The Black Dinner and the Rains of Castamere

PLEASE do not read this if you are currently reading A Song of Ice and Fire novels by George R.R. Martin or if you're watching the television version of the series, Game of Thrones, by HBO. This article contains spoilers, by discussing the alleged real-life inspiration for the event known as "the Red Wedding."

I am currently writing a history of the British monarchy which will be out later this year. Luckily, it's been split into two volumes and volume one, And the Sword Gleamed, will be available soon. The book is predominantly Anglocentric due to time and space constrictions, but where possible I am doing my best to discuss the monarchies in Scotland, Ireland and Wales, too. (I'd love one day to go back and to tell the story of their monarchies in another book.) One of the things that has struck me so much as I'm researching it is how brilliantly George R.R. Martin has been inspired by European medieval history in writing his epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire. On the one hand, this is shown in his immaculate recreation of aristocratic culture - similar names, sigils, rivalry, treachery, arranged marriages, wardships and concepts of honour. In other ways, it's by more specific nods - like the comet that trails across the sky, seen by many as a good omen for the exiled princess Daenerys Targaryen, so similar to the comet that flew over England in 1066 before the arrival from beyond the sea of William the Conqueror. 

One of the series' most infamous moments is the so-called "Red Wedding," in which Robb Stark, one of the combatants in the novels' central conflict, the War of the Five Kings, is lured into a trap by an erstwhile ally, Lord Frey, when an arranged marriage designed to seal the peace between the houses sees Frey betray Robb Stark by butchering him, his mother Catelyn and thousands of their followers while they are under his hospitality at a wedding banquet. The Starks were an aristocratic clan who, under Robb, had become so sickened by the capricious incompetence and cruelty of the boy-king Joffrey that they had developed secessionist ambitions, hoping to forcibly remove the north from the kingdom of Westeros and re-establish independent monarchy in the region. Joffrey's maternal grandfather, Lord Tywin Lannister, a man of inexhaustible wealth and equally inexhaustible cruelty, liaises with the Freys and ends the Starks' mission by orchestrating a bloody massacre that has left fans of both book and TV show reeling, particularly after the incident was so brilliantly dramatized this week in the penultimate episode of season 3, The Rains of Castamere.

Oona Chaplin, Richard Madden and Michelle Fairley as members of the Stark family in "The Rains of Castamere"

The parallels between the fictitious Red Wedding and the real-life Black Dinner are fairly clear, although Westeros's Wedding has been augmented by Martin's great skills as a writer. In a recent interview with  EW, Martin stated that two events in Scottish history - the Black Dinner and the Glencoe Massacre - had inspired him to write of the Red Wedding in which Robb and Catelyn Stark lose their lives. 

In 1440, Scotland was ruled over by the ten year-old King James II and those around him struggled to see who could rule in his name. His father, King James I, had been stabbed to death in a plot led by his uncle and former ally, the treacherous Earl of Atholl, three years earlier. The young king's English mother, Queen Joanne (left; sometimes given as "Queen Joan"), had been wounded in the attack but had managed to escape back to Edinburgh, where she had managed to hold onto power for herself and her son. As an English aristocrat, Joanne's rule was not popular in Scotland and to bolster her political strength she allied herself to a man with the magnificently Westeros-sounding nickname of "the Black Knight of Lorn," whom she eventually married. In 1439, she had lost power and been replaced in government by her enemies.  By 1440, disagreements over the legacy of the queen-regent, the death of some of her strongest allies, the political fallout of the old king's assassination and out-of-control aristocratic infighting had all produced a fraught and dangerous political environment in which paranoia, dishonesty and violence were the dominant themes. 

One clan in particular who frightened the new regency government was the Douglas clan. Their late head, Archibald Douglas, had been a political ally of the queen mother's but after his death, she had fallen from power and the young king was now ruled by her enemies, Sir William Crichton, Sir Alexander Livingston and the earl of Avondale. By 1440, with the queen mother having been placed under house arrest, there were fears that Clan Douglas were preparing to seize more power for themselves and oust the triumvirate who were controlling the young James II. After Archibald Douglas's death, the new earl and head of the Douglas family was his 16 year-old son William, an age not too dissimilar to that of Robb Stark in the series. The royal household issued an invitation to the earl and his younger brother, 11 year-old David, to join the king at a banquet in Edinburgh Castle. As in Game of Thrones, the laws of hospitality in medieval Scotland were regarded as inviolable. The king's peace was an even more sacred concept and so the Douglas brothers attended the feast, safe in the knowledge that no self-respecting Christian or aristocrat could possibly besmirch his honour by harming them under those circumstances. At the climax, the regency's servants presented him with a dish covered in a white sheet. When the earl removed the sheet, he saw they had served him a black boar's head. It was a symbol of death and the musicians begin to beat on a single drum as William and his 11 year-old brother were dragged from the king's presence and executed on the castle's hill. Their sister, the beautiful Margaret, known as the Fair Maid of Galloway, was not present and did everything she subsequently could to rebuild the family's prestige.

