The Conquering Family

  After the killers had left the cathedral and had ridden away in a sudden terror over what they had done (riding furiously with dread at their shoulders all the way to the castle of De Moreville in Cumberland, to find that the hermit Godric had already spread the word of their crime), the monks cleared the cathedral and hastily closed and locked the doors. They knew that Robert de Broc, who did not seem to share the remorse of the others, was ransacking the palace. There was nothing they could do. They waited until the insensitive brother of the brutal Randulf had broken open all the archiepiscopal coffers and taken possession of the state papers of the Church and stripped the place of costly vestments, the utensils of gold and silver, even the book; and furniture, and had left. Then they departed from the cathedral, doing nothing about the body.

  Later in the night Osbert, the chamberlain, mustered up the courage to return. With slow and reluctant steps he made his way to the north transept, holding a candle above his head, starting at every sound. The body, he found, was lying on its face, the scalp hanging by no more than a piece of skin. Cutting off a bandage from his habit, Osbert bound the head with fingers which had become reverent and tender.

  Other monks now followed him into the darkness of the great church. Speaking in the lowest of whispers, they decided to turn the body over. They found that the countenance of their murdered master was strangely full of peace. The eyes were closed, the lips seemed to smile, there was no more than a single streak of blood on the bridge of the nose. They stood about him in awed silence for several moments and looked down at him. All doubts they might have had about Thomas à Becket were gone.

  Then, still in the most complete silence, they brought clean linen and bound up the head properly. The body was lifted and carried to the high altar, which was called the Glorious Altar of Conrad, and laid there in state. Candles were lighted around it, and a vessel was placed where it would catch the blood which still dripped from the mutilated head. No longer, then, could their grief be restrained. They stood in a circle, these men who had served under him, and not all of whom had been loyal by any means, and wept bitterly. It was a long time before they turned silently to go back to their dormitories and left Thomas à Becket to his God.

  People who have been reared in the Christian faith believe in miracles, and it caused no surprise the next morning when Brother Benedict told the other Canterbury monks of a vision which had come to him as he slept. Without knowing how or why, he had found himself in the choir and had seen the archbishop rise from where he lay and stand before the altar as though to begin mass. The monk, in bewilderment and fear, had approached closer.

  “My lord,” he asked in a whisper, “are you not dead?”

  “I was dead,” answered Thomas à Becket, “but I have risen.”

  While the monk watched in still greater confusion of mind, an invisible choir had begun to chant, and the voice of the primate had joined in with, “Arise, why sleepest thou, O Lord? Arise, and cast us not out forever.”

  None doubted that what Benedict had seen had actually happened. With reverence and yet a trace of dread, they approached the altar where the body lay. A few of the candles had guttered out during the night. They blazed up again suddenly, and some of the watchers were certain that a hand not of this earth had been responsible. Some of them also declared they had seen the arm of the archbishop raised to bless them.

  The good people of Canterbury had not slept. They had lived out the night in groups in their darkened houses, wondering what the assassins might do next and what sublime things might be happening where the body of the martyred man lay. When the word came from the cathedral soon after dawn that miracles had begun already, there was almost a frenzy to visit the spot and see the sacred clay. They swarmed up the aisles and gazed with awe at the calm face on the altar. Suddenly a woman, who had been so ill that she had been carried to the cathedral, cried that she was cured. She walked out with no assistance, her family following and rejoicing.

  This started such a wave of fervor that no one in that large assembly seemed human. They laughed and wept, they prayed, they went down on their knees to touch pieces of cloth or handkerchiefs to the reddened stones. Many more who had been afflicted cried that they were cured.

  The anti-Becket faction realized at once the danger of allowing this emotional wave to spread throughout the country, and quick steps were taken to suppress it. Sir Randulf de Broc, the perfect model of the brutal tyrant of the law, was preparing to remove the body and dispose of it before it could be given proper burial. Hearing this, the monks hastened to bury their master before the altar of St. John the Baptist in the crypt. They built a wall around it with a small opening through which the sarcophagus could be seen. Even the bloodstained hands of Randulf de Broc did not dare disturb this tomb.

  When the news reached London, the Archbishop of York, who was there, went into the pulpit at St. Paul’s to declare that the death of Thomas à Becket was an act of divine punishment. The violent man of Canterbury, he cried, had perished like Pharaoh in his wickedness and pride. Other bishops followed his example, and from pulpits all over the land rang out denunciations of the dead man as a traitor. It was even demanded that his body should not be left in consecrated ground.

  All this wildness and fury had no effect. The people of England had seen the hand of God in what followed the death of the archbishop, and all the fulminations of all the bishops in the land could not make them change their minds.

  Miracles followed in quick succession. People came on crutches, gazed through the opening in the wall, and threw their supports away as they walked out. The miraculous power showed itself most often in the restoration of eyesight. Many blind people stood before the tomb in the crypt and went away, declaring they could see. One of these beneficiaries was a man whose eyes had been put out by the law, and this is a story which should be told.

