The High Sparrow
A humble, barefoot holy man who rises from tending the poor to lead the Faith of the Seven, preaching that even the highborn must answer to the gods.
A soul born at Of the smallfolk, sworn to The Faith of the Seven.
The fuller tale
Season Five
A barefoot ascetic found scrubbing latrines outside the Great Sept, more interested in bread for the poor than gold for himself, which is exactly what makes Cersei think she can use him. She has him named High Septon and helps him rearm the Faith Militant to threaten the Tyrells, never considering that a man with no appetites is a man with nothing to hold over him. He arrests Loras for his indiscretions and Margaery for lying to cover them, and when Cersei's own sins come out through her cousin Lancel's confession, he locks her in a cell too. By the season's end she is shaved, stripped and walked barefoot through King's Landing while his septas ring bells and the city spits on her.
Season Six
He keeps Cersei's trial suspended rather than settled, which suits him better than a verdict would — a queen kept waiting is a queen kept humble. He works on Tommen instead of her, courting the boy king with sermons about faith and crown until Tommen bans trial by combat outright, closing the one door Cersei might have escaped through. He plans a public reckoning at the Sept of Baelor for Cersei, Loras and Margaery together, certain the day belongs to him. Cersei does not attend. The Sept goes up in green fire under the city he thought he had tamed, and he is still inside it when it does.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Died in the Great Sept (S6·E10)
The barefoot septon brought queens to their knees and believed the Mother's mercy would shield him from one more. Cersei did not come to her trial; the wildfire came instead, and the Sept of Baelor rose into the sky.
He dies in the sept he ruled, refusing to believe the obvious. On the morning of Cersei's trial the Great Sept of Baelor fills with the Faith, the Tyrells, the court and the crowd — everyone except the accused. Margaery Tyrell, the one player present who truly understands Cersei, reads the empty seat correctly and demands the sept be emptied; the High Sparrow, serene in the conviction that no one would dare defy the gods' justice, has the Faith Militant bar the doors. Beneath their feet, Qyburn's little birds have already done their work among the old wildfire caches, and Lancel Lannister is bleeding toward a guttering candle he will not reach. The green light takes the High Sparrow first and mid-gesture — the man who brought queens to their knees vaporized with his whole revolution, his army, his hostages and his case files in a single bloom that rewrites the city's skyline. In the published books he is alive and at his zenith, both trials pending; the show's ending is its answer to his doctrine — the gods may well judge the proud, but in King's Landing, Cersei schedules first.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
The books keep him older, harder and considerably less knowable. Their High Sparrow is a small, grey, flint-eyed ascetic — no cobbler's-son confession, no supper-table charm offensives — whom readers see only through hostile eyes: Cersei's, as she arms him in a fit of tactical genius she mistakes for piety, and Jaime's, in a single audience that leaves the Kingslayer unsettled by the first churchman he cannot read. His book campaign runs the same sequence — debts, Militant, Margaery, Cersei, the walk — but stops earlier: as of the published novels he holds both queens' trials in preparation, faces Cersei's champion Ser Robert Strong in the arithmetic he may not have done, and remains alive, in power, and unexploded. The show's supper-table intimacies with Olenna and Tommen are its own invention, as is his name-brand humility; the books never even grant him the dignity of the definite article, calling him what Cersei calls him, with contempt that curdles into fear.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.