Ben Stephens reflects on the life, death, and afterlife of Thomas Becket, who rose to be Henry II’s Lord Chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury, but who after years of tension between the Crown and the Church was murdered on this day in 1170.
Each new age calls for new heroes; perhaps it calls for new patron saints, too. If so, I’d like to nominate St Thomas of Canterbury to become responsible for those who have been “cancelled” for transgressing the new (although seemingly ever-shifting) social mores to which we now find ourselves apparently beholden if we want to keep our places on the cocktail-party circuit, the Rotary Club committee, or even our very jobs.
Thomas Becket, to give him his worldly name – the jury went out some time ago on whether it should still have an “à” in between – knows all about cancellation. Had he not fallen out with Henry II he would probably have died in venerable old age and been quietly forgotten. His chantry might have been wrecked during the Commonwealth, and later used as a store for those folding plastic chairs with which Anglican cathedrals love to fill their naves when they have run out of helter-skelters, crazy-golf courses, or dinosaur skeletons.
Instead – well, you know the rest. Magna Carta, ecclesia Anglicana libera sit, the Constitutions of Clarendon. “Will no-one rid me of this turbulent priest?!”, the King may or may not have shouted. Edward Grim, Becket’s hagiographer and the monk who tried to save the archbishop before having his own arm remodelled by a sharp blade, wrote that instead he cried, “What miserable drones and traitors have I nurtured and promoted in my household who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?!”
There are two problems with this alternative. First, it’s obviously not quite as catchy. Secondly, at the time when whatever was uttered was uttered, Henry was in France and Grim was in, well, England. Possibly he was at Cambridge, as he seems to have been normally resident there and only a visitor to Canterbury on that fateful day. Not that it makes the “turbulent priest” offering any more convincing. That one seems to have gained traction in tandem with the rise of a “meddlesome priest” option, which found favour in the 1960s.
Not, it must be said, because of any new academic breakthrough found in an ancient manuscript long-forgotten and suddenly re-discovered in a crinkled vellum-bound volume that had formerly been in the monastic library at Canterbury. Instead it was the line used by Peter O’Toole, playing Henry II opposite Richard Burton’s Becket in the eponymous film of 1964. John Gielgud’s in it, too, playing Louis VII of France. It’s a triumph of cinematography; if you haven’t seen it, then watch it today.
Anyway, back to Becket. When Henry thought to sort out his problems with the Church by appointing his chum and reliable Lord Chancellor to the See of Canterbury, Becket was a deacon – and a relatively uninterested one at that. Hurriedly ordained to the priesthood and then to the episcopate a day later so that he could take up the job, a difficulty soon arose, which disarranged Henry’s plans considerably: Becket found God.
Henry needed an administrator who would see the matter from the world’s point of view. An archbishop who was short on religion but long on pleasing his king would do very well indeed. An archbishop who almost overnight turned from a hale and hearty huntsman into an ascetic prelate who seemed to be full of the fear of the Lord – and who had thereafter little trouble in instilling it in others – was rather less use.
So began a long game of cat-and-mouse, in which the cat wore a crown and the mouse wore a mitre, unless it was the other way round, as Becket frequently ensured, which culminated in Canterbury Cathedral as the light began to fail – and what a metaphor that is – just as Vespers started on 29 December 1170. And here we are, on the feast day that the Church now keeps in his honour.
“O God, who gave the Martyr Saint Thomas Becket the courage to give up his life for the sake of justice,” she bids us pray, “grant, through his intercession, that, renouncing our life for the sake of Christ in this world, we may find it in heaven.” It is a noble, worthy and lofty petition; but it does not come without some heavy baggage, for Becket died at least in part to prevent clergy accused of crimes from being tried in the secular courts.
It is what it is – but it echoes uncomfortably down the centuries. It does not, perhaps, detract from Becket’s demonstrable courage, and his refusal to compromise, even at the cost of his life, on what he believed was being asked of him and his high office. Canonised by Alexander III in 1173, his cult soon spread across Europe – as shown by the British Museum’s Covid-delayed exhibition to mark the 800th anniversary of his death in 2021.
As that show very clearly demonstrated, Becket’s murder was – sorry – something of a two-edged sword. Alive, he had been a useful papal thorn in the side of a wayward king in the course of a relatively minor local difficulty at what was then the edge of Christendom. Dead, he was a martyr whose holy blood had been spilled for Christ and the Universal Church, and his swift canonisation was a political masterstroke.
Henry was forced to do humiliating and public penance, and his reputation never quite recovered. Meanwhile, strange tales came drifting in from Canterbury of others who had knelt at Becket’s tomb and been healed from sickness or found favours granted. His shrine, as such it quickly became, turned into a major centre of European pilgrimage; soon Canterbury had cause to bless him not only for his prayers, but for the tourist-income they ensured.
Alas, having been cancelled by one Henry, a few centuries later Becket was cancelled again by another. Of the latter he was presumably aware in only a metaphysical sense; the former was surely more terrifyingly immediate. It is, after all, a good indicator that your services as Primate of All England are no longer required when the top of your head has been sliced off and your brains stamped all over the floor of Canterbury Cathedral. Yet another good argument for not having carpets in churches.
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