House of Steel The Honorverse Companion - By David Weber Page 0,178

Grayson, they took the form of swords and other muscle-powered weapons which were only slowly replaced by the reinvention of relatively crude firearms.

Following Oliver Mayhew’s death, the steadholders (already coming to be known as the Keys) consolidated their political authority, creating the Conclave of Steadholders as a body of co-equal peers, presided over by the Protector, to consult with one another and support the formation of new steadings as population and wealth permitted. The formation of the Conclave was legitimized by the approval of the Church, yet the Church remained the true secular as well as temporal authority. Over time, power came to reside in the most powerful steadholders, known collectively as “the Five Keys.” By the end of the era the five steadholders of the original Grayson steadings (Mayhew, Burdette, Mackenzie, Yanakov, and Bancroft) held effective control of the Conclave and through it, the planet. Anything like a true planetwide political state remained a purely nominal construct during this era, however.

Mayhew Steading, ruled by a direct patrilineal descendent of Oliver Mayhew, was Grayson’s largest single Steading, and the Conclave’s Articles of Establishment had provided that the Protector must be selected from all the adult males of the Mayhew line in perpetuity. This did not mean the planet had a single ruler, however. The Protector was primus inter pares (“first among equals”), responsible for presiding over the Conclave, administering its policies, and serving as the Conclave’s formal interface with the Church, but forced to govern by forging consensuses or at least pluralities among the other Keys rather than through his own legal authority. The First Elder of the Church retained a mandatory seat among the Keys and was the ultimate arbiter of matters pertaining to the Church, which made him the true fountainhead of authority, but the Protector was envisioned as the executor and enforcer of that authority on Father Church’s behalf.

By the end of the twelfth century, the life-or-death fight to survive on Grayson had stabilized in favor of survival, and by 1250 PD, sufficient resources had become available for the Five Keys to begin diverting a meaningful percentage of the planet’s available capabilities to reestablishing the space presence which had lapsed in 1065 with the failure of the last of the original landing shuttles. The proposal to do so was carried (over the vehement opposition of the Faithful) on the argument that the exploitation of the star system’s extra-planetary resources would repay the effort many times over. Ominously for the future, one of the Five Keys, Eustace Bancroft, Steadholder Bancroft, broke with his fellows to vote in opposition to the hotly contested decision.

Schism, the Time of Sundering

1261–1337 PD

The Faithful seized on this decision as “sin-filled and blasphemous,” and their attitudes and doctrines began to harden, sowing the seeds for the eventual Civil War. Indeed, the official formation of the “Congregation of the Faithful” in 1261 PD as what amounted to an openly schismatic sect within the Church of Humanity Unchained was expressly justified by its founders’ contention that in promoting a resumption of extra-atmospheric development, the Moderates had moved well beyond the technology absolutely essential to planetary survival and hence had returned to the “Sin of the Machine” against which Austin Grayson had preached.

Grayson society as a whole had by now acquired its highly consensual nature as a survival imperative, and Grayson remained a thoroughly theocratic state, but the Church enshrined a deep respect for individual belief, even when it conflicted with official doctrine, as a necessary and direct consequence of the Doctrine of the Test. Despite this, Grayson society had largely rejected the Faithful’s beliefs, and social pressure had prevented their membership from spreading broadly. As their doctrine diverged further and further from the mainstream, the Faithful found themselves increasingly marginalized, regarded as shrill extremists when they were regarded at all.

This attitude began to change, though, as the degree of discipline necessary to ensure survival decreased. The extremists, no longer seen as a direct threat to necessary conformity, were less thoroughly ostracized, and a certain percentage of the Grayson population began to regard the Faithful and their leaders with at least grudging admiration. A mainstream Church clergyman of the period famously wrote, “I reject their beliefs, yet I have no choice but to respect someone who meets his Test by living his life one hundred percent in accordance with his beliefs, however unpopular they may be.”

By the colony’s three-hundredth birthday, this toleration had expanded to the point at which the Church of the Faithful first openly converted