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Those who died young... don't

For it to be interesting, it would have to be royal, aristocratic or influential families.

How about saving Johanna? She was born in 1936 so if she survives the war she'd probably still be with us in 2018. A Hessian Princess, her teenage and adult years in the Bonn Republic, specially if she chose politics, would be interesting.
 
Definitely points off for that thread title.

Is there really any precedent in Germany for the Royalty to have gotten into Republican Politics?
 
Henry Frederick, eldest son to James I, is an interesting case. I don't know how much of recorded information about him comes after his life (and used to contrast with Charles I), but he supposedly was more competent than his brother and, maybe more importantly, was a rigid Calvinist and had a lot of disagreements with his father over his policies.

Let's say he lives to his father's age, if he were to die of natural causes ITTL (1654), he was more in favour of a conciliatory policy towards the Irish rebels and he'd have less religious troubles with Parliament. However, he was also as pig-headed as Stuarts were and a bit of a brute so he's going to have some troubles with Parliament when the time comes. The religious element may prevent the OTL Bishop's War and I'm no expert on the period in question, so how likely an English Civil War may be is up in the air. His personality and potential to want greater involvement in the religious struggles in Europe may provoke an incident.

If it is prevented, however, then it'd be a very different England with a stronger Monarchy but also a more Calvinistic-rooted Church of England with predestination and maybe even the removal of episcopacy.
 
Who do they marry?
More importantly, how many dead-babies do they have?

Being serious, I imagine if he had the same wife it'd be about as happy as a marriage between a devout Catholic and a rigid Calvinist with a bad temper could be in the 1600s. So think the Thirty Years War if they weren't actually allowed to kill each other.
 
Bridgette Andersen, Heather O'Rourke and Judith Barsi are three who you keep wondering what could have been...

Didn't knew about that poor Barsi, but I was remembered of two other similar cases

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samantha_Smith

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Schaeffer

First one died in a plane crash, after being stalked by the asshole that murdered the second one in her place...

As a completely different matters, there was Louis XVII, the son of the previous one (Louis XVI) that vanished (at least, his body) during La révolution française. He had an elder brother, Le Dauphin, that died at the worse possible moment - in June 1789, just as La révolution was boiling up furiously.
Well, there are evidently a boatload of unfortunately heirs like him in the history of France and every other kingdom...

Louis XIV lived so long, not only his son died, but also his grandson, so Louis XV was his great-grandson. Same for Louis XV, he was Louis XVI grandfather. So there are a whole bunch of "Louis-died-too-young-and-was-never-king" spanning the entire 1700's. Louis XIV was born in 1638 and become king aged five, in 1643; and Louis XV died in 1774, so that 131 freakkin' years with barely two kings. No surprise La révolution française exploded in the Bourbon faces.

Had Louis XVI and Louis XVII lasted as long as their ancestors (55 years, average), France was up to the 1900 's or even beyond with more and more bourbons.
 
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Lili Boulanger is one who could well have gone on to become one of the 20th Century's most notable composers if she hadn't died at 24.
 
World War 1 has thousands of potential names.

I mean, all wars do, but WW1 has a few specific issues. The scale of the conflict, both in the numbers mobilised, and the global nature. Then, the nature of the warfare led to huge numbers of deaths in the junior officer ranks.

How many of those names, and the fields in which they would have made their names, are known is a different question.
 
What if Elvis brother hadn't died.

This had a massive psychological impact on the guy and its interesting to think whether he'd have been the same man if he'd survived.
 
I would be interested to know what the CofE would look like if William Temple hadn't died only two years after becoming ABC. I mean to prevent it you'd need to prevent years of ill health, and reduce his capacity for overwork by a major degree, but the effects of having someone who could connect with the public and had a serious interest in public policy, running the shop in the post war period instead of someone obsessed with Canon Law could be quite fascinating.
 
Both Alexander II and III died early:

Alexander II: Alexander was planning on taking the first small steps towards a constitution (the first Russia would have ever had), but was killed the very day he signed the decree. His successor, Alexander III, was ultra-reactionary and killed the idea of constitutional reform until the 1905 Revolution forced the issue. Alexander II living could have pushed Russia in a more liberal, constitutional direction, possibly averting the Revolution.

Alexander III: Alexander III made the mistake of not teaching his son Nicholas II anything about statescraft, assuming that he would have years to teach Nicholas. Alexander III died of kidney disease in 1894, several decades earlier than expected. Had Alexander III lived Russia would have had a more stable and smarter leadership during the crucial years of the early 20th century (given that he died at 49 he could easily have lived until 1914). And while Nicholas was temperamentally unsuitable to be Tsar, getting an education in how to lead may have allowed him to at least not be completely terrible.
 
Marcel Cerdan was a famous French boxing champion and also Edith Piaf (Madame La vie en rose) beloved companion. In 1949 he boarded a Lockheed Constellation that crashed at landing in the Azores, leaving no survivors. On board was also Ginette Neveu, a very promising violonist.

