Black Tudors Read online

  Music echoed through the corridors of Tudor palaces. No architect of the time would have countenanced designing a Great Hall without a minstrels’ gallery. The Crown employed a man whose sole purpose was to marshal the court musicians, ensuring they were in the right place at the right time, prepared to entertain the King and his household with their ‘blowings and pipings’ at ‘meats and suppers’.10 Trumpeters played a vital part in royal entries, tournaments, funerals, executions, banquets, weddings, coronations, battles and sea voyages, as well as the annual grand festivities over Christmas and New Year. They were required to ‘blow the court to supper’ and to make music ‘at the king’s pleasure’. They heralded the King’s arrival: ‘The King’s coming, I know by his trumpets,’ Lavatch says in All’s Well That Ends Well. Henry VII even commissioned a pair of stone trumpeters to stand either side of the gateway leading to the inner court at Richmond Palace. At the wedding of Katherine of Aragon and Prince Arthur in 1501, the largest court festival of the first Henry Tudor’s reign, the trumpeters were ordered to ‘blow continually’ from the moment the Spanish princess left her lodgings until she reached the altar. After the ceremony, the court travelled down the Thames to Greenwich by boat. Their journey was accompanied by the music of a host of instruments, including ‘the most goodly and pleasant mirth of trumpets’. The sound of all this on the water was unlike anything that had ever been heard before.11

  It is unlikely that court trumpeters at this time could read music, but some might have read plainsong and other unmeasured notation, such as the fashionable basse danse tunes. They could play quite intricate pieces: the double-curved instruments John Blanke and his fellows are shown playing in the Westminster Tournament Roll, now known as cavalry trumpets, were able to do much more than the straight busine designed for military-style fanfares.12 The craft of trumpet-making was well established in the City of London, centred near the Guildhall in a road now known as ‘Trump Street’.13

  Trumpets have been used to mark power, status, military might and even divine power in civilisations across the world. The walls of Jericho tumbled down at the sound of trumpets. The Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, is also known as the Feast of the Trumpets, because the Torah stipulates the day should be marked with trumpet fanfares.14 Silver and bronze trumpets inscribed with the names of military gods were found in the tomb of King Tutankhamen. In some northern Nigerian kingdoms, the capture of the royal trumpets effectively signalled a coup d’état, while on the South Pacific island of Rarotonga, the word for a conch-shell trumpet is the same as that used for a chief, ruler or priest.15

  As symbols of royal authority, trumpeters sometimes served as messengers or envoys, roles that could lead them into dangerous territory. When Francis I sent a royal trumpeter to impose order on the rioting students of Paris in 1518, they broke his instrument and cut off his horse’s ears. Worse, in 1538, when the Prince of Parma, general of the Spanish troops, sent his trumpeter as a messenger to Ypres while he held it under siege, the captains and magistrates of the town burnt the letter and hanged the trumpeter. Because trumpeters acted as messengers, they were supposed to enjoy diplomatic immunity, allowing them free passage through foreign, and often enemy, territory. This left them open to suspicion of espionage: in 1560, the Duke of Norfolk wrote to William Cecil that a Scottish trumpeter had arrived with letters, but ‘more to spy than otherwise’.16

  The court musicians of Europe were highly cosmopolitan, hailing predominantly from Flanders, France and Italy. Henry VII’s court was no exception. The marshal of his trumpeters, Peter de Casa Nova, was Italian.17 German drummers, the Prince of Castile’s taberet, a French organ player, Dutch and French minstrels and some musicians simply described as ‘strange’ all played for the King.18 Henry had spent much of his youth at the court of Duke Francis of Brittany, and some time in France, so no doubt he continued to enjoy the familiar continental style of entertainment. More importantly, it was fashionable and prestigious to employ an international troupe of musicians.19

  African musicians had been playing for European monarchs and nobility since at least the twelfth century, in a tradition that owed much to medieval Islamic courts from Spain to Syria. In 1194, turbaned black trumpeters accompanied the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI on his triumphal entry into Palermo in Sicily.20 In Renaissance Italy, trumpeters worked on board royal ships. Martino, a ‘black slave’, was purchased by Ferdinand, King of Naples, in 1470, to play on the royal ship Barcha. An African trumpeter travelled with Cosimo I de’ Medici of Florence on his galley in 1555. In Portugal ten black musicians played the charamela (a wind-instrument) at the court of Teodosio I, Duke of Bragança.21

