Archive for November, 2010

Terry Pratchett’s Making Money

Wednesday, November 24th, 2010

Read this book last night from start to finish so it must certainly have something to recommend it!

All was going along swimmingly until 4000 ancient golems turned up and I really think they derailed the plot. It would have made far more sense if 4 gold ones had turned up and ended up as guards in the bank vault, and that wouldn’t have detracted from the story arcs focused on the bank, on the loss of the gold, and on Mr Bent

The characterisations all worked out – Moist, Cosmo, Vetinari, the underlings, Mr Bent, Hubert, the Igor, Miss Drapes, even the necromanced wizard from the past.

It was just the 4000 golems which knocked it all askew. Given how somehow the rumour of “4 gold golems” turned into the reality of “4 thousand golems” it felt like Pratchett changed his mind suddenly about what was going to happen, maybe thinking it too twee…

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

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Beginners Guide to Russian Names

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

http://www.alternate-history-fiction.com/russian-names-in-ah.html

Creating realistic Russian names can be a challenge, even for a historian, so in this article Alex Shalenko, owner of http://www.counter-factual.net gives a detailed breakdown of male, female and patronymic names, and diminutive forms thereof.

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

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Posted in History | 32 Comments »

Dallas, Dynasty & Medical Dramas

Thursday, November 4th, 2010

Dallas, Dynasty and medical dramas

If I had been an adult in the late 1970s onwards I think I would have been a fan, watching Dallas all the time. It would just have hit my thang

As it was, me and my sister were great Dynasty fans at the end of the 1980s until the death of the show

Curious how there is nothing to match them on TV now unless we think that medical dramas have taken their place – ER and Chicago Hope (which I preferred) at first, and now Gray’s Anatomy and House (of which I am a huge fan)

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

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Posted in Life | 28 Comments »

Children in alternate history

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010

Dead People Can Live Too

Often in alternate history it seems as if it is set in stone that of a family of half a dozen or more children the ones who survived historically will survive in the alternate timeline, and the ones who died in OTL (*see Note at bottom) will never have the chance to grow to adulthood and play an important role.

If a child dies because they are born with a weak constitution or a congenital disability, that is one thing, but for the most part illnesses are things that are contracted, and deaths are either accidental, or unforeseen. By their nature, these kinds of deaths need not have occurred. Also by their nature, they could have occurred at other times than when they did historically, and could have affected different individuals than they did historically.

A few really good examples can be found in certain generations of European royal families in the nineteenth century. Here the capriciousness of Fate can affect the very succession to the throne itself.

1. The Romanovs

Tsar Aleksandr II of Russia’s eldest son was named Nikolai, and was born in 1843. He was a popular youth and seen as an intelligent man, but died of illness at the age of 20 in 1863. This left the succession to his younger brother who became Tsar Aleksandr III, and was very much different in temperament from the man that his brother would have become.

Tsar Aleksandr III had four sons, though history really only remembers two and a half. The eldest son was called Nikolai and went on to become Tsar Nicholas II, with all that entailed. The second son was called Aleksandr and died just shy of one year old, so can probably be assumed to have had a congenital illness, but one can’t be sure without looking. The third son was George who grew to adulthood but contracted TB, though he actually died in a motorcycling accident. Neither of those things is preordained. The fourth son was Mikhail, who reigned briefly in 1917 as the last Tsar in name only.

Had Aleksandr II’s son Nikolai lived, he would have become Tsar Nicholas II, his marriage would have produced heirs of his own, and the OTL Nicholas II and his brothers would just have been his nephews, and cousins to the heirs of his body.

Accepting Tsesarevitch Nikolai’s death and looking at the children of Aleksandr III, we can see that Grand Duke George would have filled some important role under the historical Tsar Nicholas II and been the heir presumptive until Alexei’s birth, and the favoured heir in the crisis of 1917 when Alexei was passed over. His living would have allowed Michael to have lived a less stressful life, not been so constrained in the world of marriage, and perhaps got his way over Beatrice of Edinburgh.

2. The Hannoverians

The succession to the throne of Great Britain after the death of George IV was one of the most uncertain in British history after the death of his daughter Charlotte in 1817. George IV had five surviving brothers, two others (Octavius and Alfred) having died in infancy. At Charlotte’s death, NONE of these had any children, leaving succession to the British throne not only in serious confusion, but also wide open to whichever of the brothers could beget an heir.

It was too late for Frederick Augustus, Duke of York, and next in line. He was over fifty, married for almost two decades without a child, and would die in 1827.

