1170
Fifty-two years and eight days later, on December 29th 1170, he was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral by four knights who had taken at face value the outburst of King Henry II, not aware that kings, like all frail human beings, do not always mean precisely what they say, or in this case mean precisely what they mean. Henry was so upset, he appointed Thomas' sister Mary as Abbess of Barking Abbey by way of compensation - an equivalent in "damages" to many millions today.
One of my very earliest sketchbooks includes a hasty charcoal drawing of the "is that meant to be some sort of Crucifixion?" that adorns Becket's tomb in Canterbury, and in front of me as I write this is my ridiculously over-notated A-level teaching copy of Graham Swift's novel "Last Orders", in which a pilgrimage to Canterbury, including a pause at Becket's tomb, beautifully merges Chaucer with William Faulkner (Swift "borrowed" his narrative technique from Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying"), and then with Somerset Maugham, because after Canterbury the Swift tale continues on to Margate by way of Whitstable, where Maugham's "Of Human Bondage" found its final resting-place: what a splendid way of teaching literature as history and history as literature.The names of the four calumnious horsemen of this particular apocalypse were Hugh de Merville, William de Tracey, Reginal Fitzurse and Richard le Breton, four names whose etymology would, I suspect, be worth the exploring, to see if this tale is genuine history or belongs, in fact, as the Christmas dates also suggest, to a messing about with mythology (cf Robin Hood, Guy Fawkes et al). The unprecedented speed - less than two years - of his canonisation adds to my suspicions, as does the huge convenience for Henry, who lived all his life in Poitiers, and had nothing but a dynastic interest in England, of having his own personal saint, his own personal guilt to expiate, as a pretext for a triumphal procession to the seat of genuine English power, just two more years after that.
I wanted to include Thomas' sister, Abbess Mary Becket, on this page and in her own right, but first needed to know if she did anything to merit inclusion, other than being his sister, and getting the most important convent in England (click here for confirmation of that) as a form of reparation for his murder... but what was there to say about her? The history books don't even know her dates of birth and death. All they can tell us is that she became abbess in 1173, less than three years after his assassination, the same year that Pope Alexander III declared him a saint; though it is unclear whether she filled a vacancy because the previous abbess had died, or was appointed to replace her and her predecessor retired - the nearest name we have is King Stephen’s appointment, Adeliza, but she was already abbess twenty years before.
So I went hunting for, no not Mary Beckett, an exit from the train station at Ilford, where I was working on a totally different project; I had got on at the back end of a very long train, and heard someone say that there was a quicker way out over the bridge and onto Ilford Hill. There was indeed, and lo and behold, directly across the road, never seen in all my dozens of visits to the town because I always exit the front way... the Hospital Chapel of St Mary the Virgin, established by the aforementioned Adeliza in 1145 as a hospice for thirteen old and infirm men, but in such terrible condition when Mary became Abbess that you would have thought it was the stones, and not just half the local population, that was suffering from an outbreak of the most appaling leprosy.
Mary immediately set about enlarging the chapel and, just to poke the king in the eye, added “and Saint Thomas of Canterbury” to its name, then threw open the doors to all the local lepers, including many of the nuns and servants of the Barking convent who had succumbed to this incurable and highly infectious disease.
My visit, and the photos below which can also be found in a longer piece about Ilford in P's London, was in the late autumn of 2019. I had intended to go back the following spring to investigate and photo more, but unfortunately they had to close it to the public when the COVID plague broke out (I am told that it is now once again re-opened)
Vera Brittain, feminist author (as opposed to authoress), and mother of Shirley Williams (once Labour, latterly Social Democrat politician), born today in 1893 (and strangely this is their logo-colour, probably because they think they are waiting at an amber traffic light to be given the green light to government, and don’t realise they are not)
Now, as it happens, the first President of the new Czech Republic was sworn in on February 2nd, 1993 - an interesting choice, given that this was a man whose family property had been confiscated by the Communists, who had been denied access to formal education, whose plays had once been banned and his passport confiscated, who had been one of the senior troublemakers of the Prague Spring, who had served four years in prison for daring to challenge the legitimate government's record on human rights, and who had previously served as President of a country whose very existence had now been declared obsolete: the selfsame Václav Havel.
No comments:
Post a Comment