A Model for Cersei, Jaime, and the Valonqar? Philippa Gregory’s “Wideacre”
Before the premier of Season 2 of GoT, GRRM talked about his inspirations for ASOIAF:
"I read a lot of historical fiction, both the classic writers of historical fiction that I read many decades ago... and some of the more contemporary writers of historical fiction, like Bernard Cornwell, Sharon Kay Penman, and Philippa Gregory." [x]
While some of these influences have been discussed at length before, Philippa Gregory's influence over GRRM has not. For those that don't know, Philippa Gregory is a historical novelist whose most famous book is 2001's The Other Boleyn Girl. Most have taken GRRM's reference to Gregory to indicate GRRM was influenced by that book in writing ASOIAF, but I want to talk about one of Gregory's lesser-known works: Wideacre, which was first published in 1987.
I think there are a lot of similarities between Cersei's arc and that of Wideacre's main character, Beatrice Lacey. In this post, I will outline the similarities between these two characters and propose that GRRM was inspired by Beatrice when writing Cersei. I will also offer a couple of suggestions as to what this means for where Cersei's arc will go in the future. Hope you enjoy!
Wideacre spoilers ahead!
Wideacre: The Plot
Beatrice Lacey is the only daughter of the Squire of Wideacre, a country estate in eighteenth century England. She is very close to her father, and idolises him as an embodiment of the estate, the land, and her family itself. While Beatrice wants to be the Lady of Wideacre herself, she has a brother called Harry. When she is young, Beatrice is enraged by the sexist system that makes Harry the heir (lol) and her expendable, and becomes determined to supplant her brother, whatever the cost.
During her childhood, she meets a young "gypsy" boy called Ralph. By the time they are teenagers, their relationship turns sexual. Ralph eventually reveals that he has ambitions to one day rule Wideacre himself, and the two of them come up with a plan to rob Harry of his inheritance and marry each other, so Beatrice can become Lady of Wideacre. When Beatrice points out the plan is impossible because her father is still alive, Ralph suggests that he could kill the Squire the next day while the latter is out riding, and Beatrice tentatively agrees. However, she soon has a change of heart and tries to stop Ralph, but is too late. Not wanting to take any responsibility for her father's death, Beatrice blames Ralph entirely and decides he should be punished. In a primitive form of justice, she tricks Ralph into walking into one of the large mantraps (designed to ensnare poachers) hidden around the estate. However, her effort to kill him fails, as Ralph's mother Meg - who is believed to be a witch - saves his life, although Ralph loses both his legs. Ralph and Meg then flee Wideacre, and Beatrice spends the rest of the book haunted by the idea of them returning to take their revenge.
After their father's death, Harry becomes the new Squire and patriarch of the Lacey family. In an instant, Beatrice goes from feeling disdainful towards her brother to sexually attracted to him. Fetishizing him as the embodiment of male, Lacey power, Beatrice tries to seduce him, but Harry is initially resistant. He begins a relationship with one of their neighbours - Celia - and they are engaged to be married. Terrified that she will lose Wideacre to Harry's new wife, Beatrice eventually succeeds in seducing Harry, and the two of them begin a secret affair.
However, Beatrice is less than happy when she discovers that she has fallen pregnant. Claiming she has been raped, she convinces Celia to pretend the baby is hers and Harry's, therefore enabling Beatrice to keep her daughter's (Julia's) parentage secret. When she falls pregnant for a second time, Beatrice marries a local doctor, John McAndrew, and tries to pass off her son (Richard) as his. Unfortunately for Beatrice, John turns out to be quite savvy, and works out the truth. After Beatrice confirms his suspicions, John goes on a huge drinking binge to comfort himself. The same night, Beatrice and Harry's mother catches them having sex and, to avoid the truth coming out, Beatrice manipulates Celia into overdosing her mother on laudanum to kill her and keep her quiet. Although he was drunk on the night in question, John becomes convinced that Beatrice plotted to murder her mother, but Beatrice manages to turn everyone against him by pretending his drinking has driven him mad and has him sent off to an asylum.
