Tea at Trianon: The Healing Touch of Kings and Queens

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, December 20, 2022

The Healing Touch of Kings and Queens

Mary I touching the sick

Charles I

In France the kings also had healing ceremonies where the royal touch was said to heal scrofula. Louis XVI held healing ceremonies several times a year. From JSTOR Daily:

These stories reflect a debate that was raging at the time about the nature of sovereignty: Did kings rule by God’s appointment, or by the consent of the ruled? King Charles had asserted his divine right to rule by dissolving Parliament. For this, he was later executed, and the monarchy was transformed into a republic (for a time). For those who believed that English kings ruled by God’s appointment, the execution of King Charles I was a shocking scandal. The accounts of miraculous cures from the king’s blood or blessing, circulating in pamphlets, were a demonstration of God’s favor toward the king. Imagine how many more people could have been healed, one pamphleteer mourned, had Charles lived to bless all the sick and unfortunate of England with his regal hands.

For centuries in England, the ability to heal scrofula had been considered the divinely-granted power of kings. For this reason, the disease was called “the king’s evil,” the evil the king had the power to heal. Edward the Confessor, who ruled from 1042 to 1066, was the first English king to cure the king’s evil with his touch. He anointed a sick woman’s throat with water and made the sign of the cross above it. A wonder followed: “those diseased parts (morbus) that had been treated by the smearing of the king softened and separated from the skin; and, with the pressure of the hand, worms together with pus and blood came out of various holes. Again the good king kneeded with his holy hand and drew out the pus.” The woman was healed.

Over the successive centuries, and successive monarchies, the ritual of the monarch’s healing touch grew from occasional individual healings to vast spectacles. These grand occasions, formalized with an official liturgy, served to prop up the monarchy. The ceremonies showed that the monarchs ruled by the will of God, as divine power worked through the monarch’s anointed hands. The king would touch each sufferer’s swollen throat, make the sign of the cross, and hang a gold coin inscribed with the image of an angel around each neck. Often there were hundreds of supplicants for the king to heal. The mass healings were so popular that eventually sufferers were required to produce a certificate verifying that they had never received the monarch’s touch before.

Not every king was a proponent of the ceremony. William of Orange was famous for his reluctance to perform healings, and indeed seemed to think the whole idea was superstitious nonsense. The one time he was prevailed upon to touch a sufferer from the king’s evil, he prayed to God “to Heal the Patient, and grant him more Wisdom at the same time.” (Read more.)