The Realm: The True history behind Game of Thrones (8 page)

In historical times the planet has gone through a number of extended periods of relative warmth and cold, rather similar to the long winters of Westeros, and cold spells, it was known, brought hunger. In pagan times Germanic people would hang evergreen trees outside their houses to ward off the winter, and Ded Moroz, the Slavic equivalent of the Germanic Santa Claus, has its origins in Zimnik, the pagan god of winter (transformed into a benevolent figure by Christians). The long summer that we now call the Medieval Warm Period started in the 10th century and lasted until the 14th, England in the 11th century being far hotter than it is now, with vineyards scattered across the south and London enjoying the climate of central France a millennium later. During that long medieval summer, Europe’s population exploded, reaching a level it would not again for another six centuries, but farming could not keep up. And so when winter arrived suddenly between 1310 and1330, millions starved.

And Edward’s behaviour became increasingly tyrannical. In 1318 a lunatic called John Powderham turned up at court from Exeter claiming to be the rightful son of Edward I. He was mad, and the king thought of keeping him as a fool, but people were unhappy enough with the monarch, so the king had him hanged. During his trial Powderham claimed that his pet cat was possessed and so incited him, so the cat was hanged too.

Briefly, Edward’s luck changed. He defeated a rebellion by Roger Mortimer, the leading lord in the border area with Wales, ‘the march’, with the help of the Welsh. Hugh Despenser captured the king’s cousin, Thomas of Lancaster, who was forced to ride to his execution in March 1322 on an old mare, wearing a ripped hat, while locals pelted him with snowballs. This was followed a week later by the murder of six of his leading followers.

The killing of Lancaster, the first such judicial murder of someone of royal blood, shocked the Realm. At his tomb in Pontefract Priory there grew a sacred cult, where it was said that a drowned child returned to life, and a blind priest had his sight restored. A servant of Hugh Despenser defecated on the same spot, but some time later his bowels were parted from his body. A stone table in St Paul’s commemorating Lancaster became the site of further miracles, and the king could not stop it; this is what people wanted to believe.

Isabella, sent to France on a diplomatic mission, began an affair with Mortimer, who had been imprisoned in the Tower of London but who, at the banquet on the eve of his execution had drugged the guards and escaped. Isabella was declared an enemy alien and her lands confiscated for the safety of the kingdom.

But the king’s supporters were not popular. In 1326 a rioting London mob murdered the Bishop of Exeter, the king’s ally. Despenser’s end came soon: the rebels caught up with him and an associate, had nooses placed around their necks, roped them to four horses, and put them upon elevated gallows so that everyone could see their deaths. A fire was lit under the scaffold, and Despenser’s genitals were thrown in, followed by his intestines and heart, the dying man watching everything. Then the crowd cheered as his head was cut off.

Soon after, Edward was captured. The usurpers moved the king from castle to castle, not knowing what to do with him, and in 1327 Parliament was called in the name of his son, with Mortimer appointed Keeper of the Realm. Mortimer declared that the magnates had deposed Edward because he had not followed his coronation oath and was under the control of evil advisers; the king was moved to Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, where he was well treated, but after two rescue attempts he was murdered. Rumours afterwards circulated that the king, fond of his ‘minions’, had been finished off with a poker up his rectum. After his death, Parliament, for the first time without a king’s approval, chose his son as successor.

In contrast to his weak and dithering father, Edward the Third was a king of almost unparalleled strength and vigour. Great in every sense, he sent many men to their graves during his bloody 50-year reign that was wracked by plague and war. Afterwards his sons and their sons and grandsons would soak the kingdom in blood scrapping over his crown.

But while he was still a mere child, his mother and Mortimer wrecked the finances of the Realm, Crown reserves decreasing from over £60,000 in 1326 to just £41 in 1330. That year the young prince decided to act; just 17, he led a small band of friends his age in capturing Mortimer at Nottingham Castle in a daring raid. The king had his mother’s lover hung, drawn and quartered in Tyburn, west of London, while the queen was banished to Norfolk, where she spent the rest of her life, although he continued to send her gifts of boar, love birds and wine. Wine and the king’s mother were the two great issues that would lead the country to war.

