Duke of Norfolk

Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, is the realm's senior peer, a soldier of the old blood who regards the King's rise of common-born men like Cromwell with open contempt. Gruff, impatient, and proud of his lineage, he wants power kept where he thinks it belongs, and treats subtlety as something beneath him.

Timothy Spall plays him as a man permanently on the edge of eruption, all bark and bluster, which makes him funny and faintly dangerous in the same breath. Against Mark Rylance's stillness he's a study in contrast: aristocratic entitlement curdling into anxiety as he senses the ground shifting beneath men exactly like him.