Who Was Britain’s Greatest Royal Christmas Host?

Now that With Love, Meghan has apparently entered the holiday canon, Tatler asks a dangerous question: across nearly a thousand years of royal Christmases, who was the greatest host of them all?
We go back to Christmas Day 1066 and William the Conqueror, then trace the monarchy’s festive evolution through medieval excess, bizarre gifts, and court spectacle. Tatler’s verdict narrows to two very different champions: James the First, the patron saint of riotous Jacobean revelry, and Queen Victoria, whose family-centred traditions with Prince Albert helped shape the Christmas Britain still recognises today.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Calorogus Shark Media. Hello and welcome to Palace Intry Game.
Your host Mark Francis, now that with love, Meghan has
joined the pantheon of great holiday specials. Tadler wondered, for
all the royals who have presided over Christmas through the centuries,
who really was the greatest royal host of them all?

(00:25):
To answer that, we have to go back a very
long way. For the British monarchy, Christmas and power have
been intertwined from the start. The institution in the form
we recognize today was effectively born on Christmas Day ten
sixty six, when William the Conqueror chose that date and
Westminster Abbey, the same abbey where King Charles the Third
was crowned to be anointed King of England. From that

(00:48):
moment on, the festive season became a stage on which
monarch's signaled power, piety, wealth, or simple appetite. Over nearly
one thousand years, Christmas at court has swung from raucous
feasting and roaring fires to quiet family rituals and carefully
decorated fur trees. In the Middle Ages, Christmas could be vast, noisy,
and unapologetically extravagant, Henry the second even built a winter

(01:12):
palace in Dublin purely for his Christmas rebels, where guests
dined on crane, heron and peacock. Gift giving was often
saved for New Year or Twelfth Night. Some of the
presents were almost surreal. In thirteen ninety two, the citizens
of London presented Richard the Second with a pelican and
a one humped camel as Christmas offerings. This was not,

(01:33):
one suspects, a minimalist decourse sort of household. Even the
much maligned Richard the third knew how to throw a party.
One contemporary, the Croyle and Chronicler sniff that during this
feast of the Nativity, far too much attention was given
to dancing and gaiety at Richard's court. That line could
almost be pasted into a modern column about influencer Christmas

(01:56):
excess minus thee mine. But for all the colorful plan
aagonets and Tudors, Tattle's verdict, and it is a persuasive one,
is that two names stand above the rest as truly
great royal celebrators of Christmas, James the First and Queen Victoria,
very much the king and Queen of two quite different
festive worlds. James the First is in many ways the
original go big or go home Christmas monarch. Raised in

(02:19):
the relatively austere, often puritanical atmosphere of the Scottish court,
he had to tread carefully in his early years at Sterling,
Surrounded by strict religious opinion. He sometimes had to adopt
a severe tone on Christmas observance to satisfy more rigid
elements around him. But as his reign in Scotland wore
on and he looked south towards England, he detected a

(02:41):
strong appetite for something rather more indulgent. By the time
he became king of both realms in sixteen o three,
all that pent up festive energy was ready to explode
once safely on the English throne. James was famous for
his generosity, and critics would say his spendthrift nature. The
beginnings of his reign and life was marked by heavy
spending on celebrations and gifts, particularly for his Scottish favorites,

(03:05):
a habit that alarmed his more hard headed English advisers.
Christmas under James was initially centred on Hampton Court Palace, where,
only six months after he took the English crown. He
presided over his first English Christmas. There were great feasts, dancing,
and crucially theater. One of the plays performed in that
first season was a work called A Play of Robin Goodfellow,

(03:27):
which we now know better as A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Among the actors treading the boards was a certain William Shakespeare.
As the rain went on, Whitehall Palace became the main
stage for Christmas. Sprawling, messy and perched on the Thames,
it was perfectly placed to impress foreign ambassadors and English
courtiers alike. Its great banqueting house, later adorned with a

(03:49):
ceiling by Rubens, was fitted out for elaborate masks, semi
theatrical entertainments of music, dance, and dazzling costumes. The space
could be transformed one configuration for court masks at Christmas,
another for more brutal entertainments such as bear baiting with
mastiffs with nets hung to protect the spectators. The floor

(04:09):
was covered in green bays for dancing, creating a striking
contrast under candlelight and enough grip for the performers as
they moved through the intricate steps of the mask. Jacoby
and Christmas Tide typically culminated in such a mask around
Twelfth Night, works with titles like The Vision of the
Twelve Goddesses, The Golden Age Restored and Christmas his Mask.

