Black Tudors: Three Untold Stories

I thought I knew the Tudors I've done them at Primary School secondary school University I'd seen all the films and read urban novels I visited all the historical sites but even dressed up as a Tudor what's four twice but I was wrong because I didn't know about the black Tudors it all began 15 years ago for me at least in a lecture theatre at Oxford University the lecture was on early modern trade and at some point the lecturer Joseph mentioned in passing that the Tudors had started trading to Africa in the middle of the sixteenth century that was a big surprise to me because the only time I'd really ever heard about trade with Africa was in the context of the 18th century slave trade so I know like any good student I decided to find out more and headed to the library and quite quickly I began to find references to this document which when I read it let me dumbstruck because this document is from the settled papers the papers of the personal papers of Sir Robert Cecil who was Elizabeth the first de facto Prime Minister by this point and this document said that great numbers of knee guards and blackamoors have crept into this realm since her Majesty's troubles with the king of Spain that meant that there were actually Africans living here in Tudor England I had to find out more why was there nothing in the books that I had read why had I never heard about this that if there were that many Africans in Tudor England surely they would leave some record in the many many documents that survived from this period I began my search over the next few years I found records of over 200 Africans living in England in the Tudor period they appear in a whole wealth of different types of records including many of them appear in parish registers like these ones which record baptisms marriages and burials you can see some of them here Nicholas a negro of unknown parents was baptized at the age of 3 years or there abouts this is the baptism on the left here of fortune artists at blackamoor this is the burial of margretta and more and this is a marriage of a man called John a Comey it doesn't actually say he's African in that particular record but we know he is from other records we find Africans in tax returns so there was an alien poll tax at this time meaning that all foreigners were charged for prints ahead go pay up to eight points ahead towards the end of the century so alongside French people Spanish people Dutch people and all other foreigners the Africans would be were being taxed and so they crop up in those accounts they also appear in household accounts so this particular record is from the royal household accounts showing wages being paid to John Blanc known as the black trumpet and by Henry the seventh but these kind of records survived from plenty of aristocratic and Gentry households as well at the time and so these Africans appear where they're being paid wages or whether when clothing or shoes are being brought for them for example they also appear in court records and so legal papers quite often when they appear as witnesses giving testimony in court I found Africans in diaries letters wills and there is also you know the odds visual piece of evidence like these two images of John Blanc whose wages I just showed you John Blanc appears here in the Western it's the tournament roll the Western it's the tournament roll is this amazing 60 foot long vellum document that Henry the eighth's Commission's to record the Westminster tournament which was a two-day long that he plans to celebrate the birth of a son to his wife Catherine of Aragon in 1511 unfortunately the young prince died about 10 days after the tournament took place but we still have this fantastic 60 foot long record of what took place and John Blanc is playing a prominent role because as a trumpeter the trumpets were going to blow every single time and I think happened at this tournament so he appears at the beginning of the role announcing the beginning of the procession of the entire court to the central jousting scene where Henry VIII is shown knocking the other guy off his horse which never actually happened but that's just a bit of to to spin and then John Blanc plays the trumpet again with the other trumpeters to sound the end of the day's jazz ding and to signal that everyone must leave for the banquet but this is very rare in fact this these images are the only known portrait of an African in Tudor England so I found these Africans all across the country from Edinburgh and Hull in the north down to Truro in Cornwall and as you might imagine about a third of them were here in London but there were also quite large concentrations in other southern port towns such as Southampton Bristol and Plymouth but then they also appear scattered across the country in quite rural villages where you wouldn't necessarily expect to find them such as Blount assume come arif in Cambridgeshire where you can see Dido was buried in 1594 but the problem is that a lot of these records like this one are of what I would call one-liners and there's not a lot of biographical information there and there's not a lot to go on if you wanted to try and find out more about that individual so in my book black tutors available for signing after the show in the book I chose 10 of the hundreds of Africans I'd found here to focus on 10 individuals for whom I was able to piece together more of a biography for the sources and tonight I'm going to tell you about three of them Jacques Frances the salvage diver Mary Phyllis the Moroccan convert and Edward swarthy the Gloucestershire Porter but first I want to challenge a common assumption for years while I was working on this subject whenever I told people what I was doing you may be 70 percent of them responded with something along the lines of oh right you mean slaves well I don't it's all too easy to assume that all Africans in early modern Europe were enslaved oh we are bombarded with visual images of half-naked Africans in Chains in our popular culture most recently in 12 years a slave and also in the TV the rebooted version of the TV series roots which some of you may remember the original version in the 1970s but we have these images in art school textbooks when we're looking at the slave trade as well it's quite often the first image of an African that a child willing encounter in the classroom which is a travesty and that's some one of the things I'm working to combat but we have to look at these images and remember that they actually come