You saw, my lord, his porter
Give entertainment to us at the gate
In Latin good phrase; what’s the master, then,
When such good parts shine in his meanest men?29
One wonders what impression visitors to White Cross got when Edward Swarthye answered the door. Wynter was certainly displaying that he was a well-travelled man.
Swarthye was not the ‘meanest’ or lowliest member of the Wynter household, which would have numbered around twenty servants. A contemporary book of household regulations stipulated that the porter should eat his meals seated next to the yeoman of the chamber. Seating at meals reflected the hierarchy of the household: the lord of the manor dined at the top table with his family and the senior household officers, while the lowliest servants sat nearest the kitchen, at the far end of the hall. The yeoman of the chamber was allowed access to the bedchamber, and so was obviously a trusted servant.30 A seat beside him indicates that the porter was of a similar status.
Swarthye’s position in the Wynter household was not unique. He was one of about two dozen Africans serving in Tudor and early Stuart gentry and aristocratic households. The most famous of these employers included Robert Dudley (Earl of Leicester), Henry Percy (ninth Earl of Northumberland), William Cecil (Lord Burghley), Sir Robert Cecil, Sir Walter Ralegh, Ralegh’s brother-in-law Sir Arthur Throckmorton, Endymion Porter and Alethea Howard (Countess of Arundel).31 In 1560, Sir John Young of Bristol had an African gardener, as did Sir Henry Bromley of Holt, Worcestershire, in 1607. An anonymous, posthumous portrait of Peregrine Bertie (Lord Willoughby de Eresby, who died 1601), which now hangs at Grimsthorpe Hall in Lincolnshire, depicts him on horseback, attended by a black page. ‘Grace Robinson, a blackamoor’, worked as a laundress alongside ‘John Morockoe, a blackamoor’, in the kitchen and scullery for Richard Sackville, the third Earl of Dorset, at Knole in Kent between 1613 and 1624. Henry Bourchier, the fifth Earl of Bath, employed ‘James the Blackamoor’ as a cook in Tawstock, Devon, from 1640 to 1646. Edward Wynter’s father, Sir William Wynter, had an African servant, Domingo, who worked in the Wynter’s London home, The Abbey Place, in East Smithfield. When he died of consumption in August 1587, the parish clerk noted that the forty-year-old was originally from Guinea.32 Domestic service may sound little better than slavery today, but there was no shame in being a Tudor servant. It was an extremely common occupation. Even the sons of aristocrats spent some time in a great household as part of their education.
The roles of these African servants were practical, not decorative. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century portraits of aristocrats attended by ‘blackamoor’ servants dressed in rich clothes and pearls, such as that of Charles II’s mistress, Louise de Kéroualle, by Pierre Mignard (1682), give the impression that Africans existed in these households purely as exotic pets, accessories or props.33 The records that survive of the clothes bought for Africans working as household servants tell a different tale. The African ladies at the Scottish court wore plain fabrics such as kersey and russet; practical clothing that reflected the work they did. The laundress Grace Robinson was more likely to be found elbow-deep in urine and blisteringly hot water than bedecked with jewels, since protecting a new garment against stains involved placing it, complete with ruffles and silk embroidery, in warm urine for half an hour then boiling it.34
* * *
Sir Edward Wynter’s behaviour since returning to live at White Cross had not ingratiated him with his neighbours. James Bucke, whose father had gone to court against Sir William Wynter, owned two smaller estates in nearby Aylburton, and held the position of Verderer of the Royal Forest of Dean, meaning he was charged by the crown to protect the deer and the trees.35 These trees were increasingly at risk from the acquisitive Sir Edward, who had begun to enclose the common land, threatening ‘that he would bury in the ditches there whomsoever should dare to’ try to open the forest up again. The community depended on this woodland for firewood, but Wynter was hell-bent on keeping it all to himself. His actions were in keeping with the wider trend of landowners flouting anti-enclosure legislation by appropriating land for their private use that was previously open to all.36 White Cross Manor did not suddenly require large amounts of fuel to heat it; rather, Wynter had embarked on a project that required prodigious amounts of firewood. He had begun to produce iron.
