Elizabeth

by Lisa Hilton

  However, the visual language perfected by the Burgundian courts, or indeed Elizabeth’s, was not one which was accessible to later critics. To the nineteenth century, which coined the term Renaissance, when it did not mean ideas, it meant paintings. The great art which we now worship in museums was not understood by the sixteenth century in the same terms; paintings themselves were (relatively) low-status objects. Luxury arts, whether tapestries, clothes, furniture, plate, or armor—what is now termed “decorative”—were the key indicators of magnificence, and their deployment created the spectacle by which the ruler imposed it. The finest materials and the most skillful craftsmanship were used to achieve political, social, and religious aims; they “demarcated the transcendent from the mundane” but also, in a form of visual apotheosis, translated the mundane to the transcendent.5 The appearance of a ruler was as the center of a “multisensory tapestry,” created by writers, musicians, craftsmen of all kinds. Monarchs like Elizabeth did not just commission art; they were art. The desired effect was nothing short of sublimity.

  It is short-sighted, then, to judge the English Renaissance on a single category of works, that is, pictures, privileged by different ages. The function of Elizabethan portraiture was, in the queen’s case, just one component of magnificence, but it was one in which she did do something unique. Her age’s views on painting were quite different from our own. Originality was not prized, but the conception that the stilted, ornate sitters of Elizabethan “corridor portraits” owe their stiffness to incompetence on the part of painters (the reasoning being that all the great artists were Catholic and therefore could not settle in England) is a canard. What was required was emblematic portraiture, a capturing of the inner self. The images of the queen thus created, in dress, maquillage, jewelry, still leap towards us from the page or the portrait, even after nearly five hundred years. Yet though Elizabeth’s motto, taken from her mother’s Semper eadem (always the same), is reflected in the consistency of her portraits, their apparently timeless immutability was part of an image that was constantly shifting. Elizabeth took great personal interest in the diffusion of her likeness, and that likeness, as the embodiment of her nation, was required to alter according to the nation’s needs. Unlike her predecessors, Elizabeth was sensitive to the fact that “the art of royal representation was transformed by the teeming marketplace of print.”6 More people could now see the queen than had ever been the case before. And just as the reformist faith had itself been disseminated through and exploited the revolution in printing, so the Protestant ideology of Elizabeth’s court was changing the consciousness of identity into something more recognizably modern.

  A changing concept of the self has been identified as particularly characteristic of the Renaissance period. The inner life, the distinction between the “self” and the outer world, was being recognized as the core of human identity. Being and seeming, what one was as opposed to what one presented to the world, were identified as being recognizably discrete, which in political terms, as critics of Machiavelli identified, was morally disturbing. In sixteenth-century England, this new distinction was catalyzed in confessional as well as psychological terms. A “momentous ideological shift” has been identified between, on the one hand, the universal consensus of the transnational Catholic Church, and, on the other, the twin poles of a spirituality which depended on faith alone and the monarch who was the declared leader of both that faith and the state itself.7 The spiritual and the temporal were being melded in an entirely novel way; therefore, the self had to be redefined against the “absolutist claims of the Book and the King.”8 A new emphasis on individuality was created by the removal of the communicative bridges of priest and the Mass—within the reformed religion, people could in a new way speak directly to God. In a secular context, there was no “Book,” no Bible, to establish this different individual consciousness within some communal framework; instead, there was the monarch. As God’s lieutenant, Elizabeth’s authority was personalized in a new model of power and subjectivity, which meant she was represented in a different way.

  The apparent immutability of Elizabeth’s image was less concerned with the need to appear constantly beautiful or desirable than with power. On one level, it was a conquest over nature; on another, the “immortality” of the queen’s image correlated with that of her rule—so long as one lasted, the other was not threatened. (The twentieth-century fashion for pickled dictators might be seen as having a similar motivation.) So successful was the queen’s imposition of a singular image that she remains instantly recognizable, even in the cartoons of Catholic propaganda, yet within the confines of that image symbolic transformations did occur throughout the reign, while the court ceremonial which framed her as its center was also flexible and responsive to the needs and moods of the moment. In her manipulation of the courtly love tradition, Elizabeth can be seen as positioning herself intellectually as both stylized mistress and Protestant master; in the performance of her magnificenza, this is made visually, and variedly, manifest.

