Author: Jonathan Carey / Source: Atlas Obscura
No monarchy in the history of the Kingdom of England has garnered a cult following quite like the Tudors (1485-1603). The betrayals, wars, and religious reforms of the Tudor dynasty have been depicted in numerous films and in the Showtime series, The Tudors.
One perception that we get from these pop culture portrayals of the lustful King Henry VIII and the tumultuous life of Bloody Mary is that Tudor England lacked ethnic diversity.
At the College of Arms in London on a 60-foot-long vellum manuscript sits an image of a man atop a horse, with a trumpet in hand and a turban around his head. This is John Blanke, a black African trumpeter who lived under the Tudors. The manuscript was originally used to announce the Westminster Tournament in celebration of the 1511 birth of Henry, Duke of Cornwall, Henry VIII’s son. Blanke was hired for the court by Henry VII. The job came with high wages, room and board, clothing, and was considered the highest possible position a musician could obtain in Tudor England.
Blanke was no anomaly, but was one of hundreds of West and Northern Africans living freely and working in England during the Tudor dynasty. Many came via Portuguese trading vessels that had enslaved Africans onboard, others came with merchants or from captured Spanish vessels. However once in England, Africans worked and lived like other English citizens, were able to testify in court, and climbed the social hierarchy of their time. A few of their stories are now captured in the book, Black Tudors by author and historian Miranda Kaufmann.
Pulling from exchequer papers, parish records, letters, and petitions, Kaufmann pieces together the lives of 10 Africans living in Tudor England.
She sets out to change the way we understand Tudor life, Medieval England, and dispel the notion that the first Africans arrived in England as slaves. “Once people learn of the presence of Africans in Tudor England, they often assume their experience was one of enslavement and racial discrimination,” Kaufmann writes in her opening introduction.The idea that Africans were mistreated by the English well before the Atlantic slave trade comes from a Queen Elizabeth I letter sent to the Privy Council in 1596, a sort of board of directors for England. In the letter Queen Elizabeth I largely blamed the African population for England’s ongoing social issues, writing that the country did not need “divers blackmoores brought into this realme.” This proclamation was sent to the mayors of England’s major cities. She later arranged for a merchant named Casper van Senden to deport Africans from England.
However, this edict wasn’t what it appeared. Kaufmann writes that van Senden originally approached the queen telling her that Africans were taking jobs away from English citizens, a problem that could be readily solved by paying…
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