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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Beautiful, surreal and eerily empty, Vienna’s Globe Museum the only public museum on Earth dedicated to globes, and it – quite literally – tells the story of our world.
It’s a chilly afternoon in Vienna, and the line for the Austrian National Library has already spilled out the door, curling like a ribbon around the grand Josefsplatz square. I’m not in the mood to wait – I’ve already struck out at several crowded nearby attractions where timed-entry tickets were sold out.
Rather than join the queue, I walk down the street and stumble onto a smaller, somewhat hidden site: The Globe Museum. Tucked inside Vienna’s 17th-Century Palais Mollard, it’s the only public museum on Earth dedicated entirely to globes, and one of Vienna’s greatest surprises.
Different worlds
I soon realise that I’ve wandered into another world – or more accurately, many of them.
Just steps from some of the city’s most celebrated, crowded attractions, Vienna’s Globe Museum displays more than 220 rare and antique spheres, most created before 1850, ranging from towering Coronelli globes to tiny, foldable pocket orbs.
Beautiful and surreal, the museum’s extensive collection goes beyond geography to reveal how humanity has mapped and imagined the Earth and heavens above. It’s a chronicle of human curiosity, and – quite literally – the story of our world.
“Globes show the change in our imagination of our planet,” says Nikolaus Schobesberger, the director of museum. “And this is the only place in the world where you can see so many of them at the same time.”
Visitors start by travelling through the Golden Cabinet, a lavish room with centuries-old frescoes depicting scenes from Greek mythology. It’s the backdrop for a stunning array of globe-related instruments, like telluriums, which illustrate the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, and armillary spheres, which use a framework of rings to visualise the movements of celestial bodies.
As I reach the museum’s four main galleries, I realise the whole place is pin-drop quiet. I shuffle slowly from one glass case to another, holding my breath to not disturb the stillness, even though I’m alone with centuries-old objects.
I find myself marvelling at two spherical worlds suspended in time. One is terrestrial, with oceans awash in vivid blues and squiggly brown coastlines. The other is celestial, where mythological creatures and constellations spill across a tea stain-coloured backdrop. Barely bigger than beach balls, these two time capsules were made by the same craftsman 10 years apart in the mid-1500s and preserve a world as it was still coming into focus.
In one, Europe, the Mediterranean and Africa’s coasts are filled with place names, while North America fades into the uncharted Arctic. Asia is distorted, a hypothetical southern continent stands in for Australia and Antarctica and the Pacific is populated by sea monsters instead of islands. In the other, Renaissance astrological observations exist alongside Pegasus taking flight and Perseus brandishing Medusa’s severed head.
“They’re some of the oldest globes we have in our collection,” says Schobesberger.
Moving from one globe to the next, I notice how these relics extend beyond geography and depict what people once believed. Many fill the space of unexplored oceans with dragons, while some confidently depict my home state of California as an island. Some pieces also preserve colonial-era prejudices with elaborately painted scenes depicting Indigenous people as cannibals. On one, African coastlines are dotted with Spanish and Portuguese flags, showing “ownership”.
“They’re a part of this colonial thinking. And so, they’re beautiful art, but you also have to think about the time they were created,” Schobesberger says, explaining that every globe is as much a record of what people knew as what they didn’t. That’s why he believes the museum resonates with all types of people, not just historians or cartography enthusiasts.
One of Schobesberger’s favourite objects is a lunar globe from 1961. The front portion of the Moon is meticulously mapped. The back, however, is a stark white strip, intentionally left blank because the far side of the Moon had not yet been seen. An updated lunar globe made two years later, also on display, contains the missing portion.
I can’t help but circle back to a showstopper in the front hall, a replica of the Behaim Globe – completed by Martin Behaim in 1492, the year Christopher Columbus sailed west – which shows a world without the Americas. There’s simply an expanse of ocean between Europe and Asia.
“A globe is such a great thing because it’s a small-scale model of our planet, so you can tell stories about the world on it,” he says. “Climate, geology, topography, trade routes, everything.”
From curios to cultural cornerstones
Walking through the museum, visitors can see the globe’s own journey unfold. The earliest examples were luxury objects reserved for aristocrats and wealthy merchants. Over time, globes lost their exclusivity, shrunk in size and became more affordable and popular. They entered schools, appeared in living rooms and even became playthings for children. Today, they are so commonplace that my son even won his desktop globe in a classroom raffle.
I entered the museum expecting to view globes as historic artefacts, but I’m surprised by how alive they still feel. Even with Google Earth at my fingertips, these tactile objects invite curiosity and imagination in a way that a screen doesn’t.
“It’s not just that the globe is a scientific instrument. It’s also an object which lets you dream of foreign countries,” says Schobesberger.
Globes in pop culture
Beginning 24 September 2026, the museum’s newest exhibition, Globes in Everyday Life, Art and Culture, will explore how globes evolved from a status symbol to a familiar fixture. It also showcases the globe’s enduring place in pop culture, from architecture to art and film, like Charlie Chaplin’s famous dance with an inflatable globe in The Great Dictator. “The main idea was to show that globes are almost everywhere as a part of everyday life,” Schobesberger says.
