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Did Somebody Order More Fashions Made Sacred Monarchs?
What do you mean, "No"? Too bad.
Part 5: The Grand Flamingo of the South
The Kings of All Peru, Their Most American Majesties, by the Grace of God (House of Potosi -- 1830-present)
1830-1852: Joseph Maria I [1]
1852-1869: Joseph Maria II [3]
1869-1901: Michael I [5]
1901-1926: Joseph Emmanuel I [7]
1926-1946: Michael II [9]
1946-1972: Michael III [11]
1972-1981: Philip V [13]
1981-0000: Joseph Emmanuel II [14]
0000-0000: Joseph Maria Louis Hector Paul Michael Philip Ferdinand, Prince of Potosi
0000-0000: Maria Carmen Josephine Louisa Eleanor Ignatia, Duchess of Callao
Royal Consorts of Peru (1830-present, by birthright style)
1830-1852: Lady Anna Sophia Figueroa Rovires [2]
1856-1869: Lady Dolores Merino de Santa Rosa y Carbajal [4]
1869-1893: Lady America Altamirano Rubio [6]
1901-1926: Princess Rosa of Pernambuco (House of Olinda) [8]
1926-1946: Princess Margaret of France (House of Bourbon) [10]
1946-1952: Princess Francisca of Pernambuco (House of Wittelsbach) [12]
1981-2000: Princess Felicity of Maranhao (House of Ericeira)
0000-0000: Archduchess Gabriella Jacomina Isabella Raphaela Augusta Maria Immaculada, Princess of Venice (House of Hapsburg)
What do you mean, "No"? Too bad.
Part 5: The Grand Flamingo of the South
The Kings of All Peru, Their Most American Majesties, by the Grace of God (House of Potosi -- 1830-present)
1830-1852: Joseph Maria I [1]
1852-1869: Joseph Maria II [3]
1869-1901: Michael I [5]
1901-1926: Joseph Emmanuel I [7]
1926-1946: Michael II [9]
1946-1972: Michael III [11]
1972-1981: Philip V [13]
1981-0000: Joseph Emmanuel II [14]
0000-0000: Joseph Maria Louis Hector Paul Michael Philip Ferdinand, Prince of Potosi
0000-0000: Maria Carmen Josephine Louisa Eleanor Ignatia, Duchess of Callao
Royal Consorts of Peru (1830-present, by birthright style)
1830-1852: Lady Anna Sophia Figueroa Rovires [2]
1856-1869: Lady Dolores Merino de Santa Rosa y Carbajal [4]
1869-1893: Lady America Altamirano Rubio [6]
1901-1926: Princess Rosa of Pernambuco (House of Olinda) [8]
1926-1946: Princess Margaret of France (House of Bourbon) [10]
1946-1952: Princess Francisca of Pernambuco (House of Wittelsbach) [12]
1981-2000: Princess Felicity of Maranhao (House of Ericeira)
0000-0000: Archduchess Gabriella Jacomina Isabella Raphaela Augusta Maria Immaculada, Princess of Venice (House of Hapsburg)
[1] José María Echeverría Ximénez, a wealthy creole of merchant stock from Upper Peru, was the great hero of the War of Peruvian Independence. A Peruvian patriot, he led the Peruvians to many victories and defeats - but mostly victories - against their Spanish overlords. He emerged into prominence from both his writings and his valor in battle, first rising to General of the Southern Department and then to Captain-General of the entire Grand Army of the Americas. When the Spaniards finally withdrew in 1827, abandoning Peru to try desperately to keep their grasp on New Spain as it also slipped through their fingers, Echeverría remained at the head of the most powerful force in South America, which had been forged in the fires into an army of the whole Peruvian Nation -- despite being made up of people from the various disparate parts of the formal viceroyalty. Nevertheless, local militias which had never been part of the Grand Army took up arms to defend their separate "countries", the country's African slaves liberated themselves by flight into the jungles to form their own freedom-fighting principalities once again and the heirs of the old Incan lords smelled the blood in the water.
In 1828, the Cortes of Lima proclaimed Echeverría "Dictator for the Settlement of the Peruvian Nation" at his own urging, giving him broad civil and military power to restore a unified nation. With Echeverría's allies dominating the Convention of All Cortes called in Lima in 1829, it became inevitable that Echeverría would take the Peruvian Crown abandoned by the Habsburgs. Popular with a wide swathe of the Creole and Mestizo populations, he was the only man with any chance of holding Peru together, and so, on 1 January 1830, he swore an oath to defend and protect the Peruvian nation before the Cortes of Lima.
The king spent the next three years of his reign setting the realm in order on the battlefield and constitutionally, establishing a series of local Cortes in different parts of Peru - a formalization of the structure which had been created during the War of Independence - with a Supreme Cortes in Lima to represent the interests of the whole kingdom. Though he tried to force all of the former viceroyalty to accept his new realm and constitution, he was ultimately forced to concede the independence of New Granada (and, in practice, that of Venezuela, though that country acknowledged him as king in name only until his death, when the Republic of Venezuela was formed officially), as well as broad autonomy for Quito, which acknowledged him as king but refused to submit to the Peruvian charter of government and the Supreme Cortes in Lima.
After settling his dominions, the King set policies to try to encourage the immigration of disaffected Catholics from the old states of Europe, but always found himself undercut by the more prominent, more liberal and more welcoming New Spanish Republic. The king deeply resented New Spain as it grew from strength to strength, asserting its authority in the Philippines and establishing a sphere of influence not only in New Granada - which piqued him on its own - but across the newly independent Anglo commonwealths and princely states of North America, while Peru was still hemmed in by England and Portugal on its frontiers. Though a powerful man in battle, and the perfect man to cut the Gordian knot when needed, the liberality of his writings were merely given lip service while he ruled the nation, and his Peru was fundamentally a deeply conservative state that seemed to exist only to justify New Spain's policy of seemingly ever-increasing radicalism. For twenty-two years, Joseph Maria sat on his throne and settled his kingdom -- but it would take a different man to make Peru a nation, and not merely the collected dominions of Joseph Maria.
[2] Anna Sophia of Peru was a youth throughout the struggle for Peruvian independence, and played a small, but significant, role supporting her mother in running a waystation for messengers travelling back and forth through the country for the militias and Grand Army. The daughter of a Creole landowner near the oldest bastion of Spanish dominion in South America, four of the future queen's six older brothers served as officers under Captain-General Echeverría during the War for Independence, and it was through their influence that when it became necessary for the lifelong bachelor to marry a daughter of Lower Peru and secure a dynasty, Anna Sophia was his choice. She accepted his proposal, and married the Peruvian dictator five months before he would be made the King of All Peru.
Though less than half her husband's age, Anna Sophia was a formidable woman who was the match of the king in more than one way. She did not tolerate her husband's previous tendency toward collecting lovers, brooking no rival for his affections -- and, though his reputation suggests that when on campaign he was less than faithful to his wife, he remained a dutiful husband in Lima and when they travelled together to other Peruvian cities. Many in Lima disparaged her, and foreign diplomats were often scathing toward her in their missives back to Europe, as she had an assertive, even combative personality that rivaled only her husband's, and she would engage in open arguments with him regarding both public and private matters in front of his court and his council, regardless of the audience. Nevertheless, the king not only tolerated, but encouraged, his wife's attitude -- and, whatever headaches their contention may have brought to her husband's court, the advantages were obvious: the couple had nine children together, all of whom survived to adulthood.
In 1854, after her husband's death she founded and patronized Women's Institute of Lima, inspired by the similar institutes that had been formed in New Spain before the traditional universities had admitted women, and used her influence to promote liberal, natural and theological education for women of the higher racial castes in Peru. She invited Ignacia Bescós Ybaigurén to Lima from Mexico to run the Institute, leading the South American Period of the zenobian philosopher's oeuvre in the mid to late 1850s. However, despite her broad endorsement of liberal thought in a Peruvian context, she was still relentlessly conservative by the standards of a woman from New Spain, and the women fell out in 1859, and Bescós returned to Mexico. Anna Sophia was a virulent supporter of racial caste throughout her life, and opposed the abolition of slavery -- she had to be forced by her own son's state policy to admit women below the castiza racial caste into the institute.
Despite falling increasingly behind the times, "the Queen" without qualification continued to refer to Anna Sophia long after her husband's death, and she remained a powerful force at the royal court in Lima until her death in 1886.
[3] Joseph Maria II was just shy of his twentieth birthday when he took the throne of Peru at his father's death. Raised as Prince of Potosi from his birth, his father reared him to the throne, hiring the best tutors he could from Europe with near-extravagant wages in silver and training him in the royal art, raising him to think of himself as a king-in-waiting. Unlike his father, who had seemed a liberal man forced to conservatism by circumstance, Joseph Maria II was a convinced conservative, which endeared him to the creole elites who were the backbone of the state, but quickly caused the usual promise of a new king on the throne to sour; people who had held high hopes for a new, young and vibrant king bringing change were inevitably disappointed.