A later event which Martin cited as inspiration for the Red Wedding was the Glencoe (above) Massacre of 1692. Two years earlier, the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland had seen the triumph of the Protestant Dutch prince, William of Orange (left), who had seized the British throne as William III, deposing his Catholic uncle, King James, in the process. The decision over which monarch to back had split many of the clans of the Highlands. On the one hand, William was a Protestant - the majority religion in Scotland by the seventeenth century; on the other hand, James was ancestrally Scottish and carried the name of the House of Stuart who had ruled over Scotland for centuries. The Campbell clan, who sided with William, saw his victory as the perfect opportunity to extirpate their rivals in the Highlands, Clan MacDonald, who had initially remained loyal to James. Forces loyal to the Campbells arrived in the Highlands, ostensibly on a mission to collect taxes for the Scottish parliament. Seeking shelter with the MacDonalds, the Campbells' men rose up one night and slaughtered thirty-eight of the MacDonalds, even stabbing some of them in their beds. Forty women and children subsequently died from exposure in the Highland winters after the vindictive Campbells burned their homes to the ground and evicted them. It had been a slaughter under trust and in violation of the hospitality that had been offered to them by the MacDonalds, who clearly placed the ancient customs of shelter and aristocratic protocol over the feud which the Campbells would use as an excuse to slaughter them. To this day, there are pubs in Scotland that deny the right of any member of a Campbell family to cross their threshold and groups as disparate as neo-Jacobite royalist movements and the Scottish Republican Socialist Movement still annually commemorate the massacre.

As Martin said to fan backlash about the savagery of the Red Wedding in Westeros: "No matter how much I make up, there's stuff in history that's just as bad, or worse." 

Elizabeth Woodville: The real-life Cersei Lannister?

In short, the answer from me is an emphatic "no," but it's a popular theory doing the rounds in articles about an even more popular show. Cersei Lannister, the queen consort of the fictional land of Westeros in G.R.R. Martin's epic Song of Ice and Fire novels, is a magnificently unpleasant individual. Those novels have recently been adapted into the television series Game of Thrones, in which Cersei is portrayed by British actress Lena Headey (above.) The only daughter of the wealthiest aristocratic family in the Seven Kingdoms, the gorgeous Cersei is married to the bloated King Robert, but harbours an incestuous passion for her twin brother, Jaime, and an insatiable ambition for herself and her children. Manipulative, duplicitous, head-strong, vindictive and cruel, Cersei is blind to her own faults and those of her sadistic eldest son, Joffrey, who she pushes on to the Iron Throne, despite the fact that it is quite clear to everyone but her that he is totally unsuited to commanding anything more challenging than a boar hunt. Her clumsy attempts to manipulate the rival Stark family, headed by an on-screen Sean Bean, and her failure to properly manage Joffrey, provide much of the drama for the first season of Game of Thrones. The actress who plays Cersei reflected how her character's greatest weakness was that she considered herself to be a masterful political operator, when in fact she was often ruled by short-term vindictiveness rather than long-term strategy. Indeed, the show starts by showing the funerary rites of Westeros's former chief minister, Jon Arryn, while Cersei and her brother watch from a balcony above, discussing in (thinly) veiled terms why Arryn died because Cersei "worried too much" about what he knew. A brilliant femme fatale, Cersei Lannister is a fantastically compelling, if hideous, character, whose amoral schemes help shape most of Game of Thrones' best story-lines.

The broad story of Game of Thrones - that of rival aristocratic clans locked in bloody conflict as each try to claim the throne for themselves - bears more than a passing resemblance to England's fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses. Henry VI suffered a spell of madness and in 1461 he was overthrown by a distant cousin, Edward of York, who took the throne as Edward IV; in Game of Thrones, the "mad king," Aerys II, is killed and then replaced by a distant kinsman, Robert Baratheon, who then goes on to marry Cersei Lannister, a stunning beauty who is said to be the most beautiful woman in the Seven Kingdoms. Back in fifteenth century reality, in 1464 Edward IV married Elizabeth Woodville, said to be the most beautiful woman of her generation in the entirety of the British Isles. Both the factual Edward and the fictional Robert then went to seed - losing all of their youthful muscles by whoring, eating and drinking their way into an early grave. Both Cersei and Elizabeth were pale and beautiful blondes and the product of good-looking families, who they did everything in their power to promote to the detriment of every other noble family in the country. In the aftermath of Edward's premature death in 1483, Elizabeth tried desperately to secure her son's inheritance of the throne, in the face of mounting aristocratic opposition. There has therefore has been rampant internet speculation that Robert is based loosely on Edward IV and Cersei on Elizabeth Woodville.

