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18th May 2021
Today, 18th May 2021, was jolly nearly a disaster. It was the day after the Covid lock down began to be ended, and I had it down in my diary as being the press day for the opening of the Nero exhibition at the British Museum. So we decided to celebrate, so I put on my best suit and bow tie for the first time for more than a year, and ventured out into the big wide world down to the British Museum. We were very extravagant, so we went by Uber, but since we are both ancient monuments, why not have a little extravagance as it is important to arrive fresh enough to do a special exhibition.
But when we got there, disaster. We were a week too early. The Becket exhibition opened yesterday, but Nero does not open for another week. But the gatekeeper took pity on us and let us in: why not see the Becket exhibition instead? So we made our way in and investigated Thomas a Becket.
But, oh dear, what a biased exhibition! They have got Thomas a Becket all wrong. The real disaster of the Middle Ages was the constant battle between church and state. The church was far too powerful, and was always undermining the Kings, and as a result, the Middle Ages are a terrible muddle (see Wars of the Roses). However Henry II was a not-bad king, as kings go, and he found a bright young civil servant called Thomas a Becket who he promoted at a young age to be Chancellor, what we would call Prime Minister. He then thought that Becket would be the ideal person to bring the church to heel, so he made him Archbishop of Canterbury, even though he wasn’t actually a priest at the time.
But then Becket ratted on him and began taking the side of the church and being generally obnoxious. Henry in a loose moment exclaimed, Who will rid me of this turbulent priest? and a couple of young hotheads took him literally and didn’t quite realise that this is the sort of thing that Kings are apt to say in unguarded moments, and went off and topped Becket in his cathedral, which was a very silly thing to do.
For Henry, this was a disaster. If only he had been a little stronger, he might have ridden it out. After all, the Pope was not a very strong position, having only just escaped from imprisonment by the King of France, but Henry copped out and had to admit that he, or his knights, were wrong so he had to do abasement. One thinks of the fall of the Roman Empire, when Honorius came under the power of Bishop Ambrose and was forced to persecute the Christians: twenty years later, Rome fell. However Becket’s death was a wonderful PR opportunity for the church which they exploited in a brilliant PR campign and for the rest of the Middle Ages, Becket was one of the best and most effective propaganda stories. And the church became even more powerful.
The end of the story is Henry VIII. He was the first king powerful enough to overthrow the power of the church, though his dissolution of the monasteries was a little bit too over-the-top for my liking. But he realized that Becket was a dangerously powerful image, and the exhibition concludes with an account of how he set about debunking the Becket cult. In a way I began to feel slightly more sympathetic to Henry VIII: the church was extremely powerful and if you are to oppose it, I suppose you must be ruthless.
Mind you, despite its bias, it’s a pretty good exhibition. The highlights are the four windows from Canterbury Cathedral, but they had me puzzled. The colours are so vibrant, particularly the blues and the greens. Can they really be genuine? I was at New College Oxford, where we have what we consider to be the best medieval glass, though secretly I always thought it was a little dull. But surely they could not make such vibrant colours in the Middle Ages?
The best of the four windows shows the miracle of Eilward of Westoning , who was accused of theft, who is displayed with his stolen goods. He was taken before a judge who made him perform ordeals, which he failed, so he was condemned to have his eyes cut out and his balls castrated, which we see in detail, but then Becket comes along and cures him and he is shown with a sprouting tree behind him, showing that his fertility had indeed been restored.
And then there are the caskets, many of them coming from Limoges. Again they are all wonderfully bright – there must have been some very clever artisans in Limoges. I gather that over 70 of them have survived. My favourite however, it is a large carving from Scandinavia.
And then we did something completely different. I decided I wanted to see the Benin bronzes which shamefully I have never seen before. They are down in the African rooms in the basement, but there is a lift straight from Beckett to the African rooms three floors down. The African rooms are very extensive, some day I must send a couple of days, going round it them properly, but the Benin bronzes form a fairly small part of the whole. I think they only have a small portion of their total holdings on display, though they are certainly superb. But there are only a small part of the total African collections. One day I must do the African collections properly. However, next week, there’s Nero. Will I prefer Nero to Becket?