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English Coffehouses
The first coffeehouse in England was opened in Oxford in 1652. In London, the first one was opened later that same year at St Michael’s Alley, Cornhill.
The new coffeehouses became fashionable places for the chattering classes to meet, conduct business, gossip, exchange ideas and debate the news of the day. Unlike public houses, no alcohol was served and women were excluded. Each coffeehouse had a particular clientele, usually defined by occupation, interest or attitude. -
Monarchy is restored
Charles II, byname The Merry Monarch, king of Great Britain and Ireland (1660–85), who was restored to the throne after years of exile during the Puritan Commonwealth. The years of his reign are known in English history as the Restoration period. His political adaptability and his knowledge of men enabled him to steer his country through the convolutions of the struggle between Anglicans, Catholics, and Dissenters that marked much of his reign. -
Royal Society
It emerged from small gatherings of men keenly interested in science, in particular from a meeting in London on November 1660 attended by Christopher Wren. The king’s approval led to a royal charter in 1662, giving the society the right to publish under its own name. The Royal Society became the visible vanguard of natural science, through the work of prominent members such as Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, and through the society’s journal, Philosophical Transactions. -
Great Plague
In the spring and summer of 1665 an outbreak of Bubonic Plague spread from parish to parish until thousands had died and the huge pits dug to receive the bodies were full. The King, Charles II and his Court left London and fled to Oxford. Those people who could sent their families away from London during these months, but the poor had no recourse but to stay. In all, 15% of the population perished during that terrible summer. -
Great Fire
Great Fire of London, (September 2–5, 1666), the worst fire in London’s history. It destroyed a large part of the City of London, including most of the civic buildings, old St. Paul’s Cathedral, 87 parish churches, and about 13,000 houses. -
Test Act
Test Act, 1673, English statute that excluded from public office (both military and civil) all those who refused to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, who refused to receive the communion according to the rites of the Church of England, or who refused to renounce belief in the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Although directed primarily against Roman Catholics, it also excluded Protestant nonconformists. -
St Paul's Cathedral
In the 1660s Christopher Wren was enlisted to survey and repair the cathedral, but it was destroyed in the Great Fire of London (1666) before work could begin. He subsequently designed and oversaw the construction of the present cathedral. Wren's design combined Neoclassical, Gothic, and Baroque elements in an attempt to symbolize the ideals of both the English Restoration and 17th-century scientific philosophy. -
James II becomes king
Returned to England at the Restoration of his brother, Charles II, in 1660. He commanded the Royal Navy from1660 to1673. In 1660, James married Anne Hyde, daughter of Charles II's chief minister and they had two surviving children, Mary and Anne. In 1669, James converted to Catholicism and took a stand against a number of anti-Catholic moves, including the Test Act of 1673. This did not impede his succession to the throne on Charles' death in 1685. -
Glorious Revolution
The Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689 replaced the reigning king, James II, with the joint monarchy of his protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband, William of Orange. It was the keystone of the Whig history of Britain.
According to the Whig account, the events of the revolution were bloodless and the revolution settlement established the supremacy of parliament over the crown, setting Britain on the path towards constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy. -
Toleration Act
Toleration Act, (May 24, 1689), act of Parliament granting freedom of worship to Nonconformists (i.e., dissenting Protestants such as Baptists and Congregationalists). It was one of a series of measures that firmly established the Glorious Revolution (1688–89) in England. -
Act of Settlement
The Act of Settlement of 1701 was designed to secure the Protestant succession to the throne and to strengthen the guarantees for ensuring a parliamentary system of government.
The Act also strengthened the Bill of Rights (1689), which had previously established the order of succession for Mary II’s heirs. -
Queen Anne succeeds to the throne
Anne became queen upon William’s death on March 1702. From the first, she was motivated largely by an intense devotion to the Anglican church. She detested Roman Catholics and Dissenters and sympathized with High Church Tories. At the same time, she sought to be free from the domination of the political parties. Her first ministry, though predominantly Tory, was headed by two neutrals, Sidney Godolphin and the duke of Marlborough. -
Act of Union
The Acts of Union, passed by the English and Scottish Parliaments in 1707, led to the creation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain on 1 May of that year. The UK Parliament met for the first time in October 1707, the Scottish Parliament was dissolved and England and Scotland combined to work in a political union.
