The Great Usurpation (1160-1172)
In the 1160th year after the Dragonflight, the Kingdom of Prydain was overtaken by a great conflict. Queen Adrianna was challenged by a league of dissident nobles and heterodox religious leaders united by their allegiance to Returnism, a movement seeking to create the conditions for the Red Dragon’s prophesied return. They believed that the Red Dragon was the sole monarch of Prydain and any other sitting on the throne, especially a foreigner like Adrianna, was blasphemous. Within two years, they claimed the capital and southern regions, but the Loyalists held fast in the north for a good decade, slowing being pushed back by the Returnists. By 1170, nobles and some royals had already fled to the Occidental colonies, but in 1171, seeing the end was near, Adrianna left her country at the urging of her advisors. It was a good choice, as the following year the last Loyalist strongholds had fallen.
The Iron Queen’s Commonwealth (1172-1195)
The Returnists formed the so-called Provisional Regency, led by General Jethro Grinnall, and declared that Prydain had no monarch but the Red Dragon. Meanwhile, in the Occident, Adrianna worked with her closest ally, Lord Jon-Anderly Carvyn, to forge an independent nation out of the colonies. In 1174, the Occidental Commonwealth was formed, with Adrianna as Lady Sovereign and Carvyn as Chancellor. After the election of the Assembly and a brief campaign to secure the border colonies, they began work on a campaign of development and centralization, securing economic independence and strengthening ties with the Canocephali Principalities. While the Commonwealth was formally democratic, albeit with suffrage limited to human landowners, Adrianna still held a grip on power and earned her title of the Iron Queen.
The period between the end of the Border Campaigns of 1176 and Chancellor Carvyn’s death in 1187 was one of great governmental activity. Adrianna, Carvyn, and the Loyalists worked to centralize the Commonwealth’s military, banking, and bureaucracy, as well as promote the taming of the western wilderlands. Lord Carvyn’s Prosperous Triumverate was the model of choice for economic development: tools, textiles, and trade goods from the coastal cities, lumber and ore from the west, and produce and cash crops from the south - a mercantilist dream of self-contained trade.
However, after Carvyn’s death, the strength of the government suffered. The Loyalists had increasingly ‘gone native’ and accrued a large cadre of colonial landowners in their ranks, who helped put Horace Frey, one of their own, into office as chancellor. Frey aggressively pushed settlement of the frontier and attempted to implement the Estate Coupon program, offering those already owning land a government subsidy to purchase and develop more in the westward regions. This was greatly objected to by the Civics, who viewed it as an attempt to forge a new feudalism in the Commonwealth and to privilege Frey’s ilk over the middle class. But the new Chancellor’s push for the Canocephali to cede more land was what broke the camel’s back. Fearing war, Adrianna pushed for the Assembly to vote Frey out of office, which was accomplished in 1189, with both Loyalists and Civics voting remove Frey from the Chancellorship.
With strong backing from the Crown, the late first Chancellor's son, Hendrick Carvyn, was elevated to his father's former office. The younger Carvyn, however, was quite a contrast from the elder. The Civic leaders lambasted him as a pawn of the Queen with no real backbone, which was not an inaccurate attack. The Chancellor's agenda of economic self-sufficiency and anti-Regency alliance-building seemed to be handed down directly from Queen Adrianna.
An Era of Reform (1195-1217)
Following Adrianna's death in 1195, her son Mervyn I ascended to the throne. Having spent time amongst the colonial intellectual class, he held considerably more reformist stances than his mother. It has often been commented that Mervyn was perhaps a rather reluctant monarch. At any rate, he was fairly neutral politically and did not actively back the Loyalists as Adrianna did. This was a major factor in the breaking of Loyalist hegemony in the election of 1198. Chancellor Carvyn was seen as weak and bumbling, and a cadre of liberal landowners had joined the Civics in the late 1190s, giving a boost to the opposition's warchest as the Loyalist lost direct royal support.
