Roger van Cliff

Retired Admiral, former Barrister, current Steward and Lord Protector of Mirewell following the ousting of John Darling. van Cliff is the cagey offspring of a pair of the worst harridans Mirewell's upper crust has ever borne witness to. He enjoys golf, women, drinking, long walks on the beach, and bloody coups.

Not bad with a pistol, either. We play squash every third Saltday.

History
van Cliff was born in 1822 to a matched set of aristocrats, Brunhilde and Cecelia van Cliff, with the assistance of an unnamed noble-born gentleman acting as a donor of certain necessary materials. He was raised by Brunhilde, a member of the High House of Parliament, while Cecilia pursued a career as an Admiral by firing enormous guns at defenseless natives in Jakramundi.

The young van Cliff, despite the best efforts of his mothers, was a good-for-nothing drunk right up through his senior year at the Albatross Ridge Officer's Academy when, commanding six of his fellow cadets in a navigation exercise in a forty-foot steamer, van Cliff found himself in the teeth of a storm that made the hurricanes around van Cliff Island look like happy breezes on a Brideshead beach. He pulled himself out of the bottle long enough to get his crew home, losing only a single man to the drink, and went on to graduate top of his class for the year.

From there van Cliff's career was meteoric. He was captain of the Barracuda by twenty-eight, Admiral by thirty-four, and a knight of the Steward's Order of the Crow Volant by forty. He couldn't have succeeded any harder if he'd been trying. A wife, Martha Pool, and two children, Hilda and Regis, rounded out the portrait of outrageously wealthy success.

van Cliff's record during the war with Galt was spotless. He won two major victories, first at the Battle of Marathon Harbor where his flagship the Pike held off six mercenary cutters and a necromancer using a daring combination of boarding raids and counterspells from the ship's arcane corps, and second at the Siege of Fort Jackson, a Galt supply depot and munitions dump inside a heavily fortified mansion on Varley Isle off the coast of Galt.

Fortunately for the readability of this biography, all good things must come to an end.

In 1876 several newspapers ran photographs of van Cliff in a series of compromising positions with a series of compromising women. His reputation tarnished, he resigned his commission and joined the rest of us poor ground-pounders in the Barrister's Office at Rook Island Penitentiary.

In 1878 he conspired with several other Mirewellian patriots to depose then-Steward John Darling. Following a pitched battle during which Darling was forced to flee the fortress at Steward's Hill, van Cliff seized power for himself and had the Low House of Parliament, kept hostage by Darling, executed as traitors. No elections yet.