17

The Image of the Queen

WHEN ELIZABETH ASCENDED the throne, everyone confidently expected her to fulfil the first duty of a queen and the normal function of her sex by becoming a wife and mother. Since she declined to do this, she had to become something else. As a ruler, she had already been absorbed into the patriarchal system, de-sexed, elevated and hence transformed into a figure above and distinct from other women. If she was to continue to hold sway over recalcitrant men who resented female rule and over a far from united country, she could not allow her image to slip into that of ageing, childless spinster. Something else was needed to bolster her authority. Consciously or otherwise, she found she could rely on her sex to tap into the emotional power behind the image of wife-mother, particularly the most sacred mother of all, the Virgin Mary.

From the outset, Elizabeth affirmed her marriage to the kingdom and her fictional motherhood of the people. These were not novel concepts. Monarchs had always, in a mystic sense, been ‘married’ to their realms. The first queen regnant, Mary I, had used the mother image. Elizabeth assured her Parliament in 1563 that ‘though after my death you may have many stepdames, yet shall you never have any a more mother [a more natural mother] than I mean to be unto you all’. Isaiah 49: 23 reads: ‘And kings shall be thy nursing fathers and their queens shall be thy nursing mothers.’ Elizabeth was often eulogized as the nursing mother of the English Church. When she made a progress to Norwich in 1578 the city’s farewell oration addressed her as ‘the mother and nurse of this whole common welth, and countrie’, and said of the people’s distress at her departure: ‘How lamentable a thing it is, to pul away sucking babes from the breastes and bosomes of their most loving mothers.’

The need for a mother figure probably goes back to the beginning of human history. In replacing the Virgin Mary, or the mother figure once represented by the Goddess, Elizabeth was fulfilling the same universal psychological need.

A belief had developed since the Middle Ages that the anointed sovereign was God’s earthly representative. Elizabeth’s dual role as head of state and Supreme Governor of the Church placed her in a unique position, as the symbolic personification of the English Church and guardian of the ‘true’ faith. She united Church and state through herself in a spiritual marriage both with God and the nation. As a consecrated virgin, she was also – nun-like – a bride of Christ and, like the Virgin Mary, an intercessor with the supreme Deity for her people.

The idea of associating the Queen with the Virgin Mary was not new. The association of the feminine ideal, the sacred and the regal already existed long before Elizabeth came to the throne. Mary I’s reign had seen extensive use of Marian iconography, which had traditionally been associated with that of queens consort, and highlighted the parallels between the two. Just as Catholics prayed to the Virgin Mary to intercede for them with God and her son, Jesus Christ, so queens consort were seen as loving mediators between the King and his people. Their coronation pageantry included the same paradox as existed in the Virgin’s life: they were praised for their virginal chastity and for their fertility.

John Aylmer was the first to associate Elizabeth with the Virgin Mary, albeit for Protestant purposes. He did this by transforming the medieval figure of the Virgin as Mother of the Church into ‘Mother England’, who gave birth to the English Reformation. He invested Elizabeth with the qualities of Mother England, linking love of England and obedience to the Queen in strongly nationalistic terms.

It was not until the 1570s, however, that the cult of Elizabeth as the Virgin Queen began to take hold. She was in her late thirties and, although marriage negotiations would continue for another decade, it was generally recognized that she was nearing the menopause and was unlikely to have a child of her own. To elevate her virginity to a cult was to make a virtue out of necessity, and it grew in intensity with succeeding years as the ageing, mortal body became increasingly divorced from the youthful, goddess-like image. The papal bull of 1570, Regnans in Excelsis, excommunicating Elizabeth and giving Catholic assassins licence to kill her, transformed her into a Protestant saint virtually overnight. Suddenly faced with the alarming prospect of the Catholic Mary Stuart on the English throne, English Protestants began to appreciate the Queen they had, and the person of Elizabeth became very precious to them. In Parliament, they stopped haranguing her to get married; at court and in public – but only to some extent, since the country was far from united in religious belief – she became an object of worship.

It was no coincidence, then, that Elizabeth’s Accession Day, 17 November, began to be celebrated as a sort of Protestant holy day. The first Accession Day began spontaneously in Oxford in 1570, but by 1576 it was recognized officially as a Church holiday with a specific service and liturgy. It was a day of public thanksgiving, sermons, bell ringing, bonfires, elaborate pageants and tournaments. Over time, the celebrations were extended to 19 November – St Elizabeth’s Day in the Catholic calendar. The Queen’s birthday, which fell on 7 September, became another occasion for public rejoicing with religious overtones. One prayer asked God to bless Elizabeth and curse her enemies. Some considered it a divine omen that Elizabeth shared the Virgin’s birthday, the eve of the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This belief was intensified when her death – 24 March – coincided with the eve of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary.