William, Duke of Clarence, who would succeed his brother George IV in 1830 as King William IV, had a large family…but it was with a mistress. In 1818 he cast her aside and married Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, at twenty-six almost half his age. They had a couple of daughters, Charlotte who was born and died on the same day in 1819, and Elizabeth who lived three months 1820-21 before her death. As a note, William’s illegitimate family became the Earls of Munster.

Next on from William was his brother Edward, Duke of Kent, who also was living with his mistress and who also cast her off after the death of Charlotte, to marry Victoria of Saxe-Coburg. They had one daughter, named Alexandrina Victoria, in 1819. Five months later he was dead from pneumonia. The daughter also suffered a childhood illness crisis when she was 11, but would survive.

The next brother of George IV was Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, a thoroughly disreputable sort, with a sunken eye and an eye (so to speak) for self-aggrandizement. He had shocked his contemporaries by marrying in 1815, before Charlotte’s death, Princess Frederica of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, already twice a widow and not considered much of a catch. By the time of Charlotte’s death they had had two stillborn daughters, but in 1819 they were blessed with a son, George.

The next brother was Augustus, Duke of Sussex who had contracted a marriage in defiance of the Royal Marriages Act, and thus had it unrecognised legally. He had a son and daughter in their teens at Charlotte’s death, but both were outside of the line of succession. Upon the death of his not-wife in 1830, he would contract another morganatic marriage in 1831.

The last surviving son of King George III was Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge who was unmarried at the time of Charlotte’s death but wed in 1818 Princess Augusta of Hesse-Kassel, having three children, one of them a son, George, born in 1819.

Had George IV’s daughter Charlotte not died, then it is likely that neither William nor Edward would have married. Ernest already was, and Adolphus as the youngest probably would have, and it would have fallen to them to contest only the throne of Hannover, which by Salic Law could not have been passed down to Charlotte by George IV

Had Victoria (as Alexandrina Victoria came to be known) died of her illness at age 11, then as things stood her uncle, the generally despised Ernest Augustus would have become King of England, but for how long would he have survived? His son was blind, and his remaining younger brother Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge was a senior commander in the British Army.

Had either of William’s daughters survived they would have become Queen in 1837 upon his death. Had Edward, Duke of Kent survived and fathered a son, the son would by the rule of primogeniture have taken precedence over Victoria (even though she be elder) and thus become king in 1837.

And many events of an alternate timeline could have played with the decisions and outcomes even of the events listed above, in marriages, births and deaths.

3 The Hohenzollerns

The marriage of Kaiser Frederick III of Germany, and his wife, Victoria, Princess Royal of Great Britain, was blessed with 8 children, 4 of them boys. Of course, at the time Frederick was Crown Prince of Germany as his father, the old Kaiser Wilhelm I lived to be ninety, but by courtesy we will refer to him as Frederick III here, a post he held only for a few months in 1888 before his death from throat cancer.

Their eldest son, Wilhelm, named after his grandfather, had a difficult birth, emerging with a wizened arm and having to be brought back to life. Some think this brought on a degree of brain damage. By rights he ought to have been weakened by the ordeal of his birth, but Wilhelm would grow strong from his tribulations, and in overcoming his disability would be more physically fit than many a man of contemporary age. But it remains that he might very well have died at birth, and that his difficult birth might have left him susceptible to illness and disease.

The second son was Heinrich, an altogether easier birth. He was followed by Sigismund, and then a few years later by the youngest brother Waldemar.

Sigismund was destined never to know Waldemar, dying at age two, two years before the birth of his younger brother. At the time this was not considered uncommon, though it was becoming more so amongst the upper class and royalty who had access to the best doctors and best medical care.

It is in the death of Waldemar that one senses the butterflies ready to launch themselves into the timeline. Born in February 1868, he was 11 years old by March 1879 and a much-loved younger brother of Wilhelm and Heinrich. There are some very nice photographs of all of them, and contemporary sources say they were very fond of their little brother, younger by 6 years than Heinrich, and by 9 from Wilhelm, the gap made to seem the larger due to the death of the intervening brother, Sigismund.

Waldemar’s death in March 1879 was neither predictable or down to any underlying causes. It was purely illness, striking suddenly at the court, and leaving him dead. Such death can often miss completely, or could have taken more, or others in his stead. One might have expected Wilhelm to have been weak, and open to disease, but his mindset had been on overcoming his disability and by the age of 20 he was a fit young man. But death could still have struck, but it spared him and took the much-loved Waldemar instead.

It is certainly a question as to how badly Wilhelm was affected by the death of his younger brother. Waldemar was not a baby or even a child anymore, but was on the verge of adolescence, a brother than Wilhelm had known for 11 years, and loved for that period. One can say that deaths like this can strike at any time, and certainly did a lot more often back then, but if one looks at the contemporary British royal family of Queen Victoria, then none of her children died before attaining adulthood and marriage, and she had nine of them.

