"If you are a good king, things will be all right" (GRRM resumes the political thought of Tolkien and dismisses the notion)

Answering GRRM on JRRT's character Aragorn · "If you are a good king, things will be all right" (GRRM resumes the political thought of Tolkien and dismisses the notion)

Actually, Chesterton had a share of GRRM's scepticism.

See this line in a play called Blondel the Troubadour, which takes place in a novel called The Return of Don Quixote, the words being in the mouth of King Richard:

Shall I who sing with the high tree-tops at morning
Sink to be Austria; even as is that brute
And brigand that entrapped me, or be made
A slave, a spy, a cheat, a King of France?
And what crowns other shadow this the earth?
The evil kings sit easy on their thrones
Shame healed with habit; but what panic aloft
What wild white terror if a king were good!
What staggering of the stars; what prodigy.
Men easily endure an unjust master
But a just master no man will endure
His nobles shall rise up, his knights betray him
And he go forth, as I go forth, alone.

I happen to be born in Austria and so not quite sharing the sentiments of Richard Coeur de Lion in the play, at least not the ones about Austria.

But the point in the play is not the badness of Austria, alias Duke Leopold V, or supposed such, it's the comparison between Richard, valiant knight, and his brother John Lackland, capable of marrying off his daughter Joan before her eleventh birthday to a man (king of Scotland) who maybe didn't consider that in such cases waiting with consummation could be a thing, which led her to a less than satisfactory married life, and probably contributed to provoke the Pope Gregory IX to make 12 the legal minimum for a marriage valid and consummate for a girl (with some dispensations possible).

The other point is, Richard, the good king, was a failure. The play centres on a conspiracy theory according to which Richard didn't leave his reins to John by dying, but by going into exile ... because the good king was so much more opposed than the evil king.

So, I guess, apart from the more technical quibbles on taxation policies of Aragorn, GRRM had a fair point. A good king can be a blessing for the land if accepted. But it is likely that a good king is a disaster because rejected. Now, the fact is, the function of a king is to both symbolise and practically arrange the moral unity of his people. Even if he's not elected, he has a certain mutual agreement with his "constituents" ... if they are very bad, a good man cannot succeed in becoming and remaining, and that effectively and not as a puppet, their king. Precisely as if he is very bad, he won't be a success with a decently good people.

England in the time of the War of the Roses was hardly sufficiently bawdy (at least not about people better considered than peasants, confer the provocation against Wat Tyler) to fully accept the kind of royalty depicted by GRRM in Westeros. Edward II lost his crown due to sodomy or suspicion thereof. And the actual real life inspirations behind GRRM, as enumerated by Nancy Bilyeau, are not just outside the War of the Roses, but in more than one case probable smear campaigns, i e, if substantiated, it would have meant loss of power. Or even life.

The Royal Incest That Inspired the Writing of ‘Game of Thrones’
Nancy Bilyeau | Jul 26, 2019
https://tudorscribe.medium.com/the-royal-incest-that-inspired-the-writing-of-game-of-thrones-d2f8455f12ce

Less than a century later, Queen Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, was accused of incest with her brother, George, along with adultery with four men as part of the trial proceedings against her.

So, no, just as Aragorn could not have ruled in Westeros, the Lannisters could not have ruled in the England of the War of the Roses. But the thing is, what Gondor is described as is not the rotten atmosphere of Casterly Rock, we have people like Prince Imrahil and the captain of the guards Beregond and the loremaster who is a pain in the ... of a know-it-all, but not wicked and perfectly able to obey orders when insisted on, and the old woman who has some athelas. People who no doubt make the task easier for a good king than the Night's Watch killing off Jon Snow.

I think this part of GRRM's remark has also been answered.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Conversion of St. Paul, First Vespers
24~25.I.2025

Conversio sancti Pauli Apostoli, quae fuit anno secundo ab Ascensione Domini.

Apud Damascum natalis sancti Ananiae, qui fuit discipulus Domini, et eumdem Paulum Apostolum baptizavit. Ipse autem, cum Damasci, et Eleutheropoli, alibique Evangelium praedicasset, tandem, sub Licinio Judice, nervis caesus et laniatus, ac lapidibus oppressus, martyrium consummavit.

Chesterton's work is available on this link (the poem is around the midpoint of scrolling), here:

THE RETURN OF DON QUIXOTE
BY G. K. CHESTERTON
http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/Don_Quixote.txt