History Notes this week of April 1

742: Birth of Charlemagne.Charlemagne was King of the Franks from 768, King of the Lombards from 774, and Emperor of the Carolingian Empire from 800, holding all these titles until his death in 814.

1146: The monk Bernard of Clairvaux preaches an impassioned sermon in a field at Vezelay, forcefully laying out the rationale for a second crusade to the Holy Lands.

1204: Death of Eleanor of Aquitane (b.1122), Queen of France and England, and mother of Richard Coeur de Lion. Eleanor was renowned for her great beauty, wealth, vivacity and political drive, but is perhaps best remembered today for her time developing  “The Court of Love” in Poitiers, where she oversaw the full flowering of knightly chivalry and courtly love.

1453: Ottoman Turk Mehmed II begins his siege of Constantinople, which finally falls in May, ending the Christian Byzantine Empire and establishing the Muslim Ottoman Empire (which survived through the Great War as “The Sick Man of Europe,” but was finally dismembered via the Treaty of Versailles (1919)). Mehmed is credited with adopting many aspects of Byzantine administration over a fractious empire. His religious tolerance enabled one of his key methods for keeping the Christian remnants under control: kidnap the brightest Christian children from the provinces and train them up to serve in the Sultan’s court or as his personal bodyguards, the Janissaries.

1533: King Henry VIII divorces his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, widowed wife of Henry’s older brother, Arthur.

1533: Thomas Cranmer is made Archbishop of Canterbury. You will not be incorrect to think that these two items from 1533 are related. Cranmer worked the previous five years as part of the ecclesiastical legal team that developed the justification for Henry’s eventual divorce from Catherine of Aragon. You will also not be incorrect to surmise that the Boleyn family lobbied hard in favor of Cranmer’s accession to Canterbury to ensure his role in sanctifying their daughter Anne as Henry’s bride. One cannot overstate the intellectual fervor that accompanied the Christian Reformation occurring all across Europe during this period. Cranmer’s position, as head of the English Church, and his kindred intellectual-spiritual relationship with Erasmus and other key reformers, put him in the thick of changes to church doctrine that remain to this day, including the widely used Book of Common Prayer. Cranmer was caught on the wrong side of the Catholic restoration that began after the death of Henry during the short reign of his son Edward VI. He was tried for treason under a papal court and sentenced to death under English law. In the months prior to his scheduled death, he published six recantations of his “heresies.” At the pulpit on the day of his execution, he opened with a prayer and an exhortation to obey the king and queen, but he ended his sermon totally unexpectedly, deviating from the prepared script. He forcefully renounced the recantations that he had written or signed with his own hand since his degradation, and as such, he stated his hand would be punished by being burnt first. He then proclaimed, “And as for the pope, I refuse him, as Christ’s enemy, and Antichrist with all his false doctrine.” Crown bailiffs pulled him from the pulpit and took him to where his colleagues Latimer and Ridley had been burnt six months before. As the flames drew around him, he fulfilled his promise by placing his right hand into the heart of the fire. His dying words were, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit… I see the heavens open and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.” 

1581: English privateer (operating under Letters of Marque) Francis Drake arrives at Plymouth in his caravel Golden Hind, having completed a circumnavigation laden with Spanish plunder from around the globe. Queen Elizabeth I knights him for his spectacular successes. 

1614: Virginia native Pocahontas marries British subject and Jamestown leader John Rolfe.

1621: After wintering over in Cape Cod Bay, Mayflower sets sail from Plymouth, Massachusetts on its return trip to England.

1727: Death of Isaac Newton (b.1643).Sir Isaac Newton was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author who was described in his time as a natural philosopher. He was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed.

1743: Birth of Thomas Jefferson (d.1826). American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. He was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence. 

1775: In his continuing pursuit of effective colonial management, King George III endorses the New England Restricting Act. In a nod to colonial “self-rule” the act removes direct taxation to support the British military presence in New England, and replaces it with a billing invoice to for New Englanders to pay. It further stipulates that the New England colonies may only conduct commercial trade with England and adds a provision that will, as of July 20^th, prohibit New Englanders from fishing in North Atlantic waters.

