Tag: royal court

What’s a confessor? In the real world it’s like, a holy person (like King Edward -1) or a priest who administers the eponymous sacrament. But how would a secular nobleman become one of these, as per Larys Strong’s first court post? Also, I thought a septa was mentioned somewhere as a princess’ confessor. The name septa suggests a female septon, but they act more like nuns than priestesses from what we see in the text. Maybe they’re something like Roman Catholic deacons, but more powerful?

Good catch!

In Westeros, a confessor seems to have a grislier, secular purpose:

The entrance to the dungeons proper was at ground level, behind a door of hammered iron and a second of splintery grey wood. On the floors between were rooms set aside for the use of the Chief Gaoler, the Lord Confessor, and the King’s Justice.

And for that task, Ser Ilyn Payne was singularly ill suited. As he could neither read, nor write, nor speak, Ser Ilyn had left the running of the dungeons to his underlings, such as they were. The realm had not had a Lord Confessor since the second Daeron, however…

The girls became handmaids to Princess Rhaenyra, whilst their elder brother, Ser Harwin Strong, called Breakbones, was made a captain in the gold cloaks. The younger boy, Larys the Clubfoot, joined the king’s confessors.

My reading of the above text is that The Lord Confessor was in charge of torturing prisoners in the royal dungeons, to elicit confessions. Which fits Larys’ track record as a pragmatic, if not ruthless, politician. 

There’s a lot of talk about people being given “offices and honors” but outside of the Small Council and Wardens, we don’t seem to see a whole lot. What do you imagine these “offices and honors” would be?

I don’t think we need to need to examine, exactly, as much as we need to extrapolate from what we know. 

Thanks to Littlefinger’s importance to the plot, we know quite a bit about the offices that fall under the office of the Master of Coin:

“The keepers of the keys were his, all four. The king’s counter and the king’s scales were men he named. The officers in charge of all three mints. Harbormasters, tax farmers, custom sergeants, wool factors, toll collectors, pursers, wine factors; nine of every ten belonged to Littlefinger.”

Now, as I’ve written, not all of these people are royal officers, but a lot of them are. So those are offices that can be handed out to people as royal favors, and I would imagine you’d see a similar level of staffing in the other offices of the Small Council:

  • the Master of Ships oversees dozens and dozens of captains, and probably hundreds of lesser ship’s officers, then you have the officers of royal navy yards, quartermasters who handle naval logistics, etc. 
  • the Master of Laws…sigh, so much is unknown here. But we know that at the least there are chief gaolers, chief undergaolers, undergaolers, the King’s Justice, and the officers and rank-and-file of the City Watch.
  • the Master of Whisperers must have handlers and clerks and the like as well as spies. 

While not exactly canon, we also have Westeros.org’s MUSH, which has a more well-developed list of the court offices of King’s Landing.