Black Tudors Read online

  More Praise for Black Tudors

  ‘The book is based on impeccable research in a rich array of sources. But Dr Kaufmann wears her learning lightly and tells a series of fascinating stories with an elegance and wit that should appeal to many readers.’

  Dr Clive Holmes, Emeritus Fellow and Lecturer in History,

  Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford

  ‘Miranda Kaufmann’s Black Tudors, grounded in extensive and impeccable archival research, presents an evocative and convincing picture of the lives of real men and women of black African descent in Renaissance England. Concentrating on ten strikingly varied individuals – from a royal trumpeter to a silk-weaver – Kaufmann persuasively argues that Africans who came to England in this era were able to find a meaningful place in English society, not only in London, Southampton and Bristol but also in rural areas. Drawing on parish records, legal cases, letters, visual images and her broad knowledge of Tudor-era economic history and global mercantile expansion, she dispels the myth that the black Britons of this era existed only at the very upper or lower margins of society. Each of her ten individuals, who are cleverly linked to the records of many others, is vividly brought to life through a discussion of their goals, their labour and their vicissitudes, and set within the complex social, political, economic and religious history of the period. The book is a brilliant example of how to use the most detailed kind of archival data to present a broadly accessible picture of the past, and one which has enormous relevance to the present controversies about immigration and diversity.’

  Paul Kaplan, Professor of Art History,

  State University of New York

  ‘Who knew that a diver from West Africa worked to salvage Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose? Based on a wealth of original research, Miranda Kaufmann’s Black Tudors restores the black presence to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England in all its lively detail. Africans lived and worked not as slaves but as independent agents, from mariners to silk weavers, women and men, prince and prostitute. Black Tudors challenges assumptions about ethnic identity and racism in Tudor England. It will be required reading for anyone interested in new directions in Tudor history.’

  Dr John Cooper, Senior Lecturer in History,

  University of York, and author of The Queen’s Agent

  BLACK TUDORS

  THE UNTOLD STORY

  MIRANDA KAUFMANN

  For my husband Olivier, my shelter from the storm.

  My lover is an olive tree whose roots grow by the sea.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 John Blanke, the Trumpeter

  2 Jacques Francis, the Salvage Diver

  3 Diego, the Circumnavigator

  4 Edward Swarthye, the Porter

  5 Reasonable Blackman, the Silk Weaver

  6 Mary Fillis, the Moroccan Convert

  7 Dederi Jaquoah, the Prince of River Cestos

  8 John Anthony, Mariner of Dover

  9 Anne Cobbie, the Tawny Moor with Soft Skin

  10 Cattelena of Almondsbury, Independent Singlewoman

  Conclusion

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Image Section

  Bibliography

  List of Illustrations

  Notes to Text

  Index

  Introduction

  IN APRIL 1645 Sir John Wynter burnt his home to the ground rather than see it fall into Parliamentary hands. White Cross Manor, built at the zenith of the Tudor age, had been destroyed by the Civil War that marked the nadir of the following century. The Wynter family featured the sorts of characters that traditionally appear in Tudor history books: Sir William Wynter commanded the Vanguard in the fight against the Spanish Armada and his son, Sir Edward, sailed with Sir Francis Drake. The Reformation unleashed by Henry VIII had forced the family to practise their Catholic faith in secret. But White Cross Manor was also the scene of an unknown episode of Tudor history. For it was there, in the last decade of Elizabeth I’s reign, that a Black Tudor, known as Edward Swarthye, alias ‘Negro’, whipped an Englishman named John Guye.

  Despite the insatiable appetite for all things Tudor, from raunchy television series to bath ducks modelled as Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, the existence of the Black Tudors is little known. The popular concept, as dramatised in the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics in 2012, is that people of African origin first arrived in England when the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury in 1948. It’s quite a jolt to consider that there could have been Africans in the crowd gathered at those very same docks when Elizabeth I galvanised her troops to face the Spanish Armada three hundred and sixty years earlier. There were Africans present at the royal courts of Henry VII, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and James I, and in the households of famous Tudors including Robert Dudley (Earl of Leicester), Sir Walter Ralegh, Sir Francis Drake, William Cecil (Lord Burghley) and his son, Robert; and across England from Hull to Truro. Black Tudors played fascinating roles in the famous stories of the Mary Rose and the Golden Hinde, as well as in a host of other untold stories, like the whipping at White Cross Manor.

