Thomas Becket

Thomas Becket was born around 1120 in London to a family of Norman merchant stock, rose through clerical administration into royal service, and became Lord Chancellor of England in 1155 under King Henry II, whose close friend and most effective instrument of government he was for the next seven years. Their partnership was close enough that when Henry engineered Becket's appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1162, he expected to gain in the church's highest English office a loyal ally who would help him bring ecclesiastical courts and privileges more firmly under royal control.

Becket instead resigned the chancellorship and adopted the role of archbishop with what contemporaries described as unexpected and total seriousness, defending the church's independent jurisdiction, particularly its right to try clergy in its own courts rather than the king's, with the same single-minded intensity he had once brought to royal service. The resulting conflict over the Constitutions of Clarendon, Henry's 1164 attempt to formalize royal authority over the church, drove Becket into six years of exile in France, from which he returned to Canterbury in late 1170 still refusing to yield the church's claims.

On 29 December 1170, four knights of Henry II's household, having heard the king's furious words against the archbishop, most famously rendered as a wish to be rid of this troublesome priest, though the exact phrase and Henry's intent behind it remain debated, rode to Canterbury and killed Becket inside his own cathedral. The killing shocked Christian Europe: Henry did public penance at Becket's tomb, and Pope Alexander III canonized Becket within three years, in 1173, one of the fastest canonizations of the medieval period.

Canterbury Cathedral became England's greatest pilgrimage site, drawing travelers from across Europe to Becket's shrine for over three and a half centuries, a devotion later immortalized in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The shrine was destroyed in 1538 on Henry VIII's order during the dissolution of the monasteries, part of the broader suppression of saints' cults the English Reformation carried out, and Becket's remains were lost in the process, but Canterbury Cathedral itself has continued to mark the site of his martyrdom and to carry his memory as the cathedral's defining historical event. Modern historians continue to debate how much of the shrine's destruction was driven by Henry VIII's personal animus toward a saint who had, eight centuries earlier, defeated another Henry, and how much was simply the ordinary administrative logic of a dissolution that targeted every major relic cult in the kingdom regardless of its particular history.