2. Saviours
Arthur Lindley discovered the Saviour underneath the wallpaper in 1953. He stood frontally, the right hand making the two-fingered blessing, the left holding the orb surmounted with a cross: Salvator Mundi, Christ himself in supreme majesty.
Lindley owned and ran a service garage situated next door to a row of cottages, set back a little from the lane. That end of Hertfordshire had had a busy war, what with the de Havilland aircraft works at Welwyn. There had been some sprawl; Londoners coming out to Knebworth (my parents among them), Letchworth and St Albans. But Piccotts End had stayed much the same: fields and hedgerows; All Saints Church; a couple of timbered pubs. There were still barns, and the odd farm, and dozy cattle up to their knees in cow parsley and nettles. And there was that line of old, gabled houses which everyone knew were ‘historic’, though not for the reasons as yet slumbering beneath the wallpaper. Local historians liked to say, with whatever nuance, that Piccotts End was where the National Health Service had really begun. What they meant was that it had been the home of Britain’s first cottage hospital, back in the early nineteenth century. In 1827 the squire, Sir Astley Cooper, had set it up to offer, entirely gratis, the services of an infirmary and an occasional surgeon to repair broken bones or extract dangerous growths. Every so often someone came across a claw-hooked instrument or a small saw amidst the dust and fallen plaster. Moved by the traces of benevolence, Arthur Lindley began collecting old medical instruments and opened a little museum.
Lindley’s business had done well enough for him to be able to buy the cottages, since it now occurred to him that, together with the Georgian house at the other end from his garage, he might make them into a nice terraced row. He would take one of the houses; the rest might be sold to some party coming and going from a City job via Hemel Hempstead station. After he bought the row he began to look at the condition of the cottages, starting with the one at the eastern end. It was, as he thought, in a bad way, but when he peeled back the thick layer of linen- and canvas-laid wallpaper, discoloured by the elements through years of abandonment, Arthur Lindley saw timbers, which, keen amateur historian as he was, he thought looked a lot older than eighteenth century: dark, a little worm-holed here and there, but anciently stout. There was something under there; something interesting to the likes of him.
So before he had exposed the whole underwall in that first cottage, Arthur Lindley went along to the next in the row, beginning on the upper floor, where, in the time of Sir Astley Cooper, there had been hospital beds. Working with a fine-edged chisel, he peeled away the skins of many layers of paper. Sodden flakes of it fell to the floor. Beneath the paper was a layer of plaster, cracked here and there, and underneath that some old boarding. As that, too, was picked away, earwigs scuttling down the surface, the Saviour appeared, his robe the bright red of freshly shed blood. All around him was a profusion of ferny vegetation, as though the Lord’s death had made the ground fruitful: the abundant botany of salvation – coils and tendrils, vines and flowers, roses and lilies, acanthus and gillyflowers, and blooms entirely fantastic. The Christ was set between wooden divisions but the painted decoration continued over them and seemed to travel right through the floor, which made Arthur wonder whether or not, at the time of the painting, the chamber had been two storeys or one.
When Arthur uncovered the ground-floor wall he saw that his guess had been correct. Originally, the room had been a single undivided space all the way to the timbered vault ceiling. And he saw much else besides: a great unified spectacle of Christian piety. Down below, pictures of two female saints appeared. St Catherine he recognized from the wheel on which her body remained unbroken and the sword that finished her off. The other woman turned out to be St Margaret; both were set in the burgeoning decorative garden.
The British Museum was called in, though, before he did that, Arthur Lindley uncovered the rest of the vivid imagery that had lain for centuries beneath the boarding and plaster: a Baptism of Christ, with St John wearing a camel’s-hair coat (though not the kind you could buy at Austin Reed). This was the prototype, with actual dromedary attached, the big-eyed face of the animal trailing the ground, looking permanently surprised. There was a winged archangel holding the robe of Jesus; two saints, St Peter and St Clement, each wearing the triple tiara of the Pope. And there was a pietà, the Virgin costumed in the same Piccotts End uniform of red ochre, rather than the usual blue. The body of her son, whom she was holding in her arms, showed puncture wounds, spurting, as was the style, little sprays of blood. Standing back, Arthur tried to take in the full force of the revelation. But this was hard, because, with the exception of the baptized Christ, eyes closed, summarily delineated, every sacred countenance had been de-faced.
