Art & Culture
‘First there is trust, then passion, then death’: Why the ‘Virgin Queen’ never married
Elizabeth I, daughter of Henry VIII, is the only English queen never to have married. The iconic Tudor monarch’s last visit to Kenilworth 450 years ago may hold some clues to her solo reign – as revealed in a new art installation at the castle, depicting betrayal, beheadings and an elaborate declaration of love.
On a July evening in 1575, 41-year-old Queen Elizabeth I arrived at Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire, UK, for what would be her longest and last visit. She had given the castle to Robert Dudley in 1563 and granted him the title of Earl of Leicester the following year. Dudley was a great favourite of the Queen and is thought to have been her childhood friend. The precise nature of their close relationship was the subject of much gossip.
Prior to the unmarried Queen’s arrival, Dudley had given the magnificent castle a major refurb. New buildings had gone up, a new garden had been created and the estate had been landscaped. And the earl pulled out all the stops to lay on extraordinary entertainment in the form of music, dancing, acrobatics, spectacular fireworks and dramatic interludes performed by costumed actors. On the huge mere surrounding the castle, there was a moving island inhabited by the “Lady of the Lake”. There was a 24ft (7.3m) dolphin that concealed musicians, and an 18ft-(5.5m) long swimming mermaid.
It was the 16th-Century ruling class’s equivalent of hiring a plane to fly a “Marry Me” banner
No expense was spared. It cost Dudley £1,000 ($1,400) a day – millions in today’s money, and the whole extravaganza has been interpreted as an elaborate and expensive courtship display; the 16th-Century ruling class’s equivalent of hiring a plane to fly a “Marry Me” banner. “The 1575 festivities were an attempt to woo Elizabeth – marriage is a theme in some of the events,” Jeremy Ashbee, head curator of properties at English Heritage, tells the BBC. “Dr Elizabeth Goldring, who has made a detailed study of Lord Leicester, has called it ‘his last throw of the dice’.”
Dudley’s gamble seemed to be going swimmingly, but then everything changed. The highlight of the stay was to have been a masque – or performance – on Wednesday 20 July. It never took place. Was it simply a case of bad weather preventing the event, as the official version had it? Or had the monarch got wind of the subject matter and been angered? The masque featured Diana, goddess of chastity, searching for one of her chaste nymphs, pointedly called Zabetta – a version of the name Elizabeth.
It concluded with a messenger of Juno, goddess of marriage, directly addressing Elizabeth, and imploring her not to follow the path of Diana but to marry instead. Dudley had a certain amount of leeway with the Queen, but this perhaps was going too far. Whatever the reason, the masque never took place, and the revelries were over. The Queen remained in her quarters for a few more days before leaving on 27 July.
‘Proud and fiery’
Now, the artist Lindsey Mendick has marked the 450th anniversary of the visit by creating Wicked Game, a large sculptural installation at the castle. Wicked Game takes inspiration from ancient mythology as well as from the events of Elizabeth’s visit, and the way in which she used her unwed state in her shrewd political manoeuvres throughout her 45-year reign. There are 13 different tableaux. Some are sinister, others are suffused with dark humour. The fragmented ceramic sculptures strikingly depict the Queen and those around her as animals. In the central piece, Elizabeth is a lion and Dudley is a bear. The tableaux are positioned on pieces of an exploded giant chessboard.
For powerful women like Elizabeth, refusing to marry or have children was a radical act of self-preservation and autonomy – Lindsey Mendick
“Playing chess is the perfect analogy for what Elizabeth had to do to survive,” Mendick tells the BBC. “I think she is incredibly interesting and that she’s a great way of looking at how we treat women today. This event [that Dudley planned] at Kenilworth was meant to be this massive celebration for Elizabeth; it was meant to be decadent and enjoyable. But then also at the same time it was so loaded with something else. For powerful women like Elizabeth, refusing to marry or have children was a radical act of self-preservation and autonomy.”
Elizabeth I, daughter of Henry VIII, is the only English queen never to have married. She came to power in 1558 at the age of 25, inheriting religious, political and financial problems from her two predecessors, her half-brother, Edward VI (1537-1553), and her half-sister, Mary I (1516-1558).
