Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (3 page)

Yet, despite Trevelyan’s example, this was not a genre which many serious historians sought to develop. When J. C. Squire put together a collection of similar counterfactual essays twenty-five years later, his eleven contributors were a motley crew, mainly composed of novelists and journalists.
¹⁵
The whole tone of Squire’s
If It Happened Otherwise
was self-deprecating; it was even subtitled
‘lapses
into imaginary history’. Not all his contributors, Squire admitted at the outset, had written ‘on precisely the same plane of reality. Some mingle more satire with their speculations than others’; indeed, some of their fantasies put him in mind of Johnson’s remark that ‘a man is not on his oath in a lapidary inscription’. Unfortunately, Squire’s own introduction was itself something of a lapidary inscription. Counterfactual history ‘doesn’t help much’, he concluded lamely, ‘as nobody is to know’. Small wonder the volume was soon dead and buried.

Did Squire’s book discredit the notion of counterfactual history for a generation? Certainly, some of the contributions help explain why it came to be seen by so many historians as a mere parlour game. Philip Guedalla’s ‘If the Moors in Spain had won’, for example, is based on the counterfactual of a Spanish defeat at Lanjaron in 1491, which allows the Islamic kingdom of Granada to become the centre of an Arab-led Renaissance and an eighteenth-century empire. (In this alternative world, Disraeli ends up as a Granadian Grand Vizier.) Still more whimsical is G. K. Chesterton’s ‘If Don John of Austria [Philip II of Spain’s illegitimate brother] had married Mary Queen of Scots’, a Counter-Reformation romance in which the royal couple together snuff out Calvinism in Scotland, inherit the English throne, and suspend the Reformation
sine die
. H. A. L. Fisher’s ‘If Napoleon had escaped to America’ imagines Bonaparte crossing the Atlantic (rather than giving himself up to the
Bellerophon
) and joining forces with Bolivar to liberate Latin America from Popery and monarchy. Harold Nicolson offers more of the same in ’If Byron had become King of Greece‘, which has Byron surviving the fever which killed him at Missolonghi in 1824 and finally achieving an incongruous apotheosis as a henpecked and increasingly addled King George I of Greece (1830-54). (Typically, Nicolson has as ‘Byron’s most enduring achievement, ’removing the litter from the summit of the Acropolis and erecting in its place an exact replica of Newstead Abbey.) Milton Waldman’s ’If Booth had missed Lincoln’ is rather less frivolous, portraying Lincoln as a grotesquely ageing ‘thwarted autocrat’, discredited by a lenient peace settlement which has satisfied neither North nor South, at loggerheads with his own more vengeful party in Congress and finally expiring in 1867, worn out by a last, doomed election campaign.
¹⁶
But as for Squire’s own ‘If it had been discovered in 1930 that Bacon really did write Shakespeare’, the most that can be said is that it would not have been out of place in the
Punch
of its day (the laboured pay-off line is that, conversely, Shakespeare wrote the works of Bacon). The same goes for Ronald Knox’s spoof edition of
The Times
of ‘June 31, 1930’ purporting to postdate a successful General Strike.
¹⁷

To be fair, not everything in
If
... is devoid of historical value. André Maurois’s chapter avoids the French Revolution by imagining, not implausibly, a successful financial reform carried to its conclusion by Turgot, with the assistance not only of greater royal resolve, but also of a conclusive defeat of the Parlements in 1774 and a reform of the Paris police. Churchill raises equally interesting questions about a Southern victory in the American Civil War, assuming a Confederate victory at Gettysburg. And Emil Ludwig’s piece argues - as was widely believed at the time - that if the German Emperor Frederick III had not died in 1888 (after just ninety-nine days on the throne), German political development might have taken a more liberal course. Yet even the better essays in
If
... are very obviously the products of their authors’ contemporary political or religious preoccupations. As such, they tell us a good deal less about nineteenth-century alternatives than - for example - about 1930s views of the First World War. Thus Maurois imagines French security permanently underwritten by a united Anglo-America (Britain having won the American War of Independence); Churchill beats his drum for the same transatlantic combination (Britain having managed to reconcile the South and the defeated Union); and Ludwig sings the old German liberal lament for the missed chance of an Anglo-German alliance (which he imagines a longer-lived Frederick concluding). In other words, rather than approaching past events with a conscious indifference to what is known about later events, each takes as his starting point the burning contemporary question: How could the calamity of the First World War have been avoided? The result is, in essence, retrospective wishful thinking. Interestingly, only Hilaire Belloc imagines a counterfactual outcome worse than the historical reality. Like Maurois, Belloc undoes the French Revolution, but this time France’s decline as a power is simply accelerated, allowing the Holy Roman empire to wax into a federation of Europe ‘stretching from the Baltic to Sicily and from Königsberg to Ostend’. Thus, when war breaks out with this Greater Germany in 1914, it is Britain which loses, ending up as a ‘Province of the European Commonwealth’.

The same defects recur in another, more recent collection of counterfactual essays entitled
If I Had Been
.
¹⁸
Two of the contributors avert the American War of Independence (one as the Earl of Shelburne, the other as Benjamin Franklin), another (as Juarez) averts the Mexican civil war by pardoning the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico in 1867, and another (as Thiers) prevents the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1. Owen Dudley Edwards (as Gladstone) solves the Irish Question by opting for more land reform instead of Home Rule, Harold Shukman (as Kerensky) avoids the Bolshevik coup by treating Kornilov more carefully and Louis Allen (as Tojo) wins the war for Japan by attacking the British and Dutch Empires instead of Pearl Harbor - wishful thinking from an American as well as a Japanese point of view. As if that were not enough, Germany is reunified in 1952, thanks to Roger Morgan’s Adenauer; the Prague Spring is not crushed, thanks to Philip Windsor’s Dubček; and Chilean democracy is preserved by Harold Blakemore’s Allende. The obvious objection is that all this is so much wisdom after the event. In each case, the argument is based more on what we know about the consequences of what was done than on the options and data actually available to the figures in question at the time.

