Prayer, providence and empire

Special worship in the British World, 1783-1919

Joseph Hardwick, Andrew Thompson, Alan Lester, Andrew S. Thompson, Alan Lester

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781526135391
• eBook ISBN: 9781526135414
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

European settlers in Canada, Australia and South Africa said they were building 'better Britains' overseas. But their new societies were frequently threatened by devastating wars, rebellions, epidemics and natural disasters. It is striking that settlers turned to old traditions of collective prayer and worship to make sense of these calamities. At times of trauma, colonial governments set aside whole days for prayer so that entire populations could join together to implore God's intervention, assistance or guidance. And at moments of celebration, such as the coming of peace, everyone in the empire might participate in synchronized acts of thanksgiving. Prayer, providence and empire asks why occasions with origins in the sixteenth century became numerous in the democratic, pluralistic and secularised conditions of the 'British world'.

1

Calls to prayer

On a Wednesday in late March 1876 an ill-tempered debate took place in New South Wales’s legislative assembly. The disturbance began when the member for Nepean, a seed merchant named Patrick Shepherd, called on the Government to set apart a day for humiliation and prayer. For nine months much of western NSW had experienced severe drought. Tens of thousands of cattle had died. Even human beings, Shepherd said, ‘were destitute of water’. Yet not everyone was convinced that special prayer was required. One member said he was ‘not aware that anyone in this colony was suffering’, while another declared that drought ‘was doing a great deal of good’ as it would rid the country of cattle disease. Others considered it presumptuous to ask God to alter the course of natural laws to suit their needs. The angry member for West Sydney called Shepherd’s motion ‘a disgrace to a deliberative body of gentlemen in the nineteenth century’. Although the suggestion was narrowly rejected – by sixteen votes to fourteen – the day of humiliation was appointed anyway, as following the debate the governor, in response to a request by Protestant leaders, issued a proclamation inviting the people of NSW to prayer. The assembly did not protest; some had reservations about whether it was even proper for an elected assembly to discuss special worship, and as one member pointed out, the governor, the monarchy’s representative, had the right to appoint a day of humiliation on his own authority.¹

The debate illustrates the difficulties that arose when the civil and ecclesiastical authorities considered the feasibility of national acts of worship in colonial situations. What counted as a crisis, and what causes required collective acts of contrition and thanksgiving? Who should decide to appoint, and who had the authority, and the ability, to call widely scattered communities in collective prayer?² Might special acts of prayer have unwanted effects, and reveal divisions within colonial societies? At what point should the civil authorities hand responsibility for special worship to the churches? In 1876 the Sydney Morning Herald touched on these questions and problems when it wondered whether parliaments and the civil authorities could ever adjudicate on such matters, as the colony was ‘composed of men of so many different views’. Furthermore, varying rainfall in different parts of the colony meant there was ‘a great deal of difference of opinion as to the extent of the calamity’.³

Yet throughout the period covered in this book the authorities in church and state overcame or ignored these obstacles and summoned colonial populations to collective acts of prayer. This chapter traces the development of colonial special worship and builds on existing work that has identified key changes in the appointment, causes and purposes of fasts, thanksgivings and special prayers.⁴ Across the period considered in this book, a great many requests came from politicians, clergy and the wider public for some kind of special worship, and it was the responsibility of governors and councils (and sometimes other civil and church authorities) to decide which of the many causes should be subjects for public worship. If the authorities judged that a crisis or celebration required collective prayer, they then had to decide what type of worship should be appointed, though as time went on the options became more limited.⁵ This chapter makes sense of this confusing history by identifying the common patterns in colonial special worship. The most noticeable feature of the period was that occasions became more numerous as time went on. This reflected the popularity of special worship; it was also because the volume of requests increased as churches developed, as the newspaper press expanded, and as colonial democracy spread. While special occasions of worship proliferated, it was also the case that the largest and most ‘national’ occasions – those appointed by the highest state authorities – lost some of their variety. Governors and other civil leaders summoned their populations to pray in response to a shrinking range of causes, and the day of prayer became the characteristic form of special worship in most parts of the settler empire.

