by David Weber
In 1647, the survey ship Artemis made a first transit through the Gregor Terminus, opening up yet another shipping route, this one providing access to both the Andermani Empire and the Silesian Confederacy. Four T-years later, in 1651 PD, King Roger II signed the Cherwell Anti-Slavery Convention, pledging the Star Kingdom, along with the Republic of Haven and other signatories, to cooperate in suppressing the genetic slave trade and the RMN added that obligation to its missions. The Navy had been in the process of steady expansion over the last century in response to the need to protect the growing merchant fleet as well as the home system. The opportunities and the threats posed by the existence of the Junction were being analyzed, understood and incorporated into naval thinking and planning, and it was just as well that was true.
In 1660 PD, Manticore became embroiled with the Ranier System near the Hennesy Terminus of the Manticore Junction. Ranier was little more than a pirate enclave which had been raiding commerce around the relatively unsettled Phoenix Cluster. No local star system had the power to deal with the Ranierians—indeed, Phoenix itself had been forced to pay tribute to them—and the pirates saw no reason they should not extort the same payments from Manticoran merchantmen. Faced with this situation, the RMN deployed heavy escort forces and fought numerous cruiser actions against Ranierian pirates between 1660 and 1662 PD. This effort culminated in Commodore Edward Saganami’s punitive expedition against Ranier itself with the first five modern Manticoran battlecruisers under his command, which ended the Ranier War by terminating the government of the Ranier System later that same year.
In 1669 PD, Manticore began amassing evidence of governmental connivance in the growing piracy problem in Silesia. At this time, the RMN still thought of itself as primarily a system defense fleet and Saganami’s Ranier expedition as something of a flash in the pan that was unlikely to be repeated. Queen Adrienne felt differently, however, and attacks by those pirates on trade with that region via the Gregor Terminus were costing not simply ships but the lives of her subjects, as well. In 1670 PD, she directed her Admiralty to take steps to protect the Star Kingdom’s commerce in Silesia.
At the time, the involvement of Solarian interests with the region’s pirates and their targeted attacks on Manticoran shipping was not suspected. The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) would learn only later that Manpower Incorporated, apparently out of an awareness of how the RMN’s enforcement of the Cherwell Convention would hamper its slave-trading (and other illegal) activities in Silesia, had begun providing covert support through its Solarian transtellar associates in an effort to drive Manticoran trade out of the Confederacy. Should the pirates fail to fully accomplish that task, they might at least keep the still small RMN too preoccupied convoying merchant ships to go slaver-hunting.
Unaware of Solarian involvement, Saganami, the hero of the Ranier War, was ordered to assemble a force for the purpose of proactive, search-and-destroy operations against pirates in the Silesian Sector. His operations were an unqualified success, destroying dozens of pirate ships and many bases before the Silesian government—with heavy technical support from Manpower—made a covert attempt to either destroy or discredit him. These efforts resulted in the Battle of Trautman’s Star and then in the Battle of Carson, in which Saganami and the entire crew of his flagship were lost in the successful defense of a convoy against overwhelming odds.
The SKM’s response to the Battle of Carson, unfortunately for the Silesians (and Manpower), was the exact opposite of the one they had anticipated. Instead of being horrified and convinced Silesia was simply too dangerous an area for Manticoran trade, the public—and the Royal Manticoran Navy—had been given an iconic hero. HMS Nike’s last action became a rallying point which galvanized the entire Star Kingdom into wholehearted support for the Silesia mission. In the end, the RMN dispatched a complete squadron of battleships to systematically locate and destroy pirate bases throughout the entire eastern portion of the Confederacy. Following the successful eradication of piracy in the region, the battleships—supported by two divisions of dreadnoughts—made a “courtesy call” on the Confederacy’s capital system to escort the new Manticoran ambassador to Silesia. In the face of that visit, the Confederacy signed a most-favored star nation trade agreement with the SKM—and the Cherwell Convention—in 1674.
