Elizabeth I

In the wake of the failure of the Spanish Armada, England sought retaliation by launching an invasion of its own. But how to finance such a venture?

Henry VIII’s granddaughter survived numerous scandals, family tragedy and seven monarchs. 

Francis Drake’s exploits in the New World made him perfect material for the English gutter press and a figurehead for rising Hispanophobia.

One of the greatest and most fascinating of English monarchs was proclaimed queen on 17 November 1558.

In 1562 the young monarch was cured of a dangerous attack of smallpox.

Historians have often depicted the final years of Elizabeth I’s reign as a period of decline or crisis. Yet her government operated more successfully than is usually thought.

The failure of the Plot, writes Cyril Hamshere, forms a complex story of espionage and counter-espionage; its events caused Elizabeth I to give up all ideas of restoring Mary Queen of Scots to the Scottish throne.

In 1567, permission for the holding of ‘a very rich Lottery General’ in England was granted by an increasingly cash-strapped Elizabeth I.

At the end of the sixteenth century, writes David N. Durant, an ostentatious but simple-minded German Duke began pestering Queen Elizabeth to grant him the noblest of all English Orders.

An elaborate hierarchy maintained the royal household of Elizabeth I, writes Alan Haynes, but there was much pilfering and graft among the purveyors of domestic goods.