The opposite of alternate history

I got married to the widow next door.
She’s been married seven times before.
•Herman’s Hermits (1965).

To craft an alternate history is generally to indulge in flights of fancy, and outside of the most banal observations (if Archduke Ferdinand had dodged the bullet, WWI would not have happened in 1914) most extrapolations are almost certainly wrong. But maybe it’s worth taking a moment to see how an event really can ripple through the centuries in an unforeseen fashion.

When Henry VIII executed Anne...