SYMHC Classics: The King’s Evil

This 2017 episode examines the practice of British and French monarchs laying on hands to cure sick people from the medieval period to the 18th century. One disease was so often "cured" it came to be known as the King's Evil.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Recently on the show, we talked about how
one of the things that Marie and Adelaide Lenormant had
studied while learning about divination and prophecy was the power
of healing the king's evil. So the king's evil was scropula,
and in parts of Europe from the medieval period all
the way to the eighteenth century, monarchs were believed to

(00:24):
be able to heal it. This episode originally came out
on March thirteenth, twenty seventeen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You
Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and

(00:45):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Eu Wilson and I'm
Holly Crime. Today's podcast was originally supposed to be about
Afra Ben and don't worry if you are one of
the many many people who asked for that one and
are disappointed by the words supposed to be That episode

(01:05):
is still in the works, but very early on in
researching it, a book that I was reading was sort
of setting the stage with a description of life during
the Restoration that was the return of the British monarchy
in sixteen sixty in the years that followed it, and
one bit of This description was that when he was
restored to the throne, Charles the second brought back a

(01:26):
customary treatment for quote the king's evil, also known as scrofula,
and that treatment was for the king to touch people.
I love it. You know, medicine. Yeah, yeah, I knew.
I knew that the practice of the monarch laying on
hands to cure sick people had been around during the

(01:46):
medieval period, but I did not know it had gone
all the way into the restoration. And I definitely did
not know that a particular illness was so connected to
it that people literally called it the king's evil. So
that was compelling enough to put off Afriben until a
little later, which conveniently also gives me time to get

(02:07):
through the immensely large book. Holly saw that book last
week while I was in Atlanta. It was quite big.
I did. Tracy was here visiting for work, and she
held up the book and said, how am I ever
going to get through this in time? Because it is
really a serious tone it is it is, so I'm
glad that you'll have more time to work on that one.

(02:30):
Me too, because I was having that moment where like
when you're in middle school, and you put off your
paper to the last minute. Except I didn't put off
the paper till the last minute. I just didn't realize
until I got into it how colossal the research was.
I like, how you think that's a middle school thing
and not say, a in your forties working thing. It

(02:55):
could be that to you. It is for me sometimes
not on purpose. But you know, we do lots of stuff,
so sometimes things fill in and I don't get as
much time as I would like to write a thing.
But today we know that scropula is caused by the
same bacteria as tuberculosis, and tuberculosis has been around for

(03:16):
at least nine thousand years. It is one of the oldest,
if not the oldest, infectious diseases still existing on Earth,
and most people are probably familiar with tuberculosis in its
pulmonary form, which has also been known as consumption or thesis.
The huge list of historical figures who were either known
or believed to have had pulmonary tuberculosis is huge. It

(03:40):
includes people like John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Bronte,
and many, many, many others. It's come up a lot
in episodes of our show that Holly and I have
worked on, including the history of the Grove Park in
t Arh, the New England vampire panic, Alan L. Hart
and then of course Selman Waksman and the development of streptomycin,

(04:02):
which was the first drug successfully used to cure it. Scropula,
which comes from the Latin term for brood sow, is
extra pulmonary tuberculosis, so it affects the body outside of
the lungs. Specifically, it's an infection of the lymph nodes
that's caused by tuberculosis, although lymph nodes all over the
body can be affected. In general, Scrofula has been used

(04:24):
to describe an infection in the neck, and when untreated,
it causes swellings, sores, and sometimes abscesses, in particular around
the lymph nodes at the top of the neck and
under the jaw. There's a little bit of debate about
why a word for sow came to be used to
describe scrofula. In some accounts, it's because pigs were prone

(04:46):
to having tumors in their throats. In others, it's because
scrofula makes your neck look thick and swollen like a
pig's cassius Felix, who was writing in the year four
forty seven, said it looked quote, just like the swollen
neck of a sow, and some thought that maybe it
was that the swellings and the sores brought on by
scropula looked like pigs themselves. That one seems like the