Advisers and members of Parliament repeatedly urged her to marry to protect England’s security. A woman ruling alone? Inconceivable. A queen needed to marry, it was believed, not just to produce a male heir in order to avoid succession disputes but also so that a man could take charge of political and military matters. The entreaties to marry were ceaseless, and numerous matrimonial candidates were suggested or suggested themselves. Elizabeth repeatedly parried, deflected and refused. Why?
‘No master’
It’s entirely possible that she simply found the idea of having to obey or defer to a husband – any husband – intolerable. After all, she was very well educated (she learned five languages – French, Italian, Spanish, Latin and Flemish – and had studied history and rhetoric), highly intelligent, proud and fiery. She is said to have declared: “I will have but one mistress here and no master.”
Also, Elizabeth knew that a woman could govern perfectly well without a man looking over her shoulder. In the summer of 1544, at Hampton Court, she witnessed the scholarly Katherine Parr, Henry’s sixth wife, ruling with full authority while the king was on campaign in France. Katherine was a more than capable regent, and Elizabeth seems to have been profoundly influenced by seeing her stepmother exercising power, and accepting as her due the humble deference of powerful male ministers and courtiers.
Besides, her own immediate family had hardly furnished her with an image of the joys of marriage. Her father had her mother, Anne Boleyn, arrested on trumped-up charges of adultery and conspiracy, and then, shockingly, had her beheaded when Elizabeth was just three years old. One of Mendick’s sculptures is an interpretation of this execution, showing Anne as a fox kneeling in prayer, before the executioner, who takes the form of a vicious dog.
Some commentators have suggested that Elizabeth might have been afraid of sex. Alison Weir, for example, in her book, Elizabeth, the Queen, wonders if the monarch “may have made the equation that sexual involvement was inextricably linked with death”.The BBC’s 2005 series The Virgin Queen portrayed “a monarch terrified of sex”, according to the Telegraph. Paula Milne, who wrote the screenplay, told them at the time: “If I was asked to write a piece about a contemporary woman whose mother had been killed by her father, I would be expected to examine the psychological impact.”
In fact, Elizabeth enjoyed the company of handsome men, and could be flirtatious with them. However, she had plenty of reasons to fear pregnancy and childbirth. Childbirth was a very high-risk enterprise in the Tudor era. Jane Seymour, Henry’s third wife, died in childbirth, and Katherine Parr died of an illness shortly after giving birth, as had Elizabeth’s grandmother, Elizabeth of York.
How Elizabeth has been portrayed
But there were political reasons, as well as personal, for not marrying. Keeping the country free from the influence of foreign powers may have been a consideration. Also, the prospect of Elizabeth’s hand in marriage might have strengthened her negotiating position in her dealings with France, Spain and other nations. Meanwhile, if she’d married an English nobleman (and Dudley might have been a possibility had not his wife, Amy Robsart, died in somewhat suspicious circumstances in 1560), she would have automatically put another English nobleman’s nose out-of-joint.
She seems to have had an instinctive grasp of what we now call PR, and liked to present herself as wholly devoted to her realm
So she kept everyone waiting and wondering. She seems to have had an instinctive grasp of what we now call PR, and liked to present herself as wholly devoted to her realm. From early in her reign she cultivated the image of the Virgin Queen. In 1559 she declared, in response to MPs asking her to marry, that eventually “a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin”. At the end of Shekhar Kapur’s much-loved 1998 film, Elizabeth, the young monarch is played by Cate Blanchett, who then played her again in the 2007 sequel Elizabeth: The Golden Age. In Elizabeth, she purposefully transforms herself into the Virgin Queen and, all in white, presents herself to her astonished court, announcing “I am married… to England”.
Kapur’s film plays fast and loose with the historical facts, but this dialogue echoes the Queen’s actual assertion, made in 1559, that she would not marry because she was “already bound unto a husband which is the Kingdom of England”. Her sister Mary I – also known as Bloody Mary – had claimed something similar but had then gone off and married Philip II of Spain.
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Elizabeth’s decision not to marry has been a key element of depictions of her in popular culture. The connection between sex and death was made in the BBC’s multiple-Emmy-winning 1971 series Elizabeth R. Glenda Jackson’s Elizabeth says, in the very first episode: “I have trusted no man since the day when I was eight, and Queen Catherine Howard [Henry’s fifth wife – beheaded] ran screaming along the galleries of the palace to plead with the great Henry… On every hand, men had betrayed her… First there is trust, then passion, then death.”
