by Lisa Hilton
The first English queen to undergo a coronation ceremony was Judith, the daughter of the French king Charles the Bald, who in 856 married Aethelwulf, King of the West Saxons. She was consecrated by the Bishop of Reims, who placed a diadem on her head and “formally conferred on her the title of Queen, which was something not customary before then.” The latest crowning of an English monarch, that of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, was not in essence so very different from the ninth-century rite celebrated in a field in northern France. Consecration and coronation were what set the monarch apart. We can glimpse something of the moment Elizabeth I experienced in its replication in the coronation of Elizabeth II, when the Abbey was filled with a heart-stopping radiance of lifted gems. As she looked down from the dais, Elizabeth saw a silvered sea of proud English loyalty, at this moment of her apotheosis. She was queen. From now until her death, Elizabeth would be unique, sacred, magical.
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FOR ELIZABETH, AS FOR all Renaissance rulers, the concept of “magnificence” was central to her self-presentation. Discussed by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, it was defined as a virtue, “an attribute of expenditures of the kind which we call honorable.” Magnificence could not be the province of the poor, since their limited means prevented them from dispensing large sums “fittingly,” but “great expenditure is becoming to those who have suitable means … for all these things will bring them greatness and prestige.” In the Rhetoric, Aristotle lists magnificence and liberality among the constituents of virtue, while Cicero, in De inventione, discusses the idea in relation to the four cardinal virtues—justice, courage, temperance, and prudence—as applied to the sovereign dignity of rulers. These were writers whom Elizabeth spent her childhood discussing and translating with her tutors Ascham and Grindal, but even had her education been less rigorous, the visual and sensual world in which she grew up consistently reinforced the importance of dress, architecture, music and entertainment, and precious objects as crucial components of status. Magnificent display communicated authority and power; it was a form of government and, in the case of anointed monarchs, of the mystical connection with their divine right to rule. As her reign progressed, when Elizabeth walked or rode among her people, she did so as a goddess. The refined classical allusions with which her courtierpoets dazzled were not available to any but a small minority of her subjects, and while the seemingly endless conjurings of the queen as Diana, Venus, Astraea, or Belphoebe served varying symbolic requirements within the coterie of the elite throughout her reign, her status, her magnificenza, was signaled to the majority in a more immediately accessible sensual and visual fashion.
For a start, she was clean. The famously reported remark that Elizabeth I took a bath every three months “whether she needed one or no” belies the fact that she was quite scrupulous about hygiene, bathing regularly in warm scented water and making use of the up-to-date bathrooms installed in several of her palaces. Perfumes created an important associative connection, and while the sixteenth century was in general an unbelievably filthy time by modern standards, Elizabeth’s immediate environment was a fragrant one. There was a strong perceived link between not only odor and health but morality, and washing was a key mark of gentility. Elizabeth and her courtiers used aquamaniles, specially shaped vessels for pouring water over the hands on formal occasions, scented with different perfumes according to the season—“Saracen ointment” was used in autumn, for example, and in winter, myrrh. Elizabeth used “Spanish soap,” which had been introduced by a much earlier queen, Eleanor of Castile, a fashionable mixture of salted wood ash and scent. Also available were scented mouth pastilles to sweeten the breath, oils, and “pommes” (balls made from powdered gum decorated with gold, which released their scent in the warmth of the hands). Her clothing, bed linens, and the cushions on which she would recline on the floor among her ladies were scented with lavender and spices, while perfume was burned in metal pans to scent her rooms. The queen’s chamber made use of two pounds of orris root for this purpose in six months alone in 1564. Even Elizabeth’s fires used heavily scented woods such as juniper and apple, as well as herbs. All this not only created a special, perhaps slightly intoxicating aura around the queen, but, for many, recalled the scent of churches—the ruler and the altar smelled the same.
