About Cervantes   The Golden Age of Spain   TimeLinks	TimeLinks 1543 Henry VIII marries his sixth wife. 1542 Only six days old, Mary Stuart becomes Mary Queen of Scots after the death of her father, James V. 1546 The Louvre museum is erected in France. 1558 Brueghel paints The Fall of Icarus. 1558 Elizabeth I ascends to the throne. 1550s The first coffeehouse opens in Venice. 1560s England begins participation in the slave trade. 1562 The Anglican Church is founded in England. 1564 Michelangelo, sculptor of The Pieta, dies in Rome. 1560s A quarter of the London population is wiped out by a disease known as the "sweating sickness." 1576 James Burbage starts the first playhouse in England. 1570s The population of China reaches 60 million people. 1570s European porcelain is developed. 1580 Sir Francis Drake is the first Englishman to circumnavigate the world. 1582 Pope Gregory VIII calculated the Gregorian Calendar, which is the calendar in use today. 1583 The University of Edinburgh opens in Scotland. 1585 Dutchman Simon Stevin is the first to use decimal fractions in mathematics. 1585 Walter Raleigh claims the first English colony in North America, Roanoke Island, and names the territory Virginia. 1587 Mary Queen of Scots is beheaded in England after being implicated in a plot to murder Elizabeth I. 1589 William Shakespeare's first play, Henry VI, opens onstage. 1590 First version of Edmund Spenser's heroic epic, The Faerie Queene, is published. 1591 Francois Viete brings letters into arithmetic with the advent of algebra. 1592 Hideyoshi, dictator of Japan, unsuccessfully tries to invade Korea. 1590s Shakespeare pens some of his most well-known plays, including Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Much Ado About Nothing. 1603 Queen Elizabeth I dies after her 45-year reign in England, and is replaced by James I. 1603 Kabuki theater is introduced in Kyoto, Japan. 1606 King James I charters the Plymouth and London Companies, which found the Jamestown Colony in Virginia in his honor. 1609 Galileo builds the first astronomical telescope to observe the planets and solar system. 1611 The King James version of The Bible is published. 1612 Tobacco is introduced by John Rolfe as a cash crop to the colonists in Virginia. 1613 Mikhail Romanov of Russia marks the beginning of the 200-year Romanov dynasty. 1616 William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes both die.