I've been thinking a lot lately about how the main difference between Alfred and Matt is ambition and it's relationship with faith.
Alfred wants the world. He did on some level want the industrial and economic power that propelled him to the status of power. He resisted it, but he longed for the military might that all but forced his inheritance of the slipping British Empire. He longed for it. Maybe more for the respect at first, the ability to look Arthur in the eye as a man and equal, and only reluctantly for the ability to shape the world but he wanted it all the same. And he has faith he'll have it and that he deserves it. He believes with every ounce of himself that his way, his values, his path was the best one. Not only for him but for anyone around him. First the Americas, and then the world. There are doubts that whisper in his ear that sound like the roaring flames of hell and they nag at his conscience but they disapears under the barrage of success that he desired. He is God's chosen country. Icarus flew too close to the sun, and tumbled into the sea on broken wings when sun-warmed wax melted away. But Alfred swallowed the sun itself, took it into his hands and surpassed all other nations when he became that first nuclear power. He has utter faith that the entire world will dance to the tune he chooses.
Matt has little ambition. If he has any, it is only to survive, to avoid being swallowed whole by the competing empires that gave him breath and the brother he's bound too. He was the second son of the British Empire, Arthur's most dependable child. The First Dominion of Empire. Sounds so grand, like he's so in line with Arthur. It should be that he had faith in imperial dreams, in that world upon which the sun did not set upon his family and an ambition to serve it and prop it up in all things. But there is little of it there. He is the abandoned son of the French Empire. He has no faith in loyalty or in safety or love nor in any ambition too it. Except that innate need to survive. And Matt, well he is the North. Here, survival means warmth. Not the fires of nuclear power but of warmth and community and fire. Matthew's utter devotion to his Father and his family is given without so much expectation as hope that it will be returned when the brink is near and he needs help.
Matt looks softer, kinder than his brother, but he has that same sort of sharp ambition to him under it all. It's so much smaller as he has little faith in anything he gives being returned, but his one small need demands he give anyway. The North American brothers are much the same. It's just Alfred is so much louder and less desperate and more honest than Matt.