This study explores two central themes related to Puritan warfare. I termed the first ‘godly violence’ and the second ‘military providentialism’. Godly violence was a way of thinking about the act of killing; military providentialism an interpretive practice in war. As such, godly violence was embedded within the broader category of military providentialism. Of the first, this was violence performed by ‘the godly’, believed to be godly and thought to involve God as an active participant. Military providentialism (before, during and after war) helped partisans differentiate godly from ungodly, just from unjust – and this pertained to persons, causes and actions. This chapter sets the stage for the case studies by overviewing providentialism, with a particular focus on how these beliefs related to politics and war. The next chapter spells out how this study of military providentialism undergirds a deeper understanding of the relationship between justice and holiness in war.

Early modern beliefs about providence were relatively similar across Christian confessions. As noted by Barbara Donagan, ‘Puritan providentialism was doctrinally indistinguishable from Anglican or Catholic’. She continues: ‘The intensity of Puritan providentialism did not … derive from a new or distinctive doctrine. It was Augustinian as well as Calvinist, and Puritan preachers acknowledged it to be so’. There were subtle differences in how Puritans held and articulated these shared beliefs. As Mark Noll noted about providentialism in the American Civil War: ‘With these convictions, the chorus, though singing different notes, sang them all in the same way’.

The case studies address a central question: What did the godly say God did in war; and how did they claim to know? Each decisive victory occasioned hundreds – sometimes thousands – of uses of Scripture and theology. ‘The number of possible interpretations of providence was potentially limitless’, writes Geoffrey Browell. Each victory might be viewed radially – spawning an increasing number of interpretations that often pointed in opposite directions. Partisans in each conflict made dozens of claims about how they knew particulars about the will and agency of God. The chapters bear witness to the immense energy and creativity that went into their dynamic and richly textured beliefs.

Just and Holy Warfare

The previous chapter demonstrated the inner workings of providentialism as partisans strained to hear God's voice. One conclusion reached through military providentialism was the belief that killing was godly. Focusing on how beliefs about divine involvement were formed opens new vistas for understanding justice and holiness in war, with implications for understanding historical and modern violence in God's name.

Early modern just war thinking was far more ‘religious’ than many scholars acknowledge. Similarly, ‘holy war’ thinking usually made more robust appeals to justice than is often credited. At the time, theories of politics and religion were in flux. Rather than pitting the theories against each other, each case study evidences the interplay and overlap between justice and holiness in partisan's minds. I have called this ‘godly violence’. Much more can be said about possible relations between justice, holiness and providence.

Scholars across many disciplines devote great energy towards comprehending and preventing violence done in the name of God. Their work on modern violence shapes the questions I ask. Although I aim to avoid explaining the past through the lens of these disciplines, they influenced my approach to religion and violence – most notably my resistance to reductionism. Elsewhere I pushed for a complex understanding of violence in the name of God – and this complexity in three areas: ‘religion’ as a cause of violence; the relationship between readers, beliefs, texts and violence throughout history; and the complex relationship between justice and holiness in conflict.

The relationship between Christianity, violence and just war tradition is long and complex. One part of that story is important for understanding modern views about violence involving religion, and that relates to an important turn in thinking about the just war tradition. The main scholarly bifurcation between ‘just war’ and ‘holy war’ came through Roland Bainton's influential 1942 paper that formed part of a 1960 book. In Bainton's section on the English Civil War, he wrote the oft-quoted lines:

Violence and Virtue

The moderate Puritan, Richard Sibbes, argued in Violence Victorious (1639) that all people violently (i.e. wholeheartedly and earnestly) pursued desires. Religion did not diminish this violence – it redirected it. According to Matthew 11:12, ‘the kingdome of heaven suffereth violence [βιάζϵται], and the violent [βιασταὶ] take it by force’. This violence, however, was differentiated from ‘a violence of iniquity and injustice; and so the people of God, of all others, ought not to be violent people. … Violence rather debars out of the kingdom of heaven than is any qualification for it’. Taking life was no light matter.

