The Royal Touch in Early Modern England

With The Royal Touch in Early Modern England: Politics, Medicine and Sin, Stephen Brogan offers a new understanding of the royal touch – the ability of kings and queens to miraculously heal their subjects of particular diseases in 16th and especially 17th-century England. ‘Greater numbers of people were touched for scrofula during the Restoration by both Charles II and James II, and with greater regularity, than at any other time in English history’ (p. 2). Consequently, Brogan describes the Restoration as the ‘heyday’ of the royal touch (p. 120). The importance of the royal touch in early modern England is not a new claim. To cite one more recent example, in her monograph The Magnificent Monarch: Charles II and the Ceremonies of Power (1), Anna Keay detailed the popularity of the royal touch alongside other liturgical and political developments during the Restoration; in an older text such as Marc Bloch’s 1923 study The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England (2), the royal touch was seen as part and parcel of a larger set of ideas and ideals about monarchy that extended back before sacral kingship to early medieval legends about miraculous healings wrought by saints. Brogan agrees with both Keay and Bloch. New in Brogan’s volume is the claim that in England, the ceremony was most popular from 1660 to 1688. The evidence that he marshals is impressive and persuasive. However, Brogan’s volume also raises some key questions about method that touch upon the viability of his conclusions.