AH Timeline

Timeline of the Anglo-German Empire

Rise of the Empire period

1777*: General Burgoyne's army, advancing south from Quebec, soundly defeats American generals Gates and Arnold at the battles of Bennington and Saratoga. Arnold is killed by a Quebecois sharpshooter during a failed charge at Saratoga, leading to British regulars charging forth from Breymann Redoubt and routing Gates' main force. Burgoyne then advances south, pinning General Washington's troops between his and those of General Howe.

Washington's troops, demoralized from their failure at Germantown, are weary and unwilling to engage such vastly superior forces. With a British army of high morale and training between Washington and the rest of the Colonies, France refuses to side with the Americans. King George III then offers the Colonies the opportunity to surrender before the British move to crush Washington and the rest of the fledgling Continental Army.

Congress, seeing no way out, accepts. The United States of America capitulates after only three years of independence.

1787: A decade after the failed American rebellion, Parliament finally grants the Americans and Canadians of British North America representation in the House of Commons. A single new title, the Duke of New England, is created to appease demands for a position in the House of Lords.

1792: The French Revolution takes place. France is thrown into chaos.

1799: Napoleon Bonaparte takes control of the First French Republic. His programs of militarization force the British to match them; the King's German Legion is created in Hannover and troops are raised in British North America to lighten the load on the British Army. A total of ten regiments of horse and thirty of foot are raised witin the next five years.

1803: The First Napoleonic War begins.

1815: The First Napoleonic War ends with the six-month Belgian campaign. Nearly two hundred thousand soldiers are killed and wounded in the campaign, half of that number in the final, stalemated Battle of Waterloo. The battle, lasting a week and a day, is the first embryonic example of what will later be known as 'trench warfare'. Many of the casualties suffered by both sides are the result of attempts to charge and counter-charge between lines of entrenchments and repeated French attempts to secure the British strongpoints of Hougomont, La Haye Sainte, and Papelotte. A regiment of North American infantry at La Haye Sainte are responsible for a spirited, if pyhrric, defense of the hastily-fortified farmhouses against repeated attacks by French infantry.

1816: The Franco-Spanish War is ignited by Spanish refusal to cede territory in the Pyrenees to Napoleon's empire. Several regiments of Imperial Guard, the best French troops remaining after the bloodbath at Waterloo, are sent to engage the Spanish in Andorra. The Imperial Guard defeat an equally scraped-together Spanish army of nearly twenty thousand, forcing their surrender. The Spanish then capitulate, their remaining military effectively destroyed. Napoleon's elder brother, Joseph, is placed on the throne, placing the nation under the control of the Bonapartes. It is suspected in many of Europe's capitols that the entire war was fabricated to this end, but this is dismissed for lack of evidence.

1819: Prince Victor of Kent born in Kensington Palace.

1837: King WIlliam IV dies of heart failure. Victor ascends the throne as Victor I of Hannover. He travels back and forth between England and his German lands, spending half the year in Hannover and the other in Westminster, to demonstrate the continuing union between the peoples of the British Isles and of protestant northern Germany under his rule. Being of nearly entirely German descent, he would continue to reinforce the Empire's identity as an Anglo-German power. This would serve as the basis for the eventual foundation of the greatest empire since that of pre-division Rome.

1855: King Victor marries Princess Louise of Prussia.

1859: Crown Prince Victor II is born in Hannover.

1865: Prussia, a long-standing ally of the British, is invaded in late September by a coalition of the Austrian Empire and a number of German states. Victor comes to the aid of his father-in-law, Wilhelm I of Prussia, sending ninety thousand troops of the standing Royal Hannoverian Army to attack from Gottingen into Hesse, defeating a Hessian army at Kassel and moving south toward Frankfurt. His troops are engaged by a combined force from Baden, Bavaria, Frankfurt, and Nassau totalling one hundred thousand. The Hannoverian advance is halted outside the city, but Victor immediately begins to gather reinforcements from the British Isles and raise the Landwehr in Hannover, aiming to reinforce them by the new year.

1866: