TODAY IN HISTORY

1310 Fifty-four Knights Templar are publicly burned near Paris as heretics. They had confessed under torture but then recanted.

1641 Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Stafford and English King Charles I’s right hand man, is beheaded before a huge jubilant crowd in London by order of parliament after losing a war against Scotland.

1809 Arthur Wellesley (later Duke of Wellington) and his British forces defeat the French at Oporto, forcing them to retreat from Portugal.

1810 Captain William Bligh sails from Sydney for England. Deposed in 1808, he had become “a great plague’’ to his legitimate successor Lachlan Macquarie.

1824 Colonel George Arthur, who created the Port Arthur convict settlement, arrives in Hobart and remains Governor for 12 years.

1916 James Connolly, the last of the seven rebels who had declared an Irish republic and led the Easter Rising against British rule, is executed in a chair by firing squad.

1926 Britain’s general strike is called off by the Trades Union Congress. The nine-day stoppage failed to restore coalminers’ conditions.

1937 King George VI of England is crowned at Westminster Abbey, after Edward VIII’s abdication to marry US divorcee Wallis Simpson.

1997 Susie Maroney, 22, from Cronulla, becomes the first person on record to swim from Cuba to Florida, completing the 190km marathon in 24½ hours.