Black Tudors
Page 17
Of all the Africans living in this area of the City of London at this time, Mary Fillis is the only one known to be from Morocco. Very few were described as being from anywhere in particular; although Sir William Wynter’s servant Domingo was said to be from Guinea, this is quite a vague term. The majority probably came from West Africa, arriving in London either via southern Europe or with English privateers. If Mary was the only Moroccan in her neighbourhood, did the locals see her differently to the West African residents? All we know is that the parish clerk, Thomas Harridance, recorded her and her father as dark-skinned ‘black mores’, the same words used to describe many of the other Africans recorded in the parish, despite the fact that he knew her to be from Morocco. What did Mary and her African neighbours make of each other? They were few enough that we can imagine they knew each other, or had at least a nodding acquaintance on the street or at church.
Morocco would not have seemed quite as foreign to the Londoners of the time as we might imagine. Before the 1620s there were more Britons resident in North Africa than in North America and merchants had brought back accounts of the place since the 1550s.59 The markets of Safi, Agadir and Marrakesh were known as the source of the delicious sugar, dates and almonds that merchants supplied to the sweet-toothed, and wealthier, people of the capital. News of the Battle of Alcazar not only made it back to Dr Hector Nunes, Fillis’s neighbour on Mark Lane, but into London’s playhouses. The battle became the inspiration for George Peele’s play The Battle of Alcazar, as well as The Famous History of Captain Thomas Stukeley, whose author remains anonymous.
Thomas Stucley, an English soldier who’d fought and died in the battle, was a playwright’s dream. A spendthrift mercenary Catholic and a veteran of the 1571 Battle of Lepanto, he was rumoured to be an illegitimate son of Henry VIII. Burghley accused him of ‘the highest degree of vain-glory, prodigality, falsehood and vile and filthy conversation of life . . . altogether without faith, conscience, or religion’.60 John Barker crossed paths with him en route to Lisbon in the spring of 1578, in the course of his work for the Earl of Leicester. He wrote to the earl that ‘the King of Portugal doth go for Barbary, and Stucley with him’. Embarking on his doomed expedition was part of Stucley’s wider Catholic mission; King Sebastian had promised him that after victory in Morocco, he would join him in an invasion of Ireland. Barker reported that Stucley had ‘threatened the English nation’. The plan, backed by Pope Gregory XIII, was to invade Ireland, muster Catholic support there and then launch an attack on England. Stucley was also, according to Barker, giving rosaries to people who came aboard his ship, recommending they used them to pray for ‘the reducing of the English nation to the Catholic faith.’61 Mary Fillis’s first employer was well versed in recent Moroccan politics and how they fitted into the wider religious struggle.
By the time Mary Fillis was eleven years old, the people of London no longer needed to look to the stage to see her countrymen. The first Moroccan embassy arrived in London in 1589.62 Ahmad Bilqasim, known in England as ‘Mushac Reyz’, landed at St Ives in Cornwall on 1 January 1589 with Henry Roberts, the Queen’s ambassador to Morocco. Bilqasim was a Morisco, or Moorish convert to Catholicism, who was born in Spain and spoke fluent Spanish.63 As Richard Hakluyt later reported, ‘the chiefest merchants of the Barbary Company well mounted all on horseback, to the number of 40 or 50 horse’ escorted him into the City of London by torchlight on 12 January.64
