House of Ravaillac
 Arms of the house in their original blazon | |
| Country |  Commonwealth of Hamland Caputia
|
| Origin |  Alexandria
|
| Motto | An veritas, an nihil |
| Religion | Church of Alexandria |
| Titles | Governor-General of Monovia |
| Seat | Blanchefort, Zurich, Monovia |
| Founder | Donat Ravaillac |
| Successor house | House of Rothborne (1653 AN) |
| Cadet branch | Line of Judith Ravaillac |
| Notable members | Donat Ravaillac Elizabeth I of Caputia |
The House of Ravaillac is a noble house of Alexandrian origin that rose to prominence in the government of the Commonwealth of Hamland and became the founding family of the royal House of Rothborne of Caputia. The family descends from Alexandrian immigrants who settled in Monovia and in Hamland Proper, and it held to the Church of Alexandria through its rise in Hammish public life.
Its most prominent member, Donat Ravaillac, founded the Reform Party of Hamland and governed Monovia before serving as Deputy Prime Minister and afterward as Interim Prime Minister of the Commonwealth, until his assassination in 1644 AN. His daughter Regina led the Ravaillac Loyalists through the Hammish Civil War that followed, was offered the crown of the Commonwealth's successor state, and afterward received the visions on the road to Zalae out of which the Melusinian faith grew. She was invested in 1653 AN as Queen Elizabeth I of Caputia and established a new reigning house under the name Rothborne; her marriage in 1661 AN to Francis Joseph IV, titular Emperor of the Alexandrians, renewed an Alexandrian connection the family had carried since its origins.
Origins
The Ravaillacs were Alexandrian immigrants who settled in Monovia and in Hamland Proper, where they acquired extensive undeveloped land. The family's own heraldic account records that the house once held undisturbed lands where stags roamed free. It professed the faith of the Church of Alexandria and continued to do so after settling into Hammish society.
By the generation of Donat Ravaillac the family had become a Hammish office-holding house with an Alexandrian inheritance, and it carried purpure in its arms for that descent long before any marriage into the Alexandrian imperial house took place.
Rise in Hamland
The family's footing in Monovia came through the wife of Donat Ravaillac, Eva, whose gentry line gave its name to Blanchefort, the Governor-General's residence at Zurich in Monovia. The castle in the house's arms represents Blanchefort.
Donat Ravaillac was granted the office of Lieutenant-Governor of the Protectorate of Hammish Monovia, styled His Honor with the honorific The Honorable, and afterward became Governor-General of Monovia. He sat in the Hammish legislature as the member for the Protectorate of United Monovia. From the Governor's Mansion at Zurich he announced the founding of the Reform Party of Hamland, a center-right party formed against the Hamland National Party and what he called "a game of musical chairs among the nation's elite". Forza Monoviana, the Monovian right-wing party led by Jean Vargas, merged into it at Blanchefort, and the combined party went into the Hammish constitutional elections that followed expecting a supermajority. Ravaillac also introduced the Province of United Monovia Bill, which sought to raise Monovia from a protectorate to a full province of the Commonwealth and which gave the territory the name the house used thereafter.
In an allocation of the Hammish overseas governorships the house took the Protectorate of United Monovia and Villa Levi, a colony founded by the Israati businessman Benjamin Levi and vacant since he left Hammish public life; the Realm of Haifa passed at the same time to the House of Meir. The Caputian crown later assumed the Haifan governor-generalship in its own right, and Queen Elizabeth I held that title among her styles.
Villa Levi did not stay with the house. Ravaillac, signing as Minister of the Homeland and Governor of Hammish-Monovia, concluded the Treaty of Bel-Air with the Greater Pallisican Trade Association, the first article of which ceded Villa Levi in perpetuity together with Passas and the Hammish overseas colonies; in return the Commonwealth received the Region of the Northern Anterran Isles and the Isle of Eastern Rey. The overseas standing of the house rested on Monovia alone thereafter.
