William de Tracy: The Penitent Knight of Canterbury
The Road to the Great Rebellion, Part 6
The Death of Thomas Becket
A nobleman turned saint’s assassin, de Tracy sought penance and absolution on distant shores. Could he ever find it?
On that bitter December evening in 1170, when Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, fell beneath four flashing swords, one of those four blades belonged to Sir William de Tracy. Chroniclers called him the calmest of the murderers; steady-handed, methodical, a man who believed he was acting under royal command. Yet for the rest of his life, remorse and infamy would drive him abroad.
A Knight of Standing
Unlike the rougher Reginald FitzUrse, de Tracy came from Devonshire gentry. He was the lord of Toddington, with estates reaching across the West Country. He was a man of substance: well-educated, devout by contemporary standards, and close enough to Henry II to serve in his household.
He believed he was only following Henry II’s orders. But that decision to follow the others to Canterbury would ruin his life.
When the four knights swore to confront the Archbishop, de Tracy was the one who tried to reason with Becket before violence broke out. But once FitzUrse’s sword drew first blood, he shamefully joined the attack.
Flight and Excommunication
Knaresborough Castle
After the murder, de Tracy and his accomplices in crime fled north with the others to Knaresborough Castle, seeking refuge under Hugh de Morville’s protection. For a year they lived like outlaws, shunned by their peers and cursed by every priest in Christendom.
In 1171 Pope Alexander III excommunicated all four knights, demanding penance. I find it difficult to believe (political theatre or true story?) but it was said the men journeyed to Rome barefoot on their pilgrimage of humiliation, seeking forgiveness, starting in England ending before the throne of the Holy Father himself.
The Long Penance
A Knight Hospitaller
According to later tradition, Pope Alexander condemned them to fight in the Holy Land for fourteen years as penance for their crime. De Tracy is believed to have obeyed. Some accounts place him in Antioch or Jerusalem, serving with the Knights Hospitaller, his sword now turned against the enemies of Christ.
A 13th-century Devon chronicle claims he founded or endowed several chapels before sailing east, gestures of atonement for the sin that could never be undone. Yet even there, among crusaders and relics, his name carried the stench of sacrilege. The chronicler Gervase of Canterbury wrote that the knights:
“found no rest upon earth nor in heaven until the years of penance were fulfilled.”
Death in the East
We don’t know how or where William de Tracy died. Some said he never reached the Holy Land at all, perishing on the journey. Others imagined him dying in battle beneath the Levantine sun, still whispering the archbishop’s name. Whatever truth lies behind the legend, he disappears from English records after 1174, swallowed by history and penitence alike.
The Weight of a King’s Words
De Tracy’s story reminds us how easily loyalty could curdle into damnation. He was no common murderer but a knight acting, as he believed, for his sovereign’s honour. When kings ruled by personal word and gesture, a moment’s anger could unleash a tragedy that echoed for generations.
He believed he was ‘only following orders’…
That echo—the tension between obedience and conscience—would soon ring again in the Great Rebellion of 1173-4, when Henry’s own sons turned against him.
Why This Matters for Lady of Lincoln
In Lady of Lincoln, the shadow of Canterbury hung over England. When Henry II lost his moral authority over the Thomas Becket affair, the seeds of dissent were laid for the Great Rebellion. And it was often women, like Nicola, who had to pick up the pieces of a kingdom shattered by the ambition and questionable morals of the barons and knights of the time.
Next in The Road to the Great Rebellion mini-series: Hugh de Morville: The Knight Who Would Not Repent.