GRACE PERIOD
Tis call’d the evil:
A most miraculous work in this good king;
Which often, since my here-remain in England,
I have seen him do. How he solicits heaven,
Himself best knows: but strangely-visited people,
All swoln and ulcerous, 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.
These words are spoken by Malcolm in Act IV of Macbeth. The ‘good king’ in question is Edward the Confessor, one of the last of England’s Anglo-Saxon monarchs.
The king’s touch capable of restoring those scrofulous wretches to health was a medieval belief that persisted into the early 17th century, when Shakespeare wrote his Scottish play in part to ingratiate himself with the new man on the throne: James I of England, the sixth ruler of Scotland to go by that name and allegedly a descendant of Banquo. James had a more than passing interest in the occult (hence the witches), but the healing touch was more than a leftover superstition. It had been a live political issue for James’s predecessor, Elizabeth. When the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis had excommunicated Elizabeth I, she needed to demonstrate that God had not withdrawn the magic touch, and with it the legitimacy of her rule.
James’s son Charles I was particularly jealous
