History of the Free Worlds League
First Succession War: Oriente Rebels
The peace of the Star League had begun to erode years before the final end, when First Lord Simon Cameron's untimely death provoked political power plays and the build-up of personal militaries by the Inner Sphere's various House Lords. The departure of the Star League Defense Force for unknown space in 2784 removed the last, fragile check on the House Lords' ambitions. Determined to triumph in the coming battles, Captain-General Kenyon Marik persuaded a panicky Parliament to pass Resolution 288, which granted the Captain-General wide-ranging discretionary powers "for the duration of the crisis." As the Captain-General rather than Parliament decided when a particular crisis was over, Resolution 288 essentially gave the holder of that office open-ended control over the Free Worlds League military.
Initially, most Free Worlds member-states supported the new legislation. Kenyon Marik's success in capturing several Terran Hegemony planets and Star League supply depots seemed to confirm the wisdom of turning over so much power to the military men. By 2787, the Free Worlds army had grabbed all it could of former Hegemony territory, and so Kenyon attacked a new target: the Capellan Confederation. The first wave brought the Free Worlds two planets and few casualties against fragmentary Capellan resistance. Then came the Confederation assault on New Delos, a savage attack that threw the Ares Conventions to the wind and killed twenty thousand Free Worlds civilians. Another setback came in 2793, when a surge of unexpected strength by Confederation forces stopped the Marik invasion cold over the Capellan world of Anegasaki. Balked in Capellan space, Kenyon Marik turned his sights toward the Lyran Commonwealth. His attempt to capture Hesperus II, site of a massive Lyran BattleMech facility, ended in a rout that cost the Free Worlds Navy several of its best battlecruisers. As the First Succession War dragged on with no end in sight, this string of failures came to outweigh the earlier gains. More than one Member of Parliament began to regret the hasty passage of Resolution 288, and regional opposition to the Captain-General's authority slowly grew.
Kenyon's son Thaddeus succeeded him in 2804, with the "crisis" of the First Succession War still raging. After forty-one years under Resolution 288 and the Free Worlds League no closer to either dominance or peace, its political leaders were beginning to chafe at House Marik's authority. Thaddeus gave them no chance to repeal the resolution, however. Upon learning of his father's death, he returned to the League capital of Atreus with a 'Mech battalion at his back, which he deployed around the Parliament building. Balky MPs swiftly reconsidered their opposition to reaffirming Resolution 288, and Thaddeus Marik began his term with the same absolute power that had belonged to his predecessor. When Duke Carter Allison of Oriente challenged the statute's renewal, Thaddeus withdrew all military units from the duchy. The Capellan Confederation, still smarting from its recent losses to the League, invaded Oriente and came close to capturing the Oriente system before Duke Allison changed his mind. With Oriente's capitulation, the Captain-General sent in the troops and swiftly repulsed the Capellans.
The duchy's troubles, however, were far from over. The next Captain-General would plunge Oriente and the entire League into a crisis so dire that it threatened the nation's existence.