Black Tudors

by Miranda Kaufmann

  87 Hayward, Dress at the Court of King Henry VIII, p. 231.

  88 TNA, E 101/417/6, f. 57.

  89 L & P, Henry VIII, 1509–1514, p. 1645; TNA, E 101/417/3 f. 12; TNA, E101/420/1 no.29.

  90 Ashbee and Lasocki, eds., A biographical dictionary of English court musicians, I, p. 151.

  91 As Onyeka points out, there are various ‘John Blanke’’s recorded in the subsidy records as living in Tower Ward in the 1540s and 1550s, but none can be clearly identified as the trumpeter. Onyeka, Blackamoores, p. 211; Kirk and Kirk, I, pp. 20, 155, 199, 252, II, 41, 81, III, 314. A Haberdasher named Thomas Blanke appears in the London records in 1542. His son, another Thomas Blanke, was to become Lord Mayor in 1582–3. Alfred P Beaven, ‘Notes on the aldermen, 1502–1700’, in The Aldermen of the City of London Temp. Henry III–1912 (London, 1908), pp. 168–195. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/london-aldermen/hen3-1912/pp168-195 [accessed 31 March 2017].

  92 Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England, p. 2.

  93 Lowe and Earle, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, pp. 160–161; Kaufmann, ‘Courts, Blacks at Early Modern European Aristocratic’, pp. 163–166. Elizabeth I bought the following outfit for her African servant to wear:

  ‘Item, for making of a Gascon coate for a lytle Blackamore of white Taffata, cut and lyned under with tincel, striped down with gold and silver, and lined with buckram and bayes, poynted with poynts and ribands ... and faced with taffata ... with a white taffata doublet with gold and silver lace, silver buttons, faced with Taffata; a payre of Gascons, a paire of knit hose, a pair of white shoes and pantoufles, a dozen of poynts, and a paire of gaiters’: TNA, LC 5/34, f. 241 (Lord Chamberlain’s account); see also BL Egerton 2806, f. 70; Arnold, Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d, p. 106. The painting identified by Sewter in ‘Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth’ p. 75, in 1940 (and cited by the influential Peter Fryer, Staying Power, p. 9) as showing Queen Elizabeth being entertained by a group of black musicians and dancers in 1575 has been shown to be a European painting depicting Italian commedia dell’ arte actors by Katrisky, The Art of Commedia, pp. 145–6.

  94 Anthony Vause is mentioned in the burial record of ‘Anne Vause a Black-more wife to Anthonie Vause, Trompetter of the said Country’. The location of the parish close to the Tower meant that various court musicians and their families appear in the register. LMA, MS 09222/1 (St Botolph Aldgate, 27 April 1618); Marshall Denkinger, ‘Minstrels and Musicians in the Registers of St. Botolph Aldgate’, pp. 395–398; Paul van Somer, ‘Anne of Denmark’, 1617, Royal Collection, RCIN 405887; Daniel Mytens, ‘Charles I and Henrietta Maria Departing for the chase’, c.1630–2, Royal Collection, RCIN 404771. Anne of Denmark also had an African in her Scottish household in 1590: Kaufmann, ‘Africans in Britain’, pp. 172–4; Papers Relative to the Marriage of King James the Sixth of Scotland with the Princess Anna of Denmark, ed. Gibson Craig, pp. 21, 28, 36; D. Stevenson, Scotland’s Last Royal Wedding: the Marriage of James VI and Anne of Denmark with a Danish Account of the Marriage Translated by Peter Graves (Edinburgh, 1997), p. 109.

  95 Potter, Henry VIII and Francis I, p. 12.

  Chapter 2

  1 Thomas Beckingham, mayor of Southampton, had known him for about ten years in 1549: TNA, HCA 13/93, f. 273v (High Court of Admiralty Deposition, 14 May 1549).

  2 ‘Woolsack’, Glossary, UK Parliament Website, http://www.parliament.uk/site–information/glossary/woolsack/ (accessed 31 March 2017); Hentschell, The Culture of Cloth in Early Modern England, p. 2; Ruddock, Italian Merchants and Shipping in Southampton, pp. 256–272.

