I’m currently 70% through the 3rd season and am avoiding the other thread(s) for fear of spoilers. Once I catch up, I will have more questions but there is one burning question that’s been on my mind since Season 1:
What was the issue between Ned Stark and Jaime Lannister? From my understanding, the overthrow of the Mad King Targaryen and the invasion of King’s Landing was a joint effort including the Lannisters, Starks and Baratheons. So why did Ned consider Aerys’ assassination by Jaime to be so terrible? It would have been obvious to everyone that Aerys was using wildfire to torch everyone around him and Jaime’s actions essentially saved the city as well as the invading forces.
Jaime finally offers up his side of the events to Brienne, but his story wasn’t very satisfying to me. I can’t see how he wasn’t viewed as a hero by everyone except the Targaryens. I understand that he was a member of the Kings’ Guard and his allegiance should have been to the Mad King. But considering the situation, what was Ned’s problem with his actions? From Ned’s perspective, what was Jaime supposed to do?
No one knows that the Mad King was going to torch the city. Jamie never told them, presumably because he thought they wouldn’t believe him, or would see it as craven excuse making. Ned didn’t like him because, as a King’s Guard, he broke his oath by killing the Mad King.
This is from what I recall, I could be wrong, I haven’t seen the series since it first aired, and I read the books a long time ago.
As Lobohan noted nobody knew Aerys was planning on burning the city and Jaime never told anyone. But regardless Jaime was a Kingsguard - functionally a knight/monk who took a sworn oath to defend the king no matter what and particularly to someone like Ned that is akin to a serious religious obligation. Violating that for any reason is horrendous blasphemy. Ned might have pitied Jaime more if he knew why he really did it ( instead he thinks Jaime was a conniving snake in cahoots with his father who just casually murdered the king ), but in my reading he wouldn’t necessarily have respected him any more. Because an oath is an oath is an oath. And this oath was the ultimate double-plus solemn super-sized oath in the entire kingdom.
Poor Ned Stark had so much chivalry it was oozing from every pore, which sadly also saturated his brain and made him stupider than a crushed beetle. Ned in Jaime’s shoes would have very likely watched Aerys burn the city and even abetted it if ordered, weeping the whole time. Because damnit, he swore a holy OATH.
I don’t disagree with much of what you wrote, but I have a bit of a problem with this hypothetical. Because surely, at some point, Ned Stark swore an oath to Aerys Targaryen as well, as Protector of the North. Which he proceeding to break by supporting Robert’s rebellion. The “theft” of Lyanna Stark seems to have been the cause, but it is at least proof that Ned is willing to break his oath for “good reasons”. I do wonder if saving the entirety of King’s Landing would be sufficient cause.
I also wonder - did Ned know about the murder of Brandon and Rickard Stark at Aerys’ hand? That would surely be justification for oath breaking, right?
Yes, but I gather that to Westeros society at large and to Ned Stark in particular the Kingsguard’s oath is the holiest of the holiest in terms of oaths. It’s half the reason the Jaime is so despised. Ned rose in rebellion in the time-honored fashion of romantic medieval rebels everywhere - the king tacitly severed the bonds of loyalty by not living up to his end of the feudal contract. In a sense he broke his “word” first by being a tyrant.
But the Kingsguard don’t have any conditions of mutuality associated with them. They simply serve, forswearing family, inheritances and all other outside distractions to function as essentially slaves of the crown. There seems to be technically no circumstance under which it could be regarded as lawful to disobey. In truth Ned might be so conflicted by an order of the magnitude of Aerys’ that he would break down and refuse to carry it out, but I rather suspect he’d let Aerys burn him alive/behead him/have him nibbled to death by mice rather than resort to killing the king to save the city like Jaime did.
Also, IIRC, didn’t the Lannister’s join the rebellion pretty late in the game? The family as a whole was seen as opportunistic and Ned might have been projecting that on Jaime.
I think that the fact that Jaime took a rest on the Iron Throne after slaying the King, while he waited to see who would come to claim it, also factored into Ned Stark’s feelings. It was one thing to break his solemn oath and kill the king he was supposed to be protecting, but to add insult to injury by seating himself on the throne, to which he had absolutely no claim, was disrespectful to the entire Realm…and that was something up with which Eddard Stark could not put.
Absolutely - Tywin remember marched to the capital claiming to have come to defend it and Jaime begged Aerys not to give him access to the city because he knew his father was untrustworthy. But when Aerys did give access and Tywin started sacking the city and slaughtering the Targaryens, that is when Aerys gave the order to burn the city as a gesture of defiance and Jaime assassinated him. So as far as anyone knew Jaime looked like he was in league with his father to opportunistically betray the king and join the winning side. When in fact Jaime had loyally wanted to refuse his own father’s entry and try to weather a siege.
The Lannisters sat out Roberts Rebellion until Ned was already marching on the city. Then they got let in to the city by pretending to be loyal to the mad king and then the eldest son breaks his oath and literally stabs his king in the back. It makes the Lannisters seem like opportunists who never sacrificed anything while profiting from the sacrifice of others. To someone as obsessed with honor and loyalty as Ned Stark all of their actions were dishonourable.
And I guess it was his lack of loyalty that led to his demise. After all, he was still Hand of the King when he learned of Joffrey’s illegitimate conception but withheld that information from King Robert.
Ah, yes. I had forgotten about Tywin’s treachery in pretending to be the cities savior before slaughtering everybody. Surely that taint only heightens the scorn heaped on his son. Good point.
Truly a delicious irony that one of Jamie’s few heroic gestures is the one that earns him such contempt.
Aerys killed Brandon and Rickard after that Rhaegar/Lyanna abduction business, and then demanded that Jon Arryn kill Ned Stark (his ward) also. Arryn refused, and started the rebellion. Robert Baratheon was just the best non-Targaryen claimant- that’s why he was eventually made king.
So I’d assume Ned knew about his father and brother. Furthermore, I’d suspect that he wasn’t ever formally invested as Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North until after Robert was king, so no oaths sworn or anything like that.
You are both correct, Rickard was the Warden and Ned most likely never swore fealty towards Aerys. And thus never had to directly break a vow. That makes his treatment Jamie all the more believable, since Ned is such a black and white kind of guy and doesn’t seem to have even considered that, for example, his sister may not have actually been kidnapped. It probably also never occurred to him that maybe Jamie was actually doing the right thing.
From Ned Starks point of view Jamie served the Mad King loyally until his family came a knocking and then immediately turned on him the moment it appeared he war was already lost. He thought Jamie an opportunist not willing to go down with a sinking ship, not a hero doing what was right.
Everyone swears an oath to the king. There was just a huge difference to Ned in turning against him because its the right thing to do, and turning against him because all is already lost and you want to join the winning side.
I’m pretty sure it was all in the books… or possiblyin here..
The bit about not being invested as Lord of Winterfell/Warden of the North is speculation on my part though, as is the idea that Ned knew pre-rebellion about the fates of his father and brother. At any rate, it probably wouldn’t have mattered; there wasn’t any appreciable time lag between the execution of Brandon & Rickard and the start of the rebellion, so even if he found out before the rebellion actually started, it wouldn’t have been time enough for him to formally become Lord of Winterfell & Warden of the North.
I never had the impression that the gravity of the Kingsguard oath with respect to Jaime had any special significance for Ned; I always gathered that it could have been an oath to always put the seat down for Cersei, and Ned would have been equally disgusted had Jaime failed to do so.