Vulgar History Podcast
Who were the Black Tudors?
September 16, 2026
Welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster. I’m a historian and an author, and I’ve been curious about the Tudors since I was a little girl. This season on the podcast, we’re talking about the notorious Tudor era, what the royal family was up to, but also what other people were doing at that time, including people in other countries. Today, we’re going to be talking about Black Tudors, so not members of the royal family, the Tudor dynasty, who were Black people, but people who lived in this time who were of African descent.
My guest today is Miranda Kaufmann. Miranda has written two books recently, so the book we’re talking about especially is her first book, Black Tudors: The Untold Story, which came out in 2017. This was a book that got a lot of attention at the time. It was named a book of the year by both The Evening Standard and The Observer and shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize and the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize in 2018. So, this really kind of kickstarted a lot of people’s knowledge and interest in Black history in Great Britain, and Miranda explains in this interview that you’re about to hear why she decided to write this book, and also what other books have come out since then that develop on the themes that she talks about in her book.
A bit about Miranda herself as well. So, she is a senior research fellow at the University of London Institute of Commonwealth Studies, and she has appeared on Sky News, the BBC, and Al Jazeera and has written for the Times, Guardian, and BBC History magazines. She lives in North Wales, and I was really happy to get to talk to her about her book, Black Tudors, and also about what she’s learned, and how more people can find out more about Black people living in England at this time.
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Ann: So, I’m joined today by Miranda Kaufmann, author of Black Tudors: The Untold Story. Is that the full subtitle, or is it…?
Miranda: Yes, it is.
Ann: Yeah. And so, I do want to clarify for people, we’re not talking about members of the Tudor family; these are people who lived in the Tudor era. When you were choosing the title, was that a consideration, how you were going to describe these people?
Miranda: Yeah, I mean, I think in the UK, at least when we say “the Tudors,” I think that is used to mean people living in the Tudor era as well as the royal family. I mean, some of the figures towards the end of the book probably spent more time being ruled by Stuarts than Tudors. But certainly, Tudors for the publishers is a sort of more of a touchstone for sales. I did have one more academic review pointing out that there were quite a few Stuarts in there, but I think all the figures in there, I would say were born in the Tudor era at least.
Ann: Well, and that’s what I’m doing for this podcast series as well. I’m calling it Vulgar History: Tudors, and for myself, it’s like, anyone who was born between the birth of the first Tudor monarch and the death of the last Tudor monarch are fair game. So, I’m being as expansive. I think we have a similar definition.
So, could you explain, in general, how the ten people profiled in your book, how they wound up in England? Because they all have their specific ways, but there’s a connection to Spain, often. So, can you explain sort of that trade route situation?
Miranda: Yeah. So, the ten people in the book are kind of emblematic of far more people that I identified in my research of sort of over two hundred people of African descent in Britain between, as you say, within the Tudor era. I stumbled there slightly because I did go up to 1640 with my PhD research, so there were definitely more Stuarts that I found after that. I identified sort of three main ways that Africans might end up in the UK.
The first one were these interesting early English voyages to West Africa that start in the mid-1550s. Well, they actually get to Morocco in 1551, and then the first voyage to Guinea is, I think, 1553 or 1554. These voyages, they’re going to Africa. They’re going to Africa not to engage in slaving, but to buy gold, ivory, melegueta pepper. They’re sort of trading in those goods, and they need interpreters. You know, you have Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations has actually got kind of bits of vocab of what words to use when you’re communicating with the local merchants. But they do pick up a few young men, quite often of sort of noble birth or high standing in their societies, and bring them to London and teach them a bit of English and then bring them back to Africa to act as interpreters. So, that’s quite an interesting phenomenon, but it’s fairly small scale.