from a completely different time and place most of these stories are set in the American South in the 18th or the 19th century we have to peel those assumptions aside and try and get into the mindset of the Tudors to try and think about their worldview what was going on in their world and to help you do that tonight I've got some other pictures to show you so this is alessandro de medici he was Duke of Florence not for very long he got assassinated like a lot of people in that time and place who's ever watched the Medicis and he was father was a Medici and his mother was an African woman called simonetta there's these two fantastic portraits painted in the Netherlands around the middle of the 16th century and both these gentlemen have remained to be identified I hope someone does identify them at some point but there they're clearly not enslaved the man on the left has quite an interesting this badge in his hat is a clue to his identity because it's a pilgrimage badge so if you visited the shrine of this particular Saint you would sort of pick up one of these badges as a souvenir and this particular Saint shrine was very popular amongst the court of Margaret of Austria who quite confusingly was actually ruling the Netherlands so so we think that he might have been part of that Court and the list is probably my favorite this is the Congolese ambassador to holland in the 1640s so there's something else going on here isn't there and it's not least just these pictures and there's a really telling conversation that I found in the Mexican Inquisition records I love inquisition records so much detail and there's this wonderful conversation that's captured there between an enslaved African man called hunger loaf and an English sailor called William Collins who through a variety of strange circumstances have ended up in a Mexican silver mine together and huncle off ghilaf is probably a sort of Spanish attempt to to render the word Wolof which is the name of a group of people who live in West Africa so we have an idea of where he was from but one girl off says to William Collins the England must be a good country as there are no slaves there and William Collins replied that yes there are no slaves in England William Harrison explains that in his description of England that you can see here there's this concept of free soil so so soon as anyone sets foot on English soil they become free and in fact the only court case to discuss slavery in this period concluded in 69 the England has to pure and air for slaves to breathe in and we can see this playing out in practice as well it's not just a theory we have this petition from Hector Nunez who was a Portuguese convert so which means that he was of Jewish extraction but had been forced to convert to Christianity in Portugal but by this time he'd been living in London for quite a long time and he wasn't just a doctor he was also a merchant a spy he's quite live quite the character and he petitions the Queen in this document because he says that he says that he had an Ethiopian eager working for him but this man refused to tarry and serve him and and he said that he'd thought that the law of England was the same as it had been in his native Portugal but he now has learned that the common law of England has no remedy to offer him in this situation and that he can't just force this man to continue working for him and we also actually find Africans themselves testifying to becoming free in England so for example in 1490 an African man corporal Alvarez told the King of Portugal that he had been set free in England by Henry the seventh and the King of Portugal accepted that explanation and this man continued to live a free life in Portugal and over a century later an African man named Theo go who'd been brought to England by an English pirate in 1614 recounted that when he arrived in England he immediately became free because in that reign nobody is a slave so as I said I you know these Africans were not enslaved in England and as I carry on telling you some of their stories you'll see further details of how that habit was so in the book I start each chapter with a sort of imaginative paragraph trying to put myself put ourselves in shoes of some of these individuals and so I'm going to read from one of those now I'm going to read you the opening to the chapter on Jacques Francis the salvage diver this is the contemporary I mean our contemporary contemporary to us image of him that was drawn by the artist Joe Lillington 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 dive 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 amongst the sunken Timbers hundreds of onlookers including King Henry himself had watched helps us as the ship went down the Mary Rose that was what they called her and now that splendid ships a 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 Jack and the other divers in his team and brought them to this cold island to perform a miracle for the English king many of us know the story of the mary-rose here she is in all her glory and as we know on the 19th of July 15:45 she set out from Portsmouth to defend England against an invading force of 30,000 Frenchmen in what was to become the Battle of the Solent actually I'd never heard of the Battle of the salient before I started looking into this but I had heard of her Mary Rose I think we don't really hear about it because nothing really happened apparently the French managed to take the Isle of Wight for about three days before they gave up and with her but so the big drama of the day was actually that the Mary Rose sank having only just left port this drawing which sadly the original no longer exists the Cowie engraving shows at the mast sinking beneath the waves I can zoom in on that for you you can see as you can see there's plenty of drowning men you can see because actually less than thirty of over 400 men aboard survived this was partly because most of them couldn't swim but also because actually they put up these anti boarding nets on the side of the ship to stop the French getting on but in the event it stopped them getting off lady Carew the wife of the ship's commander George Carew was watching the disaster from South Sea castle which you can see in the foreground here she fainted as she saw her husband die Henry the eighth's by her side was probably more upset at losing his valuable flagship and the very expensive weaponry on board he had the guns on board marked with his royal crest were worth maybe more than 1.7 million pounds in today's