THOMAS BECKET

On the afternoon of December 29th 1170, the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, was assassinated, in his own cathedral, by four English knights. It was the most egregious crime of the Middle Ages, and it was committed in front of eye-witnesses. One of them was a writer. His account survives.

The bare and bloody facts have never been in dispute.

The perpetrators made no secret of their identities or their intent. They were Reginal fitz Urse, William de Tracy, Richard Brito, and Hugh de Morville, four otherwise obscure members of the landed gentry; and they came to Canterbury with premeditated murder in mind. Wearing chain mail and brandishing swords, they entered the cathedral unopposed — Becket’s friends wanted to bar the door, but he forbade them to, saying the church was a house of prayer, not a fortress.

Cornering Becket against one of the transept walls, the flights tried to drag him outside, shouting insults at him, but could not overcome him. “I will not leave this church”, he cried out. “If you want to kill me, you must kill me here”.

It was a crucial moment. To do violence within a church, in that age of faith, was a monstrous sacrilege.

That, however, meant nothing to the four knights, who had worked themselves up into a homicidal frenzy; and they set about him with their swords, fitz Urse urging them on. First, de Tracy slashed at Becket’s head, but the blow glanced off to a shoulder bone. Bloodied, Becket knelt and recited Jesus’ last words, “Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit”. A second blow from de Tracy felled him to the floor, prostrate and praying, Brito then finished him off, hacking his head in half. One of de Morville’s lackeys, finally and gruesomely, thrust his sword into the shattered skull and scooped out brain-matter and blood and fragments of bone onto the stone floor.

Their handiwork complete, the knights left the cathedral for the archiepiscopal palace, stripped it of portable valuables, and rode away. What they took with them was probably worth a small fortune. But there can be no doubt that loot was merely a bonus: their prime aim was slaughter. If, though, the money was only incidental, two questions have to be asked. Why did they do what they did, and what did they stand to gain?

Those are questions no historian need try to answer; for this murder was no hole-and-corner affair, like the latest item in a local newspaper. It was a turning-point in the strained mediaeval relationship between Church and State. Much larger issues were involved than simply personal hostility; and these demand interpretation, without bias.

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As Europe emerged from the Dark Ages, gradually Christianized, some kind of balance had to be struck between secular power and sacred authority. The former was vested in emperors and lesser princes, the latter in popes and their obedient clergy. Within each sphere, of course, there were always rivalries: monarchs vied with each other for supremacy; ambitious prelates strove, sometimes brutally, to ascend to the papacy. On the whole, though, workable compromises were reached: kings were crowned by archbishops and acknowledged that they held their thrones as a gift from God; and arch­bishops, however fat with wealth, contented themselves with spiritual sovereignty, conceding to royalty the right to manage the affairs of this world.

None the less, that balance was constantly insecure. Kings, even at risk of excommunication, were prone to meddle in ecclesial matters, especially when expensive wars made them envious of church property. And archbishops were swift to defend their canonical autonomy from any encroachment by monarchical expansionism. Confrontations of that sort bedevilled the peace of nations. One of the most important and far-reaching occurred in the twelfth century, in the fierce jurisdictional dispute between Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, and Henry II, who was both king of England and ruler of a vast empire across the Channel.

The dispute was over a legal procedure. Long established tradition distinguished between priests who had committed crimes and lay persons who had. The former were tried and punished exclusively by Church courts, the latter exclusively by their State counterparts.

(Footnote. To us, in a largely post-Christian world, it may seem unconscionable that priests should enjoy a special privilege, saving them from ordinary prosecution: too many pedophiles in holy orders have been protected by whitewashing superiors. Nor is priestly pedophilia anything new: in Becket’s own time, the archbishop of York was a notorious rapist of boys.)

Henry proposed to change that, especially where criminous priests had committed murder: they should not escape capital punishment simply because the Church was doctrinally barred from taking life. He himself had no such scruples. Indeed, his whole career was littered with the corpses of people who had stood in his way. Accordingly (in his capacity as Chief Justice, so to speak), he saw no reason why clerical murderers should escape the supreme penalty. Nor was it enough for him that such offenders, when tried in diocesan courts, were often punished with harsh sentences that many people, then or since, would consider far worse than hanging: solitary confinement for life, in a cramped cell, on a near-starvation diet.

