In the late summer of 1157, troops mustered by Henry II gathered on the saltings south of Chester to make their way up the coast of the Dee estuary. They were attempting to crush the most northern Welsh princes who had run amok, in the eyes of the English, during ‘the Anarchy’ of the reign of King Stephen. Thomas Becket, then still chancellor, had consulted soothsayers about the best time to launch the assault but they can’t have been much good given the problems the expedition ran into – Henry’s accompanying fleet mauled when it put into Anglesey, the king himself ambushed with his army in Flintshire, bombarded in a narrow pass by rocks and arrows, a massacre only avoided by Henry managing to fight his way out of a thicket.
Eventually the Welsh sued for peace as Henry advanced into Snowdonia. Becket was busy handling paperwork in Chester at the time and the chroniclers do not mention any role he played in the combat itself. But some of them stated he reinvented himself as a warrior from the time of the Welsh campaign. Their views speak of the inconsistencies of medieval life where it was far from unheard of for chancellors and other high-status clerics to don chainmail and fight. Becket certainly played his part in a later campaign that culminated in the siege of Toulouse where castles, towns and large swathes of land were razed to the ground and despoiled. He personally led a cohort of some 700 knights from his own household, taking great personal risk and endangering his elite troops unnecessarily, an impulsiveness which some said first showed itself when he fell into a millstream when hunting as a teenager, possibly while trying to impress his aristocratic friend Richer de l’Aigle.
It all speaks of the juxtaposition of roles and ironies of the life of the man who consorted great controversy during his life if not necessarily its wake. Becket we know could be stubborn and wilful, not unlike Henry, whose story forms the twin lodestar of the then archbishop’s fate. Speaking of both of their lives it is easy to judge or jump to easy answers. Becket after all had had a profound galvanisation of belief when made archbishop, possibly borne of insecurity regarding his fitness for the new role. We know it marked a turning point, that the worldly, even sometimes violent life of chancellorship was now behind him.
If he could be set in his ways, religious to a fault, in some eyes almost fanatical at times, we can say too his actions spoke of a very real courage. We know for instance that, even if some of his intuitions could be overblown, he certainly came to conceive that, in obstructing Henry, he was fighting a very real autocracy, even an actual tyrant and that he personally constituted the Church’s best defence in a struggle for supremacy that formed one of the themes of medieval governments for centuries either side of his life.
If any of that sounds abstract, we can consider that his messengers were sometimes tortured, swathes of his family and followers, including babes in arms, were cast out of their homes in the middle of winter in a fit of public retribution by the king, a whole religious order that had offered Becket shelter was threatened with expulsion, his bishops were menaced with threats of imprisonment or mutilation to speed along negotiations and his final days took place amid a climate of abuse and paranoia where his properties and followers in Canterbury were seized and harassed respectively and he was accused of inciting civil war. He didn’t flinch in the face of any of this and, when the time came, while he very easily could have hidden, he chose to stand his ground in the face of men whose capabilities and intent could not have been hard to surmise. Perhaps he was tired of pursuit. Perhaps he could simply see where it was going and probably had been for years.
In England, it sometimes feels we can be too disposed towards an ingrained cynicism, resent success or can be too willing to knock a good man down. What other country would take its national bard and undermine his achievements by accusations of collusion and ghost writing, his national holiday hidden away on St George’s Day (the anniversary of Shakespeare’s death) as if he doesn’t quite deserve a celebration of his own?
Perhaps the same can be said of our treatment of Becket; that, where there is doubt, it can go against him, that notions of Saints in any case are about as credible as a moon made of cheese and the very essence of religion is the stuff of fairy stories better relegated to a simpler, recalcitrant age. We are all the bold enlightened now and ought to have no place for superstition, castigate at every turn the high and mighty even if such grandness was never a thing that they sought.
But perhaps, as belief systems go, we can remember that, for all our modern cleverness, the most important things cannot be cut and dried and comprehended in a solely intellectual way. Love itself, the fabric that binds the very world together, is not a thing of equations, that the best and truest alchemy is one first and foremost of psychology, that we cannot comprehend our most intrinsic gifts by seeking to pull them apart.
Becket then can stand as an icon for a world we should not let slip through our fingers. While it can feel at times we haven’t learnt a thing since the eleven hundreds, can we be lit up at all by the things which ought to provide foundations for our lives – love, fidelity and principles; qualities Becket so surely helped embody?
The story goes, the day he fell into the stream at Michelham, the miller – oblivious to his presence – stopped the wheel in its motion just in time to avoid calamity by sheer feat of serendipity, an occurrence that was meant to have instilled in Becket a greater sense of providence and faith. Can we, even now, cultivate a belief in the more mysterious aspects of this world, the kind of mysteries that can underpin it all; a language not forgotten of the currency of love, the human heart, where discoveries only lead to a better understanding of the sense that it is all still much bigger than us, that we still have so much that we can learn?
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Copies of ‘The Shrine Way: an English Pilgrimage’ can be ordered at westmarch.co.uk
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