The Realm - The True History Behind Game of Thrones - Ed West

The Realm The True History behind Game of Thrones

Ed West

CONTENTS Introduction 1. Houses York and Lancaster 2. The First Men 3. The Old Gods and the New 4. The Seven Kingdoms 5. The Conquest 6. Winter is Coming 7. The Mad King 8. The Red Wedding 9. The Imp

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’i, 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 ii – 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-atarms 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.iii 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, roundedup 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). 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 14year-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, blondhaired 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 halfbrother 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. Likewise the presence of birds in Martin’s books, crows and ravens being heavily prominent in Celtic as well as Nordic mythology. Babd, the Celtic goddess of war, turned herself into the birds and like the birds followed armies into battle, in the expectation of corpses to eat in its aftermath. Across the North Sea the Scandinavians believed that ravens served as messengers between this world and the ‘Otherworld’, with Odin, the head of the gods, having two ravens. After a number of rebellions against the Romans, the most famous of which took place in AD60 and was led by the Iceni widow Boudicca, Britannia had been pacified, with Londonium home to 60,000 people, and the province protected by a large army in the north. About 10,000 troops were stationed on the wall, named after the Emperor Hadrian, who in 122 had decreed that the Empire’s borders should be fixed and secure. At its completion Hadrian’s Wall was 80 miles along, eight feet thick and 15 feet high, with a fort every 15 miles and a ditch on each side. But the wild men beyond the wall were a constant source of anxiety, and the Romans also began importing mercenaries to police the country, including up to 5,500 horsemen from Sarmatia, in what is now Russia, and more ominously, Saxons from Germany, who first appear in the third century.

By now the western half of the Empire was in terminal decline. In 378 the Romans suffered their first major defeat, at Adrianople, at the hands of the Goths. It was the beginning of the end: from that year coins in Britain start to become rare, and by 430 they had been abandoned altogether in favour of bartering. Pottery production had stopped in 410. Beyond the fortresses and forests to the north various population changes were occurring, and what would become known as the Völkerwanderung – the movement of peoples – had begun. Germanic tribes had sprung from southern Scandinavia around the year 1000 BC, spreading south and then fanning out, pushing the Celts in the west across the Rhine and the Slavs east of the Oder. By the 5th century barbarian tribes in war bands of up to 80,000 were sweeping across the continent, among them the Vandals from the Great Hungarian Plain who sacked Rome in 455, and the Visigoths from beyond the Danube who marched into northern Italy and sacked Rome in AD410. To the north, in Angeln, the ‘thin peninsula’, which jutted out into the icy Baltic Sea, land shortage was placing pressure on the Angles and their neighbours the Saxons and Jutes. The blond-haired Angles crossed the narrow sea and conquered at first the eastern part of Britain, later spreading west. The Jutes settled in Kent, having been invited by a tribal king, Vortigen, in AD430, and were led by two brothers, Horsa and Hengest, ‘the Horse’ and ‘the Stallion’, who came with three boats. The Jutes returned with 20 boats, and soon after with 60, and like the Valryians first settled on an island, Thanet. The Britons panicked; Vortigen told them to go

elsewhere, and refused to pay them. But the Jutes returned in greater numbers and conquered Cantium, which they pronounced Kent, driving the natives west.iv The Saxons took the land north of the Thames, and settled along the south coast too; in 577 they completed their conquest by capturing the Severn Estuary, ending native resistance by splitting their lands in two. Those remaining on the island the invaders called Welsh, ‘foreigner’ or ‘dark stranger’; in turn the Cymraeg (‘people’) referred to the country conquered by the Saxons as Lloegyr, literally ‘the lost lands’.

The Old Gods and the New The world of Game of Thrones is pagan, inhabited by people worshipping a number of different gods, although from the second book there emerges the influence of a mysterious new religion spread by a sinister foreign woman demanding the sacrifice of humans. This is true to the pattern of real history, although in real life the mysterious eastern religion spread by women across the isles proclaimed the end of sacrifices, and certainly not human ones. Like the Andals, the Angles were polytheists. The old gods they worshipped included the goddess of war, Freyja, her brother Frey the god of peace, and four others whose legacy lasted longer – Tiw, Woden, Thor and Frigg, commemorated in the days of the week. Among their other deities were Eastre, the goddess of fertility who was worshipped each spring, her name stemming from the direction in which the sun rose. Back in the eastern continent it is believed that her festival may once have involved human sacrifice. Iron Age people, the Angles and Saxons also honoured Weland the Smith, Norse god of ironwork who, like his Greek equivalent Vulcan, was crippled – although in the cruel world of the north Weland had been deliberately maimed by a king to make him stay in his service. In revenge Weland murdered the man’s son and raped his daughter. The Westeroi worship seven gods, a number with significance in almost all religions; the Catholic and Orthodox churches have seven sacraments, seven deadly sins and seven

archangels, while in Islam there are the seven circuits of the Kaaba and seven destructive sins. The Babylonians had seven gates of hell, and in Greek mythology there were seven daughters of Atlas; the Hindus have seven stages to their wedding and the Bahai seven ‘valleys’, or experiences. As in Westeros, a new and mysterious faith was emerging from the east, which claimed there was just one god. As in Westeros, it was a religion espoused by women; in the case of Angla lond it was Ethelbert of Kent’s Frankish wife Bertha who helped spread the faith, against much native superstition. The story begins in Rome towards the end of the 6th century, the former imperial city a shadow of its former self, and now home to a few thousand people. Sacked by the Lombards, barbarians from the north who had crossed the Alps as the empire’s borders collapsed, the eternal city had however emerged as the centre of one of a number of religions that had sprung up in the Near East in the centuries approaching the age of migration. Among them was Mandaeism, which believed in a world separated between darkness and light, with spirits guiding the righteous to the world of light after their deaths. This faith, which resembles that of the Red Priests of Westeros, still barely clings on in Iraq, with a few thousand believers remaining. Another group, the Yazidi, followed a religion strongly resembling Martin’s ‘new gods’; they believed in one deity who had entrusted the world to seven holy beings, the ‘Heptad’, most pre-eminent of whom was Melek Taus, the peacock angel. Like the Mandaeans they still survive mainly in Iraq, although suffering persecution.

Christianity had emerged as a sect of Judaism after the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth around the year AD30; the new religion promised eternal life for the poor and virtuous, and an end to sacrifice, the Judean God having made the final sacrifice with his son. Within a few years it had its first martyr, Stephen, killed on the orders of an official zealously hunting down the new group, a Greek-speaking Jew by the name of Saul. Soon after, on his way to Damascus in Syria, Saul was struck blind and joined the followers of the ‘messiah’, in the Greek language Christos. By the end of the second century the sect had spread across the eastern and soon the western Mediterranean, the first Latin Christian text appearing in AD180 v and the Empire abandoning the old gods in the fourth century. Now Pope Gregory pledged to return those distant isles back to the faith. The barbarians lived within 12 tribal kingdoms, although by Augustine’s time a series of conquests had reduced this to eight: Jutish Kent, the South, East and West Saxon kingdoms (Sussex, Essex and Wessex), and the Angle lands of East Anglia, Mercia, Bernicia and Deira. When the last two were united and called Northumbria this became known as the Heptarchy, or seven realms. In 597, when Augustine finally finished his long trip, Kent was ruled by Ethelbert, great-grandson of Hengest and recognised as bretwalda, the most powerful of the kings, a title that would shift between the kingdoms over the centuries. To the Jutes of Kent, the Italian missionary appeared a strange and frightening figure. For Augustine the experience must have been far more terrifying, and he had almost given up on his

hazardous trip across Gaul, now occupied by the Germanic tribe the Franks, before crossing the narrow sea. The Jutish king was suspicious, and only agreed to meet the stranger under an oak tree, which was believed by various European peoples to have magical powers. He insisted that Augustine remain on the Isle of Thanet. Ethelbert was under the influence of his Frankish queen Bertha, a Christian who had agreed to the match on condition she was allowed to maintain her exotic religion and bring her own bishop. It was Bertha who persuaded Ethelbert to speak to the stranger, and allow him to baptize a large number of Jutes, eventually himself converting in 597. Kent’s capital Canterbury became the seat of the English Church, as it remains today. Essex had come under the influence of the stronger kingdom south of the river that flowed into the German Sea. Its king, Saberht, was the son of Ethelbert’s sister, and he became a Christian in 604, with the first St Paul’s cathedral in London being built under his rule. In 616 Edwin, the king of Northumbria, was brought around to the new faith by his wife. The Angles reverted to the old gods after Edwin’s death in battle, but were restored to the Church when Oswald came to power in Northumbria, later becoming the first English king to be canonized. Some rulers hedged their bets; Redwald, King of East Anglia, recognized as bretwalda after Ethelbert and a man self-confident enough to claim descent from the Caesars, had two shrines built next to each other, one for Christ and one for the old gods. Even Alfred the Great, living in the 9th century, claimed descent from both Woden and Noah. The religion

spread across the seven kingdoms, and the Anglo-Saxons in turn converted the Saxons Overseas, as they called the Germans of the continent. Most of what we know about this era was recorded by the Venerable Bede, a monk from Northumbria who was born in 672, orphaned as a child, and at the age of 12 sent to the monastery at Jarrow. Bede lived in the kingdom of Bernicia, and he almost certainly coined the term Northumbrian to describe the people of the north, to distinguish them from the Angles south of the Humber, but in The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, written in Latin sometime around 731, he was also the first to refer to the people of the seven kingdoms as the Anyclyn, or English. To the people of the north and west they were, and are, Sassanachs, Saxons.

The Seven Kingdoms Just as the ruling houses of Westeros traced their lineage back to obscure and distant kings, in medieval England those of royal blood descended from the rulers of Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria, the ancient kingdoms of the Realm, which were eventually united before being conquered by William the Bastard. Bede lived during what was later called the Northumbrian golden age. The showpiece of this flowering of culture was the Lindisfarne Gospels, a multi-coloured masterpiece (most books at the time only used three colours) laboriously written and illustrated in the Irish style by a monk called Eadfrith, and completed around 715. In time Northumbria was eclipsed by Mercia, literally ‘the boundary’, which had been founded by the most ferocious settlers on the frontier with the British. By the end of his reign in 796 its king, Offa, effectively ruled most of England from his court in Staffordshire, styling himself ‘king of the whole fatherland of the English’. The Saxons were part of the German Sea, as they called the ocean around which the German peoples all lived. Beyond that world they knew little, only of travelers’ tales at the court of the kings, of voyages by the fjords of Norway up to the Arctic Circle and its midnight sun, and across to the land of the mysterious Finns and their shamans, and down the waterways where the Rus lived; and to the glories of Constantinople, like Rome a gilded, ancient city that filled the imagination. Although English missionaries had made great efforts in

spreading the faith in Frisia, by the banks of the great river Rhine, and in Saxony, further north in the original homeland of the Anglii the people still worshipped the old gods. These were facing hunger, and would export some 200,000 people between the 8th and 11th centuries. vi The seamen who terrorized neighbouring lands the English called Denes or heathens; since the 19th century we have known them through the Icelandic sagas as ‘raiders’, or Vikings. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles records the first of these pagani from 792 and the following year it noted that ‘dire portents appeared over Northumbria and sorely frightened the people’ – immense whirlwinds and flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons, were seen flying in the air. That year the Danes raided the monastery at Lindisfarne in Northumbria. The Vikings returned in the 830s and in 865 King Ivan ‘the Boneless’ invaded with his great host; he captured the Northumbrian capital Eoforwic and established it as a permanent Danish kingdom. Unable to pronounce the name, they called it Jorvik, York. By the late 860s all but one of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had been conquered. Then in 871 the Vikings invaded Wessex. Within a few months its young king was hiding in the Somerset Levels, with only a small band, desperately fending off the invaders. His name was Alfred, grandson of bretwalda Egbert and from the line of Cerdic who had founded the kingdom in 519. The youngest of King Ethelwulf’s five sons, his reign began with the death of his last surviving brother, Ethelred, and soon afterwards the Vikings defeated his army in battle. By the end of 877 his situation was desperate. On Twelfth

