If you ask me Thomas Becket and King Henry II deserved each other - what a pair!
I got this book second hand in a charity shop for 50p and from the cover design had formed the opinion that this was an historical novel - but actually it is a straightforward biography. Oh well, for 50p who cares? It is well written and keeps jogging along at a good pace. The footnotes are kept to a minimum and most of the references to contemporary sources are pushed to the back in an Appendix - which is how I like it, though some may prefer the flow of the text to be constantly broken up with references. The book covers the entire life of Becket and gives a lot of information about which I was not previously aware. It sets the action against the background of the society, Church and politics of the age very well - especially in the first half of the book before Becket becomes Archbishop of Canterbury. It does a good job of explaining enough so that you understand what is going on but without going off down rabbit holes of irrelevant information.
If you are looking for a good introduction to the life and times of Thomas Becket - then this is the book for you.
However, I do have some complaints. The author is very obviously on the side of Thomas Becket and hostile to Henry II. For instance, Becket as "advisers", "supporters" and "assistants" while Henry has "henchmen" and "cronies". When Becket breaks a promise he is driven by a genuine change of mind, but when Henry breaks a promise it is a cynical, sinister trick. After a while I found this relentless bias rather a trial, but I was so far into the book by then that I thought I might as well finish.
At this distance in time, it is very difficult to work out who was right and who was wrong in the basic dispute between Henry and Becket - that is the boundary between Royal and Church authority in society and constitutional terms. The author does not make much effort to try to unpick this for a modern reader. Again he just assumes that Henry is wrong and Becket is correct. Though from the little he does say it seems clear that at the time people disagreed on the issue. It seems that Henry was trying to put the clock back 30 or 40 years time to when the balance of power lay with Royal government, while Becket was trying to push through new reforms that favoured the Church.
The second half of the book concentrates exclusively on the dispute between Henry and Becket. It has nothing at all to say about other aspects of Becket's life nor his role as Archbishop of Canterbury. This is a shame as the medieval church was a powerful, wealthy and proactive organisation that did much to address social issues and moral issues. It would have been nice to have learned something about that.
What comes across in this book - whether the author intends it or not - is that both Henry and Becket were difficult men to deal with. While the author does his best to paint Becket in as positive a light as he can, there is no disguising the fact that any other prelate would have done a deal with Henry. Nor can it be disguised that Becket was an astonishingly tactless, rude and argumentative character. Nobody deserves to be murdered, but if ever a man deserved a slap - it was Becket.
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