Black Tudors Page 4

  The scorecards, or ‘jousting cheques’, from the tournament survive: a sheaf of paper for each contestant with strange markings that record their performance. They show the King did well. He broke 12 lances and scored 9 attaints, or hits, on the body and one on the head. However, he did not break a lance on the helm, as he is depicted doing in the flattering central scene of the Tournament Roll. At the end of the first day, Queen Katherine awarded the prizes (worth 200 crowns each), to Valiant Desire (Sir Thomas Knyvet) on the Challengers’ side and Richard Blount on the Answerers’. The second day’s sport ended with prizes for Coeur Loyal, the King, for the Challengers and Edmund Howard for the answerers. As the winners were announced and the prizes collected, the trumpets, inevitably, sounded once more. The heralds then issued the cry ‘a l’hostell’ to a final fanfare.79 This signified the end of the day and invited the assembled company to proceed away from the field towards the hospitality that awaited them.

  North of the border, tournaments at the Scottish court were being influenced by the African presence at James IV’s court. In June 1507, the Scottish King disguised himself as a wild or black knight in ‘the jousting of the wild knight for the black lady’. This ‘black lady’ was almost certainly one of the African women then present at court. The entertainment was so popular that it was repeated again in May 1508, and inspired William Dunbar’s poem to Ane Blak Moir. His description of the lady has been described as ‘venomous’, ‘shocking’ and ‘uniquely bad’. These are modern reactions to his references to her ‘thick lips’, ‘short cat nose’ and ‘mouth like an ape’. But these lines must be seen in the context of the Scottish tradition of ‘flyting’, or poetic insult, which was equally rude to all its targets. Dunbar traded poetic insults with another court poet, whom he addressed as ‘Cuntbitten craven Kennedy’. Kennedy in return called Dunbar an ‘Ignorant elf, ape, owl irregular’ and many worse things besides.

  Having described the lady, Dunbar explains that:

  Who for her sake with spear and shield

  Fights most mightily in the field

  Shall kiss and embrace her

  And from thenceforth her love shall wield

  My lady with the thick lips

  And who in field receives shame

  And tarnishes his knightly name

  Shall come behind and kiss her hips

  And never to other comfort claim:

  My lady with the thick lips.80

  The black lady played a central part in this spectacle, sitting in a ‘chair triumphal’ decorated with red Flemish taffeta, and taffeta ‘flowers and pansies’. According to the Scottish chronicler Pitscottie, the tournament lasted forty days, and the black knight (James IV) was victorious throughout. One wonders whether he did indeed kiss the black lady in the way that Dunbar describes. Once the jousting was over:

  The king caused to make a great triumph and banquet in Holyrood House which lasted the space of three days, beginning at 9 in the morning and lasting till 9 at night . . . between every course there was a farce or play, some spoken, some necromancy, which caused men to see things appear which were not. And so at the . . . play upon the third day there came a cloud out of the roof of the hall, as appeared to men, which opened and collected up the black lady in the presence of them all that she was no more seen, but this was done by the art of necromancy for the king’s pleasure [by] one called Bishop Andrew Forman who was a magician and served the king at such times for his pastime and pleasure.81

  The Westminster Tournament was also followed by a banquet, held in the White Hall. The resident ambassadors were guests of honour and lavish entertainments were staged to impress them. These took the form of ‘disguisings’, a sort of fancy-dress pageant; a forerunner of the masque. That night’s theatrics, entitled The Golden Arber in the Archyard of Pleasure, began with John Blanke and the other trumpeters welcoming the arrival of the extravagant pageant car. It held a ‘golden arbour’ of trees and flowers, and was inhabited by six ladies and six lords. The edifice was so heavy that it had fallen through the floor at the Bishop of Hereford’s palace during rehearsals. The twelve performers, the King and a bevy of courtiers, wore the Tudor colours of white and green, their costumes adorned with the letters ‘H’ and ‘K’ in yellow. In a flash of bawdy humour, Knyvet (Valiant Desire) sported the word ‘Desyr’ in gold on his codpiece.82

