1. The ‘Rainbow’ portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, c. 1600, attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. Elizabeth’s golden cloak is decorated with the eyes and ears of her attentive subjects. The art historian Sir Roy Strong notes an early seventeenth-century verse by Henry Peacham:
Be serv’d with eyes, and listening ears of those,
Who can from all parts give intelligence
To gall his foe, or timely to prevent
At home his malice, and intendiment.
2. The union of the royal houses of Lancaster and York, bringing peace out of civil war, from an engraving of 1589 by Jodocus Hondius. The great Tudor rose is topped by the crown imperial of the Tudor monarchs.
3. Four expensively dressed men of high rank play the popular card game of primero. Not all games were conducted in grand society. One Elizabethan writer on dice play, Gilbert Walker, warned his readers against the taverns and gaming houses that would have been familiar to the spies and intelligencers of London: ‘now such is the misery of our time, and such the licentious outrage of idle misgoverned persons’.
4. The rack, used here to torment a Protestant in the reign of Queen Mary I, from John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.
5. Sir Francis Walsingham, c. 1585, attributed to John De Critz the Elder.
6. Anthony Babington and his gentleman accomplices, from a late seventeenth-century engraving, accompanied by the verse: ‘Here Babington and all his desperate band / Ready prepar’d for royal murder stand’.
7. The reverberations of treason: Catholic conspiracies from Elizabeth I’s reign to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, from Popish Plots and Treasons, engraved in the late seventeenth century.
8. William Parry’s attempt to kill Elizabeth I in 1584, from a later engraving. This is an imaginative fiction: Parry never drew his dagger on the queen, though according to his co-conspirator Edmund Nevylle it was his preferred weapon: ‘“As for a dag [pistol]”, said Parry, “I care not: my dagger is enough.”’
9. The Heneage Jewel, c. 1595, a locket of enamelled gold set with diamonds and rubies. The portrait of Elizabeth I is by Nicholas Hilliard. The locket bears the inscription ‘Hei mihi quod tanto virtus perfusa decore non habet eternos inviolata dies’: ‘Alas, that so much virtue suffused with beauty should not last for ever inviolate’.
10. Mary Queen of Scots as a young woman, c. 1560, by François Clouet. Later images of Mary were heavily influenced by what Catholics saw as her martyrdom.
11. Mary Queen of Scots’s prayer book and rosary, now in Arundel Castle. Objects owned (or most often believed to be owned) by the Queen of Scots have always had a special significance for those who see her as a victim of Elizabeth’s tyranny.
12. A letter in cipher of 1585 or 1586 produced by Thomas Phelippes, Sir Francis Walsingham’s expert on codes and ciphers, as evidence of Mary Queen of Scots’s secret treasonable correspondence. Phelippes patiently gathered the papers that sent Mary to the executioner’s block at Fotheringhay Castle.
13. The effigy of Elizabeth I, wearing the Tudor crown imperial even in death, from her tomb in the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey.
