Unravelling Knots
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John Guy on the evidence of a ‘cult’ of Elizabeth I in contemporary portraits
In Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years (2016) I found myself interrogating the myths and legends surrounding Elizabeth I. One still gnawing at me is her so-called ‘cult’ in portraiture. Tradition holds that as early as her coronation year in 1559 she began ‘branding’ herself as a ‘Virgin Queen’ who had taken her kingdom for a husband. After that, she and her government are said to have manufactured her portraits to ‘sell’ her monarchy to her people. And as a final act of vanity in her twilight years, she apparently ordered her privy councillors to censor or destroy all images depicting her as old. But does the evidence support this? We have long understood the defining elements of this ‘cult’: Elizabeth was said to be a second Virgin Mary who by resisting the temptations of the flesh would also prevent its decay. She was ‘Astraea’ – the sacred virgin whose purity and justice would bring about a new golden age. And she was ‘Gloriana’ – an imperial virgin whose destiny is world empire. But as Sir Roy Strong long ago established, such imagery of an iconic virgin only appeared some 20 years into the reign. Until then, Elizabeth’s portraits were chiefly bland, two-dimensional affairs. Moreover, ‘the pictures commonly made to be sold’ , as the Earl of Sussex complained in 1567, ‘did nothing resemble your Majesty’ . The ‘Darnley’ portrait of c.1573–5 (named after an eighteenth-century owner) marked the change. Painted from life by an unknown Flemish artist, it intimately reveals Elizabeth’s high-boned cheeks, dark penetrating eyes, elongated and slightly hooked nose and long, slender fingers. At the same time, it conveys a 20 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
The idea of a “Virgin Queen” who had married her kingdom first came into vogue in 1578
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profound awareness of her authority and has underpinned countless claims that her government controlled the precise pattern of her features made available to artists. It is true that in 1563 her chief minister, Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley after 1571, demanded just such controls, going so far as to draft a proclamation. But Elizabeth blocked the move. Instead, she gave Nicholas Hilliard, the only artist whose work she genuinely admired and for whom she once sat informally outdoors in 1572, piecework commissions as and when she wanted them. She refused to sit for an ‘official’ face pattern. So psychologically wary was she of portraiture, she sat for artists only five or six times during her long reign. From necessity, artists and their studios resorted to plagiarism, and a face pattern derived from the ‘Darnley’ portrait began to circulate widely among them, presumably for a price. (Since the prime version of the ‘Darnley’ portrait is said to have been
commissioned by Lord Cobham, possibly to display during Elizabeth’s visit to Cobham Hall in late 1573, the ‘master version’ of the pattern would have been owned by the artist.) The dearth of ‘true’ likenesses, meanwhile, threw up the entirely different problem of the proliferation of inferior images of the queen. In 1563, Burghley had complained of ‘the errors and deformities already committed by sundry persons in this behalf’ . But, once more, Elizabeth failed to act. The pivotal date is 1578. That spring, the queen, aged 45, revived her marriage diplomacy with her last suitor, Francis, Duke of Anjou, seeking a counterweight to the growing threat to herself and the Dutch Protestants from Philip II of Spain. In reply, the opponents of the match – chief among them her favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, a noted patron of artists and stage players – began an orchestrated campaign to stymie it. The idea of a ‘Virgin Queen’ who had married her kingdom first came into vogue that summer, not in portraiture or ‘top-down’ from the queen or Burghley, but incidentally through not-so-subtle allusions in pageants and masques commissioned by critics of the marriage plan, notably Dudley himself. Their belief was that if Elizabeth was thinking of marrying the Catholic Anjou, she would do better staying single. In 1579 an unidentified artist capitalised on this theme in a series of three allegorical ‘Sieve’ portraits. One purchased by the judge Sir Christopher Wray is now missing, but was vividly described by George Vertue in 1752; the other two are in collections in Washington, D.C. and Florida. Portraits of
