Charles II brought many things into English life: theatre, horse racing, parties, amorality, drunkenness, mistresses, a royal string of illegitimate children, and, perhaps less well known, touching the diseased.

The king’s touching ceremonies are featured in a new exhibition opening on Friday at the Queen’s Gallery in Buckingham Palace.

The show, with paintings, drawings, tapestries and objects, explores Charles’s colourful reign and Restoration in 1660 after the sober, fun-free years of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth government.

Of the ceremonies Charles revived, the “curing of the king’s evil” was one of the most important. “It was a way of him being visible and being shown to the people,” said Lauren Porter, curator of works on paper at the Royal Collection. “It was very popular. It is a real sign of the power of the monarchy being shown to a wide number of people.”

The “king’s evil” was scrofula, a swelling of the lymph nodes in the neck caused by tuberculosis.



Since the Middle Ages it was believed that a touch from royalty could heal the problem, hence the importance of reviving the ceremony.

Its reintroduction was hugely popular. Porter said Charles had 7,000 people wanting to be touched in the first year and over the course of his reign he touched 96,796 scrofula sufferers. That is more, the exhibition reveals, than any other British monarch and was almost 2% of the population.

The “healings” usually took place on Fridays and were held at Banqueting House in Whitehall or the state apartments of the palace where he was residing.

Admissions were limited to 200 at a time, and not just anyone could turn up. On display is one of the admission tokens, given only if a royal surgeon confirmed the scrofula and a certificate could be provided proving they had not been touched previously.

The king would use both hands to touch a sufferer under the chin while a chaplain read aloud from the Bible.

There were many contemporary accounts of its success, but the glandular inflammation was likely to go down naturally.

17th-century masterpieces from the exhibition Charles II: Art & Power. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters

The Charles II exhibition is a companion to what will be a landmark Charles I exhibition opening at the Royal Academy of Arts in January.

The latter is collaborating with the Royal Collection to tell the story of how Charles I’s art collection, one of the most stupendous ever created, was, after his execution in 1649, sold off and scattered across Europe. It will reunite spectacular works by artists such as Titian, Van Dyck, Rubens, Holbein and Mantegna, some of which are coming to Britain for the first time in nearly 400 years.

Before that comes an exhibition showing the exuberance of Charles II’s court. The lead curator, Rufus Bird, said: “Suddenly there is this re-establishment of life and colour and excitement and theatre and luxury and all sorts of magnificence which you associate with princely European court culture in the 17th century and Charles II embraced that enthusiastically.”

It explores the traditional view of Charles II as the Merrie Monarch, his love of sex, pleasure and parties as well as his patronage of the theatre, horse racing and yachting – all part of a concerted attempt to win the support of the country.

• Charles II: Art & Power is at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace 8 December-13 May.