In 1763 Richard Richmond, vicar of Walton in Lancashire, preached a sermon in Dunkeld, Scotland on the occasion of the thanksgiving day to celebrate the treaty with France to end the Seven Years’ War. Richmond told his audience that their obedience to the directive to thank God for this peace ‘is not the unmeaning sacrifice of fools, but both a reasonable and laudable service’. Richmond's statement stipulated his listeners’ and readers’ several responsibilities for the occasion: not only were Christians to properly acknowledge God's blessings in their lives but also, as British subjects, they were to attend to a duty prescribed by their government for the advantages they had received as part of a nation that had benefited from providential dispensations. Thanksgiving days were moments when religious and secular obligations intersected in this particular way in churches in England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, as well as, at times, in British colonies throughout the long eighteenth century, when the nation as a whole was meant to come together to express its appreciation to God. In this, thanksgiving days conveyed a number of meanings, fulfilled a variety of purposes, and satisfied a series of obligations for preachers, congregations, and their government.

The sermons preached and published for thanksgiving days embodied a range of ideas about the purpose and meaning of thanksgiving to those who delivered, heard, and read them. These included the historical and religious origins of thanksgiving observances, their importance to the state, and the significance of commemorating and worshipping together as a nation. Throughout a period that lasted over 125 years, the sermons reiterated similar messages about the need to properly observe these commemorations, to recognise the source of blessings, and to acknowledge what was required to have those advantages continue. The biblical texts chosen as foundations for the sermons were used as more than the basis of theological and doctrinal lessons, instead relating and contextualising contemporary circumstances within a larger, divine political and religious plan. In all of these things, Britain was depicted and positioned as a central, unique component in European and world affairs. In their elaborations on these grand considerations, the ministers who preached and published sermons perceived their efforts as speaking to issues of national interest and good, but they did so by expressing their views and opinions in a variety of ways.

Denominational breakdown of thanksgiving-day preachers

As the previous two chapters have demonstrated, British interests in the long eighteenth century were greatly influenced by warfare that was occurring in Europe and throughout the world. These wars impacted territorial and commercial concerns, considerations which were reflected in the thanksgiving-day sermons. Among the issues discussed were the effects of war (and peace) on trade and domestic industry, as well as the development of a more global outlook for Britons. The present chapter will explore how the sermons presented and discussed commercial and imperial interests. Though preachers’ passing mentions of such issues could not fully elaborate the complexities of the nation's wide-ranging economic and expansionary policies, they do demonstrate that these matters were important considerations within which thanksgiving-day sermons framed their discussions of the purposes and implications of events, circumstances, and British actions.

The resilience of British trade

When outlining the costs of war for Britain, many thanksgiving-day preachers commented on how it inhibited trade. However, their sermons also discussed the tenacity of British commerce during wartime, which was often expressed in terms of the strength of the British economy during difficult times, the comparison of British trade to that of its enemies, and the positive influences of military success. Despite apprehension over, and complaints about, possible negative commercial effects of war, the ability of the British economy to withstand and even thrive in such circumstances was also noted. Preachers considered these issues in the context of stability and providing assurance, constructing a picture of British commercial activity their audiences could find comfort and take confidence in. Preaching to Gray's Inn in 1691, George Stanhope noted that, even during the current war, ‘we have seen safe… arrivals of rich Cargoes from abroad;… we are not reduced to the last shifts of Poverty and Exile,… but, while other Countries have been the Unhappy Scenes of Violence, Ours… continues calm and composed’. A decade later, Ralph Lambert called on his audience to ‘reflect on the vast plenty and abundance, that we enjoy, after the expence of a Ten Years War… An abundance, in which no other Nation can pretend to vie with us; no, not even our Allies of Holland, whose Riches make so mighty a Noise, and so great a Figure in the World.’

The wars from the 1690s to the 1710s, from the 1740s to the 1780s, and from the 1790s to 1815 were significant influences upon Britain during the long eighteenth century, and thus had a key role in the ideas and messages of the thanksgiving-day sermons. Of the thanksgivings used in this study, a vast majority celebrated military successes of one kind or another, and the next largest grouping celebrated peace treaties: taken together, more than 80 per cent of these occasions were associated with the waging or termination of war. With such a prominent role in national celebrations, the topic of war and its results left a large imprint upon thanksgiving sermons and, in turn, upon the people who delivered, heard, and read them. Though preachers introduced and discussed a wide range of subjects in their sermons that were not directly associated with the topic that had immediately instigated the thanksgiving service they were participating in, most did, in some way, also address the particular events being observed. This meant that most thanksgiving sermons dealt with war, or its end, in some form or another. Historians have pointed to the impact of warfare throughout the long eighteenth century in shaping expanding British interests across the globe and creating a new focus of domestic and international political concerns, as well as influencing the development of British nationalism. Thanksgiving-day sermons reflected and fed these developing national discourses.

