1638 in England

Incumbents

• Monarch – Charles I
• Secretary of State – Sir John Coke

Events

• 18 April – flogging of John Lilburne for refusing to swear an oath when brought before the court of Star Chamber for distributing Puritan publications.
• 12 June – trial of John Hampden for non-payment of ship money concludes: a narrow majority of judges find the tax to be legal.
• 21 October – The Great Thunderstorm at Widecombe-in-the-Moor in Devon: 4 are killed and around 60 injured when probable ball lightning strikes the parish church.
• The Queen's House at Greenwich, designed by Inigo Jones in 1616 as the first major example of classical architecture in the country, is completed for Henrietta Maria.
• John Milton's elegy "Lycidas" is published.

Births

• 24 January – Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset, poet and courtier
• 6 March– Henry Capell, 1st Baron Capell, First Lord of the British Admiralty
• 2 June – Henry Hyde, 2nd Earl of Clarendon, politician
• 24 December – Ralph Montagu, 1st Duke of Montagu, diplomat
• William Sacheverell, statesman

Deaths

• 14 September – John Harvard, clergyman and colonist