A Christmas fit for a king
Perhaps you think the royals celebrate differently from the rest of us but you’d be wrong, writes Jeremy Archer. In fact, their influence has been pervasive in the UK and the world
Surely the royal family don’t celebrate Christmas like the rest of us, do they? Well, actually, they do, although the scale is slightly different. But perhaps more importantly, they have had a defining influence on the way in which Christmas is celebrated in this country and across much of the Commonwealth.
Christmas customs have been imported, adapted and adopted. Like so many British families, the royal family celebrate Christmas together, decorate trees, exchange presents, play games, attend Divine Service and have fun. Through the writing of my book, A Royal Christmas, I have been able to explore the evolution of those Christmases from 1066 – when King William I (the Conqueror) was crowned in Westminster Abbey – to the present day, with a particular focus on Victorian Christmases, which are so reminiscent of those which we enjoy today.
A boar’s head served on a silver platter formed the centrepiece of King Henry VIII’s Christmas celebrations while Queen Elizabeth I commissioned William Shakespeare to write the comedy, Twelfth Night, to entertain her guest, Virginio Orsini, Duke of Bracciano, in 1601. Less than 50 years later, at the height of the English Civil War, it was “Resolved by the parliament: that no observation shall be had of the five and twentieth day of December commonly called Christmas-day; nor any solemnity used or exercised in churches upon the day in respect thereof”. The Puritans were now in the ascendant.
Over time, the Hanoverian succession in 1714 had the greatest influence on Christmas as we know it today. The first documented royal Christmas took place in 1789, just months after the French Revolution, the assistant keeper of the wardrobe observed that “Christmas week was taken up in preparing for a juvenile ball at the Lodge, which it was thought would amuse the King [George III] without the trouble of ceremony to him. His majesty was always particularly fond of children, and this idea, which was a novelty, was to be carried out on a scale calculated to give pleasure to them and to the king also, in watching the delight of the little ones”.
According to Amelia Murray, writing in 1837, there was one notable innovation however: “Christmas trees are now common. In the early part of this century they were seldom seen, but Queen Charlotte always had one dressed up in the room of Madame Berkendorff, her German attendant”. So it wasn’t down to Prince Albert after all!
He can claim a major role in the custom’s popularisation, though, writing in 1847: “I must now seek in the children an echo of what Ernest and I were in the old time, of what we felt and thought; and their delight in the Christmas tree is not less than ours used to be.” The defining moment came the following
year, though, with the publication, in The Illustrated London News, of an engraving of the royal family around a Christmas tree at Windsor castle.
Queen Victoria simply adored her family’s Christmas festivities. For her, the highlight was Bescherung, the German ritual exchange of gifts and, on Christmas Eve 1841, she wrote in her journal: “Arranged Albert’s table with Xmas presents, in my former bedroom, and there we, together, arranged Mama’s. At about six, we had our trees, and we first gave Mama her presents, then I gave Albert his, and he gave me mine. Amongst my presents to him was a large lifesize picture of ‘Eos’, by Landseer, with which he was quite delighted, and it came as a complete surprise.”
In 1899, Queen Victoria ordered 120,000 tins of chocolates for those serving in South Africa. One of her ladies-in-waiting wrote: “The gift has been appreciated beyond the wildest expectations and the invalids at Netley [Hospital] talk more of the chocolate than of their wounds. They have not yet received it but they will do so in time. I feel more than ever what a splendid sense of proportion the queen has, but it can only be realised by those who come in direct contact with her, even those just outside the inner circle get such distorted views of her opinions and prejudices.”
The queen herself described a subsequent visit to Netley: “One poor man, who had lost a leg and was sitting in a chair, when I gave him some flowers said he wished so much to have one of my chocolate boxes, he would rather lose a limb, than not get that!”
She also delighted in performances: singing, dancing, musical recitals, poetry readings, plays and variations on the theme of charades. Her particular favourites were tableaux vivants, for which the participants were dressed in costume, before acting out scenes from the Bible, myth, history or literature. On Boxing Day 1850, she wrote: “At [6.30pm] the Children performed their Charade, the same as last year, but without the dancing and the last scene. Some of the scenery from our theatre was made use of, and the whole looked very nice. The children were
particularly well got up, but did not act as well, being rather absent. Bertie [King Edward VII] spoke the best.”
Not all Christmas pastimes found favour with her, though, as Arthur, son of Sir Henry Ponsonby, the Queen's private secretary, recalled:
“At Christmastime, skating at Osborne on a pond close to the old manor house at Barton was much enjoyed by some of the royal family and by the Ponsonby children, who joined in the hockey on the ice. Their father was often the life and soul of the game. As one of the Princesses slowly and helplessly revolved with the cork bung between her skates, he would go round her beating the ice with his stick and shouting ‘don’t let the Princess have it all her own way.’ The queen however strongly disapproved of hockey on the ice. So when her outrider was seen coming over the hill, all sticks were quickly thrown onto the bank. The whole company turned innocently to figure skating, or some attempt at it, till the carriage which had stopped to allow the queen to view the skating had passed on out of sight, when the game was resumed.”
In 1926, King George V’s assistant private secretary and his family were invited to spend Christmas at Sandringham. Nora Wigram recalled a Boxing Day incident in her diary: “The King had a really beautiful gramophone and most nights he turns it on after dinner, supervises the turns himself while we all sit round chatting and smoking. We had been listening to ‘Traviata’, the
‘Volga Boating Song’ etc when a tune struck us as vaguely familiar. With one accord we all sprang to our feet realising it was the national anthem. The king in fits of laughter saying, ‘I just wondered how long it would be before you all recognised it and got up. You were all talking so hard!’”
During the Second World War, the royal family lived mainly at Windsor castle, while the king and queen visited Buckingham Palace during the week. There were four Christmas pantomimes, starring the royal princesses, in the castle’s Waterloo Chamber.
In 1943, princess Elizabeth had the title role in Aladdin and the castle librarian wrote in his diary: “Princess Margaret and two other girls sang ‘Three little maids’ from The Mikado quite up to Savoy style. There were several topical allusions directed against the master of the household, privy purse, and the crown equerry, and much badinage at the expense of Kelly’s dilatoriness in painting the state portraits. One tiny boy came on clad only in an inadequate leopard skin, which slipped off as the curtain fell and he appeared with an entirely undraped posterior presented to the king who was nearly reduced to hysterics.”
Although the Sovereign’s Christmas Broadcast – now such a feature of a British Christmas – was inaugurated by King George
V in 1932, the most impactful of all was delivered by King George VI in 1939. Having declined to broadcast the previous year, he had now forsworn civilian clothes for the duration of the war and, wearing the uniform of an admiral of the fleet, addressed the empire from Sandringham House in Norfolk:
“A new year is at hand. We cannot tell what it will bring. If it brings peace, how thankful we shall all be. If it brings continued struggle we shall remain undaunted. In the meantime I feel that we may all find a message of encouragement in the lines which, in my closing words, I would like to say to you: ‘I said to the man/ who stood at the gate of the year,/ ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely/ into the unknown.’/ And he replied,/ ‘Go out into the darkness/ and put your hand into the hand of God./ That shall be to you/ better than light/ And safer than a known way!’ May that Almighty Hand guide and uphold us all.”
His much-lamented elder daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, was so proficient at broadcasting that she became known in the trade as “one-take Windsor”. Then the royal family’s influence on all our Christmases has indeed been all-pervasive.
‘A Royal Christmas: How the Royal Family has Celebrated Christmas Through the Ages’ by Jeremy Archer is out now on Elliott and Thompson Books, £10.99
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