The Perfume of Elizabeth I
My fools for senses,
Our last Review had us smell an Imperial Powder, a sublime balm of cloven spices inspired by an aphrodisiac formula of yore and that is why we decided to turn our interest towards yet another powder. A royal, this one. Our Overview will lead us on the footsteps of a Queen, the most glorious, the most powdered ; on the footsteps of a court of roses swarmed ; on the steps of an astrologist and a romance weaved on the web of war ; on the steps of the Virgin Queen, the Victorious, Gloriana the Luminous, ; on the footsteps of Elizabeth Ist.
Some of you might have recognised the last verses of our Review taken from the poem which Elizabeth wrote on « Monsieur’s Departure ». Hers was a reign of romance and if there is one thing that Elizabeth did well and complexely so, it was love. A Virgin Queen wooed from to and fro whose virginity, it is said, she kept intact, Elizabeth’s fate and her loves especially went from epic to tragic. The mother of England’s Enlightenment, akin to the Sun King of France, Elizabeth’s long reign heralded a new era for the Engelond worn out by decades of civil war.
Today, let us draw the portrait of a woman whom by her sense of beauty and the turmoils of her soul changed the entire face of England and thus the world’s. Together, my dears, let us discover the Perfume of Elizabeth Ist.
To take interest in Elizabeth Ist’s perfume means taking interest in her entire dynasty for indeed the end of the War of the Two Roses and Henry VIII’s flamboyant reign marked a turn in English mores especially those concerning personal hygiene in that perfume was no longer seen as a superfluous accessory but a necessary means to fend off plagues and survive the foul London air. That is partly why Henry VIII and Elizabeth Ist throned outside of the capital : the former spending most of his time in Hampton Court whilst the latter rejoiced in the halls of Richmond.
It was also in Hampton Court that Henry VIII gave perfume its hour of glory when he ordered the Bayne Tower be renovated to which he added hot and cold water taps wherefrom flowed a pure water drawn from the Rosamund spring however, Elizabeth Ist, his daughter, is still remembered as the one who brought up a « perfumed court ».
It is worth noticing that although water was considered impure at the time, Tudor England, be it noble or petty, used to bathe. Of this time we recovered ancient recipes of lotions and soaps and even methods to steam oneself in rosewater vapour fragrant with many perfumes and aromatic herbs.
One may thus ask what novelty did Elizabeth Ist bring to England.
The answer is simple yet as complex as the person we are interested. Elizabeth is known as the Virgin Queen, a nickname which she owned since the second half of her reign but we also know her legendary vanity and her love of earthen pleasures. It was Elizabeth who brought vanilla to the European continent, ordering that it be put in all her dishes. It was Elizabeth as well who lost all her teeth to her fondness of sugar. It was her at last who, when her end was nigh, commanded all mirrors be hidden from her sight so she might not witness her decay.
The entire world courted Elizabeth yet the Church cursed her and sent against her what probably was the last European crusade. She had to take upon a crown which never should have been hers, coming to terms with a sister who emprisoned her and almost ordered her killed ; with a father who beheaded her mother ; with a parliament who defied her and a people who plotted against her day and night and tried to occise her until the very end of her reign.
Very soon it appeared in her correspondance that she wanted not to be the woman of any man, going as far as to say : « I will have here but one mistress and no master » however we know that she spent her entire life surrounded by extravagant suitors, going as far as courting her first lover’s son. One of them, the Earl of Oxford, surprisingly brought to England a fashion which Elizabeth would swiftly pick up, one already known in France – that of perfumed gloves.
In the year 1565, that galant man went about the northern plains of Italy and thus in 1566 he came back to England with a pocket full of treasures, one of them being a pair of perfumed gloves from Venice which he offered to his beloved Queen. She felt in love with her « Lord of Oxford’s perfume » so much that the trend quickly spread throughout England, the Oxford perfume appearing in soap and decoctions recipes of many kinds.
The Queen had Venetian perfumers brought to England so they may work on her perfumes and the aroma of pomanders swiftly rose in her courthalls along with perfumes of civet and rose and benzoin. The ambassador of Venice even wrote the Doge that the Queen bathed once a month « whether she needs or not » but it was the gloves which made Elizabeth so famous. She ordered 200 000 pelts be sent from Flanders and soon the glovesmen guild split up and gave birth to the perfumers guild. She was so fond of gloves she used to offer some to her lovers and, quite oddly, appointed her personal astrologist and true friend the Dr John Dee, « Keeper of the Gloves ».
Gloriana was thirsty for youth and symbols just as much as Dee. He was one of the most learned men of the era, condemned for sorcery and occult practices under Mary Tudor’s reign, he found in Elizabeth I a true friend and warden. She would even consult him on the eve of crucial days. They both shared a deep love of alchemy so much so that the Queen had an entire alchemy set-up brought to her castle, complete with alambics and athanors and potions of all sorts. John Dee, at last, predicted she would remain a virgin and win over the Spanish Armada.
Such love of symbols was instrument in creating the character we know today. From her motto –always equal- to her portraits to the very colour of her dresses which she set by her sumptuary laws, every moment of Elizabeth’s life was rhythmed by a constant quest for beauty and symbolism, each of her public appearances being the occasion to consolidate the image of the Virgin Queen which she had spent so much time to create.
One might thusly raise the question of her perfume. Upon studying her late portrtaits, one discovers a specious esoteric language : when her dress is covered in roses, is it a mere show of aesthetism, is it a reference to the Tudor Rose or is it one to the Virgin Mary whom inspired Gloriana ? And must we believe that her gloves perfumed with the « oil of jessamine, ambergris, cedarwood, storax, musk grains, civet, clove, cinnamon, Damascus rose and white lily » were a mere superfluity or must we here see a code to decipher ?
Of one thing we are certain : that the Virgin Queen knew how far her symbolic gestures could reach. The rose which she bore on her portraits, the one which we found in her perfumes was a symbol of the dynasty she best embodied and brought to the grave but also that of the Virgin Mary herself by the way of which Elizabeth rose above the human condition ; Gloriana stands above earthly passions, the wrath and envy and she watches over her people.
The white lily, the daisies, the « jessamine » all aim to exalt the virginity she chose to better care for her nation. The Queen’s perfume becomes a picture, it appears in her portraits to show them who would be far from her the reality of her transfiguration. Through lily and through rose, she leaves the earthly kingdom and through musk and ambergris she joins the heavenly one. Aided by John Dee, the Queen studied the symbolic meaning of all herbs and creatures painted by her side : the phoenix and the peacock, the roses and the rainbow and yet many more…
Elizabeth I was the first to act upon the collective unconscious of an entire country, using its fairy background to weave the story of a marvellous character. Gloriana is Spenser’s Faërie Queene, the Queene of Heavenly Skies. Victorious against all odds, Queen against all plots, Elizabeth closely knit her victory and her extravagance : from the colour of her dresses to that of her powders, everything served one single purpose. To tell the tale of her glory.
Nonetheless, she did know that such glory was not hers and straying afar from any pride, she lent the works of her hands to her astrologist, trusting in the stars and thus in God or rather in a God whom she worshipped and whom she feared, in a God she praised as He punished her enemies.
Semper Eadem, which means « always equal » for the work of Gloriana in her looks as in her smells has always been to seem eternal in our world. Her perfume was skyly, her dress heavenly whilst her face covered in powder white resembled more that of Angels than of English women.
“I seem stark mute, but inwardly do prate.
I am, and not; I freeze and yet am burned,
Since from myself another self I turned.
My care is like my shadow in the sun,
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it.”