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Reigns on Parade: Monarchy’s
Reigns on Parade
Just how the monarchy is portrayed has fascinated royal watchers and collectors for centuries. Andrew Graham-Dixon looks back on Tudor sovereigns to the present day
The history of the British monarchy suggests that women have a particular aptitude for ruling the waves – and, indeed, for waiving the rules. There have been relatively few regnant queens, hardly surprising given that the laws of primogeniture are stacked in favour of men, but their collective record is outstanding. Think of Queen Elizabeth I, of Queen Victoria, of our present monarch, Queen Elizabeth II: all of them long-lived, popular with their subjects (most of the time) and enviably adept at plotting a course through the fraught political landscape of their times.
Above Elizabeth I (1533-1603), The Armada Portrait, © From the Woburn Abbey Collection
Every successful monarch needs to manage the royal image, since it is largely through their images that rulers have been able to shape public perceptions and influence the judgements of posterity. And in this, too, the prominent queens have excelled greatly. This is partly so, perhaps, because of the intrinsic difficulty of being a woman in a traditionally male role.
It could be argued that regnant queens have been so adroit and innovative in developing the symbolism of power – not just through portraits, but through costume, ceremony, seals and many other media – because they have had no alternative. The royal image has been one of their main weapons against the historic chauvinistic preconception that queens must be weaker than kings, because women are the supposedly the weaker sex.
Virgin Queen
Few rulers have used the propagandistic power of art as effectively as Elizabeth I. Well schooled in the classics, she understood the way in which ancient myths could be used to bolster the monarchy. The imagery of her court is full of classical allusions: a labyrinth of allegories, codes and emblems, at the centre of which, awaiting discovery, is always the same one image, namely that of Elizabeth herself, whose favoured alter-ego was Astraea, the Virgin
Left Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (b. 1561 – ) Queen Elizabeth I (‘The Ditchley portrait’) c. 1592
Right Nicholas Hilliard (1547-1619), Portrait of Elizabeth I, 1586-1587
Below right Chris Levine (b.1960) Lightness of Being, Lenticular Lightbox, 2004
Queen. Vestiges of such symbolism still persist in unlikely places, such as the American state of Virginia, colonised by Sir Walter Raleigh and named in deference to his queen.
The daunting example of her father, Henry VIII, both as patron of Holbein and as a master of public pageantry, helped Elizabeth I to understand the ways in which the imagery of power might also help a monarch hold on to it. She had an instinctive grasp not only of how to present herself, but when to do so, to maximum effect. In the summer of 1588, on the eve of the attempted invasion of England by the Spanish Armada, she made a personal appearance on horseback before 17,000 English troops deployed at Tilbury. Somehow managing to remain in the saddle while dressed in a hooped construction of jewelencrusted silks and damasks, her neck encircled by an elaborate ruff and arrayed with pearls in her hair, she must have seemed to the men gathered before her more vision than flesh-and-blood.
The speech she made that day – prototype for those made by Winston Churchill during WWII – has been remembered as the most famous of her reign:
Standard issue
In 1586, Elizabeth I commissioned a bold alternative from her court painter, Nicholas Hilliard (1547-1619), which bore her own image, wreathed in Tudor roses and clothed in a dress and ruff similar to that which she would don for the Tilbury troops and The Armada Portrait two years later.
Not only did Elizabeth ensure that her own image proliferated everywhere at court – even encouraging her male courtiers to wear miniatures of her close to their hearts (making them her platonic lover) – she rigorously controlled the ways in which that image was created and presented.
No paintings or drawings of her could be circulated without her prior knowledge, and in the images which she did approve she was frozen at the same relatively young age.
“Let tyrants fear... I am come amongst you, as you see, at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and the heat of the battle, to live or die amongst you all, to lay down my life for my God and for my kingdom and for my people, my honour, and my blood, even in the dust. I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too...”
The Armada Portrait
In The Armada Portrait, commissioned later that year to mark victory over Spain, Elizabeth I is probably shown in the same costume she had worn to address her troops.
Wearing pearls in her hair, multiple pearl necklaces and with yet more pearls embroidered with gold thread into the rich fabric of her sleeves, her hands and face are all that can be seen of her body. Her left hand rests on her thigh, her right on the globe, protecting England and its empire. Beside her rests the crown.
