Vale Frederick Armas - an obituary

[Esterlen 4499]

 

(The Viscount Rillsworth, painted c. 1762)

 

VALE 

FREDERICK ARMAS 

(1687 – 1781)

 

14 Godfrey’s Triumph 1781

 

The Right Honorable Frederick Armas, Viscount Rillsworth and former Minister of Intelligence, has died today after a long illness. He was 94 years of age.

 

Born to a Harrenite merchant in 1687 and descended from an old but impoverished clan, who formerly held the status of advisors to the Elendil dynasts, Armas studied law and public administration at the Imperial Everardine College at Carolustadt, matriculating in 1708 at the age of twenty-one.

 

Soon after, he achieved a position as an excise officer to the Kvenoman clans and later an actuary for the Saint Edmond Trading Company in Ves, in which capacity he became acquainted with Conrad de Falstaff, Count of Leuven. Becoming Leuven’s accountant and personal solicitor, he became entangled with the infamous Nenzing Conspiracy and the War of the Two Emperors that followed, on the rebel side. Armas had studied liberal ideas such as the concepts of the social contract and enlightened government, and believed the rebel leader Joseph of Marna when he promised to put these principles into practice, something he would later regret.

 

Shortly following the formal outbreak of the war in 1715 he transferred his services to Richard de Reden, serving as the solicitor to his rowdy brigade of Owynist volunteers. In this capacity, he saw the horrors of war first-hand, becoming captured at the rebel defeat in 1716 and subsequently released by Franz Stefan de Arany-Bocsa, a loyalist general who showed him mercy.

 

 

(The rebel defeat at Helena, painted c. 1750.)

 

When Arany-Bocsa became Count of Temesch, Armas followed him to the frontier principality, serving as his majordomo. However, the Count later became ill and died of a wasting disease, leaving Armas in charge of the borderland settlement. The fields ran fallow under rumours of an elvish curse, and successive attempts at colonization failed, most notably one initiated by Adrian de Sarkozy, the Duke of Adria. Around this time Armas took a wife in his exile, Hildegard, but very little is publicly known of her. She died a few years later leaving no issue.

 

Armas became acquainted with the chief minister to the new emperor, John d’Arkent, more commonly known as the Baron of Selm, in 1726, who had attempted to persuade him to allow the Duke of Adria to settle Temesch as part of a conciliation agreement between the latter and the nascent government. Armas relented and sold the land for a stipend, however, the settlement was a catastrophic failure on account of Sarkozy’s neglectful policies.

 

Returning to the core Empire, by the turn of the year 1727 Armas found himself in the employ of the elected King of Kaedrin, Adrian, as his private legal counsel. In his service he undertook a number of civil and criminal cases on behalf of the Crown of Kaedrin, writing the realm’s constitution in 1730 as well as the king’s marriage contract. At this time, he purchased a farm in the western reaches of the Commonwealth, in an attempt to cultivate the ideals of a Kaedreni gentleman farmer. 

 

On account of his relationship with Selm, in 1730 Armas was empowered with the chairmanship of a project to reform the Empire’s defunct systems of governance. This was a failure on account of powerful reactionary interests within the country, who were committed to preventing much-needed reform to its weak institutions. At the emperor’s instruction, Selm sacked Armas not long after.

 

In 1736, Armas was recalled by Adrian de Sarkozy, who had since become perpetual regent of the Empire as Lord Protector. As one of the foremost scholars interested in old liberal philosophy, Armas was tasked by Sarkozy to develop a legislature for the realm, and placed in control of the education of his heir, Joseph Clement. He would later stand in this legislature as the elected representative for Kaedrin, becoming president of the chamber over the period of 1738 to 1742. The solicitor personally disliked Sarkozy and saw him as little better than his Pertinaxi predecessors, and was eager to educate his son with liberal ideals to prevent the rise of what he saw as another reactionary despot. He was relieved when Sarkozy died in 1737, leading to the restoration of the monarchy in the person of Peter III. Though he initially distrusted the new emperor as the son of Emperor Anthony, who had burnt down the city of Ves in 1710, this mistrust turned to veneration when Peter reigned in the reactionary nobles and committed himself to enlightened government.

 

Upon his departure from the legislature in 1742, Armas returned to Ves in Kaedrin, having successfully convinced his old war comrade Richard de Reden, now the Count of Kreden, to return to public life as the king’s viceroy. He assisted him in this capacity until 1749, when Kreden retired again. Around this time, the emperor’s chief minister, Simon Basrid, who he had become friendly with during his time in the Imperial Diet, offered him appointment to the cabinet. Armas refused, cognisant of his failure in reforming Selm’s cabinet nineteen years earlier.

