Becket’s new tour from London to Canterbury
Astrange kind of tourist will be visiting London this week. It is Thomas Becket, or part of him, for a relic of the great English saint, martyred in 1170, is being brought from Esztergom in Hungary to Westminster Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, and then to Canterbury Cathedral.
It is no surprise that Becket (as he wasn’t called by his contemporaries, who referred to him as Thomas) should have been renowned in Hungary in his day. Europe enjoyed more mobility at the time than it did centuries later. A church was dedicated to St Thomas of Canterbury in Salamanca, for example, in 1175, and a saga on the saint’s life was written in Icelandic.
But there was a special link between St Thomas and Hungary, because Henry II, whose knights murdered the Archbishop, married his own son Henry to Margaret the daughter of the king of France. She knew Becket personally, survived her English husband and then married King Bela III of Hungary in 1186.
Certainly by the 1190s there was a church of St Thomas in Esztergom. It is known that two churchmen from Hungary were present in Canterbury when in 1220 the body of the martyr was transferred (translated being the technical term) from the grave between two Purbeck marble pillars (which can still be seen in the East Crypt) to a new shrine upstairs at the eastern end of the cathedral.
When Chaucer was writing his Canterbury Tales, the death of St Thomas was only as far from him as the death of Nelson is from us, but the pilgrimage seemed established as a timeless certainty. That changed when the shrine at Canterbury was smashed up in 1538. The church of St Thomas in Esztergom was destroyed too under the occupation of the Ottomans, but its relics were known to have survived.
As it happens, Westminster Cathedral has its own relics of St Thomas, kept in the chapel dedicated to the martyr, which in 2004 was very successfully decorated with mosaics by Christopher Hobbs. But I can’t say I’ve noticed much overt devotion there to the memory of St Thomas of Canterbury.
The city of Canterbury has some relics of its saint too, at the church dedicated to him in Burgate. Of course, there are many theories about where the principal remains of St Thomas may still lie. Some say that they were rescued from Henry VIII’s commissioners and buried in a spot – perhaps in the main crypt – whose secret was passed from generation to generation. I can’t say I’m convinced, for it hardly seems necessary to keep such a location secret any longer.
There is another element in bringing Becket’s relics from Hungary to places with which he is associated in England. He was martyred because of hostility towards him from the civil power. Hungary has had its own share of such animosity, in recent decades most obviously during Communist rule.
St Thomas’s tussles with Henry II are by no means simple to understand. But it wasn’t taking the side of the Church against the King that was the making of Thomas. It seems to me that the essence of his holiness came from the single-minded transformation of his way of life after he was elected Archbishop, eight years before his death.
A striking thing about the narrative of his martyrdom is its similarity to the last hours of his new master and model, Jesus Christ. The narrative wasn’t invented, for plenty of witnesses left an account. It is just that Thomas had grown into a role that inevitably brought upon him by night men with swords and clubs. They meant him harm but left him a saint.