Magical virtue attributed to the chiefs of the Macleods.
The belief that kings possess magical or supernatural powers by virtue of which they can fertilise the earth and confer other benefits on their subjects would seem to have been shared by the ancestors of all the Aryan races from India to Ireland, and it has left clear traces of itself in our own country down to modern times. Thus the ancient Hindoo law-book called The Laws of Manu describes as follows the effects of a good king’s reign: “In that country where the king avoids taking the property of mortal sinners, men are born in due time and are long-lived. And the crops of the husbandmen spring up, each as it was sown, and the children die not, and no misshaped offspring is born.”[1293] In Homeric Greece kings and chiefs were spoken of as sacred or divine; their houses, too, were divine and their chariots sacred;[1294] and it was thought that the reign of a good king caused the black earth to bring forth wheat and barley, the trees to be loaded with fruit, the flocks to multiply, and the sea to yield fish.[1295] A Greek historian of a much later age tells us that in the reign of a very bad king of Lydia the country suffered from drought, for which he would seem to have held the king responsible.[1296] There is a tradition that once when the land of the Edonians in Thrace bore no fruit, the god Dionysus intimated to the people that its fertility could be restored by putting their king Lycurgus to death. So they took him to Mount Pangaeum and there caused him to be torn in pieces by horses.[1297] When the crops failed, the Burgundians used to blame their kings and depose them.[1298] In the time of the Swedish king Domalde a mighty famine broke out, which lasted several years, and could be stayed by the blood neither of beasts nor of men. Therefore, in a great popular {p367} assembly held at Upsala, the chiefs decided that King Domalde himself was the cause of the scarcity and must be sacrificed for good seasons. So they slew him and smeared with his blood the altars of the gods. Again, we are told that the Swedes always attributed good or bad crops to their kings as the cause. Now, in the reign of King Olaf, there came dear times and famine, and the people thought that the fault was the king’s, because he was sparing in his sacrifices. So, mustering an army, they marched against him, surrounded his dwelling, and burned him in it, “giving him to Odin as a sacrifice for good crops.”[1299] In the Middle Ages, when Waldemar I., King of Denmark, travelled in Germany, mothers brought their infants and husbandmen their seed for him to lay his hands on, thinking that children would both thrive the better for the royal touch, and for a like reason farmers asked him to throw the seed for them.[1300] It was the belief of the ancient Irish that when their kings observed the customs of their ancestors, the seasons were mild, the crops plentiful, the cattle fruitful, the waters abounded with fish, and the fruit trees had to be propped up on account of the weight of their produce. A canon attributed to St. Patrick enumerates among the blessings that attend the reign of a just king “fine weather, calm seas, crops abundant, and trees laden with fruit.” On the other hand, dearth, dryness of cows, blight of fruit, and scarcity of corn were regarded as infallible proofs that the reigning king was bad. For example, in the reign of the usurper king Carbery Kinncat, “evil was the state of Ireland: fruitless her corn, for there used to be only one grain on the stalk; fruitless her rivers; milkless her cattle; plentiless her fruit, for there used to be {p368} but one acorn on the stalk.”[1301] Superstitions of the same sort seem to have lingered in the Highlands of Scotland down to the eighteenth century; for when Dr. Johnson travelled in Skye it was still held that the return of the laird to Dunvegan, after any considerable absence, produced a plentiful capture of herring.[1302] The laird of Dunvegan is chief of the clan of the Macleods, and his family still owns a banner which is called “Macleods Fairy Banner,” on account of the supernatural powers ascribed to it. When it is unfurled, victory in war attends it, and it relieves its followers from imminent danger. But these virtues it can exert only thrice, and already it has been twice unfurled. When the potato crop failed, many of the common people desired that the magical banner should be displayed, apparently in the belief that the mere sight of it would produce a fine crop of potatoes. Every woman with child who sees it is taken with premature labour, and every cow casts her calf.[1303]
A relic of this belief is the notion that English kings can heal scrofula by their touch.
Charles II. touching for the king’s evil (scrofula).
English kings touching for scrofula.
