Walker J.M. The Elizabeth Icon, 1603-2003
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11. Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II with portraits of all
monarchs from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II; J. Lyons & Co.
Ltd, 1953. Collection of the author 134
12. Gloriana Mixture Tobacco Tin; Surburg Tobacco Co.,
1893. Collection of the author 138
13. Shakespeare at the Court of Queen Elizabeth,
engraving after the painting by Eduard Ender, c.1880 141
14. Unrecorded History V; Queen Elizabeth …
William Shakespeare. From Punch’s Almanack for 1896 144
15. “The Princess Elizabeth in the Tower”; engraving by
T. Sherratt after the painting by R. Hillingford, c.1875 145
16. “Princess Elizabeth in Prison.” Millais, engraving, after
his own painting, c.1880. Collection of the author 147
17. “Elizabeth and Mary Stuart,” print, W. Kalbach, c.1896.
Collection of the author 148
18. Elizabeth I and the Three Goddesses, attributed to
Hans Eworth, painting c.1569. Reproduced with
permission from Queen’s Gallery 149
19. Queen Elizabeth Suffragette Banner, c.1908.
Reproduced with the permission of the Women’s Library 170
20. Queen Elizabeth enters the Dardanelles, from Punch,
17 March 1915. Collection of the author 173
21. “I have become a virgin” – Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth,
from Elizabeth (d. Kapur, 1998) © The Roland Grant Picture
Archive 192
22. Queen Elizabeth with head; Harmony Ball Historical
Pot Belly, © Harmony Ball Inc., 2003 195
23. Queen Elizabeth without head; Harmony Ball Historical
Pot Belly, © Harmony Ball Inc., 2003 196
24. Queen Elizabeth Celebriduck, c.1999. Reproduced with
the kind permission of Craig Wolfe, president of
Celebriducks Inc. 197
x The Elizabeth Icon, 1603–2003
10.1057/9780230288836 - The Elizabeth Icon, 1603-2003, Julia M. Walker
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Acknowledgements
The four-century scope of this book has allowed me a sort of working
vacation, as I’ve ventured to fresh woods and pastures new of history and
culture far past my habitual “sell-by” date – Milton’s death in 1674. I am
most grateful to my friends and colleagues in later periods for their kind
and unstinting help. The bloopers, of course, are mine.
As with all my academic work, the usual suspects deserve more thanks
than I can render for help and support, moral, intellectual, and otherwise:
Laura Doan, Celia A. Easton, Anne D. Lutkus, and (especially for the War
of Jenkins’ Ear) Dr. Judith Hunter.
I am most particularly grateful to Dr. Barbara Dixon, Provost, whose
support and kindness encouraged both me and my work through bad
times and good. At Palgrave Macmillan, Emily Rosser and Paula Kennedy
combined encouragement with patience, to my eternal gratitude. Ron
Pretzer’s photographs add the key visual element to this study; he bravely
battled with the biscuit tins. The multivalent Sandra Rohlfing came
through with rescues on permissions, and Marie Henry and Michelle
Feeley with all sorts of help. And SUNY Geneseo, producing and supporting
excellence by alchemy, as far as I can tell, continues to rise above the fray
of state schools even as it rose to this occasion, buying me my very own
copy of Lady Florence Dixie’s Gloriana.
A special thanks must go to the hard-working members of the Women’s
Studies Seminar, “From Paragon to Pop Culture,” of the spring of 2002.
They shall, as I promised them, not remain the traditionally unnamed
entities of “my diligent students”: Colleen Butler, my most excellent
research assistant and her two companions in the nEXt generation,
Whitney A. Crispell and Brynn Speer; Sarah Buzanowski, Jen Nuber,
Princetta S. Self, Ilana Smith, and finally and mostly, the Three Fates:
Jess*#! Seabauer, Lauren Walton, and Krista Zimmer.
