Great Tales From English History (16 page)

Back in Canterbury, however, and preaching from the cathedral pulpit on Christmas Day, the restored archbishop denounced the bishops who had taken part in the illegal crowning.

‘May they all be damned by Jesus Christ!’ he cried, hurling flaming candles to the floor.

Over in Normandy, Henry flew into a tantrum of his own. ‘Will no man rid me of this turbulent priest?’ is the cry that legend has attributed to the furious king.

In fact, these words come from many centuries later, and there is much better evidence from closer to the time. Within two years of the episode Edward Grim, a priest on Becket’s staff who was personally involved in the drama, reported Henry railing even more bitterly. ‘What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and promoted in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a lowborn cleric?’

Four of his knights took this cry as a summons to action. They crossed the Channel to Kent, stopping at Saltwood Castle to mobilise an arrest party, then rode on to Canterbury. When they arrived at the cathedral on 29 December 1170, the archbishop had just finished his lunch. It was around three in the afternoon when the visitors were ushered into his bedroom, and though they had taken off their sword-belts as a gesture of courtesy, Thomas studiously ignored them at first. He certainly knew at least three of the knights personally, but he chose to treat them with disdain, angrily rejecting their request that he should accompany them to Winchester.

A shouting match ensued. As tempers rose, the knights waved their arms about and twisted their heavy gloves into knots, according to one eyewitness. Their leader Reginald FitzUrse - literally Reginald ‘Bear-son’ - ordered the archbishop’s followers to leave, and when they refused, led his own men out of the room to get their weapons. Thomas seemed almost disappointed that they were retreating.

‘Do you think I’m going to sneak off?’ he cried. ‘I haven’t returned to Canterbury in order to run away. You’ll find me here. And in the Lord’s battle, I’ll fight hand to hand, toe to toe.’

‘Why should you annoy them further,’ remonstrated one of his followers, ‘by getting up and following them to the door?’

‘My mind is made up,’ replied Thomas. ‘I know exactly what I have to do.’

‘Please God,’ came the reply, ‘that you have chosen well.’

By four o’clock Thomas was in the cathedral. It was getting dark. In the candlelit church, the monks were just finishing their devotions and townsfolk were arriving for public evensong. Meanwhile, the knights were out in the cloisters, pulling on their armour and strapping on their sword-belts.

‘Where is the traitor?’ they shouted as they broke into the cathedral. ‘Where is the archbishop?’

‘Here I am,’ replied Becket. ‘No traitor to the king, but a priest of God!’

We know these words and all the dramatic details of what happened next in the cathedral that fading December evening, because no less than four of Becket’s followers recorded their own accounts of the tragedy - with first-hand vividness, and considerable honesty as well. One admitted that he ran off and hid behind the altar as soon as the fighting started. But Edward Grim was made of sterner stuff, and he stayed beside Becket as the knights moved in to lay hands on the archbishop. Becket, a strong man, robustly wrestled them off, and as Grim put up a hand to shield his master, a sword struck through his arm to the bone, then rebounded, flying onwards to slice into the top of Becket’s head.

‘He received a second blow on the head,’ wrote Grim, ‘but still stood firm. At the third blow he fell on his knees and elbows, offering himself a living victim and saying in a low voice, “For the name of Jesus and the protection of the church, I am ready to embrace death.”’

Grim described the grisly details as a further blow cut Becket’s skull right open, spilling ‘blood white with the brain, and the brain red with the blood’ on to the cathedral floor.

‘Let’s be off, knights!’ cried one of the assassins. ‘This fellow won’t be up again!’

The eyewitness accounts make clear that in the initial terrible shock of such violence, few people saw the slaying as a martyrdom. It was Becket’s own confrontational style that had turned the arrest party into murderers - and some even suggested that Becket had provoked the disaster through his own arrogance.

‘He wanted to be a king - he wanted to be more than a king,’ was one angry reaction. ‘Let him be a king now!’

But then the monks started readying Thomas’s body for burial, and as they cut away his bloodstained outer vestments, the surprising garment they discovered underneath changed their attitude entirely.

‘Look,’ cried one, ‘he’s a true monk!’

AD 1174

I
F THOMAS BECKET HAD BEEN WEARING SILK
underpants when he died, he might never have become a martyr. Luxurious clothing would have confirmed all the worst suspicions about his vainglorious pride. But as Thomas’s confused followers stripped off his bloodied vestments on the evening of 29 December 1170 to prepare his body for burial, they discovered the very opposite of luxury. Next to the skin of the murdered archbishop was a shirt of the roughest goat’s hair, extending from his neck to his knees. It was the ultimate monkish symbol of humility, the painfully itchy garment that the pious wore when they wished to punish themselves - and Thomas had taken self-punishment to extremes. His hair shirt was crawling with maggots and lice.

This was the moment when the process of sainthood began. The discovery of the hair shirt, we are told, astonished everyone except Thomas’s private chaplain Robert of Merton, the archbishop’s spiritual confidant, who had been in charge of his private devotions. These included, it now turned out, the trussing-up of the heavy hair shirt as many as three times a day, so the chaplain could whip the archbishop’s back until the blood flowed - and if the man tired, Thomas would tear at his flesh with his own fingernails.

