Queen
Elizabeth's Public Face : Tarnya Cooper looks at the wider iconography of
Elizabeth, and how this evolved during her reign.
In
1603, when Elizabeth I was on her death bed, a young law student named John
Manningham was staying near the court at Richmond. His diary of that year
chronicling the Queen’s illness and final death on March 24th, includes a
remarkable statement about the power of historical evidence. Towards the end of
his notebook appear the words:
Goe
litel book I envy not thy lott, Though thou shalt go where I myself can not.
Manningham’s
words seem to envisage a future for his diary beyond his own mortal life. The
concept of passing time is, of course, fundamental to all forms of historical
record, whether personal memoir, official charter or portraiture.
Portraits
of a monarch, however, did not abide by the conventions that applied to
portraits of private citizens. The royal portrait did not strive to perform the
role of carefully observed presence – to record the features of the sitter for
posterity – but aimed to reflect a perfected emblem of that presence during
the monarch’s lifetime. Images of Elizabeth acted as idealised symbols of
embodied statehood and just, God-given order. In this respect, royal portraits
had more in common with images of religious deities, as they needed to be
depicted as distinctively monarch-like, rather than wholly individualistic.
The
famous painted portraits of Elizabeth that now hang in our national museums were
almost all produced for a courtly audience. Iconic images of the Queen, such as
the Ditchley portrait (Marcus Gheeraerts, c.1592,) showing her standing on a map
of England (commissioned by Sir Henry Lee), and the ‘Sieve’ portrait (by
George Gower), displayed as a centrepiece of theElizabeth exhibition at
the National Maritime Museum, were commissioned by loyal courtiers and
favourites. These images were designed to speak to an elite audience of educated
courtiers and they frequently include elements of an elaborate chivalric ritual.
Elizabeth appears in these portraits sumptuously dressed, with a range of
emblems that encouraged an audience schooled in Renaissance symbolism to reflect
upon her special virtues of virginity, charity and wisdom. Yet, the complex
iconography of these large-scale portraits was rarely translated wholesale for
audiences outside the court. There was a considerable difference between the
types of portraits of Elizabeth seen at court and the printed images or
small-scale painted copies of the Queen produced for the popular market.
Interest
in portraiture had increased dramatically by the second half of the sixteenth
century and Elizabeth and her Tudor kin became the most visible rulers in
English history to date. Several hundred contemporary portraits of her survive.
The Queen’s public profile and reputation for subjects at home and in Europe,
depended in part upon the effective use of visual imagery. Like her father Henry
VIII before her, Elizabeth made good use of the power of such material to
project the right image of monarchy. The Queen’s right to rule had to be
asserted visually, but from an early stage it was clear that this needed careful
management. As an unmarried female, Elizabeth had both more to prove and more to
lose in being portrayed than most European rulers. It was recognised that her
public profile had to attest to her unique status as a woman apart from her sex.
With the cunning of a modern PR guru, ministers like Lord Burghley considered
how this could best be done. In 1563, just over five years into Elizabeth’s
reign, a proclamation was drafted that set out rules for artists when making
depictions of the Queen’s image. The proclamation in effect forbade further
portraits of Elizabeth from being made at all until a model of an appropriate
positive image (in the form of a face pattern) could be provided for artists to
copy from. In the event the proclamation remained in draft form and was never
issued. Yet its existence shows how important it was to her regime to get the
Queen’s image right.
By
the mid-sixteenth century the power of visual imagery to influence opinion and
capture the imagination was already recognised. It is hard to imagine now, but
before the age of mass reproduction, painted images could appear as magically
seductive in the way they established a sense of confusion between the
represented and the actual object. Following Calvinist thought, Reformers had
long argued against the merit of religious images on the grounds that these
deceived the beholder into offering prayer to empty idols, rather than to
the spiritual entities they symbolised. Images considered idolatrous were
therefore being removed from places of worship. In England, in particular,
Protestant preachers were often critical of the corrupting power of all visual
stimuli. Yet, historians have often ignored the obvious parallels presented by
the visual representation and celebration of the monarch.
So,
how did ordinary people in Elizabethan England see the likeness of their Queen?
