Cromwell / No Christmas
A
s the year 1645 limped
towards its weary close,
a war-torn England
shivered beneath a
thick blanket of snow.
A few months earlier,
parliament’s New
Model Army, led by Sir Thomas Fairfax
and Oliver Cromwell, had routed the forces
of Charles I at the battle of Naseby.
Although that defeat had struck the king’s
cause a mortal blow, the royalists refused
to surrender, and the bloody Civil War
continued to rage.
Few Englishmen and women can have
been anticipating a particularly merry
Christmas. Yet, for those who lived in the
extensive territories which were controlledby the king’s enemies, there was to be no
Christmas this year at all – because the
traditional festivities had been abolished
by order of the two houses of parliament.
From Charles’s beleaguered wartime
capital in Oxford, the royalist satirist John
Taylor – by now in his mid-60s, but still
one of the king’s most indefatigable literary
champions – issued a cry of anguish at this
assault on England’s time-honoured
customs. All of the “harmless sports” with
which people had long celebrated Christ’s
nativity “are now extinct and put out of
use... as if they had never been,” Taylor
lamented in his pamphlet The Complaint of
Christmas, and “thus are the merry lords of
misrule suppressed by the mad lords of bad
rule at Westminster”.The attack on the feast of Christmas had
deep roots. Long before the Civil War
began, many Puritans had been troubled
both by the boisterous nature of the
festivities which took place at Christmas
and by the perceived association of those
festivities with the old Catholic faith.
During the early 1600s, most English
Puritans had been prepared to tolerate
Christmas. Following the rebellion of the
Presbyterian Scots against Charles I in
1637, however, all this was to change.
The Scottish Kirk, which was itself
fiercely Protestant, had abolished
Christmas as long ago as the 1560s and,
although James I had managed tentatively
to restore the feast in his northern
kingdom in 1617, it was banned there once
again after his son’s defeat by the Scots in- From this time onwards, attitudes
towards Christmas among English
Puritans began to harden. And as political
tensions in parliament rose during 1641,
so a handful of Puritan extremists took it
upon themselves to abandon the
celebration of Christmas.
Mark Stoyle investigates popular resistance to the Puritan
assault on Christmas during the 1640 s and 1650 s
BRIDGEMAN IMAGES, THINKSTOCK“Thus are the merry lords of
misrule suppressed by the mad
lords of bad rule at Westminster”
N
O
CH
RISTM
A
SUNDER CROMWELL