Schobesberger’s own fascination began as a young child, when he became captivated by the ships, sea monsters and mythical creatures that filled the blank spaces of historical maps and globes. He began to draw his own world maps when he was just six years old.
“You can think about what’s possible on the other side of the world, even when you’re sitting here in Europe,” he says. “Nothing else can capture the imagination quite like it.”
That sentiment resonates with author JF Penn, who stumbled onto the Globe Museum while researching her novel Spear of Destiny, based on a relic housed in Vienna’s Imperial Treasury. Like me, she ended up lingering far longer than planned.
“I particularly loved the oversized antique globes with the patina of age and use,” she says. “I considered how many fingertips have turned them over generations and wondered if they thought of travelling to these far-off places that I do.”
Even after visitors leave Palais Mollard, the search continues. Across Vienna, some 50 globes are perched on rooftops and facades, hidden in plain sight. The museum even charts them on a virtual map in its new exhibit, encouraging people to look upward as they wander the city.
When I finally step back outside, the sky is dark and the streets are even more crowded. Earlier in the day, I had been seeking a quieter corner of Vienna. Instead, I was given a whole new way of seeing the world – a place that’s constantly being redrawn and reimagined.
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This news is taken from BBC News
BISHKEK: The city of Lahore has been named the Tourism and Cultural Capital for 2026-27 by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).
The decision was announced at the 26th meeting of the SCO Council of Heads of State in the Kyrgyz capital, which was attended by PM Shehbaz Sharif.
The title of Tourism and Cultural Capital has been rotated annually among SCO member states since 2022, and the designation serves to highlight the prominence of a city that embodies the cultural heritage of the country that takes over the rotating presidency of the organisation.
This year, Pakistan assumed the SCO presidency, with PM Shehbaz defining the theme of the chairmanship as ‘Turning Vision into Action: Connectivity, Innovation and Shared Prosperity’.
Cities that have held the title in the past include Varanasi, India (2022-23), Almaty, Kazakhstan (2023-24), Qingdao, China (2024-25) and Cholpon-Ata, Kyrgyzstan (2025-26).
The decision to designate Lahore as the tourism and cultural capital was taken in April this year, when the heads of tourism administrations of SCO member states met in Bishkek.
The designation is designed to promote people-to-people contacts and tourism among the member states.
Published in Dawn, September 2nd, 2026
Art & Culture
Deputy High Commissioner Haseeb Bin Aziz Inaugurates “Masters of Canvas” Art Exhibition at Pakistan High Commission London
PRESS RELEASE
London, UK — Deputy High Commissioner of Pakistan, Mr. Haseeb Bin Aziz, inaugurated the prestigious art exhibition “Masters of Canvas” at the Pakistan High Commission in London, celebrating the exceptional talent, diversity and enduring legacy of Pakistan’s distinguished artists.
The exhibition brings together the works of renowned senior Pakistani artists and calligraphers Late Ahmed Khan, Late Mashkoor Raza, M.A. Bukhari, Chitra Pritam and Qamar Siddiqui, offering audiences in the United Kingdom a rare opportunity to experience original works of Pakistani art.
Speaking at the inauguration, Deputy High Commissioner Haseeb Bin Aziz paid tribute to the distinguished artists, appreciating their remarkable contributions to Pakistan’s artistic and cultural heritage. He also commended the efforts of Art Culture Pakistan and Crescent Art Gallery, Karachi, for bringing the work of these celebrated artists to the United Kingdom and providing an important platform for Pakistani art and culture to reach international audiences.
The exhibition is proudly presented by Art Culture Pakistan, an initiative founded by Mr. Akber Mehmood, in collaboration with Crescent Art Gallery, Karachi, founded by Mr. Nasir Javed, together with Mr. Sameer Nasir and curator Ms. Sidra Nasir. Through their continued commitment to the promotion of Pakistani art and culture, the organisations have worked to introduce outstanding Pakistani artists to audiences across Pakistan and internationally.
Addressing the gathering, Mr. Sameer Nasir of Crescent Art Gallery encouraged members of the audience to actively participate in and support cultural events of this nature. He emphasised that growing public interest in Pakistani art and culture can help create greater opportunities for cultural exchange and contribute to strengthening Pakistan’s soft image in the United Kingdom and beyond.
Mr. Asif Rangoonwala of the British Pakistan Foundation also congratulated the organisers for bringing such a prestigious selection of Pakistani artists to London. He described the exhibition as a rare cultural occasion, highlighting the significance of presenting original artworks from Pakistan to London audiences after a considerable period. He encouraged attendees to value and support such unique opportunities to engage directly with Pakistan’s rich artistic heritage.
The event also featured a special video presentation titled “Masters of Canvas,” presented by Mr. Akber Mehmood of Art Culture Pakistan. The presentation introduced the featured artists, showcasing their artworks and highlighting the distinctive genres and artistic approaches that have shaped their careers.
“To conclude the event, exquisite calligraphic masterpieces by the venerable maestro M.A. Bukhari were presented on behalf of Art Culture Pakistan to Deputy High Commissioner Haseeb bin Aziz, British Pakistani Foundation CEO Asif Rangoonwala, and Press Attaché Mr Ali Nawaz Malik.”
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