“The biographer’s trap,” John Guy remarks in “Thomas Becket,” his
portrait of that foremost friend turned foremost foe of Henry II, “is to
look for a decisive moment of change.” But, he adds, “to do that is to
write the history of the saint without his shadow.” With Becket, this
temptation often seems to have been irresistible, from the very night of
his murder, Dec. 29, 1170, near the high altar of Canterbury Cathedral.
As a crowd swooped down on the battered corpse of the archbishop,
tearing off pieces of clothing to dip in the gruesome puddle of his
blood and brains, the outlines of the story of Becket’s sudden
conversion from luxury-loving chancellor to ascetic defender of the
church were already being rehearsed, soon to be followed by tales of his
miraculous powers.
Although Guy is known as a historian of the Tudor period, he admits to a
long-held fascination with the 12th century’s “extraordinary galaxy of
larger-than-life characters.” And his previous book, “A Daughter’s Love:
Thomas More and His Dearest Meg,” must have provided ample
psychological grounding for this new one, tracing another struggle
between an imperious, unscrupulous monarch, Henry VIII, and another
stubborn commoner who found it impossible to bend to the royal will. In
the case of Becket, Guy was also aided by an array of firsthand source
materials, many of them biographies written by men who knew Becket
themselves. Shrewdly contrasting them and assessing their biases, Guy
has constructed his own modern successor, assisted by electronic search
engines and high-resolution digital photography, which revealed
previously invisible annotations in volumes from Becket’s personal
library.
After almost 900 years, are there any shocking discoveries to be made?
Was Becket, as an “impressionable teenager,” rather more than the fast
friend and protégé of Richer de l’Aigle, a Norman aristocrat and dashing
older man who introduced him to hawking and hunting and courtly
manners? Guy assembles enough evidence to suggest that Becket’s mother
(to whom he was very close) might have tried to separate the pair by
sending her son to Paris for schooling. But he hedges his bet, arguing
that the adult Becket “could not have been homosexual” because Henry
would have used this as evidence in the course of their deeply
acrimonious public feud.
And what of Henry and Becket’s own fabled closeness? Were they once “as
inseparable as lovers or blood brothers”? Here Guy deconstructs the
conventional narrative to find hints of tension from the very beginning.
Becket (a surname, we are reminded, that would rarely have been used by
his contemporaries, and then usually as a slur to remind him of his
origins as the son of a London merchant) had been placed in the royal
household to be the eyes and ears of his predecessor as archbishop. More
than a decade older than the young king, he was a talented bureaucrat
and a useful tutor. But Henry gradually felt less need of such a guide.
What he wanted was a trustworthy pawn, and he assumed he had created one
when he made Becket his chancellor and then his archbishop. Becket’s
decision to quit his government post and swear primary loyalty to the
pope came as a shock and an outrage to a monarch not known for his even
temper.
And what of Becket’s decision itself? Here Guy deftly sets a timeless
and all-too-familiar emotional tussle — two proud men, each convinced he
knows the other’s fatal weaknesses, each feeling grievously wronged —
against the less familiar social and political landscape of medieval
Europe, showing how Becket’s belief that his religion obliged him to
oppose a tyrant evolved under the influence of various scholars. Just as
important, Guy shows how Becket’s positions were shaped, during his
forced exile from England, by the complex and often brutal maneuverings
of rival popes, rival rulers, even rival clerics within his own church.
Sometimes boxed in, sometimes miscalculating, dependent on networks of
spies and bravura displays of piety and power, Becket and his sovereign
engaged in a lengthy rivalry that looks more like a chess match than a
morality play.
Guy’s depiction of the succession of convocations and parleys where this
struggle was enacted could have been as wearing as the meetings must
have been for the participants. But he heightens their drama by
stressing Becket’s flair for “set-piece encounters,” occasionally adding
a twist of sardonic humor. During one great council, deputations
shuttled between Becket, on the ground floor of Northampton Castle
wielding his cross like a battle lance against an insufficiently
cooperative cleric, and Henry, upstairs shouting at his courtiers and
refusing to descend lest a face-to-face encounter result in
excommunication. After a later failed attempt at reconciliation in
France, the order of service in the royal chapel was hastily changed
when it looked as if Becket might unexpectedly appear: the liturgy for
the day of the dead was substituted, thus eliminating the necessity for
the usual “kiss of peace.”
Both darkly comic and deeply tragic, Guy’s biography is a portrait of a
saint with plenty of shadows. Does it diminish Becket for us to know
that this future martyr in a hair shirt also made sure to keep a fine
silk robe handy for his return to Canterbury, a stately progress one
chronicler compared to Christ’s entry into Jerusalem? That his
abstemious diet was partly the result of a lifelong susceptibility to
colitis? That one of his oldest and closest friends would have found his
canonization “utterly absurd”? Only if we prefer the black-and-white
certainties of hagiography to the convincingly human portrayal of a
charismatic, contradictory individual who was, as Guy puts it, “as
prickly as he was smooth . . . a man with the habits of a hedgehog.”
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