Kevin: One quick thing before we start. Control Z Rewritten is on Patreon now. If you want more of the show, patrons will get the full written script of every episode, plus a soon-to-launch bonus series where I'm going to take apart alternate history that somebody else already made, and then tell you whether I think it holds up. You'll also get a vote on which decision I reverse next, and every December, I'll mail out a printed map of the world as it looks at the end of one of the more interesting timelines. That's patreon.com/slash Ctrl Z rewritten, all one word. And if paying for a podcast isn't your thing, listening and telling one person about the show does just as much. Thank you for being here. On with the episode. July 23rd, 1529. The Great Hall at Blackfriars, a monastery on the Thames in London, converted into a courtroom. Henry VIII has spent two years asking Rome to dissolve his marriage. And this court is here to answer him. Two cardinals sent by the Pope, with full authority to rule, sit on a raised platform. The King of England watches from a gallery above them. His wife, Catherine of Aragon, is not in the room. She walked out a month ago and has ignored three orders to come back. Elderly noblemen have testified about whether Catherine's first marriage was ever consummated on a wedding night twenty-eight years ago with her first husband, Henry's older brother. The lawyers have just finished their arguments. Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio rises slowly on gout's swollen feet. Instead of a verdict, he announces an adjournment until October, because the tribunals in Rome don't sit through the harvest. The hall empties, and that court never reconvenes. Two years before this, an unpaid army broke into Rome and Pope Clement VII spent six months locked in a fortress before escaping in a peddler's disguise. Those soldiers belong to Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. He's Catherine's nephew. Clement has already signed the order pulling this case back to Rome, where the Queen's family holds every advantage. A year earlier, he signed a different document, one that hands these two judges the power to end the marriage on English soil with no appeal to anyone. But then he ordered it burned. But what if he had it? What if he decides that the Emperor who already sacked his city has nothing left to take from him, while the king across the English Channel has everything? Let's hit Control-Z. Welcome to Control Z Rewritten, the podcast where I take the biggest decisions in history, real 50-50 calls, and ask what happens if they go the other way. One decision, we try it the other way, and see what changes. May sixth, fifteen twenty seven. Heavy fog covers the Tiber, the river running through the middle of Rome, and about twenty thousand soldiers use it as cover to climb the city wall. Those soldiers serve Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, who hasn't paid them in months. Their commander, the Duke of Bourbon, is hit by a shot in the first minutes of the assault and dies. So an army already close to mutiny loses the one officer with the authority to control it. The Swiss Guard, the Pope's personal bodyguard, forms up on the steps of St. Peter's Basilica. There are 189 of them. And they hold that position long enough for a small group of them to move Pope Clement VII into the Paseto di Borgio. It's a covered walkway built along the top of a wall, and it runs about half a mile from the Vatican to a round fortress on the riverbank called Castel Sant'Angelo. Of those 189 guards, 147 are killed. The looting lasts eight days. The population of Rome falls from roughly 55,000 to 10,000, and that's counting those killed and those who flee. Clement VII spends the next six months as a prisoner inside Castel Sant'Angelo, and that whole time he's negotiating his own release. The price is four hundred thousand ducats or gold coins. And the surrender of several cities in the Papal States, and that's the territory in central Italy that the papacy governed as its own country. Parma and Piacenza are among them. On december sixth, fifteen twenty seven, Pope Clement puts on peddler's clothes and escapes north to Ovieto, a hill town about seventy five miles from Rome, where he rebuilds his court. The English diplomats who visit him there describe the conditions as wretched. ⁓ From this man, and the case behind it started 26 years earlier. On November 14, 1501, a 15-year-old Spanish princess named Catherine of Aragon marries Arthur, Prince of Wales, at St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Arthur dies the following April. Pope Julius then issues a dispensation, a formal ruling that sets aside a point of church law in one specific case. And that dispensation clears Catherine to marry Arthur's younger brother. So in June of 1509, she becomes queen to a