  3 Kaplan, ‘Italy, 1490–1700’ in The Image of the Black in Western Art, ed. Bindman and Gates, III, 1, pp.93–125; Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1; black gondoliers appear in Vittore Carpaccio, Miracle of the Relic of the Cross at the Ponte di Rialto, c. 1496, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, and his Hunting on the Lagoon (c.1490–5), The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Lowe, ‘Visible lives: black gondoliers and other black Africans in Renaissance Venice’, pp. 412–452; Lowe and Earle, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, pp. 303–325; Fletcher, The Black Prince of Florence.

  4 Ruddock, ‘Alien Merchants in Southampton in the Later Middle Ages’, p. 12. Another possible African in late 15th-century Southampton was Maria Moriana (discussed later in this chapter see n. 41 below), but her ethnicity is never explicitly stated in the records.

  5 The following account is largely drawn from McKee, King Henry VIII’s Mary Rose and Knighton & Loades, Letters from the Mary Rose. Peter Paulo Corsi appears in the former, p. 89 and the latter, pp. 132–3.

  6 Knighton and Loades, Letters from the Mary Rose, p. 122 had it as £1.75M in 2002.

  7 Ibid.; Mortimer, The Time Travellers Guide to Elizabethan England, pp. 262–3. The bill was for 22 tons of beer. There are 204 gallons in a ton of beer, so 22 tons is 4,488 gallons. There are 8 pints in a gallon. Hence 4,488 × 8 = 35,904.I have then divided this figure by 91 men and again by 28 days (a month) to get the figure of 14 pints a day each.

  8 TNA, HCA 13/5, f. 192. (Deposition by Domenico Erizzo, 14 December 1547)

  9 Knighton & Loades, Letters from the Mary Rose, pp. 132–33, items 77–9, 81; Ungerer, ‘Recovering a Black African’s Voice in an English Lawsuit’, p. 258; Carter, ‘Carew, Sir Wymond (1498–1549)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; First fruits’ were the first year’s income for a new appointee to an ecclesiastical benefice, the ‘tenths’ an annual tax thereafter: Encyclopaedia of Tudor England, ed. Wagner and Schmid, I, 447–8.

  10 The following account is drawn from the ensuing case between Domenico Erizzo and Peter Paulo Corsi in the High Court of Admiralty. The surviving papers comprise: deposition by Domenico Erizzo, 14 December 1547 HCA 13/5, ff. 191–195; various depositions in HCA 13/93: f. 192v (John Westcott, 29 January 1548); f. 193v–4r (William Mussen, 30 January 1548); f. 202 (Jacques Francis, 8 Feb 1548); f. 241v–2 (Domenico Paza, 16 July 1548); f. 242–3, Domenico Milanes (18 July 1548); f. 246v (Antonio de Nicolao, 1 September 1548); f. 271 (Niccolo de Marini, 7 May 1549); f. 272 (Thomas Beckingham, 14 May 1549); f. 275v (Antonio de Nicolao, 23 May 1549); f. 277v (Niccolo de Marini, 5 June 1549); f. 278 (Domenico Milanes, 5 June 1549); f. 294 (Bartolomeo Fortini, 11 September 1549); f. 303 (Giacomo Ragazzoni, 25 October 1549); and HCA 24/17/130 (objection against validity of evidence of John Westcott, William Mussen, John Ito and George Blake by an agent of Domenico Erizzo; 19 March 1549).

  11 Ruddock, Italian Merchants in Southampton, pp. 95, 138, 240–253.

  12 Dawson, ‘Enslaved Swimmers and Divers in the Atlantic World’, p. 1348.

  13 Other testimonies concur: Bartholomew Fortini agreed that he did not ‘remain in prison any while’, while the Venetian Giacomo Ragazzoni believed he had been arrested for one or two days at the most. Another Venetian, Antonio de Nicolao, said that he was discharged within an hour and a half. Indeed, he said that while he was in Southampton, he ‘everyday, or every other day’ saw Corsi ‘at his free liberty in the street there’.

