1662

• Future queen Mary II of England and Scotland, daughter of James, Duke of York.

• French mathematician Blaise Pascal.  One wonders whether he collected or not.
• English classical scholar and literary critic Richard Bentley.
• Dutch painter Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne.
• English musician and composer William Young.
• German composer Johann Kruger.
• Prince Honoré II of Monaco.
• Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James I, onetime electress of The Palatine and queen of Bohemia.
• Sir Henry Vane the Younger, Dissenter leader and opponent of the Restoration and the establishment of the Church of England), beheaded for 'treason'.
• English religious leader John Biddle, founder of Unitarianism, died in prison.
• Wampanoag leader Wamsutta. See Below. His brother Metacom, aka 'Philip', succeeds him.
• Zheng Cheng Gong, aka 'Koxinga', last Ming Dynasty loyalist after the Manchu conquest, on his recently-captured strongold of Formosa.
• Qing Shizu, Shunzhi Emperor of China.  His eight-year-old son Shengzu ascends the throne as 'Kangxi'.

• Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, publishes a collection of the Plays she has written.
• Robert Boyle forlumates a mathematical law governing the behavior of gases.
• The English Parliament crushes the people who had helped them gain power.
• passes the Act of Uniformity, requiring ministers to use the rites of the Church of England, creating the class of 'Dissenters', political outcasts in addition to the Roman Catholics.  At the same time, a new version of the Book of Common Prayer comes out, defining precisely the rites the Act requires ministers to perform.
• passes a Licensing Act prohibiting the publication of books and pamphlets not conforming to the Church of England, and requiring a license for all publications.
• levies a tax of two shillings on every hearth in England.
• Charles II
• grants a charter to several New Haven planters expanding the colony in area, forming a new colony, Connecticut.
• grants a charter to several English scientists and tinkerers who had been meeting since 1645, allowing them to call themselves the Royal Society.
• marries a Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza, alarming those trying to expunge Catholicism from England.
• Louis XIV
• acquires the Paris Gobelins tapestry factory.
• expels Sephardic Jews from France.
• Polish king Jan II Casimir grants a 'writ of privelige' allowing Jews to live in Poland.
• French settlers in Newfoundland begin building their new capital, Plaisance, to counter growing English power based in Avalon.
• Quaker leader George Fox is thrown in prison.
• Plymouth Colony worthies, unable to get Wamsutta to sell them land fast enough, decide to try force. Wamsutta and his retainers are taken at gunpoint to Plymouth to be threatened. Wamsutta catches something (smallpox?) and dies on the joutney home. Metacom begins selling lands to the colonists again, but the road to war in 1675-1676 is set.
• English slave traders build a fort on the Gold Coast that would later be surrounded by the city of Accra.

1661 - 1662 - 1663

How They Were Made - 17th Century