seventeen-year-old Henry VIII, who is, by every surviving account, madly in love with her. They bury five children. One survives. Mary, born February 18, 1516. By 1527, Catherine is forty one years old. And it's becoming clear there will be no son. Henry has found his reason in the book of Leviticus, in a warning that a man who takes his brother's wife will be childless. He's also decided that no pope ever had the authority to set that warning aside. By his reading, the last 18 years were not a legitimate marriage. He's also fallen for a woman at his own court named Anne Boleyn. who refused to become his mistress and will settle for nothing short of the crown. Now the book of Deuteronomy says the opposite. It orders a man to marry his brother's widow. Two verses contradict each other, and six years of lawyers are arguing over which one governs. In the autumn of 1527, without telling his own Lord Chancellor, Henry sends a priest named William Knight toward Rome. Knight carries a request for papal permission to keep two wives at the same time. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who holds the office of Lord Chancellor and runs the government, intercepts him in France and rewrites the instructions before Knight reaches the Alps. In March of 1528, two English envoys named Stephen Gardner and Edward Fox reach Orvieto and begin pressing Clement directly. Pushed on a point of canon law, Which is the internal legal code of the Catholic Church, Clement says he doesn't know the answer. Gardner tells him that the whole of that code is locked inside him. Clement replies that God has forgotten to give him the key. On June 8th, 1528, Clement signs a decretal commission. A normal papal commission would let two judges hear the case in England and send their findings to Rome for review. A decretal commission states the relevant doctrine in advance, gives the judges the power to apply it and deliver a binding verdict on English soil, and then removes any right of appeal. So whatever they rule stands. Clement puts his name to it, then he orders it shown to Henry and Wolsey once, in private, and burned. The cardinal carrying that document to England is Lorenzo Cambeggio, and he takes four months to make the journey. He has gout in both feet and travels in a litter, which is a covered bed carried by servants. He also carries secret instructions from Rome, telling him to delay the case and decide nothing. He lands at Dover on september twenty ninth, fifteen twenty eight. Campeggio opens with two proposals he knows will fail. First, he asks Catherine to take religious vows and enter a convent, which would end the marriage without any court ruling on it. She refuses. He then proposes that Henry reconcile with his wife and withdraw the case. Obviously, Henry refuses. Clement then makes an offer through diplomatic channels. He will grant a dispensation for Princess Mary to marry Henry Fitzroy, the king's illegitimate son by mistress. Half sister and half brother married with a papal blessing, provided Henry withdraws the annulment. Pope Clement would rather bless a wedding between two of the king's own children than end the king's marriage. The court opens at Blackfriars on May 31, 1529. On June 21st, Catherine walks in through a crowd of Londoners who cheer for her, crosses the floor of the hall, and kneels at her husband's feet in front of the entire court. She asks him what she has done to offend him. She reminds him that she has been a true and humble wife for twenty years. She tells him that she came to his bed aversion and asks him to state on his conscience whether that is a lie. Then she stands, curtsies to him, and walks out. The court crier calls her name three times. She keeps walking and says this is no impartial place for her. She never comes back. On july thirteenth, fifteen twenty nine, in Rome, Clement signs the advocation, an order transferring the case out of England and into his own courts. Where the emperor's ambassadors are waiting for it. Ten days later, Campeggio stands up at Blackfriars and adjourns for the summer. In October, Wolsey is charged with premunary, an old offense covering anyone who enforced a foreign powers jurisdiction inside England. On the eighteenth, he surrenders the Great Seal, the stamp used to authorize the king's official documents and the physical symbol of the Lord Chancellor's office, after holding it for fourteen years. Thomas Moore replaces him a week later. On november twenty ninth, fifteen thirty, under arrest and traveling south for a treason trial, Wolsey dies at Leicester Abbey. He tells his keeper that if he had served God as diligently as he served the king, God would not give him over in his gray hairs. Henry marries Anne Boleyn in secret in January of fifteen thirty three. Thomas Cranmer, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, rules the first