Night, January 6, 878, the invaders beat the Saxons once again at Chippenham, and the last English king barely escaped with his life, fleeing with his army, or fyrd, to the Isle of Athelney in Somerset. During his darkest moments it was said that dead saints visited the king. Anonymously wandering through the woods, he came to a poor woman’s house and was allowed to sit by the fire if he would watch the bread (or cakes). Alfred, with his mind understandably on other matters, let the bread burn, and so the poor woman scolded him. But the king then won a series of battles, starting with Edington in May 878, driving the Danes out of Wessex and making a peace with their king, Guthrum, whereby the Danes would keep the east of the country and recognize Alfred’s rule in Wessex. Guthrum also agreed to baptism, with Alfred as godfather; to Guthrum’s way of thinking Alfred’s victory was proof that this Christian God might be strong.vii Alfred built a series of burhs or forts, no more than 40 miles apart, and these boroughs became the first towns since the Romans left, among them Exeter, Oxford, Worcester and Warwick. As well as opening and re-founding schools, and forcing aldermen (local councillors) to learn to read, Alfred also laid down the first national legal system, and also established the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, which provide a great deal of the history of the period. And he achieved all this despite being struck down with a mysterious stomach disease on his wedding day, and being in agony for much of his life. He also re-founded London on the old Roman settlement – AngloSaxon Ludenwic, built in 600 a couple of miles west, now

became known as the old city, or Aldwych.viii In 886, in the newly rebuilt city, Alfred was declared king of all the AngloSaxons not under Danish rule. He was, in the eyes of the people, rex Anglorum – King of the English. Alfred died in 899, and although his brother Ethelred’s living sons had a greater claim, he ensured his own son Edward ‘the Elder’ became king after him, recognised as fader and hlaford (father and lord) of all the island. The term lord, used by kings until Richard II, came from Loafward literally ‘loaf giver’, and this relationship was at the heart of Anglo-Saxon and later medieval society; men had certain duties towards their lords, whether it was working on the land or the taking up of arms, in return for which they received protection and food. Edward was crowned at a location close to the borders of Mercia, Kent and Essex called Kings-Town-upon-Thames, on the same spot where his father and grandfather had been anointed, and where his son’s coronation is still immortalised on a stone. That son, Athelstan, was the product of Edward’s liaison with a shepherd’s daughter, a ‘noble concubine of his father’s youth’, and despite being illegitimate, he succeeded in 924. The crowning achievement of Athelstan's rule came in 937 when he won a spectacular victory at Brunanburh. An AngloSaxon poem about the battle stated that at the end of the day five young kings lay dead: ‘Stretched lifeless by the sword, and with them seven of Olaf’s earls and a countless host of seamen of Scots.’ Although Athelstan united England, becoming in effect its first king, a feature of medieval kingship was that of constant

struggle for power by families, and within them. He was succeeded by his brother Edmund ‘the deed-doer’, whose line would continue until the time of Ethelred the Unready, who at the turn of the millennium faced the return of the Danes, now Christian but still as violent as ever. The Vikings – Danes and Norwegians – had most heavily settled on the rocky islands off the north and west of Britain, especially Orkney and Shetland, the Hebrides and the Isle of Man, and they maintained a raiding culture. (Like Westeros’s Iron Islanders, they also sometimes kept a second wife, a ‘handfast’ of lower status, often nonScandinavian.) This time a Viking king, Canute, took the crown and ruled for 20 years before it eventually passed to Edward the Confessor, Ethelred’s son by his Norman wife Emma. He spent his reign in conflict with Godwin, Earl of Wessex, and his six vicious sons, a division that would trigger the invasion of Emma’s great-nephew Duke William against the ‘usurper’ Harold Godwinson. Edward hated Godwin, who had began life as a pirate before rising up through violence and cunning, and had murdered the king’s brother Alfred. He had no choice but to recognise his power, and agreed to marry Godwin’s daughter Edith, although their marriage remained childless, and possibly chaste. The king’s relations with the Godwins reached crisis point in 1051 when Eustace of Boulogne, the husband of Edward’s sister and a major ally, made a diplomatic visit to England, and ended up stabbing a Dover innkeeper to death and starting a brawl that left 20 people dead. Edward ordered that Dover be harried, but

Godwin, as the Earl of Wessex and therefore the immediate overlord, refused. Edward exiled the entire family; but Godwin had enough powerful allies for the ruling council, the Witan, to force the king to back down. Godwin died suddenly at a feast, possibly from choking to death on bread, or perhaps a stroke, and with the childless king growing old and sick Godwin's son Harold effectively became heir apparent, though without Edward’s public blessing. But the Godwins were themselves torn apart by feuds. Godwin’s third son, Tostig, had been made Earl of Northumbria following the death of Earl Seward in 1055, who the previous year had defeated and killed the Scottish usurper Macbeth at the Battle of the Seven Sleepers. Northumbria was an alien place to southern men, there were few passable roads between north and south, and the region was far more heavily Danish, especially the country around York. Tostig, despite his Danish name and Danish mother, was considered too southern by most of the magnates but the violence he displayed in maintaining the law, to both the guilty and innocent, also unnerved many. In October 1065 this led to an uprising in the north, led by two brothers from the old ruling house, Edwin and Morcar, who reached as far as the Thames and threatened civil war. Harold acted as mediator, most likely agreeing to exile Tostig and making the brothers Earls of Northumbria and Mercia, and marrying their sister. This would give him a greater claim to the throne, which the brothers of the north would support. The final days of 1065 were marked by terrible storms. The noblemen of England came from all around the country to feast

together at Westminster Abbey, which Edward had built, but it was clear that the king was gravely ill. Two monks by his bedside warned that England was cursed by God and would suffer evil spirits for a year and a day; the king died on twelfth night, and Harold assumed the throne. Across the narrow sea William the Bastard, ferocious leader of the Duchy of Normandy, was soon assembling a fleet to conquer the Realm. The Normans were scared of crossing this dangerous stretch of ocean, and the king called a council, where with sheer force of will and the promise of riches, he proclaimed that he would become King of England. It was a fantastically bold move. But the Normans were the pre-eminent warriors of the region, the ferocity of their Viking ancestors reduced not one bit by the French tongue and Roman religion Instead their capacity for conquest was increased by a fervent faith and superior tactics. For these warlike people their entire way of life was geared towards fighting: they cut their hair short in the Roman fashion, and bred a special warhorse from Arab stallions. William was the illegitimate son of Duke Robert and a lowborn woman whose father may have been an embalmer of corpses. Although a bastard, William was accepted as Robert’s heir, but when his son was only seven the duke headed to the Holy Land. There he died, leaving William to grow up in a feud-ridden court where several attempts were made on his life, most of them by family members. Odo the Fat killed his first protector, Count Gilbert, and then his tutor Turold. Later, Osbern, head of the royal household, was stabbed to death by

William of Montgomery in young William’s bedchamber. Montgomery was himself later stabbed to death. By the time that Edward the Confessor passed away William was nearly 40, thick set, and battle-hardened by years of conflict with Normandy’s neighbours Maine, Flanders and France. He claimed the throne through his relation to the Confessor, and said that Edward had named him successor and that Harold had sworn an oath to him, although few believed him; and the one with the strongest claim was Ethelred’s greatgrandson Edgar Atheling, but he was just a boy. Meanwhile a fourth king vied for the throne, the Norwegian Harold Haadraada, ‘hard-ruler’. The 6’4” Thunderbolt of the North, as he was also known, was famed for showing no mercy to his enemies. One of his party tricks was to break a siege by attaching burning wood to the wings of birds, which would then fly back to their nests within the city. ix Haadraada had travelled far in his career; as a youth he had followed the Viking trail down the rivers of Russia to the holy city of Constantinople, capital of the eastern Roman Empire, where the north men were employed in the emperor’s Vangerian guard as mercenaries. This second Rome was a place of outstanding riches and sophistication at the very edge of the continent. It was here that Greek Fire was developed, the inspiration for the Battle of King’s Landing; it was first used by the Byzantine Greeks during the Arab Siege of Constantinople in 674, when a navy under the second caliph Yazid I was scorched. It was formed from a mysterious substance still unknown today, which caused water to burn.x

Haadraada had been persuaded to invade by none other than Tostig, with whom he set sail from Norway towards the Shetlands and down the coast of eastern Scotland. The armada consisted of 300 ships and the invading army met a pitiful English force led by Edwin and Morcar, and after the battle they walked over English heads lying in a river ‘like stepping stones’. The brothers, however, escaped, and Harold’s army marched north in record time and met the invaders at nearby Stamford Bridge, killing both the Norwegian king and Tostig. Harold, magnanimously, allowed the surviving Scandinavians to go home, the pitiful band filling only 20 or so ships, and a visitor to the area in the 1120s recalled that there was still a mountain of bones visible on the battle site. By now the Normans had landed in Sussex, along with mercenaries - sellswords, as they are called in Martin’s world from across the continent, and plundered the land. Harold could have stayed in London and let the Normans run out of food, but he was tempted out, for as lord he could not stand by while the people of Sussex, the heartland of the Godwinson family, were plundered. By the evening of October 13th the two armies were camped near Hastings, and the English, despite their tiredness, had the advantage of higher ground. Their army also included 3,000 of the elite housecarls, each carrying an enormous twohanded axe that could chop a horse in half. At 9am, 7,000 Englishmen went into battle against 7,000 invaders, the English shouting ‘Ut!’ (out) and the enemy ‘Dex Aie’ (with God’s help). The fighting went on for most of the day. The Normans charged and charged, but there was deadlock.

Then the Bretons on their left side began a retreat and, thinking that the enemy were in tatters, the English were fooled into chasing them. Their formation collapsed and the higher ground was lost, and Harold’s brothers Gyrth and Leofwine were killed. The English now on the retreat, William ordered four knights to go after the king; they hacked him to death, and it was left to Harold’s mistress, Edith Swan-Neck, to identify him by a part ‘known only to her’. After the battle, the Normans went from town to town until on Christmas Day London surrendered, supposedly after a traitor let the invaders through the Lud Gate, where the old gods had been worshipped a millennium before. On Christmas Day 1066, William was crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey, the celebration ending with his men firing on the crowd, before setting fire to the surrounding buildings. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle lamented: ‘They built castles far and wide throughout the land, oppressing the unhappy people, and things went ever from bad to worse.’

The Conquest A central theme running through Game of Thrones is the warrior code known as chivalry, which in England reached its high point in the reign of Edward III in the 14th century. It had been brought to England with the Normans, differing from other medieval warrior codes in that it prohibited the killing or mistreatment of aristocratic prisoners, who in Anglo-Saxon times would have expected to be killed.xi (Chivalry also encompassed ideas about the treatment of women, although most of what we imagine by chivalry towards women today is a later romantic idea from the far gentler Victorian era.) The invasion also brought a new elite, the barons, and with baronial power came rivalries and jealousies that would dominate the next four centuries. William ‘The Conqueror’ spent the 20 years following his invasion fighting rebels and rivals. In 1087 he attacked Mantes, in the rival duchy of Maine, besieged it and set it on fire. During the siege his horse fell and William’s fat stomach was ripped open and became infected, and he spent five weeks in agony. As he lay dying he parcelled out territories to his sons and noblemen, but all his nearby possessions were ransacked and everyone went back to their lands to prepare for anarchy. William had grown so obese that at his funeral the pallbearers collapsed under the weight of the coffin, and his body fell onto the church floor, causing everyone to flee. The Conqueror had three surviving sons, and had fallen out

with his eldest, Robert, whom he called ‘Stubby legs’; in 1079 Robert had managed to personally wound his father in battle. Yet the king left him Normandy, middle son William inherited England and the youngest, Henry, got just £5,000. So much did he mistrust his father that Henry sat counting it in front of him until he was satisfied it was all there, before riding off. Nicknamed Rufus because of his red hair and alcohol-soaked ruddy face, William II alienated the clergy, and because monks wrote most history, he generally received a bad press, becoming the subject of many allegations, among them that he indulged in devil-worshipping and homosexual orgies. His conflict with his brother was resolved when in 1090, Pope Urban II called for a Crusade to win back the Holy Land for Christendom, and Robert volunteered, mortgaging Normandy to pay for it. Rufus died in a mysterious hunting accident in the New Forest in 1100, with his brother Henry only a mile way, conveniently close enough to reach Winchester within an hour to claim the crown. Hunting was a dangerous sport and accidents were quite frequent – the Conqueror’s second son Richard had been killed in 1081 in the same forest. - but the circumstances of the king’s death were extremely fortunate for the youngest brother. Robert was still on his way back from the Holy Land, having won the crusade and picked up a beautiful (and, more importantly, rich) wife on the way back. Robert invaded the following year but foolishly agreed to a compromise under which Henry made him heir and gave him a pension on condition he go back across the Channel. In 1106 the younger brother invaded Normandy and took Robert