The room in which we find her would seem airless were it not for two glimpses of the outside world disclosed by open curtains. Through one window we see the English fleet, advancing implacably across calm seas and under sunny skies; through the other, Spanish ships scattered by storms and dashed against rocks. Elizabeth wears an expression of utter impassivity, shot through with steely resolve. In the universe of the painting she is the sun, the unmoved mover: a queen as powerful as any king, because she has God on her side.
To emphasise her special relationship with God, the painter has been bold enough to paint her in a pose very close to that of Christ the Judge in paintings of the Last Judgement. Her left hand is down, as if to condemn the Spanish (who sink and flounder on the same, sinister side) to damnation; her right hand is raised, as if to bless England and the English for all eternity.
Broad shouldered
Below her waist, dead centre, where Henry had worn that extravagant codpiece, we find a single very large dangling pearl, made all the more prominent by an x-marks-thespot ribbon of silk tying it into place. The pearl stands for purity and therefore virginity, proudly displayed.
What might in normal circumstances have been regarded as a weakness in a monarch – the lack of an heir – has been transformed into an advantage, through
Left Andy Warhol (1928-1987) Reigning Queens, 1985, Private Collection
Below Sir Godfrey Kneller,(1646-1723) Queen Anne Presenting the Plans of Blenheim to Military Merit, 1708. Reproduced with kind permission of his Grace the Duke of Marlborough, Blenheim Palace
Right Jan van der Vaart, c. 1692-1694. Queen Mary II (1662-1694) the alchemy of art. Flaunting her virginity was Elizabeth’s way of reinforcing her subjects’ impression that she might live in this world but remained essentially above it.
The cult of her purity takes on another meaning besides in The Armada Portrait, encapsulated in that detail of the pearl at her groin: just as she has guarded her virginity, so too has she preserved Protestant England against violation by Catholic Spain.
Dialling down
Later regnant queens of England (and the British Isles) took an understandably more cautious approach to the creation and dissemination of their own royal images.
Mary II, who was co-monarch with her husband, William III of Orange, did not live long, but those portraits of her that do survive – by Jan van de Vaart, for example – show that she had a far less exalted sense of herself than Elizabeth I; in fact, were it not for the ermine, the sceptre held so loosely between first and second finger, and the lurking crown, it might be thought she were a courtier rather than the queen herself.
Similarly, in Kneller’s depiction of her sister Anne presenting the plans of Blenheim to military Merit, the queen is portrayed not as an omnipotent ruler, but as a benevolent figurehead endowing the spoils of victory and distributing a cornucopia of riches amongst her people. As the first monarch of a sovereign Great Britain following the Acts of Union of 1707, Anne’s reign brought peace and stability to the British Isles, not through autocratic decree but by democratic consent.
Queen Victoria
Queen Victoria came to the throne when the powers of the monarchy had been further diminished by the beginnings of parliamentary democracy.
In Europe’s era of revolutions, she realised what she needed to be, above all, was popular and she developed a series of strategies to make herself so. After marrying Albert and, as a mother, she cultivated a different but equally unthreatening image of queendom.
The polar opposite of Elizabeth I’s Virgin Queen, remote and aloof, Victoria became the quintessential figure of the loving wife and doting mother, the incarnation of Victorian family values. Edwin Landseer’s portrait shows a thoroughly domesticated queen, greeting Albert on his return from the shoot, tellingly entitled Windsor Castle in Modern Times.
Through the dark years of her widowhood Victoria shape-shifted again with the most memorable images being sculptures, such as the statue of her created by Sir Edgar Boehm in 1887, to mark her Golden Jubilee. Seen from the back, she appears more as shape than person, from the front she resembles the figurehead of an invisible vessel, as if to suggest that the ship of state would still be guided by her, even after death.
Queen Elizabeth II
The challenge facing any modern king or queen is not alienating their public. But they also need to assert their apartness, their sense of belonging to a world unlike that in which ordinary people live, or they will lose that aura of uniqueness which is their birth right and key to survival.
The problem has been compounded by the mass media’s appetite for multiplication. Put bluntly, there are far more famous people than ever before sparking a mind-boggling number of pictures.
This may have been part of Andy Warhol’s point when he created his well-known silkscreen image of the Queen. Its effect was the opposite of that aimed for by most royal portraiture. It placed her fame on a par with that of all the other famous people – the Marilyns, the Elvises, even the Chairman Maos – to whom he had accorded the same treatment.
