January 14 – A Portuguese garrison invades Morocco and kidnaps 35 women and girls, then steals 400 head of cattle. The Moroccans counterattack and kill the garrison's commander, 12 knights and 38 other Portuguese soldiers before the surviving Portuguese are given sanctuary inside the
English fortress at Tangier. A brief war ensues between England and Morocco.
January 22 – Former Chinese Emperor
Yongli, who had surrendered to General
Wu Sangui in December, is put on a boat along with his sons and grandsons at
Sagaing in
Burma (at the time, Burma), leaving under the promise that they will be given safe passage elsewhere in Burma. Instead, the former Emperor is taken back to China and executed on June 1.
January 23 –
János Kemény,
Prince of Transylvania for slightly more than a year, is killed during Transylvania's defeat by the Ottoman Empire in a battle at Nagyszőllős, now the city of
Vynohradiv in Ukraine. An Ottoman appointee,
Michael Apafi, replaces Kemény in September and the status of the principality of Transylvania (now part of
Romania) is never regained.
February 11 – A violent storm in the
Indian Ocean strikes a fleet of seven ships of the
Dutch East India Company (VOC) as they are traveling back to the
Dutch Republic from
Batavia in the
Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta, Indonesia). Three of the freighters— Wapen van Holland, Gekroonde Leeuw and Prins Willem — are lost with all hands. The ships Vogel Phoenix, Maarsseveen and Prinses Royal make their way back to the Netherlands. The other ship, the freighter Arnhem remains afloat and its roughly 80 survivors are able to evacuate in boats to search for land.[1]
February 20 – The survivors of the wreck of the Dutch freighter Arnhem strike reefs but are able to make their way to an uninhabited island,[1] probably the
Ile D'Ambre[2] or Ilot Fourneau [1] both islands within the territory of
Mauritius. During more than two months while shipwrecked, the survivors kill and eat the local wildlife, including the last surviving
dodo. They are rescued by the English ship Truroe in May.[2]
March 18 – A short-lived experiment of the first public
bus system (horse-drawn wagons holding eight passengers) begins in Paris as the idea of mathematician
Blaise Pascal and financed by the Duc de Rouanez, with transportation to and from the Royal Square for the cost of five
sous.[3]
April–June
April 19 – Three of the former members of the English Parliament who had signed the death warrant for
Charles I of England in 1649 and then fled into exile in the Netherlands after the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660 —
Miles Corbet,
John Okey and
John Barkstead — are hanged after having been extradited, returned to England, and convicted of
regicide. Their bodies are then
drawn and quartered.
April 24 – Chinese warlord
Zheng Chenggong sends a message to the Spanish government of the Philippines demanding payment of
tribute and threatening to send a fleet of ships to conquer the area. The message reaches the Spanish Governor-General on May 5, and preparations are made to resist the invasion.
May 3 –
John Winthrop the Younger, the son of the first governor of Massachusetts, is honored by being made a fellow of the
Royal Society, England's new scientific society. Winthrop uses his election to the Society to gain access to the king, who grants him a new charter, uniting the colonies of
Connecticut and
New Haven.
The
Act of Uniformity 1662, officially "An Act for the uniformity of common prayer and service in the Church, and administration of the sacraments", is given royal assent after being passed by the English Parliament to regulate the form of public prayers, sacraments, and other rites of the
Church of England to conform with the newest edition of the
Book of Common Prayer, the
1662 prayer book.[4]
Royal assent is also given to England's new
hearth tax law, with one shilling charged for each stove or fireplace in a building, to be collected on 29 September and on 25 March each year in order to provide the £1,200,000 annual household income for King Charles II. The unpopular tax is abolished in 1689.
May 24 – Rioting in the Chinese section of
Manila breaks out in the wake of calls to kill non-Christian Chinese residents of the Philippines, and the Spanish Army fires cannons at the rioting crowd. An order follows for non-Christian Chinese Filipinos to leave Manila, and for Christian Filipinos to register with the government. Boats begin transporting the non-Christians back to China
May – The last credible report of a sighting of the
dodo bird, now extinct, is made by Volkert Evertsz, a survivor of the shipwreck of the Dutch ship
Arnhem, which struck reefs on February 12.[6] The survivors had made their way in a small boat to Ile d'Ambre, an island in the Indian Ocean 200 kilometres (120 mi) northeast of
Mauritius. When rescued by the English ship Truroe in May,[2] Evertsz reports that he and his group had survived by eating the local wildlife, including the dodo.[7]
June 23 –
Koxinga, who had founded the
Kingdom of Tungning on the island of
Taiwan a year earlier, names his successor while on his deathbed. He appoints his son,
Zheng Jing, whom he had earlier ordered unsuccessfully to be executed, as the new King.
August 24 – The
Act of Uniformity goes into effect on St Bartholomew's Day,[10] making mandatory in the
Church of England the forms of worship prescribed in the new edition of the Book of Common Prayer the deadline having been set for "every clergyman and every schoolmaster... to express, by August 24, his unfeigned consent to everything contained in the
Book of Common Prayer. This is followed by the resignation of over 2,000 clergy who resign "for conscience sake".[11] Those who refuse to take the required oath of conformity to the
established church are subject to the
Great Ejection from their jobs.
September 9 – The Parliament of Scotland passes the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, an amnesty (with numerous specific exceptions) for most political crimes committed by Scottish citizens during the years between January 1, 1637 (prior to the 1639 beginning of the
Wars of the Three Kingdoms and before the restoration of the monarchy on September 16, 1660.
^
abcJolyon C. Parish, The Dodo and the Solitaire: A Natural History (Indiana University Press, 2013) p. 45
^"The Marais: 'Paris' in the seventeenth century", by Joan Dejean, in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Paris, ed. by Anna-Louise Milne (Cambridge University Press, 2013) p. 30
^Henry Gee and William John Hardy, editors., Documents Illustrative of English Church History (Macmillan and Company, 1896) p. 600
^W. M. Lupton, English History from the Earliest Period to Our Own Times (Longmans, Green and Co., 1866) p. 272