Just a backup in advance of the detumblring
“Outside the thunder crashed and boomed, so loud it sounded as if the castle were coming down about their ears. Is this the sound of a kingdom falling?” Synopsis: Rickard Karstark commits suicide in an extremely elaborate fashion. SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones episodes. Caveat lector. (more…)
Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis: Catelyn II, ASOS
“It was the moment she had dreamt of and dreaded. Have I lost two sons, or three?”
Synopsis: “No I would not give no false hope/On this strange and mournful day/But the mother and child reunion/Is only a motion away…”
SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones episodes. Caveat lector.
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Well, the timing doesn’t work there – Robb was acclaimed before Stannis put himself forward as a candidate – but…
I think Stannis would have rewarded Robb by A. punishing the Lannisters (because they’re lawbreakers), B. returning Robb’s sisters, family sword, and father’s body (because it’s the right thing to do) and C. recognized him in his ancestral titles (because that’s the law).
I don’t know if he’d be inclined to do more than that, because as Stannis sees it, Robb owes Stannis his allegiance as a matter of law, and you don’t get brownie points for obeying the law. Now, as a matter of practical politics, a Stannis who needs Northern swords to carry him to the Iron Throne knows that you also need to reward service in proportion, so if Robb does a good job as he’s likely to do, I think Stannis would be willing to grant a request he saw as within reason.
No, Robb is not going to accept R’hllorism as a state religion in the North. But in this scenario, I don’t see Stannis feeling that indebted to Melisandre, so…
I think there were several factors. The first is that communication between armies isn’t good at the best of times – look at what happened when Jaime and Tywin (or Jaime’s cavalry and Jaime’s infantry) got separated, for example. Unless both parties have a rookery that both know to write to (and even then, ravens can go awry), you’re down to riders trying to get across hundreds of miles of very dangerous territory. This only gets more complicated when Robb takes the goat path into the Westerlands and is essentially behind enemy lines, or when Roose is on the march from the Twins to Harrenhal and isn’t near a rookery.
The second is that communications can be controlled. Roose is in a very good opportunity to dictate the narrative of how the Green Fork went down, and when he’s both at the Twins and Harrenhal, he can control what goes out by raven. You would need a subordinate to have recognized that Roose intentionally threw the battle rather than making a forgiveable mistake, be willing to be wholly insubordinate by informing on his commanding officer to the king in violation of chain of command, and then get a rider all the way to Robb Stark without being noticed, and be believed when that rider gets there.
The third has to do with expectations and perceptions. Roose Bolton stayed within the general framework of his orders at the Green Fork – he made a bunch of bad tactical choices, from failing to carry through with his night march to leaving the high ground to firing on his own men, but he didn’t violate Robb’s orders, and most importantly, Roose’s actions achieved the intended strategic effect by engaging with Tywin and allowing Robb to relieve Riverrun before Tywin could move to block him. So Robb doesn’t have any reason to perceive what happened at the Green Fork than the necessary sacrifice he thought it was.
Likewise, when Roose takes Harrenhal, he could plausibly say that A. it was the major enemy asset in the theater of war so it was good sense to take it, B. an allied commander had asked him to do it, and C. he wasn’t given orders to the contrary. Robb doesn’t have any reason to see this action as treasonous, and indeed the victory helps to obscure the pattern of Roose’s actions. It also helps that Robb is a bit distracted by Edmure’s actions at the time.
It’s not until Duskendale that Robb has something that really rings false, and Robb immediately picks up on it, recognizing that Duskendale is a target of no strategic value:
When they brought him word of the battle at Duskendale, where Lord Randyll Tarly had shattered Robett Glover and Ser Helman Tallhart, he might have been expected to rage. Instead he’d stared in dumb disbelief and said, “Duskendale, on the narrow sea? Why would they go to Duskendale?” He’d shook his head, bewildered. “A third of my foot, lost for Duskendale?”
But here’s where Roose’s control of communications kicks in. Sitting at Harrenhal, Roose is the one sending Robb information about what happened. So Roose constructs an alternative narrative in which he had nothing to do with Duskendale:
“Your Grace is too kind. I suffered grievous losses on the Green Fork, and Glover and Tallhart worse at Duskendale.”
“Duskendale.” Robb made the word a curse. “Robett Glover will answer for that when I see him, I promise you.”
“A folly,” Lord Bolton agreed, “but Glover was heedless after he learned that Deepwood Motte had fallen. Grief and fear will do that to a man.”
Robb has no way of knowing this isn’t true, because Roose made sure that the men who could have contradicted him were either killed or captured. The only people present when Roose gave the orders to take Duskendale – through a raven, so it’s not like any of the men at Harrenhal could have talked to Glover’s army and heard about new orders, and even then those men were almost all Freys and Bolton men by that point – were Arya and Qyburn.
