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17 May 1756: one folio page, issued at Kensington

At Kensington on 17 May 1756, King George II issued a formal declaration of war against the French king. It was printed as a single folio broadside.

The text cited French actions in North America and the West Indies, earlier seizures and fighting at sea, and — most immediately — the French invasion of British-held Minorca.

What it ordered

George II directed British military and naval officers to carry out acts of hostility against the French king and his subjects, and forbade British subjects to correspond or communicate with them.

Ships carrying soldiers, arms, ammunition or other contraband to French territories became liable to capture as lawful prizes. French subjects in Britain who behaved dutifully were promised safety.

Not the day the fighting started

Anglo-French hostilities had been running in North America since 1754, and the declaration's own text described the seizure of an Ohio fort that year as a commencement of war. Cambridge's account dates the European war's beginning elsewhere again — to Frederick II's invasion of Saxony on 29 August 1756.

The proclamation was printed in the London Gazette on 18 May, which is why many accounts carry that date instead. France issued its own declaration against Britain on 9 June.

23 June 1757: a cannonade, then rain

Near Palashi in Bengal on 23 June 1757, Robert Clive's East India Company army confronted the much larger army of Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah and its French artillery contingent. The National Army Museum puts Clive's force at about 3,000 — roughly 2,100 Indian sepoys and 800 Europeans — against a nominal 50,000 including 16,000 cavalry.

After an inconclusive cannonade, heavy rain interrupted the fighting. Company gunners covered their ammunition; much of the Nawab's artillery became unusable.

The men who did not fight

Most of the troops controlled by Mir Jafar, Yar Latif Khan and Rai Durlabh remained spectators — Banglapedia puts roughly two-thirds of Siraj's army in that category, standing by under disaffected commanders. Clive and Bengali financiers had secretly agreed to replace Siraj with Mir Jafar.

After the loyal commander Mir Mardan was mortally hit, the Nawab's forces began withdrawing. The Company attacked again, and the withdrawal became a general rout.

Six miles of pursuit

Clive reported pursuing the retreating army for six miles, passing more than forty abandoned cannon. The Company held the battlefield by evening.

His report counted 22 Company dead and 50 wounded, chiefly sepoys, against about 500 dead on the other side. Siraj returned to Murshidabad and was displaced within days, with Clive installing Mir Jafar as Nawab under the conspirators' prior agreement.

A watch instead of a clock

Royal Museums Greenwich, which holds H4, records it as John Harrison's completed 1759 longitude watch and dates the object to that year. The movement itself carries the inscription John Harrison and Son A.D. 1759.

Harrison began it in 1755, after a smaller watch made to his design by John Jefferys showed what a watch-sized timekeeper could do. His long-running H3 was struggling to reach the required accuracy, so he changed form entirely: a stable, high-frequency balance in a case 165 by 124 by 28 millimetres, with a 102-millimetre dial.

The 1760 problem

No exact completion day is established. The Science Museum Group chronology says Harrison produced H4 in 1760, and another historical account says it was completed and shown to the Board that year.

The difference may reflect physical completion against presentation or final adjustment. The movement inscription supports the custodian's 1759 dating.

Completed is not proven

Finishing the watch did not demonstrate that it worked at sea. Its first transatlantic trial did not begin until November 1761, carried by Harrison's son William, and evidence of performance followed in 1761–1762.

Nor was it the first marine timekeeper: Harrison's earlier H1 had made a successful Lisbon voyage in 1736. H4 was a unique, difficult-to-reproduce prototype, not yet the standardized chronometer of the nineteenth century.

September 1769: the rain does not come

During September 1769, East India Company officials in Bengal began reporting rapidly rising food costs and the monsoon's failure. Richard Becher warned Governor Harry Verelst from Murshidabad that the lack of rain threatened misery and a very short rice crop.

The crop at risk was the aman, harvested from November to January, which normally supplied about 70 percent of Bengal's rice. Recent scholarship dates the critical drought to August 1769 – January 1770.

What the correspondence worried about first

George Vansittart reported that provisions in the western jungles near Midnapore had grown too expensive for the sepoys stationed there. A Bengal general letter of 25 September reported scarcity inside Bengal even as officials were trying to supply drought-stricken Madras.

A 30 September entry predicted that Bengal and Bihar revenues would fall short because grain was unusually scarce — written weeks before London was told that the drought threatened famine.

First measures, and the count nobody has

In September the Company prohibited English people and their dependants from trading in rice and issued orders against hoarding. By April 1770 it had advanced 100,000 rupees for charitable rice distribution near Murshidabad.

September 1769 is the onset and recognition of severe scarcity, not the month of mass death; the heaviest mortality came in 1770. No census or vital registration existed, and published death estimates span one to ten million — the familiar ten-million figure is rejected or heavily qualified by recent scholarship.