(05:12):
most unlikely to me, but it weirdly, I read a
lot of old medical documents of people theorizing about why
it was called that from like the seventeen hundreds. You
know it's worth examination. But today we have diagnostic tests
to confirm a tuberculosis infection, and thankfully we have the

(05:34):
drugs to treat it, especially in places with reliable access
to modern medicine. It's really rare for scrofula to become
a serious problem, with the exception of patients whose immune
systems are compromised or occasionally in a drug resistant strain
of the disease, and when treated quickly, the symptoms are
usually limited to painless swelling in the lymph nodes. But

(05:57):
before the development of antibiotics, scraffia could become incredibly painful
and disfiguring. It was also often mistaken for other conditions
that also caused swelling or sores in the throat or neck,
or those conditions were mistaken for scropula, and these included mumps,
glandular disorders, various skin conditions, and cancer. Prior to the

(06:21):
germ theory of disease, physicians had all kinds of other
ideas about what caused scrofula. Under the ancient Greek idea
of the body being regulated by four humors, scrofula was
caused by an excess of phlegm. Charles the seconds Royal
Surgeon wrote that scrofula came from the glands filling up
with humor. Some physicians in history believed it was inherited

(06:44):
and not communicable. In eighteen thirteen, William Turon described it
as quote a genuine idiopathic hereditary disease, and in eighteen
thirty three John Kent called it quote an hereditary taint.
Kent went on to say, quote the other causes of
this disease are bad and unwholesome diet, insufficient clothing, neglect

(07:07):
of exercise, and want of proper cleanliness. I may also
observe that it frequently makes its first appearance after an
attack of measles, smallpox, rheumatic fever or other debilitating affections,
and it is often excited into obvious existence by blows, sprains, bruises,
or other accidents. According to Thomas Spern, who wrote a

(07:29):
treatise on scrapula in seventeen oh nine, it was quote
a preternatural malignant tumor or humor produced by a particular
acidity of the serum of the blood, either in gland,
muscle or membrane, which it both coagulates and indurates, or
in the marrow, which it always dissolves and also putrefies

(07:50):
the bone. Hmm, I hope nobody's eating breakfast while they
listen to this. There are several parts of this episode
where if this were an episode of saw Bones, it
would be the part where where Justin is going, hmmm,
we can move on, Like you can tell he just
wants Sydney to stop saying the gross part, Yeah, I don't,

(08:11):
I don't want you. And just occurs to me that
if somebody is a little bit delicate of tummy to
these types of things, this maybe pause until you're done
with your meal. But in Fern's treatise, children whose parents
had scrofula, especially if their mother did while nursing were
more likely to develop it themselves. And quote here I

(08:32):
cannot emit one observation by the bye that children also
who are begotten at improper times of the moon have
been often subject to be afflicted with this evil and
to the last degree too of virulency. Let this be
a warning to married people. The let this be a
warning to married people made me laugh a lot. It

(08:56):
makes the first time a lot. I just love the
idea that depending on what time of the lunar cycle
a baby is made might make it more you know,
likely to contract this. Yeah. Fern went on to list
others who were more prone to scrofula, including people whose
blood was naturally too acidic, children who had rickets, people

(09:20):
who were generally weak, people whose bodies didn't have enough
quote heat for good digestion, living in places with air
that was too thin or too thick or was bad,
and also quote salt, sour, slimy meats or drinks. Not
getting enough exercise, according to him, was yet another way
you could develop scrofula. Okay, putrefying bone is not a problem,

(09:45):
but slimy meats is like we're creeping up to the
edge of my like cupability. Here, some physicians did conclude
that scrofula and tuberculosis were related, even if all their
other ideas about it were completely off base. John Kent,
for example, who had named its cause quote an hereditary taint,

(10:06):
also wrote that consumption was quote neither more nor less
than scrofula of the lungs in an eighteen thirty three
edition of a text on scrofula and cancer. But it
wasn't until eighteen eighty two that medical science pinpointed the
bacterial cause of tuberculosis and confirmed that scrofula was caused
by the same thing. Even then, there were naysayers who

