Press Release
The Wolf & Hawk War was not a single war but a series of battles that occurred during the much larger, 50 Years War (1737 -1797) between the Empire of Frengland and Eire and The Kingdom of Holland and Zeeland, the Fennoscandian League (Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Iceland), Prussia, and a reinvigorated Empire of Spain.
The Wolf & Hawk War however was concentrated in two areas: Norway and The Low Countries.
With the outbreak of rebellion in Holland & Zeeland, Francis III, Emperor of Frengland And Eire sent newly commissioned Field Marshall Rene Apollinaire Fontainebleau to deal with the situation. Since Fontainebleau paid the Emperor in coin for his promotion, he was desperate for military victory and did any and everything he could to attain it. Managing to wrest the Company Crocodile (elite mulatto soldiers) from Field Marshall Hippolyte, he set out on a murderous rampage against the citizens and soldiers of Holland & Zeeland. They used deception and terror as their main weapon. They would dress up as beggars and traveling entertainers fleeing Francis III’s Frengland and move through the country towns gathering information on the Dutch resistance. After a few weeks of this, they would gather all of the intelligence and then attack the towns they visited in force, often killing the entire population. This was an effective deterrent to Dutch resistance and had proven very effective since Holland & Zeeland was occupied in 1740. But it was not to last. Across the sea in the English half of the Frenglish Main, in the imperial city of Dover, a skilled enemy came forth. His name was Lord Alfred Darlington.
Lord Darlington was born in Southhampton and was the son of a popular Frenglish general (Banastre) in the short-lived court of Francis II. His father was killed when Francis III came to power, yet young Alfred had been spared. His mother, (also spared) was a Dutchwoman from Amsterdam (Ineke) and it is widely believed that Alfred’s father was killed because his loyalties would be impaired when the order was given to invade Holland. Alfred grew up to loathe the Empire. He did however enroll in the military school in London and excelled at navigation and reconnaissance. When he graduated (at the top of his class) he was sent to the East Indies with Admiral Thierry Jacoulet (The Scourge Of God) to subdue the remaining forces of Holland & Zeeland on the island of Java. He carried out his duties without question and became the youngest member ever to be accepted into the Order Of The Radiant Crest (a naval fraternal order created by Francis I of Frengland). He however hated Jacoulet’s cruelty and indifference to the native people of Java. On the trip home, a fellow seaman made some disparaging comments about Darlington’s wife Laura (a crypto-Dutchwoman). Alfred then threw the man overboard to his death, effectively ending his career and all of the hard-earned prestige he had won. After his court martial, he was sentenced to house arrest. He then spent the next few years regretting his decision and at the same time, fueling his longstanding hatred of Francis III. He at last decided to renounce his allegiance to the empire and headed to Leeuwarden (birthplace of his wife Laura) to link up with the resistance there. Once in Leeuwarden, he quickly made himself useful. Especially since The Frenglish 2nd Army under Fontainebleau was planning a full scale invasion of all of the Low Countries (Netherlands). Based on his experiences fighting in Java, Darlington formed a corps of widows (whose husbands had died fighting against Frengland) and called them Darlington’s Deadly Darlings or Dx3. They were trained in riverboat warfare, espionage, reconnaissance and demolition. Dx3 was credited with countless kills and soon Darlington caught the eye of the heads of the other Dutch states. After being called to Utrecht in 1781, the heads of Drenthe, Flevoland, Friesland, Gelderland, Groningen, Limburg, Noord-Brabant, Overijssel, and Utrecht appointed him commander of the Free Dutch Forces and subsequently formed the Batavian League. Alfred was informed that Contessa Giovanna Gonzaga Di Mantua (The mulatto daughter of the late Gianfrancesco Di Mantua, and current ruler of the city-state of Mantua within the Vatican Empire) would fund the war against Frengland because of the Frenglish alliance with their enemy neighbors, the Ottomans. She had also hinted at the possibility of Prussian intervention in their favor from a conversation she overheard from her boyfriend Guy, a former Sugarcane Army of Frengland soldier who had since defected to Prussia. Alfred was pleased. He paid no attention to the possibility of Prussian aid. He merely accepted it and had begun training the available soldiers as he had done with Dx3. He emphasized special attention to the use boats and the natural waterways of the country instead of relying on horses. This concept and its implementation earned Darlington the name “Swamp Fox” by his enemies. The Batavian League had chosen the hawk as its standard and so this particular conflict with Frengland was known as The Hawk War (in Frengland only. In The Low Countries the war was called the Tulip War) and had officially begun in the spring of 1782.
