Messages 'Hidden in Yuletide Carols'

Vancouver Province, December 24, 1991

Reuter, London

Some of the best-loved English Christmas carols bear more than tidings of comfort and joy, expert Ian Bradley believes. Some, he says, could be coded calls to revolution.

Bradley said recent research suggested the much-sung carol, O Come, All Ye Faithful, may have been written to rally to arms supporters of 18th-century Scottish Prince Charles, who led the Jacobite uprising against the English.

The carol's assumed author, John Francis Wade, was a fervent Jacobite, Bradley wrote in the Times newspaper.

The hymn was written in Latin two years before the uprising and not translated into English until 100 years later.

Another favorite, It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, was inspired, at least in part, by the 1848 revolutions in France and Germany and Chartist uprisings in Britain, said Bradley.

A third carol, Angels from the Realms of Glory, first appeared in a radical English newspaper in 1816 and was written by James Montgomery, a man jailed for supporting the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution.

"Those who protest that (carols) have been robbed of their original religious purpose, by being turned into the endless tinkly Muzak which keeps us filling supermarket trolleys extra high throughout the festive season, should pause," Bradley wrote. "Some of our best-loved Christmas hymns are not quite what they seem."