Above Edwin Landseer (1802–1873) Windsor Castle in Modern Times, 1840-1843
Advancing years
Chris Levine’s Queen Elizabeth II: Lightness of Being, a photograph of Her Majesty suspended spectrally within the frame of a lightbox, proposes an impressive solution to the problem. She is poignantly present, shown in the frailty of her advancing age (the original picture was taken in 2007), with every crease and wrinkle of her face caught by the camera.
But she is also not quite there. Her body is a blur of pulsing grey, and she has been abstracted by the details of her costume – to something nearer an emblem than a human being. This is perhaps as close as Elizabeth II has ever come, in her royal imagery, to that of Elizabeth I: impassive, withheld, the unmoved mover.
Andrew Graham-Dixon is an art historian, broadcaster and author. The exhibition Power & Image: Royal Portraiture and Iconography is on view at Sotheby’s New Bond Street until June 15.
WOMEN behind the COINS
To many of her subjects one of the most enduring images of the present Queen comes from a photograph taken on February 26, 1953, just 20 days after the 26-year-old sovereign ascended to the throne.
On that day some 60 portraits were taken by the royal photographer Dorothy Wilding (1893-1976), which were used on postage stamps until 1971, and on coins from 1953 to decimalisation.
A few weeks after Wilding’s shoot, the photographs were sent to another woman, the 71-year-old sculptor and medallist, Mary Gillick (1881-1965). Gillick had beaten 17 other artists to be awarded the prestigious commission by The Royal Mint Advisory Committee (RMAC) to design the portrait that would appear on the new coinage.
Gillick’s depiction of the young monarch was light and fresh, unencumbered by a crown. Instead she is wearing a laurel wreath in the classical style. Gillick avoided using a couped portrait, where the bust is cut off by the neck, which was the norm for coins issued earlier in the century, opting instead to include the shoulders and décolletage.
Princely intervention
In the process of refining her submission for striking, Gillick was guided by the RMAC, of which Prince Philip was president. In this role, and as husband, the Prince queried Gillick’s depiction of the length of his young wife’s neck and the curve delineated.
Gillick later wrote: “At first I made the neck rather straight in the proud manner of a queen. The Queen, however, has a very beautiful neck and before the end of the sitting the Duke of Edinburgh came in and
Left Dorothy Wilding, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 26 February 1952, Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2022
Below 1953 Royal Mint sovereign, portrait by Mary Gillick, image courtesy of the Royal Mint
Right Mary Gillick with the bust of Queen Elizabeth II. Reproduced by permission of the artist, © The Trustees of the British Museum suggested it should be inclined more gently. I agreed that this was an improvement.”
In the final coin, the Queen’s portrait sits within a continuous inscription, harking back to the coins of Elizabeth I. While youthful, the depiction gave the Queen a dignified presence, seeming to sum up post-WWII optimism. It was received with great praise from the public.
Later portrayals
Designed by artist, Arnold Machin, the second definitive UK coin portrait exudes elegance. It was released with the introduction of the new five and ten pence decimalisation coins in 1968. The bust displays the Queen wearing the Girls of Great Britain and Ireland tiara – a wedding gift to the Queen from her grandmother Queen Mary in 1947. The Queen’s hair is loosely waved and fabric is draped around her shoulders. The portrait was used on coins until 1984. The third portrait came from the sculptor Raphael Maklouf in 1985 and shows a traditional couped bust. The Girls of Great Britain and Ireland tiara has been replaced by the King George IV State Diadem, which is worn by the Queen for the annual State Opening of Parliament. The fourth portrait, in 1998, by sculptor Ian RankBroadley, shows the Queen in her later years with a greater degree of realism, once again wearing the Girls of Great Britain and Ireland tiara. The fifth, in 2015, by Jody Clark, depicts the 88-year-old monarch in the King George IV State Diadem and Diamond Jubilee pearl earrings. Her chin is slightly lifted and the neck in an elegant, sweeping curve.
Portraits of the Queen by Dorothy Wilding are on display with jewellery worn at the sittings at the exhibition Platinum Jubilee: The Queen’s Accession at Buckingham Palace from July 22 to October 2. An exhibition of Mary Gillick’s designs for the first coins can be seen at the British Museum until July 31, the exhibition is accompanied by a book on the sculptor by Philip Attwood, published by Spink Books.
