Ina of Wessex and Ethelburga

Reign

Ina succeeded to the kingdom of the West Saxons in 688, when his predecessor Caedwalla went to Rome to be baptised; Bede calls him "of the blood royal" and gives him a reign of thirty-seven years. His law-code, the earliest that survives from Wessex, was preserved by being appended to the laws of King Alfred. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle shows his queen Ethelburga acting with royal decision in her own right: in 722 "Queen Ethelburga destroyed Taunton, which Ina had formerly built," in the campaign against the exile Ealdbert. Later Glastonbury tradition, reported by William of Malmesbury, makes Ina the great benefactor of Glastonbury — builder of its church, adviser and patron of St Aldhelm, and author of a princely endowment — whence the description of him in Fr Andrew Phillips's list as "the restorer of Glastonbury." His sisters Cuthburga and Cwenburga, founders of Wimborne, are themselves venerated as saints (August 31).

Abdication and pilgrimage to Rome

Bede, writing within a few years of the events, records that Ina "having reigned thirty-seven years over that nation, in like manner left his kingdom and committed it to younger men, and went away to the threshold of the blessed Apostles, at the time when Gregory was pope, being desirous to spend some part of his pilgrimage upon earth in the neighbourhood of the holy places, that he might obtain to be more readily received into the fellowship of the saints in heaven"; and he adds that in those days many of the English, "nobles and commons, laity and clergy, men and women," did the same. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle enters under 728: "This year Ina went to Rome, and there gave up the ghost."

William of Malmesbury, in the twelfth century, tells how the abdication was the queen's work. Ethelburga, "a woman of royal race and disposition," had long urged her husband to bid farewell to earthly things; when persuasion failed she turned to stratagem, having a country palace where they had just kept court defiled with filth and a farrowing sow laid in the royal bed, then leading the king back to see it, and asking him where yesterday's revels and tapestries and gold had gone — "are not all these things smoke and vapour?" By this parable of the world's decay she gained what years of words had not. William continues that at Rome, "not to make the glory of his conversion public, but that he might be acceptable in the sight of God alone, he was shorn in secret; and, clad in homely garb, grew old in privacy. Nor did his queen, the author of this noble deed, desert him," but remained to sustain him by her conversation and example until, "united in mutual affection, in due time they trod the common path of all mankind. This was attended, as we have heard, with singular miracles."

Veneration

The couple's cultus is popular and late rather than formal. The Book of Saints of the Benedictines of Ramsgate (1921) records that "miracles are said to have been worked at their tomb: but Ina and Ethelburga have never been formally recognised as Saints" — an honesty this entry preserves. Their joint commemoration on September 8 is carried by Fr Andrew Phillips's Orthodox England list of the Latin saints and, on its witness, by the St Constantine York calendar of the Antiochian Archdiocese of the British Isles and Ireland. No ancient calendar entry for them was found in this research.