In one respect her image was literally everywhere, as a profile of her features
appeared upon the newly minted coins produced first in 1558-60 and then again
from 1561 under an ambitious programme of re-coinage. Like monarchs before her,
the Queen’s face jangled about in the purses and pockets of England’s
wealthy, and was coveted by ordinary working men and women. The decision to
embark upon re-coinage meant that Elizabeth’s features were
associated with this bold economic initiative. Re-coinage also meant that
debased money was largely removed, and that there were a far greater number of
coins in circulation carrying the Queen’s head, rather than those of her Tudor
forebears. These coins even included some useful new denominations in an attempt
to ease the problem of a lack of small change by introducing the three-half
pence and three-farthing coins. The Queen’s profile on the newly minted coins
showed a crowned young woman with her hair loosely flowing to stress her status
as a maiden, and on the sixpence this was accompanied by the Tudor rose to
emphasise continuity and her right to rule. As with all such imagery showing the
official face of monarchy it was simplistic but effective. Amazingly, the
coinage carrying these images of Elizabeth remained common currency up until
1694, and thus served as the popular image of the Queen for around three
generations after her death.
Coins
were clearly commonplace, but what other images might be described as popular?
Later in the seventeenth century the Stuart populace would enjoy ceramic
delftware decorated with portraits of their monarchs, from Charles I to William
and Mary, but few popular decorative objects of this sort seems to have been
made (or have survived) from Elizabeth’s reign. Instead, paintings and prints
could be purchased both to order and ready-made. Among artisan, professional
gentry and noble households there were many who probably owned portraits of
their Queen. Susan Foister has shown in her work on inventories (1981) that
where Elizabethan households owned a painting at all, this was most likely to be
a depiction of the monarch. Indeed, the draft of the 1563 proclamation
forbidding the further execution of portraits of Elizabeth was produced to
legislate for just such this trade in royal imagery. The proclamation accepts
the ‘natural desires that all sorts of subjects and people, both noble and
mean,’ will ‘hope to procure the portrait and picture of the Queen ...’.
It goes on to say that these ‘desires’ had in the past been satisfied by all
manner of painters who ‘do daily attempt to make in short manner portraiture
of her majesty in painting, graving and printing’.
Further
evidence of the widescale availability of royal imagery appears later in the
reign, in 1596, when the Privy Council needed to issue an order that a number of
portraits – presumably on public sale – should be defaced, while new images
should be approved by George Gower the Serjeant Painter working for the crown.
Some of these public images were cheaply produced printed woodcuts that were
probably sold alongside ‘broadsheets’ displaying the text of ballads or
tabloid-style news items such as the birth of monstrous creatures or the
appearance of comets. Few of these popular woodcuts survive. The existence of a
small number of portraits of Elizabeth made for a popular market is remarkable
and offers a wonderful insight into how citizens from relatively modest
backgrounds might have viewed their queen. But the term ‘popular’ is highly
suggestive, indicating that all sorts of people from different social
backgrounds owned or saw these images, which may not be the case. Itis certainly
difficult to speculate how images sold as single leaf prints were used, but they
could have been purchased to be pasted into a Bible or a commonplace book or
even to be displayed upon the wall. The historian Tessa Watt has argued in her
book Cheap Print and Popular Piety (1991) that broadsides and chapbooks
were aimed at a broad audience and that ‘buyers remained socially
variegated’ probably ‘drawn from the middling ranks of yeomen, husbandmen
and trades people and that even gentry readers were not uncommon’. It is
difficult to estimate the costs of printed portraits, but popular ballads sold
for between a half penny and a penny between 1520-1640. Popular printed
portraits of Elizabeth may have been more expensive but they would have been in
reach of yeomen, artisans, clerks and many others who lived above a subsistance
income.
The
early years of Elizabeth’s reign was dominated by the expectation of her
marriage, upon which the fate of the realm would hinge. Early imagery therefore
tended to display her feminine virtues alongside her regal status or placed her
as a providential heroine. One of the most well-circulated printed images of
Elizabeth from the first decade of her reign appears in the frontispiece to the
Bishop’s Bible published from 1568. Other surviving images of the 1560s are
found mostly as engravings in printed texts and show her not yet as a defiant
Virgin Queen, but in the more sober role as champion of the Protestant faith.
The title page of the quarto edition of the Bishop’s Bible of 1569 depicts
Elizabeth as a heroine being crowned by Mercy and Justice, reflecting her role
as ‘supreme governor’ of the Church of England. The small scene at the base
shows a priest preaching to his parishioners, and Elizabeth’s presence above
is designed to signal her role as divine protector overthe orderly practice of
reformed religion. The genre of engraved portraits as independent printed
images, so well established in the Netherlands, France, Germany and Italy,
is barely evident in England in this period and these early examples borrow
heavily on classical iconography.
