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

By Joseph Hardwick

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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Aug 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526135414

Joseph Hardwick

Joseph Hardwick is Lecturer in British History at Northumbria University

Book preview

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 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 governments – 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 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, 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 state-sanctioned 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 nineteenth-century 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 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

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 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 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 nineteenth-century 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 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 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 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.

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, special occasions of worship often had a multi-faith, multi-ethnic and cross-class 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