The Lydney estate was unusually rich in mineral deposits, a site of iron-working since the twelfth century.37 It was a potentially lucrative business. The Earls of Rutland enjoyed a considerable income of over £500 a year from their works at Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire, while Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, received £400 a year from his in Cleobury, Shropshire.
On his return to White Cross, Wynter built an iron furnace and a forge on the Newerne stream, which he dammed to create large ponds. The problem was that iron-works required a constant supply of fuel, in the form of charcoal. The Earl of Rutland arranged for a rotational supply system from more than twenty parts of his estate, to avoid permanent destruction of the forest, but the Wynters’ much more modest holdings did not provide enough wood to keep up with demand.38 This was why Sir Edward had resorted to making ‘great wastes and spoiles’ of the Royal Forest of Dean.
Voracious attacks on the royal woodland were never going to go unnoticed. In February 1596, Henry Herbert, second Earl of Pembroke and President of the Council of the Marches of Wales, accused Wynter of abusing his position. Herbert demanded that Wynter promise to pay up to £100 compensation to the Crown if he was found to be breaking the laws of the forest in future.39 Closer to home, James Bucke found his neighbour’s bullying tactics increasingly aggravating, especially when Wynter set about enclosing Aylburton Wood, which was right on Bucke’s doorstep. However, just as antagonism mounted between the heads of the Wynter and Bucke households, an unlikely romance blossomed between two of their respective members when John Guye, the manager of Wynter’s iron works, fell in love with James Bucke’s daughter, Anne. John Guye had been taken into the Wynter household as a child. His father, Thomas Guye, a Bristol shoemaker, would have arranged this with Sir Edward’s father, Sir William Wynter, who had frequent business in that city.40 A noble or gentry household was a good place to get an education, and Guye was a bright boy. The Wynters noticed his ‘wit and towardness’ and had him educated in Latin, Greek, French ‘and in other good sciences’. Given the modest size of the household, he almost certainly shared the Wynter children’s tutor. Guye became a man ‘of honest account, credit, and estimation’ and Wynter appointed him to ‘the chief rule and ordering of the estate’, for which he was paid £60 a year, a vast sum in comparison to the average servant’s wage of £4 a year. The twenty-seven-year-old’s high wages and gentle education combined to make him quite the eligible bachelor. Anne Bucke certainly thought so. Unfortunately, when Sir Edward discovered their attachment, he made Guye promise to forget about her. It was a promise Guye would not be able to keep.
In the summer of 1596, Sir Edward travelled to London on business. The cat away, John Guye and two of Wynter’s most experienced iron workers, Henry Hyley and Francis Watkins, absconded to Bristol in hope of securing a passage to Ireland. With his heart set on marrying Anne Bucke, Guye could not continue in Wynter’s service. Wynter would not countenance an alliance between one of his most trusted servants and the daughter of his ‘mortal enemy’. A new life in Ireland might provide a way out.
It was not the most auspicious moment to visit the Emerald Isle. The Nine Years’ War had broken out two years earlier, when the Gaelic Lords rose against English attempts to extend their rule and impose the Protestant religion. Their leaders, Hugh O’Neill (Earl of Tyrone), and Red Hugh O’Donnell, appealed to their fellow Catholic, Philip II of Spain, for help, even offering the crown of Ireland to his nephew, Archduke Albert of Austria, as an incentive. Philip sent his ‘Invincible’ Armada to join the struggle, but thanks to a storm off Cape Finisterre in October 1596 the fleet never arrived. Although the war continued until 160
3, and fear of a Spanish invasion lingered, when John Guye left Lydney the real fighting was in the northern province of Ulster. In the south, the English continued with the ‘planting’ of Munster, where, after putting an end to the revolt of Gerald Fitzgerald, the fifteenth Earl of Desmond, in 1583, Queen Elizabeth granted more than 574,000 acres of forfeited land in the province to English ‘undertakers’ or ‘planters’, who imported tenants from England to work their new lands.41
Guye’s experience of managing the iron works at Lydney, plus the fact that he had persuaded two ironworkers to come with him, suggests he planned to find similar work across the Irish Sea, where the Munster planter and promoter Robert Payne had identified an area rich in iron stone and lead ore, and with enough wood to maintain ‘divers Iron and lead works (with good husbandry) forever’.42
All did not go according to plan. One of the two iron workers Guye had persuaded to go with him fell ill while they were waiting to embark from Bristol. Guye pressed on to Ireland with the other man, but returned before Wynter got back from London. Perhaps he didn’t like what he found, or maybe this first trip was a reconnaissance mission that he had hoped to carry out without his master’s knowledge.
