The Cavalry Turn

The, the first major engagement of the , ended inconclusively. The forces retreated in good order, leaving the  in command of the field, having gained a minor strategic advantage. It would not last; by the end of the war nine years later, King had been captured and executed, England had been transformed into a  ruled on  principles. The of 1660 saw the monarchy returned, but without the absolute powers it had enjoyed before the war. From then on, England - and later the - was a constitutional monarchy, in which the head of state was effectively powerless, with all true control of the state eventually falling into the hands of Parliament.

But there was a moment during the engagement at Edgehill that could, had events taken a different turn, have secured a victory for the Royalists not just in the battle, but in the entire war. The Royalist cavalry, commanded by, nephew to King Charles, broke through the Parliamentarian left flank, and continued to gallop off the field to loot the enemy camp. This left the Royalists in a much weakened position, and allowed the Parliamentarians to recover somewhat from the loss of their flank. They left the field in good order, and with sufficient men to continue to prosecute the war.

But what if Rupert had exercised more control over his horsemen? What if the Royalist cavalry had pursued their enemies just far enough to ensure that they were out of the battle, and then returned to win the battle and the war for King Charles?

The Cavalry Turn examines just such a divergence.

Differences
A Royalist victory in the English Civil War resulted in King Charles I maintaining absolute power over the English - in addition to the Scottish and Irish - political systems. Rather than develop into a constitutional monarchy, content with a figurehead king, England, and later Great Britain, was governed by an absolute monarch until the. Inspired by anti-monarchical revolutions in the Thirteen Colonies and in France, Britain experienced its own revolution in 1792, which saw King George III and his family flee in exile to the colony of, while Britain and its other overseas territories came under the rule of a republican government.

The new Republic of Great Britain closely aligned itself with the French First Republic and, later, with the French Empire of Napoleon. A close ally of France, British military, political and financial support allowed Napoleon to successfully dominate the European continent through a series of bloody and devastating conflicts, while France remained unopposed to British affairs elsewhere in the world. British support for France during the Saint-Domingue Rebellion, and the promise of further British support in any further colonial endeavours, prompted Napoleon to reject an offer made by the United States to purchase the French North American territory of Louisiana, which in time would gain independence from France and establish itself as a major power both in North America and the world at large. To this day, modern Louisiana is culturally and linguistically extremely similar to its European parent. West of Louisiana, a large area of territory that had once belonged to the Spanish Empire declared independence in 1851 to become the Republic of California, a Hispanophone nation with cultural and historic ties to other Spanish-speaking nations in Europe and the Americas.

French dominance of Europe resulted in anti-French sentiment in many of the nations that France had defeated in her rapid rise to hegemony. Prussia and Austria, in particular, led the informal anti-France coalition of European nations, which also included states such as Sweden and Bavaria. These tensions would eventually boil over in 1916 with the outbreak of World War I.