captive, which is how he remained for the last 28 years of his life. Henry married the daughter of Malcolm III of Scotland, who was also from the old English royal line of Ethelred and Alfred the Great, giving him both peace with the Scots and a greater claim to rule the English. He also managed to sire numerous other children, estimated between 22 and 25, by ‘six or eight’ different mistresses, which even in a period when lords often sired bastards was impressive. Henry also kept the Church onside, which at least could not accuse him of homosexuality, but he was cynically pious. He promoted Roger of Salisbury to archbishop because he said Mass the quickest, and tried to make his doctor Archbishop of Canterbury, although the Church blocked the appointment as they thought it an inappropriate job for a man who inspected women’s urine for a living. Like Alfred the Great, Henry was a younger brother and groomed for the Church, and so could read and write. His nickname, beauclerc, means ‘fine scholar’, but he was also a brutal leader. While fighting Norman rebels with his brother William in 1090, Henry dealt with one, Conan, by throwing him out of a castle window. He allowed two of his granddaughters to be blinded by an enemy knight rather than concede his demands. Their mother, his bastard daughter Juliane de Fontevrault, tried to assassinate Henry afterwards with a crossbow. He also once blinded a Norman minstrel who sang a song critical of him. The War of the Roses was not the first time the Realm had been

crippled by feuding warlords. In 1120, after Henry I’s only legitimate son William Atheling drowned crossing the Channel (along with 200 other aristocrats, all of them inebriated), the country had been plunged into 19 years of warfare between followers of Henry’s daughter Matilda and nephew Stephen. It was a war that Matilda – betrothed to the German emperor Heinrich V when he was 32 and she 11, and having grown up effectively running Germany while her husband was away – had lost the chance to win by her haughtiness and arrogance. But after Stephen’s eldest son died in 1153 and, weary with ‘the Anarchy’ as it was called, he had agreed to pass the throne to Matilda’s son by second husband Geoffrey of Anjou, the young Henry, who had previously invaded the country with a group of friends when just 13. Geoffrey, whose descendents came to be called Plantagenets after the planta genista broach he wore, was from a line considered by some to be descended from Satan himself. His great-grandfather, Fulk III the Black, a notorious rapist and pervert of ‘fiendish cruelty’, had his first wife burned at the stake in her wedding dress on discovery of her adultery with a goatherd.xii When St Bernard of Clairvaux saw the future Henry II he is said to have uttered ‘from the devil they came, and to the devil they will return’. The first of the Angevin kings was extremely fidgety, had a harsh, cracked voice and a red face that went even redder when he was angry (which was often). On one occasion ‘the king, flying into his usual temper, flung his cap from his head, pulled off his belt, threw off his cloak and clothes, grabbed the silken coverlet off the couch, and

sitting as it might be on some dung heap started chewing pieces of straw’. Henry’s reign was dominated by conflict, first with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, and later with his four surviving sons by his wife, the older, risqué Eleanor of Aquitaine, a divorcée previously wed to the King of France, Louis VII. Henry was a charismatic and clever ruler who led a kingdom on the rise, centred on a capital city the population of which had grown to 25,000. He was one of few medieval kings to read, spoke a number of languages and innovated the use of trial by jury rather than battle or torture, establishing in 1166 a public prosecution service and a central court of justice at Westminster. The jury system he introduced was a great innovation; in Saxon times defendants would have to walk over nine red hot ploughshares (the knife of a plough), or they could endure trial by blacksmith, by which a suspect had to hold two hot irons and walk nine paces, and then have his hands bandaged. After a week, if his wounds were healing, he was innocent and so freed, but if they had gone septic he would be found guilty and hanged. (Although if the wounds had become infected, he’d probably die in agony soon anyway.) Defendants could also plump for trial by drowning or boiling; the only exemptions were priests, who could choose ‘trial by morsel’, which involved eating a certain amount of food in a given time – understandably a rather more popular option. Just as in Westeros, justice had been extracted through blood money, Wergild in old English (‘man money’ – the word were still

survives in werewolf) the value of a man’s life, and the amount his family had to be compensated if he was killed or injured, ranging from 1,200 shillings for the most noble down to just 50 for the lowest rank of slave. (Slavery had been abolished by William the Conqueror.) The Normans had introduced trial by battle, so that knights fought with swords and lances, peasants used staves with iron heads, while women and priests could appoint a champion. One recorded case of trial by battle from 1221, in Gloucester, ended with the loser being castrated and his testicles thrown to a group of boys, who cheerfully had a kick about with them. (For having introduced the jury system Henry II was voted number 90 in the BBC’s 100 Greatest Britons list, a few places below Bono and Robbie Williams.) In 1162 Henry II made his crony Becket, an ostentatious rich merchant’s son who wore the finest coats around town and kept a pet monkey, Archbishop of Canterbury. However, the move backfired when the new religious leader began to take his role too seriously, wearing hair shirts and blocking the king’s plans to remove clerical exemption from prosecution. Becket fled the country but when he returned in 1170 and attacked the king from the pulpit on Christmas Day, Henry erupted in fury. ‘What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and promoted in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a lowborn cleric?’ Four young knights in attendance, eager to impress the king, rode to the Channel to confront Becket at Canterbury. The men, led by Reginald FitzUrse (‘son of a bear’), were severely hungover by the time

they arrived in England the following day, and having picked up another 12 men on the way, were pumped-up for a fight. When they arrived at the cathedral, Becket, ever the diplomat, shouted ‘Pimp!’ at FitzUrse. This led to a slanging match, and as the knights were leaving, Becket goaded them again and the quarrel erupted, and at some point one of the knights drew his sword and struck Becket in the head. Another blow slit his skull open, mixing brain and blood on to the cathedral floor. The murder shocked the nation, and Henry donned sackcloth, the traditional clothes of penance, and allowed himself to be whipped by clergymen in public – five lashes for each of the dozen or so bishops in attendance and three for each of the 80 monks. The final eruption of the feud was caused by Henry, in Becket’s absence, choosing the Archbishop of York to preside at his son’s coronation in 1170. Henry wanted his eldest son, Henry the Young King, to be crowned in his lifetime to reduce the risk of another war, but the gifts he bestowed on him only led to a conflict with his jealous brothers. After being crowned once, Henry demanded his father let him have a second ceremony, this time with the new Archbishop of Canterbury (who, after Becket’s exit interview, was very accommodating). Despite now being joint King of England, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou, young Henry felt that he was hard done by – after all, his father had his own duchy when he was 16 and a kingdom at 19. At a banquet, Henry made his father wait hand and foot on him, and when the older man complained, ‘No other king in Christendom has such

a butler,’ he replied: ‘It is only fitting that the son of a count should wait on the son of a king.’ History does not record the angry middle-aged king’s response. Richard and Geoffrey, the king’s middle sons, were unhappy about their elder sibling receiving so much of the inheritance. Geoffrey was described by Gerald of Wales as ‘overflowing with words, soft as oil… able to corrupt two kingdoms with his tongue; of tireless endeavour, a hypocrite in everything, a deceiver and a dissembler’.xiii The two brothers started an almost-Freudian armed rebellion against their father in 1173, the boys aged just 16 and 15. They were supported by their mother Eleanor, now estranged from her husband, as well as the kings of Scotland and of France. But later that year, when Eleanor fled the country in men’s clothing and sought refuge with Louis VII – the former husband she had supposedly committed adultery against with her own uncle – he handed her back. Richard’s 1174 rebellion ended with him throwing himself at his father’s feet and begging for forgiveness. Father and son were reconciled. But before long Henry the Young King rebelled, upset that youngest son John had been given Cornwall and three castles in Normandy, which he wanted for himself. While in southwest France in 1183, Henry died of a fever, his last act being the plunder of a shrine. Geoffrey followed him three years later, trampled to death during a tournament. His friend, the young French king Philippe II, was so distraught that he tried to throw himself into the grave. The king’s woes did not end there. Again he attempted to

intercede on behalf of John, demanding that Richard part with Aquitaine. For the heir to hand over this large, wealthy region of France, ancestral home of his mother, was an insult too much; now older, wiser and more dangerous, he raised an army against his father. With his mother, Richard joined forces with the young King of France against Henry, and father and son met at Le Mans, where the two men appeared to embrace. The old king whispered in his ear: ‘God spare me long enough to take revenge on you.’ The two rival armies were camped close to each other during the peace talks of January 1189, and the atmosphere was extremely tense. In the no man’s land between them, Richard and a gang of men accidentally caught up with some of the king’s followers, led by Henry’s loyal knight William Marshal, an old friend of Richard’s and the very pinnacle of chivalry. Marshal had experienced the most incredible life, much of which found its way into medieval tales and later novels and films (most recently in A Knight’s Tale , in which Heath Ledger re-enacted a number of incidents from his story). The fourth son of a Wiltshire baron, he’d made his money as a professional jouster, earning a fortune by taking the armour of his defeated opponents. He won partly because he had an unusually thick skull, although on several occasions he’d needed blacksmiths to remove a bashed-in helmet from his head. Such games were incredibly important, being essentially training for war: among the popular sports were cudgelling, which was won when blood poured down the opponent’s scalp; quarter-staff, in which poles over six feet long were used to

knock the opponent over, preferably out; or single-stick, similar to quarter-staff but which ended when one of the competitors was covered in blood. Although brutal, they were an accepted feature of life among the aristocracy; Henry III tried to ban them but only because he feared they would promote conspiracies. The Church had been opposed to tournaments on moral grounds, refusing burial to those who died in them, but abandoned this stance in 1316, when Pope John XXII concluded they were good training for crusaders. But they did become less violent. In the 12th century such games were basically mock battles and brute force was the important factor. By the 14th there were two horsemen in a joust, and more emphasis on skill rather than just smashing the other man’s face in, and far fewer fatalities, although these were still regular. Barriers between the two knights weren’t introduced until the 15th century. But Marshal was lucky to be alive at all. His father, John, had sided with Matilda during the Anarchy and King Stephen had taken the 10-year-old William hostage. When he threatened to kill the boy, his father replied to go ahead, for: ‘I have the hammers and anvil to forge an even finer son.’ (Similar to a line used by Walder Frey in Game of Thrones.) William was taken to be hanged in front of a horrified crowd that included his father, but as his head was placed in the noose Stephen grabbed the boy and took him away, promising from that point to look after him. Marshal later became a knight of Prince Richard, but the two had fallen out over a woman, and by now they were firm enemies. That day in January 1189 they hadn’t expected to

fight and neither was wearing a helmet, but Marshal rode straight at the prince. ‘By God’s legs do not kill me, Marshal’ Richard cried out, ‘that would be wrong, I am unarmed.’ At the last moment Marshal ran his lance into the prince’s horse instead. Now the king learned that favourite son John had joined the rebellion. Broken-hearted, he surrendered to Philippe in July 1189 and expired two days later from a massive brain haemorrhage. The only son to stay by the king at his deathbed was Geoffrey, a bastard spawned by a lowly woman called Ykenai, described by contemporary Walter Map as a ‘baseborn, common harlot who stooped to all uncleanliness’.xiv As the king had said of the young man on a previous occasion: ‘The others are the real bastards.’ Henry’s son became Richard the First, called ‘the Lionheart’, and one of his first acts was to call for William Marshal. ‘Marshal,’ he told him. ‘You are pardoned. I bear you no malice.’ He gave him Isabel de Clare to marry, a great catch, as she came with most of south Wales and eastern Ireland. Richard spent most of his reign on crusade during a decadelong orgy of violence which he seemed to find hugely entertaining, right up to the point that it killed him. Even before landing in Palestine he had managed to sack Sicily, after getting into an argument with King Tancred, who was supposed to be his ally. He also invaded Christian Cyprus in a ‘fit of pique’, xv freed the captive French king Philippe, and then sold the island to the Templars, the elite band of sworn brothers who had formed to protect pilgrims on the way to the Holy Land, but

