Status Updates From Thomas Becket

“Next morning he started out for Canterbury along a road lined with wildly enthusiastic crowds.”

“Thus, after a year of intense anxiety, Thomas Becket was left in the very position in which he had stood at the beginning. Henry, too, had gained nothing but further delay and the prospect that his kingdom would continue to be disturbed, his clergy divided, and his reputation impaired at home and abroad. . .”

“Ever since his consecration as archbishop Thomas Becket had baffled and angered his sovereign, but he had not really undermined the king’s power.”

Thus Thomas placed in a position of power the man who subsequently, as he himself would later write, “first divided the unity of the English church and armed the minds and hands of the king and his officials for the destruction of ourselves and of ecclesiastical liberty.”

“Thomas Becket has left no body of literary work. All that we have from his pen are the many letters he wrote with his controversy with Henry II. To judge by these, he must have devoted himself during his student years less to theology and philosophy than to obtaining a solid grounding in the classics and the scriptures.”