Bountiful maiden or Virgin Queen: The many faces of Elizabeth I paint a compelling portrait
Elizabeth I forged her own myth through portraiture, as a new exhibition at the Philip Mould Gallery in London reveals.
The Virgin Queen, the breaker of the Armada, the ruler with transatlantic ambitions: Elizabeth I knew how to project power through her portraits. Yet, before she became Gloriana, before she forged her own myth, she was a princess of uncertain standing — her place at her father’s Court dependent on his moods and whims — as well as a precocious scholar and gifted linguist who perhaps was even, to use a period-inappropriate word, a little nerdy.
Giving no sign of the forceful monarch she would become, she peers demurely, almost shyly, from a portrait made in about 1546, when she was 13, which will be on show in a Tudor portraiture exhibition at the Philip Mould Gallery, ‘Elizabeth I: Queen and Court’.
Mould has long been passionate about 16th-century English portraits and, after the success of a previous show on Tudor and Jacobean miniatures, he decided to return to the period this summer. Collectors responded enthusiastically to his trumpet call and he has managed to bring back under his gallery’s roof about 20 portraits from one of the greatest moments of Britain’s past. ‘It has felt like being the director of a play, with all these characters arriving through their agents — and now they’re all here to perform for three months in one great play.’ (Appropriately, the portrait of Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain who was Shakespeare’s patron — whence The Lord Chamberlain’s Men — will be on display).
Wisdom, unity between the Roses, love and, above all, royal power are expressed in the astonishing 1560s Hampden Portrait of Elizabeth I, now believed to be by George Gower.
At the heart of the exhibition lies a series of paintings that, as Mould puts it, ‘creates a chronology of Elizabeth I’s monarchical persona’, tracing the progression of how she presented herself. The 1546 portrait is only one of two recorded images of her as a princess — the other is in the Royal Collection — and was possibly painted for her father, Henry VIII. ‘Then,’ says Mould, ‘we were able to call back from a collector something really thrilling and extremely curious: the first image of Elizabeth as Queen, done in about 1558. It’s one of a group of portraits, but this is the most distinguished and arguably the primary work, so much so that it bears a name. It’s called the Clopton Elizabeth, after the Clopton family of Stratford-upon-Avon.’ (This picture, too, has a Shakespearean connection in that it hung in a house the Bard later bought, although whether the playwright ever saw it remains unknown).
Wrapped in an ermine collar — a symbol of both royalty and purity — with the Mirror of France, a large pendant that had belonged to her father, hanging from her neck, the Clopton Elizabeth has a hint of a smile on her face, but still looks almost tentative in her queenhood. ‘She is introspective, in contrast to the massively theatrical images of the later period. She’s got a prayer book in her hand and looks more like a virtuous academic than she does a reigning monarch.’
In the Clopton Elizabeth, the young monarch clasps a prayer book, offsetting the regal ermine and her father's huge Mirror of France pendant. She is portrayed as both a ruler and a scholar.
However, it didn’t take long for the Queen and her circle to realise that she should make art work to her advantage. ‘Much as her father, Henry VIII, had Holbein, she needed an image-maker who could bring some of the richness and tricks of the Renaissance in presenting her,’ notes Mould. In the early 1560s, this probably came in the form of George Gower, to whom is now attributed the first full-length picture of the Queen, the Hampden Portrait, previously thought to be the work of Steven van der Meulen.
It is a triumph of symbolism: Elizabeth I stands in a richly embroidered Lancastrian red dress — a (Yorkist) white chemisette peeking through the slits of her sleeves, an armillary sphere, emblem of wisdom, hanging from her waist and a carnation, representing love, in one hand — against a cloth-of-gold hanging, beyond which opens a forest of fruit. ‘This is a picture about nubility, about fertility,’ explains Mr Mould. ‘After she had had the smallpox, people thought she was infertile and she gave a speech to the House of Lords talking about being fertile and bountiful. We think this is what all that fruit refers to in the portrait: this is a proclamation of availability and suitability for marriage.’
Of course, Elizabeth I would then go on to disappoint both foreign and domestic suitors, never marrying nor bearing a child, and this led to a new phase in her iconography, which is encapsulated in the last portrait of the Queen presented in the exhibition, dating from the 1590s. ‘In it, she transcends the human form and becomes a virgin goddess. She takes the persona of Astraea, who’s a goddess of the Golden Age [an imagined time in the ancient Greek past, when there was no evil in the world], but is [also] partly evoking the cult of the Virgin Mary before the Reformation. Certainly, we now have, in a very broad sense, an almost mystical, spiritual figure, who is the Virgin Queen.’
At the height of her powers in the 1590s, Elizabeth I has become the image, her face tiny against the splendour of her attire.
Orbiting around her like planets to the sun were her courtiers who, taking a cue from Elizabeth I, also fashioned their own identity through portraiture. Looking at the Queen from across the Mould gallery will be pictures of her favourites, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester — his eyes piercing above a glorious moustache in a portrait made in the 1560s — and the ill-fated Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, painted by the workshop of Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger in the late 1590s, only a few years before he would lose his head having rebelled in 1601 after his disastrous campaign to quell an Irish rebellion.
The Earl of Essex is a lesson in how ruthless the Queen could be if you fell foul of her — as is another, lesser-known man, John Stubbs, whose portrait is also included in the exhibition. ‘He was a Puritan who dared question Elizabeth I’s machinations,’ says Mould. In a pamphlet entitled The Discovery of a Gaping Gulf whereunto England is like to be swallowed by another French Marriage, if the Lord forbid not the banns by letting her Majesty see the sin and punishment thereof, Stubbs railed against the negotiations for the nuptials between the 46-year-old queen and the much younger, Catholic Francis, Duke of Anjou, brother of Henry III of France. Although Elizabeth I might only have been playing her usual engagement game, with no intention of marrying her ‘frog’, as she fondly called Francis, she didn’t take Stubbs’s words kindly and ordered his hand cut off for ‘seditious writing’. Yet, as the sentence was being carried out, notes Mould, ‘he said “God bless the Queen,” then fainted: there still was a strong element of connection and loyalty’.
It’s easy to see why Stubbs would remain devoted to the Queen — and why she still grips the collective imagination to this day: ‘She was a most remarkable woman,’ believes Mould. ‘She managed to weave her way to survive, by taking no husband or consort, by keeping everyone guessing. After a long period of great turmoil in England with the Wars of the Roses, she oversaw an era of affluence and development, both culturally and economically. She is a very compelling figure with a complex iconography, which makes her today still extraordinarily appealing and enigmatic.