Even after the brutal depredations of the Edwardine Reformation, church was the only place where many people had access to delicious scents, vivid colors, and rich fabrics. Elizabeth’s spiritual association with Marianism has been much discussed, but for those lucky enough to catch a glimpse of her, this association was also visual. Many of the “popish” trappings of Catholicism so despised by the reformers had begun, initially at least, as simple sensory messages to congregations which were largely illiterate and unable to understand the Latin in which services were conducted. Golden chalices, incense, or the beautiful blue of the precious lapis lazuli paint used to depict the Virgin’s cloak reinforced the sanctity of holy space. As they disappeared, the appearance of the governing class, most of all the queen, acquired a concomitant importance. The right to govern had always been imposed through the eyes; now its spiritual dimension could be arrogated to the clothing and trappings of the powerful.
IN THE SIXTEENTH century, you were what you wore. Clothes conveyed an immediate message of rank, and sumptuary laws, which governed the quality of materials to be worn by different classes of society, attempted—often with limited success—to enforce social order sartorially. Cloth was extremely precious, not just the tapestries which fluttered from the walls in elite homes but clothes themselves—even the saddlecloths of horses had a measured value which could pinpoint status to the contemporary eye. Sumptuary legislation claimed to be protecting people from themselves; for example, Henry VIII’s 1533 act was promulgated against “costly apparel” which contributed to the “utter impoverishment and undoing of many light persons inclined to pride, the mother of all vices.”1 Under Elizabeth, the aristocracy fought a rearguard action with clothing, determined to protect their privileges from the increasingly wealthy gentry and mercantile classes, thus Elizabeth made use of magistrates to enforce her Acts of Apparel, which imposed such proscriptions as forbidding velvet or satin to anyone under the degree of baron. Not just the quality of fabric but the style of its cut was censured—certain fashions were seen as the exclusive prerogative of the higher ranks, hence the unfortunate man arrested in Blackfriars in 1565 for sporting “a very monstrous and outrageous great pair of hose.”2 In 1597, Elizabeth issued a precise proclamation on the subject of silk, gold, and silver lace, but by then the craze for fashionable clothing was too deeply entrenched, and the acts were repealed in 1604.
Elizabeth’s tutor Roger Ascham had appealed in The Schoolmaster in 1570 against “outrage in apparel,” arguing that the court ought to set an example, but this was one injunction of her old master that Elizabeth was delighted to ignore. Not only did Elizabeth love clothes but the logic of the sumptuary laws and the requirements of princely magnificence practically obliged her to be as extravagant as possible. Perhaps Elizabeth was aware of Alexandra Piccolimini’s fashion guide, Raffaella, published in 1540, which gave tips to women on how to use dress to make the best of themselves. Raffaella advised women to accentuate their best points—if they had fine hands, for example, they should show them off by putting on and drawing off elegant gloves, a technique Elizabeth was certainly noted as displaying. Raffaella also warned of dressing in styles which were too young—God could more easily pardon youthful frivolity, but in old age “loss and shame” could result from overly fashionable attire. This advice Elizabeth also gleefully ignored. Her first pair of high-heeled shoes was ordered when she was sixty-two, and she possessed more than three thousand dresses, in the most refined and exotic fabrics—damask, silk, and velvet from Italy; luxuriant furs; and, perhaps the greatest if simplest signifier of standing, the freshest, purest linen.
Linen was worn next to the skin, for comfort and hygiene, as clothes could rarely be wa
shed, though a form of “dry cleaning” using ingredients such as ash and pumice was employed. From 1561, Elizabeth wore silk stockings, along with her stiff whalebone stays and the farthingale, the support for her skirts. It changed shape over the years from the conical Spanish style to the boxy French, which stuck out from the hips, then the wheel-shaped “great farthingale.” Huge skirts were another signifier of status, as it took training to manage them gracefully, but they were also an easy target for moralists. They denounced “these bottle arsed bums,” which they associated with continental, hence Catholic, fashions for their “papery and devilishness.” (Ironically, the devout Protestants who over the century became known as “Puritans” adopted the most “Catholic” style of all, the simple black and white costumes of the “Spanish” style.) John Knox, never one to miss an opportunity for deriding womankind, complained that female rulers disturbed the order of nature with their “gorgeous apparel,” which was “abominable and odious.” The complaint was as old as the hills—Eleanor of Aquitaine had been denounced in the twelfth century for wearing earrings, long linen headdresses, and fur-trimmed trains, but as Elizabeth’s reign progressed, women were also, interestingly, criticized for adopting masculine styles—men’s beaver hats, doublet-like bodices with padded shoulders, and ruffs, a disturbingly subversive trend which was “stinking before the face of God and offensive to man.”
