Books: Byron’s Wooden Leg

IF IT HAD HAPPENED OTHERWISE

Edited by J.C. SQUIRE

320 pages. St. Martin’s Press. $8.95.

The reader of history imagines himself to be at the very fulcrum of great events and thus at a gratifying distance from the morning mail or the evening news. There is no better way of keeping reality at bay, unless—and this is the admirable theory behind If It Had Happened Otherwise—the fulcrum of the great event is fancifully shifted a few centimeters, or removed entirely.

The scholarly wags whose work is reprinted in this celebrated collection of 14 essays (Otherwise was first printed in England in 1932) obviously had great fun making history come out differently. A great part of the reader’s amusement in reading these revisionist fantasies lies in arguing with the authors. Knowing a bit of history helps, but the editor tactfully prefaces each chapter with a paragraph or so of authentic history to remind dullards of the actual date, say, of Kaiser Wilhelm’s accession to power and what really happened at Sarajevo.

The book’s most celebrated contributor is Winston Cliurchill (a clever politician-journalist-historian), who in one variant of history did not die of prison fever during the Boer War, but went on to become a heroic brandy drinker and Prime Minister. With double irony in his title, Churchill speculates on what might have happened in If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg. After Lee’s victory, Churchill notes, the Confederate general’s brilliant stroke of freeing the slaves cut away the moral underpinning of the Union cause. Could Lee actually have forced such a measure on the South? Could the Confederacy, England and the rest of the Commonwealth, banding together as the Association of English Speaking Peoples have imposed peace by fiat on Europe and thus avoided World War II? Probably not, but it is easy to imagine Churchill imagining himself rising to address the crucial meeting of the Association foreign ministers and changing history with his devastating use of the subjunctive.

Concentrating on Spain, Anti-Historian Philip Guedalla reverses history by awarding Boabdil, the Moorish King of Granada, the victory in his battle with Ferdinand and Isabella at Lanjaron in 1491. Actually, Ferdinand and Isabella won, expelled the Moors, and, for good measure, drove away Spain’s Jews under the threat of forced conversion. Spain thus was depleted of most of its learning, most of its artisans and half of its cultural inheritance.

In Guedalla’s universe, Granada continues to thrive as a great center of civilization, encompassing most of Spain. After its annexation of Morocco in the 17th century, it takes its place as a formidable European power. Granada is sporadically allied with England, but by 1865 the two countries nearly go to war, the author roguishly reports. Why? Because the poet Swinburne, who in real life had curious difficulties with the opposite sex, is killed while adventuring in the royal seraglio. The scandal is smoothed over, however, partly because of the good feeling left by the fervently pro-Moorish writings of Lord Byron, who does not die at Missolonghi in 1824, according to Guedalla, but lives on in Granada until 1850.

Byron also survives his Missolonghi fever in a wicked imagining by Harold Nicholson, who in his essay has the poet fumble on till 1854—as nothing less than King George I of Greece, “an obese little man descending the steps of the Crystal Palace on his wooden leg, supporting himself on his famous umbrella, and clasping a huge red handkerchief in the other hand.” The wooden leg has replaced the clubfoot of Byron’s dashing early years, which the poet-King lost, along with all vestiges of poetic vision, while fighting ineptly against the Turks near Lepanto in 1834.

As might be expected. Napoleon also takes several curtain calls. The great British historian G.M. Trevelyan (in a 1906 essay that gave the other writers the idea for this collection) has Bonaparte win at Waterloo, then plunge Europe into decades of troublesome peace. England is unable to disarm because of the danger that he still represents and is ruined by the cost of its huge military establishment. (The ubiquitous Byron, in this version, leads an unsuccessful workers’ rebellion against George IV and is executed.) H.A.L. Fisher’s Napoleon is a bit more believable. At 46, he escapes to America after losing at Waterloo. Thereupon he blusters his way to a conquest of Peru and finally hatches the notion of striking at England through India. Chance intervenes, and Napoleon is lost at sea.

Roman Catholic G.K. Chesterton imagines the fine Catholic realm that might have sprung forth had Mary Queen of Scots married Don John of Austria, the illegitimate brother of Philip II of Spain. Such history tinkering, though, can go on forever. Suppose Don John and Mary had established a Catholic England. Would cross-Channel Calvinism have undermined it eventually? Suppose Luther had been unable to find a nail in Wittenberg for all those theses. Or better, suppose Guedalla’s Boabdil had crossed the Pyrenees and swept through France, creating a Moorish Europe. Might there be mosques in Manchester today?

JohnSkow