The Realm: The True history behind Game of Thrones (6 page)

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.)
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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’)
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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.
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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.