ABSTRACT
Recent scholarship has recognised the continuous connection between religion and warfare in post-Westphalian Europe. This entanglement was reflected not only in the diplomacy leading to conflicts but also in how the wars were understood by contemporaries. Through the religious texts for British soldiers as well as their personal accounts during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and the War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714), this chapter investigates the lasting significance of providentialism in warfare during this supposedly secular ‘age of reason’. After Britain went into wars with France, Church of England clergymen preached ceaselessly to the soldiers that they were a divine instrument to restore the peace of Christendom, hence the battles they fought were favourably determined by the providence. Such discourse was employed to justify wars, assert political authority and discipline morality of the soldiers. Though these pamphlets were distributed in the army with the help of the newly founded Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), the efforts to edify soldiers might have been compromised by the inherent inefficiency of the army chaplaincy. As a result, while many British soldiers, regardless of their own religiosity, did not fail to invoke the divine providence to explain their experience on battlefields, from dodging a bullet to winning a battle against odds, their understandings of the providence sometimes deviated from the teaching of the church and resembled the notion of ‘fortune’ or ‘fate’.
