Her Favourites and Her Fighting Men. Explores the later years of Elizabeth Is reign through the lives of her key favourites, who she surrounded herself with at court and elsewhere in a refined game of courtly love.These were ambitious men, who operated on uneven, even uncomfortable, ground of eroticised political standing and were played off one another with half promises of financial or political preferment.Walter Raleigh, Charles Blount, Robert Devereux, and Sir Francis Vere played crucial roles in the twilight years of the Virgin Queens reign.Notable figures, spies, explorers, great military leaders