Black Tudors

by Miranda Kaufmann

  While Braems was still in Flushing, Warde went to his house. Arnold Braems, who had been entrusted with his brother’s goods, refused to hand over the key to the warehouse, so Warde ‘threatened to break open the said storehouse door’. Ultimately, Warde ‘took possession of the storehouse and sold and carried away all the said goods and merchandise’, which consisted of ‘Spanish wines, ten bales of pepper, Tobacco, and currants being all worth about five hundred pounds’. Zouche was seriously displeased. ‘I hold him not worthy of any favour for he hath so ill managed the trusts I reposed in him’, Zouche said in a letter to Warde, furious at ‘how ill he hath dealt with me’. He demanded Braems appear before him at Dover Castle on 23 September, but Braems and his wife remained in Flushing, leaving Zouche to order Warde to ‘make stay of him on his arrival and commit him to Dover Castle’.78 When Braems finally returned to England in mid-December, Warde, having gone to his home to detain him, found him ‘sick in his bed of a fever’, and so ‘commanded him to keep his house and not to stir abroad’. Braems asked Zouche to name a time for them to meet, promising to give ‘good satisfaction concerning his business and accounts’. Zouche approved of Warde’s forbearance, writing that he did not desire to use ‘extremities’, and allowed Braems ‘liberty to take the benefit of the air’ at a friend’s house, on the proviso that he swore ‘to yield himself prisoner at Dover Castle on eight days warning’.79

  A sketch of Dover Castle by Wenceslas Hollar.

  While their employers fought over the profits of the voyage, John Anthony and the rest of the crew were left waiting in Dover for their pay. It was not forthcoming. Over the next few months, Anthony became ‘indebted for his diet, lodging and washing’. He owed at least £3, and had to mortgage his ‘best apparel’ to pay the debt. As the ‘winter’s season’ drew on, he feared that ‘he shall endure great extremity if he may not have his money’. He desperately needed to pay his debts and to buy some ‘necessary apparel’, presumably warmer clothes for the winter and new ones for sea.

  During the winter of 1619, Anthony twice petitioned Zouche, and the rest of the Privy Council, for payment of his wages. In his first petition, he explained that he had been informed the sum of £30 due to him ‘for his wages and service’ in the Silver Falcon was ‘deposited in the hands of’ the Mayor of Dover, but he had not yet received any part of it because Zouche had ordered Warde ‘not to pay the said money or any part thereof’. Anthony asked that ‘your honour to be pleased to give order to Mr Mayor to pay him’. In his second petition, he was desperate. He ‘in all humble and dutiful manner beseecheth’ Zouche ‘to give order to Mr Mayor of Dover that he may pay unto him such moneys as remaineth in his hands’, even suggesting that if the money cannot be released directly to him, it might be ‘delivered into the hands of Sir Henry Mainwaring, knight . . . his worshipful master’. By now, Anthony was willing to settle for less than he was owed, ‘at the least so much thereof as may pay his debts and defray the charges on necessary apparel fit and meet for sea’.

  Sailors needed specialised clothing and equipment. Their clothes had to allow for plenty of movement and so were amply cut, though not so loose as to tangle in the rigging. A rare example of a sailor’s outfit from this period, held at the Museum of London, exhibits these qualities. It comprises a loose-fitting pullover top and full breeches, known as ‘slops’ or ‘galligaskins’. Although they were made of very strong linen, needed to endure the hard, rough work, they have been heavily mended and patched with a variety of materials, and the breeches are stained with tar across the front from hauling ropes. An illustration in Cesare Vecellio’s costume book of 1598 shows an English sailor dressed in these kind of loose garments and wearing a Monmouth cap (a shaggy, brimless woollen hat, its long pile designed to shed water). Their clothes were as warm and waterproof as the natural materials available at the time allowed. Sir Richard Hawkins’s crew wore ‘rugge gowns’, made of coarse woollen cloth, to protect them against the ‘fresh and cold’ nights they endured, even in hot countries. To stay dry, sailors made a sort of waterproof tarpaulin petticoat by coating canvas or sailcloth with tar. They had thigh-high boots with double soles, and many sailors wore mittens when the temperature called for it.80 All in all, the ‘charges on necessary apparel fit and meet for sea’ could be quite high.

