He is, therefore, a whole-hearted believer in the reforms Cromwell is carrying out. As a child, he was educated in a monastery where he learned first-hand that monks are not necessarily compassionate, godly men. Shardlake's misshapen back pains him both physically and emotionally. Shardlake's mission is to find out who murdered the agent and obtain the abbot's agreement to a dissolution. He had been looking for evidence of misbehavior that would allow him to 'encourage' the monks more persuasively.

In the novel, one of Cromwell's agents has been murdered while carrying out a visitation of a monastery. Instead, abbots and monastic administrators were encouraged to agree to voluntary dissolution. He and Cromwell moved more carefully after that, forcibly dissolving monasteries only where a strong case could be made for moral laxity and disobedience to the Crown amounting to treason. The king's first efforts at suppressing monasteries set off an uprising of dangerous strength. The monasteries were not dissolved all at once. Meanwhile, the dissolution of England's monasteries, set in motion by events surrounding Henry's marriage to Anne, proceeds apace. Inevitably, the mourning for Queen Jane recalls the more complicated affair of Anne Boleyn's death, in which the fictional Matthew Shardlake's boss, the historical Thomas Cromwell, was deeply involved. Dissolution, the first of the Matthew Shardlake mysteries, is set in 1537, shortly after the death of Henry VIII's third wife, Jane Seymour.

Dissolution cj sansom summary