IT IS a pleasant conceit that the New Elizabethan Age has become increasingly obsessed with images of the Virgin Queen, although at the hapless first night for Benjamin Britten's Coronation opera Gloriana the auguries cannot have looked beneficent.

It was left to the likes of Sir Roy Strong, at the National Portrait Gallery, to strip away the faux veneer of a Jacobethan world once created by Lytton Strachey, and, where he led, other galleries have followed. Over the past 60 years, Oliver Millar, Karen Hearn, Susan Doran, and David Starkey have made the much troubled monarch as familiar to us in the age of John Osborne and Alan Bennett as she once must have dominated Shakespeare's "wooden O" and Marlowe's tavern.

Successive exhibitions, culminating in the 400th-anniversary show in 2003 at Greenwich, have brought scholars and the public together. At the same time, Glenda Jackson, Cate Blanchett, and Judi Dench have all made fortunes in the company of Henry VIII's second daughter, which suggests that there is an appetite for historical and archaeological glimpses of the true story behind the worship offered before the silver screen and in the theatre.

Tarnya Cooper's elegant book Citizen Portrait (2012) examined in detail the upwardly mobile urban élite of Tudor and Jacobean England through the native portraiture of the period; many of her discoveries have informed this exhibition. But with one eye over her shoulder at the Trustees of the NPG, where she is chief curator, and with the other fixed on the revenue receipts, she has wisely opted to add pictures of the Queen.

Inevitably, it is the sovereign who takes centre stage. In the second gallery, it is a full-length state portrait of Elizabeth, from Hardwick Hall, which dominates one wall between the celebrated "Darnley" and so-called "Ermine" portraits, the latter almost certainly owned by her faithful civil servant William Cecil, Lord Burghley.

The Queen, in the painting brought from Derbyshire, stands alongside the chair of state richly upholstered with her monogram and the joint arms of England and of France, to which she still laid claim despite the loss of Calais in the months before her accession. She wears a bewitching dress of white satin embroidered with sea monsters and imaginary animals.

The "Ermine" portrait, dated 1585, which may be the work of the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard, offers close-up details of the magnificence of her jewels and of her dress.

Jewellery was not confined to the monarch or her immediate Court, although many of them wore items to stunning effect; in a portrait painted for his brother in the year of the Armada, the dashing Walter Raleigh, aged just 34, has two pendant pearl drops in his left ear-lobe, while the wife of the third Lord Windsor (in a less well-known family group of a recusant family, from the collection of the Earls of Bute) draws attention to her richly bejewelled necklet.

A butcher by trade, and a later merchant and Warden of the Butchers' Company, Gamaliel Pye (died 1596), appears with a prominent gold signet ring engraved with his initials. Clearly he had long since left the slaughterhouse in order to privatise the lands on which he raised cattle. On the same forefinger, Serjeant William Lovelace (c.1525/30-1577), painted in his scarlet legal robes in 1576, has a ring with his family insignia in enamelled gold. The goldsmith Richard Martin was successful enough in 1562 to have a silver medal cast with his head in profile on the obverse and his wife on the reverse.

Something of the storehouse of contemporary jewels is seen in later cabinet that display the accoutrements and accessories of an economically confident age - including the "Gatacre" jewel on which the head of a Medusa is carved in cameo on to an amethyst set in a pendant of gold scroll-work.

A much more comprehensive show of later jewellery is currently on show at the Museum of London (to 27 April 2014). The Cheapside Hoard, which was seemingly buried for safekeeping during the Civil Wars of the next century, contains a number of earlier pieces, including pendants, brooches, and rings.

The very first painting that we see is the Sherborne Castle picture of a royal procession, in which the ageing queen is carried in a litter preceded by six Knights of the Garter, the last of whom bears the Sword of State. Beside her walks another Garter knight, probably the Earl of Westmorland, tricked out in pink as the newly created Master of the Queen's Horse.

The buildings behind are probably fanciful, and are not intended as an exact record of any London view, as the image is deliberately projected to show the monarch in stately progress. It was painted for an event in the final months of Elizabeth's 45-year-long reign.

This processional image is a far cry from the streets of Bermondsey where Dr Cooper would have us loiter in the company of a bride as she leaves from the lych gate of St Mary Magdalen's, led by four at tendants who carry the large bride cakes, while two viol-players follow with another carrying the bride cup with branches of rosemary and flowing ribbons. She walks westwards, in front of the tent set for the wedding breakfast, towards festive revellers. Beyond them lie the remains of the ruined abbey, and across the river is the distinctive keep of the Tower of London.

The Elizabethan age was one of exploration and discovery. The importance of maps and of cartography is graphically shown in the accuracy of William Smith's 1588 map of the cities of London, Westminster, and Southwark. In minute detail, we see Old St Paul's, the Eleanor Cross at the end of the Strand, the Palace of Whitehall twice spanning the roadway, the Palace of Westminster, and Lambeth Palace.

This was the world in which Elizabeth held court, and where merchants and traders went about their business, as the exhibition illustrates fully. In a great immigrant city, artists such as Isaac Oliver (c.1565-1617), the son of French Huguenot refugees, appear confident (his self-portrait is a fine study of a determined man in his mid-twenties), while the denizen from Ghent, the notary Jacques Wittewronghele (1531-93), and his English-born wife became parents of a successful Essex landowner.

Edinburgh, too, was a leading city for émigrés. There is the wonderful portrait of the French-born calligrapher Esther Langlois (1570/71-1624), who was betrothed to a Scots minister, Bartholomew Kello, in 1595. It may be her marriage portrait.

Such migrants often benefited from the Elizabethan Settlement to avoid European religious persecution; so it is surprising how lightly the exhibition passes over clerical and ecclesiastical figures. We get to see only an Archbishop (Edwin Sandys, among the first English bishops ever to be married, painted with his second wife in 1576), a venerable preacher, Henry Birde, who failed to become Dean of Norwich in 1573, and a Roman Catholic priest, Gregory Martin, who had been a contemporary of the Jesuit Edmund Campion at St John's College, Oxford.

The exhibition is not concerned only with London. Dr Cooper has included the rare Joost de Hondt map of Britain and Ireland. Dated 1592, it includes not only a genealogical table to assert Elizabeth's claims to the throne, but also marks her palaces and manors in minor detail; Nonesuch and Oatlands appear alongside Hampton Court, Eltham, and Greenwich.

Visitors from the New Elizabethan Age are invited to walk in this world of godly reform and stately splendour, and to admire the lives of the soldiers and explorers who made Britain great, as Elizabeth's successor was able to proclaim it three years after her death.

"Elizabeth I and Her People" runs at the National Portrait Gallery, St Martin's Place, London WC2, until 5 January. Phone 020 7306 0055. www.npg.org.uk