It was not difficult to reconstruct when this obliteration had taken place. The ‘pedimented’ or ‘gabled’ headdress of the two female saints dated the painting firmly in the early Tudor period, most likely late fifteenth century. The last decades of Catholic England witnessed a great flowering of Christian imagery at exactly the moment when it was beginning to be attacked by reforming iconoclasts condemning its ‘idolatry’. But most of this imagery – in sculpture and stained glass as well as in painting – decorated churches. Piccotts End was evidence that the appetite for sacred imagery had spilled over into non-ecclesiastical buildings as well. Not that it was separated from the world of Christian piety. The village lay between two pilgrimage sites: that of the first English martyr, St Alban, at the town bearing his name, just six miles off; and, ten miles in the opposite direction at Ashridge, a priory of the Boni Homines, monks who practised the severe rule of St Augustine and who had in their custody a relic of the Sacred Blood of Christ.
This had been given to them in the thirteenth century by a nephew of King Henry III, Edmund, 2nd Earl of Cornwall. In 1247 the King had processed through the streets of London bearing relics which had been passed to him by the Patriarch of Jerusalem in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to persuade Henry to participate in a new crusade. The relics had been divided into three: one remained in Westminster Abbey (the redesign of which became the consuming project of the King’s life); another went to the Cistercian Hailes Abbey in Gloucestershire; and the third to Ashridge, where it became the focus of a fervent east Hertfordshire cult. The cottage at Piccotts End became a lodging house for pilgrims travelling between the two holy sites. The great murals were painted over a thin layer of limewash which covered a wattle-and-daub wall and they looked down on the company of pilgrims as they ate and said their graces and complines.
This was enough to attract the hostility of the reformers of the 1530s, who were busy liquidating monasteries, especially those holding the relics they scorned as profane trickery, maintained to deceive and enslave the credulous. Using the attack on images written by the Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer, Hugh Latimer, newly appointed Bishop of Worcester, and Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, launched a ferocious onslaught on such images around 1536. Henry VIII’s separation from Rome and his elevation to the head of a Church of England meant that this became royal policy. In order to avoid the excesses of destruction that had taken place in Europe, the Ten Articles setting out the core doctrine of the Church of England allowed for the preservation of some images, always provided they were not objects of worship and veneration. The nice distinction proved difficult to uphold, especially in the face of reforming zeal. The gaze of Christ, the Virgin and the saints, simultaneously the look of forgiveness and justice, and the association, at least in the popular mind, of those faces with the working of miracles and intercession for sins, were especially suspect. Beginning in 1536, Thomas Cromwell instigated a campaign against objects and images said to be sacrilegious. Egregious relics such as those of the Holy Blood at Hailes Abbey and the Rood of Boxley, which had movable eyes lit by candles, were prime targets. A propaganda ballad made fun of the rood: ‘He was made to jogle/ His eyes would goggle/ He would bend his eyebrowes and frowne/ With his head he would nod/ Like a young god.’
The figures of the Piccotts End lodging house would almost certainly have been de-faced at some point in this initial attack on pilgrim cults. And it may be that, of all the faces, only that of the baptized Christ was spared, precisely because the Saviour’s eyes are shown closed and thus make no direct engagement with the beholder. Because Henry VIII’s conservatism put the brakes on the most radical destruction of the Reformation, the images, with their de-facings, might have stayed in sight. Without the custom of pilgrims, the lodging house had lost its raison d’être, but it could have survived for a while as a wayside hostelry. It seems likely that the boarding and plastering which sealed up the paintings would have taken place in the second great wave of reform, under Edward VI around 1548, when any surviving images were subject to a more militant iconoclasm. Out came the brushes and the limewash, the plaster and the planks, and one of the great spectacles of pre-Reformation Christian England disappeared into its four-hundred-year sleep.
