1717
year
1717 (MDCCXVII) was a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar and a common year starting on Tuesday of the Julian calendar, the 1717th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 717th year of the 2nd millennium, the 17th year of the 18th century, and the 8th year of the 1710s decade. As of the start of 1717, the Gregorian calendar was 11 days ahead of the Julian calendar, which remained in localized use until 1923.
Events
January–March
January 1 – Count Carl Gyllenborg, the Swedish ambassador to Great Britain, was arrested in London for a plot to assist the Pretender to the British throne, James Francis Edward Stuart.
January 4 (December 24, 1716 Old Style) – The kingdoms of Great Britain, France and the Dutch Republic sign the Triple Alliance, in an attempt to maintain the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), Britain having signed a preliminary alliance with France on November 28 (November 17) 1716.
February 1 – The Silent Sejm, in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, marks the beginning of the Russian Empire's increasing influence and control over the Commonwealth.
February 6 – Following the treaty between France and Britain, the Pretender James Stuart leaves France, and seeks refuge with Pope Clement XI.
February 26–March 6 – What becomes the northeastern United States is paralyzed by a series of blizzards that bury the region.
March 2 – Dancer John Weaver performs in the first ballet in Britain, shown at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, The Loves of Mars and Venus.
March 31 – Benjamin Hoadly, Bishop of Bangor, brings the Bangorian Controversy within the Church of England into the open by delivering a sermon to, and supposedly at the request of, King George I of Great Britain, on The Nature of the Kingdom of Christ with the text "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36), concluding there is no Biblical justification for church government.
April–June
April 26 – The Whydah Gally, flagship of English pirate Samuel Bellamy, is wrecked in a storm off Wellfleet, Massachusetts. The Whydah sinks with a reputed 4+1⁄2 tons of treasure on board, and all but two of her crew are lost, including Bellamy.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6895. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1717, 1923, 1716 and 1713.
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This entry incorporates text from “1717” 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.