It is at this point that Beatrice is at the height of powers and uses her sexual control of Harry to carry out her plan for Wideacre. She gets Harry to arrange a betrothal between Richard and Julia, and to make them joint heirs of Wideacre, and persuades him to use more modern farming practices on the estate. This involves enclosing much of the common land and it pushes the villagers of Wideacre into starvation. A first-hand witness to Beatrice and Harry's monstrousness, Celia finds her strength in resisting them. She gets John out of the asylum, and the two of them try to alleviate the poverty in the village. Their efforts are, however, not enough. The people of Wideacre turn against Beatrice and Harry, and invite a mysterious man known as "The Culler" into the village to raise a revolt. When Celia and John hear of "The Culler's" arrival, they confront Beatrice and Harry, and the truth of Julia's parentage comes out. Shocked by Beatrice's betrayal, Harry leaves the estate with Celia, John, and the children, abandoning Beatrice at Wideacre Hall.
Finally the master of Wideacre, Beatrice waits alone for the arrival of "The Culler" who is - of course - Ralph. She spends her final hours fantasising about having sex with him once more but he is only here for revenge. Knowing there is no way out, Beatrice embraces her death in her beloved Wideacre, and opens her arms to her ex-lover as Ralph stabs her to put an end to her reign of terror. Ralph and the villagers then burn Wideacre to the ground.
Beatrice and Cersei: Outward Appearances
As you can see from that outline, there are some eerie similarities between Beatrice and Cersei. Besides the fact that both Beatrice and Cersei are narcissistic sociopaths, they both have something else in common - their green eyes:
From those ancestors I had my chestnut hair, but my hazel-green eyes were all my own. No portrait in the gallery showed a set of eyes slantingly placed above high cheekbones like mine. (Wideacre, Ch. 1)
His lord father had come first, escorting the queen. She was as beautiful as men said. A jeweled tiara gleamed amidst her long golden hair, its emeralds a perfect match for the green of her eyes. (AGOT, Jon I)
Both Beatrice and Cersei also think very highly of their beauty and connect it to their own self-worth. They even think they are beautiful when outside evidence would perhaps suggest their good looks are fading:
My eyes had a blank greenness, rinsed of humanity. My smile was that of a madwoman. My face's pale clear loveliness was so utterly corrupted from within that it was the face of a fallen angel, of one who has supped with a devil and used no spoon. I looked like a she-devil, as lovely as an angel from heaven but with eyes as green as a cat's, as green as jade, as green as a snake's. (Wideacre, Ch. 20)
...and...
Cersei glanced past Tommen, to where Margaery sat laughing with her father. She is pretty enough, she had to admit, but most of that is youth. Even peasant girls are pretty at a certain age, when they are still fresh and innocent and unspoiled, and most of them have the same brown hair and brown eyes as she does. Only a fool would ever claim she was more beautiful than I. (AFFC, Cersei III).
Beatrice and Cersei's overestimation of their own good looks is a symptom of their narcissism and enables them to justify their shared belief that they are above everybody else.
Idolisation of the Father
Another symptom of Beatrice and Cersei's narcissism is their obsession with their family name, which they heavily associate with their father.
Beatrice adores her father:
I cannot remember a time before I loved him [Beatrice's father], the blond, red-faced, loud Englishman... Wideacre filled my consciousness, and the Squire of Wideacre dominated me as he ruled the world. (Wideacre, Ch 1)
The Squire's domination of Beatrice is tied to his connection to Wideacre, and his position as the patriarch of the family. Beatrice also associates herself heavily with him:
Only Papa, the land and I were the constant elements in my life. Papa, the land and I had been inseparable since the first time I had seen Wideacre in its wonderful wholeness from between the hunter's ears. Papa, the land and I would be here for ever. (Wideacre, Ch 1).
