Tales of Pretenders and Impostors

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:48):
Titles, Thrones, crowns, lands, power.
These are the contested elementswithin the Game of Thrones.
Humans will go to great lengths to achieve those lofty heights.
We've seen in fiction and in thereal world countless attempts to
use military might to win these ultimate prizes.
But brute force and domination is not the only tool in the

(01:10):
power brokers arsenal. Deception can go a long way.
Even now in current times, identity theft and
impersonations are commonplace and we can only imagine how the
lack of photography and centralized documentation made
impersonations a lot easier. The ancient world, medieval
world, Westeros, these are places where impersonations work

(01:32):
differently. In A Song of Ice and Fire, there
are many cases of deception usedto win, claim or hold the
throne. Joffrey's true heritage, for
example. Young griffs in another one.
In the latter's case, babies canbe swapped or simply produced
with a conjured back story. In other words, you can claim
the babies were swapped. Doesn't mean it's true.

(01:52):
Real world history is chock fullof such examples as well that
many of which were inspirations for George.
And that's our focus today, because there's so many
examples, we'll focus primarily on the ones that actually have a
Song of Ice and Fire parallels, using the Song of Ice and Fire
to get to those examples. Sometimes the other way.
But most of the most of the times, we'll start with the Song

(02:13):
of Ice and Fire example and showthe historical parallel.
And pretenders or imposters are often intertwined.
After all, what's the point of impersonating a powerful person
if you're not going to get something out of it?
Like claim a title or wealth or something like that?
And that's where the pretenders come in.
Because a pretender, it sounds like an impersonator, but it's
really just someone who's tryingto claim a title.

(02:37):
Step one, impersonate. Step 2.
Claim the title. Step 3.
Live or die by the success of the plan.
So profit or die, win or die, right?
The back and forth nature of whois and who isn't a pretender is
a good reflection of the overused, but still often true
notion that the winners write history.
This is more of a built in thingand latter historical invention.

(03:01):
The word pretender in this context is only a few centuries
old in terms of the real world and it but the concept goes back
way farther. The obvious, any people fighting
over a crown? False king, claimant, usurper.
There's lots of terms for these things.
Pretenders still look confusing because it sounds a lot like
imposter. But these are very different

(03:23):
things that are just related andoverlapped.
So the the point being here thatthe holder of the crown gets to
call the other person the pretender, but if that changes
then that person becomes a pretender as long as they're
still fighting. It's kind of not unlike how the
Brotherhood Without Banners wentfrom King's Men to Rebels
because while they were off on their mission, the person who

(03:44):
was King changed, right? This episode features some
follow-ups to our Wars of the Roses episode and our Black
Dinner of Scotland episodes. There's many familiar elements
and some of the same historical figures that will show up in
here, and some descendants of those historical figures in
other cases. You don't have to have heard
those episodes to keep up. They're not vital, they're just

(04:04):
fun. They add to the full picture of
this, but you could also listen to them afterwards.
I don't suppose the order matters a whole lot, so if
you're a fan of our historical deep dives, this one's
definitely in that category. Roughly half A Song of Ice and
Fire, half IRL history. Lots of intriguing new
characters. Familiar names.
Names you've heard a million times.
Like Edward, Richard, Henry, Aegon, all that and more on this

(04:27):
episode of History of Westeros podcast.
Hello and welcome back everybody.
And if you are watching us live,it must be about 3:00 PM Eastern
on YouTube because that's where we're live almost every Sunday.
Afterwards though, you can find a better sounding and edited

(04:48):
version on Spotify about a week later and on anywhere you look
for podcasts, any podcast platform, you can find our
episodes as well if you listen to us on Patreon, add free.
That's nice. Shout out to our good friend
Nina. She knows quite a bit about a
lot of these historical topics, especially the Jacobites, who as
a parallel to the black fires who we'll talk about today.

(05:10):
And she also gave me some insight on some literary
inspiration from George from theAccursed Kings, Nina's favorite,
and I love to drop those notes whenever we can.
This is a good time for it. Her latest blog post over on
goodqueenalley.tumblr.com. That's one.
L in Alley is responding to a question about Alice Rivers and

(05:33):
Luca Morstrom's bastards. Check it out.
Also shout out to Matt Rees, AKAAurelian Mattheus Orisius, Lord
of House Aurelian, ruler of Domus Aurelianus and the Valley
of Tennessee, wielder of Soul. Invictus is might be Valyrian
steel, that blade and keeper of the largest collection of books
outside the citadel with the motto we restore the world.

(05:54):
Matt sent me 7 pages of notes for this one.
He's very excited about this episode.
He's been a patron for a long time And big participator in
Topicsmoot, which was where thisepisode was first chosen.
It was this is #8 from Topicsmoot 2025 out of 16, so
about halfway through. Looking good.
Yeah. And of course, that title I read

(06:15):
is the title that Matt chose forhis Patreon title.
If you're a patron, you get to choose cool titles like that.
At the end of this one, I'll mention some episodes that
relate to this one to stay immersed.
We love to give you that opportunity.
And we'll start with a trivia question, the answer of which
will also be at the end. The Moon of Three Kings, which
we could also call the Anarchy of King's Landing, actually only

(06:39):
featured 2 kings, which of the Three Kings wasn't actually
claiming to be a king. Like I said, answer at the end.
22 page document today. Let me read you the titles of
each section as a little teaser and then we'll get right to it.
This is our set up. Then we're going to do what are
pretenders and imposters? A little primer for you, The

(07:00):
most recent pretender in A Song of Ice and Fire.
Then Megor versus Aegon the Uncrowned.
Then we go through each book just to discuss the pretenders
and and cases like that with a few historical parallels, but
most of the historical parallelsare later in the episode.
So Game of Thrones, the clash ofkings, the storm of swords, the
Feast for crows, Dance of Dragons.
Then we begin our dance of the anarchy section, which is play

(07:20):
on words based on the fact that the dance of the Dragons was
inspired by the anarchy of England.
These are divided into sections.We got the before the during the
moon of the three kings, dare onthe daring, then the end and the
aftermath. So for both the dance and the
anarchy, we've got quite a bit. Then we have our code of the
week, the Black Fire rebellions and the Jacobites risings.

(07:44):
And that'll be it for the episode lot in store today.
Let's get right to it. Oh, First off, we have a a super
chat from Corn Emperor. Appreciate that.
Corn Emperor says love you all. I hope all is well.
Well, we are sitting here getting to tell you about some
fun stuff that I enjoyed researching and reading about.
So I I'm doing great. Honestly, this is a, a great

(08:06):
place to be telling you all about stuff that I really enjoy.
So I'm I'm lucky about that and happy about that and grateful
about that. So let's do it.
What are pretenders and imposters?
Real quick, though, just in caseyou are spoiler reverse for hot
DI. Assume most of you aren't or
even if if not all, because I assume you've read fire and
blood. But just in case we do have
spoilers in this one. So what are pretenders and

(08:29):
imposters? A pretender?
Well, it's someone who pretends,right?
Or a member of the band. The pretenders, right?
Yes, but we're talking about theother definition of pretender,
which is someone who is trying to claim a title, usually royal
one, but really any title. You can be a pretender to any
noble title you call themselves.You can call yourself king,

(08:50):
queen, Prince, Princess, emperor, Lord, lady, whatever
leader title it is, but you don't actually have it.
You're claiming it. You're calling yourself that,
but you don't actually possess it.
So it can end with the pretenderbecoming the real thing if they
win, right? One of the best examples comes
up a lot is the Blackfyre. So we'll be talking about them
today. Damon Blackfyre was a pretender

(09:10):
who failed. Meanwhile, Robert Baratheon,
solid example of a pretender whosucceeded.
Renly would be a good example ofanother pretender who failed.
Stannis a little more complicated because his status
changed, so we'll talk about hima little bit and he's also still
out there. And of course, Daenerys
Targaryen technically pretender to the Iron Throne.
So it can be a descendant of a deposed family, you know,

(09:32):
relative or the actual person that was deposed and is trying
to get there a thrown back. You know, sometimes you survive
being overthrown. Queen Anne I popularized this
word using it to refer to her Roman Catholic half brother
James Francis Edward Stewart whois a topic of this episode.
He was the Jacobite heir of the time and an address to
Parliament in 17 O 8 Queen Anne said the French fleet sailed

(09:54):
from Dunkirk with the pretender on board.
Pretender capitalized well, justthe P, not the whole word.
So that's pretty neat. It's only been maybe the word's
only been used for roughly 300 some years, but I guess I said
in the intro, the concept has been around forever.
Obviously challenges, usurpers, anything, whatever you want to
call it now imposter. Let's talk about that briefly.

(10:14):
And of course, in a greater context, just like pretender,
the, the definition is straightforward, but in this
context, it's a little differentbecause we're only focused on
people who impersonate rulers orclaimants, right?
People who have a, a, a way to get titles.
So a Faceless man replacing Pate, well, that's an imposter,
but it's not the kind of imposter that we care about

(10:35):
today. That obviously that's such a
broad category, we got to break it down into subcategories.
Now, if a Faceless Man were to, say, impersonate Rhaegar
Targaryen, that would count if they were trying to claim the
throne, if he just tried to be Rhaegar Targaryen to, you know,
get women to sleep with him, that doesn't really count.
That's a wreck. That's a different kind of
impostature. So.

(10:55):
And of course, you don't need supernatural elements.
You don't need Faceless Men. Obviously the real world is full
of imposters and they're not using Faceless Men technology or
supernatural stuff. You can just use lies.
That's the general way it works.Like such as claiming you're the
son of Rhaegar Targaryen and sounding so very sincere about
it because you are sincere aboutit, because you were raised to
believe it. There's a chance it's even true.

(11:17):
I personally don't think Aegon is the son of Rhaegar, but it's
a great example for us either way.
An unwitting imposter and a pretender.
This is quite simply someone whoright, pardon the confusion,
pretends to be one of the above or pretends to be an heir of the
legitimate family. That's why pretender and
imposter kind of get confusing when they're used together, even
though they need to be, because they're so intertwined in A Song

(11:40):
of Ice and Fire and The Real World, like for Joffrey.
Like Aegon imposter, but never apretender.
Because the imposter worked. Enough people were convinced or
at least played along that Joffrey was truly a Baratheon,
right? He had to.
He had to fight to keep his throne, but he didn't have to
really do much to get it in the first place thanks to, you know,
Littlefinger and Cersei and all that.

(12:00):
Roose Bolton is using a fake Aria, but this isn't.
This is sort of a pretender situation, but you could argue
it isn't because Ari is not the ruling lady.
Though the imposter play is about claiming Winterfell, so I
think it probably is a pretendersituation, but one that is
already could be arguably be already resolved temporarily.

(12:20):
Game and pale hair. Another good example here, a
false claim that he was the son of Aegon the Second.
And this is based on an IRL example, a man called Lambert
Signal, who we will delve into abit later.
The most recent pretender. When the series begins, it's
roughly the year 298, maybe 297 during the prologue.
Doesn't really matter too much. The most recent pretender is

(12:43):
Bail on Greyjoy. Here's the World of Ice and
Fire, referring to the period after Robert Baratheon became
king. Quote.
Six years after he was crowned, Balon Greyjoy unlawfully rose
against his king, not for any harm done to him or to his
people, but merely out of wantonambition.

(13:05):
Lord Stannis Baratheon, Robert'smiddle brother, led the royal
fleet against Lord Greyjoy, while King Robert himself rode
at the head of a mighty host. Great feats of arms were
performed by King Robert when Pike was eventually taken and
subdued. The king then made Balon

(13:27):
Greyjoy, the pretender to the crown of the Iron Isles, bend
the knee to the Iron Throne, andas assurance of his fealty, his
only surviving son was taken hostage.
Narrator, his only surviving sonwas not assurance of his fealty.

(13:49):
He went right for it, even with Theon in captivity.
Theon got away, but Bailon wouldn't have wouldn't have
paused his or not started his second rebellion because of
Theon. Now there's a semantic argument
here whether being crowned is what makes you a pretender or
actually achieving stability andpeace under your authority.
Are you king? Sorry, not being crowned makes

(14:11):
you a pretender but makes you a king?
Are you king the moment you crowned yourself or are?
Was Balin never actually king because he didn't succeed?
Was he? It's it's a matter of
perspective. The Ironborn treated him like a
king the minute he called himself a king.
For the most part, they followedhis order.
I mean, it's not that much different than following his

(14:32):
orders as the Lord. So it's really just as simple as
his title has changed. We're still following his
orders. Oh, oh, his orders are to go
against the king, the the king on the Iron Throne.
That could get us all killed. But they still did it.
They clearly followed him. And yeah.
I assume all Ironborn historianscall him King Bailon.

(14:53):
Good point, but but like maestros at the Citadel, I don't
know. Doesn't call him King Bailon.
In this passage it says crowned himself unlawfully wrote.
Yeah, but that's part of becausehe lost.
If he had won, they'd probably be forced to admit, yeah, that's
a king now he won, and he's an independent country or Kingdom.

