Elizabethans exchanged New Year gifts on 1 January each year, though by long convention the calendar year began in Europe on 25 March, the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or Lady Day. A few writers used 1 January as the first day of a new year, yet this practice was not adopted officially till 1600 in Scotland and 1752 in England. Throughout this book I have adjusted all dates to a calendar year that begins, as ours does, on 1 January.
In February 1582 Pope Gregory XIII ordered the use of a new calendar to replace the Julian calendar. Mathematicians had detected a small error in computing the calendar year and over the centuries this had accumulated to as much as ten days in each year. Pope Gregory’s solution was to cut ten days out of 1582, so that 15 October followed immediately upon 4 October. This Gregorian calendar, with its system of ‘New Style’ dating, came into force in Italy and France at Christmas 1582, and in the Catholic states of the Holy Roman Empire in October 1583. The Protestant Tudor kingdoms of England and Ireland did not adopt the new calendar.
Elizabeth’s government asked Doctor John Dee, astronomer and mathematician, to look at the New Style Gregorian calendar. Dee agreed that there had been an error in the old computation, but he thought that eleven days, not ten, should have been taken out of the year. In the end Dee accepted the Gregorian calculation and proposed that ten days should be shaved across May, June, July and August. So Elizabeth’s government was minded, in March 1583, to change the calendar in line with continental Europe. But there were some objections: firstly, this adjustment could cause schism in England; secondly, it would offend England’s Protestant neighbours on the continent; and thirdly, it would really matter only to ‘but a few, viz. such as have traffic with foreign nations, but to the rest of the realm it will be troublesome’. This meant that England continued to use the Old Style of the Julian calendar with ten days’ difference between England and most of the countries of continental Europe for the next 170 years.
Officials of Elizabeth’s government at home and abroad used the Old Style Julian calendar. Catholic governments, the Roman Catholic Church, foreign ambassadors at Elizabeth’s royal court, and English Catholic exiles and émigrés adopted New Style dating from 1582. In this book I use dates in Old Style, but when New Style was being used, or where it is unclear whether or not a writer was working from the Julian or Gregorian calendars, I give both dates in the notes to each chapter at the end of the book. A good example would be Thomas, Lord Paget’s letter to his mother on 12 December 1583 ‘according to the new accompt’, by which Paget meant the Gregorian calendar. This would have been 2 December in England and is shown in the Notes as 2/12 December 1583.