The Royal Touch.—The King’s Evil.
There are several instances in ancient history illustrating the healing virtue residing or alleged to reside in the person of a king. Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, according to Plutarch, cured colics and affections of the spleen by laying patients on their backs and passing his great toe over their bodies. Suelin relates that when the Emperor Vespasian was at Alexandria a poor blind man came to him saying that the god Serapis had revealed to him that if he, the Emperor, would touch his eyes with his spittle, his sight would be restored. Vespasian was angry and would have driven the man away, but some of those around him urged him to exercise his power, and at last he consented and cured the poor man of his blindness and some others of lameness. Cœlius Spartianus declares that the Emperor Adrian cured dropsy by touching patients with the tips of his fingers. The Eddas tell how King Olaf healed the wounds of Egill, the Icelandic hero, by laying on of hands and singing proverbs. A legend of the counts of Hapsburg declares that at one time they could cure a sick person by kissing him.
The superstition crystallised itself in the practice of the English and French kings of touching for the cure of scrofula, or king’s evil as the disease consequently came to be named. The term scrofula is itself one of the curiosities of etymology. Scrofula is the diminutive of scrota, a sow, and means a little pig. It is conjectured that the name was adopted from the idea of pigs burrowing under the surface of straw and likening to that the pig’s back sort of shape of the ulcers characteristic of the disease.
The first English king who undertook this treatment, so far as is known, was Edward the Confessor, who reigned from 1042 to 1066. But there is evidence that the French kings had practised it earlier. Robert the Pious (970–1031), son of Hughes Capet, is said to have exercised the miraculous power, and Church legend goes back five hundred years before this, attributing the origin of the gift to the date of the conversion of Clovis, A.D. 496. On that occasion the holy oil for the coronation of the Conqueror was brought direct from heaven in a phial carried by a dove, and the healing faculty was conferred at the same time. Most of the French kings down to Louis XV continued to touch, and it was even suggested that the practice should be resumed by Louis XVIII after the Restoration in 1815, but that monarch’s advisers prudently resolved that it would not do to risk the ridicule of modern France.
The records of Edward the Confessor’s miraculous feats of healing are obtained from William of Malmesbury, who wrote his Chronicles in the first half of the 12th century, about a hundred years after the Confessor’s reign. The earliest printed edition of the Chronicles appeared in 1577, and Shakespeare undoubtedly drew from it the description of the ceremony which is given in Macbeth (Act iv, Sc. 3). Malcolm and Macduff are represented as being in England “in a room of the King’s palace” (Edward the Confessor’s). The doctor tells them
There are a crew of wretched souls
That stay his cure: their malady convinces
The great assay of art; but at his touch—
Such sanctity hath heaven given his hand—
They presently amend.