money so now he had a problem his his first thought was to try to bring the whole ship up and he hired a team of Italians to try and do that but this was a complete disaster and all they managed to do was break foremast what to do well Plan B was to try to at least salvage the expensive weaponry from the ocean floor but most Englishmen even most Europeans couldn't swim let alone dive at this time in fact even bathing was considered dangerous and reboard the royal doctor wrote that bathing allowed the venomous heirs to enter and destroy if the lively spirits in man and envy bless the body don't have a bath tonight so yeah so what was he going to do the only it turns out the only people in the early modern world who could swim and dive were in fact Africans and this was something that English and other Europeans began to observe in this period so when an Englishman called bricks Richard Hawkins went to Lamar güerito in the Caribbean off the coast of Venezuela it's actually called margarita by the Spaniards because margarita means pearl in Spanish and Portuguese and there was a lot of pearl driving activity there and it was African divers who were diving for these pearls as you can see in this contemporary sketch and Richard Hawkins observed these divers in 1593 and he wrote that they were expert swimmers and great divers who over time and with continual practice had learnt to hold their breath long underwater for the better achieving of their work when a Dutchman called Peter de maras visited the gold coast of West Africa in 1602 he recounted that he had seen there very fast swimmers who can keep themselves under water for a long time they can dive amazingly far no less deep and can see underwater and this association between Africans and the ability to swim swim and dive became so axiomatic that when George Chapman sat down in 1596 a play called the blind beggar of Alexandria one character in the play says that he will more like learn to swim and dive into the bottom of the sea so Henry the eighth's hired a Venetian called Peter Paola Corsi who put together a team of divers led by Jack Francis and two of the other are the only two other divers in the team whose names we have were called George black and John Eco now I don't we I wasn't able to find any further details about them but given their names and their diving ability it's quite possible that they were of African origin to this then is the part of the story that until now has remained untold African divers salvaged guns from the Mary Rose that Francis was born in 1528 probably on Argan islands off the coast of Mauritania this would have been a great place to learn how to be a salvage diver because it had really treacherous waters that wrecked many ships it was mostly the Portuguese who were active in it on this island at the time so Jacques would have learnt to swim and dive as a child learning to dive deep underwater without any equipment which is still practiced today and known as free diving but it's obviously quite difficult and he but if you start young you are able to develop the lung capacity mental strength and the ability to equalize the pressure in once is required to perform that feat by the time he was 18 he was living in Southampton working for Corsi and taking his meat and drink at the dolphin in which is still in business today but the Mary Rose was of the only wreck that the team was working on at this time in November 1546 a fire broke out aboard the Santa Maria and Sanctus Eduardo's and the ship sank to just two miles from the shore so the Italian merchants who had had goods aboard that wreck hired Corsi to try and bring their goods back up but the relationship between them soured and in 1547 the merchants accused Corsi of stealing some tin from the rep and this ends up as a court case in the high court of Admiralty which is where we find most of what we know about jacques Francis and Jacques himself testified in the case something here sorry I didn't show you Mauritania anyway jack francis testified himself and this is his testimony and it says that his English wasn't good enough to testify to the court and so the court hired a translator called John Surratt who was a wine merchant as they learnt some language skills while trading for wine and it very specifically says that jacques francis testified of his own free will but not everybody was happy with Jacques Francis's testimony sorry of the Italian witnesses on the other side of the case complained that he was a slave and a heathen and that his testimony should be discounted and the three of them that what their complaints are so similar that you really do feel like they must have sat down the night before and agreed what to say as an example one of them ants needs a Nicola Romero complains that Jacques Francis is a mariska born where they are not christened and slaved to the fed Peter Paolo Corsi and therefore he believeth no credit nor faith ought to be given to his sayings as in other strange Christian countries it is to no such slave given and Romero's right throughout history slaves were not allowed to testify in court under Roman law a slaves testimony was only allowed to be taken under torture the villains of medieval England were not allowed to testify in court and in colonial America new legislation was part to bar Africans from testifying for example in Virginia and 1732 it was enacted that Africans were people of such base and corrupt natures that their testimony cannot be certainly depended on however Jack didn't define himself as a slave in his testimony he specifically describes himself as a fabulous which is a Latin word which comes from the same root as the word family and it means a servant attendant or a member of a household as opposed to the word service which means slave and the court accepted his self definition and accepted his testimony which means that he was free in the eyes of the law so that's the other untold part of this story Jacques Francis the African Salvage diver who worked on the wreck of the Mary Rose was not enslaved in fact English courts were to depend on the testimony of Africans or more than one occasion in the century following Francis's appearance the next the fact that Africans were considered reliable witnesses in court is powerful evidence that they were not enslaved in England we don't know what happened to Shack Francis after the court case he probably didn't carry on working for Corsi because course he was thrown into the Tower of London in 1549 for abandoning his work on the