The Realm: The True history behind Game of Thrones (7 page)

Short of money, Henry III began to meet the most powerful subjects in the Realm for informal meetings, where they would discuss their problems and in return grant him money. The meetings were given the formal name of ‘parliament’ in 1236, but between 1248 and 1249, four such parliaments refused Henry a grant of money. They complained about corruption, and the influence of foreigners.

Despite ill-fated attempts to distract attention by embarking on crusade, which only resulted in the king being conned by the pope into buying Sicily for a huge sum, things came to a head in 1258, the year of a famine, when the barons met at Oxford in what became known as the ‘Mad Parliament’, so called because of their document the Provisions of Oxford. In it they demanded that each county and each city should nominate two knights for Parliament, and that this talking shop should choose half a council of 15 to rule the land. Copies of the Provisions were sent to every sheriff, not just in Latin and French, but also in English, the first legal document in the language since 1066.

The barons were led by the king’s brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort, a French nobleman who had arrived in England at the age of 22 to claim his peerage after a childhood spent fighting a particularly bloodthirsty and insane crusade, this one against heretics in the south of France. Even compared to the other barons, he was incredibly rich; in one week in 1265 some 3,700 eggs were served at the house he shared with wife Eleanor, the king’s sister.

Despite his own origins, he was able to exploit the xenophobia directed at the family of Queen Eleanor of Provence. The queen was hated; in 1263 she sailed on a barge past the city of London, where the grateful citizens greeted her by throwing manure. It was not a happy time: five years earlier the country was devastated by famine and disease, and visitors to London would have been met by the sight of rotting corpses lying in the gutter, with not enough healthy men to bury them. And to add to the people’s misery, order seemed to breaking down.

Crime was endemic in the Realm at the best of times. In the 13th and 14th centuries the murder rate was proportionally at least ten times higher than that of the early 21st; killers were rarely caught and punished, and those that were identified fled to the forests to become outlaws. During the following years crime became noticeably worse as the country was torn between the king and barons. In the 1260s a brigand took over Bristol and ruled for several years, effectively setting himself up as local ruler. An army 300-strong marched around Norfolk causing havoc and doing whatever they pleased. A band of 50 men, including the Abbots of Sherbourne and Middleton, raided the Countess of Lincoln’s home at Kingston Lacy and took everything. While the Prior of Bristol was even worse: his gang invaded an estate in Wiltshire and murdered all the men and raped the lady of the house.

Under de Montfort’s radical proposals, Parliament would meet annually, and would not need to be summoned by the king. These terms were unacceptable, and in 1260 the conflict descended into full-on civil war, the ‘Second Barons War’, and the two sides met at Lewes four years later. There, de Montfort gave a moving speech in which he said they were fighting ‘for England, God, the Virgin Mary, the saints and the Church’. They called themselves the Army of God, and although the anarchy horrified people and they wished for a strong king, de Montfort may still have won were it not for his own arrogance, and that of the king’s son, the Lord Edward.

The Holy Roman Emperor once sent Henry III three leopards as a gift, and he kept them in the Tower of London, where they lived with an elephant, polar bear and a presumably rather nervous porcupine (this was the first such royal menagerie to be open to the public, the entrance fee being a dog or cat, for the lion to eat).
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As a result of these famous royal guests, Edward became known as the leopard, after the then-common belief that it could change its spots. For Edward would side with whoever was winning, then stab them in the back and twist the knife.

He once raised the money to pay for the Crown’s affairs by pulling off an armed robbery at the Templars’ bank, where the queen had pawned her jewellery. On another occasion Edward had breakfast negotiations with William de Clare, one of the rebels, with an offer of a compromise. The next day de Clare woke up with severe stomach pains and died, while his brother, the Earl of Gloucester, lost all his hair, fingernails and toenails. As well as poisoning his enemies, Edward had also infiltrated the enemy camp with spies, including a female transvestite called Margoth.

After the king had briefly held the upper hand when he kidnapped de Montfort’s son, the tables were turned when Henry and Edward were captured. But the prince escaped from his imprisonment by asking his jailors whether he could try out the horses in the yard, before riding off on one. He then negotiated the king’s release; Henry went away for recuperation in Gloucester castle, where he restored altar-plates.

