The Battle of Ashford

The one battle Robert Baratheon ever lost, to the one commander in the Reach worth the name.

Why it came to this

Robert Baratheon began the war in the worst strategic position of any of the rebel leaders and won it anyway, and Ashford is the low point from which he did it. When the rebellion broke, the stormlands rose for their lord, but the stormlands were nearly surrounded by loyalist country: the Reach to the west and south, the crownlands and the royal army to the north, and StormÔÇÖs End itself besieged behind him. RobertÔÇÖs problem was that his enemies could concentrate against him faster than his allies in the north and the Vale could reach him.

The largest loyalist army in the field was the ReachÔÇÖs, mustered by Mace Tyrell of Highgarden, and it was moving to crush the stormland rising before the rebel factions could combine. RobertÔÇÖs instinct, then and always, was to fight rather than wait, and there is a real argument that this instinct saved the rebellion more often than it endangered it ÔÇö but at Ashford it very nearly ended it. He moved to meet the Reach army and struck at what he could reach of it.

What he could reach was its vanguard, and its vanguard was commanded by Randyll Tarly of Horn Hill, who was and remained the best soldier the Reach produced in his generation ÔÇö a hard, humourless, professionally excellent commander in the service of a lord who was neither. That mismatch, a first-rate battle captain leading the advance of a second-rate general, is the whole shape of the day.

The ground and the hosts

The battle was fought near the town of Ashford in the Reach, on the approaches to it, in the broad fertile country that makes the Reach worth fighting over. The ground did not particularly favour anyone; the decisive factor was that the two forces that actually collided were badly mismatched in size, because of the order in which the Reach army arrived.

Randyll Tarly commanded the Tyrell vanguard, out ahead of the main body under Mace Tyrell. A vanguard is a fraction of an army, but TarlyÔÇÖs was a well-handled fraction and Robert did not know, or did not correctly weigh, how close the rest of the Reach host was behind it.

Robert had the strength of the stormlands, or as much of it as had not been shut up in StormÔÇÖs End ÔÇö a good army led by a man his soldiers would follow anywhere, which is a real military asset and also the thing that got them to Ashford. The trap, such as it was, was not a clever piece of ground; it was simply that Robert engaged the leading element of a much larger army with the rest of that army arriving faster than he had planned for.

How it was fought

The details of the fighting at Ashford are among the thinner in the warÔÇÖs record, because it was a loyalist victory in a war the winners wrote up, and a defeat is always described more briefly than a triumph. What is clear is the shape. Robert attacked TarlyÔÇÖs vanguard, and Tarly ÔÇö outnumbered at the point of first contact, or roughly even ÔÇö held, and then the weight of the Reach army came up and the balance turned hard against the stormlanders.

Randyll TarlyÔÇÖs reputation as a battle commander rests substantially on this day. He fought the leading division of the Reach host in a way that broke RobertÔÇÖs attack rather than merely surviving it, and he did it before Mace Tyrell arrived to take nominal command of the victory ÔÇö a pattern that repeats through TarlyÔÇÖs whole career, in which he wins the battles and his liege lord receives them.

Robert was beaten. He extricated what he could of his army and got away ÔÇö the crucial thing about Ashford is that it was a defeat and not a destruction, and the difference is RobertÔÇÖs own. A beaten commander who keeps his host together and withdraws in order has lost a battle; a beaten commander whose host dissolves has lost a war. Robert lost the battle, kept the army, and lived to reach Stoney Sept and then the Trident.

What it cost

In the immediate sense it cost Robert a battle and the initiative in the south, and it forced him into the fighting withdrawal that led, some weeks later, to his being run to ground at Stoney Sept, where the rebellion nearly ended in a single house-to-house search. Ashford is the first link in that chain.

It cost the stormlanders casualties they could ill afford, given how outnumbered the whole rebel cause was at that stage of the war. But it did not cost Robert his army, which is why it is remembered as a setback rather than a catastrophe.

For Randyll Tarly it was the making of a reputation that lasted the rest of his life. The line that followed him ever after ÔÇö that he was the only man ever to defeat Robert Baratheon in the field ÔÇö is very nearly true and was worth more to him than most menÔÇÖs victories, because it was true of the one opponent everyone had heard of.

What it changed

Strategically Ashford confirmed that Robert could not win the war in the south on his own, and pushed the whole rebel effort toward the eventual concentration of forces in the riverlands that produced the Trident. It is one of the reasons the decisive battle of the war was fought where it was fought.

It also demonstrated, early, the pattern that decided the whole rebellion: that the loyalist cause was a collection of large armies indifferently led, and the rebel cause a smaller force with better commanders and a reason to fight. The Reach could beat RobertÔÇÖs vanguard-sized fraction with Tarly in charge; it could not translate that into ending him, because the man at the top of the Reach army was Mace Tyrell.

And it is a useful footnote to Robert himself. The man is remembered as an unstoppable warrior, and on a battlefield he very nearly was ÔÇö but Ashford is the reminder that being the best fighter in a war is not the same as being the best general in it, and that Robert won his rebellion partly on his own arm and partly because his enemies handed it to him.

What became of it ÔÇö if an ending is written, it is here. Spoilers.

Robert Baratheon survived Ashford, survived Stoney Sept a few weeks later by the narrowest margin of the war, and went on to win at the Trident and take the throne. Ashford remained the only battle he ever lost, a distinction he wore lightly because it was so thoroughly outweighed by the one he won at the ford.

Randyll Tarly served the winning side in the end ÔÇö he bent the knee with the rest of the Reach after the Trident and the Tyrell surrender at StormÔÇÖs End ÔÇö and spent the peace as the hardest and most respected lord in his region. His later road, in the next war, ran through choices that his pride and his contempt for weakness made for him, and it ended in fire; that belongs to another entry.

Mace Tyrell took the public credit for Ashford as he took credit for most of what Tarly did, and it became part of the Highgarden story of the war. The gap between the lord who was named and the knight who did the work is one of the quieter running jokes of the histories, and everyone in the Reach knew it.