Hello, I hope you're well and having a great summer! I am not sure if this is a silly question but I wanted to ask, with Littlefinger creating a (in theory) permanent House Royce of the Gates of the Moon, how "good" of a deal is this for that branch of the Royces? I understand of course that there would be prestige and benefits to having a permanent title and castle, but I also wonder if not really "owning" the castle and having to host the Arryns during the summer would be negative tradeoffs at all? In the sense that maybe it limits their household or independent power because (if I understand correctly) the Gates of the Moon belongs to the Arryns, so I'm assuming the Arryns would have a lot of control over day-to-day life that wouldn't apply to other houses in the Vale. But maybe I'm not understanding it. Thank you very much!
This is not a silly question!
What Littlefinger has done with Nestor Royce - and I think he, Baelish, very much understands it - is handed Nestor a sort of dynastic white elephant, useful to Nestor and his branch of the family in the short term but potentially, and deceptively, politically tricky to hold long term. As Nestor notes to Baelish, "even after [the Targaryen Conquest], the Gates remained an Arryn castle", a seat by some reckoning "as royal as the Eyrie". Yet as both Nestor and Littlefinger acknowledge, even if the position of Keeper had never been hereditary, its officeholders had almost exclusively hailed from House Arryn: Nestor recalls that "Jon Arryn himself was Keeper of the Gates whilst his father lived" and as lord "named his brother Ronnel to the honor, and later his cousin Denys", while Baelish explains to Sansa that "Lysa dreamed of other sons and meant the castle to go to Robert's little brother". Littlefinger blithely dismisses Nestor's response by saying that "Lord Robert has no brothers, and only distant cousins", but the point remains: Littlefinger has given Nestor and his family a seat that by every reckoning has always belonged to, and remained with, the Royces' Arryn overlords.
Baelish’s grant, then, represents a substantial breaking of quite literally centuries of Arryn tradition - not merely investing the keeping of the castle in a non-Arryn (as even Lord Jon felt prepared to do when he lacked an adult male Arryn relative for the post), but formally naming that keeper the hereditary lord of this very Arryn castle. Indeed, Nestor Royce seems aware of the worryingly unprecedented nature of the grant, remarking that Littlefinger was “not without courage” to order as much, since “[s]ome will call this grant unseemly, and fault [him] for making it”. If Littlefinger is technically correct that young Robert lacks brothers or (patrilineal Arryn) cousins who might have expected to take over the position of Keeper, he has limited the observation to this generation of House Arryn. Littlefinger is keenly aware that the future of House Arryn - at least as he, Littlefinger, has planned it - will rest not with the young lord Littlefinger is actively poisoning but the Hardyng cousin whose betrothal to his own “daughter” Littlefinger has arranged by the end of AFFC. In some far-off potential future for House Arryn, would Harry and Sansa’s sons or grandsons or other descendants appreciate that their ancestral castle, the first foothold of the family in the Vale, was held in lordship, rather than merely stewardship, not by House Arryn but by a secondary branch of the Royces? In some future era of tension within the Vale, could the Royces of the Gates of the Moon keep a Lord or Lady Arryn as a virtual hostage of the castle, or even trap their overlords on the Giant’s Lance? The recent experience of the almost-siege of the Lords Declarant, as well as the similar actions taken by Lord Allard Royce against the usurping Jonos Arryn in the first century AC, illustrate how the Gates of the Moon could function during geopolitical strife in the Vale. As hereditary keepers of the Gates of the Moon, the Royces might find themselves the unwelcome landlords of their liege-tenants.
Of course, Littlefinger does not care what fallout the Royces might ever experience in the future. Baelish obtained what he wanted out of the deal - the invaluable thanks of, and subsequently an alliance with, a blue-blooded Vale aristocrat - at a cheap price; again, with no Arryn brothers or male-line cousins around, and with Baelish himself as Lord Protector of the Vale, Littlefinger could pass on the Gates of the Moon without an obvious source of challenge. More to the point, Littlefinger is expecting to get out of the Vale sooner rather than later, with Sansa and Harry leading an army of Vale chivalry to claim Winterfell in her name. Even if Nestor Royce comes along (and he might, not only as a highborn aristocrat but also as the vehicle for his highly intriguing daughter), the Gates debate will hardly demand as much attention in a struggle of third-party Stark factionalism.
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