We might well say today that such appalling masochism was reason in itself for Thomas’s incurably prickly attitude towards the world. But in Canterbury Cathedral that evening in 1170 the monks knew they had been confronted with proof of the dead archbishop’s saintliness. Thomas had mortified his body in order to master his carnal desires. Otherworldly in this last stage of his life, Becket had moved to the ultimate dimension in the manner and place of his dying, and the monks promptly set about collecting his blood in a basin. The martyr was decked out for burial in the cathedral crypt, wearing his hair shirt below his glorious robes, and carrying his ceremonial shepherd’s staff of office.

All Europe was shocked by the murder in the cathedral. The tale reached as far as Iceland, where it became the ‘Thómas Saga’, and in the scandalised retellings the complexity of Becket’s love-hate relationship with his former friend became simplified. Henry Plantagenet was cast as the villain. The Pope declared Thomas a saint, and ordered the King to do penance.

In the summer of 1174, dressed for the occasion in a hair shirt of his own, Henry went humbly to Canterbury, where he spent a day and a night fasting on the bare ground beside Thomas’s tomb. Around him lay ordinary pilgrims, so the news of the royal humiliation would be publicly known and spread. The King offered himself for five strokes of the rod from every bishop present, and three from each of Canterbury’s eighty monks. Then, wearing around his neck a phial of water that had been tinctured with drops of Becket’s blood, Henry dragged himself on to his horse and rode back to London, where he took to his bed.

‘Canterbury Water’ became a must-buy for the countless pilgrims who flocked to Becket’s tomb in the centuries that followed. The precious pink liquid was said to heal the blind and raise the crippled, and the streets around the cathedral became crammed with souvenir stalls selling badges and highly coloured images of the martyr. The tomb itself was a stupendous sight, sparkling with jewels and hung about with the sticks and crutches of those whom the visit had revivified - a gaudy spectacle of salvation. From relative obscurity, Canterbury became one of Europe’s premier religious destinations, ranking with Rome, Jerusalem, Santiago de Compostela and the continent’s other great centres of pilgrimage.

England took pride in its home-grown hero who so enhanced the country’s spiritual status in Christendom, and no one embraced the devotion of Thomas more enthusiastically than the royal family. Henry II’s three daughters, married to the rulers of Sicily, Saxony and the Spanish kingdom of Castile, spread the cult of the English saint with chapels, lavish wallpaintings and mosaics. The obstinate individual who had dared to defy their father was no longer a villain - he was an icon of English identity - and in later centuries even the name of this London merchant’s son became fancified. He came to be known as Thomas ‘à’ Becket.

The prestigious new cult and enhanced tourist business were some consolation for the fact that Henry had lost his great battle with the Church. It had been a major defeat. In addition to his public penance, the King had to agree that England’s church courts should remain independent of the common law. Priests continued to enjoy the ‘benefit of clergy’ for centuries, and from a modern perspective clerical privilege might not seem a worthy cause for which to die. But the archbishop had spoken his mind. He had stood up to authority he considered unjust and he had been prepared to lay down his life for his beliefs. Goat-hair shirt or silk underpants - either way, Thomas Becket had walked the path of the hero.

AD 1172

I
N 1172 WILLIAM FITZSTEPHEN, ONE OF THE
eyewitnesses at the death of Thomas Becket, described what you would see if you visited the bustling city of London in the reign of England’s first Plantagenet king:

On the east stands the Tower, exceeding great and strong, whose walls and bailey rise from very deep foundations, their mortar being mixed with the blood of beasts. On the west are two strongly fortified castles, while from them there runs a great continuous wall, very high, with seven double gates, and towers at intervals along its north side. On the south, London once had similar walls and towers. But the Thames, that mighty river teeming with fish, which runs on that side and ebbs and flows with the sea, has in the passage of time washed those bulwarks away, undermining them and bringing them down . . . On all sides, beyond the houses, lie the gardens of the citizens that live in the suburbs, planted with trees, spacious and fair, laid out beside each other. To the north are pasturelands and pleasant open spaces of level meadow, intersected by running waters, which turn millwheels with a cheerful sound.

FitzStephen wrote this description as a prologue to his life of Becket. He wanted to explain the background from which his hero had sprung and, as a fellow Londoner, he was clearly proud of England’s largest city, which he praised for its Christian faith, for the wholesomeness of its air - and for its ability to enjoy itself.

At Easter, they make sport with tournaments on the river. A shield is firmly tied to a stout pole in midstream and a small boat, rowed with the current by many oarsmen, carries a young man standing in the bows, who has to strike the shield with his lance. His object is to break the lance by striking the shield and keeping his footing. But if he strikes it and does not splinter the lance, he falls into the river, and the boat goes on without him.

When the great marsh along the northern walls of the city is frozen, crowds of young men go out to amuse themselves on the ice. Some run to gather speed, and slide along the ice with feet apart covering great distances. Others make seats of ice shaped like millstones, and get a group of others who run in front of them, holding hands to drag them along. Sometimes they go too fast, and all fall flat on their faces. Others more skilled in ice sports fit the shin-bones of beasts to their feet, lashing them to their ankles, and use an iron-shod pole to propel themselves, pushing against the ice. They are borne along as swiftly as a bird in flight.