But the most powerful message carried by the blonde hair of Queen Elizabeth’s later years was in its reference to the halo of golden hair seen in images of the Virgin Mary. On the day that Sir Henry Lee resigned his title as the Queen’s Champion of the Tilts in 1590, an altar was raised to the sacred English virgin queen and a verse sung by the royal lutenist which openly linked her with the Virgin Mary. ‘Vivat Eliza! for an Ave Maria!’ (Long Live Eliza instead of an Ave Maria) he sang, hailing Elizabeth as an alternative queen of heaven. An engraving of Elizabeth exists of roughly the same date, with the following couplet. ‘She was, She is (what can there more be said?) In earth the first, in heaven the second Maid.’ Elizabeth’s virginity was working as a powerful magic conferring a miraculous purity which had become equated with holiness.
From the late 1580s onwards, the hair in the portraits became more fantastically blonde and the accompanying motifs prompting divine association became more obvious. Claims of miraculous healings at Queen Elizabeth’s hands supported the comparison, and Elizabeth herself did not shy from occasionally presenting herself in her speeches to parliament as some kind of messianic saviour. Some of the imagery was magnificently unsubtle. In the elaborately illuminated manuscript for Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, the opening letter C is decorated with an image of an enthroned Elizabeth receiving homage from three kneeling bearded men. The design unmistakably equates Elizabeth with the Virgin Mary.
Fate had favoured Elizabeth’s deification not only in the date of her birth, the eve of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, but also in the date of her death, the eve of the Virgin’s Annunciation. And it was after her death that the image-makers went to work most assiduously. Three days after Elizabeth died on 24 March 1603, Dr King preached at Whitehall, referring to her as a second Virgin giving birth to the Gospel of Christ. ‘Soe there are two excellent women, one that bare Christ and an other that blessed Christ; to these may wee joyne a third that bare and blessed him both. She [Elizabeth] bare him in her heart as a wombe, she conceived him in fayth, shee brought him forth in aboundaunce of good workes. . .’ Numerous elegies written to mark her death hailed her as England’s own Madonna, and the artists, too, went to work, depicting her as the sacred Virgin in heaven, haloed by a circle of stars and sitting in celestial splendour amid billowing clouds. Representations of her tomb were erected in churches around the country. Beneath one of them are the verses: ‘This was she that in despight of death Lives still ador’d . . .’57
Elizabeth’s carefully wrought apotheosis was complete. The construction of a persona along with its visual image had been entirely deliberate, a strategy designed in a newly Protestant England to immortalise her memory as a divine figure representing the advancement of her faith. While the sacred images of Christ and of the Virgin and saints had been removed from England’s churches and rejected as idolatry, the sacred images of the Divina Ehzabetha had spread rapidly across the land. In many ways it was a natural development in Protestant England for the cult of Elizabeth to replace the banished cult of the Virgin.
Image-making at the time of her death was nothing new. We know that Elizabeth had always tried to control images of herself. Even as early as 1558, when she succeeded the throne, she seems to have had trouble with her portraits. In 1563, Lord Cecil, her supremely powerful public relations officer, had drafted a decree complaining of the daily proliferation of unsatisfactory likenesses of the queen, of ‘errors and deformities’. He proposed a kind of pattern book by which officially sanctioned artists would be able to produce ‘correct’ images. This explains why there were frequently several similar versions made of portraits, copied according to an approved pattern. It is not known whether Cecil’s draft was ever executed, but clearly its censorship aims were not achieved. Towards the end of her reign, in 1596, unseemly portraits were sought out by government officers and there was an official bonfire of those judged to be of’great offense’ to the queen. Unedifying engravings were burned, too, over the years and one writer records that ‘vile copies multiplyed from an ill Painting’ were gathered in and for several years provided the cooks at Essex House with makeshift shovels for their ovens.58
We can assume, though, that most of the surviving later images of Elizabeth had met with her approval. By the end of her life the gulf between image and reality must have been enormous. She had transformed herself from a grey-haired old lady with sunken cheeks and badly yellowing teeth (as we are told by an observant French ambassador) into a legendary blonde of imperishable youth. As well as giving her an image of goddess-like immortality, Elizabeth’s fantastic youth was designed to symbolise the continuing peaceful and successful state of the nation. Like the face, this was of course a fiction. England at the end of Elizabeth’s long reign was racked by economic hardship, by rumours of the Queen’s illness and death, and by concerns over the succession. Amid these troubles, it was more important than ever for Elizabeth to develop a protective aura of remote sanctity.
