By Heresies Distressed by David Weber

by his future brother-in-law, the Duke of Halbrook Hollow, as well.
    Irwain III had been stripped of everything the nobility recognized as a source of power, but he’d retained his status as the head of state . . . and the Crown had retained the power to summon—and dissolve—Parliament. When the old king died, and Crown Prince Sailys assumed the throne, the law of the Kingdom required that Parliament be summoned to confirm the new monarch and to swear fealty to him.
    Everyone had known it was a mere formality, of course, but they’d been wrong. What none of Irwain III’s aristocratic masters realized was that Sailys and his friend Mahrak Sahndyrs had spent the last ten years of King Irwain’s life planning for the day that summons would be issued. Along with a few very carefully chosen and recruited members of the House of Lords, they had steered the new Parliament in directions no one else had anticipated, and they’d done it so quietly, so skillfully, that their intended victims had never even seen it coming.
    That first Parliament of King Sailys was referred to now as the “Parliament of Love” in most of Chisholm’s histories. Ostensibly, that was because everyone had been so carried away with their enthusiasm for their charismatic new king that they’d gladly acquiesced in the “modest changes” he’d requested. Foremost among those “modest changes,” although Sailys and Green Mountain had been careful to bury it as deep in the underbrush as they could, had been the formation of the core of a small standing army. That particular proposal was justified on the basis of the growing threat from Corisande, and—according to those same official histories—Parliament had gladly supported such a farsighted request. In fact, the Lords had seen the minuscule authorized strength of the new “Royal Army” as little more than giving their youthful monarch a shiny new toy with which he could amuse himself rather than interfering in the serious business of running the Kingdom.
    Some toys were more dangerous than others, however, and before the great nobles had awakened to their danger, the king and his handful of trusted advisers had created a
genuine
royal army, one which was both rather larger than the nobility had anticipated and answerable directly and solely to the Crown.
And
one which was independent of the feudal levies upon which previous monarchs had been forced to rely.
    They
should
call it the Parliament of Idiots
, Cayleb thought bitingly.
Not that I mind the fact that they were idiots, but how in God’s name could they have let him get
away
with it?
    Actually, he had a pretty shrewd notion of exactly how it could happen. Chisholm’s military traditions had been so backward by the standards of the great kingdoms of the mainland that it had still relied on feudal levies on the rare occasions when an army was required. That was the way it had always been, and Sailys’ nobles had been so accustomed to thinking in terms of those same feudal levies—which
they
controlled, not the Crown—that it had never occurred to them that a professional standing army could actually pose a threat.
    Unfortunately for them, they’d been wrong. The Royal Chisholmian Army might not have been particularly large by the standards of mainland realms, but it had been large enough. And its troops had all been volunteers, raised from the ranks of commoners. That had made them a dragon of a different color compared to the conscripted peasants who had filled out the ranks of the traditional levies. Among other things, they’d had a cohesiveness, an awareness of themselves as servants of the Crown and as voluntary members of something far greater than the usual noble’s drafted levies ever attained. More than that, they’d had a very good idea of who was most likely to get ground into dust in the course of any fighting between their