On 4 October 1562 the first of six thousand English troops arrived in Normandy to support the Huguenots, who had suffered successive defeats by the royalist forces commanded by the Duke of Guise and his brother, the Duke of Aumale. Five days later orders were issued in England for a special prayer in support of the military campaign, to be read at services three days a week in all parish churches. A prayer for the present estate (1562) called on God as “the only geuer of all victories” to support the English troops and Huguenots to “withstande the crueltie of those which be common ennemies as well to the trueth of thy eternal worde, as to theyr owne naturall Prince and countrie, & manifestly to this crowne and Realme of Englande.”Footnote ¹ After one such service at Donhead St. Mary in Wiltshire, Giles Fezard, from a prominent local yeomanry family,Footnote ² complained that the prayer was “vngodly,” “vncharitable,” “not to be suffyrd,” and “meter to sett princes together by the eares.” He argued that “the Duke of Guyes is a godly man and no tyrant or cruell person but a favourer and seker of godes glorye/and suche a man as wolde be oure frende.” He added that “the Queenes Maiestie that nowe is had gon so farr in suche matters [i.e., the Religious Settlement] that nowe she wold torne agene if she wist howe.”Footnote ³ As a result of these final words—the authorities seemed surprisingly unconcerned about his praise of the Catholic Duke of Guise—Fezard was prosecuted at the Quarter Sessions for seditious and slanderous words. Indeed, so concerned were the authorities about Fezard's criticism of the queen that, when he was acquitted, the attorney-general sued the witnesses in Star Chamber for perjury and the jury for corruption.Footnote ⁴

Reflection on this episode suggests fresh perspectives on two recent debates about politics in early modern England. First, the special Forms of Prayer prepared for this and similar occasions were used to disseminate news and official interpretations of events throughout the realm. A prayer for the present estate not only informed parishioners that English troops were supporting the Huguenots in Normandy but also characterized this first episode in the French Wars of Religion as an attack on Protestantism and a threat to English safety. The prayer was disseminated at least as widely as the proclamations also issued by the regime to justify its intervention and more extensively than independent pro-Huguenot pamphlets and ballads.Footnote ⁵ Second, special prayers and services read throughout the realm provide a new dimension to our understanding of the nature of popular politics and how those outside the political elite were able to participate in politics. Recent studies have identified a much wider range of means by which non-elites engaged in politics and exercised their political agency beyond the traditional emphasis on riots and rebellions. These activities include local office holding, litigation, preaching and listening to sermons, and participating in political debate in print or verbally in a “public sphere.”Footnote ⁶ Events in 1562 suggest that political participation also occurred through praying in parish churches for the English army's success in a foreign war.

Such reflections seem out of step with the current historical orthodoxy on Elizabethan special prayers. With the exception of W. Keatinge Clay's edition of the texts of some of the prayers and liturgies for the Parker Society (1847), both ecclesiastical and political historians have concluded that nationwide special worship was used by the church or state as an instrument of indoctrination or control.Footnote ⁷ C. J. Kitching argued that such worship was used to inculcate ideas of divine providence beyond Puritan circles.Footnote ⁸ John Cooper has argued that it was one of many “strategies of persuasion” used by Tudor governments to shore up their authority.Footnote ⁹ For Steve Hindle it was a government device to maintain loyalty and order in times of crisis and, in the case of the famine of 1596–97, to monitor church attendance, almsgiving, and how much food was saved during fasts.Footnote ¹⁰

This essay aims to move beyond such orthodoxy. After briefly surveying the origins of this type of special worship, the ordering process, and the types of printed material the regime commissioned for use, it will identify three ways in which special worship enabled parishioners to engage with political issues and to participate in remedying the realm's problems: by disseminating news, provoking comments and discussions of political events, and ordering parishioners to pray and to fast for the well-being of the realm. The article will place the last of these within the context of contemporary ideas about causation, as articulated both in the liturgical material commissioned for special worship and, more widely, by showing how prayer, fasting, and related actions could be regarded as forms of political action. It will then discuss how these arguments might change our understanding of Elizabethan special worship and of early modern popular politics, as well as suggest briefly how they might be broadly applied to earlier and later periods.

Special nationwide public worship at times of crisis and celebration took two forms: petitionary prayers and services seeking divine intervention in earthly events, such as war, famine, disease, bad weather, and earthquakes, and thanksgivings offered in gratitude for divine aid. It was predicated on the idea of divine providence. “General” or “universal” providence denoted the belief that, at the time of Creation, God had mapped out all events that would happen on earth, large and small; “special” or “particular” providence signified God's intervention in, and disruptions to, everyday life in response to the realm's collective godliness or sin.Footnote ¹¹ Both social and natural calamities were widely believed to be divine warnings about the realm's collective sins, while military victories and abundant harvests were rewards for the realm's godliness. In England, orders for special occasions of worship dated from at least 1009 and were issued more systematically from the 1290s because of wars with Scotland and France.Footnote ¹² The practice continued after the break with Rome: between 1535 and 1643, there were ninety-four occasions of nationwide special prayers, fasts, and thanksgivings ordered in England and Wales, thirty-two of them in Elizabeth's reign alone.Footnote ¹³ Thus, nationwide special worship continued even after the second and third Books of Common Prayer (1552 and 1559) incorporated the occasional prayers and thanksgivings relating to war, weather, and pestilence that bishops and incumbents could add to ordinary services in times of crisis. These prayers allowed dioceses and parishes to respond to local problems but were evidently regarded as inadequate for national crises.

