Most Devout

The Most Devout is the senior collective of the Faith of the Seven, and its authority stands at the intersection of worship, wealth, law, and royal legitimacy. In the events surrounding King Tommen’s reign, it appears less as a remote spiritual council than as an institution whose choices can elevate a High Septon, negotiate with the crown, and authorize a renewed religious power capable of defending its own sanctuaries and punishing alleged crimes.

Composition and Public Authority

The Most Devout is shown accompanying the High Septon in formal religious ceremony. When Cersei Lannister brings King Tommen into the Great Sept, seven members attend the High Septon, dressed in cloth-of-silver, while he proceeds with a weirwood staff topped by a crystal orb. Their presence gives the procession institutional weight: the king and queen move through the Hall of Lamps under the observation of the senior clergy, and the assembled highborn mourners kneel as they pass.

Their collective authority also extends to choosing the High Septon. After the previous officeholder dies, advisers to Cersei Lannister discuss likely candidates among the Most Devout, including Torbert, Raynard, and Septon Ollidor. Qyburn adds Luceon, who has cultivated an image of piety by entertaining thirty members of the Most Devout with suckling pig and Arbor gold while distributing hardbread to the poor. The conversation presents selection as a contest in which devotion, patronage, public performance, and political circumstance all matter.

The elevation of the new High Septon occurs amid institutional crisis. Cersei Lannister learns that Septon Luceon had been only nine votes short of elevation when the doors of the Great Sept were forced open and the sparrows carried their leader inside with axes in their hands. The Most Devout therefore does not simply exercise power over the Faith’s popular movement; it is also pressured and, at the moment of succession, overwhelmed by it.

Wealth, Poverty, and Institutional Reversal

The Most Devout is associated with the Faith’s material vaults, but the new High Septon repudiates the splendor traditionally attached to the office. When Cersei Lannister refers to the crown once given to his predecessor by Lord Tywin, he explains that the crown has been sold, along with the other crowns in the vaults, the rings, and robes of cloth-of-gold and cloth-of-silver. His justification is practical and theological: poor people need food more than the clergy need precious metal, while wool is sufficient to keep a person warm.

This reversal changes the meaning of religious display. The previous crown represented royal generosity and ecclesiastical magnificence; its sale converts that symbol of prestige into material aid. Yet the change also unsettles the queen, who regards the High Septon as mad and suspects that the Most Devout may have raised him either through conviction or fear of the beggars at the Great Sept’s doors. The body’s authority is thus caught between ceremonial hierarchy and the moral pressure of poverty outside its walls.

The Most Devout’s relation to money becomes an explicit matter of state negotiation. Cersei Lannister calculates that the crown owes the Faith 900,000 dragons, while the High Septon corrects her with the exact figure of 900,674 dragons, describing the debt as wealth that could feed the hungry and rebuild a thousand septs. The precision of the amount turns a broad royal obligation into an accounting that the Faith can enforce, while the reference to hunger and reconstruction frames repayment as a religious and social necessity rather than a private financial demand.

The Restoration of Armed Religion

The Most Devout becomes central to the proposed restoration of the Faith Militant. Cersei Lannister offers to set aside Maegor’s laws, which had prohibited the armed religious orders, and the High Septon responds that the rebirth of the Faith Militant would fulfill three hundred years of prayer. He imagines the Warrior raising his shining sword again to cleanse the sinful realm and argues that allowing the ancient orders of the Sword and Star to return would prove King Tommen a true and rightful lord in the eyes of every godly person in the Seven Kingdoms.

The exchange reveals how religious revival and royal legitimacy are made mutually useful. Cersei Lannister wants the Faith to forgive the crown’s debt, while the High Septon wants legal permission to restore the Warrior’s Sons and the Poor Fellows. Neither side presents the arrangement as a simple act of devotion. The queen treats the revival as a bargaining instrument, and the High Septon treats royal authorization as the means by which Tommen’s rule can acquire sacred validation.

The Most Devout’s institutional decision therefore has consequences beyond doctrine. Once armed orders are restored, the Faith no longer depends solely on royal guards or secular courts to defend its interests. The arrangement creates a second coercive authority within King’s Landing, one whose claims rest on divine service and moral judgment rather than on the crown’s ordinary command structure.

Conflict with the Crown and Secular Power

The Faith’s renewed strength is also visible in its ability to defend the Great Sept. When an angry crowd of roughly a hundred people gathers outside, demanding that the High Septon release the little queen, Cersei Lannister refuses to disperse them immediately. She observes that the High Septon listens only to the gods and instructs that the Faith’s own knights defend the sept. The scene reverses the earlier image of the mob that helped raise the High Septon to power: the popular force that once enabled his elevation now becomes a threat at his door, while the restored religious militia stands between the institution and the crowd.

Cersei Lannister simultaneously orders the city gates closed so that no one may enter or leave King’s Landing without her permission until the crisis is settled. The command shows that royal and religious power operate together but do not merge. The crown controls movement and issues warrants; the Faith possesses its own knights and sanctuary. Their temporary cooperation is therefore an alliance between competing jurisdictions rather than proof of a unified authority.

The same struggle appears in the confrontation over Osney Kettleblack. Cersei Lannister insists that the Faith has no right to condemn a man to death, but the High Septon answers that Osney Kettleblack is guilty of treason and murder and that crimes must still be punished even though sins may be forgiven. He then presents changing testimony extracted under the scourge, including Osney’s claim that he never touched Margaery Tyrell. The Most Devout, through the High Septon’s office, has moved from spiritual oversight toward judgment, interrogation, and punishment.

Significance in the Political Order

The Most Devout represents the institutional threshold through which religious authority becomes political force. Its members help select the High Septon, hold the Faith’s wealth, and stand behind decisions that can reshape the relationship between the crown and the clergy. Yet the evidence also makes the body unstable: its leadership is altered by the arrival of the sparrows, its treasures are sold under a new ethic of poverty, and its authority is strengthened by restoring armed orders that can rival secular enforcement.

Its importance lies in this contradiction. The Most Devout is formally a governing body of the Faith, but the power operating through it is repeatedly redirected by forces outside conventional clerical procedure: royal bargaining, popular hunger, militant piety, and the practical control of weapons and prisons. The institution’s decisions help transform religious legitimacy from ceremonial endorsement into an active claim over debt, justice, public order, and the definition of a rightful king.