Another
image probably produced for sale on the open market is a large (50.5 x 68 cm),
relatively crude woodcut of the Queen with the Latin words ‘Elizabetha
Regina’. This is a rare example of a once popular print and presents a
traditional representation of the monarch with crown, orb and sceptre, the
instruments of monarchical power. This woodcut was probably sold singly designed
for wide dissemination. Woodcuts were cheap to produce as they could be printed
in quantities of many thousands, rather than the hundreds that etched images on
copperplate could yield. They were also the natural choice where images were
required to accompany text as letterpress text and woodcut could be printed on
the same press.
Some
images of Elizabeth, therefore, also appeared with a celebratory printed text.
Again, a very rare popular woodcut dates from after the Spanish Armada of 1588
when images of the Queen were used as emblems to rally national pride. The
example, which found in the British Library – possibly after a design by
Nicholas Hilliard – has been enlivened by a speedy application of watercolour
perhaps by its printer or vendor which may indicate that it was once intended
for display. It shows the Queen with orb and sceptre as emblems of her rule
appearing queen-like rather than as an individualised subject. And, as in
all her portraits whether popular or for a court audience she appears contained
by the elaborate splendour of her attire. The accompanying text celebrates her
virtue and health in typically winsome and florid language:
Loe
here the pearle,
Whom God and man doth love;
Loe here on earth, the onely starre of light:
Loe here the Queen, whom no mishap can move;
To chaunge her mynde, from vertues chief delight:
Loe here the heart, that so hath honord God;
That for her love, we feele not of his rod:
Pray for her health,
Such as good subjects bee: (Oh princely Dame,) there is none like to thee.
Elizabeth
is described in both text and image as absolutely set apart, not only from her
subjects, but from her sex and she is literally heralded as a prince-like
‘dame’. Through her achievements she is almost compared here to a second
Christ whose sacrifice has spared England the rod of God’s wrath. The
formulaic quality of most popular portraiture of Elizabeth comes into focus in
the light of such a text as it stresses her constancy as the source of virtue, a
theme that was also reflected in her personal motto ‘semper eadem’ (always
the same).
It
is clear that images of Elizabeth were widespread in urban centres, not just in
printed form but also as painted imagery. In some only modestly affluent
households a royal portrait may have been one of the few paintings in evidence.
In contrast, the aristocracy and wealthy gentry increasingly used portraiture
and subject pictures in the decorative programmes for their country houses. By
the end of the sixteenth-century a fashion for long galleries emerged in the
houses of the nobility. These were designed as spaces where important visitors
and friends could be amused by passing through a collections of images of
ancient heroes, legendary characters, past monarchs and ancestors. An early
portrait of Elizabeth recently put on display at the National Portrait Gallery
provides an example of the type of image that may have hung in such a gallery.
Roy Strong has rightly described this painting as ‘unsophisticated’,
but it is worth asking – unsophisticated to whom? The painting was purchased
from an aristocratic collection in the early twentieth century but it may have
originally formed part of a sequence of paintings of monarchs that hung in a
domestic long gallery or it may have simply been specifically commissioned from
an artist. The muddy brown background would have originally been bright blue in
colour and can be identified as a pigment called smalt which has dramatically
faded over time. The image shows the Queen in the first decade of her reign
before a more elaborate pattern of iconography had been established, but many
other images of this ready quality originating from later decades still exist .
What
emerges in looking at a category of representation probably produced for a
non-court audience is how constant the iconography appears after the first
decade, indicating that the articulation of female power needed careful
branding. We cannot precisely reconstruct the responses of Elizabethan viewers
to these images, and what they reveal about popular perceptions of monarchy
is frequently difficult to unpick. However, while few historical artefacts speak
as directly to an audience as John Manningham’s statement, it is clear that
many of these images were designed, despite their media, as lasting records of
female rule.
For
Further Reading:
Susan
Foister, Burlington Magazine (Vol.123, 1981); Robert Parker Sorlien
(ed.), The Diary of John Manningham of the Middle Temple 1602-3
(University Press of New England, 1976); Amanda Shephard, Gender and
Authority in Sixteenth Century England (Ryburn Publishing, 1994); Roy
Strong, Glorianna, The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (Thames
&Hudson,1987); Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety (Cambridge
University Press, 1991).
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