“Let Nature Paint your Beauty’s Glory”: Beauty and Cosmetics

Abstract

As the epigraph above suggests, in the early modern period, beauty and queenship are intimately connected: beauty amplifies female power and, as “the Image of the Creator,” reaffirms the monarch’s divine right. In chapter 1, I demonstrated that even kings were sometimes measured by their handsomeness; the onlookers were most unforgiving to plain and unattractive queens. It was crucial, therefore, that Elizabeth create and maintain her reputation as a gorgeous queen. In addition, as this chapter will show, Elizabeth’s claim to beauty is itself validated by her presence on the throne. What emerges then is a symbiotic, codependent relationship between beauty and queenship, a relationship where challenges to one inevitably threaten the other.

It is her Beauty onely creates her Queen; ‘this that which adds a commanding power to every syllable. Beauty is the Image of the Creator, and the Rhetorick of Heaven’.¹