Becket and Henry: The Becket Lectures (review)

This book is a fascinating mixture of contrasting personalities and institutions, not only in its subject matter but also in its production. After a foreword by George Cardinal Pell which deftly sketches in some of the historical background (pp. ix-xiii), the major part of book comprises five lectures delivered between 1999 and 2003 by the Honourable James Spigelman, Chief Justice of New South Wales – neither a Christian nor having English antecedents – to the guild of Catholic lawyers known as the St Thomas More Society. Spigelman's lecture to the Selden Society in Sydney in 2000, entitled 'A Twelfth Century Succession at York', concerning the disputed election of William Fitzherbert to the see of York in 1141, serves as an introduction to what he identifies as the underlying theme of the Becket lectures.

As Spigelman sees it, both Becket and Henry were motivated by a furious adherence to their particular institutional loyalties. This conflict serves to illustrate his contention that 'The basic fault line of political life in Western Christendom during the twelfth century was constituted by the conflicting institutional imperatives of the Church, on the one hand, and secular rulers, on the other.' The relevance of these events to the present, where 'The fault line of political life over ... approximately the last two centuries, has been the conflict of institutional imperatives between the centralized state, on the one hand, and private organizations of various kinds, particularly commercial corporations, on the other' (p. 3), is implicit.

The lectures essentially provide a clear and comprehensive narrative account of the quarrel between Becket and Henry, dependent on the work of historians such as Frank Barlow, R. W. Southern, A. L. Poole and more recently Robert Bartlett and Wiliam Urry. Spigelman quotes from many contemporary sources (where they are available in translation) and sometimes from modern literary texts, such as T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, to good effect. Spigelman seems reluctant to advance any original historical interpretations within the main text, although he is more inclined to judge between possibilities in the notes. An interesting exception is found on p. 178 where he suggests – since 'No one else has been able to work it out' – that Becket may have chosen Vézelay to ramp up his campaign against Henry in 1166 because of the presence there of the relics of 'the companions of Daniel who defied Nebuchadnezzar, as Becket was to defy Henry.' He adds, in a rare self-reflective moment, 'However that interpretation may be an Old Testament bias.' But as Herbert of Bosham, that well-known Christian-Hebraist, would have been able to explain, Spigelman here speaks better than he knows, since in Christian exegesis, Daniel was a type of Christ, a comparison which Herbert, if not Becket himself, was eager to advance.

In conclusion, this book may be read with pleasure by anyone wishing to(re)familiarize themselves with the complicated and drawn-out quarrel between the archbishop and the king. Moreover, it would be a fine introduction to the material for undergraduates who might find Barlow and Urry supplying more information than they need.