Iron, Fire and Ice

by Ed West

  As well as the throne, Charles IV had inherited the dispute with the English over the border region between Gascony and French-controlled Aquitaine. When the kings of England and France had met in June 1320, Philippe V had demanded Edward do fealty for Gascony. Edward had already done homage, which involved the surrender of a particular fief, or property, by a vassal to a lord where he swore to become his man, from the French homme; the lord then returned it, symbolically handing him an item associated with the property, often something that grew on the land. Fealty was something different altogether, an oath of fidelity to serve against all others, something that Edward as king could not do; he exploded in anger.

  Then in November 1323 conflict broke out when some Gascons tore down a fortress that a French lord had built on disputed territory. The following year King Charles declared Edward’s land in Gascony forfeit and the countries were now sliding into war.

  For Despenser, this was the perfect pretext to undermine the queen; all French nationals were dismissed from the court, depriving Isabella of her closest friends and confidents, and all their goods confiscated. It got worse, with the queen’s children taken away from her, the girls being sent to live with Despenser’s family while Despenser’s wife Eleanor de Clare—also the king’s niece—was appointed as the queen’s housekeeper to follow her everywhere. She was also, quite obviously, a spy who kept the queen’s seal on her person and reported everything back to her husband and his clan.

  Isabella must by now have hated her husband’s lover, and yet the queen was more skilled at the art of court politics than her enemies, perhaps having learned it in Paris. One element of court life represented by Margaery Tyrell in Westeros is the art of dissembling, because for a woman at the center of court no one should ever really know her true feelings. Isabella mastered this skill, and never gave away any signs of her real, burning hatred toward Despenser and, increasingly, her husband.

  The impasse with King Charles threatened to descend into all-out war, and it was now that Queen Isabella, outwardly forgiving to her dear husband and his trusted advisor, suggested that she take their son Edward over to do homage for Gascony in Edward’s place. This would satisfy the king of France without humiliating the king of England and, for Despenser, remove an irritant from the king’s presence.

  When the queen left for France, Edward wrote, “on her departure, she did not seem to anyone to be offended” and gave a farewell kiss to Despenser: “towards no one was she more agreeable, myself excepted.” He noted “the amiable looks and words between them, and the great friendship she professed for him on her crossing the sea.”27 Despenser had been unsure about the queen’s suggestion and her motives, but when at last he realized how they had been outwitted and placed in check, it was too late.

  Meanwhile Roger Mortimer had been languishing in the Tower of London, a fortress from which only one man had ever escaped. And yet the earl could be persuasive and had managed to turn the captain of the dungeon, who therefore arranged to drug all the guards on the night of a banquet held once a year to honor the Tower’s patron saint. Mortimer made a daring escape, dug his way through a passageway and in the darkness climbed down to the river where a waiting boat took him away. The king sent out search parties, expecting him to head toward his stronghold in the border region, but in fact he had gone in the opposite direction, to France, where his wife had relatives.

  Mortimer went to Picardy, and from there to Paris—where he and Isabella fell in love. The marcher lord was an extremely domineering and masculine man, already had ten children by his wife, and for a woman in a loveless marriage with a man who did not desire her, he may have been irresistible.28

  Romance runs through Martin’s world, with the young Sansa Stark epitomizing the naive idealization of honorable knights and damsels in distress, at least until the grim reality of the world sinks in. At the start of the epic she believes in the idea that a handsome prince such as Joffrey must by definition have the qualities attached to his class, such as nobility and gentleness (both of these words originally meant “high-born”); unlike her sister she enthusiastically adopts the traditional roles expected of an aristocratic lady, in particular courtesy.29 However, a fondness for such a romantic idealization did not suggest weakness or even naivety. Isabella, as strong-willed as her father, was nevertheless obsessed with romance books—indeed, that is one thing she had in common with her lover, who also saw himself as a latter-day King Arthur, and they both “possessed an inordinate fondness for dreadful, bodice-ripping chivalric romances of heroic derring-do.”30

  Isabella regularly borrowed books from the Tower of London library, all of them romance stories that we might think of as somewhat corny. For all that she had seen and experienced, and understood how weak and devious men could be, she still believed in the ideal.

  Now the queen, in possession of her son Edward, was extremely dangerous to her husband, for she presented not just an opposition but an opposition with a viable replacement. The king directed her to return, and when she did not, he cut off payment, continuing to send letters to his wife and son; and yet her brother was not going to allow her to go hungry. Edward also wrote to his son, now thirteen, who was put in a very difficult position; he, no doubt, hated Despenser and what he’d done to the family, but he had no love for Mortimer either, a domineering bully who was now openly the queen’s lover.

  King Charles, especially with his own history, was also uncomfortable at the openly adulterous relationship and so Isabella, Mortimer, and Edward had to flee north, to the Count of Hainault in what is now Belgium. Here she was forced to do what many desperate exiles have done down the years—arrange a marriage alliance in return for a foreign army. Pledging her son Edward to the count’s daughter Philippa, she was provided with troops with which to sail across the sea (it so happened that Edward and Philippa had spent time together and had already grown fond of each other).