And then, there were also Africans coming to England through… Sorry, did you hear that? There was a noise outside. There were also Africans coming from southern Europe, particularly Spain, Portugal, and sometimes Italy, in the households of royals or aristocrats or merchants. So, John Blanke, the Tudor trumpeter at the court of Henry VII and Henry VIII, that’s Chapter One of the book, we think probably came to England with Catherine of Aragon, the Spanish princess, when she came to marry Prince Arthur, Henry VIII’s older brother, in 1501. There are other examples. Philip II of Spain had an African in his entourage when he came to marry Mary Tudor, and there are merchants like Hector Nunez from Portugal who has Africans in his household later in the Elizabethan period.
So, that’s another route because there was a much larger Black population in Spain and Portugal, and to some extent, Italy in this period, because they had initiated the enslavement of Africans. The first enslaved Africans arrived in Portugal in 1444, so there’s quite an established population there. They also begin trafficking enslaved Africans across the Atlantic in the 16th century.
So, that’s where we find the third way, when privateers who were sort of legal pirates, or somebody like Francis Drake, capture Spanish or Portuguese ships at sea, or raid Spanish ports in the Caribbean and captures everyone on board, including enslaved Africans and brings them back to England. That’s sort of the third way.
Ann: So, it all sort of kicks off with just more global travel by British ships. They’re encountering… They’re going to other places where either they’re going to Africa, or they’re going to places where Africans have been taken or brought due to the slave trade. But I do think it’s important to note that Britain was not at this time engaging in the slave trade. They were not importing people for slavery reasons, right?
Miranda: Right. So, we know that John Hawkins did initiate trafficking enslaved Africans in the Elizabethan period in the 1560s, the early years of Elizabeth I’s reign, and she and other courtiers actually did get involved in sponsoring those voyages as well. Not the first one, but once that proved profitable, they got involved in the second one. But he ultimately dropped it, not for any moral reasons, but because it wasn’t working out. England didn’t have any of their own colonies at this point, and he was trying to sell to Spanish colonies, and the Spaniards weren’t very happy about that. They attacked his fleet in 1568, the final effort that he made, there was a big fight, and it was a disaster for him, and so he stopped trafficking Africans at that point.
So, that’s kind of the aberration in the broader scheme of the Tudor period where we’re not trafficking Africans, again, for economic reasons. Because we don’t have our own colonies, we don’t need that enslaved workforce in the colonies, and that’s something that develops in the 17th century in Barbados and Virginia. In the early 17th century, that demand develops. But also, you know, we don’t need enslaved labour in the British Isles either, because we haven’t got those high labour-intensive crops, or that kind of economic setup. So, that’s part of the reason that these Africans in England— There’s also this kind of concept of free soil. So, you know, writers at the time talk about if you set foot on English soil, you become free.
There are at least actually two Africans who themselves testified to having become free because they had visited England. There’s another court case with that Hector Nunez, that merchant I mentioned, who complains to the Court of Requests that he has an African who had run away from his service, and he realizes there’s no law of the land to force him to come back. He said, “I was surprised to find this. I thought the law would be the same here as in my native Portugal,” but it was actually a bit different.
Ann: When I was reading through your book, I was struck by this quote. I’m just going to read your own words back to you. So, you mentioned, “Domestic service may sound a little better than slavery today, but there’s no shame in being a Tudor servant.” And I think that’s a good distinction because so much of what, especially in America, people think about Black history, it’s specifically just chattel slavery and human trafficking. But what you’re talking about and what you found in your research are people working as servants in Tudor England, and it seems like they’re doing the same sort of work that a white person could be doing. They’re being paid for their work, and it’s sort of a noble occupation, I guess. Can you talk a bit about that? Not typically noble. Sort of respectable, I guess, I mean. Respectable occupation.
Miranda: Yeah. I mean, I would say that it was an occupation that occupied large numbers of British people. It certainly had nothing to do with sort of racial backgrounds. So, I think it’s not unusual, and I think you can compare their experience with that of white servants and not find any substantial differences. So, I think that was the point I was making there. Although when you read those words back, I mean, I’d also say there’s no shame in being an enslaved person, and actually, you know, their survival, the way they resisted, even in day-to-day ways, is something to be admired.
