EVENTS: In a two-hour battle at Vinegar Hill, near Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, artillery deployed by General Gerard Lake, wrought, in his words, a “dreadful carnage” among Irish rebels camped there on this day in 1798. The ‘98 Rising, led by a group known as the United Irishmen, was finally over 11 weeks later when a French force supporting the rebels surrendered to Lake, a former equerry to the future King George IV, who in 1807 became 1st Viscount Lake of Delhi and of Aston Clinton.
In 1675 the foundation stone of the new St Paul’s Cathedral was laid; in 1788, on ratification of the US Constitution by a ninth state, New Hampshire, the Constitution was officially in force; in 1919 the German fleet was scuttled at Scapa Flow, Orkney; in 1937 lawn tennis at Wimbledon was televised for the first time; in 1942 Tobruk fell to Rommel with the capture of 30,000 Allied troops.
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BIRTHS: Hinting that he might not wish for any of his own novels to be read today, Jean-Paul Sartre, in his essay of 1949, “What is literature?”, compared novels to bananas as something to be enjoyed only when fresh. The French existentialist writer and philosopher also took a negative view of the Nobel Prize for Literature, refusing to accept his in 1964 when it was awarded “for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age”. He was born in Paris in 1905.
Anthony Collins, deist philosopher, born in Heston, Middlesex, 1676; Sir Richard Wallace, art collector and philanthropist, born in London, 1818; Enrico Cecchetti, ballet dancer and teacher, born in Rome, 1850; Pier Luigi Nervi, engineer and architect, whose works include the first skyscraper in Italy, the Pirelli Building, born in Sondrino, Italy, 1891; Mary McCarthy, novelist and critic, born in Seattle, Washington State, 1912.
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DEATHS: A 21st-century tutor describing a former pupil as an “Adonis of fresh colour/Of youth the godly flower” might be viewed with suspicion, but, for John Skelton — who from 1496 to 1501 was tutor to Prince Henry — it was simply good tactics to address him thus when he became King Henry VIII in 1509. A poet, rhetorician and translator, Skelton died in London on this day in 1529.
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King Edward III, reigned 1327-77, died in Sheen, Surrey, 1377; Niccolò Machiavelli, statesman, political theorist and author of The Prince, died in Florence, Italy, 1527; Friedrich Froebel, educational reformer, died in Marienthal, Thuringia, 1852; Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, composer, died in Lyubensk, Russia, 1908; Edouard Vuillard, painter, died in La Baule, France, 1940; Maureen Connolly (Little Mo), Wimbledon singles champion (1952-54), died in Dallas, Texas, 1969.