Rogar Baratheon's Dismissal as Hand

Rogar Baratheon’s Dismissal as Hand was the decisive break between the Queen Regent and her husband: after Rogar proposed setting aside Jaehaerys, Alyssa used her authority to dismiss him and preserve her son’s place on the Iron Throne. The confrontation ended his role in the regency, left Daemon Velaryon in charge of the realm’s government, and turned a political defeat into a lasting personal estrangement.

Background and the proposal

As news of Jaehaerys’s marriage to Alysanne spread, Rogar could no longer contain his anger at a union he had opposed. Alyssa, who had at first accepted that the marriage could not be undone, urged the regency council to protect the young couple from whatever consequences might follow. Rogar answered by condemning her judgment and arguing that they should act before Jaehaerys came of age.

He denied that he wished to claim the Iron Throne for himself. Instead, he proposed sending Jaehaerys to Oldtown to become a maester and placing Princess Aerea on the throne, with Rogar continuing as Hand to guide her. He argued that Aerea’s parents had been King Aenys’s first- and second-born children, while Jaehaerys was fourth, and claimed that Aerea’s mother, Rhaena, would support her. Her dragon, he added, would strengthen her claim. The proposal made the regent’s husband’s ambition plain even as he disavowed usurpation: he sought to replace the king while retaining the office through which he could direct the new ruler.

The council confrontation

The proposal stunned the councillors. Its implication was not simply a change of monarch: Jaehaerys and Alysanne also had dragons, and the prospect of rival branches of the royal family fighting for supremacy recalled the danger of dragon against dragon. The room’s alarm gave way to a direct test of authority when Alyssa invoked her position as Queen Regent. Until Jaehaerys came of age, she reminded the council, its members served at her pleasure—including the Hand.

Alyssa then dismissed Rogar and ordered him to return to Storm’s End. Rogar rejected the order at first. Qarl Corbray rose and laid his Valyrian steel sword, Lady Forlorn, on the table with its point toward Rogar. Faced with the councillors’ opposition and Corbray’s unmistakable support for the regent, Rogar recognized that he stood alone. He said no more, removed the golden brooch Alyssa had given him as the badge of his office, threw it down, and left the room.

Departure and consequences

Rogar left King’s Landing that very night, crossing the Blackwater Rush with his brother Orryn. He waited there for six days while his brother Ronnal assembled their knights and men-at-arms for the journey home. When the Baratheons finally set out for Storm’s End, they had fewer than half the men who had marched with them two years earlier to overthrow Maegor. Many of the others had remained in the capital, a loss Rogar later attributed bitterly to the city’s inns and diversions rather than to battle.

The dismissal also changed the regency’s administration. 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 she left the government of the Seven Kingdoms to Daemon and took no further part in public life. Rogar’s removal therefore ended not only his own authority at court but also Alyssa’s active participation in governing.

A political defeat becomes a family rupture

The loss of office destroyed what remained of the affection between Rogar and Alyssa. Their marriage, once a political partnership, became an empty bond marked by the breach between them. Alyssa had endured the deaths of her husband and two eldest sons, the loss of a daughter in infancy, the years of Maegor’s rule, and distance from her surviving children; the dismissal and its consequences left her shattered.

Rogar, by contrast, did not accept defeat as a reason to retreat. He returned to Storm’s End still determined to win what he had come to regard as a political struggle. His subsequent attempt to obtain the novice Rhaella Targaryen from the motherhouse at Oldtown showed that the dismissal had ended his office, not his efforts to influence the succession. The confrontation thus closed one phase of the regency while exposing how readily a dispute over royal marriage and authority could become a contest over the crown itself.