‘Shardlake’ is a satisfying historical whodunnit

In the meet-cute, Shardlake strikes a conversation with Cromwell’s man Friday Jack Barak (Anthony Boyle) moments after the two of them witness a Peruvian parrot called Tabitha at a local market, uttering lines like, “Death to the Pope" and “Death to the bishop in Rome". Shardlake is unimpressed, telling Barak that the bird was merely repeating what it had heard—it wasn’t really “talking" on its own. At which Barak, loyal to his master Cromwell, simply says, “If you would kindly repeat after me, master Shardlake, God bless Lord Cromwell". Under the right circumstances, actual talking and “parroting" become indistinguishable from each other. Shardlake and Barak’s Sherlock Holmes-Watson riffs through the rest of the show land harder because of this impactful first meeting.

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Shardlake has four hour-long episodes and is based on the novel Dissolution (2003) by C.J. Sansom, the first book to feature the attorney Matthew Shardlake as protagonist. Sansom (who died just a week before the show aired, at age 71) was a solicitor by training, and his fictional attorney would appear in six other novels, the last of them being Tombland (2018). As Tabitha the parrot’s murderous intentions towards the Pope show us, this was an era of great animus towards the Roman catholic church. Just two decades earlier, in 1517, Martin Luther began the Reformation with the publication of his 95 Theses. By the time the show and the novel begin in 1537, Henry VIII had declared himself “Supreme Head of the Church of England" and ordered the dissolution of catholic monasteries across England, Ireland and Wales—the establishments are to be stripped for parts, basically, with Cromwell’s cronies cornering a healthy chunk of the spoils.

Shardlake’s sidekick Jack Barak, loyal as ever to Cromwell, is more interested in bringing the Scarnsea monastery under the crown’s official control, regardless of who’s guilty of murder. In Dissolution, Shardlake himself (a Lutheran reformer in his youth, as we learn) expresses his growing discontent with the way the dissolution is being carried out: “This was not the world we young reformers had sought to create when we sat talking at those endless dinners in each other’s houses. We had once believed with Erasmus that faith and charity would be enough to settle religious differences between men; but by that early winter of 1537 it had come to rebellion, an ever-increasing number of executions and greedy scrabblings for the lands of monks."

One of the show’s many triumphs is the depiction of Shardlake’s personal grievance with the Roman Catholic clergy. He clearly has a legitimate grouse—when he was a child, a cruel priest scoffed at his plea to join the priesthood by saying that God created priests in His own image and so, God could never create a hunchback on purpose. Nobody will accept you as a priest, he tells Shardlake, a traumatic event that causes the young boy to grow up quicker than he should have.

And yet, our protagonist refuses to judge the many priests before him at the scene of the crime, at Scarnsea. They all have motive to kill the victim but Shardlake doesn’t allow his prejudice to affect the investigation; this aspect has been depicted without the story becoming too preachy or Shardlake becoming too much of a do-gooder. The protagonist has a moral compass that leads him to take risks but it is always within the realm of reason—for example, when he discovers that one of the priests under investigation is secretly homosexual. Shardlake does not immediately condemn the man. He does not view homosexuality as a sin, like many of his peers do. He does, however, see it as a “moral failing", albeit one that requires no legal punishments.

The show’s photography does a fine job of bringing out the grime and the greyness of 16th century Britain—one scene in particular where Shardlake is narrowly saved from drowning in a quagmire conveys a deathly real sense of claustrophobia. The performances, too, leave you wanting more, especially the evergreen Sean Bean (Ned Stark from Game of Thrones) as the wily Cromwell. Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall described Cromwell as the sort of person who, if sent to prison, would befriend his jailors in a matter of days and soon, all the inmates would owe him money. Sean Bean communicates something cold-blooded and yet frighteningly affable about Cromwell, a highly subtle performance that makes the most of its limited screentime. Arthur Hughes and Anthony Boyle are also perfect as Shardlake and Barak, respectively—Boyle in particular is on a hot run in 2024, with Masters of the Air and more recently, the Apple TV+ miniseries Manhunt, where he plays Abraham Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth.

It’s a pity Sansom did not live to see the show being aired and appreciated around the world. But he has left us with half a dozen other Shardlake books, and two of them feature Cromwell in a significant capacity, too. Hopefully we will see Hughes and Bean returning for a second season of Shardlake.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based writer.

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