who soon ended up controlling the region. Comprised of knights who were sworn to chastity, the Templars strongly resembled the Watch in being an elite organization sworn to protect civilization from without. The crusades may have inspired Martin’s ‘Unsullied’, in particular the Mamluks of Egypt, an Islamic slave army comprising boys who had been captured from Europe, Africa and the Middle East and raised to be soldiers, who were famous for their bravery and fought off the Mongol invaders, who like the Dothraki were terrifying nomadic horsemen. (However, in their Hoplite tactics, and the cruelty of their early lives, the Unsullied far more resembled the people of Sparta, the unusual Greek city-state which had evolved a militaristic and egalitarian society after enslaving its neighbours; just as the Unsullied could only complete their training by killing a newborn in front of its slave mother, so too Spartan boys were encouraged to murder Helots.)xvi While on crusade, however, Richard was captured and sold to the German Emperor Heinrich VI, who demanded a 100,000 marks payment, as well as various marriage alliances and the provision of 50 galleys and 200 knights on Heinrich’s invasion of Sicily. No amount of diplomatic protest could free him, even after Richard’s mother sent off an abusive letter to the Pope, signed ‘Eleanor, by the wrath of God, Queen of England’. The ‘king’s ransom’ cost the English treasury 34 tons of gold, the equivalent of four years’ national expenditure. The people groaned under the burden as sheriffs collected the tax, and despite the Lionheart’s triumphs in far off lands, the

kingdom was disintegrating, crime became widespread and a pirate called Ragnald of Man now ruled the Irish Sea. During his imprisonment, Richard’s brother John revolted against his rule, in alliance with Philippe of France, who had also sought the help of the King of the Danes, a plan that came to naught. The two men also appealed to William of Scotland, who refused because Richard had freed him in 1189, and so to take up arms against the English king would be dishonourable. Likewise, Richard’s other allies, including Dietrich, Count of Holland, Henry, Duke of Brabant and Archbishop Adolf of Cologne, all remained loyal. The king arrived back in March 1194, and while hunting in Sherwood Forest, met his brother, forgiving him with the words: ‘You are only a child who has been led astray.’ John was 28. He then left almost immediately to return to fighting.. However in 1199, in Limousin, southwest France, a longbowman took aim at Richard during a siege. The king stood posing to mock the sniper, who was using a saucepan as a shield. Despite wearing no armour himself, the king applauded his first shot: the man fired again and hit him in the left shoulder, fatally, as it turned out. The peasant claimed that Richard had killed his father and two brothers, but as a last act of chivalry, the dying king pardoned him and asked that he be released after his death. Afterwards Richard’s men had the longbowman flayed alive. Richard is usually remembered in stark contrast to his younger brother John. Though extremely violent, he always

stuck by his word – he was nicknamed ‘Richard yay-or-nay’ – and was forgiving. John, meanwhile, broke every promise he ever made. Even before his brother’s death, his rule as regent was unforgiving and harsh, leading the people of London to revolt, and conditions worsened. Drunkenness had always been a common feature of life in the Realm. As far back as the eighth century St Boniface, the Devonian who converted the Germans, complained that it was ‘a vice peculiar to the heathens and to our race, and that neither Franks, Gauls, Lombards, Romans nor Greeks indulge in’. Twelfth-century writer William of Malmesbury said of the English that ‘Drinking in parties was an universal practice, in which occupation they passed entire nights as well as days.’ In the early 13th century England went through one of its periodic booze epidemics, so that ‘the whole land was filled with drink and drinkers’, and leading the way was the drunken King John, whose fondness for booze and lechery inadvertently gave the world its most important legal document – Magna Carta. By the end of the 13th century there were 354 drinking establishments in London, and everyone drank heavily, although they did so among their own class – the wealthy drank in inns, the middle ranks in taverns, while at the bottom of the social ladder there were the alehouses, where violence was almost guaranteed. During this period court rolls, which began in the reign of the Lionheart (before 1189 in English law is literally ‘time immemorial’)xvii are filled with accounts of drink-fuelled incidents, often involving ill-judged horseplay with axes,

swords and farmyard animals. At ‘church ales’ money was raised for the upkeep of the parish by hosting marathon drinking sessions in which parishioners were encouraged to drink as much as possible. These events could go on for three days, and after a certain time bachelors still able to stand up were allowed to drink for free. Weddings were also extremely drunken, so much so that in 1223 Richard Poore, Bishop of Salisbury, was forced to make a proclamation that marriages must be sober, and without ‘laughter or sport or at public potations or feasts’. The worst drink-related incident occurred in 1212 when London Bridge burned down, with up to 3,000 charred or drowned bodies turning up on the banks of the river the following morning. The fire started in Southwark at a bring your own bottle party, or ‘Scot-Ale’ as they were called. John certainly led the way in the drinking stakes. He kept 180,000 gallons of wine at his personal disposal, a slight hint at alcoholism, and drank anything he could find. His drunken antics were famed, and no woman was safe. John also displayed signs of a violent temperament from an early age. As a boy he once lost his temper while playing chess, and smashed his opponent over the head with a heavy piece. He had been nicknamed Jean sans Terre, or Lackland, after being left out of his father’s inheritance, and to his enemies – that is most of the population – he was also called ‘Softsword’ for his lack of military prowess. He had broken his father’s heart by his betrayal, so that as his life ebbed away the old king commissioned a portrait of an eagle being pecked to death by

its offspring, pointing out the most vicious one to a visitor with the words ‘that’s John’. He could also be ruthless even by the standards of the age; he once took hostage 28 sons of the Welsh princes, and had them all killed in sight of their parents. John violated all the rules of war; after his victory over the King of France in 1202, he kept his prisoners ‘so vilely and in such evil distress that it seemed shameful and ugly to all those who witnessed this cruelty’. He massacred a garrison of his own men in Normandy, because he’d switched sides without telling them. Perhaps worst of all was the sexual depredations he committed against females of all ages, including several noblemen’s daughters; and he almost certainly murdered his 16year-old nephew Arthur in a drunken rage. One baron, Eustace de Vesci, accused the king of forcing himself on his wife, and when John came to stay at his home a prostitute was put in her bed just in case the king crept in – which he did. John’s rapacious sexual appetites alienated everyone. Among his most loyal soldiers was his half-brother, Henry’s bastard William Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, but when he ended up in a French prison John made a pass at his wife. Even John’s own chronicler, who was paid to promote his image, conceded that he was ‘a very bad man, cruel and lecherous’. John was initially engaged to a woman called Isabel of Gloucester, but the year after becoming king he sold his fiancée to a baron, Geoffrey de Mandeville, for 20,000 marks. Instead he married Isabella of Angouleme, which came as a surprise to her fiancé Hugh de Lusignan, who had postponed the wedding

because she was only 12. Her age didn’t trouble John, who consummated the marriage straight away. To placate Hugh, John later offered him the hand in marriage of his daughter Joan, who was all of three years old. The wronged man appealed to his overlord, Philippe of France, who was also John’s overlord for his French territories. Philippe in contrast had for 16 years refused to have marital relations with his Danish Queen, Ingeberg, who was said to be as beautiful as Helen of Troy but who for some reason repulsed him. In 1204, as punishment for John’s misdeeds, Philippe took away most of his lands in France, including all of Normandy, Brittany and Anjou. Philippe could do this because John was liked even less in France; after Richard’s death the Bretons chose his young nephew Arthur, son of Geoffrey, as their duke, and only Gascony-Aquitaine sided with John because he reduced the tax on wine. Young Arthur certainly had his own ruthless streak: in 1202 he had besieged his own grandmother, Eleanor, in the castle of Mirebeau in the Loire Valley; the teenager also demanded England and said that while it was ruled by another he would not give a moment’s peace until the end of his life (which turned out to be quite soon). John travelled to Normandy, where he invited his nephew around for talks in his castle; there the adolescent refused to recognize him as king and denounced his ‘usurpation’. Arthur’s body was seen floating in the Seine a couple of days later. In 1205 John amassed an invasion force at Portsmouth, but had to endure a humiliating climb-down in the face of a mutiny.

To finance war with France the king increased tax by 300 per cent, mostly targeting the rich barons. He introduced ‘scutage’, literally a shield tax, forced payment for aristocrats who refused military service; but many Anglo-Norman barons no longer had family connections with France, and failed to see why they should risk their lives to help John keep hold of his land. There was also inheritance tax. Some noblemen were charged up to £7,000 to take over their father’s or brother’s land, and the king often kept barons in a state of permanent debt, and threatened arrest or worse. The king kidnapped the wife and son of one such baron, his loyal follower William de Briouze, who had failed to cough up £3,500. When Matilda de Briouze blurted out to one of John’s men that they knew about his nephew’s murder, she and her son were taken prisoner and starved to death; their corpses were found huddled together, with the boy bearing tooth-marks on his body from where his mother had tried to eat him.xviii Although increasingly hostile to the monarch, barons also fought among themselves. All major lords had their own private armies, composed of bannermen sworn to do service, and their disputes often spilled over into violence. Various methods were used to promote peace: the Earls of Leicester and Chester, constantly squabbling over their lands, agreed to give each other 15 days’ notice on any war. But whereas after 1066 the French-speaking barons had been tied to the monarch by a common fear of the English peasantry, those differences with the common people were beginning to fade. The king was getting madder and madder. In 1212, a man

called Peter of Wakefield prophesised that John would not make his 14th anniversary in charge, and so when the day came John celebrated by having Peter – and his son – hanged. On his journeys, the king would send his baggage train, packed with booze, secretly on ahead of him. He would not sleep anywhere but in his own castles (he had amassed 50 such royal residences) for fear that his barons might betray him. He would wake up before dawn and slip away. The king had become so paranoid that he developed a complex code to be used when he wished orders to be carried out. It was so complex he sometimes forgot it himself. Things came to a head with the final military defeat in July 1214 at Bouvines, and in January 1215 the king met 40 barons in London, where they demanded that John obey the Charter of Liberties that had been issued by Henry I in 1100. He stalled and then double-crossed them; in response, on May 5, 1215, a group of rebel barons renounced homage and fealty. They were led by Robert Fitzwalter, whose daughter the king had raped, and with his mostly northern barons he raised an army in the spring and headed to Northampton. After the king had failed to show, Fitzwalter declared himself ‘Marshall of the Army of God and the Holy Church’, and marched on London, where they were welcomed. With all-out civil war looming, Archbishop Langton acted as peacemaker and brought the king and the barons together at Runnymede on June 15. There they drew up a series of 63 clauses by which the sovereign would agree to rule; it became known as the Great Charter, or Magna Carta, to distinguish it from another charter

about forests. But true to form, the king reneged on the deal, claiming it was signed under duress, and civil war broke out. John besieged Rochester Castle in the autumn, trying to undermine his enemies – literally – by digging a tunnel underneath the castle walls and pouring in 40 pigs’ worth of fat, setting it alight. While John was trying to win back London, the King of Scotland invaded to annex Northumberland, as agreed with the barons. In January 1216 John marched north and captured Berwick, then Scotland’s largest city, and declared he would get his revenge on the Scottish king – ‘by God’s teeth, I will run the little sandy fox-cub to earth’. This he wasn’t able to do, so instead he just burned down Berwick out of spite, personally setting fire to the house he had stayed in, and headed south. By March he had taken back East Anglia, but had now run out of money, and there John died of gluttony-induced dysentery, after having lost the crown jewels in the Wash. In the words of one chronicler of the king: ‘Hell herself felt defiled by his admission.’ His nine-year-old son Henry was proclaimed king. Before John died, however, the barons had invited over Prince Louis, son of the King of France, to be ruler, and the country now had to deal with a French invasion, which was beaten away by a force led by William Marshal, who had vowed to carry the king ‘on his shoulders’. Marshal died in 1219, and two not so dutiful regents squandered all the crown’s money, so that by the time Henry III assumed full control there was nothing left. And the new

monarch was not the man to sort out the country’s woes. Scared of thunder and ‘as wise now as when he was a little child’, as one jester pointed out, the droopy-eyed king was also religious to a tedious degree. When Henry made a trip to Paris, the King of France ordered all churches on the route closed because the English king had insisted on visiting every one for a Mass and was taking an age to reach the city. 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).xix As a result of these famous royal guests, Edward became known as the leopard, after the thencommon 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 altarplates. 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,xx 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,xxi 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 50something 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. 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 interrelated 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. Raised in Lorraine, in the east of France, she had been brought over to England at the age of 15, a marriage arranged by William de la Pole, the Duke of Suffolk. He had welcomed her when she arrived in Hampshire in a storm, and remained her ally, some claim her lover. Like Cersei, she was rumoured to have infidelities, and battled with powerful nobles who wished the crown for themselves, fighting fiercely for her son’s right to the throne after her docile husband had surrendered. When she finally fell pregnant seven years after their marriage, Henry went into a catatonic depression; when he came out of it a couple of years later he swore he could not remember having the child, who he claimed must have been brought by the Holy Ghost. This made him a laughing stock all over Europe. Queen Margaret became regent in all but name, and was roundly hated; arrogant and haughty, she kept a great household, with five female attendants and ten ‘little damsels’. The king’s misrule led ambitious men with royal blood to circle around. Greatest of all was Richard, Duke of York, second cousin of Henry V and great-grandson of Edward III.

