Daughters of Richard of York were bit to old for Edward Lancaster, so rather not.
POLL: What's your favourite pre-modern England-wank scenario?
- Thread starter Skallagrim
- Start date
Malcolm's Scottish Kingdom included the Kingdom of Strathclyde (approx modern Cumberland) , the Kingdom of Alba and small bits of the Kingdoms of Isles & Northumbria & Orkney.
While accurate for much of Medieval Scotland's history "maybe we should stop raiding this area for a while, they're not that rich but chock full of nuts" was not always true for it.
During William the Conqueror's time; the Medieval Warm Period has boosted Scottish agriculture. The taxation would be used to fund infrastructure which should keep the territory profitable for England.
October 1160
After the death of his second wife Constance, King Louis VII of France immediately sought a replacement.
In this ATL, rumours spread that she was murdered for failing to provide him with a son and heir. Her brother King Ferdinand II of León, and her nephew King Alfonso VIII of Castile both become convinced the story of murder is true. They jointly declare war on France to avenge her. King Henry II of England privately jumps with joy, and publicly condemns King Louis for wife-slaying. He refuses to provide any support for his liege King Louis, and ignores his feudal military obligations.
Angevin wank ensues as King Henry takes advantage of Louis's war with León and Castile.
Darien and the subsequent financial arrangement definitely did not help.
True. I think Henry was much more able than Charles though, an ATL with him on the throne would be interesting
Last edited:
Skallagrim
Banned
Indeed. As a matter of fact, remaining Catholic deprives the Crown of its foremost OTL exercise in large-scale plunder and appropriation (namely that of Church property). Historically, the Catholic Church has been the one of the most effective and long-term checks on royal power that have existed in human history. An England that remains Catholic is unlikely to become particularly more abolutist-- rather to never become so in the first place.
The Glorious Revolution is sometimes touted as this great thing that gave Britain some unique advantage, but in reality, it was just a natural reaction to the excesses of the depraved royal absolutism that had in fact resulted from the English Reformation. If England had remained Catholic, the causes that made the Glorious Revolution necessary would never have existed. So indeed, as you wrote, a Catholic England would be less "divided against itself". Its internal political struggles would likely be less extreme and all-consuming. This would mean that more resources would be available for productive economic activity. The fact that the trend towards royal absolutism is curtailed would mean that there would be a less overbearing state apparatus to hinder commercial activity.
Contrary to the oft-repeated but wholly a-historical "Protestantism = economic success" myth, a Catholic England would be much better off. Henry VIII was pretty much the worst thing that could've happened to England at the time. Both a victorious Richard III and a surviving Arthur Tudor would've been a great, great boon to the country's fortunes.
VVD0D95
Banned
What would have happened to the crown? Would it have kept a manageable level of power or become simply another symbolic body?
Skallagrim
Banned
It's hard to predict the particulars there, but the tendency in OTL (across the board in Europe) was for royal power to be reduced to a largely symbolic function. A trend in that direction still seems likely in the long run, considering that the OTL causes were much larger in scope than events in England alone. However, a POD in England can change later events (the nature of Enlightenment thought; the Age of Revolutions; and much later, the World Wars) that had a major effect on the status and power of monarchs in Europe.
So we just can't tell for sure. Too many variables.
VVD0D95
Banned
That’s true and alongside England remaining catholic say, a lot of things could be butterflied with the pod
I think the notion of Catholicism holding England back doesn't bear water either, and Henry VIII being replaced/written off from taking the Throne would be a net benefit IMO for the country. I can't think of a single thing he accomplished that any other competent monarch wouldn't have also done, after all, and I can't think of a worse way to sever ties to the Church than in his case.
FWIW I'll not change my answer supporting 'no White Ship', since I feel that out of the original lineup of options it has the most 'OG English' potential out of the bunch. That being said, I'm naturally inclined to support any 'Normans-lose' scenario (whether in battle at Senlac, getting beaten before Harald Hardrada up north, or not getting the option in the first place). I'm also interested in the idea of a Yorkist victory under Richard III; I'd be lying if I said I knew what the practical difference would be between a Yorkist England and a Lancastrian-Tudor one, though.
FWIW I'll not change my answer supporting 'no White Ship', since I feel that out of the original lineup of options it has the most 'OG English' potential out of the bunch. That being said, I'm naturally inclined to support any 'Normans-lose' scenario (whether in battle at Senlac, getting beaten before Harald Hardrada up north, or not getting the option in the first place). I'm also interested in the idea of a Yorkist victory under Richard III; I'd be lying if I said I knew what the practical difference would be between a Yorkist England and a Lancastrian-Tudor one, though.
