1704 in England

Incumbents

• Monarch – Anne
• Parliament – 1st of Queen Anne

  Events

• 18 May – Robert Harley becomes Secretary of State for the Northern Department.
• 23 July – War of the Spanish Succession: Capture of Gibraltar from Spain by allied English and Dutch forces under Sir George Rooke.
• 2 August – War of the Spanish Succession: At the Battle of Blenheim, an allied army under John Churchill, Earl of Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy including English troops defeats the Franco-Bavarian army.
• 13 August – War of the Spanish Succession: Allied French/Spanish and English/Dutch fleets clash off Málaga, causing heavy casualties on both sides but with no ships being sunk.
• 3 November – Queen Anne's Bounty receives a Royal Charter.

  Undated

• Beau Nash becomes master of ceremonies at Bath, and an arbiter of fashion.
• Aaron Hart becomes rabbi of the Great Synagogue of London and de facto the country's first chief rabbi.
• Thomas Darley purchases the bay Arabian horse Darley Arabian in Aleppo, Syria, and ships him to stud in England where he becomes the most important foundation sire of all modern thoroughbred racing bloodstock.
• approx. date – the first modern orrery is built by George Graham and Thomas Tompion.

  Publications

• Isaac Newton's work Opticks.
• John Harris's Lexicon Technicum, an early encyclopedia.
• Daniel Defoe begins publication of A Review of the Affairs of France, a thrice-weekly newspaper reporting on the War of the Spanish Succession, and publishes his documentary account of the Great Storm of 1703, The Storm.
• Jonathan Swift's satire A Tale of a Tub with The Battle of the Books.

  Births

• 1 January – Soame Jenyns, writer
• 10 April – Benjamin Heath, classical scholar
• 4 June – Benjamin Huntsman, inventor and manufacturer
• 17 June – John Kay, inventor
• 22 June – John Taylor, classical scholar
• 2 October – Eugene Aram, philologist and murderer
• 29 October – John Byng, admiral

  Deaths

• 8 April – Henry Sydney, 1st Earl of Romney, statesman
• 3 May - Heinrish Ignaz Franz von Biber, composer
• 18 June – Tom Brown, satirist
• 28 October – John Locke, philosopher
• 11 December – Roger L'Estrange, pamphleteer and author