Another weakness of both Squire’s and Snowman’s collections is that in a number of the chapters a single, often trivial, change has momentous consequences. Now, while there is no logical reason why trivial things should
not
have momentous consequences, it is important to beware of the reductive inference that therefore a trivial thing is
the
cause of a great event. The theory of Cleopatra’s nose (originally Pascal’s) is just the most notorious of many such reductive explanations: thus Anthony’s passion for her proboscis determines the fate of Rome. Another attributes Richard III’s fall to a lost nail:

And the same logic underlies Gibbon’s suggestion that it was only the fourteenth-century Ottoman Sultan Bajazet’s gout which prevented him sacking Rome;
¹⁹
the die-hard Southerner’s that the American Civil War was lost only because of the fortuitous discovery of Lee’s Special Order no. 191 by the Union General George B. McClellan; and Churchill’s that a major war between Greece and Turkey was caused by the infected monkey bite which killed King Alexander of Greece in 1920.
²⁰
Just as such reductive explanations imply counterfactuals (no monkey bite, no war), so, conversely, a number of the counterfactuals in the Squire collection are inferred from reductive explanations: that Louis XVI’s lack of firmness led to the French Revolution, that the early death of Frederick III caused the First World War, and so on. Likewise, Snowman’s book from beginning to end rests on the assumption that it was the mistaken decisions of a few ‘great men’ which led to major crises like the loss of the American colonies, the Franco-Prussian War and the Bolshevik Revolution. As with the other reductive explanations discussed above, this may sometimes have been the case; but it has to be demonstrated rather than simply assumed, or the explanations are simply not plausible - and the counterfactual outcomes on which they rest collapse.
²¹

A related problem is the effect of humour. The essays in the Squire collection are, to varying degrees, supposed to be funny. But the funnier they are, the less plausible they are. This is true of most reductive explanations: formulated differently, they can become more plausible. ‘Had Anthony not delayed leaving Egypt, he might have defeated Caesar’; ‘Had Richard III won at Bosworth, he might have stabilised Yorkist rule’; ‘Had Bajazet chosen to attack Italy after his Hungarian victory, he might well have been able to sack Rome’; ‘Had it not been for their knowledge of Lee’s intentions, the armies of the Union might well have been defeated at Antietam’; ‘Had it not been for the death of the King of Greece, war with Turkey might not have broken out.’ Less funny, in each case; but more believable. Similarly, it is not nonsense to suggest that, if the General Strike had been more successful, Labour governments might have lasted longer and achieved more than they did between the wars. Only when couched as a send-up of
The Times
does the counterfactual become incredible.

If nothing else, Squire’s volume firmly established the character of the counterfactual essay as a
jeu d‘esprit
, a vehicle for wishful thinking or reductive explanation - and, above all, high table humour. In his characteristically mischievous critique of Marxism in
Freedom and Organisation
(1934), Bertrand Russell maintained the standard which Squire had set:

In the same facetious vein, Russell suggested ‘without undue solemnity, the following alternative theory of the causation of the Industrial Revolution’:

This tradition lives on in the collection of essays published in 1984 by John Merriman,
For Want of a Horse
.
²³
These include three American speculations: What if Pocahontas had not saved Captain John Smith?, What if Voltaire had emigrated to America in 1753? and What if Governor Hutchinson’s daughter had persuaded him not to send back the
Dartmouth
(the incident which precipitated the Boston tea party)? In addition, there are two on French subjects: What if the flight from Varennes had been successful? and What if the Bourbon line had not failed in 1820?; as well as one on Britain: What if William III had been defeated at sea by James II? On the whole, this is after-dinner history. The overall tone is set by the opening chapter, which speculates what would have happened if Fidel Castro had signed a contract to play baseball with the New York Giants, and is maintained by an absurd piece by Peter Gay, which implies that psychoanalysis would have been taken more seriously if its founder had not been a Jew. Only Conrad Russell’s essay on 1688 - entitled ‘The Catholic Wind’ - has any real historical value.
²⁴

Here, Russell revives the question originally (but whimsically) addressed by Chesterton in the Squire collection: could the English Reformation have been undone, in this case by a wind which favoured James II’s fleet rather than William III’s? A variation on the same theme had in fact been suggested just a few years before by Hugh Trevor-Roper, who disputed the inevitability of Stuart failure in the 1640s and 1680s, asking: ‘Could not a wiser king than [Charles I or James II] have preserved or restored an authoritarian monarchy in England, as was done in many European countries?’ If Charles had been granted ‘a few more years’, Trevor-Roper suggested, the ageing of his parliamentary opponents might have told against them. If James, ‘like his brother, had set politics above religion’ the ’Stuart reaction’ might have ‘taken root’: ‘And then would not the Whig grandees of England, like the Huguenot grandees of France, have turned to worship the risen sun?’
²⁵
John Vincent has recently developed this theme further, matching Renouvier’s ‘alternative’ history of a pagan Europe with an alternative history of a Catholic England. Vincent takes an earlier starting point than Russell and Trevor-Roper :