their admiring gaze. After having done honour to the saint, they dispersed, some to explore the cathedral, and others to find their pleasure in the town; but all were careful to purchase some of the articles offered for sale, as mementos of the visit, especially the "ampulles," or little leaden bottles containing water from the sacred well, in which was supposed to be present some small particle of the blood of the saint. A representation of the shrine appears on one of the stained windows of the cathedral. It is intended to show the great Archbishop rising out of one end, and issuing his commands to a monk who is dreaming of him on a couch below. The shrine continued to be enriched by the offerings of countless numbers of devotees till towards the middle of the sixteenth century. By that time the old order was changing and giving place to new, and the light of modern intellectual inquiry was being thrown on many objects and institutions which had been previously regarded by superstitious reverence as quite beyond its operation; the sanctity of shrines and relics was being regarded as questionable; and we have notable instances of strongly expressed disbelief in what it was formerly regarded as sacrilegious to doubt. About the year 1512, Erasmus and Dean Colet Q visited Canterbury, and we are told that, on several occasions, both in the city and on the road, the worthy Dean's temper got the better of him, when he witnessed the impudent attempts which were being made to play upon the superstitious fancies of the ignorant, by quacks like the Pardoner; and that Erasmus had much to do to calm him down, himself looking with a cynical eye on the whole proceedings, but doing what was expected of him for the sake of peace. Less than thirty years afterwards the end came, but it is remarkable that the number of yearly pilgrims continued to be undiminished to the very last. In 1534 the royal supremacy over the Church was declared, the monasteries were suppressed shortly after, and Henry VIII. resolved to destroy the shrine. The reverence paid to the saint was a standing menace to his own pretensions, for no ecclesiastic had ever done more than Becket to resist the temporal power over the Church; while the vast riches connected with the tomb were very tempting and attractive in the king's eyes. In 1538, therefore, the order went forth that Becket should no longer be regarded as a saint, but should only be spoken of as Bishop Becket; that the festivals held in his honour should cease; that his bones should be publicly burned; that pilgrimages to Canterbury should no longer be made; and that the shrine itself and all the costly gifts which for centuries had been presented to it, should be forfeited to the Crown. The order was carried out to the fullest extent in September of that year; the shrine was broken by a sledge-hammer, the body was treated with the greatest ignominy, the precious metals were put into the melting - pot, the king and his nobles appropriated the jewels, and the name of the saint was erased from all parts of the sacred books. Nowadays, as Dean Stanley says, on account of the universal desire to preserve all beautiful things, no such act of vandalism could possibly occur; but then no protest whatever seems to have been made against what was done: the people were very submissive to the Crown in the reign of Henry VIII., the shrine fell with the ignorance on which its permanence was founded, no account of its existence is to be found in the cathedral books, and the broken pavement which shows the violence used at its destruction is almost the only visible evidence we have that it ever had a being. Sic transit gloria mundi! |