Elizabeth I: Reputations
The Ditchley Portrait, painted in 1592 by Marcus Gheeraerts The Younger, was commissioned by, and produced for, Sir Henry Lee. Lee was the Queen’s Champion from 1559–90. Ditchley, near Oxfordshire, was also the residence of Lee, where in an effort to reconcile certain contradictions that had arisen between himself and Elizabeth he proffered a performance of elaborate displays of homage to her. The Ditchley Portrait was one such token of his esteem which also served to commemorate the event.
As though to acknowledge her champion’s devotion, the portrait sees Elizabeth standing on the county of Oxford. However, Gheeraert’s portrayal constitutes themes consistent with earlier portraits of Elizabeth, intended, as many of them were, to bolster both her image and status. Typically adorned by rows of pearls, for example, here she once again affirms her chastity and reputation of ‘The Virgin Queen’ (as she came to be widely known). Additionally, her complexion is characteristically white/alabaster — yet another imaginal feature used to symbolise those considered to be innocent/unblemished at heart.
The inclusion of Latin inscriptions is, as it were, further proof of Elizabeth’s piety: ‘She gives and does not expect’; ‘She can but does not take revenge’. In other words, much like The Virgin Mary, from whom certain religious characteristics were cribbed to craft a similar, iconic image of Elizabeth, the latter was also seen to possess the divine powers of forgiveness and clemency: “The identification of Elizabeth with the Virgin Mary, which developed in the mid-1570s, was very effective in encouraging loyalty to the queen.” (Levin: 1994). The use of Latin is instructive in a further sense, since it has almost always been used to assert biblical authority.
These are just some of the characteristics that came to be associated with the so-called ‘cult of Elizabeth’ — i.e. an image of Elizabeth and her body-politic which became popular in the public imagination from the 1930’s onwards. However, recent historians such as Doran and Freeman have argued that this is something of a misconception, noting for instance that Elizabeth was at one time during her reign amenable, if only potentially, to marriage.
The Hampden Portrait (c. 1563), for example, features a much younger, fertile-looking Elizabeth markedly distinct from later portrayals. Other examples have also cast doubt on Elizabeth’s reputations: “… there was no systematic presentation of Elizabeth as a virgin queen before the 1580s, but thereafter allusions to her virginity dominated her representation in miniatures and recurred frequently in court paintings.” (Doran and Freeman: 2003).
Were we to consider Elizabeth purely in the lights of her latter-day reign and the saintly virtues attributed to her by both her contemporaries and later historians alike, there would be little cause to question her iconic reputations. But this presents too cosy and neat an image. Yes, Elizabeth was first and foremost a monarch, bound by the obligations and duties intrinsic to that custom. And while she may have convinced many a mind that she had the heart of a man and that she was not afraid of anything, she was nevertheless a woman who understood the world and the realities in which she lived.
Elizabeth was often painfully aware of her humanness and the fragilities peculiar to all. The lessons of her own family history sufficed to teach her that, given the right circumstances and enough dissenting voices, even a royal could meet a sudden death. It is in this final analysis that the medieval historian, Helen Castor, sought to apprehend her in Elizabeth I: A Study In Insecurity: “Her intellect is clear in every surviving word she ever wrote or spoke. Infinitely less clear is the emotional burden or subtext of what she said, hidden as it always was behind the carapace of a carefully constructed public self.” (Castor: 2018).
The reputations of Elizabeth depend on the lenses through which we choose to view her. The contention that she failed to realise the military prowess of her male predecessors only undermines her if she is weighed on the scales of conquest. But that she ruled for nearly half a century, during which time she managed to maintain relative peace and harmony, arguably places her among some of the most magnanimous figures in history.
References:
Castor. H. Elizabeth I: A Study In Insecurity (Penguin Books, 2018)
Doran, S. and Freeman, T. The myth of Elizabeth (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003)
Levin, C. The heart and stomach of a king: Elizabeth I and the politics of sex and power (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1994)
