to accept the government of a husband over herself and her country.
Their shared mania, as Lord Home explained in a letter to the Duke of York, was "kill the bull-calf and take the heifer": the plan for these young nobles would be to marry Elizabeth, then remove Prince Henry by killing him through some indirect means, leaving Elizabeth as the heir, after which all that would remain would be to claim the same crown matrimonial that had proved so elusive for Darnley.
Thus there was no end to the inquiries concerning the Princess Elizabeth's marriage, even though she had been as of 1603 just six years old. For instance, the Duke of Lennox's younger brother and heir-presumptive, Esme Stewart, who was in 1603 all of 24 years old, was inquiring about her future. The marriages of virtually every young man among the upper reaches of the Scottish nobility were being delayed on her account. And yet King James and Queen Anne gave every sign that they still preferred a foreign match for their daughter, Queen Anne in particular still favoring one with a major Catholic power, despite the fact that now it was obvious political poison.
In 1607 a total of eleven lords, mostly Catholic, put their names to a letter demanding James refrain from marrying Elizabeth to a foreign groom, ironically enough borrowing the rhetoric from the Falkland Articles' effort to keep Prince Henry out of Spain. Instead, it was suggested that the king ought not insult Scotland by presuming it had no husband fit enough for his daughter. Later that year a company of armed men of unknown origin even attempted to gain access to Lord Livingstone's house, and shot three servants before they were turned back. Though many in the Scottish Parliament requested the king move the Princess to the more secure Stirling Castle herself, he merely hired additional guards for the Livingstones' residences.
After 1608, speculation over a domestic Scottish match for Elizabeth began to revolve around Robert Kerr, son to Sir Thomas Kerr. The younger Kerr had started at court as a page to Lord Home, but risen quickly. Emerging as a favorite of the king in his own right, in 1609 he was made Lord Kerr and in 1610 elevated to the Privy Council. Upon Lord Home's death in 1611 Kerr was no longer seen as Lord Home's creature but as his own force in Scottish political life. Soon afterward he began to express interest himself in a marriage with the Princess Elizabeth. Though interfering with the ambitions of James's favorites was always dangerous, Kerr's apparent designs with respect to the princess were hugely unpoplar, given that he was of common birth, and a marriage between he and Elizabeth would mean preferring him over virtually all the rest of the country's young male nobility.
The slowly building tensions over the succession and the marriages of the prince and princess exploded in in April 1610 when the Earl of Mar was gunned down in the streets of Linlithgow, on his way from a meeting with the king himself. It was widely believed agents of the Marquess of Huntly were responsible. Suddenly, Prince Henry was without his most important protector. Another crisis ensued, as neither the Falkland Articles nor James's original grants to the Earl of Mar made reference to what was to happen to Prince Henry on Mar's death. Complicating matters further was the fact that Henry was now 16, and so permitting him his own establishment was not outside the realm of possibility.
As it was, John Erskine, Mar's son, now the new Earl of Mar, who had grown up with Henry and was just nine years older than the prince, determined to stay at Stirling and keep the prince there as if nothing at happened, even though the king was summoning the Duke of Rothesay to court. The Prince, for his part, was now sixteen years old, and showed no sign of familial tenderness, or even obedience, to his father. Apparently the idea of being wrenched from his home and his guardians and sent to Spain in 1603 had left long-lasting scars, which were not easily forgotten.
Thus, Prince Henry's response was to make an unplanned appearance before the General Assembly of the Kirk, in Edinburgh. With the new Earl of Mar at his side, he simply walked in. Introducing himself, he began:
"Gentle sirs, who I am is your servant, God grant that I may remain so as long as I do live. From the time I was born to today, I have been the prey of those who would prevent my service, intercept my reign, and keep me from my duty to you and to my God. Therefore, that I may like the hart of the woods escape my hunters, who count among their number the greatest men of this realm, and live long enough to render you the good service you are due, I humbly ask the wing of your protection. I can seek no help from them whom blood and the solemn obligations of law assign my care, for their ears have been stopped by flattery, and their wits dulled by foulest heresy. You can call my plea a boyish fancy, but go there and you can see stained on the cobbles of the streets of Linlithgow even now the blood of the last good man brave enough to protect me. I beg you, do not let me be surrendered to those who would destroy me, who would make of our palace a slaughterhouse, our laws a butcher's block, our churches, temples to dagon. But serve me now and I shall serve you and our Lord ever after, preserve me now, and I shall, I swear, preserve this land, in Jesus' name."