After a period of 7 years, the war was beginning to stalemate. Darlington could not force Fontainebleau out of the country. Nor could Fontainebleau decimate Darlington’s guerilla army. But in 1789, The Prussians had entered into the war against Frengland and this greatly (yet fatally) inflated Darlington’s army’s hopes of total victory. So, after many years of surprising successes against a numerically superior force (the Frenglish), Darlington decided to amass a great force and march on and liberate Amsterdam. Ignoring his ingenious tactic of avoiding the use of horses and fighting in the open, he decided to follow through with his plan and commit the entire army to the task. In order to get to Amsterdam unchecked, he first had to destroy the garrison at Haarlem. And so, on that fateful July morning, Darlington led an ill-timed cavalry charge against the Frenglish fort at Haarlem. Fontainebleau, who happened to be there on this particular day had been preparing his artillery corps to defend against a Prussian assault. There were more guns out on that day than there were men to fire them. A special company of sharpshooters were also on duty. So when Darlington came charging at the gates he was instantly shot in the chest and killed. Killed on the same day was his wife, Lady Laura Darlington, who bore him a son. The cannons then opened fire with such intensity that the ground caught on fire. The leader and nearly the entirety of the Dutch armed forces were destroyed that day. Had Fontainebleau been a better commander, he would have pursued the remnants of the army and cut them down. Instead they fled to the Prussian lines and informed them of the trap at Haarlem. By the spring of 1790, Fontainebleau would be dead and the Frenglish army repulsed. Thus, bringing an end to the Hawk War.
1744 was a wonderful year for the Frenglish Empire and a terrible year for all those that defied it. The newly formed Continental Army of Frengland under Field Marshall Hippolyte Perreau had invaded Denmark and sacked Copenhagen, forcing the royal family to flee. The next year, Stockholm had also fallen and all of Sweden along with it. After that Hippolytle divided his army. One half was sent east to Finland and he traveled west with the other half to Norway. The detatchment in Finland encountered little opposition and took Helsinki in the fall of 1746. Francis III made overtures to the ‘uneasy’ Russian Tsar Grigory I, who was not very happy with the idea of a powerful empire on his western border. So Francis ensured Tsar Grigory that he had no plans to attack him and l gave the Tsar the entire Kingdom of Finland with the exception of Helsinki and the surrounding areas. This put the Tsar at ease but greatly angered the Sami troops that fought for Frengland (as the Frenglish Colonial rifles) in the hopes of creating an independent state. So Francis III, greatly pleased by the outcome of his war plans called another meeting with Tsar Grigory and told him that the northernmost regions of Finland will now become an independent Sami state with Nils (no last name) as its leader. Grigory accepted. The Kingdom of Sameland was born.
Nils was a good man. He loved the land and its people. He fought with Frengland against his own country because he wasn’t recognized or acknowledged when Scandinavians ruled it, and figured that he could at least press for autonomy if he aided the conqueror and displayed strength. He gambled right. Francis III narrowly avoided war with the Russian Empire but even then resources were spread too thin. Government needed to be set up in the conquered areas. Infrastructure needed to be built and industry resumed. After all, Frengland was a mercantile empire as well as a military one. After Nils got his wish. He created the Kingdom of Sameland in 1746 and created the wolf flag as an emblem of their prowess in battle. He then married his brother’s ‘Christianized’ widow, Annika (originally from a Swedish Sami tribe, she was only 13 when she got married). They were great for each other. Due to her fanatical Christian upbringing, she saw he destruction of all European powers as the only hope of survival for her people. She was quite skilled in combat and was a genius in military strategy. She had a devoted following of Sami orphans who devoted their lives to her for they too had been raised by the same apocalyptic Christian sect that taught her. Nils married her when she was 16 years old and used her popularity with the tribes people to his advantage but he could not tame her. She didn’t want to be a silent queen. She wanted to be the power behind the throne. So when Hippolyte and his forces finally arrived in Norway, she and her acolytes went to meet him and aid his victory. Oslo, however was prepared. The city’s defenses were top of the line and its navy was the best in all of Fennoscandia. Hippolyte’s siege methods were ineffective and