SPEECH GIVEN AT THE OPENING OF ‘ON THE NATURE OF WOMEN'

Ladies and Gentlemen, it is such a pleasure to be back at Montacute and on such an auspicious occasion. My first visit – many years ago when the Nation Portrait Galley portraits were first installed – it was pouring with rain like today. And that had the good effect of making me understand the mentality of a Tudor or Jacobean lady as I paced the Long Gallery. I realised that when the weather was ‘unseasonable’ as they used to put it, the Long Gallery was a wonderful place for ladies to take exercise; like a gym perhaps (although I hasten to say that I did not perform any unlawful gymnastic exercises in front of the precious portraits).
Long before that I had understood the sheer power of portraiture, especially royal portraiture. It was at the reception after my first wedding in 1956 at the Fishmongers Hall. As the line filed by, I was extremely pleased with myself and my appearance. I was pleased with my white satin, my white tulle, my false pearls in a sort of Mary Queen of Scots headdress… and especially pleased when the guests started to murmur appreciatively as I shook their hands: ‘What grace, what dignity, what serenity…’ It was only when people began murmuring ‘What majesty’ that I began to think: ‘Hey, what is this? I know I’m graceful, serene, but MAJESTIC at my age?’ (I was 23.) Then I suddenly realised that behind me was hanging the first celebrated portrait of Her Majesty the Queen by Annigoni, painted only a few years earlier. The compliments were for the portrait!
However, the immense delight and instruction I have received from portraits ever since, has more than repaid me for that brief moment of disillusionment. As a historical biographer, as well as spending happy hours pondering in galleries, I work surrounded by postcards or larger reproductions of the people I’m writing about, or have written about. (I shall hope to replenish my collection today.) I suppose it’s a bit like method acting; method writing: it helps to get me in the mood. When I get stuck – and who doesn’t get stuck sometimes? – I conduct a kind of dialogue with, say, the famous portrait of the Earl of Leicester, dressed in a lavishly embroidered red silk or satin suit. ‘So just what are your relations with Queen Elizabeth?’ I pester him, like a tabloid reporter. The date is around 1575: ‘Does the red mean that you are trying to present yourself as a royal figure in one last attempt to get the still-Virgin Queen to marry you?’
Since I am working on Queen Elizabeth herself, I have innumerable pictures of her. But since I began with Mary Queen of Scots, my first book, I cannot and must not forget her. Currently I have a portrait of her from the National Portrait Gallery on the mantelpiece of my study. She looks at me rather reproachfully, I think. ‘What are you doing with Queen Elizabeth? I thought you loved me. You are a historical love rat.’ This portrait incidentally has recently been redated from being an eighteenth century copy to a contemporary likeness, from the wood which has been established as belonging to a 16th century tree. It’ all part of the National Portrait Gallery’s thrilling programme to redate pictures using dendrochronology which is such a thrilling prospect for historians.
I am always aware gazing at the portraits here and elsewhere that we are seeing people as they wished to be represented: the public face. These are not informal snaps, and royal images were strictly controlled, especially as Queen Elizabeth got older. No paparazzi and unlawful pictures. Instead as she told Nicholas Hilliard, she wanted to be seen with no shadows, as in ‘an alley in a garden’. No shadows, and incidentally no wrinkles; a fairy Queen even in her sixties.
Lastly, it is so pleasing for me to be opening an exhibition of WOMENS’ portraits. I have watched the development of women’s history – real interest in women’s lives - with great enthusiasm in the past twenty odd years. When I was working on my book The Weaker Vessel in the early eighties, I bumped into the distinguished solicitor and crime-writer Michael Gilbert who was just going in to the Athenaeum. I was on my way to the London Library. He swept off his black homburg and asked me most politely: ‘What are you working on?’ I replied: ‘Women in 17th century England.’ To which he replied: ‘Were there any women in 17th century England?’ and before I could reply: ‘Only 51% of the population,’ he had vanished into the Athenaeum, then an all male club. Now I would of course reply: ‘Yes, plenty of them, go to Montacute and have a look!’