England’s supply came from Gascony, the only part of France it still controlled after King John’s defeat, and the King of France wished to conquer it. Things were further complicated because Edward, through his mother, the sister of the last King of France, had a claim to the French throne. The French didn’t recognise female heirs, nor their children, and so the crown went to the king’s cousin, but Edward saw it as a pretext. 

The English king was reluctant to press the claim until, according to one story, he was presented with a heron at a feast – a deliberate insult since it was considered the coward of the bird world – after which Edward’s response was to swear an oath to ‘cross the sea, my subjects with me… set the country ablaze and… await my mortal enemy, Philippe of Valois, who wears the fleur-de-lis… I renounce him, you can be sure of that, for I will make war on him by word and deed.’

At first the English won many victories. At Sluys in 1340 they defeated a French navy twice as big; the battle left so many dead that it was said that if fish spoke, they could have learned French. Edward also defeated the Scottish king David II and kept him prisoner for 10 years, and took back ‘the Black Rood of Scotland’, supposedly a piece of Christ’s cross kept in a black case. (Although there was by one estimate enough of the ‘true cross’ circulating around Europe at the time to build a battleship.)

The glorious way in which his campaign was viewed belies the fact that this kind of medieval warfare brought misery to the people whose homes stood in the soldiers’ path. The king could also show ruthlessness: after Edward took Calais he expelled all its inhabitants, and set up an English colony there, but he originally planned to massacre the population until his wife persuaded him to spare them.

His greatest victory came at Crecy on August 26, 1346. Some 8,000 men, half of them archers, had sailed from Portsmouth to France, then marched through Normandy on their way to Paris. North of the capital they turned around to join Flemish allies, and Philippe VI trudged across the Somme to catch them. At Crecy-en-Ponthieu the English and Welsh destroyed the French cavalry and Genoese crossbowmen, the battle won with the Welsh longbow, which could fire off up to 10 arrows a minute, against the crossbow’s four.

Following a hail of arrows at the enemy, Welsh knifemen armed with ‘misericordes’ daggers (‘mercy killers’), were sent in after dark to sneak under the horses and cut open their stomachs, then the Frenchmen above them. By the end of the day 1,500 French noblemen and 10,000 soldiers lay dead. Crecy saw the use of cannon and gunpowder, which the French had acquired from Italy. First used by the Chinese in the 8th century, this was to change medieval Europe and its feudal system based around the castle, impenetrable fortresses that could withstand rebellions or invading armies, but were powerless against the new technology.

Gunpowder was not the only thing that the Italians had brought back from the east. On June 23, 1348, when English maidens celebrated St John’s Eve (the only day of the year when unmarried women could dance with the opposite sex) an Italian ship turned up in Dartmouth, and within a decade the Realm had lost a third of its population to the plague. The first sign was bad breath, followed by huge black growths on the armpits of the afflicted, who were then struck down by fever. In some areas it was truly devastating: Jarrow lost 80 per cent of its population, while one 13-acre plague pit outside London, in what is now Smithfield, contains the remains of 50,000 bodies. The living were thrown in with the dead, and the piles of corpses were seen to squirm from the movements of the dying.

At another victory, in Poitiers in 1349, the Black Prince, Edward’s eldest son, took Jean II of France captive. He was transported into London and showered with golden leaves, and at a feast the English toasted and honoured him as a great and brave king, with the Black Prince waiting on him at table, an example of the sometimes elaborate nature of chivalry.

The pinnacle of chivalry was the king himself, who fought incognito at tournaments and formed the body of knights still known today as the Order of the Garter, officially founded on St George’s Day, 1348. Although the order was supposed to have been established after a racy incident involving the king and his future daughter-in-law, Edward seems to have had a loving marriage to Philippa of Hainault, with whom he had five sons grow to adulthood. After his death in 1377 their descendents would spend the next century murdering each other.

