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

Past & Present, Nov, 1995 by Robert Poole

Calendar reform next became a major issue at the end of the seventeenth century. 1700 was a leap year in the Julian calendar but not in the Gregorian, so the difference between the two was set to widen from ten days to eleven. During the period of relative political and religious calm which followed the Peace of Ryswick, the Protestant states of the Empire decided to adopt a reformed calendar. The imperial Diet, however, insisted that its reform could not "be interpreted an accepting of the Gregorian cyclus", since its basis was claimed to be improved astronomical observations - which just happened to be in line with those of the Vatican. Crucially, the Protestant Easter was to be determined astronomically rather than by the Gregorian formula; the Roman Catholic concept of a unified civil and liturgical calendar under ecclesiastical authority was thus rejected.(46)

The German measure touched off widespread debate in England, and there was talk at Westminster of a calendar reform bill as imminent in the autumn of 1699. The Diet contacted William III to encourage England to follow suit. When this failed to elicit a response, they approached the Royal Society for support through Leibniz, who had recently persuaded the Elector Frederick to set up an academy of sciences in Berlin to be funded by a monopoly on the new almanacs.(47) Newton became interested enough to produce his own scheme for a radically reformed calendar, as well as a draft bill which was in important respects similar to that which was actually successful fifty years later.(48) The religious alarms of the period, however, hampered calendar reform. Crucial interventions were made by John Wallis, former Puritan, a mathematician, theologian and veteran controversialist, and now a formidably well-connected Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford. Wallis's basic objection to the Gregorian calendar was the "latent Popish Interest" which lay behind it; he argued forcefully that the Church of England should remain faithful to the exact rule laid down by the Council of Nicaea. He also pointed out that the English calendar would, if reformed, differ from that of the Scots, so that the need to maintain two reckonings would remain.(49) Amongst supporters of calendar reform, Dee's improved version remained the favoured option, perhaps because of anxieties over the distinctive identity of the Church of England.(50) Once again, no agreement could be reached on reforming the calendar.

The first half of the eighteenth century saw a broad trend in calendrical writings away from the religious and towards the astronomical. Too much should not be made of all this for the early part of the century. This age of religious insecurity was also the age of Anglican devotional manuals, works characterized by a minute interest in the correct observance of fasts and festivals and by an encyclopaedic approach to the problems of the calendar.(51) A number of broadly sympathetic works on calendar reform did appear, but most continued to mix astronomy with theology and chronology, and the solutions offered varied accordingly.(52) The mid-1730s, however, saw a distinct change in the prevailing tone, and several works appeared whose main purpose was to enable the reader to outflank the complexities of the calendar by means of astronomical explanation, conversion tables and perpetual calendars.(53) The term "calendar" became less likely to signify the whole cultural edifice and more likely to refer simply to the chronometrical framework. For the basic system of numbering the days and years the neutral term "style" (or "stile") came to be used, and to "alter the style" implied much less than to "reform the calendar". Less was heard of the divine symmetry of the heavens and more of their complex irregularity: inexplicable, perhaps, but certainly measurable. The emphasis was not on theological correctness or temporal synthesis but on simple conversion - from Julian to Gregorian, civil to religious, solar to lunar, with planetary motion as measured by astronomers the only reliable common currency.