To ask which historical crossroads you wonder about?

[HoneyParsnipSoup]

For me it’s wondering what would’ve happened had Catherine of Aragon had a son and Henry hadn’t divorced her. Country may well be totally different.

This was in my head last evening.
I think 1979 was the very worst year of my entire life (I’m 70 now), and it’s a million times worse beyond my person because it brought in such changes as would destroy many of the aspects of life in GB which made things endurable even when times were very difficult.
To me, things changed so much after 1979 it is as though That Woman had been secretly tweaking a genetic alteration for all citizens, ensuring that there could be no turning back, only lurching forward ever more greedy for acquisition and entertainment.
I still mourn what was lost thanks to that election result. 😩

If stupid and selfish Ed Milliband hadn’t stood against David. Twat.

If Diana hadn’t been in that Mercedes.

If Harold had defeated the Normans at Hastings.

If Gazza had not received a yellow card during the semi final of the 1990 World Cup.
We could have perhaps avoided losing a penalty shoot out at the end of the game, gone into the final & won ⚽️🏆

If JFK hadn’t been shot.

If Franz Ferdinand hadn’t been assassinated.

If the British Empire had never existed.

If plastic hadn’t been invented!

If the Princes in the Tower had survived.

If Charles I elder brother Henry hadn't died. By all accounts, everyone loved him. He was extremely popular. No one liked Charles, including his father.

What might the alternate reality look like?

I rather suspect they’d be another slight & fuse that blew, eventually.

Well I suppose the Reformation wouldn’t have happened, Mary Queen of Scots would’ve ascended first, and possibly our relationship with Europe would’ve prevailed over our increasing drifting toward America.

Lots of intriguing ones here but I'm thinking what if Putin hadn't become president. I'm not great on Russian history but let's say he'd been put in his place earlier. Arguably no Brexit and no Trump being elected without Russian interference. No war in Ukraine either.

I think the reformation would still have happened but would have been a much slower process.

If Comey had not announced he's re-examining Hillary's emails 11 days before the election.

If David bloody Cameron had thought through his referendum properly and made a 2/3 majority necessary for Brexit to be embarked upon.
And also if BoJo had succumbed to COVID.

I wonder how different. The Dissolution would have been avoided (or would it…?) but the Reformation was coming, regardless of Henry.
I think by the 1530s, rejection of Rome’s temporal power was more of a motivator in England than was its spiritual reach, really.
As the century wore on this grew as England itself became more confident, yet that could have been the very thing which might tempt Henry to purloin the Church’s riches from the monasteries in order to finance vain and foolhardy military forays in France.
He’d have kept Cromwell on though, if there’d been no need for Anne of Cleves, but may of course never have met him in the first place since Wolsley wouldn't have been brokering marriage and divorce deals for the King!

But I think England would have rejected Rome in the 16th century, with or without Henry’s need for a new wife. But thereafter…if his son had thriven and come to the throne, ..there'd have been no Stuart dynasty, and that (with the greatest respect to our King) would have saved England (and Ireland) one hell of a lot of misery.

Came here to say same & also what if Cuban missile crisis had a different outcome & also the 2002 submarine incident.

I think all these things would have happened, just later and less suddenly. I think the wider market forces were already in play. .

In the 1930s the UK and US had the opportunity to take far, far more central European Jews than they did (due to anti immigration sentiments). How many more lives would have been saved?

On a slightly lighter note. If Obama hadn't done his 2014 White House Correspondences routine where he ripped the piss out of Trump...

I think it would have been a bigger what if, if Mary I had managed to have a son/s with Phillip. Then Catholicism would have been cemented again, the blip would have been the reformation and our relationship with Spain and mainland Europe very different

If Germany had won WWI

Great post. Which alternative though?

I think maybe a civil war in the late 16th or 17th. As in France or Germany.

I'd love to know what would have happened if Henry had simply been happy with a female heir! He could have been. There were men around him who were starting to educate their daughters to high levels. His own grandmother was an absolutely formidable woman; there were plenty of real battleaxes amongst the female nobility both past and present. Catherine of Aragon's mother was a queen in her own right. Etc. etc.

If Henry had been a different sort of person, he might have believed Mary would be a perfectly acceptable queen, and he could have started laying the foundations to make her authority unquestionable, bringing her up to be a ruler, and so on.

My (totally speculative) sense is that he wasn't able to do this precisely because no one had ever really prepared him to be king. Because his older brother was expected to be crowned, Henry had nothing to fall back on except the belief that somehow, God and fate had made him king. And I think that made him horribly insecure and nervous in a way he might not have been, had he been brought up to believe he was always going to be king one day. I think that meant he was also totally inequipped to see that his daughter might be a ruling queen.

I can imagine Henry growing old and fat and boring with Catherine, who was absolutely devoted to him, and staying in the Catholic Church.

I love the idea of how different the rest of the sixteenth century/early seventeenth century would have looked in a Catholic England. Instead of Shakespeare et al. writing plays about spooky, conspiring Catholics with their superstitions and their weird Spanish/French/Italian ways, we'd have have plays about spooky, conspiring Protestants with their superstitions and their weird German/Swiss ways.

If that turncoat at Bosworth (Stanley, was it?) had not abandoned Richard.

If Henry Tudor had been seen off in 1485, that’s another rotten dynasty we’d have been spared. (I airily dispatched the Stuarts five minutes ago!)
Those Plantagenet men had a knack for marrying astonishing women, and who knows who would have become Queens of England if the house had survived. Catherine de Medici is a possibility I guess, so I’d better watch The Serpent Queen immediately!