The Realm: The True history behind Game of Thrones Page 9
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-great-granddaughter 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 lady-in-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 great-granddaughter 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.