Elizabeth Barton: The Holy Maid of Kent

Henry did not respond but remained silent to what in some quarters could have been perceived as a threat. Indeed, he did not react at all to Elizabeth Barton’s latest revelation for almost a year. Perhaps he did so out of fear of God’s wrath, perhaps because the Holy Maid of Kent was more popular amongst the common people than he was. After all, thousands made the pilgrimage to her Convent to pray for her, or in the hope of being touched by her. But her opposition to the Royal Marriage and the fast-moving English Reformation could not remain unchallenged.

The King’s agents now began to spread rumours that the Holy Maid of Kent was not all that she seemed. She had engaged in sex with priests, it was said. That she had lascivious thoughts about both men and women, that her thirst for lust was unquenchable, that she was little more than a common whore and a charlatan.

When in May, 1533, Henry formally announced his divorce from Katherine of Aragon, Elizabeth went public with her revelations. In September of that same year she was arrested and charged with treason.

Such was her status that John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, was in regular communication with her, and the ex-Chancellor Sir Thomas More visited her in prison. But neither her celebrity nor the love of the people could save her. The successor to William Warham as Archbishop of Canterbury was Thomas Cranmer, the prime mover, along with the Chancellor Thomas Cromwell, of the English Reformation. He was determined to be rid of this troublesome woman. In a letter dated 20 December, 1533, he described his first meeting with her: ” When she brought hither and laid before the Image of Our Lady, her face was wonderfully disfigured, her tongue hanging and her eyes being in a manner plucked and laid upon her cheeks and so greatly disordered. 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.”

Under torture the Holy Maid of Kent confessed all. She had not received Divine Revelations at all but had merely possessed the talent of ventriloquism that meant she could speak without moving her lips that gave her lies and deceits a credibility that they may not otherwise have had. She was convicted of treason on the basis of her confession. Even though evidence obtained by torture, even in Tudor times, was considered inadmissible as evidence in a Court of Law.

Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent, was hanged at Tyburn with seven of her closest associates on 20 April, 1534. She was 28 years of age.