Prayer, providence and empire: Special worship in the British World, 1783-1919 9781526135407

Table of contents :
Front Matter
Dedication
Contents
List of tables
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
Calls to prayer
The churches and special worship
Participants and observances
Communities of prayer
Droughts and special prayers
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

Citation preview

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Prayer, providence and empire

STUDIES IN IMPERIALISM

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General editors: Andrew S. Thompson and Alan Lester Founding editor: John M. MacKenzie When the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series was founded by Professor John M. MacKenzie more than thirty years ago, emphasis was laid upon the conviction that ‘imperialism as a cultural ­phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’. With well over a hundred titles now published, this remains the prime concern of the series. Cross-disciplinary work has indeed appeared covering the full spectrum of cultural phenomena, as well as e­ xamining aspects of gender and sex, frontiers and law, science and the environment, language and ­literature, migration and patriotic societies, and much else. Moreover, the series has always wished to ­ present comparative work on European and American imperialism, and particularly welcomes the ­submission of books in these areas. The fascination with imperialism, in all its aspects, shows no sign of abating, and this series will continue to lead the way in encouraging the widest possible range of studies in the field. ‘Studies in Imperialism’ is fully organic in its development, always seeking to be at the cutting edge, responding to the latest interests of scholars and the needs of this ­ever-expanding area of scholarship. To buy or to find out more about the books currently available in this series, please go to: https:// manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/series/studies-in-imperialism/

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Prayer, providence and empire Special worship in the British world, 1783–1919 Joseph Hardwick

manchester university press

Copyright © Joseph Hardwick 2021 The right of Joseph Hardwick to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 3539 1 hardback First published 2021 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover image: Vintage World Map, 2015 © Michal Bednarek, bednarek-art.com Cover design: riverdesignbooks.com

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

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For my grandmothers, Edith Hardwick and Beryl Boadle

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Contents

List of tables viii Acknowledgementsix Abbreviationsxi Introduction1 1 Calls to prayer 19 2 The churches and special worship 53 3 Participants and observances 91 4 Communities of prayer 130 5 Droughts and special prayers 159 6 Prayers for monarchy 192 Conclusion227 Appendix: Acts of special worship appointed by civil authorities   in Britain’s Australian, South African and Canadian colonies,  1783–1919 235 Bibliography253 Index276

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Tables

1 The principal British Canadian colonies mentioned in the text 2 Britain’s Australian colonies 3 The South African colonies and republics

27 28 29

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Acknowledgements

This book has evolved over six years and I have received considerable support from many people and institutions since I, with help from others, first conceived the idea for a project on colonial fasts, thanksgivings and special prayers. To begin, I must thank Philip Williamson for his support, guidance and generosity, not least in reading the manuscript and making numerous helpful comments. As is made clear in the introduction and the references, this book would not have been possible without the research that Philip, along with other members of the Durham University ‘British State Prayers’ project, carried out on the British tradition. I am very grateful to Philip for sharing his knowledge as well as his time. Thanks go to the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, and Paul Pickering and Will Christie in particular, for generously awarding me a visiting fellowship in 2019. Much of the research and writing for the introduction and fifth chapter took place during the fellowship. The Centre and its 2019 ‘Crisis’ theme brought together a wonderful group of ­scholars, and  conversations with the other fellows, in particular Sarah Moore, Gordon Pentland, Chris Whitehead, Alison Searle and Stephen Bygrave, did much to enrich my understanding of how best to understand religious responses to drought. At Northumbria, I have learnt much from colleagues in the Environmental Humanities research group, notably Matt Kelly, Leona Skelton, Rebecca Wright, Daisy Hildyard, David Stewart and Brycchan Carey. The department of the Humanities at Northumbria University gave me the means – which included two sabbatical terms – to carry on the research and writing for this book. Funds from the department made possible a research trip to Cape Town and paid researchers to gather and scan archival manuscripts in St John’s, Newfoundland and Pretoria, South Africa. Further funding from the Canada-UK Foundation paid for a two-week research trip to Ottawa and Toronto in the summer of 2016. Jarrett Rudy very kindly and generously commented on what I have written about the Canadian material.

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x

Acknowledgements

Thanks go to the following librarians, archivists and researchers for lending me their assistance and expertise: Lorraine Slopek at the Anglican Diocesan Archives, Nova Scotia; Walter Batten in St John’s, Newfoundland; Anne Lehmkuhl in Pretoria, South Africa. All the staff at the National Archives of Australia, National Library of Australia and Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa were friendly and helpful. Rosemary MitchellSchuitevoeder translated Afrikaner documents sourced from South African archives. The ideas developed in this book were tried out in papers to audiences at the Universities of Portsmouth, Edinburgh and Ulster, as well as to conferences of the Ecclesiastical History Society and British Association for Canadian Studies. I thank all those who asked questions and gave guidance on these occasions. Brian Stanley, Stewart J. Brown, Alex Bremner, David Andress, Karly Kehoe, Michael Gladwin and Mike Hulme have made very useful suggestions at various points in this project. Friends and colleagues, among them Daniel Laqua, Sasha Handley, Avram Taylor, Charlotte Alston, Rob Leach and Clare McCumhaill, and particularly Penelope and Ursula, have provided help, support and fun. PE with Joe Wicks gave great inspiration during the Covid-19 lockdown. My family and cats have provided me with an important sense of perspective throughout the time spent researching and writing; I’m sure, too, that my faltering efforts to explain what is meant by ‘special worship’ has done much to clarify my own thinking. Biggest thanks of all go to Rachael: most of the best ideas in this book come from her wisdom, kindness and love.

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Abbreviations

ADNSA Anglican Diocese of Nova Scotia Archives, Halifax AO Archives of Ontario, Toronto BBC British Broadcasting Corporation EHR English Historical Review HC Héritage Canadiana JBS Journal of British Studies JICH Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History LAC Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa MP Member of Parliament NA National Archives, Kew NAA National Archives of Australia, Canberra NAR National Archives Repository, Pretoria NFL Newfoundland NLA National Library of Australia, Canberra NP N. Mears, P. Williamson et al., National Prayers: special worship since the Reformation, 4 vols (Woodbridge, 2013–) NSW New South Wales NSWSA New South Wales State Archives, Western Sydney PANS Public Archives of Nova Scotia, Halifax PEI Prince Edward’s Island PP Parliamentary Papers PROV Public Record Office of Victoria SLNSW State Library of New South Wales, Sydney SLV State Library of Victoria, Melbourne SMH Sydney Morning Herald SOAS School of Oriental and African Studies, London SCH Studies in Church History USPG United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel WCPA Western Cape Provincial Archives, Cape Town

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Introduction

In March 1949 an anxious citizen in Oakville, Ontario made a striking recommendation to the Prime Minister of Canada. News of the declining health of the British king, George VI, was of public concern. Due to lung and arterial problems, George twice became ill in late 1948 and 1949, so much so that he underwent two operations; at one point it was feared that he would lose a leg. The citizen wanted the Prime Minister to announce a ‘day of prayer’ so that ‘all Canada’ could join in praying ‘for the sane and speedy cure of His Majesty the King’s distressing ailment’. The Canadian Government did not take up the recommendation, almost certainly because no direction had come from Britain.1 Some hundred and sixty years before, in the late eighteenth century, European settlers had prayed for the recovery of another monarch, George III. As in 1949, news of a sovereign’s fragile health – in this case his mental condition – shocked some colonists. Charles Inglis, Nova Scotia’s Church of England bishop, was so disturbed when he received news of the king’s ‘indisposition’ in the winter of 1788–9 that he could not sleep for a week. Inglis’s anxiety was partially eased in March 1789 when a copy of a special prayer for the monarch’s recovery came to hand. This form – it was sent to Inglis by the archbishop of Canterbury – had been used by English Anglicans every Sunday since November. In a spirit of transatlantic unity, Inglis ordered the prayer to be used in his vast diocese, however unbeknown to him the King had recovered some weeks before.2 When news of this blessing finally reached British North America in May 1789, governments in Nova Scotia and other British colonies proclaimed special days of thanksgiving, just as in the British Isles the Crown authorities had ordered a day of thanksgiving, held on 23 April. These events catch the eye because they indicate the religious, institutional and emotional bonds that connected inhabitants of Britain’s empire with the British monarchy and nation. These episodes are also striking as they are elements in a centuries-old tradition of ‘special’ or ‘national’ worship. The Oakville man evidently understood that it was customary for the highest

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civil or church authorities to order or encourage their ­populations to gather for worship on matters of national significance. Over the centuries, numerous occasions had been appointed by governments in Canada and other parts of the empire, either for causes of empire-wide concern, such as the health of monarchs, or for events that were specific to their regions. An individual born in Sydney, New South Wales in 1850 and who was fortunate to reach their seventieth birthday would have been invited to collective prayer by colonial, state and Australian Commonwealth g­ overnments – as well as by British monarchs – on nearly thirty occasions. The individual might have fasted and prayed in times of war, drought and influenza. They could have offered prayers of thanksgiving for a failed assassination attempt on a British royal, for the recovery from illness of a prince, for a queen’s long reign and for the coronations of two male monarchs. And every year from 1915 to 1918 the elderly civilian may have sought divine intercession on behalf of the ­combatants and victims of war. These were rare moments when the diverse and disparate inhabitants of a nation or colony came together on the same day and prayed for a common goal. These occasions also represented an endorsement, by states, of church authority and the idea that prayer, when organised collectively, had efficacy, whether the anticipated result was a change in the natural or human world. These remarkable colonial occasions continued and extended a tradition of special worship that, in England, stretched back to the early Reformation, when orders and prayers published in vernacular English first appeared. The British history of special worship or ‘national prayer’ has in recent years become familiar to scholars. The ‘British State Prayers’ project at Durham University has identified over nine hundred particular acts of special national worship appointed in the British Isles from the 1530s to the present (as well as several annual religious commemorations introduced periodically from the 1550s). Special acts of worship, for the Durham project, were ‘matters of national significance which were ordered or encouraged by the sovereign, the government or the leaders of the established churches for observance on specific dates or for particular periods’.3 Special worship might take the form of specified days set aside by some state or church authority for religious purposes. It was supposed that such special days would pause usual routines: inhabitants attended special church services and listened to sermons before returning home for family prayer and private penitence, with secular forms of celebration permitted on thanksgivings. Special worship might also involve the addition of new prayers to regular church worship.4 Sometimes colonists followed identical church services and uttered the very same prayers as congregations in Britain and elsewhere in the empire. In eighteenth-century Britain, governments set aside special acts of worship during wartime as well as for epidemics, royal

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Introduction 3

births and illnesses and, on two occasions, earthquakes. Notable causes of special worship in the nineteenth century included cholera, war and the condition of the harvest, and new styles of national worship associated with prayers for the sovereign and the royal family proliferated during the twentieth century. The ‘State Prayers’ project is an inspiration for this book, and the chapters that follow make extensive use of the analysis and descriptions of British events provided in the three National Prayers volumes that consider the particular acts of special worship. These volumes contain comments and some details on special worship in the colonies, particularly for those instances when the inhabitants of the empire observed special acts of worship that had previously been ordered in Britain.5 There is also a rich literature on special days of worship in colonial America; indeed, scholars regard the sermons delivered on days of fasting and thanksgiving as foundational for the development of American political thought.6 However, for the ‘second empire’ that developed after American independence, much less is known and understood – notwithstanding three recent articles which the current author has written or co-authored.7 There is, therefore, much work to do on the colonial histories of a religious and cultural phenomenon that has been studied for the British Isles. The colonies had very different religious compositions and political and environmental circumstances to Britain. What forms did special worship take and what functions did it serve in such places? Even in the four nations of the British Isles there was a multiplicity of churches, and traditions of special worship could vary markedly across regions and faith groups. It has not so far been clear how these traditions and customs took root and evolved in ‘new world’ societies and environments. How were British cultures of special worship adapted to territories where the religious demography could be very different to that found in Britain? Did special worship take new forms in colonial societies where the authorities had to build much closer relations with Protestant ‘nonconformists’ and with Roman Catholics, groups that in Britain and Ireland suffered disabilities and discrimination?8 At what point did new colonial styles of special worship, suited to local circumstances and conditions, emerge? This book, then, takes advantage of an opportunity presented by the National Prayers volumes to examine large questions about the similarities and differences between the colonial and British traditions of special worship. Special acts of worship organised on the national and colonial scale occurred only occasionally. But they are important as they were intense, popular and highly visible events – they required considerable organisation and they stimulated debate and reflection on a range of political, social and religious issues. For scholars of religion, the empire’s culture of special,

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community-wide worship commands attention, as these occasions suggest that traditional beliefs about a superintending providence resonated and had application in ‘new world’ societies, despite controversies over the efficacy of prayer and the power of states to command religious observances.9 Like worshippers in previous centuries,10 Victorian and Edwardian colonists believed that collective worship could have spiritual and material effects – corporate prayers might impress God, avert disasters, guide politicians and, in the case of monarchy, restore national figures to health. From the 1870s, all or most of the colonies observed great imperial occasions, and such events suggest that an empire marked by religious pluralism and competition might, in certain contexts and at certain times, come together in a common act of prayer and be conceptualised as a single spiritual community. The continued observance into the twentieth century of statesanctioned prayers on special occasions is also useful for judging how far the clergy, as a large and influential professional group, continued to wield much ‘cultural leadership’ in colonial societies.11 For the imperial historian, investigation of special acts of worship provide novel means for exploring large themes in the history of empire. They point to causes and issues that promised to unite diverse colonial and imperial communities. They offer new perspectives on the changing relationships between states and churches, between different faith groups, between Britain and its colonies, and between the British monarchy and varied empire communities. Observances of imperial and regional occasions reveal the layers of community attachment in colonial societies, as well as shifts in the identifications that the inhabitants of empire developed to regions, empires and new colonial nations. Special worship shows how news of dramatic events was spread, how authorities interacted with populations and how churches emerged as visible and authoritative public institutions. The special acts of worship that marked natural calamities – Australian droughts, for instance – even suggest that religious ideas and religious personnel shaped debates about environmental degradation and conservation. Two core arguments underpin this book. First, special acts of worship reveal the pull of regional and provincial attachments in the nineteenthcentury empire of British settlement (a formation often called the ‘British world’). Public displays of prayer reminded individuals that they were not isolated beings, but existed as members of communities and societies, and were connected to others through what one clergyman, speaking at a fast day in Nova Scotia in 1793, called ‘propensities and affections’.12 Individuals, it followed, should grow up with the sense that their actions harmed or benefited others, and that God counted a person’s sins as part of a national or community aggregate. These were moments, therefore, when ministers and congregations reflected on the nature and character of

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Introduction 5

colonial identity – sermon-givers often asked the question ‘who are we?’ The answer could be complicated, as colonists held multiple identities and several loyalties simultaneously.13 Days orchestrated or initiated from the imperial centre, and which called on far-flung imperial inhabitants to gather for simultaneous prayer, orientated colonists towards the mother country and an imperial Britannic identity, one founded on the idea, taken from Old Testament Israel, that Britain was a favoured or elect nation. Much has been written about the strength of these imperial attachments and higher forms of group identity.14 Yet most occasions observed in the colonial world were appointed by churches and colonial state bodies (governors, executive councils and sometimes mayors) in response to events of regional importance. Such occasions, this book argues, nourished denominational and regional attachments, and a colonial ‘provincial spirit’ that remained remarkably durable.15 This book is therefore intended as a counterweight to the line of analysis in recent ‘British world’ scholarship that emphasises the connectedness and unity of ‘Greater Britain’.16 The second claim is that special worship makes visible the vital roles that traditional practices, ideas and institutions played in the progress that colonial societies made towards a modernity characterised by freedom of religion, greater degrees of democracy and new conceptions of colonial nationhood. Ritualised and patterned responses to crises and celebrations with early modern origins remained important elements in the formation of collective identity. More specifically, special worship reprised the traditional idea that communities could be conceived in similar terms as individuals, in that they were spiritual bodies, sharing a conscience, a moral sense of what was right and wrong, even a personality and distinctive character traits. And at some points in time, and in some parts of the empire, ministers invited colonial groups to think that they were a people apart, and participants in a scheme of ‘national providence’ that was distinct from the larger British story of judgements and deliverances.17 Old Testament ideas about chosen peoples and special election had purchase wherever settler histories told a story of exile, struggle and entry into a promised land. As Ann Curthoys notes, such memorialising had both positive and dark aspects. Feelings of specialness and exceptionalism might bind together a group, but a sense of struggle and suffering could promote an unhealthy sense of victimisation, one that, in a grim echo of the biblical story of the Israelite conquest of Canaan, legitimated the taking of other peoples’ lands.18 The ‘1820 Settlers’ who inhabited the Eastern Cape are an example of a colonial society whose sense of identity developed from a providential reading of the past, and this book shows that other groups used traditional providential ideas to cope with and make sense of the places and environments that they colonised and inhabited.19

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Furthermore, institutions that seem external to settler societies, such as monarchy, governors and old established churches, continued to order national life in colonies and dominions – one recent writer has called these the ‘feudal’ aspects of British imperialism.20 This book makes a similar claim for special worship. All these institutions, like the British tradition of national prayer, underwent significant modifications as they confronted new colonial responsibilities and adapted to colonial conditions. The final chapter of this book uses special worship to show how a monarchy that was both national and imperial gradually became more than an Anglican institution: the monarchy’s ability to appeal to other denominations has, it is true, a long history, but empire generated distinctive pressures, and encouraged the monarchy to present itself as the representative of a multiplicity of religious faiths.21 All this said, much of the original form and purpose of special acts of worship survived into the twentieth century. Often the study of colonial society is a search for the new.22 This book argues that equal attention should be paid to the old and the traditional if the varied character of Britain’s colonial settler societies are to be understood.

Focus This subject is large and complex, and there is a need to define a start and end point for the study, as well as geographical focus. Special worship is itself a complicated phenomenon and requires explanation, as such acts took different forms and performed various functions. The acts of worship studied in this book were ‘special’ in the sense that they were exceptional responses to sudden emergencies, like internal rebellions, or welcome deliverances, such as the cessation of disease. The important point is that acts of special worship stood outside the rhythm of the yearly calendar and represented a departure from regular church services and, in the case of some religious denominations, from the forms of worship prescribed in prayer books. The book is primarily interested in ‘national’ occasions appointed by the highest authorities in church and state for observance by the whole community, in all parts of a colonial territory.23 These general comments only partly capture the rich diversity of the numerous different types of occasion appointed by authorities in Britain and the colonies. Arrangements for the appointment of acts of special worship, debates over the selection of appropriate causes and the evolution of new styles of special worship are considered in Chapter 1. Another issue that enlarges the subject is that calls to prayer elicited responses from a wide range of faith groups. All the Christian churches – as well as Jewish communities – accepted the doctrines and rationale that

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Introduction 7

underlay special occasions of worship. The example of Old Testament Israel was the source of the idea that God intervened in the human and natural worlds through unusual and direct ‘special providences’, and that it was incumbent on individuals to join together as a moral community to implore God’s protection, or to give thanks for blessings received. The notion that far-reaching calamities, such as war and pestilence, represented divine punishments for the ‘general’ or ‘accumulated’ sins of national communities was one shared by all the main Christian churches, Protestant as well as Roman Catholic.24 While there was a common basis for special worship, not every church responded to state orders in the same way: styles of worship varied, churches had differing views on whether states should order worship, and some denominations had strong traditions of independent action. For a time in the early nineteenth century the two churches that enjoyed ‘established’ status in the British Isles – the United Church of England and Ireland and the Church of Scotland – occupied special roles in corporate worship in the colonies. Privileged colonial establishments did not, however, last long in the colonial world: the balances between denominations in overseas territories often differed markedly from those found in the British Isles, and nowhere did the established churches have the numerical dominance that they did in England and Scotland.25 A striking feature of colonial worship is that churches that occupied marginal presences in the British Isles helped shape distinctive styles of special worship in Britain’s overseas territories. Many church traditions of special worship migrated overseas, and the customs that flourished were usually those that best reflected the demography of that part of the empire (there was the occasional exception to this rule, such as Nova Scotia). This book describes and explains these differences between the main Christian and Jewish communities in detail. But it also recognises that for many of the empire’s inhabitants, such as the 49 per cent of the Cape Colony public that the 1891 census recorded as ‘no religion’ (most were people of African descent),26 Christian calls to prayer were alien and could be ignored. The empire was of course very big and made up of a variety of Crown colonies, settler territories, dominions and zones of informal influence. Each developed traditions of special worship that persist to the present, although in places where Europeans formed a minority of the population, such as the Indian ‘presidencies’ and the Caribbean colonies, occasions tended to be imposed on populations by governors and councils. Dramatic natural calamities, such as hurricanes, were the main cause of special worship in the British West Indies, and from the 1790s governors in the East India Company’s territories appointed thanksgivings for victories in wars against Indian states.27 This book concentrates on the colonies of British settlement

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in the ‘second’, post-American Revolution, empire, as it was in such settler societies that the persistence of state-appointed acts of national worship and special prayer was most noticeable. These societies also regularly observed occasions communicated from the civil and ecclesiastical authorities in the British Isles. (Though further research might present a different picture, the West Indian colonies seem to have observed British occasions of special worship very fitfully, possibly because the abolition of slavery in 1834 nurtured feelings of anger and betrayal among white planters.)28 Another striking feature of the settler colonies is that the pressure for the appointment of special acts of worship often came from the general public. A key question asked in this book is why occasions with British Protestant origins in the sixteenth century became numerous in the democratic, pluralistic and often secularised conditions found in settler societies. More specifically, the book focuses on the traditions of special worship that developed in Canada, Australia and South Africa from the late eighteenth century to the First World War. ‘Canada’, ‘Australia’ and ‘South Africa’ are anachronistic terms, and until the formation of confederations, commonwealths and unions in 1867 (Canada), 1901 (Australia) and 1910 (South Africa), there was a multiplicity of independent colonies in each region. These settler societies had common features that make comparisons worthwhile. Each region had histories of rapid, invasive and violent settlement that resulted in the dispossession of indigenous peoples. The inhabitants of southern Africa and south-eastern Australia contended with arid soils and frequent and contemporaneous droughts – some of them resulting from the same recurring climate pattern of global heating and cooling known today as the ‘El Niño-Southern Oscillation’.29 The appointment of special acts of worship remained a conventional response to collective trauma and celebration across the three regions (the Appendix lists the occasions appointed by state authorities to give a sense of frequency and pattern).30 That said, special worship took different forms in different contexts. The relatively benign environment faced by nineteenthcentury North American colonists, and the lack of what one scholar calls ‘a common and unifying traumatic experience’,31 meant that Canadian special worship, which largely revolved around yearly thanksgivings for good harvests, had an optimistic and positive character, one that reflected the Canadian belief that their cold climate was virtuous and the west was uniquely favoured.32 A principal reason why the Canadian, Australian and South African colonies require study is that they had rich histories of state-appointed special worship. Indeed, it is striking that governments in these regions continued to appoint and encourage acts of worship much more often than the British state. In the United Kingdom after 1860 the Crown authorities

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Introduction 9

largely ceased to issue formal orders for special days of prayer, save for occasional monarchical thanksgivings and one, unique, day of thanksgiving after the First World War. This significant development had many causes, but important was what Philip Williamson calls the ‘increased political sensitivity’ shown towards religious pluralism. As the electorate grew in size and diversity, as parliament was opened to non-Anglicans and as liberal attitudes spread, so the state authorities adopted neutral positions, and withdrew from events – such as orders for national prayers  – that might generate ‘friction’ between religious groups.33 Though new forms of national worship would emerge in the twentieth century, the implications of the state’s withdrawal from special worship were huge, not least because it undermined the traditional idea that the nation existed as a corporate moral entity.34 A contrary set of processes played out in those parts of the colonial world studied in this book. Democracy and political recognition of religious diversity began earlier in the settler colonies than in the British Isles, but in many colonies, governors, as the representatives of royal authority, continued to call colonial communities to prayer through an old style of royal proclamation. Furthermore, liberalisation in the colonies strengthened the idea that colonial communities might be regarded as moral unities and as spiritual communities that possessed what historians call a ‘national ­conscience’.35 This book charts the fortunes of this ‘national conscience’ idea in the colonial world. There was, it is true, much debate about whether particular ecclesiastical or state institutions could provide religious leadership or express this colonial conscience, and rarely did the national conscience represent or reflect the interests and views of marginalised, persecuted and indigenous peoples. Another reason for comparing special worship in the three settler societies is that traditional styles of worship that disappeared in Britain thrived in the colonial world. Acts of collective contrition – contemporaries called such occasions days of ‘fasting’ and (from the 1850s) ‘humiliation’ – had been common in the British Isles as they sat well with the sense of crisis, unease and insecurity that characterised pre-1850 British culture. However, such occasions appeared old-fashioned in the more optimistic and imperialistic climate of the later century.36 Crises caused by ‘natural’ events – such as epidemics and failed harvests – would be best resolved through scientific remedies, rather than by united and public prayers ordered or organised by states.37 By contrast, social, political and environmental disturbances frequently threatened colonial territories, particularly those in Australia and South Africa, and the feelings of uncertainty, vulnerability and insecurity engendered by these crises might explain why providential explanations for these natural causes still had power and appeal, and why governments

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Prayer, providence and empire

and churches in southern Africa and Australia continued to set aside days of contrition for regional causes, such as drought and disease. This book, then, explains why traditional forms of special worship, reinvented to suit new conditions, proliferated in many colonial societies. The continued use of the royal proclamation to summon people to prayer had much to do with the appeal of monarchy in the colonial context. And the idea of spiritual community and the national conscience had purchase because many colonial elites were preoccupied with the idea of colonial unity and believed that Christianity should form the bedrock of settler societies: new territories required ‘national’ ideas, symbols and events around which the population could gather. A final reason for selecting these regions is that they reveal how far collective worship encompassed and engaged diverse communities of Dutch Afrikaners, Catholic Irish and French Canadians, among others. The settler presence in the two British southern African colonies included large communities of Dutch descent, and in parts of British North America – most notably Quebec, but also parts of Maritime Canada and Newfoundland – French speakers predominated. Australian colonies were less cosmopolitan and more ethnically homogenous than African and American societies, although the arrival of Asian and southern European migrants after 1850 diversified the settler presence. The focus on the three regions also allows consideration of observances among varied indigenous communities, as well as Chinese and Jewish populations. As was the case with marginalised communities in the British Isles, those who encountered discrimination and suffered at the hands of white settler society found opportunities in special occasions of worship to express a sense of loyalty, as well as to make demands. New Zealand, another important component of the empire of white settle­ment, is not considered, even though the colony is not easily separated from the Australian context. Special acts of thanksgiving and fasting in one New Zealand province have been well studied.38 New Zealand was also a distinct case in the history of colonial special worship. Colonial and provincial governments in the region routinely proclaimed repeats of British events, and its churches often appointed occasions for their members, most notably after good harvests. Yet in contrast to the other colonies of British settlement, its civil authorities only occasionally called their populations to pray in response to local calamities and celebrations, and ceased to do so entirely after the late 1860s (a fast day, appointed in the province of New Munster in October 1848, followed the Wellington earthquake, and Otago’s provincial superintendent proclaimed a ‘day of humiliation’ in February 1868 after a storm).39 Disasters that happened after this period, such as the droughts that had caused damage in parts of North Otago in the

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Introduction 11

1890s and early 1900s, prompted special acts of worship, but churches, not governments, appointed these. The strongly voluntary and church-led character of special worship in New Zealand had much to do with the powerful Scottish and Presbyterian influences in the region, although New Zealand governments may also have followed the British example, and avoided special worship for political reasons, particularly a desire to minimise the risk of religious controversies.40 Identifying a start date is easier than determining when to end, as special worship is still very much a feature of Britain and its former colonies. The book starts and ends in periods when the sense of unity in colonial special worship was most evident. In the aftermath of the American Revolution the governors of Britain’s remaining overseas territories regularly repeated special acts of worship that had earlier been observed in Britain and other parts of the empire. The end date, 1919, needs more explanation. This was one of the last moments when colonies appointed occasions that belonged to an old style of special worship. Twice that year the governor of NSW, Walter Davidson, revived a tradition of days of contrition when he set aside days so that his people could ‘unite in humiliation and prayer’ and seek ‘the mitigation or removal’ of drought and influenza.41 In other ways 1919 pointed towards a new phase of special worship. A thanksgiving for the Versailles peace treaty proclaimed for the whole empire and held in July that year was unique, and the culmination of a long trend towards coordinated and simultaneous acts of special worship in the whole British world, including the new dominions as well as the colonies. This thanksgiving, like the days of prayer that came before it during the First World War, established a precedent for future events that embraced all the empire and all faith groups and more clearly involved the British monarch.42 The years from the 1780s to 1919 are, then, a discrete period in colonial special worship, in two divergent senses. One was the trend towards increased imperial consciousness. But the second was a growth of greater diversity. Regions and colonies developed their own traditions of special worship. The customs and traditions that emanated from the British Isles interacted with other national traditions, most notably a French one in Quebec, and a Dutch in southern Africa, to produce new and distinctively colonial forms. Special worship in Canada was, for instance, much influenced by the New England tradition of seasonal fasts and thanksgivings.43 Another significant development, one that encouraged the further proliferation of special acts of worship, was that churches increasingly took responsibility for ‘national’ worship and appointed special days and prayers on their own authority. This, the book suggests, reveals much about the public status of institutional churches in the colonies.

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Significance While little has been written about traditions of special worship in the nineteenth-century empire, other types of colonial ‘national day’ have attracted historical interest.44 Every colonial society would develop a tradition of holidays, public festivals, jubilees and national celebrations and commemorations. In the nineteenth century, for instance, each of the Australian colonies marked its foundation with commemorative days. To varying degrees, such ‘foundation days’ became moments for celebrating a sense of colonial difference and regionally-based ‘national’ sentiment.45 As colonies in Canada, South Africa and Australia joined in federations and unions, new commemorative occasions emerged to complement or rival these regional days. Some of the most prominent national days, for instance Thanksgiving Day in Canada, Delville Day in South Africa and Anzac Day in Australia, had important religious dimensions, and the involvement of churches in these occasions has received scholarly attention.46 Scholars of modern Britain and its empire wrote little about special worship because the concerns of modern historical studies lay elsewhere. These events seemed to be part of a history of institutions and religious and political leaders, and had little place in the sociological and cultural approaches that came to dominate religious histories.47 Historians who did notice the colonial traditions of special and community-wide worship tended to describe such occasions as embarrassing relics or ‘remnants’ of an old ‘establishment’ era of colonial development.48 The nationalist Australian historians of the 1960s and 1970s overlooked special acts of worship because such supposedly British imports and old-world survivals sat awkwardly with what Mark McKenna has called the ‘new narratives of nationhood’ that framed much Australian historical writing.49 More recent social and political developments have also not been conducive to research on colonial special worship. The old foundation celebrations have lost appeal,50 and indigenous communities and other marginalised groups have, with justification, derided other national days, such as Australia Day and Canada Day, as illegitimate colonial impositions. To present special acts of prayer and worship as exclusive, minority and old-fashioned occasions is to misjudge their character and significance. Special worship was dynamic, inclusive, flexible and attuned to the particular colonies’ needs and realities. For instance, how states ordered these occasions changed as governments became more sensitive of competing interests. Where once they commanded populations to observe special days of worship, in the later nineteenth century they exhorted, invited and recommended. Like the foundation days that commemorated the birth of colonies,

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Introduction 13

special occasions of worship often had a multi-faith, multi-ethnic and crossclass reach; certainly, they did not have the kind of specificity of appeal that characterised other holidays, such as the monarch’s birthday, or titular saint days.51 That many acts of special worship came about through public pressure is just one indication of special worship’s popular appeal. That said, assessing the extent and quality of observances is difficult, and some causes and some types of public worship had greater appeal than others. Occasions of special prayer and contrition set aside for calamities distant from the colonies, such as the Irish famine of the later 1840s, often resulted in limited observances, possibly because colonists wondered what the catastrophe had to do with them. By contrast, there is much evidence that the thanksgivings appointed for the main royal events drew large and varied colonial publics that stretched beyond white Europeans and Christians. This book shows that a host of imperial officials, politicians, clergy and laypeople had a hand in inventing and reinventing special worship so that it suited colonial conditions; this partly explains why special worship was in step with social, cultural and political developments in colonial societies. Days of thanksgiving, for example, could encourage inhabitants to reflect on the origins, history, progress and destiny of distinctive colonies and peoples. In some territories, such feelings of regional identity and mission cohered into a ‘colonial nationalism’.52 But special worship was not just about patriarchal white celebration. Days of special prayer elicited different emotional responses to foundation anniversaries. On days of ‘fasting’ and ‘humiliation’, called in response to calamities, clergy tried to make sense of what they considered to be divine punishment, and expressed feelings of anxiety, shame and guilt. A Canadian Presbyterian, speaking on a national fast day in 1855, thought the Crimean War was ‘national retribution’ for the crimes of empire, notably the introduction into Africa and India ‘of such evil customs and of such articles of commerce as were sure to prove a curse and not a blessing’.53 Marginalised communities might use acts of special worship, notably those for royal occasions, to claim an inclusive identity as subjects of the imperial monarchy. It would also be incorrect to assume that the religious character of special occasions of worship made them less ‘national’ than days of celebration and commemoration. Indeed, it was because they linked religion and colonial nationality, and provided precedents for doing so, that special acts of worship were fundamental to the genesis and development of other kinds of civic-religious celebration, of which Anzac Day is a good example. The first two chapters explore the aims of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities that decided which events were worthy of special worship. Chapter 1 uses colonial government records to examine how special worship was called and for what reasons. Chapter 2, which considers how

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the churches responded to special worship, argues that special occasions could strengthen relations between churches and states and encourage interactions between faith groups. Chapter 3 considers popular and institutional observances and shows that there was much agreement about the meaning of events, the operations of divine providence and the purpose of prayer. Chapter 4 considers how clergy, in their sermons, conceptualised the colonial communities that came together through public prayers. The final two chapters address the two causes that dominated special worship towards the end of the period. The first – natural calamity, more specifically drought – emphasised the distinctiveness of regions of empire. Special acts of worship might stimulate public reflection and debate about the causes of dry spells, the relationship between human actions and climate change, and the environmental consequences of colonisation. The analysis of the second kind of event, those for royalty, provides a fitting coda to a book on imperial community, as it demonstrates that for all empire’s diversity there were common causes that could, however fleetingly, bring cosmopolitan peoples together in a common act. Although the book emphasises the cohesive quality of special worship,54 it is recognised that such occasions might exacerbate conflicts between ethnicities or faith groups. Crises have a tendency to emphasise and exaggerate a society’s pre-existing inequalities, divisions and antagonisms, and a recent writer notes that ‘prayer, the most intimate spiritual activity, can when practised communally be an explosive political topic’.55 Days of fasting and humiliation always had a divisive quality: these were moments when commentators identified a society’s ‘collective failings’ and where blame was attributed.56 People might interpret signs, providences and bad events differently, and collective prayer could be moments to criticise rulers and protest against discriminatory legislation.57 Special worship might also reveal the absence of community sentiment. Not everyone accepted that special worship was necessary, and those who did not participate might be branded as social ‘others’. The Australian history of prayer in times of drought reveals that colonial societies did not always agree on what was important or share a sense of common purpose. Attachments to denominations, regions and other collectives – alternative ‘we’ and ‘us’ groupings – might trump those to new colonial nations. The Black Canadians who observed thanksgivings for Union victories during the American Civil War58 demonstrate that allegiances and identities were multifaceted and stretched across political borders. Yet as this book shows, colonial special worship survived and retained appeal because it was adapted to new demands, ­complexities and challenges.



Introduction 15

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Notes  1 Library and Archives Canada [LAC], R-70–1, A. King to W. L. MacKenzie King, 8 March 1949.   2 Public Archives of Nova Scotia [PANS], 10,348, C. Inglis to the archbishop of Canterbury, 18 March 1789.   3 P. Williamson et al., National Prayers [NP]: special worship since the Reformation. Volume III: worship for national and royal occasions in the United Kingdom, 1871–2016 (Woodbridge, 2020), p. xlix. Also N. Mears et al., NP, I: special prayers, fasts and thanksgivings in the British Isles, 1533–1688 (Woodbridge, 2013); P. Williamson et al., NP, II: general fasts, thanksgivings and special prayers in the British Isles, 1689–1870 (Woodbridge, 2017). The annual occasions are considered in a fourth volume (forthcoming).   4 NP, II, pp. lvi–lviii.   5 NP, II, pp. cxxxvii–cxlix; NP, III, pp. cxxiii–cxxx.   6 H. Stout, The New England Soul: preaching and religious culture in colonial New England (New York, 1986); S. Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, WI, 1978); N. Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607–1876 (Cambridge, 2007). See W. Johnston, National Thanksgivings and Ideas of Britain 1689–1816 (Woodbridge, 2020) for the British tradition of thanksgiving sermons.   7 J. Hardwick, ‘Special days of worship and national religion in the Australian colonies, 1790–c.1914’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History [JICH], 45:3 (2017), 365–90; J. Hardwick, ‘Fasts, thanksgivings and senses of community in nineteenth-century Canada and the British Empire’, Canadian Historical Review, 98:4 (2017), 675–703; J. Hardwick and P. Williamson, ‘Special worship in the British Empire: from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries’, Studies in Church History [SCH], 54 (2018), 260–80. References to isolated special days of worship appear in studies of colonial responses to drought and disease, e.g. D. Garden, Droughts, Floods and Cyclones: El Niños that shaped our colonial past (Melbourne, 2009), pp. 44, 66, 152, 179, 248, 288; G. Bilson, A Darkened House: cholera in nineteenth-century Canada (Toronto, 1980).   8 The term ‘nonconformists’ is improperly used in colonial contexts where there was no established church: the term has an English origin and identifies those who did not conform to the Church of England. The term is used in the book to refer to English Protestants who did not identify with Anglicanism.   9 F. Turner, ‘Rainfall, plagues, and the Prince of Wales: a chapter in the conflict  of  religion and science’, Journal of British Studies [JBS], 13:2 (1974), 46–65. 10 K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: studies in popular beliefs in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England (Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. 133–46. 11 Turner, ‘Rainfall’, 48, 52. 12 W. Cochran, A Sermon Preached in the Church at Falmouth (Halifax, 1793), pp. 6–7.

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13 D. Cole, ‘The problem of “nationalism” and “imperialism”’, JBS, 10:2 (1971), 160–82; T. Pietsch, ‘Rethinking the British world’, JBS, 52:2 (2013), 441–63; P. Buckner, ‘“Limited Identities” revisited: regionalism and nationalism in Canadian history’, Acadiensis, 30:1 (2000), 12. 14 C. Reed, Royal Tourists, Colonial Subjects and the Making of the British World, 1860–1911 (Manchester, 2016), chapter 3. 15 A. Thompson, ‘The languages of loyalism in South Africa, c. 1870–1914’, English Historical Review [EHR], 118:477 (2003), 622. 16 This approach, and a representative literature, is surveyed in S. Potter, British Imperial History (London, 2015), pp. 114–16. The current book seeks to show how a ‘British world’ approach does not necessarily entail the neglect of ‘diversity’, or the privileging of a single ‘British’ identity, as has been recently argued: R. Bright and A. Dilley, ‘After the British world’, Historical Journal, 60:2 (2017), 547–68. 17 N. Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607–1876 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 5–6; D. Akenson, God’s Peoples: covenant and land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster (Ithaca, NY, 1992). 18 A. Curthoys, ‘Expulsion, exodus and exile in white Australian historical mythology’, Journal of Australian Studies, 23:61 (1999), 3–5. 19 Thompson, ‘Languages of loyalism’, 623; M. Lake, ‘“Such Spiritual Acres”: Protestantism, the land and the colonisation of Australia, 1790–1850’ (PhD dissertation, University of Sydney, 2008). 20 M. McKenna, ‘Monarchy: from reverence to indifference’, in D. Schreuder and S. Ward (eds), Australia’s Empire (Oxford, 2010), pp. 261–86; B. Porter, British Imperial: what the empire wasn’t (London, 2016), chapter 1. 21 NP, II, pp. lxxxvi–xci. 22 Take, for instance, Alison Games’s comment, made in reference to the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, that ‘for migrants to colonies, … the new overpowered the old in the emergence of new cultures’: ‘Migration’, in D. Armitage and M. Braddick (eds), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 48. 23 The term ‘national’ can confuse: the ‘nation’ might refer to England and Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the United Kingdom of Great Britain (from 1800, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland), the empire as a whole, or, as was increasingly common in the nineteenth century, individual colonies. In most cases, the terms ‘colony-wide’ and ‘community-wide’ are used in place of ‘national’ to capture this sense of comprehension and to avoid confusion. 24 F. Deconinck-Brossard, ‘Acts of God, acts of men: providence in seventeenthand eighteenth-century England and France’, SCH, 41 (2005), 356–75. 25 For statistics on the principal religious denominations of the settler colonies, see H. Carey, God’s Empire: religion and colonialism in the British world, c. 1801–1908 (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 32–7. 26 Results of a Census of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope, as on the Night of Sunday, the 5th April, 1891 (Cape Town, 1892), p. 111. 27 NP, II, p. cxlvi.

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Introduction 17

28 C. Petley, ‘“Devoted Islands” and “That Madman Wilberforce”: British pro-slavery patriotism during the age of abolition’, JICH, 39:3 (2011), 393–415. 29 M. Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño famines and the making of the third world (London, 2001). 30 Complete lists of colonial occasions of special worship, extending to 1953, can be found at https://www.specialworshipbritainandempire.com/. 31 J. M. Bumsted, ‘The cultural landscape of early Canada’, in B. Bailyn and P. Morgan (eds), Strangers within the Realm: cultural margins of the first British Empire (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991), p. 392. 32 C. Berger, ‘The True North, Strong and Free’, in P. Russell (ed.), Nationalism in Canada (Toronto, 1966), pp. 3–26. 33 P. Williamson, ‘State prayers, fasts and thanksgivings: public worship in Britain 1830–1897, Past & Present, 200:1 (2008), 163–4, 166–7. 34 Ibid., 160. Also, P. Williamson, ‘National days of prayer: the churches, the state and public worship in Britain, 1899–1957’, EHR, 128:531 (2013), 323–66, for the evolution of national acts of worship. 35 A. Atkinson, ‘How do we live with ourselves? The Australian national conscience’, www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/archive/2016/185-september2016-no-384/3531-how-do-we-live-with-ourselves-the-australian-national-con science-by-alan-atkinson, accessed 4 August 2019. Also, M. Lake, The Bible in Australia: a cultural history (Sydney, 2018). 36 B. Hilton, The Age of Atonement: the influence of evangelicalism on social and economic thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 182, 268; Williamson, ‘State prayers’, 155–6. 37 1866 was the last time a British government authorised a national act of special worship for an event with ‘natural’ causes, in this case cattle disease: A. Raffe, ‘Nature’s scourges: the natural world and special prayers, fasts and thanks­ givings, 1543–1866’, SCH, 46 (2010), 237–47. 38 A. Clarke, ‘Feasts and fasts: holidays, religion and ethnicity in nineteenth-­ century Otago’ (PhD dissertation, University of Otago, 2003); Clarke, ‘“With one accord rejoice on this glad day”: celebrating the monarchy in nineteenthcentury Otago’, New Zealand Journal of History, 36 (2002), 137–69. 39 Clarke, ‘Feasts and fasts’, chapter 4. 40 J. Beattie, ‘Science, religion, and drought: rainmaking experiments and prayers in North Otago, 1889–1911’, in J. Beattie et al. (eds), Climate, Science, and Colonization: histories from Australia and New Zealand (New York, 2014), pp. 137–56. Clarke, ‘Feasts and fasts’, pp. 219, 221. 41 Government Gazette of the State of NSW, 19 February and 21 August 1919. 42 NP, III, pp. lxvii, cxxv, cxxvii. 43 W. DeLoss Love, The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England (Boston, MA, 1895). 44 E.g. M. Hayday and R. Blake (eds), Celebrating Canada, Volume 1: holidays, national days, and the crafting of identities (Toronto, 2016). 45 R. Foster and A. Nettelbeck, ‘Proclamation Day and the rise and fall of South

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Australian nationalism’, in R. Foster and P. Sendziuk (eds), Turning Points: chapters in South Australian history (Kent Town, 2012), pp. 48–62. 46 B. Nasson, ‘Delville Wood and South African Great War commemoration’, EHR, 119:480 (2004), 62; P. Stevens, ‘“Righteousness Exalteth a Nation”: ­religion, nationalism, and Thanksgiving Day in Ontario, 1859–1914’, in Hayday and Blake (eds), Celebrating Canada, Volume 1, pp. 54–82, M. Gladwin, ‘Anzac Day’s religious custodians’, in T. Frame (ed.), Anzac Day Then & Now (Sydney, 2016), pp. 90–111. 47 P. Williamson and M. Grimley, ‘Introduction: the Church of England, the British state and British politics during the twentieth century’, in T. Rodger et al. (eds), The Church of England and British Politics in the Twentieth Century (Woodbridge, 2020), p. 5. 48 R. Ely, Unto God and Caesar: religious issues in the emerging Commonwealth, 1891–1906 (Carlton, 1976), p. 24. 49 M. McKenna, ‘The history anxiety’, in A. Bashford and S. Macintyre (eds), The Cambridge History of Australia. Volume 2: the Commonwealth of Australia (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 574, 576. 50 Declining public interest in South Australia’s Proclamation Day (28 December) and foundation days in Victoria and Queensland is noted in Foster and Nettelbeck, ‘Proclamation Day’, pp. 48–9, 51–2, 60. 51 The tribalism of nineteenth-century Australian holidays is the theme of K. Inglis, The Australian Colonists: an exploration of social history 1788–1870 (Melbourne, 1974), chapter 4. 52 Foster and Nettelbeck, ‘Proclamation Day’, p. 60; Cole, ‘The problem of “nationalism” and “imperialism”’. 53 T. Wardrope, The Present War (Ottawa, 1855), p. 24. For settler guilt, see J.  Mitchell, In Good Faith? Governing indigenous Australia through God, charity and empire, 1825–1855 (Canberra, 2011). For a different view, one that takes issue with the idea that imperialism was a ‘self-correcting system, constitutively plagued by a sense of its own wrongness’, see P. Gopal, Insurgent Empire: anticolonial resistance and British dissent (London, 2019), p. 51. 54 In this sense the book follows A. Duiveman’s work on Dutch special acts of worship: ‘Praying for (the) community: disasters, ritual and solidarity in the eighteenth-century Dutch republic’, Social and Cultural History, 16:5 (2019), 543–60. 55 Consider the political and racial tensions revealed by cattle plague in 1890s southern Africa: C. van Onselen, ‘Reactions to rinderpest in southern Africa, 1896–97’, Journal of African History, 13:3 (1972), 473–88; P. Phoofolo, ‘Epidemics and revolutions: the rinderpest epidemic in late nineteenth-century southern Africa’, Past & Present, 138 (1993), 112–43. N. MacGregor, Living with the Gods: on beliefs and peoples (London, 2019), p. 137. 56 W. Johnston, National Thanksgivings and Ideas of Britain 1689–1816 (Woodbridge, 2020), p. 4. 57 For modern parallels, see S. Dube, ‘Praying for change in the nations: prayer, politics, and power in sub-Saharan Africa’, Journal of Church and State (forthcoming). 58 Globe [Toronto], 4 August 1863.

1

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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

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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

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Calls to prayer 21

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

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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 empirewide 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 What also survived into the second empire was a distinctive style of order that had first emerged in some American colonies in the seventeenth

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Calls to prayer 23

century. In Britain, royal orders were addressed to everyone, but they had an unreal quality as they presumed that everyone belonged to an established church. Because of this, and because the two Anglican establishments, the Churches of England and Ireland,16 used prescribed liturgies, orders issued in England and Ireland contained instructions to senior Anglican clergy to prepare appropriate forms of prayer for the occasion (in Scotland, orders took a different form and were addressed to ministers in general: this was because the Church of Scotland had no liturgy and so instructions to senior clergy were not needed). Orders in this style continued until the 1850s.17 But from an early date, colonial authorities issued orders that were adapted to the varied religious makeup of their settlements. Those in the northeastern American colonies issued proclamations that were addressed in non-denominational terms to all ‘ministers and people’.18 In some colonies the state followed the English example and ordered the people to observe fasts and thanksgivings (and threatened those who failed to do so), but elsewhere, such as in New Hampshire, states came to consider such forms of address inappropriate and merely invited participation.19 The inclusive style of proclamation became the norm in areas marked by religious pluralism, and in time non-denominational orders would be adopted wherever Anglican influence was weak, and where non-Protestants, and people of non-British origin, made up most of the population. Special acts of worship in this early period could express a sense of both connection and separation.20 Colonial authorities had the autonomy to set aside days for numerous regional causes. By the late seventeenth century, the New England colonies had added to the occasional days for special causes a tradition of annual fasts and thanksgivings. Fasts took place in spring, as it was supposed that through supplication and confession of sins people might encourage God to send good weather and good harvests. Thanksgivings happened in the autumn, to coincide with the harvest. The fast day was a conventional response to times of anxiety in fragile and vulnerable societies: on such days, elite authorities hoped, people would abstain from food and drink and implore God’s intervention through attendance at public worship and by private prayer and personal acts of penitence. According to one scholar, such rituals expressed a sense of corporate identity, provided reassurance in a dangerous environment, and ‘recapitulated the great cycle of sinning and repentance’ that Puritan men and women ‘passed through not once but many times in lifelong warfare against sin’.21 Governments, congregations and communities also set aside days for sudden and unpredictable events, such as storms, bad harvests, civil contentions and frontier wars. Governors in the West Indies appointed fasts after destructive earthquakes and hurricanes, and Nova Scotia (taken by the British in 1713) occasionally observed thanksgivings for good harvests in the 1770s and

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1780s.22 While such occasions focused attention on the shared experiences of smaller, colonial, communities, they did not necessarily weaken a sense of transatlantic community: indeed, long into the eighteenth century North American proclamations tended to gather causes for fasting and thanksgiving together in a list (a Scottish tendency), with British events ranked after or before the causes that were specific to the colony.23 Although some North American colonies continued to observe royal occasions into the 1770s,24 special worship had by this time become a channel through which colonists expressed a sense of separation from Britain. In the mid-1760s American assemblies pushed governors to include the reviled Stamp Act among their causes for fasting and thanksgiving, and from 1774 the revolutionary congresses cultivated a sense of colonial unity, and shared purpose, by ordering fast days, first on the provincial level, then ­continentally.25 Such occasions publicised political allegiances and marked out congregations and religious ministers – Anglican ones in particular – as ‘friends or foes of the American cause’.26 Charles Inglis, the New York rector who would become the empire’s first Anglican bishop, considered it ‘exceedingly grating & disagreeable’ to submit to the authority of the continental Congress and its request for a fast day in May 1776.27 Other ministers did not comply, and many Loyalists, Inglis among them, refused to omit prayers for the British monarchy from Sunday services. Elsewhere the governors of colonies that remained loyal used special worship to encourage the reformation of manners and cement loyalty to the imperial connection. Francis Legge in Nova Scotia issued a suite of proclamations in late 1774 to this end: one proclaimed a thanksgiving; a second enforced sabbath observance and the suppression of vice; a third stamped down on ‘illegal Confederacies, Combinations, [and] public Disorders’.28

Making empire British The imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s demonstrated that special worship did not always strengthen empire or draw communities and colonies closer together. The decentralised nature of special worship continued after the American Revolution. London never told the colonies that the British Isles had observed a day of thanksgiving in 1784 for the American peace, nor was a thanksgiving prayer, issued after George III had been attacked by a female assailant in August 1786, communicated to the ­colonies. Yet the administrators who ran the second empire did not abandon special worship; indeed, the constitutional and political questions thrown up by revolution gave imperial special worship importance and urgency. In the decades after 1783 the authorities in Britain and the colonies

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Calls to prayer 25

tried to drain special worship of any kind of oppositional quality: future occasions observed in overseas territories would replicate or complement those called in the British Isles, and special worship formed part of a wider effort to consolidate empire through the display of Anglicanism, executive authority and imperial patriotism. There were indications that the authorities in London wished to use special worship to strengthen the bonds of empire in the aftermath of revolution. In March 1789, for instance, the home secretary, Lord Sydney, sent Canadian governors the form of prayer that the archbishop of Canterbury had composed following George III’s recovery from illness, and which the Crown authorities had ordered to be used in Anglican places of worship in England and Wales, in Ireland and in Scotland.29 The ‘special prayer’ was a different form of special worship to the day of fasting or thanksgiving, and tended to be appointed for lesser occasions, such as royal births and – as in this case – royal illnesses. While short prayers would be added to ordinary sabbath services, longer special services would supersede normal church worship, but what this meant in practice varied from church to church, and the Crown authorities only had the authority to order special services and prayers in established churches in the British Isles, and in Anglican churches overseas. Special prayers and special services had most relevance to the Church of England, as worship in that church followed the prescribed daily services and prayers (the ‘liturgy’) which were provided in the Book of Common Prayer, as established in law by Parliament through the Act of Uniformity in 1662.30 For moments of acute stress and anxiety, such as when a royal fell ill, the Book of Common Prayer and its ‘occasional’ prayers (for use in times of drought, famine, war, plague and social tension) were deemed insufficient, and so alternative services or prayers had to be supplied in time for the occasion, whether this was a special day in the middle of the week, or a normal Sunday service when the special form of prayer was to be used.31 For much of the period covered in this book, it was understood that only the sovereign, using the prerogative powers as supreme governor of the Church of England, had the authority to order changes to the Book of Common Prayer’s forms of worship (although sometimes the privy council acted on the sovereign’s behalf). The assumption in 1789, and on later occasions, was that royal orders for special prayers extended to the empire, and that colonial churchmen would use the special prayers, as provided in the forms, as a matter of course. The arrangements in 1789 also demonstrated that officials wished to cement colonial attachments to monarchy and to give firmer state backing to the overseas extension of the Church of England, a policy sometimes called the ‘Anglican design’. Members of the Church of Scotland in the colonies might feel themselves obliged as members of an established church

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to follow the orders for special prayers, though for other Presbyterians and nonconformist Protestants the issue was difficult, as such groups rejected on principle orders for worship from civil authorities. And unlike Anglicans, ministers in these churches – and the Church of Scotland – typically conducted worship not by following liturgies and reading aloud set texts, but by offering their own extempore prayers.32 These complications possibly explain why Canadian governments, on receipt of the form of prayer for the King’s recovery, proclaimed days of thanksgiving: setting aside a day would enable ministers of all denominations to offer prayers, whether extempore or prescribed, in their places of worship. Generally, however, in this post-revolutionary period the London authorities did little to involve colonists in these British occasions. Importantly, Sydney did not order the use of the 1789 thanksgiving form. Britain was at war with France from 1793, and every year to 1813 (with a gap during peace in 1802–3) the British Crown authorities appointed fast days in the British Isles to encourage a feeling of shared endeavour and responsibility. Again, no order for colonial observance came from London. Special worship, then, provides little evidence that contemporaries viewed the empire as an integrated whole or thought in terms of ‘global empire’.33 But, as in the earlier period, London was content to devolve responsibility because governors could be relied on to imitate British fasts and thanksgivings in their territories. Such occasions might help nurture a sense of religious solidarity with the British war effort, as well as promote social cohesion in places where the British population was small or scattered, and where the loyalty of the inhabitants was suspect. The Canadian Maritime colonies – still the home of large Roman Catholic and Acadian populations – routinely observed repeats of British fasts during the wars with France from 1793 to 1815, as well as thanksgivings for peace treaties in 1802 and 1815–16.34 The surviving evidence indicates that the Province of Quebec, renamed Lower Canada in 1791, did not observe a thanksgiving until 1799, when naval victories were celebrated. This may have been because of the strength of Catholicism in the region, though it seems the province’s executive council was hesitant about special occasions, as it was assumed in this colony that governors had no power to appoint acts of worship or to order bishops to introduce changes to the Book of Common Prayer. In 1793, for instance, the council prevented a colonial bishop from including prayers for lieutenant governors to the usual daily services.35 Upper Canada, like Quebec, occasionally observed the wartime days of fasting and thanksgiving, but never routinely, possibly because news took a long time to travel there, and because, as the province’s senior official noted in 1799, the colony had so few Church of England clergy that such occasions could not be effective.36

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Table 1  The principal British Canadian colonies mentioned in the text Foundation as British colony

Responsible Joined larger selfterritorial entity government before 1867 Confederation

Joined as Province of Dominion of Canada Confederation

1713

1848

n/a

1867

1854

n/a

1867

Island of St. 1769 (renamed 1851 Prince Edward’s John/Prince Edward’s Island Island, 1799)

n/a

1873

Cape Breton

1784+

Reunited to Nova Scotia, 1820

Quebec

1763 (renamed Lower Canada, 1791)

1848

Combined with 1867 Upper Canada to form Province of Canada, 1841 (renamed Canada East)

Upper Canada

1791*

1848

Combined with 1867 (renamed Lower Canada to form Province Ontario) of Canada, 1841 (renamed Canada West)

1855

Nova Scotia

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New Brunswick 1784

+ +

Newfoundland

1713

n/a

1949

Red River Colony/ Manitoba

1812

n/a

1870 (renamed Manitoba)

Vancouver Island

1849

United 1871 (as with British British Columbia, 1866 Columbia)

British Columbia

1858

United with Vancouver Island, 1866

1871

* Separated from Province of Quebec + Separated from Nova Scotia

Repeats of British occasions seem to have been even less frequent elsewhere in the empire. The British settlements in Australia observed thanksgivings in 1790 for George III’s recovery from illness and in 1806 for victory at Trafalgar (the state ordered convicts to church, although happily

28

Prayer, providence and empire Table 2  Britain’s Australian colonies

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Foundation as Responsible Joined Australian British colony self-government Commonwealth New South Wales Van Diemen’s Land/Tasmania Western Australia South Australia Victoria Queensland Northern Territory Australian Capital Territory

1788 1825* 1829 1834 1851* 1859* 1911+ 1911*

1855 1854 1890 1856 1855 1859 1978 n/a

1901 1901 1901 1901 1901 1901 1911 1911

* Separated from New South Wales + Separated from South Australia

on each occasion they received full rations and a holiday). The many other British fasts and thanksgivings of the Napoleonic period seemed not to have been observed, probably because news took too long to reach the antipodes. The Cape Colony, taken by Britain in 1795, and settled permanently from 1806, offered thanksgiving prayers for a failed assassination attempt on George III in December 1800; the colony also repeated a British fast in September 1813. One reason why the executive authorities in Canada’s Maritime colonies appointed so many occasions of special worship was because they could work closely with colonial Anglican bishops.37 Charles Inglis of Nova Scotia (appointed 1787) routinely petitioned the governors in his diocese to issue proclamations that repeated British occasions of special worship. That so much was left to local initiative – Inglis acted in the 1790s after reading about British fasts in English newspapers – points to the absence of much central planning or coordination in the Church of England as well as by the state: a sense of imperial unity was to be cultivated through common attachment to a monarch, and through informal as opposed to official connections and practices.38 It is noteworthy, however, that on occasion in the early 1800s Inglis did receive, direct from the archbishop of Canterbury and later from the royal printers, copies of the forms of prayer used in England on wartime fasts.39 Inglis considered it a matter of great importance that colonial Anglicans follow royal proclamations; after all, it was natural that territories that formed integral parts of the British nation should emulate what was done at home. Moreover, the Church of England in the colonies was, like the mother body at home, duty-bound to follow orders issued by a sovereign who was supreme governor of the Church. It did not matter that colonial communities would observe British occasions months late – in Inglis’s view, such events would give empire a sense of unity and strengthen

Calls to prayer 29

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and extend the authority of an overstretched, poorly staffed and minority established Church.40 Southern Africa also provides evidence that the proliferation of days of prayer was linked to the spread of the Church of England and a renewed concern, among officials at least, that monarchical authority, as expressed in proclamations, had to be made more visible in British settlements overseas. The fast the Cape Colony observed in 1813 during war with France coincided with the arrival, from the privy council, of orders for the inclusion of daily prayers for the Prince Regent to the Book of Common Prayer.41 The publication of orders for the special days and prayers partly reflected the growing ambition of the fledgling British colonial state. That same year the state extended the reach of the colonial circuit courts (apparently to protect indigenous Khoisan labourers) and set about reforming the manners of the disparaged Cape Dutch (a proclamation, issued earlier in 1813, ordered better sabbath observances).42 The fast may also have been an early flowering of an ‘Anglicising’ agenda that would emerge more forcefully in the 1820s.43 Of more immediate significance, however, was the appointment, earlier in 1813, of the Anglican minister, George Hough, to a new civil chaplaincy in the colony. Hough’s presence also meant that special thanksgiving prayers for the British military victory at Vitoria in Spain could be read on successive Sundays in early 1814. Although fasts and thanksgivings were primarily concerned with God’s role in the world, these Napoleonic occasions can also be regarded as political initiatives that added a sense of lustre to colonial executive and royal authority.44 Canadian governors consulted bishops and executive councils when they appointed days of prayer, but not elected assemblies. Table 3  The South African colonies and republics Foundation as Responsible Change in colony/state self-government status

Joins Union of South Africa

Cape of Good Hope 1814 (The Cape Colony)

1872

n/a

1910

Natal

1856*

1893

n/a

1910

Orange Free State

1854

n/a

Orange 1910 River Colony (from 1902)

Transvaal/South African Republic

1857

n/a

Transvaal Colony (from 1902)

Italics denote non-British independent Afrikaner republics * Separated from the Cape Colony

1910

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Proclamations imitated the wording of English royal orders: inhabitants were ‘charged’ and ‘commanded’ to observe fasts and thanksgivings, with threats of ‘pain of suffering’ and God’s ‘wrath and indignation’ for nonobservers. When news of Trafalgar reached NSW in April 1806, everyone was ‘expected to attend’ thanksgiving services, except those who were prevented by ‘sickness and the necessary care of their dwellings’.45 In Canada’s Maritime colonies, where Anglicanism was a minority religion but had established status, governors cast themselves as local versions of the sovereign and supreme governor of the Church of England, with powers to order Anglican bishops to draw up forms of prayer suitable for special occasions.46 Elsewhere gubernatorial and Anglican authority was constrained. Lower and Upper Canadian orders omitted instructions to Anglican clergy, as the large Roman Catholic, nonconformist and American presences in these provinces necessitated the kind of inclusive orders found in parts of colonial America. Executive authorities in these places had to communicate Anglican authority in other ways: in Quebec during the French Wars, members of the executive council arranged for the publication of counterrevolutionary sermons delivered by Anglican bishops. In India and southern Africa – places with minority British populations – orders were also pitched in non-denominational terms.47 Special acts of worship proliferated in the second empire because they reflected orthodox religious and providential beliefs, because they bolstered executive authority, and because they imbued a scattered empire with a sense of unity, loyalty and Britishness. The second empire was governed by pious men who believed that Christianity (though not necessarily a privileged established Church) had to be the basis of a functioning society.48 Still, not every important British occasion was observed everywhere in the empire, and some regions took a long time to develop regional traditions of special worship. Those parts of the second empire where British settlement was small or recent tended to be slow to mark local calamities with special acts of worship. Devastating droughts and floods occurred in NSW throughout the 1790s and early 1800s and would recur in future decades.49 Such disasters prompted much reflection among clergy, colonial officials, newspaper editors, settlers and convicts on the workings of a divine providence that punished some and saved others. Richard Johnson, the colony’s first Anglican chaplain, thought God had sent drought in 1790–1 to punish ‘truly wicked’ European convicts and soldiers.50 Despite the tendency for newly arrived Europeans to read moral lessons into natural world disturbances, there was no attempt in early Australia to organise public displays of repentance, or to summon inhabitants to special prayers.51 In November 1829 Governor Ralph Darling appointed a thanksgiving to mark the end of a three-year drought, and a fast was appointed during a dry spell in 1838.

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Calls to prayer 31

Nothing was done for the droughts that NSW and other Australian colonies experienced in the 1840s and the 1850s, and only from the 1860s would days for humiliation and prayer became conventional responses to drought in the south-eastern Australian colonies. The Cape Colony was frequently subject to drought and frontier war, but before 1848 the only local cause that generated a state-appointed day of prayer was the smallpox epidemic of 1812. The state did not mark the end of slavery in 1834, although some ministers held their own special services.52 The arrival of an Anglican bishop heralded a new era of state special worship. The Cape observed a state thanksgiving in March 1848 after another frontier conflict with the Xhosa, and droughts, war and cattle diseases would be marked regularly thereafter. In British North America, the end of the War of 1812 was marked by thanksgivings in several colonies, and fasts and thanksgivings would be called in Upper and Lower Canada during and after the rebellions of 1837–8. The appointment of fasts in times of civil disturbances connected to the ancient notion that such ­contentions – such ‘sickness in the body social’ – could be healed by fasting and confession (an 1838 Quebec proclamation ordered collective prayers and fasting ‘to heal all our external and internal dissensions’).53 Fasting and corporate prayer and confession remained a common response to diseases, particularly cholera, which, because it carried associations with sin and contamination, seemed to be as much a moral problem as a physical one.54 Cholera fears prompted Canadian governments to appoint special days of worship in 1832, 1833 and 1834. These were not, however, distinctively colonial occasions: cholera thrived on nineteenth-century developments in communication and travelled across the Atlantic world, and most Englishspeaking Atlantic world societies set aside fasts and thanksgivings because it was believed such occasions might protect and reassure their populations. Indeed, one Presbyterian clergyman wrongly assumed that Lower Canada’s 1832 fast day was repeating a previous British occasion and had been ordered by the ‘King of Britain’.55 The slow development of regional traditions is not easily explained, though it could be that evidence on the reasons for appointments of special worship has not survived because it was not written down: in small colonial societies instructions might, for instance, have been issued verbally. That said, governors may have been wary about announcing special prayers in fragmented and cosmopolitan societies that had, like NSW and the Cape, been established for secular and strategic purposes, or those, like eighteenth-century Nova Scotia, which had been settled rapidly by a ­kaleidoscope of ethnic groups. They may also have felt causes could not bridge the divisions of ethnicity, religion, language and – in the Australian convict context in particular – class. It is noteworthy, for instance, that

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controversy marred the 1829 thanksgiving in NSW when it emerged that some masters had made convict servants work on what should have been a holiday.56 Possibly, too, the authorities would not appoint because colonial populations in new settlements were small, insufficiently British and economically unsophisticated – floods in early NSW harmed small groups, and it was only in the 1830s, when the colonial economy focused on wool production, that droughts directly impacted on all settlers, for instance in rising living costs.57 Also, governors appear to have been reticent to set aside days until they had senior Anglican clergy in post. NSW’s first regional occasion, the 1829 thanksgiving after drought, was appointed as there was an Anglican archdeacon – William Grant Broughton – who could compose a form of prayer for the occasion. Local traditions of special worship also developed slowly, as governors believed their key role was to strengthen identifications with Britain and the monarchy among their diverse and remote settlements. The British Empire was to be made more ‘British’ by, among other aspects, replicating metropolitan occasions of worship, not by appointing days for causes that reminded colonists of how different their societies and climates were.58 In 1842 – a year of particular social and political difficulty in Britain – Nova Scotia and New Brunswick expressed a sense of transatlantic solidarity and marked England’s good crop yields with a Sunday day of thanksgiving in late November (thanksgiving prayers for the good harvest had been read in English churches earlier in the year). Governor Charles Darling of the Cape Colony (nephew of Ralph Darling, the Australian governor) told London that he had set aside a fast day for the Crimean War in 1854 because ‘such demonstrations of sympathy and common interest in imperial measures fulfil the salutary purpose of reminding Colonial Dependencies of the ties which bind them to the Mother Country’. Governors elsewhere made it known in proclamations that they had appointed events that had previously been observed in Britain. Generally, however, there remained no strategy for coordinating and synchronising colonial observances: it seems that governors read about the 1854 British occasion accidentally, as the proclamation announcing the metropolitan fast day was included in a Colonial Office communication containing a wartime trade regulation.59 The colonial practice of imitating and repeating British special worship remained a key theme in the 1840s, 1850s and beyond. Royal occasions (attempted assassinations of Queen Victoria and the birth of royal children) and war (the Crimea and Indian ‘Mutiny’) prompted Anglican special prayers and state-appointed days of worship in many colonies in the 1840s and 1850s. The famine in Ireland and Scotland, marked in Britain and Ireland by a fast in March 1847, was observed similarly in Maritime and Atlantic Canada. Observances of the fast that Newfoundland observed

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Calls to prayer 33

after a year of fires, famine and storms in the colony in July 1847 also made mention of the Irish famine and prayer day.60 It was unsurprising that Canada’s Atlantic and Maritime colonies should follow the British example, as many had large Catholic, Irish and Scottish populations, and the region suffered potato blight around the same time: the visitation could, then, reasonably be interpreted as a transatlantic one. Australians did not publicly fast for the suffering Irish, though William Broughton, now bishop of Sydney, composed a special prayer that asked God to remove the ‘dearth and famine’. The Cape Colony had charitable collections for the suffering Irish (to which ‘people of color’ apparently contributed), but no fast.61 After 1850 a separation between colonial and metropolitan traditions of special worship became more pronounced. When cholera returned to Britain in 1848–9 and 1853, government ministers, and Queen Victoria, showed their dislike of traditional forms of state special worship and refused to appoint fast days, although special prayers and a thanksgiving day were appointed during 1849.62 The Governments of Nova Scotia and the Province of Canada (formed when Upper and Lower Canada combined in 1841) followed the British example and appointed thanksgiving days (in both places Anglicans used the same form of prayer as their English counterparts).63 Nova Scotia, by contrast, went further, and appointed days of humiliation in 1849 and 1854 in attempts to ward off the disease. Even colonial occasions that repeated British events had a local relevance: Newfoundland followed the metropolitan example and set aside a day of humiliation for the Crimean War in 1854, but the date chosen was 9 June, the anniversary of a fire that devastated St. John’s, the main town, in 1846.64 Colonial governments appointed days of prayer for regional causes more readily than had previously been the case. Canadian colonies began a tradition of regular harvest thanksgivings after 1859, and Australian and southern African colonies observed days for drought from the 1860s. In the 1850s, some Australian colonies celebrated the coming of self-government by setting aside days of prayer, possibly in an attempt to legitimise – perhaps to sanctify – their new parliaments.65 From mid-century the regional and empire-wide traditions existed side by side, though the balance shifted towards the regional, as colonies became larger and as colonists developed enlarged senses of what made their colony different to metropolitan Britain and other parts of the British world.66

Fragmentation and regionalism So far, this chapter has argued that despite important continuities, colonial special worship took a new direction after American independence. Fasts

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and thanksgivings increasingly reflected the agendas of colonial executives and a fledgling colonial Church of England. This era ended around 1850. The way special worship was ordered, and what it was ordered for, shifted as settler colonies became more established and more pluralistic and as representative forms of government spread. It also mattered that the colonial world contained more clergy, more congregations, more churches and more ecclesiastical authorities. Special worship displayed a voluntary, regional and even democratic character after 1850, and other bodies, not just colonial governors, summoned whole populations to worship. After 1850 special occasions of worship became more voluntary and inclusive. Irish migration to Canada and Australia increased, and nonconformists and Catholic churches became better organised. Proclamations better reflected this religious pluralism. No longer would inhabitants be ordered to observe fasts and thanksgivings, and non-observers ceased to be threatened with civil sanctions and divine punishment. Protestant nonconformists and some Presbyterians had always resented being commanded to fast and pray by civil authorities, and late eighteenth-century records show that some unlucky individuals in Maritime Canada suffered penalties for working on fast days.67 After 1850 colonial proclamations changed in line with developments in Britain and would only ‘exhort’, ‘invite’ and ‘recommend’. The adoption of softer modes of address, principally to accommodate greater religious pluralism, connected to the spread of representative forms of government in the colonies of settlement. In 1850, British parliamentary legislation founded partly-elected legislative councils in NSW, Tasmania and South Australia, and later in the decade the remaining Australian colonies – Western Australia, Victoria and Queensland  – received bicameral parliaments with elected legislative assemblies. The Cape Colony was granted an elected legislature in 1853, though official anxieties about the mix of racial groups in the region meant ‘responsible government’ – that is, control over internal affairs – would not come until the 1870s. Harsher, more commanding, forms of address survived in West Indian colonies with small white populations.68 Special worship also became more inclusive once the colonies of settlement abandoned the old idea that religious unity, or rather allegiance to an established religion, was essential for the viability of the empire. The traditional model of a privileged established church was abandoned, partly because the attempt to build colonial analogues of the established Church of England never worked well. Land had been set aside in Upper Canada and NSW for the exclusive use of the Anglican clergy, but this effort to root Anglicanism in the colonial soil – the so-called ‘clergy reserves’ – m ­ alfunctioned, as such lands were often of poor quality. After 1830, Australian state authorities refused to endow single churches and

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Calls to prayer 35

introduced more equitable systems founded on the principle of multiple establishments. The Canadian clergy reserves were discontinued, the British Parliament reduced the grants it paid to Anglican mission societies and the Church of England lost its monopoly over public education.69 The break with Anglican ascendancy was, however, not complete and vestiges of privileged establishments survived in some places. The last colonial proclamation that contained instructions to an Anglican clergyman to compose special prayers was issued in Nova Scotia in 1857 – this was six years after the Church of England was formally disestablished, when the bishop lost his seat in the legislative council.70 It seems strange that governments of such pluralistic societies should continue to issue orders in the English style (one quarter of Maritime Canada’s 160,000 inhabitants were Presbyterian in 1815). But old forms survived if they had no political significance. Nonconformists had sat in the Nova Scotian assembly since the mid-eighteenth century, Presbyterians received state financial support from the 1790s, and Roman Catholics had the vote and could, after 1827, hold public office. As a Methodist stated in 1849, ‘the command of His Excellency directing the Bishop … to draw up a form of prayer’ was a ‘matter solely between his Lordship and the Governor’.71 Elsewhere the demise of establishments gave special occasions of worship renewed importance; officials considered it desirable for a cosmopolitan and multi-faith imperial public to gather to pray for common, unifying, causes. Colonial societies might still be imagined as unities and collectives. That said, official attitudes did change as governors became increasingly alert to the competing interests in colonial society. From the late 1840s governors only set aside days of special worship for whole communities if causes had general importance, and if requests had the support of a crosssection of the religious public. Robert Gray, Cape Town’s first Anglican bishop, made sure he had the support of the Roman Catholic and Dutch Reformed churches before he asked the Government for a day of humiliation during drought in 1866.72 Some colonial governments associated themselves with national causes but withdrew from special worship. In Victoria from the 1860s, governors issued proclamations that only ordered the closure of public offices so that the ‘Clergy and Ministers of Religion of all Denominations’ had the opportunity to ‘observe such a day as a Day of Humiliation and Prayer’.73 Although civil officials became hesitant, governors still claimed the right to set aside days for communal prayer. In Britain, use of the royal proclamation to order special worship lapsed after 1860 and would only be used on one subsequent occasion, for a peace thanksgiving in 1919.74 It is true that elected politicians came to play a more important role in decision-making in most parts of the settler empire. In the Dominion of Canada (formed when

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the Canadian colonies federated in 1867), prime ministers supervised the appointment of special acts of worship from the 1870s, and from the late nineteenth century in Australia other executive authorities – state premiers and (following federation in 1901) prime ministers – took more responsibility for special worship, both in terms of receiving requests and in ordering and endorsing occasions and inviting people to participate.75 Governors, it is true, might use less elaborate means than proclamations to call communities to prayer: this was the case for a time in southern Africa, as there British traditions of special worship were not customary, and people of British descent formed a marginal element in the population. From the 1840s through to the 1860s, governors used ‘notices’ published in government gazettes (in both English and Dutch) to announce special days of humiliation and thanksgiving. Yet even in southern Africa, gubernatorial authority became more noticeable later in the century: proclamations announced a day of humiliation in 1896 (for rinderpest cattle disease) and thanksgiving days in 1897 and 1902 (for Queen Victoria’s jubilee and Edward VII’s coronation).76 Even the Government of South Australia, a colony with a history of religious voluntarism and equality, issued a proclamation inviting its people to special worship in 1897. The survival – and in some places revival – of the royal proclamation is not easily explained, though it may be connected to the symbolic importance of governors, and the appeal of monarchy in colonial contexts, themes that are developed in Chapter 6. Certainly, the public continued to look to governors to appoint special occasions of worship, and from the 1850s governors received requests for special days from a broader public. Some requests were sent direct to governors; others appeared in newspapers. Drought was frequently cited, as its effects were so generalised, and agriculture remained the basis of colonial prosperity. Yet insect infestation, floods, disease, economic crises, industrial disputes and distant calamities also prompted demands for collective acts of prayer, penitence and ­thanksgiving.77 In the southern African colonies both Dutch and English speakers petitioned governments for special days of worship. In the 1880s and 1890s branches of the ‘Afrikaner Bond’, a Dutch-speaking farmer’s organisation, petitioned the Cape Government in times of drought and cattle disease for state-proclaimed days of humiliation.78 The proliferation of days of prayer after 1850 had much to do with the development of colonial public opinion and how colonists conceptualised their societies. Colonists in NSW had, it is true, demanded the appointment of fasts and thanksgivings during droughts in the 1820s.79 It is revealing, however, that such demands became more common from the 1850s. It could be that migrant clergy and settlers brought with them memories of the numerous fasts, prayers and thanksgivings that were appointed in

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Britain from the 1830s to the 1850s, and evangelical attitudes may have been important too.80 The expansion of the press was another factor, and also significant was that the coming of representative forms of government helped colonists to imagine their societies as collectives and unities. Local events, such as a prolonged drought, might now be regarded as having a religious and moral significance for an entire colonial society. The Sydney Empire recommended a day for humiliation and prayer in 1855 – the year the colony was awarded responsible government – because it considered drought an issue which concerned ‘the whole people’, and which contained a religious significance and obligation ‘which no one can escape’.81 Women sent requests for days of prayer to newspapers and governments from at least the 1890s and possibly before then, too. Though special worship was hardly ‘feminised’82 like other aspects of religious life (public observances continued to be monopolised by male clergy), female leadership in the planning of days of prayer was, by the turn of the century, recognised and expected in some parts of the empire. In early twentieth-century South Africa, for instance, English-speaking and Afrikaner women approached British governors on behalf of towns with requests for dominion-wide days of prayer. As governments usually politely ignored requests from private individuals, those women who called for days of worship demonstrated their status as community leaders, and that their views represented wider opinion. The granddaughter of the South African Methodist missionary pioneer, Barnabas Shaw, alerted the South African Government to her distinguished family heritage when she suggested a day of humiliation during a devastating drought in January 1920. Another English-speaking female petitioner, writing to the Government of the Orange Free State during drought in 1912, sought to strengthen her appeal when she said she was ‘a Resident of a quarter of a century’.83 Evidently, female leadership in religion extended beyond the confines of the home. Requests that had the backing of vocal and powerful interests in colonial society could not be easily ignored. When governments did not appoint acts  of special worship it was because officials considered the proposed causes too controversial, too parochial or too open to abuse. Canadian Anglicans asked for a day of thanksgiving to mark the defeat of the 1885 Métis ­uprising in Saskatchewan, but the request was turned down as the Government feared that a state thanksgiving would anger Francophone Canada: at the time, the rebellion’s leader, the French-speaking Roman Catholic Louis Riel, was standing trial for treason.84 An uncontroversial issue that large Canadian communities could gather around was the harvest. The Province of Canada began a tradition when it appointed a day of thanksgiving for the harvest for a Thursday in November 1859. Civil war in the United States, and further good harvests, prompted Canadian

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thanksgivings in 1860, 1862, 1863 and 1865, and thanksgivings for peace and plenty spread to the Maritime provinces in the same period. Thanksgivings sat well with the optimistic tenor of Canadian public life in the Confederation period, and, of equal importance, most colonists of European descent were familiar with harvest thanksgivings. At times in the 1860s the Canadian Roman Catholic Church ordered thanksgiving masses for its members after abundant crop yields.85 The causes that states marked with special days of prayer were war, royal occasions and regional events – usually happenings in the natural world – that affected a large proportion of the white settler community. Although natural disasters continued after 1850 to be interpreted as divine warnings and judgements, colonial governments generally avoided marking sudden disasters, such as earthquakes, with fasts and thanksgivings. Clergymen read signs of God’s displeasure in the storms and fires that devastated Victoria in November 1849 and Hobart, Tasmania in 1854, but neither event prompted fasts and thanksgivings.86 No colonial government ever marked a commercial depression with a special act of worship (though Newfoundland observed a fast in 1865 when the fishing industry failed), even though crashes continued to be regarded, in some circles, as a ‘special providence’ brought on by corporate sin. Setting aside a day of prayer during a depression was potentially divisive: governments might also be charged with compounding hardship by disrupting work.87 Traumas that killed non-whites in great numbers, such as smallpox in Cape Town in 1882, were not observed. Such occasions did more to entrench feelings of racial animosity than to bring communities together.88 The spread of harvest thanksgivings in Canada also demonstrates how the causes of special prayers narrowed considerably – and became more regional – over the course of the nineteenth century.89 As was the case elsewhere, Canadian civil authorities left it to churches and local authorities to mark disasters and epidemics with special acts of worship. The narrowing range of causes was connected in part to changing attitudes to providence – a subject considered in later chapters. But it also had a political root. Successive governments of the Dominion of Canada recognised that they governed diverse populations and, as westward prairie expansion progressed, an expanding territory. The correspondence of John A. Macdonald, prime minister from 1867 to 1873, shows that federal politicians even worried about appointing dominion-wide thanksgivings, as the land was too large and crop yields could not be good everywhere.90 The process by which special worship was observed for a shrinking range of causes was also evident in the Australian colonies. Although NSW observed a day in response to the influenza pandemic in February 1919 (a day was also nearly called during bubonic plague in April 1900), it was

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drought that dominated. Extreme rainfall variability has been a feature of Australia before European settlement began in 1788, and south-eastern Australia experienced recurrent dry spells throughout the nineteenth century. Drought prompted one or more Australian colonies to appoint days of humiliation and thanksgiving in 1866, 1869, 1876, 1877 and 1878 and on multiple occasions during the ‘Federation’ drought of 1895 to 1903, as well as on several occasions in the twentieth century. The appointment of these occasions reflected the vulnerability felt by settlers in regions with unstable ecologies and variable climates. South African authorities also appointed days of prayer to calm anxious settlers. There is a misconception among some South African historians that English-speaking communities resisted providential explanations, as  well as days of prayer and humiliation. Mordechai Tamarkin’s ­argument that the pressure for days of humiliation in times of cattle disease and drought came almost entirely from Afrikaner farmers is not born out by the evidence. Numerous English-language newspapers congratulated the Government of the Cape Colony when it appointed a ‘solemn fastday’ during the rinderpest epizootic in 1896.91 Indeed, British governments in the two southern African colonies (Natal separated from the Cape Colony in 1856) routinely appointed special occasions of worship in times of c­alamity: days of prayer occurred during droughts in 1859, 1866 and 1878, and after the amaZulu victory at Isandhlwana in 1879. British colonies and the two Afrikaner republics (Transvaal, established 1857, and the Orange Free State, established 1854) developed comparable cultures of state-appointed special worship.92 English-speaking Anglicans in the Transvaal observed days of prayer ordered by the Afrikaner republican governments, and after the 1899–1902 war, British governors of conquered Afrikaner territories continued to order days of humiliation in times of drought.93 This shared culture of special worship was one reason why once the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910, the new federal Government was prepared to call ‘national’ days for drought on Sundays in 1912 and in 1924. The rulers of the largest colonial dominions remained nervous about calling religious holidays. In 1911, Louis Botha, the first prime minister of the newly formed Union of South Africa, would not appoint a day of humiliation during cattle disease as not all parts of the Union suffered, and in such places the occasion would be regarded as ‘no more than another holiday’.94 When Botha added that he preferred to ‘trust the profound religious feeling’ of the population, he gestured to a more profound change in special worship, one that saw colonial governments increasingly leave it to the voluntary sector, local government and the churches to propose and manage special acts of worship.

