And so things remained until 1538. By then, the king of England was Henry VIII, and he was engaged in separating the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church. Both to Henry and to his opponents, Saint Thomas was the preeminent symbol of denial of the new regime. The powerful influence of this martyr had to be destroyed if Henry was to succeed. In September 1538, the Royal Commissioners for the Destruction of Shrines, having already dealt with many prominent saints, came to Canterbury to deal with Saint Thomas. Henry VIII’s chief henchman, Thomas Cromwell, was an active participant in what followed, and the king himself was close by. The shrine was dismantled, its jewels and precious metals were seized for the king and transported to the Tower of London, and the saint’s body was removed from the reliquary at the center of the shrine. What became of it? By October 1538, the story was beginning to spread on the Continent that the body had been burned in Cromwell’s presence and the ashes had been scattered to the winds, dumped in the River Stour, or even shot out of a cannon at Cromwell’s order, depending on who was telling the story. Whether some version of this tale is true or, if not, what happened to Thomas’s mortal remains provides a minor but interesting mystery to this day.
What Happened to Thomas's Bones?
In a thorough and well-argued, but ultimately inconclusive, book, The Quest for Becket's Bones: The Mystery of the Relics of St. Thomas Becket of Canterbury (1995), John Butler explores the evidence for and against the story that the saint's bones were burned in 1538 and considers the many hypotheses as to what may have happened to them if, in fact, they were not burned. Butler sums up many of questions about possible resting places thus:
Whose remains rest in the two unmarked graves in the north aisle of the eastern crypt [of the cathedral]? Who, if anyone, lies beneath the irregular and unidentified ledger slab near the altar of St. Mary Magdalene in the north transept of the crypt—a slab that is embossed with the cross of Canterbury and is almost identical to the one covering the tomb of Archbishop Stephen Langton... ? Does the disturbed pavement immediately to the south of this slab, in the Chapel of St. Nicholas, conceal a grave, and if so, whose? Why is the lamp that burns above the altar of St. Mary Magdalene red, the colour of a martyr? Is there a grave behind the altar of Our Lady in the Undercroft, and if so, whose? And is there a parish church somewhere in east Kent that, as one popular legend has it, unknowingly harbours the bones of the saint. . . ? Of all the many speculations, none has aroused greater interest... [than] that which sprang dramatically to life on 23 January 1888, when workmen excavating part of the crypt of the Cathedral uncovered a hitherto unknown collection of bones.
Ultimately, however, Butler concludes that those bones cannot be Beck-et's, though they may, nonetheless, have something to do with what happened to his body. He leaves it up to the reader to decide among five possible solutions to the mystery.
Shortly after the destruction of the shrine and the disposal, one way or another, of the saint’s body, on November 16, 1538, the king issued a proclamation declaring that, because “Thomas Becket, sometime archbishop of Canterbury, stubbornly [opposed] the wholesome laws established against the enormities of the clergy by the king’s highness’ most noble progenitor, King Henry the second,” and because “his canonization was made only by the bishop of Rome because he [Thomas] had been a champion to maintain his [the pope’s] usurped authority and a bearer of the iniquity of the clergy,” the king now “has thought it expedient to declare. . . that. . . there appears nothing in his life and exterior conversation whereby he should be called a saint, but rather esteemed to be a rebel and traitor to his prince.” Therefore, the king ordered that “from henceforth the said Thomas Becket shall not be esteemed, named, reputed, nor called a saint. . . and that his images and pictures through the whole realm shall be put down and avoided out of all churches, chapels, and other places and that. . . the days used to be festival in his name shall not be observed, nor the service. . . and prayers in his name read, but razed and put out of all the books.” In many surviving manuscripts, images that once depicted the life, death, and miracles of Saint Thomas of Canterbury have been cut out, scraped off, or otherwise mutilated, and many of the reliquaries and other precious objects that had commemorated Thomas must have been destroyed. The archbishop of Canterbury removed the image of Saint Thomas from his seal, as in 1539 did the city of London along with the motto on the seal, which had read, “Thomas, do not cease to protect me, who gave you birth.”
In England for centuries Thomas remained a pro-Catholic, anti-Protestant symbol and a symbol of church claims for what supporters defined as independence of lay control and opponents defined as ecclesiastical supremacy over lay government. When, between 1553 and 1558, Queen Mary I tried to restore Catholicism in England, attacks on newly installed images of Saint Thomas of Canterbury were one way of expressing opposition to the queen’s policy, for example. In the seventeenth century, some English Catholics sported medallions with Thomas of Canterbury on one side and Thomas More on the other—two men named Thomas who opposed kings named Henry in support of the Catholic Church and were executed at the king’s command, a parallelism that had been noted in print in several sixteenth-century English works of history. Almost without fail, Catholic historians of the Middle Ages and biographers of Thomas of Canterbury and Henry II supported Thomas’s cause; Protestants supported Henry. Only in the twentieth century did the ideal of the dispassionate historian begin to prevail, leading scholars to attempt to evaluate the ins and outs of Thomas’s story with as little polemical input as possible.
World History
