THOMAS A BECKETT, Sylvester Hassell In the eleventh century William the Conqueror, King of England, refused to swear fealty to the pope; but in the twelfth century England was, even more than France and Germany, subject to the pope. Thomas a Beckett, the haughty and impracticable “Archbishop of Canterbury,” censured and quarreled with Henry II. Of England, not for the vices of the king, which were great, but for his futile attempt to make himself independent of the pope; and some hasty and angry words of Henry led four knights to murder Beckett in 1170—Beckett indulging to the last in bitter invectives against his foes, and falling, says Milman, “as a martyr, not of Christianity, but of sacerdotalism.” Two years afterward the pope canonized him, and Beckett became for several centuries the most popular saint in England, his worship superseding that of God and even of Mary, and as many as a hundred thousand pilgrims at one time visiting his tomb. Henry himself, in 1174, underwent a public and humiliating penance there, walking three miles with bare and bleeding feet on the flinty road, prostrating himself at the tomb, scourged, at his own request, by the willing monks, and spending a night and day in prayers and tears, imploring the intercession of the saint in Heaven.” (Hassell’s History pg 436)