The ruff, perhaps the garment which most of all signifies “Elizabethan,” drove Puritans like Philip Stubbes, in his 1583 Anatomy of Abuses, into a lacy froth of fury. Ruffs were extremely high-maintenance and practically functionless, having no purpose but decoration and requiring damp linen to be set in place with heated wands at “starching houses,” which were introduced in the 1560s (and which soon acquired a reputation as pick-up joints, rather like the milliners’ shops of Victorian London). Three proclamations were issued against “outrageous” ruffs, but the trend grew ever more elaborate; to Stubbes’s horror, ruffs were decorated with silk and laced with gold and silver, “they goeth flip flap in the wind like rags that flew abroad, lying upon their shoulders like the dishclout of a slut.”3
Elizabeth’s dresses and accessories were not only beautiful, precious, and defiantly extravagant; they were also alive with meaning. The three thousand dresses in her possession at her death formed “a moving billboard of advertisement and signification.”4 Emblems—roses, fleurs-de-lis, pomegranates, fountains, serpents—made her dresses a rustling, stirring tableau vivant. Sometimes this could be subversive, as in the masculine fashions of the 1570s, when Elizabeth set the trend for doublets and jerkins commissioned from her tailor, William Whittell. Queens who transgressed gendered dress codes had been severely censured in the past (Eleanor of Aquitaine was the scandal of Europe in the twelfth century for donning breeches and riding astride), and it is interesting that Elizabeth chose to adopt these fashions—admittedly very flattering—during the period when her diplomatic courtships were coming to an end. Masculine styling repositioned her from a marriageable woman to a martial prince. Official portraits, meanwhile, disseminated both obvious and subtle allegorical messages. The Rainbow Portrait of 1600–1603 features a golden pearl-bordered cloak decorated with ears and eyes, a clear and slightly disturbing reference to Elizabeth’s all-seeing authority (and, perhaps, to those in the know, to the “spiery” which had kept the queen safe so long). The motto makes it apparent:
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.
On her left sleeve coils a serpent, a symbol of wisdom, associated with prudence, but also, perhaps, an intriguing reference to Elizabeth’s descent, via her great-grandmother Elizabeth Woodville, from the mythological serpent-goddess Melusina. Edward IV’s queen was the daughter of Jacquetta St. Pol, who in turn was descended from French counts of Lusignan, whose blood mingled with that of the house of York. The Lusignans claimed Melusina as an ancestress, a magical serpent woman whose story winds back into the legends of the Crusader kings of the French Holy Land, Outremer. Melusina was the protectress of the Lusignans, and the association in the fifteenth century led to both Elizabeth Woodville and her mother being accused of witchcraft. That Elizabeth should be invoking such an association can only be speculation, but it would fit intriguingly with the mysticism of the portrait, as an allusion to the dynastic power of Elizabeth’s maternal ancestors.
IN SHAKESPEARE’S LATE play A Winter’s Tale, an aging queen, Hermione, protects herself by becoming her own statue, transforming herself into her own image. In the 1998 film Elizabeth, much is made of the moment when the queen, played by Cate Blanchett, paints on the official “mask” so familiar from the portraits, as a symbol of her renunciation of love and her dedication to the realm. Elizabeth’s make-up was an essential and very effective part of her image, and though its application was not quite the moment of operatic climax it appears in the film, it was nonetheless an authoritative, even a subversive statement. By using make-up so openly, Elizabeth was playing upon the cultural conventions of her era and redefining herself in terms of the perceived relationship among women, nature, and art.
