By courtesy of the Naional Portait Gallery, London

The Ditchley Portrait by Marcus Gheeraerts was probably painted to commemorate an Elizabethan tilt in 1590 and the return to favour of Sir Henry Lee, one of Elizabeth's favoured courtiers. Henry Lee had angered Elizabeth by taking as his mistress and openly living with Anne Vavasour. As Mia Rodriguez-Salgado has explained, Elizabeth's courtiers were meant to profess love and devotion to her first and foremost. Elizabeth stands on a globe, her feet planted on England. At her back, storm clouds loom on one side, while sun breaks through clouds on the other. This particular imagery was consistent with images of the Armada, which contrast storm with sunshine, defeat for the Spanish and victory for the English. Elizabeth is standing outside of the elements and above the globe. She, the monarch, is thus represented as existing above the human sphere. At the time this was painted Elizabeth would have been about 60 although she looks as young as she would have been on accession in 1558.

The personality and the financial means of individual rulers, as well as their artistic leanings, affected very deeply how they presented themselves during this period. There were some monarchs who were particularly sensitive to the projection of image and who wanted control--not only in a negative, censorious fashion but in a positive sense--because they had very clear ideas of how they wanted to be seen, what their particular image of kingship was. And they were willing to pay for these images to be produced and disseminated.

Elizabeth I simply isn't concerned with these matters. The fact that she is not a great artistic patron explains this to a certain degree. The other factor is her proverbial meanness. She expects people to give her gifts, and indeed many of the images of Elizabeth were produced by others for her, and subsequent to her reign in a rush of Protestant fervour from the radical Netherlands. So the great variety of images we have of Elizabeth were not part of a consistent policy to present her in a certain fashion, but a series of gestures, and later an effort to mythologize her as representative of a great Protestant nation.

The picture of Elizabeth

Elizabeth as an artistic patron. (5:05 min)

There are certainly a great many varied images of Elizabeth that have survived, but it would be a mistake to think that these were her images entirely. Elizabeth wasn't a great patron as a monarch, and she expected her subjects to foot the bill for her representation.

What we think of as Elizabeth's image is really what was left over from images produced and paid for by others. The government had sole responsibility for the transmission of her image on coins and in official documents, and it controlled these effectively. England under Elizabeth had one of the toughest and most stringent censorship regimes in the whole of Europe. They controlled very closely whatever was published and imposed quite savage punishments if printers broke the rules. With images, they produced a mask that any painter wishing to produce an image of Elizabeth had to use. In that sense they controlled it very closely, without having to go to the trouble of actually paying for the production of these images. They encouraged, certainly, the projection of an image of beauty, eternal beauty. In fact, the older Elizabeth gets, the more obsessed her government gets with making sure that no disseminated image shows her age. This is not just vanity. This is because any reminder of how old Elizabeth is getting will remind people that there is a succession crisis coming. What they wanted to do was to show her as a deity, a goddess, eternally young, and people would not be reminded that there was this very serious problem.

There were a lot of allegorical paintings of Elizabeth which reflect classical images of beauty and wisdom, but not of power. Most of the images of power in this period were linked to male portraiture and imagery. Henry VIII, for example, was able to project himself very much as a military leader and a powerful physical figure. It is interesting that Elizabeth did not opt for the kind of portraiture that we see very highly developed in the Italian courts and in the court of Philip II. This seeks to project an image of majesty and power, that shows the individual as a ruler, as somebody who exudes power and who suggests their political role through very subtle symbols such as a letter or a series of letters on a desk beside them.

Women can use that imagery. For example, in the 1550s when acting as regent of Spain, Princess Juana has a portrait painted of herself in this guise. There were images of power that Elizabeth would or should have known and could have used, but she didn't, because the portrait painters who could do this were extremely expensive international figures who have been snapped up by other courts. So the variety is, in a sense, a reflection of the fact that other people do much of her image making for her, and English portraiture at this period develops somewhat in isolation.

The Armada portrait

The Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I. (8:58 min)

There is no proof that the Armada portrait, which hangs at Woburn Abbey in England and cannot be reproduced here, was commissioned by Elizabeth. It is a very significant portrait and I believe it is a portrait done for her to commemorate an event of which some people felt very proud. It is interesting that Howard of Effingham commissioned a set of prints that were then made into tapestries about the Armada. He also commissioned an account of the Armada. The writer of the account is Italian. The visual images are done by Flemish painters. There are no home-grown artists involved.

