The clerical scholar harrumphed. He had no immediate answer to that. Miss Holland was right, but that didn’t mean that the skeleton was Becket’s. There wasn’t nearly enough evidence for her to jump to that conclusion.
The arguments raged back and forth. Opinion was divided in the precincts, and everywhere else as well. The columns of The Times were full of it as the discussion continued. If the skeleton in Austin’s spare room wasn’t Thomas Becket’s, it had certainly belonged to someone remarkably similar.
It wasn’t long after the announcement of the discovery in the newspapers that the first pilgrim appeared. He came from Margate, bringing his son with him.
‘My boy is going blind,’ he told Austin. ‘His sight is failing fast and the doctors say nothing can be done to save him. We’d like to see St Thomas’s bones, if we may.’
Austin was shocked. ‘I’m sorry to hear about your son,’ he said. ‘That’s awful. I’m not sure that the bones can be any help, though. We don’t even know if they’re Becket’s or not.’
‘We’d like to touch them nevertheless.’ The man was desperate. ‘It can’t do any harm. It might do some good.’
‘They’re only a few old bones.’
‘Please. I beg you. It’s our last chance to save my son’s sight. We’ve tried everything else.’
Austin didn’t have the heart to refuse. ‘All right,’ he agreed. ‘Of course you can, if you wish.’
He led the way to the spare room. The man took his son by the hand and told him to kneel down beside the skeleton.
‘Here’s St Thomas’s skull,’ he told him. ‘Feel his eye sockets. Now put your eyes close to them and say your prayers.’
The son did as he was told.
‘No doctors can heal you now,’ his father said. ‘You must pray for yourself if you want to keep your sight. St Thomas is all we have left.’
If the saint was going to work a miracle, he didn’t do so at once. The boy was still going blind as his father took him away. Austin watched them leave with sadness. He wondered how many more pilgrims would come, if they thought the bones in his spare room could effect a cure where all the doctors had failed.
The cathedral authorities wondered too. It was the last thing they wanted, a long column of pilgrims lining up to touch some old bones that had been dug up. The Church of England didn’t do things like that anymore.
‘The body will have to be reburied,’ the Dean decided. ‘As soon as the examination is complete, we’ll put it back where we found it. We don’t want a cult forming around something that might not even be Becket.’
The bones were reinterred on the afternoon of 10 February. Austin led the way as a solemn procession entered the crypt at 3.30. The two workmen carrying the bier were followed by Thornton, the Dean, Miss Holland and several attendant clergymen. They gathered by the graveside and watched quietly as the bones were placed into a new oak coffin in exactly the same positions as they had been found.
Once that had been done, Austin added a glass bottle containing a photograph of the skull and an account of the grave’s discovery. Then the lid was screwed down and the wooden coffin was put into the stone trough. The trough was cemented around and covered with a heavy stone slab before the earth was replaced on top. Five minutes later, every trace of the grave in the crypt had been hidden and there was nothing left to mark the site.
So it remained for the next sixty one years. There were attempts from time to time to erect some sort of monument over the grave, but they were always blocked by the cathedral authorities. It was widely believed that the bones were Becket’s, but nobody could say so for certain. Erecting a monument over them seemed unwise, in the circumstances.
It wasn’t until 1949 that the authorities decided that the only way to settle the issue was to re-examine the bones. Science had moved on since 1888. There were ways of analysing bones in 1949 that hadn’t been available in the nineteenth century. The cathedral authorities decided to have another look.
The grave was reopened on the evening of 18 July. An archaeologist from Cambridge and a professor of anatomy from St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London were on hand to witness the event. They watched closely as the grave was chiselled open by the light of a lamp plugged in to the organ.
A dreadful smell arose as soon as the coffin was revealed. Everyone recoiled at once and reached for a handkerchief.
‘Moisture,’ said Professor Cave. He peered gingerly into the broken coffin with a hand over his nose. ‘It looks as if damp got into the tomb in 1888. That’s the most likely explanation.’
Whatever the reason, the coffin was a mess. The wood had rotted and the skull had fallen onto its side. Austin’s bottle had been smashed and the contents saturated. The bones were covered in patches of mould and fungus, very brittle to the touch.
They were taken out carefully and laid on the floor of the crypt. After a cursory examination, they were boxed up and kept safely in the precincts overnight. Professor Cave was going to drive them to St Bartholomew’s next morning for a full study and forensic report.
‘It’ll take some time,’ he warned the cathedral authorities, before leaving for London. ‘The bones will have to dry out before we can look at them properly. It’ll be a long process. Don’t expect the results any time soon.’
St Bartholomew’s Hospital had changed out of all recognition since the murder of Wat Tyler in 1381. The peasant leader’s body had been carried into the hospital after his death outside at the hands of London’s mayor, but the only building that remained from those days was the old Norman church from the priory next door. Everything else had long since been rebuilt.
Smithfield had changed too. The ancient tournament field was now covered by the halls of the meat market. The spot where Tyler had been knocked off his horse after challenging the King was now a busy road. Professor Cave weaved through the traffic and turned into the hospital through the gate.
