No aspect of the psychology of Becket’s journey from the worldly warrior-chancellor to the conflicted, brave, otherworldly priest and victim of his later years is more intriguing than the metamorphosis he is alleged to have undergone after his consecration. Several of the earliest biographers report him as experiencing something close to a Damascene conversion, seeing him as a second Saul in the Acts of the Apostles. ‘Touched by the hand of God,’ they say, ‘he put off the old man and put on the new’, a line most effectively dramatized by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in his play Becket, published in 1884 and first produced in 1893 with the virtuoso Henry Irving making his last stage appearance in the title role:
I served our Theobald well when I was with him;
I served King Henry well as Chancellor;
I am his no more, and I must serve the Church.
This Canterbury is only less than Rome,
And all my doubts I fling from me like dust.
His character was turning, but the biographer’s trap is to look for a decisive moment of change – to do that is to write the history of the saint without his shadow. Rather than being two distinct individuals before and after a watershed, Becket had become a divided consciousness as chancellor, displaying worldly ambition and acquisitiveness on a grand scale while keeping his body chaste, saying his prayers regularly and allowing himself to be scourged before attending confession and the mass. On the other hand, given his attitude to his intellectual development so far, it is a little unrealistic to imagine that the ideas fast breeding in his highly receptive brain as archbishop had been gradually absorbed over many years. The chances are that they had been put there recently by someone, and that he resumed his studies neither for pleasure nor to satisfy his teachers, but to gather texts and arguments that would justify his cause.
If we are to believe his earliest biographers, visible changes to Becket’s lifestyle immediately accompanied his consecration. He abandoned hunting and falconry. Instead of wearing the finest silks and costliest furs, he put on a monastic garb beneath his outer clothing and mortified his flesh with a hair-shirt. It is even claimed that he was wearing the habit of a monk beneath his outer vestments when he was invested with the pallium in his cathedral. Not content with this, he adopted Theobald’s old habit of rising with the Christ Church monks at around 2 a.m. to say his daily office before washing the feet of thirteen poor men in secret and then returning to bed until about 6 a.m., when he studied a varied selection of devotional works to prepare himself for mass, which followed at around 8 a.m. The biographers concede that, unusually for an archbishop, he did not say the service daily himself, but argue that this ‘was not through neglect, but through extreme reverence’. On the days when he did consecrate the host, he would first study Anselm’s prayers. He would then hear legal cases in his court of audience from about 9 a.m. until dinner, which was eaten between noon and 2.30 p.m. depending on the season. During the meal, his cross-bearer and sacristan, Alexander Llewelyn, would read aloud passages from Scripture or some Latin work, as was customary in a monastic cathedral setting. Once the plates had been cleared, Thomas would retire to his private chamber with his clerks and some specially-invited guests. Passages from Scripture or the Church Fathers would be debated, giving him a welcome opportunity to try out his ideas informally.
A closer examination reveals that the earliest biographers handle this material in markedly inconsistent ways. Such inconsistencies are extremely damaging, since they tend to throw the whole into question. To begin with, Becket only abandoned hunting and falconry little by little. That he rose every day in the early hours of the morning to say his prayers with the monks and wash the feet of thirteen poor men seems unlikely, but is impossible to verify. And where his dress is concerned little or no change occurred during his first year as archbishop. Only after some fifteen months, and perhaps even later still, did he finally decide to cast off his silks and scarlet in favour of a simple dark robe or mantle lined with nothing more luxurious than lambskin. As to his alleged hair-shirt, no solid evidence can be found that he ever considered wearing one before fleeing into exile in France.
The biographers come even more embarrassingly unstuck when describing the new archbishop’s alleged change of eating habits. According to their stories, ‘he now partook of the sparest diet and his favourite drink was water in which fennel had been boiled’. Himself merely sipping out of courtesy the wine he served to his guests, he only picked at the dishes set before him, preferring to dine on plain bread.
This is palpable fiction. Thomas was often abstemious, but chiefly for dietary reasons: his colitis had meant that for the last ten years or so, he had eaten and drunk only in moderation. He also continued to insist on the finest and most delicate food. Herbert of Bosham, who was present throughout and alone gives a faithful account, admits that his table still glittered with gold and silver plate and that the food served in his great hall was the best that his purveyors could find. Among other costly specialities, venison, boar and pheasant were regularly on the menu. Such luxury naturally exposed him to criticism: these provisions could have been sold and the money given to the poor. An anecdote survives of how he one day justified himself to a gluttonous abbot who sneered at him for eating game in Lent. ‘If I mistake not, brother,’ he had retorted, ‘there is more greed in your eating beans than in my eating pheasant.’ His logic was that he might be eating richly, but at least he was eating less.
