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16 November 1700 in the Hall of Mirrors

At Versailles on 16 November 1700, Louis XIV publicly announced that his grandson Philip, Duke of Anjou, would succeed Charles II as ruler of the Spanish monarchy. He presented the new king formally in the Hall of Mirrors, where Philip assumed the identity Philip V of Spain.

Philip was seventeen. The Marquis of Castel dos Ríos, Spain's ambassador in France, saluted him as his sovereign and presented the Spanish dignitaries accompanying him.

The ambassador's remembered reaction was that there were "no more Pyrenees" — enthusiasm for a dynastic union rather than the abolition of any border, and a phrase that helped alarm Europe.

The decision behind the ceremony

The public act implemented a decision Louis had taken on 12 November: to accept Charles II's will on his grandson's behalf. The will offered the intact Spanish monarchy to Philip and passed to other candidates if France refused.

Louis therefore had to choose between accepting it and adhering to a partition agreement that risked placing Spain under an Austrian Habsburg. His foreign minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Torcy, helped argue that Austria would probably fight either way.

The wrong date, and the war that did not start

November 15, the date usually attached to this event, is not the best-supported one. The private acceptance was 12 November; the public presentation and proclamation were 16 November.

The announcement created a new diplomatic situation but did not itself produce an Anglo-Dutch declaration of war. Both maritime powers initially considered recognizing Philip, and English stock prices rose on news of the proclamation.

The night of 11–12 February 1700

During the night of 11–12 February 1700 Julian — 21–22 February Gregorian — Saxon forces serving Augustus II crossed into Swedish Livonia and attempted to seize Riga by surprise. That attempt opened the Great Northern War.

The deception began near Olaine. Men posing as travellers bound for Moscow carried concealed soldiers or weapons in their wagons.

Swedish guards discovered the ruse, a skirmish followed, and Riga was alerted.

Riga holds

Erik Dahlberg, Swedish governor-general of Livonia and the fortress commander, retained control of the city. The intended coup de main failed, though the Saxon Livonian campaign continued around Riga.

Jacob Heinrich von Flemming led the Saxon advance. Charles XII, whose Baltic empire was under attack, was not personally at Riga that night.

Not a simultaneous three-power assault

The opening force was principally Saxon: Augustus II acted here in his capacity as elector of Saxony as much as king of Poland. Johann Reinhold Patkul, a Livonian noble opposed to Swedish rule, had helped arrange his anti-Swedish plans.

Denmark-Norway and Russia launched nothing that night. Denmark-Norway attacked Sweden's ally Holstein-Gottorp in March, and Russia entered the war months later.

12 June 1701: royal assent

On 12 June 1701 Old Style, royal assent was given to "An Act for the further limitation of the Crown, and better securing the rights and liberties of the subject" — the statute now called the Act of Settlement.

The 24 June date often attached to it is unsupported. Contemporary English records give 12 June 1701 Old Style, equivalent to 23 June Gregorian.

Sophia placed behind Anne

Anne's only child to survive infancy, the 11-year-old Duke of Gloucester, had died in 1700, leaving no assured Protestant successor after William III and Anne.

The Act declared Sophia, Electress of Hanover — James I's Protestant granddaughter — and the Protestant heirs of her body to be the contingent successors after William III, Princess Anne and any issue either might have. It preserved the exclusion of Catholics and of people married to Catholics from inheriting or exercising the Crown.

It did not put Sophia ahead of Anne, who was still a princess and did not become queen until 1702. The statute wrote a legal contingency plan for a future failure of heirs.

Conditions written for a reign that had not begun

The Act also enacted constitutional conditions for the future Hanoverian limitation, including judicial tenure during good behaviour and restrictions aimed at foreign influence. Several were expressly conditional on that limitation taking effect rather than changing daily government in 1701.

Its restriction on war was narrower than a general requirement of parliamentary permission: it concerned war for territories not belonging to the English Crown under a foreign-born sovereign.

