Assassination in the Cathedral

The true story—that is, the spiritual story—of medieval Europe’s most shocking and momentous assassination.

On the twenty-ninth of December, the year one thousand one hundred and seventy, four knights entered Canterbury Cathedral in England. They had just confronted, unarmed, Archbishop Thomas Becket, in his private chamber. The discussion didn’t go well, and the second time, they brought their swords.

Tempers were flaring and the archbishop, a man of profound spirituality and iron will, had defied them all. Their threats meant nothing to him. Their demands were ignored. When enraged knights in full armor storm out of your room amidst a bitter and unresolved dispute of immense political significance, it’s time to find a hiding place.

But Becket sought no hiding place, though many were available. He carried no weapon, raised no alarm, planned no escape. Instead, he did one of the most remarkable things in the history of political violence. He walked into his church, an open and unprotected space, in order to sing. For it was the hour of vespers, the beloved evening prayer of medieval Christianity, and the monks were already chanting vesperal psalms in the choir of the cathedral.

Thomas Becket was assassinated, and savagely, in the house of God. Soon thereafter, he was venerated as a martyr. His death testified to the rights of the Church, and the primacy of divine law, and the Christian ideal of always choosing heaven over earth. But it testified to something else that modern commentators seem to overlook: a spiritual song—sung with sacred words and ancient melody, by a community of faith, to an all-loving God—is worth a great deal. Perhaps it is even worth dying for.

This visual narrative of Thomas Becket’s martyrdom was painted shortly after the event took place.

In my introduction to the Via Mediaevalis newsletter, I stated that I have no intention of attempting to vindicate the many villains of the Middle Ages. Was King Henry II—who incited, probably unintentionally, Becket’s assassination—one of these villains? He was not. At the height of his royal career he may well have been the most powerful man in Europe, and he is widely esteemed as “the greatest king of medieval England.” Henry was no saint—alas, “great” often does not equate to “good” in the political world—but he was a respectable and highly successful statesman.

This depiction from the Ramsey Psalter, c. 1200, emphasizes the blow that grievously wounded Becket’s head.

Cultured and astute, confident and decisive, Henry was a famously skilled administrator who reined in corruption, opposed favoritism, and improved England’s legal system. His diverse accomplishments, right there in the historical record for all to see, are truly admirable—and largely forgotten. He is not and never will be remembered as “the king of wise judicial reform.” History is a story, and the story of Henry II’s life revolves around one event: the death of Thomas Becket, his former friend and eventual enemy who vanquished the most powerful man in Europe with the strength of two fundamental beliefs: that God is greater than the king, and that the spirit is greater than the body.

I don’t hear much about T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral these days. Now that I think of it, I don’t hear much about T. S. Eliot these days, even though he is arguably the most famous English-language poet of the twentieth century, and even though his lectures drew crowds large enough to fill a football stadium (one of them actually took place in a university football stadium).

Murder in the Cathedral is a fine play that explores, in Eliot’s quiet, erudite way, two interdependent conflicts: Thomas Becket’s psychological struggle against temptation and his civilization’s architectonic struggle between Church and State. These struggles culminate in a death that the play’s chorus laments as a monstrous desecration, and which the play’s assassins hasten to justify in sophistical prose speeches filled with glaring banalities. The real-life assassination of Thomas Becket unfolded upon the cold stone of Canterbury Cathedral with the drama and poetic intensity of a Greek tragedy. This event—utterly outrageous, morbidly captivating, deeply symbolic—was a natural choice for Eliot when he decided to compose a play for the Canterbury Festival of the Arts in 1935.

Those unforgettable, and really quite surreal, photographs of Donald Trump—enclosed in a living suit of armor with blood on his face and his fist in the air—are rather tame compared to the medieval chroniclers’ graphic account of Becket’s appalling slaughter. They also bear an entirely different significance, given that Donald Trump and Joseph Biden are both, from a medieval perspective, on Henry II’s side of the political aisle. As American presidential candidates, they necessarily uphold an American principle—absence of a governmentally endorsed religion—that was unimaginable during the Middle Ages but nonetheless discernible, in embryonic form, when princes such as Henry II attempted to curtail the authority of the Church.

The martyrdom portrayed in a fifteenth-century Flemish manuscript. Medieval artists, living in a culture permeated by eloquent paradoxes, were content to surround a gruesome murder with little blue flowers and butterflies.

The conflict between Becket and his king became a crisis when Becket tenaciously opposed the Constitutions of Clarendon, a set of sixteen provisions by which Henry II sought to consolidate royal power. For a casual modern observer, the provisions read like obscure administrative details that merely exemplify the strange preoccupations of medieval monarchs and bishops. Hardly a casus belli. Hardly something worth dying for.

But a sage and zealous Christian like Becket could see where the Constitutions would lead. They would lead to a loss of balance—a loss of health, of wholeness—in the body politic. They would bring the realm one step closer to dominance of the Crown, representing society’s earthly needs, over the Cross, representing society’s heavenly needs. The provisions would restructure communal life so as to favor power over justice, time over eternity, body over spirit. And in an age that understood communal life as a reflection of and influence upon the interior life, such actions could be seen as an assault on human nature itself. Thomas Becket, a consecrated minister of God and devoted shepherd of souls, was having none of it.

This fresco of the martyred archbishop was painted in Italy perhaps less than a decade after the assassination. Devotion to St. Thomas spread rapidly throughout Europe.

Winter shall come bringing death from the sea.
Ruinous spring shall beat at our doors,
Root and shoot shall eat our eyes and our ears,
Disastrous summer burn up the beds of our streams.

Thus the chorus of Murder in the Cathedral gives voice to the ancient human fear of fraught moments and ominous changes in the political realm. “Some malady is coming upon us,” it sings: “We wait, we wait.”

Becket, however, walked calmly to his doom, despite being the focal point of a raging political tempest. Witnesses saw that even after dying slowly, amidst heinous violence, his face was remarkably serene. He lay “as if asleep,” with his eyes turned toward the altar. Long years of prayer and asceticism had filled his mind with thoughts that Eliot’s chorus spoke only haltingly, between auguries of ruin:

Destiny waits in the hand of God, shaping the still unshapen:
I have seen these things in a shaft of sunlight.
Destiny waits in the hand of God, not in the hands of statesmen.

At one point in the play, Becket is conversing with a group of panicky priests: “No time to waste. They are coming back, armed.... They are already here.... They are breaking in. We can barricade the minster doors. You cannot stay here.... They will break through presently. You will be killed.” The archbishop reassures them: “I am not in danger: only near to death.”