Margaery Tyrell

Mace's daughter, clever and gracious and quietly ambitious, who understands the winning of a crowd — and a king — better than anyone at court.

The fuller tale

Margaery Tyrell is the Reach's answer to a question the realm keeps asking wrong. Where other players seek the throne with armies and claims, Highgarden built a candidate: beautiful in the effortless Tyrell way, flawlessly gracious, educated by her grandmother in the only curriculum that matters — people, and what they want to believe about themselves. She arrives in the story already married to one king and interviews for two more without a visible seam, and the tale's long tease is the question underneath the smile: how much of Margaery is the performance, and whether the distinction would even mean anything to her.

Her method is the story's gentlest form of power. Joffrey — a torturer handed to her as a fiancé — she manages like a falconer, feeding his cruelties just enough theater to keep the talons off everyone else; the show's crossbow scene, where she turns his sadism into flirtation and his flirtation into leash, is the whole technique in miniature. The commons she wins wholesale: orphanages visited, bread distributed, a queen-to-be who learns soldiers' names and holds their babies. Cersei calls it calculation, and it is — but the story keeps noting, with some discomfort, that calculated kindness feeds exactly as many orphans as the sincere kind, which is more than anyone else in King's Landing manages.

With Tommen she comes closest to the real thing. Wedding a gentle boy-king half her age, she makes him adore her, makes the adoring look easy, and begins converting affection into policy — nudging Tommen from under his mother's thumb with such patience that Cersei can feel the ground moving and cannot point to a single overt act. It is the most dangerous thing anyone does to Cersei Lannister in the whole tale, precisely because none of it is illegal, and Cersei's response — arming the Faith to destroy her — burns down the entire board rather than lose the game.

The Faith's cells are her masterclass. Arrested on manufactured testimony, Margaery refuses to break in either telling: in the show she plays the penitent so convincingly that the High Sparrow releases her into an alliance, barefoot piety worn like the newest fashion, while her secret note to her grandmother — a drawn rose, get out — proves the player alive inside the pilgrim. She is the tale's demonstration that the game's finest practitioners are not the loudest ones, and that in a story where power is usually a hammer, the most sophisticated weapon anyone brings is being liked.

Her meaning sharpens against her rival. Cersei holds power the way a drowning woman holds driftwood; Margaery wears it like the season's silk, and everything Cersei does from the Sparrows onward is at bottom an answer to the unbearable fact that the girl from Highgarden is better at being queen than the queen ever was. The story of King's Landing's middle years is two definitions of the same office at war — and the city, given the choice, cheered for the rose.

The page and the screen

The show ages her up and moves her to center stage; the books keep her at a teenager's remove, seen only through others' eyes — mostly Cersei's, a narrator whose paranoia the reader must constantly discount, which is the books' sly trick: Margaery's true interior is one of the saga's deliberately withheld cards. Book divergences run through her whole file: her marriage to Renly is unconsummated by her own testimony, the Joffrey match ends at the purple wedding before any wedding night, and her arrest is engineered through a suborned knight confessing to her adultery — with her trial by the Faith still pending as the published books close, her cousins imprisoned beside her and a Kingsguard champion in the offing. The show's crossbow diplomacy, Sparrow alliance, and sept endgame are all its own construction.

In the show, season by season

Season Three. In Valar Dohaeris — Wins the capital one orphanage at a time. In Dark Wings, Dark Words — Handles a monster the way his mother never learned. In And Now His Watch Is Ended — Teaches Joffrey to wave at the crowd she bought for him.

Season Four. In The Lion and the Rose — Queen for the length of a feast.

Season Five. In Sons of the Harpy — Her brother in a cell; her husband too gentle to open it.

Season Six. In Blood of My Blood — Barefoot penitence as performance; the Sparrow can't tell.

In the books

A Feast for Crows. In The Queenmaker — Taken by the Faith on testimony bought with a lute.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Tywin is named Hand and savior; Margaery Tyrell replaces Sansa as the king's betrothed. (S2·E10)
• Margaery Tyrell feeds orphans in Flea Bottom and the city notices the difference. (S3·E1)
• Victory court: Joffrey sets Sansa aside for Margaery Tyrell to the cheers of both; Dontos whispers patience, and Littlefinger collects Harrenhal. (ACOK 66)
• The Blue Bard breaks on the third night of questioning; Margaery Tyrell and her cousins are taken by the Faith, and Cersei toasts her own genius. (AFFC 33)

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The show: Died when the sept burned (S6·E10)

The thrice-wed queen read the room the way she always did — she knew Cersei's absence meant death, and tried to empty the sept. The High Sparrow's certainty barred the doors, and the wildfire spared no one, not even the cleverest.

In the show she dies of being the only person in the building who understood it. At Loras's trial in the Great Sept, Margaery reads the room the way she reads every room: Cersei is absent, Cersei who never misses a triumph, and therefore the triumph is the building. Her warning is immediate and correct — she tries to force an evacuation, breaking her penitent's mask for the first and last time — and the High Sparrow's serene refusal bars the doors until the wildfire beneath the sept ends the argument. The explosion kills her, her brother, her father, and the Faith entire; the cleverest player in King's Landing loses to the one player willing to burn the game. In the published books Margaery is alive, released to await a trial that has not yet come, her endgame unwritten.