As ever, the village of Geneseo is as magical a place to live and work
as even Gloriana could imagine, and the court held in the (once and
future) Around Back Café at least as scintillating as hers, thanks to Bob
Wilcox, to Judith Hunter, Cindy Schmitt, Jim Memmott, Tom and Eileen
Bushnell, the ever-matching Ellen, the Deni and Dan show, Louise and
Will Wadsworth, the Hills, as well as Sherry, Emily, and Georgia Anderson,
and to Tom the Lawyer, John the Voice of Doom, the Chanlers and other
xi
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passing Republicans, and finally to the power-brokers – Alpha-Katie,
Katie/Katie, Kari, Kat, Marianne, Rob, Emily, De’Von, Whit, Smitty, Lauren,
and Krista.
On the home front, my son, De’Von McRavion, aka Super Kid, also of
Around Back fame, has been not only generously supportive, but gleefully
pro-active, as both a motivational coach/fetcher of fast food and historical
researcher. It takes a brave kid to adopt a mother who’s writing a book.
The fur-covered members of the family – Rosemond Tuve, Tisbury
Massachusetts, and Alice Fox – have variously contributed spaniel’d
devotion, comic kitty fingers, and a very warm lap.
Finally, the beloved members of the movable house-party are perpetual
sources of inspiration and felicity: Stuart Curran, Sarah Poyntz, Mary
Ann Radzinowicz, Anne Shaver, Joe Wittreich, and Susanne Woods.
Perhaps, if enough people buy this book, I can add yet another chapter
to the narratives of Lancaster, Ballyvaughan, and Bologna.
Geneseo, New York
July 2003
xii The Elizabeth Icon, 1603–2003
10.1057/9780230288836 - The Elizabeth Icon, 1603-2003, Julia M. Walker
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Introduction:
History of an Icon in the Public
Space of Memory
24 March 1603
Richmond Palace
Elizabeth, Queen of England, departed this life, presumably in the “sure
and certain hope of resurrection”
1
of which her 1559 Book of Common
Prayer speaks, but with remarkably little drama for a monarch whose life
was lived at the center of several stages. With her physical death, her
carefully constructed public persona passed from her control and into
an entirely new space: public memory.
In her 45 years on the throne Elizabeth had changed the image of
monarchy forever. Yes, as all historians say, she brought England power
and riches, peace on land and victory at sea, fostered arguably its greatest
flowering of literary art, made a humanist attempt at religious compromise,
and achieved for her island a position of world power that would last for
centuries. But her most profound change was worked within the minds
of her subjects and the generations to follow them. “Monarch” no longer
meant only King. In a reign spanning six decades Elizabeth appraised,
modified – first subtly, later radically – and finally claimed as her own
the icons of rule: the human body with more-than-human powers exter-
nalized, the terrestrial globe and its cosmos, and the globe of heaven, the
sun. By turning herself from a woman into a thing, Elizabeth was able
to exist in a space no woman had ever filled: the human imagination’s
picture of supreme earthly power made manifest. In 1603 a woman died,
a monarch ceded her kingdom to another prince, and a formidable intel-
ligence lost control of the icon she had so carefully constructed.
We can see her carefully developed transformation from woman to
mythic figure to icon in a chronological viewing of her portraits. She
begins in the heavy-handed Allegory of the Tudor Succession, where her dis-
proportionately large figure advancing on the public stage, leading Peace
by the hand, the object of the gaze of her dead father and brother, the
antithesis of her foreign-married sister who is shadowed by both Mars,
god of war, and Rome. Soon after, Elizabeth and the Three Goddesses is a
1
10.1057/9780230288836 - The Elizabeth Icon, 1603-2003, Julia M. Walker
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logical episode from the thin history of powerful women, and in this re-
making of the Choice of Paris, Elizabeth and her apple-like orb both
banish and out-face the triumvirate of chief goddesses, Hera, Athena,
and Aphrodite. Moreover, she accomplishes this by her mere presence;
no action (or bribery) is required.
