A wealthy bishop is said to have ordered the magnificently illuminated Bible displayed in Winchester Cathedral. But could it have been commissioned by a worried Henry II, trying to find biblical precedents for the disasters of his own life, including the death of Thomas Becket?

It is 800 years since the body of Thomas Becket was moved on 7 July 1220 from a tomb in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral into a shrine; he had been murdered in the cathedral 50 years earlier, on 29 December 1170. But I want to dwell on the tragic life of the man responsible for his murder, King Henry II, and on the way Thomas wove in and out of his story – and also that of the Winchester Bible, “a candidate for the greatest work of art produced in England”, according to the celebrated scholar Christopher de Hamel.

Winchester Cathedral reopened to visitors on 4 July, and the “Kings and Scribes” exhibition that displays the famous Bible is expected to follow soon. When I visited it before the lockdown, the guides showed me the page with the historiated initials for Psalm 51, where King Saul is ordering his servant Doeg to kill the priests who had given holy bread to David, his rival for the kingship. Christopher de Hamel was the first to make the striking suggestion that this “might be a political allusion to the order by Henry II in 1170 for the murder of Thomas Becket”.