I think Edric would have gotten less support since: A. boy king is less of a draw, and B. legitimized bastards have to deal with the legacy of the Blackfyres.
To be honest, we don’t know very much about Rhae and Daella: who they married, what happened to their children, etc. Certainly, they don’t show up at all in discussions of the reigns of Aegon V, Jaehaerys II, or Aerys II, which doesn’t exactly cream out that those lines were extant and politically relevant in the later Targaryen dynasty.
But as to Robert’s Targaryen blood, he would be the more proximate claimant than any descendants of those lines, since he descended from a daughter of the more recent King Aegon V rather than a daughter of Maekar I.
“I can’t recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. I’m naked in the dark. There’s nothing–no veil between me and the wheel of fire.”
–The Lord of the Rings
So. Here we are. Quent didn’t turn back, so neither can I. Part of me wants to, though, because “The Dragontamer” will never be OK; this wound does not close. In Quentyn Martell’s final POV chapter, George R.R. Martin does nothing less than sit us down and ask us to stare directly into the sun. And so we flinch. We have to.
“The Dragontamer” is about the fire. The fire, from the Big Bang to Prometheus: the nexus of both creation and destruction, the tipping point between glory and horror, the spark of the first human thought and the embers from the last funeral pyre. The fire is the true object of Quent’s quest. His story has burned through every trope it touched upon, leaving none of the genre’s promises unbroken. By the end, he knows deep down that he will not succeed. He is not really trying to succeed, not anymore. What he’s looking for, what he descends into that dank dark dragonpit beneath the Great Pyramid to find, is an answer.
What am I doing here? Father, why?
What was it all for? What did it all mean? Why did I live? Why am I dying? I gave it all I had in me and more! I did everything the songs said, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff! I lost everything, and did things for which I can never forgive myself. Father, why? Author, why? God, why? Time stops, space falls away, and our hero is left alone with the fire at the heart of Story itself. Quent meets his maker. And this is what George said to him: your story was about seeing it, knowing it, being it, the fire, just for a moment before it kills you.
When he raised his whip, he saw that the lash was burning. His hand as well. All of him, all of him was burning.
Oh, he thought. Then he began to scream.
Were I there, while Drink screamed his name and the big man roared desperately for him to turn around, all I would’ve been able to do is whisper: “Quentyn, what do you see?”
It was supposed to be per campaign, and there were monarchs who abused this to try to eke out multiple campaigns in a year, but monarchs who tried to get too cute would face substantial desertions.
Where did you get the idea that Henry VIII didn’t suffer rebellions?
There were the rebellions over the Amicable Grant in 1525, the Kildare Rebellion in Ireland in 1534, and the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536-7. The reason why Henry VIII executed so many people during his reign was specifically because there was so much resistance to both his taxes and his religious innovations.
Indeed, there were rebellions under every Tudor monarch.
There could be – civil wars have definitely been started over disinheritances or disputed successions. On the other hand, there are plenty of cases where that didn’t happen – Alfred the Great, for example, succeeded his brother despite his brother having adult sons, but Alfred had more support among the nobility of Wessex so managed to tough it out.
It really depends on the political circumstances.
Er, @racefortheironthrone? Minor correction. Alfred’s brother did NOT have adult sons. Have you been watching The Last Kingdom and getting mixed up?
King Aethelred of Wessex was born circa 847, and died in 871. I’m not great with numbers, but by my count that only puts him in his mid 20s. We know of two sons by the date he died, but if he’s only 24 those sons would be young boys – definitely under ten years old, and possibly very young indeed. Given the situation with the Danes and the structure of Saxon kingship (which may have liked the ease of primogeniture where possible but wasn’t as strictly bound to it as some later polities) Aethelred’s little boys were kind of screwed.
Alfred himself was only around 21 when he was crowned. Born circa 849.
The dispute from the TV show is something Aethelwold should be having with Alfred’s son Edward. They’ve moved it forward a bit for drama.
Depends on when it happened. If it happened on his deathbed, assume a will-destroying scenario as in OTL. If before that…tricky. It’s a lot harder for Cersei to row this sort of thing back once it becomes publicly known, but then again Margaret d’Anjou overcame an explicit Parliamentary decree disinheriting her son…
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