History of Bretonia
The Bretonian systems were founded by the inhabitants of the British sleeper ship Bretonia. The ship arrived almost 20 years after the Liberty. The region is now ruled over by a monarch and its capital is Planet New London.
The Bretonia was one of the last sleeper ships to arrive in the Sirius Sector, almost twenty years after the Liberty, Kusari, and Rheinland had made planetfall on what became their respective homeworlds. In the chaos of exodus, the starboard engine array of the Bretonia was destroyed, requiring her to limp the rest of the way to Sirius.
By the time the sleeper ship had arrived, most of the resource rich areas of the sector had already been claimed by the passengers of the other colonists, with the Liberty settling a lucrative area at the sector core. Bretonia was forced to select a less than ideal site near the Barrier. Here they established the colony of New London, on one of the few habitable planets in the area. Isolated by the Barrier from the other houses and years behind, Bretonia began an accelerated program of rebuilding their industrial civilization.
For the early part of its history, Bretonia was ruled over by a series of Princes, still technically subservient to the long abandoned United Kingdom of Great Britain back on Earth, there having been no Crowned Monarch since the death of Queen Elizabeth III at the height of the Alliance-Coalition War. This Principality was overthrown during the Bretonian Civil War of 317-319 A.S. due to the oppression of Prince Harry XXI in his state controlled development of Planet Leeds. Following a brief interregnum during which a Commonwealth was declared, a new constitution was drawn up under which the reigning family returned to rule as constitutional monarchs constrained by parliament. Thus the modern Kingdom of Bretonia was founded.
Throughout the late 5th and early 6th centuries, Bretonia was plagued by uncontrollable levels of space piracy, due to a group known as the Bretonian Buccaneers. Following the assassination of King William I by these Buccaneers in 565 A.S., his daughter Queen Eleanor I led a great campaign against them which finally resulted in the destruction of all Buccaneer bases and the cleansing of all organised crime for Bretonia, a situation which was to result in remarkably low crime levels in the House for the next 100 years, a period later known as the Bretonian Golden Age, often measured as 589 - 674 A.S. This period was characterised by a remarkable level of economic expansion, bringing Bretonia up to comparable economic levels with the other Houses for the first time in its history, whilst on the political front King William III, often labelled William the Great, laid claim to a vast Empire in Tau and Omega 3 during a time when the attentions of the other Houses were focused on the terrible 80 Years War in Sigma.
Following William's death in 674 A.S., however, Bretonia gradually sank into a period of troubles, ironically triggered by a series of great exploration expeditions funded on the back of recent economic successes. The discovery of Edinburgh and with it Planet Gaia in 685 A.S. was to eventually lead to the rise of the Green Front and later the Gaian terrorist movement, which would in turn eventually spawn numerous fringe pirate groups, the first major source of space piracy since the disappearance of the Bretonian Buccaneers. The greatest of these exploration expeditions, however, were those undertaken between 743 and 745 A.S. which, among other things, led to the discovery of gold in Dublin and triggered the great Dublin Gold Rush that would end so tragically with the Founder's Day Revolt and the beginning of the war of independence by the Mollies in 752 A.S.
By 760 A.S. crime levels were rising sharply across Bretonia, as Gaians, Mollies and the arrival of outcasts and corsairs from the edge worlds began to take its toll on the law enforcement capabilities of the Bretonian Police Authority and Bretonian Armed Forces. The situation was so bad that Prime Minister Lord Walter Brinkley was forced to invite the Bounty Hunters Guild into Bretonia, granting them Sheffield Station from the BPA and ordering the construction of Newgate Prison.
By the arrival of the 9th Century the situation had stabilised somewhat, with the eastern Dublin system secured by a new Fleet under the HMS-Essex and the Gaians prevented from gaining a foothold in Leeds. Being the least affected of all the Houses by the turmoil caused by the 800-801 Nomad War, Bretonia's position relative to the other three Houses was restored somewhat from its decline over the previous 100 years. Queen Carina felt confident enough in 809 to order a renewed expansion by BMM into Tau 23, with an ambitious lane and gate construction project designed to assure Bretonia's economic prosperity for years to come. A brief legal crisis involving the Independent Miners Guild in 810, however, was to prove a trigger for renewed conflict over centuries old claims to the riches of the Tau region between Bretonia and the Empire of Kusari, and by 813 A.S. the two Houses were mobilising for war. Bretonia now faces what many consider the greatest threat to its existence in its 800 year history.