A possible compromise was suggested: that clerical murderers should first be tried by a diocesan court, to establish their guilt, and then should be defrocked; after that, being now laymen, they should be handed over to the secular arm for execution.

Becket rejected any such compromise. He did so, not because it was unreasonable in itself, but because even so small a concession would serve Henry as a precedent for making larger inroads on the Church’s right to govern its own affairs. For it was quite apparent to Becket that Henry’s long-term goal was to establish himself (like his namesake later) as Head of an independent Church in England; that would be Catholic but not subject to Rome. This was something wholly unacceptable to Becket.

On a humbler scale, that sat ill with the common people, too. For the most part illiterate, they lacked the schooling, or even the language, either in Latin or in Norman-French, to disentangle the knotty problems of Church-State relations. But they were steadfast in their loyalty to the faith they had been raised in; and added to that loyalty, there was a widespread Anglo-Saxon resentment of the Norman-French hegemony, that empowered kings and barons to make their lives miserable.

It should not be thought, of course, that the downtrodden folk of England were a collection of pious nationalists. Piety they had, of a superstitious kind. But they were not on fire with libertarian principles or insurrectionary zeal. Rather, like peasants anywhere, they simply did their best to survive, and seized any opportunity that came their way to better their lot.

One such opportunity presented itself, instantly, to the people of Canterbury when Becket was murdered. No sooner had the murderers quit the scene, than opportunists swooped in, gathering up scraps of clothing, bone fragments, and gouts of blood, for preservation as sacred relics. This was not for their own spiritual gain, but for sale to the highest bidder. And their mercenary instinct was well justified: for in short order Becket was canonized, and a lucrative trade in relics ensued, followed by a brisk and profitable tourist trade, as pilgrims came by thousands, over the years, to venerate the Becket shrine.

Nor were such ghouls the only opportunists. When William the Conqueror invaded and occupied England in 1066, he immediately bestowed lordship of all lands on his Norman-French vassals. They continued to pay formal homage to his successors; yet they constituted an aristocracy ostensibly subservient to the monarch but in many ways a law unto itself. As landed gentry, they milked the economy for all it was worth, keeping the working class in serf-like servitude, and holding the middle class in lofty disdain.

The middle class there, in the twelfth century, as ever afterwards in class-conscious England, aspired always to rise in the world, but was simultaneously dogged by the fear of sinking back down into poverty and social contempt. That was Becket’s origin. His parents were immigrants from Normandy, but not of the lordly sort that had come over with the Conqueror: his father was a merchant, who settled and prospered in London. There, Thomas was born and grew up. His was a comfortable upbringing, in a solid home with plenty of servants, with access to good education. He went first to a boarding-school in a nearby priory in Surrey; already bilingual in French and English, he added Latin. After a year, he returned to London, to a grammar-school, where he studied the liberal arts and, on the side, became both an enthusiastic athlete and the protégé of a well-connected aristocrat, who could open doors for him into a world more sophisticated and luxurious than his background would otherwise have allowed him to enter. At nineteen, he went on to studies in Paris, and that greatly widened his horizons intellectually and socially. He seems not to have been a diligent scholar, then, but did have ambitions to rise in society, to join what was, effectively if not by lineage, the ruling class. The uncomfortable fact remained, however, that when Becket rose to become Chancellor of Henry’s empire and, subsequently, Primate of all England, he could not escape the stigma of his middle-class birth. He was useful to the king, very useful. But when the royal displeasure was aroused Henry, never one to temper his scorn, called him “the son of a villain”.

Strictly speaking, that was inaccurate. Becket’s father had run a well-established firm, and had filled important civic posts in London. But Henry was often given to explosive rages, and any stick was good enough to beat an underling with.