Shocked, tearful, the Convention acceded to a request from the Prince that he receive the assistance to hire twelve stout men to accompany him at all times, wherever he went, who would obey no other but him, and recognize no other authority but his, up to and including his royal father. In a winking nod to their employer, these guards soon came to be called the Twelve Apostles.
For his part, hearing this, King James, who had born so much disappointment with patience and good cheer, fell into tearful despondency at hearing of Henry's Speech to the Kirk. "What devils have I entrusted my son to, that he could come to think me capable of such evil!" Intensely desiring some reconciliation, the king sent the new Lord Kerr, who the prince promptly spurned. After Lord Kerr he sent Queen Anne, whom the Prince pretended not to recognize. Finally, he once again sent the old favorite, Ludovic Stuart, duke of Lennox, who was helped by his familial connection not to the Stuarts but as brother-in-law to the deceased Earl of Mar, whom now apparently Henry thought of as more his "real" family.
At length, the duke of Lennox coaxed Henry to court. But the duke of Rothesay, not one to forego theatrics, no sooner appeared before his father in the great hall at Linlithgow but walked over to the Marquess of Huntly, held his dagger, handle out, and bared his neck as if offering it to Gordon for the kill, making it only too clear he understood the situation, and upsetting his father even more. James addressed his son with his own speech: "For what ever have I desired in this life, be it title, or wealth, or worldy favor, I have desired not merely for myself but for you, and I would not have any worldly thing for my self but that it should be shared with you, my posterity, my every care, hereafter."
The notion James fervently began trying to persuade Prince Henry of was that the attempts against him and the Earl of Mar did not originate with Kerr, but with those trying to implicate him and spoil any good will between Kerr and James's successor. Kerr, James explained, only wished him well.
Hearing this delivered by King James with tears in his eyes, Prince Henry, finally humbled, apologized to his father and agreed to live at court, although not to send away his new guards, who would remain with him even in the palace and obey no one but him. Henry even reconciled with Robert Kerr, whom he warmly greeted as brother when his father asked.
It was in these years Henry's views hardened and became undoubtedly his own, rather than the parroted and recited lines given him by tutors and guardians. He disdained the violence and lawlessness of Scottish life, which to him was concentrated in the clans and their lords. He wanted impersonal and reliable justice, strengthened trade, and an end to what he saw as ignorance and superstition. His deep Proestant bigotry squarely placed Catholicism in this category. And his enemy in all this was not just the Scottish nobility as he saw it, which profited in its way from all these evils, it was his father, who was too weak and self-involved to take the necessary action to improve their country.
There was perhaps only one thing about which Henry and the king and queen agreed, and it was oddly enough his own choice of marriage. Henry now despised Spain with an ardor as intense in its way as Sidney or Walter Ralegh possessed in the English court, and so understood he could do nothing more vexing or offensive to Spanish interests than taking a French bride. As Frederician England became more stable and prosperous, first Henri IV, and then the regents and ministers of his minor heir, Louis XIII, realized that the Auld Alliance could be necessary once again. The elder French princess, Elizabeth, was lost to Henry, but the younger one, Henrietta Maria, was still possible. The only problems were her age (she was fifteen years younger than he, born in 1609) and the question of her whether she could maintain her Catholic religion as queen of Scotland.
Henry's expectations on this last point were absolutely unreasonable, and showed his naivete when it came to real diplomacy. As he explained to an audience of ministers from the kirk which came to visit him at court in 1613: "for it does not matter who she is now, from whence she comes or what great house she hales, when she is here Her Highness shall be but Goodwife Stuart, and take proper direction."