(15:15):
So I tend to side with the latter.
I think putting a crown on your head and calling yourself king
is too low a bar. Yeah, I think you actually have
to like win, even if only briefly.
I mean, I could put a crown on my head and call myself king
right now. Exactly my point.
I'd follow you though, so you'd have at least one follower, and
we'd and our cats would follow you too, so we'd have at least

(15:38):
five of us, you know, in an armythere.
Are you going to put me in charge of the cats, or do I have
to follow one of them, one of their orders?
No, you're definitely following their orders.
I'm a I'm just a grunt. I'm just a foot soldier in this
army. Megor versus Aegon the
Uncrowned. This is another case where the
air was usurped completely and perhaps completely by surprise,

(15:59):
because it doesn't seem like he saw it coming at all.
He certainly wasn't prepared forit, and it's the first case of a
pretender and a usurpation underthe Iron Throne.
Here's what we're told. Quote.
Though Lyman Lannister, Lord of Casterly Rock, stood firm when
Magor demanded that Aegon and his sister be returned to King's

(16:20):
Landing, quote in chains if needbe, even he would not go so far
as to pledge his sword to the youth who now found himself
being called quote the Pretenderand quote Aegon the Uncrowned.
So the lawful Arab became a pretender just like that because
he was usurped while he was awayfrom the capital and he failed

(16:42):
to overcome that. He wasn't able to take it back.
Magor killed him in a dragon on dragon battle.
That probably shouldn't have happened.
I mean, what are you doing goingup against Valerian with
Quicksilver there? That is a tiny dragon versus a
huge one. Anyway, Magor was not king for
very long, was it 4 years? Six years I forget.
And he eventually lost to another pretender, a certain

(17:04):
Jaharis. Yes, Jaharis was technically a
pretender very briefly because Magor's reign collapsed so fast
it wasn't much of a conflict. But technically Jaharis would
have had pretender status very briefly there.
It's interesting that Jaharis doesn't rewrite history to, you
know, give Aegon more lawfulness.
It's tricky because if he were to do that, he would maybe in

(17:26):
admitting that his older sister was the true heir and not him.
Yeah, Yeah, 'cause Reyna still survived and that.
Yeah. So it gets complicated.
And Reyna did complain about that a little bit.
Fair, you know, fairly, you got to say.
But you bring up a good point. These things are not simple.
In some cases. A lot of it is a matter of
perspective. Now there, of course, there are
many nonviolent pretenders at the Great Council of One O 1

(17:47):
upon Jerry's death 55 some yearslater, they weren't called
pretenders. It wasn't like a group of
pretenders. Because that's kind of it kind
of gives the wrong impression. Technically it's true though, I
think. And what?
Is a pretender but a claimant. Yeah, I mean, a pretender and a
claimant are, I think not all claimants are pretenders, but
all pretenders are claimants, I think you could say.

(18:07):
And we'll have a lot more historical examples too, which
are mostly Civil War type scenarios.
In the second-half. Let's go into A Song of Ice and
Fire first, The Game of Thrones.With the title A Game of
Thrones, you would indeed expecta fight for the throne or
Thrones, and thus pretenders area sure thing.
And, well, that is exactly what happens.

(18:30):
Meanwhile, impostors are a fun tool in the storyteller's
arsenal, one made extra potent because there's so many real
world examples surrounding titles and pretenders.
Imposter pretenders, right? Kind of sounds like a repetitive
thing, but no. Even before the War of 5 Kings
began, which really kind of kicked off in Clash of Kings,
not Game of Thrones, but we'll say Viserys, Danny's brother,

(18:53):
was a pretender. He's the first one we see in
that role. Well, Balon's is the most recent
attempt. Viserys is the first active
pretender that we see kind of walking around now.
Robert very early on was afraid that Daenerys's child would also
become a pretender to the throne.
They weren't actually that worried about Viserys.
They were more worried about this unborn child, which they

(19:15):
were right to be. Viserys not a big threat unless
you consider who was backing him.
That part's threatening. But he died quickly and in fact,
after the wine cellar incident, which was blamed on Robert,
which fair play, he was trying to assassinate Danny.
Drogo does name his unborn son Rago as a pretender.
He says I will place the my son on the eye.

(19:37):
Well, he says iron chair. Same difference, right?
As an aside, how does this work with calls?
There's not really pretenders. You can't really be a pretender
to a Kalasar 'cause they follow strength.
When a call dies, you might say you have pretender calls who are
trying to form new Kalasars, butyou don't really see kalasars
get taken over by others, sort of.

(19:59):
You might see remnants of them join new ones.
But it's another scenario where perspective and culture changes
the equation. Here.
Kalasar is already something like a mobile nation, a mobile
Kingdom. So if you think of it that way,
yeah, it's like this type of Kingdom that only lasts as long
as its current ruler, so it is hard to have claims to things

(20:21):
that don't exist later. Then we learn pretty quickly
though, as one of the major plotlines in the Game of Thrones,
that Joffrey and his siblings are imposters.
They don't. They're not pretenders because
they're already on the throne. But Renly knows this, and
because of it, he leaves to become a pretender, jumping
right over his brother. Ned, meanwhile, tries to name

(20:43):
Stannis as the true heir, because he is by the laws of
Westeros. But that bid fails because, you
know, it's not so simple to prove.
And Stannis isn't really that excited about working directly
with Ned. He's too proud, especially early
on in the books. So he's a pretender as soon as
he in any any of these circumstances, because he didn't

(21:03):
directly inherit, even if he should have.
Joffrey was crowned, his authority legitimized.
That makes Stannis A pretender. Unless Stannis says I bend the
knee, I'm not pushing my claim. You can.
You don't just become a pretender because you have a
claim. You have to push it.
You can't just have a claim. That's not enough.
Meanwhile, baby Rago dies, so that makes it Danny, a pretender

(21:24):
to the Iron Throne. She wasn't one at first, like I
said, but she obviously is for the vast majority of the series,
at least so far. So Bailon, as we said, was a
pretender but not an imposter. He could also be called a
restorer because he was trying to bring back a crown that had
formerly existed. Rob, though I don't think you
could call him a pretender because he was crowned.

(21:45):
He was successful and he was a new Kingdom, right?
It's it's a founding the Kingdomof the north that existed
before, but this wasn't the Kingdom of the North.
This was the Kingdom of the North and rivers, a Kingdom that
never before existed. You could argue that he was a
still a pretender. He was trying to claim a title
that he made-up. So that's where semantics is.
Like I'm not sure but but arguably his Kingdom was never

(22:05):
actually established it. It was wartime and the war
resulted in in losing. Even if you won all those
battles, still man's Raider. An interesting case.
There's another one where the laws are different.
You got a different cultural situation.
It's got some elements of Westeros and some elements of
colisars where kings beyond the wall don't really come from
bloodlines. It has nothing to do with

(22:26):
dynastic considerations. It's about following strength.
Someone claims it temporarily, but most of the time there isn't
1 so and I can't think of an example where a free folk king
was challenged from within for rulership of the free folk.
It's like Free Folk king, that person dies back to the status

(22:48):
quo. They don't have like someone who
takes over afterwards. It doesn't really happen.
But if you ask Elise Baratheon, they're trying to overlay the
Westerossi system on the Free Folk.
And they're like, yeah, Raymond Redbeard should be king because
he's descended from the Last King be on the wall, even though
there were plenty of kings be onthe wall before him.
So it's very arbitrary. But they actually have Raymond

(23:09):
Redbeer's descendants in their, you know, in, in, in their
court. So that's why they're picking
that arbitrary person because they have that power moving
forward to Clash of Kings. Technically, this is when Balon
actually launches his bid. You know he's he doesn't do
anything in A Game of Thrones besides get ready for it.
We find out he's been preparing all this time, so you could

(23:31):
argue that it counts. Either way, it doesn't matter.
The point is that he did it. So Joffrey is actually crowned
and as the lawful heir of Robertand he's even though he's an
imposter. Stannis is the lawful heir but a
pretender, and Renly is a pretender too, but he's killed.
Here's where we get our first historical parallel.
Owain Logak. I'm probably saying that wrong.
First of all, I'm a guy with a name that gets mispronounced a

(23:55):
lot. I believe it's a good thing to
try to pronounce people's names correctly, but we got to have
some leeway, especially when languages are really tricky.
Welsh is so tricky. The words are hard for our
mouths to form because we we we aren't using sounds that we're
used to, and the letters don't sound the same.

(24:15):
Like DD means TH in Welsh and like, so the letters that you
are very familiar with work differently in Welsh.
It's really confusing. Anyway, that's why so many Welsh
names are anglicized. Owen Owen Logoc is really not
what they would have called him.They would have pronounced it
way differently. But anyway, I don't know how to
say it. So he was a descendant, direct
descendant of Llewellyn the Great, making him claimant to

(24:37):
the Welsh Crown and a pretender.So, but the Welsh crown didn't
exist, it was subject to England.
So this is kind of like Balon Greyjoy.
He wanted to restore the former principality, like Dorn of
Wales. It wasn't a Kingdom, it was a
principality. Now at the before he launched
his bid, he was the leader of a free company that fought in the

(24:59):
100 years war. So there you go, a cell sword
company type situation. A guy who led a cell sword
company. He got a little bit of a golden
company vibe here too, don't we?With a a cell sword company
commander who goes on to make a claim for a a crown.
So he announced his intent to claim the Welsh throne in the
year of 1372. Initially he had no success but
didn't die or anything. He was able to try again in

(25:21):
1377, but England got really sneaky.
Instead of fighting it out on the battlefield, they sent some
guy named John Scott Lamb to kill him.
And this guy, he didn't just he wasn't just like walked up and
stabbed him or like wait for himin a dark alley.
No, he gained his confidence, like conned him into being like,
hey, I'm your friend. Became one of his Squires and

(25:44):
then stabbed him. What he was like putting on his
armor, helping him put on his armor like poop.
Gotcha. So that was the end of him.
So he was the last direct pretender to the Welsh throne
until Owain Glendower. Another one.
That's not how the Welsh would say it, but another Owain is.
That's neat. He tried to overthrow English

(26:04):
rule in Wales like not long after.
So we had 1377. This guy was killed shortly
after Owain Glendower started a 15 year war in the year 414
hundred. So only 20 some years later.
He also was pretender the throneto Wales was trying to restore
the principality, but interestingly he claimed descent
from all three royal houses of Wales.

(26:26):
All three. So same as Baalon Greyjoy and
Owain Logrock, he was trying to restore a crown that had been
conquered. My apologies for comparing
Baalon Greyjoy to either of these Owain's because those are
national heroes. Who Wales and Baalon Greyjoy is
a villain at one point. This Owain Glendower, he was a

(26:49):
great soldier and commander. He served John of Gaunt, which
you might recall from the Awardsof the Roses episodes.
He was the Lancastrian progenitor.
And then his son, John of Gaunt's son, a certain Henry of
Bolingbroke, who eventually became King Henry the Fourth,
who was the king that Owain Glendower LED this revolt
against. So that's pretty interesting.

(27:10):
This guy served the king before he was king and then LED a
revolt against him. So that this is personal, almost
another familiar name comes up here because earlier, earlier in
this revolt, Owain lost a battleto Hotspur the the character,
the real life person who the character Fireball is based on.
And that's we've mentioned him before as well.

(27:31):
But Hotspur, after beating Owainin this battle, he retired from
English service and you know, went back to France and had
nothing to do with the rest of the 14 years of this 15 year
war. Owain started to have more
success after that. And of course, whenever you're
going to war with England, what you should do in this era, you
what you should always do is talk to France and maybe
Scotland, because France loves to help any enemy of England.

(27:55):
So Wales is fighting for their independence.
France is like, let's help you out.
If Scotland's fighting their independence, France is like,
let me help you out. So.
And Wales is like, hey, Scotland, you want to, we could
both do this a little together. You know, let's fight the
English together. Yeah.
A bit like how the Ironwoods would always help the black
fires, perhaps, but there's not a great parallel in A Song of
Ice and Fire for that rotating situation there.

(28:17):
In 1413, the this Henry the Fourth died.
So Owain actually outlasted Henry the 4th, then Henry the
5th ascended. Remember, Henry the Fifth was
our parallel to Baylor the Blessed and Aries the Mad.
So his situation was what we kicked off the Wars of the Roses
episode with. Because he was king when the
Wars of the Roses began, he tooka much lighter, softer, peaceful

(28:42):
approach to this river, this rebellion, even though it'd been
going on for so long. Well, again, this is a Bay Lord
of the Blessed parallel guy. So he's like, yeah, let's let's
work for a truce. Let's try to back this down.
Rather than one side annihilating the other.
However, Owain died, but we don't know when or how.
Sometime around 14151416 maybe, but we don't know how it

(29:06):
happened. No one ever snitched on him that
we know of because there's a huge bounty on his head.
But Wales was just so behind it.People, like, left their jobs in
England. People just, like, picked up and
left the farms and the stores and shops to flee to Wales to
join his rebellion. It was a really big deal.
So there was a lot of loyalty there.
But yeah, we don't know how he died.
And even though there was confusion because of that death,

(29:27):
there were no impostors of him. That's something we're going to
see a lot of in this episode. And something you'll see a lot
if you study this topic in real life is when there's confusion
over someone's death that opens the door for impostors to become
pretenders. Owain's cousins.
So we just talked about Owain, Logock and Owain Glendower and
Owain's. Glendower's cousin, who was

(29:48):
named Owain, was the father of the Tudor dynasty, which of
course ended up taking England after the at the end of the
wars. The Roses Moving on to a Storm
of Swords. Not even though Storm of Swords
is a big book of climaxes and exciting stuff.
Not much actually changes in terms of kings and Queens and

(30:08):
and rulers, in terms of pretenders.
You've got people dying, but that's the end of it.
Like, Rob dies but his crown just goes away.
No one's trying to claim it anymore.
It's not. There's no pretender to that
crown. Ruse might try to push for the
King in the North eventually, but that would be not Rob's
Kingdom, because he's not. Ruse isn't going to try to rule
the Riverlands. They wouldn't follow him anyway.

