Elizabeth's physical appearance was vital to the historical event and just at least as important as the actual speech. Dozens of descriptions of Elizabeth on that day exist, with slightly differing details. Similarities between descriptions indicate that she at least wore a plumed helmet and a steel cuirass over a white velvet gown. She held a gold and silver truncheon, or baton, in her hand as she rode atop a white steed. As quoted in J. E. Neale's Elizabeth, her demeanour was "full of princely resolution and more than feminine courage" and that "she passed like some Amazonian empress through all her army".[21] That striking image is reminiscent of several literary and mythological figures. One of those is Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of war, who was often classically portrayed as wearing a helmet and armour. Another figure that Elizabeth represented during this speech was Britomart, originally a Greek nymph and more recently the allegorical heroine in Edmund Spenser's epic The Faerie Queene. The etymology of the name "Britomart" seems to suggest British military power. Spenser deliberately wrote the character to represent Queen Elizabeth I[22] and so in essence, they are the same. Her subjects would have been familiar with both Athena and Britomart, and Elizabeth's adoption of their personas would have been fairly recognisable. Besides representing the figures, by wearing armour, Elizabeth implied that she was ready to fight for and alongside her people. However, as Garrett Mattingly put it:
…an objective observer would have seen no more than a battered, rather scraggy spinster in her middle fifties perched on a fat white horse, her teeth black, her red wig slightly askew, dangling a toy sword and wearing an absurd little piece of parade armor like something out of a theatrical property box.
— Mattingly, Garrett (1959). The Armada. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 349. LCCN 59008861.