There were five developments in special nationwide public worship during Elizabeth's reign. First, the events that prompted special worship broadened to include events with a clear confessional edge, such as Catholic plots to assassinate the queen and support for the Huguenots and Henry IV during the French Wars of Religion. Second, the format of the services became more settled after the liturgical vicissitudes of the previous decades. The regime continued to commission special prayers from the higher clergy to be added to daily services—a practice begun in 1548 during the war with Scotland—but from at least 1563 it also commissioned whole liturgies that temporarily superseded those in the Book of Common Prayer for a specified duration.Footnote ¹⁴ These Forms of Prayer followed the structure of daily services but included exhortations; special prayers; collects; psalms; biblical readings; and instructions to preach or, in the absence of a licensed preacher, to read selected homilies.Footnote ¹⁵ Third, the frequency of services during periods of special worship became standardized: petitionary services were usually held three times a week for several weeks, while thanksgivings were normally single occasions.Footnote ¹⁶ Fourth, and most pertinent to this essay, the Elizabethan regime, benefiting from the development of the English print trade, was the first to invest time and effort consistently into producing printed texts—either prayers or full liturgies—and distributing them promptly to all parishes across the country. These Forms of Prayer and Thanksgiving ranged from just one page to forty-eight quarto pages in length (though eight pages was usual); they were written by the higher clergy, approved by the Privy Council, printed by the Royal Printer, and distributed using the bishops’ and ecclesiastical courts’ networks of archdeacons and apparitors.Footnote ¹⁷ By providing the parish minister with a uniform liturgical service to read aloud, Forms of Prayer and Thanksgiving enabled the whole nation—men and women, young and old, rich and poor, educated and illiterate—to worship truly collectively: to perform the same devotional exercises and pray in the same words at the same time. Finally, weekly fasts on Wednesdays were often ordered during long periods of petitionary worship for which a special liturgy had been commissioned.

Nationwide special worship allowed or encouraged parishioners to engage with political issues in two obvious ways. First, the Forms of Prayer commissioned by the regime brought news of domestic and foreign events into parishes. They contained information about, and official interpretations of, the event for which parishes were ordered to pray, in prefaces and “admonitions” or in separate, accompanying reports. This information was not only ordered to be read out during the service but was also used by ministers as the basis of sermons on Wednesdays. Ministers were instructed to “entreate of such matters especially as be meete for this cause of publique prayer” at these times.Footnote ¹⁸ For example, some editions of the Form of Prayer on the earthquake in 1580 included a detailed report:

The three-page printed confession of William Parry, convicted of plotting against Elizabeth in 1585, was ordered to be read after the sermon.Footnote ²⁰ The Form of Thanksgiving after the temporary capture of Cadiz and Faro in 1596 and the Form of Prayer issued in 1597 before the proposed attack on Ferroll both briefly noted earlier victories and, in the case of the latter, outlined the preparations for the new season's campaign.Footnote ²¹ Plots against the queen by Dr. Lopez and Patrick O’Cullen were narrated in the “Admonition” in An order for prayer and thankes-giuing (1594) and set in the context of earlier conspiracies from Arthur and Edmund Pole (1562) to the Babington Plot (1586).Footnote ²² An account of Edward Squire's plot against Elizabeth in 1598 was added to a revised version of the “Admonition” in the Form of Thanksgiving issued for parishes to use after his plot failed.Footnote ²³ John Rainolde's sermon in Oxford on the thanksgiving for the discovery of the Babington Plot in 1586 described the plot and related it to other Catholic conspiracies, including the Throckmorton and Parry plots; invasions and rebellions, such as the Northern Rising (1569–70), Thomas Stukeley's invasion of Ireland (1579), and the Desmond Rebellion (1579–80); as well as to the papal bull of excommunication, Regnans in excelsis (1570); the Norfolk–Mary Stuart marriage plan; the influx of Jesuits and seminary priests; and the seditious actions of Robert Parsons and Edmund Campion.Footnote ²⁴ Those who purchased the printed edition were supplied with dates of events, further information, and references to letters and printed books in marginalia.Footnote ²⁵

The circulation of news and official interpretations of events was far from being the primary purpose of Forms of Prayer; it was considered important for parishioners to know about the event for which they were praying to make their prayers more effective. Nonetheless, Forms of Prayer were an important means to disseminate news and probably more so than letters, newsletters, printed pamphlets, or word of mouth, the other most likely ways in which contemporaries received news. Forms were often produced and disseminated quickly. The Form of Prayer to be used during the plague in 1563 was written, approved, and printed in less than a week, and, at least in parishes in and near London, copies were distributed promptly.Footnote ²⁶ If the dates were recorded accurately by the churchwardens, then St. Mary Woolchurch in London was able to acquire a copy of this Form just two days after the final text had been approved by William Cecil, principal secretary.Footnote ²⁷ Neighboring St. Mary Woolnoth purchased the Form of Prayer in response to the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572 two days after it had been printed.Footnote ²⁸ The distribution of Forms of Prayer was also more widespread and coordinated than that enjoyed by letters, newsletters, and printed pamphlets. Although churchwardens’ accounts, the main source for assessing the distribution of the Forms, are extant only for a relatively small proportion of the more than nine thousand parishes in England and Wales, and although they overrepresent certain types of parishes, surviving accounts suggest that the Forms enjoyed wide geographical distribution.Footnote ²⁹ Indeed, churchwardens’ accounts underestimate observance rather than exaggerate it. There are no accounts for the chapels where special services were also ordered to be observed, and churchwardens’ accounts were not always precise (e.g., small, miscellaneous purchases were often grouped together), so the absence of records of purchases of Forms does not necessarily mean that they were not purchased or that special worship was unobserved.Footnote ³⁰ Finally, Forms of Prayer were a useful means to disseminate news because they were primarily an oral form of communication—to be read out in services—and were thus able to convey news to the illiterate.Footnote ³¹

