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

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

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

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