What follows is a continuation of the elements of the north portal at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Martyrs Portal, by Senior Guide Tom Fedorek. All of the major sculptures will be dicussed in depth as the series unfolds. – RM
St. Thomas Becket greets us from the first niche on the left side of the north portal. He wears the vestments of a 12th-century Archbishop of Canterbury. His pallium – the T-shaped band of cloth hanging from his shoulder – was at that time a vestment reserved for archbishops. His cape-like chasuble drapes over a calf-length dalmatic with an elaborate relief on its hem. Beneath the dalmatic, an ankle-length alb and the tips of his stole peek out. His left forearm bears the short scarf known as a maniple.
The “Life of Becket” window in Canterbury Cathedral conveys what the limestone image cannot – the lustrous splendor of medieval vestments.
John Angel forgoes the opportunity to place a miter atop Thomas’s head, thus drawing the viewer’s attention to his face. His brow is broad. His deep-sunk eyes gaze straight ahead, unlike his north portal neighbors, who all direct their eyes elsewhere. His expression is thoughtful and alert, suggesting he is a perceptive observer and attentive listener. With fingers as long and slender as those of a concert pianist, he clutches a book.
Dropping our eyes to the low-relief on the dalmatic’s hem, we see a battle at the climactic moment when one horseman unhorses another. The victorious horseman is Thomas, and the scene reminds us that he lived a very different life prior to becoming Archbishop of Canterbury in 1162.
The Life & Death of Thomas Becket
Thomas was born in 1118 to a wealthy Norman merchant family. (One often sees his name styled in the Norman manner as Thomas à Becket.) After a good education and a stint as a clerk in the City of London, he entered the service of Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury. Showing promise, he was sent abroad to study law. Upon his return, he was ordained a deacon and appointed archdeacon of Canterbury Cathedral. The position put him in frequent contact with the royal court on matters of church and state.
In 1155, Henry II, twenty-one-years-old and newly-crowned, appointed Thomas Chancellor of England. Over the next seven years, Thomas served the youthful king faithfully as a trusted advisor, diplomat, and confidant. He thrived at Henry’s royal court amid the councils and intrigues while also enjoying the hunting, hawking, feasting, and other luxuries.
Thomas even led troops into battle during the king’s Toulouse Campaign in 1159. The battle scene shown in low-relief on his dalmatic depicts an incident described by his colleague William Fitzstephen in his Life of Saint Thomas:
He himself [Thomas], cleric though he was, engaged the valiant French knight, Engelramme de Trie, in single combat. They charged at each other, with their horses at full speed. Thomas unhorsed the knight and took his charger. Of the whole English army, the knights of the Chancellor were always first, more daring and distinguished by their achievements, responding fully to the instruction, leadership, and instruction of their noble chief.
A turning point came in 1162 when the throne of the Archbishop of Canterbury was empty due to Theobald’s recent death.
Henry sought to reclaim the centralized authority the monarchy had once enjoyed but lost during the period of civil war known as the Anarchy (1138-1153). Among other initiatives, he hoped to establish a single system of justice by abolishing the independent ecclesiastical courts that held jurisdiction over anyone in holy orders charged with a crime. How better to achieve this end than by placing his own Chancellor on the throne of the Primate of the English Church?
But once enthroned as Archbishop, Thomas shocked the king by resigning as Chancellor and advocating for the Church’s independence. He also went through a profound personal transformation. In his own words, he changed from “a patron of play-actors and a follower of hounds to a shepherd of souls.”
Over the next three years, the uncompromising archbishop and the hotheaded king argued rancorously over “criminous clerks” and other matters relating to the boundaries of the respective authority of church and state. After an explosive confrontation with the king in 1165, Thomas, fearing for his life, fled to France. During his exile, Thomas enjoyed the support of Pope Alexander III.
In 1170, Becket returned to Canterbury under a tentative reconciliation negotiated by the pope. It quickly dissolved into acrimony. In an oft-quoted but probably apocryphal outburst, the exasperated king exclaimed, in the presence of his court, “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” Hearing this, or other words to the same effect, four ambitious knights sensed an opportunity to gain royal favor for themselves and set off for Canterbury to assassinate the archbishop.
Most of the pedestal is devoted to the murder, shown at the instant it occurs. The narrative is a panorama that wraps around the pedestal starting from the left side, moves across the center, and spills onto the right side. John Angel carefully follows the eyewitness accounts of the incident.