(04:31):
James himself did not usually take to the floor. By
the height of the season, over indulgence and age were
catching up with him. Christmas under James was not just
about excess. It retained a strong charitable moral to mention
the rich were expected to give to the poor, and
stories chosen for performance sometimes carried pointed messages. On Saint
Stephen's Day, in sixteen o six, the court watched Shakespeare's

(04:53):
King Lear, the tale of a monarch stripped of his
power and reduced to the status of a beggar. For
a king who had survived the Gunpowder Plot only a
year earlier, it must have been an unsettling reminder of
how quickly fortunes can turn. And yet for many of us,
our mental picture of a proper royal Christmas is not
Jacobean but Victorian, snow dusted evergreens, candle lit trees and

(05:15):
a family gathered around a table at windsor Well Palace.
In just a moment. If James the First is the
patron saint of the riotous, boozy Christmas. Queen Victoria and
Prince Albert are the architects of the cozy domestic one.
Victoria grew up at Kensington Palace, where she relished Christmas

(05:36):
from an early age. On Christmas Eve eighteen thirty two,
as a young princess, she confided in her journal how
much she was looking forward to the celebrations, a feeling
that only deepened over time. She became queen in eighteen
thirty seven and in eighteen forty married Prince Albert of Saxe,
Coburg and the Gotha, whose influence on the British Christmas
is hard to overstate. The Christmas tree, often lazily credited

(05:59):
to Albert that alone, had in fact appeared earlier. The
German born Queen Charlotte, consort of George the Third, had
introduced the custom to the royal family, usually using you
rather than fur, but it was Albert Victoria's enthusiasm that
truly popularized the tree across Britain. Engravings of the royal
couple and their children standing around a decorated tree at

(06:20):
Windsor appeared in publications such as The Illustrated London News.
In the late eighteen forties, and middle class families swiftly
copied what they saw. In the early years of Victoria's reign,
Christmas was generally celebrated at Windsor Castle. Albert, ever, the
meticulous organizer, often took charge of decorating the trees himself.

(06:41):
To a Victoria's own tree, ornaments later given to a
courtier have survived. Unsurprisingly, they are utterly charming. Very quickly,
a whole industry sprung up. Shops advertised ornaments, candles, suites
and small trinkets to hang from the branches Christmas trees,
once a curious foreign import, became a fixed feature of
the British festive season. Victoria and Albert spent every one

(07:04):
of their twenty married Christmases together at Windsor. After Albert's
death in eighteen sixty one, the queen found it too
painful to face Christmas there and shifted the celebration to
Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, while maintaining his
traditions as a way of keeping his memory alive. Their
Christmases were not merely decorative. They were intensely family centered.
Gifts for children, relatives, and favored servants were laid out

(07:27):
on tables decorated with greenery, sometimes with individual miniature trees
adorned with candles and sweets. In keeping with Albert's German roots,
presents were exchanged on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day.
The gifts were often deeply personal, commemorating travels, special events.
We shared interests, frequently in art and jewelry. One of

(07:47):
the very first Christmas gifts exchanged between the couple captures
the mood perfectly. Albert presented Victoria with a broach depicting
their first child, Vicki, born in November eighteen forty. The
miniature showed Vicki holding a ruby crucifix wings set with sapphires, diamonds, topazes,
and rubies. Victoria wrote in her journal, the workmanship and
design are quite exquisite, and dear Albert was so pleased

(08:10):
at my delight over its having been entirely his own
idea and taste. It's set the tone. Christmas for Victoria
and Albert was about sentiment, artistry, and above all family.
Another famous present was a gold bracelet composed of interchangeable segments,
each containing a portrait of one of their children at
the age of four, with a lock of that child's

(08:30):
hair on the reverse. By the time all nine links
were completed, the bracelet was too large to wear unless
she swapped children in and out. Victoria never lost her
sense of wonder at Christmas. On Christmas Eve eighteen forty one,
she wrote, Christmas I always look upon as the most
dear happy time, also for Albert, who enjoyed it naturally

(08:51):
still more in his happy home. The very smell of
the Christmas trees, of pleasant memories. To think we have
already two children now, and one who already enjoys the site,
it seems like a dream. There was nothing minimal about
the food and drink either. Christmas Dinner at Windsor often
began around nine in the evening, featuring dishes on a
frankly industrial scale. A famous woodcock pie contained one hundred birds.

(09:16):
Barrens of beef were cut from oxen Albert had reared
at Windsor and roasted in front of an open range
for some fifteen hours. The medieval ritual of displaying a
boar's head carried on into Victoria's rain. It took pride
of place on the sideboard for every meal over the
Christmas week, only being carved on the twenty fifth itself.
Viscount Torrington, a Lieutenant in waiting, recorded visiting the kitchens

(09:40):
and seeing the roasting in the kitchen of turkeys, geese
and beef, a mighty sight at least fifty turkeys before
one fire. If James Court specialized in theatrical excess, the
Victorian Court specialized in emotional abundance, trees, trinkets, photographs, hair
lockets and bracelets, family portraits, and the care we choreographed

(10:00):
rituals of gift giving. It was Christmas as we now
imagine it, and Stepier turns intimate, domestic, and sentimental. Even
if the scale of the roasting joints was anything but modest,
then there you have it. If you like to email
as who addresses the Palace Intrigue at gmail dot com,
please follow us on Spotify, Apple or the app of
your choice. I Mark Francis my thanks to John McDermott.

(10:22):
This is Palace Intrigue and good Dames