Life
Lee became Queen Elizabeth I’s champion in 1570 and was appointed Master of the Royal Armouries in 1580, an office which he held until his death. As Queen's Champion, Lee devised the Accession Day tilts held annually on 17 November, the most important Elizabethan court festival from the 1580s. He retired as Queen's Champion in 1590, and the poems "His Golden Locks" by George Peele and "Time's Eldest Son" were set to music by John Dowland and performed at the lavish retirement pageant. He was made a Knight of the Order of the Garter in 1597.
Sir Henry, like most courtiers of the day, had a portrait painted by a leading artist. In Lee's picture, his sleeves are decorated with armillary spheres, a symbol of wisdom and also his device as queen's champion. His sleeves are also decorated with lovers knots which, combined with the armillary spheres can be seen to represent his love for learning (the wisdom of the armillary spheres) and for the Queen (his symbol as her champion). Lee also wears several rings tied to his arm, and has his finger through a third ring around his neck. This may represent his marriages, and the third ring, which is not quite on his finger, may represent his relationship with Anne Vavasour.
After the death of his wife Ann Paget in 1590, Lee openly lived with his long-time mistress, Anne Vavasour, formerly one of the Queen's Ladies in Waiting.
Sir Henry commissioned the famous Ditchley Portrait of Queen Elizabeth, which shows her standing on a map of the British Isles, surveying her dominions. One foot rests near Ditchley in Oxfordshire, to commemorate her visit to Sir Henry Lee there, as sign of particular favour. Sir Henry was later famous for refusing to receive his monarch a second time, because of the enormous expense.
Three suits of armour were made for Sir Henry Lee by the renowned Greenwich armoury, and are depicted in the album of drawings left behind by that workshop. Portions of the armour survive to the present day. One of the armours currently stands in the hall of the Armourers and Brasiers company in London.
He was the uncle of Captain Thomas Lee, a troublesome soldier on whose behalf he allowed himself to be bound over and who was put to death in 1601 for an involvement in the treason of the 2nd Earl of Essex.
Read more about this topic: Henry Lee Of Ditchley
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“The symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year’s hay with the fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground.... So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The civilizing process has increased the distance between behavior and the impulse life of the animal body.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night ... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)