The evolution of special worship is tracked across three periods. Up to 1850 colonial special acts of worship were imposed by the Crown authorities and tended to be for causes that supposedly affected everyone in all parts of the empire, such as European wars and royal events. It should be said at the outset that it is difficult to identify imperial strategies and official intentions from acts of special worship as the official sources, such as executive council minutes, say little about the motives of individuals, or how decisions to appoint were reached. Nevertheless, special worship in this first period seems to have been valued as a way to give a ‘virtual’ imperial nation a stronger sense of unity.⁶ Imperial occasions continued in the second period, which began in the 1850s, though there was a lull in the 1860s, as there were few British occasions that could be repeated in the colonies. As a result of this lack of general causes, colonial special worship became regionalised, fragmented and, to an extent, democratised: colonial territories appointed more occasions for regional causes and happenings, a broad range of people requested special days, and the responsibility for initiating and organising public displays of worship largely passed from civil authorities to church and other non-state bodies. Regional and sectional acts of prayer continued to proliferate in the third phase, from the 1870s to the First World War, but in this final period the wider unifying qualities of special worship was again emphasised. Authorities in London took advantage of improvements in communication to encourage and coordinate empire-wide days of prayer for royal jubilees, funerals and coronations, as well as in wartime. All this is important for what it reveals about the empire’s divisions and points of unity. But before this history can be examined, the origins of public displays of corporate prayer in the colonial world must be examined.

Special worship across ‘first’ and ‘second’ empires

A question that once engaged historians of empire was how far the loss of thirteen North American colonies represented a watershed between a ‘first’ – commercial and Atlantic – empire, and a ‘second empire’ that was larger, more ethnically diverse, less ‘British’ and ruled – in some places – more autocratically. Recent scholarship has challenged the view that new systems of government, new priorities and new visions of empire suddenly replaced old ones. The kind of representative government that had brought down the first empire would be extended to Canada in the 1790s and the new colonies of Lower and Upper Canada. No overarching imperial policy emerged in the post-revolution period and responsibility for imperial affairs was divided between various authorities.⁷ Yet in other ways the second empire did have a new conservative character. Politics in the early Canadian colonies was, for instance, dominated by small elite groups close to the governors.

Occasions of imperial special worship displayed similar patterns of continuity and change. Though there were departures in how occasions were appointed and for what reasons, several features that characterised colonial special worship in earlier centuries continued after the 1780s. But like imperial policy more generally, special acts of worship appointed after the American Revolution would not be planned or organised according to any coordinated ‘imperial system’.⁸

On at least eight occasions between 1688 and 1763 the governors and councils in the American colonies appointed thanksgiving days after having been ordered to do so by the imperial authorities in London. Interestingly, these orders occurred at moments when imperial officials sought to make Crown authority more visible in the colonies, such as when royal governors arrived in parts of North America after the Glorious Revolution, and during the Seven Years’ War.⁹ The appointment of thanksgiving days had long been the customary way that states had marked moments of relief and celebration. Days that fell midweek were ‘set aside’ in the sense that governments ordered or requested offices and businesses to close for all or part of the day so that inhabitants could give thanks for blessings received. Each of these colonial early modern occasions was a repeat of an act of special worship previously observed in the British Isles, and each cause had considerable political significance: for example, the birth of a Catholic heir (1688), the failure of assassination plots on the monarch (1696) and, on four occasions between 1702 and 1706, military victories in the War of the Spanish Succession.¹⁰ Though London would orchestrate empire-wide thanksgivings during the Seven Years’ War in 1759 and 1763, the practice was not common and was not continued.¹¹ One reason for the rarity of imperial orders was because governors could be relied on to mark important British occasions without direction from Britain. Royal governors independently ordered special days of fasting and thanksgiving for events such as the Glorious Revolution, the Jacobite rebellions and numerous eighteenth-century military victories and peace treaties. On occasion, governors anticipated the Crown authorities in London and set aside fasts and thanksgivings before orders had even been issued at home (this happened for some naval victories in the 1690s). Colonies might set aside whole days when only special prayers had been offered in Britain, and some events, among them the discovery of a Jacobite plot in 1723, were marked by special worship in some colonies, but not in Britain.

These American observances of British causes point to a strong sense of transatlantic Protestant community, as well as attachment to Hanoverian monarchy.¹² When they called thanksgivings for British causes, colonies claimed a place in a transatlantic spiritual community that was recognised by God, and which was rewarded and punished as a collective. The reach of this community was not defined: it certainly extended to continental Europe, as for many commentators Britain fought wars against Catholic France to defend international Protestantism.¹³ And sometimes North American colonists marked calamities affecting continental Europe with prayers.¹⁴ Recent scholarship has shown how an expanding network of benevolent organisations taught the inhabitants of the Atlantic world that their sense of moral obligation extended ‘beyond the local to encompass faraway fellow subjects of Britain’s empire’. Special acts of worship may also have broadened horizons, and may have cultivated the idea that strangers, however distant, inhabited one community.¹⁵

Wha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Calls to prayer
• 2 The churches and special worship
• 3 Participants and observances
• 4 Communities of prayer
• 5 Droughts and special prayers
• 6 Prayers for monarchy
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Acts of special worship appointed by civil authorities in Britain’s Australian, South African and Canadian colonies, 1783–1919
• Bibliography
• Index