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From the 1850s there was a marked proliferation in the number of special occasions of worship arranged independently by the churches. Chapter 2 considers the varied reasons for this important development: states preferred to leave spiritual matters to churches, and religious leaders grew more confident. The other important point is that while many of the church occasions related to specific religious and denominational issues, some had a general significance. Early but uncertain attempts in this ­direction occurred at mid-century when Tasmanian ministers tried to organise public fasts to protest against the imperial Government’s plans to continue convict transportation. The day, though not successful (it was not endorsed by Catholic and Anglican leaders, and newspaper editors considered it irreverent to order public penitence for a political issue), pointed to future developments. Not only did it demonstrate that colonial churches anticipated leaving entire colonial communities in collective acts of prayer, it also suggested that days of prayer, and the churches that organised them, might become channels for protest.95 Increasingly, other non-state authorities set aside days for special religious purposes. In the early twentieth century, disfranchised communities in southern Africa organised special days of prayer as a method of resistance. In the past special worship had been used by churches to protest against unpopular legislation (such as vagrancy acts in the Cape Colony in the mid1830s), but the initiative had usually come from white missionaries.96 After 1900 ‘vigilance associations’, formed to defend and extend the rights of African communities, organised days of ‘humiliation and prayer’ to petition God to ‘deliver’ them from their ‘difficulties, oppressions and disabilities’. The circulars that announced such days suggested forms of service for prayer meetings.97 Non-whites observed 31 May 1910 – the day the four South African colonies came into Union – as a day of humiliation, mourning and prayer.98 Significantly, Mahatma Gandhi’s Indian Opinion newspaper reported the 1910 occasions, and there may have been a link between these South African demonstrations and the strike actions, which included days of fasting and prayer, that Gandhi encouraged in India in 1919 to protest against Britain’s draconian response to alleged seditious activity.99 Those who advocated such days among indigenous communities regarded them as a particularly powerful form of protest, as it was a practice and mode of expression familiar to colonisers. A Cape Colony Methodist missionary put this clearly when he recommended a day of humiliation in May 1909 to protest against the retention of white electorates in the new South African Union. ‘A day of humiliation and prayer by the natives in connection with the constitution’, the missionary said, ‘is probably the only and best method of making our Dutch fellow-South Africans in the north’ recognise ‘the exceeding gravity of the burden they impose upon their

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black fellow citizens’. ‘Humiliation days’, the missionary continued, were ‘well understood by Dutch South Africans, who have resorted to them on occasion of national strain and stress’. The preacher thought – not entirely accurately – that British South Africans ‘may not be similarly impressed’, as they were not ‘as devoted as the Dutch to religious observances’.100 Colonial special worship provides little evidence that the British Empire formed a ‘coherent world system’.101 Though colonists occasionally observed special acts of worship for imperial occasions, there was little coordination between territories, and colonists only marked their own calamities. Localised cultures of special worship narrowed visions and generated few opportunities for colonists to cultivate identifications and solidarities that reached across borders. Continental events were rare. The Government of the Dominion of Canada took until 1879 to appoint the first ‘national’ thanksgiving (provinces continued to appoint their own occasions until then, and only in 1877 was the same date observed by all Canadian territories). In Australia in the late 1890s, Protestant churchmen launched a petitioning campaign that sought, among other aims, to give governors general of the new Australian Commonwealth the power to set aside religious days for the whole continent. Although the campaign triumphed when it had a recognition of ‘Almighty God’ included in the constitution, the campaign for national days of prayer failed, mostly because handing governors such powers clashed with that part of the constitution which ruled against federal authorities ‘imposing any religious observance’ on the continental population.102 Australian colonies hardly ever coordinated inter-colonial days of humiliation and thanksgiving, and between federation in 1901 and the later stages of the First World War the Commonwealth Government left it to the state premiers and lieutenant governors to proclaim such occasions. All this is evidence of the persistence of a ‘colonial nationalism’ and a ‘provincial spirit’ in empire.103

Unifying empire Yet acts of special worship could still remind colonists that they inhabited a connected empire. In the later nineteenth century, the Crown authorities and Colonial Office made more direct and frequent efforts to notify colonies of British occasions of worship and to encourage colonial participation. In some respects this is curious, as this was now an empire of local agency: colonies enjoyed greater political and ecclesiastical self-government, Anglican churches had divided themselves into metropoles, provinces and dioceses, and religious diversity was officially recognised.104 Yet from the 1870s authorities that had previously hesitated to appoint general acts of special

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worship now encouraged colonial occasions and observances. The Colonial Office coordinated holidays and special days of worship for royal jubilees, funerals and coronations. Importantly, royalty became more visible in colonial special worship: not only was monarchy the subject of most imperial occasions, but sovereigns also stepped forward to promote and encourage empire-wide observances of special acts of worship. Even the Church of England made an unlikely comeback. The late Victorian and Edwardian periods witnessed, then, the reprise of procedures and styles of special worship last seen in the eighteenth century, but now updated to reflect changed political and religious circumstances. After 1870, special occasions of worship promised to connect British and imperial communities in new ways. Empire had been a subject for special worship in the British Isles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but there was a new emphasis on imperial and colonial causes in British special worship in this period, and metropolitan newspapers took more notice of how colonial communities, particularly those in India, marked special ­occasions of worship.105 British congregations offered prayers for the Abyssinian expedition in 1868, the royal tour of India in 1875 and 1876, the Indian famine in 1877, for military success in Egypt in 1882, and during the Sudan campaign in 1885. Though authorities within the Church of England organised and appointed some of these occasions, proposals came from prime ministers in 1868 and 1882, and on several occasions the sovereign’s approval and permission was sought.106 Special worship, therefore, may well have been another means by which politicians exploited and encouraged popular enthusiasm for empire. It is significant, for instance, that Benjamin Disraeli, the politician most associated with popular imperialism, proposed the 1868 Abyssinian thanksgiving prayer.107 The second key feature of special worship after 1870 was the number of occasions for royal events. As Philip Williamson points out, this was the beginning of a period in which special prayers for royal occasions, many of them new and innovative, proliferated. In mainland Britain, royal tours, births, jubilees, coronations and deaths were marked by thanksgiving prayers and national services, and by public and bank holidays.108 In 1872 communities across the empire observed thanksgiving days for the recovery of the Prince of Wales, and future royal events – the 1887 and 1897 jubilees, and coronations in 1902 and 1911 – would also be great imperial occasions. Although colonial communities wanted to participate in these British occasions, a sense of connection took time to emerge. The thanksgivings observed across the empire in early 1872 to mark the recovery of the Prince of Wales from typhoid belonged in some respects to the old tradition of imperial special worship, as there was no attempt to coordinate colonial observances. Colonial governments and churches ordered special days

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Calls to prayer 43

and prayers when they received telegraphic news, but no colony received an official notification of the British prayers, services or holiday (though the Colonial Office had planned some kind of encouragement, as it asked the royal printers for copies of the form of prayer).109 When news of the Prince’s recovery reached the Australian colonies, Anglican and Roman Catholic bishops quickly ordered thanksgiving prayers and hymns, Jewish and Protestant churches observed special services, and governors set aside midweek days of general thanksgiving in late February and early March.110 Curiously, some of the colonies closest to Britain, and which received news quickly, responded slowly. Nova Scotia, linked to Britain by transatlantic cable from 1866, observed a day of thanksgiving on the same day as a bank holiday in London (27 February), but the Province of Canada, which received news of the British thanksgivings within hours, did not observe one until Monday 15 April. The governors of British colonies in southern Africa set aside days on 3 April (Cape Colony) and 9 May (Natal). Improvements in communications, particularly the spread of submarine telegraph cables and faster steamships, made it possible to obtain better coordination of acts of imperial thanksgiving. These developments resulted in genuinely imperial acts of prayer, observed across the empire on the same or proximate days.111 For Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee in 1887, the Colonial Office despatched copies of the English order and form of prayer to governors, ostensibly for their ‘information’, but in the expectation that colonial authorities and churches would act on these and organise public holidays and thanksgiving services. A message from the Queen to the inhabitants of empire (of every faith), asking that thanks to God be offered during thanksgiving services ‘for the many mercies vouchsafed during Her Reign’, was later telegraphed to governors.112 The royal thanksgivings suggested that a diverse empire could be summoned to collective worship for a common cause. The empire’s peoples also came together for religious purposes in times of war. During a dark period of the South African War, Anglican churches in Australia, Canada and New Zealand (and Scotland) joined an imperial ‘day of intercession’ – Sunday 11 February 1900 – that had been arranged by English Anglicans.113 In Britain in late 1914 the leaders of the Catholic and Protestant churches in England and Scotland accepted an invitation from the archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, and worked together to organise simultaneous services of intercession on the same Sunday in January 1915. The result, as Williamson explains, was the United Kingdom’s first ‘national day of prayer’.114 The occasion had a community-wide appeal as it was organised by the leaders of all the main churches (not just those of the established churches), and it was endorsed (though not ordered) by the monarch. This and subsequent wartime days of intercession also had an imperial c­ haracter

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in the sense that the empire’s Christian and non-Christian faith groups followed the lead of the home churches and organised simultaneous days of prayer and intercession, with governors and governors general lending support by issuing notices or proclamations that recommended special services or set aside days. Empire-wide days organised by the churches and encouraged by the King were observed on Sundays closest to New Year throughout the First World War. The involvement of monarchy in these occasions would have been known, and was made explicit in Canada, as there governors general used proclamations to call the Dominion to prayer.115 Yet such imperial occasions competed with growing attachments to distinctive colonial nationalisms, and in the final year of the war the Governments of Australia and Canada – though not South Africa – ­proclaimed or recommended special days or special services to mark their own military and political anniversaries. On such occasions, the dominions acknowledged the c­ ontributions, and sacrifices, made by the colonies to the British war effort.116 Wartime days of prayer could be problematic occasions. In 1914 and 1915 the prime minister of Australia, Alfred Deakin, batted back numerous requests for national days of prayer, believing the Commonwealth Government should not intrude on church matters (British prime ministers also refused to appoint state and royal occasions for the same reason).117 Yet as the war progressed, and the military situation worsened, the Australian Government took more responsibility for proposing and organising wartime days of prayer. In December 1915 and again in December 1916, the Commonwealth Government issued appeals to the heads of churches that they set aside Sundays for special prayer and intercession, and for later occasions of special worship in 1917 and 1918 it addressed the public more directly, with printed notices, appeals, proclamations and a letter from the King.118 Special worship’s connection with monarchy – more evident towards the end of the war – may have boosted the appeal of these occasions. The day of intercession observed across the empire in January 1918 was, for instance, cast as the ‘personal initiative of the King’. The Australian Commonwealth Government printed the King’s appeal for empire-wide prayers as an official order in a gazette, while the Canadian Government went further, publishing the appeal and proclaiming a day of prayer.119 A still more striking expression of monarchical authority came in July 1919 when George V issued a proclamation that asked all the empire’s ‘Spiritual Authorities and ministers of religion’ to join in a ‘great and common act of worship’ and observe thanksgiving services for the Versailles peace treaty. This occasion, the first time a royal proclamation had ordered a special day of worship for the whole empire, suggests the ‘association of monarchy and empire’ became stronger after the First World War.120



Calls to prayer 45

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Conclusion Much of the essential form and purpose of special acts of worship changed little over the centuries. Monarchical authorities that had long issued orders and invitations to special worship continued to do so well into the twentieth century. This reveals much about the reach and popularity of royal and gubernatorial authority in the colonial world, topics to which Chapter 6 will return. This chapter has, nevertheless, emphasised important shifts in how special acts of worship – whether ‘days’ or ‘prayers’ – were ordered and in what such occasions were ordered for. Colonial Governments ceased to order or encourage special prayers as they separated themselves from the Church of England. The special day continued as the characteristic form of special worship in the colonial world. It is unsurprising that in diverse and pluralistic colonial societies these days developed an inclusive and multi-denominational character. More interesting is a narrowing of the range of causes that resulted in special acts of worship. These developments are important for what they reveal both about senses of empire and community, and about the changing outlook of colonial states. Governors and elected politicians recognised that colonial publics had become more diverse and vocal; they also appreciated that special worship had the potential to emphasise differences between communities as much as their commonalities. That the inhabitants of the nineteenth-century British world ceased to observe occasions of special worship for remote tragedies and sufferers was also significant: most acts of special worship in the later empire were specific to colonies and concentrated attention on regional identities and attachments. The other big change was that, by late in the century, the civil authorities passed much of the responsibility for initiating, organising and publicising special worship to the churches. The next chapter describes how churches increasingly organised acts of worship for entire colonial populations. Indeed, the popularity of special worship in the late Victorian period indicates that institutional religion may well have been a more important force at the end of the nineteenth century than at the start.

Notes 1 Sydney Morning Herald [SMH], 30 March and 17 April 1876. 2 Similar questions arose in metropolitan Britain and are analysed in Williamson, ‘State prayers’; NP, II, pp. lxvii–lxxviii, xci–xcviii; NP, III, pp. ci–cviii. 3 SMH, 14 April 1876.

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4 Hardwick and Williamson, ‘Special worship’, 260–80; NP, II, pp. cxxxvii–cl; NP, III, pp. lx–lxxxix. 5 For arrangements in Britain, NP, II, pp. lxv–lxxviii, and NP, III, pp. xcii–ci. 6 E. Gould, ‘A virtual nation: Greater Britain and the imperial legacy of the American Revolution’, American Historical Review, 104:2 (1999), 476–89. 7 P. J. Marshall, ‘Britain without America – a second empire?’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume II: The eighteenth century (Oxford, 1998), pp. 576–95. 8 Ibid., p. 593. 9 A. Taylor, American Colonies: the settling of North America (New York, 2002), chapters 13 and 18. 10 NP, II, pp. cxxxviii–cxliii; Hardwick and Williamson, ‘Special worship’, ­263–66. 11 For the 1759 and 1763 occasions, NP, II, pp. 518–20, 551–3. 12 P. J. Marshall, Remaking the British Atlantic: the United States and the British Empire after independence (Oxford, 2012), pp. 295–6. 13 NP, II, p. cxlii. 14 A 1689 Massachusetts fast-day proclamation referenced the ‘present Circumstances of the State of Europe’: www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.03302000/. A March 1756 Connecticut proclamation included the ‘amazingly Awful’ earthquakes in ‘diverse Places’ as a reason for fasting: www.loc.gov/resource/ rbpe.00301000/?sp=1, both accessed 14 April 2020. 15 A. Moniz, From Empire to Humanity: the American Revolution and the origins of humanitarianism (Oxford, 2016), p. 7. 16 After the Irish union in 1801 the two churches combined to form the United Church of England and Ireland. 17 Williamson, ‘State prayers’, 161–2. 18 E.g. the Massachusetts proclamations of 19 September 1689 and 6 September 1745: www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.03302000/ and www.loc.gov/resource/rb pe.03404200/?sp=1, accessed 14 April 2020. 19 For commands and threats, see the 1695 Connecticut proclamation: www. loc.gov/resource/rbpe.10200500/?st=gallery, accessed 14 April 2020. In New Hampshire the Governor ‘exhorted’ the people to observe a 1758 fast day: www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.08700700/?sp=1, accessed 14 April 2020. 20 NP, II, p. cxlv. 21 D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: popular religious belief in early New England (Cambridge, MA, 1989), p. 167; DeLoss Love, Fast and Thanksgiving Days, pp. 79, 239–55. 22 M. Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society in the Greater British Caribbean, ­1624–1783 (Baltimore, MD, 2006), pp. 38–9; Nova Scotia Gazette [Halifax], 11 October 1774; H. Alline, A Sermon, on a Day of Thanksgiving (Halifax, 1782). 23 NP, II, p. cxxxvii. A 1764 New Hampshire proclamation called for prayers for the British royal family before moving to local reasons for fasting: www.loc. gov/resource/rbpe.08701300/?sp=1, accessed 14 April 2020.

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24 Massachusetts included the birth of a prince among its reasons for thanks­ giving in 1771: Essex Gazette [Salem], 22–29 October 1771. NP, II, p. cxxxix. 25 NP, II, pp. cxl–cxlv. 26 N. Rhoden, Revolutionary Anglicanism: the colonial Church of England clergy during the American Revolution (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 105–6. 27 Inglis quoted in J. S. Moir (ed.), The Cross in Canada (Toronto, 1966), p. 89. 28 Halifax Gazette, 11 October 1774. 29 NP, II, p. 602. 30 Anglican arrangements for special worship are discussed in NP, II, pp. lxv–lxx, cv–cxii; NP, III, pp. lxviii–lxxiii, xcii–xcix. 31 Williamson, ‘State prayers’, 126. 32 Though when Crown orders for special prayers became common in Scotland after 1788, the established Church of Scotland published its own notices that special (extemporised) prayers should be offered in its places of worship: NP, II, pp. lxx–lxxv. 33 H. Bowen, ‘British conceptions of global empire, 1756–1783’, JICH, 26:3 (1998), 1–27. 34 NP, II, pp. cxlvii–cxlviii. 35 J. S. Moir (ed.), Church and State in Canada, 1627–1867: basic documents (Toronto, 1967), pp. 45–6. The prayer, which was based on one used for lord lieutenants of Ireland, was authorised for use in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick: W. Armitage, The Story of the Canadian Revision of the Prayer Book (Cambridge, 1922), p. 178. 36 A. R. Kelley, ‘Jacob Mountain, first lord bishop of Quebec: a summary of his correspondence and of papers related thereto for the years 1793 to 1799’, Rapport des Archives Nationales du Québec (1942–3), p. 248. 37 Hardwick, ‘Fasts’, pp. 681–2; NP, II, p. cxlvii. 38 Bowen, ‘British conceptions’, 20. 39 LAC, MG23-C6/2, C. Inglis to J. Wentworth, 24 April 1797, fo. 104; MG23C6/3, Inglis to C. Prevost, 18 April 1808, fo. 176; NP, II, p. cxlviii. 40 J. Fingard, The Anglican Design in Loyalist Nova Scotia, 1793–1816 (London, 1972). 41 J. Hewitt, Sketches of English Church History in South Africa (Cape Town, 1887), p. 30. 42 R. Ross, Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 1750–1870: a tragedy of manners (Cambridge, 2004), p. 53; Cape Town Gazette, 22 May 1813. 43 J. Sturgis, ‘Anglicisation at the Cape of Good Hope in the early nineteenth century’, JICH, 11:1 (1982), 5–32. 44 C. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: the British Empire and the world 1780–1830 (Harlow, 1989), pp. 109–12, 194–5. 45 For a Nova Scotian example, see Royal Gazette [Halifax], 25 March 1794. Lower Canadian proclamations are reproduced in Report of the Public Archives for the Year 1921 (Ottawa, 1922). For the NSW occasion, Sydney Gazette, 13 April 1806.

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46 Royal Gazette, 9 May 1797; Saint John Gazette [New Brunswick], 3 September 1804. 47 Kelley, ‘Jacob Mountain’, p. 247; NP, II, p. cxlix. 48 Bayly, Imperial Meridian, pp. 136–47; Carey, God’s Empire, pp. 41–54. 49 The Hawkesbury River, settled by Europeans from the 1790s, apparently suffered 153 deluges between 1795 and 1881: J. P. Josephson, ‘History of floods in the Hawkesbury River’, Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, 19 (1885), 97–108. 50 State Library of NSW [SLNSW], CY Safe 1/121, R. Johnson to H. Fricker, 18 March 1791, fo. 18. For the place of providential interpretation in settler explanation of flooding in early NSW, see Historical Records of Australia, 1:II (Sydney, 1914), Governor Hunter to the Duke of Portland, 30 March 1800, p. 480; Sydney Gazette, 28 June 1807. 51 C. Fenby, ‘Experiencing, understanding and adapting to climate in south-­ eastern Australia, 1788–1860’ (PhD dissertation, University of Melbourne, 2012), p. 150. 52 For 1834, see Memorials of the British Settlers of South Africa (Grahamstown, 1844), p. 41; for 1838, H. Calderwood, The Jubilee: the substance of a sermon (Cape Town, 1838). 53 Hall, Worlds of Wonder, pp. 170, 196. 54 H. Ritvo, The Animal Estate: the English and other creatures in the Victorian Age (London, 1990), pp. 174–6, 197. 55 W. Brunton, The Judgments of God a Call to Repentance (Montreal, 1832), p. 11; Hardwick, ‘Fasts’, 682–3. 56 Australian [Sydney], 20 November 1829. 57 Fenby, ‘Experiencing, understanding and adapting to climate’, p. 199. 58 P. Buckner, ‘Making British North America British, 1815–1860’, in C. Eldridge (ed.), Kith and Kin: Canada, Britain and the United States from the Revolution to the Cold War (Cardiff, 1997), pp. 11–44. 59 Western Cape Provincial Archives [WCPA], Government House, general despatches, vol. 23/25, reference 64, Governor C. Darling to the Duke of Newcastle, 25 July 1854; NP, II, p. 888. 60 NP, II, p. cxlvii; Morning Courier [St. John’s], 10 June 1847. 61 Australian, 15 July 1847; Cape Frontier Times [Grahamstown], 11 May 1847. 62 NP, II, pp. 872–5, 877–9. 63 A Form of Prayer and Thanksgiving to Almighty God (Halifax, 1849); NP, II, p. 878. 64 Weekly Herald and Conception-Bay General Advertiser, 7 June 1854. 65 Age [Melbourne], 18 November 1856. In January 1901, the NSW Government set aside a ‘Commonwealth Sunday’ so the churches could pray for divine blessings on the new Australian Commonwealth: Ely, Unto God and Caesar, p. 112. In Britain after 1900 churches appointed special prayers during general elections and periods of political dispute. It could be that the colonial occasions, like the British, revealed not so much a confidence as a nervousness on the part of politicians and churchmen about enlarged electorates: NP, III, p. ciii.

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66 On this tension in the Canadian context, see J. Bumsted, ‘The consolidation of British North America, 1783–1860’, in P. Buckner (ed.), Canada and the British Empire (Oxford, 2008), p. 43. 67 A Nova Scotian Presbyterian who worked on an April 1777 fast day temporarily had his horses confiscated by a sheriff: [E. Frame], Descriptive Sketches of Nova Scotia (Halifax, 1864), pp. 46–7. 68 E.g. Barbados Globe, 17 August 1868. 69 A. Porter, ‘Religion, missionary enthusiasm and empire’, in A. Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume III: the nineteenth century (Oxford, 1999), p. 232. 70 Casket [Antigonish], 29 October 1857. 71 Moir (ed.), Church and State in Canada, pp. 35–6, 46, 64–7; Wesleyan [Halifax], 25 August 1849. 72 C. Gray, The Life of Robert Gray, vol. II (London, 1876), p. 233. 73 Victoria Government Gazette, 22 December 1865 and 25 March 1869. Such orders anticipated the practice that would develop in Britain: on three occasions after 1872 – the Prince of Wales’s recovery from illness in 1871–2 and Queen Victoria’s 1887 and 1897 jubilees – the British state appointed bank holidays on the same day that the churches held thanksgiving services: Williamson, ‘State prayers’, 169 and appendix. 74 Williamson, ‘State prayers’, 125. 75 SMH, 24 April 1897 and Daily News [Perth], 23 April 1897 for delegations to state premiers, and Glen Innes Examiner [NSW], 25 February 1902, for the appointment of a day of humiliation by a premier. 76 WCPA, Prime Minister’s office, vol. 422, nos 333 (1896), 160 (1897) and 129 (1902). 77 Locusts: ‘A Well-Wisher to the Colony’, Evening Journal [Adelaide], 18 November 1872; epidemic: Ballarat Star, 25 March 1875; floods: ‘A. Brain’, Snowy River Mail [Victoria], 25 May 1893; industrial disputes: ‘S. K. Chester’, SMH, 27 November 1909; commercial crash: ‘Churchman’, Gippsland Times [Victoria], 4 April 1879. ‘Sinclair’ suggested special prayers for the United States during the American Civil War: SMH, 6 January 1862. 78 See the three Afrikaner Bond petitions sent from the Colesberg district in the Eastern Cape to the Government during the 1885 drought, gathered in WCPA, CO (memorials), vol. 4247, reference C5. Also see the request for a day of humiliation during cattle disease in 1896, sent from the Bond’s Steynsberg branch: WCPA, Prime Minister’s office, miscellaneous letters received, vol. 157, no. 192. 79 Monitor [Sydney], 29 September 1828 and 5 October 1833. 80 NP describes forty-five occasions of special worship, whether fasts, thanksgivings, or special prayers, from 1830 to 1859 in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Causes included epidemics, harvests, royal life-events, disturbances in society and churches, and war. NP, II, pp. xxviii–xxx. 81 Empire [Sydney], 23 January 1855. 82 A. O’Brien, ‘Religion’, in A. Bashford and S. Macintyre (eds), The Cambridge

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History of Australia. Volume 1: indigenous and colonial Australia (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 429–31. 83 National Archives Repository [NAR], GG/163, no. 3/3096, B. Shaw to Governor General S. Buxton, 1 January 1920; NAR, PM/1/1/247, No. PM113/18, E. Morgan to the ­administrator of the Orange Free State, 12 September 1912. For an Afrikaner woman writing to the governor general on behalf of the town of Steynsrus in the Free State, see NAR, GG/163, No. 3/3095, S. Botha to Buxton, 3 January 1920. 84 Hardwick, ‘Fasts’, 692. 85 H. Têtu and C. Gagnon, Mandements, Lettres Pastorales et Circulaires Des Évêques De Québec, vol. 4 (Quebec, 1888), p. 524. 86 W. Nicolson, The Late Fire in the City (Hobart Town, 1854), pp. 9–10; ‘The Late Floods’, Colonial Times [Hobart], 28 March 1854; J. Medland, The Voice of God in Recent Occurrences (Hobart Town, 1854), pp. 11, 16; A. Ramsay, The Voice of the Storm (Melbourne, 1850), pp. 3–4. 87 Early nineteenth-century evangelicals had regarded the economic crash as a ‘sublime example’ of a ‘special providence’: Hilton, Age of Atonement, pp. 13, 131. For the argument that a commercial crash in Victoria in the early 1890s was caused by ‘commercial immorality’ and ‘national selfishness’, see S. Robinson, National Depression (Melbourne, 1892), pp. 3, 5, 6. 88 Whites blamed the 1882 epidemic – which killed 400 Capetonians – on ‘urban black degeneracy’: V. Bickford-Smith, ‘South African urban history, racial segregation and the unique case of Cape Town?’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 21:1 (1995), 73. 89 Hardwick and Williamson, ‘Special worship’, 275. 90 J. Pope, Correspondence of Sir John Macdonald (Toronto, 1921), pp. 138–9. An earlier request for a thanksgiving in the Province of Canada had been turned down for the same reason: Héritage Canadiana [HC], H-2499, RG5-C1, 789/1333, provincial secretary to J. McFarish, 18 November 1864. 91 M. Tamarkin, Volk and Flock: ecology, identity and politics among Cape Afrikaners in the late nineteenth century (Pretoria, 2009), pp. 27–9. The  Afrikaner attachment to prayer days is mentioned in W. Beinart, The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: settlers, livestock, and the environment ­1770–1850 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 112–13. Bedford Enterprise, 3 October 1896; Beaufort Courier, 8 October 1896; ‘An Undenominational Layman’, Cape Mercury [Cape Town], 6 October 1896; Cradock Register, 13 October 1896. 92 Like its British counterpart, the Dutch tradition of fasts and thanksgivings reached back to early modernity: Duiveman, ‘Praying’ and DeLoss Love, Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England, chapter 12. 93 C. Spinage, Cattle Plague: a history (New York, 2003), p. 393. Standard and Digger’s News [Johannesburg], 19 October 1896. 94 NAR, PM/1/1/51, no. 6/2, prime minister’s private secretary to H. Jansen, 23 February 1911. 95 Launceston Examiner, 29 December 1849; Cornwall Chronicle, 5, 16 and 19 January 1850. An August 1853 Tasmanian thanksgiving to mark the success

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of the anti-convict cause is considered in C. Holdridge, ‘The pageantry of the anti-convict cause’, History Australia, 12:1 (2015), 155–6. Cape Colony clergymen protested the news that convict transportation would be started up to their colony with a public meeting ‘for prayer and humiliation’: see W. Elliott, An Address Prepared for, and Partly Delivered at, a Public Meeting of Associated Churches, held for Prayer and Humiliation (Cape Town, 1849), pp. 2–9. 96 In August 1834 Cape missionaries appointed a ‘day of humiliation and prayer’ to protest the reinstatement of legislation which would have empowered officials to classify non-whites as vagrants and force them to labour on public works. See ‘Copies or extracts of any further despatches which have been received from, or addressed to, the Governor of the Cape of Good Hope, relative to the late Caffre War’, Parliamentary Papers [PP], 503 (1837), pp. 78–9. 97 Izwi Labantu [East London], 19 May 1908. 98 Indian Opinion [Durban], 11 June 1910. 99 A. Burton, The Trouble with Empire: challenges to modern British imperialism (Oxford, 2015), pp. 109–10. 100 Rev. E. Barratt, Rand Daily Mail [Johannesburg], 7 April 1909. 101 G. Martin, ‘Was there a British Empire?’, Historical Journal, 15:3 (1972), 562–9. 102 Ely, Unto God and Caesar, p. 111. 103 J. Eddy and D. Schreuder (eds), The Rise of Colonial Nationalism: Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa first assert their nationalities, ­1880–1914 (Sydney, 1988). 104 Hardwick and Williamson, ‘Special worship’, 268, 278. 105 E.g. Times [London], 28 August 1854. 106 NP, II, pp. 934–5; NP, III, pp. 14–15, 16–17, 23, 25–7. 107 NP, III, p. lxiv. 108 Williamson, ‘State prayers’, 168–9; NP, II, p. 934; NP, III, pp. lxxix–lxxxiii. 109 NP, III, pp. 7, 11. 110 SMH, 15 February 1872 for Roman Catholic responses and 16 February 1872 for Jewish. 111 Hardwick and Williamson, ‘Special worship’, 278–80. 112 NP, III, pp. 33, 35. 113 Ibid., p. 63. 114 Williamson, ‘National days’, p. 332; NP, III, pp. 143–6. 115 NP, III, pp. 146, 163, 188, 207, 222. 116 M. McKernan, Australian Churches at War: attitudes and activities of the major churches 1914–1918 (Sydney, 1980), pp. 64, 91–2. J. Grey surveys the growing sense of separation from Britain during wartime in ‘War and the British world in the twentieth century’, in P. Buckner and R. Douglas Francis (eds), Rediscovering the British World (Calgary, 2005), pp. 233–50. 117 For examples, see National Archives of Australia [NAA], A461, AM322/1, prime minister’s secretary to R. Jones, 7 September 1915, to H. Fairfax, 30 July 1915, to F. W. Perrin, 27 July 1915, to J. Coates, 27 July 1915, to the secretary

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of the Colac and District Patriotic Fund, 17 November 1915 and to the Revs J. Burgess and J. Crookston, 13 November 1914. 118 NP, III, pp. 146, 162–3, 174, 179, 188, 197; Geelong Advertiser, 29 December 1916; Mercury [Hobart], 17 October 1917; Kalgoorlie Miner [Western Australia], 24 July 1918. 119 Commonwealth of Australia Gazette, 20 December 1917; NP, III, p. 188. The appeal from the King was not an order and was communicated by the Colonial Office as an announcement, message and request. 120 Williamson, ‘National days’, 329–30; Williamson, ‘The monarchy and public values 1910–1953’, in A. Olechnowicz (ed.), The Monarchy and the British Nation 1780 to the Present (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 243, 249. NP, III, pp. 219–25.

2

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The churches and special worship

Remarkably, Halifax, Nova Scotia escaped cholera in 1832. Everyone expected that the town, a major immigration centre, would follow other North American ports and succumb to a hideous intestinal disease that spread with shocking speed and carried off both the rich and the poor, the cleanly and the dissolute. The civil authorities had been so fearful that they set aside a general fast in May to divert the anticipated threat. The town’s luck ran out when cholera reappeared in early 1834, but this time the Government procrastinated, and it was not until September that a fast was proclaimed. For Richard Knight, a leading Methodist minister, hundreds had died because of the state’s ‘very culpable neglect of a plain duty’. While the state dithered, Knight organised a fast day for Methodists, and Baptists, in a spirit of solidarity, joined too. Although Knight said this occasion had been ‘well and solemnly attended’, it had only been a partial fast and was no substitute for a general, state-appointed, occasion. Perhaps this was why the expected religious revival, or, as Knight put it, the ‘large outpouring of the spirit’, failed to materialise.1 Knight’s response to cholera shows that institutional churches had much invested in special displays of public worship. For the devout, divine visitations and deliverances, and the accompanying days of fasting and thanksgiving, represented opportunities for evangelism and mission. It is true that some religious groups refused to participate because they did not recognise state authority in spiritual matters. For others, most notably Catholics, state occasions raised difficulties. But most Protestants, as well as Roman Catholics and Jewish communities, participated because, like Knight, they valued collective worship and remained captivated by the vision of whole communities praying for common causes on agreed dates. How churches responded to calls to prayer issued by the civil authorities, did, however, vary considerably. Styles of worship differed, and some churches, such as Knight’s Methodists, acted independently of the civil authorities, as they had a long history of appointing special acts of worship for their members. Some of these distinctive church traditions would develop a more general

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importance, and in parts of the empire, notably central Canada, ‘national’ worship was much shaped by Scottish customs and traditions. Section one of this chapter makes sense of this complicated history and describes and explains the differences between the main Christian and Jewish groups in detail. The first part of the chapter also asks why so many institutional churches conformed to state orders, both in the era of establishment, when proclamations commanded participation, and in subsequent periods, when special worship was liberalised and became a matter for individual consciences. For denominations outside the political mainstream, participation in a fast or thanksgiving might be a way to demonstrate their reliability to the state. Days of prayer also attracted the churches as such dramatic public interventions might reinforce and showcase the public status of institutional religion. This became increasingly important as the nineteenth century progressed, as in some respects ecclesiastical authority faced new challenges. The 1871 censuses revealed that some forty per cent of Australian settlers did not regularly attend church, and in four of the six colonies – NSW, Tasmania, South Australia and Victoria – parliaments opened without prayer.2 Across the settler empire, church control over public education loosened. And everywhere the intellectual and social authority of the clergy was challenged as new authorities and professional groups – medical doctors, meteorologists and the like – proliferated. Church leaders continued to turn to states to help them negotiate these challenges: it was assumed, for instance, that orders from the highest civil authorities could ensure widespread public observances, and give occasions a ‘national’ character. The other big attraction of state occasions, for the churches, was that such great public displays ensured that colonial states retained a relationship with the Christian God. Flowing from this was the higher idea, that colonies formed organic communities and spiritual unities, possessing a single ‘national conscience’. The second and third sections turn to consider the role that special acts of worship played in encouraging closer relations between churches. From the 1850s, church leaders pooled resources and gathered cosmopolitan communities in ‘national’ acts of worship on their own initiative and authority. Knight’s 1834 occasion was an early sign of special worship’s ecumenical potential. The popularity of such interdenominational occasions, the chapter argues, is evidence of the rising confidence of institutional religion in ‘new world’ colonial societies. It was not the case, as is sometimes argued, that institutional churches retreated from the public sphere.3 The popularity of special days, particularly those organised by combinations of churches, even encouraged some to envisage new ‘national’ churches that bridged the divisions of class and ethnicity. The final section shows that this was a powerful idea among Anglicans in the late nineteenth century.



The churches and special worship 55

Indeed, special worship reveals how many people, both Anglicans and nonAnglicans, continued to regard the Church of England as a national institution, even in unlikely colonial surroundings.

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Conformity and opposition Any survey of the involvement of churches in special worship should start with the Church of England. As an established church that was uniquely close to royal and state authority, the Church had special reasons to take full part in state-appointed occasions of fasting, humiliation and thanksgiving. The sovereign, as supreme governor of the Church of England, had the authority to order archbishops and bishops to compose new prayers and special services for the compulsory use of all Anglican clergymen in every diocese, not only in England, but also in Wales (until disestablishment in 1920), Ireland (likewise until 1871) and in the Episcopal Church of Scotland (this happened from 1788). As the previous chapter noted, for a time this power was delegated to governors in the colonies too. Anglican privilege was also evident in the way colonial Anglicans initiated special occasions of worship.4 The fasts that Lower and Upper Canada observed in response to cholera in 1832 originated with Charles Stewart, bishop of Quebec.5 William Grant Broughton, archdeacon of NSW from 1829 and bishop of Australia from 1836, proposed an 1829 thanksgiving and an 1838 fast.6 It is significant that in 1829 Broughton was pressed to approach the executive council by journalists who at other times fiercely criticised Anglican establishment and privilege: evidently even reformers might look to the Anglican clergy to provide religious leadership at times of crisis.7 At mid-century Church of England bishops still argued that they had the right to propose special days of worship for entire colonial communities. In 1847, for instance, the bishop of Montreal told the Quebec Government that it was his responsibility to recommend the appointment of fast and thanksgiving days that were observed ‘in the empire at large’, as this had been the ‘usage’ since the British conquered the territory in 1763.8 The other established church in the British Isles, the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland, was a different kind of church. It acted with more independence from the state than the Church of England, and Presbyterian special worship had a freer and extempore style.9 The Church of Scotland did not recognise the royal supremacy in religious matters: all spiritual issues, it ruled, were to be dealt with by church assemblies (so the General Assembly, and below that regional synods, presbyteries and sessions). Indeed, church assemblies frequently ordered their own days of fasting and prayer for the whole or part of Scotland, either on regular occasions (for  instance, as a

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preparation for taking communion), or for special causes, such as political matters, the condition of the harvest or church issues. Nevertheless, much of the Church of Scotland accepted that the Crown authorities could order special occasions of worship, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the General Assembly often issued statements of support when the Crown authorities announced a special day of prayer. On occasion the Assembly even asked the state authorities (the Crown, Parliament or privy council) to issue an order and give ‘civil sanction’ to a church-initiated act of worship: such support would help enforce public observance, as well as give special days a more ‘national’ quality.10 Though the Church of Scotland argued – justifiably – that colonial officials made more effort to extend Anglicanism than Presbyterianism,11 the limitations of the Presbyterian establishment overseas did not diminish the imperial loyalty of its members, and the small number of ministers in the early Canadian colonies who identified with the Church followed their fellow churchmen in Scotland and accepted that Crown authorities could instruct Scottish clergy to offer appropriate prayers in times of special need. The Presbyterianism that set down roots in Canada in the early nineteenth century was loyalist, anti-American and fiercely counter-revolutionary: congregations in Quebec and Nova Scotia originated in eighteenth-century military garrisons, the clergy mostly came from Scotland and Ireland, and much of the laity had either recently migrated from the British Isles, or were descendants of the Loyalists who had fled the American Revolution.12 The other key feature of early Canadian Presbyterianism was that it was fragmented and very congregational: it was not until 1818 that the first superintending presbytery was formed in the Canadas, and colonial Presbyterians did not recognise the jurisdiction of the General Assembly in the colonies. The decision to observe a special occasion was, then, made locally by ministers and congregations. The formation of a Church of Scotland synod in the Canadas in 1831 brought more organisation and made possible discrete Presbyterian occasions of prayer and humiliation that were observed by all congregations in the synod.13 Ties to the state also strengthened. The Church of Scotland’s alignment with Crown authorities in Canada was confirmed in 1840, when changes in the system of ‘Clergy Reserves’ gave the Church equal status and equal endowment to the Church of England. From the late 1830s, prominent Church figures in Upper Canada defended the right of governors to appoint special days of worship for the whole community and ‘command’ public observances.14 The slow development of superintending authorities, coupled with the congregationalism encouraged by frontier conditions, created a colonial environment that was very conducive to Presbyterian factionalism. Disputes over theology, authority, ‘lay patronage’ and congregational sovereignty in

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Scotland resulted in a series of successions from the Church of Scotland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the new ‘secessionist’ churches that emerged from successive ‘disruptions’ – ‘Anti-Burghers’, ‘Burghers’, ‘Relief Church’ and the ‘Free Church of Scotland’ – had affiliated branches in the colonies, with particularly strong presences in the Canadian Maritime colonies (in 1817 a secessionist-dominated Synod of Nova Scotia was formed).15 Secessionists were anti-establishment ‘voluntarists’; indeed, the question of whether states could command special acts of worship was one reason why the first evangelical secessionists broke with the Church of Scotland in the 1730s.16 There are examples from the 1770s and 1780s of hard-liners in Maritime Canada refusing to observe government fasts.17 Yet it is striking how even the firmest voluntarists accepted state proclamations and provided religious services on special days of worship. There were Scottish precedents for this. In the eighteenth century, secessionist presbyteries participated in national occasions of worship without accepting civil interference, as they arranged their own special services around the same time as official occasions.18 Similar practices emerged overseas. Secessionists near London, Ontario refused to observe a day of thanksgiving in Upper Canada in February 1838 because the language of the proclamation was deemed ‘unscriptural and tyrannical’ (it commanded that the day be ‘reverently and devoutly observed’). Yet, the congregation agreed to spend the day in ‘devotional exercises’, as no business was to be done on what was to be an ‘unemployed day’.19 For centuries the ministers of the established churches had tried to maintain a privileged position in public acts of special worship. In past times the established clergy had worried that the public peace would be threatened if others, outside the Church, claimed the right to divine the meaning and lessons of great public calamities.20 But establishment clergy could not monopolise or control special worship. Indeed, it was not always clear that the clergy of the Churches of England and Scotland did enjoy a special relationship with state-proclaimed fasts and thanksgivings. Proclamations issued in Upper and Lower Canada carried no instructions to Anglican clergy, and senior churchmen in these places worried that other churches used special occasions to claim an elevated public status. Jacob Mountain, Quebec’s Anglican bishop, pointed to an order issued by his Roman Catholic counterpart in November 1812 (it was for thanksgivings following British military victories) as evidence that the Catholic Church, the denomination with the largest number of adherents, was positioning itself as the province’s premier civil and ecclesiastical authority. Mountain was angered that the order did not refer to an earlier state proclamation, and that it was addressed – like the state proclamation – in both the English and French languages. It was especially galling that the author of the order,

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Joseph-Octave Plessis, styled himself ‘Bishop of Quebec’, a title Mountain thought was his preserve, as it was he who represented the empire’s state Church.21 This was just one occasion when Quebec’s Roman Catholic bishops ordered hymns, special prayers and masses in conjunction with the state-appointed days. The Catholic practice of coordinating special prayers with Protestants, which continued up to 1857, reflected the loyalty of senior Roman Catholics to a British monarchy, which, in their view, had protected the distinctive religion, culture and law of French-speaking Canadians.22 This coordination, which paralleled Catholic practices in England and Ireland,23 is striking, as Roman Catholics had a difficult relationship with public and state-appointed acts of special worship. They did not consider such orders appropriate, as they emanated from both civil and Protestant authorities – indeed from a British state and church authorities which historically had been or were still anti-Catholic. Catholics could only worship as directed by their own bishops, and their Church prohibited them from praying in the presence of members of other faiths. Although the Church had prescribed forms of prayer (in Latin), it had no need to issue new prayer for special occasions, because the Missal contained votive masses and other prayers for unusual events.24 Roman Catholic special worship had, therefore, a distinct and independent quality, but it was also manystranded. One broad strand was distinctly ‘Catholic’: in nineteenth-century French-speaking Canada, Catholics prayed for suffering co-religionists and during the illnesses of Popes.25 The second strand connected to state events. For some Catholics, making public their observance of national occasions of special worship was a way to communicate a sense of loyalty, not least to governments which allowed them liberty of worship and later political and civil rights.26 There were good reasons, too, why the civil authorities would wish to include and represent empire’s growing Catholic population, and by the early twentieth century special worship, and indeed monarchy, had become far more accommodating to Catholicism. This story, and the changing religious identity of the monarchy, is considered in Chapter 6. Fast days were also common among groups derived from the Protestant ‘nonconformists’ of England, Wales and Ireland.27 Though some Protestants, Quakers notably, refused to obey state orders for special worship, most nonconformists had good reason to observe acts of special worship on the same dates as those ordered by Crown authorities. In both the British Isles and overseas, Congregational, Methodist and Baptist churches behaved much like Presbyterians and Catholics and made a point of issuing instructions to their congregations that coincided with those from the state authorities. Protestant nonconformity was a powerful force in the colonial world, particularly in Maritime Canada and Upper Canada, and did much to shape colonial styles of special worship. It was one reason why colonial state

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The churches and special worship 59

authorities adopted softer and more inclusive modes of address when they invited colonial populations to collective prayer. Nonconformist churches also developed an ecumenical dimension, and, as later parts of this chapter will show, this was a factor in the development of new kinds of ‘national’ days of prayer in the later nineteenth century. In the nonconformist churches it was left to ministers and their congregations to decide whether they observed special occasions of worship. The Moravian mission on the Thames River in Upper Canada was an isolated congregation that agreed, after discussion, to observe state-appointed fasts during the Napoleonic period.28 The sources for early Methodist involvement in Canadian special worship are thin, and it is not clear if Methodists voluntarily observed, or if instructions to do so came from district superintendents. It seems the strong American influence in early Canadian Methodism – until the 1830s Upper Canadian Methodists formed part of the Methodist Episcopal Church of the United States – did not prevent responses to proclamations. American-born lay preachers recorded special occasions in their diaries in the Napoleonic era, and there is evidence of long-running Methodist engagement in Maritime Canada.29 The next generation of Canadian Methodists also demonstrated their loyalty and Britishness through days of fasting and thanksgiving. From the late 1820s British Methodists depicted their Canadian counterparts as disloyal American republicans who violently opposed both the colonial government and established Anglicanism.30 According to a recent account, Canadian Methodists responded by cultivating an identity as ‘New World Britons’. The Christian Guardian, the voice of anti-establishment Methodism in Upper Canada, ‘rejoiced’ in the royal proclamation that set aside a fast day as cholera threatened in 1832. Subsequent days appointed during the 1837–8 rebellions were also welcomed.31 This all fits with the picture in Britain, where Methodists had observed state-appointed days of prayer since the mid-eighteenth century.32 Less can be said about the relationship between institutional religion and the early fasts and thanksgivings in southern Africa and Australia: occasions of special worship happened rarely, and few denominations had set down institutional roots. Methodist, Presbyterian and Roman Catholic ministers would only arrive in NSW and Tasmania in the later 1810s and 1820s, though this did not mean the Church of England exercised a powerful monopoly. NSW only had a handful of Church of England chaplains in the Napoleonic period, and visiting missionaries and lay settlers helped provide religious services. The earliest collective prayers show the limitations of the fledgling Australian religious establishment. Ministers who had not been ordained in the Church of England conducted several of the 1806 thanksgiving services for Trafalgar.33 The fast day observed in NSW during

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drought in 1838 had a multi-denominational character as the proclamation made no mention of a special role for the Church of England.34 Before this occasion, John Dunmore Lang, the Presbyterian minister who founded congregations of the Church of Scotland in NSW from 1823, wrote (not entirely accurately) that the ‘Presbyterian Church has, in all times past, recognized the authority of the Civil Government to enjoin days of fasting and humiliation under the divine chastisements’.35 The 1838 fast was also observed by Sydney’s small Jewish community. Colonial Jewish people had long been frequent observers of special occasions of worship – indeed, such communities made sure newspapers recognised their observances and did not refer to days of fasting and thanksgiving as ‘Christian’ occasions. Such sensitivity points to a ‘fear of marginalisation’ among colonial Jewish people.36 Though a prominent social ‘other’, Jewish people in Britain had observed special prayers and services to accompany state-appointed acts of worship since at least the early eighteenth century. Jewish communities are also noteworthy as they were amongst the first religious groups to coordinate empire-wide observances of special occasions of worship: by the 1840s the chief rabbi in London was distributing Jewish forms of prayer across the empire.37 The special occasions of worship were a chance to identify with the larger colonial community and to celebrate a British tradition of religious liberty that, in the view of many, had brought civil rights and British subject status. Australian Jewish people did indeed benefit from empire. They participated in early colonial legislatures on the same terms as others, and colonial governments often provided funds and land for Jewish places of worship. Before 1858 – the year of ‘emancipation’ in Britain – prayer days were moments when colonial Jewish communities demanded citizenship rights for their co-religionists back in Britain.38 To an extent, therefore, marginalised communities found opportunities in special occasions of worship to express a sense of loyalty and subjecthood, and to claim a place in the national and colonial community.39 Observances by denominations other than the established Church are also a reminder that the relationship between the state and institutional religion was a matter of negotiation in all parts of the British world in the age of revolution. For Anglicans, engagement in special worship was a way to affirm establishment status, but other denominations drew closer to the colonial authorities. In Australia and Canada, nonconformists would accept state salaries from the 1820s. The British authorities in Maritime Canada even built alliances with Roman Catholic clergy, because it was believed priests could mediate with indigenous Mi’kmaq communities.40 The archive of published sermons surviving from the pre-1816 period demonstrates that secessionist Presbyterians delivered fast and thanksgiving addresses that were as counter-revolutionary, monarchical and anti-American as any

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composed by Anglican and Church of Scotland preachers.41 Engagement with state-appointed days of prayer demonstrates how non-Anglican denominations moved towards the centre and became – as one scholar of the Canadian scene has put it – ‘friends of the system’.42 In Britain, opposition to state-ordered special worship became ‘more widespread and more public’ as campaigns for religious equality gained momentum after the abolition of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828.43 Opposition to state-proclaimed acts of worship was also widely reported in the colonies from the 1830s – partly this was because refusals to comply with state orders fused with ‘voluntarism’ campaigns that demanded the end of religious endowment and every vestige of a colonial state Church. John Roaf, Toronto’s premier Congregationalist minister and prominent critic of religious establishments, publicly refused to observe a thanksgiving called during the rebellions of 1837–8 because he could not ‘recognize any secular authority in religion’, especially when the command threatened non-observers with God’s ‘wrath and indignation’. Roaf is an unusual example of an individual who was punished for refusing to observe a fast or thanksgiving – following the thanksgiving, the state forced him to quarter militiamen in his home. Presumably, it was unwise to make such a public refusal at a time of acute social tension. Roaf retaliated and publicised his objections as a pamphlet.44 For many, participation in public displays of worship could never be a route to social acceptance or inclusion in the political mainstream. Religion in Canada, Australia and South Africa was diverse and shaped by processes of global migration as much as empire. The gold rushes of mid-century did much to diversify Australian religion, and by the end of the century communities of Muslims, Buddhists, Confucians and Taoists had established places of worship and congregations.45 Later chapters note that some of these groups – Chinese peoples in particular – understood and responded to Christian appeals to divine intervention. Nevertheless, all Australia’s ethnic and religious minorities experienced some form of discrimination. Protestants continued to view Irish Catholics as subversives, and the Roman Catholic practice of organising independent special occasions of worship prompted much speculation among Protestant commentators about the loyalty of Roman Catholics. Special worship also reveals an assumption, strong in elite circles, that British settler societies should remain Christian nations.46 During the First World War, the Australian Commonwealth Government notified every Christian church and Jewish congregation of forthcoming days of prayer, but did not bother to do the same with the country’s small but organised Muslim communities. Though it has been argued that ‘religion was not a discriminative category during wartime’, and that the only Muslims denied naturalisation during the First World

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War were Ottoman Turks, clearly it was the case that Muslim people did not occupy positions at the centre of an exclusive ‘white Australia’ that had embraced a Christian identity.47

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Pluralism After 1850, churches that had previously responded to summons for special worship became more assertive and approached government for special days. A greater range of churches helped appoint and organise public ­displays of worship, and faith groups other than the Church of England had the chance to shape uniquely colonial traditions of special worship. The confidence and authority of the institutional churches was such that some religious leaders even took the place of the civil authorities and claimed the power to call special occasions of worship for entire colonial communities. This toppling of Anglican privilege was particularly evident in the Cape Colony, though here the links between the state and the Church of England had always been weak. The British who took over the colony in 1806 had neither the resources nor the inclination to erect a well-endowed and privileged Church of England; instead, a system of multiple Christian establishments was maintained, one that lasted until state aid to religion was abolished in 1875. The Dutch Reformed Church, which in the eighteenth century had been regarded as the colony’s established church, remained the largest denomination, and continued to receive the largest share of state support.48 Anglicans had to observe occasions arranged by other denominations. When the synod of the Dutch Reformed Church set aside Thursday 28 May 1846 as a day of humiliation to ‘avert the scourge’ of frontier war, Anglican ministers, along with other denominations, offered special services and sermons. As there was still no bishop, Anglican clergymen took the unorthodox step of composing and publishing their own special prayers for the occasion.49 Robert Gray brought a new style of high churchmanship and a determination to raise the profile of Anglicanism when he arrived as Cape Town’s first Anglican bishop in 1848. In his view, Anglicans should lead the colonial community in corporate prayer in times of crisis and celebration: it was, for instance, Gray who chose the date for the state thanksgiving that the Cape Colony observed following peace with the Xhosa in March 1848.50 This burst of Anglican energy did not last long. Gray was not consulted about an 1854 Crimean War fast and in October 1859 Methodists in Grahamstown initiated a day of humiliation that the Cape Colony observed during drought. When rain fell after the publication of the proclamation, a

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Methodist editor delightedly took it as evidence that God specially favoured his faith group.51 Not only did these events show that colonial states would not always recognise Anglican religious leadership, they also revealed Gray’s weak control over a Cape Church that remained a collection of independent congregations. Though he had instructed his clergy not to observe the fast (he complained he had not had time to draw up a form of prayer), recalcitrant evangelical clergy who disliked Gray’s high churchmanship made a point of observing the state order.52 Special worship was not, then, always good for church leaders: when not managed properly, fasts and thanksgivings might expose the limitations of episcopal authority and make public the Church’s internal diversity, as well as tensions between its members. Gray’s refusal to take part in the 1859 occasion was also an indication that the Church of England’s relationship with state authorities would become more ­complicated – and Anglican independence more noticeable – once the era of establishment passed. As forms of special worship associated with English and Anglican practices fell away in most parts of the empire in the early nineteenth century, other traditions, connected to other denominations, became more important at the ‘national’ level. For example, a Scottish tradition left an important imprint in central Canada, where a large percentage of the population had Scottish roots and identified with the Presbyterian churches. Presbyterian involvement in the Canadian thanksgiving tradition is an overlooked aspect of Scottish social, economic and political power in British North America. Scots were a crucial element of the Montreal ­business community; they dominated the Toronto press and secured top posts in imperial and colonial government. Presbyterians were the largest group of Protestants in both Nova Scotia and Manitoba (some twenty-six per cent of the religious public in the former in the late nineteenth century described themselves as Presbyterian), and by the 1920s the Presbyterian population had grown to such an extent in the Dominion as a whole that the group was the second largest, behind Roman Catholics.53 In the 1850s and 1860s Canadian special prayer would increasingly display a Scottish character. This is not to say that state-appointed occasions of special worship ceased to be controversial for Presbyterians; indeed, the question of state control of churches had become more important in the early 1840s when Canada felt the shock waves of the ‘Disruption’ in the Church of Scotland. In 1844 thirty-three of the ninety-one ministers in the Synod of the Presbyterian Church, Canada’s Church of Scotland body, left to form a new ‘free church’ body, the Presbyterian Church of Canada.54 Although the voluntarism of free churchmen did not extend as far as that of secessionists (these Canadian free churchmen accepted that states should

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provide funds to support churches), both groups rejected civil intrusion into spiritual matters, and, for a time at least, this Canadian Disruption made secessionist and free church Presbyterians more resistant to special acts of worship announced by royal proclamations. In December 1849 in Nova Scotia – an area with strong secessionist and free church constituencies – it was reported that Presbyterian ministers refused to observe a state proclamation for a thanksgiving. In 1859, Toronto newspapers featured debates among secessionists over whether proclamations amounted to unjustifiable interferences by a civil authority in religious matters.55 Yet the picture is mixed, and old anxieties about state interference in matters of church worship dissipated during the 1850s.56 As early as December 1849 a Toronto delegation of free churchmen approached the governor general of the Province of Canada for a day of thanksgiving to acknowledge a good harvest.57 The ‘secularisation’ of the clergy reserves in 1854 – proceeds from the sale of reserve land would subsequently be allocated to municipal authorities for non-religious purposes – p ­ artially resolved the questions of authority and state control, and made Presbyterians more amenable to state-proclaimed special worship.58 In late October 1857, Toronto secessionists agreed that the ‘civil magistrate may with propriety nominate the day and recommend the observance of it by all under his rule’, and later that year free churchmen expressed their preference for a state-appointed day of humiliation.59 In 1855, 1857 and again in 1858, free churchmen pressed the Province’s Government for general thanksgivings.60 In 1861 the (free church) Synod of the Presbyterian Church of Canada merged with the (secession) Synod of the United Presbyterian Church in Canada to create the Canada Presbyterian Church, and this new organisation helped initiate the state thanksgivings that proliferated in Canada in the 1860s.61 Though the texts of Canadian proclamations continued to draw on past English styles, Presbyterian influence was evident when Canadian governments chose to hold special days of worship on Thursdays, the Scottish preference.62 Canadian Presbyterians embraced state-appointed special worship because they wished to harness the power and authority of the state for spiritual and moral ends. Denis McKim argues that Presbyterian ministers recognised that the nineteenth-century Canadian state was ‘capable of exerting substantial legal and moral influence over peoples’ lives’. The alliance of Protestant activism and state legislation were essential elements in what McKim calls a ‘moral establishment’, and through this combination of state and church energy, the sins of the community – most notably sabbath desecration and drunkenness – could be banished and the new Canadian nation more fully Christianised. Starting in the early 1850s, Presbyterians petitioned government for laws that would prohibit Sunday trading and

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entertainments and restrict the sale and consumption of alcohol. The appointment of special days of worship became another means to ensure that ‘Christianity would constitute the foundation of public life’.63 Indeed, the campaign for public thanksgivings had more immediate success: thanksgivings spread from the 1860s, but only in the twentieth century would Canadian governments pass legislation prohibiting Sunday trading and entertainments. Not everything that characterised special worship in Scotland was carried to the colonies or influenced the culture of public acts of worship in overseas territories. The tradition of fast days in communion season migrated, and free church Presbyterians in the Province of Canada regularly issued lengthy addresses which, in the Scottish style, listed the numerous reasons why the members of the church should observe fast days (reasons included ‘prevailing sin’ and the ‘low state of religion’).64 But Presbyterian colonists did not, it seems, observe special occasions ordered by the church assemblies in Scotland. Given the absence of any centralising tendency in Presbyterianism, it is difficult to argue that special worship helped nurture the kind of Scottish national identity that scholars argue was ‘perpetuated and enhanced’ in the colonial world.65 The situation was more complicated: as the Canadian example shows, the tendency in heterogenous colonies was for traditions to blend, and for Scottish and English traditions to come together to form new and uniquely colonial styles. Although the prominent Presbyterian influence in special worship in British North America was not replicated in other parts of the empire, all regions witnessed the retreat of Anglican privilege. Church of England bishops had to work alongside other denominations to plan and execute community-wide acts of prayer. By the 1860s, Australian colonists no longer looked to Anglican bishops to lead corporate special prayer; the requests for days in newspapers assumed that delegations of church leaders, not Anglican bishops, would approach government. Such delegations became common by the 1870s, governments would only consider requests for special days that had the backing of a cross-section of the religious public.66 Protestant opinion impressed governors, though wherever Protestants were outnumbered, such as in Roman-Catholic Quebec, administrators had, from an early date, required Protestant churches to consult with the heads of the dominant church.67 That these multi-denominational delegations often met with success is an indication of how church leaders, and the institutional churches they represented, grew in social importance in settler societies as the nineteenth century progressed.68 There is little doubt that the authority of institutional religion was severely constrained in the early pioneer stage of colonial development. Clergy were few and poorly paid, lay communities frequently

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c­hallenged ­clerical authority, there was an emphasis on informal family worship, and a weak sense of denominational identity meant that settlers (and some clergy) experimented with differing doctrines and styles of worship. In the second half of the nineteenth century, by contrast, the churches of the British world emerged as ‘formidable social institutions’.69 More churchgoers identified with a single denomination, and the spread of Sunday schools, temperance societies and church-based recreational associations made churches more visible in colonial civil society. The tendency for states to appoint special days of worship on the advice of church leaders indicates how far Anglican bishops, Presbyterian moderators and Methodist presidents had emerged as important public figures in settler societies in the later nineteenth century. Perhaps the Church in the British world with the greatest social significance, and the one that enjoyed the closest relationship with its lay constituency, was Quebec’s French-speaking Roman Catholic Church. The liberal state that emerged in Canada during the mid-nineteenth century devolved the responsibility for providing education and social services to voluntary and church institutions, the most prominent of which was the Roman Catholic Church. The Church emerged as an arm of the state: it controlled and supplied social services, charity and educational provision.70 The orders and instructions that Catholic bishops issued for occasions of special worship helped Catholic clergy forge close bonds between the Church and the community. While orders and pastoral letters issued by Protestant leaders tended to be religious documents, Roman Catholics included advice on how communities should respond to calamities, such as epidemics or crop diseases. In the late 1870s, for instance, Quebec’s Catholic archbishop disseminated information from a government agricultural council on how farmers could mitigate an insect infestation – known as ‘potato fly’ – that threatened crops.71 Special occasions of worship did not always strengthen the authority of institutional religion. Church leaders lost out when governments introduced a new kind of ‘special day’ that did not disrupt normal routines, one that was more focused on special services and so could happen on Sundays, rather than weekdays. When Australian governments declared days of humiliation on Sundays and Good Fridays – as NSW did in 1895, 1897, 1902 and 1903 – religious commentators complained that commerce had triumphed over religion.72 Canadian churches also lost control of thanksgivings. By the early 1870s these churches no longer selected the dates for thanksgivings, and governors chose dates that were convenient for businesses. In 1899 the Dominion Government moved thanksgiving from a date in November to one in October because it wanted to give holidaymakers the chance to enjoy pleasanter weather and open-air recreations. A further blow to clerical authority came in 1908, when the Canadian Government moved

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thanksgivings from Thursdays to Mondays: while Government considered the new day less disruptive, churchmen thought moving the day next to a Sunday would encourage holidaymaking. One historian even argues that this shift signalled the end of Protestant influence over thanksgiving.73 During the late nineteenth century some colonial churchmen turned away from special prayers altogether, either because they had theological objections, or because they feared that poor attendances would raise questions about the churches’ public significance.74 But such people tended to be lone voices; indeed, narratives that focus on the decline of institutional religion are too pessimistic. Churches in the later nineteenth century colonial world did not turn in on themselves and become, as one Canadian historian puts it, ‘private organizations catering merely to the spiritual needs of their individual members’.75 Special days of worship made the institutional churches visible in settler societies. What clergy said on these occasions was broadcast widely in newspapers and printed sermons. And much of the colonial public expected church leaders to solemnise moments of national crisis and celebration and to offer public statements at times of drought, disease, ­commercial depression, war and royal celebration.76

Independence and ecumenicalism For ministers of religion, the fact that imperial and colonial governments continued to summon churches to special prayers demonstrated that the state retained a religious identity. Yet public fasts, thanksgivings and acts of intercession indicated something more. By bringing mixed populations together in collective acts of worship, these occasions suggested that colonial societies, for all their size and diversity, could be understood as spiritual communities and as moral beings. In this view, as Meredith Lake puts it, the nation was a ‘single moral entity’ that ‘could itself sin and deserve punishment, display true penitence and be restored’.77 What also emerged was the sense that nations possessed a ‘national conscience’: the national community was a unity and could express a sense of solidarity and shared responsibility and purpose in the face of great events. Though the process by which colonies joined together in larger federations, commonwealths and unions encouraged contemporaries to talk in terms of a national conscience (Alan Atkinson makes a convincing case for this in the Australian context),78 examination of special worship reveals that in earlier colonial history groups of colonists had come to conceive of themselves as spiritual communities, united under and guided by God. Understandings of what constituted a spiritual community changed considerably over time. In the early days of Anglican ascendancy, leading

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colonial officials and churchmen had understood the colonial spiritual community in narrow terms and imagined days of prayer as occasions when everyone gathered around a single church and followed common forms of prayer. Such a community never existed in reality; indeed, as Chapter 3 notes, the Church of England never had the facilities to form or lead such a thing. The inclusive character of state orders in most parts of the colonial world indicates that much more pluralistic understandings of colonial society circulated – among civil officials at least – even in the ‘Anglican design’ era. More practically, the question was how the spiritual community could be gathered, and how this national conscience might best express itself. While most ministers of religion continued to look to states to help them summon populations to collective worship, other church leaders worked both independently and collectively, and approached the public with appeals for colony-wide special acts of worship on their own ecclesiastical authority. Although these occasions brought together spiritual communities of varying size and diversity (the most cosmopolitan, it seems, gathered for the monarchical occasions of late century), the extent of cooperation between church leaders, particularly nonconformists, reveals the extent to which churchmen, like the civil authorities, could perceive the colonial spiritual community in pluralistic terms. As the nineteenth century progressed, churches appointed more occasions of special prayer independently of the civil authorities. For some religious groups, such as the Methodists and Presbyterians, this was a case of continuing a traditional practice, although the spread of executive church authorities during the early nineteenth century had an important effect, as it made it possible to coordinate observances across congregations. Churchappointed special occasions might be a way for congregations to express a sense of solidarity with distant co-religionists; collective action might also be moments for celebrating victories in the battle for civil rights and social recognition. In Newfoundland in May 1829, shops closed when the local Roman Catholic population observed a day of thanksgiving to celebrate ‘emancipation’.79 A marginalised or minority church could make a striking statement about its public and national status if it was the first to call a special occasion of worship in response to a crisis: in 1838, for instance, Anglicans in Upper Canada were dismayed that Methodists got ahead of them in appointing a fast day during the rebellion.80 The Church of England also became better able at responding independently to crises and celebrations. Partly this was born out of necessity, as bishops no longer had special access to the civil authorities. Important currents within Anglicanism, particularly the stronger emphasis on the Church as an autonomous spiritual body that came with the high church revival of the post-1830 period, also encouraged churchmen to act independently

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of the Crown authorities and to appoint special prayers and days on their own authority. Anglican bishops had always, in principle, possessed the power to order acts of special worship, but the practice had withered as royal orders became common. However, in 1846 and in 1849 bishops in Ireland and England had responded to famine and cholera by ordering special religious observances in their dioceses; in both years Anglican archbishops had coordinated observances and given the occasions a ‘national’ character.81 These metropolitan occasions encouraged colonial bishops – many, though not all, were high churchmen – to act similarly in their own dioceses. During cholera in 1849, Canadian bishops appointed days of fasting and prayer, and as flood threatened along the Red River in 1852, David Anderson, the evangelical bishop of Rupert’s Land, appointed a day for ‘public humiliation’ in his diocese to ‘avert the impending judgment’.82 During the eighth Xhosa war, Robert Gray of Cape Town – an advocate of Anglican independence – initiated a general day of humiliation in February 1851 and then set aside a day for Anglicans on the anniversary of the outbreak of war. Another high churchman, John Strachan of Toronto, had planned to appoint a diocesan fast for the Crimean War for March 1855 but gave up on the idea when the provincial Government appointed a day for the following month. For Strachan, church-appointed days of prayer would bind Anglicans together, strengthen Anglican identity and cement the Church’s special relationship with God. Such occasions could demonstrate church autonomy, and they might – as Strachan put it – be ‘a feeler & perhaps help prepare the way’ for independent colonial church government.83 While the evangelical colonial laity often reacted negatively to high church innovations, there is little evidence that these church events were shunned or denounced as improper, or regarded as an unwanted imposition of episcopal authority. From the 1860s independent action became common in Anglican dioceses, and colonists observed special days and offered special prayers for droughts, famines and epidemics. Special worship was also arranged for occasions that helped to nurture a sense of pan-Anglicanism in what was coming to be called the ‘Anglican Communion’. In 1849 Anglican clergymen across the empire observed a general thanksgiving for the tercentenary of the adoption of the Book of Common Prayer (there was no special prayer; ministers just marked the occasion with special sermons).84 More striking were the special days of worship for global missions that became a fixture of Anglican calendars from the early 1870s. Encouraged by the example of the pan-Anglican Lambeth conferences (the first was held in 1867), high churchmen in the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (USPG) – a Church of England outreach association – invited Anglicans across the world to observe a day of intercession for missions in late 1872.

