The life of St Aethelberht of Kent
Seeking an alliance with the Christian Frankish royal house, he married a princess named Bertha, and because she was already a Christian, her marriage settlement provided for her own chaplain and for the use of an old Roman church at Canterbury where she could worship, so that Christian practice had a quiet foothold at his court even before his own conversion.
In 597 Pope Gregory the Great sent a party of monks under Augustine to bring the Gospel to the English, and Aethelberht welcomed them, giving them leave to preach and to settle in his capital at Canterbury. Before that same year had ended he had been baptized himself, and a great number of his people followed him into the new faith. He is remembered as the first English king to become Christian, and not long afterward he issued the earliest surviving code of law written for the Anglo-Saxons. He reigned until his death in 616. Much of what is known of his life and reign rests on the account of the Venerable Bede, writing more than a century after these events.