marriage void that May, and their daughter Elizabeth, is born in September. In November of 1534, Parliament declares Henry VIII the supreme head of the Church of England, and the king Rome once decorated with the title of Defender of the Faith, becomes the head of his own church. Bishop John Fisher is beheaded on Tower Hill in June of 1535. Thomas More is executed on the same ground as On july sixth. Thomas Cromwell, the lawyer who has replaced Wolsey as the king's chief minister, sends commissioners across England in fifteen thirty-five to count what the church owns. They come back with a figure around two hundred thousand pounds a year, against a crown income closer to one hundred thousand pounds. Between fifteen thirty-six and fifteen forty, more than eight hundred monasteries, priories, and convents are dissolved. By the end, they're closing at a rate of fifty per month. On november twenty sixth, fifteen thirty nine, in a valley in Yorkshire, an abbot named Marmaduke Bradley signs away Fountains Abbey, the wealthiest cistercian house in England. Bradley takes a pension of a hundred pounds a year. His thirty monks receive five or six pounds apiece and are told to leave. Many of them entered as teenagers and have spent their entire adult lives inside those walls. Workmen strip the lead off the roof, the window glass is carried away to churches in Ripon and York, the abbey doors are laid flat as flooring in a nearby mill, and a local landowner builds a manor house out of the stone. Waltham Abbey, the last house still standing, surrenders in March of fifteen forty. English monastic life, nine hundred years of it, ends inside four years because Clement VII was more frightened of the emperor's army than the than of a king in London. And here is where we press Ctrl Z. July twenty third, fifteen twenty nine. The same hall at Blackfriars, the same two cardinals on the platform, and King Henry in the same gallery. On the table in front of Cardinal Campeggio sits the Decretal Commission, the document Clement ordered shown once and burned. No order has arrived from Rome. Campeggio rises and delivers a verdict. The dispensation Pope Julius II issued in 1503. exceeded the authority of the papacy. The marriage of Henry and Catherine was invalid from the day it was performed, and under the terms of that commission, neither party may appeal the ruling, either in England or in Rome. Catherine writes to Charles V that night. The letter takes five weeks to reach him. On September twenty seventh, fifteen twenty nine, an Ottoman army under Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent arrives at the walls of Vienna. The capital of Charles's brother Ferdinand and at the eastern edge of Habsburg territory. Charles spends that autumn raising money and men to hold Austria. He instructs his ambassadors to lodge a formal protest with Rome, but that protest is the whole of what he does. Catherine keeps the title of Princess Dowager, the style given to the widow of a prince of Wales, and moves with her daughter to Amphil, a royal manor in Bedfordshire. Church law includes a rule called putative marriage, which protects the children of a union both parties entered honestly. Mary stays legitimate and stays in the succession line. Catherine lives at Amphil for seven years, writes to Rome and Spain, and then dies in January of fifteen thirty-six, still signing her letters as Queen. In January of fifteen thirty, in the Chapel Royal at Greenwich Palace, Cardinal Wolsey, still Lord Chancellor, Performs the marriage of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn in front of the assembled court at midday. In our timeline, that wedding took place three years later in a room before dawn, in front of about five or six witnesses, and the priest who conducted it was never told whose marriage he was performing. Here, the Royal Heralds, who are the officers responsible for announcing state business, proclaim it publicly. Anne is crowned at Westminster Abbey in the spring. One month later, on February 24, 1530, at the Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna, northern Italy, Pope Clement VII places the imperial crown on the head of Charles V. No Pope ever crowns an emperor again. This takes place in our timeline as well, three years after Charles's soldiers sacked Rome and held Clement prisoner for six months. Martin Luther's movement is spreading through the German states. An Ottoman Empire has just spent three weeks outside of Vienna. And against these problems, an English marriage carries very little weight. Charles settles Milan on his own terms, and over the following months, imperial troops besiege Florence and put the Medici back in charge there. That's the banking family that Pope Clement was actually born into. Later in 1530, Clement follows the annulment with a concordat, which is a formal treaty