13 July 1643
Sir William Waller’s parliamentarian army was totally defeated by a royalist force from Oxford at the battle of Roundway Down. The army had been besieging Sir Ralph Hopton’s royalists in the Wiltshire town of Devizes.
13 July 1793: Jean-Paul Marat is stabbed to death in his bathtub
A fervent supporter of the French Revolution is murdered by Girondin sympathiser Charlotte Corday
Just before noon on 13 July 1793, a young woman called Charlotte Corday presented herself at the house of the demagogic radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat, one of the most outspoken and bloodthirsty voices of the French Revolution. She had, she said, important information about a potential uprising in Normandy. But Marat’s wife was unimpressed and sent her away.
That evening, however, Corday came back, and this time Marat told his wife to let her in. Suffering from an intensely painful skin disease, he was working on papers in his medicinal bath. For 15 minutes or so, he listened to what Corday had to say, and as she listed the names of disloyal deputies in the Caen region, north-western France, he scribbled their names on a sheet of paper. “Their heads,” he said with morbid satisfaction, “will fall within a fortnight”.
It was then that Charlotte Corday made her move. The daughter of royalist parents, she had seen her brothers flee abroad and had reportedly been inspired by the rhetoric of the more moderate Girondin faction. Now she pulled from her corset a five-inch kitchen knife, and plunged it deep into Marat’s chest. “Help me, my dear!” Marat screamed at his wife. But it was already too late; as blood gushed from the wound, he was dead within moments.
Arrested at the scene, Corday was executed four days later. Her crime was immortalised in a famous painting by the revolutionary artist Jacques-Louis David, showing Marat as a Christ-like martyr. As for the famous bathtub, it now stands in a Paris waxworks. | Written by Dominic Sandbrook
13 July 1811
George Gilbert Scott was born in Gawcott, Buckinghamshire. After beginning his career designing workhouses and gaols, Scott became one of the leading Gothic Revival architects of Victorian Britain and designed or worked on over 700 buildings. His projects included St Giles church, Camberwell; the Martyrs’ Memorial in Oxford; the Albert Memorial at Hyde Park; St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh; and St Pancras station. Scott, whose sons and grandson were also architects, died in 1878 and is buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey.
13 July 1930
French footballer Lucien Laurent scored the first World Cup goal, a right-foot volley in the 19th minute of France’s 4-1 victory over Mexico at the Estadio Pocitos in Montevideo.
13 July 1962
British prime minister Harold Macmillan announced that he was sacking seven members of his cabinet including the chancellor of the exchequer, Selwyn Lloyd, and the minister of defence, Harold Watkinson, in an event sometimes known as ‘the night of the Long Knives’.
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