Elizabeth's Image
That Elizabeth was a queen and not a king may lie at the root of her popularity. Kings are seldom seen as fathers, and of the three kings before her, her brother had been a non-entity, her father a fitful tyrant, and her grandfather a tax-collector. A queen, however, assumes an almost motherly role with her country and, because perceived to be more interested in promoting the arts that give an age its character, influences national character more directly. It is not a coincidence that the two eras in English history in which the country made its greatest strides in art, literature, and world expansion were eras known by the names of two women.
Some historians hypothesize that she replaced the Virgin Mary as an object of worship in the English tradition. Deprived by the Tudor reforms of a close personal prayer relationship with the Mother of God, the people turned to the most important woman in public life and glorified her. She was untouchable, the ever-young virgin (despite great suspicion that she was nothing of the kind – the scandals concerning her sexual behavior started early in Mary Tudor’s reign and lasted until Essex’s death).
While Mary of Scotland’s supposed immorality with the Earl of Bothwell (whom she actually married) toppled her from her throne, among the nobility who knew the truth about her behavior Elizabeth’s exploits seemed to enhance her image as a woman not to be held to the same standards as ordinary women and were completely ignored by the rest of the populace. It is no coincidence that she was the "Virgin Queen" in an era and among a people who had lost the Virgin Mary, and they gave her a similar devotion.
The most revealing tribute upon Elizabeth’s death in 1603 ranked her only just below the Virgin Mary:
She was and is, what can there more be said,
In earth the first, in heaven the second maid.
Elizabeth as Saint
Even poets not normally given to hyperbole about monarchs mourned her using language previously reserved for the Virgin Mary:
... and yet a virgin,
A most unspotted lily shall she pass,
To the ground, and all the world shall mourn her.
(Shakespeare, Henry VIII, V, v, 61-3)
Such devotion given (and reciprocated) survives in the art and literature of the day, which celebrated her as superhuman, a goddess, Astraea, the Fairie Queen. Her portraits (which every good courtier wore in miniature) are the only in English history that depict the reigning monarch as something more than him/herself or use allegory to suggest that the monarch was something he/she was not.
Most English monarchs were painted endlessly, and, of the Tudors, Henry VIII more than most. Even Henry’s portraits, however, powerful as they are, never idealize him. As Henry grew older, fatter, and crueller in appearance, his portraits faithfully reflect the changes. Contrast this portrait of Henry as a young man with the older Henry.
Young Henry VIII
Elizabeth, no matter what her age or state of health, was always painted as the ideal, the majestic, the Diana of her time, the epitome of wisdom, grace, beauty, and power. A few years before her death, Hilliard still painted her as a springtime goddess. In literature, she became Astraea, Queen of Beauty, with poetry written to celebrate a beauty that had vanished long before her death. She was Eliza Triumphans, and not only a fine ruler (the best in English history and at least one of the best, if not the best, in world history), but an idea, an image around which England built its character.
Elizabeth represented the finest of the English, and from her character the English took their own. This cannot be traced to anything other than the sheer force of Elizabeth’s personality and her devotion to her country:
Are you then travelling to the temple of Eliza?
Even to her temple are my feeble limbs travelling. Some call her Pandora: some Gloriana: some Cynthia: some Belphoebe: some Astraea: all by several names to express several loves: Yet all those names make but one celestial body, as all those loves meet to create but one soul.
I am of her country, and we adore her by the name of Eliza.
Bacon wrote in praise of her after her death:
[I]f Plutarch were now alive to write lives by parallels, it would trouble him…to find for her a parallel among women. This lady was endued with learning in her sex singular, and rare even among masculine princes…As for her government, this island never had forty-five years of better times; and yet not through the calmness of the season, but through the wisdom of her regiment. For if there be considered, of the one side, the truth of religion established, the constant peace and security; the good administration of justice, the temperature use of the prerogative…the flourishing state of learning…and if there be considered, on the other side, the differences of religion, the troubles of neighbor countries, the ambition of Spain, and opposition of Rome; and then that she was solitary and of herself: these things I say considered, as I could not have chosen an[other] instance so recent and so proper, so I suppose I could not have chosen one more remarkable or eminent…concerning the conjunction of learning in the prince with felicity in the people.
Elizabeth herself was a realist and probably never thought of herself as anything more than mortal. She knew herself to be quite a superior mortal, existing on a higher plane than most others; on her deathbed, told that she should rest, she snapped back, "Little man, the word must is not used with princes." But she held no godlike powers, she did not bathe at the fountain of youth, and she would not live forever. Elizabeth may have enjoyed the adulation that came with being at the center of the cult of Gloriana, but she knew her own limitations.
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