  The “internal” quality of the portraits of Elizabeth reflected the influence of an Italian theorist, Giovan Lomazzo, whose Tratatto dell’arte della pittura (1584) became very popular. Lomazzo was far more widely known in England at the time than Giorgio Vasari, whose Lives of artists helped to create the legend of the innovative geniuses who constitute the Renaissance’s greatest hits. Lomazzo stressed the importance of the idea contained within a painting, rather than its surface. Every aspect of Elizabethan culture was imbued with emblemology, allowing all forms of decoration, including paintings, to be “read.” Increasingly popular tracts such as Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems helped the public to keep up and offered a selection of suitable emblems for aspiring sitters. Elizabeth herself observed that “the inward good mind … might as well be declared as the outward face and countenance,” and the symbolic readings of her portraits can, and do, fill volumes. Elizabeth’s claim to originality in portraiture is limited, but equally it was so bold as to be revolutionary. Images of the Virgin Mary have been identified as the single most consistent source for Tudor propaganda painting, but it was Elizabeth, unlike any of her forbears, who dared to seat herself down square in the sanctuary of sacred art.

  Two portraits by Nicholas Hilliard dating from 1572–76, known respectively as the Phoenix and the Pelican, are the first to include any personalized rather than generic iconography associated with the queen. Their provenance covers the period of the papal excommunication and the Ridolfi plot, so it is considered likely that the emblems used were a reaction to these events. The pelican became associated with Elizabeth in the jewelry inventories as early as 1573, and the bird appears in bestiaries as a symbol of redemption and charity, noted by John Lyly in 1580 as “the good pelican that to feed her people spareth not to rend her own person,” a reference to the fact that female pelicans will, if necessary, feed their young with their own blood. What has been overlooked is the connection of the pelican to earlier English queenship, in the gift of the bird by the citizens of Anne of Bohemia in the fourteenth century. The pelican was thus a highly appropriate emblem to represent Elizabeth’s sacrificial, maternal relationship with her subjects, particularly given the atmosphere of insecurity and threat surrounding Regnans and Ridolfi. It is also—just—conceivable that, given Anne Boleyn’s association with Anne of Bohemia through her interest in the vernacular Bible, the pelican may be a gesture on Elizabeth’s part to her mother’s “sacrifice,” though this connection can only be speculative. However, the pelican has a further association, with Christ himself. In Catholic iconography, the pelican is Christ, who gave his blood for the spiritual nourishment of the faithful; thus, “Elizabeth has arrogated to herself a symbol which under the old religious order had been reserved for God himself.” What makes the symbol particularly daring is that since Henry VIII’s edicts on idolatry, the use of such symbols was seen as blasphemous. The Pelican Portrait therefore represents an audacious irony in that sacred imagery is i
nvoked in defense of a new political order, which shifted its potency on to the figure of the monarch herself. No other ruler before Elizabeth had gone quite so far.

  THE COURT PAGEANTS staged by the Burgundian dukes of the fifteenth century were perhaps the most powerful visual indicators of their cultural preeminence, and such pageants were very much part of English royal display by the end of the period and continued into the seventeenth century in the form of the court masque. Yet their very nature, unlike pictures, makes them difficult to judge. They were temporary, ephemeral, designed as brief, dazzling displays of theatre which centered around the ruler, so that when the ruler departed, their magic left with them. The impact of such pageants was created through the “layering of diverse arts, the simultaneous stimulation of all senses, the inventiveness with which political messages were delivered and the enormity of wealth expended on ephemera.” Princely festivities were multimedia happenings, which even the beauty of isolated objects as viewed today in museums cannot possibly convey. In Elizabeth’s reign, the Accession Day Tilts were among the most elaborate of such pageants, and they also provided a further instance, as in the Pelican Portrait, of the absorption of the sacred by the secular.

