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// Chancellor Puddinghead 
// Story: A Brief History of Equestria 
// by K9Thefirst1 
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Chancellor Puddinghead

“Hold on to your hooves! I am being brilliant!”



“In a Democracy, anypony can become the leader. It’s one of the risks you take.” The pony who wrote this piece of satire has been lost to history, but the idea that he or she was talking about Chancellor Puddinghead, born in 49 BW in what is now Pudding Center Park on Leggington Avenue, is hardly improbable.

Unlike the Founders we have previously discussed, particularly Hurricane, Pansy and Platinum, whose traits were either exaggerated or glossed over entirely, Puddinghead has actually been toned down from the reality. Had she lived in the modern era, Puddinghead would no doubt have been placed in a psychiatric ward for study and an attempt at counseling. However, as modern medicine of the mind was millennia away in the future, mental illness was only vaguely understood and often confused for other things, such as Changeling impersonation, demon possession, or being divinely inspired.

Few documents exist concerning Puddinghead’s early life, we can’t even be sure if that is even her real name, and not a nickname, considering her most famous, or infamous, fashion statement . However, we do know that she had always been longing for the center of attention, as a large collection of ancient documents have been recovered over the years hinting that she was often muscling her way in to perform in the local theater productions, more often than not as the lead. However, many of these documents highlight of just how poor an actress she was. During this time, other contemporary sources describe Puddinghead’s eccentricities, such as public consulting a tiny, invisible human who lived in her front right hoof named Mr. Thimble, as well as her insistence of wearing a bowl of fresh pudding on her head every day. It was during this time that she first developed a taste for politics, with her first foray as an aid for her mother, senator Apricot the Elder.

In 20 BW, Puddinghead ran for election for the Chancellorship, even though she was too young to be a legal candidate. Naturally, she didn’t win. However, Puddinghead put forward that the election was rigged. Nopony believed her of course, but the fuss she raised was certainly entertaining to the ponies of the Republic, and for each of the next three elections the drama would repeat, with the young Puddinghead’s popularity growing with each try. From what records exist, it is believed that Puddinghead’s appeal with the Earth Ponies, especially the younger Earth Ponies, was less on her stand of issues both real and of her own invention (an example of the latter being on Pot Colors, with Puddinghead being on the side that they should be green rather than black), and more with the sensationalism her campaigns generated, along with her amusing personality.

In 17 BW, Puddinghead was finally old enough to run, and won the election for the Chancellorship by a landslide, thanks in large part by her large fanbase becoming eligible to vote as well, rather than her proving to her subjects that she would be the superior candidate. According to Puddinghead’s biography by Historian Luscious Day, when her parents learned of Puddinghead’s success, her father, Germination, was quoted as saying “So the bedlam runs the bedlam house. Now we’re all Sons of Bitches,” and proceeded to drink heavily for almost a week. However, there is some speculation that she may have been exaggerating.

At the start of the new Chancellor’s term in office, it was both tradition and law that said new head of state would give a speech to the senate to lay out her policy for the year, appoint a Speaker of the House, and try to encourage a cordial relationship between the Legislature and Executive halves of the government. In her speech, Puddinghead vowed to work to start a series of public works projects to improve the living conditions of the citizens of the Republic, the abolishment of certain unpopular taxes, and reform of the military. 

“…all of which were all well and good, and the new Chancellor received many ovations during her speech, but the one point of concern that all of senators were agreed on was the fact that not once did Puddinghead face her audience during her forty minute speech.”

- Luscious Day

Among the projects Puddinghead commissioned were the construction of two aqueducts to bring in more water to both the growing urban centers and more importantly to the farmlands, as well as the setting aside of forest for firewood to battle the ever lowering temperatures. She also commissioned for repairing the temples to the spirits in the capitol city, as well as an amphitheater and racetrack. However, Puddinghead also devoted funds to projects whose purpose was either obscure, or wasteful, such as building a giant ship for no particular reason. Puddinghead would use the ship as a personal luxury yacht. In 932 ANM, the remains of said ship were discovered in Lake Neighmi, and brought to the surface, and each feature described by near-contemporary historians such as Luscious Day, such as the marble floors, the stained-glass windows and mosaic-tile murals exalting Puddinghead’s family history were all there, in pristine condition. The ship now rests inside the Manehattan Museum of History. Puddinghead would also commission the construction of a bridge across the Manehattan River, connecting the capitol with the farming settlements that would eventually become Bucklyn. Considering that the river was over a mile across at this part of its course, the project was ignored. However, Puddinghead’s commission would in fact be completed as ordered thousands of years later with the completion of the Bucklyn Bridge.

