Interpreting the King’s Touch: Authority and Accessibility in the Reign of Charles II

James Blair Historical Review Volume 9 Issue 1 James Blair Historical Review, Volume 9, Issue 1 Article 2 2019 Interpreting the King’s Touch: Authority and Accessibility in the Reign of Charles II Audrey Spensley Princeton University, Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/jbhr Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Spensley, Audrey (2019) "Interpreting the King’s Touch: Authority and Accessibility in the Reign of Charles II," James Blair Historical Review: Vol. 9 : Iss. 1 , Article 2. Available at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/jbhr/vol9/iss1/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in James Blair Historical Review by an authorized editor of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact . Spensley: Charles II and the King's Touch Interpreting the King’s Touch: Authority and Accessibility in the Reign of Charles II Audrey Spensley “’Tis call’d the evil:/ A most miraculous work in this good king;/ Which often, since my here-remain in England, I have seen him do./ How he solicits heaven,/ Himself best knows: but strangelyvisited people, /All swoln and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye, /The mere despair of surgery, he cures,/ Hanging a golden stamp about their necks,/ Put on with holy prayers: and ‘tis spoken, To the succeeding royalty he leaves/ The healing benediction.” 1 The above passage from Shakespeare’s Macbeth is typically omitted from readings of the play; it was likely included as a piece of flattery for James I during a performance in his presence. 2 The ceremony it describes—the ‘King’s Touch’—was an established part of English culture from the reign of Edward the Confessor in the eleventh century to George I in the eighteenth and was particularly prominent under the Stuarts. 3 “Strangely-visited people” from throughout the kingdom were indeed afflicted with “swoln,” often painful, sores, which were typically “lodged chiefly in the Neck and Throat.”4 Today, these are identified as symptoms of scrofula, or tuberculosis of the neck. At the time, they signaled ‘the King’s Evil,’ so called because the king was thought to be able to heal them. The ill traveled in droves to the king’s court, where they hoped to be cured through a quasi-religious ceremony in which the king issued “contact or imposition of hands” on their necks before a blessing for their cure was read. 5 Charles II, for instance, performed the healing ceremony for 4,000 sufferers per year on average during the height of his reign. 6 The highly structured touching ceremonies treated between 20 and 600 patients, and lasted “at least three or four hours,” which the king bore with “majesty and patience.”7 Published by W&M ScholarWorks, 2019 1 1 James Blair Historical Review, Vol. 9 [2019], Iss. 1, Art. 2 Inherent in the ceremony itself was a tension between a strong projection of royal, sacred authority, as the king sat enshrined on his throne, graciously receiving the “poor Mortals” who stumbled towards him, and accessibility, as the sick gained close physical contact to the king, received a commemorative gold piece, and had themselves initiated to the ceremony through a request placed by their local ministers. 8 The reference to the disease as being “the mere despair of surgery” is also telling: for many petitioners, the King’s powers were viewed as a final effort to cure a particularly ingrained case of the evil. 9 That is, the King was one particularly powerful method in an arsenal of more humble, homemade treatments. This essay will focus on the intersection between these dual aspects of the king’s touch, authority and accessibility, under the reign of Charles II. Charles’ reign bears further study for two reasons. First, the number of the touched reached record highs under him; and second, the political context following the Interregnum allows us to assess the role of the touch at a time when the authority of the king had drastically shifted only years earlier due to the regicide. 10 This paper argues that, while the royal touch functioned as a symbol to project sacral and religious authority and legitimacy in the Restoration period, the literal process of securing the touch often demonstrated the agency of common people in adapting the monarch’s resources to their needs, as well as Charles II’s own desire to balance his authority with a sense of accessibility. The authoritative, mystical aspect of the Royal Touch has been well recognized in the historiography on the topic, mainly stemming from Marc Bloch’s seminal 1924 work The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England. Stressing the role of magical beliefs in early modern French and English culture, Bloch argued that the touch was utilized by monarchs in both countries to project authority over their subjects. 11 Although Bloch does not focus on the later Stuart period, his argument on the royal touch as a tool of authority directly relates to the political techniques which royalists employed to differentiate Charles II’s sphere of power from Parliament’s. Many contemporary texts emphasize Charles II’s powerful ability to heal a nation damaged by internecine conflict and a weakened monarchy. During and immediately after the Interregnum, contemporaries asserted that the King’s Touch metaphorically https://scholarworks.wm.edu/jbhr/vol9/iss1/2 2 2 Spensley: Charles II and the King's Touch represents the King’s ability to heal the body politic. For example, in a 1662 royal apology for Charles I dedicated to Charles II, Cimlegus Bonde criticized the “seditious men” of Parliament for depriving the nation of both a healer and ruler, connecting the physical disease of scrofula to the moral disease of disloyalty: “Who shall now cure the Kings evil? Or who shall cure the evil of the People?”12 According to Bonde, the monarch was the only figure invested with the authority to correct the nation’s sins; as he argued, “we are all sick of the Kings Evil, therefore nothing but the touch of his Sacred Majesties hands can cure us.”13 Even more boldly, the royalist and amateur physicist John Bird penned a treatise directly linking the king’s curing of “Bruises and Putrified Sores of those whom he toucheth” with his ability to cure “the Falseness of Doctrine and Blasphemy of Religion, Injustice, Oppression in the State, and wicked living from all.” 14 Published in 1661, this treatise heralded the return of Charles II to England and identified him as a especially potent royal healer, one who would not only treat but eradicate scrofula.15 These treatises thus acknowledge Charles’ unique position as he returned to England following the Interregnum, but frame his status in a positive light: as a particularly potent royal healer, Charles II was also imbued with the necessary qualities to heal a traumatized nation. 16 The body politic, an ingrained cultural metaphor in early modern England with roots extending (...truncated)