Elizabeth
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Elizabeth was to live much of that life in little rooms. She was almost never alone, even at night, when one or more of her ladies would share her chamber, if not her bed. Like many “cold bodies,” Elizabeth loved fires and furs but hated stuffiness, and one senses a claustrophobia in her insistence, often to the inconvenience of her women, that windows be opened. No wonder she loved the open air, walking every morning in her garden or on a terrace, stalking lengths and lengths of galleries when the weather was poor, so that her puffing, court-bred maids struggled to keep up. Riding was a way to outrun herself, to be, for a few precious moments, free, and all her life Elizabeth adored hunting. She may not have been able to follow her brother in all the physical aspects of his education, but at riding she far outstripped him, galloping with a recklessness which later alarmed even her Master of the Horse, Robert Dudley, himself a brilliant equestrian. Of some “good gallopers” sent from Ireland, he was to remark, “she spareth not to try as fast as they can go. And I fear them much but she will prove them.”5 When she could not ride, Elizabeth loved dancing, particularly, in her early years as queen, the scandalous Volta, where the male partner lifted his lady between her skirts, often exposing her legs. Dancing and hunting were very much courtly accomplishments, but Elizabeth was a creature of her times in other respects, enjoying not only cockfights but bear-baiting. When required, Elizabeth could stand motionless in ceremonial majesty for hours—a skill which sorely tested the legs and back of many an ambassador—but active, even bloodthirsty, pursuits seem to have provided a sense of excitement and release which she craved.
Confinement in palace etiquette and the physical endurance required for ceremonial was her duty, but while she accepted this, Elizabeth declared that “I had rather be dead than put in custody.” To the later despair of her ministers, Elizabeth’s need for movement and air translated into a refusal of any but the most minimal security measures: she was aware of the value of walking freely among her people in terms of maintaining her visibility and hence popularity, but it was also something that she required for its own sake. An interesting corollary of this has been proposed—that Elizabeth’s insistence on preserving her independence to walk abroad necessitated the increasingly harsh measures taken against potential Catholic traitors later in the reign, that her freedom was paid for in their great suffering. Had the queen been more willing to be guarded, the rack might have been less used.
For the present, though, thanks to Katherine, Elizabeth’s spiritual and humanist education was progressing brilliantly. Katherine’s influence has also been detected in the more tranquil relationship she enjoyed with her father. The dynastic portrait known as The Family of Henry VIII (c. 1545), depicting the interior and the garden of Whitehall Palace, includes Elizabeth on the right, separated from her father, Jane Seymour, and the heir, Edward, by an ornate column, a distinction which is mirrored on the right by her sister Mary’s pose. It has been proposed that the necklace Elizabeth wears in the picture is an “A” medallion owned by her mother, Anne Boleyn, and that Elizabeth had chosen to wear it as a gesture of solidarity to her mother. While this is not impossible, it seems extremely unlikely, but since the theory has been widely canvassed, it is worth discussing. The most famous portrait of Anne Boleyn, the Hever portrait showing her wearing a “B” pendant, was painted well after her death, and in fact there exists only one drawing, a Holbein showing the queen in a chemise and cap, which gives us any indication at all of what Anne looked like in her lifetime. For all that she was Henry’s most famous queen, there is no painted record of her appearance during her brief reign. All the images which exist of her belong to the latter half of the sixteenth century, and in none of these is she wearing an “A” necklace. We know that Anne possessed a “B” and an “AH,” but there is no record in the royal accounts of her owning a single “A.” It is quite possible that she did, and equally possible that Elizabeth inherited it; certainly, the necklace she wears looks like an “A,” but it could equally be something else, or possibly have been painted in at a later date, as one expert suggests.6 The principal scholar on portraits of Elizabeth makes no mention of the necklace in his discussion of the painting. Moreover, it is almost inconceivable that, had relations with her father been restored through the good offices of Katherine Parr, Elizabeth (at the age of eleven to thirteen) would have risked her father’s wrath by such a gesture at this point. The idea that the necklace was a “secret” between the girl and the unknown, probably Italian, artist seems equally unlikely, given the perceptiveness to allegorical detail in paintings of the time, which were meant to be “read” symbolically by the cognoscenti. Elizabeth’s position in the picture, beyond the column, is an instance of this; viewers of the portrait would have understood her illegitimate status from the stone barrier that separated her from the inner circle of her father’s third wife and heir. The idea that Henry might have noticed and simply not minded seems equally extraordinary. And if Elizabeth was so determined to challenge her father by commemorating her mother in this fashion, why does the purported “A” never reappear?