The second obvious way in which nationwide special worship allowed or encouraged parishioners to engage with political issues was as a means of eliciting or demonstrating support for the regime or a particular cause or for expressing criticisms. Parishes regularly organized and paid for additional activities, such as ringing the church bells on days of thanksgiving, emphasizing their support for the cause at hand. For instance, the capture of the Babington conspirators in 1585 was marked by bell ringing at Lambeth, St. Christopher le Stocks in London, St. Peter in Hertfordshire, and Prescot in Lancashire.Footnote ³² For the thanksgiving on the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Tilney All Saints, Norfolk, paid for their bells to be rung; St. Alphage London Wall paid for additional sermons to be preached.Footnote ³³ In Norwich, the mayor ordered trumpeters, flutists, and drummers to play, and the townsmen of Northampton organized a “warlike fight” or “feat” in which they turned the town hall into a castle and laid siege to it for three days.Footnote ³⁴ The London parish of St. Martin-in-the-Fields rang the church bells for Henry IV's victory at Ivry (1590).Footnote ³⁵ After the thanksgiving sermon at Paul's Cross for the earl of Essex's victory at Cadiz (1596), there was “drinking, banketting & other waies [of] reioycing” in the capital.Footnote ³⁶ Even fasting could be enthusiastically embraced. Lady Margaret Hoby reported in her diary that, on at least two occasions during the outbreak of plague in 1603–4, her chaplain, Richard Rhodes, fasted and preached well into the night.Footnote ³⁷ Conversely, Fezard's case demonstrates how special services could elicit criticism of the regime's interpretation of events (in particular, the role of the duke of Guise) and of policy (the Religious Settlement). Such criticism was not confined to the laity. Because the sins of the realm that provoked divine wrath were often unspecified, preachers could use occasions of special worship to expound on what they considered to be ungodly behavior. Thus, preaching to his Westmorland congregation during the outbreak of plague in 1596–97, Richard Leake singled out the abuse of communion as “the greatest and capitall of crimes that hath puld these plagues vpon our countrie.” He criticized the administering of the sacrament to everyone without separating the ungodly from the godly, “the profane from the sound professor, the dogs and swine from the sincere and sanctified people of the Lord.” This was an abuse because it allowed the unrepentant sinner to partake of God's grace; it also condoned sin and did not encourage the ungodly to repent and reform, condemning the whole realm to God's wrath.Footnote ³⁸

However, nationwide special worship also allowed or encouraged parishioners to engage with political issues in, to modern eyes, a less obvious way. It encouraged them to become involved in national politics through a wide range of activities commonly considered by historians only in terms of religious practice, including confession of sins, prayer, fasting, study of the scriptures, and almsgiving. Special worship was organized in response to major domestic and foreign events that affected the welfare and security of the realm, and all subjects, young and old, male and female, rich and poor, were reminded that their behavior, individually and collectively, directly affected the outcome of events. Their confession and repentance of their own sins and their collective petitions to God for mercy could assuage his wrath and turn away national disasters, such as war, famine, and disease. Similarly, repentance and heartfelt thankfulness demonstrated gratefulness to God for military success or the end of epidemics and ensured, at least temporarily, his continued favor and protection.

Parishioners were, therefore, not only supplied with news of national and foreign events but with a framework of activities through which they could collectively resolve the realm's problems. Special worship was far from passive. During petitionary services, parishioners were expected to pray “with penitent hearts,” “devoutly give ear” to the sermons, and “with mind and speech … assent to the same prayers.”Footnote ³⁹ The same was true of thanksgivings; these were not merely festive celebrations. Rainolde, preaching in Oxford on the thanksgiving for the discovery of the Babington Plot in 1586, urged his audience to “confess him [God] sincerely and faithfully not onely in wordes, but in deeds … cast away profane songes of wantonness, of lightness, of vanity,” urging them to amend their “slackness in frequenting of sermons, of praiers, of celebrating the Lordes Supper.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Nor was participation confined to the church services. On fast days, religious mortification and reflection were expected. All adults between the ages of sixteen and sixty, excluding the sick and laborers involved in harvesting or other heavy work, were expected to have only one moderate meal. Those who could “forbeare from bodyly labour” were expected to occupy themselves with prayer, reading, hearing, and studying the scriptures or “good exhortations”: “No parte therof to be spent in playes, pastymes, or ydlenesse, muche lesse in lewde, wicked, or wanton behauyour.” Those “of wealth and habilitie” were expected to offer alms to the poor.Footnote ⁴¹ For the rest of the time, parishioners were expected to reflect on their faith and behavior.

