The White Ship sinks in the English Channel, drowning William Adelin, son of Henry I of England on 25 November 1120. The Prince and his companions had been crossing the English Channel from Barfleur in the White Ship, the swiftest and most modern ship in the royal fleet. William and his party had remained drinking on the shore until after dark, confident that in a fast ship and on the still sea the delay would have no real effect. Consequently, it was the middle of the night when the drunken helmsman rammed the ship into a rock in the bay. The crew and passengers could not lever the ship off the rock, or prevent the ship from filling with water; however, William and several of his friends managed to launch a life-dinghy. At the last minute, William dashed back to rescue his illegitimate half-sister, Matilda FitzRoy, Countess of Perche; when they and several others threw themselves into the small dinghy, it, overcharged by the multitude that leapt into her, capsized and sank and buried all indiscriminately in the deep. (Thanx to Hal Thurow) The Anarchy. Following Henry Is death without a male heir in 1135, due to the death of William Adelin (this being a latinized German calque of Ætheling, an epithet traditional to the Anglo-Saxon Kings denoting princes of the royal blood in line for succession) in the White Ship disaster in 1120, Count Stephen of Blois, Boulogne, and Maine seized the Crown in spite of Henry forcing his barons to swear that they would recognize Mathildas claim. (Thanx to Erkki William KochKetola) Interestingly, if William Adelin had lived to be William III, Henry FitzEmpres would still have been Count of Anjou, if not Duke of Normandy, and might well have managed to wed Eleanor. Coure de Lione would still by the parfait chevalier of France, Geoffrey would probably have gone for the priesthood, and Lackland would be a joke. Dont know what William III would have done, but King Louis of France, instead of being outclassed by a Plantagenet hegemony from Aquitaine to Ireland, would have faced two powerful vassals in a more equal relationship, which could have lead to an earlier unification of France, especially if the Plantagenet Hegemony imploded without even an Arthur or Lackland to salvage a remnant. Meanwhile, Ireland might not have been given to an English King by an English Pope. Wrapping up, suppose the Pope had granted Ireland to the French King Louis, or better yet, William the Rough of Scotland? Course, William might have been a worthy memory of the wolf pack that gave the world the Bastard, FitzEmpress, Lion-Heart and Longshanks, as in the GURPS role-playing game Infinite Worlds, where the Infinity Patrol that travels between parallel universes is opposed by another world with parachronic travel, Centrum. The point of historical divergence on Centrum is the survival of the White Ship, where William Adelin survives and his descendants lead an Anglo-French Empire that conquers the world. That empire is later decimated by a nuclear attack on the palace in 1902, leading to civil war and worldwide collapse, which brings about the rise there of the socialist technocratic meritocracy Centrum. youtube/watch?v=Z00b2bm_0JA
Posted on: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 05:32:08 +0000
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