Interesting Facts

27th April 1124 – David I became King of Scotland. 1296 – The Scots were defeated by Edward I of England at the Battle of Dunbar. 1667 – The blind and impoverished John Milton sold the copyright of Paradise Lost for £10. 1773 – The Parliament of Great Britain passed the Tea Act, designed to save the British East India Company by granting it a monopoly on the North American tea trade. They were not a Fair Trade company. 1791 - Samuel Finley Breese Morse, the inventor of the Morse code, was born. 1840 – The foundation stone for new Palace of Westminster, London, was laid. 1992 – Betty Boothroyd became the first woman to be elected Speaker of the British House of Commons in its 700-year history.

6th February 1945 - Bob Marley was born. 1952 - King George VI died in his sleep aged just 56 and Princess Elizabeth became sovereign of Great Britain. (She wasn't declared Queen until February 8, and wasn't crowned Queen Elizabeth II until June 2, 1953.) 1958 - British European Airways Flight 609 crashed on its third attempt to take off from a slush-covered runway at the Munich-Riem airport in Munich, West Germany. On board the plane was the Manchester United football team, nicknamed the Busby Babes, along with a number of supporters and journalists. Twenty-three of the 44 passengers on board the aircraft died in what was to be called The Munich Air Disaster.

According to research carried out by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, half of Western European men are descended from one Bronze Age ‘king’. (The unamed monarch, who lived around 4,000 years ago, sired a dynasty of elite nobles which spread throughout Europe. Previous genetic research has found that 16 million men across the world could be related to Genghis Khan, the Mongol leader who died in 1227. So, who's your daddy?) Source

According to news reports, the new royal baby, Prince George has been given some unusual gifts, they include the following:- A hand-embroidered blanket made by nuns in Spain. An apple tree (supposedly this is traditional, but I can't remember getting one, probably because I'm not the first born son). A baby crocodile (called George). (I guess it beats silver spoons and rattles, but really, all he needs is loving parents and a relatively normal upbringing. We always tell our children that they can be whatever they want to be, so why not tell them they don't have to be whoever people say they ought to be.  If I were his parents I'd give him a free pass from becoming king.)

King Willem-Alexander has become the first Dutch male monarch in more than a century after his mother Beatrix abdicated today. He is the first Dutch king since Willem III died in 1890.

A load of old bones found under a council car park in Leicestershire, belonged to King Richard III. (Archeologists, from the University of Leicester, have confirmed that DNA evidence proves the discovery of the body of Richard, who was slain at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485.) Update - The University of Leicester, which led the project to find and exhume Richard, was given permission to reinter the king's remains at the cathedral in Leicester, which is close to Bosworth in central England, but descendants of the monarch, who was the last king of the Plantagenet dynasty, are seeking a legal challenge to have his body laid to rest instead in York, the northern English city with which he had close links during his life. They should be grateful Laika didn't find them, or they really would be - history.

King George III of England and his wife Charlotte had 15 children. (Imagine if they had started fighting for the throne!)

Being a monarch up to 1800 was more risky business than being a soldier engaged in a contemporary war. (According to "Killing Kings", a paper that will appear on the website of the British Journal of Criminology on Monday 31 January, a statistical study of the demise of 1,513 monarchs in 45 European monarchies over the period 600 to 1800 revealed that almost a quarter (22 per cent) of all royal deaths were bloody - accidents, battle deaths and killings - and that 15 per cent of all deaths were outright murder. Heavy is the head that wears the crown.) Thanks to Alex