The habsburgs might not be as bankrupts in this TL because they don't have to fight wars with france and everyone as every moment.
Una diferente ‘Plus Ultra’ - the Avís-Trastámara Kings of All Spain and the Indies (Updated 11/7)
- Thread starter Torbald
- Start date
I know I haven't made a very good showing with updates and individual responses recently - something which I can only apologize for - but if any of you are willing to toss a vote this way in the current Turtledoves, I'd be greatly appreciative. 
If not that's fine, writing this timeline and being able to have such fruitful discussion with all of you has been more than rewarding since we started more than a year ago!
If not that's fine, writing this timeline and being able to have such fruitful discussion with all of you has been more than rewarding since we started more than a year ago!
30. Avalon
~ Avalon ~
The British Isles c. 1510-1560
"Yet some men say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had by the will of our Lord Jesu into another place;
And men say that he shall come again, and he shall win the holy cross."
- Le Morte d’Arthur
The British Isles c. 1510-1560
"Yet some men say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had by the will of our Lord Jesu into another place;
And men say that he shall come again, and he shall win the holy cross."
- Le Morte d’Arthur
Much like Juan Pelayo in Spain, Charles V in the Holy Roman Empire, and Charles IX in France, Arthur Tudor was part of a generation of European rulers that came to the throne during a time of great reorganization, consolidation, and optimism. England’s reputation in Europe had been greatly bruised during the 15th century, with all but one of its once vast continental possessions lost to the French, and with its domestic stability and dynastic legitimacy badly shaken by more than three decades of internal bloodshed during the War of the Roses. Things had rapidly turned around, however, under the guidance of the new ruling Tudor dynasty, which was determined in pushing England into the 16th century and out of the Medieval era. Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch, spent his reign centralizing royal authority, forcibly disbanding the private armies of the great noble houses, and also reasserting England’s position on the world stage, crafting useful alliances through marriage and necessity with the houses of Hapsburg and Avís-Trastámara. Henry VII likewise ran the kingdom’s budget with great frugality, and was notorious for putting the wealthiest members of the English nobility through a gauntlet of fines. By the conclusion of Henry VII’s nearly 30-year rule, England was prepared fiscally and administratively to become a force to be reckoned with.
There was an almost mythic element to the House of Tudor as well. Unlike their Plantagenet predecessors, who had originated in France, the Tudors were pure Britons. The house of Tudor’s Welsh roots only served to strengthen their ties to the Kingdom of England, tying them to an ancient bloodline that preceded the Normans, Saxons, and Romans, and heightening the aura of Arthurian greatness imbued in Henry VII’s eldest son and heir, who had been given the name of that legendary king. Across England there could be felt a hope and excitement for things to come as they were steered in this new direction: one gradually less concerned with the goings-on of Continental Europe, and that rather looked towards an English - and to a certain extent British - future.
There were, however, insecurities that plagued Arthur’s reign and hindered the kingdom of England from tapping its full potential while under his rule and even the rule of his successors. Like every European prince Arthur was prepared from birth to be king, but his education was intense even by royal standards. Arthur would consequently mature into a profoundly learned monarch, but this was only accomplished through an environment of acute anxiety. Arthur’s accession to the throne was guarded by a household that had lived through all the tribulations of a succession crisis, and Arthur was therefore prohibited from activities such as jousting or hunting as well as from what was felt to be excessive carousing with his friends, all of which may have stunted the Tudor heir’s social skills and left him helpless to avoid coming across as perpetually standoffish.
Arthur and Catherine
After marrying Catherine of Aragon (Catalina de Trastámara), the youngest child of the Catholic Monarchs, he took up residence with her at Ludlow Castle in the West Midlands, where the couple remained to govern Wales until 1512 with few interruptions. Beyond his immediate family, Catherine was probably Arthur’s only close companion throughout his life, and - being also incredibly strong-willed (having come from a dynasty fairly accustomed to female monarchs) - she exercised a substantial influence on his policies as king. Whenever Arthur was absent from England, he authorized Catherine to act as regent, something which she did admirably on many occasions through acts such as pardoning rioters and initiating a program of poverty relief, earning her the affection of many of her English subjects. However, Arthur’s strict faithfulness deference to Catherine caused a deal of apprehension and sometimes resentment for the king’s subordinates. For one, attaining a healthy male heir as quickly as possible was of utmost importance given the fresh memory of the War of the Roses, and this was a task with which Arthur and Catherine had some difficulty. The couple had an awkward first few years of marriage and there were murmurs of Arthur being unable to perform. When their first child, a son named Henry, was born in 1505, he was healthy enough until he suddenly took ill after his fifth birthday and died unexpectedly. After a daughter named Elizabeth was born in 1507 and survived past infancy, Catherine finally conceived another son, also named Henry, in 1511 who only lived a few hours after birth. This unpromising trend put an enormous strain on Arthur and Catherine’s marriage, which would not be relieved until the birth of a son in 1513, this time named Edward after Arthur's father. Edward would survive his father, but the pain of child mortality still plagued the royal couple, losing two of their next four daughters at young ages: one stillborn and the other dying at the age of two.
- The Dowry of Mary -
While Catherine’s role in Arthur’s succession caused tension at court, her religious inclinations were another issue. The Tudors were certainly devout Catholics like their continental contemporaries, but their devotion still did not compare to the heady faith of the Trastámaras. As a true renaissance prince, the “New Learning” of Renaissance humanism was Arthur’s bread and butter, and the Tudor court under Arthur was very much invested in it. Arthur was known to have regularly entertained thinkers who had studied under the tutelage of such renowned Renaissance humanists as Desiderius Erasmus and Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples, both of whose works Arthur kept in his personal library. This was troubling from Catherine’s perspective. Not only did the humanist approach of the scholars studied and hosted by Arthur grate with the Thomistic scholasticism that prevailed in Castile, but their concern with reforming the Church from the inside seemed like it was being quickly replaced by a desire to break with the Church entirely. The Trastámaras were no strangers to aggressive Church reform, but only on a structural and disciplinary level, not in regards to the fundamental dogmas of Catholicism.
Catherine was not misled in her suspicion of these humanists importing Protestantism, whether intentionally or not. Proto-Protestant thought first filtered into the British Isles through the Low Countries and Northern France, where most English and Scottish scholars traveled to study. The circle of humanists sponsored by Arthur grew to include not only the Englishmen Thomas Bilney, Robert Barnes, and Myles Coverdale - all known for agitating against the authority of the Pope - but also foreigners who had formerly been gathered by the liberal bishop of Meaux, Guillaume Briçonnet, such as François Vatable, Merten de Keyser, and Johannes Murmellius. As the prodigious violence over Protestantism began to unfold in Germany and elsewhere in the 1520s, these individuals came under greater scrutiny. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Lord Chancellor of England and Arthur’s closest advisor, had hitherto been a generous supporter of a broad range of humanist thinkers in the hopes of building up an intellectual current that would lead to sweeping Church reforms, but now began to tone down his enthusiasm for such a project - in part at the behest of Queen Catherine. In 1525, Wolsey convinced Arthur to retract his sponsorship of William Tyndale, who had undertaken a translation of the New Testament into vernacular English, and banish him to the continent (where his views quickly grew more Protestant) despite the fact that Tyndale disagreed with Luther and Karlstadt and was in fact opposed to humanist teaching as well, having remarked:
“They have ordained that no man shall look on the Scripture, until he be noselled in heathen learning eight or nine years and armed with false principles, with which he is clean shut out of the understanding of the Scripture.”