Conflict between the two men was inevitable, for reasons that far transcended any differences in rank. Once Becket became archbishop, he and Henry were bound to proceed on a collision course. For each of them headed a power-structure that was essentially totalitarian. Peaceful co-existence, of a sort, had obtained while both sides were willing that the Church should be autonomous in religious matters, and that the State should be sovereign in the secular. But conflict was bound to occur, if the Church presumed to interfere in royal concerns, or the State to meddle in ecclesiastical business. There had been a delicate balance hitherto. But when Henry came to the throne (with, be it said, somewhat dubious entitlement to it), that balance was put at risk, because his personality was consumed with power-lust: continually, he was intent on expanding and securing; a vast empire on the continent; and within his dominions, he could brook no resistance from anyone else, lay or clerical, let alone come-uppance from some bourgeois upstart in the cloth.

Cast in the role of Defender of the Faith, Becket was almost an equal match for his monarch. Years of secondary power, as Chancellor, had taught him pride in his position; and by temperament he was anyway a stubborn man. When the parting of their ways resulted from Henry’s appointment of Becket to the archbishopric, with attendant confrontation on points of principle, both men dug their heels in. That Becket won in the end is a fact of history. But it was only at the cost of his life. Until then, he had been outmatched and outwitted by a Henry who stopped at nothing to have his own way. This was a man in whom a belief in the divine right of kings nourished an ego content with nothing less than absolute power. In international relations, he marshalled great armies to subdue foreign lands; and, when it suited him, he laid them waste, massacring and starving their inhabitants, to solidify his conquests; he entered into treaties, and ignored them at will; he swore, on oath, to co-operate people as an ally, and broke his promises without blinking an eye. In his relations with Becket, it is a small wonder that Henry should bring more guns to bear on their differ­ences than Becket would ever have been able to deploy — at least while he was still alive.

It was Becket’s assassination, though, that reversed the situation. Henry did not order it in so many words. He did not shout out, in wrath, “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” That is an apocryphal story, of late date. But he did cry out, in the hearing of many, that Becket was a traitor who had kicked him in the teeth, and no one seemed willing to avenge him. He commissioned two noblemen to go to England from France (this was in Henry’s court at Bur-le-Roi) with an emergency task force, to arrest Becket for future prosecution on a number of trumped-up charges, including treason.

Among those present were the four knights, who took it upon themselves to go post-haste to Canterbury and carry out, summarily, what they took to be Henry’s murderous intentions. They were not really mistaken. It was quite clear that the world, in Henry’s view, was not big enough for both him and Becket: the archbishop had to be finished with somehow, though the king would probably have referred that this be done through a sham judicial process, rather than by unauthorized butchery. Be that as it may, the deed was done; and the killers no doubt supposed that Henry would be grateful, and would reward them with signal marks of his esteem.

For the moment, it must have seemed that they were right. But the assassination provoked a wave of public hysteria; and this spawned an epidemic of romantic legends. Typical of them were reports of miraculous healings of the sick, ascribed to the intercessory powers of the new saint. One less colourful story went the rounds, that Henry had been instantly stricken with remorse. This seemed plausible: for Henry in 1174 did public penance in Canterbury Cathedral, and submitted himself there to ritual scourging. But none of this represented any genuine contrition. In fact, Henry was not sorry that Becket was dead. What troubled him was that the killing would certainly be laid at his door. He made no move to punish the assassins, either for their presumption as vigilantes or for the actual crime. He himself tried to evade blame by telling the pope, in an urgent letter, that Becket had aimed, treacherously, to foment rebellion in

England, and had only perished at the hands of local enemies he had made who wanted none of his deviltry. It was all a pack of lies, of course; and the pope was not taken in. First, he excommunicated the assassins, who had resumed their ordinary lives, unbothered by guilt and unafraid of retribution. That done, the pope was of a mind to excommunicate Henry, too, and to place all England under interdict. This would have meant total disaster for the whole realm; and it forced Henry, however grudgingly to admit defeat. There were protracted negotiations, inch by inch, Henry made all the concessions required of him, to obtain personal absolution and to prevent the interdict. He stymied as long as he could; but in the end he had to renounce all the arrogant demands he had made on Becket as primate and on the English Church he headed. Only when Henry’s surrender was complete did the pope absolve him; and that, on turn, was conditional on his undergoing total humiliation at Becket’s tomb. Only then did the situation revert to the status quo, with the Church intact as an autonomous institution, and with the Monarchy separate in its own secular sphere, still powerful and often despotic, but impotent to overrule archbishops, let alone popes.

