On February 19, 1797, the citizens of Fishguard, Wales, had the dubious honor of experiencing the last invasion of Britain by a foreign force—and what a magnificently botched affair it was.

The French Directory, clearly scraping the bottom of the barrel for military brilliance, dispatched 1,400 troops under the command of Irish-American Colonel William Tate aboard four warships. Their mission was to land in Britain, stir up a revolution, and generally cause mayhem. The plan was already dubious; the execution was farcical.

Rather than professional soldiers, Tate's force consisted largely of convicts and ne'er-do-wells who'd been offered freedom in exchange for military service—about as reliable as one might expect. After missing their intended landing site at Bristol, they ended up at Carreg Wastad Point near Fishguard on February 22nd.

The invasion immediately went sideways. Instead of conquering territory, the French troops discovered a Portuguese ship wrecked nearby, its cargo of wine conveniently washed ashore. They proceeded to get spectacularly drunk. Meanwhile, local Welsh women, dressed in traditional red cloaks and tall black hats, were reportedly mistaken by the addled French for British redcoats from a distance.

Within two days, facing local militia and a spirited civilian resistance (including the legendary Jemima Nicholas, a cobbler who single-handedly captured twelve French soldiers with a pitchfork), Tate surrendered unconditionally. The invasion force never made it beyond the beach, and France's grand military adventure ended with hungover troops signing their capitulation at the Royal Oak Inn.

Britain remains uninvaded to this day.

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On February 18, 1478, George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence, was executed in the Tower of London, allegedly by drowning in a butt of Malmsey wine—which, if true, makes it perhaps history's most baroque method of capital punishment.

George was the middle brother sandwiched between two kings: Edward IV and the future Richard III. Being a royal spare in the Wars of the Roses was rather like playing musical chairs with swords, and George proved spectacularly bad at the game. He'd already switched sides multiple times, first betraying Edward to join the Kingmaker Warwick, then betraying Warwick to rejoin Edward, all while nursing grievances that would make a modern family therapist weep.

His final downfall came after he publicly accused his brother the king of being a bastard (never a career-enhancing move) and conducted his own private trial that resulted in the execution of an innocent woman he blamed for his wife's death. Edward IV, understandably fed up with his brother's treasonous tantrums, had him attainted by Parliament.

Now, the wine-barrel drowning story comes from contemporary chroniclers and was later immortalized by Shakespeare, though historians remain divided on whether it actually happened or was merely period propaganda. The truth is we don't know exactly how George died—the execution was conducted privately, as befitting his royal blood. But the wine story stuck because it was simply too delicious not to: a nobleman literally drowning in his favorite vintage, a death as excessive and self-indulgent as his life.

The barrel in question, a "butt," held 126 gallons. One hopes, for George's sake, that the story is apocryphal.

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On February 17, 1600, the philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome's Campo de' Fiori after the Inquisition found him guilty of heresy. What makes Bruno's case particularly remarkable isn't just the gruesome execution itself—plenty of unfortunates met that fate during the Counter-Reformation—but rather what he refused to recant and the sheer stubbornness with which he went to his death.

Bruno had proposed that the universe was infinite and contained countless worlds, that stars were distant suns with their own planets, and that some of these planets might harbor life. He suggested the Earth moved around the Sun (following Copernicus) and rejected the notion that humans occupied any special position in the cosmos. When given multiple opportunities over his eight-year imprisonment to recant these views, Bruno reportedly told his inquisitors, "Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it."

The Church gagged him before his execution, though accounts differ on whether this was to prevent him from screaming or from sharing more heretical ideas with the crowd. One witness noted that Bruno pushed away the crucifix offered to him at the stake, facing his immolation with the same defiance he'd maintained throughout his trial.

The delicious irony? Bruno's cosmological speculations, considered dangerously heretical fantasy in 1600, turned out to be essentially correct. Today, a statue of him stands in the very square where he was executed, erected in 1889 over fierce Vatican objections—staring, one imagines with some satisfaction, at the headquarters of his executioners.

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On February 16, 1568, the Spanish Inquisition sentenced the entire population of the Netherlands to death for heresy.

Yes, you read that correctly. Every single man, woman, and child—roughly three million people—were condemned en masse by the Council of Troubles, a tribunal established by the Duke of Alba on behalf of King Philip II of Spain.

The Council, which the Dutch cheerfully nicknamed the "Council of Blood," had been set up to suppress Protestant dissent in the Spanish-controlled Low Countries. But clearly someone on the council woke up that morning and thought, "You know what? Subtlety is overrated. Let's just condemn everyone and sort it out later."

The death sentence specifically exempted "a few persons" who might be named individually—how generous—but the default position was that all inhabitants were guilty of heresy, treason, or both. This was bureaucratic overreach elevated to an art form, the administrative equivalent of burning down your house to deal with a spider.

