May 8, 1516 – Le Tuong Duc Wins the Loyalty of his Guard

A zealous peasant rebellion in Vietnam rose up under the popular Tran Cao in the spring of 1516. Believed by some to be a Taoist sorcerer clad in his crimson robes, Tran Cao began gathering his warriors at the Quynh Lam Pagoda. He declared that he was the avatar of the god Indra, master of weather and warfare, and that this body was meant to rule as it had been born with links to both the ruling Le family and the previous dynasty, the Tran. His following expanded to form an army of ten thousand warriors that marched on the capital, Thang Long (later to be known as Hanoi).

As the massive peasant-army approached, the young emperor Le Tuong Duc stood up to address his personal guard. Tuong Duc was the latest in a line of disappointing emperors since the golden age under his grandfather, Le Thanh Tong. Thanh Tong had come to power through invitation as a teenager in 1460 when a counter-coup knocked his half-brother from the throne. Through his thirty-seven year rule, Thanh Tong instituted Confucian ideals into government. He wrote the Hong-duc, a comprehensive and systematic law, ordered detailed maps and a census, and personally toured the empire to alleviate issues with corrupt local officials. While highly popular with the Vietnamese, Thanh Tong notoriously opposed to outsiders, instituting isolation against trade and repeatedly campaigning to conquer land to the south and west. Foreign sailors who washed ashore in storms were castrated and impressed into military service.

After Thanh Tong’s death, his son Le Hien Tong continued the Confucian kingship until 1504, but the cruel five-year rule of Le Uy Muc made the imperial family very unpopular with peasants and nobles alike. He pitted palace guards against one another like gladiators for his amusement while he studied martial arts. Uy Muc’s cousin Tuong Duc, just fourteen years old, organized the emperor’s assassination and seized power. He worked to bring back the golden days of his grandfather, chasing out Uy Muc’s violent favorites and filling the court with scholars. To emulate greatness, he began costly projects like artificial lakes, pleasure palaces, and building an enormous harem that included many of his father’s concubines (breaking both Confucian and Vietnamese law). Heavy taxes to fund the projects spawned rebellions, and Tran Cao was the latest in a series of disputes. Le Tuong Duc expected his soldiers to put them down. Anyone who tried to show their disapproval was whipped, including the captain of his guard, Trinh Duy San.

With only the river between the capital and the oncoming army of rebels, Le Tuong Duc was suddenly shown the obvious errors of his ways as his heavy taxes logically led to such rebellion. He broke down and confessed his failures as a Confucian and emptied his harem, granting the wives to his guard to make up for the pain he had caused them. If this infighting continued as people acted beyond their positions, he predicted a Vietnam of weakness on a national scale. If strength did not come from within, it would oppress them from without.

Trinh Duy San swore his loyalty, and he led the defense as a veteran of the 1511 rebellion, once fighting a battle down to the last thirty men. The defenders attacked wherever the peasants attempted to make a beachhead on the river, finally driving back their superior numbers with superior weapons. Tran Cao fell in the battle, and the leaderless rebels dispersed.

Le Tuong Duc made good on his word, adhering to the law of his grandfather and repealing taxes. As the economy recovered, he found resources to organize more campaigns into the south against the growing power of the Tai and maintain Vietnam’s independence from China. In Tuong Duc’s later reign, the great general Mac Dang Dung stormed the lands of the dying Khmer Empire, conquering huge swaths of which he was made governor. Children of major families were brought to court schools and imbued with Confucian ritual and teaching: most importantly, to uphold the emperor.

In the seventeenth century, European ships began to appear on the coast. Portuguese and Dutch traders attempted to broker deals with emperors, but the boarders remained largely closed. Some technology had to be proven useful, such as the printing press that was installed to decrease dependence on China. Firearms were strictly regulated. Foreign luxuries and religions were banned, despite the efforts of French Catholic missionaries to make inroads.

It was not until the nineteenth century that the warships of the Kaiser opened Vietnam for trade with Germany, following the example of the United States Navy in Japan. A flood of western technology and cheap manufactured goods caused reprisals from locals suddenly being undersold. The German-Vietnam War briefly turned the empire into a colony, but Germany’s collapse in World War I liberated the country thanks to Woodrow Wilson’s vote of confidence at Versailles. Japan similarly seized and lost control in WWII. Vietnam transitioned to a constitutional monarchy supported by a vocal parliament with members such as the outspoken Nguyen Ai Quoc, who gained his attitudes of anti-socialism while being educated in Germany. 

