Rogar Baratheon’s Plan to Depose Jaehaerys

Rogar Baratheon’s Plan to Depose Jaehaerys was a failed bid to replace the young king with Princess Aerea and keep the crown’s government in Rogar’s hands. It brought a private conflict within the royal family into the open: Rogar challenged Queen Regent Alyssa’s authority in front of the council, while the prospect of rival claims backed by dragons made the political dispute threaten something far more catastrophic. Alyssa dismissed him, but the victory came at a lasting personal cost and altered the course of the regency.

Background and the Breaking Point

The plan emerged after word of the marriage between Jaehaerys Targaryen and Alysanne Targaryen spread through the court and beyond. Too many people had witnessed the confrontation at the castle gates, and visitors to Dragonstone had seen Alysanne beside the king and noticed their affection. Rogar might threaten those who spread the story, but he could not stop the whispers. Queen Alyssa, who had at last accepted that the marriage was done, told her councillors that it could not be undone and that they must protect the couple from what might follow. Having lost two sons to Maegor the Cruel and living with a coldness between herself and her eldest daughter, she could not bear to become estranged from the two children who remained to her.

Rogar did not accept his wife’s position. In the presence of Grand Maester Benifer, Septon Mattheus, Daemon Velaryon, and the other councillors, he rebuked Alyssa for putting sentiment ahead of her duties as regent. He declared that crowning Jaehaerys had been a mistake and urged the council to act before it was too late. His proposal was not simply to remove a king he considered unsuitable: he wanted the council to displace Jaehaerys while preserving his own influence over the throne.

Rogar’s Proposal and the Question of Succession

When the councillors challenged him, Rogar denied that he meant to claim the Iron Throne for himself. He proposed instead that Jaehaerys be sent to Oldtown and made a maester, arguing that the bookish boy would suit a life at the Citadel. Asked who should rule in his place, Rogar immediately named Aerea. He claimed she had the stronger right because her parents had been King Aenys’s first and secondborn, whereas Jaehaerys had been fourth. Rogar also asserted that Aerea’s mother, Queen Rhaena, would support her, and stressed that Rhaena had a dragon.

Rogar’s intended role was just as important as his choice of queen. He meant to continue as Hand and to shape, guide, and teach Aerea. His professed concern for the realm therefore came with a specific transfer of power: Jaehaerys would be removed, an eight-year-old princess would be raised to the throne, and Rogar would remain the adult directing her rule. He presented this as a response to the king’s character and a claim based on birth order, but his plan depended on the council accepting his authority to decide both the king’s fate and the succession.

The proposal also made the danger of the succession dispute unmistakable. The councillors fell silent at the thought that Jaehaerys and Alysanne had dragons too. Qarl Corbray, who had fought in the Battle Beneath the Gods Eye and seen dragon fight dragon, understood the threat in concrete terms. For the others, Rogar’s words evoked the dragonlords of Old Valyria contending for supremacy before the Doom. The scheme’s advocates were discussing a change of monarch, but the means by which their rival claims might be enforced threatened to turn the realm’s political crisis into conflict between dragonriders.

Alyssa’s Decision and Rogar’s Departure

Alyssa broke the silence by asserting her authority as Queen Regent. Until Jaehaerys came of age, she reminded the council, its members served at her pleasure—including the Hand. She then dismissed Rogar and ordered him to return to Storm’s End, treating his proposal as treason rather than a permissible council debate. Her response was a direct exercise of the regency’s power: the man who had sought to control the king’s future was stripped of office by the regent he had challenged.

Rogar refused to accept the dismissal at first. The turning point came when Qarl Corbray stood and drew Lady Forlorn, the Valyrian steel sword of his house. He laid the blade on the table with its point toward Rogar. Only then, Benifer’s account relates, did Rogar understand that he stood alone. He said no more. Pale-faced, he removed the golden brooch Alyssa had given him as the token of his office, threw it at her, and left the room.

That night Rogar left King’s Landing with his brother Orryn, crossing the Blackwater Rush. He waited six days while his brother Ronnal gathered knights and men-at-arms for their return to Storm’s End. The force that eventually departed numbered barely half the men who had marched with Rogar two years earlier to overthrow Maegor. The account suggests that many of the missing men chose to remain among the city’s alleys and inns rather than return to the stormlands; Rogar later complained bitterly that King’s Landing’s pleasures had cost him more men than any battle.

Aerea’s Disappearance and the Cost of the Crisis

The challenge to Alyssa’s authority had an immediate consequence for Aerea. On the night Rogar was dismissed, Ser Ronnal Baratheon and a dozen of his men forced their way into her chambers in the Red Keep, intending to take her with them. They found her gone. At the Queen Regent’s command, Qarl Corbray had removed the princess before Rogar’s party could seize her.

Aerea was disguised as a common girl: her silver-gold hair had been dyed muddy brown, and she wore rags. She spent the remainder of the regency working in a stable near the King’s Gate. She was eight years old and loved horses; years later, she would describe that period as the happiest time of her life. Her removal kept her out of Rogar’s hands and prevented the proposed change of monarch from being carried through, but it did so by hiding a child whose name had just been put forward as the basis for a royal coup.

The immediate political outcome favored Alyssa: Rogar lost the Handship and left the capital, while Aerea remained beyond his reach. The domestic consequences were more destructive. Alyssa’s dismissal ended whatever affection Rogar had felt for her, leaving their marriage an empty shell. Septon Barth later wrote that the rupture shattered her. Benifer’s account records that Alyssa appointed her brother Daemon Velaryon as Hand, sent a raven to Dragonstone to tell Jaehaerys some, but not all, of what had happened, and withdrew to her chambers in Maegor’s Holdfast. For the rest of the regency, Daemon governed while Alyssa took no further part in public life.

Significance

The failed plan laid bare the difference between claiming a throne and securing the means to rule it. Rogar appealed to Aerea’s lineage and his own reading of the succession, but the council’s silence revealed that dynastic arguments could not be separated from the dragons possessed by the rival claimants. His position collapsed not through a battle but through Alyssa’s formal authority and Qarl Corbray’s unmistakable display of force. The confrontation thus preserved Jaehaerys’s rule without resolving the emotional divisions that had made the plot possible: Rogar departed, Aerea was concealed, and the Queen Regent survived the challenge at the price of retreating from government.