In Which a Gentleman Succeeds to the Iron Throne

Or, A Lawyerly Analysis of the Very Silly Question of Who is the Rightful Ruler of Westeros

If you watch Game of Thrones, you’ve lately had to endure a lot of breathless statements by an array of characters claiming that Jon Snow is the “rightful King” of Westeros by virtue of the revelation of his parentage at the end of Season 7. Now, admittedly we are talking about a fantasy television show that exists purely for the enjoyment of the audience, so what follows below is perhaps the most frivolous thing I’ll ever write. However, that statement as it applies to Jon – and also, by the way, if applied to any of the other claimants in the series – is at best a dramatic oversimiplification, and in pretty much any scenario a gross misrepresentation. Since, as we all know, a gentleman is also a monarchist, I am personally offended by the way this show leads its viewers into terrible misunderstandings about the nature of succession. Consider this, then, an effort to set the record straight.

We all know the old Aristotelian division of governments into three types. (A quick aside here to note that I am aware that these descriptions are vastly oversimplified, nothing fits as neatly as this, and blah blah blah.) In democracies, sovereignty is vested in the mass of the citizenry; in aristocracies, it is vested in a privileged subset of the citizenry; in monarchies, it is vested in one person. Living in the United States, we of course know that the operation of a democratic system is far more complex than the simple concept of “everyone casts a vote and the person who gets the most votes wins.” Indeed, questions about who gets to vote, and in what jurisdictions, and how votes are tallied and winners selected, are ongoing questions in American and all other representative governments. (A gentleman’s cynical side observation: it goes without saying that one’s supposedly principled and moral position on these questions in almost every case has much more to do with what benefits one’s side’s chances of winning than with actual principles or morals.)

So, too, with monarchies, which can take many forms and of which even the most universally recognized and comprehensible form, ie, absolute primogeniture, with the eldest child of the monarch succeeding to the throne on the monarch’s death, is inevitably more complicated than it seems like it should be.

If you don’t believe me, consider the below:

Philip IV (“the Fair”) of France succeeded his father Philip III as King of France in 1285, and reigned until his death in 1314. Philip had seven children, three girls (Margaret, Blanche, and Isabella) and four boys (Louis, Philip, Charles, and Robert). Margaret, Blanche, and Robert died in childhood, so three sons and one daughter survived to adulthood. When Philip died in 1314, his son Louis succeeded him as King. All as expected and simple enough… right? 

Well, not so fast, my friends. Louis promptly popped off two years later in 1316, leaving behind him a daughter, Joan, and a pregnant wife; his wife Margaret gave birth to a son, John I, who died five days later after gaining the distinction of being both France’s youngest King and its shortest reigning.

Well, it should all still be straightforward, since Louis had a surviving daughter, Joan. However, Joan’s mother, Margaret of Burgundy, had been accused of adultery, meaning Joan’s legitimacy was in doubt, and if you think that wasn’t enough for a woman in 14th-century France to be excluded from the succession, you don’t know much about 14th-century France. Joan had some supporters, but her uncle Philip ultimately became King Philip V, thanks to a heady cocktail of swift action, backroom maneuvering, and good old-fashioned misogyny; this was justified by the claim, adopted by the Estates General and later (though not claimed so at the time) described as relying on the ancient Salic Law, that females could not inherit the throne of France. In a delightful irony, however, Philip V’s only son died in infancy, leaving him four daughters – all now theoretically excluded by the same “no girls” logic that had allowed Philip to claim the throne in the first place. When Philip V died in 1322, therefore, the succession fell to his brother Charles, now Philip IV’s only surviving son. Charles reigned as Charles IV for six years, dying 1328. At the time of his death, Charles had no sons and three daughters, all under three years old.

So, who should have succeeded as the new monarch of France? A minor daughter? His nearest male relative (Edward III of England, the son of Philip IV’s daughter Isabella)? His nearest male relative through the male line (Philip of Valois?) In the event, Philip of Valois, Charles’s cousin, was the one whom the crown fell to. In practice, though, this had more to do with the fact that Philip was a French power broker who was actually present in France, and not (in Edward) the monarch of a foreign and potentially hostile power, than with the legal technicalities of succession law – which, anyway, everyone had been kind of making up as they went along ever since poor baby John I died.