However, Puddinghead’s projects were very expensive, with Luscious Day listing the total price being some 2,700,000,000 copper pieces in six months, which in modern currency would be about forty billion bits. Naturally, a financial crisis followed, and Puddinghead’s approval rating plummeted as a result. Puddinghead’s political career looked destined to die young, and no doubt she would have been voted out of office, if not for the Lake Trot Crisis, where Puddinghead pushed through major overhauls in the training of the Republic’s army, which had been considered a joke by both the Celestine Junta and Kingdom of Unicorns for centuries. From the tactics described by Luscious Day, by all rights the army should have been slaughtered in every campaign during the crisis. However, considering the outlandishness of Puddinghead’s reforms, it is almost universally agreed by historians and scholars that the only reason that they were so effective in battle was because the Pegasi and Unicorns were stunned by what they were seeing. Either way, the Hyracotherium Republic proved to no longer be the rope that the Unicorns and Pegasi could pull at in their tug-of-war for more food. As a result, Puddinghead was re-elected by a unanimous vote, much to the horror of the Senate.

For the next decade and a half, Puddinghead would be re-elected every year, even after she had served the constitutionally allowed five terms of office, and each year Puddinghead grew more and more detached from reality. In 14 BW, she appointed her pet Parrot, Pluminary, as Speaker of the House, and did so every year. According to Luscious Day, it would seem that the only phrase Pluminary could speak regularly would be praises to Puddinghead’s brilliance. Even after he died, Puddinghead would continue to appoint him, even going as far as to stuff and mount the bird, and insisting that he was still alive.

With the abysmal failure of the Shouting Congress in 10 BW, Puddinghead made a surprisingly lucid decision to seek out a new home for the Earth Ponies, out from under the shadow of the Junta and Kingdom. In fact, from what records exist, it is widely accepted that it was the Hyracotherium Republic that actually sent out the first scouts to search for a new land, as far ahead as a week before either the Junta or the Kingdom, and by 9 BW the Republic had made the first stabs at claiming territory.

To do this, Puddinghead presented the Homestead Act to the Senate, which was ratified in surprisingly short order.

A decade later, the new land that the Republic had settled was in the middle of deciding its future, when word came in of Pegasopolis seeking out a Republic citizen by the name of Trencher for crimes unexplained. Without a second’s hesitation, Puddinghead declared war, even above Secretary Smart Cookie’s call for calm and caution, leading to the Winter War and eventually The Warming.

After the Warming, Puddinghead shocked both the former Senate and Smart Cookie by stepping down from power voluntarily, and would spend her time working to bring the three tribes together in a social setting, starting massive celebrations with hundreds of ponies from each tribe together that would last for days, with no purpose for celebration other than being together. In 3 AW, Puddinghead would die while taking up a dare to drink a gallon of hard cider while swallowing goldfish on a flagpole, falling off and breaking her neck doing so. According to Luscious Day, nopony noticed that she was dead for hours.

Luscious Day notes in her histories that the Equestrian Republic saw a foalboom in these early years; of note being most mares refusing to name the fathers, and almost as many giving birth to foals that were not their own race. Luscious suggests that the Spirits were at work to help encourage the merging of the three tribes into a single nationality. However, modern academia agrees that, given all of the cider that was often consumed at Puddinghead’s parties, and the general high mood, a great deal of merrymaking of a different source was going on that many ponies were awkward about discussing with others.

But Luscious Day does have a point: Puddinghead, in her own special way, ensured (if not expedited) that the national identity of Equestria would be of a single group, rather than three groups working for a single goal.