1746
Battle of Culloden
On a bleak moor outside Inverness, in forty minutes, Cumberland's regulars shattered the exhausted Highland army of Charles Edward Stuart. The Pretender fled, eventually to France in a fishing boat. Cumberland earned the name Butcher for the reprisals that followed. Tartan, pibroch, and the Gaelic way of life were outlawed in the cabin ash.
French Capture Madras
In the Carnatic, the French governor Dupleix sent a force that took Madras from the British East India Company. Robert Clive, a young clerk sent there to tally invoices, escaped in disguise and resolved to become a soldier. The future of India had quietly turned on an accountant's boredom. Madras was returned to Britain by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle two years later, but Clive never returned to his ledgers.
Princeton University Chartered
Presbyterians sympathetic to the Great Awakening received a charter for the College of New Jersey, later moved to Princeton. It was the fourth college in the colonies. Revivalist enthusiasm had bred a reformist Ivy. Its students would include two signers of the Declaration and a future president, James Madison. The campus at Nassau Hall became, briefly, the capital of the United States during the Revolutionary War.
Ferdinand VI of Spain Ascends
Philip V, the Bourbon grandson of Louis XIV, died in Madrid after forty-six years of neurotic, sometimes comatose rule. His son Ferdinand VI, gentler and more pacific, turned Spain toward neutrality and reform. The talented minister Ensenada began the Bourbon reforms that would modernize, belatedly, the empire of Charles V.