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In reality, Trinh Duy San and others in the imperial guard assassinated Le Tuong Duc for his wasteful hedonism. They seized his nephew Chieu Tong as a puppet and retreated as the country fell into anarchy. Generals acted as warlords, looting as they pleased. Tran Cao was eventually defeated by a confederation of the two major houses, the Trinh in the north and the Nguyen in the south. While Vietnam would be united from time to time through the years, it would suffer a constant north-south division of power, even to the twentieth century when it was again united by Ho Chi Minh.

May 24, 1796 – Irish Rebels Take Dublin

For centuries, the English maintained rule in Ireland. The two had been joined politically after the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169 and 1171 under Henry II with permission of Pope Adrian IV (the only English Pope in Catholic history) to aid Dermot MacMurrough in retaking his lost throne in Leinster. Henry made further conquests in Dublin and created the Lordship of Ireland, making much of the island vassal states with relative independence. Henry VIII, as part of his Protestantizing of England, was named King of Ireland to assure his political dominance over the vast Catholic majority. When Ireland supported the Catholic James II against the incoming Protestant Mary and her husband, William of Orange, and lost the Williamite War in 1691, rule became systematized through the Ascendancy, the Protestant minority who controlled the Church of Ireland.

New ideas of liberty came to Ireland in the Enlightenment just as they had America and France. These ideas came later, as thousands of Irish were quick to join the Volunteers against the Americans in the 1770s, and, in the 1780s, most were pleased with the gradual freedoms won by politician Henry Grattan such overturning Poyning's Law that forced approval from London and granting Catholics of property voting rights (though they would not be able to hold office). By the 1790s, however, the Irish were ready for a rebellion to win their freedom.

In 1791, the Society of United Irishmen was founded in Belfast by liberal-minded Protestants who sought togetherness through Irish nationalism and an end to religious divisiveness. The success of the revolution in France excited the Irish in Ulster to find unity, which was a stark difference to the typical thinking that inspired sectarian warfare such as that between the Protestant Peep o' Day Boys and the Catholic Defenders. Loyalists fanned the flames of violence between them and contributed to founding the Orange Order as another society to counterbalance the efforts of the United Irishmen. When it became obvious that the goal of universal suffrage was not to be found politically, the United Irishmen looked for help in 1794 from revolutionary France, who dispatched an army of 14,000 soldiers in 1796 that never landed due to inclement weather and poor leadership. Uprising continued in Ireland without them, and the British reacted with violent measures such as execution, arson, torture, and pitchcapping. Martial law spread over much of the island, and loyalist spies among the rebels led to the capture of much of the Irish leadership.

On the night of May 23, the British military received late notice of an Irish march on Dublin. Samuel Neilson and Lord Edward FitzGerald, two of the remaining Irish leadership, decided to capitalize on the unrest born from martial law. British soldiers marched en masse to capture rebel meeting places, but they found them already held by the Irish. In furious firefights throughout the city's alleys and squares, the cunning and local knowledge of the rebels won out over superior British firepower. The city fell along with hundreds of British dead and thousands captured. Rebels intercepted mail-carriages, which was the secret signal to alert their allies in the surrounding counties.

While the British stopped a similar uprising at Carlow, the rebellion won out at Tara Hill and spread to the north, where it turned into guerrilla warfare among those seeking independence and those loyalists and Catholics who had come to distrust revolution after the French's capture of Rome three months before. Wexford (where the Normans had come into Ireland some 600 years before) became the center of Irish success, and the rest of the island became embroiled in war. In September, France finally made good on its promise of support, sending thousands of troops by sea into County Mayo on the northwest, giving all but Ulster to the revolution. The British, now wary of French intervention, began a blockade of the island, and a second expedition in October was intercepted. While the French were scattered, a few made it to shore, including Theobald Wolfe Tone, one of the original leaders of the United Irishmen who had been in exile since 1793 after the first discovery of communications with the French.

Wolfe soared through the ranks of the Irish with great promises, using to his advantage his theatrical leanings and firsthand knowledge of the French Revolution as well as interviews with General Napoleon (who himself did not much believe in the success of an Irish movement). Among some of his first actions were to remove the strength the Anglican Church, and then to weaken the Catholic church, placing as much property and money into government hands loyal to him. Wolfe dispatched Robert Emmet to the newly crowned Emperor Napoleon for additional aid, which was supplied, though the British redoubled their efforts to find a foothold among loyalists frustrated with Wolfe's rule. Napoleon was dubbed the greater enemy, however, and the fighting in Ireland grew into a stalemate until 1812 with Allied success in the Peninsular War and Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia.

After forced abdication in France, the British turned on Ireland, where Wolfe was hastily overthrown. The chaos continued until the newly made Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, an Irishman, was made military governor. While he was very popular in London because of his war service, he became immensely popular in Ireland after championing reforms, particularly Catholic Emancipation. With a better balance of political rule, reinforced by groundbreaking social services instituted during the Great Famine of the 1840s. Wellington's liberal nature, applauded by the Tories, would prove too much for British sensibilities, hamstringing his chances of a prime ministership.

