St. Thomas à Becket, stained glass, Canterbury Cathedral.
This image taken from "The Story Behind Thomas à Becket."
On 29 December 1170, four knights of King Henry II's court entered Canterbury Cathedral demanding that Archbishop Thomas à Becket appear before them. The Archbishop came to meet them asking what they wanted of him. To this they replied: "We have come to kill you! You cannot live any longer!" To this he replied:
I am ready to die for God, to defend justice, and to protect the freedom of the Church. If therefore you are looking for me, I adjure you, in the name of almighty God and under pain of anathema, to do no harm to any of those around me. As for me, I commend myself and the cause of the Church to God, the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint Denis, and all the saints.
At that Archbishop Thomas stepped forward and bowed his head, as The Golden Legend tells us, "to the swords of the wicked, and they split his skull and spilled his brains over the pavement of the church. Thus the martyr was consecrated to the Lord . . . " (trans. by William Granger Ryan; Nihil Obstat Otto L. Garcia, S.T.D, Censor Librorum; Imprimatur Thomas V. Daily, D.D., Bishop of Brooklyn; Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993, pg. 61).
A somewhat different version of St. Thomas' martyrdom is told in the on-line essay "The Story Behind Thomas à Becket." (This page is located remotely at Peter's Genealogy and East Kent Pages.)
St. Thomas à Becket had been a good friend of Henry II prior to his consecration as Bishop, but immediately following his consecration he took it upon himself to serve God to the best of his ability and hence opposed the King's attempts to force his power over the Church. While many believe the Archbishop's martyrdom arose out of a misunderstanding of King Henry II's exclamation "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" and some modern monarchists even believe England and the Church were better off without him (John Gillingham, "The Angevins," in The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England, edited by Antonia Fraser; London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976, pg. 54), St. Thomas was a champion of the Church's independence and soon became canonised and, indeed was for quite some time one of England's most popular native saints. Canterbury became a scene of pilgrimages to see and kiss the relics of St. Thomas, and it was to these relics that the pilgrims of Chaucer's famous Canterbury Tales travel.
This pilgrimage is also discussed the Places of Peace and Power, Canterbury Cathedral page. (This page is located remotely at Martin Gray's Places of Peace and Power.)
In was another King Henry, King Henry VIII, who would do all within his power to end this veneration of the popular Saint. Seeing his seizing of the religious power of the Catholic Church in England as too closely akin to the acts of King Henry II, King Henry VIII declared St. Thomas to be a traitor and, according to the official histories, ordered that "The bones of Thomas à Becket would be tossed by royal hatred on the common dust heap" (Garrett Mattingly, Catherine of Aragon; New York: Vintage Books, 1941). However, according to some reports, some if not all of the relics of St. Thomas exist even to this day.
In the Tudor Gallery at the Victoria and Albert Museum is preserved a cup known as the Howard Grace Cup which some believe to have been a cup once belonging to St. Thomas himself and to have been owned by King Henry's wife Catherine of Aragon, who gave it to a loyal subject. Philippa Glanville has published a paper detailing what she believes the cup's history to be, traced from the time of Catherine. You may wish to read the following very interesting article:
Glanville, Philippa. 1994, October. "The Howard Grace Cup." History Today, vol. 44, no. 10, pg. 41 (5).
Others contend that even St. Thomas' bones were preserved following their removal from his shrine at Canterbury Cathedral. In 1920 Arthur James Mason, D.D., Canon of Canterbury, published a book proposing that bones found within the Cathedral grounds are indeed the bones of St. Thomas. You may wish to search for:
Mason, Arthur James, D.D., Canon of Canterbury. 1920. What Became of the Bones of St Thomas? A Contribution to His Fifteenth Jubilee. Cambridge: At the University Press.
In more recent years, John Butler has published a book discussing this theory and several others of the location of St. Thomas' mortal remains, including the arrest in 1990 of two adventurers hunting for the Saint's bones (pgs. ix-xii). You may wish to find:
Butler, John. 1995. The Quest for Becket's Bones: The Mystery of the Relics of St Thomas Becket of Canterbury. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.