In 1644, Griffith Williams, a royalist chaplain, believed eminent Puritan divines would be damned. By leading the nation into an unjust and unholy so-called ‘bellum sanctum’, these ministers would be ‘indicted at the barre of Gods justice for a felo de se’ (suicide). The sword Puritans thrust at their sovereign pierced their own souls. The difference between righteous killing and spiritual suicide was in the beholder's eye – and views hinged on rival interpretations of God's providential communications.

Scripture placed the highest sanctions on those who unjustly took life. However, between 1636 and 1676, Puritans exerted enormous energy towards killing countless humans. They frequently showed a mundane disregard for civilian or soldier through warfare, impressment, imprisonment, mutilation, pillage, destructions of homes and crops, forced relocation, land confiscation, stripping civilians of clothing, slavery, forced transatlantic relocation and the ritualised display of the dead. Why did they think these acts were just? Why were these acts not considered damnable? Why were they deemed holy and praiseworthy? As this study demonstrates, they believed this life-taking was just and even that God participated in it.

What did the godly say God did in war; and how did they claim to know? This question lies at the heart of the book. I have given the term ‘military providentialism’ to the attempt to understand God's will and agency in war; ‘godly violence’ to the conclusion that a lethal act was just and holy. The godly analysed the details of war on several levels and used many competing interpretive frames.

In the sixteenth century, the Scottish and English reformations parted ways. Whereas Scotland enjoyed relative success in reforming church and state, Edward VI's death arrested England's reformation. When Protestantism was restored after Mary I's death, further reformation was not on the agenda of Elizabeth I, James I or Charles I. By the late 1630s, long-standing tensions burst into the open after a royal intrusion into the theology and practice of the Scottish Presbyterian Church led the Scots to march into England (the Bishop's Wars of 1639–1640). These wars helped bring England's parliament into open conflict with their king. Then military cooperation between Scotland and England's parliament laid the groundwork for a theological union. Although the Westminster Assembly of Divines worked to bring about theological concord, uniformity remained elusive. It was natural for Scotland to believe that their purified church would provide the template for England, and the Solemn League and Covenant even made this an aim of military cooperation (an agreement with loopholes).

Puritan theology fragmented as the godly entered the daylight. Victory and defeat facilitated this splintering. ‘Puritanism’, wrote John Morrill, ‘both triumphed and disintegrated in the English Revolution’. The Westminster Assembly of Divines, noted Chad Van Dixhoorn, experienced a similar rise and decline:

Given the political and religious fragmentation, one sub-theme in this book is that there was no authoritative interpretation of victory.

To the frustration of Presbyterians, they were only one of many voices trying to interpret providence and reform England. New Englanders returned to Old England and assisted parliament. Many articulated an alternative vision for a purified church – Congregationalism. Unity and purity, again, pulled in opposite directions. As Michael Winship has argued, ‘the wound Congregationalism created in English Puritanism would never heal’.

The five case studies support many cross-conflict comparisons. Many of these comparisons have never been made across all the groups considered in this book. There were surprising similarities between enemies as different as Scottish Presbyterians and Algonquians, but also intriguing differences. These cross-conflict comparisons relate to ad bellum, in bello and post bellum beliefs and actions, and are arranged accordingly. Some of the comparisons are made for all five case studies and others for only two, three or four.

Ad bellum

Victimisation. First, in each conflict, the Puritans had a deep and abiding sense of victimisation. Their enemies also felt this way, leading to competing discourses of victimisation. The national and religious identity of the perpetrator seemed to influence how they formed, nurtured, articulated and debated these beliefs. A few, like Roger Williams, were acutely aware of the ease with which victims could victimise. Although he cautiously and critically supported the godly in all five wars, he emphasised merciful justice.

The currency of conflict often depicts the same face on both sides of the coin – the victimised on one side was often the victimiser on the other. This suggests hidden dangers in a just cause, namely to redress wrongs through force puts one on a slippery slope that could lead to the creation of new victims.

In the years before the Pequot War, the English were largely indifferent to the Pequot, and vice versa. Several killings of Englishmen by Indians led the English to try to hold a trial to determine guilt. The clash of legal cultures spilt over into a clash of military cultures and civilians on both sides often bore the brunt of their leaders’ decisions. Acting in fear and frustration, the English sent a large force that could compel the Pequot to turn over suspected murderers. They ended up massacring or enslaving much of the Pequot population.

