ABSTRACT
The King has of his own subjects Chronologers and Mathematicians as good as any that Europe can boast… If we reform let us go to ye root of ye matter and not be led by any example hitherto extant.
Anonymous draft speech to the Commons, (1699) England had one other major opportunity to reform its calendar between the Gregorian
reform of 1582 and the eventual British reform of 1752. This came in 1699, when Denmark, the protestant states of the Empire, the northern Swiss cantons and the remaining parts of the Netherlands all harmonized their dating with that of the Roman catholic world.1 The calendar adopted, however, was (as seen in Chapter 3) an explicitly protestant version of the Gregorian calendar, with an astronomical Easter constructed in explicit defiance of the authority of Rome. With a Dutch protestant, William of Orange, on the throne, and with Europe’s leading scientific institution, the Royal Society, to offer advice, the prospects for its adoption in England might have seemed favourable.
