Alicent Hightower, as depicted by Douglas Wheatley in Fire & Blood.
Alicent Hightower was a member of House Hightower who became the second wife to King Viserys I Targaryen. She was the daughter of Ser Otto Hightower, who had been Hand of the King to Jaehaerys I, Viserys I, and later his grandson Aegon II. She was the mother of King Aegon II, Queen Helaena, Prince Aemond and Prince Daeron.
In the television adaption House of the Dragon, Alicent is portrayed by Olivia Cooke and Emily Carey.
Alicent was described as precocious at fifteen and clever and lovely at the age of eighteen. After having given birth four times, Alicent remained as slender and graceful as before the first pregnancy.
Alicent’s hair color is uncertain, since it is not described in the text: the illustrations within The World of Ice & Fire, Fire & Blood, and The Rise of the Dragon all depict her with dark hair, but the fact King Jaehaerys I Targaryen mistook her for one of his daughters may suggest she was blonde.
Alicent was born in 88 AC to Otto Hightower, the younger brother of Lord Hightower, the Lord of the Hightower. Alicent had several brothers, including Gwayne.
When her father was named Hand of the King by King Jaehaerys I Targaryen in 101 AC, thirteen year-old Alicent accompanied him to court together with her brothers and mother. In 103 AC, Alicent became the constant companion of King Jaehaerys, whose health was failing. She fetched his meals, helped him wash and dress, and read to him. In the end, King Jaehaerys sometimes mistook her for one of his daughters, especially Saera Targaryen. Jaehaerys eventually died the same year, while Alicent was reading to him.
Alicent stayed at court, as her father continued to occupy the position as Hand under Jaehaerys’s grandson and successor, King Viserys I Targaryen. Already early in the reign of Viserys, Ser Otto and Prince Daemon Targaryen were at odds with each other.
In the years that followed, Alicent caught the eye of King Viserys I Targaryen, whose first wife, Queen Aemma Arryn, had died, and whose small council was urging him to wed again. Ignoring all advice from his council, Viserys chose Alicent as his wife. They married in 106 AC, despite the whispers of people who believed that the Hand had risen above himself. Some doubted Alicent’s virtue, as rumors began circling that she had slept with King Viserys while Queen Aemma was still alive; the notorious court fool Mushroom mischievously suggested that Alicent had been more than an aide to the late Jaehaerys. Nonetheless, Alicent was wed to Viserys. While this forestalled other potential marriage-alliances Viserys’s small council would have preferred, it was not a completely unwise choice, as the Hightowers were still one of the leading families in Westeros, with close ties to the Faith of the Seven (whose leadership were still based at the Starry Sept in Oldtown at the time).
The birth of the blacks and the greens. Art by Jota Saraiva.
Originally, Queen Alicent had a good relationship with her step-daughter, Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen. But when Alicent gave birth to a son, Prince Aegon, a daughter, Princess Helaena, and another son, Prince Aemond, in rapid succession, and Rhaenyra remained Viserys’s heir, those feelings started to change. Both women wanted to be the first lady of the realm, but there could only be one. One example of their growing enmity was when Alicent noticed that Rhaenyra paid much attention to Ser Criston Cole of the Kingsguard, she publicly asked the court who was protecting the princess from her knight.
Alicent’s biggest supporter was her own father, Ser Otto Hightower. He eventually pushed too far on the matter, and was stripped of his position as Hand. Having no place at court anymore, Otto returned to Oldtown. A “queen’s party” remained, a group of powerful lords who were friends with Queen Alicent, who supposed the rights of Alicent’s sons.
In 111 AC, a great tourney was held at King’s Landing on the fifth anniversary of the king’s marriage to Queen Alicent. At the opening feast, Alicent wore a green gown, whilst Princess Rhaenyra dressed in Targaryen red and black. Note was taken, and it became the custom to refer to “greens” and “blacks” when talking of the queen’s party of the princess, respectively. In the tourney itself, the greens were defeated by the blacks, when Ser Criston Cole, wearing Rhaenyra’s favor, unhorsed all of the queen’s champions, including two of her cousins and her youngest brother, Ser Gwayne Hightower.
Prince Daemon Targaryen was opposed to Alicent and her sons, after his return to King’s Landing, he made fun of Alicent, Aegon and Aemond, and the other greens, to entertain Princess Rhaenyra. It is said that he acted cool towards the princes Aegon and Aemond, because they had pushed him even lower in the line of succession.
