Simon I (Prince of Caledon)
| Simon I | |
| Incumbent | |
| Assumed office 80 | |
| Preceded by | Roger III |
|---|---|
| Succeeded by | Colin VII |
| Born | 47 |
| Died | 133 |
This article about a Sovereign Prince of Caledon is a stub. More material coming soon.
Simon Calhoun Douglass was the younger son of John III and Princess Adriane.
At birth, Simon was fourth in line to the throne, with every chance of dropping further had his older half-brothers and brother had children. There was little realistic expectation that he'd take the throne, ever.
So he went to the Royal University of Caledon, became a lawyer and joined a prominent trading house.
Then, as each of his half-brothers' and brother's reigns collapsed, he was called to the throne.
Simon was a capable but mediocre ruler - which, following Bruce II, Laurence and Roger III, was a step up. And as a businessman and lawyer, he had little patience for court intrigues, successfully mobilizing parliamentary support to quell their effects.
The Douglass Concord[edit]
His greatest accomplishment, perhaps, was reconciling the various branches of Clan Douglass, who had been feuding for two centuries, bringing the Grand Duchy of Douglass back into the Principality (albeit as a semi-autonomous region with its own sub-parliament) - and, almost as important, given the feuding, bickering and battling going on among the petty royals, the almost equally-difficult task of ushering Clan Douglass away from center stage. He negotiated a complex deal, offering a variety of political and commercial stimuli to the various branches of the clan to turn the throne over to Colin MacArthur, president of his privy council.
In the two centuries since the coup d'etat by Clan Craig of Laphraoig that ousted Clan Douglass from the monarchy, Caledon's fortunes had ebbed; the principality's social and economic dynamism was supplanted by pointless court intrigues that occasionally broke out into armed hostilities.
In the aftermath of the coup, the Mourhead sect of Clan Douglass had fled to start Grand Duchy of Douglass, and rumors abounded that other nobles were thinking of trying their luck outside the Caledonian umbrella.
Simon had brought some order to the clan's workings - but he looked at his own children, and saw the extent to which they were a group of bickering bobbleheads, and realized that Caledon needed a major change.
He approached his regent, Colin MacArthur, and formulated a plan; usher the corrupt Derwent and Clyde branches of the Douglass clans into retirement (with a large land grant and a charter for several Douglass-owned enterprises to keep the relatives busy), the negotiation of a treaty with his long-estranged distant relatives in the Mourhead clan on the Grand Duchy of Douglass bringing those three systems into the Principality, and the turning of the monarchy over to Clan MacArthur of Inverloch.
The Douglass Concord was not an easy process - it involved the careful delegation of power to a coalition of several clans in support of the MacArthurs (the Stuarts of Sutherland, Andrews of Leith and Adamsons of Dunfermline), but in the end it led to a successful turnover of power. Simon was broadly derided by the parts of the nobility that had been supporting one branch or another of Clan Douglass - but history has been kinder, christening Simon "Simon the Wise" not long after his death in 108.
Prince Colin VII has gone down in history as "Colin The Fair".
Later in Reign[edit]
He abdicated on 2-103, and spent the next thirty years writing books about the nature of power; many of these are regarded as classics of the Caledonian academy today.
During his rule, he never married; after his abdication, he married Preetha Gandhi, one of his personal secretaries. He had two children; one a successful scientist, the other a prominent humanities professor.