Miranda Richardson’s caricatured Elizabeth, who appears in the second season of the celebrated sitcom Blackadder, remarks in the first episode, “Everybody seems to get married except me.” But in the series she uses the promise of marriage to manipulate Blackadder, and others, into doing what she wants.
Had the real Elizabeth allowed Dudley to think he might be in with a chance? And what did the Kenilworth visit mean for their relationship? “I don’t believe that he felt humiliated by her rejection of his proposal,” says Ashbee. “He was happy for an official account of the festivities to be published soon afterwards, and in his will, he stipulated that the castle was to be left exactly as it had been. I rather get the feeling that he saw 1575 as his ‘finest hour’. He certainly didn’t retire quietly into private life after 1575.”
Elizabeth was furious with Dudley for a while when he married Lettice Knollys in 1578 – but she forgave him. When he died, in 1588, she locked herself in her room for so long that her chief adviser ordered that the doors be forced open. And when Elizabeth died in 1603, a note Dudley had sent her shortly before his death was found in a casket she kept by the side of her bed. She had written on it “his last letter”.
Lindsey Mendick‘s Wicked Game will be on display in the Great Hall at Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire, UK, until 31 October 2025.
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Lost or little-known works by the Mexican artist provide fresh insights on her life and work. Holly Williams explores the rarely seen art included in a new book of the complete paintings.
You know Frida Kahlo – of course you do. She is the most famous female artist of all time, and her image is instantly recognisable, and unavoidable. Kahlo can be found everywhere, on T-shirts and notebooks and mugs. While writing this piece, I spotted a selection of cutesy cartoon Kahlo merchandise in the window of a shop, maybe three minutes’ walk from my home. I bet many readers are similarly in striking distance of some representation of her, with her monobrow and traditional Mexican clothing, her flowery headbands and red lipstick.
Partly, this is because her own image was a major subject for Kahlo – around a third of her works were self-portraits. Although she died in 1954, her work still reads as bracingly fresh: her self-portraits speak volumes about identity, of the need to craft your own image and tell your own story. She paints herself looking out at the viewer: direct, fierce, challenging.
All of which means Kahlo can fit snugly into certain contemporary, feminist narratives – the strong independent woman, using herself as her subject, and unflinchingly exploring the complicated, messy, painful aspects of being female. Her paintings intensely represent dramatic elements of a dramatic life: a miscarriage, and being unable to have children; bodily pain (she was in a horrific crash at 18, and suffered physically all her life); great love (she had a tempestuous relationship with the Mexican artist Diego Rivera, as well as many other lovers, male and female, including Leon Trotsky), and great jealousy (Rivera cheated on her repeatedly, including with her own sister).
Kahlo has become a bankable blockbuster topic, guaranteed to get visitors through the door
But thats not all they show – her art is not always just about her life, although you could be forgiven for assuming it was. Books are written about her trauma, her love life; she’s been the subject of a Hollywood movie starring Salma Hayek. Kahlo has become a bankable blockbuster topic, guaranteed to get visitors through the door of galleries, even if what they see is often more about the woman than her art.
But what about her work? For some art historians, the relentless focus on the person rather than the output has become tiresome, which is why a new, monumental book – Frida Kahlo: The Complete Paintings – has just been published by Taschen, offering for the first time a survey of her entire oeuvre. Mexican art historian Luis-Martín Lozano, working with Andrea Kettenmann and Marina Vázquez Ramos, provides notes on every single Kahlo work we have images of – 152 in total, including many lost works we only know from photographs.
Speaking to Lozano on a video call from Mexico City, I ask if a comprehensive survey of her work is overdue, despite there being so many shows about her all over the world?
“As an art historian, my main interest in Kahlo has been in her work as an artist. If this had been the main concern of most projects in recent decades, maybe I would say this book has no reason to be. But the truth is, it hasn’t,” he says. “Most people at exhibitions, they’re interested in her personality – who she is, how she dressed, who does she go to bed with, her lovers, her story.”
Because of this, exhibitions and their catalogues have often focused on that story, and tend to “repeat the same paintings, and the same ideas about the same paintings. They leave aside a whole bunch of works,” says Lozano. Books also re-tread the same ground: “You repeat the same things, and it will sell – because everything about Kahlo sells. It’s unfortunate to say, but she’s become a merchandise. But this explains why [exhibitions and books] don’t go beyond this – because they don’t need to.”
