Daniel O’Connell and Alfred Elmore’s Martyrdom of Thomas à Becket

Abstract

Daniel O’Connell and Alfred Elmore’s Martyrdom of Thomas à Becket Caoimhín de Bhailís In a letter written in 1834, Daniel O’Connell describes his visit to Canterbury Cathedral and how, when directed to the exact spot on which Saint Thomas à Becket had been martyred, he ‘knelt down and kissed the stone which had received his life-blood’.1 The verger on duty who witnessed this act was horrified by such ‘Popish work’ in the Cathedral.2 In correspondence with Archbishop John McHale, in which they debated the merits and flaws of the 1837 Tithe Bill, O’Connell expressed his fear that, should the Whig government fall due to opposition to the Bill, they would lose the ‘only bearable government Ireland ever experienced since the fatal day when the followers of the murderers of Becket polluted our shores’.3 The Tithe Bill had been problematic on many fronts for the government in its attempts to appease the growing anger of the Catholic clergy and peasantry in Ireland while also ensuring that a tax was levied for educational purposes, both Anglican and Catholic. In his letter to McHale O’Connell saw this levy as a meritorious aspect of Lord Morpeth’s Bill.4 However, in a speech given at the Franchise Association in 1835, he disagreed with any appropriation of the Established church’s surplus revenue to the Catholic church.5 In his speech, O’Connell voiced his opinion that any link between the church and state would serve to undermine the role of the Catholic church through a financial dependency on the state, as, he had argued, was the case between the Established church and the state.6 Further to this, he pointed to Thomas à Becket as an example of the church’s opposition to the tyranny of the state, in the guise of Henry II, and as one who acted as ‘the guardian of the liberties of the people’.7 There can be no doubt that his earlier visit to Canterbury, in 1834, influenced the speech in which he pointed to the three hundred years prior to the Reformation during which the people congregated en masse at Becket’s shrine.8 O’Connell’s referencing and championing of Becket would have been noted by his audience, as the martyr was a subject of immense interest to the Victorian public. Studies • volume 107 • number 425 76 Thomas à Becket in thenineteenth century Nicholas Vincent has provided a worthy litany of the discussion and debate that surrounded the reappraisal of Becket during the nineteenth century.9 However, although Becket is the saint being discussed here, Devon Fisher has shown that Becket was just one of many saints that were being revisited, reappraised and repositioned in the religious cauldron of nineteenth century Britain.10 Charles Kingsley made a determined attempt to claim pre-reformation saints as Protestant, rather than Catholic, exemplars, something especially evident in his play based on the life of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, The Saint’s Tragedy.11 In this context and in connection with O’Connell, Becket becomes a disputed property. Having had the feast day of his translation abolished in 1536 and his shrine destroyed in 1538, Henry VIII was determined to undermine Becket, who quickly came to be seen as a traitor to the crown. This negation of the saint was still in vogue in the early nineteenth century, as examples in books of the period such as Lady Callcott’s Little Arthur’s History of England, Elizabeth Penrose’s History of England and works by Lord Lyttelton and David Hume confirm.12 However, a revisioning of Becket as a champion of the people and defender of the church, albeit a pre-reformation Catholic church, was also occurring at this time. Richard Hurrell Froude’s History of the Contest between Thomas À Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury and Henry II., King of England, sought to reevaluate Becket from the viewpoint of the Oxford Movement, as it looked to the medieval church as a foundational form of Anglicanism.13 As O’Connell had done in his speech to the Franchise Association, Froude saw Becket as a protector of the poor and of the defenceless against the tyranny of...