The official portraits of Elizabeth done after 1590 portray an increasingly aloof and staggeringly unreal blonde diva. The Ditchley portrait shows a symbolically flawless creature hovering over a map of England, her tiny pointed toes directly above Oxfordshire. It was painted by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger to commemorate the queen’s visit to Sir Henry Lee at Ditchley in Oxfordshire in 1592. She wears an elaborately worked gown (one of nearly two thousand she owned at the end of her life), regal white and overrun with a lattice of pearls and jewels. Round her neck she has a pearl and ruby choker and looped over her bodice is the usual fistful of ropes of more fat pearls. Her wig is yellow-blonde. But by the time the portrait had been transposed to its pattern versions, one formerly at Blair Castle, another at Blickling Hall, it had been tweaked a couple of shades and become a stunning platinum.
Nicholas Hilliard painted many images of the queen in miniature in various shades of blonde and a few of brunette. But those done after 1590 were all subject to what is known as the Hilliard ‘Mask of Youth’ pattern. This was designed to reflect an idealisation of Elizabeth, a visual expression of the poetic worship of her beauty and loveliness during the last years of her reign. All of these depict Elizabeth as a pale yellow-blonde, several of them with her hair flowing loosely on to her shoulders like a young bride.
The painting attributed to Robert Peake called Queen Elizabeth going in Procession to Blackfriars in 1600 shows a legendary queen dressed a white gown studded with jewels and borne aloft in a canopied litter by her courtiers. She has pouting ruby lips, dark, sensuous eyes and the glowing complexion of a young girl. Her hair, dressed with jewels and pearls, is a fantastic shade of shimmering blonde. Massed around her are ageing courtiers and grandees strutting like peacocks and her dark-haired maids of honour, mere decorative foils to the queen’s eye-catching magnificence. Stage-managing her image right to the last, Elizabeth floats ethereally above them like some luminescent celestial being. At the sunset of her glorious long reign, this was perhaps Elizabeth’s most exotic and fantastic incarnation ever.
We know that the smooth face, the teenage eyes and the flawless hands are all blatant lies. But the hair might be truer than we at first think. Elizabeth had been wearing elaborately dressed wigs for twenty years when this painting was done, partly for convenience but also to conceal grey and thinning hair. By the 1590s Elizabeth had a substantial collection of wigs. In 1592, Roger Mountague, her silkman, delivered ‘vij heads of haire to make attiers, flowers, and other devices for Attiers, Two periwigs of haire’;59 and in 1595 he supplied ‘iiij lardge fayre heddes of heaire iiij perewigges of heaire’. In 1602, a year before she died, she was still buying hair for wigs.
Queen Elizabeth had always had a clear understanding of the language of clothes and hair. When she was engaged in foreign policy negotiations or being courted by potential suitors from Europe, she would wear varying styles of dress for diplomatic purposes as well as for reasons of fashion. Sir James Melville, the Scottish ambassador, noted in 1564 that some days she wore the
English fashion, some days the French and other days the Italian. ‘She asked me which of them became her best. I said, the Italian dress; which pleased her well, for she delighted to shew her golden coloured hair.’60
Melville had been sent to England that year by Mary Queen of Scots to renew relations with Queen Elizabeth which had deteriorated to a point beyond even the pretence of friendship. During his stay he discovered a queen interested in very feminine rivalries:
She entered to discern what colour of hair was reputed best; and whether my queen’s hair or hers was best; and which of them two was fairest. I answered that the fairness of them both was not their worst faults. But she was earnest with me to declare which of them I thought fairest. I said she was the fairest queen in England and ours the fairest queen in Scotland. Yet she was earnest. I answered they were both the fairest ladies of their courts and that Fler Majesty was whiter, but our queen was very lovely.61