It may well be that with the demise of the Catholic calendar of holy days, the chief of which had coincided with the major festivals at court, Elizabeth’s government had felt obliged to inaugurate some secular holidays. However, the appropriation of the former feast day of the Virgin for the Queen’s birthday celebration, implying that Elizabeth was either a rival or a replacement for the Virgin Mary, offended Catholics and extreme Protestants alike.

While Protestant England banned religious images as idolatrous – falsifying, seductive distractions from the direct worship of God – images of the monarch were accorded the ceremonial deference formerly reserved for the holy. This was permissible, because the ruler was secular. The elevation of Elizabeth to the status once held by the Virgin Mary followed a period of intense iconoclasm, when religious paintings and statues had been systematically destroyed and smashed. In pre-Reformation England the Virgin Mary had been held in profound esteem. Her image had been ubiquitous; many shrines and churches had been devoted to her and public spectacles and ceremonies held in her honour. Her demise must have left many people bereft, suffering from a deep sense of deprivation.

Fortuitously, the accession of a virgin queen suggested a means of filling the void by re-channelling the loyalty – and the emotional power that accompanied it – formerly given the Queen of Heaven to the Queen of England. The jewel-encrusted statue of the Virgin which had been cast out of the churches and monasteries and wayside shrines was replaced by the gorgeously arrayed, bejewelled figure of the Queen at court. She was carried on progress much as the Virgin had been carried in procession, so that her subjects could adore her. ‘Hail Mary!’ gave way to ‘Long live Eliza!’ To be visited by the Queen on progress was tantamount to having one’s house or town blessed.

It is impossible to say for certain how much of this was orchestrated by the Queen and the court, and how much of it was a natural, spontaneous refocusing of the people’s energies. Elizabeth had a powerful charisma and well understood how this was reinforced by magnificent displays of dress and elaborate jewellery. The royal wardrobe was a sort of props department to bolster the Queen’s majestic image. Always careful with money, she treated it almost as a state treasure. A large number of people were employed making, maintaining, replenishing, repairing and recycling its contents.

Elizabeth used only two tailors between her accession and her death; they would make a toile and send it to a tailor in Paris, who used a woman Elizabeth’s size to fit the gown exactly. Not only were the Queen’s gowns superbly cut and styled, but she often copied the fashions of France and Spain, keeping up with the fashion news by having dolls or finished gowns sent from abroad. Others were employed acquiring the cloth of gold and silver tissue, the velvets, silks and satins denoting the Queen’s status and embroidering them with the flowers she favoured – sometimes copied from those in her gardens, or else from illustrated herbals – or with motifs such as the letter S for ‘Soverayne’ in gold. The robes were too heavily embroidered to wash, so that Elizabeth, ever fastidious about personal cleanliness, would have them scented with rose water. When she had finished with them, they were often handed down to the ladies and gentlewomen of the Privy Chamber and the maids of honour as the perquisites of office.

For someone so conscious of her image, it is surprising that Elizabeth herself was slow to manipulate it in her portraiture. Unlike her father, whose image as a larger-than-life macho ruler was forged through his patronage of Hans Holbein, or even her sister Mary who employed Antonis Mor who painted her with the sort of guileless, transparent honesty that was one of her chief characteristics, Elizabeth appointed no official court painter. She had inherited an empty treasury and the money-saving instincts of her grandfather, Henry VII, so was probably chary of spending money on having herself painted. The nearest she came to official sponsorship was by commissioning Nicholas Hilliard to paint dozens of miniatures of her during the last two decades, giving them to courtiers and servants as tokens of her favour – to be worn rather as Catholics wore medals. She found she could rely on others, such as the favourites, Lord Leicester and Sir Christopher Hatton, as well as Sir William Cecil and Sir Henry Lee, to commission major portraits on her behalf. Her non-employment of a court painter meant that she had less control over how she was portrayed, while those who commissioned the portraits had their own agenda.

