There was no Duke of Suffolk in the 1590s. The dukedom had been forfeited in 1553/4; the line of de la Pole was extinct, and the family that had held the title briefly in Henry VIII's reign had been declared illegitimate. The title of Suffolk carried pretensions to the throne, and the family that temporarily possessed it, the Greys, effectively carried those pretensions to the brink of reality. A decade or two of inglorious behavior had bestowed the taint of Tudor displeasure upon all who held the title, and in the succession-obsessed talk of the 1590s these were the names spoken in whispers, the objects of secret speculations and the subjects of surreptitious writings. Unencumbered by the influence of either titular or familial descendants, Shakespeare was therefore free to portray William de la Pole in Henry VI Part One, The Contention, and Henry VI Part Two as a consummate villain in the tradition of Richard III. Instead, however, Shakespeare chose to invent a character who is a complex amalgamation of political ruthlessness and romantic devotion, a somewhat pathetic perversion of the romantic hero, whose ruthless ambition, personal weakness, and ultimate downfall are instigated and hastened by a forbidden and all-consuming love.

It is true that many critics do not recognize any subtlety in the portrayal of Suffolk and have been generally dismissive of the character, categorizing him, as F. W. Brownlow does, as a “villain absolute” or as a one-dimensional Machiavellian felon.