When Rhaenyra turned sixteen, the small council started looking for a suitable husband. Alicent had her own choice: her eldest son, Prince Aegon, who was only six years old. Viserys argued that the siblings had never gotten along, but Alicent urged her husband that was all the more reason to wed the two. Viserys refused, believing that Alicent only made the suggestion to get her own blood on the throne.
By the time Princess Rhaenyra got married, in 114 AC, Queen Alicent had found a few member for her greens: Ser Cristo Cole, former companion to Princess Rhaenyra, who had broken from her for an unspecified reason. Criston fought in the tourney for Rhaenyra’s wedding with Alicent’s favor, and was named Alicent’s personal sworn shield after.
Alicent and her four children, Aegon, Helaena, Aemond, and Daeron, art by Fkaluis.
By 115 AC, the enmity between the greens and the blacks grew deep. While Alicent had given birth in 114 AC to Prince Daeron, who unmistakably shared the Targaryen looks like his brothers and sister, Princess Rhaenyra had given birth to Prince Jacaerys and Lucerys Velaryon, who both looked nothing like either Rhaenyra or her husband, Ser Laenor Velaryon. Alicent was convinced the children had actually been fathered by Ser Harwin Strong, but King Viserys did not share these feelings. He had even ordered that Daeron and Jacaerys share a wet nurse until they were weaned, hoping that them being milk brothers would ease the enmity between Alicent and Rhaenyra.
In 120 AC, Alicent’s second son became involved in an incident at Driftmark where he fought with Rhaenyra’s three sons over his claiming of the dragon Vhagar. In the fight, Lucerys took out Aemond’s right eye with his dagger after he mocked the three boys as “Strongs”. Alicent, angered, demanded that the same would be done to Lucerys. After King Viserys refused, Princess Rhaenyra demanded that Aemond should be questioned “sharply” until he revealed where he heard her sons described as “Strongs” — as naming them such suggested they were bastards, and therefore that Rhaenyra was guilty of high treason by sleeping with Ser Harwin Strong. Pressured by his father, Aemond eventually admitted hearing the name from his brother, Prince Aegon. After the incident, King Viserys decreed that anyone who mocked his grandsons as “Strongs” again would have their tongues pulled out with hot pincers. Viserys further declared that Alicent and her children would remain at court in King’s Landing, whilst Rhaenyra and her family remained at Dragonstone. Later that year, as Rhaenyra gave birth to her first son by Prince Daemon, Alicent grew wroth upon learning the child had been named Aegon, believing it to be a slight against her own firstborn, who had also been named Aegon.
In 122 AC, Prince Aegon the Elder and Princess Helaena were parried per the Targaryen tradition of sibling marriage, and within a year they welcomed twins, Prince Jaehaerys and Princess Jaehaera, Alicent’s first grandchildren. According to the scurrilous Testimony of the fool Mushroom, Aegon also fathered two bastards in 123 AC, including a girl by one of Alicent’s maidservants. When Alicent’s youngest son, Daeron, turned twelve in 126 AC, he was sent to serve as a cupbearer and squire to Lord Ormund Hightower, Alicent’s cousin, in Oldtown.
In 126 AC, King Viserys’s hand became infected after he cut it on the Iron Throne, and it was feared that he might die. He recovered, and on the first day of 127 AC, the king held a feast to celebrate the return of his health. Alicent and Rhaenyra made a show of amity and love, each wearing the other’s colors. Their families greeted each other with kisses and toasts, to Viserys’s pleasure. After the king left the feast to rest, Aemond toasted his three Velaryon nephews, speaking in mock admiration of their brown hair, brown eyes, and strength, calling them “three strong boys”. Aegon also became offended when Jacaerys asked Helaena to dance, and a fight between the prince was prevented by the intervention of the Kingsguard.
After the death of Grand Maester Mellos, Rhaenyra’s recommended that Gerardys take his place. Alicent instead named Maester Alfador, who served House Hightower, named to the office. Beset from both sides, Viserys chose neither, reminding both his wife and daughter that the Citadel would decide; in the end, they chose Orwyle.
Green Council plotting just after the death of King Viserys I Targaryen, as depicted by Douglas Wheatley in Fire & Blood.