Scotland kept its independence with respect to its legal and religious systems, but coinage, taxation, sovereignty, trade, parliament, and flag became one. -
Treaty of Utrecht 1713
By the treaty with Britain (April 11), France recognized Queen Anne as the British sovereign and undertook to cease supporting James Edward, the son of the deposed King James II. France ceded Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, the Hudson Bay territory, and the island of St. Kitts to Britain and promised to demolish the fortifications at Dunkirk, which had been used as a base for attacks on English and Dutch shipping.
Spain’s treaty with Britain (July 13) gave Gibraltar and Minorca to Britain. -
George I, first Hanoverian King of England
In 1701, under the Act of Settlement, George's mother Sophia was nominated heiress to the English throne if the reigning monarch William III and his heir Anne died without issue. The Act sought to guarantee a Protestant succession and George's mother was the closest Protestant relative, although there were at least 50 Catholic relatives whose claims were stronger. The Electress Sophia and Anne died in quick succession and George became king in August 1714. -
The English novel Robinson Crusoe
Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" began the literary genre of realistic fiction. The aspects of his writing that define "realism" would be the immense detail he uses; descriptive language; and the flow of his narrative (dialect included). Defoe concentrates on the qualities of different objects, which provide us with a picture to accompany the words. -
Sir Robert Walpole Prime Minister
Walpole was a British Whig statesman, considered to be the first holder of the office of prime minister, who dominated politics in the reigns of George I and George II. -
The English novel Gulliver's Travels
Gulliver’s Travels, four-part satirical work by Anglo-Irish author Jonathan Swift, published anonymously in 1726. A keystone of English literature, it was one of the books that gave birth to the novel form, though it did not yet have the rules of the genre as an organizing tool. A parody of the then popular travel narrative, Gulliver’s Travels combines adventure with savage satire, mocking English customs and the politics of the day. -
George II
George II, in full George Augustus, German Georg August, also called (1706–27) marquess and duke of Cambridge, (born November 10 [October 30, Old Style], 1683, Herrenhausen Palace, Hanover—died October 25, 1760, London), king of Great Britain and elector of Hanover from 1727 to 1760. Although he possessed sound political judgment, his lack of self-confidence caused him to rely heavily on his ministers, most notable of whom was Sir Robert Walpole. -
Battle of Culloden
The Battle of Culloden occurred on April 16, 1746, and was the last pitched battle in Britain. Effectively, it defeated and put an end to a series of Jacobite uprisings that had been ongoing since 1688 following the Glorious Revolution. It also put an end to the male-line succession of the House of Stuart on the British throne. -
Prime Minister William Pitt
William Pitt, the Elder, twice virtual prime minister (1756–61, 1766–68), who secured the transformation of his country into an imperial power.
British Prime Minister William Pitt (the older) recognized the potential of imperial expansion that would come out of victory against the French and borrowed heavily to fund an expanded war effort. Pitt financed Prussia’s struggle against France and her allies in Europe and reimbursed the colonies for the raising of armies in North America. -
King George III
George III was born on 4 June 1738 in London, son of Frederick, Prince of Wales and Augusta of Saxe-Gotha. He became heir to the throne when his father died in 1751, succeeding his grandfather George II in 1760.
George III was the third Hanoverian king of Great Britain. During his reign, Britain lost its American colonies but emerged as a leading power in Europe. He suffered from recurrent fits of madness and after 1810, his son acted as regent. -
Treaty of Paris
The Treaty of Paris of 1763 ended the French and Indian War/Seven Years’ War between Great Britain and France, as well as their respective allies. In the terms of the treaty, France gave up all its territories in mainland North America, effectively ending any foreign military threat to the British colonies there. -
Proclamation Act of 1763
Proclamation of 1763, proclamation declared by the British crown at the end of the French and Indian War in North America, mainly intended to conciliate the Native Americans by checking the encroachment of settlers on their lands. In the centuries since the proclamation, it has become one of the cornerstones of Native American law in the United States and Canada. -
Sugar Act
Sugar Act, also called Plantation Act or Revenue Act, (1764), in U.S. colonial history, British legislation aimed at ending the smuggling trade in sugar and molasses from the French and Dutch West Indies and at providing increased revenues to fund enlarged British Empire responsibilities following the French and Indian War. The Sugar Act provided for strong customs enforcement of the duties on refined sugar and molasses imported into the colonies from non-British Caribbean sources. -
Stamp Act
The Stamp Act of 1765 was the first internal tax levied directly on American colonists by the British government. Arguing that only their own representative assemblies could tax them, the colonists insisted that the act was unconstitutional, and they resorted to mob violence to intimidate stamp collectors into resigning. -
Sons of Liberty
