In the final months of her life, Queen Elizabeth I refused to let her doctors examine her. She had fallen into a deep melancholy, according to a member of her court, yet she would not rest. She believed that if she lay down, she would never get up again. For fifteen hours straight, the aging queen stood, with her ladies spreading pillows around her for the moment when she would inevitably collapse.
On March 24, 1603, Elizabeth passed away. The official causes of death suggested by physicians at the time included cancer or pneumonia. But there was another possibility, one rooted in decades of daily ritual: the lead and mercury-based makeup Elizabeth had applied to her face for most of her life had slowly poisoned her. The Elizabethan ideal of beauty demanded smooth, blindingly white skin.
For the English elite of the sixteenth century, porcelain pallor signified nobility, virtue, and earthly perfection. Queen Elizabeth herself embodied this standard, but the price she paid was severe. To achieve the ghostly complexion that became her signature, Elizabeth wore a cosmetic called Venetian ceruse, a paste made from white lead and vinegar. She powdered her face and neck with the substance, transforming her scarred skin into an eerie porcelain canvas.
The mixture likely smelled like sour wine. Modern science has established that applying lead to the face daily causes serious and often irreversible problems: hair loss, skin deterioration, and ultimately death by lead poisoning. But lead was not the only poison in Elizabeth’s beauty routine. Her signature red lips came from a stain made of cinnabar, a toxic mineral containing mercury.
Together, the two poisons worked through skin absorption over long periods. The lead slowly corroded the queen’s skin, and in response, she wore thicker and thicker layers of makeup. Toward the end of her life, it was reported that she layered her makeup nearly an inch thick. Symptoms of mercury poisoning include memory loss, irritability, and depression, conditions Elizabeth reportedly experienced in her final years.
And she did not clean the makeup off nightly. In the Elizabethan era, nobles wore their makeup for extended periods; Elizabeth herself wore hers for at least a week at a time. The lead soaked into her skin, turning it gray and wrinkled. When the makeup was finally removed, historians suggest she may have used a concoction of eggshells, alum, and more mercury.
Some claimed the mercury-based remover left skin soft, but that was only because it was effectively skinning the wearer one layer at a time. As a teenager, Elizabeth had not worn quite so much lead on her face. She had not yet caught smallpox. In October 1562, she was struck with a high fever and displayed all the hallmarks of the pox.
Courtiers feared she would die within the week, but the young royal survived. The disease, however, left her with permanent scars. Smallpox scarring was a common problem at the time, which explains why so many women were willing to wear vinegary lead paste on their faces. Elizabeth’s close friend Mary Sidney suffered the same fate.
Mary’s husband, Henry Sidney, wrote of the scars that remained on his wife’s face, describing them as a resolute discomfort. Elizabeth understood the weight of expectations placed upon her as a female ruler, a rarity in English history. She knew that all eyes were on her, and that any visible blemish would mark her not as a survivor but as a pariah. In 1586, addressing Parliament, she spoke of this burden: “We princes, as I tell you, are set on stage in the sight and view of all the world duly observed.
The eyes of many behold our actions. A spot is soon spied in our garments, a blemish noted quickly in our doings. ”
In a bold act of image control, Elizabeth forbade unflattering portraits of herself. Painters were forced to make her look young and supple and white, even as she entered her later years.
The famous Darnley portrait, painted in 1575, became a model for later depictions. Grateful artists reused its representation of Elizabeth’s face in paintings for decades, preserving the mask of youth long after the reality beneath it had begun to fail. Elizabeth’s battle against the ravages of time lasted her entire life. One of her wiser tricks was to wear a wig.
For a long time, the fact that she wore one was never officially confirmed. In 1599, the Earl of Essex changed that. Upon beholding his elderly queen, he expressed shock at her mostly bald head, with only a thin ring of hair hanging about her ears. His observation became immortalized, and the secret was out.
In the last months of her life, Elizabeth refused medical examination. She had fallen into a deep melancholy but insisted on standing rather than lying down, believing that rest would be the end of her. When she finally collapsed, her ladies attended to her, and she died on March 24, 1603. After a lifetime of lead and mercury poisoning, her body was toxic.
Elizabeth Southwell, one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, claimed that Elizabeth’s body burst in her coffin at her wake due to an abundance of noxious vapors. While Southwell’s account has often been dismissed as Jesuit propaganda, the phenomenon she described is not unheard of. It is known as exploding casket syndrome, which occurs when a corpse is sealed too tightly and the coffin acts as a pressure cooker for the gases and fluids produced by decomposition. There was another grim possibility surrounding her death.
Just a week before she passed, Elizabeth’s doctors recommended a risky procedure. For forty-five years, since the day she was crowned, Elizabeth had worn her coronation ring. By then, the ring had begun cutting into her poisoned skin. The doctors warned her that it had to be surgically removed.
A week later, she was dead. The use of lead in makeup dates back to at least the fifth century BCE, when Roman women powdered their faces with it. By the sixteenth century, the concoction was known as Venetian ceruse, or the spirits of Saturn. It became Elizabeth’s favorite cosmetic.
Yet it was not classified as a poison until 1630, only twenty-seven years after her death. People knew the makeup caused hair loss and skin damage, but it took a long time for the full consequences to be understood. Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, spent decades applying layers of poison to her skin in the name of beauty, and it very likely contributed to her decline and death.