sketch

My short career as a cartoonist lasted until Queen Elizabeth took my vulgarish cartoon away from me.

The first political cartoon is generally thought to be 'Join or Die' in 1754 which was written by Ben Franklin during the French and Indian war.

I had him beat by 170 years in both quality as well as in content.

I started out with an old painting of Henry VIII and family

It was this old painting called the 'The Family of Henry VIII Allegory of Tudor Succession'

Actually, I only used the part with princess Elizabeth in it which was only the right third of the painting...

...and redrew it in pen and ink as this cartoon, with me as Peace. It was when I was a lady in waiting in the court being Queen Elizabeth but also her scribe (later called Secretary of State).* Queen Elizabeth hated the old painting and I was really bored since she was outside riding so I unknowingly invented the cartoon, in fact I invented the political cartoon as we know today with all the common elements including parody, caricature, metaphors, and satire. They were also funny.

It has three levels of whimsy added one on top of another other. (I found the cartoon here in one of the two the best collections of Queen Elizabeth's paintings but they say someone else drew it but they could not have for several reasons** (and here is the other collection for you to enjoy.)

Notice at the bottom there appears to be a line of heraldry, like a coat of arms, signifying the royal nature of the court of Queen Elizabeth except there is no heraldry that is as long as that one to extend all the way across the bottom of a drawing and if you look closer you will see numbers on them like the number '3' on one of them and that means it has to be something other than heraldry.

When we used candles for footlights in the theater they went across the floor like in both pictures and they were almost, but not quite out of view of the audience like in both pictures. And the numbers? They all had numbers on them so when one candle had to have it's wick trimmed a person called a snuffer man did it. However, he was in front (in the orchestra pit) who could not see which one needed trimming, usually when it was flickering, so an actor would hold up fingers to indicate which candle to trim or sometimes to redirect if the scene demanded like to Juliet's balcony.

I was saying that the English royal court was a big stage production that Elizabeth put on for the world. 'All the worlds a stage and we are...'

scribe

The style of the drawing itself was one that I invented where the important issues and themes are made larger than life. which is now called caricature. My nose, my quill, how Queen Elizabeth leads by the hand. Because they are important each are increased in the drawing until my nose is bizarrely pointed, my quill is the largest in England and Elizabeth is about to pull me right off my feet (which she did to everyone if your feet were not facing the right direction when she took you by the hand and dragged you off to meet someone.) .

very phalic

So people could not ignore the phalic symbolism of the quill then there was the real implied use of large feathers for sexual foreplay. Then so that people could not ignore both of those symbolisms look a bit lower and you will notice that my fingers are pointed at my very real non-symbolic penis,

That thing on it is what we called a mitt or the Scots called a sock. It was like a penis sock with a string for a man to tie to his waist so that it would not fall out of his codpiece. If a man wore a codpiece, with it's sharp edges, without a mitt their penis might fall out of it and then they were in danger of it getting chopped off if their codpiece got pushed against their body hard. Such would occur if they got kicked in the groin or landed on a saddle the wrong way or even if their horse pulled up short and they were thrust against the horse's neck. So it was very important not to have their mitt untied but for me it was my flag of independence.

The slang that went with it was more important. 'Only my wife unties my mitt' meant a faithful husband. 'A man who doesn't bother to tie his mitt' means a fearless or an alpha male who doesn't need to worry about getting kicked in the groin.

That also goes for women in cartoons.

At his own peril a man might ignore my pen but that penis is hard to ignore. I knew what I was drawing and I am an expert at knowing what effect it would have.

hidden horse head

Did you notice the woman to the right of me and how her hair looks like a horses head made from vegetables? I've outlined it on the right. You can't see all the lines since this scan only picked up the darkest ones. It's both a hidden horse's head and it's made of vegetables which made it the only double optical illusion seen in art until about the 1800's (which only means that very few people caught it).

Then to add another level to it the horse is eating from a bowl of apples. Yes, it is very important. I always say that whenever you catch vegtables eating fruit it should always be immediately brought to the attention of the proper authorites.

