Harold Godwinson and witenagemot support William of Normandy

Had Edward the Confessor made William his more obvious successor and had the witan supported William (with harold doing so as well) how would everything have been different without armed conquest? Would England and the world be different today?
 
Oh, extremely. Without an armed conquest, I highly doubt that William would have ran around ousting local nobles and replacing them with Normans, which I think means considerably less Norman influence on England in general. William and his prodigy would quite probably have been the only Normans in England for awhile at least, and had he not come in the foreign conqueror I really don't think that Norman French would've supplanted English as the language of law and the upperclass, but rather that William and his descendants would've been anglicized.


The real question is... how do you get Harold to support his claim? Harold is NOT going to support William's claim. Not as long as he's alive, and he had the pull with the Witan and the king to get his way, as was demonstrated when HE was named king over the king's legitimate heir.
 
The real question is... how do you get Harold to support his claim? Harold is NOT going to support William's claim. Not as long as he's alive, and he had the pull with the Witan and the king to get his way, as was demonstrated when HE was named king over the king's legitimate heir.


How about if Harold drowns in that 1064 shipwreck?

Is there any chance his brother Tosti could be persuaded to support William, or would he just seize the throne himself?
 
The serious flaw I see here is that no one ever had any intention of making William King. There's very little other than William himself claiming the confessor said he wanted him to be king and the Witan very clearly is the one that chose the king, which wasn't him. Even if you kill Harold at some point it's probably more likely to go to some earl or the Æthling.
 
Long term, it can't last. Harold had been the de facto ruler of England for years before 1066, and his family still held Wessex and East Anglia. He would have found a demotion hard, and giving up any significant estates to Normans even worse. On the other side of the partnership, William, given his nightmarish early reign, didn't trust anybody. He would be especially suspicious of a talented, ambitious non-Norman like Harold who had a sterling military reputation and who possessed far more popularity in England than he did.
 
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