Kraznaya
Princeps
Dachs I'm like your biggest fan and you have to use imageshack 
Alternate History Thread V
- Thread starter Dachs
- Start date
Right. 
Kentharu
Zebra Commander
Mmmmmm maps make me so hot.
Thlayli
Le Pétit Prince
Those are awesome maps. Despite Sobieski riding to the rescue being the most badass part of the OTL battle, Baden-Baden continues to be dashing and lucky.
For some reason I see a non-fail Poland coming out of this...
Unrelated interesting historical fact: The Sassanids established a court in exile in Chang'an after the Arab invasion. I don't know enough about regional history to predict this, but an ambitious Emperor seeking to gain greater control (by proxy) over the Silk Road could support some type of Sassanid revanche, perhaps.
For some reason I see a non-fail Poland coming out of this...
Unrelated interesting historical fact: The Sassanids established a court in exile in Chang'an after the Arab invasion. I don't know enough about regional history to predict this, but an ambitious Emperor seeking to gain greater control (by proxy) over the Silk Road could support some type of Sassanid revanche, perhaps.
Those are awesome maps. Despite Sobieski riding to the rescue being the most badass part of the OTL battle, Baden-Baden continues to be dashing and lucky.
For some reason I see a non-fail Poland coming out of this...
Unrelated interesting historical fact: The Sassanids established a court in exile in Chang'an after the Arab invasion. I don't know enough about regional history to predict this, but an ambitious Emperor seeking to gain greater control (by proxy) over the Silk Road could support some type of Sassanid revanche, perhaps.
That already sort of happened through the Samanaid dynasty who controlled significant parts of Central Asia and the silk road.
Thlayli
Le Pétit Prince
Yeah, but I was thinking more direct-continuity, i.e. Zoroastrian, and directly allied to/client states of the Tang.
I suppose the Tang were already overextended around Talas, but there's nothing to say they couldn't overextend themselves more.
(Or focus less on Koguryo or something)EDIT: Ooooh, interesting idea. Send An Lushan to protect his native Sogdiana.
Kentharu
Zebra Commander
Fire and Progress
Fire consumes all when left to run free. In this case it was fire that would be the ultimate undoing of Emperor Jianwen. After a humiliating defeats by Zhu Di, pretender to the Dragon Throne, the loyalist general Li Jinglong conceded defeat and opened to gates to the imperial palace at Nanjing. The previous winter offensive had proved to be to much for the tired general to handle as Zhu Di had out flanked, out matched, and generally out played Li Jinglong. It seemed to be only a matter of times before the pretender came to the gates of the imperial palace and indeed this was the day.
13th of July, 1402, Zhu Di marched his forces through the gates only to find the temple engulfed in flames. Moments before the general had granted him entrance the desperate Emperor Jianwen had set his palace a blaze in a mad bid to deny Zhu Di ultimate victory. Of course it was only natural that the crazed Emperor throw all his concubines, his heirs, wife, and all his servants into the flames as well, forcing them to burn as he knelt on the steps of the palace and proceeded to cut his own throat. While this saved him from a agonizing death in fire it did not, as he had intended, stop his uncle Zhu Di from claiming the dragon throne with all the legitimacy that was required. Indeed the palace was burnt to the ground as the flames ravaged the entire complex for all of that night and carried on into the morning. But Zhu Di, despite this set back, went about immediately securing his rule and only four days after Zhu Yunwen’s death Zhu Di ascended the dragon throne as Emperor Yongle.
As is custom with most Emperors who take the throne by force, and even some who ascend to it by less dubious means, Zhu Di proceeded to purge his newly held empire of people who were previously loyal to Zhu Yunwen. Zhu Di even went so far as ordering the extermination of ten agnates of Fang Xiaoru, after the historian had refused to write the inaugural address for Zhu Di’s ascension. It seemed like the Yongle emperor had only replaced another rule of oppression with another. For months he hunted down former supporters of Yunwen and slaughtered them, yet such brutality was necessary. The country had been shaken by civil war and instability time after time for nearly four years. The economy had been struggling to recover when Zhu Di carried out his coup and now the situation was only made worse. Yet the Emperor’s tactics would prove to be necessary and successful in uniting his nation. Indeed when the dust settled and the Emperor could rest easy knowing that his enemies were no more. However, with the pressure of repairing the damage he caused, the now destroyed imperial palace, and growing piracy from Japan, Zhu Di could not simply sit back. Instead he would embark on three ambitious projects, almost simultaneous, to repair the damage he had done to the empire’s economy and the tattered foreign relations.
His first step would begin in the spring of the following year the Emperor ordered the construction of what would later become arguably the largest fleet in the world at the time. Initially a method of increasing his influence over the sea trade and countering attempts by Japanese pirates who had been poaching Chinese ocean trade for decades, it would become one of the hallmarks of his rule. In the past the Japanese wokou (pirates) had been given free reign as a civil war between the northern and southern courts of Japan had raged on. When the southern court of Go-Kameyama finally abdicated in 1392 to the northern court, Emperor Go-Komatsu was finally able to pursue the wokou who had caused his international relations with China and Korea to deteriorate. Backed by Seii Taishogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu and later his son Ashikaga Yoshimochi, Go-Komatsu restarted his tribute system to Ming China in the form of mostly wood, sulphur, copper ore, swords, and folding fans. Despite this show of gratitude, and even a letter from Ashikaga Yoshimitsu in which he referred to himself as “Your subject, the King of Japan”, Zhu Di was skeptical of this new found ally. In this case, Zhu Di was unsure of what to do. It was this hesitance that produced the first skirmishes between two forces within the Imperial court that would come to change history, the Confucians and Eunuchs.
Even before the “Japanese question” the two had been silently vying for power. The Japanese question would only be a small, but never the less important, conflict within the broader war between isolationism and imperialism. The Confucians however, had the upper-hand. Being traditionally entrenched in positions of influence in the court, they sought to first stale attempts to expand diplomatic relations with Ashikaga Shogunate by bringing the Emperor’s attention to conflict in the north with the Mongols and the threat of the crumbling Yuan Dynasty. As 1402 came to a close and the new year rounded envoys were sent forth to Orug Temur Khan (Guilichi) an Oirate Bunyashiri, in the hopes of securing his tribute and allegiance. The signs were good, considering that in the previous year Guilichi had abolished the Great Yuan, effectively ending the power of the Yuan Dynasty within Mongolia. Despite this fact, fierce opposition materialize in eastern Mongolia in the form of Arughtai of the Asud clan. The situation quickly heated up into open civil war and by June of 1403 pitch battles between both sides were seen. Yet the Yongle Emperor was not sitting idly by while the north descended into chaos. The Confucians were indeed right in stressing the seriousness of the Mongol situation in the north, however it was the Eunuchs who successfully persuaded the Emperor to throw his support behind the Oirats in the form supplies allowing them to amass a formidable force of 30,000. Guilichi was stronger militarily than the Arughatai, who had only succeeded in gathering 17,000 poorly armed men to his cause, yet he was weaker politically. By replacing a Mongol Khan with a Tartar Khan and abolishing the Yuan Dynasty he had succeeding in alienating many Mongol clans leaders and in the end, much of the Mongolian people. His hope of gaining Ming support to allow him time to consolidate power came true but crashed his support base into ruins, leaving little power to consolidate.
However Guilichi succeeded still in winning multiple engagements with Asud forces, pushing them further and further east. In the last battle on 15th of June, Arughtai himself was killed in a failed attempt to escape across the Sungari River. But with military victory came political defeat. The support of the Ming and subsequent tribute to them had raised the ire of much of Guilichi’s newly found subjects and left him with few supports. For Zhu Di however, it was a resounding political victory, as well as a minor notch for the Eunuchs. With the Oirat controlled Mongolia now forced to turn to internal matters, the Emperor was free to actively pursue the wokou who had so often evaded his capture. With his growing fleet he set about securing his grasp on the maritime trade routes as well as garnering precious political allies from Japan. All the while the Eunuchs continued to extended their power throughout the courts, using the Emperors new fondness of the navy to secure for themselves valuable positions of power within the command structure. Zheng He, a prominent Eunuch advisor to Zhu Di, was at the for-front of the Eunuch court and he had garnered for himself the precious position of having Zhu Di’s ear almost glued to his lips. It was under his advisement that the fleet expanded along more military lines than expanding it into a simple merchant fleet. Both the Emperor and the growing Eunuch court were now in a position to exert unprecedented influence and it seemed as if nothing could oppose them.
Notes: This is basically a short teaser for the TL to come. I've never written out a TL in this fashion, it has mostly just been bullet points and thoughtless garbage.
Also Wikipedia is awesome
I suppose this is the place to post it. I would like people's opinions on this scenario:
Athens successfully conquers Syracuse in the opening year of their Sicilian Campaign 415 BCE. As a result Athens doesn't lose tens of thousands of men, doesn't lose hundred of ships, and gains the resources of Sicily to aid them in any future operations against the rest of Greece. How much does this effect the Peloponessian War? Will Persia still fund Sparta, and if so will this be enough to overcome Athens apparent superiority? Does Sicily sit idle or will Athens need to spend even more resources there simply trying to keep the Syracuse democracy from rebelling?
If it allows Athens to win the war, how long does their supremacy last? Do they unite Greece under an Athenian Empire eventually? Are the capable of holding it against the rise of Macedon? If so then what does this mean the Persian Empire lasts and if so how does the lack of Hellenization play on the near east? What about standing the test of time against the rise of Carthage and Rome?
These questions are really interesting to me as it seems to completely change the course of world history if certain events, like Alexander, never occur as a result.
Athens successfully conquers Syracuse in the opening year of their Sicilian Campaign 415 BCE. As a result Athens doesn't lose tens of thousands of men, doesn't lose hundred of ships, and gains the resources of Sicily to aid them in any future operations against the rest of Greece. How much does this effect the Peloponessian War? Will Persia still fund Sparta, and if so will this be enough to overcome Athens apparent superiority? Does Sicily sit idle or will Athens need to spend even more resources there simply trying to keep the Syracuse democracy from rebelling?
If it allows Athens to win the war, how long does their supremacy last? Do they unite Greece under an Athenian Empire eventually? Are the capable of holding it against the rise of Macedon? If so then what does this mean the Persian Empire lasts and if so how does the lack of Hellenization play on the near east? What about standing the test of time against the rise of Carthage and Rome?
These questions are really interesting to me as it seems to completely change the course of world history if certain events, like Alexander, never occur as a result.
I love this scenario because my opinions about it keep changing every few months.
I was recently convinced (again) that Athens would have been able to keep Syracuse more or less allied to them after the place fell, assuming it did. Since this occurs before Gylippos arrives in Sicily, the Athenians may not even face the resumption of open war against Sparta, perhaps not even Corinth. (It certainly depends on what one does with Alkibiades.)
Well, not immediately anyway. It's true that low-level violations of the Nikias Peace were going on all the time, and I think that either the Messenian raids from Pylos or the Argive-Spartan border skirmishes will flare up into open warfare in the next couple of years even without the Spartans and the League getting directly involved in Sicily. But without the Syracuse disaster, I expect the Athenians will have enough troops to contest Dekeleia and prevent Agis II from fortifying sally-ports into Attika. Meanwhile, Konon and Eurymedon in Akarnania and Naupaktos will be able to control the Corinthian Gulf. But in any renewed war, I don't think that Athens' greater resources (which will exist) will be enough for them to directly overpower the League. I could see the Athenians knocking Corinth out of the war. They came damned close after Pylos-Sphakteria during Nikias' raid; too bad for them he cocked it up. But not Sparta, and probably not Thebes. The most I can see the Athenians gaining in a 414/3-406 (?) BC resumption of war is their old Thraikian empire. Possibly some territory in the West in Aitolia and Ambrakia. And they won't lose their Aegean empire.
Lamachos et al in Sicily will be able to hold it with less than the original expedition size. There were significant elements in Syracuse sympathetic to Athens and it was comparatively easier to hold the place than one might think. Look at what Timoleon would do a few decades into the next century. Combined with the support of other key Sicilian cities like Katane and probably Messene (after a timely intervention that OTL just barely didn't work out), Athens has a good chance at hegemony in western Sicily for a few decades.
Persia doesn't join if Athens doesn't lose at Syracuse, period. The old "Amorges" thing is almost certainly of secondary importance if any. Darius II doesn't have the ability to project the power to hit the Athenians in the Ionian coast if they haven't been bled to death in Sicily, and his satraps don't command enough resources independently and will fight each other more readily than the Athenians. Pharnabazos and Tissaphernes won't be able to do much to Athens in Ionia and around the Propontis.
So, that old Athenian hegemony in Greece thing. I don't think so, personally. Everything and everyone is just too polarized against Athens in the late fifth century, and the Athenians don't have the manpower to take on everybody in land warfare and win, barring a truly genial Great Captain like Philippos II (nah) or something of that nature. I actually think that Athenian hegemony in the west would bring a tighter knit group of opposition states in Greece itself. Sparta's social structure is not going to change without some massive alterations in circumstances, and it isn't adapted for holding onto the northern Peloponnese directly. I think Thebes could increase its power somewhat, or at least that it has scope for it, if it's one of the poleis that manages to avoid Athenian domination. In OTL it formed a semi-federal league (essentially, a Delian League-esque vehicle for its own power until the final Sacred Wars) under major pressure from Sparta. The same kind of pressure from Athens could lead to similar Theban developments a few decades earlier, with expansion into Thessalia as a result. And we all know what's in Thessalia - kickass cavalry.