That would all change, in England, under Henry VIII, another tyrant, who severed ties with Rome, not from any Reformist zeal, but simply for the shabby reason that he wanted a divorce the pope was refusing to grant him. Meanwhile, in the remaining decades of the Middle Ages, Becket had a posthumous triumph: he was canonized, and became the object of a cult; Henry II was left with only his military adventures, his greeds and rages, his imperialist ambitions, and his virulent marriage.

Was Becket, in truth, a saint? Observant Catholics believe so. And they buttress that belief with reliance on the oft-told tale that he underwent a born-again conversion when he was appointed Archbishop, and that from then on he led the inner life of a devout mystic. There is no evidence of this. On the contrary, modern research indicates that he already, prior to his archiepiscopal appointment, was leading a life of regular, if conventional, attention to his religious duties — this despite the luxurious life-style that came with his job as Chancellor. In other words, there ran a smooth line of religious practice throughout his career; there was no sudden conversion precipitated by a mid-life crisis. Moreover, his canonization was clearly not based on a deep-seated saintliness of charac­ter, but on the fact that he had consistently been a loyal champion of the institutional Church, in the face of secular assault on its privileges. Nearly a millennium later, people can ask themselves whether any particular religion should or should not have any rights beyond the right to manage its own affairs. But it is not for historians to provide an answer.

Nor is it the historians’ right to pass moral judgement on the past. Their job is to describe, narrate, and interpret, but not to evaluate; and certainly not to burnish a progressive image of the present by com­parison with the murky reflection of former centuries. Nevertheless, in one important respect, it is legitimate and illuminating to make comparisons, namely, where psychopaths are concerned. All other individuals, in any period, lead lives that are variously ambiguous, far too complicated to fit neatly into some theoretical box. They can only be accurately portrayed in light of the culture that formed them, that shaped their behaviour in ways peculiar to their time, constituting norms that change as time goes by. But the psychopath has only one norm, the ruthless gratification of his own impulses, unconstrained by social taboos. In any period or place, his behaviour is the same, however well it is veiled by exterior charm; and he is recognizable, by simple common sense, for what he is, a wild and solitary beast, answerable only to himself.

That, in a nutshell, was Henry II. Like many psychopaths, he was highly intelligent, at least in knowing how to manipulate others. His record speaks for itself. Other people existed solely to serve his appetites: for wealth, power, women’s bodies, empire; no one should stand in his way, and he left a pile of dead bodies or crippled souls in his wake. Having to make a public show of penitence in Canterbury was a real setback for him, but it cannot be said to have had any redemptive effect on his character. He lived to the end as he always had, brutal to all around him: he put his wife in prison, replacing her with one of his mistresses; and he waged war on three of his sons, who sufficiently took after him to battle each other for the chance to succeed him. He died at fifty-six, and is not known to have been mourned.

In almost every way, twelfth-century England was vastly different from twentieth-century Germany or Russia. The one thing they have in common is that they were all ruled by a ruthless psychopath with a squalid entourage of vicious henchmen. Hitler’s Third Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union were both gangster-states of deep iniquity. So was Henry II’s England. In each country, needless to say, there were countless decent citizens unbesmirched by the regnant evil. But they were powerless to remedy their predicament. All they could do was hope to survive.

To thus characterize England under Henry II would not sit well with English monarchists who, to this day, worship royalty with a fervour that is intense and, at the same time, ludicrous. Such fans of the throne would probably resent the imputation that anyone who has sat on it was a scoundrel. The fact remains, though, for anyone to see who has an open mind, that Henry II was a truly wicked man.

Whether Thomas Becket was a holy man, or even just a well-meaning fellow, is another matter. Certainly he was a child of his time. Within his culture, he seized the opportunities that came his way, whether in State or Church. In either milieu, he had the brains and talent to rise high. That such a rise should bring him into conflict with a monster was his misfortune. He did all he could to stand by his principles in the face of overwhelming force, and he did so with a hero’s courage. We can admire him for that, even if, in a widely godless age, we disagree with those principles — and be it said that any such disagreement is anachronistic: it ignores mediaeval realities, and it substitutes modern prejudice for historical understanding.