Elizabeth’s presence in the picture correlates chronologically with the Act of Parliament of 1544 which restored her and Mary to the succession. Neither sister was re-legitimated, but both were formally designated, in order after Edward, as their father’s heirs. At a reception on 26 June that year at Whitehall, Henry dined with all three children and then presented them to the court informally over wine and sweets. Katherine Parr, who had no child and, given the state of Henry’s health and girth, was never likely to have one by him, was pointedly not included in the party. So if there was “triumph in [Elizabeth’s] heart” at her inclusion in the family picture at this moment, would this intelligent child have risked so much by doing something so crassly stupid?7
Perhaps more interesting than this theory is the key the family portrait gives to the visual world Elizabeth knew as a child at her father’s court. Pictures such as this were relatively rare in princely courts in comparison with tapestries, which were considered by contemporaries as being more prestigious objects. Tapestries usually travelled with their peripatetic owners (for his wedding a century earlier, Philip of Burgundy transported fifteen carts’ worth of them), and their function was to create “instant splendor and magic.”8 As a means of impressing onlookers, tapestries were intimately connected with their owners, appearing and vanishing as they came and went. They “defined the spaces of political power, their dazzling visual richness and carefully selected iconography circumscribing the realm of the ruler.”9 Tapestries were also an instance of the intricacy of the trans-European networks which connected merchants, artisans, and consumers in the Renaissance. Gold and silver thread was sent from Venice, wool from England, silk from northern Italy, and dyes from Turkey. Knowledgeable contemporaries were alert to the finish of the pieces—the greater the number of warp yarns, the finer the thread had to be, and the better quality the appearance of the tapestry. Pictorial detail and the presence of precious threads were noted and judged. It is hard, now, to appreciate the wonder that tapestries could create to sixteenth-century eyes, but in torch or candlelight, animated by the movement of bodies in crowded rooms, their “full size figures would appear to move and mingle with similarly dressed inhabitants,” in a shimmering, living dance. They were not flat, practical wall insulations but “interactive tableaux,” and the stories they portrayed were the familiar soap operas of their world. Henry VIII, like his father, collected numerous tapestries, including, in 1528, a set of the Raphael series The Acts of the Apostles. One of these, The Healing of the Lame Man, which divides the visual space into three sections in between the twisted vine columns of St. Peter’s, has been identified as the source for the compositional structure of the family group. The tracery on the column next to Elizabeth and the friezes on the walls above her connect the piece aptly with an innovation introduced during Jane Seymour’s queenship, when Holbein produced a goblet for her, one of the first pieces of metalwork north of
the Alps to employ a design of Moorish tracery. Holbein had encountered the styles, known as grotesque and rinceaux, of linear compositions in frieze and twining vegetable and floral garlands, at the French court at Fontainebleau, whence it had been imported from Lombardy. Although these styles derived from classical antiquity, the use of tracery was new and originated in Islamic art, spread particularly through Persian book bindings coming from Venice. The world of The Family of Henry VIII is a miniature of the Renaissance, a melding of assertive princely magnificence with exotic imagery, Italian art, and Christianity in the language of the new learning, which Elizabeth’s education had so precisely fitted her to understand.