At exactly the same time that the look of this Christ in Majesty was being de-faced, another look was being devised for English majesty, this time for the monarch who was now God’s deputy in his kingdom. There was a direct connection between these two events. As the de-facings were taking place, Hans Holbein the Younger was commissioned to produce charismatic images of the godlike royal presence. Holbein had been to England before, staying between 1526 and 1528, and had brought his beautiful profile of the learned Erasmus of Rotterdam as a gift for their common friend Thomas More. Holbein’s accomplishments – a supreme talent for rendering the tactile quality of fabrics and the vitality of the human face, and an unerring ability to set figures in dramatic space – were enough to acquire him an important circle of patrons and sitters in London, ranging from the German steelyard merchants among whom he lived to high members of the clergy and, most significantly, the Comptroller of the Royal Household, Henry Guildford, and his wife.
None of this, however, was enough to put him on the royal payroll, and he returned, restively, to Switzerland. When he came back to England in 1532, his old circle of patrons had been whittled away by death, or (in More’s case) by suspicion. Holbein’s alertness to changes in political wind direction did not fail him. A portrait head of Thomas Cromwell, posed in the same three-quarter profile he had used for More but facing left, while his adversary had faced right, was executed in 1534, while Cromwell was Chancellor of the Exchequer and Master of the King’s Jewel House but before he had become Henry’s Principal Secretary. The painting is a study in beady-eyed vigilance; Cromwell’s face set in watchful severity. His left elbow leans on a table on which a handsomely bound book and a letter from Henry VIII rest. His dress, though richly fur-collared, is calculated to speak of modest simplicity. No massive chain of office lies upon his coat, as it had on More’s. He is the very picture of duty.
Holbein was given the prize of the woodcut title page for Miles Coverdale’s English Bible, the first complete translation of both Old and New Testaments. (William Tyndale’s translation, which had been condemned to the flames by Thomas More, had encompassed only the Gospels and half of the Hebrew Bible.) Knowing the Coverdale Bible was as important politically as it was theologically, Holbein made the most of its comprehensiveness, setting images from the Old Testament to the left of the title, while placing those of the New to its right. Thus, Adam and Eve on the left line up with the Resurrected Christ (the Fall with Salvation) on the right; Moses’ tablets of the ‘old’ law on the left with Christ preaching the new, superceding, gospel on the right. Most significantly of all, however, is the image of the enthroned Henry VIII at the foot of the page, handing the book – this very book – to a trio of mitred, kneeling bishops: the unquestionably supreme head of both Church and state.
While the Dissolution of the Monasteries was under way, Holbein was employed in the most spectacular of all Henrician paintings, a vast celebration of the Tudor dynasty, designed for the Privy Chamber at Whitehall Palace. After Cardinal Wolsey’s fall the King had appropriated the sprawling palace and set about remodelling it as a house of royal business and ceremony. It was so designed that the person of the King should be made as inaccessible as possible, except to the chosen few, so that when ambassadors were finally admitted to an inner sanctum they would be properly awed by the royal presence. The figure of Christ in Majesty currently being erased from churches and lodgings like that at Piccotts End, whether shown standing or enthroned, combined divine authority with the knowledge of compassionate sacrifice, embodied, literally, in the tormented and broken person of the crucified Saviour. Henry VIII’s body, as presented by Holbein, was bull-like and Jovian, the King’s legs lengthened, his chest expanded by shoulder-extending, padded costume, to project an aura of massive invincibility.
The painting was lost in the fire which consumed Whitehall Palace in 1698 and is known in its entirety only from a copy made by Remigius van Leemput, commissioned by Charles II in 1667. It shows that, beyond anything else, the painting was meant as a statement of Tudor legitimacy and perpetuation. Behind the King and Queen Jane Seymour, who provided the male heir Henry had been desperately seeking, are depicted his father, Henry VII, and that monarch’s queen, Elizabeth of York: the union which ended the long English civil wars. The portrait of Henry VII was largely recycled from the version painted by an unknown Netherlandish artist in 1505: he looks lean-cheeked, watchful and vaguely learned. But that was a half-length, as were nearly all portraits of English kings when they were not mere head and shoulders (with the exception of Richard II, whose enthroned godlike presence was stationed for a while in Westminster Abbey).
