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.

If Cromwell had not died at 59 ( no restoration of Monarchy?)
If Lenin had not died at 53 ( no Stalin in charge).
If Napoleon had been killed in the Italian Campaign ( a successful invasion of revolutionary France by other European countries/restoration of the Monarchy long before 1815.)
If Napoleon had successfully invaded England (would we all be speaking French...back to Middle Ages post 1066.)
If Mao Zedong had lost to Chiang Kai-shek in 1949. (Would China still be largely an illiterate third world country.)

If Gordon Brown had realised his microphone was still on before delivering his (accurate and justified) description of Gillian Duffy.

Oh quite right. Regarding hopes of a reversal of the break with Rome, that ship had sailed and it'd be no more than futile skirmishes henceforth.
Mistrust of Rome and her client courts in Europe was already becoming entrenched, and we’d still have had the ejection of James II…..though if his brother had sired a legitimate son, things could have become very tricky.

No triumph of Whigs over Tories in terms of bringing in Hanover, let alone Dutch William. How would the house of Stuart have honourably disentangled itself from Versailles?
No Battle of the Boyne (huzzah!) but also no injection of interest into the royal line from the fascinating descendants of Elisabeth of Bohemia.

(Just to dash orf at a great tangent here:
I often get through difficult nights by mentally tallying categories within the royal family tree, back to the Conquest.
It’s the queens, all consorts except Victoria in terms of direct ancestry, who interest me most.
If you count back from our present King Charles, considering only the women from whom he is descended, he really has some amazing female influences coursing through him.
(We might even include the mother of Jacquetta of Luxembourg [mother of Queen Elizabeth of York], a semi-divine water goddess!)

I often think how much beautiful art we would have if Van Gogh, Jane Austen and Purcell had all not died too young.

Would history have been much different if Edward hadn't existed? He only reigned for 6 years, from age 9 to 15 so a lot of the politicing was done by regents. Jane Grey wouldn't have been dragged onto the throne then executed and Mary would have reigned for 8 years instead of 2, but that wouldn't have magically made her conceive an heir or live any longer - so Elizabeth the first would have become queen at the same time point. Arguably Elizabeth had a greater influence than Edward, Jane Grey or Mary simply by length of reign plus her intelligence and talent as a monarch.

I'm not convinced we'd still have any heavy industry or more council housing if Thatcher hadn't been PM. Coal & steel in Britain are uneconomical and any government since Thatcher could have ended right to buy in England but they still haven't. Right to buy was abolished in Scotland in 2016 and there are still multi-year wait lists in popular cities.

😂

1603 but she almost died from smallpox when she was Queen in 1562

I don't think it's Edward's reign that's the huge deal. I think it's the actions Henry went through to get Edward, and what that did to both Elizabeth and Mary.

If the NHS hadn't been established.

(On a lighter note, if Meatloaf had done "that").

With Ireland, there’s that request from Dermot for a bit of help from Norman knights.
But no doubt some other pretext for an incursion into and consequent acquisition of Ireland would have been found pdq by Henry II, though his great imperial ambitions were all in the opposite direction.

(His son…might John have made something solid as overlord of Ireland had he been of a different character? )

In the bonkers fantasy series A Discovery of Witches, an aged Queen Bess asks our time travelling vampire hero if her realm has survived and thriven, into his own era. She is reassured on this point.
But the realm was handed to the son of her treacherous cousin upon her (QE1) death, and so it’s through MQ of S rather than Gloriana that the realm continued its journey. Cruel fate.

Very interesting question.

• What if the English army hadn’t pursued the Normans down the hill at Hastings? If they’d listened to their commanders and stayed where they were, the Normans would have lost and I’d be typing this in a different language.
• What if Henry VIII hadn’t wanted a divorce? He was a Catholic and disliked Protestantism. Had he not been unhappily married, England would have remained Catholic.
• What if Elizabeth I had had a child? Because she died childless, England invited a Scotsman (James I) to take the English throne, uniting England and Scotland. That was the first step on the road to the U.K., or ‘Britain’.
• What if the Christmas truce of 1914 had spread and both sides had refused to continue fighting? Had that happened, and had some sort of peace treaty been signed, there’d have been no mass slaughter, no Somme, no Russian Revolution, no Stalin, no Hitler, no Holocaust and no WW2. I agree with Peter Hitchens that WW1 was the worst thing that ever happened to Britain.
• What if the Germans hadn’t re-directed army group centre away from Moscow in 1941. Had they gone all out and taken Moscow and offered a reasonable peace to the Russians, the war would have been won.

@CaspersMum24

No Falklands War

Would Callaghan have just let Argentina invade the Falklands and not defend its citizens?

If the US hadn't gained independence. Would they have provided troops for WW1 from 1914, leading to a quicker end, and then a more peaceful Europe afterwards, so no chance for WW2?

Of course they would. What excuse do the male pm's we've had in power since have for being such wet lettuces? They've all been wealthy and had good support at home.
Despite their wealth and support they couldnt lead us up the garden path, never mind into war.
I'm not a Maggie supporter, she made some terrible decisions, but that's aniother chat. I admired her resolve against Argentina & the terrorist bombings at their conference in Brighton

We were musing on another thread about what would’ve happened had Ireland joined the Allies in WW2. About how it possibly would’ve united the two countries and put Ireland in a strong negotiation position afterwards for lending support. Alas it didn’t happen.

I loved the Dennis Dear Bill letters! Might still have the book somewhere

So would we be speaking English as it is now without all the French words, or would English have developed differently. It was only the upper classes that spoke French after 1066 wasn't it, most of the ordinary people just carried on as before.

People always say that we'd all be speaking german if Germany had won WWII but we wouldn't though we might be bilingual.

What if Lord Halifax had become PM instead of Churchill in 1940?

If Michael Collins hadn't signed the Anglo Irish Treaty in 1921.

If the British Empire had never existed, there would be no United States, no Canada, no Australia, and no New Zealand, not as we know them today. The British Empire also used its navy to stamp out slavery in the early 19th-century. Funny that the Italians are proud of the Roman Empire, which was based on slavery, yet the British, whose empire did more to end slavery than any other empire in history, are ashamed. Many African and Arabic people fought against the British because they wanted to keep slavery. I know that doesn’t fit the woke narrative, but I can only apologise. Britain also came close to war with the United States in the 1840s and 1850s because British ships stopped American slave ships and freed the slaves. I wonder if Mel Gibson will make a movie about that? 🤔. I suspect not.

Had the British Empire never existed, you’d be living in a world dominated by China and Putin and Iran.

I think to imagine that as any kind of serious possibility regardless of Irish neutrality in WW2 suggests a general lack of knowledge of Irish history.

There was no reasonable peace to offer the Russians - only slavery ( the Nazis made no secret of the fact, they believed in themselves as a 'master race', come to force lesser beings in to total subordination.)

Slavery, massacre and starvation was the Russians' future; no wonder the Russians fought so hard, losing 8.7 million military and 19 million civilians in the process - 'tearing the guts out of the German armies' as Churchill acknowledged.

😂

Wouldn’t there still be those countries? As the French and Dutch etc would have just taken over more. Maybe India would have carried on its industrialisation unfettered - how great would that be

I asking honestly I don’t know

The Roman empire was over 2000 years ago!