Back in Lydney, John Guye married Anne Bucke in secret. Their marriage could not be celebrated publicly, as the relationship between Wynter and Bucke was deteriorating rapidly. Bucke had formally complained to the Council of the Marches of Wales that Wynter had unlawfully dispossessed him of the bailiwick of Awre, part of the Royal Forest of Dean. The regional body had a reputation for cheap and swift justice, and its Lord President, the Earl of Pembroke, had cautioned Wynter about his behaviour earlier that year. Towards the end of September, Bucke appeared at the gate of White Cross Manor, brandishing a summons from the Council. Wynter was incensed, exclaiming that he was tempted to stab Bucke there and then with his dagger. He swore that thenceforth he would do more and say less.
A few weeks later, James Bucke was walking close to the boundary of the White Cross estate when he was set upon, assaulted and badly wounded. John Guye ran into the manor house brandishing a rapier, albeit undrawn, crying: ‘My father-in-law is murdered!’ He appealed to Lady Wynter for help; she sent her maid, Elizabeth Dixton, to fetch white wine to wash Bucke’s wounds. On returning from this errand, Elizabeth observed that her mistress was troubled and asked what ailed her. Lady Anne – as well she might – replied that she was somewhat afraid.
While Bucke recovered at home, his new son-in-law busied himself trying to track down those responsible. Bucke was either too badly hurt, or retained too hazy a recollection of the attack to identify the culprits, but as the assault had taken place some twenty paces from the boundary of White Cross park, and given Bucke had no enemies in the county other than Wynter, he and his retainers were the main suspects. Circumstantial evidence mounted: the door of the White Cross cider house, an ideal base from which to launch the attack and shelter from the hue and cry afterwards, had been ajar on the morning of the crime. The movements of Wynter’s servants in the days following the attack were scrutinised. Why had one left for London the following day? Why had another been taken to Wales? When two of Wynter’s retainers, Samuel Parker and John Bromfield, were arrested by the constable William Hammond, Sir Edward demanded to know how Hammond dared to ‘be so bold as to arrest any man in my house’, even if he were suspected of felony or murder. Wynter put up bail for his men, which only heightened his guilt in the eyes of the victim and his friends. And there was a rumour that one Thomas Bridgman had crossed Wynter and been threatened with a fate similar to Bucke’s as a result.
By early December, when Wynter was due to hold a session at White Cross in his role as Justice of the Peace, it was clear he could no longer trust John Guye. It was bad enough that Guye had absconded to Ireland over the summer, leaving Wynter’s iron works unsupervised and short of two key workers, but to have married Anne Bucke and virtually accused Wynter of attempting to murder her father was something else entirely. Guye had turned from the family to whom he owed his education and livelihood. His loyalties now lay with the Buckes.
Wynter bided his time, saying nothing when Guye delivered his accounts as usual at the end of November. He wanted a public reckoning with the man, and on 3 December he had it. More than twenty people bore witness to what happened that day at White Cross Manor. Wynter asked Guye if he was behind in paying his wages. ‘No,’ came the reply. ‘Do I owe you anything else?’ asked Sir Edward. ‘No, sir,’ answered Guye. ‘What would you desire of me otherwise?’ demanded Wynter, before launching into a speech of vitriolic condemnation:
Now John Guye, I have performed with you in all I have promised you and have been a good master unto you: I have given you threescore pounds by your wages to do my business, but you notwithstanding have dealt very badly with me in neglecting my business and going into Ireland at your pleasure, persuading two other of my servants to go with you, leaving your charge of two or three thousand pounds very carelessly and lewdly which may be to my great loss! And therefore you have deserved correction at my hands, being so good a master unto you and always willing to prefer you. And therefore you shall have punishment for your great abuse!