The king's policies unofficially entrenched the existing racial caste system which kept the creoles in command, and he broadly got along with a Cortes that was dominated by the creole aristocracy, to the detriment of poor creoles and even wealthy castizos, much less the lower racial castes. Most of all, though, was the continuing dependence of Peruvian agriculture on Black slavery, and Peruvian mining on the Indio racial caste, which both buckled under the kingdom's oppressive continuation of the old policy. Though the supply of new slaves had ended during his father's reign, as England, France and Portugal cracked down on the slave trade as they became more invested in building up their interests in Africa, and England, which had made the River Plate free soil decades ago, imposed both diplomatic and economic pressure on Peru that increasingly pressed the issue.
The king and most of the Cortes had little incentive to end a system which had empowered them, but the King's weakness - his conservativism being subverted by even his own mother - enabled liberalism to firmly establish themselves and voice their strenuous objection to the Peruvian status quo. Finding allies even among the most noted grandees of the Peruvian Cortes, the liberals - especially in the Peruvian military, which was far less dominated by the traditional creole aristocracy - became increasingly radicalized against the status quo, with increasing opposition to the King's government in the form of stoppages and embargos against the government, which led the king to crack down using the same local militias which had once plagued his father.
Pressure on the king reached a breaking point in 1869, when business in the capital ground to a halt as creole, castiza and mestizo opponents of the king first stopped work and then, when militias were brought in from the countryside to suppress them, rioting began. In response to the king's clear inability to control the situation, the military deployed into Lima against the militias, moved on the palace, dissolving the Cortes and detaining the king. Three days later, Joseph Maria II signed documents of abdication on behalf of himself and his children; they were taken, under guard, to a Peruvian naval vessel, which delivered them to a pensioned-off exile in France, where he would live out his days traveling the width and breadth of Europe, and living in a chateau outside Aix-en-Provence, where he died in 1909.
[4] Dolores of Peru was a woman who much matched her husband in both outlook and temperament -- indeed, she was, if anything, more conservative. Her father, a count and grandee of Peru, was a leader in the regional council during the war of independence, and a powerful landowner in his region, and she was raised as such -- not new ground for a Queen of Peru, even at this stage. However, despite coming from such a similar background to her mother-in-law, their personalities were quite different, and the two queens constantly clashed over the royal household. The Queen almost always won in these clashes; and not the one who was Queen of Peru in title.
Queen Dolores became an increasingly withdrawn figure in a court and household that she, in theory, ran; she seemed to be the perfect society woman, someone who could be respected as a stately queen in her age, but she was constantly living in the shadows of more prominent and more active ladies, and not just her mother-in-law. She retreated into near-seclusion with her maids at times, and was constantly distant from her husband. When her husband abdicated, and their family went into exile, Dolores found her life transformed much for the better, as she far preferred the life of a pensioned noblewoman about town with a small, quiet circle of her own, far away from the bustling court of her husband's family in Lima.
[5] Where his brother had been prepared for the life of a king, King Michael had been raised to the life of a soldier. Noted for his aptitude for sport from a very young age, his father intended that he be trained to support his brother as king, to be the sword of Joseph Maria II's will across the realm. However, still being quite young when his brother took the throne, King Michael ended up being brought up into adulthood among the liberal ideas of the Peruvian officer corps; though disproportionately creole, far fewer of their number were hidalgos than those who surrounded his brother, and, unlike his brother, he was constantly exposed to the castiza and migrante officers in their number, as well as to the largely mestizo rank and file. His brother accelerated his promotions, and it was not long before he held the rank of general, and the role of liaison between his brother and the army. Though a loyalist for longer than much of the officer corps - and, due to personal loyalty to him, he kept the army in check for a long time - his brother's mismanagement of the realm ultimately became too much for him, and when a cadre of liberal officers approached him in 1869 as the protests turned to riots, Michael agreed to lead the coup d'etat against his brother. After his brother's abdication, he was proclaimed him King of All Peru to cheering of the people of Lima. The army acted quickly against the militias surrounding the capital, which hamstrung the response of his brother's loyalists to the coup -- apart from a brief, abortive uprising near Trujillo, King Michael's accession was a fait accompli.
King Michael abrogated the Charter of Government, and summoned a new Cortes elected by a much broader spectrum of the population than had been eligible to elect the old one to approve with little discussion a charter written up by the king's secretary, who was soon to become the Count of Tacna. The new charter gave the king broad power to bring the powerful creole landowners to heel. In 1871, using this power, he issued the Royal Emancipation Decree, which dictated that, from 1 January 1872, no man or woman would be born in slavery, and would be released from any obligation of labor to their parents' owners on reaching their twenty-first birthday. Before the date came, a general uprising began among the hidalgos, but, mindful of the lessons of Virginia's civil war over the issue, King Michael's agents had already infiltrated the loose-lipped conspiracy -- the Hidalgos' Uprising was strangled in the cradle in most of the country, apart from the northernmost reaches of Lower Peru proper and Quito, where military formations lasted for about eight months in the former, and three years in the latter.
The retribution for revolt was swift and brutal, with mass confiscations of land and executions for men foolish enough to not quickly surrender to the King and his forces. None found themselves exempt; one in four Peruvian grandees found themselves stripped not only of their titles, but their nobility, many were exiled, and the King's own brother-in-law, the Count of San Felipe and his only son - who had also taken up arms - were executed publicly for treason, among others. By the end of the reprisals, two thirds of the productive land in Quito were royal lands, as well as regions across the country where revolts had been stopped and confiscations taken out on only the leaders. Outside of Quito, most of the land was distributed to landless military officers through a system of division and purchase which encouraged a more decentralized, individually weaker but large and cross-racial hidalgo class that was personally loyal to the king. King Michael ruled alongside his military allies, summoning the National Cortes only as often as required by the new charter, and, though its elections were open and its debate was free, it had limited influence over policy. Quito's local Cortes was dissolved for the rest of his reign and the region came under his direct rule, and the other regional Cortes were kept on a tight leash by the army and the King's agents. In 1884, he issued the Royal Revised Emancipation Decree, bringing slavery to an immediate end - the last territory on the American mainland to abolish slavery - though former-slaves were subjected to peonage to pay off the cost of their freedom to their former owners as happened in other parts of the Americas -- and, due to the confiscations, many of these peons owed their debt to the Crown.
The King openly encouraged a benign liberalism we would today consider to be proto-democratic, openly emulating New Spain and trying to create an environment of innovation and discovery as existed in their northern rival, and moving toward reducing the importance of the racial castes as New Spain already had. He reorganized and centralized administration to weaken the distinctions between the different parts of the country -- apart from Quito, which became in practice a separate royal fief, and, by the end of his forty-two year reign, no one could question that Peru was a powerful, dynamic state with its own nationhood, well on the way toward being South America's answer to New Spain.
[6] America of Peru was a retiring figure by nature, rather than necessity as her sister-in-law was. The daughter of an obscure hidalgo from the southern frontiers of Peru, and sister of one of King Michael's contemporaries early in his military career, Queen America seems to have been a liberal more due to her tendency to go along with her husband and her mother-in-law for the sake of peace in the household rather than out of any serious conviction. At the urging of her husband, she became involved in the founding of women's schools, particularly in the underserved southern reaches from which she came, but her role was ever symbolic, rather than dynamic as her mother-in-law.
A devout Catholic, more so than most of the royal family in these times, one of Queen America's few independent initiatives was the total revival and reconstruction of the Cathedral of St. John the Apostle in Lima, which had fallen into disrepair since Peruvian independence had sapped resources that traditionally would have gone to the Church. After the cathedral's revival, Queen America undertook a project at the behest of the Archbishop to do similar restoration work at Lima's other parish churches and chapels. She became increasingly pietist in her religious outlook as time went on, and likely would have broken with the royal family's new penchant for liberalism had she ever had the initiative to do so. When her mother-in-law died, she continued as she had been, surrendering the role of head of the royal household and the women at court to her daughter and, ultimately, her daughter-in-law.
She died in 1894, predeceasing her younger husband. The Queen America Church Restoration Fund, initially created from her considerable estate, continues to be a charity run by members of the royal family to restore Catholic places of worship throughout Peru, particularly in deprived urban and remote areas.
[7] Joseph Emmanuel I came to the throne at the age of 40, already an experienced statesman and competent military officer. He had been raised by a military father toward a life in the military, himself, until he became Prince of Potosi when he was eight, and the priorities of his education shifted. As he grew up, Joseph Emmanuel I became a convinced liberal by contemporary standards in the vein of his father. More radically, he was openly dismissive of the "Hapsburg castes", and spoke before the Cortes of Lima as what he called a "Convinced American" on the question of racial castes, and openly called for the abolition of the legal aspects of the racial caste system, pointing to Spain's increasingly bull-headed refusal to abolish slavery in its remaining American territories as all the evidence needed to show the destructive, degrading aspect of racial caste system. The very first foreign visit the prince undertook as an adult was as part of a delegation to Mexico, and the second - and much more controversial - was to Ayiti.