It is worth speculating that without Waldemar’s death, Wilhelm would have been something of a different man, and that later once his younger brother had grown to adulthood, Waldemar would have had an influence on the Kaiser that could have been beneficial to humanity as a whole.

It is also worth noting that Heinrich named his eldest son Waldemar, and his next Sigismund, his third Heinrich, suggesting a close relationship with his dead brothers, especially the eldest of them who had died ten years before the birth of his own Waldemar

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

*Note: OTL is short-hand for Our TimeLine and means what really happened historically

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Marriages that might have been

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010

Royal Marriages That Never Happened
- but might have done…

Whilst there can be endless speculation about marriages that might have been in timelines, the more interesting course of action for a discussion article is to look at those which nearly were, or were wanted to be but for an intransigent and immovable object.

I will take half a dozen from the 19th century as examples, as the possible futures created by them occurring are both the easier to project, and the more immediate to comprehend

1 – Alexander of Battenberg and Viktoria of Prussia

In 1879, Alexander of Battenberg, son of a morganatic marriage by a prince of Hesse, was proclaimed as Prince of the newly autonomous state of Bulgaria. High hopes were laid at his door, and it was assumed that he would do what Otho had begun to do in Greece, and what Carol of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was doing in Rumania, that is create a modern and civilised European monarchy out of a former possession of the Ottoman Empire.

But things went badly wrong for Alexander. Russia who had initially sponsored him soon became disillusioned by the fact that he was his own man, trying to do his best for Bulgarian interests, rather than those of Russia. In response Russia backed the opposition to his rule within Bulgaria and an almost constant state of conflict was the result.

In the midst of this Alexander wished to marry Princess Viktoria of Prussia, daughter of the then Crown Prince Frederick, granddaughter of Kaiser Wilhelm I, and a sister of he who would one day become Kaiser Wilhelm II. Concerned from the start about the status of Alexander as both son of a morganatic marriage, and Prince of what seemed an Eastern despotate, rather than a civilised kingdom, there was much opposition within Germany, but ? loved Alexander and wanted it to happen as much as he did.

What really put an end to the possibility was the state of internal politics in Bulgaria, which went from unstable political warfare to outright deposition of Alexander in 1886. Now, the German royal family could in no way even begin to think about countenancing the marriage proposition – Alexander was an exile, an ex-prince with no likely prospect. The marriage was killed stone dead.

Viktoria would go on in 1890 to marry the Prince of Schaumburg-Lippe, whilst in 1889 Alexander married Johanna Loisinger and had two children before his death in 1893.

2 – Michael of Russia and Beatrice of Edinburgh Saxe-Coburg

Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovitch was the only surviving brother, and thus heir presumptive, to Tsar Nicholas II whilst Beatrice was a British princess, daughter of the Duke of Edinburgh (one of Queen Victoria’s sons) who had been made also Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha upon the death of Prince Leopold, his younger brother.

Michael and Beatrice met and fell madly in love, and wanted to marry. The British were concerned mostly because she was known for being somewhat delicate, and because her father, the Duke of Edinburgh had married a Russian Grand Duchess, and it was not a marriage that would be called an unqualified success. But they were open to persuasion.

As a Russian Grand Duke, and especially as heir presumptive to his brother, Michael needed his brother, the Tsar’s, permission to marry, but despite the excellent credentials of the match, Nicholas II, by this time steeped in religious fervour, would not grant it, citing cosanguinity as a reason. It is true that Michael and Beatrice were first cousins, but across most of Europe, and especially within the royal families this was hardly a bar to marriage, and at best was something that a dispensation needed to be obtained for.

But Nicholas II was adamant – Mikhail could not marry Bea. The decision broke the delicate Bea who had a complete breakdown, whereas Mikhail rebounded but was never as serious in his consideration of romantic adventures again – not to say he never felt the same, only that he did not care so much to find a bride that would please the dynastic aims of his brother and instead eventually wooed and married a minor noble, causing his brother to exile him from Russia entirely.

A marriage between Michael and Beatrice would have been a perfect dynastic union, and also a marriage of love. There is no reason to assume it would not have been blessed by children, and Michael would have remained in Russia at his brother’s side, rather than become one of the Romanovs in exile from him, as several of his cousins also had become, through love.

3 – Carol II and one of the Romanov Grand Duchesses

Relations between the royal families of Russia and Romania were very close in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. In the early Summer of 1914 the two families holidayed together in Moldavia, close to the Russian border.

