It features armillary spheres – models of the solar system - symbolising heavenly wisdom. The hat echoes the design of the blue surcoat. The queen's glove, set in diamonds with a crown visible on the embroidered fingers, is pinned by a rose jewel with a pendant pearl to his ostrich-plumed hat as a sign of her favour. He has brown eyes, long loose brown hair, moustache, and a full beard trimmed to a point. It shows George in tilting attire: he is wearing star-spangled leg protectors, blued steel armour, a surcoat gilded with gold leaf and his right arm is held out to support a tilting lance. A beautiful if slightly ludicrous miniature painted by Nicholas Hilliard from this time commemorates his appointment as champion. The performance was a sort of serio-comic affectation hinting at George’s past loyal service - and his lack of material reward. The queen’s grandfather, Henry VII, also claimed to be descended from Arthur as a means of beefing up his shaky claim to the throne. By dressing up in this way, George was presenting himself as some kind of successor to Arthur. The Clifford family played up the Arthurian connection by adopting a fiery dragon as its heraldic crest. The castle was allegedly built on the site of an older fortress owned by Uther Pendragon, father of the legendary King Arthur. George was posing as an Arthurian knight from his family’s Pendragon Castle near Kirkby Stephen in Cumbria. They were staged at the Westminster jousting tiltyard in 1593, 1595 and the first was in November 1590, the day he was made her Champion.Ĭlad in glittering steel armour with white feathers on his helmet and a white surcoat on his breast, the symbolic colour of the virgin queen, he was accompanied by a page playing the wizard Merlin. Reputedly cost the equivalent of £250,000. Among his many other extravagances, George paid for no fewer than three costumed pageants to commemorate Elizabeth’s accession to the throne.Īrmour of George Clifford, 1585. To equip himself for the task he would never carry out, he commissioned the top military artificer Jacob Holder of Greenwich to create what is today regarded as the finest suit of Tudor armour.Ĭopiously enamelled with Tudor Roses, fleur-de-lis, and Elizabeth’s emblem of two E’s back-to-back, it set George back an estimated £250,000 (2023). Officially, the champion’s job was to challenge anyone who denied the new monarch's right to occupy the throne (as if) to trial by combat. He ascended to the pinnacle of fatuousness when he was chosen as Queen Elizabeth’s Champion in 1590. Seemingly mesmerised by the queen’s erotic charge, the ambitious earl risked all in an attempt to become her chief playmate. Despite his wealth, his northern origins and regional accent counted against him. The outlay would drive George to the brink of bankruptcy, and over it. She liked gorgeous men who were prepared to finance her often staggeringly expensive amusements. Once he arrived in Whitehall from Cumbria, Elizabeth singled out George as a man of great personal beauty. The sea dogs, as they were disparagingly called by the Spanish authorities, were English privateers who, with the consent, license and sometimes financial support of the queen attacked and plundered Spanish colonial settlements and treasure ships in the second half of the 16th century. Elizabeth’s regime was blocked from trading legitimately with much of the world by Philip II of Spain. He eventually resorted to privateering, licensed piracy, in a frantic attempt to rebuild his fortune. But he spent so lavishly on flashy clothes, huge tournaments, gilded armour and elaborate events aimed at winning the queen’s good opinion, he almost frittered away one of the largest inheritances in England. Of all the glamorous, adventurous and wealthy nobles who ruined themselves pursuing the fickle favour of the flirtatious Queen Elizabeth I, the most spectacular example is George Clifford, the 3rd Earl of Cumberland.Īn inveterate gambler, jouster, wastrel, and womaniser, he was an exceptional naval commander who played an important part in the destruction of the Spanish Armada. Miniature by Elizabeth’s court painter, Nicholas Hilliard. Note the Cumbrian mountains in the background. Gorgeous George, Earl of Cumberland, wearing powder blue steel armour made to commemorate his assumption in 1590 of the role of Queen Elizabeth's champion.
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