Hollow Crowns, Deadly Thrones – Political Philosophies of Two Clashing Kings

This is by close friend of the blog Steven Attewell, who as you probably know runs Race for the Iron Throne. Or from the many podcasts he’s done with the house moron, SEK. He’s also written a series of essays that examine the politics and history of the world of Game of Thrones, which we thought people interested in both Game of Thrones and political science (not that there are ANY of those people here at LG&M) would like to read.

This essay is part 4 in a five part series on the monarchy of Westeros.

For Part 1 on the constitution (in an Aristotlean sense) of Westeros, see here.

For Part 2 on the foundation of the monarchy and the rise and fall of “dracocracy,” see here.

For Part 3 on failed attempts to refound the monarchy on alternative power bases, see here.

For Steve’s previous series of essays on the Hands of the King, see here.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR ALL OF THE SONG OF ICE AND FIRE BOOKS

The Targaryen Kings were no more. Long live the kings.

At the very end of the third century of Westerosi unification, the victory of the rebel coalition of Houses Arryn, Baratheon, Stark, and Tully, the crowning of Robert Baratheon as king, his marriage to Cersei Lannister and the birth of two supposedly Baratheon sons, the successful defeat of the Greyjoy Rebellion, and a decade-long summer of peace and plenty during the tenure of Jon Arryn as Hand of the King, seemed to have rescued the monarchy from internal instability and refounded it on a strong foundation of alliances between five of the Great Houses.

Yet in 298 AL, the unexpected death of King Robert, the blood vendetta between Houses Stark and Lannister, and the disputed parentage of Joffrey Baratheon gave rise to a war that has completely destabilized the monarchy more than any previous crisis. Two of the Seven Kingdoms declared independence (with the Riverlands siding with one of the secessionist powers), threatening the loss of huge amounts of territory, population, and resources. Even more than the King in the North and the King of the Iron Islands, Renly and Stannis Baratheon are at the very heart of A Clash of Kings – as the two brothers are the only kings who clash directly not just over who should be king, but also to what it means to be king.

Their dispute, and the issues it raises, sheds much light on what the Westerosi monarchy is and will be.

Renly Baratheon’s Conception of Monarchy – Military Power, Personal Excellence, and Feudalism

“You have the better claim, Stannis, but I still have the larger army.”

As the brother who lacks a strong conventional claim, Renly Baratheon must, out of necessity, come up with a novel justification for why he should be king. His solution is to directly attack the concept of legitimate succession through agnatic primogeniture in favor of “might makes right:”

This is a shading of the truth, to say the least. Far from hundred year old marriages, Robert was Daenerys‘ second cousin – and had he succeeded in his drive to eliminate Daenerys and Viserys, he would have been the rightful heir under Targaryen inheritance traditions – and his blood link to the Targaryens was arguably what placed Robert above Jon Arryn, Eddard Stark, Hoster Tully, and the other leaders of the rebellion. At the same time, Robert always showed a certain inferiority complex and resentment towards those who still privately called him usurper that Renly seems not to have shared (“The Targaryens called Robert usurper. He seemed to be able to bear the shame. So shall I.”), in part because Renly was raised as a prince. Renly’s position on the senselessness of blood succession is a bit odd, when we consider that Renly intends at the Siege of Storm’s End not merely to defeat his brother’s army but to kill his brother to strengthen his own claim (“Your brother is the lawful heir.” “While he lives.”), and that his entire plan in A Game of Thrones to place Margaery in Robert’s bed only works if he knows that Cersei‘s kids aren’t Robert’s and is willing to use that fact, which makes his disbelief in Stannis‘ claims at their parley to ring rather hollow.

Truth aside, Renly’s appeal to military supremacy has a certain pragmatic sense given that he has an army of 100,000, which is a staggering size for a medieval army. [1]When you have an army bigger than all your other rivals combined. arguments that military strength should trump everything definitely favors his argument in the short-term. When Renly offers to Catelyn to count his camp fires, as:

there is no denying the crude strength of his argument that his opponents should bend the knee because he possesses a predominance (if not a hegemony) of military force, lest they be destroyed outright. In many ways, it’s the same argument Aegon made to his peers before the Conquest.

In the long-term, however, it’s an extremely dangerous political theory for the stability of the Westerosi monarchy. Renly has the most troops at that moment, but there’s no way to be sure that Renly or his descendant, or his descendant’s descendant will have the same numerical advantage in the future. If his argument is accepted as binding precedent, Renly will forever have to remain on his guard lest someone out there strike while he is unaware since it’s now accepted that a strongman can legitimately overthrow a sitting king. Even if he succeeded in holding the Iron Throne for the duration of his natural life, the odds are good that his death will set off a new civil war as each of the Great Houses assesses the new balance of power.

Inheritance by blood is not a political principle that most of us accept today, but in its time it promised stability and a predictable consistency in the transition of power. When the alternative isn’t representative government or an elective mandate but rather military strength, the results are brutal and chaotic, as the Romans found out. Augustus was able to sweep away the Republic and found an Empire largely because the public was terrified of the wars, assassinations, and purges that marked the period between the death of Julius Caesar and the end of the Antonian-Octavian civil war. Likewise, as much as the paranoia, tyranny, and outright madness of the Julio-Claudian dynasty was seen afterwards as preferable to the chaos of the “Year of Four Emperors,” which saw legionary uprisings, inter-legionary, Galba’s purges, more rebellions, the assassination of Galba at Otho’s instigation, Otho’s defeat at the hands of Vitellius, Vitellius’ turn to murder and confiscation as a solution to imperial bankruptcy, and so on and so forth. Likewise, the death of Commodus in AD 192 gave the Romans the “Year of Five Emperors,” where Pertinax was assassinated by the Praetorian Guard and the imperial title auctioned by the Praetorian Guard, and three rival emperors emerging in Syria, Britain, and Pannonia.

And don’t even get me started on the “Year of Six Emperors”…

“It’s a fool’s law, wouldn’t you agree? Why the oldest son, and not the best-fitted?”

Given these shortcomings, Renly buttresses his martial argument with the idea of a kind of meritocratic monarchy, founded on the personal charisma of a king who should embody the ideal ruler. As Renly argues, “The crown will suit me, as it never suited Robert and would not suit Stannis. I have it in me to be a great king, strong yet generous, clever, just, diligent, loyal to my friends and terrible to my enemies, yet capable of forgiveness, patient.” (Catelyn II, ACOK) Charisma as a necessary quality for the succession places Renly on much stronger ground vis-a-vis Stannis (and Joffrey and Balon for that matter, although Robb at this point has an equally strong hold on Northern loyalties), and Renly uses it both as a source of legitimacy and a tool to power. As much as Olenna disapproves after the fact, Renly’s charm wins him the support of a hundred thousand swords even when he had a weak direct claim to many of them – especially the 20,000 Stormlords whose loyalty to House Baratheon ought to have placed Stannis first, or the Florents who are tied to Stannis by marriage.

The importance of charisma and personal excellence also explains why Renly put so much emphasis on creating his Rainbow Guard, an innovative blend of knightly chivalry religious symbolism that is especially useful against his brother’s newfound devotion to the Lord of Light, to endow himself with the trappings of kingship ahead of his formal installation on the Iron Throne. Likewise, his use of tourneys and feats isn’t just meant to allow him to gain strength while his enemies fight each other to exhaustion, but it also acts as a lure for tens of thousands of idealistic knights, who come for the fame and the food and get seduced by Renly’s personal charm to the point where they’re willing to fight and die for him.

This theory of monarchy has deep roots in our own history. The idea of a sacral or sacred king goes all the way back to the Bronze Age, where the king was seen as chosen by the gods or god as a link between the mundane and the divine. In order to properly exemplify the idea of the king-as-avatar-of-the-divine, the sacred king is supposed to be physically perfect, because as with the Fisher King, an imperfection in the king threatens a corruption in the land. Nuada of the Silver Hand, the first King of the Tuatha De Danann of Irish myth, loses his arm in battle with the champion of the Fir Bolg and becomes ineligible to be king until he is given an arm of living silver at which point the Tuatha De Danann can overthrow the oppressive Fomorians. In James George Frazer’s influential book, The Golden Bough, this physical perfection is tied in with the idea that the sacred king is a ritual sacrifice, and in order for the sacrifice to end the winter and bring in a new spring, the sacrifice must be without blemish so that it’s pleasing to the gods.