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Although the day of intercession for missions would occur annually and do much to communicate Anglican unity and independence,85 the occasions also revealed the difficulty of organising collective actions in a diverse and far-flung Anglican world. Some Anglican evangelicals suspected the whole venture was a high-church scheme to enhance the power and prestige of bishops. Finding a suitable date for the whole Communion was also not easy, and angry comments from colonial bishops revealed there was little space in crowded secular calendars for church events. The Anglican bishop of Nova Scotia was upset when the USPG chose St Andrew’s Day for the intercession prayers in 1876, as the strong Scottish presence in his diocese made it unlikely anyone would show much interest in the Anglican occasion.86 The difficulty of reaching out to ‘national’ populations might be resolved if churches combined and organised multi-denominational occasions. Such events, which mushroomed in the later nineteenth century, were radical and important occasions, because to participate was to acknowledge that every faith could interpret the providential meaning of public events, and that the prayers offered by one church were as efficacious as the next. The Old Testament and the experiences of ancient Israel taught that the most effectual prayers were those offered by a large and united community. As one southern African colonist put it during cattle plague in 1896, ‘all denominations should sink their differences and join together in one place and at one time’ in the face of ‘such an impending calamity’.87 Cooperation among Protestants in settler societies often started at the local level, in villages or towns, and became more pronounced and elaborate over time.88 From the later 1870s, neutral venues, such as mechanics’ institutes and town halls, hosted united, inter-faith services. In rural Australia ministers set aside local days of prayer because local municipal authorities often doubted that they had the authority to call such ­occasions,89 and because the higher authorities in church and state would only appoint public days of humiliation and thanksgiving if calamities had a general impact. A striking occasion occurred in Melbourne in May 1893 during a commercial depression: the main Protestant denominations set aside a midweek day of humiliation, and then met in a large interdenominational gathering in the town hall. The Anglican bishop of Melbourne, the evangelical Field Flowers Goe, chaired and gave the first address, but there was no form of prayer, and representatives of the nonconformist churches preached and offered prayers.90 Similar interdenominational occasions and services happened elsewhere in Victoria, as well as in NSW and Queensland the following month.91 In southern Africa it was common after the 1870s for churches of English and Scottish origin to join the Dutch Reformed Church in united services on occasions of special worship. In October 1896

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it was estimated that 3,500 people, of all denominations, gathered in the Groote Kerk in Adderley Street, Cape Town, to observe the day of humiliation called during the rinderpest epizootic. Reformed churches elsewhere reported similar gatherings.92 Protestant nonconformists worked together as they had a shared history of struggle against establishment, and they had long cooperated in missions and in educational and social welfare ventures. The global spread of Protestant ecumenical organisations with British and anti-Catholic origins, notably the Evangelical Alliance (a multi-denominational Protestant initiative founded in Britain in 1846 to promote evangelical unity), promoted interdenominational services and weeks of prayer for special causes.93 Other ecumenical bodies that mushroomed in the later nineteenth century, such as councils of churches (such consultative bodies spread in Australia from the 1890s), encouraged the coordination of acts of special worship between evangelical Protestants.94 Ecumenical attitudes blossomed once states abolished or phased out church funding, as churches no longer had to compete for state recognition. Anti-Catholic prejudice also brought Protestants together. Cooperation between the Protestant churches came early in areas where Protestants considered themselves to be an embattled minority. When the Quebec Government refused to join with other Canadian provinces in setting aside harvest thanksgivings in the early 1870s, the main Protestant churches appointed joint Thursday thanksgivings.95 Times of acute stress also stimulated movements for church unity and community-wide special acts of worship. There was, for instance, considerable interdenominational cooperation during the First World War – partly this was because the conflict was traumatic and because denominational conflict appeared distasteful during wartime. Colonists would have known, too, that there was much cooperation between the established, free and Roman Catholic churches in Britain during the war.96 Even Roman Catholic cooperation was considered if the issues were general and apolitical. In Quebec, senior Anglicans worked alongside their Roman Catholic counterparts to select an appropriate date for a 1799 thanksgiving for British naval victories.97 Catholic leaders continued to appoint special days of prayer for their members that coincided with national occasions,98 and such coordination became particularly ­noticeable in Australia (and, for a time, Canada) during the First World War, as Roman Catholics wished to prove their loyalty, end sectarianism and achieve political aims. On occasion, Catholics did more, and moved from coordinating their special prayers with those of Protestant churches to cooperating with Protestant leaders in the organisation of special acts of worship. During late 1915, the Anglican archbishop of Sydney followed the example of senior churchmen in Britain when he obtained the support

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of Australia’s senior Roman Catholic, as well as other Protestant church leaders, before approaching the governor general for a nationwide ‘day of intercession’ for the first Sunday in 1916. The Roman Catholic archbishop of Adelaide, Robert Spence, even signed a call to prayer with Protestants in South Australia in late 1915.99 These wartime occasions prompted ministers to remark on the similarities between the empire’s religions. In January 1915, a Methodist preacher in Bendigo, Victoria argued that despite differences between Roman Catholics and Protestants, ‘beneath all the differences there is the distinct cry of the human heart’. Such multi-faith occasions, the preacher continued, demonstrated ‘the basic elements of our religion’.100 Ecumenicalism had limits, and it did not lead to fully cosmopolitan and multi-faith occasions. Marginalised and persecuted faith groups often could not participate in interdenominational displays of corporate prayer, because dominant Protestants might not want to invite such groups. Nor did Christian leaders in the settler colonies extend the hand of solidarity to indigenous faith groups, though on at least one occasion in the 1860s – ­discussed in Chapter 5 – an Australian settler suggested involving Victoria’s Chinese population in a community-wide day of prayer for rain. Other groups remained aloof, either for principled reasons, or because divisive issues were involved. French-speaking Catholics in Canada stayed away from Queen Victoria’s 1887 jubilee as it came shortly after state repression of the 1885 North-West Rebellion and the execution of the Roman Catholic leader, Louis Riel. In Australia and Canada during the First World War, Roman Catholic enthusiasm for the days of intercession cooled considerably once the divisive issue of conscription surfaced, and as Catholic leaders, such as Daniel Maddix, archbishop of Melbourne, scrutinised and condemned British war aims.101 Some felt threatened by the levelling and democratic implications of multi-faith gatherings. The Anglican bishop of Adelaide would not commit his diocese to a cross-denominational day of humiliation in 1886 because he remained committed to the old idea that his Church represented the nation and national religion.102 Interdenominational occasions were also difficult to organise and might generate tensions between faith groups. Churches might disagree on the purpose of special worship, and whether particular causes should be subjects for collective prayer. Plans for the 1886 Adelaide occasion nearly had to be abandoned as delegates disagreed on whether general repentance was appropriate in times of drought and commercial recession: not every industry was depressed and not everyone felt the effects of drought. One solution was to keep causes vague. In this case, South Australian Protestants agreed to observe a day of humiliation on a Sunday in April for ‘the present circumstances of the colony’.103

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Another problem was that many people might be unfamiliar with ‘national’ occasions appointed by churches. The number of requests from individuals and public organisations in state archives in Australia, South Africa and Canada indicate that colonial populations continued to assume that it was the responsibility of states to gather populations for religious purposes.104 It has already been noted that in the run-up to Australian federation in 1901, churches and private citizens composed numerous ­petitions  – some carried thousands of signatures – demanding that governors general be given the right to appoint days of humiliation and thanksgiving.105 Church leaders also continued to look to the highest civil officials to summon populations to general, public and ‘national’ acts of contrition and prayer. In Victoria in 1887 a delegation representing all the main Protestant churches convinced the reluctant premier, Duncan Gillies, to issue a proclamation that invited the colonial population to observe a Sunday in June as one of thanksgiving for Queen Victoria’s jubilee. In the view of the delegation, Gillies was ‘the representative of the people’ and it was appropriate for democracies to issue proclamations, as such texts would ‘only be an invitation, and not an instruction’.106 Throughout the First World War, church leaders repeatedly asked the Commonwealth Government to encourage Australians to observe special days of prayer and intercession, either through proclamations, notices in the press, or – as one Anglican clergyman put it – some other ‘official countenance’. As Australia’s most senior Anglican said in December 1915, the churches looked to the governor general, as his was ‘a voice that can speak to the Commonwealth as a whole’.107 Modern historians have claimed that Australian church leaders turned to states because the public would not heed appeals from the churches, and that Protestants probably banded together when weak.108 Neither view can be sustained. Churches combined and sought state support because they wanted collective acts to have community-wide appeal. Although state support was usually sought, occasions appointed by churches, particularly combinations of churches, could, in the colonies at least, be remarkably well observed.109 In Montreal in the early 1870s Protestant ministers had much success when they jointly appealed to shopkeepers and businesses to close their premises for a multi-denominational day of thanksgiving. In Ipswich, Queensland in November 1877, hundreds of business owners and shopkeepers signed newspaper notices to make public their intention of falling in with church-appointed days of prayer, and during drought in January 1885 shops and offices in Grahamstown in the Cape Colony responded to church appeals and closed for a day of humiliation on a Wednesday.110 All this is striking evidence of the moral authority of the churches and the popularity of special days among the laity, as well as the fact that c­ ommunities could

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make special days work without orders and sanctions from the civil authorities. Indeed, it was because churches had developed a tradition of disrupting work and leisure that churchmen in the decades after the First World War held days of remembrance, such as Anzac Day (a public holiday from 1921), on weekdays.111 Special days appointed independently by churches or combinations of churches could, then, demonstrate the formidable power and appeal of institutional religion in settler societies.

National churches Another illustration of the confidence of institutional religion at the close of the century was the revival, among Protestants, of the old idea that colonies and the empire might possess a ‘national church’, one that could reflect the ‘national character’ and express the ‘national conscience’.112 The period covered by this book saw an important shift in understandings of what constituted a national church. According to the old formulation, the national church was an ‘establishment’ that maintained social cohesion and enjoyed legal privileges. Financial support, through endowments and the right to gather tithes, allowed the church to maintain a presence everywhere in the realm and to serve the spiritual, educational and welfare needs of every inhabitant. The idea of the established church would fade in Ireland and Wales and had never had much purchase in the colonial world, apart from in the brief ‘Anglican design’ period (though as has been shown, remnants of religious establishment survived for a surprisingly long time in the state proclamations that called inhabitants to special worship). What emerged in the later nineteenth century was an alternative definition of national church, one rooted in ideas of culture and common heritage, as well as the notion that a suitably comprehensive, tolerant and non-threatening institution could represent a diverse nation. Colonists in the later nineteenth century applied the epithet ‘national church’ to religious institutions that had a national presence and a sense of public responsibility.113 Protestants across the settler empire periodically discussed the possibility of a new kind of national colonial church, formed from fragments of existing churches, though such proposals were articulated with varying degrees of conviction in different parts of the empire. Some Anglicans wanted the Church of England to rediscover its national status in a unified empire: only the Anglican Church, it was claimed, had the reach, breadth, appeal and sense of mission needed to mould the empire’s ‘diverse peoples’ and ‘heterogeneous elements’ into a unity.114 Such ideas were controversial and largely unrealisable. But the proliferation of occasions of special worship in the later nineteenth century fed this

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new e­ mphasis on national religion, both in terms of showing why national churches could seem to be desirable, as well as in giving institutional religion a renewed confidence and sense of purpose. For some colonists, new nations were well placed to build new national churches, and perhaps even lead the reunification of Christendom.115 Confederation in 1867 encouraged Canadian Protestant churches to organise themselves as national institutions, and national unity gave impetus to plans for interdenominational church unions. Union between nonconformists and Anglicans was problematic as the former would not accept the authority of the latter’s bishops, and nothing was realised in any of the settler colonies before the First World War. Indeed, it was not until 1925 that the United Church of Canada, an institution formed from Presbyterians, Methodists and Congregationalists, came into being (it had been proposed in 1901).116 Anglicans in the Cape Colony developed amicable relations with the Dutch Reformed Church in joint special days of worship, and at various times to 1870 the two churches discussed union, but without any result.117 Racial sensitivities impeded church union in southern Africa, and this partly explains why Presbyterians and Methodists did not formally discuss union until the 1920s.118 Non-episcopal churches preferred to work together on temperance, Sunday observance and other social issues through existing interdenominational associations, such as the Evangelical Alliance and the councils of churches. In Australia, plans for a federal church had surfaced around the time of federation in 1901, and during the First World War the moderator general of the Presbyterian Church of Australia (a federal body, formed in 1901) proposed a national church that united Protestant, Catholic and Greek Orthodox Christians. Still, it was only in 1977 that the Uniting Church of Australia, a body representing Methodists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists, was established.119 The point is not that church union schemes developed slowly, but that such plans were articulated at all. It is also significant that those favouring union pointed to special worship as a reason why colonies needed a new kind of national church. A South Australian Anglican cleric named John Wellington Owen publicised plans for a ‘National Church of Australasia’ in the 1880s and 1890s. For Owen, a national religious institution, founded on the ‘essentials of the Catholic Faith’, was preferable to the existing system of religious competition which, in Owen’s view, had only strengthened the appeal of secularism and what he called the ‘naturalistic school’.120 Also, a national church might resolve some of the problems that churchmen detected in colonial public life. Owen claimed in 1890 that a damaging consequence of religious dissension was that there was no ‘nationally-organised’ institution that could lead colonial populations

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in collective repentance for national sins.121 He underestimated the extent to which churches already worked together, and he overlooked the fact that Australian governments continued to summon communities to special prayers. But his comments reflected a wider feeling that colonial societies lacked a spiritual centre around which a diverse community could gather. Many within the Church of England believed Anglicanism could provide this centre. It has been said that an ‘establishment mentality’, one characterised by a belief in Anglican superiority and privilege, continued to shape Australian Anglicanism well into the twentieth century, though this would be a different kind of establishment to that which Charles Inglis in Canada and others tried to extend in the age of revolution.122 At a diocesan synod in 1899 the British-born archbishop of Sydney, the conservative William Saumarez Smith, remarked that ‘national life requires national religion’, and that ‘the broad character which historic development has given to the Anglican Church’ meant it had to use its position ‘for a national religious purpose’.123 Frederick Goldsmith, the dean of Perth, told the general synod in 1900 that a federated Australia ‘must have a national church’, and that the ‘people of the Anglican Church on the grounds of history and population were the only people who could make any claim to represent the people’.124 Goldsmith was one of a number of Australian Anglicans who wanted their Church to distance itself from its English origins and to connect itself to what he saw as an emergent Australian ‘national sentiment’.125 Recent scholarship on Anglicanism in the United Kingdom argues that the Church of England’s public standing rose as its constitutional privileges ceased to have the political significance that they had in the nineteenth century, and after Protestant nonconformists and Catholics achieved full political recognition and equality. As denominational politics cooled during the early twentieth century, the Church gathered support, retained influence and projected itself as the ‘representative of British religion in general’. Its churches, cathedrals and prayer book became symbols of Englishness, and it was increasingly acknowledged that Anglican archbishops, as the leaders of the British churches, should speak on behalf of the nation.126 Critical to this rising national influence was the ability of Anglican leaders to develop, from the 1870s, new relationships with other religious leaders on matters of public and national concern. That other religious groups could act together under Anglican leadership is suggested by the moments in times of war, industrial dispute and international crisis when Anglican archbishops acted on behalf of, or in concert with, the leaders of Protestant, Jewish and (though less frequently) Roman Catholic churches.127 Similar developments played out – indeed, came earlier – in the colonial world. John Moir, the scholar of Canadian Presbyterianism, found evidence of a ‘deference’ to Anglican ‘social pre-eminence’ among Nova Scotian

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nonconformists in the late 1750s. Nonconformists sat on the colony’s legislative assembly and with political representation came a willingness – among elites at least – to recognise Anglican privilege and to pass legislation that established the Church of England and allocated public funds for the completion of Halifax’s first Anglican church.128 Communities elsewhere in the empire came to recognise Anglican leadership as discriminatory legislation was repealed and as privileged establishments gave way to more egalitarian religious settlements. A day of humiliation, organised by Bishop Gray of Cape Town during frontier war in 1851, was apparently ‘universally observed’.129 In September 1869, shops and offices in Adelaide closed for a midweek day of humiliation that had been appointed by the Anglican bishop. Though the Evangelical Alliance gave support, this was a remarkable display of Anglican leadership in a colony that has been called the ‘paradise of dissent’.130 The year before, during crop disease, Perth’s evangelical Anglican bishop, Matthew Hale, organised a midweek day of humiliation that resulted in the suspension of all business and was apparently widely observed.131 During drought in Victoria in 1897 and in NSW in 1902 and 1903, and from the start of the First World War, Anglican archdeacons, bishops and archbishops initiated cooperation between churches and led multi-faith delegations that pressed civil officials to appoint special days of worship.132 In Melbourne in 1893, and in Sydney in 1919, bishops and archbishops presided over meetings of church leaders (sometimes in Anglican buildings) to plan special days of prayer, and when churches issued joint calls for prayer it was often the case that the names of senior Anglicans appeared first.133 In South Australia in January 1915, Protestants acceded to the request of the Anglican archbishop for a wartime day of intercession, and at the end of year Presbyterians asked Australia’s most senior Anglican to make the case to government for a national day of intercession.134 Anglican leadership was also evident at the local level. In Australia in the 1880s and 1890s it was common for Anglican parish clergy to lead interdenominational services of special worship; sometimes these services used prayers from Church of England services and forms (for a Crimean War fast day in 1854 Tasmanian Jewish people read a form of prayer composed by Hobart’s bishop).135 In February 1878, a Grahamstown newspaper reported that Presbyterian and Methodist ministers ‘wearing university gowns’ read lessons at an Anglican cathedral service for the day of ­humiliation – apparently this was the first time such a thing had happened in the Cape Colony.136 Scholars of Britain have argued that Protestant nonconformists accepted Anglican leadership once they had achieved greater recognition and status. Australian nonconformists could do the same, so long as Anglicans consulted them about the appointment of special prayers

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and days. Indeed, as early as 1879 a prominent Congregationalist in South Australia told an Evangelical Alliance meeting that the Church of England represented ‘in a large degree a national Christianity’.137 Special occasions of worship, particularly those for royal causes, encouraged plans for a new kind of national cathedral in the colonies.138 Bishop Webber of Brisbane disseminated plans for a new Anglican cathedral after the 1887 royal jubilee. Following the monarch’s death in 1901 Webber told his fellow Queenslanders that the building would be a suitable ‘national memorial’ to her memory. For decades before then, Anglican churchmen, and some officials, had spread the idea that Anglican cathedrals were for everyone, not just the Anglican community. For example, at the laying of the foundation stone of St Peter’s Cathedral in Adelaide in 1869, South Australia’s Presbyterian governor, James Fergusson, remarked that the cathedral would be ‘a common bond of union for all the Churches in the diocese – not confined to the Church of England alone’. Augustus Short, the Anglican bishop, made similar comments.139 Fundraisers for the Brisbane cathedral explained that the institution would be a ‘national possession’ and ‘the home of the religion of the whole community’.140 Though some criticised Webber for behaving as if he led a privileged establishment, support came from surprising places. Two Presbyterian subscribers to the cathedral fund called it a ‘national’ and ‘public monument’, and a correspondent told the Brisbane Courier that Queenslanders were ‘part and parcel of that Empire where the Anglican Church is the State church’.141 The laying of the foundation stone by the duke of York (the future King George V) in May 1901 focused attention on the links between monarchy and church. In the Cape Colony, as in Queensland, Queen Victoria’s death prompted the Anglican dean to propose a new cathedral in Cape Town – the present St George’s – as a national memorial, one where ‘citizens of divers Christian faiths and creeds unhesitatingly gather’ on ‘notable occasions of public joy and grief’.142 Conveniently, the royal tour had reached South Africa in August 1901 and the duke was able to lay the foundation stone there too; he also donated one hundred guineas to the building fund. The stone laying has, however, been described as the ‘most controversial ceremony of the tour’. The Church of England was accused of behaving as a national church, and the Church of Scotland was particularly irked that the Anglican Church planned to build a ‘national monument’ to the dead of the South African War at the eastern end of the cathedral. Such a monument, Presbyterians argued, could only be ‘sectarian’.143 Correspondents in south Africa objected to an Anglican dean’s claim that a city was ‘a community of inhabitants which has a Cathedral Church and a bishop’. Nevertheless, the national cathedral concept received support in the newspapers.144

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In Canada, Anglican churchmen seized on the South African War (1899–1902) to reassert their Church’s leadership credentials. The Anglican bishop of Quebec, Andrew Dunn, believed that ‘Presbyterians, Methodists, & indeed all English speaking Christians’ would unite in observing a day of prayer and humiliation arranged by the archbishop of Canterbury, though he admitted that the war had ‘revealed some anti-English feeling’, and that French Canadians would not ‘take much part’.145 Although the imperial day of humiliation never materialised, Canadian Anglicans joined their coreligionists in Britain and in other parts of the empire in observing Sunday 11 February 1900 as a day of intercession for the combatants and victims of war. This occasion is supposed to have generated considerable anti-­Anglican feeling amongst the wider Protestant community, as it was felt that the Church of England was again behaving like a privileged ­establishment.146 The South African War was undoubtedly controversial, but this view tends to overplay the depth of hostility. In Quebec, where Protestants had a long history of joining together for corporate worship, newspapers reported that Presbyterians and Methodists offered special prayers on the Anglican day of intercession.147 In parts of South Africa, an Anglican-appointed day of thanksgiving, called on a Sunday in June 1902 to mark peace with the Boers, received more newspaper coverage than the civil-appointed and community-wide occasion held on a previous Sunday.148 As in Britain, religious leadership was not so much claimed by Anglican leaders as assigned to them by other religious groups. Colonial states reinforced the idea that the Church of England had a special relationship with the monarchy – the symbol of an imperial nation – when they printed the Anglican form of prayer for Queen Victoria’s jubilees in government gazettes.149 Whether the late nineteenth-century Church of England was indeed a comprehensive ‘national’ church is questionable, as there continued to be much party conflict, and in some places disputes over authority and theology resulted in the formation of splinter churches. Evangelicals in southern Africa set up their own ‘Church of England in South Africa’ because they refused to join Bishop Gray’s – apparently high-church – Church of the Province of South Africa (formed 1870), while a schism in Natal – which came about when the bishop, the Bible sceptic John Colenso, was found guilty of heresy by Gray – meant that from the 1860s to the 1890s there existed two rival Anglican dioceses, each of which observed separate days of thanksgiving, and followed their own forms of prayer.150 It is also hard to judge whether Anglican leadership ever became ‘normalized’ in the colonial world to the extent it did in Britain.151 The religious procession and service that marked the inauguration of the Australian Commonwealth in Sydney in January 1901 illustrates the limits of Anglican leadership.152 Initially it seemed that the ceremony would emphasise the

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authority of the Church of England, as the council of churches asked the Anglican archbishop, Saumarez Smith, to compose a special prayer for the swearing-in of the new prime minister on 1 January. Smith thought this entirely proper, as his church had the largest number of adherents in Australia. A religious newspaper agreed, and noted that the archbishop was ‘the representative, not only of the Anglican church, but practically of all the other Protestant Churches of Australia’. Things unravelled when the head of Australia’s Roman Catholic Church, Cardinal Patrick Moran, overlooked papal prohibitions and said he would only participate if he could read his own prayer for the Commonwealth, preferably before the Anglican archbishop’s (on the grounds that the Cardinal had served for longer). Presbyterians then argued that they should have a position in the procession just behind the Anglican and Roman Catholic representatives. If that was not possible there should be no hierarchy at all. In the event, neither cardinal nor archbishop participated in the procession. Moran boycotted the swearing-in ceremony too, though Smith opened it with a special prayer, an event captured on film. Some churches, then, did not recognise Anglican leadership at all, and for others the primacy of the Church of England was a matter of numbers, not principle. Disputes over precedence and religious leadership reared up again during the coronations of 1902 and 1911, as Chapter 6 shows. Church of England leadership had less purchase elsewhere than in Australia, as Anglicans in both Canada and South Africa Anglicans formed a smaller proportion of the religious public. In British North America, Anglican bishops sometimes coordinated fasts and thanksgiving for the rest of the community (this happened when the Newfoundland fisheries failed in 1865),153 but generally the Church wielded limited political influence because nowhere – not even in Ontario – was it the largest denomination. Anglican leadership was halting in southern Africa too: bishops were relative new­comers and Anglicans always formed less than ten per cent of the population in the Cape Colony. In Natal in the 1870s, clergymen did not turn to Anglican bishops when they approached governments for special days of worship.154 It was true that senior Anglican clergy occupied prominent positions in the united services of intercession that South Africans observed during the First World War: the archbishop of Cape Town, for instance, delivered the key address at the thanksgiving service held in Cape Town for peace in 1918. But united services were often led by mayors’ chaplains, not all of whom were Anglican. The Methodist chaplain of the mayor of Port Elizabeth led 5,000 people in an outdoor service of intercession in August 1915, and the following year the Scottish Caledonian Association in King William’s Town rejected an offer to join the town mayor and other ethnic societies at an Anglican service for the war anniversary.155 Indeed, such a divisive conflict as the First World War

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could only temporarily boost Anglicanism’s imperial appeal. Sectarian, ethnic and class tensions were inflamed in both Canada and Australia, and the Australian Anglican Church suffered when it associated itself with the deeply unpopular conscription campaign.156 Yet even South Africa provides examples of a pluralist public turning to Anglican leaders and Anglican symbols at moments of national importance. A muted expression of Anglican leadership was, for example, evident at the ‘civic thanksgiving service’ that was held in the city hall, Cape Town, on 31 May 1910 to mark the Union of South Africa. The preacher was Alexander Pitt, a Congregational minister, but the order of service included a general confession and the general thanksgiving taken from the Book of Common Prayer.157 It is also noteworthy that the legislatures in two Australian ­colonies – Queensland and Western Australia – opened with prayers based on the Anglican prayer book.158 The use of these prayers in colonial parliaments and at the consummation of new nations may have pointed to the Church of England’s enduring status and appeal as a representative national body. More strikingly, the form of service at the foundation of South Africa indicated that the Book of Common Prayer was not only a symbol of the English nation and a ‘carrier of national identity’, but also a text that, for some inhabitants at least, had a part to play in founding new ‘religious nations’ in ‘Greater Britain’.159

Conclusion Special worship in the colonial world reveals the processes by which states accepted religious pluralism and churches embraced increasingly ‘national’ outlooks. In the early nineteenth century religious life in pioneer colonies had been marked by provincialism, congregationalism and factionalism, and the fragmented observances of early occasions of special worship reflected this. The spread of ecclesiastical bureaucracies and executive authorities – entities such as bishops, presbyteries, synods and conferences – made possible more coordinated and denominational responses, and by the middle of the nineteenth century Protestant churches with no history of established status organised general or ‘national’ acts of worship, either for their denominations, or, more ambitiously, for entire colonial communities. Special worship reveals, then, the confidence and ambition of church leaders around 1900, not their concerns about low church attendances and the spread of atheism. And the special role played by Christian leaders in the appointment of state-ordered displays of public worship reinforced the old idea that despite their diversity, the settler societies of Britain’s empires should retain an identity as Christian nations.

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Judging how far these occasions strengthened the authority or popular appeal of institutional religion is, however, difficult. Later chapters say more about ill-chosen special acts of worship which seemed to undermine the authority of religious leaders. Clergy did not always shape public opinion or occupy privileged positions as community leaders in colonial society. To assess the significance of special worship for church authority more must be said about how occasions were observed, and how the laity responded to the messages disseminated by churchmen. The following two chapters turn to consider these messages, as well as the relationship between institutional and popular observances on days of prayer.

Notes 1 School for Oriental and Asian Studies [SOAS], Wesleyan Missionary Society Archives [WMSA], Box 8, Nova Scotia 1833–4, No. 98, R. Knight to the Wesleyan Missionary Society, 26 September 1834, fo. 58. 2 O’Brien, ‘Religion’, p. 428; Ely, Unto God and Caesar, pp. 122–3. From July 1854 to their dissolution in 1910, both houses of the Parliament of Cape of Good Hope (formed 1853) read a form of prayer previously used in the colony’s legislative council: R. Kilpin, The Old Cape House (Cape Town, 1918), p. 26. 3 For the appeal and strength of institutional religion in nineteenth-century Canada, N. Christie and M. Gauvreau, Christian Churches and Their Peoples, 1840–1965: a social history of religion in Canada (Toronto, 2010), chapter 1. For the view that churches retreated, J. Grant, A Profusion of Spires: religion in nineteenth-century Ontario (Toronto, 1988), p. 223. 4 Anglican initiatives in England and Britain are described in NP, II, pp. xci–xcii, 783, 798, 800. 5 T. Millman, The Life of the Right Reverend, The Honourable Charles James ­ 4739–41, Stewart (London, Ont., 1953), pp. 147–8; HC, C-6875, vol. 115, fos 6 Bishop Stewart to Governor Colborne, 31 March 1832. 6 Monitor, 16 November 1829; Weston Library, Oxford, United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Archives [USPG], C/AUS/SYD/2, Bishop Broughton to USPG, 28 November 1838. 7 Monitor, 19 October 1829. 8 HC, H-2585, RG4-C1, 198, nos 1267 and 2387 (1267 is placed at 2387), Bishop of Montreal to the provincial secretary, 18 June 1847. 9 NP, II, pp. lxvi, lxx–lxxv, and NP, III, pp. lxxiii–lxxiv, xcix–ci, for special worship in the Church of Scotland. 10 NP, II, pp. lxv–lxvi. 11 D. Chambers, ‘The Kirk and the colonies in the early 19th century’, Historical Studies, 16:64 (1975), 381–401. 12 J. S. Moir, ‘Loyalties in conflict: Scottish and American influences on Canadian Presbyterianism’, in P. Laverdure (ed.), Early Presbyterianism in Canada:

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essays by John S. Moir (Gravelbourg, 2003), pp. 177–8. The loyalism of early Canadian Presbyterianism is evident from thanksgiving sermons from the French Wars: A. Spark, A Sermon Preached in the Presbyterian Chapel at Quebec (Quebec, 1799). 13 One such occasion (in January 1839) is reported in E. McDougall and J. S. Moir (eds), Selected Correspondence of the Glasgow Colonial Society 1825–40 (Toronto, 1994), p. 137. 14 British Colonist [Toronto], 15 February 1838. 15 D. McKim, Boundless Dominion: providence, politics, and the early Canadian Presbyterian worldview (Montreal, 2017), pp. 39–40. 16 NP, II, p. lxxiv. 17 Descriptive Sketches of Nova Scotia, pp. 46–7; G. Patterson, Memoir of the Rev. James MacGregor (Philadelphia, PA, 1859), pp. 116–17. 18 NP, II, p. lxxxvii. 19 C. Read and R. Stagg, The Rebellion of 1837 in Upper Canada: a collection of documents (Ottawa, 1988), p. 363. 20 M. Winship, Seers of God: Puritan providentialism in the Restoration and early enlightenment (Baltimore, MD, 1996), pp. 36–9. 21 General Synod Archives, Toronto, MG67–1, Bishop Mountain to Bishop Pretyman of Lincoln, 29 June 1813. 22 Hardwick, ‘Fasts’, p. 682 and note 24. For the deference of Catholic bishops in Quebec to the Crown, see D. Lowry, ‘The Crown, empire loyalism and the assimilation of non-British white subjects’, JICH, 31:2 (2003), 102–3. 23 NP, II, pp. lxxxix–xc for the Irish situation from the 1760s. 24 NP, II, p. lxxxix; NP, III, pp. lxxvi–lxxvii. 25 Hardwick, ‘Fasts’, 700. 26 O. Rafferty, ‘The Catholic Church, Ireland and the British empire, 1800–1921’, Historical Research, 84:224 (2011), 288–309. 27 Non-Anglican Protestant observances in the British Isles are examined in NP, II, pp. lxxxvi–xci; NP, III, pp. lxxic–lxxv. 28 L. Sabathy-Judd (ed.), Moravians in Upper Canada: the diary of the Indian Mission of Fairfield on the Thames 1792–1813 (Toronto, 1999), p. 306. 29 For the activities of one American-born Methodist in Upper Canada days of prayer, see the 1802–50 diary of Benjamin Smith of Ancaster Township: Archives of Ontario [AO], F582, MS199. For Maritime Canada, see the diaries of the American-born Methodist Simeon Perkins: H. A. Innis, D. C. Harvey and C. Fergusson (eds), The Diary of Simeon Perkins, 5 vols (Toronto, 1947–78). 30 T. Webb, ‘How the Canadian Methodists became British: unity, schism and transatlantic identity’, in N. Christie (ed.), Transatlantic Subjects (Montreal, 2008), pp. 163–5. 31 Christian Guardian [Toronto], 9 May 1832 and 7 February 1838; Webb, ‘How the Canadian Methodists became British’, p. 176. 32 NP, II, p. lxxxvii. 33 Sydney Gazette, 13 April 1806. 34 NSW Government Gazette, 17 October 1838.

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35 Colonist [Sydney], 27 October 1838; Sydney Gazette, 6 November 1838. 36 ‘Z.’, South Australian Register [Adelaide], 13 July 1854; S. Constantine, ‘Monarchy and constructing identity in “British” Gibraltar, c. 1800 to the present’, JICH, 34:1 (2006), 28. 37 NP, II, p. xc. 38 A. Green, ‘The British Empire and the Jews: an imperialism of human rights?’, Past & Present, 199:1 (2008), 175–205; Rev. A. De Sola, Montreal Gazette, 20 April 1855. 39 Johnston, National Thanksgivings, p. 3. 40 T. Murphy, ‘The emergence of Maritime Catholicism, 1781–1830’, Acadiensis, 13:2 (1984), 42. 41 J. Burns, True Patriotism (Montreal, 1814); R. Easton, Reasons for Joy and Praise (Montreal, 1815), pp. 6–9. 42 Grant, Profusion of Spires, p. 91; Webb, ‘How the Canadian Methodists became British’, p. 182. 43 NP, II, p. lxxxviii. 44 J. Roaf, Religious Liberty (Toronto, 1838); Read and Stagg (eds), Rebellion of 1837, p. 363. 45 Lake, Bible in Australia, p. 79; O’Brien, ‘Religion’, p. 426. 46 M. Lake, ‘The Bible in Australian history and culture’, St. Mark’s Review, 240 (2017), 12–33. 47 N. Kabir, Muslims in Australia: immigration, race relations and cultural history (London, 2010), pp. 70, 120. The lists of churches that the Commonwealth Government contacted during the Great War about special worship are in NAA, A461, AM322/1. 48 R. Davenport, ‘Settlement, conquest, and theological controversy: the churches of nineteenth-century European immigrants’, in R. Elphick and R. Davenport (eds), Christianity in South Africa: a political, social, and cultural history (Berkeley, CA, 1997), pp. 51–4. 49 Cape Town Gazette, 7 August 1813; South African Commercial Advertiser [Cape Town], 16 May 1846; H. Okes, A Sermon Preached at Wynberg (Cape Town, 1846), p. 17. 50 C. Gray, Life of Robert Gray, I, p. 163. 51 Bishop Gray to Sir George Grey, 26 December 1854, ‘Correspondence relative to addresses, resolutions, &c. received from the British colonies, on the subject of the war with Russia’, PP, 1940 (1854–5), p. 22; Cape Monitor [Cape Town], 5 and 12 (reporting a Grahamstown Journal editorial) October 1859. 52 ‘M.’, Cape Monitor, 8 October 1859. 53 P. Rider and H. McNabb (eds), Kingdom of the Mind: how the Scots helped make Canada (Montreal, 2006); P. Airhart, ‘Ordering a new nation and reordering Protestantism 1867–1914’, in G. A. Rawlyk (ed.), The Canadian Protestant Experience 1760–1990 (Burlington, VT, 1990), pp. 102–4. 54 J. S. Moir, ‘The quay of Greenock: jurisdiction and nationality in the Canadian Disruption of 1844’, in Laverdure (ed.), Early Presbyterianism, pp. 107–23.

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55 Wesleyan, 25 August 1849; Globe, 2, 21 and 30 November and 8 December 1859; Canadian United Presbyterian Magazine, 1 October 1859, p. 339. 56 McKim, Boundless Dominion, p. 44. 57 Ecclesiastical and Missionary Record for the Presbyterian Church of Canada, 6:3 (1850). 58 McKim, Boundless Dominion, pp. 132–4. 59 Canadian United Presbyterian Magazine, 1 November 1857; Ecclesiastical and Missionary Record for the Presbyterian Church of Canada, 14:1 (November 1857). 60 HC, H-1364, RG7-G20/6280, presbytery of Hamilton to civil secretary, 10 October 1855; Canadian United Presbyterian Magazine, 1 November 1857 (reporting on a joint meeting of free churchmen and secessionists); HC, H-2461, RG5-C1/588/2082, A. Topp to the governor general, 3 November 1858. 61 HC, H-2485, RG5-C1/789/1333, J. MacFarish to provincial secretary, 3 November 1864. 62 Stevens, ‘“Righteousness Exalteth a Nation”’, p. 61; for the importance of Thursdays in Scottish special worship, NP, II, p. lxxvi. 63 McKim, Boundless Dominion, pp. 153–61, 264. 64 Ecclesiastical and Missionary Record, for the Presbyterian Church of Canada, 8:12 (October 1852) and 9:12 (October 1853). 65 J. MacKenzie, ‘Empire and national identities: the case of Scotland’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 8 (2016), 231. 66 ‘West Australia’, Perth Gazette, 6 April 1866; ‘A Resident’, Brisbane Courier, 4 January 1869; ‘Gratus’, SMH, 1 January 1870; ‘A Sufferer’, Western Australia Times [Perth], 27 March 1877. Gundagai Times [NSW], 15 February 1878, for the government view. 67 See the correspondence in HC, H-2585, RG4-C1/198/1267 and 2387. 68 Christie and Gauvreau, Christian Churches, chapter 1. 69 Ibid., p. 57. 70 N. Christie and M. Gauvreau, ‘Secularisation or resacralisation? The Canadian case, 1760–2000’, in C. G. Brown and M. Snape (eds), Secularisation in the Christian World: essays in honour of Hugh McLeod (Farnham, 2010), pp. 99–100. 71 Têtu and Gagnon, Mandements, Lettres Pastorales et Circulaires Des Évêques De Québec, vol. 5 (Quebec, 1888), pp. 38–9, 86, 123–5, 263. 72 ‘John Bergan’, Australian Star [Sydney], 13 April 1897. 73 Stevens, ‘“Righteousness Exalteth the Nation”’, pp. 73–5. 74 Queensland Times [Ipswich], 6 June 1893; Daily Telegraph [Sydney], 30 October 1907. 75 Grant, A Profusion of Spires, p. 223. 76 Ibid., p. 197; McKernan, Australian Churches at War, pp. 169, 172; Christie and Gauvreau, Christian Churches, p. 62. 77 Lake, Bible in Australia, p. 201. 78 Atkinson, ‘How do we live with ourselves?’ 79 Newfoundlander [St. John’s], 21 and 28 May 1829.

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80 Church [Cobourg], 13 January 1838. 81 NP, II, pp. lxix, 848–9, 872–3. 82 M. E. Reisner (ed.), The Diary of a Country Clergyman, 1848–1851: James Reid (Montreal, 2000), pp. 42, 296; D. Anderson, Notes of the Flood at the Red River, 1852 (London, 1852), p. 12. 83 Gray, The Life of Robert Gray, I, p. 328; Port Elizabeth Mercury, 20 December 1851; AO, F983–2, MS35/12, Bishop Strachan to the Bishop of Quebec, 26 March 1855, fo. 61. 84 The occasion was proposed by the Bishop George Tomlinson of Gibraltar: Colonial Church Chronicle [London], 2 (July 1848–June 1849), 234–6. 85 Annual observances were widely reported in the colonial press. For the first Australian examples, see Empire, 30 December 1872 and Argus, 21 December 1872. The plans for the 1872 and 1873 occasions are in Lambeth Palace Library, Tait papers, vol. 182, fos 146–58 and vol. 191, fos 262–9. 86 S. Maughan, Mighty England Do Good: culture, faith, empire, and the world in the foreign missions of the Church of England, 1850–1915 (Grand Rapids, MI, 2014), pp. 92–5; HC, H-2003, D44, Bishop Binney of Nova Scotia to the USPG, 2 May and 15 November 1876, fos 292, 310–11. 87 ‘An Undenominational Layman’, Cape Mercury [King William’s Town], 6 October 1896. 88 For two examples of local days in southern Africa, see Natal Witness [Durban], 14 November 1878 and Grahamstown Journal, 24 January and 14 November 1885. 89 See Gippsland Times, 3 December 1888 for one mayor’s doubts. 90 Age, 18 May 1893. 91 SMH, 24 June 1893; Brisbane Courier, 15 June 1893. 92 Cape Argus Weekly Edition [Cape Town], 21 October 1896; Midland News and Karroo Farmer [Cradock], 13 October 1896; Northern Post [Aliwal North], 17 October 1896. 93 C. Silcox, Church Union in Canada: its causes and consequences (New York, 1933), p. 86 and chapter 4. 94 Plans for Victoria’s council of churches are in Argus, 10 December 1892. The first Australian council was apparently formed in NSW in 1889 to tackle the problem of sabbath desecration: ‘John Walker’, SMH, 15 December 1892. 95 Montreal Gazette, 15 November 1871, 15 November 1872 and 30 October 1874. Christie and Gauvreau, Christian Churches, p. 17. 96 McKernan, Australian Churches at War, p. 156; NP, III, pp. lxxi–lxxvi. 97 Kelley, ‘Jacob Mountain’, p. 247. 98 E.g. the circular Cardinal Patrick Moran issued during drought in October 1898: Daily Telegraph, 18 October 1898. 99 NAA, A461, AM322/1, Archbishop Wright of Sydney to the governor general, 11 December 1915; McKernan, Australian Churches at War, pp. 91–2. The archbishop correctly noted that such ‘joint action is happening in England’. Archbishop Davidson had received the public approval of the King and the support of Protestant and Roman Catholic leaders for a national day of

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intercession in England and Wales in January 1915. Davidson made similar arrangements in late 1915 for a January 1916 occasion: Williamson, ‘National days’, 332; NP, III, pp. 162–3. For the South Australia joint letter, see Daily Herald [Adelaide], 25 December 1915. 100 Rev. G. Scholes, Bendigo Independent, 4 January 1915. 101 Hardwick, ‘Fasts’, 698–9, 701; McKernan, Australian Churches at War, pp. 122–3, 163. Newspapers noticed that Maddix did not issue instructions for a day of intercession on the anniversary of the war in 1918: Argus [Melbourne], 1 August 1918. 102 Williamson, ‘National days’, 331; SMH, 10 April 1886. 103 South Australian Weekly Chronicle [Adelaide], 10 April 1886. 104 In time, bishops and other church leaders emerged as visible community figures, and newspapers published requests to such figures: for South Africa, see ‘W.’, Grahamstown Journal, 13 September 1883, and the editorial in Grahamstown Journal, 4 October 1883. For Australia, see ‘A Believer in Prayer’, Maitland Mercury, 12 January 1884; ‘A Voice from the Country’, SMH, 29 June 1893. 105 NAA, R216 for the petitions. For the debates, Lake, Bible in Australia, pp. 227–9 and Ely, Unto God and Caesar. 106 Weekly Times [Melbourne], 18 June 1887. 107 NAA, A461, AM322/1, Archbishop Wright to the governor general, 11 December 1915. 108 McKernan, Australian Churches at War, pp. 91–2; A. Ryrie, Protestants: the radicals who made the modern world (London, 2017), p. 77. 109 Matthew Cragoe cites the days of humiliation called during cattle plague in 1866 as evidence that church-appointed acts of special worship were not widely observed in English industrial areas: ‘“The hand of the Lord is upon the cattle”: religious reactions to the cattle plague, 1865–67’, in M. Hewitt (ed.), An Age of Equipoise? Reassessing mid-Victorian Britain (Aldershot, 2000), p. 200. 110 LAC, MG26-A, D. Macdonnell to J. A. Macdonald, 12 and 17 October 1885, and Bishop Binney to Macdonald, 22 October 1885; SMH, 24 June 1893. 111 J. Moses, ‘Anglicanism and Anzac observance: the essential contribution of canon David John Garland’, Pacifica, 19:1 (2006), 75. 112 Proposals for an Australian national church, and its significance for an Australian national conscience, are discussed in Atkinson, ‘How do we live with ourselves?’ 113 M. Grimley, ‘The state, nationalism, and Anglican identities’, in J. Morris (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume IV: global western Anglicanism, c.1910–present (Oxford, 2017), p. 119. 114 S. Maughan, ‘Imperial Christianity? Bishop Montgomery and the foreign missions of the Church of England, 1895–1915’, in A. Porter (ed.), The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880–1914 (Grand Rapids, MI, 2003), pp. 32–57; S. J. Brown, ‘Anglicanism in the British Empire, ­1829–1910’, in R. Strong (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume III: partisan Anglicanism and its global expansion, 1829–c.1914 (Oxford, 2017), pp. 66–7.

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115 N. Clifford, The Resistance to Church Union in Canada 1904–1939 (Vancouver, 1985), pp. 18–19. 116 C. Silcox, Church Union in Canada: its causes and consequences (New York, 1933), pp. 106–10; Grant, A Profusion of Spires, pp. 194–5; N. Semple, The Lord’s Dominion: the history of Canadian Methodism (Montreal, 1996), pp. 419–20. 117 Gray, Life of Robert Gray, II, p. 545. 118 J. de Gruchy, ‘Grappling with colonial heritage: the English-speaking churches under imperialism and apartheid’, in Elphick and Davenport (eds), Christianity in South Africa, pp. 157–60. 119 Ely, Unto God and Caesar, p. 11; G. Davison, ‘Religion’, in Bashford and Macintyre (eds), Cambridge History of Australia, 2, pp. 219, 229–30; McKernan, Australian Churches at War, p. 156. 120 J. W. Owen, What the Colonies Need: a plea for a national church of Australasia (Adelaide, 1886), pp. 4–7, 27. 121 Evening Journal, 20 September 1890. 122 R. Strong, ‘An antipodean establishment: institutional Anglicanism in Australia, 1788–c.1934’, Journal of Anglican Studies, 1:1 (2003), 61–90; B.  Fletcher, ‘Anglicanism and nationalism in Australia, 1901–1962’, Journal of Religious History, 23:2 (1999), 216–19. 123 Australian Town and Country Journal [Sydney], 30 September 1899. 124 Geelong Advertiser, 4 September 1900. 125 See Bishop Mercer of Tasmania, Daily Telegraph, 12 October 1910, and Bishop Thomas of Adelaide, Advertiser [Adelaide], 4 September 1912. 126 Williamson, ‘National days’, 325; Grimley, ‘The state’, p. 118; Grimley, ‘The religion of Englishness: Puritanism, providentialism and “national character,” 1918–1945’, JBS, 46:4 (2007), 884–906; Williamson and Grimley, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–3, 29–30. 127 Williamson, ‘Archbishops and the monarchy: leadership in British religion, 1900–2012’, in T. Rodger et al. (eds), The Church of England and British Politics in the Twentieth Century (Woodbridge, 2020), p. 77. 128 Moir (ed.), Church and State in Canada, pp. 35–6. 129 Cape Monitor, 14 February 1851. 130 D. Pike, The Paradise of Dissent: South Australia 1829–1857 (Melbourne, 1957). 131 South Australian Advertiser, 23 September 1869; Inquirer and Commercial News [Perth], 25 November 1868. 132 Geelong Advertiser, 24 April 1897; Evening News [Sydney], 22 February 1902; Daily Telegraph, 19 February 1902 and 7 March 1903; Age, 12 November 1914. 133 Argus, 17 May 1893; Young Witness [NSW], 14 November 1919. 134 Daily Herald, 27 November 1914; NAA, A461, AM322/1, Archbishop Wright to the governor general, 11 December 1915. 135 Maitland Mercury, 26 October 1882; Courier [Hobart], 14 August 1854. 136 Eastern Star [Grahamstown], 15 February 1878.

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137 Williamson, ‘National days’, pp. 325, 341; Grimley, ‘The state’, p. 124; South Australian Register, 13 May 1879. 138 Brown, ‘Anglicanism in the British Empire’, p. 56, and G. A. Bremner, Imperial Gothic: religious architecture in the British Empire, 1840–1870 (New Haven, CT, 2013), for neo-Gothic cathedrals and growing Anglican confidence. 139 South Australian Register, 17 July 1869. 140 S. Griffith, former premier of Queensland, in Week [Brisbane], 10 June 1898. 141 Brisbane Courier: ‘Scotchman’, 16 February 1901; ‘Presbyterian’, 15 February 1901; ‘German’, 7 February 1901. Critical correspondence is printed in Brisbane Courier, 6 February 1901. 142 Cape Times [Cape Town], 5 February 1901. 143 P. Buckner, ‘The royal tour of 1901 and the construction of an imperial identity in South Africa’, South African Historical Journal, 41:1 (1999), 339. 144 See ‘A Stranger in the City’, Cape Times, 12 February 1901, and ‘Diaconus’, Cape Times, 14 February 1901 for the Anglican privilege controversy. 145 Lambeth Palace Library, Frederick Temple papers, vol. 42, Bishop Dunn of Quebec to Archbishop Temple of Canterbury, 1 January 1900, fos 20–1. 146 G. Heath, War with a Silver Lining: Canadian Protestant churches and the South African War, 1899–1902 (Montreal, 2009), pp. 65–9. 147 Quebec Mercury, 12 February 1900; Montreal Gazette, 12 February 1900; Quebec Chronicle, 12 February 1900. 148 Compare the reports of the general thanksgiving services for peace, and the Anglican day of thanksgiving, in Cape Mercury, 10 June (general) and 16 June 1902 (Anglican). 149 E.g. Victoria Government Gazette, 17 June 1897. 150 Two congregations, formerly under Colenso, angrily refused to use a form of prayer that Colenso’s rival, Bishop Macrorie, issued for Queen Victoria’s jubilee: Natal Mercury, 29 June 1887. 151 Williamson, ‘Archbishops and the monarchy’, p. 68. 152 R. Ely, ‘God, the churches, and the making of the Australian Commonwealth’ (PhD dissertation, University of Tasmania, 1975), pp. 230–43. 153 Times and General Commercial Gazette [St. John’s], 14 January 1865. 154 Natal Witness, 22 February 1879. 155 Cape Argus, 16 November 1918 and 5 August 1915. WCPA, 3/KWT, vol. 4/1/242, ref. ZE/2/19, Caledonian Association to town clerk, 1 August 1916. 156 McKernan, Australian Churches at War, chapter 8; Hardwick, ‘Fasts’, 698–9, 701. 157 [Corporation of the City of Capetown], Union of South Africa: civic thanksgiving service, 31st May, 1910 (Cape Town, 1910), pp. 3–4. No official religious services marked the inauguration of confederation in Canada in 1867: J. W. Grant, ‘Canadian Confederation and the Protestant churches’, Church History, 38:3 (1969), 328. 158 Ely, Unto God and Caesar, p. 123.

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159 J. Gregory, ‘“For all sorts and conditions of men”: the social life of the Book of Common Prayer during the long eighteenth century: or, bring the history of religion and social history together’, Social History, 34:1 (2009), 52–3; B.  Cummings, The Book of Common Prayer: a very short introduction (Oxford, 2018), pp. 2–3.

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Participants and observances

In October 1854 a British newspaper, the Leeds Intelligencer, reported that copper miners in far-distant South Australia had marked the outbreak of war with Russia with a day of humiliation, just as the inhabitants of the British Isles had done months previously, on a Wednesday in late April. Strikingly, the miners did not respond to an official summons from a local authority, but acted spontaneously, on news read in British newspapers. The local Church of England clergyman even conducted religious services according to the English form of prayer he found printed in the Intelligencer’s columns. In reporting this distant display of public worship, the paper celebrated the British world’s sense of community and emphasised the connecting power of the press.1 This incident, though obscure, emphasises key aspects in colonial observances of special occasions of worship. First, days of fasting, humiliation, thanksgiving and intercession had great appeal for many, and might be observed voluntarily and spontaneously, with unlikely groups participating. Second, the use of the form of prayer demonstrates the importance of printed texts in special occasions of worship, and the need to get these documents into the hands of worshippers. Scripted prayers and services had always structured worship in the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, but by the twentieth century it became common for nonconformists to use forms of prayer too. Third, while newspapers kept remote communities informed of great events, news often spread in piecemeal fashion: communities, such as the miners, learnt of occasions by chance, and some people might never know that there had been a day of fasting or thanksgiving. This chapter reveals commonalities in public observances of acts of special prayer across the British world, and how far these aligned with what clergymen thought communities should do on such occasions. The messages that religious ministers disseminated on days of prayer are also discussed. Sermons and forms of prayer reveal that preachers articulated a common set of beliefs about divine providence, the purpose of prayer and the moral significance of events. But there was much change over time, too.

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Styles of worship rooted in traditional beliefs in providential interventions declined, and attention shifted to the character and attributes of the praying people. And more flexible and lay-oriented styles of worship emerged alongside the use of scripted forms of prayer. While the National Prayers volumes point to many of the same processes in special worship in metropolitan Britain,2 the speed with which churches embraced new modes and sites of worship was a distinctively colonial development. Assessing how individuals spent days of prayer is difficult, but the historian can recover enough from diaries and newspaper reports to make meaningful generalisations about public and private observances. Not everyone gave up work and leisure, and some inhabitants had personal reasons for fasting and giving thanks. Yet there was much conformity. Importantly, lay involvement became more noticeable and extensive over time – indeed, occasions organised by church leaders only worked because laypeople coordinated the closure of shops, businesses and offices. Days of prayer were not, therefore, always controlled from above; indeed, by the twentieth century, laypersons composed prayers, spoke at multi-faith services, and led services at all-day prayer gatherings. Much has been written about how lay involvement made institutional religion work in the colonial world, and examples of lay initiative and agency on days of prayer should be considered as aspects of a long-term process of ‘laicisation’ in institutional religion.3 Before addressing these issues, the chapter considers fundamental questions raised by the South Australian copper miners. How did news travel in the empire, and how did colonial communities learn about special occasions of worship? Did all colonists have the chance to engage? How far did the authorities manage to coordinate observances through the distribution of printed texts, such as proclamations, orders and forms of prayer? What role did laypeople play in publicising special occasions of worship?

Receiving the news In the British Isles, the texts that announced special worship and the forms of prayer that structured worship in Anglican churches had to be printed and distributed as widely and speedily as possible – occasions, after all, happened on specific dates and could involve every inhabitant. This could not happen just by word of mouth. Proclamations, as important expressions of royal and state authority, had to be seen, read or heard. Furthermore, every Anglican churchgoer would need a form of prayer for special services, as such documents might include unfamiliar texts; they also guided congregations on when responses should be said and what hymns should be sung.

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In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, copies of proclamations were printed by the royal printers and then distributed to public officials in London, provincial authorities and to clergy. The royal printers also had to print forms of prayer and distribute one or more copies to parishes in time for the occasion. For a late seventeenth-century fast day, the Crown authorities paid for the publication of nearly 14,000 forms of prayer; in 1794 the number had doubled to nearly 28,000. Riding messengers and local officials distributed bundles of proclamations in the eighteenth century; after 1800 the postal service was used, and announcements appeared in gazettes and newspapers.4 The situation in Scotland was complicated, as the Church of Scotland acted independently and issued its own ‘acts’ and ‘addresses’ that explained the causes and the reasons for special worship. The Church’s General Assembly had its own printing presses and distribution networks, though unlike the English authorities the Assembly had no need to circulate forms of prayer. Across Britain and Ireland, news of forthcoming occasions was made known by the reading out of proclamations at church services, and the subsequent posting of orders to church doors and noticeboards. These systems had functioned effectively for centuries, however there was always difficulty in sending news and texts to rural Ireland and to Scottish islands, and even Birmingham complained about the tardy supply of an 1854 fast-day proclamation.5 The colonial arrangements for alerting communities and distributing texts followed these British practices. Charles Inglis, the Anglican bishop, was so keen to replicate English examples that he told a Nova Scotian governor that a 1797 fast day should be held five weeks after the issue of the proclamation, as that was how long the British Government had taken to spread news of the same occasion earlier in the year.6 Quite probably many Nova Scotians never heard the news, as the problems of printing and distribution encountered in the British Isles could only be magnified in huge colonial territories where communication was rudimentary, print networks unsophisticated, and where clergy and civil officials were spread thinly. The dissemination of orders and forms of prayer was still far from perfect in the  early twentieth century, despite developments in communication and the expansion of the colonial press. Indeed, special worship reveals the unevenness and limitations of the empire’s news system, even in the latter part of the century.7 The failure to notify communities could be damaging for churches and states. The anger expressed by those who did not receive the news reveals much about the popularity of special worship, and a sense of marginalisation might be exacerbated if a denomination or region received news late. Yet while special worship struggled to overcome distance throughout this period, it is impressive how many heard the news, even in the pioneer era of colonial development. Special worship also

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illustrates the increasing effectiveness of ecclesiastical communication. The provision of instructions and forms of services did something to standardise styles of worship, and this, in turn, nurtured ‘national’ outlooks, and stronger denominational attachments and identities. To make special occasions of worship known, states printed proclamations in government gazettes and then relied on laypeople and privately owned newspapers to spread the word. The state’s reliance on the press worked well once national news systems had developed in settler colonies in the later nineteenth century, because this allowed single agencies to disseminate telegraphic news to papers throughout a colonial territory. Telegraph communication allowed newspapers to spread news of approaching occasions across colonial territories in a matter of hours. Eastern Australia had a system of intercolonial telegraphic communication by the late 1850s, and from late 1872 the Australian continent was connected to Britain through an overseas telegraph line through Darwin.8 As early as the 1860s country clergymen in NSW implored governments to alert people to forthcoming days of prayer through telegraph offices rather than gazettes, and this seems to have become common practice quite quickly.9 The imperial Government used the telegraph to inform the colonial world of arrangements for Queen Victoria’s jubilees in 1887 and 1897. But in other ways telegraph communication was of limited use. The cost of sending longer messages meant that the texts necessary for worship – proclamations, forms of prayer and circulars from church leaders – had to be sent by post. ‘Bush’ settlements in the NSW interior continued to be serviced by horse and mail coaches well into the 1920s.10 The proliferation of colonial newspaper titles from the 1850s helped, but a persistent problem was that small provincial newspapers copied material from larger, ‘national’, papers.11 In 1859, communities in the east of the Cape Colony missed a day of humiliation because local papers only received notice from the Grahamstown Journal, the region’s dominant newspaper, on the day itself.12 Early in the nineteenth century governments had been active in spreading the news of special worship. In the Napoleonic era, the Governments of Upper and Lower Canada ordered their printers to produce hundreds of proclamations on single sheets (in the French and English languages in Quebec) that were then (in the British fashion) read out in churches and posted on noticeboards and in other ‘conspicuous parts’ of towns. Laypeople had important roles in spreading the news, as magistrates, sheriffs and heads of families received bundles of proclamations which they were told to ‘make public’ in their district.13 There are reports from mid-nineteenth century Ontario of municipal officials ‘glorifying their brief authority’ by issuing their own versions of the governor’s proclamation – Presbyterians

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objected when such municipal documents used more commanding language (‘enjoin’ as opposed to ‘exhort’) to call people to prayer.14 When Anglican clergymen and heads of families read gubernatorial proclamations to congregations and communities they communicated the power and sovereignty of the state, and demonstrated the linkages between the church, the monarchy, the colonial government and the patriarchal family. Though placards continued to appear in colonial towns and cities,15 speech remained a key means by which news was spread and sovereign power articulated. During the First World War, for instance, Canadian governments told religious leaders that the old practice of reading out proclamations at church services should continue.16 The war was also significant as a moment when governments resumed a more active role in religious communication. Canadian governments forwarded proclamations to church leaders for days of prayer and intercession (governments gave force to proclamations when they said occasions had been directed by the king, even when the order came from the governor general).17 The Australian Commonwealth Government also communicated news of wartime days of prayer and intercession directly to the heads of Christian churches; that they did the same with Jewish synagogues, which British governments never did, is perhaps an indication of how far colonial governments recognised the multi-faith character of their societies.18 Presumably the more active role of governments in the First World War stemmed from the seriousness of the wartime crisis, the pressing need to cultivate patriotic sentiment, and because calls to prayer had either been endorsed or issued by the British monarch. For all the limitations of the early colonial news system, it is surprising how quickly news spread, particularly in times of war and disease. There are, for instance, reports of remote settlements in Upper and Lower Canada observing days of prayer in the Napoleonic period and during the cholera epidemics of the early 1830s. Itinerating missionaries in Upper Canada conducted fast-day and thanksgiving services at short notice during the 1838 rebellion, and the same year a fast in NSW was observed on at least one remote mission station.19 Nevertheless, colonists reacted angrily if they received news after the event, or if they had insufficient time to prepare. Evidently people wanted to participate. Ministers could of course improvise and observe their own days of prayer, but congregations appear to have valued general and synchronised acts of corporate worship. A Presbyterian minister in Perth, Upper Canada, wrote that he received news of the 1838 fast so late that he only had two days to notify his congregation and to prepare a sermon. The near non-observance left Presbyterians having to counter claims that they were ‘disaffected and disloyal’. The minister even charged the g­ overnment

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of Anglican favouritism, and of deliberately keeping the news from Presbyterians. ‘All denominations of Christians’, the minister said, ‘should be equally favored with timely notice of public fasting or Thanksgiving Day.’20 Efficient and equitable communication mattered greatly wherever churches felt marginalised or suffered a loss of privileges. The Anglican bishop of Montreal was incensed that he had been left to stumble across news of an 1850 thanksgiving in a gazette, and in 1859 the bishop of Cape Town refused to observe a state occasion as he had not received special notice.21 Hurried or poorly disseminated notices could exacerbate fractures between regions, and between the denizens of town and country. In 1872, the minister of isolated Bungonia, NSW, only learnt of a thanksgiving for  the recovery of the Prince of Wales from a local newspaper which published the proclamation two days before the event. The minister told a newspaper that it was ‘a hardship, and a great one, to the people in the country districts that their interests should be entirely ignored in the appointment of religious fasts and feasts by public authority’.22 During drought, rural spokespersons complained that government set aside days without considering the rural settlers who suffered most. In 1869 a rural clergyman complained to a Sydney newspaper that a forthcoming day of humiliation could not be a ‘national act’ as notification came too late for farmers, with the consequence ‘that the only people who know anything about the misery of drought shall have no chance of uniting in prayer for its removal’. The timing of the day, coupled with the shoddy publicity, demonstrated that country people were far removed from the centres of power. The day, the clergymen said, would only result in an ‘additional day of pleasuring’ for Sydney ‘clerks’, most of whom, the clergyman felt, had no understanding of drought. Sydney, the clergyman reminded his city readers, ‘was not New South Wales’.23 Resentment against the power of urban centres, and elites, was commonplace among rural settler communities in Australia and South Africa after 1850. An Australian historian has coined the term ‘country-mindedness’ to describe a sense of rural solidarity that was born from feelings of cultural and political difference. This brand of Australian physiocratic agrarianism was founded on the belief that agriculture was ennobling and that the struggles of country people was the bedrock of Australian prosperity and national character. It also rested on a sharp distinction between country and town: while country folk were loyal and virtuous, urbanites – as the clergyman cited above implied – were dissolute, narrow-minded and parasitical.24 Later in the century primary producers in Australian country districts criticised churchmen for buckling to commercial and urban interests when in times of drought they appointed fasts on Sundays, rather than on weekdays.

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Farmers preferred midweek days of prayer, as such occasions would force townspeople to give up work and so concentrate attention on the sufferings of rural people.25 The Church of England used set services and encountered difficulties if an occasion of special worship was badly publicised, as new forms of prayer had to be composed and printed, and then sent to every colonial church, chapel and mission station. In theory, a church that considered itself an establishment with a national and imperial reach would possess the resources to get a form of prayer into the hands of every inhabitant of a colony or empire. This was not even possible in England; colonial clergymen found the task harder, as only for a brief period in the early nineteenth century did states assist the church. In 1802, the Quebec Government provided the Anglican bishop with 280 copies of a form of prayer, printed at its own expense and by ‘the King’s printer’; for an 1812 fast, this figure had reached 500 – still far too few for a province whose population numbered around 335,000 in 1814.26 Though governments in the Canadas ceased to provide such support after 1816, this species of establishment lived on in Nova Scotia into the 1850s. The printing of Anglican forms of prayer by royal printers could be controversial when it was noticed. In Nova Scotia in 1854 an angry Roman Catholic editor argued that the Government’s use of public funds to pay for the printing of Anglican fast-day services was evidence that Nova Scotia still had a state church, and that non-Anglicans were taxed for its support.27 Distributing forms was one problem; composing them was another. This difficulty was lessened somewhat if an act of worship followed a similar occasion in Britain, as colonial Anglicans might receive a copy of the form of prayer used in English churches from the royal printers, the British Government or an archbishop. Colonial governors then arranged for further copies to be printed locally. This seems to have been the practice in the early nineteenth century, though limitations in the available evidence makes it difficult to know for how long these imperial arrangements continued. It seems that over the nineteenth century the Church’s distribution networks became more robust. By the late century, the Society for the Promoting Christian Knowledge, an Anglican outreach organisation, helped distribute forms of prayer for imperial occasions across the whole empire: indeed, the form of service for the 1902 coronation was the first to state that it was for use in the ‘churches of the Church of England throughout His Majesty’s Empire’.28 These distribution networks were, however, never fully reliable. In 1830, Edward Wix, archdeacon of Newfoundland, had to compose his own prayers for George IV’s recovery from illness as no form came from home. Even for the 1902 coronation some colonial bishops composed their own forms as they wondered if English ones would arrive in time.29

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Regional occasions presented particular challenges, as colonial bishops often wondered whether they had authority to compose wholly new forms of prayer. Worship had, however, to be adapted to local needs and circumstances, and by mid-century most overseas bishops – and some ­archdeacons – had written new forms and services for use in their dioceses. As colonial Anglican churches achieved greater independence in the later nineteenth century, it was increasingly accepted that the Anglican liturgy had to be made flexible. Indeed, when the Church of the Province of South Africa, an independent body, was established in 1870, its constitution ruled that its governing body, the provincial synod, had the power to introduce ‘adaptations and abridgements’ of the Book of Common Prayer, so long, that is, that such changes conformed with the ‘spirit and teaching’ of the 1662 book.30 There is also evidence that colonists demanded special forms of prayer, as there was an expectation that important events would be marked – ­sanctified is a better word – by the issue of bespoke prayers and services.31 That newspapers published such forms of prayer may well suggest that these documents were for more than just the Anglican community. Composing new forms was a considerable undertaking, particularly when time was short, and bishops tended to rework existing prayers from the Book of Common Prayer. Toronto Anglicans read two collects from the ‘Gunpowder treason day’ thanksgiving service after a rebellion in February 1838. The bishop of Rupert’s Land tried to prevent floods on the Red River in May 1852 with a form that adapted the ‘prayer for fair weather’ and one used at sea before storms. The ‘prayer for unity’ from the service on the anniversary of the monarch’s accession was popular, as its references to ‘unhappy divisions’ and the need for community – what it termed ‘godly union and concord’ – was particularly apposite in times of crisis and in divided colonial societies. Colonial bishops might recycle very old special prayers. The collect used in the Quebec diocese for a December 1838 rebellion fast – it referenced God’s ‘avenging hand’ and the colonists’ ‘manifold and heinous provocations’ – had been used many times in eighteenthcentury England and had been first composed during war with Spain in 1740.32 Though it is questionable whether worshippers were aware of these allusions to prayers ancient and modern, reusing familiar texts may have strengthened a sense of community and connectedness between metropolitan and colonial Anglicans. In many ways the colonial Church of England was an inflexible institution that struggled to respond to sudden events and crises. Custom ruled that Anglican congregations could only observe fasts and thanksgivings once they had received instructions from bishops; if circulars did not arrive, church clerks wondered whether they could act on notices in local newspapers.33 The use of specially composed forms raised problems if the purpose

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of public prayers suddenly changed, as happened in Victoria in April 1869, when rains prompted the Government to recast, at the last moment, the proposed drought fast day as a thanksgiving.34 Even when there was time to prepare the Anglican authorities struggled to get copies of forms into the hands of worshippers. In NSW in 1829 a thanksgiving form was available from Government printers and a private shop in Sydney, though the expensive price – sixpence a copy – led to poor sales.35 In 1838, by contrast, the Government printer sold around 3,000 copies of an eight-page fast-day form of prayer through Sydney booksellers at twopence apiece.36 The advent of church presses, newspapers and diocesan gazettes in the 1850s made it easier to communicate forms of prayer.37 As was the case in the Churches of England and Ireland, colonial dioceses passed the cost of purchasing forms to churchgoers, as advertisements for bulk orders, sometimes directed at churchwardens, were common in the 1850s and 1860s.38 Here again is evidence that special worship only worked because laypeople helped spread the news and purchase the necessary texts. The question now is what people did on these occasions.

Institutional observances At the core of special worship – indeed, inseparable from it – was the arrangement of public church services, where people in all local communities would gather to offer prayers, listen to sermons and perhaps contribute money to charitable collections. In 1854 a Tasmanian clergyman said that in contrast to ‘the disjoined efforts of individuals’, attendance at divine service meant the people of the empire would combine at one altar the ‘collective … offering to the Divine Ruler of a nation’s faith, penitence, and hope’.39 Worship took many forms and observances varied between denominations. Importantly, participation did not always take place in churches and chapels or under the guidance of the clergy. Indeed, in large colonial territories where clergy were few the authorities had to rely on a culture of lay-led ‘informal family worship’. It has already been noted that civil officials in early nineteenth-century Quebec delivered forms of prayer to heads of families if a district had no clergyman. Here, perhaps, is evidence that the patriarchal family ‘functioned in symbiosis with the ­institutional church’.40 Clergy remained important figures, however, and it was they who delivered the sermons that made sense of the causes of fasts and thanksgivings. Nevertheless, as the following sections on church arrangements show, religious ministers involved the laity and left much to local initiative.

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Instructions What clergy said on days of prayer and the way they conducted services for local communities was only partially scripted by the highest authorities in church and state. In early modernity governments had sometimes sent parish clergy accounts of disasters, instructions on how to respond to epidemics, or justifications of state policies.41 State superintendence over special worship was rare in the colonies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Proclamations and notices just set out the cause of the occasion and the date to be set aside, though in one exceptional instance in August 1916, Sydney Buxton, the governor general of South Africa, issued an appeal for a special day of prayer that recommended appropriate psalms, hymns and scriptural texts.42 More direction came from church leaders. Anglican bishops issued forms of prayer and pastoral letters that, to varying degrees, guided clergy on how a trauma or celebration should be interpreted and observed. Catholic bishops also issued pastoral letters stating the causes for worship and directing clergy on which parts of the Missal to use. In the later nineteenth century, Anglican bishops tended to suggest, not order, the use of prayers and services, as they recognised that clergy of many styles of churchmanship inhabited their dioceses. Bishop Saumarez Smith of Sydney, a cautious evangelical, requested his clergy to ‘take such steps as they may think desirable’ to make an 1895 day of humiliation, called during drought, ‘one of solemn and special significance’. For an 1882 day of humiliation, the bishop of Newcastle, Josiah Brown Pearson, did not issue a special prayer at all; he just authorised his clergy to use ‘such special psalms and lessons as may appear appropriate to the occasion’.43 The editors of the National Prayers volumes note that in Britain during the First World War, and particularly from the 1930s, Anglican bishops encouraged their clergy to improvise and to select prayers from a menu of options. A freer and more spontaneous culture of special worship that was better adapted to local conditions would, it was supposed, emerge.44 Colonial bishops may have adopted flexible approaches to special worship earlier than metropolitans  – perhaps because in their part of the British world communication was problematic and higher forms of ecclesiastical authority pressed lightly on congregations. Much, however, depended on the personality and churchmanship of bishops, and some circulars and pastorals carried news, instructions and more analysis. Inexperienced and anxious clergymen might be unsure how to make sense of great public traumas and celebrations, and so welcomed close instruction. Even bishops might look to their superiors for guidance, as some wondered ‘quite what to suggest’ for days of ‘self-denial and

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penitence’.45 Allan Becher Webb, the high-church bishop of Grahamstown, itemised the collective sins he felt had brought on cattle disease in South Africa in 1896, while another bishop of Newcastle, the scientific George Henry Stanton, issued a circular for a 1903 day of humiliation that offered explanations for the frequency and causes of Australian droughts.46 Episcopal circulars became longer and more detailed during protracted periods of stress. A circular issued by Australian bishops in December 1915 for a day of penitence extended over six paragraphs: it tried to boost Anglican resolve and to reassure Australians that they were ‘fighting in the cause of righteousness’.47 Practices varied in other denominations. Colonial Presbyterians continued Scottish practices and included long statements of ‘causes’ or ‘reasons’ that explained why days of prayer had been appointed for their members.48 Nonconformist ministers chose the psalms, scriptural texts and prayers on which services and sermons were based, though sometimes circulars from senior clergy suggested themes for prayer and interpreted current events (a Canadian Free Church circular, issued in November 1857 for an Indian ‘Mutiny’ fast, made a political point when it said the rebels had no ‘reasonable ground for complaint’).49 In the Roman Catholic Church, pastoral letters ordered special prayers, masses and private devotions, though as was noted earlier, those in Quebec informed congregations of the causes and treatments of crop diseases and insect infestations. The pastoral that Archbishop John Bede Polding of NSW issued after an assassination attempt on Prince Alfred in 1868 asked Australia’s Catholics to join with Protestants in a common thanksgiving, and to prove their loyalty and ‘Australian identity’ by renouncing all ‘invidious distinctions’ and avoiding all ‘secret societies’ that might ‘excite and maintain unfriendly classes or factions’.50 Polding was an English Benedictine, and once control of Australian Catholicism passed into Irish hands, pastorals featured expressions of Irish solidarity and nationalism. In 1918, for instance, Archbishop Kelly of Sydney – whose nationalism at other times was low-key – mentioned ‘offences against the right and liberty’ of Ireland when he appealed to his congregations to offer wartime intercessory prayers.51 Despite this variety, common themes emerge in the pastorals and circulars, and these documents could determine what clergy said in their sermons and services. Most clearly, instructions reveal that providential belief and explanation – the idea that God made disastrous events happen in order to warn or punish communities for their collective or aggregated sin – continued to have considerable purchase in the later nineteenth century (a modern scholar terms this ‘national providentialism’).52 God might intervene occasionally, through sudden and unexpected ‘special providences’, such as when He diverted the bullet that a Fenian fired at point-blank range

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at Prince Alfred in Sydney in 1868. He also operated through ‘general providence’, ‘second causes’ and ‘natural law’. The calamities that were interpreted as special divine judgements were so far-reaching and so indiscriminate in their impact that they could only be explained ‘in terms of the sins of the whole community’.53 Frederic Barker, an Anglican evangelical who served as bishop of Sydney from 1855 to his death in 1882, wrote that drought in NSW in 1866 was punishment for national sin, and that once the people ‘turn from their sins’ God would ‘grant the blessings they require’.54 Floods in NSW in 1864 prompted Polding, the archbishop, to announce that ‘the judgments of God are upon the earth’. A Presbyterian circular, issued in 1882 during drought in Victoria, declared that ‘public calamities are rightly regarded as chastisements for public sin’. Another, issued during bubonic plague in 1900, acknowledged that Australians deserved ‘the judgment of God’, but expected divine deliverance, as the God that had brought respite to the peoples of the Old Testament in times of trouble was ‘still the same God’.55 The instructions also suggest important changes in how providence was understood and what religious leaders considered to be the purpose of collective acts of prayer. In March 1903 Bishop Stanton of Newcastle, Australia, remarked that God was ‘not responsible for the indirect results of human enterprise’, and that if humans made more ‘careful observance of His processes in nature’ droughts and other disasters might be mitigated or averted.56 Stanton’s comment indicates that days of prayer would, in time, focus on the agency, character and responsibilities of the people who prayed, as opposed to God and His divine interventions.57 To gain a richer sense of these important changes in beliefs, practices and styles of worship, attention must turn to the prayers offered during public services, and also the sermons delivered by ministers.

