Thomas Becket

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 29th of December 1170, four knights stopped outside Canterbury Cathedral, left their weapons under a tree, and went to find Thomas Becket. Their armour stayed hidden beneath their cloaks as they stepped inside. The men were loyal to King Henry II, and the man they sought was the Archbishop of Canterbury. By the time they left, an archbishop lay dead in his own cathedral.

  Becket, later revered as Saint Thomas of Canterbury, had once been among the king's most trusted servants. What could turn such a man into an enemy worth killing? Why did a quarrel between a monarch and a churchman end in bloodshed on holy ground? And why would crowds travel to the tomb of a man whom the knights had branded a traitor?

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• 2. Cheapside to Court

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  Thomas Becket was born in Cheapside, London, on the 21st of December, the feast day of Thomas the Apostle. The year was probably 1119, although later tradition preferred 1120. His parents were Gilbert and Matilda, and both came from Norman families. Gilbert's father came from Thierville in the lordship of Brionne in Normandy, and Matilda's relatives may have come from near Caen.

  Gilbert himself began as a merchant, perhaps dealing in textiles. By the 1120s he lived in London on the rents from his properties, and at some point he served as the city's sheriff. He may also have been related to Theobald of Bec, whose family came from the same Thierville. Both of Becket's parents were later buried in Old St Paul's Cathedral.

  Hunting and hawking entered Thomas's life through Richer de L'Aigle, a wealthy friend of his father. Richer often invited the boy to his estates in Sussex. According to Edward Grim, Thomas learned a great deal from him. Richer would later sign the Constitutions of Clarendon against his former guest.

  At the age of 10, Thomas was sent to study at Merton Priory, south-west of London in Surrey. He afterwards attended a grammar school in the city, perhaps the one at St Paul's Cathedral. His studies went no further than the trivium and quadrivium, the basic curriculum of the medieval schools. Around the age of 20 he spent about a year in Paris. He studied neither canon law, the law of the church, nor civil law there, and his Latin stayed rudimentary.

  When Gilbert suffered financial reverses, Thomas had to earn a living as a clerk. His father helped him secure a place in the business of a relative. Later he found work in the household of Theobald of Bec, Archbishop of Canterbury.

  Theobald sent his new recruit on several important missions to Rome. He also sent him to Bologna and Auxerre to study canon law, the very subject Becket had missed in Paris. In 1154 Theobald named him Archdeacon of Canterbury. Other church posts followed, including prebends at Lincoln Cathedral and St Paul's Cathedral, and the position of provost of Beverley.

  Becket's efficiency in these roles led Theobald to recommend him to King Henry II for the vacant post of Lord Chancellor. He received the appointment in January 1155. As chancellor, he enforced the king's traditional revenues, which were owed by every landowner, churches and bishoprics included. Henry also sent his young son, named Henry, to live in Becket's household, following the custom of fostering noble children in other noble homes. Few signs of royal favour were plainer than a king entrusting his own son to a chancellor's care.

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• 3. Archbishop Against King

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  The 23rd of May 1162 brought Becket his greatest promotion. A royal council of bishops and noblemen confirmed his election as Archbishop of Canterbury, several months after Theobald's death. Henry may have hoped his old chancellor would keep putting royal government ahead of the church. The opposite happened. Becket underwent a famed transformation into an ascetic, a man who lives by strict self-denial.

  On the 2nd of June 1162, Becket was ordained a priest at Canterbury. The next day, the 3rd of June, Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester, consecrated him as archbishop together with the other bishops who answered to Canterbury.

  Within months, Becket resigned the chancellorship that Henry II had given him and set out to recover and extend the rights of his archbishopric. One clash concerned whether secular courts could try English clergymen, and it deepened the hostility between archbishop and king. In October 1163, at Westminster Abbey, Henry tried to turn the other bishops against Becket. He also sought their approval for the traditional rights of royal government over the church.

  On the 30th of January 1164, Henry presided at Clarendon Palace over an assembly of most of England's senior clergy. He presented 16 constitutions that aimed to reduce clerical independence and weaken the bonds with Rome. Using his considerable skill at persuasion, he won the consent of every churchman except Becket. Eventually even Becket said he would accept the substance of the Constitutions of Clarendon. Still, he would not formally sign the documents.

  Henry summoned him to a great council at Northampton Castle on the 8th of October 1164. The charges were contempt of royal authority and malfeasance, meaning misconduct, in the chancellor's office. The court convicted him. Becket stormed out of the trial and fled to the Continent. He would spend the next six years away from England.

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• 4. Years in Exile

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  King Louis VII of France took the fugitive archbishop under his protection. Henry II answered with a series of edicts aimed at Becket and at all of his friends and supporters. Becket spent nearly two years in the Cistercian abbey of Pontigny. Then Henry's threats against the Cistercian order forced him to move to Sens.

