Septon Baldrick

Septon Baldrick was one of the Seven Speakers, the preachers Jaehaerys Targaryen sent through the realm to win acceptance for his marriage to his sister, Queen Alysanne. Remembered as cunning and quick-witted, Baldrick gave the king’s effort a memorable voice: rather than answer opposition with force, he met it with a pointed argument about what made the Targaryens different.

Role Among the Seven Speakers

Baldrick was one of three young septons among the seven chosen—three men and four women—to speak on behalf of the king and queen. Their task was to praise Alysanne’s piety, generosity, and love for the people, and to answer objections to the Targaryen tradition of sibling marriage. The speakers carried no swords or axes; their instruments were their wits, courage, and tongues. Their arguments drew on the Doctrine of Exceptionalism, which held that the Faith’s prohibitions applied to ordinary people but not to the Targaryens, whose Valyrian origins and command of dragons set them apart.

The Hedge Knight’s Challenge

Legend tells that in a small village Baldrick was confronted by a burly hedge knight, once a Poor Fellow, who tested the king’s argument with a deliberately crude challenge: “Aye, and if I want to fuck my sister too, do I have your leave?” Baldrick smiled rather than answer with force or retreat into doctrine. “Go to Dragonstone and claim a dragon. If you can do that, ser, I will marry you and your sister myself.” His retort turned the exception into a pointed test: the permission he defended was not a license for anyone to imitate the royal marriage, but a privilege bound to the Targaryens’ supposedly unique possession of dragons. The episode, presented as legend, distills the Seven Speakers’ method into a single exchange—wit meeting provocation, and a theological argument made memorable through an impossible challenge.

Legend and Historical Significance

Baldrick’s surviving portrait is deliberately shaped by the uncertain life of a legend: the village encounter is introduced as a story told about him, and the account cautions that such tales grow in the telling. The broader achievement attributed to the Seven Speakers is also qualified. The realm did not rise against Jaehaerys and Alysanne in 51 AC as it had against Aegon and Rhaena a decade earlier, but the narrative cannot establish why an uprising never came; the High Septon’s silence and a general weariness of war may have mattered, and the preachers may have helped. Baldrick’s significance therefore rests less on a securely documented biography than on the memorable form given to the king’s argument: a quick-witted answer preserved as legend, while the political effect of the mission remains open to historical uncertainty.

The Doctrine in Practice

Baldrick carried an argument devised at court rather than an independent theological case: Jaehaerys fashioned the speakers’ answer in King’s Landing with Septon Oswyck and, especially, Septon Barth. When septons, begging brothers, and pious knights or lords challenged the mission with scripture and earlier High Septons’ sermons, Baldrick and the others could answer from this prepared position. The Citadel and the Starry Sept would later call it the Doctrine of Exceptionalism, giving a formal name to the reasoning the speakers had taken across the realm.