Services, worship and prayer Public worship on special occasions fulfilled various purposes, some social, others religious. Special occasions of worship had long been a customary means by which European Christians had responded to, and managed, moments of uncertainty, risk and danger. Gathering as a community might reassure and nurture feelings of solidarity among frightened people.58 Services also had practical functions. The special services that the bishop of Rupert’s Land organised for a day of humiliation during floods in 1852 allowed local people to store grain and personal possessions in church galleries. After mid-century special occasions of worship became major fundraising opportunities for colonial churches that now relied on voluntary subscriptions. Ministers in Canada used harvest thanksgivings and the

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general mood of colonial optimism to implore congregations for funds for new churches and improved clerical salaries and pensions.59 For the clergy, and possibly much of the laity, the day of worship was, above all, a religious occasion: the primary aim was to gather communities to petition God for intervention, to seek better understanding of divine purposes, or to offer prayers of thanks for blessings received. In addition to reinforcing and reiterating the Christian faith, communal prayers might prompt individuals to consider their ways and amend their behaviour. Different aspects of prayer received greater emphasis as churchmen responded to developments in science and controversies over whether prayer could have physical results, for instance in bringing fair weather or rain. Beyond this, two generalisations can be made about church services. First, special services became more accessible for those who did not regularly attend Sunday worship; the laity also increasingly played active roles in organising and contributing to the content of services. Second, in the early twentieth century non-Anglican Protestant denominations that had a tradition of extemporary prayer increasingly followed the Church of England example and adopted scripted forms and services.60 What was special about fast and thanksgiving services? Testimony from missionaries and clergy suggests that congregations for fast-day services could be larger and more ‘solemn and attentive’ than for regular worship.61 Methodist diaries give some sense of the energy, emotion, earnestness and blend of noise and introspection that characterised fast-day services or ‘meetings’.62 The use of new services and forms marked out special occasions of worship for Anglicans. Interestingly, during the First World War colonial Presbyterians followed the example of the Church of Scotland and adopted printed services for private, family and public use (the first issued by the General Assembly in Scotland was for a January 1915 day of intercession).63 The introduction of uniform services among non-Anglican Protestants was not accepted practice: in 1914 the president of the South Australian Methodist Conference resisted calls to draw up a wartime form of prayer because conditions were ‘ever-changing’ and because Methodists had been taught to express needs ‘in words given at the moment by the Divine Spirit’.64 But in 1915 a committee of the Methodist Conference in Britain drew up a ‘form of service’ with hymns, prayers and responsive readings that was used by Methodists across the empire on Sunday 31 October. Methodist forms for South African wartime days of intercession are also extant.65 Whereas nonconformists journeyed towards greater standardisation, Anglicans – both in the British Isles and overseas – embraced more flexible and accessible styles of worship.66 Many new prayers and services appeared as Anglican churches separated from states in the final decades of the

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nineteenth century; indeed, the proliferation concerned evangelicals who worried that Anglican unity would be threatened if bishops issued multiple services for the same event, or introduced prayers that were alien to the Book of Common Prayer. Speakers at colonial synods in the Australian colonies in the 1890s and early 1900s wanted archbishops and bishops to draw up standard forms for special occasions, including ‘services of humiliation for drought’. It was also suggested that new forms be submitted to councils for validation.67 Nothing was done, and forms continued to multiply in subsequent decades. Within days of the outbreak of the First World War, the bishop of Adelaide issued a form that suggested subjects for intercession and additional prayers (for the wounded and suffering, the ‘nations at war’ and soldiers and sailors) that could ‘be used separately, or combined as desired’.68 More Australian forms appeared later in August, and colonial clergy also received services composed by Archbishop Davidson of Canterbury.69 The important point is that it was left to clergy how they used the forms and conducted their services: those on the ground would supposedly best appreciate local needs and preferences. In the late nineteenth century, some colonists wrote to newspapers demanding more lay-orientated, more accessible and less scripted forms of worship. An Australian (denomination unknown) wanted ‘ejaculatory prayers’ or prayers that had been agreed on by congregations, not the ‘cold, dead and formal’ set prayers for rain composed by distant bishops.70 Such demands prompted changes in the style of special worship, either because institutional churches recognised the need for more accessible services, or because laypeople themselves introduced innovations outside church worship. Such an extended and traumatic crisis pushed demands for new kinds of group worship that encouraged more intense and personal relationships with the divine.71 At least one Australian layperson published a form of prayer in a colonial newspaper.72 In Melbourne in October 1917, a mixed committee of laity and clergy had success with an ‘all day of prayer’ that they organised on weekdays, as such ecumenical occasions – they featured services in neutral venues throughout the day – suited busy schedules and did not disrupt war work.73 In South Africa in early 1918, ‘citizens’ meeting committees’ worked with town authorities to arrange Sunday ‘fellowship meetings’ that brought together inhabitants for silent reflection and prayers for the wellbeing of soldiers. Such occasions – they were non-denominational, lay-led and held in neutral venues – went some way towards satisfying those who wanted personal services that were ‘representative’ of colonial society.74 Evidence from the latter part of the century indicates that even Anglican leaders embraced lay-led prayer. Bishops encouraged prayer meetings in private homes and composed forms of prayer especially for private use. The adoption, during the First World War,

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of prayers of ‘intercession’ for the victims and combatants of war – and in some striking instances, animals – was also significant.75 Intercessions and petitions, coupled with silent prayers, gave special occasions of worship an intimate, emotional and personal quality.76 Three questions emerge at this point. First, what did churchgoers pray for? Second, how far did prayers change over time? Third, did a distinctively colonial form of worship develop? To answer the first question, it must be appreciated that prayers were of different types and served different purposes. A common form was the prayer of petition. In times of unusual difficulty, worshippers asked that God might intervene in the human and natural worlds and send guidance, relief, or spiritual and material benefits. Once the thing prayed for had come about, communities offered prayers of thanksgiving. Petitionary prayer was always controversial: since early modernity ministers had worried that people might ask for the impossible or offer prayers for trivial things.77 Those who questioned the physical efficacy of prayer – the idea that God would respond to petitions to stay diseases, or send fair weather – grew particularly vocal in the later 1860s, though it was also the case that clergy absorbed scientific explanations and emphasised the workings of a ‘general’ as opposed to ‘special’ providence. Much is known about the debates about the nature of prayer that boiled up in Britain during cholera in 1853, the cattle plague of 1865–6, and the recovery of the Prince of Wales from typhoid in 1871–2 – debates that culminated in suggestions for prayer experiments in hospitals.78 These debates spread to the colonies and reared up whenever churches pressed for days of humiliation. There was much discussion about prayer in the Australian colonies in 1875 and 1876 during outbreaks of measles and scarlet fever. Proposals for days of humiliation in these years reflected the panic felt by bereaved parents (it was reckoned that 8,000 people, mostly children, died in the Australian colonies), but the suggested occasions did not receive official approval, neither did they generate much popular support: the diseases were known quantities and the public was told to put their faith in isolation, quarantine and sanitation measures, rather than prayer. Critics argued that prayers for rain or relief from disease were presumptuous and ignored the ‘unchangeable and irreversible’ laws which governed health and which God had revealed to science. Such prayers assumed, too, that a rational and loving God was in fact, as the Melbourne Argus put it, ‘as capricious and vacillating as an Oriental potentate’.79 Yet petitions to an interventionist providence continued to appear in corporate prayers. One reason was that there remained crises that seemed beyond human explanation or solution. A later chapter notes that extreme weather episodes, most notably severe droughts, were one such cause.

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Cattle disease was another. In 1896 Cape Colony Anglicans prayed that God would look ‘with compassion’ on farmers (though not, revealingly, the suffering farm animals) and ‘stay’ the rinderpest disease that had brought death and distress to agricultural communities. Prayers of petition also had relevance when an unfamiliar disease made communities fearful. During influenza in 1919, Anglicans in the Sydney diocese prayed that God would ‘withdraw’ the ‘grievous sickness which is now troubling us’.80 And, as others have pointed out, belief in a direct and personal God, and the efficacy of prayer, was bolstered by remarkable episodes in the lives of individ­uals. Anglican forms attributed the survival of the Prince of Wales to God’s mercy, and like many British clergymen, colonial ministers cited the recovery as evidence that God had answered ‘the devout prayers of His people throughout the world’.81 Petitionary prayers flourished because they could be repurposed to meet new demands and new intellectual concerns. Commentators argued that prayer was a stimulus to human endeavour: people prayed not to ‘alter the will of the infinite God’, but to encourage self-examination and to prompt the kind of spiritual, intellectual and behavioural changes that would lead to a better understanding of God’s purposes. Prayers for guidance – ­commonplace since early modernity – received emphasis as contemporaries adopted theories of causation that placed more emphasis on human failings. God had provided people with the capacities to understand His natural laws and to profit by His general providence; calamities such as drought stemmed from the folly of humans who had failed to understand and work with God’s natural order. As one Anglican in Victoria noted during  the measles outbreak of 1875, prayer was not about asking God to work miracles, but was about stimulating the ‘conscience of society’ to reflect on the sins of ignorance and misgovernment that had led them to disregard the ‘principles of health’.82 Other preachers made prayer compatible with scientific developments and argued that it was not impious to offer prayers that asked for the alteration of suspension of natural law. A South African Presbyterian justified prayers for rain in 1866 when he said God might respond to prayers as He could ‘apply and regulate’ His natural laws ‘as to produce different and apparently opposite results’, just as humans could protect and improve life by interfering with nature’s laws. In this way, therefore, a belief in a personal and interventionist God could be reconciled with an understanding of the regularity, order and benevolence of a ‘general providence’ that worked through, not over, natural laws. These were not new issues; nineteenth-century commentators tackled problems that had circulated since early modernity.83 These developments are a crucial explanation for why special acts of worship proliferated in the colonial world. Across denominations, p ­ etitions

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for special divine interventions gave way to a strong emphasis on the character and qualities of those praying. In 1900, for example, Sydney Anglicans asked God to bless human efforts to combat bubonic plague.84 A later chapter notes how shifts in the purpose of prayer in times of drought – from requesting rain to seeking guidance – are a key reason why such an antique form as the day of humiliation remained a feature of Australian public life deep into the twentieth century. Worshippers offered prayers of intercession on behalf of other people. Intercessions had been offered before the South African and First World Wars, though only from the 1850s and only once the British soldier had been transformed from an enlisted mercenary into a Christian hero. In 1857 Anglicans in the diocese of Toronto used a reprint of a metropolitan form of prayer and prayed that God would protect Europeans in British India ‘from the malice and treachery of the sons of violence who have risen up against them’. In 1885 Australian Jewish people prayed that God would protect the relief force (which included Australians) sent to defeat the Mahdist army in the Sudan.85 During the First World War colonial communities followed their metropolitan counterparts and offered prayers of intercession for a range of groups caught up in war: sailors, soldiers, the sick and wounded, nurses, the bereaved, and those ‘in poverty and in need’. While it is true, as one scholar has written, that these ‘were prayers for a more democratic age and for wars of mass mobilisation’, worshippers and institutional churches discriminated, and not all the empire’s inhabitants became the object of prayers of intercession.86 Revealingly, the prayer that the bishop of Newcastle (NSW) composed during China’s anti-western Boxer Rebellion only asked God’s protection for missionaries ‘who have gone to China to preach Thy gospel of peace and good-will towards men’.87 Distinctively colonial forms of worship had appeared by the First World War. Even before then colonial episcopal churches had issued special forms and services for regional occasions that referenced the challenges of colonial climates, the sins of colonial communities and the sufferings endured by colonists in wartime. After the First World War, multi-faith gatherings in Australia followed specially-composed standard prayers for Anzac Day (25 April), a distinctively colonial occasion (though one connected to the Cenotaph ceremony in London on Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday).88 Colonial special worship also developed a strikingly inclusive character. Ecumenical forms of worship formed part of British religion too, particularly during and after the First World War, though further research might reveal a longer history of united services involving English Anglicans and free churchmen.89 There are striking instances, particularly in Australia, of colonists gathering in united services that mixed a range of styles and forms of worship, with Anglican prayers often featuring

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prominently. When Protestants in one NSW community gave thanks for rain in 1882, the Anglican minister read the general thanksgiving from the Book of Common Prayer. A thanksgiving held in Grahamstown in 1844 to commemorate the settlement of British colonists – the event was open to every inhabitant, regardless of denomination – began with prayers and thanksgivings ‘enjoined by the formularies for the Established Church’.90 Church leaders also combined to compose new, multi-denominational, forms of prayer. To mark peace in 1919, Australia’s Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregational churches drew up a form of service for use at civic and open-air thanksgiving services.91 A united service of intercession in East London, South Africa, in January 1916 offered prayers in Dutch as well as English.92 Making forms acceptable to a wide religious public was difficult. The liturgy used on early Anzac commemorations did not include prayers for dead servicemen, as Australian evangelicals, like their British counterparts, considered it too Roman Catholic for worshippers to intercede for a place in heaven for dead people.93 Despite the increasingly flexible nature of special worship, and the difficulty of coordinating inclusive acts of worship, the spread of united services and the adoption of standard prayers ensured that a common set of messages were expressed on days of prayer. Widespread belief in divine interventions and the efficacy of petitionary prayer provides some evidence that cosmopolitan communities in the colonial world could, like their counterparts in Britain, gather around a generalised, non-dogmatic and non-denominational ‘civil’ religion.94 The adoption of united, multifaith services also indicates that the days of prayer had become much more inclusive, participative and community-wide by the early twentieth century.

Sermons One thing that made fast and thanksgiving services unique was that churchgoers would hear a sermon specially composed for the occasion. One historian has called the sermon a ‘key form of public conversation’ and a ‘predominant form of public speech’: colonists listened to sermons, bought them as pamphlets and discussed them in newspapers.95 Another modern historian, writing on late nineteenth-century Australia, argues that the newspaper came to supplant the sermon as the ‘dominant medium of civil society’.96 What this argument overlooks is that newspapers helped broadcast the clerical voice, as from the 1850s it was common for the press to report and summarise what clergy said in sermons. Indeed, while scholars of British religion have suggested that public demand for summarised and printed sermons fell away after 1900, there is evidence that colonists remained great consumers of sermon literature. The Sydney Morning

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Herald devoted six columns to reports of humiliation-day sermons during drought in 1902, and while the coverage fell to one column for an 1919 drought occasion, the paper typically devoted three columns to report days of prayer during the First World War.97 Because of the unusual circumstances, every special occasion required the composition of new and special sermons. The literature on fast and thanksgivings is large and well known, but scholars have tended to focus on ­eighteenth-century Britain and colonial America, and only a few articlelength studies of special sermons in the nineteenth-century empire exist.98 How far sermons preached in settler societies represented distinctively ‘colonial’ productions is questionable, as while contexts might be new, the content of sermons, and the ideas expressed, could well have been familiar to metropolitan audiences – indeed, it was the clergyman’s task to apply familiar ideas and biblical lessons to new circumstances and environments. Joseph Docker, minister at Windsor, NSW from 1828 to 1833, delivered sermons in Australia that he had previously read to Lancashire congregations, but a thanksgiving called after drought in 1829 required him to compose a new sermon. Docker’s subject – severe drought – was unknown in Britain, but his key themes – the efficacy of prayer and the need to ‘express our obligations in thanksgiving’ for ‘every benefit received’ – had been the stuff of thanksgiving sermons in England for centuries.99 As a result of this recycling of ideas and lessons, sermons delivered in the colonial world could be very similar and very repetitive. Those who preached on special occasions wished to instruct, guide, persuade, educate and inform. Sermons might even transmit news, though this function became less important as communications improved and newspapers became more prominent.100 In April 1806, for instance, NSW clergymen delivered sermons on Trafalgar only a week after news of the battle had arrived in the colony.101 Sermons also explained the cause, meaning and significance of national events. It is too much to argue (as has been stated of Britain) that sermons served as a ‘vehicle’ for the colonial state to convey messages to its subjects, or that what colonists heard was the ‘closest thing to an official national statement on the event in question that most people were likely to hear’.102 Minimal guidance came from the highest authorities, and clergymen might offer their own interpretations and explanations. That said, sermons preached in the Canadian colonies during the Napoleonic Wars and the rebellions of the late 1830s publicised overtly loyalist messages.103 Yet preachers, even Anglican ones, did not always follow an official script, and this became more noticeable as churches and states increasingly pursued separate agendas. In 1857, for instance, several Canadian preachers blamed rebellion in India on decades of British misrule, and, more recently, the imperial Government’s sanctioning of

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the Chinese opium trade, and its failure to support Christian missionary activity.104 Sermons also educated congregations on how days of fasting and thanksgiving should be spent. Charles Inglis took it ‘for granted’ that those who heard him preach on a fast day in Halifax, Nova Scotia in April 1794 would abstain from ‘bodily food’ for the whole day. While the practice persisted in some quarters in the nineteenth century (some said it would help worshippers identify with disaster sufferers), abstinence was rare once the ‘fast day’ came to be understood later in the century not as a day without food and drink, but as a moment when the individual implored God’s intervention or sought better understanding of divine purposes through attendance at church, private prayer and personal acts of penitence.105 Sermons also guided participants on how they should respond emotionally to great national events. After divine favours, such as military victories, preachers told worshippers to publicly express their thanks and gratitude, though Alexander Spark, a Quebec Presbyterian, made a customary point in 1814 when he said any gratitude for peace with France had to be accompanied by personal repentance and amendment, as well as the recognition that the war had happened because British subjects – at home and ­overseas – had ‘violated the Divine Law’ and ‘dishonoured God’.106 On days of fasting and humiliation, preachers told worshippers that feelings of guilt and shame should be expressed publicly, as a community. During the cholera and rebellion fasts of the 1830s, for example, Canadian preachers invited participants to ‘cry mightily unto God’ for forgiveness and to turn their ‘laughter into mourning’ and ‘joy into heaviness’.107 References to weeping suggest important continuities with early modern sermon literature. A leading authority on early modern providentialism has noted the considerable ‘spiritual significance’ Protestants attached to crying; even Puritans regarded weeping as the kind of ‘internal movement or upheaval of the heart and soul’ necessary for personal repentance and transformation.108 Outpourings had, however, to be of the right sort. Some ministers, particularly Anglicans, frowned on public displays of emotion and enthusiasm,109 and an Australian Presbyterian made the point that weeping was best done in private when he considered the ‘genuine confessional emotions’ that should accompany repentance in an 1838 fast sermon. ‘We must carry matters homeward,’ he said, ‘our hearts must be affected; sorrow, deep sorrow for our sins must be felt by us.’ The emphasis that Protestants placed on the intensive periods of private prayer, reflection and penitence suggests the extent to which ‘religious emotion’ was ‘internalised’ and ‘relocated from the public domain to the private realm’. The Presbyterian William Brunton, speaking in Lower Canada in 1832, acknowledged that ‘weeping and mourning’ were ‘external indications of

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repentance’, but the important point was that the individual had ‘unfeignedly grieved’ in their ‘mind’ on the harm they had caused by their ‘sins’, ‘unbelief’ and ‘impenitence’.110 Yet the picture (at least for Presbyterians) is mixed, and twenty years later, at a fast for the Indian ‘Mutiny’, a Canadian Presbyterian endorsed communal and public tears. The congregation was asked to weep over their ‘sins, national and personal, when alone with God in our closets’, as well as ‘when convened with our Christian brethren, … in the sanctuary of God’.111 Such evidence lends support to the view, put forward by a recent writer, that in the mid-nineteenth century there was space in British national life, both at home and overseas, for public displays of emotion and sentiment.112 Preachers worried that responses might be insincere and fleeting. To counter this, catastrophes and national crises had to be made relevant to observers. Preachers reminded their audiences that distant catastrophes and disasters were everyone’s concern and responsibility, as God counted the sins of individuals towards a corporate or colonial aggregate, and sent divine punishment to warn or chasten. Famines, wars and droughts, though distant for the moment, might spread and harm colonists.113 Sermon-givers also sought to provoke an emotional response among their listeners and readers. Alexandra Walsham points out that early modern sermons did not just engage the ‘intellect or reason’, but were intended to ‘engage’ and ‘move’ hearers and readers ‘to sincere amendment of life’ and ‘real contrition’.114 Sermons delivered during nineteenth-century wars and after natural disasters appealed to the emotions and contained vivid descriptions of disaster situations and victims’ pain and suffering. Thomas Wardrope communicated the horrors of the Crimean War in an 1855 sermon when he remarked on wounded soldiers who had ‘no mother, wife, or sister’ to ‘speak to them in words of encouragement and condolence, to minister to their wants, to smooth their pillow, to ease their posture, or to close their eyes in death’.115 Other preachers provoked more violent emotions. In November 1857, for instance, Canadian preachers contributed to the sense of vindictive outrage that greeted news of the Indian rebellion when they delivered fast-day sermons that dwelt on the ‘horrors’ suffered by the European victims of a ‘wicked revolt’.116 Through the kind of narration and description cited above, sermons transported audiences to the scene of disasters and death, made real the suffering of others and encouraged those fasting and praying to contribute to charitable collections. Like today’s rolling news reports, the ‘disaster sermon’ drew audiences into an ‘intimate identification with the emotions of disaster-affected communities’.117 Vivid descriptions of the cholera epidemics of the early 1830s induced a combination of fear, shame and guilt. A Lower Canadian preacher told his country population in 1832 that because

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of ‘the low state of religion, and the general prevalence of iniquity’, there was ‘too much reason to fear’ that cholera would ‘extend its ravages into every village and seigniory, and into every parish, and township and settlement in the province’.118 Though preachers wanted their audiences to ‘see’ disaster situations and to feel the suffering of others, some catastrophes could not be communicated, either because the events were too distant, or because their effects could not be described. A later chapter notes that drought was one such ‘slow catastrophe’ whose impact preachers always struggled to express in emotive terms.119 Sermons also communicated providential doctrines to the public. Nineteenth-century preachers devoted much of their sermons to explaining the basic idea that God handled human societies like individuals and punished and rewarded them in proportion to their sinfulness and piety. Other key concepts and ideas, such as collective sin, the efficacy of prayer, and the notion that disturbances in the natural world reflected disorders in human society, received considerable coverage in sermon literature. It could be that such beliefs were not widely understood or respected, though equally clergy recognised that the lay public was an educated one, and subtle changes in providential understanding – the shift from ‘special’ to ‘general’ – required explanation. Furthermore, developments in scientific understanding had to be absorbed. What clergymen said about providence partly depended on where the challenge came from. Edward Wix, archdeacon of Newfoundland, directed his 1832 cholera sermon to the many ‘impenitent and unbelieving’ atheists in his region who ‘ridiculed the doctrine of [God’s] Providence’. A South African preacher, speaking during drought in 1866, spoke more to scientific developments when he said there was a ‘reluctance in fallen man to think of God as a living, personal God, to whom he is responsible, on whose will he is absolutely dependent, and to whom he must render an account’.120 Others regarded crises and shocks as moments to wrench people out of a ‘practical atheism’ that excluded God ‘from any interference with the course of that world which He has created’. The prosperity enjoyed by colonists in new lands seemed to engender such complacency. ‘So long as things prosper around us,’ an evangelical Anglican bishop in NSW explained in 1866, ‘and success crowns the labours of the husbandman, and seed-time and harvest and summer and winter follow in unbroken order, we receive these temporal mercies as though they were ours by an unchangeable law.’121 Despite these concerns, sermons reveal that the language of providential chastisements, collective sinfulness and judicial retribution had considerable purchase in colonial societies that experienced recurrent political, economic and environmental disturbances. Of the forty-seven sermons delivered in Sydney for a day of humiliation during drought in early January  1866,

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twenty-eight used Old Testament texts, with the favoured books – in this example, Jeremiah and Micah – those that recounted the judgements and calamities that befell a dishonest people who broke their covenant with God.122 Australian occasions from the 1890s provide numerous examples of preachers arguing in Old Testament fashion that public calamities, notably drought and insect infestation, came about because of the combined sins of the community.123 A South Australian thought the stories of suffering and deliverance in the Old Testament had more relevance for rural Australians than ‘old country’ folk, as only the former could ‘appreciate the full significance of scriptural references to dry and parched lands’ (some Australians remarked on what one called the ‘very close resemblance’ between the climate of Australia and Palestine). The language of providential chastisements was common to a range of denominations and ethnic groups in South Africa, and settlers there made similar comments about the correspondences between their circumstances and the droughts of the Old Testament.124 Canadians did not contend with such calamities and conditions, and so the language of judgement and national sin tended to be aired only after local disasters, such as railway accidents.125 Despite the persistence of such traditional ideas and explanatory frameworks, sermons, like other prayer-day texts, reveal changing understandings of prayer and providence. The characteristics, capabilities and behaviours of the laity became an increasingly important theme. An Anglican, speaking in Cape Town during rinderpest in 1896, argued that God was neither a ‘revengeful’ or a ‘capricious being’, nor did He act irregularly, suddenly or in violation of natural laws. Calamities, such as cattle disease, were judgements on sinful humans who had brought punishment on themselves by ignoring ‘those laws which regulate every phase of human life, and every condition of human existence’. Responsibility for these failings fell on ‘every adult member of any civilized community’, as all those who possessed a ‘developed moral sense’ had ‘tacitly approved’ the ‘actions and methods’ of the individuals, corporations and governments that c­ ontravened God’s laws.126 Finally, sermon culture provides more evidence of the growing importance of the laity in special worship and colonial religion generally. Though Anglicans and Roman Catholics traditionally only permitted qualified ministers to preach, a chronic lack of clergy meant that such stipulations had to be loosened or ignored. Women read services, and possibly delivered sermons, to country households in late nineteenth-century Australia.127 There are examples from the early twentieth century of prominent male lay figures delivering addresses at religious gatherings, such as at the continuous prayer sessions that several Australian towns and cities organised in neutral venues in October 1917.128 From the later nineteenth century

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l­aypeople wrote to newspapers to identify the sins that, in their mind, had provoked divine anger and retribution, and to challenge the interpretations that clergy offered for the causes and meanings of protracted drought.129 There was, for example, much criticism in Australia of Protestant ministers who interpreted assassination attempts, or war in the Crimea, as divine punishments for the extension of freedoms to Catholics.130 To fully appreciate the growing lay involvement in special worship, attention must now turn to how inhabitants engaged with fasts and thanksgivings and the ­services and sermons provided by the institutional churches.

Popular observances It is questionable how far the acts of worship appointed in pluralistic settler societies cultivated a sense of unanimity and community. It was difficult to predict how large and cosmopolitan colonial populations would respond to special acts of worship, particularly if a community felt a distant disaster had nothing to do with them. No prayer day could be fully isolated from ordinary time or imbued with a ritual element. People might also wonder what was expected, though churches provided some guidance, and colonists might have had access to manuals on how days should be observed, such as the volumes that the Anglican evangelical, Edward Bickersteth, prepared for British fast days in 1832 and 1847.131 Some public prayers might be ignored, or did more to divide people than bring them together. This was particularly the case in moments of crisis when a disturbed public mind already distrusted the civil authorities. For instance, the day of humiliation that the Cape Government appointed in 1896 amid spreading cattle disease antagonised many, as the epizootic occurred at a time of social and political upheaval and economic dislocation, and Cape Town’s white working class accused the Government of using the occasion to hide the fact that it had worsened the effects of cattle plague by permitting food producers to raise prices. One Cape Town inhabitant said they wanted a ‘day of agitation’, not one for ‘humiliation’.132 Preachers gave the impression that entire communities came together to worship for a common purpose, but many laypeople refused to take part because they thought orders from states infringed their religious liberty. James Barry, a devout but irritable Nova Scotian miller who resented all ‘strictures imposed from above’, and who prized ‘free will, individual autonomy and minimal government’, noted in his diary when fasts and thanksgivings came around but refused to observe them, adding comments such as ‘damned fools’, ‘humbug’ and ‘folly’ to his entries on the Canadian thanksgivings of the late nineteenth century.133 Such attitudes

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become more common – or received more publicity – as the century proceeded. Individuals objected to offering special prayers for specific causes, such as disease and commercial collapses, as it was human incompetence, negligence or greed that was responsible.134 Others had political reasons for not participating. At least one Australian colonist would not observe the thanksgiving called after Prince Alfred survived an assassination attempt in Sydney in 1868 because the occasion, they felt, would open ‘old sores’ between ethnic groups.135 Other individuals observed days in ways that civil and church authorities did not intend. In the convict society of NSW in 1829, for instance, reformers published satirical forms of prayer that criticised the governor and ‘all despotic and corrupted rulers’, in much the same way as in previous decades radicals in England had responded to what they considered ‘political prayers’ with their own anti-establishment forms.136 Judging the nature and extent of participation for much of the period is difficult, as newspapers tended to only report what went on in the largest colonial centres. Diarists in nineteenth-century Canada noted when fasts and thanksgivings came around but gave bare details on how they spent the day, though comments on the content and quality of sermons indicate the value many people attached to that part of services. Diaries reveal that varied communities of American-born Loyalists and Methodists observed fasts and thanksgivings in Upper Canada and New Brunswick in the Napoleonic era. German-born inhabitants of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, observed fasts and thanksgivings during the Crimean War and Indian ‘Mutiny’.137 Newspapers for later periods give fuller accounts of public engagement. An editor at Oudtshoorn, Cape Colony, reported ‘exceptionally large’ congregations for a day of humiliation called during a rinderpest epizootic in 1896. On the same day, services at Worcester, a town 70 miles east of Cape Town, were said to be ‘exceedingly well attended’, and apparently there was a ‘stillness’ throughout King William’s Town, with indigenous people – the newspaper used the disparaging term ‘red kafirs’ – reportedly attending services in the ‘Native Church’ (the participation of ‘Coloured’ congregations had been noted on humiliation days during droughts earlier in the century). A writer to a newspaper in the town of George, styling himself ‘Businessman’, argued that the 1896 occasion was well observed, and that ‘the great majority of those in the churches that day were active workers in shops, farms, and home life’.138 Diaries and newspapers say little about why individuals participated. Perhaps for some, such occasions were a means to assert and perform their imperial citizenship, their sense of Britishness, and an attachment to new colonies. While some believed communal prayers could alter the course of events and bring material benefits, others may have valued the social aspects of days of prayer. Canadian diarists in the early 1830s recorded the terror

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that gripped communities during the transatlantic cholera epidemic and the extent to which collective acts of fasting and prayer – called before cholera struck – provided some reassurance. David Anderson, bishop of Rupert’s Land, said those who attended his humiliation-day special service during floods on the Red River in 1852 ‘seemed strengthened’ and ‘prepared to endure what might be before them’.139 The special day of prayer helped some individuals attach personal meanings to national events. In the later nineteenth century religious diarists in Canada used annual thanksgivings to meditate on the past year and to record their thanks for all the blessings and benefits that God had brought. On thanksgiving day 1862, William Rudolf, a merchant in Pictou, Nova Scotia, thanked God’s ‘love and mercy’ for the safe delivery of his child, the good health of his family, his success in business and for his son getting a job.140 Female diarists who had few opportunities to preach and lead church services used their journals to record the prayers they had offered privately on fasts and thanksgivings.141 Whether labour, commerce and worldly pleasures could ever be entirely suspended during special days of prayer is questionable. Days of prayer could be separated from the normal routines of everyday life in towns, as for midweek occasions newspapers commonly reported that shops and offices closed voluntarily for all or part of the day. In country regions, by contrast, the rhythm of life continued as normal – people spent fasts and thanksgivings doing usual farm work and visiting friends and family. Edwin Ryerson of Annapolis, Nova Scotia entered the words ‘did sum chores it rained all day’ in his diary for the 1857 Indian ‘Mutiny’ fast. On the same day, Alexander Edmison, a schoolteacher in Peterborough County, Ontario, helped his father haul wood.142 Towards the end of the period most politicians and churchmen dispensed with the idea that days should be ‘set aside’ from usual work and leisure routines. Increasingly the day of prayer was understood not as an occasion when work and pleasure stopped (a ‘time out of time’, to use the language of a modern scholar),143 but as moments when church services were dedicated to special purposes. This focus on services meant Sundays could be appointed, and governments that worried about upsetting working people (fasts and thanksgivings could mean lost wages) or interrupting the war effort favoured this kind of special day.144 Some causes and some types of special worship prompted public responses, while others passed by relatively unnoticed. The South African occasion noted earlier, called in response to cattle disease, was the kind of emergency that typically engaged the public, as the calamity hurt everyone, from farmers who witnessed their animals die in great numbers to city dwellers who struggled with rising food prices. By contrast, preachers often grumbled that people overlooked thanksgivings. Joseph Docker, the

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NSW clergyman mentioned earlier, was just one preacher who complained that people ‘call upon God in the time of their trouble but seldom praise him in the season of their prosperity’.145 Then there was the worry that special days, particularly those that came around annually, would lose the religious element and become associated with consumption and entertainment. Bonfires, illuminations and fireworks had been a feature of thanksgivings in the British Isles for centuries, and by the 1880s it was common for Canadians of all classes and denominations to gather on thanksgiving holidays for turkey dinners, spectator sports, concerts, sham battles and hunting excursions. It may be that churchmen encouraged a festive atmosphere when they put on harvest thanksgiving festivals in church that were ‘more shows than services’.146 Yet the introduction of decorations, concerts and sporting events was another instance of ministers reinventing occasions of special worship to make them more accessible and appealing. What can be said of non-Christian engagement with public displays of worship? It may well be that missionaries used fasts and thanksgivings as part of their efforts to convert, as special prayers that coincided with the end of a crisis could be an impressive demonstration of the power of the Christian God. George Taplin, missionary to the Ngarrindjeri people at Point Macleay, South Australia, regularly held ‘harvest home’ thanksgivings and observed special prayers in times of drought in the 1860s, and on occasion indigenous converts on Taplin’s mission led prayers for rain.147 Missionaries in southern Africa sometimes expressed surprise at the large and heterogeneous congregations that gathered in times of drought, locust infestation and cattle disease, and one Presbyterian missionary journal made much of an instance when indigenous peoples in the Eastern Cape supposedly abandoned their ‘rain-doctor’ and asked for a fast day so as to implore the Christian God for rain.148 Charles Taberer, Anglican missionary at Keiskammahoeck in the Eastern Cape, reported that ‘more than 2,000 people’, including ‘Christians and Heathen’, assembled for a day of humiliation called amid rinderpest in October 1896.149 Though little is known about why such congregations gathered, it might be that crises revealed commonalities between even the most separate communities. Historians of southern Africa have noted that peoples of European and African descent shared comparable beliefs about natural world phenomena. Meredith McKittrick notes that many South Africans, from multiple ethnic backgrounds, thought that a once-watered African continent had passed through a process of desiccation, and that wars between Britons and Boers had disrupted the fertility of the land.150 There is, however, evidence that Protestant missionaries in southern Africa had mixed success when they asked indigenous communities to join in special prayers for rain. W. H. Turpin, whose congregation in

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Grahamstown was predominantly African, noted in 1866 that Black and Coloured communities understood and participated in days of humiliation and special prayers for rain, as ‘they have among themselves in their heathen state “rain makers”, whose duty it is to cause rain to fall in times of drought’. William Greenstock, missionary at St Luke’s Mission in the Eastern Cape in the 1850s, organised special prayers during droughts but found his conversion efforts frustrated by powerful rainmakers, one of whom, Greenstock noted acidly, claimed he could make it rain in England.151 Rainmaking had political significance, and African community leaders might be suspicious of the missionaries’ alternative practices. Successful ceremonies and prayers could engender uneasiness, and failed efforts could expose the weakness or foul intentions of settlers.152 The doleful South African minister who said in 1896 that it was ‘pitiable to think of the ignorant masses of the heathen to whom’ proclamations for days of humiliation ‘brought no message’, was perhaps close to the truth, as for most indigenous peoples, Christian special prayer passed unnoticed.153 Even if work and leisure continued, communities might still value and reflect on what clergy said. Anglican churchgoers purchased forms in advance of days of prayer and then preserved the texts in private collections alongside printed sermons. Forms of prayer attracted considerable public scrutiny. The form that Colenso, the renegade bishop of Natal, composed for an 1879 day of humiliation was described in the Transvaal press as ‘nothing short of a political manifesto’, as it blamed ‘British hands’ for bringing the ‘terrible scourge of war’ to the amaZulu.154 During the financial crash in 1893, the bishop of Melbourne was criticised for failing to select biblical passages that carried criticisms of the ‘land withholders or Directors of Companies’ who had brought on the economic crisis.155 A form used in the diocese of Sydney in 1876 was criticised because it stated God had ‘dried up the water-springs and turned a fruitful land into barrenness for the sins of them that dwell therein’. Not only did this inaccurately represent conditions in many parts of NSW, but the form failed to explain why neighbouring – but equally sinful – colonies had been blessed with rain, not drought.156 There is little evidence to support the Australian commentator who claimed that sermons delivered on special occasions ‘died with the occasion’.157 Evidence from the press indicates that what preachers said and published in print could generate much public debate, particularly if the content was overtly political, and delivered at times of social unrest, war or frontier conflict. Bishop Colenso again angered settlers with an 1879 humiliation sermon that justified amaZulu resistance to British colonialism. Preachers who advocated the return of privileged church establishments – as one Canadian did during the Canadian rebellions in 1838 – attracted

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­criticism.158 In 1855 members of a Montreal congregation reportedly left the church service when a visiting American minister boasted that the Crimean War would destroy England’s aristocracy. In the later nineteenth century, impoverished working-class audiences shouted down preachers who gave optimistic accounts of Canadian prosperity and wealth. Sermons delivered on sensitive occasions by preachers from suspect communities might be closely observed. English-language newspapers were not impressed that Dutch Reformed preachers in Cape Town avoided talking about the recent war when the community gave thanks for peace in 1902.159 Such responses indicate the complex position that clergy occupied in settler societies. It would be simplistic to argue that ministers of religion dominated public life or occupied positions as great public leaders or moral spokespersons. Many authority figures inhabited settler societies, and colonists could judge between various interpretations of why a drought was so severe, or why an epidemic killed so indiscriminately. But neither can ministers be dismissed as marginal figures. Utterances by ministers on the causes of drought – a topic considered in Chapter 5 – generated much debate about issues such as conservation, the efficacy of prayers and the relationship between settlers and the environment. Clergy could represent large constituencies of opinion when they spoke on days of prayer. One historian, writing on British sermons, argues that ministers became the ‘voices of communities’ when they printed sermons at public behest.160 Certainly this phenomenon – which was also widespread in the colonial world – is some indication that ministers had much in common with churchgoers and voiced shared beliefs. What were these common beliefs? Letters in newspapers indicate that old beliefs in the efficacy of prayer and an interventionist providence – the idea that prayer and ritual could have material effects – continued to circulate well into the twentieth century. It also seems a broad section of colonial Christians retained, in some form, a powerful sense that God’s active providence shaped and controlled happenings in the human and natural world. One scholar has argued that while ‘national providentialism’ – the idea that God directed the fates of nations and communities – flourished well into the twentieth century, the belief that God intervened in the lives of individuals (‘personal providentialism’) declined to the point of being branded ‘superstitious and backward’. Yet it is not clear on what evidence such claims are based. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial diarists often reported their ‘providential escape’ from death and drowning. Scholars of the Australian scene have argued that even the less devout colonists believed that ‘history flowed with some external purpose’ and that happenings in lives of individuals ‘occurred with the order and action of a divine will, force or person’. In 1866 a Nova Scotian judge could still find a publisher

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for his autobiography, and this despite the fact that he explained everything in his life – from good career moves to meeting his wife – through the dispensations of an ‘interfering providence’.161 Such beliefs sat alongside, and nourished, the belief that the hand of God could be read in the fortunes and misfortunes of communities, nations and empires. This might explain why national providence, and the attendant concepts of chosen peoples, just nations and divine election, should have remained an important part of the cultural life of Britain and the dominions.162

Conclusion Much cannot be known about public observances of special acts of worship. What one writer has called the ‘emotional effects’ of prayer days are hard to determine. Possibly the experience of gathering for communal prayer generated feelings of fear and grief on the one hand, and relief, friendship and solidarity on the other, but the nature of the available sources – clipped diary entries and formulaic newspaper reports – do not permit this kind of analysis. It is, then, difficult to judge how far communal prayers and fasting helped worshippers identify with disaster sufferers elsewhere.163 This chapter has, nonetheless, described several key changes in popular and official responses to religious holidays across Canada, Australia and South Africa. As time passed, special acts of worship focused not so much on a vengeful or merciful deity but on the people and communities that prayed. The other big development was that colonial special worship was, in varying ways, laicised. Laypeople publicised special worship, led prayers and helped organise new kinds of public services that satisfied demands for personal and intimate forms of prayer that did not interrupt daily activities. Such lay activity is another indication of the enduring popularity of special worship. These colonial developments also played out in metropolitan Britain, but it seems that colonial democracy, and the paucity of clergy in many places, greatly encouraged lay agency. The next chapter, which considers the emphasis that ministers placed on the meaning of colonial community in their day of prayer sermons, provides more evidence that special worship had particular relevance in colonial contexts, and that the praying laity increasingly became the focus.

Notes 1 Leeds Intelligencer, 21 October 1854. 2 NP, II, pp. lxxviii–lxxxvi; NP, III, pp. cii–ciii.

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3 J. Hardwick, An Anglican British World: the Church of England and the expansion of the settler empire, c. 1790–1860 (Manchester, 2014), chapter 2; J. Gregory, ‘Introduction: transforming the “age of reason” into “an age of faiths”: or, putting religions and beliefs (back) into the eighteenth century’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32:3 (2009), 295–6. 4 This section repeats the analysis in NP, II, pp. cxii–cxxx; NP, III, pp. cxiii–cxxi. 5 NP, II, pp. ciii–civ, cxii–cxiii; NP, III, pp. xcix–c, cxxix. 6 LAC, MG23-C-6/2, C. Inglis to J. Wentworth, 24 April 1797; NP, II, pp. 649–51. 7 S. Potter, ‘Webs, networks, and systems: globalization and the mass media in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century British Empire’, JBS, 46 (2007), 622. 8 K. Livingston, Wired Nation Continent: the communication revolution and federating Australia (Melbourne, 1996), pp. 49–55, 79–89. 9 NSW State Archives and Records [NSWSA], NRS905–434-[4/649]-69/1121, S. Fox to colonial secretary, 6 February 1869. 10 K. Burke, The Stamp of Australia: the story of our mail – from First Fleet to twenty-first century (Crows Nest, NSW, 2009), p. 26. 11 S. Potter, News and the British World: the emergence of an imperial news system, 1876–1922 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 14–15; Reed, Royal Tourists, pp. 82–4. 12 Queenstown Free Press, 5 October 1859; Potter, ‘Webs’, 628. 13 HC, C-10789, RG7-G16c, vol. 6, W. Stanton to magistrates and sheriffs, 20 May 1812, fo. 137. 14 Canadian United Presbyterian Magazine, 1 May 1855, 150. 15 Argus, 3 April 1869. 16 Anglican Diocese of Nova Scotia Archives [ADNSA], Worrell papers, MG1/1/2B#63, under-secretary of state to Archbishop Worrell, 12 June 1918. 17 Ibid. The occasion was a June day of prayer and intercession in 1918; this was a Canadian occasion and was not coordinated with a British event. 18 See the correspondence between the Commonwealth Government, the heads of churches and the secretary of state for the colonies in NAA, A461, AM322/1. 19 W. Porter Journal, CMS missionary, 2 November 1838, https://downloads. newcastle.edu.au/library/cultural%20collections/the-wellington-valley-pro ject/porter/porter-journals/ii-oct-dec-1838.html, accessed 11 January 2018. 20 Rev. T. Wilson, British Colonist, 27 December 1838; Queen’s University Archives, F00566, Rev. W. Bell, February 1838, fos 4–5. 21 LAC, H-2620, RG4-C1/270, Bishop of Montreal to provincial secretary, 19 January 1850; C-10472, RG4-C2/42, provincial secretary to the Bishop of Montreal, 9 February 1850; Cape Monitor, 5 October 1859. 22 Rev. E. Proctor, Goulburn Herald [NSW], 2 March 1872. 23 SMH, 11 February 1869. Also Argus, 24 March 1868. 24 D. Aitkin, ‘“Country-mindedness”: the spread of an idea’, in S. Goldberg and F. Smith (eds), Australian Cultural History (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 50–7. 25 ‘Fruitgrower’, Windsor and Richmond Gazette [NSW], 20 March 1897.

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26 HC, C-922, G-15-C, vol. 7, government secretary to the Bishop of Quebec, 7 April 1802, fo. 526; LAC, C-92, RG1-E1, vol. G, government secretary to the Bishop of Quebec, 3 April 1812, fo. 171. 27 Halifax Catholic, 13 May 1854. An 1850 thanksgiving prayer for the birth of a royal prince, published in the Royal Gazette and by the Queen’s printer, is held in the ADNSA, St Paul’s church, service leaflets, 2007–7-57. 28 Hardwick and Williamson, ‘Special worship’, 279. 29 NP, II, pp. cxlviii, 602; NP, III, pp. cxxiv–cxxv. Charles Inglis of Nova Scotia said in 1808 that it was ‘usual’ for him to receive forms of prayer for British fasts from archbishops and the royal printers, though he added that he was not sure forms would arrive, and in 1803 he copied a form from an English newspaper: LAC, MG23-C-6/3, Inglis to the Archbishop of Canterbury, 12 November 1803, and Inglis to G. Prevost, 18 April 1808, fos 118, 176–7. The confusion in 1902 is described in the colonial bishops’ correspondence in Lambeth Palace Library, Frederick Temple papers, vol. 58, fos 166–287. USPG, C/CAN/NS/16/4, Archdeacon Wix to USPG, 9 August 1830. 30 Gray, Life of Robert Gray, II, p. 488. 31 A form was requested for the jubilee marking fifty years of Australian settlement: Australian, 29 December 1837. 32 A Form of Prayer, with Thanksgiving to Almighty God (Toronto, 1838), pp. 4–5; A Form of Prayer, to be used on Friday, the 7th Day of December, 1838 (Montreal, 1838), pp. 4–5; Anderson, Notes of the Flood, pp. 12, 117–18. For the 1740 text, see NP, II, p. 425. The prayer for unity appears in a southern African form, issued during drought in 1866: A Form of Prayer, to be used throughout the Dioceses of Capetown and Grahamstown (Cape Town, 1865), p. 7. 33 See the church clerk in The Church of England Messenger for the Diocese of Melbourne, 22 April 1869. 34 Geelong Advertiser, 5 April 1869. 35 Sydney Gazette, 7 November 1829; Australian, 13 November 1829. Thanksgiving forms in England and Wales cost threepence. 36 Sydney Herald, 29 October 1838; Sydney Gazette, 6 November 1838. NSW’s population was 118,918 in 1841. 37 Canadian Ecclesiastical Gazette, 4:1 (November 1857). 38 SMH, 5 January 1866; Canadian Ecclesiastical Gazette, 9:22 (November 1862). Commercial sales of forms of prayer in England, Wales and Ireland are described in NP, II, pp. cxxx–cxxxvii. 39 R. Ewing, A Plea for a Fast Day (Launceston, 1854), pp. 3, 7, 10. 40 Christie and Gauvreau, Christian Churches, pp. 18–22. 41 Raffe, ‘Nature’s scourges’, 243–6. 42 Mafeking Mail, 24 December 1915. 43 Daily Telegraph, 14 September 1895; Maitland Mercury, 21 Oct 1882. 44 NP, III, pp. xcvii–xcviii. 45 USPG, C/CAN/QUE/5/392, J. Milton to the Archdeacon of Quebec, 27 April

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and 11 May 1832; ADNSA, MG1, Series 1, vol. 20, #6, #19, Bishop of Quebec to Archbishop Worrell, 10 December 1915. 46 Daily Dispatch [East London], 17 October 1896; Maitland Weekly Mercury, 21 March 1903. 47 Daily Herald, 30 December 1915. 48 See the statement issued by the Presbyterian Church of Victoria: State Library of Victoria [SLV], M24, ‘Letter from the Presbytery of Melbourne to the Members and Adherents of the Presbyterian Church’ (1882); NP, II, p. lxvi. 49 Ecclesiastical and Missionary Record for the Presbyterian Church of Canada, 14:1 (November 1857). 50 G. Haines et al. (eds), The Eye of Faith: the pastoral letters of John Bede Polding (Kilmore, 1978), pp. 231–33, 310–13. 51 Maryborough Chronicle [Queensland], 7 January 1918. 52 Guyatt, Providence, pp. 5–6. Historians argue that providential interpretation, and belief in ‘special providences’, remained relevant for eighteenth-century western Europeans, although they hesitate to make similar claims about later generations: Duiveman, ‘Praying’, 2; R. Ingram, ‘“The Trembling Earth is God’s Herald”: earthquakes, religion and public life in Britain during the 1750s’, in T. Braun and J. Radner (eds), The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755: representations and reactions (Oxford, 2005), pp. 97–115; J. Clark, ‘Providence, predestination and progress; or, did the Enlightenment fail?’, Albion, 35:4 (2004), 559–89. For the persistence into the 1950s of beliefs in a general providence that explained the course of national events, see Grimley, ‘The religion of Englishness’. 53 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 99; Hilton, Age of Atonement, p. 155. 54 SMH, 6 January 1866. 55 Haines et al. (eds), Eye of Faith, p. 293; SLV, ‘Letter from the Presbytery of Melbourne’; Maitland Daily Mercury, 7 April 1900. 56 Maitland Daily Mercury, 21 March 1903. 57 Williamson, ‘National days’, 352–4. 58 Compare this with what sociologists call the modern ‘socio-historical process of individualization – whereby the individual is increasingly expected to negotiate uncertainty for herself, by herself’: S. Moore and A. Burgess, ‘Risk rituals?’, Journal of Risk Research, 14:1 (2011), 112. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, pp. 173–5, follows Émile Durkheim in emphasising the social function of special worship. As one scholar puts it, collective prayer was ‘as much about communities as about God’: Duiveman, ‘Praying’. 59 Anderson, Notes of the Flood, p. 15; E. Kendall, Sermon Preached at the Church of St. John the Evangelist, Toronto (Toronto, 1859). 60 For similar British developments, NP, III, pp. liii, xcii–ci. 61 USPG, C/CAN/QUE/5/392, Milton to the Archdeacon of Quebec, 11 May 1832. 62 Aaron Kinney, an itinerant Methodist preacher in Nova Scotia, remarked on the rising spiritual temperature experienced at the three meetings he held one

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thanksgiving day, adding that ‘hard and stubborn hearts yealded’: PANS, MG1/1667, 17 November 1887. 63 Age, 28 May 1915; NP, III, p. c. Forms of service for special occasions had been issued by unofficial Presbyterian bodies in Scotland since the 1860s, and Australian Presbyterians picked up on this when they used a prescribed prayer to give thanks for a failed assassination attempt on Prince Alfred: Empire, 16 March 1868. 64 Australian Christian Commonwealth [Adelaide], 18 September 1914. 65 Spectator and Methodist Chronicle [Melbourne], 29 October 1915; A Service of Intercession and Thanksgiving for Our Army and Navy and the British Empire, used in the Wesleyan Methodist Churches, on Sunday, 3rd January, 1915 (n.p., 1915). 66 Compare colonial developments with those described for the Church in England in NP, III, pp. xcii–xcix. 67 Daily Telegraph, 22 July 1898 and 25 and 28 August 1905; Sydney Mail, 1 October 1898. 68 NLA, FERG/7666, ‘Church services for days of prayer and intercession in connection with the First World War’, https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-87992370/ view?partId=nla.obj-87993922, accessed 8 June 2018. 69 E.g. prayers ‘for those engaged in war’ and ‘for our rulers in a time of war’ issued for the Sydney diocese in Daily Telegraph, 11 and 15 August 1914. 70 ‘Formal Prayers’, Bendigo Advertiser [Victoria], 18 October 1902. 71 For wartime British developments, NP, III, pp. xcv–xciv. 72 Mount Alexander Mail [Victoria], 30 December 1917. 73 Proposals from the ‘Melbourne Day of Prayer Committee’ are in NAA, A461, AM322/1. This occasion possibly followed the bi-monthly occasions organised in Melbourne the previous year: Weekly Times, 29 January 1916. 74 WCPA, 3/ELN, vol. 1047, reference 1473; ‘A Citizen’, Daily Dispatch, 8 August 1917. For the ‘simplicity and sincerity’ in late Victorian British worship, see J. Wolffe, Great Deaths: grieving, religion and nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (Oxford, 2000), pp. 78, 82. 75 See Bishop Goe of Melbourne’s instructions for an 1893 day of humiliation: South Australian Register, 10 May 1893. A number of Australian Anglican bishops included a prayer for ‘humble beasts’ (supposedly from the Russian Orthodox liturgy) in their special collects for wartime days of intercession: Numurkah Standard, 18 November 1914. 76 NP, III, pp. xc, xcvi–xcvii. 77 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 134. 78 Turner, ‘Rainfall’. 79 For press support for humiliation day proposals see, Ballarat Courier, 25 March 1875. For opposition to special petitionary prayers: ‘Werbeh’, Ballarat Star, 30 March 1875; editorial in Argus, 31 March 1875, ‘An Artisan’, Argus, 3 April 1875; ‘Lux’, Argus, 6 April 1875; ‘Common Sense’, Argus, 2 and 7 April 1875; ‘Per Se Valens’, Age, 17 April 1875. 80 Daily Dispatch, 7 October 1896; SMH, 22 February 1919.

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81 Turner, ‘Rainfall’, 60; Brisbane Courier, 28 February 1872; T. Fuller, A Nation’s Mercy Vouchsafed to a Nation’s Prayers (Toronto, 1872), pp. 2, 7. A Cape Town form gave greater scope to medical and scientific explanations for the Prince’s recovery: it gave thanks that God ‘didst bless the means employed for his recovery’: Thanksgiving Service for the Recovery of H. R. H. the Prince of Wales (Cape Town, 1872), p. 2. 82 Rev. H. Handfield, Argus, 1 April 1875; Turner, ‘Rainfall’, 56–7; Williamson, ‘National days’, 353–4. For changes in understandings of prayer during natural disasters in Britain, see NP, III, pp. cii–ciii. 83 G. Morgan, A Sermon Preached in the Scottish church, Cape Town (Cape Town, 1866), pp. 15–16. L. Daston, ‘Marvelous facts and miraculous evidence in early modern Europe’, Critical Inquiry, 18:1 (1991), 93–124. 84 Maitland Weekly Mercury, 21 March 1903; SMH, 26 March 1900. 85 A Form of Prayer to be used in all Churches and Chapels throughout the Diocese of Toronto (Toronto, 1857), p. 5; NP, II, pp. 912, 1914; NP, III, p. xcvi; K. Hendrickson, Making Saints: religion and the public image of the British Army, 1809–1885 (Madison, WI, 1998). 86 Williamson, ‘National days’, 352. 87 Maitland Weekly Mercury, 14 July 1900. 88 Moses, ‘Anglicanism and Anzac observance’, 74–5. 89 In 1918, the council of evangelical churches included Anglican forms of prayer in its services for a day of intercession, and in 1922 Anglicans used a prayer composed by a Congregationalist: NP, III, p. lxxvii. 90 Memorials of the British Settlers, pp. 2–3. 91 Celebration of Peace, 1919. Service of thanksgiving to Almighty God for the termination of the war and the victory of the Allies (n.p., 1919). 92 Maitland Mercury, 26 October 1882; Daily Dispatch, 3 January 1916. 93 ‘Unitarian’, Argus, 20 October 1917; Herald [Melbourne], 20 October 1917; Moses, ‘Anglicanism and Anzac observance’. NP, III, p. xcvi, for controversy in Britain, though p. 179 notes that such prayers became common as Anglican clergy responded to ‘mass bereavement’. 94 Williamson, ‘National days’, 354–5. 95 Lake, Bible in Australia, pp. 116–17; M. Gladwin, ‘Preaching and Australian public life’, St Mark’s Review, 227 (2014), 1–14. 96 Atkinson, cited in Lake, Bible in Australia, pp. 147–51, 178. 97 SMH, 27 February 1902, 3 January 1916, 1 January 1917 and 24 February 1919. For decline in Britain, see J. Wolffe, ‘British sermons on national events’, in R. Ellison (ed.), A New History of the Sermon: the nineteenth century (Leiden, 2010), pp. 181–206. 98 W. Gibson, ‘The British sermon 1689–1901: quantities, performance, and culture’, in K. Francis and W. Gibson (eds), Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon, 1689–1901 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 25–6; Johnston, National Thanksgivings; J. Cruickshank, ‘The sermon in the British colonies’, in Francis and Gibson (eds), Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon, pp. 513–29; Stevens, ‘“Righteousness Exalteth a Nation”’; S. F. Wise, ‘Sermon literature

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and Canadian intellectual history’, in A. McKillop and P. Romney (eds), God’s Peculiar Peoples: essays on political culture in nineteenth-century Canada (Ottawa, 1993), pp. 3–17; M. Gladwin, ‘Preaching and Australian public life’. 99 SLV, Joseph Docker sermons, 1820–9, Box 1343/2, sermon preached 12 November 1829, fo. 1. 100 Johnston, National Thanksgivings, pp. 13, 16. 101 Sydney Gazette, 13 April 1806. 102 Johnston, National Thanksgivings, p. 34; Wolffe, ‘British sermons on national events’, p. 182. 103 A. Spark, A Sermon Preached in the Scotch Presbyterian Church (Quebec, 1804), pp. 15–17; W. Leach, A Discourse Delivered in St. Andrew’s Church, Toronto (Toronto, 1838), pp. 7–8; T. Creen, Two Discourses, Delivered in St Mark’s Church, Niagara (Niagara, 1838); J. George, The Duties of Subjects to their Rulers (Toronto, 1838). 104 G. Mountain, A Fast-Day Sermon upon the Day Appointed in the Province of Canada (Quebec, 1857), p. 17; J. Gibson, Bochim, or the Weepers (Toronto, 1857), pp. 8–14. 105 C. Inglis, A Sermon Preached in the Parish Church of St Paul at Halifax (Halifax, 1794), p. 32; Rev. R. Dickinson, Australasian [Melbourne], 6 January 1866. 106 A. Spark, A Sermon, Preached in the Scotch Church (Quebec, 1814), pp. 15–16. 107 G. Salmon, A Sermon Preached in the Village of Waterloo (Montreal, 1833), pp. 13–14. 108 A. Walsham, ‘Deciphering divine wrath and displaying Godly sorrow: providentialism and emotion in early modern England’, in J. Spinks and C. Zika (eds), Disaster, Death and the Emotions in the Shadow of the Apocalypse, 1400–1700 (London, 2016), pp. 31–2, 34–5. Also, T. Dixon, Weeping Britannia: portrait of a nation in tears (Oxford, 2015), chapter 2. 109 Walsham, ‘Deciphering divine wrath’, p. 35. 110 J. Gregor, Duties Appropriate to a Day of Public Fast and Humiliation (Sydney, 1838), p. 15; Brunton, Judgments of God, pp. 18, 20. 111 Gibson, Bochim, p. 20. 112 Dixon, Weeping Britannia, p. 152. 113 During the Crimean War, Gray, the bishop of Cape Town, warned his congregation that they were ‘far from secure’ and a ‘thousand things may easily happen’ to bring the war closer to their door: Gray, A Sermon Preached, in the Cathedral Church, Cape Town (Cape Town, 1854), p. 6. 114 Walsham, ‘Deciphering divine wrath’, p. 27. 115 Wardrope, Present War, p. 14. 116 Mountain, A Fast-Day Sermon, pp. 10, 16, 19–20. 117 Duiveman, ‘Praying’, pp. 7–8; Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society, pp. 159–60. M. Duffy and S. Yell, ‘Mediated public emotion: collective grief and Australian national disasters’, in D. Lemmings and A. Brooks (eds), Emotions and

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Social Change: historical and sociological perspectives (New York, 2014), p. 101. 118 Brunton, Judgments of God, p. 12. 119 R. Jones, Slow Catastrophes: living with drought in Australia (Clayton, 2017). 120 E. Wix, The Guilt of the Denial of God’s Providence (St. John’s, 1832), p. 23; Morgan, A Sermon Preached in the Scottish Church, p. 5. 121 F. Barker, A Sermon Preached at St. James’ Church (Sydney, 1866), p. 5. 122 The SMH listed the texts of the sermons, a sign, perhaps, of public familiarity with the Bible: 20 January 1866. On the use of Old Testament texts and doctrines in Britain, see Wolffe, ‘British sermons on national events’, pp. 190–99; Johnston, National Thanksgivings, p. 48. 123 Rev. R. Taylor, SMH, 16 September 1895; Bishop F. F. Goe and Rev. D.  Marshall, Argus, 3 May 1897; Rev. E. Smith, Queensland Times, 17 September 1895. 124 South Australian Register, 25 July 1896; W. B. Clarke, ‘Effects of forest vegetation on climate’, Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of NSW, 10 (1876), 211. Revs Russell (Presbyterian) and Rooney (Roman Catholic), Cape Argus Weekly Edition, 21 October 1896; Archdeacon Seaton and Rev. Ross, Transvaal Leader [Johannesburg], 14 October 1912. An editor commented that ‘the circumstances of this land are such, that we are often led to the Bible for historical analogies’: Cape Standard, 11 January 1866. 125 J. Usher, The Doctrine of a Divine Special Providence Illustrated (Brantford, 1857). 126 H. Gladstone-Hawke, The Rinderpest (Cape Town, 1896), pp. 4, 6. 127 W. Evans (ed.), Diary of a Welsh Swagman, 1869–1894 (Melbourne, 1977), p. 85. No evidence has been found of women taking to pulpits on special days of worship. 128 Maldon News [Victoria], 16 October 1917. 129 ‘A Layman’, Ballarat Star, 18 May 1893; William Slack, Inverell Argus [NSW], 29 April 1902. 130 ‘E. L.’, Empire, 31 August 1854; ‘A. Canterbury’, Freeman’s Journal [Sydney], 26 August 1854. 131 Williamson, ‘State prayers’, 129. 132 See the correspondence in Cape Argus Weekly Edition, 7 October 1896, the editorial in The Standard and Digger’s News [Johannesburg], 15 October 1896, and ‘Citizen’ in Daily Dispatch, 10 October 1896. Phoofolo, ‘Epidemics and revolutions’, 130–1. 133 D. Samson, ‘“Damn Tories Say I”: dissent, print culture, and anti-­Confederation thought in James Barry’s diary’, Acadiensis, 46:1 (2017), 177–90; PANS, MG1/1217, 10,070, 18 November 1886, 12 November 1891, 23 November 1893, 25 November 1897 and 28 November 1901. 134 On disease, see ‘Werbah’, Ballarat Star, 30 March 1875, and for commercial collapse, ‘James Cumming’, South Australian Register, 5 May 1893. 135 ‘A Loyal Englishman’, Darling Downs Gazette [Queensland], 25 April 1868.

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136 Australian, 12 December 1829. For satirical forms in Regency England, see NP, II, p. 754. 137 For Loyalists, see Ely Playter, AO, F556, MS87/1, 16 March 1804 and 19 June 1812; Benjamin Crawford, AO, F709, MS796/1, 7 February 1810, 6 March 1811, 19 March 1813 and 15 April 1814. For an American Methodist, see Benjamin Smith, AO, 582, MS199, 19 June 1812 and 3 June 1814. For the Lunenberg German, see Adolphus Gaetz, LAC, MG24-I86, 27 December 1855 and 30 October 1857. 138 Oudtshoorn Courant, 19 October 1896; Worcester Standard, 17 October 1896; Cape Mercury, 6 October 1896; ‘Businessman’, George and Knysna Herald, 28 October 1896; Colesberg Advertiser, 16 January 1866. 139 PANS, 10,075, September 1834; Anderson, Notes of the Flood, pp. 15–16. 140 PANS, 10,980 #12, 4 December 1862. 141 M. Bradley, A Narrative of the Life and Christian Experience of Mrs Mary Bradley (Boston, MA, 1849), pp. 324–5. 142 PANS, 10,983, 30 October 1857; AO, F1215, MS37, 28 November 1857. 143 A. McCrossen, ‘Sunday: marker of time, setting for memory’, Time & Society, 14:1 (2005), 35. 144 In March 1918 the governor general of South Africa made a new move when he requested towns to observe special services – not whole days – for ‘thanksgiving and intercession’: WCPA, 3/KWT, vol. 4/1/242, ref. ZE/2/40. Also see Eastern Province Herald [Port Elizabeth], 27 March 1918. 145 Sermon preached 12 November 1829, SLV, Docker Sermons, Box 1343/2, fo. 4. 146 Stevens, ‘“Righteousness Exalteth a Nation”’, pp. 68–76. 147 See 5 and 7 September, 22 and 17 October 1869, 20 July 1870 and 27 April 1879, G. Taplin Journals, https://www.firstsources.info/taplin-and-pointmcleay.html, accessed 14 October 2019. 148 Christian Express [Lovedale], 1 April 1897, 52; Cape Mercury, 17 October 1896; Home and Foreign Record of the Free Church of Scotland, 2 July 1855. 149 University of York Library, United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel records, Grahamstown, E Series, 96723/3, Reel 12, C. Taberer, report to USPG, 31 December 1896, fo. 171. 150 M. McKittrick, ‘Talking about the weather: settler vernaculars and climate anxieties in early twentieth-century South Africa’, Environmental History, 23 (2018), 11. 151 UPSG, Grahamstown, E Series, 96723/3, Reel 10, W. H. Turpin to unnamed correspondent, 30 June 1866, fo. 263; Reel 8, W. Greenstock to E. Hawkins, November 1856, fo. 41. 152 S. White, ‘“Shewing the difference betweene their conjuration, and our invocation of the name of God for rayne”: weather, prayer, and magic in early American encounters’, William and Mary Quarterly, 72:1 (2015), 33–56. For Christian disparagement of indigenous rainmaking in southern Africa, see G.  Endfield and D. Nash, ‘Drought, desiccation and discourse: missionary

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c­orrespondence and nineteenth-century climate change in central southern Africa’, Geographical Journal, 168:1 (2002), 33–47. 153 Rev. Nuttall, Cape Argus Weekly Edition, 21 October 1896. 154 Kapunda Herald [South Australia], 27 May 1879, reprinting an original article from Transvaal Argus. 155 The bishop recommended passages from Nehemiah 9, Ezra 9 and Daniel 9: South Australian Register, 10 May 1893; ‘James Cumming’, South Australian Register, 12 May 1893. 156 Australasian, 22 April 1876; SMH, 14 April 1876 for the form. 157 Age, 21 November 1856. 158 J. Colenso, What Doth the Lord Require of Us? (Pietermaritzburg, 1879); ‘Guy Pollock’, British Colonist, 26 July 1838. 159 Montreal Gazette, 20 April 1855; Stevens, ‘“Righteousness Exalteth a Nation”’, p. 71; Cape Argus Weekly Edition, 1 June 1902. 160 E. Major, ‘Ithuriel’s spear: Barbauld, sermons and citizens, 1789–93’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 41:2 (2018), 259. 161 Guyatt, Providence, pp. 5–6; PANS, 23,744, MG1 vol. 483c/1, 10 June 1797. Lake, Bible in Australia, pp. 82–8; P. Gregory, ‘Popular religion in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land from 1788 to the 1850s’ (PhD dissertation, University of New England, 1994), pp. 67–100; J. Marshall, Personal Narratives (Halifax, 1866), chapter 2. 162 Grimley, ‘The religion of Englishness’, 903–5. 163 Duiveman, ‘Praying’, 3.

4

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Communities of prayer

In December 1837 Upper Canada was in the grip of an armed insurrection. The governor, Francis Bond Head, had a bad shock when he learnt that hundreds of armed rebels had marched down Toronto’s Yonge Street demanding the overthrow of oligarchic rule and the establishment of a republic. The insurrection, and a later cross-border raid, collapsed after brief skirmishes with loyal militia. Seizing the moment, Bond Head summoned the colony to a public thanksgiving. The proclamation was issued as a command, and those who failed to participate would face God’s ‘wrath and indignation’. Despite the threats, Featherstone Osler, an Anglican missionary, worried that the event would pass unnoticed. His ‘parish’, West Gwillimsbury, was 37 miles from Toronto, and back in early December, Osler, a fervent loyalist, had described the people of the district as ‘panic-struck’. Yet Osler’s memories of similar occasions in Britain led him to suppose that ‘days of thanksgiving and fasting are too often little attended to’. In the event Osler was happy to find ‘a very large and attentive congregation’ at morning service in one church, and ‘an equally large congregation’ in the afternoon at another.1 On the same day at London – another town that had been threatened by rebels – an Anglican missionary preached to 500 people, among whom were ‘fifteen to twenty Roman Catholics’.2 Osler had discovered that familiar rituals and texts carried much importance for colonists who sought a comforting sense of solidarity and belonging amid unfamiliar and threatening environments.3 Special days of worship tightened the bonds of local community and put churchgoers in touch with communities that extended far beyond their immediate world. The ­circulation of Anglican forms of prayer, with their frequent use of the plural pronouns ‘we’, ‘our’ and ‘us’, broadened horizons too, as church­goers recognised that they and countless other co-religionists in other parts of the empire offered the same prayers and form of words at roughly the same moment in time.4 Other texts generated by these occasions – p ­ roclamations, reports of church services and published sermons – might promote the

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f­eelings of ‘horizontal simultaneity’ that, in Benedict Anderson’s famous thesis, brought disparate peoples together in an ‘imagined community’.5 Clergymen made sense of these communal attachments in their fast and thanksgiving sermons.6 These texts reveal the multiple and overlapping layers of regional, colonial, imperial and denominational identification that developed in settler societies. The first part of this chapter explores the imperial identifications that emerged when colonists joined other British subjects in collective acts of prayer for imperial causes, notably war and royal celebration. Such occasions presented the empire (or, more accurately, the settler empire) as a single, expansive community – the kind of ‘vast English nation’ that J. R. Seeley referred to in his Expansion of England lectures in the early 1880s.7 Days of prayer also prompted churchgoers to think in terms of regions and smaller national units. The chapter’s second section considers the three regions in turn and shows that clergy reminded colonists of the ties that bound them to individual colonies, and even regions within colonies. Sermon-givers told colonists that they were different to other British communities, that God guided them through peculiar struggles and challenges, and that colonial history, and the colonial future, was distinctive. Communities might even develop a sense of being a ‘chosen people’ in the mould of Old Testament Israel.8 All this meant that the empire of British settlement – what some called ‘Greater Britain’ – could be imagined in various ways: both as a single political unit that shared a common nationality, and as a multinational polity made up of various colonial nationalisms.9 First, however, more must be said about the idea of ‘national providentialism’ touched on in the previous chapter, as such ideas underpinned different forms of communal attachment in the colonial world.