Shockingly, Edward III didn’t agree with Philip of Valois’s perspective, and England and France spent 116 years at war because of it.

Confused yet? You should be – and this is as simple as I can make it! The overall point is that, when it comes to succession, the operative and interlinked questions at play are the question of claim and the question of support. Ideally, the line of succession is so obvious and straightforward that one candidate’s claim is overwhelmingly stronger than anyone else’s. When it isn’t – which is, pretty much, whenever the monarch doesn’t have a well-known eldest child (in most systems, eldest son) available to take the throne on his or her death – we’re talking about who has the best claim and is able to marshal the strongest support, not about who in absolute terms is right, because “who is right” is a question that most people are going to have their own opinions about, and those opinions have a way of confirming the correctness of each person’s preferred outcome. (Cf. my earlier observation about people’s opinions about voting systems, etc.)

 So, with that long discourse on historical context out of the way, let us return to the question of the whiniest man in Westeros. Is Jon Snow, aka (in show world) Aegon Targaryen, truly “the rightful King of the Seven Kingdoms”? Let us evaluate. I’m using bullet points not because you guys are idiots, but because it’s the easiest way to keep things as clear as possible. Note that events described in the show that haven’t yet happened or been revealed in the books may take a different aspect in the books.

The fundamental argument of those making the claim that Jon is the rightful heir to the Iron Throne do so on the basis of the claim that Jon is the most senior legitimate male in the Targaryen line of succession. This in turn relies on the basis of male-preference primogeniture, ie, on the principle that the throne can be inherited by a woman if and only if all possible male claimants are exhausted. Jon’s claim is based on the following sequence of events:

1.     Aerys II “the mad king” Targaryen and his sister-wife Rhaella produced five living children – four sons (Rhaegar the Crown Prince, Daeron, Aegon, Viserys) and one daughter, Daenerys. Daeron and Aegon died in infancy.

2.     Rhaegar, the Crown Prince, married the Princess Elia of Dorne. They had two children together, Rhaenys and Aegon.

3.     Rhaegar then eloped with Lyanna Stark (setting off the sequence of events that would lead to Robert’s Rebellion, because Rhaegar was, like, a really good guy). Rhaegar’s marriage to Elia was annulled and he married Lyanna.

a.     Note that this is specified to be an annulment, not a divorce. This could mean that Rhaegar’s first two children, Rhaenys and Aegon, are rendered illegitimate and outside the succession. However, it’s also possible that in the Seven Kingdoms, annulment doesn’t change the legal status of children borne prior to the granting of the annulment.

4.     Rhaegar was killed by Robert Baratheon, predeceasing his father and leaving behind him a pregnant Lyanna. As long as Lyanna’s baby remained unborn, either Rhaegar’s son Aegon (his son by Elia, NOT Jon/Aegon, his son by Lyanna) or Aerys’s son Viserys became the new heir (depending on whether or not annulment meant the disinheritance of children of the annulled marriage).

5.     Aerys was killed by Jaime Lannister and Rhaegar’s children by Elia were killed by the Mountain. Rhaella declared that Viserys was the new King.

6.     Lyanna gave birth to a boy, Aegon (whom we know as Jon). Jon / Aegon then became the senior Targaryen male (eldest legitimate son of the eldest legitimate son of King Aerys).

7.     Years later, Viserys was killed by Khal Drogo, leaving Jon as the only male claimant.

Simple, right? Jon is the trueborn King! It’s indisputable!

