Swiftly dismounting from their horses in the courtyard for soon it would be dusk, leaving their chain-mail and weapons stacked up beneath a mulberry tree, the four knights strode into the archbishop’s great hall, where the members of Becket’s household were finishing dinner and the plates being cleared away, demanding to talk immediately to him.
Becket deliberately kept them waiting. When at last he arrived to greet them, all save Reginald fitz Urse, a natural bully, were tongue-tied. The verbal confrontation is described by at least five eyewitnesses, all monks or clerks who were present throughout. Their reports, written independently at different times and quoting what they claimed to be the exact words spoken, concur remarkably and read so vividly and journalistically, although set down originally in Latin, that they might have been done yesterday.
‘God help you,’ began fitz Urse, making himself spokesman for the four. ‘We have brought you a message from the king. Will you hear it in public or in private?’
‘Whichever you choose,’ replied Thomas.
Hastily putting aside their plates, the monks and clerks began slipping away, until Thomas recalled them, correctly guessing that if he was left alone with these potential assassins, they could easily have killed him on the spot with their bare hands.
John of Salisbury interjected, ‘My lord, let us discuss this in private.’
But Thomas knew better. ‘It would serve no good purpose,’ he answered firmly. ‘Such things should not be spoken in private nor in the chamber, but in public.’
‘When the king made peace with you,’ fitz Urse resumed accusingly, ‘he sent you back to Canterbury as you requested, but you – in contrary fashion, adding insult to injury – have broken the peace and in your obstinate pride have excommunicated those at whose hands the king’s son was crowned and anointed, from which it is all too clear that your intention would be to depose the king’s son and take away his crown if you had the power.’
‘Never was it my wish as God is my witness,’ said Thomas, ‘to disinherit my lord the king’s son or to diminish his power. Even now I am ready to satisfy my lord wherever he pleases, if in anything I have done amiss; but he has forbidden me with threats to enter any of his cities and towns. In any case, it was not by me, but by the lord pope that the bishops were excommunicated.’
‘You were behind it,’ snarled fitz Urse.
Thomas remained calm. ‘I do not deny that it was done through me, but the sentence itself was given by my superior and is beyond my power to change, and it is certainly beyond my power to absolve the archbishop of York as he is outside of my jurisdiction. I made an offer to the bishops of London and Salisbury for their absolution if they humbly sued for pardon and agreed to accept the verdict of the pope, but they rejected it.’
‘The king’s orders are that you and yours must depart this realm with all your men: from this day forth there can never be peace with you, for you have broken the peace.’
‘Stop threatening me, Reginald. I put my trust in the king of heaven and from this day forward I refuse to leave my church. Once I fled like a timid priest. Now I have returned to my church in the counsel and obedience of the lord pope. I have not come back to flee again: anyone who wants me can find me here. You know that the lord king, on St Mary Magdalene’s day at Fréteval, admitted me again to his peace and favour and sent me back to England with a letter of safe-conduct? Some of you I know were present there, and it seemed to me that you were pleased at the event.’
‘From whom, then,’ countered Reginald, ‘do you hold your archbishopric?’
‘My spiritual authority,’ answered Thomas, ‘I hold from God and the lord pope, my temporalities and material possessions from the lord king.’
‘Do you not recognize that you hold everything from the king?’
‘By no means; we must render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.’
‘But I’m telling you,’ said Reginald, grinding his teeth, ‘what the king says. You’ve been rash enough to excommunicate his officers when you ought to have shown respect to the king’s majesty and submitted your vengeance to his judgement.’
Thomas, bridling and pausing for breath, drew himself up to his full height. ‘In vain you threaten me. If all the swords in England were aimed at my head, your threats could not dislodge me from my observance of God’s justice and my obedience to the lord pope. I tell you I shall strike at anyone who violates the right of the pope or Christ’s Church. I will not spare him, nor will I delay to impose ecclesiastical sentences upon him.’
The knights stepped forward, jostling him and threatening, ‘You’ve risked your head by saying that.’
‘Are you then come to slay me? If so, I shall commit myself and my cause to the great judge of all mankind. I am not moved by threats, nor are your swords more ready to strike than is my soul for martyrdom. Find someone else to frighten – you will find me steadfast in the battle of the Lord.’
‘We are king’s men,’ growled fitz Urse. And, turning to the monks and clerks, he cried out, ‘In the king’s name, we command you, both clerks and monks, to seize and hold that man, lest he flee before the king can take full justice on his body.’
Storming out, they took two of the archbishop’s servants as hostages before they left, provoking Becket to pursue them as far as the door, angrily demanding that they release his men. Contemptuously they took no notice.
Once outside, at a signal from one of the knights, the crack troops stationed in the house opposite the gateway to the archbishop’s palace charged into the courtyard, crying, ‘King’s men, king’s men!’ Once inside, the great gate was slammed and bolted behind them, and Simon de Croil, a tenant of the neighbouring abbey of St Augustine’s, put on guard in the porter’s lodge with orders to prevent anyone from entering or leaving. Gathering a handful of their retainers, the four knights then returned to the mulberry tree to collect their swords and chain-mail, arming themselves in the porch of the archbishop’s great hall.
Thomas, meanwhile, had returned to his clerks, reassuring them and telling them not to be afraid. Some were utterly terrified, others believed there was no undue cause for alarm. ‘The knights,’ they said, ‘were drunk when they arrived. It was the drink speaking, and we have the assurance of the king’s peace.’
John of Salisbury, who believed that Becket could have shown more tact towards the four knights, took the lead in trying to calm things down, talking candidly to his friend, as he had done so many times before during the last twenty-five years.
‘Look, Thomas. You’re doing what you always do. You act and speak on impulse, saying just what you like, never asking anyone’s advice. What need was there in a man of your rank to inflame and exasperate those butchers still further? Would it not have been better to have taken our advice and given them a softer answer?’
His intervention has always been taken by Becket’s biographers to support the notion of Thomas as incorrigibly reckless and impetuous. Impulsive and a risk-taker he often could be, but on this occasion nothing would have been different whatever he had said to the angry knights. John – ever prudent, a lover of life, his friends, his books and a bottle of wine, and at fifty-three only three years older than Thomas and too young to die – lived mainly in a world of scholars and of the mind and was terrified at the prospect of violence. For all his fine talk in his Policraticus and elsewhere, he was no more willing to stand up to the king and the ‘untamed beasts’ than Becket’s old Paris master, Robert of Melun, had been. Only when Henry had insisted in 1166 that, as the price of his return to favour, John should swear an oath to observe the ‘ancestral customs’ had he reluctantly accepted that in all good conscience he had to stand his ground. Otherwise, his philosophy (as he had more than once declared) was to accept what Pope Alexander and Thomas had accepted and to reject what they had rejected.
Becket, who as chancellor had discovered to his cost what angry knights could be like in the council of war outside the gates of Toulouse, was in no mood for a lecture in philosophy, cutting the discussion short. ‘My counsel is now all taken,’ he said. ‘I know well enough what I ought to do.’
‘Pray God that it may turn out well,’ said John.
‘May God’s will be done,’ was Thomas’s reply.
No sooner were these words uttered than a terrible noise was heard outside. The knights were back, and this time their followers were with them. Clad in full armour, carrying swords, axes and hatchets, they tried the door between the porch and the archbishop’s hall, only to find it locked and barricaded against them by Becket’s servants. Frustrated in their first attempt, they hurriedly retraced their steps into the courtyard to search for a back way in. And they were lucky, because one of their number was Robert de Broc, the royal sequestrator who had occupied the archbishop’s palace for the last six years and so knew all its entrances and secret passages. Following him, they scrambled along a side path and through some bushes into an orchard, where a set of stone steps led up to an oriel window on the opposite side of the building.
There they were in luck again, for workmen repairing the steps had finished for the day, leaving their tools and a ladder behind. Clambering up the ladder, the knights smashed open the wooden shutters of the window and jumped inside the hall, unbolting the door to admit their men waiting outside.
The monks, many of whom now stood around Thomas so as to shield him, urged him to take sanctuary inside his cathedral.
‘No,’ he answered. ‘Far be it from me. Most monks are too easily intimidated. Do not be afraid.’
The bell then rang for vespers, which Thomas had promised to attend. He rose, and instantly the monks tried to drag him towards a connecting door placed at the opposite end of the hall to the main entrance which led into a passage directly linked to the cloister. But he resisted their efforts until his processional cross was borne before him. Since his faithful cross-bearer, Alexander Llewelyn, had already left for France with Herbert of Bosham, it was carried by a junior clerk named Henry of Auxerre.
The monks reached the connecting door only to discover that the bolt had stuck. All hope of escape seemed lost until one of them, rushing forward, quickly said a prayer and pulled on the bolt, which slid back ‘as if in liquid glue’. Hurrying Thomas around the freezing cloister, a group of monks pushed him through a door leading into the north transept of the cathedral, slamming it shut before everyone was inside.
Thomas ordered them to reopen the door. ‘The Church,’ he said sternly, ‘is a house of prayer and is not to be made into a fortress.’
It was now dark and the monks whose turn it was to say vespers were chanting in the choir. The only light came from their candles and from the oil lamps above the altars in the adjacent chapels. Seeing Thomas stride into the cathedral, the monks ceased vespers and ran to meet him, rejoicing that he was alive and unharmed, since rumour had it that he was already arrested or dead.
Becket started to walk up the steps towards the high altar in the choir. He had already mounted four steps when fitz Urse burst through the cloister door, still in full armour and brandishing his sword, shouting, ‘Where is Thomas Becket, traitor to the king and the kingdom?’ It was a deliberate use of the archbishop’s low-born surname – an insult designed to remind him that he was very much the social inferior of his assailants. Within a few seconds the other knights were behind him, their swords drawn, followed by their retainers and friends. Pandemonium broke out inside the cathedral as all those who had been at vespers gasped in horror at the armed gang.
Greeted by a stunned silence, fitz Urse cried out again, ‘Where is the archbishop?’
‘Here I am. What do you want from me?’ answered Thomas. ‘I am no traitor to the king, but a priest.’
He now stood by the east wall of the transept, encircled by his clerks and monks, beside a pillar of the arcading. He might so easily have fled or hidden himself in the dark and winding passages of the crypt below or climbed a spiral staircase behind a concealed door nearby leading to the vaulted chambers in the cathedral’s roof, but he refused.
One of the assassins shouted, ‘Absolve and restore to communion those whom you have excommunicated.’
‘I will not absolve them until they have repented and made satisfaction,’ he replied.
‘Then you will die now and receive your just deserts.’
‘And I am ready to die for my Lord, so that in my blood the Church may obtain peace and liberty. But I forbid you in the name of God Almighty and on pain of excommunication to harm any of my men, whether clerk or lay.’
Then the knights rushed at him, and with bloodshed plainly imminent, three of his more fearful companions, John of Salisbury, Benedict of Peterborough and William of Canterbury, fled to hide under altars or in the crypt down a small flight of stairs – out of sight but still within earshot – leaving only Robert of Merton, Edward Grim and William fitz Stephen to stand beside him to the last.
When the other knights attempted to bundle Thomas on to the shoulders of William de Tracy so that they could deal with him outside, he threw his arms around the adjacent pillar, holding on with all his strength so that they could not dislodge him. Fitz Urse was the first to use his sword, taunting the trapped archbishop by flicking his fur cap off his head with the tip, then striking him with the flat side of the weapon, saying, ‘Fly, you are a dead man.’
‘Unhand me, Reginald,’ said Thomas, ‘You are my sworn vassal. You know well the bond existing between us. You and your accomplices are acting like madmen.’
These words, usually thought impossible to explain, make perfect sense in the light of fitz Stephen’s observation that fitz Urse, de Morville and de Tracy had sworn homage to Becket as chancellor, saving only their liege loyalty to the king. In reply, these three knights cried out their defiance, declaring that now they were the king’s men, not his, and fitz Urse grabbed at the archbishop’s cloak.
‘Unhand me, Reginald, you pimp,’ shouted Thomas, still enough of an athlete to shove him away with such force that he keeled over backwards. ‘I will not leave this church. If you wish to kill me, you must kill me here.’
Whether Becket called fitz Urse a ‘pimp’ as something more than a general insult is harder to unpick, but a credible reason might be that his position at Henry’s court was that of an under-marshal, an assistant to his friend and co-conspirator Ranulf de Broc, the king’s crony and official whoremaster.
‘Strike, strike,’ shouted a furious fitz Urse to his companions.
Thomas, realizing the moment had come, bent forwards, covering his eyes with his hands and saying, ‘To God and St Mary and the saints who protect and defend this cathedral, and to the blessed St Denis and St Alphege, I commend myself and the Church’s cause.’
William de Tracy lunged forwards, aiming a blow with his sword that glanced off the top of Becket’s cranium and cut through his clothing to the shoulder bone. Edward Grim, who stood his ground and was closest to Thomas, instinctively threw out one of his arms to shield him and was grievously wounded, his arm almost severed.
With blood streaming down his face from his head, Thomas continued to pray: ‘Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.’ As he knelt down, clasping and stretching out his hands to God, de Tracy slashed again, aiming at his head, causing him to fall prostrate beside an altar dedicated to St Benedict, his arms still outstretched.
