9 February - Parliament assembles and debates the Great Contract proposed by Robert Cecil whereby in return for an annual grant of £200,000, the Crown should give up its feudal rights of Wardship and Purveyance, as well as New Impositions.
23 May - The House of Commons petitions King James I against imposed duties.
1 November - At Whitehall Palace in London, William Shakespeare's romantic comedy and last solo play The Tempest is performed, perhaps for the first time. The Winter's Tale is presented at Court on 5 November.
John Donne's poem An Anatomy of the World published.
The first part of William Camden's Annales Rerum Gestarum Angliae et Hiberniae Regnate Elizabetha is published.
Gervase Markham's The English Huswife, Containing the Inward and Outward Virtues Which Ought to Be in a Complete Woman first published in London.
1616
1 January - King James attends the masqueThe Golden Age Restored, a satire by Ben Jonson on fallen court favorite the Earl of Somerset. The king asks for a repeat performance on 4 January.
3 January - The King's current favourite Sir George Villiers is appointed Master of the Horse; on 24 April he receives the Order of the Garter; and on 27 August is created Viscount Villiers and Baron Waddon, receiving a grant of land valued at £80,000.
23 April - Playwright and poet William Shakespeare dies (on or about his 52nd birthday) in retirement in Stratford-upon-Avon and is buried two days later in the Church of the Holy Trinity there.
25 May - The King's former favourite the Earl of Somerset and his wife Frances are convicted of the murder of Thomas Overbury. They are spared death and are sentenced to imprisonment in the Tower of London.
July - King James begins to raise revenue by the sale of peerages.
October/November - Ben Jonson's satirical five-act comedy The Devil is an Ass is produced at the Blackfriars Theatre by the King's Men, poking fun at credence in witchcraft and Middlesex juries.
4 November - Prince Charles, the 15-year-old surviving son of King James and Anne of Denmark, is invested as Prince of Wales at Whitehall, the last such investiture until 1911.
6/25 November - Ben Jonson's works are published in a collected folio edition; the first of any English playwright.
25 December - Captain Nathaniel Courthope reaches the nutmeg-rich island of Run in the Moluccas to defend it against the Dutch East India Company. A contract with the inhabitants accepting James I as their sovereign makes it part of the English colonial empire.
Witch trials under the Witchcraft Act 1604: Elizabeth Rutter is hanged as a witch in Middlesex, Agnes Berrye in Enfield, and nine women in Leicester at a summer assize presided over by Sir Humphrey Winch.
The Anchor Brewery is established in London by James Monger next to the Globe Theatre in Southwark; it will be the world's largest by the early nineteenth century and brew until the 1970s.
Dr. John Bullokar's dictionary An English Expositor: teaching the interpretation of the hardest words used in our language, with sundry explications, descriptions and discourses.
John Deacon's tract Tobacco Tortured in the Filthy Fumes of Tobacco Refined.
Robert Fludd's defence of RosicrucianismApologia Compendiaria, Fraternitatem de Rosea Cruce suspicionis … maculis aspersam, veritatis quasi Fluctibus abluens (at Leiden).
Ben Jonson's poem "To Celia".
1617
January
Sir George Villiers made Earl of Buckingham.
Pocahontas received at court; she dies two months later at Gravesend.
7 March - Francis Bacon appointed Lord High Chancellor.
17 March - Sir Walter Ralegh in The Destiny leaves on a second expedition to the Orinoco River in search of El Dorado. On 12 June, soon after leaving Plymouth, his fleet is scattered by a storm and it is unable to set out again (from Cork) until 19 August.
23 August - The first one-way streets are created in alleys near the River Thames in London.
29 October - Execution at the Palace of Westminster of Sir Walter Ralegh who has angered the Spanish on his final voyage by attacking one of their settlements on the Orinoco. The Spanish ambassador Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, conde de Gondomar has pressurised King James I over the matter.
King James issues the Declaration of Sports permitting certain sports to be played on Sundays and other holidays.
John Selden's work The History of Tythes suppressed by the Privy Council.
The Company of Adventurers of London Trading to the Ports of Africa founded; establishes trading posts in Guinea.
1619
January - The royal Banqueting House, Whitehall in London is destroyed by fire. Inigo Jones is commissioned to design a replacement.
11 March - Witches of Belvoir: Margaret and Philippa Flower are burnt at the stake having been found guilty of witchcraft.
2 June - A treaty is signed to regulate trade and resolve disputes between the English and the Dutch East India Company.
Act of parliament forbidding the growing of tobacco in England.
