Tywin Lannister

Tywin inherited a Casterly Rock whose authority his father Tytos had let slip through generosity mistaken for weakness, and rebuilt it early in his lordship by crushing Houses Reyne and Tarbeck when they rose against Lannister rule — an annihilation so total and so quiet about its own details that the phrase 'the rains of Castamere' became a threat sung rather than explained. He was named Hand of the King to Aerys II in 262 AC at twenty, the youngest man given the honor in living memory, and effectively ran the Seven Kingdoms' government for twenty years while the king he served slid into madness.

The Defiance of Duskendale in 277 AC cost him the king's trust, and Aerys's decision in 281 AC to name Tywin's son and heir Jaime to the Kingsguard — stripping him of Casterly Rock's succession without so much as a private word of warning — cost Tywin his patience. He resigned the Handship in fury and returned to the Westerlands to wait.

He waited through most of Robert's Rebellion before declaring for the rebels at the last possible hour, sacking King's Landing in the crown's name and his own. In the chaos his men, Ser Gregor Clegane and Amory Lorch prominent among them, killed Princess Elia Martell and her two young children — a stain on the Lannister name that Tywin never publicly acknowledged ordering and never troubled to disown, and offered Robert Baratheon his daughter Cersei's hand as a peace price the new king could not easily refuse.

He returned as Hand a generation later under his grandson Joffrey as the War of the Five Kings consumed the realm, wielding the same ruthless pragmatism that rebuilt Casterly Rock in his youth to hold a contested crown together against three armies at once. That second Handship, and the war he waged to secure it, is where the published chronicle's account of his life currently ends.