National providentialism and empire The doctrine of ‘national providentialism’ ruled that in times of acute calamity it was the duty of every member of society to join with their fellow inhabitants and repent and pray for God’s forgiveness, as the sins of the individual counted towards a national aggregate.10 Drought, disease and war had a moral significance and signalled that God was angry with a chosen nation or favoured community. Historian John Wolffe, writing on the British Isles, has called the doctrine a ‘significant factor in the development of British national consciousness’, as it stimulated a ‘sense of ­participation in the nation as an “imagined community”’.11 Surviving sermons from the Canadian colonies in the Napoleonic period reveal that preachers stretched this sense of collective responsibility, and national consciousness, to include the inhabitants of empire. To give this

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concept of shared responsibility and national community purchase, clergy argued that distant calamities, such as war with republican France, were either partly the fault of colonists, or had been sent as a warning. A Nova Scotian Anglican thought the French Wars were a ‘wholesome correction’ for a widely scattered British people who displayed such ‘dreadful sins’ as ‘idleness, drunkenness, profaneness, and impurity’.12 A Quebec Presbyterian, speaking in 1814, focused on political shortcomings when he identified the sins that were common ‘in every part of the British Dominions’: British subjects everywhere had not displayed that ‘love of order and justice’, and ‘that subordination, and prompt obedience to the Laws’, required of those who enjoyed the ‘blessing’ of the ‘excellent’ British constitution.13 The notion of shared sin carried some danger for elites, as it might have a levelling effect and minimise the differences between classes and ethnicities. But it had uses too. It diverted attention from government failings, and it meant colonists could not abrogate responsibilities, as the reform of manners now became a public, patriotic and national act.14 The idea that there were accumulated or national sins led some to argue that colonists and metropolitan Britons shared a ‘national character’. According to Peter Mandler, English and British intellectuals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries played down the idea of national solidarity, as the argument that subjects shared a common character and culture had democratic implications.15 While Mandler’s work pays limited attention to religion, it is evident that a notion of national character, the idea that a group of people might share common traits, qualities and a culture, appeared in British and colonial fast and thanksgiving sermons. The Quebec Presbyterian, cited above, said that ‘nations, like private persons, have their characters, and, according to their characters, so are they also dealt with by Providence’. As the ‘vices of individuals have a certain influence on the national character’, the preacher continued, so it was incumbent on every member of the nation to reform themselves and eradicate private vices.16 James Somerville, a Montreal Church of Scotland minister, did not use the term ‘national character’ in his 1814 thanksgiving sermon, but he spoke about ‘the spirit of the people’ that was shared by ‘whole inhabitants of the country’. According to Somerville, the ‘sense of independence’ and ‘correctness of thinking’ that characterised the British was created and preserved by Britain’s system of education, its political constitution, its free press, judiciary and its ‘famed’ benevolent and charitable institutions. Somerville reminded his hearers (and readers) that they represented ‘a part’ of this people and nation.17 Arguments about colonial responsibility for distant disasters, and the shared character that linked a ‘sinful nation’ of colonial and metropolitan Britons, appeared during the transatlantic cholera epidemics of the early

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1830s, and during the Crimean War and the Indian ‘Mutiny’.18 Bishop Gray of Cape Town remarked during an 1854 fast that a series of calamities at home and abroad – the Irish famine, cholera and war (both the big Russian one and smaller ones within colonies) – demonstrated that the ‘people of the empire have sinned before the Lord’, and that the ‘type’ of sin was ‘remarkably similar in the mother and the daughter lands’.19 Nevertheless, as time passed, providentialist doctrines about collective sins figured less prominently in conceptions of community at the empire-wide level. Beliefs in penal judgements and special divine interventions became unfashionable as a sunnier religiosity took hold in the English-speaking world.20 It also mattered that there were not many great calamities. The Crimean War was regarded as a national conflict and a national judgement, but Britain’s small wars in China and southern Africa were distant and possibly – as one Australian Methodist thought – unjust.21 Some colonies observed fasts for the famine in Ireland and Scotland in 1847, but these occasions seem not to have been well observed.22 Indeed, the Irish famine, and the ‘Mutiny’ a decade later, were the last times colonies observed special days of worship for calamities that affected only a portion of the British world community. Why this happened is not easily explained. Boyd Hilton has argued that the famine dealt a blow to providence theory and discredited the idea that distant communities should mark other peoples’ traumas with general fasts. According to Hilton, some English churchmen were uncomfortable with the idea that national sin brought on famine, as it was bewildering that while God punished the Irish and Scots so horribly, other sinners and other members of the national community, namely the English middle class, escaped retribution. The notion that those who escaped suffering shared responsibility for distant calamities became hard to maintain as God’s actions appeared arbitrary and disproportionate.23 It was noted earlier that Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, the two colonies that observed fasts in 1847, had experienced traumas comparable to those suffered by the Irish. Still, some religious ministers regarded the fires, storms and commercial failures that struck unfortunate Newfoundland as discrete visitations brought on by the peculiarly sinful nature of the island’s inhabitants. Reflecting on these ‘afflictive dispensations’, a Methodist missionary noted that while ‘one half of our population is enclosed in the Popish net’, many Protestants were engaged in a sealing industry in which ‘the Christian Sabbath is almost generally disregarded’. ‘Perhaps’, the missionary added, ‘we have in Newfoundland a more wholesale & aggravated case of Sabbath desecration than is such in England or Scotland.’24 The Irish famine showed that it was difficult to unite the empire through a sense of collective guilt and shared responsibility.25 In 1855, a Montreal Unitarian minister said Canadians had no reason to humiliate themselves

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because they had no ‘culpable connection’ with war with Russia. The minister added bluntly, ‘I do not consider myself responsible in any way, by any sin of mine, for the calamities of the Crimea.’26 Another colonist, writing in 1857, said Britons overseas had no reason to join in collective repentance for the ‘Mutiny’ as their actions had ‘little to do in producing the Indian calamities’.27 Colonial inhabitants developed other relationships with distant calamities and to suffering fellow subjects; relationships based more on charitable giving than prayer and penitence. Instead of collective punishments, distant catastrophes were warnings, sent by God to encourage sinful communities to amend their ways. In the famine period, an English-born Anglican minister told a Goulburn, NSW congregation that it was their duty to reform their manners and relieve sufferers in Ireland, as not to do so would bring divine retribution. Interestingly, the sermon separated colony from metropole. The minister acknowledged that colonists contributed to famine-relief funds as so many were ‘connected by the nearest and dearest ties’ to sufferers. But nothing was said about the sense of sin and repentance that might have united Britons at home and overseas. Instead, the sermon described the advantages Australia held out to migrants, and the privileges enjoyed by colonists. Similarly, the special prayer used by Australian Anglicans during the famine separated colonists from metropolitan sufferers and focused on colonial ‘abundance’ and ‘liberality’.28 Who were guilty of national sins, and who was included in the penitential nation? Sermons rarely addressed such questions. In theory, all British subjects who owed loyalty and allegiance to the British monarchy, of every faith and ethnicity, would take part. Missionaries tried to teach indigenous communities that they, as subjects of empire, also shared in the national guilt. For a Napoleonic War fast in 1804, Moravians on the Thames River in Upper Canada explained the concept of fasting to the Delaware Indians on their mission by telling them to give up work.29 Clergy that ministered to settler congregations tried to nurture feelings of community that crossed ethnic divides. For the cholera thanksgiving called in Lower Canada in 1834, a minister told the English-speaking inhabitants of New Carlisle, Quebec to think of French Canadians and to give thanks for ‘the liberation of your Brethren of every denomination in the Province’. On the same day, an Anglican minister in the predominantly English-speaking Eastern Townships said cholera had nurtured a ‘sympathy’ and ‘sensibility’ that extended itself ‘beyond the narrow precincts’ of the community’s ‘personal concerns’.30 Such comments perhaps reflected an intellectual climate in which Britishness was not defined in ‘exclusive race terms’, and when notions about the unity, similarity and educability of all humans predominated.31

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Nevertheless, imperial acts of special worship in the later nineteenth century became celebrations of the unity of an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ race. There was much talk about the achievements and demographic expansion of ‘Greater Britain’ and the ‘Anglo Saxons’ in Australia during the 1887 and 1897 royal jubilees.32 This redefinition of the imperial community in narrow terms, as an Anglo-Saxon entity, reflected the anxious international political climate of late century. The appeal of Anglo-Saxonism grew as fears grew about the threats posed by rival empires, Asian migration and the debilitating social effects of modernisation and industrialisation. According to Neville Meaney, Anglo-Saxonism provided anxious settlers with ‘psychological security’. In the Australian context, the emphasis on Anglo-Saxonism intensified the Britishness of colonists and it made settlers conceive of community in ‘exclusive’ and ‘racial’ terms – what became known as ‘white Australia’.33 In the 1890s came the first immigration restrictions against Asian migrants and the first moves to a ‘white Australia’ policy. Yet Anglo-Saxonism had a porous quality. A common view was that the Anglo-Saxon race was the product of the mixing and blending of what one preacher called ‘the Saxon, the Norman, the Scotch, and the Welsh’. Another, speaking at the jubilee celebrations in NSW in 1887, thought Queen Victoria herself was a ‘representative of every section of her subjects’, as she possessed the blood of ‘Anglo-Saxon, Norman and Welsh princes’, as well as that of the ‘Stuart Princes of Scotland’.34 It followed from this that as the race migrated and grew, others would be brought into the fold through a process of assimilation. Furthermore, whatever behaviours and traits marked out the Anglo-Saxon were mutable and could be learnt by new arrivals. But as Duncan Bell points out, ‘mutability’ only went so far and was ‘implicitly delimited by the boundaries of “whiteness”’.35 The presentation of the imperial community as an Anglo-Saxon and Christian formation did not go uncontested. British ‘subjecthood’ was something to be invoked and claimed by any group that sought recognition, representation and enhanced civil rights.36 In days of prayer a diversity of voices articulated views on the nature of imperial community and citizenship. During royal thanksgivings, Irish-born Catholic clergy presented themselves as loyal subjects, and co-owners of an empire that had brought the Irish justice, freedom and prosperity. In 1887 a Catholic preacher in Ballarat, Victoria said he was prepared to unite with his ‘fellow subjects’ in giving thanks for the Queen’s reign, as British brutality in Ireland – such as the recent 1887 coercion act – was the work of Parliament, not the sovereign.37 Jewish people seized on the language of British ‘subjecthood’ to challenge narrow readings of imperial community and citizenship. Jewish people in Victoria noted in 1872 that they were the first ‘loyal subjects’ in the colony to ‘express their gratitude to the Almighty for the recovery of the

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Prince [of Wales] before the Government or any church dignitary thought of giving an order on the subject’.38 Chapter 6 says more about when and why marginalised communities engaged with public acts of special worship, particularly on royal occasions, though here it is worth noting that for many of the empire’s inhabitants Britishness was, as modern scholars note, a ‘composite, rather than exclusive form of identity’.39

Special worship and the ‘provincial spirit’ Preachers, therefore, deployed various doctrines and languages to remind individuals that they inhabited a larger imperial community. Providentialism was a difficult and problematic explanatory system, and the notion of a chastising providence – ‘the economy of sin’ – played a diminishing role in the mobilisation of communities, especially at the empire level.40 Yet running through other sermons was a more positive account of the place that colonial congregations occupied in a larger providential scheme, one that encompassed a transoceanic British nation. According to this narrative, victory in war and escape from revolution signalled that God had singled out Britain to improve and Christianise the world. Such ideas about election and favoured peoples justified empire and helped to unify it too.41 National consciousness in the settler world was, however, complex, and a regional or ‘provincial spirit’ has been detected in the late nineteenthcentury empire. Another term, ‘local patriotism’, refers to the attachments that colonial peoples developed to colonial landscapes and institutions.42 Days of prayer, especially those for colonial happenings, helped nurture such identifications. But these occasions also point to a stronger sense of colonial nationhood, one that might even be termed a ‘nationalism’, as it was based on the idea that colonial people – not territories or ­institutions – shared characters and behaviours that marked them out from British  subjects elsewhere. It cannot be said that colonial nationalisms, based on strong senses of ethnicity and distinctive culture, flowered in the nineteenth century.43 But there was a sense that colonial climates and environments had created new types of people. Days of prayer were one forum through which contemporaries articulated and made sense of these colonial particularisms. These occasions reveal that community leaders in colonial societies developed readings of divine providence that worked independently of the grand imperial narrative. As Nicholas Guyatt notes, any group that considered themselves a ‘people apart’ might take up the language of national providence. The imperial crises of the 1760s and 1770s had, for instance, sharpened an awareness among some American colonists that colonies had

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distinctive histories, and that colonists, as favoured peoples, would break with the mother country and realise future achievements, beyond those of the old country.44 Though this kind of politicised ‘providential separatism’ rarely appeared in the nineteenth-century British empire, later colonial communities developed distinct understandings of how God guided their history.45 The national providence idea was articulated with varying degrees of force in different parts of the empire, and not every colonial community considered themselves a chosen people; such ideas even took time to emerge in expected places, such as among Dutch-speaking Afrikaners.46 But as the next three sections demonstrate, settler societies developed distinctive providential narratives, and these helped nourish a sense of provincialism that sat alongside an attachment to a ‘Greater Britain’.

Canadian thanksgivings Though they frequently reminded their congregations that they formed part of the British nation, early Canadian preachers recognised the striking differences between the condition of the mother country and the British North American colonies. The violence and contention of the American Revolution fostered not only a religious revival in Nova Scotia but also a sense of special election among some of the colony’s inhabitants, many of whom had previously migrated from New England. In this view, God had spared the province the horrors of war because it was predestined to forward God’s purpose in the world.47 This sense of distinctiveness and mission appeared at other times when colonists seemed to enjoy blessings when others suffered distress. Nova Scotia’s commercial prosperity during the Napoleonic Wars – the Maritimes were a major beneficiary of the European trade blockades – led a preacher to remark during an 1804 fast day that the province was the most ‘highly favoured province’ of the ‘most favoured nation on earth’.48 The War of 1812, which featured American invasions of Upper and Lower Canada, sharpened a sense of distinctiveness and exceptionalism among Canadians further west. From the war came the myth that Upper Canada had been saved by the fortitude of the colonists, not the forces of the British Empire. Religious ministers helped shape an emergent Canadian consciousness when they articulated a providential reading of Canada’s wartime experiences.49 In a thanksgiving sermon delivered when peace came in 1815, Robert Easton, a Montreal Presbyterian, used the term ‘Canadian’ to refer to a people who, in his view, were specially blessed by God. In 1814, John Strachan – a future Anglican bishop – suggested a narrative of Canadian development that was semi-detached from the larger imperial story. By resisting invasion, Upper Canadians had shown ‘that

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the same spirit animates the children of the Loyalists, which inspired their fathers to put down treason and rebellion’.50 The sense that providence had marked out Canadian communities remained undeveloped until mid-century. Sermons delivered during cholera and rebellion in the 1830s noted that Canadian colonists enjoyed ‘great and peculiar’ advantages and blessings; they also remarked on the ‘national sins’ of discrete colonial communities. Yet preachers continued to place greater emphasis on the ties that bound Canadians to British institutions, values and traditions.51 For the harvest thanksgivings that took place after 1859, Canadian Anglicans said prayers and collects that were adapted from those that had been used in English dioceses on occasional harvest thanksgivings since 1796. The ‘form of prayer with thanksgiving to Almighty God for the blessing of the harvest’, composed in England in 1862, was replicated in whole or in part in later Canadian forms, though Maritime communities followed unique and innovative collects that referenced ‘the harvest of the seas’ and gave thanks that ‘the fishes of the sea are multiplied for the ­sustenance of man’.52 It was during the Confederation era of the 1860s and 1870s that a distinctively Canadian national providentialism pervaded thanksgiving sermon literature. Clergymen articulated the idea that Canada was a unity, and that Canadians were a single people: they shared a past and a future, and their blessings and privileges demonstrated that God considered them special and unique.53 For Protestant churchmen, thanksgivings were a chance to shape a Canadian identity and to invest a new Canadian nation with a Christian character. The foremost scholar of Canadian thanksgiving has noted that nationalism was a dominant theme in Ontarian thanksgiving discourses, though this was not the only part of the Canadian Dominion where Protestant clergy delivered nationalistic thanksgiving sermons. Thanksgiving sermons pointed out that Canada’s favourable climate, and its rich agricultural environment, had formed a people that possessed distinctive traits, a ‘national character’ and a ‘national feeling’. Preachers avoided the question of who the Canadian was, and they did not detail the features of this Canadian ‘type’.54 Others thought that Canada was fulfilling a providential mission that was independent of the British imperial one. In the 1860s, preachers contrasted the energy and prosperity of the Canadian prairies with the cotton famines and cattle plagues that ravaged metropolitan Britain. In 1870, Bishop Machray of Rupert’s Land composed a form of thanksgiving for the harvest that had little of the penitential character of some previous English harvest forms (such as the one used in the famine year of 1847). Machray’s prayers and collects had a strongly Canadian character, and were adapted to an optimistic country that was, as he put it, ‘entering on a new era’.55

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Thanksgivings invited Canadians to regard themselves as members of several kinds of community, from the regional to the diasporic. Numerous thanksgiving sermons connected Canada’s blessings to its British heritage, particularly Britain’s constitutional and monarchical tradition. In an 1883 thanksgiving sermon, C. B. Pitblado, a Winnipeg Presbyterian, called Canadians ‘subjects of an empire’ and ‘heirs of an historic inheritance which has been the growth of centuries’. While some sermon-givers emphasised Canada’s British origins, others pointed to its commonalities with the United States. Pitblado drew implicit comparisons between Canadian and American westward expansion: both provided ‘a new home for the Anglo-Saxon race’ and both had a providential significance.56 The notion that Canadians and Americans shared ‘a way of life invested with special, unprecedented, significance’ helped nourish a sense of continental community. Indeed, from the 1870s, laypersons and churchmen started to request bilateral thanksgivings, when all the continent’s Anglo-Saxons could celebrate the progress of the ‘new world’.57 In 1901 Canada would express a sense of North American community when it observed a ‘fast day’, proclaimed by the governor general to mark the assassination of William McKinley, the United States president. Canadian thanksgivings also show how national occasions could focus attention on a colonial territory’s diversity and particularisms. As late as the 1880s provincial Canadian newspapers sometimes forgot that thanksgiving was a Dominion-wide occasion. Nova Scotian newspapers used thanksgiving to remark on the blessings and progress enjoyed by inhabitants of the province. This phenomenon was particularly evident in western territories, most notably British Columbia. Scholars of British Columbia’s festive culture have presented this as a place apart: 4 July was widely celebrated, and American thanksgivings sometimes attracted more attention than the Canadian occasions that were appointed from 1879. When British Columbians did engage with Dominion thanksgivings in the later 1880s, thanksgiving editorials focused on provincial, not national, blessings and advantages. British Columbia was a ‘virgin Province’ boasting ‘illimitable resources’ and populated by an ‘enterprising, hard-working and God-fearing people’. Such representations undoubtedly fed into efforts to transform British Columbia from a rough-and-tumble, and overwhelmingly male, frontier world into a familiar and civilised white settler society.58 Yet a sense of regionalism and pre-eminence, as expressed in the British Columbia thanksgiving editorials, survived, and indeed may have been an early sprouting of the kind of celebration of ‘regional particularity’ that one historian argues was a feature of Dominion Day (1 July) celebrations in twentieth-century British Columbia.59 Canadian thanksgivings, then, suggest that occasions of special worship that were intended to draw attention to imperial and national formations

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and identifications could have a contrary effect, and stress and nourish a ‘provincial spirit’. English-speaking settlers may have identified with a broader Anglo-Saxon community, but they also retained attachments to colonies and regions with distinctive populations, environments or characters.60 Special worship in Australia and South Africa provides other ­examples of this multiplication of colonial identifications.

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Regionalism and nationalism in Australian special worship In March 1868, Prince Alfred, Queen Victoria’s second son, attended a charity picnic in a Sydney park as part of his Australian royal tour. Henry O’Farrell saw his chance, took out a revolver, and fired three shots at the Prince at point-blank range. Though one bullet entered Alfred’s back, the assassination attempt failed – while the Prince recovered and returned to his tour, O’Farrell, a suspected Fenian, went to the gallows. In the following days and weeks angry colonists across Australia attended ‘indignation meetings’. According to a recent account, these gatherings nurtured a sense that Australians, for all their differences, formed an ‘emotional community’. Beyond the outrage was a nuanced discussion of the nature, character and meaning of a trans-continental Australian ‘nation’ and Australian ‘nationality’. The nation envisioned at these meetings was free, open and tolerant; its people combined a democratic sense with loyalty to monarchy.61 Australians also gathered for public days of thanksgiving. This had a national character too, as between March and May governors in all Australian colonies, except remote and singular Western Australia, issued proclamations to set aside days. All the main Christian and non-Christian denominations participated, with Roman Catholics particularly keen to demonstrate their loyalty. At the thanksgiving services, clergy remarked on the common ‘impulses’ of the ‘whole people of the Australias’, and the ‘burst of horror’ that apparently emanated from the ‘whole continent’ when news became known. The attempted assassination of a man ‘dear to Australia’ was a ‘great calamity’ for all the colonies, as the crime threatened to ‘stamp’ on the Australian ‘lands’ the ‘unmerited character of a disloyal and disaffected people’.62 Anglican ministers, reflecting on the ‘feelings of the people’, dwelt on the loyalty to monarchy that connected the ‘Australian child’ to the mother country.63 Ministers had different understandings of who inhabited this Australian nation, and some excluded suspect communities. A Sydney Presbyterian thought the ‘real source’ of Fenianism lay in ‘the teaching and influence of Popery’, and another asserted that the ‘subjects of the Pope were not, and could not, be the subjects of the Queen in the same sense as Protestants are’. They were he added, ‘strangers’ and ‘foreigners’.64

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‘Nation’ was a loose term that might be applied to any colonial territory that had representative forms of government.65 Considered in this way, the Australian continent was home to many nations. The meetings and thanksgivings of 1868 nurtured a sense of attachment to these smaller national units, as colonies competed with each other in demonstrations of anger, shame and loyalty.66 Some Sydney clergymen considered the assassination attempt a peculiarly NSW issue: the crime had been committed in Sydney, and it threatened a ‘deep injury to the colony’. The Anglican minister of Newtown, NSW connected the assassination attempt with ‘disloyal speeches and writings in this colony, and our silence as a people in relation thereto’.67 And an Adelaide Unitarian gave thanks that the ‘crime had not been perpetrated in South Australia’; indeed the preacher argued that such a thing would never have happened in Adelaide, as religious equality, and what he called ‘moral culture’, was further advanced there than in other Australian colonies.68 A sense of distinctiveness, born from a providential reading of the past, took time to emerge in the Australian colonies. In 1829, William Grant Broughton, NSW’s Anglican archdeacon, imagined the colony’s history and future as part of a larger imperial providential narrative. Providence, Broughton said, had decreed that Australia was to be ‘replenished’ by a British nation that was extending its ‘power to the limits of the habitable world’.69 Elevated communal sentiments were unlikely to flourish in a European settlement that had been founded as a dump for Britain’s convicts and surplus population. A provincial national consciousness is, however, evident during the days of prayer that Australian governments set aside in times of drought from the 1860s. Dry spells were frequent, widespread and affected multiple colonies, though rainfall could vary between regions, and some farmers prospered while others suffered.70 Chapter 5 says more about special prayers in times of drought, though the relevant point is that Australian colonies never observed days of prayer for other regions’ droughts. NSW and Victoria appointed days of humiliation for drought within months of one another in early 1869, but although there was now a national press, a sense of continentalism rarely emerged on these occasions.71 As well as emphasising community attachments in the present, special occasions of worship encouraged individuals to place themselves in communities that stretched back in time. Ministers of religion often complained that colonial societies lacked an historical consciousness and that materialistic colonists too often forgot the lessons of past events and calamities. After a Melbourne flood in November 1849 a minister remarked that ‘it is truly astonishing how quickly the most striking events pass away from the mind’.72 Special days of worship served as memorable calendrical markers

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and might combat this presentism. When days began to be observed with more frequency in the late nineteenth century, so it became common for newspapers to catalogue providential punishments and deliverances, and to place happenings in the natural world in longer historical narratives.73 It is plausible that catalogues of past providences nourished a colonial ‘national memory’. Scholars have noted how Australia’s earliest historical societies – the first appeared in the 1880s – cultivated ‘state-wide identities’. Days of prayer similarly invited colonists to imagine their colonies ‘in national terms, as communities stretched across time’.74 The appointment of repeated regional days of prayer, and the cataloguing of providences, encouraged the idea that God recognised individual colonial territories and treated colonial communities differently. When drought devastated South Australia in 1865, an Adelaide minister took it as proof that the colony was a new Israel and had a special relationship with God, as no other country, he thought, had experienced such punishment after decades of commercial prosperity and religious improvement.75 More generally, Meredith Lake has noted that some nineteenth-century Australian preachers used the notion of a chosen people and elect nation to argue that colonists had been called by providence to build a godly commonwealth on the Australian continent.76 By connecting past and present droughts to the sins and failings of colonists, individuals recognised how generations of colonists had shaped a colony’s ‘national story’. This was not, however, the kind of anti-imperial ‘providential separatism’ Guyatt finds in the American colonies. The national providentialism that emerged in Australia also lacked the intensity of the Anglo-Canadian version. In Guyatt’s formulation, the Australian strain of national providentialism was of a ‘modest’ or ‘judicial’ sort: despite the occasional ­characterisation of a colony as a new Israel, special worship provides little evidence that Australia was widely regarded as pursuing a providential mission or that the continent enjoyed a special divine status; rather, God rewarded or punished Australian colonists in relation to their piety and the conduct of their leaders.77 The continent did not have the kind of welcoming open spaces that sustained the Canadian sense of mission, and although settlers comforted themselves that droughts were abnormal, recurrent and severe dry spells challenged those who argued that the continent’s harsh and arid lands could be watered and made fruitful.78 Some later nineteenthcentury Australians struggled with the idea that their colonies had any special significance in God’s great providential scheme. When the NSW assembly debated the appointment of a day of humiliation in March 1876, two members – one a future premier – remarked that the colony represented an ‘infinitely small speck’ of the universe, and that it was ridiculous for the colonial population to think God would listen to their prayers and give

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them special consideration.79 Only in the 1920s did intellectuals present Australia as a ‘new type of nation’, chosen by God to realise a ‘new and better civilisation’. For one scholar, it was in the aftermath of the Second World War that Australians developed a strong sense that their nation was especially fortunate and that this was a sign of divine favour.80 Even then, as Lake points out, Australian political rhetoric tended to be ‘self-deprecating and understated’, and avoided the ‘messianic rhetoric’ and ‘religious and idealistic flourishes characteristic of the United States’.81 A sense of Australia as an elected or chosen nation may have been slow to emerge, but the ‘local patriotism’ or ‘colonial nationalism’ of the nineteenth century was something more than an attachment to a state or territory. Angela Coote has found evidence of a ‘belief in a common destiny’ and a ‘powerful sense of sovereignty’ in NSW.82 Days of prayer suggest that a stronger local patriotism could be articulated, one concerned with colonists’ distinctive ‘manners and mores’. The inhabitants of territories might be guilty of distinct indiscretions. As early as 1838 the prominent Presbyterian, John Dunmore Lang, referred to sins of ‘colonial growth’ in a fast sermon.83 Later natural disasters prompted preachers to draw on old prejudices, first uttered by English visitors to the seventeenth-century Caribbean, that fixated on the greed and crass materialism of colonists and colonial societies that had grown up without the social restraints found in Britain.84 Gold rushes in Australia, like westward expansion in Canada and diamonds in South Africa, had created peculiarly worldly, materialistic and secular colonial societies. Indeed, such places seemed more American than British. The Anglican bishop of Goulburn urged ‘national penitence’ in January 1916 because Australians ‘were becoming Americanised in our commercial transactions’.85 ‘Race hatred’ and violence against indigenous communities also marked out colonists. Such views could not be pushed too far, however, as to ascribe depopulation to white violence carried with it a powerful critique of empire and the settler presence. It was safer to fall back on the mysteries of God’s providence as an explanation for why terrible things happened.86 How far colonists identified with such negative portraits is questionable. And local patriotisms always coexisted with identifications with larger imperial and continental communities.87 Colonists observed royal thanksgivings, offered prayers of intercession for British troops and donated funds to the victims of famine and war. Furthermore, days of prayer attached churchgoers to denominations that stretched beyond colonies, continents and even empires. On thanksgivings in Australia and Canada, sermongivers outlined the progress and future potential, both in their colonies and overseas, of their denominations. Continental identifications also emerged. Days of worship might nourish and give expression to the emotions and sentiments that encouraged Australian federation in 1901.88 By the late

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nineteenth century, widespread drought and the observance of days of prayer in different colonies sharpened awareness of an ‘Australian climate’. The banking crisis of 1893, which involved the collapse of Sydney and Melbourne banks, prompted religious ministers to comment on the character of a sinful Australian people that had sacrificed morals for money. A preacher who looked forward to the creation of an Australian nation commented that the financial depression was the kind of ‘common sorrow’ that ‘was wanted to bring the colonies together’; indeed, the crisis was a ‘blessing in disguise’ as it would teach Australia’s ‘public men their common interest’.89

Special worship, South Africanism and separatism In South Africa too, special worship concentrated attention on the peculiar history, achievements and characteristics of discrete colonial communities, though here too this took time to emerge. It was smaller regional communities, notably British settlers in the Eastern Cape, who developed a sense of exceptionalism as they battled nature, indigenous inhabitants and distant governments. The divisiveness of South African special worship, and the encouragement that days of fasting and thanksgiving gave to regional outlooks and particularisms, reflected the fractures and conflicts that characterised civil society in South Africa in the later nineteenth century.90 Even celebratory thanksgivings showed that English speakers were not a cohesive or unified community. Indeed, the difficulty of imagining higher forms of collective identity partly explains why the region’s clergy seem to have focused less attention on the theme of community in their prayer-day sermons than their counterparts elsewhere in the empire. Yet despite all this, there were moments of acute environmental and political crisis when disparate communities of white English and Dutch speakers gathered to offer collective prayers. Before 1850, most special occasions of worship in Britain’s southern African colonies were organised by churches or groups of settlers and directed at discrete communities. In 1844, British settlers in the Eastern Cape observed days of thanksgiving to commemorate the arrival, a quartercentury before, of 4,000 assisted migrants from Britain and Ireland. In part the jubilee celebrations were commemorative festivals, featuring dinners, toasts, songs and, for some, long drinking sessions. But they were religious occasions as well. Settlers gathered in thanksgiving services to recognise ‘that providential care and abundant mercy’ that was ‘conspicuous in almost every page of the Settlement’s history’.91 The notion that a ‘beneficent and bounteous Providence’ guided and protected settlers nourished a powerful sense of distinction and election among Eastern Cape settlers.

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A ‘settler identity’, one founded on ‘unique local narratives of belonging’, was sustained through subsequent commemorations and thanksgivings.92 The 1844 services happened in Anglican places of worship, but these were ecumenical occasions, with Methodists and Anglicans delivering sermons and worshipping according to one another’s styles and forms.93 In later years, however, commemorative culture was increasingly dominated by Methodists. Commemorative sermons cast the 1820 settlers and their descendants as a chosen people, comparable to the Pilgrim Fathers, or, as one preacher argued in 1856, to the Old Testament Israelites.94 Grahamstown’s thanksgivings reflected regional differences in the Cape Colony’s English-speaking community and a sense of Eastern provincialism that, in time, developed into demands for political separation. Curiously, no other community of European descent in southern Africa followed the Grahamstown settlers and used special worship to articulate a sense of distinctiveness. Historians have found surprisingly little evidence of ‘ethnic mobilisation’ among Cape Afrikaners before the 1870s. The Dutch Reformed Church marked two hundred years of white settlement with a thanksgiving in April 1852, but this had been planned as a state occasion for the whole community, not just Afrikaners. Only in the mid-1860s would the Dutch Reformed Church in Natal observe 16 December, the anniversary of an 1838 Boer battle with the amaZulu, as a day of prayer and thanksgiving.95 Before then, Afrikaners rarely uttered the kind of providential discourses of ordination, election and mission found among the British settlers of the Eastern Cape. It was not until the 1860s and 1870s, when British imperial intervention in southern Africa became more overt and noticeable, that what one scholar has called an Afrikaner ‘worldview’, ‘common culture’ and ‘coherent belief system’ took shape. Underpinning this was the notion that Afrikaners were God’s chosen people because they possessed a sacred land and shared a collective memory of ­persecution, exodus and divine deliverance.96 It was in the later nineteenth century that the Afrikaner republics, under the leadership of Calvinists such as the Transvaal’s Paul Kruger, regularly observed days of humiliation in times of drought, cattle disease and war. Commemorations of an ethnic and denominational character, such as those at Grahamstown, sat awkwardly with the processes that drew Anglophones and Dutch speakers closer together. The political campaigns of the first half of the nineteenth century – press freedom, trial by jury, constitutional reform and anti-transportation – nurtured coalitions of English and Dutch speakers. Beyond these campaigns lay a fluid social scene in which Scots served in the Dutch Reformed Church and elite Dutch speakers adopted the English language and Anglicised forms of behaviour. Scholars have noted how this early multi-ethnic ‘colonial consciousness’ fed

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into later conceptions of a ‘South Africa’ and a South African nationality. Various groups, not just British and Dutch elites, articulated pan-South African visions. The Afrikaner Bond, the farmer’s organisation, talked, for instance, in terms of a united South Africa under a British imperial flag. And the newspapers, religious institutions and political campaigns established by African and Indian leaders from the 1880s fostered senses of unity and imagined community that cut across political borders.97 Special occasions of worship offer glimpses of a shared colonial consciousness among southern African whites. English-language newspapers welcomed the day of humiliation that the Dutch Reformed Church set aside in May 1846 during war with the Xhosa. An Anglican minister delivered a fast sermon that talked in general terms about the sins of the colony, and contemporary reports suggest that a mixed settler community observed the occasion.98 When war with the Xhosa erupted again in December 1850, the Church of England and the Dutch Reformed Church jointly set aside a day of humiliation for a Friday in February 1851. The newspaper correspondent ‘An Independent’, noted that ‘national calamities’, such as war, demanded ‘the consideration’ of what the writer called ‘the people of southern Africa’.99 When peace with Russia came in 1856, the president of the Orange Free State set aside the same day of thanksgiving as the Cape Colony so that his Afrikaner population could, ‘offer in unison with their brethren of the neighbouring Colony, their grateful acknowledgements to the God of Peace, for a dispensation so salutary to the European Nations’.100 By the 1860s, commentators in the Cape Colony had developed a sharper sense of the distinctive shortcomings and sins of a South African people. A succession of disasters in the late 1850s, among them drought, war and smallpox, prompted Robert Gray, the bishop, to publish an 1860 sermon on the ‘national sins’ of the Cape Colony. For Gray, national acts and sins were those ‘done or approved by the many’; Gray’s interest in the colony’s national sins had, consequently, been sharpened by the coming of representative government and a relatively inclusive, non-racial, franchise in 1853. As more people came into the political nation, so the constituency of the guilty was enlarged, and a more diverse colonial community shouldered responsibility for national crimes. For Gray, the colony’s chief national sin was what he called colonists’ ‘harshness, and injustice, and want of sympathy, and neglect of the heathen’.101 The day of humiliation that the Cape Colony observed during drought in January 1866 prompted others to develop the idea of a multi-ethnic penitential community. A Colesberg editor thought God sent drought to punish a ‘white population’ that had become ‘more modern and less religious’. In an echo of preachers in other colonial societies, the editor argued that cultural pluralism and political freedom led to a dangerous permissiveness and

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a peculiarly sinful community: ‘we are a mixed people,’ the editor wrote, ‘and the counteracting and remedial influences which are brought to bear on society here are fewer than in Britain, and our danger is consequently greater’. South Africa apparently provided a fertile environment in which a ‘heartless and invidious’ religious scepticism had proliferated to an extent not seen in Europe. Much blame for this was heaped on the heretical Bishop Colenso, but religious scepticism and free thought were considered more general South African products and signs of ‘national degeneracy’. Colenso was just the most prominent figure in a wider movement: significantly, the editor thought support also came from ‘certain ministers of the [Dutch] Reformed Church’.102 That such views circulated in the Cape Colony is unsurprising: this was the South African region where inter-ethnic solidarity was furthest advanced, and an inclusive local patriotism most deeply rooted. The colony harboured a Dutch-speaking population that refused to throw off a ‘colonial yoke’ that brought privileges, freedoms and protection.103 The Cape also housed the Afrikaner Bond, an organisation that only briefly exhibited an anti-imperial and Anglophobic character when it was established in the late 1870s. By the early 1880s the Bond had emerged as a moderate and inclusive organisation, one that envisaged a ‘composite’ South African nationality formed from English and Dutch speakers. The Bond’s 1883 constitution even defined the ‘Afrikaner’ as ‘anyone, of whatever origin, who strives for the welfare of South Africa’.104 Bond members urged this new nationality to come together for collective prayer in times of crisis: both in 1885, during drought, and in 1896, during the rinderpest epizootic, Bond branches petitioned the Cape Government for days of prayer for the entire colonial community. The Bond’s brand of ‘South Africanism’ was hampered by the pull of regionalism. Though they might identify with Dutch speakers in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, Cape Afrikaners were orientated towards Britain, the monarchy and the empire in a way Dutch speakers elsewhere were not. English speakers were hardly a unity either. There was little to connect the established English-speaking settlers of the Cape and Natal with the diverse British population that hunted diamonds and gold in Kimberley and the Transvaal Rand. Mining populations seemed to lack a ‘communal feeling’ altogether (unsurprisingly, perhaps, newspapers in Kimberley – the premier mining community – mocked days of humiliation).105 It has been said that Natal’s distinctive white community – which adopted the ‘Natalian’ identifier from an early date – mixed an ‘insistent parochialism’ with an intense Britishness. The limited visions of Natal’s small English-speaking community (the white population numbered 36,000 in 1887), its overt loyalty to empire, as well as its racism, emerged from a

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sense of isolation, vulnerability and impoverishment. Not only did Englishspeaking Natalians fear an Afrikaner-dominated South African federation, but they also contended with an unstable frontier, and were outnumbered by amaZulu and Indian populations.106 Special worship reflected and possibly enhanced these regional outlooks and attachments. Though Natalians prayed for deliverance from drought on the same day as their Cape counterparts in October 1859, only Natal marked the British defeat at Isandhlwana in January 1879 with a day of humiliation. Natal observed a thanksgiving for the recovery of the Prince of Wales on a different day to the Cape in 1872, and Natalians did not observe the days of prayer that the Cape Government appointed in response to drought in 1866, frontier war in 1878, and rinderpest in 1896. That South Africans would not offer prayers for one another’s calamities bears out Andrew Thompson’s point that colonial communities ‘imagined themselves as distinct entities, and sought to work out their own salvation with little regard for each other’.107 How far Natal clergymen set out to nourish a parochial outlook is questionable, however. Though Natalians sometimes commented on the ‘national calamities’ and national sins of their community,108 southern African clergymen had other interests: key sermon topics included ‘native’ affairs, misguided imperial policies, the causes of drought and efficacy of praying for rain. Indeed, special occasions of worship might expose the lack of communal feeling within South Africa’s British colonies. English- and Dutch-speaking agricultural settlers have been commonly depicted as prickly characters who resented interference from external forces, whether distant imperial and colonial governments, humanitarians or ‘progressive’ agricultural improvers. Amid outbreaks of ‘scab disease’ in the 1880s and 1890s, Dutchspeaking farmers protested government diktats for the compulsory dipping and quarantining of sheep.109 Among settlers of British descent, resentment against a supposedly arbitrary, inactive and Afrikaner-dominated Cape Government grew into political campaigns that demanded a new Eastern Cape colony or the relocation of the Cape Town Parliament. Yet the separatist movements never achieved their aims; partly this was because Easterners never cohered as a ‘community’. The thanksgiving commemorations of the 1840s and 1850s fabricated a sense of unity and shared history: as one historian of separatism notes, there were important differences in the ambitions, outlooks and demands of Eastern elites and the settler constituencies they represented.110 To an extent not seen in other settler societies, South Africa’s people of British descent lacked unifying traumas, heroes and myths, and in contrast to Canada, there was no impetus to invent causes for special worship – such as the harvest – that might have drawn distant communities together or nourished a British South African identity. The pull of

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Britain and Britishness inhibited the development of any deep attachment to a colonial South African nationalism among people of British descent, at least before the early 1900s.111 The days of prayer appointed in the Cape Colony in times of drought and war highlighted the fraught relations between rural and urban settlers, and between country districts and central government.112 A notable example came in 1878, during the final Xhosa conflict. The war, which resulted from British attempts to force remaining independent African states into a South African confederation, was an unlikely cause for special worship, as the conflict was deeply unpopular among the Cape taxpayers who paid for it. Governor Henry Bartle Frere’s decision to mark peace with a day of thanksgiving was also ill-judged because the occasion was appointed at a moment – August 1878 – when guerrilla war still raged further east. A public meeting in King William’s Town even asked the Government to postpone the occasion.113 Colonists in Grahamstown, Graaf Reinet and other Eastern towns used the thanksgiving to express solidarity with other frontier settlers. A Grahamstown newspaper said its readers could not keep the day when they ‘knew that savage massacre was running riot’ amongst ‘brave fellow-Colonists’ who, the paper claimed, had ‘nobly helped us at our worst’. The real villains, for Eastern Cape newspapers, were the Cape Town elites who, despite knowing little of frontier conditions, had pushed the governor to appoint the thanksgiving. Observances of the occasion were thin across the Eastern Cape; apparently only timely rains saved the thanksgiving from ‘utter failure’, as colonists now had a more general cause for celebration.114 Special occasions of worship, therefore, could not always unify, nor could such events always concentrate attention on collectives and communities that existed above the regional, the local and the ethnic. Nevertheless, special occasions of worship could reveal the appeal and grip of higher forms of group identity. The enthusiasm with which people of British descent observed the 1887 and 1897 royal jubilees in the British colonies and Afrikaner republics (in the latter, British ‘uitlanders’ attended religious thanksgivings in English churches and celebrated Victoria’s long reign with sports and dinners), suggest that despite a strong provincialism, Britishness and an imperial identity had relevance and remained a powerful ‘cultural force’.115 Days of prayer continued to promise the possibility of AngloAfrikaner cooperation, even as Afrikaner nationalism and anti-imperialism intensified in the lead up to the outbreak of war in 1899. English-language newspapers were, for instance, much encouraged that Afrikaner politicians attended Anglican thanksgiving services in English churches in Pretoria and Bloemfontein for the 1897 jubilee. An English journalist noted that Afrikaners of the ‘younger generation’ participated in secular jubilee

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c­ elebrations in Pretoria and took this as evidence ‘that the two races can get on well and harmoniously with one another’. Royal celebration, the journalist thought, might even bring a ‘new dawn’ in race relations.116 Two years earlier, in 1895, the Anglican bishop of Cape Town delivered a sermon and offered special prayers on the same day Afrikaner churches in the Orange Free State observed a day of prayer for the seriously ill Afrikaner president, Francis Reitz.117 The disasters of 1895, 1896 and 1897  – r­inderpest, drought and locusts – highlighted commonalities in white communities’ interests, beliefs and coping mechanisms.118 Both British colonies and Afrikaner republics observed days of humiliation, often on the same or proximate days, and in the Transvaal, English churchmen offered special prayers alongside Dutch speakers when asked to do so by the Afrikaner authorities.119 On two occasions in 1897 the Governments of the Orange Free State and South African Republic contacted the Cape Colony to synchronise a common South African day of humiliation amid drought and cattle plague. The Cape authorities turned down the invitation, presumably because it was an Afrikaner and Dutch Reformed Church initiative. Special worship, it was supposed, might be a stalking horse for Afrikaner expansion and the absorption of British colonies in a kind of republican ‘United States of South Africa’.120 The war of 1899–1902 undoubtedly damaged hopes of an inclusive white South African nationalism. Still, in the years running up to the Union of South Africa in 1910 a cadre of English-speaking officials known as the ‘Milner Kindergarten’ sought to cultivate a common sense of ‘South Africanism’ that would reconcile the two white ‘races’.121 The day of humiliation that South Africa observed on a Sunday in October 1912 continued this policy of conciliation and Anglo-Afrikaner cooperation. Prime Minister Louis Botha, an advocate of a unified white nationalism, appointed the occasion to satisfy demands from English- and Dutch-speaking farmers in the Transvaal.122 This attempt to engineer a sense of shared interest and community among a diverse population failed, because few outside the Transvaal observed the occasion.123 This early experiment in national cohesion only highlighted the limitations (particularly among Afrikaners) of a white South African ‘colonial nationalism’ on the eve of the First World War.124 Indeed, for all the similarities between the days of prayer observed by English and Dutch speakers, it is not even clear that white South Africans shared a culture of special worship. After 1910, for example, Afrikaners referenced the example of the days of humiliation called in the time of President Kruger when they approached the South African Government for special days of worship.125 The concept of a united South Africa perhaps had most purchase among the Black elites of the Cape and Natal. From the 1880s, an African elite

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established western-style political organisations that mobilised the Cape’s Black voters to defend African interests everywhere. African-run newspapers, and autonomous Black churches, also fostered a sense of independence and unity that was pan-South African. One historian has written that this sense of Black South Africanism was ‘sharpened’ after 1902 when the British reneged on promises to extend the Cape’s non-racial franchise to other colonies.126 Occasions of special worship, organised by African ‘vigilance associations’ in the early 1900s, deepened this sense of Black and African unity. In May 1908, vigilance associations in the Transvaal called on ‘the sons and daughters of the South African Races’ to keep a ‘day of humiliation and prayer’ so that God might deliver them from their ‘difficulties, oppressions and disabilities’. The associations hoped the sense of Black unity would reach beyond South Africa and that a superintending providence would deliver all ‘the sons of Africa’ from white colonialism and racism.127 The day of prayer expressed a ‘radical Africanism’ that cast ‘South Africa as a ‘black man’s country and not a multi-racial one’.128 In the following decades national days of prayer emerged as a notable form of protest: in the 1920s and 1930s Black political organisations called on ‘all African inhabitants of the Union’ to observe days of prayer and humiliation to protest segregationist legislation that eroded Black peoples’ voting rights.129

Conclusion Special occasions of worship reminded colonists to think in terms of ‘we’ and ‘us’; such acts also taught that the individual was not an isolated entity, but a member of a community. These occasions also suggest that, over time, community attachments in empire narrowed. Clergymen made sense of what it was to be the inhabitant of a new colonial nation, or the member of a distinctive regional community. The regional attachments did not dissipate as the dominions embraced new national identities, and as the ‘homogenising forces’ of war, telegraph communication and responsible government concentrated attention on larger groupings and higher forms of identity.130 Colonial preachers brought with them from Britain the notion that societies formed single entities that shared a character, a conscience and a past. It may be that every nationality develops a sense of special election.131 Yet settler colonialism had a propensity to produce communities that considered themselves to be chosen in the manner of the Old Testament Israelites. That said, the evidence presented in this chapter can only confirm that those who talked most about chosen peoples were religious ministers who

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sought to bolster their social position and wished to present themselves as the ‘prophets and judges of the community’.132 To judge the extent to which settlers shared a sense of special election would require a much fuller study of diaries and private religious practices. Identifications with colonial landscapes, institutions and peoples did not negate an imperial loyalism and sense of British identity. The providential accounts that helped settler clergymen make sense of the colonial past and present sat within a larger narrative of God’s special dealings with the British empire. The final two chapters examine the relationship between these colonial and imperial nationalisms through an analysis of two causes that came to dominate special worship in settler societies from the later nineteenth century – drought and royal affairs. These events both confirmed and tested the old idea that colonial communities existed as unities under the guidance and instruction of God.

Notes 1 Records of the Lives of Ellen Free Pickton and Featherstone Lake Osler (Oxford, 1915), pp. 171, 182–3. 2 W. J. D. Waddilove, The Stewart Missions (London, 1838), p. 249. 3 N. Meaney, ‘Britishness and Australian identity: the problem of nationalism in Australian history and historiography’, Australian Historical Studies, 32 (2001), 81; Christie and Gauvreau, Christian Churches, p. 10. 4 J. Gregory, ‘Introduction: transforming the “age of reason” into “an age of faiths”’, 296. 5 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism (London, 1991), p. 7. 6 Just as preachers in the British Isles made sense of ideas of Britain and British identity to metropolitan audiences: Johnston, National Thanksgivings, p. 10. 7 J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (London, 1883), pp. 51, 75. 8 Akenson, God’s Peoples, pp. 28–9, 84; A. Thompson, ‘The languages of loyalism in South Africa, c. 1870–1914’, EHR, 118:477 (2003), 622. 9 D. Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: empire and the future of world order, 1860–1900 (Princeton, NJ, 2007), chapter 4. 10 A. Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), pp. 116–24. 11 J. Wolffe, ‘Judging the nation: evangelicals and divine retribution, 1817–1861’, SCH, 40 (2004), 300. 12 Cochran, A Sermon Preached in the Church at Falmouth, p. 13; Wise, ‘Sermon literature’, pp. 3–17. 13 Spark, A Sermon, Preached in the Scotch Church, pp. 12, 15. 14 Wolffe, ‘British sermons’, p. 195; Duiveman, ‘Praying’, 6–7. 15 P. Mandler, The English National Character: the history of an idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven, CT, 2005), pp. 21–36.

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16 Spark, A Sermon, Preached in the Scotch Church, pp. 16–18. 17 J. Somerville, The Greatness and the Happiness of a People Briefly Considered (Montreal, 1814), pp. 7–17. 18 Salmon, A Sermon Preached at the Village of Waterloo, pp. 13–14; E. H. Dewar, National Calamities a Call to Repentance (Toronto, 1855), p. 10. John Strachan, bishop of Toronto, said colonists, ‘as part and parcel of the British nation’, had ‘by our acts & words assented’ to the Crimean War: AO, F983–3, MS767/4, no. 262, sermon dated 18 April 1855, fo. 11. 19 Gray, A Sermon Preached in the Cathedral Church, Cape Town, pp. 10–11. 20 Wolffe, ‘Judging the nation’, 299. 21 Argus, 7 August 1854. 22 ‘A Loyal Conservative’, Standard and Conservative Advocate [Halifax], 21  May 1847. Some Australians fasted alone: ‘Anti-Military’, Adelaide Observer, 7 August 1854. 23 Hilton, Age of Atonement, pp. 108–14, 250–1. 24 SOAS, WMSA, Box 14, Newfoundland 1846–8, No. 104/11, W. Faulkner to the secretary of the Wesleyan Missionary Society, 20 January 1847. 25 P. Gray, ‘National humiliation and the Great Hunger: fast and famine in 1847’, Irish Historical Studies, 32:126 (2000), 206. 26 Rev. J. Cordner, Liberal Christian [Montreal], 2:5 (May 1855). 27 Casket, 29 October 1857. 28 W. Sowerby, The Duty of Inhabitants of this Colony (Sydney, 1847), pp. 10–13; Australian, 15 July 1847; C. Kinealy, Charity and the Great Hunger in Ireland: the kindness of strangers (London, 2013), chapter 2. 29 Sabathy-Judd (ed.), Moravians in Upper Canada, p. 306. 30 Quoted in Hardwick, ‘Fasts’, 683. 31 N. Meaney, ‘“In History’s Page”: identity and myth’, in D. Schreuder and S. Ward (eds), Australia’s Empire (Oxford, 2010), p. 366. 32 Rev. Jefferis, Advertiser, 23 June 1897; Rev. E. Youngman, Brisbane Courier, 21 June 1897. 33 Meaney, ‘“In History’s Page”’, pp. 367–9; J. Darwin, After Tamerlane: the rise and fall of global empires, 1400–2000 (New York, 2008), pp. 301–4. 34 Rev. J. McMichael, South Australian Advertiser, 20 June 1887; Rev. White, Singleton Argus [NSW], 23 June 1887. 35 Bell, Idea of Greater Britain, p. 114. 36 H. Muller, ‘Bonds of belonging: subjecthood and the British Empire’, JBS, 53 (2014), 29–58. 37 Rev. Hoyne, Ballarat Star, 20 June 1887; R. Davis, ‘Loyalism in Australasia, 1788–1860’, in A. Blackstock and F. O’Gorman (eds), Loyalism and the Formation of the British World, 1775–1914 (Woodbridge, 2014), p. 239. 38 Ballarat Courier, 21 February 1872. 39 S. Dubow, ‘How British was the British world? The case of South Africa’, JICH, 37:1 (2009), 7; C. Saunders, ‘Britishness in South Africa: some reflections’, Humanities Research, 13:1 (2006), 61–9. 40 Duiveman, ‘Praying’, 4.

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41 Guyatt, Providence, pp. 60–1, 83; Johnston, National Thanksgivings, pp. 47–52, 294. 42 A. Coote: ‘Out from the legend’s shadow: re-thinking national feeling in colonial Australia’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, 10:2 (2008), 103–22; Thompson, ‘The languages of loyalism’, 622; Cole, ‘The problem of “nationalism” and “imperialism”’, 164–5. 43 Meaney, ‘Britishness and Australian identity’, 76. 44 Guyatt, Providence, pp. 82–6; NP, II, pp. cxliv–cxlv. 45 R. Ely, ‘The forgotten nationalism: Australian patriotism in the Second World War’, Journal of Australian Studies, 11:20 (1987), 60–1. 46 Akenson, God’s Peoples, pp. 59–72. 47 G. Rawlyk and G. Stewart, ‘Nova Scotia’s sense of mission’, Histoire Sociale/ Social History, 1:2 (1968), 5–17. 48 A. Gray, A Sermon Preached on 10th August, 1804 (Halifax, 1804), p. 36. 49 J. Errington, The Lion, the Eagle, and Upper Canada: a developing colonial ideology (Montreal, 1987), pp. 102, 222. 50 Easton, Reasons for Joy and Praise, p. 7; J. Strachan, A Sermon, Preached at York, Upper Canada (Montreal, 1814), p. 34. 51 Hardwick, ‘Fasts’, 686; Buckner, ‘Making British North America British’, pp.  11–44. For a contrary view, that a ‘Canadian frame of reference’ was influential from the 1820s, see A. Smith, ‘Old Ontario and the emergence of a national frame of mind’, in A. Smith, Canada – An American Nation? Essays on continentalism, identity, and the Canadian frame of mind (Montreal, 1994), pp. 259, 262, 264–5. 52 Collects and prayers – some penitential – from the 1796, 1801, 1810, 1813, 1832, 1842, 1847 and 1854 British Isles occasions, as well as the 1862 form agreed by convocation, appear in Canadian harvest thanksgiving forms from the 1850s and 1860s: e.g. A Form of Prayer to be used in all Churches and Chapels of the United Church of England and Ireland within the Province of Canada (Montreal, 1865). The Nova Scotian collect is in A Form of Prayer and Thanksgiving (Halifax, 1864), p. 5. For the British occasions, see NP, II, pp.  643, 689, 736, 798, 836, 859, 893. The Canadian borrowings are explained in Armitage, Story of the Canadian Revision, pp. 336–47. 53 Stevens, ‘“Righteousness Exalteth a Nation”’, pp. 56–9. This section draws on Stevens and reproduces the argument in Hardwick, ‘Fasts’, 691–6. 54 Smith, ‘Old Ontario’, pp. 268–9. 55 R. Machray, A Pastoral Letter (Winnipeg, 1870), pp. 2–3; Armitage, Story of the Canadian Revision, pp. 340, 342–3. 56 C. Pitblado, Our Heritage (Winnipeg, 1883), pp. 2–5. 57 LAC, MG26-A, secretary of the Evangelical Alliance to Macdonald, 15 October 1878 and 14 October 1879. A Dr Dupius recommended a continental thanksgiving to celebrate the discovery of the ‘new world’: Daily British Whig [Kingston], 20 February 1886. 58 A. Perry, On the Age of Empire: gender, race and the making of British Columbia, 1849–1871 (Toronto, 2001).

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59 F. Pass, ‘Dominion Day and the rites of regionalism in British Columbia, 1867–1937’, in Hayday and Blake (eds), Celebrating Canada, 1, pp. 203–12. 60 Thompson, ‘The languages of loyalism’, 622, 647. 61 This paragraph follows the analysis in G. Pentland, ‘The indignant nation: Australian responses to the attempted assassination of the Duke of Edinburgh in 1868’, EHR, 130:542 (2015), 57–88. 62 Quotations are from sermons from Christchurch, North Adelaide and Pirie Street Wesleyan, in South Australian Advertiser, 4 May 1868; St Mark’s, Alexandria, in SMH, 29 April 1868; Tamar Street Independent chapel, Launceston, in Launceston Examiner, 7 April 1868; and St Andrew’s church, Hobart, in Mercury, 6 April 1868. 63 Sermon in St Philip’s, Sydney, SMH, 29 April 1868. 64 Sermons in Woolloomooloo church and St George’s Presbyterian, Sydney, SMH, 29 April 1868. 65 Coote, ‘Out from the legend’s shadow’, 104, 108. 66 Pentland, ‘The indignant nation’, 82–4. 67 Sermons in St Thomas, Willoughby, and St Stephen’s, Newtown, SMH, 29 April 1868. 68 Sermon in Unitarian chapel, Adelaide, South Australian Advertiser, 4 May 1868. 69 W. G. Broughton, The Counsel and Pleasure of God in the Vicissitudes of States and Communities (Sydney, 1829), p. 10. 70 Jones, Slow Catastrophes, p. 42. 71 Coote, ‘“This is the people’s golden day”: Anniversary Day press coverage and national consciousness in New South Wales’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, 12 (2010), 53. 72 Ramsay, Voice of the Storm, p. 11; Fenby, ‘Experiencing, understanding and adapting to climate’, p. 243. 73 SMH, 16 September 1895. For ‘national providences’ catalogues, see Clark, ‘Providence’, 587. 74 T. Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: the antiquarian imagination in Australia (Cambridge, 1996), p. 206; Coote, ‘Out from the legend’s shadow’, 117. 75 ‘As of ancient Israel, so may it be said of ourselves – “He hath not dealt so with any nation”’: G. Stonehouse, The Drought and its Lessons (Adelaide, 1865), p. 9. 76 Lake, Bible in Australia, pp. 223–4. 77 Guyatt, Providence, pp. 60–1, 83. 78 S. Mirams, ‘“The Attractions of Australia”: E. J. Brady and the making of Australian Unlimited’, Australian Historical Studies, 43:2 (2012), 270–86. 79 Speeches of J. Farnell (St Leonards) and M. Fitzpatrick (Yass Plains), SMH, 30 March 1876. 80 Mercury, 3 May 1926; Ely, ‘The forgotten nationalism’, 59–67. 81 Lake, Bible in Australia, pp. 246–8. 82 Coote, ‘Out from the legend’s shadow’, 114.

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83 J. D. Lang, National Sins the Cause and Precursor of National Judgments (Sydney, 1838), p. vi. 84 ‘Respectability is an easier purchase here than at home. Men can do base things here, and yet maintain their standing in society’: Ramsay, Voice of the Storm, pp. 14–15. 85 For such accusations in the Canadian context, see sermons from Richmond Street Methodist and Second Congregational Church, Toronto, Globe, 28 November 1857. And in South Africa, Daily Dispatch, 17 October 1896; Goulburn Evening Penny Post, 4 January 1916. 86 Debates over who or what was to blame for indigenous depopulation are addressed in Mitchell, In Good Faith?, chapter 8. 87 Coote, ‘Out from the legend’s shadow’, 112; Cole, ‘The problem of “nationalism” and “imperialism”’, 160–82; Pietsch, ‘Rethinking the British world’, 441–63; Reed, Royal Tourists, p. 79. 88 Hardwick, ‘Special days of worship’, 378. 89 Rev. Watkins, Argus, 18 May 1893. 90 S. Marks, ‘Class, culture and consciousness in South Africa, 1880–1889’, in R. Ross et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of South Africa. Volume 2: ­1885–1994 (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 102–56. 91 Memorials of the British Settlers, p. 2. 92 Ross, Status and Respectability, pp. 62–3, 65–6; Reed, Royal Tourists, p. 95. 93 Memorials of the British Settlers, pp. 2, 50. 94 T. Glanville, A Sermon Delivered in the Wesleyan Chapel (Grahamstown, 1856), pp. 5–15. 95 H. Giliomee, The Afrikaners: biography of a people (London, 2003), pp. 204–5; Ross, Status and Respectability, pp. 67–9; Akenson, God’s Peoples, p. 66. 96 A. Du Toit, ‘No chosen people: the myth of the Calvinist origins of Afrikaner nationalism and racial ideology’, American Historical Review, 88:4 (1983), 920–52. Carli Coetzee is also sceptical that Trek Boers drew on the Old Testament to ‘forge a coherent group identity’: C. Coetzee, ‘Individual and collective notions of the “Promised Land”: the “private” writings of the Boer emigrants’, South African Historical Journal, 32 (1995), 48–65. For the chosen people paradigm in later decades, see Akenson, God’s Peoples, chapter 3. 97 Marks, ‘Class, culture, and consciousness’, pp. 104–5, 110–11, 119–21, 145. 98 South African Commercial Advertiser, 16 May 1846; Cape Town Mail, 23 May 1846; Okes, A Sermon Preached at Wynberg, p. 11; H. Ward, The Cape and the Kaffirs (London, 1852), p. 108. 99 Church in the Colonies. No. XXVII (London, 1851), 218; South African Commercial Advertiser, 22 January 1851. 100 Friend of the Free State and Bloemfontein Gazette, 28 June 1856. 101 R. Gray, National Sins (Cape Town, 1860), pp. 5–8. 102 Colesberg Advertiser, 2 January 1866. The editor might have been calmed by the results of the 1875 census, which revealed that only 148 ‘European and white’ people identified as ‘no religion’.

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103 Giliomee, Afrikaners, p. 225; S. Dubow, ‘Colonial nationalism, the Milner Kindergarten and the rise of “South Africanism”, 1902–10’, History Workshop Journal, 43:1 (1997), 62. 104 Giliomee, Afrikaners, p. 222. 105 Thompson, ‘The languages of loyalism’, 622, 625; J. Lambert, ‘“An Unknown People”: reconstructing British South African identity’, JICH, 37:4 (2009), 602; Diamond News [Kimberley], 9 February 1878. 106 Dubow, ‘Colonial nationalism’, 63; Thompson, ‘The languages of loyalism’, 628–9; J. Lambert, ‘“The Last Outpost”: the Natalians, South Africa, and the British Empire’, in R. Bickers (ed.), Settlers and Expatriates: Britons over the seas (Oxford, 2010), pp. 150–76. 107 Thompson, ‘The languages of loyalism’, 622. 108 W. Macrorie, National Calamities (Pietermaritzburg, 1873). 109 Giliomee, Afrikaners, p. 226. 110 B. le Cordeur, The Politics of Eastern Cape Separatism 1820–1854 (Cape Town, 1981); Dubow, ‘Colonial nationalism’, 62. 111 Lambert, ‘“An Unknown People”’, 602, 606. 112 According to one historian, British settlers in the Eastern Cape had strong connection to empire but felt ‘firmly disconnected from and hostile to Cape Town’: Reed, Royal Tourists, pp. 94–8. 113 Cape Mercury, 29 July 1878. 114 Eastern Star, 2 August 1878; Grahamstown Journal, 31 July 1878; Graaf Reinet Herald, 31 July, 3 and 7 August 1878; Cape Mercury, 5 August 1878; Daily Dispatch, 3 August 1878. 115 Reed, Royal Tourists, p. 116. Transvaal Leader [Pretoria], 25 June 1887 and Friend of the Free State [Bloemfontein], 25 June 1897. 116 The Press [Pretoria], 21 and 23 June 1897; Friend of the Free State, 22 June 1897. 117 Imvo Zabantsundu [King William’s Town], 25 April 1895. 118 Phoofolo, ‘Epidemics and revolutions’, 127–40. 119 In 1896 days of humiliation were called in response to rinderpest in the Cape Colony (15 October), the Orange Free State (16 October) and the Transvaal (18 October). For Anglican observances of republican Afrikaner occasions, see Standard and Diggers’ News, 19 October 1896. The Transvaal and Cape Colony observed days of humiliation on the same Sunday in early November 1895, though it is not known if this was coordinated: Port Elizabeth Telegraph, 31 October 1895. 120 See the correspondence dated 11 May (Orange Free State) and 16 September (South African Republic) 1897, WCPA, despatches received from colonial ­secretary’s Office, PMO/120. 121 Lambert, ‘“An Unknown People”’, 608. 122 NAR, GG/105/3/823, A. Crozesky to the governor general, 20 January 1912; PM/1/1/247, No. PM113/18, E. Morgan to administrator of Orange Free State, 12 September 1912. 123 Like other Cape newspapers, the Port Elizabeth Weekly Telegraph reported

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church services in the Transvaal but said nothing of local observances: 19 October 1912. In the Transvaal, the occasion was observed by British and Afrikaner churches: see Transvaal Leader, 14 October 1912, and Rand Daily Mail [Johannesburg], 14 October 1912. 124 Dubow, ‘Colonial nationalism’, 75; Lambert, ‘“An Unknown People”’, 608. 125 NAR, PM/1/1/51, no. PM 6/2, Lydenberg (Transvaal) branch of the South African National Party to Prime Minister Botha, n.d. 126 S. Marks, ‘War and Union, 1900–1910’, in Ross et al. (eds), Cambridge History of South Africa, 2, p. 196. 127 Izwi Labantu, 19 May 1908. 128 G. Frederickson, Black Liberation: a comparative history of Black ideologies in the United States and South Africa (Oxford, 1997), pp. 88–9. 129 T. Karis and G. M. Carter (eds), From Protest to Challenge: a documentary history of African politics in South Africa 1882–1964. Volume 2: hope and challenge 1935–1952 (Stanford, CT, 1973). 130 Thompson, ‘The languages of loyalism’, 647. 131 A. Smith, Chosen Peoples: sacred sources of national identity (New York, 2003). 132 Coetzee, ‘Individual and collective notions’, 49.

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Droughts and special prayers

In the final months of the Second World War a husband and wife from Dunolly, Victoria – a town fifty miles north of Ballarat – wrote two desperate letters to John Curtin, the prime minister of Australia. The letters described in feeling terms the plight of farmers who had struggled with severe drought since Britain had declared war on Nazi Germany. ‘We have no feed, no water & losing stock & sheep every week’, the couple wrote, before ending with a pained ‘please will you help us’. Curtin should appoint what the couple called a ‘day of prayer in all churches’. ‘Only God can send the rain’, they said, and only Curtin, Australia’s most senior politician, could ‘give the order for National Prayer’. Curtin replied sympathetically but said that he could not take the initiative as there was no precedent for doing so: since its formation in 1901, the Commonwealth Government had only summoned its population to pray for peace and for success in war.1 Protracted periods of low rainfall had threatened white settlement since the start of European colonisation. Droughts killed animals in great numbers, ruined livelihoods, halted settlement, threatened the existence of churches, and prompted much despairing comment in diaries, letters and newspapers. Special acts of worship proliferated in such hard conditions. The Dunolly couple were just one of hundreds of Australians who at various moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries implored their governments to set aside special days of worship to combat drought. Though this request was rejected, there was a history of colonial and state governments responding to appeals for special worship during droughts. Holy days, usually for humiliation but sometimes for thanksgiving too, were appointed by one or more south-eastern Australian colonies during dry spells in 1866–9, 1876–8, 1895–1904, 1912, 1914 and 1919–20. These were just the largest occasions. At numerous other times and in countless places, churches organised days of humiliation, prayers for rain and thanksgiving ceremonies for local, denominational and colonial communities. The chronology of Australian special days supports Don Garden’s comment that settlers became more conscious of drought as settlement

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spread into the interior from the 1860s. Sheep multiplied, and the livelihood of more people became dependent on reliable rainfall.2 In other ways these Australian occasions are unexpected. Bushfires and floods continued to be understood in some quarters as judgements, chastisements and special providences, but such calamities never resulted in state-appointed or community-wide public prayers: probably this was because floods and fires occurred so regularly, or because it was easier to see how such disasters had resulted from human failings.3 That states got involved is also curious as droughts were processes, not events, and were not easy to mark with special acts of worship. As Rebecca Jones notes, judging the beginning and end of droughts is difficult as they unfold slowly, their effect is cumulative, they ‘lack an obvious ignition point’ and rarely do they end with a ‘decisive deluge’.4 The impact of dry spells might vary, with some regions and sectors suffering while others prospered. Cities might be unaware that there was drought. Colonists disagreed on what drought even was. The term might refer to periods of below-average rainfall of differing lengths, and the lack of agreement and common usage made it difficult for governments and churches to judge the nature and extent of distress.5 This chapter’s first two sections ask why, despite difficulties, drought attracted such religious concern, and why Australian governments and churches continued to set aside days for humiliation and prayer. While fires and floods tended to affect localities, the impact of drought was widespread and indiscriminate, with everyone, both in town and country, suffering in some way. Protracted periods of low rainfall generated more uncertainty and anxiety than sudden fires and floods. It was unclear what caused drought, and nobody was sure why some dry periods lasted longer than others. Days of prayer remained relevant and popular because they enabled communities to combat this uncertainty through different forms of action. Prayer days were both a form of ‘emergency ritual’ that encouraged immediate responses, such as prayers for rain, and a space where clergy – and increasingly l­aypeople – reflected on the causes of drought and offered longer-term solutions to settler society’s environmental crisis.6 In sermons, ministers argued that something had gone wrong with the weather and that someone was to blame for drought. Most believed Australia was a fertile and productive land, and that the weather could be restored to a supposed normality. For some, this required moral reform. Others reconciled a belief in Australia’s fertility with an acceptance that drought was inherent to the climate. Europeans, in this view, should adopt new relationships with the land.7 The chapter’s third section continues the community theme from the previous chapter, but instead of considering how preachers talked about community, it focuses on the extent to which Christian churchmen cultivated a sense of common ‘we’ and ‘us’ through sermons, special prayers and charity

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work. Nurturing a sense of shared responsibility – and common purpose – among disparate populations was difficult, as droughts spotlighted the widening cultural and political differences between town and country touched on in Chapter 3.8 Rural residents wrote to newspapers to condemn ‘city people’ who cared little about the country and had ‘no idea what a drought is’.9 Only in late twentieth-century droughts, Michael McKernan thinks, has a sense of ‘spiritual and cultural interdependence’ – the feeling that ‘we are all in this together’ – emerged to unite town and country.10 This may be correct, but since the nineteenth century churches had worked to remind colonists of the bonds that connected them to distant others. Special worship was crucial to this effort. Ministers tried to unite town and country when they said that drought was everyone’s responsibility, and that the solution to recurrent bad weather required widespread behavioural change. That the churches failed to nurture an enduring sense of community across town and country does not diminish the importance of their efforts; indeed the ‘collective action problem’ that they sought to resolve is comparable to that which confronts environmental campaigners today.11

Droughts, states and special worship It was sometimes argued, as a trade-union newspaper did in 1919, that Australian governments appointed days of prayer for calculating reasons: collective prayers might win the ‘church vote’ in future elections, deflect blame from the authorities, and hide the fact that states had done little to mitigate the effects of drought.12 Such political criticisms underestimated the various ways that governments responded to extreme weather. Governments in early NSW stored grain and imported food.13 Efforts to make Australia ‘drought-proof’, notably through private irrigation schemes, had been carried on since early European settlement, and from 1886 the Victoria Government provided loans for local irrigation works, built water storage facilities, and allowed private enterprise to develop irrigated ‘colonies’ of close settlement.14 Some thought that it would be possible to eradicate drought by manipulating the weather. Rainmakers approached Australian governments with schemes to make rain with fires, loud noises and cannonading. In 1892 a Californian named Michael Cahill contacted the NSW Government with a plan to make rain through the release of high-flying birds (Cahill supported his case with biblical references).15 Though desperate farmers urged their governments to take up the more plausible schemes, no Australian government funded a rainmaker before the 1940s, though meteorologist Clement Wragge attacked the skies around Charleville, Queensland with guns in 1902.16

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Though setting aside a day of prayer was, for governments, a fairly uncontroversial means of showing that something was being done about drought, the decision to appoint was not taken lightly. The South Australian Government did not appoint or encourage special acts of worship in either the 1860s or the 1870s, both because the colony had been founded on the principle of religious voluntarism, and because drought harmed pastoralists, not the more important wheat industry.17 Colonial governments would also only proclaim days when there was evidence that distress was, as the official documents put it, ‘general’. Judging conditions and colonial needs was difficult, however. Changes in the weather occurred unexpectedly, and even in supposedly ‘normal’ years rainfall averages varied markedly within a region. The droughts of the 1860s and 1870s struck different regions with varying degrees of intensity. While much of western Queensland beyond the Great Dividing Range suffered severe and protracted low rainfall from 1864 to 1869, coastal Queensland enjoyed good seasons, so much so that Maryborough developed a sugar-production industry. A local newspaper editor thought his region had no reason to observe the colony-wide day of humiliation of April 1866, as pastoralists had a ‘fine season’ and cotton growers were ‘jubilant’.18 The effects of the 1860s drought was similarly varied in NSW. The inhabitants of Paterson, in the north of the colony, told local clergy not to observe a January 1869 day of humiliation because rains had come to the region, and winegrowers did not need more.19 Governments and churches faced the problem that while special worship was a colonywide act, the weather was always experienced at the local level.20 Another problem was that governments knew little about climatic conditions or the effects of drought in the interior. Official knowledge of the terrain, soils, vegetation, watercourses and rainfall of western NSW and Queensland was limited until royal commissions in the 1890s and early 1900s gathered testimony from local pastoralists, land agents and smallholders.21 In this context, colonial governments could be guided by appeals from the rural public, so long, that is, that the public agreed that a colonywide day of prayer was desirable. A petition for a day of humiliation from Tamworth, NSW was turned down in January 1878 because it had only local support.22 Government would not appoint if they received conflicting demands. In late February 1878, for instance, the Anglican bishop of Goulburn suggested a thanksgiving for rain, while the drought-stricken inhabitants of Walgett, 370 miles to the north, wanted a day for humiliation and prayer.23 Only occasionally did governments verify rainfall levels with local telegraph operators.24 When governments did appoint it was because a network of mayors and prominent laypeople had coordinated a petitioning movement that encompassed entire districts. It was, for instance, largely on the back of petitions emanating from the Warrego district of NSW that

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Governor Hercules Robinson overrode the objections of members of the legislative assembly and set aside a day for humiliation in April 1876.25 Given all these difficulties, it is striking that Australian governments appointed more days of prayer as time went on. On eight occasions between 1895 and 1904 – the period of the ‘great’, ‘long’ or ‘Federation’ drought – NSW invited its population to observe days for humiliation, prayer or thanksgiving. Even South Australia set aside a day for humiliation in May 1897. The effects of drought worsened severely as the environmental costs of sheep grazing became more apparent: it is reckoned that by the end of the Federation drought Australia’s sheep population was half what it had been in 1891. The Federation drought, which followed rabbit plagues and recession, cost the country a decade of growth. In Sydney, the cost of living rose and the city experienced acute ‘water famines’.26 The proliferation of days of prayer in the Federation era may also have been related to the changing perceptions of the rural population. Since they had begun to monopolise land in the 1830s, large pastoralists had been portrayed in negative terms: the pastoralist was a single man on the make who thought little about the future, never prepared for lean years and had ruined the soil by cutting down trees and stocking too many hoofed animals on land that could not bear the stress.27 Shifts in land-settlement policy and struggles with droughts redefined the Australian relationship with the grazier. From the 1880s south-eastern colonies passed legislation to ‘unlock’ the land for intensive and closer settlement: large estates were divided and sold at auction, and small-scale ‘yeoman’ farmers had access to smaller grazing leases at modest rents.28 Many small graziers who settled western NSW and Queensland from the 1880s were ruined when droughts killed their animals and exhausted whatever meagre capital they had put aside.29 The grazier became a subject for compassion and sympathy. As McKernan notes, the press of the 1890s and early 1900s talked much about the courage, resilience and self-reliance of ‘authentic’ farmers who had ‘fought the battle of the land’. Such ‘agrarian idealism’ fed the development of a ‘pioneer legend’. Possibly, too, the experience of praying for distressed farmers nourished a patriotic attachment to the wool industry, one founded on the idea that the grazier was foundational to the Australian economy and identity.30 By the turn of the nineteenth century the appointment of special acts of prayer had settled into a pattern. Governments recycled the texts of old proclamations and states avoided antagonising working people by appointing the days of prayer on Sundays instead of weekdays. It was, however, up to the churches to gather a national community in collective worship. The Brisbane Courier noted in 1902 that whether days for humiliation had a ‘national character’ depended ‘entirely on the extent to which our people

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address themselves to it’.31 Before examining how the churches brought together a scattered colonial public, it must be asked why churches, and the communities they represented, valued displays of united prayer. What did churches and congregations think public worship during drought was for? How did the purpose of days change over time? Essentially, prayer days proliferated because they had relevance for a colonial society that struggled to understand and adapt to recurrent droughts.