Upon becoming king, Joseph Emmanuel's first act was to forgive the debts of all the peons whose contracts were owned by the royal family, dividing up vast parts of the royal haciendas into a mixture of large plantations based upon contract labor and smaller, divided farmlands made into tenancies taken up by the Black Peruvians as family holdings, with usually the same families providing both sets of laborers. Though the material conditions took a long time to genuinely improve, it was finally legal for these Black families to instead choose to leave for the cities or the Amazon frontier to make a new life for themselves. He further imposed a new Charter of Government on Quito, clearly and permanently setting it outside of the authority of the Cortes of Lima, which legally abolished the concept of racial caste. The Cortes in Lima reasserted itself in response, as conservative forces in Cortes tried to reverse what they saw as the damage the new king had already done, but it was to little avail -- all that he had done had been firmly within the royal prerogative, and the incomes the King derived from Quito made it incredibly difficult for the Cortes to hurt the king financially and force him to the table without badly hurting their own constituents. The king also, quite wisely, held back on forcing changes on the rest of Peru, and it was hard to complain of royal tyranny -- as the admittedly sweeping changes he had made were still both smaller in scope and in effect than those which the Cortes had waved past from his father.
When the backlash of their loss of the Philippines War brought the First New Spanish Republic crashing down, the newly proclaimed King of New Spain's new, hyper-conservative order caused an outward flow of political refugees from the country, the lion's share of whom made their way south to Peru, now seen as a bulwark of liberalism by many instead of a mere second-rate imitator -- or, perhaps, a second-rate imitation was preferable to what Severino was now offering them in Mexico. He took enormous pains to integrate the New Spaniards into the country, as well as complete Peru's realignment into the French circle now that New Spain had burned its bridges with its closest European partner. Joseph Emmanuel and Severino of New Spain became fierce rivals personally, neatly matching the traditional rivalry between the two greatest native American states.
The King's attempts to firmly abolish racial caste were his political undoing, as his efforts vastly alienated the Indians, who saw their own protections and traditions as being preserved in part by the structures of the racial caste system. His attempts to break the Indians' traditional power blocks in order to fully "Peruvianize" them provoked a medium-scale insurgency in the rural and mining regions of Lower Peru, which gave an opening to Platinean settlers who began to move further and further past the Peruvian frontiers to take advantage of the chaos, and hampered the state's finances considerably. All the eggs were laid for the next stage of Peru's long history, but they would not hatch during Joseph Emmanuel's lifetime.
[8] Rosa of Peru was the liberal-minded fourth daughter of King Thomas I of Pernambuco; educated in New Spain at the Pontifical University of St. Charles Borromeo as the king ingratiated himself with America's great power, she took the lessons of the liberal professors there to heart when she returned to Pernambuco, and beyond when she was promised to the heir to the Peruvian throne to secure Pernambuco on both nation's good lists. The pair were poorly matched, in terms of their personality, and they often clashed - and not in the relatively beneficial way that the first King and Queen did - but their shared political and social values kept them together on political projects.
Queen Rosa became close and lifelong partners with her sister-in-law, Princess Consuelo of Peru, who never married and so remained in her brother's court throughout her life; they shared many of the same values and both were passionately in favor of the King's liberal projects across the board and both were fierce zenobians. In all but name, the two shared the role of leader of the royal household and of Lima's noble society. Conservatives and other opponents in court would jeer - but always behind closed doors - that it seemed more like the Queen was married to the princess than to her brother.
Queen Rosa took on the patronage of the Women's Institute, and ultimately worked to combine its faculty and resources with the University of Peru in Lima, creating a coequal, coeducational institution along the lines of her own alma mater, and she became patron of the Queen Anna Sophia Faculty of Letters which was formed within the combined university. She further sponsored three young ladies in their application to join the Royal Military Academy at Cañete in 1921 which, after significant debate at court and in the Cortes, was permitted; among them was Lady Rosario Moreno de Calama y Morales de la Serena, who is considered to be the first woman to graduate from an established military academy in the world and receive an officer's commission.
Queen Rosa survived her husband by only a few years, and died only a few days after Princess Consuelo. Today, after much dispute between both contemporaries and historians, it is now broadly accepted that the pair were romantically linked, and mutual dislike but shared political interest caused the King and Queen to overlook one another's constant infidelity in the public eye -- though the royal family still strongly rejects this assertion.
[9] Michael II came to the throne at a crucial moment in modern Peruvian history; his father's death, though not unexpected, caused a significant shift in American affairs. Not long after he came to the throne, he seemed to go against the bellicose reputation he had developed in the Cortes as Prince of Potosi by conceding the existence of the racial caste system in negotiations with the more powerful Indian leadership, and, echoing a development that could be found in other parts of America, he offered the Indians permanent representation in the Cortes and explicit constitutional protection of their indigenous status. The compromise rankled many radicals -- and displayed Michael II's conservative bent, but also his broadly pragmatic governance principles. Shortly after agreeing the treaty, though, he proved his reputation was well-earned, as he sent in the Peruvian Army to drive out Platinean interlopers in the southern reaches. The ongoing fight between Platinean and Peruvian settlers was escalated by the entry of the army, and soon the army began to take part in the same sort of retaliation strikes that had characterized the low-level conflict between Platineans and Peruvians for the past century. After a short time, Peruvian soldiers burned an Anglo-Platinean village to the ground well inside the Platinean frontier while in uniform.
King Michael refused to pay reparations, and so England declared war over the disputed territories. The war quickly escalated, with Peru receiving unofficial support from France, and the full might of the English Army and Navy were brought to bear against Peru. However, the English had expected the sort of battle they'd been fighting in Africa and in Asia -- and not that which came from facing a fully-established American power. The jungles and mountains of South America proved an incredible hindrance to the English, and, though England was more powerful at sea in theory, England's navy had to maintain a global presence -- Peru could bring a concentration of force that prevented England from making full use of their powerful navy. The war quickly became unpopular in Europe, and England sued for terms, and Michael considered the conflict a short, victorious war. However, River Plate erupted into revolt at England's "betrayal" of the colony's interests, and soon Peru was fighting a high-level insurgency in the concessions which England had made while England struggled to take back control of its wayward colony. King Severino offered his support, and, soon, was involved in his own border conflict with the English colony in Oregon, which quickly became a whole new war, and Peru was now aligned with England against their first and greatest rival.
The long, grueling war pushed Peru to its limits, but Michael - who was far more charismatic than his father - held the country together as they fought on to final victory against their opponents. New Spain was cowed, River Plate was back under Peruvian control -- and the disputed territories were indisputably part of Peru in 1938. The victory was Peru's finest hour, as Peruvian force of arms had secured its borders, and had defeated New Spain in battle, both in sea and on land, seemingly showing itself to be a power on the same scale as New Spain. King Michael was ascendant, while King Severino's regime began to crumble in Mexico. Unfortunately for Peru, its new allies in England were badly weakened by the war, which led to the great power going down to defeat in the Great Baltic War, which forced both England and France to begin their long withdrawal from their colonial empires in the face of the ascendant power of Poland-Lithuania.
Though the glory was fleeting, Michael II had brought Peru to glory nonetheless, and when he died of cancer in 1946, he was proclaimed by many to be the greatest king the realm had ever seen. Plazas across the country were renamed in his honor, and a monument to his glorious victory was erected at the heart of Lima.
[10] Margaret of Peru was the daughter of both worlds, a Daughter of France who was also a scion of the Bescós family from her mother; the marriage between her and King Michael II came as Peru realigned itself to France in the aftermath of Severino's seizure of power in Mexico, and the symbolism did not go unheeded by the community of New Spanish refugees that had begun to settle in to Peru. Margaret was an intensely political woman, who did not shy from becoming directly involved in the issues of the day, both as Princess of Potosi and then as the royal consort at the head of the royal household. She advocated fiercely for her mother's countrymen at court.
Margaret spent most of her time as Princess of Potosi focused on charity work, trying to bring food, fuel and shelter to the deprived of Peru's industrializing cities, and support to people in the villages at the outermost reaches of the jungle. A democrat in her sympathies, rather than a radical, she as much as many others in the Peruvian political scene helped to develop the foundation for the democratic ideology - and, thus, the Peruvian Democratic Party - that would become dominant in the country in the second part of the twentieth century. Through the long war with River Plate, and then New Spain, she pressed on the nobility to make proportional sacrifices to achieve victory from the side of her husband, and for those with much to do without so that those with little would have enough, and lead the other classes by their example -- a foundational element of Democratic ideology as it had emerged in Western Europe at the turn of the century.
The reframing of conservatism in Peru happened almost overnight as the King increasingly leaned on his consort as the human face in answer to the self-denial policies he enacted to keep up the funding for Peru's oversized army and navy, and, as charismatic as her husband was, she took on that role with a steady hand. She was by far the most interventionist consort Peru has ever had, and she, arguably as much - and perhaps more than - her husband helped to shape the country that Peru would be in the years to come.
She long outlived her husband, and remained a prominent voice in court and - unofficially - for the Democratic Party for nearly half a century after her husband's death. In 1951, she remarried a widower, Juan Echeverría de Ayacucho y Montalvo, Marquis of Ayacucho, a junior cadet of royal family descended from Joseph Maria I's youngest son, and retired elected statesman of the Cortes, being married to him until his death in 1982. She died in 1984, well in line with the traditional record Bescós dynastic traditional female longevity, though not quite matching her mother's record.