But if the notion that Becket underwent a conversion overnight from Saul to St Paul is far too crude, there were discernible changes in him. Soon after his consecration, he chose Herbert of Bosham to be his divinity tutor. Thereafter, as Herbert himself recounts, he was ‘like a man awakening from a deep sleep’. He began to study in depth and out of this process of prayer and self-examination was able to reanimate the spiritual side of his character. And as time went on ‘the new man hungered to be revealed and would let himself be hidden no longer’. Thomas increasingly ‘embraced the holy image-bearing Scriptures with deep attention and devotion’. He sought eagerly ‘by his new learning to shake off the old ignorance which long occupation with the world had brought, so that he, a new bishop, should be reformed to the new image of a bishop’. In particular, he mastered every conceivable detail of the case put forward by the ascetic reformers for the immunity of the clergy from secular jurisdiction: ‘Touch not mine anointed’ (Psalm 105:15) was one of several biblical mantras to which Herbert introduced him.
That Becket took his biblical studies extremely seriously can be verified: the earliest fruits can be detected in his correspondence, where he began quoting Scripture constantly. In perhaps his earliest surviving letter written as archbishop, the one in which he orders Henry of Winchester to restore a missing gold cross to his cathedral, he wove together multiple quotations from Isaiah, the Psalms, the Book of Wisdom and the Song of Songs. Another letter to Gilbert Foliot, congratulating him on his enthronement as bishop of London, is built around material from the Psalms and the Gospels. Paraphrasing the passage in the Sermon on the Mount in which Christ compares his disciples to ‘the light of the world’, Thomas declares that, with Foliot’s promotion, ‘the lighted lantern which lay as if hidden under a bushel has now been placed on a lamp stand, so that it can spread its light far and wide through the house of the Lord’. Such a clumsy attempt to mollify his rival would only earn its author a further dose of hearty contempt, but the letter proves handsomely Becket’s increasing familiarity with the key passages of Scripture.
Other signs of his intellectual reawakening can be observed in the contents of the library he would gradually begin to amass. After his murder his personal possessions became the property of the Christ Church monks, one of whom catalogued his collection of seventy or so books as it existed in the early fourteenth century. Many of these manuscripts would be purchased after his final breach with Henry, but Thomas had acquired a dozen or more earlier. One of the very first people he would ask for help in tracking down a copy of a book for him after his consecration was John of Salisbury’s friend Peter of Celle, from whom he requested the sermons of Gebuin of Troyes, a disciple of St Bernard.
As archbishop Thomas was said to carry a book in a pocket of his outer garments, even when on horseback. Roughly one-tenth of the actual volumes from his collection can still be traced today, dispersed when the monasteries were suppressed by Henry VIII and now hidden away in Oxford or Cambridge libraries. Most were de luxe productions, two still in their original bindings and with a note of Thomas’s ownership on the flyleaf. Whether he was chancellor or archbishop, it seems that when he wanted something it always had to be the best that money could buy. Before printing with movable metal type was invented, books had to be copied and illustrated by hand. Extremely expensive if they also included colour illustrations, as several of Becket’s certainly did, they would have been treasured and studied, not merely tucked away in his travelling coffers as cultural trophies after a single cursory browse.
Organized around four main themes, most likely under Herbert’s influence, Becket’s collection, according to the fourteenth-century inventory, brought together scriptural and devotional works, moral and political philosophy, canon and civil law, history and rhetoric. A small section of works on classical history and military and the physical sciences, including duplicate copies of The Art of War by Flavius Vegetius, had most probably been previously acquired while he was chancellor, those on military science doubtless around the time of the Toulouse campaign.
The first category is by far the largest. As would be expected of a newly-appointed archbishop, Thomas purchased copies of the Latin Vulgate Bible together with a variety of different commentaries on nearly all the individual books of the Old and New Testaments. As a novice obliged to preach in his cathedral at the major church festivals, he also acquired a set of preaching or devotional aids, including Gebuin’s sermons and a popular commentary on the story of Noah’s Ark. He dipped extensively into the Church Fathers, notably St Isidore of Seville, St Cyprian and St Gregory of Nazianzus, chiefly their scriptural paraphrases or writings on the obligations of the ministry, but his copy of the famous Apology of St Gregory of Nazianzus, a largely autobiographical work, would have struck an immediate chord with him. Ordained a priest against his will at an early age, the young St Gregory had been nominated archbishop of Constantinople on the insistence of the Emperor Theodosius, had reluctantly yielded and was initially acclaimed as the hero and restorer of Christianity, only to be attacked, denounced and ridiculed within months for his ignorance and inexperience. After surviving for a year in the face of fierce rivalry and opposition from his fellow-bishops, he had resigned, retiring to his family estates in Cappadocia.
