London - Edward Rutherfurd [166]
He did not come like a lamb. Becket might have made peace with the king, but not with the bishops who had insulted him by crowning the prince in his absence. Within days he had excommunicated the Bishop of Sarum and Gilbert Foliot, the contemptuous Bishop of London. The English Church was in an uproar. “It’s worse than when he was away,” his opponents protested. Foliot and his supporters sent messengers across the sea to Normandy, to let King Henry know what was passing in his kingdom.
One of them was also paid, by the Silversleeves family, to keep them informed.
In the mid-afternoon of 30 December 1170, Pentecost Silversleeves, dressed in several layers of clothes to keep himself warm, was engaged in a curious activity. With a pair of waxed and polished beef shin bones attached to his feet by leather thongs, he was pushing himself along with the aid of a stick. He was skating.
London’s skating rink lay just outside the centre of the city’s northern wall. Even now, eight hundred years after the Romans had left, the old watercourses, through which the Walbrook stream passed under the wall were still choked with rubbish, so that the undrained area outside remained a marsh. Moorfields, they called it. A morass in summer, in the harsh midwinter it froze into a vast, wild skating rink where Londoners came to enjoy themselves. It was a cheerful scene. There was even a man selling roasted chestnuts on the ice. But Pentecost was not cheerful.
For the news the messenger had just brought from Normandy was very bad.
“The king’s going to arrest Becket. Foliot has won,” his father had told him that morning. “That’s bad for you: Foliot hates criminous clerks as much as Henry does.”
“Perhaps the king’s forgotten me by now.”
“No. He still speaks of you. So,” his father concluded grimly, “there’s nothing for it. You’ll have to abjure the realm.” And his mother had begun to cry.
Abjure the realm. Leave the kingdom. It was the only way a criminal could escape justice. But where could he go? Nowhere in Henry’s vast domains. “You could go to the Holy Land on pilgrimage,” his mother had piously suggested. But this did not appeal to Pentecost in the least.
Mournfully therefore he pushed himself about, and the sun was dipping when a fellow came running out from the city, shouting the message that, within a month, would echo all round an astounded Europe.
“Becket’s dead. The king’s men have murdered him.”
And Pentecost ran home, to find out what it meant.
The murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket took place before the altar of Canterbury Cathedral, at vespers on 29 December in the year of Our Lord 1170. Monastic historians, who at that date reckoned the new year from Christmas Day, often give the year as 1171. The details remain ambiguous.
Four junior barons who were of the party sent to arrest Becket, went on ahead, confronted the archbishop themselves, and in a scene of the utmost confusion, killed him. Having heard Henry cursing Becket in one of his rages, they thought he would be pleased.
But it was the aftermath that really shocked the world. For when the frightened monks began to strip the archbishop’s body, they found to their astonishment that, concealed under his clothing, the proud prelate had been wearing the rough hair shirt of the penitent. Not only that, it was crawling with lice. Now, suddenly, they saw him in a new light. The chancellor turned churchman, the unexpected martyr, was not what he had been content to appear. This was no obstinate actor. His rejection of his former worldly life had been far more complete than anyone had guessed. “He was a true penitent after all,” they cried. A son of the Church.
The word began to spread, and with gathering force. London proclaimed the merchant’s son a martyr. Soon all England was saying it, and clamouring for him to be made a saint, no less. The chorus grew throughout Europe. The Pope, having already excommunicated the murderers and their accomplices, gave ear.
For King Henry II of England it was a catastrophe. “If not culpable, at least responsible,” the greatest churchmen