But the beauty of the portrayed Richard II lay in his slender Gothic elegance; angelically ethereal. Holbein’s Henry VIII, known from the artist’s preparatory drawing, or cartoon, is the opposite: a hulking, meaty mass of physical force, posed in a manner completely unprecedented for a king or an emperor. There had been other famous standing figures: Titian’s of the Habsburg Emperor Charles V, for example, – but it was self-contained in its dignity. Henry’s pose was theatrically demonstrative, facing the spectator down, hands on his hips as if threatening an oncoming adversary who might wish him or his realm ill. In this guise he marshalled one of the parental looks to which all children respond: the immovable sturdiness of fatherly protection.
At this particular moment Henry was indeed a father. He was well into his forties, already corpulent, and had taken a bad spill in the tiltyard earlier in 1536 from which neither his gait nor his general health had quite recovered. But Holbein made him the image of virile power and, above all, an unstoppable engine of dynastic generation. The King’s left hand grasps a dagger but, otherwise, none of the customary symbols of royal authority – sword, helmet, sceptre – are there. Instead there is something incomparably mightier: the royal codpiece, imposing and indefatigable, clothing the organ which had produced a prince. The whole composition, in fact, may have been painted to celebrate either the birth of Edward or else the advanced pregnancy of Queen Jane, whose homely, chinless features Holbein had also painted but who seems here to shrink beside the alarming bulk of her husband.
The cartoon shows the King’s face, with its small eyes and withering gaze, in Holbein’s favourite three-quarter profile. But the van Leemput copy of the finished composition has Henry front-facing, and it has been suggested that the change was made in deference to the King’s own wishes, for he took an exacting interest in every aspect of the rebuilding and redecoration of his palaces. There could be no question of anything other than full-face power: the kind of look that would reduce incoming ambassadors and courtiers to a trembling jelly, and which even in the days of the informal and mostly affable Charles II would still send a shiver down the spine of all those entering the Privy Chamber. It was the kind of look which all by itself could decapitate your courage. Behold my codpiece and prepare to die.
The codpiece turned out to be optimistic. None of the three children who succeeded Henry managed to produce heirs. His son Edward VI, whose arrival Holbein’s ‘Greate Peece’ at Whitehall celebrated, died at fifteen, before he could marry and beget a successor. Edward’s elder half-sister Mary, who turned England back to Roman obedience, married Philip II of Spain, but had no children. Although, in the interests of political order and even survival, Philip attempted to contain the more ferociously punitive aspects of Mary’s Counter-Reformation, she pressed on relentlessly with trials, burnings and the restoration of the old cults and images. Devotion to the Virgin Mary, she could not help but believe, would somehow by association make Queen Mary more sympathetic to subjects who were still alienated from her Romanized church. In fact, it served only to mark the contrast between the Madonna’s compassion and merciful intercession for sin and the Queen’s intractable asperity.
On her accession in 1558, Mary’s half-sister, Elizabeth, found herself in the middle of a war of images: between the radical enemies of ‘idolatry’ who had purged the country of pictures in the reign of Edward, and those whose devotion to them had been rekindled by the Marian Counter-Reformation. But one of the many remarkable qualities of the new Queen was her understanding of the psychological need for images by people who did not consider themselves Catholic. In this shrewd attention to image-fascination (rather than veneration), Elizabeth was the truest heir of her father’s conservative pragmatism. As a result, she took her time proscribing the old mystery plays, which, in some places, went on into the 1570s. It was only when an alternative cult – that of herself, the Virgin Queen – had been firmly established in the popular mind as a kind of national religion that she could afford to stamp out the older practices entirely.
Two salient dates in Elizabeth’s life quickly assumed the status of cult festivals: 17 November (her Accession Day) and 7 September (her birthday). The latter was particularly contentious for devotees of the old Catholic calendar, because it coincided with the eve of the celebration of the Virgin’s Ascension, and they suspected, quite rightly, that the Virgin Queen had established the celebration both to pre-empt and absorb the old piety.
Elizabeth, and her alter ego, the indispensable William Cecil, recognized very early on, and with strikingly modern acumen, that portrayal was political, and that control of the royal image was critical to the effectiveness of government. In 1563 Cecil drafted a proclamation which is the first explicit acknowledgement of the importance of managing the image of the Queen, and not allowing it simply to become generated in the public realm, either by devotees or enemies. It had been barely thirty years since Holbein, Cromwell and the King had designed his image, on the assumption that it would stay inaccessible to most of his subjects, at least in its original form. Now, the wording of the proclamation recognized the demand by ‘all sorts of people both noble and mean’ for a likeness of the Queen, both painted and (most significantly) ‘graved’ and thus available for mass circulation. But they must restrain their commendable enthusiasm ‘until some special person that shall by her be allowed, shall first have finished a portraiture thereof, after which finished her Majesty will be content that all other painters and gravers … shall and may at their pleasure follow the said pattern or first portraiture’.
