SEVENTEENTH CENTURY HISTORY (and Milton's
life and career)
Political
authority: monarch vs. Parliament
Spiritual
authority: Anglican episcopacy vs. presbyterians vs.
Puritans
1603 Death of Elizabeth I; accession of James I
1608 Group
of Puritans departs for Amsterdam, later Plymouth (1620), rather than submit to
Anglican episcopate
1609
Milton born
1616 Death of Shakespeare
1625 James I dies; Charles I accedes
1631
Death of John Donne.
1639-40 War with Scotland (in part over attempts to impose Anglican forms on presbyterian Church of Scotland)
1640 (to 1649) Long Parliament
1641 Archbishop of Canterbury, Laud, impeached, imprisoned, and eventually
executed (1645)
1642 Charles
attempts and fails to arrest 5 members of Parliament; theatres closed by order
of Puritans. Civil war begins: Cavaliers (royalists) vs. Roundheads (parliamentarians).
Theatres closed.
1647 Charles taken prisoner
1649 Charles
tried, convicted, beheaded on Jan. 30. Cromwell's military government controls
the Commonwealth. Milton serves as Latin
Secretary to Cromwell’s government, 1649-60
1653 Cromwell becomes Lord Protector of England, now a Protectorate; Parliament
dissolved.
1655 Cromwell prohibits Anglican services
1658 Cromwell dies; succeeded as Lord Protector by his son Richard, who dies
the next year
1660 Restoration: at Parliament's request, Charles II (a closet Catholic) returns
from the Continent. London theatres reopened.
Milton imprisoned briefly.
1664 Nonconformist (i.e., non-Anglican) religious practices made illegal
1665 Plague in London kills 70,000
1666 Great Fire in London leaves 2/3 of the city homeless
1667 First edition of Paradise Lost published
1673 Test
Act requiring conformity, excluding Catholics from office and requiring
occupants all civil and military offices to declare their allegiance to the
Anglican faith
1674 Second
edition of Paradise Lost; death of Milton
1678 "Popish
Plot" revealed; Catholics tried, hung, excluded from Parliament; Exclusion
bills considered to prevent a Catholic from inheriting the throne.
1681 Charles
gets $$ from France, dissolves Parliament. Tories (Chas.) vs. Whigs
(Shaftesbury, etc.)
1685 Charles dies; succeeded by Catholic brother James II
1687 James suspends Test Act
1688 "Glorious
Revolution"--William of Orange (married to James’s daughter Mary),
Protestant lord, invited to England; James abdicates
1689 Toleration Act grants freedom of worship to dissenters and nonconformists;
Bill of Rights limits the powers of the crown