  Organized by Sir Henry Lee of Ditchley, the tilts had begun as an informal celebration of Elizabeth’s accession day, 17 November, and by the 1580s had become the major court spectacle of the calendar, not only an opportunity for Elizabeth’s knights and nobles to demonstrate their chivalric prowess but a chance for thousands of members of the public to see (for a shilling) their queen. They were thrillingly elaborate, packed with exotic costumes and decorations, as well as the violent excitement of the tilt itself, where the armored combatants thundered head-to-head down the lists, to break their lances (and sometimes a good deal else) in a romantic display underpinned by both theological and political endorsement of the Elizabethan state. The inauguration of the tilt in 1581 as the principal state festival, as opposed to smaller tournaments such as that of “The Four Foster Children of Desire” organized for the French ambassadors that year, is notable in that it coincided with Elizabeth’s “official” entry into virginity. That year, Philip Sidney made an appearance as a shepherd, a likely connection with Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar, and his description of the Iberian jousts in his later poetic masterpiece Arcadia recalled the 1581 tilt, where Elizabeth was compared with Helen, virgin queen of Corinth, whose “sports were such as carried riches of knowledge on streams of delight.” Sir Henry’s public management of the tilts lasted until 1590, and he also gave two great pageants for Elizabeth, at Woodstock in 1575 and Ditchley in 1592. The relationship between these festivals, and the tilts which intervened, provide a picture across time of the emergent mythology of Elizabeth as “Gloriana” and the manner in which the apparatus of chivalry was publicly exploited to translate religious tradition on to her person.

  The Fairy Queen made her first appearance in relation to Elizabeth at the first of Lee’s pageants, which began with two knights, Contarenus and Loricus (one of Lee’s pseudonyms in the tilt), and a Hermit recounting a story of a princess who fell in love with a lowly knight. Manuscript evidence suggests Lee as the author of this play, which was received so rapturously that Elizabeth was presented with three copies of it, in Latin, Italian, and French, the next Christmas. Part two of the drama, played the next day, had Princess Gaudina reject her humble lover for reasons of state, which brought Elizabeth and her women to tears. After the greeting, the queen’s party was led to an ivy-covered banqueting house whose tables were covered with turf and flowers and set with gold plate, under an oak tree hung with posies and gilt emblems. The camouflaging effect made it appear that the “fairy queen” and her ladies were dining in the tree, hovering above the ground.

  Lee’s pageant at Woodstock came some weeks after one of the most evolved celebrations of the “cult” of Elizabeth, staged by the Earl of Leicester at Kenilworth. The sensational entertainment has been interpreted as a (failed) last attempt on Leicester’s part to persuade Elizabeth to marry him, but also as a statement of the political agenda—military intervention in favor of European Protestants—which the earl was hoping to press upon the queen. As with all Renaissance conceits, it is difficult to disentangle one single element of meaning from the complex layerings of spectacle, and it may be that the Kenilworth fetes were also a tribute to the relationship between queen and courtier staged at a moment when Leicester accepted, personally, that it was time to move on.

  Elizabeth was nearing her forty-second birthday that summer. Her ability to bear children had been a constant source of speculation and gossip (Ben Jonson’s later claim that she was prevented by a membranous growth from enjoying intercourse is topped only by recent speculation that she was, in fact, a man). There is no real evidence that her menstrual cycle was abnormal, and an examination by doctors when she was forty-six claimed that the queen was still “apt” to conceive. Yet surely Leicester must by this time have accepted that while he still might—just—aspire to the power of the crown matrimonial, royal progeny were by now unlikely. Earlier in the reign, he had used performance to press both his own suit and the need for Elizabeth to produce an heir. One play at Whitehall in 1565 in which a dialogue on chastity between Juno and Diana resulted in Jupiter arguing for marriage had provoked the weary remark from Elizabeth that “This is all against me.” Three years previously, in the wake of the Katherine Grey scandal, Leicester had brought a play originally performed at the Inner Temple to court for the New Year. Gorboduc is an extremely worthy and lengthy meditation on the reversion issue, derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth, in which a divided and heirless realm is left to the mercies of foreign powers. Elizabeth made no comment.

