What your signature says about you

I have a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II and her parents on the wall of my bathroom, not out of any lack of respect but because the gloom there prevents it fading. It is signed Albert, with an odd droop forward of the bar of the T to join a single flourish beneath, and Elizabeth in a familiar hand. This is not the late Queen’s signature, though, for it was made in 1927, when Princess Elizabeth was hardly into talking, let alone signing.

Queen Elizabeth, whom we still think of as the Queen Mother, was a simple royal duchess then. Yet one can’t help thinking that in choosing her style of italic signature she had taken note of that of her namesake: the first Queen Elizabeth.

Another Elizabeth, Liz Truss, got some stick for the signature on the letter to Kwasi Kwarteng about his sacking. Actually, sticks have been a-thrashing wildly, even when she did nothing wrong, as with the inclusion of his name at bottom left. That was pounced upon by know-alls on Twitter, as if she thought it was her name, though it is perfectly correct to put the addressee’s name there.

But it was the knotted-wool form of the signature that provoked gasps. Her Christian name seemed to begin with an R (Robot?) or D (Dumbo?). ‘Tells you all you need to know,’ tweeted someone or other. Another commented: ‘Graphologist’s field day.’ Hey presto, up popped one in Metro. ‘Truss can be captivating, tenacious, imaginative, and eternally optimistic,’ she said. ‘But there’s vanity and fear that she will elicit criticism.’ That sounds more like astrology than graphology to me, although now I think of it, the latter has just as few claims to scientific method.

That first Queen Elizabeth betrayed few symptoms of wobble in her sign manual. Hurry perhaps would account for her sometimes omitting a criss-cross flourish to the B in addition to the one descending from her long Z, which underpinned her name with four overlooped bows.

Even in the 1530s, when she had no lively prospect of becoming queen, she put a mousetrap-shaped flourish after her name. This was happily replaced with a curlicued R on her accession.

In a chillingly familial variant for letters to her cousin – and prisoner – Mary, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth signed herself El R. But it would take an imaginative graphologist to detect any tremble in Mary Stuart’s signature the night before her death. No tangled wool for her. A letter to the King of France wound up in clearly formed italic script: ‘Vostre tres affectionee & bien bonne soeur Mari R.’

Legibility has not always been counted a virtue among the mighty. Charles Kingsley once received a letter of condolence from the Bishop of Durham. In its 14 pages, he could make out only one phrase: ‘ungrateful devil’. Past prime ministers have made their signatures with practised dullness: H.H. Asquith’s like cranes on a building site: Lloyd George’s like a roped party climbing an Alpine glacier. Churchill signed himself Winston S. Churchill to avoid confusion with the once famous American novelist Winston Churchill.

If there is now a need felt for legibility, I suggest our leaders go the way of the Spanish monarchy in the Golden Age. Philip II did not sign letters with his name but appended the words ‘Yo el Rey’ – ‘I the King’. With a rapid turnover, there’s simplicity in the sign-off ‘I Prime Minister’.