Marcus Gheeraerts was a Flemish artist working at the Tudor court, described as "the most important artist of quality to work in England in large-scale between Eworth and Van Dyck" He was brought to England as a child by his father Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder a painter. He became a fashionable portraitist in the last decade of the reign of Elizabeth I under the patronage of her champion and pageant-master Sir Henry Lee, he introduced a new aesthetic in English court painting that captured the essence of a sitter through close observation. He became a favorite portraitist of James I's queen Anne of Denmark, but fell out of fashion in the late 1610s. Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger was born in Bruges, the son of the artist Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder and his wife Johanna. Hardly anything is known of the paintings of the elder Gheeraerts, although his work as a printmaker was renowned in Europe. Like other Protestant artists from the Low Countries, Gheeraerts the Elder fled to England with his son to escape persecution in the Low Countries under the Duke of Alba.

His wife remained behind and is believed to have died a few years later. Father and son are recorded living with a Dutch servant in the London parish of St Mary Abchurch in 1568. On 9 September 1571, the elder Gheeraerts remarried, his new wife was a member of an exiled family from Antwerp. It is not known by whom young Marcus was trained, although it is to have been his father, he was also a pupil of Lucas de Heere. Records suggest that Marcus was active as a painter by 1586. In 1590 he married Magdalena, the sister of his stepmother Susanna and of the painter John de Critz; the couple had six children, only two of whom seem to have survived—a son, Marcus III a painter, a son Henry. His half-sister Sara married the painter Isaac Oliver in 1602; the earliest signed works by Gheeraerts the Younger date from c. 1592, but Roy Strong identified a set of portraits of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley dated to around 1586 as based on an original by Gheeraerts. Although raised in England, Gheeraerts' work reflects a continental aesthetic different from the flat modeling of features and pure, brilliant colours associated with Elizabethan artists such as Nicolas Hilliard.

"The implications suggest that Oliver and Gheeraerts singly or together visited Antwerp in the late eighties and were influenced by the portrait style of Frans Pourbus." From around 1590, Gheeraerts led a "revolution" in English portraiture. For the first time in English art sitters were rendered in three dimensions, achieving a lifelike impression through tonality and shadow. New too were capturing the character of individual sitters through close observation and the use of sombre colour and greyed flesh tones. Gheeraerts was one of the first English artists to paint on canvas rather than wood panel, allowing much larger pictures to be produced, he introduced the full-length figure set out-out-of-doors in a naturalistic landscape for full-scale portraiture, a feature seen in portrait miniatures of the same era. The need for assistants to complete the backgrounds and details of the new large canvas paintings, the numbers of surviving copies and variants of Gheeraerts' works, suggest a studio or workshop staffed with assistants and apprentices.

There are similarities of features between Gheeraert's portraits of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex and miniatures of Essex by Gheeraerts' brother-in-law Isaac Oliver, between their portraits of Anne of Denmark, but it is unknown whether the two artists collaborated or shared patterns for portraits. Sir Henry Lee of Ditchley, who retired as Queen's Champion in the autumn of 1590, was the architect of much of the chivalric pageantry at the court of Elizabeth I. Lee became Gheeraerts' patron around 1590, Gheeraerts became fashionable in court circles, creating emblematic portraits associated with the elaborate costumed iconography of Lee's Accession Day tilts; the queen sat to him for the Ditchley Portrait of 1592, her favourite the Earl of Essex employed Gheeraerts from 1596. The royal accounts for 1596–98 include payments for decorative work by "Marcus Gerarde". Another Gheeraerts portrait of Elizabeth is in the collection of Cambridge; the Ditchley Portrait seems to have always been at Lee's home in Oxfordshire, was painted for her two-day visit to Ditchley in 1592.

In this image, the queen stands on a map of her feet on Oxfordshire. The painting has been trimmed and the background poorly repainted, so that the inscription and sonnet are incomplete. Storms rage behind her while the sun shines before her, she wears a jewel in the form of a celestial or armillary sphere close to her left ear; the new portrait aesthetic did not please the aging queen, in the many versions of this painting made with the allegorical items removed in Gheeraerts' workshop, Elizabeth's features are "softened" from the stark realism of her face in the original. One of these was sent as a diplomatic gift to the Grand Duke of Tuscany and is now in the Palazzo Pitti. Around 1594, Gheeraerts painted a portrait of Lee's cousin Captain Thomas Lee standing in a landscape wearing Irish dress; the iconography of the portrait alludes to Captain Lee's service in Ireland. Gheeraerts painted several portraits of Sir Henry Lee himself, including a full-length portrait in his robes of the Order of the Garter.

Essex seems to have used Gheeraerts for large-scale portraits from the mid-1590s. The first of these is the 1596

Hadstock is a village in Essex, about 6 miles from Saffron Walden. It is on about 9 miles from Cambridge; the 2001 Census recorded a parish population of 320. The Church of England parish church of Saint Botolph has the oldest door still in use in Great Britain; the oldest parts of the church are thought to date from about AD 1020. Since that time the church has undergone several renovations. On the outskirts of the village is a disused airfield, used in World War II. While the official name for the airfield became RAF Little Walden, it was named after the village of Hadstock. Hadstock has a silver band; the Hundred Parishes Media related to Hadstock at Wikimedia Commons St Botolph's Church

Audrey Mullender FAcSS FRSA is a British academic, Principal of Ruskin College, from April 2004 to November 2013. Mullender was educated at the University of Sheffield, as well as the University of Bordeaux, University of Nottingham, the University of Warwick, where she obtained a PhD and a DLitt. From 1996 to 2004, she was Professor of Social Work and chair of the School of Health and Social Studies and the Faculty of Social Studies and director of the Centre for the Study of Safety and Well-being at the University of Warwick, she is a prolific writer, with more than 120 publications in the social work field, including 20 books. She is a member of the Academy of Social Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, was Vice-Chair of the Social Policy and Social Work Sub-Panel in the last Research Assessment Exercise. Mullender has carried out research on domestic violence, post-adoption issues, group work theory. Mullender, Audrey. Children Living with Domestic Violence: putting men's abuse of women on the child care agenda.

London Concord, Massachusetts: Whiting & Birch. ISBN 9781871177725. Mullender, Audrey. Child Protection and Domestic Violence. Birmingham: Venture Press. ISBN 9781861780423. Mullender, Audrey. Challenging Violence Against Women: the Canadian experience. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. ISBN 9781861342782. Mullender, Audrey. Children's Perspectives on Domestic Violence. London: Sage. ISBN 9780761971061. Mullender, Audrey. Rethinking Domestic Violence: the social work and probation response. London: Routledge. ISBN 9781134894574. Mullender, Audrey. Empowerment in Action: self-directed groupwork. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9780230298170. Mullender, Audrey. "Working with children in women's refuges". Child & Family Social Work. 3: 87–98. Doi:10.1046/j.1365-2206.1998.00074.x. Mullender, Audrey. "How do children understand and cope with domestic violence?". Practice. 14: 17–26. Doi:10.1080/09503150208414289