Thomas Howard

Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, is one of the most powerful nobles in Henry VIII's England, and he intends to stay that way. Sharp-tongued and unsentimental, he treats his own family as instruments of advancement, angling his nieces toward the King's bed with the cool calculation of a man for whom loyalty is simply another tool of ambition.

Henry Czerny plays him without a flicker of apology, all clipped authority and contempt for weakness, which makes Norfolk's scheming feel less like villainy than professional competence. The writing never asks you to like him, only to watch how skillfully he survives, and that cold clarity is what makes him so compulsively watchable amid the court's softer, more romantic disasters.