Cromwell / No Christmas
Following the outbreak of full-scale Civil
War between king and parliament in 1642,
John Taylor became one of the first to
allude in print to the radicals’ decision to
dump Christmas. In a satirical pamphlet
published in January 1643, Taylor provided
his readers with A Tub Lecture, which, he
claimed, had been preached by a godly
joiner to a group of Puritans at Watford “on
the 25 of December last, being Christmas
day”. In this fictitious address, the ‘lecturer’
is shown assuring his audience that they
should not “conceive of me to be so
superstitious, as to make any conscience
of... this day, because the Church hath
ordained [it]” to be a holy feast. “No, God
forbid I should be so profane,” he
continues, “rather it is a detestation of their
blindness that have brought me hither
this day, to enlighten you... [and] I give
you to understand that the very name of
Christmas is idolatrous and profane,
and so, verily, are the whole 12 days [of
Christmas] wherein the wicked make
daily... sacrifices to riot and sensuality”.Seizing the initiative
One of the clauses of the ‘Solemn League
and Covenant’ which parliament signed
with the Scots in September 1643 statedthat, in exchange for Scottish military
assistance against the king, MPs would
ensure that further “reformation” of the
Church of England took place. As Ronald
Hutton has observed, this clause
encouraged religious radicals on the ground
to seize the initiative and to attack those
aspects of the traditional ecclesiastical
calendar which they disliked. Three months
later, a number of Puritan tradesmen in
London opened up their shops for business
on 25 December in order to show that they
regarded this day as no different from any
other, while several London ministers kept
their church doors firmly shut. Meanwhile,
many MPs turned up to sit in the parliament
house, thus making their own disdain for
the customary Christmas holiday very clear.
During the following year, moreover- when Christmas Day happened to coincide
with one of the monthly fast days upon
which parliament’s supporters were enjoined
to pray for the success of their cause – MPs
ordered, not only that the fast day should be
“observed” instead of the traditional feast,
but also that the fast should be kept “with
the more solemn humiliation, because it
may call to remembrance our sins, and the
sins of our forefathers, who have turned this
feast, pretending [to] the memory of Christ,
into an extreme forgetfulness of him, by
giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights”.
“In the closing verse of a ballad, a
gloomy royalist writer remarked ‘To
conclude, I’ll tell you news that’s right,
Christmas was killed at Naseby fight’” BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
In January 1645 the final nail was
hammered into Christmas’s coffin, when
parliament issued its new Directory for the
Public Worship of God, a radical alternative
to the established Book of Common
Prayer, which made no reference to
Christmas. Thus the way was paved for the
‘anti-Christmas’ of 1645 – a day upon
which, in Taylor’s words, a man might pass
through the parliamentary quarters, and
“perceive no sign or token of any holy day”.
The parliamentarians had abolished the
high point of the English ritual year, and
the cancellation of Christmas aroused huge
popular resentment – not just in the
royalist camp, but in the districts
controlled by parliament, too. As early as
December 1643, the apprentice boys of
London rose up in violent protest against
the shop-keepers who had opened on
Christmas Day, and, in the words of a
delighted royalist, “forced these money-
changers to shut up their shops again”.
There were further dark mutterings next
year. On 24 December 1644, the editor of
a pro-parliamentarian news-pamphlet
expressed his support for the MPs’ decision
to favour the monthly fast over the
traditional feast, but admitted that “the
parliament is cried out on” by the common
people as a result, with incredulous shouts
of “What, not keep Christmas? Here’s a
Reformation indeed!”
Many ordinary Londoners
continued to show a dogged
determination to keep Christmas
special during the following year,
and John Taylor’s decision to rush
into print at this time with his
Complaint of Christmas – a work
which bore the same title as a
pamphlet urging the enthusiastic
observance of the mid-winterPeople rejoice that ‘old Christmas Day’ is brought back with Charles II in 1660