Greetings, I love your analysis. Stannis is my favorite character.
People say Stannis is a hypocrite claiming the IT as his brother usurped
it, and say that Renly was basically doing the same thing as Robert.
What are your thoughts on that?
I’ll grab your two questions together. The bottom line is, Robert and Renly had two incredibly different motives for rebelling. They are only similar in Renly’s mind, and Renly is keenly aware of it. He’s dressing up his usurpation in whatever nice symbols he can, to lend his movement more legitimacy than it had.
Robert’s Rebellion was not a movement to install Robert as the new king of the Seven Kingdoms. Robert was not acclaimed by his bannermen and future vassals until before the Battle of the Trident. Robert’s Rebellion was born out of violent and flagrant feudal overreach on the part of Aerys II and Rhaegar Targaryen. We’ll go over the events in the order they happened.
First, Rhaegar abducts Lyanna Stark (to everyone’s contemporary understanding). For Rhaegar, a married man, to take Lyanna Stark was confirmation of his earlier crowning of Lyanna at Harrenhal as the Queen of Love and Beauty, Rhaegar was declaring openly that Lyanna was his mistress. This shames the Starks (who now cannot fulfill their marriage obligations to the Baratheons and cannot protect their daughters from the predations of the Crown Prince), the Baratheons (Robert’s betrothed is now ‘sullied’ by Rhaegar), and the Martells (whose Elia Martell now runs the risk of being set aside for Lyanna and risking a Blackfyre-type scenario). Affairs were tolerated (even celebrated), but it was expected that men would keep them minimally discreet, and this was anything but subtle). To steal away a noble daughter for personal pleasure was not conduct becoming of the crown prince, but rather of outlaws and brigands.
After that, Brandon Stark gets arrested for calling out for Rhaegar to ‘come out and die,’ and Aerys II seizes Brandon and all of his companions, demanding that their fathers come to King’s Landing. When the fathers came as called by the crown, Aerys had them all rounded up and executed as traitors. When Rickard Stark demanded his right to trial by combat, Aerys instead burns him to death to mock the custom.
Aerys here was misusing his position as feudal overlord. Aerys promises safe passage and then immediately rescinds it, throwing royal credibility into the cesspool (we see this with Aenys Blackfyre and Aegon V’s exiling of Bloodraven to the Wall, royal credibility clearly matters to the Westerosi). In denying Rickard Stark the right to trial, Aerys makes the public statement that royal whim trumps noble privileges, making the feudal oaths sworn to Aerys worthless. At any point, Aerys could murder a noble, even a Lord Paramount, with no right to trial, placing every noble of Westeros under a death sentence. Now, any man can be marked for death by royal writ without warning or recourse.
Brandon Stark’s companions and their unnamed fathers are important here too. The Mallisters depend on the Tullys for protection and the Glovers (Ethan survived, but his father did not) depend upon the Starks, and their nobles were murdered unjustly, thus now, Aerys makes a statement that his desires trump the obligations that a Lord Paramount owes to its own vassal houses. For Aerys, all that matters is that he gets what he wants: a true absolute monarch, beyond reach or question.
Then, Aerys marks Robert Baratheon (Lyanna’s betrothed) and Eddard Stark (the new Lord of Winterfell) for death, commanding Jon Arryn to turn over the two boys to the funeral pyre. Aerys commands that Jon break his fosterage contracts (thus commanding him to break two alliances) and guest right (a sacred tradition) and be complicit in the murder of two innocent boys after he just murdered Jon Arryn’s heir! Aerys truly believed nothing was beyond his grasp, and for Jon to comply would be him breaking his oath of alliance to Houses Stark and Baratheon, his oath of guardianship to House Royce (who had two of its members murdered by the king) and his own duty to look after his own family members.
Now, after all this, Rhaegar emerges from Dorne and immediately declares that he shall fight for his father. This is Rhaegar making the statement that the Targaryen dynasty was right in its actions, that he was permitted to abduct Lyanna Stark without consequence, that Jon Arryn was wrong for refusing Aerys’s order, that Rickard Stark did not deserve his right to trial by combat. Now, given what he said to Jaime about a council being called, it’s likely that he didn’t actually believe some of that, but the rebels aren’t privy to his ideas for change (nor does Rhaegar apparently make any effort to do so). So, in the absence of any other claimant (Viserys offers too big of a risk of Targaryen vendetta), Robert is the new king, by acclaim of his future bannermen. So that’s the long story of how Robert got to be king.