Cersei has a similar view of Tywin, as she sees him as the brightest star of the Westerlands:
"By the time they left Maegor’s Holdfast, the sky had turned a deep cobalt blue, though the stars still shone. All but one, Cersei thought. The bright star of the west has fallen, and the nights will be darker now." (AFFC, Cersei I)
While Cersei sees Tywin as one of the greatest men of his generation, she also sees herself as the only viable heir to Tywin:
Stannis did not frighten her, no more than Mace Tyrell did. No one frightened her. She was a daughter of the Rock, a lion. There will be no more talk of forcing me to wed again. Casterly Rock was hers now, and all the power of House Lannister. No one would ever disregard her again. Even when Tommen had no further need of a regent, the Lady of Casterly Rock would remain a power in the land." (AFFC, Cersei I)
While Cersei and Beatrice both idolise their fathers, they are both acutely aware that the Squire and Tywin see them as lesser because of their gender:
The precious elder son always took the land - and the redundant girls could go where they could find a man to take them. My residence at Wideacre was not an exclusive favour, and Harry's departure an exile - but I was kept at home because I was not worth educating. (Wideacre, Ch 2)
When she was small she would sometimes don her brother's clothing as a lark. She was always startled by how differently men treated her when they thought that she was Jaime. Even Lord Tywin himself... (AFFC, Cersei IV)
Beatrice and Cersei are both disdainful of the sexist social order that keeps them oppressed, but only because it affects them personally. They are happy for patriarchy to continue, as long they themselves are exempt:
I had never imagined that the rule that favoured older sons to the exclusion of all others could ever, possibly, apply to us - to me... It was a feature of the lives of the poor, like early death, poor health, and starvation in winter. These things were not the same for us. (Wideacre, Ch 2)
"When Jaime was given his first sword, there was none for me. ‘What do I get?’ I remember asking. We were so much alike, I could never understand why they treated us so differently. Jaime learned to fight with sword and lance and mace, while I was taught to smile and sing and please. He was heir to Casterly Rock, while I was to be sold to some stranger like a horse, to be ridden whenever my new owner liked, beaten whenever he liked, and cast aside in time for a younger filly. Jaime’s lot was to be glory and power, while mine was birth and moonblood.” (ACOK, Sansa V)
Beatrice and Cersei's idolisation of their fathers therefore comes from a place of self-hatred, from despising their own femininity that keeps them trapped and unable to wield power. They see themselves as their fathers' true heirs, only limited by their gender:
Oddly, I had never thought of Harry as the son and heir, just as I had never thought of Mama as the Mistress of Wideacre. They were simply private individuals, seldom seen outside the walls of the park. They were the background to the glory of the Squire and me. (Wideacre, Ch 2)
"His sister liked to think of herself as Lord Tywin with teats, but she was wrong. Their father had been as relentless and implacable as a glacier, where Cersei was all wildfire, especially when thwarted." (AFFC, Jaime II).
It is this self-hating conceptualisation of their own identity that pushes both women into some of their most brutal and manipulative acts and serves as the catalyst to both Beatrice and Cersei's downfall arcs that play out across Wideacre and ASOIAF respectively.
Illegitimate children
Beatrice and Cersei's similar internalised misogyny also finds expression in the way they treat their children, as both women prefer their sons to their daughters. In Beatrice's case, she blatantly values the power a son can bring her over that of a daughter:
If it were a boy - and I knew with certainty that it was a boy - then he was the future Master of Wideacre and my place there was assured for ever. Mistress in all but name of those most precious acres, and the mother of the son of the Squire. My baby would be the Master. (Wideacre, Ch 8)
...and...
The baby that I had carried so carefully and so long, this baby, for whom I had laboured all night, was my son, was Wideacre's heir. He was the end and triumph of my sinning and striving. This was my child, who would inherit by unquestioned right. This was my son, my son, my son.
'A lovely girl,' repeated Celia.
I turned on my side so roughly that the baby nearly fell but Celia's hands were quick to catch her and hold her safe. The child set up a shriek as I jerked away and cried and cried in Celia's arms. (Wideacre, Ch 9).
Cersei is not quite so explicit, but she clearly favours Joffrey and Tommen over Myrcella. Throughout her POV, her two living children are mentioned drastically different amounts: Tommen 127 times, and Myrcella only 10 times. Joffrey, who is dead by the time of Cersei's POV, is mentioned 31 times, also more than Myrcella. Cersei's favouritism for Joffrey is the most explicit, and she thinks of breast-feeding him as among the happiest moments of her life:
It is beautiful, she thought, as beautiful as Joffrey when they laid him in my arms. No man had ever made her feel as good as she had felt when he took her nipple in his mouth to nurse. (AFFC, Cersei III).
In contrast, she is more bothered about Myrcella losing her beauty when she is maimed by Darkstar than the fact she has been hurt:
Ser Kevan gave her another scowl. "Myrcella was attacked by a Dornish knight named Gerold Dayne. She's alive, but hurt. He slashed her face open, she... I'm sorry... she lost an ear."
