Canterbury tales: St Thomas Becket’s martyrdom echoes down the centuries

A lofty 12th-century quire is perhaps one of the last places you would expect to meet Liam Gallagher. This one assured me that he was not one half of Oasis bunking off from their sold-out reunion tour, but a priest from Maidstone who shares a name with the abrasive rocker. Given how heaving Canterbury Cathedral was on 7 July, it was only natural I would brush shoulders with a few celebrities.

While waiting to enter the Mass, I had my first encounter with Rose Hudson-Wilkin, the Anglican Bishop of Dover. Like the Gallaghers, she has been no stranger to public spats. The Jamaican-born prelate was driving away from the Archbishop’s Palace toward gaggles of queuing Catholics; sensibly, she slowed down and politely asked queuers to step aside to permit her passage. While I am sure her personal instincts were at play, it certainly helps that the cathedral operates its own police service; its driveways are among the most surveilled thoroughfares in the country.

This was no ordinary road, and this was no ordinary service. This was deep Kentish city. The occasion was a Mass, celebrated by Archbishop Miguel Maury Buendía, the current apostolic nuncio to Great Britain. The service marked the 805th anniversary of the translation of St Thomas Becket’s relics from the erstwhile Catholic see’s grubby crypt to a purpose-built chapel. His vibrant and jewel-encrusted shrine attracted 100,000 pilgrims a year, from as far afield as India, until Henry VIII’s wanton spasm of destruction.

St Thomas, a former confident and chancellor to King Henry II, was slaughtered by knights loyal to the monarch on the steps of the north-west transept in 1170. Henry had appointed him Archbishop of Canterbury eight years earlier, assuming that Becket would aid his quest to interfere with the Church’s independence. To the Crown’s chagrin, he underwent a profound religious conversion; his newfound faith led him into exile after he rejected the Constitutions of Clarendon of 1164, which aimed to promote royal authority over its ecclesiastical competitor.

The tale of Becket’s martyrdom, like that of any Christian, is almost as grisly and solemn as it is inspiring. Still, the rare celebration of a Catholic Mass in a venue originally built for it naturally conjured a jovial atmosphere. However, I could hardly ignore the murmur of sighs that emerged as the Dean of Canterbury announced in a rather worldly manner that the building’s upkeep amounted to £30,000 per day, and that we should “dig deep” before sealing our collection envelopes.

Some might think that the cathedral’s leadership has debased itself by holding “raves in the nave”, but the site itself (unlike many post-Emancipation Catholic church buildings in England) is thick with more than a thousand years of events and emotion. I would never long to see it disappear.

For post-Roman Christianity in Britain, Canterbury is where it all began. Could it ever be where it ends? At times I found myself forgetting that the cathedral now belonged to the Church of England at all. As trends change, and Anglicanism finds itself short of money and enthusiasm, could a grand Mass in such a significant setting be a glimpse of something less peculiar in the near future?

The Anglican firebrand writer T.S. Eliot, who adored Becket, was perhaps more doubtful about rapprochement. As he wrote in his play Murder in the Cathedral, which tells the story of Becket’s life and death:

Unreal friendship may turn to real

But real friendship, once ended,

cannot be mended.

Sooner shall enmity turn to alliance.

The enmity that never knew friendship

Can sooner know accord.

Before exploring Christianity, my concept of martyrdom was largely forged by Eliot’s chilling text. His masterful play draws on contemporary sources to envision Becket’s conflicted consciousness in the lead-up to his murder. It concludes with the king’s knights, smeared with saintly blood, pleading with the audience to understand their actions. In contrast to the majority of Eliot’s verse, epic, their familiar, unflowery language attempts to frame their killing as a practical defence of secular authority against religious excess.

One hears these echoes down the centuries when parliamentarians justify their campaigns for assisted suicide and abortion up on the grounds of “efficiency” and “liberation”. It was these fictionalised Becket’s sage words, not those of any contemporary politician, which replayed in my head as I scanned the limestone vaulting above.

“Wherever a saint has died, wherever a martyr has given his blood for the blood of Christ, there is holy ground, and the sanctity shall not depart from it.” Whatever blood has been spilt at Canterbury and beyond, just as Eliot’s Becket reminds us: “The church shall be open, even to our enemies.”

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