The 1198 election saw the Civics under Lloyd J. Greeley, a man of letters from a mercantile family, win a large victory over the Loyalists, flipping more Assembly seats than anyone expected. This begins what is often referred to as the Reform Era, in which the Civics won four consecutive majorities against the withering Loyalists, who seemed aimless without royal favour. Their unstable lineup of leaders, often serving a few years before being couped by the party potentates, surely did not help either.
The Civics used their time in office to enact a number of sweeping reforms, most significantly the Suffrage Act of 1201, which gave human men over the age of 21 and married women over the age of 25 the right to vote, removing the property-ownership requirement present beforehand. The clause letting only married women vote and putting their age of suffrage four years older than those of men was present largely due to pressure from Dr. Horace Ponselvayne, an important member of the party, who believed, from his 'extensive research', that single women were too libidinous to make rational decisions and could only be trusted with the ballot after marriage and age caused their voluptuous impulses to decline to a manageable level.
In addition to the Suffrage Act, the Civics sponsored industry in the north and the development of the western frontier by small farmers, which pleased both western yeomen and coastal merchants considerably. On the front of foreign policy, the Civics intervened in an uprising on the Gryfford Isles. These island colonies had been seized by Returnist militias who had subsequently been backed by the Regency and maintained an iron-fisted rule of the island. The Commonwealth had always been hostile to this regime and claimed the Gryfford Isles as rightful territory, but in 1205, liberal and royalist dissidents joined forces to rise up against the Returnists, which Greeley saw as a golden opportunity. He sponsored the rebels with weapons and money, not directly intervening so as not to risk outright war with the Regency. By 1208, the insurgents controlled large swathes of territory and the Commonwealth offered them a formal alliance, helping them form a provisional government and continue to battle the Returnists in the outer islands.
The year 1209 saw King Mervyn's unfortunate death at the age of 54 by the rather un-regal cause of dysentery. His son, Dorian I, ascended to the throne following this, and would come to reign for almost half a century. He continued his father's practice in respecting the authority of the Assembly, but had a very definite vision for the Commonwealth nonetheless. Dorian heavily promoted friendly relations with the Canocephali and the Admiral Vaspardo's Grand Paferdian Republic as a western alliance against the established empires of the old world. This derived greatly from his sense of the Commonwealth's unique identity, that they were not simply a Prydanian government-in-exile but a nation unto themselves.
Meanwhile, the Civic government maintained itself in the face of the moribund Loyalists. However, there came opposition from a new front. In the 1208 election, a group of several Assembly Members were elected from the western regions under the banner of 'farmer's representatives' and served as a loosely affiliated legislative group. By 1212, this caucus solidified into the Populists, a large-scale movement seeking to unite farmers, labourers, and middle-class radicals. A number of Populist AM's were elected in that year's election, causing the Civics to view them as a genuine threat to their hegemony.
In 1213, Chancellor Greeley was succeeded by Ernest Portfish, a major player in the growing northeastern Civic political machinery who decidedly represented urban interests. He further sought to expand free trade and industrialization, and famously proposed the Farmer's Dividend in an attempt to win back rural support from the Populists. This policy would give a lump sum to struggling farmers who underperformed in terms of income, and it felt considerable backlash - Populists decried it as an obvious bribe to sway farmers to vote Civic, and a number of Civics considered it a frivolous expenditure. In the end, it did not pass the Assembly, with only those truly loyal to Portfish voting for it.
Following this, Chancellor Portfish became increasingly aggressive toward the Populists while doubling down on his urban coastal base of support and reshuffling his cabinet to purge it of those who criticized him. The new Populist leader as of 1215, radical writer Isadora Buck, capitalized on this by slamming Portfish as a would-be tyrant who does not care about the farmers and workers of the Commonwealth. The Civic government suffered from a rapid drop in popularity during the 1215-16 period.
