Chapter Four
1483:
On 9th April, Edward IV of England dies. He is succeeded by his son Edward V, with Richard of Gloucester named as Protector. By June, Richard has forced Parliament to declare Edward, and his brother the Duke of York, illegitimate, and Richard takes the throne.
A tiny, almost (almost...) insignificant update now. I was going to do a narrative interpolation for this, but it would cover very similar ground to the next chapter, and besides, this is actually an OTL update, and is covered pretty well by just about every historian you can think of!
Instead, I thought that perhaps this might be a good opportunity to post some thoughts I had when developing this timeline: about why I wanted to do it; what I learned about the history; and what I conjecture about Burgundian motivations and hence the plausibility of the timeline.
My fascination with alt history is more often with medieval and early timelines, rather than recent ones (ACW, WW2, I'm looking at you); largely because there's more fluidity about events and their consequences, and because history then is much more 'personal', in that one person in power seems to have much more ptential to affect the world with their decisions. I imagine some social historians are fuming at that, but never mind.
I like Burgundy for the fact that it seems to have come so close to achieving permanent statehood, and fallen back for seemingly banal and avoidable reasons, because I so enjoyed reading Mary Gentle's
Ash, although that of course isn't really alt hist, and finally because many yuears ago I played the Duke of Burgundy in Shakespeare's
Henry V, who has a very powerful anti-war speech at the end of the play when he mediates the peace conference between the English and French.
When I started thinking about this timeline, I felt the key point was whether Charles had a male heir to succeed him after the Siege of Nancy, and I worked back from their looking for a valid way to give him such an heir; and I was also intrigued as to why Burgundy under Philippe broke off the alliance with england and returned to the French alliance: after all the England-Burgundy alliance had worked very successfully up till then (I hadn't realised quite how successfully until I read the history) and there seemed little to gain - but more of that later.
The death of the Duchess of Bedford, and the Duke's remarriage, was an astonishing find to me: almost all the historical accounts referred to this as a real cause of friction between Burgundy and England, and so it seemed quite an important event, and also true to my belief that in this period it was personal relationships that were important. And with the connection to the Treaty of Arras a few years later, it gave an obvious opening to rearrange Charles' marriage arrangements. Of course, Charles could have struggled to father an heir on any bride, but his family background seems to suggest otherwise, and anyway, this is counterfactual - no point in changing history and then sticking too close to the original.
But was that the only reason Burgundy switched sides? I tend to think not. One thing that began to become apparent, after considerable staring at maps, was that Philippe was desperate to unify his territories - administering his patchwork of fiefs must have been a nightmare - and there are really only two options available to him to link up the Duchy with his lands in the Low Countries: he either needs Champagne or Lorraine.
I have a feeling that at some stage, Philippe looked at his chances of wresting control of Champagne from France - Champagne, where Rheims has the cathedral wherein French kings are crowned, a fief regularly held by close relatives of the French King - and decided that it wasn't going to happen. So if you are then focused on Lorraine, you need to guard your back, and that means makign sure that you have good relations with France, and England becomes much less important. Of course, ironically, it was going for Lorraine that led to Charles' embroilment with lands in the HRE, and eventually his death, but that was a long way in the future at this point.
I think that my timeline is, therefore, inherently implausible - Philippe would have taken some persuading to go back on such a decision at Arras - but with enough of a grain of possibility that, had Anne survived, being the one person who might have persuaded Philippe, the rest after that is quite plausible. It's a bit like meeting Brazil in the quarter finals of the World Cup - before the match, the chances of winning the Cup are small, because that match is so difficult, but if you win that, suddenly you could be the favourites.
One other thing I've learned from doing this, which I shall apply to future timelines, is to write longer narrative or descriptive sections. I honestly thought I'd written some long passages, but they compress quite a lot on wide screen. 'More words, more words!' (next time)
