A look back at events in history on April 9 with Mike Badham

1413: King Henry V was crowned at Westminster. Later he went on to duff up the French at Agincourt.

1626: Sir Francis Bacon caught cold and died, soon after an experiment in refrigeration. He had stuffed a dead chicken with snow to see if it kept longer that way.

1694: Mystery man Beau Wilson was killed in a duel in Bloomsbury Square. He had been challenged by gambler John Law for some obscure reason. Years later, it emerged that he had been the lover of Lady Elizabeth Villiers, the mistress of William III. Fearing that he would expose her double-dealing, she had him killed, or so went the tale.

1731: Captain Jenkins had his ear cut off near Cuba by a Spanish coastguard who suspected him of smuggling. But the famous War of Jenkins' Ear did not start for another seven years, when Britain wanted an excuse to declare war on Spain.

1747: Eighty year-old Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat became the last person to be beheaded in public on Tower Hill. He had rebelled against the King in the 1745 Jacobite rising, and was captured after the battle of Culloden in 1746. The axe and block used are now on show in the Tower. Two other Scottish lords were beheaded earlier in the day, so they don't qualify for the record books. (They were Lords Kilmarnock and Balmerino.)

1770: Captain James Cook discovered Botany Bay in Australia.

1898: Paul Robeson was born in Princeton, New Jersey. He became a lawyer, footballer, actor and singer, notably in the 1928 Showboat, where he sang Old Man River. Later he played Othello to Peggy Ashcroft's Desdemona in London, and an African chief in the film Sanders of the River. But he was less successful in America, because he was a communist.

1941: The Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour film Road to Zanzibar opened in New York. This was the second of their "Road" series, which ran to seven films.

1942: The Japanese took Bataan, in the Philippines, taking 36,000 prisoners.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.