Alternate Europe: 1901

Great Debates
1

British Parliament has changed the rules of succession. Women may now inherit the throne ending a 300 year old tradition. What if this law had been passed at the turn of the 20th century, perhaps to celebrate Queen Vicki at the Diamond Jubilee?

In early January, 1901 Victoria was at her estate on the Isle of Wight when she began feeling sick, she wouldn’t survive the month. Succession would pass to her eldest, not Edward VII, this new law would make it the Princess Victoria. Princess Victoria had already been diagnosed with breast cancer two years earlier and becoming queen wouldn’t change the fact she’ll survive only until August, 7 months later. The ruling monarch of Britain would then be her eldest who happens to be Wilhelm II. The Kaiser had already been emperor of Germany for 13 years.

So what happens next? If one thing is for sure Europe does not abide hegemony and Wilhelm has just become Emperor of two of the most powerful nations on Earth.

2

Yes, most interesting.

Who knows, Europe might have avoided the horror of The Great War, and at worst a another minor Balkan War between Serbia and Austro-Hungary may have been the only outcome of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand 13 years later

3

The problem with this scenario is of course is it’s never going to happen. Yes, yes i know this is a What-If? but still. The people making this change can see that it means the German Kaiser will inevitably become Monarch. There’s no way the people that have to agree to this will agree.

4

I am not sure whether the Brit rules of succession allowed/allow another monarch to become the monarch of GB. Anyone?

5

Wasn’t the King of England just a figurehead at that time? I would think that the job would carry no particular political power, and so be obnoxious symbolically but meaningless politically.

6

The MPs of the time might have seen this as a possibility to unite a stagnating Empire stretched around the globe with Europe’s future Continental powerhouse. In 1900 England still saw Russia as its primary global threat. The United States was beginning to flex it’s industrial muscle and already proved it had dreams of empire. It’s historical nemesis, France, was still regarded with suspicion as it was even in 1914. Over the preceding 200 years England had used proxies to wage Continental war most often using, wait for it, Prussian and Hanoverian Germans.

You think there is no way they couldn’t have foreseen the consequences of this change in law, I agree.

So you think they wouldn’t have done it, I disagree.

7

I’m fairly sure there was already a good amount of Teutonophobia in Britain by 1901 (the Huns were invading Britain in fiction as early as 1871), so I can’t see that Parliament would accept a German as their king. In any event, as a Lutheran, wouldn’t Wilhelm have been required to convert to Anglicanism in order to become king?

8

If Salic Law hadn’t been in place in Hanover in 1830, Victoria ( who also had a German mother ) would have become Queen of both England and Hanover, continuing a union already over 100 years old at that point. Instead the throne of Hanover went to her uncle, the Duke of Cumberland.

I’m sure Teutonophobia was rampant in 1901, but a good deal of that would have had to do with the rapidly rising German state built by Bismarck. A Hanover still in personal union with England might have actually partially blocked such a rise and in 1901 you would have a union with a German state that was by then nearly 200 years old ( 1714-1901 ). At THAT point a merger with whatever Prussian/German state was then in existence might have seemed much more normal.

Yeah you have to add another unlikely “what if” step, but really it isn’t quite as outre a proposition as it seems on first glance here in the 21rst century.

9

So, we have to speculate as to backstory. Obviously, in setting, that must be the whole point of changing the succession rules now. So: Why would the PTB in the UK of 1901 want what amounts to a personal union of the British and German Empires? Do they have full constitutional union in mind for some reason? Perhaps to forestall a challenge from a rival superpower by bringing it under the tent?

Of course Wilhelm (Victoria’s grandson, everybody’s cousin) is not ignorant and knows he cannot rule Britain the way he rules Germany. (Unlike James VI of Scotland, who apparently was ignorant and got some unpleasant surprises when he moved south to England as James I.)

10

why would this prevent WW1? You can still have a war of Germany and Austria against Russia and France, with England staying neutral or else being dragged into the war kicking and screaming by the likes of Wilson later on.

11

No, you can’t, because from Kaiser Wilhelm’s POV – and this war don’t happen if he don’t want it – the whole point of WWI was to defeat England and bring Germany to its rightful “place in the sun” as a world-power. But if Wilhelm is also by then King of GB, Emperor of India, etc., then, why?

12

Why not? It’s happened before about a half dozen times, most notably in the following cases:
[ul]
[li]Philip II (King of Naples) became King of England and King of Ireland in 1554. He later became King of Spain as well.[/li][li]James VI (King of Scotland) inherited the English and Irish thrones in 1603.[/li][li]William III (a Dutch monarch) became King of England, King of Ireland, and King of Scotland in 1688.[/li][/ul]
The current monarch, Elizabeth II, is not just the queen of the United Kingdom, but also of 15 other sovereign states.

13

Never mind.

14

If I recall correctly, there is precedent for something similar. Princess Charlotte, who was at the time expected to inherit the throne, was at one point engaged to the hereditary Prince of Orange, known as Slender Billy. The marriage contract specified that their eldest son would inherit the throne of England, and the second son would inherit his fathers Orange position. However, if they were to have only one son, he would be King of England, and the Orange business would pass to some cousin or other. I don’t know what they would have done if they had only had daughters, but never mind.

Of course, she didn’t marry Slender Billy, and, more famously, didn’t become Queen of England, and neither Charlotte nor the later Victoria married men who where first in line to anything.

However, I think it fairly likely that any change in the law after the birth of Vicky, definitely after her son became Kaizer, would have specified that the throne of England should go to a younger child, in this case another girl. So there might have been three Queens in a row, interestingly enough.

If the law was made after the birth of Vicky, but before her son became Kaizer, I think they might have insisted on the other way around, i.e. Willhelm as king of England, and his younger brother Henry as kaizer.

If the change was made earlier still, they would have just strategically controlled any marriages of the elder two or three royal children, so that something like that couldn’t happen.

However, there is no way they would have changed the laws so that the ruler of another, lesser nation (and all nations were considered lesser) would be King of England. That is just not done.

15

Not sure that was "the whole point’. Didn’t Britain get involved on behalf of Belgium? And in the summer of 1914, it wasn’t certain they would do so.

As it is, they didn’t become a major force (on the continent) until 1916. The battle of the Marne could have easily gone the other way, the Germans take Paris and the whole thing is over in a few months.

16

Ever since the days of Charles II, the monarch is whoever Parliament says is the monarch. You don’t get to be king of the UK just because you’re related to the last monarch. So if Parliament doesn’t want the German Emperor to become King, they can just pass a law that makes whoever they like King.

17

It was in the sense that it was the whole reason why Wilhelm wanted a war and was determined to find a pretext for one sooner or later. Can’t find a cite right now, but I believe historians are generally agreed on that based on his correspondence and diaries. Bismarck was satisfied with making Germany the predominant power in Central Europe; he feared a two-front war, and always arranged things so that whenever Germany was on bad terms with France it would be on good terms with Russia and vice-versa. But that wasn’t enough for Wilhelm, he wanted imperial-latecomer Germany to be a real world-power like Britain – he wanted his biz to be as successful as Gramma’s – and the only way he saw was to lick Britain. He spent years looking for a chance and never considered he might lose – since unification, Germany had always won.

18

See post #9 – I think the OP assumes Parliament assents to changing the laws of succession, and assents knowing that that will make Wilhelm their King, and that that is the whole point of making the change.

19

I don’t agree. Wilhelm’s primary goal in WWI was to lick Russia before it modernized and industrialized and usurped Germany’s role as the leading power on the Continent. He would have been happy if GB stayed out of the war, but thought that it wouldn’t matter either way because WWI would be a short war in which naval might played little role.