Special Chapter
In the Name of the Lord
The Kingdom of Britannia, unlike some other countries, survived the 18th century without much of a scratch. An isolationist state ruling over the British Isles, it avoided participating in the German Revolutionary Wars, while the flames of the Revolution barely even touched it.
The Kingdom was officially founded by Charles I in 1630, after the Twenty Years' War and the final unification of the Isles under one crown. After a brief civil war against the supporters of the Parliament, Charles I and his Puritans, a radical Catholic sect, obtained absolute control over the nation, and the King of Britannia became the first absolute monarch in Europe. However, while other monarchies followed it's lead throughout the 17th century, the level of control the King had in Britannia was never matched. His rule was deeply connected with the religiousness of the nation, in some cases even upholding the monarch as God's representative in the Kingdom, and while Britannia nominally remained Catholic, even the Papacy began to distance itself away from the Brits and their "craziness". The Puritans banned theatre, music, other types of arts, sports, many sciences, gambling, chess and other types of leisure, their
"Millenarian Squads" patrolled the countryside, hunting witches, heretics and undertaking exorcisms, with torture and maiming being a common sight in all three activities. The government and it's institutions were organized under the fundamentals of Christianity - as an example, all government institutions had a tablet with engraved Ten Commandments hanging above the door both inside and outside, to remind the people of "God's and thus Britannia's laws".
While this was happening all across Britannia, the Irish and the Scots were not having a good time. The monarchy believed that the Celts, many of whom were Reformists, were too dangerous to the British society, and thus their lands must be colonized with Englishmen and assimilated as quickly as possible. King Charles I even once noted that "Connaught and Munster must become as ethnically English as Lancashire". In a way, this colonization of Scotland and Ireland was pretty much a necessity due to England proper's rapidly rising population, it needed to "lay off population pressure". Both the Irish and Scottish languages were banned from any official press and publications, as well as from usage in public, and the education system in the regions was built solely around assimilating the younger generations into English culture and language. History was being rewritten to paint the pre-British Kingdom of Scotland and the Irish clans as "uncivilized, pagan and brutal barbarians" and records on the pre-British period were rapidly being destroyed. Any opposition to the regime, especially rebellions, were brutally squashed by the constant English military presence in the regions - it is estimated that by 1750, over 300 000 regular soldiers of the British army were stationed in Scotland and Ireland to keep up order and the assimilation processes. Rebellions helped colonization, too - after every failed revolt, the British regime would round up and kick out the relatives of any known or suspected rebel, seize any land they own and quickly hand it away to English colonists. Similar, though not as intense assimilation was also happening in Cornwall and Wales. It was a sad fate for the Celtic nations - thousands died in the long resistance, many more fled to the New World in search of a less oppressive life, while the near absolute majority of those who stayed ended up assimilated into the English nation in the long run.
The tyranny of the Kingdom slightly cooled off during the 18th century. It had lived for a hundred years, the generation which founded Britannia was long since dead, and the built up religious fundamentalism started to fade away, bit by bit. The French, who were keeping an eye on the situation in the Isles, coined the term
Détente for this period. The intensity of the assimilation began to weaken, the flow of colonists slowed down, even a few Celtic schools were eventually opened in Connaught and the Highlands, far from the major population centres and under careful supervision, of course. The port of Southampton was opened to free trade with the rest of the world, although partially also because the monarchy realized that perfect autarky is impossible. However, Détente did not last long, until the 1760s. The German Revolution was a great worry to King
Henry X, who feared that a similar rebellion could happen in his own country as well, and in 1771, he ordered the arrest of over 500 intellectuals, artists and scientists across England, 219 of whom were later hanged for "conspiring to betray the Kingdom of Britannia". Historical records show that the monarchy did not hesitate to use such underhanded tactics as torture and holding family members as hostages to extort a confirmation of their participation in this plot. The rest were imprisoned either for life or for other long sentences. This act, known as the
London Affair, was a severe blow to Britannia's already small class of intelligentsia, but some politicians believed that this didn't go far enough, most notably
Sir Henry Braddock, King Henry X's Minister of War, who was pushing through the
Braddock Plan - in order to "root out the possibility of rebellion, heretical thoughts and traitorous beliefs", he hoped to outright destroy the education system by removing any semblance of humanitarian or scientific education from the nation, replacing it with the only thing he believed was worthy of being studied - faith and war. Braddock hoped to destroy the intelligentsia and turn the kingdom into "a united, immortal, perfect nation".
