Edward of Lower Columbia

Edward of Lower Columbia, formally His Majesty, King Edward, was the first monarch of the Federal Kingdom of Lower Columbia. As such, he was also the founder of Lower Columbia's first royal house, the house of du Loup, which takes its name from King Edward's surname.

Election to the throne
At the Convention on Confederation in early 1712, the leaders of the commonwealths of Pacifica, Willamette, and Rainier agreed to unite their territories into a federation, with a king leading the new federal government. Edward, as a senior member of the Pacifica Commonwealth Council, was nominated for the kingship by the other members of the Pacifican delegation. However, rather than accept the kingship at the convention, he proposed that a general election take place throughout the commonwealths as soon as possible. The other delegates at the convention agreed with Edward's proposal, and once the convention was over, they began preparing for the royal election.

Edward campaigned throughout the three commonwealths in the weeks leading up to the election, but his campaign was aided by the high regard in which the people of Pacifica held him. Many of his supporters took it upon themselves to promote Edward's campaign. With their help, Edward won a landslide victory in the election, winning with over 70% of the vote.

Role in early national politics
Once he had been crowned, Edward found wielding absolute power uncomfortable. As a former legislator and an elected official, he valued the democratic system he had been part of before the royal election. However, neither the election nor the Convention on Confederation ever specified any limits on the king's powers, making Edward a de facto autocrat. As a student of history, he believed that any country that sought to be the kingdom of God on Earth (as the convention delegates had stated) needed to avoid the inherent shortcomings of absolute monarchy, or else it would end up no different from other kingdoms of the era. Therefore, the new king made it his goal, with the help of democratically-chosen representatives of the people, to draw up a document specifying and limiting the king's powers, as well as those of the nascent federal government of Lower Columbia - a document that would become the country's constitution.

The preparations for Lower Columbia's constitutional convention took longer than King Edward expected, so he decided to use his power wisely in the time leading up to the convention. One of his earliest decisions, promulgated as the Calendar Decree of 1713, was to adopt the Gregorian calendar nationwide. In the decades since the first settlers arrived in Lower Columbia, the Catholic Church had corrected a growing problem with the calendar by adopting what is now known as the Gregorian calendar. Many Protestant countries, fearing that these calendar reforms were some kind of Catholic plot, refused to adopt them until long after their introduction in 1582. Many early Lower Columbians came from these countries, but many others came from countries that had already adopted the new calendar. As a result, there were two calendars in use in different parts of the new kingdom – sometimes even in the same city – leading to confusion and disputes over what date it really was. Edward's decree, which went into effect on what would have been 18 February 1713 (but was actually 1 March 1713 because of the decree), eliminated this confusion. Edward also took the opportunity to decree that any future celebrations of the anniversary of his coronation would take place on 22 August (which was 11 August O.S.), effectively back-dating his calendar reforms to his coronation date.