"An ear." Cersei stared at him, aghast. She was just a child, my precious princess. She was so pretty, too. (ADWD, Cersei I).
Harry Lacey and Jaime Lannister: The Manipulated Brothers
As well as sharing this gendered treatment of their children, Beatrice and Cersei also both go to great lengths to keep the true parentage of their offspring hidden. Interestingly, both women also get kicks out of the deception inherent in this arrangement, especially when third parties - Harry's wife Celia, and Cersei's husband Robert - are inadvertant witnesses.
In Beatrice's case, when she sleeps with Harry on his wedding night, she delights in the fact that Celia is in the next room:
The wedding night was all that Harry and I had planned, with the added excitement for me of deceiving Celia who was sleeping next door. Harry had to hold his hand over my mouth to smother my cries of pleasure, and that hint of his violence and my helplessness excited us even more. When his own time came he had to thrust his face into the soft pillows to muffle his long, low groans. (Wideacre, Ch 8).
Cersei and Jaime also have sex while Robert is asleep right next to them:
"Past midnight, the queen summoned me inside. The king was passed out snoring on the Myrish carpet. I asked my sister if she wanted me to carry him to bed. She told me I should carry her to bed, and shrugged out of her robe. I took her on Raymun Darry's bed after stepping over Robert. If His Grace had woken I would have killed him there and then." (AFFC, Jaime IV)
Yet while Harry and Beatrice engage in similar dangerous couplings to Jaime and Cersei, Jaime and Harry do not initially seem to have much in common, besides their blond hair:
Harry took after my father in colouring, with his bright blond curls and his wide blue, honest eyes. From Mama he had inherited her delicate bone structure and the sweetness of her smile. (Wideacre, Ch 1)
Tyrion turned back to his siblings. Twins, male and female. They looked very much the part this morning. Both had chosen a deep green that matched their eyes. Their blond curls were all a fashionable tumble, and gold ornaments shone at wrists and fingers and throats. (AGOT, Tyrion I)
While Jaime and Cersei's relationship begins in childhood, Beatrice and Harry's starts after Harry has returned from boarding school. Even so, there are some similarities. Beatrice is disdainful of Harry as a person, but she adores him when he occupies the position of "Squire of Wideacre", the patriarch she wishes she could be herself:
Unbidden, into my dozy, daydreaming mind, came thoughts of my brother. Not Harry my brother the schoolboy, nor Harry the incompetent farmer. But Harry the harvest demigod at whose bidding and whose land the corn stood tall... Of the Harry that I saw growing in authority and power. Of the Harry who was daily becoming a true Master of Wideacre, whom I could never shift. (Wideacre, Ch 5)
Cersei similarly divides Jaime into different parts; loving him when he plays the Lion of Lannister but less when he is the Kingsguard knight:
"Gold? Or silver?" Cersei plucked a hair from beneath his [Jaime's] chin and held it up. It was grey. "All the colour is draining out of you, brother. You've become a ghost of what you were, a pale crippled thing. And so bloodless, always in white." She flicked the hair away. "I prefer you garbed in crimson and gold." (AFFC, Jaime III).
Yet, despite these conflicted thoughts about Harry and Jaime, both Beatrice and Cersei engage in sexual relationships with their brothers that are partly motivated by a desire to control (Beatrice more explicitly than Cersei). In Beatrice's case, she accidentally learns that Harry has a whipping and bondage fetish that he picked up at boarding school, and milks it for all it is worth:
'Understand this, Harry,' I said, and my voice was clear with hatred. 'I am never, in all my life, leaving Wideacre. I am never, in all my life, leaving you. We are together forever. While you are the Squire of Wideacre you have me as surely as you have the land. You forget that, that is why I am going to punish you. I shall punish you in such a way that you will never forget and it will be a drug and a longing to you which you will never rid yourself of.' (Wideacre, Ch 11)
Nothing so extreme ever happens between Cersei and Jaime, but we definitely get the sense that Cersei knows how to pull at Jaime's sexual strings to get what she wants. For example, she persuades him to join the Kingsguard and give up Casterly Rock by seducing him while dressed as a serving wench, and there is a hint that she is playing on his particular sexual fantasies:
"He remembered the night as if it were yesterday. They spent it in an old inn on Eel Alley, well away from watchful eyes. Cersei had come to him dressed as a simple serving wench, which somehow excited him all the more. Jaime had never seen her more passionate. Every time he went to sleep, she woke him again. By morning Casterly Rock seemed a small price to pay to be near her always. He gave his consent, and Cersei promised to do the rest." (ASOS, Jaime II)
Later, when Cersei tries to persuade Jaime to become hand, she tries a similar tactic of dressing plainly with the express purpose of seducing him into accepting the position of Hand of the King:
"The hour of the wolf." His sister lowered her hood, and made a face. "The drowned wolf, perhaps." She smiled for him, so sweetly. "Do you remember the first time I came to you like this? It was some dismal inn off Weasel Alley, and I put on servant's garb to get past Father's guards."