between the papacy and a national government. Henry receives the right to nominate every bishop in England, while Rome retains authority over doctrine and over appeals in church courts. Francis I of France has governed his church on precisely these terms since 1516, under an agreement signed in Bologna, the same city where Charles has just been crowned. Henry obtains most of what the Act of Supremacy would later take by force in our world. The difference is the papal seal at the bottom of the page, and also Fisher and Moore keep their heads. In the summer of fifteen thirty one, Anne Boleyn gives birth to a son. He is christened Henry in the chapel where his parents were married. Market towns from Kent to Northumberland light bonfires, and the guns fire at the Tower of London. The Tudor dynasty is only forty six years old, and its founder took a crown off a dead man's head on a battlefield in fourteen eighty five. A daughter follows in fifteen thirty three. They name her Elizabeth after both of her grandmothers. She's raised a Catholic princess, taught Latin and Greek by tutors from Cambridge, and she grows up behind an older brother who will be king. At nineteen, she marries into the Habsburg court and lives the rest of her life in Vienna. Woolsey dies at York Place, his London residence, in 1532. He's the wealthiest churchman in Europe, and his college at Oxford is finished. He paid for it by closing twenty nine small religious houses. Those twenty nine are the only monasteries closed in this England, and they come down in order to fund a school. The lawyer who managed those closures for him was Thomas Cromwell. In our timeline, Wolsey's fall pushes Cromwell into the king's service, and within six years he is the second most powerful man in England, dissolving eight hundred religious houses and drafting the legislation that separates the country from Rome. Here, his patron dies in office, so Cromwell remains a property administrator for the crown. He grows wealthy, buys an estate in Surrey, and dies at around seventy-five years of age. Stephen Gardner, the envoy who obtained the decretal commission at Orvieto, becomes the king's principal minister instead. Thomas More remains at Chelsea, a village west of London in the house he built there. He continues writing, continues attacking Martin Lutheran print with royal approval, And educating his daughters in the classical language at a time when almost no Englishwoman received that training. Moore takes the Great Seal after Wolsey dies and holds it for six years. He then resigns over a dispute about the jurisdiction of the church courts and returns to his family. He dies at home in fifteen forty one at the age of sixty three, and England remembers him for his books rather than for losing his head. John Fisher preaches in his diocese at Rochester until he's about eighty. On october sixth, fifteen thirty six at Vilvorde, a fortress outside Brussels, a man named William Tyndale is tied to a stake, strangled with a chain, and burned. Tyndale produced the first English New Testament translated directly from the Greek, and his copies were smuggled into England concealed in bales of cloth. He spent his final years in the Low Countries, the region covering modern Belgium and the Netherlands, which was then under imperial rule. Officers of the emperor arrested him in Antwerp in 1535, and English agents assisted them. In this timeline, that assistance is more thorough because a Catholic England wants him caught, and there's no king in London who has a reason to rescue that translation. In our world, three years after Tyndale's execution, Henry VIII orders an English Bible placed in every parish church in the country, chained to a desk so it cannot be removed. The text of that Bible is largely Tyndale's work edited by other men. Here, a farmer in Kent who wants to read scripture in his own language is still committing a crime in sixteen hundred. On january twenty eighth, fifteen forty seven at Greenwich Palace, Henry VIII dies at fifty five years old. He's enormously overweight by this point. He's unable to walk from a jousting injury that never healed, and he's carried between rooms in a chair. But he dies in communion with Rome. Still holding the title that Pope Leo X granted him in 1521 for writing a defense of the sacraments against Martin Luther. Fidei Defensor, or Defender of the Faith. Anne Boleyn survives him and lives another twelve years as Queen Mother. Their son is fifteen. He's crowned Henry IX at Westminster Abbey, and the Benedictine monks who have served that church since the tenth century sing the Mass at his coronation. Just as they have for every English monarch since the Norman conquest in ten sixty six. Reginald Poole is born at Sorton Castle in Staffordshire in March of 1500. His mother Margaret is the daughter of George, Duke of Clarence, who