  The man in question, whose name was Aylward, had been sentenced to this most horrible of punishments because he had broken into the house of a neighbor who owed him money and had taken away goods to compensate himself. Perhaps he was a moneylender and a hard creditor. At any rate, he stood in ill repute with the people thereabouts, for they combined to swear against him. Sentence of mutilation had been pronounced and duly carried out. This had happened in Bedford, and one night Thomas à Becket appeared at the bedside of the blinded man and told him to go the next day to Bedford Church and pray to have his eyesight restored. This Aylward did and suddenly cried out in a madness of excitement that it was as the saintly primate had promised, that he could see! To prove it, he left the church alone, without hesitation or stumbling. This, as might be expected, created more of a sensation than anything which had happened up to that time; for where his eyes had once been were dark and gaping sockets, and if ever man was blind for life, it was this unfortunate redeemer of debts.

  An investigation followed at once. Aylward was taken before a group made up of priests and citizens who studied his face with the greatest care. While they did this a strange thing happened. All of a sudden they turned to look at each other, to nod their heads in conviction. Each of them was convinced that the sight of the man had been restored as he had sworn! Somewhere in the unsightly folds of scar tissue, far back in the ugly sockets, something could be seen: a light, they thought, a mere pin point of light. This light was not always there, it came and went, but for that one moment at least all of them had seen it.

  Aylward went on living thereabouts and declaring he could see.

  It would have been impossible for those who wrote of these things at the time, and even more so for those who described them later, to make any accurate count of the miracles which were reported. They ran literally into the thousands. The power to speak and acknowledge sins was granted to dying people who had lost the use of their faculties. People appealed to the Martyr when in peril on the sea. Miracles of all kinds were performed by his blood, which had been saved in some quantity. It was given away in single drops. A receptacle containing
no more than a drop would suddenly be seen to have filled, and this fluid would possess the full potency of the original. For centuries thereafter there were in existence quantities of the Water of St. Thomas, as it was called, and the power to create miracles was still in it.

  While these miraculous manifestations were going on, and the whole Continent of Europe had united in belief, it remained a crime in England to say publicly that any miracle had occurred. It was at the risk of flogging or worse that a priest prayed for the soul of Thomas à Becket or mentioned his name in service. There were equal penalties for visiting the spot where he died, but in spite of this the roads were black with pilgrims. For a year no services were allowed in Canterbury.

  But no official dam, no matter how strongly built or stubbornly maintained, could hold back such a flood. Within two years the evidence was so overwhelming that the Pope issued a bull of canonization, and Thomas à Becket became St. Thomas, the most appealed to, the most talked about, the most revered saint in the calendar.

  Now that the sanction of Rome had been given, all doubts about the miracles ceased, all tendency to think or speak ill of him stopped. He had become so great in the eyes of men that for a time he monopolized all attention. Belief in him was manifested in unexpected ways. William of Sicily, who had married Henry’s daughter Joanna, erected a statue to the Martyr in the church of Monreale. Louis VII of France came to England to pray at the tomb of the man he had sometimes supported, sometimes neglected and opposed. He brought a gold cup and a very large diamond as gifts for the shrine of the saint. His visit was a dull excursion and without drama, which is not strange, because Louis was a dull man.

  The worship of St. Thomas continued unabated for several centuries. It became the custom for people to make a pilgrimage to Canterbury to pray at the tomb of the Martyr, often donning the gown of the palmer and carrying a staff. The three roads which led into the cathedral city were never free of men, women, and children, walking to the tomb. They came from all parts of the Continent as well, and the inns thereabouts flourished on the trade of guests who spoke no English but displayed their intentions by holding up a vial or the English penny which each pilgrim was supposed to leave. It has been estimated that as many as one hundred thousand pilgrims walked to Canterbury in a single year. In 1220, in the reign of Henry III, who was a great builder (and a bitter failure as a king in every other respect), the new cathedral was finished and a shrine of unexampled beauty was erected on the spot where the archbishop had fallen.

  He became to the people a symbol of everything right, a protector always looking down from the heavenly regions and ready to stand between them and aggression.

  One hundred years later a weak and dangerous king was building the wharf where the Tower of London fronted on the river in order to combat the action of the tides and to provide entrances from the water. He had no other motive, as it turned out, but the people were bitterly opposed. They suspected everything he did, and it seemed to them that what he was striving to do was to turn the Tower into a great fortress with which he could overawe and control London. They were delighted, therefore, when the silt under the foundations proved too unstable to hold and the walls came tumbling down one night. The King persisted and, with the assistance of a great architect and builder named Adam de Lamburn, began again. One year later to the very day, there was a similar crash. The barbican which had been going up above the wharf toppled over into the high tidewaters swirling about the base. This could not be coincidence, said the people of London to each other. Never before had the hand of God been seen more certainly than in this destruction of the treacherous King’s work. And then a story grew out of the incident which was repeated all over the city and then all over England, and was believed by everyone.

