Challenge; Earliest possible UK?

As it say's in the title, extra points for making it as close to the OTL UK as possible in for.
 
Uniting the british isles can probably be done in roman times. They have no particularily good reason to do so except just to expand on the map, but it´s doable I guess.

But that wouldn´t end up being close to OTL at all.

If by UK you mean act of the union I suppose an earlier date for it is possible. But if you mean England and Scotland with the same monarch is proabably doable in medieval times. But, then when protestanism or religious reforms start for real in Europe it might be difficult. If a king based in London decides to change the church, it might well cause tensions in Scotland. Different kinds of tension than OTL where the church of England was founded before Scotland and England came together.
 

Thande

Donor
As Fabilius says, uniting the British Isles under the Romans and then a Constantine-type guy inheriting all the isles as a united Romano-Celtic successor state is possible.

If you mean something even vaguely similar racially and linguistically to what we have now, though (i.e. dominated by Anglo-Saxons) you're probably looking at a more successful Edward I. The first attempt to unite the kingdoms on equal grounds was tried by James VI and I in the 1600s-1610s, but ironically back then the Scots were for it and the English were against.
 
I'm simply referring to having Great Britain at least united (though no complaints if it's bigger), preferably though a union of the Crown's type mechanism, followed or accompanied by an act of Union. However, alternatives would also be nice to see.

One idea I had was that it would come from a Scandinavian invader who sets up shop around New Castle (which becomes the capital) and from there slowly unites with the other Kingdoms until a series of unions brings about a big one.
 

Thande

Donor
I'm simply referring to having Great Britain at least united (though no complaints if it's bigger), preferably though a union of the Crown's type mechanism, followed or accompanied by an act of Union. However, alternatives would also be nice to see.

One idea I had was that it would come from a Scandinavian invader who sets up shop around New Castle (which becomes the capital) and from there slowly unites with the other Kingdoms until a series of unions brings about a big one.
That's basically the backstory for L. Sprague de Camp's Wheels of If, although bear in mind Newcastle did not exist then, being founded in 1080. The capital of Northumbria was Bamburgh.
 
That's basically the backstory for L. Sprague de Camp's Wheels of If, although bear in mind Newcastle did not exist then, being founded in 1080. The capital of Northumbria was Bamburgh.

I'll look into that at some point, thanks. I was meaning the rough area, not the actual city, should have made that clear :p
 
Scandinavian unification's a good bet in my mind, too. The languages would be pretty different, but is British culture all that different from Norwegian? Free, liberal democracies, check.

I feel we tend to underrate Vikings because of period Christian propaganda. Like Britain, later, they had command of the sea by better sea tech that was able to colonize Vinland centuries before Columbus.
 
Let's work back...

1) The Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland lasts. Boom!

2) Royalists win ECW or, better, more delicate royal politics mean it's never fought (Henry Stuart lives?) and the royal house is able to gradually continue consolidating its power.

The Stewarts were pretty union-mad until the idea became associated with Cromwell and, at the same time, they realised the value of playing one kingdom off against the other. Remove those factors and their long-term ambition for Union - which circa 1604 was going nowhere in England, although as Thande points out we were more keen - may come to pass.

3) England stays Presbyterian (Edward VI lives): if that happens, a *union of crowns at about the same time had a much better shot of leading to a full political union.

4) Speaking of Edward VI: I don't really know how to arrange it, but perhaps some continental butterfly to the detriment of France means Somerset can win the Rough Wooing, enforce a union of crowns, and ensure that whichever Protestant discipline England adopts, so does Scotland. This one's go pedigree: John Knox, who was at the time a senior figure in the Presbyterian-inclined CoE, lamented the missed opportunity in his history of the Scottish Reformation.

5) Skipping over a bunch of stuff where some opportunities probably exist but broadly speaking England is stuff in France and remembers what happened the last time...

Edward I could probably have subdued Scotland if Robert the Bruce had just plain drowned on his way out of Ireland. He may have been an evil horrible bastard, but his military skill and sheer bloody-minded ruthlessness succeeded where the rest had failed. If not him and his faction, who? The English had prevented the return of Balliol and learned their lesson about coercion verses conciliation, so although they didn't really control anything beyond the Forth, they may succeed in getting their sovereignty recognised as in Ireland.

Surer and better, however, to have the Maid of Norway live and Scotland peacefully enter into Angevindom like everyone planned for. The Scottish and English elites would not become as intertwined and similar as they were in 1286 until, oh, a bittie after 1832?, so if this had happened and lasted one would think that political union would follow naturally in a couple of centuries.

I honestly don't know whether any of the subsequent Balliol-based attempts to set up an English client regime had much chance, but given that the Bruce line were in exile at one point, you'd think so. No Hundred Years War = English southern Lowlands and a Scottish vassal?

6) England's earliest intervention in Scotland was a big success, even if Shakespeare was exagerrating. ;) If the Earl of Northumberland, acting largely by himself, could depose the king of Alba, one would think that Saxon England - relatively unbothered by what goes on in France, and quite possibly more and for longer conscious of itself within a Scandinavian world with Scandinavian threats - would keep a damn close eye on the Canmore line he had put in its place.

