Kings, Bastards, and Enthusiasts Touching for the Evil in Restoration England
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Kings, Bastards, and Enthusiasts Touching for the Evil in Restoration England By Christopher Andrews An honors thesis submitted to the History Department of Rutgers University Written under the supervision of Professor Alastair Bellany Rutgers University April 2012 Contents Acknowledgments 2 Introduction 3 Part One: 14 Valentine Greatrakes and Popular Attitudes towards Miraculous Healing Part Two: 62 John Browne’s “Adenochoiradelogia” and the Royal Touch Part Three: 132 The Duke of Monmouth and the Politicization of the Royal Touch Epilogue 180 Bibliography 197 1 Acknowledgments This project would not have been possible without the help and encouragement of a number of people. I am particularly indebted to Professor Alastair Bellany. This thesis would not exist without him, and his expertise, his generosity, and his ability to rapidly edit many, many pages were essential to the completion of this paper. Before I took his class, I had only the vaguest of knowledge about seventeenth century England and its history. But his passion for the subject was contagious, and he sparked in me a fascination with British history that I will carry for the rest of my life. For that, I am truly grateful. Thank you also to Professor Jennifer Jones, my second reader, who was willing to read this project on such short notice, and who made the defense process an enjoyable experience rather than a painful one. Professor Masschaele’s deadlines, helpful comments, and steadying advice were also invaluable in turning this project into a reality. The entire History Department deserves a great deal of praise for their thesis program, and I am honored and grateful that I was able to participate in it. 2 Introduction A crowd of several hundred had gathered outside the Banqueting House of Whitehall Palace. It was the morning of June 23, 1660. The building stood impressively against the sky, its white stones almost shining, its classical pilasters and pediments a stark contrast to the eclectic architecture that surrounded it. It was not the first time such a throng had been seen outside the building. Eleven years before, King Charles I had been marched onto a scaffold erected in front of the Banqueting House, and before a crowd of his own subjects, he was beheaded, initiating a decade of non-monarchical rule in England. The crowd that gathered now, however, had come to see his son, King Charles II. England’s experiment in republicanism had been short lived, and after the near political anarchy that followed Oliver Cromwell’s death in 1658, the monarchy was quickly restored, to widespread relief among the English populace. In fact, Charles had returned less than a month ago, in grand style, and Whitehall had again become a hive of activity as nobles poured in from all corners of the country to prove their loyalty, and commoners gathered to catch a glimpse of their new monarch. The people that had gathered this day were no mere idlers or sightseers, however. The group, a motley collection of men, women and children from across the British Isles, stood expectantly, as if waiting for something, their nervous energy palpable. A closer inspection, though, would reveal that their faces were not contorted with excitement, but pain—ulcerous and weeping wounds covered the necks and heads of many, some were blind, some clung to crutches or were carried by their family and friends. Thick storm banks set in as this wretched crowd stood patiently, and as if to confirm the English cliché, it soon began to rain. Most people retreated indoors to avoid the sudden onslaught, but our crowd 3 stood stubbornly in front of the Banqueting House, waiting, waiting for the appointment they so desperately desired.1 What drove these people to travel hundreds of miles across the country, to risk their fortunes and their lives in the treacherous maze of London, and to wait for hours in a downpour, all while afflicted with the most miserable diseases? It was a hope, a belief; a belief that had once exercised a powerful hold over the English imagination. These people had come to receive the touch of the king—the royal touch. For centuries, it was widely believed that the English monarch possessed a sacred gift, a healing power that allowed him to cure the disease known as scrofula or the ‘king’s evil’ by the touch of his hand alone. From its obscure origins in the twelfth century, the royal touch became perhaps the most famed of all the ceremonies of the English monarchy, the archetypal royal ritual. It was practiced universally by all the rulers of England for years, and enjoyed immense popularity throughout its history. Charles II alone touched nearly seven thousand of his subjects in 1660, and by the end of his twenty-four year reign, he had stroked around one hundred thousand people.2 However, despite this popularity, within thirty years of Charles’ death the royal rite of healing was totally abandoned by the English monarchy. Today, most people have never even heard of the royal touch or the English king’s supposed healing gift, and none would lend the belief any credence. Yet once it was one of the greatest symbols of English royal rule, both at home and abroad, and millions believed wholeheartedly in the wonder working power of the king. Why? What drove so many people to accept that their sovereign possessed a healing touch? And why did this belief die out so rapidly 1 Samuel Pepys attended the ceremony on June 23 and recorded it in his diary. Samuel Pepys, “June 23 1660”, Diaries; http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1660/06/. 