The visit heralded the beginning of a new era in Anglo-Moroccan relations. Where before the main impetus for friendship had been a desire for trade, the deterioration of England’s relationship with Spain now gave way to a new and urgent agenda. In September 1579 there was a treatise on ‘the intentions of Spain and how the plans of the King of Spain and France may be frustrated by forming a league with the King of Barbary’.65 A year after the Battle of Alcazar, the threat of Philip II taking the Portuguese crown and its empire was very real, but it was only after the English defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 that Al-Mansur began to see Elizabeth I as a credible ally. When news of the Spanish defeat reached Marrakesh, the jubilant English merchants lit bonfires and paraded the streets with a banner they had painted showing Queen Elizabeth triumphant over Philip II. Al-Mansur decided to send an ambassador to the English court at the end of that year. The Spanish ambassador to France, Bernardino de Mendoza, described the visit in a letter to Philip II:
A man had arrived from Fez to see the Queen and Don Antonio [the pretender to the Portuguese throne], and in order to beguile the people they had christened him ambassador of the Sherriff [Sultan] and asserted that he had brought a great sum of money for Don Antonio. They caused the merchants of London to go out and meet him with 200 horsemen, and the Queen received him with the ceremonial of an ambassador, Don Antonio doing the same, sending him a coach in which to visit him.66
Bilqasim’s arrival was wonderful news for Don Antonio. His initial hopes for a speedy return to Portugal at the head of an English invading force had been stifled for eight years by a spiral of debt, ill-health, and political and commercial intrigue but the Moroccan envoy’s arrival breathed new life into his ambitions.67 Bilqasim conveyed to the Queen and Don Antonio that his master, Al-Mansur, would provide ‘men, money, victuals, and the use of his ports, and his own person’ in return for English ships and mariners, and help with strengthening the Moroccan navy. He offered to pay 150,000 ducats towards the expedition, but only once English troops had arrived in Morocco ready to join him in a joint attack on Spain, starting with Spanish-occupied Tangier.68
In April, Bilqasim left England ‘dressed as a Portuguese’ on the expedition led by Francis Drake and John Norris to Portugal. They aimed to exact revenge on the Spaniards for the Armada attack and put Don Antonio back on the throne. Bilqasim’s objective, according to a Spanish spy known as ‘David’, was ‘to carry the news of the landing to the Sheriff [Al-Mansur] who will then send a force of Moors, or perhaps try to land them in Andalusia’.69 From the start, the expedition was a fiasco; an over-ambitious amalgamation of conflicting objectives. The Queen’s priority was to destroy the remaining Armada ships sheltered in the ports of Santander and San Sebastian; Don Antonio wanted to seize the throne in Lisbon; Walsingham and Drake had their eyes on the Spanish silver fleet in the Azores. In the end, no one got what they wanted.
Drake and Norris wasted two weeks in a fruitless siege of La Coruña. The invading force decided to march on Lisbon from Peniche, forty-five miles to the north, costing them both the element of surprise and the lives of several men who died on the road due to heat, hunger and sickness. On top of that, the people of Portugal showed little interest in having ‘King Antonio’ restored to them. The English abandoned the idea of the Azores and returned home in disarray in July, having lost dozens of ships and thousands of men.70 The promised help from the Moroccans had not materialised. Edward Perrin, who’d been sent to collect money from Barbary, reported ‘the Moor would never give a real’.71 The English and the Moroccans might have shared a common enemy, but they did not share a common plan of attack. England simply did not have the resources or the inclination to aid Al-Mansur in the joint land invasion of Tangier and Andalusia that he had envisaged.
Mary Fillis had more immediate concerns that summer. Early in June, John Barker died. He left neither her, nor any of his other servants, anything in his will.72 After his death, Mary worked for his widow for several years.
