Black Tudors

The Untold Story

Miranda Kaufmann

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786071859
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2018 A Book of the Year for the Evening Standard and the Observer A black porter publicly whips a white Englishman in the hall of a Gloucestershire manor house. A Moroccan woman is baptised in a London church. Henry VIII dispatches a Mauritanian diver to salvage lost treasures from the Mary Rose. From long-forgotten records emerge the remarkable stories of Africans who lived free in Tudor England…They were present at some of the defining moments of the age. They were christened, married and buried by the Church. They were paid wages like any other Tudors. The untold stories of the Black Tudors, dazzlingly brought to life by Kaufmann, will transform how we see this most intriguing period of history.

1

John Blanke, the Trumpeter

He gripped the horse tightly with his thighs, steadying her against the shock of the trumpet’s blast. It had taken a while to master the art of playing the trumpet on horseback but now he was doing just that, as one of the King’s trumpeters at the Westminster Tournament. King Henry had decreed two days of jousting to celebrate the birth of a son to his wife, Katherine of Aragon. He had also commissioned the heraldic artists of the College of Arms to record the proceedings on vellum. As Blanke watched the King charge towards his opponent, he considered that the artists might need to use a bit of licence when they recorded the scene for posterity. Best to show the King in some feat of great chivalric prowess, such as breaking a lance on the helm. It didn’t really matter whether it had actually happened. He wondered how he would appear in the vellum roll – on horseback amongst the other trumpeters, of course, dressed in the royal livery of yellow halved with grey. The artists would enjoy painting the brightly coloured tasselled banners, with their quartered fleur-de-lys and lions, hanging from their trumpets. The instruments themselves would be flecked with gold. But would they remember his turban, which set him apart from his bareheaded companions? And how would they depict his dark skin? It was not a pigment they would be accustomed to using. Indeed, it might be the first time anyone had painted a Black Tudor.

THE TWO IMAGES of John Blanke in the 60-foot-long vellum manuscript known as the Westminster Tournament Roll comprise the only identifiable portrait of an African in Tudor England.¹ It’s the most popular image of all those kept in the vast collection of the College of Arms and it shows that Africans were present in England from the earliest years of the sixteenth century. Seeing him for the first time provokes a visceral reaction: often surprise, followed closely by curiosity. His presence at the Tudor court raises as many, if not more, questions than it answers. Was he the only African in England at this time? What brought him to London? What were the circumstances of his arrival, decades before the English began engaging in direct trade with Africa, or in the slave trade? How much about his origin or religious beliefs can we deduce from the fact that he wears a turban? His striking image is regularly used to demonstrate that Africans were present in Tudor times, without much further interrogation of his story, or the existence of any contemporaries.

Histories of the early Tudor period, when England was just emerging from the shadow cast by the Wars of the Roses, are often focused on domestic politics, or relations with other European powers. John Blanke forces us to consider the country’s relationship with the wider world. In the early sixteenth century England did not have strong, direct links with the world beyond Europe. The Englishmen John Tintam and William Fabian had contemplated a voyage to Guinea in 1481 but the Portuguese complained to Edward IV about the intrusion into João II’s imperial dominion, and the expedition was abandoned. In 1497, Henry VII commissioned the Italian explorer John Cabot’s voyage to America, yet few Englishmen came forward to follow in his footsteps.²

Any connections with Africa, Asia and the Americas were mediated through southern Europe. In 1535, Andrew Boorde sent Thomas Cromwell ‘seeds of rhubarb’ from Catalonia, explaining that they came ‘out of Barbary’ and were considered ‘a great treasure’ or delicacy by the Catalans.³ Africans themselves tended to arrive in England via Portugal, Spain or Italy.

