688. Cædwalla of Wessex abdicates, goes to Rome
Ine succeeds to Wessex
April 10, 689. Cædwalla baptised by Pope Sergius I
April 20, 689. Cædwalla dies; buried in St Peter's church, Rome
Bede records (HE, v.7 and 23) that Cædwalla, after ruling the West Saxons most ably for two years, went to Rome in the third year of Aldfrith of Northumbria (688), was baptised there on the Saturday before Easter Day of 689 (April 10) by Pope Sergius, who gave him the name Peter. Cædwalla/Peter then fell ill, and died on April 20. He was buried in St Peter's church in Rome, and Bede gives the text of an epitaph which he reports was put up on Sergius's orders. [The epitaph was written by Crispus, the then archbishop of Milan, and the stone itself was discovered in the sixteenth century when St Peter's was rebuilt, though it has since disappeared again. -- from the footnote in Colgrave/Mynors]
After Cædwalla left in 688, Ine succeeded to kingship of the West Saxons. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle notes that he was the son of Cenred, son of Ceolwold, who was the brother of Cynegils, both grandsons of Ceawlin. Bede notes that Ine continued to oppress the South Saxons as Cædwalla had done (HE, iv.15), and a letter of Wealdhere, bishop of London, reveals conflicts between the West and East Saxons in 704/5. The Chronicle records a battle in which Ine and his kinsman Nunna of Sussex fought the British king Geraint in 710, and another between Ine and Ceolred of Mercia at Woden's Barrow in 715. Ine was probably the English king who was defeated by the Cornish in 722, in a battle recorded only by Welsh sources. There seems to have been internal tension in 721-5, perhaps amounting to a civil war: Ine killed two æthelings, Queen Æthelburh demolished Taunton, and Ine fought the South Saxons twice, probably for harbouring an exiled ætheling. But in spite of these upsets, with strong kings in Wessex (until 726), Kent (until 725), and Mercia (until 704), the political situation in the south at the turn of the 7th/8th centuries was much more stable than it had been in the days of the wars of Penda or Wulfhere of Mercia or Cædwalla of Wessex. In 694, for instance, the people of Kent paid Ine compensation for the burning of the West Saxon prince Mul in 687, rather than prolonging the fight, and an almost identical clause in the law codes of Ine of Wessex and Wihtred of Kent suggests cooperation on other fronts as well (Wihtred 28 and Ine 20, see EHD, pp.398 and 401). Ine's is the first West Saxon law code to be preserved (it survives as a "reprint" attached to the later laws of Alfred), and it was also in Ine's reign that a second West Saxon bishopric was established, at Sherborne (see entry on 705). Like Cædwalla before him, at the end of his reign he retired to go to Rome (see entry on 726).
B. Yorke, Wessex in the Early Middle Ages (London: 1995)