Unravelling Knots

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 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.

The ‘Siena’ portrait of Elizabeth holding a sieve, an emblem of virginity, by Quentin Metsys the Younger, c.1583. Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena, Italy/ Bridgeman Images.

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 this type used the ‘Darnley’ face pattern, but show Elizabeth holding a golden sieve, with a terrestrial globe behind her. Links between the sieve and virginity stem from the story of Tuccia, a Roman Vestal Virgin who proved her purity by carrying water in a sieve from the Tiber to the Vestal’s Temple without spilling a drop. Tuccia makes a noted appearance in Petrarch’s poem The Triumph of Chastity, and among the inscriptions common to this portrait-type is one from Petrarch’s Triumph of Love alluding to the errors made by those enslaved by love.

Later, fuller realisations of the ‘Sieve’ theme include the famous ‘Siena’ portrait, commissioned by Sir Christopher Hatton in 1583. Hatton had opposed the Anjou match to the point where he and Elizabeth quarrelled and she banned him from her presence for a week. He was also a leading champion of crown-sponsored colonisation in the New World and a patron of the queen’s part-time astrologer, John Dee, whose General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation (1577), dedicated to Hatton, had urged Elizabeth to recover a lost overseas ‘British’ empire once ruled by King Arthur. The portrait, by Quentin Metsys the Younger, shows Elizabeth in a black gown shrouded in a veil, her left hand clutching a sieve and her right forearm leaning against a column studded with golden medallions extolling the imperial theme. Behind her, in the foreground of a colonnaded arcade where Hatton makes a cameo appearance, is a globe showing the British Isles suffused with light as ships traverse to and from the New World.

The obvious mistake is to infer that Elizabeth shared Hatton’s views. More likely the opposite is true. Whereas Hatton, Sir Francis Walsingham and Sir Walter Ralegh championed crown-sponsored colonisation, Burghley and the queen were highly sceptical on grounds of cost. By eulogising the queen in his ‘Sieve’ portrait, Hatton fought a rearguard action, depicting not what he knew she was, but what he believed she could become.

And with Elizabeth unambiguously past the menopause, Burghley also saw the appeal of an iconography of chastity. It has become fashionable to claim that the ‘Ermine’ portrait in which an ermine, an emblem of chastity, is seen clambering up the queen’s left arm, was a gift from Elizabeth to Burghley in June 1585 when she stayed briefly at his house. Since, however, no payment for such a portrait can be found anywhere in the royal accounts, it is likelier that Burghley commissioned it himself to display to her as a pledge of his loyalty. Naturally, given his stance on colonisation, there is no globe. Instead, a golden swordhilt rests on a table and the queen holds an olive branch in her right hand. Signifying ‘justice’ and ‘peace’ , they make the point, as Burghley well knew, that Elizabeth was no warrior queen. At that very same moment, she was striving to broker peace in the Netherlands; and in the anxious months before the Spanish Armada of 1588 sailed up the English Channel, her envoys were desperately begging Philip II’s agents for peace at any price.

A 1603 posthumous engraving of the ageing Elizabeth by Crispijn van de Passe. Based on Isaac Oliver’s miniature of 1592 and a censored earlier engraving by William Rogers. Private collection. A

The three principal surviving versions of the ‘Armada’ portrait of 1588–9 raise a different set of issues. All three have been extensively restored and the one in the National Portrait Gallery has been severely cut down: the horizontal alignment of the boards suggests that it too was originally landscape format like the version at Woburn Abbey (shown on our front cover) and the one acquired in 2016 by the National Maritime Museum. The brushwork indicates that each is by a different hand, but it is likely that all emanated from the same studio as their composition suggests a shared formula.

Quite possibly, none is the original, and all three imitate a single master-type now lost. The portraits depict Elizabeth in ‘imperial majesty’ . Embroidered on her sleeves and skirt is an elaborate design of suns-in-splendour. She sports a golden collar with pendant pearls, partly concealed by an enormous ruff, and rests her right hand on a globe. Beside her elbow stands the arched or ‘imperial’ crown, while to the left and right of her head are seascapes of Sir Francis Drake’s fire-ships sailing out to meet the Armada at anchor off Calais, and of the sinking of the Spanish ships and their destruction off a rocky coastline.

Whoever the artists were, they shared a new face pattern showing a much younger woman. The face is rounder and fuller;

the true shape of Elizabeth’s nose is lost to view; her eyes are larger and less piercing. This is another image that may well have been carefully choreographed. But if so, the inspiration surely came from an advocate of Atlantic colonisation – perhaps Drake or Ralegh – because in the versions where the globe is fully visible, the fingers of the queen’s right hand point directly to America. Soon Ralegh can be found cultivating links in poetry and prose between Elizabeth, chastity and the moon goddess Diana, otherwise known as Cynthia or Phoebe (or ‘Belphoebe’ , as Edmund Spenser calls her in The Faerie Queene of 1590), a theme also taken up in jewellery presented to the queen by Drake and in a miniature of her by Hilliard. But it was Sir Henry Lee, for many years the chief impresario of the queen’s Accession Day tilts, who did most to morph such allegorical iconography into a fully fledged ‘cult’ of Astraea and Gloriana. Acting on his own initiative, Lee staged a magnificent closing ceremony in the tilt-yard at Whitehall in 1590 to mark his retirement, one that sought to deify the postmenopausal queen as both a ‘Vestal Virgin’ and goddess incarnate.

