The Calendar (38 page)

Burghley read the
Discourse
and then consulted with three other intellectual advisors to the queen: the mathematician Thomas Digges (d. 1595), Sir Henry Savile (1549-1622), and a Mr Chambers. These experts added their approvals and referred the matter to the Queen’s chief councillors. They too approved the plan, as did the queen, who set a date for implementation in May 1583.

Before they could move, however, one hurdle remained: the approval of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Grindal (c. 1519-1583), and key bishops in the Church of England. To secure this, Walsingham, the secretary of state, dispatched a letter on 18 March 1582,* asking the archbishop to confer with his bishops and return his response ‘with all convenient speed, for that it is meant the said callendar whall be published by proclamation before the first of May next.’ Walsingham followed up on this just 11 days later, on 29 March, with another note urging Grindal to respond quickly. He suggested that the queen herself was anxious to receive his official nod. ‘Her majesty doth now find some fault that [she] doth yet hear nothing of the reports thereof that she looked to have received your Grace,’ wrote Walsingham.

*That is, on 28 March 1583, according to the new Gregorian calendar. Because England not only was on the Julian calendar but started their year on 25 March.

Nothing could have been plainer, except for one problem--Archbishop Grindal said no.

Part of his obstinacy was a long-standing feud between him and the queen that undoubtedly would have led to his forced resignation had he not died that very year. But more than this was the aged archbishop’s deep distrust of Rome, a stance that represented a strong current in the Anglican Church and in an English society in the 1580s that was proud to the point of xenophobia about their new religion, their hatred of Spain and the Catholics, and their love for their queen.

The savvy Elizabeth understood this--which makes her support of the measure all the more perplexing. Possibly she was simply succumbing to the eagerness of the intellectual circle at her court, the poets, scientists, adventurers and philosophers who spent their time delighting one another--and Elizabeth--with their wit, wisdom and earthy good sense, when they weren’t intriguing against the queen’s enemies at home and abroad. But Elizabeth was also a pragmatist, a consummate political tightrope walker with an uncanny ability to fend off enemies and impassion loyalists.

Apparently she agreed with ‘hyr Philosopher’ that the reform was good science. She may also have been convinced by Dee’s assessment that the reform had a British connection through Roger Bacon. Undoubtedly she had a political motive, though what it was is unclear. It may have been part of her delicate game of tacking towards and away from Spain in these years leading up to the attempted invasion by the armada. Or possibly it was an attempt to enforce her will on the archbishop in their long-standing tug-of-war.

Whatever it was, Grindal dispatched his reply on 4 April, including comments from key bishops and a ‘godly learned in the mathematicalls’. The gist of the letter to Walsingham was a masterful strategy that avoided saying no outright. Instead, Grindal asked for a delay by insisting that a change this sweeping should be discussed in a general council of all Christians, such as the one convened in Nicaea by Constantine.

After our hearty commendations unto your honour, may it please you to understand, that upon receipt of your letters in Her Majesty’s name, and the view of Mr Dee’s resolutions ... we have upon good conference and deliberation . . . that we love not to deale with or in anye wise to admit it, before mature and deliberate consultation had, nott only with our principall assemblie of the clergie and convocation of this realme, but also with other reformed Churches which profess the same religion as we doe, without whose consent if we should herein proceed we should offer juste occasion of schisme, and so by allowinge, though not openly yet indirectly, the Pope’s devvyse and the [Trent] counsayle, [cause] some to swerve from all other Churches of our profession.

Grindal thus deflected the pressure exerted on him personally by insisting on a meeting that would never happen, even among the fractious Protestants. Grindal also argued that the Church of England could not under the rule of Scripture or God endorse an edict from a papacy that ‘all the reformed Churches in Europe for the most part doe hold and affirme ... is Antichrist’. In a long list of reasons why the calendar should not be reformed, Grindal and his bishops also reminded Walsingham that it would be particularly loathsome to accept an edict issued as a bull, since it was this same instrument of the pope’s authority that had excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570.

