Maximilian in 1595, wrote: 'As to your highness's well-beloved nmbassador at our blessed Porte, Edward Barton, one in the nation of the Messiah, he having been enjoined by us to follow our imperial camp without having been enabled previously to obtain your highness's permission to go with my imperial staff, has well acquitted himself of his duties in the campaign, so that we have reason to be satisfied, and to hope that also your highness will know how to appreciate the services he has thus rendered to us in our imperial camp.' Soon after his return from this campaign the plague raged in Constantinople, and in 1597 Barton took refuge in the little island of Halke (Χάλκη), where he fell a victim to the scourge on 15 Dec. He was buried there, outside the principal door of the church attached to the convent of the Virgin. The inscription on the slab above his grave was as follows: 'Eduardo Barton, Illustrissimo Serenissimæ Anglorum Reginæ Oratori, viro præstantissimo, qui post reditum a bello Ungarico, quo cum invicto Turcor, imperatore profectus fuerat, diem obiit pietatis ergo, ætatis anno xxxv., Sal. vero mdxcvii. xviii. Kal. Januar.'
In a letter to Barton from Thomas Humphreys, preserved among the State Papers (20 Aug. 1591); complaint is made of the conduct of Barton's elder brother, to whom he appears to have given large sums of money, and he is asked to bestow his bounty for the future on his sister and her children. A copy of Calvin's' Institutes' accompanied the letter as a gift from the writer.
[Ellis's Orig. Letters, (1st series) iii. 84-8, (3rd series) iv. 147; Notes and Queries (3rd series), xii. 459; Cal. of Domest. State Papers, 1590-6.]
BARTON, ELIZABETH (1506?–1534), commonly called the Nun or Maid of Kent, was, according to her own account, born in 1506. About 1525 she was domestic servant at Aldington, Kent, in the household of Thomas Cobb, steward of a neighbouring estate owned by Warham, archbishop of Canterbury. In that year she was attacked by some internal disease, and in the course of her recovery suffered from a violent nervous derangement, which developed into a religious mania. For days together she often lay in a trance, and while apparently unconscious 'told wondrously things done in other places, whilst she was neither herself present nor yet heard no report thereof.' Her hysterical cries were at times 'of marvellous holiness in rebuke of sin and vice' or concerned 'the seven deadly sins and the ten commandments.'
Superstitious neighbours, easily misled by a doubtful consistency in her ravings, concluded that either the Holy Ghost or the Devil possessed her. Cobb, her master, summoned Richard Masters, the parish priest, to aid him in watching her, and they were soon convinced that Elizabeth was inspired by the Holy Ghost. Masters straightway reported the matter to Archbishop Warham at Lambeth, and Warham, then in his dotage, sent the girl a message that she was not 'to hide the goodness and the works of God.' In a few months the girl's illness left her, but Cobb and Masters, together with the villagers of Aldington, continued to treat her with pious respect, and Cobb, removing her from his kitchen, invited her to live on terms of equality with his family. She was unwilling to hastily forfeit the regard of her neighbours, and perceived it easy, as she subsequently confessed, to feign her former trances and the alleged prophetic utterances. About 1526 Archbishop Warham found her reputation still growing, and directed the prior of Christ Church, Canterbury, to send two of his monks, Edward Bocking [q. v.] and William Hadley, to observe the girl more closely. The prior obeyed the order unwillingly; but Bocking on his arrival perceived that Elizabeth might prove a useful agent in restoring popular esteem to certain practices of the mediaeval church then widely discredited. He educated her in the catholic legends of the saints and induced her to insist in her utterances that she was in direct communication with the Virgin Mary. He taught her to anathematise in her ravings all the opponents of the catholic church, and to dispose of the protestant arguments with much coherency. The exhibition of theological knowledge by an uneducated village girl naturally confirmed the popular belief that Elizabeth was divinely inspired. To extend her fame, Bocking announced that on a certain day she would perform a miracle. In the presence of 2,000 persons she was laid before the image of the Virgin in the famous chapel of Our Lady in the neighbouring village of Court-at-Strete. There she fell into a trance lasting for three hours, during which her face underwent much distortion. 'A voice speaking within her belly' spoke 'sweetly and heavenly' of the joys of heaven, and 'horribly and terribly' of the torments of hell. 'It spake also many things for the confirmation of pilgrimages and trentals, hearing of masses and confessions, and many other such things.' An account of the so-called miracle was written under Bocking's direction by a gentleman of the district, named Edward Thwaytes, and was circulated
