Black Tudors

by Miranda Kaufmann

  Mary Fillis was born the year before this decisive battle. In the aftermath, Ahmad Al-Mansur took the crown and much of the credit for the outcome: ‘Al-Mansur’ means ‘the Victorious’. He succeeded in uniting Morocco after years of civil war, and ensured it remained independent, despite the machinations of the Turks. In 1591 he invaded present-day Mali, conquering the extensive Songhai Empire, his victory assured by the fact that his soldiers bore English-imported muskets, while their victims had only lances and javelins. This conquest brought great riches to Marrakesh: Al-Mansur received an annual tribute of 1,000 slaves and 100,000 gold pieces from his new fiefdom.15 He reigned in peace for twenty-five years, finally dying of the plague in 1603, five months after Elizabeth I. Like the English Queen, he did not manage the succession well. She had no children and refused to name an heir; he failed to make it clear which of his three sons should succeed him. Their rivalry dragged the country into civil war once more, and the kingdom their father had made strong was destroyed.16

  The battle had repercussions across the globe. King Sebastian of Portugal had died aged only twenty-four, unmarried and without an heir. As a teenager he had shown little interest in women, preferring the company of ‘dissolute’ young men, with whom he frequented beaches and woods in the middle of the night. Some historians have taken this behaviour, alongside indications that Sebastian contracted gonorrhoea and/or chlamydia at the age of ten, to mean that the prince was sexually abused by his Jesuit tutor Luís Gonçalves da Câmara. They claim that as a result he was so spiritually tormented that his fervour for military glory in Africa was in fact a barely concealed death wish.17 Whatever its ultimate cause, his death was excellent news for Spain. As Philip II commented before the battle, ‘If he succeeds, we shall have a fine nephew, if he fails, a fine kingdom’. The Portuguese were well aware of this. An agent for the Fuggers – a powerful German banking family – in Lisbon reported: ‘It is a woeful matter to lose in one day their King, their husbands and their sons . . . but what is even more terrible is that this kingdom must now fall under Spanish rule, which they can brook least of all’.18

  After Sebastian’s death, the Portuguese throne passed to his great-uncle, Cardinal Henry. The Pope refused to grant this churchman a dispensation to marry, and so he became the last of the Aviz family to rule Portugal. On his death in 1580, Philip II of Spain claimed the Portuguese throne. His title was through his mother, Isabella of Portugal, Cardinal Henry’s younger sister. The only other candidate was Don Antonio, Prior of Crato, the illegitimate son of Luis of Portugal, Duke of Beja, the older brother of Cardinal Henry and Isabella. Don Antonio had previously served as governor of Tangier. He managed to survive the Battle of Alcazar, escape his Moroccan captors, and find his way home. However, his illegitimacy seriously compromised his position, and his forces were unable to resist when Philip II invaded in the summer of 1580. The Spanish King took the crown, and with it acquired a trading empire that encompassed the coast of Africa, part of India, the Spice Islands and Brazil. Don Antonio fled to France, and then England, in search of military aid to regain the throne.

  A few years later, the six- or seven-year-old Mary Fillis arrived in England and became a servant to the Barker family: John Barker, a merchant, originally from Ipswich, his second wife, Anne, and their new-born daughter, Abigail. The Barkers made their home in Mark Lane, in the parish of St Olave’s, Hart Street. Originally ‘Mart’ or ‘Market’ Lane, the street runs between Great Tower Street and Fenchurch Street. Its proximity to Leadenhall Market, the customs house, weigh house and the quays made it an ideal address for a merchant, especially one who traded in cloth with the Spanish as John Barker did; Clothworkers’ Hall is situated in Dunster Court, just off the street where he lived.19 As well as trading, Barker was a Member of Parliament, representing Ipswich in the parliaments of 1584, 1586 and 1589. He had lived in London since at least 1582, when records show he was assessed for tax on £300 worth of goods in Tower Ward, which included the parish of St Olave’s. If he was not actually resident in the parish then, he was by 1584, as his daughter Abigail was baptised there in March of that year.20 A wealthy man, at his death in June 1589 he bequeathed £100 a year to his two sons from his first marriage, and provided a marriage portion of £1,000 for his daughter.

