Finding the Founding (Part II): The North Forgotten

For over 100 years Spain had a virtual monopoly on developing sugar colonies, destroying populations and eradicating cultures. Sweet success, literally and figuratively. During that century other Euro nations were arming themselves and they soon would join the fray. Spain became the “King of the Mountain,” like we used to play when I was a kid. Some kid is on top of a mound of dirt (that’s the King) and the rest try to drag that kid off the mound – the mountain. Not incredibly complicated, but it got you dirty, and that is the goal of being a kid. England, France and the Netherlands wanted to play and they wanted to pull Spain off their mound of dirt. For us in the United States today, England is the one “colonizer” with which we are most familiar, but what became most important to England in the New World wasn’t what we spend most of our time studying at school. Not even close.

So let’s see, so far I have used the word fray, and originally spelled it Frey. I referred to a mountain and a King and made an allusion in the title. The Game of Thrones references are quite fitting as the scramble for the New World, its lands and resources, and likewise control of the African Slave Trade, was much like the competing houses in GOT. Everyone believes in their own cause and discounts the cause of any rival – and the regular people, well, they likewise just get stabbed by Hounds and Needles. England is the ultimate winner, and just like __________ (to be filled in with the name of whoever survives Season 8), will sit on the iron throne of imperial domination in the New World and Africa …. And everywhere else for that matter. But it wasn’t the North American colonies that brought about an empire upon which the sun never set. No, this started in the Caribbean, just where Columbus started it for Spain.

In the 1500s Spain gobbled up the New World and controlled the Atlantic to become Europe’s premier power …. and Europe itself was primed to become the power of the world. England was not such a power, but its monarchs were setting out plans Baelish style to achieve a better place in the sun. After the War of the Roses between the Lancasters and Yorks, which formed the background for George R. R. Martin’s fiction, England was a second rate power in a third rate region. Henry VIII changed all that with a bit of double dealing with his rival Spain.

This is as close to GOT as Henry will ever come

Because of Henry’s girth and wastefulness in managing the resources of the realm, he appears to be the ultimate Robert Baratheon, but really his recklessness is more the style of Tywin of House Lannister – after all Henry is the heir of the line of Lancaster. He spent, borrowed and strong-armed, in a will to power that would have made Nietzsche proud. His main goal appears to have been reclaiming lands in France – if not all of France – for England. To do this he was sometimes ally of France (weird) and the Holy Roman Empire (Germany, sort of) but most of all to his in-laws, Spain. Henry VII who won the War of the Roses and invested England heavily into features of the wool trade seems to have understood that for England to grow great it needed to hitch its wagon to the rising power of Spain – a power emerging not from Dark Ages wealth in land and peasants and European trade goods (like wool) but in colonial investment in New World sugar production. Ferdinand and Isabella agreed to Henry 7’s desire to forge an alliance by blood, the main instrument of diplomacy in pre-modern societies. Henry 7 had his heir married to Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter, Catherine. Originally that heir was Arthur, but Arthur died before consummation and Henry 7 had to finagle a match with his new heir, Henry who would be the 8^th of his name.

But Henry 8 seems not to be satisfied to be tied to Spain’s ship. The importance of all his marriages is not really the intrigue behind trying to produce an heir but rather his wish to make England #1 among the powers of Europe – to win the real game of thrones. Henry 8 got rid of Catherine, not because of their mutual inability to gain a male heir as most historians go on about, but to break with Spain, break with the Catholic world and to break into new sources of revenue in his quest to make England a dominant power. Was he the real world Daenerys? The breaker of chains? The breaker of wheels? There was a dragon on his coat of arms.

Henry's Coat of Arms

But the wheel he wanted to break had nothing to do with slavery or mad kings as with Westeros’ Targaeyon claimant, and not even because of religion, as he was in early life a devout Catholic. Henry’s bad breaking had everything to do with Caesarian ambition – to seize property and resources, in this case from the Roman Catholic Church in England. Henry 8 made his own church for the love of power and a need for money, and to do that he had to get rid of Catherine, and his ties to Spain (and their most “Catholic” monarchs). Therefore, Henry 8 had enough money to pursue military affairs on the continent.

Henry VIII never realized that the true game of thrones was not about land in Europe, however, but would be played in the Atlantic World and in colonies in the New World. He was still thinking as a Middle-Ages warrior king rather than a modern monarch of a new age. In the new age wealth and power was not going to be about land and bread, but about trade, commerce and the mass production of whatever could make more and more wealth. Henry 8 failed to get England into the real game which would take place out at sea, and right where Columbus had left it – the New World. For England that would be left to Henry 8’s daughter and eventual heir, Elizabeth, and to her heirs the Stuarts. England enters the fray!