Developments in Makedonia are heavily heavily HEAVILY dependent on what Athens does. Retaking the old Thraikian empire will prove pretty devastating. The Maks could pull together under the crisis and force the Upper and Lower parts together for mutual support. Or they could degenerate into sick internecine strife and not accomplish much of anything. It's up in the air, and with the state of Mak internal politics as it was it could go either way. I'd bet on Archelaos being able to come out of the resumed Peloponnesian War after the Sicilian expedition with at least some significant advantages, because frankly he was that awesome. Horse-trading with Athens (literally and metaphorically) will put him ahead. If he isn't assassinated I expect he'll be able to force further integration, maybe even seek an augmentation of the Mak military in Thraikia. Certainly he'll profit from aiding the Athenians against the Spartan clients in the north.
And of course developments in Athenian internal politics will make all of this go completely out the window anyway. Who the hell even knows what Alkibiades, Nikias, Thrasyboulos, and Peisandros will cook up even if Athens doesn't come under the same kind of severe pressure that obtained after the Sicilian events. No probouloi in 413 does change a lot, after all. You can mix and match these four, plus any number of other key players like Theramenes, Konon, Archeptolemos, Antiphon, Phrynichos, and so forth, and get almost any political outcome conceivable. It's great.
I was recently convinced (again) that Athens would have been able to keep Syracuse more or less allied to them after the place fell, assuming it did. Since this occurs before Gylippos arrives in Sicily, the Athenians may not even face the resumption of open war against Sparta, perhaps not even Corinth. (It certainly depends on what one does with Alkibiades.)
Well, not immediately anyway. It's true that low-level violations of the Nikias Peace were going on all the time, and I think that either the Messenian raids from Pylos or the Argive-Spartan border skirmishes will flare up into open warfare in the next couple of years even without the Spartans and the League getting directly involved in Sicily. But without the Syracuse disaster, I expect the Athenians will have enough troops to contest Dekeleia and prevent Agis II from fortifying sally-ports into Attika. Meanwhile, Konon and Eurymedon in Akarnania and Naupaktos will be able to control the Corinthian Gulf. But in any renewed war, I don't think that Athens' greater resources (which will exist) will be enough for them to directly overpower the League. I could see the Athenians knocking Corinth out of the war. They came damned close after Pylos-Sphakteria during Nikias' raid; too bad for them he cocked it up. But not Sparta, and probably not Thebes. The most I can see the Athenians gaining in a 414/3-406 (?) BC resumption of war is their old Thraikian empire. Possibly some territory in the West in Aitolia and Ambrakia. And they won't lose their Aegean empire.
Lamachos et al in Sicily will be able to hold it with less than the original expedition size. There were significant elements in Syracuse sympathetic to Athens and it was comparatively easier to hold the place than one might think. Look at what Timoleon would do a few decades into the next century. Combined with the support of other key Sicilian cities like Katane and probably Messene (after a timely intervention that OTL just barely didn't work out), Athens has a good chance at hegemony in western Sicily for a few decades.
Persia doesn't join if Athens doesn't lose at Syracuse, period. The old "Amorges" thing is almost certainly of secondary importance if any. Darius II doesn't have the ability to project the power to hit the Athenians in the Ionian coast if they haven't been bled to death in Sicily, and his satraps don't command enough resources independently and will fight each other more readily than the Athenians. Pharnabazos and Tissaphernes won't be able to do much to Athens in Ionia and around the Propontis.
So, that old Athenian hegemony in Greece thing. I don't think so, personally. Everything and everyone is just too polarized against Athens in the late fifth century, and the Athenians don't have the manpower to take on everybody in land warfare and win, barring a truly genial Great Captain like Philippos II (nah) or something of that nature. I actually think that Athenian hegemony in the west would bring a tighter knit group of opposition states in Greece itself. Sparta's social structure is not going to change without some massive alterations in circumstances, and it isn't adapted for holding onto the northern Peloponnese directly. I think Thebes could increase its power somewhat, or at least that it has scope for it, if it's one of the poleis that manages to avoid Athenian domination. In OTL it formed a semi-federal league (essentially, a Delian League-esque vehicle for its own power until the final Sacred Wars) under major pressure from Sparta. The same kind of pressure from Athens could lead to similar Theban developments a few decades earlier, with expansion into Thessalia as a result. And we all know what's in Thessalia - kickass cavalry.
Developments in Makedonia are heavily heavily HEAVILY dependent on what Athens does. Retaking the old Thraikian empire will prove pretty devastating. The Maks could pull together under the crisis and force the Upper and Lower parts together for mutual support. Or they could degenerate into sick internecine strife and not accomplish much of anything. It's up in the air, and with the state of Mak internal politics as it was it could go either way. I'd bet on Archelaos being able to come out of the resumed Peloponnesian War after the Sicilian expedition with at least some significant advantages, because frankly he was that awesome. Horse-trading with Athens (literally and metaphorically) will put him ahead. If he isn't assassinated I expect he'll be able to force further integration, maybe even seek an augmentation of the Mak military in Thraikia. Certainly he'll profit from aiding the Athenians against the Spartan clients in the north.
And of course developments in Athenian internal politics will make all of this go completely out the window anyway. Who the hell even knows what Alkibiades, Nikias, Thrasyboulos, and Peisandros will cook up even if Athens doesn't come under the same kind of severe pressure that obtained after the Sicilian events. No probouloi in 413 does change a lot, after all. You can mix and match these four, plus any number of other key players like Theramenes, Konon, Archeptolemos, Antiphon, Phrynichos, and so forth, and get almost any political outcome conceivable. It's great.
I've been doing a lot of work recently on an Alternate History time line where Julian Grenier, Lord of Sidon, decides to not be an idiot and raid Mongol ruled Syria. In this raid he accidentally killed Hulagu's (the Mongol regional ruler) favorite grandson. In response the Mongols raided the territory of Sidon and permanently spoiled Mongol-Outremer relations and ruined plans for an alliance. Later that year, the Crusader States provided significant assistance to the Mameluke Army in their attack on the Mongol Army.
My POD is Julian Grenier isn't an idiot and that relations between the Mongols and Crusader States warm considerably, leading to a Mongol victory at Ain Jalut (assisted by the knights of Outremer). Eventually Conradin (heir to the throne AND last of the Hohenstaufens) returns to rule over a revitalized Kingdom of Jerusalem. While he loses the Holy Roman Empire he manages to take control of Jerusalem and make Cyprus a vassal state. Also, Egypt is now ruled by Kitbuqa, a Mongolian general who is also a devout Nestorian Christian.
I have some other ideas, but they aren't fully developed.
My POD is Julian Grenier isn't an idiot and that relations between the Mongols and Crusader States warm considerably, leading to a Mongol victory at Ain Jalut (assisted by the knights of Outremer). Eventually Conradin (heir to the throne AND last of the Hohenstaufens) returns to rule over a revitalized Kingdom of Jerusalem. While he loses the Holy Roman Empire he manages to take control of Jerusalem and make Cyprus a vassal state. Also, Egypt is now ruled by Kitbuqa, a Mongolian general who is also a devout Nestorian Christian.
I have some other ideas, but they aren't fully developed.
Thlayli
Le Pétit Prince
That's actually a pretty good case for an Ain Jalut Mongol victory.
Part of a new alternate history I'm making. Maybe coming soon to a nes near you
United States of America: A bright future for the young republic ended with the First American War tearing apart the nation. The United States suffered defeat after defeat, cumulating at the simultaneous defeats at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania and at Vicksburg in Mississippi. With the Confederates within striking distance of Philadelphia, and the British and French threatening to intervene, the United States accepted the humiliating Treaty of Orleans, ending the war. The broken Republican party exited the national scene, the Democrats monopolizing the presidency until 1876, with Schuyler Colfax giving the Republicans the Presidency. His blunders in the Second Mexican War removed not only the Republicans from the world stage, but the United States of America from world affairs. It was not until President John Carlisle entered the United States into the Triple Alliance of Austria, Germany, and Italy in 1894 that the United States gained any relevance again in world affairs. The United States headed into a highly reactionary phase of politics after the Red Riots in 1908, which were suppressed brutally. With the reactionary mood fresh in everyone’s minds, the coalition of the Jingo Party and the Democrats easily put Theodore Roosevelt, the hero of the Second Mexican War, into office over the Progressives and the Socialists, and re-elected him in 1912. Now, with her German allies at her side to defend her, the United States is confident once more, and ready to take back what she lost on the fields of Pennsylvania fifty years ago.
Confederate States of America: After defeating two Union armies, one at Gettysburg and the other Vicksburg, angels descended upon the Confederacy, in the form of Britain and France. For the next two decades, the Confederacy saw an upheaval of industry. Following the abolition of tariffs, the Confederacy became a large free trade area, and as British and French industrialists poured capital into the nation, the Confederacy grew stronger. Trouble began brewing with their larger neighbor in the late 1870s. Following the Confederate annexation of Nicaragua in 1874, and the Mexican riots against Emperor Maximilian, capped off by a Republican victory in the 1876 elections brought war again to the continent. Following heavy defeats, with the loss of Texas, Tennessee, New Orleans, and Richmond under siege, the British and French again helped the Confederacy, and the defeat of the US navy and the capture of Philadelphia sealed the end of the war, allowing Confederate annexation of Sequoyah, parts of West Virginia, and a large part of Northern Mexico. After the wars conclusion in 1883, the Confederate States would declare war on Columbia, annexing Panama from them. Following this, Confederate Admiral Franklin Buchanan, under orders of President James Stuart, was sent to conduct a treaty of alliance with Japan for mutual cooperation against the Spanish. In what would be known as the Cuban War in the Confederacy, the Confederate forces easily captured Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spain, ending the war with the Treaty of Norwich in 1894. With her alliance with Japan expired, and Tokyo showing no interest in renewing it, in 1900 the Confederacy joined an alliance with the United Kingdom, France, and Russia, forming the Quadruple Alliance. 1912 saw the election of the nation’s eleventh president, the Whig Woodrow Wilson, easily beating out the Radical Liberals. As the Confederacy heads off to this Great War, she faces heavy problems still. A third of her population is still enslaved to the plantations. Another third of the population, those descended from the Spanish and Aztecs who live in Confederate States in former Mexico and Central America are denied the rights of Confederate citizens. Even the most privileged group, the whites have their own problems. Only men are able to vote, and there has been infighting between the workers of the factories and the capitalists who own them. While the Confederacy suffered little from the Red Riots, the Confederacy heads to war truly a divided nation.
The Dominion of Canada: When war broke out with the United States in the Second Mexican War, the British colony of Canada found itself for the most part unprepared. Lack of autonomous officials had made it difficult for the British armies, and poor organization led to Toronto’s capture. After the war, seeing future hostilities with the United States as a distinct possibility, as well as the clamoring for North American self-rule, the British Empire created the Dominion of Canada. Largely a Liberal nation, Canada has many liberties that are nowhere else available on the continent. There is little divide between the citizens from the Quebec region, and those from the other regions, due to the fear of their southern neighbor. While Canada has little reason for war, when the United States implemented conscription, Canada was forced to do the same. However, even with help from the mother country and the Confederate States diverting the Yankee’s attention, Canada is easily dwarfed by the United States in industry and manpower. Now, with war staring the world in the face, Canada’s Great Lakes Battleships have left their ports, and men take positions in the earthworks outside of Toronto, to defend their nation against the Yankee threat.
United Kingdom: On July 4th, 1776, the United Kingdom was tossed out of her thirteen American colonies. However, over fifty years from that date, the British returned to once again influence the fate of the continent. With threats to intervene on behalf of the Confederacy, the United Kingdom was able to end the war that had torn the nation apart. With a guarantee to Confederate independence, the British were able to concentrate on expanding her empire until the 1880s when the United States attacked the Confederacy. Using Confederate independence as a caulis belie, Britain entered the war, and eventually, with French aid, defeated the United States. After the war, the British continued her expansion, and at the end of the 19th century, Britain captured La Plata, making it a member of its Commonwealth. With the formation of the German Empire, the British at last saw a rival of strength equal to hers, and when the Germans became allies with the Austrians and Americans, the British was forced to join the Franco-Russian entente in the late 1890s. Now, Britain goes to war, to protect her interests in both Europe and America, but she goes cautiously. The Royal Navy still is the largest navy on Earth, but both the High Seas fleet of Germany and the United States navy have caught up, and combined they outweigh the British. This is a point of great stress for the British, as they require Argentinean food stores to keep their population fed. If they cannot continue the shipments, Britain will starve.
United States of America: A bright future for the young republic ended with the First American War tearing apart the nation. The United States suffered defeat after defeat, cumulating at the simultaneous defeats at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania and at Vicksburg in Mississippi. With the Confederates within striking distance of Philadelphia, and the British and French threatening to intervene, the United States accepted the humiliating Treaty of Orleans, ending the war. The broken Republican party exited the national scene, the Democrats monopolizing the presidency until 1876, with Schuyler Colfax giving the Republicans the Presidency. His blunders in the Second Mexican War removed not only the Republicans from the world stage, but the United States of America from world affairs. It was not until President John Carlisle entered the United States into the Triple Alliance of Austria, Germany, and Italy in 1894 that the United States gained any relevance again in world affairs. The United States headed into a highly reactionary phase of politics after the Red Riots in 1908, which were suppressed brutally. With the reactionary mood fresh in everyone’s minds, the coalition of the Jingo Party and the Democrats easily put Theodore Roosevelt, the hero of the Second Mexican War, into office over the Progressives and the Socialists, and re-elected him in 1912. Now, with her German allies at her side to defend her, the United States is confident once more, and ready to take back what she lost on the fields of Pennsylvania fifty years ago.