  Closer to home, James IV of Scotland employed a Moorish drummer in the early years of the sixteenth century. This musician, who is known only as the ‘More taubronar’, not only played the tabor drum but was something of a choreographer. He devised a dance with twelve performers in black and white costumes for the 1505 Shrove Tuesday celebrations at the Scottish court. This may have been a boisterous event, resulting in some wear and tear to his instrument, because the following month he was given 28 shillings ‘to pay for the painting of his taubroun’.22

  The ubiquitous presence of black musicians at European courts is echoed in the artwork of the time: a dark-skinned trumpeter in French livery appears in a tapestry depicting part of the festivities at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520.23 A group of African boys making music with a variety of wind and brass instruments, including a trombone, are featured in The Engagement of St Ursula and Prince Etherius, commissioned in 1522 by Eleanor, Queen of Portugal, to adorn the St Auta altarpiece in the Convent of Madre de Deus, in Lisbon.24

  When John Blanke arrived, England was a relatively weak kingdom on the edge of Europe. Henry VII was still trying to cement the legitimacy of his new Tudor dynasty. Like the marriage he negotiated between his son Arthur and the Spanish Infanta, emulating other European rulers by employing an African musician at court was a way of enhancing his prestige on the European stage.

  There is no record of exactly how John Blanke came to be working as a trumpeter at the Tudor court. However, trumpeters were the most mobile of musicians, used as messengers and required for diplomatic exchanges and ceremonial affairs. They accompanied rulers and their representatives on foreign journeys, giving them the opportunity to jump ship and remain as a permanent employee in the court they were visiting. So it proved for John de Cecil, a Spaniard who played for Archduke Philip the Handsome in Brussels in the 1490s. By 1496, he had returned to Spain, and was chosen to accompany Katherine of Aragon to England for her marriage in 1501. In January 1502 he was issued with a banner in England and began to receive a monthly wage of 20 shillings from Henry VII, the same rate at which the King was to pay John Blanke. De Cecil continued to travel around Europe. In 1511, he accompanied Lord Darcy on a diplomatic mission to the court of Ferdinand of Aragon, while in 1514 he attended Henry’s younger sister Mary on her journey to become Queen of France. He does not appear in the English records after that date, which suggests he found permanent employment in the French court.25

  Like John de Cecil, John Blanke may well have arrived in England with Katherine of Aragon in 1501. She certainly brought a group of trumpeters with her; Henry VII’s Treasurer of the Chamber paid a reward of £4 to ‘9 trumpets of Spain’ shortly after her arrival. In January 1502, a reward of 20 shillings was paid to ‘the new trumpet,’ who remains anonymous.26

  It was certainly possible that one of Katherine’s trumpeters was African and skilled enough to attract the attention of Henry VII. Music thrived at the Spanish court of Ferdinand and Isabella and the number of musicians employed increased dramatically during their reign. Princess Katherine and her siblings were taught music by the famous composer Juan de Anchieta in the royal chapel, and each had their own troupe of household musicians.27

  By this time, growing numbers of Africans were living in Spain; a consequence of the growing Spanish empire. This was a newly arrived
population, in contrast to the North African Moors who had ruled parts of Spain since the eighth century. Between 1441 and 1521, an estimated 156,000 Africans arrived in Spain, Portugal and the Atlantic islands, mostly from the modern-day West African nations of Guinea-Bissau, Guinea-Conakry, Senegal, the Gambia and parts of Mali and Burkina Faso. By 1550, they made up 7.5% of the population of Seville and in 1574 Melchor de Santa Cruz described the city as a ‘giant chessboard containing an equal number of white and black chessmen’. But while some gained their freedom, most were enslaved.28