You know, I do find frustrations in the literature, sometimes people use this phrase “enslaved servant,” which is really confusing. Usually, they use it more like in the 18th century in the English context. But it’s like, well, either they’re a servant, or they’re enslaved, but they can’t be both. I think it’s because they’re thinking of domestic service. I suppose they’re using servant to mean they’re a kind of household servant, but it’s a bit confusing.
Ann: Yeah. Well, I mean, the wording is… We’re applying contemporary words to the past. That actually reminds me of, could you explain how you tracked down the people who you found for your book? Sometimes it’s their surname, but that’s not always a hundred percent… Like, people have a surname like Black Man, which is…
Miranda: I was very, very particular about this because I think there is some room for confusion potentially, and I was perhaps on the conservative side of I wouldn’t just take a surname. So, Reasonable Blackman in the book is also described as Blackamoore in one of the sources. I really wanted those ethnic descriptors in the source. So, there may be other Africans in Tudor England whose ethnicity was never recorded, and therefore, we don’t know whether they were African or not. That’s probably true because, you know, sometimes you have multiple sources about the same person, but only one of them mentions their ethnicity.
So, I’m looking for terms, like Blackamoore was the most common word used to describe an African in this period. I think about forty percent of my sources used the word Blackamoore, but there are other words. Nnegro’ is used, and so was ‘ethiope’ because they used the word ‘Ethiopia’ as a broad reference to Africa rather than to modern Ethiopia, particularly. So, that was the kind of stuff I was looking for.
And, you know, I found references in quite a wide range of sources. Parish registers give us the sort of numbers and distribution across the country from baptisms, burials, marriages. There are tax returns because there was this alien poll tax. So, if you were an alien (another unusual word), if you were a foreigner, you had to pay a poll tax, so it turns up there. There were wills where people— Actually, interestingly, in the wills, there are African people being left money by their employers, not being left as property, which is something I found in my research for my new book, Heiresses, which is set in the later period where Britain was at the forefront of enslavement. You find wills with long lists, probate inventories of all the people that they owned that they’re passing on to their descendants. So, it is that striking contrast there.
The most exciting sources often are court cases because then you get a bit of drama in them because there’s, you know, implicit conflict, and you get a bit more detail about people’s lives.
Ann: Well, I mean, you say that, and that makes me think right away about one of— The people you profile in your book are all really interesting, really fascinating people, but I was especially fascinated by Jacques Francis, the salvage diver. There is a court case involved in that. But first, just the concept that people were doing diving in the Tudor era! I didn’t think that the technology existed. Can you explain his work?
Miranda: So, Jacques Francis was a salvage diver living in Southampton in the south of England, in the reign of Henry VIII, and he was part of a team that were employed to salvage guns from the Mary Rose, which was Henry VIII’s flagship that had sunk on its way to go and fight the French in this really sort of dramatic fashion, with most of the sailors on board dying.
Ann: Because people didn’t swim. I just wanted to mention that, too. I found that interesting.
Miranda: Yes. So, most Europeans couldn’t swim. That meant that it wasn’t just diving that was a special skill; it was swimming as well. But you find, you know, a lot of Africans in the early modern world did know how to swim and dive, and they were good with canoes as well. There’s a historian called Kevin Dawson who’s written about this; he’s based in California, he’s actually a diver himself.
So, I mean, it was fascinating researching the technology, or lack of, of diving, deep sea diving during this period, it’s absolutely fascinating. They didn’t have scuba equipment, but there were things like a diving bell where you would submerge a big bell underwater, and that gave you a kind of pocket of air so that you could keep popping back to that and getting a new breath. I found this great story about Leonardo da Vinci inventing some diving equipment, but then refusing to publish the details because he felt that it would just be used for warfare, you know, in scuttling your enemy’s ship and that sort of thing. So, you know, we don’t know whether it would ever have worked.
So, yes. You find him doing this in Southampton, which is just fascinating, isn’t it?
Ann: It blew my mind, honestly. Like, just the fact that there was… Not just that he had the disability and the skill and he’d been trained, but that there was a company, like, “Oh, did your ship sink? Hire these guys! We’ll come in, we’ll salvage, we’ll see what we can get out of your shipwreck.” So, he was using techniques also that people today, it’s called free diving, I think, where you just kind of train yourself to hold your breath for a long time. I don’t know how you make yourself okay with the pressure that’s down there.
