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The Massacre of Glencoe February 13 enrages Scotland with its treachery and will lead to years of feuding in the highlands. Ian MacDonald, chieftain of the MacDonald clan at Glencoe, has taken an oath of allegiance January 6 to England's William III, but William's agent John Dalrymple, 44, earl of Stair, has suppressed news of the oath and has conspired against MacDonald with Archibald Argyll, 41, and with John Campbell, 57, first earl of Breadalbane. A troop of soldiers, whose ranks include many members of the rival Campbell clan, has accepted the hospitality of the MacDonald clan at Glencoe. The Campbells have risen at a signal early in the morning, and they kill some 36 of the MacDonalds, including Ian (see Rob Roy, 1693).
The Battle of La Hogue May 29 costs France 15 ships, and Louis XIV's military advisers persuade him that great fleets are a waste of money. Admiral de Tourville has been compelled to help plan an ill-conceived landing on English soil, and he puts up a good fight (for which he will be made a marshal of France next year), but a Royal Navy fleet under the command of Admiral Edward Russell annihilates the French Navy with help from master of the fleet John Benbow, 39. France will avenge her loss next year but will leave England and the Dutch to dispute supremacy of the seas.
The Battle of Steinkirk (Steenkirken) July 24 gives France's duc de Luxembourg a victory over England's William III in the continuing War of the League of Augsburg.
Former parliamentary general Charles Fleetwood dies at Stoke Newington, Middlesex, October 4 at age 74 (approximate).
Benjamin Fletcher arrives at New York in August to take office as the new royal governor, replacing the late Governor Sloughter. Citizens who include Captain William Kidd and Robert Livingston opposed the late Jacob Leisler and welcome Fletcher with a parade. William and Mary deprive William Penn of his proprietorship and commission Fletcher as governor of Pennsylvania.
Protestant rebels overthrow the Maryland colony's proprietary government and institute royal rule (see 1688). Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore, sets sail for England and will not return.
New Hampshire regains its status as a royal colony.
Spanish forces recapture the New Mexican territories from which the Spaniards were driven in 1680.
Accusations of witchcraft by English-born clergyman Samuel Parris, 39, result in dozens of alleged witches being brought to trial at Salem in the Massachusetts Bay colony in April as Parris reminds his neighbors of the Old Testament command, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" (Exodus 22:18). Tituba, Parris's female slave, has entertained neighborhood girls, including his daughter Elizabeth, 9, and Mary Warren, a 20-year-old servant, with tales from her native West Indies. Her story telling has led to descriptions of spirits, fortune-telling, and voodoo rituals. She has performed bits of magic, and her listeners, excited, have reacted with strange behavior that the Reverend Parris ascribes to witchcraft. One farmer's crops did poorly, and it is recalled that his neighbor, Sarah Good, was seen loitering near his property. Hearings on charges of witchcraft begin March 1. The suggestible girls are quick to level accusations against scores of "witches," and Rebecca Nurse (née Towne), 71, mother of eight and having many grandchildren, is arrested March 24, protests her innocence, but is placed in chains and kept in filthy jails at Salem and Boston until June 30, when she is tried and found guilty despite petitions signed on her behalf by 40 citizens, including members of the Putnam family. She is hanged on Gallows Hill July 19 with four others. Despite protests from citizens who include Boston-born businessman Thomas Brattle, 34, a total of 19 are hanged and one pressed to death, many of them on the testimony of 12-year-old Anne Putnam (who in 1706, seeking Church membership, will confess that it "was a great delusion of Satan in that sad time" and ask special forgiveness for her accusations against Rebecca Nurse). The last execution takes place September 22. Tituba herself, although sentenced to death, will be held in jail until May of next year, when the governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony will order the release of all those accused and awaiting trial, but since she is unable to pay for her 13-months' maintenance in prison she will be sold to raise money for the expenses of keeping her for 13 months (see 1664; Mather, 1693; Sewall, 1700).
