The Madness of Lord Jonathan

After all that time in the Periphery, we're finally back on Terra

Following victory in the Reunification War, the Star League’s promise of peace between the Great House was almost fulfilled. Most conflicts continued at a much lower tempo, especially between the Draconis Combine and bordering states. The Free Worlds League, destabilized by House Marik’s usurpation of power during the formation of the Star League, suffered terrorist activity, rebellion, and eventually full-blown civil war – marking the start of a disastrous pattern for that once-stable realm. (The “Damned Mariks, they ruined the Free Worlds League!” meme is one of the most accurate in the whole fandom.)

Only Racing Ourselves

However, there was a big problem at the center of the Star League. Almost from the moment the Reunification War ended, the rulers of the Terran Hegemony started wondering how they could possibly stay on top of their vast empire. Nicholas Cameron, who became First Lord of the Star League after his father Ian died on 24 August 2602, saw the Star League Defense Force (SLDF) as the ultimate answer. He ordered his generals to develop plans for putting down a rebellion by any of the Great Houses by force. When they came back with a list of what would be required, Nicholas signed off on all of it and his successors would be no more restrained. Even though history’s purpose had supposedly been fulfilled and humanity was united under one flag, huge sums of money were poured into military research and military recruitment.

The best (or, perhaps, worst) examples of the Star League’s arms race against itself are found in the realm of warship design. The League might have justified in building more armed dropships and perhaps the smallest warships for operations against pirates and small-scale rebellions – though the spending here was still staggering. A series of destroyer classes were commissioned; the failed Lola II-class in 2622, the unreliable Carson-class a decade later, then the adequate Naga-class arrived in 2645 to mark time until the arrival of the Lola III Destroyers in 2662. The Essex II-class of 2711 was the last of the Star League’s destroyer classes.

But if we can squint and see spending on destroyers as part of an anti-pirate program, massive investment in larger ships was clearly intended for use against the Great Houses – and it started early. The Potemkin-class Troop Cruiser was ordered right after the Reunification War. The first design from Riga Interstellar Shipyards came in at 750,000 tons, but by the time the first Potemkins were completed in 2611, the design had ballooned out to twice that size and a much greater cost. One hundred and six of these giant ships would be built. The first of fifty-two Texas-class Battleships, all of them massing about one and a half million tons, was commissioned in 2618 as an answer to the heavy warships fielded by the Star League’s member states. Not content with the Texas-class, the SLDF commissioned the enormous McKenna-class Battleship in 2652 and built two hundred and eighty of them over the following century. The priority shifted to battlecruiser designs in the latter years of the 27^th century, with the failed Cameron-class of 2688 replaced just three years later by the Black Lion II. In the 28^th century, the SLDF would turn to lighter cruiser designs – but we have an appointment with Lord Jonathan and need to get closer to the point.

The Star Lords

The old Star League sourcebook is practically our only source on the Cameron line. That makes it harder to tell where the text’s biases lie, but there are a few eyebrow-raising moments. We’re told that Joseph Cameron, only son of Nicholas Cameron, met a fairly unlikely end in 2641. The source is not complimentary to Joseph, describing him as a nasty character who resisted all attempts at reform and only adopted a superficial adherence to neo-feudal virtue after being trained by the SLDF. This was enough progress for Joseph Cameron to be appointed Director-General of the Terran Hegemony. It’s not entirely clear how this worked, but I assume that it was a kind of “training kingdom” for the heir. (Notably, we’re not told about any election for the post. Perhaps this is an oversight in the source, though given that the Captains-General of the Free Worlds League secured dynastic power in the Star League Accords it may be that the Camerons tightened their grip, too.)

Joseph’s time as Director-General was brief and ill-starred. He was quickly caught up in a major corruption scandal, supposedly of his own making. The forty-one year old heir to the Star League was then shipped out to the Periphery to avoid the press until things quieted own. However, our source claims that the case against Joseph was so good that an arrest warrant was in the process of being issue – when he died in a training accident. The actual description, of Cameron’s ‘mech just happening to stand on an “improperly prepared vibrabomb” and then suffering from an ejection system malfunction strains belief. (In my opinion, this section suggests that Joseph was assassinated, though it’s far from conclusive.)

The next First Lord of the Star League was Joseph’s son, Michael. He’s treated with more respect than his father – some suggestions of a playboy period, followed by a long and gushing description of Michael Cameron’s celebrity romance with his eventual wife, Duchess Katarina Mann. More substantially, Michael Cameron’s reign as First Lord was marked by an attempt to limit the military forces of the Star League’s component states. Star League portrays the decree, “Council Edict 2650”, as a response to Tadeo Amaris raising a dozen regiments in the Rim Worlds Republic. This seems like over-explanation given how much Nicholas Cameron had spent on building up military superiority over the Great Houses. In the Periphery sourcebook the incident is played off as little more than saber-rattling on the Lyran-Rim border. Once again, we’re stuck with healthy doubt rather than a clear idea of the truth.

