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On 20 April 1653, Oliver Cromwell walked into the Commons with a file of musketeers, pointed at the Speaker's mace, called it 'a bauble,' and dissolved the Rump Parliament. He had no constitution to replace it with. Seven years later, the same Rump voted to bring back the king.
On 19 April 1529, the Diet of Speyer voted to ban Lutheranism and reinstate the Edict of Worms. Six princes and fourteen cities filed a legal protest. That document coined the word 'Protestant.' Ten years later to the day, Charles V made peace with them. He never managed more than that.
On 18 April 1912, the Carpathia arrived in New York with 712 Titanic survivors. The disaster is remembered as a tragedy of fate. It was not. It was a sequence of human decisions, most of them wrong - and one of them spectacularly right.
On 17 April 1895, China signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki and surrendered Korea, Taiwan, and 200 million taels of silver to Japan. Eight months of unbroken defeats confirmed what the Self-Strengthening Movement had spent thirty years denying: Japan had transformed itself. China had not.
On 16 April 1457 BC, Pharaoh Thutmose III won a battle at Megiddo that his scribe recorded in enough detail to reconstruct. Every military history before it is archaeology. This is where the written record begins.
On 15 April 1755, Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary of the English Language — 42,000 words, nine years of work, and one of the more entertaining acts of self-description in literary history.
On 14 April 966, Mieszko I, pagan ruler of the Polans, converted to Christianity following his marriage to Doubravka of Bohemia. The baptism created Poland. What followed would be centuries of glory, tragedy, erasure, and resurrection.
On 13th April 1829, the Roman Catholic Relief Act received royal assent, allowing Catholics to sit in Parliament for the first time since the Penal Laws. It was a genuine victory. The terms on which it was extracted deserve closer inspection.
On 12 April 1204, Crusaders breached the walls of Constantinople. They had set out to free Jerusalem. They ended up sacking the greatest Christian city in the world - and dismantling the one barrier standing between Europe and the Ottoman advance.
On 11 April 1689, William III and Mary II were crowned as joint sovereigns of Britain. The Glorious Revolution that put them there is one of history's rarest things: a constitutional order that reformed itself without first destroying itself.