Robert Cecil, brilliant but frail and hunchbacked, enters the House of Commons in 1584 after several years abroad, while his father, William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, serves as chief minister to Elizabeth.

In an age that attaches much importance to physical beauty in both sexes, Robert will endure much ridicule as a result: Queen Elizabeth will call him "my pygmy", and King James I will nick-name him "my little beagle".

Nonetheless his father recognizes that it is Robert rather than Thomas who had inherited his own political genius.

While Burghley is fond of both his sons, he is said to have remarked that Robert could rule England, but Thomas could hardly rule a tennis court.

Cecil attended St John's College, Cambridge in the 1580s, but did not take a degree.
He also attended "disputations" at the Sorbonne

Lawyer Francis Bacon is elected to Parliament in this year.

George Carew, the son of George Carew, dean of Windsor, had in 1574 gone to Ireland as a soldier and distinguished himself in 1577 in defending Leighlin Castle, County Carlow, from the Irish rebels.

Well liked by Elizabeth and the powerful Cecil family, he is in 1586 knighted and made master of the ordnance in Ireland.

Phillip II, the Habsburg King of Spain, sends a great Armada in 1588 to crush the English rebellion against Papal Authority, but the mission fails to conquer Englands: the English secure the Church of England with their defeat of the Spanish Armada in the Battle of Gravelines.

Francis Walsingham’s network of spies in the European capitals provides him with advance knowledge of the impending attack of the Spanish Armada.

The English victory marks the beginning of British naval superiority.

Spain continues her two-front war with England and the United Provinces.

Elizabeth I, Queen of England from 1558 to 1603, apparently inherited her red tresses from her father, Henry VII, as her mother, Anne Boleyn, seems to have been a brunette.

Also called The Virgin Queen, or Good Queen Bess, she reigns during the period, often (and justly) called the Elizabethan Age, when the small island kingdom asserts itself vigorously as a major European power in politics, commerce, and the arts.

Known for ordering the execution of her royal cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, as well as a few former favorites like Sir Walter Raleigh and the rebellious Earl of Essex, Elizabeth never marries.

Shrewd, courageous, and a master of self-display, she transforms herself into a powerful and enduring image of female authority, regal magnificence, and national pride.

Given her seventy-year life span, she has undoubtedly enhanced her natural color with dye in her later years, but that has long been the prerogative of any natural redhead.

The period after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 brings new difficulties for Elizabeth that are to last the fifteen years until the end of her reign.

The conflicts with Spain and in Ireland drag on, the tax burden grows heavier, and the economy is hit by poor harvests and the cost of war.

Prices rise and the standard of living falls.

During this time, repression of Catholics intensifies, and Elizabeth in 1591 authorizes commissions to interrogate and monitor Catholic householders.

To maintain the illusion of peace and prosperity, she increasingly relies on internal spies and propaganda.

Mounting criticism in her last years reflects a decline in the public's affection for her.

One of the causes for this "second reign" of Elizabeth, as it is now frequently called, is the different character in the 1590s of Elizabeth's governing body, the privy council.

A new generation is in power.

With the exception of Lord Burghley, the most important politicians had died around 1590: The Earl of Leicester in 1588, Sir Francis Walsingham in 1590, Sir Christopher Hatton in 1591.

Factional strife in the government, which had not existed in a noteworthy form before the 1590s, now becomes its hallmark.

A bitter rivalry between the Earl of Essex and Robert Cecil, son of Lord Burghley, and their respective adherents, for the most powerful positions in the state marred politics.

The queen's personal authority is lessening, as is shown in the affair of Dr. Lopez, her trusted physician.

When he is wrongly accused by the Earl of Essex of treason out of personal pique, she cannot prevent his execution, although she had been angry about his arrest and seems not to have believed in his guilt.

This same period of economic and political uncertainty, however, produces an unsurpassed literary flowering in England.

The first signs of a new literary movement had appeared at the end of the second decade of Elizabeth's reign, with John Lyly's Euphues and Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender in 1578.

Some of the great names of English literature enter their maturity during the 1590s, including William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe.

The English theater during this period and into the Jacobean era that is to follow reaches its highest peaks.

The notion of a great Elizabethan age depends largely on the builders, dramatists, poets, and musicians who were active during Elizabeth's reign.

They owe little directly to the queen, who was never a major patron of the arts.

Elizabeth, deeply affected by the death of the Earl of Leicester, had locked herself in her apartment for a few days until Lord Burghley had the door broken.

Her nickname for Dudley was "Eyes", symbolized by the sign of ôô in their letters to each other.

Elizabeth keeps the letter he had sent her six days before his death in her bedside treasure box, endorsing it with "his last letter" on the outside.

It will still be there when she dies fifteen years later.

In the Armada Portrait, the name of any of three surviving versions of an allegorical panel painting depicting the Tudor queen surrounded by symbols of imperial majesty against a backdrop representing the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, she possibly wears the necklace of six hundred pearls the Earl had bequeathed to her in his will.

The version at Woburn Abbey, the seat of the Dukes of Bedford, was until the second decade of the twenty-first century generally accepted as the work of George Gower, a fashionable court portraitist who in 1581 had been appointed Serjeant Painter.

The version in the National Portrait Gallery, London, which has been cut down at both sides leaving just a portrait of the queen, was also attributed to Gower.

The earl’s handsome and dashing young stepson Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, had first come to court in 1584, and by 1587 had become a favorite of the Queen, who relishes his lively mind and eloquence, as well as his skills as a showman and in courtly love.

