Following Mary, Queen of Scots' flight to England (1568) and imprisonment, Elizabeth became a target of successive conspiracies hatched by English Catholics. After the Babington plot was discovered (1586), she was reluctantly persuaded to approve Mary's execution (1587). In response to papal excommunication and Jesuit missions, she approved anti-Catholic legislation, while trying to control the Puritan wing of the Anglican Church. When Philip of Spain attempted an invasion of England, sending his ‘invincible armada’ (1588), her fleet under Howard of Effingham managed to repel the attack, and the weather completed its destruction. Elizabeth had a number of favourites, but she never married, and died childless. Of all her relationships, only that with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, touched her deeply. A strong-willed, astute, yet capricious woman who faced growing parliamentary turbulence, she was nevertheless popular with her subjects. Her reign was crowned with the maritime exploits of Hawkyns, Drake, and Raleigh, the artistic genius of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Spenser, and the musical works of Tallis and Byrd. Historians differ over her reign. Some say it anticipated the rise of the power of parliament that culminated in the Civil Wars of 1642–9, and that she had been forced by Parliament in 1559 to accept a more radical religious settlement than she would have preferred. Others emphasize the queen and her counsellors' relationship to policy-making, and the social dynamics of the political process. More recently, gender has been a factor - that she was able to capitalize on people's expectations of her behaviour as a woman and turn this to her own political advantage.