f in the efficacy of the king's touch was general, and Lecky
tells us its genuineness "was asserted by the privy council, by the
bishops of two religions, by the general voice of the clergy in the
palmiest days of the English Church, by the University of Oxford, and
by the enthusiastic assent of the people. It survived the ages of the
Reformation, of Bacon, of Milton, and of Hobbes. It was by no means
extinct at the age of Locke, and would probably have lasted still
longer, had not the change of dynasty at the Revolution assisted the
tardy scepticism."[180]

In France there was the same belief in the efficacy of the royal
touch. Philip I exercised the gift, but the French historians say that
he was deprived of the power on account of the irregularity of his
life. Laurentius reports that Francis I, when a prisoner in Spain,
cured a great number of people of struma (scrofula). A paraphrase of
the Latin verse which Lascaris wrote concerning this event is as
follows:

"The king applies his hand, diseases fly,
And though a captive, still the powers on high
Regard his touch. This striking proof is giv'n,
That they who bound him are the foes of Heav'n."

Concerning the touching by the kings of France, Pettigrew says: "In
the church of St. Maclou, in St. Denys, Heylin (_Cosmograph._, p. 184)
says the kings of France, with a fast of nine days and other penances,
used to receive the gift of healing the king's evil with nothing but a
touch. Philip de Comines states, that the king always confessed before
the cure of the king's evil. Butler (_Lives of the Saints_, vol. VIII,
p. 394) says, 'The French kings usually only perform this ceremony on
the day they have received the holy communion.' The historians who
write under the first two families of the French kings are altogether
silent as to the kings' curing the evil by the touching. (_Veyrard
Trav._, p. 109.) Philip of Valois is reported to have cured 1400 people
afflicted with the king's evil. Of Louis XIII, it was said that he had
assigned all his power to Cardinal Richelieu, except that of curing
the king's evil. Carte says, some of the French writers ascribe the
gift of healing to their king's devotion toward the relics of St.
Marculf, in the church of Corbigny, in Champagne: to which the kings
of France, immediately after their coronation at Rheims, used to go in
solemn procession. A veneration was also paid to this saint in
England, and a room in memory of him, in