SILENT NIGHT,

 BLOODY NIGHT

Truces may have been called on the battlefield during the Christmas sojourn, but at court, peace and physical well-being were not necessarily givens. One would assume that with so many people of such importance in close proximity to the king, the holiday season would not be the prime time to attempt a royal kidnapping or assassination (and hardly in keeping with the yuletide spirit, we might add). Yet such dire events were barely averted several times during the 14th and 15th centuries.

Chivalric code called for a 12-day battle truce over the Christmas holidays. However, such niceties were not always observed. One of the earliest - and bloodiest - confrontations of the Wars of the Roses took place during the holiday season. It was on December 30, 1460, at the battle of Wakefield, that Richard, Duke of York and his son the Earl of Rutland lost their lives in battle against the Lancastrian forces. Their corpses were horribly defiled, which turned the tide of sentiment temporarily in favor of the Yorkists. At other times, truces were put to productive use. Pope Benedict used the truce of 1337 to negotiate an important (if all too short-lived) peace treaty between Edward III and the king of France.

Henry IV's first Christmas at Windsor in 1399 brought the king and his sons perilously close to being murdered. Noble supporters of the recently-deposed Richard II aimed to restore him to the throne and recover their influence at court in the process. One of the conspirators, the Earl of Rutland, had a last-minute change of heart; the earls of Salisbury, Gloucester, Exeter and Surrey were immediately run to the earth, lynched, and decapitated. Nor was this the last time that Henry had to worry about who might have spiked the wassail. Rumors were rife in 1403 of a second assassination plot, this one by Edward, Duke of York, to take place during the Eltham Palace Christmas celebration. Advance warning and lack of evidence put the entire issue to rest - at least on the surface.

Eltham was also the focal point of a dangerous - and luckily foiled - attempt to inflict mortal harm on Henry V during the height of the Lollard rebellion. Masterminded by Henry's one time crony and boon companion, Sir John Oldcastle, the plan was to smuggle a number of hostile rebels, disguised as mummers, into the king's presence. The rebels were to kidnap the king and hold him for ransom until their religious demands were met. Although the plot was exposed well before the holidays and Oldcastle was imprisoned in the Tower, it did not prevent a hapless (dare we say "witless") group of dedicated Lollards from attempting to execute the plan, regardless. They were captured, and dealt with harshly. Oldcastle, however, managed to escape the Tower and flee for Wales.

It was on New Year's Day, 1593, that the Earl of Essex uncovered a plot against Elizabeth, involving her personal physician, Roderigo Lopez. Although she hosted a dance until one o'clock in the morning, her mind must have been consumed by Lopez's betrayal and subsequent arrest. The Queen, however, had her own dark Christmas deeds to atone for: it was in 1586, while keeping Christmas at Greenwich, that Elizabeth drafted the formal warrant for her cousin Mary Stuart's execution - granted, she did not sign it until February.

Perhaps the most tragic event to result from the heightened passions of the season is the infamous murder of Thomas a Becket in 1170. Although tensions had been rife between the monarch and the Archbishop of Canterbury for years, Becket's inflammatory sermon from the pulpit of Canterbury Cathedral on Christmas morning seems to have been the final straw for Henry II. In a typically-Plantagenet burst of temper, the king spat out the fateful words, "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" Four knights in attendance at Henry's court took the opportunity to make their liege lord's Christmas wish come true. Riding pell-mell from the coast to Canterbury, they entered the Cathedral on December 29 and foully murdered Becket in cold blood in the Cathedral's north transept. It was not a Happy New Year for any of those involved - Henry suffered the horrifying consequences of his outburst for the rest of his reign.