King Carol I was old, and childless his heir was his nephew, Ferdinand, married to a British princess. Their eldest son Carol (to become Carol II of Romania) was of marriageable age, and a union with one of Tsar Nicholas II’s daughters was considered to be a perfect match, within the grasp of the ambitions of the Romanian dynasty.

Tsar Nicholas II’s daughters had said that they did not want to leave Russia, did not want to marry and have to leave the country, but Romania was only just a border away, and of any of the potential places to end up it was the closest, and the easiest to retain ties to the family from.

The Tsar, a weak man in many ways, had promised his daughters that if they did not want to marry outside the country then they would not have to, but a promise given one day can change on another for a plea to do so. If one of the Grand Duchesses, and either the eldest Olga or the second eldest Tatiana, were the ones in the picture had fallen in love with Carol, then they too would have begun to see Rumania as a perect compromise.

But the outbreak of war blasted the potential apart. By 1918 the grand duchesses were dead, executed in the basement of a house in Ekaterinburg, and Carol II (to be) had in the August contracted a highly unsuitable marriage to Joana Maria Valentina-Lambrino, amarriage soon annulled and replaced with a much more suitable marriage to Princess Helen of Greece.

Had the First World War not occurred, or not broken out when it did, then how much more likely would a marriage between Olga, or possibly Tatiana, and Carol have become? Could Carol’s wild ways have been calmed by an early dynastic marriage without the intervening trauma of war and conquest, humiliation and eventual victory for Romania?

4 – Prince Albert Victor of Great Britain

Albert Victor Christian Edward, who would have taken the regnal name of Edward, was the eldest son of Albert Edward, at that time Prince of Wales, but eventually to be known to history as King Edward VII. He was the elder brother of George, Duke of York, who would eventually become King George V, and had had a similar upbringing including attending naval college at Osborne as a young lad.

History is uncertain as to the true nature of Albert Victor. Some see him as thick, and thick-headed, scraping by in his studies only because his tutors dare not fail him. Others see him as intelligent enough, but disinterested in academia. There have been wild theories that he was Jack the Ripper, or that he was secretly gay, but all that can be said with any certainty is that he lived the more or less typical life of an upper class scion of his time, visiting disreputable houses as had his father before him, gambling, and mixing with company the Queen would have refused to set eyes upon.

Princess Helene of Orleans was the daughter of Philippe, Count of Paris, and putative, or titular, King of France. He was the grandson of King Louis Philippe, the son of Ferdinand, who had died in a carriage accident a decade before the Orleans monarchy had been overthrown in 1848, and he was believed by his supporters to have inherited the crown upon Louis Philippe’s abdication. Exiled from France, one of his homes was Britain where some at least of his children were born.

Helene was his second daughter, born in 1871, seven years after Albert Victor had entered the world. But they met and fell in love, and he wished to marry her. It was one of those love stories like Romeo and Juliet, where both sides abhore the idea of marriage to the other, albeit here for reasons of religion rather than for personal animosity, of which there was little between the British and Orleans royal families. But the Orleans were Catholic, and the British Anglican, and not only that but the entire Act of Succession was aimed against letting any Catholic succeed to the throne of England, and barring from doing so any prince who would wed a Catholic wife.

But Albert Victor was either pig-headed, very much in love, or an eternal optimist and he pressed his grandmother, Queen Victoria, for the marriage. Constitutional lawyers delved deep into the bowels of the various acts governing succession to the throne and discovered that were he to marry Helene and they had children brought up in the Anglican tradition, that whilst he may be barred from the throne by his marriage, their children would not be. But Queen Victoria was the classic immovable object, and the marriage was killed, to fade away into the mists soon enough.

In 1892, Albert Victor appeared to have come round, agreeing to marry the dull, and rather straight, Princess Mary of Teck. His parents and Queen Victoria were delighted, and everyone looked forward to the wedding. Princess Mary was descended on her father’s side (the Duke of Teck) from a Wurttemberg morganitic union, but on her mother’s side from the Dukes of Cambridge, and thus in direct succession from King George III.

Then Albert Victor died, a death which shocked the nation, but is oddly forgotten about by most people today, and probably was even ten years later. His status as a quasi-person seemed only to be added to by his intended’s decision to marry his brother, the future King George V

Tsesarevitch Nikolai and Dagmar of Denmark

The eldest son of Tsar Aleksandr II, the Tsesarevitch Nikolai was engaged to be married to Princess Dagmar of Denmark when he died at the age of twenty.

She then went on to marry his brother, the next in line, who became Tsar Aleksandr III

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

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