Official statute collections sometimes call it the Act of Settlement 1700, because statutes were then dated by the parliamentary session in which they passed. It nevertheless received assent in the calendar year 1701.

1705: Astronomiae cometicae synopsis

In 1705 Edmond Halley published Astronomiae cometicae synopsis, also issued in English as A Synopsis of the Astronomy of Comets.

Using Newtonian orbital methods, he compared historical comet observations and tabulated 24 cometary orbits. The elements reported for the comets of 1531, 1607 and 1682 came out strikingly similar.

One comet, three appearances

Halley argued that the three apparitions were returns of a single body with a period of roughly 75 to 76 years, and forecast publicly that it would come back in 1758.

The records he leaned on were other people's: Petrus Apianus had observed the 1531 apparition, and Johannes Kepler and Christian Sørensen Longomontanus contributed to the reconstruction of 1607. The 1682 sighting was his own.

What the forecast did not contain

Halley recognized that planetary gravity could change the interval between returns, but he published no precise future path and no detailed numerical perturbation calculation behind the 1758 date. That work came later, from Alexis Clairaut with Jérôme Lalande and Nicole-Reine Lepaute.

Nor had he discovered the comet; people had recorded it for centuries, and the name Halley's Comet was applied only after the return succeeded.

Nothing was confirmed observationally in 1705. The prediction could not be tested until 1758–1759.

10 April 1710: commencement, not enactment

On 10 April 1710 Old Style, five days after royal assent, the principal copyright provisions of the Statute of Anne came into force throughout Great Britain.

Royal assent had been given on 5 April. Accounts that say the statute was "passed" on 10 April conflate enactment with taking effect.

Twenty-one years, then fourteen and fourteen

From that date, authors who had retained their rights — and the booksellers, printers or others who had bought them — held the sole statutory liberty to print qualifying existing books for 21 years.

Unpublished or future books carried a 14-year term for the author or assignee, with a second 14-year term returning to an author who was alive when the first expired.

The right was in books and the liberty of printing or reprinting them, not in every category of creative work. Authors could sell it straight back to booksellers.

Penalties, nine copies, and a power over prices

Unauthorized printing, importing or sale brought forfeiture of the infringing sheets, which were ordered to be made into waste paper, plus a penny for every infringing sheet found — half for the Crown, half for the person who sued.

Printers had to supply nine copies on their best paper for specified libraries before publication. Registration and legal deposit both ran through the Stationers' Company.

The statute also empowered senior judges, bishops and university officials to reduce book prices they judged unreasonably high.

14 April 1712, three versts up the Neva

On 14 April 1712 in Russia's Julian calendar — 25 April Gregorian — Peter I was in Saint Petersburg and ceremonially received Field Marshal Boris Sheremetev on the Neva.

Peter met him three versts upstream from the city, and cannon fired from ships as they approached the fortress. He then spent about two hours at Sheremetev's lodgings.

The senators who arrived and stayed

The contemporary account used by the Higher School of Economics records that several senators arrived at the same time, and that from then on the senators lived and the Senate government operated in Saint Petersburg.

Peter had been increasingly running government and Baltic naval operations from the city. No decree transferring the capital from Moscow has been found.

Which day, and even which year

The 19 May 1712 date attached to this event is unsupported by the consulted scholarship. Even the year is debated: HSE says many historians count from the Senate's move in April 1712, while other work describes the court and Senate moving in 1713 and P. A. Krotov argues for an official-calendar declaration in May 1714.

Because the court, diplomatic corps and government offices moved at different times, there is no universally accepted single day on which the capital changed.

Moscow kept institutions of its own, and the ground Saint Petersburg stood on remained formally Swedish territory until the 1721 Treaty of Nystad.

11 April 1713: four signatures at Utrecht

At Utrecht on 11 April 1713, John Robinson, bishop of Bristol, and Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford, signed for Great Britain; Nicolas d'Huxelles and Nicolas Mesnager signed for France.

