Stuart monarch Charles II, restored to the…

Stuart monarch Charles II, restored to the English throne in 1661, takes advantage of the rebounding popularity of his brother James, Duke of York, in the wake of the failed Whig conspiracy against Charles and James, known as the Rye House Plot, to invite him back onto the privy council in 1684.

While some in Parliament remain wary of the possibility of a Catholic King, the threat of excluding James from the throne has passed.

Had Exclusion succeeded, James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, the illegitimate son of Charles II and Lucy Walter, would have been the personal choice of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, the leader of the anti-Catholic Whigs in Parliament.

Monmouth, who had been pardoned for his part in the Rye House Plot but banished from court, takes refuge in the Netherlands early in 1684.

Charles, just after the death of Henry Jermyn, 1st Earl of St. Albans at the turn of the year, gives the title Duke of St. Albans to Charles Beauclerk, Earl of Burford, his thirteen-year-old illegitimate son by his longtime mistress Nell Gwyn.

The King awards Charles an allowance of one thousand pounds a year, and grants him the offices of Chief Ranger of Enfield Chace and Master of the Hawks in reversion (i.e., after the death of the current incumbents).

Also in January of this year, Edmund Halley, Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke have a conversation in which Hooke will later claim not only to have derived the inverse-square law, but also all the laws of planetary motion.