In 1660, the newly restored King Charles II was approached by a Welsh man known as Arise Evans whose face was covered in a cloth. The Welsh man had some sort of fungal infection of his nose, and even though he knew this wasn’t actually the King’s Evil (scrofula), he thought the king’s touch would do the trick as a cure. According to John Aubrey, it was a disturbing encounter for the king – having a diseased nose thrust into hand, but according to the Welshman himself he was respectful. The king, still new to his role, allowed his hand to be kissed, and the nose was cured.
Arise was a man afflicted by visions and even more unfortunately seems to have felt compelled to write about them. Earlier in his life he had predicted that Charles I would fall, and then, during the Interregnum, had predicted the republic would fall too. He was punished with jail for his prophecies but must have been feeling fairly smug when he approached the king for his cure, and afterwards petitioned the king for a pension, before dying a short time afterwards.
Arise was not his real name. There seem to be several conflicting accounts about the details of his earlier life, but he was born Rhys Evans in Ynys Faig House, thought to be what is now the site of Fairbourne Hotel in Fairbourne on the north Wales coast. There, in this remote place, Rhys Evans, while still a child, was taught to speak and write perfect English by a local curate. Sometime afterwards his father died and his mother remarried, and Rhys found himself in Wrexham and then Chester as an apprentice tailor. And it was in one of these two places that Rhys became Arise, courtesy of his master, Hugh Jones, who despite being of Welsh descent, decided that the name of his apprentice was too difficult to pronounce. According to Lloyd Bowen in Early Modern Wales it was Chester, and that makes more sense to me – because why would anyone in Welsh-speaking Wrexham find much of a problem with a word like Rhys?
Clare Dudman 