Last month at the annual Grosvenor House Arts & Antiques Fair a portrait was auctioned off at a reserve price of ₤800 000. The portrait had been around since 1932 when it was sold at an auction for ₤54…₤2500 in today’s prices…and shows Queen Elizabeth twelve years before she ascended the throne in 1558 and started her long 44 year reign which ended with her natural death in 1603. Here are the big four portraits of Good Queen Bess.

The new portrait is by an unknown artist and a copy of one in the Royal Collection. Elizabeth moved in circles where portraiture was taken seriously and authorised only a few to be painted during her reign. This latest portrait shows Elizabeth as a young teenager and was thought to have been painted in the 18th or 19th century until a specialist in historical portraits bought it at auction from a private Spanish vendor suspecting that there was a painting hidden beneath. Over the past 300 years artists had brightened the face and added side panels to expand Elizabeth’s sleeves. But parts of the portrait had not been over painted and contained colours consistent with 16th-century pigments.

I was tempted to use the word allegedly about this fortunate find because the art market is awash with forgeries and there are plenty of nervous insurance companies uncertain who to believe. At this level the whole art market is pretty suspect with price fixing, bogus sales, insurance jobs and tax evasion alongside good old run-of-the mill hubris. Indeed art markets can be looked upon as financial devices to ensure the rich stay rich while the poor get poorer.

But there are no grounds for doubting Philip Mould’s version of events. He knows his stuff, did his research, took a gamble and won big. His suspicions were confirmed when tests on the wooden panel also came up with the right date…1546…for the felling of the tree used to make the panel….you look at the space between the grain and match it to weather records with larger spaces between the lines signifying a hotter year. Better than working for your living.

Philippa Gregory is a novelist so she lies to reveal the truth…there is more to love and power than historians unearth in court records. An earlier novel The Virgin’s Lover is about the young Elizabeth while her latest novel The Constant Princess tells the story of Katherine of Aragon…daughter of a warrior queen brought up in the Alhambra...who married for love only to be rejected when King Henry VIII fell in love with Ann Boleyn…Elizabeth’s mother. The Boleyn Inheritance comes out in November. Here is Philippa’s take on the portrait of the young princess.

She is her mother’s daughter…from the rich vanity of the rings on her fingers to the pearl choker necklace at her throat. Typical too of the stylish Boleyn fashion sense is the French hood pushed daringly back on the head to show off the crimson brocade. That is how Ann Boleyn wore her hood…to the very steps of the scaffold. And what an enchanting young woman she is. She has the long Boleyn face with that slightly horsey nose which the Tudors found so beautiful and well-shaped eyebrows set in a high forehead.

This is the girl who became the beauty poets adored and who was courted by every bachelor in Christendom. Her small mouth looks ready to laugh and the round chin has the set of a determined woman who will become a formidable plotter and a powerful politician. Within months of her coronation she was fighting for her life using a combination of female wiles, a brilliant spy service and a whole new definition of a nation and national interest.

I can also see in this portrait the tough indomitable woman she will become and yet also the shades of the frightened child who lost her mother when she was little more than a toddler and learned only when her maids started calling her Lady Elizabeth that she was no longer royal. This is the Elizabeth who schemed unceasingly for the throne, who could face the greatest sea power the world had ever seen and yet could take to her bed to avoid a decision genuinely sick with fear. Here we have a unique glimpse of a girl who had tasted the glamour of royal favour and the shame of royal disdain. She had been declared sole heir to the throne and then proclaimed a bastard and disinherited.