As the years passed and the non-conformists in Arthur’s company made greater commotion over issues such as papal primacy, baptism, transubstantiation, and biblical interpretation, their numbers were gradually thinned. Foreigners such as Vatable, Keyser, and Murmellius were exempt from the local jurisdiction and were simply induced to return to their homelands, but native Englishmen such as Bilney, Barnes, and Coverdale were more troublesome. Coverdale solved his own inconvenience in 1532 by crossing over to Guelders in self-imposed exile, and from there to the court of William of Jülich-Cleves-Berg. The only solution available for Robert Barnes and Thomas Bilney - who had become suspected of Protestant sympathies as early as 1526 - was to submit them to a Church Tribunal, and if they refused to recant any heretical beliefs, leave them to the pyre. While Barnes was found guilty of disseminating the works of Martin Luther upon returning to Essex from Germany in 1530, the only suspect activity Bilney had engaged in was to preach against substituting faith for works and against the excessive veneration of the saints and their relics - neither of which constituted heresy. What was more, Bilney had become a good friend of Arthur, and the king was loath to consider removing him.
But Arthur’s hands were tied. The late 1520s had significantly damaged his standing amongst the Catholics of his realm, with the most harmful development happening during the so-called “Fishmongers’ Revolt” in 1528. In response to the crown’s attempt to cut back on guild privileges in port towns (so as to encourage private investment, preferably from the nobility), a group of fishermen from Wessex began organizing a strike in mid 1527, forbidding the departure of boats from the quays of Portsmouth, Southampton, Fareham, and Havant until they received assurances of their old rights. Small operation fishermen in the south of England had been struggling to maintain their livelihoods in the face of the irregularities brought on by chaotic warfare on the continent, lowered demand from markets that had become primarily Protestant (and thus not observant of the Friday fast), and an inability to compete with the growing Grand Banks fisheries. The strike spread east to the fishing communities of Sussex, Essex, and Kent, but the crown refused to budge, being preoccupied with war in Europe. Piggybacking on a wave of anti-Protestantism, a procession led by the fishermen of Maldon was organized in early 1528, representing many different concerns arising from a maelstrom of all the fears and frustrations of the 16th century English common folk. This procession would march to London in the hopes of eliciting a response from the king and with the added objective of encouraging the eradication of English Protestantism. Things moved along peaceably enough until this procession reached Romford, where it was set upon by a mounted force under the knight Sir John Talbot and was violently dispersed. Accounts are divided on whether or not this reaction was provoked, with Talbot claiming that the roughly 4,000 armed rebels had already ransacked numerous villages on the way to London, while others claimed that the rebels - while armed - were in easy spirits, singing as they ambled along and even carrying a statue of the Blessed Virgin at the fore. Whatever had actually occurred, in the eyes of many it constituted a major scandal for King Arthur, who had authorized deadly force against such a minimal threat that bore such understandable concerns. For several years following the Fishmongers’ Revolt, Arthur attempted to counterbalance this by cracking down on Protestant influences at court.
The Maldon Procession
As rueful as he may have been to do it, Arthur had Thomas Bilney taken from his quarters in Ipswich in chains, arraigned before Cardinal Wolsey at Westminster Abbey, and burned alongside Robert Barnes for heresy in 1532. The grisly execution of Bilney, who was hardly a shade removed from pure, orthodox Catholicism, was a massive blunder. Targeting a Catholic dissenter merely due to his position at court while legitimate heresiarchs were traipsing around the countryside was clearly not the solution to England’s religious problems, nor was it expedient merely to silence the dissenting voices in the English Church, and the Tudor court was aware of this. While Catholicism in England was generally much healthier in the early 16th century than it was in Germany, the bastion of the English Church was not so impervious as that of, say, Castile or Portugal, and a great many grievances against it were becoming painfully apparent once Henry VII died. The English Church was badly in need of reform and both the hardline Catholics and the Protestant objectors in the realm knew it. England, along with the polities of Germany and Scandinavia, had not achieved concessions from the Papacy as extensive as those carved out by the monarchs of Spain and (to a lesser extent) France. Consequently, the Papacy remained a tremendously unpopular institution in these areas of Europe in the 16th century, representing an indifferent, foreign influence that siphoned inordinate amounts of money through tithes and benefices and that used its legal immunity to grant asylum to men of the cloth suspected of crimes sometimes as serious as murder. In England and the rest of Northern Europe, distaste for the Pope was a fairly common sentiment felt in varying degrees across all tiers of society no matter how strong one’s devotion to Catholicism was, and consequently anger towards the Papacy provided Protestantism with a significant portion of its emotional drive early on.
Likewise, the monasteries - once the lifeblood of Christian devotion in the West - had slipped into a state of apathy during the Renaissance, becoming secluded, self-sufficient communes that contributing little to Western Europe’s spiritual or intellectual development while occupying an enormous share of its workable land (1/3rd of English land being owned by the Church). Drastic reforms were needed to ensure the monastic system fulfilled its original function and that the land it owned wasn’t going to waste. These reforms required some measures that many Church officials found intrusive, however, and, unlike the Catholic Monarchs in Spain, the Tudors and their predecessors had no crusading Reconquista through which they could have been gifted leverage against the Church. It was estimated by Cardinal Wolsey, one of the leading voices of English Church reform, that the land held by the monasteries could be redistributed to as many as 100,000 freehold farms. While this number was almost certainly an embellishment, it is not very far off, and England’s growing population would surely benefit from so much land put under the vigorous attention of small-hold farmers.
By the 1530s, however, Wolsey’s attempts to reform the English and Irish Churches had amounted to practically nothing, with a formidable opposition led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham. Admittedly, there was little that could be done so long as Rome had not begun its own process of reform, but there was something that could be said for the intransigence of the old Church order in England during Arthur’s reign, which more than likely influenced his sometimes nebulous relationship with Rome, his continued allegiance to which may be attributed principally to his wife. Arthur would ease off publicly burning Protestants and crypto-Protestants after the death of Thomas Bilney, and returned to a more conciliatory approach to extinguishing heresy in his realm shortly after, but inter-confessional battle lines were already being drawn in ways that were beyond the house of Tudor’s control.
Meyeran and Lutheran Protestantism had made some minor inroads amongst the English by the 1540s - with “Saxon Rite” (Lutheran), “Winteran” (Vinteran/Nordic), and “Franconian” (Meyeran) churches found from Kent to Northumberland (although mostly concentrated in Essex) - but their particular congregations more or less remained foreign introductions and mainline English Protestants usually preferred to whittle off the elements relevant to them and go about discerning their own strain of Protestant doctrine. Radical Protestantism, on the other hand, had been actively seeding its teachings in the British Isles since the early 1520s, primarily through Karlstadt and his followers, at first from Norway and eventually from the Frisian coast. These “Brethren of the Word” were mostly popular in East Anglia (although their numbers were spreading in Essex and Lincolnshire), meeting secretly in barns in the countryside whenever they could and removing themselves from the company of their Catholic countrymen. There had been sporadic persecutions of the Brethren churches whenever they were discovered, but there were no consistent countermeasures to their activities until they were pushed into open rebellion.
