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Elizabeth I, Visual Icon: a Title Unintended by Emily Ballance Stewart July, 2014

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Elizabeth I, Visual Icon: a Title Unintended by Emily Ballance Stewart July, 2014 Elizabeth I, Visual Icon: A Title Unintended by Emily Ballance Stewart July, 2014 Director of Thesis: Dr. Jonathan Reid Major Department: History This thesis explores Elizabeth I's relationship with her official state portraiture to show that she placed little value in its meaning and authority for political and diplomatic uses. Understanding her personal relationship with the state portrait is significant because there are many surviving contemporary portraits of Elizabeth and most scholars believe that she tried to control the production and dissemination of these portraits for various reasons. This thesis argues that Elizabeth did not value this type of portrait enough to be a consistent well-paying patron or to exert censorship over its creation and distribution. By comparing Elizabeth to her Tudor predecessors and Western European royal peers it is clear that she did not commission and use the state portrait to the extent that other early modern kings and queens had. When comparing Elizabeth's use of censorship in other areas of communication such as the printing press, the theatre, and the church, state portraiture received little to no censorship or royal concern. An analysis of Elizabeth's words, written, spoken, or recorded by others, also reveals Elizabeth was antithetical to the state portrait for domestic or foreign diplomatic use. Elizabeth did not value the state portrait, therefore, she was not an active agent in its production and she did not attempt to control its creation and distribution. These findings contradict Sir Roy Strong's assertion, which has been widely accepted, that Elizabeth did try to control these images based on his analysis of a draft proclamation of 1563 and a Privy Council Order of 1596. This revised assessment of Elizabeth's relationship to state portraiture is essential to righting our understanding of who commissioned and censored her portraits, their meaning, and the ends for which they were created. Elizabeth I, Visual Icon: A Title Unintended A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Department of History East Carolina University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master’s Degree in History by Emily Ballance Stewart July, 2014 © Emily Ballance Stewart, 2014 Elizabeth I Visual Icon: A Title Unintended by Emily Ballance Stewart APPROVED BY: DIRECTOR OF DISSERTATION/THESIS: _______________________________________________________ Jonathan A. Reid, PhD COMMITTEE MEMBER: _______________________________________________________ Timothy Jenks, PhD COMMITTEE MEMBER: _______________________________________________________ Frank Romer, PhD COMMITTEE MEMBER: _______________________________________________________ Thomas Herron, PhD CHAIR OF THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY: _________________________________________________________________ Gerald J. Prokopowicz, PhD DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL: _________________________________________________________ Paul J. Gemperline, PhD TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1: HISTORIOGRAPHY ................................................................................... 18 CHAPTER 2: ROLE OF ART IN TUDOR HISTORY ...................................................... 30 Italy ........................................................................................................... 31 Low Countries ........................................................................................................... 33 Spain ........................................................................................................... 37 France ........................................................................................................... 37 England ........................................................................................................... 41 Henry VII ...................................................................................................... 42 Henry VIII ..................................................................................................... 43 Edward VI ..................................................................................................... 47 Mary I ........................................................................................................... 48 Elizabeth I ..................................................................................................... 50 CHAPTER 3: TUDOR CENSORSHIP ............................................................................... 54 Henry VII & Henry VIII ........................................................................................... 55 Edward VI ........................................................................................................... 57 Mary I ........................................................................................................... 58 Elizabeth I ........................................................................................................... 59 CHAPTER 4: ELIZABETH AND THE PORTRAIT ........................................................ 76 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................... 99 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................... 103 Introduction Queen Elizabeth I has been a source of tremendous interest for over 450 years. She achieved legendary status during her lifetime, and has drawn historians, philosophers, literary critics, and artists to explore the distinctive and illuminating life she left behind. An interdisciplinary approach to the life of Elizabeth is essential to understanding the world in which she lived and the culture of the Elizabethan period. Literary culture and innovation flourished especially during the Elizabethan period, and because of that rank upon rank of scholars have explored that wealth of material. The visual arts, the subject area of this thesis, have left a trove of important monuments as well, which have attracted much attention, though they are notoriously difficult sources to interpret. British paintings are different from their continental counterparts in aesthetic, composition, and symbolism. In particular, poor documentation and record keeping often make it difficult to establish even the most basic information about the artists, subjects, and patrons of British portraits, which suggests that they may have different symbolic functions in Britain than in other countries. Both Elizabeth’s life and image have been thoroughly studied from various angles including political, religious, gendered, and artistic approaches. This study focuses on the portraits of Elizabeth herself, but not from the perspective of an art historian, or from an analysis of the portraits themselves. Rather, this investigation seeks to elucidate Elizabeth’s relationship with her painted portrait, the extent of the control, or lack thereof, she exerted over this popular form of image-making, and why her relationship and interaction with portraiture was different from her contemporaries. This study attempts to show that modern scholars have concluded incorrectly that Elizabeth desired direct control over her state portraiture through a seemingly willful misreading of a narrow body of primary source material. Against this widely accepted belief, this study will argue that Elizabeth herself did not actively try to control her visual image whether, as alleged, to rid the market of unflattering images, or to perpetuate a mythical image of an ideal ruler. I have found that Elizabeth placed little value in the large painted portrait for public and political use, and chose to represent her authority and legacy in words, both written and spoken, rather than public displays of royal art. That is not to say that other people in her court, government, and realm, as well as in foreign ones did not place profound significance in these images. These people are the reason these images were commissioned, fought over, collected, and, hence, exist and survive today. Sir Roy Strong, the great student and cataloguer of portraits of Elizabeth, has done the most to perpetuate and popularize the incorrect notion that Elizabeth herself sought to control her public visual image. He deduced this plausible conclusion from a series of draft and published policies issued during her reign, which did indeed seek to regulate visual representations of the queen, but he never clearly established her as the author of those edicts. Moreover he overlooked one fundamental question during his analysis of Elizabeth’s role in the creation and regulation of her painted portrait: “why.” The only questions Strong was concerned to address were why portraits of the queen were needed in the first place and why the problem of hack artists producing debased images of the queen was never resolved during her reign.1 His answer to the latter was simply that “she was never to have a court painter well paid by the crown and 2 hence be able to sustain government control over her own image.” This paper will address the questions that need to be asked for a better understanding of Elizabeth’s motivations and involvement with royal portraiture: Why did she never appoint a well-paid court painter? Why did she wait twenty-three years before appointing a court painter 1 Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I. London: Thames & Hudson, 1987, 10, 18. 2 Strong,
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