Ethelburga of Lyming

Saint Ethelburga of Lyming (d 647) was the daughter of King Ethelbert of Kent, one of the first Christian kings in Saxon England. In 625, she was given in marriage to King Edwin of Northumbria by her brother, who at that point was King of Kent, on the condition that she be allowed to practice Christianity at Edwin's court. (Edwin was a pagan at the time, though he would be baptized two years after the wedding).

Upon the death of her husband in 633, the widowed Ethelburga received from Pope Boniface V permission to set up a religious abbey. It is believed the abbey was initially coeducational. The abbey remained until Henry VIII of England ordered the seizure of all monastic properties in England nine hundred years later, and its ruins are still identifiable today.

Ethelburga in Ruled Britannia
St Ethelburga was the patron saint of St Ethelburga's Bishopsgate, the parish which William Shakespeare attended in London in the 1590s, when England was a Catholic kingdom.

On Christmas Day 1597, Lope de Vega was ordered to attend Mass at the parish and ensure that Shakespeare was in attendance--that he was a practicing Catholic in good standing with the Church.

Upon receiving his assignment, de Vega stumbled over the pronunciation of the name "Ethelberge" and expressed his frustration with the strangely-named saints whom the English venerated, idly wondering whether there was any such saint as Ethelberge. Baltasar Guzman assured de Vega that the English Inquisition and the Society of Jesus had surely verified the legitimacy of the church's name and would have shut it down had they found St Ethelberge not to exist.