Emperor's Royal Guard/Legends

"A Royal Guardsman never seeks special privileges. Ever. His entire goal in life is to serve the Emperor, and the New Order he created. His goal in life, and his desire in death."

- Grodin Tierce

The successors to the Republic's Red Guard, the Emperor's Royal Guard, also called Imperial Royal Guard, was an elite guard unit tasked with the protection of Emperor Palpatine. Unswervingly loyal, the Emperor was almost never seen without a detachment of Royal Guards at his side.

The exact number of Royal Guardsmen serving the Emperor was unknown, with speculations ranging from less than fifty to tens of thousands, although their numbers were known to have exceeded four hundred.

Like the stormtroopers of the Stormtrooper Corps, the Royal Guards formed a military unit independent of the Imperial Military and directly answerable to the Emperor.

Palpatine's Royal Guard
Royal Guards wore matching scarlet robes, battle armor, and helmets. Although ceremonial, the red armor did not hamper movement or fighting. The armor bore design influences from the uniforms of the Death Watch of the Mandalore system, the Sun Guards of the Thyrsus system, and the Senate Guards of the old Galactic Republic. Their preferred weapon was the meter-long force pike, although they were trained in the use of many common and exotic weapons and martial arts, such as Echani art. They used a special "combat language" that only they understood, and part of the training included removal of fingerprints. They flew specialized red variants of the TIE/In starfighter.



The number of Guardsmen was unknown; the only records remained with Palpatine, or in his private archives on Imperial Center. With their primary mission to protect the Emperor and any of his designees, the Royal Guard was never sent on combat missions as a corps. Instead, a few small elements of Royal Guardsmen were sent into combat on a rotating basis to keep them in fighting trim, appearing as and working alongside the usual stormtroopers. This was how Grodin Tierce explained his survival of the rest of the Guard's destruction and presumably also how the Guards who appeared after this survived.

After the death of Palpatine, many of the Royal Guard&mdash;such as Kir Kanos&mdash;refused to choose sides among the various Imperial factions. Some remained undercover in their stormtrooper units, while others pledged themselves to Sate Pestage and his successors. In 10 ABY, however, they all flocked to Byss when summoned by the reborn Palpatine. They fought by his side until his final death the next year. It was later revealed that his death was hastened by the sabotage of his clones by renegade Guardsman Carnor Jax.

After Palpatine's final death, the Royal Guard returned to Yinchorr, where they gathered to mourn Palpatine and form a plan to avenge him. However, Jax had laid a trap, and they were slaughtered by his stormtroopers. Only Kir Kanos escaped, and eventually killed Jax. Kanos is often said to be the last surviving member of the Royal Guard; but this may only be true "from a certain point of view": while the clone of Grodin Tierce and members of the new Royal Guard recruited by Admiral Daala were the most high-profile "Guardsmen" encountered by the New Republic, at least one member of Palpatine's original Royal Guard, Vin Northal, defected to the Rebel Alliance, and others may still serve the Dark Lady Lumiya.

Training
Members of the Royal Guard were hand-picked from the ranks of the elite stormtroopers and considered a special detachment of the Imperial Stormtrooper Corps. Each recruit was scrutinized to fit select size, strength, intelligence and loyalty requirements, as well as latent Force sensitivity. Recruits strong but not too strong in the Force were noted and pulled aside to test into a special class of Royal Guards known as Sovereign Protectors. If they passed the even more rigorous tests, they were trained by Dark Jedi to wield the Force. The names of the Royal Guardsmen were never uttered by anyone outside the Guard, including Palpatine.



Equipment and training were lavished upon them at the Imperial Royal Guard Academy on Yinchorr. Classes consisted of forty students each, and were partnered up into doubles. During a yearlong training program, recruits sparred against each other continuously to perfect their combat skills. A step away from the squad-based stormtrooper training received on Carida, by working both alone and in pairs, recruits learned how to rely on themselves or on a teammate to achieve victory. Training mainly centered on Echani hand-to-hand combat, and failure often resulted in death. During their final test, trainees fought each other to the death in an arena called the Squall before Palpatine himself. Only a handful would survive this final test in a display of their loyalty and skill.

