King of Midland

In his prime the king was a tall figure with long brown hair and strong features. A year after he threw Griffith into prison, the manga shows him transformed by his obsession: his hair had gone white and his frame wasted away to gauntness.

At first the king came across as just, sagacious, and open-handed, welcoming the Band of the Falcon to noble standing and lavishing rewards on them for their service against Tudor. He prized Griffith and saw plainly the worth that others, Julius above all, refused to grant a man of low birth. His second wife judged him a fine ruler but a lacking husband and lover. Beneath it all festered the secret that unmade him: a smothered desire for his daughter Charlotte.

As the weight of the crown began to feel like a prison, he came to loathe the strain of governing and looked to Charlotte, the one bright thing in his life, for relief. When that love curdled into lust and he tried to force himself on her, she came to despise him, and her revulsion tipped him into madness even as he knew he had done something baser than any devil. Once he learned Griffith had bedded her, admiration soured into loathing, and he took the lash to the imprisoned knight himself. After Griffith laid bare the king's incestuous cravings, the ruler grew unhinged and cruel, ordering unending torture, threatening to execute his guards' families should they ever repeat what they heard, and blaming Griffith for stealing his daughter with mere words. For two years he flung seven tenths of his army into the hunt for the fugitive.

The king first appears watching the Band of the Falcon crush Tudor's Black Ram cavalry. Taken with Griffith, he folds the band into his army, names their leader a viscount, and lets them stand in for Julius and the White Dragon Knights at the Autumn Hunt. With the Hundred-Year War won, he soon raises Griffith to general. That favor curdles the moment he discovers Griffith has lain with Charlotte: he orders the band seized and executed and personally flogs their captured leader within the Tower of Rebirth himself. Griffith's cutting remarks about his lust and his hollow claim to have won the war alone drive the king to exhaustion and fury, after which he commands the torturer to keep the prisoner alive for endless suffering.

Visiting his resting daughter, the king gives in to weakness and tries to assault her, only for Charlotte to fight him off and cast him from her room, after which she refuses even to name him her father. A year later, learning of Griffith's escape, he looses a band of Bakiraka assassins; when they fail, and after Charlotte turns his own lust against him as leverage, he publicly relents but secretly hands the job to Wyald and his savage Black Dog Knights.

Two years on, the king lies dying of illness. On his deathbed he shares in the kingdom-wide vision of a shining Falcon of Light: enthroned in the dream, held back from his daughter by his own soldiers, he watches the radiant falcon appear behind her and resolve into Griffith. In that final moment he wonders whether all he ever truly wanted was for someone to lift the burden of rule from his shoulders.