The Kentish Coast

by Charles G. Harper

Immediately at the end of the next hamlet, Court-at-Street, a steep, rough lane deeply sunk between rugged banks and overhung with trees leads down to the Marsh, or rather, to a little plateau or undercliff looking upon it. It is a beautiful view you get hence, a variant of other beautiful glimpses on the way from Lympne to Appledore, taking in the flat Marsh and the Royal Military Canal and the long sweep of coast curving to Dungeness. But something other than a mere view-point makes the spot interesting. It is a little building, roofless and otherwise in ruins, that stands there; a building with one remaining architectural feature in the shape of a late doorway, probably of the time of Henry the Seventh. This was anciently a chapel. The reason of its being placed in a situation so obscure is lost, but there must have been an excellent one for such a choice, for mediæval chapels commonly stood, as shops do now, in positions that commanded traffic, and for the same reason: that they should secure the notice and the custom of wayfarers, by whose alms and offerings they were largely supported. At the time when the story presently to be told was enacted this chapel had already fallen upon evil times. Whatever relics it had possessed had—as modern theatrical managers say of their unsuccessful plays—“failed to attract”—and the hermit who once had lived there was gone.

ROMNEY MARSH: THE MARTELLO TOWERS AND MILITARY CANAL: MOONLIGHT.

But it has a late story of its own, a tragical story of the tragic and epoch-making age of Henry the Eighth. In those last few years when it was still roofed and weather-proof it was used by the cunning priests of a declining and damnable creed for the purpose of keeping alive their almost exploded superstitions. Reformation was in the air, in things spiritual and temporal alike, and the religious houses were presently to be dissolved and to be made loose their hold upon the large proportion of English soil they had accumulated by centuries of bequests. Some sign, any sign, was required by the doomed clergy of that age by which the pretensions of their class could be bolstered up and the actions of a King bent upon reform discredited; and such a sign, the religious of Canterbury acutely believed, could be made to appear from the strange possession, demoniacal or angelic—that had suddenly befallen a peasant girl in Aldington, one Elizabeth Barton, at that time a servant in the employ of Master Thomas Cobb, bailiff to the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. Cobb lived in the little house still standing at Aldington, and now known as “Cobb’s Hall,” and was startled when his maid-servant suddenly developed strange and terrifying behaviour, and began to rave on religious matters. To modern ideas the symptoms detailed in the lengthy old accounts of Elizabeth Barton’s career would seem to point to epileptic fits, followed by religious mania; but the simple folk of those times thought her inspired, and those others who were not so simple, and knew a good deal better, took excellent good care that the notion of her inspiration should be well nursed. Religious mania is generally the product of outside influences acting upon a diseased body and an ill-balanced mind; and it may be suspected, since the crisis in the affairs of the Church was then the chief topic in the mouths of all men, that Elizabeth had been influenced by the talk she heard, and by the preaching of the then rector of Aldington, Richard Masters. In her trances and somnambulistic exploits and in her ravings the ordinary people thought her possessed of evil spirits; but Richard Masters declared she had always been a devout girl, and he now professed, when called to her bedside, to have heard her say “very godly certain things concerning the seven deadly sins and the Ten Commandments.” This, in the view of the Church, was inspiration. Masters journeyed to London, and at Lambeth Palace acquainted the old and failing Archbishop Warham with this strange portent, and was encouraged to keep diligent account of all her utterances.

And then Elizabeth Barton suddenly recovered, and was in the scullery again, cleaning pots and pans and dishes. We may picture the disappointment Masters experienced, on his return, to find his prodigy become suddenly so commonplace.

But it was too late for this poor Elizabeth to be allowed to return obscurely to her domestic duties. Cobb’s house was besieged by the curious, who came merely to look at her, and by the superstitious, who had heard she could prophesy, and by the ailing, who thought that a laying on of hands would cure them.

Two monks were brought over from Canterbury, to make a religious seer and prophetess of her, and Cobb was persuaded that the best room in the house, and not the scullery, was her proper place. These two emissaries, Doctor Bocking and Dan William Hadley, gave her a course of instruction in the Acta Sanctorum, and taught her to believe herself of the company of saints and equal to such miraculous deeds as theirs. Thus arose the title by which she is known in history, the “Holy Maid of Kent.” She now experienced a recurrence of her cataleptic states, but appears more often to have made a pretence of them. Her instructors removed her at this juncture to this lonely Chapel of Our Lady at Court-at-Street, which had for some time past, with the general decay of pilgrimage and the growing disbelief in relics, been doing very badly. The removal was made the occasion for a great and striking religious procession, and two thousand persons assembled to witness a promised miracle: a promise said to have been made to Elizabeth by the Virgin Mary that she should be cured if she visited that shrine. Elizabeth was carried to the place, with every appearance of severe affliction, “her face wondrously disfigured, her tongue hanging out, and her eyes being in like manner plucked out and lying upon her cheek. There was then heard a voice speaking within her belly, as it had been in a tunnel, her lips not greatly moving; she all that while continuing by the space of three hours or more in a trance.”

And the voice spoke of the joys of heaven and the torments of hell and of the efficacy of pilgrimage and the beauty of giving to Holy Church.

“And,” continues the account, “after she had lyen there a long time, she came to herself again, and was perfectly whole.” It was, in short, a very clever and successful exhibition of acting and ventriloquy, and completely captured the crowd.

The Virgin now desired her to repair to the Priory of St. Sepulchre at Canterbury, and to assume the name of Sister Elizabeth and take Dr. Bocking for her spiritual instructor. There she was gradually coached into religious and political prophecies, and began to launch threats against the King in respect of his divorce and of his proposed marriage with Anne Boleyn. She declared—and forced her way into his presence at Canterbury, on his return from France, to declare it—that he should not reign a month after that marriage and should die “a villain’s death.” But the King, quite unmoved, married as he had intended, and a month passed, and he seemed none the worse. The Holy Maid, like many another prophet before and since, was obliged to move the date of the anticipated retribution forward, and still the vengeance of Heaven did not descend. The obvious inference is that Elizabeth was not in the confidence of Providence; but through the reports of the monks of Canterbury, who spread the most extraordinary accounts of her life in the Priory, in which the devil in person was said to have appeared, in an attempt to commit an indecent assault upon her, she was widely looked upon as divinely inspired. Sir Thomas More, regarded by all competent persons as one of the most learned and cultured persons of that age, believed in her.