(10:27):
argued that scrofula was unrelated and not transmissible. Over the centuries,
a wide range of treatments were used to relieve scrofula,
or try to. Because the glands in question were usually
in the neck, surgeries could be particularly dangerous, although some
doctors did attempt them while still in the world of

(10:50):
four humor theory. Treatments were often meant to balance the
humors or drain excess through purgatives, diuretics and bleeding compresses.
Poultices and topical bombs were applied to the swellings as well.
And for those who thought that too much salt or
too thin air are those sorts of things were the problems.
The treatment would include a change of diet or a

(11:12):
change of scenery. And we're going to talk about how
scrophula came to be known as the king's evil that
could be cured if the king touched it, But first
we're going to pause for a little sponsor break. In
medieval England, the name the King's evil eventually came to

(11:33):
be directly connected to scrophula, but the basic idea goes
back earlier than that and also connects to other diseases.
In ancient Rome, the Latin morbus regius, or royal disease
was used to describe a number of different diseases, including
jaundice and leprosy, which today is known as Hanson's disease.
It's not entirely clear where either of these associations came from.

(11:58):
One is that royal was reference to gold, so jaundice
being called the royal disease is because the color of
the patient's skin. Another theory is that particular royal or
noble families were prone to certain diseases long after the
time we're talking about today, and in other parts of
the world, epilepsy and hemophilia have been described as royal

(12:19):
diseases because of their connections to royal families. There's some
suggestion that people thought Hansen's disease could be cured through
a royal touch, but there's the very little evidence of
a king actually trying that, although of course there are
biblical and other religious references that are not about a monarch.

(12:40):
There are a few very spotty references to monarchs in
England and France curing people through touch prior to the
tenth and eleventh centuries. The first was Clovis, King of
the Franks, who ranged from four eighty one to five eleven,
although the record on that one is very sparse. There
are also reports of miraculous cures at the hands of
Robert the Second of France, also known as Robert the

(13:02):
Pious or Robert the Pious, who was co ruler of
the Franks with his father from nine eighty seven to
nine ninety six, and then he was the soul monarch
until his death in ten thirty one. But the first
widely chronicled event of the royal touch was under Edward
the Confessor, who lived from one thousand and three to
ten sixty six, and he ruled England from ten forty

(13:25):
two until his death. He's called the Confessor because of
his reputation for being a deeply pious man, and he's
the only king of England ever to have been canonized.
Edward the Confessor reportedly cured a woman of scrofula. The
woman had an infection under her jaw that was causing swelling,
a bad smell, and multiple sores. She had a dream

(13:48):
that if the king washed her with water, she would
be cured, so she went to the court and asked
to be given an audience. This might sound odd to
today's ears, but asking for an audience with the king
for something like this at the time was definitely not
unheard of. Edward the Confessor, along with other monarchs, distributed
alms and offered comfort to the poor and the sick,

(14:10):
particularly on religious holidays, and in this case, when the
woman was brought before the king, he asked for a
bowl of water. There's some variation in exactly what happened
next as described in later accounts, but in general it
was more than just a laying on of hands or
an anointing with water, combining the miraculous with the medical.

(14:32):
Edward dipped his fingers in the water and touched the
woman's abscesses, which opened up and drained, with some of
the descriptions of what came out being far grosser than others.
He kept dipping his fingers and washing and pressing until
all of the putrescence was gone, and then he ordered
the woman to be fed and cared for out of
the royal purse until she recovered. I will repeat that

(14:55):
if you go read up about this on the internet.
Some of the descriptions are incredibly graphic. I originally had
more graphic stuff in here, and then I was like,
you know what, we're gonna read this at ten o'clock
in the morning, when we're both a little you know,

(15:15):
still getting used to the day. Maybe this is a
little too intense. I'm okay with the absess draining. I'm
still back on slimy meat and the oh no. So
there's some debate about whether this woman's symptoms were really
scrofula or whether it was some other condition, but regardless,

(15:39):
this one event solidified the connection between the King's evil
and Scrofula, and soon the royal ability to cure through
touch was connected pretty much only to scrofula. Thomas Fern,
who's treat Us on Scrapula we referenced in Part one,
wrote quote, but I beg leave here to make one digression,

