Some 50,000 refugees arrived in England from the southern Netherlands between 1550 and 1585, bringing the art of weaving silk with them.34 As John Stow recounted in his Survey of London, ‘Among the trading strangers that came over into England from Flanders and those parts for their religion, in the said Queen Elizabeth’s Reign, there were divers of this Sort that dealt in dressing and preparing Silk for the other trades.’35 The number of immigrant heads of households and their servants recorded as working in silk manufacture in London more than doubled, from two hundred and thirty-seven in 1571 to five hundred and twenty-two in 1593. The best silks were still imported from Italy, but the refugees focused on making cheaper alternatives, mixing raw silk with linen or wool. These cheaper fabrics, amongst other purposes, were used for lining expensive garments and fine bed curtains, and making silk handkerchiefs. Spitalfields would later become London’s silk-weaving centre, but at this early stage the trade was widely dispersed throughout the city, with silk weavers to be found in Bishopsgate, Cripplegate and Blackman’s Southwark. In 1571, of the fifteen foreign silk weavers living in St Olave’s parish, twelve were from Flanders, Brabant or Holland.36
That Blackman was a silk weaver living in Southwark suggests he came to London from the Netherlands, which, as well as being a centre for his craft, was home to a number of Africans, due to its connections with Spain and Portugal. In the sixteenth century, Antwerp is thought to have had the second-largest black population in Europe, after Lisbon, so Blackman may well have arrived from there. While the Netherlands were governed from Spain, the status of Africans there followed the Spanish example. Most were enslaved, but some, for example Antoine Rodrigues, became free: this ‘African from Cape Verde’ was manumitted in Antwerp in 1566.37
Africans are recorded in the city’s artwork as well as its archives. When the German painter Albrecht Dürer visited Antwerp in 1521 he drew a portrait of a twenty-year-old African woman named Katherina. She was the servant of João Brandão, the Portuguese royal factor who oversaw the trade at the Indiahouse, the hub for selling Portuguese colonial goods. A few years later, Jan Mostaert, an artist working at the court of Margaret of Austria in Mechelen, just to the south of Antwerp, painted a high-status African Christian courtier.38 Over the next century, portraits of Africans appear in works by a range of Dutch artists including Pieter Breughel the Elder, Wenceslaus Hollar, Rubens and Rembrandt, who lived in the same area as a group of several free African men and women in 1630s Amsterdam.39
Dürer’s portraits of Katherina and an unidentified African man. Although the latter is dated 1508, this is considered unreliable and, like Katherina, this man may also have been a member of João Brandão’s household.
Blackman was not the only independent African businessman working in the cloth industry in Tudor London. Some thirty years earlier, in the reign of Queen Mary, Elizabeth’s older, Catholic half-sister, ‘there was a Negro made fine Spanish needles in Cheapside, but would never teach his Art to any’. Like silk weaving, ‘Spanish needles’, fine sewing needles made of steel, were new to England. Before this, needles were made of wood, bone or ivory, or were crude iron needles produced by blacksmiths. This man, who like his needles was probably from Spain, clearly made the most of his monopoly. He taught no one else his craft so that he could continue to charge a premium for his unrivalled wares. After his death, the art was lost to England until it was reintroduced by a German, Elias Crowse, in 1566.40 Technologies ranging from silk weaving to weapon manufacture were closely guarded national secrets in a time of intense rivalries between European powers; not unlike the way the blueprint for making atomic bombs was treated during the Cold War.
The needlemaker’s place of business, Cheapside, was known for its metal work. Goldsmith’s Row, in the heart of Cheapside, was a centre for gold and silver work. In 1500, an Italian traveller wrote:
the most remarkable thing in London, is the wonderful quantity of wrought silver ... In one single street, named [Cheapside], leading to St Paul’s, there are fifty-two goldsmiths’ shops, so rich and full of silver vessels, great and small, that in all the shops in Milan, Rome, Venice, and Florence put together, I do not think there would be found so many of the magnificence that are to be seen in London.