  14 TNA, HCA 13/5, f. 195. (Deposition by Domenico Erizzo, 14 December 1547)

  15 TNA, HCA 13/93, ff. 203–4, 275–6.

  16 Ungerer, ‘Recovering a Black African’s Voice in an English Lawsuit’, n. 25.

  17 TNA, C 1/1386/70 (Court of Chancery, Six Clerks Office, John Tyrart of London, vintner, v. the sheriffs of London, 7 September 1554).

  18 Gallagher, ‘Vernacular language-learning in early modern England’, pp. 119, 192 and personal correspondence.

  19 Ungerer, ‘Recovering a Black African’s Voice in an English Lawsuit’, p. 261, n. 26; Dawson, ‘History from Below: Enslaved Salvage Divers in the Atlantic World’, p. 20.

  20 Ungerer, ‘Recovering a Black African’s Voice in an English Lawsuit’, p. 261, n. 29; Costello, Black Salt, pp. 4–5. Though the complaint in HCA 24/17/130 suggests the other divers also gave evidence, I have not been able to locate their testimonies.

  21 Dawson, ‘Ensla
ved Swimmers and Divers in the Atlantic World’, pp. 1346–1347; Dawson, ‘Swimming, Surfing, and Underwater Diving in Early Modern Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora’, p. 108.

  22 In 1455, the Venetian Alvise de Cadamosto, wrote that Africans living along the Senegal River ‘are the most expert swimmers in the world’: Dawson, ‘Swimming, Surfing, and Underwater Diving in Early Modern Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora’, pp. 84–86, 94–95; Dawson, ‘Enslaved Swimmers and Divers in the Atlantic World’, p. 1337–8; Baker, Travails in Guinea: Robert Baker’s ‘Briefe Dyscourse’ (?1568), ed. Hair. Klein, ‘“To pot straight way we goe”: Robert Baker in Guinea, 1563–4’, pp. 243–256.

  23 Orme, Early British Swimming, pp. 63–4.

  24 Boorde, A Dyetary of Health, ed. Furnivall, pp. 51–3.

  25 Gentile Bellini, ‘Miracle of the Cross at the Bridge of San Lorenzo’, 1500, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice; Debrunner, Presence and Prestige, p. 22 mistakenly places the instructor in Naples, not Genoa; Burkhardt, The Civilisation of the Period of the Renaissance in Italy, p. 19; Jovius, De Piscibus Romanis, Chapter 3.

  26 ‘Elizabeth: February 1588, 1–15’, in Calendar of State Papers Foreign: Elizabeth, Volume 21, Part 1, 1586–1588, ed. Sophie Crawford Lomas (London, 1927), pp. 500–517. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/foreign/vol21/no1/pp500-517 [accessed 2 April 2017].

  27 Dawson, ‘Swimming, Surfing, and Underwater Diving in Early Modern Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora’, pp. 81, 109. De Marees, Description and historical account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea, ed. Van Dantzig and Jones, p. 186.

  28 Dawson, ‘Swimming, Surfing, and Underwater Diving in Early Modern Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora’, p. 111; Dawson, ‘Enslaved Swimmers and Divers in the Atlantic World’, p. 1350; Morgan, ‘British Encounters with Africans and African–Americans, c.1600–1780’, p. 170; The Troublesome Voyage of Captain Edward Fenton, 1582–1583, ed. Taylor, p. 107; The Comedies of George Chapman, ed. Parrott, p. 4.

  29 Donkin, Beyond Price, p. 320; Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, Chapter 5.

  30 Marx, The History of Underwater Exploration, pp. 40–41.

  31 McKee, King Henry VIII’s Mary Rose, pp. 93–99; Braithwaite and Bevan, ‘Deane, Charles Anthony (1796–1848)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  32 Eliav, ‘Guglielmo’s Secret’, pp. 60–69.

  33 Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, Chapter 5; Donkin, Beyond Price, p. 322.

  34 HCA 13/93, f. 241v–242 (Domenico Paza, 16 July 1548).

  35 ‘gynno’ does not appear in the OED and was possibly an Italian term. All three men stated that they had known the diver for about two years.

  36 Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour, I. p. xviii. sig. p. Jvii.