2 John Browne, Adenochoiradelogia, (London: Printed for Tho. Newcomb for Sam. Lowndes, 1684), Book III 197- 207. 4 and completely? Though the origins of the rite lie deep within the Middle Ages, both its ceremonial peak and its precipitate decline occurred under the rule of the later Stuart monarchs, a period of incredible intellectual and social ferment in English history. The nature of the rite during the reign of Charles II and his successors sheds light, then, on the beliefs that both informed the royal touch and that led to its rejection. However, these beliefs did not develop in isolation, and the evolution of the rite through the years is essential to understanding its role at the turn of the eighteenth century. It is to this history that we must first turn. Scrofula or struma, known as the king’s evil in the seventeenth century, is a painful disease, debilitating and disfiguring. Today we know it is caused by tubercular infections of the cervical lymph nodes, but medical diagnosis in the 1600s was vague and imprecise, and the term was used to describe a wide range of maladies, from tumors to cancers to infected wounds to blindness. Its chief symptoms are large swellings that form in the neck and face, which, if left untreated, as they inevitably were in the seventeenth century, suppurate and fester into large, open, pus filled wounds. The mark of such a disease naturally evoked revulsion in many people, and the “Running Sores [that]… issued out much stinking matter” isolated the sufferers from the companionship and the help of their fellow man.3 Apart from offensive swellings, scrofula sometimes led to death. Though not on the level of the great killers like smallpox and plague, a steady stream of casualties from the disease are recorded in the London Bills of Mortality throughout the 1600s, and so the fear of death was added to the discomfort and disfigurement of the illness.4 Scrofula, however, has the frequent, and convenient, tendency to go into remission for long stretches of time, and so it is perhaps easy to see why this disease in particular became 3 Browne, Adenochoiradelogia, Book III, 170. 4 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in sixteenth and seventeenth century England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 192. 5 the sovereign remedy of the monarch. Still, we must always keep in the back of our minds the crowd that stood in front of the Banqueting House on that rainy morning, desperate in the truest sense of the word for any relief from the suffering they endured. The precise intellectual genesis of the royal touch is shrouded by both time and the impenetrable depths of the human psyche. However, we can be fairly certain when the touch began. The royal rite of healing probably arose in England around the twelfth century, during the reign of Henry I (r. 1100-1135), though was not formalized until the reign of his grandson Henry II, who ruled from 1154-1189. The ceremony was gradually expanded and refined throughout the years until it reached its ultimate ceremonial expression under the Stuarts.5 However, the English monarch was not the only ruler in Europe to touch for scrofula. The French too, practiced the rite as fervently as the English kings, and continued to do so for years after the end of the touch in England. The origins of the rite in France can be definitely dated to the reign of Philip I (r. 1059-1108), under whom the French cure first became institutionalized. However, in both the French and the English case, the origins of the rite were frequently traced back further, to two saintly and pious kings of the past. Saint Edward the Confessor and Robert the Pious, of England and France respectively, were widely recognized as the originators of the healing power in French and English accounts up until the modern era. During and immediately after their reigns, legends grew around both rulers of cures they supposedly wrought through their touch alone, and both Henry I and Philip I apparently appropriated these vague legends in their initial efforts at royal healing.6 It is notable that both of these mythical founders of the royal touch were famed for the religiosity, and became holy and saint like figures to latter generations.