Jaehaerys Targaryen and Alysanne Targaryen’s first royal progress in 51 AC set out to make the Crown more present across the realm without burdening the people required to host it. Its carefully limited retinue and public audiences offered a different model of royal visitation; at Maidenpool, however, the journey was interrupted by an attack on the pregnant queen at Jonquil’s Pool.

A Smaller Royal Progress

Jaehaerys announced the progress late in 51 AC, invoking the principle that kings and queens needed to be seen by their subjects so people could bring their griefs and grievances before them. He would make many such journeys during his reign, often spending more time visiting lords or holding audiences in towns and villages than at Dragonstone and the Red Keep combined. Alysanne frequently travelled with him, her dragon Silverwing flying beside the king’s Vermithor. The king deliberately rejected the scale of earlier royal processions, which could include as many as a thousand knights, servants, and other attendants. Such a party strained even wealthy hosts: it consumed provisions and wine, and could overrun local hunting grounds. Jaehaerys set a limit of one hundred people, including twenty knights, with the rest made up of men-at-arms and servants. With fewer mouths to feed and fewer demands on a host, the king could visit smaller lords whose castles had not been able to accommodate a grander court, stay for less time, and avoid becoming an unwelcome guest.

Route and Public Audiences

The first itinerary was intended to be modest: through the Crownlands north of King’s Landing and as far as the Vale. Jaehaerys wanted Alysanne to accompany him, but her pregnancy made him wary of imposing an overly taxing journey. They began at Stokeworth and Rosby, then travelled north along the coast to Duskendale. At Duskendale, Jaehaerys visited Lord Darklyn’s boatyards and went fishing. Alysanne, meanwhile, held the first of the women’s courts that would become a feature of later royal progresses. These audiences were reserved for women and girls, whether highborn or lowborn, and invited them to bring their fears, concerns, and hopes directly to the young queen. The progress thus provided more than a formal royal appearance: it created a separate forum in which women could address the Crown through Alysanne.

Maidenpool and the Attack

The journey continued without incident to Maidenpool. Lord and Lady Mooton were to host the royal couple for a fortnight before they sailed across the Bay of Crabs toward Wickenden, Gulltown, and the Vale. The town was famed for Jonquil’s Pool, associated with a legend that Florian the Fool had first seen Jonquil bathing there in the Age of Heroes. A stone bathhouse had been built around the pool centuries earlier and entrusted to an order of holy sisters; men were forbidden to enter. Alysanne went to bathe in the pool, whose waters were reputed to have healing properties, accompanied by her ladies-in-waiting, maids, and septas. Three of the sisters who tended the bathhouse opposed the queen’s presence because she was pregnant, and attacked her with concealed daggers. The assault transformed a carefully planned royal visit into a moment of immediate danger. The account of the progress therefore places its promise of access and public contact beside the limits of royal protection, even within a sacred place where the queen was attended only by women.

Significance

The progress joined a practical change in royal travel to a wider effort to make rule visible. A smaller retinue reduced the demands placed on hosts and widened the range of communities the king could visit; Alysanne’s women’s court extended that access to people who would not ordinarily address the king’s court on equal terms. The attack at Maidenpool sharply disrupted that purpose, showing that a royal presence could invite contact without securing the queen from hostility. The journey’s legacy lay both in the model of visitation it established and in the vulnerable public encounter that marked its passage through Maidenpool.