  Anne Barker came from a wealthy background. Her father Henry Herdson was an Alderman of London, while her stepfather, Sir Richard Champion, had served as Lord Mayor. She had been married before, to George Stoddard, a member of the Grocers’ Company. An unscrupulous businessman and loan shark, Stoddard no doubt left her a merry widow when he died in October 1580.21 She wore a gold chain every day, and owned two pearl bracelets and two diamond rings. Her London home boasted quite an array of expensive linen, gilt and silver plate, upholstery and embroidered silk cushions. Tapestries hung in the Great Chamber and another bedchamber. As well as dozens of silver spoons, gilt goblets, pots, trenchers and candlesticks, she possessed silver bowls marked with her stepfather’s coat of arms, and a ewer and basin marked with the arms of both her first husband and the Grocers’ Company. Her bed was bedecked with a new red cloth bedspread embroidered with black, yellow and white, and there were matching bed curtains and cushions. Six of her ‘best’ chairs, those covered with crimson-figured satin, were specifically ‘for gentlewomen to sit on’. Such was the opulence that Mary Fillis would have seen all around her as she was growing up. Images spring to mind of her laundering the contents of Mrs Barker’s seemingly bottomless linen cupboard and polishing her extensive collection of plate.22

  Fillis was not the only African in the Barker household. In 1593, Leying Mouea, a ‘blackamoor of 20 years’ was recorded ‘at Mistress Barker’s’.23 Two years later, ‘George, a blackamore out of Mrs Barker’s’ was buried at St Olave’s, Hart Street.24 How might Mary Fillis, Leying Mouea and George have come to be living there? John Barker was a factor in the Spanish trade for Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in the 1570s.25 We know that Leicester had an African in his household; an inventory from Leicester House, the earl’s townhouse on the Strand, records that a mattress was given to ‘the blackamore’ in March 1583, and another account book records that he received a reward of five shillings at Wanstead in April 1584.26 Shortly after Mary Fillis arrived in England, Leicester’s interest in the burgeoning trade to Morocco was formalised when the Queen issued Letters Patent to a group of merchants trading to Barbary. The charter of July 1585 gave great power to Leicester, who was named as governor, and to his brother, Ambrose Dudley, the Earl of Warwick.27 All in all, forty merchants of London traded with Barbary at this time; it was very much a going concern. The following month, Leicester signalled a more personal interest by sending Sultan Al-Mansur a gift of horses, care of Henry Roberts, the English ambassador to Morocco.28

  St Olave’s, Hart St. (marked ‘A’), in the 1560s.

  Regular English trade with Morocco began in the summer of 1551, when a group of prominent London merchants* clubbed together to sponsor Captain Thomas Wyndham’s voyage in the Lion of London.29 He returned to Morocco the following May accompanied by two more ships, the Buttolfe and a vessel that had been purchased from some Portuguese men in the Welsh town of Newport. It took two weeks to reach the port of Safi, whence some of their merchandise was transported overland to Marrakesh. They went on to Agadir, where, after a bit of bother with a French ship whose captain did not know whether or not his country was currently at war with the English, they sold ‘linen, woollen cloth, coral, amber, jet and divers other things well accepted by the Moors’, including hardware, guns, and copies of the Old Testament, which were sold to the significant Jewish population. They spent three months in the port, leaving with their ships full of the sweet cargo they had sought: ‘sugar, dates, almonds, and molasses or sugar syrup’. On the way home they passed Tenerife, where they got into a fight with the Spaniards and took the ageing governor of the island prisoner. Having made peace, they narrowly avoided being attacked by the Portuguese before finally arriving home with t
heir valuable cargo towards the end of October.30

  The hostility Wyndham and his men encountered in the Canaries was symptomatic of a bigger problem; the Iberian powers did not welcome interlopers to the trade they had monopolised. Portuguese merchants in England threatened that if they found English merchants trading in Morocco they would treat them as ‘mortal enemies, with great threats and menaces’. Almost thirty years later, one of Francis Walsingham’s advisers warned that ‘if the Spaniards take you trading with them [the Moroccans] you die for it’.31 Before 1550, African goods had mostly come to England via Spain, Portugal or the Spanish-controlled Netherlands. However, the wars of the 1540s disrupted English trade with Spain and the Antwerp cloth market collapsed following the Revolt of the Netherlands, leaving English merchants to seek new markets for cloth and to develop the means to obtain exotic imports such as gold, sugar and meleguetta pepper directly from African sources rather than via Spanish and Portuguese middlemen.32 By 1558, the Moroccan trade had developed into a more permanent enterprise, based on trade factors resident in the country, most of whom were in the ports of Larache, Safi and Agadir.33 By 1576, English trade with Morocco was worth £17,775, equivalent to £3.3 million today. This was twice the value of their trade with Portugal.34 As a cloth merchant, John Barker would have taken a keen interest in this new and developing market for his wares.