mary rose to do a job for the earl of arundel but Jack Francis's rare skills would surely have continued to be in demand the second black tutor I wanted to tell you about tonight is Mary Phyllis of mariscos so let's again I'll read the opening to her chapter Mary finished the Moroccan convert our Father which art in heaven the strange words echoed around the church hallowed be thy name mistress Porter had helped her learn this verse and what it meant in preparation for the day when she'd reached the end of the Lord's Prayer Reverend freckled asked her to rehearse the articles of her belief and she did so carefully and fluently then he asked did she desire to be baptized I she replied and so they went to the font the whole congregation called on God the Father through the Lord Jesus Christ to receive her into Christ's Holy Church she had been in London 13 or 14 years now since she was 6 or 7 she had seen the church spires every day towering over the city streets she had heard these people speak of their God of his great Providence of his heaven and of his ruff finally reverence records said i baptize thee in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost amen and it was over she was a Christian and she could go forth and daily proceed in all virtue and godliness of living Mary Phyllis was born in Morocco in 1577 the daughter of Phyllis of Maurice go a basket weaver and shovel maker and at the time of her birth morocco was in the throes of a civil war being waged between Abu Abdullah Mohammed and his uncle Abdul Malik and this culminated in the Battle of Alcazar in 1578 which is also known as the Battle of the three kings because three kings fought and died there the nephew his uncle and King Sebastian the first of Portugal and when Sebastian the first died there was actually a succession crisis in Portugal which actually lit which LEDs have philip ii of spain taking the Portuguese throne and becoming au office known as a universal monarch but maybe the first man with a empire on which the Sun never set and that's another thing I never learned at school the Elizabeth first arch-enemy philip ii the villain of the tudor story became pic King of Portugal as a result of a battle fought on African soil so as I said Mary came to London of aged about 6 or 7 in 1580 3 or 4 and she starts out working in the household of John Barker and his work wife Anne in mark Lane in the Paris of Stan oh love heart Street right in the centre of the city of London a bit north from the Tower of London how did she get there well we don't know exactly how Mary Phyllis came to London but we do know quite a lot about how England's relationship with Morocco was developing at this time although again it's not something I ever learnt at school the first trading voyage from England's Morocco took place in 1551 and by 1558 there was a regular trade with merchants British merchants actually resident in Morocco mostly in the Atlantic ports of Safie LaRoche and Agadir and this was something that really struck me that actually it turns out that before 1620 there were more Englishmen living in North Africa than there were in North America and yet we hear all about the new world at school and on the telly and all the rest of it and very little about the old world in Africa and this this trade with Morocco was formula formalized in 1585 when forty London merchants forms the Barbary Company and the governor of this company was Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester who you might know from the movies as Elizabeth the first favorite favorite I like to call him so he his interest in the trade with Morocco was not so much in the sugars dates molasses almonds importing from Morocco but actually in something called saltpeter which was a key ingredient in making gunpowder that we were getting quite a lot of from Morocco by this point and that was because the Earl of Leicester was very much a hawk at the Queen course of Elizabeth the first he was he was very keen on going to war on the continent against the Catholics so he wanted to have as much gunpowder as possible and at the same time as this trading relationship was developing a diplomatic relationship was evolving between armored almonds saw should be here Alma diamond saw became Sultan of Morocco after everyone else had been killed at Battle of Alcazar and he developed a diplomatic relationship with Elizabeth the first who he always addresses as Sultana Isabella which are quite liked and he actually sends embassies to London in 1589 and 1600 and we have this fantastic portrait of the Moroccan ambassador to London in 1600 and the markings were here to discuss the potential for a military alliance against the common enemy which was Spain and it's it's no coincidence that that first embassy came in 1589 the year after the English or in fact I think the English weather had defeated the Spanish Armada because before that from the Moroccan perspective England was just this sort of small insignificant islands off the coast of Europe with very little power beyond its borders but after they heard the news that the English had defeated the Spanish they suddenly thought well maybe we should reach out to them maybe they could help us but there's the Moroccans where many of them were standed from the Moors who had been expelled exposed know who had been expelled from from Spain in 1492 and they were very keen to retake that territory in Andalusia but ultimately these these talks didn't really get anywhere because the English had such difference to teach objectives there was there was some attempts to help each other out but didn't really get anywhere which again is perhaps why we don't hear very much about it anyway as I said Mary Phyllis arrived in London aged about 6 or 7 in 1583 or 1584 just the year or two before the Barbara company was formed and it's here that the information that John Barker who was actually a merchant and at some point was a factor for the Earl of Leicester becomes significant because this may explain why how and how Mary Phyllis arrived in London so my my working theory is that John Barker was trading to Morocco on behalf of the Earl of Leicester and that Mary Phyllis returns with him on one of those voyages John Barker dies in 1589 but Mary Phyllis continues working for his widow and for some years by 1597 however she is working for a woman called Millicent Porter a few stris who lived in East Smithfield and I sort of wonder why why did Mary Phyllis make this move and Barker was still alive in 1597 but Mary