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Although
lots of portraits exist of Elizabeth, she did not pose for many of
them. Perhaps she was a little vain - if she disliked a
particular picture she would have it destroyed. Her Secretary
of State, Robert Cecil, an astute diplomat, worded it
carefully...."Many painters have done portraits of the Queen
but none has sufficiently shown her looks or charms. Therefore
Her Majesty commands all manner of persons to stop doing portraits
of her until a clever painter has finished one which all other
painters can copy. Her Majesty, in the meantime, forbids the
showing of any portraits which are ugly until they are
improved."
 So
what did she really look like? Quotes from visitors to her
Court can perhaps shed some light. In
her Twenty-Second Year:
"Her
figure and face are very handsome; she has such an air of dignified
majesty that no-one could ever doubt that she is a queen" In
her Twenty-Fourth Year:
"Although
her face is comely rather than handsome, she is tall and
well-formed, with a good skin, although swarthy; she has fine eyes
and above all, a beautiful hand with which she makes display. In
her Thirty-Second Year:
"Her
hair was more reddish than yellow, curled naturally in
appearance."
 In
her Sixty-Fourth Year:
"When
anyone speaks of her beauty she says she was never beautiful.
Nevertheless, she speaks of her beauty as often as she can." In
her Sixty-Fifth Year:
"Her
face is oblong, fair but wrinkled; her eyes small, yet black and
pleasant; her nose a little hooked; her teeth black (a fault the
English seem to suffer from because of their great use of sugar);
she wore false hair, and that red."
It is known however that she contracted smallpox in
1562 which left her face scarred. She took to wearing white
lead makeup to cover the scars. In later life, she suffered
the loss of her hair and her teeth, and in the last few years of her
life, she refused to have a mirror in any of her rooms.
So, because of her vanity, perhaps we shall never
know exactly what Elizabeth I looked like.
© HUK. |
