The Kingsguard
The seven white knights sworn to shield the king with their lives and their silence ÔÇö the highest honor in the realm, and sometimes the heaviest chain.
The fuller tale
Aegon the Conqueror modeled the Kingsguard on the sworn swords of Valyria's old dragonlords: seven knights in white cloaks and white armor, sworn for life to protect the king's body with their own, forbidden lands, titles, or families of their own that might one day compete with the crown for their loyalty. It is framed as the highest honor a knight in Westeros can receive, and functions, often enough, as the heaviest chain ÔÇö a Kingsguard cannot refuse an order from the king he serves, whatever that order happens to be, which turns the White Book recording each knight's deeds into as much a ledger of complicity as of glory.
That tension defines the order's most famous member long before the story proper begins. Ser Arthur Dayne and his brothers in white guarded a tower in Dorne on the Mad King's orders during Robert's Rebellion, a stand so absolute that even the men who eventually killed them are said to have respected it ÔÇö knights who never questioned an order even when the war they were fighting for had already been lost. Jaime Lannister inherited that same code and broke it in the opposite direction, killing the king he had sworn to protect to save a city from being burned alive, and spent the rest of his life wearing the name Kingslayer for an act the realm never bothered to understand as mercy.
By the story's own present, the order has decayed alongside the throne it guards ÔÇö Barristan Selmy, its most decorated living knight, dismissed without ceremony by a boy king who wants a favorite in his place rather than the realm's finest sword; the white cloaks increasingly filled with men more loyal to whoever controls the throne than to any code the position was built on. What the Kingsguard is supposed to mean and what it has been reduced to protecting come apart in full view, and nearly every character who wears the cloak spends some part of their story reckoning with that gap.
The page and the screen
The novels give the order's mythic backbone ÔÇö the stand at the Tower of Joy, the White Book's centuries of recorded oaths and deeds, the specific reasoning behind Kingsguard vows and their occasional violent contradictions ÔÇö far more page space and lore than the show's mostly visual, mostly implied treatment. Jaime's memories of Ser Arthur Dayne and the other white knights of Aerys's reign run considerably deeper in the books, coloring his own sense of what the cloak is supposed to mean against what he actually did with it.