Lewis succession and the emergency government
When Lord Lewis was elected Prime Minister of the Commonwealth, he invited Donat Ravaillac to serve as Deputy Prime Minister together with any further post Donat wished to hold. Lewis, the founding sovereign figure of Hamland and head of the Miller dynasty, attended to the Commonwealth intermittently, and in his final addresses to the nation he proposed that the country be reconstituted with Donat as Prime Minister. Lewis did not govern again. Donat's own reply accepted the designation but asked Parliament to confirm him in the office rather than let him assume it on that authority alone.
Parliament never answered. After more than four months in which neither Prime Minister Lewis nor the Seneschal Juan Teaodir was heard from, and after a search by the intelligence services, the military and the national police had failed to find either man, Donat, then Minister of the Homeland, issued Order 001 reciting their prolonged absences and declared a national state of emergency. Provisional Constitutional Order 001 made him Interim Prime Minister at the head of the Council of State for the Salvation of Hamland. Opponents of the Council called the order a usurpation, and the charge has attached to his name since; his defenders answer that his reply to Lewis had asked Parliament to confirm the designation rather than let him assume it.
The balance between the civilian and military halves of the new government did not survive the death of Gerardo Lopez, one of Donat's chief negotiators. After Lopez died the military officers held practical control of the country, and Donat served as the unwilling face of their government. His promises of new elections and constitutional reform set him against the generals, and the National Salvation Front formed in opposition to the Council of State.
At a military review held at New Kirrie in 1644 AN to mark the pacification of Haifa and to send off troops for Israat and Anglia, Donat was shot by a sniper as Air Force jets passed overhead and distracted the crowd during his speech. Bombs detonated across the city, destroying the Prime Minister's Residence and cutting the roads out of New Kirrie. Ravaillac and ten others were killed and the Alexandrian ambassador Josef Droz was wounded; the Interim Prime Minister was airlifted to a military hospital and declared dead on arrival, at the age of forty-eight. Contemporary reporting recorded responsibility as disputed: his own loyalists held that the military had arranged both the killing and the rise of General Augustus Eliphas, while other accounts laid it to the National Salvation Front. The Hammish Civil War had been nearing its end; the assassination reopened it, and Eliphas governed under martial law for nearly the whole of the nine years that followed.
Donat was survived by his wife, Eva, and three children: his eldest son and heir Aurèle, his daughter Regina, and his younger daughter Judith. Aurèle, then about twelve years old, was killed in the reprisals against Ravaillac loyalists that followed his father's death. The killing extinguished the senior male line of the house and left Regina, a child of about eight, as its heir.
Ravaillac Loyalists
Regina Ravaillac succeeded her father as Governor-General of Monovia, declaring in her instrument of succession that she assumed all of the rights, responsibilities and power of the office; she was eight years old, and the powers of the office were exercised through a regency during her minority. She withdrew to Monovia, where the governorship her father had held supplied the Ravaillac Loyalists with an organized political wing alongside the National Congress of United Monovia.
The Loyalists took the field against the National Provisional Authority, the military government of the Council of State. Regina sat as a mediator, with the Alexandrian ambassador to Hamland Josef Droz, at the Weanburg Conference between the Authority, the Hammish Republican Army and the National Salvation Front. The conference collapsed into recrimination, and on its last night a member of the Weanburg Militia attempted to kill her and Droz.
Neo Patrova, a neglected coastal exclave whose governor held the title of Gabbnor, had been in Loyalist hands since the beginning of the war. An Authority armada entered the estuary of the Camoleo river by night, bombarded the naval base and artillery fort that commanded it, and put six regiments ashore; the fort fell after six days of fighting, at a cost of some 2,740 Authority dead. The campaign was halted rather than concluded. Shireroth, which had until then supported the Authority, changed sides, broke off the advance on the exclave's capital at Freedom City and declared a unilateral ceasefire; under the terms agreed at Freedom City the Gabbnorship passed to an elected civil government aligned with Regina.