  Once people learn of the presence of Africans in Tudor England, they often assume their experience was one of enslavement and racial discrimination. This attitude is neatly summarized by the only three entries in the Guardian Black history timeline for the period: ‘1562: First English slave trade expedition’, ‘1596: Elizabeth I expels Africans’ and ‘1604: Shakespeare and Othello’.1 It is true that John Hawkins masterminded the first English transatlantic slaving voyages in the 1560s, but he was, in an awful sense, ahead of his time. After his final voyage returned in disarray in 1569, the English did not take up the trade again in earnest until the 1640s. Elizabeth I did not ‘expel’ Africans from England in 1596; rather her Privy Council issued a limited licence to an unscrupulous merchant named Caspar Van Senden, who was only allowed to transport individuals out of England with their masters’ consent: a consent that he utterly failed to obtain.2 And although much has been written on the question of racism in Shakespeare’s Othello, we mustn’t forget that it was a work of fiction designed to entertain, and so must be set alongside archival evidence of how Africans were treated in England’s churches, households and law courts.

  The misconceptions surrounding the status of Black Tudors are part of a wider impression that any African living outside Africa before the mid-nineteenth century, be it in Europe or the Americas, must have been enslaved. When most of us think of a slave, the image that appears in our minds is of an African. There is more than enough visual material to draw upon, from films such as 12 Years a Slave and television series such as Roots, to the exhibits at museums such as the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool and the ‘London, Sugar and Slavery’ gallery at Museum of London, Docklands.3 Often the first and only mention of Africa in the school curriculum is when children are taught about the slave trade. They see Africans reduced to one of a series of commodities traded in a triangle, packed into ships in chains. Equal attention is not given to the extensive history of Africa before the Europeans arrived there and to examples of collaboration between Europeans and Africans, or to the free Africans living in Europe.

  Not all slaves were African. The word ‘slave’ itself comes from ‘Slav’, referring to the Slavonic peoples of Eastern Europe, who were enslaved in great numbers by the Holy Roman Emperor Otto the Great and his successors from the tenth century onwards.4 And more than a million white Europeans were enslaved in North Africa between 1530 and 1780, having been captured from the shores of England, Ireland, France, Spain and Portugal by the Barbary pirates.5

  Contemporary concerns naturally shape the questions we ask about our past. It is difficult for us in t
he twenty-first century to push aside the nationalist myth of the Tudors created by nineteenth-century imperialists and imagine an England before the emergence of the British Empire. Tudor England was a small, relatively weak kingdom on the edge of Europe, which had not yet experienced the full horrors of the transatlantic slave trade and colonial plantation slavery. These abominations, alongside the imperialism and scientific racism that followed, cast their shadows across almost every discussion of the history of Africans in Britain. Today, immigration and the question of whether institutional racism is endemic to society bedevil political discourse. These issues may be the source of our questions, but they cannot be allowed to shape our conclusions about the past.

  The answers are complex, but the questions that most commonly spring to mind about the Black Tudors are simple: why and how did they come to England? How were they treated? What were their lives like?

  To understand how and why Africans came to England, we must look to the dramatic developments going on in the wider world. In a century dominated by the Spanish and Portuguese, England was small fry on the global stage. Following Columbus’s discovery of the Americas in 1492, the Iberian powers carved up the world between them in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. Spain laid claim to the New World of South America and the Caribbean, while Portugal looked to Africa and the East Indies. Their empires were united from 1580 under the rule of Philip II. Strangely enough, it was the death of the young Portuguese King, Don Sebastian, on African soil, at the Battle of Alcazar in 1578, that allowed Philip of Spain to annex the Portuguese crown and become the dreaded ‘universal monarch’, establishing a global dominion ‘on which the sun never set’.

