Thomas Becket by John Guy

Author:John Guy [Guy, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-60341-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-07-02T16:00:00+00:00

SUNDAY WAS MEANT to be a day of rest, but Becket spent it at the priory in earnest, anxious conclave with his clerks. “Scarcely,” reports William fitz Stephen, “was there a free hour to breathe and take sustenance. The archbishop did not leave his lodgings all day.” The psychological and emotional pressure was mounting. Thomas, facing the crisis of his life, could not have failed to be deeply apprehensive. As dusk fell, the strain became unbearable, and later that night, his colitis flared up in a highly aggravated form. “He was struck by an illness that is called a colic,” says Herbert of Bosham. “His loins were shaking with cold and pain,” resumes fitz Stephen, “and it was necessary to keep his pillows warm and replace them regularly.”

On Monday morning, he was unable to ride to the castle, but Henry and the barons suspected a feint. “They considered this sickness to be a fiction,” says Herbert, “and sent some of the leading barons to investigate the claim.” Meanwhile, rumor had it that Henry had been overheard swearing that if Becket did not yield, the king would have him executed or thrown into a dungeon to rot. Whether this was playacting or merely arose from the febrile atmosphere at the castle over the weekend is unknown. But the story reached the ears of Thomas’s clerks.

On Tuesday, the archbishop awakened feeling better. Barely had he dressed when the bishops reappeared to report that Henry had resolved to try him that day as a traitor. They begged him to resign or submit unconditionally to the vengeful king. Stunned by their defeatism, Thomas wondered why so few of them were guided by principle or love of the church; why so many acted simply out of ambition, fear, or a mixture of the two. He believed that by interpreting the dispute purely as a personal quarrel between himself and Henry that could be ended by his resignation as if at the stroke of a pen, his colleagues were missing the point. Even if they did not like him, he was their spiritual leader. If they allowed him to be crushed, they and the church would go down with him. Henry, he had come to think, wished to subjugate and enslave the church. His view of the king as a tyrant had recently received what seemed to be the strongest possible endorsement, in the shape of a letter from John of Canterbury warning him that Henry was already attempting to extend the ancestral customs across the Channel to all his continental dominions. Becket knew that he had to make a stand, even if his colleagues deserted him. On no account was he going to allow their counsel of despair to dampen his resolve.

Becket most likely met his fellow bishops in the Lady Chapel at the priory, a place well-known to several of them, since the Benedictine monks of the Canterbury province held their triennial gatherings there. Suddenly finding new reserves of inner strength, Thomas raised himself to his full six feet before addressing them.

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