Special worship provided places—the church but also the household, given the emphasis on family prayers, study of the scriptures, fasting, and almsgiving—and structure for the repentance of sins and for petition or thanksgiving. Fasts humbled the body and spirit and prepared the individual for repentance. During the services, prayers, psalms, readings, sermons, and homilies helped parishioners to recognize and confess their sins and seek God's help to reform, and provided them with opportunities for collective repentance. Homilies—such as those on turning away from God and on death, repentance, and the punishment of impenitent sinners, which were ordered to be used during the outbreak of plague in 1563—reminded congregations of the dangers of sin and the importance of repentance. Those on fasting, prayer, and almsgiving—also ordered for use in 1563—instructed parishioners how to repent.Footnote ⁴² Sermons conveyed the same messages. In his four sermons preached in Westmorland during the outbreak of plague in 1596–97, Richard Leake, minister of Killington, focused on sin, the efficacy of collective prayer, and the necessity of thanking God for his mercies.Footnote ⁴³ At least fifteen minutes of private prayer and meditation were ordered at the end of morning prayer on Wednesdays during long periods of petitionary worship.Footnote ⁴⁴

Specially commissioned prayers and antiphonal psalms (comprising verses from various parts of the Bible and recited as calls and responses) guided parishioners to confess and repent of their sins. One of the antiphonal psalms in the Form of Prayer for 1563 exhorted:

One of the prayers in the service appealing against bad weather in 1585 allowed parishioners “with greefe and vnfeigned sorrow [to] confesse that wee haue sundrie wayes abused thy Fatherly goodnesse, in multiplying our offences and … defiling this good Land with all abhominations. All haue sinned from the least to the highest, there is no parte whole or free from greeuous enormities.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Parishioners confessed their sins publicly and collectively in designated prayers and psalms, as well as in the general confession. “We haue sinned Lorde, we haue sinned greeuously, we haue done vniustly, we haue liued wickedly, we are sorye therefore, O Lorde, yea we are most sorie,” congregations prayed during services after the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.Footnote ⁴⁷ “Let vs turne, and the Lord wyll turne from his heauy wrath, and wyll pardon vs, and we shall not peryshe” (Jonah 3:8–9), ministers exhorted in services during the plague in 1563. “For we knowledge our faultes: and our sinnes be euer before vs” (Psalm 51:3), his congregation would reply.Footnote ⁴⁸ Conversely, in thanksgiving services, prayers and psalms were used to acknowledge God's mercies. One of three antiphonal psalms provided for the thanksgiving after the discovery of the Babington Plot, declared:

Parishioners participated in these services in different ways and at different levels. For occasions when only special prayers were ordered to be added to the Common Prayer services, parishioners would have been able to recite the regular prayers, collects, and responses because of their familiarity with the Book of Common Prayer. They would be expected to listen and assent to the special prayers. For occasions when new liturgies were commissioned, verbal participation would have been more challenging because, though parts of the Common Prayer service were retained, there was a greater proportion of “new” liturgical material, including exhortations, antiphonal psalms, and prayers. Because the antiphonal psalms were composed from verses scattered across the Bible, they were unfamiliar and unpredictable even to those who knew their Bible well. Nevertheless, the regime expected (or hoped) that congregations would participate verbally in these services: the instructions in the Form of Prayer during the plague in 1563 stated that responses in antiphonal psalms should be made by the congregation or the clerk.Footnote ⁵⁰ But with little evidence that parishes bought large quantities of Forms of Prayer and Thanksgiving that could have been distributed among the congregation (two or three copies was usual; some London parishes occasionally purchased four or five copies), it is likely that parishioners listened to and assented to these psalms as well.Footnote ⁵¹

The practical problems in realizing high levels of verbal participation during special worship should not diminish the participatory nature of the services and the other activities expected of parishioners, which would have included silent meditation, fasting, and study of the scriptures. Moreover, it was not the verbal nature of the prayers that was significant but the transformative effects they had on individuals to confess and repent of their sins and, after such repentance, on God to show his mercy. This was why instructions in Forms of Prayer emphasized how parishioners should act rather than just what they should do: they were to pray “with penitent hearts”; “devoutly give ear” to the sermons; and “with mind,” as well as with speech, assent to prayers.Footnote ⁵² The regime may have wished everyone to participate verbally during services, but they recognized that this was impossible. They accepted gradations in activity to secure the widest possible participation and did not distinguish between different levels of activity or establish notions of equivalence, as the pre-Reformation church had done when granting indulgences and pardons. All prayers, whether recited by the congregation or assented to, were worth the same if they were undertaken in the right frame of mind.Footnote ⁵³

This sort of participation during special worship was predicated on conformity to the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, which leaves open the question of Catholic and Puritan involvement. Both groups believed in divine providence, though they disputed which events were providential warnings, which sins provoked God's wrath, and how such wrath could be appeased. Though the work of Alexandra Walsham, Michael Questier, and others has revealed much about Elizabethan Catholicism, we still know relatively little about Catholic religious practice during this period, especially of those who did not openly oppose Common Prayer services, did not refuse to communicate, or were not fined for nonattendance at church.Footnote ⁵⁴ Thus, it is hard to know if the Essex laborer David Ramsey's comment that he “was a papyste and that he wolde praye for the pope,” spoken on Sunday, 11 August 1588, when petitionary services were being held for English success against the Spanish Armada, was typical of Catholic responses to nationwide prayers.Footnote ⁵⁵ Puritans may have applauded both the emphasis in special worship on spiritual reform and fasting and the organization of such worship against Catholic conspiracies and in support of foreign Protestants, but many opposed set and responsive prayers on the grounds that these were mechanical.Footnote ⁵⁶ Nevertheless, there is evidence that some Puritans participated in special worship and conformed to the regime's orders. For instance, in 1588, Henry Sands, minister of Boxford, unsuccessfully proposed to the Dedham Conference a “solempne profession of our thankes” after the defeat of the Armada. Fellow members concluded that this was unnecessary “bicause they had done it already in their Churches publikely.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Oliver Pigg, another member of the Dedham Conference, wrote prayers for himself and his friends to supplement the official ones during the summer of 1588 and subsequently printed them for general, private use.Footnote ⁵⁸

