Dudley has consolidated his power through institutional maneuvers and was by January 1550 effectively the new regent.

He becomes Lord President of the Council on February 2, 1550, with the capacity to debar councilors from the body and appoint new ones.

He excludes Southampton and other conservatives, but arranges Somerset's release and his return to the Privy Council and Privy Chamber.

Ralph Robinson, educated at Stamford School, Lincolnshire and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, had been a classmate of William Cecil, now Lord Burghley, chief adviser to Queen Elizabeth.

Graduating Bachelor of Arts in 1540, and elected fellow of his college Corpus in June 1542, he had supplicated for the degree of Master of Arts. in March 1544.

Coming to London, he had obtained the livery of the Goldsmiths' Company, and a small post as clerk in the service of his early friend, Cecil.

From a poor background, he was long hampered by the poverty of the rest of his family.

Sixteen years after the execution of Sir Thomas More, Robinson translates More’s Utopia, published in Latin in 1516.

In the first edition of Robinson’s translation, published in 1551, he dedicates the Foreword to Burghley, alluding to their school days together.

John Foxe, educated at Oxford and a fellow of Magdalen College, had been hired by Mary Fitzroy, Duchess of Richmond, as tutor to the orphan children of her brother, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, a Catholic who had been executed for treason in January 1547.

(The children are Thomas, who will become the fourth duke of Norfolk and a valuable friend of Foxe's; Jane, later Countess of Westmorland; Henry, later earl of Northampton; and Charles, who will later command the English fleet against the Spanish Armada.)

Foxe had been ordained deacon by Nicholas Ridley on June 24, 1550, and his circle of friends, associates, and supporters included John Hooper, William Turner, John Rogers, William Cecil, and most importantly John Bale, who was to become a close friend and "certainly encouraged, very probably guided, Foxe in the composition of his first martyrology.

From 1548 to 1551, Foxe had brought out one tract opposing the death penalty for adultery and another supporting ecclesiastical excommunication of those whom he thought "veiled ambition under the cloak of Protestantism."

He also worked unsuccessfully to prevent the two burnings for religion that had occurred during the reign of Edward VI.

On the accession of Mary I in July 1553, Foxe had lost his tutorship when the children's grandfather, the Duke of Norfolk, was released from prison.

Foxe walked warily, as befitted one who had published Protestant books in his own name.

As the political climate worsened, Foxe believed himself personally threatened by Bishop Stephen Gardiner.

Just ahead of officers sent to arrest him, he had sailed with his pregnant wife from Ipswich to Nieuwpoort, then traveled to Antwerp, Rotterdam, Frankfurt and Strasbourg, which he reaches by July 1554.

In Strasbourg, Foxe publishes a Latin history of the Christian persecutions, the draft of which he had brought from England and "which became the first shadowy draft of his Acts and Monuments."

Elizabeth's immediate and lasting aim is to reunite England—now at its lowest ebb since Tudor rule began in 1485—reestablish the Anglican church, fend off foreign threats, and bring her people as much peace and prosperity as possible.

On the morning of her accession, Elizabeth, herself a moderate Protestant, names as her secretary of state Sir William Cecil, who shares many of her views.

With his help, Elizabeth concludes the famous Elizabethan Settlement for the Church of England.

The Settlement excludes papal authority and reinstitutes the Book of Common Prayer, an English-language liturgy, but does not recognize the demands of the more extreme Puritans, who wish to purify their national church by eliminating every shred of Catholic influence.

John Dee, the alchemist, astrologer, and mathematician, is asked to name a propitious day for Elizabeth's official coronation.

Francis Walsingham returns from the Continent and immediately secures a prominent position among Elizabeth’s advisors, as well as a seat in Parliament.

Elizabeth names as master of the horse her court favorite, Robert Dudley, pardoned for his involvement in his father's plan to secure the succession to the throne of Lady Jane Grey in 1553.

The Queen’s financial agent, Sir Thomas Gresham, educated at the University of Cambridge and later trained as a lawyer, had in 1558 advised Elizabeth to re-coin the currency following her father's debasement of it with inferior metal.

Thus, his name would later be associated with the monetary principle, hence known as Gresham's law, which may be summarized by the aphorism that “bad money drives out good.” More exactly, if coins containing metal of different value have the same value as legal tender, the coins composed of the cheaper metal will be used for payment, while those made of more expensive metal will be hoarded or exported and thus tend to disappear from circulation.

(Gresham is not the first to recognize this monetary principle, but his elucidation of it prompted the economist H.D.

Macleod to suggest the term Gresham's law in the nineteenth century.)

Thus, England replaces its old silver coins with a new coinage system in 1560.

Already in April 1559 court observers had noted that Elizabeth never let Dudley from her side; but her favor did not extend to his wife.

Lady Amy Dudley, neé Robsart, has lived in different parts of the country since her ancestral manor house is uninhabitable.

Her husband had visited her for four days at Easter 1559 and she spent a month around London in the early summer of the same year.

They were never to see each other again; Dudley is with the Queen at Windsor Castle and possibly planning a visit to her, when his wife is found dead at her residence Cumnor Place near Oxford on September 8, 1560.

Retiring to his house at Kew, away from court as from the putative crime scene, he presses for an impartial inquiry, which had already begun in the form of an inquest.

The jury finds that it was an accident: Lady Dudley, staying alone "in a certain chamber", had fallen down the adjoining stairs, sustaining two head injuries and breaking her neck.

