The Protestant ideal of a personal faith, based on an understanding of the scriptures, meant that Mary Fillis and others like her could not just convert on the spot. They had to be educated to a level where they could understand the basic tenets of the religion and convince clergymen and the congregation of their faith.86 Other employers also took the responsibility to educate their servants in their faith seriously. When Paul Bayning died on 30 September 1616, he bequeathed £10 to John Simpson, the minister of St Olave, Hart Street, of which half was to be used for ‘instructing Anthony my Negro in the principles of the Christian faith and religion when he shall be fit to be baptised’.87
How the process of conversion worked in practice can be seen in the case of an Indian boy brought to Kent in 1633 from Armagon on the Coromandel Coast by an East India merchant named Nicholas Bix. Over the next two years, the boy was ‘instructed in the English tongue’, and ‘catechised in the rudiments of Christian religion’. He regularly attended church, where he was ‘a diligent hearer of the word preached’ and ‘joined with the congregation in prayers’. In July 1635, when he was thirteen, a petition was submitted on his behalf to the Canterbury Archdeaconry Court, asking for a baptism licence. Reginald Ansell, the parson of Fordwich, certified that the boy ‘doth now desire to be baptised & to be made a member of the Church’. The licence was granted, and the very next day, an ‘Indian Manchild of 14 years old, of Armagon’, was baptised ‘Thomas’ at St Mary, Fordwich.88
Thomas Harridance said Mary Fillis was ‘desirous to become a Christian’. On the occasion of her baptism, the curate, Christopher Threlkeld, specifically ‘demanded of her if she were desirous to be baptized in the said faith’, it being necessary to confirm the willingness to become a Christian. This inclination is often emphasised in contemporary accounts of conversions.89 When Pocahontas was baptised in Virginia in 1614, the colony’s Governor, Sir Thomas Dale, not only records her education in the religion, but also her wish to convert:
Powhatan’s daughter I caused to be carefully instructed in Christian Religion . . . who after she had made some good progress therein, renounced publicly her country Idolatry, openly confessed her Christian faith, [and] was, as she desired, baptised.90
Edward Terrill, a member of the Baptist church led by Nathaniel Ingelo in Bristol, also emphasised this desire in his account of an African woman named Frances, who joined the congregation in the 1640s. She was, he said, ‘truly convinced of Sin’ and ‘truly converted to ye Lord Jesus Christ’:
which by her profession or declaration at ye time of her reception together with her sincere conversation she gave great ground for charity to believe she was truly brought to Christ; for this poor Aethiopian’s soule savoured much of God, and she walked very humble and blameless in her Conversation to her end.91
Of course, it is not always easy to unpick the true motivations of the convert from the zeal of the author in these accounts.
What were Mary Fillis’s motivations? She was a foreigner, which might well have caused those she met to question her religious identity. Public baptism would go some way towards dispelling such suspicion, at least amongst her fellow parishioners. In Morocco, Mary would have been born into a Muslim family, yet she was so young when she came to England that she is unlikely to have retained much of that faith, which she couldn’t have practised openly in London. She grew up amidst a zealously Protestant population, who marked out their lives by the Church. She may truly have believed in a Christian God; her new mistress may have asked her about her faith for the first time and given her the opportunity to make it official. Protestant Christianity was not only a private conviction, but a very public indicator of full participation in post-Reformation Tudor society.92 Anyone who had not been baptised would never be fully accepted as a member of the community. On a more personal level, the ritual of baptism, with the acquisition of godparents and the approbation of the congregation, signalled an acceptance into the parish, and would have strengthened Fillis’s relationships with her neighbours.