There was, as yet, no single Elizabethan Holbein to supply such an agreed template, certainly not the Flemish artist Hans Eworth, who had served Mary and managed to survive the abrupt change of regime to continue as a portraitist and designer of court masques and allegories. As long as the Queen – and her anxious councillors – were invested in seeking for her a suitable marriage partner, the control of her image insisted on by Cecil did not preclude a natural likeness, for Elizabeth, in her strong-featured way – the slightly hawkish nose inherited from her grandfather; the lustrous copper tresses – was beautiful, at least to any potential suitor not seeking features of demure submission. A few paintings from this period survive, like the full-length ‘Hampden portrait’ from around 1564 attributed to Steven van Herwijck, one of the many Flemish artists working in London at the time, which, in that Netherlandish style, turns the young Queen into a fashion plate, almost swallowed up by sumptuous lengths of scarlet cloth (the best possible advertisement for Flemish dyed textiles), with a drop of crystals and a rope of pearls descending from her high-collared throat, down through her stomacher and almost to the hem of her skirt. Van Herwijck and the unknown but probably foreign painter who produced the last portrait recording the natural features of the Queen (ropes of pearls about her bodice and a costume of gold and white), both had to navigate the tricky passage between nubile woman and royal mannequin. But they were up against that face, with its uncompromising, angular severity; lips pursed in an attitude legible either as royal pride or merely the irritable impatience the Queen was known to have for sittings (and much else).
Nicholas Hilliard, the miniaturist who, with his pupil Isaac Oliver, was to come closest to establishing an Elizabethan iconography, described with wonderful vividness the nerve-racking experience of a first encounter with the Queen. Like Churchill long after, Elizabeth was an opinionated sitter but, unlike him, she was not going to leave anything on trust, especially to a twenty-something miniature painter (however well commended). Before he got his pencil out, Elizabeth made it categorically clear she didn’t care for chiaroscuro, for exaggerated lights and darks:
[A]fter showing me how she noticed great difference of shadowing in the works and diversity of drawers of sundry nations and that the Italians, who had the name to be cunningest and to draw best, shadowed not, requiring of me the reason of it, seeing that best to show oneself needeth no shadow of place, but rather the open light. To which I granted … Here her Majesty … chose her place to sit in for the purpose in the open alley of a goodly garden, where no tree was near, nor any shadow at all, save that as the Heaven is lighter than the earth …
Elizabeth’s ‘curious demand’, Hilliard added, ‘hath greatly bettered my judgement’. Why, to be sure! But he did in fact produce miniatures of dazzling, jewel-like clarity and brilliance, and this is not surprising, since his background was that of a goldsmith. As for the Queen herself and Cecil, Mary’s Counter-Reformation had been painful for the Protestant Hilliards. Young Nicholas had been sent to Geneva, returning only in 1559, when Elizabeth succeeded to the throne. So he was one English artist who would celebrate Accession Day every year with wholehearted sincerity. In London, Hilliard was apprenticed to Robert Brandon, the royal goldsmith, and worked in the neighbourhood of their company. Miniatures – watercolour on vellum, applied with the finest squirrel-hair brushes – were beginning to be popular among the aristocracy. But miniatures of the Queen painted in the 1570s, along with medallions, had special value as expressions of loving loyalty that could be pocketed, worn and displayed wherever the owner went. The year 1570 saw a Bull of excommunication issued against Elizabeth by the militant Counter-Reformation Pope Pius V. Henceforth, all true sons and daughters of Rome were released from allegiance. This meant not only that they could, but that they ought to become rebels against the heretic Queen. Were a party to bring about her death, he would find special favour in the eyes of the Church. In the circumstances, with the Queen’s very life in hazard, her likenesses on medals and miniatures – or, best of all, both, combined in cunningly articulated small objects – became a personal statement of defiant allegiance; a passion taken to the point of true love. And she was termagant on Tuesday, flirt on Wednesday, warrior on Thursday, goddess on Friday, so very easy to love. A portrait of the courtier Sir Christopher Hatton by an unknown artist shows him with a cameo of the Queen wound about his hand and wrist.