It is widely suspected that Dudley had arranged his wife's death to be able to marry the Queen.

The scandal plays into the hands of nobles and politicians who desperately try to prevent Elizabeth from marrying him.

Some of these, like William Cecil and Nicholas Throckmorton, make use of it, but do not themselves believe Dudley to be involved in the tragedy, which will affect the rest of his life.

Most historians have considered murder to be unlikely.

The coroner's report will come to light in The National Archives in the late 2000s and is compatible with a fall as well as other violence.

In the absence of the forensic findings of 1560, it was often assumed that a simple accident could not be the explanation —on the basis of near-contemporary tales that Amy Dudley was found at the bottom of a short flight of stairs with a broken neck, her headdress still standing undisturbed "upon her head", a detail that will first appear as a satirical remark in the libel Leicester's Commonwealth of 1584 and will ever since been repeated for a fact.

To account for such oddities and evidence that she was ill, Ian Aird, a professor of medicine, will suggest in 1956 that Amy Dudley might have suffered from breast cancer, which through metastatic cancerous deposits in the spine, could have caused her neck to break under only limited strain, such as a short fall or even just coming down the stairs.

This explanation has been widely accepted.

Suicide has also often been considered an option, motives being Amy Dudley's depression or mortal illness.

Sidney has been absent from Ireland for ten months.

On his return, he urges upon Cecil the necessity for measures to improve the economic condition of Ireland, to open up the country by the construction of roads and bridges, to replace the Ulster tribal institutions by a system of freehold land tenure, and to repress the ceaseless disorder prevalent in every part of the island.

Edmund Campion, who had held a fellowship at St. John's College, Oxford, had in 1566 welcomed Queen Elizabeth to the university, and won her lasting regard when was chosen among the scholars to lead a public debate in front of the queen.

By the time Elizabeth had left Oxford, Campion had earned the patronage of the powerful William Cecil and also the Earl of Leicester, tipped by some to be future husband of the young Queen.

People were now talking of Campion in terms of being a future Archbishop of Canterbury, in the newly established Anglican Church.

Religious difficulties had then aroisen; but at the persuasion of Richard Cheyney, Bishop of Gloucester, although holding Catholic doctrines, Campion had received deacon's orders in the Anglican Church.

Inwardly "he took a remorse of conscience and detestation of mind."

Rumors of his opinions began to spread and, giving up the office of proctor, he leaves Oxford in 1569 and ...

...goes to Ireland to take part in a proposed establishment of the University of Dublin.

Campion is appointed tutor to Richard Stanihurst, son of the Speaker of the Irish parliament, and attends the first session of the House of Commons, which includes the prorogation.

He lives as part of the Stanihurst household in Dublin and has conversation with the Speaker daily at table.

He is also under the protection of Lord Deputy Sidney.

Sidney oversees the opening in 1569 of the Irish parliament, the first to be held for ten years.

In pursuance of this policy Sidney proposes the appointment of a military governor ("Lord President") in the provinces of Munster and Connaught.

Gilbert, who had gone on to write an account of strange and turbulent visions he had witnessed early in 1567, in which he had received the homage of Solomon and Job, with their promise to grant him access to secret mystical knowledge, also has returned to Ireland and is appointed to the profitless office of governor of Ulster, serving as a member of the Irish parliament.

At about this time he petitions the queen's principal secretary, Lord Burghley, for a recall to England—"for the recovery of my eyes"—but his ambitions still rest in Ireland, and particularly in the province of Munster.

Gilbert in April 1569 proposes the establishment of a presidency and council for the province of Ulster, and pursues the notion of an extensive settlement around Baltimore (in modern County Cork), which is approved by the Dublin council.

At the same time, he is involved with Sidney and the secretary of state, Sir Thomas Smith, in planning a large settlement of the northern province of Ulster by Devonshire gentlemen.

English Roman Catholics and various foreign agents develop another anti-Elizabeth conspiracy.

As with the Northern Rebellion of 1569, the conspirators focus their hopes on the deposed Mary.

Their leader is Roberto di Ridolfi, who, posing as an international banker, is able to travel between Brussels, Rome and Madrid without attracting too much suspicion.

Ridolfi has discussed his plans with the Duke of Alba in the Netherlands.

The plan is to foment another rebellion of the northern English nobility, many of whom are believed to still be Catholic, and wed Mary to Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, the leading Catholic nobleman, whom Elizabeth had pardoned for his role in the previous rising.

Spanish ships carrying large sums of money destined for their armies in the Netherlands cause a worsening of relations between England and Spain.

The Spanish crown, encouraged by petitions from English Catholics for deliverance, goes along with the plan, but Spanish involvement is never guaranteed.

Alba is unenthusiastic about an invasion along with the French, fearing that if the plot should be successful, it might lead to Mary occupying the throne of England and wedded the island nation her beloved France, which would not be in the Spanish interest.

The plot comes to light when Charles Baillie, a Scot favorable to the Marian party, is arrested at Dover carrying compromising letters, and reveals its existence under torture.

Elizabeth’s principal secretary Sir William Cecil assigns his protégé Francis Walsingham—who, having cultivated languages and contacts among the leading Protestant statesmen on the continent, has become active in soliciting support for the Huguenots in France—to unravel the Ridolfi plot, his first government role.

John Hawkins, pretending to be part of the plot, offers his services to the Spanish, in order to obtain the release of prisoners and to discover plans for the proposed Spanish invasion of England.