This idea was carried forward into the Middle Ages, with the sacred king being seen as someone touched by God, and therefore capable of semi-miraculous abilities such as the “royal touch” with which monarchs were supposed to cure disease, through to Louis XIV’s emphasis on the “divine right of kings” and his construction of Versailles as a theater in which the nobility would become an audience, with the king as the center of attention, a glorious Sun King whose beauty and majesty the whole world depends on.

Renly would have felt right at home amid the pageantry and high fashion, and it certainly helped his cause that he looked the part of a proper king, as opposed to drunken, gone-to-seed Robert. The question is: do we take this image at face value, or like Donal Noye, should we question whether there’s mettle under the shiny surface? At the end of the day, while Renly is certainly charming and good at public relations, it’s less than clear whether this is a complete skill set. For all that show-Renly disparages whether good soldiers make good kings, his own lack of military prowess means that it takes him over a month and a half to travel from Highgarden to Bitterbridge, when he could have easily made it to King’s Landing in eighteen days and captured the Iron Throne a month before Stannis could have put Storm’s End to siege.

And as much as Renly’s good at charming people in good times, it remains to be seen how he would perform when winter comes and vassals get stroppy.

“All the chivalry of the south rides with me.”

At the same time, for all that Renly is revolutionary in how he seeks to take the Iron Throne, his conception of the nature of the monarchy is rather old-fashioned. Renly posits a rather extreme form of weak-feudal monarchy which almost verges on an elective monarchy, in which the king essentially is his bannermen:

The nature of the Westerosi monarchy is a study in change: the early Targaryen monarchy was a dracocracy, but it was also a centralizing monarchy that established a royal bureaucracy, that effectively suppressed the political independence of the Faith of the Seven for three hundred years, that turned to dynastic marriages and outside conquest and religious patronage and police states as new foundations for the power of the monarchy.

By contrast, Renly reverses this tradition in favor of empowering a coalition of noble houses. At the end of the day, it’s House Tyrell and the Houses of the Reach, along with the Stormlords, who Renly sees as having the power to decide who will become king. To the extent that Renly sees a place for the king himself, it’s as a giver of lands and honors as rewards, where the virtues of generosity and loyalty to friends are foremost. The extent of this generosity can be seen in his offer to Robb Stark:

Renly is offering Robb what we could call a “Dornish Compromise,” where the North is allowed to maintain a symbolic, cultural, and judicial semi-autonomy, with the Starks as Kings in the North as technical equals to the King on the Iron Throne who do personal homage to Renly as part of a historic alliance between House Baratheon and House Stark – hence “as his father supported Robert.” For someone as attuned to the symbolism of monarchy as Renly Baratheon, the statement “King is only a word,” is a bit startling, given how important and powerful words can be. At the same time, Renly’s emphasis on “homage,” “overlord,” “fealty,” “loyalty,” “service – the core concepts of feudalism – is not accidental.

Within a weak feudal system, where land holdings were often widely distributed rather than contiguous, it wasn’t unheard of for a lord of one country to become king in another (as was the case with William of Normandy and his Angevin heirs, who did homage to the kings of France as dukes of Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Brittany, Poiters, Acquitaine, etc. while still retaining their equal status as independent kings of England). What counts, Renly is arguing is whether Robb will render military “service,” and put the Stark/Tully host of 40,000 to his own 100,000, and build a new Baratheon/Tyrell/Stark/Tully alliance that can hold the Seven Kingdoms.

At the extreme, what we are seeing here is an idea of the Seven Kingdoms as a true federal monarchy. The danger to Renly here is that he will have succeeded in retaking Robert’s throne, only to find himself in the same bind as before, only with Tyrells demanding royal patronage appointments in return for Tyrell financing of royal debts, becoming the true power behind the Iron Throne and eventually sparking conflict between insiders and outsiders. Such conflicts over patronage and power could easily lead to wars of independence as outsiders come to view the central authority as corrupt and no longer an honest broker for their interests – and the more decentralized the monarchy is, the harder it would be to stop them. To be fair, he is smarter and better-suited to these kinds of political intrigues than his brother, and while the Tyrells will no doubt be as greedy and as grasping as their predecessors, they’re at least less likely to try to disrupt the succession.

