What If?

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The best examples of counterfactual history display two characteristics. The first is equal plausibility for both the actual historical event and its alternative. The other is impact: the alternative must be consequential. This explains the popularity of military history in the world of the counterfactual; battles are refought incessantly, both by professional soldiers studying their intricacies and by historians wondering about the long tail of consequences had the Persians defeated the Spartans at Thermopylae, or if Robert E. Lee had flanked George Meade at Gettysburg and headed for Washington. Counterfactuals can also cover scientific discoveries: even though they always seem inevitable in retrospect, where and when they are made certainly matters. Imagine, for example, if Hitler had been free of anti-Semitism, and therefore disinclined to chase Europe’s best physicists into the embrace of the Manhattan Project, or the historical repercussions if twelfth-century China had acquired steam power. The path of history can even be rerouted by a single bullet: perhaps the most famous is the one used by Gavrilo Princip to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, setting in motion the events that led to World War I. Histories turn on epidemics, earthquakes, and, of course, elections. The U.S. presidential election was thrown into the hands of the Supreme Court by a margin of no more than a thousand ballots cast in Florida—probably fewer than the number of voters whose cars broke down on their way to the polls.

And then there’s love. Any particular courtship may be plausible, but its outcome is always unforeseeable: Cupid is blind for a reason. Sometimes a romance starts in the bedroom and ends on the battlefield; dowries and dynastic claims alone are responsible for enough wars, assassinations, and conquests to fill a month on the History Channel. When the Infanta Catherine of Braganza was betrothed to Charles II, her trousseau included deeds to the cities of Tangier and Bombay, laying the foundation for the British control of India. The 1677 marriage of William of Orange to Catherine’s niece Mary led, eleven years later, to the offer of the English throne, an end to five decades of civil war, and what has come to be known as the Glorious Revolution. Even more significant are the most frequent (and predictable) consequences of sex: children. In James Goldman’s play The Lion in Winter, Eleanor of Aquitaine, the onetime wife to Louis VII of France, reminds her sons by her second husband, Henry II of England, “Good, good Louis. If I’d managed sons for him instead of all those little girls, I’d still be stuck with being Queen of France, and we should not have known one another. Such, my angels, is the role of sex in history.” It played a starring role, in this case, since two of those sons—Richard the Lion-hearted, the leader of the Third Crusade, and John Lackland, reluctant signer of the Magna Carta—were among the more consequential monarchs in English history.

But while kings and queens may come to love, and even lust, after one another, their unions are usually motivated by a more cold-blooded calculus. The ideal erotic counterfactual wouldn’t depend upon the union of two dynastic houses, nor would its world-historical impact be its progeny. The couple would have chosen one another, rather than be chosen for one another. The historical record of the marriage would include an event in which two possible outcomes appear in stark relief: one in which the couple married, and one in which they did not. And the event would be so well documented that we could even name the day on which it occurred.

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