Chapter 1 - God's Will: Judgement, Providence, and the Prayers of the Poor

Summary

For faithful Christians, there could be no doubt that god was a sovereign whose dominion encompassed both this world and the next. The dire fate that awaited dying sinners was well known, but it was also clear that he might intervene directly or indirectly in human affairs. God overthrew popish tyrants, foiled assassins, smote murderers, and burned great cities to the ground. And this vengeful, interventionist deity also had a role to play in dealings that modern commentators might regard as purely economic. God ordained society's vast inequalities in wealth, rewarded the industrious poor and the charitable rich, punished ruthless money-lenders and food-hoarders, and responded quickly to pious individuals afflicted by sudden material hardships. Though some widely held assumptions about divine influence and otherworldly intervention were theologically dubious, they supported a whole web of early modern beliefs about property, accumulation, charity, finance, and trade.

Previous work on the later Stuart period has almost entirely neglected these manifold connections between religious ideas and economic culture, in some cases simply denying such links even existed. Richard Tawney argued that late seventeenth-century Protestantism ‘left little room for religious teaching as to economic morality’. Unfortunately, many scholars have followed his lead and, even in recent decades, the ‘secularisation’ of later Stuart social relations has often been regarded as a self-evident fact.