Phyllis had moved from earth of wealthy merchants household in the city of London to a much smaller household she was probably Melissa Porter's only servant in east myth field which has outside the walls of the city and a much poorer neighborhood and I think this is interesting partly because it suggests a level of independence and agency on her part because if she's only left after Anne bark had died that would suggest she had less choice in the matter and I I think perhaps her motivation was that in going to work for mrs. Porter she would be able to learn how to be a seamstress which would set her in good stead in future to find more employment or even in fact set up as an independent crafts woman of her oan I actually did find evidence of other Africans as working as independent craftsmen we know the needle maker working in Cheapside in the 1550s and the record said that he would not share his art with any because he's come from from Spain and he knows how to make fine Spanish needles which are made of steel at a time when the English are still making needles out of wood or bone so he's got a monopoly on these new this new technology and another example was a silk Weaver called reasonable Blackman who was living in Southwark in the 1590s somake so hopefully that's what what Mary Phyllis was was up to the only other thing I managed to find out about Millicent Porter was back in 1584 when she'd been about 45 she'd been accused of being one that liveth very suspiciously and she'd had to do public penance at some polls despite denying that she was guilty of fornication or adultery and I wondered whether that maybe made her one of those sort of reformed characters who make samosas Ellis evangelicals certainly by the time she met Mary Phyllis she was very keen to encourage her to be baptized and Mary Phyllis was baptized at some bottles old gates on the 3rd of June 1597 and this is what some bottles or gate looks like today as you can see right in there in the middle of the City of London with a gherkin there in the background but at the time it probably looked more like this and as I mentioned in that opening paragraph you know at this time the churches really were the towering over the city streets they were the tallest buildings in the cityscape not like the huge skyscrapers we have now and that that urban geography really reflected the society which was so religious at the time and we know more about Mary Phyllis's baptism than perhaps any other baptism of an ass in this period because we have is it this fantastic record three whole pages you can imagine my delight through your old pages compared with those one-liners I showed you earlier just about Mary Phyllis and I'll just zoom in on a bit for you yes right that's the bit the first sentence of this three page account of the baptism where you can see Mary Phyllis's name and that she's described as being a black moor and this this record comes from the memorandum book of Thomas Harrigan's who was the Parish clerk and it's this amazing resource for historians because he actually kept these memorandum books or sort of a parish diary for 40 years that's you know there's I think nine volumes ranging from 1580 to 1620 wealth of material and it's so it's really quite special and it's exciting for me to have all that all that information um so Mary Phyllis's baptism was just one of over 60 baptisms of Africans that I found in this period and that's without saying all the other indicators of Christianity such as anyone who was married or buried in the Church of England would also have had to have been a Christian as well as those who testify in court because of course you swear on the Bible to tell the truth and that would be meaningless without Christian faith they haven't introduced the Quran into the courtroom by this time so again here we know about the process in Reformation but not about Africans who became Protestants and in English English people at the time but quite clear that the Africans could become Christians a Baptist preacher in Bristol wrote that God is no respecter of persons but in every nation he that feareth him and worketh righteousness is accepted with him and a merchant called William Bragg wrote the Africans were created after the image similitude and likeness of God and in time the Lord may call them to be true Christians and I'm pointing this out because it provides such a stark contrast with what happens later in the 18th century and just to illustrate that shift I found this extract from a London newspaper called Lloyds Evening Post which reported in 1760 last week a Negro girl about nine years old having a loked from her mistress on account of ill-usage was brought to a church in Westminster by two housekeepers to be baptized but the mistress of the girl getting intelligence of it while the minister was reading the churching service seized upon her in the face of the congregation and violently forced her out of the church regardless of her cries and tears telling the people about her that she was her slave and she would use her as she please so that's such a stark contrast to the way that Minister Porter is clearly encouraging Mary Phyllis to be baptized and supporting her in the education required for that because the Protestant faith was very clear that the individual had to have a kind of personal understanding of the Bible and that engagement with with the religion and Millicent Porter wasn't the only person with that sort of attitude and Paul baning who glimpsed earlier by mistakes Paul baning who was a merchant and privateering magnate say sponsoring privateering voyages which were sort of legalized piracy so he got very wealthy from that but when he died in 1616 he left five pounds in his will to the ministers and Olaf Hart Street for instructing his African servant Anthony in the principles of the Christian faith and religion when he shall be fit to be baptized and similarly Mary Phyllis demonstrates at her baptism that she has had that sort of education because when the curate asks certain questions about her faith Thomas harridans reports that she answered the curate very christian-like and afterwards when he asked it to say the Lord's Prayer and to rehearse the articles of her belief she did both say and rehearse very decently and well confessing her faith so she's learnt the Lord's Prayer and the articles of the faith off by heart and this is interesting as well because actually this ceremony there was no there was no written liturgy for it the first liturgy for an