He had replaced the Leicester in June 1587 as Master of the Horse.

He had underestimated the Queen, however, and his later behavior towards her lacks due respect and shows disdain for the influence of her principal secretary, Sir Robert Cecil.

On one occasion during a heated Privy Council debate on the problems in Ireland, the Queen reportedly cuffed an insolent Essex round the ear, prompting him to draw his sword on her.

After Leicester's death in 1588, the Queen transfers to Essex the royal monopoly on sweet wines, which the late Earl had held; by this Essex can profit from collecting taxes.

William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, has strengthened his hold over Elizabeth I in his two decades as Lord high Treasurer; in 1592, he collapses (possibly from a stroke or heart attack).

Robert, his only surviving son by his second wife, is well prepared to step into his father’s shoes as the Queen's principal adviser.

Euphuism, an elegant Elizabethan literary style marked by excessive use of balance, antithesis, and alliteration and by frequent use of similes drawn from mythology and nature, is derived from the name of a character in the prose romances Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and his England (1580) by the English author John Lyly.

The style, although it will soon fall out of fashion, plays an important role in the development of English prose.

It appears at a time of experimentation with prose styles, and it offers prose that is lighter and more fanciful than previous writing.

The influence of euphuism can be seen in the works of such writers as Robert Greene and William Shakespeare, both of whom will imitate the style in some works and parody it in others.

Lyly has after 1580 devoted himself almost entirely to writing comedies.

He had in 1583 gained control of the first Blackfriars Theatre, in which his earliest plays, Campaspe and Sapho and Phao, had been produced.

All of Lyly's comedies except The Woman in the Moon are presented by the Children of Paul's, a children's company that receives the periodic favor of Queen Elizabeth.

The performance dates of his plays are as follows: Campaspe and Sapho and Phao, 1583–84; Gallathea, 1585–88; Endimion, 1588; Midas, 1590; Love's Metamorphosis, 1590; Mother Bombie, 1590; and The Woman in the Moon, 1595.

All but one of these are in prose.

The finest is considered to be Endimion, which some critics hold a masterpiece despite its preciosity.

Lyly's comedies mark an enormous advance upon those of his predecessors in English drama.

Their plots are drawn from classical mythology and legend, and their characters engage in euphuistic speeches redolent of Renaissance pedantry; but the charm and wit of the dialogues and the light and skillful construction of the plots set standards that younger and more gifted dramatists cannot ignore.

Lyly's popularity had waned with the rise of Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare, and his appeals to Elizabeth for financial relief go unheeded.

Shakespeare's Richard II is acted on December 9, 1595, at a private performance at the Canon Row house of Sir Edward Hoby; Sir Robert Cecil attends.

Robert Cecil officially assumes the post of secretary of state in 1596, the fourth of a five-year run of poor harvests, largely caused by the weather, a pattern typical of the last third of the century.

Famine obtains throughout Europe; there are food riots in Britain.

Elizabeth, in reaction to the food crisis, decrees that all Africans should be removed from the British realm.

Essex has enjoyed immense popularity in England during the 1590s, especially in Puritan London, where he is considered a pillar of Protestantism.

The hero of England’s recent expedition against Cadiz, he has championed maritime attacks on Spain and strong measures in Ireland to counter the rebel Hugh O'Neill, 3rd Earl of Tyrone, making himself leader of the war party at the height of the Anglo-Spanish war).

The Queen's principal secretary, Lord Burghley (father of Sir Robert Cecil), is however strongly opposed to him, favoring peace with Spain and a steady hand in Ireland.

Burghley in April 1598 confronts Essex in the council chamber or the last time.

Essex denounces peace with Spain as dishonorable, but Burghley interrupts him, saying that, "he breathed forth nothing but war, slaughter and blood", and then points to the twenty third verse of Psalm 55 in his prayerbook: "Bloodthirsty and deceitful men shall not live out half their days."

The Queen, during a debate at the royal council board over the appointment of the new military commander for Ireland, had lost her temper and given Essex a box on the ear, and he in response had laid his hand on the hilt of his sword.

Burghley had died soon after this infamous incident, and ten days later the Crown forces in Ireland had been heavily defeated at the Battle of the Yellow Ford.

To complicate matters, King Philip II of Spain had died some days after.

Essex and the younger Cecil have each tried to diminish the other's influence at court by proposing the appointment (and therefore removal from court) of members of the opposing party.

The list of candidates had been exhausted upon the death in Dublin of Sir Richard Bingham, and when his name is put forward by the Cecil party Essex feels bound to offer his services.

The Queen, with some hesitation, accepts the offer and formally opts for Essex as her lord lieutenant of Ireland, whereupon he triumphantly announces his determination to beat O'Neill in the field.

Robert Cecil, son of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, and half-brother of Thomas Cecil, 1st Earl of Exeter, had graduated St. John's College, Cambridge, and been made Secretary of State following the death of Sir Francis Walsingham in 1590; he had become the leading minister after the death of his father in 1598.

One task he has addressed is to prepare the way for a smooth succession.

Since Elizabeth will never name her successor, Cecil has been obliged to proceed in secret.

He has therefore entered into a coded negotiation with James VI of Scotland, who has a strong but unrecognized claim.

Cecil has coached the impatient James to humor Elizabeth and "secure the heart of the highest, to whose sex and quality nothing is so improper as either needless expostulations or over much curiosity in her own actions".

The advice works.

James's tone delights Elizabeth, who responds: "So trust I that you will not doubt but that your last letters are so acceptably taken as my thanks cannot be lacking for the same, but yield them to you in grateful sort".