Author: stevenattewell

In the minority of a king, are the titles of Regent and Protector of the Realm different? Can they be given to different people? Also, does the king, as a minor, have the right to dismiss his regent and appoint a new one?

The King as a minor cannot dismiss his regent, because formally speaking he hasn’t been invested in royal authority yet – he is legally speaking a ward of his Regent, who holds that authority in trust. 

So, Regent and Protector of the Realm: not quite the same thing, although they often go together, and they don’t have to happen during a minority. For example, Aemond was Regent when Aegon II was injured, and none of the Regents on the Regency Council of Aegon III were Protectors (not even Unwin Peake). Likewise, Daemon Targaryen was Rhaenyra’s Protector while she was Queen regnant, and Baelor Breakspear was named Protector  by Daeron II.

So how we we understand the meaning of all these royal titles?

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Here is how I understand it:

  • King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men is a recognition that the King is monarch of three nations (in the sense of peoples), both in the sense of glorifying the union of the whole of Westeros but also a promise to respect the customs and folkways of these different peoples. 
  • Lord of the Seven Kingdoms is a statement of feudal authority – the king as ultimate liege lord, whose right to rule in part flows from his acclamation and oath-taking by his vassals.
  • Protector of the Realm is a military title, recognizing the king as the supreme authority in warmaking – he’s the one who gets to declare war and make peace, he’s the one who calls the banners and who sits atop the chain of command in cases of dispute, and lesser military authorities like the Wardens Cardinal get their authority through him. But as I’ve said before, there’s also a recognition of reciprocal obligation to a social contract: because the King is the warmaking authority, he’s also the one responsible for the defense of the realm against foreign invasion and domestic rebellion.That’s why it’s the King’s Peace and the King’s Justice – he’s the one tasked with maintaining law and order in the face of everything from rebellious vassals to bandits and outlaws to common criminals. 

And this is why I think we see the two titles sometimes separated. Daemon’s Protectorate was a recognition that he was the commander-in-chief of Rhaenrya’s armies; Baelor’s Protectorate was a statement from Daeron II that Baelor was being eased into becoming King, but also a way to counteract the king’s lack of skill by endowing supreme military authority on someone whose martial abilities were unquestionable. Whereas a Regent represents more the civilian side of power – the Small Council and the royal bureaucracy, the judicial and lawmaking sides of Kingship. 

racefortheironthrone:

Race for the Iron Throne Volume 2 is Here!

Apologies for my recent silence – I took a plane to California and my laptop didn’t make it and I’ve spent the last six days trapped in a Kafkaesque situation where FedEx’s delivery times slipping and inflexible IT systems meant that I flew from San Francisco to Santa Barbara and couldn’t re-route the package so had to resend it from SF to SB – but now that I have my laptop back I can once again communicate!

And now it’s available on Amazon.com!

If you didn’t get a chance to pick it up with the Kickstarter, you can grab yourself a copy now. And either way, I’d really appreciate it if you could leave a review. 

Stannis’ arcs

Stannis’ arc from ACOK to ASOS was to become from the king Westeros deserved for its stupidity in the nobles to the king Westeros desperately needs in the face of the Winter-creatures.
Now sadly Stannis’ arc from ADWD to TWOW will be to realize that being King of Westeros =/= Hero of the World, even though he is fit to be and will horrifyingly prove it, only for it to be worthless. However, I thought about something, and I know GRRM said he would not end it in “Westeros became a wasteland, but Essos got lucky, the end” to paraphrase it, but I thought on how much horrifyingly fitting would it be if Stannis has to sacrifice not only his only child, but ALL WESTEROS (supposed someone would give him the means) to decide “Kill Westeros to keep humanity alive”, it would be an interesting choice from a dramatic literary viewpoint where, to keep the role of hero, he has to commit the worst crime possible from the viewpoint of his original position, the position from which he accepted Melisandre’s service in the first place, to help him being the king, initially caring nothing for the hero thing, except as a little booster of self-esteem. Your thoughts?

I don’t think scale is necessary for the “worst crime imaginable.” Rather, I would argue that it’s intimacy that acts as an intensifier, while sadly scale often de-sensitizes. 

Hence my theory as to where Stannis is ending up. 

What do the various hangers-on and other minor members of the court who seem to have no actual function do with their days? Are they doing work in the background or simply lounging around the Red Keep whenever court is not in session?

Good question! 

So I’ve talked a bit about how you become a courtier, a bit about various offices, a bit about how you would get paid (or not)…But let’s say we’re talking about someone who isn’t one of these people, who is literally just a hanger-on: what do they do with their days? 

A big part of what they’re there for is access. Since royal politics is far more organized around proximity to the person of the monarch and, further out from there, proximity to people who are proximate to the person of the monarch, just being around the court means that you can present petitions, ask for favors or money (you’d be amazed at how good nobility were at mooching), and (more importantly) get money from less important people for doing it for them. (There’s not a huge difference between being a courtier without office and being a lobbyist.) But mostly, you’re hanging around waiting to be noticed and given your big break, just like show business.

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So while you wait, a big part of your life is entertainment. Remember, these hangers-on are nobility; by definition, they don’t work for a living and would be horribly offended if you suggested that they should. So they have money from the family’s estates, and they spend their lives in the pursuit of pleasure – and to do that, you need a big enough concentration of highborn folks that you can do social events. So there’s hunting, feasting and drinking (and other recreational substances), dancing, having affairs, GAMBLING (for reckless gamblers, you really can’t beat that combination of cultural disdain for money and aristocratic competitiveness), amateur and professional arts, and other organized activities, and some of them are socialized as male and some as female and some as mixed (because courts are also marriage markets, because one of the ways that people who don’t work make their way in life is by marrying well). And as smart people like @goodqueenaly and @nobodysuspectsthebutterfly have written about, these entertainments had symbolic political functions, which is why people paid for them to happen. 

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And another big part? Gossip, rumor, and public opinion. In the absence of a news media, it’s handy to have a big group of well-connected people who have nothing to do but talk about what’s going on. You’d better bet that there are ambassadors who hang out with or pay courtiers-without-office for the latest scuttlebut about what the king and his family and his officials are up to, so there’s real value here. Likewise, if you’re the king, the royal family, and the government, without any way to assess public opinion, the court is the only sounding board you have – and it’s a sounding board that is connected to the broader political class, because all of these hangers-on will talk to their relatives and peers back home – so it matters if a proclamation or decree or policy is very unpopular at court. And since no one’s getting elected, the standing of any official is their popularity with the court, so rumor could “make or mar.” 

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So that’s what the idle rich did with their lives. 

Race for the Iron Throne Volume 2 is Here!

Apologies for my recent silence – I took a plane to California and my laptop didn’t make it and I’ve spent the last six days trapped in a Kafkaesque situation where FedEx’s delivery times slipping and inflexible IT systems meant that I flew from San Francisco to Santa Barbara and couldn’t re-route the package so had to resend it from SF to SB – but now that I have my laptop back I can once again communicate!

eidetictelekinetic:

I still don’t get the Bran and Rickon/Princes in the Tower parallel. The whole point with the Princes is that no one really knows what happened, they just vanished. In Westeros, as far as anyone knows, Bran and Rickon’s fate is known. They were murdered by Theon. While the assumption was and is that the Princes were murdered, the mystery still lingers in the question of who really did it.

The much closer parallel is with Sansa and Arya – the Stark daughters who vanished into thin air to fates unknown. Most people think Arya is dead, and theories about Sansa are as wild as some about the Princes once were.

The Princes kept reappearing after their deaths, tho…