  37 BL, Lansdowne MS 10, ff. 16–60, no. 5; Returns of Aliens, ed. Kirk & Kirk, I, p. 336. Tego is likely to be the one of the two ‘Blackmores’ recorded in Edmund Grindal, Bishop of London’s survey of strangers of 15 December 1567: Haynes, A Collection of State Papers, Relating to Affairs . . . from the Year 1542 to 1570, I, pp. 455, 457, 460, 461. The other is Francis Fran, listed as a servant to Peter Fanall in Bishopsgate Ward, in Returns of Aliens, ed. Kirk & Kirk, I, p. 323. See also Habib Index no. 129.

  38 Acts, 8: 26–40; Zemon Davis, Trickster’s Travels, p. 65; Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa, trans. Pory, III, p. 1021. For more on Leo Africanus, see Chapter 4 and Chapter 6.

  39 Encyclopaedia of Tudor England, ed. Wagner and Schmid, I, pp. 45–6.

  40 Lowe, ‘Visible lives: black gondoliers and other black Africans in Renaissance Venice’, p. 425.

  41 TNA, C1/148/67; her ethnic identity remains uncertain, as it is not specified in the original document. Ruddock describes her as ‘an Italian servant’: Ruddock, Italian merchants and shipping in Southampton, p. 127. Ungerer describes her as ‘Moorish’: Ungerer, ‘Recovering a Black African’s Voice in an English Lawsuit’, p. 261; TNA, REQ 2/164/117 For more on Hector Nunes and the Ethiopian Negar see Chapter 4, Chapter 6 and also Kaufmann, M., ‘African freedom in Tudor England: Dr Hector Nunes’ petition’, Our Migration Story, http://www.ourmigrationstory.org.uk/oms/african–freedom–in–tudor–england–dr–hector–nuness–request

  42 London Consistory Court Wills, 1492–1547, ed. Darlington, p. 62.

  43 TNA, HCA, 13/93, f. 275v.

  44 TNA, HCA 13/5, f. 192.

  45 Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, p. 725; Latham, Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, I,905. That famulus was used in this way in sixteenth–century English courts is proven by the fact that mariners John Tonnes and Humphrey Ffones are both described as ‘famulus Johannes Hawkins’ [sic] when they give evidence in a case of 1568: TNA, SP 12/53. Ungerer, ‘Recovering a Black African’s Voice in an English Lawsuit’, p. 260, confuses the issue by translating famulus as ‘slave member of a household’.

  46 MacCulloch, ’Bondmen Under the Tudors’, p. 98; Cairns, ‘Slavery and the Roman Law of Evidence’, p. 608 and pp. 600–602. Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, ed. Lowe & Earle, p. 35; Schwarz, Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705–1865, pp. 19–20. The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia, ed. Henning, IV, 326–7.

  47 Senior, ‘An Investigation of the Activities and Importance of English Pirates, 1603–1640’, pp. 411–12; The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America, 1480–1650, ed. Andrews, Canny, Hair and Quinn, pp. 132–3; Appleby, ‘Thomas Mun’s West Indies Venture, 1602–5’, pp. 101–110. ‘The Lives, Apprehensions, Arraignments, and Executions, of the 19. Late Pyrates’, sig. E2r; Weatherford, Crime and Punishment in the England of Shakespeare and Milton, pp. 100–1; depositions relating to this case are to be found in TNA, HCA 1/47, ff. 4–5 (William Hill 1 May 1609), f. 56 (William Longcastle), ff. 56–57 (William Tavernor), f. 59 (John Moore, 20 November 1609).

  48 TNA, HCA, 24/17/130 (objection against the validity of the evidence of John Westcott, William Mussen, John Ito and George Blake by an agent of Domenico Erizzo, 19 March 1549.

  49 TNA, SP 10/9 f. 93 (Report on the prisoners in the Tower of London, 22 October 1549); CSPD, 1547–1553, p. 151; MacMahon, ‘Wotton, Sir Edward (1489?–1551)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Lock, ‘Fitzalan, Henry, twelfth earl of Arundel (1512–1580)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; TNA, PC 2/3 f. 129 (Privy Council meeting at Westminster, 26 March 1550).

