New perspectives on the Armada Portrait:
Elizabeth I as Queen of the Winds
Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I, c. 1588. Queen’s House, National Maritime Museum, London. ID number ZBA7719. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Reproduced with a Creative Commons Licence.
This portrait of Queen Elizabeth I is one of three with a similar composition commemorating the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The portraits’ rich symbolism has been extensively decoded by other scholars before me (Belsey and Belsey 11-35, Strong 131-3). I add to their analysis the observation that the whole portrait is composed as a portolan map or sea chart. I discuss this compositional relationship in my book, Conceiving Histories: Trying for Pregnancy, Past and Present, in the context of late sixteenth-century writing about conception in both in Spain and England (Davis 133-7). I extract the observation here to make it better available and of use to other decoders of this extraordinary painting, which so exemplifies British royal portraiture.
The portolan map I have chosen to compare with the Armada composition, both here and in my book, is not directly quoted by the portrait. It is merely contemporaneous with the English portraits and, like the written texts I use and the historical contexts in which I read them, connects Spanish court culture. As such the map does not perfectly match the portrait. Nonetheless, superimposing them makes a compositional association clear. I show this in the images below but also by providing videos that show the map superimposed at different orientations.
Portolan Map of the Mediterranean, Joan Martines (Royal Cartographer to Philip II of Spain), 1584. Trinity College Cambridge MS R.4.50. Copyright © The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. Reproduced courtesy of a Creative Commons License.
The portraits’ interest in interlocking circles has been noticed before (Belsey and Belsey 17-18). The form of the portolan map, however, gives a specific organisational logic to that interest. Portolan maps are structured by a ring of wind roses or compasses (synonyms in the sixteenth-century maritime context). Rhumb lines are drawn between the compass points, indicating the shipping routes formed by prevailing winds. The portrait borrows this organisational design, projecting a similar ring of circles and network of lines onto the queen’s body. Moreover, a wind rose motif is explicitly picked out in gold in the red velvet upholstery at the queen’s elbows, and in the lace of her ruff and cuffs.
Armada portrait and portolan map superimposed.
This cartographic reference brings the influence of the winds out of the scenes through the windows, which depict the discrepant fortunes of the English and Spanish navies in their 1588 engagement, into direct contact with the queen’s body and her immediate surroundings. The feather fan in the queen’s hand and the aigrette on her head (styled to resemble a puff of wind), present the queen as the source rather than a subject of the winds. She is depicted here as the Queen of the Winds.
In Conceiving Histories I used wind to link the paintings’ maritime, military and colonial themes with its messaging around fertility and sexuality (Belsey and Belsey 12, Strong). Whilst all the four elements and the six so-called ‘non-naturals’ were implicated in fertility health, wind had a special role. In classical mythology Zephyrus, the West Wind, blew through nature in the springtime, activating its reproductive potential. The earth was round in some classical myths because it had been pregnant with the winds. In the monotheistic religions, which absorbed Greek medical traditions in the Middle Ages, wind was analogised to the breath of God which inspired all foetuses to perfection at ensoulment.
Armada portrait and portolan map animated to show different correspondences at different orientations.
Wind, though, accommodated a common ambiguity around pregnancy. The condition that was most often muddled up with pregnancy was what sixteenth-century medical writing referred to as a ‘windy tympany’, a build-up of gas in the stomach. Wind could be fructifying, or it could be vacant. The Armada portraits are, of course, of a childless queen. Indeed, others have written about the emphasis in the paintings on the purity of Elizabeth’s virginity, symbolised by the many pearls decorating her dress and hair. Moreover, she was a childless queen who followed her childless half-sister onto the throne, and who was now at war with Philip of Spain, a man who was both her former suitor and brother-in-law. The children she and Mary didn’t have, for all their absence, were implicated in the military scenes playing out through the windows in the Armada portraits.
Take a closer look at elements of the Armada portrait and the portolan map compared.
Mastery of the narrative around non-reproduction was critical. Wind is presented as being in the queen’s control and gift, rather than being something that just happens to and around her. Elizabeth’s and England’s fertile expectations are trained not on having royal children, but instead on the colonial dreams so volubly articulated by her hand resting on a globe turned to represent the Americas. And the only way to the Americas, before the private energy represented by the invention of the internal combustion engine, was with a good wind.
Isabel Davis. May 2025.
Web links:
Decoding videos on the website of Royal Museums Greenwich.
‘Portolan Chart of the Mediterranean’, Blog Post, Wren Library, Trinity College Cambridge.
Armada Portrait at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
References:
Andrew Belsey and Catherine Belsey, ‘Icons of Divinity: Portraits of Elizabeth I’, in Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure iin English Culture 1540-1660, eds. Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (London: Reaktion, 1997), 11-35.
Isabel Davis, Conceiving Histories: Trying for Pregnancy, Past and Present (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2025).
Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987).
References for material in the video:
Mermaid image from: The Grynaeus / Munster map of the World: Typus Cosmographicus Universalis (with 1537 edition of Novus Orbis Regionum: Ex Libris Principissae Piccolominiae Bibliotheca). Copyright © Stanford University. Available via a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC-SA).
Wind Head image from: Sebastian Münster, Typus orbis universalis [S.l.: s.n, 1550]. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. In the Public Domain.
Further reading:
Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘All Swell that End Swell: Dropsy, Phantom Pregnancy, and the Sound of Deconception in All’s Well that Ends Well,’ Renaissance Drama 35 (2006): 169-189.
P. D. A. Harvey, Medieval Maps (London: British Library, 1991).
Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker, The Spanish Armada (Harmondsworth: Hamish Hamilton, 1988).
Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions on the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
Christine Riding and Robert Blyth, The Armada Portrait (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich: London, 2020).