  The Queen of England had now been declared an enemy alien and her lands had been confiscated for the safety of the kingdom, but her rival court abroad began to attract leading noblemen from England, among them the king’s half-brother Edmund, Earl of Kent. She now planned her crossing to England.

  Gathering her forces, she made land in East Anglia, and of two thousand soldiers sent to contest Isabella, only fifty-five turned up, and they switched sides. London collapsed into chaos and the invasion was met with widespread support, and soon Edward and the younger Despenser were isolated in Caerphilly Castle in south Wales. They should have stayed there, one of the strongest in Europe, with thirty-foot-high walls that were twelve feet thick, and well supplied. Instead they made a dash for the sea but were stuck for six days in torrential weather before being forced to return.

  Hugh le Despenser’s father, aged sixty-five, had been condemned to die as a traitor and hanged. Afterwards his torso was suspended by the arms with two strong ropes for four days, after which it was chopped up and thrown to some dogs. The younger Despenser’s fate would be far worse; after being condemned by a group of barons, including Mortimer and Lancaster’s brother Henry, Earl of Leicester, he was sentenced to be executed in London, but tried to starve himself to death. Instead, now desperately weakened by hunger, he endured an agonizing death in Hereford, as the authorities worried the journey to the capital would kill him. Dressed in a reversed coat of arms—symbol of treachery—a crown of nettles was placed on his head, with mocking biblical verses about hubris carved into his skin with knives. He was dragged through the city by four horses, to the sound of trumpets and bagpipes, and half-hanged on a fifty-foot-tall-gallows so that all might see. At one point he fell unconscious but was cut down and slapped awake before his intestines were cut out; likewise, “his member and his testicles were cut off, because he was a heretic and a sodomite, even, it was said, with the king.” 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 o
ff.

  Mortimer declared that the magnates had deposed Edward because he had not followed his coronation oath and was under the control of evil advisers. And so, in January 1327, Parliament was called in the name of Edward’s son, with Mortimer appointed Keeper of the Realm. Edward II witnessed Sir Thomas Blount, steward of the household, break his staff of office to show the household had been disbanded.

  The king was moved to Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, but after a rescue attempt by supporters he was found dead. A story soon circulated that he had been killed with a red-hot poker inserted in his anus so that no signs of violence would show on his corpse.31 Almost certainly Mortimer was responsible.

  Just a few weeks later, in April 1327, an army was sent north to battle the Scots again, but it ended in failure once more. The English force had gone to Percy-controlled Topcliffe in Yorkshire and onto to Durham, which French chronicler Jean le Bel, a soldier in this army, called “the last outpost of civilization.”32 Believing the Scots to be attacking through Cumberland, the English were tricked, sending their men onto the western approach to the border, while Black Douglas and his men went east and burned and pillaged Northumberland, sending terrified villagers into fortresses and woods. The Scots could not be defeated, and so a treaty was signed in 1328 recognizing their independence formally, much to the fury of the boy king Edward, whose sister Joan was married off to Bruce’s son David. Robert the Bruce died the following year, of leprosy, but the king beyond the wall had succeeded.

  11

  THE SEVEN

  They watch over all of us, ready to dole out mercy, or justice.

  —LANCEL LANNISTER

  Religion evolves as societies change and eventually, in the most complex of Middle Eastern civilizations in the first millennium BC, there developed what evolutionary psychologist Ara Norenzayan called “Big Gods”—all-powerful deities who were concerned with how people lived and behaved. Previously the spirits people worshipped did not especially care what men did with their lives, but increasingly they acted in a moralistic way, even if the behavior of the Old Testament God appears to us cruel at times. The sophisticated Assyrians worshipped a number of deities but were perhaps the first to raise the lead god, Ashur, to such importance that the others almost lost their divinity in comparison. Between the tenth and sixth centuries BC, the Hebrew pantheon of gods evolved into the worship of just one, Yahweh, but monotheism exploded across the ancient world only when a sect of Judaism began to proclaim that their leader Jesus of Nazareth, crucified by the Romans in Jerusalem, was the promised Messiah, or as it was translated into Greek, Christos—and not just for the Jews, but for all humanity.

  This new cult promised eternal life for the poor and virtuous and an end to sacrifice, God having made the final sacrifice with His Son. In 34 AD they had their first martyr, Stephen, stoned to death in front of a crowd that included a Greek-speaking Jew called Saul who was at the time zealously hunting down members of the new group. Soon after, in one of the most fateful events in history, Saul was on his way to Damascus when he was struck blind and saw a vision of Jesus, and joined the followers of the “Messiah,” these Christians. 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 180 AD.1 By 200 it had already established a foothold in Britain, and the island’s first martyr, a soldier called Alban, died in 304 after sheltering a Christian priest and converting. The new religion, although sometimes tolerated, suffered periodic persecution from the Roman authorities, among the worst being the wave of destruction and murder that followed the Emperor Diocletian’s edict of February 24, 303, which ordered the destruction of all churches and the burning of all their scriptures. Countless Christians were burned to death or otherwise gruesomely murdered in the “Great Persecution” that followed.