Skallagrim
Banned
I'm highly sympathetic to the idea myself, and a survinging Anglo-Saxon England with correspondingly reduced Norman influences is a very interesting scenario in its own right. It's not the point of this thread, but that certainly doesn't mean I don't find it interesting.
For our practical purposes, the two last scenarios I have suggested would be very similar. In part, I added the one about Richard III because I'm just inclined to like him, and because Henry Tudor was a pretty duplicitous fellow who won and then wrote the histories to glorify himself (and vilify his opponents). Also, I consider the Yorkist cause to be more legitimate, and the Lancastrians to be a self-serving bunch who threw the country into a lengthy and costly conflict. As such, A Yorkist victory is more to my liking than a Lancastrian one.
More objectively, I think that if Richard defeats and kills Henry, that will definitively secure his reign and bring a stop to any meaningful resistance. Such a very clear victory would basically 'seal the deal', making everyone recognise that Richard III has won. Henry VII, by contrast, had to spend another two blood-soaked decades to really secure his reign after he killed Richard. So a Ricardian victory is, in my view, likely to result in peace two decades earlier. (Also, excellent marriage ties to Portugal will ensue, which can only be a good thing.)
True, although since Henry ended up selling most of the Crown's new lands to pay for yet more hare-brained schemes to conquer France, its long-term impact on royal finances was less than one might expect.
(Does anybody know wealthy the nobility would be compared to the Crown if the monastic lands still remained in Church hands? Would they still be able to challenge royal authority as they did IOTL, or would we see a three-way balance going on, with power resting in the Crown, nobility and Church, and no single group being strong enough to dominate because the other two groups would gang up and clobber them?)
To be fair, France was (or at least had a reputation for being) pretty absolutist, although I'm not sure how representative the country was of Continental European monarchies.
Henry Tudor was indeed a duplicitous type, although I think this gets overstated by Riccardianists a lot of the time. In particular, Richard was widely suspected of murdering his nephews even before Bosworth (indeed, it was this that let Henry gather enough support to overthrow him), so the whole "Princes in the Tower" thing wasn't just post facto Tudor propaganda.
Skallagrim
Banned
That's a fair point, although the impact on the position of the Crown (meaning royal power and independence to act unilaterally) cannot easily be overstated. and more importantly, of course, there's the fact that it not only removed a crucial check on royal power (the Church), but gave the authority of that institution directly to the King.
I think that all monarchs have a tendency to want to centralise power and bolster their own supremacy. The Kings of France are no different in this regard. It was only under Louis XIV that France implemented centralism and royal absolutism to an unprecedented degree. The reputation of France having always been unusually absolutist is -- at least in part -- an invention of historiography, to cast the policies of Louis XIV as the natural culmination of a long process. That it was the culmination of a historical trend is true. That it was the natural outcome, or anything other than a rather extreme one (made possible by fairly unique circumstances), is another matter entirely...
It's my understanding that France as of Louis XIV became unusually absolutist and centralist. Certainly moreso than other European monarchies did at the time. That this could happen in a Catholic country thus demonstrates that Catholicism certainly doesn't rule out a "total victory" for royal abslutism. But again, I think that France was fairly unusual in this regard. The English tradition being substantially different from the French one, I don't think it particularly likely that an English analogue to Louis XIV could easily crop up. (But I admit that it's not unthinkable. Few things are.)
I wouldn't go so far as to proclaim Richard innocent. He certainly was a pragmatic man, more than capable of serving his own ends when circumstance called for it. Yet even beyond the matter of the Princes in the Tower, Henry's propaganda utterly demonised Richard-- both in life and after his death. Many people get their image of Richard from Shakespeare, whose fiction is a distillation of the nigh-satanic Tudor caricatures of his character. It's very far beside reality.
Maybe, although I've also seen it argued that the English Reformation was responsible for the doctrine of Parliamentary supremacy -- the doctrines of the new Church of England were established by Parliamentary statute, and if Parliament's competent to adjudicate on matters of religious doctrine, it's difficult to see what it couldn't adjudicate on.
It's worth bearing in mind that even in the 18th century France was run in quite a ramshackle way: you had different systems of law for north and south, internal tariffs, some parts of the country had to pay tariffs to trade with the rest of France but not across the border in Germany... For all that the British monarch as an individual had less power than the French monarch, you could certainly argue that the British government exerted more centralised control than the French government, in practice if not in theory.
Still, France was, as you say, unusually absolutist. In particular, the French monarch exerted an unusual level of control over the Catholic Church in his lands. The Church of England under Henry VIII is often (albeit misleadingly) described as "Catholicism without the Pope"; the Catholic Church in France during the 17th and 18th centuries might be fairly described as "Anglicanism with the Pope". So it's possible that the English kings could gain a similar level of control over the Church in their lands, in which case the situation would be quite like IOTL.