"I remember. It was Eel Alley." She wants something of me. (AFFC, Jaime I)
Both Beatrice and Cersei also have similar justifications for why their incest is acceptable. When Harry and Beatrice first sleep together, he needs reassuring that what they are doing is morally correct. She falls back on their Lacey ancestry as a justification:
'We are the Laceys of Wideacre,' I said simply. That statement of family pride still seemed to me the only explanation I would ever need for my behaviour, even though the man who had said it was dead and his son, my brother, had lain in my arms.
'We are the Laceys of Wideacre,' I said again. Harry was blank. He needed words and complicated explanations. Nothing simple would ever do for him. 'Who else could there be for me?' I asked. 'Who else could there be for you? On our own land, where we rule. Who else could there ever be?' (Wideacre, Ch 6)
Cersei also sees herself and Jaime above usual human rules, and explicitly links her incest to the incest of the Targaryen kings, hinting at a type of Lannister exceptionalism:
"Your brother?" Ned said. "Or your lover?"
"Both." She did not flinch from the truth. "Since we were children together. And why not? The Targaryens wed brother to sister for three hundred years, to keep the bloodlines pure. And Jaime and I are more than brother and sister. We are one person in two bodies. We shared a womb together. He came into this world holding my foot, our old maester said. When he is in me, I feel... whole." The ghost of a smile flitted over her lips. (AGOT, Eddard XII)
There is one final way in which Beatrice and Harry's relationship is comparable to Cersei and Jaime's: both Beatrice and Cersei have a sweet and innocent foil who ultimately contributes to the breakdown of their relationships with their brothers:
Even in my dark mourning clothes I was bright beside Celia, with flushed cheeks from the warmth of my heavy dress in the sun. She was pale and cool, her shy brown eyes scarcely daring to look over the hedges as we drove. She had a little trembly face and a quivering rosebud mouth. She seemed so young beside me. Five years older but such a sweet baby. (Wideacre, Ch 5)
... and ...
"His wife?" Brienne said, appalled. "The Imp? But... he sword, before the whole court, in sight of gods and men..."
She is such an innocent. (ASOS, Jaime V)
Although Harry and Beatrice never become estranged in the way Jaime and Cersei do, in Beatrice and Cersei's hour of greatest need, both Harry and Jaime abandon them to follow Celia and Brienne:
Celia walked past me without a word, without even a backward glance, and Harry followed her like a good foal his dam. He was blind and deaf and dumb with shock, all he could do was follow in Celia's small determined footsteps until his own haze of horror lifted... I was alone. (Wideacre, Ch 19)
... and...
A snowflake landed on the letter. As it melted, the ink began to blur. Jaime rolled the parchment up again, as tight as one hand would allow, and handed it to Peck. "No," he said. "Put this in the fire." (AFFC, Jaime VII)
Jaime scrambled to his feet. "My lady. I had not thought to see you again so soon." Gods be good, she looks ten years older than when I saw her last. And what's happened to her face? "That bandage... you've been wounded..." (ADWD, Jaime I)
So, while Harry is a much more malleable figure than the independently minded Jaime, both characters are manipulated sexually over many years by their sisters. With Beatrice, this is a much more overt play for power, while Cersei genuinely believes she loves Jaime (even as she manipulates him). Ultimately, however, both Harry and Jaime abandon their sisters in their time of need to follow Celia and Brienne. In Jaime's case, this is a much more conscious decision to break away from Cersei and to commit to his oath to Catelyn, while Harry is motivated by weakness and fear. Nevertheless, both characters share a distinct place within their sisters' arcs and, therefore, perhaps Harry Lacey should be considered a model for Jaime's trajectory in future books.
