Daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth was the third of Henry's children to come to the throne. In the political and religious upheaval of the times she found herself a Protestant Queen taking the throne from a Catholic Queen. She also found herself having to maintain an uneasy peace with the most powerful nation on earth at the time, Spain. Political intrigue led to her having her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, executed after the latter had been found to be plotting with Philip of Spain. The discoveries in the New World had led to English Privateers attacking Spanish treasure ships and this was all the pretext the Catholic Philip required to invade. In 1588 Elizabeth, 'Good Queen Bess' or the 'Virgin Queen', had her finest hour. The Spanish Armada was defeated and England was safe. Her 45 year-long reign is perhaps one of the most romanticised of all the early reigns with such memorable names and events as Shakespeare's plays, Drake's circumnavigation of the world and Raleigh's colonisation of Virginia and introduction of the potato and tobacco to England known to this day. Elizabeth died of natural causes, at the age of 69, unmarried yet mourned by a nation. She had survived several assassination attempts, countless plots and any number of diseases that were rife at that time.