It’s a rare historical novelist who truly respects the past
CJ Sansom’s Shardlake books sought to recreate a lost world, not impose our values on our history
The death of a favourite author triggers a rush of conflicting emotions. Sadness, selfish disappointment that there will be no more books, but also deep, posthumous gratitude for the many hours of joy someone you’ve never met has given you. So it was with the death of the historical novelist C J Sansom, announced on Monday. I enjoyed all his books; but especially the Matthew Shardlake series, in which a shrewd, hunchbacked lawyer solves grisly murders in 16th-century England.
There’s no shortage of murder mysteries, nor of books set in Tudor times. But Sansom was a special writer whose books stand out, both for their readability, and for his commitment to understanding the past. Always impeccably researched, his novels first make you obsess about the time period, then marvel at the effort he put into recreating Tudor England, pockmarks and all. Sansom, an academic historian who later became a solicitor, never skimped on the local colour. You can practically smell the horse dung and suppurating corpses, and feel the prickle of flea bites. We experience everything from the panic-stricken atmosphere of a monastery on the eve of its destruction, to the eerie sound of church bells ringing out across the Norfolk countryside to summon the rebels to Kett’s uprising against the Lord Protector.
Sansom, sadly, died just days before the release of a new Shardlake TV adaptation. Disney’s involvement inspires little confidence; anyone who can butcher Star Wars is quite capable of repeating the exercise with Shardlake. The actor playing Matthew seems too young (and handsome) for Sansom’s world-weary, middle-aged barrister. Still, if the series even vaguely resembles the novels, I’ll be hooked.
The Tudors famously dominate our curriculum; history teaching is often parodied as Henry VIII and Hitler, with little in between. But there are reasons for this. History thrives on compelling stories and there are few more vivid soap opera figures than the Tudors. Their society is closer to ours than we think, too. Religious extremism, unstable governments, technological change, plague, war: none of these have magically vanished, and their world has much to tell us about our own. Sansom evoked this powerfully. His success lay in getting inside characters’ heads and treating the people of the past as actors, as rational or irrational as we are.
He trod a fine line between embellishment and rigid adherence to the known events that constitute the historic record (what Thomas Carlyle called “dry as dust” history). It wouldn’t be credible for someone of Shardlake’s status to be entirely absent from the fray, but if he spent the novels traipsing around England, a key player in every notable event of the period like some proto-forrest Gump, that would ring equally false. By way of compromise, he encounters various historic luminaries (fans of A Man for All Seasons will enjoy Sansom’s portrayal of dastardly Richard Rich), but the mysteries largely revolve around fictional characters.
What set Sansom apart from the rank and file historical novelist was his respect for the past. By “respect”, I don’t mean “admiration”. He portrayed the brutality of Tudor England with horrible clarity. The final outing,
Tombland, dramatising Kett’s rebellion, is so bleak it makes the ending of Lord of
the Flies look like a romp. Here, “respect” means paying the past the courtesy of not regarding it as a purely barbarous (or picture-postcard) place.
Sansom paid close attention to elements like language; dialects change subtly as Shardlake travels around the country. Most importantly, Sansom worked hard to capture his characters’ habits of mind, a more subtle task than recording what they ate or wore. Nobody has nice, 21st-century views about respect and tolerance. Shardlake’s strikingly humane attitudes are the nearest we get to a modern viewpoint, his disability and outsider status affording him greater empathy with the underdog. Crucially, Sansom tried to portray how the Tudors would have viewed the world, without imposing contemporary values and preoccupations on his work, a rare achievement nowadays.
We are familiar with sexed-up period dramas like The Tudors where the key players miraculously develop the appetites and motivations of 21st century Westerners. These are essentially modern sagas played out in ruffs and codpieces, peopled with rutting monarchs, ardent musicmasters and saucy wenches.
Another tendency is the excessively present-minded study of the past. The BBC’S recent documentary on Julius Caesar (featuring Rory Stewart and, for some reason, Shami Chakrabarti) seemed less interested in the subjectmatter than in drawing comparisons between Caesar and contemporary populists – Trump, Boris, etc. Sometimes such contrasts are valid, but they shouldn’t become the whole story.
Such editorial choices are essentially arrogant – what CS Lewis described as “chronological snobbery”, in which historic events and ways of thinking are demoted in importance simply because they happened long ago. Sansom’s approach to the past was a rebuke to both this Whiggish view of history as the onward rush of progress, and the “woke” school, which sees the past as a sin for which we must atone.
In CJ Sansom, we have lost a subtle writer who triumphantly avoided these pitfalls to produce complex recreations of a long-lost society. His death brings us back to his remaining works with renewed gratitude.