There are also countless singers and celebrities that died in car wrecks in the 60's. Enrico Macias brother, Barbara pianist, and famous singer Serge Lama were all in the same car that crashed into a tree, in 1965. Only Serge Lama survived. Both Barbara and Macias were devastated. So was Lama, who was in love with Barbara's pianist.

Even more astoninshing are Didier Deschamps and Marcel Desailly stories. The two 1998 world champions first met as teens at Nantes football club, in 1982. Two years later, the club was crippled by a car wreck killing two and maiming a third young player. One of the victims was Desailly elder half-brother, and a young Deschamps was the one that told Desailly about it. Three years later, in 1987, Deschamps elder brother was killed in an aircraft accident near Bordeaux. Desailly was at his side for the funeral.
 
World War 1 has thousands of potential names.

I mean, all wars do, but WW1 has a few specific issues. The scale of the conflict, both in the numbers mobilised, and the global nature. Then, the nature of the warfare led to huge numbers of deaths in the junior officer ranks.

How many of those names, and the fields in which they would have made their names, are known is a different question.

It would be completely fascinating to try and imagine how these ten thousands of genius might have changed the times. Unfortunately, they were millions of people from all over the world that enlisted, and a century later, the family member that might remember them are mostly dead...

Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Pergaut, Charles Péguy, were already famous, but how many not-famous-yet poets died in Verdun ? https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_écrivains_morts_pour_la_France
 
Sadi Carnot’s early death threw thermodynamics back a minimum of ten years, probably more. Had he lived and been able to actually discuss his theories on heat engines with Thomson (or Kelvin if you prefer) rather than the latter having the good fortune to stumble upon his work in 1848, then... I don’t know. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that we could have gotten turbines and Diesel engines in the 1870s.
 
More importantly, how many dead-babies do they have?

.

The babies don't die young either. everyone only ever dies at old age from the PoD onwards. Massive population boom.


What about William Adelin/Aethling? Probably butterflies away the Anarchy. Probable continuation of the house of Normandy for longer, no Angevin Empire, althought Adelin was married to a daughter of the count of Anjou.
 
There are also countless singers and celebrities that died in car wrecks in the 60's. Enrico Macias brother, Barbara pianist, and famous singer Serge Lama were all in the same car that crashed into a tree, in 1965. Only Serge Lama survived. Both Barbara and Macias were devastated. So was Lama, who was in love with Barbara's pianist.
Celebrities who died before their time in car and plane crashes could be its own thread. They're almost too many to count. Grace Kelly, James Dean, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, The Big Bopper,* Marc Bolan. Which segues onto the next point...
Even more astoninshing are Didier Deschamps and Marcel Desailly stories. The two 1998 world champions first met as teens at Nantes football club, in 1982. Two years later, the club was crippled by a car wreck killing two and maiming a third young player. One of the victims was Desailly elder half-brother, and a young Deschamps was the one that told Desailly about it. Three years later, in 1987, Deschamps elder brother was killed in an aircraft accident near Bordeaux. Desailly was at his side for the funeral.
I suppose the big two in football that come to mind are the Munich and the Turin disasters. However, the thing with sport is that it doesn't need death to change a career. Injury will do more than enough. To take three examples from the north east of England:

  • In the 1962 World Cup squad, Bobby Robson was one of England's starting centre halves. However, he broke his ankle in a pre-tournament friendly against a local Chilean side, and never played for England again. A young Bobby Moore took his place. Four years later, Robson watched the World Cup Final from the terraces of Wembley stadium. Avoid that injury, and there's every chance that Robson takes either Moore or Jack Charlton's place in that team. Probably Charlton.
  • Brian Clough, usually the answer to "the best England manager they never had", was one of the greatest goalscorers in the history of football. For Middlesbrough, he scored 204 in 222 games. He then transferred to Sunderland, converting 63 in 74, thus proving that he wasn't a one-club wonder. And then, he got clattered by a goalkeeper while through on a one on one. Tore the ligaments in his knee to shreds. Not only did that rob Sunderland of promotion, but stopped what appeared to be a career that was set to break all sorts of records. Yeah, both clubs were in the second division at the time, but those statistics are world beating. Whether he blamed the injury on his turn to drink, I'm not sure.
  • Last one is a smaller one. @Youngmarshall might, if he takes an interest in Sunderland's youth setup, remember a midfielder called Jamie Chandler. Technically speaking, he started in the same team as me. We went to the same primary school, I was a centre back, and he, a year younger, played centre midfield. From there, our paths rather diverged. He first went to Newcastle's school of excellence, then Sunderland's Academy. He was captain of England Schoolboys, and won caps up to under 19 level. Then, he got injured. Pretty badly. Didn't play for over a year. When he did, they sent him out to Darlington on loan, and he never recaptured the form that had excited coaches at Sunderland and England. He's still a semi-professional, having moved between Darlington, Gateshead, and now Spennymoor. However, at Gateshead, he always looked a cut above some of the others. More composure on the ball. But recurring injuries, stemming from the one that hit him at Sunderland about a decade ago limited his game time. I'm not saying that, minus the injury, he would have become a superstar like Clough. But he certainly had a chance to do an awful lot more than he did in TTL.
*Holly, Valens and the Bopper dying in the same plane crash For added PoDs, Waylon Jennings gave the flu-laden Bopper his seat, saying he'd slum it on the bus, so that the Bopper could recover before the next gig on the tour. Valens won his seat after tossing a coin for it against Tommy Allsup.
 