The treaty declared peace between Queen Anne and Louis XIV and ordered hostilities by their subjects to cease on land and water throughout the world. It bound those two crowns: Emperor Charles VI kept fighting France until Rastatt in 1714.

The document itself gives the date as 31 March/11 April 1713 — 31 March under the British Julian calendar, 11 April under the Gregorian.

What France gave up across the Atlantic

France agreed to restore Hudson Bay, to yield exclusive possession of St Christopher and of Nova Scotia or Acadia, and to recognize Newfoundland and its adjacent islands as wholly British.

French crews kept a precisely bounded seasonal right to catch and dry fish on Newfoundland's coast. France retained Cape Breton, and the zone closed to French fishing ran within 30 leagues from Sable Island toward the southwest.

Clocks, and the harbour at Dunkirk

Ratifications were to be exchanged within four weeks, Hudson Bay delivered within six months of ratification, Newfoundland within seven months of the exchange.

Louis XIV was to demolish Dunkirk's defences and obstruct its harbour within five months — paying to fill in the harbour and level the sluices that kept it clear, and never rebuild them.

The settlement incorporated reciprocal Bourbon renunciations intended to prevent the French and Spanish crowns from ever being united in one person. Britain and France also concluded a separate 39-article treaty of commerce, navigation and marine that same day.

9 June 1715: a reform undone

On 9 June 1715 Philip V issued a royal decree annulling the Council reforms of 10 November 1713 and their subsequent declarations, because the new arrangements had produced confusion and disorder.

The decree restored the Royal and Supreme Council of Castile's earlier functions and internal organization. It did not unify the Crowns of Castile and Aragon.

What went back to what it had been

The Cámara of Castile returned as a separate council — a body the previous reform had declared extinguished forever. The fiscal general, substitute prosecutors, advocates-general and chief secretaries introduced in 1713 disappeared.

The Council's chambers recovered their former names and jurisdictions, and the presidency became a one-person office again. The five-man presidency created in 1713 had lasted about nineteen months.

Why the unification label does not fit

No act unifying the Crowns of Castile and Aragon was issued on 9 June 1715. The Crown of Aragon was a composite of distinct realms, not one kingdom whose constitution could be abolished in a single document.

The centralization associated with Philip V ran through multiple decrees between 1707 and 1716. Catalonia's Nueva Planta was drafted later in 1715 and dispatched by royal cédula on 16 January 1716.

Spain remained legally and institutionally uneven afterwards. Navarre and the Basque provinces retained important fueros.

3 April 1721: the Treasury seals

On 3 April 1721 — not 4 April, as the date is often given — Robert Walpole received the seals of office as First Lord of the Treasury. He was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer at the same time; the two offices frequently went together in this period.

It was his second turn at both. He had held them from 1715 to 1717.

The vacancy the South Sea Bubble made

The South Sea Bubble had discredited leading politicians. James Stanhope died and the Earl of Sunderland's position collapsed amid scandal, leaving Walpole as the administration's strongest parliamentary figure.

George I made the appointments. What followed was initially a partnership with Charles Townshend, Walpole's brother-in-law and Secretary of State, rather than an uncontested one-man cabinet.

A title that began as an insult

No patent appointed Walpole to a new office called Prime Minister. Historians conventionally date his de facto premiership from these appointments, running 1721 to 1742.

The term "prime minister" was initially used as criticism, and Walpole later denied that he was a sole or prime minister.

Within two weeks a supportive newspaper listed government posts held by Walpole, his sons, brothers and brother-in-law — the human machinery behind the "Robinocracy".

8 March 1722, east of Isfahan

On 8 March 1722, near Gulnabad about eighteen miles east of Isfahan, an Afghan tribal army commanded by Mahmud Ghilzai routed the hastily assembled army of the Safavid shah Soltan Hosayn.

