10 agosto

After an open-air Calvinist sermon near Steenvoorde in Flanders, the crowd stormed a monastery and smashed its images. The Beeldenstorm spread north within weeks and reached Antwerp cathedral on 20 August. Philip II answered by sending the Duke of Alba with an army.

Charles II ordered it “for the finding out of the longitude of places”, and Wren designed it on old castle foundations for about £520. John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, bought many of his instruments himself.

Marthanda Varma of Travancore beat the Dutch East India Company, a rare defeat of a European company’s army by an Indian kingdom. The captured Dutch officer Eustachius De Lannoy trained his army for decades.

Symphonies in E flat, G minor and C major, K. 543, 550 and 551, entered in his catalogue within seven weeks of one summer, in a suburban flat he had moved to to save rent. The same weeks he wrote to his fellow Mason Michael Puchberg for loans. The last was later nicknamed the “Jupiter”.

National Guards and volunteers from Marseille and Brest stormed the palace. The king took refuge with the Assembly, which suspended him. Of the Swiss Guards defending an empty palace, about 600 were killed.

The royal commission’s report, with drawings of girls hauling coal tubs on all fours, shocked Parliament. The Act banned all women and girls, and boys under ten, from working underground.

The first major battle west of the Mississippi, fought for Missouri. Nathaniel Lyon became the first Union general killed in the war. The Confederates held the field; the state stayed in the Union. About 2,330 casualties (NPS).

Every boat in the harbour follows the captain’s funeral, and Mina and Lucy watch from their seat. Old Mr. Swales is found dead on the seat, his neck broken, with a look of fear and horror, and a dog that would not come to its master howls until it is thrown onto a tombstone. That night, after a…

Five cars answered Le Matin’s challenge to drive from Peking to Paris, across a continent with almost no roads. Prince Scipione Borghese’s Itala, with the journalist Luigi Barzini aboard, was hauled over mountain passes by teams of men, crossed the Gobi and ran on the Trans-Siberian’s tracks, and…

The songwriter Perry Bradford talked OKeh into recording a Black singer. The record sold tens of thousands of copies in its first month, mostly to Black buyers, and the labels opened separate “race records” catalogues to sell to them: the market that would record Bessie Smith, King Oliver and…

The sultan’s delegates signed a peace that left the Turks a rump state in central and northern Anatolia, with an Armenian state in the east, Greek rule at Smyrna and the Straits under the Allies. It was never ratified.