The gold lettering above the young man’s head, Dat poenas laudata fides [loyalty, though praised, pays the penalty], is half a line from the 8th book of Lucan’s De Bello Civili [On the Civil War], drawn from the scene in which a courtier argues for killing Pompey the Great (106–48 BC) now that his side has lost, so that the penalty named falls on exactly those who keep faith with a man whom fortune has already thrown down (Nicholl, 2019). Carried onto the miniature, the line reads as a private admission rather than a Roman aside, since it lays claim to a fidelity that expects to be made to suffer for itself, and that one idea, faithfulness repaid with pain, is the single thing the portrait declaresabout the man who commissioned it, whatever remains unsettled about his identity and the object’s purpose.
Nearly everything else about it is guesswork. Hilliard painted this young man around 1587, standing at full length, leaning against a tree with one hand at his heart and surrounded by eglantine roses. The shape is very unusual, a tall narrow oval that he never used again, which the museum thinks may once have been set into a larger object such as a mirror worn on a chain (Victoria and Albert Museum (n.d.). The miniature has almost no history before the 20th century, so we know neither the sitter’s name nor the reason it was made, and that gap is why so much has been read into the flowers and the clothes.
For a long time the picture was explained as a courtier declaring his love for Elizabeth I (1533–1603), and the courtier was often named as Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex (1565–1601), her young favourite, who was later executed for treason. That reading rested on two things, the black and white he wears, said to be the Queen’s colours, and the eglantine, said to be her personal flower, but recent scholarship has weakened both (MacLeod, 2019). Black and white were common and belonged to no one in particular, and the eglantine has red flowers rather than white (Edmond, 1983), so neither the costume nor the roses can prove a link to the Queen. What is left is the motto, which speaks of faith and its cost without naming anyone loved, so we cannot say whether the devotion was meant for a woman, for the Queen, or for a cause.
Without the Queen and the Earl, the picture possibly becomes something calmer and more lasting than court gossip. A young man whose name is lost stands among roses, carefully dressed and giving nothing away, beneath a line of Latin that promises pain to the faithful. The portrait behaves like its own motto, offering loyalty and its price in the same breath while keeping secret who or what that loyalty was for. What has kept it famous is the steadiness of that idea, that to keep faith is also to suffer for it, and that holds true whoever the sitter finally proves to be.
References
Edmond, M. (1983) Hilliard and Oliver: The Lives and Works of Two Great Miniaturists. London: Robert Hale
Goldring, E. (2019) Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist. New Haven: Yale University Press
Lucan (1st c. AD) De Bello Civili [On the Civil War], Book VIII.Translated by A. S. Kline. Available online at : https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/PharsaliaVIIImaster.php (Accessed 28 July 2026).
MacLeod, C., with MacGibbon, R., Button, V., Coombs, K. and Derbyshire, A. (2019) Elizabethan Treasures: Miniatures by Hilliard and Oliver. London: National Portrait Gallery, cat. 64.
Strong, R. (1983) Artists of the Tudor Court: The Portrait Miniature Rediscovered 1520–1620. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, cat. 263, pp. 156–157.
Victoria and Albert Museum (n.d.) Young Man among Roses, P.163-1910. Available at: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O17315/ (Accessed: 27 July 2026)