Complete Poems and Plays (34 page)

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by stratagem, or by

resistance,

Not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast

And have conquered. We have only to conquer

Now, by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Now is the triumph of the Cross, now

Open the door! I command it.
OPEN THE DOOR
!

[
The
door
is
opened.
The
K
NIGHTS
enter,
slightly
tipsy
]

P
RIESTS
.
This way, my Lord! Quick. Up the stair. To the roof.

To the crypt. Quick. Come. Force him.

K
NIGHTS
.
Where is Becket, the traitor to the King?

Where is Becket, the meddling priest?

Come down Daniel to the lions’ den,

Come down Daniel for the mark of the beast.

Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?

Are you marked with the mark of the beast?

Come down Daniel to the lions’ den,

Come down Daniel and join in the feast.

Where is Becket the Cheapside brat?

Where is Becket the faithless priest?

Come down Daniel to the lions’ den,

Come down Daniel and join in the feast.

T
HOMAS
.
It is the just man who

Like a bold lion, should be without fear.

I am here.

No traitor to the King. I am a priest,

A Christian, saved by the blood of Christ,

Ready to suffer with my blood.

This is the sign of the Church always.

The sign of blood. Blood for blood.

His blood given to buy my life,

My blood given to pay for His death,

My death for His death.

F
IRST
K
NIGHT
.
Absolve all those you have excommunicated.

S
ECOND
K
NIGHT
.
Resign the powers you have arrogated.

T
HIRD
K
NIGHT
.
Restore to the King the money you appropriated.

F
IRST
K
NIGHT
.
Renew the obedience you have violated.

T
HOMAS
.
For my Lord I am now ready to die,

That his Church may have peace and liberty.

Do with me as you will, to your hurt and shame;

But none of my people, in God’s name,

Whether layman or clerk, shall you touch.

This I forbid.

K
NIGHTS
.
Traitor! traitor! traitor!

T
HOMAS
.
You, Reginald, three times traitor you:

Traitor to me as my temporal vassal,

Traitor to me as your spiritual lord,

Traitor to God in desecrating His Church.

F
IRST
K
NIGHT
.
No faith do I owe to a renegade,

And what I owe shall now be paid.

T
HOMAS
.
Now to Almighty God, to the Blessed Mary ever Virgin, to the blessed John the Baptist, the holy apostles Peter and Paul, to the blessed martyr Denys, and to all the Saints, I commend my cause and that of the Church.

While
the
K
NIGHTS
kill
him,
we
hear
the

C
HORUS
.
Clear the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! take stone from

stone and wash them.

The land is foul, the water is foul, our beasts and ourselves defiled

with blood.

A rain of blood has blinded my eyes. Where is England? where is

Kent? where is Canterbury?

O far far far far in the past; and I wander in a land of barren boughs:

if I break them, they bleed; I wander in a land of dry stones: if

I touch them they bleed.

How how can I ever return, to the soft quiet seasons?

Night stay with us, stop sun, hold season, let the day not come, let

the spring not come.

Can I look again at the day and its common things, and see them

all smeared with blood, through a curtain of falling blood?

We did not wish anything to happen.

We understood the private catastrophe,

The personal loss, the general misery,

Living and partly living;

The terror by night that ends in daily action,

The terror by day that ends in sleep;

But the talk in the market-place, the hand on the broom,

The night-time heaping of the ashes,

The fuel laid on the fire at daybreak,

These acts marked a limit to our suffering.

Every horror had its definition,

Every sorrow had a kind of end:

In life there is not time to grieve long.

But this, this is out of life, this is out of time,

An instant eternity of evil and wrong.

We are soiled by a filth that we cannot clean, united to supernatural

vermin,

It is not we alone, it is not the house, it is not the city that is defiled,

But the world that is wholly foul.

Clear the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! take the stone from the

stone, take the skin from the arm, take the muscle from the

bone, and wash them. Wash the stone, wash the bone, wash the

brain, wash the soul, wash them wash them!

[
The
K
NIGHTS
,
having
completed
the
murder,
advance
to
the
front
of
the
stage
and
address
the
audience.
]

F
IRST
K
NIGHT
.
We beg you to give us your attention for a few moments. We know that you may be disposed to judge unfavourably of our action. You are Englishmen, and therefore you believe in fair play: and when you see one man being set upon by four, then your sympathies are all with the under dog. I respect such feelings, I share them. Nevertheless, I appeal to your sense of honour. You are Englishmen, and therefore will not judge anybody without hearing both sides of the case. That is in accordance with our
long-established
principle of Trial by Jury. I am not myself qualified to put our case to you. I am a man of action and not of words. For that reason I shall do no more than introduce the other speakers, who, with their various abilities, and different points of view, will be able to lay before you the merits of this extremely complex problem. I shall call upon our eldest member to speak first, my neighbour in the country: Baron William de Traci.