 

In 1750, King Adrian I of Kaedrin finally perished from the consumption that had crippled him for the preceding decade. Despite being named as an executor to the late king’s will, the same year he served as legal representation to his son, Leopold Helvets, who laid claim to his title of Duke of Cathalon. He would grow to privately regret this in his final years. That same year, the sixty-three year old Armas was inducted into the Most Excellent Petrine Order of Humanity and the Empire, the highest order of chivalry within the country, thus becoming a Petrine knight. This was done as part of the Basrid Ministry’s ‘half-century’ honors and was a reward for years of service to pan-humanist ideals.

 

It was at a ball in Helena in honour of the Princess Imperial’s debutante that Joseph Clement de Sarkozy, his former pupil, brought up again the idea of his appointment to the Council of State. Reluctantly, Armas agreed, now unencumbered by his duties in the long-suffering Commonwealth. He was appointed to the Cabinet as His Imperial Majesty’s Secretary of State for Intelligence, known informally as the Minister of Intelligence, being confirmed unanimously by the Imperial Diet.

 

 

(The 1760s Basrid cabinet, painted c. 1767.)

 

As the Empire’s spymaster, Armas modernized the intelligence network available to the government, with a particular emphasis on foreign affairs. He imported his nephew Riordain MacDroch to the capital city to assist him with this task, simultaneously grooming him as his successor. Over the next years, the government would see the introduction of a number of enlightened institutions, the end of the war with the Nordlings, the introduction of the Pale of Settlement and the partnership with Valandos Elverhilin’s militia as well as the unprecedented economic expansion of the capital city of Helena. Many of his specific operations as minister remain classified to the public. In 1761, at the age of 74, he was created a peer by the emperor as the Viscount Rillsworth. Around this time and as part of an anti-clerical wave that had gripped high society, the minister attempted to prosecute the Bishop of Ves, Krisztian Karoly, for sedition. He failed, with the court finding Karoly not guilty. After this, he achieved rapprochement with Karoly and later his successor, Laurence Pruvia. 

 

In 1768, Rillsworth as he was now primarily known, retired from his position as the Emperor’s intelligence minister, with the intention that MacDroch succeed him. Earlier in the same year his other nephew, Veikko Harjalainen, had been sentenced to several years in a debtor’s prison and foreign exile thereafter. 

Aside from one term in the House of Lords, the Viscount Rillsworth led a mostly quiet life in the years subsequent. He infrequently emerged from retirement to comment on, in a characteristically ornery fashion, the various political crises of the day, much to the chagrin of his former colleagues within the Basrid ministry. He was extremely supportive of Basrid’s decision in 1780 to appoint Jonah Stahl-Elendil, an old friend of his from the war and a fellow Harrenite, to the position of Vice Chancellor. Rillsworth had fond words for many of his colleagues and successors, such as Franziska Vimmark, whose worth ethic he had praised publicly many times, as well as the foreign minister Godfrey Briarwood, an old colleague who had worked for him in his own ministry (despite his suspicions that Briarwood had accidentally burnt down his manor, Rillsworth House, in 1765). For others, though, he had rancor.

 

In his last years, Armas had several strokes of varying severity, with worsening gout leaving him crippled and often wheelchair-bound. He passed away on account of a collection of these ailments on 14^th of Godfrey’s Triumph in the year 1781, aged 94. He is survived by Riordain MacDroch-Armas, his sole heir.

 

[sergisala 3451]

"Sir Frederick Armas has perished today." Sir Edward Galbraith would start saying to his colleagues in a very sad tone:

 

"Since the first day I met him, now more than two decades ago, Lord Rillsworth hasn't just been my mentor but also my friend. For that, I'll eternally be grateful with him and with his legacy. May God bless him. Rest in peace, old friend." he would sign the Lorraine.

[calculusdesola 1658]

Riordain MacDroch-Armas solemnly attends Sir Frederick’s state funeral, the man becoming recluse for a time, not long after his uncle’s death. His benefactor and the closest thing he’d had to a father, taken by the long cold sleep. There was nothing inordinately special about this, but it struck the now-aging ginger Harrenite quite hard. As MacDroch sat grieving his benefactor with brandy and pipe, he fondly recalled daring infiltrations of numerous settlements alongside his uncle, Cocaine Fred. He recalled, in the decades past, watching Frederick personally kill enemies of the state. At the end of this brandy and smoke imbibe, Riordain concluded that every last thing he knew was owed to his uncle.

 

“A man of this legend cannae go unsung..”

[Marquesa_ 298]

The Harlot of Leone wept in honor of such an absolute king .

[Lhindir_ 3691]

A certain figure plots.

[John Ivory 4546]

“Out with the old, in with the new, as the parables go.” The Duke of Helena muses to his brother The Count of Pompourelia over morning tea, reflecting on the death of another statesman and Founding Father of the constitution. Staring momentarily as the wrinkles of his brother’s forehead ripple like waves while stuffing his maw with toasted crumpets, the quinquagenarian has a more sullen thought: Are we, too, growing old?