When King Viserys I Targaryen died in his sleep in King’s Landing, on the third day of the third moon in 129 AC, a servant warned Queen Alicent as instructed, without telling anyone else. According to Mushroom, who was away with Rhaenyra Targaryen on Dragonstone at the time, Alicent poisoned Viserys’s hippocras. Regardless, Alicent warned Ser Criston Cole, now Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, and together, they called the small council, where plans were made to crown Alicent’s son Prince Aegon, instead of Princess Rhaenyra, who had been Viserys’s heir. At the coronation ceremony held for Aegon II and Helaena, Aegon’s sister-wife, in the Dragonpit, Alicent placed her own crown upon the head of Helaena and addressed her as “my queen”.
After Aegon heard of the rival coronation of Rhaenyra, he was incensed, demanding her execution. But Alicent, Helaena, and Grand Maester Orwyle urged Aegon to offer generous terms to Rhaenyra, allowing her to remain the lady of Dragonstone and for the lands to pass to Jaecerys after her death, for Driftmark to pass to Lucerys, and for her sons Aegon the Younger and Viserys to serve as the king’s squire and cupbearer, respectively, if she acknowledged him as kind and made obeisance before the Iron Throne, also offering pardons to her supporters. Rhaenyra rejected these terms, and war was inevitable. After Aemond killed Lucerys in the fight above Shipbreaker Bay, he did not receive a hero’s welcome in King’s Landing when he returned with the news. His mother Alicent paled and cried out for the Mother’s mercy, while his grandfather Otto asked him how he could have been so blind. Prince Daemon swore revenge, promising Rhaenyra “a son for a son”.
After the coronation, Alicent had moved her chambers to the Tower of the Hand, where her father resided. Every evening before bed, Queen Helaena brought her children to see their grandmother. Because the Tower of the Hand was less secure than Maegor’s Holdfast, Blood and Cheese were able to take advantage of this custom. They stole into Alicent’s chambers, slew her bedmaid, and bound tje gagged Alicent. When Helaena arrived with the children, they slew Prince Jaehaerys, Aegon’s eldest son and heir, as revenge for the death of Rhaenyra’s son Lucerys, cutting off his head. Blood was captured and tortured for thirteen days; Alicent ordered that Lord Confessor Larys Strong learn his true name, so that she might bathe in the blood of his wife and children, but Archmaester Gyldayn’s sources could not determine if she his occurred. Helaena subsequently went mad with grief, and Aegon gave his surviving son, Prince Maelor, to his mother Alicent to raise.
Alicent successfully defended her father, Ser Otto Hightower, when Aegon II replaced him as Hand of the King with Ser Criston Cole. After the battle at Rook’s Rest, the smallfolk of King’s Landing were greatly awed by the sight of the dragon Meleys’s head, drawn through the city on a cart. Thousands of people began fleeing the capital, until Dowager Queen Alicent ordered the gates closed and barred. In the battle, King Aegon’s dragon Sunfyre was badly maimed and Aegon himself had been grievously injured. He slept nine hours out of every ten under the effects of milk of the poppy, and only Alicent and Ser Criston were allowed to disturb his rest. Prince Aemond took over the rule in his stead as Prince Regent and Protector of the Realm.
In 130 AC, when Rhaenyra’s dragons first appeared in the skies above King’s Landing, the master of whisperers Lord Larys Strong spirited Aegon out of the city, along with Alicent’s grandchildren, Prince Maelor and Princess Jaehaera. Alicent yielded the Red Keep to Rhaenyra during the fall of King’s Landing, during which her brother, Ser Gwayne Hightower, was killed by Ser Luthor Largent. Alicent was bound in golden fetters, but though her father, Ser Otto, and co-conspirators on the small council were beheaded for treason, Rhaenyra spared Alicent’s life “for the sake of our father, who loved you once”.
Alicent begs Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen for peace, on her knees before the Iron Throne as depicted by Douglas Wheatley in Fire & Blood.
Alicent’s Grandison Maelor died at Bitterbridge while on the run from Rhaenyra’s knights inquisitor. After Alicent heard of Rhaenyra’s planned campaigns against Prince Aemond and Prince Daeron, she plead for peace, on her knees before the Iron Throne. Alicent petitioned that the Seven Kingdoms should be divided between Rhaenyra and Aegon II, with her son taking the stormlands, westerlands and the Reach, ruling his new realm from Oldtown, while Rhaenyra would rule the crownlands, riverlands, the Vale of Arryn, the Iron Islands and the North. Her stepdaughter rejected this offer of peace, claiming that her brothers had given up their positions of honor by stealing her birthright and claiming the lives of her own sons. When Alicent claimed that only bastard blood had been spilled, whereas her grandsons had been innocent, Rhaenyra was enraged, and threatened to cut out her tongue if she spoke any more of bastards. According to Mushroom, Mysaria suggested to Rhaenyra that Alicent and Helaena be forced to prostitute themselves in one of King’s Landing’s brothels as an even crueler punishment than their tongues being cut out. Gyldayn discredits the story of the “Brothel Queens”.
