aculously restored each broken
shell to perfect shape, each yolk to soundness. Saith William of
Malmesbury, recounting this marvellous achievement--"statimque porrecto
crucis signo, fracturam omnium ovorum consolidat."

Like Chancellor Swithin before him, and like Chancellor Wolsey in a
later time, Chancellor Becket was a royal tutor;[35] and like Swithin,
who still remains the pluvious saint of humid England, and unlike
Wolsey, who just missed the glory of canonization, Becket became a
widely venerated saint. But less kind to St. Thomas of Canterbury than
to St. Swithin, the Reformation degraded Becket from the saintly rank by
the decision which terminated the ridiculous legal proceedings
instituted by Henry VIII. against the holy reputation of St. Thomas.
After the saint's counsel had replied to the Attorney-General, who, of
course, conducted the cause for the crown, the court declared that
"Thomas, sometime Archbishop of Canterbury, had been guilty of
contumacy, treason and rebellion; that his bones should be publicly
burnt, to admonish the living of their duty by the punishment of the
dead; and that the offerings made at his shrine should be forfeited to
the crown."

After the conclusion of the suit for the saint's degradation--a suit
which was an extravagant parody of the process for establishing at Rome
a holy man's title to the honors of canonization--proclamation was made
that "forasmuch as it now clearly appeared that Thomas Becket had been
killed in a riot excited by his own obstinacy and intemperate language,
and had been afterwards canonized by the Bishop of Rome as the champion
of his usurped authority, the king's majesty thought it expedient to
declare to his loving subjects that he was no saint, but rather a rebel
and traitor to his prince, and therefore strictly charged and commanded
that he should not be esteemed or called a saint; that all images and
pictures of him should be destroyed, the festivals in his honor be
abolished, and his name and remembrance be erased out of all books,
under pain of his majesty's indignation and imprisonment at his grace's
pleasure."

But neither St. Swithin nor St. Thomas of Canterbury, lawyers though
they were, deigned to take the legal profession under especial
protection, and to mediate with particular officiousness between the
long robe and St. Peter. The peculiar saint of the profession was St.
Evona, concerning whom Carr, in his 'Remarks of the Government of the