adult baptism only appears in the Book of Common Prayer in 1662 so what Mary Phyllis went through was a sort of improvised mix of the infant baptism which of course you know babies don't recite the Lord's Prayer Eve even the most advanced ones and and the the conversion via conversion the confirmation ceremony that other people would do when they're a bit older and one of the other things we could get out of Thomas harridans account is a description of who actually attended the baptism and in the top left here you can see these three names joined together with a bracket and those are the names of the three godparents William Benson Margery barek and Millicent Porter so Millicent Porter is being really so supportive of Mary Phyllis's baptism that she's actually acting as her godmother and this this also says twice here diverse others and it says it again diverse others attended the ceremony and I think this large congregation partly reflects some curiosity amongst the parishioners because although as I said the word various Africans being baptized in this time it was still fairly scattered in time and place and so it was still an unusual experience to witness but I think it also symbolizes a sort of rich work ritualized welcoming into the parish community the the text of the baptism they're only talks about the newly baptized person now being regenerate and grafted into the body of Christ congregation and it was this kind of acceptance that most likely motivated Mary to want to be baptized at this point because it really was necessary to be a baptized Christian in order to play a full role in Tudor society but she was 20 years old and she had been in London for 13 or 14 years and that could partly because of the attitudes of the Barker family's opposed to Millicent Porter's approach but another possibility would be that now age 20 Mary Phyllis wanted to get married and as I said marriage required Christian status and I've actually found records of Africans being baptized a matter of weeks before their marriage and and lower there are various records of Africans being married to English people in England a man called George best wrote in 1578 I myself have seen in Ethiopian as black as coal brought to England who taking a fair English woman to wife began a son in all respects as black as the father and we have various marriage records such as this one of Jonah Komi that I mentioned earlier he married the widow paranal Mae in half a chair in 63 but it wasn't just African men marrying English women African women also were marrying English men for example in 1600 a woman called Joan Maria in Bristol was married to a man called Thomas Smith who was a bills maker so a bill was a kind of weapon and Smith was manufacturing those and there was a biblical precedent for this so in the Geneva translation of the Bible which was the most popular one in this period the original text is translated as Moses marrying a woman of Ethiopia and you can see from this painting a Dutch interpretation of of that so marriage was definitely a possibility for Mary Phyllis at this time unfortunately Mary Phyllis then disappears from the records we know that Minister Porter died in June $15.99 and was buried but we don't know what happened to Mary Phillips after that as I suggested earlier I'm hoping that she then began a career as a seamstress in her own right and at this point I just wanted to show you this fantastic portrait which isn't a black Tudor because it was probably painted in Bologna in Italy but she does I mean it's just such a fantastic image isn't it and she had my excuses that she has some pins in her bodice as can see here which might suggest that she also knew how to make for your dress or two so the third and final but definitely last but definitely not least black Tudor I wanted to tell you about tonight is Edward swarthy the porter and I'm going to begin by reading the opening to my chapter on him again unfortunately I have an image for him because Joel Ellington didn't know he existed when he did those other pictures so as with swarthy the porter sir edward winter had a reputation for violence in his youth he had killed a man in a duel fought against the Spanish Armada raided the Caribbean with Francis Drake and spent four years in prison in France after seeking to follow the wars on the continent yes as he approached 40 in the winter of 1596 he was serving as the Justice of the Peace in Gloucestershire still all was not peaceful at home winter had summoned one of his servants John guy to appear before him in the Great Hall of white cross Manor where a small crowd of local men had gathered at first they exchanged only words winter accused Guy of gross negligence but when guy did not appear to be the least bit contrite winter called for his porter Edward swarthy on his master's command swarthy took up a rod and brought it down hard and fast on guys back guy cried out in pain the assemble company looked on in shock as a man of good standing was soundly whipped so Edward struck a few blows himself before it was over as guy limped away he bade him depart like a knave dismissing him from his service for good Edward swarthy looked down at the rod in his hands then back at the man he had dined with every day in this very Hall in the future he would have to turn him away from the gate he gripped the rod very tightly and the colour drained from his dark skin forever swarthy had another name his alias was negro he was a black Tudor so let's start with Edward Saudis name his first name Edward is the same afar as his master Edward winter which suggests that he may have been baptized with Edward winter standing as his Godfather because it was quite normal to be named ostracod parent the most famous example of that in this period is probably Leo africanus who was baptised and named after Pope Leo the tenth in Rome in the 1520's and unfortunately the parish registers from their village don't survive until before 1678 so I was unable to find out for sure and his surname swabbie obviously comes from the old english words for the meaning dark-skinned and if that wasn't clear enough he also has this alias of negro and edit swarthy is working as a porter in Gloucestershire in the village of lid knee which is at the southern end of the Forest of Dean in rural Gloucestershire how did Edward swarthy and African man come to be working as a porter in rural Gloucestershire you may well ask well I think that he's most likely to have ended up in Gloucestershire because Sir Edward winter set