by John Guy
The defective English translation of de Maisse’s diary has persistently been used by Elizabeth’s biographers to make it seem as if the sixty-four-year-old queen had taken to dressing like a whore for hire, flaunting her naked bosom to make it appear that, although her prospects of marriage and childbearing were long past, she was still sexually provocative. ‘I’m not ready to die just yet, Mr Ambassador’, she told de Maisse at one of their encounters, ‘and am not as old as everyone thinks.’14 But the original French text makes plain what was really going on: as a fluent Italian speaker and lover of all things Italian, Elizabeth was determined to prove to this former ambassador to Venice that she could outplay the Italians at their own game. Flirtatious and distant in confusingly equal measure during their talks, she often spoke to him in Italian rather than French.
For their first meeting, she wore a loose white-and-carnation-coloured dress made from a fabric de Maisse called ‘silver gauze’. (Most likely this meant either that the silk was embellished with puffs of white gauze or else that tiny silver or silver-gilt metal strips were interwoven into it so that it sparkled.) The dress had open sleeves lined with red taffeta, and a high collar at the back, flecked with tiny rubies and pearls. For at least two years, gowns with a closed front, low neckline, open sleeves and exactly such a collar, much in vogue in Italy, had made their way to London. Commonly, the sleeve openings could be fastened with ribbons or gold buttons, or adorned with other miniature pendant sleeves, leaving just a hint of the lining visible. It would appear from de Maisse’s description that the queen’s sleeves were of this type, and he adds the fascinating detail that she constantly fidgeted with her pendant sleeves when speaking.15
According to the defective English translation, Elizabeth had dressed to kill, flaunting her sexuality:
She kept the front of her dress open, and one could see the whole of her bosom, and passing low, and often she would open the front of this robe with her hands as if she was too hot . . . Her bosom is somewhat wrinkled as well as [several words are missing in the manuscript here, replaced by seven dots]* the collar that she wears around her neck, but lower down her flesh is exceeding white and delicate, so far as one could see.16
But the original French in the Bibliothèque Nationale manuscript is quite emphatic that it was only toute sa gorge et assez bas that de Maisse could see, so la gorge and ‘enough’ or ‘sufficiently below it’.17 And while la gorge in twenty-first-century French usually means ‘throat’, but can indeed sometimes refer to ‘bosom’, as the translator assumes, we can confidently say that, during the sixteenth century, the second of these meanings had not yet come into being. Our guide is the expert etymologist and lexicographer Randle Cotgrave. He had lived for many years in France and, in his monumental Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, finally published in 1611, he explains that la gorge normally means ‘the throat or gullet, most properly the bottom of the mouth, or the most deep and inward part thereof’.* But in the case of a woman, it means the outward and upper part of the flesh ‘between the neck and the pappes’. ‘Pappes’ is the sixteenth-century English word for a woman’s mammary glands or bosom. And Cotgrave confirms with reassuring specificity that the correct French word for ‘bosom’ during his lifetime was le sein (as it still is today) and not la gorge.
What did de Maisse mean by saying, according to the translator, ‘lower down her flesh is exceeding white and delicate, so far as one could see’?18 The answer is: very little. The translator fails to inform us that immediately before this passage several words are missing in the French manuscript. Instead, he attempts to supply them. He adds the words ‘one can see for’, to make the sentence read: ‘Her bosom is somewhat wrinkled as well as one can see for the collar that she wears round her neck, but lower down her flesh is exceeding white and delicate, so far as one could see.’ For almost a century, these words have been attributed to de Maisse as if he had recorded them. But all we know about what he actually said is that, below the collar around the queen’s neck, her flesh was ‘exceeding white and delicate, so far as one could see’. Given the solid fact as confirmed by modern-costume experts that Elizabeth was commissioning Italian and especially Venetian-style dresses around the time of de Maisse’s visit, the most credible explanation is that her gown was cut down to the cleavage in the latest Italian style.19 In other words, even supposing de Maisse had managed to catch a glimpse of her bosom, this was not a sign of sexual desperation but a reflection of the fact that she had always loved haute couture.
