Things in History You Should Know: Queen Crisantha

This is an attempt at writing one of my history articles about the world in which Strike takes place. It was fun times.

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away – okay, Spira – us peasantry got it in the teeth a plenitude of times. And it wasn’t all that long ago, being more like a century and a half, give our take. Yet now we live in a happy fun world where the colonies are their own nations, parliaments reign supreme, and the nobility don’t have a whole mess of privileges with which to lord it over us lesser folk. And who do we have to thank for this?

That’s right. Crisantha fuckin’ Landrell. Queen Crisantha, that is.

Nevertheless, democratic reformer types don’t just magically spring fully-formed from the foreheads of the nobility. Sure, there had been revolutions, both peaceful and violent, springing up pretty much all over the Estelian continent and a suitably idealistic young noble might possibly, without further provocation, take up the cause of the downtrodden. Might, but not likely.

The key element here is the Shulmanian Revolution, in which that country, its last emperor having got himself killed through act of horse and his remaining relatives being so distant they might as well be on another hemisphere, decided that elections might be worth a try. Thus so did Abelard von Aschenheim became their first president, a couple of generations before Crisantha got started. Why is this relevant, you may ask? Well, it just so happens that Crisantha’s mother was a cousin of his. And that Crisantha was sent over to Shulmania in her youth to go get educated. And who was in charge of her education? Come on, now. You can figure this out.

So you have this young noblewoman, who’s next in line to inherit her father’s duchy of Belsworth and who also, incidentally and through the most technically correct interpretations, has more of a right to the throne than the then-queen Lucina did. And she’s off in foreign parts, getting her head stuffed full of ideas.

Now, if you’re a sensibly minded monarch, you’ll leave that branch of the family well enough alone and find some nice little cause they can distract themselves with. Queen Lucina was hardly sensible. In fact, most historians say, she was downright crazy. She had the Duke of Belsworth arrested, along with Crisantha’s younger brother Tiberian, and told the whippersnapper to stay out of the country, lest she have the two executed.

Too bad the prison conditions were so lousy that the duke died. Also too bad that rumours of torture, involving said duke and her brother reached the newly-fledged Lady Crisantha’s ears in not-far-enough-off Shulmania. (These later turned out to be true.) And you better believe that she declared it on. Or the 13th century equivalent thereof.

She got herself an army. This was easy enough, considering the Shulmanian Congress had already voted to support her and oh, incidentally, there were a lot of people down south in Spira that thought she might possibly make a better queen than Lucina. Wholesale oppression of the lower – and middle classes, who had quite the percentage of the nation’s wealth in their ample pockets – had that effect. Rebellion had begun.

It lasted an entire year, fracturing the country like a mirror that got a rock tossed at it. Brother against sister! Parent against child! Pristinian against Nelurian! (Although as those last two were foreign, no one was really paying attention to what they had to say about it.) Long story short, the ‘Belsworths’, as they were called, were victorious, despite more than their fare share of near finishes.

Crisantha celebrated her nineteenth birthday on February 29, 1211, the very day she was crowned. And your parents thought you were precocious. The former Queen Lucina was executed just afterwards and she was lucky enough to watch the whole, wonderfully choreographed coronation. Her last words were recorded for posterity; alas, they’re but a string of expletives.

Then the nobles who supported her got a nasty shock: she really meant her grand speeches of reform and democracy and egalitarianism. She stripped her former fellow dukes and duchesses of most of their privileges, particularly those of tax avoidance and their hogging of almost all of the seats in the House of Commons, not to mention all of the laws that gave them a free pass for almost any offense committed against someone of a ‘lesser’ class. Good thing the middle class supported her, then – the uppers wouldn’t lend her money anymore.

She carried along those lines for the rest of her days, fitting in a couple of scandalous affairs to spice up the quiet times. Counter-rebellions were quashed, including that headed by the late Lucina’s brother, Asher. (We don’t know what happened to him – if he died in battle or was captured, it was never reported.) Then she died in 1291, so peacefully as to annoy all of her enemies and having already declared that the monarchy was to be a strictly ceremonial position from that point onwards.

In interest of full disclosure, one of her grandchildren did have the unmitigated gall to attempt a coup, as did some other scions of the royal line over the years. And for some of the colonies, most famously Abelia, the transition towards self-government didn’t come fast enough for them, leading to their own rebellions to gain their independence. (This hasn’t prevented them from wanting to snatch independence from others for the sake of some sweet, sweet land.) And, yes, she didn’t do it alone – many of her prime ministers, including Evelyn Godsmark, did much of the grunt work in getting her reforms passed through Parliament in the first place.

It couldn’t have happened at all, though, if it wasn’t for one young woman on a revenge kick. Now that’s a moral for the ages.