Even as Manticore’s economy expanded following the discovery of the Junction, the Star Kingdom’s constitutional system of government prospered, blessed by a series of strong monarchs and a steadily growing population base. The constitution contained a strong “Declaration of Fundamental Rights,” but the franchise remained limited to citizens who had paid taxes for at least five consecutive Manticoran years. The policies encouraging immigration with land rights credits were ended after a period of fifty years, having served their purpose most effectively, and it was no longer possible for an immigrant to become an instant shareholder or gain the franchise immediately upon arrival. The steadily expanding economy and one of the best educational systems in the explored galaxy continued to offer vast opportunity for the talented and the hardworking, however, and the SKM had become a bustling meritocracy which welcomed those eager to take advantage of the opportunities it offered. The result was a remarkably stable society, despite the rapid growth of its economy and the upswing in immigration following the discovery of the Junction.
The only real challenge to the Manticoran monarchy came in 1721 PD with the so-called “Gryphon Uprising,” which remains the most serious internal dissent the Star Kingdom has been forced to confront. Gryphon, the least congenial of the three habitable planets of the Manticore System, had, by far, the smallest share of First Shareholder families. The bulk of its aristocracy came from the Second Shareholders, who, for the most part, had substantially less credit than First Shareholders and so received smaller “Clear Grants” (that is, land to which clear title was granted prior to improvements by the owner/tenant). The Crown, however, had established the principle of “Crown Range” (land in the public domain and free for the use of any individual) to encourage emigration to Gryphon. By 1715 PD, the population of Gryphon had grown to the level set under the Crown Range Charter of 1490, so the Crown began phasing out the Crown Range, granting title on the basis of improvements made. That’s when the trouble began. Yeomen who hoped to become independent ranchers, farmers, or miners claimed that the planetary nobility was using strong-arm tactics to force them off the land. Something very like a shooting war erupted between these “squatters” and “the children of shareholders.” After two years of increasingly bloody unrest, the Gryphon Range Commission was established in 1717 with extraordinary police powers and a mandate to suppress open violence and reach a settlement. Its final finding was that there was a sound foundation to the yeomen’s original complaints and the Manticoran Army, having pacified and stabilized the situation, then oversaw a closely regulated privatization of the Crown Range. There remains some hostility between small landholders and certain of the noble families, although it has become something of a tradition rather than a source of active hostility for the majority of the population.
The Calm Before the Storm
1723–1857 PD
The period from 1723 to 1857 was a time of relative peace for the Star Kingdom although events beyond its borders were later to have profound consequences for the House of Winton and all its subjects. In particular, the Republic of Haven’s official transformation into the People’s Republic of Haven, although of little apparent concern to Manticore, would eventually present the SKM with a fundamental threat to its very existence.
For two centuries, the RMN’s attention was directed primarily to commerce protection and anti-slavery operations. As the power that claimed sovereignty over the Manticore Junction, the Star Kingdom felt a degree of responsibility to protect the trade of other systems as well as its own, and the RMN found itself involved in several punitive expeditions (none on the scale of the Silesia Mission). Although some of the weaker star nations in Manticore’s
growing sphere of interest resented the SKM’s “interference” in their affairs, most also recognized how much their own peace and prosperity during this period owed to Manticore’s protection against outside threats.
In 1752 PD Manticore fought a brief, almost bloodless, war with Trevor’s Star over the punitive tariffs the near-bankrupt San Martin government had decided to impose on all traffic through its terminus of the Junction in violation of The Treaty of 1590 PD. The RMN followed a deep-space approach with half its battle fleet rather than using the wormhole route the Trevor’s Star government on San Martin had assumed it would use. The war ended with a single, sharp engagement around the planet. As part of the peace terms, Manticore, recognizing the fiscal extremity which had driven San Martin to levy its tariffs, negotiated a “most favored star system” trade agreement with them. Shaken by its experience, the war government of San Martin brought the Trevor’s Star budget under control and greatly reduced welfare payments, and the system became one of the few systems of the Haven Sector that had a sound, thriving economy.