Similar confusions about women’s fashions pervade the other descriptions. Describing de Maisse’s second audience, the defective translation claims the queen wore a gown of black taffeta trimmed with gold lace in the Italian style with a ‘petticoat of white damask’ and a matching chemise, which she left open at the front so that ‘one could see all her belly, and even to her navel’. ‘When she raises her head, she has a trick of putting both hands on her gown and opening it, insomuch that all her belly can be seen.’20
Once again, the original French does not support these luridly erotic suggestions. The word ‘chemise’ in the context of Italian gowns means a jerkin, or an embroidered bodice. As to a ‘petticoat’, the manuscript does not use this word but refers merely to ‘the garment beneath’. Beneath her chemise in the 1590s, a lady of fashion wore a silk under-bodice, or ‘a shirt or smock’, cut no lower than the top of the cleavage, and usually both the chemise and the smock had slashes at the front, towards the centre. Four of the five Italian gowns that are accompanied by fully detailed tailoring specifications in Elizabeth’s costume accounts called for a ‘double bodice’ of precisely this sort. As the queen put her hands to her side as she raised her head, therefore, the decorative guards of the gown would have parted slightly, half opening to reveal the garments beneath. And it was merely through their slashes that de Maisse would have been able to glimpse small parts of the queen’s estomach (‘stomach’) down as far as the nombril (‘navel’) – for that was considered chic. With the chemise worn directly over the smock, however, acres of bare flesh would never be seen.21
The same misapprehension mars the translator’s account of de Maisse’s third audience. On this occasion, he reports Elizabeth as wearing ‘a white robe of cloth of silver, cut very low and her bosom uncovered’. For once, de Maisse does use the word for ‘bosom’ (le sein).22 But what the original French confirms is that her low neckline was ‘cut or made hollow and into a half-round’ in the Italian manner (the correct sixteenth-century meaning of the word échancré). It is a proven fact that a fashionable neckline of this type would indeed have left the top, and only the top, of the cleavage visible.23 But this was not a provocation. Elizabeth would be shown wearing almost exactly this type of décolletage in her famous ‘Rainbow Portrait’, painted a few years later, and no one has ever claimed it was erotic or indecent.
• • •
Besides describing her attire, de Maisse put on record a vivid, if hardly flattering, impression of Elizabeth’s appearance in his diary:
On her head . . . she wore a great reddish-coloured wig, with a great number of spangles of gold and silver, and hanging down over her forehead some pearls . . . As for her face, it is and appears to be very aged. It is long and thin, and her teeth are very yellow and unequal, compared with what they were formerly, so they say, and on the left side less than on the right. Many of them are missing so that one cannot understand her easily when she speaks quickly.24
This complements Paul Hentzner’s similar description of the queen at Greenwich in 1598:
Her face [is] oblong, fair but wrinkled; her eyes small, yet black and pleasant; her nose a little hooked, her lips narrow and her teeth black (a defect the English seem subject to for their too great use of sugar) . . . She wore false hair, and that red; upon her head she had a small crown.25
Both accounts conform closely to an unusually arresting, recently rediscovered portrait of the queen made by
Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger’s studio, painted when she was sixty-two or sixty-three. Purchased by a wealthy American, Mrs Ruth Coltrane Cannon, from a New York dealer in 1958, the painting was later given to the Garden Club of North Carolina to adorn the entrance of its Elizabethan Garden at Manteo on the eastern side of Roanoke Island. (There it remained until 2008, when it was spotted by a visiting academic, who recognized its significance.)26
A stark and compelling reworking of the upper half of the portrait that Gheeraerts had painted for Sir Henry Lee in 1592 to adorn his house at Ditchley in Oxfordshire, the ‘Manteo’ painting depicts the ageing queen with unflattering realism.27 Her face is covered in folds and wrinkles. She gazes down haughtily at the viewer, showing off her elongated, slightly hooked nose. Her dark eyes are piercing, her lips pursed, and no attempt is made to disguise the fact that the crown and pearls on her head are pinned to a thick auburn wig. A few wisps of natural grey hair are visible underneath, peeping out at the sides. Like her mother, the queen has a long, thin neck. A closer scrutiny of the portrait suggests evidence of the dermatological damage caused by the powders and creams she used to smooth and blanch her skin and the rouge she used to colour her lips and cheeks. Around the mouth, her cheeks seem pinched: perhaps evidence of her missing teeth.