In 1265 the two sides met at Evesham. Once again Lord Edward showed the sort of ruthlessness and cunning that would mark his life: he and his troops turned up in the enemy’s fatigues, surrounding their outnumbered foes before revealing their true colours. De Montfort was killed in the battle, along with his two eldest sons, and afterwards 30 of his knights were executed on the spot. Edward had his uncle’s testicles cut off and hung around his nose, his body cut up into four pieces and sent around the country, and his head delivered to a noblewoman who had helped him escape from de Montfort’s imprisonment, as a thank you.

Although there was occasional unrest, including from outlaws called the ‘Disinherited’, and the Sheriff of Essex was accused of having plotted to release flying cockerels carrying incendiary bombs over London during 1267,
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the royal family had pacified the country. The king and his son in any case gave the rebels most of what they wanted, and in 1275 the new king signed the Statute of Westminster formalising Parliament, and for the first time commoners – knights and burgesses (city men) – were allowed into the Privy Council, the king’s inner circle of advisers that was a sort of forerunner to the Cabinet.

Henry spent his remaining years going slowly senile, until his death in 1272.

Winter is coming

The Cousins' War, as the War of the Roses was known at the time,
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had its origins in the third king Edward, who along with his grandfather, Edward the First, epitomized the medieval warrior ethos, and who most strongly resembles Tywin Lannister – a man prepared to do what is necessary.

The first Edward,  standing at 6’3”, was  a commanding, terrifying figure nicknamed ‘Longshanks’ and ‘the Hammer of the Scots’.

Edward I had a slight lisp and his left eyelid drooped like that of his father, Henry III, but was totally unlike him in temperament. The dean of St Paul’s died on the spot when he went to complain about taxation; the Archbishop of York, being told off by the king, sunk into depression and expired. Like his ancestor William two centuries earlier, his ferocity to his enemies was matched by his tender love for wife Eleanor of Castile, with whom he was betrothed when he was 15 and she just nine. They had 16 children. The king would outlive 12 of them; such was the age.

The Lord Edward was in Sicily when his father died, but it took him two years to arrive home, so confident was he that all potential opposition had been crushed. However a new series of wars began soon after when the Prince of Wales, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, refused to turn up to his coronation. Edward demanded he pay his respects, and when Llywelyn again refused, the king even travelled up to Chester to make it easier on the Welshman. Again the prince declined, and in total Edward sent Llewelyn five summons.

The prince explained that he was waiting for Edward to hand over rebel Welsh factions, including his brother, who were given sanctuary in England. To add further insult the 50-something Llywelyn married the 23-year-old daughter of Simon de Montfort, without the king’s permission (and without even having met her). Prince Llewelyn had reason to be confident; he had won control of two-thirds of Wales, and had a court large enough to include a bard, a harpist, falconers and a ‘silentiary’, whose job it was to keep the rowdiness to an acceptable level. The Anglo-Normans had been encroaching on southern Wales for 200 years, but in deepest Wales (
pura Wallia
), where Llewelyn’s rule held sway, the old laws still applied; disputes were settled by blood feuds, and a thief would be pardoned if he had passed 10 houses and ‘failed to obtain anything to eat’.

Edward raised an army and marched west, crushing opposition by building a series of castles. Having kidnapped his cousin Eleanor who was en route to marry the Welsh leader, he agreed to the match, part of a scheme by which he would ensure his powerbase there; however she died in childbirth, and he had her daughter imprisoned almost from birth in case she might prove a rallying point for rebellion. She lived to her fifties, a prisoner her entire life. By the end of 1282 all Welsh resistance was over. Llewelyn himself died in December that year, at the hands of an English soldier in Powys who had failed to recognise him as a valuable hostage.

His brother Daffydd then took up the fight but was captured, and convicted of treason, murder, sacrilege and plotting against the king. Daffydd underwent four corresponding punishments for his four crimes, respectively dragged by horses, hanged, disembowled and quartered. Before he was dead, his intestines were slashed from his body and burned in front of him. His corpse was then sent to various English cities, and his head placed on a spike at the Tower of London, along with his brother’s.

In 1284 Edward passed the Statute of Wales, making that country part of the Realm. To celebrate, the king held an Arthurian-style Round Table celebration, presenting himself as heir to the mythical British king and the rightful ruler of all Britain. It is recorded that the party was so popular, with attendees coming from all over the Realm and eager not to snub the king, that the floor gave way.