Following the “war” with Trevor’s Star, Manticore returned to the normal affairs of expanding and protecting its commerce and the Junction’s ever-growing traffic. Over the course of the next century, the Manticoran shipbuilding industry became the most efficient and productive in the known galaxy, and the advantages of the Junction also transformed the Star Kingdom into one of the galaxy’s largest and most important financial hubs. The resulting prosperity raised Manticoran per-capita income to a level unsurpassed even by the Sol System itself, and in 1829, first-generation prolong reached the Star Kingdom, with all its promises and implications for the future.
In many ways, this period was the “Golden Age” of Manticore, yet clouds were gathering on the horizon. In 1793 the People’s Republic of Haven issued a new constitution which made the Legislaturalists its hereditary rulers, and in 1794 the PRH, despite a huge and growing national debt, began a systematic, sustained military expansion. Initially described as a “public works project,” the enlarged People’s Navy’s actual purpose became clear in 1846, with the PRH’s first forcible conquests of neighboring star systems.
King Roger’s Buildup
1857–1883 PD
In early 1856 PD, survey ships successfully charted the Junction terminus in what became known as the Basilisk System, 210 light-years to galactic north of Manticore, and about the same distance from Havenite space. The following year the aging Queen Samantha II passed away in her sleep leaving her son Crown Prince Roger to ascend to the throne as King Roger III, the first prolong recipient to take the crown, on September 24, 1857 PD.
King Roger III was an astute student of galactic history and politics and it had been clear to him even before 1846 that the PRH posed a threat not only to its immediate neighbors but to Manticore as well. The SKM’s wealth must make it an attractive target, and as the only star nation in the Haven Sector with the potential to match its military power it was a threat which must be neutralized. With two termini (Trevor’s Star and Basilisk) already within reach of the PRH’s expanding military the Star Kingdom’s vulnerability was obvious to him, as was its need to build up its ability to protect not only its commerce and the Home System, but also to defend the Junction itself.
Roger, a gifted politician as well as an experienced naval officer, realized the Conservative Association and the alliance of the Liberals and Progressives in both houses of Parliament would oppose any rapid and massive expansion of the fleet. Queen Samantha had begun a gradual buildup, largely on Roger’s advice, despite that opposition, and following his own coronation, he immediately began building on that foundation. Aware that Manticore would never be able to match the sheer tonnage the far larger PRH could produce and unwilling to accept the plateaued, virtually stagnant state of galactic naval technology and doctrine, he adopted a two-pronged approach.
The first prong was an open, public increase in the Navy’s size, expanding the capacity of the major naval yards aboard the space stations Hephaestus, Vulcan and Weyland and slowly growing the number of ships available to it despite a number of often ugly confrontations with the Opposition. The second, highly secret prong was what became known as “Project Gram,” a highly covert R&D program designed to overcome the Star Kingdom’s quantitative disadvantage by providing it with a decisive qualitative superiority.
Thus began a fifty-year “cold war” between Manticore and the People’s Republic. Roger’s strategy for winning that cold war largely depended on three of the Star Kingdom’s greatest strengths: the quality of its educational system and the innovative R&D it supported; its enormous, far-reaching merchant marine (with ties to both the Navy and to various industrial cartels throughout the Star Kingdom); and the vast wealth generated by Manticoran economy and from the transit fees from the Junction. Despite those advantages and his own role as head of government, as well as head of state, Roger was never able to move as quickly and decisively as he would truly have preferred. He was a powerful and effective monarch, but it took him almost twenty T-years to build the decisive political majority he required in Parliament, and especially in the House of Lords. It is a testimonial to his abilities as statesman and politician that he did achieve it and that he passed it intact to his daughter upon his own untimely death.
Despite opposition from some members of the aristocracy, King Roger’s buildup increased the RMN from a mere twelve ships of the wall at the time of his coronation to nearly eighty ships of the wall by his death.
