The king responded enthusiastically to the portrait, which is interesting because I wouldn’t say it looked exactly sexy. It wouldn’t make it into a Pirelli calendar. It’s quite a plain picture of a normal-looking woman dressed extremely oddly. The oddness of the dress is to do with it being the sixteenth century so we have to ignore that. Almost everyone I mention in this book dressed very strangely by our standards. All in all, it’s not a picture that would make you rule out marrying its subject, but it wouldn’t clinch the deal for me.