While he lay there in agony, murmuring, ‘For the name of Jesus and the protection of the Church I am ready to embrace death,’ Richard Brito smote his skull with such force that he lopped off the whole upper portion of his head, causing sparks to flash as his sword struck the paving stones below and shattered into shards. ‘Take that,’ he screamed, ‘for love of my lord, William, the king’s brother!’ William, always one of Henry’s favourites, had, of course, supposedly pined to death in 1164 as the direct result of Becket’s refusal to licence his marriage to the widowed lsabel de Warenne. These knights were certainly settling some old scores.
Hugh de Morville, the fourth assassin, had been holding back the onlookers and did not touch Thomas, but one of his flunkeys, Hugh of Horsea, a renegade clerk known as ‘Mauclerk’ for his evil ways, delivered the coup de grâce, putting his foot on the archbishop’s neck to hold it still and, with the point of his sword, scraping out the brains from the hollow of his skull and smearing them, mixed with blood and bone fragments, over the paving stones, shouting out, ‘This one won’t get up again.’
The knights then hurried out from the cathedral and back inside the archbishop’s palace, where, after ransacking Becket’s chests and travelling coffers and stripping them of their gold and silver plate and cash, they mounted their horses and returned to Saltwood Castle, leaving the de Brocs and their men to loot anything else of value, stealing everything from clothes, furniture, rings, ornaments, vellum books and jewelled vestments to the horses and harness from the stables, and dividing the spoils among themselves.
When at last the looters had gone, torches were fetched and the monks and clerks, with a crowd of weeping citizens, thronged around the murdered archbishop. Even while his body lay cold on the paving stones, some of these onlookers, aware that a truly awesome event had occurred, cut off pieces of their clothing and dipped them in his blood for use as relics. Some daubed their eyes with his blood, perhaps hoping that their defective sight might be cured. Others brought tiny bottles and made off with as much blood as they could, either to keep or to sell. The paralysed wife of one of these souvenir hunters, when he returned home, asked to be washed in water mixed with drops of the blood. No sooner was her bath completed, says fitz Stephen, than she was miraculously cured. And within a week a local woman named Brithiva had recovered her sight through the application of a blood-stained piece of cloth, another woman married to a Sussex knight had been cured of blindness and a Berkshire knight cured of rheumatism in his left arm.
At last the monks succeeded in clearing the cathedral of the crowd. The remaining blood and brains, already beginning to coagulate and turn black, were carefully collected and put into a silver basin by a monk called Ernold, to become a precious treasure in later years. Becket’s pallium and vestments, stained with blood, were – ‘for the sake of charity and his soul’ – given to the poor, who immediately sold them for what they would fetch.
After his shattered skull had been bound with a white linen cloth, the archbishop’s body was placed on a bier, carried through the choir and laid before the high altar. Robert of Merton then said silent prayers, before thrusting his hand beneath Thomas’s outer garments to reveal a hair-shirt. Probably first put on while Becket was in sanctuary at the abbey of Pontigny and now teeming with lice, it caused a sensation among the monks, who had never been privy to this final secret, making many of them believe that they had seriously misjudged their spiritual leader.
Next day, Robert de Broc reappeared with another gang of thugs, threatening to drag Becket’s corpse behind horses to the gallows and hang it as a traitor’s, or else tear it apart and throw the pieces into a swamp unless the monks disposed of it speedily. Fearful of a second act of sacrilege, the monks made haste to bury it. There was no time either to wash the body or to embalm it, according to the usual custom for a deceased archbishop. Instead, after removing what still remained of his clothing apart from his shoes, hair-shirt and the monastic underclothes that he had also begun to wear at Pontigny, they dressed him as best they could in the vestments he had worn on the day of his consecration, all of which he had ordered to be kept ready for his return. Reverently they laid his chalice, ring, gloves, sandals and pastoral staff upon the corpse. The burial rites were said by the monks, but because the cathedral had been desecrated by bloodshed, no mass was held. Once the service was over, the body was interred in a stone coffin in the crypt facing two altars built into the east wall, one dedicated to St John the Baptist, the other to St Augustine, directly beneath the high altar where Thomas had celebrated his first mass.
Finally, a small group of monks – fitz Stephen says it was led by the same Ernold who had scooped up the last of the archbishop’s blood and brains – returned to the north transept to put benches over the spot where Becket had been murdered to mark it out and prevent it being trampled on by the feet of visitors. That place can still be seen, a site of pilgrimage scarcely altered after almost 900 years.