[11] King Michael III came to the throne following his father's untimely death in 1946 during a time of global transition, with Peru seen as an emerging great power in its own right and ascendant in the Americas. It was only a month after Severino of New Spain had been shot by an impromptu firing squad in Mexico's central square. Across the ocean, amid Poland's vicious reprisals against its clients who had rise up against its dominion in the aftermath of the Fifth Defenestration of Prague, England found itself beaten back from the Baltic, while the last reigning scion of the House of Brandenburg watching helplessly from her palace in Whitehall as the Polish flag flew from Berliner Schloss. In this new world order, though, Peru stood triumphant. At least, for now, it did. Many Peruvians of New Spanish ancestry - and original New Spaniards - left the country to return to the embrace of the Second Republic, and King Michael initially offered moral and financial support to the republicans, but he was mostly rebuffed; resentment for Peru, having the audacity to defeat America's natural leader in a war, was rampant and expressed in the revanchist dreams of even some of the most die-hard republicans, and so Peru left New Spain to lick its wounds alone.
Meanwhile, Michael faced increasing calls from his own people for a new, regularized constitutional order, and to set aside his namesake's constitution by fiat. As someone who was, like his mother, a democrat by inclination, he was willing to negotiate, and, in 1949, he summoned a Constituent Assembly from across Peru to resettle the constitutional foundations of the realm. Including representatives from every part of Peru - including Quito - and every racial caste, along with representatives of the Church and commissioners from the Crown the Constituent Assembly spent two years at its work. In the end, they produced the modern Fundamental Laws of the Kingdom of Peru, which attempted to address the many flaws of Peru's existing order, answer the complaints of subjects of all racial castes, classes and political persuasions, as well as provide for the different political and social situations across the far-flung kingdom. Representatives from Quito quit the convention halfway through 1950, and so they were excluded from the final settlement, but the new constitution received widespread support in the rest of Peru's regions, and, following a national referendum, Michael III promulgated it on 1 January 1952, settling the state with a two-chamber Cortes which represented the interests of the grandees, the large, widespread hidalgo class, and the leaders of the Indian tribes across the country, as well as the wider interests of the Peruvian nation through an broad lower house.
After the death of the Queen in childbirth, and the death of their only child a few months later, the same year, King Michael became withdrawn from government for several years due to his grief, which gave significantly more influence to the President and Royal Audience selected by the Cortes. Even after returning properly to the reins, King Michael was often far more conciliatory to the elected government than had been expected by most under the new constitutional order. Apart from the King's natural sphere in military, defense and foreign affairs, many royal prerogatives were surrendered to the advice of an Audience made up of both the Lords and Delegates of the realm. By the early 1960s, the new constitution was a clear success, and Peru had successfully transitioned into the form of constitutional monarchy which had become the norm in France, England, China and other powers with which Peru found itself aligned.
King Michael came back to the forefront of policy in 1966 as the New Granadan Civil War began (as the War of Platinean Independence had remained studiously contained in-borders by both England and the ultimately victorious republic), and spilled over both into the traditional royal domain of Quito and into Peru proper, as well as into Maranhao, Venezuela and New Spain. In 1968, the king began a full-scale military deployment into New Granada, technically neutral but clearly aligned toward the Lozanistas, in the borderlands near Peru and Quito. New Spain and its Venezuelan allies quickly responded with their own deployment into the northern and eastern parts of the republic, and, by 1970, the interventionist soldiers had begun shooting at one another, carefully never acknowledging the provenance of the casualties coming home. In 1972, the shooting became formal when Peruvian troops crossed the border accidentally into New Spain proper during an operation in northern New Granada, and Peru once again found itself at war with its rival. King Michael was ready to be tested as a wartime ruler, but he never would be; he died suddenly only weeks after New Spain declared war, and he left Peru in its hour of need in the hands of his brother.
[12] Francisca of Peru was yet another Pernambucan princess in the court of Lima, but the match, while politically acceptable to all sides, was one of mutual interest; Francisca had come to Lima to study at the University of Peru, and, out of courtesy, had been invited to present at court -- where, not too long after, she became drawn to the young Prince of Potosi. Despite the contrast in their personalities, the pair became increasingly enamored with one another, and soon, at the request of both parties, negotiations for marriage began between the two states, which concluded with the couple's happy union.
Francisca, unlike her husband, was incredibly studious, and continued her university studies even after her engagement to the Prince, and, ultimately, even after their marriage. Fascinated by natural philosophy, the princess spent much of her time both in her engagement and the early years of her marriage, traveling to the most remote parts of South America, and wrote several noted papers on gradual speciation via adaptive survival in the Amazon which are still cited today. She continued to publish occasionally after her husband took the Peruvian crown, but did so under the legal pseudonym "Lady Carolina Villabaja y de la Cruz", and these later works were far less notable.
The couple at first struggled to conceive, and then Francisca had usually problematic pregnancies, usually ending in miscarriage or stillbirth; they only had one son, Michael, Prince of Potosi, shortly after her husband became king. Her final pregnancy, in 1952, ended in stillbirth, with the queen dying - according to the Peruvian legal courts - as a result to malpractice by the royal physician, who intervened with Francisca's midwives during the difficult birth. Though, as a studious and quiet woman, she was not widely loved by the people, she was much mourned by the royal family, nobles and associates who knew her personally -- especially the King, for whom her death was a particular blow from which it is widely considered that he never recovered.
[13] King Philip V, though not the Prince of Potosi, had been his brother's heir since the tragic death of his nephew in 1952, and, as the years went by, it became increasingly clear that Michael III had no inclination toward remarriage. Though never officially made Prince of Potosi, Philip was referred to regularly as "my eventual successor" by the king from 1961, and so his coming to the throne was not a surprise. The circumstances, however, were -- the former king dead very suddenly, and New Spain on the march, the widowed o who had long been king in waiting was now the man of the hour.
Unfortunately for Philip, Peru was woefully unready for a modern war. Having been forced toward demobilizing simply to keep the state's finances in order, the preceding decades had seen Peru's military become increasingly aged, increasingly backward, while New Spain once again had sunk its resources into building its armies and navies ever the greater and stronger, well on the way to becoming the supreme great power it is today. The full might of New Spain being brought down on New Granada - despite the coup that took their Venezuelan allies out of the war - quickly put Peru on the backfoot, and, after eighteen months of fighting, Peru had been completely driven out of New Granada, and New Spanish soldiers were fully operational on Quito soil, embarrassing Peru by making a prominent royal hacienda their headquarters. Peru's attempts at deception were no match for New Spain's growing air reconnaissance capabilities, and the Peruvian navy was, by the end of 1973, unable to operate more than a few hundred miles from their ports, with foreign trade nearly cut off by the encroaching New Spanish.
It grated on Philip but, ultimately, it became impossible for him to go on -- with the agreement of the Royal Audience and Cortes, he sued for terms. New Spain issued outlandish demands including the complete annexation of Quito into New Granada, which outraged the King and Cortes and prompted a blanket refusal and led to a resolution by the Cortes to fight to the bitter end to protect Peruvian soil. However, this became unnecessary, when France, China and the Hapsburg realms jointly issued an ultimatum to New Spain directing them to accept status quo ante, with a Cozzolinista government established in Bogota under guidance from New Spain. The consuls in Mexico begrudgingly agreed to the terms, and an uneasy peace was restored between the two states.
Philip ruled after the war for the better part of a decade, but his reign was overshadowed by the aftermath of the war in New Granada. The people and the army resented the defeat, and many blamed the king for the failure, despite his having quite literally inherited the situation from his brother. Philip successfully demanded greater military funding from the Cortes and began a vast reorganization of the Peruvian military along the centralized lines adopted by England the preceding decade, much as the bicameral Cortes had been modeled on the English Parliament, and many English officers on every level - probably most notably today, then-Captain Amelia Ferguson of Ayrshire, of His Majesty's the Royal Hussars, now known as the Savior of Paris for her undertakings in the Global War - were invited to Peru to help remake it for the next war. For there would be another war -- Peru's national honor, after all, demanded it.
Philip's health rapidly deteriorated as he got older, though, and it was little surprise when he passed away in his sleep due to his medical condition in 1981, having reigned Peru only nine years.
[14] Joseph Emmanuel II came to the throne as Peru geared up for yet another war, but, never a military man, the new king was not particularly keen on the amount of military expenditure that his father and uncle had geared up over the preceding decades. Fearful of the growing social disorder and unrest in the country, only barely lidded by the country's joint hatred of New Spain, he oriented his rule more toward social and political reform, answering calls from parts of society that had often been left unheard in the mad preparations for what was to come, and seeking to restore a level of normalcy to Peru. He met with the leaders of the industrial, agricultural and domestic labor alliances - which had never been powerful in Peru despite the prominence of the Democratic Party - over the increasing squeeze on the most vulnerable Peruvians as money went to machines of war. At their urging, he called for a formalization of the state-funded hospital structure administered by the Catholic Church, and, within his power as sovereign, began to require alliance contracts for companies and families that provided services to the Crown.
When he tried to initiate legislation in this direction in the Cortes, and the Cortes resisted, in 1986 the king summoned an extraordinary Constituent Assembly to consider - and, very quickly, approve - the implementation of universal suffrage in Peru proper, which changed the composition of the House of Delegates to one which was more amenable to Joseph Emmanuel's democratic legislative initiatives, and, slowly, new taxes were approved to expand access to social services across the realm -- though, to Joseph Emmanuel's distaste, the military budget continued to grow apace.
