Murder in the Cathedral

The case

The monks wanted to bar the doors. It was late afternoon on 29 December 1170, vespers had begun in the choir of Canterbury Cathedral, and four armed knights were coming through the cloister looking for the archbishop. Thomas Becket would not allow it. A church, he told them, was not to be turned into a fortress. So the doors stayed open, and the knights walked in calling for the traitor to the king.

Twenty years earlier the idea that Becket would die as the king's enemy would have seemed absurd. The son of a Norman merchant settled in London, he had risen through the household of Archbishop Theobald and in 1155 became Henry II's chancellor, the king's closest adviser and, by every account, his friend. He lived lavishly, raised the king's revenues, and even took the young prince Henry into his household. When Theobald died, Henry made Becket archbishop in 1162, expecting a loyal ally at the head of the English church.

Instead Becket resigned the chancellorship, took to a hair shirt, and became the church's most stubborn defender. The two men fell out over whether clergy accused of crimes could be tried in the king's courts, and over the written list of royal rights over the church known as the Constitutions of Clarendon, which Becket refused to seal. In October 1164 a royal council at Northampton condemned him for contempt and for his conduct as chancellor. He fled across the Channel that night and spent six years in France under the protection of Louis VII, trading excommunications and threats with the king while the pope tried to broker a peace.

A settlement of sorts was reached in 1170 and Becket came home. But in June, while he was still abroad, the Archbishop of York and the bishops of London and Salisbury had crowned Henry's eldest son in Westminster Abbey, a right that belonged to Canterbury. Becket excommunicated them. The bishops took their complaint to Henry, who was keeping Christmas at Bures in Normandy, and the king flew into a rage. The famous line, "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?", is a much later invention; the monk Edward Grim, who was present at the murder, has Henry raging that he had nourished drones and traitors who let their lord be mocked by a low-born clerk. Whatever he said, four knights of his household took it as a command.

Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy and Richard le Breton crossed the Channel, gathered at Saltwood Castle in Kent and rode to Canterbury. They first confronted Becket in his chamber and demanded that he lift the excommunications and answer to the king. He refused. They left to arm themselves and came back through the cloister into the cathedral. In the half-light near the steps to the choir they tried to drag him outside; he held on to a pillar. Then they struck him down with their swords. Grim, a visiting monk from Cambridge who had stayed at his side, put up his arm to protect him and was badly wounded. Becket died on the floor of the north-west transept, at about fifty years of age.

Nobody was ever brought to trial. The king, whatever his private feelings, did not arrest his own men, and the church dealt with them in its own way. The knights withdrew to Hugh de Morville's castle at Knaresborough. Pope Alexander III excommunicated them, and when they went to Rome to seek absolution he ordered them to serve fourteen years in the Holy Land. Henry swore he had never ordered the killing, and in July 1174 he walked barefoot to the tomb and submitted to being scourged by the monks.