Confession of sins, prayer, fasting, study of the scriptures, and almsgiving were all appropriate ways of seeking remedy to such national problems as war, famine, and disease because these events were believed to be providential responses to human sins. Since the publication of Alexandra Walsham's seminal work on providence, it has been acknowledged that divine providence was central to post-Reformation English Protestant and Roman Catholic thought.Footnote ⁵⁹ However, little attention has been given to how providential ideas shaped contemporary understandings of what constituted political events and political action. Divine providence—whether general or special—was fundamental to how Elizabethans—of whatever religious hue—understood these concepts because it was the principal means of explaining causation in late sixteenth-century England. “God hath not only a generall working in euery thing,” noted the preacher Ralph Walker, “but … he doth bring euery thing in particular to a certaine end.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Both general and special providence explained to Elizabethans why wars, rebellions, conspiracies, plagues, famines, and drought happened. Either they were preordained by God before Creation, or they were divine interventions that registered God's pleasure or displeasure at the realm's behavior, good and bad.Footnote ⁶¹ “For euerie plague, everie calamitie, sudden death, burning with fire, murther, strange sicknesses, famine, euerie flood of waters, ruine of buildings, vnseasonable weather,” preached Huw Roberts in 1598, “euerie one of these and of the like aduersities, as oft as they happen in the world, are a sermon of repentance to all that see them, or heare therof.”Footnote ⁶²

As a theory of causation, the idea of divine providence was not without problems. Special or particular providence was not obviously consistent with general providence: if God had planned all earthly events in advance, how could he then change this plan?Footnote ⁶³ Did God intervene even in the smallest of actions?Footnote ⁶⁴ How could a good and merciful God kill thousands by disease or starvation?Footnote ⁶⁵ Why were the godly or apparently innocent children punished when the wicked were not?Footnote ⁶⁶ There were points of contention between Catholics, Protestants, and Puritans, particularly over which sins provoked God's wrath. The striking of St. Paul's by lightning in June 1561 was, according to the Catholic John Morwen, formerly chaplain to Bishop Bonner during Mary's reign, “an example and token of a greater plage to follow” if people did not turn away from Protestantism, which had “abused” and “polluted” the cathedral.Footnote ⁶⁷ Conversely, for James Pilkington, bishop of Durham, it was “no maruaile yf God haue sende downe fire to brinne [sic] parte of the Churche as a signe of his wrath,” considering “howe farre nowe contrarye the Churche hais bene vsed” with “euery night at midnight they had Mattines, all the fore noone Masses in the Church, with other deuine seruice and contynuall prayer: and in the steple Antimes and prayers: were hadde certayne tymes.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Nor was belief in divine providence uncontested. Clergy complained of their parishioners’ beliefs in Fortuna, luck, chance, Nature, the stars, magic, and witches.Footnote ⁶⁹ Physicians argued that the plague was caused by bad air.Footnote ⁷⁰

Nevertheless, neither logical problems nor alternative explanations seriously undermined the primacy of divine providence as the theory of causation in the sixteenth century. It was understood that God ruled a moral universe and that human actions, especially spiritual decisions and actions, affected not just the human world, by triggering events such as wars and rebellions, but also the natural world, by influencing the weather and harvests and by causing disease. Preachers, theologians, and other writers did their best to address the problems, questions, and inconsistencies in providential ideas. They argued that special providences were themselves part of God's ordained plan.Footnote ⁷¹ A distinction was made between God's “revealed” or “signified” will, evident in the daily pattern of life, and his “secret” or “effectual” will, which was manifested during “special providences.Footnote ⁷² The pious or innocent could be “victims” of divine providence for reasons that God did not reveal or because he was nurturing the predestined.Footnote ⁷³ What looked like “chance” or “fortune” was actually God's will.Footnote ⁷⁴ And distinctions were made between primary and secondary causes. “Bad air” was only a secondary cause of disease, which was “the rodde of his [God’s] rigor and iustice … for the amendment of our sinnes”; “a manifest signe of the wrath of God conceiued against vs” and “the punishment of sinne and disobedience of mankind.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Though these writers were at pains to emphasize that all events were preordained and that God was immutable, ideas of divine providence did allow the individual and the collective—the community or the kingdom—a degree of agency. The individual's or the realm's sins might provoke God to exercise special providential intervention, and the individual or the people collectively could attempt to assuage God's wrath through confession, repentance, and reform of their lives. “Confession is a certaine remedie to hym that hath done amisse,” Alexander Nowell wrote in one the most popular Elizabethan catechisms. “The Lord promiseth that he will pardon sinners if they repent, if they amend and turne their hartes from their naughtie liues vnto hym.”Footnote ⁷⁶