  When the pageant car was put to one side to accommodate the ensuing dancing, the ‘rude people’ suddenly ran towards it, each wanting a piece of its costly decoration: the car was completely torn to pieces. The King was in danger of a similar fate when, later in the evening, the ladies, gentlewomen and ambassadors were encouraged to pluck the gold letters from his person ‘in token of liberality’. Things got out of hand, and the rest of the crowd joined in, stripping him and his companions down to their hose and doublets. Even the ladies were ‘spoyled’, and the King’s guard had to be called in to fend off the ravening crowd. The King retired to his chamber with the Queen and her ladies, where ‘all these hurts were turned to laughing and game’, and so the night ended with ‘mirth and gladness’.83 After two long days, John Blanke and the attendant trumpeters were finally able to retire.

  A mere ten days later, on 22 February 1511, the infant Prince Henry died. He had lived for only 53 days. The Queen, ‘like a natural woman, made much lamentation’. Henry played tennis and dice to distract himself, and by the end of April had issued a new Challenge for jousting in May. When this failed to prove distraction enough, he set about making preparations to declare war against Louis XII of France.84

  John Blanke soon had his own cause for celebration; he married in January 1512. We do not know whom he married, but it seems probable, given the dearth of Africans in England at this time, that she was an Englishwoman. To marry in a Catholic ceremony, both parties had to have been baptised. Hence, while he may have been born into a Muslim family in North Africa or Spain, and despite the turban he wore at the Westminster Tournament the year before, by 1512 John Blanke was a Christian, at least on paper.

  The court had spent Christmas and New Year at Greenwich Palace, built by Henry VII on the site of today’s Old Royal Naval College. Henry VIII was born there and it was the younger King’s favourite residence until the rebuilding of Whitehall in the early 1530s. The Palace had its own chapel, at the eastern end of the complex, but this was mostly used by aristocrats and so is unlikely to have been the site of the Blanke wedding. Men of the trumpeter’s status were more often married at the local parish church of St Nicholas.85

  Henry VIII himself footed the bill for John Blanke’s wedding outfit. At Greenwich, on 14 January, the King ordered a gown of violet cloth, and also a bonnet and a hat, which was ‘to be taken of our gift against’ the marriage of ‘our trumpeter’.86 Gifts of clothing were a common wedding present, and violet was a popular colour for the cloth.87 On the same day that he authorised the gift to John Blanke, the King also signed a warrant in favour of Richard Mayre, a yeoman of the Ewery; he was to receive ‘for his wedding apparel, a gown cloth of violet containing four broad yards and as much black Irish lamb as will suffice to fur the same, also tawny chamlet for a jacket, and for his wife three broad yards of violet cloth for her gown’.88 This was a more substantial gift. Mayre was in charge of the Ewer, a vessel which carried water, as well as all the royal napkins and basins, and so was responsible for washing the hands of the King and his guests, and shaving the King every morning. This was a position of great responsibility, with personal access to the King, hence the larger gift. Other servants received similar or lesser gifts to Blanke. William Toke, page of the laundry, received a gown, jacket, doublet and a bonnet at the time of his marriage, while John Hethe, yeoman almoner of the King’s chamber, was given broadcloth for a gown before his wedding.89

  The record of John Blanke’s wedding present is the last mention of him in the royal records. Although his petition had stated that he intended to serve the King for the rest of his life, he is not named in the next full list
of trumpeters dated 31 January 1514.90 People at court came and went, of course, and musicians in particular frequently exchanged one European royal master for another. It is also possible that Blanke’s marriage heralded a change of direction. It was not uncommon for court servants to marry a widow and take on her former husband’s trade in the City.91 A more morbid conclusion is that Blanke’s court career ended with his death. He could have perished in the fire that consumed the living quarters of the palace of Westminster in 1512, or he might have met his death at either the Battle of the Spurs in France or the Battle of Flodden against the Scots the following year.92