In the case of the so-called Armada portrait, what we have is an enormously impressive image of power, and it is that which dominates the elements that hint at the event itself. The Armada is actually put into the background. There is on one side an image of a distant fleet in calm waters, and on the other side the image of a fleet being destroyed by giant waves and a terrible, dark thunderstorm. You can interpret this as the defeat of the Armada with the fleet coming into the Channel in calm waters and then being destroyed by hurricane-type winds, the quite unseasonal desperate weather that the Spanish encountered when trying to get back to Spain by going round the British Isles.

iven the portrait its name are actually not the primary elements. They are there as a suggestion that Elizabeth is a figure who protects her people, who had God's blessing, in so far as they believe that surviving the invasion sent by Philip against Elizabeth was a miracle. Ultimately, the English had not done a great deal to destroy it: terrible weather conditions sank most of the ships. This consciousness, that they had been saved by some miracle, is implicit in the way that the ships are portrayed in the background. The colour differences also suggest that on the one hand you have peace, prosperity and sun, and on the other darkness, the devil and so on. They are very contrasting images, in which a number of meanings could be read, essentially without having recourse to the particular event of the Armada. Somebody seeing those would not have thought in terms of that particular event.

So what does dominate the portrait? It is Elizabeth, more of a statue than a human being, very typical of the kind of portraiture that the government was pushing the painters towards. The face is a mask. It is not a real depiction of what she looked like. It is one of the standard masks issued by the government for the portrayal of the queen. She is shown with a wig that is studded with jewels. This in part reflects her own taste. She absolutely adored jewels, she covered herself in them. But jewels have a function in that they are a very obvious symbol of wealth, and you only have to look at her to see that what is being projected is a very wealthy ruler, whether that showed reality or not. It is not difficult to conclude that England was not a very wealthy nation.

She is also covered in pearls, which have an additional meaning: in many of the Elizabethan portraits these pearls are present not merely as a symbol of wealth but also of purity and virginity. A number of other elements are also worth bringing out. The fact that there is a closed crown on the little table beside her is very important. That is a crown which evokes not only sovereignty--any crown would evoke sovereignty, and an open crown could have evoked kingship or monarchy in general. The closed crown evokes an imperial crown. This is a bogus claim because Elizabeth is not an Empress. The only person who is meant to use that kind of closed crown is the Holy Roman Emperor. So here we have the symbol of ultimate power. It is saying that she accepts no political master on earth.

National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

English ships and the Spanish Armada, 1588. Some argue that this picture was  painted in the years immediately following the Armada. Using innovative design and rich colour work, the composition symbolises the Armada campaign as a whole, rather than a specific episode. It does this with a degree of satire. In the foreground two English ships flank a Spanish galleon flying the papal banner. A jester appears with figures led by a preaching monk thus rendering her a 'ship of fools'. Many of the images that were produced from the Armada actually came from a much later period of Protestant nationalism and actually originated from the Netherlands. At the time of the Armada, it didn't figure large in the English imagination.

Another element which is highly significant is the globe. It was quite traditional for a monarch in western Europe to be represented holding a globe. Indeed there are some representations of Elizabeth, particularly the younger Elizabeth, sitting on a throne with a globe in her hand and a staff in the other hand. This later portrait is rather different, however. She is holding her hand over the globe in a rather possessive way. The part of the globe that is shown to the viewer, I think, is meant to represent the American continent. So you could see it both as a very traditional symbol of monarchy, but being used in a very peculiar way to show that she is a possessor. You could draw significance from where it is that she is pointing to and see it as part of a claim to possession of at least part of the American continent.

It is not a subtle portrait. All its messages are very obviously being projected, one could even say crudely projected. But the overall effect is a tremendously impressive vision of power.

The Armada imagination

Mythologising the Armada victory. (4:27 min)

Most of the images that we associate with the Armada campaign of 1588 are either not English or were produced much later. We tend to think of the Armada as the defining moment of Elizabeth's reign and of her regime. But it wasn't. It certainly was a major crisis but it was a short-lived crisis. There were fears of an invasion subsequently, and Philip II planned two other ones, but nothing ever materialised as a substantial threat in the way that the 1588 attack did.

Most of what we think of as either propaganda or images of the Armada came from the English allies in the Netherlands. It was they who produced a number of very well-known medals or coins. It was the account by a Dutch rebel that was used as the standard English account in translation. It was the propaganda the Protestant Dutch and the English in the Netherlands issued that came to be part and parcel of our current image of an English response to the Armada. If it had been quite so important we would have seen it in the literature of the period in a way that we just don't. It isn't the all-consuming symbol of either English identity or English power that it seems to be. It is mythologized and enlarged out of all proportions in the seventeenth century and thereafter. There is one particular wave of Armada propaganda that follows on from the gunpowder plot and that links these two events as examples of God delivering Protestant England from the nasty Catholics.