The present chapter will examine a number of topics connected to war in the long eighteenth century in Britain. It will look at how war and warfare were discussed by thanksgiving preachers, including the results, commemoration, and justification of wars, and the celebration of those who fought them. In all of this, it will provide a sense of how largely considerations of the topic of war permeated the messages in thanksgiving-day sermons, as well as demonstrating its effects on ideas of Britain during this period.

The ‘fruits of British valour’: meanings of military success

In 1702 Humphrey Prideaux declared that the military results of that year had shown that God ‘hereto hath given us greater Victories and Successes in this last Summers War, than all our Foreign Expeditions before these last hundred years past all put together’.

In 1798 A New Year's Gift to the Good People of England was published anonymously. Its full title presented the work as ‘a sermon, or something like a sermon… preached on the Day of public thanksgiving’. It becomes clear, however, that the pamphlet is not what it purported to be; instead, it is a parody containing pointed assessments and criticisms of the thanksgiving-day sermon tradition. The flavour of the tract's message is apparent from its opening passage, which feigned to assert ‘At a time when the nation seemeth still divided, in sentiments, between peace and war, it is the duty of every individual, but more particularly of the vigilant pastor, to throw his weight… into that scale of opinion which he wisheth to preponderate.’ Continuing in this vein, the author discussed his ‘conversion’ from being an opponent to the ‘rash, unnecessary, pernicious war’ with France, abandoning ‘a strict adherence to Gospel-maxims’ in order to go along with ‘the uniform tenor of that multitude of Christian Sermons, which my fellow-ministers have preached and published during these four last years’ in support of the war. This change of heart was intended to promote the author's advancement to a bishopric, and eventually – by delivering ‘a pastoral charge against French infidels, and English heretics’ – he would be ‘instantly translated to a better see; and so from one see to another, until I be translated to Lambeth’. The tone of these opening pages demonstrates not only a criticism of government policy, but also a sharp denunciation of the clergy who used their positions to advocate in support of it.

The reference to, and ridicule of, practices and devices from thanksgiving-day sermons continued throughout the work. The author declared he would deliver ‘a theologico-political Sermon’, and ‘(at your request) to print it’, expecting ‘its rapid circulation’ because he had been careful to use ‘such ingredients, as cannot but be suitable to the palates of every loyal liege, and sound believer, throughout the whole of his Majesty's dominions’. The author noted he had included no main biblical text because it was too difficult to find, or for preachers to stick to, a proper text, though he did explain how the verse on the ‘sword of the Lord, and of Gideon’ would have ‘given me an ample field for pulpit eloquence, and beautiful allegory.

This chapter will look at the religious issues and concerns that were discussed in thanksgiving-day sermons. This will not include a consideration and analysis of fine theological points or doctrinal intricacies but, instead, will focus particularly on preachers’ ideas on relationships among and between denominations of British Protestants, and their perception of the major threats to British Protestantism in the long eighteenth century. These include consideration of the place of the Church of England – and responses to dissent – presented by Anglican clergy, and the views of dissenting clergy regarding their position within the ecclesiastical structure of Britain. It will also examine ideas about the significance of religious freedom and the importance of religious unity for British Christianity in the eighteenth century. Finally, it will analyse the relevance of anti-Catholicism as a prominent theme from the early modern period, and then perceptions of the growth of irreligion as a danger gaining strength in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Anglican preachers and Anglicanism

Anglican clergy preached a majority of the thanksgiving-day sermons, so it should be no surprise that they presented some strong opinions regarding the importance of the Established Church within society. In addition to their defence and promotion of the Church of England, some preachers also criticised dissenters and dissenting practices. Though the pitched struggles and provocative rhetoric between Anglican and nonconforming clergy lessened in the period following the Revolution of 1688– 1689, there was still much at stake as the Church of England (and its episcopal counterpart in Ireland) tried to protect and solidify its pre-eminence within British Christianity during the eighteenth century. Though the suspension of the penal laws against Protestant dissenters helped to lower the stakes in religious disagreements between churches and denominations, there was still much to play for in the effort to survive in the competitive landscape of British Christianity: though persecution may have ended, turf wars continued.

The belief in the Church of England as properly reformed in its practices and composition was an idea that continued from the Reformation and Restoration into the long eighteenth century, and Anglican clergymen persisted in reminding their audiences of their Church's characteristics. ‘Our Doctrines are True, our Worship, Hierarchy and Ceremonies Pure and Primitive, and every part of our Religion Sincere and without Guile’, Thomas Comber declared in 1697.