Dee countered by saying that the new calendar had nothing to do with the pope, that it was astronomy that dictated the change. He pointed out the need of a rising maritime power to conform with its trading partners on the continent in something so basic as dates. But the matter was dropped after an abortive attempt to pass it in Parliament in 1584 (Old Style)--titled ‘An Act giving Her Majesty authority to alter and make new a Calendar according to the Calendar used in other countries.’ This bill was introduced on 16 March and possibly reread on 18 March. It then disappears along with all efforts to change the calendar, for reasons that are not recorded. Possibly the queen and her advisors simply dropped the matter so as not to push the issue of the state versus the church as the possibility of war with Spain increased.

Shortly after the calendar debate ended, Dee left the English court for eastern Europe, travelling with his family and a ‘spirit medium’ named Edward Kelley. In Bohemia he continued his intellectual pursuits and got involved with several dubious affairs involving astrology and angel readings with Kelley at the court in Prague. For the rest of his life Dee argued for the adoption of the new calendar in England, though after the attempted invasion by Spain in 1588--launched with the support of the pope--the revulsion for all things Roman made any reform impossible.

It would be another 170 years before Britain finally adopted the Gregorian calendar; it was one of the last major European countries to do so. This was despite serious reform attempts in 1645 and 1699, both blocked by a still strident Church of England and by Puritans taking the line that the ‘old stile’ calendar was the true style of God.

But as Britain became a major international military and economic power, the inconvenience of the ‘old stile’ and ‘new stile’ became increasingly a nuisance for businessmen and an embarrassment for anyone with connections on the continent. ‘The English mob preferred their calendar to disagree with the Sun than to agree with the Pope,’ chided Voltaire. And in Latin someone wrote a ditty reprinted in a pro-reform tract in 1656:

Cur Anni errorem non corrigit Anglia notum,
Cum faciant alii; cemere nemo potest.

Why England doth not th’years known error mend,
When all else do; no Man can comprehend.

Still, over the years most people in Britain and, as time went on, in its colonies seemed to take the inconveniences in stride, with overseas letters dated with two dates--OS and NS. Over the years the English even seem to have developed a certain amount of pride (or arrogance) in being different--something akin to Americans’ turning up their noses at the metric system today.

And here the matter stood until one spring day in 1750, on 10 May, when a stodgy earl named George Parker (1697-1764) stood up to deliver to the Royal Society an address with a seemingly deadly dull title: ‘Remarks upon the Solar and the Lunar Years, the Cycle of 19 years, commonly called The Golden Number, the Epact And a Method of Finding the Time of Easter, as it is now observed in most Parts of Europe.’ Parker, an amateur astronomer well-connected with the Newtonian circle in Greenwich and London, started his talk by updating just how far off the Julian year had drifted against the true year since Caesar’s time--and since the Gregorian reform. As a point of reference, he used what was then perhaps the most accurate measurement of the year ever--365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 55 seconds--calculated by the late royal astronomer Edmund Hailey (1656-1742), the man who gave his name to Hailey’s Comet.

‘We do as yet in England follow the Julian Account or the Old Style in the Civil Year,’ Parker noted toward the end of his mostly technical talk, ‘as also the Old Method of finding those Moons upon which Easter depends: Both of which have been shewn to be very erroneous.’

Most likely, the earl’s speech would have gone unnoticed except for one member of the audience: the recently retired secretary of state Philip Dormer Stanhope (1694-1773), the earl of Chesterfield. Famous for his wit and sophistication, and for his sagacious letters to his son and godson, the 56-year-old Stanhope was for some reason fired up by the old earl’s speech and launched an effort to push for reform at last in Britain.

Still an important member of the Whig Party and a prominent intellectual during this golden age of the drawing room, Stanhope first consulted with mathematicians and astronomers. He then took his cause to the leaders of his party; starting with his longtime political colleague Thomas Pelham (1693-1768), the secretary of state and future prime minister.

Pelham initially gave the idea a cool reception, as Stanhope later recounted. ‘He was allarmed at so bold an undertaking,’ Stanhope wrote, ‘and conjured me, not to stir matters that had been long quiet, adding that he did not love new fangled things.’ In another account of this meeting, the editor of Pelham’s memoirs, William Coxe, agrees that the future prime minister was none too thrilled. ‘The noble secretary was too deeply impressed with the favourite maxim of Sir Robert Walpole,’ wrote Coxe,
‘tranquilla non movere
[do not disturb things at rest], to relish a proposal, which was likely to shock the civil and religious prejudices of the people.’

