St Etheldreda of Ely

Etheldreda belongs to that first generation of royal English saints in whom rank, politics, and holiness are all tightly knotted together, but the story never lets the royalty overshadow the sanctity. Daughter of King Anna of the East Angles, she is remembered above all for an unusual steadiness. Tradition says that in her first marriage, to Tonbert, she kept a vow of continence. After his death she spent years in prayer at Ely, and when political necessity drew her into a second marriage with Egfrid of Northumbria, she tried to preserve the same consecrated life there as well. The testing point came when Egfrid reached manhood and wanted an ordinary royal marriage. Etheldreda refused, appealed with him to St Wilfrid, and was sustained by him in her resolve.

She withdrew first to Coldingham under St Ebba and then returned to Ely, where about 672 she founded the double monastery that would forever carry her mark. This life of her as abbess is severe and memorable: simple dress, little food, long prayer, and a life that drew authority from example rather than from birth. Old tradition also remembers her as foretelling both the illness that would carry her off and the deaths of several of her nuns in the same pestilence. She died in 679 and was buried, by her own wish, in a plain wooden coffin. Sixteen years later her body was said to have been found incorrupt, and Ely grew into one of the great pilgrimage centers of medieval England. Even allowing for the later flowering of devotion, the main image is already strong: a queen who would not let power, marriage, or pressure undo her consecration, and an abbess whose austerity helped make Ely one of the sacred centers of the Anglo-Saxon Church.