Ralph the Valonqar
And so, we turn to the last similarity between Beatrice and Cersei: their valonqar.
When Ralph is first introduced in Wideacre, it is noted he lives in the woods with his mother, Meg, who is described as a "slattern" and a "gypsy":
Ralph was free from the day he could walk because his mother, Meg, a slattern in a tumbledown cottage in the middle of the woods, had never troubled where he went or what he did. This made him the perfect playmate for me - and he taught me all the paths and trees of Wideacre woods in a great sweep around the Hall as far as my little legs could carry me in a morning. (Wideacre, Ch 2)
It is implied - but never stated outright - that Ralph is the Squire's illegitimate son:
She [Meg] was supposed to be a widow. Ralph's father, the black sheep of one of the oldest families in Acre, had been pressed into the Navy and disappeared: dead, or missing, or run away. The other men of the village followed her with their eyes like hungry dogs but she looked neither to right nor left. Only my father, the Squire, brough a smile to her eyes, and those dark eyes to his face. No other man was ever worth a second glance. So, although she had offers, oh, many, she and Ralph never moved from the dark little house by the river. (Wideacre, Ch 2)
As Ralph and Beatrice grow, they develop a strange flirtation, which, by the time she is fourteen, turns sexual. One day, they discuss love and their feelings about the concept. Ralph says he refuses to love, but be the one who is loved instead, while Beatrice declares that she will do things just as a man does. She will have pleasure and own the land:
I would have all the pleasure, and all the land as well. My misfortune of being born a girl would not be my destiny... I would get pleasure with any man I wanted. I would get the land, too. I wanted Wideacre with every waking thought, and breath, and dream. And I deserved Wideacre, too. No one cared for it as I did, or loved it as I did, or knew it as well as I. (Wideacre, Ch 2)
Beatrice's declaration that she will not be limited by her gender and will live like a man is very similar to Cersei's philosophy. In AFFC, Cersei sleeps with Taena Merryweather in order to have sex like a man, and focusses on the idea of taking her pleasure in the way a man would:
The Myrish woman gave a gasp of pain. "You're hurting me."
"It's just the wine. I had a flagon with my supper, and another with the widow Stokeworth. I had to drink to keep her calm." She twisted Taena's other nipple too, pulling until the other woman gasped. "I am the queen. I mean to claim my rights." (AFFC, Cersei VII)
Ralph and Beatrice discuss the merits of being the one who is loved rather than the one doing the loving. It is a lesson that Beatrice carries with her:
Wideacre spoke to me in my loneliness and my longing for love and the beat of its heart said, 'Trust no one. There is only the land.' And I remembered Ralph's advice - which he himself had fatally forgotten - to be the one who is loved. Never to make the mistake of being the one who does the loving. (Wideacre, Ch 6)
Interestingly, the distrust of love is a theme that comes up in both Tyrion and Cersei's arcs in ASOIAF. Both are desperate for love and admiration, but not the one to be loving:
"Robert wanted smiles and cheers, always, so he went where he found them, to his friends and his whores. Robert wanted to be loved. My brother Tyrion has the same disease." (ACOK, Sansa IV)
"Cersei is as gentle as King Maegor, as selfless as Aegon the Unworthy, as wise as Mad Aerys. She never forgets a slight, real or imagined. She takes caution for cowardice and dissent for defiance. And she is greedy. Greedy for power, for honor, for love." (ADWD, Tyrion VI)
At the height of Beatrice and Ralph's love affair, it becomes clear that Ralph has an interest in taking Wideacre for himself. The two of them plot to steal Harry's fortune from him, for Ralph to take his place, and for Beatrice to become his wife:
'We ruin him.' Ralph's voice was a whisper, mingling with the clatter of the stream. 'You'll have a jointure protected, or probably a dower house protected, or funds. Your income is safe, but we make him bankrupt. With the money we've saved I buy the estate from him. And then I'm the Master here and you're what you deserve to be, the Mistress of the finest estate and house in England, the Squire's Lady, the Mistress of Wideacre.' (Wideacre, Ch 3)
Like Ralph, Tyrion also wants a great inheritance - Casterly Rock.
