“English-speaking visitors to the crypt of St Peter’s at Rome often have their attention called to the epitaph which eulogizes an English king buried in that hollowed spot. Caedwalla in 685 began a campaign to obtain and to enlarge the West Saxon kingdom. After several years of savage fighting he made a pilgrimage to Rome, where he received baptism at the hands of Pope St Sergius I on Easter eve in the year 689. The king was taken ill almost immediately afterwards, and died-as Bede tells us he had wished to die-while still wearing his white baptismal garment. He was buried in the arch basilica, and his long metrical epitaph (without the prose addition given by Bede) has been preserved from the original stone in old St. Peter’s. Caedwalla was the first of several Anglo-Saxon kings who are recorded to have left their kingdoms to go ad lumina Apostolorum, but there is no evidence that there was any ancient cultus of him.”