Reverend Giles Shawcross is a character appearing in the episode The Sword of Guillaume of the ITV crime drama Midsomer Murders.
Twenty years before, he, Richard William and Marcia Macintyre were all students at Oxford. The two young men were lovers, but at a certain point Richard fell in love with Marcia and decided to end his relationship with Giles. The two met in a park known for being a typical meeting place for gay men and where the two had spent time together as well. Giles didn't take well the news and reacted violently, pushing Richard who accidentally hit his head on a rock, ending permanently paralysed. With Giles who never confessed, Richard unable to identify his assailant and authorities that were sure that the cause of Richard's accident was a homophobic assault (despite the latter's mother, Lady Matilda, using her authority to hide his son's sexual orientation), Giles was never charged nor suspected, eventually becoming a priest out of guilt, while Marcia became Richard's caretaker.
Years later, Giles became vicar of the church near of William's Manor: to be near his lost love seemed to Giles like some kind of divine test for his redemption, but didn't know that Marcia had guessed who he was.
When Hugh Dalgleish proposed a plan to allow the William bloodline to continue by him forcing Jenny Russell to marry and carry the child of Richard, with Giles tasked to marry them, Marcia decided to stop this and, after killing Hugh and Jenny using the famous Sword of Guillaume, she eventually prepared to do the same to Giles as well. Being still stricken with guilt over what he did years before, Giles doesn't oppose to the macabre rite until DCI Tom Barnaby and DS Ben Jones intervene, but Marcia still manages to end the rite by stabbing Giles with the sword, paralyzing him as well, albeit "only" from to the waist down.
It's unknown whether Giles will be charged for what he did to Richard years before.