1797 in Great Britain

1797 in Great Britain:

Other years

1795 | 1796 | 1797 | 1798 | 1799

Sport

1797 English cricket season

Events from the year 1797 in Great Britain.

Incumbents

• Monarch – George III
• Prime Minister – William Pitt the Younger (Tory)

Events

• 3 January – Three of the stones making up Stonehenge fall due to heavy frosts.
• 15 January – London haberdasher John Hetherington wears the first top hat in public and attracts a large crowd of onlookers. He is later fined £50 for causing public nuisance.
• 14 February – Battle of Cape St Vincent: The Royal Navy under Admiral Sir John Jervis defeats a larger Spanish fleet off Cape St. Vincent, Portugal. On 23 May, Jervis is made Earl of St Vincent, and Horatio Nelson made a Knight of the Bath, for their part in the victory.
• 18 February – Spanish Governor Chacon peacefully surrenders the colony of Trinidad and Tobago to a British naval force commanded by Sir Ralph Abercromby.
• 22 February – The last invasion of Britain begins: French forces under the command of American Colonel William Tate land near Fishguard in Wales.
• 24 February – Tate surrenders at Fishguard.
• 26 February – Start of "restriction period" during which, by Government order, Bank of England notes are inconvertible to gold. The Bank issues the first one-pound and two-pound notes (the former denomination remains in issue until 11 March 1988).
• c.February/March – Prisoners taken in the French Revolutionary Wars are first moved to the world's first purpose-built prisoner-of-war camp, a 40-acre (162,000 m²) site at Norman Cross in Huntingdonshire.
• 16 April to 30 June – Spithead and Nore mutinies: Two mutinies in the Royal Navy spark fears of a revolution.
• 17 April – Sir Ralph Abercromby unsuccessfully invades San Juan, Puerto Rico, in what would be one of the largest British attacks on Spanish territories in the western hemisphere and one of the worst defeats of the navy for years to come.
• 24 July – Horatio Nelson is wounded at the Battle of Santa Cruz, causing the loss of his right arm.
• August – The Home Office sends an agent to Nether Stowey in Somerset to investigate the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth who are suspected of being French spies.
• 29 August – Massacre of Tranent: British troops attack protestors against enforced recruitment into the militia at Tranent in Scotland, killing 12.
• October – Coleridge composes the poem Kubla Khan in an opium-induced dream, writing down only a fragment of it on waking.
• 11 October – Battle of Camperdown: Royal Navy defeats the fleet of the Batavian Republic off the coast of Holland.
• 18 October – Treaty of Campo Formio ends the First Coalition, leaving Britain fighting alone against France.
• Undated – "Cartwheel" twopence coins pressed, for the only time, at Boulton and Watt's Soho Mint in copper.

Ongoing

• Anglo-Spanish War, 1796–1808.
• French Revolutionary Wars, First Coalition.

Publications

• Thomas Bewick's History of British Birds vol. 1.

Births

• 6 January – Edward Turner Bennett, zoologist and writer (died 1836)
• 14 January – George Agar-Ellis, 1st Baron Dover, man of letters (died 1833)
• 29 April – George Don, botanist (died 1856)
• 9 August – Charles Robert Malden, explorer (died 1855)
• 30 August – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, writer (died 1851)
• 16 October – James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan, military commander (died 1868)
• 14 November – Charles Lyell, geologist (died 1875)
• 22 November – David Salomons, banker and campaigner for emancipation of the Jews in England (died 1873)

Deaths

• 2 March – Horace Walpole, politician and writer (born 1717)
• 26 March – James Hutton, geologist (born 1726)
• 31 March – Olaudah Equiano Nigerian ex-slave and slavery abolitionist in Britain (born 1745, Nigeria)
• 25 May – John Griffin, 4th Baron Howard de Walden, field marshal (born 1719)
• 3 August – Jeffrey Amherst, military commander (born 1717)
• 29 August – Joseph Wright of Derby, painter (born 1734)
• 10 September – Mary Wollstonecraft, writer, philosopher and feminist (born 1759)
• 11 December – Richard Brocklesby, physician (born 1722)
• 26 December – John Wilkes, politician and journalist (born 1725)