1776: Lacking a navy worthy of the name, the Continental Congress authorizes its first Letters of Marque and Reprisal. A letter of marque and reprisal was a government license in the Age of Sail that authorized a private person, known as a privateer or corsair, to attack and capture vessels of a nation at war with the issuer.

1776: After his unlikely success in the siege of Boston, Major General George Washington begins to march his Continental Army south to the defense of New York.

1792: President Washington issues the first presidential veto on a bill concerning apportionment of representatives between the several states.

1801: The British Channel Fleet, with Horatio Lord Nelson second in command, destroys the majority of the Danish fleet in the Battle of Copenhagen. During the battle, Nelson refused an order to withdraw, instead turning with renewed fury to pound the line of moored Danish ships. At the height of this renewed engagement, Nelson suddenly ceased fire and opened negotiations with the Danes, who in the end agreed to a fourteen-week armistice. The victory was a blow to French interests in the Baltic and gave the British breathing room to re-fit and continue their seaborne pressure on trade with the French Republic.

1841: After only 31 days as President, William Henry Harrison (b.1773) dies of pneumonia. His Vice President, John Tyler, becomes the first to ascend to the office due to the death of the President. Harrison’s campaign began the modern era of personality campaigning (“Tippecanoe* and Tyler too!”). He was not only the first to die in office, he was the oldest to be elected (until Reagan in 1980 (and now Biden in 2020)), the last to be born before the American Revolution, and the first to be photographed.

1853: Birth of Vincent van Gogh (d.1890). Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade, he created approximately 2100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life.

1854: Commodore Matthew Perry signs the Treaty of Kanagawa, opening ports in Japan to American commerce. Japanese cultural memory of the visit of the Black Ships remains a very positive piece of U.S.- Japan relations. 

1860: Pony Express mail service begins between St. Joseph, Missouri and Sacramento, California. The money-losing service inspired the country with its dramatic rides and colorful riders (including William “Buffalo Bill” Cody), but quickly lost its reason for being with the rapid expansion of the telegraph and railroad services. The last horses ran in October, 1861. 

1865: Union troops overrun Confederate defenses at Petersburg. Lee orders a strategic retreat up the Appomattox River.

1865: On news of the fall of Petersburg, President Jefferson Davis and his war cabinet abandon Richmond in the hopes of re-establishing a functioning Confederate government in Mississippi.

1865: Union forces enter Richmond, where they find little but the burned-out shells of its downtown buildings, fired by the retreating Confederates. Robert E. Lee leads the remnants of the Army of Northern Virginia up the Appomattox River to meet with a promised supply train near Lynchburg. 

1865: Following the Confederate evacuation of the city, President Abraham Lincoln visits Richmond, Virginia, including during his tour a short sit in Jefferson Davis’ chair. As he becomes recognized, a growing number of black workers join the procession through town and bow down to him. Lincoln responds, “Kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty you will heretofore enjoy.”

1867: Secretary of State William Seward signs a treaty with Russia purchasing the Alaska territory for $7,200,000.00, or about $.02 per acre.

1882: Former Confederate guerrilla (and participant in the 1863 massacre at Lawrence, Kansas) Jesse James is shot in the back by a member of his own gang, Robert Ford.

1884: Birth of Yamamoto Isokoku. The architect of the Pearl Harbor attacks dies in 1943 when his airplane is intercepted and shot down over Bougainville Island.

1887: Anne Sullivan teaches the word “water” to Helen Keller. Her parents were impoverished immigrants who fled the Great Famine in Ireland. She became almost blind from a bacterial eye disease when she was 5. Her mother died when she was 8, and her father abandoned Sullivan and her brother. They were sent to the Tewksbury Almshouse – an overcrowded home for the destitute – where her brother died a few months later. The experience roused in her, she wrote later, “not only compassion but a fierce indignation” for the plight of poor and marginalized people. Sullivan learned finger-spelling from Laura Bridgman. A graduate of Perkins School for the Blind, Bridgman was the first person with deafblindness to get a formal education. The two spent time together when Sullivan was a student at Perkins. Bridgman taught her how to form letters with her fingers to spell out words into the palm of a hand. Sullivan used that finger-spelling method to teach Helen Keller how to communicate.

