Fate of Becket bones unknown

In your article on the celebrations this year to mark the 850th anniversary of the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket [Gazette, January 2] your reporter repeats the commonly heard assertion that the holy relics of the saint were “destroyed on the orders of King Henry VIII in the early years of the English Reformation”.

It is certainly possible that Becket’s bones were subjected to some form of violent destruction when his shrine was demolished in September 1538, but I am not aware of any direct evidence of this. It is true that Pope Paul III announced in both October and December 1538 that the king had ordered the bones of Becket to be burnt, and there are second-hand reports that some sort of conflagration did indeed take place in Canterbury. These reports, however, are contradictory in their details, and none contains eye-witness assurance that Becket’s bones were among any that may have been thrown into the flames. Against this, there is credible evidence that the relics of St Thomas were not, in fact, destroyed in 1538. Two 16th century clerks of the Privy Council, Thomas Derby and William Thomas, who were well placed to know what had really happened, each recorded that Becket’s bones had been taken to a place where they could no longer be a focus of piety or pilgrimage. And the Catholic bishop of Winchester Stephen Gardiner, who passed through Canterbury a short time after the destruction of Becket’s shrine and who would therefore have known exactly what became of the relics, is reported to have said that he “did not dislike” the way they had been treated. He would hardly have said this if he knew that the saint’s bones had been the subject of sacrilegious violence. The evidence, then, is equivocal, and in my view it does not support the assertion as fact that the bones of St Thomas were either destroyed or preserved. The truth may never be known.

Author, The Relics of Thomas Becket, Pitkin, 2019

Leycroft Close, Canterbury

Ian Parker sent in this stunning floral shot of a winter heliotrope - one of the first flowers of the year to show - taken at the Oare Gunpowder Works Country Park in Faversham.

Nuneaton aren’t?

And how is Canterbury “open”? If Canterbury remains “open” following Ms Duffield’s re-election then by implication other places must therefore necessarily be closed? How do you even close a 21st century British city? Such terminology highlights the utter vacuity of the “Canterbury for Rosie” social media campaign which used these words to celebrate Ms Duffield’s candidacy in the weeks before polling day.

All this is evidence of the cult of “Rosie” which has grown up around Ms Duffield in the upper middle class neighbourhoods of St Augustine’s Road, Ethelbert Road and South Canterbury Road, all of which were festooned with placards bearing her name in the weeks before polling day.

They prove that Ms Duffield really need do nothing other than be herself and she would still be comfortably elected.

The Old Tannery, Canterbury

people for Brexit.

His letter seems to be a warning issued towards our MP, not towards me, and is crammed with facts and his own interpretations of them.

What he does not say is that the Kent and Canterbury Hospital was one of the architects of its own downgrading. In 1994 and 1995, senior managers conspired to conceal the facts about wrongly diagnosed cervical cancer scans, with the result that many women died unnecessarily from the disease. This erupted into a national scandal widely debated in the press and in Parliament. I am sure many committed and hard-working KCH employees felt betrayed by this purposeful and selfprotecting concealment, which went right to the top.

This was the background to the building of the QEQM in Margate.

I think Ms Duffield (who wrote a very convincing and committed article on climate change last week) should now go out and stimulate others into positive action.

She is our Labour representative in Parliament but her vote will be insignificant against the massive (and logical) turn of the population to the Tories against Labour. What she can do effectively will be locally based and what she will be judged on.

I have no political axe to grind.

I did not vote for Mrs May, or Ms Duffield. Political parties foist a load of ambitious, compliant and useless non-entities on voters who follow party