  From Sens, Becket fought back with threats of excommunication and of an interdict, a ban on public worship, against the king, the bishops and the whole kingdom. Pope Alexander III sympathised with him in principle but favoured a more diplomatic approach. In 1167 the pope sent legates with authority to act as arbitrators.

  In 1170, Alexander sent delegates to impose a settlement. Henry then offered a compromise that would let Becket return from exile. Becket came back to England in 1170, but the dispute with the crown carried on.

  On the 14th of June 1170, Roger de Pont L'Évêque, Archbishop of York, crowned the heir apparent, Henry the Young King, at Westminster Abbey. He was joined by Gilbert Foliot, Bishop of London, and Josceline de Bohon, Bishop of Salisbury. Crowning the heir was a privilege of Canterbury, so the ceremony breached it. In November 1170, Becket excommunicated all three men. Word of his action soon reached Henry II.

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• 5. Murder at Vespers

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  The most famous words attributed to Henry II, "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?", date only from 1740, when they were invented and then handed down by oral tradition. Historian Simon Schama rejects them. He prefers the Latin account of the contemporary biographer Edward Grim. In that version, Henry cries, "What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household," and goes on, "who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?" Many other variants have found their way into popular culture. The exact wording is in doubt, but his men read it as a wish to see Becket dead, and they treated it as a royal command.

  Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy and Richard le Breton set out to confront the archbishop. They first told Becket he must go to Winchester to account for his actions. He refused. He also refused their demands that he submit to the king's will. The knights then retrieved their weapons and rushed back inside.

  Becket, meanwhile, went on to the cathedral for vespers, the evening service. The other monks tried to bolt themselves in for safety. Becket ordered the doors reopened, telling them, "It is not right to make a fortress out of the house of prayer!"

  With swords drawn, the four knights ran in crying, "Where is Thomas Becket, traitor to the king and country?" They found him near a door to the monastic cloister, close to the stairs down to the crypt and the stairs up to the quire, where the monks were chanting vespers. "I am no traitor and I am ready to die," Becket answered. One knight seized him and tried to drag him outside. Becket clung to a pillar and bowed his head to make peace with God.

  Edward Grim, who was wounded in the attack, left the most noted eyewitness account. He wrote that the first blow struck the crown of Becket's head, the spot consecrated with holy oil. A second blow to the head left Becket standing firm. After the third, he sank to his knees and elbows and said quietly, "For the name of Jesus and the protection of the church, I am ready to embrace death." A further grave wound followed. The fifth attacker, in Grim's telling, was not a knight but a cleric who had entered with them. He placed a foot on the fallen archbishop's neck and called to the others, "We can leave this place, knights, he will not get up again."

  Grim is only one of ten named biographers from Becket's own time, a group that includes John of Salisbury, William fitz Stephen and Herbert of Bosham. Three more wrote anonymously, and scholars call them Anonymous I, Anonymous II (or Anonymous of Lambeth) and Anonymous III (or Lansdowne Anonymous).

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• 6. Penance and Punishment

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  Some accounts say that monks preparing Becket's body for burial found a hairshirt beneath his archbishop's garments. A hairshirt was a rough garment worn as a sign of penance. The faithful throughout Europe soon began venerating him as a martyr. On the 21st of February 1173, little more than two years after his death, Pope Alexander III canonised him in St Peter's Church, Segni.

  In 1173, Becket's sister Mary was appointed abbess of Barking as reparation for the murder of her brother. On the 12th of July 1174, during the Revolt of 1173-1174, Henry humbled himself in public penance at Becket's tomb. He did the same at St Dunstan's Church in Canterbury, which became a popular pilgrimage site.

  The four knights fled north to Hugh de Morville's Knaresborough Castle, where they stayed for about a year. De Morville also held property in Cumbria, which may have offered another hiding place while the men prepared for a longer stay in the separate kingdom of Scotland. Nobody arrested them, and Henry did not confiscate their lands. Yet when they sought his advice in August 1171, he gave them no help.

  Pope Alexander excommunicated all four. Seeking forgiveness, they travelled to Rome, where the pope ordered them to serve as knights in the Holy Lands for 14 years. That sentence also inspired the Knights of Saint Thomas, incorporated in 1191 at Acre and modelled on the Teutonic Knights. It was the only military order native to England, with chapters in Acre, London, Kilkenny and Nicosia.

  William de Tracy made amends closer to home. Among his obligations in contrition to Henry, he greatly enlarged the parish church at Lapford in Devon, in his manor of Bradninch, and re-dedicated it to St Thomas of Canterbury. The Lapford Revel still marks the martyrdom day.