The bones were laid out again in the anatomy department. Some of them were so mouldy that they disintegrated at the slightest touch. Cave began the painstaking process of drying them all out before putting the pieces back together again.
It was almost two years before he was able to produce his report. The typescript ran to thirty-one double-spaced pages by the time he had finished. It made disappointing reading for the cathedral authorities.
‘The bones aren’t Becket’s,’ Cave told them. ‘The body comes from the right century, but the man was only five foot eight, nowhere near as tall as the Archbishop. He was nearer sixty than fifty, in my opinion. And he didn’t die from sword cuts to the head.’
‘What were they, then? The gashes in the skull?’
‘Post-mortem fractures caused by natural disintegration after death. You see it all the time in reopened graves. Nobody killed this man with a sword. Which means, I’m afraid, that wherever Becket’s bones are now, they certainly aren’t the ones that Austin’s men discovered in the crypt.’
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Unknown Warrior
In a makeshift chapel at St Pol in France, four military stretchers lay side by side. Each was covered by a Union Jack concealing the body of a British soldier killed in the Great War. The bodies had been brought separately to the British military headquarters at St Pol from the fields of the Somme, the Aisne, Arras and Ypres, four of the most bitterly contested battlegrounds of the war.
The bodies were all anonymous, with no identifying marks of any kind. Nobody knew their name, rank, number or anything about them. All that could be said for sure was that all four bodies had belonged to British soldiers killed in the fighting. And one of them was shortly to be reburied in Westminster Abbey.
The selection was made at midnight on 7 November 1920. Accompanied only by a colonel, Brigadier-General Wyatt entered the chapel without ceremony and touched one of the corpses at random. The two officers then placed it in the coffin shell standing in front of the altar before leaving again. The body remained under guard there for the
rest of the night.
Army chaplains held a service in the chapel next morning. At noon, the deal coffin was carried out to a motor ambulance and driven to the port of Boulogne. It was accompanied by six barrels of earth from the battlefields, so that after its reburial in London the body could lie forever in the soil that had cost so many British and Imperial troops their lives.
The ambulance passed close to the old battlefield of Agincourt before arriving in Boulogne. British and French troops lined the route as the body was driven up the hill to the chateau overlooking the town. It was taken to the former library of the chateau, now the British officers’ mess, and guarded by French soldiers for its last night on French territory.
Next morning, the body was transferred to a new coffin of English oak that had been brought from England for the purpose. A Crusader’s sword from the private collection of King George V was placed on the lid before the coffin was secured with wrought iron bands. It was then covered with a Union Jack and transferred to an army wagon drawn by six black horses for the short journey down to the harbour.
The procession began at 10.30. All the bells of Boulogne rang out before the mile-long cortege set off. The town’s firemen led the way, followed by disabled French soldiers wearing their medals, local dignitaries and hundreds of French children, who had been given the day off school for the occasion.
Behind them came several columns of French infantry, marching through packed streets to the sound of Chopin’s Funeral March. Behind them came the wagon bearing the coffin, followed by French soldiers carrying giant wreaths from the French army, navy and government. British soldiers marched with them, carrying similar wreaths. High-ranking officers from both armies brought up the rear.
At the dockside, the destroyer HMS Verdun was waiting to take the Unknown Warrior to England. A French bugler sounded the Last Post after the cortege had come to a halt. Then Marshal Foch of the French army stepped forward. Saluting the coffin, he made a short speech on behalf of the French people:
‘I express the profound feelings of France for the invincible heroism of the British army, and I regard the body of this hero as a souvenir of the future and as a reminder to work in common to cement the victories we have gained by eternal union.’
For the British, Lieutenant-General Sir George MacDonogh thanked Foch in French on behalf of the King and the British government. Everyone stood to attention as both countries’ national anthems were played. Then the British bearer party removed the coffin from the wagon and carried it aboard the warship.
HMS Verdun was flying her flag at half-mast as she left harbour. A nineteen-gun salute sent the Warrior on his way. Out at sea, six more Royal Navy destroyers waited in the middle of the English Channel to meet HMS Verdun in the fog and escort her precious cargo safely in to Dover.
All six destroyers lowered their Union flags and ensigns to half-mast as the Verdun approached. It was a mark of respect usually reserved for the King. The ships quickly took station around the Verdun and accompanied her the rest of the way to Dover.
Another nineteen-gun salute welcomed the Unknown Warrior’s arrival in England. High above the town, Dover Castle’s flag flew at half-mast as the body came in to harbour. As so often in the port’s history, every available vantage point was crammed with sightseers as the ship docked and the band played Land of Hope and Glory on the dockside.
A bearer party carried the coffin from the ship to the railway station. The route was lined by soldiers of the Connaught Rangers and the Royal West Kents, all with their heads bowed and their arms reversed. At the station, more troops from the Rangers snapped to attention and shouldered their rifles as the Unknown Warrior arrived.
‘Guard of honour,’ shouted the officer in command. ‘General salute. Present arms.’