His attention now turned north. In 1290 the Queen of Scotland, six-year-old Margaret, ‘Maid of Norway’, died in a shipwreck. King Edward had planned for her to marry his youngest son, Edward, and thereby unite the crowns. That same year the king was devastated by the loss of his wife Eleanor, so grief-stricken that he left a cross at every stop that her body rested on its journey from London to Lincoln, 12 in total, three of which still survive.

Edward helped impose a puppet, John Balliol, among the 13 different claimants to the Scottish throne, but when in 1295 the French invaded Gascony-Aquitaine, the Scots rose up. Balliol then turned against his master, and the Welsh took advantage to attack the English. The king marched north and defeated Balliol, taking to London the Stone of Scone, the legendary rock of Scottish kingship, and putting in Balliol’s place another puppet ruler. This led to a fresh Scots revolt in 1307, and Edward, now 68, marched north once again. He never made it. Near the border he came down with dysentery and expired.

Even with his dying breath, the king demanded that servants carry his bones around Scotland until the rebels were crushed. His son ignored his wish, but the two had never had an easy relationship. According to Walter of Guisborough, Edward I once said to his son Edward, his sixteenth and last child by Eleanor: ‘You bastard son of a bitch! As the Lord lives, were it not for fear of breaking up the kingdom, you should never enjoy your inheritance.’

Edward the Second’s reign would begin disastrously, and get worse. At the coronation a plaster wall collapsed, bringing down the high altar and royal scaffolding, killing a knight. The service was hastily completed.

But the wedding, to the French princess Isabella, was even worse. While people often complained that the king’s countenance was unregal, that he preferred gardening to soldiering and to mingle with ‘harlots, singers and jesters’, his major problem was poor judgement in people. He had a lonely childhood, his mother having died when he was six and his father being a distant, brutal figure;‘Longshanks’ once threw his daughter’s crown in a fire, while on another occasion he ripped all his son’s hair out in a rage. The cause was Piers Gaveston.

Gaveston had been Edward’s friend from a young age, and their relationship seemed to be intimate. The king put Gaveston in charge of his marriage ceremony, and they shocked the crowd by outward physical affection, even fondling (to make matters worse, Gaveston managed to ruin the catering with undercooked chicken). After the ceremony, in which the arms of Edward and Gaveston were displayed on the wall, he went and sat with his ‘minion’ rather than the queen.

Edward and Gaveston even wore the same clothes when they were holding court, and his favourite made enemies by giving powerful barons acidic nicknames, such as ‘whoreson’ for the Earl of Gloucester, ‘the fiddler’ for Leicester, and ‘the black hound’ for Warwick. When a group of barons asked the king to get rid of him, he made Gaveston Regent of Ireland, but he soon returned uninvited. With the war in Scotland being lost, a group of barons, led by the king’s cousin Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, a man with an enormous private army, set up a committee of 28, called the Lords Ordainers, and demanded reform of the Crown. Again, in 1310, they told the king to exile Gaveston, and this time Edward made him Lord of the Isle of Man, but the following Christmas he again turned up at the king’s celebrations. The barons had enough and, led by ‘the dog’ Warwick, had Gaveston captured and executed.

Edward II then came under the spell of Nicholas of Wisbech, a fraudulent friar who claimed to own a vial of holy oil given to Thomas Becket; the king believed that if he were re-anointed with this oil all the political troubles in England would end and he would also be able to conquer the Holy Land.

First, Edward invaded Scotland, with disastrous results. In 1314 the Scots, under Robert Le Bruce, King of Scots, met an English army at least twice its size at Bannock Burn, fought in ‘an evil, deep and wet marsh’, and slaughtered them. Edward’s disastrous leadership was to blame: the country’s two leading noblemen had bickered over who would be in charge, and the king dithered, offering them joint command. Edward fled back south, lucky to escape with his life. Stunned by defeat, England plunged into violence, with armed barons set against the king’s supporters, led by another favourite, Hugh le Despenser. The same year, Europe was hit with freakishly high levels of rainfall, the crops failed and the continent was gripped by a terrible famine: a tenth of the population starved to death in 1315-1317, and at one point, on the road near St Albans, no food could be found for the king. There was misery ‘such as our age has never seen’, and people were reduced to digging up the newly buried to eat.