(15:59):
by the way, about our English term for the struma
or scrofula is at it is, as it is now
commonly called the king's evil in everybody's mouth before I
begin to define what I have hitherto only been describing
by name. And some writers think that this name was
given to any scrofulous or struma's disease long before Edward

(16:20):
the Confessor's time. But however, all agree at least that
from his reign was called nothing else generally, and I
may say vulgarly too, but the King's evil in England.
Fern also wrote that the ability to heal it through
touch was quote a particular gift to him at first,
and to no body before him, as a singular reward

(16:42):
of his holiness, And it was from there hereditary through
the monarchy, at least according to this guy. This event
also comes up in the work of Shakespeare, and Act
four of Macbeth. Macduff and Malcolm are standing outside Edward
the Confessor's palace, and a doctor comes through and mentions

(17:03):
that there's a crowd of people inside seeking the king's touch.
Malcolm then explains to McDuff what is going on. Quote
tis called the evil a most miraculous work in this
good king, which often, since my heir remain in England,
I have seen him do. How he solicits heaven himself
best known knows, but strangely visited people all swollen and ulcerous,

(17:28):
pitiful to the eye, the mere despair of surgery he cures,
hanging a golden stamp about their necks, put on with
holy prayers, and tis spoken to the succeeding royalty. He
leaves the healing benediction with this strange virtue. He hath
a heavenly gift of prophecy, and sundry blessings hang about
his throne that speak him full of grace. Although this

(17:52):
scene takes place outside the palace of Edward the Confessor,
his treatment of this woman for scrofula seems to have
been a one time thing performed on one person, not
a mass ceremony with a coin involved. However, it's a
really good description of what this practice morphed into in
later centuries as monarchs in England and France started touching

(18:13):
large groups of subjects at special ceremonies and holidays. Yeah,
even though Shakespeare was writing about Edward the Confessor here,
what he was describing was what was actually happening while
he was living, when people went to get cured of
the king's evil. Louis the sixth of France, who ruled
from eleven oh eight to eleven thirty seven, viewed this

(18:35):
practice as quote customary, and he treated whole crowds with
laying on of hands and the sign of the cross.
Edward the First of England, who ruled from twelve seventy
two to thirteen oh seven, touched more than five hundred
of his subjects to cure them of scrofula in the
course of a single month. By the end of his reign,
he was touching more than one thousand people every year.

(18:59):
People travel great distances to the court of Philip the
Fourth of France, who ruled from twelve eighty five to
thirteen fourteen, and the people who traveled the farthest to
see him were also rewarded with large sums of alms.
Aure the fourth of France, who ruled from fifteen eighty
nine to sixteen ten, touched up to fifteen hundred people

(19:20):
in one single ceremony. I'm just gonna interject here that
seems like a bad public health move. That's I was
thinking about, like the germs, that how did all of
these monarchs not constantly become ill themselves. It's a great
question because they were magical clearly. Uh. It was Edward

(19:42):
the Third of England, who ruled from thirteen twenty seven
to thirteen seventy seven, who first started presenting those he
touched with a coin, which was described in that passage
that Tracy read from Macbeth. These coins became an ongoing
practice known as angels or touch pieces, and were sometimes
strung through with a ribbon to be worn as a talisman.

(20:03):
Edward the Third's father, Edward the Second, also started the
practice of the monarch donating gold or silver on Good Friday,
which would be made into cramp rings said to have
healing powers. For the most part, the first few generations
of this royal touch were viewed as an outward expression
of the monarch's personal sanctity, and if the monarch didn't

(20:25):
have a lot of personal sanctity, the gift would go away.
For example, Philip the First was King of the Franks
from ten sixty to eleven oh eight, and he reportedly
did practice the royal touch at first, until he became
too sinful for it to work for him. He wound
up having the nickname Philip the Amorus. But that connection

(20:47):
to personal piety shifted a little bit after the Protestant Reformation,
and we're going to talk about that after we paused
one more time for a sponsor break. Over the years,
some circular logic grew up around the king's evil and
the royal touch. Scrapula was the king's evil because kings

(21:08):
could cure it, and kings could cure scrapula because it
was the king's evil. Following this same pattern, the monarch's
practice of the royal touch started to be used as
evidence of the monarch's legitimacy as the monarch. If the
monarch did this thing, clearly they were legitimately the monarch.

