A look back on days in history on May 21 with Mike Badham

1471: Lancastrian king Henry VI, the pious son of Henry V, was murdered in the Tower, aged 49. Yorkist Edward IV then came to the throne. In 1485, Richard III lost the battle of Bosworth and the Yorkists were superseded by the Tudors.

1650: With Charles I executed in 1649, the royalist Earl of Montrose landed in Scotland but was defeated at Corblesdale and sentenced to death. As he sat combing his hair in an Edinburgh jail, a warder remarked that there was little point. Said Montrose: "It's still my head. Tonight it will be yours and you can do what you like with it." Later that day it was cut off and stuck on a pike.

1690: John Eliot died. He was a keen puritan who preached to the Red Indians in Massachusetts and published the first Bible in North America to be printed in the Indians' own language.

1688: The deformed poet and wit Alexander Pope was born. He was very short and had to wear a corset to hold his body straight. It was said that had he been a normal size, he would have attracted many a thrashing for his satirical remarks. 1894: The Manchester Ship Canal was officially opened. It had been seven years in the building.

1927: Charles A. Lindbergh landed in Paris after becoming the first man to fly solo from America. On this day in 1932 Amelia Earhart arrived in Wales - first woman across the Atlantic.

1940: After their Blitzkrieg through the Low Countries, German troops were only 60 miles from Paris.

1945: Humphrey Bogart married Lauren Bacall in a quiet ceremony at the Ohio house of novelist Louis Bromfield. The previous year they had appeared together in the film To Have and Have Not. He was 25 years her senior.

Births: 1471, Albrecht Durer, Nuremberg Germany, artist; 1688, Alexander Pope, poet; 1878, Glenn Curtiss, US pioneer aviator; 1898, Armand Hammer, NYC, millionaire oil man, 1904, Fats Waller, Thomas Wright, singer/composer; 1904, Robert Montgomery, NY, film actor, director; 1916, Harold Robbins, NYC, author; 1916, Helen Wills Moody, tennis player; 1917, Raymond Burr, Canada, actor; 1927, Kay Kendall, actress; 1944, Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland; 1948, Leo Sayer, England, singer; 1949, Andrew Neil, former editor, Sunday Times.

Deaths: 1786, Carl Scheele, Swedish chemist, dies at 43 from accident with cyanide; 1924, Bobby Franks, 14, murdered by Leopold & Loeb; 1926, Ronald Firbank, 40, writer 1952, John Garfield, 39, actor, dies making love.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.