Although the Siena Sieve portrait addresses the specific topic of the
queen’s marriage negotiations, while the Armada portrait celebrates that
victory, both paintings pick up the reference to Elizabeth’s relationship
to England and England’s relationship to the world. In the most famous
of the Sieve portraits (early 1580s), there is a large globe at the queen’s
left elbow, with England uppermost and enlarged. In the Armada portrait
(1588), the globe is smaller, but is now in the foreground and under her
right hand. In the Ditchley portrait of the early 1590s, the queen’s more-
than-life-size figure is straddling the globe, specifically standing on
England, as little ships follow the Thames upstream under her spreading
skirts. The body of the queen has become the land of England in the
Welbeck portrait, with plants, animals, birds, and water creatures all
cavorting on her gown. And, finally, the queen’s image departs from the
earthly sphere altogether, as Nicholas Hillyard’s representation makes
her the sun behind the rainbow, complete with the Latin inscription:
“Non sine sole Iris” – no rainbow without the sun. In the 45 years of her
reign, Elizabeth’s image has morphed from that of a woman who was also
a monarch, into that of a monarch who was also a woman, and finally
into an image of a new concept – a woman, but not a realistic woman,
rather a manifestation of earthly and heavenly power. Her body has
ceased to become a sight at which to gaze (although the Rainbow portrait
is hot not only in color values); it has become a site of power, a wholly
unrealistic but instantly recognizable image of a particular emblem of
power. Elizabeth had become an icon.
The light of the glowing sun-colored dress behind the rainbow shone
brightly for the next 70 years, repeating the span of the queen’s life. The
tomb that James erected merely blurred the light of Elizabeth’s icon in
the first decades. Like any solid object too close to a source of light, it
could partially obscure and diffuse the light of the source, but it did not
yet cast a clear shadow of its own. But as the decades turned to centuries,
the shadow of the tomb formed more sharp outlines, becoming itself the
most recognizable element of this luminare sans son. As the centuries
passed, however, even the tomb lost its clearly recognizable form, and
all that survived was the iconic memory of a woman who was monarch.
The hair, the ruff, and most of all the name – Good Queen Bess, England’s
Eliza, Elizabeth of blessed memory: Elizabeth.
2 The Elizabeth Icon, 1603–2003
10.1057/9780230288836 - The Elizabeth Icon, 1603-2003, Julia M. Walker
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It is one of the ironies of the Elizabeth Icon that its use in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries requires more explanation than its use today.
Not only did Elizabeth’s image move into the newly created sphere of
public memory, but her history and the history of her time were tied to
the image. We require considerable background to recover the significance
of Thomas Cecil’s c.1622 print showing the queen mounted on a horse
receiving a lance from Truth. To the citizen of London, the Armada
reference in the print would have spoken directly to the debate about
the proposed Spanish marriage of Prince Charles. Today, however, there
is often no logical – let alone historical – relationship between the late
queen’s image and the manifestation of its use. A biscuit tin, a bath duck,
a set of playing cards, a tea pot – these all say simply “England.” Elizabeth
has become an icon for her nation.
In the twentieth century, both before and after Elizabeth needed the
designation “the First,” if the person in the street were shown a pictorial
succession of English monarchs, whom would she recognize, besides the
current resident of the throne? Henry VIII, probably, although she may
be a bit shaky on the numeral. “Isn’t that the one with all the wives?”
she might ask. He would probably be sure with Victoria, even if more for
singularity of gender and her famous stubby figure clad in widow’s weeds
than for chronological proximity. But Elizabeth is always recognized,
and not only in Britain and the Commonwealth nations; she is England’s
most recognizable royal export, with (perhaps) the current exceptions of
the late Princess of Wales and Elizabeth II. In the “Renaissance Fairs”
popular in the United States and Canada, while the activities are primarily
pop-culture medieval, the publicity begins, more often than not, with
the announcement that: “Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the First [and
that anachronism is only the first of many] invites you to her royal court
for a day of jousting, feasting, dunking, …” In this context, Elizabeth has
become an icon of “Merrie Olde England,” even if the England being so
generally and generously imagined is a version of times several centuries
before the House of Tudor existed.
