“The biographer’s trap,” John Guy remarks in “Thomas Becket,” his portrait of that foremost friend turned foremost foe of Henry II, “is to look for a decisive moment of change.” But, he adds, “to do that is to write the history of the saint without his shadow.” With Becket, this temptation often seems to have been irresistible, from the very night of his murder, Dec. 29, 1170, near the high altar of Canterbury Cathedral. As a crowd swooped down on the battered corpse of the archbishop, tearing off pieces of clothing to dip in the gruesome puddle of his blood and brains, the outlines of the story of Becket’s sudden conversion from luxury-loving chancellor to ascetic defender of the church were already being rehearsed, soon to be followed by tales of his miraculous powers.
Although Guy is known as a historian of the Tudor period, he admits to a long-held fascination with the 12th century’s “extraordinary galaxy of larger-than-life characters.” And his previous book, “A Daughter’s Love: Thomas More and His Dearest Meg,” must have provided ample psychological grounding for this new one, tracing another struggle between an imperious, unscrupulous monarch, Henry VIII, and another stubborn commoner who found it impossible to bend to the royal will. In the case of Becket, Guy was also aided by an array of firsthand source materials, many of them biographies written by men who knew Becket themselves. Shrewdly contrasting them and assessing their biases, Guy has constructed his own modern successor, assisted by electronic search engines and high-resolution digital photography, which revealed previously invisible annotations in volumes from Becket’s personal library.
After almost 900 years, are there any shocking discoveries to be made? Was Becket, as an “impressionable teenager,” rather more than the fast friend and protégé of Richer de l’Aigle, a Norman aristocrat and dashing older man who introduced him to hawking and hunting and courtly manners? Guy assembles enough evidence to suggest that Becket’s mother (to whom he was very close) might have tried to separate the pair by sending her son to Paris for schooling. But he hedges his bet, arguing that the adult Becket “could not have been homosexual” because Henry would have used this as evidence in the course of their deeply acrimonious public feud.
And what of Henry and Becket’s own fabled closeness? Were they once “as inseparable as lovers or blood brothers”? Here Guy deconstructs the conventional narrative to find hints of tension from the very beginning. Becket (a surname, we are reminded, that would rarely have been used by his contemporaries, and then usually as a slur to remind him of his origins as the son of a London merchant) had been placed in the royal household to be the eyes and ears of his predecessor as archbishop. More than a decade older than the young king, he was a talented bureaucrat and a useful tutor. But Henry gradually felt less need of such a guide. What he wanted was a trustworthy pawn, and he assumed he had created one when he made Becket his chancellor and then his archbishop. Becket’s decision to quit his government post and swear primary loyalty to the pope came as a shock and an outrage to a monarch not known for his even temper.
And what of Becket’s decision itself? Here Guy deftly sets a timeless and all-too-familiar emotional tussle — two proud men, each convinced he knows the other’s fatal weaknesses, each feeling grievously wronged — against the less familiar social and political landscape of medieval Europe, showing how Becket’s belief that his religion obliged him to oppose a tyrant evolved under the influence of various scholars. Just as important, Guy shows how Becket’s positions were shaped, during his forced exile from England, by the complex and often brutal maneuverings of rival popes, rival rulers, even rival clerics within his own church. Sometimes boxed in, sometimes miscalculating, dependent on networks of spies and bravura displays of piety and power, Becket and his sovereign engaged in a lengthy rivalry that looks more like a chess match than a morality play.
Guy’s depiction of the succession of convocations and parleys where this struggle was enacted could have been as wearing as the meetings must have been for the participants. But he heightens their drama by stressing Becket’s flair for “set-piece encounters,” occasionally adding a twist of sardonic humor. During one great council, deputations shuttled between Becket, on the ground floor of Northampton Castle wielding his cross like a battle lance against an insufficiently cooperative cleric, and Henry, upstairs shouting at his courtiers and refusing to descend lest a face-to-face encounter result in excommunication. After a later failed attempt at reconciliation in France, the order of service in the royal chapel was hastily changed when it looked as if Becket might unexpectedly appear: the liturgy for the day of the dead was substituted, thus eliminating the necessity for the usual “kiss of peace.”
Both darkly comic and deeply tragic, Guy’s biography is a portrait of a saint with plenty of shadows. Does it diminish Becket for us to know that this future martyr in a hair shirt also made sure to keep a fine silk robe handy for his return to Canterbury, a stately progress one chronicler compared to Christ’s entry into Jerusalem? That his abstemious diet was partly the result of a lifelong susceptibility to colitis? That one of his oldest and closest friends would have found his canonization “utterly absurd”? Only if we prefer the black-and-white certainties of hagiography to the convincingly human portrayal of a charismatic, contradictory individual who was, as Guy puts it, “as prickly as he was smooth . . . a man with the habits of a hedgehog.”