Margaret despised York and the feeling was mutual. Allied to York was his brother-in-law Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury and Salisbury’s son the Earl of Warwick. Warwick and Somerset, the leader of the Queen’s faction, had an ancient grudge that dated back to when they were married to halfsisters and argued over the inheritance. Warwick the Kingmaker, as the younger Richard Neville was later called, was the grandson of Ralph de Neville, an especially brutal figure who rather resembles Game of Thrones character Walder Frey. xxii Just as the Freys were enraged at the wealth and power of their rival northern warlords, the Starks, so were the Nevilles towards the Percys. Like Frey, Ralph Neville had an enormous number of children, at least 22 by two wives. His first wife, Margaret Stafford, the daughter of the Duke of Stafford and descended from the Mortimers, gave him eight children, but died in 1396, and just five months later he married again. Wife number two was the even grander Joan Beaufort, the daughter of John of Gaunt by his mistress Katherine Swynford, who had in childhood been legitimized and therefore become a powerful landowner. Neville’s second marriage produced another 14 children, including nine sons; however the two branches became bitterly opposed after he was persuaded by Joan to pass over his sons from the first marriage in his inheritance, and they ended up on different sides at the Battle of Wakefield in 1460. The Neville family tree illustrates the complex web of alliances of the period. Ralph’s eldest son by his second marriage, Richard, born 1400, married the Montacute heiress of

Salisbury and became Earl. His younger brothers William, George and Edward, became respectively barons of Fauconberg, Latimer and Bergavenny, all by marriage. Some of Ralph de Neville’s daughters married well, too, to the Dukes of York and Norfolk and earls of Stafford and Northumberland. But Richard Neville’s match was by far the greatest; and he also inherited the bulk of the estates, the castles of Middleham, Sheriff Hutton in Yorkshire, and the main Neville home of Raby Castle in Durham, as well as estates in Westmoreland and Essex. Salisbury's eldest son, born in 1428, then became Earl of Warwick through marriage to Anne de Beauchamp, which made him the largest landowner in the country. Another of Ralph’s children, Cecily, was betrothed to Richard of York at the age of eight and married at 13. Cecily Neville was pious, rising at seven and attending eight church services a day, before going to bed at eight. She bore her husband 13 children, and after his death she would stand by her eldest son as he fought for the crown. Although York, whose parents both died in his youth, could be cold and charmless, they appeared to have a happy marriage. In 1450 the country suffered a wave of violence. In January soldiers in Portsmouth rioted and murdered the local bishop, who in his dying words blamed the loss of Maine on the Duke of Suffolk, who had become the principle power behind the throne since the downfall of the king’s uncle, Gloucester, three years earlier. According to the Abbot of St Albans, ‘satellites of Satan’ had poisoned the king’s mind against Gloucester, who was placed under house arrest but then died mysteriously in

February 1447. Later that month Suffolk was arrested and placed in the Tower of London, but the king intervened and ordered that he instead be banished. However, on his journey to exile in Burgundy sailors from a royal ship caught him and he was taken to a small boat and a sword was prepared to kill him, befitting his aristocratic status. His executioner, ‘one of the lewdest of the ship’ and armed with a rusty weapon, took several blows to finish the job. In June there was an uprising in Kent, led by Jack Cade, who claimed to be a cousin of the Duke of York, although he was actually a former soldier and convicted thief from Ireland. The county had been devastated by the collapse of the wine trade due to the loss of France, and the halving of imports. The complaints of the Kent rebellion were that ‘France is lost, the king himself is so placed that he may not pay for his meat and drink, and he owes more than ever any King of England ought, for daily his traitors about him, when anything should come to him by his laws, at once they ask it for him.’ The rebellion descended into carnage. Numerous officials were executed, and the heads of the hated Warden of the Cinque Ports, James Fiennes, and his son-in-law William Crowmer were made to kiss. When he arrived in the capital, Cade rode around London with Fiennes’ body attached to his horse, and the Sheriff of Kent was dragged to Mile End and beheaded. Understandably this rather alarmed the Londoners, who ended up fighting the Kentishmen on London Bridge. After it was crushed, the Cade rebellion was punished by the ‘Harvest

of heads’, with mass executions across the county. Then in September 1450 York marched on Westminster with 5,000 men in a show of force, and while the Lords and Commons sat, his men placed York's symbol of the falcon and fetterlock around town. Then in November there was a brawl in Parliament between supporters and opponents of York. The war in France lurched from disaster to disaster, with the defeat at Castillon, in Gascony, in 1453, marking the end of the 100 Years War. The king now descended into full madness, and in March 1454 York was appointed Protector of England, insisting on a strange clause that stated he didn’t want the job. York could not work with his enemy John Beaufort, the Duke of Somerset, a grandson of John of Gaunt, and soon violence broke out, sparked by the Percy-Neville feud. It erupted in August 1454 at the wedding of Sir Thomas Neville, grandson of Ralph and a cousin of Warwick, and Maud Stanhope, whose father had lands that had been confiscated from the Percys by Henry IV. The Battle of Heworth Moor, as this red wedding was called, was ‘the beginning of sorrows’. (Real life incidents where hospitality was violated were rare, and as in Westeros, the laws of hospitality were especially important in all ancient and medieval societies. The most notorious violation in British history was the massacre of Glencoe in 1692, in which the Campbell clan killed 38 MacDonalds who were their houseguests. Other possible inspirations for the Red Wedding are the murder of William and David Douglas by the Livingstons and Critchtons at

Edinburgh Castle in November 1440. xxiii And back in the 11th century nobleman Eadric Streona had become notorious for having killed a rival while entertaining him, and then blinding both his sons. Having double-crossed Ethelred to side with the Viking king Sweyn, Sweyn’s son Canute had him executed.) The first battle proper took place at St Albans in May 1455, with 6,000 men fighting with longbows, swords, maces, axes and pole-axes through side streets and even houses. Most of the battle involved bludgeoning, or the use of battleaxes; once a man was down his enemies would put a dagger through the slits of his eyes. ‘Here you saw a man with his brains dashed out. Here another with his throat cut, the whole street full of corpses,’ local Abbot of St Albans, John Whethamstede, wrote. The Nevilles killed the Earl of Northumberland, the head of the Percy family and son of Hotspur; his son Henry, the third earl, would be killed at Towton six years later. Somerset, fighting hand-to-hand with Warwick outside an inn called The Castle, looked up and felt a sense of doom, recalling that a soothsayer had once warned him about castles; momentarily stunned, he was fatally stabbed. King Henry spent the duration standing under the royal banner in the market place, a pathetic figure. At some point the Lancastrian nerve was lost, and the king’s men began to flee, leaving him sitting on the ground, dazed and wounded in the neck. The Duke of York and Earl of Warwick fell on their knees before the king, calling for a surgeon to help him. He was respectfully brought down to the local abbey, where survivors on both sides spent the night together, saying a Mass for the 60

dead. The king awoke from his stupor in early 1458, and declared that York should pay for his behaviour with a fine of £45 a year for Masses to be said for the dead. This would be followed by a ‘love day’ on March 25, Lady Day (Mothering Sunday), a well-meaning but useless idea fashioned by the more moderate men of the council. It was hoped to bring together Lancastrians Somerset, Northumberland and Clifford, whose fathers had all been killed at St Albans, and Yorkists Salisbury and Warwick, who would make reparations to them and agree to keep the peace for 10 years. The leaders of all the factions walked handin-hand to St Paul’s for a service of thanksgiving, the feeling of love only slightly diminished by the fact that the Lancastrians had turned up with 2,000 heavily-armed men, the Yorks and Nevilles with 1,500, and the two sides were separated by the walls of the city… while the Mayor of London brought a force of 500 just in case anyone was not feeling the love. In November that year Warwick narrowly avoided assassination and escaped to Calais, the king and queen fled to the Midlands, and York turned up in Westminster expecting to be proclaimed King – yet when he went to sit on the throne there were hushes rather than acclamations. Queen Margaret tried to punish York through an Act of Attainder, which blamed him for all the kingdom’s troubles. This took away his lands but it also denied his heirs any of them, an act against precedent (the sons of traitors were given their father’s lands after his death). At a battle at Ludford Bridge, Shropshire, in 1459 York was

defeated, and made for Calais, which Warwick had captured; it was England’s second most important city and the entry point for the country’s continental exports. More battles took place, at Blore Heath in 1459 and Northampton in 1460, where poor King Henry was discovered sitting in his tent, Queen Margaret having fled to Wales with their son Edward. London fell to the Yorkists, with the loyalist Lord Scales, a veteran of the 100 Years War, holding onto the Tower of London by firing on the city, before trying to escape to Westminster Abbey. The notoriously unruly London boatmen surrounded and murdered him, dragging his naked corpse onto the priory of St Mary Overie in Southwark. Now York claimed the throne outright, using his descent from Lionel, second son of Edward III. His own followers thought this was a step too far, among them Warwick, Salisbury and York’s eldest son Edward, Earl of March, just 17 but already a warrior in his own right. A compromise was reached where York would be made heir, and Prince Edward disinherited. Henry, totally insane by now anyway, agreed, but the queen refused and the war went on. Warwick remained in London, with the king in the tower, while Edward of March went to Salisbury to recruit more men and York and his second son Edmund, Earl of Rutland, rode to Yorkshire. There they spent Christmas in the castle of Sandal, but were besieged and tricked into coming out to face a Lancastrian army of 5,000 men. While York was killed, his son made his escape, but on the way out was stopped by Baron Clifford, a leading Lancastrian whose father had died at St

Albans, and a descendent of Ralph de Neville through his first wife. Upon discovering his captive’s identity, Clifford shouted: ‘By God’s blood, thy father slew mine and so shall I slay thee.’ Salisbury’s son Thomas Neville was also killed and Salisbury himself captured and beheaded the next day. The heads of York and Rutland were cut off and with Salisbury’s were stuck on the gates of the city, York’s with a paper crown, along with the sign ‘Let York overlook the town of York’. While York’s youngest sons, George and Richard, were sent to France to safety, Edward of March was in the West Country celebrating Christmas when he was told the devastating news. Tall, blond, good-looking and affable, he had charm as well as strength; when a Lancastrian force landed accidentally at Calais, Edward sweet-talked its leader Lord Audley into changing sides, despite his father having been killed by Yorkists. But he also had intelligence. While a more impulsive man would have headed to Wakefield to avenge his father, Edward stayed put and planned his attack. Instead he met a Lancastrian force at Mortimer’s Cross on February 3, 1461, where ‘on the morning there was seen three suns rising’. It was a parhelion, or sun dog, an optical illusion caused by the sun refracting on ice crystals, but the Yorkists took it as a good omen, representing the three surviving sons of York and the Trinity. March took the symbol of the ‘Sun in Splendour’ as his personal banner, which became a popular name for taverns during his reign. Edward triumphed, and after the battle the Yorkists ran after the fleeing enemies, capturing Henry VI’s stepfather, an elderly

knight called Owain Tudor and taking him to Hereford for execution on Edward’s orders. The old man was unaware at first what was happening, until his captors undid the buttons around his neck, when he realised the full horror of his fate, and lamented that the head that was to go on a block once lay on a queen’s lap. His head was mounted on the market cross, where an old mad woman combed the corpse’s hair and washed off the blood by 100 candles she had placed by it. Although we think of the 15th century as the golden age of chivalry, like many concepts it only became celebrated as it was dying. A great turning point had been Agincourt, after which French prisoners were murdered, and back in England the cycle of revenge had grown steadily worse, and the rules of war had disappeared, with routine executions and the cry of ‘kill the nobles, spare the commons’. Le Morte d’Arthur, recalling a bygone age of chivalry, was published in 1485, as the concept it celebrated came to an end. Meanwhile Margaret had gone to Scotland, where she met Mary, the Queen of the Scots, on January 5, 1461. There she agreed to hand over Berwick in exchange for an army, not realizing what a terrible prospect this was to the people of the Realm, who instinctively feared the men north of the border. Furthermore, short of funds to attract soldiers, she had agreed that anyone who signed up could freely plunder once they had crossed the Trent. The two sides met again on February 17, 1461, at the second Battle of St Albans. Margaret and her Scottish army had brought 10,000 men; Warwick had 8,000, as well as the king as

