On the Fifth Day of Christmas, the carol sends to us Five Gold Rings. It is also the day on which the Church remembers St Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury murdered in his cathedral on 28 December in 1170.
The archbishop’s supporters and friends, seeing the world in their robust medieval way, would have likened the five gold rings of the song to the five sword-blows it took to win Thomas the martyr’s crown. For us today, whose taste is generally for less beefy fare, the five gold rings offer instead a way to tell the story of Becket’s life in five cantos: his career in royal service; as archbishop of Canterbury; his exile; his martyrdom; and his legacy.
There can be no medieval Englishman about whom we know more. Three clerks of Becket’s inner circle, all of them learned littérateurs, wrote detailed accounts of his life drawn from a lifetime’s personal experience. In addition, Becket drew comment and attention from many of the men he moved among, especially during the period of his exile in France. We also have, of course, the evidence of his acts as royal chancellor and archbishop, and there is a voluminous surviving correspondence. He does nonetheless remain enigmatic, and it is a challenge to explain the inner man who could so completely change his outward show.
Thomas Becket was born around 1120 in London, on Cheapside, to a Norman family. His father was a wealthy merchant, and Thomas’s early life was a courtly one until a financial collapse meant that he had to earn his living as a clerk. He was clearly a charismatic man who drew the interest of his contemporaries, and that helped him in his early career.
Through service for Theobald of Bec, archbishop of Canterbury, he caught the eye of King Henry II, who appointed him royal chancellor. Then began a close friendship. “Never in Christian times,” wrote one contemporary, “were there two greater friends, more of one mind.” But this meant that it was Thomas who raised clerical taxes for the king’s wars and supported the royal authority over the Church. It is a period his biographers felt they needed to explain. They did so by arguing that the inner man was burgeoning, and by referring to what came next and Becket’s “conversion” moment.
What made Thomas fascinating to contemporaries was his manner of life after consecration as archbishop of Canterbury in 1162. In giving preference to Becket, the king was clearly anticipating the beneficial advantages of a compliant placeman. Instead, Becket became the staunchest upholder of the rights and privileges of the Church, and particularly his own church of Canterbury, against any apparent encroachment of the secular arm. The clash between two obstinate men—the king, energetic and hot-tempered; and the archbishop, determined and aloof—led inevitably to trouble.
It was the domestic aspect of a Europe-wide clash between an ecclesiastical power that was growing in confidence and the secular power determined to resist it. Events in England were watched carefully from the Continent.
When Thomas would not accede to the infuriated Henry’s bill to limit clerical independence, he fled to the Continent with several followers and was given protection by King Louis VII of France. Thomas spent two years living at the Cistercian abbey of Pontigny, where he joined in the monks’ austere rule of life and gave time to theological study. His habits of life took an ascetic turn. Beneath his fine vestments he wore a hairshirt: it was only discovered after his death—but its disgraceful condition, “swarming with vermin”, showed it was no new item.
Thomas may have been aloof in his former life; that part of his temperament remained, mixed now with a moral certainty which made him even less willing to bend. The fragile rapprochement that had been brokered by the Pope, under which Thomas could return to England, was quickly in tatters when Thomas used his new legatine powers to excommunicate the three English bishops who had served uncanonically at the coronation in York of Henry II’s eldest son, Henry the Young King.
Henry II certainly did not utter the famous words: “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?,” which were only put into his mouth in 1740. But that was certainly the drift of it, an exasperated howl that four of his knights took it upon themselves to answer. The details of the martyrdom are well known: Thomas’s final words to his friends; his courage before the knights and acceptance of death; who it was who struck the first blow and where.
The Christological significance of Thomas’s final days were brought out by his followers. He had returned to England during Advent. The popular acclaim that greeted him when he landed in Kent mirrored Christ’s entry into Jerusalem; the martyrdom fell on the day after Holy Innocents; the five blows it took to kill him were a memory of the five wounds of Christ. Like Christ, he had foretold his own death, most publicly on Christmas Day in the cathedral when he addressed the people.
While the monks of the cathedral priory and all Thomas’s friends expected further reprisals and hid the body, it was the people who created the cult, in a rolling tide of popular acclamation. The outrage that the archbishop of one of the great powers of Europe should have been cut down in his own sanctuary for defending the liberties of the Church was political dynamite. That miracles were immediately reported gave the cause spiritual potency and turned Canterbury into England’s preeminent site of pilgrimage. Canonization was declared extraordinarily quickly on 21 February 1173. For the centuries until St George was promoted by Henry V after Agincourt, Thomas fulfilled the role of national saint.
He remained a symbolic figurehead of resistance against overmighty princes. Some 360 years later, when another King Henry was involved in another wrestling match with the Church, Thomas was once more the clergy’s champion. William Warham, the venerable archbishop of Canterbury, wrote a will in which he commended his soul to St Thomas, and then upbraided Henry VIII openly for the break with Rome. His death in 1532 from natural causes denied him the martyr’s crown he was expecting. He was buried in the small chantry chapel he had built, situated in the Martyrdom in the cathedral’s north transept, close to the spot where Becket had fallen. Four years later, Cardinal Reginald Pole, the king’s cousin and a leader of the Church in Rome, launched his own campaign against Henry, arguing powerfully for the unity of the western Church against the English secession. He cast himself as a new Becket: just as that holy martyr had died defending the rights and privileges of the Church against Henry II, so too was Pole prepared to die decrying the antichristian spirit which seemed to be driving the actions of Henry VIII.
Small wonder that the king made a particular point of wanting to obliterate Thomas’s cult. A royal decree of 1538 proclaimed that Becket had been “a rebel who shall no longer be named a saint” and that “his pictures throughout the realm are to be plucked down and his festivals shall no longer be kept, and the services in his name shall be razed out of all books”. The shrine at Canterbury was destroyed and, according to a claim by Pole, Henry exhumed and burnt Becket’s bones—an act, Pole said, “which no apostate has ever attempted, which no heretic has ever endeavoured”.
So it was that one of the great shrines of western Christendom was effaced; but the memory of one of the defining personalities of the European middle ages doggedly persists, as so in life did the saint himself.
On the fifth day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Five gold rings,
Four calling birds,
Three French hens,
Two turtle doves, and
A partridge in a pear tree.
(Image by Sean Jefferson, courtesy David Messum Fine Art.)
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