To touch on every mention of providential intervention in thanksgiving-day sermons would, as one late eighteenth-century preacher put it, require ‘a volume, rather than a single discourse’. Thanksgiving days were founded on the premise of active and ongoing divine operation in the world, making providence the essential element of consideration: it was God who had intervened on Britain's behalf, and God was to be thanked for that oversight and benevolence. Preachers like Thomas Taylor, the vicar of Bicester in Oxfordshire, drove this home to his audience by asking: if God ‘were unconcern’d at the Successes, or Misfortunes of our Present Life, of what use would be a great part of our Services and Devotions? Why should we pray unto him for temporal Mercies, or return thanks for Benefits received… if there were nothing in the whole event, but what was owing to humane Strength and Policy, and the natural course of things?’ Whether in passing or as a principal theme, every thanksgiving-day sermon throughout the period from 1689 to 1816 mentions the role of providence in some way. To appropriate the phrase Alexandra Walsham applies to events like the Armada and the Gunpowder Plot, thanksgiving days were celebrations of ‘providential landmarks’ in the late seventeenth, the eighteenth, and the early nineteenth centuries.

Walsham's study of Providence in Early Modern England proves the great significance of the concept of providentialism to English culture and worldview in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was not simply a religious viewpoint, but instead permeated early modern English understanding of how God, and the world, functioned, ‘a set of ideological spectacles through which individuals of all social levels and from all positions on the confessional spectrum were apt to view their universe’. Walsham also asserts that special celebrations marking important providential anniversaries and victories were used successfully by the government to develop a sense of community amongst English people, and Mary Morrisey and Natalie Mears have confirmed that the sermons for those occasions reinforced the providential understanding of contemporary events, as well as those which had occurred throughout English history.5 Jonathan Clark argues that this providential understanding of worldly affairs carried into the eighteenth century.

While the celebration of military success was the predominant response to war in the thanksgiving-day sermons, this was not the only attitude represented, with some preachers pointing to its adverse impacts. Summarising the effects of the recent conflict in Ireland, in 1695 John Travers reminded his congregation at St Andrew's in Dublin of ‘the Ruins, and Devastations, the Wrongs and Oppressions, the Rapine and Violence, the Poverty and Complaining, the Blood and Slaughter that attended it’. Travers concluded ‘It stampt much the same impression upon our Land, that the Army of Locusts and Caterpillars did upon that of the late Jews; it found it like a Garden of Eden, but left it a desolate Wilderness.’ At the end of the eighteenth century, Richard Hardy told his University of Cambridge audience that war was ‘one of the calamities… inflicted by the angry Deity upon a sinful Nation’ and asserted that war was ‘a national calamity [that] originates in national crime’. Hardy was incredulous ‘that a Nation then should be so blind to it's own sins, as even to applaud itself under the idea of it's being engaged in a just War’. In the midst of celebrations of Trafalgar, Richard Warner accused preachers, publishers, and the government of promoting this ‘unhappy war’, noting that ‘Our press has for years teemed with fast and thanksgiving sermons, chiefly made up of bitter invectives against our foes; or of abuse by implication, in irritating comparisons between our own worth and their abominations.’

Though those who directly criticised British involvement in and celebration of warfare were a small minority, there were many other thanksgiving-day preachers who did mention the costs of war. This recognition included acknowledgement of the effects of war on the soldiers and sailors who were doing the actual fighting, as well as on those left behind and on those who returned from war, the societal results of war, the costs of funding warfare, and the economic impact of war. In addition to sermons that hailed victories, those that acknowledged or even criticised the costs of war contributed to the ongoing impression that military actions made on British society during the long eighteenth century.

For readers in the early twenty-first century, it can be difficult to understand the importance of sermons in early modern British society. The impediment is not simply due to the decline in the presence of the church in contemporary people's everyday lives, but also the fact that sermons are viewed often with trepidation (at best) or derision. For those who regularly attend church services, sermons are perhaps seen as necessary moral and theological guidance, or instigation to social awareness. But even these aspects can now be found more readily in other places and through other media. Even historians of English religion at times do not provide much encouragement to seek out sermons from the early modern period: in his seminal study of the public sermons given in London at Paul's Cross, Millar MacLure described the sermon literature from the beginning of the English Reformation to the eve of the Civil Wars as including ‘a great maze of repetitious bad rhetoric… singularly dull humourless pedestrian thought and expression’. More recently, Patrick Collinson, the late prominent historian of the Elizabethan and Jacobean churches, called seventeenth-century fast sermons and jeremiads ‘theologically limited, intellectually impoverished, and almost unbearably repetitious’. Stark judgements like these from historians who used hundreds of early modern sermons in their work make it more difficult to argue the case for the study of sermons as beneficial and significant.

