Devils

The Devils in Elizabeth Barton’s visions are not a separate supernatural cast so much as a recurring feature of her testimony: figures she invokes to explain temptation, danger, and the afterlife, and whose changing forms become part of the political inquiry into her prophecies. Their significance lies in the gap between the claims attributed to them and the skeptical, strategic questioning through which those claims are examined.

Visions and changing forms

Barton tells the investigators that she has seen Devils disputing for Cardinal Wolsey’s soul. Asked whether she knows the result, she says there is none: she searched for Wolsey, thought God had extinguished him, and later saw his soul seated among the unborn. The Devil’s presence in this account is therefore bound up with uncertainty about Wolsey’s fate, rather than a settled vision of judgment. Barton offers to pray for him, but her account gives no resolution to the question of his soul.

When Archbishop Cranmer asks how Devils appear, Barton first says they appear as birds. She then describes a figure she identifies as Lucifer in grotesque terms, before adding that he also comes as a young man. The variety matters to the examination: Cranmer observes that Devils may show themselves in more than one way, while Barton explains that they do so in order to deceive. The vision thus makes disguise itself part of the alleged danger.

Temptation and the cell

Barton recounts that a Devil once brought a woman to her cell at night. The investigators press her about the episode, asking what happened and whether she knew the woman; Barton does not answer the latter question. The account places the apparition in her cell and on her bed, but the scene remains an allegation under interrogation, not independently established evidence about the Devil or the woman.

Barton says that Lucifer later tried to persuade her in the guise of a well-dressed young man, wearing a blue silk coat and new hose decorated with diamonds. He asked her to marry him, and she refused because she was vowed to chastity. She says he spat at her, and that she wiped it away with a napkin; she describes the napkin as black and foul-smelling, and says Dom Edward has it. The investigators ask whether he displays it for offerings, turning the claimed physical trace into a question about the religious and financial uses made of her visions. The account supplies no independent confirmation of the napkin’s contents or significance.

Prophecy, death, and political pressure

During the examination, Barton predicts that a plague will kill Henry within six months, and that she too will die. She also condemns people in the room and women of Cromwell’s household, extending the threat to the infant Princess Elizabeth. Her prediction that the child should have been christened with boiling water makes the Devil-centered inquiry part of a wider confrontation over the consequences of Barton’s words. Cromwell answers that he saw Elizabeth thriving; Cranmer is visibly unsettled by the exchange.

Later, while imprisoned in the Tower, Barton says that she goes to Hell in her visions and that Lucifer shows her a chair made of human bones and padded with cushions of flame. She says the chair is for the king, and argues that he should be warned of what awaits him after death. Her statements place Lucifer’s visions in direct proximity to the threatened king, but they do not change the practical balance of power: Barton is a prisoner awaiting the outcome of the proceedings against her.

Narrative and evidentiary role

The Devils recur in accounts that range from Wolsey’s unresolved afterlife to temptation in Barton’s cell and a warning directed at the king. Across these episodes, their forms shift, but the political stakes become more explicit: what begins as testimony about visions is scrutinized for its implications for royal authority and public order. The investigators question the claims, their possible uses, and the people who have benefited from Barton’s reputation, without the narration establishing the apparitions as objective events.

The contrast between the spectacular visions and the ordinary conditions of Barton’s imprisonment keeps their status open. In the Tower, she speaks of Hell and Lucifer while Cromwell questions her about her treatment, the possibility of execution, and whether she might seek a delay. The visions give Barton language with which to confront powerful figures, but the proceedings leave her exposed to decisions made by those figures. Devils therefore mark both the claimed supernatural reach of her testimony and the limits of that testimony under political scrutiny.