At the same time, the Princess Elizabeth was beginning to attract the interest of marriage prospects outside Scotland. Hopeless as it may have been under the circumstances, England now had a Prince of Wales, and though he was younger, and bitter memories of the Rough Wooing and the War of English Succession were hard to set aside, delicate inquiries were made, and went frigidly unanswered. For their parts James and Anne had hoped for a double-wedding with France, their Henry marrying Henrietta Maria and their Elizabeth marrying the young French king, Louis XIII. But by 1615 Louis XIII had married elsewhere, Scotland's inducements, strategic and monetary, being simply insufficient to secure the French king.
This left several suitors from the second tier of Protestant powers for Elizabeth, including Gustavus Adolphus, Prince of Sweden, Elector Friedrich of the Palatinate, and the young Elector Christian of Saxony. Lured by accounts of the princess's beauty, and stories of Scotland's wildness and danger, Christian decided to visit, even though Saxony's support of Frederick Brandon in the War of the English Succession had been neither forgiven nor forgotten in the least at the Scottish court. As ever in these years, Saxony needed a royal match with a Protestant house to maintain its prestige relative to the other Holy Roman princely states. It had already made too many trips to the well with the Danish royal family in preceding generations, and the Brandon princesses of England were too young, which left Scotland the obvious choice.
In order to ameliorate the ill will arising from 1603, Christian was willing to offer a remarkable set of inducements to a marriage contract. And Scotland, without the subsidies it had enjoyed from Elizabeth I to her prospective heir, without the Auld Alliance, which hollow rhetoric aside, had been effectively nullified for a long while now by the English courtship of France, and without Spain, James VI needed the money Christian was offering badly.
Self-confidence, self-love even, falls well short of the truth in describing Christian during these years. All the cunning of the Holy Prince, and all the caution of Alexander, were to Christian just the unfolding of the plan of divine Providence, which would lead inexorably to his final victory and the humiliation of all those who stood in his way. If he was callow, foolish, and capable of great, and greatly consequential, recklessness, he was also capable of making an impressive entrance. Thus his visit to Scotland in 1615 was the richest spectacle the country had seen in living memory. And Christian himself--handsome, athletic, well-spoken--had little trouble winning the heart of the princess. In fact, perhaps understanding the nature of his assignment, Christian perhaps worked a bit at winning the heart of his prospective father-in-law as well.
In retrospect, it was perhaps not surprising that Christian and Prince Henry would become fast friends during the young Saxon elector's stay. Christian was everything Henry wanted to be, a respected and wealthy Protestant prince who had already gone to war and won conquests while still a young man. Christian also took to the Scottish courtly outdoor pastimes very well, and for a time the Scottish prince and princess and their German guest were happily inseparable. Despite Anne's dislike of a Protestant match, even with her own sister's son, and James's residual annoyance over 1603, the combination of money and youthful charm were propelling the marriage negotiations along in late summer 1615.
Which created its own crisis, in that so many members of the Scottish nobility, particularly among those who feared the prospect of Henry's reign, were eagerly angling for he hand of the Princess Elizabeth themselves. There were anonymous letters to the king and flybills denouncing Christian and the proposed marriage. Then matters gradually became more serious. An intentionally damaged saddle caused the Elector of Saxony to fall from his horse directly into the path of other riders while he was out hunting. Though he could have been killed, Christian laughed at the mishap and asked if his hosts had any saddles with straps that had not been sliced halfway through, on account they tended to work better. Then, a clumsy attempt at poisoning a dish of sauce that was to be shared by Christian and Prince Henry was detected by the elector's physician in the kitchens before a meal. Finally, there were efforts by armed men to force their way into the royal apartments at Stirling Castle while Christian was staying with Henry.
It reached the point where even a prince with as unflinching a sense of his own invulnerability as Christian had, was forced to relent. In a private audience with James, he admitted he would be forced to leave Scotland. But he also challenged the king that as word of his treatment in Scotland spread, James would find precious few suitors for his daughter, and none willing to offer James a fraction of what he was. Then Christian made his final offer, which James felt obliged to accept. And so after a rushed ceremony, which was held at Edinburgh Castle on account it was believed impregnable to assault, Christian left, took Elizabeth with him, and thus began one of the great tragic love stories in German history. Henry's own nicknames for the couple would echo through the ages: Careless and Fearless.
