The Realm: The True history behind Game of Thrones (12 page)

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.
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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’.
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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.
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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 16
^th
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.

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-of-thrones.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.

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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.

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Freeman, Charles
A New History of Early Christianity

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Clements, Jonathan
Vikings

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Schama, Simon
A History of Britain

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Schama, Simon

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Schama, Simon

^x
http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/mar/24/game-of-thrones-realistic-history

^xi
Morris, Marc
The Norman Conquest

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Jones, Dan
The Plantagenets

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Jones, Dan

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Schama, Simon

^xv
Ormrod, W.D.
The Kings and Queens of England

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http://history-behind-game-of-thrones.com/real-events/unsullied-thermopylae

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 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.