Alicent laughed when she heard of the Two Betrayers at the First Battle of Tumbleton, promising that the blacks would now reap what they had sowed. Prince Aemond died fighting Prince Daemon Targaryen in the Battle Above the Gods Eye, and Prince Daeron died at the Second Battle of Tumbleton. When Helaena’s madness led her to commit suicide by jumping from her window, Alicent rent her garments and cursed her rival.
Rhaenyra fled the capital after the Storming of the Dragonpit and the riot of King’s Landing, and Alicent was in attendance when Ser Perkin the Flea then placed his squire, Trystane Truefyre, on the Iron Throne. Aegon II secretly captured Dragonstone, and when Rhaenyra arrived at the island, he fed her to his dragon, Sunfyre.
When Lord Borros Baratheon ended the Moon of the Three Kings, Alicent negotiated the betrothal of her surviving son, King Aegon the Elder, to Cassandra Baratheon. Alicent was overcome with joy to learn that her granddaughter, Princess Jaehaera Targaryen, had reached Storm’s End in safety. Alicent did not trust the Sea Snake, Lord Corlys Velaryon, but Larys Strong persuaded her to consent to his proposals, and she reluctantly agreed to betroth Jaehaera to Rhaenyra’s son, Prince Aegon the Younger. Alicent, acting as proxy for King Aegon II, publicly pardoned Lord Corlys, and restored him to his place on the small council.
After King Aegon II returned to King’s Landing, he was determined to get revenge on those who had betrayed him, and was urged on in these plans by Alicent. When the greens learned that Lady Rhaena Targaryen had hatched a dragon in the Vale, Alicent feared that the smallfolk would now consider the blacks as more legitimate, and Aegon made unsuccessful efforts to hatch a new dragon for himself. As the armies of the Lads and Lord Cregan Stark advanced on the capital, conspirators plotted against Aegon II. The king was found poisoned, and Alicent was arrested by Velaryons on the serpentine steps and taken to the dungeons.
Alicent in the last year of her life, haunted by the deaths of her children and grandchildren. Art by Jaydeewis.
Rhaenyra Targaryen’s ten-year-old son took the throne as King Aegon III Targaryen in 131 AC. When the Lads arrived at the Red Keep, they found that the late Aegon II Targaryen had been laid out on a bier before the Iron Throne, while Alicent stood crying beside it. During the Hour of the Wolf, King Aegon III’s Hand, Lord Cregan Stark, sentenced to death the men who had arrested Alicent. The Dowager Queen opposed the marriage of her granddaughter Jaehaera to the new king, and was absent from the ceremony.
Aegon’s new regents were divided on what to do with Alicent. While they did not desire Alicent’s own execution, some from compassion and others for fear that doing so would reignite the war, they felt she could not be allowed to participate in court life. If she did, she was likely to curse at the young king, or snatch a dagger from a guard and try to attack him. Alicent could not even be trusted around her granddaughter; once when she was allowed to share a meal with the little queen, she terrified Jaehaera by suggesting she slit Aegon’s throat while he was sleeping. Since Alicent refused to be reconciled, Ser Tyland Lannister, the Hand of the King, ordered a gentle imprisonment, confining her within her own apartments in Maegor’s Holdfast.
Alicent remained in her chambers for the last year of her life. Her only company was her septa, serving girls, and guards. She was given books as well as needles and thread, but Alicent’s guards reported she spent more time weeping then reading or sewing. One day she ripped all her clothing into pieces. By the end of the year, Alicent had begun talking to herself, and was know to abhor the color green. A few days into 133 AC, the Winter Fever epidemic arrived in King’s Landing, and Alicent became one of the victims of the disease. Though most infected became delirious, she regained some sanity, confessing her sins and telling her septa of her wish to see her children again. In her final hours, Alicent also often spoke of hoping to see King Jaehaerys, but oddly never of her husband, King Viserys. Dowager Queen Alicent Hightower died of the fever on a rainy night, at the hour of the wolf, and her death was considered a mercy.