The debate over the relative superiority of nature and artifice was very much a Renaissance preoccupation, and again it was one with which Elizabeth was familiar. Essentially, the Aristotelian view was that art could, at best, only imitate nature, as opposed to the Platonic conception that art could produce superior creations to those found naturally. The debate was gendered in that the Aristotelian model privileged the masculine as superior to the “natural” feminine, and the Platonic posited a “masculine” freedom of form (art) over “feminine” matter (nature). A degree of synthesis between these two philosophical matrices was formulated by Thomas Aquinas, who saw nature as an intermediary between the creations of the human and the divine. The two most significant writers on the subject of Elizabeth’s day, Philip Sidney and George Puttenham, thus allied art with both the masculine and the divine. For Sidney in the Apology, the poet is “not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her [nature’s] gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of her own wit,” while for Puttenham, in the 1585 Art of English Poesie, the poet improves “the causes where she is impotent and defective.” Both writers propose that the artist is more “virile” than nature herself, transcending the confines of biology to “create” in a divine fashion.
A different view was taken by the thirteenth-century feminist writer Christine de Pisan. That Elizabeth had some awareness of Christine’s work has been suggested by several scholars, as an inventory of Henry VIII shows her to have been in possession, aged fourteen, of a collection of tapestries (now lost) which illustrated Christine’s most celebrated work, The City of Ladies. The book was translated in 1521 and the manuscript was recorded at Henry’s court, but Elizabeth herself never mentioned Christine, though the potential influence of the text is intriguing, as it details the lives of significant queens and offers theories on how to resist misogyny. In another work, the Vision, Christine suggested a united model of nature and art, using the image of nature as a cook who feeds Chaos, forming and directing matter; rather than opposing art, nature can absorb both female biology and female intellectual endeavor. The queen’s use of make-up can be interpreted in the light of all three arguments, as a political necessity which also, literally, painted over the boundaries between her woman’s body and her princely self.
Make-up was the province of women at two extreme ends of the social spectrum, aristocrats and prostitutes. Moralists disapproved of the vanity and wastefulness of cosmetics, their deplorable unchastity, and perhaps most of all for their deceptiveness. If creativity was permitted to men, women, confined by their bodies, had better make do with what God gave them—“What a contempt of God is this, to prefer the work of thine own finger to the work of God.”5 In painting their faces, women were disguising that mortal body, tran
sforming themselves, even challenging the social order by using “artistry” not just to render themselves more attractive but to redefine themselves as agents. A late Elizabethan text, Richard Haydock’s 1598 Tract Containing the Art of Curious Painting, Carving and Building, makes the connection with artisanship clear by including a criticism of make-up, “where a known natural shape is defaced, that an unknown Artificial hue may be painted on.”
Elizabeth’s famous porcelain complexion was smoothed on like modern foundation from a foaming mixture of egg white, borax, alum, and poppy seed, though mercury was also much used (sometimes to deadly effect on the wearer). Her face was then powdered with ground alabaster, and the cheeks and lips colored with “Venetian crayon,” another alabaster compound, colored with ingredients such as crushed rose petals and cochineal. Red lips were seen as a sign of good breeding, as well as youthfulness, while the luminescent glow of Elizabeth’s skin evoked a jewel-like quality, a glow reminiscent of the haloes around holy figures in religious painting, the effect enhanced later in the reign by the fashion for stiff, filmy ruffs which framed the face. Elizabeth’s make-up was not designed to enhance the natural prettiness which she certainly possessed as a young woman. It was defiantly unnatural, a mask of singularity, not seductiveness. The white-lead complexion (which some women attempted to naturalize by painting artificial blue veins across it), vermilion lips, darkened eyebrows, and rouged cheeks advertised Elizabeth as her own creation. For Sidney, art was allied with both the divine and the masculine. Elizabeth’s ostentatious painting staked a claim on these categories. Following Christine de Pisan’s argument, the image she imposed on herself was not “unnatural” in that what attracted censure in other women was appropriate for a queen. Perhaps Elizabeth, like Hermione in the play, became a prisoner of the protective image in which she encased herself, but Elizabeth also turned the moralists’ criticisms back on themselves with her artistry, rendering reprehensible artifice the prerogative of a prince.
