1642
year
1642 (MDCXLII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar and a common year starting on Saturday of the Julian calendar, the 1642nd year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 642nd year of the 2nd millennium, the 42nd year of the 17th century, and the 3rd year of the 1640s decade. As of the start of 1642, the Gregorian calendar was 10 days ahead of the Julian calendar, which remained in localized use until 1923.
Events
January–March
January 4 – King Charles I of England, accompanied by soldiers, arrives at a session of the Long Parliament and attempts to arrest his chief opponents, the Five Members, John Hampden, Arthur Haselrig, Denzil Holles, John Pym and William Strode, for what he regards as treason but they escape and are protected by the Lord Mayor of London. This is the last time any monarch enters the House of Commons.
February 5 – The Bishops Exclusion Act is passed in England to prevent any member of the clergy from holding political office.
February 15 – Royalist Endymion Porter is voted to be a "dangerous counsellor" by the English parliament.
February 17 – The Treaty of Axim is signed between the Dutch West India Company and the chiefs of the Nzema people in the modern-day African nation of Ghana.
February 18 – A group of Protestant English settlers in Ireland surrender to Irish authorities at Castlebar in County Mayo in hopes of having their lives spared, but are killed one week later at Shrule on orders of Edmond Bourke.
February 20 – The Treaty of The Hague (1641), between the Dutch Republic and the Kingdom of Portugal, is ratified by the Republic's States-General.
February 22 – The Italian opera Il palazzo incantato (The Enchanted Palace), by Luigi Rossi with libretto by Giulion Rospigliosi (the future Pope Clement IX), is given its first performance at the Teatro delle Quattro Fontane (Palazzo Barberini) in Rome.
“1642” enters the record as year. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what year can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“1642” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, year provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6912. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1642, 1923 and 1641.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
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- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “1642”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow 1642 primary sources, 1642 archive and year research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “1642” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.