The cult of Elizabeth has traditionally been seen as a propaganda triumph for Tudor despotism, flourishing paradoxically in the final decade of her reign when the queen's difficulties and decline had to be concealed beneath what Roy Strong calls ‘the mask of youth’. In his influential study of her cult and the artwork and pageantry that it inspired, Strong argues that ‘the mask of youth’ worked as long as her courtiers ‘could yet join in paeans to the Divine One who alone seemed capable of holding together the world they knew’. The fair complexion and the blush of youth were, of course, a façade sustained by make-up and make-believe, but still the tributes continued to her virtue and her beauty. Midway through her reign, in the ‘Aprill’ eclogue of The Shepheardes Calendar (1579), Edmund Spenser had blended the tropes of Petrarchan compliment with the heraldic devices of the Tudor dynasty in his portrait of Elizabeth:

Twenty years later those roses still flourished in both the paintings and poetry of her last decade. Sir John Davies dedicates his most ambitious work, Nosce Teipsum (1599) to Elizabeth: