by Ed West
The Church’s increasingly strict rules about legitimacy were partly designed toward protecting high-born wives, who were keen to have their own children inherit the land rather than their husband’s other offspring. As Jon Snow knows, life for a bastard could be cruel. In Westeros, they could be legitimized only by the king, a prize offered to Snow and taken by Ramsay Bolton; in real life, the four illegitimate children of John of Gaunt by his mistress Katherine Swynford were later legitimized by Parliament and became the House of Beaufort, although their mother had by this stage married their father. And the act legitimizing them specifically said they could not inherit the throne; generally speaking, though, instances of bastards becoming legitimized heirs were very rare, since the wife’s family would strongly oppose it.
Problems arose when the position of wife and mistress were confused. Lord Tytos, the father of Tywin Lannister, was widowed and gave his mistress not just gifts and honors but power too, even asking her views on the running of Lannister affairs; soon she was in charge of Lannisport. The unnamed woman, a lowborn daughter of a candlemaker, even took to wearing Tywin’s mother’s jewels. But after Tytos’s death from a heart attack, Tywin had her expelled from Casterley Rock and confiscated her jewelery, before making her walk naked around the city “like a common whore.”
Edward III was widowed after Philippa of Hainault died in 1369, by which stage he had already made Alice Perrers his mistress, the girl just fifteen when the elderly king had first taken her. The notoriously greedy Perrers, a former lady-in-waiting to the queen, came to rule over the increasingly doddery old king during a period of economic turmoil and as he became more elderly he further fell under the spell of his mistress, whom he lavished with cash, jewels, gold dresses, and fifty manors.
Although Perrers was high born, the chronicler Thomas Walsingham described her as a “shameless, impudent harlot” and stated that “she was not attractive or beautiful, but compensated for these defects by her seductive voice.”11 Walsingham believed that she employed a friar who was also a sort of warlock to make wax images of her and Edward together, with magic herbs, in order to gain power over him; whether this is true we can only guess, although the king was highly susceptible to more obvious, less supernatural female charms. She gave him three bastards, a son born before his wife even died, and two daughters. Perrers’s downfall came in 1376, by which time the king was senile, when Parliament finally had her tried for corruption and banished, inventing a new device to bring one of her ministers down, called impeachment (since abandoned in England but still used in the United States).
Similarly Edward’s grandson Henry IV was also widowed after his wife Mary de Bohun had borne him four sons and a daughter; she died giving birth to their youngest, Philippa. Henry took a second wife, Joan of Navarre, but after the king’s death his heir Henry V arrested his stepmother on charges of sorcery and employing a necromancer, a magician who communicates with the dead, and she was imprisoned in Leeds Castle. Although a religious fanatic, the king’s motives were certainly to some extent financial, as Joan’s personal fortune of six thousand pounds was enormous.
THE DANCE OF THE DRAGON
Most of the fighting during the Anarchy took place in the Thames valley, the rich swathe of land between London and the west country, and mostly concerned the taking of castles, often by stealth or cunning, but sometimes through sheer brutality.
In 1139, when Stephen wished to capture Devizes castle from its lady-owner, yet another Matilda, he took captive her lover Bishop Roger of Salisbury and their son, former chancellor Roger the Poor; he brought Bishop Roger in chains and had gallows built outside and threatened to hang the younger Roger before the walls. A rope was put around the former chancellor’s neck and he was led to the gallows, at which point his mother immediately surrendered, shouting “I gave him birth, and it can never be right for me to cause his destruction.”12 Afterwards Bishop Roger was a broken man and retired from affairs; the younger Roger went into exile and was ruined, thus his enduring nickname.
On another occasion, Stephen captured Shrewsbury castile and hanged the entire garrison of ninety-three men and its commander, Arnulf de Hesdin—that he was still considered unduly merciful tells us something about the time.
Stephen also approached Malmesbury, the castle controlled by a mercenary captain, Robert fitz Hubert, “a man of great cruelty and unequalled in wickedness and crime.”13 Fitz Hubert boasted that he once roasted alive eighty monks in a church and “would do so again,” according to William of Malmesbury, who also claimed he smeared prisoners with honey and left them in the midday sun to be attacked by insects. This time, though, fitz Hubert surrendered to the royal army on the advice of a relative.
Later, fitz Hubert attacked John Le Marechal and tried to force his submission, but Le Marechal captured him instead, demanded he hand over Devizes and when he refused, simply hanged him. Some barons changed sides to suit whoever was winning; one, Ranulf, Earl of Chester, switched sides seven times during the conflict. He was the son-in-law of Robert of Gloucester, his wife, of course, being yet another Matilda.
In 1141, the major battle of the Anarchy took place at Lincoln when Stephen laid siege to the city’s castle; however Ranulf (then on Matilda’s side) had escaped to Chester and appealed to Robert of Gloucester and together they marched east “with a dreadful and unendurable mass of Welsh.” During the battle Stephen at first fought with a sword, with his “terrible arm,” but after intense fighting his weapon broke and someone passed him a battle axe. He continued to struggle “like a lion, grinding his teeth and foaming at the mouth like a boar” until eventually he was captured “by the just judgement of God”; up to five hundred men drowned trying to cross the river to escape, more than the amount that died in the actual battle.
Stephen was later released in return for Robert of Gloucester, and so Matilda missed her chance to win the war. Soon afterwards London’s leaders turned against her and she was forced to flee from the enraged city folk.
IF YOU THINK THIS HAS A HAPPY ENDING, YOU HAVEN’T BEEN PAYING ATTENTION.
The common people of Westeros are often faced with the horror of rampaging armies, with the burning of farms and killing of cattle, as well as the rape and murder that went with it, unable to attract the ransom money that protected aristocrats. As in Westeros so in England during the Anarchy, which saw a number of extremely cruel noblemen, “irresponsible and undisciplined desperadoes,” in the words of the noted historian A.L. Poole.14 Among them were Thomas de Marle, who Benedictine Abbot Guibert called “the wickedest man of his generation.” He turned up at convents and stole nuns, tortured men by hanging them from their testicles until they were torn off, personally cut the throat of thirty townspeople in one rebellion, and turned his castles into “a nest of dragons and a cave of thieves.”15 He was eventually excommunicated, and an anathema was read out against him every week in his local parish, but later he died in his bed, leaving a generous amount of money to the Church.
Henry of Huntingdon says that during the Anarchy many lords put their peasants in prison and used
indescribable torture to extort gold and silver . . . They were hung by the thumbs or by the head, and chains were hung on their feet. Knotted ropes were put round their heads and twisted till they penetrated to the brains. They put them in prisons where there were adders and snakes and toads, and killed them like that. Some they put in a torture chamber, that is in a chest which was short, narrow and not deep, and they put sharp stones in and pressed the man in it so that he had all his limbs broken.16
Chains were “fastened to a beam, and they used to put a sharp iron around a man’s throat and neck so that he could not sit or lie or sleep in any direction.”17
One known victim was a skinner from Pontefract in Yorkshire, tortured in order to get money, then kept with his hands chained behind his back and legs in wooden stocks at Selby Castle. Another, a little boy, was left as a hostage by his father and kept in fetters, while a woman was kept
as surety for her husband owing six pounds and when he was only able to send nine pence, the knight who held her captive threatened to cut off her breasts and left her chained outside at night half-naked in winter. One victim was suspended by his feet and hands with mail-coats used to weigh him down and held above smoky fires and plunged beneath icy waters in winter. A squire called Martin was so tortured by two knights over the alleged theft of fifteen marks that he seized a pair of scissors from a seamstress and stabbed himself in the heart.
The launch of the Second Crusade in 1147 had eased the fighting somewhat; Matilda fled from Oxford two years later, escaping by rope from an open window and crossing the frozen river; she and her four companions were camouflaged in white against the snow. She never returned to England, and by now most of her supporters were dead, including her brother Robert. However, the war was continued by her son Henry Fitzempress who, in 1153, only seventeen or eighteen, attacked Malmesbury castle, having earlier tried to attack Stephen when barely out of his teens.
That year Stephen approached Wallingford, his son Eustace alongside him, where they engaged the enemy. “Eustace was already showing abilities as a knight though his beard had hardly begun to grow,”18 but Stephen was thrown three times from his horse during the skirmish and was shaken by the ordeal. He was showing weariness, and that year the two sides had finally begun to negotiate; Stephen and Henry met, where “both complained bitterly of the disloyalty of their nobles,”19 and it was suggested that Stephen would remain king but adopt Henry as his heir. Stephen controlled most of England and Henry the continental possessions, but the Anglo-Norman aristocracy would not accept a partition, so a compromise had to be reached; and from Stephen’s point of view anything could happen—indeed Henry was seriously ill that year.
For Stephen’s young heir it must have appeared a surrender and betrayal, and the Anarchy provided the inspiration for one of the most famous scenes in Martin’s series. When the barons sued for peace with Henry Fitzempress, the notorious Eustace ravaged East Anglia; he arrived at the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, wrecked the lands when it refused his extortion, and then dined in its refectory, where he choked to death. As Martin told Entertainment Weekly: “I based it a little on the death of Eustace, the son of King Stephen of England . . . Eustace choked to death at a feast. People are still debating a thousand of years later: Did he choke to death or was he poisoned? Because by removing Eustace, it brought about a peace that ended the English civil war.”20
Although the whereabouts and circumstances of Eustace’s death remain a mystery, the Peterborough Chronicle recorded “He was an evil man and did more harm than good wherever he went; he spoiled the lands and laid thereon heavy taxes.”21 Or as Olenna Tyrell might put it, “he really was a cunt, wasn’t he?”
On the day of Eustace’s death, young Henry Fitzempress’s wife Eleanor of Aquitaine gave birth to their first child, a boy. The game had shifted undeniably in Matilda’s favor, while his heir’s death seemed to destroy Stephen’s will to fight, and now sick with a stomach ailment that would kill him within a year he formalized the treaty and agreed to pass the throne to Henry. After all this time Matilda’s line would win, and the House of Plantagenet would rule for over three centuries.
As for five-year-old William, son of the Marshal—the king, pitying the innocent young boy, could not go through with his threat and took him into his care. The monarch, despite the pressure, had drawn back from committing such an appalling act, and Stephen and William were later seen that day playing at knights and laughing together. Although “such tender heartedness in a monarch was almost as little admired as John Marshal’s brutality,”22 Stephen did the realm a great favor. The boy would live to be an old man, William Marshal serving three kings and becoming the most famous knight in history, the embodiment of chivalry, and eventually regent of England (and the model for Ser Barristan Selmy). Most importantly to us, he also played a central part in saving and enshrining that most famous and important of legal agreements, Magna Carta.
27
A GOLDEN CROWN
Laughing. Drinking. Boasting. Those were the things he was best at. Those, and fighting.
—STANNIS ON ROBERT BARATHEON
Charles’s insanity had by now driven France into two factions, one led by his pleasure-loving brother Louis de Valois, Duke of Orléans, and the other by a cousin—Philippe the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. After years of simmering tensions, the conflict escalated on November 23, 1407 when fifteen masked men in the pay of Duke Philippe and his son Jean “the Fearless” had attacked Louis of Orléans in Paris, stabbing him to death. After Louis’s eldest son, Charles, forged an alliance with his father-in-law Bernard, Count of Armagnac, the two factions became known as the Burgundians and Armagnacs.
It so happened that England was now ruled by a religious fanatic who was also a military genius. Henry V was the virtual opposite of his Shakespearean character—humorless, ruthless, and religiously devout—and yet he was an inspiring leader who people followed. With his pudding bowl haircut, he resembled a monk more than a king, and in the first eight years of his reign had no physical contact with women. Already possessing great military experience when he came to the throne, as a young man Henry had learned the dirty trade of war in Wales where he had his own canon called “The Messenger” which he used to keep order in that rebellious land. He had also taken part in a skirmish in France, between the two factions, and acquired a taste for bloodshed there; his father, the sick old king, was opposed to any further involvement in France, leading to a fall out, and although father and son were eventually reconciled, the prematurely old man was already fading.
As monarch, Henry V faced the same dynastic uncertainty as his predecessor and two years into his reign there was yet another conspiracy—there had been at least six against the previous king—this one called the Southampton Plot. The aim was to overthrow Henry and have him replaced with Edmund Mortimer, son of the unfortunate Roger who had died in 1398, and nephew of the Edmund Mortimer who had joined Glyndŵr and Percy. The conspiracy involved a group of men entangled by marriage; the ringleader was Thomas Grey, who sat on the King’s Council, and whose son was betrothed to the daughter of Richard, Earl of Cambridge, another conspirator. Cambridge, the son of Edward III’s youngest son Edmund of York, was a cousin of the king and also the widower of Mortimer’s sister Anne.
Edmund Mortimer had been born into dynastic conflict, on both sides of the family. His maternal uncle Thomas Holland, Duke of Surrey, had been killed in 1400 trying to free Richard II from prison, but the nephew had no such stomach for treason and now informed King Henry of the plot. All the conspirators were executed, but Mortimer received little reward for his loyalty. Two years later he was given a papal dispensation to marry a “fit woman,” Anne Stafford, who was also his second cousin, but this angered King Henry who refused to give back his cousin’s lands, even when he reached adulthood; he died without children in 1425.
Richard, Earl of Cambridge had left one son, four-year-old Richard, who would one day launch the rebellion against the mad king—the son of the man who killed his father.
That same year Henry V reignited the war with France, a country now perilously weak due to internal strife. Charles had appointed his son the Dauphin as Duke of Aquitaine in 1402, a slight to King Henry, and even though the Gascons remained loyal to the English crown; the House of Valois was determined to insult the House of Lancaster, whom they openly declared to be illegitimate. The conflict was also made more likely by the inability of the Church to meditate, overwhelmed by its own problems. In an attempt to end the Great Schism in which two men claimed to be popes, in 1409 a Church council met in Pisa; their solution was to depose the Avignon pope Benedict XIII and the Roman pope Gregory XII and instead elect a new, neutral pontiff, Alexander V. However, neither of the other men accepted this and so there were now three popes walking around.
Upon ascending the throne, Henry V signed a treaty with the Armagnac faction, who recognized his
lordship over the regions of Poitou, Angouleme, and Perigord. However, in 1415 he also insisted on Normandy, Maine, Anjou, Brittany, and Touraine, the lands that had constituted the empire of his ancestor Henry II some two and a half centuries prior. When it was refused, as it inevitably would be, he prepared an invasion. In October 1415, Henry won a spectacular victory at Agincourt, destroying a French force perhaps six times as large as his own. Once again, the archers proved decisive, overwhelming the disorganized French cavalry who were bogged down in muck, many crushed to death under a pile of bodies, some even drowning in mud. The king was almost struck with an axe during the fighting, but according to one story was saved by Edward of York, brother of Cambridge, the man he had recently beheaded. Agincourt was perhaps the most spectacular military victory in the country’s history, the English casualties totalling only 120 dead, against as many as 10,000 Frenchmen.1
These figures include the execution of several hundred French prisoners, ordered by the king himself as he feared attack from the rear, a sordid but perhaps necessary act that broke the rules of war. The highest-ranking English casualty of the day was Edward of York, who most likely died of a heart attack in his armor, but because of his gallantry his young nephew Richard was allowed to inherit his title.
Henry, after a terrible journey back at sea, eventually returned home to glory where in London wine flowed from the city’s water pipes, a recent innovation, as the country celebrated a God-given victory. But away from the revelling the reality of the fighting, where so many men suffocated below the piles of bodies, or had their throats cut by Welsh mountain men, was horror. And what followed was even worse. Throughout 1417 the English besieged Caen in Normandy and, when the city fell on September 4, there was appalling violence, with rape, looting, and slaughter.