Becket, indeed, was a martyr, whether in the canonized sense or just as a political victim. Either way, he deserves our respect.

POSTSCRIPT

Becket’s shrine, in Canterbury Cathedral, was a magnificent structure, glitteringly decorated with precious metals and jewels, and richly endowed. Year upon year, thousands of pilgrims flocked to it. And long after it was vandalized and razed, it lives on poetically in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”.

Its destruction in the early Reformation was just one part of the devastation wreaked by Henry VIII. He dissolved the monasteries, seized their lands, and pocketed their wealth. Unquestionably he was moved by greed, and by the near-bankruptcy he has incurred through his own extravagance. This was as much his motive as any personal ambition he had, to be Head of the Church in England, without subservience to the Bishop of Rome. His quarrel with the pope over his suit for divorce was merely the trigger for his ecclesiastical separatism.

However, in all the iconoclastic wreckage that Henry VIII instigated, the destruction of Becket’s shrine had a special place. To him it had represented the triumph of papal ascendancy over English king’s sovereignty: Becket in giving his life to defend the Church’s established privileges, had forced Henry II to submit to Roman rebuke. This rankled with the later Henry who, through his father, had also had only a spurious claim to the crown. Accordingly he singled out the Becket shrine for special hatred, as emblematic of papal triumphalism. He proclaimed Becket to have been a traitorous rebel and no saint. He ordered the demolition of the shrine, seizing the chief gem, an enormous ruby, for his own adornment. And he had Becket’s bones contemptuously burned.

No trace remains of the shrine today in Canterbury Cathedral. But the actual site of the assassination, next to a transept wall, is reverently memorialized; and modern pilgrims visit it and make donations there.

The Roman Catholic martyrology still honours Thomas Becket as a saint, with a Feast Day on December 29th, the date of his murder. The Anglican Church, despite the spleen of Henry VIII, also honours him in its liturgical calendar, though that rehabilitation had to wait for a time less disfigured by anti-papal bigotry.

By 1935, inter-denominational hostility had largely evaporated (except in Northern Ireland); and in that year. T.S. Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral” was premiered in the very cathedral where the murder had occurred. He was, then, England’s greatest living poet, and the play is a masterpiece. His portrayal of Becket as a probable but ambiguous saint is convincing. And the central passage of text, Becket’s Christmas sermon, preached four days before his death, is perhaps the most eloquent and touching piece of pulpit prose in modern English. Its impact on those who heard it in 1935, superbly delivered by a virtuoso actor, Robert Speaight, who later recorded it, must have been profound. From that very pulpit, in 1170, Becket in real life had preached his Christmas sermon to the people of Canterbury, who had thronged to welcome him back from exile, their beloved shepherd, their shield from a hateful king. They were then, as the commons so often have been, pawns on the chessboard of history, dominated by the mighty of this world. But Eliot gave them a voice: their women speak as a chorus in his play; and they give it a tragic dimension worthy of what it evokes.

Twenty-three years later, in 1958, a new and reformist pope, John XXIII, forsook the closed rigidity of his recent predecessors, and turned his face to a more open, more tolerant future. This made possible, though not immediately, better relations with other Christians. Overtures were made to reconcile the Anglican Church with the Roman, while preserving the autonomy of each. That hope vanished in 1989 when the Anglicans decided to ordain women to the priesthood — an enlightened step that Rome has not yet been willing to take. Before that, however, there had been quite amicable feelers put out; and even after negotiations broke down, there did remain an encouragingly friendly spirit between the two Churches. In that atmosphere, in 1992, Pope John Paul II travelled to England. In the course of his visit, he went to Canterbury Cathedral. There he addressed a packed and enthusiastic congregation from the pulpit. All present were fully aware, as of course he was, that the place had been Roman Catholic long before there was any such person as an Anglican. His opening words, uttered with a jovial smile, were not without a tinge of gentle irony.

“Well”, he said, “here we are again”.