(30:30):
Now Joffrey's killed too, but that doesn't change much because
Tommen takes over and Tommen's also an impostor, just like his
brother, under the same circumstances.
Danny still a pretender to the Iron Throne.
That hasn't changed. But she also somewhat claims the
throne of Marine. I say somewhat because Marine
hasn't had a king or a queen in like 1000 years and she's not
fully ruling like a queen, but kind of is and she intends to

(30:53):
leave. So and everybody knows that.
So it's it's a little tricky in that situation.
Now. Balon's also killed by Euron or
by a faceless man hired by Euron, and Euron becomes a
pretender because he tries to seize the sea stone chair after
Balon's death, but doesn't entirely succeed because of the
King's moot, and then he just succeeds there instead.

(31:14):
But you could call him a pretender during that time.
And all the people who showed upfor the King's moot in A Feast
for Crows would be claimants pretenders as well.
Now, of course, let's talk aboutA Feast for Crows.
Not from A Feast for Crows, but this quote I'm about to that
Shay is about to read us from the World of Ice and Fire
because this the World of Ice and Fire is written during a

(31:35):
song of Ice and fire and this book, this passage in the book
happens around the same time King Tommen becomes King Tommen
quote. The death of the noble hand John
Aaron has unleashed a madness onthe land, a madness of pride and
violence. The madness has robbed the realm

(31:55):
of Robert and of his fair son and heir Joffrey.
Pretenders strive to steal the Iron Throne and disturbing
rumors of Dragons reborn tricklein from the East.
In such times of trouble, we must all pray that good King
Tommen shall see a long reign and a just one to usher us again

(32:22):
out of the darkness and into thelight.
The phrase times of trouble is aclever 1.
I don't know if George did it onpurpose, but in Russia there
were the times of trouble where they were troubled by multiple
false Dimitri's, and we'll talk about the false Dimitri's later
in this episode when we have theA Song of Ice and Fire parallel

(32:45):
alongside it. This quote just happened now, so
I had to throw that out there. So Asha's a pretender now,
right? She didn't accept the results of
the King's mood. In her mind, it was the Queen's
mood. So Euron has the driftwood
clown. Clown.
I did it again. Driftwood clown.
There we go. We have a very old gag reel
where as he says, driftwood clown that always makes me

(33:06):
laugh. Well, we we unfortunately lost
that gag reel. Remember it got accidentally
deleted when we had a hard drivecrash.
It was very sad. Those years of years of Joe of
of oops that were funny. But anyway, we can start a whole
new one. Driftwood clown.
So I you can call Euron the driftwood clown.
Why not? He's got make up and he's kind
of silly. He's a, he's a more like the
clown from like it or, you know,a lot of these slasher films or

(33:31):
something like that anyway. But so is Osher the pretender or
is she going to push her brotheras the pretender?
Using the good brother example from Ironborn history where a
person was allowed to make theirplay for the Iron Isles because
they were not at the King's moon.
He's like, hey, it was not fair.He wasn't at the King's moon.
He should have a chance so. But beyond that, Euron is

(33:53):
actually a pretender too. Not to the sea stone chair.
He's got that on lockdown for now.
To the Iron Throne. He wants the Iron Throne.
He wants all of Westeros. Honestly, he wouldn't call
himself that. He would.
In his mind, his vision is much grander.
He doesn't just want to conquer Westeros.
He's kind of wants like the whole world.
I don't know. This guy's got delusions of
grandeur. He does lots of drugs, but

(34:15):
still, we can call him a pretender.
The Iron Throne. You just got to say there's more
than that on top of it. Turning our attention to a much
smaller minor example that is introduced, I think, no, it's
introduced before A Feast for Crows, but it gets a little more
play in A Feast for Crows because we see we have Dornish
chapters, which is the Vulture kings.
There's various attempts to carve out a Kingdom in the Red

(34:36):
Mountains of Dorn and there's been I think 3 or 4 vulture
kings. None of them succeeded because,
well, the there's no vulture Kingdom now, is there?
Never, never was for more than the length of the of these
rebellions took. None of them ever stuck.
But definitely they count as pretenders to the Vulture King
throne, whatever that means. theVulture crown, the Vulture

(34:58):
crown, you know, we'll call it that.
The Dance of Dragons. Stannis still pretending way up
in the North, hasn't given up, still a pretender.
Aegon joins the chat. A new pretender.
Even though the plot for Aegon has been around since Aria just
heard virus and Illyrio talking amidst the dragon skulls, he's

(35:21):
definitely a pretender. He he wasn't one until he
announced his bid, but he certainly has now he's landed in
Westeros, he's calling himself Aegon, calling himself the son
of Rhaegar. Now here's where it gets tricky.
Because if he's a black fire, he's a pretender and an
imposter. An imposter because he's
claiming to be Targaryen, right?But he's a pretender either way,
because the Brathians have the throne right now, not the

(35:43):
Targaryens or the Blackfires. So he's trying to take the
throne. So he's a pretender.
While this is ongoing, while these are all plot lines are
happening elsewhere, Davos actually wonders briefly if Lord
Manderly is going to present an imposter Stark.
He's like, does does Manderly have a pretender Stark hidden
that he's going to act like is areal Stark?

(36:05):
But of course, it turns out he has a line on the actual Rickon
Stark. But it's interesting that Davos
has this thought, maybe as a wayfor George to nod to the fact
that that is what's happening with Winterfell and a fake
imposter Aria is being used to claim Winterfell.
Between the latter 2 books there's a lot of non royal slash
title claimant related impostors.

(36:26):
Not exactly the kind of imposterwe're looking at today.
Or sort of like they, they relate, they overlap their their
cousins of the situation. Or you could say maybe they do
count. I don't know.
I'd rather say them than not. Mance Ryder again, we bring him
up and the baby situation with them.
That's real tricky, right? Mance's child getting swapped

(36:47):
with Gilly's child. Which one's the baby?
Which one's an imposter? They're both babies.
Which one's an imposter for the throne?
Which one's a claim? Which one's a pretender?
Are any of them? It gets the supernatural
elements thrown in there with Melisandre and King's blood.
It's all a mess of supernatural and competing claims and
imposture. It's very tricky, but still we

(37:09):
we get it. Basically, I think we all we all
kind of understand what's going on there.
Meanwhile, Jane is Arya with Theon helping sell the lie and
Aegon big part of the whole plothere.
Who does count as a pretender? Now here's where we have an
example from George is and his likely influence from the
accursed kings. Now we have a resident accursed

(37:29):
kings expert in Nina Krusling here.
So Louis the 10th, who was called Louis the quarrelsome was
poisoned. And the new king is a baby.
There's a wet nurse for this newborn king.
And she was chosen in part because she just had her own
baby, right? And her baby kind of looks like

(37:50):
the baby king. A lot of babies look similar.
It's it's easier to swap on babyfor another than it is an adult
or or even a child. But her child is the healthier
of the two babies. So when it comes time for the
baby king to be presented at court in front of all the nobles
and like the coming out party, you know how they do these
things that present the royal baby, right?
They decide to swap the babies, not to take the crown or

(38:11):
anything like that, just to makethe baby look healthier, just to
give everyone more confidence. Just show this healthier baby.
You pretend it's the king. It's only temporary.
Unfortunately, this was the opportunity that one of these
nobles seized upon to kill the king.
So they murder the baby, the imposter baby.
In real life. This isn't what happened.

(38:32):
We don't think. We just know.
We don't know for sure. Actually.
The baby just dies within five days, which is, I mean, that
just happens. Like in those days, infants
dying, it's not uncommon. So you can't really say that it
was poison. But Maurice Drewan was like,
hey, let's make it poison. Why not?
That'll be more interesting. So the false baby king is
killed, but they keep it a secret because they're like,

(38:53):
that was an imposter. We can't reveal that this is the
real king. They'll kill that baby too.
So they hide the baby in a convent and many years later the
truth comes out, or at least it threatens to.
That's part of the plot. I don't need to spoil all of
Cursed King. There's seven books.
I didn't spoil much there. So think of the poor wet nurse

(39:13):
there in this scenario as a parallel to Gilly who was forced
into this, forced to give up herreal baby to take care of a baby
that's not hers, that's actuallya royal baby.
So it's just, yeah, you can see the similarity there, can't you?
Dance of the anarchy? Yes, of course.
The anarchy is the famous real World War that George famously

(39:37):
and openly says he was inspired to write the Dance of the Dragon
song. I'm sure most all of you know
that by now. But there is a lot of reason for
this, a lot of detail and a lot to talk about that we have not
done before, even though we havetouched on these parallels in
the past more as a glossing overthis.
We're going to get into it pretty big here.
It's sort of like fiddling whileRome burns, dancing while

(40:00):
England or fictional continent like shaped a lot like England,
is plunged into anarchy. Yeah, well, remember that the
phrase used during the anarchy in England was the time when
Christ and his Saints slept because it was like God had
turned his face from England, things were so bad.
The two factions were so busy trying to win the throne that
they were not dealing out justice, they were not

(40:22):
protecting the commoners. Rebel barons, robber Knights
were everywhere causing problemsand there was no one to stop
them. So Empress Matilda was heir to
the throne of England, but like Viserys the 1st and Rainier,
King Henry had a hard time getting the nobility to accept
her as his heir even though she was an Empress in her own right

(40:43):
'cause she was Empress Holy Roman Empress, she was married
to the Holy Roman Empire. So she this would have been her
second crown basically if she had won it.
She was usurped by her cousin Steven while she was late stage
pregnant overseas like Rainier was, except instead of her
cousin it was her brother Aegon.And of course it was the throne

(41:04):
of Westeros instead and Dragonstone instead of France.
But you can see that's very similar, right?
But the unlike the Dance of the Dragons, the anarchy, there
wasn't four. It was four years before any
fighting broke out. Steven usurped, but it took no
one started fighting right away.They're like, hey, don't do
that. But it took a while to get the
armies until like they argued about it.
There were some legal challenges, I suppose.

(41:26):
And so it took a while for fighting to begin the Dance of
the Dragons, only less than lessthan three years.
So that's one major difference here.
And that's something I want to say as an aside.
Sometimes we get really deep into the weeds with these
comparisons and it might start to seem like, wow, George
borrowed a lot from these. It's not really the case.
Yes, he did borrow a good bit, but there's so much that isn't

(41:46):
the same. We're just not focused on that
because there's no parallel to it.
There's so much that George created on his own and so much
that he took, borrowed and just changed a little bit.
So yeah, don't don't ever let yourself think that.
Don't let you don't think that because we're taking a narrow
slice that this is how it all is.
Anyway. Matilda, like Rainiera, like
Aegon the Uncrowned became a pretender to the throne she had

(42:09):
been lawful heir to. Right?
So before the set up, kind of similar.
You are familiar with the set upto the Dance for the most part,
Great Council, 28 years of back and forth between the families.
We don't have to rehash all thatrival factions with strong
claims and huge amounts of military power.
Now Westeros way bigger than England, regardless of the shape

(42:31):
being similar, it's way bigger. So that's a factor you have to
keep in mind too. And also during that this before
era, you could say Damon was a pretender to the Kingdom of the
step stones, which he succeeded in.
And then he just gave it up. He's like, I'm bored of this.
But once he created it, it's oneof those things that once you
make a Kingdom, other people arelike, that's a Kingdom.
I can take that. If it's just a loose collection

(42:52):
of regions, no one thinks of it that way until someone takes it
and unites it into one. Even if it's briefly like it was
for Damon, now all of a sudden the whole world sees it as that
region. It's, it's, it's a Kingdom now.
It's no longer just the step stones.
So Damon was king of the Narrow Sea and five different men
claimed that crown after he gaveit up.

(43:14):
Five different people in a fairly short period of time
what, 15 ish years? 20 ish years?
And the fifth of those was slainby none other than Ricalio
Rendoon, who of course went on to claim the Kingdom of the
Narrow Sea for himself. He lost it but wasn't killed in
the attempt. So part of how they motivated
Aegon, as in Aegon the Second was convincing him he'd be

(43:37):
executed or murdered if he didn't usurp the throne.
They were like, he didn't want to do it.
But then they're like, man, they're going to kill you,
though. And he's like, oh, in that case,
all right, let's go. There isn't really a comparison
from the anarchy here. Historians debate with the
motivations of Stephen and his inner circle was but it wasn't
fear of being executed. Stephen was married to a
daughter of William the Conqueror.

(43:58):
Confusingly enough, her name wasalso Matilda.
But so he had a powerful claim and William the Conqueror, I
mean, that's the guy that conquered England.
That's a really important get a little important bloodline to
have. But Stephen was.
Yeah, not in danger of being executed.
It would have been highly unusual.
Stephen was captured at one point and he was a.
They let him go like there was aransom they just agreed to.

(44:20):
What? Isn't that weird?
That would never happen during the dance right Now if one side
had gotten their hand on the other claimant executed.
I mean, that is what happened, Right.
But here, this was an era in which it's hard to say war was
more civilized. But I mean, that's kind of like,
it's such a weird thing to call civilize at all.
But it was more civilized. There was less killing of
people. It's still terrible.
There's lots of murder and deathand devastation.

(44:42):
But yeah, it's good to see history creeping a little bit
towards not killing people. Of course, sometimes leaving
people alive causes bigger problems when you leave someone
alive and they just escape and launch a fresh claim like like
Bitter Steel did. Escaping on his way to the wall,
right? Yeah, maybe if they had executed
him. That wouldn't happen during the

(45:04):
Anarchy and the Dance of the Dragons.
So Aegon usurped the throne right away and Rainier
immediately declared her intent to take it back.
So technically she's the pretender.
But then she took it back so he became the pretender.
The counter argument would be that she never actually held it
in a time of peace, but neither did he.
The war started the second he usurped it.
He did it, and he only had it briefly at the end before

(45:25):
getting poisoned himself. Was that really a time of peace?
According to Westeros history, the way it was written, yes.
Aegon the Second counts Rainier a dozen, which is always the
kind of thing where we're like, you know, I think she should
have counted. But history is written by the
winners. Maybe someday they'll fix that.
They'll edit history and change it.
You think, you think that's weird?

