Throughout his life, Essex was closely identified with military men and with martial activities in the support and defence of the Queen and of the country. As Paul Hammer has shown, Essex went to great lengths to fashion a self-image for himself as a military figure, using portraiture, pageantry and patronage. But the set of chivalric values and beliefs that supported and sustained Essex's identity as a nobleman and knight remain relatively unexplored. Chivalric culture provides a vitally important framework for Essex's beliefs and behaviour, but it remains the case that Essex is seen as having set himself apart from the rest of the court by consciously cultivating his martial identity – in short, that he was an anachronism, described mostly recently by Keith Thomas as ‘a dinosaur’. Yet recent studies of the seventeenth century have made it clear that chivalric culture remained important both in personal and political terms, demonstrating just how relevant and significant an element the chivalric ethos was to contemporary political culture.