Isfahan's government had sent untrained peasants and merchants into the field alongside its remaining seasoned troops. Dissension among the Safavid commanders helped turn the battle into a rout.

The Georgians, and the flight back to the capital

Rustam Khan's experienced Georgian contingent was decimated. It reportedly stood and fought while much of the larger Safavid formation collapsed around it.

The surviving Safavid troops fled toward Isfahan. Encyclopaedia Iranica puts Safavid battlefield losses at about 4,000–5,000 soldiers; army strengths vary sharply between accounts and are not settled figures.

A blockade instead of a storming

Mahmud occupied nearby Farahabad and Julfa, but his army was too weak to storm the fortified capital. He began enclosing it instead.

The dynasty did not end on the battlefield: Soltan Hosayn did not surrender until October, and Safavid claimants continued afterwards.

The date is the prevailing one rather than the unanimous one. The Cambridge History of Islam and Encyclopaedia Iranica give 8 March 1722 (30 Jumada I 1134), while Rudi Matthee notes that Vladimir Minorsky dated the battle to 6 March.

1722, at Köthen

In 1722, while serving as Kapellmeister at Köthen, Johann Sebastian Bach completed and compiled an autograph fair copy titled Das Wohltemperierte Clavier.

The manuscript organized a prelude and fugue in every major and minor key, proceeding through the chromatic sequence from C major and C minor to B major and B minor — 24 paired key-settings, 48 individual pieces, now catalogued as BWV 846–869.

On the title page Bach identified himself as Kapellmeister and director of chamber music to Leopold, Prince of Anhalt-Köthen.

Made for learners and for the already skilled

The title page says the collection was made for the use of musical young people eager to learn and for the diversion of players already skilled in the subject. That is a declaration of intended use, not a dedication to a named person.

The 1722 manuscript was a teaching and copying source rather than a printed publication. Bach revised it afterwards, and his pupils transmitted it through hand-copied scores.

What the year on the page fixes

No month or day is known; 1722 is what the autograph title page carries. It dates the completed fair copy and compilation of what is now called Book I, not the first composition of every prelude and fugue.

"Well-tempered" does not establish that Bach intended modern equal temperament; the particular tuning remains debated.

The surviving title page carries an elaborate row of loops that has generated modern tuning reconstructions, though scholars dispute whether it encodes a temperament at all.

1728: a star moving on the wrong schedule

By about September 1728, James Bradley had worked out both an empirical law for the stars' annual apparent motion and an explanation for it: Earth's orbital motion combined with the finite propagation speed of light.

The work had begun as a parallax experiment with Samuel Molyneux, whose telescope at Kew was installed through the ceiling and roof of his house. Gamma Draconis did shift annually, but its maxima fell at the wrong seasons for parallax.

Bradley tested for instrumental errors and observed additional stars with a new sector at Wanstead. George Graham had built the precision zenith sectors that made shifts of a few seconds of arc measurable.

Eight minutes twelve seconds

From the aberration Bradley derived a ratio of light speed to Earth's orbital speed of 10,210 to one — equivalent, in his calculation, to light crossing the Sun–Earth distance in 8 minutes 12 seconds.

He prepared a letter to Edmond Halley setting out the observations, the calculations and the explanation. It was read at two Royal Society meetings in January 1729 by modern year reckoning, though the Society's catalogue labels the reading "9 January 1728" under contemporary British Old Style conventions.

What he did not find

Aberration turned up during a failed search for parallax, and Bradley did not measure stellar parallax. The aberration angle does not shrink with a star's distance; it was the failure to detect parallax that put the stars beyond his instruments' reach.

His 1727–1728 observations also held a residual change that aberration did not explain, but he did not yet have the long-period evidence to establish nutation of Earth's axis. He disclosed the idea privately in 1737 and published in 1748, after observing a complete lunar-node cycle.

The familiar Thames sailing-boat and wind-vane story does not appear in Bradley's own account and may be apocryphal.