So, well, obviously not, and the objections begin with Jon’s claim’s most essential foundation. The chaos of the first several seasons of Game of Thrones is, after all, the result of a succession dispute about who is the rightful Baratheon heir, not the Targaryen heir, to the throne; as far as almost every major player is concerned, the Targaryen dynasty is no longer the ruling dynasty, and Robert Baratheon is King. Those who claim that Robert is a usurper who holds the throne illegitimately do so on the basis of their loyalty to the Targaryen line – but ultimately, the Baratheon claim has just as much right as the Targaryen claim does when one looks beyond the antiquity of the latter, because both dynasties rule by right of conquest. As Bronn pointed out in last week’s episode, all these noble houses got ennobled by virtue of someone up the ancestral line being very, very good at killing their enemies – just some of those enemies got killed longer ago than others.

In the show, the Baratheon succession would seem to be extinct – or was until last week, when Daenerys, in perhaps the most bone-headed political move ever performed on the show, legitimized Gendry, more on which below. In the far wider world of the books, it’s probably safe to assume that Robert does have an heir, but it’s likely a distant one that readers will never meet. (Though, knowing George RR Martin, everything is up for grabs). A more likely claimant would probably be Robert’s noble-borne bastard Edric Storm, who would seem to be a Henry FitzRoy analogue. Henry FitzRoy was the noble-born bastard son of Henry VIII who received lands and titles. I think, but I can’t easily Google supporting sources, that FitzRoy was considered as a possible heir for Henry as long as he remained without a legitimate male heir; whether or not that was actually considered, FitzRoy died at 17.

In show-world, the legitimizing of Gendry by Dany adds a new and somewhat confusing dimension. On one hand, Gendry’s legitimacy depends on recognizing Dany as the rightful ruler, since it is the sole prerogative of the Crown to legitimize natural-born children. Thus, if Dany isn’t the legitimate Queen, Gendry isn’t a legitimate Baratheon. But, if Gendry is a legitimate Baratheon, that makes him the legitimate heir to the Baratheon claim. For Dany and her lawyers, this is an easy square to circle, since they would argue that Robert was a pretender all along and the throne passed on Aerys’s death to the next Targaryen heir and ultimately to Dany. For anyone not interested in having Daenerys as Queen, all she’s done in legitimizing Gendry is giving them the option of supporting the apparently legitimate son of the last undisputed King. From a legal perspective, I think Gendry’s claim is very tenuous indeed – but, nonetheless, now he has some runway to make a claim.

Let’s next consider the question of Jon’s position within the Targaryen line of succession. Since I’ve written almost two thousand words in this essay already, and since we know ex post facto that Jon and Daenerys are the only two remaining Targaryens (leaving aside the book character of Young Griff, who claims to be Rhaegar’s son Aegon by Elia of Dorne, whom Varys in turn claims to have smuggled out of King’s Landing during the Sack), I want to concern myself only with the question of which of the two of them has the superior claim, leaving aside the twists and turns of all the Targaryens who died between the Battle of the Trident and Drogo’s killing of Viserys. 

The respective claims of Jon and Dany in a legal sense – and I stress in a legal sense because, again, the relative merit of the claim per se doesn’t matter once it becomes a question of whose army beats the other – pretty much comes down to the question of whether or not Jon is, in fact, the legitimate son of Rhaegar Targaryen. Characters on the show keep telling us that this is an obvious “yes,” but looking at the evidence we have, all that becomes clear is that none of these characters understand how to ask important critical questions. To wit:

1.     Was the annulment of Rhaegar’s first marriage legally valid?

We know that the annulment was granted by High Septon Maynard, since it is in Maynard’s diary that Gilly reads of it; Maynard also then officiated the marriage of Rhaegar and Lyanna. But does the High Septon actually have the authority to unilaterally nullify a marriage? In a multi-religious aristocratic society in which dynastic concerns are of paramount importance, marriage and the validity thereof are questions of civil and political, as well as religious, concern, and therefore a central concern of the Crown. There must be some mechanism by which the Crown recognizes changes in dynastic status and marital bonds and sorts out the implications of an annulment like that granted to Rhaegar – and, for obvious reasons, the need for such a mechanism becomes all the more important when the parties involved are the Crown Prince of the realm, who is setting aside the daughter of one of the most powerful nobles of the realm, in favor of a daughter of ANOTHER of the most powerful nobles in the realm, who is in turn betrothed to yet a fourth of the most powerful nobles in the realm.

