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