Yet More Fashions Made Sacred Monarchs
Part 2: The Old Dominion
The Most Excellent and American Kings and Queens of Virginia, Their Majesties, by the Grace of God (House of Corotoman — 1838-present)
1838-1854: Robert I [1]
1854-1866: Robert II [2]
1866-1874: Andrew [3]
1874-1904: Thomas I [4]
1904-1920: Thomas II [5]
1920-1965: Phoebe I [6]
1965-1990: Robert III [7]
1991-0000: Phoebe II [8]
0000-0000: Phoebe Alice Elizabeth Stephanie Roberta Carter, Her Royal Highness the Princess of Lancaster
0000-0000: Her Royal Highness, Princess Phoebe Elizabeth Margaret Christina Amelia Roberta Carter of Lancaster
Royal Consorts of the Kingdom of Virginia (by birthright style — 1838-present)
1838-1854: Miss Amelia Bolling Spencer
1854-1866: Lady Louise de Saint-Hilaire
1869-1870: Lady Mary Lee of the Eastern Shore
1874-1876: Lady Jane Robinson of Middlesex
1885-1904: Henrietta, Titular Princess of Maryland
1918-1920: Lady Sarah Haroldson-Smith of the Attican Valley
1920-1945: Prince Simeon of Roumania
1965-1990: Lady Elizabeth Woodruffe of Kentucky
1991-0000: Lord James Bolling of Appomattox
0000-0000: Prince Henrik of Denmark
[1] When Robert I took the Virginian Crown after the collapse of the short-lived Commonwealth of Virginia, he took control of a realm in financial ruin, with much of the country not only in ruins, but suffering from the ongoing war which the Commonwealth's Council of State had triggered with their once-brothers in arms against English rule in Ohio and Pennsylvania. King Robert quickly brought his former allies to the diplomatic table, conceding the regions which the Council of State had claimed from Ohio and Pennsylvania, and set about putting the realm on solid foundations. He spent most of his reign rebuilding the nation from its war of independence, reestablishing its agricultural base.
[2] Robert II was already a man when his father took the throne, making him the heir-apparent to the new realm. He set the precedent for other members of the royal family to be as active in the state as monarch, taking his seat in the House of Lords. Though always a loyalist to his father's governments, he also took on his own initiatives, and publicly disagreed with his father on some matters. When he became king, he doubled down on the efforts he had made as Prince of Lancaster. Where his father had focused on Virginia's agricultural history, Robert II looked forward to a Virginia built as much upon industry, learning and yeomen as it was on tobacco, maize and planters. Robert encouraged the development of industry in the northern settlements on the Potomac and Rappahanock, still the industrial heartland of Virginia today, and he founded - upon the base of the proud College of William and Mary - the University of Williamsburg, founding Robert College, Corotoman College, St. Matthias' College and St. John Wesley's College, and encouraging the nobility to do the same. Robert II is today considered to be, for his efforts, the real founder of the Church of Virginia, the first fully-formed Wesleyan church not to be governed by the monarch of England and Ireland.
Robert II became a much more controversial monarch when, in 1860, he acceded to the terms of the Treaty of Cape Liberation, in which New Spain finally called in the promise made by the Commonwealth's Council of State in exchange for Bescós Veracruz' vital aid in their war for independence. The aristocracy, whose power was built upon their plantations, resisted the king's Emancipation Decree, which would require the beginning of a fifteen-year process of gradual emancipation beginning in 1870. When Robert II went to dissolve the General Assembly in 1866, to prevent the passage of a resolution revoking the Decree, he was murdered by a member of the House of Burgesses as he sat on his throne in the House of Lords' chamber.
[3] As Prince of Lancaster, Andrew had been a reluctant supporter of the Emancipation Decree. He was generally closer to the nobility than his father had been in his inclinations, but he, better than they, understood the consequences if Virginia failed to live up to its obligations under Cape Liberation -- being abandoned to their fate and surrendered back into the fold of the English Empire, which had already banned slavery. The murder of his father, however, changed his outlook considerably, and Andrew became a fierce convert to the cause of abolition, and bringing the nobility to heel, once and for all. Andrew seized the assassin's family's property, and attainted his brother's title, rendering forfeit his seat in the House of Lords. Not waiting the Decree, King Andrew freed their slaves; further, he established an expedited plan to emancipate all of the royal family's slaves by 1871, and pressured loyal nobles to do the same to prove their loyalty to the Crown.
Tensions rose higher and higher across the realm as the process of emancipation began to accelerate, and certain eastern and southern nobles began to gather together "militias"; Andrew's control of these regions of Virginia began to stretch thinner and thinner. In 1870, an assassination attempt was made on King Andrew, but only succeeded in murdering his pregnant queen, just shy of the first anniversary of their wedding. Andrew responded by attempting a violent crackdown on the militias, but they - with the support of Carolina - began an uprising to restore the Commonwealth, and abolish the monarchy, rather than abolish slavery.
Andrew led his armies onto the field of battle for the next four years, and died after his horse fell on him, after being struck by a cannonball at the Battle of Attican Valley.