In the half-century after her death, Elizabeth was a more potent political
marker than she is today, when she has come to stand popularly for the
glories of the English Renaissance and the comparatively innocent
excitement of exploring a “new” world. Yet in the years between 1603
and 1660 we find a complex range of appropriations of the dead queen
by artists, writers, preachers, architects, and politicians. In these varied
appropriations, we see a significant transformation: the power of the
brilliant icon of the Rainbow portrait first blurred, then casting an increas-
ingly long shadow: the shadow of her tomb. The “late queen of blessed
Introduction 3
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memory” has, in many ways, more power than the living monarch. After
the Restoration, that shadow becomes sharper and is ultimately used to
define a new icon: the England of Elizabeth. But, like the tomb that casts
the shadow, the new icons of the following centuries have little to do
with the reality of Elizabeth Tudor. The picture held in the sphere of
public memory – a picture that still enables, to a great extent, the insti-
tution of the British monarchy – became (as are all icons) the picture of
an idea. And that idea is England.
As we examine the final decades of the four centuries since Elizabeth’s
death, we might consider the observations of recent cultural commen-
tators, who have observed how the relatively blank canvas of Diana,
Princess of Wales, allowed private, public, and political figures to paint
a glowing portrait of whatever image best fit their immediate needs.
Ironically, the very full canvas of the life of Elizabeth I also allowed mul-
tivalent posthumous representation, albeit for the opposite reason. Like
the Shield of Achilles, such accomplishment and political significance,
so many powerful words and images, could never be incorporated into
a comprehensive representation, making fragmented appropriations
expedient and effective.
In the BBC’s list of the Top Ten Most-Admired Britons, there are two
women: Elizabeth and Diana. Like Lady Diana Spencer, the late Princess
of Wales, Elizabeth Tudor is a guaranteed headline attraction, alive or dead.
That she was used to further a variety of agendas, often conflicting, should
hardly surprise us, for all that we have tended to cease studying the
monarch at the very moment that her image passed out of her control.
Some uses of the Elizabeth icon will require us to recover an historical
context not readily at our mental fingertips. As we move in time from
the clear shadow cast by the tomb that James built to contain Elizabeth’s
power, we lose the meaning of that shadow. One historical cliché – the
figure of X casts a long shadow – is fascinatingly wrong when we speak
of the history of Queen Elizabeth. Her authorized self-image, like her
historical legacy, is a source of light, literal and symbolic. The shadows
are cast by those of us who came after her, as, back-lit, we try to figure
our own agendas on the surface of the public scene.
The best testament to the public’s multivalent and perennial fascination
with Elizabeth Tudor is that between the excellent scholarly study authored
by Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson, England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife
in Fame and Fantasy, and this book, there is very little common ground.
While I have had the great good fortune to use their book as a source of
both information and enlightenment, I’ve also been pleased (relieved?)
that the two works are so essentially dissimilar. Both studies are chrono-
4 The Elizabeth Icon, 1603–2003
10.1057/9780230288836 - The Elizabeth Icon, 1603-2003, Julia M. Walker
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logical analyses of the re-presentations of the Queen from her death to
the present; both works examine a variety of genres, written and visual;
but neither work mines to any significant extent the same veins of material
or uses the same subjects as set-pieces. Far from being a tribute to scholarly
fair play, this fact is a monument to the mass of Elizabeth material available
for study and analysis. The Elizabeth icon and the place it claims in the
common sphere of public memory are, it certainly seems, rich enough
to nourish any number of studies.
In 1603 Elizabeth Tudor, the woman, died. The afterlife of her icon,
claimed by all manner of people and causes, gives evidence of the newly
created public sphere of memory. Coming into being as Elizabeth passed
to dust, this new public sphere has granted the queen a resurrection at
once relentlessly secular and perpetually mutable.
