Who Were The Black Tudors?
Dr Miranda Kaufmann discusses her book Black Tudors: The Untold Story and uncovering the lost stories of black people in Tudor England
Dr Miranda Kaufmann discusses her groundbreaking book
Undoubtedly one of the most popular periods of English history, the Tudor era has been dramatised in various books, television dramas and films, while countless scholars have explored every inch of its history – or so we thought. In her book Black Tudors: The Untold Story, Dr Miranda Kaufmann investigates a part of Tudor history that has been forgotten, exploring the lives of African men and women who lived in Tudor and early Stuart England.
Challenging people’s preconceptions of black Tudors, their day-to-day lives, their careers and even their freedom, Kaufmann’s illuminating research provides a vital reassessment of English history that changes our understanding of the Tudors as we know them. What triggered your interest in black Tudors and why did you decide to write your book?
In my final year as an undergrad at Oxford, I was in a lecture about early modern trade and they mentioned that the Tudors had started trading to Africa in the middle of the 16th century, which was surprising because I had only learnt about the 18th-century trade of enslaved Africans. I found a couple of references in the library to Africans in Elizabethan England and I was inspired to find out more, so that became the subject of my doctorate. I eventually found archival references to over 360 individuals living in Tudor and early Stuart Britain between 1500 and 1640. I wrote the book because I wanted to share what I’d found with the world and change people’s
“The evidence of Africans being paid wages, testifying in court and intermarrying all suggests a level of civic freedom”
perception of British history. The black presence in Tudor England is an important corrective to the false narrative that black people first arrived in Britain on the Empire Windrush in 1948. This can feed into a negative perspective on the immigration debate, suggesting that as black people have only recently arrived here, there is an option for them to ‘go home’. Also, the stories were individually fascinating. How did you piece together the lives of the black men and women that you wrote about? What sources did you use?
With difficulty! Although other scholars have since published on the topic, those books by Imtiaz Habib and Onyeka Nubia weren’t around when I began my research in 2004. Marika Sherwood of the Black and Asian Studies Association was a great help in pointing me towards the primary sources. Parish registers, which record baptisms, marriages and burials, provide information about where and how many people were in the country, but they don’t often give a huge amount of biographical information. They might say something like ‘John, a blackamoor, was buried on the 3rd of December’, and that’s about it, although there is an unusually detailed account of Mary Fillis being baptised at St Botolph’s, Aldgate, in 1597. There’s a small amount of visual evidence, such as the two images of John Blanke in the Westminster
Tournament Roll, or the portrait of Anne of Denmark with an African attendant. I also used royal and aristocratic household accounts, letters, diaries and state papers. For the book, I often got the most out of legal records that had more detail about people’s lives. For example, most of what we know about Jacques Francis, the salvage diver, and Edward Swarthye, comes from the High Court of Admiralty or Star Chamber cases.
Unfortunately, there aren’t any primary accounts by the black Tudors themselves, so you have to read the sources written by white men backwards and try to grasp the black experience. A lot of historians looking at black history encounter this problem. When I couldn’t find a huge amount of biographical information about the black people then I researched the white people in the story and that often led to more insights. When I looked into Sir Edward Wynter’s life, I found out how Edward Swarthye likely came to England – Wynter had sailed to the Caribbean with Francis Drake. With John Anthony, who was a sailor in Dover, I did more digging into the ship that he worked on, the Silver Falcon, and learned of her illfated voyage to Virginia. How and when did black Tudors first arrive in England?
Although an African man named Pero Alvarez from Portugal visited the court of Henry VII in the late-1480s John Blanke, the Tudor court trumpeter, was the earliest person I found living here for a significant period of time. Our first record of Blanke is from 1507 but he probably came with Catherine of Aragon in 1501. Around the same time, there were several Africans at the court of James IV of Scotland.
I identified that Africans arrived in Britain in three main ways. Some came from Southern Europe, like Blanke. There was a much higher black population in Spain, Portugal and to some extent Italy in this period, because those countries were already engaged in enslavement and contact with Africa and had colonies in the Americas. Africans came to England as a side effect of that, with royals like Catherine and Philip II of Spain; with English aristocrats or merchants who travelled in Europe; or with the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Portugal and Spain. The second way was through direct trade with Africa. For example, Prince Dederi Jaquoah and those before him who came to England learnt English and then went back as traders and interpreters. The final way is through privateering, so when Francis Drake or other privateers captured Africans when they raided Spanish ports or captured Spanish or Portuguese ships
– the largest number in this period was the 135 Africans brought to Bristol in 1590 aboard the Charles. In your book, you discuss how people were more likely to be judged on their religion and social class rather than the colour of their skin. Why was this?
We have to remember that this was a highly religious society and religious identity was central to the way people conceived of themselves. The English went through the Reformation in this period and were increasingly identifying as a Protestant nation. I argue that welcoming Africans into the Protestant faith through baptism is a key indicator of acceptance, they were seen as potential equals in the eyes of God. Meredith Hanmer preached a sermon in 1586 at St Paul’s Cathedral on the baptism of a ‘Turk’ – he was thrilled that the heathen had become a Protestant and that the Spanish had failed to entice him to become a Catholic.
As for social class, there was this idea of ‘the Great Chain of Being’; everybody had their place. The Moroccan ambassadors were received with diplomatic pomp;
West African merchants were traded with as equals by English merchants; Francis Drake sees the Panama Maroons as military allies. If you were skilled like Francis the salvage diver, Reasonable
Blackman the silk-weaver or John Blanke the musician, then you were respected and remunerated for your work.
Those who had been previously enslaved by the Spaniards and Portuguese and had arrived without a penny to their name were more likely to be treated – not necessarily worse than an impoverished white Englishman – but according to the perception of their social status, and they might end up working as a servant. I think people sometimes see black people in domestic service and assume it was akin to enslavement because now domestic service isn’t really seen as a career path. Africans were paid wages, just like their white counterparts, which makes it clear they were not enslaved. In Black Tudors, you include a quote from 1569 that states that England had “too pure an Air for Slaves to breath in”. Did the belief that black labourers in England were ‘free’ during this period encourage them to move there?
I argue that the Africans were free in England not only because of the idea that setting foot on English soil conferred freedom, but also because there wasn’t any legislation passed delineating enslavement in England in this period, compared to the codes in Portugal or later in France and English colonies like Virginia and Barbados. The evidence of Africans being paid wages, testifying in court and intermarrying all suggests a level of civic freedom. Across the Atlantic world, people were aware that Africans weren’t enslaved in England and someone like Diego [a circumnavigator] might have heard that and taken the risk to get on Drake’s ship rather than stay enslaved in Panama. However, the Africans who arrived in England in this period didn’t always come here of their own volition so were not necessarily ‘voting with their feet’. Did African women have different experiences compared to African men in Tudor England?
The short answer is yes. Roughly half of the records I found were of women and the original draft of my book had five chapters on women. One was about Maria, who was abandoned on an island in Indonesia by Drake, but as she never actually came to England I couldn’t justify a whole chapter on her, and instead told her story in the Diego chapter. There was another woman called Helen Jeronimo, who was described as a ‘moor’ but I couldn’t be sure if she was of African origin or whether she was from the East Indies because she was the wife of an East India Company sailor. I ended