1643 to 1647

Society

1643. Nieuw Amsterdam's Dutch governor orders a massacre of the Wappinger Indians who have sought Dutch protection from attacks by raiding Mohawks. Some 1,500 of the 15,000 Wappingers are treacherously wiped out.

1643. The first permanent settlement in what will be Pennsylvania is made at Tinicum Island in the Schuylkill River, where Swedish colonists build some log cabins.

Literature

Religio Medici (A Doctor's Religion). Thomas Browne. British. 1643. Nonfiction. Attempt to arrive at a faith acceptable to a scientist. Ornate style.

Society

1644. The Battle of Marston Moor, July 2, ends in victory for Oliver Cromwell's English Roundheads over the Cavaliers of Charles I and wins the north country for the Puritan parliamentary forces.

Literature

The Bloudy Tenent. Roger Williams. American. 1644. Nonfiction. Tract pleading for religious toleration. Advocates democracy. John Cotton replied. Both tracts were eloquent.

Society

1645. Europe's Thirty Years' War nears its end.

1646. England's 4-year civil war ends as Oliver Cromwell's Roundheads defeat and capture Lord Ashley, March 26. Charles surrenders himself to the Scots May 5, but in July he rejects Parliament's Newcastle proposals that he take the Covenant and support the Protestant establishment and that he let Parliament control the militia for 20 years.

Literature

Vulgar Errors. Sir Thomas Browne. British. 1646. Treatise. Display of recondite learning. Confutes errors and misconceptions in science, history, etc. Title: Enquiries into very many received tenets and commonly presumed truths.

"Wishes to His Supposed Mistress." Richard Crashaw. British. 1646. Poetry. Addressed to his ideal mistress. Radiant but humorous picture of her physical and spiritual beauty.

Society

1647. The Scots surrender England's Charles I to Parliament, January 30, in return for 400,000 pounds.

1647. Peter Stuyvesant, 55, is named governor of New Netherlands. He has lost his right leg 3 years ago in a campaign.

1647. The Black Death strikes Spain in an epidemic that will last for 4 years, the worst since 1599.

1647. The Society of Friends (Quakers) has its beginning in the "Friends of Truth," established in Leicestershire by English clergyman George Fox, 23, who begins preaching the need for inward spiritual experience. Troubled by the deadly formalism of Puritan Christianity, Fox makes conscience and self-examination supreme, and he draws recruits from the lower middle classes who heed his protest against the Presbyterian system. The Friends will be called Quakers in 1650 by Justice Gervase Bennet either because of the Friends' vehemence in appealing to conscience, which makes them shake with emotion, or because they assert that those who do not know quaking and trembling are strangers to the experience of Moses, David and other saints.