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.

I do all the time. I imagine going back in a time machine and telling Henry 8th Elizabeth ascended to the throne instead of his sickly son and watching his outrage 😁

Or indeed if he’d had the courage to say that it was rude to talk behind her back but she was bigoted, then make the case for the benefits of immigration. What might have been.

Yes, she was! She was in the running to get Cleopatra too, but for some reason the director didn't want her. Liz was fab as Cleo, and it's where she met two-time husband Richard Burton. I'd just like to have seen Joan's version.. and what if she ended up with Burton instead? You have to wonder what that would've been like.

There’s a few of us wondering that one! Possibilities that spring to mind: better women’s rights and reduced class system - possibly a clearer rejection of empire building and greater upkeep of ecological thinking. Maybe. We’ll never know.

Another opportunity to cut Rome off before it got started may have been if the Sabine women had gone back to the Etruscans and Etruria had lasted. That civilization is also thought to have been better for women, and then no empire in Europe. Of course that wouldnt have stopped empires or famine in Asia so maybe we’d be worse off.

What if the jacobite rebellion had succeeded

If the British Raj never existed or the East India Company.
If Oppenheimer failed
If Judas hadn't betrayed Jesus
If Tsar Nicholas and family weren't murderd

The one that really makes me shudder is if we had never restored Charles II and the monarchy, and had stayed under puritanical rule. We'd probably have had centuries of religious wars (far worse than the awful legacy they left in N.Ireland), and regressed into utter obscurity and raging factions of protestants.

I'm not a massive royalist, but they did save us from the misery of religious extremisim and saw them off to the Americas - and we all know how that turned out.

You mean David instead of Ed, I often think this too.

If the recount had been done fairly and Al Gore had become president instead of Bush. Would the WMD debacle have happened?

If farming had never been thought of and we had all remained hunter-gatherers.

If neither Jesus nor Muhammad gained followers and, instead, faded into obscurity without making a mark on the historical record.

Then we'd all be zoroastrians and live in peace?

😅 naaaaaah!

This would have dramatic changed my life, crazy to think how many peoples lives in fact.

If God had looked at Adam and Eve, paused, and then said to himself "Oops, bad idea, they"ll only fuck it up."

This is the answer to the question for me. I have a bit of an obsession with it all. It's such a good story. It's like a film.

I've thought about changes in history a lot. You can drive yourself mad looking all the different possibilities - the different permutations of dominos falling and coming to dead ends etc. all throughout history.

How would it have averted the Falklands War? Argentina would still have invaded - they would have been totally overwhelmed without British support and they are a British Overseas Territory, they never belonged to Argentina.

Oooh that's a very good one.

Another one I think about a lot is if RMS Titanic hadn't met an iceberg on the night if 15th April 1912. Might not have changed history so much as some things but it would have probably carried on being a beautiful boat giving many people pleasure.

If Khrushchev hadn't backed down during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I love that book. So clever, and not what you might expect.

If Queen Victoria’s eldest child , her clever daughter Victoria , had been able to inherit the throne instead of Edward VII ( as she would under our present day rules ) she wouldn’t have been married off abroad & given birth to the Kaiser -WW1 would have been avoided & without WW1 there wouldn’t have been WW2 …

If Rasputin has not survived his journey from Siberia to ST Petersburg where he managed to infiltrate the royal family. Would the Romanovs have survived?

brilliant thread! I would love there to be a ‘what if?’ Podcast around this very theme. There would need to be people far more clever than me on it though!

My contribution would be what if Mary Queen of Scot’s first husband hadn’t died? He was heir to the French throne, so would there have been a proper uniting of France and Scotland?

What if the jacobites had won at Culloden?

The Romanovs would have survived had the Tsars cousin King George V allowed them refuge in the UK. He did not.

Me too. I used to think it wouldn’t have made much difference to your average peasant who the king was. But the Norman invasion was an absolute catastrophe.

William took the whole land as his personal possession and the entire population was dispossessed. He gave tracts of land to his followers, along with the people who lived on it. Ordinary people, who until then had been free, were now tied to the land they had previously owned -- servants to the Norman overlords. The lowest class, serfs, could even be sold along with the land.

It took a long time to regain anything near the freedom and quality of life they had had before 1066.

And Harold came so painfully close to winning the Battle of Hastings. His army had defeated the invading Norwegians at Stamford Bridge a couple of weeks earlier, and then had to march straight down to the south coast to confront the Normans, so they were tired. Even so, they had the high ground until the bloody Normans pretended to retreat, the men rushed down recklessly to chase them off, and were then wiped out.