British state prayers, fasts and thanksgivings 1540s to 1940s

For four hundred years, from the 1540s to the 1940s, English monarchs and British governments summoned the nation to special acts of public worship. Most of these occasions are unstudied, and their long history -- a remarkable continuity between early-modern and recent times -- remains obscure. This project brings together for the first time information and texts for these special observances, defines their nature and purposes, and demonstrates their wider religious, political and cultural significance.

At times of national threat or celebration (e.g. conspiracies, bad weather, military victories, royal births) the state added special prayers to ordinary church services. At especially anxious or momentous times (war, epidemics, dearth; defeat of rebellions, peace treaties, royal jubilees) whole days were set aside for either fasting and humiliation or thanksgiving, with special liturgies superseding the Prayer Book services. Some occasions -- Charles I's 'martyrdom', the Restoration, Gunpowder Treason and the Glorious Revolution, the monarch's accession -- became annual religious commemorations. Until the 1850s, special 'days' were usually ordered for weekdays, requiring cessation of secular work. In the early twentieth century they were revived as national days of prayer, held on Sundays, the last in 1947.

State prayers and days were national events, reaching into every parish in England and Wales, and from the seventeenth century Scotland and Ireland. They were significant occasions, rich in meaning, purpose and consequence. Most basically, they register peaks of public religious, moral, political and social anxiety or celebration. More deeply, the state orders and forms of prayer express official religious belief about particular secular events and natural occurrences. They are prime evidence for the force and persistence of government acknowledgement of divine superintendence over the English, later British, nation, and belief in special providential interventions that could be assuaged or prompted by the united prayers of the whole people. State prayers and days were central in shaping ideas of national identity in terms of Protestantism, godliness and divine providence, and helped consolidate the idea of a British state. They had considerable political and social significance, in communicating news to local communities and eliciting officially sanctioned participation in public issues. Together with the annual commemorations they illuminate church-state relations: exercise of the royal supremacy, ministerial decisions on religious matters, and the higher clergy's (in Scotland the General Assembly's) role in public life. At times occasions of political contention, they long aroused tension between the established churches and dissenters, until becoming opportunities for ecumenical co-operation in the twentieth century.

Although features of the annual commemorations have been examined, few special occasions have been studied, no list exists and their full history has never been investigated. This project will produce an edition containing a complete list of prayers and days (numbering c. 450) and extracts from the orders and forms of prayer. A co-authored monograph will analyse these texts, the conditions which produced them and the responses they evoked, revealing much about religious and political doctrine, state ideological 'projection', and popular religiosity. It will provide a fresh perspective on particular political and religious episodes and on the character of the British Protestant alliance between state and church. A volume of essays will explore their wider significance for studies in politics, religion and culture over the four centuries.