# Henry II's requested scourging at Canterbury

Commentary on Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.

On [CH06.P025](https://glosses.org/orthodoxy/pg16769-r1/CH06.P025/#char=1143,1234): "that monkish fierceness that scourged like a dog the first and greatest of the Plantagenets"

The king is Henry II. The historical setting is his penance at Canterbury in July 1174 after Thomas Becket's murder. William of Newburgh's late-twelfth-century *History*, II.35, says that Henry prostrated himself before the monks and, at his own urgent request, received blows from each brother in turn. The inspected witness is Joseph Stevenson's 1856 English translation, reproduced by Fordham's Medieval Sourcebook. [William of Newburgh, II.35](https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/williamnewburgh-becket1.asp).

That request complicates the image of an independently ferocious monastic assault: this was also a king's performance of penitential submission. William interprets the episode as extraordinary royal humility and connects it with divine assistance against Henry's enemies. Chesterton concentrates the spectacle into ecclesiastical indignation directed at supreme worldly power. His final imagined whipping of Rockefeller in Westminster Abbey transfers the social relationship to modern London; Westminster is not the site of Henry's penance. The medieval narrative documents the ritual and its religious interpretation, rather than independently proving Chesterton's larger claim that such moral drama disappeared with supernatural belief.

## Sources

- [William of Newburgh: Becket and Henry, selections from History, Book II](https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/williamnewburgh-becket1.asp), II.35, opening three paragraphs; Joseph Stevenson translation, The Church Historians of England IV.II (1856), extract pp. 493–95; Fordham transcription

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