What if Prince Arthur Tudor Had lived to Become King ?

Instead of his younger brother Henry. If you could project history from that point on, how would Britain and the rest of the world be different? What kind of a King would Arthur Tudor have likely been?

And in that timeline what would have happened to Henry ?

No Reformation in England? No Queen Elizabeth? Possibly no Shakespeare? No Armada? As a result Spain maintains a strong naval fleet. That changes wider world history.

England remains Catholic and supports Spain in Europe.

Henry devises a plot to kill Arthur, fails and is executed on the 19th May 1536.

Henry dies, alone, unknown to history.

Arthur becomes the first openingly transgender King of England.

Just some random thoughts.

svalbard said:

No Reformation in England? No Queen Elizabeth? Possibly no Shakespeare? No Armada? As a result Spain maintains a strong naval fleet. That changes wider world history.

England remains Catholic and supports Spain in Europe.

Henry devises a plot to kill Arthur, fails and is executed on the 19th May 1536.

Henry dies, alone, unknown to history.

Arthur becomes the first openingly transgender King of England.

Just some random thoughts.

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Why wouldn't Shakespeare have happened? How would Arthur being king have changed that ?

Elizabeth was a patron of the arts and Shakespeare flourished during her reign. With no Reformation maybe the arts would have stalled in England. Who knows? Maybe Marlow would have lived and supplanted Shakespeare as the greatest dramatist of the age.

svalbard said:

Elizabeth was a patron of the arts and Shakespeare flourished during her reign. With no Reformation maybe the arts would have stalled in England. Who knows? Maybe Marlow would have lived and supplanted Shakespeare as the greatest dramatist of the age.

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But Shakespeare a. k. a. Edward de Vere would have still likely have existed even in that timeline and probably still would have written plays. But you might not have a play like McBeth given that it glorified the ancestors of the Stewarts who in said timeline have likely remained in Scotland. I say this because Arthur would have likely gotten a male heir with Catherine because he he wouldn't infected her with Syphilis like Henry did.

Shakespeare = Edward de Vere.
Questionable.

svalbard said:

Shakespeare = Edward de Vere.
Questionable.

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It's one of history's raging controversies

BAYLOR said:

It's one of history's raging controversies

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I wouldn't call it a raging controversy. Maybe those who think it was de Vere get excited about it, but the vast majority of those who care seem to calmly accept that Shakespeare was Shakespeare.

Although perhaps proponents of the de Vere theory regularly come to fisticuffs with the Baconians and the Marloverians. The Baconians were always a scrappy lot.

Teresa Edgerton said:

I wouldn't call it a raging controversy. Maybe those we think it was de Vere get excited about it, but the vast majority of those who care seem to calmly accept that Shakespeare was Shakespeare.

Although perhaps proponents of the de Vere theory regularly come to fisticuffs with the Baconians and the Marloverians. The Baconians were always a scrappy lot.

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There is the making of quite a comedy in that.

Just found this, and it's an interesting thread.

Katherine of Aragon would presumably have had the same trouble having children, but would have had the benefit of getting started some years earlier with a different husband. So it's possible she would have had a son who survived long enough to be king.

Of course, if she didn't... Henry would meanwhile have married someone else, with whom he would probably not have had the same fertility difficulties. If Katherine had the same problems with Arthur as she did with Henry, as far as having children went, then Henry and his children would have been next in line for the throne. So, one ironic possible consequence could have been a son of Henry ending up as King of England.

Then again, Arthur seems to have been more sensible than Henry, and, even if he ended up with only daughters, would probably have dealt with the problem better. If Arthur and Katherine had had a daughter and married her off early then they could have ended up with their grandsons on the throne, even if they didn't have sons.

If all of this had led to a king on England's throne rather than a queen at the time of Mary Queen of Scots, then the obvious outcome would have been for them to marry, so Scotland and England would have been unified earlier. Alternatively, if that marriage didn't happen, we could well have ended up in a situation where unification never happened, as the Tudor line probably wouldn't have run out of male heirs and so James VI wouldn't have become James I.

The most obvious difference is that England may well have remained Catholic. Even if we eventually became Protestant for different reasons, we wouldn't have had a Church of England, as such.

I don't know what else would have been different. I love counterfactuals.

By the way - the theory that Henry had syphilis is highly questionable. It's debatable whether it even existed in England at that time (it's currently thought to have come over from America with Columbus's men), and, even if it was in England earlier, Henry fathered a normal son something like twenty years after he and Katherine first started having fertility problems together, which doesn't really fit with the idea that his problems with Katherine were due to syphilis.

NannyOgg said:

If all of this had led to a king on England's throne rather than a queen at the time of Mary Queen of Scots, then the obvious outcome would have been for them to marry

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Henry VIII did try this actually - he wanted a marriage between Mary and his son Edward VI. But Mary's mother, Mary of Guise, sent Mary off to France to marry the Dauphin instead. Of course, Arthur might have gone about things more tactfully - Henry sent an army into Scotland, described as "this rough wooing".

NannyOgg said:

Alternatively, if that marriage didn't happen, we could well have ended up in a situation where unification never happened, as the Tudor line probably wouldn't have run out of male heirs and so James VI wouldn't have become James I.

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Being a bit of a pedant here, but only the crowns were unified in 1603 on succession of James I/VI to Elizabeth. It's not entirely pedantic though, because Scotland remaining a separate state with its own Church and Parliament was instrumental in kicking off the Civil War, when the Scots got fed up with Charles I and his new prayer book.

BAYLOR said:

I say this because Arthur would have likely gotten a male heir with Catherine because he he wouldn't infected her with Syphilis like Henry did.

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What makes you think Arthur was a saint? He might have had it as well.

AnyaKimlin said:

What makes you think Arthur was a saint? He might have had it as well.

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He died at age 15 and didn't live long enough to do much of anything .

BAYLOR said:

He died at age 15 and didn't live long enough to do much of anything .

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So a prince in mediaeval times dies at 15, admittedly he had always been sickly, but it doesn't mean he was a virgin.