The Realm: The True history behind Game of Thrones Read online

  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 16-year-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 beca
me 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 then-common belief that it could change its spots. For Edward would side with whoever was winning, then stab them in the back and twist the knife.

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

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

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

  Although there was occasional unrest, including from outlaws called the ‘Disinherited’, and the Sheriff of Essex was accused of having plotted to release flying cockerels carrying incendiary bombs over London during 1267,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 Cous
ins' 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 50-something Llywelyn married the 23-year-old daughter of Simon de Montfort, without the king’s permission (and without even having met her). Prince Llewelyn had reason to be confident; he had won control of two-thirds of Wales, and had a court large enough to include a bard, a harpist, falconers and a ‘silentiary’, whose job it was to keep the rowdiness to an acceptable level. The Anglo-Normans had been encroaching on southern Wales for 200 years, but in deepest Wales (pura Wallia), where Llewelyn’s rule held sway, the old laws still applied; disputes were settled by blood feuds, and a thief would be pardoned if he had passed 10 houses and ‘failed to obtain anything to eat’.