Like ideas of divine providence, however, arguments about human agency also raised fundamental questions about God's omnipotence and immutability. If all events were preordained, how could humans change God's plan through their prayers and repentance? Were they guaranteed success? What was the value of secular, practical measures, such as quarantining plague victims to stop the spread of infection? Writers and preachers such as Peter Martyr Vermigli countered the first two questions by arguing that man's prayers and repentance were foreseen by God and that their results were preordained.Footnote ⁷⁷ A common response to the third argument was to recognize that pragmatism had a role to play alongside providence, that secular measures were of secondary importance to repentance, and that they too were part of God's providence—instruments to effect his will.Footnote ⁷⁸

There were also points of contention between Catholics and Protestants and between Protestants and Puritans about which human actions were most efficacious. For Catholics, petitions and thanks to God were best offered through processions and prayers to the Virgin Mary and the saints. For Protestants, God's wrath could only be assuaged through everyone confessing and repenting of their sins, a transformation that could only be achieved by the inner reflection brought about by prayer, fasting, and study of the scriptures. The debate between Protestants and Puritans focused on whether such prayers should be set or extempore, and whether responsive prayers or antiphonal psalms should be used, in case these discouraged parishioners from paying attention to the whole service or prayer.Footnote ⁷⁹

However, as with divine providence, questions about human agency and the efficacy of different devotional exercises were often glossed over. The homilies, one of which was ordered to be read each week in every parish church if there was no preaching minister, promulgated to Elizabethan parishioners a straightforward view of human agency.Footnote ⁸⁰ The homily on prayer taught them to pray for what was right and good, defined as their “owne necessitie, and the glorye of almightie God.”Footnote ⁸¹ As in more learned treatises, “necessitie” was defined as man's spiritual and bodily needs (such as food, clothing, health, and good fortune) and “the daies of thy trouble.”Footnote ⁸² During such times, the second book of homilies noted, God's wrath could be eased by confession and repentance, which comprised four aspects: contrition of heart, “unfayned confession and acknowledgynge of our sinnes vnto God,” faith, and the amendment of one's life.Footnote ⁸³ On an individual level, repentance was effected by study of the scriptures and by prayer. Studying the scriptures “paynt[ed] out before our eyes, our naturall vnclenlyness, and the enormitie of our sinfull lyfe.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Through prayer, the individual sought God's help “to harken vnto the voice of the true shepehearde.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Both made confession easier, “For unless we haue a through [sic] feelynge of our sinnes, howe can it be, that we shoulde earnestlye be sorye for them?”Footnote ⁸⁶

For national calamities, everyone (rulers and ruled) had to repent collectively of their sins and reform their behavior; for national successes, the whole realm had to give thanks. The general confession, said every Sunday during the Common Prayer service, provided Elizabethans with a regular opportunity for collective confession. Indeed, the general confession enshrined the importance of collective or corporate confession as a standard practice. But, national calamities required additional action: extra prayers, fasting, almsgiving, and further confession. Public prayer was seen as particularly appropriate for addressing dangers facing the realm and effecting collective repentance and reform.Footnote ⁸⁷ John Smith argued in The doctrine of praier in generall for All Men (1595) that “praiers intreating the Lord for deliuerance, supplications for the increase of Gods gifts, both spiritual and temporal … giuing of thankes, for the Lords great kindnesse shewed” should be “publike praier … made in church.”Footnote ⁸⁸ A host of biblical precedents was regularly rehearsed in support of this, including Moses's prayers to end the plagues of Egypt; Helias's prayer for rain after years of drought; and Jehoshaphat’s, Hezekiah’s, and Judas Maccabaeus's successful prayers for victory in battle.Footnote ⁸⁹ But common public prayer was ineffective on its own; ideally, it should be accompanied by fasting and almsgiving. These were “an helpe to prayer” or the “wings of prayer.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Fasting humbled the flesh, made the heart contrite, and brought the realm's prayers to the attention of God. “Thus se we,” Thomas Becon argued, “how necessary a thinge it is to ioyne fasting with prayer.”Footnote ⁹¹ General fasts were regarded as vital partners to prayer in alleviating God's wrath as manifested in national disasters such as wars and plagues: “When God shall afflicte a whole Region, or countrey, with warres, with famine, with pestilence, with straunge diseases, and vnknowne sicknesses, and other suche lyke calamities: then it is tyme for al states, and sortes of people, hygh and lowe, men, women & chyldren, to humble themselues by fastyng, and bewayle theyr synnefulle lyuynge, before God, and praye with one common voyce.”Footnote ⁹² Almsgiving made “pleasaunt the humble supplycacion of a sinner in the eyes of the diuine maiesty.”Footnote ⁹³ Prayer, fasting, and almsgiving enabled the nation collectively to confess and repent of its sins.Footnote ⁹⁴