(45:46):
You think that someone changing history 150 years, 200 years
later? Because I don't know when this
would happen maybe it happens 50years after the end of the
books. Real world is full of such
examples. Let me tell you, rewriting
history can happen hundreds of years later where someone that's
a pretender can be called a king.
Someone that's a a usurper can be called, you know, the lawful
person. It's really just about
interpretations of the law. Different generations, different

(46:07):
people will interpret these laws, especially when they're
hundreds of years old. The interpretations are harder
to, to hold true or to stick to the original vibe of the
original of, of the first version of that.
Because you don't know what theywere thinking 200 years ago.
You only know the, the, the details like, well, who was son
of who and who was queen of this?

(46:28):
And they don't have all the, thedetail of that era.
Oh, nor do they have the values of that era.
The culture, what they, what they care about changes over
time. So in any case, both Aegon and
Rainier called each other pretender and the sources back
and forth. It was part of the the war of
words that happens during any war of sorts.

(46:49):
And it's convenient that you canjust take the S off of swords
and you've got war of words. Yeah.
The debate might include the fact that while Rainier lost the
throne, she didn't lose it to the Greens.
She just lost it. Right.
That's the moon of three kings, right.
The Greens didn't take it from her.
She just couldn't hold it and had to flee and never got it
back. And the Greens reclaimed it, but

(47:09):
they also didn't keep it very long.
So they're also paralleled by Empress Matilda.
Empress Matilda actually did seize London and she was going
to have a coronation, but the people were like riots.
She had to leave. She had the unrest in London was
so severe she left, just like Rainiera.
Now the difference, of course, there wasn't like a moon of
three kings in London. There wasn't like rioting in the

(47:32):
streets and multiple false claimants just popping up.
That's something George came up with and it was very fun.
That's going to be a big part ofthe second-half.
Now the anarchy was knotted at by the Moon of Three Kings in
King's Landing Because it is an anarchy in King's Landing and we
get imposters and pretenders in in that event.

(47:53):
Now again as I said before, the anarchy was was characterized by
a lack of of justice and law being done because the two
factions were so busy ripping each other apart.
This wasn't as big a deal in Westeros because the war was
short. Yes, there were people that took
advantage of the opening, especially Dalton Greyjoy, the

(48:15):
Red Kraken. He took advantage of it more so
than anyone else. He seized territory on the West
and dared anyone to do anything about it.
They couldn't because they were too busy fighting each other.
They couldn't send a deal with him while they were fighting for
the throne in the Under the Anarchy.
Remember, it lasted way longer, 15 years.
So what you get is a scenario where the first couple of years,

(48:35):
some of these robber Knights andunlawful barons, tyrannical
Lords, they start testing the waters.
They're like, I can get away with this, I can get away with
this, I can get away with this. Little time goes by, they got
away with it. A year goes by, they go a little
bolder, get away with more, get away with more, still get away
with it. No justice, no pushback.

(48:57):
After years and years of this, they're just going to be
extremely bold and just extremely tyrannical and just
extremely grasping and corrupt and greedy because 15 years of
no pushback on on this lawlessness.
They're just going to get more bold and more brutal and people
are just going to get more scared.
This is a microcosm of the moon of Three Kings.

(49:18):
The realm at large wasn't overwhelmingly lawless, like I
said, because the war just didn't drag on that long, but
King's Landing was. King's Landing did fall into
that state and that's what we will talk about when we come
back. Hey folks, we've got something
pretty exciting over on our Patreon page.
We have so many episodes these days that occasionally we think

(49:42):
about the fact that it's kind ofhard to get to find the episode
you want. Sometimes we can tell you, hey,
we've got this episode, we've got this episode.
Then you're like, where is that?I got to scroll through this 12
years of RSS feed to find an episode.
Sometimes it's tricky, so and sometimes you don't know what
you're looking for. So Ashea built an episode

(50:03):
database searcher that allows you to find episodes using a
number of different criteria. It's really good and we'll let
her take over here. Yeah, I've got it on screen as
well, if you're seeing visually.But yeah, basically it's a feed
that intakes our Spotify and YouTube feed.
So it has the podcast and video versions.

(50:25):
It has all of our shorts. I have it set to tag based on
like Doom of Valyria and you click and it takes you to Doom
of Valyria related things. Or like you click on guest Lady
Gwynn and it'll take you to the episodes that Lady Gwynn has
tagged in and you can type and search things you know, Gwynn
and it'll come up like that. You can see a whole list of all

(50:49):
of the tags of which they're honestly a a really crazy
amount. I just feel like we have it like
cataloged here. We have 511 episodes.
It's not actually our full catalog because this doesn't
include paid private episodes, ones that we made on listed
because they're quite old. So it is not comprehensive.

(51:11):
We actually have more than this.But I think this should help any
patron member, you know, use ourcatalog a little bit better, a
little more efficiently. It can be really hard to find
episodes, so I hope you like it.And the problem is only going to
get bigger over time. As we just described, the
anarchy got worse and worse. When we keep adding episodes,
it's going to get harder and harder to search our back

(51:32):
catalog unless you use a tool like this or some other search
features. So yeah, sign up
patreon.com/history of Westeros and enjoy that benefit and lots
of others like bonus episodes, titles and participation in
episode selection like Topics mode.
Something to keep in mind with the concept of royal or noble
impostors conceptually is that it isn't a lot of crimes where

(51:56):
even if the culprits escape justice, the crime is eventually
discovered. For example if someone were to
steal a bunch of money from a company, it might not be noticed
right away but eventually like an accounting is going to be
done and be like hey there's $40million missing.
But not all crimes get solved. Not all crimes even are ever
identified as crimes. What I mean by that is every

(52:18):
example of an imposter we have from real world history.
Here is 1 where the imposter wasdiscovered and failed, because
if they didn't, we wouldn't know.
If they succeeded, there would be no historical record of it.
They wouldn't be listed as an ifthey were never discovered to be
an imposter, how would we know? So that's kind of like, oh,
really? Yeah, you're right.
There might have been some kingsand Queens or emperors or Lords

(52:40):
and ladies that faked it and gotaway with it.
Now in A Song of Ice and Fire, it's a little different because
we have inside information that humans wouldn't have.
We're inside people's heads. We have the equivalent of
narrator. It's not really a narrator, but
we have the equivalent of a narrator from this perspective
because we get direct thoughts that we wouldn't always have,
but not always. Like we don't always know
because we're not in the POV, wedon't have everyone as APOV,

(53:02):
we're not in everyone's heads. So yeah, Now in in real life,
some of these imposters are verywell documented, though the
farther back we go, generally speaking, that's less true.
I mean, that's that's standard, right?
The farther you back you go backin history, the less there's
written about it for the most part.
Do you recall the example of Margaret of Norway from our

(53:23):
Black dinner episode? She was the seven-year old who
was queen of Norway who was going to marry the King of
Scotland and she died on the way.
But we didn't tell you at that time was there was a fake
Margaret who came up an imposterMargaret who's like, I'm that
Margaret and I want not just thethrone of Norway, but I want the
throne of Scotland too, even though Margaret never actually

(53:44):
married into it and it wouldn't have been hers because she
married into it. Like you don't get the that's
not how it works. Also, she was 30 years older
than the actual Margaret would have been.
This wasn't the best attempt ever at an imposter.
And some imposters have, you know, happy endings like Game
and pale hair and his real worldparallel.

(54:06):
Well, Game Impaler didn't reallyhave that happy of an ending
since he died of poison, but he could have had a happy ending.
This Margaret very unhappy ending burned at the stake.
The famous Darius the Great, as in the third king of Persia,
became king after revealing thatthe current king Bardea or
Bardea, I don't have to say it was an imposter.

(54:28):
He told us like everybody. That's not Bardea, it's an
imposter. It's the mage.
Galmata Mage. Yeah, the magi.
Like an astrologer. But historians aren't sure about
this. They think this might have been
a trumped up claim. He might have just told everyone
that Bardea was an imposter and it might have been completely
made-up. He might have been making up an

(54:49):
imposter story to kill his cousin or brother, older
brother, I forget which. He was definitely related to
Bardea. So that's a way that the
imposter imposter thing can work.
The other way. You can take a real person, call
them an imposter. If you can get enough support,
people will believe it. And there you go.
Now, Darius. So I guess in the effort to do

(55:11):
this, he was a pretender. And then he succeeded and that,
and then he's then he's the great king.
All right, let's get into the moon of the three kings and the
2 Princess in the tower. So this is where we not only
include an element from the Anarchy, but also from the ends
of the Wars of the Roses where the famous 2 Princess in the

(55:31):
tower, Edward and Richard, the nephews of Richard the Third who
usurped them and took their throne and probably had them
killed. Here is a quote to kick us off
about the moon of Three Kings. Madness gripped the city after
Rainera fled, and it showed itself in many ways.
Strangest of all was the rise oftwo Pretender Kings who reigned

(55:56):
during the time remembered as the Moon of the Three Kings.
Two pretender kings that it saysduring the Moon of Three Kings
because the shepherd was the 3rd, but he wasn't trying to be
a king. He was just a leader that had a
lot of followers like these other two, Gaman and Tristane
Truefire. So yes, the moon of Three Kings
has the parallels with the 2 Princess of the tower. 2 kings,

(56:19):
2 Princess. Yeah.
All right, so to stoke your memory again, these were the
sons of Robert, who we called Robert Edward, actually King
Edward the 4th, we called him Robert Edward because he's so
much in common with Robert Baratheon.
Now, Richard was the brother of Edward, the younger brother of
Edward the 4th and Edward the 4th had sons named Edward and

(56:43):
Richard. Richard the third, of course,
was a Stannis Eddard parallel, right?
Now recall what we said earlier about Daron.
We're going to talk about Daron the Daring later in this episode
because the uncertainty of his death allowed false claimants to
appear. And as remember we said that
earlier, uncertainty is the power source here.

(57:03):
If you have uncertainty, impostors can flow in from that.
They're like, oh, that summons the impostors whenever there's
uncertainty about someone dying,That's that's their their cue to
get started. The uncertainty is the point.
And I don't just mean the uncertainty of wait, there's too
many Richards and Edwards here, but that might be enough, right

(57:23):
to say, hey, I'm King Edward. Story checks out.
I'm King Henry. Yep.
Story also check. I'm King Richard.
Yep, story checks out. Anyway, the fact that everyone
but the conspirators were in thedark about what happened to
these two Princess with strong claims.
Nobody knows what happened to them, right?
Everybody assumes they were killed.

(57:45):
But we can say that now. Hundreds of years.
At the time, it wasn't quite so certain.
It was like, did he kill them? Are they?
Did he have them hidden? You know, maybe he's got them
stashed somewhere. It wasn't sure until a lot of
time had passed and it was like,OK, well, they're definitely
dead now. It's been 30 years, but again,
in the current moment. So that opened the door for
imposters. And these imposters have a lot

(58:06):
to do and a lot of inspiration for Tristane True Fire, Perkin
the Flea and Game and pale hair.Our powerful song of ice and
fire parallels. Let's get to it first.
Tristane true Fire and Perkin the Flea.
Let's start this section with anintroductory quote about the
King's quote. The first was Tristane True

(58:28):
Fire, a Squire to a disreputablehedge knight named Sir Perkin
the Flea, who Sir Perkin declared was the natural son of
Viserys the First. After the storming of the Dragon
Pit and Rainier's Flight, the Shepherd and his mob ruled much
of the city, but SER Perkin installed Tristane in the

(58:51):
abandoned Red Keep and began to issue edicts.
Tristane himself was a relative nobody.
He was a Squire to Sir Perkin the Flea, and Sir Perkin the
Flea was a hedge knight. But these were particularly
ambitious people, both of them. I assume Tristane had silvery
hair, maybe blonde to share something that could maybe

(59:11):
identify him as a little bit Targaryen.
It would have helped sell the lie, but we don't have a
description on them, so I can't be sure of that.
It just seems to it would it would fit.
They had a brief but notable run.
As it said in the quote, they actually took the Red Keep.
They got the they convinced the the guards inside to open the
door that they would be treated safely and they weren't.
They killed them all. And they even got because of

(59:33):
that, probably the small councilwere like, yeah, we'll do
whatever you want. Laurie Strong worked with them
or while worked with them. They're like Corliss, even
Corliss worked with them. They're like, yeah, we don't
want to be killed. So we're the small, we're your
small council now. He's like, well, this.
And they were all for it becauseit helped legitimize them.
Like, well, we got an actual group of nobles as our small
council, famous people that might actually help make this

(59:53):
work. So they started issuing edicts
and they took four of the seven city gates, some of it by
subterfuge, some of it just by offering deals to them.
And some of the captains were killed, some of the loyalists
were killed, But and he even whipped Mazaria through the
streets and she did not survive that.
So some of this was going back and forth.

