The Calendar

by David Ewing Duncan

  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.

  During the months between the vote and enactment the government acquired an unlikely ally in the Church of England, which had finally lined up in favour of reform and adopted a slogan: ‘The New Style the True Style.’ This became the motto of preachers across Britain, who added an appeal to patriotism by repeating John Dee’s assertion that Roger Bacon, an Englishman, was among the first to call for reform some five hundred years earlier.

  The act was also disseminated in the London Gazette and in other newspapers and almanacs. For instance, The Ladies Diary, or Woman’s Almanack, published in London, offered a detailed explanation of the change on their cover and in their calendar for the month of September.

  Still, many people in Britain reacted with dismay when September actually rolled around--and, in some cases, with anger at the confusion over 11 days lost. William Coxe, editor of Pelham’s memoirs, summarized the response:

  In practice . . . this innovation was strongly opposed, even among the higher classes of society. Many landholders, tenants and merchants, were apprehensive of difficulties, in regard to rents, leases, bills of exchange and debts, dependent on periods fixed by the Old Style . . . Greater difficulty was, however, found in appeasing the clamour of the people against the supposed profaneness, of changing the saints’ days in the Calendar, and altering the time of all the immoveable feasts.

  In London and elsewhere mobs collected in the streets and shouted, ‘Give us back our eleven days.’ This became a campaign slogan in 1754 in Oxfordshire, where the son of George Parker, the astronomer who made the speech that ignited Stanhope, was standing for Parliament. This election was depicted in a famous set of etchings by William Hogarth (1697-1764). In one of the etchings a banquet is being held by two Whig candidates--one of them is ‘Sir Commodity Taxem’--for their supporters--everyone is revelling, with numerous small scenes showing people eating, a doctor tending to an injured man, musicians playing and a man being struck in the head by a brick tossed by parading Tories. Lying on the floor at the feet of the wounded man is a poster: GIVE US BACK OUR ELEVEN DAYS.

  Other protesters shouted out a popular anti-reform ditty:

  In seventeen hundred and fifty-three

  The style it was changed to Popery.

  In Bristol, riots over the reform apparently ended up with people killed. On 6 January 1753, which would have been the day after Christmas Day under the Old Style, a period journal reports:

  Yesterday being Old Christmas Day, the same was obstinately observed by our country people in general, so that (being market day according to the order of our magistrates) there were but a few at market, who embraced the opportunity of raising their butter to 9d. or 10d. per pound.

  Also in Bristol a certain John Latimer reports that the Glastonbury thorn, which blossomed every year exactly on Christmas Day, ‘contemptuously ignored the new style’ when it ‘burst into blossom on the 5th January, thus indicating that Old Christmas Day should alone be observed, in spite of an irreligious legislature’.

  In the City of London, bankers protested the reform and the confusion it caused for their industry by refusing to pay taxes on the usual date of 25 March 1753. They paid up 11 days later, on 5 April, which remains tax day in Britain.

  In a lighter vein, a correspondent wrote a letter to The Inspector that was published in the September 1752 issue of the popular Gentleman’s Magazine:

  Mr Inspector,

  I write to you in the greatest perplexity, I desire you’ll find some way of setting my affair to rights; or I believe I shall run mad, and break my heart into the bargain. How is all this? I desire to know plainly and truly!

  I went to bed last night, it was Wednesday Sept. 2, and the first thing I cast my eye upon this morning at the top of your paper, was Thursday, Sept. 14. I did not go to bed till between one and two: Have I slept away days in 7 hours, or how is it? For my part I don’t find I’m any more refresh’d than after a common night’s sleep.

  They tell me there’s an act of parliament for this. With due reverence be it spoken, I have always thought there were very few things a British parliament could not do, but if I had been ask’d, I should have guess’d the annihilation of time was one of them!

  Most people, however, did not seem too rattled by the change, with most diarists at the time simply mentioning the event with little comment. James Clegg, a 62-year-old minister and farmer living in Derbyshire, jotted down what he considered key events in his life for September 1752:

  1. heavy rain all the forenoon, I was back home close at work writing my last will and was at home all day.

  2. at home til afternoon then took a ride out into Chinley, visited at old William Bennets and at John Moults at Nase and returnd safe Blessed be God.

  14. This day the use of the new Stile in numbring the days of the months commenceth and according to that computation, the last day of October will be my Birthday. I was at home til afternoon, we had an heavy shower of rain which raizd the water, after it was over I went up to Chappel on business and returned home in good time.

  Newspapers also noted the change, but little more. None reported on the riots or other problems, since this was not yet part of what constituted a duty or practice of the general press. The General Advertiser of London printed excerpts from the act in its 2 September 1752 (Old Style) edition. The next day, 14 September was marked in the paper with a simple N.S. after the date. Otherwise the paper ran its usual mix of news from world capitals, shipping notices, stock quotes and advertisements. The latter included on this first day of the new calendar an announcement that ‘The Evening Entertainments’ at Spring Gardens, Vauxhall, ‘will end this evening, the 14th of September, N.S.’ There also was to be a violin concert that night at Islington, a sale of ten barges at Billingsgate at noon the following Tuesday, and a meeting of the governors of the Small-Pox Hospital on 20th September. High water at London Bridge was at 5:28 PM.

  Across the Atlantic in the British colonies, Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac, published in Quaker Philadelphia, noted:

  At the Yearly Meeting of the People called Quakers . . . since the Passing of this Act, it was agreed to recommend to the Friends a Conformity thereto, both in omitting the eleven Days of September . . . and beginning the Year hereafter on the first Day of the Month called January.

  The author of this notice, R. Saunders, then extended a wish to his readers ‘that this New Year (which is indeed a New Year, such an one as we never saw before, and shall never see again) may be a happy Year’.

  In this same almanac Franklin himself, then 46, jauntily told his readers:

  Be not astonished, nor look with scorn, dear reader, at such a deduction of days, nor regret as for the loss of so much time, but take this for your consolation, that your expenses will appear lighter and your mind be more at ease. And what an indulgence is here, for those who love their pillow to lie down in peace on the second of this month and not perhaps awake till the morning of the fourteenth.

  A number of colonial newspapers--including The Boston Weekly News-Letter, The Carolina Gazette, and The New York Evening Post --noted the arri
val of the New Style but say little more.

  Britain was not the last country to change in Europe. Sweden changed the next year, in 1753. Then there is a long gap, with the heavily Greek Orthodox countries in the Balkans waiting until the early twentieth century. Bulgaria made the switch in either 1912, 1915 or March of 1916, depending on which source one believes. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia converted around 1915, during the German occupation; Romania and Yugoslavia made the change in 1919. Russia waited until 1918, after the Bolshevik Revolution, but had to drop 13 days--February 1-13--to make up for the accumulation of days by which the Julian calendar was in error 336 years after the Gregorian reform. Greece did not reform its civil calendar until 1924.

  Countries and people outside of Europe mostly had no reaction to the new calendar in the decades and centuries following 1582--the exception being in the Americas, where the reform was imposed by Spain and Portugal on those people they had conquered. These included the Aztecs, Incas and Mayas, whose brilliant work in astronomy and calendars was already mostly forgotten and expunged by the Europeans, though to this day isolated groups of Maya, for one, continue to use their ancient calendar. Later, Britain, France, the United States and other colonial powers imposed their calendar on Indian tribes in the Western Hemisphere.