Overall, Herbert of Bosham steered his pupil towards an understanding of the plain texts of Scripture. Far less time must have been allocated for deeper, abstract theology, since such genuinely heavyweight Church Fathers as St Augustine and St Jerome were not on Becket’s reading list. Herbert did introduce him at some stage to one leading manual of scholastic theology, Peter Lombard’s Sentences, but since this was the latest and most fashionable work on the subject, he may have acquired it more for the sake of appearances.
Of the books Thomas had already collected as chancellor, the most interesting is the handsome presentation copy of John of Salisbury’s Policraticus now safely preserved in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, which his friend had dedicated to him and delivered to him by courier while he was still camped with Henry’s army outside the gates of Toulouse. A copy of Livy’s History of Rome, acquired in Italy and now in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, was another of John’s gifts, and to complement it, Becket purchased Cassiodorus’s Variae, which continues Livy’s story to the end of the classical era. He owned a popular History of Troy and its companion The Life and Deeds of Alexander the Great by Quintus Curtius. For insights into the physical and natural world, he turned to Gaius Julius Solinus’s Polyhistor, an encyclopaedia often found in cathedral or monastic libraries, much of which is plagiarized from Pliny’s Natural History.
Thomas had already encountered Gratian’s Decretum and Justinian’s Code and Institutes as a young clerk in Theobald’s household, and as archbishop he would soon purchase his own working copies of these standard works. Lastly, to hone his preaching and oratorical techniques, he obtained a copy of the famous handbook of the first-century rhetorician Quintilian, The Training of an Orator, besides what is likely to have been a well-thumbed copy of an anthology of the Attic Nights by Aulus Gellius, a second-century author famous for his wordplay, conceits and racy anecdotes.
Although the idea of a Damascene conversion peppers several of the earliest biographies, it is significantly missing from John of Salisbury’s earliest vignette of Becket in the form of an open letter circulated among his friends within a few weeks of the murder. Between friends there is, of course, no need for pretence: those like John who had known Thomas from his earliest days as a clerk in Theobald’s household were under no illusions that his career would be something of a rollercoaster, that he was far from an obvious candidate for sainthood; in fact they would have considered utterly absurd the whole idea of his future canonization by the pope.
Chief among Thomas’s critics in the same year as he was consecrated archbishop is Peter of Celle, who at his abbey of St Rémi at Rheims scribbled innuendo against him into the margins of a manuscript of Lactantius, a third-century Christian apologist persecuted by the Emperor Diocletian. Unimpressed by his search for a copy of Gebuin’s sermons, Peter was scandalized by what he believed to be Becket’s fondness for grand gestures. ‘Hear, Thomas’, ‘Nota’, he scrawled alongside several passages of Lactantius warning that generous gifts to and from the rich and powerful or to those from whom something is expected in return are unworthy of the name. Always the force of these annotations is the same: Becket’s life shows that he is little better than a charlatan. His faith is superficial, his behaviour driven by pride and ambition, and by mingling with the great and good with such relish, he is helping the wicked to flourish at the expense of the just and innocent.
No more could Peter be convinced by changes in outward appearances. Although Peter still addresses him as chancellor, as Becket continued to hold that office until the autumn of 1162, his letter in answer to the request he had received for a copy of Gebuin’s sermons must have been written after Thomas’s consecration as archbishop, for why else would Becket need a preaching crib? Despite promising to send the sermons, Peter’s response is icy. Somewhat cheekily, Thomas had asked to be admitted into his intimate circle, effectively to become one of his penfriends, for nothing in the eyes of Christendom could have done more to advertise a fledging archbishop’s claim to piety and spirituality. Peter, whose galaxy of celebrity correspondents had included Peter the Venerable and St Bernard, brutally snubbed him in return:
What common ground is there between the abbot of Celle and the chancellor of the English king? Who does not know that you are second only to the king in four realms? Who does not count me first in the sufferings of our brothers? My words are carefully weighed, for to the degree that I find you more and more excellent, I realize myself to be all the more worthless. By no means, then, shall I extend to you the hand of friendship, but if we were to become mere acquaintances, I should be flattered.