Naturally, the Spanish crown lacked both the resources and the stomach to actually execute three million people. The sentence was more of a legal fiction designed to strike terror into the populace and provide cover for selective prosecutions. In practice, the Council executed around 1,000 to 2,000 people and confiscated vast amounts of property from the condemned.

The strategy backfired spectacularly. Rather than cowing the Dutch into submission, this cartoonish overreach helped unite the provinces in rebellion, ultimately leading to the Eighty Years' War and the independence of the Dutch Republic. Nothing quite galvanizes resistance like being told you're all scheduled for execution.

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On February 15, 1933, Giuseppe Zangara, a 32-year-old Italian immigrant and unemployed bricklayer, opened fire on President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in Miami's Bayfront Park. The remarkable part? He missed Roosevelt entirely but managed to hit five other people, including Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, who would die from his wounds nineteen days later.

What makes this assassination attempt particularly bizarre is that Zangara had to stand on a wobbly folding chair to see over the crowd—he was only five feet tall. The moment he started firing, a woman named Lillian Cross grabbed his arm, throwing off his aim. Had she been a foot shorter or possessed less presence of mind, American history might have taken a dramatically different turn.

Zangara's motive was equally peculiar. He claimed to hate all presidents and capitalists because he suffered from chronic stomach pain, which he blamed on the rich and powerful. His last words before being executed in Florida's electric chair just 33 days after the shooting were reportedly: "Pusha da button!" urging his executioners to get on with it. He also complained that there were no photographers present to capture his final moment—vanity apparently transcending his chronic gastritis.

The incident spawned conspiracy theories that Cermak, not Roosevelt, was the actual target due to his battles with Chicago's organized crime. However, most historians dismiss this, noting that hiring a mentally unstable man with terrible aim who needed furniture assistance hardly represents the pinnacle of mob strategy.

Roosevelt, displaying the sangfroid that would define his presidency, calmly cradled the dying mayor in his car on the way to the hospital.

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On February 14, 1929—that most romantic of days—Chicago witnessed what would become known as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, proving once and for all that Al Capone had a rather different interpretation of "Be My Valentine" than the rest of society.

Seven members of Chicago's North Side Gang were lined up against a warehouse wall at 2122 North Clark Street and systematically gunned down by four men, two of whom were dressed as police officers. The victims, who had been lured there under the pretense of receiving a shipment of hijacked whiskey, likely experienced a brief moment of relief when they saw what appeared to be Chicago's finest arriving—right before realizing their catastrophic error in judgment.

The hit was orchestrated (though never proven in court) by Capone, who was conveniently vacationing in Florida at the time, establishing what would become the gold standard for mob boss alibis. The massacre was designed to eliminate George "Bugs" Moran, leader of the North Side Gang and Capone's chief rival in the bootlegging business. Moran, however, arrived late that morning—a punctuality failure that saved his life and made him perhaps the only person in history genuinely grateful for running behind schedule.

The sheer audacity and brutality of the event shocked even Prohibition-era Chicago, a city not exactly known for its squeamishness about gang violence. The massacre marked the beginning of the end for Capone's reign; public outrage finally forced authorities to pursue him with genuine vigor, eventually nailing him on—of all things—tax evasion in 1931.

The warehouse was demolished in 1967, but the bullet-riddled wall became a macabre collector's item, with bricks selling to murder memorabilia enthusiasts. Romance, apparently, is in the eye of the beholder.

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On February 13, 1692, the infamous Glencoe Massacre unfolded in the Scottish Highlands with a betrayal so spectacular it makes Game of Thrones look like amateur hour.

Captain Robert Campbell of Glenlyon arrived in the glen with 120 government soldiers, claiming they needed lodging because the fort at nearby Inverlochy was full. The MacDonald clan, bound by the sacred Highland tradition of hospitality, welcomed them warmly. For twelve days, Campbell's men ate MacDonald food, drank MacDonald whisky, played cards with MacDonald men, and sang songs with MacDonald women. Campbell himself enjoyed regular dinners with the clan chief, Alexander MacDonald.

Then, at five o'clock on this frigid morning, Campbell received his orders: kill every MacDonald under seventy years of age. The soldiers rose from their beds—beds provided by their hosts—and set about murdering the people who had sheltered them.

Thirty-eight MacDonalds were slaughtered in their homes or as they fled into the snow. Dozens more died of exposure in the February blizzards after their houses were burned. The death toll would have been far worse had some of Campbell's men not "accidentally" fired their muskets prematurely, alerting many clansmen to escape into the mountains.

