Henry Norris (courtier)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Henry Norris died on the 17th of May 1536, on Tower Hill, and his last words were almost nothing at all. Where his fellow condemned men chose their scaffold speeches with care, implying innocence through careful phrasing, Norris said little. He had reason to be cautious. The men who had arranged his trial could have changed his sentence from beheading back to being hanged, drawn and quartered, and Norris was not going to give them the excuse.

  He had started at court as a young man and risen to become one of the most powerful figures in Henry VIII's inner circle, keeper of parks and castles, chamberlain of North Wales, Groom of the Stool. His annual income at the time of his death, combining crown annuities, offices, farms, grants and private sources, came to more than £1327, a sum that made him wealthier than many members of the nobility. Yet within weeks of Anne Boleyn losing the king's favour, Norris was arrested, tried on charges most historians now regard as fabrications, and executed alongside the queen's own brother.

  How did a man so close to the king end up on a scaffold? What did his friendship with Anne Boleyn actually cost him? And what did Queen Elizabeth I make of his fate, decades later, when she was old enough to understand it?

• 2. Roots and Relations

  ›

  Sir William Norris, Henry's grandfather, fought at the Battle of Stoke Field on the 16th of June 1487, the battle that effectively ended the Wars of the Roses. That family connection to Tudor origins would shape the Norris name for generations.

  Where Henry himself came from is a matter of scholarly dispute. Many sources place him as the second son of Sir Edward Norris of Yattendon Castle in Berkshire, born around 1482. But the historian Eric Ives argued that Henry was younger, probably born in the 1490s, and that he was the son of Richard Norris, Edward's younger brother. The problem with Ives's reading is that the Heralds' Visitations of Berkshire from 1664-6 record Richard as the father of only one child, a daughter named Anne. She inherited Richard's manor of Great Shefford around 1522. Had Henry been Richard's son, he would have inherited that manor himself. The evidence, quietly but firmly, points back to Edward as the father.

  Henry's mother was Lady Frideswide Lovell, and through her the family carried one of the stranger threads in late medieval English history. Her brother, Francis Lovell, 1st Viscount Lovell, born in 1454, had been a committed champion of the House of York. He too fought at Stoke Field in 1487, and then simply vanished. No confirmed account of his death exists. Henry grew up in a family shaped by the loyalties and disappearances of the civil wars that the Tudors had supposedly ended.

  His brother John Norreys, born around 1481, gave the family a different kind of longevity. John served four successive English monarchs. He held the post of Esquire of the Body under Henry VII, then Usher of the Outer Chamber under both Henry VIII and Edward VI, and finally became Chief Usher of the Privy Chamber under Mary I.

• 3. The King's Inner Circle

  ›

  The first recorded office Henry Norris received from the king came in 1515, when he was appointed keeper of Foliejon Park in Winkfield. By 1517 he was serving in Henry VIII's Privy Chamber, and the roles accumulated steadily after that.

  In 1518 he became weigher at the common beam at Southampton, which the source describes as then the great mart of the Italian merchants. On the 28th of January 1518-19, he was appointed bailiff of Ewelme, and in 1519 he received an annuity of 50 marks, equivalent to about £33. In 1520 he was present at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the famous summit between Henry VIII and King Francis I of France. By 1523 he held the Keepership of Langley New Park in Buckinghamshire and the bailiwick of Watlington.

  In 1526 he took over from Sir William Compton as Groom of the Stool, putting him in charge of the gentlemen of the King's Privy Chamber. Eric Ives, writing in 2004, described this position as making Norris not only the king's confidant but perhaps the closest friend Henry had. That same October, Norris succeeded Compton again as Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod.

  The offices kept coming through the early 1530s. In 1531 he became chamberlain of North Wales. In 1534 he was appointed constable of Beaumaris Castle. In 1535 he received manors that had belonged to Sir Thomas More, and was present at the execution of the Charterhouse monks on the 4th of May 1535. On the 29th of November that year, Henry granted him the constableship of Wallingford Castle.

• 4. Caught Between Factions

  ›

  Norris navigated the court's competing factions for years, but the tension between loyalty to the king and loyalty to Anne Boleyn placed him in an impossible position long before the crisis of 1536.