  The fanatical red priestess Melisandre is extremely intolerant of other religions, destroying any signs of their worship and indeed killing unbelievers. She convinces Stannis to abandon the worship of the Seven and burn their effigies, and to also force conversion on unbelievers; Stannis then goes into battle with the flaming heart of the Lord of Light on his banner.

  And so, in 313 the Roman Emperor Constantine, before a great battle with a rival for the throne, had seen a vision of a crucifix in the sky with the words “by this sign you will conquer.” He ordered his troops to paint a cross on their shield before the battle, and soon after this victory he legalized Christianity, and later converted himself. But, having achieved tolerance and then dominance after centuries of persecution, it was not long before the Christians turned persecutors, both of pagans and—more zealously—other Christians, often over the most pedantic of doctrinal differences.

  One of the most revered saints from the late Roman period, St Martin of Tours, was also an enthusiastic destroyer of pagan temples in Gaul before his death in 397—although local people would not allow him to knock down a particular tree, which remained sacred. St Martin’s desecration of pagan shrines was universal. When the king of Northumbria accepted the new God, the first thing his chief religious leader, freshly converted, did was throw a spear into the old pagan place of worship, angry that the gods had not favored him. As Samwell says: “The Seven have never answered my prayers. Perhaps the old gods will.”2

  But worship of the new God was not spread by conquest, and indeed many conquerors of Christian people took the religion of their subjects, rather than vice versa. The Targaryens, upon subjugating Westeros, accepted the faith of the Seven rather than bringing their own religion, which has often been the case with conquering peoples. At the collapse of the western Roman Empire, many barbarian tribes became Christian as they overwhelmed Roman lands, if they were not already converted. Later conquerors of the Middle East adopted Islam as their faith; on purely practical grounds it’s far easier to rule people if you share their religion. And after the fall of the western empire, Christianity, once a religion of prostitutes and beggars and outcasts, would become institutionalized under bishops who assumed authority in the crumbling cities.

  SEPT AND STATE

  The religion of the Seven is more formalized than that of the Old Gods, just as Christianity was more formalized than traditional European religion; they have temples called Septs and their own caste of priests, the Septons. Like with Christianity, the religion has some emphasis on sexual shame and guilt, the Septons playing a leading part in Cersei’s humiliation for adultery. The faith of the Seven is linked to the state, with the High Septon anointing the king, and his support is essential for any monarch. Like with western Christianity, the king is expected to follow the religion, with official ceremonies conducted by Septons and Septas, male and female priests respectively. The clergy of the Faith of the Seven are chosen by the Council of the Most Devout, and people take oaths to the Seven, like men and women in medieval Europe took an oath to God. There is also inevitably a clash between church and state, as in real life, where many Church leaders ended their lives violently as a result.

  Of the seven Westerosi godheads, three are masculine, representing divine justice, courage, and production; three are feminine, representing fertility, purity, and wisdom. The seventh, the Stranger, is “unknowable and transcendent,”3 described in A Clash of Kings as “less and more than human, unknown and unknowable.” There are obvious comparisons here with Christianity, which has a Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, three and one at the same time, with the Stranger resembling Christianity’s Holy Spirit. The Stranger also provides for outcasts, which is why the dwarf Tyrion Lannister prays to it.

  In Martin’s own words, “The faith of the Seven is of course based on [the] medieval Catholic church” and the Seven based on the Trinity. The religion of the Seven also contains the physical aspects of European medieval Christianity, such as cathedrals, stained glass windows, church bells, altars in candlelight, and catacombs. The classic western style of cathedral in the popular imagination is Gothic, called the “Fren
ch style” at the time and which originated in northern France (it was only later called Gothic, originally as an insult, because its pointed arches were seen as the antithesis of Roman architecture, and so more suitable to barbarian Goths). Almost all the best-known cathedrals, such as Notre-Dame de Paris, Chartres, Cologne, and Lincoln, are Gothic, although the Great Sept of Baelor is designed to look more exotic.

  That Catholic Christianity came to dominate Europe had much to do with one very successful barbarian tribe, the Franks. Their supremacy began during a period commonly known as the Dark Ages, although this is a term medieval historians dislike for a number of reasons. However, while “dark” historically refers to the lack of historical records of the period, in every measure of progress there was a sharp decline both in western European living standards and intellectual output from 500 to 1000AD.4

  For some years it was also literally a time of darkness. Just as in Westeros, where there are folk memories of times gone by when the sun disappeared and the crops failed, so on earth the doom of Rome was followed by cataclysm. By the mid-sixth century the imperial city, once a hubristic metropolis that ruled most of the known world, was being fought over by Greeks from the east and Goths from the north, a site that would have stunned Romans from two centuries earlier.

  While uncultured tribes from beyond the Alps had swarmed into northern Italy in the late fifth century as Rome collapsed, and the west was overrun by blond-haired barbarians, in the east the empire survived in its new capital, Constantinople, and would do so for another thousand years. This Greek-speaking empire became known to western historians as Byzantium, although the “Byzantines” just called themselves Romans.