Now, we look at Renly. From the start, the contrast is obvious. Renly’s rebellion has been to install himself as the new ruler from the very beginning, under no ideology or pretext. Sure, under blood primogeniture, none of Robert’s kids are eligible to inherit, but Stannis is eligible before Renly is. At the outset, Stannis’s war is not ideological, it is simply “Robert’s children are illegitimate, I’m the next in line for the Iron Throne, so here we go.” Renly’s war doesn’t use Joffrey’s actions as a springboard because there’s no argument to put Stannis aside for the Throne. There’s no matter of ethics, law, or the proper course of governance. Renly’s rebellion is, at its core: “I am the king, and I have an army big enough to kill all who disagree.” Had it been successful, then any new claimant could take the Throne by the same logic, riding a wave of political outsiders and creating the “all against all” of Leviathan horror. So to counteract this, he invents a fiction of worth, that he is the king because he is better suited. However, this claim of merit over Stannis is instantly quelled when we see that he has no objective standard as fitness to rule (that is, only his deduction makes him a ‘better king.’ Privately, he acknowledges Stannis claim as superior with the ‘while he lives’ comment, leading me to believe he doesn’t believe in meritocratic rule as opposed to rule by force. Catelyn is key here with some of her most intelligent political action (and most delightful chapters, seriously go reread ACOK Catelyn III and IV and wonder why people aren’t a fan of Catelyn, she’s easily top five POV-material), she’s the one that pieces together that the Lannister incest must be true for Renly. Renly can easily dismiss Stannis’s claim as self-serving, because it makes him the king by law, but the North was rebelling over the killing of Eddard, not the validity of Joffrey’s parentage, so Catelyn’s promotion of the idea cannot be dismissed as a self-serving ‘truth.’
Likening Renly’s Rebellion to Robert’s Rebellion is a pure surface-level read of the Rebellion. To say that Robert was looking to become a king because he was a great warleader and warfighter is an active denial. Renly is doing it to give his rebellion a greater sense of meaning, a noble purpose beyond: “Hey guys, you know what? I think being a king is just really awesome.” Robert’s Rebellion is not an usurpation of the Throne, it was a war over whether Aerys’s actions were permissible for a king, and the rebel’s position was that, if you perform actions like this, you lose the right to rule. To equate it to Renly’s naked power grab, or any of the other feudal ‘pissing matches’ that Rohanne Webber believes are so vital to noble power is a mistake at best, a deliberate misread at worst. Robert’s Rebellion was neither a naked power grab nor a fight for pride…it came down to very real questions of tyranny, (one wrestled with in our own world by philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, and Rouseau, thinkers whose writings have a profound influence on our modern notion of government).
Now, as to why out-of-universe observers think that Renly and Robert had the same motivations for rebellion, I can’t say why they might think that. I illustrated what the core ideologies were surrounding each of the movements. I can address some arguments I’ve heard, and these may or may not be the reasons your friends use to support their arguments.
Robert just wanted to knock out the Targaryens and take the Throne for himself - Patently false. We see in a So Spake Martin that: “Robert proclaimed his intention to take the throne … around the time
of the Trident. Would not elaborate any further. Mentioned Robert’s
claim being stronger than Eddard Stark’s and Jon Arryn’s, the leaders of
the two other great houses that spearheaded the revolution, due to
blood ties to the Targaryen’s.“ If he only wanted the Throne, why wait until then to declare it?
Robert hated Rhaegar and just wanted to kill him to avenge his macho pride - While I do not doubt that Robert was no friend to Rhaegar, and his speech in Eddard’s chapter clearly show that the thought of Rhaegar abducting and raping Lyanna drove him to fury, Aerys presented an actual threat to his physical safety.
Renly’s war as an ideological one against the established Westerosi culture - That’s a conception of the show, as is the conception of Renly as a sensitive literati. Renly’s cruelly mocks Shireen and Brienne behind their backs, and professes to a distrust of book learning, considering it the provenance of maesters. Hilariously enough, Stannis is the meritocratic, well-educated candidate out of the three Baratheon brothers. Renly, if anything is a creature of the established Westerosi culture.
Aegon/Viserys/Daenerys has a better claim to the Iron Throne - If Aerys lost the right to rule, he lost the ability to pass it on to his descendants. Robert’s establishment of a new regime completes the invalidation of any Targaryen claim through Aerys.
Blood succession is a terrible way to pick a leader - No argument here, but replacing it with “whoever has the most swords is the new leader” isn’t an improvement, by my reckoning.
If you’re eager for more reading, here’s a few great reads on Robert’s and Renly’s Rebellions from other minds. @mademoisellesansa wrote a splendid article a while back examining Robert’s Rebellion under the just war theory. @racefortheironthrone wrote about Renly’s rebellion and his idea on monarchy (as well as Stannis’s) in his Hollow Crowns and Deadly Thrones essay series. @turtle-paced‘s also got a great book/show comparison piece called: Introducing Stannis, for a look at the book and series conception of Stannis and where a lot of the show support for Renly comes from. Turtle’s doing rewatches of Season 1 right now, but I really hope that this essay will be continued in the future.
Thanks for the question, cynicalclassicist.
SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King