To overcome this inertia Stanhope set out to embarrass his countrymen into change, pointing out to everyone who would listen what he later wrote in a letter to his son: that other than England, Russia and Sweden remained unreformed. ‘It was not, in my opinion very honourable for England to remain in a gross and avowed error, especially in such company, the inconveniency of it was likewise felt by all those who had foreign correspondences, whether political or mercantile.’ Stanhope also took his proposal to a medium that was unavailable to Christopher Clavius or to John Dee in the 1580s: the popular press. He penned a number of amusing and informative articles under a pseudonym in an eighteenth-century London periodical,
The World.
The affable earl also talked up the change in fashionable London townhouses, parliamentary antechambers, smoking rooms and estates.

Eventually winning Pelham’s approval and that of other senior government ministers, Stanhope in 1751 introduced a bill for reforming the calendar in Parliament: ‘An Act for Regulating the Commencement of the Year, and for Correcting the Calendar now in Use.’ In a letter to his son, he writes: ‘I had brought a bill into the House of Lords for correcting and reforming our present calendar ... It was notorious, that the Julian calendar was erroneous, and had overcharged the solar year with eleven days.’ He then described his preparations for the bill and his presentation, in part as a lesson for his son on how to comport oneself in presenting a complicated matter in public.

I determined, therefore, to attempt the reformation; I consulted the best lawyers and the most skillful astronomers, and we cooked up a bill for that purpose. But then my difficulty began: I was to bring in this bill, which was necessarily composed of law jargon and astronomical calculations, to both of which I am an utter stranger. However, it was absolutely necessary to make the House of Lords think that I knew something of the matter; and also to make them believe that they knew something of it themselves, which they do not. For my own part, I could just as soon have talked Celtic or Sclavonian to them, as astronomy, and could have understood me full as well: so I resolved ... to please instead of informing them. I gave them, therefore, only an historical account of calendars, from the Egyptian down to the Gregorian, amusing them now and then with little episodes . . . They thought I was informed, because I pleased them; and many of them said, that I had made the whole very clear to them; when, God knows, I had not even attempted it.

Stanhope had laid his groundwork well. The bill sailed through the usual three readings and was passed on 17 May with a unanimous vote and approved by King George II on the 22nd, after which Stanhope quipped that it was his ‘style that carried the House through this difficult subject’ and not the content of what he said concerning the mathematics and science, which ‘he himself could not understand’.

The act itself ordered 11 days expunged from the calendar in Great Britain and in its colonies, with Wednesday. 2 September followed by Thursday, 14 September. The 11th day was added because in 1700 the Gregorians, according to Lilius’s century leap-year rule, had not observed a leap year and did not add a day. This meant that the Julian calendar, which
had
added a day, was 24 more hours out of step. The act also mandated that in the future the calendar year and Easter be observed according to the Gregorian system, and that the year would begin on 1 January in England instead of 25 March.

Stanhope and Parliament took pains to legislate details of the changeover to minimize problems with banking, contracts, holidays and matters public and private. For instance, the act explains that all court dates, holidays, ‘Meetings and Assemblies of any Bodies Politick or Corporate’, elections, and all official obligations according to ‘Law, Statute, Charter Custom or Usage’ shall be ‘computed according to the said new method of numbering and reckoning the Days of the Calendar as aforesaid, that is to say, 11 Days sooner than the respective Days whereon the same are now holden and kept’.

Similar provisions applied to markets, fairs and marts, ‘whether for the sale of Goods or Cattle, or for the hiring of Servants, or for any other Purpose’, and to rents, usages of property, contracts, ‘the Delivery of such Goods and Chattels, Wares and Merchandize’, with the Act ordering that no one was to pay wages or count or pay interest for the 11 lost days. Even those who happened to be turning 21 years of age between 3 and 13 September 1752, OS--this was the legal age of majority in Britain--did not get a break. Nor did soldiers about to be discharged from the army, indentured servants at the end of their contracts, or criminals about to be released from jail. They all had to wait the proper number of ‘natural days’ that would have occurred under the old calendar.