Captain William Kidd receives £150 from the city council for having chased a hostile privateer off the New York coast. Kidd purchases a large lot on the north side of Wall Street, marries the twice-widowed Sara Bradley Cox Oort, thus increasing his holdings by £155 14s, and settles with his bride in a tall stone house east of Hanover Square at 119-121 Pearl Street, with Turkish carpets on his parlor floor and casks of Madeira in his cellar (see 1695).
New York colonist Frederick Philipse marries for a second time November 30 (his first wife, Margaret, has died), this time to Catherine, daughter of Oloff Stevenson Van Cortlandt and widow of merchant John Derval. Now 66, Philipse has befriended every royal governor since Edmund Andros, avoiding political controversies.
Pope Innocent XII issues the encyclical Romanum decet pontificem June 22 forbidding nepotism: only one relative of a pope shall be eligible for the cardinalate.
The Ukrainian Catholic metropolitanate of Przemyshl gives up its opposition to the 1596 Union of Brest-Litovsk and joins the union (see Lvov, 1677).
Mme. de Maintenon begins transforming her school at Saint-Cyr into a convent school, the Institute de Saint Louis, after hearing scurrilous charges that it has become a training school for courtesans (see 1688; theater, 1689). "It is I who have spread the sin of pride through our house," she professes, "and I shall be very fortunate if God does not punish me for it . . . I wanted that the girls should have intelligence, that their hearts should be uplifted, and they are prouder and more haughty than is becoming in the greatest princesse . . . A simple Christian education would have made them good girls, out of whom we could make good wives; we have made beaux-esprits, whom we ourselves cannot endure" (see 1713).
Journalist Henry Muddiman dies at Coldhern, near Earl's Court, London March 7 at age 63.
The French National Library (Bibliothèque Nationale de France) opens to the public at Paris (it will not be given that name until 1795). Moved to Paris sometime between 1567 and 1593, it had its origin as the King's Library (Bibliothèque du Roi) in the 14th century under Charles V, whose 1,200 manuscripts were installed in the Louvre, but that collection was dispersed, and no new national library was created until the reign of Louis XI in the late 15th century. Beginning in 1537 it received a copy of every French publication, and François I relocated it to Fontainebleau in 1544, where it remained for at least 22 years (see 1721).
Nonfiction: New Memoirs in the Service of History (Nouveaux memoire pour servir a l'histoire) by Pierre-Daniel Huet, who continues his critique of Cartesian ideas, saying that it is only through faith, not reason, that truth is ultimately known (the philosophy will be called fideism).
Fiction: Fables of Aesop, and other Eminent Mythologists, with Morals and Reflexions is published at London. Journalist Sir Roger L'Estrange, now 75, has translated stories that are said to have originated with an ugly, deformed Greek slave of the 6th century B.C., although some of the fables will be traced to earlier literature.
Poet-playwright Sir George Etherege dies on or about May 10 at age 56 (approximate); Thomas Shadwell at London November 19 at age 50, evidently from an overdose of opium taken to relieve the pain of his gout. He is succeeded as poet laureate by Nahum Tate, who will hold the position for 23 years.
Hymn: "Adeste Fidelis" by English clergyman John Reading. An English version beginning "Oh Come All Ye Faithful" will be published in 1841 with lyrics by another clergyman.
Jamaica in the West Indies has a violent earthquake wave June 7, shattering two-thirds of Port Royal, now the largest city in the New World (see 1655). About 2,000 of its 7,000 inhabitants are killed outright, and an ensuing tidal wave 30 feet high kills many more in the stronghold of Spanish Main buccaneers, washing away brothels, churches, gambling dens, mansions, shops, a synagogue, taverns, and warehouses containing vast fortunes in booty. Gangs of cutthroats roam the streets that survive the disaster, seizing whatever they can of what remains.
England's two leading provincial towns of Bristol and Norwich have some 30,000 inhabitants each. York and Exeter are the only other towns with as many as 10,000, but London has close to 550,000 and rivals Paris as a center of population. England's total population approaches 6 million, of which half are farm workers in a country that is still half fen, heath, and forest.
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