By Paul Carrier
King Henry VIII’s parade of wives continues in Revelation, the fourth outing in C. J. Sansom’s Matthew Shardlake mystery series, as the Tudor monarch woos a reluctant Catherine Parr in 1543, following the execution of his fifth queen, Catherine Howard.
But Henry’s marital adventures recede into the background until the climax of this compelling tale. Just as the king has found it impossible to stay married to any one queen, so Shardlake finds it equally impossible to steer clear of Henry’s top lieutenants, try as he might to quietly practice law as a court-appointed advocate for the poor.
Shardlake is defending a teenage boy whose rabid religious views have landed him in the Bedlam, an infamous mental hospital, when Roger Elliard, a fellow lawyer and close friend, is murdered in gruesome fashion.
Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, for whom Shardlake worked in the previous installment of this series, fears Elliard’s murder is tied to another bizarre killing, and that both deaths may be designed to discourage Henry from marrying Parr. Cranmer calls upon Shardlake’s investigative skills once again, to sort it all out.
Like Cranmer, Parr is a religious reformer. Her marriage to Henry might stop the king from backsliding toward Catholicism. So Cranmer and his powerful allies decide not to tell Henry about the murders, fearing that to do so would frighten the superstitious king, scotch the hoped-for marriage, and jeopardize reform.
Shardlake uncovers a third murder that appears to have been committed by the same killer. Worse still, the murderer’s macabre modus operandi is inspired by the Book of Revelation, the fiery, apocalyptic final book in the New Testament. That means more biblically inspired killings are in the offing, as Shardlake and his street-smart clerk, Jack Barak, race to identify and catch a killer who is either insane or possessed.
Thanks to “a monstrous killer and a deranged boy,” Shardlake muses, “it seemed as though this past fortnight I had left the world of normal behaviour, normal passions, behind, and entered a strange, terrifying new country.”
In addition to telling a riveting story well, author C. J. Sansom captures the seething cauldron of religious turmoil that was England during the Reformation. If you take freedom of conscience and religious liberty for granted, Revelation will help you to appreciate such rights more fully, by portraying a society where dissent, tolerance and diversity were anathema.
A decade after Henry broke from the Catholic Church, the dust has yet to settle in his realm. “Papists” are at odds with Protestants, who are themselves at war with one another over whether the newly formed Church of England should pursue limited changes in religious practices or embrace the radical reforms of the “hot-gospellers.” An Englishman can burn at the stake for disagreeing with the king on matters of faith. Even people deemed insane can be legally executed.
All of which seems quite esoteric to 21st-century minds, but as Sansom makes clear, hard-fought theological battles were at the very heart of 16th-century life in England (and elsewhere). The stakes are very high in Revelation, not only because a religious radical may be behind the killings but also because “heresy” can send an otherwise law-abiding believer to his death if he runs afoul of whichever faction happens to have the king’s ear on matters of doctrine.
Thanks to the scheming of the killer, who repeatedly outwits his pursuers, Revelation ratchets up the tension as the body count rises across London. Meanwhile, Cranmer and his fellow reformers grow to fear the consequences of keeping the king in the dark about the crime wave. All while Shardlake juggles the search for the murderer and the needs of Adam Kite, his obsessed, seemingly mad, young client confined to the Bedlam.
Revelation is a joy to read on several levels. The characters are well-developed, the setting is convincingly atmospheric and the plot gallops along in search of a solution to the hideous mystery at the heart of it all. This is historical fiction of a high caliber, and diving into this suspenseful tale will leave you desperate to learn how the story turns out.