the army was tired from prolonged marching and fighting. They decided to winter on the outskirts of the city. But as they waited for long winter to be over, the Norwegians stocked up on supplies and money sent from Vatica (at the behest of ‘Comely Gigi With The Tattooed Eyelids’ Giovanna Gonzaga). Just as the winter was coming to a close, Annika arrived with 7,000 troops. Hardly enough to make a dent in the city’s defenses, but what they lacked in numbers, they teemed with zeal. Annika knew that there was a group of orphans inside the city that was loyal to her cause. And on the last dayof winter in 1747, her ‘allies on the inside’ secretly opened all the gates during the night, sabotaged the cannons, and spread poison in the food supplies that didn’t kill the soldiers but made them very sick. Annika reported this to Hippolyte who decided to ‘press the advantage’ and attack before dawn. The naval situation couldn’t be remedied right away. Horsemen rode to Malmo to get word to Admiral Jacoulet to come with the fleet. And then the pre-dawn invasion commenced. The Norwegians were caught unaware. The lot of them were massacred before the sun came up, including the royal family. Annika proclaimed herself queen. Hippolyte didn’t argue. The Norwegian navy bombarded the city for weeks and then, out of the blue, Jacoulet’s fleet came and smashed them to pieces. The conquest of Fennoscandia was complete. Or so they thought. Decades had gone by without much incident. Hippolyte was called back to Schleswig-Holstein and Annika eased into her position as regent of the western Sameland. Hippolyte’s fleet never went far but he often raided the coasts often taking what he could find. Annika had fallen for a Company Crocodile soldier named Patrice. He encouraged her to let go and get some tattoos. She did. And she joined the first Sami Fraternal order Ordre Loup (Order of the Wolf). She was content but she knew that she did not wield real power and was only alive as long as she was beneficial. She was right. One day in 1782 an Icelandic fishing vessel appeared on the coast. Jacoulet was away on one of his raids so he didn’t detect it. A few more came and a few more after that, followed by frigates. It was an invasion force. They didn’t want to land in Oslo, they just wanted to show their strength. They landed up the coast and started to take Norway piece by piece over the next decade. And to make matters worse, all Frenglish ground forces were tied up. Hippolyte was still in Denmark fighting off early Prussian incursions and The Russians had invaded Eastern Sameland under Nils. Annika and Jacoulet were all alone. And being the scoundrel he was, rather than help Annika defend Oslo, he destroyed most of the Icelandic navy’s ships, abandoned her, and took the fleet to North America. The Icelandic marines were relentless. Annika and her forces had lost the zeal of their earlier years and were barely hanging on. In the winter of 1790, a group of exiled Norwegian assassins broke into her chamber and shot her dead. Her followers were later rounded up and executed. Western and Eastern Sameland fell simultaneously. The Wolf War had come to an end.
PULSE Miami, 2010
Frohawk Two Feathers
December 2 - 5, 2010
THE WOLF & HAWK WAR 1782-1790The Wolf & Hawk War was not a single war but a series of battles that occurred during the much larger, 50 Years War (1737 -1797) between the Empire of Frengland and Eire and The Kingdom of Holland and Zeeland, the Fennoscandian League (Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Iceland), Prussia, and a reinvigorated Empire of Spain.
The Wolf & Hawk War however was concentrated in two areas: Norway and The Low Countries.
With the outbreak of rebellion in Holland & Zeeland, Francis III, Emperor of Frengland And Eire sent newly commissioned Field Marshall Rene Apollinaire Fontainebleau to deal with the situation. Since Fontainebleau paid the Emperor in coin for his promotion, he was desperate for military victory and did any and everything he could to attain it. Managing to wrest the Company Crocodile (elite mulatto soldiers) from Field Marshall Hippolyte, he set out on a murderous rampage against the citizens and soldiers of Holland & Zeeland. They used deception and terror as their main weapon. They would dress up as beggars and traveling entertainers fleeing Francis III’s Frengland and move through the country towns gathering information on the Dutch resistance. After a few weeks of this, they would gather all of the intelligence and then attack the towns they visited in force, often killing the entire population. This was an effective deterrent to Dutch resistance and had proven very effective since Holland & Zeeland was occupied in 1740. But it was not to last. Across the sea in the English half of the Frenglish Main, in the imperial city of Dover, a skilled enemy came forth. His name was Lord Alfred Darlington.
