William III evidently thought of the matter as a superstition, and on one occasion he touched a patient, saying to him, "God give you better health and more sense"; notwithstanding the incredulity of the sovereign, Whiston assures us that the person was healed. With honest good sense, however, William refused to exercise the power which most of his subjects undoubtedly thought he possessed, and many protests were made, and much proof was adduced concerning "the balsamic virtues of the royal hand." This refusal to continue the practice of touching brought upon him the charge of cruelty from the parents of scrofulous children, while bigots lifted up their hands and eyes in holy horror at his impiety. Dr. Samuel Johnson was one of the last persons to receive the imposition of royal hands; when a boy of four and a half years, he was touched by Queen Anne, together with about two hundred others, on March 30, 1712. In his case at least the touch was inefficacious, for he was subject to scrofula all his life. Boswell says:[177] "His mother, yielding to the superstitious notion, which, it is wonderful to think, prevailed so long in this country, as to the virtue of the royal touch; a notion which our kings encouraged, and to which a man of such inquiry and such judgment as Carte could give credit, carried him to London, where he was actually touched by Queen Anne. Mrs. Johnson, indeed, as Mr. Hector informed me, acted by the advice of the celebrated Sir John Floyer, then a physician in Litchfield." At this time few persons but Jacobites believed in king's touch as a miracle. Dr. Daniel Turner, though, relates that several cases of scrofula which had been unsuccessfully treated by himself and Dr. Charles Bernard, sergeant-surgeon to her majesty, yielded afterwards to the efficacy of the queen's touch. During the reign of Anne the sceptics outnumbered the believers and at her death the practice was discontinued. Among the unbelievers was the above-mentioned Dr. Charles Bernard, an account of whose conversion is given by Oldmixon as follows: "Yesterday the queen was graciously pleased to touch for the King's evil some particular persons in private; and three weeks after, December 19, yesterday, about twelve at noon her majesty was pleased to touch, at St. James', about twenty persons afflicted with the King's evil. The more ludicrous sort of skeptics, in this case, asked why it was not called the queen's evil, as the chief court of justice was called the Queen's Bench. But Charles Bernard, the surgeon who had made this touching the subject of his raillery all his lifetime till he became body surgeon at court, and found it a good perquisite, solved all difficulties by telling his companions with a fleer '_Really one could not have thought it, if one had not seen it_.' A friend of mine heard him say it, and knew well his opinion of it."[178]