Adeste Fideles the Unofficial British Anthem

Ok, so with Christmas coming up, one can hardly go anywhere without hearing carols every time you do. As I was waiting in line at one of the stores yesterday, one of the carols that they were playing was Adeste Fidelis (also known as as O Come All Ye Faithful).

Now while the origins of this tune can be traced back to Portugal, the Latin words rendered it compatible with the Jacobite movement in the early 18th century:

Adeste fideles, laeti triomphantes.
Vedite, vedite in Bethlehem,
Natum videte, regum angelorum
Venite adoremus, venite adoremus
In domine

O Come all ye faithful (Jacobites)
Joyful and triumphant (at the birth of an heir to the Stuarts)
O come ye, o come ye to Bethlehem (Rome)
Come and behold him (the infant prince)
Born thr king of Angels (a play on the similarities between of the angels and 'of the English' in Latin)
O come let us adore him, o come let us adore him,
(In) Christ the Lord. (the in was scrapped later in English, but implies basically the subjects being Heaven-bound to serve (adore) their prince).

Now if the Jacobites had been restored, could Adeste Fideles become a sort of unofficial national anthem for Britain?

It was written specifically by a Roman Catholic, for Roman Catholics, in Latin for that reason.

The fact that it is beloved of Protestants, who mostly only know the English translation is ... very ironic.

It would be a hard sell. The reason the Stuarts were turfed out was because of their Roman/crypto-Roman/believed to be Roman faith. An RC anthem celebrating (RC?) monarchs in Protestant England?

It's more likely to marginalize the hymn. IMO.

JonasResende said:

Adeste fideles, laeti triomphantes.
Vedite, vedite in Bethlehem,
Natum videte, regum angelorum
Venite adoremus, venite adoremus
In domine

O Come all ye faithful (Jacobites)
Joyful and triumphant (at the birth of an heir to the Stuarts)
O come ye, o come ye to Bethlehem (Rome)
Come and behold him (the infant prince)
Born thr king of Angels (a play on the similarities between of the angels and 'of the English' in Latin)
O come let us adore him, o come let us adore him,
(In) Christ the Lord. (the in was scrapped later in English, but implies basically the subjects being Heaven-bound to serve (adore) their prince).

Click to expand...

I would love to see Wayne Rooney and Steven Gerard trying to sing this but as Dathi THorfinnsson stated it is not practical, its hard enough to get British people to sing Jerusalem.

I never knew that O Come All Ye Faithful was a Jacobite anthem, it's one of my favourite hymns/carols. Though now I think about it I can't believe I never noticed.