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REIGN OF HENRY THE EIGHTH.
[ch. 15.
lish Church. Sept. 30.On the 30th of September the shrine and the relics were shown, perhaps for the last time, to Madame de Montreuil and a party of French ladies.[1] October.In the following month the bones of the martyr who for centuries had been venerated throughout Europe, which peers and princes had crossed the seas to look upon, which tens of thousands of pilgrims year after year for all those ages had crowded to reverence, were torn from their hallowed resting-place, and burnt to powder, and scattered to the winds. The golden plating of the shrine, the emeralds and rubies, the votive offerings of the whole Christian world, were packed in chests, and despatched to the treasury. The chiselled stone was splintered with hammers. The impressions worn upon the pavement by the millions of knees[2] which had bent in adoration there, alone remained to tell of the glory which had been. Simultaneously with the destruction of his remains, Becket's name was erased out of the service-
- ↑ Madame de Montreuil, though a Frenchwoman and a good Catholic, had caught the infection of the prevailing unbelief in saints and saintly relics.'I showed her St Thomas's shrine,' writes an attendant, 'and all such other things worthy of sight, of the which she was not little marvelled of the great riches thereof, saying it to be innumerable, and that: if she had not seen it all the men in the world could never have made her to believe it. Thus overlooking and viewing more than an hour as well the shrine as St Thomas's head, being at both set cushions to kneel, the prior, opening St Thomas's head, said to her three times, this is St Thomas's head, and offered her to kiss it, hut she neither kneeled nor would kiss it, but (stood), still viewing the riches thereof.'—Penison to Cromwell: State Papers, vol. i. p. 583.
- ↑ These marks are still distinctly visible.