  Seville was one of the regular haunts of the peripatetic Spanish court, which travelled between the principal cities of the kingdoms of Castile (Seville, Valladolid, Toledo and after 1492, Granada), and of Aragon (Barcelona, Zaragoza and Valencia).29 Katherine’s mother, Isabella of Castile, and her husband, Ferdinand of Aragon, had at least one African in their entourage in the early years of their reign: in the summer of 1475 a black slave was amongst those who died of thirst while they travelled around Castile.30 Not all royal slaves were African; people of many ethnicities were enslaved in Spain at this time. Indeed, one of the two individuals enslaved in the Spanish household of Katherine of Aragon was a native Guanche from the recently colonised Canary Islands. A slightly later African presence at the Spanish court was depicted by the German artist Christoph Weiditz in 1529. When he accompanied Charles V through Aragon and Catalonia that summer, he included a picture of an attendant African drummer amongst his sketches of the progress.31 As Africans were increasingly present in royal and aristocratic households across Europe, especially in the Italian states, Spain and Portugal, it’s easy to imagine that one of the trumpeters Katherine of Aragon brought to England in 1501 was of African origin.32

  There was some debate between Katherine’s parents and her future father-in-law as to how large a household she might be allowed to bring with her to her new home. Ferdinand and Isabella wrote to Henry VII in October 1500 with a list of fifty-eight names. The list did not include John Blanke but did mention ‘two slaves to attend on the maids of honour’. Henry, no doubt considering the cost of feeding and clothing all these Spaniards, insisted the future Queen of England would be better served by a more modest household of some twenty people of English stock. When Katherine disembarked in Plymouth on 1 October 1501, her entourage numbered close to sixty.33 Her new father-in-law’s advice had evidently fallen on deaf ears.

  The journey across Spain to the Atlantic port of La Coruña had begun from Granada, where Ferdinand and Isabella had been obliged to go to deal with the revolt of the Moors of Ronda. The Moorish kingdom of Granada had only submitted to Spanish rule in 1492 and the aftershocks were still being felt. The princess’s retinue would have been used to travelling with the court around Castile and Aragon but many would be unfamiliar with the most northerly reaches of the peninsula, and would have been glad of the opportunity to call en route at the shrine of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. They would have been considerably less enamoured of what, for most of them, would have been their first sea voyage. The weather was so bad the first time they set sail from La Coruña that they were forced to return to port. They finally made landfall in Plymouth, then continued the journey to London by road. King Henry and Prince Arthur met them at Dogmersfield in Hampshire on 6 November and the travellers reached the capital a week later.34

  Thomas More witnessed Katherine’s entry into London. In a letter to his friend, John Holt, he described her retinue as ‘laceri, nudipedes pigmei Ethiopes’ (hunchbacked, barefoot Ethiopian pigmies). It would be tempting to take this description as confirmation that some were African but it smacks of rhetorical exaggeration. Just as the ladies are thought to have been wearing sandals, and so appeared to be barefoot, More was most likely commenting on the darker features of the Spaniards rather than recording their true ethnicity. Other accounts only mention that the Spanish women were ‘not of the fairest’.35

  One woman who accompanied Katherine probably was dark-skinned. Catalina, born in Motril, Granada, was presumably from a Moorish Muslim family, though she would have had to convert to Christianity to become part of Katherine’s household. In all likelihood, she was one of the two ‘slaves to attend on the maids of honour’ listed in Katherine’s entourage in 1500. It was her duty to ‘make the Queen’s bed and attend to other secret or private services of her Highness’s chamber’. She was in attendance on both of Katherine’s wedding nights, in 1501 and 1509, making her a sought-after witness when Henry VIII began divorce proceedings and the question of whether the first marriage, to Arthur, had been consummated became a live issue. Catalina was one of a handful of people who knew the answer. By this time, she had gone back to Spain, where she married a Moorish crossbow-maker named Oviedo. After his death, she returned to her native Motril with their two daughters.36

  While Ferdinand and Isabella may have considered the people they chose to wait on their daughter’s maids of honour as ‘slaves’, this was not a recognised status in England. Henry VII had made the distinction clear earlier in his reign, when he set free Pero Alvarez, an African man who had come to England from Portugal. This act of manumission, and its validity in his kingdom, was confirmed by King João II of Portugal in 1490.37 When the question arose in an English court of law in 1569, it was resolved ‘that England has too pure an Air for Slaves to breathe in.’ As William Harrison put it, in his Description of England some twenty years later:

  As for slaves and bondmen, we have none; nay such is the privilege of our country by the especial grace of God and bounty of our princes, that if any come hither from other realms, so soon as they set foot on land they become as free in condition as their masters, whereby all note of servile bondage is utterly removed from them.38