The proliferation of Elizabethan portraits from the 1570s onwards coincided with the receding of any realistic prospect of her marrying (though the hopes of the Duc d’Anjou staggered on until 1582). The image-makers – Hilliard, Oliver and the Flemish artists Lucas de Heere and Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger – responded, together with the poets, by making the best of what they had: the Virgin Queen who had professed early in her reign she would be content to stay that way. Thus she became, in the words of her motto, semper eadem, always the same, unchanged by fleshly union; married only to her people (though actually it had been Mary who, when confronted by the unpopularity of her Spanish union, insisted with a show of a ring that her ‘first marriage’ was to her subjects alone). Now the body politic took over entirely from the body natural; indeed, the latter had been sacrificed to the former. One of the formal, mask-like paintings included a pelican, which, by tearing its breast to feed its young, demonstrated the sacrifice of the body. This was but one of the emblems taken from the sacred iconography of the Virgin Mary: others recycled for the Virgin Queen were the rose, the pearl, lilies, moons and stars.
Face painting depended on the painting of the face. Though Elizabeth’s naked face was increasingly concealed behind her Mask of Beauty, heavy cosmetics were still applied to sustain its perfection: potions and lotions to cleanse the complexion and disguise freckling – asses’ milk, cherries and berries, honey and rosewater; and, to achieve the absolute whiteness needed by the Queen as she became old, terrifying, multilayered concoctions of chalky pastes that could take hours to apply before she could be revealed to the court.
Elizabeth was on her way to becoming England’s first national fetish: face disappeared inside its formulaic mask; a body encrusted both with gems and symbolic meanings; the whole persona giving off an aura of potent magic: the sovereign as sorceress of Albion. The face of the fetish was as pale as the moon and, like all deities, impervious to the ravages of time. At its most artful, Renaissance portraiture – in the faces painted by Lorenzo Lotto, Giambattista Moroni or indeed Hans Holbein – was all about tangible presence; the uncanny detail: a curl of hair hanging over a brow; the catchlight in a pair of eyes; the set of a mouth – cumulatively giving the viewer the feeling that they were sharing the room with such and such a person, or even that the looking face was on the point of speaking. But Elizabeth’s portraits were meant to create distance, an unapproachable remoteness, the veil of mystery which, on selective occasions, could be parted to reveal tantalizing glimpses of the actual woman. Thus her body politic, if not her body natural, lived in a sacred space positioned somewhere between womanly warmth and lunar frost.
For most of her reign the Queen kept herself very much to herself, retreating within the inner sanctum of Hampton Court, Whitehall, Greenwich or, towards the end, Hatfield House, the residence of Robert Cecil. But remoteness was calculated to make her public appearances, when they happened, correspondingly more exciting and precious. There she was at the Tilts on her Accession Day; there again on St George’s Day, when the Knights of the Garter processed in public, admired by throngs of spectators. Most adventurous and carefully stage-managed were the periodic progresses around the country (within a reasonable radius), expressly orchestrated for the goddess-monarch to show herself to her subjects. Her features would have been known from engraved versions and from the frontispieces to books, including the Bishops’ Bible. But when Elizabeth appeared in person the effect could be stupefying. In a famous encounter in the summer of 1572, at Warwick, the larynx of the local dignitary assigned to welcome the Queen seized up in terror, and in one account Elizabeth took the opportunity to exercise the common touch, her aspect as tender-hearted mother of the ‘loving people’, as she called the English in her speeches. ‘Come hither, Little Recorder,’ she was reported to have said. ‘It was told me you would be afraid to look upon me or speak so boldly, but you are not so afraid of me as I was of you and I thank you for putting me in mind of my duty and that should be in me.’
