The High Septon
The corpulent, well-fed head of the Faith of the Seven in King's Landing, more at home at a feast than in a fast.
The fuller tale
The High Septon of the story's opening seasons is the Faith of the Seven as the crown prefers it: fat, splendid, agreeable and for sale. Elected in the customary way — by the Most Devout, with the customary attention to the customary considerations — he presides over the realm's spiritual life from the Great Sept of Baelor in a crystal crown worth more than most lordships, blessing whatever the throne requires blessed. He crowns kings, sanctifies the war's convenient marriages, and pronounces the gods' favor on the reign of Joffrey Baratheon with a straight face, which is perhaps the most demanding act of faith in the capital. The books' smallfolk, starving through the war he decorates, take his measure precisely: they know to a dragon what his vestments cost, and they are keeping accounts.
His function in the saga is to be the before picture. Everything the High Sparrow's revolution later weaponizes — the Faith's debts to the crown, its princes' luxury, its silence about the court's sins — is this man's administration; the sparrows' rage is the invoice for his tenure. The story accordingly gives him no name, no sermon worth recording and no interiority at all: he is the institution at its most purchasable, a crystal crown with a man somewhere underneath, and when the city's hunger finally boils over, the mob's theology proves simpler and faster than his own. His successors complete the arc he begins — first another creature of the court, and then the barefoot man who owns nothing — the Faith swinging from his extreme to its opposite inside two seasons, with all the violence that pendulums promise.
The page and the screen
The books run through High Septons faster and more pointedly than the show. The fat one of the riot is succeeded, at Tyrion's brisk arrangement, by a pliable old man raised for his loyalty to the throne — and when that successor dies suddenly in the night, the novels drop dark hints that Cersei had him smothered for knowing too much, a murder the show never touches; only then do the Most Devout, pressured by the sparrow movement flooding the city, elect the barefoot radical. The show compresses the succession to a single cut — jeweled hypocrite to High Sparrow — trading the books' study of institutional decay for velocity. Both tellings agree on the founding irony: the Faith's collapse into revolution is not caused by its enemies but catered by its own princes, and the fat man in crystal is the caterer-in-chief.
Where they stand, season by season
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The show: Torn apart by the mob (S2·E6)
The books: Killed in the bread riots (ACOK, ch. 41)
He blessed Joffrey's procession on the day the starving city finally broke. The mob tore the crystal-crowned old man limb from limb in the streets, and the riot swallowed the rest of the afternoon.
The mob takes him apart with its hands. On the day Princess Myrcella sails for Dorne, the royal party processes back through a city that has been starving all winter while the court feasts — and when the crowd's misery finds its voice, dung and curses turn in a heartbeat to riot. The High Septon, borne along in his litter in full regalia, is the crowd's first and most symbolic harvest: the man who spoke for the gods while the gods' children starved is pulled from his litter and torn limb from limb in the street, his crystal crown vanishing into the same gutters his flock lived in. The books add the grace note that he is literally pulled to pieces — the Faith later recovers the crown but not, in any assembled sense, the Septon — and both tellings stage the death as the city's verdict rather than any schemer's plot: of all the story's murdered institutions, he is the one killed purely by his own congregation. The riot that consumes him nearly takes Sansa Stark too, and announces the truth the capital's rulers spend the rest of the saga relearning — the smallfolk are not scenery.