Louen Leoncoeur

Louen Leoncoeur is accounted the greatest king to sit Bretonnia's throne since Gilles the Uniter, and the rare monarch who might survive the comparison. A Grail Knight before he was ever crowned, he drank from the Lady's cup and stopped counting years: decades into his reign he still breaks lances at tourney like a man of twenty-five, and he has sworn never to order a charge he does not lead.

In war he takes to the sky astride Beaquis, a hippogryph as proud and battle-scarred as his rider, falling upon the enemies of the realm like the Lady's judgment given wings and talons. Beneath his banner Bretonnia has carried its errantry wars far beyond its own borders, breaking greenskin invasions and scattering the risen dead, until the lion of Couronne has come to mean, across half the Old World, that help is coming.

What makes Louen singular, though, is not his lance but his conscience. Almost alone among great lords he looks down as well as forward — lightening levies in famine years, stripping the spurs from knights who brutalize their villages, and admitting aloud what the Code prefers unsaid: that the kingdom rests on the backs of those it feeds worst. To remake Bretonnia would be to break it, and Louen knows this. So he does what a good man can at the summit of a machine he cannot rebuild, and leaves history to judge whether that was enough.