Queen Elizabeth I was the most bejewelled person in the history of England. In a century whose portraits suggest an importance for male and female jewellery-wearing unmatched by previous or subsequent eras, Elizabeth's image stands out as saturated with gems and precious metals. Contemporaries also remarked this, particularly visiting foreigners. Paul Hentzner from Bradenburg, admitted to the presence chamber in the summer of 1598, wrote up the experience in his journal, describing the queen's ‘Necklace of exceeding fine jewels’, her white silk gown bordered with ‘pearls the size of beans’, and her ‘oblong Collar of gold and jewels’. Under her gloves, he wrote, she wore rings and jewels, so that when she raised her bare hand to be kissed, it sparkled. The following year Thomas Platter found her ‘gorgeously apparelled’, ‘lavishly attired’, and ‘studded with costly jewels’. Another description comes from Giovanni Carlo Scaramelli, a Venetian official whose 1603 letter reporting to the Doge recounts Elizabeth's appearance in the month before her death. Her throat was ‘encircled with pearls and rubies down to her breast’, and around her forehead were ‘great pearls like pears’. Indeed, Scaramelli said, the queen ‘displayed a vast quantity of gems and pearls upon her person; even under her stomacher she was covered with golden jewelled girdles and single gems, carbuncles, balas-rubies, diamonds; around her wrists in place of bracelets she wore double rows of pearls’.

The excess of these and similar descriptions, although seemingly hyperbolic, effectively render in words Elizabeth's portraits from the second half of her reign.