At the same time, it’s a dangerous precedent for Renly to embrace, given that (had Renly succeeded on these terms), Robb Stark at the very least would have led a largely successful movement for autonomy (Balon Greyjoy probably wouldn’t have gotten the same offer), netting him two out of Seven Kingdoms.

Stannis Baratheon’s Conception of Monarchy – Hereditary, Contractual, Unitary, and Judicial

Stannis Baratheon‘s vision of monarchy is diametrically opposed to his younger brother’s: where Renly emphasizes martial power, he insists on succession by traditional inheritance laws; where Renly embraces the sacral kingship, he promotes the idea of a social contract; where Renly’s acceptance of feudalism stretches to federalism, he is adamant on the unitary nature of the nation. However, Stannis also puts forward a new justification for the monarchy as a source of justice that goes beyond anything asserted by previous rulers.

“The Iron Throne is mine by rights. All who deny that are my foes.”

In a way, it was almost destined that the Lord of Dragonstone would enter the War of Five Kings on behalf of the principle that the law of blood inheritance must be upheld at all costs. Most of Stannis’ life has been structured by his sense of duty to family, beginning with the most formative experience of his adulthood – the Siege of Storm’s End. As he says when tasked by Davos that he chose his brother over King Aerys, “That was a hard choosing. My blood or my liege. My brother or my king.” In the end, Stannis chose family over royalty (although arguably as a younger brother without lands or titles, Stannis didn’t formally owe fealty to the king), and while the Legends and Lore extras from the Game of Thrones DVD aren’t precisely canon, the explanation given in Stannis’ video that “there are deeper, older laws. The younger brother bows before the older,” fits so perfectly with his character that it might as well be. Certainly, it fits with his argument to Catelyn later on that “I have no quarrel with Renly, should he prove dutiful. I am his elder, and his king. I want only what is mine by rights. Renly owes me loyalty and obedience. I mean to have it.”

When we see Stannis make his claim to the Iron Throne known in only the second chapter he appears in, it makes sense that he stands foresquare on the principle of inheritance by blood right:

The text of his letter betrays a deep obsession with the nature of heredity, as we might expect from the man who first suspected that Joffrey‘s bastardy, took his suspicions to Jon Arryn, and spent what must have been months looking in the face of each of Robert‘s bastards (which, given his experience with the conception of Edric Storm, wouldn’t have been pleasant). Stannis describes himself as the “trueborn” son of his and Robert’s parents, which parallels his claim that Robert left no “trueborn issue of his body.”

Robert’s supercharged libido might be a sign that he gave free reign to the demands of nature, but even that is preferable to the “abominations of incest” which to Stannis are inversions of nature. After speaking of sons and brothers, he switches to the abstract “boy” and “girl” when speaking of Joffrey, Tommen, and Myrcella, a sign of how their bastardy renders them less human in his eyes. Given this perspective, it’s no wonder that Renly’s attempt to seize the crown angers Stannis to the point of war, given that it represents not merely disloyalty but an inversion of the oldest laws, the laws of nature.

As I’ve said, the value of hereditary succession is that it establishes a stable precedent whereby power can be handed down from one ruler to the next without recourse to bloodshed. And certainly in Stannis’ experience in two separate wars, bloodshed and chaos are the result when the right to rule is determined by military strength. However, the example of Aerys II brings up a problem that Stannis’ philosophy doesn’t quite have an answer for: what does a “true man” and loyal subject do when the king violates the laws and customs of his country, in other words, what does a monarchist do when the monarch is a tyrant?

This is a problem that was historically confronted in the 17^th century in the British Isles during the reign of Charles I. Prompted by conflicts between the Parliament and the king over taxation, foreign policy, and religion, and between Scotland and England over the extension of High Anglican prayer books into Calvinist Scotland, new theories of politics were developed. The Parliamentarians in England, for example, while still portraying themselves as loyal monarchists advanced in the Petition of Right and innumerable pamphlets, put forward the argument that the king was himself bound by a tradition of laws going back to the Magna Carta (and beyond to a largely imaginary idea of a liberal Saxon constitution) that he could not violate without becoming a tyrant and losing the loyalty of his subjects. Likewise, the Scottish Covenanters developed the theory that only in religious matters, subjects could resist the authority of the sovereign king when the sovereign denied their liberties.