The reluctant warmonger of Lima watched in despair as, in spite of his efforts, even the labor alliances were driven first and foremost by resentment for New Spain, and the wish for a new victory against a great power which had objectively - and, to the king, obviously - eclipsed Peru once more, as it had even begun to eclipse the European powers themselves. While most Peruvians saw New Spain as their permanent rival, the eyes of Mexico were only ever fixed on their only equal among the powers of the Earth -- China, which had by now fully integrated into its administration what New Spain saw as its own rightful Philippine islands.
When the Global War, despite Joseph Emmanuel's fruitless efforts, inevitably came, it was Quito and Northern Peru which would suffer, as they and New Granada became one of the most contested fronts of the war. Peruvians by the thousands of every racial caste, of every class and every status died in the relentless slaughter of the North Front, while Peru barely held off the unending day-and-night bombing raids on Santiago and Charcas as the Platineans, Brazilians and Sao Pedrans threw themselves fruitlessly at Peru's southern frontiers. By 1997, New Spain began a campaign of terror-bombing against Lima and other central Peruvian cities, dropping petroleum jelly and alchemical-air bombs in an attempt to force Peru out of the war -- but, as elsewhere, this only hardened their will as New Spain was soon reversed across the Peruvian frontier and back into New Granada, with Bogota taken by a Peruvian-Venezuelan force in 1998.
They withdrew to status quo borders, however, in 1999, as the war ended. When Acapulco vanished in an instant, the world had been changed forever.
In the seventeen years since the uneasy peace was signed, Joseph Emmanuel has been forced to wait and be watchful, as money he wishes would go to social programs is instead built for Chinese and English troops stacked on the heavy fortifications that tripwire Peru's northern and southern frontiers. With no armageddonic weapons of its own, and two hostile armageddonic powers on either frontier, Peru is left desperately waiting, desperately hoping, desperately dependent upon her allies for her safety, for her independence, watching helplessly as her Venezuelan partners drive a near-insurmountable wedge in the alliance system that keeps the world from blowing itself into smithereens.
But then, Peru has always lived in the shadow of New Spain. It's the Europeans that really need to just get used to it.
In 1828, the Cortes of Lima proclaimed Echeverría "Dictator for the Settlement of the Peruvian Nation" at his own urging, giving him broad civil and military power to restore a unified nation. With Echeverría's allies dominating the Convention of All Cortes called in Lima in 1829, it became inevitable that Echeverría would take the Peruvian Crown abandoned by the Habsburgs. Popular with a wide swathe of the Creole and Mestizo populations, he was the only man with any chance of holding Peru together, and so, on 1 January 1830, he swore an oath to defend and protect the Peruvian nation before the Cortes of Lima.
The king spent the next three years of his reign setting the realm in order on the battlefield and constitutionally, establishing a series of local Cortes in different parts of Peru - a formalization of the structure which had been created during the War of Independence - with a Supreme Cortes in Lima to represent the interests of the whole kingdom. Though he tried to force all of the former viceroyalty to accept his new realm and constitution, he was ultimately forced to concede the independence of New Granada (and, in practice, that of Venezuela, though that country acknowledged him as king in name only until his death, when the Republic of Venezuela was formed officially), as well as broad autonomy for Quito, which acknowledged him as king but refused to submit to the Peruvian charter of government and the Supreme Cortes in Lima.
After settling his dominions, the King set policies to try to encourage the immigration of disaffected Catholics from the old states of Europe, but always found himself undercut by the more prominent, more liberal and more welcoming New Spanish Republic. The king deeply resented New Spain as it grew from strength to strength, asserting its authority in the Philippines and establishing a sphere of influence not only in New Granada - which piqued him on its own - but across the newly independent Anglo commonwealths and princely states of North America, while Peru was still hemmed in by England and Portugal on its frontiers. Though a powerful man in battle, and the perfect man to cut the Gordian knot when needed, the liberality of his writings were merely given lip service while he ruled the nation, and his Peru was fundamentally a deeply conservative state that seemed to exist only to justify New Spain's policy of seemingly ever-increasing radicalism. For twenty-two years, Joseph Maria sat on his throne and settled his kingdom -- but it would take a different man to make Peru a nation, and not merely the collected dominions of Joseph Maria.
[2] Anna Sophia of Peru was a youth throughout the struggle for Peruvian independence, and played a small, but significant, role supporting her mother in running a waystation for messengers travelling back and forth through the country for the militias and Grand Army. The daughter of a Creole landowner near the oldest bastion of Spanish dominion in South America, four of the future queen's six older brothers served as officers under Captain-General Echeverría during the War for Independence, and it was through their influence that when it became necessary for the lifelong bachelor to marry a daughter of Lower Peru and secure a dynasty, Anna Sophia was his choice. She accepted his proposal, and married the Peruvian dictator five months before he would be made the King of All Peru.
Though less than half her husband's age, Anna Sophia was a formidable woman who was the match of the king in more than one way. She did not tolerate her husband's previous tendency toward collecting lovers, brooking no rival for his affections -- and, though his reputation suggests that when on campaign he was less than faithful to his wife, he remained a dutiful husband in Lima and when they travelled together to other Peruvian cities. Many in Lima disparaged her, and foreign diplomats were often scathing toward her in their missives back to Europe, as she had an assertive, even combative personality that rivaled only her husband's, and she would engage in open arguments with him regarding both public and private matters in front of his court and his council, regardless of the audience. Nevertheless, the king not only tolerated, but encouraged, his wife's attitude -- and, whatever headaches their contention may have brought to her husband's court, the advantages were obvious: the couple had nine children together, all of whom survived to adulthood.
In 1854, after her husband's death she founded and patronized Women's Institute of Lima, inspired by the similar institutes that had been formed in New Spain before the traditional universities had admitted women, and used her influence to promote liberal, natural and theological education for women of the higher racial castes in Peru. She invited Ignacia Bescós Ybaigurén to Lima from Mexico to run the Institute, leading the South American Period of the zenobian philosopher's oeuvre in the mid to late 1850s. However, despite her broad endorsement of liberal thought in a Peruvian context, she was still relentlessly conservative by the standards of a woman from New Spain, and the women fell out in 1859, and Bescós returned to Mexico. Anna Sophia was a virulent supporter of racial caste throughout her life, and opposed the abolition of slavery -- she had to be forced by her own son's state policy to admit women below the castiza racial caste into the institute.
Despite falling increasingly behind the times, "the Queen" without qualification continued to refer to Anna Sophia long after her husband's death, and she remained a powerful force at the royal court in Lima until her death in 1886.
[3] Joseph Maria II was just shy of his twentieth birthday when he took the throne of Peru at his father's death. Raised as Prince of Potosi from his birth, his father reared him to the throne, hiring the best tutors he could from Europe with near-extravagant wages in silver and training him in the royal art, raising him to think of himself as a king-in-waiting. Unlike his father, who had seemed a liberal man forced to conservatism by circumstance, Joseph Maria II was a convinced conservative, which endeared him to the creole elites who were the backbone of the state, but quickly caused the usual promise of a new king on the throne to sour; people who had held high hopes for a new, young and vibrant king bringing change were inevitably disappointed.
The king's policies unofficially entrenched the existing racial caste system which kept the creoles in command, and he broadly got along with a Cortes that was dominated by the creole aristocracy, to the detriment of poor creoles and even wealthy castizos, much less the lower racial castes. Most of all, though, was the continuing dependence of Peruvian agriculture on Black slavery, and Peruvian mining on the Indio racial caste, which both buckled under the kingdom's oppressive continuation of the old policy. Though the supply of new slaves had ended during his father's reign, as England, France and Portugal cracked down on the slave trade as they became more invested in building up their interests in Africa, and England, which had made the River Plate free soil decades ago, imposed both diplomatic and economic pressure on Peru that increasingly pressed the issue.
The king and most of the Cortes had little incentive to end a system which had empowered them, but the King's weakness - his conservativism being subverted by even his own mother - enabled liberalism to firmly establish themselves and voice their strenuous objection to the Peruvian status quo. Finding allies even among the most noted grandees of the Peruvian Cortes, the liberals - especially in the Peruvian military, which was far less dominated by the traditional creole aristocracy - became increasingly radicalized against the status quo, with increasing opposition to the King's government in the form of stoppages and embargos against the government, which led the king to crack down using the same local militias which had once plagued his father.
Pressure on the king reached a breaking point in 1869, when business in the capital ground to a halt as creole, castiza and mestizo opponents of the king first stopped work and then, when militias were brought in from the countryside to suppress them, rioting began. In response to the king's clear inability to control the situation, the military deployed into Lima against the militias, moved on the palace, dissolving the Cortes and detaining the king. Three days later, Joseph Maria II signed documents of abdication on behalf of himself and his children; they were taken, under guard, to a Peruvian naval vessel, which delivered them to a pensioned-off exile in France, where he would live out his days traveling the width and breadth of Europe, and living in a chateau outside Aix-en-Provence, where he died in 1909.
[4] Dolores of Peru was a woman who much matched her husband in both outlook and temperament -- indeed, she was, if anything, more conservative. Her father, a count and grandee of Peru, was a leader in the regional council during the war of independence, and a powerful landowner in his region, and she was raised as such -- not new ground for a Queen of Peru, even at this stage. However, despite coming from such a similar background to her mother-in-law, their personalities were quite different, and the two queens constantly clashed over the royal household. The Queen almost always won in these clashes; and not the one who was Queen of Peru in title.
