Roberto di Ridolfi, a Florentine banker, coordinates a scheme to win the English throne for Mary Queen of Scots

John Dee brings back from Lorraine a cartload of special instruments for alchemy, to be installed in his laboratory at Mortlake

English sailor and slave-trader John Hawkins turns the top-heavy carrack into the more seaworthy galleon

James Burbage builds London's first theatre and calls it the Theatre

Francis Drake sails from Plymouth, heading west for the Pacific and the East Indies

Queen Elizabeth buys the lease of Barn Elms for her spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham

The first Jesuit missionaries arrive in England, with Edmund Campion among their number

Francis Drake returns to England after his three-year voyage round the world and is knighted by Queen Elizabeth on board his Golden Hind

The 18-year-old William Shakespeare marries Anne Hathaway in Stratford-upon-Avon

Humphrey Gilbert claims Newfoundland on behalf of England's queen Elizabeth

John Dee sets off for six years of travel in Europe, during which his laboratory and library in Mortlake is plundered by former associates and rivals

England's queen Elizabeth sends 6000 troops to support the Dutch rebels against Spain

Catholics are now the martyrs in England, their numbers almost matching the Protestant martyrs of the previous reign

Anthony Babington is involved in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth and place Mary Queen of Scots on the English throne

Mary Queen of Scots, implicated in the Babington plot, is beheaded in Fotheringay castle

Marlowe's first play, Tamburlaine the Great, introduces the swaggering blank verse of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama

A new group of English settlers arrives at Roanoke Island and makes a second attempt at a settlement

Virginia Dare becomes the first English child to be born in America, on Roanoke Island

Francis Drake sails into a crowded Cadiz harbour and destroys some thirty Spanish ships

The more nimble English fleet destroys the galleons of the Spanish Armada, introducing a new kind of naval warfare

The tactics used against the Armada reveal that the sailing ships themselves have become fighting machines, as men-of-war

An English clergyman, William Lee, develops the world's first industrial machinery, to knit stockings

Queen Elizabeth I instals in Richmond Palace a flushing water closet (or toilet) recently invented by Sir John Harington

English poet Edmund Spenser celebrates the Protestant Elizabeth I as The Faerie Queene

Queen Elizabeth I grants Jane Lovell, widow of John, the ongoing rights to his offices in Richmond Palace