Chapter IV
The End of Divine Right
The swamps that Carr found around the Mississippi proved to be a death-trap. Almost 600 of his men were killed by disease and the treacherous terrain during Carr’s trek to the area now known as Baton Rouge. When he finally decided to cut his losses in the area and head north, the expedition had named the area in the most reprehensible way they could think of; Louisiana, after Louis the Thirteenth of France. The King of France was extremely unhappy with the name, and many French documents to this day refer to Louisiana as “The Mississippi Swamps”.The End of Divine Right
On his way up the river, Carr engaged in much the same practices that Onslow had after the Attawadora Incident. British trade was thus cemented as the first step of the process that led the Empire to expand after the initial land-rush of the New England Era. Edward the Sixth’s reign would turn out to be the only one in British history, during which the empire’s expansion was based on a desire to gain more land. Future parliaments would be sucked into expansion by a desire to protect British trade.
For now however, Carr’s expedition headed upriver, the winter slowly closing in on them. In the winter of 1520-21, the expedition suffered the consequences of abandoning their heavier gear in Florida. The soldiers had thrown away items that seemed pointless at the time, which meant large amounts of winter clothing and extra blankets. The result was an expedition reduced to some 2,500 men. Carr himself contracted what his personal doctor diagnosed as the common cold. One year later, mere miles from the hill on which Onslow was buried, Alfred Carr died of pneumonia.
1. The statue of Carr’s successor, Simon Plumer, in Detroit, Michigan.
After the winter and Carr’s death, the expedition finally came out of its long post-Florida hell. Plumer was charismatic and liked enough to get the men’s spirits up, and make them sympathetic to the idea of continuing the expedition into the great hole that now dominated their cartographers’ maps of America between the Mississippi and the coast. It is often speculated that Plumer spread a rumor among the men of a great city of gold somewhere in the Americas, which he believed to be in that hole that proved to be dominated by the Appalachians. Regardless of Plumer’s actual methods, it was around the time of the expedition’s return that the tale of El Dorado began to take root.
Plumer and his men spent a year trying to find a way through the Appalachians to the coast, but ultimately had to go back down to Florida, and head back up the way they came in order to get back to the Commonwealths. Upon their return, they had increased the number of tribes trading with the British three times over, and inadvertently sparked a fascination toward the new continent in the mind of a young Spanish prince when their stories reached Europe.
In the old world, a slowing down of the initial spread of Protestantism was taking place. The Holy Roman Empire was still nominally catholic due to Bohemia’s refusal to become a part of the League of Hesse. The League was an internal imperial organization set up by the protestant constituencies to protect their rights. When Vladislav the First refused to convert at the League’s request, the League detached itself from the empire, forming a bizarre nation within a nation.
In Britain, religious strife was almost non-existent. In the 1520s, Edward and parliament legislated against religion-based laws to avoid the kind of strife that was now rampant in France and the League-Empire, thus unwittingly creating the first instance of what a young American revolutionary named Thomas Jefferson would hundreds of years later call “the wall of separation between church and state”.
2. Edward the Sixth, King of England, Great Britain and Ireland, and Sovereign of the American Commonwealths.
In 1528, Edward officially ended the monarchy’s association with any form of religion, by renouncing the idea of divine right. The monarchy was thus now based on air. Many members of parliament suggested abolishing the monarchy, since it had no legal or divine basis. The majority of parliament however, dismissed the idea, and Edward managed to reaffirm the monarchy’s right to the throne two months later in a most unusual way.
He called the first proper election in history, albeit limited to the nobles in the land and parliament. The matter to be voted on was the monarchy, and whether the King of England had the right to rule the country. Despite often being painted as a benevolent and perhaps overly kind king, it was during the election that Edward showed just how ruthless a political mind he was. He unscrupulously dug up favors and old friendships among the nobility, worked feverishly to ensure that the most adamant anti-monarchists in parliament were otherwise disposed on Election Day, and even turned to bribes in the case of Prime Minister James Lancaster.
When the time eventually came, parliament and the nobility almost unanimously voted in favor of “the given right”. That is, Edward, and all his descendants and their legal heirs, were given the right in perpetuity to the office of Sovereign. The British monarchy is to this day the only monarchy that has, even technically, been elected into office. The genius with which Edward conducted his moves late in his reign has prompted many historians to believe that the King’s entire reign was one long gambit to make the British monarchy a legal institution, independent from religion.
3. James, 3rd Duke of Lancaster (1505-1581). First Prime Minister of Great Britain (1525-1574). His time in office was extended considerably by the lack of age and term limits on the position of Prime Minister, which was created as a personal favor of Edward’s for James.
Edward the Sixth died in his bed at the age of 82, on August 5th 1533. Edward’s long reign had wreaked havoc with succession, as his only living legal heir was his sixty year-old daughter, Mary. Her only legal heir in turn, was her grandson, three-year old George of Middlesex. Mary was crowned in January 1534, but her reign proved to be especially short-lived. In August of 1534, Mary died. Unwittingly, 29-year old Prime Minister James Lancaster had become head-of-state until George reached adulthood.
In the next decade, Lancaster would turn the office of prime minister into something radically different from what Edward had envisioned it as in 1525. When George came to the throne, Lancaster would wield more power legally than the new king, and it would not be until after Lancaster’s resignation due to old age that the system of checks-and-balances would be restored. Of course, by then Britain would be a very different place from the peaceful trading nation that Lancaster became temporary sovereign of in 1534.
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