The Elizabethan ideal of feminine beauty was the product of a mixture of poetic influences, contemporary paintings and the whims of Queen Elizabeth herself, whose appearance was imitated by society ladies as an expression of flattery. John Marston, the sixteenth-century poet and dramatist, gave a detailed specification for the ideal English beauty. ‘The face should be round and ruddy, the forehead smooth, high and white, the eyebrows small delicate and marked with a pencil, the lips coral or like cherries . . . the hair a rich golden yellow.’ Marston’s mother was Italian, so he may have been influenced by the Italian obsession with blonde hair.62 But he was not the only poet glorifying the blonde. This description of a yellow-haired beauty was written before Elizabeth’s day, but the story was reprinted in England three times, the last edition appearing in 1567. The heroine was named Lady Lucres and looked like this: ‘Her heare [was] plenteous, and lyke unto the goulde were, which hanged not downe behinde her, after the manner and custome of maydens, but in goulde and stone she had enclosed it; her forhed highe, of seemlye space, without wiynkell, her brows bente, her eyne shining like as the sun . . . strayt as thriede was her noose. Her mouth smal and comely, her lippes of corall colour, her small tethe, wel set in order, semed Cristal.’ Historians have taken this as the perfect Elizabethan beauty because we have her exact opposite described ironically by Shakespeare in Sonnet 130:63
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
Sonnets and love poems flooded the later years of Elizabeth, often written as gifts for the queen, singing the glory of the monarch and the beauty of the lady. The sonneteers, patriotic Englishmen entranced by beauty and nobility, all praise the queen’s hair of gold and eyes like heavenly stars. These were stock compliments of the era, thought to derive ultimately from Petrarch’s pure and blonde Laura, that most enduringly popular sonnet mistress. One sonnet by Robert Tofte, from a collection called Laura, praises: ‘As burnished gold, such are my Sovereign’s Hairs; A brace of stars divine, her blackish Eyes.’ And Spenser’s description of Belphoebe (who represents Queen Elizabeth) in The Faerie Queen gives her ‘yellow locks, crisped like golden wyre’ loosely shed about her shoulders. Poetry and picture were very closely allied during Elizabeth’s reign, and Hilliard’s Mask of Youth images of the queen, as the ideal Elizabethan beauty with her rosy complexion and her flowing yellow locks, perhaps corresponded most closely with the descriptions of the poets.64
Ladies of rank modelled themselves on the queen’s portraits and on poetic descriptions of her, and those not blessed by nature with the admired requirements had to make good with artifice. Many resorted to hair dye. A book by Sir Hugh Platt published in 1602 entitled Delightes for Ladies to adorne their persons includes a selection of disagreeably tangy recipes to dye hair a ‘faire yellowe or golden’ colour.
Those squeamish about anointing their hair with putrid mixtures bought their hair on the street. This was, according to Philip Stubbes, ‘either of horses, mares or any other straunge beastes, dying it of what colour they list themselves’. But as usual different rules applied for the rich, who simply pillaged the heads of the poor. ‘If there be any poore women,’ Stubbes tells us, ‘. . . that hath faire haire, these nice dames will not rest till they have bought it, or if any children have faire haire, they will entice them into a secret place, and for a penie or two they will cut off their haire, as I heard that one did in the citie of London of late, who, meeting a little childe with very faire haire, inveigled her into a house, promised her a penie, and so cutte off her haire.’65
With such manifest fakery going on, it is not surprising that the satirists and wits had a field day, much as Ovid and his friends had done hundreds of years earlier. Ben Jonson’s character Moria comments in Cynthia’s Revels: ‘I would wish to . . . know all the secrets of court, citie, and countrie . . . which ladie had her owne face to lie with her a-nights, & which not; who put off her teeth with their clothes court, who their haire, who their complexion; and in which boxe they put it.’66
Apelles, in Alexander and Campaspe by John Lyly, tells Alexander: ‘If the haire of her eye browes be black, yet must the haire of her head be yellowe.’ Shakespeare, too, could not resist a few digs.67 Commenting in The Merchant of Venice on the fact that ‘All that glisters is not gold’, Bassanio expresses his thoughts on a woman’s beauty, so often ‘purchas’d by the weight’. He goes on:
So are those crisped snaky golden locks
Which make such wanton gambols with the wind,
Upon supposed fairness, often known
To be the dowry of a second head,
The skull that bred them, in the sepulchre.
