Hasznia 0-3 New Gelderland
18 June 2014 @ Stade 1916, Warton
Just Hasznian Things #1: The Royal Family
The House of Diedrich ruled Hasznia for almost 400 years until they were deposed in a coup perpetrated by Brianna Kingsley, establishing the Kingsley Republic. Below are biographies of the last four members of the royal family, the last Grand Duke and his three children.
Grand Duke Victor II "The Last"Reign: 1922-1963
1894-1975
Spouse: Grand Duchess Maude (1908-1994)
Parents: Grand Duke Adrian (1861-1922) and Grand Duchess Elena (1870-1925)
Fate: Deposed 1963, died in exile
Victor II was the last of the Diedrich Grand Dukes, and is said to have been born in one world and died in another. In 1894 when Victor was born, the House of Diedrich had its strongest hold it ever over a united Hasznia as the country was booming from decades of increased demand for its raw material. The birth of the new Hereditary Grand Duke was the event of the decade, with one hundred thousand well-wishers each attending his baptism and anointment. As a young man, Victor joined the Navy as his father had, entering the Walrus Company of commandos and retiring as a lieutenant commander in 1921 when his father's health declined. He was crowned in 1922 upon the death of the Grand Duke Adrian, his father, and reigned unchecked for three decades thereafter.
Black Friday in 1929 represented the beginning of the end for the Hasznian monarchy. Demand plummeted for the minerals and raw materials that the chartered corporations produced, leaving the crown unable to pay its debts for the first time in three hundred years. Agitators for democracy took to the streets and began organizing behind closed doors, publishing anonymous manifestos demanding either the complete removal of the monarchy or a limiting constitution. The anointment of Prince Noah in 1931 drew more protesters than well-wishers.
Victor was largely open to the democrats’ demands, arranging meetings with the best-organized of them, but for the more radical, change could not come fast enough. In 1943, the royally-appointed Prime Minister was removed by a vote of no confidence in the Assembly and replaced with firebrand democrat Candace Fuller. Another vote of no confidence a year later would have removed Fuller in favor of Leroy Kingsley, the CEO of White Sun Corporation, but Victor was tipped off and managed to dismiss the Assembly before the vote could come to pass.
After long, tense negotiations with the Assembly democrats, Victor II managed to establish a tentative road map for the divestment of the royal family from power. Key to the plan was the incremental privatization of the "crown charters", the government-funded corporations which by 1950 controlled most of the nation's infrastructure. The privatization approach kept the peace until late 1961, when Brianna Kingsley, Leroy's daughter, in her first act as Chairman of the Board of White Sun, demanded that he privatize the White Dog Company.
The White Dogs were one of Hasznia's first charters, a hundred-man unit that acted as personal security for the royal family. While still technically a charter, by 1960 their members were assigned by the Hasznian Marines, and the company's origins were more a historical tidbit than a fact of its organization. Victor refused to privatize them, his first refusal since the process had begun ten years prior, enraging the volatile Kingsley. With the help of key leaders among the White Dogs as well as the conventional Hasznian military, Kingsley launched a coup that saw the royal family captured and herself installed as President-for-Life.
Victor reportedly surrendered to his former bodyguards without a fight, and accepted exile in The Royal Kingdom of Quebec for himself and his family. Of his three children, none went along: the eldest, Prince Liam, Hereditary Grand Duke and Earl of Darley, committed suicide the same night his father was captured; Prince Noah, Grandmaster of Reform, remained in Hasznia but never had children, leading to his nickname "The Eunuch Prince"; and the youngest, Princess Sonja, Landgravine of Wick, joined the royalist partizans led by Lord Archibald Sharp and was killed in action.
Prince Liam, Earl of Darley “Lame Liam”Parents: Grand Duke Victor and Grand Duchess Maude
1927-1963
Fate: Suicide by heroin overdose, 19 September 1963
Prince Liam was born to Grand Duke Victor II and Grand Duchess Maude in 1927, two years before Black Friday marked the downturn of the House of Diedrich’s fortunes. Liam grew up in uncertain times for both his family and Hasznia. He was sixteen when Prime Minister Lord Martin Cross, whom he described as his “favorite uncle”, was removed by a vote of no confidence and replaced by Candace Fuller. He would later describe that day as the worst of his life.
