29 June 1509
Lady Margaret Beaufort dies, aged 66. A widow (of Edmund Tudor) and a mother (of the future Henry VII) by the age of 13, she had just lived long enough to see the coronation of her grandson, Henry VIII.
29 June 1613: The Globe theatre burns to the ground
Cannon fire sparks a blaze during a Shakespeare play
It’s fair to say that All Is True isn’t one of William Shakespeare’s best-known plays – not least because it’s now more widely called Henry VIII, and is believed to have been co-written with another playwright, John Fletcher. So its first recorded performance – at the Globe theatre on the banks of the Thames in June 1613 – might have sunk into obscurity had it not been for the disaster that brought it to an untimely end.
The production company clearly wanted the play – which centres on Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon – to go off with a bang. And so, at a climactic moment in the performance, a cannon was fired towards the theatre’s famous open roof.
The explosion certainly made an impact, but for all the wrong reasons. Sparks set the thick thatched roof smouldering and, before long, smoke was creeping through the rafters. At first, nobody in the crowd seemed to notice – according to one onlooker, “their eyes [were] more attentive to the show” – but soon the fire had become impossible to ignore. Remarkably, nobody was hurt in the blaze, though one man’s breeches caught alight (his skin was literally saved when someone soaked him in beer).
The Globe itself wasn’t so lucky and the inferno quickly swept through the building. The theatre that had been built by Shakespeare’s playing company in 1599, and had puton some of his most famous plays, was burned to cinders. | Written by Helen Carr
29 June 1612
Robert, Lord Crichton of Sanquhar was hanged at Great Palace Yard, Westminster for arranging the murder of John Turner, an English fencing master who had wounded him in a fencing match eight years earlier.
29 June 1911
Birth in New York City of composer Bernard Herrmann. A frequent collaborator with film director Alfred Hitchcock, his work included the scores for Vertigo, North by Northwest and Psycho.
29 June 1941
In Iasi, Romania, the government launches one of the bloodiest anti-Jewish pogroms in history, claiming at least 13,000 lives.
29 June 1950
On one of English sport’s worst ever days the USA beat England 1-0 in the 1950 FIFA World Cup in Brazil, and at Lord’s, the West Indies beat England at cricket for the first time.
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