By the time Mary Fillis was nineteen, Morocco was once again a potential ally in the ongoing struggle against Spain. But on this occasion Al-Mansur made a more substantial effort to aid the English. He was better placed to do so, following his successful subjugation of the rich Songhai Empire. In the summer of 1596, he sent three galleys with supplies to support the English attack on the port of Cadiz, which was being led by Lord Thomas Howard and Sir Walter Ralegh, and dispatched ships to carry out a simultaneous attack on the Spanish in the Canaries. This joint offensive may have been negotiated by an ambassador to L
ondon in 1595, but this embassy is only referred to in a letter from an English merchant in Morocco; there is no record of a Moroccan delegation arriving in England. Al-Fishtali, a court scribe in Marrakesh, wrote that Al-Mansur ‘may God be with him, prepared for jihad against the enemy of religion [Philip II] to punish him for what he had done to Islam’.73 Besides sending ships, Al-Mansur ‘showed her [Elizabeth I] his willingness to help confront him [Philip II] by supplying her with copper to cast cannons, and saltpetre for ammunition, which he permitted her to buy from his noble kingdoms. He also supplied her with metals that were not found in her lands’.74
The attack on Cadiz was a success. The English sacked the city, the Spanish fleet was burnt and many Spaniards were taken hostage. English accounts didn’t give Al-Mansur as much credit for the victory as Al-Fishtali, but nonetheless, Morocco had finally proved herself as a military ally. Later that year, Shakespeare included a ‘Prince of Morocco’ as one of Portia’s three suitors in The Merchant of Venice. The prince makes the wildly exaggerated boast that with his scimitar he not only killed the Shah of Persia, but bested the Ottoman Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, in the field three times.75
By 1597 Mary Fillis had left the service of Widow Barker, and was the servant of Millicent Porter, a seamstress dwelling in East Smithfield. East Smithfield, in Middlesex, was a village surrounded by fields. It lay just outside the city walls and was beyond the jurisdiction of the City authorities. The village had a community of foreigners, mostly Dutch and French, who used St Katherine’s Docks to unload their cargoes, as they were not allowed to do so inside the City. The nearby Cistercian monastery, which Edward III had established to commemorate the victims of the Black Death buried in the plague pits there, had been surrendered in ‘the late general suppression’ of the monasteries under Henry VIII. In 1560, the Navy Victuallers Yard, ‘a large storehouse for victuals, and convenient ovens, for baking of biscuits to serve her majesty’s ships’ was built in its place.76
Millicent Porter lived in ‘Mr Crew’s rents’, accommodation rented from one of the family of bakers of that name, who probably baked biscuits for the Navy.77 Her immediate neighbours included Edward Harwin, an embroiderer and ‘drawer of linen cloth’, William Pearce, a gentleman and sea captain, and John Pavy, a clerk of the Ordnance in the Tower. In 1597, she was fifty-eight years old and a widow. Her daughter had the uncommon name of Lucrezia, presumably not out of an admiration for the infamous Lucrezia Borgia, nor in homage to the ninth-century Spanish martyr Lucrezius.78 Lucrezia Porter had married a local beer brewer’s clerk, Robert Whitaker, in 1594, and provided Millicent with three granddaughters, the third of whom was also named Millicent. The newlyweds initially moved in with Widow Porter, but by 1596 they had moved to rented accommodation in Nightingale Lane. Widow Porter had recently lost two young servant girls to consumption: Frances Warkeup, aged ten, in June 1595, and seven months later the twelve-year-old Margaret Nynnie. Their deaths left a vacancy, which was filled by Mary Fillis.
Why did Fillis move from a wealthy merchant household to the lowlier establishment of a seamstress? Mrs Barker lived until 1610, so it was not a result of her death. The move suggests that Mary was able to choose her employer. Maybe she met Millicent Porter when the seamstress made some dresses for Mrs Barker, the wealthy widow. Working for Widow Porter gave her the opportunity to learn a trade. As the seamstress did not have a large household, she would be heavily reliant on Mary Fillis for help with everything from household chores to the more skilled aspects of her profession. Fillis would doubtless have learnt to sew, to make and mend clothes, and develop an appreciation for the intricacies of Tudor dress. Her work for Mrs Porter puts paid to the popular assumption that African servants of this time were mere playthings for the aristocracy. The domestic servants we know of were doing practical work in a range of households, from the likes of White Cross Manor, where Edward Swarthye was one of many servants, to much more lowly establishments such as Millicent Porter’s, where Mary Fillis was probably her only employee.
