Among the many appreciations of C.J. Sansom, the author of bestselling historical mysteries who died last week aged 71, one of the most eloquent came from Rear Admiral John Lippiett. A friend since Sansom first researched the sinking of Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose (Lippiett headed the Mary Rose Trust in Portsmouth after he retired), the admiral recalled ‘a very remarkable man, private and modest, fascinating in his conversations, caring about individuals, generous in the issues that moved him’. Sansom, he acknowledged, was a ‘card-carrying socialist’ who wobbled during the Corbyn years but ‘remained true to Labour’s overall policies’.
Rabble-rousing demagoguery and reckless foreign wars distract the populace from land- and power-grabs by the elite
Chris Sansom shunned every sort of limelight. He lived in Brighton as invisibly as any chart-topper can – he sold more than four million books – in a period when publishing success often mandates 24/7 social-media performance. (He died in the week that the Disney+ TV adaptation of his Shardlake novels gave them a fresh sales wind.) Yet the ecumenical warmth of the farewells revealed that a wide spectrum readers had come to think of him not merely as a genre entertainer but a literary, even moral, companion and guide. This widespread affection tells us something valuable about the mood of a sizeable swathe of literate Middle Britain (born in Edinburgh, Sansom detested SNP-style nationalism). And the party he supported has taken that message on board – in bulk.
Matthew Shardlake, the crookbacked lawyer who over seven titles investigates crime and corruption in the strife-torn England of the 1530s and 1540s, is on one level a classic detective hero. Flawed (not ethically but genetically), solitary, self-doubting, outgunned by might and wealth, he defends the vulnerable and seeks justice down the mean streets – and palace corridors – of a Tudor world shadowed in every corner by deceit, treachery and violence. Meticulously researched by this historian-turned-solicitor-turned writer, the Shardlake mysteries – from Dissolution in 2003 to Tombland in 2018 – also show a society ripped apart by polarising ideology. Catholic orthodoxy and reformist belief (with moderates and zealots on both sides) clash not only at the pinnacles of politics or the depths of slum streets, they contend as well within his characters’ divided breasts.
Shardlake, whose debut as a reluctant enforcer for Thomas Cromwell’s dissolution of the monasteries predated Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall by six years, is at the outset a cautious reformer. He deplores ecclesiastical abuses and hopes for consensual change. In Dissolution, Shardlake tells us he belonged with those who felt, like the great conciliator Erasmus, that ‘faith and charity would be enough to settle religious differences between men’. The arc of the books, however, pulls us across a landscape scarred by radicalisation on both flanks, the empowering of fanatics, and the cynical assumption of doctrinal poses by power-hungry factions of court and church. By the time of Lamentation, set in 1546 as the ailing King Henry turns heretic-hunter (and burner), Shardlake admits that ‘I no longer had sympathies with either side in the religious quarrel’. Justice still exists. Its pursuit remains an ethical imperative, and Shardlake safeguards his integrity and self-respect by advocacy for the helpless and despised – such as the lost souls locked up in Bedlam. But no ideology of faith now serves its cause.
From the mid-1530s to the accession of the boy puppet-king Edward VI, reason ebbs while force and fraud flourish. Rabble-rousing demagoguery and reckless foreign wars distract the populace from land- and power-grabs by the elite. For all his archival research and contempt for crude anachronism (Tombland, set at the moment of Robert Kett’s rebellion in 1549, has a 60-page historical appendix), Sansom knew that for many readers his Tudor imbroglios held a dark mirror up to their present woes. And Shardlake serves as an archetype of the values-driven professional. He strives against the odds to do small-scale good and find the truth in institutions and circumstances where careerists and charlatans can shoot to the top on the rocket-fuel of inflammatory rhetoric.
Sansom said that he was drawn to ‘the moral dilemmas the literate classes often find themselves in at times of ideological conflict’. His non-Shardlake novels also dramatise that fix. Winter in Madrid is set after Franco’s triumph in the Spanish Civil War, while Dominion paints a chillingly plausible Britain in 1952 as a shabby, restive satellite of the dying Hitler’s victorious regime. He first planned a single outing for Shardlake. As popularity extended the series, the outsider lawyer-sleuth grew into a sort of idealistic champion for the conscientious middle ground – a role-model for quiet meliorists marooned in a shouty, extremist-friendly age. Mockers of centrist dads, and mums, beware. Shardlake’s Britain has had a rough passage of late. But as one its most cherished voices departs, it seems – across today’s political landscape – to be taking a polite revenge.
C.J. Sansom’s Tudor England is a mirror of our divided world
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1
08.05.2024
Among the many appreciations of C.J. Sansom, the author of bestselling historical mysteries who died last week aged 71, one of the most eloquent came from Rear Admiral John Lippiett. A friend since Sansom first researched the sinking of Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose (Lippiett headed the Mary Rose Trust in Portsmouth after he retired), the admiral recalled ‘a very remarkable man, private and modest, fascinating in his conversations, caring about individuals, generous in the issues that moved him’. Sansom, he acknowledged, was a ‘card-carrying socialist’ who wobbled during the Corbyn years but ‘remained true to Labour’s overall policies’.
Rabble-rousing demagoguery and reckless foreign wars distract the populace from land- and power-grabs by the elite
Chris Sansom shunned every sort of limelight. He lived in Brighton as invisibly as any chart-topper can – he sold more than four million books – in a period when publishing success often mandates 24/7 social-media performance. (He died in the week that the Disney TV adaptation of his Shardlake novels gave them a fresh sales wind.) Yet the ecumenical warmth of the farewells revealed that a wide spectrum readers had come to think of him not merely as a genre entertainer but a literary, even moral, companion and guide. This........
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