1773: £8,750, voted by Parliament

In 1773, following Harrison's appeals and a successful royal trial of his fifth timekeeper, Parliament granted him a special award of £8,750 for his services to navigation.

Sources disagree on the exact June date — scholarly payment tables give 19 June, other histories say Parliament agreed on 30 June. The year itself is secure.

Compensation, not the prize

The money was parliamentary compensation rather than an award of the Longitude Prize by the Board of Longitude. Harrison never formally received the reward specified by the 1714 Act, whose three accuracy thresholds offered £10,000, £15,000 and £20,000.

Nor had it ever arrived as one sum. The 1773 grant was his final large payment after decades of development grants and an earlier £10,000 associated with H4; one scholarly accounting totals £23,065 across his career.

What the quarrel was actually about

The Board accepted that H4 met the Act's strictest accuracy limit, then required Harrison to disclose its construction and demonstrate that other makers could reproduce it. That condition, set against his wish to protect his methods, kept the dispute alive.

It outlasted even H5's successful test at the royal observatory at Richmond, which George III supported. Harrison was about eighty when Parliament voted him the £8,750.

1 August 1774: sunlight on a red powder

In his laboratory at Bowood House in Wiltshire, on 1 August 1774, Joseph Priestley focused sunlight through a burning lens twelve inches across and twenty inches in focal length onto red mercuric oxide — then called mercurius calcinatus per se — held in a glass vessel inverted over mercury.

The material readily gave off air. Priestley collected roughly three or four times the bulk of the starting material, which was already more than the substance had any obvious business yielding.

Water, a candle, and a piece of red-hot wood

He admitted water to the collected gas, expecting it to be absorbed as several of the airs he had worked with were. It was not.

A candle then burned in it with what he called a remarkably vigorous flame, far more intensely than he expected. A red-hot piece of wood put into the gas did not merely glow: it sparkled and was consumed rapidly.

Priestley wrote that he was utterly at a loss how to account for it. He read the result inside phlogiston theory rather than as the isolation of an element, and by the end of the day he had a collected, water-insoluble gas that supported combustion violently — an anomalous experimental result and nothing more settled than that.

The mouse, the name and the priority came later

Priestley soon left with his patron Lord Shelburne for continental Europe and did not resume systematic work on the gas until March 1775; the famous mouse test belongs to 8 March 1775, when he observed survival of about an hour in the new gas against roughly fifteen minutes in ordinary air. Nothing was named oxygen on 1 August: Priestley called it dephlogisticated air, Antoine Lavoisier later proposed the name and folded the gas into a new account of combustion, and Carl Wilhelm Scheele had probably produced it independently in the early 1770s but published only in 1777.

Which is why "the third discovery of oxygen" is a label rather than a fact — first production, first publication, correct identification and naming point to four different moments. Priestley supplied one of them, and spent the rest of his life defending the theory that his own gas would demolish.

23 August 1775: a proclamation at St James's

At the court at St James's on 23 August 1775, George III, acting with the advice of his Privy Council, issued "A Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition."

It declared that subjects in Britain's North American colonies had proceeded to "open and avowed Rebellion" by organizing in a hostile manner and levying war against the king.

What it commanded

The proclamation ordered civil and military officers and loyal subjects throughout the king's dominions to help suppress the rebellion and bring those responsible to justice.

It went further than officialdom. Subjects were commanded to report people corresponding with or aiding those in arms, so that the authors and abettors of the alleged treason could be punished.

The petition, and the timing

This was not the king reading the Olive Branch Petition and rejecting its contents that day. Richard Penn and Arthur Lee did not present the formal original to Lord Dartmouth until 1 September, though a copy may have reached him around 21 August.

The proclamation made the petition's hoped-for reconciliation far less plausible. Congress did not learn that the king had declined to receive it formally until November.

2 July 1776: twelve delegations vote yes

Meeting in Philadelphia on 2 July 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the first clause of Richard Henry Lee's resolution, declaring the United Colonies free and independent states, absolved from allegiance to the British Crown and politically separate from Great Britain.

Twelve colonial delegations voted for it. New York cast no vote at all — its delegates were still bound by their instructions, and the New York Convention approved the action on 9 July.

How the last votes moved

Caesar Rodney arrived in time to break Delaware's divided vote in favour of independence. Pennsylvania changed after two opponents were absent, and South Carolina changed its position.

The day before, Edward Rutledge had asked for the decision to be postponed from 1 July to 2 July, believing his colleagues would then join the independence vote. The 1 July debate in committee of the whole had already run about nine hours.

