The image of Elizabeth which did so much to hold the country together through the crisis of the 1590s was built upon the foundations of monarchical ideology which had been laid by her predecessors, notably Henry VII and in particular Henry VIII. The general Tudor myth of the monarch as the sole bulwark against anarchy was given particular expression in the person of Elizabeth. Moreover, it was an image which was built up gradually and deliberately through the reign. Elizabeth herself was always concerned with the public face of her words and actions, and she chose and designed them carefully in order to put across favourable impressions of herself. Hence her care to distance herself as far as possible from unpleasant or unpopular proceedings. It was the bishops who had to suppress unwanted manifestations of Puritanism. It was her councillors and servants who had to bear the brunt of responsibility for executing Mary Queen of Scots. It would be going too far to see her as a practitioner of ‘spin’ along the lines of modern political media manipulation. But she showed something of the same concern with her image.
There was positive image-making as well as a shrewd management of the negative. The progresses which presented the queen to her subjects, although confined within the English heartlands of the south and east, were filled with civic receptions and public entertainments which put across positive images of Elizabeth as a Protestant paragon, a dispenser of justice, a bringer of peace and a defender of the realm. Themes such as these ran through the splendid entertainment laid on by the Earl of Leicester at his great castle of Kenilworth for a royal visit in 1575. With fireworks and water features, music and pageants, this was one of the most spectacular shows of the Tudor era. It took months to prepare, and was recorded for posterity in a pamphlet written by one of Leicester’s clients. Official propaganda was by no means unknown, but alongside it there was a barrage of printed material produced by well-wishers of various kinds: hack writers in search of reward, clergy out for preferment, minor officials in search of promotion and public office. And in between the official propaganda and the private enterprise variety were a host of
‘A Hieroglyphic of Britain’, which John Dee himself designed as the frontispiece to his General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (1577). John Dee (15271608), alchemist, geographer, mathematician and astrologer to the queen, wrote the Arte of Navigation as a manifesto for Elizabethan naval imperialism. He explains in the text (p.53) that the frontispiece shows the British Republic (or commonwealth) ‘on her Knees, very Humbly and ernestly Soliciting the most Excellent Royall Maiesty, of our Elizabeth (Sitting at the helm of this Imperiall Monarchy; or rather, at the helm of this Imperiall Ship, of the most parte of Christendome...)’, and that above is a ‘Good Angell’, sent by God to guard the English people ‘with Shield and Sword’. Elizabeth steers her vessel towards the Tower of Safety, atop which stands Victory, ready with a wreath to crown her.
The Red Cross Knight from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (3rd edition, 1598). This vast chivalric epic, one of the supreme artistic achievements of the cult of Queen Elizabeth, was designed as an allegory of the political and religious struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism.
Further publications, many of them hugely influential, which struck the same notes. John Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’, the Acts and Monuments, issued in successive and expanding editions, may have been international in its scope and intention, but its readers drew from it a national myth in which Elizabeth - presented by Foxe as a woman denied her martyr’s crown only by a special and greater providence of God - played a decisive role.
Elizabeth’s court, too, played its part in presenting a glorious picture of the queen to her people. From the ordinary offices of its daily life and the regular ceremonies of the Chapel Royal to the set-pieces of Accession Day celebrations and tournaments (which emerged in the 1570s) and grand state processions, there was usually something to impress the visitor to London and Westminster. Audiences for such displays might consist largely of Londoners, foreign dignitaries and visiting country gentry - but it was a socially, and perhaps also a statistically, significant fraction of the population which at some time or other saw the queen in her splendour. The portraiture and poetry in which the creation of the queen’s image is seen at its most sophisticated, most of which was produced and circulated within the context of the
Above: Portrait of Richard Tarlton. Tarlton was introduced to Elizabeth I through the Earl of Leicester and became immensely popular as one of the Queen’s Players, specialising in the dramatic jigs popular at the time.