On the question of 'Henry IX', ie the elder son of James VI and I who died aged 18 in 1612 , apparently of typhoid after swimming in the River Thames:
As I have explored in a chapter pf my current Sealion ebook 'King Henry IX', I think Henry surviving to succeed James in 1625 would have profound results on UK history , but not necessarily avoid the Civil War. As mentioned, he was a strong Calvinist so he would not back the supposedly 'Popish' (as feared by opponents) ceremonialism of Archbishop Laud in the Anglican Church after 1633 and so arouse Scots Calvinist opposition as well as that of English 'Puritans'.He would probably not even make the theologically suspect Laud archbishop of Canterbury or promote any non-Calvinist bishops unless they were congenial to him as disciplinarians, and would certainly not risk increasing Anglican-style bishops' powers, or Prayer Book theology in either England or Scotland. He had been brought up in Scotland until he was 9 and then had had Scots close to him in his household in England,, so he understood their fears (his brother Charles had left Scotland when he was 2). At most, a disciplinarian like him would have been irritated by autonomous Calvinist groups in the English and Scots Churches as disrupters and cracked down on this - as James did after he came to England. So no Scots rebellion in 1637 - but given his anti-Catholic attitude and fear of expansionist Counter-Reformationary Catholicism on the Continent he could well have extended Protestant colonization in Ulster or elsewhere in Ireland. So an earlier Irish Catholic revolt than the real one in 1641, then a stronger Royal reaction than was possible in real life from crisis-hit Charles I? A Cromwell-style 'plantation' by 'godly' English Protestants after Henry defeated the rebels?

Henry was in real life interested in European affairs and alert to the 'Catholic expansionist' threat masterminded by the Austrian and Spanish Habsburgs, and backed the abortive plans of French King Henri IV for a German Protestant alliance backed by France to stop this. Henri was assassinated and then Pr Henry died, but in 1618-19 Henry's favourite sister Elizabeth and her German Prot husband Frederick of the Palatinate tried to take the kingdom of Bohemia off the Catholic Habsburgs and were driven out of B and then the Palatinate. This sparked the Thirty Years' War off; would-be mediator James I stayed out of it but eventually lent Elizabeth and Frederick troops to try to get the Palatinate back after mediation with Spain failed. In real life Charles stayed out of the war once he was king, and ended up fighting his wife's brother Louis XIII of France over French Catholic suppression of the autonomous towns given to the French Protestants (ie Huguenots) instead in 1627-8. (This is the setting of Dumas' 'Three Musketeers' stories and the modern films of it, with the English under Charles I's minister Buckingham trying to rescue the Huguenots besieged at La Rochelle.)

Would the more determined and martial Henry, who unlike Charles was a confidant horseman and rode in tournaments, have led his army to intervene in Europe in 1625-6 once he was King and aided the German Protestants? Could they have stopped the Catholic advances in the late 1620s with Henry's help, and so not needed the intervention of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden to rescue them? Or could Henry and GA combined have defeated the Habsburgs and forced the Emperor to cede large amounts of land to the Prot princes, redressing the balance of power in Central Europe? Or would Henry have rescued the Huguenots and stabilised their power as autonomous communities with guaranteed legal rights in France, humiliating (and causing the fall of?) the centralising chief minister Cardinal Richelieu? Either English success in Germany or in France would however rely on Henry having success in reforming, training, and supplying the army and navy far better than Charles did in real life, which would not be impossible given his administrative zeal and the financial support of Parliament if this liked his fervent anti-Catholic rhetoric. Unlike Charles, Henry was in tune with majority elite opinion in England about the 'Catholic threat' so he would not have been dissolving and ruling without Parliament in 1629 - but wars have to be paid for and his ambitions would be very costly. Like Charles, he does not seem to have been inclined to compromise.
In that case , perhaps he would annoy MPs by demanding too much money too often and by centralising administrative reform, rather than by religion etc as Charles did. So England would end up with a crisis of governance between MPs and a strong and demanding King after all in the 1640s - but in a far different context . Notably, some of the real-life Parliamentary generals in the 1640s (eg the Earl of Essex) were Henry's friends as young men, or had similar religious views - so in a crisis they would probably back him. And would zealous Puritan and failed Fenland farmer Oliver Cromwell be busy as a 'planter' in Ireland not in England in the 1640s?
 
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