Introduction 5
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1603–1620:
The Shadow of the Rainbow
The death of Elizabeth has become one of the major mile-markers in
English history. Her passing puts a period to the popular conception of
the Renaissance – never mind that Shakespeare wrote for another decade
or that the Divine Right of Kings was not effectively challenged until the
execution of Charles I in 1649. On a more pedantic level, 1603 makes a
change from memorizing Tudors to memorizing Stuarts for those who
are toiling their way through British monarchs. In one sense, the death
of Elizabeth can be read as the end of English history, for with the
beginnings of union with Scotland, England ceased to define itself as an
individual national identity and began to articulate the language of
collective power. This, in turn, generated a larger beginning, the first
articulation of a collective identity that would grow naturally into the
ideology of Empire. And, after all, when had England been truly English?
The pre-1066 divisions were no less discrete entities than was the post-
1066 definition of the country as including large chucks of what is now
France. We should remember the telling fact that William the Conqueror
made his oldest son Duke of Normandy; his second son got the land west
of the Channel, showing the value placed on the newly-acquired England
by the conquerors, if not the conquered. Even into the Stuarts, in the
second half of the second millennium, the “English” throne claimed and
reclaimed lands in France. And this is only the most clearly defined locus
of national identity problems. Wales, Cornwall, and, of course, Ireland
were at various times and with varying degrees of success defined as part
of England. So rather than a national identity passing with Elizabeth,
perhaps it is more fair to say that one idea of England died while yet
another was conceived. Well worth noting is Paul Langford’s lively study
Englishness Identified (Oxford University Press, 2000), which has as its
subtitle: “Manners and Character 1650–1850.”
6
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For all that it did mark the end of a dynasty, the transfer of Elizabeth’s
crown to James was accomplished very smoothly, especially when
compared to earlier dynastic shifts. That most famous of changes, marked
by the word “Conquest,” allowed William of Normandy to overturn the
House of Wessex in 1066. William II followed his father to the throne
and was in turn succeeded by his brother, Henry I. The strife generated
by the death of Henry I’s male heir in 1120, leaving his daughter, the
Empress Matilda, battling with his nephew Stephen for the crown of
England, was not resolved in that generation, but with the establishment
of the House of Plantagenet as Henry II, Empress Matilda’s son (with the
maddening redundancy of Henrys and Richards in Shakespeare’s history
plays, both Henry I’s daughter and his nephew’s wife were named Matilda),
took the throne in 1154. While the crown passed in succession from
Henry II to Richard I to John I to Henry III and then to Edwards I, II, and
III, it can hardly be said to have passed smoothly. Still, there was no
major disjunction within the House of Plantagenet until the deposition
of Richard II by his first cousin Henry IV in 1399. This gave rise to the
War of the Roses, but that was all in the dynasty (if not the family), as
the Yorks and Lancasters quarreled over which plant was the proper off-
shoot of Edward III. The brief and busy reign of Henry V left his infant
son the supposed heir to France, before Joan of Arc took issue with the
situation. When Henry VI (a Lancaster) was defeated by his cousin Edward
of York, the historians barely blinked, at least in retrospect; Edward was
crowned Edward IV in 1461. The popular myth of the Princes in the
Tower murdered by their wicked uncle Richard makes much of the end
of the Plantagenets, as Richard III died in 1485 on Bosworth Field, his
crown in a hawthorn bush and the plea for a horse on his lips. His
successor, Henry VII, six generations removed from Edward III (and
arguably on the wrong side of the blanket), had the sound political
acumen to claim the throne by right of conquest first, right of blood
second. Henry’s grafted Tudor rose wilted within two generations on the
English throne, but his daughter Margaret’s marriage to James IV of
Scotland provided the continuity needed to make James VI/I the most
logical, though not the only, choice for Elizabeth.
One of the most appealing aspects of James VI of Scotland for the
English public was that he would come complete with all the accessories
of a dynasty: a queen, an heir, a second son, and several daughters. His
queen, Anne of Denmark, was neither Spanish nor French; his religion
firmly Protestant; his bloodlines satisfactory both to the Tudor loyalists
and to those who had cherished a theological or romantic fondness for
his mother, Mary Stuart. That he was a humorless bi-sexual without the
1603–1620: The Shadow of the Rainbow 7
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