his prisoner. And although Warwick’s Burgundian soldiers were armed with hackbuts, which fired lead shots (the first use of hand guns in England), the Lancastrians were the victors. Afterwards the king’s captors Lord Bonville and Sir Thomas Kyriell were brought before the queen and seven-year-old Prince Edward. He was asked: ‘Fair son, by what manner of means shall these knights die?’ ‘Let their heads be taken off.’ The boy got his wish. Bonville and Kyriell had been ordered to guard the fallen king, but had not behaved dishonourably and treated him well. Bonville replied to the boy: ‘May God destroy those who taught thee this manner of speech.’ Thirty-one men were knighted after the battle, including the young prince and Andrew Trollope, who had changed sides, and boasted to the Queen: ‘My Lord, I have not deserved it, for I slew but 15 men, for I stood still in one place, and they came unto me.’ Queen Margaret descended on London, with Edward in the Cotswolds, but she then made a dreadful mistake, stopping outside for fear of what her Scots army might do in London, the men having already ransacked Westminster and Southwark. So she withdrew north, and the Earl of March simply rode in from the west and was proclaimed King Edward IV, aged only 18. This was in many ways a war of north v south. The Yorkists did have some support in the northern counties, and the Lancastrians in the south, but most of their soldiers came from different ends of the country, and this helps explain the

savagery of the fighting. That the Yorkists won was down to the support of London, which was vastly richer than anywhere else in England, due to its role in the export of wool. In the nine months before Towton the city provided £13,000 for the Yorkist cause, enough to pay 26,000 archers for 20 days’ service.xxiv When in late 1460 the royal army headed south from Wakefield there was a genuine terror in the capital that the northerners would sack the city. Songs of the period recall the threats of northern men violating southern women and of ‘the lords of the North’ coming to ‘destroy the south country’. Edward now brought an enormous army, 48,000 men, to Towton, facing at least 40,000 of the queen’s men. The Lancastrians were forced against the River Cock, in what became known as Bloody Meadow, and by the end of the day there were up to 28,000 dead, among them Andrew Trollope, leader of the Lancastrian forces. Another baron, Lord Clifford’s kinsman Lord Dacre, was killed when he went to take a drink and took off his helmet, and a sniper perched in a tree hit him in the neck with a crossbow bolt (Clifford had been killed a week earlier in a skirmish). The battle was followed by numerous executions, forensic evidence has suggested, with at least two dozen knights and countless more men put to death. Others were chased through the blizzard, and many on both sides were killed when pursuing Yorkists chased Lancastrians on to a bridge that collapsed, the heavily armoured men plunging to an icy death. It was said afterwards that a trail of blood marked the 23-mile road from Towton to York. The new king then marched on York where he was greeted

with the heads of his father and brother, which the people of the city had not had the wit to take down. They were buried, and in their place were put the heads of Devon, Wiltshire and various other Lancastrian aristocrats. A sad trail of Lancastrians headed towards Scotland, and close to Banburgh, site of the old royal house of the north, Queen Margaret and her son were separated from the rest of the group. According to one (admittedly rather dubious) story a gang of robbers attacked and were ready to cut her throat when Margaret fell to her knees and pleaded: ‘I am the daughter and wife of a king, and was in past time recognized by yourselves as your queen. Wherefore if you now stain your hands with my blood, your cruelty will be held in abhorrence by all men in all ages.’ It turned out that Black Jack, as the man was called, was a former Lancastrian soldier and it was now his turn to get on his knees and swear to take her to safety, which he did, to the Scottish border at Kirkcudbright. In Scotland, Margaret would remain for the time being, so poor that she had to borrow a groat from an archer to make an offering on her saint’s day. Two more uprisings the following year were crushed, and led to the deaths of some of the last few remaining Lancastrians, among them Ralph Percy, Hotspur’s grandson, and the third Duke of Somerset, whose father had died at St Albans. He left a bastard son, who became the ancestor of the Dukes of Beaufort, but with him dead, the Lancastrian cause was too.

The Red Wedding The former King Henry was finally captured in 1465 and left a prisoner in the Tower, where he was given five marks a week pocket money, as well as wine. More troubling for the new ruler was the thought of Margaret of Anjou abroad, and her son Edward of Westminster who would inevitably mount a challenge when he came of age. Her spies were everywhere, and several men thought to be passing on her messages were tortured and killed. But for now the people of London were overjoyed to have a king worthy of that name. As well as being tall – he stood at 6’3” – Edward was handsome, fair-haired and blessed with charisma and natural affability. He had that knack of remembering the names of everyone under him, as well as something about them with which to make small talk. The king knew how to keep the growing merchant class happy, even taking leading merchants away for a day’s hunting, where they played sport in the morning and drank themselves senseless in the afternoon, For the first time in living memory the Crown was not in financial meltdown, as Edward saved money by avoiding overseas conflict and managing stability at home. With the profit he was able to build Windsor Castle and lavish money on court. Sitting on the marble throne, he was attended by 400 men under the control of the Lord Chamberlain, while the Knights of the Body looked after his personal needs. Each day he would sit in the King’s Chamber, where in the morning

2,000 ate at the king’s expense with servants on hand with water and 13 minstrels playing. This was an era of outlandish fashions, with huge pointy shoes, ostentatious and disgusting rings and enormous belt buckles, which young men thought made them look dangerous and sexy. The king himself was a great lover of fashion. In the first year of his reign the keeper of the great wardrobe spent £4,784 on clothes and furs for the king’s person, at a time when the average annual wage of a labourer was £6. He even employed a peasant to jump on his bed after he had woken up to ensure it was wrinkle-free. Edward also loved gold and had a toothpick made of it, the paranoid monarch having it garnished with diamond, pearls and ruby, as it was believed that if a poison went near the gemstone it became moist. He also brought jousting back into fashion, and in June 1467 he arranged for the greatest fighters in Christendom – Lord Scales, the Queen’s brother, and Anthony, ‘Bastard of Burgundy’ – to come to London to fight. It was meant to be a light-hearted affair, but after a day it was interrupted by the news that the Bastard’s father had died, and the plague was back in town. The sports fans left and spread it all over the country. Fashion, fighting, food and fornication – Edward had ferocious appetites, but his lust for women would be his undoing. After the bloodshed, he was wise enough to forgive Lancastrian lords who bent the knee, including Lord Rivers, who was given his lands back within a year, as was his eldest son Anthony, both even being allowed to join the king’s

council. Rivers’ daughter Elizabeth had lost her husband Sir John Gray in the fighting, and she took it upon herself to ambush the king while he was out hunting to get his lands back. Elizabeth Woodville was a beautiful schemer with long blonde hair and blue eyes, and the king was enraptured, and by some accounts tried to take her by force, only for her to stick a knife to her own throat.xxv He backed down, and when his attempts to make her his mistress failed he did the unthinkable, by marrying her in secret. As in Westeros, where Robb Stark married for love, this was a disaster. When Edward told the council that he was married there was at first laughter; no king had married a commoner for 400 years and that’s what Richard Woodville, now Earl Rivers, had been born. Then there was outrage. Marriage was for the purpose of alliance-making, and Edward’s decision to marry for love (or lust) was a serious mistake. It infuriated Warwick in particular, as he had been in communication with the wily French king Louis XI, nicknamed ‘the Universal Spider’ for his network of spies, about a marriage alliance with France. Out of lust the king had thrown away a hugely advantageous chance of such an alliance. The Earl of Warwick’s aim was to thwart Margaret of Anjou’s attempts to have her own son Edward married to a French princess, and the king’s marriage was his prime diplomatic bargaining tool. Warwick had also toyed with the idea of Edward marrying the highly immoral (and sadly for the negotiations, dead) dowager queen of Scotland and later to the 12-year-old Lady Isabella of Castile; she instead married

Ferdinand of Aragon, uniting Spain, an event that had huge ramifications, especially in the Americas. Rivers and Warwick were also old enemies, having fallen out when Woodville had been in charge of the Calais garrison and refused orders until they had been paid. Likewise Cecily Neville also strongly objected to her son’s disastrous choice, and with good reason. While Anthony Woodville, Rivers’s eldest son, was an intellectual who translated the first book printed by William Caxton in England, the Woodvilles as a family were over mighty and unpopular. Elizabeth Woodville was, in the words of one historian, ‘calculating, ambitious, devious, greedy, ruthless and arrogant’. xxvi She had 11 living siblings, who Edward felt obliged to help marry off; John Woodville, her 20-year-old brother, was paired with the 66year-old Catherine Neville, the king’s aunt, a match known as ‘the diabolical marriage’. She already had three dead husbands and several children older than their new stepfather. In one of the worst instances, the Duchess of Bedford, the Queen’s mother, took a liking to a tapestry in the house of wealthy London merchant Sir Thomas Cook. She demanded that Cook sell it for under its £800 value but he refused. The Woodvilles then accused him of working for the Lancastrians, and sent retainers to sack his houses in London and the country. Then Rivers had him tried with ‘misprision of treason’ for not disclosing a loan he had made to Margaret’s agent many years before; they gave him a fine of £8,000 and he was ruined. Warwick, the king’s cousin and 14 years his senior, had been the effective second ruler of the kingdom. Such was his power

over Edward that in 1464 a senior French lord told his master Louis XI: ‘They tell me they have two rulers in England – Monsieur de Warwick and another, whose name I have forgotten.’ But he now found himself sidelined by the queen’s brother, Anthony, while Edward also removed Warwick’s brother George Neville from his position as Archbishop of York. Warwick, away in Burgundy, was furious when he found out; it got to such a state in their relationship that the king ignored Warwick when he came to court with his French allies. The kingmaker approached Edward’s brother George, Duke of Clarence, who was scheming away to get the crown himself. He proposed that his daughter Isobel would marry Clarence, but Edward blocked the idea. By 1469 there was serious discontent and violence and crime had returned with a vengeance. The troubles started in the spring of 1469, with a rising in the north, led by two men, each called Robin, one of whom was clearly put up to it by Warwick. Warwick then effectively took over in a coup, and sent out his agents to capture the queen’s father and brother Sir John Woodville. He had them beheaded in Coventry (and so poor Catherine Neville found herself widowed for the fourth time). Warwick then had Rivers’ widow arrested on witchcraft charges, accusing her of using black arts to get her daughter married to the king. But she was found not guilty. Warwick’s authority was at any rate falling to pieces. Humphrey Neville, from a different branch of the family, began a rebellion in the north, which Warwick crushed, having the

leader brought back to London to be beheaded. The king, meanwhile, recalled his lord high executioner, John Tiptoft, from Ireland. A refined and cultured Renaissance man, Tiptoft owned a rarefied collection of books and had made pilgrimages to Jerusalem, but he was also a sadist. In March the king sent the new Earl Rivers to capture Warwick’s ship in Southampton, and there arranged for Tiptoft to sit in judgment on the captive men; 20 were hanged, drawn and quartered. After they were dead the stunned crowd watched as they were beheaded and their naked torsos hung up by the legs. Sharpened stakes were then forced between their buttocks and their heads stuck onto the polls protruding out of the other end. Edward’s position became untenable. Warwick and Margaret were reconciled and an alliance made in France, after Warwick was forced to repent his earlier slurs about her fidelity, while on his knees. As part of their alliance, Warwick would be named Regent and Governor of England, and the queen agreed to marry her son Edward of Westminster to Neville’s daughter Anne, but only once he had taken the field against his cousin. While Anne was ‘seemly, amiable and beauteous, right virtuous and full gracious’, Edward of Westminster had developed into a sadist at a very early age, the very epitome of the King Joffrey figure. The Milanese envoy in 1467 recalled that the 13-year-old, who had grown up in an atmosphere of extreme violence, ‘already talks of nothing but cutting off heads or making war, as if he had everything in his hands or was the god of battle’. The two were married on July 25, 1470, in Normandy; but in

