AFRICAN FACES OF THE WORLD

Black Tudors in the 16th Century

Yes, there were black people in Tudor England—and no, they were not slaves. (Slavery was allowed only in the British colonies, never in England itself.) In the historical work Black Tudors: The Untold Story, by Miranda Kaufmann (Oneworld Publications, 2018), it is revealing to discover that it was not considered beyond the pale in 1596 England for a black porter named Edward Swarthye to publicly whip a white servant on behalf of their common employer.

Some of Kaufmann’s more enlightening stories:

John Blanke, an African court trumpeter who played at the coronation of Henry VII in 1485, was held in such high esteem that the king paid for his wedding outfit. He demanded— and received—good money for his services.

By the end of the 16th century, there were 10 Africans living in Southampton, one of whom, Jacques Francis, was a diver searching for the wreck of the Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s great warship, which had sunk in 1545. At the time, the idea of immersing oneself in water was regarded with considerable suspicion by most of the population, so homegrown divers were hard to come by.

Far from there being any sexual prejudice against black people, a number of them married white men or women.

Many Africans perished in the Plague, with some of them given funerals “grander than those recorded for non-African parishioners.”

The identity of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady—to whom he wrote several of his sonnets—is one of literature’s most enduring mysteries. Kaufmann suggests she might have been an African prostitute called Anne Cobbie, known as “the Tawny Moor with Soft Skin,” who was greatly esteemed by a number of prominent men of the period. Indeed, Anne was in such high demand that she was able to charge five times as much as her white colleagues.

Official records make few references to black people, so Kaufmann has had to try to reconstruct these lives from whatever information is available. Some of it is pure fiction based on supposition, but it does not take away from the overall fact that being black in 16th century England vs. the 17th century American colonies was vastly different.

RIGHT: Portrait of a Moor, Jan Mostaert, circa 15251530

BELOW: Black musicians in a Portuguese painting of The Engagement of St Ursula and Prince Etherius, c 1520

photo credit: BridgemanImages.com