The Healing Reawakening by Francis MacNutt

Author:Francis MacNutt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL079000
ISBN: 9781585582693
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2006-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

16

THE ROYAL TOUCH

And now we come to perhaps the most unusual revelation in our mystery of who nearly killed the healing ministry. It is this: “the Royal Touch,” an ancient English and French belief that their kings and queens had the power to heal.[1] As they saw it in those days, the monarch’s healing gift did not depend on his or her virtue but came from his position, a divine anointing.

Most English people today (about three out of four in English churches when I have asked for a show of hands) have never even heard about the Royal Touch. And yet, for seven hundred years the English believed that their sovereigns possessed a God-given power to heal those who suffered from the “King’s Evil.” This was another name for scrofula, a foul disease common in medieval times—a type of tuberculosis infecting the lymph system, creating fetid boils and pustules that broke out on the sick person’s body. Scrofula was called the King’s Evil because the people believed that the king could heal it through his Royal Touch. The monarchs were healing specialists!

Not to be left behind, the monarchs of France also claimed healing power over scrofula, and in France this belief also lasted for seven hundred years.

Not only did everyone believe in this kind of healing but people acted upon it in a big way; in both France and England, the monarchs regularly held large healing services! It may be hard for us to believe, but King Henry VIII held healing services several times a year.

In England, this healing power was supposed to have dated back to King Edward the Confessor. We definitely know that King Henry I (ca. 1100) touched scrofulous sufferers while making the sign of the cross over them.[2] In one year, Edward I (thirteenth century) blessed some 1,736 people, and many testimonies of healing were recorded.[3] Hard as it may be for us to imagine today, monarchs like Queen Elizabeth I held healing services several times a year, and these were major events.

This healing power was an everyday belief in England and France. Shakespeare, for example, depicts Malcolm fleeing the murderous Macbeth and taking refuge in the court of King Edward the Confessor. There Malcolm witnesses a healing and reports to his companion Macduff that the sick,

All sworn and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye,

The mere despair of surgery, he cures,

. . . and ’tis spoken,

To the succeeding royalty he leaves

The healing benediction.

Macbeth, IV, iii

Contributing to this extraordinary healing phenomenon was the theory that the kings were divinely anointed, and therefore the miracles of healing were signs and wonders that testified to the “divine right of kings.” Healing services, consequently, proved that anyone who rebelled against the monarch was fighting God’s own appointment.

In this way, healing services served an enormous political purpose. When England was torn by civil war between the houses of Lancaster and York, the rival claimants both claimed to possess the Royal Touch, and they prayed for the sick to prove it.[4] After 1688,

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