Richard Nykke, the elderly and conservative bishop of Norwich, had been vested with the duties of Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, while the latter was away in the Netherlands fighting the French, and he began to enforce Catholic observance with the ducal authority that had been left at his disposal (with Thomas Howard’s approval, of course). Bishop Nykke underestimated the number of Protestants in Norfolk, however, and when absence from mass began to be punished by local magistrates, the Brethren drove them out. The unrest eventually spread to Norwich by late 1527, where Bishop Nykke attempted to address the crowd at the height of its frenzy. Whether the bishop attempted to calm the crowd or merely wanted to harangue them is unknown, as no record exists of his speech. Nonetheless we can surmise that the bishop must have said the wrong thing, as the crowd forced its way past him before he had finished his oration and ransacked Norwich Cathedral. When a few ruffians took hold of the bishop himself, he was protected by a Catholic mob that had assembled in response, and narrowly escaped capture or worse. Luckily for Bishop Nykke, the war with France concluded a few months later and Duke Howard returned to England alongside the king’s brother Henry, the Duke of York, to mop up the remnants of both the East Anglian and Fishmongers’ Revolts.
The Despenser Retable,
one of the few pieces of religious art in Norwich Cathedral that survived the East Anglian Revolt
Leadership in the campaign of suppression was granted to Howard and Henry of York. Those that were specifically identified at Norwich as being in the Protestant camp were declared outlaws, and any who assisted or sheltered them were warned that they would be guilty by association. What was supposed to be the hanging of a few miscreants quickly turned into a drawn-out war of attrition across the marshes and moorlands of Norfolk and Suffolk. As the largest English rebellion of the time, the East Anglian Revolt would be a seminal event in English history, removing the bonds of national brotherhood as an obstacle to the elevation of Catholic-Protestant animosity to the point of warfare. The rebellion would not be stamped out until 1532, and then only partially, segueing into several separate, smaller revolts - the most significant being that of Rowland Taylor, the rector of a small parish in Suffolk who had, along with most of his flock, made the transition to Radical Protestantism and initiated another rebellion stretching into Essex in 1550. Rather than solve East Anglia’s religious confusion, the Catholic handling of the revolt only strengthened the Brethren and was detrimental to the standing of the Tudor family, particularly via the character of Henry of York. Arthur’s younger brother was in marked contrast to the king. Robust and rowdy, Henry cut a jovial, if boisterous figure amidst the English elite, and tended to be well-liked by those that did not make the mistake of firing his notoriously short temper. Henry was also a committed Catholic, and made large donations to the monastic institutions of Yorkshire and pushed for improved religious education. However, Henry’s bon vivant tendencies made him something of a liability in the grander scheme of the Crown’s fight against Protestantism. To England’s embattled Protestant community, Henry was a perfect propaganda item, fitting the archetype of the greedy, adulterous, corpulent Papist prince gorging himself on Protestant blood - especially given his involvement in the bloodletting in East Anglia. Alongside Cardinal Wolsey - known for his casual displays of opulence and rumored illegitimate children - the two were an ideal representation of the purported rottenness of the Church-State apparatus which the Radical Protestants despised so heartily.
Radical Protestantism evoked little interest from the quasi-Protestant intellectual elite, however, who considered it too extreme and simplistic when compared to the more moderate reformist sentiment of the likes of Erasmus. The Brethren remained a working class (primarily burgher) phenomenon as a consequence, and only Mainline Protestant thought found its way into the upper echelons of the clergy and nobility. Nevertheless, Mainline Protestantism struggled to find its voice in England, and some argue that its perhaps never did. When it did emerge in recognizable form, it did not spring up in the regions continually exposed to the ideals of Meyer and Luther, but rather in the rural counties of western and central England. Beginning in the late 1530s and under the auspices of Hugh Latimer, the bishop of Worcester, a new and distinctly English for of Protestantism began to grow in a region stretching from Wiltshire in the south, to the north through Gloucestershire and Herefordshire, and to the east through Worcestershire, Warwickshire, and Leicestershire. Much like the areas to the east that had fostered the growth of Brethren churches, these counties were hotbeds of Lollardy in the 15th century - the reform movement of John Wycliffe, opposing the veneration of saints, denying transubstantiation, denouncing the wealth of the Church, and calling for a readily-available English translation of the Bible. Old Lollardy and later Protestantism were so similar in many of their beliefs and aims, in fact, that, in 1522, Cuthbert Tunstall, the Bishop of London, even referred to Luther and Karlstadt as the “foster children” of Wycliffe.
Prior to the crackdown in the late 1520s, Cambridge - being a university town and in great proximity to high concentrations of Brethren churches - was a breeding ground for reform theology. Latimer had been made university chaplain of Cambridge in 1522, and, in its open atmosphere, he was exposed to the creeds of continental Protestantism in all their various shades. Taking what he had come to believe at Cambridge and imbuing it with the spectre of Lollardy, Latimer began preaching the doctrine of his idealized “Commoner’s Church” by the mid 1530s, eventually winning over Edward Foxe, the bishop of Hereford. When two of Latimer’s Gloucestershire followers, Simon Fish and James Bainham, were burned at the stake in 1536 for the publication of their ”Supplycacion for the Beggars,” a pamphlet attacking the excess of the clergy, the Commoner’s Church began to solidify in opposition to Catholicism, taking on iconoclasm as one of its defining facets. By the time the followers of Latimer became numerous enough to pose issues to the crown, however, King Arthur had been succeeded by his son Edward, who knew how to suppress Protestant sects with a bit more of a measured hand. The Commoner’s Church would never be given enough elbow room to organize a rebellion, consequently, but their agitation would continue to be a problem for English stability for many future generations.
- Caledonia Invicta -
The Tudors’ difficulty in keeping amicable terms amidst the emergent religious divide manifested itself on an international level as well. Arthur’s youngest daughter, Margaret (born 1523), had been pledged to the second son of (then prince) Christian III of Denmark, Eric (born 1524), almost as soon as the latter had been born, so when Christian III (as king) officially severed the Danish Church from Rome in 1532, the English court was unsure how to react. Christian III’s excommunication by Pope Paul III was slow in its finalization, only reaching Denmark in 1534, and the excommunication of all the bishops sworn to the new Vinteran Church only arrived in 1535. As a papal interdict had not been not issued, only the individuals specified by the Pope were considered to be no longer in communion with Rome, and the betrothal between Margaret and Eric was left untouched. Margaret’s parents were perturbed by the implications of these events, but Christian III insisted that his quarrel with the Papacy was primarily concerned with temporal authority rather than with a theological disputation. As the majority of the monarchies of Europe failed to embrace the wave of Protestantism, Denmark had found itself relatively isolated and Christian III thus saw it necessary to maintain cordial relations with at least some of his Catholic neighbors. Arthur was likewise intent on testing the waters with an alternative alliance system in the North Sea (at the time extending the olive branch to the Scots as well), feeling stifled by the overbearing Hapsburgs and finding recurring warfare against the French on their behalf increasingly tiresome. Hoping also to break into the trade routes of the Baltic, Arthur made the unconventional choice of a Polish princess, Hedwig Jagiellon, for his son Prince Edward, with the two marrying in 1529. Christian III meanwhile ensured the lords of the Danish realm that Eric would be removed from the succession should he decide to embrace Catholicism.
