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| 1649, Jan. 20 |
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| The army council drew up a temporary Instrument of Government. Charles was tried before the high court (67 members present, Bradshaw presiding), whose jurisdiction he simply denied (Jan. 20–27). The king was sentenced to death and beheaded at Whitehall (Jan. 30). (See 1795, Oct. 24) | 1 |
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| Cultural Developments |
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| Inigo Jones (1573–1652) built Lincoln's Inn Chapel, the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall, the Queen's House at Greenwich. | 2 |
| University of Glasgow (1452); University of Aberdeen (1494); St. Paul's School, London (1510); Rugby (1567); Harrow (1571); Trinity College, Dublin (1591). | 3 |
| Prose: Archbishop Cranmer, Book of Common Prayer; Thomas More (1478–1535), Utopia, 1516; Roger Ascham (1515–68), The Schoolmaster; Raphael Holinshed (d. 1580), Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland; Richard Hakluyt (1552–1616), Principall Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation, 1589; Richard Hooker (1554–1600), Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity; Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86), poet and critic, Defense of Poesie; Sir Walter Raleigh (1552–1618), The History of the World; John Lyly (1554–1606), Euphues; The Anatomy of Wit; the essayist Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Essays, New Atlantis, 1621; Robert Burton (1577–1640), Anatomy of Melancholy; the political philosophers Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Leviathan, 1651, and James Harrington (1611–77), Oceana, 1656; Izaak Walton (1593–1683), The Compleat Angler, 1653; Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82), Religio Medici. | 4 |
| Poets: Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–99). Faerie Queene; Sir Walter Raleigh; Sir Philip Sidney; Ben Jonson (1573–1637); John Donne (1573–1631). | 5 |
| Composers: Thomas Tallis (c. 1505–85); William Byrd (1540–1623); Orlando Gibbons (1583–1625). | 6 |
| Miracle plays ceased after the Reformation, but dramas in a popular vein were produced. Christopher Marlowe's use of blank verse in his morality plays (Dr. Faustus, 1588; The Jew of Malta, 1589) established its use in the English theater. | 7 |
| William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was the greatest dramatist of the Elizabethan or any other age. The power of his dramas derives from his extraordinary development of individual characters, his forceful and precise vocabulary, and the universal and enduring appeal of his plots to other ages and other cultures. Many of his plays, especially the tragedies, relied on history for their stories (Julius Caesar, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI); the greatest tragedies are probably Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth; among the comedies are A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. Shakespeare also wrote some of the best sonnets in the English language, using a rhyme scheme of his own devising; also lyrics, incorporated in the narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece and often in the plays. | 8 |
| Shakespeare established the drama as a respected literary medium. The collaborators Francis Beaumont (1579–1625) and John Fletcher (1584–1616) dared to poke fun at their society (The Knight of the Burning Pestle, 1607). | 9 |
| John Milton (1608–74), the blind poet of the Puritan Revolution, composed sonnets and lyric poems (L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Lycidas) in his youth; published his three major poems after the Restoration (Paradise Lost, 1667; Paradise Regained, 1671; Samson Agonistes, 1671); and a History of Britain to the Conquest (1670). During the 20 years of political unrest he wrote prose tracts in support of liberty—in religion, education, and the press (Areopagitica, 1644). | 10 |
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