Confederate States of America: After defeating two Union armies, one at Gettysburg and the other Vicksburg, angels descended upon the Confederacy, in the form of Britain and France. For the next two decades, the Confederacy saw an upheaval of industry. Following the abolition of tariffs, the Confederacy became a large free trade area, and as British and French industrialists poured capital into the nation, the Confederacy grew stronger. Trouble began brewing with their larger neighbor in the late 1870s. Following the Confederate annexation of Nicaragua in 1874, and the Mexican riots against Emperor Maximilian, capped off by a Republican victory in the 1876 elections brought war again to the continent. Following heavy defeats, with the loss of Texas, Tennessee, New Orleans, and Richmond under siege, the British and French again helped the Confederacy, and the defeat of the US navy and the capture of Philadelphia sealed the end of the war, allowing Confederate annexation of Sequoyah, parts of West Virginia, and a large part of Northern Mexico. After the wars conclusion in 1883, the Confederate States would declare war on Columbia, annexing Panama from them. Following this, Confederate Admiral Franklin Buchanan, under orders of President James Stuart, was sent to conduct a treaty of alliance with Japan for mutual cooperation against the Spanish. In what would be known as the Cuban War in the Confederacy, the Confederate forces easily captured Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spain, ending the war with the Treaty of Norwich in 1894. With her alliance with Japan expired, and Tokyo showing no interest in renewing it, in 1900 the Confederacy joined an alliance with the United Kingdom, France, and Russia, forming the Quadruple Alliance. 1912 saw the election of the nation’s eleventh president, the Whig Woodrow Wilson, easily beating out the Radical Liberals. As the Confederacy heads off to this Great War, she faces heavy problems still. A third of her population is still enslaved to the plantations. Another third of the population, those descended from the Spanish and Aztecs who live in Confederate States in former Mexico and Central America are denied the rights of Confederate citizens. Even the most privileged group, the whites have their own problems. Only men are able to vote, and there has been infighting between the workers of the factories and the capitalists who own them. While the Confederacy suffered little from the Red Riots, the Confederacy heads to war truly a divided nation.
The Dominion of Canada: When war broke out with the United States in the Second Mexican War, the British colony of Canada found itself for the most part unprepared. Lack of autonomous officials had made it difficult for the British armies, and poor organization led to Toronto’s capture. After the war, seeing future hostilities with the United States as a distinct possibility, as well as the clamoring for North American self-rule, the British Empire created the Dominion of Canada. Largely a Liberal nation, Canada has many liberties that are nowhere else available on the continent. There is little divide between the citizens from the Quebec region, and those from the other regions, due to the fear of their southern neighbor. While Canada has little reason for war, when the United States implemented conscription, Canada was forced to do the same. However, even with help from the mother country and the Confederate States diverting the Yankee’s attention, Canada is easily dwarfed by the United States in industry and manpower. Now, with war staring the world in the face, Canada’s Great Lakes Battleships have left their ports, and men take positions in the earthworks outside of Toronto, to defend their nation against the Yankee threat.
United Kingdom: On July 4th, 1776, the United Kingdom was tossed out of her thirteen American colonies. However, over fifty years from that date, the British returned to once again influence the fate of the continent. With threats to intervene on behalf of the Confederacy, the United Kingdom was able to end the war that had torn the nation apart. With a guarantee to Confederate independence, the British were able to concentrate on expanding her empire until the 1880s when the United States attacked the Confederacy. Using Confederate independence as a caulis belie, Britain entered the war, and eventually, with French aid, defeated the United States. After the war, the British continued her expansion, and at the end of the 19th century, Britain captured La Plata, making it a member of its Commonwealth. With the formation of the German Empire, the British at last saw a rival of strength equal to hers, and when the Germans became allies with the Austrians and Americans, the British was forced to join the Franco-Russian entente in the late 1890s. Now, Britain goes to war, to protect her interests in both Europe and America, but she goes cautiously. The Royal Navy still is the largest navy on Earth, but both the High Seas fleet of Germany and the United States navy have caught up, and combined they outweigh the British. This is a point of great stress for the British, as they require Argentinean food stores to keep their population fed. If they cannot continue the shipments, Britain will starve.
Defeat at Vicksburg? That's...interesting. I'll read yours in a bit, Kentharu, I accidentally skipped over it when I saw Warman's post.
In the meantime, there is this.
Cliffs of Dover.
When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.
-Jesus of Nazareth, Mark 13:7
At this point, the British Isles reenter the story in which they have been making mere cameos for the last decade. It must be remembered that Charles II, the king of England, was at the very least sympathetic to Catholics, even if his first priority was the power of the Crown. Hence his alliance of 1670 with the French at Dover: it played the role of enhancing royal power by subsidy, and aligned England with the MostCatholic Christian King, Louis XIV, against the Dutch. Two years later, Charles attempted to widen the royal power base further by his issuance of the Declaration of Indulgence, suspending all penal laws against both Catholics and Nonconformists.
This met with backlash quickly enough. Parliament, in an uproar, threatened to withhold war funds a potential disaster, as the prewar crisis to the Dutch War was just then heating up. Charles attempted to go ahead with the war anyway. In March 1672, not long after the Declaration was issued, Royal Navy ships attempted to capture the Dutch Smyrna convoy (failing to secure many prizes); a few weeks later, French troops crossed the Dutch frontier. Charles issued a declaration of war against the United Provinces a day after that. But English fortunes were uneven at best. At Solebay in the summer, Dutch lieutenant-admiral Michiel de Ruyter fought the Anglo-French fleet to a draw and prevented an allied blockade of the Netherlands for another year. The poor military situation persisted into the next year, and Charles was forced to repeal his Declaration of Indulgence under renewed pressure from Nonconformists (who generally hated Catholics too much to care that they were benefited by the law as well) and Anglicans in Parliament.
The Declaration was replaced by a series of Test Acts, so called because they mandated that all applicants for public office be forced to undergo a test as to whether they were Catholic or not. All were to swear an oath denying the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. This precipitated a number of key resignations in the English armed forces, including that of the able Lord High Admiral, James, duke of York. Having effectively mutilated their own fleet, which suffered even more from the genial Dutch admirals de Ruyter and Cornelis Tromp, the English began to shift away from supporting the war. By 1674, they had had enough, and extricated themselves by the Second Treaty of Westminster, by which the essentials of the territorial status quo were confirmed.
Up to this point, English politics had previously been more or less directed by the Cabal Ministry, five Privy Councilors who had exercised the greater share of power. This ministry, which had held up well since the late 1660s, was finally beginning to fracture under the strain of the Declaration crisis and the Dutch War; in 1674, the Cabal finally came apart. It was replaced by Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby, as the head of the royal party in Parliament. The former Cabal Minister Anthony Ashley Cooper, newly created earl of Shaftesbury, took charge of the Country Party, the Parliament opposition to Danby. By 1675 Danby had allied himself with the duke of York, and began to push measures that were, if not pro-Catholic, strongly royalist.
Shaftesbury, aided by the young pamphleteer John Locke, waged an able propaganda war, rallying opposition to Danbys measures and forcing Charles to prorogue Parliament by the winter of 1675. Yet Shaftesburys Country Party continued to attack the kings allegedly absolutist activities in other fora during 1676, bringing up several arguments claiming that when Parliament was due to meet again in 1677, it would need to stand for fresh elections. Charles was aware that the current Cavalier Parliament, which had been elected in 1661 during the zenith of his popularity, was his best chance at passing any bills at all. The king naturally refused to consider the Country Partys initiatives and Shaftesbury was thrown in the Tower of London for a few months for his trouble.
The situation was revolutionized late in 1677 with the revelation of the Popish Plot, described by pamphleteers Titus Oates and Israel Tonge as a Catholic scheme, sponsored by Louis XIV, to assassinate the king and replace him with the duke of York. Charles, after an audience with Oates, quickly determined the entire thing was a gigantic lie, but Shaftesburys Country Party seized on the plot as an avenue towards eliminating key royalist supporters. Aided by Locke and the pamphlets of the poet Andrew Marvell, the Country Party managed to rally public opinion against the duke of York. Some unexpected events further strengthened the Country Partys case. Correspondence with Louis XIVs confessor was discovered among the papers of the secretary to the duchess of York (and everybody knew that the Jesuit confessors orchestrated all popish conspiracies against Protestant Europe); the justice to whom Oates had originally confided the story was found mysteriously murdered a few months later. By early spring 1678, the Country Party managed to railroad Parliament into convicting several royal ministers and confining them to the Tower of London. Charles attempted to stave off the crisis by preparing for war with France, to limit its advance in the Netherlands in the last stages of the Dutch War. But Shaftesbury, fearing that the expedition was a sham to allow Charles to build up a royal army, prevented the force from being made very large, and the quick conclusion of the Dutch War in any case prevented Charles from using foreign policy as a distraction for very long.
By now Oates had achieved such stature with Parliament that even when he was caught in a lie the Country Party was able to extricate him from the ensuing mess. He and his hysterical Parliamentarian supporters pressed onward, forcing the duke of York to flee to the Continent and claiming that Danby himself who originally had supported the investigations was guilty of accepting bribes from the French. Attempts to demonstrate that this was a French subsidy to the King from the Treaty of Dover were ignored, and Charles was only able to save him by dissolving the Cavalier Parliament in the fall of 1678 and forcing a new election. Its replacement, the first so-called Whig Parliament (as anti-royalists were beginning to be known), was even more opposed to Charles. Danby was forced to hide in the Tower of London; other royalists and papist supporters were not so lucky, and went to the executioners block.
Shaftesbury could finally rally enough support to pass even more radical legislation. He proposed an Exclusion Bill in 1679 that would totally bar the absent duke of York from the line of succession entirely. The debates over the Bill further crystallized the political factions in Parliament: Whig was applied to its proponents, while Tory became the label for its opponents. The Tories were outnumbered, and the Bill seemed sure to pass before Charles once again prorogued Parliament in the summer. Another predominantly Whig Parliament was duly elected in 1680 and resumed the Popish Plot trials and the Exclusion Bill debates. Already, though, the brief outbreak of terror was receding. Oates made one obvious mistake too many and was discredited in summer 1680, ending the trials for good. The Whigs were divided by the choice of successor beyond York: on the one hand lay the duke of Monmouth, bastard son of Charles II and clearly an illegal candidate; on the other lay Mary, Yorks daughter and a Protestant married to no less than Willem van Oranje, who was curbing the liberties of the Staten-Generaal at the same time in the United Provinces. Tory propaganda hit back as well, and public support for Charles rebounded such that when yet another Parliament was elected in 1681, the Whigs were once again a minority. The Exclusion Bill was defeated and the duke of York returned to the country.
One last throw was left to the Whigs, who attempted to rally support behind another Exclusion Bill with fresh Popish Plot evidence mostly fabricated from the private papers of Catarina de Bragança, Charles barren queen. Once again the bill came near to passing; once again Charles dissolved the Parliament. Shaftesbury began plotting for civil war. Locke ghostwrote a pamphlet calling on the spirit of 41, while the earl himself contacted the disbanded Commons and tried to form them into a Revolutionary Committee. He was discovered and arrested by the King, to whom the support of the masses had once again shifted (memories of the Civil Wars being in fact a spectacular Whig own goal most people did not wish a return to two decades of incessant conflict). A jury acquitted him of treason in the winter of 1681-2, but he fled the country for his life anyhow, alighting in the United Provinces, where Willem van Oranje and the Staten-Generaal lodged him for the few years remaining until his 1684 death.
Shaftesburys defeat had forced Whiggery into remission, but at the cost of Charles health, which was already poor. Rumors of further plots spread, including ones against the Kings life, but by early 1683 he was confined to bed, and by April he was terminal. His decline was accompanied by the rising star of the duke of York, who won a civil case against Oates with an attendant judgment so huge Oates was consigned to debtors prison. York resumed his post as Lord High Admiral in contravention of the Test Acts; nobody raised a voice in opposition. He was already in more or less full control of the government when Charles died on 24 April 1683 after a deathbed conversion to Catholicism.
The duke of York, now crowned king of England as James II, was less radical than most Whigs might have hoped. His Privy Councils leadership was composed of Protestants, and although he opened fresh legal proceedings against Oates he was conciliatory to all other Whigs. This had the happy effect of lessening the opposition to him just as his opponents struck. Monmouth, along with a core of other Whigs including the earl of Essex and Algernon Sidney, had raised an army from north German and Dutch recruits, armed with Dutch weapons. He landed in south England and attempted to raise a rebellion in Cornwall and Exeter, successfully capturing Bristol, where he was crowned James II himself. Issuing proclamations that James II (the former duke of York) was responsible for the Popish Plot and for various other offenses, Monmouth made Puritan Dorsetshire his stronghold, and received many locals into his army, swelling its size to 6,000. It made little difference: a royal army under the command of the earl of Feversham, a Privy Councilor, surprised the rebels at Taunton a month after Monmouth landed. Monmouths rebellion was destroyed, the duke himself was executed, and the Whigs who had joined him were scattered.
