The Realm: The True history behind Game of Thrones

Copyright © 2014, Ed West

Introduction

A young pretender, barely more than a boy, raises an army to take the throne. Recently learning of his father’s beheading, the young man, dashing and charismatic and descended from the old kings of the north, vows to avenge him on the field. Despite his youth, he has already won several battles and commands the loyalty of many of the leading families of the Realm; he is supported in this war by his mother, who has spirited away her two younger sons for safety. Against them is the queen, ‘passionate, proud and strong-willed’
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, and with more of the masculine virtues of the time than most men, battling for the inheritance of her young son, not yet a man but already a sadist who takes delight in watching executions. 

This was the Realm of England, the world that inspired
Game of Thrones
, where on Palm Sunday, 1461, the bloodiest battle in British history took place in a thick blizzard on a spot called Bloody Meadow. Lasting into the night, the Battle of Towton was marked by extreme brutality, with many executions taking place afterwards and all the rules of war abandoned.

On one side was Edward of March – the name was pronounced as ‘Eddard’ at the time
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– the 18-year-old heir to the House of York, who had claimed the throne that year following the death of his father, Richard. Facing him were the Lancasters, with Queen Margaret of Anjou and her husband the mad King Henry VI, whose insanity had been the cause of York’s rebellion.

Edward of March had just won a victory at Mortimer’s Cross in Herefordshire, weeks after his father and brother Edmund were slain at Wakefield. York, a descendant of the great warrior king Edward III through both his mother and father, had emerged in the 1450s as the most powerful man in the kingdom, but he would not win the throne. Instead his head was stuck on a pole in the city of York with a paper crown on it; Edward had sworn vengeance and would get it.

The conflict between the Yorks and the Lancasters would grow ever more ferocious until its finale at Bosworth in 1485, when Henry Tudor took the crown and established a new dynasty. The story would fascinate future generations, retold in the plays of William Shakespeare, and later by the 19th-century novelist Walter Scott, who christened it the ‘War of the Roses’ in reference to the white and red roses that Henry Tudor used to symbolize the uniting of the two families by his marriage to Edward of March’s daughter Elizabeth. More recently it inspired the George R.R. Martin fantasy series
A Song of Fire and Ice
, and the HBO television adaptation
Game of Thrones
.

A Song of Fire and Ice
is set in ‘the Realm’, or Seven Kingdoms, a country comprising the southern half of the island of Westeros. The books tell the story of the struggle to win the Iron Throne, and feature a wide cast of competing families. Among them are the Lannisters, the richest clan in the kingdom who control the capital, King’s Landing, in the south-east of the island; the Starks, who rule the old northern kingdom; and the Baratheons. It is a brutal and tragic world, one where the stakes are as high as they can be; as Cersai Lannister tells Eddard Stark when he is sentenced to death: ‘When you play the Game of Thrones, you win or you die.’

The story begins a few years after a revolt by leading magnates in the Realm, who have overthrown the mad king Aerys II Targaryen. The rebellion had been led by Robert Baratheon, who in turn took the throne and married Cersei Lannister, who is beautiful, cunning and ruthless. And unfaithful. Her twin brother, Jaime, is the real father of her three children, including the eldest, Joffrey, a cruel, sadistic pervert in his early teens. A simmering conflict is emerging between the Lannisters and the Starks, the latter descendents of the old kings of the North and the most powerful family in that kingdom. Ned Stark had been Robert Baratheon’s comrade-at-arms and then his Hand, charged with administering the Realm under the monarch.

Robert’s death when mauled by a boar in a hunting accident early on in the series triggers a conflict, with the succession of Joffrey opposed by his uncles, Stannis and Renly Baratheon, who both claim the throne. Eddard Stark, having learned the truth of Joffrey’s parentage, puts his weight behind Stannis, only to be arrested by Cersai Lannister and executed on Joffrey’s orders. This is despite the new king being betrothed to Sansa Stark, Ned’s daughter. After Stark’s death his son Robb declares himself the King of the North, while Ned’s bastard Jon Snow has joined the Night Watch, the body of men sworn to guard the wall that protects the seven kingdoms from the wildings to the north.

Within King’s Landing various figures jostle for power: Varys, a eunuch nicknamed ‘the Spider’ because of his network of spies; Petyr Baelish, a moneylender and brothel-keeper who has risen to the council from a lowly station; Tyrion Lannister, the dwarf brother of Jaime and Cersei; and their father Tywin Lannister, an imposing and brutal aristocrat warrior whose sole motivation is to further the interests of his house, whoever he has to kill.

The books and the television series are both deeply engrossing, but as well as having strong characters and storylines,
Game of Thrones
is also a fantastic (in both senses of the word) retelling of the story of the real Realm – England. It was inspired, in the author’s own words, by ‘The Wars of the Roses… but also the Hundred Years War, the Crusades, the Norman Conquest.’ For the struggle for the throne of England, from the Saxon invasion in the fifth century to the defeat of the House of York in 1485, is as fascinating as any fiction on earth. This was the real Game of Thrones. 

Houses York and Lancaster

The conflict began 60 years earlier when the mad king’s grandfather Henry of Lancaster usurped the crown from his cousin Richard the Second. As in Westeros, this was in parts a battle between north and south, although in real life it was the Lancasters who controlled the north and the Yorks (despite the name) whose stronghold was London, close to the family seat of King’s Langley in Hertfordshire.