Tease as they might, the satirists could do nothing to alter the fact that blatant artifice was, as ever, no barrier to accepted beauty. Ladies spent much of their day getting dressed and preparing and repairing their hair and faces. In 1607 Thomas Tomkis published a comedy, Lingua, in which a dozen maids were asked to dress up a boy like a nice gentlewoman. There was ‘such doing with their looking glasses, pinning, unpinning, setting, unsetting, formings and conformings, painting blew veins and cheeks; such stir with sticks and combs . . .’ and it was claimed that the whole operation took five hours. This was probably an exaggeration, but it is certain that ladies were constantly preoccupied with the state of their faces and hair.
The much-admired pale skin that denoted breeding, leisure and therefore wealth was attained with dangerous preparations made from white lead. Borax was also used to give whiteness to the skin and the surface was often glazed over with egg white. Blue veins were sometimes pencilled on to the partially revealed bosom to display a refined ‘blue-bloodedness’, although the results when done with a heavy hand more often resembled Stilton cheese. Eyebrows were also plucked or sometimes thickened with artificial additions, usually slivers of mouse skin. Age was clearly no bar to aspirational beauty, and those of particularly advanced years used a ‘plumper’ to lift their cheeks: ‘a fine thin light ball which old ladies that have lost their side teeth, hold in their mouths to plump out their cheeks which else would hang like leathern bags’. One might call it a very rudimentary attempt at the face lift. Appealing to a similar constituency was the poem The Folly of Love which poked fun at the ‘old madam’ who tries to cheat time by the use of such devices as false hair, glass eyes and even artificial buttocks.
But it was the hair, a lady’s acknowledged crowning glory, that perhaps received the most attention, being constantly dyed, powdered, curled, pomaded, perfumed and pinned in elaborate coiffures. Complaints were constantly heard that the popular beauty spent too much time on herself and would ‘all the morning learne to dresse her head’. The Elizabethan quest for beauty was such that a whole new class of quacks sprang up to play the role of the cosmetic surgeon. In Marston’s T
he Malcontent, Maquerelle asks Bianca: ‘Do you know Doctor Plaster-face? by this curd, he is the most exquisite in forging of veins, spright’ning of eyes, dying of hair, sleeking of skins, blushing of cheeks, surphling [sulphuring] of breasts, blanching and bleaching of teeth, that ever made an old lady gracious by torchlight.’68
Queen Elizabeth did not, of course, require the services of a Dr Plaster-face, for she had her loyal painters to render her appearance miraculously and painlessly just as she wished. And this is exactly what happened with a painting known as the Coronation Portrait. It was initially thought to have been painted in 1559, just after the coronation, but tree-ring dating has recently confirmed that the wood used for the panel is from trees felled around 1600, making this an image painted at the end of the queen’s life. It shows the young crowned queen in her elaborate ermine-trimmed coronation robes, holding the orb and sceptre. The face is a flawless mask of cream and rose, her eyebrows barely a pencilled suggestion, her eyes dark and sensuous, her lips coral-red. And over her shoulders flows a loose mane of thick golden-blonde hair. In other words, every element of the ideal Elizabethan beauty is there, down to the delicate blue veins gently painted on to her white temples. The auburn hair that we can assume the 25-year-old Elizabeth still possessed at the time of her coronation has been replaced with golden blonde for the judgment of posterity, embodying the purity, the virtue, the beauty, glory and riches of her imperial golden age. This final refashioning of fact was the ultimate manifestation of the alliance between art and power, used by the queen with great effect to magnify and immortalise her most glamorous sacred mystique. Elizabeth had remained dazzling to the end.
8
Saint-Seducing Gold
The glorious aura of Elizabeth, England’s blonde goddess queen, who had astounded her subjects with the occasional radiant glimpse during her last years, was already out of date by the time of her funeral. Her portraits were magnificently dated in style, possibly even, as Roy Strong has suggested, deliberately archaic. Her impenetrable icon-like mask of divine majesty was one which looked back to the portraits of medieval kings and emperors who had been God-ordained rulers. Her Coronation Portrait, one of the last images thought to have been painted during her lifetime, is done in the tradition of the High Middle Ages, and bears remarkable similarities in style and conception to the thirteenth-century portrait in Westminster Abbey of Richard II. In artistic terms, Elizabethan England – insular in so many ways and set apart by its faith – lagged well behind continental Europe.
On Blondes Page 10