The Realm: The True history behind Game of Thrones (2 page)

But the king made the wrong enemy in his cousin Henry Bollingbroke, son of John of Gaunt, who was the richest man in the land, with Henry due to inherit his vast estates in Lancashire. Henry had been raised in the same household as the king, and they had been in the Tower of London together as 14-year-olds during the terrifying revolt of 1381, but he had later become one of the Appellants. Henry had fallen out with another Appellant, Mowbray, the Duke of Norfolk, and the conflict was to be settled by ‘the laws of chivalry’: a joust, arranged for September 1398, an event that attracted people from across western Europe. But at the last minute the king stopped proceedings and ordered both men banished from the kingdom, Norfolk for five and Bolingbroke for 10 years, with the condition that Henry could return when his father died.

The following year John of Gaunt did die, but Richard had all of his son’s lands confiscated. The king then embarked for Ireland to settle a dispute between warring lords there, and Bolingbroke landed in Yorkshire to reclaim his property. Marching south, he amassed followers and it occurred to him that he must either take the crown or nothing; for Richard was isolated, and his support melted away. The king refused to abdicate in favour of his cousin, and instead put his ceremonial circlet on the ground, symbolically abdicating to God. He was dragged back to London, greeted with jeers and pelted with rubbish from the rooftops. The old king’s fate remains unclear: officially Richard died on hunger strike a few months later, although most suspect murder.

Henry the Fourth opened his first Parliament by shouting along with the barons ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ before asking them to shout it again, louder this time. For his coronation he commissioned a new royal crown, and had himself anointed with special oil supposedly given to St Thomas Becket by the Virgin Mary herself. But during the ceremony lice emerged from his hair, and a further omen of doom came when he dropped the gold coin given to him by the archbishop. It rolled away, never to be found, a sign from God – Henry was a usurper and a usurper he would remain.

The new monarch faced rebellion from supporters of the deposed King Richard, who could be identified by the white hart they wore on their coats. After one attempt to assassinate Henry and his sons three rebel lords were lynched and another 26 executed; another plot, in September 1401, involved placing a caltrap with three poisoned spikes in his bed.

He faced rebellion in the south, the north and the west. Owain Glyndwr, the last native to hold the title of Prince of Wales, rose up and defeated an army led by Edmund Mortimer, a great-grandson of Edward III, whose own Welsh troops had changed sides; Mortimer was led to Wales and there he married the Welsh leader’s daughter and joined him, upset that the king had refused to pay the ransom. The web of aristocratic family alliances dictated the allegiances people took in conflicts: Mortimer’s sister was married to the son of Henry Percy, the Duke of Northumberland, whose family army protected the country’s northern border from the Scots. The Percys had arrived in England alongside William the Conqueror and for almost as long had been the most powerful family in the north.

The duke’s son, who was known as Harry Hotspur and who had first experienced battle at the age of nine, took up arms against the king, but in 1403 the rebel army was defeated at Shrewsbury in a battle which cost 5,000 lives, among them Hotspur, like much of this story being immortalised in Shakespeare’s plays. (Hotspur had the consolation of having a football team in north London indirectly named after him, having been founded on an area of land once owned by the Percy family.)

Another of Edward III’s descendents, Edward of Norwich, was also implicated in the plot against the king, denounced by his own sister, and sent to the Tower where he took to translating a treatise on hunting,
The Master of Game
.

In 1406 the king suffered a stroke, after which he found speech difficult; he ordered that it be a crime to spread rumours of the king’s poor state, which most people attributed to divine retribution for regicide, a view shared by Henry himself. Many people also believed his second wife, Joan of Navarre, to be a practitioner of witchcraft. Henry had never had a good complexion, but in later years he seems to have developed leprosy, which he may have caught on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem (alternative explanations are gangrene or syphilis). After 1405 he grew heavily disfigured and would cry out in pain that he was on fire; there were swellings and rashes on his skin, and rumours abounded in France that his toes and fingers had fallen off, while the Scots got it into their heads that he had shrunk to the size of a child. Haunted by the killing of his cousin, the king’s last words before he succumbed to his wasting disease in 1413 were ‘God alone knows why I wear this crown’. 

Henry left four sons, the eldest of whom became Henry V, a pious, unsmiling man who was rather less fun than Shakespeare depicted him. He cracked down on the Lollards, a religious sect that had been tolerated by his father and even mildly favoured by his grandfather, having several leaders burned to death in 1414. The following year he defeated the Southampton Plot to kill him and have him replaced with Edmund Mortimer, the son of the man who had rebelled against Henry’s father and who had a better claim to the throne than Henry. Mortimer himself had informed Henry of the plot.

It involved Thomas Grey, who sat on the King’s Council, and whose son was betrothed to the four-year-old daughter of the Earl of Cambridge, the king’s cousin and another of the conspirators. Cambridge, the brother of Edward of Norwich, had married Anne Mortimer, brother of Edmund, and was beheaded along with Grey and three others. Anne had died four years earlier, soon after the birth of their second son, Richard, at the family home of King’s Langley. Richard of York, as he would become after his uncle Langley's death on the battlefield, would begin the rebellion against the mad king 40 years later.

That same year Henry V, having reignited the war with France, won a spectacular victory at Agincourt where an English army destroyed a French force four times as large. After his victory, Henry V was recognised as heir to the French throne, and King Charles of France agreed to a marriage with his daughter, Catherine of Valois. But before his son’s birth Henry V had been told by a soothsayer that ‘Henry of Windsor shall long reign and lose all’ and warned his wife not to give birth there, but while out on campaign she ignored his advice and a son, Henry, was born in 1421. The following year the king of England died, of dysentery, followed a month later by the King of France. And the prophecy would turn out true.

The First Men

The world that George R.R. Martin created is composed of four known continents: Westeros, Essos, Sothoryos and Ulthos. The latter two we hear little of in the series. Between Westeros and Essos lies the Narrow Sea, on the other side of which are a group of city-states called the Free Cities, and to the east of them are ancient fallen civilizations as well as nomadic peoples such as the Dothraki.

Westeros is 900 miles long, and with a wide range of climates; the southernmost kingdom, Dorne, is equivalent to the Mediterranean, while the north is snowbound, even in summer. The Realm, covering the southern portion of the island, is protected by a 300-mile wall, beyond which are the Free Folk, or Wildlings, descendants of the original inhabitants of the island, who speak the Old Tongue. At the very far north is the Land of Always Winter, from where the feared White Walkers are supposed to hail, although the existence of these ghost-like creatures is disputed.

The first inhabitants of the island were the Children of the Forest, a human species who dwelled in caves and lived off the land; they were said to have magical powers and believed the weirwood trees were deities, ‘the nameless gods’, whom they would join in death. They were smaller than men, dark, freckled and with large ears, and arrived on the island during ‘the dawn age’.

The First Men arrived on Westeros 12,000 years before the current era, via the Arm of Dorne, a land crossing linking the continents. In an attempt to stop the migration the Children of the Forest used dark magic to flood the world, but to no avail; the invaders burned the weirwoods and the two groups went to war. Armed with bronze swords, the First Men triumphed, but eventually a pact was reached in which the Children stayed in the forest and the First Men had the rest of the island. For 4,000 years they lived in peace, and the newcomers even adopted their tree gods.

The First Men used runes and spoke a harsh-sounding language that survives Beyond the Wall and in given names. Although much of their culture was lost, it is known that they followed the laws of hospitality, that justice was meted out by a blood price, and that they worshipped the Lady of the Waves and the Lord of the Skies, who made thunder.

The Pact was ended after 4,000 years by the Andals, blond-haired people who hailed from a peninsula on the north of Essos by the Shivering Sea. They used iron, and conquered six of the kingdoms, with only the North holding out, and they destroyed the last remnants of the Children. The North, although part of the Realm, still maintains much of the culture of the First Men, including aspects of its religion.

The Andals worshipped anthropomorphic gods called The Seven: the Mother, the Warrior, the Maiden, the Smith, the Crone, the Stranger and the Father Above, the last being head of the gods as well as god of justice, depicted as a bearded man who carries scales (the gods are also described as being seven aspects of one god). However the new gods are themselves challenged by R’hllor, the ‘Lord of Light’ followed by Melisandre, a priestess who has turned Stannis Baratheon over to her new faith. Her religion is dualist, with the priests believing in two gods at war.

In turn new invaders came to Westeros; the Valyrians had also originated in Essos, and crossed the sea after their kingdom, the Valyrian Freehold, was destroyed in a cataclysm. They were led by Aegon I Targaryen and his two sister-wives, with the aid of three dragons, and originally held Dragonstone, a small island in south-east Westeros.

Alongside him on his daring and risky invasion was his half-brother Orys Baratheon, ancestor of Robert. Aegon allowed lords who bent the knee to keep the land, but those that didn’t he destroyed, and he won Westeros with extreme brutality. The conqueror established King’s Landing, which had developed into a bustling, if squalid, city between the conquest and the current era, although its population had at one point been depleted by the Great Spring Sickness, which had killed 4 in 10. Four centuries later, and the Targaryens and Baratheons would be on opposing sides in the War of Five Kings.

Both the Yorks and Lancasters could trace their line to Edward III a century earlier and through him to William the Conqueror, who had won the kingdom four centuries earlier after crossing the Channel. They also descended from the old Saxon kings of the House of Wessex, and even further back a thousand years to the semi-mythical Hengest, Horsa and Cerdic, warriors who had come from the eastern continent and overpowered the native inhabitants. Just as the people of Martin’s world live on an island with memories of strange and mysterious peoples who still inhabit the wilder edges of the island, so did the people of the Realm of England.

Until 6000BC Britain had been joined to the continent by a peninsula called Doggerland. It was over this land, and the ice sheet that covered the Channel, that various waves of people arrived from the tenth millennium before Christ until the first, their obscure tongues clinging on to rocky outposts much later.

The first men left their pottery, their stonework and their bloodlines; DNA tests of Cheddar Man, a skeleton from approximately 7150BC, showed a direct maternal link with a number of local people in Somerset. Another group, called the Beaker People, set foot on the island in the third millennium BC during the Bronze Age. Their world was violent, as can be seen from the various massacre sites that dot the island, and they spoke an alien pre-Indo European language, part of a family of tongues that only survives in northern Spain among the Basque people. Over the millennia several waves of people crossed over, some up the coast of Iberia and France and others from across the North Sea.

Among them were the Picts of Caledonia, who lived beyond the Wall of Hadrian, as the Wildlings live beyond the Wall of Ice. The ancestors of the Gaels of Ireland and Scotland, and the related Britonnic speakers of southern Britain, arrived between 1000 and 500BC, during the period when Greek civilization flourished across the Mediterranean world. The Gaelic culture and language survived in the mountains and islands of Scotland until the 18th century and the Highland clearances, at which point their clannish society was crushed forever and their tongue driven to near extinction.

The Phoenicians and Greeks had been aware of the Cassiterides, or Tin Islands, located on the very edge of the known world; its new name came from Pytheas, a Greek sailor from what is now Marseilles who in 330BC sailed all the way to northern Scotland. Noting the tattoos with which the natives covered themselves, he named it
Pretani
, or land of the Tattooed People.

Then came the Romans, who conquered the island under Emperor Claudius in AD43. Among the 20 or so tribes they encountered were the Hammerers, the Hill Folk and the People of the Deep, although we know them by the names given to them by their conquerors – the Ordovices, Brigantes and Dumnonii respectively. Their gods carried clubs and were mysterious even to those who followed them: Dagda the lord of knowledge, Lugh the god of arts and crafts, and Lud (or Nud) the closest thing the barbarians had to a supreme deity, and whose temple may have been on or close to the current site of St Paul’s cathedral. The Britons, like their near relations further west, celebrated Samhain (later Halloween) during the time of year when the animals were slaughtered for winter.

The White Walkers resemble creatures from Celtic folklore, such as the
Sidhe
or
aos sí
, a fairy-like race that lived in burial mounds in ancient Irish mythology. Among the most frightening of the
Sidhe
are the banshees, bearers of bad omens and messages from beyond, with their piercing cries. It is thought that much of Irish mythology has its origins in the migrations of different peoples to the island, with the myth of the leprechauns, or little people, supposedly based on the small and dark Tuatha de Danan, who moved to the hills when later Bronze Age Celtic migrants arrived, while the newcomers lived in the valleys.