was the brother to two kings of England. That makes Poole a plantagenet, a member of the royal house the Tudors took the throne from in fourteen eighty five, and a second cousin of Henry VIII. England had just come through thirty years of civil war over who had the better claim to that throne. And his bloodline makes him dangerous. Henry pays for his education anyway. Oxford first, then the University at Padua, where Pohl spends eight years on Greek and Latin, and builds a correspondence with most of the leading scholars in Italy. In our timeline, that relationship ends badly. In 1536, Poole publishes a treatise calling Henry a heretic and a tyrant. and urging the Catholic rulers of Europe to invade England and depose him. Henry can't reach him in Italy, so instead he moves against the family at home. Poole's brother Henry, Lord Montague, is beheaded in January of fifteen thirty nine. In May of fifteen forty one, his sixty seven year old mother is executed on Tower Green in front of about ten witnesses. The regular headsman is away in northern England, and by the account the Imperial Ambassador sends home, The substitute is inexperienced and needs eleven strokes to behead her. Here, Poole keeps his cousin's patronage. He goes on writing to the king and spends Christmas at his mother's house in Hampshire. On december twenty second, fifteen thirty six, Pope Paul III makes him a cardinal at thirty six years old. In fifteen forty five, Paul sends him to open the Council of Trent, the assembly of the papacy convened to answer the Protestant Reformation. Poole is one of three legates presiding, a legate being a man who speaks in the Pope's name and carries his full authority. That council sits on and off for eighteen years and rewrites Catholic doctrine, the training of priests, and the duties of bishops. On November 10th, 1549, Paul III dies. The cardinals travel to Rome for a conclave, which is the sealed election that chooses a pope. They enter the Capella Paolina, a chapel inside the Vatican. and the guards lock the doors. On December 4th, the first ballot gives Reginald Poole 26 votes. Election requires 28. That evening, his supporters come to his rooms and offer to elect him by acclamation, which just means declaring him Pope by unanimous shout as opposed to a formal count. Poole turns them down because he wants the votes recorded properly in daylight. A tailor in the building Has already finished a set of white papal robes cut to his exact measurements. On the morning of December 5th, Cardinal Gian Pietro Carafa stands up in front of the entire college and accuses Poole of heresy. Carafa points to what Poole has written about how a person is saved and says it reads like Martin Luther. In our world, the accusation costs Poole the papacy. The conclave runs into February. And elects Cardinal Giovanni Maria Del Monte, who takes the name Julius III. Poole spends the rest of his life under suspicion. Carafa becomes Pope himself in 1555 as Paul IV. He revokes Poole's authority and tries to summon him back to Rome to answer for those same writings. In this timeline, Carafa is accusing a man whose cousin governs a Catholic England and whose record as a reformer everyone in that chapel knows. The Cardinals weigh 13 years of that record against one accusation, and the next ballot delivers the two remaining votes. In February of 1550, Reginald Poole is elected Pope. He's the second Englishman ever to hold the office after Adrian IV in eleven fifty four, and the last one in either timeline. His mother is seventy six years old. She travels to Rome, kneels before her son, and he blesses her. Through the 1550s, Poole reconvenes the Council of Trent with bishops from his own country in the hall and tutor money behind the reform decrees. He's argued his entire career that the church recovers Protestants by persuasion and by cleaning up its own corruption. And for eight years he runs that policy with the whole institution behind him. The reforms to the priesthood take hold across Europe, while Germany builds its own Lutheran state churches, principality by principality. Poole dies in Rome on november seventeenth, fifteen fifty eight, during an influenza epidemic crossing Europe that autumn. He's fifty-eight years old. The same illness kills him on that date in our timeline too, at Lambeth Palace in London, twelve hours after Queen Mary I. In that world, he's buried at Canterbury Cathedral, near the ground where the shrine of Thomas Becket stood until Henry's men pulled it down. And he's the last Catholic Archbishop ever to hold that seat. Seven months later, on June 29, 1559, a preacher named John Knox delivers a sermon at St. Giles, the main church in Edinburgh. Knox is the most uncompromising figure in the Scottish Reformation, recently back from exile in Geneva, and his preaching sets off a rising against Mary of