With love, Spain

XI.

"By affixing my royal seal, these mandates must be complied with in the viceregal lands," the Bourbon King pronounced. The red wax fell on the parchment, and before it had dried, the seal of the Empire had been affixed.

The reforms would not be long in coming, taxes would rise and the Church would lose the territories it had accumulated in the Americas. The first would be to make up for the lost battles and the second because the Church was made of properties and fields that she neither attended to nor produced.

It was also expected to consolidate the dominance of the crown over the territories, to make sure that the aberrant seed that the North American territory planted did not bear fruit, putting out the insurrectionary fires as soon as they arose.

Would my little brothers know of the conspiracies and battles that raged against the Empire? I lied to myself, believing otherwise, my eyes and ears were blinded by the memories of those boys and girls playing happily in the gardens.

However, America's evil seed was growing its roots, if you will. Do you know that boy owes me a huge favor? Well, it was I who managed to get the crown to sell him some weapons to achieve his independence.

My argument fell on the opportunity to weaken the English empire, without the largest of its colonies, it would lose a lot of power. I expected a domino effect, that when one colony fell, the others would fall, but that cunning crow managed to avoid it. To date, he maintains several territories under his influence. If Belize will know, if Argentina will know, if I will know.

However, the movement that the American had caused undoubtedly shook the structure of the world... and we were very slow to understand how weak our columns were.

Maybe that's my biggest flaw, ignoring the signs, too focused on what's happening now to think about the future. Let short-lived humans worry about tomorrow, we worry about now.

It was a summer when, finally, my eyes would see my little brothers again. Despite the fights for territories and wars, Europe had to keep up appearances, show us as the cradle of civilization and good manners, even if we hated each other. We should be better than Asia and the Americas, so a big party was organized.

After 100 years of war and decades of friction, the United Kingdom finally married the Republic of France. Everyone was invited... everyone.

The ceremony was exquisite, the pompously dressed groom waiting at the altar and a bride decorated in magnificent jewels and fabrics, advancing down the aisle hand in hand with her brother, Imperio Frances.

Now, we Europeans have always prided ourselves on our culture, technology, art, and so on, but when it comes to family, oh my gosh, we're a mess. Daughters marrying uncles and brothers murdering brothers.

For example, we have the family of the bride.

The French Kingdom had two children: the French Republic, known today simply as France, the one we all love and love, and the French Empire, renamed in history the Napoleonic Empire.

The eldest daughter killed her own father in the guillotine when he denied her power because she was a woman and forced her to commit to English. Her so-called "Revolution" led her to rule for a time, but when Napoleon Bonaparte arrived, he and her brother conspired against her.

Practically, the wedding was his brother's cordial way of getting rid of her without the need to shed more of his family's blood, but rather to cut her off from his life, to send her abroad, to a territory where she would have no influence or possibility of revealing herself. again.

But she did not want to get married, no matter how smiling she looked at herself while they exchanged her rings with the Englishman, we all knew that she preferred to have her head cut off, if not, why did she also give weapons and supplies to Thirteen Colonies? ? Or because she told him about the wonders of being a republic?