Thomas Becket. Cancelled.
The story of Thomas Becket is well known. Born in London, probably in 1120, Thomas rose from a modest background to become chancellor to King Henry II and archbishop of Canterbury. Thomas and Henry had been close friends, but following Thomas’s elevation to high religious office, they fell out in spectacular fashion and Thomas took himself off into exile in Europe. He returned to England in autumn 1170, having supposedly made up with Henry, but a few weeks later, in one of the most horrific episodes in English history, Thomas was hacked to death in his own cathedral on 29 December by knights who believed, either mistakenly or foolishly, that they were carrying out the king’s wishes.
2020 marked the 850th anniversary of Thomas’s death. At the start of the year, I decided to write a series of ‘on this day’ blogs about Thomas and King Henry. I wanted to delve into the story of their friendship and its bloody unravelling, and to explore the characters of the two brilliant yet flawed protagonists. I also expected there to be a big focus on Thomas and Henry, with exhibitions, events, memorial services, books, TV programmes and much more. In the end, 2020 didn’t quite work out like that. Along with pretty much everything else that was planned in that year, exhibitions and remembrances of Thomas and Henry were cancelled and the anniversary of the murder barely registered on a news agenda dominated by lurid headlines of death and doom.
However, the clouds lifted, somewhat at least, in 2021 and the British Museum’s Thomas Becket: Murder and the Making of the Saint exhibition is now open. Last week, I went along with two friends to see how the famous story was told through the objects on display. As you can imagine, in the school holidays, with strictly limited numbers and hardly any overseas tourists in London, it was very quiet. In fact, I cannot remember ever visiting the British Museum with fewer people there. Of course, that is hardly a bad thing for the visitor – quite the opposite in fact, as it really allows one more time to enjoy the exhibition and to take it all in without the usual crowds.
I won’t go through the details of each item on display – you’ll have to go for yourselves – but I thought it was thoughtfully put together. I enjoyed the manuscripts, of course, but it was a real pleasure to see the reliquaries, altarpieces and other monuments, for example this baptismal font from Scandinavia.
It brought home, to me at least, just how popular and widespread Becket’s cult was. We have to remember that manuscripts were only ever read by a tiny proportion of the medieval population, but these objects would have been seen by hundreds of thousands of people across Europe.
I was also very interested in the objects which illustrated the overthrowing of Becket’s cult in the 1530s as part of King Henry VIII’s ‘Break with Rome’. At that time, among other things, Thomas’s shrine at Canterbury was destroyed and his image was removed from the seal of the City of London. In the course of my researches, I have seen evidence of this. For example, someone in the sixteenth century went through the annals produced at Southwark Priory and erased Thomas’s name wherever it appears. When I first saw this, some years ago, I remember thinking it something of a curiosity. At the British Museum, however, I could not help but draw two parallels with today’s ‘cancel culture’. First, here really is no new thing under the sun; we have seen this all before. In the 1530s, the king and his ministers sought to cancel Thomas. Second, you might think, like Gilbert Foliot, that Becket was a ‘born fool’; you might equally think him a martyr who stood up to an overmighty king. I imagine that we can all agree, however, that this attempt at cancellation was nihilistic and ultimately pointless. I wonder if historians who look back on this period would feel the same way about the current frenzy of cancellation.
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