But the cycle of assassination attempts against he and Christian left Prince Henry rattled and somewhat paranoid. After all, of that inseparable threesome he was the one who was left to fend for himself among the uncaught perpetrators, with whom he had to interact at court every day. There was even an angry confrontation between he and Lord Kerr in which he drew his sword. Brought before the king, Henry refused to apologize to Kerr and begged to be allowed to leave court on account of the attempts on his life. And he now made no show of accepting James's proposition, which he thought preposterous, that the real problem was Kerr's jealous enemies.
James refused to permit him to leave or to give him his own establishment, no matter how mean. Henry left anyway, repudiating his father's authority. Once again, the Earls of Mar, Morton and Moray came to his defense, asserting that the Duke of Rothesay did not desire the throne, but merely his own safety, which his father plainly could not guarantee. From the Duke of Lennox came the counter-charge that finally the pride of Prince Henry had gone too far, and that he had to accept his father's authority as king. He would not intervene to prevent conflict between father and son this time.
Needing a refuge, Prince Henry first considered England, but then realized his enemies would be only too happy to see him flee there on account of what that would do to his reputation as a defender of Scotland against the great hereditary enemy. Also, though times were very different now, the historical example of his grandmother's fate did not inspire confidence. Instead they would go to Lochleven Castle, on Morton's lands, where his father had held Mary Queen of Scots before her flight. They felt the Castle, on an island in a lake, would be easy to hold for a long siege, and that at length the king would relent.
James, after the brawl and threat against Kerr, had lost all patience with his son. He was encouraged in his stern attitude by Kerr and the Duke of Lennox, the latter of whom was trying, with the Princess Elizabeth now gone, to have himself declared the next in line for the throne after Prince Henry. The king dispatched 600 soldiers to fetch the Duke of Rothesay and return with him. With them James sent Lord Kerr, to make sure Prince Henry was taken alive and unhurt. What he did not know is that the Earls had gathered for Henry at Stirling some 500 men, enough to make more than a mere show of resistance.
Nonetheless, because Prince Henry and the Earls of Morton and Moray were slowed by the time it took to gather their force, James's men closed, At Tullibody they chose to make a stand. Perhaps taking Frederick Brandon's surprise counterattack at Dordon as their model, they fought James's forces. The king's forces, expecting to retrieve a truculent heir with little resistance, were surprised to be met with deadly force. One of the first felled was Kerr, who took a gunshot wound to the chest and died.
With the king's favorite dead, and the possibility of taking the prince alive fast declining, James's men asked for a truce to parley. It was at this point Prince Henry made another speech. He had not wanted the king's throne, he claimed, nor anything but the assurance of his own safety. He had been prevented from this by the interference of the king's overmighty favorites. The duke of Rothesay continued, saying these favorites, meaning not just Kerr but Lennox, were now grown so great that they oppressed not just him, or the good people of Scotland, but the king himself. And, Prince Henry counseled, if these soldiers sent by the king, joined to his own, would but follow him, he would release the king from the manipulations of these evil men. If they would follow him, they would not harm King James, they would free him.
If this was, to these common soldiers, a doubtful proposition, it was still favorable to explaining to the king how they had gotten his favorite killed. And Prince Henry was, technically, returning with them to the Palace of Linlithgow, which was their mission, albeit he was not in their custody and he had not been disarmed. On the ride back, which took several days, the Prince was adamant he did not mean to depose his father, but that matters had gone far enough and that he could not submit to further attempts on his life. Arriving at Linlithgow, the soldiers who had set out to retrieve Henry were admitted alongside the forces he and the earls had been able to raise, the guards at the gates not understanding at first what was happening.
Entering the king's presence armed, Prince Henry set before James one instrument naming him James's regent, and another abdicating the throne in Henry's favor, and gave King James his choice of the two. Asking where Robert Kerr was and getting a bitter answer from the prince, James VI relinquished power and named Prince Henry his regent and custodian. As word spread of the fighting at Tullibody, and the subsequent march on Linlithgow, the Highland lords began raising forces for a new civil war to liberate the king from the prince. The kirk for its part began mustering the fateful for a new armed force, loyal only to Prince Henry, which would not rely on the affinities of the great lords.
