Harry Strickland
Homeless Harry, captain-general of the Golden Company, the largest and most storied of the free companies of Essos — cautious where his forebears were bold (book).
The fuller tale
Harry Strickland is captain-general of the Golden Company — the largest, richest and most storied free company in the world, founded a century past by the exiled Blackfyre faction on the promise of going home, its officers the descendants of Westerosi attainder, its dead boiled down to gilded skulls that travel with the baggage so that even the company’s ancestors remain, technically, in camp. Strickland inherited the command as he inherited the exile: fourth generation, his forebears attainted with the Blackfyre cause, the words beneath the gold — our word is good as gold — his to keep. He is, the books insist with visible amusement, a decidedly unmartial heir to all this: plump, amiable, prone to blisters, happiest in his tent with his feet in a basin, called Homeless Harry by men who do not entirely mean it kindly.
The books make his caution the character. When Jon Connington and the boy who may be Aegon Targaryen bring the company its ancestral errand — a Targaryen restoration, the contract the Golden Company was literally founded to fulfill — Strickland is the voice against every risk: against the landing, against haste, against the storming of Storm’s End, forever counting costs while harder men make history around him. The company follows the griffin and the prince rather than its own captain-general at each decisive turn, and the books leave deliciously open whether Harry is a coward, a prudent quartermaster of other men’s adventures, or something slyer — a Blackfyre heirloom himself, perhaps, waiting on a different restoration than the one he is contracted to.
The show’s Strickland is a different, simpler soldier: trim and professional, hired by Cersei Lannister through the Iron Bank to hold King’s Landing against the dragon queen — twenty thousand men, two thousand horse, and famously, to Cersei’s irritation, no elephants. He gets one good scene of confident parade-ground presence outside the walls, which in this story is a death sentence with a salary.
The page and the screen
The screen and the page use the same name for nearly opposite men. Book Strickland is the reluctant, blister-footed brake on the Golden Company’s invasion of the stormlands — a landing made for Aegon and against Cersei’s whole world, still unfolding, and still undefeated, when the published novels end; he is alive on the page, commanding from a comfortable rear. The show, having cut Aegon and Connington, rented the company to the other side entirely: its Strickland is Cersei’s crisp mercenary general, and the invasion of Westeros the company was built for becomes a garrison contract in the city it was founded to take. Book readers regard the switch as one of the adaptation’s stranger inversions — the exiles’ homecoming legion dying in Lannister service — and the elephants, promised and undelivered, as the show’s own wry acknowledgment that something had been lost in the hiring.
Where they stand, season by season
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The show: Ridden down before the walls of King's Landing (S8·E5)
The captain-general of the Golden Company drew his lines before the walls of King's Landing looking very fine. Drogon undid the company in one pass, and Grey Worm's thrown spear caught Harry mid-flight.
In the show, Harry Strickland dies with his company in the fall of King’s Landing, and the staging is deliberately merciless: the Golden Company forms up in gleaming ranks before the city gates, the picture of professional confidence — and Drogon simply comes through the gate behind them, the wall and the vanguard erupting in the same breath. The company is annihilated in moments without landing a blow, and Strickland, unhorsed and fleeing across the field, is run down by Grey Worm, whose thrown spear takes the captain-general mid-stride — the last commander of the exile legion dying in flight from the Targaryen restoration his order was founded to achieve, on the wrong side of the contract.
In the published books Strickland is alive and, by his lights, winning: the Golden Company holds Storm’s End and a spreading beachhead in the stormlands for Aegon’s cause, its captain-general soaking his feet and counselling delay while bolder men spend the company’s gold-good word. Whether Martin’s version dies better than the show’s — or reveals, as some readers suspect, that Homeless Harry was never quite fighting for the boy at all — waits on The Winds of Winter.