Beautiful Britain | Page 7

were the King's own gift." To this Hugh de Moreville, who was the least aggressive of the four, replied: "Why did you not complain to the King of these outrages? Why did you take upon yourself to punish them by your own authority?" But Becket, turning sharply towards him, said: "Hugh! how proudly you lift up your head! When the rights of the Church are violated, I shall wait for no man's permission to avenge them. I will give to the King the things that are the King's, but to God the things that are God's. It is my business, and I alone will see to it." Taking up such an attitude in front of four men who had come hot-foot to Canterbury with the express determination to seek an excuse for killing him, Becket was sealing his own fate.
For the first time in the interview the Archbishop had assumed an attitude of defiance; the fury of the knights broke at once through the bonds which had partially restrained it, and displayed itself openly in those impassioned gestures which are now confined to the half-civilized nations of the South and East, but which seem to have been natural to all classes of medieval Europe. Their eyes flashed fire, they sprang upon their feet, and, rushing close up to him, gnashed their teeth, twisting their long gloves, and wildly threw their arms above their heads. Fitzurse exclaimed: "You threaten us--you threaten us! are you going to excommunicate us all?"
Becket sprang up from his couch at this insulting demonstration, and in the state of great excitement into which he could fall when roused, he flung down his defiant challenge that all the swords in England could not shake his obedience to the Pope. The four knights, goaded to fury by other passionate words, left him, shouting, "To arms! to arms!" They made their way with an excited throng to the great gateway, where they armed, while the doors were closed to shut off the monastery from communication with the town. The Archbishop seems to have been fully alive to his danger, and yet he persistently refused to take the smallest measure for his safety, opening with his own hands the door from the cloisters into the north transept which some of the monks had closed and barred immediately after they had dragged the Archbishop into the nearly dark building.
Vespers had just begun when the murderers entered, but the singing of that service was never completed. The fear of sacrilege induced the knights to try to drag the defenceless Archbishop out of the Cathedral, but he struggled with such vigour, flinging one of the men down on the stone floor, that they gave up the attempt and killed him with three or four sword strokes, the last of which, as he lay prone, was delivered by Richard le Bret, or the Breton, and so tremendous was the force with which it was delivered that the crown of the head was severed from the skull and the sword broke in two on the pavement.
Canterbury being much divided in its attachment to Becket, the murderers found escape easy, and the general regrets most expressed seem to have been at the sacrilege rather than at the murder.
It is almost incredible how rapidly Becket became St. Thomas of Canterbury. Within a few hours of the tragic scene, when, night having fallen and the great church being closed and deserted, Osbert, the Archbishop's chamberlain, entering with a light in his hand, found his master's body lying on its face, with the frightful wound exposed, the monks had kissed the hands and feet of the corpse and called him by the name of Saint Thomas. What appears to have raised the fraternity to this enthusiastic anticipation of the canonization, officially announced at Westminster in 1173, was the discovery that Becket had on beneath his outer robes, and the many other garments he wore, the black cowled cloak of the Benedictines, and next to his skin a hair-cloth shirt of unusual roughness. When the body was being prepared for the tomb this shirt was found to be easily removable for the daily scourging Becket had been in the habit of enduring, the marks of the stripes administered on the previous day being plainly visible. Dean Stanley adds another fact not easy to be believed by those who have never become intimate with the practices of medieval monasticism:
Such austerity had hitherto been unknown to English saints, and the marvel was increased by the sight--to our notions so revolting--of the innumerable vermin with which the hair-cloth abounded--boiling over with them, as one account describes it, like water in a simmering cauldron. At the dreadful sight all the enthusiasm of the previous night revived with double ardour. They looked at one another in