John Blanke is described as ‘black’ and depicted with dark skin and wearing a turban in the Westminster Tournament Roll, but that is the extent of our knowledge as to his origin. Given his youthful appearance in the Roll, and the extent of the African diaspora in the early years of the sixteenth century, we can posit that he was born in North or West Africa, or in southern Europe to African parents, in the late fifteenth century. The turban suggests an Islamic heritage, and its relatively flat shape is reminiscent of North African or Andalusian styles. That said, Henry VIII enjoyed dressing himself and his courtiers in Turkish or Moorish fashion and may also have chosen to dress John Blanke in this way.⁴ As musical knowledge was often passed, like any trade, from father to son, John Blanke probably came from a musical family.⁵

The first record of wages being paid to ‘John Blanke the blacke Trumpet’ dates from December 1507.⁶ One wonders how his name was coined, and whether it was thought humorous to use the French word ‘blanc’, in the same spirit that Robin Hood’s tall friend was called Little John. It seems to have been a joke with wide appeal: an African slave named ‘Juan Blanco’ appeared in Granada in 1565.⁷ Blanke was paid 20 shillings (at a rate of 8d a day) for his work that December and he continued to receive monthly payments of the same amount through the following year.⁸ His annual wage of £12 was twice that of an agricultural labourer and three times the average servant’s wage.⁹ Blanke joined a group of seven existing trumpeters retained by Henry VII. A position at court was the best any musician could hope for; it brought high status and a regular wage, as well as board, lodging and a clothing allowance.

Music echoed through the corridors of Tudor palaces. No architect of the time would have countenanced designing a Great Hall without a minstrels’ gallery. The Crown employed a man whose sole purpose was to marshal the court musicians, ensuring they were in the right place at the right time, prepared to entertain the King and his household with their ‘blowings and pipings’ at ‘meats and suppers’.¹⁰ Trumpeters played a vital part in royal entries, tournaments, funerals, executions, banquets, weddings, coronations, battles and sea voyages, as well as the annual grand festivities over Christmas and New Year. They were required to ‘blow the court to supper’ and to make music ‘at the king’s pleasure’. They heralded the King’s arrival: ‘The King’s coming, I know by his trumpets,’ Lavatch says in All’s Well That Ends Well. Henry VII even commissioned a pair of stone trumpeters to stand either side of the gateway leading to the inner court at Richmond Palace. At the wedding of Katherine of Aragon and Prince Arthur in 1501, the largest court festival of the first Henry Tudor’s reign, the trumpeters were ordered to ‘blow continually’ from the moment the Spanish princess left her lodgings until she reached the altar. After the ceremony, the court travelled down the Thames to Greenwich by boat. Their journey was accompanied by the music of a host of instruments, including ‘the most goodly and pleasant mirth of trumpets’. The sound of all this on the water was unlike anything that had ever been heard before.¹¹

It is unlikely that court trumpeters at this time could read music, but some might have read plainsong and other unmeasured notation, such as the fashionable basse danse tunes. They could play quite intricate pieces: the double-curved instruments John Blanke and his fellows are shown playing in the Westminster Tournament Roll, now known as cavalry trumpets, were able to do much more than the straight busine designed for military-style fanfares.¹² The craft of trumpet-making was well established in the City of London, centred near the Guildhall in a road now known as ‘Trump Street’.¹³

Trumpets have been used to mark power, status, military might and even divine power in civilisations across the world. The walls of Jericho tumbled down at the sound of trumpets. The Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, is also known as the Feast of the Trumpets, because the Torah stipulates the day should be marked with trumpet fanfares.¹⁴ Silver and bronze trumpets inscribed with the names of military gods were found in the tomb of King Tutankhamen. In some northern Nigerian kingdoms, the capture of the royal trumpets effectively signalled a coup d’état, while on the South Pacific island of Rarotonga, the word for a conch-shell trumpet is the same as that used for a chief, ruler or priest.¹⁵