When he came of age, Liam enlisted in the gendarmerie under an assumed name, breaking with family tradition of joining either the Hasznian army or navy as a cadet or midshipman. Because his nom de guerre was never publicized, few details of his service are known, but being an enlisted gendarme and not known as a royal, he would have been mixed with mostly young men of common or poor birth. His service came at a time when the gendarmerie was increasingly called upon to quell democratic rallies and demonstrations, and the experience had a profound effect on him.
Upon his exit from the gendarme in 1949, Liam became involved in underground literature and poetry in Barracha, a scene he shared with many radical democrats. Under the “pseudonym” “Prince Liam”, he published articles in numerous underground magazines about the need for shared power between the people and the crown. His views were dismissed by hardline democrats as pandering to the royalists, who were seen as the enemy, but some of his articles were reprinted in national newspapers and gained a following.
In 1952 at the age of twenty-five, Liam came out as the author of the “Prince Liam” articles and a proponent of reform. He was present and actively participating at almost all the meetings his father held with advocates of democracy, and the first few agreements bore his signature. However, as the talks became increasingly focused on privatization, Liam came to believe that the democratic movement had succumbed to greed. He became depressed and withdrew from public life in 1954, returning to the underground.
Again, little is known of Liam’s life after his withdrawal. More “Prince Liam” articles surfaced, each seeming to advocate a different radical anti-monarchist position, but popular opinion held that they were the work of imitators. On the morning of 19 September 1963, the day after the coup that removed Grand Duke Victor II from power, a man matching Prince Liam’s description was admitted to All Saints’ Hospital in Barracha for a heroin overdose, and he died shortly after noon. His parents delayed their flight to exile by six hours to identify the body, which was cremated and scattered over Barracha Harbor.
Prince Noah, Grandmaster of Reform "The Eunuch Prince"Parents: Grand Duke Victor and Grand Duchess Maude
1931-2010
Spouse: Rachel Potter (1937-)
Fate: Surrendered to Kingsleys, allegedly castrated
Prince Noah was born in the wake of the economic collapse on Black Friday, and while his childhood was every bit as tumultuous as his elder brother’s, Noah’s experiences shaped him into a soft-spoken but clever young man and a sharp contrast to his bitter, outspoken older brother. Like his father, he entered the Hasznian Naval Academy at eighteen, just as the democratic agitators were beginning to gain steam. At the Naval Academy, he was shielded from the tensions outside by his superiors and senior midshipmen, many of whom were active conspirators against his family.
After his graduation in 1953, Noah spent two years overseas learning to fly the Hasznian Navy’s newly-acquired helicopters. Some reports indicate that this was a deliberate move on the part of Naval Command to keep the young prince out of Hasznian politics at a time when the monarchy was losing ground on every front. Noah had only eighteen total months on shore in eight years between 1955 and 1963, possibly as the result of a continuing Naval Command conspiracy.
Noah was at sea again when the White Dogs, the Grand Duke’s bodyguards, turned on the Hasznian crown in 1963 and installed Brianna Kingsley as President-for-Life. Upon receiving the communication via wireless, Noah, who had grown up admiring the White Dogs and kept in touch with his personal bodyguards, reportedly said that “if the Dogs have turned on us, that’s it, then.” He returned to shore and surrendered to the Hasznian Marines.
Noah lived several years in the Summer Palace in Sterling as a guest of the fledgling Kingsley Republic, which made good on its promise that it would not harm the royals if they would renounce their titles and submit to captivity. Barely six months after the coup, he married Rachel Potter in a small, private ceremony. Noah frankly explained to the papers that they’d struck up a relationship while he was on shore leave years previous, but had abandoned it because she was of common blood, and with his royalty no longer and obstacle they’d decided to go ahead with it.