Guise. She's the French noblewoman governing Scotland as regent for her daughter, who's 16 years old living in France, and known to history as Mary, Queen of Scots. Within weeks, the Protestant nobles supporting Knox, who call themselves the Lords of Congregation, hold most of the towns in the country. The one place still standing against them is the port of Leith, two miles from Edinburgh, where a French garrison sits behind a newly built fortification and waits for reinforcements to arrive by sea. The Lords write to London for an army. In our timeline, the queen on that throne is Elizabeth, the daughter Anne Boleyn bore in fifteen thirty three. And she sends one. She signs the Treaty of Berwick in February of 1560 and marches 12,000 English soldiers north. They besiege Leith alongside the Scots, the French garrison surrenders in July, and Scotland becomes a Protestant country. That gives Scotland its own national church. It creates the Covenanters, the movement that will take up arms for Presbyterian worship. And in 1639, it puts Charles I at war with his own northern kingdom. Which forces him to recall Parliament to pay for the fighting, and those same members eventually put him on trial and execute him in 1649. Here, the letter reaches a Catholic king in London, who reads it and returns a polite refusal. The French hold leith through the winter and fresh troops land in May. The rising runs out of money and provisions before the men are ready to quit. And by autumn of 1560, the lords of the congregation are negotiating terms. John Knox goes back to Geneva and preaches to exiles for the rest of his life. Mary, Queen of Scots, comes home in 1561 to a Catholic country that wants her. She rules for forty years and dies at Holyrood Palace with her son at her bedside. Twenty five years later, a Spanish army is closing on Antwerp, and the rebels holding the city need English money. In August of 1585, after a siege lasting more than a year, the Duke of Parma takes the place. He commands the Spanish army in the Netherlands, and the city he has just captured is the wealthiest in northern Europe. English wool arrives on its docks, Portuguese merchants sell pepper in its warehouses, and its exchange offers credit at rates nobody in London can match. Parma has spent the war taking rebel towns back individually, and Antwerp is the prize that should end the Dutch revolt. The rebellion of the Low Countries against Spanish rule. In our world, the revolt survived because of what Elizabeth does that same month. She signs the Treaty of Nonsuch and commits 6,400 English infantry, 1,000 cavalry, and 600,000 florins, which are Dutch gold coins, per year to a rebellion close to collapse. That money covers roughly a quarter of the annual cost of the Dutch war effort. The treaty also puts England and Spain at war for the next 19 years. Here, the money stays in the English treasury and the soldiers stay home because London and Madrid answer to the same church. Parma completes the reconquest by fifteen ninety. Without an English army in the field, the rebel provinces to the north fall one after another, so the merchants and the capital that built Amsterdam in our world never gather there. The trade of the Americas and the East Indies keeps moving up the river skelt. In 1588, Philip II of Spain has 130 warships, and he uses them to escort his treasure convoys home from the Americas. The invasion he launches in our timeline, the Spanish Armada, is aimed at a queen he considers a heretic, whom Rome excommunicated in 1570 and who has been paying his Dutch rebels for three years. In this timeline, the king ruling England here is a Catholic in good standing with Rome. Those convoys, though, need an escort, because English captains are hunting them. The captains sail under royal commission and hear mass before they go, and they raid Spanish shipping because the Treaty of Tordesias divided the New World between Spain and Portugal in 1494 and gave England nothing. Shared religion has never once prevented two kings from going to war. In 1536, Francis I of France signed a military alliance with Suleiman the Magnificent. against the Catholic Emperor in Vienna. In sixteen thirty five, Cardinal Richelieu brought Catholic France into the Thirty Years' War on the Protestant side, fighting the Spanish. And in sixteen fifty seven, Oliver Cromwell, a Puritan who had signed the death warrant of his own king, allied with the French against Spain, an English infantry fought under a Marshal of France in the sand dunes outside Dunkirk. England and Spain go to war in this timeline as well. However, this one Is fought over trade. Fountain's Abbey sits in a narrow valley in Yorkshire, on a small river called the Skell, about three miles from the town of Ripon. Its abbot in 1539 is Marmaduke Bradley. Bradley got the job by reporting his predecessor, William