  The Portuguese had been the first Europeans to visit Africa, en route to India, in the fifteenth century. They brought the first enslaved Africans to Europe in 1444.6 From then, a substantial black population developed across southern Europe, with smaller numbers appearing in the more northerly parts of the continent. By 1502 the transatlantic slave trade had begun, and over the next century more than 370,000 Africans would be transported to the Spanish Americas.7 With people of African origin scattered across the early modern world, Black Tudors could arrive in England not only directly from Africa, but also from Europe, the Americas and places in between. The fact that they had often travelled through the Iberian world is reflected in names such as Catalina or Diego.

  Understanding the world of the Black Tudors means becoming familiar with the sixteenth-century mind-set and its ideas about religion, politics, life and death, so very different from our own. When the Black Tudors encountered Tudor Englishmen, they found a people who, though certainly xenophobic on occasion, were deeply curious about the world beyond the seas. Most English men and women knew little or nothing of the world beyond their parish boundary. A ‘stranger’ was simply someone from outside the parish. Tudors were far more likely to judge a new acquaintance by his or her religion and social class than by where they were born or the colour of their skin, though these categories did on occasion intersect.

  How Africans were treated by the church tells us a lot about where they stood in Tudor England. This was a deeply religious society, in which life after death was no abstract ideal but the foundation of daily life. Death was impossible to ignore; high child mortality rates and a range of gruesome, incurable diseases conspired to impose an average life expectancy at birth of just thirty-eight years.8 Was a Black Tudor’s acceptance into a parish community through the rituals of baptism, marriage and burial an effacement of African identity, or was the promise of eternal life the greatest gift a Christian society could bestow?

  Many of the hundreds of Africans in Tudor England are only recorded in tantalizing one-liners, such as this 1630 burial record for ‘Anthony a pore ould Negro aged 105’, from the parish register of St Augustine’s Church, Hackney.

  Social class governed society. Everyone, from the King (who ruled by divine right), through the aristocracy, to the gentry, yeomen and husbandmen, down to the lowliest vagrant, occupied a particular place in the ‘Great Chain of Being’. When Africans arrived in England as ambassadors, they were treated as such, but when they arrived aboard a captured ship, they found themselves at the bottom of the pile. Those who had skills, such as musicians, sailors or craftsmen, fared better. In many ways, their lives were no worse than those of the vast majority of Tudors: ‘nasty, brutish and short’, but this was the result of having no social standing, not of having dark skin.9

  In 1772, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield heard the landmark case of James Somerset, an African whose former master wished to transport him forcibly to Jamaica for sale. One of the lawyers defending him cited as precedent a court ruling from 1569. In the same year that Hawkins’s final slaving venture returned, it had been pronounced that ‘England was too pure an air for a slave to breathe in’. Somerset’s lawyer argued that ‘the plain inference from it is, that the slave was become free by his arrival in England’.10 The idea that setting foot on English soil conferred freedom was so widespread in the Tudor period that it reached the ears of Juan Gelofe, a forty-year-old Wolof from West Africa, enslaved in a Mexican silver mine belonging to one Francisco Ginoves. In 1572 he told an English sailor named William Collins that England ‘must be a good country as there were no slaves there’.11 His conclusion, like the knowledge that Edward Swarthye whipped John Guye in Elizabethan Gloucestershire, confounds modern assumptions about the lives of Africans in Tudor England.

  For all who thought they knew the Tudors, it is time to think again . . .

