Cloud of Witnesses: Archiepiscopal Executions

The archbishopric of Canterbury is the oldest continuous institution in Britain – older than the English crown and much older than parliament. The first archbishop, St Augustine, was consecrated in 598, and although there have been some gaps in the line of succession, most notably during the civil war between 1645 and 1660 when the Church of England went into hibernation, the acknowledged leader of the English church has, from the very beginning, been the bishop of the diocese of Canterbury. He – for there have so far been no women – is graced with the title of Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of All England.

Of the 105 or so archbishops of Canterbury since Augustine, five have been executed while still in office; and of these, three are depicted in the cloister windows at Chester Cathedral: St Alphege, St Thomas Becket and William Laud. (The other two were Simon Sudbury, who was killed in London during the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, and Thomas Cranmer, who was burnt at the stake in Oxford in 1556.) 

Alphege was born into a noble family in 954 and was an austere and pious monk in Bath before being elected abbot of the Benedictine monastery there. Aided by his friendship with the archbishop of Canterbury, Dunstan, Alphege was consecrated bishop of Winchester in 984 and was promoted to Canterbury in 1005. In September 1011 a Danish force besieged the city, capturing Alphege and taking him to Greenwich where he was pelted with bones and cattle skulls before being struck on the head with an axe. Mortally wounded, Alphege sank down and, in the words of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘his holy blood fell on the earth and sent forth his holy soul to God’s kingdom’. It was an act of brutal thuggery.

Thomas Becket’s martyrdom in 1170, by contrast, was a nakedly political killing. Once very close to King Henry II, Becket incurred the king’s wrath as archbishop by refusing to acknowledge some of the monarch’s customary rights and privileges over the church. This ‘troublesome priest’, as Henry allegedly called him, met his end at the hands of four of the king’s knights inside Canterbury Cathedral in December 1170. It was an act of sacrilege as well as murder, propelling Becket to saintly stardom and making Canterbury a major focus of medieval pilgrimage from all over Europe until the destruction of his shrine in 1538.

William Laud, the last of the five archbishops of Canterbury to be executed, also fell out with the monarch, in his case King Charles I. As archbishop, Laud held a high view of order and discipline in the Church of England, and he was harsh on those who opposed him. But charges that he was covertly sympathetic to Roman Catholicism finally overwhelmed him, and the king came to see him as a source of damaging dissension in the church. After an unsatisfactory – and probably unjust – trial instigated by the Puritan Long Parliament, Laud was beheaded on Tower Hill in January 1645. The Church of England then went into a sort of ecclesiastical hibernation, and the archbishopric of Canterbury remained vacant until 1660 when William Juxon was appointed following the return from exile of Charles II and the restoration of the monarchy. 

Although it is unthinkable that a modern archbishop of Canterbury could be executed, the fates of Alphege, Thomas Becket and William Laud (and also of Simon Sudbury and Thomas Cranmer) are stark reminders of the conflicting circumstances in which archbishops may find themselves. On the one hand they have been, and still are, obligated to the state. In pre-Reformation times the obligation stemmed from their appointment by the monarch and in the post-Reformation era because the Supreme Governor of the Church of England is also the head of state. On the other hand, it is the duty of archbishops as Christian leaders to preach the gospel of Christ; and this may at times compel them to challenge the state. In the modern era, for example, archbishops can and do oppose the legislative intentions of the government through their voice in the House of Lords, and they can and do still incur the wrath of prime ministers, as Robert Runcie discovered at the hands of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. It is an enduring paradox that, while the archbishopric of Canterbury sits at the pinnacle of the British establishment, its incumbents have sometimes been among the fiercest critics of establishment values and interests. Some may see this as one of the great strengths of the Church of England.