(01:00:14):
Some of the edicts were against the tyranny that was happening
during the war as both sides sort of pushed a little harder
on the populace to get extra money and, and soldiers and
stuff to, to fight this war. And before the war as well,
there were issues in King's Landing.
So there's a lot of unrest, unhappiness with some of the

(01:00:35):
leadership from before. And so they were issuing edicts
that repealed some of these unpopular laws.
There was a a lot of this there was Hey, you can they changed
the laws for the Kingswood, likeyou can hunt small animals there
now you can do this and that different things that were
allowing people to to get food and and survive.
So common appeal to the common born, which makes sense because

(01:00:56):
that's who was going to fill their armies had they managed to
get so far, which they didn't. But you know, it was a it was a
reasonable attempt. So Tristane was eventually
betrayed by Perkin in exchange for a pardon, right.
Tristane very foolishly allowed all these nobles to negotiate
out of his presence and they negotiated his end and pardons

(01:01:18):
for everyone else. So Perkin the fleet was
pardoned, but then he participated in the poisoning of
Aegon the Second, which earned him an execution from Craig and
Stark, but he took the black. However, before he took the
black, he killed Sir Alfred Broome by pushing him off the
drawbridge onto the spikes. Not such a bad guy, Sir Perkin,

(01:01:38):
I think. Yeah.
Killing Sir Alfred Broome was a feather in his calf there.
Sorry thing that hey, he killed bro, he killed Alfred.
Sorry, he's a little troublesome.
Anyways, so you know. Yeah, yeah, Book Missouri is not
so not such a good person. So we'll return to their peril
in a moment because we got to set up both parallels because
these things happen together. So also the parallel for this

(01:01:59):
next character came first in real life, but second here in
Westeros history. It's a little confusing, but
we'll straighten it out here in a second.
Game. And pale hair.
A quote about him. This is who I support.
Well, this is the figurehead I support.
The other king was curiouser still, a child who became known

(01:02:20):
as Game and pale Hair. The son of a whore.
This 4 year old boy was claimed to be a bastard of Aegon the
Second, which was not improbablegiven the King's body ways in
his youth. From his seat in the House of
Kisses atop Visenya's Hill, he gathered followers by the

(01:02:40):
thousands and issued a series ofedicts.
His mother later was hanged, having confessed he was the son
of a silver haired oarsman from Lease, but gay man was spared
and taken into the King's household.
In time, he befriended Aegon theThird, becoming his constant

(01:03:02):
companion and food taster for some years before dying of
poison that might have been intended for the king himself.
So these are two kids who lookedsimilar to each other.
They were both pawns of adults who took advantage of their
claims. So you got to see on paper why
they would become friends. They have a lot in common in
their early upbringing and, you know, looking similar.

(01:03:24):
But a deeper look into this mystery shows that it probably
wasn't Aegon the Third who was the target of that poisoning.
It was a, a dessert that was poison and he did not eat
desserts. So look, this doesn't make any
sense, right? Unless they just had no idea
what they were doing. It makes more sense that they
were trying to poison the his wife or his betrothed because
Unwin Peak wanted it to be his daughter who was his betrothed.

(01:03:45):
He was very upset. Anyway, that doesn't have a
whole lot to do with the pretending and stuff.
It's just, you know, for completion's sake.
So Gaiman ceased to be a pretender the moment the fraud
was revealed. His his mother confessed, as it
says, and then she was hanged. But that's why he was allowed to
live. He's like, yeah, I'm not my mom
confessed. I'm just a kid.
I didn't do this. Like, I don't, I don't have any

(01:04:06):
agency here. And yeah, it doesn't look good
to execute a child, right, especially one who isn't a
threat. Like this kid is outed as a
fraud. Everybody knows it.
He's not a danger anymore. He's like, ah, gaming.
Pale hair rises again. Like how?
How could he do that? Everybody knows.
So he's not important politically, which is why he
could be a food Taser. He was like, well, yeah, he's

(01:04:27):
also. We don't care what happens to
him. It was very sad when he died
because Egan the third lost one of his only friends.
But that's also kind of not related to our topic here.
Earlier, we teased a strong historical parallel here, and
indeed, let's talk about it. Lambert Symnal.
What a name. Lambert was discovered in a way
that child actors are often discovered, and I mean,

(01:04:49):
exploited. Yes.
The actor comparison is extra onpoint here because a priest
named Richard Simon wanted to bea kingmaker.
He's like, you know what? I'm going to be a kingmaker, A
Yorkist kingmaker. Recall your factions, York,
Lancaster, Remember Stark, York,Lancaster, Lannister, and then
Tudor. That came out of it all.
Simon taught this common born Lambert who wasn't even named

(01:05:10):
Lambert. He was named John probably.
So think about this. He was actually John.
They called him Lambert and theymade him into King Richard and
then they made him into someone.This kid had a lot of identity.
He's like Arya. So many identities on a kid who
wasn't even like 10 years old. Anyway he he taught him how to
act. This is a little bit of Aegon
the sixth Young Griff vibes. They educated him and taught him
how to act royal and courtly andhe did look like the sons of

(01:05:34):
Edward the 4th. He's the seed is strong type
business here. Some people actually think he
might have been a lost descendant but probably not.
Anyway if you recall our Wars ofthe Roses episode, this was the
younger the 2 Princess that theywere trying to impersonate here.
He also declared, if you recall,Richard the Third not only
killed his nephews, the two Princess of the Tower, he also

(01:05:54):
moved to make them illegitimate.So it was like a double whammy
to remove their claim and removetheir lives.
So it's interesting that this Lambert signal under the
auspices of priest Richard Simon, the kingmaker, had him
impersonate a king that was declared illegitimate.
So you're in a pretender king that was named illegitimate.

(01:06:16):
He had to overcome two of these obstacles, which he did not.
So presumably the thought was ifwe win this legal problem, this
illegitimacy can be solved, It'sa legal issue.
We can smooth that over. We can get the courts to solve
that for us. Which is probably true.
It's a good parallel to Joffrey,right?
If Joffrey had lost the throne, if they had lost and tried to

(01:06:37):
get back, you'd have imposter pretenders.
They would also have to face claims of being bastards, of
being illegitimate, just like Lambert might have had to as
impersonating Prince Richard, who was declared illegitimate by
his uncle Richard. So after all this planning to
make Lambert Seminole an imposter, they crowned him as

(01:06:58):
King Richard. They changed their mind.
They're like, wait, hang on a SEC, Richard Simon here's a
rumor along with his fellow conspirators, they hear a rumor
that the son of George, who was the younger brother of King
Edward and King Richard, he had a son who was the Earl of

(01:07:18):
Warwick. He supposedly died in captivity
at the Tower of London, just like the Princess in the Tower.
So Richard Simon instead changedthis like change the plan.
We're not going to make our fakeRichard or our fake boy here
into Richard. We're going to make him into the
Earl of Warwick. They changed which imposter he
was after crowning him. This is crazy, right?

(01:07:42):
And it gets even crazier becauseit was a false rumor.
The boy didn't die in captivity,he was still alive.
So Lambert Seminole impersonateda living trout instead of a dead
one with the goal of overthrowing Henry the 7th at
the time. This is keep track of all these
Henry's. So what did they do?
Henry the 7th is like, I've got the real Richard here or the

(01:08:05):
real Earl of Warwick here. I'm going to parade him through
the streets. By the way, the real Earl of
Warwick's name was Edward. Yeah, of course.
So they call him Warwick becausehis name is Edward, and that's
confusing. So they actually did crown him
as Edward the 6th, but he wasn'tactually a sitting king.
So they paraded the real boy through the streets.

(01:08:26):
Like, look, he's not dead, He's right here.
They're making stuff up. But think about what year this
is. News did not spread quick
enough. The army, the Yorkist army was
already on the way when this parading happens.
And they're like, news is not going to spread fast enough for
the imposter to be outed. And the imposter wasn't crucial.

(01:08:46):
The orchists were just looking for an excuse to invade again
and try their hand at overthrowing the Lancasters or
the tutors. So they're like, this is just a
bonus. They're like, oh, we got a false
claimant Imposter 2. Let's do that.
Let's name him Edward the 6th, crown him Edward the 6th and go
for it. They would have done it anyway,
is what most historians believe.They would have just made a

(01:09:06):
naked attempt at conquest with Idon't need a they don't need
this kid. But it was a it helped, but
ultimately it failed because therebel army was defeated in
Ireland at the Battle of Stoke Field.
Simon's was captured because he was a priest.
They didn't kill him. They just imprisoned him for
life. Game and pale hair's mother was
not spared, as we saw. So the, the perpetrator, the,

(01:09:28):
you know, main conspirator in both these cases had different
fates, whereas the reverse is true for the claimants.
Whereas Game and Pale Hair eventually died to poison
Seminole, he was also pardoned because he was 10 years old.
Just like Game and Pale Hair, they're like, this is a boy.
He didn't do this on his own. This wasn't his plan.

(01:09:49):
This wasn't his agency. So they let him go.
They're like, we're not going tolet you go.
They gave him a job as a spit Turner.
Not that different than a food taster, except a way less
perilous kitchen related food related, right.
But he rose higher, which maybe game and pale hair would have if
he hadn't died so young. Signal actually became a
Falconer. Yeah, that's a pretty good job.

(01:10:11):
Royal Falconer. Yeah, probably good pay in that
and not much danger. Not much.
Pretty good prestige. So it worked out all right for
Lambert Simmell. Happy ending for him.
And he might even still have descendants out there.
There's signals that that probably relate to him and I
didn't die of poison, that's forsure.
And of course, Lambert Seminole leads us back to Aegon slash
Young Griff because it's not just the appearance, but that is

(01:10:35):
important, but the training in secret to make him a king in
secret, like teaching him courtly men or taking a regular
person that wasn't raised that way and pretending that they
were. Also, they're both the 6th,
right? This is Edward the 6th.
He was crowned as Edward the 6th, and Aegon is Aegon the 6th.
Now this brings us back to our previous example of Perkin the
Flea, Tristane True Fire and their historical parallel Perkin

(01:10:56):
Warbach. The dead giveaway, of course, is
the name Perkin. There are a few other Perkins in
the Song of Ice and Fire, but not many.
This is probably the most famousby far.
This guy didn't look like the sons of Edward the 4th.
He looked like Edward the 4th specifically.
So he didn't have any like person backing him.
He's like, hey, I look like thatformer king, I'm going for it.

(01:11:19):
But he did the same thing Lambert Signal did, or his
conspirators did. He claimed to also be that same
dead younger Prince in the Tower, Richard.
They were like, it almost workedfor him.
Why not? And everybody exposed that one
as a fraud. So it's still kind of an Open
title to be grabbed. I can be the Richard he claimed
he had been spared. Yes.
They killed my older brother Edward.

(01:11:40):
But they spared me because I wasyoung at the time.
I took an oath not to reveal myself until now.
A holy oath. I couldn't say anything until
now. Yeah.
It's so convenient, isn't it? But it makes me wonder, will
Aegon Young Griff do the same thing?
Something like that? Like I couldn't reveal myself
until now, you know, I had to keep my secret the the enemies

(01:12:03):
of my family are legion and I had to hide, blah blah blah.
He's got to make statements, right?
This can't just be, hey, I'm back y'all.
And I think they'll be carefullywritten statements engineered by
Varis, a master of such things, right?
So this is we haven't gotten to this phase of Aegon's claim to
the throne yet. We've only gotten to the

(01:12:24):
beginning of the invasion. We haven't really seen how the
propaganda and how the getting people to believe that he is
what he says he is part that hasn't we haven't seen that take
root in Westeros yet. That's to come and I'm pretty
excited about it. This guy also had coins minted
in his name. He was really deep into it.
He was like, I'm going to do allthe things the king does.

(01:12:44):
Don't forget who else did that in in Westeros history.
Damon Blackfire. That was even a part of the plot
in the mystery night. Remember the snail guy?
The snail jouster got mad at hisSquire for accepting a Damon
Blackfire gold coin. He's like, this is treason to
this. Pass this currency around.
They really came down hard on it, Right?
I'd like Tristane Trufire. Perkin Warbeck stoked anger by

(01:13:08):
referring to unfair laws, especially taxes.
Yeah, that was one of the ones that Tristane Trufire issued an
edict against was the unpopular taxes of Bartima Seltegar, which
were wartime taxes. When Perkin Warbeck landed in, I
think it was Cornwall, he was like, taxes are too high, taxes
are too damn high. I'm going to lower taxes.

(01:13:29):
Just just a reminder that I'm going to lower taxes is
something politicians have been promising for forever, and a few
of them actually do it, but onlya few.
This guy made multiple landings in England, didn't succeed, Went
to Ireland to get support, went to Scotland to get support, went
to Burgundy to get support. Remember, if you want to fight
England, Ireland, Scotland, Burgundy, and maybe Wales are

(01:13:52):
your allies. Wales wasn't involved in this
one, but you know, his imposturewent really far though.
He was called King Richard the 4th by other monarchs.
They were like, Yep, that's KingRichard the 4th all right.
He went to the funeral of the Holy Roman Emperor and they're
like presenting King Richard the4th, but he actually got married

(01:14:14):
to a woman named Lady Catherine Gordon got married under the
auspices of being this king. But this is actually the the
biggest clue that everyone in onit knew that he wasn't really
Richard because this was a very minor noble woman.
If they believed he was really King Richard, he would have
married someone way higher born.This was a minor noble woman.

