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Oct 21, 1485
Richard III is killed in battle
King of England for two years, from 1483 until his death in 1485 in the Battle of Bosworth Field. He was the last king of the House of York and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty -
Oct 21, 1492
Christopher Columbus reaches Americas
Columbus participated in several other expeditions to Africa. 1492, Columbus left Spain in the Santa Maria, with the Pinta and the Niña along side. He has been credited for opening up the Americas to European colonization. -
Oct 21, 1503
Leonardo da Vinci paints the Mona Lisa
half-length portrait of a woman by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci, which has been acclaimed as "the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world -
Oct 21, 1516
Thomas More's Utopia is published
Thomas More’s Utopia is about a supposed “perfect” society or place, and it has come to carry that meaning in today’s culture also. The technique used to relate the details of this society is quite ingenious. When it was first published many people believed it as an actual work of non-fiction. -
Oct 22, 1543
Sumpremacy Act, Henry VIII proclaimed head of C.O.E.
who was responsible for the English church breaking away from the authority of the Roman Catholic Church after the Pope excommunicated Henry in 1533 over his divorce from Catherine of Aragon -
Oct 21, 1558
Elizabeth I becomes queen of England
Sometimes called "The Virgin Queen", "Gloriana" or "Good Queen Bess", Elizabeth was the fifth and last monarch of the Tudor dynasty. The daughter of Henry VIII, she was born into the royal succession, but her mother, Anne Boleyn, was executed two and a half years after her birth -
Oct 21, 1564
William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon, is born
Shakeapeare is often called "the Bard of Avon". This book was actually both his story and that of a great art rediscovered in the modern world. -
The Globe Theatre is built in London
After the Theatre, further open air theaters opened in the London area, including the Rose Theatre (1587), and the Hope Theatre (1613). The most famous Elizabethan theater was the Globe Theatre (1599) built by the company in which Shakespeare had a stake - now often referred to as the Shakespearean Globe. -
Shakespeare write King Lear and Macbeth
King Lear and its immediate successor Macbeth are Shakespeare’s most profound tragedies. Both contain studies of murderous ambition and self-consuming evil; both seem to raise the question whether human disorder is mirrored in the natural world; both are concerned with the nature of kingship and authority. -
First permanent English settlement in North America at Jamestown, VA
settlement in the Colony of Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. Established by the Virginia Company of London as "James Fort" on May 24, 1607 and considered permanent after brief abandonment in 1610, it followed several earlier failed attempts, including the Lost Colony of Roanoke. -
Shakepeare's sonnets are published
Shakespeare's sonnets are a collection of 154 sonnets, dealing with themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty and mortality. -
King James Bible is published
an English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England begun in 1604 and completed in 1611. -
Mayflower lands at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts
made the historic voyage from England to the New World. The ship carried 102 passengers in two core groups – religious Separatists coming from Holland and a largely non-religious settler group from London -
Newspapers are first published in London
The London Gazette claims to be the oldest surviving English newspaper and the oldest continuously published newspaper in the UK, having been first published on 7 November 1665 as The Oxford Gazette -
John Milton begins Paradise Lost
an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton (1608-1674). It was originally published in 1667 in ten books, with a total of over ten thousand individual lines of verse. -
Puirtan Commonwealth ends; monarchy is restored with Charles II
Charles II King of Great Britain and Ireland in Edinburgh on 6 February 1649, the English Parliament instead passed a statute that made any such proclamation unlawful. England entered the period known as the English Interregnum or the English Commonwealth, and the country was a de facto republic
