St. Ethelbert, King of Kent
Born, 552; died, 24 February, 616; son of Eormenric, through whom he was descended from Hengest.
He succeeded his father, in 560, as King of Kent and made an
unsuccessful attempt to win from Ceawlin of Wessex the overlordship of
Britain. His political importance was doubtless advanced by his marriage
with Bertha, daughter of Charibert, King of the Franks. A noble
disposition to fair dealing is argued by his giving her the old Roman
church of St. Martin in his capital of Cantwaraburh (Canterbury) and
affording her every opportunity for the exercise of her religion,
although he himself had been reared, and remained, a worshiper of Odin.
The same natural virtue, combined with a quaint spiritual caution and,
on the other hand, a large instinct of hospitality, appears in his
message to St. Augustine when, in 597, the Apostle of England landed on
the Kentish coast.
In the interval between Ethelbert’s defeat by Ceawlin and the arrival
of the Roman missionaries, the death of the Wessex king had left
Ethelbert, at least virtually, supreme in southern Britain, and his
baptism, which took place on Whitsunday next following the landing of
Augustine (2 June, 597) had such an effect in deciding the minds of his
wavering countrymen that as many as 10,000 are said to have followed his
example within a few months.
The
Conversion of St Ethelbert by St. Augustine. Detail of a mosaic by
Clayton & Bell in the chapel of St Gregory and St Augustine in
Westminster Cathedral.
Thenceforward Ethelbert became the watchful father of the infant
Anglo-Saxon Church. He founded the church which in after-ages was to be
the primatial cathedral of all England, besides other churches at
Rochester and Canterbury. But, although he permitted, and even helped,
Augustine to convert a heathen temple into the church of St. Pancras
(Canterbury), he never compelled his heathen subjects to accept baptism.
Moreover, as the lawgiver who issued their first written laws to the
English people (the ninety “Dooms of Ethelbert”, A.D. 604) he holds in
English history a place thoroughly consistent with his character as the
temporal founder of that see which did more than any other for the
upbuilding of free and orderly political institutions in Christendom.
When St. Mellitus had converted Sæbert, King of the East Saxons,
whose capital was London, and it was proposed to make that see the
metropolitan, Ethelbert, supported by Augustine, successfully resisted
the attempt, and thus fixed for more than nine centuries the individual
character of the English church. He left three children, of whom the
only son, Eadbald, lived and died a pagan.
STUBBS in Dict. Christ. Biogr., s.v.; HUNT in Dict. Nat. Biogr.,
s.v.; BEDE, Hist. Eccl., I, II; GREGORY OF TOURS, Historia Francorum,
IV, IX; Acta SS.; BUTLER, Lives of the Saints, 24 Feb.
E. Macpherson (Catholic Encyclopedia)
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