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ELIZABETH PROUDLY DISPLAYED that education in her first extant letter, written in Italian to Katherine Parr in July 1544. The two had not seen one another for a year, Elizabeth being occupied with her studies and Katherine at court, where she was serving as regent while her ulcerous, lumbering husband was making his last stab at playing the chivalric hero on a vainglorious campaign in France. Elizabeth expressed both conventional and loving concern for her father, “humbly beseeching” the queen to “recommend me to him, praying always for his sweet blessing and similarly entreating our Lord God to send him best success and obtaining of victory over his enemies in order that your Highness and I may as soon as possible rejoice with him on his happy return.” She soon had her wish, being received by the king along with her sister Mary at Leeds Castle on his return from France, after which she returned to the schoolroom with Edward and began work on a project more ambitious than the Italian letter, a translation from the French of Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse (The Mirror of the Sinful Soul) by Marguerite of Navarre, planned as a New Year’s gift for Katherine. Twenty-seven pages of theological translation is an extraordinary achievement for an eleven-year-old, though the child Elizabeth is still visible in the obvious rush she made to complete her present, the spelling errors increasing as she hurried along. Elizabeth embroidered a beautiful cover for her work (which still exists), of silver thread on blue cloth, with “KP” in the center of four pansies. The charm of the presentation sits somewhat uneasily with the text itself, not least as it contains observations such as “Thou hast made separation of my bed and did put thy false lovers in my place and committed fornication with them.” Elizabeth may have been a dab hand with a needle, but there was never anything meek or ladylike about her mind. The pleasure and the terrors of the flesh were not then considered unsuitable material for princesses.
As queen, Elizabeth’s physical body was to become an object of obsessive interest. “In the war of faith which divided Europe, Elizabeth’s body … was the focal point of the conflict.”1 To an extent, though, this had always been the case. Across Europe, the queen’s body was a mystic vessel, the point of translation of the king’s line, a source both of succor and suspicion. The physical intimacy between royal couples often led to a deflection of criticism of a king on to the body of a queen, a means of positing “unmanly” behavior as the consequence of feminine power. King John’s child-queen Isabelle of Angoulême, for example, in the thirteenth century, was accused by contemporary chroniclers of causing the king’s disastrous losses on the Continent, of draining his virility so that he preferred to make love to her rather than fight with his magnates, while Eleanor of Provence, forty years later, was known as the “nicatrix,” the night bird, whispering poison into her husband’s ear in the privacy of their bed. Stories of licentious and incestuous queens abounded from the Bible to the histories of the Crusades to the poetry of Boccaccio, “a cultural stereotype from which to mount an assault on female rule.”2 One response of queens was to disassociate themselves from images of potentially corrupt sexuality through identifying with the Virgin Mary, as Anne Boleyn had done in her Book of Hours. In choosing to translate Marguerite of Navarre’s work, Elizabeth was associating herself with a similar tradition of queenship, as well as creating a literary connection with two women who had influenced her mother and formed her own self-conception as an educated woman fit to rule.
During her time in France, Anne had undoubtedly been in the service of Queen Claude, rather than François I’s sister Marguerite as has sometimes been supposed, but Anne was also acquainted with Marguerite’s mother, Louise of Savoy. Louise herself had been trained at the court of Anne of Beaujeu, a daughter of Louis XII and a powerful regent during the minorities of both her brother and cousin, Charles VIII and Louis XII, respectively. Anne of Beaujeu was known as a promoter of women’s learning, a devotee of the scholar Christine de Pisan, and the author of a manual, the Enseignements, dedicated to her daughter Suzanne. Louise gave Marguerite a princely education, so much so that as a patron, poetess, and sponsor of the new humanist learning, Marguerite’s own court became known as the “New Parnassus.” The French historian Michelet termed her the “Mother” of the French Renaissance. She thus represented a tradition of ruling women whose accomplishments embodied those of the Renaissance and from whose authority Elizabeth, in her translation, could draw.
