Also in December 1704
6th: At the Battle of Chamkaur (in the Punjab region, modern-day India) Guru Gobind Singh’s small number of Khalsa warriors fight a sizable Mughal army led by Wazir Khan.
With defeat looking inevitable, Gobind Singh’s men persuade him to escape in disguise before they go on to face slaughter.
9th: Johann Kuhnau, Kantor of St Thomas’s Church, Leipzig, writes a letter complaining that fellow composer Georg Philipp
Telemann is stealing his best pupils. Since arriving in the city in 1701, Telemann has been appointed as music director of both the municipal opera house and the Neukirche and, to Kuhnau’s dismay, has even been commissioned to write music for St Thomas’s. 11th: Author, pamphleteer and politician Roger L’estrange dies aged 87. L’estrange’s Royalist sympathies saw him serve time in both prison and exile during and after the Civil War before resurrecting his career following the Restoration. Briefly the MP for Winchester, his pro-tory pamphlets were notable for their scathing attacks on political opponents.
14th: Four months after leading his army to victory over the French at the Battle of Blenheim, the Duke of Marlborough receives a hero’s welcome on his return to England. Since the battle, he has continued the campaign in Bavaria, capturing the towns of Landau and Trier. Tarbach also falls to the Allies soon after his return.
14th: Queen Anne grants the playwrights William Congreve and John Vanbrugh a licence to run a new opera house in London’s Haymarket. The pair raise funds for the Queen’s Theatre, which opens the following April, partly by selling subscriptions to fellow members of the Kit-cat Club, one of London’s most affluent and influential societies.