James VI and I has long endured a mixed reputation. To many, he is the homosexual King, the inveterate witch-roaster, the smelly sovereign who never washed, the colourless man behind the authorised Bible bearing his name, the drooling fool whose speech could barely be understood. For too long, he has paled in comparison to his more celebrated – and analysed – Tudor and Stuart forebears. But who was he really? To what extent have myth, anecdote, and rumour obscured him?
Christmas with the Tudors sounds fun – not least because it wasn’t just a single day of ‘good cheer’ (for which we might read ‘heavy drinking’) but twelve of them. When people the length and breadth of Tudor England downed tools for the festive holidays, they were following the well-worn path of medieval Catholicism (as, indeed, Tudor England was very much part of the fabric of the Roman Catholic Church until its Reformations under Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth I).
Yet, curiously, the break with Rome did not greatly affect the general sense of gaiety associated with the Christmas Revels. Thus, we find Henry VIII overseeing a season of good cheer (if not always goodwill) with as much gusto in the second half of his reign as the first. Elizabeth I, too, was assiduous in overseeing splendid court revels (involving the staging of masques and plays and the ritual giving of New Year’s Gifts on January 1st, despite the official calendar not marking New Year until Lady Day in March).
Edward VI might have whitewashed the churches and Elizabeth’s more puritanical subjects might have grimaced at the cutting down and heaving home of Yule logs and the baking of ‘Shird Pies’, but Christmas, throughout the Tudor period, remained in rude health.
We find, for example, in the pre-Reformation period a youthful Henry VIII receiving cups of gold from Cardinal Wolsey, whilst elaborate festivities were staged as court entertainments (in 1524, a mock-castle at Greenwich, for example, was besieged by the king himself, arrayed as an old man in a false silver beard). We might compare this to the equally opulent – and considerably more literary – plays staged before Queen Elizabeth in the Christmas period of 1593-4. There, at Hampton Court, the queen was showered with gifts:
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Lord Admiral Charles Howard (1536-1624),
by Daniel Mytens (Wikimedia Commons)
Among 184 gifts to the Queen: by Lord Howard, Lord Admiral:
‘One attire for the head containing seven pieces of gold like pyramids,under them ciphers garnished with diamonds and rubies of sundry bignesses with thirteen pearls and her Majesty’s picture cut upon a sapphire in the midst’; by George Bishop, stationer: ‘Twelve books of Latin poets covered with vellum’; by William Clarke: ‘A book of Caesar’s Dialogues covered with vellum’; by William Dethick, Garter King of Arms: ‘One Book of Arms covered with black velvet’; by Petruccio Ubaldini: ‘A book covered with vellum in Italian’.
When Elizabeth died and her Scottish cousin James VI became James I of England, the opulence, pomp and flash of the Christmas period only got more glittery. During the first Stuart Christmas Revels at Hampton Court, both James and his queen, Anna of Denmark, spent wildly, commissioning productions of The Masque of Indian and China Knights, Robin Goodfellow, and The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. In the latter – a masque composed by the playwright Samuel Daniel – Anna herself took to the stage, performing as Pallas.
Anne of Denmark (1574-1619)
Within years of taking the throne, the lavish new king and the culturally-invested queen had run the royal players so ragged that they were required to seek out new plays: the court had seen everything in the King’s Men’s repertoire (a fact which must have sent Shakespeare – a member of the troupe – back to his quill and inkpot). By 1607 the monarch, indeed, found himself standing before his parliament and attempting to justify his spending (much of which went on gifts to his Scottish friends), with the words, ‘For my liberality, I have told you of it heretofore: my three first years were to me as a Christmas – I could not then be miserable [miserly]. Should I have been over-sparing…?’
Yet despite the new Scottish royal couple’s desire to keep the Tudor Christmas parties going, the English predilection for Christmas (or, at least, the predilection outside certain Puritanical circles) was not shared equally across Great Britain. Despite James and Anna’s passion for partying even when north of the border, Christmas had been looked at by Scottish Calvinists with asperity for years.
In James’s minority, those ardent Protestants had been in the ascendancy in Scotland. In 1573, the General Assembly (the Scottish ecclesiastical body which maintained governance of the Church) had shorn the country of all holidays save the Sabbath, which led to women in Aberdeen being rebuked for ‘playing, dancing, and singing filthy carols on Yule Day.’ In 1583, five men were publicly shamed in Glasgow for celebrating Christmas Day. A general air of cheerlessness, it seems, was very much in vogue.
This, however, does not appear to have been to James’s taste. To the king, who could – and frequently did – turn jealous eyes southwards, it was clearly possible to be a Protestant monarch of a Protestant nation without banning Christmas. At court, therefore, he remained willing to entertain as much as his shallow pockets allowed – and when he married Queen Anna in 1589, she added her own understanding of the value of monarchical largesse, display, and cultural patronage to his.
Thus, the pair met – and faced down – the censure of disapproving Kirk ministers who appeared to find their own Christmas cheer in lambasting the royals couple for celebrating with overmuch pleasure and leisure and not nearly enough devotion to the Scriptures. Dancing at court, especially, came under fire, with the stauncher Kirk elders anticipating the later Baptists: they appeared to condemn premarital sex only out of fear that it might lead to dancing.
When James took Elizabeth’s throne in 1603, and when he proceeded to spend every Christmas hosting parties so rich, gorgeous and costly that they’d have made even the image-conscious Henry VIII green with envy, it was in part in deference to England’s ongoing love affair with the season and in part because the celebrations accorded with the new king’s own tastes. When Anna fell ill over the Christmas period of 1618-19, her absence was noted (and noted especially as having robbed the festivities of much merriment).
So too was James’s during what would be his own final illness throughout the winter of 1624-5. Yet the Christmas revels would – at least until Cromwell’s regime later in the century – continue, as high and low celebrated (those ‘upstairs’ with grand festivities and those ‘downstairs’ with days free of labour and filled with wassail, log-burning and evergreen garlands).
Cromwell’s pause on Christmas wouldn’t, of course, last – and today, when we sit in a Boxing Day slump of post-turkey and post-Baileys hangovers, it’s perhaps worth being grateful that we don’t have to seek a hair of the dog and keep the party going for another eleven days.
Steven Veerapen
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About the Author
Steven Veerapen is a writer of fiction and nonfiction and a lecturer at the University of Strathclyde who specialises in sixteenth-century literature. His first novel was The Queen’s Consort, which focused on Mary Queen of Scots’ infamous husband, Lord Darnley. Steven’s other books include the Simon Danforth trilogy, the Queen’s Spies trilogy, and three non-fiction works: Blood Feud, Elizabeth and Essex, and Slander and Sedition in Elizabethan Law, Speech, and Writing. Find out more at https://www.stevenveerapen.com/ and you can follow Steven on Instagram @steven.veerapen.3 and on Goodreads and Twitter @ScrutinEye
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