BLACK TUDORS
THE UNTOLD STORY
MIRANDA KAUFMANN Oneworld, 384pp, £18.99, Oldie price £12.10 inc p&p
Reviewers agreed that Kaufmann’s book was fresh and ground-breaking. ‘Splendid… that rare thing – a work of history about the Tudors that actually says something fresh and new,’ wrote Dan Jones in the Sunday
Times. Financial Times reviewer Jesse Childs described it as ‘an enlightening and constantly surprising book... Far too many popular studies of the Tudors return the same faces. To its great credit,
Black Tudors presents fresh figures and challenges the way we look at them.’
Kaufmann’s archive research has unearthed more than 360 Africans in early modern England and Scotland. Here she concentrates on ten case studies. ‘The book’s best chapters have the force of a short story. An account of Francis Drake’s ambush of a Spanish silver-packed mule train in Panama is thrilling. He would never have succeeded without his Cimarron (escaped-african) allies or his black fixer Diego.’
As Kaufmann ‘reveals in this consistently fascinating, historically invaluable book, conventional wisdom has got it hopelessly wrong’, wrote John Preston in the Daily
Mail. Take the case of an African court trumpeter called John Blanke, who played at the coronation of Henry VII in 1485 and was held in such high esteem that the king paid for his wedding outfit. Far from being enslaved (as Kaufmann points out, slavery was never legal in Britain itself, only in the colonies) Blanke demanded – and received – good money for his services.’ Preston praised the book for its ‘pacey’ narrative, its ‘scrupulously thorough research’, and a ‘tone mercifully free of sermonising’ before concluding that ‘anyone reading it will never look at Tudor England in quite the same light again’.