With neither side voicing their objections, the wedding proceeded in 1539. When it became apparent that Christian III had no intention of reconciling with the Pope, however, Catherine began the request for an annulment following Arthur’s death in 1540. The separation probably would have been speedily accomplished had it not been for the fact that Margaret conceived a child almost right away, and in 1541 delivered a healthy son. Catherine’s nerves were momentarily calmed when it seemed certain that prince Eric would choose Catholicism and establish himself in England, but the sudden death of his elder brother, the Danish heir Frederick, in early 1542, prompted Eric to sail for Denmark and convene with his father, staking his claim for the throne and publicly embracing Vinteran Protestantism before the Council of the Realm. The approval of the annulment arrived in England almost concurrently.
To surrender Margaret and her child to Eric would be a massive embarrassment - the giving away of a royal princess to a heretical prince - while the alternative - divorcing Margaret from Eric - now meant permanently splitting a family in two, either sundering the sacred bond between mother and child or holding a foreign monarch’s heir hostage. Christian III continued to make overtures of friendship towards the Tudors, with pointed jabs directed at the Papacy in a thinly veiled bid to convince the English monarchy to take its Church in the Danish direction, but he now had to contend with a different king. Arthur had been succeeded by his only son Edward - now Edward VI - who was not only the son of a Trastámara, but was also mentally the product of a legion of Spanish and Italian tutors. Edward VI was a Catholic prince firmly entrenched in Counter-Protestantism. Edward VI stood by his pious mother’s last wishes and proclaimed the annulment of his sister, moving her and her child, Frederick, to Windsor Castle. As Prince Eric was poised to inherit the throne of Denmark, it was intolerable that his only legitimate son should be withheld from him, and the two kingdoms entered into a state of war immediately. English Protestants mocked these attempts as a subversion of marriage and the nuclear family. As William Tyndale, writing from the County of Oldenburg in 1542, remarked: “Honour thy father and thy mother also, saith the Lord - unless one be the young prince Frederick, then only the latter.”
King Edward VI Tudor and Queen-Consort Hedwig Jagiellon
This dispute became much more complicated with the renewal of hostilities between France and the Holy Roman Empire that same year. During the reign of Henry VII, it had been implicitly decided that the first step in restoring England’s prestige in the European sphere would be to batter the French and carve out continental possessions at their expense. Henry VII’s policy towards France had become more complicated towards the end of his reign- seeing the French as a natural rival but also periodically defusing tensions with them as a means of keeping England out from under the Hapsburg thumb. Arthur’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon and his sister Mary’s marriage to Ferdinand von Hapsburg removed this nuance, and hostility towards France once again became the status quo for English foreign policy. While Henry VII had intervened against the French early on in the Third Italian War of 1508-1516, besieging and taking the city of Thérouanne in 1509 and handing it to the Hapsburgs in 1510, this was done primarily out of concern for the safety of English Calais. Arthur, on the other hand, formally announced England’s participation in the war in 1513, declaring that peace would only be considered with France once all parties had agreed to discuss terms. Besides a naval raid on Caen and a small English army making it as far as Abbeville, not much action of great consequence occurred between France and England before peace was declared in 1516.
Edward VI had doubled down on the old Hapsburg-Spanish alliance - marrying his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, to Gabriel of Spain, and his second daughter, Mary, to Charles V’s third son, Charles Ladislaus - and was thus hard-pressed to enter the war once the Spanish entered in 1545. Under kings Arthur and Edward, England found itself at war with France three times, each time to honor the alliance with the house of Hapsburg: first from 1514 to 1516, again from 1524 to 1528, and finally on and off from 1546 to 1562. Thanks to the “Auld Alliance” that existed between France and Scotland, this meant that Northern England and the Scottish Lowlands were engulfed in warfare for nearly the entire first half of the 16th century, bringing enough death and uncertainty on both sides to seriously affect their trajectory as nation-states.
The first war with Scotland in 1514 was a moderately successful affair. After the Scots under their king, James IV, put Berwick to siege, they were defeated handily by an English force under the baron William Eure at Lowick to the south, leading to the relief of the city. Shortly after, an English fleet pillaged Dunbar and blockaded Edinburgh and the inner Firth of Forth in late 1514. However, the French front had proved to be far too demanding and the English were forced to withdraw in late 1515, satisfying themselves with a modest indemnity from James IV.
The fighting in the Anglo-Scottish borderlands proceeded without any respect to neutrality, with brutal raiding campaigns undertaken by bands of “border reivers” on both sides. The violence along the border was actually more intense during the long truces between Scotland and England from 1516 to 1524 and from 1528 to 1542 than it was during the periods of open warfare (with most able-bodied men in the region being mustered for pitched battles and sieges). It was apparent that there were confidence issues afflicting the English monarchy when its troops returned to Scotland in 1524 - at least in comparison to the Scottish monarchy - and this faltering confidence seems to have trickled down into its military leadership.
James IV had reinforced his realm along the River Tweed, and this time struck at English Cumbria, putting Carlisle to siege. The English army that had assembled at Durham and was headed for Berwick under George Talbot, the Earl of Shrewsbury, and Henry of York had to switch course westward over the Pennine Hills, and although it was successful in driving off James IV’s army at Brampton and again at Langholm, it had become badly disorganized and needed to re-assemble at Newcastle. The first cracks in the English army began to show when it overwhelmed the Scots garrison at Coldstream and crossed the Tweed, where its losses - while not devastating by any means - were exorbitant considering the numbers they were up against.
Hoping to take Edinburgh, the English crossed paths with a Scottish army led by James IV - who was still working his way west after his defeat at the battle of Langholm - at Houndslow in mid 1527. George Talbot attempted to draw his army into formation, but the bulk of his cavalry had been persuaded by the young knight Sir Walter Dorsey to circle around the outlying hills and bear down on the Scots flank, hoping to take James IV captive. Talbot cursed the leaders of this unapproved maneuver, injudiciously exclaiming the he hoped they would defect to the Scottish so that he might meet them on the battlefield and slay them himself. The English heavy cavalry found the terrain less than ideal and their encirclement took much longer than expected. By the time the English lances came down on the Scottish lines, the English infantry had been broken and were fleeing the field.
The Battle of Houndslow
The arrival of the English cavalry did in fact take James IV by surprise, but his flank was no longer exposed. In the confusion, James IV would be thrown from his horse and would lose an ear to one of the bolder English knights, but he was helped up by James Douglas, the Earl of Morton, who picked up the king’s banner to ensure the Scottish troops that James was still alive. A massive number of nobles were taken captive at Houndslow, an unexpected crushing defeat for the English, and the Scottish army was able to treat itself to the spoils of the abandoned English baggage train during the rout. Talbot, returning to Coldstream with the remains of his army, would be informed as soon as he was inside the town’s palisade that many of the ships carrying the artillery that was floated down the River Tyne from Newcastle and was intended for the siege of Edinburgh had run aground during a storm at Eyemouth, and the remnant had been bested by a Scottish fleet off the coast at Dunglass. James IV and his army appeared outside the town within a few days’ time, declaring to Talbot that he would refrain from wiping out what remained of the English and declare a ceasefire if Talbot agreed to withdraw back across the Tweed. Despite his broken leg and missing ear, James IV made a good showing and the English accepted his terms. James IV would die from his wounds after suffering another two weeks. King Arthur dismissed Talbot from his command for accepting terms that he had not approved, but later ratified them when the treaty was signed in 1528.