In 1970, the last of the Companions of the White Rose, the royalist partisans whom Princess Sonja had joined, signed a cease-fire with the Kingsley Republic after their camps were betrayed and decimated by napalm. Their leaders conceded that the Princess had been killed by an airstrike in early 1965. The news hit Noah hard. He allegedly escaped the Summer Palace the same night, the first time he’d left the grounds since surrendering, made his way to a shore patrol station, and reported as though he had been absent without leave since 1963.
Brianna Kingsley herself made the decision to reinstate Noah’s commission, owing largely to the dearth of public support for the military after Noah’s beloved naval helicopters delivered chemical munitions to civilians suspected of supporting the CWR during Sharp’s rebellion. Upon reinstatement, Noah was promoted to the grade of captain and given command of the Naval Academy, where he instituted reforms to bring the navy closer to the civilian populace. Noah retired from naval service in 1980 as a commodore and transitioned to a quiet life aboard a hundred-foot yacht with his wife and was buried at sea on his death in 2010.
Princess Sonja, Landgravine of WickParents: Grand Duke Victor and Grand Duchess Maude
1944-1965
Spouses: Lord Archibald Sharp (1940-1964) (betrothed)
Fate: KIA, Sharp's Rebellion
Sonja was the youngest of Grand Duke Victor II’s three children, born in 1944 as the fires of pro-democracy sentiment were being stoked in the streets of Barracha. Her childhood was lonely, being mostly spent with her bodyguards and nursemaids. Her older brother Noah was one of her only friends in childhood, and she was devastated when he left for the gendarme in 1949 when she was five.
As an adolescent, Sonja was kept out of the public eye, with the royalists not wanting to give their democratic opponents an easy target by having a royal debut. In 1960, when she was sixteen, she was betrothed to twenty-year-old Lord Archibald Sharp, son of Lord Cornelius Sharp, an industrialist, retired Army general, and staunch royalist. Her betrothal was the first in Hasznia in almost two hundred years, and immediately after it was made official she left the palace to live with the Sharps at their manor outside Deloraine.
In Deloraine, Sonja became acquainted with the Companions of the White Rose, a secret society of which both Lords Sharp were founding members. The CWR was founded to keep the royal family safe in the event of a military coup. Three years after Sonja and Lord Archibald were betrothed, weeks before their scheduled wedding, the coup the CWR had predicted came to pass. Gendarmes stormed the Sharp manner just hours after the Grand Duke’s surrender, but Sonja and Archibald were nowhere to be found, having hid out in the home of a sympathizer on the outskirts of Deloraine.
In the months that followed, the CWR executed the plan they had spent years developing, taking to the dense forests and bogs around Deloraine and Warton to form an armed resistance to the Kingsley Republic. Sharp’s Rebellion, as it became called, was a guerilla conflict between the CWR and the gendarmerie and conventional military of Hasznia. Sonja was shuttled from guerilla base to guerilla base ahead of the enemies of Sharp’s Rebellion.
The last months of Sonja’s life are poorly-documented, as her location as a closely-guarded secret, but it is known that the first chemical strikes against CWR sustainment nodes occurred in early 1965. Women and children were included among the casualties far in the rear. Sonja’s betrothed was an early loss, being killed on the front lines by a regiment of motorized infantry from the Hasznian army. Sharp’s Rebellion was mostly suppressed by 1969. In 1970 the last of its leadership surrendered, and in their depositions they admitted that Sonja had been killed by an airstrike sometime in 1965, whereas they had previously maintained that she was alive and being kept in an undisclosed location.
Princess Sonja’s body was recovered from an underground guerilla base in 1979 and interred in the Sharp family plot alongside Lord Archibald. The remaining CWS veterans gave her a semblance of a proper royal burial, and government and military officials were in attendance, dressed in mourning, to include her brother, Captain Noah Diedrich, the former Prince and Grandmaster of Reform. Sonja’s funeral was widely seen as a moment of reconciliation between former democrats and royals, and afterwards the guerilla warfare around the bog country was greatly reduced.
