This summer, you can step into Queen Elizabeth I’s court as an exhibition of rarely seen portraits opens in central London.

The free display at Philip Mould gallery puts the earliest surviving life-size, full-length portrait of Queen Elizabeth I in a room surrounded by her favourites and courtiers.

Names that echo down history are here and will be familiar to most people – Walsingham, Essex, Cecil, Burley – and of course, Robert Dudley.

And they swirl around four rare portraits of the Queen, including one that is very unusual indeed.

Three might look like you would expect, but one painted in the earliest days of her reign shows a very modest and quite unassuming person who could pass for any random painting of a wealthy lady of the time. Portrait painters were still struggling to work out how to paint a female monarch, known as the “Clopton Portrait”; it’s almost masculine in style and lacks the trappings of regal grandeur we’d expect.

But dominating the room is the sort of portrait we’d expect of QEI – although this time in Tudor red and with all the trappings of power and wealth that come from being the monarch. There’s a suggestion that this is a marriage proposal portrait – to be sent to a prospective husband as the codes in the background all show symbols of fertility and coupling. Possibly painting at Greenwich Palace, it’s the view of the Queen that a visiting ambassador would have seen on arriving at the palace.

Opposite is Robert Dudley, resplendent in red, in a portrait that is strikingly similar to one of Erik XIV of Sweden by Steven van der Meulen. The Swedish king was a rival suitor for the Queen’s hand, so this is unlikely to be a coincidence.

Someone else in the exhibition with a grim story to tell is a private travelling portrait of John Stubbs. Unfortunately for him, he angered the Queen when he published a pamphlet criticising her proposed marriage to Francis, Duke of Anjou.

Arguing that she was too old to bear children and should remain single for the good of the country, both John Stubbs and his publisher were both punished by having their right hands cut off. That was a mercy as the furious Queen had wanted the death penalty.

The portrait of John Stubbs shows him with his arms folded, and if you look carefully, you’ll see that one hand is missing. Oh, and do look at the back of the freestanding painting.

Incidentally, a portrait of the Duke’s father, King Henry III of France, in the exhibition looks remarkably like Edmund Blackadder.

There’s a good 20-minute video in the side room that explains the painters’ codes used in the portraits, showing how different animals and flowers convey meanings that were obvious at the time but are less so today.

Also, check out the painting next to the video, simply labelled a “portrait of a lady” from the 1590s, on an unusual curved panel. And a rather severe-looking man belies his artistic nature, as the black-robed Henry Carey was a patron of William Shakespeare, and almost certainly introduced him to the Queen.

As an exhibition, it brings together several privately owned portraits of the courtiers who swirled around the Queen, and in the middle, four of the Queen herself at different times in her life.

It’s a rare chance to see them at all, and even rarer to see them together.

The exhibition, Elizabeth I: Queen and Court, is at the Philip Mould Gallery on Pall Mall from 14th May to 10th July and is free to visit.

It’s open Monday to Friday from 9.30am to 6pm

Details here.