  Leicester’s ambitions at Kenilworth were considerably more subtle. The queen arrived at about eight o’clock on the evening of 9 July, to be greeted by ten “sibyls” dressed in white silk. A giant surrendered his keys to the queen in the tiltyard as six eight-foot-high trumpeters played “very delectably” as Elizabeth approached the Lake, where an artificial island bore a Lady and her nymphs. The Lady, who claimed she had been waiting since King Arthur’s time, offered up her power, after which Elizabeth progressed to a new bridge, seventy feet long, past cornucopia of songbirds, fruits, fish, wine, weapons, musical instruments, and gifts from Pomona, Neptune, Mars, Phoebus, Sylvanus, and Ceres. When the queen dismounted in the courtyard, a cannonade announced the fireworks display, which echoed for twenty miles around.

  The sibyls and their prophecies were an appropriate choice for Leicester to make his point about Elizabeth’s role in the protection of the reformist cause. Sibylline prophecy had been a feature of early Christian writings and had been particularly adopted by Elizabeth’s grandfather Henry VII as a means of connecting the sacred and dynastic aspects of kingship through the work of his court poet, Johannes Opicius, Praises to the King. As we have seen, sibylline prophecy had also featured at Anne Boleyn’s coronation, where three women had held up tablets with the mottoes “Come, my love, thou shall be crowned,” “Trust in God,” and “Lord God direct my ways.” The use of the sibyls, then, was a subtle affirmation of Elizabeth’s own dynastic legitimacy. English reformists such as John Jewel and John Foxe also made use of the sibylline motif, quoting such passages as “Sybilla sayeth … That the great terror and fury of the Antichrist’s Empire and the greatest woe that he shall work, shall be by the banks of the Tiber and Antichrist shall be a bishop and placed at Rome.” Several writers over the course of Elizabeth’s reign identified her with the sibylline figure in Revelation as the woman clothed with the sun, among them Jane Seager, who was in 1589 to translate ten of twelve sibylline prophecies concerning Christ from a fifteenth-century Latin text as a gift for the queen. Seager’s Divine Prophesies of the Ten Sibyls centers around a “true Virgin” who will protect the Church. She was connected with Leicester through her brothers William and Francis, both of them militant reformers, and she was among the ten women who greeted Elizabeth at Ken
ilworth in the summer of 1575. Her speech presented the queen as a “prince of peace” who would preside over a safe realm until a final, apocalyptic battle in which the “Last Emperor” (an image appropriated by both Henry VII and Henry VIII) would defeat the foes of Christianity. The sibyls provided a connection between Leicester’s entertainment at Kenilworth and Lee’s at Woodstock, where the Hermit greeted Elizabeth with the announcement: “And now best Lady and most beautiful, so termed of the Oracle and so thought in the world … what Sibilla showed, by your most happy coming is verified.” That is, both Leicester and Lee chose to emphasize the centrality of the queen’s role in the salvation of reform. In Lee’s case, this met with Elizabeth’s approval, but Leicester’s magnificent entertainment, which over a week comprised the usual hunting, bear-baiting, dancing, masquerading, and an extraordinary finale involving a twenty-four-foot-long singing dolphin, did not apparently amuse, or influence, her as much as the earl hoped: “One has the impression that it fell rather flat. Its classicism was slightly university-wittish and provincial, its romanticism slightly ridiculous.”

  Perhaps Elizabeth was rather weary of endless nymphs and giants, or perhaps she was irritated by Leicester’s ostentatious courtly tactics at a time when she knew perfectly well that he had recently conducted a clandestine affair (and possibly a secret marriage) with Lady Douglas Sheffield, who bore him a son. Either way, the queen departed (as High Dudgeon?) while in a last ditch effort to save his party, Leicester had his poet George Gascoigne improvise some eleventh-hour verses to be sung by “Deep Desire” from a holly bush as Elizabeth rode by.