The result is that certain mistakes get made – paintings mis-titled, mis-dated, or the same poor-quality, off-colour photographs reproduced. But it also means that ideas about what her works mean get repeated ad infinitum. “The interpretation level becomes contaminated,” suggests Lozano. “All they say about the paintings, over and over, is ‘oh it’s because she loved Rivera’, ‘because she couldn’t have a kid’, ‘because she’s in the hospital’. In some cases, it is true – but there’s so much more to it than that.”
The number of paintings – 152 – is not an enormous body of work for a major artist. And yet, astonishingly, some of these havenever been written about before: “never, not a single sentence!” laughs Lozano. “It’s kind of a mess, in terms of art history.”
Offering a comprehensive survey of her work means bringing together lost or little-known works, including those that have come to light in auctions in the past decade or so, and others that are rarely loaned by private collectors and so have remained obscure. Lozano hopes to open up our understanding of Kahlo. “First of all – who was she as an artist? What did she think of her own work? What did she want to achieve as an artist? And what do these paintings mean by themselves?”
This means looking again at early works, which might not be the sort of thing we associate with Kahlo – but reveal how much she was inspired by her father, Guillermo, a professional photographer and an amateur painter of floral still lifes. Pieces such as the little-known Still Life (with Roses) from 1925, which has not been exhibited since 1953, are notably similar in style to his.
Kahlo continued to paint astonishing, vibrant still lifes her whole career – although they are less well-known to the general public than her self-portraits, less collectable, and less studied. An understanding of their importance to her has been strengthened since Lozano and co discovered documents revealing Kahlo’s life-long interest in the symbolic meaning of plants. She learnt this from her father, and discussed it in letters with her half-sister Margarita (her father’s child from an earlier marriage), who became a nun.
The missing links
Kahlo and Margarita’s letters “talk about the symbolic meaning of flowers and fruits and the garden of Eden, that our body is like a flower we have to take care of because it was ripped off from paradise,” says Lozano. “This is amazing, and proves why this topic of still lifes and flowers had such meaning to her.”
He offers a new interpretation of a painting from 1938, called Tunas, which depicts three prickly pears in different stages of ripening – from green and unripe to a vibrant, juicy, blood-red – as representing Kahlo’s own understanding of her maturation as an artist and person, but as also potentially having religious symbolism (the bloody flesh evoking sacrifice).
The Complete Paintings book also takes pains to reveal the depths of Kahlo’s intellectual engagement with art-world developments – countering the notion that she was merely influenced by meeting Rivera in 1928, or that her work is some self-taught, instinctive howl of womanly pain. Her paintings reveal Kahlo’s research into and experiments in art movements, from the youthful Mexican take on Modernism, Stridentism, to Cubism and later Surrealism.
“Frida Kahlo’s paintings were not only the result of her personal issues, but she looked around at who was painting, what were the trends, the discussions,” says Lozano. He points to her first attempts at avant-garde paintings – 1927’s Pancho Villa and Adelita, and the lost work If Adelita, both of which use sharp, Modernist lines and angles – as proof that “she was looking at trends in Mexican art even before she met Rivera”.
You can also see her interest in Renaissance Old Masters, which she discovered prints of in her father’s library, in early work: it’s suggested her 1928 painting, Two Women (Portrait of Salvadora and Herminia), depicting two maids against a lush, leafy background, was inspired by Renaissance portraiture traditions, as seen in the works of Leonardo da Vinci. Bought in the year it was painted, the location of this work remained unknown until it was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2015.
Given she only made around 152 paintings, a surprising number are lost. But then, Kahlo wasn’t so successful in her lifetime – she didn’t have so many shows, or sell that many works through galleries and dealers. Instead, many of her paintings were sold or given away directly to artists, friends and family, as well as movie stars and other glittering admirers, often living abroad. That means less of a paper trail, making it harder to track down works.
There are some astonishing paintings still missing
In honesty, looking at black-and-white pictures of lost portraits probably isn’t going to prove revelatory to anyone beyond the most hard-core scholars – although there are some astonishing paintings still missing. One lost 1938 image, Girl with Death Mask II, depicts a little girl in a skull mask in an empty landscape; it chills, and we know Kahlo discussed this painting in relation to her sorrow at being unable to conceive. Check your attics, too, for Kahlo’s painting of a horrific plane crash – which we only have a photograph of now – which she’s known to have made in a period of great personal turmoil in the years after discovering her sister’s affair with Rivera in 1935.