The war was decided less by arms than by disease. The Alexandrian Flu, released by the Authority from a weapons facility and then loosed by accident while being moved to the eastern front, ravaged the country and degraded every faction in the field. It spread into Alexandria with the withdrawing peacekeepers and brought that country down as well. With Shirerithian and Natopian support the Loyalists and the Hammish Republican Army pushed to the outskirts of the Authority's capital at New Kirrie, where the fighting settled into a siege of months.
Neither side could carry it. The stalemate, the flu and the famine that came with them brought all parties to talks at Monoviaville, where Regina deputized George Blakeslee to lead the National League's negotiating team in her absence. She was afterward elected President of the Constitutional Convention that assembled to refound the country, and the Convention resolved on the nomination of the delegates Blakeslee and Jean Overstreet to offer her its crown.
On the road from Judah to Zalae a wave carried Regina and her party out to sea and returned them unharmed to the shore, where those with her reported that a goddess rose from the water, named herself Melusine, and granted Regina a vision of a united and prosperous nation to be called Caputia. At the ruined city of Macsen a hundred thousand people lined the road, and a pair of twins stricken with the flu were presented to her; witnesses reported that she healed them at a touch, and the Church of Caputia afterward recorded the act as the first miracle of the Melusinian faith. Tens of thousands more gathered outside Zalae for the miracle she had promised on her arrival, and reported a spinning sun and a wave that broke into vapor and colored light. Zalae became a place of pilgrimage. Regina was taken as the leader of what was then called the Cult of Melusine, though she said repeatedly that she would not serve as its head.
Eliphas died in 1653 AN, two days before the Declaration of Zalae, leaving a will that ordered the war ended and invited Regina, whom it styled the Queen-in-Zalae, to march on New Kirrie and reunify the country.
Elizabeth I and the House of Rothborne
Regina accepted the crown on the condition that the choice be confirmed by a plebiscite of the whole country, and was invested on 25.XV.1653 AN as Queen of the Kingdom of the Union of Caputia, taking the regnal name Elizabeth. The constitution and her queenship were afterward ratified by referendum. She reigned for seventy years, longer than the kingdom itself.
Rather than continue the Ravaillac name, Elizabeth established a new reigning house under a new name, the House of Rothborne, in the first year of her reign. The choice followed the destruction of the senior Ravaillac line in the war: with her father and her brother dead, the queen founded the dynasty afresh. The Rothborne Family Pact of 1661 AN nevertheless defined the Royal Family as the descendants of Donat. In the same year she married Francis Joseph IV, titular Emperor of the Alexandrians, of the House of Carrillo. Because each spouse stood at the head of a church, the marriage was celebrated in three rites: a civil ceremony at Bellesea Palace in Zalae, chosen as neutral ground; a Melusinian service of prayer and dedication at the Most Holy Temple of the Faith; and an Alexandrian consecration at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Storms in Dos Gardenias. Her children were reckoned to their father's house, and through that line the descent of the House of Ravaillac passed into the royal houses of Caputia and Alexandria.
The house's Alexandrian adherence did not pass to the reigning line. Elizabeth established the Church of Caputia by act in 1654 AN as the state church of the kingdom and the institutional form of the Melusinian faith that had grown from her visions, and took its supreme governorship among her styles. The senior order she founded in the same year, the Most Noble Order of the Melusine, carries the motto Vincit Semper Veritas on the same theme of truth as her father's house.
Blanchefort passed with her into the monarchy. A royal proclamation of 1659 AN regulating the establishments of the Caputian Royal Court defined it as the secondary center of the court, reserved to the sovereign and the royal household and used for instruments of lesser weight issued while Parliament stood prorogued or dissolved, and named its place as the city of Zurich in the state of Monovia.