One good reason for Fillis to become a Christian would be so that she could get married, or at least be able to marry if she met someone. Although most of the known examples of inter-racial marriage at this time are between African men and English women, it also happened the other way round. In August 1600, the parish register of St Philip and St Jacob, Bristol, recorded the baptism of ‘Richard a Bastard, the son of Joane Maria a Black Moore & now the wife of Thomas Smythe’.93 Smythe was a skilled craftsman who made a living making ‘bills’, polearm weapons similar to the halberd but with a hooked blade.94 In marrying him, Joane would have gained a certain level of social status. Whether Thomas Smythe was Richard’s father or not isn’t clear, but the child’s existence had not prevented Joane Maria from marrying. There was a Biblical precedent; according to the popular Geneva translation, Moses had married ‘a woman of Ethiopia’.95
It was not at all uncommon for Africans in England to be baptised as adults. When Christopher Adam was christened in Chislehurst, Kent, in April 1593, he was noted to be ‘a man grown’. Some parish register entries record exact ages. Gylman Ivie was thirty at his baptism in Dyrham, Gloucestershire, in 1575. Julyane, one of Paul Bayning’s maids, was baptised at the ‘age of 22 years’ in 1602. In other cases, we can deduce that individuals were adults because they are recorded as getting married or giving birth shortly afterwards. ‘Grace (a blackmore)’ was baptised in Hatherleigh in May 1604, and had a child two years later in August 1606.96
When a person is baptised as an adult they are conscious, in a way that a baby cannot be, of what they are doing. When Fillis was asked to say the Lord’s Prayer at her baptism, she demonstrated her knowledge of the faith. The ritual was actually more like that usually required at a confirmation, which was to be performed as ‘soon as the children can say in their mother tongue, the articles of the faith, the Lordes prayer, the ten commandments, and also can answer to such questions of this short Catechism’.97 The confession of the faith was a specific requirement laid out by the French theologian John Calvin in The institution of the Christian religion, first translated into English in 1561. He insisted that the ritual had to signal a personal spiritual acceptance of God, and be as far from the ‘stage-like pomps, which dazzle the eyes of the simple and dull their minds’ that he associated with Catholic practice.98
The conversion of an African was a deeply significant occasion for the Church of England and its ministers, as was reflected in the sermon preached by Meredith Hanmer, the vicar of St Leonard’s Shoreditch, on the occasion of the baptism of Chinano in October 1586. Chinano was one of the hundred Turks recently released from Spanish enslavement in Cartagena by Francis Drake. Originally from Chalcis, the capital of the Greek island of Euboea, which had been under Turkish rule since 1470, he spent twenty-five years enslaved and was forty years old by the time he was once again free. At the Hospital of St Katherine by the Tower, Meredith Hanmer contrasted Chinano’s conversion to Protestant Christianity with the fact that he had refused to convert to Spanish Catholicism during his captivity. After his arrival in England, Hanmer reports that Chinano saw:
courtesy, gentleness, friendly salutations of the people, succour for him and his countrymen, pity and compassion of the Englishmen, and withal he learned that the poor, the aged, the impotent, the sick and diseased Christians were provided for, whereas in his country and where he had been in captivity the poor, sick and diseased were scorned, despised and accounted of as dogs.
He was said to have concluded that ‘if there was not a God in England, there was none nowhere’. The experience of coming to England should, preached Hanmer, result in conversions like this. The English people should do their best to inspire such thoughts. England should set an example, as Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount: be ‘the light of the world’, ‘a city that is set on a hill’ and so ‘cannot be hid’. ‘And whereas now one silly [insignificant] Turk is won’, Hanmer declared, ‘ten thousands no doubt would receive the faith’
.99
Edward Terrill was similarly enthused in his account of Frances’s baptism in Bristol. For him, her conversion was an eloquent confirmation of his faith, and the universality of God’s word. He concluded his account with the remark that Frances’s Christianity showed ‘Experimentally, that scripture made good . . . that is, God is no respecter of faces: But among all nations, &c. Acts X 34: 35’.100 The biblical passage he cited reads:
Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: But in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him.101
Terrill emphasised that Christianity is for everyone, and was more than happy to recognise Africans as members of his church. His approach was part of a wider evangelical mission to expand Christianity’s reach across the world, which can also be seen by Spanish, Portuguese and, latterly, English efforts to baptise the ‘noble savages’ they found in the Americas.
