As an English churchman involved in politics, Sir Thomas Becket represents the check on royal power by the church. In 1163, King Henry II coerced English bishops to approve laws that transferred power from ecclesiastical to secular (royal) courts. Becket, as archbishop of Canterbury (the highest authority in the English church), refused the king's order. King Henry II convened a council of his loyal barons and bishops to punish Becket, forcing the archbishop to escape to France.

After extensive negotiations between the king, Becket, and the pope, during which two bishops loyal to the king were excommunicated and Henry II threatened to expel from England all clergy associated with Becket, a reconciliation was realized. Becket returned to England triumphantly. His resistance to royal encroachment was popularly seen as a valuable check on the government and limitation on arbitrary royal power. When he refused to absolve the excommunicated English bishops unless they swore allegiance to the pope, the king shouted words in a fit of rage, which four knights took as orders to kill Becket. The archbishop was murdered in the cathedral on December 29, 1170. The European response to this assassination of a church leader by the state was shock and horror. Pope Alexander III named Becket a saint of the church on February 21, 1173, and King Henry had to do public penance.

Becket's resistance to the government and martyrdom stands as a historical example of opposing state power by appealing to a law higher than worldly power and forms a basis for civil disobedience on moral grounds.

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