Special nationwide worship was founded on and justified by ideas of divine providence. Leake told his Westmorland congregation during the outbreak of plague in 1596–97 that this disease “flow[ed] from our owne disobedience and wilfull rebellion.”Footnote ⁹⁵ William Younger, preaching in Great Yarmouth in 1599, declared that the Spanish war was a sign of God's anger, provoked by the “wickednesse [that] walkes vp and downe among you without controlment” and the “iniquitie [that] runs full sea in the channel of thy streets.”Footnote ⁹⁶ The response to such divine warnings and punishments was to try to assuage God's wrath by the collective confession and repentance of the nation's sins and the reforming of all subjects’ lives. “If therefore we wil haue peace in our lord betwixt Spayne and vs,” Younger said, “wee must labour for peace in our consciences betwixt God and vs.”Footnote ⁹⁷ All people must repent of their sins, reform their behavior, and help the needy. They must thank the Lord and petition him for help: to deliver the queen from danger, to help everyone praise him and live a godly life, and to enable all rulers and magistrates to uphold God's law. Similarly, national successes, such as military victories, were (undeserved) blessings for which God should be thanked. The Form of Thanksgiving for the delivery of Malta in 1565 attributed this success to “thy fatherly pitie and merciful goodnes, without any desert of ours.”Footnote ⁹⁸ “Considering the great peace and quietnesse, wherewith God hath continually blessed this Noble Realme of England, since the time that it pleased him by the hand of her Maiestie to haue the sincere trueth of the Gospel of our Sauiour planted among vs,” the preface to the Form of Thanksgiving after the discovery of the Babington Plot in 1586 began, “It were too great impietie, not to shewe our selues dayly thankefull for these great mercies.”Footnote ⁹⁹

This suggests three key aspects of early modern political life that have been insufficiently considered by modern political historians. First, politics was not just concerned with dynastic, territorial, and ideological conflict but also with the realm's collective moral and spiritual failings. Collective sin could bring divine warnings and punishments upon the realm, such as war or disease; collective godliness could be rewarded by military success or abundant harvests. Both affected central aspects of good governance: defense of the realm and the health (and wealth) of the realm's subjects. The spiritual welfare of the realm was the monarch's responsibility, not only as God's representative on earth and, for Protestant regimes like Elizabeth’s, as Supreme Governor of the church, but because the realm's spiritual health directly affected its material prosperity and martial success. This represented common ground among both Protestants and Catholics, even though the particular sins provoking God were open to dispute and Catholics rejected the royal supremacy.

Second, events such as plague, famine, and bad weather can be regarded, along with wars, rebellions, and conspiracies, as political events. Natural occurrences (famine and plague) and human events (war and rebellion) both had the same cause, the collective sins of the kingdom's subjects, and these sins affected the safety and wealth of the nation. All calamities were divine warnings and punishments for sins—judgments on the body politic. There was no pattern to why God chose to warn or punish by war one year and by famine the next, but all such judgments could be remedied the same way: through collective repentance of sins. Clearly, there were differences in the degrees of human responsibility acting as secondary causes. Events such as bad weather, famine, and plague were largely beyond man's control. By contrast, wars, rebellions, and conspiracies were more obviously, though superficially, the product of human action, even if that action was preordained by God. Events were also subject to different degrees of human agency. Wars could be fought and rebellions suppressed by military force; famine could be addressed by regulating grain supplies and prices; nothing could be done about bad weather. Ultimately, however, human agency was subject to God. He gave humans the ability and knowledge to respond to the dangers of war, rebellion, conspiracy, famine, and plague, and the success of all prayers and supplications relied on his grace.

Third, it followed that confession and repentance of sins, prayer, reciting or singing psalms, listening to sermons and homilies, fasting, and studying the scriptures were all forms of political action. Even though Protestants and Catholics might dispute the efficacy of specific devotional exercises (e.g., processions, set prayer), taken as a whole, these were the principal means to respond to providential warnings and punishments and to maintain God's favor, thus enabling the realm to respond both to such crises as famine or war as well as to military success or good harvests. Special worship was not, therefore, merely another form of public religious practice but an occasion on which everyone, including those people usually excluded from more formal means of political activity, could participate to resolve the realm's political problems.

