with faith in the healing powers of the royal touch. The kings both of France and England claimed a sole and special right to this supernatural gift: the house of France deducing its origin from Clovis (5th century) and that of England declaring Edward the Confessor the first owner of this virtue. That the Saxon origin of the royal power of healing was the popular theory in England is evident from the striking and accurate description of the ceremony in Macbeth (act vi. scene iii.). Nevertheless the practice of this rite cannot be traced back to an earlier date than the reign of Edward III. in England, and of St Louis (Louis IX.) in France; consequently, it is believed that the performance of healing by the touch emanated in the first instance from the French Crusader-King, whose miraculous powers were subsequently transmitted to his descendant and representative, Isabella of Valois, wife of Edward II. of England. In any case, Queen Isabella’s son and heir, Edward III., claimant to the French throne through his mother, was the first English king to order a public display of an attribute that had hitherto been associated with the Valois kings alone. From his reign dates the use of the “touch-piece,” a gold medal given to the sufferer as a kind of talisman, which was originally the angel coin, stamped with designs of St Michael and of a three-masted ship.
The actual ceremony seems first to have consisted of the sovereign’s personal act of washing the diseased flesh with water, but under Henry VII. the use of an ablution was omitted, and a regular office was drawn up for insertion in the Service Book. At the “Ceremonies for the Healing” the king now merely touched his afflicted subject in the presence of the court chaplain who offered up certain prayers and afterwards presented the touch-piece, pierced so that it might be suspended by a ribbon round the patient’s neck. Henry VII.’s office was henceforth issued with variations from time to time under successive kings, nor did it disappear from certain editions of the Book of Common Prayer until the middle of the 18th century. The practice of the Royal Healing seems to have reached the height of its popularity during the reign of Charles II., who is stated on good authority to have touched over 100,000 strumous persons. So great a number of applicants becoming a nuisance to the Court, it was afterwards enacted that special certificates should in future be granted to individuals demanding the touch, and such certificates are occasionally to be found amongst old parish registers of the close of the 17th century. After the Revolution, William of Orange refused to touch, and referred all applicants to the exiled James II. at St Germain; but Queen Anne touched frequently, one of her patients being Dr Samuel Johnson in his infancy. The Hanoverian kings declined to touch, and there exists no further record of any ceremony of healing henceforward at the English court. The practice, however, was continued by the exiled Stuarts, and was constantly performed in Italy by James Stuart, “the Old Pretender,” and by his two sons, Charles and Henry (Cardinal York). (H. M. V.)
KINGSFORD, WILLIAM (1819–1898), British engineer and
Canadian historian, was born in London on the 23rd of December
1819. He first studied architecture, but disliking the confinement
of an office enlisted in the 1st Dragoon Guards, obtaining his
discharge in Canada in 1841. After serving for a time in the
office of the city surveyor of Montreal he made a survey for the
Lachine canal (1846–1848), and was employed in the United
States in the building of the Hudson River railroad in 1849, and
in Panama on the railroad being constructed there in 1851.
In 1853 he was surveyor and, afterwards district superintendent
for the Grand Trunk railroad, remaining in the employment of
that company until 1864. The following year he went to England
but returned to Canada in 1867 in the hope of taking part in the
construction of the Intercolonial Railway. In this he was unsuccessful,
but from 1872 to 1879 he held a government post in
charge of the harbours of the Great Lakes and the St Lawrence.
He had previously written books on engineering and topographical
subjects, and in 1880 he began to study the records of
Canadian history at Ottawa. Among other books he published
Canadian Archaeology (1886) and Early Bibliography of Ontario
(1892). But the great work of his life was a History of Canada
in 10 volumes (1887–1897), ending with the union of Upper
and Lower Canada in 1841. Kingsford died on the 28th of
September 1898.
KINGSLEY, CHARLES (1819–1875), English clergyman, poet
and novelist, was born on the 12th of June 1819, at Holne
vicarage, Dartmoor, Devon. His early years were spent at
Barnack in the Fen country and at Clovelly in North Devon.
The scenery of both made a great impression on his mind,
and was afterwards described with singular vividness in his
writings. He was educated at private schools and at King’s
College, London, after his father’s promotion to the rectory
of St Luke’s, Chelsea. In 1838 he entered Magdalene College,
Cambridge, and in 1842 he was ordained to the curacy of Eversley
in Hampshire, to the rectory of which he was not long afterwards
presented, and this, with short intervals, was his home
for the remaining thirty-three years of his life. In 1844 he
married Fanny, daughter of Pascoe Grenfell, and in 1848
he published his first volume, The Saint’s Tragedy. In 1859 he
became chaplain to Queen Victoria; in 1860 he was appointed
to the professorship of modern history at Cambridge, which he
resigned in 1869; and soon after he was appointed to a canonry
at Chester. In 1873 this was exchanged for a canonry at Westminster.
He died at Eversley on the 23rd of January 1875.
With the exception of occasional changes of residence in England, generally for the sake of his wife’s health, one or two short holiday trips abroad, a tour in the West Indies, and another in America to visit his eldest son settled there as an engineer, his life was spent in the peaceful, if active, occupations of a clergyman who did his duty earnestly, and of a vigorous and prolific writer. But in spite of this apparently uneventful life, he was for many years one of the most prominent men of his time, and by his personality and his books he exercised considerable influence on the thought of his generation. Though not profoundly learned, he was a man of wide and various information, whose interests and sympathies embraced many branches of human knowledge. He was an enthusiastic student in particular of natural history and geology. Sprung on the father’s side from an old English race of country squires, and on his mother’s side from a good West Indian family who had been slaveholders for generations, he had a keen love of sport and a genuine sympathy with country-folk, but he had at the same time something of the scorn for lower races to be found in the members of a dominant race.
With the sympathetic organization which made him keenly sensible of the wants of the poor, he threw himself heartily into the movement known as Christian Socialism, of which Frederick Denison Maurice was the recognized leader, and for many years he was considered as an extreme radical in a profession the traditions of which were conservative. While in this phase he wrote his novels Yeast and Alton Locke, in which, though he pointed out unsparingly the folly of extremes, he certainly sympathized not only with the poor, but with much that was done and said by the leaders in the Chartist movement. Yet even then he considered that the true leaders of the people were a peer and a dean, and there was no real inconsistency in the fact that at a later period he was among the most strenuous defenders of Governor Eyre in the measures adopted by him to put down the Jamaican disturbances. He looked rather to the extension of the co-operative principle and to sanitary reform for the amelioration of the condition of the people than to any radical political change. His politics might therefore have been described as Toryism tempered by sympathy, or as Radicalism tempered by hereditary scorn of subject races. He was bitterly opposed to what he considered to be the medievalism and narrowness of the Oxford Tractarian Movement. In Macmillan’s Magazine for January 1864 he asserted that truth for its own sake was not obligatory with the Roman Catholic clergy, quoting as his authority John Henry Newman (q.v.). In the ensuing controversy Kingsley was completely discomfited. He was a broad churchman, who held what would be called a liberal theology, but the Church, its organization, its creed, its dogma, had ever an increasing hold upon him. Although at one
