'Give us our eleven days!': calendar reform in eighteenth-century England

Past & Present, Nov, 1995 by Robert Poole

In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century debates over the calendar, correct astronomical measurement was seen as an essential tool, but it was not the central issue. The key questions were theological: how important was exactitude in the observance of Christian festivals? Was the time of the Council of Nicaea an appropriate starting-point for the new calendar, or was the time of Christ more suitable? Above all, who had the authority to alter the calendar in the first place: the pope, the monarch, the national church, or only another general council? Despite this religious mine-field, England in fact came remarkably close to adopting the Gregorian reform the first time round. John Dee, the court magus, was asked by the privy council for his opinion. He responded with a substantial treatise which argued for a super-reformed Elizabethan calendar, corrected to the first century rather than the fourth by omitting eleven days rather than the Gregorian ten. Dee was optimistic that his calendar would in time oust the Gregorian, given an evolutionary advantage by its superior rationality, by its Protestant assumptions, and by England's imperial destiny. The council, however, was attracted by the diplomatic convenience of harmony with the Continent, and resolved to adopt the Gregorian calendar as it stood. A proclamation was drawn up, but the scheme was sunk by the opinion of the bishops consulted, who argued that "seeing all the reformed Churches in Europe for the most part do hold and affirme and preach that the Bishop of Rome is Antichrist, therefore we may not communicate with him in any thing", and held up the possibility of a schism between England and the rest of the Protestant world.(41) The English calendar was not, after all, reformed, and there the matter lay for another sixty years.

The next proposal to adopt the Gregorian calendar came, significantly, from the Laudian astronomer John Greaves during the Civil Wars. Dee's work had somehow come to his notice, and although he acknowledged the force of Dee's arguments for a distinctive English Protestant calendar he felt that the unity of Christian Europe came first, and urged that the Gregorian calendar be adopted. The privy council apparently approved of Greaves's proposal, but royalist Oxford in 1645 did not provide the ideal opportunity for the king to try to impose a popish calendar on his rebellious subjects, and once again the matter went no further.(42)

The defeat of the king in the Civil Wars saw moves to reform the calendar in a Protestant and rational direction. The parliamentary religious calendar of the 1640s was entirely aseasonal, a monotonous round of monthly fast-days broken only by Guy Fawkes night.(43) A scheme for a radically reformed calendar had been mooted by the chronologer Thomas Lydiat as early as 1605,(44) but by the middle of the century the agenda had moved on to the abolition of saints' days and even of the pagan names of months and days, "as that instead of January, February, etc., Sunday, Monday, etc., we shall only say the first, second, etc., month or day". In the new Commonwealth, the dating of documents issued under the great seal was carried out according to a chronology in which 1649 was "the first year of freedom", but other schemes for calendar reform came to nothing; in the end, it was only the Quakers who adopted a numerical calendar purged of all un-Christian associations.(45)