Books: Self-Made Martyr

MY LIFE FOR MY SHEEP (341 pp.)—Alfred Duggan—Coward-McCann ($5).

Martyrs are rarely popular. Their persecutors, haunted by persistent ghosts, find them stronger in death than in life. Their fellow believers, faced by heroic example, find them reproaching a safe and compromising existence. By the 18th century, the whole business of martyrdom was widely considered to be fanatical and rather ill-mannered. A gibbous Gibbon age that saw the fall of the Roman Empire as caused by Christianity was apt to feel that the early Christian martyrs were really the spiritual aggressors who provoked legitimate rulers. In other words, those martyrs asked for it.

Something of that feeling carries over into this English biography of Thomas a Becket, archbishop, martyr, and definitely a man who asked for it. Becket was the first famous victim in a struggle between church and state that culminated, four centuries later, in Henry VIII’s breach with Rome. But historians are divided on Becket’s role. To many he was a worldly opportunist who, somewhere along the way, underwent a remarkable spiritual conversion. Others saw him as a martyr only to ambition, who lost out in a struggle for power with his King. Britain’s Alfred Duggan, a first-rate historical novelist (The Little Emperors), takes a polite middle ground. He does not really care for the business of martyrdom either, and accepts King Henry II’s description of Becket as “a very good actor [who] played his part so carefully that he became the character he was imitating.”

Two Young Men. Duggan brilliantly sets the scene: the turmoil of 12th century England, in which Norman rule was still insecure. Since the conquerors felt they must stick together, it was possible for an ambitious young Norman lad, though only the son of a Cheapside burgess, to get a helping hand from Norman nobles. Young Thomas managed to acquire both a knight’s training and a lawyer’s education, a combination which, while he was still in his 30s, had drawn him to the attention of England’s brand-new young Norman King, Henry II. Redhaired, red-tempered Harry made Becket his Chancellor. Towering Thomas a Becket impressed the King with his courage (he would ride to war at the head of his own troop of knights) and skillfully helped Henry rule his vast realm. But to keep the King’s peace, Becket had to keep peace with the King. Monarch and merchant’s son became friends. Hawking in the marshes of Essex or carousing in the taverns of Cheapside, they were seldom apart.

Becket lived high, but only, Biographer Duggan maintains, to uphold his position. He sipped water flavored with lime blossoms while his guests downed Gascon wine. When Henry picked Becket to be Archbishop of Canterbury—largely to get control of the church and church funds—Thomas accepted reluctantly. “The love you now feel for me,” he said prophetically, “will turn to bitter hate.”

Murder in the Cathedral. And now began Becket’s great transformation. He exchanged the scarlet of state for a monk’s hair shirt. If he was merely playing a part, he utterly convinced his audience and, in the end, himself. He proudly recalled that the Archbishops of Canterbury had traditionally been protectors of the poor and oppressed, that St. Augustine had been the first to occupy the ancient see. Step by step, Becket fought the King’s encroachments on church power; finally, in danger of his life, he fled to France in a rowboat. After six years he returned to Canterbury, still defiant. The King was heard to scream: “What sluggards, what cowards have I reared in my courts? Not one will deliver me from this turbulent priest!”

Soon after, on Dec. 29, 1170 four knights with a band of brigands approached Canterbury Cathedral. When the prior tried to bar the doors, the archbishop said: “The House of God should not be made a castle. I command you, under holy obedience, to open those doors!” In cold detail, Author Duggan describes how Becket, the trained warrior, suffered the fatal sword blows, and said, with his dying breath: “For the Holy Name of Jesus and the safety of His Church, I offer myself to death.”

Duggan is a master at painting the background of this drama—the clothes, the customs, the pageantry. He reconstructs the dialogue of his characters and reads their thoughts. But somehow he never seems to read their souls. Why did Becket choose martyrdom? In Duggan’s view, Becket was goaded to death by a kind of perverse romanticism: as a Norman knight ringed by his enemies, he died to show the English that it was “the Norman custom to stand fast.” This mutedly rationalist ending of an otherwise excellent book will fail to satisfy many readers. It shows, once again, what a superb and poetically accurate work is T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, with its far nobler picture of a man who had put aside ambition—even spiritual ambition—and found a faith so strong that he could joyfully accept death as its price: I have had a tremor of bliss, a wink of heaven, a whisper, And I would no longer be denied; all things Proceed to a joyful consummation.