They had neither of them been brought up to wage war. Tomàs took to the civil war like it was what he had been born to do, securing alliances and raising armies and planning out exactly how they would help his chosen claimant grind his rivals into dust.

Jonatan — didn't. It was a deficit of character — of bravery, of loyalty, of honor — and he knew it. But he could barely stomach the thought of leading an army out under his banners, to — what? To desperately hope that if they slaughtered their way through enough of their countrymen they'd find their way to peace and prosperity? A virtuous man would fight the war to its conclusion and build the Age of Glory on the other side, but no matter how hard he tried he couldn't manage it.

And Tomàs was brave enough, kind enough, generous enough to let Jonatan stay out of it. He deputized Jonatan to protect their county from monsters — he could hardly prosecute a war effectively if his bridges were overrun by river drakes and his soldiers were eaten by ettins — and he rode out to lead their men into battle.

Three years after the war started, Jonatan and his band of monster hunters responded to a report of regular bears menacing a nearby village and found themselves surrounded instead by a pack of dire bears.

He could have run. It wouldn't even have been difficult to run. He had Dimension Door; his companions had more plausible escape routes. And the entire village would have been overrun, and everyone in it would have died.

Jonatan was surprised when he found himself in Heaven. He'd expected Axis; on some level he'd never really stopped expecting Aroden's realm, no matter how impossible that was. And of course it was an honor to be in Heaven, of course it spoke well to his character, of course he'd have said he'd be happy to join the ranks of Heaven's archons—

—only, the fundamental project of Heaven was the war on Hell.

You didn't have to be a soldier, necessarily. Heaven's armies had a place for spies, for tacticians, for messengers. For anyone who wanted to join them in waging what was, objectively, a worthy war.

And Jonatan — didn't.

That wasn't all there was to do in Heaven. There was nothing wrong with the Summerlands, if you were a farmer. There was nothing wrong with specializing as a lawyer. There was nothing wrong with spending your time in Heavenly debate halls and Heavenly libraries and Heavenly groves and never, ever becoming the sort of person who was temperamentally suited for war.

In a hundred years, Jonatan never really adjusted.

His first question, when the archmages find him in Heaven and ask if he wants his county back, is why not Tomàs.

Tomàs is in Hell, they tell him. Tomàs is in Hell, and if Jonatan turns them down the next person on their list is his second-oldest sister, and after that his cousin the drunkard.

His sister is a perfectly virtuous and reasonable woman — but her virtues are, after all, those of a noblewoman, not those of a count. He'd take her over the drunkard, if he had to, but he wouldn't be pleased about it. He knows how to govern a county, if they trust him to do it, and he stands ready to serve Cheliax.

And — he has no intention of giving himself over to vice. No intention of doing any more Evil than necessary to maintain a functional county. 

But if he should happen to find himself in Axis, the next time around, he won't complain.

The problem, or at least a problem, is that the people of Reclaimed Cheliax are not at all like the people of Arodenite Cheliax. It's not that there weren't plenty of unvirtuous or anarchic men in Arodenite Cheliax, of course. But there were virtuous men too, in far greater number, and even the Evil men knew what Goodness was.

More men hang in his first month back than would've been executed in Tomàs's time in a year; a Good and Lawful justice system must be predictable, and it's no mercy to spare a sympathetic murderer and watch as ten more rise up to imitate him. He tries to hire servants and advisors with any discernable virtues beyond simple deference; this proves to be nearly impossible. He hires workers out of his starkly limited budget to repair a bridge on a critical trade route, and they report dutifully that they've done so; when it collapses a month later, the head of the work crew insists under interrogation that he thought he'd be killed if he told Jonatan of the critical structural flaws that meant it would need to be replaced entirely. He rides out personally to investigate a report that an entire village has started worshipping Asmodeus again, and every villager there insists that the claimed defeat of Asmodeus is merely a loyalty test and they'll face greater torments in Hell for defying him.

...He doesn't hang the entire village. He does find the man who instigated it, and kills him where he stands, and tells the rest of them that they'll follow if he hears any of them so much as breathe the names of infernal deities. 

There are a great deal many things his people need, but above all they need peace, stability, consistency. They cannot rebuild in the aftermath of Asmodeus if the very foundations they stand on are infirm. But day by day, month by bloody, exhausting month, they get closer.

The Constitutional Convention is, frankly, meaning no criticism to the Queen, one of the worst ideas Jonatan has ever heard of, which is impressive, considering that it's competing with "sell out the country to the diabolists." He shows up expecting that surely the Queen does not actually mean to have random peasants and anarchic clerics write the constitution. He's happy to "vote" for whatever she wants it to say.

The Queen... apparently does intend to have random peasants and anarchic clerics write the constitution. It must be a demand of the anarchic archmages she's allied with; she was born and raised among the nobility, and must necessarily have more sense. Just about the only good thing he can say about it is that the Duchess of Chelam has managed to divert the commoners and radicals to so-called committees almost none of which will ever be relevant. The real influence over the constitution will come from private afternoon meetings, not from whores and farmers fighting over the precise nature of the laws.

And then an adolescent girl with more splendor than sense calls on the people of Westcrown to rise up against the holdover nobility, and—

—he hadn't expected the riots, which in hindsight was very foolish of him. He makes it out unscathed, but the city doesn't. 

The Crown is hanging rioters, but not enough of them. The people are going to come out with the impression that it's safe to riot as long as no one sees your face. Really, she needs to make an example of Wain if she wants anyone to get the message; in her place she'd be one of the first problems he dealt with. 

And the slavers and slaves and monsters have somehow managed to accidentally conspire to bring about full abolition, and one of the handful of committees that might actually be relevant has decided to abandon primogeniture entirely, and pamphlets spread dangerous lies about Iomedae halfway around the city in an hour, and teenage whores seem to think it acceptable to mortally insult archduchesses on the floor, and they barely manage to vote down a proposal to bankrupt their country—

The Galtan Revolution was wholly after Jonatan's death, but he had studied a bit of its history in Heaven, trying to distract himself from not becoming a soldier. It is barely possible it was worth the cost, if it freed them from Hell. Cheliax is free from Hell, and what it needs now is stability, not anarchy. Perhaps in a better time they could have afforded to grant the populace more freedom; but if one must choose between an excess of Law and an excess of anarchism, no man in his right mind would risk the second.