  The trend for employing Africans at royal courts continued after John Blanke’s time, both in England and across Europe. As well as making music, they also worked in the stables and the kitchens. Others went on to greater things, such as João de Sa Panasco, who began as a court jester in Lisbon, went on to become a gentleman of the household, King’s valet, a soldier who participated in Charles V’s campaign in North Africa in 1535 and finally a member of the prestigious Order of Santiago. At the English court, Elizabeth I paid for an outfit in white taffeta with gold and silver detailing for a ‘little blackamore’ in 1575.93 Anthony Vause, a ‘black-more’ trumpeter, was employed at the Tower of London by James I in 1618. Both King James’s wife, Anne of Denmark, and his son, Charles I, appear in paintings in which their horses are attended to by African grooms.94

  John Blanke was not the last African to serve King Henry VIII. As a French diplomat remarked to his English counterpart in the summer of 1545: ‘King’s hearts are in God’s hand and he turns them as pleases him from peace to war and from war to peace’.95 During his final war with France, instead of a skilled musician King Henry required the services of a man versed in an art that was at this time little practised by Europeans, but which people from West Africa were taught from birth: swimming and diving.

  2

  Jacques Francis, the Salvage Diver

  Jacques plunged into the sea, and the cold engulfed him. It was so different to the warm waters where he’d learnt to swim and dive as a child. He took a series of deep breaths, allowing his lungs to inflate with air and take precious oxygen into his blood, and dived beneath the waves. As he reached the depths, he began to make out the shape of the wreck through the murky water. He had heard the tale of how this proud warship had met her doom. The men of the town didn’t agree on exactly what had caused her to sink, but they well recalled the spectacle of her quick, cruel disappearance beneath the waves. The screams of the drowning men were loud enough to reach the shore. Their skeletons would be waiting for him among the sunken timbers. Hundreds of onlookers, including King Henry himself, had watched, helpless, as the ship went down. The Mary Rose; that was what they called her. And now that splendid ship lay lifeless before him in the water. Her side was studded with guns of iron and bronze, the latter marked with the royal crest. That was why he was here, why the King had hired his master: to salvage the expensive weaponry. The Venetian could not dive this deep himself and so he’d found Jacques, and the other divers in his team, and brought them to this cold island to perform a miracle for the English King.

  FEW OF US know that there were attempts to salvage the Mary Rose in the Tudor period, still fewer that some of the men qualified to undertake the job came from Africa. How did they manage to retrieve objects from the sea floor centuries before the invention of modern diving equipment? Why was it that Africans were so skilled in diving when most Europeans couldn’t even swim? How did Jacques Francis’s expertise affect the way he was viewed and treated by Tudor society? Most of what we know about him comes from precious evidence preserved in the records of the High Court of Admiralty. Jacques was the very first known African to give testimony before an English court. But how would his words have been received? Yes, he was an eyewitness, but according to the prosecution he was also an infidel and a slave.

  Jacques Francis was about eighteen when, in 1546, he began working for a Venetian named Peter Paulo Corsi. Corsi, who had been in Southampton since about 1539, was one of a considerable, though dwindling, number of Italians based in the port.1 There had been a strong Venetian, Florentine and Genoese presence in Southampton in the medieval period. The merchants of these powerful city-states had come there since the thirteenth century to satisfy northern Italy’s demand for English wool. The wool trade was central to the English economy, its importance symbolised by the fact that, since the reign of Edward III, the Lord Chancellor sat on the Woolsack in the House of Lords, as the Lord Speaker does today. As the geographer Richard Hakluyt put it in 1584: ‘for certain hundreds [of] years ... by the peculiar commodities of wools, and of later years by clothing of the same . . . [England] raised itself from meaner state to greater wealth and much higher honour might and power than before’. Southampton was also the chief centre for the export of Cornish tin, since Henry VII had established a staple, or exclusive market, for metals there in 1492. But by the 1540s the port was in a terminal decline brought on by the increasing dominance of the capital, with fewer and fewer Italian visitors.2

  John Speed’s map of Southampton in 1611.