In 1542, certain that the English would have their hands full with the French and Danish, King James V of Scotland - having succeeded his father James IV in 1527 - ordered an invasion of Northumberland. The de facto cooperation between Denmark and Scotland bore results quickly. After James V had secured Berwick, he arrived at Bamburgh at the same time that a Danish naval squadron just so happened to anchor itself off the nearby Farne Islands. The Danes were able to inform the Scottish king of a great number of English ships amassed in the Humber estuary, who then ordered the construction of coastal batteries at North Berwick and Kirkcaldy. After ranging as far south as Alnwick, James V turned north to catch up with an English army undery Henry Clifford, the Earl of Cumberland, which he caught at Norham and beat back. Clifford returned to the Scottish front alongside Henry FitzAlan, the Earl of Arundel, this time headed for Dumfries, with the ultimate goal being Glasgow.
Things turned south for the English war effort in early 1544, when 22 English carracks - a huge portion of the English navy - were narrowly defeated by a Danish fleet near the Frisian island of Borkum. Danish flotillas began to haunt the eastern coast of England with greater frequency after Borkum, laying waste to the towns of Grimsby, Scarborough, and Hartlepool. The disturbance of English shipping and fishing took its toll, and the crown was unable to foot the bill for the ships and ordnance required to carry on with its plans to ravage the Firth of Clyde and put Glasgow to siege. Supply lines to Solway Firth and the besieging army at Dumfries similarly became harder to maintain, and the uncovering of a mutiny plot left the English army in disarray. When James V arrived at Lockerbie, Clifford and FitzAlan organized an ill-advised attack which ended in a total rout by the Scottish.
A respite for the English came in November, when James V succumbed to typhus while planning another siege of Carlisle. Since James V had no legitimate sons to his name, his younger brother Alexander would succeed him as Alexander IV of Scotland. Alexander did not possess his father or brother’s martial aptitude, and was slow to push the Scottish advantage after his brother’s death, although this was partly due to increasingly violent feuds between his realm’s polarized Catholic and Protestant clans. The Royal Stewarts had been active in opposing the spread of Protestantism wherever they found it, and the persecution of Scottish Protestants had reached its height under James V. Wed to a particularly devout French princess, James V had turned Edinburgh into a raging furnace into which were fed innumerable Protestant reformers throughout the 1530s and 1540s such as George Buchanan and John Knox - both admirers of Guillaume Farel and Andreas Karlstadt. James V also suppressed the Seamen’s Kirk, a large Karlstadter congregation comprised mostly of sailors and their families that had its nucleus in Edinburgh and was involved in anti-Spanish privateering. Nonetheless, James IV and his sons never found Scottish foreign affairs secure enough to root heresy out at the level of the nobility, which continued to shelter a great number of Protestant thinkers.
No matter their recent victories, the Scots had been significantly battered by James V’s energetic protection of the border, as well as by a English counterattack under Earl FitzAlan, which pushed as far Moffat and succeeded in sacking Dumfries. Alexander could not raise a new army until 1546, following the official entry of England into the 20 Years War - and even then he encountered onerous resistance from both the peasantry and nobility. Leading his army personally, Alexander confronted the English at Kelso and repulsed them in a pyrrhic victory. A disparity in quality had emerged between the militaries of the two realms in the years since 1528, and it now gradually revealed itself beginning in the mid 1540s. Much of King Arthur’s twilight years had been spent saving every last penny and building up the crown’s credit, all for the sake of paying for an across-the-board improvement of England’s war-making abilities. The English troops who bled themselves at Houndslow and Lockerbie were an outdated remnant, in the process of being replaced by thousands of men-at-arms who were being extensively drilled by Castilian tercio captains and armed to the teeth with halberds and firearms forged by Dutch weaponsmiths. An army of such soldiery gathered and marched north from Lincolnshire under Edward VI in mid 1547.
Put to siege at Berwick, Alexander burrowed in and prayed for the men he requested from clan Douglas to arrive soon, but there would be no assistance forthcoming: at the battle of Caddonfoot in early 1548, an English army under Henry Clifford, trapped and shattered Alexander’s reinforcements under Archibald Douglas, the Earl of Angus, as they were attempting to cross the river Tweed from Ettrick. Panicking at the thought of a full encirclement, Alexander withdrew his army from Berwick and headed for Edinburgh, staving off the tailing English with a rearguard action at Duns. Edward VI took his time plundering the Scottish Lowlands before wintering at Berwick, returning to the field ahead of 15,000 men and prepared to take Edinburgh. Against all odds, Alexander pulled together 17,000 of his own, and sallied forth to meet Edward VI near Dalkeith Castle. The battle of Dalkeith would be another pyrrhic victory for the Scots, but the death of King Alexander himself in the fray - killed instantly by a head wound from being dehorsed - was more stinging than the bloodiest of defeats.
Alexander IV's body is retrieved after the Battle of Dalkeith
The two sons of James IV certainly had no difficulty in siring sons. However, they seemed to be completely incapable of siring sons with their legally recognized wives. The problem with declaring one of the Stewart bastards king was that it could not be done without offending the powerful Campbell clan, who had provided Alexander IV with his lawful wife, or the French king Charles IX, who had married his eldest daughter to James V. With the death of Alexander IV, the Stewart line of James IV was extinguished, leaving James Hamilton, the Earl of Arran, as the next in line to the throne. However, even before Hamilton made public his acceptance of this succession, he was immediately denounced by a number of Scottish lords on the grounds that his parents’ marriage had been illegitimate. Such a contention was fairly flimsy, but it was the only legal recourse available to prevent his accession. What was really the issue with Hamilton taking the throne was that he was a Protestant. Since the early 1530s, Hamilton had been the host of a certain George Wishart, who had studied under the Sorbonne-educated Scotsman John Major and had adopted a theology heavily influenced by the writings of the preeminent French Protestant reformer Guillaume Farel. A large pro-Catholic camp emerged around the Lennox Stewarts - John and Matthew, the 3rd and 4th Earls of Lennox - and Cardinal David Beaton, who was the Archbishop of St Andrews and the leading Catholic cleric in Scotland by virtue of his cardinalate. Despite John and Matthew belonging to the royal house of Stewart, Hamilton still possessed a superior claim to the throne.
George Wishart, martyr of Scottish Protestantism
Aided by clan Douglas (who had also largely converted to Protestantism), Hamilton brought together a few thousand men in the Firth of Clyde before he was confronted by Matthew Stewart at Paisley in mid 1550. Hamilton was hugely outnumbered, and his defeat left him a prisoner on the isle of Arran, which Matthew Stewart ravaged before returning to Dumbarton in his family’s holdings to hang the captured George Wishart, drum up support for his father’s bid for the throne, and organize a campaign to push Edward VI out of the Lowlands. But Earl Hamilton found himself a surprising benefactor.