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• 7. The Shrine

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  The monks of Canterbury feared that Becket's body might be stolen, so they placed his remains beneath the floor of the cathedral's eastern crypt. A stone cover over the tomb had two holes, where pilgrims could insert their heads and kiss the grave. This is shown in the "Miracle Windows" of the Trinity Chapel. A guard chamber, now called the Wax Chamber, had a clear view of the grave. Canterbury had always drawn pilgrims, and after Becket's death their numbers rose rapidly.

  On the 7th of July 1220, in the 50th jubilee year of his death, his bones were moved in a ceremony called the translation. They went into a gold-plated, bejewelled shrine behind the high altar in the recently built Trinity Chapel. The golden casket stood on a pink marble base with prayer niches, raised on three steps. King Henry III, the papal legate and Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, attended along with many other dignitaries. The occasion was described as "one of the great symbolic events in the life of the medieval English Church." A major new feast day was created to commemorate it, and it was celebrated each July almost everywhere in England and in many French churches.

  A popular cult grew up around the martyr, including the drinking of "water of Saint Thomas." This was a mix of water and the remains of the martyr's blood, said to be miraculously multiplied. More orthodox churchmen frowned on the practice because it resembled the eucharist of the blood of Jesus.

  Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales features a company of pilgrims travelling from Southwark to Becket's shrine in Canterbury Cathedral.

  The end came under Henry VIII. The July feast was suppressed in 1536 with the Reformation. In 1538, during the dissolution of the monasteries, the shrine was destroyed on the king's orders. He also destroyed Becket's bones and ordered every mention of his name obliterated. Yet the arms of the city of Canterbury, officially registered in 1619 but dating back to at least 1380, still rest on Becket's attributed arms of three Cornish choughs.

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• 8. Saint in Many Lands

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  In Dublin, the Abbey of St Thomas the Martyr was built in 1177 for the Augustines. In Scotland, King William the Lion ordered the building of Arbroath Abbey in 1178. When it was completed in 1197, the new foundation was dedicated to Becket, whom the king had known personally as a young man at the English court.

  A mosaic icon in Monreale Cathedral in Sicily, created shortly after Becket's death, is thought to be the first holy image of him. Becket's cousins found refuge at the Sicilian court during their exile, and King William II of Sicily married a daughter of Henry II. Marsala Cathedral in western Sicily is dedicated to Becket.

  In Spain, Eleanor Plantagenet, the second daughter of Henry II, married King Alfonso VIII of Castile in 1170. She honoured Becket with a wall painting of his martyrdom that survives in the church of San Nicolás de Soria. Within five years of his death, Salamanca had a church named after him, Iglesia de Santo Tomás Cantuariense. Monumental frescoes of the martyrdom were painted in the romanesque church of Santa Maria in Terrassa. In Hungary, a hill in Esztergom called Szent Tamás is dedicated to him, and part of the city is named Szenttamás. He had been a classmate in Paris of Lucas, Archbishop of Esztergom.

  More than 45 medieval chasse reliquaries, boxes for holy relics decorated with champlevé enamel, survive with scenes from Becket's life. One of them, the Becket Casket, was made to hold relics at Peterborough Abbey and now sits in London's Victoria and Albert Museum. The same museum shows a set of Becket panels carved by Nottingham alabaster workers, for whom his story was a popular theme. The treasury of Fermo Cathedral holds the Fermo chasuble of Thomas Becket, displayed at the Museo Diocesano.

  Londoners adopted Becket as a native son. As the scion of a mercantile dynasty of later centuries, the Mercers, he was made London's co-patron saint with Saint Paul. Both appear on the seals of the city and of the Lord Mayor. The Bridge House Estates seal carries only Becket's image, with his martyrdom on the reverse. Churches dedicated to him stand across the United Kingdom and France, from Portsmouth to Bénodet in Brittany, and St Thomas' Hospital in Britain also carries a form of his name.

  Writers and artists kept returning to the story. In 1884, Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote Becket, a play that Henry Irving produced after Tennyson's death and performed in the title role. T. S. Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral was adapted as an opera by Ildebrando Pizzetti. Jean Anouilh's play Becket made him a Saxon rather than a Norman and reached the screen in 1964, starring Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton. Ken Follett's novel The Pillars of the Earth places Becket's murder in a late scene. In 2000, David Reeves's oratorio Becket - The Kiss of Peace premiered at Canterbury Cathedral during the Canterbury Festival. In the United States, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty took its inspiration from him.

  Becket's reputation has not always been warm. In 2005, a poll of historians by BBC History magazine chose him as the worst Briton of the 12th century. When readers voted the following year on the worst of the last thousand years, he came second behind Jack the Ripper. The magazine's editor suggested that both were chosen because they were the best known names, and few would have heard of most of the other candidates.

  Today the Church of England and the Episcopal Church honour Becket every year on the 29th of December.

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