Peter, who during these years rarely strayed far from his comfortable cloister where he was busily directing the rebuilding of the abbey-church, was as yet unaware that his friend John of Salisbury had rallied to assist Herbert of Bosham in revitalizing the moral side of Becket’s character. Still not allowed into Henry’s presence without an official minder but steadily recovering royal favour after his disgrace in 1156–7 for meddling in Irish policy, John had no appetite for a second brush with the king but would steadily warm to the new archbishop to the point where he willingly consented to assist him by performing duties similar to those he had undertaken for many years for Theobald.
John’s cooperation was not lightly to be assumed. A candid critic as well as a dutiful friend, he had severely rebuked Thomas for ‘putting the king before God’ when imposing scutage on the Church as chancellor. Moreover, once he took the plunge and joined the new archbishop’s household, his relationship with Becket’s divinity tutor would be far from smooth. Herbert of Bosham was something of a zealot who allowed his pen and his tongue to run away with him. He and John often sharply disagreed, but generally only over timing and tactics. On basic principles they tended to agree. In particular, a close affinity existed between them concerning the punishment of criminous clerks. On that explosive subject, they spoke, and would continue to speak, as one.
If Herbert’s influence chiefly came to bear in the sphere of Scripture and knowledge of the Church Fathers, John’s was in assisting Becket with intelligence-gathering across Europe using his legendary networks of friends and correspondents, in helping with the drafting of correspondence and ensuring its delivery and in stimulating Becket’s interest in his moral obligations as a minister of the Church, notably in relation to Henry. John wholeheartedly agreed with Herbert that any infringements of the Church’s liberty were an affront to God. Already in the final chapters of his Policraticus, completed in 1159, he had carefully built upon Robert of Melun’s theories of resistance to a tyrant, agreeing with him that the officers of the Church, not least an archbishop, had a duty to impose sanctions, but taking the argument considerably further by claiming that a good pastor should resist a wicked ruler who stubbornly refuses to mend his ways even to the point of martyrdom.
When the squabbling with Henry over criminous clerks turned into something far more dangerous, Becket would begin to draw heavily on these ideas. John’s influence, felt as early as 1163 and 1164 and in full flood by 1165 and 1166, is apparent from what appear to be Thomas’s own marginal notes in his presentation copy of the Policraticus. Chiefly comprising the letters ‘a’ and ‘b’ and also a small banner or flag, ranked according to a system in which the flag appears to indicate the most significant passages and ‘a’ and ‘b’ the next most important, these annotations have never previously been noticed and can only be satisfactorily observed with the assistance of high-resolution digital photography. The bulk appear in John’s account of how tyrants are to be called to account for their transgressions, many of them where he discusses the extreme difficulty of distinguishing when a tyrant is condemned by God from when his tyranny is merely a manifestation of God’s providence in the world, sent to scourge the people for their sins. Also greatly troubling the annotator is the extent to which a tyrannical ruler can be disciplined by someone already tied to him by a bond of fealty, as Becket was. Tyrants may be brought to account by the Church and perhaps also by the community, but they are to be punished without loss to religion and honour; hence a man who has sworn an oath of fealty to a tyrant may already have disqualified himself from being an agent of divine retribution. Often the safest method of dealing with a tyrant, the annotator observes, is through prayer and penitence, in the hope that punishment might be inflicted on him by the visitation of God. The classic dilemma is whether action should be taken, or the remedy left to God’s providence.
If Thomas really is their author, these annotations suggest that he was indeed undergoing something of a conversion, but chiefly inside his own head. With Herbert and John as his most trusted councillors, he would soon acquire a clear vision of the world, one he would find utterly compelling, even if the reasons that had driven him to acquire it in the first place were another matter. Now Scripture and the Church Fathers, papal decrees and canon law would become the acid test of his relationship with Henry, whom he would paint in the colours of a tyrant for his determination to subjugate the Church. Soon the new archbishop would be proclaiming to Pope Alexander and to anyone else who would listen that, ‘Although the king must be obeyed in many things, he must not be obeyed in those things which cause him not to be a king.’ While it remains true that ‘what is Caesar’s must be rendered unto Caesar’, rulers who seek to subordinate the Church to the secular power are tyrants whom the Church must resist. Anything appropriated by the secular power over and above its lawful entitlement ‘belongs not to Caesar but to a tyrant’.
Such ideas would gradually come to furnish Becket with what he would regard as a supremely convincing narrative justifying his quarrel with Henry, enabling him to interpret the past and the present in a coherent way so as to create a clear message for his supporters and for posterity. If the king wanted to attack the Church, Thomas would be forced to rebuke him, as John the Baptist had once rebuked King Herod.
If the early biographers thought they had observed a metamorphosis in Becket, surely this was it.