Thursk, to the Royal Commissioners for immorality and incompetence, testifying against Thursk the hearing, and then paying the government six hundred marks, which is roughly four hundred pounds, for the vacancy. He runs the richest Cistercian monastery in England. The Cistercians broke away from the Benedictines 400 years earlier to live under a stricter rule, and this house has drifted a long way from that. There are 30 monks, rents arriving from tenant farms across half the county, and a bell tower 168 feet high that Abbot Marmaduke Hubie finished in the 1520s. In our timeline, the commissioners reached that valley in November and Bradley signs. Here, Henry has no quarrel with Rome and no legal claim on a single acre of monastic land, so those same men are working on other business entirely. Bradley dies as abbot in fifteen fifty three, wealthy and completely obscure. Sixty eight years later, in May of sixteen ⁓ seven, three English ships land one hundred and four men on a marshy peninsula in the James River in Virginia. The Virginia Company sent them to look for gold and a water route to Asia. And they find neither. In 1612, a colonist named John Rolfe plants West Indian tobacco in Virginia soil, and by 1614 it's going back to London by the barrel. That crop saves the settlement. A Jesuit priest says Mass in the fort at Jamestown, and that's the shape of English America for the next century. Company towns and cash crops, parishes answering to Rome. Friars working the frontier the way French missionaries are working Canada at the same time. Merchants from the southwest coast of England who have fished the grand banks off Newfoundland for cod since the 1500s build a permanent station on Massachusetts Bay, and they call it Boston. George Calvert spends those years in London. In our world, he converted to Catholicism in 1625, resigned as Secretary of State within the week, sailed to Newfoundland to build a colony for his new church, and nearly died of the winter there, and came home to petition for warmer territory. He died two months before the charter for Maryland was granted, and his son founded it as a refuge for English Catholics fleeing their own country. Here, Calvert holds his office until he dies in it, because his church and his kings are the same one. Back in the Skill Valley, the rents keep coming in. They arrive from tenant farmers on Abbey land the way they have since the Black Death in 1349. And the same arrangement holds across the entire country. The estates supporting monks in 1529 are still supporting them in 1629. In our timeline, the crown sold those estates off through the 1540s, mostly to landowning families who already had money, and historians rank that sale among the largest transfers of property in English history. It created the men who filled the House of Commons, the elected chamber that controlled what a monarch could tax. and their grandsons eventually had enough money and confidence to put a king on trial. Here, the land stays where it is. The Crown funds itself through church patronage and raises revenue the way France does, through exemptions granted to the nobility and the sale of government offices to whoever will pay. Parliament assembles when the king summons it and disperses when he dismisses it. England has its constitutional reckoning in a later century, And it's a quarrel about taxes and offices as opposed to bishops and prayer books. Ireland is conquered anyway. The Tudors moved on the island for its position, its farmland, and its revenue, and every one of those reasons predates the argument about religion. The plantations proceed, which means the Crown confiscates Irish land and settles English and Scottish tenants on it. Everyone involved attends the same church, so what follows is a war about rent and language, which is bitter enough on its own. Catholic members go on sitting in the Dublin Parliament for the next 300 years. Landowners and tenants sue each other in courts where either side can win. And when Ireland leaves the UK in 1921, it goes as one country because the border in our world was drawn around what people did on Sunday. The cost of all of this comes due in the 1750s. England beat France in that century using money. The Bank of England opened in 1694 and lent against a national debt that Parliament guaranteed, which let a country with roughly a quarter of the French population raise more cash at a lower interest and keep raising it through the Seven Years' War. That system needed a legislature with real authority over taxation, and a large part of it traces back to the families who bought the Abbey lands 150 years earlier. So this England borrows the way Bourbon France did. Higher interest, weaker security, and lenders who want land signed over against every loan. It fights the 18th century as the poorer power, and it loses. Quebec stays