31 MARCH
1519 Henry II (French: Henri II; 31 March 1519 â 10 July 1559) was King of France from 31 March 1547 until his death in 1559. The second son of Francis I, he became Dauphin of France upon the death of his elder brother Francis III, Duke of Brittany, in 1536. He persevered in the Italian Wars against the House of Habsburg and tried to suppress the Protestant Reformation, even as the Huguenot numbers were increasing drastically in France during his reign. Henry suffered an untimely death in a jousting tournament held to celebrate the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis. The king’s surgeon, Ambroise Paré, was unable to cure the infected wound inflicted by Gabriel de Montgomery, the captain of his Scottish Guard.
1635 Patrick Gordon (March 31, 1635 â November 29, 1699 ), was a Russian General originally from Scotland who served under several rulers, most importantly Peter the Great. Fleeing his native Scotland at a relatively young age due to religious oppression, Gordon found himself a home and a place in history as a soldier in the Russian service.
1813 Richard de Beaufré comte de Guyon (31 March 1813 â 12 October 1856) was a British-born Hungarian soldier, general in the Hungarian revolutionary army and Turkish pasha (Kurshid Pasha). At the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution, Guyon was among the first to offer his services to the national government as an officer of the Royal Hungarian Army, and played a prominent part in the struggle for independence during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. In 1852 Guyon entered the service of the Sultan without being required to change his faith. Under the name of Kourshid Pasha, he, as a general of division, was Governor of Damascus, and at the beginning of the Crimean war, did much to organise the army of Kars. Guyon died of cholera at Scutari in 1856.
1840 John Herbert Kelly (March 31, 1840 â September 4, 1864) was, at the time of his promotion, the youngest brigadier general in the Confederate States Army.[1] He became one of the youngest generals to die during the American Civil War, at the age of 24.[2] His death occurred during an engagement at Franklin, Tennessee on September 2, 1864 during Major General Joseph Wheeler’s raid into Tennessee in August and early September 1864 in an attempt to destroy the railroad that Union Army Major General William Tecumseh Sherman was using to supply his force from Chattanooga, Tennessee during the Atlanta Campaign
1874 BenjamÃn G.Hill (born 31 March 1874, Choix, Sinaloa, â died 14 December 1920, Mexico City) was a military commander during the Mexican Revolution.
1957 Patrick Graham Forrester (born March 31, 1957) is a retired United States Army officer, Army aviator and a NASA astronaut. At the time of his retirement from the U.S. Army, Forrester had achieved the rank of colonel. He is married and has two children. Forrester flew on three Space Shuttle missions, STS-105, STS-117 and STS-128. He also served as Chief of the Astronaut Office, having assumed the role from Chris Cassidy in June 2017. On 19 December 2020, Forrester announced he was taking a leave of absence from NASA.
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