(01:14:35):
So that's a giveaway. And this is consistent with what
we see in The Song of Ice and Fire with Joffrey, Jane Poole
and others, which is that they know, but they're not going to
speak up. Who's going to say in Roose
Bolton, like in Roose Bolton, that's not really our Yeah, a
good way to die, right? Same thing with Joffrey.
Like, who's going to stay? Like, who's going to stand there

(01:14:56):
and say, that's not really, you know, Robert's son?
Well, there Ned will, but very few others will, right?
Stannis will, but only when an army behind him.
Either they can't do anything about it or it's against their
best interest to even try, or both.
So real world, this has happenedas well.
Now he's certain Robert Cliffordjoined this conspiracy of Perkin

(01:15:16):
Warbeck as a double agent. He lied to his fellow
conspirators. So, yeah, Perkins, really King
Richard to get them to join, to see who would join, right.
It's like, it's like a it's likea false flag.
It's like, yeah, we got the realdeal.
Now who's with me? And then when the who's with me
revealed themselves, he gave he made a list and gave it to the

(01:15:38):
king, gave to King Henry. And then Henry went and had
those people arrested and most of them were executed.
It would be kind of like if someone was like, yeah, this
King Aegon's the real deal. Hey, friends in the Reach, who's
with us? But it turns out this was
somebody on the Lannister side and and had them all killed.
Now, in the end, Perkin Warbeck confessed in writing to his true

(01:16:00):
identity. Well, he was forced to do this,
so who knows what was actually true.
And this guy wasn't exactly honest in the 1st place.
We don't know, but he also was, not surprisingly.
Now you can get why they didn't kill young Lambert Seminole.
He's a boy. He didn't really have that much
to do with it. Like, why execute a child?
It doesn't look good in this eraof Christianity.

(01:16:20):
And you're trying not to kill, you know, So killing boys is
pretty bad. But this was a man, a full grown
man who tried to impersonate a king and got really far with it.
You would think they'd kill him,but they didn't.
They kept him in captivity, justheld on to him.
Like, you can chill here. Hey, he tried to escape and they

(01:16:40):
still didn't kill him. They got him back, put him in
the Tower of London. They're like, OK, we're going to
give you a tougher prison. And he was put inside the Tower
of London with the current Earl of Warwick, another Earl of
Warwick, the 17th Earl of Warwick, also named Edward.
Those two conspired together to try to escape.
They did, but they got caught. This time they're like, all

(01:17:02):
right, that's it, execution. His wife, Catherine Gordon,
became a lady in waiting to the royal family.
So not the not, not a terrible ending for her.
So doesn't this show you how history provides so much raw
material for George? There's so many stories that
sound fictional that aren't. They're just too like, what's

(01:17:23):
that word? Stranger than fiction?
Yeah. But this also helps keep it
authentic. George's stories, his writing.
One of the things he's so amazing at is creating scenes,
dialogue and characters that speak in ways that feel real.
And he backs this up with thingsthat are authentic.
And we know there are things because they really happened.
And you when you hear that they really happened, it makes
George's world feel more real because you know this is not

(01:17:46):
made from whole cloth. It's a combination of his
invention, his, his imagination,his creativity and what he's
learned from the real world. The Dance of the Dragon.
We're not done with the Dance ofthe Dragons.
He it gives us another brief pretender whose death opened the
door for imposter pretenders. Deron the daring.

(01:18:07):
During the war, Deron was the most effective of the Green
Dragon riders. His case showed how effective a
dragon and an army working together could be disciplined,
organized, and They dominated the Southern Reach, winning a
number of battles against the Black faction, thanks in part to
the two betrayers, in large partto the two betrayers, Deron and

(01:18:28):
Lord Ormond Hightower. And the Greens won the first
battle of Tumbleton right with with Hugh Hammer and Wolf White
being the two betrayers, of course.
Now, it really should have been Eamond who was the most
effective of the Green Dragon Riders, but he was too erratic,
too driven by emotion, maybe a little crazy.
And when Eamon died, Daron actually became the Green
claimant for the throne because Malore was already dead and

(01:18:52):
people thought Egon the Second was dead.
He wasn't. But none of neither Daron nor
these other Lords of the Reach knew that they thought he was
dead. So Daron's the pretender to the
throne. Easy to forget or miss that that
he was technically the claimant for a little while.
So many actually wanted to proclaim him king and he was all

(01:19:12):
for it. And This is why the impostors of
him that came along later had somuch potency because he was an
actual pretender. He was very close to getting the
throne. And then it would have been
confusing when his brother revealed him, said, hey, I'm
still alive, you know, like, Oh well, I guess it's yours.
Had the Reach Lords continued towork together as they had been

(01:19:33):
for a while, things might have gone pretty well for them 'cause
they had worked together. It went well, they won the
Battle of Tumbleton. But then bad leadership really
started to take over. Just like it was fairly true for
the Anarchy. There's so many bad decisions
made during the Anarchy. Just fling military decisions,
weird political decisions, legalrulings that were that harmed

(01:19:56):
the side making them. Yeah, just bizarre choices.
Bad leadership is just a simple way to put it, and obviously
that was the case with the Blacks and the Greens.
Very few of leaders on either side were competent and a lot of
them were incompetent. But the real distraction here
was Hugh Hammer making his move instead.
Yes, Darren's the claimant, but Darren was young and Hugh

(01:20:17):
Hammer's like, I've got the biggest dragon now.
I've got a better play for the throne than this boy with his
small dragon. And this caused infighting
amongst the greens. The caltrops were like all
right, well we're going to assassinate the two betrayers.
So we got 2 Princess of the tower, 2 betray betrayers, 2
kings under the moon of three king, let's say Paris today.

(01:20:40):
This of course was great for thearmy headed towards them for the
Riverlands, right? The Riverlands were Riverlands
army led by Bloody Ben and BlackAlley, Blackwood and all those
folks. They were headed for Tumbleton
and it really worked out well for them that the Greens were
infighting because they were very unprepared for this attack.
So when the Riverlands army shows up, as you all probably

(01:21:01):
remember, neither of the Two Betrayers nor Damon or sorry
Deron managed to get to their Dragons in time to actually use
them in the battle. And that was a huge part of why
the Second Battle of Tumbleton was a huge win for the Blacks.
A reversal of the First Battle of Tumbleton.
Here is what Fire and Blood tells us.

(01:21:21):
Quote. So intent were they upon their
own conflicts and rivalries thatthey had all but forgotten their
true foes. Sarah Adams night attack took
them completely unawares before the men of Prince Darren's army
even knew they were in a battle.The enemy was amongst them,

(01:21:43):
cutting them down as they staggered from their tents, as
they were saddling their horses,struggling to Don their armor,
buckling their sword belts. Most devastating of all was the
Dragon Sea. Smoke came swooping down again,
and yet again breathing flame. 100 tents were soon afire, even

(01:22:07):
the splendid silken pavilions ofSER Hobert Hightail, Sorry of
SER Hobert Hightower, Lord UnwinPeak, and Prince Daron himself.
So Lord Unwin and Sir Hobert, even though their tents were set
afire, as this quote tells you, they survived.
But Prince Daron was never seen again, and accounts differ as to

(01:22:28):
what happened to him. And what did we tell you?
If accounts differ, If there's confusion, then it opens the
door for imposters. That's exactly what happened.
But first, here are the tales we're actually given about what
happened to Daron. Quote #1. 3 Conflicting accounts
exist as to the manner of death of Prince Daron Targaryen.
The best known claims that the Prince stumbled from his

(01:22:49):
pavilion with his night clothes a fire, only to be cut down by
the mirror cell sword Black Trombo, who smashed his face in
with the swing of his spiked morning star.
This version was the one preferred by Black Trombo, who
told it far and wide. The second version is more or

(01:23:11):
less the same, save that the Prince was killed with a sword,
not a morning star, and his Slayer was not black trombone,
but some unknown man at arms wholike is not did not even realize
whom he had killed. In the third alternative, the
brave boy known as Deron the Daring did not even make it out

(01:23:34):
at all, but died when his burning pavilion collapsed upon
him. That is the version preferred by
Munkins true telling and by us. You think if Black Trombo had
been hired by the Greens, he would have changed his name to
Green Trombo? So all three versions of this
story have Deron on fire. In the first two, he runs out of
his tent and is killed, and the third he never makes out of his

(01:23:55):
tent at all. So really, these aren't terribly
different accounts. They all.
He dies in all of them. He's on fire in all of them, you
know, and he doesn't get very far in two of them.
So there's not much dispute hereyet.
The fact that there's any different, any dispute at all,
opens that door a little. And with that door open, in come
the impostors. Let's start with the historical

(01:24:17):
parallel for these impostors, the false Dmitri's.
We mentioned them earlier. Shout out again to Matt Reese
for this. And this is the times of trouble
that we referred to earlier as well.
So first of all, we have Dmitri of Uglik, AKA Dmitri Ivanovich,
who was the youngest son of Ivanthe 4th, also known as Ivan the
Terrible. So the heir apparent, his older

(01:24:39):
half brother Fedor the first, who's kind of weak and sickly.
So the country was ruled by a council instead, headed by this
guy named Boris Godinov. Godinov who sent Dmitri, his
mother and her brothers into external exile, internal exile,
because he wanted to keep his rule of the council through this
puppet king. Basically, Dmitri died under

(01:25:00):
mysterious circumstances, probably killed by Godinov, and
so that Godinov could become Tsar when Fedor died.
Now later the first false Dmitriappears.
He entered history around 1600 and he made it.
He made a strong impression on the Patriarch of Moscow, which
is a big deal. The Patriarch of Moscow, big
religious leader Goodenough, is czar now.

(01:25:23):
So he succeeded in that. But he try and he tries to
arrest this Dmitri, but Dmitri flees to the Polish border with
Lithuania. And so he's get a little bit
outside of of Dimitri of Gudinov's reach in 16 O 5.
Five years later, a Polish Lithuanian army backs him, plus

(01:25:44):
anti Gudinov Russians helping him out.
And they win the first battle, but then lose the second battle.
Then there again, Gudinov dies and some of the victorious
Russians, they just beat Dmitri.They switched to his side
because Gudinov died. They're like, well, we, we got
to be on the side of the guy who's going to be king, even
though he just lost. So he married a Polish

(01:26:06):
noblewoman, presumably as part of his deal to get this Polish
army. But she didn't convert to
Orthodoxy, which was a big problem because the Russia was
very Orthodox at this time. And there was a rumor that
Dmitri was going to unite the Russian Orthodox Church with
Rome, with the papacy, which is like, God, they didn't want
that. They really there was bad.

(01:26:28):
So this may have been a false rumor just to push back against
Dmitri. Anyway, it was led to a revolt
that led his he he died. He was killed 10 days after his
marriage and only 11 months intohis reign.
So this marriage to the not orthodox Polish noblewoman was
the death blow in his short reign of of false Dmitri the

(01:26:49):
first. Now we have false Dmitri the
second or the second false Dmitri giving him an ordinal
number. False Dmitri, the second false
Dmitri, the third, yes. Like, no, the second false
Dmitri appeared only two years after the death of this other
one, or maybe even only a year and a half.
He was probably a priest's son or maybe a converted Jew that
had a resemblance to the first false Dmitri.

(01:27:09):
And like Aegon the 6th and Lambert Signal, he was raised
for this role. It was a not just a, hey, I'm
going to impersonate somebody. You know, there's a lot of
planning and teaching and learning how to act.
So like learning how to be courtly, speaking other
language, whatever all the things that Royals do, he had to
be able to pass all these sniff tests and be able to behave like
a royalty, like a royal person and not get caught.

(01:27:32):
So he was impersonating A Muscovite boyar, which was a
thing that was happening throughout the events here.
He got tortured and falsely confessed under torture to be
Dimitri. He's like, I'm Dimitri.
I really am Dimitri. So that that's amazing.
He's tortured and he still held out to still convince him that

(01:27:55):
he was what he said he was. And then because he was, because
he confessed under torture, it made people believe, even though
it was a fake confession. So Cossacks, Poles, Muscovites
all started to join him. They were like, OK, this guy's
the real deal after all, like tortured.
And he's still that's that's pretty good proof.
False. Dmitri's wife, the this previous

(01:28:15):
woman that we talked about, she meets him and accepts him.
She's like, Yep, that's him. Obviously she's in on it, I
guess, but it really helped legitimize he got people.
You get the belief that he was tortured and and still made this
claim that he was Dmitri. His wife says, Yep, that's him.
That's a lot of proof, but it was all fake.

(01:28:36):
He led an army only a year laterin 16 O 8 to Moscow, won some
battles, but then the king of Poland arrived and all his polar
supporters are like, Nah, that'swe're going to go to his we're
we're following our king, not you.
And then the the Russian loyalists got Sweden on their
side and marched on Dimitri and he had to flee.