Christian III’s attempts to maintain a friendship with the English Tudors in spite of the looming crisis over their daughter reflects just how desperately the Danish needed allies. Although relations with the Swedes had warmed over their shared religion - with Gustav Vasa even providing the Danes assistance in putting down a popular rebellion in Scania, a region contested by Sweden - any hope of fully allying them was scarce, especially given how they had just wrested their independence from the Danish monarchy in the 1520s and preferred to remain aloof. Beyond Pomerania-Prussia, Denmark had thus far failed to accumulate friends and had even made a greater number of enemies: the Poles, Saxons, and Brandenburgers had all been antagonized by the decision to support Pomerania-Prussia and abandon the old German marriage alliances, and the Holy Roman Emperor had likewise been angered by Christian III’s decision to sign a compact with a number of Protestant princes at Cuxhaven in 1552.
Earl Hamilton therefore represented an exceptional opportunity for Denmark. While the differences between his quasi-Farelard beliefs and the more traditional Vinteran creed of the Danish state were a potential hurdle, the need for solidarity amongst the few Protestants adrift in the sea of European Catholicism was pressing enough for such differences to be easily overlooked. Hamilton’s eldest son, also named James, would be wed to Christian III’s eldest daughter, Anne, and her dowry would arrive in the form of 9,000 Danish troops and 20 carracks, disembarked at St Andrews. The unexpected arrival of thousands of heavily armed and hostile Danes sent Cardinal Beaton running from St Andrews, grouping up with John Stewart at Glasgow. Allowed safe passage by the Protestant clans of Cunningham and Campbell, Hamilton was able to relocate himself to Fife, where he met the Danish army at Cupar. When news of Hamilton’s escape and the arrival of the Danish army spread, Scottish Protestants traveled great distances to march under the Earl of Arran’s banner.
Meanwhile, John Stewart had died unexpectedly while marshalling troops in Dumbarton, leaving his son Matthew with the earldom and an even weaker claim to the throne than he had. In March of 1552, the Scottish lords opposite Hamilton mustered 12,000 men and crossed at Stirling, marching 10 miles east to meet the Earl of Arran and his supporters and Danish auxiliaries - numbering 15,000 at Clackmannan. Old feuds amongst the Scottish nobles in the Catholic camp gave their army a fractious composition, which was easily exploited by Hamilton to bring himself a resounding victory. Matthew Stewart was forced to flee across English lines, where Edward VI welcomed him. Having himself crowned at Scone by a Danish bishop and using the English occupation of Edinburgh as leverage, Hamilton, now James VI of Scotland, reached an agreement with Cardinal Beaton in a meeting at the manor of Callendar House, outside of Falkirk. This agreement - the Callendar House Accord - promised equal protection for both Catholics and Protestants and non-interference in that customary jurisdiction of the Scottish Catholic hierarchy.
- "Into the Vale of Avilion" -
With the French besieging Calais and with Scotland decimated, Edward VI withdrew from the Lowlands on his own. Edinburgh had been sacked in the chaos following the battle of Dalkeith, and the old Edinburgh Castle was completely levelled. Yet despite the ravages of war and the shaky interconfessional truce patched together at Callendar House, Scotland began a new era of growth under house Hamilton. Edward VI would return to intervene in the Scottish succession, but the place of James VI and his descendants on the throne would prove to be unshakeable. Aided by their Danish allies - who surrendered their rights to the Grand Banks to Scottish fishermen in a goodwill gesture, angering many of their Norwegian subjects - and with new port facilities eventually constructed at Greenock, Leith, and Dundee, the Scottish were poised to strike out into the North Atlantic and beyond.
King James VI Hamilton of Scotland
Likewise, against the unprecedented challenges and growing pains of the first half of the 16th century, prosperity began to return to England. The faithfulness of the Tudors to their Hapsburg allies would not go unrewarded, and they were gifted with a sizeable belt added to the Pale of Calais in 1562 by the Treaty of Soissons, which brought numerous wealthy towns with it. While this region had been thoroughly devastated by plague and warfare, capital returned very quickly and England now had an even greater plug into the bustling commerce and intricate financial institutions of the Low Countries. The expanded Pale - or the “English Netherlands,” as it came to be referred to by some - became so profitable, in fact, that the customs revenue collected through Calais paid entirely for the 40,000 man English expedition sent to Ireland in 1570.
England’s 16th century religious anguish would also begin to be remedied. A royally-approved translation of the Bible into English was finally approved in 1548 and was placed under the supervision of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Reginald Pole, rendering one of the largest complaints of the Commoner’s Church obsolete. A synod would be called at Ely in 1554, as well, wherein the developments of the Second Council of Basel were explained, concerns from a plethora of Protestant representatives were given ear, and numerous congregations belonging to the Commoner’s Church were fully or partially reconciled with Rome.
Of all the contributions the early Tudors made to the kingdom of England, the most beneficial when considering long term effects would be their maritime projects. Arthur was responsible for an unprecedented enlargement of the English navy: from 24 ships in 1513, to 40 in 1526, while Edward VI expanded it to 60 ships by 1548. Additionally, Arthur had the cast of naval cannons switched in 1524 from bronze to iron, which allowed English ships to be much more extensively armed, albeit heavier. The improved ability of the English navy to project English interests began to show early on, with the English crown able to intimidate France into reining in its privateers after threatening a punitive expedition against the port of La Rochelle, a common staging point for the “lobos de mar” during the Silent War of the 1530s. The English navy continued to outperform the French even after Arthur’s death, with a number of significant English victories in the Channel during the 20 Years War such as the battle of Le Conquet in 1548, wherein a French-Breton fleet was defeated by a much smaller English patrol, leaving the port of Brest open for plunder.
The dynastic union of Portugal and Castile, who were intended to divide the East and West Indies between them, obviously caused many to take issue with the Papal enforcement of their claims. The vastness of the concession given to Portugal and Castile, now combined, led to a mounting number of petitions beseeching the Papacy to reconsider how the New World was to be divided. In the meantime, the Catholic monarchies of Western Europe acted on their complaints by commissioning droves of explorers to chart the coasts that were contentiously claimed by the King of All Spain. English contact with the Americas had begun very shortly after their discovery, with the Venetian navigator John Cabot sponsored by Henry VII to sail west in the late 1490s, leading to the discovery of a landmass roughly parallel with England. The English crown’s interest in overseas exploration waned for a time after Henry VII’s death, but Arthur eventually took great interest in the trans-Atlantic. Italian explorers such as Giovanni Verrazzano and Sebastian Caboto (John Cabot’ son) were pursued by the crown fervently, but they were lost to contracts with the French and Spanish crowns. Given England’s storied friendship with Portugal and the Portuguese discovery of lands adjacent to John Cabot’s own discoveries, England’s participation in the Age of Exploration was revived through contracts with freelance Portuguese navigators such as Fernão de Loronha and João da Cunha (Anglicized as Ferdinand de Loronne/Lorogne and John de Cuny, respectively). Gradually, the advanced technical knowledge the Portuguese possessed in navigation began to rub off on their English proteges, with a School of Navigation founded in Bristol in 1561 and with native English navigators, such as Thomas Wyndham and John Luttrell (active mostly in the South Atlantic), taking the reins from the Portuguese.