Like another of her very well-known paintings, Passionately in Love or A Few Small Nips, depicting a woman murdered by her husband, The Airplane Crash was based very closely on a real-life news report; Lozano’s team have unearthed both original articles in their research. While Kahlo may have been drawn to these traumatic events because she was suffering pain in her own life, her degree of almost documentary precision in external news stories here should not be overlooked.
Kahlo was an avowed Communist, and politically engaged all her life, but it is in less well-known works from the final years of her life where you see this most explicitly emerge. At this time, she suffered a great deal of pain, and underwent many operations, eventually including amputation below the knee. But Kahlo continued painting till 1953, with difficulty but also with renewed purpose. Her biographer Raquel Tibol documented her saying: “I am very concerned about my painting.
More than anything, to change it, to make it into something useful, because up until now all I have painted is faithful portraits of my own self, but that’s so far removed from what my painting could be doing to serve the [Communist] Party. I must fight with all my strength so that the small amount of good I am able to do with my health in the way it is will be directed toward helping the Revolution. That’s the only real reason for living.”
This resulted in works like 1952’s Congress of the Peoples for Peace (which has not been exhibited since 1953), showing a dove in broad fruit tree – and two mushroom clouds, representing Kahlo’s nightmares about nuclear warfare. She became an active member of many peace groups – collecting signatures from Mexican artists in support of a World Peace Council, helping form the Mexican Committee of Partisans for Peace, and making this painting for Rivera to take to the Congress of the Peoples for Peace in Vienna in 1952.
Doves feature in several of her late still lifes – as do an increasing number of Mexican flags or colour schemes (using watermelons to reflect the green, white and red of the flag), suggesting Kahlo’s intention was that her work should show her nationalism and Communism. More uncomfortably, her final paintings include loving depictions of Stalin, as her politics became more militant.
Perhaps her most moving late painting, however, is a self-portrait: Frida in Flames (Self-portrait Inside a Sunflower). It’s harrowing, painted in thick, colourful impasto; shortly before her death, Kahlo slashed at it with a knife, scraping away the paint, frustrated at her inability to make work or perhaps in an acknowledgment that her end was nearing. Tibol, who was witness to this decisive, destructive act, called it “a ritual of self-sacrifice”. “It’s a tremendous image,” says Lozano.
“It’s very interesting in terms of aesthetics – when your body is not working anymore, when your brain is not enough to portray what you want to paint, the only source she’s left with is to deconstruct the image. This is a very contemporary, conceptual position about art: that the painting exists not only in its craft, but also what I think the painting stands for.”
We are left with a painting that is imperfect, certainly a world away from the fine, smooth surfaces and attention to detail of Kahlo’s more famous self-portraits – but it nonetheless is an astonishingly powerful work that deserves to be known. There is something tremendously poignant in an artist so well-known for crafting their own image using their final creative act to deliberately destroy that image. Even in obliterating herself, Kahlo made her work speak loudly to us.
Frida Kahlo: The Complete Paintings is published by Taschen.
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Art & Culture
Children of a Lesser God: A Poetic Reflection on Marginalized Lives by Zeenat Iqbal Hakimjee from Harmony
Walking about in torn and tattered clothes, Looking messy with a running nose.
Crippled, unable to walk properly,
The arrogant man, looks at him disdainfully.
The other day the car almost ran her down,
As she leaped forward, begging For an aim,
Hand outstretched, unable to see,
In the sun, wearing dark glasses,
Makes him look shady.
For a cheap rate, They are bought,
Are they, Children of a Lesser God?
Art & Culture
My Weakness Is My Strength: A Poem on Resilience and Grace by Zeenat Iqbal Hakimjee from Harmony
If there can be appeal
In the scar on that face,
I will take my weakness
With a lot of grace,
If every tumble gives you a chance
To rise erect with a new stance,
When the going gets tough
The tough get going
Yesterday, I fell to-
Get up again and start moving.
In the classroom the young boy
From his neighbour snatched the toy.
The truck rammed into the car
With all its might,
Killed the occupants and threw
Them out a sight,
The sky roared with thunder
Scared stiff as they went down under.
My weakness shall he my strength,
May I never misuse it
Even for one moment. The meek shall inherit the earth.
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