  The £30 John Anthony claimed was a relatively high amount, especially considering the voyage had lasted only a few months. Most sailors earned in the region of £1 to £2 a month, although the more skilled might get £3 or £4, and ship-masters £5 to £6. Anthony’s earnings suggest he was a skilled worker, perhaps a quartermaster, carpenter or gunner. The normal practice was to pay sailors half wages while in port, so some of the £30 could have been owed from the months Anthony waited in Dover for the Silver Falcon to set sail. Of course, Anthony might have petitioned for more than he was owed.81

  ‘An English Sailor’ in Vecillo’s 1598 costume book.

  Anthony’s fortunes were caught up in the larger struggle between Lord Zouche and Jacob Braems. Zouche was delaying making payments relating to the voyage until he himself had received satisfaction. This was not uncommon, as ship-owners were not legally obliged to pay the crew until they themselves had been paid by the merchants who had hired the ship. Although Braems had undertaken to pay the men’s wages, by this time that responsibility had passed to Zouche. In January, Zouche asked Warde for an account of the goods seized from Braems and in February requested ‘all the money which you have received for any such goods’. Zouche wrote to Mainwaring on 24 February 1620: ‘As soon as I receive the money which the Mayor is to send me for such goods of Braems I will give order for the payment of the purse man that looks to the pinnace’.

  Soon, Zouche began to suspect that Braems was not the only one who had ‘deceived his trust’. On 1 March he wrote to William Warde that his account of the profits made from selling the goods seized from Braems and moneys spent in relation to the Silver Falcon did not add up: ‘I much doubt whether the things mentioned in your note of receipt be all the goods of Braems that went to your hands’. He accused Warde of juggling the books, of meddling, of ‘foul play’ and said he would not be ‘satisfied with such shuffling’. Zouche ordered him to provide ‘a more honest account than you have yet given me, which if you will not perform, I will trouble you if you live, and yours when you are gone, for I will not be cozened by all your running’. He signed this letter, the last he was to write to Warde: ‘yours as you shall deserve’!

  On 20 March, Mainwaring, whom Lord Zouche had appointed lieutenant of Dover Castle the month before, wrote to Zouche from the Castle that ‘the blacke boy is come her[e] for his money & the Mayor hath very honestly payed him 17s 6d for half a year’s interest’. For payments to be delayed was hardly unusual; the state papers and High Court of Admiralty records are littered with similar cases.82 What is significant is that Anthony was being paid just like everybody else, and that his petitions were taken seriously by senior members of the administration. He was even paid interest, in acknowledgement of his long wait. Zouche replied to Mainwaring’s letter the same day, commenting ‘I mislike not that you gave Ward order to pay the poor man for his pains about the pinnace’.

  John Anthony’s paid employment indicates that he was not enslaved. To the modern eye it might be suspicious that in one of his petitions he suggested his wages be paid to Sir Henry Mainwaring, but other sailors’ wages were paid to their masters in the same way.83 Sailors often empowered third parties to receive their wages, usually a wife or relative; Anthony might well simply have invoked Mainwaring’s influential name in an attempt to expedite matters. John Anthony called Sir Henry Mainwaring his ‘worshipful master’, but as he was in debt for his ‘diet, lodging and washing’, he clearly did not live in his household.84 Anthony might not formally have been Mainwaring’s servant, but rather seen him as his patron.

  John Anthony is one of several Africans, including John Blanke and ‘James the Blackamoor’, cook to Henry Bourchier the fi
fth Earl of Bath in Tawstock, Devon, who were paid wages in this period. But wages were not the only way in which servants of all ethnicities were compensated for their labour. Harry Domingo, a ‘moir’ employed by the Burgh of Aberdeen in the early seventeenth century, was paid for specific tasks, such as ‘sounding the trumpet at the proclaiming’ of letters ‘from the council’, rather than receiving a regular wage.85 Some worked only for board and lodging, often being provided with clothing at the household’s expense. ‘Nageir the Moor’, who worked for Lord Regent James Stewart, Earl of Moray, had various outfits made for him in the late 1560s, including a cloak lined with velvet at the neck. Others received the occasional cash reward, such as the six shillings given to ‘the blackemor’ by a member of the Cecil family in 1622.86

