For many centuries the surname Greatorex, earlier spelt Greatrakes or Gretraks, has been familiar around the Peak, ‘from a hamlet of which’ claimed an Irishman when researching that name in the 1860s, ‘came his patronymic’. In other words, the surname was derived from a hamlet which he identified as Great Rocks, formerly Great Rakes, a few miles from Tideswell.

In the reign of Elizabeth I, one William Greatrakes, grandson of Robert Greatrakes ‘of Great Rakes’, had settled in Co. Waterford in Ireland, setting vast orchards which produced the first cider in Waterford. On 14 February in the year of William's death, 1628, his grandson was born and duly named Valentine. At the age of thirteen the boy was forced to flee to England with his family but after completing his classical studies returned to Ireland, in due course rising to become High Sheriff of the County of Waterford.

Early in 1664 Valentine Greatrakes found his waking hours and his dreams inexplicably disturbed by the belief that God had blessed him with the ability to cure, by laying on of hands, the King's Evil - or scrofula. By popular belief, this disease was considered curable by royal touch, dispensed to sufferers since early medieval times at special prayer services held in the English court.

MOST RETURNED WELL HOME A modest, God-fearing man, Greatrakes soon found his conviction to be a reality; he could cure the scrofulous sick simply by stroking them gently with his hands. His fame spread rapidly after further successes during an ‘epidemical ague’ (a fever epidemic), leading him to build extra accommodation for the hordes who sought his healing powers, given quite freely and without respite. In the summer of 1665 a Councellor-at-Law was quoted in a Dublin newspaper: ‘The multitudes that follow, and the press of the people are only for those to believe that see it. Two of three ships well fraighted out of England with all diseases, are most returned well home’. During one night alone, three score patients declared themselves cured - of deafness, blindness, cancers, sciaticas, palsies, impostumes, fistulas and the like, ‘the French pox and dry ptisicks not excepted’.

The following January, whilst in England, Greatrakes demonstrated wonderful cures both publicly and privately. Physicians and clerics published treatises and testimonials, mostly in defence of 'The Stroking Doctor; who was soon commanded to attend King Charles in London. No doubt the King was intrigued to meet the man who had taken over a traditionally regal role. After the Restoration, English monarchs apparently ceased ‘curing’ the King's Evil, although the practice was defiantly continued by the exiled James Stuart in Italy.

Whilst Valentine Greatrakes was achieving national fame, a non conformist minister, born by coincidence in the same year, was becoming more quietly celebrated in the Peak District, where his fame lives on. His name was William Bagshaw, ‘The Apostle of the Peak’, and great-great-great grandson of Robert Greatrakes, ancestor-in-common of ‘The Stroking Doctor’.

© Julie Bunting
From "The Peak Advertiser", 15th October 1990.