Kingdom of England down. By 1588, her new navy was strong enough to defeat the Spanish Armada, which had sought to invade England to put a Catholic monarch on the throne in her place. The House of Tudor ended with the death of Elizabeth I on 24 March 1603. James I ascended the throne of England and brought it into personal union with the Kingdom of Scotland. Despite the Union of the Crowns, the kingdoms remained separate and independent states: a state of affairs which lasted for more than a century. The Stuart kings overestimated the power of the English monarchy, and were
Angevin kings of England the Cathedral", an exploration of Becket's death and Eliot's religious interpretation of it. During the Tudor period, popular representations of John emerged. He appeared as a "proto-Protestant martyr" in the anonymous play "The Troublesome Reign of King John" and John Bale's morality play "Kynge Johan", in which John attempts to save England from the "evil agents of the Roman Church". Shakespeare's anti-Catholic "King John" draws on "The Troublesome Reign", offering a "balanced, dual view of a complex monarch as both a proto-Protestant victim of Rome's machinations and as a weak, selfishly motivated ruler". Anthony Munday's plays "The Downfall and The