He goes on to say that ‘artificers . . . have congregated there from all parts of the island, and from Flanders, and from every other place’.41 No African appears in the clerk’s lists of the occupants of Goldsmith’s Row for 1558, the last year of Mary’s reign, yet the diarist Henry Machyn, who died in 1563, recorded that Number 29 had the sign of ‘The Black Boy’.42 This sign was still in place in 1577, when ‘the black boy in chepeside’ was referred to in a Bridewell court case.43 Could this establishment have been named after the black craftsman? Another reference to the African needlemaker can be found in the crest that the Worshipful Company of Needlemakers had adopted by 1780, which remained in use until at least 1915. In the strange yet poetic language of heraldry, the crest was described as ‘A Moor’s Head couped at the shoulders in profile proper wreathed about the temples Argent and Gules vested round the shoulders Argent in his ear a Pearl’. In other words, the bust of a Moor in profile, who wore a red and silver wreath around his temples, silver about his shoulders, and a pearl earring. It is believed to be an allusion to the man who first brought the art of steel needle making to England.44
The engagement of these craftsmen, silk weavers and needle-maker, in the larger project of England’s cloth industry was no accident. The enterprise was central to the Tudor economy and a number of other Africans in London were involved. The subject of the next chapter, Mary Fillis, was a servant to Millicent Porter, an East Smithfield seamstress. Simon Valencia, ‘a black moore’, who died in the parish of St Botolph’s Aldgate in 1593, worked for Stephen Drifield, a needlemaker.45 If he was from Spain, as his surname might suggest, he may have been able to teach his master how to make fine Spanish needles. Around the same time, two African women worked for hat or hat-band makers in the capital.46 Having learnt the skills of their master’s trade while in service, these individuals might have taken the opportunity to set out on their own. In all likelihood, Blackman did just that.
By 1587 Blackman was married.47 This was a sign of his growing prosperity, as marriage was a serious financial undertaking that required a large initial outlay to acquire all the furniture, utensils and other accoutrements necessary to establish a household.48 His business was successful enough to enable him to support a family of at least five. In turn, the whole family presumably helped their father in his work.49 His son Edward was baptised in February 1587 at St Olave, Tooley Street. We know he was also the father of Edmund and Jane, who both died in 1592. ‘John Blakemore son of Reasonable Blakemore,’ who was baptised at St Saviour’s on 26 October 1579, might be a fourth child.50 Although the surname was different, ‘Reasonable’ was such an uncommon first name that John was almost certainly his son. Tudor spelling and naming is not known for its consistency; no two of the six surviving versions of Shakespeare’s signature are spelt the same way.
The name of Blackman’s wife is not recorded and we have no other information about her. Parish registers did not consistently name the mothers of children unless they were born out of wedlock. It has recently been suggested that Mrs Blackman was the African woman alluded to in the exchange between Lorenzo and Launcelot Gobbo in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (1597):
LORENZO: I shall answer that better to the commonwealth than you can the getting up of the Negro’s belly; the Moor is with child by you, Launcelot.
LAUNCELOT: It is much that the Moor should be more than reason; but if she be less than an honest woman she is indeed more than I took her for.
LORENZO: How every fool can play upon the word!51
For Shakespeare, the main attraction of making Gobbo’s mistress a ‘Negro’ could be the opportunity it provides to make a pun on ‘Moor’ and ‘more’. However, her identity is of no consequence to the plot, so it could well be a re
ference to something happening in London at the time.52 Shakespeare’s use of the words ‘more than reason’ has led some scholars to imagine an affair between Will Kemp, the actor who played Launcelot Gobbo, and the widow of Reasonable Blackman.53 The only connection is that both Kemp and the Blackman family lived in Southwark, which is circumstantial evidence at best.
