Alyn Velaryon and Baela Targaryen's Marriage

Alyn Velaryon and Baela Targaryen’s marriage joined a dragon-blooded princess to a rising Velaryon captain, but it was not the match the regents had planned. Baela rejected their chosen husband, escaped their control, and married Alyn on Dragonstone. The union shaped not only their family life but the regency’s calculations about who might inherit the Iron Throne, while making Alyn a brother by marriage to King Aegon III.

A Match Made for the Succession

The marriage arose amid the regents’ concern over Baela’s place in the line of succession. With the king young and without an heir of his own body, the council considered Baela a possible successor, but worried that her husband might acquire dangerous proximity to the throne. A score of candidates were discussed and dismissed, including lords and even Dalton Greyjoy. The Hand and council eventually chose Thaddeus Rowan, Lord of Goldengrove, whose steadiness and lack of overweening ambition seemed to make him a safe consort should Baela inherit.

The choice was also shaped by dynastic arithmetic. Rowan had seven sons from his previous marriages and no daughters; the regents reasoned that any son he fathered with Baela could provide Aegon III with a clear successor. They expected Baela to become mistress of his castle and take a hand in the household, including the care of his four youngest sons still living at home. In their view, Rowan offered a stable marriage and an orderly path of succession. Baela, however, did not share their assessment of the match.

When informed of it, she objected to the disparity in their ages and mocked Rowan’s appearance. She also claimed that she had already slept with two of his sons, though the account leaves open whether this was true or a deliberately provocative way of resisting the arrangement. The Hand sent her to her rooms and posted guards at the door until the regents could meet again. The episode made the council’s plan to direct Baela’s marriage an immediate contest over her freedom of choice.

Escape and Marriage on Dragonstone

Baela escaped by climbing out of a window, exchanging clothes with a washerwoman, and leaving through the castle’s front gate. By the time her absence was discovered, she had crossed much of Blackwater Bay in a fisherman’s boat bound for Driftmark. There she sought out her cousin, the Lord of the Tides, and told him of her distress. Two weeks later, she and Alyn were married in the sept on Dragonstone. Baela was sixteen; Alyn was nearly seventeen.

Her choice overturned the regents’ plan without dissolving the political problem that had prompted it. Several of them wanted the Hand to seek an annulment from the High Septon. Instead, he presented the marriage as a match arranged by the king and court, reasoning that Baela’s defiance would otherwise become the greater scandal. He maintained that Alyn’s noble blood and expected loyalty made the marriage acceptable. The rejected Rowan’s pride was addressed by a betrothal to Floris Baratheon, although she died in childbirth two years later.

The council’s broader judgment of Baela was less forgiving. Her escape reinforced their suspicion that she was too willful to serve as Aegon’s heir, and they objected that she had bound herself to Alyn, whom one regent disparaged as Corlys’s upjumped bastard. They concluded that Baela could not be the king’s successor and turned instead to her twin, Rhaena. Thus the marriage became a public test of whether the regents could treat Baela’s personal choice as compatible with the political role they had contemplated for her.

Alyn’s New Place at Court

The marriage gave Alyn a consequential connection to the royal family. When the Hand later sent him on a perilous voyage to relieve Fair Isle and check the Ironborn, Alyn returned to Hull to gather provisions and say farewell to Baela. She told him she was pregnant. He proposed that a son be named Corlys, after his grandsire, and imagined the child might one day sit the Iron Throne; Baela answered that, if the child were a girl, she would name her Laena, after her mother, and hoped she might one day ride a dragon.

That exchange brought the succession question into the couple’s private future. Their child might be imagined as a possible heir, but Baela’s pregnancy did not itself resolve the regents’ concerns about her marriage or place. A healthy daughter was born while Alyn was away, and Baela named her Laena. The child’s birth extended the family line and fulfilled the name Baela had chosen, while leaving Aegon III without the male child on whom some of the Hand’s calculations had rested.

Alyn’s return made the marriage visible to the capital as well as the court. The Velaryon fleet arrived to the sound of bells and the cheers of crowds, but the Hand wanted the admiral to present himself at the Red Keep rather than have the king go to meet him. Other regents overruled him. Aegon III, Queen Daenaera, Baela, and the infant Laena went to the docks with their attendants. There Alyn saw his daughter for the first time, kissed Baela, and held Laena up before the assembled crowd before kneeling to the king and queen. Daenaera placed a sapphire-studded gold chain around his neck, and Aegon welcomed him as his brother. Alyn acknowledged that he could not be the king’s brother by blood, but that marriage had made him his brother-in-law.

Separation, Conflict, and Continuing Partnership

The marriage also had to withstand long absences. Alyn’s voyages took him away from Driftmark and from Baela, and the account records that they quarrelled before his second great voyage. Baela was said to be quick to anger and had heard too much talk from Alyn about Princess Aliandra Martell. They reconciled, as they had before, and the fleet sailed under Alyn in the galley Bold Marilda, named for his mother. Baela remained on Driftmark, pregnant with their second child. The narrative gives no account of what became of that pregnancy, so it does not establish a further outcome.

Their marriage also connected Baela to her twin’s troubles. After Rhaena’s husband, Corwyn Corbray, was killed, Alyn commanded the Velaryon fleet for a campaign against the Vale. Baela was sent to Dragonstone to comfort her widowed sister and, as a secondary precaution, to ensure Rhaena did not try to avenge her husband herself on Morning. Here Baela’s role as Alyn’s wife and as Rhaena’s twin converged: the regents relied on her presence within her family to manage a danger they feared might become another conflict.

Political and Dynastic Significance

The marriage reflects a recurring feature of the Targaryen court: marriage could be a means of binding families, but royal plans for alliance and succession did not guarantee the consent of those being matched. Earlier rulers had brokered marriages across the realm to knit formerly divided regions together, and Aenys’s marriage to Alyssa Velaryon likewise joined royal and Valyrian kinship. Baela and Alyn’s union belongs to that political world, yet its decisive beginning was her escape from a court-arranged match.

For the regents, the question was not simply whether Baela and Alyn were suited to one another. Their marriage placed Alyn close to the throne, supplied the king’s household with a new family connection, and made Baela’s possible succession harder for the council to control. The regents’ attempt to redirect her choice ended in a marriage they could not prevent; their response was to redefine who among the royal women could safely inherit. The union endured beyond that struggle, marked by their daughter, Alyn’s public welcome as the king’s brother by marriage, and the repeated negotiations between separation, family obligation, and political risk.