The survival of the ‘Manteo Portrait’ confounds those who have insisted that Elizabeth’s extreme sensitivity to her appearance led her to order the destruction of all realistic depictions of her in old age. As one famous art historian put it in a quotation regularly taken out of context, ‘all likenesses of the Queen that depicted her as being in any way old and hence subject to mortality’ were to be sought out and destroyed.28 This assessment was based on a Privy Council order of 1596, but scrutiny of the original document, tucked away in the Privy Council’s records, makes clear that only images (this probably meant face patterns, woodblocks or copper plates) used by ‘divers unskilful artisans’ were ‘to be defaced and none to be allowed’. Evidently, the Council’s intention was to regulate the burgeoning problem of the mass manufacture of debased images of the queen, chiefly engravings put out by London and Antwerp printers. There is no mention of banning realistic images by skilful artists that were faithful to the queen’s true likeness. It would, in any case, have been logistically impossible for privy councillors to enter hundreds of private houses and confiscate unwelcome images of the queen, simply because they made her look her full age.29
When, in 1592, Isaac Oliver, a brilliant protégé of Nicholas Hilliard who would go on to marry Marcus Gheeraerts’s half-sister Sara, had produced a miniature of the queen, painted from life, he had intended it to be a model for engravers, hence its unfinished state. His sketch was utterly realistic. The queen looks every one of her fifty-nine years.30 No doubt she did not much care for the result, since she gave Oliver no further commissions. But, equally, no attempt was made to ban the engravings based upon Oliver’s image. Quite the reverse. The pattern was used extensively, among others by John Woutneel, a prolific book- and print-seller from the Netherlands who had settled in London. He sent Oliver’s template to one of the most famous engravers in Europe, Crispijn de Passe, who produced a series of copper plates based on it for more than a decade, only slightly softening the queen’s facial appearance.31
Admittedly, the preferred face pattern of Elizabeth’s final years is one that would become known as the ‘Mask of Youth’. Mainly the work of Hilliard, whose studio produced over twenty miniatures in this style, beginning in 1594, this image consciously abandoned any attempt to depict the reality of a woman in her sixties. Instead, Elizabeth’s features were airbrushed back to become those of a young woman in her late twenties or early thirties.32 The apotheosis of this most famous face pattern would be the ‘Rainbow Portrait’ of the queen, most likely commissioned from Gheeraerts by Robert Cecil in 1602 to mark her visit to his fine new house on the Strand, with its glorious gardens running down to the Thames.33
At the reception Cecil laid on for her, Elizabeth was eulogized in verse as Cynthia, Phoebe and Flora (the goddess of flowering and blossoming plants), and a pageant was staged, at the climax of which a messenger arrived in Turkish dress to present the queen with a rich, imperial mantle.34 She is depicted in the portrait wearing a ruby-jewelled crown with a crescent moon on the top and clutching a rainbow in her right hand, above which appears the legend Non sine sole iris (‘No rainbow without the sun’).
