The assassination was a shock to Christendom.  The most intrepid churchman of his age was slain at his post for doing, as he believed, his duty.  No one felt the shock more than the King himself, who knew he would be held responsible for the murder.  He dreaded the consequences, and shut himself up for three days in his chamber, refusing food, issuing orders for the arrest of the murderers, and sending ambassadors to the Pope to exculpate himself.  Fearing an excommunication and an interdict, he swore on the Gospel, in one of the Norman cathedrals, that he had not commanded nor desired the death of the Archbishop; and stipulated to maintain at his own cost two hundred knights in the Holy Land, to abrogate the Constitutions of Clarendon, to reinvest the See of Canterbury with all he had wrested away, and even to undertake a crusade against the Saracens of Spain if the Pope desired.  Amid the calamities which saddened his latter days, he felt that all were the judgments of God for his persecution of the martyr, and did penance at his tomb.

So Becket slew more by his death than he did by his life.  His cause was gained by his blood:  it arrested the encroachments of the Norman kings for more than three hundred years.  He gained the gratitude of the Church and a martyr’s crown.  He was canonized as a saint.  His shrine was enriched with princely offerings beyond any other object of popular veneration in the Middle Ages.  Till the time of the Reformation a pilgrimage to that shrine was a common form of penance for people of all conditions, the nobility as well as the common people.  Even miracles were reputed to be wrought at that shrine, while a drop of Becket’s blood would purchase a domain!

Whatever may be said about the cause of Becket, to which there are two sides, there is no doubt about his popularity.  Even the Reformation, and the changes made in the English Constitution, have not obliterated the veneration in which he was held for five hundred years.  You cannot destroy respect for a man who is willing to be a martyr, whether his cause is right or wrong.  If enlightened judgments declare that he was “a martyr of sacerdotal power, not of Christianity; of a caste, and not of mankind;” that he struggled for the authority and privileges of the clergy rather than for the good of his country,—­still it will be conceded that he fought bravely and died with dignity.  All people love heroism.  They are inclined to worship heroes; and especially when an unarmed priest dares to resist an unscrupulous and rapacious king, as Henry is well known to have been, and succeeds in tearing from his hands the spoils he has seized, there must be admiration.  You cannot extinguish the tribute of the soul for heroism, any more than that of the mind for genius.  The historian who seeks to pull down a hero from the pedestal on which he has been seated for ages plays a losing game.  No brilliancy in sophistical pleadings can make men