Thomas Becket

Life and Ministry

Thomas Becket was born in Cheapside, London, in 1119 to a prosperous Norman merchant family, educated at Merton Priory and in the cathedral schools of Paris, and entered the household of Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, in his late twenties. His administrative gifts brought him quickly to royal notice, and in 1155 King Henry II appointed him chancellor of England — the highest office in the realm under the king. Becket was Henry's closest friend for seven years, his most effective diplomat, and the godfather of his eldest son. When Theobald died in 1162 Henry compelled Becket's election as Archbishop of Canterbury, supposing that with his own man in the see he would have an end to clerical resistance to royal jurisdiction. Becket's transformation on his consecration was immediate and total, and the friendship of king and archbishop became the great quarrel of twelfth-century Europe.

Circumstances of Death

The dispute centered on the Constitutions of Clarendon — Henry's attempt to bring criminous clerks under royal courts and to limit appeals to Rome — which Becket had at first signed and then disavowed. Six years of escalating conflict and a six-year exile of the archbishop in France followed. Becket returned to Canterbury under uneasy reconciliation in early December 1170. Within three weeks Henry, in a fit of frustration at Bures-sur-Dives in Normandy, spoke aloud the words remembered by every chronicler — variously transmitted as "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" — and four of his knights took it as an order. They crossed to England, presented themselves at Canterbury Cathedral on the afternoon of December 29 during vespers, and killed the archbishop at the steps of the high altar with sword strokes that scattered his brain on the pavement.

Legacy

Pope Alexander III canonized Becket in 1173, less than three years after his death — the fastest formal canonization in the medieval Western church. Henry II walked barefoot to Canterbury in 1174 to receive scourging at the tomb. The shrine of Saint Thomas became the greatest pilgrimage destination in northern Europe — the destination of Chaucer's pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales, the recipient of two centuries of royal and noble offerings. Henry VIII destroyed the shrine in 1538 in the dissolution of the monasteries and ordered Becket's name struck from English liturgical books, but the cult survived in folk memory and revived in the nineteenth century. T. S. Eliot's verse-drama Murder in the Cathedral (1935) is the modern memorial.