Aegon III’s Personal Rule

Aegon III’s Personal Rule began not with a progress through the realm but with a confrontation in the council chamber. On his sixteenth nameday, the king claimed the chair at the head of the table, rejected the regents’ plans, and dismissed both them and his Hand, Torrhen Manderly. In the same exchange, he set out a policy of peace, food, and justice for the smallfolk, while making clear that the governance of the Seven Kingdoms would now be his own. The regency ended in a room where its departing Hand had only moments earlier been speaking on the king’s behalf.

The King Enters the Council

It was still morning, and the council was debating whether Tumbleton should be included in the royal progress. Aegon entered accompanied by four Kingsguard and Sandoq the Shadow, veiled and silent, carrying his great sword. The armed escort altered the room’s atmosphere: the source recounts that Sandoq’s presence cast a pall, and that even Manderly briefly lost his tongue. The king’s arrival thus interrupted a discussion about how he should travel among his subjects with an unmistakable demonstration of the power he already possessed.

Aegon addressed Manderly and asked him to state the king’s age. Manderly answered that Aegon was sixteen that day, a man grown, and that it was time for him to take the governance of the Seven Kingdoms into his own hands. Aegon agreed: “I shall,” he said, before adding, “You are sitting in my chair.” The exchange turned the question of age into an immediate claim of authority. Rather than announce a gradual transition or invite the council’s consent, Aegon made the chair itself the first business of his rule.

Grand Maester Munkun would later describe the coldness in Aegon’s tone and the confusion it caused. Manderly had to prise his considerable bulk out of the chair, casting an uneasy glance at Sandoq as he yielded it to the king. He began to return to the subject under discussion—the progress—but Aegon cut him off. The king sat down, and the council’s consideration of where he might travel gave way to the question of how he meant to govern.

The Progress Refused

Aegon declared that there would be no progress. He rejected the prospect of spending a year on horseback, sleeping in strange beds, and exchanging courtesies with lords he believed might welcome his death for financial gain. His objection was not simply to the discomfort of travel: he refused the idea that a year of royal appearances and courtly exchange was the necessary route to authority or popular affection. If anyone wanted words with him, he said, they could find him on the Iron Throne.

Manderly argued that the progress would do much to win the love of the smallfolk. Aegon answered with a different account of what the people needed from their king: peace, food, and justice. If those things did not suffice to win their love, he proposed sending Mushroom—or a dancing bear—in his place. The contrast gave his refusal its bite: where Manderly saw the progress as a means of cultivating affection, Aegon treated spectacle as a poor substitute for material care.

He extended that reasoning to the feast planned for that evening. Aegon ordered it stopped and its food given to the hungry, making the distribution of provisions part of the same declaration as his rejection of ceremonial display. His reference to full bellies and dancing bears joined a concrete instruction to a deliberately mocking image of popular entertainment. The scene presents his policy not as an elaborate program but as a sharp distinction between what he considered useful to the realm and what he regarded as empty performance.

The Hand and the Regents Dismissed

After addressing the council’s plans, Aegon turned to the three regents—Lord Stackspear, Lord Grandison, and Lord Merryweather—and thanked them for their service. He then declared them free to go and said he would have no further need of regents. The announcement ended their authority in the same room where they had been debating the king’s itinerary; the progress had supplied the occasion, but the transfer of power was the decisive business.

Manderly asked whether the king would still need a Hand. Aegon replied that a king should have a Hand of his own choosing. He acknowledged that Manderly had served him well, as he had served Aegon’s mother before him, but pointed out that the lords had chosen Manderly. The distinction was pointed: Aegon did not deny the Hand’s service, but made the source of his appointment the reason he would not retain him. He told Manderly he could return to White Harbor.

Manderly accepted with a growl, complained that he had not drunk decent ale since coming to the castle, and removed his chain of office, setting it on the council table. The gesture made the dismissal visible and final. Within moments of taking power, Aegon had turned one of his most loyal servants into an enemy: Manderly would not forgive either the brusque manner of his dismissal or what he regarded as the king’s humiliating murder of the progress.

Departure and the End of the Regency

Less than a fortnight later, Manderly sailed north for White Harbor with a small party of sworn swords and servants. Mushroom went with him, having accepted the offer of a place in Manderly’s household rather than remain at court with a king who seldom smiled and never laughed. The ship, Mushroom reported, was called the Jolly Salt, though the mood aboard was far from jolly as it beat north. Manderly’s letters to his daughters likewise made clear his dislike of the king, whom he called “that sullen boy.”

Mushroom’s departure also marks a change in the account of the reign. He would outlive Aegon and later record his experiences at White Harbor, at the court of the Sealord of Braavos, at Port of Ibben, and among the mummers of the Lisping Lady. The chronicle regards these later volumes as valuable in themselves but less useful to its immediate history. It also cautions that Mushroom was not the most reliable chronicler, even while crediting him with truths others dared not speak and a gift for drollery. His exit therefore removes a distinctive, if fallible, witness from the narrative just as Aegon’s independent rule begins.

The account closes by describing the regents’ rule as coming to an end and Aegon’s as beginning. The transition is deliberately unceremonious: no royal progress, no prolonged settlement, and no retained Hand chosen by the departing lords. A king claims his chair, orders the feast stopped, sends his governors away, and leaves a former servant sailing north in anger. The reign that begins in this scene is called the Broken King’s broken reign, but its first act is an unmistakable assertion that the king will decide who governs, what the court does, and what he owes the people.