It’s not an accident that this same time period saw the development of social contract theory among philosophers – who might have helped a teenage Stannis resolve his “hard choosing.” More on this in a second…

“My duty is to the realm… we must do our duty, no? Great our small, we must do our duty.”

As Stannis finds out quite early in A Clash of Kings, demanding loyalty by right of birth yields few followers. His turn to a new religion, a human parallel to his failed experiment with Proudwing, does produce some results in the form of 20-odd thousand soldiers when Melisandre‘s shadowy assassin takes out Renly. If we can take from events any lessons on political theory, I think this serves as conclusive proof that charisma only lasts as long as the charismatic monarch draws breath, and that military strength can be amazingly hollow when it depends so heavily on feudal oaths to an individual liege lord. At the same time, Stannis’ defeat at the Battle of the Blackwater, and the speed at which so many of his lords bent the knee to Joffrey, can be seen as proof that heredity alone cannot inspire the loyalty and endurance necessary to win an extended civil war full of ups and downs.

Thus, if A Clash of Kings can be read as an exploration on the different ways on which would-be kings can stake a claim to power, it can also be argued that A Storm of Swords is a story about how monarchs deal with setbacks: the failure of Robb‘s political strategy in the Riverlands, the unexpected death of Balon Greyjoy, and the attempt to construct a new alliance in King’s Landing amidst a transition of both Hands and kings. Stannis’ own path is constructed as an indirect debate between Melisandre’s messianic vision and Davos’ insistence on the social contract.

The idea that the monarchy is based on a mutual obligation follows from Stannis’ earlier belief that the laws of heredity are binding both on subjects and sovereigns: “It is not a question of wanting. The throne is mine, as Robert’s heir. That is law. After me, it must pass to my daughter… I am king. Wants do not enter into it. I have a duty to my daughter. To the realm. Even to Robert.” (Davos IV, A Storm of Swords) It’s not that far a leap from a duty to the realm as an abstract concept to a duty to its people, as Davos advises – “a king protects his people, or he is no king at all.” (ibid) As I’ve noted, there is already a kernel of this embedded in the titles of the king: the king is at once “King of the Andals, the Rhoynar and the First Men,” reflecting the ethnic, legal, and religious diversity of Westeros, “Lord of the Seven Kingdoms,” acknowledging its political divisions, but above all “Protector of the Realm,” tasked with protecting the people from war.

In a sense, Davos is Westeros’ original social contract theorist. As I mentioned above, in response to the crisis of monarchy in the 17^th century, a number of philosophers advanced new theories to tackle the question of what happens when the monarch comes in conflict with his people and thus breached the “social contract,” and it’s not surprising that similar ideas should emerge during a War of Five Kings. John Locke famously argued that since the state of nature is one of complete liberty and that social contracts are formed specifically to protect natural rights, that when the government trespasses against those rights the contract is broken and society returns to a state of nature, in which the people retain their right to self-defense against the monarch. A teenage Stannis hearing of the murders of Rickard and Brandon Stark and his own brother being marked for death would probably have found a lot of merit in this theory.

At the same time, I doubt that even a young Stannis would have been as sanguine about human nature as John Locke or his fellow social contract theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who both pointed to the inherent goodness of man as proof that the state of nature would have been a benign one and that therefore rebellions against tyrants are not to be feared. The gloomy pessimism of Thomas Hobbes, who famously believed that the life of man in a state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” is a much better match for the middle Baratheon.

Likewise, Stannis’ insistence that “It is every man’s duty to remain loyal to his rightful king” would find favor with Hobbes, who believed that the only safety from the war of all against all lay in submission to an absolute monarch. At the same time, even though Hobbes believed that the subjects could never be freed from their social contract because of the actions of their sovereign which could not be considered injustice, he also maintained that subjects still retain the right to disobey or resist their monarch if their monarch threatened their lives, and that likewise the monarch had the responsibility to maintain a hegemony on military power in order to prevent the war of all against all.