French, so does the Ohio Valley. And when the East India Company goes to Bengal for the richest province in Asia, a French company gets their first and keeps it. Huby's Tower is standing in the Skell Valley in 2026, and there's still a roof on it. Bells ring for Vespers, the evening prayer service at six o'clock. A guest house takes bookings, a shop sells honey and beeswax candles, and about twenty monks walk into a choir that has been occupied on that spot every day since eleven thirty two. In our timeline, that same tower stands over the largest monastic ruin in England, roofless since fifteen thirty nine, and a preservation charity called the National Trust sells tickets at the gate. Visitors walk through the nave, the long central hall where the congregation stood, with grass growing on the floor. UNESCO lists the site as a World Heritage property, which is a designation for places of importance to all humanity. It was granted on the strength of what a crew of workmen took apart in two weeks. At Westminster this morning, the abbey is a working Benedictine monastery, as it was for six hundred years before fifteen forty. And the monks of that house sang the Mass at the current king's coronation. He is a Catholic, as every English monarch has been since the country converted in the seventh century. In our world, the Act of Settlement of 1701 makes that illegal. The statute is still on the books in 2026, and Parliament amended it in 2013 only far enough to let an heir marry a Catholic without forfeiting the throne. The roughly 85 million people who They call themselves Anglican in our timeline, hear Catholic Mass instead. About eighteen million of them live in Nigeria, in a province that now has more members than the English Church that sent the first missionaries. The Archbishop of Canterbury holds the rank of cardinal. Every coin in the country carries the letters FD, for the title Pope Leo X gave Henry VIII in fifteen twenty one. The king whose coronation those monks sang carries them, the way every English monarch has carried them for five hundred years. And here they mean what Leo X meant by that. Henry VIII never wanted a reformation. The story everybody tells is that a king wanted a divorce, the church said no, and he broke it in half to get his way. The church said yes constantly. Popes had been granting annulments to kings for 400 years. Louis XII of France went to Pope Alexander VI in 1498, asking him to dissolve his marriage to Joan of Velois. His case was thin. He claimed he had never consummated it, and his wife produced witnesses who had heard him boast about their wedding night. A historian later called the proceedings among the seemiest lawsuits of the age. Alexander granted the annulment in December because Louis was offering his son, Cesar Borgia, a dukedom in France and a bride to go with it. Clement VII had reasons too. He offered to bless a marriage between the king's daughter and the king's illegitimate son, half sister and half brother, if Henry would drop the annulment. He refused because the emperor's soldiers had held him prisoner in his own fortress for six months, and Charles V was Catherine's nephew. Both timelines agree, the marriage was finished. Catherine was in her forties, she wasn't gonna give him a son, and everybody in that hall knew it. The only question left at Blackfriars was who would pay for ending it? Clement handed that cost to the one king in Europe angry enough. Rich enough to refuse it. Rome kept its ruling, and it lost England. It lost 800 monasteries and the land underneath them. It lost Scotland, the Dutch coast, the northern half of Europe's money, and every colony that island had not yet founded. The church got the answer it wanted, but no pope since has lost as much in a single ruling. The other version costs Clement one signature. On a document he had already written and then ordered burned. The man in the fortress was weighing the emperor who could hurt him this year against the king who could hurt him later, and he picked the one whose soldiers were still hanging around the building. Everybody does that. You've done that. The difference is that when Clement VII did it, three centuries of English history, an ocean full of colonists, and 85 million people Sunday mornings were sitting on the other side of the desk. Decisions don't get do-overs, but on this show they do. If you like the show, please rate and subscribe wherever you happen to be listening. It allows me to understand whether people are actually enjoying this. Until next time, I'm Kevin Perez Allen. Thank you for hitting Ctrl-Z wick. Control Z is hosted, written, researched, edited, and produced by me, Kevin Perez Allen. If you've got a coin flip decision from history you want reversed on a future episode, find the show on YouTube. That's CTRLZ Rewritten All Word and leave it in the comments.