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Historical person
1482–1536
Sir Henry Norris was a prominent courtier of Henry VIII and one of the king’s closest personal servants, eventually holding the influential office of Groom of the Stool. He accumulated offices and property through royal favour and moved at the centre of the Tudor court during the 1520s and 1530s.
In May 1536 Norris was accused of adultery with Queen Anne Boleyn and of participating in a supposed conspiracy against the king. He denied the charges but was convicted and executed with several other men; modern historians generally regard the case against Anne and the accused courtiers as politically contrived.
Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies makes Henry Norris one of the courtiers caught in Thomas Cromwell’s construction of the case against Anne Boleyn. His closeness to Henry VIII and the queen turns ordinary courtly intimacy into potentially lethal evidence, and his arrest and execution show how quickly membership of the king’s privy circle could become a liability once Cromwell began assembling the men accused with Anne.
Series
The Wolf Hall Trilogy follows Thomas Cromwell from his early service to Cardinal Wolsey through his rise as Henry VIII’s most effective minister and his fall in 1540. Told largely through Cromwell’s perspective, the series reinterprets the Tudor court as a working political system shaped by patronage, law,…
All books in this series