As for the English tradition, I was under the impression that even before the 16th century English monarchs' powers were more circumscribed than those of their French counterparts, although admittedly this might just be a false impression created by 18th-century Whig propaganda. One thing I do remember, though, is that English common law forbade the use of torture to try and get suspects to confess.
Oh yeah, Richard definitely wasn't the moustache-twirling cartoon villain Shakespeare portrays him as. In fact, if we're comparing him to Shakespeare characters, I'd say that Macbeth would be a better analogy: a respected and competent leader of men, who let his ambition get the better of him and ended up being destroyed as a result.
VVD0D95
Banned
Aye though the historical Macbeth was again quite different to how Shakespeare portrayed him
Weirdly Shakespeare doesn't portray him as a totally moustache twirling villain in it for the evulz either. There's a very prominent scene that sets out his motivations as primarily to outdo Henry the one way he knows he can outdo someone always being lauded as heroic: being the better at bastardry. Basically if he's fated to be cast as a villain he'll make sure he's the most renowned and successful villain ever, long after everyone's going "Henry Tudor who?" they'll know who Richard of Gloucester was.
To be fair, I still think that "I'm going to be as evil as possible so everybody will remember how evil I was" is a perfectly acceptable motivation for a moustache-twirling villain.
The POD I would really love most is having the inverse of the OTL union of the two roses with a Lancastrian princess available for either of the Yorkist Kings: so either Elizabeth, Duchess of Bedford (aka an ATL Elizabeth Woodwille born from her mother’s first husband instead of the second) or Edward of Westminster being born female for Edward IV (as York will not lose the opportunity to marry either girl to his eldest son) or ATL daughter of Edward of Westminster (by either Anne Neville or Margaret Stewart, daughter of James II of Scotland) for Edward V. In all the cases said girl is without brothers so the legitimate Lancastrian heiress.
Another POD could be the survival of Edward of Middleham, the son of Richard III and Anne Neville. Though sickly, his survival might strengthen Richard's position. And if Richard wins Bosworth and marries Joanna of Portugal, then for Edward, the best foreign match I could see for him would be Joanna of Naples, youngest daughter of Ferdinand I of Naples.
That suggests the interesting ATL idea, where Henry creates the new Church of England without any Acts of Parliament. Perhaps if Thomas Cromwell died in 1527, and without his advice/support Henry uses Royal Declarations instead of acting through Parliament. Power in the Church of England would be divided between the Monarch (Henry) and the Archbishop of Canterbury (Thomas Cranmer), and Parliament would have no say.
Many lords would oppose King Henry, as it would provide him with a source of funds independent of Parliament, which would slow down (but not stop) the English Reformation.
As a result of Henry's attachment to Catholic doctrines, the Archbishop of Canterbury would be basically the Pope of the Church of England (e.g. crowns the king, approves annulments, runs the Church) but gains and loses the position by royal decision.
While outside the scope of this thread; I would be interested in a POD where the 1550 plan to smuggle Mary I out of England to the safety of the European mainland goes ahead but is fatal for her. Edward VI of England does not worry about a Catholic Mary inheriting, and does not block Elizabeth I in favour of Lady Jane Grey.
March 1167
The Battle of al-Babein results in a Crusader victory, including the death of Saladin. With the early death of صلاح الدين يوسف بن أيوب, the crusaders manage to keep the Kingdom of Jerusalem for a longer period. The Third Crusade is not started by the loss of Jerusalem, and King Richard I of England (the Lionheart) remains in England/France. Without the expenses of the Crusade, and ransoms, England will be wealthier.
Whether this leads to an England wank or the reverse depends on how successfully he rules England.
1125
Upon her return to Normandy, Matilda (The daughter of King Henry I of England) successfully convinces King Henry I to provide her with lands of her own. She takes possession of them over the following year, and they are specifically not included with her dowry.
During her first separation from Count Geoffrey of Anjou, after forcing the Anglo-Norman court to swear an oath of loyalty to her, Henry turns over control of several English castles to her. With a stronger position, she supports the King against the rebellious barons in southern Normandy resulting in a longer life for King Henry I. King Henry remains fearful of being deposed by his son-in-law, and deliberately only gives authority to Matilda (delaying as much as possible on delivery of the dowry lands).
She successfully becomes crowned as Queen of England, and her reign heavily focuses on her efforts to consolidate her lands and centralise authority.
Henry II inherits a stronger, more united Kingdom, and he does so at a later age than OTL.
If it's not too far outside the scope of the thread, I'd like to put forward the 'Mary and Philip have a son who inherits the Netherlands' scenario, combining the maritime strength of England and the low countries under one crown indefinitely.