Queen Elizabeth III
1883–1905 PD
Roger III was killed in a grav ski accident on August 24, 1883 PD. His daughter was crowned Queen Elizabeth III, supported by a regency until she reached the majority age of twenty-one T-years in 1886. Contrary to the expectations of many members of Parliament, Queen Elizabeth not only continued but accelerated her father’s naval expansion programs.
Over the next twenty T-years, hostility between Manticore and Haven deepened, especially after the Havenite conquest of Trevor’s Star gave the PRH control of that system’s Junction terminus. During the same time period, as the stakes and the inevitability of an eventual military confrontation became ever clearer, the SKM’s internal political struggles intensified. The isolationism of the Conservative Association, which had initially generated at least grudging support for the Navy’s buildup, turned into a sense of profound alarm as the Conservatives recognized Elizabeth’s grim determination to continue her father’s work, further strengthen the Navy, and expand the anti-Haven Manticoran Alliance Roger had envisioned and begun. They came to view her efforts and her obvious readiness to confront the PRH openly as a dangerous and provocative eagerness to do so. Their alarm brought them into alliance with the Liberals and Progressives in their efforts to block or slow military appropriations. Fortunately, Elizabeth proved as skilled a politician as her father had been. She and her prime minister, the Duke of Cromarty, maintained and strengthened the partnership, based on Cromarty’s own Centrists and the Crown Loyalists, which Roger had forged and continued their war preparations despite the Opposition’s vociferous resistance.
The first shooting incident between Manticoran and Havenite forces occurred in the Basilisk System in 1900 PD with the destruction of the armed merchant ship PMSS Sirius by the light cruiser HMS Fearless (Commander Honor Harrington, commanding) following a failed attempt by Havenite operatives to incite a general native uprising on the planet of Medusa. A second incident occurred two T-years later in the Yeltsin’s Star System, when RMN forces (once again under Captain Honor Harrington’s command) successfully stymied a Havenite-backed attack on the planet Grayson by the planet of Masada in the neighboring Endicott System. These incidents further increased the tensions between the two star nations.
The next few years saw a hardening of positions as Haven expanded into neighboring systems while Manticore continued to consolidate its alliance of smaller single-system star nations along the front. Both sides built a number of fleet
bases and established nodal concentrations of warships and both realized it was only a matter of time before a shooting war began.
The First Havenite War
1905–1918 PD
The long-awaited catastrophe began in 1905 when the People’s Republic launched a deliberate, widespread, undeclared series of attacks on the Star Kingdom designed to draw the RMN into dispersing its strength in response. The initial attacks were followed with a two-pronged offensive directed against Yeltsin’s Star and the RMN fleet station in the Hancock System. The intention was to strike both of these nodal points in overwhelming strength in order to defeat the forces stationed there in detail, destroying them and substantially weakening the Navy before the decisive campaign. Both attacks were thrown back with heavy Havenite casualties, however, and the shock of the PRH’s first serious military defeats had profound consequences. Acting quickly and decisively in the wake of the disastrous news from the front, Rob S. Pierre and his Committee of Public Safety were able to assassinate Hereditary President Sydney Harris and overthrow the Legislaturalist regime in a bloody coup.
For the next ten years, the war raged. Initially the RMN won battle after battle against the demoralized Havenite Navy, which had lost the bulk of its experienced senior officers to the Pierre Coup and was badly hampered by the control of “people’s commissioners” who had little or no understanding of naval warfare. The RMN made deep inroads into Havenite territory, but the People’s Republic gradually recovered and the Manticoran advances began to slow. Finally in 1910 PD, the RMN’s Sixth Fleet under the command of Admiral White Haven was able to liberate the Trevor’s Star System, thus regaining control of all of the termini of the Junction. Three T-years later, in 1913, a new president, Jesus Ramirez, was elected under the restored, prewar San Martin Constitution following his escape from the prison planet of Cerberus in company with Admiral Honor Harrington, and in June of 1914, Trevor’s Star sought annexation by the Star Kingdom of Manticore.
