Saint Ethelbert of Kent

Saint Ethelbert was king of Kent at the turn of the sixth and seventh centuries and the first ruler of the Anglo-Saxons to receive baptism. He welcomed the missionaries sent by Pope Saint Gregory the Great and helped them establish the Church at Canterbury. Almost everything that is known about him was recorded by Saint Bede the Venerable in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on February 24.

The year of his birth is not certain. According to Bede, all the peoples south of the river Humber acknowledged Ethelbert’s overlordship. He married Bertha, a Christian of the royal house of the Franks, daughter of King Charibert. He agreed that she should keep her faith, and Bishop Liudhard came to Kent with her. The queen used to pray in the church of Saint Martin near Canterbury.

In 597 the monk Augustine, sent from Rome by Pope Gregory, landed with about forty companions on the Isle of Thanet off the coast of Kent. The king heard the newcomers out in the open air. He answered that their words were fair, but new and uncertain, so he could not abandon what he had long believed together with his whole people. Yet since they had come from afar to share what they held to be true and best, he would receive them as guests and allow them to preach the faith. He gave them a dwelling in Canterbury, his capital.

The king was drawn by the pure life of the missionaries. He believed and was baptized. Bede gives no date; tradition links the event with the feast of Pentecost in 597. Many of his subjects followed the ruler’s example. Bede stresses that Ethelbert compelled no one to be baptized, for he had learned from his teachers that the service of Christ must be voluntary.

The king gave Augustine an episcopal see in Canterbury. There Augustine restored an old Roman church and dedicated it to the Savior; from this church grew the cathedral. East of the city, beside the monastery founded by Augustine, Ethelbert built the church of the Apostles Peter and Paul. He also built the church of Saint Andrew in Rochester and the church of Saint Paul in London. In 601 Pope Gregory sent him a letter and gifts. He urged the king to guard the grace he had received and to spread the faith among his subjects, and he held up the emperor Constantine as his model. Ethelbert also set down the laws of his people in writing in their own language; the first of them protected the property of the Church.

According to Bede, Ethelbert died on February 24, 616. He was buried beside Queen Bertha in the church of the Apostles Peter and Paul, the later Saint Augustine’s Abbey. Bede wrote of him that he was the third of the kings who ruled over all the southern lands of the English, but the first to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Ethelbert was not canonized in a formal process, for he lived centuries before one existed; the Church has long venerated him as a saint. The Roman Martyrology calls him the first among the rulers of the English nation whom the holy bishop Augustine won for the Christian faith.