“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” “Thomas Becket: murder and the making of a saint” (The British Museum exhibition: En)

“…he possessed such great keenness of reason that he wisely solved unusual and difficult questions” (John of Salisbury, Becket’s clerk and biographer, 1171-2)

“…very quickly you would turn your heart and favour away from me, which is now so great between us, and replace it with the most savage hatred…” (Becket speaking to Henry II in 1152)

The very first major exhibition we managed to see after the long (and, frankly, dismal) months of COVID reclusiveness hasn’t disappointed in the least: it’s been dedicated to an event that in modern terms would be described as a political assassination of a major powerful figure, which resulted in reshaping the whole of Christendom (its Western part in particular) not only in what we now call the United Kingdom, but pretty much in all continental Europe (France, Italy, Spain and Norway, to name a few) for many centuries ahead.

Thomas Becket, not being a nobleman himself, but a smart young boy from London’s Cheapside, where his father, a merchant from Normandy, ran several successful businesses, got a precious chance to obtain the best possible education for that murky time and became a scholarly monk at first and then a controversial archbishop, whose impact on future Anglicanism and the Magna Carta (the one and only written document of these lands that should be regarded as their pre-Constitution) is hard to underestimate.

Was Becket really a friend of King Henry II? A Cambridge historian, Prof. John Guy, consistently disproves this claim: the two men obviously tried hard to remain in a dialogue, but once the dispute was heated by the core dilemma “who’s primas et pontifex summus, Pope or Caesar,” there was a no-go for both of them: as an experienced diplomat, Becket was keen on every move that his royal rival was up to. As a truly fearless man, he became a harbinger of his own death: that’s why he faced it with incredible bravery.

“For the name of Jesus and the protection of the church I am ready to embrace death,” he said in front of the four knights, his bloodthirsty murderers.

Oddly enough, one of the most powerful parts of the exhibition is the animated display, which recreates the death scene of Becket surrounded by the four knights, but defiant. The roles are played by marionettes (they somehow resemble the figurines from Harry Potter’s Tale of the Three Brothers), and their shadowy moves inside Canterbury Cathedral, with the monks’ chants as an accompaniment, give a spectator an uncanny and eerie feeling of involvement.

It’s also quite ironic that Henry VIII, being an avid admirer of Becket’s martyrdom in his youth (he made a few pilgrimages to Becket’s shrine) turned against the man who established the pre-concept of Anglicanism 350 years before the Reformation.

“I have fought the good fight,” Becket once said. And he did.