On this day: Ayrton Senna wins fourth successive Grand Prix
1536: Sir Francis Weston, Mark Smeaton and other alleged paramours of Queen Anne Boleyn went on trial for treason.
1608: Protestant Union of German princes opposing Catholic bloc was formed at Anhausen.
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Hide Ad1679: Reverend James Kirkwood, the father of public libraries in Scotland, became minister of Minto.
1725: The Black Watch was commissioned under General Wade as the Independent Companies to police the Highlands.
1780: Charlestown fell to the British during the American Revolutionary War.
1915: Forces of South Africa’s Louis Botha occupied Windhoek, capital of German Southwest Africa.
1926: The General Strike in Britain ended after nine days.
1926: Josef Pilsudski staged coup in Poland.
1932: The kidnapped baby son of aviator Charles Lindbergh was found dead.
1935: Alcoholics Anonymous was founded by William Wilson in Ohio.
1937: The Coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth took place in Westminster Abbey.
1942: Russians opened Kharkov offensive.
1949: The USSR lifted its blockade of Berlin after 11 months. It had cost the Allies £200million to fly in food and essential supplies.
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Hide Ad1951: The first H-bomb test on Eniwetok Atoll in the mid-Pacific proved it was possible to destroy a city more than 100 times the size of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
1969: The voting age in Britain was lowered to 18.
1982: The QE2 sailed to join the Falklands Task Force.
1988: World Health Organisation said more than 34,000 Aids cases had been reported worldwide.
1990: At a Baltic summit, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania revived a 1934 political alliance, hoping a united front would crack Soviet resistance to the republics’ attempts to break away from the Soviet Union.
1990: A 1,000-tonne oil slick leaked from the Liberian tanker Rose Bay, which was in collision with a trawler in the Channel.
1991: In Monte Carlo, Ayrton Senna won his fourth successive Grand Prix.
1992: The Queen made a historic first speech to the European parliament in Strasbourg.
2003: Clare Short, the international development secretary, quit the Cabinet and accused the prime minister, Tony Blair, of endangering Labour’s achievements through his “obsessive” pursuit of a place in history.
2009: A rare blue diamond sold for a record 10.5million Swiss francs (£6.2million) at auction in Geneva. It weighed 7.03 carats, was smaller than a penny piece, and was one of only a handful of blue diamonds in existence.