Attitudes to drought and the purposes of special worship It is plausible that days for humiliation and prayer survived as a form of weather ritual, comparable to medieval rogation processions and bellringing ceremonies. Such patterned responses to crisis helped colonists manage uncertainty and cope with extreme weather episodes.32 Rebecca Jones has remarked that droughts breed anxiety and uncertainty as they are ‘slow catastrophes’: their impact is ‘incremental and accumulative’, their duration is uncertain, and they overturn established expectations of seasonable weather. Gathering for public and united prayer in such circumstances may well have nurtured feelings of group solidarity. What Jones calls the ‘euphoria’ that came when rain fell found expression in the numerous acts of thanksgiving that individuals and congregations offered when drought finally broke.33 But ritual did more than offer reassurance. The desperate farming couple quoted at the start of this chapter believed that shared ritual, in this case public and united prayer, could work material transformations and bring fair weather. Praying for rain was an immediate and emergency response, designed to ward off an exceptional disaster, save lives and return things to what they had once been.34 Yet as the following sections show, other religious figures took longer views and regarded drought as a crisis, a challenge of considerable magnitude that kept recurring. This class of clergy used occasions of special worship to urge colonists to consider their actions and their relationship with the land.

Punishments, interventions and prayers for rain Belief in divine intervention and the effectiveness of petitionary prayer had official recognition and remained the chief reason for the appointment of special days. Proclamations issued in NSW around 1900 used a form of words first used in 1838: through ‘humiliation and prayer’ and appeals to ‘His divine mercy’, the proclamations stated, colonial populations could obtain a ‘mitigation or removal’ of the ‘protracted drought’.35 Importantly,

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Australian proclamations did not speculate on the cause of drought: it was left to individuals to judge whether dry spells resulted from natural phenomena, human failings or an angry and vengeful God. The proclamations instead presented drought as a crisis beyond human rectification, one that required the intervention of a superintending providence who would send ‘such moderate showers and rain’ and who would ‘relieve’ the people from ‘distress’. Praying for rain and divine aid was, as an earlier chapter pointed out, controversial, even among the devout.36 In a well-known 1882 episode, James Moorhouse, the Anglican bishop of Melbourne, told the droughtaffected inhabitants of Kerang, Victoria that the age of miracles was over, and that drought was a human problem that required human solutions, not special petitionary prayers. Moorhouse’s special prayer said settlers had ‘indolently and irreligiously’ broken God’s laws and should ‘conserve and employ’ God’s ‘precious gift of water’. Farmers in Victoria wrote to newspapers to condemn Moorhouse as unfeeling and callous. Moorhouse had also not explained why there was rain one year but not in another.37 The correspondent ‘Bushman’ said that the bishop’s remarks revealed ‘a want of sympathy’ for drought sufferers, and was ‘contrary to the kindly and merciful teaching of Him who gave assurance of the efficacy, not only of habitual, but also of special prayer’. Combined prayer was also valued. In 1898 a farmer wrote to an agricultural journal asking to know why townspeople ‘down south’ had not continued ‘the praying business’.38 Such comments indicate a lack of public trust in meteorology, too. Scornful comments on the ‘weather guess-work’ of ‘pseudo scientists’ and ‘weather prophets’ regularly appeared in newspapers in the later nineteenth century.39 That suspicion of experts and faith in petitionary prayer was widespread is suggested by the number of times the advocates of water storage and irrigation complained about the intransigence of rural ‘prayer and humiliation men’ who put all their trust in ‘luck and providence’.40 Joseph Jenkins, an itinerant Welsh labourer, often complained about settlers who prayed for rain but who overstocked the land and failed to store water and hay to ease animal suffering.41 An anthropological journal said a similar thing in 1903 when it complained that ‘in this land they only pray for rain instead of storing and using it when it comes’.42 Others brought race into the debate about praying for rain. Petitionary prayer and days for humiliation were primitive rituals, comparable to the invocations for rain offered by indigenous peoples. Such practices collapsed the supposed differences between European and Aboriginal peoples’ understandings of irregular weather. A writer told Melbourne’s Argus newspaper in 1915 that as a ‘manly Briton’ he protested against days for humiliation and prayer: the modern practice of ‘contemptible self-abasement’, the writer claimed, was comparable to

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rituals he said he had witnessed among what he called ‘our Australian aboriginals’.43 Churchmen who refused to pray for rain, like Moorhouse, achieved notoriety because they were exceptional. Other ministers advocated petitionary prayers even when they accepted that drought was a regular occurrence, and that variations in the Australian weather, however extreme, followed God’s natural laws. The favoured argument was that God worked through the forces that He had laid down at the Creation, but He was not bound by these laws, and could answer prayer by interrupting the normal course of events.44 Laypeople who requested public prayer days often argued that combined prayer could bring rain and return the people to God’s favour.45 The inhabitants of Orange, a district beyond NSW’s Blue Mountains, petitioned the Government in March 1876 for a day of prayer so that the public could pray that God ‘may be pleased to send rain to refresh the earth so that His creatures perish not’. Two years later the people of Yetman in northern NSW voiced the idea that drought was abnormal, and that Australia was a fertile and productive country, when they asked the Government for a day so that God would send ‘bountiful rain’ and restore ‘the fruits of the earth’.46 Nobody thought prayer alone brought relief and material benefits. As James Beattie points out, Australasian settlers prayed for rain even as they explored practical rainmaking methods, such as ploughing crops, planting trees and firing guns into the atmosphere.47 Yet the attachment to rain prayers reveals something important about settler attitudes to drought. To think in terms of petitions and interventions was to approach Australia’s climate and environment from a European perspective. The pastoralists and smallholders who spread into the interior from the 1860s understood droughts as exceptional and singular weather events as they had no understanding of average rainfall – indeed, without data or decades of experience settlers could not order a supposedly unruly and unpredictable set of weather events into a sense of climate.48 The expansion of settlement in Victoria, South Australia, NSW and Queensland proceeded through ‘trial and error’ and what has been called ‘empirical testing’.49 Successive years of good rainfall and popular mantras – most notably the ‘rain follows the plough’ idea – powered settlement and nourished a brash settler confidence, at least for a time. A South Australian editor noted in 1865 that settlers remained confident about future rainfall and clung to the idea that ‘seasons of drought may be less and less frequent’.50 When dry spells struck, as happened in northern South Australia in the early 1880s, shocked settlers abandoned their farms and the settler frontier retreated.51 Disorientated colonists might have learnt from Aboriginal peoples, but this seems not to have been common. That said, an early English–indigenous

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language phrase book from Victoria indicates that some colonists valued indigenous weather forecasting, as it contained a translation for the question ‘will it rain?’52 Scholars have modified this picture of struggling settlers and stressed the speed with which colonists learned about and adapted to drought. Early nineteenth-century colonists developed enlarged senses of Australia’s climate variation as more rooted European populations and the building up of meteorological data encouraged the formation of a ‘collective climate memory’.53 This led to the idea that Australia’s climatic variations were patterned and cyclical. Edward Smith Hall, an evangelical editor in 1820s Sydney, drew on Genesis 41 and the account of Egypt’s seven years of famine and seven years of plenty when he said that ‘seven years of dry weather have hitherto been found to succeed seven of wet’.54 Later in the century, Henry Chamberlain Russell, a government meteorologist, brought together settler folk knowledge, scientific observation, Aboriginal testimony and weather reports from India and South Africa to proposed the idea that ‘waves of drought’ passed over the earth in intervals, with Australia alternating from wet to dry every nineteen years.55 Some drew on old ideas about ‘antipodean inversion’ and thought that there was a global climate system, and that dry years in Australia would follow wet years in Europe.56 The development of vineyards in arid regions and the storage of grain in purpose-built siloes are instances of colonial adaptation and an acceptance that drought was an inherent feature of the Australian climate. It is also noteworthy that the droughts that pushed back colonial settlement in South Australia’s northern districts prompted the development, from the 1880s, of ‘dry’ farming techniques appropriate to semi-arid regions. Other forms of explanation emerged: while some found the cause of droughts in sunspots, others recognised how human actions – notably deforestation and poor farming practices – intensified the impact of drought.57 Popular attitudes varied and how far an individual regarded a protracted dry spell as an aberration, or an inherent part of the climate, had much to do with whether a colonist was new to a region or intended to stay on the land.58 Royal commissions on land settlement (Queensland, 1897) and conditions of Crown tenants (NSW, 1901) reveal something about how large pastoralists and smaller graziers in the far interior understood drought. While those who had recently settled, such as Adam James Mitchell, a grazier with 20,000 acres at Bulloo Downs, western Queensland, regarded recent droughts as exceptional, those who had settled longer, such as Thomas Penny of Hughenden in northern Queensland, expected and prepared for droughts every three or four years. Yet severe drought might disturb even the most experienced. Edmund Harrison, who had spent twelve years in the Muttaburra district of north-central Queensland, was

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haunted by the 1883–5 drought: as he told the Queensland commissioners, ‘stations that have stood droughts since could not stand that drought’.59 It is not known if Harrison prayed for rain, though there are examples of t­wentieth-century farmers, such as the Britza family at Quorn, South Australia who conserved water and diversified their farming, but who at the height of drought in the 1940s turned to prayer.60 Religious understandings of drought evolved to reflect these realities and changing attitudes. Richard Johnson, NSW’s first chaplain, had no way of knowing whether the drought of 1790 and 1791 was normal, and unsurprisingly he associated the event as a divine intervention, a providential retribution for the moral delinquencies of a degraded European population. Connecting drought to human sin was a way for Johnson to impose a sense of order on an Australian nature that he, like other Europeans, considered to be ‘whimsical and freakish in its operations’.61 In later decades, ministers from various denominations agreed that God could suspend the laws of nature to warn, chastise or bless sinful people. While evangelicals readily detected the hand of God in events, it is striking that a high churchman, Archdeacon Broughton of Sydney, interpreted the drought of the late 1820s as a divine intervention, sent by a ‘superintending Providence’ and calculated to ‘awaken among us those Christian dispositions in which we are too manifestly wanting’. On the same day another Anglican, Joseph Docker, told congregations at Windsor and Richmond that there was ‘nothing arrogant’ about them regarding recent rains as a ‘wonder’ sent by God in answer to prayer.62 The idea that drought was a moral problem retained currency in later decades. John Dunmore Lang, the prominent Sydney Presbyterian, interpreted the protracted dry spell of the late 1830s as an expression of divine displeasure and a punishment for sin. Lang drew parallels between NSW and the drought described in chapter 19 of the Old Testament book of Jeremiah.63 Preachers disagreed on what God was punishing colonists for. On the same day another Presbyterian, John Gregor, told his Maitland congregation that God had made the sky ‘a molten canopy of brass’ because of the widespread ‘vice of drunken dissipation’.64 Both Gregor and Lang thought European civilisation and the failings of settlers had disrupted Australia’s – otherwise benign and fruitful – environment and climate. Neither seems to have considered the land cursed or irredeemable,65 nor did they follow missionaries in southern Africa and connect drought to the destructive practices or supposedly sinful state of the first indigenous peoples. European Australia, after all, began as a convict society and it was  Europeans who had brought sin to the continent. Also, Aboriginal peoples could not be held responsible for drought in the same way as communities of Khoikhoi, Tswana and Xhosa in southern Africa were, as

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Australia’s indigenous peoples seemed to form part of the landscape and did not pursue recognisable forms of agriculture.66 These examples show how two old ideas, that disturbed climates reflected disorders in human society, and that moral failings could disrupt the order of nature and bring bad weather, helped settlers make sense of the environments they colonised and inhabited.67 Undoubtedly, evangelistic clergy talked in such terms because they wanted to enforce a ‘behavioural  code’ on settler society. Yet providential explanations flourished in early colonial Australia because they provided settlers with a sense of order and regularity in what appeared to be a variable and chaotic climate. Settlers continued to interpret drought as a ‘special providence’ even when they accrued evidence that dry spells were a recurring phenomenon. Hall, the editor, recommended days of humiliation at the same time as he developed a cyclical theory of Australian droughts. Presumably, only the severest dry spells, such as the one that struck in the late 1820s, were an act of God.68 Henry Fulton, the Anglican minister at Penrith, described drought as a special chastisement in an 1838 fast sermon, even though he had experienced four severe dry spells (1809–11, 1813–15, 1826–9 and 1837–9). For Fulton, the struggles of the colony – successive droughts, crop failures and epidemics – were warnings, notices of God’s anger that portended some greater calamity. Fulton maintained that God was beneficent and he, like many other Australians after him, thought it possible to ‘cure’ drought and that through better behaviour, settlers could return the country to fertility and production.69 Not everybody turned to providential theory to explain drought, nor did all those who prayed for rain accept that drought was retribution for sin. As early as the 1830s newspaper correspondents challenged preachers who taught that droughts represented special punishments for national sin.70 Opposition to days of prayer became more vocal and newspapers increasingly published letters criticising clerical explanation. Some said droughts could not be special visitations as they had occurred before European settle­ment.71 One thought it was wrong to associate God with drought as it taught people to regard Him as a ‘tyrant’ and ‘malevolent entity’. Others doubted that God could be asked to change His mind. A South Australian thought the colony’s climate had not changed since the beginning of European occupation; they also denied that ‘short harvests have any relation to the special sins of the people of South Australia’. The problem was that settlers ‘till the soil in those portions where the average rainfall is insufficient to secure a fair average crop’.72 Droughts destroyed some people’s faith in a benevolent and loving God. George Boyle White, a retired surveyor in NSW’s Hunter Valley, was regularly alarmed and depressed by unseasonable weather. White denounced

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the Christian God who sent long droughts to torment and destroy innocent animals and agriculturists. At the height of dry spell in October 1866, White confided to his diary that ‘people may be found to Kiss the rod’ but he was ‘never one of them’. ‘I did not come into the cursed planet at my own desire,’ he continued, ‘and I do not see the right, however the power may lie, of my existence being made a torture, and existence of no avail, for the will or amusement of a Supreme Might.’ White made a striking statement of apostasy several weeks later when he wrote that he ‘would rather have been born in Thibet, a worshipper of the Grand Lama than a believer in the jealous and revengeful power whom the Enlightened of the World say made them after his own image’.73

Praying for guidance The interpretation of drought as a form of divine retribution was aired late in the century, and not just by evangelical Protestants. Australia’s most senior Catholic, Archbishop Roger Vaughan, urged his flock in February 1878 to ‘look into ourselves and see if we may not have brought about this visitation through our forgetfulness, or ingratitude, or absolute sin’.74 At least one Methodist preacher regarded the Federation drought as a judgement on a political class who refused to recognise God in the Australian Commonwealth.75 Nevertheless, such views became less common, or had to compete with other understandings. Later preachers thought less in terms of arbitrary and catastrophic divine interpositions, and placed more emphasis on laws, ‘general providence’, and the regular operation of the natural order. Droughts, for this group, were inherent to Australia, and the severest were best understood as lessons and correctives, handed down by a beneficent and paternal deity whose purpose was not to punish and judge, but to teach humans to understand and work with His natural order.76 A discussion of a representative example can illustrate this alternative perspective on drought. George Henry Stanton was an English-born Church of England evangelical of a scientific bent who, after arriving in Australia in 1879, served as bishop of North Queensland and, from 1890, as bishop of Newcastle, NSW. Stanton regularly conducted visitations in his diocese during the Federation drought and, like other ministers, he witnessed first-hand the severity of drought. For Stanton, Australian history showed that ‘drought was of periodical recurrence’ and was evidence of ‘God’s orderliness in nature’. As he told one English correspondent, ‘Australia is a queer country & has its own whims & ways & we English settlers must not attempt to force our own home ways of farming but must consult science & conform ourselves to local conditions.’77 Stanton rejected the notion that drought

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was a ‘special visitation’, and in contrast to earlier preachers he did not draw correspondences between modern and Old Testament examples of drought. ‘Only during the world’s childhood’, Stanton said, had God ‘thought to act by impulse’. For Stanton, providence was essentially beneficent, and God’s ‘order of nature’, as he told a 1902 synod, ‘is wisest and best’.78 The bishop was one of a growing number of clergymen who used their pulpits and social authority to lecture farmers, the general public and government on the need to work with God’s laws to expand the capacity of the land and to act – as moderns would put it – ‘sustainably’. Stanton urged water conservancy, the development of artificial grasses for stock, and the use of inedible scrub, prickly pear. Droughts also necessitated changes in attitudes: Australians, Stanton said, ‘must practice the spirit of self-denial’.79 Importantly, Stanton welcomed the appointment of days for humiliation and prayer, as such ceremonies would complement practical efforts. As he told his diocesan synod in 1902, ‘God has other ways of answering beside that of altering the physical conditions.’80 To make sense of this it is useful to recall the changes in the understanding of prayer discussed in Chapter 3; also relevant are the distinctions between ‘emergencies’ requiring immediate action, and ‘crises’, where reflection, thought and longer-term responses were appropriate.81 Farmers who regarded droughts as emergencies, and who wanted fast actions, such as prayers for rain, emphasised the power of God. Stanton, by contrast, followed Moorhouse in considering that special prayer was more about the people praying. Public and united prayer was valued for the work it did in bringing communities together and for providing a forum for the reflection and thought that would lead to better understanding of natural laws and God’s purposes.82 In 1895 a Congregational minister in Ipswich, Queensland said that prayers for rain would not make difference to ‘nature’s movement’ as drought was inherent to the continent. What would ‘do us more good’, this minister said, was ‘humiliation, repentance, prayer, doing justice, [and] learning patience’.83 A Primitive Methodist put it succinctly when he said that the purpose of prayer was not to ‘bend God towards man, but to bend men towards God’.84 Such attitudes appeared among the laity and in the secular press. A South Australian editor remarked as early as 1879 that prayers could not disturb ‘the natural sequence between cause and effect’ but would have a ‘good effect on the minds of the petitioners’. The experience of collective prayer ‘may be a good lesson to those who are too self-sufficient’ and bring before them ‘the fact of their dependence upon a power and wisdom which is so much higher than their own’.85 The laity expressed similar views. A Western Australian said in 1873 that prayer was ‘not for the accomplishment of physical objects’ but that the ‘efficacy of prayer is on the heart and conduct’. ‘Human efforts must be made to remedy natural ills’, the writer continued,

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and individuals should ‘pray for spiritual guidance, for resignation, submission and solace’.86 There were scientifically minded clergy who joined Moorhouse and abandoned special worship altogether. In April 1902, two ministers – one Anglican, the other Presbyterian – argued in a Queensland newspaper that special prayers were ‘unwarranted and attended with much danger to religion’: droughts were ‘normal features in our climate’, they could be expected at ‘more of less regular intervals’, and people who wasted water, and failed to take responsibility for the crisis, could not beg God for more.87 Such hostility was, however, exceptional. Anglican forms of prayer at the end of the nineteenth century reflected shifting understandings of the purpose of prayer, and the new emphasis on divine guidance. The 1869 and 1876 forms used by NSW Anglicans interpreted drought as a punishment for sin and appealed for divine intervention to ‘increase the fruits of the earth’: God, as one collect put it, had ‘dried up the water-springs and turned a fruitful land into barrenness for the sins of them that dwell therein’.88 By contrast, the prayer that the archbishop of Australia issued in 1903 asked that God would help people gain ‘more wisdom, and humility and patience’. A form that Stanton issued in the same year prayed that the people of NSW would be imbued with ‘wisdom and understanding’ and to ‘learn more prudent use’ of God’s ‘gifts’.89 Drought, in this view, was more than just an emergency requiring immediate, remedial, action: it was a complex problem, a crisis that required thought, reflection and personal reformation.

Environmental criticism This emphasis on better decision-making gave the clergy new roles in colonial discussions on drought. Stanton was just one among many clergymen who advocated a new kind of settler presence on the land. Part of the fault, these clergymen said, lay at the door of governments that had failed to conserve the water that God had provided through frequent flooding. Pierce Galliard Smith, an Anglican stationed near modern Canberra, lectured his flock during the Federation drought on the need to prepare for bad times by storing water in the good, and utterances in newspapers indicate that other ministers criticised settlers for a lack of foresight.90 Richard Grove, writing on southern Africa, has interpreted the long-running missionary enthusiasm for irrigation as ‘an attempt to re-water a ruined garden’ and to maintain ‘European control over the environment’. Many Australian clergymen also believed that through better water management a ‘moral wilderness’ could be redeemed, just as the individual could be ennobled through ‘spiritual irrigation’. Churchill Julius, Anglican archdeacon of Ballarat, told

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a ­congregation in March 1887 that water, when ‘properly husbanded and distributed, would have turned the desert into a garden of Eden’.91 Clergy also directed their criticisms at farmers. The chief crime of pastoralists was stocking the land with cattle and sheep beyond its capacity.92 As early as 1866 the prominent South Australian Congregational preacher, James Jefferis, had said drought ‘was due to our sin of overworking the powers of nature’. A Presbyterian minister, speaking in Singleton, NSW in 1902, noted that ‘whatever we suffer now we suffer because we fail to exercise forethought to make provision for the future’. Another Presbyterian acknowledged that ‘it was part of the climatic economy of Australia that there should be seasons of drought and flood’. The fault lay with settlers who had wasted the skills and money that ‘would have rendered us almost independent of these changes of weather’. A Rev. Watkin, speaking in Melbourne in 1902, thought that God sent drought to impart four practical lessons: ‘conserve your water, store up forage, do not overstock your pastures, and restore and increase your forests’. Others followed Stanton and condemned the deleterious environmental effects of frontier and pioneer attitudes. The Anglican dean of Adelaide thought that droughts had beneficial aspects, as they taught humility, and encouraged people to understand their surroundings and to work with the laws that governed the world. Settlers would learn that their mastery of the environment was incomplete. A Congregational minister said in November 1895 that the great lesson of ‘dry seasons’ was that soils needed intervals of rest. Settlers, he said, ‘must make provision for “Nature’s holiday”’.93 These clergymen tended to respond to environmental crises by looking forward and imagining some future state: in good Protestant fashion, they thought humans, through well-directed labour, could redeem ruined, and once fertile, environments.94 Other preachers, meanwhile, looked backwards and blamed droughts on systematic failures, notably decades of destructive European settlement. Important here is the influence of George Perkins Marsh’s famous 1864 work, Man and Nature. Marsh’s anxiety about the ecological, environmental and climatic impact of human activity led him to emphasise old ideas about the climatic effects of deforestation. ‘The felling of the woods’, Marsh wrote, ‘has been attended with momentous consequences to the drainage of the soil, to the external configuration of its surface, and probably, also, to local climate.’95 Marsh’s coupling of deforestation and climate change inspired evangelical Protestants in South Africa and Australia, though there is not much evidence of ideas trafficking between colonial preachers.96 Richard Grove, writing on southern Africa, has focused on the desiccation theories advanced by the former Presbyterian missionary and government botanist John Croumbie Brown. In The Hydrology of South Africa (1875), Brown argued that

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drought and the other ills that accompanied long-term ­desiccation – floods, soil erosion and land deterioration – had resulted from irresponsible settler farming practices. Brown’s ideas were noticed in the press97 and his larger point – that human activity could change local climates – was reflected in the work of two Australian clergymen-scientists, William Branwhite Clarke and William Woolls, both of whom can be described as evangelicals.98 In the 1870s Clarke and Woolls argued that deforestation, carried on by reckless white settlers, had lessened rainfall, increased temperatures and made droughts more frequent and severe. Woolls had a strong sense of ecology and the ‘balance of nature’: the idea that God’s providential design was perfect, and that the removal or destruction of a species would have dangerous results. In an often-cited 1876 address to the Royal Society of New South Wales, Clarke remarked that ‘civilization has destructive as well as conservative tendencies’.99 Clarke cited many of Brown’s sources, but he did not reference Hydrology. And, in contrast to Brown, Clarke blamed indigenous peoples as much as white settlers for southern Africa’s desiccation and declining rainfall.100 Still, both men agreed that practices such as ‘ring-barking’ – a forest-clearing method – were sinful and evil, while others – irrigation, planting trees, conserving water and protecting forests – would redeem the land, and enable settlers to realise the purposes of what Clarke called ‘an all-wise providence’. In the 1876 address, Clarke referred to the ‘moral vileness’ of ‘ruthless’, ‘careless’ and ‘murderous’ settler deforesters (some of whom, he said revealingly, were Chinese) who had ‘disfigured’ and ruined the ‘great Australian garden’ planted by ‘the providence of the All-Wise Creator’.101 The important point is that all these clergymen thought the solutions to environmental crisis required more European colonisation and intervention, not less. Drought-related special acts of worship provide an opportunity to assess the nature and extent of this clerical environmentalism in nineteenth-century Australia. There is evidence that on days of prayer clergy delivered what two scholars, writing on New Zealand, have called ‘environmental sermons’. The environmental sermon had two features: on the one hand, it emphasised settler-induced environmental degradation and the possibility of redemption; on the other, it sought to mobilise a conservationist conscience by communicating the idea that God had entrusted care of the environment to humans, the proper use of which was everyone’s responsibility.102 The sermon that Alfred Barry, the Anglican evangelical bishop of Sydney, delivered at a thanksgiving in August 1886 developed those ideas of stewardship, cooperation, ‘responsible dominion’ and accountability that, in the view of some later writers, have formed crucial aspects of Christian thought since medieval times.103 Barry’s sermon was an excoriating critique of the environmental ­destruction wrought by

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exploitative English settlers who did with nature as they pleased, and his language is worth quoting: ‘We of the English-speaking race’, he wrote, ‘are more guilty of that waste than any other of the civilised races. We hear of forests wantonly destroyed which take generations of centuries to grow; land ruined by reckless agriculture – if indeed it deserves the name – ­pastures neglected or overstocked; fruits of the earth allowed to fall and rot ungathered.’ In this and earlier thanksgiving sermons Barry argued that a benevolent providence had sent drought to teach settlers to work with His laws and to develop feelings of dependence, reverence for nature, humility and what he called ‘self-reliant responsibility’.104 He did not question the European right to the land. Barry’s 1885 sermon on ‘water famines’ was a classic ‘dominion theology’ statement: the idea God gave humans, more specifically white Anglo-Saxons, the right to ‘replenish and subdue’ the earth and its creatures. As Barry said, ‘to us English people here and elsewhere, it is especially given to occupy new regions continually, as yet a virgin soil for what we may plant of good or of evil’.105 Barry’s belief in irrigation, progress and unlimited settlement over a redeemed and Christian landscape marks him as an Australian booster: there is nothing in his environmental critique that reflects the doleful accounts of ‘dead lands’ that formed such a part of some travellers’ accounts of the Australian interior in the 1830s and 1840s. Nor does Barry anticipate the negative assessment of Australia’s environmental limits that Griffith Taylor, the University of Sydney geographer, publicised in the 1910s and 1920s.106 Some correspondents wrote to newspapers commending what they read in conservation sermons.107 A recent study of the South African situation has, however, argued that the understandings of climate and environmental damage offered by elite ‘experts’ – clergymen, scientists and politicians  – often clashed with a ‘folk’ or ‘settler vernacular’ knowledge.108 While politicians and government scientists claimed that settlers’ poor agricultural practices, namely overstocking and deforestation, made droughts severer and more frequent, many South African farmers argued that it was declining rainfall, brought on either by human actions or by larger global climatic changes, that made the land ‘dry up’.109 Though Australians sometimes talked about continental desiccation,110 this idea seems not to have been common currency: the consensus, if there was one, was that droughts were a feature of the Australian climate and came in cycles. Nevertheless, like their South African counterparts, Australian settlers could react angrily to the accusation that their bad environmental management made droughts worse. A Sydney editor, reviewing Barry’s 1886 thanksgiving sermon, argued that the bishop had overestimated the potential of irrigation and misrepresented farming communities. Also, farmers challenged the view that ring-barking and the removal of trees made climates drier.111 Settlers

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countered experts by drawing on decades of personal observation. A pastoralist writing under the pseudonym ‘Old Settler’ told the Australian Town and Country Journal in August 1901 that removing trees could make grass grow where none had grown before. ‘There are times when droughts will occur, irrespective of trees or ringbarking’, the settler added.112 In general the criticism of clergy was muted; indeed, while preachers who continued to conceptualise droughts in terms of special providences and national sins encountered critical comment in newspapers, there is little evidence that agriculturists wrote to newspapers to challenge what they heard in environmental sermons.113 The criticism that Bishop Moorhouse experienced in the early 1880s may have been exceptional. Possibly some settlers accepted the environmental critique and acknowledged that their actions had contributed to the changing climate.114 Country newspapers even published letters from settler farmers who accepted that overstocking and other forms of ‘bad judgment’ had made droughts worse.115 Perhaps clergy escaped criticism because they occupied a unique and privileged position in public life. It also mattered that clergy lived among communities and shared the struggles of farmers. A correspondent named ‘G’, writing to Sydney’s Daily Telegraph in March 1903, believed that ‘people listen to sermons and take them as they find them, partly because in the hurry-scurry scramble of life they have not the time to do otherwise, and partly because they do not wish to appear discourteous and troublesome by making remarks’. Clergy faced the strongest criticism from other preachers. In 1888 Rev. J. B. Sharp of Maffra, Victoria condemned a Presbyterian minister who had told a south Melbourne congregation that an improvident people could not ask God to rearrange the natural order for their convenience. Sharp, in an angry sermon, defended the character of his farming community and asserted that the drought was unexampled and could not have been anticipated. Only those who had no understanding of farming and grazing, he said, could call the people improvident, or the current ­conditions part of the ‘natural order of things’.116

The collective action problem Although communities valued special days of worship for differing reasons, all expected collective ritual to bring about a transformation, whether in the material or the spiritual worlds, or, as Barry and Stanton hoped, in public attitudes. Whether such varied objectives were or could be realised is difficult to assess. Sceptics argued that there was no evidence that rain followed days of prayer; indeed, it was alleged that ministers waited for signs of favourable weather before appointing special prayers. (One Queenslander,

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writing in 1895, gestured to a settler ‘weather-wisdom’ when they complained that clergy had waited for a new moon in September – an event which apparently indicated coming rain – before appointing a day of humiliation.)117 It is doubtful that ministers’ sermons did much to influence the development of irrigation and water conservation. The schemes for state-sponsored irrigation that emerged in Victoria and elsewhere from the 1860s drew support from many state and private agencies and rural and urban interest groups.118 The important issue is how far churchmen, through special occasions of worship, mobilised a sense of concern and responsibility among the colonial public. The difficulties facing nineteenth-century Australian churchmen can be conceptualised as a ‘collective action problem’. In this case the end of drought, and the return of agricultural prosperity, was the public or general good. As a South Australian newspaper noted in 1897, the absence of rain was a subject ‘concerning which common impulse is felt and collective action desired’.119 Collective action was, as has been shown, conceived in different ways, and might include group penance, behavioural change, praying for rain, or seeking guidance and better understanding of divine purposes. Participation was open to all and involved little cost. The problem, as with all large-scale collective actions, is that individuals enter with varying degrees of commitment: for religious ministers, the concern was that communal acts of prayer would attract ‘free riders’ who recognised that collective prayer might do good, but who reasoned that they could get that benefit without having to participate.120 This final section considers the challenges facing churchmen who sought to mobilise a colonial community in a common endeavour: some stemmed from the fact that drought was a difficult subject for collective action; others came about because of the limitations of special worship. By emphasising common suffering and collective guilt, special prayers placed the individual in a colonial community that stretched far beyond the immediate surroundings of the family, locality and congregation. Anglican forms of prayer were intended to bring about benefits for the whole community; they also sought to erase any sense of separation between townspeople and the agriculturists who suffered most in droughts. A collect circulated in 1869 explained that drought was punishment for the collective sins of a people who had ruined a fertile land: ‘thou hast dried up the water-springs and turned a fruitful land into barrenness for the sins of them that dwell therein’. The inclusion in the form of a reference to the gospel of Luke and the collapse of the tower of Siloam was a reminder that everyone should repent their sins; those who fell victim to falling towers and other disasters were not necessarily society’s most sinful people, nor were they personally responsible for calamities. A thanksgiving form used in the Sydney diocese

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in 1878 spread the blame when it acknowledged that ‘all the punishments which are threatened in Thy law might justly have fallen upon us by reason of our manifold transgressions and hardness of heart’.121 It is not clear, however, that the days of prayer of the 1860s and 1870s encouraged a close relationship between worshippers and the victims of drought. According to a recent writer, the prayer days that followed floods and other calamities in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic nurtured a sense of ‘shared identity’ and ‘disaster solidarity’ between sufferers and non-victims.122 What is striking in the Australian context is how the victims of drought remained hidden from public view, even on special days of worship. There was no ‘national silence’ over drought in nineteenth-century Australia – calamitous dry spells were represented in print and image – but the problem could seem distant to townspeople.123 As the Sydney Morning Herald reported before a day of humiliation in February 1869, ‘a large part of the inhabitants of this city consider that the Governor by this order demands humiliation mainly from that section of the community not guilty of the particular transgression which this drought is designed to punish’. Townspeople, the paper added, believed large pastoralists ‘had brought calamity upon themselves, and obliged the whole colony to suffer with them’.124 In 1899 the western grazier, E. D. Millen, wrote in a Sydney newspaper that the urban public’s ‘shadowy knowledge’ of the western districts went little further than the sense that it was a remote region of ‘great sheep-runs and intense heat, or prolonged drought and occasional prolific seasons’. Millen’s articles – tellingly titled ‘Our Western Lands’ – represent an early attempt to educate city dwellers about the ‘critical’ state of western regions devastated by rabbits, overstocking and soil degradation.125 The scripted forms of prayer that survive reveal that worshippers rarely offered prayers specifically for suffering farmers; indeed, it is striking how little mention was made of the victims of drought (human and animal) in forms of prayer and sermons. Drought sermons rarely contained the kind of dramatic and emotional descriptions found in eighteenth-century ‘disaster sermons’. The Baptist minister George Stonehouse barely mentioned suffering farmers when he spoke on ‘the drought and its lessons’ in Adelaide in November 1865.126 Perhaps this was because drought was a difficult calamity to communicate to non-sufferers. Ministers either said it was beyond their powers to convey the effects of drought, or they admitted, like a Melbourne Presbyterian did in 1866, that ‘they could little judge from personal observation of the severity of the sufferings … occasioned by drought’. Others communicated the effects of drought by drawing analogies between Australian conditions and Old Testament droughts. An Anglican minister, speaking in Melbourne in 1869, said that the traveller passing through Victoria ‘might imagine himself beholding Ezekiel’s vision

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of the valley of dry bones’.127 It also mattered that the chief victims of drought were not human, but sheep and cattle. Still, the deaths of millions of animals could elicit compassionate responses from the colonial public: newspapers frequently carried pained letters from rural correspondents describing the experience of watching hundreds of animals die excruciating and cruel deaths.128 Religious journals told settlers to take responsibility for their animals, and feel compassion when sheep and cattle suffered, as ever since the Fall the beasts (or ‘God’s creatures’ as one editor termed them) had been the innocent victims of human sin.129 The limits of communal feeling are also evident in the fact that on days of prayer churches collected funds for missions, benevolent societies and the poor, but rarely for ruined farmers. It was not that Australian colonists lacked a sense of philanthropy or charity: on many occasions, settlers opened relief funds to assist the victims of disasters and bereaved dependents. But as recent work on charity points out, not every disaster garnered the same kind of reportage, or attracted public money, or nurtured feelings of community and solidarity between observers and sufferers (Australian collections for Indian famine sufferers in the 1870s and 1890s, for instance, tended to emphasise the differences and distances separating white colonists from the colonial ‘other’).130 The most newsworthy causes, and which prompted relief efforts, were those where the death toll was high, where the human consequences were striking and easily represented in print, and where the scale of the destruction, the nature of the suffering and the character of the sufferers struck a chord with the national public.131 Floods, for example, frequently resulted in collections. At such times public meetings featured many dramatic and ‘heartrending’ descriptions of drowned districts, the ruined homes of ‘virtuous and industrious people’, stranded families and distressed parents cut off from children. A Sydney speaker noted at an 1864 relief meeting that floods were ‘a kind of family affliction’.132 Droughts were different. As the Newcastle Chronicle pointed out in 1868, while the damage of floods was ‘severely felt in certain localities and may rouse the national charity into action’, the ‘individual effects’ of drought was ‘not so ruinous’.133 Drought failed to elicit strong emotional responses from townspeople, as the victims were not families, but the single male pastoralists who from the 1860s had hurried to take up huge leases in western NSW and Queensland.134 Preachers sometimes asked city congregations to share their resources with sufferers in the interior, and an 1869 Anglican form of prayer invited colonists to use God’s ‘bountiful liberality’ for ‘the relief of those that are needy’.135 Yet it was not until the 1890s and early 1900s that Methodists in South Australia, and then Sydney’s mayor, organised the first drought-relief funds.136 In the 1890s and early

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1900s, private citizens publicised the needs of drought sufferers and focused ­attention on suffering families and starving children.137 In some ways, then, special acts of worship reinforced the distance separating town and country. Ministers of religion who sought to counter this and cultivate a shared sense of ‘we’ and ‘us’ had various strategies for raising colonial awareness of drought and its victims. Around 1900 more preachers included graphic descriptions of the suffering and losses of agriculturalists in their sermons.138 Others deployed economic arguments. In 1866 the congregation at Melbourne’s Anglican cathedral heard that it was everyone’s responsibility to pray for rain, because no country felt the lack of rain more than Victoria, and the long dryness harmed both agriculture and the mining industry. Three decades later, at the start of the Federation drought, a Presbyterian minister in Wollongong, a seaside town south of Sydney, argued that drought could not be ignored as agriculture was the basis for all colonial wealth.139 It was obvious, however, that the suffering of townspeople was not equivalent to that experienced in country areas. This was why one Anglican minister in Victoria thought that fasting – total abstinence from food and drink – was necessary on days for humiliation: ‘by denying ourselves’, he said, ‘we were taught to sympathise with those who were in want’.140 Preachers tried to galvanise a sense of collective responsibility through the concept of shared guilt. It was noted earlier that this feelings of guilt and sin provided an uncertain basis for community feeling and mobilisation, not least because ministers disagreed on what would count as national sin. Clergy who wished to avoid controversy referred to general failings that applied to everyone, such as sabbath desecration, intemperance or the pursuit of worldly wealth. Others, more riskily, identified specific sins.141 Noteworthy are the preachers who connected drought to the violence settlers perpetrated against Aboriginal peoples: this bears comparison with the eighteenth-century British abolitionists who used a language of divine wrath and ‘blood guilt’ to argue that the American Revolution was a fitting divine punishment for a nation that enslaved and traded Africans.142 When white settlers massacred twenty-eight Aboriginal people at Myall Creek in June 1838, John Dunmore Lang, the Presbyterian, used the blood guilt trope to condemn his fellow colonists in a fast sermon: ‘not only have we despoiled them of their land,’ Lang said, ‘and given them in exchange European vice and European disease in every foul and fatal form, but the blood of hundreds, nay of thousands of their number, … still stains the hands of many of the inhabitants of the land!’143 Though Lang’s sermon was well received in the Sydney press, the abolitionist campaigns had shown that the use of providential argument and the language of chastisement was risky, especially when applied to controversial issues such as slavery, as it

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was easy to alienate those who considered it puritanical and presumptuous to accuse a whole nation of sharing in the blood guilt.144 While it is probably true that violence against indigenous peoples never became a major theme in national sin and repentance, the idea resonated among some groups, as preachers later in the century continued to couple drought with white violence. The Rev. Watkin, mentioned earlier, talked in terms of intergenerational guilt and thought Australians of the Federation drought era had been chastised ‘for the sins of our pioneer settlers – who in some cases ruthlessly shot down or poisoned the aboriginals’.145 The language of divine wrath continued to be a useful rhetoric, as such a ‘highly charged’ language did ‘justice to the moral gravity’ of such crimes as slavery and indigenous dispossession, and might inject a sense of anxiety, as well as feelings of shame, guilt and outrage, to public debate.146 The larger point is that colonists never gathered around an agreed understanding of national sin. Special days of worship generated debates, involving many individuals, groups and interests, on the meaning of great traumas and celebrations, and as settler societies became increasingly populous and pluralistic, and as the colonial press expanded, more people, and not just clergymen, speculated on the specific sins that prompted divine retribution. The risk for clergy was that their authority would be weakened as the laity interpreted God’s purposes. Though the point made earlier about lay deference and respect is broadly correct, clerical interpretations could, on occasion, be ridiculed in the press. When a Queensland minister claimed that drought was caused by the wicked behaviour of local people who played cricket on Sundays, a newspaper editor developed his own fanciful reading of divine providence, and claimed that droughts only happened when clergymen resided in the district.147 In 1897, numerous South Australians challenged a Methodist preacher who had claimed God sent drought to punish the wicked politicians who refused to recognise God in the federal ­constitution. The drought, the lay correspondents said, had started long before the first conventions met to discuss federation. Furthermore, a benevolent God had blessed his people, not punished them, as a recent earthquake had released artesian waters ‘before too deep to be got at’. Another said it was equally likely that the God sent drought to encourage the Australians to put aside their differences and join in a federation.148 Special acts of worship could not bring communities together, mobilise public opinion, change behaviours or provoke a moral revolution. Given the nature of colonial society, and its abuse of the Australian environment, this is not surprising. But a sense of spiritual community did exist. Collective action was, for instance, common at the local level. In 1876 and 1878 settlements in Warrego district of NSW counteract the isolating effects of drought and organised local days for humiliation and prayer. These

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local occasions then led to a petitioning campaign, coordinated across the district, which pressured the colonial Government for a ‘national’ day of prayer. Shared religious beliefs might, then, stimulate a sense of integration and community, even in regions, such as Warrego, where settlement was scattered, temporary and isolated.149 Disaster situations, and rituals, could also generate and reinforce a sense of solidarity and cohesion among people not directly caught up in catast­ rophe.150 Although drought had relatively light effects on the Hunter Valley region of NSW in 1865 and 1866, a day of humiliation in January 1866 was apparently ‘very well observed’ in the town. When NSW appointed a day for humiliation three years later, a Hunter Valley newspaper editor wrote that while his town had more reason to give thanks for rain, local people had a duty to pray that ‘the long drought may cease over the wide interior’.151 Communities who suffered modestly from drought reacted badly if they felt excluded from colonial events. Maryborough, Queensland escaped the worst effects of drought in 1877, but the town’s newspaper was still upset that the Anglican bishop did not inform the town of a forthcoming day of humiliation. This, the editor said, was an ‘instance of greed on the part of the cormorant South, which desires to monopolise all benefits, celestial as well as terrestrial that can be obtained by prayer, and will not stir a finger to interfere in the appointed order of the seasons for anybody but itself’.152 It is wise not to exaggerate the size or inclusivity of the community that gathered on drought-related special days of worship. There are reports of indigenous people on Christian mission stations – such as the one at Purfleet, north of Sydney – praying for rain, although whether this was part of a collective action is unclear.153 In 1865 a private citizen urged clergymen to approach the Chinese of Bendigo, Victoria to unite with Christians in a multi-faith, multi-ethnic day for humiliation and prayer.154 Yet the praying public remained largely white and Christian. Nothing seems to have come of the Bendigo gathering, and Chinese prayers for rain were much mocked, as Australian Sinophobia became increasingly virulent. How many colonists anticipated the involvement of Aboriginal peoples is hard to assess. Indigenous rainmaking rituals attracted settler interest from the late nineteenth century, and one historian has noted the example of a Wotjobaluk rainmaker in north-west Victoria agreeing to make rain for a white settler. Yet no evidence has been found that Europeans and Aboriginal peoples engaged in collaborative rainmaking. Possibly this was because Aboriginal peoples, such as the Wathaurong people that the settler Katherine Kirkland described in the 1840s near Geelong, blamed drought on the arrival of white settlement.155



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Conclusion According to a recent writer, white Australian responses to special prayers in times of drought grew ‘increasingly negative’ towards the end of the nineteenth century. Criticism became public and vociferous, observances fell away, and churches and governments lost confidence to the extent that both favoured setting aside Sundays, as opposed to the conventional weekday.156 Though partly true, such comments understate the popular appeal of prayers for rain and exaggerate the extent to which contemporaries always conceptualised special worship in terms of petitions and interventions. Some settlers did regard environmental problems as signs of God’s displeasure. The coupling of human sin with deteriorating climates and environments show how old ideas about the connectedness of the natural and human worlds – the notion that the weather was ‘redolent with human analogy and symbolic meaning, and sensitive to man’s behaviour’ – migrated to nineteenth-century Australia.157 But droughts were not always regarded as abnormal and as symbolic aberrations, and special days and prayers did not necessarily encourage short-term outlooks. Special days of prayer during ‘slow catastrophes’ were preaching occasions when ministers encouraged congregations to reflect on their actions and inactions, and to consider how drought, and the wider environmental crisis facing settler societies, was their responsibility. Droughts, then, could have a positive side and might encourage moral reflection as well as new kinds of practical action.158 Whether they emphasised human or divine agency, or regarded droughts as abnormal or inherent to Australia, the characters considered in this chapter believed droughts had meanings and carried lessons, and that climatic conditions were connected to the behaviours of humans. It was human failings – moral, intellectual, practical – that explained the severe effects of extreme weather. Purely naturalistic explanation was insufficient. Also running through the responses to drought – even those that brought the most devastation – was a confident belief that Australia was a fertile land that could support a European society. Such ideas continue to circulate. An Australian rugby player caused much offence in 2019 when he blamed drought on Australia’s permissive society, but as Mike Hulme, a human geographer, points out, this idea – that the weather can be a moral issue, and that disordered weather reflects a disordered society – is still widespread today, and not just among the extreme wings of religious opinion.159 The discourse of collective sin also has purchase in today’s  climate crisis. Michael Northcott, an environmental theologian, said in a 2007 book that global warming is ‘earth’s judgment’ on the heedless consumption and moral shortcomings of selfish westerners.160 A

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link can also be drawn between days of prayer and later days set aside for ­environmental awareness, such as Arbor Day (a community tree-planting occasion first introduced to South Australia in the 1880s),161 and even the modern Earth Day. The nineteenth-century days of prayer demonstrated how even the most rapacious, patriarchal and ecologically abusive colonial societies could put aside work and leisure and gather, however fleetingly, for ­communal reflection and thought.

Notes 1 NAA, A461, L372/1/1, Mr and Mrs Hill to J. Curtin, 14 September 1944 and 24 April 1945, and prime minister’s secretary to the Hills, 18 September 1944 and 10 May 1945. 2 Garden, Droughts, p. 15; M. McKernan, Drought: the red marauder (Crows Nest, NSW, 2005), p. 8; T. Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth (Carlton, 2000), pp. 283–4. 3 Floods and fires prompted requests to governments for special worship: ‘Christian’, Brisbane Courier, 14 May 1867; ‘A Voice Crying’, Telegraph [Brisbane], 11 March 1890; ‘Brotherhood’, Maitland Daily Mercury, 29 January 1895. 4 R. Jones, ‘Uncertainty and the emotional landscape of drought’, International Review of Environmental History, 4:2 (2018), 17. 5 C. Fenby et al., ‘“The usual weather in NSW is uncommonly bright and clear… equal to the finest summer day in England”: flood and drought in New South Wales, 1788–1815’, in Beattie et al. (eds), Climate, Science, and Colonization, p. 50. 6 J. Rubenstein, ‘Emergency claims and democratic action’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 32:1 (2015), 104–8. The author thanks Sarah Moore for this reference. ‘Emergency rituals’ is from Duiveman, ‘Praying’, 2. 7 M. Hulme, in Weathered: cultures of climate (London, 2017), chapter 6, shows how concepts of climate restoration and narratives of blame operate in historic and current climate change debates. 8 L. Frost, ‘The economy’, in Bashford and Macintyre (eds), Cambridge History of Australia, 1, pp. 332–7; J. B. Hirst, Adelaide and the Country 1870–1917: their social and political relationship (Melbourne, 1973), pp. vii, 63–4. 9 ‘Fruitgrower’, Windsor and Richmond Gazette, 20 March 1897; ‘F. Hall’, SMH, 25 August 1888. 10 McKernan, Drought, p. 17. 11 S. Brechin, ‘Climate change mitigation and collective action problem: exploring country differences in Greenhouse gas contributions’, Sociological Forum, 31 (2016), 846–61. 12 Australian Worker [Sydney], 4 September 1919. 13 Fenby et al., ‘Flood and drought’, p. 53. 14 Jones, Slow Catastrophes, p. 172; G. Blackburn, Pioneering Irrigation

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in Australia to 1920 (Melbourne, 2004), chapters 1–4; J. M. Powell, Environmental Management in Australia, 1788–1914: guardians, improvers and profit (Melbourne, 1976), pp. 132, 136. 15 NSWSA, NRS905, 5/6085–92/10924, M. Cahill to the colonial secretary, 17 and 21 July 1892. For weather control, Hulme, Weathered, chapter 10. See Beattie, ‘Science, religion, and drought’, pp. 138–9 for the circulation of rainmaking knowledge. 16 D. Day, The Weather Watchers: 100 years of the Bureau of Meteorology (Carlton, 2007), pp. 35–7, 40–1, 321–2. 17 D. Meinig, On the Margins of the Good Earth: the South Australian wheat frontier, 1869–1884 (Adelaide, 1962), p. 22. 18 Garden, Droughts, pp. 64–9; 76–81; Jones, ‘Uncertainty’, 18; Maryborough Chronicle, 11 April 1866. 19 Newcastle Chronicle [NSW], 20 February 1869. 20 E. O’Gorman et al., ‘Histories of climate, science, and colonization in Australia and New Zealand, 1800–1945’, WIREs Climate Change, 7 (2016), 901; Hulme, Weathered, p. 66. 21 R. L. Heathcote, Back of Bourke: a study of land appraisal and settlement in semi-arid Australia (Carlton, 1965), p. 41. 22 NSWSA, NRS906, 4/814.2, 78/1078, P. King to the colonial secretary, 29 January 1878. 23 NSWSA, NRS906, 4/814.2, 78/1437 and 78/1108, inhabitants of Walgett and the Bishop of Goulburn to the colonial secretary, 28 January and 13 February 1878. 24 See NSWSA, NRS906, 4/814.2, 78/1290, the colonial secretary’s annotation to a telegraph from Bourke, 8 February 1878. 25 The petitions are gathered in NSWSA, NRS906, 4/814.2. 26 Garden, Droughts, p. 242. 27 R. Waterhouse, ‘Settling the land’, in Schreuder and Ward (eds), Australia’s Empire, p. 56. 28 Ibid., pp. 65–6; Heathcote, Back of Bourke, pp. 46–49. 29 Heathcote, Back of Bourke, pp. 140–1. 30 McKernan, Drought, pp. 65–6; Waterhouse, ‘Settling the land’, p. 75. For wool and Australian distinctiveness, L. Robin, How a Continent Created a Nation (Sydney, 2009), pp. 57–74. 31 Brisbane Courier, 14 April 1902. 32 Hall, Worlds of Wonder, pp. 137, 167–8. 33 Jones, ‘Uncertainty’, 19, 21; Fenby, ‘Experiencing, understanding and adapting to climate’, p. 174. 34 Rubenstein, ‘Emergency claims’, 105–6. 35 NSW Government Gazette, 17 October 1838, 14 October 1898, 20 February 1902 and 10 March 1903. 36 For a notable southern African example, see Praying for Rain (Pietermaritzburg, 1923). For controversies over such prayers, see Beattie, ‘Science, religion, and drought’, pp. 141–2.

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37 McKernan, Drought, pp. 61–8; Bonyhady, Colonial Earth, pp. 292–4. 38 ‘Prudence’, Bendigo Advertiser, 21 March 1882; ‘Bushman’, Australasian, 25 March 1882; Australian Pastoralists Review [Melbourne], 15 November 1898. 39 A medical doctor, a resident of the ‘bush’ for forty years, said he put more trust in the ‘lessons obtained from the instinct of animals’ and ‘insect life’ than the teachings of meteorologists: National Advocate [NSW], 14 September 1895. For ridicule of periodicity theories, Border Watch [South Australia], 9 October 1889. 40 Dungog Chronicle [NSW], 14 May 1897. 41 Evans (ed.), Diary of a Welsh Swagman, pp. 84, 90–1, 99, 279–80. 42 Science of Man and Journal of the Anthropological Society of NSW, 21 March 1903. 43 ‘Stand Up Right’, Argus, 30 December 1915; World’s News [Sydney], 15 March 1902. 44 For statements on prayers for rain from Anglicans, Methodists and Presbyterians, see Two Papers Read by Canon Selwyn (Sydney, 1883), pp. 13–14; Christian Advocate and Wesleyan Record [Sydney], 1 March 1876; Australian Witness and Presbyterian Herald [Sydney], 9 February 1878. 45 South Australian examples include: ‘A Citizen’, South Australian Register, 11 February 1860; ‘H. B.’, South Australian Weekly Chronicle, 12 May 1866; Advertiser: ‘John Richards’, 30 May 1891; ‘Southern Baptist’, 18 November 1907. 46 NSWSA, NRS906, 4/814.2, 76/2332, W. Wells to Governor Robinson, 27 March 1876; NRS905–257–1-[1/2404], 78/2010, inhabitants of Yetman to the executive council, 6 February 1878. 47 Beattie, ‘Science, religion, and drought’, p. 144. 48 For climate as a construct that orders weather, see Hulme, Weathered, pp. 10–11. 49 J. M. Powell, ‘Enterprise and dependency: water management in Australia’, in T. Griffiths and L. Robin (eds), Ecology and Empire: environmental history of settler societies (Edinburgh, 1997), pp. 103, 107. 50 South Australian Register, 27 April 1865. For Australian certainty about future rainfall, J. Miller, La Niña and the Making of Climate Optimism: remembering rain (London, 2019). 51 T. Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora: environment and history in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 74–5; Meinig, On the Margins of the Good Earth. 52 P. Clarke, ‘Time’, in F. Cahir et al. (eds), Aboriginal Biocultural Knowledge in South-Eastern Australia: perspectives of early colonists (Clayton, 2018), pp. 266–7; Letters from Victorian Pioneers (Melbourne, 1898), p. 309. 53 Fenby, ‘Experiencing, understanding and adapting to climate’, p. 91. 54 Ibid., p. 164; [E. S. Hall], The State of New South Wales in December, 1830 (London, 1831), p. 4. 55 H. C. Russell, The Climate of New South Wales (Sydney, 1877), pp. 181–2. 56 G. Bolton, Spoils and Spoilers: a history of Australians shaping their

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­environment (Sydney, 1992), pp. 28–9; Day, Weather Watchers, pp. 34–5; B. Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific 1768–1850: a study in the history of art and ideas (Oxford, 1960), p. 135. 57 Garden, Droughts, pp. 146–57. 58 Rebecca Jones distinguishes between two conceptions of drought – as an aberration or natural disaster, and as an inherent part of the Australian climate – in Slow Catastrophes, chapter 1. Also, T. Sherratt, ‘Human elements’, in Sherratt et al. (eds), A Change in the Weather: climate and culture in Australia (Canberra, 2005), pp. 6, 12. 59 Report of the Royal Commission on Land Settlement (Brisbane, 1897), pp. 24–6, 115–18, 122–5. 60 J. Glasson, Richman Valley Farmer: work, life and other things from the diaries of Fred Britza (Beaumont, 2019), pp. 33–4. 61 SLNSW, CY Safe 1/121, Johnson to Fricker, 18 March 1791, fo. 18; Lake, ‘“Such Spiritual Acres”’, p. 74; Smith, European Vision, pp. 169–73; R. Gibson, The Diminishing Paradise: changing literary perceptions of Australia (Sydney, 1984), pp. 37, 40. 62 Broughton, Counsel and Pleasure of God, p. 17; SLV, Box 1343/2, sermon dated 12 and 15 November 1829, fo. 8. 63 Lang, National Sins. 64 Gregor, Duties Appropriate to a Day of Public Fast, p. 11. 65 Views varied. Barron Field wrote in an 1819 poem that Australia, a desolate and treeless land, was ‘not conceiv’d in the Beginning’ but emerged when the ‘ground was therefore curst’: Smith, European Vision, p. 172. 66 Gibson, Diminishing Paradise, pp. 87, 89, 172–3, 175, 178. R. Grove, ‘Scottish missionaries, evangelical discourses and the origins of conservation thinking in southern Africa, 1820–1900’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 15:2 (1989), 166–7; McKittrick, ‘Talking about the weather’, 21. 67 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 105. 68 Monitor, 5 July and 29 September 1828. John Dunmore Lang regarded drought as inherent to Australia too: Lake, ‘“Such Spiritual Acres”’, p. 312. 69 H. Fulton, A Sermon: preached at Castlereagh and Penrith (Sydney, 1838), pp. 8, 10. 70 ‘A Disciple’, Australian, 1 January 1839. 71 Garden cites examples in Droughts, pp. 154, 248. 72 ‘John Bergan’, Australian Star, 1 September 1902; ‘M. J. Whitty’, Evening Telegraph [Queensland], 16 April 1902; ‘F. W. Cox’, South Australian Register, 13 April 1886. 73 SLNSW, B619, 28 September, 15 October and 2 November 1866. 74 R. Vaughan, A Letter to the Clergy Ordering Prayers for Rain (Sydney, 1878), p. 4; Bonyhady, Colonial Earth, p. 294. 75 Rev. C. Goldsmith reported in Methodist, 15 May 1897; for criticism of this view, see letter of ‘F. Smith’, South Australian Register, 18 May 1897. 76 For the place of a ‘beneficent providence’ in the intellectual culture of ­middle-class Sydney, see G. Melleuish, ‘Beneficent providence and the quest

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for harmony: the cultural setting for colonial science in Sydney, 1850–1890’, Journal and Proceedings, Royal Society of NSW, 118 (1985), 169, 172. Australian Churchman [Sydney], 20 February 1869. 77 Bishop Stanton’s address to synod, Daily Telegraph, 22 May 1901; NLA, M1300/1, Stanton to USPG, 15 December 1898, fos 479–80. 78 Daily Telegraph, 22 May 1901; SMH, 28 May 1902. 79 Maitland Daily Mercury, 8 March 1902. 80 SMH, 28 May 1902. 81 Rubenstein, ‘Emergency claims’, 104–8. 82 For such reconsiderations in the British context, NP, III, pp. cii–ciii. 83 Rev. T. Jones, Telegraph [Queensland], 18 September 1895. 84 Revs G. Wheatley and J. Day, Advertiser, 10 May 1897. 85 Port Augusta Despatch [South Australia], 4 April 1879. 86 E. Tenebris, Perth Gazette, 14 March 1873. 87 Revs M. Hainsselin and W. Boyle, Capricornian [Queensland], 19 April 1902. 88 A Form of Prayer for the 13th Day of February, 1869 (Sydney, 1869), p. 2; SMH, 14 April 1876. 89 Maitland Weekly Mercury, 21 March 1903. 90 NLA, MS2656, Box 16, 26 February 1902. Reviewing humiliation day services, the South Australian Register (10 May 1897) noted that several Adelaide preachers argued that settlers who failed to store water, hay and ensilage could not expect God to change the seasons for their convenience. 91 Ballarat Star, 22 March 1887. 92 Bonyhady, Colonial Earth, pp. 284–5. 93 Rev. J. White, Singleton Argus, 8 April 1902; Rev. J. Ferguson, Daily Telegraph, 16 September 1895; Rev. Watkin, Weekly Times, 20 September 1902; South Australian Advertiser, 20 February 1882; Rev. J. Allen, North Eastern Ensign [Victoria], 19 November 1895. 94 For Protestant ideas about human sin and climate degradation, and the possibility that humans could renovate and redeem, see L. Barnett, ‘The theology of climate change: sin as agency in the Enlightenment’s Anthropocene’, Environmental History, 20 (2015), 228–9. 95 G. P. Marsh, Man and Nature (New York, 1864), p. iv. The idea that deforestation brought warmer summers and colder winters circulated in early modern America: W. Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, colonists and the ecology of New England (New York, 1983), pp. 122–6. 96 Powell, Environmental Management, pp. 89–92; R. Grove, ‘Scotland in South Africa: John Croumbie Brown and the roots of settler environmentalism’, in Griffiths and Robin (eds), Ecology and Empire, pp. 139–53. 97 Bendigo Advertiser, 20 February 1875. 98 The prominence of evangelicals among nineteenth-century conservationists and animal welfare advocates is noteworthy, and connects to their preoccupation with sin, covenants and the authority of the Bible. A recent treatment of the subject is P. Sampson, Animal Ethics and the Nonconformist Conscience (London, 2018).

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99 K. Thomas, Man and the Natural World: changing attitudes in England ­1500–1800 (Harmondsworth, 1983), p. 278; L. A. Gilbert, William Woolls, 1814–1893: “a most useful colonist” (Canberra, 1985), pp. 91–2; Clarke, ‘Effects of forest vegetation on climate’, 180; M. Gladwin, ‘Australian Anglican clergymen, science and religion, 1820–1850’, SCH, 46 (2010), 293–306. 100 Clarke, ‘Effects of forest vegetation’, 200. 101 Ibid., 180, 213. Comparable attitudes are discussed in Grove, ‘Scotland in South Africa’. 102 J. Beattie and J. Stenhouse, ‘Empire, environment and religion: God and the natural world in nineteenth-century New Zealand’, Environment and History, 13 (2007), 433. 103 C. Attfield, ‘Christian attitudes to nature’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 44:3 (1983), 369–86. 104 Daily Telegraph, 30 August 1886. Also Barry’s sermon ‘The giver of all good gifts’ (22 May 1884), in First Words in Australia (Sydney, 1884), pp. 202–5. 105 Daily Telegraph, 18 May 1885. For ‘dominion theology’, see Beattie and Stenhouse, ‘Empire, environment and religion’. For the idea that God had reserved Australia for redemption by Christian settlers, see Gibson, Diminishing Paradise, pp. 96, 122, 126. 106 For Barry’s boosterism, see ‘Advance Australia’, Bathurst Free Press, 7 February 1889. On Griffith Taylor, Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora, pp. 175–9. Gibson, Diminishing Paradise, chapter 4, for early negative representations. 107 ‘Store the Water’, Brisbane Courier, 11 November 1919. 108 McKittrick, ‘Talking about the weather’, 5, 9, 21, 23. 109 Ibid., 8–13. 110 E.g. ‘Is Australia becoming drier?’, Dubbo Dispatch [NSW], 7 March 1903. 111 J. Thompson, Maitland Mercury, 30 September 1880; W. Webb, Bathurst Post, 15 December 1897. 112 Australian Town and Country Journal, 10 August 1901. 113 Sydney Mail, 4 September 1886. 114 Some South African farmers acknowledged that abusive land management exacerbated the effects of drought: McKittrick, ‘Talking about the weather’, 12–13, 21. 115 At least one South Australian farmer thought overstocking made droughts worse: ‘M. Searle’, Quorn Mercury [South Australia], 18 September and 9 October 1896. 116 Maffra Spectator [Victoria], 29 November 1888. 117 Bonyhady, Colonial Earth, p. 293; ‘Horrified’, Queensland Times, 21 September 1895. For British ‘weather-wisdom’, see J. Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (Chicago, IL, 2007), p. 92. 118 Powell, ‘Enterprise and dependency’, pp. 102–21. 119 Advertiser, 8 May 1897. 120 Brechin, ‘Climate change mitigation’, 849.

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121 A Form of Prayer for the 13th Day of February, 1869, pp. 2, 4; A Form of Thanksgiving to Almighty God, for His Great Mercy in Sending the Rain (Sydney, 1878), p. 4. 122 Duiveman, ‘Praying’, 5. 123 Garden, Droughts, p. 268. 124 SMH, 12 February 1869. 125 T. Griffiths, ‘One hundred years of environmental crisis’, Rangeland Journal, 23:1 (2001), 9–10; SMH, 18 and 25 November 1899. 126 Stonehouse, Drought and its Lessons, pp. 9–10. 127 M. Becher, Argus, 3 April 1869. 128 Daily Telegraph, 18 May 1885; ‘Plymouth Brother’, Macleay Argus [NSW], 30 October 1909; ‘John Jewell’, Bendigo Advertiser, 3 November 1914. For an alternative view, Garden, Droughts, p. 268. 129 Australian Churchman, 20 February 1869; Thomas, Man and the Natural World, pp. 156–7. 130 C. Twomey and A. May, ‘Australian responses to the Indian famine, 1876–78: sympathy, photography and the British Empire’, Australian Historical Studies, 43:2 (2012), 233–52. 131 S. Roddy et al., The Charity Market and Humanitarianism in Britain, ­1870–1912 (London, 2019), chapter 6. 132 See the meeting after Hunter Valley floods reported in the Sydney Mail, 2 July 1864. 133 Newcastle Chronicle, 18 January 1868. 134 SMH, 12 February 1869. 135 A Form of Prayer for the 13th Day of February, 1869, p. 2. 136 McKernan, Drought, chapter 3. For drought relief as a Methodist initiative, ‘Bokakkah’, Gippsland Times, 10 November 1902. 137 Mercury and Weekly Courier [Victoria], 13 December 1902. 138 E.g. the description offered by Bishop Camidge of Bathurst, Mudgee Guardian [NSW], 18 July 1901. 139 Australasian, 6 January 1866; Rev. Fulton, Illawarra Mercury [NSW], 17 September 1895. 140 R. Dickinson, Australasian, 6 January 1866. For this idea in earlier centuries, see Duiveman, ‘Praying’, 4–5. 141 On the controversies that attended efforts to identify specific sins in Britain, see Wolffe, ‘Judging the nation’, 296, 298. 142 J. Coffey, ‘“Tremble, Britannia!”: fear, providence, and the abolition of the slave trade, 1758–1807’, EHR, 127:527 (2012), 844–81. 143 Lang, National Sins, p. 14; Lake, ‘“Such Spiritual Acres”’, p. 295. 144 Coffey, ‘“Tremble, Britannia!’”, 872–5. 145 Colonist, 22 and 29 December 1838; Weekly Times [Melbourne], 20 September 1902; also ‘Two Samuel Twenty-one’, Kerang New Times [Victoria], 20 January 1903 and Bishop Barker of Sydney’s 1866 comments in A Sermon Preached at St. James’ Church, pp. 6–10. 146 Coffey, ‘“Tremble, Britannia!’”, 876.

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47 Western Star and Roma Advertiser [Queensland], 1 March 1884. 1 148 The correspondence is gathered in South Australian Register, 18 and 20 May 1897. 149 NSWSA, NRS906, 4/814.2, 78/1224, F. Rusden to P. King, 31 January 1878. 150 Duiveman, ‘Praying’, 2. 151 Maitland Mercury, 13 January 1866 and 13 February 1869. 152 Maryborough Chronicle, 15 November 1877; Garden, Droughts, pp. 194–5. 153 New South Wales Aborigines’ Advocate, 30 October 1907. Also see Australian Aborigines Advocate [NSW], 30 November 1912. 154 Bendigo Advertiser, 24 October 1865. 155 I. Clark, ‘Water’, in Cahir et al. (eds), Aboriginal Biocultural Knowledge, pp. 104–5. White settlers’ adoption of African rainmaking practices in southern Africa is noted in McKittrick, ‘Talking about the weather’, 14–15. 156 Bonyhady, Colonial Earth, pp. 292, 294. 157 Thomas, Man and the Natural World, pp. 89, 91; Barnett, ‘The theology of climate change’, 219. 158 Published sermons indicate that discussions about the abnormality or periodicity of drought, and the need to plant trees and work with the ‘laws of nature’, surfaced in Britain’s southern African colonies: a Presbyterian minister commented on those who ‘have neglected to obey the laws of nature’ in an 1866 sermon (Morgan, A Sermon Preached in the Scottish Church, p. 20). And, in 1878 a Cape Town preacher noted that if ‘we neglect His gifts, and refuse, as fellow-workers with Him, to prove the riches of His goodness, we must perish’ (H. Foot, Praying and Working: a sermon (Cape Town, 1878), pp. 12). 159 SMH, 17 November 2019; Hulme, Weathered, pp. 46–50. 160 M. Northcott, A Moral Climate: the ethics of global warming (Maryknoll, NY, 2007), p. 7. 161 D. Jones, ‘“Plant trees”: the foundations of Arbor Day in Australia’, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, 30:1 (2010), 77–93.

