The portrait was produced for Sir Henry Lee two years after his retirement as the Queen’s Champion, a position he held for more than three decades.
According to the National Portrait Gallery, the painting likely marks “an elaborate symbolic entertainment” that Lee organised for the monarch after she forgave him for moving in with Anne Vavasour, his mistress.
Elizabeth I was an early supporter of English involvement in the slave trade and gave permission to the adventurer Sir John Hawkins to fly the royal flag on his ships.
Hawkins took 300 African slaves across the Atlantic to sell in Spanish colonies on his first voyage. The queen invested money and ships in Hawkins’s expeditions and would go on to give him his own coat of arms.
The portrait of Raleigh appears to have been restored and created by an unknown artist. It depicts him wearing chainmail with a neutral expression on his face.
Raleigh was a colonialist who attempted to establish a British settlement in North Carolina, only to ultimately fail in doing so because of sour relations with Native Americans.