The soldiers slapped their rifles as one man and came to the salute. The officers lowered their swords. The coffin was carried to a specially prepared luggage van attached to the boat train. The roof of the van had been painted white so that the crowds along the route would know exactly which one contained the Unknown Warrior on his journey to London.
It was 5.50, already dark, as the train pulled out of Dover Marine station. Ahead lay Kearsney, Shepherdswell, Adisham, Canterbury East and many other railway stations on the way to London Victoria. At every station, whether the boat train stopped there or not, crowds were already gathering to salute the Warrior as he passed.
Canterbury was no exception. Old soldiers, sailors, wives, widows, boy scouts, schoolchildren, people of all kinds, were waiting in the evening gloom to see the Unknown Warrior pass through their city. Everyone wanted to pay their respects as he made his last journey. Nobody wanted to miss it when he came through Canterbury on his way to Westminster Abbey.
The city had been closer to the war than most places in Britain. St Augustine’s had been used as a hospital for wounded soldiers. So had the military barracks. Convalescent troops had filled the cathedral every day throughout the war. Some had gone there to pray for a speedy recovery, others to beg that they would never become whole again if it meant a rapid return to the fighting.
On still summer evenings, the sound of the war had been clearly audible in Canterbury from across the sea. The rumble of guns that preceded every big push in France or Flanders had echoed around the cathedral precincts, filling everyone who heard it with fear and dread. They knew, as sure as night followed day, that the guns would be followed within a week or two by the red bicycle, the two-wheeled monster that everyone in Britain hated to see in their street.
Red was the colour of the Post Office. The bicycles were ridden by messenger boys delivering telegrams. There were always telegrams after a big military push in France or Belgium. They never brought good news.
‘Deeply regret to inform you that your son/brother/husband/father…’ Nobody wanted to receive that awful message. Households with a man at the front were never able to settle to anything if they spotted a red bicycle at the end of their road. All they could do was sit and wait until the messenger boy had ridden past.
Even then, they had to wait a bit longer, in case the boy had mistaken the house numbers and returned quickly with bad news. Sometimes people were on their knees in the hallway, praying for no telegram, when it came through the letter box and dropped noiselessly onto the mat. Nothing cowed the British people like the sight of a humble Post Office bicycle in their street.
Almost every family in the land had suffered a loss during the catastrophic war. Rather than give in to their grief, the British had nevertheless insisted on always remaining calm and stoical in public. Walter Hines Page, the American ambassador, had watched in wonder as the casualties mounted, sometimes many thousands in a single day, and Britons of all kinds remained brave and steadfast, refusing to surrender in public to the feelings that had devastated them in private:
‘They never weep. Their voices do not falter. Not a tear have I seen yet. It isn’t an accident that these people own a fifth of the world. Utterly unwarlike, they outlast anybody else when war comes.’
But the price was very heavy. It wasn’t much of a victory for the British. The majority of the people crowding the platform at Canterbury East railway station to await the Unknown Warrior were women mourning their men. Quite a few of them didn’t even know what had happened to the man in their life. They knew only that he was missing on the Western Front, believed killed.
Bell Harry towered above them in the darkness as they waited for the train to arrive. The woman all knew that the chances of the Unknown Warrior being their own personal warrior were infinitely small, but that didn’t stop them hoping. The Unknown Warrior, on his way to national honour in Westminster Abbey, was all they had left.
The train arrived at last and drew into the station. All eyes turned to the luggage van with the white-painted roof. The doors were locked and the barred windows were small, difficult to see into. But the Warrior was inside, surrounded with floral wreaths, en route to his final resting place among th
e Kings and Queens of England.
There was barely room to move on the platform as the crowd stood in bowed silence. The train stayed only long enough to set down passengers and take up new ones. There was little ceremony beyond a salute from the soldiers present. The real ceremony was reserved for London, where the whole city was preparing to bury the Warrior in the Abbey next day, with full military honours.
The ordinary people of Canterbury were not alone on the platform as they saluted his body. The shades of the cathedral were there too, unseen, unheard, but present all the same. The ghosts of Canterbury from times past had come of their own accord to salute the Unknown Warrior and pay tribute to his sacrifice. The Warrior was as much a part of the country’s story as they were.
William the Conqueror was there, the Norman king who had granted the accord giving Canterbury cathedral primacy over York. The cathedral still had the document, signed by William and his wife with a cross, in accordance with best legal practice at the time.
Henry II was there, and Thomas Becket, and Richard the Lionheart and bad King John. Edward I and the Black Prince were there too. So was Henry V, surrounded by all the knights and stout archers who had followed him into the cathedral after Agincourt. Henry’s men-at-arms were with him still, standing solemn and silent beside him along the railway line.
Edward IV was there with his hunchbacked brother Richard III. Henry VIII was standing with his daughter Queen Elizabeth. Charles I, reunited with his head, was standing with his son Charles II and his blood doctor William Harvey.
Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell were both present. So were the Scrivenor of Magna Carta and Sir Thomas More, keeping company with Wat Tyler, the leader of the Peasants’ Revolt.
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