fact Margaret had forbidden her son to consummate his wedding with Anne Neville so that when the time came he could marry a more suitable bride. The Lancastrians landed in Devon. Edward was in the Midlands, and learned that Montagu, Warwick’s brother and another powerful landowner, had sided with the rebels. He was forced to flee to Burgundy with his brother Richard, Lord Hastings and Earl Rivers; they were so poor that Edward had to pay for the crossing by selling his fur-lined coat. Meanwhile his brother George had also joined the rebellion. Queen Elizabeth and her children stayed in Westminster while Londoners closed the walls against the French mercenaries, but Warwick and Clarence rode in on October 6 and Henry was crowned again a week later. All the lords and knights present wore the badge of Warwick, now more powerful than ever. Meanwhile young John de Vere, whose father and brother had been executed by Tiptoft, presided over his trial after the hated executioner was captured up a tree near Huntingdon. Although Warwick planned to be conciliatory towards Yorkists, he would make an exemption for Tiptoft; in front of a braying, enormous London mob he went out in style, wearing his best clothes and telling the executioner to do it in three strokes. Warwick declared that Edward IV was a bastard, and that his real father was a French archer, and therefore George would be heir presumptive after Edward of Westminster. On November 2, meanwhile, Elizabeth gave birth to a son, yet another Edward, in London, and Henry VI sent for a midwife

and provided her with beef, a great kindness typical of the man, and in a grizzly twist the baby would share a fate with the gentle king – the boy’s uncle would murder them both. However, Edward IV had by February 1471 raised up to 1,500 Englishmen and 300 Flemish mercenaries. He had also obtained ships from the Hanseatic League, the collection of mostly German city-states across the sea. Edward invaded in March, near the Humber, marched south with 4,000 men and met Sir William Stanley’s army of 2,000; the Stanleys, notoriously, never sided with anyone who might lose. (At Northampton in 1460 Lord Stanley had ignored the king’s summons, because he wished to see which way the wind blew.) Then they came across Clarence’s 4,000 men near Banbury. Young Richard was sent to talk to the middle brother, and persuaded him to changed sides, adding his men to the king’s. Edward entered London unopposed on April 11 and there he met his son for the first time. Henry VI greeted him with the words: ‘Cousin Edward, I am right glad to see you. I hold my life in no danger from your hands.’ There followed the Battle of Barnet three days later on Easter Sunday, at a place called Dead Man’s Bottom. Edward turned up with 10,000 men, and poor King Henry once again a prisoner, and the rebels were slaughtered. In the thick fog Warwick’s affinity mistook the Lancastrian Earl of Oxford’s banner of an Enrayed Star for the Sun in Splendour, and fired at them. When the battle was lost Warwick tried to escape but was recognised by his ostentatious and colourful blazoned surcoat;

the king’s men cut him down. His brother Montagu was also killed and their bodies were displayed at St Paul’s Cathedral to prove to the common people that they were indeed dead. King Edward intercepted the rebel forces in the west at Tewkesbury on May 4, a tired and desolately body of men who had walked 45 miles without rest and then had to set up defences. Even amid the battle, such were the hatreds that had overcome England that the Lancastrian fourth Duke of Somerset killed his own ally Lord Wenlock by smashing his brains out with a battleaxe. By the Avon, young Prince Edward of Westminster, wearing a coat with the arms of England, was also killed, one of 2,000 that day. It was said that after being captured, Westminster was interrogated by the king, who asked him why he had taken up arms against him: ‘I came to recover my father's heritage. My father has been miserably oppressed, and the crown usurped.’ Edward slapped the young man, and his brothers Clarence and Gloucester drew their swords and struck him down. Somerset, whose father and brother had been killed in the conflict, was executed afterwards. King Edward re-entered London once again on May 21, with Queen Margaret his prisoner, and that night Henry VI was murdered in the Tower on the king’s orders, although according to official reports he died of ‘displeasure and melancholy’ at his son’s death; possibly he was maced to death by Richard, Duke of Gloucester.xxvii With Henry’s son dead, the line was finished, and his presence could only fuel further rebellion. Brother Clarence was forgiven, and allowed all his wife Isabel Neville’s lands after 1471, as well as Richard’s job of

Great Chamberlain, and yet he remained enemies with his younger brother, a rivalry fuelled by jealousy over power. Gloucester had chosen to marry Anne Neville, Isabel’s sister and the widow of Edward of Westminster, but Clarence had kidnapped her to prevent a match that would enrich his brother and had her disguised as a maid at one of his castles. Gloucester managed to rescue her. Meanwhile, Clarence seems to have lost his mind after his wife and child died in October 1476. He turned up in Somerset and accused a local widow, Ankarette Twynho, of being a witch and responsible for his wife’s death. She was charged with sorcery and of poisoning the Lady Isabel, to whom she was once lady-in-waiting, and was executed within an hour. A Warwickshire man called John Thirsby was also hanged for murdering the royal child and another knight, Sir Roger Tucotes, was accused but escaped to London to report the incident. Clarence was brought before the king, where he made things much worse by suggesting that the murdered Twynho had accused the king of using ‘necromancy and craft to poison his subjects’ and alleging that he was a bastard. The ‘incorrigible’ Clarence, as the king called his brother, was charged with treason and put to death, drowned in a vat of wine. A soothsayer had told King Edward IV that ‘G’ would take his crown, and this may have fuelled his paranoia about George. The king, once so dynamic and youthful, grew fat and tired, gorged on wine and meat. Aged just 40, he became seriously ill at Easter 1483, one of his last acts being to change his will to

make his brother Gloucester ‘Protector of the Realm’. Richard, short, sickly and disfigured, from a young age showed an ambitious, devious side; he took every position available in order to increase his base of support and by the time he was 20 was already Constable and Lord High Admiral of England, Chief Justice of the Welsh Marches, Chief Steward, Chamberlain of South Wales, Great Chamberlain of England and Chief Steward of the Duchy of Lancaster. Under his brother, Richard had become so powerful in his personal fiefdom that he was known as Lord of the North, and was much loved by the north-country people. Through marriage he gained much of the estates of Warwick, although it became a love match. They named their only son, born in 1476, Edward. (The match also said something of the incest of the time. Richard was descended from his great-great-grandfather Edward III four times over, his wife descended from him twice over.) The new king, Edward, the fifth of that name, was just 12, when, on his way to London with his mother’s family, they were met by his father’s brother, accompanied by an armed retinue. Gloucester took the boy into his care, soon had him declared illegitimate, and himself crowned Richard III. Edward and his 10-year-old brother Richard were placed in the Tower for their safekeeping and never seen after July 1483; it was soon rumoured that the new king, who grew very unpopular, had killed them. His banner was a boar and the people of London called him ‘the Hog' behind his back, along with his cronies, nicknamed the Dog, the Cat and the Rat. One man, Sir

William Collingbourne, was hanged, drawn and quartered for writing a scornful poem about Richard, his last words being ‘Oh Lord Jesus, yet more trouble’. Richard also had Earl Rivers executed, as well as several other leading nobles. After a prolonged campaign of fratricide, most of the leading lords were dead. Except one – Henry Tudor.

The Imp There was one more claimant – ‘the imp’, as Edward IV referred to Henry Tudor, ‘the only one left of Henry VI’s brood’. Just like Daenerys Stormborn, he was therefore a threat, and Edward offered a huge reward for his capture, although he was safe as long as the King of France protected him. The descendant of Welsh nobility, from the first men of the island, his grandfather Owain ‘son of Theodore’ was a mere footman for Queen Catherine, widow of Henry V. She used to spy on the Welshman as he bathed naked in the Thames, and English society was outraged when she then married him. His son, the mad king’s half-brother Edmund Tudor, had been married to Margaret Beaufort, a great-greatgranddaughter of Edward III and the Red Queen to Woodville’s White Queen in the Philippa Gregory novels. Hers had been an unhappy childhood, her father having committed suicide before her first birthday, leaving the girl without a protector. She became a ward of William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, and as she was considered a possible heir to the throne, he arranged her marriage to his son, when he was just two and she one. After Suffolk’s execution-cum-murder at sea, Henry VI dissolved the child’s marriage and gave his half-brothers Edmund and Jasper Tudor wardship, and betrothed her to the former. They were married when she was 12, and she was pregnant at 13, but before she had even given birth, her husband was dead, expiring in captivity at the hands of William Herbert,

known as ‘Black William’, one of a powerful Yorkist family from Wales. Margaret almost died during childbirth, as did her sickly baby, and she never had children again, most likely due to infertility. For noble women of the period, their value and importance was as potential alliance-forgers through marriage, and their ability to create an heir as soon as menstruation began. Like Sansa Stark, they were pawns to be traded. It was a highly dangerous life, with a high proportion of women dying in childbirth, mostly through blood loss; available figures from 15th-century Florence suggest 1,450 deaths per 100,000 births, compared to between four and eight in Europe today, and as it was common for women to give birth to 10 or more children, their life chances of dying in labour were high. Just two months after giving birth, Margaret rode to the home of the powerful Duke of Buckingham and negotiated a marriage with his second son, Henry Stafford, which was happy enough, although she rarely saw her own son, who was raised by his uncle in exile. A man with small, shrewd eyes, Henry Tudor had lived rather against the odds and had developed into a cunning, untrusting survivor, but it was only as the House of York imploded in self-inflicted violence that he saw his chance to win the throne. Tudor had tried to invade in 1483 but was forced to return to Brittany after the planned uprising was crushed, and Richard enjoyed a brief moment of peaceful rule; he was in many ways an upright and moral man, devoted to both the Church and his wife, and was popular in the north. But the following year the

king’s only son died and by the end of that cruel 12 months Anne Neville was dying, and Richard was forced to deny rumours that he intended to marry his niece, Elizabeth of York, aware that kinsmen of Anne would rebel. Despite Richard having accused Elizabeth Woodville of witchcraft, showing his withered arm to his ally Hastings and blaming ‘that sorceress, my brother’s wife’, she may even have encouraged the match with the deformed king who killed her sons. This may strike us as perverse, but it was the only way to secure her daughter’s safety and prosperity. Alternatively Elizabeth Woodville, who had remained in sanctuary for a year until agreeing to let her daughters attend court, believed that Richard held her sons hostage and was using her daughter as a bargaining chip. (Some, of course, believe that it was Henry Tudor who murdered the boys.) Elizabeth of York had already endured an unsettled upbringing. When she was three, her father was forced into exile, and his cousin killed her grandfather. Later one uncle murdered another and probably her brothers too. In 1475 she was betrothed to the dauphin of France and her training as a princess would have began; however that match was broken, and she was now free, or as it could be interpreted, vulnerable. The rumour that Richard might marry his niece was the trigger for Henry Tudor’s invasion, launched with a force of 1,800 mercenaries from France and Scotland. In August 1485 Tudor landed in Wales, his ancestral home, with a small force, and the two armies met in Bosworth just outside Leicester. Richard had been plagued by bad dreams the night before

battle. The battle turned on Lord Stanley, who was now Margaret Beaufort’s fourth husband, and who yet managed to avoid being drawn into a clash in which Henry Tudor was outnumbered. Stanley had been summoned by the king to aid him, but claimed to have sweating sickness, a mysterious disease that killed many during the 15th and 16th centuries. The king threatened to execute Stanley’s son, who he had as hostage, to which the lord replied: ‘Sire, I have other sons.’ Stanley’s affinity was uncommitted until it was clear which side was winning, and only then did he join his stepson. King Richard III charged from the front, wearing his crown, the last king of England to die in battle, and afterwards his body was stripped naked and dumped in a river. His remains were discovered in 2012, under a car park in Leicester, identified via DNA of the son of a direct female descendent of the king’s sister, Anne. The Imp settled any dynastic questions by marrying Elizabeth of York, her mother having backed Tudor’s invasion, and reconciled most noblemen, returning their lands. And so the game of thrones ended, or at least it seemed to in retrospect, although no one at the time could have known. In fact Henry and his monstrous son continued to hunt down any uppity relatives for the next two decades, behaviour that seems repugnant now but, as with the actions of Martin’s characters, makes sense in its own context. George, Duke of Clarence, had a son, Edward of Warwick, who had a better claim, so Henry had him imprisoned; another

