Look, you can’t be doing a sexy gay history show and suddenly drop us into a random room with a man we’ve never seen before who talks with some other new guy about the Spanish and a battle we also have no idea about. These men don’t even make out. Would I want them to? Probably not, but it would be better than their inscrutable conversation, which is followed by one of them stabbing the other in a particularly violent way.
We eventually discover that Man No. 1 is Sir Walter Raleigh (the stabber, not the stabbee).