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goodqueenaly · 3 months

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Not to be too "true crime" about, but it you think Jaehaera Targaryen was actually murderer and if what she had survived her fall?

Spoiler alert: it was Unwin Peake.

I don’t find any of the alternative explanations (other than the rather obvious one above) for Jaehaera’s death very convincing. While Jaehaera was certainly a very traumatized child, the proffered explanations as to why she would have chosen that moment to end her life seem rather thin: at no other point does Jaehaera appear to express sympathy for Rhaena (such that she would be so traumatized at the news of the latter's miscarriage), or jealousy of Baela (over the latter’s continued pregnancy), and the idea that Jaehaera “loved the king with all her heart” and mourned that he “paid her no mind” and “showed her no affection” appears at odds with the queen who was “loath to leave her chambers” where she “had seemed content … with her maids and ladies, her kittens and her dolls”. Likewise, Gyldayn himself acknowledges that while rumors abounded blaming the king, or Cassandra Baratheon, or one or more of the queen’s servants for her death, “[w]ith hindsight, we can say for a fair certainty that none of these played any role in” Jaehaera’s death. This is not, I think, an inaccurate take from Gyldayn either. Aegon was definitely withdrawn and gloomy, but he was certainly no child sadist as young Maegor the Cruel had been, and his lack of interest in either his queen or partisan vengeance argues against any role he may have had in killing her. Cassandra Baratheon may not have liked Jaehaera, but the rumor that she had had the queen killed seems to stem more from antagonistic scheming by Unwin Peake, the better to promote his own daughter, rather than any real motivation on Cassandra’s part (and you might think Cassandra would have admitted, alluded to, or been questioned about any role she might have had in Jaehaera’s death during the unraveling of the poisoning and treason conspiracy).

By contrast, the means, motive, and opportunity behind, as well as the overall general character of, Jaehaera's murder all fit far too well with Unwin Peake. The Kingsguard posted at the door of Jaehaera’s chamber on the day of her death was Mervyn Flowers, a man whose connections to Unwin Peake were both natural and explicit: not only was Mervyn Unwin’s bastard brother, who was put on the Kingsguard by Unwin himself (along with another Peake relative, Set Amaury), but Mervyn would also continue acting in Unwin’s barely disguised name thereafter: colluding with Tessario the Tiger and Cassandra Baratheon to murder Daenaera Velaryon, arresting the Hand Lord Rowan, and being named alongside Peake’s other co-conspirators by George Graceford. Nor, as Gyldayn admits (albeit rather reluctantly - more on that below), would Mervyn Flowers have had to get the queen’s blood (metaphorically) on his hands: as Mushroom alleges, Tessario, the unscrupulous and mercenarily violent captain of Unwin Peake’s personal guard and as much a co-conspirator with Peake as Mervyn himself, might easily have been allowed into Jaehaera’s chambers to throw her to her death. That Unwin Peake confronted Aegon just one week after Jaehaera’s death with the news that the young king was already betrothed to his, Peake’s, own daughter demonstrates Peake’s naked ambition, and his motive for removing the sitting queen; even Gyldayn acknowledges that the hasty fait accompli-style betrothal acts as its own sort of proof of Unwin’s guilt in Jaehaera’s death. Moreover, Unwin’s vigorous bias against the succession of either one of Aegon’s sisters or Baela’s then-unborn child - caustically referred to, presumably by Unwin himself, as “the whelp of a wanton and a bastard” - supports Unwin’s motive: eager to secure the succession of his preferred line - that is, not just a child of the only surviving male-line male Targaryen, but also one through the Peake family - and concerned that he would achieve neither if the king acknowledged the unborn child carried by Baela as his heir, Unwin I think had all the reason he needed to make the Queen’s role vacant, the better to push his daughter into it.

