Now & Then
4 APRIL
1618: Cardinal Richelieu was ordered into exile in Avignon for intrigues with France’s Queen Mother Marie de Medici.
1660: King Charles II issued the Declaration of Breda, promising religious tolerance.
1896: The discovery of gold in the Yukon led to the “gold rush”. Thousands of prospectors flooded the territory.
1904: Britain and France signed the Entente Cordiale, a mutual recognition of each other’s colonial interests.
1918: Second Battle of the Somme ended.
1922: Armand Jeannes, the man who betrayed British nurse Edith Cavell, was sentenced to death by a Brussels court. Cavell, who had helped many allied soldiers to escape from German occupied Belgium during the First World War, was executed by a German firing squad on 12 October, 1915.
1924: BBC broadcast the first radio programmes for schools.
1934: The first cat’s eye road studs – the invention of Percy Shaw – were installed near Bradford. 1942: Japanese naval forces sank three British warships in Bay of Bengal.
1949: The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was created by the United States, Britain, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Canada.
1958: The first protest march by Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament left Hyde Park Corner, London, for Aldermaston. 1964: Archbishop Makarios abrogated 1960 treaty among Greece, Turkey and Cyprus, and heavy fighting erupted in northwest Cyprus.
1969: Doctors in Houston hospital, Texas, implanted the first complete artificial heart in a 47-year-old man, who died four days later.
1981: Bob Champion won the Grand National on Aldaniti.
1986: Israel formally asked for access to the UN War Crimes Commission file on former Secretary-general Kurt Waldheim. 1988: Iran hammered Iraq’s oil centres with missiles and fighterbombers.
1988: The soap opera Crossroads ended on television, after 4,510 episodes, the first having been shown in December, 1964. 1991: Nine Orkney children taken into care on 27 February amid allegations of child sex abuse, were returned to their families after ruling by Sheriff David Kelbie in Inverness.
1995: Keith Schellenberg, former owner of Eigg, left the island under police protection after selling it to German artist Marlin Eckhard Maruma.
2002: The Angolan government and UNITA rebels signed a peace treaty ending the Angolan Civil War.
2007: Fifteen British Royal Navy personnel held in Iran were released by the Iranian president. 2008: Inaraidonthe Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints’ YFZ Ranch in Texas, 401 children and 133 women were taken into state custody.
2010: During his Easter Sunday Mass, the Pope did not mention the child abuse allegations that had engulfed the Catholic Church. 2013: More than 70 people were killed when a building collapsed in Thane, India.