James proceeded, however, to destroy the goodwill the rebellion had earned him. He appointed a commission to hear cases in the West Country, which turned into a series of vicious show-trials, punctuated with instances of corruption, that earned the name Bloody Assizes (the assizes being county superior courts). His further actions went downhill from there. From Parliament he demanded a declaration of war against the United Provinces for having harbored Monmouth and supplied his rebellion, with an attendant revocation of the Test Acts and a standing royal army to conduct the invasion of the Netherlands.
Willem van Oranjes efforts to defuse the crisis and his need to watch his seaward flank prevented him from participating in more than a token role in the opening stages of the French War of the Reunions. This has already been described at some length, and Willems role in the English internal crisis alluded to. It suffices to say that for 1683 and 1684 he had most of his attention focused on an impending threat of war with England. During the year of 1684 this finally receded as James had to grapple with fresh internal problems. The king of England attempted to try Parliamentary government once more, summoning a fresh one in 1684, but a confrontation over the keystone in James platform, the repeal of the Test Acts, led to a fresh dissolution in the winter. He would henceforth attempt to govern by fiat, and set about increasing the size of the royal army to facilitate this policy.
And here (however, as it might happen, briefly) we rejoin the main thread of European events in 1685. The war on the Danube, described in such excruciating detail, held the attention of many in Western Europe, it is true; that war, however, did not prevent the king of England from pressing on with his program. He was warned by an unusually prescient Louis XIV that his policy of establishing Catholic supremacy in England would be more difficult than it seemed. The Pope cautioned him against his reckless schemes; his own supporters, the converted Catholic earl of Sunderland and the still-Anglican John Churchill, began to cautiously distance themselves from his policies. Other men, like the Quaker colonist William Penn, tried to salvage something of the kings platform. Partially on Penns advice, James promulgated a Declaration of Indulgence that went far beyond Charles IIs abortive edict. It was a landmark in the history of religious toleration, guaranteeing freedom of religion and abolishing all religious tests for offices and religious penal laws, and forbade interference with peaceable religious assemblies. It was also essentially a declaration of war on the dissolved Parliamentarians.
So in the early summer of 1685, as Ludwig von Baden-Baden and Musahib Mustafa Paşa sparred in Austria and Louis armies continued to observe a precarious local truce in the Netherlands, James IIs opponents began to seek allies. Unfortunately, the only current alternative to James was his daughter and her husband in the United Provinces. Charles Talbot, the earl of Shrewsbury and a prominent Whig, made his way to Amsterdam and presented to Willem and Amsterdam burgemeester Coenraad van Beuningen a petition for Dutch intervention, signed by several other Whigs and members of the Anglican clergy. The impassioned Shrewsbury convinced the two Dutchmen of the necessity and viability of intervention, but Willem knew that the Staten-Generaal would not yet countenance such a decision. An expedition to England would be far too risky with the French sitting as close as they were to the Scheldt. But at least now he knew that the option was viable, and could be acted upon.
Louis XIV had chosen to use his truce productively. Already for most of his reign he had been engaging in active attempts to proselytize among the Huguenot populace of France. His expedients ranged from offering a state pension for converts to a series of edicts passed limiting Huguenot freedoms during the 1660s and 1670s. A favored tactic was to quarter units of dragoons on Huguenot farmsteads, forcing the family there to convert before the burden of quartering troops was lifted. Egged on by his ministers, especially de Louvois, Louis was convinced of the successes of his policy and saw no detrimental effects. By the summer of 1685 he was ready to conclude his religious offensive. On 17 June he published the Edict of Fontainebleau, which essentially revoked Henri IVs Edict of Nantes, formally ending Huguenot toleration and announcing the demolition of all Protestant places of worship within France. This vastly accelerated the Huguenot diaspora and further inflamed Louis northern neighbors against him.
One particularly devastating effect the Edict of Fontainebleau had on French diplomacy was the neutralization of Scandinavia. Since the failure of the Third Northern War, Christian V of Denmark-Norway had been quietly moving towards alliance with France to replace Sweden. Louis had been amenable to the change in alliance, since Karl XI was turning towards internal matters instead of threatening the north German states. Under the leadership of Niels Juel, the Danish fleet was expanded even further, while Gyldenløve in Norway rebuilt the Norwegian army and secretly supplied partisans in Swedish Trondheim. Beginning with some minor border clashes around Trondheim in 1684, it had seemed as though Denmark-Norway and Sweden would fall back into fighting.
The revocation of the Edict of Nantes altered the situation. Spurred by national outrage over the shabby treatment of their co-religionists, Dano-Norwegian and Swedish diplomats began to negotiate a treaty of alliance in the late summer of 1685. This culminated in the League of Groningen of that winter, to which the Danes, Swedes, and the United Provinces were signatories. Aided by Dutch subsidies, the Scandinavian states entered into a defensive alliance with each other and with the Netherlands, aimed against France and Frances client states within the Empire, especially Münster, the Palatine Electoral Principality, and the Archbishopric of Köln. They further made a statement of toleration towards all Huguenots fleeing France, who were offered generous terms to emigrate to the Groningen Powers, including tax-free status for ten years. The toleration clause of the Groningen League was mimicked by ones in the Hohenzollern territories and in several other north German states by the end of the year.
Speaking of those Hohenzollern territories, we must return to the Commonwealth, where Sobieskis Słuck confederates were, at the end of the year 1684, in control of the entirety of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Polish Ukraine, and Galicia, and busily endeavoring to crack the iron triangle of fortifications at Lublin, Warsaw, and Kraków. Lublin, isolated as it was on the eastern side of the Vistula, was the easiest target, and Sobieski himself led an army of some 41,000 to besiege it in the spring of 1685. Yet Sobieskis allies were already beginning to grow uneasy with the confederation. The prominent Radziwiłłs of Lithuania, in particular, were negotiating with the Elector-King. During the Deluge, the Calvinists among their family had aided the Swedes; after it, many of the Calvinist Radziwiłłs were killed, while still others were forced to convert to Catholicism (conversion away from Catholicism was made punishable by death by Jan II Casimir in 1668). But Ludwika Karolina Radziwiłł, a princess in her own right and married to the Elector-Kings younger son Ludwig to boot, was still head of the Polish Reformed Church, and she managed to get many of her relatives to side with her after the Słuck confederates failed to score an early victory. Sobieskis move to attack Lublin provided the Radziwiłłs with the opportunity to switch sides, linking up with Prince Ludwig and a Prussian detachment at Kaunas, where they crossed the Memel River and began to systematically capture northern Lithuania.
The Radziwiłł defection also solidified Friedrich Wilhelms support in the rump Sejm. During the early spring of 1685 he and his marszałek Rafał Leszczyński forced through a number of pivotal measures, including the Sejms abdication of key rights relating to the regulation of the military. The right to levy the łanowa was arrogated to the King, and a significant allowance was voted him for life. It was not immediately apparent that these reforms would have any effect, as Sobieskis siege of Lublin continued apace; but in April von Derfflinger and a royalist army of nearly 35,000 the largest of the war managed to cross the Vistula and fight a sanguinary drawn battle with Sobieskis covering force at Dęblin. Sobieski was forced to fall back; his army retreated to Zamość to catch its breath, but von Derfflinger used the pause for his own purposes marching his army east to cross the Bug River and storm Brześć Litewski (Brest-Litovsk).
Sobieski, his army reduced by attrition and desertion, boldly marched northwards to confront the royalists and managed to cross the Bug. Von Derfflinger was caught with his pants down and forced to pull out what he could, extricating 23,000 of his men from Brześć before Sobieskis army reached the fortress. But a strong garrison of 6,000 was left inside, so it was a week before the confederals were able to storm the citadel, and even then they did so with heavy loss. Badly depleted, the army eventually limped into Słuck in early June. The situation was grim: Radziwiłłs in Sudovia and Highland Lithuania (Auktaitija), royalists moving into Galicia and the Ukraine, and internal disputes were rife. Sobieski never tired or despaired, and energetically began to rebuild his army in preparation for a late summer campaign. By the end of July he once more had 40,000 men and was at Trakai, preparing to attack the royalist lodgment north of the Memel. He never got the chance; on the 29th of July, he was murdered on the orders of his rival Sapieha.
The konfederacja that Sapieha had hijacked was spinning towards disaster by the fall of 1685, yet the Lithuanian magnate was worried not so much about the royalists as about his eastern Russian neighbors in Muscovy. They, like the inhabitants of the British Isles, were conveniently skipped earlier, so we must make up for lost time. Muscovy was left under the hand of Artamon Matveyev in 1677, with the boyar Romodanovsky and the cossack hetman Samoylovych having captured Petro Doroshenko, ending the brushfire war with the Ottomans and Crimean Tatars. Matveyev, however, had more problems. His position at court had been strongly connected with the favor of Tsar Aleksey, who had moved aside older boyars to make room for Matveyevs clients. With the tsars death, that bastion of support was gone, and a new playing field was left for the boyars to fight on. At first the struggle was against Matveyev: simply put, many displaced boyar families wanted revenge. The first beneficiary of this was knyaz Yuri Dolgoruky, who became head of the streltsy chancellery; offices were soon awarded to others of his family, as well as his ally Ivan Repnin, who became chancellor of the Estates. A few months later, the boyars struck again. Kiril Naryshkin, the father of Alekseys widow Natalia and one of Matveyevs closest allies, lost control of the Ustyug Quarter, a key source of revenue it went to Yuri Dolgoruky instead. And as the months went on and other boyars moved back towards the capital in the wake of Alekseys death, opposition in the Duma of the Boyars to Matveyev was only going to mount.
Which, of course, it did in due course. Matveyevs keystone office, his control of the foreign chancellery, was not the source of any boyar dispute. His cossack policy of unseating Doroshenko and his avoidance of war with Sweden (despite heavy pressure from the Danish-Norwegian envoy Magnus Gjøe) met with approval from almost all quarters. Dolgoruky even accompanied Matveyev into a meeting with Gjøe in the fall of 1676, where the two presented a united front against expansion of Muscovite foreign commitments. Instead, opposition was founded on a sort of xenophobic reaction to the introduction of foreign cultural practices under the tenures of Aleksey and Matveyev: many of the old boyars unseated by them both railed against the ballets, the plays, even the installation of foreign envoys on a permanent basis in Moscow. Dolgoruky was not one of these men, but he had led their attacks for personal profit; now that his star was rising, he could be attacked as well. Paradoxically, he was forced to ally with Matveyev in the Duma for political survival, and during the course of the winter the two of them were able to survive, negotiating the formal end of the steppe war with the Ottomans in the process and forcing the boyars to allow a new envoy to take up residence in Moscow, Johan van Keller of the United Provinces.
In the meantime, there is this.
Cliffs of Dover.
When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.
-Jesus of Nazareth, Mark 13:7
At this point, the British Isles reenter the story in which they have been making mere cameos for the last decade. It must be remembered that Charles II, the king of England, was at the very least sympathetic to Catholics, even if his first priority was the power of the Crown. Hence his alliance of 1670 with the French at Dover: it played the role of enhancing royal power by subsidy, and aligned England with the Most
This met with backlash quickly enough. Parliament, in an uproar, threatened to withhold war funds a potential disaster, as the prewar crisis to the Dutch War was just then heating up. Charles attempted to go ahead with the war anyway. In March 1672, not long after the Declaration was issued, Royal Navy ships attempted to capture the Dutch Smyrna convoy (failing to secure many prizes); a few weeks later, French troops crossed the Dutch frontier. Charles issued a declaration of war against the United Provinces a day after that. But English fortunes were uneven at best. At Solebay in the summer, Dutch lieutenant-admiral Michiel de Ruyter fought the Anglo-French fleet to a draw and prevented an allied blockade of the Netherlands for another year. The poor military situation persisted into the next year, and Charles was forced to repeal his Declaration of Indulgence under renewed pressure from Nonconformists (who generally hated Catholics too much to care that they were benefited by the law as well) and Anglicans in Parliament.
The Declaration was replaced by a series of Test Acts, so called because they mandated that all applicants for public office be forced to undergo a test as to whether they were Catholic or not. All were to swear an oath denying the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. This precipitated a number of key resignations in the English armed forces, including that of the able Lord High Admiral, James, duke of York. Having effectively mutilated their own fleet, which suffered even more from the genial Dutch admirals de Ruyter and Cornelis Tromp, the English began to shift away from supporting the war. By 1674, they had had enough, and extricated themselves by the Second Treaty of Westminster, by which the essentials of the territorial status quo were confirmed.
Up to this point, English politics had previously been more or less directed by the Cabal Ministry, five Privy Councilors who had exercised the greater share of power. This ministry, which had held up well since the late 1660s, was finally beginning to fracture under the strain of the Declaration crisis and the Dutch War; in 1674, the Cabal finally came apart. It was replaced by Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby, as the head of the royal party in Parliament. The former Cabal Minister Anthony Ashley Cooper, newly created earl of Shaftesbury, took charge of the Country Party, the Parliament opposition to Danby. By 1675 Danby had allied himself with the duke of York, and began to push measures that were, if not pro-Catholic, strongly royalist.
