Pioneers, Power Brokers and Saints: Thomas Becket
PIONEERS, POWER BROKERS and SAINTS
The Churches Committee is always keen to emphasise that its remit encompasses beliefs and people as well as ecclesiastical buildings and artefacts. Accordingly this series (the first two articles appeared in Issue 80 and Issue 82) focuses on people in our own county whose impact has been noteworthy. The contributors will be those knowledgeable in their areas of interest. The series will run to about ten articles.
Thomas Becket
by Liz Nussbaum
The story of Thomas Becket is one of the best-known chapters in English history. Church and state had clashed before and would continue to throughout the Middle Ages, but no confrontation ever came near the drama of that December day in 1170.
Becket had been born in Cheapside where his father was a successful trader. After school in London and Paris and later study of civil and canon law at Bologna and Auxerre, Thomas had acquired a cosmopolitan education that served him well in his first major appointment, in the household of Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury. By the time he was 36 he had been promoted to the position of archdeacon. The year was 1154.
In that same year Henry II came to the throne, heir to a vast Anglo-French empire and an English kingdom that had been in a state of virtual civil war for nearly 20 years (‘never did a country endure greater misery,’ recorded the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle [1]). The king’s task was clear – to shore up his empire and above all strengthen its centre by reviving the royal rights and customs that had been eroded during Stephen’s anarchic reign. For this he needed an efficient chancellor, a kindred spirit of like energy who could share his vision.
Within a year, on Theobald’s recommendation, Becket had been appointed to the chancellorship. Now, free of the archbishop’s tutelage, he carried out the king’s will with a zeal that led him at one point to join the king’s war with his own company of knights, and in a dispute over royal privileges to support the king against his old employer. (‘He won his way by being all things to all men,’ is Knowles’ wry comment.[2]).
Was there a competitive element in his relationship with the king? William fitzStephen’s contemporary account describes Thomas and Henry meeting a ragged beggar on a ride through London, prompting the following exchange. Henry: ‘Would it not be an act of charity to give him a thick warm coat?’ Thomas: ‘It would indeed, and you, O King, ought to have a mind and an eye to it’ [3]. Henry then proceeded to try to pull off the chancellor’s cape. In the ensuing tug of war they both nearly fell off their horses. Henry won; the beggar got Thomas’ cape, in a literal investiture contest aptly symbolising their relative power. Thomas, 15 years Henry’s senior, might have been his equal in intelligence and force of character, but Henry was feudal monarch by divine right.
In 1161 Archbishop Theobald died. While the see was still vacant a local family, the de Brocs, used this interval to tighten their grip on the former cathedral demesne of Saltwood: a small detail in this complex tapestry but an important one.
When Henry told Thomas he wanted to make him archbishop the latter answered, with a gesture at his own rich attire: ‘How religious, how saintly is the man you would appoint to that holy see and over so renowned and pious a body of monks!’ [4] – a virtual rejection, cloaked in irony. But the king was not to be deflected. He needed a pliant archbishop, and that was what he thought he would have.
Henry chose to drive his programme through at the famous councils – Westminster, Clarendon and Northampton – where in full feudal assembly he set out his claims. The details were minute, the overarching design hugely ambitious: to secure barons’ and bishops’ obedience to the ‘ancient customs’ that would be codified into written constitutions. But statecraft soon turned to vendetta as Becket blocked him. The latter’s failure to attend the first day at Northampton gave Henry the excuse he needed to distrain his goods; at which point Becket fled to France.
During the next six years of his exile the drama took on the form of a lethal chess game involving not just the English church and its divided
episcopacy but leading European players too. When diplomacy failed, the weapons on the church side were interdict and excommunication; on the king’s side more brutal ones - arrest, mutilation and execution. What actually happened at the end had been, if not foreseen, certainly feared by onlookers at Northampton.
The knights who happened to be at the king’s court in Argentan in December 1170 when Henry raged against his followers for allowing him to be mocked by a low-born clerk, nursed their own grudges. After crossing the Channel the murderous gang joined Robert de Broc at Saltwood. It was the Broc axe that shattered the party wall, enabling the marauders to get into the archbishop’s hall [5]. When Thomas entered the cathedral after his earlier confrontation with them, he knew exactly what would happen.
Through his murder Becket had won the battle. Henry did penance; the ‘evil’ clauses in the constitutions of Clarendon were annulled.
And the war? Canterbury’s primacy, challenged by bishop Roger of York when he crowned Henry’s son heir to the throne, was never questioned again. Thanks to the miracles, the pilgrim trade and the attraction of the cathedral as final resting place for those seeking the saint’s protection, untold wealth flowed in. Pilgrim inns, lodging houses and monastic guesthouses sprung up inside the city and along the roads leading to it, while the tourist trade in relics and souvenirs boomed.
In the early 1500s Erasmus and Dean Colet, visiting the shrine, saw it ‘crusted and buried in gold and jewels,’ evoking the following comment from Colet: ‘To what end are these fonts and candles and golden images…while our brethren, who are living temples of Christ, are perishing of hunger?’ [6].
Times – and perceptions – were changing. Other eyes than theirs had the cathedral treasures in their sights. Within 3 decades the monarchy would claim the final victory and Canterbury’s fortunes would plummet. From being a treasure-store of three and a half centuries’ accumulated wealth, plunder and the ban on pilgrimages would reduce the city to ‘poverty, nakedness and decay.’ [7].
[1] Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Everyman edition, Dent 1953 p.254
[2] M.D.Knowles: Archbishop Thomas Becket, a character study. The Raleigh Lecture, British Academy 1949 p.14
[3] Life and Death of Thomas Becket based on an account of William fitzStephen, his clerk. Edited by George Greenway. Folio Society 1961 p.94
[4] Ibid. p.51
[5] Ibid. p.153
[6] A.L.Smith: Erasmus, Lothian Essay, Clarendon Press 1864 p.45
[7] William Lambarde: A Perambulation of Kent 1570