  What particularly disturbed the Iberian powers, and what attracted the Earl of Leicester’s attention, was the fact that the new Anglo-Moroccan trade was also a trade in arms. The English obtained saltpetre, a key ingredient for making gunpowder, from Morocco. In return, they exported weapons and ammunition. Jehan Scheyfve, the Imperial ambassador to the court of Edward VI, reported to Charles V in 1551 that Thomas Wyndham’s cargo contained pikes and armour.35 In 1574, an intelligencer wrote to Don Luis De Requesens y Zuñiga, the Governor of the Netherlands, that the English took ‘great quantities of arms and ammunition to Morocco’.36 Such reports were explosive at a time when Iberian trading posts in the region were threatened by an increasingly united and powerful Moroccan kingdom. The Papal nuncio in Madrid blamed Queen Elizabeth for the Moroccan victory at the Battle of Alcazar: ‘There is no evil that is not devised by that woman, who, it is perfectly plain, succoured Mulocco [Abd Al-Malik] with arms, especially artillery’.37 England’s enemies were equally disturbed that she was receiving a steady supply of saltpetre from Morocco, where it was ‘more plenty and better than in any country’.38 When the merchant Edmund Hogan led an embassy to Morocco in 1577, negotiating a supply of saltpetre was one of his principal concerns. The Earl of Leicester, who had advocated military intervention in the Netherlands and subsequently led an English expedition there, took a keen interest in the supply of Moroccan saltpetre, samples of which he had viewed as early as 1575. In 1581, his agent John Symcot was granted a licence to ‘bring into this our realm so much saltpetre as he shall have in exchange in Barbary’.39 As John Barker acted as a factor for Leicester in the 1570s, it is quite plausible that he played a similar role when the Earl later took an interest in the Barbary trade. Certainly, this connection would go some way towards explaining the arrival of a young Moroccan girl in his household in 1583 or 1584.

  In the late 1580s, Barker also became involved in privateering. Although too late to account for Fillis’s arrival, this may be how the other Africans came to be in his household. Privateering was essentially piracy by royal approval. When a captain had been robbed at sea, he could be given letters of marque or reprisal by a monarch that authorised him to seize enemy goods equal in value to that which he had lost. In 1586, Barker and some other Ipswich merchants were granted such letters of reprisal, authorising them to recover losses up to £19,000.40 Privateering was hugely popular amongst Tudor merchants; between 1575 and 1630, far more capital was invested in privateering ventures than in any trading company. An estimated £4.4 million was invested in privateering during this period, £2.9 million in the East India Company, and just £7,100 in the Guinea and Binney Company.41 Unsurprisingly, privateering tended to peak during periods of war. More than two hundred vessels made reprisal voyages between 1589 and 1591, in the years immediately following the attack of the Spanish Armada.42

  In 1601, one observer noted that ‘great numbers of Negroes and blackamoors ... are carried into this realm of England since the troubles between her highness and the King of Spain’.43 Spanish ships almost always had at least a few Africans on board, even if they were not slaving ships. There was an African aboard the San Pedro Mayor, wrecked near Salcombe in South Devon in November 1588 after the Armada battle, who died shortly afterwards.44 In February 1589, the English intercepted the Francis of Lisbon on its way home from the Portuguese trading fort at Elmina in modern-day Ghana. As well as a plentiful cargo of meleguetta pepper and gold, they found eight Africans on board.45 We don’t know what became of them, but other such encounters led to Africans being brought back to England; ‘two Negroes formerly belonging to Don Luis Vasconcelos’ arrived on the Isle of Wight aboard the Castle of Comfort, a privateering ship belonging to Sir Henry Compton in November 1571. Their Portuguese master, Vasconcelos, was en route to take up the governorship of Brazil but bad weather drove him to the Canaries where he ‘and all his people’ were ‘captured and murdered’ by the crew of the Castle of Comfort in concert with a crew of French Huguenot corsairs.46 The two Africans were the only survivors.

  The largest group of Africans known to have come to England as a result of privateering in this period arrived in Bristol in October 1590, on a prize (a ship captured legally in war) brought in by her Majesty’s ship, the Charles.47 The prize bore 734 chests of sugar and 13 hogsheads of molasses. There were 32 Spaniards and Portuguese and 135 Africans on board. The Bristol authorities put them up in a barn for a week before shipping them back to Spain, asking Lord Burghley for £302 13s 3d to cover their expenses.48

  Not all Africans who arrived in England in this way were shipped back to their enslavers’ lands.49 A prisoner of war in Spain, John Hill of Stonehouse, Plymouth, was released in 1597 on the condition that he return to England to procure two Africans taken by Captain Clements of Weymouth the year before. He was to return to La Coruña with the Africans or a ‘true certificate why they could not be obtained’, at which point his fellow prisoners would be released.50 But Clements had seen no reason to return the Africans, one of whom, according to Hill, was now in the service of Lady Ralegh. Hill asked the Privy Council to allow him to take this man back to Spain with him. Their response to his request is not recorded but presumably, as had been the case with Caspar Van Senden the year before, they told him the African could only be taken with his master’s or mistress’s consent, a consent the Raleghs were unlikely to have given.