As symbols of royal authority, trumpeters sometimes served as messengers or envoys, roles that could lead them into dangerous territory. When Francis I sent a royal trumpeter to impose order on the rioting students of Paris in 1518, they broke his instrument and cut off his horse’s ears. Worse, in 1538, when the Prince of Parma, general of the Spanish troops, sent his trumpeter as a messenger to Ypres while he held it under siege, the captains and magistrates of the town burnt the letter and hanged the trumpeter. Because trumpeters acted as messengers, they were supposed to enjoy diplomatic immunity, allowing them free passage through foreign, and often enemy, territory. This left them open to suspicion of espionage: in 1560, the Duke of Norfolk wrote to William Cecil that a Scottish trumpeter had arrived with letters, but ‘more to spy than otherwise’.¹⁶

The court musicians of Europe were highly cosmopolitan, hailing predominantly from Flanders, France and Italy. Henry VII’s court was no exception. The marshal of his trumpeters, Peter de Casa Nova, was Italian.¹⁷ German drummers, the Prince of Castile’s taberet, a French organ player, Dutch and French minstrels and some musicians simply described as ‘strange’ all played for the King.¹⁸ Henry had spent much of his youth at the court of Duke Francis of Brittany, and some time in France, so no doubt he continued to enjoy the familiar continental style of entertainment. More importantly, it was fashionable and prestigious to employ an international troupe of musicians.¹⁹

African musicians had been playing for European monarchs and nobility since at least the twelfth century, in a tradition that owed much to medieval Islamic courts from Spain to Syria. In 1194, turbaned black trumpeters accompanied the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI on his triumphal entry into Palermo in Sicily.²⁰ In Renaissance Italy, trumpeters worked on board royal ships. Martino, a ‘black slave’, was purchased by Ferdinand, King of Naples, in 1470, to play on the royal ship Barcha. An African trumpeter travelled with Cosimo I de’ Medici of Florence on his galley in 1555. In Portugal ten black musicians played the charamela (a wind-instrument) at the court of Teodosio I, Duke of Bragança.²¹

Closer to home, James IV of Scotland employed a Moorish drummer in the early years of the sixteenth century. This musician, who is known only as the ‘More taubronar’, not only played the tabor drum but was something of a choreographer. He devised a dance with twelve performers in black and white costumes for the 1505 Shrove Tuesday celebrations at the Scottish court. This may have been a boisterous event, resulting in some wear and tear to his instrument, because the following month he was given 28 shillings ‘to pay for the painting of his taubroun’.²²

The ubiquitous presence of black musicians at European courts is echoed in the artwork of the time: a dark-skinned trumpeter in French livery appears in a tapestry depicting part of the festivities at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520.²³ A group of African boys making music with a variety of wind and brass instruments, including a trombone, are featured in The Engagement of St Ursula and Prince Etherius, commissioned in 1522 by Eleanor, Queen of Portugal, to adorn the St Auta altarpiece in the Convent of Madre de Deus, in Lisbon.²⁴

When John Blanke arrived, England was a relatively weak kingdom on the edge of Europe. Henry VII was still trying to cement the legitimacy of his new Tudor dynasty. Like the marriage he negotiated between his son Arthur and the Spanish Infanta, emulating other European rulers by employing an African musician at court was a way of enhancing his prestige on the European stage.

There is no record of exactly how John Blanke came to be working as a trumpeter at the Tudor court. However, trumpeters were the most mobile of musicians, used as messengers and required for diplomatic exchanges and ceremonial affairs. They accompanied rulers and their representatives on foreign journeys, giving them the opportunity to jump ship and remain as a permanent employee in the court they were visiting. So it proved for John de Cecil, a Spaniard who played for Archduke Philip the Handsome in Brussels in the 1490s. By 1496, he had returned to Spain, and was chosen to accompany Katherine of Aragon to England for her marriage in 1501. In January 1502 he was issued with a banner in England and began to receive a monthly wage of 20 shillings from Henry VII, the same rate at which the King was to pay John Blanke. De Cecil continued to travel around Europe. In 1511, he accompanied Lord Darcy on a diplomatic mission to the court of Ferdinand of Aragon, while in 1514 he attended Henry’s younger sister Mary on her journey to become Queen of...