As full re-entry into the continent seemed unlikely for England, and as ancient religious bonds to old Europe were cut for Scotland, the west - with its bountiful cod, unspoiled wilderness, and inestimable supply of furs - seemed more and more enticing. It was as if the once impenetrable mists occluding the Vale of Avalon suddenly pulled back, laying it bare and beckoning for the dispensation of its riches.
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I suppose that OTL Hudson Bay, Lower Canada and perhaps New England would be start to be colonized/settled by Scotland (and Denmark?) with England, raiding first and then would be become in conquest /colonization attempts...
So there's a Zulfurium-length update for you all. Again, let me know if you find any typos or inconsistencies.
I'm planning on making my updates more bite-sized from now on, focusing on more specific areas and hopefully allowing me to update more frequently. This one kinda got away from me, and I haven't even been able to touch on Ireland...
I will finally - FINALLY - be returning to Spain in the next few updates, covering difficulties with piracy, reforming the American colonies and the Spanish navy (or navies, rather), then on to reforming Spain's many law codes and financial institutions, and from there the inevitable Great Turco-Spanish War (actual name tbd).
Also, I've noticed that this TL is currently in the lead for its category, which I must say is extremely flattering! I'll try to get as many updates out as soon as possible as a sign of my gratitude
Again, let me know if you find any typos or inconsistencies.I'm planning on making my updates more bite-sized from now on, focusing on more specific areas and hopefully allowing me to update more frequently. This one kinda got away from me, and I haven't even been able to touch on Ireland...
I will finally - FINALLY - be returning to Spain in the next few updates, covering difficulties with piracy, reforming the American colonies and the Spanish navy (or navies, rather), then on to reforming Spain's many law codes and financial institutions, and from there the inevitable Great Turco-Spanish War (actual name tbd).
Also, I've noticed that this TL is currently in the lead for its category, which I must say is extremely flattering! I'll try to get as many updates out as soon as possible as a sign of my gratitude
can u give us any hints as to how u intend to split up tje americas, im all for the carribeans being shared. But im honestly hoping Spain gets ALL of south america.
Hedwig Jagiellon has enormous potential for AH, in OTL she was proposed to dukes of Masovia, Bavaria and Beja, Elector of Brandenburg and his brother, Kings of France and Scotland (Francis I and James V) and future Holy Roman Emperor (Ferdinand I). And now she's also Queen of England in two TLs on this forum
Edmund III?
English numbering is traditionally since the Norman Conquest else Edward Longshanks would be IV not I.
Has this changed?
English numbering is traditionally since the Norman Conquest else Edward Longshanks would be IV not I.
Has this changed?
Not all countries were consequent with numbering of their monarchs, if Edmund decided, that he want to be E3, who'll bother to stop him?
What I'm saying is that if he's declaring himself Edmund 3 then chroniclers will start altering the numbering of other monarchs to fit, or once he's dead remove the 3 label.
It's not given. For example-King Vladislaus the Short of Poland is regarded as Vladislaus I, despite fact, that there were 3 oder monarchs of Poland bearing this name before, but they were not crowned as Kings, so OK, let him be Vladislaus I. But by the same logic, his son, Casimir III the Great should be Casimir I-previous two were mere dukes, but he is regarded as third (another thing is the fact, that he used number "I" during his lifetime).
So it is possible to use two methods of counting names at once.
After all, numeration of Popes is also not consequent, with anti-Popes sometimes being counted, somethimes not.
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Possible but unlikely considering the context of the numbering in England.
Really interesting update . As someone else already mentioned the Jagiellon sisters really make for a fantastic start to a marriage network. I like that you were able to bring Arthur into the mix properly, though I am a bit saddened that the Winteran Church isn’t more influential.
I can’t recall if you already covered this, but exactly how close are the Danes and the French, particularly given the powerful Protestant faction?
We also never got a resolution to the whole Frederick mess, is he still in England or did the Danes force a hand-over?
I can’t recall if you already covered this, but exactly how close are the Danes and the French, particularly given the powerful Protestant faction?
We also never got a resolution to the whole Frederick mess, is he still in England or did the Danes force a hand-over?
I'm amused greatly by King Alexander of Scotland falling off his horse and dying without an heir throwing the country into chaos, again! I'm intrigued by the Danish connection. I know you said you want to get back to Spain and I may have missed it in an earlier update but why have they - and seemingly only they and Sweden - gone Protestant here so quickly?
Oh and I agree with @The Professor about Edmund III being a bit odd, but it could be that they number the Edwards differently ittl as I think that's the only place it would cause issues?
Anyway, very nicely done as usual!
Oh and I agree with @The Professor about Edmund III being a bit odd, but it could be that they number the Edwards differently ittl as I think that's the only place it would cause issues?
Anyway, very nicely done as usual!
Where would the Habsburgs be if not teetering on Bankruptcy
Well they just wouldn't be Hapsburgs now would they!
You're right about the nobility and magnates being the chief source of agitation: John Filipec, the bishop of Várad, was said to have told Vladislaus II that the only way his Hungarian vassals could be made to cooperate was with a "rod of iron."
I think the ideal way for the Hapsburgs to keep Hungary both healthy and concretely within the Hapsburg sphere would be for Charles V or Philip II to grant it to one of their sons. This would give the Hungarians the independence they prize and a monarch who can give them his full attention, while allowing the Imperial Hapsburgs to keep them at arm's length in case they ever step out of line.
Certainly not as bankrupt as they were in OTL's second half on the 16th century, but the 20 Years War has got them in the pit big time. They may end up relying on Spanish gold, even if it means accepting it at an unfavorable interest rate...
There was for sure a lot more resistance to Ottoman occupation in the Muslim parts of their empire than people like to give credit to. I'm not sure if that resistance will be strong enough to keep the Hejaz out of Ottoman hands, but I agree with you that a Mamluk successor state in the Arabian peninsula is a cool concept to play around with.
That's a good estimate of what's roughly going to happen, although you can expect some Danes/Norwegians, Dutch, and Frenchmen thrown into the mix. A Catholic England and continued Hapsburg control of the Netherlands both mean that colonization of North America is going to be an even more hesitant, inconsistent process than it was IOTL. The English and Dutch are perhaps the most poised to undertake large scale colonization in North America, but the Catholic English will most likely treat Inter Caetera with slightly more respect (so long as it keeps its current interpretation) and the Dutch will have to colonize through private ventures (if at all) as their Hapsburg overlords are too preoccupied with other matters to invest heavily in overseas projects. The French, on the other hand, will likely have no issue with angering the Spanish and colonizing the Americas, although the Valois-Alençons are trying to be on much friendlier terms with their southern neighbor at the moment.