The Mad King

As in Westeros, the Realm was ruled by a King’s Council, which included members of the monarch’s own family, and was often (if not usually) beset by bitter rivalries. Although the monarch stayed in Westminster, much of the time the story was centred around the Tower of London, built by the Conqueror and the city’s fortress, palace and prison. It was located on the eastern side of the capital, by the 15th century a teeming, bustling and squalid city, surrounded on three sides by a wall with seven gates and on the other by the river.

The cause of the civil war between the families of York and Lancaster was England’s defeat in the Hundred Years War, which led to an enormous number of extremely violent men returning home, shocked and angered by the military humiliations of the 1440s and 1450s. In that period royal debt continued to mount, up from £164,000 in 1433 to £372,000 in 1450, at a time when the Crown’s annual income was £33,000 a year.

Henry VI had come to the throne at just nine months of age, but as well as gaining the thrones of both England and France he had also inherited, from his French grandfather Charles VI, a serious mental illness. Charles had suddenly become insane in 1392 in an episode in which he killed four people with a lance before being overpowered. During periods of insanity he foamed at the mouth, became infested with vermin and covered in sores, and would eat from the floor. He became obsessed with the idea that he was made of glass and would shatter if touched.

The king’s illness brought on long periods of catatonia, during which he could do nothing, but at all times he was of a nervous, neurotic, peaceful disposition; he was disgusted by the sight of a decayed corpse, and objected to the impaling of executed prisoners as cruel. His courtiers thought he was weak, ‘more timorous than a woman’ in the words of the pope. The rudest thing he ever said was ‘forsooth, forsooth’.

Impoverished and terrified of conflict, the king employed patronage to appease powerful subjects, further undermining his authority and encouraging rivalries. Between 1441 and 1449 the king created ten barons, five earls, two marquises and five dukes. To make ends meet he sold off more and more Crown land, reducing the rents he earned further still.

A medieval society could not function with a weak king, and the people began to fear for their safety from rival lords and their entourages. This was the era of ‘bastard feudalism’, in which lords paid retinues of hired thugs to fight for them, in return for money and protection, without which the small folk were vulnerable to predators. The groups of magnates linked by blood became known as ‘affinities’, and most of the conflict was indeed about blood: the violence committed by inter-related aristocrats vying for power for themselves, their siblings and their children; or settling scores.

By 1450 England’s 2,000 aristocrats were going down in the world; since the Black Death landowning had lost its profitability, and they had to sell to yeoman farmers to make ends meet. A new class of wealthier ex-peasant was rising, men who had became increasingly wealthy and able to educate their children. Many of these ‘broggers’ (brokers) made money in the wool trade, building the cottages and picturesque churches of the Cotswolds.

Within the aristocracy, vicious clan rivalries prevailed. The most bitter was the Neville-Percy feud in the far north, hugely violent despite there being marriages between the two families; likewise the Nevilles were related to the Somersets, but still fought each other. Unlike most of the aristocratic families, the Nevilles traced their line back to the Anglo-Saxons and the old royal house of Northumbria through an 11th-century magnate called Uhtred (their Norman-sounding name was only adopted several years after the Conquest).

The most powerful aristocrats commanded vast armies and led them into battle under their banners – the White Lion of Mortimer, the Bear of the Duke of Warwick, or the White Swan of the Duke of Buckingham. Where their men would go drinking the landlords began to parade the sigil of the lord by the entrance, which is how English ale houses and taverns (and many of today’s pubs) got their names. Although it later became known as the Quarrel of the Warring Roses and later War of the Two Roses, the House of York’s symbol of the white rose and Lancaster’s of red were rarely used, and when the conflict climaxed in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth, the rival armies displayed banners of a boar and a dragon, the latter of which belonged to the Welsh Henry Tudor and became the symbol of that country. (In fact it might have been a good idea to wear roses: at the Battle of Barnet the Lancastrian faction ended up fighting each other by accident.)

The kingdom may have had a weakling on the throne, terrified of sex and women, offended by nudity, and dressed in a hair shirt, but the queen was anything but. Formidable, beautiful, cunning and ruthless, Margaret of Anjou was every bit the Cersei Lannister figure, respected even by the Scots warlords with whom she took shelter, and feared by Edward of York more ‘than all the princes of the House of Lancaster combined’, according to one chronicler.