Solicitor General Richard Riche

Richard Riche is a young lawyer hovering at the edges of Thomas Cromwell's household, eager to be noticed and useful to men with more power than himself. Personable, quick-witted and endlessly adaptable, he trades in favours and small services, attaching himself to whoever seems to be winning at any given moment.

Tom Mothersdale gives him a smiling, ingratiating charm that never quite disguises the calculation running underneath it — a young man who has already worked out that scruples are expensive and loyalty is negotiable. He's a small, precise study in ambition: likeable, plausible, and faintly unsettling in how easily he bends.