BOOKS AND ARTS
03 May 2012, Review by Nicholas Vincent
Opportunist yet man of principle
Thomas Becket: warrior, priest, rebel, victim – a 900-year-old story retold
John GuyViking, £25
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 Tel 01420 592974
"Celebrity culture” is sometimes reckoned an invention of the twentieth century. Yet, as celebrities from Hector and Achilles onwards could testify, the popular impulse to pair off the famous into titanic struggles is as old as mankind’s taste for storytelling. In Christian history, few rivalries have achieved the fame of that between Thomas à Becket, the middle-class Londoner, and his nemesis, King Henry II. After his butchering on the flagstones of Canterbury Cathedral, at least a dozen contemporaries wrote biographies of Becket. For the Pope, previously unconvinced of Becket’s sincerity, the martyrdom of December 1170 offered an opportunity to preach the heroism of a Church beset by secularism and other dark powers. Becket was canonised within 26 months of his death, a record beaten only by St Francis of Assisi. Thanks to his connections to the mass media of his day, above all to the networks of gossip and news-gathering controlled by the Cistercians (who like the Pope had been less than entirely supportive in his lifetime), Becket joined the celebrity A-list.
In recent years there have been two great retellings of his story, by Frank Barlow (first published in 1986) and by Anne Duggan (in 2004). Barlow argued the case for the prosecution: that Becket was a charismatic but ultimately histrionic and self-obsessed figure, his pride the symptom of insecurity caused by lowly birth and uncertain vocation. Duggan, by contrast, portrays neither a snob nor a poser but a genuinely spiritual leader. Her Becket is a wise manipulator of law and theology, resisting a tyranny Stalinist in its determination to stifle dissent. Duggan and Barlow’s books are both masterpieces, written by experts addressing a general audience yet with a degree of attention to the forensic details that has entirely transformed our understanding of Becket.
John Guy, Becket’s latest biographer, has few of the advantages of his
predecessors. Professionally, he is an early modernist more familiar with the period after 1500. He often relies on English translations from medieval Latin. He seeks to synthesise recent discoveries rather than to reshape the context. Yet, perhaps precisely because he finds himself on unfamiliar territory, explaining his vast canvas of personalities, events and ideas not only to his readers but to himself, the outcome is magnificently successful. This is a vivid, often contentious reworking of the materials that will both entertain and enlighten. As Guy concludes, Becket, for all his very obvious failings, fought with such conviction, against so powerful an opponent, that his story remains both moving and remarkable.
In essence, the hero revealed here is a blend of Barlow’s opportunist and Duggan’s man of principle. Guy’s Becket is shown to have been capable of both cowardice and foolishness. He never entirely understood the king, whose friendship was not the mutual bond of affection that Becket liked to suppose. His inability to choose a particular line and stick to it rendered him a traitor in the eyes of his fellow bishops, long before his flight to France branded him a traitor to king and courtiers. He betrayed or disappointed virtually all his patrons or defenders, from Archbishop Theobald via the Canterbury monks to his most intelligent propagandist, John of Salisbury. And yet the cause for which he fought was a worthy one, since the king’s schemes posed a real threat to the liberty of the Church.
This is an account not without problems. Through no fault of the author, the details of Becket’s exile in the 1160s are very complicated. Even the most attentive of readers may find themselves plunged too deeply into the thickets and thorns. There are numerous references to “Poitevans” (presumably a Poitevin car-hire service); witnesses did not seal the documents they witnessed (p. 299), and the old myth (p. 14) that writing was a seasonal occupation, abandoned in wintertime, should have no place in a book that deals with Henry II’s Constitutions of Clarendon, written down in the freezing cold of January 1164.
Attempts to impute a homosexual edge to the relations between Becket and his patrons, up to and including the king, may tell us more about present-day assumptions than they do of twelfth-century realities. Guy’s Henry II, indeed, is in many ways more Tudor than Plantagenet, modelled upon the author’s portrayal, in an earlier book, of the struggles between Henry VIII and Thomas More. We are told that Becket had no alternative but to resist the customs claimed by the king. Yet this is to ignore the extent to which those customs were themselves the king’s reaction to Becket’s lack of pliancy. Becket is here excused the charge of seeking his own martyrdom, at least until his final few days. Yet as early as the Council of Northampton, in November 1164, he had recited the Mass of St Stephen, deliberately aligning himself with the Christian protomartyr. Most of his early biographers went out of their way to demonstrate the long-term identifications that could be drawn between Becket and a Christ whose Passion was prefigured, if not predestined, from birth.
By using Anne Duggan’s English translations of Becket’s letters, Guy risks accepting a version of these texts that is itself subtly crafted for the defence. In doing so, he ignores the fact that, however much these letters resound with the rhetoric of friendship or intimacy, there seems not to be a single correspondent who could be considered Becket’s close personal friend. Saints often make for difficult acquaintance. Notwithstanding all this, for disclosing some of the difficulties of Thomas à Becket, and for rendering them both comprehensible and exciting to a modern readership, John Guy deserves both our thanks and our admiration.
In essence, the hero revealed here is a blend of Barlow’s opportunist and Duggan’s man of principle. Guy’s Becket is shown to have been capable of both cowardice and foolishness. He never entirely understood the king, whose friendship was not the mutual bond of affection that Becket liked to suppose. His inability to choose a particular line and stick to it rendered him a traitor in the eyes of his fellow bishops, long before his flight to France branded him a traitor to king and courtiers. He betrayed or disappointed virtually all his patrons or defenders, from Archbishop Theobald via the Canterbury monks to his most intelligent propagandist, John of Salisbury. And yet the cause for which he fought was a worthy one, since the king’s schemes posed a real threat to the liberty of the Church.
This is an account not without problems. Through no fault of the author, the details of Becket’s exile in the 1160s are very complicated. Even the most attentive of readers may find themselves plunged too deeply into the thickets and thorns. There are numerous references to “Poitevans” (presumably a Poitevin car-hire service); witnesses did not seal the documents they witnessed (p. 299), and the old myth (p. 14) that writing was a seasonal occupation, abandoned in wintertime, should have no place in a book that deals with Henry II’s Constitutions of Clarendon, written down in the freezing cold of January 1164.
Attempts to impute a homosexual edge to the relations between Becket and his patrons, up to and including the king, may tell us more about present-day assumptions than they do of twelfth-century realities. Guy’s Henry II, indeed, is in many ways more Tudor than Plantagenet, modelled upon the author’s portrayal, in an earlier book, of the struggles between Henry VIII and Thomas More. We are told that Becket had no alternative but to resist the customs claimed by the king. Yet this is to ignore the extent to which those customs were themselves the king’s reaction to Becket’s lack of pliancy. Becket is here excused the charge of seeking his own martyrdom, at least until his final few days. Yet as early as the Council of Northampton, in November 1164, he had recited the Mass of St Stephen, deliberately aligning himself with the Christian protomartyr. Most of his early biographers went out of their way to demonstrate the long-term identifications that could be drawn between Becket and a Christ whose Passion was prefigured, if not predestined, from birth.
By using Anne Duggan’s English translations of Becket’s letters, Guy risks accepting a version of these texts that is itself subtly crafted for the defence. In doing so, he ignores the fact that, however much these letters resound with the rhetoric of friendship or intimacy, there seems not to be a single correspondent who could be considered Becket’s close personal friend. Saints often make for difficult acquaintance. Notwithstanding all this, for disclosing some of the difficulties of Thomas à Becket, and for rendering them both comprehensible and exciting to a modern readership, John Guy deserves both our thanks and our admiration.