The massacre's real target wasn't just the MacDonalds—it was designed to terrorize all Highland clans into submission. The MacDonalds' actual crime? Their chief had been six days late submitting his oath of allegiance to King William III, mostly because a government official deliberately obstructed him.

The massacre became Scotland's most enduring symbol of governmental treachery, not because of the body count—sadly, worse slaughters occurred—but because of the violation of hospitality, a transgression that appalled even hardened 17th-century sensibilities.

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On February 12, 1554, Lady Jane Grey—England's "Nine Days' Queen"—lost her head in the most literal sense possible at the Tower of London, bringing to an ignominious end one of history's most reluctant reigns.

Poor Jane never wanted to be queen. At sixteen, she was a brilliant scholar who preferred studying Greek to scheming for power. But her ambitious in-laws, the Duke of Northumberland chief among them, had other plans. When the teenage King Edward VI lay dying, Northumberland convinced him to bypass his half-sisters Mary and Elizabeth in favor of Jane, who had the misfortune of being both Protestant and marriageable to Northumberland's son.

Jane's reign lasted from July 10 to July 19, 1553—nine days that must have felt like nine years. The English people, it turned out, rather preferred legitimate heirs to puppet queens, and rallied behind Mary Tudor despite her Catholicism. Jane was arrested and initially spared, with Mary showing some mercy to her unfortunate cousin.

But then Jane's father, the spectacularly stupid Duke of Suffolk, joined Wyatt's Rebellion against Mary's planned marriage to Philip of Spain. Even though Jane was still imprisoned and had nothing to do with it, her continued existence became too dangerous for Mary to tolerate.

On that frigid February morning, Jane was led to the scaffold on Tower Green. In a final moment of dark comedy, the executioner asked her forgiveness—as was custom—and she granted it, adding that she hoped he'd do the job quickly. After a brief prayer, she was blindfolded but couldn't find the block, groping about pathetically while crying "What shall I do? Where is it?" Someone guided her hands to it.

The axe fell cleanly. Nine days as queen, seven months in prison, and a legacy as perhaps the most unwilling monarch in English history.

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On February 11, 1978, Chinese Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping donned a ten-gallon cowboy hat at a Texas rodeo, creating one of the Cold War's most delightfully incongruous photo opportunities.

Fresh off normalizing diplomatic relations with the United States, the diminutive revolutionary leader—who had survived two political purges, the Long March, and Mao's Cultural Revolution—found himself in Simonton, Texas, watching professional bronco riding. When local officials presented him with the oversized Stetson, Deng, ever the pragmatist who understood symbolism, popped it right on his head and waved to the cheering crowd.

The image was perfect political theater: here was a lifelong Communist, architect of China's coming economic transformation, dressed like a extra from a John Wayne film. American newspapers ate it up. For a country still processing the trauma of Vietnam and watching the Soviet Union with deep suspicion, seeing a Chinese leader embrace Americana—even if just a hat—suggested that perhaps this particular Communist was different.

And he was calculating every moment of it. Deng's nine-day American tour wasn't about rodeos and photo ops—it was about sending an unmistakable message to Moscow that China had options. The hat was merely the spoonful of sugar helping Americans swallow a radical geopolitical realignment.

The cowboy hat moment worked because it was genuinely odd: this 4'11" revolutionary who'd helped overthrow an empire, grinning beneath an absurd hat at a Texas rodeo, represented a pivot point in twentieth-century history dressed up as folksy fun. Within a decade, his economic reforms would unleash the forces that transformed China into an economic superpower.

Not bad for a day's work in a silly hat.

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On February 10, 1355, a brawl that began over bad wine at an Oxford tavern escalated into what historians now call the St. Scholastica Day riot—a two-day pitched battle between town and gown that left 63 students and 30 townsfolk dead.

The trouble started at the Swaindlestock Tavern when two Oxford students, Walter Spryngeheuse and Roger de Chesterfield, complained that tavern-keeper John Croydona had served them wine that was, in their learned opinion, absolutely dreadful. Words were exchanged. The students threw the wine in the tavern-keeper's face, then escalated matters by hurling the cup at his head for good measure.

The mayor rang the town bell. The university authorities rang their bell in response. What followed was essentially a medieval gang war, with armed townspeople and students battling through Oxford's streets. On the second day, approximately 2,000 countrymen from surrounding villages—already nursing long-standing grievances about students' exemption from local laws and their general haughtiness—stormed into Oxford and went on what can only be described as a rampage, attacking any student they could find.

The aftermath was remarkably lopsided: King Edward III sided decisively with the university. The town was forced to pay annual penance for the next 470 years, with the mayor and bailiffs required to attend a Mass for the dead scholars every St. Scholastica's Day and pay the university one penny for each murdered student. This humiliating ritual continued until 1825, when civic pride finally won a reprieve.

All because someone complained about bad wine.

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