evilauthor wrote:Hmm. A thought in Siddarmark Republicanism... sort of:
Even before Merlin and Charis becoming an Empire, all the out islands had parliaments, a quasi-legislative body where the nobles and high ranking clergy of the land get together. But not a single mainland monarchy that we've seen has a parliament, or at least, not one important enough to actually be mentioned in the story.
And as I've previously mentioned, it's likely that the out-islands aped the mainland nations when putting a government together, especially since they likely did it later.
So my thought: monarchies with parliaments is how the angels and Writ mandated governments should be, at least at the start. Or maybe they didn't mandate it, but had the first countries bigger than a single village made that way.
Countries however evolve with time. The out-island kingdoms were young enough to still have parliaments. Most of the mainland nations though had their parliaments whither away, usually to centralize power in the monarch (or the bureaucracy in Harchong's case).
Siddarmark however went in the OTHER direction. Instead of withering away, their parliament became more important to their government. They started expanding the franchise early on. Some angel probably looked in on it and dropped the word "Republic" which Siddarmark embraced.
And the Temple Lands of course probably stays closest to its original form of government, at least until current events. The Grand Vicar and Council of Vicars IS the Temple Lands' government.
And irony of ironies, I suspect that the reason the Lord Protector is an elected position was done to ape the way the Grand Vicar gets elected. I suspect alot of Siddarmark's original Republican structure was done to copy the way the CoGA was run.
I mean, it can't be coincidence that the ONLY other major political unit other than Siddarmark that elects its leader is Mother Church herself, right?
It's probably stating the obvious, but 'Lord Protector' was the title given to Oliver Cromwell when he took over the 'head of government ' post. This was following the argument between King Charles and the English Parliament, which Parliament eventually resolved by disconnecting Charles' head from his body.
The quarrel was indeed over centralising power in the monarchy.