Furthermore, Blackman’s wife was probably English. There are only a handful of known records of marriages between Africans in this period. Three took place in Stepney, early in the seventeenth century: ‘Peter & Mary both nigers’ were married at the church of St Dunstan’s and All Saints in July 1608; the following February saw the nuptials of ‘John Mens of Ratcliffe a niger & Luce Pluatt a niger’; and in September 1610, ‘Salomon Cowrder of Poplar a niger sailor’ was united with ‘Katheren Castilliano a niger also’.54 Outside Stepney, we know of only one other marriage between two Africans before the Civil War, that of the trumpeter named Antony Vause and his wife Anne, who was buried in 1618 at St Botolph’s Aldgate.55
Both Blackman and his wife would have been baptised. Blackman bought a token for Holy Communion at St Saviour’s in 1579 and only Christians could be married. The Book of Common Prayer stipulated that ‘The new married persons (the same day of their marriage) must receive the holy Communion’. We can see how this played out in the case of Samuel Munsur of Greenwich, who seems to have been baptised with marriage in mind. He was christened on 28 November 1613, a month before his wedding to Jane Johnson on 26 December 1613. This would allow just enough time for the banns giving notice of the marriage to be read out in church on three Sundays before the ceremony. James Curres’s status as a baptised Christian was explicitly confirmed when he was described as ‘a Moore Christian’ in the record of his marriage to Margaret Person in 1617.56
‘An old black ram is tupping your white ewe.’ The villainous Iago’s words to Desdemona’s father Brabantio drip with disgust yet no archival evidence has been found that interracial relationships met this kind of hostility off stage. Tudor England was a far cry from the American colonies, which began passing anti-miscegenation laws, forbidding marriage between different races, in the 1660s. In 1578, George Best, who lived in the maritime hamlet of Ratcliffe, reported ‘I myself have seen an Ethiopian as black as coal brought to England who taking a faire English woman to wife, begat a son in all respects as black as the father’. His tone of is one of curiosity rather than repulsion or condemnation.57 As we shall see in Chapter Nine, skin colour was no obstacle to sexual relationships between black and white Tudors, whether they took place within the sanctity of marriage or not.
If not the first, Blackman was definitely one of the first financially independent family men of African origin to live in Tudor England. Others followed in Cornwall, Kent, Worcestershire and Hertford.58
In Truro, Cornwall, we find the family of ‘Emmanuel the Moor’, whose daughter, Maria, was buried at St Mary’s Truro in August 1611. There is no baptismal record for her, which suggests the family had only recently moved to the area. Her brother Richard was baptised in October 1612. As with the Blackman family, there is no record of the mother, but the children were not labelled bastards so it follows that their parents were married. Emmanuel died in August 1623.59 There is no reference to his being in service, so in all likelihood he was making his own living to support his family. We can assume the same was true for ‘George a blackamoore’ who married Marie Smith at All Saints’ church in Staplehurst, Kent, in 1616. Their son, George, was baptised in February 1620 and their daughter, Elizabeth, in May 1622.60
There are two known examples of men previously in service who left to establish independent households. We learnt in Chapter Four of Henry Jetto, who left his post as Sir Henry Bromley’s gardener at Holt Castle. His contemporary, John Accomy, was a servant to the Cappell family of Hadham Hall, Little Hadham, until 1614, when he left to live in Hertford with his second wife Temperance Swain. Like the Jettos, they went on to have five children, who were all baptised.61
The baptisms of John and Edward Blackman, Richard and Maria Moor of Truro, George and Elizabeth in Staplehurst, the Jetto children in Worcestershire and the Accomy children in Hertford are significant. As we shall see in the next chapter, in the highly religious world of the Tudors, the ritual signalled acceptance into both the parish community and Tudor society more broadly. With their offspring, these families were, as the priests intoned as they made the sign of the cross upon the child’s forehead, received ‘into the congregacion of Christes flocke.’62
In the summer of 1592 the plague swept through London, reaching St Olave’s parish in July. The parish register departs from its usual brief listings of names, and notes in large writing that ‘the 14th day of this month the plague did begin, Margaret the wife of Hugh Jones, the first buried of the same’.63 By the end of the month twenty-six people had died. In August the figure was one hundred and eighty, in September 248, in October 158, and in November ninety-six.* The burials column of the register, usually contained in one column on a single page, becomes half-a-dozen columns over several pages. On 10 September, the Privy Council wrote to the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London that ‘by the weekly certificates, it doth appear that the present infection within the city of London doth greatly increase, growing as well by the carelessness of the people as by the want of good order to see the sound severed from the sick’.64
