Yet once such men were found, and but little more than two centuries ago. It was on the 24th day of December, 1652—day for ever to be marked with the blackest of black stones, nay, with a bowlder of Plutonian nigritude—that the British House of Commons, being moved thereto “by a terrible remonstrance against Christmas day grounded upon divine Scripture, wherein Christmas is called Antichrists masse, and those masse-mongers and Papists who observe it,” and after much time “spent in consultation about the abolition of Christmas day, passed order to that effect, and resolved to sit upon the following day, which was commonly called Christmas day.” Whether this latter resolution was carried into effect we do not know. If so, let us hope that their Christmas dinners disagreed with them horribly, and that the foul fiend Nightmare kept hideous vigil by every Parliamentary pillow.
But think of such an atrocious sentiment being heard at all in Westminster! How must the very echoes of the hall have shrunk from repeating that monstrous proposition—how shuddered and fled away into remotest corners and crevices as that
“Hideous hum
Ran through the arch’d roof in words deceiving”!
How must they have disbelieved their ears, and tossed the impious utterance back and forth from one to another in agonized questioning, growing feebler and fainter at each repulse, until their voices, faltering through doubt into dismay, grew dumb with horror! How must “Rufus’ Roaring Hall”[[107]] have roared again outright with rage and grief over that strange, that unhallowed profanation! What wan phantoms of old-time mummeries and maskings, what dusty and crumbling memories of royal feast and junketing, must have hovered about the heads of those audacious innovators, shrieking at them what unsyllabled reproaches from voiceless lips, shaking at them what shadowy fingers of entreaty or menace! And if the proverb about ill words and burning ears be true, how those crop-ears must have tingled!
Within those very walls England’s kings for generations had kept their Christmas-tide most royally with revelry and dance and wassail. There Henry III. on New Year’s day, 1236, to celebrate the coronation of Eleanor, his queen, entertained 6,000 of his poorer subjects of all degrees; and there twelve years later, though he himself ate his plum-pudding at Winchester, he was graciously pleased to bid his treasurer “fill the king’s Great Hall from Christmas day to the Day of Circumcision with poor people and feast them.” There, too, at a later date Edward III. had for sauce to his Christmas turkey—not to mention all sorts of cates and confections, tarts and pasties of most cunning device, rare liquors and spiced wines—no less than two captive kings, to wit, David of Scotland and John of France. Poor captive kings! Their turkey—though no doubt their princely entertainer was careful to help them to the daintiest tidbits, and to see that they had plenty of stuffing and cranberry sauce—must have been but a tasteless morsel, and their sweetbreads bitter indeed. Another Scottish king, the first James, of tuneful and unhappy memory, had even worse (pot) luck soon after. Fate, and that hospitable penchant of our English cousins in the remoter centuries for quietly confiscating all stray Scotch princes who fell in their way, as though they had been contraband of war, gave him the enviable opportunity of eating no less than a score of Christmas dinners on English soil. But he seems to have been left to eat them alone or with his jailer in “bowery Windsor’s calm retreat” or the less cheerful solitude of the Tower. It does not appear that either the fourth or the fifth Henry, his enforced hosts, ever asked him to put his royal Scotch legs under their royal English mahogany. Had Richard II. been in the place of “the ingrate and cankered Bolingbroke,” we may be sure that his northern guest would not have been treated so shabbily. In his time Westminster and his two thousand French cooks (shades of Lucullus! what an appetite he must have had, and what a broiling and a baking and a basting must they have kept up among them; the proverb of “busier than an English oven at Christmas” had reason then, at least) were not long left idle; for it was their sovereign’s jovial custom to keep open house in the holidays for as many as ten thousand a day—a comfortable tableful. It was his motto plainly to
“Be merry, for our time of stay is short.”
Such a device, however, the third Richard might have made his own with still greater reason. That ill-used prince, who was no doubt a much better fellow at bottom than it has pleased Master Shakspeare to represent him—if Richmond had not been Queen Bess’ grandpapa, we should like enough have had a different story and altogether less about humps and barking dogs—made the most of a limited opportunity to show what he could do in the way of holiday dinner-giving. The only two Christmases he had to spend as king at Westminster—for him but a royal stage on his way to a more permanent residence at Bosworth Field—he celebrated with extraordinary magnificence, as became a prince “reigning,” says Philip de Comines, “in greater splendor than any king of England for the last hundred years.” On the second and last Christmas of his reign and life the revelry was kept up till the Epiphany, when “the king himself, wearing his crown, held a splendid feast in the Great Hall similar to his coronation.” Wearing his crown, poor wretch! He seems to have felt that his time was short for wearing it, and that he must put it to use while he had it. Already, indeed, as he feasted, rapacious Fortune, swooping implacable, was clawing it with skinny, insatiable claws, estimating its value and the probable cost of altering it to fit another wearer, and thinking how much better it would look on the long head of her good friend Richmond, who had privately bespoken it. No doubt some cold shadow of that awful, unseen presence fell across the banquet-table and poisoned the royal porridge.
What need to tell over the long roll of Christmas jollities, whose memory from those historic walls might have pleaded with or rebuked the sour iconoclasts planning gloomily to put an end to all such for ever; how even close-fisted Henry VII.—no fear of his losing a crown, if gripping tight could keep it—feasted there the lord-mayor and aldermen of London on the ninth Christmas of his reign, sitting down himself, with his queen and court and the rest of the nobility and gentry, to one hundred and twenty dishes served by as many knights, while the mayor, who sat at a side-table, no doubt, had to his own share no fewer than twenty-four dishes, followed, it is to be feared, if he ate them all, by as many nightmares; how that meek and exemplary Christian monarch, Henry VIII., “welcomed the coming, sped the parting” wife at successive Christmas banquets of as much splendor as the spoils of something over a thousand monasteries could furnish forth;[[108]] how good Queen Bess, who had her own private reading of the doctrine “it is more blessed to give than to receive,” sat in state there at this festival season to accept the offerings of her loyal lieges, high and low, gentle and simple, from prime minister to kitchen scullion, until she was able to add to the terrors of death by having to leave behind her something like three thousand dresses and some trunkfuls of jewels in Christmas gifts; or what gorgeous revels and masques—Inigo Jones (Inigo Marquis Would-be), Ben Jonson, and Master Henry Lawes (he of “the tuneful and well-measured song”) thereto conspiring—made the holidays joyous under James and Charles. Some ghostly savor of those bygone banquets might, one would think, have made even Praise-God Barebone’s mouth water, and melted his surly virtue into tolerance of other folks’ cakes and ale—what virtue, however ascetic, could resist the onslaught of two thousand French cooks? Some faint, far echo of all these vanished jollities should have won the ear, if not the heart, of the grimmest “saint” among them. Or if they were proof against the blandishments of the world’s people, if they fled from the abominations of Baal, could not their own George Wither move them to spare the cheery, harmless frivolities, the merry pranks of Yule? Jovially as any Cavalier, shamelessly as any Malignant of them all, he sings their praises in his
“CHRISTMAS CAROL.