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Prayers for monarchy

Acts of prayer for royal events had an appeal much greater than other kinds of special worship. Even the disengaged noticed when British monarchs called their people to prayer. A NSW wool farmer named Robert McGeoch noted that Sunday 6 January 1918 had been ‘set apart by the King for prayer for peace’, even though no other special day – not even those in times of drought – was mentioned in his diary.1 Colonists displayed an enthusiasm for elaborate special acts of prayer at times of royal celebration, and some colonial states gave great effect to royal occasions when they issued proclamations to formally announce midweek thanksgivings for the Queen’s jubilees in 1887 and 1897. Here, perhaps, is evidence that attachment to monarchy became more intense the further one travelled from metropolitan Britain.2 Royal occasions became more noticeable, more elaborate and more ‘national’ towards the end of the nineteenth century. Before 1870, special worship for royal events took the form of special prayers for matters affecting the sovereign, such as births, illnesses and attempted assassinations, while religious commemoration of events that were not usually marked with religious services – that is, coronations, birthdays and funerals – was left to local ministers. Sovereigns rarely appeared at national thanksgiving services at Westminster Abbey or St Paul’s Cathedral. This all changed as the monarchy became a greater focus for patriotic and religious feeling in the later nineteenth century. There were more special prayers for royal events, the Queen attended big national thanksgiving services, and churches and communities across Britain and the empire organised their own events. The jubilees of 1887 and 1897 and the coronations of 1902 and 1911, as well as the memorial services for dead monarchs in 1901 and 1910, provided a focus for imperial unity in an age of colonial self-government and intensifying international competition.3 Royal events appealed because they had a personal quality lacking in other kinds of ‘national’ event. For centuries, the tradition of praying for the well-being of royalty had encouraged a degree of intimacy between

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worshippers and royals (since 1549 the Book of Common Prayer had ­ included prayers and suffrages for the sovereign, and prayers for the royal family were used from 1604).4 The previous chapter noted that observances of prayer days in times of drought could be patchy, as for many the cause was distant. By contrast, special prayers on royal occasions marked relatable events in the lives of sovereigns, such as illnesses, recoveries and the birth of children. Later, in 1868, Australian colonists thanked God that an assassin failed to kill Prince Alfred, Queen Victoria’s second son, and thanksgivings occurred across the empire when the Prince of Wales survived typhoid – a common killer – in 1872. A Canadian cleric imagined an anxious empire joining the royal family at the bedside of the ailing prince: ‘the heart of the kingdom’, the preacher said, had ‘throbbed with hope or sunk down in dismay as the fluctuation of the fever spoke of life or death’. Another said the royal family ‘seem very near to us, so that we can hear their heart beats and find them of like passions with ourselves’.5 Prayers, therefore, contributed to the idea, strong since George III’s time, that royals could be both ordinary as well as subjects for national celebration. They were exemplars too. In 1897 a Jewish rabbi echoed others when he commented on Queen Victoria’s ‘unstained life’, ‘womanly grace’, her ‘wondrous fidelity to the memory of the dead’ and ‘the purity of her domestic life’.6 Mark McKenna has written that monarchy in the colonial world was often an ‘act of imaginative re-creation’. Many kinds of occasion connected colonial communities to royalty and made the ‘idea’ of monarchy tangible.7 Australian colonies marked the birthdays of sovereigns and heirs to throne with public holidays in a way not seen in Britain, and from 1860, when the Prince of Wales visited Canada, royal tours brought colonists into physical proximity with royalty.8 Special acts of worship encouraged more distant, but equally intense, forms of connection between royalty and the people. Loyalism and attachment to monarchy were often expressed in terms of feeling and what one scholar has called an ‘emotional relationship’.9 Diary evidence reveals the extent to which settlers shared in the happiness, pain or grief of virtuous royals: on jubilees and the deaths of monarchs, people reflected on the passage of time and the loss of family members.10 An Australian preacher noted that the 1868 assassination attempt was a ‘public calamity’, but that ‘the intensity of sympathy for the sufferer’ made it a ‘private one’ too. Others, drawing on old ideas about the ‘body politic’, thought subjects felt pain when assassins hurt royals.11 The National Prayers volumes are the first works to provide evidence of the imperial scope of royal occasions,12 and this chapter builds on this research to examine more closely how and why the people of empire prayed for monarchy. Such a study is needed to further recent work that has connected the study of the monarchy and empire with religion, as well

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as broaden understandings of the multiple ways that colonial communities engaged with monarchy. The existing literature, which tends to concentrate on royal tours, has revealed much about ceremony and the symbolic power of the British monarchy, though the best work has moved further and revealed the meaning of royalty for local communities. Monarchy was not imposed on reluctant populations, nor could elite choreographers control the meaning of ceremonies and celebrations.13 This opening up of monarchy was evident in special worship too, because while the Crown authorities and Colonial Office made great effort to build a sense of imperial unity by involving overseas territories in royal events from the late nineteenth century, arrangements for jubilee and coronation celebrations was left to colonies and private citizens (this could exacerbate social conflicts, as public and religious bodies jostled for the best places in celebrations).14 Royal thanksgivings attracted observances from many colonial publics – indeed their inclusivity possibly extended beyond that of royal tours, as while prayer days could, like tours, give expression to ‘a vast diversity of voices’, such occasions reached communities that tour itineraries bypassed.15 For white settlers, the royal day of prayer was a festive moment, as well as an opportunity to express a complex of identifications and attachments, ranging from the imperial down to the local.16 For the less privileged, a royal thanksgiving, like a royal tour, was a moment to communicate grievances and demand subject status, though always through a constraining language of loyalty.17 The chapter makes the broad point that faith communities across the settler empire drew closer to monarchy as the nineteenth century progressed. Much of the story happened after 1870; before then the religious character of the monarchy was not made explicit or was confined, at least in Anglican churches, to daily prayers for royalty. Royal celebrations had a cliquish quality, and governors made little show of attending special occasions of worship. Even Anglicans did not always publicise or exploit their historic associations with the monarchy. All this changed in the late nineteenth century as colonial special worship exhibited the kind of ceremonial quality that became such a feature of British royal culture.18 Royal occasions happened more frequently and religious bodies with no history of establishment jostled for status and prestige. Monarchy also reset its relationship with organised religion. In a significant development, governors showed themselves at special religious services. The chapter’s first section argues that the movements of governors are an important register of the evolving relationship between the monarchy, and the Crown authorities more generally, and the empire’s varied faith communities. Governors who had once embodied Anglican privilege and the monarchy’s traditional Protestant identity gradually embraced a new status as the representative of a plurality of faiths,

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though difficulties during the coronations of 1902 and 1911 show that this journey was not smooth.19 The second section examines two Australian case studies to give a sense of why marginalised groups sought closer relations with monarchy. Australia’s growing Chinese population regarded Queen Victoria as a protectress and a point of appeal. The involvement of indigenous communities in Australia in royal celebration – particularly its religious aspects – may have been limited, yet in Australia, as in other parts of empire, indigenous peoples used royal occasions to speak directly to monarchs and their representatives. For Aboriginal communities, like others in empire, loyalty to monarchy was strategic, a means to assert British subject status and to extract concessions from the colonial power.20

Governors, national services and religious leadership Western monarchies are, in origin, sacred institutions. The books of the Old Testament cast the Israelite monarchs as religious leaders and community representatives: as one authority puts it, the biblical king assumed a ‘priestly and a representative role which involved leading his people in the worship of God, embodying the nation in a corporate persona and defending the land’. The New Testament added to this the model of the Christian monarch who imitated Christ and demonstrated comparable personal qualities and moral virtues, notably ‘righteousness, justice, mercy, wisdom, peace and humility’, as well as a ‘spirit of self-sacrifice’.21 These biblical models of spiritual monarchy have shaped the British monarchy, and for centuries sovereigns led the nation in prayer through the royal proclamations and other orders that announced fasts, thanksgivings and special prayers. Only occasionally in modern history, however, have sovereigns appeared at public services in major places of worship. Religious leadership has been best expressed in the large but rare state thanksgivings attended by the sovereign at St Paul’s Cathedral. Elaborate ceremonials held after military victories, peace treaties and other great political events had been relatively common during the reign of Queen Anne. But such services lapsed after 1715 and were only periodically revived: first, in 1789, when a state service and a royal procession formed part of thanksgiving celebrations for George III’s restoration to health; and then in 1797 for naval victories and in 1814 for peace with France. Though they could generate much attention, state thanksgivings were not an expected part of a monarch’s role on occasions of special worship.22 No central state service occurred after 1814, either because there was no reason to have one, or because Queen Victoria declined to attend. It was only towards the end of the period

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covered in this book that British monarchs became visible in empire-wide acts of special worship: the most striking instance came in wartime, when King George V issued a public letter – which was subsequently read out in churches – that called on the peoples of the dominions to observe 6 January 1918 as a ‘special day of prayer and thanksgiving’. The next year the British Government took the unprecedented step of issuing a single royal proclamation that commanded the Church of England (and requested all other churches) to hold thanksgiving services for the Versailles peace treaty.23 Most of the time it was left to governors, as the monarch’s representative, to provide leadership and to embody the links between Crown, Church and Christianity. Governors expressed a sense of religious leadership – and royal authority – through the proclamations that set aside days for worship.24 Curiously, however, governors rarely made themselves visible at public displays of corporate worship. When governors did lead populations in special worship – which happened from the 1880s – they faced the problem of how best to manage religious pluralism. An imperial monarchy that encompassed a diversity of peoples had to juggle a range of religious identities: the sovereign was supreme governor of the Church of England – the ‘Defender of the Faith’ – as well as the protector of the Church of Scotland (and, after 1858, Indian religions), as well as liberty of conscience more generally. Would officials attend the Church of England, which some regarded as the empire’s established church? Would they encourage multi-denominational gatherings, or attend multiple church services? Was it politic for a British governor to witness Roman Catholic mass? How colonial governors negotiated these difficulties reveals much about how an ‘Anglican monarchy’ was repositioned, in stages, as a symbol of a broad Protestantism, an inclusive Christianity and possibly even a generalised ‘civil’ religion. Certainly, the monarchy’s embrace of religious pluralism proceeded at a faster pace ­overseas than it did in Britain.25

Royal ceremony and elite celebration in the early second empire Before the 1870s, newspapers said little about how governors and official entourages observed special days of worship. The newly appointed lieutenant governor of Victoria, Charles Hotham, attended a fast-day ­ service for the Crimean War in Melbourne’s St James’ Cathedral in 1854, but such reports were exceptional.26 Possibly the attendance of governors was not remarked on as it was customary; alternatively, governors may have followed Queen  Victoria and observed fasts and thanksgivings ­privately  – certainly this undemonstrative style was in keeping with the spirit and devout character of days of fasting and thanksgiving. Services at the largest Anglican places of worship were not showpiece occasions, nor

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did colonial elites make their involvement the focus of public observances. For a time in Nova Scotia in the early nineteenth century the attendance of governors at Halifax’s main Anglican church was made visible as a ceremonial occasion, but this effort to add lustre to the church–state connection did not last.27 The same was true of royal celebrations. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, celebrations of these in the colonies either passed without religious observances, or they engaged few colonists. George III’s jubilee – an entirely new kind of occasion – was apparently marked with ‘great ceremony’ at Halifax, Nova Scotia and there was an exclusive ball in Quebec, but in neither place, it seems, were thanksgiving prayers offered (as happened in England in October 1809).28 Royal occasions that included church services tended to be dominated by the military and the colonial elite. When news of George III’s death and the accession of George IV reached NSW in July 1820, Governor Lachlan Macquarie commanded civil and military officers, as well as the ‘principal Inhabitants of the Territory’, to process from government house to St Philip’s church, where all would ‘join in returning humble Thanks to Almighty God’.29 Limited public participation in royal events was normal in England as well as the colonies until the last decades of the nineteenth century.30 The military men who governed in this era worried about the political ramifications of involving colonial publics that, in the case of Australia and southern Africa, did not have free presses or representative institutions. In early Australia, royal birthdays – a secular celebration – were marked by fireworks, salutes, military parades, exclusive levees and balls, as well as pardons for convicts. The earliest foundation days in the Australian colonies – Macquarie ordered the first in NSW in 1818 – involved military salutes, public holidays, regattas, sports, balls and dinners, but no religious ceremony. Thomas Brisbane, governor from 1821 to 1825, avoided public displays altogether: not even George IV’s birthday was formally observed in his time.31 In Canada, rituals that communicated the authority of governors and which might have had a more ‘national’ quality, such as the opening of parliament, or the laying of cornerstones of public buildings, only involved small groups of people.32 The Cape Government avoided marking public occasions with holidays, and as was already noted, communities of English- and Dutch-speaking settlers celebrated their own foundation and ­anniversary days.33 Not even the Church of England, the religious body closest to monarchy, made much of royal celebration. Anglicans offered special thanksgiving prayers when Queen Victoria gave birth and survived assassination attempts,34 but other reminders of the Church’s special position went ­unpublicised. Two of the four royal anniversary services that were appended

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to the Book of Common Prayer – the 30 January fast day for the ‘martyrdom’ of Charles I, and the 29 May thanksgiving for the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 – are hardly mentioned in nineteenth-century colonial records, and the services were neglected in England too.35 The counter-­ revolutionary sermon that Charles Inglis delivered in New York on 30 January 1780 – it was titled ‘the duty of honouring the King’ – was the last of its type to be published in a British colony. A ‘cult’ of King Charles may have been kept up in the colonies, but presumably later clergymen, operating in less fevered times, shrank from delivering sermons that, in emphasising loyalty, non-resistance and submission to authority, could only be overtly political.36 A festive gathering for ‘Oak Apple Day’ (a name sometimes given to 29 May) was reported near Sydney in 1830, and a NSW newspaper remarked on the 1660 anniversary in 1846, though only to note ‘how long holidays and observances may survive, after the motives for their first institution have ceased to operate’.37 In the United Kingdom, an 1859 royal warrant discontinued the use of both these anniversary services, as by then they seemed obsolete and outdated. The third anniversary service, the one that commemorated the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot on 5 November and William III’s arrival in 1688, had a monarchical character (it gave thanks for the ‘wonderful and mighty deliverance’ of the monarchy from ‘Popish treachery’, and asked God to ‘strengthen the hands’ of the current sovereign), and seems to have been more widely used (the occasional Protestant missionary used it to educate indigenous peoples about English history, and to damage Catholic missions), but it too was discontinued in 1859.38 Use of the fourth royal anniversary service appended to the Book of Common Prayer, the thanksgiving for the sovereign’s accession, was also infrequent, or its usage was so routine as not to be newsworthy. Showpiece Anglican services on accession day were either not reported, or did not take place.39 It is likely that, as in the British Isles, use of the service lapsed in the colonies because the date usually fell in the middle of the week. The few colonial sermons on royal themes that survive from the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century suggest that nineteenth-century colonial churchmen, like their predecessors in colonial America, preferred to honour Queen Victoria on her birthday (a civil occasion for which the Book of Common Prayer did not provide a service). Birthdays seemed less political than accession anniversaries, and one could dwell on the personal qualities of monarchs.40 Other reasons that churchmen gave for not using the accession service was that it interfered with other religious festivals (the anniversary of Queen Victoria’s accession was close to Trinity Sunday), and that it had not been authorised by convocation, the Church’s governing body. The few clergymen who pointed out these conflicts – they tended to be high

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churchmen who valued church independence – are a useful reminder that the Church of England juggled loyalty to monarchy with the pursuit of ecclesiastical agendas.41 Special worship may, then, have prompted widespread observance on the same day across a territory, but in the colonies, as in Britain, before the 1870s it was not focused on a central religious ceremony in a capital or main town, nor was it led by a chief public official acting as a ‘national’ or ‘sovereign’ figurehead. It is questionable whether small colonial settlements even possessed such ‘national’ figures. Governors seemed to lead privileged ­factions, not communities of people. In Australia, reform-minded newspaper editors complained that the government-house balls reflected the exclusiveness of a conservative colonial regime that shut the people out of power.42 Sydney and Cape Town have been represented as gossipy places where personal behaviour was closely scrutinised, and where negative press comment harmed the reputations of senior officials. Some governors, notably Lord Charles Somerset (governor of the Cape Colony from 1814 to 1826) and Ralph Darling (NSW, 1825–31), were much disliked and frequently subject to public vituperation. In Upper Canada, radicals around William Lyon MacKenzie denounced Sir John Colborne (lieutenant governor from 1828 to 1836) as a partisan despot.43 Governors might be regarded as unfit to lead the people in prayer. A Natalian considered it a ‘mockery’ and ‘downright hypocrisy’ that the lieutenant governor, Benjamin Pine, should order the people to fast during the Crimean War in 1854, because, according to the correspondent, Pine’s many failings included lying, swearing, slander, bribery and sabbath desecration.44 One historian has argued that the royal ceremonies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries presented the Hanoverian monarch as ‘more the head of society than the head of a nation’.45 Similar can be said of colonial governors in the same period. The circumscribed nature of ceremonial culture in the colonial world mirrored the situation in Britain. As David Cannadine has shown, until the 1870s great royal ceremonies, such as coronations, ‘were not so much shared, corporate events as remote, inaccessible group rites, performed for the benefit of the few rather than the edification of the many’.46 While Cannadine underappreciates the impressiveness of these occasions, royal funerals did take place in private, and the clergy and the court officers, the people tasked with lending such events a dignified element, could be unfamiliar or averse to elaborate ecclesiastical ritual. Few settler societies could host stately religious ceremonies. The Cape Colony had no senior clergy until mid-century and it was not until 1835 that an Anglican church, complete with a locally built organ, opened in Cape Town. An Anglican choir had been formed in 1830 to sing at ‘English Church’ services at Cape Town’s main Dutch Reformed church, but the standard of singing was

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apparently variable, and poor pay made recruiting organists difficult. ‘Full cathedral services’ featuring sung anthems and hymns by trained (and robed) choirs would only be introduced by slow degrees by Gray, the high church bishop, after 1848. St James’, Sydney’s modest Anglican church, had an organ and choir from the 1820s, but criticisms of the quality of singing and music appeared in newspapers throughout the 1820s and 1830s.47

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Colonial royal ceremonial and Anglican privilege from 1872 All this changed in the final three decades of the nineteenth century. The British story is well known. In 1872, William Gladstone, as prime minister, convinced Victoria to re-engage with public life and attend a national thanksgiving service at St Paul’s Cathedral for her son’s recovery. The cathedral service was designed as a great anti-republican performance, observed by a national audience. The royal family processed through the streets of London to the cathedral, where the archbishop of Canterbury presided over a service that was attended by 12,000 invited guests who supposedly represented the United Kingdom’s range of public and religious bodies (the presence of several Indian and foreign princes gave some representation to Islam and Hinduism). In the following decades, the position of the monarch was ‘ceremonially enhanced’ by more frequent and more extravagant observances of royal events. The 1887 and 1897 jubilees and the 1902 coronation (as well as the end of the South African War the same year) were marked by large thanksgiving services at either Westminster Abbey or St Paul’s, and it was now conventional for sovereigns to make themselves visible (though not always in ‘ceremonial state’) as the symbolic focus of national worship at such ‘centrepiece public services’.48 The model of the ‘national thanksgiving service’ was now replicated in the colonial world. Every colony had bishops and archbishops, provincial centres boasted impressive cathedrals, and organs and choirs improved the quality of sung services and anthems. Governors, too, seemed more like the leading representative of colonial societies, and now appeared as symbols of constitutional monarchy, titular figures who stood above politics and partisanship.49 In 1902, the year of the coronation, newspapers referred to the largest thanksgiving ceremonies as ‘state functions’ and ‘official state services’. In Australia, governors and governors general made greater show of leading their populations in praying for or giving thanks for rain (October 1898, February 1902 and February 1904) and in offering thanks for federation (January 1901), as well as peace in South Africa and the end of drought.50 Anglicans now broadcast the royalism of the Book of Common Prayer. In Australia, use of the accession service spread after 1875, a year when

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the date – 20 June – fell on a Sunday. The better reporting of accession day services from this time is not easily explained, though examples from the Australian colonies suggest that the use of the service intensified before and after jubilee years, and around notable royal birthdays.51 On the one hand it was another element in the new emphasis on the religious aspect of monarchy – surviving Anglican accession-day sermons presented monarchs as God’s servants and contained frequent reminders of the good things that came to societies that ‘feared God’ and ‘honoured the King’.52 On the other, it reflected the outlook of an increasingly confident Church of England that was reconnecting with both nation and empire. The Church of England, a Melbourne minister said on accession day in 1875, had an advantage over ‘other communities’ as its ‘religious life is in harmony with our national life’.53 For George V’s accession anniversary in May 1916, Percival Waddy, the Australian-born headmaster of Sydney’s King’s School, called the Anglican Church both the ‘national church’ of England and the ‘Catholic Church of Australia’. The latter status made sense, he claimed, because the Anglican was ‘the first Church planted in these lands’.54 Still, in 1872, the year of the Prince of Wales thanksgiving, nothing in the colonies compared to the service in London. The congregation at Toronto’s Anglican cathedral was treated to hymns and anthems, though the gathering was described as ‘not large’. An order went out for members of the militia to wear full uniform, but few attended and there was no mention of governors or official retinues. In Quebec, by contrast, the thanksgiving was apparently celebrated with ‘great éclat’ by a congregation at the Roman Catholic cathedral that included the lieutenant governor, judges, military officers, university professors and lawyers. In other Canadian centres mayors and civil officials attended church services in Anglican cathedrals, though the secondary importance of the colonial events was captured by the Halifax editor who noted that London was ‘the centre of attraction’. A Montreal editor wrote in similar vein when he remarked that Canadian thanksgiving celebrations lacked ‘pomp and pageant’. The occasion, the editor continued, could not be a ‘great national act’, as Canadians ‘have not her Majesty in our midst’ and there would be ‘no sight to attract a multitude, no show to live in the memory or history’.55 Members of local military forces attended thanksgiving services in the main centres and largest places of worship in the Australian and South African colonies, and some cathedrals, notably St Peter’s in Natal, offered extensive and impressive musical programmes. The attendance of governors at these services was, though, not widely reported.56 Things improved for Queen Victoria’s jubilees. There was better communication across the empire and within colonies, and in both 1887 and 1897 the Colonial Office sent governors copies of the orders that authorised

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the use of forms of prayer and the national services in London (in 1887 the service took place in Westminster Abbey; in 1897 the Queen’s poor health required a shorter service in the open-air outside St Paul’s Cathedral). Governors, then, were well placed to lead the observances of jubilees in their colonies.57 Colonial ‘national’ services were created or ‘invented’ in similar styles to those described by Cannadine. An Adelaide newspaper reported a ‘thoroughly representative’ service in the Anglican cathedral in  1887: it included the governor, William Robinson, MPs, senior civil servants, leading ministers of non-Anglican religious bodies and ‘influential colonists irrespective of sect or creed’. In Brisbane, Governor Anthony Musgrave participated in a parade of the military and naval forces before attending, in uniform, the Anglican cathedral. A local newspaper considered the jubilee thanksgiving service at Hobart’s cathedral a ‘national act of public worship’, as it was attended by the city council and civil and military officials, and the arrival of the governor – the Scot, Robert Hamilton – occasioned much fanfare.58 A Western Australian journalist referred to the ‘stateliness’ of the service at Perth’s Anglican cathedral, while the service at St Andrew’s, Sydney was said to be ‘in every respect representative’ as the congregation included the heads of the Baptist and Congregational Unions. At Maritzburg, Natal, the governor, Arthur Havelock, staff and members of the executive council appeared in full state dress at St Saviour’s Anglican cathedral to participate in an ‘impressive’ and ‘crowded’ service that featured special prayers and sung anthems, as well as versicles and responses from the accession service.59 In Canada and Newfoundland, the largest jubilee thanksgiving services happened after parades and processions by the ‘Sons of England’ and other ethnic and benevolent associations. Such demonstrations were supposed to emphasise the national and representative quality of church services. For the 1897 jubilee in Ottawa, for example, a variety of fraternal societies – not just ‘English’ ones – processed to a service at Christ Church Cathedral, and in St. John’s, Newfoundland a similar procession preceded an Anglican cathedral service that featured the stately entry of the governor and the singing of the national anthem. The singing of the anthem – it took place at 4pm local time – was one part of a continuous and collective ‘wave of song’, organised and coordinated by the Sons of England, that circled the globe and knitted together imperial communities in a powerful statement of unity and loyalty to monarchy and empire.60 The problem for governors was how to maintain the monarch’s traditional Anglican identity while representing members of different churches and different faiths. Constitutionally, the attendance of governors at Anglican places of worship made sense; it also reflected a feeling, strong in some quarters, that Anglicanism was the established faith of the empire. As

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late as 1897 one protectionist Australian newspaper called the Church of England the ‘mother Church of New South Wales’.61 The mixed and large – some were described as ‘overflowing’ – congregations that gathered at ‘representative’ cathedral services in Australian cities for the 1887 and 1897 jubilees indicate that many members of the public shared the assumption that national services on royal occasions were properly held at Anglican places of worship.62 Bishop Kennion of Adelaide told the diverse congregation that assembled at St Peter’s Cathedral in 1887 (it included representatives of other Protestant churches) that they had gathered ‘not by constraint or under the requirement of an Established Church’, but ‘in the exercise of the very liberty’ that was South Australian’s ‘boast’.63 ‘National’ services at Anglican places of worship, attended by governors, made clear the Church of England’s public association with monarchy extended to empire.

Royal ceremonial and religious pluralism Not everyone accepted these arguments. Commentators pointed out that the Adelaide event was an Anglican occasion, not a national one, as the representatives of other faiths did not speak or do anything of consequence. Westminster Abbey was a ‘national institution’ and the proper focus for Britain’s jubilee thanksgivings; Adelaide’s cathedral was, by contrast, only a ‘denominational’ building.64 An indication of future developments came in Melbourne in 1887, when the president of the legislative council attended a united thanksgiving service in the town hall along with 4,500 other people. A choir, formed from Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregational and Baptist churches, provided music, though interestingly the Anglican bishop of Melbourne – described by a Congregational minister as ‘the leading Christian pastor of the city’ – gave the first speech.65 South Australia, always keen to display its history of religious voluntarism, went further in 1897 when its governor, the evangelical Anglican Thomas Fowell Buxton (grandson of the famous abolitionist), attended a united Protestant service in one of Adelaide’s Methodist churches.66 The presence of governors at such venues and services was part of the process by which, in the words of John Wolffe, the British monarchy was repositioned to ‘represent an interdenominational and non-sectarian Protestantism’, as opposed to ‘a more narrowly Anglican and explicitly anti-Catholic one’.67 Although the representative 1872 state thanksgiving in St Paul’s Cathedral was an important moment, the transition from Anglicanism to Protestantism was more advanced in the cosmopolitan and increasingly democratic societies of the colonial world: only after the First World War would a British sovereign make the ‘momentous’ move of attending special services in England at nonconformist places of worship

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(or ‘free churches’ as they were now called).68 When Cape Town gave thanks for the end of the South African War in June 1902, Governor Walter Hely-Hutchinson attended a service at the Anglican St George’s Cathedral before joining an ‘enormous’ congregation at an opera house for a general service organised by an interdenominational body, the Evangelical Church Council.69 The federation of Australia in 1901 prompted governors to present themselves as the leaders of a plurality of religious communities. To mark the inauguration of the Commonwealth, the governor general – the Earl of Hopetoun – attended a thanksgiving service chaired by a Presbyterian minister at Sydney town hall.70 Such a neutral space was the appropriate venue for the expression of an Australian national religion, as the new Commonwealth had no state church; indeed, its constitution prohibited any sort of religious favouritism. For the coronation in 1902, Hopetoun directed that combined and inclusive religious services be held in all state capitals. The aim, he said, was to give emphasis to what was revealingly called the ‘Christian constitution of the British Crown’.71 After much organisation (which were complicated when King Edward fell ill and the coronation was moved from June to August), united services, attended by governors, took place in neutral venues in NSW, Queensland and South Australia.72 A variety of Protestant denominations shared the responsibility for the content and delivery of the services.73 The governors of Victoria and South Australia made inclusive gestures when they attended coronation services at Presbyterian places of worship, though these episodes were less dramatic than other events, as since 1707 the monarchy had been bound by constitutional oath to sustain the Church of Scotland. Some empire officials went further and associated the highest civil authority with a generalised civil religion, one that better reflected the pluralism of colonial communities. The mayor of Toronto, for example, attended – at special request – a Jewish synagogue for the 1887 jubilee.74 More problematic, however, were governors’ relations with Catholic places of worship.

Roman Catholic loyalty and the British monarchy An earlier chapter noted that Roman Catholics had always had a problematic relationship with ‘national’ and state-appointed acts of special worship, but royal events presented particular difficulties, as since 1689 the monarchy had, in constitutional terms, been anti-Catholic: indeed, as will be explained below, this anti-Catholicism was made explicit in the declaration that new British sovereigns made on their accession. Nevertheless, Roman Catholics in Britain, Ireland and the colonies pressed the monarchy to realise what one scholar has called the monarchy’s ‘ecumenical p ­ otentialities’.75 This

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pressure had effect. Though the situation varied from colony to colony, in all parts of the empire monarchical representatives appeared at more special church services and developed closer relations with Catholics. Indeed, by the early twentieth century, governors had embraced expanded roles as the protectors and leaders of a generalised Christianity.76 Roman Catholics had various reasons for welcoming closer ties with the monarchy. The toasts to Queen Victoria offered at St Patrick’s Day dinners in Sydney in the 1840s demonstrate how far expressions of loyalty fed into a search for social acceptance and good citizenship. Concern that rising migration from Ireland would bring a more confrontational community to Australia perhaps explains why in March 1843 John Bede Polding, the English archbishop, ordered prayers for the monarch and the governor to be included before or after mass.77 The Catholic hierarchy’s enthusiasm for participating in occasions of special worship was in part a defence mechanism. In Canada, questions about Catholic loyalty and commitment to their new home grew more insistent as Catholic immigration from eastern Europe increased and as French Canadians expressed misgivings about Canadian involvement in the South African War and the First World War.78 Polding was so sensitive that in 1868, following the assassination attempt on Prince Alfred, he ordered NSW Catholics to join ‘the body of Australians’ in observing a public thanksgiving on the same Tuesday as Protestants, even though Catholics had already offered a ‘solemn Thanksgiving’ on a Sunday previously.79 Attachment to monarchy remained important as control of Australian Catholicism passed from English to Irish hands. The most senior Roman Catholic in late nineteenth century Australia, Cardinal Patrick Moran, has been described as the ‘great integrator’ who sought to ‘fit Catholics into a diverse community in which each element would accept all others on the basis of tolerance and respect’.80 Loyalty to a British monarchy that symbolised religious freedom was crucial to this vision of national harmony and imperial loyalty. In an 1897 jubilee sermon, for example, Moran connected the spread of Catholicism in Australia and the progress of the empire to the extension of civil and religious liberty that had characterised Victoria’s reign.81 To confirm their attachment to monarchy and empire, Catholics sought recognition from the monarchy through special religious services. The civil authorities reciprocated because so many Catholics served in Britain’s armed forces and because the loyalty of Catholic priests would help maintain civil peace and social stability.82 The presence of a governor at a Roman Catholic place of worship in Quebec for the 1872 thanksgiving – noted earlier – is not remarkable, as ever since the 1770s – when legislation was passed that accorded Catholics rights and liberties unknown in the rest of the empire – relations between the state and the Catholic hierarchy in

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the colony had been friendly; indeed, the Catholic church was regarded as the province’s established church.83 In early Australia governors had long cultivated the loyalty of Irish subjects; Governor Macquarie, for example, laid the foundation stone of Sydney’s first Catholic church. More striking was that Australian governors attended Sydney’s Roman Catholic cathedral as part of Australia’s centenary celebrations in 1888. Later writers considered the ‘gathering of seven Protestant Governors within the sanctuary of a Catholic Cathedral’ a crucial moment, one that signified the acceptance of Roman Catholicism in the Australian polity.84 Federation in 1901 encouraged closer associations with Roman Catholicism. The governor general and the governor of Victoria attended a service to mark the coronation in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne, in June 1902, while celebrations of the 1911 coronation in Perth included a Catholic mass performed in the presence of the governor, Gerald Strickland, the colonial secretary and the speaker of the legislative assembly. Strickland was the third Roman Catholic to serve as a governor in Australia, and he, like the Duke of Norfolk in England (as earl marshal, Norfolk was the man responsible for arranging the coronation ceremonies of Edward VII and George V), attended mass at royal events for religious rather than political reasons. The empire’s varied Catholic populations did not all think alike. In French-speaking Canada a split emerged between recalcitrant lay communities and a Catholic hierarchy that maintained friendly relations with British institutions that, in Quebec at least, were considered to have protected the rights and religious freedom of Catholics. Catholic ecclesiastical leaders offered prayers and supplications to British royalty, even, on occasion, instructing their congregations to sing the national anthem after mass.85 Lay communities evinced a more varied set of responses. Francophone ‘patriotes’ – the people associated with the rebellions in Quebec in 1837 and 1838 – responded angrily when the Catholic hierarchy ordered Te Deums on Victoria’s accession in August 1837. At St Polycarpe, west of Montreal, patriotes halted a service when the priest praised the new monarch; they also prevented the church bell from being rung – the group was reported to have said the ‘bell belonged to them, and not the Queen of England’.86 Radical Irish nationalist newspapers, notably Toronto’s Irish Canadian, paid no notice to the 1872 Prince of Wales thanksgiving, and in 1887 Canadian Irish Catholic newspapers printed much about the misjustices of British rule in Ireland. Patrick Boyle, the veteran Irish nationalist editor of the Irish Canadian, said he would ‘pay honor to her Majesty Queen Victoria on personal grounds’ but added that ‘to parade in honor of the “glories” of her reign is something that few Irishmen will do’. Ontario’s most senior Roman Catholic, Archbishop John Lynch, refused to order special services for the 1887 jubilee.87 In subsequent decades, however, old

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differences between French- and English-speakers came to define Catholic responses to monarchy. Disagreements among Irish Catholics on whether Ireland should seek complete independence or maintain its ties to the British Crown as a self-governing dominion dissipated as loyalty to Canada came to outweigh older Irish attachments. In 1897 Canadian Catholics heard sermons that argued that loyalty to monarchy increased wherever home rule had been granted, and that Ireland should have the same kind of constitutional status as Canada. As one Catholic clergyman put it at a jubilee service in Toronto, ‘Canada is loyal because she is free, and it was Queen Victoria who made her free’.88 French Canadian opposition to the South African War, which was primarily expressed by the lay communities and politicians rather than the Catholic hierarchy, indicated that while loyalty to monarchy strengthened among those of Irish descent, it was weakening in francophone communities.89 The accession of Edward VII in 1901 was a more general test of Catholic loyalty, as the event revealed that the monarchy had not, in constitutional terms at least, fully embraced ecumenicalism and religious freedom. Indeed, the accession and the coronation captured in text the monarchy’s – as well as the British Parliament’s – institutional association with a long history of religious prejudice, discrimination and anti-Catholicism. At the start of his reign the new king was bound by law to read out an accession declaration and a coronation oath, the forms of which had remained unchanged since William III’s time. The declaration, which was read out either at the first parliament or during the coronation (whichever came first), was much more offensive than the oath the king read at the coronation. While the latter was an affirmation of faith – it asked the monarch to commit to protecting the ‘Protestant Reformed religion’ and the ‘doctrine, worship and discipline’ of the Church of England – the declaration was, as numerous Catholics pointed out, blatantly anti-Catholic, as it forced the king to say that the Catholic mass, and the beliefs of millions of British subjects, were ‘­superstitious and idolatrous’.90 Catholics in the empire mobilised to express their disquiet about the declaration while Queen Victoria was still alive. According to a recent account, the Canadian agitation began in late 1898 when a former vicerector of  the University of Ottawa, Michael Fallon, delivered a series of addresses that condemned the declaration as offensive, discriminatory and at odds with the empire’s commitment to denominational equality. After Victoria’s death, numerous commentators in the Canadian press, as well as speakers at a protest meeting in Halifax, Nova Scotia, argued that the declaration appeared particularly objectionable as Catholic soldiers had died for the monarchy in the South African War. In March 1901 – a month after an embarrassed Edward VII reluctantly gave the declaration – Canada’s

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federal Parliament resolved by 125 votes to nineteen that an address be sent to the king demanding that the declaration be abolished. The resolution, which was composed by John Costigan, Canada’s most prominent Irish Catholic politician, complained that Catholics were the only religion in the empire to be officially branded as false.91 The amendment issue raised important questions not only about monarchy’s religious identity, but also about the nature of imperial nationality and the relationship between colonies and metropolitan Britain. The declaration’s Protestant defenders said Canadians had no right to pronounce on a British issue, and the limited support francophones gave to the amendment campaign in the early stages reflected a belief – strong in the Catholic hierarchy – that francophones should avoid imperial and British affairs and concentrate on Canadian issues. Some French speakers worried that amendment would throw into doubt Catholic loyalty, while for others the major benefit, religious freedom, had been won.92 Nevertheless, French Canadian support spread once francophone bishops joined their Englishspeaking counterparts in publicly stating their support for amendment in April 1901. Even before then, Canada’s Catholic prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier, had backed amendment because he considered the declaration ‘painful to Roman Catholic subjects who honour their King, and are loyal to him’. In the same debate the French Canadian politician Henri Bourassa agreed with Laurier, Fallon and others that the ‘sovereign of England should be a Protestant’, but that amendment would ‘enable the sovereign to be considered not only as the king of a certain portion of his subjects, but as the king of all his subjects in this vast empire’.93 An appreciative Toronto Catholic newspaper reckoned all this showed that ‘the spirit of intolerance’ was ‘rapidly dying away in Canada’, while an Ottawa paper indicated that Catholic loyalty was conditional when it said King Edward had ‘been served with notice’ that the coronation declaration was ‘an insult to Catholics and will not be tolerated’.94 Catholics in India, Malta, Australia and South Africa also mobilised.95 In June 1901 the Australian prime minister, Edmund Barton, received a protest from Catholic archbishops and bishops which described the declaration an ‘insult’, ‘an outrage against common sense’ and ‘an infringement of the religious equality’ to which everyone was ‘entitled by the Constitution of this Commonwealth’. Barton favoured amendment, and Protestant groups expressed support.96 In February 1902 Catholics in Cape Town gathered against the terms of the declaration and the coronation oath,97 but in neither Australia or South Africa did protest advance as far as it did in Canada, as in both countries Catholics lacked the numbers to give their objections weight. Possibly, too, Protestant opposition was particularly visible and powerful in Australia. A meeting described in the press as ‘large’

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gathered in Sydney in May 1901 to petition the federal Parliament and protest any alteration in the declaration and oath.98 It was also the case that metropolitan Catholics – most notably Cardinal Vaughan, archbishop of Westminster and England’s senior Catholic – particularly encouraged the Canadian agitation.99 An amended declaration was presented to the British Parliament in July 1901, and though it did not pass, Catholic clergy in the colonies still celebrated Edward VII’s coronation – most recognised that loyalty to the Crown could still be expressed while such historic relics remained in place. The declaration and oath remained of great significance for many rankand-file Catholics. Two Catholic councillors in Victoria’s Yarrawonga region refused to join their fellows in attending a special religious service for the coronation. Marcel-François Richard, a New Brunswick priest active in the survival of francophone Acadian culture in the Maritimes, boycotted the event and urged Laurier not to attend the coronation service in London.100 Most Catholics, however, followed the lead of the members of the church hierarchy and agreed that observances of the coronation were permissible as the declaration formed no part of the service and celebrations. A South Australian Catholic newspaper, for example, considered the coronation oath ‘quite unexceptional’, though it added that ‘Catholics cannot divest the ceremony of the significance which has been attached to it by the terms of the declaration’.101 Expressions of Catholic loyalty had freer vent for the 1911 coronation, as by then the British Parliament had passed government legislation to amend the declaration. The one read by George V affirmed the monarchy’s broad Protestant identity and did not repudiate particular doctrines, so did not offend Catholics. Four times before then (in 1903, 1904, 1905 and 1908) bills for the abolition or amendment of the declaration had been introduced but rejected by Parliament. Empire was a powerful argument for the supporters of amendment. At least one of these bills – Earl Grey’s 1903 measure – took into account the interests of Canadian Catholics when it was introduced,102 and when amendment finally came in 1910, contributors to the parliamentary debate – including Herbert Asquith, the prime ­minister – referenced the sentiments of imperial Catholics. Though domestic (and Irish) pressures were decisive, the protests of colonial communities – both the Canadian and Australian Parliaments passed resolutions – helped reshape the Protestant constitution and the Crown’s relationship with Catholicism. As several MPs pointed out, the sovereign ruled a multi-faith empire, not just a Protestant England.103 To celebrate the coronation and the amendment of the declaration, Bishop Adelard Langevin, a passionate advocate of French Canadian culture, directed that the national anthem be sung in all coronation-day services in his Manitoba diocese. Patrick

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Phelan, the home-rule supporting dean of Melbourne, said Catholics, like all ­citizens, owed loyalty to monarchy, but that this coronation was special, as George V was the first sovereign who had been relieved of the ‘odious duty of insulting his Catholic subjects’.104 Militant Protestants clung to narrow definitions of the monarchy’s religious identity. The campaign to safeguard the Protestant constitution was, like its adversary, empire-wide and networked. Evangelical Protestant organisations such as the Imperial Protestant Federation and Church Association and National Protestant League had colonial branches, and whenever proposals for amendment surfaced these organisations gathered signatures from petitioners across the empire, and particularly from Australia.105 Individuals carried on defence campaigns locally. A Brisbane archdeacon would not participate in a united service for the 1902 coronation as he believed the coronation was an Anglican service, and that what he called the ‘Church of the English people’ should provide an ‘official service’ to which ‘all members of the community could come’.106 Opposition to the appointment of Roman Catholic governors intensified.107 NSW’s Evangelical Council expressed ‘surprise’ when the governors of NSW and Queensland attended the opening of St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney in September 1900. How, the body asked, could the Queen’s representatives observe the Catholic mass, something which ‘her Majesty herself is by oath disallowed from doing’?108 Governors may have represented ‘all sections of society’, but this was only true in a ‘civic sense’, not a religious one. As one prominent Australian Protestant put it, Catholics had ‘no part in the Coronation’, and even Roman Catholic governors should confine themselves to attending coronation services ‘in the English Church as the King’s representative’.109 The story of governors’ relationships with special worship is a reminder that ‘the institutions of the empire’ were ‘more flexible and accommodating’ than those in Britain.110 For some commentators, the empire-wide occasions of special worship of the early twentieth century demonstrated that the British monarchy had embraced a new identity as a multi-faith institution. A Presbyterian clergyman, speaking on a day of intercession in January 1915 in Johannesburg, considered King George V a multi-denominational prayer leader; or, as the preacher strikingly put it, ‘the Muezzin of the Christian Church’.111 Though undoubtedly there was, by the turn of the  twentieth century, much more official recognition of the multi-faith nature of empire, the clergyman’s rhetoric was too excited. Anti-Catholicism did not disappear, and vestiges of the monarchy’s Anglican identity remained when it spread overseas. Several Australian governors made a special point of attending Anglican cathedrals for the 1902 coronation before moving to multi-faith services, and at united services in Hobart and Adelaide the first

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address was delivered by a senior Anglican clergyman. The ‘official state service’ for the coronation at St. John’s, Newfoundland occurred in the Anglican cathedral, and Earl Minto, Canada’s governor general, observed the occasion at Quebec’s Anglican cathedral. Officials, including the mayor, attended the Anglican services in Johannesburg for the 1911 coronation, and Sydney Buxton, governor general of South Africa, did similar for most wartime days of intercession. Like the reigning monarchs, colonial governors struggled to reconcile a commitment to religious pluralism with the old attachments with the Church of England.112

Monarchy and the marginalised Preachers made much of the multi-faith appeal of royal thanksgivings. The thanksgiving celebrations that followed the recovery of the Prince of Wales prompted one Cape Town preacher to remark that ‘a united empire’ had spoken to the divine in a ‘common voice’. A Canadian Presbyterian said similar when he said the prince’s life had been saved by the combined prayers of Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists.113 The political context did much to determine how far marginalised communities engaged with corporate special worship and embraced an identity as British subjects. Royalty may have served as an integrative symbol for the new Canadian nation, but political troubles in the late 1880s, most notably the aftermath of the 1885 north-west rebellion, delayed expressions of French Canadian loyalty until the 1897 jubilee.114 Allegiance to monarchy was conditional and fluctuated among Afrikaners too. Afrikaner royalism, coordinated by the Bond, was noticeable at the 1887 jubilee, but a bloody and divisive war explains why Cape Town’s English-language press reported ‘meagre’ attendances at Dutch Reformed churches for coronation thanksgivings in 1902.115 Indians in Natal fought social discrimination by boycotting celebrations of the 1911 coronation: community representatives told the Durban town council that Indians could not ‘share in the common rejoicings’ while a racist white society branded as ‘undesirables’ the ‘British Indian Colonists of Natal’. Yet Gandhi still used his Indian Opinion editorial to express the Indian attachment to monarchy, as, in his words, ‘British sovereigns represent, in theory, purity and equality of justice.’116 Despite such guarded loyalty, there is much evidence that numerous churches and faiths admired and sought closer relations with the m ­ onarchy. As in Britain, the leaders of the Catholic and non-Anglican Protestant churches recognised that such associations might confirm their churches’ position within the national community. Involvement in royal thanksgivings was a powerful statement that a plurality of faiths made up the nation

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and the empire. Jewish communities similarly thanked monarchy for its shielding care. Afrikaners who saw advantages in empire were so keen to demonstrate their monarchism that in times of drought they addressed petitions for days of humiliation to Queen Victoria herself.117 This final section considers the evidence that Chinese and Aboriginal Australians used special occasions of worship to demonstrate their attachment to monarchy. Undoubtedly, white missionaries did much to orchestrate associations between marginalised and indigenous peoples and the monarchy. Yet non-white communities developed independent relations with monarchy as well. Indeed, observances by non-Christians and nonwhites of special occasions of worship usefully illustrate how far expressions of imperial loyalty was a ‘political tactic’.118 While monarchy symbolised freedom and equality, the sovereign was a person who, in contrast to parliaments, could be appealed to for greater recognition and acceptance, as well as equal rights, including full subject status.

Chinese Australians Chinese attachment to monarchy had been evident in Australia since the gold-rush days of the 1850s. By the end of that decade one-fifth of the miners on the Victoria diggings were Chinese (around 20,000 in all), and it was common for these communities to make loyal addresses to governors. Some of the ‘language of affection’ that had characterised addresses in Britain since the eighteenth century is evident in the Chinese examples. In 1857, the year the Victoria Government imposed a residence tax on Chinese miners, Castlemaine’s Chinese community expressed, through their missionary (a man named Chu A Luk), their ‘sincere regard for her gracious Majesty Queen Victoria’ and ‘the entire British People with all British laws and institutions throughout the world’.119 Subsequent addresses talked of Chinese ‘devotion to the throne and person’ of the monarch; new governors were also reminded that the community expected ‘equitable consideration’, and that it was the duty of the Crown to ‘promote the highest welfare of the people irrespective of creed or nationality’.120 Chinese populations experienced mounting prejudice and racism as the nineteenth century progressed – since the 1850s the Chinese in Victoria had endured violence from resentful white settlers, and from the early 1880s colonial parliaments, preoccupied by the perceived social dangers brought by Chinese migrants, passed immigration restriction laws.121 Chinese peoples’ use of prayer days and royal thanksgivings was part of a sophisticated strategy to integrate themselves into new societies, and to claim the equality and freedoms that came with subject status. Indeed, Australian Chinese involvement in royal celebrations shows that ­non-British peoples

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stressed ‘the monarch’s protective concern for their rights and religion’.122 For the 1887 and 1897 jubilees, Chinese communities participated in street celebrations, sent congratulatory addresses to the Queen and illuminated their temples. In their 1887 jubilee address, thirty-two Chinese residents in Sydney explicitly presented themselves as British subjects: the message assured Victoria that ‘the sentiments of devotion to your throne and person are as warmly cherished by the Chinese in this colony as by the subjects in any part of the dominions’ under her rule.123 Chinese involvement was a noteworthy aspect of coronation celebrations in several Australian towns, though the English-language press said little about observances in Chinese temples.124 It was noted earlier that white settlers did, on occasion, invite Chinese communities to join in public displays of prayer. Such appeals, though rare, indicate that some in colonial society could view the Chinese as fellow subjects. At coronation celebrations, settler preachers referenced the spread of Chinese temples in Australia as a progressive development, one that evidenced the empire’s commitment to religious freedom and tolerance. Despite such statements, Chinese participation in royal occasions did not bring acceptance or citizenship on equal terms with white Christians.125 Chinese people participated in a town procession for the 1902 coronation at Rockhampton, Queensland, but the contingent was placed near the back, after ‘cyclists’ but before a meat company.126 Some considered royal thanksgivings not to be celebrations of diversity, but appropriate moments to reaffirm the Anglo-Saxon character of colonial society. Members of a Queensland anti-Chinese League – eighty such organisations mushroomed across the colony between 1886 and 1888 – pressed the colonial Government to mark the 1887 jubilee by imposing a poll tax on Chinese people. One individual thought the date of the jubilee – 21 June – should be the moment to close Australian ports to the Chinese forever, and another wanted to issue a jubilee medal that bore a portrait of the Queen on one side and the inscription ‘Queensland for the white man; No Chinese’ on the other.127

Aboriginal Australians Aboriginal peoples in Australia forged relations to British monarchs as the settler dominion consolidated, and as indigenous peoples lost land and access to resources. From the 1840s, Aboriginal peoples on Tasmanian and Victorian missions and reservations developed sophisticated petitioning strategies to bypass local bodies and to speak directly to the highest Crown authorities. Loyal addresses, letters of congratulation and petitions were presented in a deferential and sometimes familial language: Queen Victoria

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was a compassionate ‘mother’ and on occasion governors were addressed as ‘father’. Some examples meshed expressions of loyalty with appeals for land, improved living conditions and protection and recognition of British subject status. Historians have found in such addresses the origins of the powerful idea that the Queen had given them land for perpetuity. Royal tours, starting with Prince Alfred’s in 1868, featured ritualised dances and addresses of welcome from Aboriginal peoples, and when whites allowed them to do so, individuals and communities asserted their public standing, challenged the prevailing order and made claims.128 Monarchs and governors, therefore, remained important authority figures for Aboriginal peoples. All these forms of engagement illustrate, however, the limitations of Aboriginal involvement in the religious dimensions of royal celebration: participation was most evident in secular forms of royal celebration and personal occasions such as royal birthdays and jubilees. And it was Queen Victoria, and not her male successors, who received special regard. There is little evidence that Aboriginal peoples responded to proclamations and calls to prayer on royal occasions. The exception was those observances that took place on mission stations, under the supervision of white ministers. Daniel Matthews, the missionary at Maloga, NSW, said he had always encouraged ‘a spirit of loyalty’ and ‘a love for our sovereign lady the Queen’ among the Yorta Yorta people on his mission, and when news of an assassination attempt arrived in March 1882 Matthews organised special services to give thanks for the Queen’s deliverance ‘from a shocking death’. Press reports of jubilee thanksgiving services at mission stations made approving points about colonial progress when it was noted that no Christian service would have taken placed in country that was ‘unexplored and unknown’ when Victoria had come to the throne in 1837.129 For those whites who encouraged closer relations between Aboriginal peoples and the British monarchy, Aboriginal participation communicated reassuring messages about the spread of British sovereignty, the loyalty of indigenous peoples, and the beneficence and improving character of imperial rule. It was a reported that a ‘native black’ signed the proclamation that announced Victoria’s accession in Sydney in November 1837; presumably the act was encouraged as it seemed to confirm the completeness of the Queen’s sovereignty.130 At other times whites cast Aboriginal peoples in subordinate roles. In many places, jubilee celebrations featured gifts of blankets. Whites comforted themselves that such charitable acts illustrated the monarchy’s protective concern and eased the pain of peoples that faced what one Sydney editor called ‘racial oblivion’. The same editor noted that ‘there could be no more fitting thing done at this time of jubilee rejoicing than for the Australian that is to turn to the Australian that was and give

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him the benefits of the civilisation which robbed him of his heritage’.131 The involvement of Aboriginal peoples in jubilee sports was frequently reported, though mocking and condescending descriptions in the press indicate that the most successful Aboriginal sportsmen were regarded as entertainers or ‘professional savages’.132 In both 1887 and 1897 whites were reluctant to encourage Aboriginal peoples to play active or independent roles at royal celebrations. This contrasts with the situation elsewhere in the empire, and earlier Australian celebrations: during the 1868 royal tour, for instance, Prince Alfred witnessed corroborees on mission stations. Such ceremonies might feature dance, song and storytelling, and were a customary way for Aboriginal peoples to mark significant occasions and celebrate a sense of community and group identity.133 Dance performances and displays of indigenous costume and sports also featured in Canadian royal tours, first with the Prince of Wales in 1860 and then on a larger scale for the Duke and Duchess of York in 1901. Through such spectacles, indigenous peoples accepted the monarch’s ‘parental protection’ and endorsed ‘their right to exist in the British North American community’, as well as ‘their special relationship with the Crown’.134 Some white Canadians worried that to encourage the participation of First Nations peoples was to celebrate ‘savagery’, and that the larger message, about assimilation, improvement and civilisation, would be lost. But then other settlers thought colourful, ordered and unthreatening indigenous displays, featuring ‘popular romantic images of savage Indians’, both communicated the distinctiveness of Canadian culture and identity and legitimised white rule, as a supposedly barbaric past was contrasted against a racially harmonious present.135 The same ambivalent attitudes run through press reports of a ‘native dance’ at the jubilee celebrations at Maritzburg, Natal in June 1887 – the year Zululand was incorporated into the British Empire. The Natal Mercury remarked that a ‘war dance of 3,000 naked savages is a spectacle that can only be witnessed in South Africa’. Though the paper worried that such an ‘exhibition’ would ‘conserve and foster the barbarism we all desire to see superseded’, the jubilee was an ‘exceptional’ occasion and it was right that the ‘natives of the colony’ – who the paper added behaved with ‘order’ and ‘control’ and had been selected for their ‘conspicuous service and loyalty’ – should have the opportunity to demonstrate ‘their fidelity to the Crown that has done so much for them’.136 Some Australian settlers may have valued Aboriginal displays as useful symbols of colonial distinction,137 but the celebration organisers did not discuss the issue of Aboriginal involvement to the extent of their Canadian and South African counterparts. Aboriginal peoples, it was supposed, were dying out, and those that remained could not be regarded as citizens of

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Australian states or the new Commonwealth.138 Though corroborees took place in some Queensland towns in 1887,139 ten years later authorities in the colony tried to avoid Aboriginal participation altogether. The committee tasked with organising jubilee celebrations at Rockhampton, Queensland initially planned to stage a ‘grand corroboree’ by paying the travel fees of 200 Aboriginal people from neighbouring districts. However,  the request for free rail passes was refused by a Queensland Government that was ‘not disposed to encourage the aggregation of aborigines in town’. The committee expressed ‘much regret’ at a ‘discourtesy which rejects what would have been a pleasant episode in the history of a fast-vanishing people connected with an event that can never be repeated’.140 Special occasions could be moments for Aboriginal peoples to make demands and to claim positions as equal subjects of the monarch. The objects and symbols that circulated at royal celebrations acquired new uses and meanings in Aboriginal communities. Amanda Nettelbeck has shown that the blankets that whites handed out as goodwill gifts were objects of economic exchange in Aboriginal societies.141 Aboriginal jubilee addresses displayed the mix of ‘paternalism and obligation’ and ‘assertiveness and submissiveness’ that characterised Aboriginal petitioning.142 It is difficult to know who authored such addresses. The one from the Lakes Condah and Tyers missions in Victoria was likely the work of a white missionary, as it celebrated that the community no longer lived ‘wandering and ignorant lives’ and thanked Queen Victoria for her ‘care and protection’. Whoever its author, the document is an attempt to use the ritual-setting of the jubilee to situate Aboriginal peoples in a larger community of British subjects, in part by drawing an equivalence between British and Aboriginal conceptions of monarchy, hierarchy and Eldership. The address claims that the concept of a ‘good Queen mother’ was a familiar one and had indigenous parallels – indeed, the address compared the Queen’s beneficence to the shielding care of ‘one of our former kings’.143 Other communities displayed a strategic sense when they exploited royal celebrations and monarchical beneficence to demand concessions from government. Yorta Yorta people resident on the Maloga mission in NSW had, after a struggle, secured a grant of 1,800 acres from the Government in 1883, and in July 1887 another petition was sent to the governor, this time asking that Aboriginal peoples should enjoy independence and have the right to buy land on the reservation. The ‘Aborigines’, the petitioners reminded the governor, ‘were the former occupiers of the land’ and such a benefit would be ‘in accord with the wishes of Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria in this jubilee year of her reign’.144 Queen Victoria, and the notion of a protective and beneficent ‘great mother’, had a special place in Aboriginal peoples’ imaginaries. That subsequent male monarchs lacked such appeal is evident from the muted

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Aboriginal involvement in the 1902 and 1911 coronations. In both years, newspapers reported feasts, charity handouts and thanksgiving services on missions and reserves,145 but no press coverage of Aboriginal addresses has been found. Elsewhere newspapers made familiar comments about the charity of governments and protection boards that laid on food, gifts and entertainments for Aboriginal communities.146 For some settlers, there had been no change in the quality of Aboriginal loyalty, and displays of monarchical affection and loyalty could be disparaged as ‘meaningless’.147 The news that Yarra Yarra people in Victoria planned to send an address to Queen Victoria in 1887 prompted a NSW journalist to remark that none of the ‘sable children of the soil’ had the ‘vaguest notion of the existence of the Queen of England’. ‘What the guileless n----- has to thank England or its Queen for is a difficult thing to determine’, the writer added.148 Such comments indicate the hostility that confronted all Aboriginal people when they communicated loyalty and affection to British monarchs.

Conclusion This chapter has charted the evolutions in the religious identity of the British monarchy as it spread overseas and made more visible its sacred associations. Since the early eighteenth century the monarchy governed and protected multiple established churches in the British Isles. Such comprehension might be a source of strength, but for some observers, particularly Anglicans, such a ‘peculiar religious position’ generated ‘inherent tensions’.149 The monarchy became more representative and more pluralist as its imperial commitments widened and as more faith communities sought protection, recognition and equal subject status. Non-Anglican Protestants in seventeenth-century colonial America had regarded the Hanoverians as their protectors and supporters. In later centuries the monarchy had to juggle a wider range of competing religious commitments. Queen Victoria’s religious associations changed, chameleon-like, from context to context: in England she was ‘Defender’ of the Anglican faith; in Britain and the settler empire she was Christian monarch; and in India she tolerated and protected all religions – Christian, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh.150 Propagandists made much of the multi-faith observances of the royal jubilees and coronations, as such displays appeared to confirm that the empire was, as Victorians liked to think, a unified, tolerant and righteous entity. The royal occasion, for many of the empire’s inhabitants, was a moment to express an imperial citizenship or ‘hybrid identity’, one that offered a pathway to the rights and status denied them by white settlers. The picture of the empire as a family under the leadership of a maternal

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or paternal figure was, then, not entirely a white invention. But for many minorities and marginalised peoples, royal thanksgivings revealed the ugliness of empire. Racism and intolerance marred some royal celebrations. And disenfranchised peoples could only win gains if they performed ­appropriate roles in what one historian has called the ‘loyalty play’.151

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Notes 1 NLA, MS6611/5, 6 January 1918. For a Canadian example, see M. A. Harlow diary, Queens County, Nova Scotia, PANS, MG1, vol. 1300. 2 NP, III, p. 33; McKenna, ‘Monarchy’, p. 262; Canada Gazette, 7 May 1887. 3 NP, III, pp. lxxix–lxxxiv, cxxv–cxxvi. 4 J. Gregory, ‘The Hanoverians and the colonial churches’, in A. Gestrich and M. Schaich (eds), The Hanoverian Succession: dynastic politics and monarchical culture (London, 2015). 5 Archdeacon Bond and Rev. Taylor, Montreal Gazette, 16 April 1872. 6 NP, III, pp. lxxix–lxxx; J. Wolffe, ‘Protestantism, monarchy and the defence of Christian Britain 1837–2005’, in Brown and Snape (eds), Secularisation in the Christian World, p. 65; I. Bradley, God Save the Queen: the spiritual dimensions of monarchy (London, 2002), pp. 120, 130. J. Landau, Sermon Delivered in the Great Synagogue (Sydney, 1897), p. 4. 7 McKenna, ‘Monarchy’, p. 262. 8 Inglis, Australian Colonists, chapter 4; I. Radforth, Royal Spectacle: the 1860 visit of the Prince of Wales to Canada and the United States (Toronto, 2004). 9 M. McCormack, ‘Rethinking “loyalty” in eighteenth-century Britain’, Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 35:3 (2012), 407–21; Pentland, ‘Indignant nation’, 61. 10 Rebecca Ellis, a Nova Scotian, reflected on the day of mourning for ‘our beloved Queen’ that six years had passed since the loss of her own mother: N.  Conrad et al., No Place Like Home: diaries and letters of Nova Scotia Women, 1771–1938 (Halifax, 1988), p. 210. Wolffe notes Victorians tended to ‘identify their personal bereavements with those of the royal family’: Great Deaths, p. 67. 11 Z. Barry, “The Danger Controlled” (Sydney, 1868), pp. 6–7. Rev. Pepper (Congregational), Newcastle Chronicle, 2 May 1868; S. Kent, Brief Notes of a Thanksgiving Sermon (Sydney, 1868), p. 4. 12 NP, III, pp. cxxiii–cxxvi. 13 P. Buckner, ‘The invention of tradition? The royal tours of 1860 and 1901 to Canada’, in C. Coates (ed.), Majesty in Canada: essays on the role of royalty (Toronto, 2006), pp. 18–43. 14 A Halifax businessman said there was ‘much squabbling’ in the town over the 1887 jubilee preparations: PANS, 10,076, 23 June 1887. NP, III, p. cxxiv, for the motivations of the Crown and imperial authorities.

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15 Buckner, ‘The invention of tradition’, 31. 16 For similar comments on royal tours, see Reed, Royal Tourists, p. 87. 17 C. Reed, ‘Respectable subjects of the Queen: the royal tour of 1901 and imperial citizenship in South Africa’, in C. McGlynn et al. (eds), Britishness, Identity and Citizenship: the view from abroad (Oxford, 2011), pp. 11–30; J. Mitchell, ‘“It will enlarge the ideas of the natives”: indigenous Australians and the tour of Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh’, Aboriginal History, 34 (2010), 197–216; Reed, Royal Tourists, p. xx; H. Sapire, ‘Ambiguities of loyalism: the Prince of Wales in India and Africa, 1921–2 and 25’, History Workshop Journal, 73 (2011), 38, 40. 18 D. Cannadine, ‘The context, performance and meaning of ritual: the British monarchy and the “invention of tradition” c. 1820–1977’, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 101–62. 19 For the British Isles, see Wolffe, ‘Protestantism’, pp. 57–74; Williamson, ‘Archbishops and the monarchy’. 20 M. Taylor, Empress: Queen Victoria and India (New Haven, CT, 2018), p. 5. 21 Bradley, God Save the Queen, pp. 24, 45. 22 Cannadine, ‘Context’, pp. 101–62; NP, II, pp. lxxx–lxxxi. 23 NP, III, pp. 185–8, 219–22; Williamson, ‘National days’, 329–30. 24 For royal power in the colonial world, see M. Taylor, ‘The British royal family and the colonial empire from the Georgians to Prince George’, in R. Aldrich and C. McCreery (eds), Crowns and Colonies: European monarchies and overseas empires (Manchester, 2016), pp. 28–30. 25 Wolffe, ‘Protestantism’, pp. 57–74. 26 Argus, 5 August 1854. 27 M. Francis, Governors and Settlers: images of authority in the British colonies, 1820–60 (Basingstoke, 1992), p. 32. 28 Collections of the Nova Scotia Historical Society for the Years 1892–94, vol. 8 (Halifax, 1895), p. 146; Quebec Mercury, 19 February 1810. The thanksgiving prayer was actually a late addition to a celebration that was initially planned as a secular occasion, and this might explain why the colonies could not participate in special worship: NP, II, pp. 728–31. 29 Sydney Gazette, 15 July 1820. 30 NP, III, p. lxxvi; Constantine, ‘Monarchy and constructing “British” Gibraltar’, 24–5. 31 Sydney Gazette, 10 June 1804 and 9 June 1810. For Brisbane’s ‘withdrawal and modesty’, see Francis, Governors and Settlers, pp. 76–7. 32 Francis, Governors and Settlers, chapter 2. 33 Ross, Status and Respectability, p. 67. 34 NP, II, pp. 814, 817, 827, 829. 35 Details of British and Irish observances of these anniversaries are in a forthcoming fourth volume of NP. 36 http://anglicanhistory.org/charles/inglis.html, accessed 11 August 2019. For falling English observances, see C. Hefling, ‘The state services’, in C. Hefling

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and C. Shattuck (eds), The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer: a worldwide survey (Oxford, 2006), p. 74. A. Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr (Woodbridge, 2003). A trace of the ‘cult’ comes from early t­wentieth-century Australia, and the correspondent ‘H. W. L.’, who urged Australians to ‘venerate the memory’ and ‘duly observe the festival’ of the ‘Blessed King Charles’: Evening News, 30 January 1909 and 29 January 1910. 37 Australian, 6 May 1830 and 28 May 1846. 38 James Hunter, Anglican missionary at the Cumberland Station in north-west Canada, said he ‘entered fully into the subject of Popery’ in a sermon for 5 November 1844 as he anticipated the arrival of a Catholic rival. Hunter said his largely Cree congregation were ‘exceedingly attentive, & manifested much interest in the service’, and that afterwards many made enquiries ‘relative to the subject of Popery, & especially as to the historical event’. Cadbury Research Library, CMS/B/OMS/C C1 O/35/99, J. Hunter journal, 5 November 1844. 39 A judgement made from an analysis of accession-day celebrations reported in online Australian newspapers and, for Canada, the Kingston Chronicle, 31 January 1829 and 30 January 1830, and Kingston Chronicle and Gazette, 21 June 1843. 40 NP, II, pp. cxxxix–cxl. Few published colonial birthday sermons have been found, but see J. Barclay, The Throne Established by Righteousness (Toronto, 1863), p. 20. 41 See letters of ‘A Clergyman’ and ‘Churchman’, Argus, 19 June 1886. Some eighteenth-century English clergy made similar points: NP, II, p. lxix. 42 Australian, 21 April 1830. 43 K. McKenzie, Scandal: Sydney and Cape Town, 1820–1850 (Melbourne, 2004); Francis, Governors and Settlers, p. 81 and chapter 7. 44 ‘A Consistent Loyalist’, Natal Witness, 18 August 1854. 45 Cannadine, ‘Context’, p. 116. 46 Ibid., p. 111. 47 A. Bethke, ‘The roots of Anglican music in southern Africa: a historical survey of Anglican music in the Cape’, Anglican and Episcopal History, 83:1 (2014), 4–6; ‘A Calvinist of the 19th Century’, Australian, 10 February 1825; Monitor, 22 September 1826; ‘A Layman’, Monitor, 2 October 1835. 48 Cannadine, ‘Context’, pp. 133–8; W. Kuhn, ‘Ceremony and politics: the British monarchy, 1871–1872’, JBS, 26:2 (1987), 133–62; Williamson, ‘State prayers’, 169–70; J. Wolffe, ‘National occasions in St. Paul’s since 1800’, in D.  Keene et al. (eds), St. Paul’s: the cathedral church of London 604–2004 (New York, 2004), pp. 381–91; NP, III, pp. lxxix–lxxxiii, 29–33, 46–50, 75–8, 79–81. 49 A transformation described in Francis, Governors and Settlers. 50 SMH, 24 October 1898 and 27 February 1902; Brisbane Courier, 5 June 1902; Evening News [Sydney], 8 June 1902; Goulburn Herald, 5 February 1904. 51 Tasmanian [Launceston], 26 June 1886; Argus, 21 June 1886; Telegraph [Brisbane], 21 June 1889; Goulburn Herald, 20 June 1898; Alexandra and

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Yea Standard [Victoria], 23 June 1899 (1899 was the year of Queen Victoria’s eightieth birthday). 52 T. Sarjeant, The Fear of God as it Stands Connected with the Honour Due to Rulers (Williamstown, 1880), pp. 5–7. 53 Portland Guardian [Victoria], 25 June 1875. Also, Church of England Messenger, 1 July 1875 and ‘Episcopalian’, Argus, 8 June 1875. 54 Cumberland Argus [NSW], 10 May 1916. For similar comments in Edward VII’s time, see Brisbane Courier, 27 January 1908. 55 Globe, 16 April 1872; Quebec Daily Mercury, 16 April 1872; British Colonist, 27 February 1872; Montreal Gazette, 15 April 1872. 56 Natal Witness, 7 and 10 May 1872; Argus, 21 February 1872; Empire, 28 February 1872. 57 NP, III, pp. 31, 33, 47, 50. 58 Adelaide Observer, 25 June 1887; Queenslander, 25 June 1887; Mercury, 22 June 1887; SMH, 20 June 1887. 59 Western Mail [Perth], 25 June 1897; Daily Telegraph, 23 June 1897; Natal Mercury, 29 June 1887. 60 Ottawa Citizen, 21 June 1897; Evening Telegram [St. John’s], 21 June 1897. For the ‘continuous anthem’, see T. Bueltmann and D. MacRaild, ‘Globalizing St George: English associations in the Anglo-world to the 1930s’, Journal of Global History, 7 (2012), 80–1. In Australia, mayors worked with church leaders to coordinate the song: see the file at Public Record Office of Victoria [PROV], VPRS 3182/PO5. 61 Australian Star, 21 June 1897. 62 E.g. the ‘enormous crowd’ (which included the governor) that attended a united Anglican service at Brisbane’s Exhibition Building in 1897: Brisbane Courier, 21 June 1897. 63 South Australian Register, 21 June 1887. 64 Ibid., 20 June 1887. 65 Argus, 25 June 1887. 66 Chronicle [Adelaide], 26 June 1897. 67 Wolffe, ‘Protestantism’, pp. 61, 70. 68 See Williamson, ‘Archbishops and the monarchy’, p. 66, for the attendance of the King and Queen at non-Anglican places of worship at the thanksgiving services following the armistice in 1919. 69 Cape Argus Weekly Edition, 11 June 1902. 70 Leader [Melbourne], 12 January 1901. 71 Weekly Times, 14 June 1902. 72 Plans had been far advanced in Melbourne, but were terminated when politicians protested that such a grant represented a form of state aid to religion. 73 Ovens and Murray Advertiser [Victoria], 14 June 1902; Register, 7 August 1902; Telegraph, 9 August 1902; SMH, 11 August 1902. 74 For governors at Presbyterian services, see Age, 27 June 1902. Toronto Daily Mail, 22 June 1887.

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75 Williamson, ‘Archbishops and the monarchy’, p. 61. 76 For the incorporation of Roman Catholics in the 1901 Canadian royal tour, see P. Buckner, ‘Casting daylight upon magic: deconstructing the royal tour of 1901 to Canada’, JICH, 31:2 (2003), 179. 77 P. O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia: 1788 to the present (Sydney, 2000), pp. 44–5, 47. The order for royal prayers is reproduced in Haines et al., Eye of Faith, p. 214. 78 M. McGowan, The Imperial Irish: Canada’s Irish Catholics fight the Great War, 1914–1918 (Montreal, 2017), pp. 202, 208–9, 226. 79 Newcastle Chronicle, 2 May 1868. 80 P. O’Farrell, The Catholic Church in Australia: a short history, 1788–1967 (London, 1969), p. 156. 81 SMH, 21 June 1897. For similar views among senior Catholics in Ireland and England, Rafferty, ‘The Catholic Church’, 301–2. 82 Rafferty, ‘The Catholic Church’, 297–9. 83 Ibid., 294. Similar displays happened in Malta: see N. Dixon, ‘Queen Adelaide and the extension of Anglicanism in Malta’, SCH, 54 (2018), 284. 84 Freeman’s Journal, 29 September 1900. 85 M. McGowan, ‘Canadian Catholics, loyalty, and the British Empire, ­1763–1901’, in Blackstock and O’Gorman (eds), Loyalism and the Formation of the British World, pp. 201–22. 86 A. Greer, The Patriots and the People: the rebellion of 1837 in rural Lower Canada (Toronto, 1993), p. 190. Perhaps in French-speaking Canada, as in France, the village bell was ‘a unique object’ that served ‘as a natural symbol of a community’s identity’: A. Corbin, Village Bells: sound and meaning in the nineteenth-century French countryside (London, 1999), p. 73. 87 Irish Canadian [Toronto], 23 and 30 June 1887; True Witness and Catholic Chronicle [Quebec], 15 June 1887; Hardwick, ‘Fasts’, 699. 88 Catholic Register [Toronto], 24 June 1897; for similar views, see McGowan, ‘Canadian Catholics’, pp. 212–15 and McGowan, Imperial Irish, pp. 216–17. 89 McGowan, ‘Canadian Catholics’, pp. 218–19, 221–2. 90 Wolffe, ‘Protestantism’, pp. 62–3. 91 F. McEvoy, ‘“A relic of religious barbarism”: the controversy over the royal declaration against transubstantiation’, CCHA Historical Studies, 82 (2016), 49–54. 92 McEvoy, ‘“A relic of religious barbarism”’, 59–60. 93 Official Report of the Debates of the House of Commons of the Dominion of Canada. First Session-Ninth Parliament. vol. LIV (Ottawa, 1901), pp. 432, 703, 745, 749. 94 Catholic Register [Toronto], 7 March 1901; United Canada [Ottawa], 9 March 1901. According to McEvoy, Canadian press opinion in 1901 overwhelmingly supported amendment: ‘“A relic of religious barbarism”’, 55–7. 95 Colonial protests are gathered in the pamphlet Some Public Protests Against the Royal Declaration from Distant Parts of the Empire [c. 1901], Durham University, Special Collections, papers of 4th Earl Grey, GRE/B/245/9.

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96 Yass Evening Tribune, 13 June 1901. For the support of the Australian Presbyterian General Assembly for amendment, see Daily Telegraph [Sydney], 11 June 1901. For an Anglican synod in the Goulburn diocese, see Freeman’s Journal, 8 February 1902. A United Methodist meeting in Sydney refused alteration: SMH, 10 March 1902. 97 Yass Evening Tribune [NSW], 13 June 1901; Tablet [London], 22 March 1902. J. Fewster cites Canadian and Australian protests in ‘The royal declaration against transubstantiation and the struggle against religious discrimination in the early twentieth century’, British Catholic History, 30 (2011), 556–7. 98 Wagga Wagga Express [NSW], 23 May 1901. 99 McEvoy, ‘“A relic of religious barbarism”’, 60. Protestant opposition in Canada is surveyed at 58–9, 65. 100 Age, 23 May 1902. For Richard, see K. Munro, ‘Canada as reflected in her participation in the coronation of her monarchs in the twentieth century’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 14:1 (2001), 31. 101 Southern Cross [Adelaide], 27 June 1902. Also ‘Truth’ in Freeman’s Journal, 31 May 1902. For the position of the Australian church hierarchy, see statements of Archbishop Carr in Age, 26 May 1902 and Bishop Kelly in South Australia in Geraldton Advertiser, 23 June 1902. 102 McEvoy, ‘“A relic of religious barbarism”’, 63; Fewster, ‘The royal declaration against transubstantiation’, 562. Grey, like other proponents of imperial federation, worried that the declaration threatened the unity of empire. 103 House of Commons Hansard, Fifth Series, Vol. 19 (1910), Sir Ivor Herbert, 27 July 1910, cols 2170–71 and William Redmond, 28 July 1910, col. 2421; Rafferty, ‘The Catholic Church’, 309; McEvoy, ‘“A relic of religious barbarism”’, 65. The balance of imperial and domestic concerns, and the motivation of Asquith’s Liberal Government, are considered in Fewster, ‘The royal declaration against transubstantiation’, 564–70. 104 Age, 15 May, 20 June, 22 July 1911. 105 G. Vaughan, ‘“Britishers and Protestants”: Protestantism and imperial British identities in Britain, Canada and Australia from the 1880s to the 1920s’, SCH, 54 (2018), 363–4. The Church Association gathered petitions from across the empire to present to Parliament in early 1902, and 126,502 of the 159,080 signatures from British overseas possessions were Australian: Watchman [Sydney], 26 April 1902. 106 Brisbane Courier, 9 June 1902; ‘Ratepayer’, Brighton Southern Cross [Victoria], 14 June 1902. For Anglican intransigence in Tasmania, see ‘A Member of the Church’, North Western Advocate and Emu Bay Times [Tasmania], 26 June 1902. 107 Orangemen objected to the appointment of Gerald Strickland to NSW in 1913 because ‘the population of the state is overwhelmingly Protestant’, and the ‘religious principles’ of governors should be ‘in accord with the majority of the people’: Examiner, 23 January 1913. 108 Age, 25 September 1900. Such anger was far from universal, and other

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Protestants, among them the Anglican bishop of Goulburn, NSW, thought ­governors of egalitarian colonies could attend any religious service they wished: Goulburn Evening Penny Post, 27 September 1900. 109 H. Gainford, vice-president of the Federal Protestant Council of Australia, Watchman, 29 June 1911. For further objections, ‘Not Lukewarm’, Register, 20 July 1911; Daily Advertiser [Wagga Wagga], 11 July 1911; ‘H. Penno’, Watchman, 6 July 1911. 110 Rafferty, ‘The Catholic Church’, 308. 111 Rev. A. Snadden, Rand Daily Mail, 4 January 1915. 112 Register, 11 August 1902; Examiner, 11 August 1902; Evening Telegram, 8 August 1902; Daily Telegraph [Quebec], 11 August 1902; Rand Daily Mail, 23 June 1911, 4 January and 5 August 1915 and 3 January 1916; P. Murphy, Monarchy and the End of Empire: the House of Windsor, the British government, and the post-war Commonwealth (Oxford, 2013), p. 5. 113 C. Clarke, The Sermon Preached in St. George’s Cathedral (Cape Town, 1872), p. 15; Rev. Taylor, Montreal Gazette, 16 April 1872. 114 W. Henry, ‘Royal representation, ceremony, and cultural identity in the building of the Canadian nation’ (PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2001), p. 300; Hardwick, ‘Fasts’, 698. 115 Cape Argus Weekly Edition, 13 August 1902. 116 Indian Opinion, 22 April and 24 June 1911. Taylor, Empress, pp. 5–6 for Gandhi’s royalism and loyalism. 117 Landau, Sermon Delivered in the Great Synagogue, p. 9; Rev. Phillips, Rand Daily Mail, 23 June 1911; NP, III, pp. 32, 58, 72, 94; Williamson, ‘State prayers’, 153. The petition of the Albany branch of the Afrikaner Bond from January 1885 is in WCPA, CO [memorials], vol. 4247, ref. C5. Lowry, ‘The Crown’, 114–15, for Afrikaner monarchism. 118 Taylor, ‘The British royal family’, p. 30. 119 PROV, VPRS 1078, address from Castlemaine Chinese inhabitants. 120 Maitland Mercury, 14 June 1887; SMH, 28 May 1902. 121 D. Goodman, ‘The gold rushes of the 1850s’, in Bashford and Macintyre (eds), Cambridge History of Australia, 1, pp. 182–4. 122 Lowry, ‘The Crown’, 116. For Chinese people in New Zealand and royal celebrations (and efforts of European settlers to exclude them), see Clarke, ‘Feasts and fasts’, pp. 7, 255, 317, 337, 344–6. 123 For temple illuminations, see Age, 22 June 1887, and Australasian, 25 June 1887; Maitland Mercury, 14 June 1887. For Chinese loyalty, see McKenna, ‘Monarchy’, p. 277. 124 Ovens and Murray Advertiser, 28 June 1902; Weekly Times, 5 August 1911. Research into Chinese newspapers, such as Melbourne’s Chinese Times, may reveal a history of religious engagement, but the present author lacks the necessary language skills. 125 For the comment about tolerance of Chinese places of worship in Australia, see Rev. A. Brown, Grafton Argus [NSW], 26 June 1911. 126 Morning Bulletin [Queensland], 23 June 1902.

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127 Queensland Figaro [Brisbane], 7 May 1887; R. Evans, A History of Queensland (Cambridge, 2007), p. 130. 128 These paragraphs summarise the analysis in Mitchell, ‘“It will enlarge the ideas of the natives”’, 197–216; A. Curthoys and J. Mitchell, ‘“Bring this paper to the Good Governor”: Aboriginal petitioning in Britain’s Australian colonies’, in S. Belmessous (ed.), Native Claims: indigenous law against empire, 1500–1920 (New York, 2012), pp. 182–98; M. Nugent, ‘The politics of memory and the memory of politics: Australian Aboriginal interpretations of Queen Victoria, 1881–2011’, P. Edmonds, ‘Sovereignty performances, sovereignty testings: the Queen’s currency and imperial pedagogies on Australia’s south-eastern settler frontiers’, and A. Nettelbeck, ‘Bracelets, blankets and badges of distinction: Aboriginal subjects and Queen Victoria’s gifts in Canada and Australia’, all in S. Carter and M. Nugent (eds), Mistress of Everything: Queen Victoria in indigenous worlds (Manchester, 2016), pp. 100–21, 187–209, 210–27. 129 Seventh Report of the Maloga Aboriginal Mission School, Murray River, New South Wales (Echuca, 1878), p. 21. Also the report of the jubilee thanksgiving service at Ramahyuck mission station, Victoria: Gippsland Times, 27 June 1887. 130 Colonist [Sydney], 2 November 1837. 131 Sydney Mail, 11 June 1887. 132 E.g. West Australian, 23 June 1887. On sportsmen, see Mitchell, ‘“It will enlarge the ideas of the natives”’, 209. 133 H. Doyle, ‘Corroboree’, in G. Davison, J. Hirst and S. Macintyre (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian History, online version (Oxford, 2003). 134 Henry, ‘Royal representation’, pp. 368, 380. 135 I. Radforth, ‘Performance, politics, and representation: Aboriginal people and the 1860 royal tour of Canada’, Canadian Historical Review, 84:1 (2003), 2, 14, 18, 32; Henry, ‘Royal representation’, pp. 400, 417; Reed, Royal Tourists, pp. 89, 107. 136 Natal Mercury, 29 June 1887. 137 Mitchell, ‘“It will enlarge the ideas of the natives”’, 202. 138 A. Curthoys, ‘Indigenous subjects’, in Schreuder and Ward (eds), Australia’s Empire, p. 97. 139 Queensland Figaro, 9 July 1887. 140 Morning Bulletin, 18 June 1897. 141 Nettelbeck, ‘Bracelets’, p. 222. 142 Curthoys and Mitchell, ‘“Bring this paper to the Good Governor”’, p. 198. 143 Ballarat Star, 27 July 1887; Nugent, ‘The politics of memory’, p. 113. 144 B. Attwood and A. Markus, Thinking Black: William Cooper and the Australia Aborigines’ League (Canberra, 2004), p. 27; Curthoys and Mitchell, ‘“Bring this paper to the Good Governor”’, pp. 194–98. 145 At Barambah settlement, Queensland, see Brisbane Courier, 26 June 1911, and at Cummeragunja government station (land granted to inhabitants of the Maloga mission), see Riverine Herald, 28 June 1911. 146 Australian Star [Sydney], 27 June 1902; Northern Star, 25 June 1902.