It would be wrong and foolish, of course, to suggest that Game of Thrones is really nothing more than a fantasy-genre version of the Wars of the Roses. In the first place, George Martin is far too good a writer to do that - Westeros and the world it exists in are probably the most believably-complex fictional lands created since Tolkein put pen to paper and first created Middle Earth. In the second instance, Game of Thrones is actually almost more complicated than the real war. At its height, the Rose conflict was only being contested by two rival families - the Lancasters, the Yorks and, at the tail end of things, the Tudors. In Song of Ice and Fire / Game of Thrones, there are multiple royal claimants - including the exiled children of the dead "mad king," the new king and his alleged family, aristocratic families seeking secession for the northern provinces, the two rival brothers of the new king (overtones of the Duke of Clarence and Richard III? Who knows?) and foreign princelings. Finally, there are enough glaring differences in the narrative, let alone the specifics, to suggest that Game of Thrones is far more a work of fiction than an allegory of real-life events. 

However, there are also enough similarities to suggest that the Wars of the Roses may, sometimes, have been used as inspiration for the story of Game of Thrones - particularly in the case of Cersei and Elizabeth Woodville. (It's perhaps worth noting that at no point in history was Elizabeth ever accused of committing incest with her brothers, in the way Cersei is in Game of Thrones.) However, both women were famed for their beauty and loathed for their alleged penchant for intrigues. Both were far less capable at politics than they liked to think and both badly mishandled their enemies. Both Elizabeth and Cersei were totally blinkered in their desire to promote their own lineage, at whatever cost - Elizabeth supported the disinheritance of the Howard family, in order that her youngest son, Richard, could be given their cousin's title and estates; she also caused a scandal by marrying her 20 year-old brother, John, to the 69-year-old Catherine Neville, a fantastically wealthy duchess, whose connections would help the Woodville family and whose marriage to John also had the added benefit of helping Elizabeth disinherit her enemy, and the duchess's nephew, Lord Warwick. 

There are admittedly a significant number of differences, beyond the fairly obvious one of incest.  Robert and Cersei's marriage was a political one; Edward and Elizabeth's, for all its faults, was a love match. Cersei is shown as being murderous in Game of Thrones, while the only way Elizabeth Woodville could ever have been accused of homicide was by those inclined to believe the worst of her - since there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that she ever resorted to poison, assassinations or witchcraft to achieve her goals. Despite her general unpopularity, Elizabeth Woodville was never accused of adultery; although both women were eventually to face the horror of having their children's legitimacy impugned. Although both were married to once-handsome-now-fat monarchs, Elizabeth never seems to have harboured the revulsion towards Edward IV that Cersei cannot quite hide holding for King Robert. In the novels and the television show, the Lannister family are one of the most respected and feared families of the Westeros nobility; Elizabeth's family, the Woodvilles, were considered social-climbing upstarts, pigging-back on their daughter's incredible beauty and equally jaw-dropping greed. (Elizabeth's mother, Jacquetta, was actually related to the royal family by marriage, but that point was conveniently ignored by Elizabeth's many, many detractors.) 

There are a sufficient number of similarities between the personalities (and perceptions) of Cersei Lannister and Elizabeth Woodville to see why people think the story of Elizabeth might have helped inspire the story of Cersei. It might, I think, be more tempting to say that Cersei Lannister is in many ways the dark legend of Elizabeth Woodville - at its darkest. Despite her bad press, Elizabeth Woodville was almost certainly a far more pleasant individual than Cersei Lannister is, even on her best days. However, the complexities and nuances of Cersei's character are far more of a tribute to the skill of G.R.R. Martin as a writer than to the enduring fascination of Queen Elizabeth's personality. If part of the Game of Thrones was inspired by the Wars of the Roses, then that's not quite the same thing as saying it's based on them. As an historian the really exciting thing about Game of Thrones is not what conflicts it's based on, but rather that it can remind us of the reality of the human historical experience. We are so used to the story of history that we become numb to it. Familiarity breeds indifference. We know the ultimate fate of Elizabeth Woodville's sons; we know the grizzly death waiting for Edward IV's disloyal brother, the Duke of Clarence; we know that Elizabeth of York will die in childbirth, Anne Boleyn will lose her head and that Henry VIII will marry six times. We know all of these extraordinary facts so well that we lose the ability to be shocked by them and we therefore lose the ability to fully appreciate how nerve-wracking and uncertain it must have been to actually live through those times. Since Game of Thrones is not history, but incredibly manages to be as believably complicated and unexpected as any historical era, it not only becomes to be a phenomenal story but can also remind even the most jaded of historical enthusiasts of the sheer horror and tumult that people must have experienced by living through something like the Wars of the Roses.