Left: Detail from a portrait of Elizabeth I. Elizabeth was often depicted holding a sieve. This was an allusion to the Roman tale of Tuccia, a Vestal Virgin whose virginity was impugned. Tuccia vindicated her honour by carrying water from the Tiber to the Temple of Vesta in a sieve, without spilling a drop. The ‘sieve portraits’ are thus among the clearest assertions of the cult of England’s ‘Virgin Queen’.
Court, was inevitably accessible and comprehensible only to a restricted audience. But simpler messages about the queen were widely disseminated.
Parliament gave the queen and her councillors a national stage on which to perform. Although, in accordance with its role, Parliament served as a sounding-board for the grievances of the people (especially those of the gentry and civic leaders who populated the House of Commons), the long historiographical tradition which has seen Parliament as a forum for growing ‘opposition’ to the Crown in Elizabeth’s reign has fundamentally mistaken the nature and purpose of the institution at that time. It was there to vote taxation, to help enact legislation, and to offer advice to the Crown. Elizabeth got the laws she wanted and got tax, although often not as much as she wanted. She tended perhaps to get rather more advice than she wanted, which was where most of the tensions arose between her and the House of Commons. But few members of her Parliaments would have wished to classify themselves as ‘opposition’ in the sense in which the term is used today. To oppose the monarch was to be at best a disobedient subject, at worst a traitor or a rebel. The Catholic bishops opposed the religious settlement in 1559 - and all but one were subsequently deprived of their bishoprics. Most of the trouble Elizabeth had with her Parliaments was over unwelcome advice: on further religious change; on the succession; on Mary Queen of Scots; on foreign policy; on how to deal with Catholics. Often enough, troublesome MPs were mouthpieces or stalking-horses for Elizabeth’s own Privy Councillors, using Parliament as an extra forum for urging their policies upon the queen. As a woman she inevitably suffered, in a way that a competent king usually would not, from the casual assumption by the men of her council and indeed of her Parliaments that they knew more of the ways of the world than she did.
Despite her imperious way with unwanted advice, Elizabeth knew how to charm her Parliaments. Her responses to delegations from the Commons were carefully scripted and widely reported. In Lords and Commons, her councillors were tireless in putting over the themes of peace, Protestantism and prosperity as the fruits of her rule. And when grievances became acute, as in the intense agitation against monopolies around 1600, she knew how to make concessions graciously and to maximum effect. Parliament was, in short, an important ‘point of contact’ between Crown and country.
Above all, the daily and weekly liturgical offices of the Church of England drummed home a message of obedience and loyalty, from the daily prayers for the queen to special services of thanksgiving for her accession or for deliverance from dangers. With the ‘Homily against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion’ regularly read in parish churches across the land, the duties of the subject were constantly reiterated. And with the royal coat of arms prominently displayed in those churches, where paintings of the crucifixion or the Last Judgement had once had their place, the sacred status of the Crown was unmistakably proclaimed to everyone.
Elizabeth worked at her contemporary image in ways in which previous monarchs had worked at their memory. The media, the court, Parliament and the Church all played their part in creating that image, which had a more lasting impact
The ‘Procession Picture’, an idealised representation, as Sir Roy Strong argues, of the glories of Elizabeth’s court. Six Knights of the Garter walk before the queen, who rides on a triumphal chariot beneath a canopy borne by four courtiers. Gentlemen Pensioners guard the route. In the foreground stands the Earl of Worcester, who, as Master of the Horse, was the manager of court life and ceremonial.
On posterity than the memorials on which other monarchs spent so heavily. Her reign was a great age for building, and saw some of the greatest houses in the land go up: for example, Hardwick Hall and Burghley House. It was also a great age for foundations: grammar schools and almshouses were established in towns across the country, and one or two colleges in Oxford and Cambridge. Yet Elizabeth, unlike her four Tudor predecessors, built and founded nothing (with the partial exception of the collegiate church at what we still call Westminster Abbey, which she ‘founded’ at no real cost to herself after she had closed down the actual monastery). Of their palaces and colleges and hospitals and religious houses, some have survived and some have fallen. But her portraiture and literature have, ultimately, proved more durable than their architecture.
World History
