A TURBULENT KING AND HIS PRIEST.

THE RELATIONSHIP between Henry II of England--warrior, count, duke and king--and Thomas Becket--clerk, chancellor, archbishop, martyr and saint--is a tale with heroic, indeed Homeric, qualities which has acquired the status of myth, a mother lode of parables for subsequent ages, each with their different preoccupations. Century after century theologians, medievalists, constitutional lawyers, historians, poets and playwrights have returned to rework the original sources--which include no fewer than eight contemporary biographies and hundreds of letters.

Myth has bred myth: from the astounding fertility of Becket's shrine at Canterbury as a producer of miracles, to the apocryphal tale of Henry VIII disinterring Becket's remains and putting them on trial for treason, before spreading them to the winds and waters of reliquary oblivion.

For advocates of the English monarchy and effective centralised administration of justice, the stiff-necked resistance of the archbishop was treachery. For the religious, the same resistance represents the triumph of the spiritual over the temporal, and martyrdom for the church. For the anxieties of a world after the pointless sacrifices of the Great War, T.S. Eliot found an ideal statement of the strength of spiritual belief in his play Murder in the Cathedral expressed in poetic form (save for the speeches of the assassins, which are in prose). For Jean Anouilh, writing his play Becket in Nazi-occupied France, there was the theme of resistance to foreign invasion based on the historically inaccurate description of Thomas, in a French biography, as a Saxon resisting the Norman king. In fact Becket was a Norman.

In the first centuries of the second millennium, the basic faultline of political life in western Christendom was constituted by the conflicting institutional imperatives of the church on the one hand and secular rulers on the other This has some similarities to the faultline of politics over approximately the last two centuries, which has been the conflicting institutional imperatives of the centralised state on the one hand and private organisations of various kinds, particularly commercial corporations, on the other. In both of these periods, the pursuit of institutional self-interest was a mainspring of social action. Institutional loyalty was a primary social bond. It was so during medieval times and has become so again.

Institutions, like individuals, have a craving for self-esteem. The personal imperative for prestige, recognition and freedom among individuals is reflected in institutional demands for autonomy. A preoccupation with institutional loyalties is present in all ages, but in some periods of history it proves to be more central to the issues of the time than in others. The salience of institutional loyalty is something our own times share with the twelfth century.

Loyalty was the centrepiece of the medieval moral framework--loyalty which overrode all standards of ethical conduct; loyalty which drove four knights to murder an archbishop in his cathedral. This was just the kind of behaviour that aristocrats demanded and admired--indeed still demand and admire--from their underlings. They call it honour. On the other hand there was a loyalty of similar force based on the power of ideas and faith--specifically, in the context with which I am dealing, the sense of loyalty demanded by an organised church and by the institutionalised component parts of that church.

Any student of medieval society, knows the significance attached to the institutional independence of the corporate groups into which that society was divided. A keyword of the contemporary rhetoric was libertas, identifying the special rights and privileges of particular institutions. In a sense the church and the various manifestations of secular authority were each claiming autonomy on their own part. The claim of institutional autonomy by both the monarchy and the church is the central theme of the conflict between Becket and Henry.