(21:28):
It sounds a lot like the Lord of the Rings
legend from Gondor about the hands of the king or
the hands of a healer, and so shall the rightful
king be known. This shows up especially in the post
Reformation reign of Queen Elizabeth I, who was queen from
fifteen fifty eight until her death in sixteen oh three.
Her first attempts at the king's touch seemed reluctant. However,

(21:52):
after Pope Pious the fifth excommunicated her and declared her
a pretended queen and a heretic, she revived the practice
in part because her detractors claimed that God had taken
the gift away from her for her heresy, and in
one account, a Catholic woman came to her and begged
to be cured, and when Elizabeth's touch was successful, the

(22:13):
woman announced that the papal bull was clearly null because
God was still working through the queen. Today's episode of
the podcast was inspired by this description of Charles the
Second's revival of the practice during the Restoration. Under the
reign of Charles the Second's father, Charles the First, a
form for healing at the hands of the king had

(22:36):
become a part of the Book of Common Prayer. Charles
the First had also had touch piece coins meanted that
were inscribed in Latin, translated to quote the love of
the people is the King's protection. He got executed so
apparently love was not enough protection for him. Charles the

(22:57):
First was king until he was executed for high treason
and the monarchy was abolished. Oliver Cromwell then became Lord
Protector of England, Ireland and Scotland. Cromwell was not a
king and did not practice the royal touch, but Charles
the Second, while in exile, continued the practice, in part
as evidence of his place on the throne. When the

(23:18):
monarchy was restored, Charles the Second's touch pieces were inscribed
with the Latin for glory to God alone. John Evelyn
wrote about Charles the Second's reinstatement of the practice of
the royal touch after the restoration of the monarchy in
his diary for July sixth, sixteen sixty. Here's what it said.
His Majesty began first to touch for the evil according

(23:42):
to custom. Thus his Majesty, sitting under his state in
the banqueting house, the surgeons caused the sick to be
brought or led up to the throne, where they kneeling.
The King strokes their faces or cheeks with both his
hands at once, at which instant a chaplain in his
formality says quote, he has he put his hands upon them,

(24:03):
and he healed them. This is said to everyone in particular.
When they have all been touched, they come up again
in the same order, and the other chaplain, kneeling and
having an angel gold strung on white ribbon on his arm,
delivers them one by one. So is Majesty, who puts
them about the necks of the touched as they pass,
while the first chaplain repeats quote, this is the true

(24:26):
light who came into the world. Then follows an epistle,
at first a gospel with the liturgy, prayers for the
sick with some alteration, lastly the blessing. Then the Lord
Chamberlain and the comptroller of the household bring a basin
your towel for his Majesty to wash. Samuel Peeps wrote

(24:46):
about it as well on April thirteenth of sixteen sixty one,
writing quote, I went to the banquet house, and there
saw the King heel the first time that I ever
saw him do it, which he did with great gravity,
and it seemed to me to be an ugly office
and a simple one. Apparently, Charles the Second also had
to set up a system to keep people from coming

(25:07):
back for seconds. Basically, Charles the Second used the King's
touch on ninety thousand subjects between sixteen sixty and sixteen
eighty two. He and his court also tried to put
a stop to anyone else treating scrapula through the laying
on of hands. Charles the First had taken similar steps
in his reign, and they had both also taken steps

(25:29):
to keep people from coming back repeatedly. In sixteen thirty seven,
a father and his seventh son were investigated for their
use of the son's purported healing powers. A neighbor had
had scrofula and the child's grandmother had held the baby's
hand up to the neighbor's neck, who had then reportedly
been cured. Father and son went on to treat many

(25:51):
more people, but were told to stop it. They were, however,
spared for their punishment because folks were basically afraid that
their followers would be angered if they were treated too harshly. Similarly,
Valentine Great Rakes, also known as the Stroker, had been
a lieutenant in Oliver Cromwell's army, but went on to

