Elizabeth I: The Face in the Record

Elizabeth I reigned from 1558 until her death in 1603, and the face most people picture for her is a white mask with a small red mouth under a high red hairline. That face is real in one sense. It is the face in the portraits.^[1]

Whether it was also the face in the room is another question, and the scholarship that has looked hardest at the evidence is more doubtful than the popular story allows.

In 1598 a German traveller, Paul Hentzner, watched the queen go in procession to prayers at Greenwich. He was told she was in the sixty-fifth year of her age, and he wrote down what he saw: a face oblong, fair, but wrinkled, small dark eyes, a slightly hooked nose, narrow lips, and teeth that were black, a defect the English seem subject to, from their too great use of sugar. She wore false hair, and that red.^[2]

It is among the best-known eyewitness descriptions of the ageing queen, and it is precise about her face. It records wrinkles, teeth and a wig. It does not mention white paint, or paint of any kind.^[2]

An omission is weak evidence and should not be pushed far. A visitor could miss cosmetics that were well applied, or not think them worth a line. But the silence is not isolated. The study that has examined how Elizabeth's face was represented, in eyewitness reports, poetry, portraiture and writing about beauty, records scholarly doubt about how much contemporary evidence exists that she used ceruse, the white lead of popular accounts, at all.^[3]

The familiar debate is about how much white lead she wore and what it did to her. The prior question, whether the sources show her wearing it, is the one the record struggles to answer.

The white face comes, overwhelmingly, from paintings. Portraits of a reigning queen were instruments of state, and their complexions follow the conventions of idealised court portraiture before they record anyone's skin.^[4] A very pale face on a panel may show a painted face, an unpainted face rendered in the idiom for a noble complexion, or a decision about how a monarch ought to appear. The panel alone cannot say which.

None of this is an argument that she never used cosmetics. White lead was sold and worn in England in her lifetime.^[5] It is an argument about which evidence the most famous version of her face is built on.

The story that lead cosmetics killed her is told with more confidence still. The contemporary accounts of her final illness do not name cosmetics among its causes, and the image of a ruined, heavily painted old queen was assembled afterwards, as her death was remembered and retold.^[6] The case is examined at length elsewhere on this site. The short version is that a real hazard does not need a doubtful example.

What Elizabeth put on her face on an ordinary day, if anything, and whether it changed across a reign of forty-four years. The surviving evidence, portraits made to flatter and to govern, poems written to please, and eyewitnesses who noticed some things and not others, can support several answers, and none of the sources cited here settles the matter.^[7]