At Dragonstone, Stannis is forced to choose between whether he will threaten the life of one of his subjects in order to gain overwhelming supernatural power or follow-through on his responsibility to defend his subjects against invasion. Ultimately, Davos the social contract theorist wins the argument and the results speak for themselves:

The little-loved Lord of Dragonstone not only recovers from a crushing defeat to win an equally-crushing victory against the army of Mance Rayder, but in the process gains himself hundreds of thousands of new wildling subjects, thousands of Northern soldiers (especially in the wake of his victory at Deepwood Motte), the Gift, and the Nightfort.

Such are the wages of social contract theory.

“One realm, one god, one king!”

Brooding over Aegon‘s Painted Table, Stannis Baratheon has pondered the nature of the monarchy more than any other character we meet in A Song of Ice and Fire. And as we might expect from Renly Baratheon’s nemesis, when it comes to the question of how federal or how unitary Westeros is or should be, he comes down exactly opposite from his brother:

It is characteristic of the anti-social and withdrawn character of the King in the Narrow Sea that his conception of the realm here (as yet unleavened by Davos’ social contract theory) is one of geography rather than sociology, a realm of waters and lands and structures with people as an afterthought. At the same time, Stannis’ conception of the monarchy of Westeros as a nation-state is quite revolutionary for his time, a dream that hasn’t really been seen since Aegon the Conqueror.

And arguably, it’s also one of Stannis’ major weaknesses. Given the evidence we can find of a decline of the central monarchy’s power vis-a-vis the Lords Paramount (especially following the death of the last dragon), insisting on treating Westeros as a nation-state threatens the prerogatives of the feudal powers of the Seven Kingdoms. While personality definitely played a role in whether the lords of the Stormlands (and House Florent as well) would back Stannis or Renly, I think part of the fear expressed by those like Littlefinger or Varys is that the “truly just man” would insist on upholding royal authority and interfere with the balance of power between the monarchy and the nobility. The most notable example of this weakness is Stannis’ refusal to even consider Cressen‘s suggestion to ally with Robb Stark at the cost of conceding the North and possibly the Riverlands, which potentially could have netted him the support of the 12-16,000 men Roose Bolton basically did nothing with between the Battle of the Green Fork and the capture of Harrenhal.

If it’s a weakness, though, it’s a double-edged sword – while his devotion to the unity of the nation alienates potential supporters outside of his immediate circle, it also engenders an incredible amount of devotion from what men he does has. Stannis’ men follow their lord through a supposedly hopeless battle at Storm’s End where they faced 5 to 1 odds to the Battle of Blackwater, where men crossed over a river of fire on a bridge of broken ships, to the very edge of the world where they win the Siege of Castle Black against a host of hundreds of thousands, through a punishing march through the North in winter to take Deepwood Motte and virtually to the front doors of Winterfell. Indeed, it’s the one thing that his followers agree on: just as Davos and the King’s Men believe that “one king means peace,” the Queen’s Men believe in “one realm, one king, one god.”

“There is no creature on earth half so terrifying as a truly just man.”

Stannis is certainly devoted to the idea of the nation-state, comes to accept the social contract as a raison d’etre for the monarchy, and will fight to the death to maintain the tradition of succession by agnatic primogeniture, but at the end of the day, nothing so embodies the unique and radical perspective that Stannis brings to the monarchy than his belief that the king of Westeros ought to be the font of justice for the entire realm, a judicial officer set forth above the smallfolk and highborn alike, as key a part of the contract between king and subject as his role as “Protector of the Realm.” As even his detractors admit, Stannis is completely sincere about his desire to make the monarchy an agent for justice in an unjust society:

While no one would confuse Stannis Baratheon for a modern thinker, there is something revolutionary about his idea that all of his subjects should receive equal justice; Westeros, after all, is a land that (despite not having slavery) is founded on legal inequality between the smallfolk who are at the mercy of their local lord’s “right of pit and gallows,” and the highborn, who have the privilege of the right of trial by combat and the political status that makes local lords think twice about meting out summary punishment to their prisoners. And while Stannis hasn’t exactly forgotten that his onion knight, smuggler lord, and Hand of the King comes from lowly birth, his experience with the lords of the Stormlands and the Reach have convinced him that “to be lordly is to be false,” requiring the relaxation of social caste in favor of the promotion of new lords on the basis of merits.