The only, only way Robb could have heard differently is if Robett Glover had turned the ship around at Duskendale and headed for the Twins instead of White Harbor and gotten there ahead of the Red Wedding. Even then, odds are that Robett would have been seen as a rash incompetent looking to excuse his folly by making a scandalous accusation at his forgiving commanding officer.
But even if Robb had believed Robett, the 5,000 Stark loyalists in Roose’s army were dead or captured, and Roose and Walder had Robb outnumbered two to one. The damage was already done.
Why would Sybelle want her daughter to sleep with Robb or marry him? Her family wouldn’t have been in trouble with Tywin just because he took their castle. She didn’t need to fear repraisals just for that. Why would she deliberately cause trouble for her family?
How was anyone to know for sure that 1) Robb would marry Jeyne just because he slept with her, 2) that would necessarily lead to the Red Wedding, which would require a lot of things to go exactly a certain way, including Robb, Catelyn and others acting exactly as predicted?
The idea that the whole thing was some complicated conspiracy orchestrated by Tywin and Sybelle strikes me as 1) unlikely, as it requires a lot of anticipating the actions of various people, 2) an example of assigning Tywin incredible, almost godlike powers of planning, control and anticipation of events (fandom also does that with Varys, as with the theory that Varys put Shae in Tywin’s bed), and 3) an attempt by the fandom to relieve Robb of responsibility for his actions, and hoist it all on the Evil Foreign Witchy Woman.
The far more likely scenario, I think, is that Robb slept with Jeyne, through a conspiracy of no one but teenage hormones and heightened emotions, decided to marry her because he thought that was the right thing to do, and Sybelle naturally feared her family getting Castamered by Tywin, so she agreed to stop her daughter from getting pregnant, in exchange for protection for her family.
Seriously, the idea that some one in Sybelle Spicer’s position would WANT her daughter to sleep with the rebel lord that just conquered her castle is…. what. Congratulations for taking Jaime’s sexism and racism at face value, I guess.
Why would she do this? Because she magically knew that Robb was one of the very few men in Westeros that would have acted the way he did? (Presumably because she’s one of those Evil Foreign Witchy Women, as @travllingbunny said.) If this was a plan it was absurdly risky. All she was likely to end up with was a daughter who already had no dowry who would probably be almost impossible to marry to anyone.
Sybelle is an abusive piece of shit, but her actions are literally the only reason any of her children got out of this alive. Most people agreed Robb’s cause was doomed, even at the end of aCoK when the lovebirds would have gotten married. Wishing her death for it is a very ugly thing to say.
As for the OP original question. No one in-universe seemed to think it was odd that Jeyne nursed Robb rather than the maester. Catelyn’s pretty sharp, she would have commented if that was usual. Maybe the maester had lots of patients to deal with and only did the things that required his expertise while Jeyne did all the fevered brow wiping and stuff. Who knows. But I don’t think it’s any kind of smoking gun.
Sorry I haven’t gotten round to this earlier, but here goes.
Why Would Sybell Want Jeyne to Sleep With Robb?
At the time that the affair in question happened, Robb was an unstoppable warrior-king who had, for all intents and purposes, conquered the Westerlands, in that he had destroyed two of their armies and was now roaming the Westerlands without opposition, sacking whatever and wherever he wanted. (Look at what happened to Castamere, Nunn’s Deep, and the Pendric Hills, or the people who owned the thousands of cattle Maege Mormont “requisitioned,” or whoever got in the path of Lords Glover and Karstark along the northern coast) Meanwhile, Tywin is losing the war badly – more than 2,000 lost at the Whispering Woods, another 8,000 at the Camps, another 10,000 at Oxcross, however many thousand Tywin lost between the Green Fork, the retreat from the Green Fork, the bushwhacking in the Riverlands, the Westerlands raided, King’s Landing threatened.
”Pushing” Jeyne into his bed at worst protects the family against the very real threat that they will be put to the sword in the same way that the Lannisters did to House Darry, for example. (And it’s not like Robb doesn’t have bannermen around him like Rickard Karstark who would be down for some retaliatory executions…) At best, it gives the Westerlings one of the best positions in the new regime if Robb wins the war.
Sybell doesn’t need to have magic powers, just a willingness to play the odds, and an ability to hedge her bets. By making her deal with Tywin at the same time that she “pushes” Jeyne into Robb’s bed, she turns her potential weakness – Tywin isn’t exactly rewarding to people who fail him – into a source of strength, because now Jeyne is a bargaining chip she can use to bargain with Tywin to protect the family in case he wins instead. And while it’s a less valuable chip absent the marriage, it’s a valuable chip nonetheless.