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When Fillis started working for Millicent Porter, she, ‘now taking some hold of faith in Jesus Christ, was desirous to become a Christian.’ It would seem that the Barker family had not thought it necessary to provide their young maid with a Christian education during her first thirteen years in England but Millicent Porter encouraged Fillis in her faith. She went to the curate of St Botolph’s Aldgate to arrange for Fillis to talk to him. Later, she became Fillis’s godmother. In 1584, the then forty-five-year-old Millicent Porter had been charged with being ‘one that liveth very suspiciously’, and had done public penance at St Paul’s, despite denying she was ‘guilty of fornication or adultery’. Could this experience have made her one of those reformed characters that make the most zealous evangelicals?79 However, it is the Barkers’ lack of interest that is more surprising, given the intense religiosity of the times. Did they really not care or were they merely waiting until Fillis was old enough to fully understand the significance of baptism?
Millicent Porter had good reason to consider it her duty to give Mary Fillis a Christian education. The Book of Common Prayer exhorted that not only ‘fathers and mothers’, but also ‘masters, and dames’ should ensure that ‘their children, servants, and apprentices (which have not learned their Catechism)*’ went to ‘Church at the time appointed, and obediently to hear, and be ordered by the Curate, until such time as they have learned all that is here appointed for them to learn’.80 Christopher Threlkeld, the curate of St Botolph’s Aldgate, also had a special interest. A few years before the Bishop had specifically admonished him to catechise children, apprentices and servants.81
Mary Fillis had many opportunities to hear the word of God. In the year leading up to her baptism on 3 June 1597 there were on average seven sermons a month at St Botolph’s Aldgate. They were often preached at funerals, and sometimes twice on Sundays. Threlkeld was a regular preacher, but the parish also received sermons from a range of visiting lecturers, some boasting an Oxford or Cambridge education, some from neighbouring parishes and some at the invitation of members of the congregation.
As well as Millicent Porter, Fillis’s other godparents were William Benton and Margery Barrick. This was a serious responsibility. The Book of Common Prayer stated that godparents should ensure the child understood ‘what a solemn vow, promise, and profession he hath made’, and encourage him or her to hear sermons. They were to see to it that the child learnt the creed, the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments ‘and all other things which a Christian man ought to know, and believe to his soul’s health’. It was their duty to see ‘that this child may be virtuously brought up, to lead a godly, and a Christian life’.82 Although Mary was no longer a child, this duty of care would have remained, and wouldn’t have been taken lightly by god-fearing people.
Millicent Porter’s support of Mary Fillis’s conversion is placed in sharp relief by an episode that occurred in eighteenth-century Westminster. In November 1760, Lloyd’s Evening Post reported:
Last week a Negro girl about nine years old, having eloped 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 would use her as she pleased.83
Despite the woman’s assertion, no positive statute law was ever passed to legalise slavery in England. By the final quarter of the seventeenth century the legal status of Africans who had been enslaved in the colonies, but were then brought to England, was a vexed question that was not to be truly resolved until slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1834. When the question came before English judges, however, a key element of the deliberation was often the religious status of the African or Africans involved. Therefore, thi
s woman’s aversion to the girl being baptised sprang from the fear that, in seeking to become a Christian, the girl was trying to confirm her freedom.
It had long been held invidious to enslave Christians. In his Bull Sicut dudum of 1435, Pope Eugenius IV sentenced to excommunication ‘all who attempt to capture, sell, or subject to slavery, baptised residents of the Canary Islands, or those who are freely seeking Baptism’. The scholar and diplomat Thomas Smith explained in his De Republica Anglorum of 1583 that when the English became Christian ‘men began to have conscience to hold in captivity and such extreme bondage him whom he must acknowledge to be his brother . . . that is who looketh in Christ and by Christ to have equal portion with me in the Gospel and salvation’. He was discussing the manumission of villeins, the feudal serfs of medieval England, but the idea that fellow Christians should not be enslaved was also applied to Africans. In 1624, the General Court of Virginia ruled that ‘John Phillip a negro’ was qualified, as a free man and a Christian, to give testimony because he had been ‘Christened in England 12 years since’.84 But as slavery developed in the colonies, such principles became impossible to uphold. In 1667, the Virginia Assembly declared that conversion to Christianity would not give an African freedom, implying that it previously had.85