Columbus wanted to sail across the ocean for Asia and he didn’t really care who he did it for. He visited London in 1487 and tried to convince Henry VII to back his trip. He was of course unsuccessful.
But suppose Henry had agreed and Columbus achieved the same thing for England he would achieve for Spain five years later. Spanish America becomes English America instead.
Obviously a major change in English history. The Tudor dynasty was full of energetic monarchs and one of the biggest restraints of them was a lack of funds. But if they had the gold and silver of Mexico and Peru flowing into their treasuries, what would they have done with it? Wars in Scotland, Ireland, and France no doubt. Maybe an attempt to steal the Netherlands away as well.
Would Arthur have lived and what kind of King would he have been? Would his brother Henry have accepted being a mere Duke? Would Spain have been a minor power and would the English royal family have looked to Catherine as a fitting bride? Would the Pope have succumbed to the demands of a stronger English king? And what would be the effects in America if it had been settled by Englishmen rather than Spaniards?
More interesting to me, being a Western Hemispherean, would’ve been the effect on what is now Latin America. Spain and England approached colonial possessions in very different ways, and their former colonies still suffer or enjoy the consequences of those approaches. While English colonial rule was by no means a joy and delight for all, its former territories have, I think, done on the whole better than those of the other major colonial powers. I’m imagining a South America with an Australia-like country in place of, say, Venezuela…
Even if you disagree w/ me regarding the benefits of English colonial rule (and I’m well aware that reasonable minds may differ here), an English South/Mesoamerica would be very different from what we have there today…
What makes you think that a voyage from England would have resulted in England conquering the Aztecs and the Incas?
It’s not like, in real life, only Spain knew about America. Lots of other people did. Sweden didn’t conquer the Aztecs, not because they didn’t know that America existed, but because they weren’t able to send a transatlantic fleet of conquest to the Americas.
In real life it wasn’t the case that Spanish conquered most of the Americas just because they got first dibs. They had a lot of advantages that other countries just didn’t have that enabled the Spanish to exploit the opportunity that fell to them.
But did they have a standing group of armed bloodthirsty religious fanatics who had just completed a genocidal war against the infidels and totally conquered them, and were now sitting around wondering what to do next?
I’ve always thought it was weird that the Spanish are sailing all the way across the Atlantic to conquer the Americas, yet just across the straits there were plenty of infidels to crush and destroy. Plus that Portugal never got annexed into Spain.
The Spanish did try to invade and conquer the British but had their ass handed to them on the high seas. They understood that they had little chance to land an army on the British Isles.
You’re all missing the obvious. England is ~1000 north of Spain. By starting out that far north, Columbus would have ended up landing somewhere in the Chesapeake Bay area, or perhaps on Roanoke Island. There’s no telling how history would work out had England landed there, but then I’m sure there are some works of speculative fiction that would be interesting.
Portugal was temporarily annexed by Spain. And both Spain and Portugal attempted to conquer North Africa. They just failed, occasionally catastrophically. Moor states were much more resilients than Meso- and South American empires.
ETA : In fact Portugal was annexed by Spain as a result of one such catastrophic failures in North Africa.
I think Spain and Portugal would still have conquered Meso- and South America, just a few years later. England just didn’t have the manpower for such an undertaking, disease or not. The Iberian states were primed for conquest, a lot closer to the target, and nothing realistically could have stopped them. The English getting the first landing in would mean nothing except to historians.
They did evince some interest in North Africa, Ferdinand in particular was very keen on expansion there. The problem was that even after the reclamation of some of the previously lost crown properties under Ferdinand and Isabella, crown resources were slim. Particularly Aragonese resources, where tax liberties were much more extensive than in Castille. And those already slender resources were frequently heavily committed elsewhere ( particularly in Italy ).
Meanwhile extra-governmental resources ( aka the untaxed nobility & gentry ) were hard to entice into North African adventures. Unlike Andalusia, the North African lands typically offered much more meager financial rewards for adventurers and in addition resistance could be intense. By contrast the spectacular success of Cortes, Pizarro and a few lesser conquistadors greatly encouraged a steady stream of self-financing treasure-seekers to stake their hopes on the New World. It was always money more than religious zeal that really fired the Spanish advance.
So you ended up with a couple of precarious enclaves like Ceuta and Melilla, but little permanent advance into the interior until the early 20th century.
Portugal pursued those North African adventures a bit more aggressively, which probably turned out far worse than they ever could have imagined. This did lead to the annexation of Portugal by Spain for 60 years, at least two generations. That Portugal ever managed to break away was to a great extent down to Spanish exhaustion from the Dutch Wars/Thirty Years War, which left the state virtually prostrate at one point.
As it was Portugal had only narrowly escaped conquest before and at one point was very close to being joined to Spain by inheritance. That it survived absorption through the centuries is actually a little bit remarkable.
I don’t see why England couldn’t have done what Spain did. From what I can find England had a larger population. And there were ready militarily. The thirty year long War of the Roses had finally ended in 1485. So Henry VII had masses of experienced veterans sitting around with no war to fight - having a new land to sent them off to conquer would have been perfect. And the distance from the Caribbean to England is less than fifty miles greater than the distance to Spain. And once you’ve established a base in the Caribbean, all of the distances in the Americas would be the same.
That’s a good point that gets discussed often in alt-history forums. Some people argue you should only change one event and assume everything else remains the same.
Other people argue that you should do the exact opposite and assume once you’ve changed one event, you have to assume all subsequent events are changed as well. They say it’s silly to argue, for example, whether Barack Obama would have been elected President if the South had won the Civil War - if the South had won the Civil War, American history would have changed so much by 1961 that our version of Barack Obama would never have been born.
Same thing with Prince Arthur. He died in 1502 of some random disease. The chances that he would have caught the same infection and died at the same time in a significantly different history are low.
Henry VII had better things to do with all those people than to send them off to conquer the Inca. By the time he took over, England was pretty well bankrupt. Not to mention the fact that Henry really wasn’t all that militarily inclined. He had enough on his plate just getting England’s house in order.
OTOH, the New World would be an ideal place to ship off all those people who were trying to rebel.
On the gripping hand, that would just establish English colonies that were hostile to the crown.