out on a voyage to the Caribbean was the Francis Drake in 1585 and Englishmen inevitably would encounter Africans when they set out across the Atlantic to raid the Spanish ports in the Caribbean because between 1502 and 1619 over 300,000 Africans were transported to the Americas mostly by the Portuguese and mostly to work in Spanish in the Spanish colonies that had developed by this point and have an image of of some of them working in a Spanish silver mine here but not all Africans in the Spanish Atlantic world remained enslaved some of them managed to escape into the hinterland and set up their own settlements and they were known as the Maroons and you can find Maroons in every place that Europeans brought enslaved Africans because the desire for freedom never left them and where possible they did escape and we have this fantastic portrait of three maroon leaders and from Esmerelda's in Ecuador and here they're on a treaty signing visit the Quito in 1599 and I think this image really projects the sort of military power that they had in this world and it's a fantastic combination of three different cultures in one image the artist himself was indigenous Ecuadorian and you can see that in indigenous jewelry the gold jewelry they're wearing as well as the Spanish clothing and of course their African heritage so there's a lot going on there so again while we're familiar with Francis Drake his voyages to the Caribbean and encounters with Africans often remain untold and actually where there is a clue there's always a clue and they're in this portrait of Francis Drake if you look closely he's wearing a duel around his waist which is known as the Drake jewel it was a present from Elizabeth the first and it's now in the V&A if you want to look at it but the people have often wondered what the imagery of this jewel represents and actually as I described elsewhere in the book and don't have time to go into tonight there is this amazing episode in Drake's career where he ends up a lying with the Panama Maroons which who were known as the Simmons and successfully attacking the Spanish treasure train as it's crossing the Isthmus of Panama and he makes away with a hundred and fifty thousand pesos of Spanish treasure thanks largely to the Sumerians and thus alliances brokered by an African man called Diego without whom Drake would never have made that fortune so and the success of that actually affected English policy for the next century or so there whenever they're thinking about attacking the Spaniards in the New World they always factor in well maybe we can ally with the Maroons again or even turn the enslaved Africans that are still working with a Spanish against their masters and this feeds through the discussion right up until when from where Oliver Cromwell is planning his Western design in 1650 four or five where their plan is to attack Hispaniola and they fail miserably and sort of take to make her as an afterthought but that and part of the failure is down to the fact that they had been relying on the idea that the Maroons of Hispaniola amnio saved Africans on those Spanish plantations would take the English side which of course the reality was more complicated so that's what I think mr. imagery represents but back to 1585 in September 15 85 Drake and his fleet of 24 ships left Plymouth and and Edward winter was captaining one of those 24 ships called the aid and you as you can see from this map of their routes they set off and they raided Santiago in the Cape Verde Islands and then cross the Atlantic to raid Santo Domingo Carter Hana and San Agustin in the Caribbean and at each of these ports enslaved Africans ran away from their Spanish masters to join the English one Spanish official reported that Drake had carried off a hundred and fifty African men and women from Santo Domingo and Cape Verde alone and so this must have been how Edwards swarthy met Edward winter most likely during the raid on Cartagena because this is where Winslet took him as the most active role he actually swapped his ships command for a land command and would have been amongst these soldiers who can see marching to attack the town at its weakest point and in fact they knew that that was the town's weakest point you can see another option would have been to come through here but this is actually a chain across the harbor here so that would have been had more heavily guarded there's a fort there but they actually knew that this was the weakest points for tap on the information they have gleaned from some African fishermen that they've encountered as they were approaching the port so in that case I suppose the Africans work were helpful to the English anyway I having left Carrefour Haina Drake's fleet went on to Roanoke Virginia where Walter Raleigh's men were trying to set up the first English colony in Virginia but by this time the they found that the English there were desperate to go home and they just shortly after they arrived there was a huge storm with hailstones that were described as being as big as hens eggs and that actually killed quite a lot of people including presumably some of these Africans because you know the numbers that these Spanish officials are reporting as having left do not match up with the numbers that we find in and afterwards but some of these Africans do survive and make it back to Europe most dramatically one gets as far as Paris Edward Stafford the English ambassador to France writes back to London in August 15 86 and he writes there is in this town in with a cut on his face that say if he came with Sir Francis Drake and stole away from him when he was landed in England and actually this African is kind of in cahoots with the Spanish ambassador and they're going around Paris spreading misinformation about Drake saying his voyage was completely unsuccessful Fiasco and this man is the kind of eyewitness because the news of Drake's return and his success on the voyage has not yet reached Paris at this point and Stafford is writing back desperately for good news to counter this this propaganda campaign we also find Africans appearing in the household of Henry Percy the 9th of Earl of Northumberland and it says in the record that he had been brought there by mr. crosses man and Robert Cross was the captain of one of the other ships on the voyage the bond and when we look again at that petition I showed you at the beginning Hector Nunez his petition it says that the Ethiopian new girl that he's having trouble retaining was brought from the port of Santa