  50 Ireton, “They are of the caste of black Christians;” Old Christian black blood in the sixteenth century Iberian Atlantic,” Hispanic American Historical Review, forthcoming.

  51 Africans appear in the following tax returns: TNA, E179/174/415 (10 September 1594), E179/174/432 (26 September 1598), E179/174/446 (24 September 1599), E179/174/444 (8 September 1600), and E179/175/488 (4 March 1611); Central Hampshire Lay Subsidy Assessments, 1558–1603, ed. Vick, pp. vi, 32–38; The parish registers do not survive for most of Southampton’s churches in this period, but I have found one African buried there, a servant to Laurence Groce, who also appears in the tax returns, and whose wife Mary leaves a legacy to her African servant, Joane, in 1612 (discussed in Chapter 10): Southampton Record Office, PR 7/1/1, St Michael CMB 1552–1651 6/14 (St Michael, 23 August 1598), Hampshire Record Office, 1612B/036 (Will of Mary Groce, 14 October 1612); Third Book of Remembrance of Southampton, ed. James, IV, 6; Southampton in the 1620s and the ‘Mayflower’, ed. Thompson, pp. 44, 51; ‘Jeffery, Sir John (1611), of High Street, Southampton, Hants and Catherston-Leweston, Dorset’ The History of Parliament.

  Chapter 3

  1 Price, Maroon Societies, p. 1.

  2 Hakluyt, II, 700; The Hawkins’ Voyages During the Reigns of Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth, and James I, ed. Markham, p. 5; Morgan, ‘Hawkins, William (b. before 1490, d. 1554/5)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. For more on African trade and meleguetta pepper see Chapter 7. Voyages: The Trans–Atlantic Slave Trade Database Much has been written on Joh
n Hawkins. See sources listed in: Morgan, ‘Hawkins, Sir John (1532–1595)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Williamson, Hawkins of Plymouth; Kelsey Sir John Hawkins; Hazlewood, The Queen’s Slave Trader.

  3 Kelsey, ‘Drake, Sir Francis (1540–1596)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Sugden, Sir Francis Drake, pp. 20–23; Turner, M. ‘The Need to Know the Year of Drake’s Birth with reference to the Early Hawkins Slaving Voyages’, http://www.indrakeswake.co.uk

  4 Maltby, The Black Legend in England, p. 15. Bartholemé de Las Casas’s Brevissima Relación de la Destructión de las Indias was written in 1542, printed in 1552, and the English version, entitled The Spanish Colonie, came out in 1583. Old World diseases, particularly smallpox and measles, to which European arrivals were largely resistant or immune, combined with warfare, forced migrations and enslavement to reduce the population of some 40–70 million indigenous Amerindians in 1492 by c. 90–95% by 1650: Day, ‘Disease and World History: A Dark Side of Interaction’, p. 10; McNeill, Mosquito Empires, p. 16.

  5 Voyages: The Trans–Atlantic Slave Trade Database calculates that 378,734 slaves disembarked from 1,328 voyages between 1514 and 1619.

  6 Morgan cites 3.3 million transported between 1662 and 1807: Morgan, X., Slavery and the British Empire, p. 12; Voyages: The Trans–Atlantic Slave Trade Database has 2.9 million from 1640–1807.

  7 The English resumed the slave trade c.1641 in which year the Star delivered a cargo of Africans to Barbados: Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted, p. 119; Voyages: The Trans–Atlantic Slave Trade Database: Voyage number 21876.

  8 Kelsey, Sir John Hawkins, p. 93, 331, n. 60. The Inquisition records for Hawkins’s abandoned crew are in Cambridge University Library, Additional Manuscripts, 7226–7306 (GRG Conway Collection, Mexican Inquisition) and listed in Street, ‘The GRG Conway Collection in Cambridge University Library: A Checklist’, pp. 60–81. Conway also deposited copies of his transcripts in the Library of Congress and Aberdeen University Library.

  9 Documents Concerning English Voyages to the Spanish Main 1569–1580, ed. Wright, pp. 253–4.