"You have important letters, yes." Tyrion rose on unsteady legs, closed his eyes for an instant as a wave of dizziness washed over him, a took a shaky step toward the door. Later, he would reflect that he should have taken a second, and then a third. Instead he turned. "What do I want, you ask? I'll tell you what I want. I want what is mine by rights. I want Casterly Rock."
His father's mouth grew hard. "Your brother's birthright?" (ASOS, Tyrion I)
Yet Ralph is determined to be more treacherous than Tyrion in getting what he wants: he and Beatrice arrange to kill the Squire so they can trick Harry out of his fortune. When Ralph kills the Squire and Beatrice has a change of heart, she decides to get revenge on Ralph by baiting him into walking into a mantrap. Ralph is horribly maimed by the attack and loses both legs. Over the next few days, Beatrice fearfully waits to hear news of Ralph's death, but instead she discovers that both Ralph and his mother Meg have gone missing. Convinced that Meg has used her magical powers to save Ralph, Beatrice imagines that Meg is training Ralph to seek his revenge:
It sounded very, very likely that Meg had managed to save Ralph's life, though he was too weak to walk. Ralph must have been able to tell her who set the trap, and who had baited it. If he had not told her, she would have instantly brought him down to the Hall. But she did not! She had taken him away, far away from the Hall and out of my reach; away to her people, to the untamed gypsy tribe. Away to heal him so that he could get fit and strong and able to come back and confront me. Away from our lands and our influence, so he could move and plot and scheme and forever threaten my life and my future. (Wideacre, Ch 4)
Just as Beatrice remains fearful of Meg's powers, Cersei lives in terror of Maggy:
A lioness does not fear a frog, no matter how old and ugly she might be. She should have gone, she should have listened, she should have run away. (AFFC, Cersei VIII)
While Cersei spends AFFC and ADWD tortured by imaginings of the valonqar and Maggy, Beatrice is haunted by Ralph and focusses on his maimed body as a reason to despise him:
Every waking moment from now I would half expect to see him as I already did in every night's dream. Limping, or horribly mutilated, coming after me for revenge. The picture in my mind was so bright, so vivid, so inescapable, that it seemed to me Ralph was at that second heaving his legless body up the steps to the door of the Hall. (Wideacre, Ch 4)
Similarly, Cersei focusses on Tyrion's disabilities when thinking of her hate for him:
Her twisted little brother was too clever to allow Lollys to name her wretched ill-begotten bastard after him, knowing it was sure to draw the queen's wroth down upon her. (AFFC, Cersei VII)
Cersei had never realised there were so many dwarfs. "Is the whole world overrun with these twisted little monsters?" she complained, whilst the last of the informers were being ushered out. "How many of them can there be?" (AFFC, Cersei VIII)
Throughout the rest of their story, Beatrice and Cersei remain in constant fear of Ralph and Tyrion, and that they are going to invade their home and kill them:
Then, and then only, I leaned back on the sun-warmed doorpost and moaned in fright at the thought of Ralph daring enough to ride or, even more hideous, to crawl right up to the walls of the Hall... (Wideacre, Ch 12)
... and...
She imagined Tyrion creeping between the walls like some monstrous rat. No. You are being silly. The dwarf is in his cell. (AFFC, Cersei I)
Both women collect rumours of Ralph and Tyrion, and it drives them to distraction:
'Oh yes,' I said with polite interest. 'Bread riots where?'
'In Portsmouth, Mama said, I think,' he said vaguely. 'Apparently a mob broke into two bakers' claiming the bread was made with adulterated flour. They were led by a legless gypsy on horseback. Fancy that!'
'Fancy,' I repeated slowly, uneasy with a feeling of dread I could not properly understand. (Wideacre, Ch 7)
... and...
Sad to say, the three would-be informers probed no more useful than the Tyroshi. One said the Imp was hiding in an Oldtown brothel, pleasuring men with his mouth. It made for a droll picture, but Cersei did not believe it for an instant. The second claimed to have seen the dwarf in a mummer's show in Braavos. The third insisted Tyrion had become a hermit in the riverlands, living on some haunted hill. (AFFC, Cersei VIII)
As Wideacre reaches its conclusion, it becomes clear that Ralph is now living under the name "The Culler" and is attacking members of the gentry on behalf of the poor and oppressed. After Celia and John confront Beatrice for her crimes, and take Harry and the children away from Wideacre, Beatrice sits in wait for "The Culler" and becomes lost to her madness.
