Carol stories 3 - O Come all ye faithful
O Come, all ye faithful, is one of the most popular
English carols, but it began life written in Latin by
an Englishman living in France.
It’s 1750 and a community of English Catholics are
living in Douai, working towards the restoration of
a Catholic monarch in England.
One of them is a music copyist and calligrapher called
John Francis Wade. His beautiful manuscript books were
the finest examples of his artistic craft. Wade also
wrote and published poems and hymns in Latin. One of
his hymns was Adeste Fidelis.
It had been assumed that Wade had copied the words
from an older hymn, but recent discoveries suggest that
Adeste Fidelis was all Wade’s own work, and that he
also composed the tune that we are familiar with today.
The carol is sometimes called the Portuguese hymn.
The reason for that is that it was being played in the
Portuguese Embassy in London in 1786 when a certain
Duke of Leeds heard it. He then introduced it in major
concerts as being Portuguese which it isn’t.
It took nearly a hundred years for the carol to be
translated into English. The translator was Frederick
Oakley, a senior Anglican clergyman based at Margaret
Street Chapel in London. Oakley gave the English version
of the carol to the Church of England and then four
years later became a Roman Catholic and eventually a
canon of Westminster Cathedral and worked for most of
his life among the poor of London.
Oakley’s English version, unlike the Latin original
doesn’t rhyme and has an irregular metre.
The words are simple and direct, calling those who
have faith in Christ to come in spirit to Bethlehem
to worship him.
The less convincing parts do the carols are those
which try to explain the birth of Christ in theological
terms: The line “Lo he abhors not the virgin’s womb”
is one that generations have puzzled over. But the music
is simple, unsophisticated and easily sung. And
for more than 200 years, in Latin, in English, and in
many other languages, the words and music written by
a transplanted Englishman have become one of the most
popular songs of Christmas.