Lord Darlington was born in Southhampton and was the son of a popular Frenglish general (Banastre) in the short-lived court of Francis II. His father was killed when Francis III came to power, yet young Alfred had been spared. His mother, (also spared) was a Dutchwoman from Amsterdam (Ineke) and it is widely believed that Alfred’s father was killed because his loyalties would be impaired when the order was given to invade Holland. Alfred grew up to loathe the Empire. He did however enroll in the military school in London and excelled at navigation and reconnaissance. When he graduated (at the top of his class) he was sent to the East Indies with Admiral Thierry Jacoulet (The Scourge Of God) to subdue the remaining forces of Holland & Zeeland on the island of Java. He carried out his duties without question and became the youngest member ever to be accepted into the Order Of The Radiant Crest (a naval fraternal order created by Francis I of Frengland). He however hated Jacoulet’s cruelty and indifference to the native people of Java. On the trip home, a fellow seaman made some disparaging comments about Darlington’s wife Laura (a crypto-Dutchwoman). Alfred then threw the man overboard to his death, effectively ending his career and all of the hard-earned prestige he had won. After his court martial, he was sentenced to house arrest. He then spent the next few years regretting his decision and at the same time, fueling his longstanding hatred of Francis III. He at last decided to renounce his allegiance to the empire and headed to Leeuwarden (birthplace of his wife Laura) to link up with the resistance there. Once in Leeuwarden, he quickly made himself useful. Especially since The Frenglish 2nd Army under Fontainebleau was planning a full scale invasion of all of the Low Countries (Netherlands). Based on his experiences fighting in Java, Darlington formed a corps of widows (whose husbands had died fighting against Frengland) and called them Darlington’s Deadly Darlings or Dx3. They were trained in riverboat warfare, espionage, reconnaissance and demolition. Dx3 was credited with countless kills and soon Darlington caught the eye of the heads of the other Dutch states. After being called to Utrecht in 1781, the heads of Drenthe, Flevoland, Friesland, Gelderland, Groningen, Limburg, Noord-Brabant, Overijssel, and Utrecht appointed him commander of the Free Dutch Forces and subsequently formed the Batavian League. Alfred was informed that Contessa Giovanna Gonzaga Di Mantua (The mulatto daughter of the late Gianfrancesco Di Mantua, and current ruler of the city-state of Mantua within the Vatican Empire) would fund the war against Frengland because of the Frenglish alliance with their enemy neighbors, the Ottomans. She had also hinted at the possibility of Prussian intervention in their favor from a conversation she overheard from her boyfriend Guy, a former Sugarcane Army of Frengland soldier who had since defected to Prussia. Alfred was pleased. He paid no attention to the possibility of Prussian aid. He merely accepted it and had begun training the available soldiers as he had done with Dx3. He emphasized special attention to the use boats and the natural waterways of the country instead of relying on horses. This concept and its implementation earned Darlington the name “Swamp Fox” by his enemies. The Batavian League had chosen the hawk as its standard and so this particular conflict with Frengland was known as The Hawk War (in Frengland only. In The Low Countries the war was called the Tulip War) and had officially begun in the spring of 1782.
After a period of 7 years, the war was beginning to stalemate. Darlington could not force Fontainebleau out of the country. Nor could Fontainebleau decimate Darlington’s guerilla army. But in 1789, The Prussians had entered into the war against Frengland and this greatly (yet fatally) inflated Darlington’s army’s hopes of total victory. So, after many years of surprising successes against a numerically superior force (the Frenglish), Darlington decided to amass a great force and march on and liberate Amsterdam. Ignoring his ingenious tactic of avoiding the use of horses and fighting in the open, he decided to follow through with his plan and commit the entire army to the task. In order to get to Amsterdam unchecked, he first had to destroy the garrison at Haarlem. And so, on that fateful July morning, Darlington led an ill-timed cavalry charge against the Frenglish fort at Haarlem. Fontainebleau, who happened to be there on this particular day had been preparing his artillery corps to defend against a Prussian assault. There were more guns out on that day than there were men to fire them. A special company of sharpshooters were also on duty. So when Darlington came charging at the gates he was instantly shot in the chest and killed. Killed on the same day was his wife, Lady Laura Darlington, who bore him a son. The cannons then opened fire with such intensity that the ground caught on fire. The leader and nearly the entirety of the Dutch armed forces were destroyed that day. Had Fontainebleau been a better commander, he would have pursued the remnants of the army and cut them down. Instead they fled to the Prussian lines and informed them of the trap at Haarlem. By the spring of 1790, Fontainebleau would be dead and the Frenglish army repulsed. Thus, bringing an end to the Hawk War.
1744 was a wonderful year for the Frenglish Empire and a terrible year for all those that defied it. The newly formed Continental Army of Frengland under Field Marshall Hippolyte Perreau had invaded Denmark and sacked Copenhagen, forcing the royal family to flee. The next year, Stockholm had also fallen and all of Sweden along with it. After that Hippolytle divided his army. One half was sent east to Finland and he traveled west with the other half to Norway. The detatchment in Finland encountered little opposition and took Helsinki in the fall of 1746. Francis III made overtures to the ‘uneasy’ Russian Tsar Grigory I, who was not very happy with the idea of a powerful empire on his western border. So Francis ensured Tsar Grigory that he had no plans to attack him and l gave the Tsar the entire Kingdom of Finland with the exception of Helsinki and the surrounding areas. This put the Tsar at ease but greatly angered the Sami troops that fought for Frengland (as the Frenglish Colonial rifles) in the hopes of creating an independent state. So Francis III, greatly pleased by the outcome of his war plans called another meeting with Tsar Grigory and told him that the northernmost regions of Finland will now become an independent Sami state with Nils (no last name) as its leader. Grigory accepted. The Kingdom of Sameland was born.