With these words, he commanded Edward Swarthye to strike Guye, who had remained silent throughout. Swarthye administered the ‘odious’ punishment. He whipped Guye, landing at least four or five strokes upon his back, his legs and ‘sundry parts of his body’. There, in the hall of White Cross Manor, a minor Elizabethan gentry house in rural Gloucestershire, a black man whipped a white man, and no one tried to stop him.
Wynter himself joined in, and hit his servant on the head, dismissing him from his service for good. The warring neighbours’ accounts differ as to how viciously Wynter had struck. Wynter claimed that he had not hit Guye hard, but only struck him once on the head with a little riding wand, a blow that could not have drawn blood, or even caused much pain. Bucke asserted that Wynter had used a ‘cudgel’ to beat Guye violently about the head and shoulders. Given the scale of Guye’s betrayal and Wynter’s propensity for violence, Bucke’s version of events rings more true.
Bucke was sufficiently recovered from his injuries to be able to sue Wynter in the Court of Star Chamber the following year. An offshoot of the King’s Council, named for the star-spangled ceiling of the room in the Palace of Westminster where it sat, the Court derived its authority from the King’s ancient right to give legal judgments. It dealt with ‘a better class of accused’ from the beginning of the Tudor era in 1485 until 1641, when it was abolished by the Long Parliament, whose members saw it as one of many means by which Charles I abused his powers.43 Bucke’s Bill of Complaint detailed Wynter’s illegal enclosure of land and use of wood from the Royal Forest of Dean. He blamed Wynter for the assault he had suffered and held the whipping of John Guye to be a malicious act that was far more violent than the admonishment of a wayward servant warranted.
Thanks to his starring role in this final scene, Edward Swarthye was called as a witness. He and the other witnesses travelled to Gloucester to give their evidence in the presence of two Justices of the Peace. Swarthye swore an oath on the Bible to tell the truth and answered the questions prepared for him by the lawyers in London. He admitted that Wynter had commanded him to whip John Guye, but testified that he was ‘not prepared of his rods’ beforehand, rather the command had come ‘on the Sudden’, and so the alleged crime was not premeditated. He may have only been saying this to protect his master, as he also made light of his involvement, supporting Wynter’s claim that he had only hit Guye on the shoulder with a ‘little riding wand.’
Swarthye’s answers, together with the original Bill of Complaint and the other papers relating to the case, would have been read aloud before the members of the Privy Council, who, alongside two common law judges, made up the judicial bench in Star Chamber cases. In 1597, the council had eleven members, including Lord Burghley, his son Sir Robert Cecil, the Earl of Essex, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chancel
lor of the Exchequer and the Lord High Admiral.44 Swarthye’s testimony was therefore heard by some of the most prominent politicians and noblemen in Elizabethan England. As with Jacques Francis, the fact that he was accepted as a witness in an English court of law confirms that he had been baptised and shows that he was not considered a slave. The lawyers who interrogated Swarthye treated him just like the other servants in the Wynter household.
Unfortunately, the decree and order books of the Star Chamber, which gave the final judgments, do not survive, so the outcome of the case is unknown.45 However, the ultimate victory in the war between the two families was Wynter’s. He purchased James Bucke’s estates at Aylburton in 1599, and went on to serve as an MP in 1601, and also as a member of the Council of the Marches of Wales.46
The summer before the Privy Council heard Swarthye’s testimony, it issued a licence to a certain Caspar Van Senden to ‘take up ... Blackamoores here in this Realm and to transport them into Spain and Portugal’, in a document often misinterpreted as an edict expelling Africans from England. Van Senden was a merchant of Lubeck, and the protégé of the bankrupt former Treasurer-at-war, Sir Thomas Sherley. Van Senden had brought back eighty-nine English prisoners of war from Spain and Portugal, and had hatched a plan with Sherley to make money from selling the Africans on his return. But the Council added the key proviso that the Africans could only be taken ‘with the consent of their masters’. This would prove disastrous to Van Senden’s scheme. He later complained that:
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