EVENTS: In 1838 Queen Victoria was crowned in Westminster Abbey; in 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo; in 1919 the Peace Treaty between the Allies and Germany was signed in the Palace of Versailles; in 1960 45 miners were killed in a gas explosion at Six Bells Colliery in Monmouthshire; in 1976 three British mercenaries and an American were sentenced to death by firing squad for their role in the Angolan civil war (they were executed on July 10); in 1991 the former Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, declared that she would retire from the House of Commons at the next general election; in 1935 the US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered a federal vault to be built for the nation’s gold at Fort Knox, Kentucky.
BIRTHS: King Henry VIII, reigned 1509-47, born in Greenwich, 1491; Sir Peter Paul Rubens, painter, born in Siegen, Westphalia, 1577; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, philosopher, born in Geneva, 1712; Charles Mathews, actor-manager, born in London, 1776; Sir Henry Lawrence, soldier and administrator, born in Matura, Ceylon, 1806; Luigi Pirandello, Italian dramatist (Nobel laureate 1934), born in Agrigento, Sicily, 1867; Pierre Laval, head of the Vichy Government 1942-44, born in Châteldon, France, 1883; Richard Rodgers, composer who collaborated with the librettists Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II, born in Long Island, New York, 1902.
DEATHS: Francis Wheatley, painter, died in London, 1801; James Madison, fourth American President 1809-17, died in Montpelier, Virginia, 1836; James Henry Somerset (1st Baron Raglan), British commander-in-chief during the Crimean War, whose ambiguous order led to the Charge of the Light Brigade, died near Sebastopol, Crimea, 1855; Robert O’Hara Burke, explorer of Australia, died of starvation at Cooper’s Creek, South Australia, 1861; John Piper, artist, died in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, 1992.