In Easter 1525, a servant girl named Elizabeth Barton fell ill in the
house of her master in the Kent village of Aldington. After suffering for
seven months with pains, swelling of the throat and trance-like fits of
immobility, she began to have clairvoyant visions of events occurring far
distant, along with visions of souls in the afterlife. She also gave voice
to oracular revelations concerning the mass and confession. Her celebrity
reached the ears of Archbishop Warham in Canterbury, who sent an episcopal
commission to investigate her. After this commission concluded that she
was neither unorthodox, nor a dissembler, she was carried in triumph to
the chapel of Court-le-Street, where she had a convulsive prophetic fit
and was miraculously cured of her condition. The only description we have
of the events in the chapel is that of Thomas Cranmer, who, as the successor
to Warham as Archbishop of Canterbury, was in charge of the much more serious
legal investigations which were to be undertaken in 1532-3 of the woman
who had by then became known as the Holy Maid of Kent. It is contained
in a letter written by Cranmer on December 20th 1533 to Archdeacon Hawkins:
Then there was a voice heard speaking within her belly, as it had been in a tun, her lips not greatly moving; she all that while continuing by the space of three hours in a trance. The which voice, when it told anything of the joys of heaven, it spake so sweetly and heavenly that every man was ravished with the hearing thereof. And contrary, when it told anything of hell, it spake so horribly and terribly that it put the hearers in a great fear. [H. Jenkyns, Remains of Thomas Cranmer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1833), letter lxxxiv.] After her miraculous cure, Elizabeth Barton became a nun in the nearby Benedictine convent of St. Sepulchre's. There, her trances and revelations intensified. Although her revelations were theologically quite orthodox, her emphasis upon the sacraments of the mass and of confession irritated those associated with the growing movements of reformist thinking in the English Church. She might nevertheless have continued with her prophecies in relative peace and security until her death had she not chosen to turn her attention to political matters. Early in 1527, Henry VIII announced his intention of divorcing his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, who had failed to provide him with a male heir, and of marrying Anne Boleyn. Extraordinarily, Elizabeth Barton managed to secure an audience with the King in 1528, at which she delivered to him a warning received from an angel of the terrible consequences of putting aside his wife. She continued to issue these warnings during the four years of negotiations between the King's agents and the Pope regarding the divorce and remarriage. Perhaps most damagingly for her case, she gathered around her a circle of friends and supporters, which, in the highly charged political atmosphere of the early 1530s, began to make her utterances seem more like conspiracy than excess of piety. After the King had married Anne Boleyn in 1533, and the Protestant Thomas Cranmer had been appointed successor to Archbishop Warham, Elizabeth Barton was arrested along with a number of her associates. She confessed almost straight away to counterfeiting her visions and revelations and was condemned, after the case against her had been elaborately prepared and publicised, to be hanged, along with a number of her supporters. The sentence was carried out in 1534. Further Reading |