“Let him go, Gertrude: do not fear our person:
There’s such divinity doth hedge a king,
That treason can but peep to what it would,
Acts little of his will.”
This notion is by no means confined to either civilized or semi-civilized nations. It is, says Mr. Hardwick, “a universal feeling among savage tribes.” The ignorant serf of Russia believed, and, indeed, yet believes, that if the deity were to die the emperor would succeed to his power and authority.
Sympathetic Indications. According to a very old tradition the wounds of a murdered person were supposed to bleed afresh at the approach or touch of the murderer. This effect, though impossible, remarks Nares,[958] except it were by miracle, was firmly believed, and almost universally, for a very long period. Poets, therefore, were fully justified in their use of it. Thus Shakespeare, in “Richard III.” (i. 2) makes Lady Anne, speaking of Richard, Duke of Gloster, say:
“O, gentlemen, see, see! dead Henry’s wounds
Open their congeal’d mouths, and bleed afresh!—
Blush, blush, thou lump of foul deformity;
For ’tis thy presence that exhales this blood
From cold and empty veins, where no blood dwells;
Thy deed, inhuman and unnatural,
Provokes this deluge most unnatural.”
Stow alludes to this circumstance in his “Annals” (p. 424). He says the king’s body “was brought to St. Paul’s in an open coffin, barefaced, where he bled; thence he was carried to the Blackfriars, and there bled.” Matthew Paris also states that after Henry II.’s death his son Richard came to view the body—“Quo superveniente, confestim erupit sanguis ex naribus regis mortui; ac si indignaretur spiritus in adventue ejus, qui ejusdem mortis causa esse credebatur, ut videretur sanguis clamare ad Deum.”[959] In the “Athenian Oracle” (i. 106), this supposed phenomenon is thus accounted for: “The blood is congealed in the body for two or three days, and then becomes liquid again, in its tendency to corruption. The air being heated by many persons coming about the body, is the same thing to it as motion is. ’Tis observed that dead bodies will bleed in a concourse of people, when murderers are absent, as well as present, yet legislators have thought fit to authorize it, and use this trial as an argument, at least to frighten, though ’tis no conclusive one to condemn them.” Among other allusions to this superstition may be mentioned one by King James in his “Dæmonology,” where we read: “In a secret murder, if the dead carkasse be at any time thereafter handled by the murderer, it will gush out of blood, as if the blood were crying to heaven for revenge of the murderer.” It is spoken of also in a note to chapter v. of the “Fair Maid of Perth,” that this bleeding of a corpse was urged as an evidence of guilt in the High Court of Justiciary at Edinburgh as late as the year 1668. An interesting survival of this curious notion exists in Durham, where, says Mr. Henderson,[960] “touching of the corpse by those who come to look at it is still expected by the poor on the part of those who come to their house while a dead body is lying in it, in token that they wished no ill to the departed, and were in peace and amity with him.”
We may also compare the following passage, where Macbeth (iii. 4), speaking of the Ghost, says:
“It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood:
Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak;
Augurs and understood relations have
By magot-pies and choughs and rooks brought forth
The secret’st man of blood.”
Shakespeare perhaps alludes to some story in which the stones covering the corpse of a murdered man were said to have moved of themselves, and so revealed the secret. The idea of trees speaking probably refers to the story of the tree which revealed to Æneas the murder of Polydorus (Verg., “Æneid,” iii. 22, 599). Indeed, in days gone by, this superstition was carried to such an extent that we are told, in D’Israeli’s “Curiosities of Literature,” “by the side of the bier, if the slightest change was observable in the eyes, the mouth, feet, or hands of the corpse, the murderer was conjectured to be present, and many an innocent spectator must have suffered death. This practice forms a rich picture in the imagination of our old writers; and their histories and ballads are labored into pathos by dwelling on this phenomenon.”
FOOTNOTES:
[938] Pettigrew’s “Medical Superstitions,” p. 48.