Nils was a good man. He loved the land and its people. He fought with Frengland against his own country because he wasn’t recognized or acknowledged when Scandinavians ruled it, and figured that he could at least press for autonomy if he aided the conqueror and displayed strength. He gambled right. Francis III narrowly avoided war with the Russian Empire but even then resources were spread too thin. Government needed to be set up in the conquered areas. Infrastructure needed to be built and industry resumed. After all, Frengland was a mercantile empire as well as a military one. After Nils got his wish. He created the Kingdom of Sameland in 1746 and created the wolf flag as an emblem of their prowess in battle. He then married his brother’s ‘Christianized’ widow, Annika (originally from a Swedish Sami tribe, she was only 13 when she got married). They were great for each other. Due to her fanatical Christian upbringing, she saw he destruction of all European powers as the only hope of survival for her people. She was quite skilled in combat and was a genius in military strategy. She had a devoted following of Sami orphans who devoted their lives to her for they too had been raised by the same apocalyptic Christian sect that taught her. Nils married her when she was 16 years old and used her popularity with the tribes people to his advantage but he could not tame her. She didn’t want to be a silent queen. She wanted to be the power behind the throne. So when Hippolyte and his forces finally arrived in Norway, she and her acolytes went to meet him and aid his victory. Oslo, however was prepared. The city’s defenses were top of the line and its navy was the best in all of Fennoscandia. Hippolyte’s siege methods were ineffective and the army was tired from prolonged marching and fighting. They decided to winter on the outskirts of the city. But as they waited for long winter to be over, the Norwegians stocked up on supplies and money sent from Vatica (at the behest of ‘Comely Gigi With The Tattooed Eyelids’ Giovanna Gonzaga). Just as the winter was coming to a close, Annika arrived with 7,000 troops. Hardly enough to make a dent in the city’s defenses, but what they lacked in numbers, they teemed with zeal. Annika knew that there was a group of orphans inside the city that was loyal to her cause. And on the last dayof winter in 1747, her ‘allies on the inside’ secretly opened all the gates during the night, sabotaged the cannons, and spread poison in the food supplies that didn’t kill the soldiers but made them very sick. Annika reported this to Hippolyte who decided to ‘press the advantage’ and attack before dawn. The naval situation couldn’t be remedied right away. Horsemen rode to Malmo to get word to Admiral Jacoulet to come with the fleet. And then the pre-dawn invasion commenced. The Norwegians were caught unaware. The lot of them were massacred before the sun came up, including the royal family. Annika proclaimed herself queen. Hippolyte didn’t argue. The Norwegian navy bombarded the city for weeks and then, out of the blue, Jacoulet’s fleet came and smashed them to pieces. The conquest of Fennoscandia was complete. Or so they thought. Decades had gone by without much incident. Hippolyte was called back to Schleswig-Holstein and Annika eased into her position as regent of the western Sameland. Hippolyte’s fleet never went far but he often raided the coasts often taking what he could find. Annika had fallen for a Company Crocodile soldier named Patrice. He encouraged her to let go and get some tattoos. She did. And she joined the first Sami Fraternal order Ordre Loup (Order of the Wolf). She was content but she knew that she did not wield real power and was only alive as long as she was beneficial. She was right. One day in 1782 an Icelandic fishing vessel appeared on the coast. Jacoulet was away on one of his raids so he didn’t detect it. A few more came and a few more after that, followed by frigates. It was an invasion force. They didn’t want to land in Oslo, they just wanted to show their strength. They landed up the coast and started to take Norway piece by piece over the next decade. And to make matters worse, all Frenglish ground forces were tied up. Hippolyte was still in Denmark fighting off early Prussian incursions and The Russians had invaded Eastern Sameland under Nils. Annika and Jacoulet were all alone. And being the scoundrel he was, rather than help Annika defend Oslo, he destroyed most of the Icelandic navy’s ships, abandoned her, and took the fleet to North America. The Icelandic marines were relentless. Annika and her forces had lost the zeal of their earlier years and were barely hanging on. In the winter of 1790, a group of exiled Norwegian assassins broke into her chamber and shot her dead. Her followers were later rounded up and executed. Western and Eastern Sameland fell simultaneously. The Wolf War had come to an end.