Whipping Boy: Origins of a Royal Institution July 7, 2015

Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval

The whipping boy needs little introduction. He was the child, brought up with a prince or with a young king, and punished on his behalf, when the prince or king was naughty: crucially the royal and his proxy were friends so any pain was vicariously felt. And why not just hit the royal in question? Well, the only person who could hit a royal, at least if you took the whole God’s anointed thing seriously, was, of course, that royal’s father, aka the king, and he was usually too busy. The whipping boy was an unusual institution and the truth is that, until today, Beach wondered if it wasn’t a legend dreamt up in Victorian times to make our ancestors look silly. As it happens there is definite evidence that there were whipping boys, though we might wonder how often they were truly debreeched for their royal friend’s crimes or neglect in doing Greek homework. For instance, Charles I (obit 1649) had William Murray as his whipping boy and William was amply rewarded in later life. Where though did the custom originate? The conventional answer is in England in the time of Edward VI who became king when he was ten (obit 1553): it may have been possible to punish a prince but who would dare raise their hands to a monarch? It is credible that the institution began as a way to deal with a boy king, but the proof is hardly ideal. Some historians claim that an Irish hostage Barnaby Fitzpatrick or an English boy Edward Browne was Edward’s whipping boy: but there is no contemporary evidence. Having said that Beach likes the idea that the first truly protestant king had the first truly pained friend. But was the idea even really English? There are some hints it was used further afield. Louis XV had had a whipping boy as a child (obit 1774). There have likewise been suggestions, buoyed along by a passage in Sir Walter Scott, that the custom came south from Scotland with the Stuarts. The idea is obvious enough that perhaps the whipping boy (or some similar victim) was used in more despotic eastern monarchies in ancient or medieval times: Persia, China, Egypt… For all Beach knows perhaps little pharaohs used to watch in horror as their playmates were fed to crocodiles because the prince had not done his coptic homework.

Can anyone help trace the origins of this institution or its earliest occurrence? Drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com