JUST as music and harmony had shaped Elizabeth's image in life, so they did upon her death. Among the tributes from the broadside and chap-book press, Henry Chettle's eulogy reproached all earthly tributes as insufficient for the ‘Muses’ Patroness’, while others pictured Elizabeth singing with the angels. The following year Thomas Bateson's madrigal ‘Oriana's Farewell’ imagined an all-encompassing musical tribute: Jove playing harmonies upon the spheres, followed by a choir of nightingales, and finally the praises of nymphs and shepherds. In death as in life, musical imagery encapsulated Elizabeth's intelligence, piety, popularity, and power.

Once the glowing tributes faded Elizabeth's musical image was uncertain, as it had been in life. While historian William Camden considered her skill in music ‘beseeming a Prince’, other seventeenth-century historians saw greater tensions between Elizabeth's image as chaste Virgin Queen and the dancing, music, and frivolous entertainments of her splendid court. Edmund Bohun's The Character of Elizabeth (1693) was written in the early years of the reign of another ruling queen, Mary II (as co-monarch with her husband William III). Bohun presented Elizabeth as an exemplary model for Mary and her husband, though he was also prepared to admit her personal faults. He drew particularly heavily on Robert Johnston's Historia rerum Britannicarum (posthumously published in 1655), often little more than loosely translating, though claiming to apply his own ‘Thoughts, as well as Judgement’. Johnston was a Scot working in London, a Protestant, and a royalist. His belief that history's purpose was to inspire his readers to virtue and wisdom gave his writing a distinctly moral tone in which he strained to moralise Elizabeth's love of music and reconcile it with her image as a diligent ruler. As Bohun similarly intended to moralise Elizabeth for a contemporary audience, he found Johnston's interpretation of her music-making appropriate to his own aims, and by writing in English he popularised this image for a broader audience.

Though aware of music's capacity to ‘adorn and sweeten her Government’ in the eyes of both foreign dignitaries and the nobility, Bohun followed Johnston in seeing Elizabeth's personal musical talents as mere ornament.