rival, the Duke of Northumberland, was lynched. There were also pretenders who landed claiming to be Edward IV’s son, one an Irish conman, another a baker’s boy called Lambert Simnel, whom Henry Tudor forgave and allowed to work in his kitchens, Tudor’s victory came a few years after the introduction of printing into England, heralding the end of the era later called the medieval period. It was now the age of the Renaissance, of courtly intrigue and scheming. Henry had brought the crown under the rule of the original peoples of the Realm, the Welsh, and named his first son Arthur in honour of the Welsh legend. He was married to Catherine of Aragon, but when he died, aged 16, she married his brother Henry. The king’s daughter, Margaret Tudor, was married to James IV, the King of the Scots, entering a cold, tough land where kings fathered many bastards and died violent deaths. James IV had succeeded after taking to the battlefield against his father James III at Sauchieburn, after which someone stabbed the old king to death. His father James II and his father James I had both suffered frightful, violent ends, while James III’s brother the Duke of Albany had tried to capture the throne but fled to France in 1485, where he was accidentally killed in a tournament by the future Louis XII when a splinter entered his eye. When Margaret arrived in Scotland she discovered the castle was home to the royal nursery of the king’s numerous bastards, and courtly entertainment consisted of wordsmiths taking part in games of competitive insults, both in Scots dialect and Gaelic, the old tongue.xxviii James IV would end up dying

on the way to battle, and his son, James V, would die violently too, as would his daughter, the beheaded Mary, Queen of Scots – six Scottish monarchs in succession having had grizzly deaths. After Arthur’s death, Elizabeth of York tried for another child, and shortly after giving birth to a daughter on her 38th birthday, she died, shortly after the child. Now widowed, the king pursued the queen of Naples for her fortune, and sent despatches asking ‘Whether her visage be fat or lean; whether there appeared to be any hair about her lips; whether she wore high slippers to increase her stature; whether her breath was sweet; whether she be a great feeder or drinker?’ He also chased Joanna of Castile, to rule her country, even though she was insane. Money was of course a prime motivator for this monarch, whose meanness had come to irritate his subjects; it is Henry VII who is supposedly remembered ‘counting out his money’ in the nursery rhyme ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’.xxix Henry Tudor died in 1509, and within days his heir Henry VIII had two of his father’s moneylenders tried and executed in a show trial. It was a sign of things to come. As well as thousands of common people, the king had numerous aristocrats executed, most of them close relations with outside claims to the throne. Edmund, Earl of Suffolk, the White Rose, had been handed over to Henry VII in 1506, who had made a solemn pledge not to execute him. He kept that pledge, and instructed his son to kill him when he became king; this the youngster did. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who was descended from Edward III on both sides of his family, was tried for treason and executed by Henry VIII merely for ordering a new coat of

arms with the royal insignia inserted. His father the Duke of Norfolk was already in the Tower of London awaiting execution, and would be saved only by the king’s death. As a young king, Henry was a formidable athlete. At the Field of the Cloth of Gold in Calais, 1520, a tournament to celebrate his prowess, he amazed the crowd by performing 1,000 jumps on six horses and hitting the bulls-eye at 220 metres. Henry also loved jousting tournaments, and twice almost died in them, and while very much the Renaissance man, represented the last of a medieval type. A spendthrift, Henry VIII had amassed 50 palaces, held enormous banquets, and spent lavishly at his court, squandering all the money his father had saved. His courtiers were encouraged to spend money on gifts: his Lord Chancellor Thomas Wolsey once gave him a gold cup valued at the equivalent of £30,000 today. Wolsey was the consummate Renaissance schemer, the type who provided the inspiration for Petyr Baelish. He had grown up in Ipswich as the son of a butcher, and was a great example of the ruthless self-made man who loved the trappings of extreme wealth, fond of walking into Westminster Hall in scarlet satin, dressed in fine sables and always carrying an orange soaked in vinegar to his nose so he wouldn’t have to smell the odour of the ghastly poverty of London. But after Catherine and Henry were unable to have a healthy son, Wolsey failed in his attempts to negotiate an annulment, which the king had called for so that he could marry the pregnant Anne Boleyn, a 25-year-old courtier, the sister of a

former mistress. Wolsey hated Boleyn and called her ‘the night crow’, but he tried his best. He failed, and was arrested for treason in 1530, but died of ‘stress’ on the way to London. This made the king rather popular, since Wolsey was hated for his wealth and pomposity; neither did anyone mind that Henry simply stole the cardinal’s home, Hampton Court. Cardinal Wolsey’s secretary was promoted to be the king’s chief adviser: Thomas Cromwell, another self-made man, had grown up in a pub in Putney, hated clerics, and was sympathetic to Martin Luther, the German monk who had sparked the Protestant Reformation 20 years earlier. Cromwell suggested that Henry adopt Lutheranism, but the king refused, and instead he simply declared that he had the right to appoint bishops himself. After Henry killed several people for disagreeing with him, the new Archbishop of Canterbury agreed that it was God’s will Henry should remarry and so annulled his first marriage. The Pope retaliated by having the King of England excommunicated. Henry famously went on to have six wives in total, having executed Anne for adultery, and divorced Anne of Cleves, the sister of the Duke of Cleves, a powerful German state on the Rhineland. Apart from political reasons, Henry had fallen in love with her portrait, drawn by renowned German artist Hans Holbein. Unfortunately Holbein, the finest artist in the land, was not in the habit of upsetting his clients, and Anne was in reality rather plain, so much so that Henry called her the ‘Flanders Mare’. She also had bad breath and body odour, and the king confessed to a friend: ‘I had neither the will nor

courage to proceed further.’ The marriage was never consummated, and Anne agreed to a divorce; strangely, they stayed good friends. Cromwell, however, was sent to the block in July 1540. The king remarried within a month, to 20-year-old Katherine Howard, who really did commit adultery; she was executed alongside her lover Thomas Culpeper, and just to make sure that his honour remained intact, Henry executed two previous lovers of Katherine, despite there being no suggestion of anything occurring since: one was her old music teacher and the other her cousin. And for good measure he had Howard’s ladyin-waiting executed just for knowing about the affair. Of his six wives, he is said to have only truly loved number three, Jane Seymour, who had given him a son, Edward, who succeeded his father in 1547. The boy king, just nine, was a fanatical Protestant and at 12 he had called the Pope the Antichrist in a tract. He once ripped apart a live falcon in a rage, and when he was 11 he had his own uncle, Thomas Seymour, executed. xxx Seymour had come up with a harebrained plot to kidnap the king and force him to marry his cousin, Lady Jane Grey. Seymour drunkenly stumbled into the king’s chamber but was foiled by the boy’s spaniel. Three years later another uncle, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset and ‘Protector of the Realm’, was executed, too. After the downfall of the Seymours came John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, an even bigger schemer who immediately conspired to have the court 'wise woman’ – a sort of royal adviser-cum-soothsayer – murdered.

Before his 16th birthday Edward fell ill and died of consumption. Northumberland had by this stage done a deal to marry his 16-year-old son to the 15-year-old Lady Jane, daughter of his friend the Earl of Suffolk and greatgranddaughter of Henry VII, and convinced the dying Edward to make her heir to deny his Catholic half-sister, Mary, the throne. When the king died, supporters of Lady Jane placed her on the throne. But the coup was unpopular with the London mob, and its leader Northumberland was pelted with excrement. The regime lasted nine days, after which Northumberland’s army was defeated, the ringleaders executed, and Jane imprisoned. Mary at first showed leniency, but when Grey’s father was found to be in the conspiracy, the queen had her executed, along with her 16-year-old husband, whom Jane had never liked but who died, rather romantically, at the end, by the same axe. While Jane showed immense bravery and stoicism, Northumberland desperately pleaded for his life and claimed that he was Catholic all along, although he finally admitted on the scaffold that, ‘I have deserved a thousand deaths’. Suffolk also begged for mercy but to no avail. Mary reigned for only five years, her health had never been good, and her sister Elizabeth would revert the country to Protestantism. But the succession was never so challenged again, and when she died, her crown passed peacefully, and unquestioned, to her cousin James VI of Scotland, from the line of Henry Tudor but also from the men beyond the wall, a strange and cunning man who – rather understandably – walked

around at all times wearing a stab-proof vest. He would now style himself not the King of Scotland or England but of Great Britain. The game of thrones was over. When James’ son went to the block, in January 1649, it was not to make another man king, but to rid the Realm of kings altogether. The genius of Game of Thrones is that it successfully captures the motives and mindsets of people before modernity; despite being from the fantasy genre, it does this better than most historical fiction, which tends to impose modern ways of thinking on people for whom it would have been totally alien, that is, almost everyone who lived before the 18th century. And so it tells us much about our history. The one exception in this story is Henry VI, the mad king who found the whole business too much of an ordeal, and who is certainly the most sympathetic character, suited far more to the 21st than the 15th century. His reign was a disaster, yet for all his father’s great victories and the stirring words put into his mouth by William Shakespeare, Henry V left behind nothing but corpses and grieving mothers, while his feeble-minded son gave us King’s College, Cambridge, and Eton, two of the finest educational establishments in Britain. They still commemorate the mad king on May 21 every year, the anniversary of his death, where in the Presence Chamber of the Plantagenet Kings in the Tower of London, the headmaster of Eton College and the provost of King’s lay flowers on the spot where he was killed.

Further reading Ackroyd, Peter Foundation Ashley, Mike British Kings and Queens Brooke, Christopher The Saxons and Norman Kings Clements, Jonathan Vikings Crossley-Holland, Kevin The Anglo-Saxon World Duffy, Maureen England Fraser, Antonia The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England Goodwin, George Fatal Colours Groom, Nick Union Jack The Story of the British Flag Hannan, Daniel How We invented Freedom Hindley, Geoffrey A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons Holmes, George The Later Middle Ages 1272-1485 Jones, Dan The Plantagenets Lacey, Robert Great Tales from English History (Parts One and Two) McLynn, Frank Lionheart and Lackland Morris, Marc The Norman Conquest Mortimer, Ian The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III Oliver, Neil A History of Ancient Britain Ormrod, W.M. The Kings and Queen of England Palmer, Alan Kings and Queens of England Read, Piers Paul The Templars Schama, Simon A History of Britain Speck, W.A. A Concise History of Britain Strong, Roy The Story of Britain

Weir, Alison Lancaster and York White, R.J. A Short History of England Wood, Harriet The Battle of Hastings *There is also a website, http://history-behind-game-ofthrones.com which looks at the real-life events that inspired Game of Thrones.

Footnotes i Kendall, Paul Murray Richard the Third ii Bryson, Bill Mother Tongue iii There is debate about the circumstances of Tyler’s death, and who drew a weapon first and why. Suffice it to say that the meeting didn’t go well for him. iv Much of this is of course conjecture or guesswork, there being few sources for the period; most of our information comes from a miserable British chronicler called Gildas, whose account of the period, The Ruin and Conquest of Britain, is unsurprisingly rather negative about the recent turn of events. v Freeman, Charles A New History of Early Christianity vi Clements, Jonathan Vikings vii Schama, Simon A History of Britain viii Schama, Simon ix Schama, Simon x http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/mar/24/gameof-thrones-realistic-history xi Morris, Marc The Norman Conquest xii Jones, Dan The Plantagenets xiii Jones, Dan xiv Schama, Simon xv Ormrod, W.D. The Kings and Queens of England xvi http://history-behind-game-of-thrones.com/realevents/unsullied-thermopylae xvii Anyone who could prove he owned land at the start of

Richard’s reign did not have to show how his family came by it, because before that was beyond memory. xviii Jones, Dan xix Hannan, Daniel How We Invented Freedom xx Jones, Dan xxi Like almost everything from this period, this is disputed by some historians xxii http://history-behind-game-ofthrones.com/gameofthrones/walder-frey-weddings-warwick xxiii http://history-behind-game-of-thrones.com/realevents/redwedding xxiv Goodwin, George Fatal Colours xxv This is admittedly a colourful version of events. What really took place, to paraphrase comedian Stewart Lee, was probably not quite as romantic. xxvi Weir, Alison Weir Lancaster and York xxvii Admittedly it was Thomas More who first wrote this, and he was not exactly an impartial observer of Richard III; however Gloucester was in charge of the Tower at the time, so it’s not implausible. xxviii Goodwin, George Fatal Rivalry xxix This is at least one tradition for the rhyme, first recorded in the 18th century but thought to be much older. xxx How much say the young boy had in this is obviously open to question.

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