Having spent way too much time going down the rabbit hole of subreddits for A Song of Ice and Fire superfans, I’ve seen a couple inconclusive fragments of evidence pulled from George R.R. Martin’s books and words:

a.     King Baelor the Blessed requested, and was granted by the High Septon, an annulment of his marriage to his sister-wife Daena. In this case, royal assent is not a concern, since it was the King requesting the annulment in the first place, and it does affirm that annulment at least within the Faith of the Seven is in the hands of the High Septon. However, the grounds for the annulment were that the marriage had never been consummated, which obviously does not apply in Rhaegar’s case.

b.     King Viserys Targaryen refused the request of his brother, Prince Daemon, to annul (or possibly divorce – the words in the text are “set aside”) his marriage to a noblewoman of the Vale, suggesting that the royal assent is at least in theory required.

Other questions: were the proper forms of the annulment followed? Did there need to be witnesses? Is an annulment valid if the only people who know about it are the High Septon, one of the two parties getting the annulment, his preferred new wife, and an omniscient preteen living under a tree?

2.     Even if the annulment is agreed by all to have been valid, was Rhaegar’s ensuing marriage to Lyanna valid?

This really boils down to two related questions. Lyanna was a Stark and therefore an adherent of the Old Gods – can she be married by the High Septon at all? (I think we can dispense with this question since conversion of course is always an option.) More importantly, is a member of the royal family allowed to marry without the consent of the monarch and retain their claim to the throne? In the episode “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” the song that Pod sings is about Jenny of Oldstones. In book-world, Jenny was a commoner that Crown Prince Duncan Targaryen married against the wishes of his father, the King; the result of that marriage was that Duncan was forced to abdicate. Precedent therefore would seem to favor an interpretation by which marriage against the royal will is grounds for the extinction of a Prince’s claim to the throne.

Then there’s this bonus question that has never been adequately addressed in the show:

3.     Has everyone just forgotten that Jon gave up all claim to lands and title when he joined the Night’s Watch and that he is, furthermore, a deserter of that institution?

The best argument that this isn’t an issue is that Jon’s Night’s Watch vows bound him until death, and he died and was resurrected. I find that to smack of sophistry a little bit, which isn’t to say that the argument isn’t good so much as to say that it’s easy to see how people who oppose Jon’s claim could find a way to ignore it.

To wrap this up, let’s take another detour to real life history.

In 1688, Mary of Modena, wife of the unpopular Roman Catholic King James II of England, Scotland, and Ireland, gave birth to a son. Up until then, James II’s heir had been his eldest daughter Mary, a Protestant princess married to a prominent Protestant prince in William of Orange; William and Mary’s Protestantism salved the fears of the mostly Protestant nobility and gentry of the reimposition of a Catholic dynasty in Britain. Now faced with the possibility of a Roman Catholic heir, a cadre of powerful leaders in England invited William and Mary to come and take the throne from James. When James fled to Ireland to marshal support, Parliament used it as an excuse to claim that he had abandoned his Kingdoms (conveniently forgetting that Ireland was one of said Kingdoms to do so) and thereby abdicated, and formally offered the throne to William and Mary as joint rulers. In the process they passed over James’s newborn son, who normally would have been the heir apparent.

(I feel it incumbent upon me to note at this juncture that this entire mess would have been avoided had Parliament not rebelled against and then executed James’s father Charles I more than forty years earlier, driving his heirs, James among them, into exile in Roman Catholic France.) 

Were William and Mary the rightful rulers, dynastically speaking? Absolutely not! Their reign rested on an outright fiction (that James II had abdicated); on a generous interpretation of the laws of succession (that Mary should supplant her infant brother in the line of succession); and, above all, on the combined military power of Prince William and his English allies. Without Mary’s proximity to the throne and her attendant claim, William and Mary would not have been viable candidates. What made them King and Queen was power.

So, who is the rightful ruler of Westeros? Whom do you want? Give me the name, and I’ll give you the claim. In Game of the Thrones, as in real life, the only absolutely correct answer is the answer to the practical question: Who won?