The Assassination of Thomas Becket
THE four knights soon found England too hot for them. Hugh Morville let the others hide out with him in his Cumbrian castle, but his servants (and even his dog) refused to know them. So they fled to Rome, to throw themselves on Pope Alexander III’s mercy. He ordered them to make pilgrimage to the holy land, where three of them died;* William Tracy died before leaving Italy.
Nor did King Henry spare himself. In 1174 he rode from Southampton to Canterbury fasting severely, then walked barefoot to the Cathedral where he did public penance, bidding the clergy scourge him with knotted ropes.* He too sought pardon from the Pope, for which he was obliged not only to make generous benefactions to the Church and to Becket’s relatives, but more irksomely to renounce all his plans for control over the English Church.
“For the defence of the Church, I am ready to die” Becket had declared; and by his death he had defended it.
Their penance was apparently deep and sincere, for they were buried before the doors of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
His grandson, Henry III, built a magnificent new shrine in the Cathedral, but it was one of the first to be destroyed in the Reformation under King Henry VIII. Becket had come to symbolise the independence of the Church from State interference, making him a prime target for the Reformers’ wrath.