Since its turbulent, short-lived republic, Ireland has been a key member of the British Commonwealth. It aided greatly in many of the Empire's international concerns including both world wars, although a renewed independence movement out of the Lost Generation in the 1920s that came mainly as social reforms and literary marvels.

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In reality, the capture of Dublin was foiled. While gains were made in Wexford over the summer of 1798, Britain put down the rebellion, albeit with substantial violence. Ireland would go through further rebellions in 1803, 1848, 1867, and 1913 until finally winning its independence in 1921. Ulster remained with the United Kingdom and would be the site of additional violence through the 1990s.

September 19, 1676 – Bacon Refuses to Torch Jamestown

The past two years in the Colony of Virginia had been troubling. Indians were attacking settlements on the western frontier after seizing property promised as payment from a farmer. The English retaliated with violence, and the raiding parties on both sides escalated. Governor William Berkeley had proposed a system of forts to placate the Indians under gradual removal, but farmers felt the plan would be as costly as it was ineffectual. Berkeley, who had long favored his own inner circle in government affairs, decided finally to recall the House of Burgesses to deal with the matter.

While the Burgesses gave great reforms, they did not directly address the issue, so wealthy planter Nathaniel Bacon marched to Jamestown with 500 followers and demanded to be commissioned as leader of a militia to destroy the Indian menace. He challenged Berkeley to give him a commission at gunpoint from his men, but the governor merely bared his breast and challenged Bacon to fire himself. Bacon repeated the action with the Burgesses, and they quickly gave him the commission.

After publishing the "Declaration of the People of Virginia" criticizing Berkeley's faulty government, Bacon and his men, some of whom were rebelling slaves and indentured servants, spent months fighting Indians, many of whom were peaceful and, in fact, allies of the English. Upon their return to Jamestown, many called for a revolution to remove Berkeley (who had fled across the river), but Bacon stopped them. His thirst for blood had been quenched, and he decided that his place was to ensure that the wrongs in the Declaration were made right. Working with the Burgesses, Bacon put forth the bill that the governor would now be elected by the colony as well as an ambassador to communicate with Parliament and the Company in London. Though Bacon would die of dysentery in October, his ideas would follow after him. Berkeley returned, intending on putting down a rebellion, but instead only finding landowners and freedmen looking for political change.

Berkeley was returned to London along with John Ingram, who would serve as representative from the colony. While Parliament disagreed with self-representation of the colony, the Virginia Company saw great potential in men striving for success (fighting Indians themselves, for example, instead of using English dividends to pay soldiers), and, after much debate and back-room deals, the agreement was made.

Virginia continued to expand and profit over the next century. Though Parliament enacted several laws over trade issues, political matters were largely reviewed by the colonists, who were given a requested amount of taxes by their representative and left to themselves to produce it. Other North American colonies followed in self-representation such as Maryland, Massachusetts, Bermuda, and Pennsylvania. The experiment was considered proven in the 1770s when the colonies were asked to aid in Britain's tremendous national debt from the Seven Years' War, which they did (though some colonists, such as the fiery Samuel Adams were arrested on suspicions of treason). Ideals of self-representation also came to Europe in several waves of revolt. They did not translate well in the bloody and ultimately pointless French Revolution, though many tyrants became controlled by constitutions.

While the colonies and Britain would often disagree with the violent treatment of natives, it would be another matter that would eventually drive them apart: slavery. Parliament ended slavery in the British Empire in 1833, and many American colonies saw it as a stomping of colonies' rights. Many of the Upper Canadian and New England colonies remained loyal, but the South and West rose up under General Andrew Jackson who had established himself as an Indian Fighter. Other rebellions went up in the Caribbean, and were quickly put down by the Navy before beginning the blockade that would choke out the rebel colonies. After six bloody years and the death of Jackson at New Orleans, the rebellion would come to an end in 1840.

America would continue to be an important part of the British Empire, serving with distinction in its wars against Mexico and Spain. Independence would creep up routinely in the collective mind of the Americans, which gained Dominion status in 1868 after being broken into New England, Dixieland, and the Western United Provinces of America. After the Second World War, these lands would gain independence but remain in the powerful bloc of the British Commonwealth.


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In reality, Bacon burned Jamestown as a display of dissatisfaction with Berkeley. The action would prove too much, and, after Bacon's death, his rebellion would disintegrate as Berkeley returned with Naval firepower. After retaking his post, Berkeley seized property, executed twenty men, and created strict lines between the races that would haunt the South to this day.