In order to exert some control over her image, a modicum of censorship was applied to the ordinary portrait. In 1563 and 1596 Cecil drafted proclamations ordering the destruction of non-authorized portraits of the Queen, while the later proclamation stipulated that all new images must be approved by George Gower, the Queen’s Sergeant Painter. Gower’s role also involved managing a large body of temporarily employed artists, reproducing portraits of the Queen from patterns based on some of the key images. Few portraits were made directly from life, especially as Elizabeth was not prepared to spare the time for sittings. One of her ladies would arrange for the props – some of the hundreds of gowns from the royal wardrobe, jewels and accessories – to be placed in a studio for the artist to copy, or she might even take the Queen’s place for the pose. The demand for the Queen’s portrait was apparently very high from subjects ‘both noble and mean’. To display her portrait in the home was a sign of unswerving loyalty, especially after the papal bull of 1570. The lowliest members of society are likely to have seen her image only on the coin of the realm.

With the exception of Federico Zuccaro’s Darnley portrait of Elizabeth, commissioned by Leicester in 1575, which captures the full penetrating power of her black-eyed gaze from the life, no attempt was made to produce a true resemblance of the Queen in her portraits. Elizabeth the woman was irrelevant. What was being portrayed was the Queen’s Majesty, her authority, wealth and greatness – the qualities that require absolute obedience. The portrayal of the face was less important than the detailed rendering of items of dress, jewellery and accessories, all of which were richly symbolic. Her preference for certain colours is well recorded. As she once remarked to the French ambassador, her colours were white and black, the first for virginity or virtue, the second for constancy. She was also portrayed in gold, silver, russet and crimson. After she fell ill with smallpox in 1562, Elizabeth seems to have begun to lose her hair and no portrait was complete without the red wig – the hair colour of the royal house.

The portraits had to demonstrate Elizabeth’s right to rule, in spite of her sex. Her representation developed according to her status as an unmarried virgin queen. Initially, she was a virgin queen who might get married, so still nubile. Eventually, she was a virgin queen whose body was a static emblem of female virtue, the very embodiment of stable monarchy. The portraits subdue her sexuality in order to proclaim her power and in the process place her outside the realm of nature. This was imperative as she grew older when, goddess-like, she had to be seen to escape the constraints of time and space and appear immortal.

Elizabeth told her best artist, Nicholas Hilliard, that she disliked artful shadowing on the face, which was anyway coated with a concoction of lead, powder and egg white, giving it a mask-like appearance. Hilliard’s jewel-like miniatures show an impossibly young Elizabeth with the flowing hair and uncovered bosom of the virgin and the unlined face and skin of youth, implying that her sexual intactness had brought with it resistance to bodily decay. Elizabeth’s motto, Semper Eadem, came to signify not just constancy, integrity and singularity, but also a miraculous physical purity and immutability. However, the idea that the Queen’s triumph over the flesh would ensure the same over time and death concealed an underlying anxiety about the future beyond her death.

Virginity was not the exclusive preserve of the Virgin Mary. Christianity had inherited from the classical world an assumption that virginity was powerful magic and conferred strength. The virgin body equated with wholeness, or holiness, and was charmed. Virginity was symbolic of political integrity and independence, making Elizabeth’s virtue synonymous with the good and security of England. By devoting herself to God and keeping herself pure, Elizabeth would argue, she won His favour for her realm. In the 1580s, when England was feeling isolated and beleaguered as a Protestant nation under threat from more powerful Catholic neighbours, the Queen’s virginity became emblematic of the defiant impregnability of the body politic.

This was the theme of the series of eight Sieve portraits, painted between 1579 and 1583. Accused of breaking her vow of chastity, Tuccia, the Vestal Virgin, had refuted the slander by filling a sieve with water from the Tiber and carrying it back to the Temple of Vesta without spilling a drop. The Queen holding a sieve invokes the magic power of chastity, demonstrated by Tuccia, to seal the leaky orifices of the female body, to make it impenetrable and, by inference, invulnerable. Elizabeth-Tuccia’s virginity shows her more than a woman, more than human. She transcends the body of a weak and feeble woman, until she becomes the personification of mystical sovereignty. Similarly, in the Ermine portrait, the ermine on the Queen’s arm symbolizes virginity, since according to legend it died if its white coat became soiled. The creature’s gold collar in the painting is in the form of an open crown and, together with the sword of justice on the table close to the ermine, this insignia of royalty implies that the body politic, like the Queen’s natural body, is pure, uncorrupted and strong.