Perhaps the last relic of such superstitions which lingered about our English kings was the notion that they could heal scrofula by their touch. The disease was accordingly known as the King’s Evil. Queen Elizabeth often exercised this miraculous gift of healing. On Midsummer Day 1633, Charles the First cured a hundred patients at one swoop in the chapel royal at Holyrood.[1304] But it was under his son Charles the Second that the practice seems to have attained its highest vogue. In this respect the Merry Monarch did not let the grass grow under his feet. It was the twenty-ninth of May 1660 when he was brought home in triumph from exile amid a shouting multitude and a forest of brandished swords, over roads strewed with flowers and through streets hung with tapestry, while the fountains ran wine and all the bells of London rang for joy. And it was on the sixth of July that he began to touch for the King’s {p369} Evil. The ceremony is thus described by Evelyn, who may have witnessed it. “His Majestie began first to touch for ye evil, according to costome, thus: His Matie sitting under his state in the Banquetting House, the chirurgeons cause the sick to be brought or led up to the throne, where they kneeling, ye King strokes their faces or cheekes with both his hands at once, at which instant a chaplaine in his formalities says, ‘He put his hands upon them and he healed them.’ This is sayd to everyone in particular. When they have been all touch’d they come up again in the same order, and the other chaplaine kneeling, and having angel gold strung on white ribbon on his arme, delivers them one by one to his Matie, who puts them about the necks of the touched as they pass, whilst the first chaplaine repeats, ‘That is ye true light who came into ye world.’ Then follows an Epistle (as at first a Gospell) with the liturgy, prayers for the sick, with some alteration, lastly ye blessing; and then the Lo. Chamberlaine and the Comptroller of the Household bring a basin, ewer and towell, for his Majesty to wash.”[1305] Pepys witnessed the same ceremony at the same place on the thirteenth of April in the following year and he has recorded his opinion that it was “an ugly office and a simple.”[1306] It is said that in the course of his reign Charles the Second touched near a hundred thousand persons for scrofula. The press to get near him was sometimes terrific. On one occasion six or seven of those who came to be healed were trampled to death. While the hope of a miraculous cure attracted the pious and sanguine, the certainty of receiving angel gold attracted the needy and avaricious, and it was not always easy for the royal surgeons to distinguish between the motives of the applicants. This solemn mummery cost the state little less than ten thousand pounds a year. The cool-headed William the Third contemptuously refused to lend himself to the hocus-pocus; and when his palace was besieged by the usual unsavoury crowd, he ordered them to be turned away {p370} with a dole. On the only occasion when he was importuned into laying his hand on a patient, he said to him, “God give you better health and more sense.” However, the practice was continued, as might have been expected, by the dull bigot James the Second[1307] and his dull daughter Queen Anne. In his childhood Dr. Johnson was touched for scrofula by the queen, and he always retained a faint but solemn recollection of her as of a lady in diamonds with a long black hood.[1308] To judge by the too faithful picture which his biographer has drawn of the doctor’s appearance in later life we may conclude that the touch of the queen’s hand was not a perfect remedy for the disorder; perhaps the stream of divine grace which had flowed so copiously in the veins of Charles the Second had been dried up by the interposition of the sceptical William.
Other kings and chiefs have claimed to heal diseases by a touch.
The kings of France also claimed to possess the same gift of healing by touch, which they are said to have derived from Clovis or from St. Louis, while our English kings inherited it from Edward the Confessor.[1309] We may suspect that these estimates of the antiquity of the gift were far too modest, and that the barbarous, nay savage, predecessors both of the Saxon and of the Merovingian kings had with the same justice claimed the same powers many ages before. Down to the nineteenth century the West African tribe of the Walos, in Senegal, ascribed to their royal family a like power of healing by touch. Mothers have been seen to bring their sick children to the queen, who touched them solemnly with her foot on the back, the stomach, the head, and the legs, after which the women departed in peace, convinced that {p371} their children had been made whole.[1310] Similarly the savage chiefs of Tonga were believed to heal scrofula and cases of indurated liver by the touch of their feet; and the cure was strictly homoeopathic, for the disease as well as the cure was thought to be caused by contact with the royal person or with anything that belonged to it.[1311] In fact royal personages in the Pacific and elsewhere have been supposed to live in a sort of atmosphere highly charged with what we may call spiritual electricity, which, if it blasts all who intrude into its charmed circle, has happily also the gift of making them whole again by a touch.[1312] We may conjecture that similar views prevailed in ancient times as to the predecessors of our English monarchs, and that accordingly scrofula received its name of the King’s Evil from the belief that it was caused as well as cured by contact with a king.[1313] In Loango palsy is called the king’s disease, because the negroes imagine it to be heaven’s punishment for treason meditated against the king.[1314]
On the whole kings seem to have been often evolved out of magicians, but in course of time to have exchanged magical for religious functions, in other words, to have become priests instead of sorcerers.
On the whole, then, we seem to be justified in inferring that in many parts of the world the king is the lineal successor of the old magician or medicine-man. When once a special class of sorcerers has been segregated from the community and entrusted by it with the discharge of duties on which the public safety and welfare are believed to depend, these men gradually rise to wealth and power, till their leaders blossom out into sacred kings. But the great social revolution which thus begins with democracy and ends in despotism is attended by an intellectual revolution which affects both the conception and the functions of royalty. {p372} For as time goes on, the fallacy of magic becomes more and more apparent to the acuter minds and is slowly displaced by religion; in other words, the magician gives way to the priest, who renouncing the attempt to control directly the processes of nature for the good of man, seeks to attain the same end indirectly by appealing to the gods to do for him what he no longer fancies he can do for himself. Hence the king, starting as a magician, tends gradually to exchange the practice of magic for the priestly functions of prayer and sacrifice. And while the distinction between the human and the divine is still imperfectly drawn, it is often imagined that men may themselves attain to godhead, not merely after their death, but in their lifetime, through the temporary or permanent possession of their whole nature by a great and powerful spirit. No class of the community has benefited so much as kings by this belief in the possible incarnation of a god in human form. The doctrine of that incarnation, and with it the theory of the divinity of kings in the strict sense of the word, will form the subject of the following chapter.