In 1706 Kimpa Vita was captured by the forces of King Pedro IV, one of the claimants she had been trying to reconcile, at a moment when she had a child and could no longer travel freely. The Capuchin Bernardo da Gallo conducted the examination. The charges were heresy and, in the language of the period, witchcraft, and the specific offences included her claim to be possessed by a saint, her teaching that the sacraments were unnecessary, and her denial that the imported objects held power. She was condemned by a royal council on the missionary's advice and burned at the stake in July 1706 along with her infant son.
The Antonian movement did not stop. Its adherents held São Salvador for a further period and the reunification of the kingdom, when it came, followed the course she had argued for. Almost everything known about her comes from the Capuchin accounts written by the men who tried her, which is the standing condition of the record for African prophets of the period, and John Thornton's reconstruction works by reading those hostile documents closely rather than by finding better ones, because there are none. She is now a public figure in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Angola, named on streets and institutions, and read variously as a proto-nationalist, as an early African theologian, and as a Christian martyr killed by her own church.