The medieval kings of England and France were able to heal the sick by touching them.
There: I have put it in print. I have resisted the urge to buttress myself against the skeptics—to write “thought they were able,” or, more generously, that they “were involved in a complex social ritual of healing.” After much reading, and a little thinking, I am convinced that these kings basically did what the crowds who came to them thought they did: cured those who were ill with scrofula (mycobacterial cervical lymphadenitis and the disease that generally gives rise to it, namely, tuberculosis) “with prayer poured out, with laying on of hands, and with a blessing given along with the sign of the Cross.” The king
does [this] continually, and very often did it to the foulest of men and women, who flocked to him in crowds, in England, in Germany, and in all parts of France.... And this is a thing that all Christian kings of the English have been accustomed to do by gift of God, and French kings too, as the books of ancient records and the unanimous tradition of these kingdoms testify.
In France, the custom of touching the sick was destroyed by the Revolution. In England, the healing rite was subjected to skepticism more gradually, throughout the 18th century, as England became more thoroughly “enlightened” and anti-Catholic, with Whigs insisting that “belief in the royal touch had been ‘long exploded by men of sense and existed nowhere but in the brains of Popish enthusiasts,’ ” that “if we give [the royal touch] a kind Reception, we cannot refuse the same ... To all the Absurdities and Superstitions of Popery,” and that “if a man will ... believe in One Miracle, he may well believe in One Thousand, and so may swallow all the miracles of the Romish Church.”
Prior to such sectarian dismissals, the healing power of the king’s hands enjoyed something like 800 years of unbroken popular belief. Debates during this long period never concerned whether his hands were healing hands, but whether the king healed by virtue of his office or by virtue of his personal holiness. This question was never exactly cleared up, not for want of debate, but because it is the nature of Christianity to blur the line between person and office, to see institutions as both the fruits and the causes of personal holiness, and the “offices” of the Church as flourishing in the lives and through the merits of (wildly particular) saints—the papacy in Peter, the ascetic life in John the Baptist, the contemplative life in Mary, kingship in David; each of these renewed and developed by subsequent saints, even up to our own day.
The English power of healing was rooted in the sanctity of Edward the Confessor (1042–1066), last king of the House of Wessex, who healed the sick, not by virtue of belonging to a royal line, but by the same imitation of Christ which had Francis embrace the lepers. Henry II of England (1154–1189), who was devoted to the Confessor King, was the first English king we know to have regularly touched the sick—though the practice…
