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Oct 21, 1485
Richard III is killed in battle
Richard III was 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 the Americas
Christopher Columbus (born between October 31, 1450 and October 30, 1451 – 20 May 1506) was an Italian explorer, navigator, and colonizer, born in the Republic of Genoa, in what is today northwestern Italy. Under the auspices of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, he completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean that led to general European awareness of the American continents. -
Oct 21, 1503
Leonardo da Vinci paints the Mona Lisa
The Mona Lisa is a 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." The ambiguity of the subject's expression, the monumentality of the composition, the subtle modeling of forms and the atmospheric illusionism were qualities that have contributed to the continuing study of the work. -
Oct 21, 1516
Tomas More's Utopia is published
The first book tells of the traveller Raphael Hythloday, to whom More is introduced in Antwerp, and it also explores the subject of how best to counsel a prince, a popular topic at the time. In the second book Utopia is placed in the New World and More links Raphael's travels in with Amerigo Vespucci's real life voyages of discovery. He suggests that Raphael is one of the 24 men Vespucci, in his Four Voyages of 1507, says he left for six months at Cabo Frio, Brazil. -
Oct 21, 1543
Henry VIII proclaims himself head of the Church of England
By 1536, Henry had broken with Rome, seized the church's assets in England and declared the Church of England as the established church with himself as its head. The Act of Supremacy of 1534 confirmed the King's status as having supremacy over the church and required the nobility to swear an oath recognising Henry's supremacy. Henry's daughter, Queen Mary I, a staunch Catholic, attempted to restore the English church's allegiance to the pope and repealed the Act of Supremacy in 1555. -
Oct 21, 1558
Elizabeth I becomes queen of England
Queen of England (1558–1603), the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Through her Religious Settlement of 1559 she enforced the Protestant religion by law. She had Mary Queen of Scots executed in 1587. Her conflict with Roman Catholic Spain led to the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The Elizabethan age was expansionist in commerce and geographical exploration, and arts and literature flourished. -
Oct 21, 1564
William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon, is born
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". -
Globe Theatre is built in london
The Globe Theatre was a theatre in London associated with William Shakespeare. It was built in 1599 by Shakespeare's playing company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, on land owned by Thomas Brend and inherited by his son, Nicholas Brend and grandson Sir Matthew Brend, and was destroyed by fire on 29 June 1613. A second Globe Theatre was built on the same site by June 1614 and closed in 1642. -
Shakespeare writes King Lear and Macbeth
Macbeth is a play written by William Shakespeare. It is considered one of his darkest and most powerful tragedies. Set in Scotland, the play dramatizes the corrosive psychological and political effects produced when evil is chosen as a way to fulfil the ambition for power. -
Jamestown, Virgina is established
The settlement was located within the territory of a political entity known as Tsenacommacah, the state of the Powhatan Confederacy, with around 14,000 native inhabitants, and specifically was in part of the subdivision known as the Paspahegh tribe. The natives initially welcomed the colonists with dancing, feasting and tobacco ceremonies,[3] and they provided crucial provisions and support for the survival of the colonists, who were not agriculturally inclined. -
Shakespeare'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, first published in a 1609 quarto entitled SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS. -
King James Bible is published
The King James Version, commonly known as the Authorized Version or King James Bible, is an English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England begun in 1604 and completed in 1611. -
The Mayflower lands at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts
The Mayflower was the Pilgrim ship that in 1620 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. -
Newpapers are first published in London
Corante: or, Newes from Italy, Germany, Hungarie, Spaine and France was published by the printer Nathaniel Butter in London. The earliest of the seven surviving copies is dated September 24, 1621, but it is thought that this single page news sheet began publication earlier in 1621. -
John Milton begins Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost is 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. The poem concerns the Biblical story of the Fall of Man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Milton's purpose, stated in Book I, is to "justify the ways of God to men". -
Puritan Commonwealth end; monarchy is restored with Charles II
The Restoration of the English monarchy began when the English, Scottish and Irish monarchies were all restored under Charles II after the Interregnum that followed the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The term Restoration is used to describe both the actual event by which the monarchy was restored, and the period of several years afterwards in which a new political settlement was established. It is very often used to cover the whole reign of Charles II and often the reign of his younger brother.
