March 22

William Woods Holden was the governor of North Carolina in 1871. On the 22nd in 1871, he became the first governor of a state in the United States to be removed from office as the result of an impeachment proceeding. He does not have the prestige associated with being the first governor to be impeached however. That honor goes to Charles Lawrence Robinson, governor of Kansas in 1862, who was the first governor to be impeached, though he was acquitted and was not removed from office.

March 21

It is a long-settled fact that the Anglican Church is really nothing more than Catholic Lite. In the England of the sixteenth century however, it is more like Catholic Light. In 1556, Thomas Cranmer was the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was a rather committed member of the Anglican Church. You would not be incorrect if you were to label him one of the cornerstones of Anglican theology. He’s the guy who gave Henry VIII a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, which led to the dominoes falling for the Roman Catholic Church in England. Cranmer was also on the wrong side of the street in all that nastiness that surrounded Lady Jane Grey and her attempt to usurp the throne. With Mary, Queen of Scots on the throne, she being a Catholic definitely out of the closet, Cranmer tried to do a bit of back-pedaling to distance himself from his rabidly anti-Catholic views. He was not terribly successful at this however and Mary directed that he either recant or be burned at the stake. He gave recanting a shot, though he didn’t really have his heart in it. Mary then directed that he declare his position in public. He was led into a square on the 21st in 1556 and placed on top of a big pile of sticks. This should have given him a clue that he should probably have paid a bit closer attention to what was going on. He was called upon to make public his belief that the pope was an o.k. kind of guy he said, instead, "And as for the Pope, I refuse him, as Christ's enemy and Antichrist, with all his false doctrine.” A match was then put to the woodpile and all his hopes for having a good day went up in smoke.

March 20

Giuseppe Zangara died on the 20th in 1933. Zangara was an unremarkable person. Except, that is, for one little thing, a minor detail really: He attempted to assassinate both President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Chicago mayor Anton Cermak on the preceding February 15. FDR, of course, survived the attempt. Cermak did not. Zangara pled guilty and was sentenced to death in Old Sparky, Florida’s electric chair. The sentence was carried out only 10 days after Cermak’s confession. Zangara was an ardent anti-capitalist who stated to police "I have the gun in my hand. I kill kings and presidents first and next all capitalists." It is more than likely that the reason for Zangara failing to hit both of his targets is that he was only 5 feet tall and had to stand on a folding chair to see over the hat that spectator Lilian Cross was wearing while standing in front of him. I imagine that having to do that threw his aim off just a little bit.

March 19

David Livingstone was born on the 19th in 1813 in Scotland. As an adult, he would become a doctor and a missionary who spent the bulk of his life in central Africa. Everyone must be familiar with his famous encounter with Sir Henry Morton Stanley, who was Welsh and who had been sent to Africa by the New York Herald to find Livingstone, which he did in 1871. When Livingstone finally got around to dying on the 1st of May in 1871, two of his friends, Chuma and Susi, would carry his body for over 1000 miles to a port so that Livingstone’s body could be returned to England for proper burial in Westminster Abbey. One question that immediately occurred to be when I learned of this was “What condition was the body in after being carried for that distance across Africa in May?” The weather had to have been really hot.

Livingstone’s wife, Mary, would die when she contracted malaria trying to reunite with him in Africa. Mary was the daughter of Robert Moffat who was, like Stanley, a missionary in Africa.

Stanley would enlist at first in the Confederacy’s army during the American civil war. He was taken prisoner by the Union and would then switch sides. Once in the Union army, he would desert and enlist in the Union’s navy, from which he would also desert.

March 18

Isabella Stewart Gardner was a very wealthy woman who was born on April 14, 1840. Time and her husband were both very kind to her, affording her the opportunity to amass an extraordinary collection of art. When she died in 1924, she left instructions for her vast collection to be housed in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a museum that she designed and built to house her collection. I cannot state emphatically enough how very precise her instructions were. She gave strict directions as to how the paintings and other various art objects were to be displayed in the museum. On the 18th in 1990, thieves broke into the museum and made off with paintings conservatively valued in excess of $300 million. The paintings have not been recovered, nor has the identity of the thieves been conclusively determined. As a result of the terms of Ms. Gardner’s will, the empty frames of all the paintings stolen are still on display, exactly where they were when the theft occurred. The museum has taken the extraordinary step of constructing an additional building to exhibit more of its collection without disturbing the layout mandated by Ms. Gardner for the main exhibition space.

Three Rembrandts, including the only seascape that he painted, were among the paintings stolen.

March 17

Lawrence Edward Grace Oates, who went by the nickname Titus Oates[i], was born on the 17th in 1880. He was an English member of Robert Falcon Scott’s expeditions taking a shot at reaching the South Pole in 1912. The expedition ran into a heck of a lot of problems, Oates more so then the other members of the team due to an old injury. Oates, hoping to make a sacrifice for the others in his party so that they might not be slowed down by him, stepped out of their tent during a raging storm, saying to his compatriots as he opened the tent door to leave “I am just going outside and may be some time.” It was, I suppose, a noble gesture. A gesture that would ultimately prove to be useless, as everyone else would also die, shortly after Oates left, on the ice.

[i] Titus Oates was a conspirator in attempts to kill King Charles II in the late seventeenth century. Titus is ranked first on the BBC’s the list of the 17th century’s 100 worst Britons. In the list of the worst Britons in the last 1000 years, Oates is placed in third place.

March 16

Gustav III was the king of Sweden in the latter part of the eighteenth century. On the 16th in 1792, being prone to any number of excesses Gustav hosted an extravagant Masked Ball. Apparently, not all was particularly well in paradise and a number of assassins used the occasion to enter into the king’s presence and attempt to kill him. While Gustav was gravely wounded, the injury was not immediately fatal. He would remain in power, albeit suffering from the painful infection of his wound. He would linger until March 29 on which day he said to those caring for him Jag känner mig sömning, några ögonblicks vila skulle göra mig gott. Which translates to "I feel sleepy; a few moments rest will do me good". Having said this, Gustav quietly died.