Sons of Liberty, organizations formed in the American colonies in the summer of 1765 to oppose the Stamp Act. They took their name from a speech given in the British Parliament. They rallied support for colonial resistance through the use of petitions, assemblies, and propaganda, and they sometimes resorted to violence against officials of the mother country. Instrumental in preventing the enforcement of the Stamp Act, they remained an active pre-Revolutionary force against the crown. -
Townshend Acts
Townshend Acts, (June 15–July 2, 1767), in colonial U.S. history, series of four acts passed by the British Parliament in an attempt to assert what it considered to be its historic right to exert authority over the colonies through suspension of a recalcitrant representative assembly and through strict provisions for the collection of revenue duties. The British American colonists named the acts after Charles Townshend, who sponsored them. -
Boston Massacre
The Boston Massacre was a deadly riot that occurred on March 5, 1770, on King Street in Boston. It began as a street brawl between American colonists and a lone British soldier but quickly escalated to a chaotic, bloody slaughter. The conflict energized anti-Britain sentiment and paved the way for the American Revolution. -
Boston Tea Party
Boston Tea Party, (December 16, 1773), incident in which 342 chests of tea belonging to the British East India Company were thrown from ships into Boston Harbor by American patriots disguised as Mohawk Indians. The Americans were protesting both a tax on tea (taxation without representation) and the perceived monopoly of the East India Company. -
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense published
In late 1775 the colonial conflict with the British still looked like a civil war, not a war aiming to separate nations; however, the publication of Thomas Paine’s irreverent pamphlet Common Sense abruptly put independence on the agenda. Paine’s 50-page pamphlet, couched in elegant direct language, sold more than 100,000 copies within a few months. More than any other single publication, Common Sense paved the way for the Declaration of Independence. -
Intolerable Acts
Upset by the Boston Tea Party and other blatant acts of destruction of British property by American colonists, the British Parliament enacts the Coercive Acts, to the outrage of American Patriots, on this day in 1774.
The Coercive Acts were a series of four acts established by the British government. The aim of the legislation was to restore order in Massachusetts and punish Bostonians for their Tea Party. -
Batlles of Lexington and Concord
The Battles of Lexington and Concord kicked off the American Revolutionary War. On the night of April 18, 1775, hundreds of British troops marched from Boston to nearby Concord in order to seize an arms cache. Paul Revere and other riders sounded the alarm, and colonial militiamen began mobilizing to intercept the Redcoat column. A confrontation on the Lexington town green started off the fighting, and soon the British were hastily retreating under intense fire. -
Continental Congress
In response to the British Parliament’s enactment of the Coercive Acts in the American colonies, the first session of the Continental Congress convenes at Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia. Fifty-six delegates from all the colonies except Georgia drafted a declaration of rights and grievances and elected Virginian Peyton Randolph as the first president of Congress. Patrick Henry, George Washington, John Adams, and John Jay were among the delegates -
2nd Continental Congress
The Congress “adopted” the New England military forces that had converged upon Boston and appointed Washington commander in chief of the American army on June 15, 1775. It also acted as the provisional government of the 13 colony-states, issuing and borrowing money, establishing a postal service, and creating a navy. Although the Congress for some months maintained that the Americans were struggling for their rights within the British Empire, it gradually cut tie after tie with Britain -
Declaration of Independence
Declaration of Independence, in U.S. history, document that was approved by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, and that announced the separation of 13 North American British colonies from Great Britain. It explained why the Congress on July 2 “unanimously” by the votes of 12 colonies (with New York abstaining) had resolved that “these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be Free and Independent States.” -
France and the United States form an alliance
The French had secretly furnished financial and material aid to the Americans since 1776, but with the signing in Paris of the Treaty of Amity and Commerce and the Treaty of Alliance, the Franco-American alliance was formalized. France began preparing fleets and armies to enter the fight but did not formally declare war on Britain until June 1778. -
Siege of Yorktown
After winning a costly victory at Guilford Courthouse, North Carolina, on March 15, 1781, Lord Cornwallis entered Virginia to join other British forces there, setting up a base at Yorktown. Washington’s army and a force under the French Count de Rochambeau placed Yorktown under siege, and Cornwallis surrendered his army of more than 7,000 men on October 19, 1781. -
Treaty of Paris ends the American Revolutionary War
After the British defeat at Yorktown, the land battles in America largely died out. The military verdict in North America was reflected in the preliminary Anglo-American peace treaty of 1782, which was included in the Treaty of Paris of 1783. By its terms, Britain recognized the independence of the United States with generous boundaries, including the Mississippi River on the west. Britain retained Canada but ceded East and West Florida to Spain.