Elizabeth's eldest son Edgard III succeeded her as head of the house on her death in 1723 AN and took the Alexandrian imperial title in 1737 AN. His marriage in 1689 AN to Vadoma I, Empress of the Natopians, carried the line into the Natopian imperial house of Waffel-Paine. As of 1758 AN their eldest daughter reigns as Empress Clara of the Natopians and is queen consort of Nouvelle Alexandrie. Through her eldest daughter Sayari, Princess of Rimarima the line reaches Inti, Duke of Vilcabamba, born in 1755 AN, the fifth generation in descent from Donat Ravaillac.
Cadet branch
The Ravaillac name survived the transformation of the senior line through Judith Ravaillac, the youngest child of Donat and Eva. Born about 1640 AN, she lived through the war and was afterward created a Caputian peeress, becoming the ancestress of the house's cadet branch. Her Hebraic given name placed her within the naming register of the city of Judah and the Hammish regions of Israat and Haifa.
Caputia fell to the White Plague on 30.XV.1668 AN, and the cadet Ravaillacs passed with the rest of the kingdom's people into the Caputian diaspora. Their descendants are recorded among the tens of millions holding claim and proof of Caputian citizenship or ancestry under the Royal Caputian Government in Exile rather than as a titled house. As of 1758 AN the name survives chiefly in toponymy. Ravaillac, the capital of New Caputia in Nouvelle Alexandrie, was founded by Hamland as New Northmann, passed to Nouvelle Alexandrie in the aftermath of Operation Purple Splendor in 1719 AN and was renamed thereafter; it is a cultural center for the descendants of the diaspora. In Amaland, the municipality of Donat's Hamlet is named for Donat Ravaillac and the municipality of Ravaillac for the house itself.
Heraldry
The arms of the House of Ravaillac were first blazoned parted per fess murrey and tenne, cross sanguine. A later and fuller version reads parted per fess purpure and or, cross sanguine, chief dexter eagle displayed or, armed and langued gules, chief sinister stag rampant proper, sun in his splendor or, base dexter castle proper, base sinister trefoil vert. The house motto is An veritas, an nihil, "the truth or nothing".
By the family's own account the purpure records its Alexandrian ties, as does the gold eagle, while the gold field refers to Hamland and to the gold star in the flag of the Commonwealth and the red cross stands for its faith as adherents of the Church of Alexandria. Three charges carry the settlement history: the stag for the immigrants from Alexandria who settled in Monovia and Hamland Proper, the castle for Blanchefort, and the trefoil for the luck the family had in Hamland, where it prospered and lived in health. The sun in splendor stands for Hamland itself, which that account sets above all else. The blazon dates from before the civil war that destroyed the senior line.
Family tree
- Donat Ravaillac, Governor-General of Monovia (b. c. 1596 AN, d. 1644 AN), m. Eva, of the Monovian gentry
- Aurèle Ravaillac, heir of the house (b. c. 1632 AN, d. 1644 AN)
- Elizabeth I (born Regina Ravaillac), Queen of Caputia and founder of the House of Rothborne (b. c. 1636 AN, d. 1723 AN), m. 1661 AN Francis Joseph IV, titular Emperor of the Alexandrians, of the House of Carrillo
- Prince Edward, afterward Edgard III, titular Emperor of the Alexandrians and titular King of Caputia and of Hamland (b. 1664 AN), m. 1689 AN Vadoma I, Empress of the Natopians
- Princess Carla (b. 1664 AN), twin of Prince Edward
- Princess Andrea (b. 1665 AN)
- Prince Lewis (b. 1669 AN)
- Prince Felipe (b. 1671 AN)
- Prince Donat (b. 1673 AN)
- Judith Ravaillac, Caputian peeress and ancestress of the cadet branch (b. c. 1640 AN)
The children of Elizabeth I were reckoned to their father's house. For the senior line after 1664 AN, see House of Rothborne and House of Carrillo; for its Natopian descent, see Waffel-Paine.