Shaftesbury, aided by the young pamphleteer John Locke, waged an able propaganda war, rallying opposition to Danbys measures and forcing Charles to prorogue Parliament by the winter of 1675. Yet Shaftesburys Country Party continued to attack the kings allegedly absolutist activities in other fora during 1676, bringing up several arguments claiming that when Parliament was due to meet again in 1677, it would need to stand for fresh elections. Charles was aware that the current Cavalier Parliament, which had been elected in 1661 during the zenith of his popularity, was his best chance at passing any bills at all. The king naturally refused to consider the Country Partys initiatives and Shaftesbury was thrown in the Tower of London for a few months for his trouble.
The situation was revolutionized late in 1677 with the revelation of the Popish Plot, described by pamphleteers Titus Oates and Israel Tonge as a Catholic scheme, sponsored by Louis XIV, to assassinate the king and replace him with the duke of York. Charles, after an audience with Oates, quickly determined the entire thing was a gigantic lie, but Shaftesburys Country Party seized on the plot as an avenue towards eliminating key royalist supporters. Aided by Locke and the pamphlets of the poet Andrew Marvell, the Country Party managed to rally public opinion against the duke of York. Some unexpected events further strengthened the Country Partys case. Correspondence with Louis XIVs confessor was discovered among the papers of the secretary to the duchess of York (and everybody knew that the Jesuit confessors orchestrated all popish conspiracies against Protestant Europe); the justice to whom Oates had originally confided the story was found mysteriously murdered a few months later. By early spring 1678, the Country Party managed to railroad Parliament into convicting several royal ministers and confining them to the Tower of London. Charles attempted to stave off the crisis by preparing for war with France, to limit its advance in the Netherlands in the last stages of the Dutch War. But Shaftesbury, fearing that the expedition was a sham to allow Charles to build up a royal army, prevented the force from being made very large, and the quick conclusion of the Dutch War in any case prevented Charles from using foreign policy as a distraction for very long.
By now Oates had achieved such stature with Parliament that even when he was caught in a lie the Country Party was able to extricate him from the ensuing mess. He and his hysterical Parliamentarian supporters pressed onward, forcing the duke of York to flee to the Continent and claiming that Danby himself who originally had supported the investigations was guilty of accepting bribes from the French. Attempts to demonstrate that this was a French subsidy to the King from the Treaty of Dover were ignored, and Charles was only able to save him by dissolving the Cavalier Parliament in the fall of 1678 and forcing a new election. Its replacement, the first so-called Whig Parliament (as anti-royalists were beginning to be known), was even more opposed to Charles. Danby was forced to hide in the Tower of London; other royalists and papist supporters were not so lucky, and went to the executioners block.
Shaftesbury could finally rally enough support to pass even more radical legislation. He proposed an Exclusion Bill in 1679 that would totally bar the absent duke of York from the line of succession entirely. The debates over the Bill further crystallized the political factions in Parliament: Whig was applied to its proponents, while Tory became the label for its opponents. The Tories were outnumbered, and the Bill seemed sure to pass before Charles once again prorogued Parliament in the summer. Another predominantly Whig Parliament was duly elected in 1680 and resumed the Popish Plot trials and the Exclusion Bill debates. Already, though, the brief outbreak of terror was receding. Oates made one obvious mistake too many and was discredited in summer 1680, ending the trials for good. The Whigs were divided by the choice of successor beyond York: on the one hand lay the duke of Monmouth, bastard son of Charles II and clearly an illegal candidate; on the other lay Mary, Yorks daughter and a Protestant married to no less than Willem van Oranje, who was curbing the liberties of the Staten-Generaal at the same time in the United Provinces. Tory propaganda hit back as well, and public support for Charles rebounded such that when yet another Parliament was elected in 1681, the Whigs were once again a minority. The Exclusion Bill was defeated and the duke of York returned to the country.
One last throw was left to the Whigs, who attempted to rally support behind another Exclusion Bill with fresh Popish Plot evidence mostly fabricated from the private papers of Catarina de Bragança, Charles barren queen. Once again the bill came near to passing; once again Charles dissolved the Parliament. Shaftesbury began plotting for civil war. Locke ghostwrote a pamphlet calling on the spirit of 41, while the earl himself contacted the disbanded Commons and tried to form them into a Revolutionary Committee. He was discovered and arrested by the King, to whom the support of the masses had once again shifted (memories of the Civil Wars being in fact a spectacular Whig own goal most people did not wish a return to two decades of incessant conflict). A jury acquitted him of treason in the winter of 1681-2, but he fled the country for his life anyhow, alighting in the United Provinces, where Willem van Oranje and the Staten-Generaal lodged him for the few years remaining until his 1684 death.
Shaftesburys defeat had forced Whiggery into remission, but at the cost of Charles health, which was already poor. Rumors of further plots spread, including ones against the Kings life, but by early 1683 he was confined to bed, and by April he was terminal. His decline was accompanied by the rising star of the duke of York, who won a civil case against Oates with an attendant judgment so huge Oates was consigned to debtors prison. York resumed his post as Lord High Admiral in contravention of the Test Acts; nobody raised a voice in opposition. He was already in more or less full control of the government when Charles died on 24 April 1683 after a deathbed conversion to Catholicism.
The duke of York, now crowned king of England as James II, was less radical than most Whigs might have hoped. His Privy Councils leadership was composed of Protestants, and although he opened fresh legal proceedings against Oates he was conciliatory to all other Whigs. This had the happy effect of lessening the opposition to him just as his opponents struck. Monmouth, along with a core of other Whigs including the earl of Essex and Algernon Sidney, had raised an army from north German and Dutch recruits, armed with Dutch weapons. He landed in south England and attempted to raise a rebellion in Cornwall and Exeter, successfully capturing Bristol, where he was crowned James II himself. Issuing proclamations that James II (the former duke of York) was responsible for the Popish Plot and for various other offenses, Monmouth made Puritan Dorsetshire his stronghold, and received many locals into his army, swelling its size to 6,000. It made little difference: a royal army under the command of the earl of Feversham, a Privy Councilor, surprised the rebels at Taunton a month after Monmouth landed. Monmouths rebellion was destroyed, the duke himself was executed, and the Whigs who had joined him were scattered.
James proceeded, however, to destroy the goodwill the rebellion had earned him. He appointed a commission to hear cases in the West Country, which turned into a series of vicious show-trials, punctuated with instances of corruption, that earned the name Bloody Assizes (the assizes being county superior courts). His further actions went downhill from there. From Parliament he demanded a declaration of war against the United Provinces for having harbored Monmouth and supplied his rebellion, with an attendant revocation of the Test Acts and a standing royal army to conduct the invasion of the Netherlands.
Willem van Oranjes efforts to defuse the crisis and his need to watch his seaward flank prevented him from participating in more than a token role in the opening stages of the French War of the Reunions. This has already been described at some length, and Willems role in the English internal crisis alluded to. It suffices to say that for 1683 and 1684 he had most of his attention focused on an impending threat of war with England. During the year of 1684 this finally receded as James had to grapple with fresh internal problems. The king of England attempted to try Parliamentary government once more, summoning a fresh one in 1684, but a confrontation over the keystone in James platform, the repeal of the Test Acts, led to a fresh dissolution in the winter. He would henceforth attempt to govern by fiat, and set about increasing the size of the royal army to facilitate this policy.
And here (however, as it might happen, briefly) we rejoin the main thread of European events in 1685. The war on the Danube, described in such excruciating detail, held the attention of many in Western Europe, it is true; that war, however, did not prevent the king of England from pressing on with his program. He was warned by an unusually prescient Louis XIV that his policy of establishing Catholic supremacy in England would be more difficult than it seemed. The Pope cautioned him against his reckless schemes; his own supporters, the converted Catholic earl of Sunderland and the still-Anglican John Churchill, began to cautiously distance themselves from his policies. Other men, like the Quaker colonist William Penn, tried to salvage something of the kings platform. Partially on Penns advice, James promulgated a Declaration of Indulgence that went far beyond Charles IIs abortive edict. It was a landmark in the history of religious toleration, guaranteeing freedom of religion and abolishing all religious tests for offices and religious penal laws, and forbade interference with peaceable religious assemblies. It was also essentially a declaration of war on the dissolved Parliamentarians.
So in the early summer of 1685, as Ludwig von Baden-Baden and Musahib Mustafa Paşa sparred in Austria and Louis armies continued to observe a precarious local truce in the Netherlands, James IIs opponents began to seek allies. Unfortunately, the only current alternative to James was his daughter and her husband in the United Provinces. Charles Talbot, the earl of Shrewsbury and a prominent Whig, made his way to Amsterdam and presented to Willem and Amsterdam burgemeester Coenraad van Beuningen a petition for Dutch intervention, signed by several other Whigs and members of the Anglican clergy. The impassioned Shrewsbury convinced the two Dutchmen of the necessity and viability of intervention, but Willem knew that the Staten-Generaal would not yet countenance such a decision. An expedition to England would be far too risky with the French sitting as close as they were to the Scheldt. But at least now he knew that the option was viable, and could be acted upon.
Louis XIV had chosen to use his truce productively. Already for most of his reign he had been engaging in active attempts to proselytize among the Huguenot populace of France. His expedients ranged from offering a state pension for converts to a series of edicts passed limiting Huguenot freedoms during the 1660s and 1670s. A favored tactic was to quarter units of dragoons on Huguenot farmsteads, forcing the family there to convert before the burden of quartering troops was lifted. Egged on by his ministers, especially de Louvois, Louis was convinced of the successes of his policy and saw no detrimental effects. By the summer of 1685 he was ready to conclude his religious offensive. On 17 June he published the Edict of Fontainebleau, which essentially revoked Henri IVs Edict of Nantes, formally ending Huguenot toleration and announcing the demolition of all Protestant places of worship within France. This vastly accelerated the Huguenot diaspora and further inflamed Louis northern neighbors against him.
One particularly devastating effect the Edict of Fontainebleau had on French diplomacy was the neutralization of Scandinavia. Since the failure of the Third Northern War, Christian V of Denmark-Norway had been quietly moving towards alliance with France to replace Sweden. Louis had been amenable to the change in alliance, since Karl XI was turning towards internal matters instead of threatening the north German states. Under the leadership of Niels Juel, the Danish fleet was expanded even further, while Gyldenløve in Norway rebuilt the Norwegian army and secretly supplied partisans in Swedish Trondheim. Beginning with some minor border clashes around Trondheim in 1684, it had seemed as though Denmark-Norway and Sweden would fall back into fighting.
The revocation of the Edict of Nantes altered the situation. Spurred by national outrage over the shabby treatment of their co-religionists, Dano-Norwegian and Swedish diplomats began to negotiate a treaty of alliance in the late summer of 1685. This culminated in the League of Groningen of that winter, to which the Danes, Swedes, and the United Provinces were signatories. Aided by Dutch subsidies, the Scandinavian states entered into a defensive alliance with each other and with the Netherlands, aimed against France and Frances client states within the Empire, especially Münster, the Palatine Electoral Principality, and the Archbishopric of Köln. They further made a statement of toleration towards all Huguenots fleeing France, who were offered generous terms to emigrate to the Groningen Powers, including tax-free status for ten years. The toleration clause of the Groningen League was mimicked by ones in the Hohenzollern territories and in several other north German states by the end of the year.
Speaking of those Hohenzollern territories, we must return to the Commonwealth, where Sobieskis Słuck confederates were, at the end of the year 1684, in control of the entirety of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Polish Ukraine, and Galicia, and busily endeavoring to crack the iron triangle of fortifications at Lublin, Warsaw, and Kraków. Lublin, isolated as it was on the eastern side of the Vistula, was the easiest target, and Sobieski himself led an army of some 41,000 to besiege it in the spring of 1685. Yet Sobieskis allies were already beginning to grow uneasy with the confederation. The prominent Radziwiłłs of Lithuania, in particular, were negotiating with the Elector-King. During the Deluge, the Calvinists among their family had aided the Swedes; after it, many of the Calvinist Radziwiłłs were killed, while still others were forced to convert to Catholicism (conversion away from Catholicism was made punishable by death by Jan II Casimir in 1668). But Ludwika Karolina Radziwiłł, a princess in her own right and married to the Elector-Kings younger son Ludwig to boot, was still head of the Polish Reformed Church, and she managed to get many of her relatives to side with her after the Słuck confederates failed to score an early victory. Sobieskis move to attack Lublin provided the Radziwiłłs with the opportunity to switch sides, linking up with Prince Ludwig and a Prussian detachment at Kaunas, where they crossed the Memel River and began to systematically capture northern Lithuania.
The Radziwiłł defection also solidified Friedrich Wilhelms support in the rump Sejm. During the early spring of 1685 he and his marszałek Rafał Leszczyński forced through a number of pivotal measures, including the Sejms abdication of key rights relating to the regulation of the military. The right to levy the łanowa was arrogated to the King, and a significant allowance was voted him for life. It was not immediately apparent that these reforms would have any effect, as Sobieskis siege of Lublin continued apace; but in April von Derfflinger and a royalist army of nearly 35,000 the largest of the war managed to cross the Vistula and fight a sanguinary drawn battle with Sobieskis covering force at Dęblin. Sobieski was forced to fall back; his army retreated to Zamość to catch its breath, but von Derfflinger used the pause for his own purposes marching his army east to cross the Bug River and storm Brześć Litewski (Brest-Litovsk).
Sobieski, his army reduced by attrition and desertion, boldly marched northwards to confront the royalists and managed to cross the Bug. Von Derfflinger was caught with his pants down and forced to pull out what he could, extricating 23,000 of his men from Brześć before Sobieskis army reached the fortress. But a strong garrison of 6,000 was left inside, so it was a week before the confederals were able to storm the citadel, and even then they did so with heavy loss. Badly depleted, the army eventually limped into Słuck in early June. The situation was grim: Radziwiłłs in Sudovia and Highland Lithuania (Auktaitija), royalists moving into Galicia and the Ukraine, and internal disputes were rife. Sobieski never tired or despaired, and energetically began to rebuild his army in preparation for a late summer campaign. By the end of July he once more had 40,000 men and was at Trakai, preparing to attack the royalist lodgment north of the Memel. He never got the chance; on the 29th of July, he was murdered on the orders of his rival Sapieha.
The konfederacja that Sapieha had hijacked was spinning towards disaster by the fall of 1685, yet the Lithuanian magnate was worried not so much about the royalists as about his eastern Russian neighbors in Muscovy. They, like the inhabitants of the British Isles, were conveniently skipped earlier, so we must make up for lost time. Muscovy was left under the hand of Artamon Matveyev in 1677, with the boyar Romodanovsky and the cossack hetman Samoylovych having captured Petro Doroshenko, ending the brushfire war with the Ottomans and Crimean Tatars. Matveyev, however, had more problems. His position at court had been strongly connected with the favor of Tsar Aleksey, who had moved aside older boyars to make room for Matveyevs clients. With the tsars death, that bastion of support was gone, and a new playing field was left for the boyars to fight on. At first the struggle was against Matveyev: simply put, many displaced boyar families wanted revenge. The first beneficiary of this was knyaz Yuri Dolgoruky, who became head of the streltsy chancellery; offices were soon awarded to others of his family, as well as his ally Ivan Repnin, who became chancellor of the Estates. A few months later, the boyars struck again. Kiril Naryshkin, the father of Alekseys widow Natalia and one of Matveyevs closest allies, lost control of the Ustyug Quarter, a key source of revenue it went to Yuri Dolgoruky instead. And as the months went on and other boyars moved back towards the capital in the wake of Alekseys death, opposition in the Duma of the Boyars to Matveyev was only going to mount.
Which, of course, it did in due course. Matveyevs keystone office, his control of the foreign chancellery, was not the source of any boyar dispute. His cossack policy of unseating Doroshenko and his avoidance of war with Sweden (despite heavy pressure from the Danish-Norwegian envoy Magnus Gjøe) met with approval from almost all quarters. Dolgoruky even accompanied Matveyev into a meeting with Gjøe in the fall of 1676, where the two presented a united front against expansion of Muscovite foreign commitments. Instead, opposition was founded on a sort of xenophobic reaction to the introduction of foreign cultural practices under the tenures of Aleksey and Matveyev: many of the old boyars unseated by them both railed against the ballets, the plays, even the installation of foreign envoys on a permanent basis in Moscow. Dolgoruky was not one of these men, but he had led their attacks for personal profit; now that his star was rising, he could be attacked as well. Paradoxically, he was forced to ally with Matveyev in the Duma for political survival, and during the course of the winter the two of them were able to survive, negotiating the formal end of the steppe war with the Ottomans in the process and forcing the boyars to allow a new envoy to take up residence in Moscow, Johan van Keller of the United Provinces.
In February 1677, it all came to an end. Ivan Miloslavsky, a relative of Tsar Alekseys first wife (Irina Miloslavskaya) and a member of one boyar family impoverished under the rule of Matveyev, sought a pretext for removing the troublesome foreign chancellor and found one: he fabricated letters that implicated Matveyev in the political squabble over Tsar Alekseys second marriage (to Natalya Naryshkina). Dolgoruky was lucky to escape with most of his privileges intact (but his prestige badly bruised); Matveyev was stripped of his boyar rank and consigned to exile in Pustozyorsk. Another wave of political struggle was soon inaugurated, as Miloslavsky turned his newfound prestige into a weapon against Matveyevs former clients, Kiril Naryshkin and his family among them. Miloslavskys attacks were aided by the actions of a useful liar, the doctor David Berlov, who had turned evidence against Matveyev in order to get out of his own legal troubles, claiming that Matveyevs serfs had told him they had seen Matveyev and some of the foreigners reading through a magic book. Berlov, playing the role Titus Oates was doing at the same time in England, provided fuel for more accusations of sorcery against some of the other Naryshkins, who were tortured for information on Matveyevs spells.
The whole macabre spectacle came to an end by late 1677 with the establishment of an uneasy political equilibrium amongst the boyars. With young Tsar Fyodor who will be uninventively described here, as in every single other work on the period, as sickly unable to exercise much power at all, the position at the top was filled by Dolgoruky, Miloslavsky, Bogdan Khitrovo, and the tsarevna Irina Mikhailovna, the sister of the late Tsar Aleksey. Having harnessed the energies of the old boyars for tactical purposes against Matveyev, however, they proved unwilling to go along with their prescription for foreign policy. War with Sweden, which was consistently pressed by Gjøes replacement Friedrich von Gabel, was avoided, despite Swedens obvious weakness, due to the fixation on the southern steppes. There, a state of near-war persisted, with Romodanovskys forces skirmishing with Crimean detachments.
In 1679, one of these skirmishes erupted into heavy fighting near Mykolaivka. One of Romodanovskys subordinates, a newly promoted boyar named Vasily Vasilyevich Golitsyn, managed to defuse the situation, despite opposition from Romodanovsky, who was apparently trying to precipitate a fresh war. Golitsyn, backed by Mikhail Dolgoruky and Yuri Trubetskoy in the Duma, subsequently won a dispute with Romodanovsky over precedence of command. This was accompanied by the deaths from old age of Irina Mikhailovna and Bogdan Khitrovo in 1679 and 1680 respectively. Into this comparative vacuum stepped none other than the tsar, whose weak health did not prevent him from allying with the Danish-Norwegian envoy von Gabel before the end of the Third Northern War made Muscovite intervention moot. He did, however, begin to exercise independence in other areas. The first of these was his choice of wife: in 1680 he married the minor Ukrainian noble Agafya Grushevskaya. Apparently she shared his plans for further change, and encouraged them.
These plans would become apparent in the fall of that year, when Fyodor issued a decree ordering all boyars, state servitors and other men of high rank to all wear more or less similar clothing a tool for putting the older boyars on the same footing as newer men like Ivan Yazykov who were beginning to assume some of the state offices. Fyodor continued to push against the older men later in the year Yazykov and Mikhail Dolgoruky received some of Miloslavskys offices, while Averky Kirilov and Larion Ivanov came to prominence as well. In 1681, more offices were dispensed, so that some of Golitsyns allies came into possession of power. These new men combined with two of the older men, Vasily Sheremetyev and Andrey Romodanovsky (son of the opponent of Golitsyn), who had come away from the steppe war with an impression of the need for army reform, to propose just that army reform. The system of mestnichestvo, of precedence in determining appointments, was formally abolished late in the year following the proposals of an army assembly called by Fyodor.
This system was in some ways the culmination of a long process that had begun in the earlier parts of the century as Muscovite armies struggled in performance against their Swedish and Polish-Lithuanian neighbors. Muscovys crisis of leadership was one problem: mestnichestvo stifled offices of effective leadership and left the scions of ancient houses in charge of armies and chancelleries with which they were frequently ill equipped to deal. Seventeenth century Muscovite tsars had attempted to solve this problem in part by the use of foreigners in both high command and as mid- and low-level leaders. This was part of the solution, but another was the growth of a Muscovite group of nobles who were simply more experienced. Muscovy spent most of the latter half of the century in one kind of fighting or another, and that was reflected by a growth in the quality of their commanders. Abolishing mestnichestvo was simply clearing the way for these new officers to come to the fore.
Tsar Fyodors attempts to produce an heir were (for him) infuriatingly unsuccessful; the Tsaritsa Agafyas 1680 pregnancy ended in the stillbirth of a daughter. Fyodors sicknesses caught up with him in the winter of 1681, before which the royal couple was unable to conceive; he died in January 1682. His death left Moscow once again in a state of flux. The tsar had clearly been aiming to improve the position of the remaining Naryshkins at court; he had begun to plan for the recall of Matveyev from exile. But he had not completed either task, and the old boyar party remained somewhat strong. Yet old and new men were able to agree on the heir for Fyodor, a name that had been bandied about in the last few years already Pyotr Alekseyevich, the only surviving son of Aleksey and Natalya Naryshkina. His selection allowed Matveyev to set out for Moscow, while the young tsars mother temporarily took control of government and began appointing her family members to important posts.
Matveyev was still outside Moscow when the trouble started. Golitsyn, who had hoped to secure further appointments from Fyodor and expected to see them in due course under Pyotr, was instead summarily deprived of his offices in favor of Natalyas relatives. He quickly gathered a party of old boyars and Miloslavskys together during the spring of 1682 and then led them in a political attack on the Naryshkins. Natalya was replaced with two convenient Miloslavskys, Alekseys sister Tatiana Mikhailovna and Fyodors sister Sofia Alekseyevna. Golitsyn was clearly preeminent, though the Naryshkins were not murdered or even exiled for the most part. Matveyev, however, was ordered back to Pustozyorsk, where he died of smallpox in 1683.
Muscovys political situation, however, was still unresolved. Tatiana Mikhailovna was slowly edged out by the much younger Sofia during the course of the summer of 1682, and by winter was once again a nonentity. A loose alliance between Sofia and Golitsyn soon came to dominate court politics, but the Naryshkins were not eliminated and continued to play a role in the Duma. Initially, with the Ottoman war tied up, it appeared as though Golitsyn would favor some kind of war in Sweden, in alliance with Denmark-Norway, a union to be brought about by the Danish envoy Hildebrand von Horn. The outbreak of civil war in Poland-Lithuania that summer changed the regencys leanings dramatically, and soon Golitsyn was contemplating an alliance with the Swedes and intervention in the Commonwealth. Boris Golitsyn, Vasilys relative and rival, who had aligned himself with the Naryshkins, wanted to ally with Denmark-Norway and the Hohenzollerns against Sweden. V. Golitsyns plan for intervention in Lithuania, however, foundered when Sobieski informed Muscovite secret envoys in 1683 in no uncertain terms that the Słuck confederates would oppose Muscovite territorial gains at Commonwealth expense just as the Hohenzollerns would. Proposals for Swedish alliance were ruined by Golitsyns request for direct Swedish support, which Bengt Oxenstierna and Karl XI were unwilling to give in the middle of the reduktion reforms.
Vasily Golitsyn finally got a foreign policy opportunity when the Imperials and the Pope sent a delegation in late 1684 to try to negotiate a Muscovite accession to the Holy League recently formed against the Turk. The Naryshkins opposed the policy for the sole reason that Golitsyn supported it, for he was anxious to end Muscovys isolation. He convinced Sofia to overcome her misgivings, but she could not rally the Miloslavskys behind the alliance program either. The tsarevna had never been all that politically attached to the rest of her family, especially after she forced Tatiana Mikhailovna out of the government. (It is thus silly to speak of the Golitsyn-led government as a Miloslavsky one in opposition to the Naryshkins if anything, the balance of the Miloslavskys supported the Naryshkins on most issues.) Golitsyn did manage to persuade Patriarch Joakim to consent to the Holy League program after the League negotiators reduced the number of Catholic churches they wanted to be permitted to build in Moscow. He also made common cause with Yuri Dolgoruky, the aged commander of the streltsy.
This last was unfortunate, as Dolgorukys streltsy were in a period of ferment. The system was often abused by officers, as some regimental commanders used the soldiers as forced labor on their estates, while others kept their troops wages for themselves. Dolgoruky was slow to respond to these grievances when he knew about them; his subordinates were generally even less responsive. When Semyon Griboyedov was approached by one strelets in November 1684 for a redress, he first ignored the complaint; when the hapless soldier returned a day later, he was brutally whipped. Spurred by this latest outrage, several regiments in Moscow took up arms. Dolgoruky and Griboyedov were both lynched, as were other officers. One of the colonels, Ivan Khovansky, managed to hijack the revolt, rallying some remaining Old Believer sentiment among the streltsy against Patriarch Joakim. Under Khovanskys direction, most of Golitsyns remaining supporters were hunted down and murdered. Golitsyn himself was ignominiously run through while on the toilet. But soon even Golitsyns opposition was at risk. Sofia and Patriarch Joakim, who managed to escape, were soon forgotten as the streltsy started going after the entire government. Kiril and Ivan Naryshkin were both killed, as were Ivan Miloslavsky and Grigory Romodanovsky.
Pyotr himself, in the midst of the tumult, was spirited out of the city to Kolomenskoye by his tutors, the Streshnevs, his mother, and Boris Golitsyn. Khovansky, deprived of the only remaining bit of leverage he might have been able to muster, was now isolated with his rebels. Individually, though, they still outnumbered the troops that either Sofia or the Naryshkins could muster immediately, so an uneasy temporary alliance was forged, with Sofia willing to yield the regency in exchange for being allowed to stay in the womens quarters of the palace. In the last week of November 1684, Sofias adherent, Aleksey Shein, linked up with the Scot general (and Naryshkin supporter) Patrick Gordon outside Moscow and moved into the city. In the ensuing bloodbath, most of the rebel streltsy were killed. Khovansky was captured and executed a few days later.