To some, these baptisms, and the giving of Christian names, seem an effacement of African identity, an arrogant assertion of English cultural superiority.102 These arguments are rooted in a modern political perspective that would have made no sense to the Tudors. This was a time when people died for their faith. They believed there was only one way to heaven, and that by bringing Africans into their church they were saving their lives. Not only religious men believed this. In 1621, William Bragge, a merchant and privateer, who had encountered a group of thirteen ‘heathens . . . negroes or Indian people’ in Bermuda a few years before, wrote that they were: ‘Created after the Image, Similitude, and Likeness of God, our most heavenly, most sweet Comforter, whom in Troubles is ready always to be found’. He explained that:
the Lord Jesus hath suffered Death as well for them as for all you, for in time the Lord may call them to be true Christians, the which I most humbly beseech thy Great and Glorious Majesty in Thy good appointed Time, that thou wilt, Good Father, out of Thy most great, sweet and careful Love call them all home in Thy most good appointed Time, most merciful and most loving sweet Father, which must Good Lord be done, if it pleaseth Thy great and glorious Majesty, before that most heavenly kingdom of thine is finished . . .
This heartfelt prayer, which continues for another two paragraphs, shows that the ideal of conversion had spread beyond the pulpit.103 It was so universal a precept that it was even followed by William Longcastle who, as we saw in Chapter Two, was so impious as to be hanged as a pirate in 1609. He had baptised the African boy who later testified against him, an act pronounced as ‘the most virtuous & blessedst deed that he did show in his whole life’.104
Baptism was a public event, witnessed by the whole parish community. According to John Calvin, the person to be baptised should be ‘presented to the whole assembly of the faithful, and be offered to God, the whole Church looking on as a witness: and praying over him’.105 The Book of Common Prayer stipulated that christenings should take place on Sundays and other holy days, ‘when the most number of people may come together’ so that the ‘congregation there present may testify the receiving of them that be newly Baptized into the number of Christ’s Church’.106 Although Mary Fillis was baptised on a Friday, many people attended. As well as her godparents, others present at the ceremony were the curate’s wife, Mrs Magdalene Threlkeld, Matthew Pearson, Mrs Young, Thomas Ponder, the sexton and his wife Gertrude, Thomas Harridance and ‘divers others’. Similarly, in 1621, Maria, a five-year-old black girl who had come from Spain with the courtier Endymion Porter, was baptised ‘in presentia multos’ (in the presence of many) at St Martin in the Fields, Westminster.107
The large congregations who bore witness to these events testify to the curiosity of parishioners keen to witness a relatively unusual event, but they also represent a ritualised welcoming of the new convert into the wider community. The words of the ceremony ordained that the convert was now ‘regenerate’ and would be ‘grafted into the body of Christ’s congregation’.108 Frances’s experience of the Baptist church in Bristol in the late 1640s illustrates how an African could become an accepted member of a community in this way. Having become a full member of the church, she was not forgotten by her friends as she lay on her deathbed:
one of the Sisters of the Congregation, coming to visit her in her Sickness, she solemnly took her leave of her, as to this world, and prayed the Sister to remember her to the whole Congregation.109
After baptism, an African convert would take part in parish life, attending church regularly and interacting with other members of the congregation, as Thomas, the Indian boy brought to Kent by Nicholas Bix, had begun to do before his baptism.110 Mary Fillis’s baptism, and those of more than sixty other Africans recorded in this period, directly contradict the impression historians have previously gleaned from a draft proclamation of 1601 that asserted that ‘most of them are infidels, having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel’.111 This document, presumably penned by Caspar Van Senden and Sir Thomas Sherley, was a draft designed to be of ‘some stronger purpose’ than the 1596 Privy Council letter that granted Van Senden a limited licence to transport individuals out of England with their masters’ consent. The proposed draft of 1601 insisted that:
if there be any person or persons which be possessed of any such blackamoores that refused to deliver them in sort aforesaid, then we require you to call them before you to advise and persuade them by all good means ... if they shall eftsoons wilfully and obstinately refuse, we pray you to certify their names to us to the end her majesty may take such further course therein as it shall seem best in her princely wisdom.