  Although Harrison’s text is designed to show England in the best possible light, there is a ring of truth to his theory. It is echoed in many of the experiences of Africans in England, as well as in the absence of legislation establishing the status of slavery under English law. Parliament never issued any law codes delineating slavery to compare with the Portuguese Ordenações Manuelinas (1481–1514), the Dutch East India Ordinances (1622), France’s Code Noir (1685) or the codes that appeared in Virginia and other American states from the 1670s.39 Of course, the absence of a written law would not make it impossible for Africans to be treated as slaves in practice.40 If they were referred to as slaves, bought and sold, subjected to brutal whippings and other harsh physical punishments, and did not receive any payment or other compensation for their labour, it would be fair to conclude that they were enslaved. But we know John Blanke was paid wages like the rest of the court musicians. Catalina was later described as ‘esclava que fue’, literally the ‘slave that was’, suggesting she had been enslaved in Spain, but became free in England.41

  The status of John Blanke, Catalina and any other Africans in Katherine’s retinue was certainly better in England than in Spain, where African slaves were sold on the Cathedral steps in Seville, alongside goods such as tapestries and jewellery.42 John Blanke’s musical skills earned him a decent wage at the Tudor court, and in England he was free. Or, at least, freer. His status was as much dictated by his class as his colour; very few Englishmen could be said to be truly ‘free’ in this period. Some, known as ‘villeins’, were still legally unfree. Villeins were men bound either to a personal lord or to work on a manor: a feudal legacy. In 1485, at least four hundred manors in thirty English and Welsh counties still had villeins. By the 1560s, this figure had fallen to one hundred manors in twenty-one counties.43 Villeins were in the minority but far more English people were severely limited by their circumstances. Two-fifths of the rural population and between a half and two-thirds of those in cities were in service, working in husbandry, or as apprentices or domestics.44 That said, other servants could move around more freely and had families to support them in times of trouble. John Blanke did not have that luxury.

  In Spain, Blanke would have been one of many Africans, but in Henry’s Eng
land he would rarely encounter a fellow countryman. Only a handful of Africans appear in the records before the age of Elizabeth: Pero Alvarez met Henry VII in the late 1480s; in 1522, Peter Blackmore, ‘a moren borne’, was listed among ‘bill men’ ready to fight in St Petrock, Exeter; and one ‘Thomas Bull, niger’ was buried in Eydon, Northamptonshire in 1545. As we will see in the next chapter, Jacques Francis, born off the Guinea coast, was living in Southampton in the late 1540s. At least one ‘blakemor’ was among the entourage of Philip II when he came to London to marry Mary Tudor in 1554, and chroniclers relate that an African needlemaker operated in Cheapside during her reign.45 The paucity of records can partly be explained by the fact that it only became compulsory for parishes to keep registers of baptisms, marriages and burials in 1538, and few survive from before 1558. Although some Africans might have come to England unrecorded in this period, it is safe to say that there were far fewer in England than in southern Europe.

  More Africans were recorded in Scotland than in England in the first half of the sixteenth century. The drummer who played for James IV was one of at least seven Africans, male and female, living at or visiting the Scottish court. Some we know by name: Peter the Moor, present in 1501 and 1504, was paid a pension by the King and travelled to France and back, as well as journeying around Scotland with the court. Perhaps John Blanke heard about him from the trumpeters at the English court who accompanied Margaret Tudor to Edinburgh for her marriage in 1503? Margaret and Elene (or Helenor), probably the ‘More lasses’ who arrived in 1504, formed part of the household of Margaret Stewart, James IV’s illegitimate daughter. They were well looked after and regularly provided with new clothes and shoes.46 Others are recorded without a name. On St Valentine’s Day in 1506, a nurse brought ‘the Moor’s bairn [child]’ to show the King. Two ‘blak More freirs’ (friars) were James IV’s guests at court in 1508. In 1512, an African servant of Andrew Forman, Bishop of Moray, was paid a reward of 14 shillings for bringing a present to the king. Mary of Guise distributed bread to ‘moors’ at Stirling Castle each day throughout 1549,47 and in March of that year she received a letter from Lady Home recommending a ‘Mour’ who was billeted at Hume Castle, Berwickshire, as being ‘as sharp a man as rides’.48