  Many merchants engaged in privateering had Africans in their households.51 In the case of John Barker’s neighbour, Paul Bayning, the connection is clear. Bayning was also a parishioner of St Olave Hart Street, in fact his name comes directly after John Barker’s in the 1582 tax assessment. The two men must have known each other, especially as John’s son, Robert Barker, was a business partner of Bayning’s by the mid-1580s. Bayning was one of the leading privateering magnates of his generation, contributing a ship to Drake’s attack on Cadiz in 1587, and investing heavily in Sir James Lancaster’s 1595 venture to Pernambuco in Brazil and the Earl of Cumberland’s Puerto Rico expedition of 1598. In June 1599, his ship the Golden Phoenix took a prize ship near Havana and sent it home. The following February she took another near Barbados, which had 125–130 African slaves on board; the English sold them for 60 ounces of pearls at La Margarita.52

  Bayning had at least five Africans in his household. In 1593 ‘three maids, blackamores’, are recorded as lodging there. In March 1602 ‘Julyane a blackamore servant with Mr Alderman Bayning’ was christened at St Mary Bothaw, half a mile west of St Olave’s, close to today’s Cannon Street station. In 1609, ‘Abell a Blackamor’ appeared before the Governors of the Bridewell and was punished for b
eing stubborn and incorrigible. Finally, Bayning’s 1616 will mentioned an African servant named Anthony.53 It is most likely that these Africans ended up in Bayning’s household as a direct result of his involvement in privateering. In this, he would have been part a larger trend that included John Barker, and others in London, Southampton and Barnstaple.

  The parish of St Olave, Hart Street, where the Barkers and the Baynings lived, saw three baptisms and twelve burials of Africans between 1588 and 1638. The neighbouring church of St Botolph’s Aldgate had one baptism (Fillis’s) and seventeen burials between 1583 and 1631. Some Africans worked in gentry households, such as Sir William Wynter’s servant Domingo, and a man named Robert, who worked for William Matthew, ‘a Gentleman dwelling in a garden being behind Mr Quarles his house and near unto Hogg Lane in the liberty of Eastsmithfield’. Others lived with merchants, such as Thomas Barber or the Portuguese converso Francis Pinto. And some were in more lowly households, such as those of Peter Miller, a beer-brewer, and Stephen Drifield, the needlemaker mentioned in the last chapter. Still others were not recorded as being part of a household, and could have been financially independent.54

  St Botolph’s Aldgate in the 1560s.

  Another prominent household in the neighbourhood with African servants was that of Dr Hector Nunes and his wife Leonor. Jewish conversos, refugees from the Portuguese Inquisition, they had been resident in Mark Lane since 1549.55 Nunes was a physician to the court. His patients included William Cecil (Lord Burghley) and his wife. He was also a merchant, importing Spanish wool and Brazilian sugar, and a marine insurance broker. With his trading network and court connections, Nunes was in a good position to provide intelligence to men like Burghley and Walsingham. In September 1578, he sent Burghley a description of the Battle of Alcazar, quoting letters he’d received from Lisbon.56 He later kept Walsingham informed of the preparations of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Like a handful of the eighty or ninety other conversos in London, Nunes and his brother-in-law Ferdinando Alvarez employed black servants. Besides the unnamed ‘Ethiopian Negar’ Nunes acquired illegally from John Lax of Fowey in 1587, there were three women, Elizabeth, Grace and Mary, working for them between 1576 and 1590.57 These Africans presumably either came to London with the family from Portugal or arrived later through their Iberian trade connections. When some of Nunes’s creditors brought a Chancery lawsuit against him between 1588 and 1596, they tried to discredit him by claiming he and his family still observed Jewish rituals. Thomas Wilson, a former servant of Ferdinando Alvarez, although he had not actually seen anything untoward himself, testified that he was told by ‘their blackmores which they kept’ that a week before Easter, ‘they did commonly . . . light a great wax candle and set the same in a basin with four white loaves about the candle in the midst of a great room in the said Ferdinando’s house.’ This rather confused description contains elements of Shabbat, Passover and Yom Kippur.58 Did the Jews consider it sensible to hide their practices from their English servants, while trusting the Africans to keep their secrets?