The Federated Kingdoms

[John Cowan <cowan>]

Further details have appeared about the Federated Kingdoms.
What follows is written mostly from an English perspective.

The modern Federated Kingdoms date from the Act of Federation,
passed by the English Parliament in 1805 in response to the
French threat.  The three Kingdoms --- England, Scotland, and
Cambria --- are officially equal participants, although there
is a personal union between England and Scotland (i.e. they
have the same Monarch).

Federation is implemented by a process of mutual representation.
Each parliament elects two groups of representatives who attend
 the other two parliaments as full voting members.  This applies
separately to the Lords Temporal and Commons.  Lords Spiritual
(bishops) are not so exchanged, because Scotland has no bishops
and the Cambriese and Anglican Churches cannot agree on who is and 
who is not a legitimate bishop.  (The Anglican Church is national
and Protestant, There as Here, though perhaps not quite so
tolerant historically of "Low Church" viewpoints.)

In addition, the two Monarchs have an extralegal, but constitutionally
firmly entrenched, program of exchanging Privy Councillors.
Since in the eyes of the law the Cabinet is a mere committee
of the Privy Council, there are invariably Cabinet members in
each Kingdom who are M.P.s from the other Kingdoms.
A detailed system of Committees of Correspondence maintain
uniformity in matters of external defense, and formerly in
matters of the overseas possessions as well.

One difference between the English and Scottish parliamentary
systems and the Cambriese one is that the Royal Assent is not
quite as much a matter of form in Cambria as it is elsewhere.
Although the present Monarch, King Gerontius XIII, has never
refused the Assent, his late father did so or threatened to
do so on more than one occasion, particularly in connection
with the Budget of 1911.

Oddly, despite the personal union, Scots law is more different
from English and Cambriese law than they are from each other.
Cambria and England never received Roman law (the Codex
of Justinian) as Scotland did, although there are both Roman
and Celtic customary legal systems at the base of Cambriese law.
Nevertheless, Cambria is now more a common-law than a civil-law
country: jury trials of course exist there, though not quite
in English or Scottish form.

Ireland was never part of the F.K., but was ruled from 1155 to
1922 as a dependency of Cambria; the "rule" was often no more
than nominal in the Northland (Uladh), where the control of
Goidelic petty kings remained strong.  King Peter II of Cambria,
armed with the *Laudabiliter* bull from Pope Adrian IV, took
the submissions of most of the Irish rulers, and created his son
John (Iewan) *Dominus Hiberniae*.  Eventually an Irish Parliament
parallel to the Cambriese one evolved, representing at first
only the interests of the colonists.  This Parliament, however,
was entirely subordinate to the Cambriese Government.

After the Act of Federation, Cambriese control of the
Emerald Isle came to be a matter of mostly benign neglect.
However, a failure to recognize the legitimate aspirations of the
native Irish, plus a comparable tendency to allow the Cambrio-Irish
to have matters too much their own way, caused Ireland to seethe
with increasingly military revolts throughout the 18th and 19th
centuries.  The enfranchisement of the native Irish in 1822 did
nothing to quiet the agitation for a Free State.  After World War I,
the Cambriese in the mother country grew weary of supporting their
arrogant relatives to the west, and made plans culminating in
the Great Withdrawal and creation of the Irish Free State, a
self-governing country with only the most tenuous connection to
the Crown.  The Free State eventually unilaterally repudiated
monarchical government and quietly transformed itself in 1956
into a republic.

(Parenthentically, I must protest the loose use of "British"
for the English on Sessiwn Kemres: in the Brithenig Universe,
the "British" are unquestionably the Chomro.  As JRRT says,
"[I]n the quest for a quite unnecessary uniformity, the English
were deprived of their Englishry and the Welsh of their claim
to be the primary inheritors of the title 'British'."  Not
so across the interuniversal divide!)

-- 
John Cowan					cowan@ccil.org
		e'osai ko sarji la lojban.