This proclamation was never published. Robert Cecil, the Queen’s Secretary of State, who himself had an African servant named Fortunatus, ‘thought it not meet to have those kind taken from their masters compulsorily’.* Van Senden and Sherley tried to depict Africans as irreligious outsiders, but the parish registers across England tell a different tale.112
Two years after Mary Fillis was baptised, Millicent Porter died. She was buried at St Botolph’s Aldgate on 28 June 1599. Thomas Harridance noted in his memorandum book that she had been ‘long sick’; Fillis may well have taken on the burden of nursing her through her long illness. Porter was buried in the middle of the south churchyard and bells were rung. Four bearers, Thomas Harridance and the sexton, Thomas Ponder, were paid for their attendance. Presumably Mary Fillis was there too. A sermon was preached at the funeral by John Fulthorpe, a minister recently returned from a journey to ‘the North Country some twenty miles beyond Newcastle’. His text was Acts 9:36, which tells the story of how St Peter resurrected a woman named Dorcas or Tabitha of Joppa (now Jaffa, part of modern-day Tel Aviv), who was a seamstress. If Fulthorpe drew a parallel with Dorcas’s ‘good works and alms deeds’, then it would seem that Widow Porter’s reputation had recovered significantly in the parish since she was accused of fornication in 1584.
The year after Millicent Porter died, a new embassy from Morocco visited London. This ambassador is better known than his predecessors since he had his portrait painted during his visit. Abd-al-Wahid bin Masoud bin Muhammad al-Annuri, and fourteen others, arrived ‘very strangely attired and behavioured’ in August 1600. They stayed at Alderman Anthony Radcliffe’s house near the Royal Exchange for six months, their food and ‘all other provisions’ paid for by the Queen. Radcliffe was Master of the Guild of Merchant Taylors; his daughter Ann later became an early benefactor of Harvard University, giving the family name to Radcliffe College. The Moroccans kept Halal, as John Stow observed that they killed all their own meat ‘and turn their faces eastwards when they kill anything’. He criticised them for selling, rather than giving away, their leftover food to the poor. As their stay wore on, London merchants began to worry they were collecting information about the price of goods, which could prove injurious to English profits in future.113
Ultimately, the embassy was sabotaged by the Queen, who tried to enlist the ambassadors as mercenary soldiers without the involvement of their
Moroccan lord. Al-Annuri refused, but other members of the party were tempted. The foremost were Hajj Mesa, an elder statesman, and Abdullah Dudar, an interpreter. Dudar had served as a mercenary in Italy, and now employed the Italian language to plot with the Queen. Rumours later circulated that al-Annuri and his advisers had poisoned both Mesa and Dudar. The newsletter-writer John Chamberlain reported unsympathetically on Mesa’s death: ‘the eldest of them, which was a kind of priest or prophet, hath taken his leave of the world and is gone to prophecy apud infernos [in Hell] and to seek out Mahomet their mediator’.114 This same hostility meant the embassy had some trouble returning home. Chamberlain wrote that the English merchants and mariners refused to take them ‘because they think it is a matter odious and scandalous to the world to be friendly or familiar with Infidels’.
The English Queen was not the only Christian ruler to overlook doctrinal differences when choosing allies. The French King Francis I had showed no scruples in joining forces with the Ottoman Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, against Charles V.115 Chamberlain was obviously in two minds about the Moroccan alliance, as he went on to say that it was an honour ‘that nations so far removed and every way different should meet here to admire the glory and magnificence of our Queen of Saba [Sheba]’.116 The prejudice here was not racial, but religious, albeit the two are not always easily disentangled.
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