Pedestal closeup of St. Thomas Becket as he is murdered by four knights in Canterbury Cathedral.
Standing before a monk holding the prayer book before him, Thomas reads the evening office known as Vespers. One knight approaches Thomas from behind the monk. Three others creep up behind Thomas. One knight strikes the first blow as an unarmed man attempts to intervene. He is Edward Grim, Thomas’s secretary, who will later write an eyewitness account. According to some accounts, as the knights departed, one sliced open Thomas’s skull and scattered his brains on the floor as a coup-de-grâce.
Grim reports that a moment before the first blow fell, Becket prayed: “I commend to God, to our lady St. Mary, and to St. Denis my cause and the right of the Holy Church.” Becket may have become devoted to Denis, the 3rd-century bishop of Paris, during his exile in France. Angel positions the two martyred bishops directly opposite one another in the portal.
The Aftermath
As news of Thomas’s murder spread quickly throughout Christendom, he was universally acknowledged as a martyr. No sooner was he laid to rest in Canterbury’s eastern crypt than a never-ending stream of pilgrims began arriving to pray at his tomb, lured by tales of miraculous healings in the presence of his relics. Pope Alexander III canonized him in 1173, a mere 26 months after his death.
Pedestal closeup, Henry II does penance.
The final image on the pedestal shows Henry on his knees as a monk scourges him.
Henry, who was widely held responsible for the murder, performed several public penitential acts. In July 1174, he walked barefoot through Canterbury to do penance at the cathedral. As Becket biographer John Guy recounts:
There, in the presence of dumbfounded courtiers and the monks, he knelt before the tomb in the crypt and repeated his earlier confession that his “incautious words” had been the principal cause of Becket’s murder … He was then lightly scourged (probably with rods of birch or elm bound together in a bundle) receiving five strokes each from the bishops present and three from each of a hundred or so Christ Church monks … With so many strokes delivered, Henry’s scourging cannot have been severe and was more symbolic than real. The public humiliation was, however, the same, which for a royal penitent was the true penalty.
In 1220, fifty years after his martyrdom, his remains were translated to a new shrine in Trinity Chapel at the cathedral’s east end. Of the shrine, Canon D. Ingam Hill writes in his guide to the cathedral:
Its splendor was to dazzle the Christian Church in northern Europe for the next three centuries. This shrine was to draw pilgrims up the great flights of steps to kneel around the chapel in prayer and worship at the round of masses and services which were maintained independently of the normal liturgical life of the choir below until the Reformation.
Over those three centuries, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims climbed the stairs on their knees, wearing down the stone in a way that can be seen to this day.
The shrine became one of the most-visited pilgrimage sites in Europe. Some pilgrims came seeking healing, others to give thanks for it, as recorded in the General Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales:
And specially, from every shires ende,
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The holy blissful martir for to seke,
To hem hath holpen whan they were seke.
(“And especially, from every town in England they travel to Canterbury to seek the holy blissful martyr, who helped them when they were sick.”)
After Henry VIII severed the Church of England’s connection to Rome, he ordered the shrine destroyed. Thomas’s bones disappeared – burned, according to one account. Nevertheless, five centuries later, Thomas Becket continues to be revered as a martyr, particularly by Christians living under repressive governments.
Today, visitors to Canterbury may pray at the Altar of the Sword’s Point – a jagged metal cross suspended above a plain altar stone, accompanied by two red-pointed swords whose shadows double their number, recalling Thomas’s four assassins. The memorial, created by sculptor Giles Blomfield in 1986, is in the chapel where Thomas was martyred. A stone marks the spot where he fell.
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Sources
- Atwater, Donald. The Penguin Dictionary of Saints 2nd ed. (Penguin, 1983).
- Farmer, David Hugh. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 2nd ed. (OUP, 1987).
- Fordham University, Internet Medieval Sourcebook. “Edward Grim: The Murder of Thomas Becket.” https://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/source/Grim-becket.asp
- Guy, John. Thomas Becket: Warrior, Priest, Rebel (Random House, 2012).
- Harvard University, Chaucer Website. “The Martyrdom of Thomas Becket.” https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/martyrdom-thomas-%C3%A0-becket
- Hill, D. Ingram. Canterbury Cathedral (Bell & Hyman, 1986).Loyola University, Loyola eCommons. “An Annotated Translation of the Life of Thomas Becket by William Fitzstephen.”https://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1621&context=luc_theses
Major sculpture on the north and south sides of the Martyrs Portal. Photos: Robert F. Rodriguez