With Boris Golitsyn and the Naryshkins struggling to consolidate their control of the government in early 1685, the Poles had not had to fear any sort of intervention on either side of the civil war. The streltsy bloodletting had also weakened the Muscovite ability to make foreign policy moves. But Golitsyn was clearly contemplating intervention eventually, and the head of the foreign chancellery, Yemelyan Ukraintsev, was already poking around to see which of the Hohenzollerns or the rebels would make for a better ally. Discussions began in March between the Hohenzollerns and Ukraintsev about a possible Russo-Prussian alliance against Sweden in exchange for Muscovite assistance against the Słuck confederates. Initial talks seemed promising, and the Hohenzollern victories of the summer strengthened the alliances supporters among the Muscovites, who would no longer be forced to bear so much of the burden of fighting. Friedrich Wilhelm was still interested in acquiring Swedish Pomerania, a prize he had sought his entire reign; Golitsyn, as had most Muscovite statesmen of the seventeenth century, saw the clear advantages of capturing Ingria. In August, they made the menacing (to Sapieha anyway) step of ratifying an Eternal Peace stemming from the Andrusovo terms of 1667. An alliance seemed sure to follow but Golitsyn was faced with a major debate in the Duma following the Battle of Vienna. Gains against the Ottomans and their Tatar allies were seen as practically guaranteed following the Turkish defeat. His Swedish policy was sharply criticized by Lev Naryshkin among others. No alliance was to be concluded that year.
An alliance that was concluded that year was signed by James II and Louis XIV. By the fall, the Fontainebleau backlash had badly shaken Louis. He needed friends (or at least distractions for his enemies); James needed both friends and money. What was more, the English king was convinced that the Dutch were harboring his enemies (true), arming them (true), and that Willem van Oranje was about to attack England (wishful thinking on both Willems and James parts). The ostensibly alliance was almost immediately leaked by somebody or other, and it raised a hue and cry from all corners of Western Europe. It was accompanied by other threatening French moves. To enforce the Edict of Fontainebleau, Louis chose to pressure the young Savoyard duke Vittorio Amadeo II into attacking his loyal but Calvinist subjects, the Vaudois, who were allegedly harboring Huguenot refugees from France. With French fortresses at Pinerolo and Casale towering menacingly over their mutual frontier, the duke acquiesced, and Savoyard troops linked up with French soldiers to round up and inter the surprised Vaudois, who fought back viciously. In Germany, the Elector Palatine, Karl II, died and was succeeded by a Wittelsbach of the Pfalz-Neuburg line, Philipp Wilhelm, who was a Catholic to boot. Louis sponsored the claims of Karl IIs widow, his sister-in-law Elisabeth Charlotte, another Wittelsbach, and moved troops menacingly towards the Palatinate. And in Ayutthaya, halfway around the globe, reconciled French and English India Company ships and troops crushed a revolt by Phetracha, a cousin of the reigning French client Phra Narai. Phetrachas revolt had been aimed largely against the prime minister, the Greek Catholic adventurer Konstantinos Gerakis (called Phaulkon by everybody who wasnt Greek), who was, Phetracha had claimed, Christianizing Ayutthaya and destroying its peoples culture.
As James II and Louis XIV brought their militaries back up to full capacity in the winter of 1686, furious diplomatic activity was going on between their several opponents. Willem van Oranje, having solidified his support in Amsterdam and among the Staten-Generaal following the Edict of Fontainebleau and the imposition of a French tariff on Dutch goods, sent representatives to Ansbach to expand the Groningen agreement of the previous year. His envoys were met with negotiators from Denmark-Norway, Sweden, the Palatinate, Bavaria, Saxony, Savoy, and the Habsburgs. The League that came into being at Ansbach on the 23rd of January 1686 underwrote the integrity of the Empire and the safety of each of its members against France; the members were to pledge troops in the event of war, though the alliance terms did not initially call for many from each of the signatories. Meanwhile, in the United Provinces, Willem received an extremely stiff request from James to send home all officers and men who wished to abjure their martial oaths in the English and Scottish regiments in Dutch service. This was fine with Willem, as he wasnt particularly interested in having Jacobites in his army in potential clashes, so some 150 soldiers returned to England. There they were given a position of such prominence that many of the regular professional soldiers began to lean even more strongly towards the Dutch.
James jumped the gun in March 1686 by massing his army in southern England in clear preparation for an invasion of the Netherlands. His fleet had not yet fully assembled. The King had some 22,000 men in his army, mostly recruited with the French subsidy. In the United Provinces, spurred by the warnings of English deserters and more antiroyal letters from Whigs (and even some Tories), Willem van Oranje managed to get clearance for his own expedition from the Staten-Generaal, and with Cornelis Evertsen in charge of the fleet left the Continent on 19 March. James declaration of war was already on its way to Amsterdam. An English squadron met the Dutch off Dover, and in an ominous sign for James, its commander, Rear Admiral Arthur Herbert, had his ships heave to and salute the passing Dutch. The weather was near-perfect for a Dutch invasion, and pamphleteers claimed afterward that the passage was made easy by the Protestant wind that carried Willems ships along. None of the scattered Royal Navy squadrons in the area were both willing and able to intercept the Dutch before the landing at Weymouth on the twenty-first.
Dutch troops spread out throughout Dorset, and then onto the Salisbury Plain, where James army was hastily massing. Initial clashes seemed promising for the Jacobite army. Its cavalry performed decently at Gillingham and Verwood against the advancing Dutch. Numbers were still on the kings side, and there hadnt been that many deserters. Feversham and his ever-present second, Churchill (now Lord of Eyemouth) cautiously maneuvered against Willem, but there was no open battle quite yet. James arrival in Salisbury on the 29th of March changed that, as he ordered Feversham to risk open battle. Reluctantly, the earl made preparations for a field engagement the next day. During the night of 29-30 March, Churchill and some 4,000 troops deserted to the Dutch, who now had numerical preponderance. James ordered an attack anyway the next day. It was somewhat on the disastrous side. Only 10,000 of the Kings men even deigned to move, and those who did were horribly outnumbered. Feversham toyed with deserting as well, but loyally led fruitless attacks on Dutch positions along the nearby Avon River before ordering a retreat in the early afternoon. The Jacobite army disintegrated with Fevershams retreat. A few regiments rallied in the streets of Salisbury under the frantic direction of the King, so Willem brought up his artillery to bombard the place, destroying several buildings and turning Salisbury itself into a ruin. After a roof tile dislodged from a collapsing house felled a nearby colonel, the unnerved James spurred his horse and fled, leaving his troops to fend for themselves as best they could. This meant, of course, flight or surrender. By three in the afternoon the area was clear of all resistance to Willems army.
The series of events that followed confused many, doing even more damage to James side. He spent the morning of the 1st of April in London itself, but left for Dover in the afternoon in despair, dumping the Great Seal in the Thames in an effort to prevent the Dutch and rebels from calling Parliament. But on the third he returned, trying to rally the denizens of London against the usurper. By then it was far too late, and he found no supporters. From Reading came the news that Feversham had surrendered what was left of the army to Willem; the Royal Navy had already switched sides, escorting another Dutch flotilla (which bore Mary) into Portsmouth. Willem reached the outskirts of London on the fifth, by which time James was already halfway out the door on the other side of the city. Even if Willem had wanted to try to stop him, he couldnt have, and so James managed to make his way to Folkestone successfully, evading a halfhearted Royal Navy and Dutch blockade. After all, the revolutionaries werent sure what they would do with him if they were to catch him, and certainly didnt want a repetition of the whole Charles I episode.
By then war had erupted on the Continent, as it is wont to do. Yet Willem wanted to make sure of his conquest. The problem of convening Parliament which could only be done by a sitting King was done neatly by the Peers, who decided that James flight to the Continent had invalidated his claim to the throne and crown, making Mary and Willem (William) the heirs. William made further sure to be appointed joint monarch with his wife, as opposed to a mere regent for her, by threatening to go back to the Continent and leave Parliament and Britain to James mercy. Willem and Mary were crowned on June 15. Even after that, there was some give-and-take left to manage with Parliament. The Scottish Privy Council, too, had journeyed south to pledge for Willem and Mary, at a price. Parliaments and the Scots prices were remarkably similar, putting restrictions on the sovereigns ability to pass legislation in absence of Parliament, the ability to tax without consent of Parliament, and freedom from the quartering of an army on civilian homes in peacetime this with an express eye towards Louis dragonnades. Certain rights were arrogated to the people and to Parliament as well, including the right of free elections to Parliament, the right for Protestants to bear arms, the right of freedom of speech in Parliament, and the right to petition the sovereign. Collected, these are often given the title of a Bill of Rights. Willem and Mary accepted them in September 1686, though not without a murmur of protest.
What was already being termed a glorious revolution in the British Isles was over for the moment. The Continental war, however, was just beginning, as French troops swarmed across the Rhine, over the Alps, and through Catalonia. And now the stakes were higher than they had been in the 1670s.
Much higher.
The whole macabre spectacle came to an end by late 1677 with the establishment of an uneasy political equilibrium amongst the boyars. With young Tsar Fyodor who will be uninventively described here, as in every single other work on the period, as sickly unable to exercise much power at all, the position at the top was filled by Dolgoruky, Miloslavsky, Bogdan Khitrovo, and the tsarevna Irina Mikhailovna, the sister of the late Tsar Aleksey. Having harnessed the energies of the old boyars for tactical purposes against Matveyev, however, they proved unwilling to go along with their prescription for foreign policy. War with Sweden, which was consistently pressed by Gjøes replacement Friedrich von Gabel, was avoided, despite Swedens obvious weakness, due to the fixation on the southern steppes. There, a state of near-war persisted, with Romodanovskys forces skirmishing with Crimean detachments.
In 1679, one of these skirmishes erupted into heavy fighting near Mykolaivka. One of Romodanovskys subordinates, a newly promoted boyar named Vasily Vasilyevich Golitsyn, managed to defuse the situation, despite opposition from Romodanovsky, who was apparently trying to precipitate a fresh war. Golitsyn, backed by Mikhail Dolgoruky and Yuri Trubetskoy in the Duma, subsequently won a dispute with Romodanovsky over precedence of command. This was accompanied by the deaths from old age of Irina Mikhailovna and Bogdan Khitrovo in 1679 and 1680 respectively. Into this comparative vacuum stepped none other than the tsar, whose weak health did not prevent him from allying with the Danish-Norwegian envoy von Gabel before the end of the Third Northern War made Muscovite intervention moot. He did, however, begin to exercise independence in other areas. The first of these was his choice of wife: in 1680 he married the minor Ukrainian noble Agafya Grushevskaya. Apparently she shared his plans for further change, and encouraged them.
These plans would become apparent in the fall of that year, when Fyodor issued a decree ordering all boyars, state servitors and other men of high rank to all wear more or less similar clothing a tool for putting the older boyars on the same footing as newer men like Ivan Yazykov who were beginning to assume some of the state offices. Fyodor continued to push against the older men later in the year Yazykov and Mikhail Dolgoruky received some of Miloslavskys offices, while Averky Kirilov and Larion Ivanov came to prominence as well. In 1681, more offices were dispensed, so that some of Golitsyns allies came into possession of power. These new men combined with two of the older men, Vasily Sheremetyev and Andrey Romodanovsky (son of the opponent of Golitsyn), who had come away from the steppe war with an impression of the need for army reform, to propose just that army reform. The system of mestnichestvo, of precedence in determining appointments, was formally abolished late in the year following the proposals of an army assembly called by Fyodor.
This system was in some ways the culmination of a long process that had begun in the earlier parts of the century as Muscovite armies struggled in performance against their Swedish and Polish-Lithuanian neighbors. Muscovys crisis of leadership was one problem: mestnichestvo stifled offices of effective leadership and left the scions of ancient houses in charge of armies and chancelleries with which they were frequently ill equipped to deal. Seventeenth century Muscovite tsars had attempted to solve this problem in part by the use of foreigners in both high command and as mid- and low-level leaders. This was part of the solution, but another was the growth of a Muscovite group of nobles who were simply more experienced. Muscovy spent most of the latter half of the century in one kind of fighting or another, and that was reflected by a growth in the quality of their commanders. Abolishing mestnichestvo was simply clearing the way for these new officers to come to the fore.
Tsar Fyodors attempts to produce an heir were (for him) infuriatingly unsuccessful; the Tsaritsa Agafyas 1680 pregnancy ended in the stillbirth of a daughter. Fyodors sicknesses caught up with him in the winter of 1681, before which the royal couple was unable to conceive; he died in January 1682. His death left Moscow once again in a state of flux. The tsar had clearly been aiming to improve the position of the remaining Naryshkins at court; he had begun to plan for the recall of Matveyev from exile. But he had not completed either task, and the old boyar party remained somewhat strong. Yet old and new men were able to agree on the heir for Fyodor, a name that had been bandied about in the last few years already Pyotr Alekseyevich, the only surviving son of Aleksey and Natalya Naryshkina. His selection allowed Matveyev to set out for Moscow, while the young tsars mother temporarily took control of government and began appointing her family members to important posts.
Matveyev was still outside Moscow when the trouble started. Golitsyn, who had hoped to secure further appointments from Fyodor and expected to see them in due course under Pyotr, was instead summarily deprived of his offices in favor of Natalyas relatives. He quickly gathered a party of old boyars and Miloslavskys together during the spring of 1682 and then led them in a political attack on the Naryshkins. Natalya was replaced with two convenient Miloslavskys, Alekseys sister Tatiana Mikhailovna and Fyodors sister Sofia Alekseyevna. Golitsyn was clearly preeminent, though the Naryshkins were not murdered or even exiled for the most part. Matveyev, however, was ordered back to Pustozyorsk, where he died of smallpox in 1683.
