Canterbury is presented as the setting for a reported encounter between Elizabeth Barton and Henry VIII during the king’s marriage crisis. The episode reaches the reader not as a scene witnessed by Margaret Pole, but through Montague’s account of what happened when he and his companions stopped there on their return from France.

A Stop on the Return from France

On the journey home, Montague and his companions spent a night at Canterbury. He later recounted the incident to Margaret Pole at Richmond Palace, while visiting the princess. The city appears briefly in the narrative, but the stop becomes consequential because Barton used it to approach the king.

Barton’s Warning to the King

According to Montague, Elizabeth Barton passed through a crowd of thousands and the guards to reach a garden where Henry VIII was walking with Anne Boleyn. She knelt before him and warned that setting Katherine of Aragon aside to marry Anne would bring disaster: plague, the Sweating sickness, the king’s death within seven months, and ruin for the country. Montague reported that Henry was afraid and kept repeating the predicted interval as Barton was taken away.

A Prophecy in a Political Crisis

The Canterbury episode connects a specific place and encounter to the wider dispute over Henry’s marriage. Its details come through Montague’s report to Margaret Pole, so the narrative presents the warning as remembered and relayed testimony rather than a directly witnessed exchange. The prophecy gives the king’s marriage decision a national and personal consequence, while his reported alarm briefly suggests that Barton’s warning has reached him. Canterbury’s role is therefore concentrated in one overnight stop and one public confrontation, but that encounter carries the threat of political and dynastic upheaval into the story.