Domingo in Nava Spain beyond the seas so I think like those three this voyage is the most likely way that Edward swarthy ended up working for Edward winter in Gloucestershire and he wasn't the only African working in an English aristocrat accordion tree household at this time I also found Africans working for the Earl of Leicester William and Robert's vessel and Walter Raleigh and they would have been paid wages like James the blackamoor who was working as a cook the Earl of Devon I mean it was the Earl of Bath in horse dog and Devon so finally what led to swarthy whipping young guy at white cross manner in 1596 this event is really a shock to us because we've always assumed that it was always the white man whipping the black man in our history and that indeed was the case for vast majority of the time but on the 3rd of December 1596 Hedford swarthy whipped John guy in front of a crowd of 20 men and those men was shocked too but they were not shaped with shocks because of any racial element they were shocks because John guy was a much higher state of servant than entrance worthy because John guy had lived in the winter household since he was a child he'd been brought up there he'd been taught Greek Latin and French probably a long sido but winter because you know there wasn't going to be one more than one Greek tutor in the household and by this time he's actually in charge of winces iron works on a wage of 60 pounds a year at a time when the average servants wage was four pounds a year so why was he whipped well winter accused him of running off to Ireland while he'd been away with two other servants leaving the ironworks unmanaged and he said to him therefore you have deserved correction at my hands being so good on a master unto you and always willing to prefer you and therefore you shall have punishment for your great abuse but there was another explanation James buck a neighbor of winters and also a deadly enemy had a different explanation he said that winter was angry with John guy because he had recently married Anne Burke James Burke's daughter because this whipping was just one episode in a much longer running family feud James buck and Edward winters fathers who hated them each other as well they've been in court against each other in the previous generation and we know all of this actually because James buck took Edward winter to court in 1597 and these are just some of the documents that survived from that court case and buck actually accuses winter of whole host of crimes from including common land stealing wood from the Forest of Dean to fuel his ironworks and actually arranging for James box to be assaulted by some of his servants but the only part of this case against him that winter freely admitted was the whipping and the court case took place in in the court of Star Chamber so known so named for its beautifully starry ceiling and the judges of the court of Stella chamber were never included Elizabeth the first Privy Council which included at the time both settles the Earl of Essex the Archbishop of Canterbury the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Lord High Admiral so the testimony about Edward swarthy whipping John guy was heard before some of the most prominent noblemen and politicians in the land and every Saudi himself gave a deposition in the case this is it and he largely supported Edward winters version of events he emphasized that the whipping have not been premeditated and rather it had come on the sudden and that he was not prepared of his rods beforehand and the fact that he does testify in this court case shows that like Jack Francis he was seen as a free man in the eyes of the law again we don't know what happens to Saudi after 1597 we do in this case know what happened to John guy he went on to become the mayor of Bristol an MP in the parliaments of 1621 and 1624 and the governor of the first English colony in Newfoundland here he is meeting the barefoot people who were the indigenous people there apparently they got on relatively well comparable what happened later it's quite something to look at this picture and think that in his youth that man there with a feather in his hat has been whipped by an African man so those were the three black Tudors out of the ten in my book that I wanted to tell you about tonight and they of course they're just a fraction of the 200 or so Africans that we know we're living here in Tudor England centuries earlier than most people usually imagine they came here from Africa like Mary Phyllis from southern Europe and from the Spanish Carribean like Edward swarthy and they were not enslaved there was no law of slavery in England they were paid wages they were allowed to testify in court they were baptized all key indicators of freedom and that acceptance by the Church of England and the parish community is so very significant in such a highly religious Society but the image I'd like to leave you with is that of Edward swarthy a black Tudor bringing down a rod on the back of John Guy a future colonizer because it actually inverts everything we thought we knew about the Tudors thank you [Applause]

Channel: Gresham College

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Keywords: gresham, gresham college, education, lecture, public, london, debate, academia, knowledge, tudors, tudor england, tudor history, Henry VIII, Mary Rose, Elizabethan London, Miranda Kaufmann, Westminster Tournament Roll, Description of England, Joe Lillington, Jacques Francis, The Mary Rose, Arguin Island, Mary Fillisof Morisco, Ahmad Al-Mansur, Portrait of an African woman, AnnibaleCarracci

Id: JfTaXRFV7EA

Length: 65min 9sec (3909 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 17 2019

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Dr Kaufmann tells the intriguing tales of three Africans living in Tudor England: a diver, a Moroccan woman and a porter.

A lecture by Dr Miranda Kaufmann, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London 17 October 2019 6PM BST

Dr Kaufmann tells the intriguing tales of three Africans living in Tudor England – Jacques Francis, a diver employed by Henry VIII to recover guns from the wreck of the Mary Rose; Mary Fillis, a Moroccan woman baptized in Elizabethan London; and Edward Swarthye, a porter who whipped a fellow servant at their master's Gloucestershire manor house. Their stories illuminate key issues: – how did they come to England? What were their lives like? How were they treated by the church and the law? Most importantly: were they free?