As the contagion spread, measures were put in place to combat it. Bonfires were lit in the streets ‘to purge and cleanse the air’.65 Dogs, thought to be carriers of infection, were culled by parish authorities.66 Clothes belonging to the dead were also suspect. In Kent, in 1610, a man sold a coat belonging to his lodger, who had recently died of the plague. Unfortunately, the man who bought it died soon afterwards, as the coat was ‘not well aired or purified’.67 Great efforts were made to stop crowds from gathering. Theatres, many of which were located in Southwark, were closed on 23 June, and did not open again until August 1594.68 The Westminster law courts were prevented from beginning their new term in October, and by the end of the month it was decided to hold them in Hertford instead. The High Court of Admiralty, which usually met in Southwark, was relocated to Woolwich. On 11 October, the usual ceremonies held to inaugurate the new Lord Mayor of London were cancelled, and the Queen suggested the money was spent on relieving ‘those persons whose houses are infected’ instead.69
Southwark, crowded and poverty-stricken, was one of the capital’s most vulnerable areas. The Blackman household was amongst the contaminated. The silk weaver’s daughter Jane, and his son Edmund, fell ill. James Balmford, the curate of St Olave’s, Tooley Street, observed that some sufferers lost their minds, leaping out of windows or running into the Thames. He put much of the blame for the spread of disease on the ‘bloody error’ that many people made, in thinking that the ‘Pestilence’ was not contagious. He dedicated his A Short Dialogue concerning the Plagues Infection of 1603 to his parishioners: a publication in which he ‘set down all that I have publicly taught’ and tried to disabuse them of this fatal misconception that led ‘men, women and children with running sores’ to go commonly abroad and thrust themselves into company’.70
Once their children’s illness was discovered by the parish searchers, the Blackman’s house was shut up and marked with a red cross to warn others away. Shakespeare describes the way plague victims were quarantined in Romeo and Juliet:
the searchers of the town,
Suspecting that we both were in a house
Where the infectious pestilence did reign,
Seal’d up the doors, and would not let us forth.’71
This added to their misery. As Balmford put it, those who were isolated in this way ‘think it an hell to be so long shut up from company and their business: the neglecting whereof is the decay of their state’. The loss of business was a very real concern for those of modest means, such as the silk weaver. Balmford callously dismissed such concerns, remarking that those infected should be ‘content to
forbear a while, since in the Plague they usually mend or end in short time.’72
The plague could attack the lymphatic system, or spread into the lungs or blood. The first type, bubonic plague, manifested itself in red, grossly inflamed and swollen lymph nodes, called buboes (hence the name), high fever, delirium and convulsions. If it got into the lungs (pneumonic plague), the victim would begin coughing up blood, and if it got into the bloodstream (septicemic plague), there would be bleeding under the skin, from the mouth, nose and rectum, and gangrene would cause the fingers, toes and nose to turn black.73 Thomas Dekker likened the advent of plague to Death pitching his tents in the ‘sinfully polluted suburbs’, from where he commanded his army of ‘Burning Fevers, Boils, Blaines, and Carbuncles’. These generals led his rank and file: ‘a mingle-mangle’ of ‘dumpish Mourners, merry Sextons, hungry Coffin-sellers, scrubbing Bearers, and nastie Grave-makers’.74
Reasonable Blackman and his wife could have done little to save their children from death’s onslaught. Various remedies against the plague were prescribed in the twenty-three books published on the subject between 1486 and 1604.75 Some came with royal authorisation, others most definitely did not. It was popularly thought that beer and ale had medicinal qualities, and alehouses were notably busier at times of plague.76 The official government advice, first issued in 1578, suggested a host of preventative measures and cures, such as potions and lotions made up of ingredients like vinegar or various herbs and spices, or what to burn to purge the air. If you could not afford the ingredients, this was no obstacle: ‘The poor which can not get vinegar nor buy Cinnamon, may eat bread and Butter alone, for Butter is not only a preservative against the plague, but against all manner of poisons’.77 Simon Kellwaye’s 1593 tract, A defensative against the plague, suggested applying live plucked chickens to the plague sores to draw out the disease. A later pamphlet gave more detailed advice as to how this would work:
Black Tudors Page 14