reluctance to deal with Mary, Queen of Scots. Within two decades of Elizabeth's death, the Elizabethan period had come to be known as a "golden age", a period of great literary achievements, the age of William Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser, but, at the time, the regime often felt beleaguered at home and abroad. Internally, Elizabethan England was marked by religious divisions, as "official" Protestantism was consolidated in the local communities, and there was intense commercial rivalry and expansion abroad. The Religious Settlement of 1559 was the defining moment of the English Reformation, while the late 1580s and the 1590s were dominated by war with Spain and the French Catholic League, and by rebellion in Ireland. The iconography associated with the Queen herself, however, as
ultraviolet light. But with newspapers being carried as third-class mail,' this was hardly the fastest method of getting information to where it was going. The Germans then came up with what F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover called "the enemy's masterpiece of espionage." This was the microdot, a photograph the size of a printed period that reproduced with perfect clarity a standard-sized typewritten letter. Though microphotographs (of a lesser reduction) had carried messages to beleaguered Paris as far back as 1870, a tip to the F.B.I, in January of 1940 by a double agent, "Watch out for the dots—lots and lots of little dots," threw the bureau into a near panic. Agents feverishly looked everywhere for some evidence of them, but it was not until August of 1941 that a laboratory technician saw a sudden tiny gleam on the surface of an envelope carried by a suspected German agent-—and carefully pried off the first of the microdots, which
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