Queen Dolores became an increasingly withdrawn figure in a court and household that she, in theory, ran; she seemed to be the perfect society woman, someone who could be respected as a stately queen in her age, but she was constantly living in the shadows of more prominent and more active ladies, and not just her mother-in-law. She retreated into near-seclusion with her maids at times, and was constantly distant from her husband. When her husband abdicated, and their family went into exile, Dolores found her life transformed much for the better, as she far preferred the life of a pensioned noblewoman about town with a small, quiet circle of her own, far away from the bustling court of her husband's family in Lima.
[5] Where his brother had been prepared for the life of a king, King Michael had been raised to the life of a soldier. Noted for his aptitude for sport from a very young age, his father intended that he be trained to support his brother as king, to be the sword of Joseph Maria II's will across the realm. However, still being quite young when his brother took the throne, King Michael ended up being brought up into adulthood among the liberal ideas of the Peruvian officer corps; though disproportionately creole, far fewer of their number were hidalgos than those who surrounded his brother, and, unlike his brother, he was constantly exposed to the castiza and migrante officers in their number, as well as to the largely mestizo rank and file. His brother accelerated his promotions, and it was not long before he held the rank of general, and the role of liaison between his brother and the army. Though a loyalist for longer than much of the officer corps - and, due to personal loyalty to him, he kept the army in check for a long time - his brother's mismanagement of the realm ultimately became too much for him, and when a cadre of liberal officers approached him in 1869 as the protests turned to riots, Michael agreed to lead the coup d'etat against his brother. After his brother's abdication, he was proclaimed him King of All Peru to cheering of the people of Lima. The army acted quickly against the militias surrounding the capital, which hamstrung the response of his brother's loyalists to the coup -- apart from a brief, abortive uprising near Trujillo, King Michael's accession was a fait accompli.
King Michael abrogated the Charter of Government, and summoned a new Cortes elected by a much broader spectrum of the population than had been eligible to elect the old one to approve with little discussion a charter written up by the king's secretary, who was soon to become the Count of Tacna. The new charter gave the king broad power to bring the powerful creole landowners to heel. In 1871, using this power, he issued the Royal Emancipation Decree, which dictated that, from 1 January 1872, no man or woman would be born in slavery, and would be released from any obligation of labor to their parents' owners on reaching their twenty-first birthday. Before the date came, a general uprising began among the hidalgos, but, mindful of the lessons of Virginia's civil war over the issue, King Michael's agents had already infiltrated the loose-lipped conspiracy -- the Hidalgos' Uprising was strangled in the cradle in most of the country, apart from the northernmost reaches of Lower Peru proper and Quito, where military formations lasted for about eight months in the former, and three years in the latter.
The retribution for revolt was swift and brutal, with mass confiscations of land and executions for men foolish enough to not quickly surrender to the King and his forces. None found themselves exempt; one in four Peruvian grandees found themselves stripped not only of their titles, but their nobility, many were exiled, and the King's own brother-in-law, the Count of San Felipe and his only son - who had also taken up arms - were executed publicly for treason, among others. By the end of the reprisals, two thirds of the productive land in Quito were royal lands, as well as regions across the country where revolts had been stopped and confiscations taken out on only the leaders. Outside of Quito, most of the land was distributed to landless military officers through a system of division and purchase which encouraged a more decentralized, individually weaker but large and cross-racial hidalgo class that was personally loyal to the king. King Michael ruled alongside his military allies, summoning the National Cortes only as often as required by the new charter, and, though its elections were open and its debate was free, it had limited influence over policy. Quito's local Cortes was dissolved for the rest of his reign and the region came under his direct rule, and the other regional Cortes were kept on a tight leash by the army and the King's agents. In 1884, he issued the Royal Revised Emancipation Decree, bringing slavery to an immediate end - the last territory on the American mainland to abolish slavery - though former-slaves were subjected to peonage to pay off the cost of their freedom to their former owners as happened in other parts of the Americas -- and, due to the confiscations, many of these peons owed their debt to the Crown.
The King openly encouraged a benign liberalism we would today consider to be proto-democratic, openly emulating New Spain and trying to create an environment of innovation and discovery as existed in their northern rival, and moving toward reducing the importance of the racial castes as New Spain already had. He reorganized and centralized administration to weaken the distinctions between the different parts of the country -- apart from Quito, which became in practice a separate royal fief, and, by the end of his forty-two year reign, no one could question that Peru was a powerful, dynamic state with its own nationhood, well on the way toward being South America's answer to New Spain.
[6] America of Peru was a retiring figure by nature, rather than necessity as her sister-in-law was. The daughter of an obscure hidalgo from the southern frontiers of Peru, and sister of one of King Michael's contemporaries early in his military career, Queen America seems to have been a liberal more due to her tendency to go along with her husband and her mother-in-law for the sake of peace in the household rather than out of any serious conviction. At the urging of her husband, she became involved in the founding of women's schools, particularly in the underserved southern reaches from which she came, but her role was ever symbolic, rather than dynamic as her mother-in-law.
A devout Catholic, more so than most of the royal family in these times, one of Queen America's few independent initiatives was the total revival and reconstruction of the Cathedral of St. John the Apostle in Lima, which had fallen into disrepair since Peruvian independence had sapped resources that traditionally would have gone to the Church. After the cathedral's revival, Queen America undertook a project at the behest of the Archbishop to do similar restoration work at Lima's other parish churches and chapels. She became increasingly pietist in her religious outlook as time went on, and likely would have broken with the royal family's new penchant for liberalism had she ever had the initiative to do so. When her mother-in-law died, she continued as she had been, surrendering the role of head of the royal household and the women at court to her daughter and, ultimately, her daughter-in-law.
She died in 1894, predeceasing her younger husband. The Queen America Church Restoration Fund, initially created from her considerable estate, continues to be a charity run by members of the royal family to restore Catholic places of worship throughout Peru, particularly in deprived urban and remote areas.
[7] Joseph Emmanuel I came to the throne at the age of 40, already an experienced statesman and competent military officer. He had been raised by a military father toward a life in the military, himself, until he became Prince of Potosi when he was eight, and the priorities of his education shifted. As he grew up, Joseph Emmanuel I became a convinced liberal by contemporary standards in the vein of his father. More radically, he was openly dismissive of the "Hapsburg castes", and spoke before the Cortes of Lima as what he called a "Convinced American" on the question of racial castes, and openly called for the abolition of the legal aspects of the racial caste system, pointing to Spain's increasingly bull-headed refusal to abolish slavery in its remaining American territories as all the evidence needed to show the destructive, degrading aspect of racial caste system. The very first foreign visit the prince undertook as an adult was as part of a delegation to Mexico, and the second - and much more controversial - was to Ayiti.
Upon becoming king, Joseph Emmanuel's first act was to forgive the debts of all the peons whose contracts were owned by the royal family, dividing up vast parts of the royal haciendas into a mixture of large plantations based upon contract labor and smaller, divided farmlands made into tenancies taken up by the Black Peruvians as family holdings, with usually the same families providing both sets of laborers. Though the material conditions took a long time to genuinely improve, it was finally legal for these Black families to instead choose to leave for the cities or the Amazon frontier to make a new life for themselves. He further imposed a new Charter of Government on Quito, clearly and permanently setting it outside of the authority of the Cortes of Lima, which legally abolished the concept of racial caste. The Cortes in Lima reasserted itself in response, as conservative forces in Cortes tried to reverse what they saw as the damage the new king had already done, but it was to little avail -- all that he had done had been firmly within the royal prerogative, and the incomes the King derived from Quito made it incredibly difficult for the Cortes to hurt the king financially and force him to the table without badly hurting their own constituents. The king also, quite wisely, held back on forcing changes on the rest of Peru, and it was hard to complain of royal tyranny -- as the admittedly sweeping changes he had made were still both smaller in scope and in effect than those which the Cortes had waved past from his father.
When the backlash of their loss of the Philippines War brought the First New Spanish Republic crashing down, the newly proclaimed King of New Spain's new, hyper-conservative order caused an outward flow of political refugees from the country, the lion's share of whom made their way south to Peru, now seen as a bulwark of liberalism by many instead of a mere second-rate imitator -- or, perhaps, a second-rate imitation was preferable to what Severino was now offering them in Mexico. He took enormous pains to integrate the New Spaniards into the country, as well as complete Peru's realignment into the French circle now that New Spain had burned its bridges with its closest European partner. Joseph Emmanuel and Severino of New Spain became fierce rivals personally, neatly matching the traditional rivalry between the two greatest native American states.
The King's attempts to firmly abolish racial caste were his political undoing, as his efforts vastly alienated the Indians, who saw their own protections and traditions as being preserved in part by the structures of the racial caste system. His attempts to break the Indians' traditional power blocks in order to fully "Peruvianize" them provoked a medium-scale insurgency in the rural and mining regions of Lower Peru, which gave an opening to Platinean settlers who began to move further and further past the Peruvian frontiers to take advantage of the chaos, and hampered the state's finances considerably. All the eggs were laid for the next stage of Peru's long history, but they would not hatch during Joseph Emmanuel's lifetime.
