the blonde of the week: Queen Elizabeth I of England

The Virgin Queen. Gloriana. The Faerie Queen. Good Queen Bess. These were nicknames for Queen Elizabeth I of England, one of England's most beloved royals and a legend in her own time. Queen Elizabeth was also a blonde.

Or was she?

"Attentive schoolgirls may remember being told that Queen Elizabeth I had auburn hair," writes Joanna Pittman in ON BLONDES. Indeed, early portraits of the Queen such as this one, thought to have been painted by Elizabethan female court painter, Levina Teerling when Elizabeth was thirteen, show her as a bona fide redhead.

So...what happened? Queen Elizabeth was a brilliant self-promoter, that's what. Right around the time England defeated the Spanish armada, thus forever cementing her association with one of the greatest victories in British history, Queen Elizabeth made the transition into blonde. At the time she was 55-years old, her real hair already grey and thinning. But she will be remembered for time immortal, thanks to her large, trusty collection of wigs, as an ageless, wrinkle-free blonde.

Elizabeth's reign was recognized by her public as one of "exceptional prudence and felicity", but it was the Armada defeat of 1588 that sealed the deal for Queen Bess. According to Pittman, "it provided the final impetus for the creation of a Queen Elizabeth cult."

Why did Elizabeth choose blonde? Because in 16th century England the color held potent, powerful symbolism. In addition to being a key component of the Elizabethan ideal of femininity, it also conferred a non-negligible association between the Queen and all things holy. As you may recall, the Queen never married: she pitted suitors against one another throughout her lifetime in the end rebuffing them all. At age fifty-one she refused the hand of her final suitor (the French Duke of Anjou, a man half her age) and her foreign policy ministers finally took the hint: the Queen would never marry.

Thereafter Queen Eliz became immortalized as "the Virgin Queen" and subsequently deified for her virtuous piety. Scared images of Christ, the saints, and the Virgin Mary had recently been "removed from England's churches and rejected as idolatry", leaving ample room for a new brand of virgin-worship: the cult of Queen Elizabeth.

Throughout her life Queen Elizabeth keep close tabs on artistic representations of her image throughout the kingdom. It is rumored that she had her public relations officer issue a "pattern book by which officially sanctioned artists would be able to produce 'correct' images ." In 1596, towards the end of her life, she had "unseemly portraits sought out by government officers" and turned into fuel for the fire.

In official portraits her likeness marched on: aloof, otherworldly, and in increasingly lighter shades of blonde. They were produced with perhaps even greater vigor after her death. Writes Pittman:

"She was a golden ruler of a golden age, and her blonde hair was part of this divine unreality."

the blonde of the week: The Virgin Mary

For many centuries, the only leading ladies of Catholicism permitted to be blonde were the harlots: Eve and Mary Magdalene. And this was for good reason: blonde hair was considered synonymous with sex, sexual attraction, and sexual appeal, thanks in large part to Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love, Beauty and Sexual Rapture, a.k.a. the Original Blonde.

Mary, on the other hand, was the exact opposite of all of these things. “Mary was in all ways perfect," writes Joanna Pitman, author of On Blondes. "One of her many distinguishing characteristics was her freedom from carnal desire. Not only had she been conceived immaculately by divine intervention, but her purity had been preserved by the miraculous birth of Jesus Christ.” She was without a doubt the purest woman in all of Catholicism, and as such it makes sense that she be visually depicted as a brunette, or perhaps more commonly, with hair that was not visible at all, hidden beneath a pious veil.

Thanks to the visions of a Swede named Bridget, all of this changed in the 14th century. Bridget, later to become St. Bridget, first began to receive visions when she was just 7 years old. After the death of her husband, King Ulfo, she pursued what I would call a seriously religious life, eventually denouncing her place in her court and her title as Princess, and turning to a life as a woman of the cloth in the service of God. She went on to found the Bridgettine order.

Bridget’s visions were extremely popular during her life, and even more so after her death. They were originally written in Swedish and translated into Latin, but these revelations were in such high demand that they were eventually translated into most European languages. According to Pittman, “Within a few decades of her death in 1373, the revelations became a standard part of the works of devotion.” St. Bridget’s visions had wide appeal, and even longer-enduring effects. Here is how Bridget envisioned Catholicism’s first lady during the nativity (quoting from Joanna Pittman’s translation in On Blondes):

“I beheld a Virgin of extreme beauty…then the virgin pulled off the shoes from her feet, drew off the white mantle than enveloped her, removed the veil from her head, laying it by her side, thus remaining in her tunic alone with her beautiful golden hair falling loosely down her shoulders…”

It wasn’t long before artists began to incorporate these images into their renderings of the Madonna, casting her as a luminous, transcendent blonde for all posterity, and creating a serious dichotomy in the symbolism of the blonde. All of this thanks to a Swedish saint named Bridget.

Hmm…she was Swedish after all...is it possible that Bridget was blonde herself?