What we think we know isn’t necessarily true
Today we went to the British Museum to see the two exhibitions on Nero and Thomas Becket.
The Nero exhibition set out to illustrate that the very bad press Nero has had, may just have been that, very bad press – he was known to be a popular ruler (with the populace, but not the elites of Rome) – and many of the stories and calumnies about him, if not made up wholly of new cloth may well have been so embroidered that the truth disappeared.
The second exhibition focused on the death of Becket, the Plantagenet reaction and that of Europe who galloped him into sainthood, and the eventual Tudor response, almost literally trying to excise him from history – destroying his tomb and cutting out or defacing documents mentioning him.
Many of the exhibits were contemporary but not actually linked to Becket. We all still feel however that Becket was broadly a good thing, and Henry II decidedly not so in his handling of his chancellor turned Archbishop. (Consider ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ as a modern take on the subject).
But Henry promoted Becket to address the very real scandal of benefit of clergy, where clerics guilty of murder or rape (and other crimes) were tried by church courts and did not suffer the penalties of the non-clerical populace.
That benefit of clergy mind-set, I would argue, still permeates the Roman and Anglican church today (or until very recently), although it is paedophiles which now got (and may still get) that benefit, as the Church sets out to look after its own.
On that basis alone I am an Henrican in this matter – he was, and is, right to have challenged benefit of clergy, and Becket wrong not to have continued his stance against it when he moved from Chancellor to Archbishop.
The exhibitions, of course, were informative, excellently curated in the main and engaging.