Just as the eldest Baratheon brother, King Robert, drinks and eats himself to death in middle age, so too would Edward IV, as March became, with his surviving brothers George and Richard scheming and plotting to win the crown. Edward, like the Starks, was also, through his mother, a member of the Neville family, descended from the old ruling family of the most northerly of the country’s seven kingdoms. When the conflict ended, with the defeat of Richard III in 1485, most of the leading lords had been killed in the fratricidal fighting, and the way was left clear for Henry Tudor, distantly related to the Lancasters, to take power.

Game of Thrones
begins with the aftermath of a rebellion against a mad and paranoid king who has alienated the great magnates of the land; likewise the War of the Roses had its origins in Richard II, the younger son of Edward the Black Prince and grandson of Edward III. His father and elder brother having died before his grandfather’s passing in 1377, Richard was made king at the age of 10, and just four years later was faced with a revolt in Kent and Essex. The spark was the levying of a poll tax, which came on top of taxes on selling land, grinding corn and even marriage. Peasants’ wages had been fixed since the plague 30 years earlier had left the countryside short of manpower, and anyone who left his master’s land to get work elsewhere could end up imprisoned or sent to the stocks; furthermore when a
villein
died, his lord could take his best beast, and the local priest would get the second best. The uprising of 1381 involved as many as 50,000 men from Kent and Essex marching on the capital demanding tax relief, but the Mad Multitude or ‘Rumour’ (as it was then called) descended into violence after the wine cellars of London’s royal palaces were looted.

King Richard, just 14 years old, agreed to meet their leader, Wat Tyler, at Smithfield, just outside the city. There, Tyler showed great disrespect by raising his hands to the monarch – unthinkable, especially in an age when men were routinely armed. The young king held his nerve, even when Tyler made a series of demands, including the redistribution of Church lands to the poor, and for ‘all men to be one condition’. The peasant leader then ordered beers all around, but when one of the king’s men muttered that he was ‘the biggest thief in Kent’, Tyler drew his knife. The mayor, William Walworth, pulled out his weapon and fatally stabbed him.
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The king, much to his credit, placated the mob and offered safe passage home and an end to the poll tax; afterwards hundreds were massacred as they made their journey back to Essex and Kent. Walworth, for his good work, was knighted.

After crushing the rebellion Richard told the rebels: ‘You wretches, detestable on land and sea; you who seek equality with lords are unworthy to live. Give this message to your colleagues. Rustics you were and rustics you are still; you will remain in bondage not as before but incomparably harsher. For as long as you live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity.’

But even the peasants admired the young king’s bravery, and he seemed to have the makings of a wise king. As it turned out, though, Richard had deep psychological faults that grew worse as he got older; he was the first to use the royal ‘we’, demanding to be known not as ‘my lord’, as monarchs always had, but ‘highness’, ‘majesty’, ‘your high royal majesty’ and even ‘most high and puissant prince’. All his subjects, however mighty, were prohibited from making eye contact, and ordered to kneel before him three times upon meeting the royal presence. Later in his reign the king would sit in silence on his throne for hours on end, wearing his crown, each person in the room forced to bend their knee whenever he looked their way. When he commissioned a royal portrait, the first king to have one drawn from life, he had himself painted with a gold crown, carrying a gold sceptre and orb, and sat on a chair in front of a gold wall. He was also responsible for the Wilton Diptych, which showed him besides St Edward, St Edmund and St John, as well as the Virgin Mary; a fantastic piece of art, but one suggestive of a certain derangement.

With his long blond hair, he resembled his great-grandfather Edward II, whose rule had turned into a bloodbath 60 years earlier, and as in that unhappy time there developed a circle of aristocratic rebels opposed to the king, known as the Lords Appellant. In 1387 they defeated Richard’s supporters in battle and in the ‘Merciless Parliament’ of 1388 had four of the king’s cronies impeached and executed. (Another of Richard’s supporters, Robert de Vere, with whom he had a close and possibly sexual relationship, was sentenced to death in absentia but fled to Flanders, where in 1392 he was killed by a boar, a not uncommon form of death.)

The king gathered around him a group of followers, an ‘affinity’, who adopted the symbol of the white hart as a mark of membership, such badges having come into fashion among aristocratic factions. His behaviour could be  puzzling. In 1392, after falling out with the people of London, the king demanded a great pageantry of coronation proportions in the city; he and his queen, Anne of Bohemia, proceeded through town in splendour, with boys dressed as angels. The royal couple continued to demand and receive gifts from their subjects; in January 1393 Richard was sent a camel, and Anne a pelican.

The king, who stammered and reddened when excited or agitated, was always unpredictably violent, and once drew a sword at the Archbishop of Canterbury and almost killed him. But when his wife died in 1394 his behaviour became increasingly erratic. He had Sheen Palace, where she had died, razed to the ground; ever obsessed with ceremony, he delayed his wife’s funeral for two months so the right sort of wax torches could be brought from Flanders.

The leading figures in the Realm were keen for the childless 28-year-old to remarry, but were less than impressed with his choice of bride, who was just six; they might not expect an adult heir for 30 years, by which time the mentally unstable king might be dead, or worse, still alive.

He began to have his enemies, real and perceived, rounded-up and their lands confiscated. The king invited one of the Lords Appellant, Thomas de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, to dinner and then ordered his arrest. He then sent armed retainers to Pleshey Castle in Essex, home of his uncle Thomas of Woodstock, who woke him and had him arrested too. Richard then called a Parliament and arrived with 300 archers from Cheshire, his loyal king’s guard who called him ‘Dykon’. He said everyone would be pardoned except 50 ‘unknown individuals’ whom he did not name; he then had his uncle strangled with a towel (or, some say, suffocated beneath a featherbed).