Murder in the Cathedral
For tedious reasons of my own, I have been prodding about in the Latin literature of the twelfth century, which is how come I found myself in the library the other day taking a look through the letters of the future St Thomas ŕ Becket, before he was done in on the orders of Henry II. Saintly he may have been, but otherwordly he was not. I was greatly interested by a letter which he wrote (in Latin) to a lady called Idonea, which seemed to be saying an awful lot between the lines, one way or another. The key fact which you need to know to understand what’s going on here is that Becket’s great enemy was Roger, Archbishop of York.
The letter starts by reminding Idonea of the stories of Judith and Esther –– that is to say, courageous noblewomen who were in one context or another, the saviours of their people. Then he continues with a sentence which I translate as follows: ‘My daughter, the mighty reward of the remission of sins is proposed for your labour, an unfading reward and crown of glory, which those blessed sinners, the Magdalen and Mary of Egypt, received from Christ the Lord, the sins of their entire previous lives having been deleted.’ Then he cuts to the chase, as it were: what he wants her to do is to take a letter, which he encloses, and make sure that when Archbishop Roger goes to say Mass in the morning, he finds it waiting for him on the altar. Quite a delicate mission; since it may be assumed that the Archbishop’s nasty little surprise was a fairly explosive document. Several things intrigue me about this. It’s generally assumed that women didn’t read Latin, but assuming that the lady was in her right mind, who on earth would she be showing this to? So I think you have to assume she could read it. Anyway, who was she? ‘Idonea’ could be a sobriquet, since as a Latin word, it means ‘a suitable person (female)’, or alternatively, it’s sometimes used as a Latinization of the not uncommon name, Ida. One possibility is that she was the Countess of Norfolk, Ida, wife of Roger Bigod; or she might be a French Ida. I don’t at the moment have any idea whether the letter was written when Becket was in exile in France and his enemies were in England, or when he’d gone back to England, and Roger and the king were in France, which was the situation in 1170, when he was martyred. But another thing is worth noticing; the very pointed evocation of the Magdalen and Mary of Egypt, both of whom had a long career of harlotry behind them before they went to heaven in a blaze of glory. It looks very much as if Becket knows of some pretty major peccadillo in Idonea’s past, because he’s quite obviously offering a deal: undertake this risky and potentially embarrassing mission, which if you are caught will put you on the wrong side of the king, and in my capacity as Archbishop of Canterbury, I will undertake to absolve you of –– well, whatever it might be. And if you don’t …? There are circles in which this kind of thing might be most conveniently referred to as ‘blackmail’. If nothing else, the whole story sheds an interesting cross-light on why there might have been people who thought murdering this man was a Good Idea.