Two days from a decision to a document

Immediately after adopting the resolution, Congress began considering the Committee of Five's draft Declaration of Independence. Only the independence clause passed on 2 July; Lee's treaty and confederation proposals proceeded separately.

The Pennsylvania Evening Post carried the news that same day, reporting that Congress had declared the United Colonies free and independent states. Congress adopted and ordered the Declaration printed on 4 July.

9 September 1776: two words swapped in Philadelphia

Meeting in Philadelphia on 9 September 1776, the Continental Congress resolved that future continental commissions and other instruments should use "United States" wherever "United Colonies" had previously been used.

The recorded resolution says "United States." It does not say "United States of America."

A housekeeping fix, not a coinage

Congress's official commissions and instruments still carried the pre-independence style, an administrative inconsistency left over after the July declaration of independent states. The measure was prospective: it directed the substitution in documents yet to be issued.

The phrase itself was not new. "United States of America" had already appeared in the Declaration and in the draft Articles of Confederation.

The rest of the day's business

The naming resolution sat among routine work — military payments, correspondence, an admiralty appeal, appointments. Earlier in the same session Congress ordered $500,000 sent to the army's paymaster general.

John Adams recorded the resolution in his account of 9 September, then left Philadelphia for an unsuccessful peace conference with Lord Howe.

19 September 1777: contact at Freeman's Farm

Burgoyne's army left camp in three columns on 19 September 1777 and moved south toward the American fortifications at Bemis Heights, near present-day Stillwater, New York.

Shortly after noon, Daniel Morgan's riflemen ran into Burgoyne's center column near Freeman's Farm. Benedict Arnold then fed successive American regiments into the fighting, managing the forward battle from a distance.

Seesaw, then the late reinforcements

The fighting swung back and forth through the farm clearing and the surrounding woods, running from about 12:30 p.m. to roughly 5 p.m.

It ended when General Friedrich Riedesel arrived with about 750 reinforcements, prompting a general American withdrawal.

A tactical win that went nowhere

The British held the battlefield at day's end. The Americans fell back to their fortified lines and went on blocking the route south toward Albany.

The National Park Service estimates about 580 Crown casualties against about 320 American. Burgoyne had lost roughly twice as many troops as Gates and had advanced no farther, while additional militia kept reaching the American camp.

6 February 1778: two treaties, four signatories

In Paris on 6 February 1778, the French plenipotentiary Conrad Alexandre Gérard and the American commissioners Benjamin Franklin, Silas Deane and Arthur Lee signed the Treaty of Alliance.

The same four men signed the Treaty of Amity and Commerce, establishing reciprocal commercial relations and recognizing the United States as an independent nation.

An alliance with a trigger

The alliance was expressly defensive and contingent: if war broke out between France and Britain, its purpose was to maintain American sovereignty and independence. Article 12 tied the wartime guarantees to that rupture.

The allies also agreed to make no separate truce or peace with Britain, and not to lay down their arms until American independence had been secured. Ratifications were to be exchanged within six months, or sooner if possible.

Why it happened when it did

The British surrender at Saratoga had convinced Louis XVI and Vergennes that the American rebellion was viable, and rumors of British peace offers pushed France to conclude without waiting for Spain. Spain's opportunity to accede was placed in a separate secret act, with language inserted at Arthur Lee's insistence.

Franklin and Deane notified Congress on 8 February that both treaties had been signed. The signatures did not, by themselves, instantly produce open Anglo-French warfare.

5 September 1781: getting twenty-four ships out of an anchorage

At about 9 a.m. on 5 September 1781, Thomas Graves's British fleet reached the mouth of Chesapeake Bay and learned from a scouting frigate that de Grasse was anchored inside.

Many French officers and crewmen were ashore. De Grasse nonetheless hurried 24 ships of the line out of the bay and formed them against Graves's 19.

A shallow V, and two and a half hours of firing

Firing began at about 4:15 p.m. The two lines closed at an angle, forming a shallow V, so the leading divisions carried most of the fighting while the rear divisions never fully engaged. Wind and Graves's confusing signals contributed to the British rear's failure to close, Hood's division among them.

The fleets disengaged at sunset, around 6:30 p.m. The National Park Service reports 90 British killed and 246 wounded, and 209 French casualties; the Naval History and Heritage Command puts French losses at 220 killed and wounded.

No fleet destroyed, but the bay stayed closed to Graves

No fleet was destroyed, so the cannonade was tactically inconclusive. But Graves had failed to enter the Chesapeake or dislodge de Grasse, which was the whole point of the voyage.

The damaged fleets drifted south within sight of each other, leaving the bay entrance open. The Comte de Barras brought his transports and siege equipment in unopposed; de Grasse was back by 10 September, and when Graves approached again he found the French reinforced and withdrew to New York.