Nationwide prayers, fasts, and thanksgivings were not, therefore, “strategies of persuasion” to shore up Tudor authority. They were part of a well-established, accepted, and shared means of seeking divine assistance in earthly affairs and offering thanks for such aid. Certainly, the regime controlled the creation of occasions of nationwide special worship. It chose which events warranted nationwide worship; commissioned, edited, and approved prayers and liturgies; and employed its own printer to produce copies and used official networks to distribute them to parishes.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The regime also chose what information was disseminated to parishes in Forms of Prayer and Thanksgiving, and framed this information in particular ways to shape parishioners’ interpretation of events.Footnote ¹⁰¹ However, as Michael Braddick has shown for the seventeenth century, and Keith Wrightson, Steve Hindle, Krista Kesselring, and others for the sixteenth century, the early modern state was “a form of organized social power” that was “deeply embedded in the social fabric” and had to appeal to non-elites.Footnote ¹⁰² Both petitionary and thanksgiving services commanded widespread popular support. Bell ringing, extra sermons, and secular celebrations for thanksgivings have already been noted. Moreover, some parishes did not restrict themselves to celebrating events ordered by the regime but anticipated orders for special worship. In the winter of 1599–1600, several London parishes, including St. Andrews by the Wardrobe, were reported to be reciting prayers for the recovery from illness of the popular earl of Essex, who had been confined to York House for negotiating a truce with the rebel earl of Tyrone in Ireland. It was hotly denied that a special day of worship had been sanctioned by the regime or organized unofficially at the connivance of parish ministers.Footnote ¹⁰³ The defeat of the Ottomans at Lepanto in 1572 was celebrated, in London, at All Hallows London Wall, St. Mary Aldermanbury, St. Michael Cornhill, and St. Michael le Querne, as well as at Lambeth, Surrey.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Churchwardens at St. Antholin, St. Botolph Aldgate, St. Christopher le Stocks, St. Mary Woolchurch, and St. Peters Westcheap in London, as well as at St. Thomas, Salisbury, all paid for the bells to be rung to mark Mary Stuart's execution.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Conversely, opposition to special worship by the clergy or the laity appears to have been rare. In 1597, only four parishes out of 806 in the diocese of Norwich failed to hold divine service on fast days.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Another twenty clergy were charged for failing to inform their parishioners of fast days a week in advance—failures that can suggest shoddy organization as easily as opposition.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Edward Phelippes, minister of St. Mary Overy, Southwark, who was imprisoned for postponing an official fast on 5 January 1597, did not oppose state-ordered special fasts. Rather, he argued that he had postponed the fast day only so that he did not have to write two sermons for consecutive days (he preached a weekly sermon on Thursday) and to provide an additional day of reflection and repentance. He had still conducted the prescribed service on Wednesday and ordered a collection for the poor.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Indeed, extant cases suggest that the regime's concerns were either with criticism of the queen (Fezard), perceived challenges to its authority to order fasts (Phelippes), or the failure of ministers to follow procedure (Norwich ministers), rather than opposition to special worship itself.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ It is also probably significant that many of these cases date from the 1590s, when the regime became more authoritarian and more concerned about private Puritan fasts and when, simultaneously, conciliar support for Puritanism declined because of the death of leading patrons (the earls of Leicester and Warwick, Sir Francis Walsingham, and others) and the quasi-republican ideas inherent in Puritanism became more dangerous because the country was at war.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Rather than “strategies of persuasion,” it may be more useful to distinguish between forms of political activity originating among “the people,” such as riots and rebellions, and those initiated by the regime, such as special worship. The former offered people the chance to react independently to local or national events, whereas in the case of the latter, the reason for, time, place, and mode of activity was chosen for them. However, spontaneous action had its limits. Riots and rebellions were extreme and risky forms of action, prompted by severe criticisms of the regime that could not otherwise be resolved and were a last resort. As Kesselring has shown, they were also “sites of negotiation” between rulers and rebels based on shared ideas of mercy but subject to different agenda. For the ruler, the goal was to contain dissent but, for the rebels, it was to seek redress for grievances without loss of life.Footnote ¹¹¹ Equally, top-down action had greater room for maneuver than might initially appear. As special worship relied on collective action, the regime had to ensure that both the events for which it chose to order services and the nature of the action it ordered its subjects to perform would command broad support. Moreover, as we have seen, special worship provided opportunities for individuals and communities to voice criticism of or to support both the regime's immediate purpose and its wider policies.

The political dimensions of nationwide special worship—providential politics—have wider significance in two main areas. First, they contribute to the growing debate on the relationship between politics and religion in early modern England. Since the 1980s, historians of the Civil War have debated whether politics and religion should be regarded as separate factors, analyzed together, or considered to be “inextricably fused together.”Footnote ¹¹² This debate has now migrated to studies of the Elizabethan period: Patrick Collinson, Peter Lake, Michael Questier, and Ethan Shagan have all explored how Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Puritans understood the relationship between politics and religion and how they used it rhetorically and polemically.Footnote ¹¹³ Nicholas Tyacke has also argued that Puritans developed a definite conception of politics, specifically of Christian liberty: a “Puritan paradigm” or “all-embracing Puritan political vision.” This was drawn from the Bible and advocated a specific form of governance (the “mixed polity”) to guarantee the (godly) commonwealth and prevent the descent into tyranny.Footnote ¹¹⁴ A study of Elizabethan nationwide special worship builds on this work, offering a broader, and potentially cross-confessional, answer. By demonstrating that the dominant theory of causation (divine providence) and consequential forms of political action (prayer, fasting, study of the scriptures, confession, repentance) lay wholly or partly within the religious sphere, it suggests that national politics was, at its most fundamental, concerned with managing subjects’ sins, beliefs, and practices. Events and remedies that appeared to owe much to human agency (dynastic, territorial, and ideological conflict; quarantining plague victims; and mustering armies) were either providential or founded on the knowledge that God had given to man as a sign of his protection of his chosen nation. Thus, politics was subsumed into religion, or religion was inherently political.

Second, providential politics was not peculiar or distinctive to Elizabeth's reign but may be applied over a much longer period. Although there was a marked increase in the frequency of special worship during Elizabeth's reign compared to earlier periods, and the format of vernacular liturgies was standardized, there was significant continuity with the periods before 1558 and after 1603. From King Aethelred to Queen Victoria, special worship was ordered by the state to help resolve the nation's problems, to offer thanks for national successes, and to rally support for the government's actions.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Divine providence continued to be recognized as a factor in causation into the nineteenth century, though its primacy was challenged and its invocation was increasingly rhetorical. Though the efficacy of prayer was questioned in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most famously in the “Prayer Gauge Debate” in 1872, many continued to resort to it in times of crisis. These continuities suggest that the practice of Elizabethan special worship stands as a microcosm of wide political participation in England over the longue durée. Even as the franchise widened, office holding proliferated, and newspapers were developed, English subjects continued to be able and willing to participate in resolving their nation's problems through public, common worship. Indeed, the technology that might have militated against the continuing value of special worship—such as better communications and the expansion of printing—actually made greater participation possible by improving the speed with which orders were issued, the provision and distribution of Forms of Prayer to parishes, the availability of Forms of Prayer and Thanksgiving for personal use, and the accessibility of major sermons, especially those preached at St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey, by printing them in newspapers.