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Aug 22, 1485
Richard III is killed in battle
Richard III was the last king of the House of York and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty. His defeat at Bosworth Field, the decisive battle of the Wars of the Roses, is sometimes regarded as the end of the Middle Ages in England. He is the subject of the play Richard III by William Shakespeare. -
Oct 12, 1492
Christopher Columbus reaches the Americas
Columbus first sailed to the Canary Islands, which belonged to Castile, where he restocked the provisions and made repairs. After stopping over in Gran Canaria, he departed from San Sebastián de La Gomera on 6 September, for what turned out to be a five-week voyage across the ocean. A lookout on the Pinta, Rodrigo de Triana (also known as Juan Rodríguez Bermeo), spotted land about 2:00 on the morning of 12 October, and immediately alerted the rest of the crew with a shout. -
Oct 21, 1503
Leonardo da Vinci paints the Mona Lisa
The Mona Lisa (La Gioconda or La Joconde) is a half-length portrait of a woman by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci, which has been acclaimed as "the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world." -
Oct 21, 1516
Thomas More's Utopia is published
More's best known and most controversial work, Utopia is a novel written in Latin. More completed and Erasmus published the book in Leuven in 1516, but it was only translated into English and published in his native land in 1551 (long after More's execution), and the 1684 translation became the most commonly cited. -
Nov 26, 1543
With the Supremacy Act, Henry VIII proclaims himself head of Church of England
The first Act of Supremacy was a piece of legislation that granted King Henry VIII of England Royal Supremacy, which means that he was declared the supreme head of the Church of England. It is still the legal authority of the Sovereign of the United Kingdom. Royal Supremacy is specifically used to describe the legal sovereignty of the civil laws over the laws of the Church in England. -
Nov 17, 1558
Elizabeth I becomes queen of England
Elizabeth became queen at the age of 25, and declared her intentions to her Council and other peers who had come to Hatfield to swear allegiance. The speech contains the first record of her adoption of the mediaeval political theology of the sovereign's "two bodies": the body natural and the body politic. -
Apr 26, 1564
William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon, is born
William Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman and a successful glover originally from Snitterfield, and Mary Arden, the daughter of an affluent landowning farmer. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and baptised there on 26 April 1564. His actual date of birth remains unknown, but is traditionally observed on 23 April, Saint George's Day. -
Globe Theatre is built in London
The Globe Theatre was a theatre in London associated with William Shakespeare. It was built in 1599 by Shakespeare's playing company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, on land owned by Thomas Brend and inherited by his son, Nicholas Brend and grandson Sir Matthew Brend, and was destroyed by fire on 29 June 1613. A second Globe Theatre was built on the same site by June 1614 and closed in 1642. -
Shakespeare writes King Lear and Macbeth
King Lear is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. The title character descends into madness after disposing of his estate between two of his three daughters based on their flattery, bringing tragic consequences for all. Macbeth is a play written by William Shakespeare. It is considered one of his darkest and most powerful tragedies. Set in Scotland, the play dramatizes the corrosive psychological and political effects produced when evil is chosen as a way to fulfil the ambition for power. -
First permanent Englith settlement in North America is established at Jamestown, Virginia.
Jamestown was a settlement in the Colony of Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. Established by the Virginia Company of London as "James Fort" on May 24, 1607 (O.S., May 14, 1607 N.S.), and considered permanent after brief abandonment in 1610, it followed several earlier failed attempts, including the Lost Colony of Roanoke. Jamestown served as the capital of the colony for 83 years, from 1616 until 1699. -
Shakespeare's sonnets are published
Shakespeare's sonnets are a collection of 154 sonnets, dealing with themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty and mortality, first published in a 1609 quarto entitled SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS.: Never before imprinted. (although sonnets 138 and 144 had previously been published in the 1599 miscellany The Passionate Pilgrim). The quarto ends with "A Lover's Complaint", a narrative poem of 47 seven-line stanzas written in rhyme royal. -
King James Bible is published
The King James Version (KJV), commonly known as the Authorized Version (AV) or King James Bible (KJB), is an English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England begun in 1604 and completed in 1611. First printed by the King's Printer Robert Barker, this was the third translation into English to be approved by the English Church authorities. The first was the Great Bible commissioned in the reign of King Henry VIII, and the second was the Bishops' Bible of 1568. -
The Mayflower lands at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts
The Mayflower was the Pilgrim ship that in 1620 made the historic voyage from England to the New World. The ship carried 102 passengers in two core groups – religious Separatists coming from Holland and a largely non-religious settler group from London. -
Newspapers are first published in London
The Gentleman's Magazine, published in London, is considered to have been the first general-interest magazine. Edward Cave, who edited The Gentleman's Magazine under the pen name "Sylvanus Urban", was the first to use the term "magazine", on the analogy of a military storehouse of varied materiel, originally derived from the Arabic makhazin "storehouses". -
John Milton begins Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton (1608-1674). It was originally published in 1667 in ten books, with a total of over ten thousand individual lines of verse. A second edition followed in 1674, changed into twelve books (in the manner of the division of Virgil's Aeneid) with minor revisions throughout and a note on the versification. It is considered by critics to be Milton's "major work", and the work helped to solidify his reputation as -
Puritan Commonwealth ends; monarchy is restored with Charles II
A political crisis that followed the death of Cromwell in 1658 resulted in the restoration of the monarchy, and Charles was invited to return to Britain. On 29 May 1660, his 30th birthday, he was received in London to public acclaim. After 1660, all legal documents were dated as if he had succeeded his father as king in 1649. Charles was also the conductor of the crazy train choo choo chugga chugga.
