And again on March 3, 1687 (fo. 249b), ten shillings was granted for “carrying of Judith Gibbons & her Child & one Dorothy Browne to London to be touched by his Majestie in order to be healed of the Kings Evil.”
The Records of the Corporation of Preston, Lancashire, contain at least two references to this matter. In the year 1682 the bailiffs were instructed to “pay unto James Harrison, bricklayer, 10s. towards carrying his son to London, in order to the procuring of His Majesty’s touch.”
Five years later, when James II. was at Chester, the council passed a vote that “the Bailiff pay unto the persons undermentioned each of them 5s. towards their charge in going to Chester to get his Majesty’s touch:—Anne, daughter of Abel Mope; —— daughter Richard Letmore.”
It is recorded that James II. touched eight hundred persons in the choir of the Cathedral of Chester.
The ceremony cost, we learn from Macaulay, about £10,000 a year, and the amount would have been much greater but for the vigilance of the royal surgeons, whose business it was to examine the applicants, and to distinguish those who came for the cure, and those who came for the gold.
William III. declined to have anything to do with a ceremony he regarded as an imposture. “It is a silly superstition,” he said, when he heard that at the close of Lent his palace was besieged by a crowd of sick. “Give the poor creatures some money, and send them away.” On one occasion only was he induced to lay his hand on a sufferer. “God give you better health,” he said, “and more sense.”
The next to wear the crown was Queen Anne, and she revived the rite. In the London Gazette of March 12th, 1712, appeared an official announcement that the queen intended to touch for the evil. In Lent of that year, Dr. Johnson, then a child, went up to London with his mother in the stage coach that he might have the benefit of the royal touch. He was then between two and three years of age. “His mother,” writes Boswell, “yielding to the superstitious notion which, it is wonderful to think, prevailed so long in this country as to the virtue of regal touch (a notion to which a man of such inquiry and such judgment as Carte, the historian, could give credit), carried him to London, where he was actually touched by Queen Anne. Mrs. Johnson, indeed, as Mr. Hector informed me, acted by the advice of the celebrated Sir John Floyer, then a physician in Lichfield. Johnson used to talk of this very frankly, and Mrs. Piozzi has preserved his very picturesque description of the scene as it remained upon his fancy. Being asked if he could remember Queen Anne, ‘He had,’ he said, ‘a confused but somehow a sort of solemn recollection of a lady in diamonds and a long black hood.’ This touch, however, was without any effect.” The malady remained with Dr. Johnson to his death.
TOUCH-PIECE OF CHARLES II. (GOLD).
After the death of Queen Anne, no other English sovereign kept up the custom, although the service remained in the “Book of Common Prayer” as late as 1719.