1461Edward IV was crowned King of England. He was the first Yorkist King and the first half of his rule was marred by the violence associated with the Wars of the Roses.

1491The birth of Henry VIII, King of England and second son of Henry VII. He married six times, beheaded two wives, broke away from the Catholic church to form the Church of England, executed Catholics who failed to recognize the church and executed Protestants who complained that he should execute more Catholics! Yet he still managed to remain a popular king.

1645In the English Civil War, the Royalists lost Carlisle.

1829The first policeman to be murdered in Britain was Constable Joseph Grantham in Somers Town. He went to the aid of a woman involved in a fight between drunken men and when he fell, all three proceeded to kick him to death.

1838Queen Victoria was crowned at Westminster Abbey in London. She was just 19 years old.

1914Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie were killed by a Bosnian Serb nationalist during an official visit to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. The killings sparked a chain of events that led to the outbreak of World War I.

1919Exactly five years to the day after Franz Ferdinand's death, Germany and the Allied Powers signed the Treaty of Versailles, officially marking the end of World War I. Although the armistice, signed on 11th November 1918, ended the actual fighting, it took six months of negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference to conclude the peace treaty.

1928The birth of the politician Sir Cyril Smith MBE. He served as Liberal and Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament for Rochdale from 1972 until his retirement in 1992. See picture of Rochdale Town Hall. After his death in 2010 , numerous allegations of child sex abuse of young boys by Smith emerged. Greater Manchester Police said the boys 'were victims of physical and sexual abuse' and the Crown Prosecution Service said that the MP should have been charged with the crimes more than 40 years previously.

1930Mick the Miller becomes the first dog to win the Greyhound Derby for a second time.

1948English middleweight boxer Dick Turpin, (the elder brother and trainer of the more famous Randolph Turpin), beat Vince Hawkins at Villa Park in Birmingham to become the first black fighter to win a British boxing title.

1950A novice U.S. team beat the highly fancied England players 1-0 in the first round of the World Cup in Brazil. The English team included Billy Wright and Tom Finney.

1956Sydney Silverman's bill for the abolition of the death penalty was passed by the House of Commons. It was defeated in the Lords on 10th July.

196045 men were killed in a gas explosion at a coal mine in Monmouthshire, Wales.

1991Margaret Thatcher announced that she was to retire from the House of Commons at the next general election. The former prime minister, who held her Finchley seat for more than thirty years, said she intended to remain in politics and wanted to go to the House of Lords .... and she did!

2001 36,000 people lined the banks of the River Tyne to watch the Millennium Bridge tilt for the first time. The bridge (see picture) was the world's first tilting bridge. It spans the River Tyne between Gateshead's Quays arts quarter on the south bank, and the Quayside of Newcastle upon Tyne on the north bank.

2004The US handed sovereignty back to Iraq in a low-key ceremony in Baghdad.

2012 The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh attended a ceremony in London's Green Park when the first national memorial dedicated to more than 50,000 fallen personnel from World War 2's Bomber Command was unveiled. The ceremony culminated in a poppy drop from the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight.

201375 year old 'Moors Murderer' Ian Brady, who, along with Myra Hindley, tortured and murdered five children in the 1960s, lost his legal bid to be transferred from a psychiatric hospital back to prison. He claimed that he hated Ashworth hospital because 'the regime has changed to a penal warehouse.'

2014The death of Eric Whalley, aged 74, former player, manager, chairman and 'saviour' of Accrington Stanley, who guided the club back to the Football League. Accrington Stanley folded in 1963, reformed in 1968 and returned to the Football League in 2006 after Whalley took over running the club in 1995.

2015 The broadcast of the final episode of Top Gear with presenters Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May. Clarkson's contract was not renewed earlier in the year after an 'unprovoked physical attack' on producer, Oisin Tymon at a hotel in North Yorkshire in March 2015. His co-hosts refused to present future shows without him.

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