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Every year since 1919, “Once in Royal David’s City” has opened Nine Lessons and Carols of King’s College Cambridge. A treble soloist sings the first verse and the choir processes slowly while singing the remainder of the hymn. Anything with such a long tradition seems ancient nowadays, but looking at its history, we see it wasn’t that old when the tradition started.

Cecil Frances Humphreys wrote the words. With a name like Cecil, it might surprise some people that it’s a woman’s name. Hymnals always show her name as Cecil Frances Alexander, but she didn’t marry until after she had published the hymn. Henry Gauntlett, who composed the tune, had a hand in nearly every hymnal published in his lifetime. The Anglican church had only recently started to embrace congregational hymn singing.

Cecil Frances Alexander

Alexander was born in 1818 in Dublin to Major John Humphreys, the land agent for an Irish nobleman. She started to write poetry as a child. Her religious poetry shows the strong influence of the Oxford movement.

The great 18th-English hymns of Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley found their home in “dissenting” churches. The Church of England showed little interest until after about 1810. The Oxford Movement sought to recover forgotten ecclesiastical traditions of the ancient Greek and Latin churches. In the process, its leaders published translations of both ancient hymns and Lutheran hymns.

By the 1840s, Cecil Humphreys had quite a reputation as a writer of hymns. Some of her hymns entered official Church of Ireland hymnals. Besides “Once in Royal David’s City,” her best-known hymns include “All Things Bright and Beautiful” and “There Is a Green Hill Far Away.”

In that same decade, she issued three anthologies of her poems. “Once in Royal David’s City” appeared in the third,  Hymns for Little Children (1848). She donated its profits to a school for the deaf she helped found. She also carried on several other charitable activities.

In 1850, she married William Alexander. She was 32 and he was 26, which caused her family some concern. William Alexander was also a poet of some distinction. He eventually became Bishop of Derry and Archbishop of Armagh. Cecil continued both her charitable and literary activities for the rest of her life. William published a posthumous collection of her poetry in 1896.

Henry Gauntlett

Henry John Gauntlett was born to an English clergyman, also named Henry Gauntlett, in 1805. As vicar of Olney, Buckinghamshire, the elder Gauntlett challenged the congregation to provide money for an organ and promised to provide an organist. He intended for his daughters to share the service, but young Henry wanted it. He took lessons from his mother, and by the time the organ was built, he had become proficient enough to be appointed organist—at age nine! During the ten years he held that post, he led a performance of Messiah, copying the parts and training the musicians himself.

He studied music with Samuel Wesley and Thomas Attwood. Attwood wanted to groom Gauntlett as his successor, but his father objected to a musical career for his son, fearing it would corrupt his morals. Add Henry John Gauntlett to the long list of musicians who studied law! He served as solicitor for 15 years, but never gave up a chance to play organ.

As organist, his primary achievements came in organ design. Against opposition, he had an organ built that was capable of performing Bach’s fugues and other continental organ masterpieces. Later, he invented a way of electrifying the organ. He also became involved in nearly every English hymnal published in his lifetime.

Some say he composed ten thousand hymn tunes. As that would require composing two or three a day for a very extended time, it’s no doubt an exaggeration, but he was certainly prolific. Only a few of his tunes still appear in hymnals, but the tune he wrote for “Once in Royal David’s City,” titled Irby, remains the one most commonly used.

Alexander’s text with Gautlett’s tune first appeared in the Appendix to Hymns Ancient & Modern (1868).

Once in Royal David’s City analysis

Illustration to Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” / William Blake, ca 1809

At least some of Hymns for Little Children illustrate the Apostles’ Creed. “Once in Royal David’s  City goes with “born of the Virgin Mary.” The opening line recalls the opening of traditional folk tales and fairy tales, “once upon a time.” Traditionally, adults told these stories for other adults, but by 1848, they had been relegated to children’s stories. So the opening signals not a fairy tale, but a story to be read to children.

The first two and a half verses retell the nativity story. The middle of the poem contains admonitions for children. The last two verses show Jesus leading his children “to the place where he has gone.” He started in a stable but leads his children to heaven, where they shall appear like stars.

In common with many Victorian-era Christmas carols, Alexander focuses on Jesus’ humble origins and the glorious nature of his spiritual reality. The poor baby of Bethlehem became the Savior of the world. Neither Alexander nor Scripture always mean “children” literally. We will all enter heaven as children or not at all. So we should find blessed hope in that last verse.

Some possible controversy

I suppose people have always taken their own time and society as normative. That, by the way, is why centuries of European and American painting have portrayed Jesus and other biblical characters as white people wearing expensive and colorful clothes.

In our time, however, the tendency has taken on what can only be described as bigotry against the dead. Some people harshly criticize any aspect of the past that fails to live up to their standard of rightness. And so it is that some people take exception to the “patronizing” lines in the third and fourth stanzas. Christian children should be obedient! The baby Jesus was “little, weak, and helpless”!

What? Don’t all parents expect their children to obey them? And aren’t all babies little, weak, and helpless?

Let’s not miss Alexander’s point, that Jesus learned empathy from his hard life as a child. The rest of us would do well to learn empathy and stop thinking that everyone in history should have had 21st-century progressive attitudes.

Some people today may find the picture of children in heaven troubling, for they can only get there by death. For one thing, infant mortality and premature death of children were more common in Alexander’s day, and people faced it without our modern squeamishness about it. For another, we will all die before we see Jesus in heaven.

Once in Royal David’s City lyrics

Adoration of the Mystic Lamb / Jan vay Eyck, from Ghent Altarpiece, 1432

Once in Royal David’s city
Stood a lowly cattle shed,
Where a mother laid her Baby
In a manger for His bed:
Mary was that mother mild,
Jesus Christ her little Child.

He came down to earth from heaven,
Who is God and Lord of all,
And His shelter was a stable,
And His cradle was a stall;
With the poor, and mean, and lowly,
Lived on earth our Saviour holy.

And through all His wondrous childhood
He would honour and obey,
Love and watch the lowly maiden,
In whose gentle arms He lay:
Christian children all must be
Mild, obedient, good as He.

For he is our childhood’s pattern;
Day by day, like us He grew;
He was little, weak and helpless,
Tears and smiles like us He knew;
And He feeleth for our sadness,
And He shareth in our gladness.

And our eyes at last shall see Him,
Through His own redeeming love;
For that Child so dear and gentle
Is our Lord in heaven above,
And He leads His children on
To the place where He is gone.

Not in that poor lowly stable,
With the oxen standing by,
We shall see Him; but in heaven,
Set at God’s right hand on high;
Where like stars His children crowned
All in white shall wait around.

Sources:

Biography of Cecil Frances Alexander / Poem Hunter
Gauntlett, Henry John / John Alexander Fuller Maitland, Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, volume 21
History of hymns: “Once in Royal David’s City” serves as processional hymn / Discipleship Ministries, the United Methodist Church
Once in Royal David’s City / JRW, Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology