• Spain's Queen Isabella II, advised by Prime Minister Narváez and five ministers, abolished trial by jury for press offences, replacing it with a special six-judge tribunal requiring four votes of six for conviction.
• France's Chamber of Peers held 92 sittings in a single session, passed 60 bills, and admitted 36 new peers — among them the novelist Victor Hugo, elevated by ordinance of 13 April 1845.
• Auckland, New Zealand, is described as overrun by over a thousand convict vagabonds from Botany Bay since the Māori victory at Kororareka, with streets chaotic day and night and all outlying mines and shipyards abandoned.

Music

• Prussia's King Friedrich Wilhelm IV personally invited Meyerbeer to direct festivals in Queen Victoria's honour, with Mendelssohn already in Koblenz rehearsing choruses and Pauline Viardot, Liszt, and Vieuxtemps engaged as performers.
• Beethoven's autograph manuscripts of the Missa Solemnis and the Ninth Symphony, chemically treated for preservation, were sealed inside the pedestal of his new statue in Bonn before members of the monument committee and four town councillors.

• London's Her Majesty's Theatre staged an unprecedented quadruple ballet pas danced simultaneously by Taglioni, Lucile Grahn, Cerrito, and Carlotta Grisi, prompting ten minutes of uninterrupted applause and a shower of bouquets from the boxes.

• A Paris bill-sticker nicknamed 'the Napoleon of Bill-Sticking' was acquitted after painting over advertising columns, because the court ruled the columns were not monuments of public utility under Article 257 of the Penal Code.

• Reviewer of Le Plutarque français and Galerie des Contemporains illustres notes that the French biographical pantheon includes Agnès Sorel and Madame de La Vallière while omitting Diderot, d'Alembert, Turgot, Carnot, and Hoche entirely.