Louise herself ruled for a time as regent, being assigned full royal powers by her son François in 1523, when he left on campaign to Italy. She, François, and Marguerite created a series of verse epistles to one another, known as the Epitres, casting themselves as a trinity in which Marguerite herself embodied youthful royal femininity while Louise represented a latter-day Virgin, a model of prudence and wisdom. The Epitres displace the physical body and sexuality of the regent on to her daughter, with Marguerite acting as a sort of “body double” for Louise, while Louise carefully depicted herself with icons suggestive of chastity and learning.3
Marguerite’s feelings towards Anne Boleyn have been debated, but it is clear that Anne herself desired to cultivate a friendship. She had been Marguerite’s guest when she visited Boulogne with Henry as his betrothed in 1532; afterwards, she corresponded with Marguerite and also passed on messages through her relatives. In 1533, the Duke of Norfolk was charged to tell her that Anne was “as affectionate to your highness as if she were your own sister,” while the following year, Lord Rochford informed Marguerite of Anne’s regret at being unable to meet Marguerite and her brother in France due to her pregnancy. Poignantly, Anne expressed the following year that “her greatest wish, next to having a son, was to see you again.”4 Such effusive courtesies were customary, and it does not do to read too much into the relationship between Anne and Marguerite, but Anne’s biographer proposes that she attempted to imitate the Queen of Navarre’s learning by collecting books and illuminated manuscripts from authors and artists patronized by Marguerite, and even that the French original of Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse from which Elizabeth made her translation could have been owned by Anne. If so, Elizabeth’s translation was not only a highly appropriate gift to Katherine in religious, intellectual, and queenly terms, but an indication of affection to her stepmother, as a rendering of one of the few mementoes of her birthmother that she possessed.
Anne Boleyn’s possession of a Book of Hours, a devotional collection based on the Divine Office used in monasteries, has sometimes been cited as evidence of her reformist tendencies due to a reference in French to the Day of Judgment. This is disputable, since possession and use of such a book, well established in medieval tradition, was entirely concordant with orthodox religious practice. Anne’s book does connect her with one aspect of the imagery surrounding her daughter, that of the Virgin Mary. Marian identification was a dominant motif in the representation of English queenship. Matilda of Scotland, Henry I’s queen, had been close to Gundulph of Rochester, who had promoted the cult of the mother of Christ, celebrating the feast of the Immaculate Conception in the early twelfth century, before it was officially recognized by the Church. Ever since, the connection between the Queen of Heaven and the quasi-mystical power of the queen had been a significant dynamic. In Anne’s book, she wrote a note above an illustration of the Annunciation, the great moment when Mary receives the news that she bears God’
s Son: “Be daily prove you shall me find / To be to you both loving and kind.”
In Elizabeth’s own manuscript book of devotions is a French prayer which also alludes to Mary: “Je te loveray en magnificat ton nom, o mon Pere” (I will praise thee, o My Father, magnifying Thy name). The line is a melding of Protestant and Catholic themes, combining the Magnificat, the first Marian hymn, with the resonance of the Psalms so important to reformers. Elizabeth made frequent reference to Mary, describing herself as “God’s handmaid” in a speech to Parliament of 1576 and in the 1569 text known as “Queen Elizabeth’s Prayer Book.” At a masque in July 1564, Elizabeth observed to the Spanish ambassador, indicating her black and white costume, “These are my colors.” Black represented constancy and white virginity, so combined they signaled constant virginity. That an English queen should identify herself with the cult of Mary was nothing new, except that in Elizabeth’s time, there was no more cult of Mary. It is also crass to suggest that Elizabeth deliberately set herself up as a Virgin substitute in response to some mass psychological desire to replace Mary on the part of her subjects. Elizabeth did arrogate to herself some of the mystic power of the Virgin, though, and the way in which she did so is a product of the courtly love dynamic employed by her mother.