The Dissolution of the Monasteries
BUT, on the other hand, there is no doubt either, that the King’s officers and men punished the good monks with the bad; did great injustice; demolished many beautiful things and many valuable libraries; destroyed numbers of paintings, stained glass windows, fine pavements, and carvings; and that the whole court were ravenously greedy and rapacious for the division of this great spoil among them.
The King seems to have grown almost mad in the ardour of this pursuit; for he declared Thomas à Becket* a traitor, though he had been dead so many years, and had his body dug up out of his grave.* He must have been as miraculous as the monks pretended, if they had told the truth, for he was found with one head on his shoulders, and they had shown another as his undoubted and genuine head ever since his death. It had brought them vast sums of money, too. The gold and jewels on his shrine filled two great chests, and eight men tottered as they carried them away.*
Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1162 to 1170. Dickens adopts the form Thomas à Becket, which was not known in Thomas’s own lifetime; it appears to be a post-Reformation romance, possibly on the model of Thomas à Kempis (?1380-1471), Bishop of Utrecht, where à Kempis means ‘of Kempen’, his birthplace. Becket was born in Cheapside.
In 1538, Henry destroyed Becket’s shrine, the finest in England, and then held a macabre show trial in Westminster Abbey at which the saint’s remains were put in the dock, convicted of treason and sentenced to burning. Becket was assassinated in 1170 on the steps of the altar in Canterbury Cathedral, and as penance for his part in it King Henry II was required by the Pope to renounce all control over the English Church; that at any rate explains why Henry VIII chose to make an example of Becket. See The Assassination of Thomas Becket.
All over the country shrines were raided, the human remains burnt with dishonour and the valuables seized or auctioned off. Bureaucrats and progressive academics monitored the proceedings, and assured the King that it was in keeping with Modern Thought. Sometimes, however, the Government’s experts got more than they bargained for. See Cvthbertvs.