  Having received his wages, John Anthony was on the lookout for new employment. As he wrote in his petition to Zouche, he was keen to return to sea and sought to obtain ‘clothes and other necessaries fit to be used at sea, where he intendeth speedily to employ himself’. He also planned to invest some of his wages, writing that ‘some of the said £30 may be put out to some profit’. Did he want to put money into a voyage? A more common course for mariners was to purchase a ‘venture’, goods that they could trade on their own behalf while at sea.87

  The Silver Falcon did not sail again for some time. In March 1620 Zouche asked Mainwaring to look for a ‘cheupman’, or purchaser, for the vessel, as he was concerned ‘she will decay if she be not much used’. Robert Barrett, a Jurat (municipal officer), of Dover bought her for £160, about half of the £300 Braems thought her to be worth. The legal wrangles over her 1619 voyage outlasted the lives of many of those involved; by 1625, Zouche, Warde, Fenner and Bacon were all dead. A ‘John Anthony of the town and port of Dover in the county of Kent, shipwright’, who had a wife called Elizabeth and a son called Richard, made his will in Lisbon in 1650, having sailed on voyages to Bahia, Brazil, and Luna, northern Italy. But as the will makes no mention of the testator’s ethnicity, we cannot be sure that this was the John Anthony who went to sea aboard the Silver Falcon.88

  The story of John Anthony, the sailor aboard the Silver Falcon, who was eventually paid his wages with interest, ends on a positive note. His connection with Mainwaring suggests that once the golden age of Elizabethan privateering came to an end, Africans still came to England as a result of similar activity, which, without the veneer of legality provided by letters of reprisal, was plain piracy. His role as a waged sailor aboard the Silver Falcon in 1619, and the agency he demonstrated in pursuing payment of his wages, provides a stark contrast to the experience of the Africans who arrived in Jamestown that same year. And while the English were happy to employ African men as sailors, there were fewer viable careers for African women in England. Some were left with no choice but to join the world’s oldest profession.

  * This may actually have been William Warde, the Mayor of Dover, who appears later in the chapter.

  * As we saw in Chapter Three, Diego, Maria and the two other unnamed African men aboard the Golden Hinde had set foot in California with Drake in June 1579.

  9

  Anne Cobbie, the Tawny Moor with Soft Skin

  Anne slathered the unguent over her arms, her shoulders, her breasts, her belly, her legs and her back. It was her daily ritual. Her soft skin was what the punters remembered, what they were willing to pay above the odds for. They would give a gold coin for the chance to touch her. Not that she got to keep it all. Mrs Bankes took her share, but it was from her house that Anne did her most profitable business. Westminster offered richer pickings than Clerkenwell or Southwark. Crowded with courtiers, politicians, merchants, men in town to pursue a case at the law courts, as well as the apprentices and servants who found the money from God-knows-where. She had bedded them all. There, she was ready. What did the French character in that old play call the black maid? A ‘black swan, silk’ner then Signet’s plush’.

  HISTORIANS AND LITERARY critics have asserted that many African women worked as prostitutes in Tudor and early Stuart England. One has written that Africans were ‘used ... in three capacities: as household servants (the majority); as prostitutes or sexual conveniences for well-to-do Englishmen and Dutchmen; and as court entertainers’. Another claims that there were ‘several’ black courtesans in Clerkenwell during this period.1 The most-often cited example is a woman known as Lucy Negro, ‘tentatively identified’ as the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets in 1933.2 Yet there are almost as many theories about who ‘Lucy Negro’ was as there are about the Dark Lady. Is there any truth in the idea that Shakespeare was enamoured of an African prostitute, and was her name Lucy Negro? How representative was the experience of Anne Cobbie, who worked in a brothel in 1620s Westminster, of the experiences of other African women in England at this time?3