  1

  John Blanke, the Trumpeter

  He gripped the horse tightly with his thighs, steadying her against the shock of the trumpet’s blast. It had taken a while to master the art of playing the trumpet on horseback but now he was doing just that, as one of the King’s trumpeters at the Westminster Tournament. King Henry had decreed two days of jousting to celebrate the birth of a son to his wife, Katherine of Aragon. He had also commissioned the heraldic artists of the College of Arms to record the proceedings on vellum. As Blanke watched the King charge towards his opponent, he considered that the artists might need to use a bit of licence when they recorded the scene for posterity. Best to show the King in some feat of great chivalric prowess, such as breaking a lance on the helm. It didn’t really matter whether it had actually happened. He wondered how he would appear in the vellum roll – on horseback amongst the other trumpeters, of course, dressed in the royal livery of yellow halved with grey. The artists would enjoy painting the brightly coloured tasselled banners, with their quartered fleur-de-lys and lions, hanging from their trumpets. The instruments themselves would be flecked with gold. But would they remember his turban, which set him apart from his bareheaded companions? And how would they depict his dark skin? It was not a pigment they would be accustomed to using. Indeed, it might be the first time anyone had painted a Black Tudor.

  THE TWO IMAGES of John Blanke in the 60-foot-long vellum manuscript known as the Westminster Tournament Roll comprise the only identifiable portrait of an African in Tudor England.1 It’s the most popular image of all those kept in the vast collection of the College of Arms and it shows that Africans were present in England from the earliest years of the sixteenth century. Seeing him for the first time provokes a visceral reaction: often surprise, followed closely by curiosity. His presence at the Tudor court raises as many, if not more, questions than it answers. Was he the only African in England at this time? What brought him to London? What were the circumstances of his arrival, decades before the English began engaging in direct trade with Africa, or in the slave trade? How much about his origin or religious beliefs can we deduce from the fact that he wears a turban? His striking image is regularly used to demonstrate that Africans were present in Tudor times, without much further interrogation of his story, or the existence of any contemporaries.

  Histories of the early Tudor period, when England was just emerging from the shadow cast by the Wars of the Roses, are often focused on
domestic politics, or relations with other European powers. John Blanke forces us to consider the country’s relationship with the wider world. In the early sixteenth century England did not have strong, direct links with the world beyond Europe. The Englishmen John Tintam and William Fabian had contemplated a voyage to Guinea in 1481 but the Portuguese complained to Edward IV about the intrusion into João II’s imperial dominion, and the expedition was abandoned. In 1497, Henry VII commissioned the Italian explorer John Cabot’s voyage to America, yet few Englishmen came forward to follow in his footsteps.2

  Any connections with Africa, Asia and the Americas were mediated through southern Europe. In 1535, Andrew Boorde sent Thomas Cromwell ‘seeds of rhubarb’ from Catalonia, explaining that they came ‘out of Barbary’ and were considered ‘a great treasure’ or delicacy by the Catalans.3 Africans themselves tended to arrive in England via Portugal, Spain or Italy.

  John Blanke is described as ‘black’ and depicted with dark skin and wearing a turban in the Westminster Tournament Roll, but that is the extent of our knowledge as to his origin. Given his youthful appearance in the Roll, and the extent of the African diaspora in the early years of the sixteenth century, we can posit that he was born in North or West Africa, or in southern Europe to African parents, in the late fifteenth century. The turban suggests an Islamic heritage, and its relatively flat shape is reminiscent of North African or Andalusian styles. That said, Henry VIII enjoyed dressing himself and his courtiers in Turkish or Moorish fashion and may also have chosen to dress John Blanke in this way.4 As musical knowledge was often passed, like any trade, from father to son, John Blanke probably came from a musical family.5

  The first record of wages being paid to ‘John Blanke the blacke Trumpet’ dates from December 1507.6 One wonders how his name was coined, and whether it was thought humorous to use the French word ‘blanc’, in the same spirit that Robin Hood’s tall friend was called Little John. It seems to have been a joke with wide appeal: an African slave named ‘Juan Blanco’ appeared in Granada in 1565.7 Blanke was paid 20 shillings (at a rate of 8d a day) for his work that December and he continued to receive monthly payments of the same amount through the following year.8 His annual wage of £12 was twice that of an agricultural labourer and three times the average servant’s wage.9 Blanke joined a group of seven existing trumpeters retained by Henry VII. A position at court was the best any musician could hope for; it brought high status and a regular wage, as well as board, lodging and a clothing allowance.