Firstly, she rejoices that Wideacre is now - unequivocally - hers:
And the house, my lovely Wideacre, was at last mine. Mine alone... No one was here but me. I was the only person in the Hall, the only person on the land. And my ownership was undisputed. (Wideacre, Ch 19)
Her mind then turns to Ralph, who she fantasises about being with again:
He kissed my collarbone in the hollow at the base of my neck. He opened my gown and kissed one breast, the nipple as hard as a blackberry, and then he kissed the other. I found my voice but I only made a soft moan of longing... He was not gentle. He did not kiss. He did not lick. He sank his teeth into me as if he was starving for meat and he bit deep until his teeth ground on the core of my body and closed on my most private, most secret, flesh. (Wideacre, Ch 20)
Although Cersei's chief sexual relationship is with Jaime, there is also a weird eroticism when she thinks of the man she views as her valonqar - Tyrion. In particular, a dream she has of Tyrion is eerily similar to the one Beatrice has about Ralph:
Cersei dreamt that she was down in the black cells once again, only this time it was her chained to the wall in place of the singer. She was naked, and blood dripped from the tips of her breasts where the Imp had torn off her nipples with his teeth. "Please," she begged, "please, not my children, do not harm my children." Tyrion only leered at her. He was naked too, covered with coarse hair that made him look more like monkey than a man. "You shall see them crowned," he said, "and you shall see them die." Then he took her bleeding breast into his mouth and began to suck, and pain sawed through her like a hot knife. (AFFC, Cersei IX)
Of course, we do not have Cersei's POV when she finally meets her valonqar, but we do have Beatrice's. Wandering through her ancestral home, Beatrice's language suddenly gets very "two halves of a whole" when describing her feelings for Ralph:
It had been the same for him because we were two halves of a trap. We could only snap together. And even that death-toothed real trap could break only his legs, could break nothing between us. He was mine even though I had tried to kill him. He was mine even though I had sliced him in two neatly as one slices a peach. He was mine even if he came to murder me. (Wideacre, Ch 20)
As Ralph and the mob of villagers approach Wideacre, Beatrice oscillates between fear and longing, but eventually tries to embrace Ralph as a lover:
The lightning split the sky and shone bright on the knife in his hand.
His gamekeeper's knife, for slitting the throats of cornered deer.
I smiled and in the sharp blue light he saw my eyes gleam as he leaned down to me, as if he would catch me up to him, and hold me, and hold me, and hold me, for ever.
'Oh, Ralph,' I said with a lifetime of longing in my voice, and I held up my arms to him.
And then his knife hand came down like a thunder blow. And the lightning itself was black. (Wideacre, Ch 20)
Conclusions
So, what can we conclude from all this?
There are many, many similarities between Beatrice and Cersei. If you read the whole of Wideacre, there are even more than the ones I mentioned here.
GRRM has said he has read Philippa Gregory. I reckon he means Wideacre, which came out several years before AGOT. I think he therefore might have been inspired by Wideacre when writing Cersei's arc.
Like Beatrice, Cersei is a narcissistic sociopath who values her own beauty, idolises her father, sexually manipulates her brother, wants to become her father's true heir, hides the paternity of her children, attempts to murder someone while she is still a child, lives in fear of a witch called Meg/Maggy, is terrified of the revenge of the maimed man who murdered her father, and has a sweet and innocent foil in Celia/Brienne.
Beatrice is murdered in her beloved family estate by Ralph, the man she has long feared and who killed her father. This looks very much like Cersei's eventual fate at Casterly Rock at the hands of the valonqar.
If GRRM was inspired by Beatrice Lacey's fate when writing Cersei, Wideacre perhaps gives credence to the idea of Tyrion, the man she has always feared, being the valonqar. However, Beatrice also thinks of Ralph very romantically in her last moments and embraces death like a lover, which may point to Jaime.
There are also differences between Cersei and Beatrice's arc - most prominently, Jaime is a much more independent character than Harry is - but the parallels are obvious when you put them side by side.
So, to conclude, I think GRRM was inspired by Beatrice Lacey when writing Cersei, and we might be able to use Wideacre to guess where GRRM intends to go with Cersei.
