Heart Beating for Heartstone, by C.J. Sansom
C.J. Sansom’s Heartstone is the fifth in his Tudor-era series starring hunchbacked but nimble-minded and huge-hearted lawyer Matthew Shardlake. It is another great novel by Sansom to add to the shelf of well-loved books. We first met Shardlake in Dissolution, when Cromwell was still alive and Henry VIII was closing down monasteries to acquire lands and money, having made his decision to break with the Roman Catholic Church. Now it is July 1545, eight years and five wives later, and Henry is once again in need of money, this time to finance his war against the French. The French army is rumored to arrive within days at Portsmouth in their swift and armed galleys and the English are preparing for invasion. It is Shardlake’s bad luck that he too will end up at Portsmouth, seeking the truth not only about fate of the young ward of a corrupt landowner (at the bequest of Henry’s final Queen, Catherine Parr) but also about where his agoraphobic friend Ellen came from (we first met her in Sansom’s Revelation). Ellen is still stuck in Bedlam and Matthew wants to find how she got there, not only to relieve his own guilt at not returning her love but because when something smells rotten in the land, lawyer Shardlake seeks justice.
The historical facts of Heartstone revolve not only around the ill-fated war with France but also around the corrupt management of the Court of Wards, an evil but ingenious brainchild of the long dead Cromwell to raise money for the king and spread wealth around his supporters. As lucrative as the court is, Henry must come up with more funds for the coming war and he levies tax after tax, re-mints coinage, and sends his country ever-closer to financial ruin, making life for the lower classes more miserable than ever and the lure of corruption among the higher classes more appealing. Enter Shardlake to make sure evil cannot prevail in court or on the streets and, as usual, he has more than his share of opposing forces in the form of gentry, fellow lawyers, officers in the King’s Army, and the king himself.
Sansom does a magnificent job rendering the mobilization of an entire country for war, everything from the baiting and beating of foreigners in the streets of London to the forging of cannons in the towns of Sussex to the installation of thousands of soldiers and sailors in and around Portsmouth, at land and on sea in the immense warships built especially for Henry — and brought horribly down by the arriving French. The scenes of war, both its preparation and its engagement, are powerful visions of what horrors greedy or foolish or power hungry leaders can create for their own people as well as for their enemies. In his afterward, Sansom laments that no history of the 1544–46 war between France and England has been written and adds, “Somebody should.” Well, somebody has given it a good start, and that is Sansom himself, in this great novel.