This legal egalitarianism is very much of a piece of with Stannis general idea of justice that “It was justice… a good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward. You were a hero and a smuggler… these pardoned lords would do well to reflect on that.” If good acts and bad acts should be rewarded equally, then so should those who commit them. Especially revolutionary is the implicit promise to punish those lords who “have made my kingdom bleed,” which suggests a proto-idea of war crimes and human rights law, in which the heads of state will be judged not simply for their personal crimes but also for the general suffering they have caused the common people of Westeros.

Stannis’ obsession with justice, especially early in A Clash of Kings, can be seen as the idee fixe of a sour and embittered man who confuses justice with getting even against those who he feels have wronged him. Certainly there is an element to that, and I would agree that vengeance and a narrow retributive sense of justice is the demon on Stannis’ shoulder, but it would be a mistake to see Stannis as someone whose thinking rises no higher than settling grudges. Rather, his conception of justice has a larger political bent – at the end of the day, the justice Stannis wants is both a desire to set right a wounded kingdom and a determination to avenge the dead that Stannis resents, even the late Lord Eddard Stark and his older brother:

Elements of the fandom who assert than Stannis’ inflexibility and desire to settle scores would make him a bad king whose reign would devolve into treason trials and paranoia often forget that the people who Stannis wants to hurl down from power are some of the people who’ve done the most damage to the realm: Cersei’s plot to fill the government with Lannister loyalists (including the heir to the Iron Throne) sets up the preconditions for civil war and a near-total collapse of the state following Tywin‘s death; Varys encourages Aerys’ paranoia to the point of tyranny and rebellion, anticipates and does nothing to prevent a civil war, and then works to completely destabilize Tywin Lannister’s political settlement so that his chosen puppet monarch has time to seize the Iron Throne; Littlefinger spreads corruption and embezzlement throughout the bureaucracy, connives at the death of two different Hands of the King, and engineers a civil war; even Pycelle betrayed every oath he swore as a maester and engineered the Sack of King’s Landing.

While the smallfolk may never know precisely who it was who is truly responsible for the suffering they have undergone in the War of Five Kings, isn’t it a good act to bring justice to the people who play a game with people’s lives? And what would we say of a man who will fight his way across burning rivers and hundreds of miles of snowy wilderness to make this happen, besides that “why in spite of everything he is a righteous man, and not just a version of Henry VII, Tiberius or Louis XI.”[2]

Conclusion

I think it might be going a bit too far to say that the relative depth and sophistication of their respective political analyses of the Westerosi monarchy is the reason why Renly died without having gotten closer than 520 miles to the Iron Throne and why Stannis is the last survivor of the Five Kings and is currently growing in strength in the North. Certainly a certain shadowy assassin had a lot to do with how their confrontation ultimately worked out.

However, I would say that it is Stannis’ intensive study of the monarchy, the multiple facets that he has uncovered about what the monarchy is and should be, that explains how a man once dismissed as “strong, yes, but brittle, the way iron gets. He’ll break before he bends” has been able to adapt to changing circumstances that outfoxed Renly, Robb, Joffrey, Tywin, and Balon. To Stannis, he is the king because that is what the law demands and he cannot back down from that – but what it means to be king, how a king ought to behave and what he ought to fight for, that can and must change and Stannis more than any other monarch has a surplus of mental frameworks he can use.

And of all the qualities of a successful king of Westeros, nothing is more useful than the capacity for growth while in office.

1. In the Middle Ages, logistical shortcomings meant that armies of this size were not practical, with an average size for medieval armies of 10-20,000 men. As late as the 16th century, armies tended to top out at the 40,000 mark. The “military revolution” of the early 17th century was where things really started to change, with armies in the 100,000 and above range becoming common for major military powers. (see “The Military Revolution in Early Europe” by David Parrott, in in History Today Volume: 42 Issue: 12)

2. George R.R. Martin