During training, the Guards were inculcated with the belief that Palpatine, and his every order, were beyond fault or question.

Royal Guards serving other Imperial commanders
During Palpatine's time, he would occasionally "loan" detachments of the Royal Guard out to several Grand Moffs and Grand Admirals. However, such deputations occurred only at the Emperor's request.

After the Battle of Endor, Royal Guards appeared as personal protectors of some of those who claimed Imperial power. Some of the Guardsmen seen after Endor were merely ordinary soldiers, organized into new units wearing Royal Guard uniform; others, however, were genuine members of Palpatine's pre-Endor corps d'&eacute;lite. The examples of Grodin Tierce and Carnor Jax show that the loyalty of the Royal Guard to Palpatine was not as absolute and unquestioning as their mystique suggests&mdash;at least one Guardsman, Vin Northal, even defected to the Rebellion.

In the immediate aftermath of Endor, power on Coruscant passed initially to the leader of the Imperial Council, Grand Vizier Sate Pestage, and although at first no Royal Guards were observed among his protectors, he began to use a visible escort of the red-robed warriors as his power began to wane. Subsequently, when Ysanne Isard took stewardship of the Empire, a unit of Royal Guards appeared in turn as her personal bodyguard, and she would retain them later as Premier of Thyferra. Some of these were certainly genuine Royal Guards, but others may have been recruited from the elite cadre of black-clad enforcers which Isard had controlled since her days as a relatively junior field operative&mdash;hulking paramilitaries who she used as bodyguards, special operations troops, and casual lovers&mdash;all of whom had disappeared from everyday view when she took power.



Isard also lent a force of Royal Guards to her former Imperial Intelligence subordinate Shira Brie, now the Dark Lady Lumiya. Unlike most Royal Guards, who wore either their scarlet ceremonial uniforms or white stormtrooper armor, these two squads wore distinctive crimson stormtrooper armor in the field, serving their mistress as crack shock-troops. One of them, Carnor Jax, showed Force potential, and was trained by Lumiya as her Sith apprentice.

At least one Royal Guard was known to have sided with the Central Committee of Grand Moffs and Trioculus.

As noted above, at least one warrior from the genuine Royal Guard, Grodin Tierce, attached himself to Grand Admiral Thrawn, and Tierce became the template for at least one Mount Tantiss clone. Thrawn did not, however, surround himself with a visible Royal Guard detail; instead, the original Grodin Tierce, followed by his clone in turn, served as officers with the stormtrooper force aboard Chimaera, supplementing the Grand Admiral's Noghri bodyguard.

Later, when Admiral Daala seized command of remaining Imperial assets in the Deep Core, she recruited stormtroopers into a new Royal Guard unit; after her defeat, four of them became leaders of the Second Imperium, while another, Chik Apla, became an associate of Moff Derran Takkar, the lover of his wife Anlys, and part of the strike team he used to disrupt the marriage of Luke and Mara Jade Skywalker on Coruscant.

Sovereign Protectors

 * Carnor Jax

Royal Guardsmen

 * Guardsman 22716
 * Kile Hannad
 * Kir Kanos
 * Ved Kennede
 * Myn Kyneugh
 * Vin Northal
 * Grodin Tierce

Apprentice Guardsmen

 * Burr Danid
 * Alum Frost
 * Lemmet Tauk

Others

 * Chik Apla
 * Four unnamed Imperial Royal Guards
 * Grodin Tierce (clone)

Behind the scenes

 * According to Randy Stradley, when writing Crimson Empire, they worked under the idea that all Royal Guards were clones, with the shot of the unmasked Jax supposed to show that he and Kanos were from the same prime clone. However, the establishment of Jax's father, and the fact that other Royal Guardsmen have been developed, seem to have vanquished that concept (unless they are all oblivious GeNode clones). Also, Star Wars: The Complete Visual Dictionary states that guards were chosen from non-clone military units.

Notes and references
Ehrengarde