"His Sacred Majesty, having declared it to be his Royal will and purpose to continue the healing of his People for the Evil during the month of May, and then to give over till Michaelmas next, I am commanded to give notice thereof, that the people may not come up to Town in the interim and lose their labour." Charles II is said to have found the practice extremely lucrative. It is not surprising that many practitioners in those days were credited with having wrought marvellous cures. We know that the undoubted influence of the mind on the body, and the power of suggestion and expectant attention, apply only to subjective states and functional ailments. Thus it is intelligible why so many people of education and culture, on the principle that seeing is believing, were able to testify to miraculous cures in their own experience.[86:1] William Andrews, in "Historic Romance," says that the records of the Town of Preston, Lancashire, show that the local Corporation voted grants of money to enable patients to make the journey to London, to be touched for the evil. In the year 1682 bailiffs were instructed to "pay unto James Harrison, bricklayer, ten shillings, towards carrying his son to London, in order to the procuring of His Majesty's touch." Again, in 1687, being the third year of James II, when the King was at Chester, the Preston Town Council passed a vote, ordering the payment to two young women, of five shillings each, "towards their charge in going to Chester to get His Majesty's touch." Thomas Cartwright, Bishop of Chester, wrote in his diary, August 27, 1687: "I was at His Majesty's levee, from whence, at nine o'clock, I attended him into the closet, where he healed three hundred and fifty persons." Queen Anne (1702-1714) was the last of the English sovereigns who exercised the royal prerogative of healing by laying-on of hands. She made an official announcement in the London "Gazette," March 12, 1712, of her intention to "touch publicly." Samuel Johnson, then a child of about three years of age, was one of the last who tested the efficacy of this superstitious rite, and without success. Acting upon the advice of Sir John Floyer, a noted physician of Lichfield, Mrs. Johnson took her son to London, where he was touched by the Queen. When asked in later years if he could remember the latter, he used to say that he had a "confused, but somehow a sort of solemn recollection of a lady in diamonds and a long black hood."[88:1] George I, the successor of Queen Anne, regarded the Royal Touch as a purely superstitious method of healing, and during his reign the practice fell into desuetude.