Queen Charlotte’s Christmas Tree
Cromwell’s killjoys almost silenced the English Christmas, but thanks to a royal family tradition the message is still being proclaimed.
1800
King George III 1760-1820
Cromwell’s killjoys almost silenced the English Christmas, but thanks to a royal family tradition the message is still being proclaimed.
1800
King George III 1760-1820
England lost many long-standing folk-traditions during the republican Commonwealth (1649-1660), which banned Christmas celebrations along with music, plays and dancing. Some were reinstated after the Restoration in 1660, but there was plenty of room for fresh ideas.
IN 1800, King George III’s German-born wife, Charlotte, set up a decorated Christmas tree at a children’s party. Her grand-daughter Queen Victoria recalled that a candle-lit tree, hung with sugar ornaments, subsequently became a feature of the royal family’s Christmas. It was a novelty for England, but before long a royal family custom became first a national fashion, and then a national tradition.
There were echoes in it of English mediaeval mystery plays, performed on Christmas Eve, which had dramatised Adam and Eve in Eden beside a Tree of Life laden with sweet fruit. And those plays recalled even more ancient prayers,* that spoke of the Cross as the Tree of Life, on which Christ hung ‘like a cluster of grapes, dropping the life-bearing sweetness of the whole world’s salvation’.
Queen Charlotte’s tree, with its candles and its candy, brought a little of the sweetness of Paradise back to Christmas in England.
Sunday Matins, Greek Church.