It's a satire of those old idiotic paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo which has vegetables made into faces which I hated with a passion. It was the pop art of the day and it reminds me a lot like those tawdry black velvet Elvis paintings. Oh, you like those? Then you have your choice of 63 Elvises here.

People would even serve dinners with the food arranged in happy faces while fairs all over England held contests offering expensive prizes for the best looking pile of vegetables.

A horse was my signature image. I put one all my cartoons until I ended up spending more time figuring out how to integrate a horse into the drawing than I spent drawing the picture itself. I got even with the people that insisted on my putting them in when I made it so hard to find them that they had to spend hours to locate them.

It is just like men now spend hours looking for the bunny ears on each Playboy Magazine cover. My hidden trademark beat out Playboy by 350 years and the scantily covered male genitalia beat out Playgirl by 370 years.

The queen liked these. At least for awhile until she saw one I made of her riding bareback with too big of a smile on her face but it wasn't even near finished when she snatched it from me. Like I said, I was running out of horse ideas and at the time it made some kind of real horse sense to me.

If I did this cartoon work today I'd just be another one of 10,000 cartoonists, but nobody else did cartoons 400 years ago.

It is hard to even get a grasp on how earth shaking the cartoon was. Nothing like cartoons of kings had ever been seen before. It was unheard of to do such a thing. Nobody had a perspective or knew what to even think about these pen and ink insults inside a diagram.

Words they could get a ruler very angry such as if you talked about his pregnant unmarried daughter since the truth could be easily defined but what could the King do when his unmarried daughter had a bulging waist and a midwife standing near her in an English cartoon? Where did he go from there? Words could start a war but what about the picture of the preggers daughter made by the personal secretary to the Queen of England?

I made them of Spain's Royalty, the French, the German's even the Swedes and a few Russians. Then I gave them to the ambassadors... of their biggest enemies. Then the Ambassador kept wanting the ones of their own rulers which took me aback.

England was considered a dead end assignment and so the Ambassadors often hated their own rulers.

The French ones I did of King Henry III of France took the cake. I made his with a donkey head since he brayed when he laughed. He and the donkey became Puck of the play 'A Midsummers Night Dream'. By the way how do the actors pronounce his name today? See how it was 400 years ago on this page.

* The position was as scribe or personal secretary. The next ruler of England King James made the name Secretary of State official but most everyone thought my name was 'write-this-down'.

**They really don't know who drew the cartoon of Queen Elizabeth and me. There at the impeccable British Museum they imagine that Federigo Zuccaro did a series of these when he was in England for a few years. They date it at 1575 because that was the only time he was in England. They are wrong and I am about to prove differently than you would expect.

Elizabeth rainbow

The collar on the queen's dress is my proof. They did not exist until after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 which was a dozen years after Zuccaro left England. About 1595 is when those collars started to be used more. Just check the collars and the dates on these paintings and confirm it yourself. The one in the sketch is almost identical to the dress that Elizabeth is wearing in her famous Rainbow Painting (see right) which simply everyone at Hatfield House Museum knows is dated 1600. Just check the gallery and y, 22 years after Federigo left England so it simply cannot have been drawn by him. In 1575 all the collars were small like in the Danley portrait. Then they started growing to an over sized accordion plait about 1585 and then they got even bigger until they went out about 1596. Then she started wearing the large thin flat style of collars like in the sketch and the Rainbow painting. She also didn't particularly like to wear anything in her hair and she wouldn't until the 1580's (then a small crown) and then finally she almost built crowns in her hair by 1600.

If someone points to a large horse and says 'that cow weighs 6,000 pounds' I'm not weighting the damn horse to prove that they are wrong about it being a 6,000 pounds.To tell you the truth this is too much like beating up on children, it was very easy and it made me feel bad doing so.

Put yourself in my position. I am single heterosexual male American engineer who lives in Arizona, has not studied Tudor English History for even so much as a day and has never even visited England. Yet I just destroyed the reputation of 500 experts at the British Museum.

How would you feel?

I do recall being Queen Elizabeth's most treasured friend and confidant. I'll be their friend too and they can ask me questions. Now, maybe that will make them feel better.