[8] Rosa of Peru was the liberal-minded fourth daughter of King Thomas I of Pernambuco; educated in New Spain at the Pontifical University of St. Charles Borromeo as the king ingratiated himself with America's great power, she took the lessons of the liberal professors there to heart when she returned to Pernambuco, and beyond when she was promised to the heir to the Peruvian throne to secure Pernambuco on both nation's good lists. The pair were poorly matched, in terms of their personality, and they often clashed - and not in the relatively beneficial way that the first King and Queen did - but their shared political and social values kept them together on political projects.
Queen Rosa became close and lifelong partners with her sister-in-law, Princess Consuelo of Peru, who never married and so remained in her brother's court throughout her life; they shared many of the same values and both were passionately in favor of the King's liberal projects across the board and both were fierce zenobians. In all but name, the two shared the role of leader of the royal household and of Lima's noble society. Conservatives and other opponents in court would jeer - but always behind closed doors - that it seemed more like the Queen was married to the princess than to her brother.
Queen Rosa took on the patronage of the Women's Institute, and ultimately worked to combine its faculty and resources with the University of Peru in Lima, creating a coequal, coeducational institution along the lines of her own alma mater, and she became patron of the Queen Anna Sophia Faculty of Letters which was formed within the combined university. She further sponsored three young ladies in their application to join the Royal Military Academy at Cañete in 1921 which, after significant debate at court and in the Cortes, was permitted; among them was Lady Rosario Moreno de Calama y Morales de la Serena, who is considered to be the first woman to graduate from an established military academy in the world and receive an officer's commission.
Queen Rosa survived her husband by only a few years, and died only a few days after Princess Consuelo. Today, after much dispute between both contemporaries and historians, it is now broadly accepted that the pair were romantically linked, and mutual dislike but shared political interest caused the King and Queen to overlook one another's constant infidelity in the public eye -- though the royal family still strongly rejects this assertion.
[9] Michael II came to the throne at a crucial moment in modern Peruvian history; his father's death, though not unexpected, caused a significant shift in American affairs. Not long after he came to the throne, he seemed to go against the bellicose reputation he had developed in the Cortes as Prince of Potosi by conceding the existence of the racial caste system in negotiations with the more powerful Indian leadership, and, echoing a development that could be found in other parts of America, he offered the Indians permanent representation in the Cortes and explicit constitutional protection of their indigenous status. The compromise rankled many radicals -- and displayed Michael II's conservative bent, but also his broadly pragmatic governance principles. Shortly after agreeing the treaty, though, he proved his reputation was well-earned, as he sent in the Peruvian Army to drive out Platinean interlopers in the southern reaches. The ongoing fight between Platinean and Peruvian settlers was escalated by the entry of the army, and soon the army began to take part in the same sort of retaliation strikes that had characterized the low-level conflict between Platineans and Peruvians for the past century. After a short time, Peruvian soldiers burned an Anglo-Platinean village to the ground well inside the Platinean frontier while in uniform.
King Michael refused to pay reparations, and so England declared war over the disputed territories. The war quickly escalated, with Peru receiving unofficial support from France, and the full might of the English Army and Navy were brought to bear against Peru. However, the English had expected the sort of battle they'd been fighting in Africa and in Asia -- and not that which came from facing a fully-established American power. The jungles and mountains of South America proved an incredible hindrance to the English, and, though England was more powerful at sea in theory, England's navy had to maintain a global presence -- Peru could bring a concentration of force that prevented England from making full use of their powerful navy. The war quickly became unpopular in Europe, and England sued for terms, and Michael considered the conflict a short, victorious war. However, River Plate erupted into revolt at England's "betrayal" of the colony's interests, and soon Peru was fighting a high-level insurgency in the concessions which England had made while England struggled to take back control of its wayward colony. King Severino offered his support, and, soon, was involved in his own border conflict with the English colony in Oregon, which quickly became a whole new war, and Peru was now aligned with England against their first and greatest rival.
The long, grueling war pushed Peru to its limits, but Michael - who was far more charismatic than his father - held the country together as they fought on to final victory against their opponents. New Spain was cowed, River Plate was back under Peruvian control -- and the disputed territories were indisputably part of Peru in 1938. The victory was Peru's finest hour, as Peruvian force of arms had secured its borders, and had defeated New Spain in battle, both in sea and on land, seemingly showing itself to be a power on the same scale as New Spain. King Michael was ascendant, while King Severino's regime began to crumble in Mexico. Unfortunately for Peru, its new allies in England were badly weakened by the war, which led to the great power going down to defeat in the Great Baltic War, which forced both England and France to begin their long withdrawal from their colonial empires in the face of the ascendant power of Poland-Lithuania.
Though the glory was fleeting, Michael II had brought Peru to glory nonetheless, and when he died of cancer in 1946, he was proclaimed by many to be the greatest king the realm had ever seen. Plazas across the country were renamed in his honor, and a monument to his glorious victory was erected at the heart of Lima.
[10] Margaret of Peru was the daughter of both worlds, a Daughter of France who was also a scion of the Bescós family from her mother; the marriage between her and King Michael II came as Peru realigned itself to France in the aftermath of Severino's seizure of power in Mexico, and the symbolism did not go unheeded by the community of New Spanish refugees that had begun to settle in to Peru. Margaret was an intensely political woman, who did not shy from becoming directly involved in the issues of the day, both as Princess of Potosi and then as the royal consort at the head of the royal household. She advocated fiercely for her mother's countrymen at court.
Margaret spent most of her time as Princess of Potosi focused on charity work, trying to bring food, fuel and shelter to the deprived of Peru's industrializing cities, and support to people in the villages at the outermost reaches of the jungle. A democrat in her sympathies, rather than a radical, she as much as many others in the Peruvian political scene helped to develop the foundation for the democratic ideology - and, thus, the Peruvian Democratic Party - that would become dominant in the country in the second part of the twentieth century. Through the long war with River Plate, and then New Spain, she pressed on the nobility to make proportional sacrifices to achieve victory from the side of her husband, and for those with much to do without so that those with little would have enough, and lead the other classes by their example -- a foundational element of Democratic ideology as it had emerged in Western Europe at the turn of the century.
The reframing of conservatism in Peru happened almost overnight as the King increasingly leaned on his consort as the human face in answer to the self-denial policies he enacted to keep up the funding for Peru's oversized army and navy, and, as charismatic as her husband was, she took on that role with a steady hand. She was by far the most interventionist consort Peru has ever had, and she, arguably as much - and perhaps more than - her husband helped to shape the country that Peru would be in the years to come.
She long outlived her husband, and remained a prominent voice in court and - unofficially - for the Democratic Party for nearly half a century after her husband's death. In 1951, she remarried a widower, Juan Echeverría de Ayacucho y Montalvo, Marquis of Ayacucho, a junior cadet of royal family descended from Joseph Maria I's youngest son, and retired elected statesman of the Cortes, being married to him until his death in 1982. She died in 1984, well in line with the traditional record Bescós dynastic traditional female longevity, though not quite matching her mother's record.
[11] King Michael III came to the throne following his father's untimely death in 1946 during a time of global transition, with Peru seen as an emerging great power in its own right and ascendant in the Americas. It was only a month after Severino of New Spain had been shot by an impromptu firing squad in Mexico's central square. Across the ocean, amid Poland's vicious reprisals against its clients who had rise up against its dominion in the aftermath of the Fifth Defenestration of Prague, England found itself beaten back from the Baltic, while the last reigning scion of the House of Brandenburg watching helplessly from her palace in Whitehall as the Polish flag flew from Berliner Schloss. In this new world order, though, Peru stood triumphant. At least, for now, it did. Many Peruvians of New Spanish ancestry - and original New Spaniards - left the country to return to the embrace of the Second Republic, and King Michael initially offered moral and financial support to the republicans, but he was mostly rebuffed; resentment for Peru, having the audacity to defeat America's natural leader in a war, was rampant and expressed in the revanchist dreams of even some of the most die-hard republicans, and so Peru left New Spain to lick its wounds alone.
Meanwhile, Michael faced increasing calls from his own people for a new, regularized constitutional order, and to set aside his namesake's constitution by fiat. As someone who was, like his mother, a democrat by inclination, he was willing to negotiate, and, in 1949, he summoned a Constituent Assembly from across Peru to resettle the constitutional foundations of the realm. Including representatives from every part of Peru - including Quito - and every racial caste, along with representatives of the Church and commissioners from the Crown the Constituent Assembly spent two years at its work. In the end, they produced the modern Fundamental Laws of the Kingdom of Peru, which attempted to address the many flaws of Peru's existing order, answer the complaints of subjects of all racial castes, classes and political persuasions, as well as provide for the different political and social situations across the far-flung kingdom. Representatives from Quito quit the convention halfway through 1950, and so they were excluded from the final settlement, but the new constitution received widespread support in the rest of Peru's regions, and, following a national referendum, Michael III promulgated it on 1 January 1952, settling the state with a two-chamber Cortes which represented the interests of the grandees, the large, widespread hidalgo class, and the leaders of the Indian tribes across the country, as well as the wider interests of the Peruvian nation through an broad lower house.
After the death of the Queen in childbirth, and the death of their only child a few months later, the same year, King Michael became withdrawn from government for several years due to his grief, which gave significantly more influence to the President and Royal Audience selected by the Cortes. Even after returning properly to the reins, King Michael was often far more conciliatory to the elected government than had been expected by most under the new constitutional order. Apart from the King's natural sphere in military, defense and foreign affairs, many royal prerogatives were surrendered to the advice of an Audience made up of both the Lords and Delegates of the realm. By the early 1960s, the new constitution was a clear success, and Peru had successfully transitioned into the form of constitutional monarchy which had become the norm in France, England, China and other powers with which Peru found itself aligned.
King Michael came back to the forefront of policy in 1966 as the New Granadan Civil War began (as the War of Platinean Independence had remained studiously contained in-borders by both England and the ultimately victorious republic), and spilled over both into the traditional royal domain of Quito and into Peru proper, as well as into Maranhao, Venezuela and New Spain. In 1968, the king began a full-scale military deployment into New Granada, technically neutral but clearly aligned toward the Lozanistas, in the borderlands near Peru and Quito. New Spain and its Venezuelan allies quickly responded with their own deployment into the northern and eastern parts of the republic, and, by 1970, the interventionist soldiers had begun shooting at one another, carefully never acknowledging the provenance of the casualties coming home. In 1972, the shooting became formal when Peruvian troops crossed the border accidentally into New Spain proper during an operation in northern New Granada, and Peru once again found itself at war with its rival. King Michael was ready to be tested as a wartime ruler, but he never would be; he died suddenly only weeks after New Spain declared war, and he left Peru in its hour of need in the hands of his brother.
[12] Francisca of Peru was yet another Pernambucan princess in the court of Lima, but the match, while politically acceptable to all sides, was one of mutual interest; Francisca had come to Lima to study at the University of Peru, and, out of courtesy, had been invited to present at court -- where, not too long after, she became drawn to the young Prince of Potosi. Despite the contrast in their personalities, the pair became increasingly enamored with one another, and soon, at the request of both parties, negotiations for marriage began between the two states, which concluded with the couple's happy union.
Francisca, unlike her husband, was incredibly studious, and continued her university studies even after her engagement to the Prince, and, ultimately, even after their marriage. Fascinated by natural philosophy, the princess spent much of her time both in her engagement and the early years of her marriage, traveling to the most remote parts of South America, and wrote several noted papers on gradual speciation via adaptive survival in the Amazon which are still cited today. She continued to publish occasionally after her husband took the Peruvian crown, but did so under the legal pseudonym "Lady Carolina Villabaja y de la Cruz", and these later works were far less notable.
The couple at first struggled to conceive, and then Francisca had usually problematic pregnancies, usually ending in miscarriage or stillbirth; they only had one son, Michael, Prince of Potosi, shortly after her husband became king. Her final pregnancy, in 1952, ended in stillbirth, with the queen dying - according to the Peruvian legal courts - as a result to malpractice by the royal physician, who intervened with Francisca's midwives during the difficult birth. Though, as a studious and quiet woman, she was not widely loved by the people, she was much mourned by the royal family, nobles and associates who knew her personally -- especially the King, for whom her death was a particular blow from which it is widely considered that he never recovered.
[13] King Philip V, though not the Prince of Potosi, had been his brother's heir since the tragic death of his nephew in 1952, and, as the years went by, it became increasingly clear that Michael III had no inclination toward remarriage. Though never officially made Prince of Potosi, Philip was referred to regularly as "my eventual successor" by the king from 1961, and so his coming to the throne was not a surprise. The circumstances, however, were -- the former king dead very suddenly, and New Spain on the march, the widowed o who had long been king in waiting was now the man of the hour.
Unfortunately for Philip, Peru was woefully unready for a modern war. Having been forced toward demobilizing simply to keep the state's finances in order, the preceding decades had seen Peru's military become increasingly aged, increasingly backward, while New Spain once again had sunk its resources into building its armies and navies ever the greater and stronger, well on the way to becoming the supreme great power it is today. The full might of New Spain being brought down on New Granada - despite the coup that took their Venezuelan allies out of the war - quickly put Peru on the backfoot, and, after eighteen months of fighting, Peru had been completely driven out of New Granada, and New Spanish soldiers were fully operational on Quito soil, embarrassing Peru by making a prominent royal hacienda their headquarters. Peru's attempts at deception were no match for New Spain's growing air reconnaissance capabilities, and the Peruvian navy was, by the end of 1973, unable to operate more than a few hundred miles from their ports, with foreign trade nearly cut off by the encroaching New Spanish.
It grated on Philip but, ultimately, it became impossible for him to go on -- with the agreement of the Royal Audience and Cortes, he sued for terms. New Spain issued outlandish demands including the complete annexation of Quito into New Granada, which outraged the King and Cortes and prompted a blanket refusal and led to a resolution by the Cortes to fight to the bitter end to protect Peruvian soil. However, this became unnecessary, when France, China and the Hapsburg realms jointly issued an ultimatum to New Spain directing them to accept status quo ante, with a Cozzolinista government established in Bogota under guidance from New Spain. The consuls in Mexico begrudgingly agreed to the terms, and an uneasy peace was restored between the two states.
Philip ruled after the war for the better part of a decade, but his reign was overshadowed by the aftermath of the war in New Granada. The people and the army resented the defeat, and many blamed the king for the failure, despite his having quite literally inherited the situation from his brother. Philip successfully demanded greater military funding from the Cortes and began a vast reorganization of the Peruvian military along the centralized lines adopted by England the preceding decade, much as the bicameral Cortes had been modeled on the English Parliament, and many English officers on every level - probably most notably today, then-Captain Amelia Ferguson of Ayrshire, of His Majesty's the Royal Hussars, now known as the Savior of Paris for her undertakings in the Global War - were invited to Peru to help remake it for the next war. For there would be another war -- Peru's national honor, after all, demanded it.
Philip's health rapidly deteriorated as he got older, though, and it was little surprise when he passed away in his sleep due to his medical condition in 1981, having reigned Peru only nine years.
[14] Joseph Emmanuel II came to the throne as Peru geared up for yet another war, but, never a military man, the new king was not particularly keen on the amount of military expenditure that his father and uncle had geared up over the preceding decades. Fearful of the growing social disorder and unrest in the country, only barely lidded by the country's joint hatred of New Spain, he oriented his rule more toward social and political reform, answering calls from parts of society that had often been left unheard in the mad preparations for what was to come, and seeking to restore a level of normalcy to Peru. He met with the leaders of the industrial, agricultural and domestic labor alliances - which had never been powerful in Peru despite the prominence of the Democratic Party - over the increasing squeeze on the most vulnerable Peruvians as money went to machines of war. At their urging, he called for a formalization of the state-funded hospital structure administered by the Catholic Church, and, within his power as sovereign, began to require alliance contracts for companies and families that provided services to the Crown.
When he tried to initiate legislation in this direction in the Cortes, and the Cortes resisted, in 1986 the king summoned an extraordinary Constituent Assembly to consider - and, very quickly, approve - the implementation of universal suffrage in Peru proper, which changed the composition of the House of Delegates to one which was more amenable to Joseph Emmanuel's democratic legislative initiatives, and, slowly, new taxes were approved to expand access to social services across the realm -- though, to Joseph Emmanuel's distaste, the military budget continued to grow apace.
The reluctant warmonger of Lima watched in despair as, in spite of his efforts, even the labor alliances were driven first and foremost by resentment for New Spain, and the wish for a new victory against a great power which had objectively - and, to the king, obviously - eclipsed Peru once more, as it had even begun to eclipse the European powers themselves. While most Peruvians saw New Spain as their permanent rival, the eyes of Mexico were only ever fixed on their only equal among the powers of the Earth -- China, which had by now fully integrated into its administration what New Spain saw as its own rightful Philippine islands.
When the Global War, despite Joseph Emmanuel's fruitless efforts, inevitably came, it was Quito and Northern Peru which would suffer, as they and New Granada became one of the most contested fronts of the war. Peruvians by the thousands of every racial caste, of every class and every status died in the relentless slaughter of the North Front, while Peru barely held off the unending day-and-night bombing raids on Santiago and Charcas as the Platineans, Brazilians and Sao Pedrans threw themselves fruitlessly at Peru's southern frontiers. By 1997, New Spain began a campaign of terror-bombing against Lima and other central Peruvian cities, dropping petroleum jelly and alchemical-air bombs in an attempt to force Peru out of the war -- but, as elsewhere, this only hardened their will as New Spain was soon reversed across the Peruvian frontier and back into New Granada, with Bogota taken by a Peruvian-Venezuelan force in 1998.
They withdrew to status quo borders, however, in 1999, as the war ended. When Acapulco vanished in an instant, the world had been changed forever.
In the seventeen years since the uneasy peace was signed, Joseph Emmanuel has been forced to wait and be watchful, as money he wishes would go to social programs is instead built for Chinese and English troops stacked on the heavy fortifications that tripwire Peru's northern and southern frontiers. With no armageddonic weapons of its own, and two hostile armageddonic powers on either frontier, Peru is left desperately waiting, desperately hoping, desperately dependent upon her allies for her safety, for her independence, watching helplessly as her Venezuelan partners drive a near-insurmountable wedge in the alliance system that keeps the world from blowing itself into smithereens.
But then, Peru has always lived in the shadow of New Spain. It's the Europeans that really need to just get used to it.
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