By Dominic Sandbrook

Published: Saturday, 15 January 2022 at 12:00 am


15 January 1503

The proxy marriage of Margaret Tudor and James IV of Scotland was held in London, with the Earl of Bothwell representing the Scottish king.


15 January 1512

Brasenose College, Oxford, received its royal charter from King Henry VIII. The college had been founded by Sir Richard Sutton, a lawyer from north-west England, and William Smyth, the bishop of Lincoln.


15 January 1559

The coronation of Queen Elizabeth I takes place in Westminster Abbey. The date had been specially chosen on the astrological advice of the noted Tudor scholar and mystic Dr John Dee. The previous day Elizabeth had ridden in state from the Tower of London to Whitehall in a display of pageantry that cost the Queen alone the sum of £16,000. Most of England’s bishops are too old, infirm, unacceptable to the Queen or unwilling to serve so it is left to the very junior Bishop of Carlisle, Owen Oglethorpe, to carry out the actual coronation ceremony.


15 January 1918

The Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel-Nasser is born in Alexandria.


15 January 1951

Ilse Koch, the wife of Buchenwald and Majdanek concentration camp commandant Karl Koch, was sentenced to life imprisonment by a West German court. She committed suicide in prison in 1967.

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