  On the night of the second crash a priest was passing and saw a figure, dressed in the robes of an archbishop and holding up a large cross, approach the masonry. There was a lack of substantiality about the figure, an unearthly glow, which told the frightened priest he was witnessing a visitation from the world of the spirit. Losing all power of motion, he remained where he was and saw the nebulous visitor approach the walls, asking in a stern voice, “What do ye here?” The cross was raised and then brought sharply down against the masonry. Instantly the walls crumbled and began to fall. There was a loud reverberation, a swirling of waters; the strange figure vanished, and so did the walls, tumbling into the eager current of the Thames.

  The priest, regaining his faculties, turned and ran. To the people who came rushing out of the houses and rubbing sleepy eyes, or from the doors of taverns in obscure closes and corners where behind bolted shutters they had been defying curfew, he told what he had seen, saying that he had recognized the spirit at once. It was St. Thomas the Martyr.

  The most striking evidence of the sentiment which existed throughout the Middle Ages is to be found in the burial of the Black Prince. This great warrior, who ranks in English history with Richard Coeur de Lion, died at an early age of an incurable disease, and his last days were spent in planning for his final home on earth. He wanted to be buried beside Thomas à Becket and he designed in the most minute detail the tomb he desired built for his bones. His wishes were carried out so far as the tomb was concerned, a handsome sarcophagus with the effigy of the great warrior, and the lions of England combined with the lilies of France. But it was deemed unfitting that so great a memorial should be erected in the crypt, and so it was placed instead near the site of what undoubtedly had been the Lady Chapel, where vespers were being sung on the night of the martyrdom. It is a pity that his last wishes were thus disregarded. There were points of difference between the primate and the prince but also some qualities they shared in common. They would have slept through the centuries in amity.

  7

  As for the four knights whose rash act of violence thus worked ill for the King they thought to serve, many legends about them have found their way into histories. They are generally supposed to have lived like lepers, that even dogs ran from them, that they could never escape the evidences of a revulsion which all nature had conceived for them. It has been most often told of them, and most generally believed, that they were summoned to Rome to receive sentences of punishment from the Pope, which took the form of going to the Holy Land to fight for the cross. Three of them are supposed to have died in Palestine and to have been buried in the church of the Templars in Jerusalem. The fourth, William de Tracey, because he had struck the first blow, was reserved for a special form of punishment. He was not permitted to reach the Holy Land because a strong wind always blew in his face and drove him back. This legend was believed even by his descendants, about whom it was written that “the Traceys have always the wind in their faces.”

  The facts, of course, are quite different. Each member of the execrated group remained in seclusion for some time and was then taken back unobtrusively into the royal service. De Moreville had been suspended for the first year from his post of justiciar-itinerant in the north counties but was then reinstated. Reginald Fitzurse certainly went to Ireland with the forces of the Norman barons. He remained there, founded a family which retained the estates he had won with the sword, and became later a branch of the MacMahons. Four years after the dark events which stamped him with the brand of Cain, William de Tracey was made a justiciar in Normandy and lived out the balance of his life there. Le Breton seems to have settled down on his estates in Somersetshire.

  From this it is clear that Henry did not try to escape his share of the guilt by laying it all on the shoulders of the men who had heeded his ill-considered words. As will be shown later, he was prepared to assume guilt himself and to seek expiation in his own way. However, his willingness to take the knights back into his service affords additional light on his motives and his reactions. He must have become reconciled to what they had done after the first reverberations had died down and the danger of sacerdotal lightnings had been averted. He felt an increasing relief that the primate, immovable in life, had
been thus cleared from his path. Not then could the future be glimpsed, and Henry would have no realization of what this would do to his memory; how his greatness as a king would be obscured and forgotten and he would be remembered for the shoddier aspects of his life, seen against the dark curtain of one of the worst crimes in history.

  8

  Henry received word of the death of his uncompromising opponent at Argenteuil in Normandy. Without uttering a sound he turned and went into a seclusion which lasted for three days, seeing no one and refusing food. What his thoughts were can well be imagined. He would be under no delusions as to what this meant to him. The opinion of the world would be against him, he would be blamed and condemned, he might expect that the Pope would excommunicate him as the instigator of the murder. He would know this: in the duel he had fought with his one-time friend he had emerged the loser, even though it had been necessary for the archbishop to die in order to score a victory.

  The most superficial examination of Henry’s character would leave no doubt, however, that these considerations would not occupy his thoughts to the exclusion of everything else. It has already been said that he never completely lost an affection, and it must be remembered that his friendship with Becket had been a deep one. There is every reason to believe that, as he wrestled with his conscience and his unhappiness through those three long days, regrets for the death of that strange man were often uppermost in his mind. Perhaps he would think of the many times he had ridden into the hall of the chancellery and had vaulted across the board to the seat reserved for him. It had been a stimulating relationship and it would have been continued on the same basis if he had not insisted on putting his friend into the higher post where he had ranked next to royalty. His sharp temper had often made him wish for Becket’s death, of course, but this had been no more than a phase of his sudden rages. In his sober moments he had not wanted the struggle to end in tragedy. But it had been rash and bitter words of his which had led to the murder, and he knew that nothing he could do would remove the stain.