Ten Kings From History That Were Worse Than King Joffrey

WARNING: This piece deals directly with the most recent episode of Game of Thrones. If you haven’t watched it yet, click away.

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It was all going so well for Joffrey.  Triumphant in battle, now hitched to a babin’ queen, things were looking up for our favourite character — or as we should call him, His Grace, Joffrey of the Houses Baratheon and Lannister, the First of His Name, King of the Andals and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, and Protector of the Realm.

In this series we’ve seen him play an unlikely jock by hitting a book with a sword, riding his word-skateboard all over his uncool uncles, and being only ambivalently supportive of the King’s Landing music scene by pelting a band with a purseful of gold dragons. As for his patronage of dwarf theatre, well, the Iron Throne can expect to hear from the Westerosi Human Rights Commissioner.

Now I know that a lot of people are pretty glad His Grace was offered that very special congratulatory wedding toast, but when you consider what the other kings got up to over in that boring place without dragons that we call HISTORY, you might think he wasn’t so bad, and maybe even start to miss him a little.

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On Cruelty:

So there’s been a lot of tattle going about that Joffrey hasn’t been the gentlest king since Baelor the Blessed or King Twinkles the Nice. Perhaps he got a little carried away with a crossbow in the bedroom; maybe he almost butchered that butcher’s boy and tried to turn down the volume on that bard by taking his tongue out. Maybe he didn’t have to be quite so rude to Ser Barristan the Bold, and sure, it would have been nice to see a young king obey the sticker and give up his throne for the elderly, pregnant and less mobile. Still, compared to what some of his fellow kings got up to in reality, it’s pretty mild stuff.

Joffrey’s justice could have been a little more, well, just, but at least he didn’t keep a bear named ‘Innocence’ next to his throne like the Roman Emperor Maximin – a bear to whom the guilty would be fed with (for the bear at least) delicious irony. Maybe Joffrey delighted in blood a little more than you and I, but things could have been worse — he could have roasted his victims alive inside a hollow bronze bull with a fire lit under it like Phalaris, the tyrant king of Acragas. Almost drowning Ser Dontos in wine was just a prank; it’s small beer compared to Kaiser Wilhelm II, who in 1908 forced one of his generals, Dietrich von Hulsen-Haeseler, to perform for the court dressed in a tutu, until a particularly strenuous pas seul caused the general a fatal heart attack.

It’s only natural that Joffrey would start to strain in teenage rebellion against his mother’s correcting hand, but then he never sent Cersei for a cruise on the Blackwater in a ship designed to collapse and drown her, as the Emperor Nero tried on Aggripina one memorable Mother’s Day. (When she turned out to be a powerful swimmer, an old-fashioned stabbing did the trick). And while there’s no doubting that Joffrey could probably have been nicer to Sansa, things were going well with Margaery, and he never ended up like the Emperor Constantine, steaming his wife Fausta to death in an overheated bath-house.

Not even the most bloodthirsty fantasies of George R. R. Martin could make our Joffrey worse than the Emperors of Byzantium. Justinian II Rhinotmetus (the Noseless) lost his nose and throne before returning to power after ten years in sniffly exile and sending a fleet of his once-again loyal subjects to chase down fleeing rebels; on hearing that his ships had perished in a storm, Justinian was delighted, remarking, “All are guilty, all must perish.”

For sheer cruelty, it would be hard to top Basil II Boulgaroktonos (the Bulgar-slayer) who, on capturing 15 000 Bulgar prisoners, blinded them all, leaving only one eye to every hundredth man to lead them back to their king — who quite reasonably died of a stroke at the sight. Compared to them, Joffrey’s still on his training wheels for bastardry.

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On Cowardice:

Some traitorous types say that Joffrey didn’t pull his weight at the Battle of the Blackwater, and that it was his uncle’s wildfire and grandfather’s troops that turned the tide. But compared to Frederick II of Prussia at the Battle of Mollwitz in 1741, Joffrey was courage itself. When his Austrian opponents seemed to be winning, Frederick decided that running away very fast was the better part of valour, and was 20 miles away on his horse before news could reach him that his troops had considerately won the battle in his absence. At least he got his act together and went on to become Frederick the Great — whereas from the troubled rumours I’m starting to hear on the internet, the best title our young Baratheon could aspire to is Joffrey the Dead.

And then there’s George IV, who didn’t even bother to turn up to his battlefield. In old age, the vain, gouty King George (who enjoyed Blackadder’s butlering services in his youth) convinced himself that he’d fought incognito at the battle of Waterloo, and kept trying to reminisce at state banquets with the Duke of Wellington, who actually had put Napoleon to flight. Wellington’s grasp of tactics didn’t fail him here, given how often he feigned diplomatic deafness at his delusional king’s stories.

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On Inbreeding:

There are some nasty, baseless rumours going around that Joffrey’s royal mother Cersei has been doing things I dare not name with her twin brother Ser Jaime. Sounds more like a Targaryen sort of thing to me. Joffrey’s fine golden Baratheon mane is refutation enough of these scandalous lies, much like how Prince Harry being the only ginger in the House of Windsor only confirms the legitimacy of his birth.

Even if Joffrey’s parents were lovers from the same mother, we shouldn’t get all bourgeois and shocked about it. It’s even odds that royal incest might turn out fine — generations of Egypt’s Ptolemaic pharaohs having children by their sisters, their daughters and once by their grand-daughter produced, after 300 years of confusing family reunions, the paragon Cleopatra, who started out pretty well despite starring in a frankly confusing episode of Who Do You Think You Are.

On the other hand, one branch of the Hapsburg dynasty, which married nieces to uncles five or six generations running, ended in Carlos II (the Bewitched) of Spain, whose tongue was so swollen he couldn’t swallow properly; he couldn’t talk until he was five, walk until he was nine, and, mercifully, was impotent. Maybe having fewer ingredients in the genetic cocktail would have spelled trouble ahead for Joffrey’s and Margaery’s kids; I guess we’ll never know if the House of Bannister, the celebrity portmanteau of Baratheon and Lannister, was heading towards a dynastic hangover.

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David Cunningham is a Sydney comedian completing a history PhD on 18th century naval officers who were also members of parliament. He was the runner up in the Raw National Stand-up Comedy Competition in 2008, and is a regular performer at Giant Dwarf’s Story Club. He lovingly tends royaldayout.tumblr.com, where members of the royal family are fondly miscaptioned.