The context of the ‘Information Age’ also makes it challenging to recognise the role sermons played in early modern society. As James Downey has observed, modern scholars’ disregard of sermons ‘arises from the failure to appreciate the importance that sermons once had in secular as well as religious life. In an age of mass media, compulsory education, … [and] highly-specialised entertainments… many former functions of the pulpit have been taken over by other agencies.’ Though it may seem trite, it bears remembering that the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were a time without the availability and distractions of all of the forms of information sources we take for granted today: because of this, it was the pulpit and the press that accounted for much of the spread of ideas and news that occurred then.

The biographical information provided below is not intended to give full details of preachers’ lives and careers. Instead, it supplies details pertinent to the context of the delivery of thanksgiving-day sermons. Please see pages xii–xiii for information on the sources of basic biographical details of preachers.

The preceding chapters show how thanksgiving-day sermons, in their discussion of a variety of themes, asserted certain principles and ideas about what it meant to be British during the period from 1689 to 1816. Preachers presented characteristics they associated with Britain and Britons –including the nation's place in the providential scheme, political ideals, structures, and behaviours, military and maritime qualities and purposes, commercial attributes, and religious ideas and positions – and many of these were juxtaposed to traits and attitudes of other peoples and nations perceived as opposite of or contrary to British values. As Kathleen Wilson and Linda Colley have noted, such distinctions were receiving impetus from British commercial and territorial expansion, warfare and their promulgation through printed and popular sources. This chapter will demonstrate that thanksgiving-day sermons were one of the genres in which such ideas were given voice. It will examine several prominent responses to ‘others’ which preachers developed and presented to audiences throughout the period, not only moulding attitudes towards other groups, but also reinforcing ideas of Britain.

French rulers

Britain's main rival throughout the entire period from 1689 to 1816 was France, and it was portrayed as the common adversary and antagonist to British concerns and ideals in the thanksgiving days and sermons. Previous chapters have demonstrated some aspects of this relationship, but it is useful to now focus explicitly on how France was perceived and presented by preachers across the long eighteenth century. France as a nation and the French as a people were associated with specific ideologies and imputed to have particular proclivities, but it is first useful to examine how British preachers depicted French rulers. These portrayals say much about what congregations and readers came to understand about the country and people who were Britain's principal foe.

A number of general attributes were ascribed to French rulers in thanksgiving sermons, and particularly the two rulers who bookended the period. Louis XIV was described variously as ‘the great Destroyer and Enemy of Mankind’, the ‘Enemy of this Nation,… the Common Foe of Europe,… the Common Adversary of all Christendom’, that ‘haughty Monarch’, ‘Proud and Cruel Lewis’. In 1702 Benjamin Loveling reflected happily on ‘how the Grand Incendiary of Europe, contrary to his ambitious Inclination’, was forced to give up his conquered territories, and Daniel Williams justified renewed war by pointing to ‘the French King's Ambition, Oppressions, Cruelty, Depredations, Treachery, and usurping Designs’.

‘Should what is here published be thought too political for the pulpit, let it be recollected, that scripture politics very well agree with sound doctrine; and, it is presumed, nothing contrary to sound doctrine has here been admitted.’ This justification is found on the opening page of the preface to the published version of John Martin's sermon from the thanksgiving day in November 1798. Martin was the Baptist minister to the Grafton Street meeting in Piccadilly in London, and his discussion of political ideas and themes was not unusual. Topics of a political nature, and with political implications, were regularly delivered from the pulpit, and this is certainly confirmed in the thanksgiving-day sermons from 1689 to 1816. On these occasions, intricately entwined with current circumstances, preachers perceived consideration of a variety of political topics as being within their purview, and they invited people to consider these events as junctures where political contexts and results were important elements of the day's significance. Sermons connected religious themes to political ideologies, as well as to current political debates. This chapter will examine how preachers presented British political principles, while the next chapter will explore their commentary upon political happenings and arguments of the day.

Thanksgiving and political philosophies

The range of political ideas that thanksgiving-day preachers considered was wide, stretching from the very foundations of human society to commentary on current political thought. Ministers explained this as a proper and important element of their religious responsibilities, and of their acknowledgements of the benefits that Britain had, and would continue to, receive. Far from being contrary to thanksgiving messages, political topics were essential to understanding the implications and effects of divine support for human society in general, and for Britain in particular. Some preachers, like John Barr, the rector of Owmby in Lincolnshire, felt it necessary to ‘go back to the Institution of political Society’. Barr's 1746 sermon included a lesson in Lockean ideas regarding the state of nature and the establishment of government, noting that equality in creation meant ‘no one can have any Dominion over another’ until ‘a number of Men have freely consented to quit their natural State of Freedom and Independence by constituting some one or more to have Government of them… [and] agree on some Form under which they are to live’.