Never in England were there so many gentlemen and so little gentleness.
After two years working for Elizabeth on legal land matters, Matthew Shardlake is summoned in front of her. Edith Boleyn, a wife of a distant relation has been recently murdered, and her husband, John Boleyn, is on trial for it. As Elizabeth is fiercely protective of any relation of hers due to being unable to save her mother (seriously, I get the feeling from this book that if Elizabeth thought it would have saved Anne, she would have thrown hands at Henry), she wants Matthew to try and prove John’s innocence. So off Matthew goes to Norwich, taking his assistant Nicholas Overton along for the ride, which puts a damper on Nicholas’ courtship of a fellow lawyer’s daughter, Beatrice Kenzy. One thing Matthew is upset about leaving London for is the fear that his old friend Guy, the former monk turned physician, may succumb to his mysterious illness and die whilst Matthew is away. While in Norwich, they meet back up with Jack Barak, who is working as a clerk at the traveling Court of Assizes, and thankful he’s out of London and away from his two children and his wife, who he is starting to view as an overbearing and domineering shrew. There are only three problems with it all; Norwich is in Mary’s territory (who will do anything to thwart Elizabeth), someone actively wants John Boleyn dead, and it’s 1549 in Norwich, and a man by the name of Richard Kett is gathering commonfolk on Mousehold Heath…..
As usual, Sansom did extensive research to make the book as historically accurate as possible, and it shows. Especially with the over sixty pages of historical backstory at the end of the book.
Kett’s Rebellion of 1549 was the people’s attempt to allow the lower classes to have a say over their own lives; tired of being taxed to fund yet another failed war (Scotland this time, with France as an extension), and being driven off their lands so the landlords could get more money off of raising sheep, the people believed that if they showed strength in gatherings of large numbers, the Protectorate Edward Seymour, Uncle of the King, would listen and grant them their requests. On the whole, other than some mild looting and roughing up the Gentry, Kett’s army was reasonably peaceful and nonviolent until Edward Seymour sent armed forces against them; in fact, the rebels constantly stressed they were doing all this in the name of King Edward VI and the Protectorate, as they knew the two would agree with them. Boy, were they naive; to this day, the Monarchy doesn’t really like being told they’re not measuring up, and they’re far less likely to start drawing and quartering people nowadays.
(Edward re: the commonfolk)
The Rebellion lasted two months and resulted in over 3,000 dead and pretty much no changes to the status quo, other than Edward Seymour being ousted out of for all sense and purposes ruling England. Which I guess was some foreshadowing of the beginning on the end; his nephew Edward VI only had another four years on the throne.
I’m actually really sorry that Sansom died and this series came to an abrupt end, because I want to know where he was going from here. Would Matthew go back to working for Elizabeth? Would he gain a wife, which it looks like he was leaning towards at the end of this book? I liked the vast character growth Nicholas and Matthew (especially Nicholas) made over the course of the book. Thankfully, because I spent the first third of Tombland wanting to slap Nicholas with a sock full of half a brick. Serious Nicky my boy, can you not sense the mood and read a room occasionally?
I weep for what happened to Josephine, but unfortunately it is a side effect of war. I feel like Edith and her mother were upper-class parallels of Josephine: showing that men’s indignities to women and the suffering they cause occurs no matter what class you are. I’m glad that certain characters get it in the neck by the time the book ends, it’s just a shame that another three or four didn’t join them; one of the things that Sansom did truly well was write characters that were probably very realistic for the time period, but were incredibly easy to loathe for everything they did.
Happily at the end of the book Guy lived, Tamsin and Jack realized what they meant to each other, and Matthew and Tamasin reconciled. Beatrice Kenzy had hidden depths to her, and I guess was included to show not only how much the events of the book changed Nicholas, but to also point out a facet of society that Matthew was totally blind to.
What this book amazed me on, especially after the last one, was how Matthew keeps escaping with his life when he has pissed off so many powerful and highly placed people; it must be that “Main Character Plot Armor” he’s worn for seven books. Two dings I will take from Matthew: one, he really needs to stop noticing and commenting on the buxomness of women (if Elizabeth knew what you thought about her bodice Matthew, she’d probably do more than throw an inkpot at you). And two, if you insist on Simon Scambler not being called “Sooty”, are you really going to spend her entire life calling Mary “Mousy”?
It was interesting to see Shardlake join the rebels, first unwillingly, and then quite actively. It showed another side of his personality; it also enabled Sansom to show how truly despicable the British Upper Class was in war. There is a scene with a young man named Simon and the Protectorate’s Herald that is just hard to read. Which I suppose leads me to my warning: seeing as this is a book about murder and war, be warned there is a lot of graphic discussions about murder, rape, the aftereffects of bullets, cannonballs, and swords on the human body, profanity, and two frankly psychopathic brothers.