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147 In 1887 the Brisbane Courier said the recipients of jubilee blankets gave ‘three meaningless cheers’: 24 May 1887. 148 Newcastle Morning Herald, 6 July 1887. The word appears in full in the original. While the author considers the quotation necessary, dashes have been used as it is recognised that the racist epithet will cause offence. 149 Gregory, ‘The Hanoverians and the colonial churches’, p. 109. 150 Taylor, Empress, pp. 79–83. 151 M. McKenna, quoted in Pentland, ‘The indignant nation’, 65.

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Conclusion

In October 1898 an elderly Anglican dean, William Macquarie Cowper, wrote to a Sydney newspaper to implore the people of NSW to observe a day of humiliation that had just been appointed by the colony’s governor. Cowper, then 88 years old, said he remembered a fast day that had occurred half a century earlier, in November 1838. His time in the colony, Cowper wrote, had confirmed to him that such appeals to an ‘overruling providence’ had never failed and that God in his ‘infinite wisdom and goodness’ had always granted the ‘blessing sought’ in ‘greater or smaller measure’.1 In telling this story of God’s special dealings with NSW, Cowper reminded his readers of the bonds that connected them with their fellow colonists and with past generations. The theme of community has been a central concern of this book. Special occasions of worship made salient multiple forms of community and various ‘we’ and ‘us’ groupings, extending upwards from families and congregations to colonies, nations, faith communities and empires. Days of prayer did not make communities; indeed, they tended to be appointed only in mature colonial societies. These occasions reminded individuals that they were social animals, that their lives were bound up with others and that communities shared a past and were recognised by God. In their sermons, preachers tried to fit current events into shared narratives, whether these be stories of God’s special care or deliverance, or analyses of the common sins which passed down through the generations and which every member of the community took responsibility for. In the most elevated formulation, the colonial community was understood to be a unity, possessing a single conscience. A Cape Town Anglican preacher said at an 1872 thanksgiving that nations were not aggregates of ‘individuals, heaped up like atoms on a sand hill, with no unity of voice, no corporate conscience, no moral responsibility, no soul for sin, no body for punishment’. ‘Each nation’, the preacher thought, ‘is a moral Being.’2 For a brief time in the days of Anglican ascendancy, leading colonial officials and churchmen had imagined colonial societies and days of prayer

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where everyone gathered around a single church and followed common forms of prayer. This vision of genuinely collective acts of worship was unrealisable, and most figures in church and state came to accept that a society could retain and possess a corporate conscience while its members identified with a plurality of religious faiths. To an extent the authorities that called people to prayer – most notably the British monarchy – became more representative of the empire’s religious diversity. Newspapers, in southern Africa particularly, reported approvingly of observances of days of fasting and thanksgiving in ‘native churches’ and among people of African and non-Christian descent. Yet there were many – both in the colonising Christian and colonised indigenous communities – who did not respond, and participation did not lead to full citizenship or political gains. The question of who was inside or outside the national community was rarely satisfactorily answered. That it was sometimes suggested that domestic animals should fast on special days, and that humans should pray to God to ease the suffering of ‘humble beasts’, suggests some in settler societies could even include non-human animals within a ‘mixed community’.3 The book has explained why special acts of public worship thrived in Britain’s colonial settler empire. In some ways the proliferation of special worship is to be expected, especially as these occasions were reinvented to suit new colonial conditions. Most settlers were churchgoing Christians and those who ruled were pious men, committed to building Christian societies. But in other senses the spread of special acts of worship of the ‘national’, state-appointed sort is surprising; indeed, some colonists expected such occasions to die out in Britain’s settler empire.4 Historians of the British situation note that formal Crown orders for special acts of worship declined as the nation became more sectional, more pluralistic and as the relationships between churches and the state altered.5 Britain’s settler colonies experienced comparable transformations; in fact, such changes ran further and happened more rapidly in the colonial world. Yet the coming of selfgovernment and the extension of democratic franchises after 1850 made many colonial governments more likely to appoint (and indeed proclaim) special days of worship. Why the extension of liberal forms of government halted Crown orders and proclamations in Britain but had the reverse effect in parts of the colonial world is not easily explained. What this book has suggested is that the advent of representative government helped contemporaries imagine their new societies as unities and communities. Indeed, colonial democracy gave new life to the old concept of ‘national sin’. It was, for instance, an idea deployed by those who believed colonial voters shared responsibility for harming – if not destroying – environments, ecologies and indigenous peoples and cultures.

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Most of all, special worship retained popularity because such occasions – and providential explanation – remained relevant in diverse societies where communal feeling was embryonic and where inhabitants felt isolated and vulnerable. Of course not every colonist engaged with complex discussions about shifting understandings of what constituted ‘special’ and ‘general’ providence; presumably, some people associated the word with luck and fate (this is how the Gallipoli veteran A. B. Facey used the word in his classic 1981 Australian autobiography, A Fortunate Life),6 and numerous politicians and churchmen drew on a well-established, and somewhat secularised, providential rhetoric when they spoke about the progress and mission of new colonial nations. The important point is that days of prayer appealed to all these constituencies. Such occasions also facilitated different forms of action and served various purposes, some religious, some social and political. Public displays of prayer, particularly those organised at the local level, point to the ‘relations of reliance and cooperation’ that made settler colonialism work in sparsely inhabited pioneer regions.7 Days of prayer also had uses for the imperialists who ran the empire. Once the language of orders and commands disappeared, days of worship conformed to the image of an empire of voluntary association and religious liberty. The coordinated days of the later part of the century, which synchronised religious observances for war and royal events in different colonies at proximate moments, meshed with plans for greater imperial unity, whether this was a great federation of colonial states, or the kind of imperial customs union advocated by Joseph Chamberlain, the secretary of state for the colonies, in the early 1900s. The British Empire housed many national and denominational traditions of special worship. Some customs were brought to the colonies when laypeople, religious ministers and government officials migrated from the British Isles. Others pre-dated British settlement and immigration. The  result was that at moments of crisis and celebration colonists might observe a variety of occasions: some might be appointed by states, arranged by churches, or – as was increasingly common in the twentieth century – by the laity. Though special worship was often the product of cultural contact and exchange between varied ethnic and faith groups, the style of worship in a region often reflected the ethnic and religious composition of the population: while special worship in the Canadas and Maritimes displayed Scottish and American elements, the leadership of the Church of England was more accepted in the Australian colony of NSW, where Anglicans were numerous. Though local and denominational occasions of special worship multiplied in the later nineteenth century, this book has shown that states, churches and communities continued to attach great importance to the ‘national’ occasion – this was why the ‘royal proclamation’ survived. It was

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the case that some religious leaders abandoned special prayers altogether, either because they seemed outmoded or because they drew attention from human failings. Others worried that churches had too much to lose on days of prayer. Yet a great many figures in church and state continued to call these occasions because they valued their communal and consensual qualities, as well as their religious purposes. Church-appointed acts of special worship reflected a growing sense that the churches could represent the national conscience and could direct, enlighten, regenerate and Christianise colonial populations without state assistance. There was, it is true, much mockery of appeals for special worship. But it is not clear that the clergy surrendered ‘cultural and intellectual leadership’ to other professional groups.8 Meteorologists and weather forecasters fought to have their field recognised as a ‘legitimate science’ in the early twentieth century; rainmakers might have to convince sceptical audiences that there was nothing un-Christian about their experiments;9 and work on colonial epidemics reveals that the medics who claimed to explain and cure cholera encountered much popular resistance, especially when they recommended far-reaching state interventions into everyday lives.10 Special worship reveals how Protestant nonconformists moved from the margins to the centre of colonial polities. For other denominations and ethnicities, notably Irish Catholics and Chinese Australians, participation in collective prayer brought only temporary acceptance and changes in status. The faith group that perhaps benefited most from special worship was, surprisingly, the Church of England. Scholars of Britain cite the deaths of great Victorians, as well as more recent examples – the popularity of church worship after the death of Princess Diana in 1997, for instance – as evidence that communities turn to the familiar, the orthodox and the traditional at moments of crisis and shock.11 Special worship perhaps provides more evidence of this, both in terms of the appeal of the Church of England and the way such old practices as the fast day, when rebranded, continued to resonate in ‘new world’ environments. There is some evidence that colonial Anglican archbishops came to be regarded, like their English counterparts, as spokespersons and leaders of a generalised ‘civil religion’. The Anglican cathedral, too, emerged as a civic space. Historians argue that the Church of England became publicly more significant as its ties to the British state weakened; something similar happened in the colonial world.12 Though conformity, cohesion and consensus have been this book’s key words, public displays of worship could drive communities apart as much as bring them together.13 The ugly racism that marred Australian celebrations of Queen Victoria’s jubilees undermined the claim that royal thanksgivings brought together an imperial ‘family’ of different faiths and

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ethnicities. Special worship might also expose fractures in white communities. Controversies over privileged churches, the providential meaning of great events and the efficacy of prayer seem not to have subsided as time went on, partly because traditional beliefs continued to receive a degree of state approval and sanction.14 Disagreements might be divisive, particularly in colonial societies, where a mixture of denominations and ethnicities competed for political power and social recognition. This book encourages historians to consider settler societies in new ways. With good reason, existing works emphasise the confidence, mobility, violence and rapaciousness of nineteenth-century settler colonisers.15 Yet we have argued that an enduring sense of crisis, anxiety, vulnerability and guilt characterised settler empire, particularly in southern Africa and Australia, where settler behaviour had made ecologies unstable.16 The book has also departed from much recent ‘British world’ scholarship and emphasised empire’s centrifugal tendencies, as well as the rivalries, tensions and cultural and political differences that separated settler societies from each other and metropolitan Britain.17 The preponderance of days called for regional causes indicates that identifications that lay below the level of empires, nations and colonies exerted a powerful pull. Imperial special worship was remarkably un-networked. For most of the nineteenth century the central imperial authorities, as well as the home churches, did little to include the empire in metropolitan special prayers and days: the jurisdiction of the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly never ran to the colonies, and not until 1902 was an Anglican form of prayer issued that was explicitly for use in the whole empire. And neighbouring colonies rarely coordinated their fasts and thanksgivings, even when the cause was a war or royal event that had empire-wide appeal (the opponents of special prayers sometimes seized on this provincialism to ridicule the whole practice: it was selfish, and ludicrous, to suppose that God punished particular communities, or that the divine could be asked to send rain to regions, or protect individual colonies from disease).18 Special occasions of worship might pull colonial societies away from one another and from metropolitan Britain. For some the fact that colonies continued to call days for contrition and prayer was an unwelcome marker of colonial difference, because it badged overseas territories as primitive, superstitious and unmodern. An eye-catching piece in a liberal journal entitled ‘Australia in the Middle Ages’ lamented that settler colonies had regressed, as while the ‘English nation’ had for centuries protested against ‘the authority of the State in matters of worship’, Australian governments remained in the past, as they continued to invite churches to worship at particular times and for particular causes. It was remarkable, the writer said, that in the nineteenth century states in ‘free’ colonies would deign to

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‘set the standard of religious feeling and pious procedure’. Colonists often worried about how they appeared to metropolitan observers, and a South Australian, writing a decade earlier, wondered ‘what will the world think of us’ when it became known that during drought colonists had ‘as a last resource’ appointed a day of humiliation.19 The sense of separation could, however, engender brighter readings of colonial development, identity and nationalism. Successive days of prayer encouraged the idea that the colonial community was a unity, one whose fortunes rose and fell as it passed through a history of providential punishments and blessings. There were, nevertheless, moments when imperial acts of special worship connected communities across great distances. Contemporaries thought the empire-wide days of intercession during the First World War had helped build a remarkably inclusive and multi-denominational religious ­community.20 War had a unifying effect during an era of colonial nationalism and dominion independence. During the Second World War, British governments encouraged overseas observances of national days of prayer. Further developments in communication made new forms of ‘spiritual mobilisation’ possible. From 1932 British monarchs broadcast Christmas radio messages to the empire that, according to one writer, had a ‘markedly sermonic character’.21 Building on this, in September 1942 the British Broadcasting Corporation’s imperial radio system aired a special religious service across the empire that featured an address by the archbishop of Canterbury. In Australia during the Second World War church leaders pressed broadcasters for midday calls to prayer; some also wanted Australian radio stations to follow the BBC example and institute a silent minute of prayer at 9.00 p.m. every evening, announced by the broadcast of the (recorded) chimes of Big Ben in London. Though Australia would not adopt the ‘Big Ben minute’ (New Zealand did), a midday silent minute of prayer was introduced from late 1941. Synchronised collective prayers in private homes showed how much had changed since the nineteenth century. The role of the institutional churches and public worship was diminished. The private and personal aspects of prayer was once more emphasised, though in a nod to the ancient tradition of ‘common prayer’, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation began each silent prayer session with a short invocation, agreed on by the Commonwealth’s religious leaders.22 This book was completed as the world struggled to a contain a Covid-19 pandemic that had killed hundreds of thousands and sent billions of people into self-isolation and ‘lockdown’. This unprecedented global calamity witnessed the reprise of familiar forms of collective worship, both nationally and globally. In Britain, Protestant and Catholic church leaders urged their members to observe a ‘national day of prayer and action’ on Sunday 22 March 2020, and on Thursday 14 May religious communities across

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the world followed Pope Francis and observed a ‘day of prayer for humanity’. These occasions continued and extended the ecumenicalism evident in special worship since the early twentieth century, though in one respect the March occasion was unique: because ‘lockdown’ made church services impossible, this was the first act of special worship in British history that was observed entirely in private homes.23 Before this global trauma, a devastating national disaster had revealed that corporate prayer persisted in the former settler empire. In late 2019 and early 2020, disastrous Australian bushfires, brought on by severe drought, burned 16 million hectares, destroyed 3,500 homes, and killed thirty-three people and an estimated one billion animals. Catholic and Anglican churches offered special prayers that, in the latter case, asked God to ‘restrain the forces of nature’, ‘to protect human life’ and to ‘guard’ members of the emergency services. A special prayer issued by ‘Green Anglicans’ prayed for the ‘four-legged and the winged’ and asked God to help humans to ‘repent of all the ways we continue to make this world a place of death, rather than life’. Baptists prayed that God would send rain to the ‘special nation of Australia’.24 Though special worship is now entirely a matter for churches (at least outside the United States and some African states), and prayers for animals are more common, styles of petitionary prayer and notions of collective responsibility and elect peoples that would have been familiar to past generations are still very much with us.

Notes   1 SMH, 18 October 1898.   2 Clarke, Sermon Preached, p. 16.   3 Thomas, Man and the Natural World, p. 137. ‘Mixed community’ is from M. Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter (Athens, GA, 1998), chapter 10.   4 E.g. the South Australian freethinker writing in the South Australian Register, 11 January 1886.   5 Williamson, ‘State prayers’, 161, 166. Days of prayer, did however, continue in Britain – though in new forms – into the twentieth century and, indeed, proliferated after 1914.   6 Reflecting on the moment when he met the woman who would become his wife, Facey writes: ‘Although I had never had any real schooling, I knew what the word providence meant and that it was here now.’ A. B. Facey, A Fortunate Life (Camberwell, 1981), p. 282.   7 A. Woollacott, Settler Society in the Australian Colonies: self-government and imperial culture (Oxford, 2015), p. 8.   8 Turner, ‘Rainfall’, 48, 65.   9 Beattie, ‘Science, religion, and drought’, pp. 138–9, 141, 146–7.

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234

Prayer, providence and empire

10 For disturbances in Quebec City in July 1849, see S. K. Cohn, ‘Cholera revolts: a class struggle we may not like’, Social History, 42:2 (2017), 169. 11 Bradley, God Save the Queen, p. 158; Wolffe, Great Deaths. 12 Williamson, ‘Archbishops and the monarchy’, p. 77; Williamson, ‘National days’, 341; Grimley, ‘The religion of Englishness’, 884–906. 13 MacGregor, Living with the Gods, p. 136. 14 Beattie finds limited controversy over prayers for rain in twentieth-century New Zealand, presumably because special worship there was a church matter: Beattie, ‘Science, religion, and drought’, p. 149. 15 Woollacott, Settler Society, introduction; Porter, British Imperial, p. 86. 16 J. Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety: health, science, art and conservation in South Asia and Australasia, 1800–1920 (London, 2011). 17 Reed, Royal Tourists, chapter 3. 18 South Australian Register, 13 April 1886. 19 Australian Herald, May 1897; ‘J. T.’, South Australian Register, 16 April 1886. 20 Rev. Aldridge, Rand Daily Mail, 3 January 1916; Cape Argus, 3 January 1916. 21 Bradley, God Save the Queen, p. 136; NP, III, p. liv. 22 NAA, SP112/1, 265/29/2. For the ‘Big Ben minute’ in Britain, NP, III, p. 424. 23 P. Williamson, ‘Wars, famines – and pandemics’, Church Times, 3 April 2020. 24 ‘Prayer for protection amid bushfire emergency’, https://sydneyanglicans.net/ news/prayer-for-protection-amid-bushfire-emergency; ‘Catholic Church plans national response to bushfire crisis’, https://catholic.org.au/bushfires; ‘A prayer for Australia’, www.greenanglicans.org/a-prayer-for-australia/; www.baptist. org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Prayer-for-Australian-Bushfire-Crisis_ January-2020.pdf (all accessed 22 May 2020).

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Appendix: Acts of special worship appointed by civil authorities in Britain’s Australian, South African and Canadian colonies, 1783–1919

Abbreviations CB Cape Breton CC Cape Colony CG Canada Gazette CoA Commonwealth of Australia DoC Dominion of Canada LC Lower Canada NB New Brunswick NS Nova Scotia NSW New South Wales P Proclamation (issued by governor, lieutenant governor or governor general) PoC Province of Canada SA South Australia SAFR Union of South Africa UC Upper Canada WA Western Australia

a. Australia Type

Where observed

Date(s)

Appointing authority

1790

Thanksgiving day

NSW

Wednesday 9 June

Governor order Recovery of George NP, II, p. 608 III from illness

1806

Thanksgiving days NSW Tasmania

Sunday 20 April Friday 22 August

Governor order Victory at Trafalgar NP, II, p. 714

1808

Thanksgiving prayers

NSW

Sunday 31 January

Order of Major Overthrow of Governor Bligh Johnson of NSW Corps

1829

Thanksgiving day

NSW

Thursday 12 November P

End of drought

Sydney Gazette, 5 November 1829

1838

Day of general fast NSW and humiliation

Friday 2 November

P

Drought

NSW Government Gazette, 17 October 1838

1854

Public day of solemn fast, humiliation and prayer

SA Victoria Tasmania NSW

Friday 28 July Friday 4 August Friday 11 August Friday 18 August

P

Crimean War military campaigns

NP, II, p. 888

1856 (1) Public holiday and thanksgiving services

Tasmania

Wednesday 9 July Sunday 13 July

P and invitation Paris peace treaty to ministers

1856 (2) Day of prayer

Victoria

1866

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Year

Days of humiliation Victoria and prayer NSW Queensland

Thursday 20 November P Friday 5 January Friday 12 January Friday 13 April

P

Cause

Source

Historical Records of Australia, I:VI (Sydney, 1916), pp. 272, 529

Colonial Times, 4 July 1856; NP, II, p. 905

New constitution

Age, 14 November 1856

Drought

Victoria Government Gazette, 22 December 1865; NSW Government Gazette, 4 January 1866; Maryborough Chronicle, 7 April 1866

Thanksgiving days Victoria Tasmania WA NSW Queensland SA

Sunday 22 March Thursday 2 April Friday 24 April Tuesday 28 April Tuesday 28 April Sunday 3 May

P

Failure of an attack on Duke of Edinburgh

NP, II, p. 934

1869

Days of humiliation NSW and prayer Victoria

Saturday 13 February Friday 2 April

P

Drought

NSW Government Gazette, 5 February 1869; Victoria Government Gazette, 25 March 1869

1872

Thanksgiving days Victoria Tasmania NSW Queensland

Tuesday 20 February Thursday 22 February Tuesday 27 February Monday 4 March

P

Recovery of Prince NP, III, p. 11 of Wales from illness

1876

Day of humiliation NSW and prayer

Friday 14 April

P

Drought

NSW Government Gazette, 10 April 1876

1878

Thanksgiving day

NSW

Friday 1 March

P

End of drought

NSW Government Gazette, 20 February 1878

1887

Thanksgiving day

Queensland

Sunday 19 June

P

Recommended thanksgiving day

Victoria

Sunday 19 June

Queen Victoria’s jubilee

public holidays

Tasmania NSW

Monday 20 June Tuesday 21 June

NP, III, p. 33; Victoria Government Gazette, 15 June 1887; SA Register, 20 June 1887

P

Drought

NSW Government Gazette, 11 September 1895

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1868

request for Queen’s SA Wednesday 22 June thanksgiving read WA and Tasmania Thursday 23 June in church services 1895 (1) Day of humiliation NSW and prayer

Sunday 15 September

(Continued)

Year

Type

Where observed

Date(s)

Appointing authority

Cause

Source

NSW

Sunday 6 October

P

End of drought

NSW Government Gazette, 2 October 1895.

1897 (1) Days of humiliation NSW and prayer Victoria SA

Friday 16 April Sunday 2 May Sunday 9 May

P

Drought

NSW Government Gazette, 9 April 1897; Victoria Government Gazette, 28 April 1897; SA Government Gazette, 6 May 1897

1897 (2) Public holidays

Monday 21 June Tuesday 22 June

P

Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee

NP, III, p. 50

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1895 (2) Thanksgiving day

South Australia NSW Queensland

Tuesday 22 June

holidays in WA government offices

Tuesday 22 June– Thursday 24 June

1898

Day of humiliation NSW and prayer

Sunday 23 October

P

Drought

NSW Government Gazette, 14 October 1898

1901

Days of mourning

Saturday 2 February

P

Death of Queen Victoria

NP, III, p. 72

SA Queensland NSW WA Victoria Tasmania

1902 (1) Day of humiliation NSW and prayer

Wednesday 26 February P

Drought

Government Gazette of NSW, 20 February 1902

1902 (2) Public holiday/day Queensland of humiliation and prayer

Thursday 17 April

Drought

Telegraph, 12 April 1902

P

NP, III, p. 81

All states

P Thursday 26 June; rearranged to Saturday 9 August because of monarch’s illness

Coronation of Edward VII

1902 (4) Thanksgiving days (where rain fallen); days of humiliation and prayer (where drought continued)

NSW Victoria Queensland SA WA

Sunday 7 September

P; invitation of state premier (Victoria, Queensland, WA and South Australia)

End or continuation Government Gazette of of drought NSW, 4 September 1902; Victoria Government Gazette, 3 September 1902; Telegraph, 3 September 1902; Western Australian, 7 September 1902

1902 (5) Thanksgiving day

NSW

Sunday 28 December

P

End of drought

Government Gazette of NSW, 23 December 1902

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1902 (3) Public holidays

1903

Day of humiliation NSW and prayer

Sunday 22 March

P

Drought

Government Gazette of NSW, 10 March 1903

1904

Thanksgiving day

NSW

Thursday 4 February

P

End of drought

Government Gazette of NSW, 20 January 1904

1910

Days and periods of mourning; invitations to churches to hold special services

All states and CoA

Friday 20 June and various dates

P

Death of King Edward VII

NP, III, p. 94

1911

Public holidays and All states special services

Thursday 22 June

P

Coronation of King NP, III, p. 102 George V

1912

Thanksgiving days NSW Victoria

Sunday 16 June Sunday 7 July

P

End of drought

Government Gazette of NSW, 13 June 1912; Victoria Government Gazette, 4 July 1912

(Continued)

Type

Where observed

Date(s)

1916 (1) Special day of intercession

CoA

War Appeal of Sunday 31 December Commonwealth 1915 or Sunday 7 January 1916 Government to heads of churches

NAA, A461, AM322/1

1916 (2) Commemorative services and oneminute silence

Queensland NSW

Tuesday 25 April

Premier orders

Brisbane Courier, 2 March and 25 April 1916; SMH, 18 April 1916

1916 (3) Day of special prayer

CoA

Sunday 31 December

War Appeal of Commonwealth Government to heads of churches

NAA, A461, AM322/1

1917 (1) Special day of prayer

CoA

Sunday 21 October

War Request of Prime Minister and Commonwealth Government

NP, III, p. 179

1917 (2) Thanksgiving service

Sydney

Tuesday 27 November

Battle of Premier’s notice; desire of Passchendaele Governor

Government Gazette of NSW, 26 November 1917

1918 (1) Special day of prayer and thanksgiving

CoA

Sunday 6 January

Appeal of King War George V

Commonwealth of Australia Gazette, 20 December 1917; NP, III, p. 188

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Year

Appointing authority

Cause

Anniversary of Gallipoli landings

Source

CoA

Thursday 25 April

Anniversary of Request of Commonwealth Gallipoli landings Government to heads of churches to offer special services

NAA, A461, AM322/1

1918 (3) Day of prayer

CoA

Sunday 4 August

War anniversary Appeal of Commonwealth Government

NP, III, pp. 198–9

1918 (4) Thanksgiving day

Victoria

Sunday 17 November

P

Armistice and victory

NP, III, p. 20

1919 (1) Day of humiliation NSW and prayer

Sunday 23 February

P

Influenza

Government Gazette of NSW, 19 February 1919

1919 (2) Thanksgiving day

NSW

Sunday 16 March

P

Rain, ending the drought

SMH, 15 March 1919

1919 (3) Thanksgiving day

CoA

Sunday 6 July

P from King George V

Versailles peace treaty

NP, III, p. 222

Sunday 24 August

P

Drought

Government Gazette of NSW, 21 August 1919

Cause

Source

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1918 (2) Day of intercession and commemoration

1919 (4) Day of humiliation NSW and prayer

b. Southern Africa

Year

Type

Where observed

Date(s)

1800

Thanksgiving prayers

CC

Unspecified Sunday in December

Appointing authority

Failure of attack on Hewitt, Sketches, p. 6; George III NP, II, pp. 680–1

(Continued)

Type

Where observed

Date(s)

Appointing authority

1812

Thanksgiving day

CC

Sunday 11 October

Governor notice Smallpox

Hewitt, Sketches, p. 28; Cape Town Gazette, 12 September 1812

1813

Fast day

CC

Wednesday 1 September

P

NP, II, p. 749

1814

Thanksgiving prayers Thanksgiving day

CC CC Natal

Sunday 2 January Sunday 9 January Saturday 25 March Saturday 22 April

Governor order Military victories in NP, II, p. 751 Spain Governor notice End of war with Cape of Good Hope Xhosa Government Gazette, 16 March 1848

CC

Friday 7 February

Governor notice War with Xhosa

Cape of Good Hope Observer, 28 January 1851

1848

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Year

Cause

Military campaigns against France

Source

1851

Day of fasting and humiliation

1854

Days of humiliation CC Natal

Friday 28 July Friday 25 August

P

Crimean War military campaigns

NP, II, p. 888

1856

Thanksgiving day

Friday 4 July Thursday 10 July

P

Paris peace treaty

NP, II, p. 905

1859

Days of humiliation CC Natal

Wednesday 5 October

P

Drought

Cape Frontier Times, 4 October 1859; Natal Witness, 11 November 1859

1866

Day of humiliation CC

Friday 12 January

Governor notice Drought

Colesberg Advertiser, 2 January 1866

1872

Thanksgiving days CC Natal

Thursday 3 April Thursday 9 May

P

Thursday 7 February

Governor notice Drought and war with Xhosa

CC Natal

1878 (1) Day of humiliation CC

Recovery of Prince NP, III, p. 11 of Wales from illness Cape Town Daily News, 7 February 1878

1878 (2) Thanksgiving day

CC

Thursday 1 August

Governor notice End of Ninth Xhosa Eastern Star, 30 July 1878 War

Day of humiliation Natal

Wednesday 12 March

P

War with amaZulu

Natal Witness, 25 February 1879

1887

Thanksgiving day

Tuesday 21 June

P

Queen Victoria’s jubilee

NP, III, p. 33

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1879

Public holiday

CC Natal

1895

Day of humiliation CC

Sunday 3 November

P

Drought

Port Elizabeth Telegraph, 31 October 1895

1896

‘Solemn fast day’

CC

Thursday 15 October

P

Rinderpest

WCPA, PMO/422, no. 333

1897 (1) Fast day

CC

Sunday 13 June

P

Continued rinderpest

Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette, 28 May 1897

1897 (2) Public holiday

CC

Tuesday 22 June

P

Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee

WCPA, PMO/422, no. 160

1901

CC

Saturday 2 February

P

Death of Queen Victoria

NP, III, p. 72

1902 (1) Thanksgiving days CC

Sunday 8 June Monday 9 June

P

End of South African War

NP, III, p. 76

1902 (2) Thanksgiving day

Saturday 9 August

P

Coronation

WCPA, PMO/422, no. 129

1902 (3) Day of humiliation Orange River Colony

Sunday 5 October

P

Drought

Indian Opinion, 8 October 1902

1908

Day of humiliation Natal

Sunday 7 June

Government request

Cattle disease

Natal Witness, 8 June 1908

1912

Day of humiliation SAFR

Sunday 13 October

P

Drought

South African News, 11 October 1912

1915

Special prayers of intercession

Sunday 3 January

Governor War General appeal

Fast day

CC

SAFR

NP, III, p. 146

(Continued)

Type

Where observed

Date(s)

Appointing authority

1916 (1) Special day of intercession

SAFR

Sunday 2 January

Governor War General appeal

NP, III, p. 163

1916 (2) Day of prayer

SAFR

Friday 4 August

War anniversary

NP, III, p. 170

1917

Memorial day and services

SAFR

Saturday 4 August Sunday 5 August

Governor General appeal King’s desire and Governor General appeal

Services of remembrance, and anniversary of war

Rand Daily Mail, 8 June and 6 August 1917

1918 (1) Day of prayer and thanksgiving

SAFR

Sunday 6 January

Governor War General appeal

NP, III, p. 188

1918 (2) Intercession services

SAFR

Thursday 28 March

Governor Forces in France General appeal

Rand Daily Mail, 27 March 1918

1918 (3) Thanksgiving day

SAFR

Friday 15 November

Governor General appointment

1919

SAFR

Sunday 3 August

Governor Peace treaty of General appeal Versailles

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Year

Thanksgiving day

Armistice

Source

Cape Argus, 16 November 1918 NP, III, p. 222; Mafeking Mail, 4 July 1919

c. Canada

Year

Type

1789

Thanksgiving days NS CB St. John’s Island Thanksgiving prayers

Cause

Where observed

Quebec

Date(s)

Appointing authority

Cause

Wednesday 20 May Tuesday 26 May Wednesday 27 May

P

George III’s recovery NP, II, p. 608 from illness

Sunday 14 June

Sources

Fast days

NS NB

Friday 10 May Wednesday 3 June

P

Outbreak of war with France

NP, II, p. 618

1794

Fast days

NS CB St. John’s Island NB

Friday 25 April Friday 25 April Saturday 10 May Friday 25 July

P

Military campaigns

NP, II, p. 624

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1793

1795

Fast days

NS

Wednesday 13 May

P

Military campaigns

NP, II, p. 630

1796

Fast days

CB NFL NB

Friday 3 June Friday 3 June Wednesday 6 July

P

Military campaigns

NP, II, p. 638; C/CAN/ NFL/1/218, fo. 35

1797

Fast days

NS CB St. John’s Island

Wednesday 21 June

P

Military campaigns

NP, II, p. 650

1798

Fast day

NS

Thursday 31 May

P

Military campaigns

NP, II, p. 663

1799 (1) Thanksgiving days LC UC

Thursday 10 January Tuesday 12 March

P

Naval victories

NP, II, p. 672

1799 (2) Fast day

Friday 28 June

P

Military campaigns

Innis, H. A., D. C. Harvey and C. Fergusson, (ed.), The Diary of Simeon Perkins, 5 vols (Toronto, 1947–78) [C. Fergusson (ed.), The Diary, ­ 1797–1803 (1967), p. 174]

NS

1800

Fast day

NS

Friday 27 June

P

Military campaigns

NP, II, p. 678

1801

Fast days

NS NB

Friday 19 June Friday 17 July

P

Military campaigns

NP, II, p. 684; Saint John Gazette, 11 July 1801

1802

Thanksgiving days NS CB NB LC

Thursday 8 July Friday 16 July Tuesday 27 July Thursday 12 August

P

Amiens peace treaty NP, II, p. 692

(Continued)

Type

Where observed

Date(s)

Appointing authority

1803

Fast days

NS CB

Thursday 15 December P Friday 23 December

NB

Cause

Source

Military campaigns

NP, II, p. 701

1807

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Year

Fast day

NS

Friday 12 June

P

Military campaigns

NP, II, p. 725

1808

Fast day

NS

Friday 10 June

P

Military campaigns

NP, II, p. 726

1810

Fast days

NS NB

Friday 23 February Wednesday 7 March

P

Military campaigns

NP, II, p. 733

1811

Fast days

NS NB

Friday 15 February Wednesday 6 March

P

Military campaigns

NP, II, p. 739

UC

Wednesday 11 January 1804 Wednesday 1 February 1804 Friday 16 March 1804

1804

Fast days

NS CB NB

Friday 10 August Wednesday 15 August Friday 7 September

P

Military campaigns

NP, II, p. 708; HC, H-1980, B/13, fo. 112

1805

Fast days

NS CB NB

Friday 21 June Wednesday 26 June Friday 26 July

P

Military campaigns

T. Haliburton, An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova-Scotia, vol. I (Halifax, 1829), p. 281; HC, H-1980, B/13, fo. 147; Saint John Gazette, 1 July 1805

LC

1806 (1) Thanksgiving day

NS

Thursday 6 February

P

Victory at Trafalgar NP, II, p. 715

1806 (2) Fast days

NS NB

Friday 20 June Wednesday 27 August

P

Military campaigns

NP, II, p. 719

Fast days

NS LC UC

Wednesday 19 February P Friday 8 May Friday 19 June

Military campaigns

NP, II, p. 741

1813

Fast days

NS NB LC UC

Friday 19 February Friday 19 March Friday 28 May Friday 18 June

P

Military campaigns

NP, II, p. 749

NS NB

Friday 25 February Friday 15 April

P

Military campaigns

NP, II, p. 755

1814 (2) Thanksgiving days LC UC

Thursday 21 April Friday 3 June

P

British and allied victories

NP, II, p. 755

1814 (3) Thanksgiving days LC UC NS

Tuesday 13 September Thursday 20 October Thursday 27 October

P

End of war with France

NP, II, p. 762

1815

Thanksgiving days LC NS

Thursday 6 April Thursday 8 July

P

Peace with United States

NP, II, p. 762; A Form of Prayer and Thanksgiving to Almighty God (Halifax, 1815)

1815

Thanksgiving prayers

during October

P

Victory at Waterloo NP, II, p. 767

1816

Thanksgiving days LC UC

Tuesday 21 May Tuesday 18 June

P

Paris peace treaty

NP, II, p. 769.

1832

Fast days

Friday 4 May Wednesday 16 May Wednesday 23 May Wednesday 23 May Friday 26 October

P

Relief from cholera

NP, II, p. 791; Times, and General Commercial Gazette [St. John’s], 19 September 1832.

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1812

1814 (1) Fast days

UC

LC UC NB NS NFL

(Continued)

Type

1833

Thanksgiving days LC UC

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Year

1834 (1) Fast day

Where observed

NS

Date(s)

Appointing authority

Wednesday 6 February P Thursday 14 February Wednesday 17 September

P

Cause

Source

End of cholera

NP, II, p. 801

Relief from cholera

Acadian Recorder, 20 September 1834

1834 (2) Thanksgiving days UC LC NS

P Thursday 30 October Saturday 1 November Thursday 18 December

End of cholera

HC, C-3911, fo. 196; HC, C-3909, fo. 517; A Form of Prayer and Thanksgiving, to Almighty God (Halifax, 1834)

1838 (1) Thanksgiving days UC LC

Tuesday 6 February Monday 26 February

P

End of rebellion

HC, C-3911, fo. 261; HC, C-3911

1838 (2) Fast days

Friday 7 December Friday 14 December

P

‘Imploring the divine Montreal Gazette, 17 favor and assistance November 1838; HC, in the suppression of C-3911, fos 306–7 the said wicked and unnatural rebellion’; ‘To heal all our external and internal dissensions’

Sunday 20 November

P

Good harvests in British Isles and in Maritime provinces

Nova Scotian, 27 October and 17 November 1842 NP, II, p. 853

1842

LC UC

Thanksgiving days NB NS

1847 (1) Fast days

NS NB

Friday 14 May Wednesday 16 June

P

Irish famine

1847 (2) Day of public fasting and humiliation

NFL

Wednesday 9 June

P

Weekly Herald and Anniversary of 1846 St. John’s fire; Conception-Bay General dearth and hurricane Advertiser, 26 May 1847

1849 (1) Fast day

NS

Wednesday 29 August

P

Cholera

Nova Scotian, 3 September 1849

Thursday 20 December P Thursday 3 January 1850

Relief from cholera

British Colonist, 22 December 1849; CG, 22 December 1849

1854 (1) Fast days

NS NB NFL

Wednesday 17 May Wednesday 31 May Friday 9 June

P

Crimean War military campaigns

NP, II, p. 888

1854 (2) Thanksgiving day

NS

Thursday 21 September P

Relief from cholera

Morning Journal, 22 September 1854

1855 (1) Day of humiliation PoC

Wednesday 18 April

P

Crimean War military campaigns

NP, II, p. 897

1855 (2) Thanksgiving day

NS

Thursday 27 December P

For British military victories and abundant harvest

C/CAN/NS/8 add,/75, 34a

1856

Thanksgiving day

PoC

Wednesday 4 June

P

Paris peace treaty

NP, II, p. 905

1857

Days of humiliation NS PoC

Friday 30 October Friday 27 November

P

Revolt in India

British Colonist, 29 October 1857; NP, II, p. 912

1859

Thanksgiving day

PoC

Thursday 3 November

P

Abundant harvest

CG, 17 September 1859

1860

Thanksgiving days PoC NS NB

Thursday 6 November

P

Thursday 13 December

Manifold blessings and abundant harvest

CG, 10 November 1860; Nova Scotian, 10 December 1860

1861

Thanksgiving day

Thursday 19 December P

Abundant harvest

Ecclesiastical Gazette, 14 January 1862, p. 189

1862

Thanksgiving days NS PoC

Thursday 4 December

Abundant harvest and peace

Evening Express [Halifax], 5 December 1862; Kingston Daily News, 4 December 1862

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1849 (2) Thanksgiving days NS PoC

NS

P

(Continued)

Type

Where observed

Date(s)

Appointing authority

Cause

Source

1863

Thanksgiving day

PoC

Wednesday 11 November

P

Abundant harvest

CG, 7 November 1863

1864

Thanksgiving day

NS

Thursday 1 December

P

Abundant harvest and peace

Halifax Morning Sun, 2 December 1864

Friday 13 January

P

Fishing industry failure

Times and General Commercial Gazette, 21 December 1864

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Year

1865 (1) Day of humiliation NFL

1865 (2) Thanksgiving day

PoC

Wednesday 18 October P

Abundant harvest

CG, 23 September 1865

1868

Thanksgiving day

NB

Thursday 12 November P

Abundant harvest

Globe, 17 October 1868

1871

Thanksgiving days Ontario NS Manitoba

Thursday 16 November P

Abundant harvest

Globe, 7 and 17 November 1871; Ottawa Citizen, 18 November 1871

Thanksgiving day

Monday 15 April

1872

PoC

Thursday 23 November P

Prince of Wales’ NP, III, p. 11 recovery from illness

1873

Thanksgiving day

Ontario

Thursday 6 November

P

Abundant harvest

Globe, 7 November 1873

1874

Thanksgiving day

Ontario

Thursday 29 October

P

Abundant harvest

Globe, 23 October 1874

1875

Thanksgiving days NS Ontario NB PEI

Thursday 28 October

P

Abundant harvest

Globe, 29 October 1875

1876

Thanksgiving day

Thursday 2 November

P

Abundant harvest

Globe, 13 October 1876

NB

Thanksgiving days Quebec NS NB PEI Manitoba Ontario British Columbia

Thursday 22 November P

Abundant harvest

Globe, 24 September 1877

1879

Thanksgiving day

Thursday 6 November

Abundant harvest

CG, 18 October 1879

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1877

DoC

P

Every year from 1879 to 1919 (and beyond), the Dominion Government appointed thanksgiving days for harvests and other blessings for the whole of Canada. Governors general set apart the days with proclamations that appeared in the Canada Gazette. Until 1909 thanksgivings usually occurred on Thursdays in October or November, with the date moving each year. 1887

Thanksgiving day

DoC

Tuesday 21 June

P

Queen Victoria’s jubilee

NP, III, p. 33

1897

Thanksgiving day

DoC

Tuesday 22 June

P

Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee

NP, III, p. 50

1901 (1) Day of mourning

DoC

Saturday 2 February

P

Death of Queen Victoria

NP, III, p. 72

1901 (2) General fast and day of mourning

DoC

Thursday 19 September P

Assassination of President McKinley

CG, 21 September 1901

1902

Thanksgiving day

DoC

P Thursday 26 June; rearranged to Saturday 9 August because of monarch’s illness

Coronation of King NP, III, p. 80 Edward VII

1910

Day of mourning

DoC

Friday 20 May

P

Death of King Edward VII

1911

Thanksgiving day

DoC

Thursday 22 June

P

Coronation of King NP, III, p. 101 George V

NP, III, p. 94

(Continued)

Type

Where observed

Date(s)

Appointing authority

Cause

Source

1915

Special day of prayer and intercession

DoC

Sunday 3 January

P

War

NP, III, p. 146

1916

Day of humble prayer and intercession

DoC

Sunday 2 January

P

War

NP, III, p. 163

1917

Day of humble prayer and intercession

DoC

Sunday 1 January

P

War

CG, 23 June 1917

1918 (1) Day of humble prayer

DoC

Sunday 6 January

P

War

NP, III, p. 188

1918 (2) Day of humble prayer and intercession

DoC

Sunday 30 June

P

Confederation CG, 15 June 1918 anniversary and war

1918 (3)

DoC

Sunday 1 December

P

1919 (1) Day of intercession

Sunday 16 February

P

for Versailles peace conference

CG, 27 January 1919

1919 (2) Thanksgiving days DoC

Sunday 6 July Saturday 19 July Sunday 6 July

P

Peace treaty of Versailles

NP, III, p. 222

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Year

NFL

Armistice and end of war; NP, III, p. 207

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Microfilm 10,075: Miss Almira Bell diaries Microfilm 10,076: John Allison Bell diaries Microfilm 10,176: Sarah Clinch fonds, MG1, vol. 1056 MG1, vol. 1300: diary of Maurice A. Harlow MG1, vol. 1667: Aaron Kinney diaries MG1, vol. 729a: diary of Mary Ann Norris, 1818–39 Microfilm 10,980 #12: William Norman Rudolf diaries Microfilm 10,983: Edwin Ryerson diary, 1857–67 Public Record Office of Victoria, Melbourne VPRS 1078: petitions and addresses to the governor, 1851–87 VPRS 3182/PO5: town clerk’s files, Queen’s jubilee, 1897 Queen’s University Archives, Kingston, Ontario F00566: Rev. W. Bell fonds School of Oriental and African Studies, London Wesleyan Missionary Society Archives Box 8, Nova Scotia 1833–4 Box 14, Newfoundland 1846–8 State Library of NSW, Sydney B619: George Boyle White, diaries CY Safe 1/121: letters from the Rev. Richard Johnson to Henry Fricker State Library of Victoria, Melbourne Joseph Docker sermons 1820–9, Box 1343/2 RARELT: 285.2945, M24: Presbyterianism in Victoria, press cuttings University of York Library, York United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel records (microfilms) Western Cape Provincial Archives, Cape Town CO (memorials), vol. 4247 East London, town clerk’s office, 3/ELN, 1047/1473 Government House, general despatches, vols 1, 23 King William’s Town, town clerk’s office, 3/KWT, 4/1/242, ZE/2/19, /33, /40, /41, /47 Prime Minister’s office, miscellaneous letters received, vols 157, 158 Prime Minister’s office, proclamations, vol. 422 United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel archives, Weston Library, Oxford C/AUS/SYD/2 C/CAN/NFL/1 C/CAN/NS/8 add, /16 C/CAN/QUE/5

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Listing the newspaper titles cited in the endnotes would be an arduous and superfluous task. The project was made possible by two excellent digitised newspaper collections: https://trove.nla.gov.au/ (Australia) and https://libguides.bgsu.edu/ CanadianNewspapers (Canada). At the time of writing both are open-access. The British Library, the Australian National Library and Library and Archives Canada also have microfilm collections. For South Africa, the project made use of the British Library’s digitised ‘African Newspapers’ and the outstanding collection at the National Library of South Africa. Printed primary sources: pamphlets and books A Form of Prayer and Thanksgiving to Almighty God; to be used in all churches and chapels throughout His Majesty’s Province of Nova-Scotia, on Thursday the Eighth Day of July next (Halifax, 1815). A Form of Prayer and Thanksgiving, to Almighty God to be used in all Churches and Chapels in Nova-Scotia, on Thursday the eighteenth day of December, 1834 (Halifax, 1834). A Form of Prayer, with Thanksgiving to Almighty God: to be used upon Tuesday the 6th Day of February, 1838 (Toronto, 1838). A Form of Prayer, to be used on Friday the 7th day of December, 1838 (Montreal, 1838). A Form of Prayer and Thanksgiving to Almighty God; to be used in all churches and chapels belonging to the United Church of England and Ireland, within the province of Nova Scotia. On Thursday the 20th Day of December, 1849 (Halifax, 1849). A Form of Prayer to be used in all Churches and Chapels throughout the Diocese of Toronto, on Friday the 27th day of November, 1857 (Toronto, 1857). A Form of Prayer to Almighty God, to be used in all Churches and Chapels of the United Church of England and Ireland within the Province of Canada (Toronto, 1859). A Form of Prayer and Thanksgiving: to be used in all churches and chapels of the United Church of England and Ireland in the Province of Nova Scotia, on Thursday December 1, 1864 (Halifax, 1864). A Form of Prayer to be used in all Churches and Chapels of the United Church of England and Ireland within the Province of Canada, on the Occasion of Thanksgivings to Almighty God, After the In-Gathering of the Harvest (Montreal, 1865). A Form of Prayer, to be used throughout the Dioceses of Capetown and Grahamstown, by all Congregations of the English Church, on Friday the 12th of January, 1866 (Cape Town, 1865). A Form of Prayer for the 13th Day of February, 1869, Being the Day Appointed by the Government of New South Wales, for Humiliation and Prayer to Almighty God (Sydney, 1869). A Form of Thanksgiving to Almighty God, for His Great Mercy in Sending the Rain, by which the Colony has been Recently Blessed, and the Long Continued Drought Removed (Sydney, 1878).

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Anderson, D., Notes of the Flood at the Red River, 1852 (London, 1852). Alline, H., A Sermon on a Day of Thanksgiving Preached at Liverpool on the 21st, of November 1782 (Halifax, 1782). A Service of Intercession and Thanksgiving for our Army and Navy and the British Empire, used in the Wesleyan Methodist Churches, on Sunday 3rd January, 1915 (n.p., 1915). Barclay, J., The Throne Established by Righteousness: a discourse preached in St. Andrew’s church, Toronto, on the 24th of May, 1863, being the anniversary of the birth-day of Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria (Toronto, 1863). Barker, F., A Sermon Preached at St. James’ Church, by the Lord Bishop of Sydney, on Friday January 12th (Sydney, 1866). Barry, A., First Words in Australia: sermons preached in April and May 1884 (Sydney, 1884). Barry, Z., “The Danger Controlled”. A sermon for the Sunday after the attempted murder of Prince Alfred, preached in St. Jude’s, Randwick (Sydney, 1868). Bradley, M., A Narrative of the Life and Christian Experience of Mrs Mary Bradley, of Saint John, New Brunswick (Boston, 1849). Broughton, W. G., The Counsel and Pleasure of God in the Vicissitudes of States and Communities (Sydney, 1829). Brunton, W., The Judgments of God a Call to Repentance: a sermon, preached at La Chute, Lower Canada, on Tuesday the 26th of June, 1832 (Montreal, 1832). Burns, J., True Patriotism: a sermon preached in the Presbyterian Church in Stamford, Upper Canada, on the 3rd day of June, 1814 (Montreal, 1814). Calderwood, H., The Jubilee: the substance of a sermon preached in Union Chapel, on the evening of the Sabbath immediately preceding the day on which the apprenticeship of the slaves terminated (Cape Town, 1838). Celebration of Peace, 1919. Service of thanksgiving to Almighty God for the termination of the war and the victory of the Allies (n.p., 1919). Church in the Colonies. No. XXVII. Diocese of Capetown, Part II. A journal of the bishop’s visitation tour through the Cape Colony, in 1850 (London, 1851). Clarke, C., The Sermon Preached in St. George’s Cathedral, Cape Town, on Wednesday, 3rd April, 1872 (Cape Town, 1872). Clarke, W. B., ‘Effects of forest vegetation on climate’, Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, 10 (1876), pp. 179–228. Cochran, W., A Sermon Preached in the Church at Falmouth, Nova-Scotia, on Friday the 10th of May, 1793 (Halifax, 1793). Colenso, J., What Doth the Lord Require of Us? A sermon preached in the cathedral church of St. Peter’s, Pietermaritzburg, on Wednesday, March 12, 1879 (Pietermaritzburg, 1879). Collections of the Nova Scotia Historical Society for the Years 1892–94, vol. 8 (Halifax, 1895). Conrad, N., R. Laidlaw and D. Smith, No Place Like Home: diaries and letters of Nova Scotia women, 1771–1938 (Halifax, 1988). ‘Copies or extracts of any further despatches which have been received from, or addressed to, the Governor of the Cape of Good Hope, relative to the late Caffre War’, PP, 503 (1837). [Corporation of the City of Capetown], Union of South Africa: civic thanksgiving service, 31st May, 1910 (Cape Town, 1910).

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Index

Aboriginal peoples, Australian, 165–6, 168–9 Ngarrindjeri 117 and petitioning 213–14, 216 and Queen Victoria 213–14, 216–17 relationship with British monarchy 195, 213–17 violence against 180–1 Wathaurong 182 weather knowledge of 166–7, 182 Wotjobaluk 182 accession declaration 204, 207–10 see also monarchs Adelaide 72, 77, 78, 173, 178, 202, 203 see also South Australia Afrikaner Bond (southern African farmers’ organisation) 36, 146, 147 see also Afrikaners Afrikaners 10, 37, 39, 41, 137, 145–7 as ‘chosen people’, 145, 156 (n. 96) relationship with British monarchy 149–50, 211–12 see also Afrikaner Bond; Kruger, Paul Alfred, Prince, Duke of Edinburgh, second son of Queen Victoria 115, 140, 193, 214, 215 see also monarchy American Civil War 14, 37 American Revolution 11, 21, 24, 56, 136–7, 180 Anderson, David, Church of England bishop 69, 98, 116 Anglo-Saxonism 135–6, 139, 140 animals, non-human 105, 106, 163, 186 (n. 39), 233 prayers for 124 (n. 75), 170, 228

suffer during droughts 178–9 anti-Catholicism 71, 204–10 anti-transportation agitation 40, 51 (n. 95) Anzac Day 12, 13, 74, 107, 108 Arbor Day 184 archbishops of Canterbury 1, 25, 28, 43, 79, 232 Australia colonies in 34, 39, 61–2, 70, 159–84, 201, 231–2 Commonwealth of 2, 8, 12, 41, 44, 72, 73, 95, 104, 159, 204, 232 federation of 41, 48 (n. 65), 61–2, 65, 73, 75, 76, 79–80, 143, 170, 181, 204, 206 regionalism in 4–5, 41, 96–7, 140–4 sense of continental nation in 140, 143–4 Sinophobia in 182, 213 ‘white Australia’ policies in 135 see also New South Wales; Queensland; South Australia; Tasmania; Victoria; Western Australia; also under entries for main towns Australian Broadcasting Corporation 232 Baptists 53, 58, 178, 233 Barry, Alfred, Church of England bishop 174–5 Bible, the 127 (n. 122), 195 Old Testament 5, 7, 70, 113, 130, 145, 151, 171, 195 application to ‘new world’ environments 113, 168, 178–9 New Testament 177, 195

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‘Big Ben Minute’, the 232 Book of Common Prayer 25, 29, 98, 104 anniversary services in 98, 197–8, 200–1, 220 (n. 38) popular appeal of 81, 108 prayers for sovereigns and royal family in 193 tercentenary celebrations of 69 Botha, Louis, first prime minister of South Africa 39, 150 Brisbane, 78, 202, 210 see also Queensland British Broadcasting Corporation 232 British Columbia 139–40 British Isles established churches in 74, 76 traditions of special worship in 1, 2, 3, 9, 23, 31, 42, 43, 48 (n. 65), 49 (n. 80), 55–61, 71, 86 (n. 99), 92–3, 100, 105, 198 British State Prayers research project, Durham University 2, 92, 100, 193 ‘Britishness’ 5, 134–6, 139, 143, 147, 148–9, 152 British subject status 135, 195, 211–17, 230 Broughton, William Grant, Church of England archdeacon and bishop 32, 33, 55, 141, 168 Brown, John Croumbie, Presbyterian missionary and botanist 173–4 Buddhism 61, 170, 211 Buxton, Sydney, governor general of South Africa 100, 128 (n. 144), 211 Canada Black communities in 14 colonies in 25–6, 27, 31, 54, 55–9, 63, 80, 109, 113, 131–4, 137–40, 201, 202 confederation of 75, 89 (n. 157), 138 Dominion of 1, 8, 11, 12, 35–6, 38, 41, 44, 66–7, 79, 95, 138 First Nations peoples in 215 Province of 33, 37, 43, 64–5 regionalism in 4–5, 137–40 see also British Columbia; Manitoba; Maritime Canada; New Brunswick; Newfoundland; Nova Scotia; Quebec; Upper Canada; also under entries of main towns

Canada Presbyterian Church, united Presbyterian body 64 Cape Colony 5, 7, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 39, 40, 43, 62, 70, 73, 75, 77, 78, 115, 117–18, 144–8, 151, 197 Black African communities in 115, 117–18 see also Cape Town; Eastern Cape; southern Africa Cape Town 38, 70–1, 80, 114, 148, 149, 199, 204 see also Cape Colony cathedrals Church of England 78, 195, 196, 200, 201, 202–3, 204, 210, 211, 230 Roman Catholic 201, 206, 210 see also St Paul’s Cathedral; Westminster Abbey cattle disease 17 (n. 37), 18 (n. 55), 31, 36, 39, 70–1, 87 (n. 109), 101, 106, 114, 115, 116, 117, 147, 148, 150 censuses 7, 54, 156 (n. 102) charitable giving 103, 134, 143, 179, 214, 217 Charles I, King fast day and service for 198 memory of 220 (n. 36) Chinese peoples 10, 61, 72, 224 (n. 122), 230 blamed for Australian deforestation 174 invited to join collective acts of prayer 182 relationship with British monarchy 195, 212–13 cholera 3, 33, 53, 55, 69, 95, 116, 132–3, 230 as moral problem 31 emotionalism of sermons on 111–12 ‘chosen peoples’ idea 5, 120, 131, 136–7, 151–2, 156 (n. 96), 233 in Australia 142–3 in the Canadian colonies 137–40 in southern Africa 144–5 Church of England in Australia 32, 59, 72, 79–80, 170–1, 199–200, 229 in Canada 26, 30, 34–5, 96 changing status of 65, 96 as colonial ‘national church’ 42, 54–5, 74–81, 201–3, 230

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Church of England (cont.) communication networks of 1, 28, 68–70, 100–1, 231 evangelicals in 79, 89 (n. 150), 104, 168, 173–4 high churchmanship in 68–70, 168, 198–9 independence of 68–70, 98 provides religious leadership 43, 74–81, 230 relationship with British monarchy 55, 194, 197–9, 200–1, 202, 203, 210–11 relationships with other denominations 70–3, 146, 230 in southern Africa 29, 62–3, 146, 199–200 styles of special worship in 23, 25, 55, 91, 92, 97–9, 100–1, 103–4 see also cathedrals; Episcopal Church of Scotland; also entries for individual archbishops, bishops, archdeacons and clergymen Church of Scotland 55–6, 60, 63–4, 78, 93, 103, 231 relationship with British monarchy 204 styles of special worship in 23, 25–6, 47 (n. 32), 55–6, 103 see also Lang, John Dunmore; Presbyterians and Presbyterianism Church of the Province of South Africa, Anglican splinter church 79, 89 (n. 150) church union 74–6 Clarke, William Branwhite, Church of England clergyman 174 Colenso, John, Church of England bishop 79, 89 (n. 150), 118–19, 147 collective action problem 160–1, 176–82 ‘colonial nationalism’ 13, 44, 130, 136, 143, 152, 232 Colonial Office 32, 41–2, 43, 194 Congregationalists 58, 61, 78, 81, 171, 173, 203 convicts 27–8, 30, 31–2, 40, 197 see also anti-transportation agitation coronation oath 207–9 councils of churches 71, 75, 80, 204 Covid-19 pandemic 232–3

desiccation theories 117, 174–5 Davidson, Randall, archbishop of Canterbury 43, 86 (n. 99), 104 deforestation 167, 173–6, 188 (n. 95) see also environmental awareness Docker, Joseph, Church of England clergyman 109, 116–17, 168 droughts 2, 8, 30–1, 32, 35, 36, 37, 62, 73, 77, 99, 105, 112–13, 117–18, 146–7, 159–84, 233 as common cause of special worship 31, 39, 150, 159–60 explanations of 30, 101, 102, 164–5, 167–70, 173–6, 180–1, 183 in New Zealand 10–11 relief funds during 179–80 reveal divisions between town and country 96, 141 as ‘special providences’ 176 as stimulating an environmental awareness 4, 14 sufferers of 178–80 variable effects of 162 Dutch Reformed Church 35, 62, 70–1, 75, 119, 145, 146, 150, 199, 211 Dutch traditions of special worship 11, 178 earthquakes 3, 10, 23, 181 Earth Day 184 Eastern Cape 5, 94, 117 expressions of regional identity in 144–5, 148–9 see also Cape Colony; southern Africa economic crashes 36, 50 (n. 87), 70, 115, 118, 144 ecumenicalism 54, 59, 70–2, 76–8, 107–8, 145, 233 Edward VII, King 36, 204, 207, 209 as Prince of Wales 42–3, 49 (n. 73), 193, 201, 211, 215 see also monarchs; monarchy environmental awareness 14, 160, 171, 172–6 epidemics 2, 31, 36, 38, 105, 106, 107, 230, 232 see also cattle disease; cholera; Covid-19; influenza; measles; plague, bubonic; smallpox Episcopal Church of Scotland 43, 55



Index 279

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established and national churches 6, 7, 23, 30, 34, 35, 57, 74–81, 118–19 see also Church of England, Church of Scotland ethnic associations and societies 80, 202 Evangelical Alliance 71, 75, 77, 78 evangelicals and evangelicalism 37, 173–4, 188 (n. 98) anti-Catholicism of 210 see also Evangelical Alliance famine Indian 179 Irish 13, 32–3, 69, 133–4 fasting animals and 228 spiritual and social significance of 110, 180 fires and bushfires 32–33, 38, 133, 160, 233 floods 30, 32, 36, 48 (n. 49), 98, 102, 116, 141, 160, 179 forms of prayer 2, 92–3, 107–8, 130, 178 in Church of England 1, 25, 28, 43, 92–9, 103–4, 122 (n. 29), 134, 138, 154 (n. 52), 172, 177–8, 202, 231 criticism of 118 satirical 115 use by other denominations 60, 77, 103, 107–8, 124 (n. 63) foundation days and anniversaries 12, 13, 18 (n. 50), 139, 144–5, 197 French Canadians 10, 72, 79, 134 relationship with monarchy 205–6, 207, 208, 211, 222 (n. 86) see also Quebec; Roman Catholic Church; Roman Catholics Gandhi, Mahatma 40, 211 George III, King 1, 24, 25, 27–8, 197 see also monarchs; monarchy George IV, King 197 see also monarchs; monarchy George V, King 44, 196, 201, 209, 210 as duke of York 78, 215 see also monarchs; monarchy George VI, King 1 see also monarchs; monarchy governors 5, 6, 26, 41, 45, 204 addresses to 212 appoint acts of special worship, 11, 19, 20, 24, 32, 35–6, 44, 100

as national figures 199, 200, 202, 203–4 relationship with Church of England 30, 196, 200–3 relationship with Roman Catholicism 196, 205–6 as representatives of royal authority 9, 29–30, 194–7, 200 Roman Catholic 206, 210 see also Buxton, Sydney; Macquarie, Lachlan Grahamstown 73, 108, 144–5, 149 see also Cape Colony; Eastern Cape Gray, Robert, Church of England bishop 35, 62–3, 69, 77, 79, 96, 133, 146 Halifax, Nova Scotia 54, 77, 110, 197, 201, 207 see also Nova Scotia Hall, Edward Smith, New South Wales editor 167, 169 harvests 3, 8, 10, 23, 32, 37–8, 64, 117, 138, 154 (n. 52) see also Thanksgiving Day (Canadian holiday) Hinduism 200, 211 Hobart, Tasmania 38, 202, 210–11 see also Tasmania hurricanes and storms 7, 10, 23, 33, 38 see also West Indian colonies India 7, 30, 40, 42, 217 industrial disputes 36 influenza 2, 11, 38, 106 Inglis, Charles, Church of England bishop 1, 24, 28, 76, 93, 110, 198 insect infestation 36, 66, 150 irrigation 161, 165, 172–5, 177 Islam 61–2, 200, 211 Jewish peoples 6, 10, 43, 95, 107 appeal of national special worship among 60 and attachment to monarchy 135–6, 193, 204, 211–12 networked nature of 60 use of Church of England forms of prayer among 77 Johnson, Richard, Church of England clergyman 30, 168

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Kruger, Paul, Afrikaner president, 145, 150 Lang, John Dunmore, Presbyterian minister 60, 143, 168, 180, 187 (n. 68) laypeople active involvement in special worship 104–5, 120 as consumers of sermons 108–9, 118–19 help spread news of occasions 94–5, 99 interpret providential happenings 114, 181 observe special worship 114–20 preaching 113–14 Loyalists 24, 56, 115, 137–8 see also American Revolution Macquarie, Lachlan, colonial governor 197, 206 Manitoba (formerly the Red River Colony) 63, 69, 98, 102, 116, 138 Maritime Canada 10, 26, 30, 32–3, 38, 57, 58, 59, 60, 138 see also New Brunswick; Nova Scotia Marsh, George Perkins 173 Maryborough, Queensland 162, 182 see also Queensland measles 105, 106 Melbourne 70, 77, 104, 118, 141, 173, 176, 196, 203, 206 see also Victoria meteorologists 161, 165, 167, 230 Methodists 53, 58, 59, 62–3, 68, 77, 103, 115, 133, 145, 170, 171, 179, 181, 203 Métis peoples 37 see also Riel, Louis monarchs accession of 198, 201, 204–11, 214 attempted assassinations of 2, 22, 24, 28, 32, 197, 214 birthdays of 13, 197, 198, 201, 214 coronations of 2, 36, 42, 97, 192, 195, 204–11, 213, 216–17 deaths of 42, 192, 193 illnesses of 1, 3, 27, 97, 195, 197 involvement in special worship 25, 42, 44, 95, 196, 232

jubilees for 12, 36, 42, 43, 49 (n. 73), 72, 73, 79, 94, 135, 149–50, 192, 194, 197, 201–2, 204, 205, 206–7, 213, 214–16, 230 as point of appeal 195, 212, 214 prayers for 24, 192–3, 197, 205 see also under entries for individual monarchs monarchy (British) 2, 3, 4, 6, 11, 13, 22, 29, 42, 192–218 anti-Catholicism 204–10 attempted assassinations (of nonsovereigns) 101, 115, 124 (n. 63), 140–1, 193, 205 ceremony and celebrations 192, 194, 195, 197, 199, 200, 202–3, 213, 214–6 illness (of non-sovereigns) 42–3, 49 (n. 73), 106, 125 (n. 81), 135–6, 193, 200, 201, 211 religious identity of 58, 194–5, 196, 204–11, 217, 228 relationship with Church of England 79, 196, 202, 207, 210–11 relationship with Roman Catholics 204–10 royal births 3, 22, 32, 42 royal tours 42, 78, 140, 193, 194, 214, 215 see also state thanksgiving services; also under entries for individual monarchs and royal family members Montreal 63, 73, 119, 201 see also Quebec Moorhouse, James, Church of England bishop 165, 166, 171, 172, 176 Moran, Patrick, Roman Catholic cardinal 80, 205 Moravians 59, 134 Natal 39, 43, 79, 80, 118, 145, 147–8, 199, 201, 202, 215 ‘national conscience’ 9, 54, 67, 74, 230 ‘national sin’ 7, 101–2, 111, 131–36, 143, 146, 180–1, 228 see also providence and providentialism New Brunswick 32, 115 see also Maritime Canada New England 11, 23, 137 Newfoundland 10, 32–3, 38, 68, 80, 97, 112, 133, 202

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New South Wales 2, 11, 27, 30, 31–2, 34, 36, 37, 38, 55, 59–60, 66, 70, 94, 96, 102, 108, 109, 115, 118, 134, 141, 142, 143, 161, 162, 164, 166, 168–9, 173, 178, 179, 181–2, 192, 197, 199, 205, 214, 227, 229 see also Sydney New Zealand 10–11, 19, 43, 232 nonconformists and nonconformity 3, 15 (n. 8), 26, 30, 35, 58–60, 71, 75, 77, 91, 101, 103, 108, 203–4, 211, 217, 230 see also Baptists; Congregationalists; Methodists; Presbyterians; Quakers; Unitarians North American colonies 21–4 Nova Scotia 1, 4, 7, 23, 24, 31, 32, 33, 35, 43, 53, 57, 63, 70, 76–7, 93, 97, 114, 115, 116, 132, 133, 137, 139 Acadian communities in 26 Mi’kmaq communities in 60 see also Halifax ‘Oak Apple Day’ (Restoration Day) 198 Orange Free State 37, 39, 146, 150 British population in 39, 149–50 Owen, John Wellington, Church of England clergyman 75–6 parliaments British 9 colonial 19, 34, 54, 142, 208, 209, 212 prayers in 54, 81, 82 (n. 2) pastoral letters and episcopal instructions 66, 100–2 Perth, Western Australia 202, 206 see also Western Australia plague, bubonic 38, 102, 107 Polding, John Bede, Roman Catholic archbishop 101, 102, 205 premiers, of Australian states 36, 41, 73, 142 Presbyterians and Presbyterianism 11, 26, 35, 55–7, 60, 63–5, 68, 77, 80, 95–6, 101, 102, 103, 110–11, 124 (n. 63), 168, 173, 176, 180, 204 free church 63–4

secession 57, 60, 63–4 see also Canada Presbyterian Church; Church of Scotland; Lang, John Dunmore; Presbyterian Church of Australia; Presbyterian Church of Canada; Synod of the Presbyterian Church of Canada; Synod of the United Presbyterian Church in Canada Presbyterian Church of Australia 75 Presbyterian Church of Canada, Canadian free church body 63, 64 prime ministers 36, 38, 39, 42, 44, 159, 208 proclamations 9, 10, 19, 23, 24, 28, 30, 31, 34, 35, 36, 44, 57, 60, 64, 130, 164–5, 192, 196, 228, 229 dissemination of 92–9 as statements of royal authority 9 protest 40–1, 51 (n. 96), 114, 151 providence and providentialism 4, 9, 30, 91–2, 105–7, 111, 112–14, 119–20, 142, 164–5, 169, 172, 174–5, 180–1, 183, 229 ‘general’ 101–2, 106, 123 (n. 52), 166, 170 ‘national’ 5, 101–2, 119–20, 130–51 ‘personal’ 119–20 ‘special’ 7, 38, 101–2, 107, 123 (n. 52), 133, 168–9, 176 Quakers 58 Quebec (Lower Canada/Canada East) 10, 11, 21, 26, 30, 31, 55, 56, 57–8, 65, 66, 71, 79, 94, 95, 97, 134, 205–6 see also Quebec, city Quebec, city 197, 201, 205 Queensland 70, 73, 78, 81, 162, 167–8, 171, 172, 179, 181, 182, 213, 216 see also Brisbane; Maryborough rainmaking 161, 165–6, 191 (n. 155), 230 indigenous peoples and 117–18, 128 (n. 152), 182 rebellions 31, 37, 59, 61, 68, 72, 95, 98, 109, 130, 206, 211 Riel, Louis 37, 72

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Roman Catholic Church 38, 43, 66, 71–2, 80, 100, 170, 233 forms of special worship in 57–8, 91, 101 relationship with British monarchy 204–10, 211 see also cathedrals; Moran, Patrick; Polding, John Bede Roman Catholics 3, 26, 30, 35, 53, 60, 61, 68, 80, 97, 101, 130, 140 of Irish descent and origin 10, 61, 101, 135, 205, 206, 207, 208, 230 relationship with British monarchy 204–10 see also French Canadians St Paul’s Cathedral 192, 195, 200, 202, 203 Scotland traditions of special worship in 11, 23, 24, 54, 55–7, 63–5, 93, 229 sermons 2, 3, 5, 60–1, 83 (n. 12), 108–14, 227 accession day 201 communicate suffering 178–80 criticisms of 118–19, 176 on droughts 160, 168–9, 172, 174–6 ‘environmental’ 174–6, 191 (n. 158) ideas of community in 131–51 Roman Catholic, on monarchy 205, 207 slavery 8, 31, 180–1 smallpox 31, 38, 146 Smith, William Saumerez, Church of England archbishop of Sydney 76, 80, 100 Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge 97 southern Africa South Africa, Union of 8, 11, 12, 37, 39, 75, 81, 104, 108, 113, 150–1 Black and Coloured communities in 40–1, 117–18, 150–1, 168–9, 215 Indian communities in 40, 211 southern African British colonies 29, 36, 75, 80 regional feeling among European settlers in 144–50 sense of national community in 145–7, 149–50

see also Afrikaners; Cape Colony; Eastern Cape; Natal; Orange Free State; Transvaal South Australia 36, 72, 75, 77, 78, 91, 113, 117, 141, 142, 162, 163, 166, 167–8, 169, 171, 173, 179, 181, 203 see also Adelaide special days of prayer 2, 9, 13, 45, 48 (n. 65), 55–9, 104–5, 161–4, 171, 229, 230 appointed by churches 39–40, 53, 54, 62, 68–74, 77–9, 145–6 observances of 73, 77, 79, 87 (n. 109) for fasting and humiliation 4, 9, 10, 11, 13, 19, 23, 26, 30, 32, 33, 35, 39, 53, 55, 66, 68, 91, 95–6, 110, 112–13, 116, 117, 141, 146, 148, 150, 159, 162–3, 178, 182, 196, 227, 232 of intercession 43, 44, 69–70, 72, 79, 107, 211, 232 observances of 103, 114–20 by indigenous peoples 117–18 opposition to 57, 61, 67, 165–6, 169–70, 230, 234 (n. 14) public requests for 20, 36–7, 41, 65, 73, 77, 87 (n. 104), 162–3, 166, 181–2 on Sundays 66, 96–7, 163–4 for thanksgiving 1, 9, 11, 13, 21–22, 23, 26, 30, 32, 33, 39, 42, 55, 64–5, 68, 95, 116–17, 130, 137–8, 140–1, 148, 196, 201 special prayers 1, 2, 3, 25–6, 42, 45, 177–8, 183, 192, 233 changing purposes of 105–7, 171–2 criticism of 165, 171, 176–7 in Church of England 25, 29, 33, 47 (n. 35), 134 opposition to 67, 105, 108, 114, 172 personal 104–5, 116 for rain 104, 105, 106, 117, 164–6, 168, 171–2 types of 105–8 Stanton, George Henry, Church of England bishop 101, 102, 107, 170–1, 173 state thanksgiving services 195, 197, 200, 202–3, 204

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Index 283

Strachan, John, Church of England rector, archdeacon and bishop 69, 137, 153 (n. 18) Sydney 60, 77, 78–9, 96, 112, 140, 179, 180, 199–200, 202, 204 see also New South Wales Synod of the Presbyterian Church, Canadian Church of Scotland body 63 Synod of the United Presbyterian Church in Canada, Canadian secessionist body 64 Tasmania (Van Diemen’s Land) 27, 38, 40, 59, 77 see also Hobart telegraph communication 43, 94, 162 Thanksgiving Day (Canadian holiday) 12, 37–8, 41, 66–7, 114, 117, 138–40 Toronto 63, 64, 130, 201 see also Upper Canada (Canada West) Trafalgar, battle of 27, 30, 59, 109 Transvaal 39, 145, 147, 150, 151 British population in 39, 149–50 Unitarians 133–4, 141 United Church of Canada 75 United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel 69–70 United States 14, 139 see also American Civil War Uniting Church of Australia 75 Upper Canada (Canada West) 21, 26, 31, 55, 56, 57, 58, 68, 94, 95, 115, 130, 134, 137 Versailles peace treaty 11, 44, 108, 196 Victoria, Australian colony and state 35, 38, 70, 73, 99, 135, 141, 161, 165, 167, 176, 177, 180, 182, 212–13, 217 see also Melbourne

Victoria, Queen 33, 42, 43, 78, 135, 195, 197, 198, 201–2, 205, 206, 207, 212, 213 as imperial mother 214 as moral exemplar 193 reticence to attend state thanksgiving services 195–6, 200 significance for Aboriginal peoples 213–14, 216–7 war 2, 3, 7, 22 of 1812 13, 137 Abyssinian 42 amaZulu 39, 118–19, 148 Crimean 13, 32, 33, 62, 69, 77, 91, 111, 115, 133–4, 199 Egypt 42 First World War 2, 9, 11, 41, 43, 44, 61, 71, 72, 73, 77, 80–1, 95, 101, 103, 104, 107, 232 Indian ‘Mutiny’ 32, 101, 109, 111, 115, 133–4 Napoleonic 26, 29, 57, 71, 109, 132, 137, 195 see also Trafalgar, battle of Second World War 143, 232 Seven Years’ War 22 South African (1899–1902) 43, 78, 79, 117, 119, 149, 207 of Spanish Succession 22 Sudan 42, 107 Xhosa 31, 62, 69, 77, 146, 149 weather rituals 164 Western Australia 77, 81, 140, 202 see also Perth West Indian colonies 7, 8, 23, 34 Westminster Abbey 192, 200, 202 Wix, Edward, Church of England archdeacon 97, 112 wool industry (Australia) 32, 163 Woolls, William, Church of England clergyman 174