The destruction of the Houses of Parliament by the Catholic conspirators led by Robert Catesby would have resulted in far more deaths than that of King James, Queen Anne, Prince Henry and the MPs and peers unlucky enough to have been caught in the blast. The attempt by the plotters to capture the infant sons of the King would always be doomed to failure. Despite this, it is very likely that the wave of anti-Catholicism created by the regicide would render the atrocities seen in our own timeline as relatively benign.
Charles Stuart would have become King at the tender age of four. Like his father, he would no doubt have been brought up a strict Protestant. Taught by his tutors to despise the papists who had killed his martyred parents, he would most certainly not have become the Anglo-Catholic that he developed into during his childhood. Thus, the English Civil War would not have occurred in any remotely recognizable form. Instead, his sympathetic regents and later the King himself, would feel justified in ensuring the eradication of Catholicism from Great Britain. The evangelical Presbyterian that Charles would have become would be assured of far more popular support from the Scots. Therefore, with the Catholic powers of Europe limited in their response due to common sympathy, the purging of “papist elements” from the mainland would be very likely, as would brutal repression in Ireland, perhaps led by troops under a different Yeoman than Huntingdon.
Therefore, rather than the gradual development of parliamentary democracy, the Stuart dynasty would have developed into an absolute monarchy akin to that in Sweden and dynastic ties would have been created accordingly. Married into the Protestant powers of central Europe, Great Britain would have been involved in the great wars of religion far more than she was in our own Thirty Years’ War. It is difficult to predict the effects that this would have on the British constitution, but it is possible that, without reform and with power vested in a single figure rather than parliament, a popular uprising may have resulted in the toppling of the hypothetical King Henry X in around 1750.
A true “British Revolution” rather than the coup d’état headed by William III, would be a natural result of an absolute monarchy. Indeed, without representative democracy of some description leading to the enlightened attitudes that produced Adam Smith and John Locke, the development of Britain as a global power would be limited. In addition, without the English Bill of Rights 1689 resulting from the Glorious Revolution, future revolutionaries such the American Rebels would be far less open to democratic ideals. The world-spanning British Empire may not have come to fruition, with Britain remaining the nation she had been under the Tudors: a great naval power perhaps, but not a superpower. India would most likely become a French colony, Spain would retain her dominance in central America and Paris would rule over a vast swathe of North America from Nova Scotia to New Orleans. Rather than the Anglophone dominance seen in our timeline, the 17th and 18th Centuries would belong to the great powers of the Holy League.
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