Elizabeth 1, of course, was never a bride - but was almost always gloriously costumed.
Reading Elizabeth and Essex by Lytton Strachey. Highly elaborate and stylised prose. A keen eye constantly on the look out for the tiny clue that might give an insight into the mind of this extraordinary woman. Her costume, for example, was a stiff and splendid Baroque exterior perfectly encasing the woman beneath….
“From her visible aspect to the profundities of her being, every part of her was permeated by the bewildering discordances of the real and the apparent. Under the serried complexities of her raiment –the huge hoop- the stiff ruff, the swollen sleeves, the powdered pearls, the spreading, gilded gauzes – the form of the woman vanished and men saw instead an image – magnificent, portentous. self-created – an image of regality, which yet, by a miracle was actually alive. Posterity has suffered y a similar deceit of vision. The great Queen of its imagination, the lion-hearted heroine, who flung back the insolence of Spain and crushed the tyranny of Rome with splendid unhesitating gestures, no more resembled the Queen of fact than the clothed Elizabeth the naked one.”
