Authors: Lance Parkin,Lars Pearson
On one occasion, the Doctor saw a beached whale lie on the shore for four days until its bowels exploded - some of the eye-witnesses died from disease after being splattered by rotten whale meat.
[570]
Chamberlen, the inventor of modern obstetrical forceps, bequeathed a pair of his creations upon the Doctor. He used this item in 1649 to deliver a child during the sacking of Wexford.
[571]
The Doctor met Inigo Jones in 1649, and either helped him find his cat or defeat an army of cats - he couldn’t remember which.
[572]
The Doctor was present at the Defenestration of Prague, and saved the lives of the intended victims with a pile of manure. The TARDIS stank for a week.
[573]
In 1621, the infamous Lady Peinforte poisoned her neighbour Dorothea Remington.
[574]
In 1624, the Doctor met an Agent of the Council of Eight in Devon.
[575]
The Phiadoran Directorate systems were dominated by the Phiadoran Clan Matriarchy, who influenced males with genetically augmented pheromones. The Matriarchy instigated ten generations of tyranny that lasted Galactic Time Index 611,072.26 to 611,548.91. The Sarmon Revolution brought down the Matriarchy, and exiled its members to die in a safari park built on Earth’s moon. Thirty-two years later, the carnivorous Vrall killed the Matriarchy, and disguised themselves as the Phiadorans by wearing their skins. Lacking space-travel, the Vrall launched RNA spores encoded with technical information to Earth.
[576]
Nathaniel Silver was born in 1625.
[577]
1626 - The Church and the Crown
[578]
At the court of King Louis, the Musketeers and Cardinal Richelieu were in constant dispute. The fifth Doctor, Peri and Erimem arrived, and it transpired that Peri was the double of Queen Anne. The Duke of Buckingham kidnapped Peri - he was planning a British invasion of France by dividing the French court. Erimem rallied the troops, and averted a major diplomatic incident.
The Doctor apparently visited the Det-Sen monastery in Tibet on a number of occasions, and in 1630 helped the monks there to survive bandit attacks. He was entrusted with the holy Ghanta when he left.
[579]
It was possibly on this visit that the Doctor learned the Tibetan language and meditation techniques.
[580]
The Doctor witnessed philosopher Francis Bacon conduct an experiment on the preservation of meat by stuffing snow into a chicken. Bacon later contracted pneumonia from the incident and died.
[581]
The War Lords lifted a battlefield from some point during the Thirty Years War.
[582]
1636 - Borrowed Time
[583]
Jane Blythe, now a fugitive from the Time Market following her economic ruin in 2007, fled into the past and established a low-level time commodities scheme. Her avatars, Mr Hoogeveen and Mr Verspronck, loaned out time to certain residents of the Netherlands - before long, this created an economic bubble pertaining to the value of tulips.
The Doctor met Louis XIII in 1637.
[584]
1638 (November) - Silver Nemesis
[585]
On 23rd November, 1638, the seventh Doctor was present as some Roundheads fought Lady Peinforte’s soldiers, and as the Nemesis asteroid was launched into space from a meadow in Windsor. Following this, the Doctor set his watch alarm to go off on 23rd November, 1988, the day that the Nemesis would return to Earth.
The Nemesis passed over the Earth every twenty-five years, influencing human affairs. Lady Peinforte employed a mathematician to work out the asteroid’s trajectory, and then used his blood in a magical ceremony - one that also involved the Validium arrow in Peinforte’s possession - to transport Peinforte and her servant Richard Maynarde to its ultimate destination. The imprisoned Fenric aided her time travel.
w - 1642 - FP: Newtons Sleep
[586]
Nathaniel Silver, a Roundhead soldier, was shot dead at Edgehill. Representatives from humanity’s posthuman era, seeking to guarantee the stability of their timeline, meddled with Silver’s biodata and resurrected him. Silver didn’t age from this point onward. The posthumans also gave him possession of a mysterious egg that aided his efforts to learn the secrets of natural philosophy.
The English Civil War
The War Lords kidnapped a Civil War battlefield.
[587]
A division of Roundheads was also kidnapped by the Master using TOM-TIT.
[588]
On 13th July, 1643, the Royalists and Roundheads met in Little Hodcombe, wiping out themselves and the entire village. The Malus fed from the psychic energy released by the deaths and briefly emerged from its dormancy. The Doctor returned the time-flung Will Chandler to this, his native era, shortly afterwards.
[589]
Returning Will Chandler was not a straightforward business.
[590]
A group of Roundheads was torn apart on Lanyon Moor, apparently by wild beasts.
[591]
In 1644, “strange fire” consumed the castle of Crook Marsham.
[592]
Witches hid from Matthew Hopkins in Devil’s End.
[593]
The Doctor met King Charles II.
[594]
1648 - The Roundheads
[595]
Ben Jackson and Polly were mistaken for Parliamentarians. Polly was kidnapped by Royalists, while Ben was press-ganged. Meanwhile, Oliver Cromwell’s men arrested the second Doctor and Jamie. Cromwell’s belief that Jamie was a fortune teller aided the TARDIS crew in escaping, but they were accompanied by King Charles... who according to history should have stayed in prison. Polly was forced to betray Christopher Whyte, a new friend and a Royalist, to protect history. Charles was duly recaptured and executed.
1649 (12th September to 11th October) - The Settling
[596]
The seventh Doctor, Ace and Hex arrived in Ireland as Oliver Cromwell’s forces successfully besieged Drogheda. Weeks later, Cromwell’s army threatened Wexford, and he demanded that the town recognise the authority of Parliament. Conflict ensued until Cromwell received a surrender notice and ordered the fighting to cease. Hex, having witnessed the horror at Drogheda, roused the townsfolk to resist. The fighting resumed, hundreds of fleeing women and children drowned on crowded boats. Cromwell’s troops prevailed.
The seventh Doctor met Dr. Goddard, who helped to found the Royal Society.
w - 1650 - FP: Newtons Sleep
[597]
When Isaac Newton, a.k.a. Jeova Unus Sanctus, was a young boy, the wounded babel that had escaped from Thessalia of the Order of the Weal hid within his timeline. Newton carried on with his life, unaware of this.
w - 1651 - FP: Newtons Sleep
[598]
The mortally wounded Thessalia, a member of the Great Houses, arrived from 1678 and regenerated. A young girl named Aphra Behn - later a dramatist and spy for King Charles II - mistook the reborn Thessalia, later named Larissa, for a beautiful nymph and pledged allegiance to her.
An act of murder within the standing stones in Cirbury awakened the Ragman. Emily, the mayor’s daughter, was raped by a corpse that the Ragman animated. The Ragman triggered acts of class warfare, but was driven back into the stones. The townsfolk relocated the stones to Dartmoor. Emily was left pregnant and later died in poverty, but her bloodline led to the journalist Charmange Peters and the lout Kane Sawyer in the twentieth century.
[599]
The Doctor fished with Izaak Walton.
[600]
He also met Thomas Hobbes.
[601]
Lady Peinforte’s servant Richard Maynarde died on 2nd November, 1657, and was entombed at Windsor.
[602]
According to the Doctor, Aubrey invented Druidism “as a joke”.
[603]
The Doctor was a founder member of the Royal Geographical Society.
[604]
Mindscape generators, devices capable of crafting fake scenarios in a subject’s mind, were invented.
[605]
c 1660 (autumn) - The Witch from the Well
[606]
Two shapeshifting Varaxils arrived in the village of Tranchard’s Fell while hunting beings who could channel Odic power. They killed Finicia and Lucern, the children of Squire Portillon, and assumed their forms. The eighth Doctor and Mary Shelley arrived six months later, but the older versions of Finicia and Lucern with them used the TARDIS’ Fast Return Switch to return to the twenty-first century with Mary, stranding the Doctor.
A botched attempt by the Varaxils to leech Odic energy from the midwife Agnes Bates, who had the “second sight”, resulted in her becoming a monstrosity that attacked the village. The Doctor drained her Odic energy, and tricked everyone involved into thinking that the monster-Agnes was imprisoned down a well. In actuality, only an energy echo of monster-Agnes was trapped. The Doctor aided Agnes, who had been found guilty of witchcraft, in moving to another village.
Finicia and Lucern pledged to spend their lengthy lifespans searching for their Odic scanner - a.k.a. the Witch Star - which Squire Claude Portillon had hidden. Mary returned in the TARDIS, and the Doctor left with her.
In 1661, the astronomer Clancy discovered a comet that returned to Earth every one hundred and fifty-seven years.
[607]
The mathematician Pierre de Fermat died in a duel, his last theorem unproven, because the Doctor slept in.
[608]
In 1665, an alien stranded on Earth adopted the guise of Erasmus Darkening, an alchemist. James, the Third Earl of Marchwood, hired Darkening to find the secret of turning common metal into gold - but Darkening instead built trans-dimensional equipment in the hopes of getting home, and powered it with the life force of Marchwood’s children. Marchwood stabbed at Darkening, damaging Darkening’s device - which reduced them both to a ghost-like state. In the centuries to follow, Darkening’s ghost turned at least thirteen people into shades, using their life-energies to fuel his immortality.
[609]
w - 1665 - FP: Newtons Sleep
[610]
A commoner, Thomas Piper, died from the plague. A Faction Paradox delegation that included Cousin Hateman, Mother Sphinx, the androgynous Father-Mother Olympia and their cat, Faction Cat, recruited his widow to join the Faction as Little Sister Greenaway.
1665 - The Demons of Red Lodge and Other Stories: “The Demons of Red Lodge”
[611]
The fifth Doctor and Nyssa visited the village of Red Lodge. The alien Spira were busy replicating the townsfolk as a precursor to a takeover of Earth, but died from imperfections upon incorporating the nonhuman Doctor into their genetic matrix.
The Welsh philosopher Thomas Vaughn studied alchemy, and discovered a means of living for centuries.
[612]
In 1665, a plague spread across London, killing thousands and causing widespread panic.
[613]
The Mortimer family - George, Helen and their children Ida and Alan - stumbled into the TARDIS when the first Doctor landed during the Great Fire of London. Much to the Doctor’s irritation, they thought he was a warlock. Together, they travelled to the Andromeda galaxy in the far future.
[614]
1666 (early September) - The Visitation
[615]
A group of escaped Terileptil prisoners made planetfall on Earth. They planned to wipe out the human population with rats infected with the bubonic plague virus, but were thwarted by the fifth Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa and Adric. A final confrontation resulted in the Doctor dropping a torch that caused the Terileptils’ equipment to explode - which killed the Terileptils and caused the Great Fire of London.
Prior to this in his lifetime, the Doctor had already been blamed for the Great Fire. The Doctor perhaps met Mr and Mrs Pepys on the same visit. Mrs Pepys “makes an excellent cup of coffee”.
The Doctor doesn’t like to talk about the Great Fire of London.
[616]
1669 - “Black Death White Life”
[617]
The tenth Doctor and Martha found an English village in the grip of a plague. A “fallen angel” in the local church was healing people, and the Doctor identified it as an Immunoglobulin from Mimosa 3 in the Crux Constellation. The Immunoglobulins and the Macroviruses had been locked in an ongoing war, but recently the Macroviruses had gained an advantage - and were now on Earth. The Doctor coaxed the Immunoglobulin to reproduce and destroy the Macroviruses on Earth, then returned it to Mimosa 3.