(As a matter of fact, despite the best efforts of the monks or Melrose to expunge this event from history, Malcolm did do some sort of personal homage to William the Bastard, though it was a much less formal relationship than what Edward I was talking about. But William was provoked to that by our support for the Last of the English and, when the threat of Saxon resurgence with the support of outside powers was gone, seems to have largely forgotten us.)

7) As mentioned, something sub-Roman. Rheged, the strongest British kingdom which at one point was on the point of defeating Northumbria, extended into modern Scotland; all the kingdoms between the Antonine and Hadriine walls clearly considered themselves Romano-Britons. If the Saxons never turn up/are confined to the southeast of England as subjects of the High King, everything up to the Forth-Clyde line looks more to the British world than to the Pictish and Gaelic north.
 
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Scandinavian unification's a good bet in my mind, too.

If the Norse had been a unified and organised force at the time of their greatest impunity, they could probably have destroyed all of Britain's kingdoms and set up their own. Sveyn and Canute, a little after, came bloody close. Thing is, they weren't, and neither were Britain's kingdoms. Would a Norse king in Yorvik have really found subduing Alba an easier or more productive use of his time than a Saxon king at London?

An England under a viking adventurer-dynasty (as it briefly was) and part of a North Germanic cultural sphere (as it was both before and after the Vikings), focused on a northern world, would surely make Scotland part of its policies (Ireland, also: some people reckon the events leading up to Clontarff were a plan of Sveyn to turn the king of Dublin into a Gall-Gael High King under his protection). But in that regard, I don't think it would be any different from any other England that avoids becoming the chief province of a French feudal empire.
 
Wow, that's quite the list! So what do you think is the earliest that could lead to a country like the one we know today?
 

Thande

Donor
Wow, that's quite the list! So what do you think is the earliest that could lead to a country like the one we know today?

It wouldn't be that similar. A POD only thirty years ago could result in a Britain drastically unlike OTL's, that the thing about the butterfly effect.
 
Yep. A lot of what defines us in the past as well as the present has been invented since 1707. Scotland, for instance, which was invented by Scott in the first two decades of the 19th C. The English Gentleman: Wellington was the first. Our tradition of democracy: it was applied retro-actively by Whig historians.

Not even the name is a fixed fact. Even though the name and symbolism of Great Britain had all been invented, Cromwell's united Commonwealth was called England, Scotland, and Ireland, and one suspects that Scotland and Ireland would be to England as Herzegovina to Bosnia in the common usage if it were to last.

Whereas in the early modern period, there was a lot of ambiguity about whether 'Britannia' referred rightly to the island or to to the area of the old Roman province, that is, England (the English government, of course, said that obviously it meant both and that therefore they had an inherent right to overlordship). By way of retaliation, even the early unionist thinkers in Scotland rejected Britannia as a name for the island in favour of Albion, with its distinct whiff of Alba.

And with a sufficiently early PoD the island, and certainly the whole of whole of what we might by analogy to Gaeldom call Saxondom- including, say, Edinburgh - would probably be 'England'.

To provide some sort of answer to the question: you'd want a PoD in or after the 1500s to create an entity which contains England and Scotland as sections but is not either of them, where most people speak English or something very much like it, and follow some form of Protestantism.
 
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Thande

Donor
The English Gentleman: Wellington was the first.

I've actually heard it claimed that the Victorian conception of the English gentleman was invented by Joseph Addison, a playwright and Whig politician of Queen Anne's time. He himself was self-effacing and liked to hide his emotions, put a lot of his own character into his plays (which until the 20th century were almost as famous and influential as Shakespeare) and from this was derived the idea of a golden age in which everyone was modest and had a stiff upper lip, which was promptly adopted by the Victorians as the "innate British national character".
 
I've actually heard it claimed that the Victorian conception of the English gentleman was invented by Joseph Addison, a playwright and Whig politician of Queen Anne's time. He himself was self-effacing and liked to hide his emotions, put a lot of his own character into his plays (which until the 20th century were almost as famous and influential as Shakespeare) and from this was derived the idea of a golden age in which everyone was modest and had a stiff upper lip, which was promptly adopted by the Victorians as the "innate British national character".

Interesting! Nothing ever has only one origin, of course, so I'd presume that when it became necessary to discover the English gentleman, the evidence was handy. And of course the English probably like to think of themselves as staid and dignified before foreigners did.

Thing thing I read about Wellington was that his own laconic and reserved traits were set up in opposition to the self-aggrandisement and ambition of the Evil Boneparte, thus proving the superiority of conservative values and roast beef.

(On a semi-related note: one of my recipe-books points out somewhere that, since the Roast Beef of Old England was identified as an essential national trait in the mid 18th century, whereas the cattle-trade with Scotland had been going on on a massive scale since the 1500s, the actual roast beef in question could well have been Scots. :D:p)
 
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