The more precarious the Queen’s power, the more extravagant were the claims of the royal portraits. They were weapons in an ideological and cultural struggle. Many portraits of Elizabeth were devised principally by her courtiers and involved complex allegorical and emblematic themes; as such they were the preserve of a small, ruling, male elite, whose privileged classical education enabled them to read their meaning. While ostensibly championing the Queen’s virtues, their main purpose was to advance their patron’s agenda or signal his indispensability. For instance, the Queen’s old favourite, Sir Christopher Hatton, commissioned the Sieve portrait of 1583 to commemorate the success of his counsel in warning against the Anjou marriage, of which he had strongly disapproved. Sir Henry Lee commissioned the Ditchley portrait in 1592, depicting the Queen standing like the Queen of the Heavens, literally, on the top of the world – with the royal feet firmly planted on his home at Ditchley in Oxfordshire – perhaps as part of a general policy held by certain courtiers to encourage her to look outward, towards global expansion.

In the Rainbow portrait, the Queen is portrayed in masque costume as a goddess, her fingers touching a rainbow, on which the words ‘No rainbow without the sun’ are inscribed. A serpent embroidered on her left sleeve has a ruby in its mouth, denoting wise counsel. The dominant motif of counsel is continued in the eyes, ears and mouths dotted on the golden mantle. The portrait could only have been commissioned by one of the Cecils – William, or his son Robert, who succeeded him. As royal secretary, they both had sight of all official documents and controlled much of the intelligence system and they were advocating a policy of peace with Spain in the 1590s.

Portraiture was not the only expression of the cult of the Virgin Queen. Simultaneously, the discourse of courtly love was permeating the English court in poetry and pageantry. The Queen was addressed either as a saint or a goddess. Quasi-religious devotion to Elizabeth is used as a metaphor for erotic desire for her, which in turn is a metaphor for political loyalty to her. The Kenilworth entertainment of July 1575, staged by Leicester in his final bid to win the Queen, was the first hint of the idealization of Elizabeth’s unmarried state which would become the central element in the courtly and popular expression of her cult.

As in other entertainments of this kind, Leicester’s three-day extravaganza had an ulterior motive. He was hoping to further his military ambition by soliciting the Queen’s support for England’s participation in the revolt against Philip of Spain in the Netherlands. Unlike the Queen and Cecil, Leicester and other militant Protestants wanted a foreign policy in which they could play heroic roles, incidentally defining a sphere of male action beyond the boundaries of Elizabeth’s, who could not follow her father as an active leader on the battlefield. She was being put on a pedestal, leaving Leicester to play questing knight. But Elizabeth was not so easily manipulated. Not only did she refuse to play the marriage game at Kenilworth, but it was to be another ten years before she would change her foreign policy and agree to active military involvement in the Netherlands.

How far the cult of Elizabeth permeated society beyond the rarefied world of the court is open to speculation. Beneath the veneer of adulation were less savoury undertones. As an autonomous woman with political authority, Elizabeth was inevitably unsettling. Many of her subjects had ambiguous feelings about being ruled by a woman. She had come to the throne amid controversy about female rule, and then remained unmarried, contravening Protestant ideology and royal precedent and leaving the succession in doubt. Together with the love and respect Elizabeth undoubtedly inspired, there was antagonism towards a queen who refused to secure her people’s future by providing a successor.

This manifested itself in malicious rumours. Elizabeth’s government took adverse criticism of her extremely seriously and many people were brought before the courts for spreading slander about the Queen. The obvious target was her sexuality. Her indiscreet behaviour with Leicester quickly led to speculation that they were lovers. There were even rumours that she had children by him, that she went away on progress every summer in order to have those children. In 1587 a young man, Arthur Dudley, turned up in Spain, claiming to be the illegitimate son of the Queen and Leicester. Just as in Mary’s reign after the disappointment of her false pregnancy, the longing for a king led to renewed ‘sightings’ of Edward VI in the 1580s and 1590s. To some extent, these rumours reflected a wish to imagine Elizabeth fulfilling her womanly function, but they also revealed a tendency to denigrate her as a whore, an incompetent female, unfit to rule.

In 1597 Simon Forman the astrologer recorded a dream in which Elizabeth was leaning over him, about to kiss him, when he awoke. It is not unusual to ‘dream the Queen’ in any century, but Forman’s dream, in which Elizabeth has become both mother and sex object, indicates how deeply her image as Virgin Queen, quasi-divine goddess and mother of her people had penetrated the nation’s psyche. It is testimony to the power of her personality and to her success as a ruler.