Constitution of the Caldan Union

The Constitution of the Caldan Union is a supreme law that establishes the union between the various Provinces of the Caldan Union as well as the form of the federal government and the basic rights and liberties of the citizenry. The constitution was originally drafted at the Riverton Conference, featuring delegates from all over Caldas, acting at the invitation of the Congress of the Resurgent Dream. It was subsequently enacted by the legislatures of Tasat, Edina, New Arundel, Anata, Arcadia, and Prince James Island. Although the various legislatures acted on different time frames, King Henry granted the royal assent to all six acts on 18 March 1841. Although the Constitution has been amended 35 times since, there has been no radical or wholesale alteration of document or its framework. Caldans usually speak of themselves as having had the same constitution since 1841.

History of the Constitution

The original provinces of the Caldan Union each have a constitutional history predating Caldan federation. Prior to the Jacobite Wars, Anata, Edina, New Arundel, and Prince James Island were governed by variations of the General Council system where an appointed royal governor ruled in consultation with an appointed council. The appointment of councilors was in the hands of the governors themselves. During the Jacobite Wars, each governor was presented with delegations claiming to represent the people in favour of both James II and VII and William III and II. The Jacobite governors, who ultimately prevailed, accepted these loyal delegations as General Assemblies, called to express popular support. While it was impossible to hold an orderly election in the conditions of the Jacobite Wars, historians generally agree popular was with the Jacobites. The opposite was the case in neighbouring Laneria, which was then grouped together with Caldas as part of British Vasconia. After the restoration of civil peace, new constitutions were passed which created bicameral legislatures. An elected General Assembly served as the loyal house and an appointed General Council as the upper. In Tasat, the Duke governed with a Senate of local landowners whose consent was needed for the appointment of magistrates and the levying of taxes. In Arcadia, a National Assembly was elected on the basis of universal male suffrage and the King already could not act other than through the National Assembly or ministers with the confidence of the National Assembly.

During the Jacobite Wars, what would become the provinces of the Caldan Union created the Congress of the Resurgent Dream to coordinate their military activities. The members of Congress were representatives of their respective governments and answerable to them. After the Jacobite Wars, when Caldan kings had an established court and capital in Tarana, Congress also met there and the King was frequently invited to address the members. However, the formalities observed on those occasions stressed that the delegates, while sharing a sovereign, did not recognise a united Crown. Early Caldan monarchs reigned in Arcadia as kings; in Tasat as dukes; in Anata, New Arundel, and Prince James Island as kings of England; and in Edina as kings of Scotland. As Caldas began to develop its own identity and a local, rather than imperial, politics, a movement grew to federate the various Caldan governments into a federal state with a genuine national legislature, directly representing the people. Thus it was that Congress proposed the Riverton Conference which convened on 21 October 1839.

No official records of the Riverton Conference were kept aside from those documents actually submitted for a vote. However, the delegates agreed on the original outline of the Constitution, including responsible government at both the federal and provincial levels, a bicameral parliament consisting of a House of Representatives and a House of Lords, an ongoing commitment to recover the Crown of the Three Kingdoms, and a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Although the King had originally given his blessing, believing a union in Caldas would make governance easier, he was wary of the constitution which actually emerged, feeling that it too greatly restricted royal authority and even referring to it as "that Whig constitution" in correspondence with political allies. Caldans organised for or against the Constitution. Caldans for the Constitution described themselves as Jacobites and opponents as Royalists, terms that has previously been used more or less synonymously. The Jacobites identified their cause with groups in Caldas and in the Three Kingdoms which had been disenfranchised or marginalised by what they viewed as an aristocratic coup usurping their rights and liberties remembered through the lens of a then thriving Romanticism. The Royalists, on the other hand, considered any such causes incidental to the near Absolutist claims of the Stuart monarchs. However, when the Constitution separately passed the legislature of each province, the King grudgingly gave it his assent.

The Caldan Constitution was first amended as early as 1849 to require proportional districts for the House of Representatives. It was amended again in 186