But none of this was to be. Three days after signing the Article of Regency, James VI was found dead of apparent natural causes in his bed at Linlithgow the morning of June 17, 1617. It was believed his death was brought on by heartbreak over the loss of Robert Kerr. Henry was thereupon acclaimed the undisputed king of Scotland.
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So, like I thought would happen, real-world responsibilities are going to make me step a way from the timeline for a bit, hopefully just for a short while. But I feel like this is a good place to break: not just because it's the turn of the century, but because moving forward at this point is going to involve updates in several new national and colonial histories, which will in turn involve some research and heavy thinking before I charge ahead with updates. Of course, it's also a good place to break because I've just introduced three of the main characters we will be following for the next several decades: Christian, Elizabeth and Henry, and I've done so in a way that gives us a taste of their personalities.
I will however be around for a while first, to put in the long-promised threadmarks. Second, this is a great time for questions, requests for clarification, that sort of thing.
When I come back I'm going to try to have more alt-present day and alt-pop culture stuff, which I always find really fun to write, as well as more alt-history of science. We will also finally delve into Eastern Europe and address the Netherlands in a more definitive way.
Finally, and most importantly, I want to thank you all for your warm support of my work here. I hope you've been entertained, and I hope to be back with more installments very soon.
I will however be around for a while first, to put in the long-promised threadmarks. Second, this is a great time for questions, requests for clarification, that sort of thing.
When I come back I'm going to try to have more alt-present day and alt-pop culture stuff, which I always find really fun to write, as well as more alt-history of science. We will also finally delve into Eastern Europe and address the Netherlands in a more definitive way.
Finally, and most importantly, I want to thank you all for your warm support of my work here. I hope you've been entertained, and I hope to be back with more installments very soon.
Sorry to hear that this will be on break but I fully understand!
I was wondering if the English-Saxon relationship was here to stay? Basically their fates seem intricately intertwined right now and I guess this could be the basis of a lasting friendship.
I was wondering if the English-Saxon relationship was here to stay? Basically their fates seem intricately intertwined right now and I guess this could be the basis of a lasting friendship.
I'm enjoying this timeline very much! And I agree that this is a good stopping point -- it feels like we've reached a turning point of some kind, at least in the British Isles. Youve placed Frederick Brandon (apparently?) securely on the throne, and so it seems like a good moment to transition to looking at the rest of Europe again.
Also, regarding James: natural causes, hunh? Well, I guess it's possible.
I hope all your RL commitments go smoothly!
Also, regarding James: natural causes, hunh? Well, I guess it's possible.
I hope all your RL commitments go smoothly!
Well with respect to James's death, that's exactly how that's meant to be taken. One of those moments when you're reading a history book and your eyes narrow and your lip curls in disgust and you say, "yeah, I'm sure it happened just that like that..."
The biggest driver of the longer-term alliance is going to be France. Henri IV actually had a great quote in the book I was reading on James's succession to the English throne that "Scotland is France's bridle on England". So once you enter the wars of the era of Louis XIV with England still England, not Britain, the great power math works differently between the two. And for Wittenberg, sharing the continent with Louis XIV during this period is like being locked in a cage with a hungry tiger. So both are going to cling to each other for dear life for a bit. And Scotland? Is in a very interesting position in all this. A Protestant junior power with dynastic connections to one, a grudge against the other, and a traditional ally adverse to both.
So, from what we've seen of Henry so far, do we think he's going to be offering us a foreign policy grounded in moral principle? That this will be James's spirit of "Blessed is the peacemaker" in a different bottle? Or is it going to be something more cynical?
But at the same time, it's going to get complicated between London and Wittenberg. There are going to be inevitable imperial rivalries. And more to the point, all these familial connections bring with them problems too. Because like what we just saw with the War of the English Succession, it's one thing to marry your daughter off to a foreign ruler or heir on the notion that just maybe it might result in a foreign successor to your own throne, it's another when such a succession is actually about to happen and you have to decide whether to go through with it. So the dynastic alliances can become not just ways to bind the countries together, but points of contention as well.