  In 1626, Anne Cobbie was in her prime, so she was probably born in the early years of the century.4 A fellow prostitute described her as a ‘tawny Moor’.5 The word ‘Moor’ is derived from the Latin ‘maurus’, which specifically referred to the predominantly light-skinned inhabitants of the ancient province of Mauretania in North Africa. However, by the sixteenth century the term indicated dark skin. As early as 1489, William Caxton wrote: ‘He was so angry for it, that he became as black as a Moor’.6 In 1550 William Thomas, in his Principal rules of the Italian grammar, defined ‘Moro’ as ‘a Moore or blacke man’, as if the two were synonymous.7 Shakespeare described Othello, and Aaron in Titus Andronicus, as ‘Moors’, but references to Othello’s ‘sooty bosom’ and Aaron’s ‘coal-black’ visage make it clear that both were conceived as being dark-skinned.8 A brief glance at Henry Peacham’s drawing of a staging of Titus Andronicus confirms that Aaron was played as a black man.9 Standing alone, it seems ‘moor’ had come to signify black skin.10

  Peacham’s sketch of a scene from Titus Andronicus is the only contemporary illustration of a Shakespeare play known to exist.

  With the addition of ‘tawny’, meaning brown, ‘tawny-moor’ referred to lighter-skinned North Africans. In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare described the Prince of Morocco as a ‘tawnie Moore’, and his Cleopatra as having a ‘tawny front’.11 John Pory, the scholar who translated Leo Africanus’ Description of Africa in 1600, spoke of the ‘tawnie Moores’ who inhabited North Africa.12 One Welsh squire wrote that the sunburnt peasants of Pembrokeshire ‘are forced to endure the heat of the sun in its greatest extremity, to parch and burn their faces, hands, legs, feet and breasts in such sort as they seem more like tawny Moors than people of this land’.13 But other than in these literary sources, ‘tawny’ was rarely applied to a person’s complexion; to date, Anne Cobbie is the only person found in the archives of the period to be described this way. ‘Tawny moor’ suggests a North African origin; that she was either from Morocco, like Mary Fillis, or from one of the other ‘Barbary States’ (Algeria, Tunisia and Tripoli) which, unlike Morocco, were part of the Ottoman Empire. Or, perhaps, given her English surname, she was the mixed-race child of a Black Tudor and an Englishman or woman.14

  By 1626, Anne Cobbie was a well-known and sought-after prostitute who was often found at the St Clement Danes’s bawdy house of John and Jane Bankes.15 The most eastern parish of Westminster, St Clement Danes ran from Somerset House along the Strand to Temple Bar, and the gate to the City of London. To the north lay Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the Inns of Court. To the south, ‘to the Thames-ward’, as one ‘silver-tongued’ poet put it in 1590, ‘all along the Strand, The stately houses of the nobles stand’.16 Butcher’s Row – so named for the butchers’ stalls ranged on its southern side – ran north of and almost parallel to the Strand from Temple Bar to Wych Street. Brewers and market gardeners were also to be found here, outside the City of London’s walls.17 A mile or so upriver was the heart of Westminster: the site of Parliament, the Law Courts and the royal court at Whitehall Palace. Beyond these monumental establishments and the main thoroughfares lay a complex of narrow alleys and squalid streets running off
the Strand and Fleet Street, known as ‘the Straits’ or ‘the Bermudas’ because they were infested with ‘land pirates’ and other miscreants.18 John and Jane Bankes’s bawdy house was doubtless situated on such a street.

  The church of St Clement, just off Temple Bar.

  As it lay outside the City of London, the ‘Liberty’ of Westminster benefited from certain traditional immunities. A draft Act of Parliament in 1585 described Westminster as the site of ‘sundry great murders, Riots, Routs, frays, robberies . . . Adulteries and other incontinent life . . . and many other the like shameful sins’. By 1620, there were said to be almost a hundred taverns along the Strand between Charing Cross and Temple Bar.19 The number of bawdy houses in Westminster grew substantially in the Tudor period. One street on the south side of Petty France even earned itself the name ‘Codpiece Row’.20 When Henry VIII officially shut down the sanctioned brothels of Southwark in 1546, their prostitutes scattered across the capital. This ‘privatisation’ of prostitution was recounted in verse by the poet John Taylor in 1630:

  The Stews in England bore a beastly sway,

  Till the eight Henry banish’d them away:

  And since these common whores were quite put down,

  A damned crew of private whores are grown,