1696
calendar year
1696 (MDCXCVI) was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar and a leap year starting on Wednesday of the Julian calendar, the 1696th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 696th year of the 2nd millennium, the 96th year of the 17th century, and the 7th year of the 1690s decade. As of the start of 1696, the Gregorian calendar was 10 days ahead of the Julian calendar, which remained in localized use until 1923.
Events
January–March
January 21 – The Recoinage Act, passed by the Parliament of England to pull counterfeit silver coins out of circulation, becomes law.
January 27 – In England, the ship HMS Royal Sovereign (formerly Sovereign of the Seas) catches fire and burns at Chatham, after 57 years of service.
January 31 – In the Netherlands, undertakers revolt after funeral reforms in Amsterdam.
January – Colley Cibber's play Love's Last Shift is first performed in London.
February 8 (January 29 old style) – Peter the Great, who had jointly reigned since 1682 with his mentally ill older half-brother Tsar Ivan V, becomes the sole Tsar of Russia when Ivan dies at the age of 29.
February 15 – A plot to ambush and assassinate King William III of England in order to restore King James and the House of Stuart to the throne is foiled when the king cancels his usual plan to return from a hunting trip by way of the road between Turnham Green and Brentford. The king's guard is alerted by the Earl of Portland, William Bentinck, who had been approached on February 13 by Sir Thomas Prendergast.
February 23 – A royal proclamation is issued to arrest suspected Jacobite conspirators who had plotted the assassination of King William III, including gunman Robert Charnock and organizers George Barclay, and Sir John Fenwick.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “1696” as calendar year. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as calendar year. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7699. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1696, 1923 and 1682.
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This entry incorporates text from “1696” 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.