Does Tywin Need “incredible, almost godlike powers of planning, control and anticipation of events”?
No, because Tywin was already in communication with Walder and Roose. This is where the timing of the Red Wedding and the logistics and negotiations needed to set it up becomes very important. As I argued here, the deal (including the Freys, Boltons, and Lannisters, because all three have to do their part) had to have been done before the Battle of Duskendale (i.e, before Arya X of ACOK), because that battle is necessary for the Red Wedding to take place.* Moreover, Roose gives the order before the news breaks about Robb sleeping with Jeyne, and it’s telling that somehow the news gets all the way to Harrenhal by way of “a bird from the Twins” before it gets to Riverrun despite Riverrun being 300 miles closer to the Crag.
*if we’re looking for an earliest possible start-date to when the conspiracy started, I’d peg it to Catelyn V of ACOK, where she finds out that Roose Bolton has married Walda Frey.
To me, this suggests that, because Sybell was in communication with Tywin, he leaks the information to Walder to get Walder off the fence. (How else do we explain how Walder knew ahead of anyone else?) This also means that Walder was already part of the conspiracy before the Freys were dishonored, as “he would have searched for some way to disentangle himself from a losing cause sooner or later.”
So what does this all mean for Tywin? It means he doesn’t need godlike powers, all he needs is to know the character of Walder Frey (a man he’s known since he was ten years old): he knows that Walder is a peevishly proud man who’s incredibly insecure about his family’s status, especially when it comes to marriages, and he knows from their correspondence that Walder wants to get out of the Stark camp, and he knows from universal repute that Walder is notoriously cowardly when it comes to committing himself.
In fact, as I have said before, it doesn’t really show Tywin in as good a light as people think. Up until this point in the War of Five Kings, he has been out-thought and out-fought by the Young Wolf at every single point, and has only just managed to scrape himself from the verge of total defeat thanks to Tyrion’s (and Littlefinger) swift thinking. And his master-stroke relies on a complete fluke: his rival taking a stray arrow and landing in the bed of one of Tywin’s vassals.
Does This Theory Buy Into “Jaime’s sexism and racism”?
I don’t think it does. We know from the text that Sybell and Tywin made a deal regarding Jeyne through extensive communication:
I don’t think she ordered Jeyne to sleep with Robb, because A. the odds of Jeyne agreeing to do that, even if it was necessary to save their family, were really low, and B. her modus operandi is usually to lie to her daughter and use drugs instead.
At the very least, I think Sybell ordered Jeyne to care for Robb, thinking that caring for a handsome conqueror king might cause her to fall prey to the Florence Nightingale Effect. But given that Sybell’s grandmother was Maggy the Frog, and that Maggy may well have taught her how to make “cures and love potions and the like,” along with the recipe for moon tea, it’’s quite possible she drugged either or both of Robb and Jeyne to “make certainty doubly sure.”
And I’m very certain that she did so after negotiating her deal with Tywin, which is incredibly cold-blooded. While some pretty awful things are going to happen in the Prologue of TWOW, I hope her death at Lady Stoneheart’s hands is the silver lining.
“I made certain of that, as your lord father bid me…”
“House Westerling has its pardon, and your brother Rolph has been made Lord of Castamere. What else would you have of us?”
“Your lord father promised me worthy marriages for Jeyne and her younger sister. Lords or heirs, he swore to me, not younger sons nor household knights.”
Given Tywin’s legendary tightfistedness, I think that this is a hell of a lot for Sybell to have gotten just for ensuring that Robb didn’t sire an heir. I think the price is right if breaking Robb’s Frey alliance is added into the pot.
However, to the extent that this theory plays into the Evil Matriarch trope, it’s baked into the text – the fact that Jaime despises Sybell while letting his father off the hook is sexist and racist (and classist), but the event is a matter of fact.
Moreover, from a meta perspective, I think it has to be asked why, if Robb and Jeyne were purely a matter of chance, GRRM felt it necessary to inform us that Sybell’s grandmother was Maggy the Frog and that, in addition to telling the future, Maggy dealt in “cures and love potions”? One could argue that Maggy the Frog dabbles in the gendered trope of the Wicked Witch and the mystical foreigner, but that doesn’t change the fact that the author added it into the text when he didn’t have to.
After all, plenty of highborn ladies have made use of moon tea without any association to Essosi Maegi – not only is it made by maesters for the ladies they serve, but Cersei finds women who can provide abortions when Robert gets her pregnant. So if all Sybell was doing was making sure that Jeyne didn’t get pregnant after the fact, GRRM could have explained this to the reader without reference to Maggy the Frog.
Ultimately, I think it comes down to whether you think someone as cooly calculating as Sybell would have left something this vital to her family’s survival to chance or not. I lean to the latter.
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