For all her hatred of shadow, Elizabeth could not stop the advancing dimness of age. But her portraits compensated by showing her as the regal source of light. The ‘Ditchley portrait’, where she appears as the banisher of stormy darkness, probably painted by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, commemorated an elaborate entertainment laid on for the Queen at the estate of Sir Henry Lee near Oxford. Lee had been the Queen’s Champion at the Accession Day Tilts, an occasion he himself had devised, but retired from the office in 1590 at the age of fifty-seven. For his retirement pageant, John Dowland set to music a poem by George Peele, ‘His Golden Locks Time Hath to Silver Turned’. The poetic conceit was that Lee had retired ‘hermit-like’ to Ditchley, but, unlike a hermit, he openly lived with his mistress, Anne Vavasour, by whom he had an illegitimate child. The Queen, increasingly prim in her own advancing years, was said to be displeased, and it may have been to restore himself to her favour, if not to the court’s, that Lee staged his entertainment. The scale was so lavish and spectacular that the cost nearly ruined him, and he became the butt of the sneerers when he declined to repeat it some years later. The picture, however, remained unprecedented in its union of monarchy and geography, for Elizabeth’s reign also saw the production of detailed maps of the kingdom. Elizabeth stands with her feet planted on Ditchley, the giantess-goddess of her dominions, the personification of England. Behind her left shoulder a tempest rages, struck by bolts of lightning. But the storm loses force in her majestic presence. Over her right shoulder sunlit clouds are parting and the sky is coloured the cerulean blue of peace. An inscription acclaims her as the ‘Prince of Light’.
The theme of royal radiance gets its consummation in the prodigious ‘Rainbow portrait’, possibly painted by Isaac Oliver for Robert Cecil and still in his spectacular mannerist palace of Hatfield House. Elizabeth has become sun as well as moon. Her hair (or rather her wig) is brilliant with the red-gold of its benign rays, which form themselves into the streaming tresses falling over her shoulders. The colour is repeated on the silk lining of her cape, and on her skirts. The rainbow she grasps is the sacred sign of hope and peace, the promise of a second golden age. But without the sun-queen, there is no peace and no light. Non sine sole iris.
But this is just the principal element in the stupendous visual encyclopaedia of symbols swarming over the picture without, somehow, choking it to death. Can an old girl (in her sixties) have too many pearls? Not this one. They drop from her throat over the bosom exposed by the deep décolletage fashionable around 1600 and from which all signs of crêpey wrinkling were of course banished. No visible body part is left unpearled. Ropes of them hang about both wrists; they glow from the trim of her robes; festoon the edging of the gossamer outer ruff encircling her head; a pearly threesome depends from her left ear; a circlet of them sits atop her hair with two monster pearls set apart by a square-cut diamond; they climb all the way to the top of her fantastical headpiece, curved like the horns of an ibex, and further still again, up to its very pinnacle.
Queen Elizabeth I, ‘The Rainbow Portrait’: detail
Radiance nourishes everything: the field of spring wild flowers – pansies, carnations and roses – that riot on her bodice. On her left arm the serpent of wisdom catches a heart-shaped ruby. The queen-goddess’s heart is ruled by her head. And her coat is covered with an astonishing pattern of eyes and ears, signifying her omniscient attention to the care of her subjects (not least by the institution of an intelligence service). But less noticed by commentators are open mouths clustered near the base of her rope of pearls, as well as on the opened left side of her golden coat. These are the organs of renown; a fame seen, attended to, spoken of, the wide world over.
And yet there was, for some of her subjects at least, a craving for simplicity. For someone around 1600 commissioned a copy of the first portrait of Elizabeth as Queen, painted at the time of her coronation in 1559, and to celebrate it. It is quite obviously an adaptation of the large portrait of Richard II displayed in Westminster Abbey. Elizabeth, like Richard, is depicted frontally, ceremoniously; like him, enthroned and holding as he does the orb in one hand and the sceptre in the other. Her undressed locks proclaim her virginity. They are scarcely grown up, these two: the lad-king and the maiden queen. But one knew how to inhabit the body politic with ruthless understanding, and one did not. ‘Know ye not that I am Richard II?’ an angry Elizabeth is supposed to have said after hearing that the rebellious Earl of Essex had staged a performance of Shakespeare’s play of deposition as a morale booster for his comrades. But the truth is she was not. Beneath the mask operated one of the most formidable political intelligences ever to have ruled in England. She knew what power lay with the royal stare. But she also knew that image was not everything.
