Robert Baratheon
The king who won his throne with a warhammer and has spent the years since eating, drinking, and whoring away the crown's gold — still mourning a Stark girl he never wed.
The fuller tale
Robert Baratheon is what happens when the best day of a man's life comes twenty years too early. Heir to Storm's End, fostered in the Vale with Ned Stark under Jon Arryn's roof, he was built for the age of heroes he just missed — huge, black-haired, loud, impossible not to love, and happiest with a warhammer in his fists. He was betrothed to Lyanna Stark, and whether she wanted him is a question he never once thought to ask; when Rhaegar Targaryen carried her off, Robert's grief and fury became the engine of a continent-wide war that history politely named after him.
The rebellion was his masterpiece. He fought three battles in a single day at Summerhall, took a wound and lost a fight at Ashford, and won the war in the ford of the Trident, where his hammer caved in Rhaegar's breastplate and scattered rubies in the water that smallfolk were still diving for years later. A Targaryen grandmother gave his conquest a coat of lawful paint, and the realm — exhausted, half-burned, short one royal family — set the crown on the head of its best soldier. It is the tale's founding joke that this was the worst thing anyone ever did to him.
Robert reigned seventeen years and governed for none of them. Jon Arryn ran the realm; Robert ran up the debts — tourneys, feasts, hunts, and a treasury six million in the hole to the very Lannisters he'd married. The marriage was the other wound: Cersei was the most beautiful woman in Westeros and he called her by a dead girl's name on their wedding night, and neither of them ever forgave it. He scattered bastards from the Vale to the Stormlands and acknowledged almost none, grew a belly over the muscle, and told anyone who would listen that he was never so alive as when he was winning the throne he now couldn't stand to sit.
The tale opens with Robert doing the one wise thing left in him: riding north to fetch the only man he trusts. Making Ned Stark his Hand is half an act of state and half a rescue request — and it drags his friend into the pit of secrets Jon Arryn died of. Robert's court is a man's blind spots given offices: a wife who hates him, a brother he slights, a council of flatterers and schemers, and three golden children with a secret in their faces that everyone but the king can count on their fingers. His one act of policy in the whole story — the order to assassinate a pregnant Targaryen girl across the sea — is also his ugliest, and the quarrel it causes with Ned is the last honest conversation of his life.
And yet the story keeps a rough tenderness for him, because Robert keeps one for himself. He knows exactly what he is. He says it plainly — that he was made for war and ruined by peace, that the realm was better run by the man he killed for it, that Cersei's smiles and his crown are both lies he agreed to live inside. The books give him a wistfulness the show sharpens into barroom honesty, but both versions agree on the diagnosis: the demon of the Trident won everything, and the winning was the only part he was ever any good at.
The page and the screen
Show and book Robert are unusually close — Mark Addy's performance lifts whole scenes from the page, including the crypt scene at Winterfell and the terrible marital post-mortem with Cersei (a show invention, but one that book readers tend to adopt as canon on the spot). The books deepen the edges: Ned's memories give us the young Robert of the Vale in loving detail, the bastards multiply (Mya in the Vale and Edric at Storm's End matter to later plots the show never runs), and his brothers' resentments are given more room — Stannis nursing the grudge of Storm's End, Renly noting acidly how little of the old Robert was left. The show also lets Cersei claim their marriage held one good night; the books' version of the ledger is grimmer on both sides.
Where they stand, season by season
Mentioned in the chronicle
- Ser Barristan hands Jorah a royal pardon signed by Robert Baratheon: the spying is out; Dany exiles him. (S4·E8)
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The show: Gored by a boar (S1·E7)
The books: Gored on a hunt (AGOT, ch. 50)
The king hunted boar in the kingswood, sodden with wine his squire kept pouring, and the boar won. He died in the Red Keep naming Ned Stark Protector of the Realm — a testament altered and betrayed before the body cooled.
The king died as he lived — hunting, drunk, and surrounded by people who profited from him being both. In the kingswood, chasing a boar with a skin of strongwine his squire Lancel Lannister dutifully kept full, Robert took the tusks low across the belly. He was days dying in the Red Keep, long enough to make his last mistakes generous ones: he named Ned Stark Protector of the Realm, dictated a will for his 'son Joffrey,' and never saw Ned quietly amend the words to 'my rightful heir' — a mercy and a hedge in four words. He asked pardon for the Targaryen girl, too late for the order already sailing. Both tellings agree on the essentials and on the epitaph Robert would have chosen himself: killed by a pig, undone by wine, and betrayed by nearly everyone at the bedside — though the wine, as Varys observes, was the assassin that mattered, and Cersei never even had to raise her voice.