This is my favourite painting in the National Portrait Gallery in London.
It was made in Antwerp in 1568 by the Dutch artist Anthonis Mor, one of the most brilliant portraitists of the sixteenth century. The sitter was an Englishman: 35-year-old Sir Henry Lee.
That gaze. It’s as direct – as alive – as his pose and understated clothes are cryptic. What’s the significance of the rings tied with red cord round his arm, his wrist and his neck? Why has he chosen to pull at the ring hanging from his neck with his thumb? The motifs on his sleeves are intricately embroidered; I’d call them blackwork, if the thread didn’t look as though it’s fine-spun gold. But are the lovers’ knots and armillary spheres his own emblems, or a nod – a message – to someone else? The gold chain looped five times around his neck is rich but coolly plain: this, it seems to say, is a man of action.
I’ve loved the painting for years, but all I’ve known about Sir Henry, apart from his extraordinary face, is that he was Elizabeth I’s champion at the tilt. (There’s a job title to conjure with.)
Last week, I wrote about one of Elizabeth’s forensic administrators, Walter Mildmay. This week, it seems well past time to find out more about Henry Lee.
Henry was born in March 1533, just six months before the woman who would one day be his queen. His mother Margaret, sister of the poet Thomas Wyatt, served Elizabeth’s mother as a lady in waiting. His father Anthony Lee also made a career at Henry VIII’s court, although his attempts at writing verse were less successful. (One poem survives; it’s almost unspeakably awful.)
The Lee fortune had been made over the previous two generations by farming sheep at their estate at Quarrendon in Buckinghamshire. After Henry’s mother died in the mid-1540s, however, the family’s domestic arrangements became a little less conventional.
Henry was the oldest of four boys; his younger brothers were Robert, Thomas and Cromwell – the last named after the king’s all-powerful chief minister, with exquisitely bad timing, just before his fall in 1540. (Anthony Lee had been among the knights who rode to greet Anne of Cleves, the king’s Cromwell-arranged unloved bride, when she arrived near London that January.)
But Henry’s mother was not the only woman in Anthony’s life. He had a mistress, Anne Hassell, who gave him two more sons, Richard and Russell. So far, so unremarkable. What was out of the ordinary was that in 1548, now a widower, Anthony made his mistress his second wife. What Margaret’s boys thought of this newly blended family – there were also five Lee sisters in the mix – isn’t recorded.
When Anthony died in November 1549, therefore, 16-year-old Henry inherited weighty responsibilities along with his Buckinghamshire estates. By that point he had already found a place within the royal household, a young man serving a young king, Edward VI. Like Edward, Henry was a believer in the reformed religion, but he survived the terrifying upheavals precipitated by the king’s death in 1553 thanks to an uncle who (he later said) had a ‘furious zeal’ for the cause of Edward’s sister Mary. He was one of eighty young men knighted the day after the new queen’s coronation, and by May 1554 had married Anne Paget, daughter of Mary’s privy councillor William Paget.
But Henry, by both talent and temperament, wasn’t an administrator or a scholar. He was a soldier, who spent most of 1558 leading 300 men in defence of the Scottish border. He had just returned to Westminster that autumn when Queen Mary died. England had a new queen: Elizabeth.
Embroidered in gold on the white glove Elizabeth wore at her coronation was an armillary sphere, a skeletal globe of intersecting golden rings representing the motion of the stars and planets in the sky. As a symbol, it was as complex and multilayered as the queen herself: did it signify knowledge, constancy, harmony, the passage of time, dominion over the heavens or the earth? And, if it was an emblem claimed by the queen, were the lovers’ knots and armillary spheres Henry Lee wore in 1568 a gesture of courtly devotion?
Perhaps. But this, like almost everything else Elizabeth touched, is hard to read. This early in the reign, the coronation glove stands alone; there’s no other hard evidence that the armillary sphere was specifically identified with the queen by the time Henry sat for his portrait.
And it hadn’t been easy for him to find his place within the new regime. His sovereign was a woman, who couldn’t lead an army into battle even if she wanted to. In any case, she didn’t want to: all the signs were that peace, not war, was Elizabeth’s risk-averse preference. What was a soldier to do? Henry was a loyal, able man, but he had no interest in court intrigue, no ambition to climb the greasy pole of preferment at Westminster.
What he did enjoy was travel. Thanks to a family connection with the queen’s chief minister William Cecil, Henry served on a diplomatic mission to Paris in the spring of 1559. Two years later he was in Venice and Naples, from where he sent whatever snippets of political and military news he could gather that might prove useful to the administration back home.
In the mid-1560s he developed a friendship with the queen’s favourite Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester – Leicester was staying with him in Buckinghamshire in February 1566, for example – but it seems to have been a personal attachment rather than a route to political promotion. In 1568 Henry left England once again.
That summer he was in Antwerp with a friend, Edward, Lord Windsor, who had been knighted with him the day after Queen Mary’s coronation. The two men were almost exactly the same age, and Windsor’s home at Bradenham in Buckinghamshire was only 15 miles from Henry’s at Quarrendon. During their stay in Antwerp, Henry sat for Anthonis Mor – and it turns out his portrait has a twin. Windsor’s likeness is much less finely drawn – it’s not by Mor – and much less well known, because it’s still in private hands; but the pose is almost identical, down to the thumb looped into the ring hanging from a cord around his neck. In other words, if there’s devotion here, it could be the commitment of friendship rather than the display of courtly love. (Matching tattoos portraits from a lads’ trip abroad? Or – I’m tempted to wonder, given the disparity in the artists’ skill and the sitters’ charisma – is this a case of Windsor emulating a more glamorous friend??)
After Antwerp, the pair parted company. Lee went on via Augsburg to Venice and Florence, again sending information home wherever he found it, this time to both Cecil and Leicester. (On one occasion Cecil sent dispatches back, addressed in Italian to ‘Arigo Lee’.)
Henry was in no hurry to return, but in March 1569 news reached Venice of ratcheting conflict between England and Spain. ‘The fame of warres wyll make me draw homeward sooner than I ment,’ he wrote to Cecil.
And althoughe my abylyte is leste to be respected, yet the desyre I haue to searve her majestie as I am bounde, and my contre, makeathe me desyre rather to creape with the pismare than reste with the dormouse.
And although my ability is least to be respected, yet the desire I have to serve her majesty as I am bound, and my country, maketh me desire rather to creep with the pismire than rest with the dormouse.
(A ‘pismire’, I discover, is an ant, so called because ant hills smell like urine. Henry, it seems, had a way with words and a neat line in self-deprecation.)