  He had actively helped Anne establish herself at court and became one of her close friends and a leader of the faction that backed her attempts at political influence. This put him in direct conflict with Thomas Cromwell, who was driving the Dissolution of the Monasteries and who saw Anne and her associates as obstacles.

  Norris also showed a streak of personal generosity that crossed factional lines. Just before the fall of Thomas Wolsey, he offered the Cardinal his own rooms when Wolsey had been deliberately left without accommodation. He was present when Wolsey handed over the Great Seal. On the 24th of October 1529, Norris was the only royal attendant when Henry VIII and Anne and her mother went to inspect Wolsey's property. He carried Henry's kind personal message to Wolsey at Putney around the same time, and the source notes he appeared genuinely moved by Wolsey's fallen condition. These gestures risked the anger of Anne's faction, yet Norris maintained his relationship with Anne regardless.

  The conflict with Cromwell ultimately proved fatal. By April 1536, Cromwell had decided that Anne and her associates had to go. He had the king's approval to gather evidence of treason.

• 5. A Fabricated Case

  ›

  On the 18th of April 1536, negotiations with the French ambassador at Greenwich provided the trigger. Cromwell saw his opening and began securing evidence for treason charges against Anne, Norris, and four others: Mark Smeaton, William Brereton, Sir Francis Weston, and Anne's brother George Boleyn.

  The specific charges against Norris were striking in how poorly constructed they were. He was accused of being solicited by Anne at Westminster on the 6th of October 1533, and of adultery on the 12th of October and again at Greenwich in November. The problem, which historians have noted ever since, is that Anne was not in Westminster at those dates. She was in Greenwich, recovering from the birth of her daughter Elizabeth on the 7th of September. The prosecution's choice of dates now reads, as the source puts it, as particularly improbable and careless.

  A grand jury assembled at Westminster Hall on the 9th of May and found a case to answer on offences said to have occurred at Whitehall. The presiding justice was John Baldwin, a chief justice, sitting with six judicial colleagues. On the 10th of May, Baldwin and three assistants traveled to Deptford, where a Kent jury found a case to answer on events said to have taken place at Greenwich.

  The trial of Norris, Brereton, Weston and Smeaton was held in Westminster Hall on the 12th of May. The jury had been assembled with people hostile to Anne Boleyn's cause or personally opposed to one of the accused. It also included Anne's own father Thomas Boleyn, her uncle the Duke of Norfolk, and Henry Percy, 6th Earl of Northumberland, the man she had wished to marry thirteen years earlier. The accused had no defence counsel, no advance warning of the evidence against them, and had to improvise their responses in court. Smeaton, a commoner who had been subjected to torture, pleaded guilty to one charge. The others, including Norris, pleaded not guilty to everything. All four were convicted and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Because they were royal courtiers, the sentence was reduced to beheading.

• 6. Memory and Aftermath

  ›

  After the execution, Henry VIII took possession of Norris's house called Parlaunt at Langley Marish. When Henry married Anne of Cleves in 1540, furnishings from Parlaunt were moved to Oatlands Palace.

  Norris had married Mary Fiennes, daughter of Thomas Fiennes, 8th Lord Dacre. Three of their children survived him. His son Henry Norris, born around 1525, would go on to become the 1st Baron Norreys of Rycote. That younger Henry had been educated alongside Henry Carey, the son of Mary Boleyn. A daughter, Mary, married Sir George Carew, who died when the Mary Rose sank in 1545, and later Sir Arthur Champernowne.

  The most striking testament to Norris's reputation came from Queen Elizabeth I. According to Sir Robert Naunton, Elizabeth always honoured Norris's memory. She believed he had died, in Naunton's words, "in a noble cause and in the justification of her mother's innocence." Elizabeth was not quite three years old when Norris was executed alongside the men accused of adultery with her mother. That she remembered him as someone who died defending Anne Boleyn's honour says something about how the events of 1536 were understood in the generation that followed.

  Norris has since appeared in dramatizations of the Tudor court. In the BBC Two series Wolf Hall, an adaptation of Hilary Mantel's novels, the character was portrayed by Luke Roberts. In the Showtime series The Tudors, which ran from 2007 to 2010, Stephen Hogan played the role.