Forks, branches and the last Plantagenet King
I suppose that many of us have wondered at one time or another what our lives would have been like if we had made a different decision at some crucial point; where would that fork in the road have taken us? This tangle of alternative paths and branches amounts to a set of parallel histories in which our lifeâand perhaps the whole worldâwould have been different. This idea has been a very fruitful one for literature and films (Fatherland by Robert Harris and One by Richard Bach immediately spring to mind), but in reality, it is almost impossible to predict what would have happened if an alternative path had been taken. You can reconstruct events easily enough when you know the actual end-point, but in a complex, interconnected system, there are so many potential alternatives ahead that you can’t predict the outcome given the events with any kind of certainty.
My mind took this uncharacteristically philosophical turn because we finally got around to watching our recording of Britain’s Real Monarch, in which Tony Robinson reports findings by Michael K Jones suggesting that Edward IV was illegitimate, thus changing the whole line of succession to the British throne. The evidence seems quite strong: either Edward was conceived at a time when his father Richard, Duke of York was in France, or he had a gestation of 11 months. So either his mother was a horse, or his father had fantastically heroic sperm. Oh, and his mother Cecily Neville was prepared to testify that he was a bastard.