(26:13):
become something of a faith healer. In sixteen sixty two,
he was suddenly struck by the knowledge that he had
the power to heal the king's evil. He started healing
people with prayers and laying on of hands, and eventually
his fame spread far enough that he was summoned before
the court and ordered to stop. After repeated orders from

(26:33):
increasingly more powerful figures within the church failed to get
him to stop, the ecclesiastical Court decided that they were
risking the ire of his followers, and they gave up.
He finally wound up being summoned to Whitehall to appear
before Charles the Second, the results of which did not
make it into the historical record. It's there are so

(26:53):
many different ways that conversation could have gone, because he
and Charles the Second were both touching a whole lot
of people to try to here there's cropula. So it's
not one hundred percent clear whether Charles the Second was like, dude,
you gotta lay off, this is my territory, or whether
it was more like a meeting of the faith healers,
or maybe they touched each other an event horizon opened

(27:15):
up and things got really crazy. No, so, the idea
of the royal touch as being evidence for who was
the legitimate ruler appeared once again during the Glorious Revolution
and the Jacobite attempts to return the Stewarts to the throne.

(27:37):
William the Third, also known as William of Orange, and
his wife Mary became joint monarchs in sixteen eighty nine.
William only performed the royal touch once, saying afterward quote,
God give you better health and more sense. Meanwhile, the
exiled Stuarts, including Bonnie Prince Charlie, kept up the habit,

(27:58):
and Queen Anne, last monarch of the House of Stuart,
touched hundreds of subjects. One was writer Samuel Johnson, who
she touched when he was just two years old. In
the words of John Kent's eighteen thirty three treatise on Scrofula,
which we read from earlier in the show, quote, it
appears that Queen Anne was the last sovereign who practiced

(28:20):
such a ridiculous and superstitious imposition, and successor George the
First put an end to the practice in England after
becoming king in seventeen fourteen because he thought it was
just a superstition. In France, the French Revolution put an
end to the practice by overthrowing the monarchy in seventeen
eighty nine. See what you did. Now we can't have

(28:43):
the King's touch. There is, of course, lots of debate
about what was really going on here, from both a
medical and a religious sense. There were doctors and clergy
alike who viewed the practice with a lot of skepticism.
It wasn't like everybody believed that this was a legitimate
healing practice, in spite of the fact that speaking out

(29:04):
against the royal touch got at least one person convicted
for treason. Much like all of the other people who
were told to stop being faith healers with scropula, this
guy was ultimately pardoned because they were afraid of angering
his followers. One common cause of scrofula in medieval and

(29:24):
early modern Europe was contracting a bovine form of tuberculosis
through drinking contaminated milk, and this comes up a whole
lot in modern treatments of this whole phenomenon. This form
of the condition didn't typically lead to other symptoms of tuberculosis,
and it often resolved itself later, giving the patient a
heightened immunity to pulmonary tuberculosis as well. So there are

(29:47):
a lot of people who were like, maybe because so
many people were getting this bovine form of tuberculosis through
contaminated milk, and then it was resolving coincidentally after the
monarch touched them. Maybe that explained at all, But that's
really not uh really not quite an adequate explanation for

(30:07):
something that went on for that many centuries. It's a
very long time and thousands of people. Yeah, I wonder
if there's much on the record about the timeline of
the healing, right, like, other than the one where there's
discussion of the pressing of the abscesses and draining them.

(30:33):
You know, it's Is it as though people magically walked
away with unswollen necks and were instantly healed according to
the record, or is it a case where it probably
was just it running its course and they're like, the
king touched me three weeks ago, and I feel much
better now, yeah, Or a people selectively remembering the people
who got better, right, and not remembering the folks who didn't.

(30:58):
Like I said at the top of the show, I
knew that this was a thing among medieval monarchs. I
had no idea that it continued on and on and
on all the way to the French Revolution. That's just
threw me for a little bit of a loop. Thanks

(31:18):
so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this
episode is out of the archive, if you heard an
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(31:41):
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