We can have more confidence about something not stated directly in the sources. The Camerons were building up the state apparatus of the Star League, and especially its military, as the guarantee of their rule. This rather predictably caused a degree of resentment in other parts of the Inner Sphere (and especially in the Draconis Combine), but it also had the unexpected effect of creating cadres of public servants who swore their loyalty not to a specific homeland or to a feudal lord, but to the Star League itself. For generations, the distinction between loyalty to the League and fealty to its First Lord went untested.

Jonathan

In 2690, Michael Cameron was diagnosed with severe pancreatic cancer and abdicated his position as First Lord of the Star League. His eldest son Jonathan, then thirty years old, was seen as promising if a little unproven. His first act was to further increase SLDF funding. Star League notes, tellingly, that in Michael Cameron’s last years as First Lord, he’d “considered proposals to cut the military budget” – though clearly the source couldn’t tell us that Michael had actually made cuts. I think it’s fair to say that under new First Lord Jonathan, the extra SLDF money was not so much a change of course as a call for more speed. We’re told that the Star League High Council was sold on the idea with promises of benefitting from new military research after the SLDF had already moved on to the next cutting-edge systems. This is rather strange and must be a simplification. I can’t help wondering about what the negotiations really looked like. Perhaps the Great Houses were individually told that if they supported the new appropriations, they’d get rewarded? That would probably go down pretty well, at least until the budget vote passed unanimously.

I should clarify something here. The title of this issue doesn’t refer to the Star League’s arms race against itself – though I’m not opposed to saying that business was crazy, it was mostly the activity of sane people in an insane system. From what’s described in our sources, Jonathan Cameron seems to have suffered from epilepsy (Star League says that his symptoms were “similar to mild epileptic seizures” without making it clear how they were different), and went through bouts of schizophrenia-like psychosis. We also get some indications – nothing more – that Jonathan’s younger brother William had more serious mental health issues, suggesting a genetic component to the First Lord’s troubles.

Whatever their cause, Jonathan Cameron emerged from his seizures with memories of terrifying visions of his homeworld ravaged by foreign barbarians and became increasingly paranoid. The First Lord obsessed over building up enormously expensive defense systems for Terra and the surrounding worlds. We get some fragments attributed to him, including the rather intriguing hope of “an impenetrable wall of swords and ever-vigilant eyes”. The wall of swords, of course, is heavily discussed, but the ever-vigilant eyes are more mysterious. We hardly hear anything about the Star League’s civilian intelligence agencies in this period. There’s a line in the first Liberation of Terra volume indicating that the old Hegemony Central Intelligence Bureau was part of the massive Bureau of Star League Affairs – a subsection of its Department of Social Relations – but that’s about it.

Who Watches?

In 2725 a dynastic crisis in the Federated Suns exploded into what’s sometimes called the Second Hidden War, sometimes called the War of Davion Succession. We’re not terribly interested in this conflict today. For our purposes, it’s enough to say that it threatened the stability of the Star League, and that Jonathan Cameron’s paranoia did nothing to help him resolve the issue. Indeed, when the First Lord had been pressed to make a ruling on the legitimate succession of House Davion, he’d demurred and set up a board of inquiry to make regular reports without settling the issue.

When the shooting started, a number of senior Star League officials were horrified. We have the names of three: SLDF Commanding General Ikolor Fredasa, Bureau of Star League Affairs Commander Gregory Wallace, and Revenue Director Brice Hinchcliffe IV. Fredasa and Wallace were the two most important civil servants of their day, and Hinchcliffe was arguably the third. These three quite rightly saw Jonathan Cameron’s inaction as (at least) enabling a civil war that threatened the stability of the Star League and urged decisive action. Ironically, their own lack of decisiveness was their undoing. After years of trying to reason with his liege, Fredasa concluded that if it came to a choice between the Star League and its ruler, his loyalty must lie with the state. This would be a more alarming decision in a democratic realm, but I can’t convince myself that the General was a villain just because he thought Jonathan Cameron needed to be spending less time directing the affairs of the Star League and more time getting professional help. On pragmatic grounds, however, it must be said that Fredasa’s plan was rather stupid: he tried to convince Jonathan Cameron’s sister, Jocasta, to give up her spiritual life as an Abbess and become First Lord instead of her brother. When that failed, he tried to destabilize Terra ahead of a more straightforward coup by spreading rumors that Jocasta was plotting a coup. It should come as no surprise that this failed. The Hegemony Central Intelligence Bureau emerged from the murky depths of unseen history just long enough to expose this amateurish plotting. Fredasa, Wallaca, and Hinchcliffe were all hanged as traitors to the Star League.

Having done with the tale of the coup attempt, our sources generally focus on the “silver lining” of Jonathan finally realizing he needed help to rule and gradually turning his responsibilities over to Jocasta. But I think these developments within the Star League’s apparatus are extremely important for understanding what’s to come, and not just because someone else is going to organize a much more professional coup on Terra before the end of the 28^th century. After all, Ikolor Fredasa’s successor as Commanding General of the SLDF was Rebecca Fetladral, and she’d only last nine years in the role before retiring and recommending a successor we’ve all heard of – Aleksandr Kerensky.