4 februari

Mary I restored Catholicism and the heresy laws. From the burning of John Rogers at Smithfield to the last five at Canterbury a week before her death, Eamon Duffy counts 284 people burned, 56 of them women, and around thirty more who died in prison. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs kept their memory alive…

From the Montgomery convention to Jefferson Davis’s capture. Its constitution copied the federal one almost clause for clause, but barred any law “denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves”. The capital moved to Richmond in May 1861.

Sent east to land a party on King Edward VII Land, the Terra Nova came into the Bay of Whales at midnight and found the Fram there. Campbell and Pennell breakfasted at Framheim and watched the Norwegian dogs run; the Norwegians lunched on board. The ship sailed that afternoon.

After police fired on a protest, the crowd set fire to the police station and twenty-two policemen died. Gandhi called off the whole movement within days, to the dismay of Congress leaders then in jail, Jawaharlal Nehru among them.

A white cornetist from Davenport, Iowa, who had learned from ODJB records, recorded with the saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer a solo so lyrical and restrained that musicians memorised it note for note. Lester Young named Trumbauer as his model. Beiderbecke died in 1931, aged 28.

The Big Three met in the Crimea to settle Europe after the war: Germany split into zones, Poland’s borders moved west, and a conference to found the United Nations. Stalin agreed to attack Japan within three months of Germany’s surrender.

The deepest point of the Southern Ocean, south of 60° S, in freezing seas that forced the team to wait for a weather window.

Beijing became the first city to hold both Summer and Winter Games, reusing the Bird’s Nest for the ceremonies, with snow for the ski events made almost entirely by machine.