The King's Evil Without the King: The Royal Touch during the Interregnum
secondary literature · 2025
LINK
SUMMARY
Peer-reviewed article on the royal touch for scrofula (the king's evil) during and after the English Interregnum, confirmed directly against the Crossref record: Smith, Journal of Religious History, published December 2025, DOI 10.1111/1467-9809.13158. Discusses Greatrakes as a leading rival claimant to the healing power, summoned before the Dublin clerical hierarchy and interrogated in summer 1665 before his 1666 English tour, and records that his powers failed to persuade in a public demonstration before Charles II and the royal court in May 1666, after which he returned to Ireland. Cited only as general background corroboration for the exclusive-access framing (Greatrakes as an unlicensed rival to the crown's own exclusive claim to healing by touch); the case body does not quote this article verbatim.
NOTES
Confirmed via Crossref metadata lookup (title, author, journal, and publication date match the citation above). The article’s discussion of Greatrakes was surfaced only through EXA/Perplexity discovery search-result snippets, not an independent direct fetch of the full paywalled (Wiley) article page, so no phrase from it is quoted verbatim anywhere in this case; the case body relies instead on the directly fetched Dictionary of National Biography entries for the equivalent, independently verified facts (Dublin remonstration, failed Whitehall demonstration).