[4] Thomas I took the throne after his brother's demise, but, where his brother had led Virginia's armies to war, Thomas, then the Duke of Port Amelia, had become his right-hand man, stewarding the country from Williamsburg in the king's stead. Thomas was a more able administrator, and a more politic man, than his brother was, but was no less out for vengeance from the nobles who had so turned on the royal family. Thomas' constitutional reforms may as well be called constitutional rewriting, for the powers which he seized for the Crown, and took away from the aristocracy -- by the end, the lords' only remaining effective, constitutional power was to sit in the House of Lords. Upon taking the Crown, King Thomas issued the Revised Emancipation Decree, immediately freeing the slaves of any man who had taken up arms against the Crown, unless they laid down arms and returned to their homes within thirty days, formalizing a haphazard policy which his brother had adopted. After two more long years of fighting, Thomas I - with the support of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland and Virginia - brought the rebels and Carolina to heel, and his generals marched on Ameliasborough and Charleston. Thomas and the rest of the coalition forced Carolina to accede to the Treaty of Cape Liberation, bringing a close to the final chapter of slavery in the English-speaking world.
Thomas I spent the rest of his long reign bringing the kingdom back to order, and reconstructing his realm from the devastating six-year civil war.
[5] Thomas II took the throne at the age of sixteen, and was quickly brought under the influence of the nobility, jealous for power after a king who had kept them in line. Thomas II was largely a weak king, who allowed the more conservative elements of his country to take hold and reverse much of the progress his father had made. It was during his reign that the infamous Contracts of Labor were approved by the Crown, which many accused of bringing many rural Black Virginians back into bondage, if of an arguably lesser tyranny than the old chattel slavery. Thomas I spent much of his time on royal plantations, avoiding Williamsburg as much as he could, and he seemed to idealize the old Virginia of the colonial era and his great-grandfather, rather than living in the Virginia which existed in his own time.
[6] When her brother died, suddenly, in a boiler explosion on his way back from a state visit to New England, the nobility's greatest fear in the royal family - Phoebe I - came to the Virginian throne. Phoebe was one of the New Women, as they had been foreseen and named by the zenobian philosopher Ignacia Bescós Ybaigurén, who demanded a radical change to the makeup of human society, and, in her case, to Virginian society in particular. She represented a new generation of Virginian women, and not only spoke, but acted on their behalf, modifying the laws of succession and inheritance, property laws, voting laws, as well as lifting the long-since-ignored laws against contraception, to bring women onto a more equal footing with men. Her zenobian radicalism alienated much of the General Assembly, leading her to follow her grandfather's habit of trying to call it sparingly.
However, Phoebe I's radicalism ended with zenobianism -- indeed, she was, as her brother had been, an outspoken skin-tone phulonist, who did little for Black Virginians or, indeed, even for common Virginians who shared her racial background.
[7] Where Phoebe I was a New Woman, her son, Robert III, was a "new man", who not only accepted the great strides of progress for the opposite sex, but sought to entrench and expand them; he was far less apprehensive of the General Assembly than his mother and, proving an able negotiator, brought the finances of the kingdom into order in a way that hadn't been seen since the time of his two namesakes. Robert III brought Virginia into another war with Carolina, the backlash of which - including great resistance to conscription - led directly to the Universal Liberty Movement. With its roots buried deep in the radical element of the Church of Virginia - epitomized by Saint Stephen of Edo's ministry during the reign of Thomas I before his return to Niphon - the Universal Liberty Movement echoed in some ways both the Radical and Democratic movements of Europe and other parts of America, adapted to the unique circumstance of Virginia, a country where the nobility and the industrial elite were more united than in other parts of the world.
Decades of protests, worker secessions and labor occupations plunged Virginia into a long civil disorder, which King Robert found himself unable to stop; Robert III, so used to working with the Lords and the Burgesses, struggled when it came to those Virginians without a voice in the halls of the General Assembly. The king, after some time, ultimately sought to embrace the more Democratic elements of the Universal Liberty Movement, while spurning the radical, but he managed primarily to alienate the General Assembly by this measure. Ultimately, though the Movement - and not the king - brought the General Assembly to the table, and universal suffrage and official skin-tone equality were, at least, in law, adopted in 1983. Though he struggled with the new reality, by the end of his reign, Robert III was slowly beginning to come to terms with the new Virginia the ULM had wrought.
[8] Phoebe II, who had been hostile to the ULM for most of her time as Princess of Lancaster, was forced to come to terms with them upon taking the throne in 1991. Though their relationship has been rocky, she has successfully navigated the waters of Virginia's new world, even seeing her first government led by a Black Virginian take office in 2015. Much of the conviviality now enjoyed between the Universal Liberty Movement and more traditional ends of power has been the renewed rivalry with Carolina, brought into full effect by the Global War, which was devastating to southern Virginia, once again serving as the chief battleground of the English-speaking American states. Carolina's unrepentant phulonistic government, in which the common person has no say, is now the villain both to the Virginian royal and the Virginian commoner, both the Virginian aristocrat and the Virginian industrialist.
They dare not strike any new blow against Carolina, though. If the tripwire of French and Polish troops standing in between them is snapped ...
Well, maybe Virginia is far enough away to survive an originalistic war.
Maybe.