  Like John Blanke, Jacques Francis arrived in England before regular, direct trade with Africa began. Francis was born in the 1520s, on an island off the coast of the part of West Africa known to the Tudors as ‘Guinea’. We do not know the exact route by which he came to Southampton. Corsi may have hired him directly from Africa through a Portuguese intermediary, or perhaps they met in Corsi’s home city, Venice. After Spain and Portugal, the next largest African population in Europe was in the collection of states that today make up modern Italy, of which Milan, Naples and Sicily were ruled from Madrid after 1535. Most came via Portugal, the country that initiated the import of Africans into Europe in the 1440s; the trade partly financed by Italian investors. The largest numbers of Africans were in the south, especially in Sicily, but in the sixteenth century there was a growing presence in the northern cities of Mantua, Milan, Ferrara and Corsi’s Venice. This was where Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, sent her agent in 1491 when she was looking for a girl ‘as black as possible’ to serve her. The presence of enslaved Africans in Venice was certainly a truism by Shakespeare’s time: in The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–1598) Shylock tells the Venetians:

  You have among you many a purchased slave,

  Which, like your asses and your dogs and mules,

  You use in abject and in slavish parts,

  Because you bought them.

  And of course, Othello was employed by the Venetian state.

  Although most Africans had arrived as slaves, some were manumitted and found employment. It was not uncommon to spot a free African in command of a gondola, gliding along the Grand Canal beneath the Rialto Bridge. The first hereditary Duke of Florence, Alessandro de’ Medici (d. 1537), was said to be the son of an African woman, named either Simunetta or Anna, who may have been a former slave.3

  At least one African had come to Southampton from Italy before Jacques Francis’s arrival. In 1491, Richard Hortensell, beadle of God’s House hospital, was fined for his involvement in a fight with ‘a black man that was a taboryn in the galley of [South] Hampton’. This galley, a low ship powered chiefly by oars and favoured in piracy and war, was probably part of the Florentine or Venetian state fleet, as both used Southampton as their English base at that time.4 The ‘taboryn’ was a drummer, a musician like the Scottish ‘More taubronar’ or John Blanke, who would usually play alongside a piper, setting a beat for revellers to dance or, to in this case, keeping time for the strokes of the oarsmen.

  In the summer of 1545, England was under attack. Two hundred and thirty-five ships bearing 30,000 Frenchmen spoiling for a fight were on their way across the Channel.5 Two years before his death, King Henry VIII was once again at war with the foe of his youth. His navy gathered at Portsmouth and set sail on a calm, sunny July day; the Mary Rose one of the vessels leading the fleet. Henry had built this four-masted, 400
-ton battleship in the first years of his reign and she had given good service, particularly in the sack of Brest in 1512, on the eve of the better-known 1513 victories at Flodden and the Battle of the Spurs. After an extensive refit in 1536, the ship was ready to attack the French once more. Loaded with ninety-one guns and packed with some five hundred men, she set out to meet the enemy in what was to become known – before being largely forgotten – as the Battle of the Solent. Yet, before she was able to engage the French, in fact while she was still in full view of the harbour, the Mary Rose sank. As Jacques Francis would have heard from those recounting the tale, the piercing cries of the drowning men echoed across the water to the shore. Fewer than thirty men survived.

  The lack of wind had lulled the crew into a false sense of security. The sea was so calm that no one thought it necessary to close the gun ports before setting sail. When the wind suddenly picked up and the Mary Rose attempted to tack, water poured into the open gun ports. Once the ship began to heel, the heavy cannonballs and ballast slid to the starboard side and gravity did the rest. The last recorded words of the ship’s commander, Sir George Carew, which he called out to his uncle, Sir Gawen Carew, close by on the Matthew Gonson, were ‘I have the sort of knaves I cannot rule’. But the disaster was hardly the fault of the crew. From his vantage point on top of Southsea Castle, Henry VIII could only look on in horror as the ship where he had dined earlier that day keeled over and sank before his eyes and comfort Lady Carew, who fell into a faint as she watched her husband sink to his certain death, along with most of his crew.

  Most Tudor sailors did not know how to swim. It was thought unlucky, and of little use, as ships were not in the habit of changing course to rescue those who fell overboard; better to drown quickly. Those aboard the Mary Rose had the extra impediment of the anti-boarding nets, which now kept the sailors in, instead of keeping the enemy out.