At Naseby, the sense of victimisation was much more theoretical, being inseparable from notions of proper worship and governance. It was the perceived violations of rights, privileges and godliness that led persons to take up arms against their sovereign. In the opening years of the war, the godly increasingly felt as if they were the victims of the king's policies and military forces.

In the third decade of the twenty-first century, visitors to Rome on a whistlestop tour to take in the splendours of St Peter's Basilica are likely to miss the now unassuming-looking buildings comprising the Hospital of Santo Spirito in Sassia. The hospital, located just out of sight of the busy Via della Concilazione leading to Bernini's piazza, and a few minutes’ walk from the Basilica, is still active today in a modern building adjacent to the fifteenth-century complex. It is an institution with a documented history dating back to 1198, though its origins as an ecclesiastical institution are even older.1 The scope and function of what constituted a Hospital and similar charitable institutions at the time of the foundation of the Order of Santo Spirito and its hospital are, however, vastly different from their modern equivalents.

At the time of the Hospital's foundation and throughout the period with which this book is concerned, the separation of disciplines into science, religion, art and their subsidiary disciplines of biology, botany, music, philosophy and so on did not exist. A university-trained physician of the Renaissance would have had a thorough understanding of a wide range of topics embraced within ‘natural philosophy’, as well as music theory, rhetoric, logic and astronomy, all of which were included in grammar-school education. This study focuses in particular on the close relationship between religion and medicine – a relationship that is extremely complex, with roots reaching back to antiquity – and how music may be viewed as a point of triangulation between them.

In pre-Christian and non-Western contexts, temples were (and are) places where the sick sought relief through rituals, and shamans functioned as mediators between the spirit world and physical world for guidance in curing diseases. We know from ancient literature that music played a part in these healing practices. It should not be surprising that as Christian communities developed, their places of worship likewise became sanctuaries to which folk came to find cures for mental and physical illness.

Healing was a fundamental part of the activities of the followers of Jesus recounted in the New Testament and, according to the earliest defences of Christianity written by Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Origen and Irenaeus, contin-ued in the Christian communities of late antiquity up until around the Council of Nicaea.

The Ludlamshöhle Petition, February, 1824

The petition that Beethoven received was of indeterminate authorship, signed by thirty of Vienna's most prominent music lovers and dated simply as “Vienna, in February, 1824” (see Appendix B). It is long and written in the most flowery, convoluted, and self-important language possible. It declares that the signers are representatives of Vienna's wide circle of lovers of art, that they know that Beethoven has great new works that have not yet been heard, and that they hope that he will not allow these works to be performed elsewhere (implying Berlin or even London) until they have been heard in this, his second native city. With the exception of a half-dozen members of the nobility, including Prince Eduard Lichnowsky, Count Moritz Lichnowsky, and Count Moritz von Dietrichstein, most of the signers are wealthy (or at least prominent) lovers of music and theater, music dealers, government officials, and so on. With the exceptions of Carl Czerny, Anton Halm, and Abbé Stadler, no one in the list could be considered a professional musician.

Thanks to Beethoven's conversation books, we now know the document's origins. On May 1, 1824, Joseph Carl Bernard, the editor of the Wiener Zeitung, told Beethoven that the “letter” was “a product of the Ludlamshöhle” group, who met in “a beerhouse next to the Trattnerhof, where Castelli, Kuffner, Deinhardstein, Bäuerle, and many others congregated. They wanted to strike a blow against the Italians with it.” And sure enough, the poet and playwright Ignaz Castelli (1781–1862), poet Christoph Kuffner (1780–1846), and poet Johann Ludwig Deinhardstein (1794–1859) were among the signers. Earlier, on Tuesday, April 27, Schindler had told Beethoven that Carl Czerny had assured him that Stainer von Felsburg was the author, but the document's length and tone suggest that several hands had a role in drafting it.

Similarly, we can now be clearer about when it was delivered. On Wednesday, February 25, nephew Karl told Beethoven that there had been a visitor while he (Beethoven) was gone from his apartment. The implication was that the visitor had brought Beethoven an important message and was somewhat irritated at not finding the composer at home so he could deliver it personally.