DBWI: What if Queen Victoria hadn't been assassinated?

As we all know, Queen Victoria was killed on the 10th of June, 1840 by Edward Oxford. Her uncle Ernest Agustus was crowned King Ernest I (unless you think he might've taken a different name). How might history have unfolded had Victoria's assassin failed in killing her?
 
We wouldn't have had the British Revolution of 1848 which overthrew King Ernest I and installed a more liberal-minded monarch on the British throne, for starters.
 
(How would he have ended up on the throne? Ernest's son George would've succeeded him as George V rather than his brother)
(If he was removed by Revolution, there's no guarantee that George would have been allowed the throne. He may have kept Hanover, but I think it's likely that Parliament would give the throne to Adolphus)
 
(I don't want to nitpick, but tradition - in the UK at least - wants that a monarch only gets a numeral when he isn't the only one of his name. Hence "Queen Victoria" and not "Queen Victoria I" - there are some some exceptions (e.g. the clock on Big Ben does have an enscription mentioning "Victoriam primam"), but that has become the general rule.
So talking about an "Ernest I" implies there's at least been an "Ernest II". But it seems rather unlikely that any new monarch would chose the reigning name of a monarch that was so hated he was deposed by revolution.)
 
What would the long term impact of a surviving Queen Victoria be? For starters, I doubt that the wave of revolutions which struck Europe in 1848 would have affected Britain as I doubt she would have been as reactionary as King Ernest.
 
(I don't want to nitpick, but tradition - in the UK at least - wants that a monarch only gets a numeral when he isn't the only one of his name. Hence "Queen Victoria" and not "Queen Victoria I" - there are some some exceptions (e.g. the clock on Big Ben does have an enscription mentioning "Victoriam primam"), but that has become the general rule.
So talking about an "Ernest I" implies there's at least been an "Ernest II". But it seems rather unlikely that any new monarch would chose the reigning name of a monarch that was so hated he was deposed by revolution.)

OOC:


images


(Assuming he chooses Charles III).
 

Skallagrim

Banned
Well, the revolutions of the late 1840s did have effects in European countries with monarchs less reactionary than King Ernest. You see the more 'flexible' monarchs avoiding trouble by suddenly "discovering" that they woke up more liberal that they'd been before-- and adjusting their politics accordingly. Maybe something like that would have happened in Britain, too? Of course, there had been the Reform act of 1832, which Ernest couldn't reverse no matter how much he wished it. On the other hand, he caused major problems for himself by working to block the plans to repeal the "Corn Laws" (agricultural tariffs) in 1846. A lot depends on how that matter is treated, I'd say.
 
Well, the revolutions of the late 1840s did have effects in European countries with monarchs less reactionary than King Ernest. You see the more 'flexible' monarchs avoiding trouble by suddenly "discovering" that they woke up more liberal that they'd been before-- and adjusting their politics accordingly. Maybe something like that would have happened in Britain, too? Of course, there had been the Reform act of 1832, which Ernest couldn't reverse no matter how much he wished it. On the other hand, he caused major problems for himself by working to block the plans to repeal the "Corn Laws" (agricultural tariffs) in 1846. A lot depends on how that matter is treated, I'd say.

Major problems among the industrial and urban populations, as well as the "professional class". Though they should have learned by the French and American revolution your gunsmiths, shippers, printers, and lawyers are precisely the sort of people you don't want to tick off if you want to avoid the agitation and supply of violent revolutionaries, the government WAS facing very legitimate concerns about unrest and poverty growing quite rapidly in the countryside (particularly in Ireland and Scotland, who ran the risk of nationalistic tendencies) as New World and Russian imports were crashing the global price of staple crops to the point many independent farmers were going bankrupt and larger estates displacing large numbers of their employees. He wasn't stupid; just stuck between a rock and a hard place by Britain's overheated industrialization and unequal regional growth,

As for effects, Vicky would be facing all the same problems. I fail to see how she prevents the Revolution merely by her survival, anymore than the Czars could prevent the exact opposite; mass rural unrest and territorial dissolution/lose of centeral authority to the provencial nobility by trying to cram through impossible to enforce and broadly unpopular pro-industrial "Iron Laws" and massive projects funded by an alchohal and land tax
 
So, why do you think did the British opt to name Adolphus as King instead of proclaiming a Republic as the more radical factions urged after Ernest Augustus was deposed during the British Revolution of 1848?
 
So, why do you think did the British opt to name Adolphus as King instead of proclaiming a Republic as the more radical factions urged after Ernest Augustus was deposed during the British Revolution of 1848?

Precisely because of that: those factions were the radical fringe. Most folks in Britain diden't have a problem with the concept of Monarchy per say: in fact, the vast majority for for it. Rather, the Revolutionaries wanted changes in state policy that would adjust to the new reality of British power: the urban worker and industrialist as opposed to the country gentry and producer of domestic woolens and crops, and were getting annoyed at the logger-jam created by the "Alliance of Crown and Cotter" that was keeping the middle class surpressed.
 
Top