In 1592, in readiness for the queen’s visit to his house at Ditchley in Oxfordshire, Lee commissioned Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger to paint a portrait in which the image of a fast-ageing monarch was successfully wedded to an icon of cosmic power. Elizabeth, dressed to kill, stands on a map of England with her feet on the site of Ditchley, wearing an eardrop in the shape of an armillary sphere, a symbol long associated with ‘Virgo-Astraea’ . At the right of the portrait is a sonnet – the text now cropped – proclaiming her to be so omnipotent, she can cause a thunderstorm to clear, as the background illustrates.

This hauntingly lifelike image formed an integral part of the entertainments Lee staged for Elizabeth at his house. She was led to a pavilion where an actor dressed as an old knight lay ‘under a spell’ . Pointing her towards a row of allegorical ‘tables’ (i.e. portraits) hung around the walls of the pavilion, a page invited her to ‘Draw near and take a view of every table’ , because only after she had closely examined ‘those charmed pictures on the wall depending’ could the spell be broken. Almost certainly, the ‘Ditchley’ portrait of her marked the climax of this display.

In a similar vein, Burghley’s successor as the queen’s chief minister, his son Robert Cecil, commissioned Gheeraerts to paint the ‘Rainbow’ portrait in 1602 to mark her visit to his fine new house on the Strand. The face pattern this time, though, is the so-called ‘Mask of Youth’ . Mainly Hilliard’s work, this image consciously abandoned any attempt to capture the reality of a woman in her sixties. Instead, her features were airbrushed back to become those of a young woman in her late twenties or early thirties.

At Cecil’s reception, a pageant was staged in which a messenger in Turkish dress entered to present Elizabeth with a rich, imperial mantle. In the portrait she is depicted wearing a ruby-jewelled crown with a crescent moon on the top and clutching a rainbow in her right hand, above which appears the legend Non sine sole iris (‘No rainbow without the sun’). But it is her sumptuous mantle, adorned with eyes and ears to indicate her hold over her subjects, that chiefly draws our gaze. This is almost certainly an exact representation of the gift carried by the actor playing the part of the Turkish courier; one side of the mantle in the portrait is of pale silk woven with a fine silver stripe, the other of orange satin, the colour of the sun.

Spin-offs from the 1592 ‘Ditchley’ portrait include a stark studio reworking of its upper half (see right), recently sold at Sotheby’s. The artist makes no attempt to disguise Elizabeth’s true age, and a technical and scientific analysis in 2010 at the University of East Carolina broadly supports the conclusion that this painting derives from the closing years of the sixteenth century. Its existence and that of half a dozen related portraits throws into question the almost universal belief that around this time she ordered all images depicting her as in any way old to be censored or destroyed.

The purported source is a Privy Council order of 1596 amplifying the portraitist George Gower’s role as the queen’s Serjeant- Painter. In 1584, Gower and Hilliard had jointly bid to secure a monopoly over royal portraiture, a move Elizabeth rebuffed. So resistant was she to the whole idea of sitting for an ‘official’ image that Gower’s duties had been largely confined to interior decoration in palaces and law courts and the occasional restoration of damaged paintings. Now, however, he was charged with rectifying the ‘abuse … in unseemly and improperly painting, [en]graving and printing of Her Majesty’s person and visage to her most great offence’ . Except, it is made clear that only grossly inferior images ‘by divers unskilful artisans’ were to be censored or destroyed. Nothing is said about realistic depictions by skilful artists. And it turns out that first-hand evidence of a bonfire of paintings is lacking. Efforts were evidently made to censor or destroy the earliest editions of an engraving of Elizabeth holding an orb and sceptre by William Rogers, loosely based upon a notorious 1592 miniature of the queen by Isaac Oliver, Hilliard’s pupil. A re-engraved version by Crispijn van de Passe (see opposite) was rushed out after Elizabeth’s death in 1603, in which her facial appearance was softened. All along, the Privy Council had most likely sought to regulate mass-market engravings rather than paintings.

Elizabeth aged 62 or 63, studio of Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, c.1596. Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s Picture Library.

Far, then, from there being much evidence of Elizabeth ‘selling’ her monarchy through manufacturing portraiture, it seems likelier that her courtiers, acting as individuals, commissioned the vast majority of her most celebrated portraits and determined their iconography themselves. That is not to deny Elizabeth’s unfaltering talent for stage-managing her public appearances. Artworks were not, however, a passion, in the way they were for her father, Henry VIII. And where censorship is concerned, it would – if only on a purely practical level – have been logistically impossible for privy councillors to enter hundreds of private houses and confiscate unwelcome portraits of her, simply because they made her look old.