Going forward, I guess it works a bit the way the Anglo-Dutch relationship works in the same period OTL. Are there religious, economic and cultural common factors that create a tendency for them to fall in with each other? Yes. Will great power politics occasionally require them to do so? Yes. But will they also quarrel from time to time, up to and including the odd war? Also yes.
But all this is further off, in the reigns of Edward VII, Mary II and Edward VIII for England, Henry II for Scotland, and a bunch of future Friedrichs.
Yep, it's strongly implied. Although several questions are left open. It's not necessarily Henry personally, or even someone operating under Henry's orders, but someone with a vested interest in ending the uncertainty around the succession and averting the coming civil war who sees that as an acceptable price to pay.
And I'll gladly cop to the charge that all this echoes the death of Henry VI as much as it does the conflict between James III and IV. Maybe the fact that I find Henry VI's story so interesting has something to do with the fact that if the story goes as planned and we get far enough, we will eventually have a Second Reademption in England.
Inevitably, we will. The question is going to be when and how the effects of what's happened thus far reaches the wider world. Obviously when most of the timeline was occurring in the Holy Roman Empire, those effects would be very limited. Now that we have substantial changes to some of the Atlantic monarchies, that's going to mean almost immediately changes to the story of early modern imperialism and colonialism. And that in turn will have material effects on what's happening in non-western societies. Figuring those out and researching them carefully is one reason we're going to go a bit without new updates.
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Will there be any changes in history of india and China?
Will we see occult or New age movements before canon timeline? I mean transdalism and theosophy were created after coming in contact with Vedanta and Buddhism. Will this encounter happen early in this timeline? Germany was after all Main centre of Indology in canon timeline.
Looking at some of the older posts, ran into this bit.
Now, OTL Amsterdam has 872,680 inhabitants in the city proper, with 1,558,755 in the "urban area" and 2,480,394 in the "metropolitan area." If Amsterdam has over 1.3 million Jews, these numbers are are probably substantially larger than OTL. Bigger Netherlands implied?
Now, OTL Amsterdam has 872,680 inhabitants in the city proper, with 1,558,755 in the "urban area" and 2,480,394 in the "metropolitan area." If Amsterdam has over 1.3 million Jews, these numbers are are probably substantially larger than OTL. Bigger Netherlands implied?
Deleted member 147978
I can only say that I hope once you return from your break your TL would be more better than ever especially if you're going for ATL National and Colonial Histories alongside ATL Pop-Culture. Wish you good luck on that mission.
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Oh by the way, are all of the older chapter canon @Dr. Waterhouse ? I'm asking since I seem to remember you saying after your hiatus that they are pending a rewrite or something, but I cannot find the comment you said it in...
Well there is a very big question already in the air with respect to India. England, like we said, is more or less going to be England. No Great Britain. No United Kingdom. (However, still having the personal union with Ireland, and the de facto colonial relationship that entails.) And, like we said, that creates a different dynamic to those pivotal early modern confrontations with France. In North America, we've already seen how one effect of this (and some other crucial changes) is surviving francophone countries.
So the question with respect to India is, can England pull off there what Great Britain did in OTL? If not, is the primary beneficiary going to be the other colonizing powers, or is it going to be the Mughals, Marathas or some successor state? Are we going to see a native-led political order that endures the whole time? Are we going to see something analogous to OTL's China, with treaty ports and spheres of influence but no military conquest and administration? Or, do one of the other colonizing powers (I imagine the French are the only ones who can pull off something of the necessary scale) do what Great Britain did?
As to new religions, in the old timeline I tried playing around a bit with an illicit mystery religion in the RCR and a variation on the Yezidi. (I did enough research on it I was getting some very interesting book recommendations on Amazon, as you can imagine.) I may try to work on new religions, especially arising out of the cultural collisions and hybridizations that arise out of colonialism, because these are very interesting, but the great delimiting factor there is my own skill. I'm happy to try, unless it begins to look to my own eyes that what I'm going to do will come off as stupid, facile, or worst of all, disrespectful to someone's real-world belief.