(01:28:59):
And he was just killed two yearslater by another princeling, a
tar. He got into like a fight with a
Tartar princeling and was killed.
Drunken death, like very ignobleending.
One more false Dimitri. Yes, the third one, he was
supposed to have been a Deacon. So like, there's a lot of
religion behind all these guys. But that's partly because the

(01:29:21):
church had so much power in Russia in this era.
He he was probably called Siddurka.
Matt says he's the most enigmatic of the three, and I
think I agree. He was more like secretive, a
little more mysterious. We know a little less about.
He might have been the cleverest.
He appeared only a year later, after the death of the last
Dmitri. And maybe the death of him in
such a big noble way was part ofhow this guy was able to get

(01:29:44):
going. So he appeared in a town called
Ivan Gourd, proclaimed himself Dmitri.
This was 1611, like I said, onlya year later.
The Cossacks acknowledged him asczar a year less than a year
later, or about a year later. And he forced the Gentry like
the all the like the the middle class and up the the wealthier

(01:30:04):
people to kiss the hand like he made them bend the knee
basically. But he had to flee.
It didn't go that well. And they captured him and had
him secretly executed, which is kind of odd that they executed
him secretly. I wonder why they did that
because you'd think they'd want to execute him publicly.
So it would be widely known thatthis Dimitri was killed, but it

(01:30:25):
must have had their reasons. And it worked.
I guess there weren't any more false Dimitris.
So either way, that was the end of the Dimitris.
Now we go back to the Derons andyou'll see.
And this is the end of the war. So the Dance of the Dragons is
where we get back to before the war actually ended.
Remember, Aegon emerges from hiding and is like, oh, Aegon's

(01:30:47):
still alive. He's terribly wounded like his
dragon. His dragon eats Raneera and
captures Raneera's son, the future Aegon the Third.
He then proclaims quote. The time for hiding is done,
King Aegon the Second declared. Let the Ravens fly that the
realm may know the pretenders dead and their true king is

(01:31:09):
coming home to reclaim his father's throne.
Straightforward political speak here.
My enemy is the pretender. I'm the true king.
He reminds people it's his father's throne while ignoring
that it's also his sister's throne.
Rainier was every bit or his daughter too, right?
So that makes a lot of sense, right?
The War of words is is a big deal because the War of Swords

(01:31:33):
and Dragons is the the front of it.
But it's the war of words that helps determine what side people
fight on in the War of Swords and Dragons in the first place.
But of course, at this point, Aegon thinks it's over.
He thinks he's won. Of course he didn't.
Now, let's jump back to the anarchy briefly.
We're we're swirling through a lot of parallels, jumping from
different time periods in both the real world and Westeros.

(01:31:56):
Empress Matilda didn't give up the fight for England, but she
did hand it over to her son Henry.
Obviously Henry, right? She's like, I'm done fighting
for England. But her son's like, yeah, I'll
keep doing it and I'll do it. Part of the reason she she was
done was that it wasn't going well.
She'd already been booed out of London, basically.
And her second husband, remember, she was married to the

(01:32:17):
Holy Roman Empire. Well, he died.
She remarried to Jeffrey the Fair, who conquered Normandy in
her name in 44, Normandy in 44. That sounds like World War 2,
but no, not 19441144. So she was now the Duchess of
Normandy. She's like, you know what?
I got the Duchess of Normandy. I got all these other things.

(01:32:37):
I don't care about England anymore.
Let me just do this. But like I said, her son Henry
Fitz Empress, he was all about it.
He he basically inherited her pretender status.
The anarchy was finally resolvedby Stephen getting to keep the
crown, but he had to knock his own son out of the line of
succession and accept Henry, sonof Matilda.

(01:32:59):
So both sides kind of like, well, Stephen's going to be
king, but the line is going to go through the original line.
It started with through King Henry, father of Matilda.
This is Henry the Second. He became Henry the Second
because King King Stephen died within a year.
There's no accusations of foul play, but I guess you never
know. Certainly didn't.
Henry didn't have to wait long. And in the meantime, Stephen's

(01:33:22):
son, a Eustis, the Black Prince,was not happy about being
written out of the succession and started a war over it.
But he died. He was very effective Prince.
He was dangerous, but he he got sick and died shortly after
looting some temples, which a lot of people in that era, they
of course blamed him looting temples on.
That's why he died. You're like, God punished you

(01:33:44):
for that man. So Henry the second, who, like I
said, became king after Stephen and that's the end of the
anarchy. He ruled for 45 years.
So you could maybe compare him to Jaharius the first, but
that's a comparison for another day.
That's a sitting king. So now here we go with the
aftermath. And back to Dara on the daring

(01:34:04):
because his name clearly did notdie with him starting about five
years after his death, so maybe around the year one 35136 his
shadow returned quote. Whatever the manner of his
death, it is beyond dispute thatDaron Targaryen, youngest son of
King Viserys the First by Queen Allison, died at the Second

(01:34:27):
Battle of Tumbleton. The feigned Princess who
appeared during the reign of Aegon the Third, using his name,
have been conclusively shown to be impostors.
Sadly, we don't know who they were, what they did, how they
were conclusively shown to be impostors.

(01:34:48):
This is all stuff that would be covered in fire and blood.
Two blood and fire. It's that era.
That's that's where this happened.
So Darren looked like a Targaryen.
We know that from his description.
He favored his Targaryen ancestry, not his Hightower.
So if he had looked like a Highttower, it probably would have
been easier to impersonate him because you got probably a lot
more light brown or dark brown haired people around than you

(01:35:11):
know, Targaryen looking. Regardless, it's not that hard
to find Targaryen looking people, right?
Like Lease in the free cities, Volantis especially, you can
find people that have that coloring.
So that might be a good theory here because who supported these
imposter Princess? They didn't just like show up
like Amy's black fire and get executed, right?
They had they probably came witharmies and it says they were

(01:35:33):
troublesome. It says the realm.
It was difficult, right? There was disputes about it.
There was there was needing to be these challenges needed to be
put down. So they weren't simple.
They weren't they weren't just something you could just sneeze
at. They they caused problems,
though we don't know how big or how serious they were.
And remember, this was after theera of Dragons.
Yes, the Dance of the Dragons had just happened, but so many

(01:35:55):
of the Dragons were killed already.
Targaryen supremacy was severelymuted because of their loss of
their ultimate weapon. So that's what anyone who's
coming at them in this era is, is going on that calculation.
It's like, hey, we don't have todeal with the Dragons anymore.
This dynasty might be a lot easier to knock off now.
So this, these false Darrons almost certainly have that in

(01:36:16):
mind. They're like, this is our
chance. And if we don't take it now,
someone else will cause the whole world now realizes these
Targaryens might be vulnerable. The Targaryens will be eager to
say, hey, were still strong and powerful, they would be pretty
keen on proving that to shut down further challenges to their
supremacy. So like I said, we don't know a

(01:36:38):
lot of detail about these false Darrons.
There were at least three 'causeit says several, it doesn't say
2, it doesn't say one, it says several.
That's at least three. I said there could even be like
1/4 or 1/5. I'm guessing three 'cause it
seems a lot to have more than that, but hey, it's possible.
So. And the time frame for this is
sometime around 1:36 to before 157.

(01:36:59):
So the first one would have beenaround 1:36 and the others would
have been done by 1:57 because they all happened during the
reign of Egon the 3rd, and Egon the Third's reign ended in 157.
And of course the when this happened would give you an idea
of how old these false Darrons were.
If it happened in the late 130's.
The imposters would have to be early 20s because that's how old

(01:37:20):
Darren would have been. So on and so forth.
This could be a little bit like a Young Griff of the 9 penny
King situation where you've got a pretty strong claimant by name
and reasonable if not powerful support behind them due to
ambition. Or just no, no, just ambition.
That's it. So in the quote also it says

(01:37:42):
that Viserys or in that section of the book, it tells us that
Viserys as in the future of Viserys the Second, Aegon's
younger brother and Hand was chiefly responsible for dealing
with these impostors. He and he was a very competent
hand who ruled for 20 years. He managed things during Baylor
the blesseds time. So dealing with these imposter
Derrons is probably easier than dealing with Baylor the blessed.

(01:38:03):
But again, we don't know. Now Aegon the Third also named
his first born son Derrons in the year 143, which might have
been a way to sort of take a little steam away from possible
future false Derrons. Maybe, possibly there's also the
matter of the child of Alice Rivers and Amund, who was put
forth as a claimant, possibly asa pretender.

(01:38:25):
Yeah, as a pretender. But we don't know what happened
with that either 'cause this is also in that same time frame of
where Fire and Blood 1 ends and where we have some missing data
for now. But definitely she and that boy
were around in the same era and we don't know what happened to
them. Meanwhile, on the Iron Isles,
another example comes to us fromthis era quote.

(01:38:47):
In the Iron Islands a savage struggle for power followed upon
the death of the Red Kraken. His three sisters and the men
they had married seized Toron Greyjoy, the boy upon the sea
stone chair, and put his mother to death, whilst his cousins
joined with the Lords of Harlaugh and Black Tide to raise

(01:39:10):
up Toron's half brother Roderickand the man of Great Wick
rallied to a pretender called Sam Salt, who claimed to be
descended of the Black Line. The black line, of course is the
line of Heron Heron, the Black, Harwin, Hardhan, all those the
the Hor dynasty Hoare. The Lannisters actually invaded

(01:39:34):
during this chaos and one of the, one of the Lannister
vassals tried to actually seize the sea stone chair.
And so he was sort of a pretender to the sea stone
chair, but he didn't hold that. He lost it quickly.
The Lannisters also during this invasion, this, this claim that
wasn't part of the the plan. They were just trying to stop
the uprising and settle the IronIslands and get revenge on what

(01:39:58):
they had done during Dalton Greyjoy's depredations during
the Dance. He certainly did a lot of damage
to the West Coast and to the Lannisters and their vassals.
So they were keen on revenge here.
We don't know what happened to Sam Salt.
He was presumably killed becausehe was captured during this
Lannister invasion. It was very easy for them to
invade because the Iron Aisles were fighting each other and

(01:40:21):
they they were also dealing witha power vacuum after the death
of the Red Kraken. And of course, soon enough the
Iron Throne brought the Iron Aisles back in under their
auspices and things died back down to normal for the Iron
Aisles. Here's a little an example a

(01:40:42):
little farther off the beaten path that is historical, but is
a comparison slash parallel to the Blacks and Greens and
involves our earlier touched on subject of historical
revisionism. This one also comes to us from
Matt Reeves. Thanks, Matt.
In the 14th century, 2 lines of the Imperial clan in Japan

(01:41:02):
claimed the throne, the NorthernCourt and the Southern Court.
Their rivalry was was resolved in 1392, so only about 60 years
before the beginning of the Warsof the Roses.
So similar time frame here. This would be during the 100
Years War. Then by that same reckoning,
every Emperor of the Southern Court enthroned prior to 1392
was established as legitimate and the throne was determined by

(01:41:25):
Emperor Gokomatsu of the Northern Court and his
successors since 1911. More than 500 years later, the
Japanese government retroactively declared the
southern claimants were actuallythe rightful emperors, despite
the fact that all subsequent emperors, including the emperor
of the time, were northern courtdescendants.

(01:41:48):
So the reasoning here was that the southern court retained
possession of the three sacred treasures, which are very
important symbols of rule in Japan for the for the imperial
court there. So this they converted the
emperors of the northern former northern court into pretenders.
So like 500 years of reversing these guys status, six former

(01:42:10):
northern emperors are now pretenders in history.
Now this is very much like how Rainier was like written out of
it. Like you can see this happen.
They wrote her out right away. This happened 519 years later or
21 year. Yeah, 519 years later.
They changed history to change who the pretenders were and who
the legit were. It's it's wild, right?
But you can, the words do have power like the swords and

(01:42:33):
Dragons, don't they? Sometimes they take a little
longer to take root or to make their power felt.
But yeah, that's pretty crazy that they just changed that.
Like the present Japanese familyis descended from Northern court
emperors, even though the Southern court is the one that
was made the legitimate 1. So it's all very strange to me.

(01:42:57):
Probably beggars further readingon my part.
I'm curious. Thanks Matt for bringing this to
my attention so I can look into it more.
I love stories like that. History is fun.
Our quote of the week. This one comes from Madeline
Miller's Cersei, a book I really, really loved.
The book is from Cersei's POV. This is Circe, as in the

(01:43:18):
daughter of Helios and the Oceanid, which is a nymph, a sea
nymph, an ocean nymph called PerSE.
So this quote is from the time that Odysseus was on her island.
Remember, in the traditional myth, Cersei is the one that
turns most of his crew into pigs.
He spent his days working on theship.
In the evenings we would sit before the hearth while the men

(01:43:41):
ate their suppers, and at night he came to my bed.
His shoulders were thick, carvedfrom his warrior hours.
I ran my hands across his raggedscars.
There were pleasures there, but in truth the greater pleasure
was after, when we lay together in the darkness and he told me
stories of Troy conjuring the war for me, spear by spear.
Proud Agamemnon, leader of the host, brittle as badly tempered

(01:44:04):
iron. Menelaus, his brother, whose
wife Helen's abduction had begunthe war.
Brave, dull brained Ajax built like a mountainside.
Diomedes. Odysseus is ruthless, right
hand, and then the Trojans handsome Paris, laughing thief
of Helen's heart. His father, white bearded.
Priam, king of Troy, beloved by the gods for his gentleness.

(01:44:25):
Hacuba, his queen with a warrior's spirit whose womb had
borne so many noble fruits. Hector, her eldest noble air and
bulwark to his great walled city.
And Odysseus, I thought, the spiral shell always another
curve out of sight. I began to see what he'd meant
when he had talked of his army'sweakness.

(01:44:46):
It was not their sinews that hadwavered, but their discipline.
There had never been a parade ofprouder men, more fractious and
unyielding, each certain the warwould fail without them.
Madeline Miller's extremely talented.
Her prose is the kind that sometimes I just, I just had to,
like, reread what I just read. Like, what?
That was so good, I got to read that again.

(01:45:07):
You know, that quote reminds me of the one about Stannis, Robert
and Renly. That's pretty good.
You're right. Yeah.
From the blacksmith, yeah. Yeah, totally.
Where they talk about, you know,iron and.
The shiny, the true steel and the yeah, you're right, That's a
good one. So but also beware.
Her books are sad. She is incredible, for example,
at writing loneliness. This book is Cersei is lonely

(01:45:27):
and she writes it so well. It is, It is not the easiest
read, but it's such all in some ways it is an easy read because
it's so good, but in other ways it's like, whoa, this is heavy.
HBO had picked this up to make into a show, but I don't think
it's still under development. I think they dropped it and
maybe it'll get unshelved. Maybe it's just on the shelf,
maybe it's not permanently dropped.
Hopefully it comes back. Hopefully they make it into a

(01:45:48):
show and hopefully it's good. She also wrote a great book
called Song of Achilles, which is also really, really freaking
good. So check those out if you
haven't. You can get them on go to our
website. You can get them through Amazon
through our links there, or Audible if you want to listen to
them on audiobook. History of westeros.com,
Blackfire Rebellions and Jacobite Risings.
Now, we mentioned Aegon off and on throughout this episode.