T
HIRD
K
NIGHT
.
I am afraid I am not anything like such an experienced speaker as my old friend Reginald Fitz Urse would lead you to believe. But there is one thing I should like to say, and I might as well say it at once. It is this: in what we have done, and whatever you may think of it, we have been perfectly disinterested. [
The
other
K
NIGHTS
: ‘Hear! hear!’]
We
are not getting anything out of this. We have much more to lose than to gain. We are four plain
Englishmen
who put our country first. I dare say that we didn’t make a very good impression when we came in just now. The fact is that we knew we had taken on a pretty stiff job; I’ll only speak for myself, but I had drunk a good deal — I am not a drinking man ordinarily — to brace myself up for it. When you come to the point, it does go against the grain to kill an Archbishop, especially when you have been brought up in good Church traditions. So if we seemed a bit rowdy, you will understand why it was; and for my part I am awfully sorry about it. We realised this was our duty, but all the same we had to work ourselves up to it. And, as I said,
we
are not getting a penny out of this. We know perfectly well how things will turn out. King Henry — God bless him — will have to say, for reasons of state, that he never meant this to happen; and there is going to be an awful row; and at the best we shall have to spend the rest of our lives abroad. And even when reasonable people come to see that the Archbishop
had
to be put out of the way — and personally I had a tremendous admiration for him — you must have noted what a good show he put up at the end — they won’t give
us
any glory. No, we have done for ourselves, there’s no mistake about that. So, as I said at the beginning, please give us at least the credit for being completely disinterested in this business. I think that is about all I have to say.

F
IRST
K
NIGHT
.
I think we will all agree that William de Traci has spoken well and has made a very important point. The gist of his argument is this: that we have been completely disinterested. But our act itself needs more justification than that; and you must hear our other speakers. I shall next call upon Hugh de Morville, who has made a special study of statecraft and constitutional law. Sir Hugh de Morville.

S
ECOND
K
NIGHT
.
I should like first to recur to a point that was very well put by our leader, Reginald Fitz Urse: that you are
Englishmen
, and therefore your sympathies are always with the under dog. It is the English spirit of fair play. Now the worthy Archbishop, whose good qualities I very much admired, has throughout been presented as the under dog. But is this really the case? I am going to appeal not to your emotions but to your reason. You are
hardheaded
sensible people, as I can see, and not to be taken in by emotional clap-trap. I therefore ask you to consider soberly: what were the Archbishop’s aims? and what are King Henry’s aims? In the answer to these questions lies the key to the problem.

The King’s aim has been perfectly consistent. During the reign of the late Queen Matilda and the irruption of the unhappy usurper Stephen, the kingdom was very much divided. Our King saw that the one thing needful was to restore order: to curb the excessive powers of local government, which were usually exercised for selfish and often for seditious ends, and to reform the legal system. He therefore intended that Becket, who had proved himself an
extremely
able administrator — no one denies that — should unite the offices of Chancellor and Archbishop. Had Becket concurred with the King’s wishes, we should have had an almost ideal State: a union of spiritual and temporal administration, under the central government. I knew Becket well, in various official relations; and I may say that I have never known a man so well qualified for the highest rank of the Civil Service. And what happened? The moment that Becket, at the King’s instance, had been made Archbishop, he resigned the office of Chancellor, he became more priestly than the priests, he ostentatiously and offensively adopted an ascetic manner of life, he affirmed immediately that there was a higher order than that which our King, and he as the King’s servant, had for so many years striven to establish; and that — God knows why — the two orders were incompatible.

You will agree with me that such interference by an Archbishop offends the instincts of a people like ours. So far, I know that I have your approval: I read it in your faces. It is only with the measures we have had to adopt, in order to set matters to rights, that you take issue. No one regrets the necessity for violence more than we do. Unhappily, there are times when violence is the only way in which social justice can be secured. At another time, you would condemn an Archbishop by vote of Parliament and execute him formally as a traitor, and no one would have to bear the burden of being called murderer. And at a later time still, even such temperate measures as these would become unnecessary. But, if you have now arrived at a just subordination of the pretensions of the Church to the welfare of the State, remember that it is we who took the first step. We have been instrumental in bringing about the state of affairs that you approve. We have served your interests; we merit your applause; and if there is any guilt whatever in the matter, you must share it with us.