1889: Inauguration of La Tour Eiffel. Gustave Eiffel was a French structural engineer who achieved fame for his innovative use of iron in construction. Although the tower that bears his name is his most prominent legacy, he earlier became famous for his bridge building and other engineering feats before raising the tower in Paris. He also played a major role in the unsuccessful French efforts to build a canal across the isthmus of Panama.

1896: The first modern Olympic Games opens in Athens.

1917: Vladimir I. Lenin arrives in St. Petersburg from Switzerland, via Germany and Sweden. There is a fascinating sub-plot to this story, in that the putative leader of Russia’s Bolsheviks was in exile in Switzerland when the original Russian Revolution broke out in February, and was thus unable to influence the immediate course of events. As the Kerensky government tried to find its post-czarist footing, the Imperial German government sensed a unique opportunity to consolidate its dominant military victories on the eastern front with a decisive political victory that would decapitate the Russian government. The Germans made secret arrangements for a guarded “extra-territorial” train to transport a small cadre of their nominal Russian enemies from their Swiss exile in order to foment continued revolution, with the goal of generating a separate peace between Russia and Germany. The plan worked exactly as expected, with Lenin’s Bolshevik faction seizing power in October and making it their first order of business to conclude the Treaty of Brest-Litvosk in March, 1918.

1917: President Woodrow  Wilson asks Congress for a declaration of war against Imperial Germany.

1922: Joseph Stalin becomes General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Soviet revolutionary and politician who was the longest-serving leader of the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922–1952) and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union (1941–1953). Stalin initially governed the country as part of a collective leadership before consolidating power to become a dictator by the 1930s. Stalin coined the term Marxism–Leninism to outline his Leninist interpretation of Marxism, also known as Stalinism.

1931: Fox Studios fires John Wayne from its list of in-house actors. Yes, they actually fired John Wayne.

1936: Richard Bruno Hauptmann is executed by the electric chair for the kidnapping and murder of Charles and Ann Morrow Lindbergh’s baby.

1949: NATO is established at a treaty-signing ceremony in Washington, D.C.

1951: Julius and Ethel Rosenburg are found guilty of espionage- giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. They are both executed by electric chair at Sing-Sing prison two years later. Their two sons, aged 6 and 10, are adopted by family friends under assumed names. Both husband and wife maintained their innocence to the end.

1955: Citing health reasons, the 80-year-old Sir Winston Churchill resigns as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He remains a back-bencher in Parliament until 1964 and died in his home at age 90 in January, 1965. 

1962: Civilian test pilot Neil Armstrong takes the X-15 rocket plane to 180,000 feet altitude. 

1968: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is shot in Memphis, Tennessee.

1974: Opening day for the new World Trade Center twin towers in Manhattan.

1976: Death of movie mogul, aviation pioneer, industrialist and fabulously wealthy eccentric, Howard Hughes (b.1905). Hughes developed a passion for flying and founded his own aircraft company in the early 1930s. Besides designing and building planes, he risked his own life several times testing planes and setting world air-speed records in the mid- to late 1930s. 

1981: John Hinkley shoots President Ronald Reagan and three others in his entourage in Washington D.C. A .22 calibre bullet buried itself to within an inch of his heart, but Reagan’s confidence and sense of humor carried the day. To his wife Nancy, “Honey, I forgot to duck.” To the doctors who were about to operate, “Please tell me you are all Republicans.” And as he came out of anesthesia, a note to his aides: “All in all, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.” Hinkley is eventually found Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity (NGRI) and remained mostly confined to a mental institution just up the road from here, although in late 2016 the court granted him a bit more freedom to leave the hospital campus, with many conditions. As of this writing (2022) Hinkley will be completely released from court supervision in June of this year.

1974: Hank Aaron ties Babe Ruth’s 714 home run record.

1982: The United Kingdom deploys the initial flotilla of the Royal Navy task force ordered to re-take the Falkland Islands from Argentina. 

1984: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (born Lou Alcindor) breaks Wilt Chamberlain’s all-time scoring record of 31,419 

1996: Theodore Kaczynski is arrested. The Unabomber sent his first letter bomb in 1978; his casualties totaled 3 dead and 26 wounded.

1997: The United States’ last active battleship, USS Missouri (BB-63) is decommissioned in Long Beach, California. After a cosmetic overhaul, she is towed to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, where she serves as a memorial to World War II, directly adjacent to the entombed hull of USS Arizona (BB-36).