Servants of
God, not King Henry
by Mike Oettle
TWO Thomases
appear on the calendar for July: on the 3rd, Thomas the Apostle, and on the
6th, Thomas More (martyr, 1535).
About the
Apostle (“doubting” Thomas), sadly, we know little for certain beyond what
appears in John’s Gospel – although he is mentioned in four apocryphal[1] works including the Acts of Thomas, which has him journeying to India and dying in Madras in AD 53. The Syrian church of Malabar, in India, claims him as its founder. His name simply means “twin”, (in Aramaic, Te’oma; in Greek, Didymos), and has found its way into geography in several places including the formerly Portuguese island of São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea.
We do know
a great deal about Thomas More and about Thomas Becket (martyred on 29 December
1170), two extraordinary Englishmen whose careers bear comparison. Each was
the subject of a film made in the 1960s: Becket and A Man for All
Seasons (based on the play of the same name), and Becket was also the
subject of T S Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral.
What these men have in common is a devotion to God and His Church which defied the authority of their royal masters – in each case a king called Henry.
Both films made a deep impression on me as a teenager – you may recall Becket’s opening (and closing) scene where Henry II allows himself to be flogged by the Church as a penance for calling for Thomas’s death.
This is not the place to recount their entire careers – the Encyclopædia Britannica devotes more than a page and a half to Becket and 2½ to More, and volumes have been written about them. Both were lawyers (More was a successful barrister before he entered the King’s service) and both served as Chancellor (chief royal minister).
But Becket, though celibate, was a worldly man who grew wealthy from the revenues of an archdeaconry although he was not ordained. He was hand-picked to be Archbishop of Canterbury because he was the King’s man, and in 1162 was rushed through ordination as deacon, priest and bishop on the day of his consecration – only to disappoint Henry by becoming a devout man and a devoted servant of the Pope. He soon resigned as Chancellor, a further disappointment.
More, on the other hand, tried the religious life but chose eventually to marry (he married again after the death of his first wife). His scrupulous honesty and distaste for bribery resulted in relative poverty and debt, yet he upheld education as a virtue. He continued studying all his life and kept his house as a school for his wives, his four children, two stepchildren, a foster-daughter and several wards. He was regarded as one of the foremost scholars in Europe, and was a friend of the great Desiderius Erasmus.
Each Thomas eventually came into conflict with his King. Henry II was opposed to a movement called the Gregorian reform, a revitalisation of the institutional Church which also entailed a reduction of royal power over the Church, and Becket resisted Henry from the year after his consecration, being obliged to go into exile for several years. Henry went too far, however, in 1170, when he had
his son Henry crowned co-king by the Archbishop of York. In several ways this
was unprecedented and improper, and Thomas excommunicated all responsible.
The King, realising he, too, was about to be excommunicated, visited Thomas
in France and allowed him to return.
(Prince Henry, incidentally, did not live long enough to succeed his father. The crown went first to his brother Richard Lion-Heart and then to the youngest brother, John.)
Thomas’s return made no difference, though, and when, just after Christmas, the King asked: “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” four leading knights took him literally and, arriving at Canterbury on the 29th, cut him down with their swords. Within days pilgrims began visiting his tomb, and he was canonised in 1173.
More, on the other hand, had no history of quarrel with his King, Henry VIII, until 1533 when he failed to attend Queen Anne Boleyn’s coronation. Henry tried to get rid of him in February the next year, but the House of Lords took his name off a list of people to be executed. When in April he was required to assent under oath to the Act of Succession, he said he would agree to allowing Anne’s children to succeed to the throne, but objected to a passage in the Act which rejected the Pope’s authority. For this he was jailed in the Tower of London, where he spent his time writing devotional works.
At his trial the following year he was convicted on perjured evidence that he had
denied the King’s title as supreme head of the Church of England. Speaking in
his own defence, he upheld the unity of the Church and said that “no temporal
man may be head of the spirituality”. Sentenced to be hanged, drawn and
quartered, he was instead beheaded at the King’s request. Few people believed
he had been a traitor, and all Europe mourned him. He was, however, only
canonised in 1935.
Henry VIII also dealt harshly with Thomas Becket: the martyr’s bones were burned, his shrine despoiled and his name erased from service books. Why? He, like More, had heroically defied a tyrant.
Because of Henry’s displeasure, and because they were supposed to be partisans of Rome over England, the two Thomases were long forgotten by the Church of England. But the realisation that their loyalty to the papacy arose from their desire for the Church’s unity, and their acknowledgement of God as a higher authority than a crowned head, has no doubt led to their reappearance on the Anglican calendar. In an era when we are increasingly enjoined in the words of Romans 13:1 to be obedient to the State authorities, it is well to mark the words of the psalmist: “O put not your trust in princes; nor in any child of man: for there is no help in them.”[2]