In other words, Elizabeth is the sun queen (Phoebe was the grandmother of Apollo, the sun god). She is also the moon goddess, with all the associated motifs of female power, virginity and sexual allure. Embroidered on her gown, flowers are in bloom – symbols of fertility and rebirth. A twisted serpent on her sleeve, the symbol of wisdom, has a red, heart-shaped jewel hanging from its jaws, indicating that she rules from the head and not the heart. Finally, the viewer’s gaze is held by her sumptuous mantle, one side of which is made of pale silk woven with a fine silver stripe and the other of orange satin, the colour of the sun. Quite possibly an exact representation of the gift carried by the actor playing the part of the Turkish courier, it is adorned with eyes and ears, to indicate her hold over her subjects.35
• • •
And yet, for all de Maisse’s frankness about the effects of her age, there was still something he found awesome about Elizabeth.36 Almost immediately after describing her rotting teeth, he found himself declaring her to be as tall and elegant as she was perfectly poised. Her hands, in particular, were very beautiful. She could not resist showing them off to him, removing her gloves so that he could admire her long, slender fingers.37
Elizabeth may have been old, but she had not lost her touch: beguiling the French ambassador with her small talk, she made sure that he left the country no wiser as to her intentions concerning détente than he had been on arrival. Burghley was more forthcoming. The old Lord Treasurer badly wanted peace. When de Maisse made a final visit to his house on the Strand to say farewell, Burghley told him that he wished for nothing else save that before his death, adding in a whisper, Nunc dimittis,* before reminding Henry’s envoy that what Elizabeth saw as the chief obstacle was the lack of progress over the question of the French and Dutch war debts.38
Elizabeth now decided she would test the waters for herself by sending special envoys to speak directly to Henry. De Maisse suspected double-dealing. Mistrustful of Burghley, whom he described as proud, presumptuous and instinctively hostile to French interests, he was worried that secret bilateral talks between England and the Archduke might already have begun.39 He was especially disturbed that it took more than a month after his departure from London on 5 January 1598 before the queen’s special envoys would land in Dieppe. Robert Cecil led the delegation, and it did not include Essex. Elizabeth, wary of the Earl’s commitment to waging an aggressive war against Spain in alliance with the French and the Dutch, had refused to let him go. To buy him off, Cecil was forced to beg the queen to offer him a gift of cochineal captured during the Azores expedition worth £7,000 and sell him another £50,000 worth at eighteen shillings per pound, when the market price was thirty to forty shillings. Desperate for as much ready cash as he could lay his hands on to appease his creditors, Essex accepted, but he also began taking bribes.40
When Cecil arrived in France, he set out for Rouen and from there made his way to Paris, seemingly unaware that peace negotiations between Henry IV’s diplomats and those of the Archduke were already well advanced at Vervins in Picardy.41 Watching closely from the sidelines, Essex wrote Cecil a five-page letter urging him to keep the war alive, since ‘from Spain there can be no peace meant.’42 But the pressure for peace was intense, notably from wealthy merchants and investors who had originally made their fortunes in the Iberian trade. Cecil himself had shareholdings in several mercantile ventures, and many London and Bristol merchants had already resumed trading clandestinely at Seville, claiming Scots or Irish nationality.43
By 14 March, the peace te
rms Henry sought had been secretly approved by Philip. France was to recover all of its lost territory, including Calais and Blavet, and the Spanish king agreed to offer a six-month period of grace to Elizabeth and the Dutch while they considered their positions. No longer willing to wait for his allies to make up their minds as to whether or not to join in the negotiations, Henry ordered his diplomats to conclude a peace on these conditions ‘without insisting any longer upon the desires or humours of our neighbours for whom the king has had too much regard’.44
Three days later, Cecil met Henry face to face at Angers in the Loire Valley.45 Deadlock ensued as the French king insisted on a peace and Cecil countered by reminding him that he was bound by oath not to make a separate one without his allies, and that the Dutch States General wanted neither a peace nor a truce. Resolved to continue the fight until Spain gave in, the Dutch at once appealed to Elizabeth for thirteen thousand infantry to invade the heart of the southern Netherlands so that a victory could be won.46
Elizabeth, however, had no intention of being bounced into anything by anyone. Burghley, weak in body as his health collapsed once more but still strong mentally, had already set about planting spies inside the Archduke’s Court at Brussels. Now, Burghley took his revenge for the damage done in 1588 by ‘Julio’: he found a highly placed mole willing to make him copies of all the most secret correspondence between Albert and Philip II relating to the peace negotiations. Just as ‘Julio’ had provided Philip with every last detail about Elizabeth’s overtures to the Duke of Parma’s representatives at Bourbourg, so this time Burghley was able to show Elizabeth every move on Philip’s chessboard.