Henry Norris

Henry Norris was a senior gentleman of Henry VIII’s privy chamber and one of the king’s closest personal attendants. In 1536 he was arrested and accused of committing adultery with Anne Boleyn. Anne had once joked with him about waiting for the king’s death, a dangerous exchange later interpreted as evidence of treason. Norris rejected the accusation and was offered no meaningful chance of acquittal. He was executed with the other accused men on Tower Hill.

Norris appears prominently in Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies and in many novels about Anne Boleyn. Fiction often uses his intimacy with Henry to demonstrate that no degree of royal favour offered protection once the king accepted Cromwell’s case. The surviving evidence strongly suggests a political prosecution, but novels differ over the exact nature of Norris’s friendship with Anne.

Alison Weir’s The Lady in the Tower places Henry Norris within a narrative shaped by family, marriage and personal loyalty, political ambition and government, and court politics and dynastic power.