Last Man Standing?

[Mike Scott]

Having been thinking about the real history behind ASOIAF, I have a theory about who will end up on the Iron Throne (assuming it still exists) at the end of the story.

 

First, let's look at the Wars of the Roses, on which the plot is (admittedly loosely) based. The wars began when the Plantagenet (= Targaryen) dynasty failed with the death of the mad king Henry VI (= Aerys II), involved numerous conflicts between the houses of York (= Stark) and Lancaster (= Lannister) and ended when Henry Tudor, Henry VII, came to the throne of England & Wales and founded a new dynasty, which went on to produce some of England's most famous monarchs such as Henry VIII and Elizabeth I before failing in its turn and being supplanted by the Stuarts. The parallels are not perfect -- the houses of York and Lancaster were both branches of the Plantagenets, and in Westeros only the Baratheons can claim to be a branch of the Targaryens -- but they're pretty close.

 

So if we want to know who will end up on the throne, we need to look for the closest parallel to Henry VII. Henry came from very minor nobility (his grandfather was a page at the court of Henry V), whose seat was in a very remote coastal area (Anglesey, off the coast of north Wales). His claim to the throne was tenuous at best, and arose because his great-great-great-grandfather was the Plantagenet king Edward III, but his line of descent was both through a female line (his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort) and also involved illlegitimacy (his great-great-grandmother (Katherine Swynford) was not married to his great-great-grandfather (John of Gaunt) when Henry's great-grandfather (John of Beaufort) was born, although they did later marry and their children were legitimised.

 

Henry played off both sides against each other, keeping the pot boiling until he was the last even half-plausible claimant left alive. He was fiscally prudent and a great tax collector. He was a pragmatic leader and not a military man. He consolidated his hold on the throne by marrying one of the remaining daughters of the House of York, Elizabeth of York.

 

Now, does all this remind us of anyone? Other than the Targaryen ancestry to legitimise his claim, we seem to be talking about Petyr Baelish. Everything in the previous two paragraphs describes him perfectly. If he manages to follow through on his obvious desire to marry Sansa Stark, the only (known) surviving daughter of the house of Stark, he will fit even better. But he's lacking that legitimacy that could only come from Targaryen blood.

 

Or is he? The Fingers are the closest part of Westeros to Braavos, just across the Narrow Sea, and it is known that Petyr's great-grandfather was a Braavosi sellsword. But we don't know who his great-grandmother was. Petyr's great-grandfather was probably of marrying age around the time of the Third Blackfyre Rebellion (219AC), after which it was clear that House Blackfyre would never reclaim the Iron Throne. It is known that the Blackfyres are extinct in the male line, but Daemon I Blackfyre had an unknown number of daughters as well as the Blackfyre pretenders Daemon II and Haegon, and we know nothing at all about what heppened to them. Suppose that one of Daemon I Blackfyre's daughters married a Braavosi sellsword, and came with him to the Vale of Arryn when he went into the service of Lyn Corbray (or died in childbirth, leaving him with an infant son to bring to the Vale)? Then Petyr Baelish three generations later would have a great-great-great grandfather who was a Targaryen king (Aegon IV "The Unworthy"), and a claim to the throne. It would be an extremely dubious claim, through an illegitimate female line -- but so was Henry VII's.

 

It's probably too far-fetched to go on to imagine that Aegor Rivers ("Bittersteel", founder of the Golden Company) gave the Targaryen ancestral sword Blackfyre (whose whereabouts are unknown) to his nephew (Petyr's grandfather) in the Vale before his death, and that Petyr has it safely stowed away in a chest back on the Fingers just waiting for the right time to produce it and rally Westeros to his banner. Or is it?

[Varys' member]

I thought this thread would be a hypothetical "if all the people in the world had a massive free-for-all battle, who would be the last man standing?"