The English and Scottish have been investing themselves in the Grand Banks, and the English are currently looking at Newfoundland and the St Lawrence estuary (both to have different names ITTL) with interest. Giovanni Verrazzano has also been employed by the French and has taken voyages almost identical to OTL. Jean and Raoul Parmentier and Jacques Cartier have also made voyages in the 1520s and 1530s, but only one of them (by Cartier) has been down the St Lawrence River while the rest have focused on the North American Southeast. Also, the French Protestants Jean-François Roberval, Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon, and Gaspard II de Coligny have all done their share of Caribbean and South Atlantic piracy and exploration of the coasts of the North American Southeast. This should give you an idea on where the French are beginning to feel most comfortable.
Pretty much all of South America will be in Spanish hands, but I can't speak for Guyana.
Also, I think it would help if I gave a brief overview of how things in South America have carried on differently to OTL:
- Peru was conquered almost a whole decade earlier, and was done in different circumstances. The Berazas and their associate Chavarria had already enmeshed themselves and their followers in the imperial Inca system before they toppled Huascar and divvied up his empire, meaning that they're on much better terms with the Inca nobility. Huascar was also much more unpopular than OTL's last Sapa Inca, his brother Atahualpa, meaning that rule by the Berazas is almost seen as a preferable alternative by some. Unlike Pizarro, the Berazas didn't so much wipe out the old Inca state and its concept of authority so much as they put a new slant on it: there is only one Sapa Inca who is the son of Inti - Jesucristo. TTL's Peru is a bit more divided and its allegiance to the Spanish Crown mostly nominal, although the practice of encomienda is minimal compared to the other colonies. This also means that Nueva Andalucia (Colombia and Venezuela) have received a greater share of settlers and build-up by this point than they did IOTL, somewhat at the expense of Peru.
- La Plata was settled much earlier, as part of Bartolomé de las Casas' program to found settler colonies where Amerindian slavery was forbidden. This colony, named Espiritu Santo, is still small and struggles without the appeal of precious metals, but it continues to survive thanks to the agreeable climate and the fertility of the Pampas. What constitutes modern Bolivia, northwestern Argentina, and Chile north of the Gulf of Ancud has been colonized by a wave of conquistadors who arrived too late to share in the spoils of Peru. The colony in Chile, based in OTL's Valdivia, was conquered by Diego de Almagro and has been much more successful against the Mapuche. The two Greek conquistadors Jorge Griego and Pedro de Candia were responsible for conquering the northern half of the Chilean coast, establishing "Nueva Candia" centered on OTL's La Serena.
- With more Portuguese settling in conquered territories in Morocco traveling east to India and the Malay Archipelgao, Brazil has received less settlers than IOTL and also has a demographically stable chain of French settlements from Ilhabela to Ilha de São Francisco do Sul to contend with (known as France-Australe). This French colony has been subjugated and made into a de facto appendage of Portuguese Brazil, but it continues to receive French settlers and pursue its own interests. Two Castilian colonies have also been planted at OTL's Florianopolis (Isla de Santa Isabel) and Porto Alegre (Puerto del Infante), which subsist on the thriving South Atlantic contraband trade that's primarily led by the inhabitants of France-Australe and their compatriots.
Hedwig Jagiellon has enormous potential for AH, in OTL she was proposed to dukes of Masovia, Bavaria and Beja, Elector of Brandenburg and his brother, Kings of France and Scotland (Francis I and James V) and future Holy Roman Emperor (Ferdinand I). And now she's also Queen of England in two TLs on this forum
I knew Hedwig was sought after, but I had no idea she was so popular! I originally planned on marrying Edmund to a daughter of the Duke of Bavaria, but the match didn't make much sense and I couldn't get the birth dates to match up in a way that wouldn't require a lot of moving marriages around.
What're the other two TLs where Hedwig becomes Queen of England, if you don't mind me asking? I've been struggling to keep up with a lot of TLs lately...
Arthur had intended his heir to be named Henry, giving his two first sons the name before their untimely deaths, so the next king being named Edmund is something of a fluke. Edmund's decision to number himself the third of his name (Edmund Ironside being the second) was taken to establish a stronger continuity with England's decidedly Catholic past, something he felt necessary given the struggle between the more traditionalist Catholics and the more progressive Protestants. It was also a conscious choice to cement the house of Tudor's Englishness and thus differentiate it from its Franco-Norman predecessors.
Thank you! When compared to the congregations of Luther (which are strongly divided), Meyer (which have had their grand bid for supremacy shot down by Charles V), Karlstadt (which are spread very thin and are only barely associated with one another), and Farel (which are fighting for their lives), the Vinteran/Winteran system has actually been remarkably successful. With Denmark, Sweden, Pomerania-Prussia, and now Scotland all brought together into a formidable Vinteran bloc, there's no other Protestant creed that can claim as much secular power behind it.
They're naturally going to drift together through their shared enemies and with a shared ally in Scotland. This is going to indirectly lead to mounting pressure to subordinate the French Church to the French monarchy, even after the victory of the Sainte-Ligue.
As you've probably been able to tell a lot of threads were left unresolved in the last update: Scotland's religious question is still up in the air and they're still technically at war with England, Matthew Stewart is still alive and in English custody, nothing has been said about Ireland, what exactly has been discovered by the English and Scottish in the Americas and elsewhere isn't specified, who marries who isn't detailed, etc. These things were intended to be concluded in the last update, but it was ending up painfully long so I decided to tie them in to a future update where they might be more relevant. However, since such an update isn't really forthcoming, I can tell you a few things:
- Prince Frederick is released from his English guardianship in 1560 with the death of Christian III as part of the peace offering ending the Anglo-Danish War. It's also a lot easier to separate a mother from her child when said child is 18 years old rather than a newborn, even if it means surrendering him to Protestantism. It's one of the last things Edmund III does before his death in 1563, by then totally world-weary and only desiring peace.
- Scotland will go Protestant under James VI Hamilton. The Callendar House Accord isn't poised to last forever, especially not when Matthew Stewart is eventually going to come back to claim the Scottish throne. The English will involve themselves in the Scottish Civil War from 1554 to 1562 (the first phase from 1554-1559 being the most hard-fought, 1559-1562 being only raids and naval encounters) but will give up in the face of stiff Scots-Danish resistance, with the Scots increasingly associating Protestantism with their own independence in the process. Scotland will be brought into the greater Vinteran/Winteran fold (at least nominally, with most of their theology being Farelard) and will firmly enter into a Nordic circuit rather than a British one.
Thank you
Goodness, I had completely forgotten about how Alexander III had died, the way I killed off Alexander IV was a complete coincidence! That's hilarious
The conversion of Denmark and Sweden didn't occur that much quicker than in OTL. The Scandinavians had many of the same grievances with the state of Renaissance Catholicism as their German neighbors, and with the added bonus of seizing gigantic tracts of Church land in the process, conversion to a creed like that of David Vinter's represented an opportunity for both national reorganization and a quick cash grab that was too tempting too pass up. Being far removed from Rome or from another devoutly Catholic state (such as Spain) or ruler (such as the Holy Roman Emperor) that might seek to punish them, the Nordic kingdoms were also in a much safer position to convert than many of the nobles in, say, France or Germany.
Also, @Zulfurium, I forgot to ask: are you Danish? If so, then I imagine you'll be pleased with how things are going to turn out for your homeland.
I won't mention the Tudors being Welsh
Exactly why they have to make such an effort to pass themselves off as English