Too, I think Unwin arranging Jaehaera’s death as such aligns with Unwin’s other murder plot - that is, the attempted murder of Daenaera Velaryon, which actually resulted in the murder of Gaemon Palehair. In both cases, Unwin’s goal was the same: the elimination of Aegon III’s wife and queen so that his own daughter could be slotted into her space. What’s more, in both cases Unwin seems to have utilized a clumsily obvious framing narrative for each death, the better either to excuse himself and/or to work against his enemies. In the case of Daenaera, Unwin I think specifically used the “tears of Lys” in order to fuel his anti-Rogare conspiracy - of course, Unwin I think tried to suggest, those no-good-very-bad Lyseni would use a poison whose very name advertised their origins to try to kill Aegon III. Likewise, In the case of Jaehaera, her death is deliberately paralleled with that of her mother: just as Helaena is widely (and I think correctly) assumed to have thrown herself to her death toward the end of the Dance, so I believe Unwin wanted onlookers to believe that Jaehaera had, quite literally, followed her mother to the grave. (Of course, when it then became profitable for Unwin to undermine other young women ahead of the Maiden’s Day Cattle Show, he was also quite willing to shift the parallel - blaming Cassandra Baratheon for her death, just as Rhaenyra had been blamed for Helaena’s.) In both cases, however, Unwin all but gave himself away through the ruthlessness and obviousness of his ambition: just as the king and Prince Viserys sniffed out the Peake conspiracy through the tortured false confessions of Thaddeus Rowan, so the unseemly, peremptory hastiness of the king’s betrothal to Lady Myrielle revealed Unwin’s hand (no pun intended) in brutally moving Jaehaera out of the way for Myrielle’s sake. In both cases, moreover, Unwin relied on his known, unsubtle agents Tessario and Ser Mervyn, whose later guilt only I think highlights their guilt for the earlier murder.

I do also think it notable that while Gyldayn does show a rather baffling (to me, at least) level of favoritism toward Unwin Peake, even the maester-author has to concede the likelihood that Gyldayn was responsible for Jaehaera’s death. Though he adds the exculpatory parenthetical that “there is no shred of proof of that [i.e. that Jaehaera was murdered]”, Gyldayn names “the only truly plausible culprit” as Unwin Peake; too, after explaining the reasoning behind this possibility, Gyldayn concludes that “[i]f murder was indeed the cause of her demise … the man behind it could only have been Lord Unwin Peake”. Further, as noted above, Gyldayn also states that “without proof, none of this would have been damning … [sic] if not for what the Hand did afterward” - that is, betrothing Aegon III to his daughter. If even an author who spends multiple paragraphs praising the Peakes generally and Unwin specifically admits the high likelihood that Lord Peake was behind Jaehaera’s murder, I take that as pretty conclusive evidence of where we as readers are supposed to lay blame for Jaehaera’s death. (Nor, indeed, does that other maester-author, Yandel, quibble about Peake’s guilt: Yandel simply states in TWOIAF that “[t]hough we will never know the truth of the events that day, it now seems likely that Jaehaera's death was somehow instigated by Lord Peake”.)

To that point as well, I think that GRRM wants us readers to compare the murder of Princess Elia (and, relatedly, those of her children at the same time) to that of Queen Jaehaera. While neither Tywin nor Unwin put their own hands on Elia (and her children) or Jaehaera, respectively, their guilt behind the scenes is made very evident: these two similarly named men, sometime Hands with vindictive streaks and a desire to see their daughters made queens (and, incidentally, a penchant for stealing dead men's Valyrian steel swords), sent their personal, violent agents against a royal woman and her children or a royal female child herself, with the expectation that those agents would see to the murders of these people (something I've talked about specifically with Tywin). Therefore, despite the unwillingness of biased in-world scholarly sources to commit, in whole or in part, to placing the blame on these men - recall Yandel’s weaselly statement “[i]t is tragic that the blood spilled in war may as readily be innocent as it is guilty, and that those who ravished and murdered Princess Elia escaped justice”, and his laughable attempts to blame Aerys II or even Elia herself for those deaths - I think GRRM himself makes clear that both Tywin and Unwin were responsible for their respective royal murders.

#asoiaf meta #fire and blood volume 1 #jaehaera targaryen #unwin peake #tywin lannister

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