Sir Henry Braddock, Minister of War
Thankfully, however, the Braddock Plan was never instituted, because even Henry X realized that the Minister of War was outright insane in his Christian fundamentalism, and soon removed him from his position. Still, Britannia remained behind the rest of Western Europe in technology and economic advancement. While France, Germania and Visegrad were rapidly adopting industrialism, Britannia stayed as mostly an agrarian nation, though that's not to say that there weren't industrial centers cropping up there even with the Puritans in charge. One of the biggest centers was Lancashire, where cities like Liverpool and Manchester were rapidly rising thanks to nearby coal deposits.
As colonization of Ireland and Scotland slowed, Britannia needed an another place to "discharge" it's surplus population. Despite of (and partially because of) it's agrarian nature, Britannia's population was one of the fastest growing in Europe, and this equated to overpopulation in these two tiny islands. The middle of the 18th century saw the foundation of Virginia, located at the southern part of South Vespucia, but the cold climate and the proximity to the nearby hostile Inca Empire made it unattractive to settlers. British expeditions to Oceania, however, gave the kingdom a right to claim the entire uncivilized continent, and since nobody else in Europe wanted to contest their claim - who would fight for a bunch of sand and rocks? - the Brits went forward with it. The first British colonial town in Oceania was founded by 500 Irish and English prisoners and was named
New Plymouth, and after pushing out the local Aborigines with the traditional European approach of gunpowder, the British laid claim to their first colony on the continent -
New Cornwall, located in the southeastern part of the continent, near a local strait. From this humble beginning, a vast colony began, and by 1850, British Oceania was stretching across the entire eastern and southeastern coast of the landmass, numbering over 500 thousand inhabitants.
An even more distant colony was founded far from both Oceania and Virginia. While the eastern coast of North Vespucia was already bustling with activity, the western coast was left completely forgotten, with only a rare Mejican or Spanish explorer coming through to find the path to the Pacific Ocean. British interests there, surprisingly, started out almost purely as a private venture, and the story behind it is actually quite interesting. After a long famine, the disgruntled Irish in Connaught rebelled in 1821, and after the revolt was defeated, the British Army acquired over 5000 prisoners, many of whom didn't even participate in the uprising. They were set for either execution or imprisonment, but suddenly, an old, retired businessman by the name of
Joseph Conway offered to buy them out and he'll "make sure they never see you again". Since the worth of the Irish prisoners in the eyes of the king was basically nil, he agreed. What Conway, a known fundamentalist, set out for was to send himself and all the Irish to create a colony in North Vespucia which would serve as a base for him and his followers to proselytize the Native Vespucians in the continent. After a long and arduous journey, he and the 1400 survivors of the trip landed on the western coast of North Vespucia, next to a small bay, founding the city of
New York and declaring this land to be
New England, the personal property of Joseph Conway. Of course, this didn't go as well as Conway expected, and only 11 years later, he was forced to send the last surviving ship to Virginia and request help. What Britannia did was send a regiment and a few vessels to annex New England and turn it into a British colony, pushing Conway aside and declaring it to be under the rule of the King. The Brits did only nominally better than Conway, plagued with the huge distance between the colony and any other British territory, as well as attacks from nearby Native Vespucians, but it miraculously survived and lived on, for now.
The Kingdom of Britannia, despite it's many weakness, was still a capable secondary European power, and it still had a future ahead of itself.
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New Plymouth - Melbourne
New Cornwall - Victoria State
New York - San Francisco
New England - California I suppose
The next chapter will be called "For Our Liberty and Yours"
Though yes, they do feel very much like a USA analogue.