Muscovys political situation, however, was still unresolved. Tatiana Mikhailovna was slowly edged out by the much younger Sofia during the course of the summer of 1682, and by winter was once again a nonentity. A loose alliance between Sofia and Golitsyn soon came to dominate court politics, but the Naryshkins were not eliminated and continued to play a role in the Duma. Initially, with the Ottoman war tied up, it appeared as though Golitsyn would favor some kind of war in Sweden, in alliance with Denmark-Norway, a union to be brought about by the Danish envoy Hildebrand von Horn. The outbreak of civil war in Poland-Lithuania that summer changed the regencys leanings dramatically, and soon Golitsyn was contemplating an alliance with the Swedes and intervention in the Commonwealth. Boris Golitsyn, Vasilys relative and rival, who had aligned himself with the Naryshkins, wanted to ally with Denmark-Norway and the Hohenzollerns against Sweden. V. Golitsyns plan for intervention in Lithuania, however, foundered when Sobieski informed Muscovite secret envoys in 1683 in no uncertain terms that the Słuck confederates would oppose Muscovite territorial gains at Commonwealth expense just as the Hohenzollerns would. Proposals for Swedish alliance were ruined by Golitsyns request for direct Swedish support, which Bengt Oxenstierna and Karl XI were unwilling to give in the middle of the reduktion reforms.
Vasily Golitsyn finally got a foreign policy opportunity when the Imperials and the Pope sent a delegation in late 1684 to try to negotiate a Muscovite accession to the Holy League recently formed against the Turk. The Naryshkins opposed the policy for the sole reason that Golitsyn supported it, for he was anxious to end Muscovys isolation. He convinced Sofia to overcome her misgivings, but she could not rally the Miloslavskys behind the alliance program either. The tsarevna had never been all that politically attached to the rest of her family, especially after she forced Tatiana Mikhailovna out of the government. (It is thus silly to speak of the Golitsyn-led government as a Miloslavsky one in opposition to the Naryshkins if anything, the balance of the Miloslavskys supported the Naryshkins on most issues.) Golitsyn did manage to persuade Patriarch Joakim to consent to the Holy League program after the League negotiators reduced the number of Catholic churches they wanted to be permitted to build in Moscow. He also made common cause with Yuri Dolgoruky, the aged commander of the streltsy.
This last was unfortunate, as Dolgorukys streltsy were in a period of ferment. The system was often abused by officers, as some regimental commanders used the soldiers as forced labor on their estates, while others kept their troops wages for themselves. Dolgoruky was slow to respond to these grievances when he knew about them; his subordinates were generally even less responsive. When Semyon Griboyedov was approached by one strelets in November 1684 for a redress, he first ignored the complaint; when the hapless soldier returned a day later, he was brutally whipped. Spurred by this latest outrage, several regiments in Moscow took up arms. Dolgoruky and Griboyedov were both lynched, as were other officers. One of the colonels, Ivan Khovansky, managed to hijack the revolt, rallying some remaining Old Believer sentiment among the streltsy against Patriarch Joakim. Under Khovanskys direction, most of Golitsyns remaining supporters were hunted down and murdered. Golitsyn himself was ignominiously run through while on the toilet. But soon even Golitsyns opposition was at risk. Sofia and Patriarch Joakim, who managed to escape, were soon forgotten as the streltsy started going after the entire government. Kiril and Ivan Naryshkin were both killed, as were Ivan Miloslavsky and Grigory Romodanovsky.
Pyotr himself, in the midst of the tumult, was spirited out of the city to Kolomenskoye by his tutors, the Streshnevs, his mother, and Boris Golitsyn. Khovansky, deprived of the only remaining bit of leverage he might have been able to muster, was now isolated with his rebels. Individually, though, they still outnumbered the troops that either Sofia or the Naryshkins could muster immediately, so an uneasy temporary alliance was forged, with Sofia willing to yield the regency in exchange for being allowed to stay in the womens quarters of the palace. In the last week of November 1684, Sofias adherent, Aleksey Shein, linked up with the Scot general (and Naryshkin supporter) Patrick Gordon outside Moscow and moved into the city. In the ensuing bloodbath, most of the rebel streltsy were killed. Khovansky was captured and executed a few days later.
With Boris Golitsyn and the Naryshkins struggling to consolidate their control of the government in early 1685, the Poles had not had to fear any sort of intervention on either side of the civil war. The streltsy bloodletting had also weakened the Muscovite ability to make foreign policy moves. But Golitsyn was clearly contemplating intervention eventually, and the head of the foreign chancellery, Yemelyan Ukraintsev, was already poking around to see which of the Hohenzollerns or the rebels would make for a better ally. Discussions began in March between the Hohenzollerns and Ukraintsev about a possible Russo-Prussian alliance against Sweden in exchange for Muscovite assistance against the Słuck confederates. Initial talks seemed promising, and the Hohenzollern victories of the summer strengthened the alliances supporters among the Muscovites, who would no longer be forced to bear so much of the burden of fighting. Friedrich Wilhelm was still interested in acquiring Swedish Pomerania, a prize he had sought his entire reign; Golitsyn, as had most Muscovite statesmen of the seventeenth century, saw the clear advantages of capturing Ingria. In August, they made the menacing (to Sapieha anyway) step of ratifying an Eternal Peace stemming from the Andrusovo terms of 1667. An alliance seemed sure to follow but Golitsyn was faced with a major debate in the Duma following the Battle of Vienna. Gains against the Ottomans and their Tatar allies were seen as practically guaranteed following the Turkish defeat. His Swedish policy was sharply criticized by Lev Naryshkin among others. No alliance was to be concluded that year.
An alliance that was concluded that year was signed by James II and Louis XIV. By the fall, the Fontainebleau backlash had badly shaken Louis. He needed friends (or at least distractions for his enemies); James needed both friends and money. What was more, the English king was convinced that the Dutch were harboring his enemies (true), arming them (true), and that Willem van Oranje was about to attack England (wishful thinking on both Willems and James parts). The ostensibly alliance was almost immediately leaked by somebody or other, and it raised a hue and cry from all corners of Western Europe. It was accompanied by other threatening French moves. To enforce the Edict of Fontainebleau, Louis chose to pressure the young Savoyard duke Vittorio Amadeo II into attacking his loyal but Calvinist subjects, the Vaudois, who were allegedly harboring Huguenot refugees from France. With French fortresses at Pinerolo and Casale towering menacingly over their mutual frontier, the duke acquiesced, and Savoyard troops linked up with French soldiers to round up and inter the surprised Vaudois, who fought back viciously. In Germany, the Elector Palatine, Karl II, died and was succeeded by a Wittelsbach of the Pfalz-Neuburg line, Philipp Wilhelm, who was a Catholic to boot. Louis sponsored the claims of Karl IIs widow, his sister-in-law Elisabeth Charlotte, another Wittelsbach, and moved troops menacingly towards the Palatinate. And in Ayutthaya, halfway around the globe, reconciled French and English India Company ships and troops crushed a revolt by Phetracha, a cousin of the reigning French client Phra Narai. Phetrachas revolt had been aimed largely against the prime minister, the Greek Catholic adventurer Konstantinos Gerakis (called Phaulkon by everybody who wasnt Greek), who was, Phetracha had claimed, Christianizing Ayutthaya and destroying its peoples culture.
As James II and Louis XIV brought their militaries back up to full capacity in the winter of 1686, furious diplomatic activity was going on between their several opponents. Willem van Oranje, having solidified his support in Amsterdam and among the Staten-Generaal following the Edict of Fontainebleau and the imposition of a French tariff on Dutch goods, sent representatives to Ansbach to expand the Groningen agreement of the previous year. His envoys were met with negotiators from Denmark-Norway, Sweden, the Palatinate, Bavaria, Saxony, Savoy, and the Habsburgs. The League that came into being at Ansbach on the 23rd of January 1686 underwrote the integrity of the Empire and the safety of each of its members against France; the members were to pledge troops in the event of war, though the alliance terms did not initially call for many from each of the signatories. Meanwhile, in the United Provinces, Willem received an extremely stiff request from James to send home all officers and men who wished to abjure their martial oaths in the English and Scottish regiments in Dutch service. This was fine with Willem, as he wasnt particularly interested in having Jacobites in his army in potential clashes, so some 150 soldiers returned to England. There they were given a position of such prominence that many of the regular professional soldiers began to lean even more strongly towards the Dutch.
James jumped the gun in March 1686 by massing his army in southern England in clear preparation for an invasion of the Netherlands. His fleet had not yet fully assembled. The King had some 22,000 men in his army, mostly recruited with the French subsidy. In the United Provinces, spurred by the warnings of English deserters and more antiroyal letters from Whigs (and even some Tories), Willem van Oranje managed to get clearance for his own expedition from the Staten-Generaal, and with Cornelis Evertsen in charge of the fleet left the Continent on 19 March. James declaration of war was already on its way to Amsterdam. An English squadron met the Dutch off Dover, and in an ominous sign for James, its commander, Rear Admiral Arthur Herbert, had his ships heave to and salute the passing Dutch. The weather was near-perfect for a Dutch invasion, and pamphleteers claimed afterward that the passage was made easy by the Protestant wind that carried Willems ships along. None of the scattered Royal Navy squadrons in the area were both willing and able to intercept the Dutch before the landing at Weymouth on the twenty-first.
Dutch troops spread out throughout Dorset, and then onto the Salisbury Plain, where James army was hastily massing. Initial clashes seemed promising for the Jacobite army. Its cavalry performed decently at Gillingham and Verwood against the advancing Dutch. Numbers were still on the kings side, and there hadnt been that many deserters. Feversham and his ever-present second, Churchill (now Lord of Eyemouth) cautiously maneuvered against Willem, but there was no open battle quite yet. James arrival in Salisbury on the 29th of March changed that, as he ordered Feversham to risk open battle. Reluctantly, the earl made preparations for a field engagement the next day. During the night of 29-30 March, Churchill and some 4,000 troops deserted to the Dutch, who now had numerical preponderance. James ordered an attack anyway the next day. It was somewhat on the disastrous side. Only 10,000 of the Kings men even deigned to move, and those who did were horribly outnumbered. Feversham toyed with deserting as well, but loyally led fruitless attacks on Dutch positions along the nearby Avon River before ordering a retreat in the early afternoon. The Jacobite army disintegrated with Fevershams retreat. A few regiments rallied in the streets of Salisbury under the frantic direction of the King, so Willem brought up his artillery to bombard the place, destroying several buildings and turning Salisbury itself into a ruin. After a roof tile dislodged from a collapsing house felled a nearby colonel, the unnerved James spurred his horse and fled, leaving his troops to fend for themselves as best they could. This meant, of course, flight or surrender. By three in the afternoon the area was clear of all resistance to Willems army.
The series of events that followed confused many, doing even more damage to James side. He spent the morning of the 1st of April in London itself, but left for Dover in the afternoon in despair, dumping the Great Seal in the Thames in an effort to prevent the Dutch and rebels from calling Parliament. But on the third he returned, trying to rally the denizens of London against the usurper. By then it was far too late, and he found no supporters. From Reading came the news that Feversham had surrendered what was left of the army to Willem; the Royal Navy had already switched sides, escorting another Dutch flotilla (which bore Mary) into Portsmouth. Willem reached the outskirts of London on the fifth, by which time James was already halfway out the door on the other side of the city. Even if Willem had wanted to try to stop him, he couldnt have, and so James managed to make his way to Folkestone successfully, evading a halfhearted Royal Navy and Dutch blockade. After all, the revolutionaries werent sure what they would do with him if they were to catch him, and certainly didnt want a repetition of the whole Charles I episode.
By then war had erupted on the Continent, as it is wont to do. Yet Willem wanted to make sure of his conquest. The problem of convening Parliament which could only be done by a sitting King was done neatly by the Peers, who decided that James flight to the Continent had invalidated his claim to the throne and crown, making Mary and Willem (William) the heirs. William made further sure to be appointed joint monarch with his wife, as opposed to a mere regent for her, by threatening to go back to the Continent and leave Parliament and Britain to James mercy. Willem and Mary were crowned on June 15. Even after that, there was some give-and-take left to manage with Parliament. The Scottish Privy Council, too, had journeyed south to pledge for Willem and Mary, at a price. Parliaments and the Scots prices were remarkably similar, putting restrictions on the sovereigns ability to pass legislation in absence of Parliament, the ability to tax without consent of Parliament, and freedom from the quartering of an army on civilian homes in peacetime this with an express eye towards Louis dragonnades. Certain rights were arrogated to the people and to Parliament as well, including the right of free elections to Parliament, the right for Protestants to bear arms, the right of freedom of speech in Parliament, and the right to petition the sovereign. Collected, these are often given the title of a Bill of Rights. Willem and Mary accepted them in September 1686, though not without a murmur of protest.
What was already being termed a glorious revolution in the British Isles was over for the moment. The Continental war, however, was just beginning, as French troops swarmed across the Rhine, over the Alps, and through Catalonia. And now the stakes were higher than they had been in the 1670s.
Much higher.
Thlayli
Le Pétit Prince
Roof tiles ftw. Even so, you always manage to kill off my favorite character. 
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