* EVENTS
1605 Guy Fawkes arrested as Gunpowder Plot fails (right)
1609 Galileo uses first complete telescope
1618 Pan-European Thirty Years' War begins
1620 Pilgrim Fathers set sail in Mayflower for America
1633 Galileo recants Copernican views at Inquisition trial
1642 English civil war begins
1648 Thirty Years' War ends with Peace of Westphalia
1649 Execution of Charles I
1666 Great Fire (below) destroys four-fifths of London
1687 Sir Isaac Newton (right) formulates laws of motion in Principia Mathematica
1688 Expulsion of English king James II after conversion to Catholicism
1694 Bank of England founded
1696 Protestant philosopher Pierre Bayle persecuted for profanity in his Dictionnaire
* IDEAS
1600 Philosopher Giordano Bruno burnt for heresy
1611 Publication of King James's Authorised Version of the Bible
1620 Francis Bacon's Novum Organum applies inductive method to science
1641 Rene Descartes (below) defends mind/body dualism in his Meditations
1651 Philosopher Thomas Hobbes rejects the divine right of kings in Leviathan
1667 John Milton's epic masterpiece, Paradise Lost, appears
1676 German philosopher and mathematician, Gottfried Leibniz, invents calculus
1690 John Locke defends individual liberty in Two Treatises on Government