The Queen as Artist

Elizabeth I made manipulation of her image – in pomp and portraits, in public speeches and in poetry – a key to her queenship; and perhaps also to the expression of her personality. Hers was designed to be an image of unchanging perfection, as evinced by the “Mask of Youth” which in later portraits hid the reality of an aging queen. In recent biofiction, Hollywood has delighted in stripping that mask away; yet revealed behind it is a figure that itself plays well for today.

In life, Elizabeth's kinswoman Mary Queen of Scots was far less successful a self-creator. But her death – and she played a conscious part in this process – gave her the role of a victim, and the status of a martyr, that has served her well down the centuries. It may, however, be a form of validation we accept less readily today.

Elizabeth as creator – and creation

“No ruler,” wrote John Guy of Elizabeth I, “has ever better understood the relationship of words to power” (2016, p. 12). She clearly had as keen an understanding of the relationship between personal feeling and the pen. The translation made by an eleven-year-old Elizabeth of Marguerite de Navarre's The Mirror of the Sinful Soul, given to her stepmother Katherine Parr at the end of 1544, is well known. So too is the trilingual translation (into Latin, French, and Italian) of Parr's own published Prayers or Meditations made for Elizabeth's father a year later. But another present, given to Parr at the same time, is even more interesting.