#everytime I want to feel smart i scroll TikTok 😂

[fideidefenswhore]

If Catherine got pregnant by Arthur, but it was a girl, would it be possible to skip the kid and go straight to Henry VIII? In a way I could see it like the Great Matter 20 years earlier, Henry VII saying he needs a male heir and Catherine and her family backing the kid and maybe some kind of Exeter Conspiracy to get power.

Hm, that would be an interesting AU… tbh, what I find most frustrating about the (seemingly) obstinate refusal to acknowledge the Henrician 1520s as a ‘succession crisis’ (or in the least, why Henry saw it that way) is actually a more immediate precedent: literally no one was backing the claim of EoY as queen regnant when it was a matter of Richard III or the rival claimant of her future spouse, once it became accepted by most that her brothers were murdered and thus no longer options to inherit the throne.

So yeah, there is actually a question of if CoA and Arthur had a daughter, if she would be preferred in the succession before Henry VIII. If they had a son, it’s far less questionable, their son would be heir to the throne and Henry would be second in line (although if they had daughters as well… again, another question mark, far more ambiguous counterfactually…. dramaturgically, even, iyw….)

I think HVIII would have a comparably popular accession; the question of, would a faction form to prefer his royal niece over him, or one with the aim of making her his heir (over perhaps, his own son and/or daughter , if he has them in this scenario with an alternate wife— I’m not sure the Levitical prohibition would be brushed aside so easily by Pope Julius in the scenario of children by COA and Arthur proving consummation, even with the circumstances as they were it wasn’t ‘so easily’, he didn’t give that dispensation for years after it was requested) would really depend on his reign, if he made comparably controversial choices that would lead to enough dissent for factions to form seeking alternate rule revolving around prophecy and international intrigue in the same way, in this specific counterfactual.