(01:46:10):
Aegon the 6th, a possible Blackfire descendant, a
pretender. Either way, as we said, 'cause
he's trying to claim the throne,potentially an imposter.
Let's look at a strong IRL parallel for him.
James the second of England and Ireland and James the 7th of
Scotland. Same person has different titles
for different Thrones. He was the last Catholic monarch
of all three of those countries,England, Ireland and Scotland of

(01:46:31):
course. It's all under 1 crown.
He was deposed in 1688 in what was called the Glorious
Revolution. Now interestingly, part of the
reason for his removal was they were trying to prevent a civil
war, which they didn't. It still happened, but sort of
because maybe this wasn't a civil maybe, maybe it was just
like a civil conflict. It didn't maybe devolve into war
semantics. But the reason they were so keen

(01:46:53):
on avoiding this or so worried about it was because the first
English Civil War, that's the official name.
First English Civil War had had only been about 40 years before
this, so there was still a lot of like, let's not do that
again. It was too recent.
A lot of people who lived through it were still alive.
So James had an army, but they deserted him and he fled into
exile. He returned again in 1690, but

(01:47:14):
he was defeated and he fled, went into exile in France, where
he eventually died. What that meant was that the
Hanoverian succession would prevail over the Jacobite
succession. Hanoverian succession was the
the rulers who won and they represented Protestantism at the
time. And the Jacobites were Catholic
and that was the main dispute here, Catholic, first

(01:47:37):
Protestant. And the Jacobites were the ones
who thought the Stewart should be kings.
This, this James Stewart, that was who he was.
And the Hanover, the Hanoverianswere the ones who thought, no,
it should be the Hanoverian thatthem they should be the
Protestant kings. So you could say the real life
version here would be like in Westeros if the Black fires had

(01:47:59):
actually won, but the Targaryensweren't eliminated and instead
they spent years trying to get it back but never did.
So that's a missing angle for Westeros is the religious part,
like the Catholic Protestant. That's not a real parallel for
tarred versus black fire. It got pretty bitter, but not as
potent or as or or as ideological as Catholic versus

(01:48:22):
Protestant. Red versus black wasn't quite as
you know. It wasn't quite as bitter or as
deeply held, but even after James the second slash James the
7th died, several of his descendants and others continue
to keep the dream and their claims and their status as
pretenders alive. So his son was another.

(01:48:43):
James had this status for so long he became known as the Old
Pretender and his son Charles the Young Pretender.
So there was an old James the Old Pretender and Charles the
Young Pretender who were descendants of James the second
slash James the 7th. So they weren't just trying to
overthrow the Hanoverian kings, they were trying to overthrow

(01:49:04):
Parliament because it was Parliament that changed the
rules. They were like, Nope, divine
right of kings isn't the same anymore.
We're changing the rules for divine right of kings and we're
changing the way monarchy works.We're not going with birth.
We're going with, well, choice right there.
There's parliamentary choice really.

(01:49:26):
So it's like this, these are thetwo disputes.
It's like besides Catholic and Protestant, there's also the how
we choose kings and what what the basis of it is.
This is a big root cause disputeand that's why there's still
people even today. There was a Neo Jacobite revival
around 1890. Again, because of the deeply
held religious beliefs and play here.

(01:49:47):
They're like, no, go back 300 years.
It should have been this guy. And then since it was should
have been that guy. That means it should have gone
through all his descending instead of all of them, right?
So this, this dispute, it's not really happening anymore, but
there still are people who thinkit that way.
There's not like a powerful movement, but there are still
people to this day that insist that it should be the the Stuart

(01:50:08):
kings, even though the Stuarts, they're extinct.
I mean, in that name, there's obviously descendants of them
that have other last names. Now there's not really a
parallel to the trying to overthrow Parliament because
Parliament, there's not really an analog to Parliament in
Westeros. It would the closest thing they
could maybe come up with is if there was a war fought to
overthrow the doctrine of exceptionalism because they were
trying to change the way that kings and the kings were viewed

(01:50:31):
and what laws surrounded the choosing of kings, which is part
of the doctrine of exceptionalism, saying hey,
Targaryens are special, we're better, we're different.
Also similar to the Blackfyre rebellions.
And this is one of the things that make it.
It isn't just that they fled overseas and had they were
pretenders for so long, the kingover the water, that kind of
business, which is what they called some of the black fires.

(01:50:52):
It's because there were four different uprising slash
campaigns in addition to some sort of minor little movements
that never reached the status of, of wars or uprising like
that Neo Jacobite revival in 1890.
But in 1689 there was a campaignagain of of the Jacobites
against England to take the throne again in 1715, again in

(01:51:13):
1719 and then again in 174526 years later, Right.
So I've definitely seen people look at the Black Fire
rebellions under George's writing and say this is
unrealistic, there's no way thisbeaten dynasty would still be
taking stabs 30 years later. Well, real life says otherwise.

(01:51:34):
We've got more than 30 years apart.
This is a wider range of time than the Black Fire rebellions
were apparent or present. Roughly I guess if you count
melees, which wasn't a Black Fire rebellion.
That was 70 years later or 65 years later, which is similar to
this. So anyway, the point, the point
stands regardless. And of course, what did we say?

(01:51:55):
If you're invading England, who do you get on your side?
France. Now France was very Catholic, so
they were even more excited and willing to be on the side.
And that's why he was hiding in France in the 1st place as exile
was to France 'cause they were like, yeah, you're one of us.
But this time, since it wasn't just anti England, it was anti
Protestant, you got Spain and the the papacy, of course, the

(01:52:18):
papacy is number one on the listof get those Protestants.
Well, or rather convert those Protestants, one or the other
one. Either convert them or get them
one way or the other. And Spain, of course, is all
about that too. Super Catholic country.
Yeah. So making a claim to a great
council, as I said before, I want to make sure that's clear
here. That counts as being a pretender

(01:52:38):
too. So Amy's black fire counted even
and he was called a pretender even in the in the text of fire
and blood or, or, or what of iceand fire actually, yeah, or of
ice and fire. So again, Parliament had a lot
to do with the legalities here. And that's a kind of a a side
topic. Just an interesting point of
interest that you have a ruling body that decides what
determines a king. I mean, if you think back,

(01:53:00):
somebody had to decide that in the 1st place, somebody had to
say the, the heir of the king isthe first born son or in
different countries, the last born son or the first born
person or just I get to pick. So it's a reminder that, yeah,
Parliament changed this, some other people changed this.

(01:53:21):
Well, someone started it in the first place.
It's not, it may have been a change from before that, you
know, before there was even monarchy.
So we always have to remember that humans are always making
these things up in the 1st place.
Like it's like George, it's likewhat George said about world
building and Canon. It's like we're making all this
up. All this is made-up.
All these are cultural creations, the titles, the

(01:53:44):
decisions on who rules, who getsto be what.
We make it all up. And that's that's a good place
to leave it. We couldn't cover every case of
a pretender even in Westeros history.
It would be a bit too much to simply list them all off.
That would be kind of bored if Ijust listed them that I'd be
like, yeah, that's not very exciting.
Rickon Stark could be a pretender to the seat of
Winterfell, right? We could call all the various
Bolton attempts to overthrow theStarks in the in the long past

(01:54:06):
and currently as pretending pretenders to Winterfell, but we
were mostly focused on royal titles.
Today, if you go back before theIron Throne, well, there would
be a lot more royal titles. There were 7 kingdoms plus other
times when they were more than 7kingdoms.
So there would have been a lot of pretenders to a lot of those
Thrones that we just don't have names for.

(01:54:26):
But certainly it happened. Truly, there are endless stories
of both impersonations and pretenders in the real world.
And some of those again, some ofthose that escaped our notice
might serve as great parallels to some of what George has
created and that we haven't had yet, right?
Like there's two sides of this. One is there might be
inspirations out there that I missed that that our that y'all

(01:54:48):
missed that you that I didn't cover that Ishay and I didn't
put in here, right? You might find one and be like,
hey, guys, look, this is one that this is probably a peril.
This might be an inspiration to George.
I encourage you to send those tous because it's such a vast
topic. There's no way we could get it
all. And on the other side of this,
as we said about Aegon and Danny, in some of these other
situations, it's not resolved yet.

(01:55:10):
We have yet to see exactly what's going to happen.
And in the process of seeing those get resolved, we might be
able to and are likely to see more historical parallels as
these things play out. We'll be like, oh, Aegon in this
with John Cunning, that's kind of like that thing that happened
in France or that thing that happened with the Jacobites or
whatever. So there's more to come when

(01:55:32):
more comes. You know, it's funny, all the
Stark kids are technically pretenders, but not in the way
you mean. Really.
Yeah, yeah. Because there is going to be a
stark succession crisis. We've talked about that a lot
and it yeah. So it's like.
Well, in that way, but I also mean they all are pretending to
be other people. Oh yes, so hence is pretending
to be Elaine. Ari has got a whole lot of

(01:55:52):
identities. John Master, pretend to be a
traitor. Jonathan trying to be alive, you
know, and alive. Yeah, a few.
Things, you know, they all pretend in different ways.
They also, we all have, we have that flashback where they're all
pretending down in the crypts. Oh yeah.
Anyways, but not not the type ofpretenders we need.
Nope, got 1. So a question here.
Dornus Dame says I wonder if themother pretended Gaiman wasn't

(01:56:13):
Aegons and confessed only in part to save her son.
Maybe as in she really believed sincerely that her son Gaiman
pale hair was Aegons, but in order to save his life she lied.
Makes sense. And that's something a mother
would do, or a father. And Ned pretended John is not
Rhaegar's, just pretends it's his reverse, saying, yeah, this

(01:56:34):
is my kid. Yeah.
To save. That's a great take, Darnish
Dame. Excellent one.
I like that. Yeah.
It's something a mother would do.
And it's it's. Yeah, it's a viable theory for
sure. Trivia answer.
The moon of Three Kings, which we could also call the anarchy
of King's Landing, actually onlyfeatured 2 kings, which of the
three so-called 3 kings wasn't actually claiming to be king.

(01:56:57):
The shepherd. The shepherd religious leader,
if you could even call him that.Just mob mob guy, you know, a
mob ruler, a riot leader, riot specialist, I don't know,
definitely not a king didn't crown himself, but he certainly
got you know, you could burn at the stake a.
Shepherd. Hey, there you go.
He's a shepherd. Shepherd.
A shepherd. Yeah, Shepherd of rioters.

(01:57:20):
We mentioned some other episodesthat relate to this one, such as
The Wars of the Roses, of course, The Black Dinner of
Scotland, The Dance of the Dragons are long series with
Radio Westeros, plus the Red Kraken and red Kraken follow up
the lioness, the seahorse and the.
Kraken. Kraken.
The Kraken, Yeah, Which is the Part 2 of the Red Kraken.

(01:57:41):
Those are Patreon episodes. You can also get them on our
Spotify paid feed and they were irrelevant here today.
Also our Hour of the Wolf episode dealing with the fallout
of Kraken Stark being Hand for ashort time and taking care of
people like Tristane. Fire was the name he was given
when he was killed, not true fire.
As well as people like Laurice and Sir Perkin, the Flea and

(01:58:06):
game and pale hair, other stuff like that.
So that relates. Also thanks to Nina for her
advice and takes. She definitely knows a lot about
history and that is always valuable to me.
Thanks to Joey Townsend for composing our intro song.
Thanks to Michael Klarfeld for our intro video.
You can get Michael's maps like this one behind me by going to

(01:58:29):
his website, claradox.de KLARADOX link is in the
description. You can what what people usually
do is you order, you buy the file from him rather than buying
the whole map. That way you can just have it
printed yourself and you, you know, there's not all that
shipping to do. You just take it to your Kinko's
or your FedEx or something like that.
Well, same thing, FedEx, Kinkos,take it to your local print shop

(01:58:51):
and get it all big like this. Good deal.
Yeah, we have ours printed on a on a fabric material.
So really the Sky's the limit with that print file.
You could take that file and print it on a shirt for
yourself. You could, you know, put a
banner you know it doesn't have.To take big old flag, yeah.
Yeah. I just want to say like you have
that file and you can print lotsof a cup for yourself.

(01:59:11):
I don't know. Yeah.
Yeah, lots of options. Yeah, it's really, it's really
good wide open. And finally, thanks to Aurelian
Mattheus Rhesus, Lord of House Aurelian, ruler of Domus
Aurelianus and the Valley of Tennessee, wielder of Soul
Invictus, A potentially Valyrianseal blade keeper of the largest
collection of books outside the Citadel with the motto we
restore the world. And thanks to everyone else who
supports us on Patreon or Spotify, where you're the reason

(01:59:34):
we can keep doing this. We we make more from y'all than
we make from sponsors. And if y'all want us to continue
doing episodes like this, which frankly are a lot of y'all love,
but we get fewer downloads on so.
But we want to make episodes like this because they're fun,
but they have to be viable for us because we do this as a
living. So please support us if you can
spread the word. And TuneIn next time for more.

(01:59:57):
You know what to do in the meantime.
Valar Rereadus.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Tales of Pretenders and Impostors

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

All Episodes

Tales of Pretenders and Impostors

Stuff You Should Know