Miranda: Yeah. I think that is something that people do now. And at the time, it was, like, part of the culture in West Africa, just from childhood. It was just something people did and knew how to do. It was quite common knowledge, even in England, that that was something that the Africans could do, and you find that in the travel literature and even in plays. You know, somebody says, you know, “I will moor-like learn to dive into the sea,” and this sort of thing.
So, yeah, it’s amazing, and a skill to really be able to trade on in England, where it was so uncommon. Although he is part of a team led by a guy from Venice, Piero Paolo Corsi, so he wasn’t an independent diver in that sense, but we think he was paid by the Italian guy because there’s a reference to him, them arguing about wages. And, you know, again, you have this court case. So, there’s loads of information on the broader kind of context of this drama because Jacques Francis is in court testifying because his employer, Corsi, has been accused of stealing tin from another wreck. It’s quite interesting. I gave a talk about this at the Historical Diving Society conference a couple of years ago now.
Ann: Oh!
Miranda: And it was really interesting because Alex Hildred, who’s from the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, was sharing details with me of various wrecks from this period that have been found in the right sort of area. You know, I don’t think it’s been pinned down, but it would be fascinating— There was potential that maybe one of these actual wrecks that’s been found is the one that Jacques Francis dived on, not the Mary Rose, but the one where the theft is meant to have happened. Because he’s testified, “I was down there. I know what I saw. It wasn’t how the other guys were saying.” And, yes, I found that absolutely fascinating.
Ann: I agree. I think that court cases— I mean, there’s so many people who are not royal, we don’t know about them, and you only kind of hear about them if there is a court case sometimes. So, it’s always something especially interesting.
Miranda: And they do have that bit, you know, when anyone testifies in this case, it was in the High Court of Admiralty, but when everyone testifies, they have to give a brief description of who they are, their name, their age, where they’re from, and that’s where we get a bit of that biography for Jacques Francis.
Ann: The fact that he had this skill set, like, if he’s growing up somewhere on the coast of Africa, perhaps where a lot of ships get shipwrecked, so the people there would be able to sort of train themselves on the shipwrecks that are there. Would that make sense?
Miranda: Yes. So, he says in the sort of Latin text that he’s from insula de Guinea, so like an island off the coast of Guinea, which is what they used to refer to sort of West Africa quite broadly. But historians, we’ve sort of concluded it’s most likely that this was Arguin Island off the coast of Mauritania, because that was a place where there were a lot of shipwrecks as well. So, that’s the current theory. But yes, broadly, yes.
Ann: It’s just such a fascinating and interesting story. What I find very interesting, and I guess ironic, is that in contemporary America, especially, there’s a stereotype that Black people can’t swim, that they’re not good at swimming. And yet, you see back then it was, like, the only people you could call on to do this would be people like him.
Miranda: Yeah. There are examples of that in the UK as well, but it says a lot more about inequality and even segregation than it does— It’s very much a cultural thing, you know, with the history of there being swimming pools where Black people weren’t allowed to go, and just not the facilities to learn, or the time or means to pay for swimming lessons or whatever. So, it’s very much cultural, modern racism, actually, that leads to occasionally, you know, potentially Black people being less likely to be swimmers, which is really unfair. I mean, I guess you see it play out in the Olympic pool, don’t you? Yeah, it’s quite interesting. But I think there are a lot of initiatives now to try and reverse that.
And I mean, there’s also this sort of sideline to this story, a gendered element of it, of hair. So, you know, because Black women, they spend a lot of money on their hair and doing very ornate hairstyles and things, and so then they don’t necessarily want to go into a swimming pool and ruin it all. Although, I definitely saw somebody invented a swimming cap specifically to solve this problem that has a lot more space in it. So, that looked really interesting. But, yeah, it’s all cultural, you know, in a completely different context to the Tudor period.
Ann: So, speaking of Black women, you profile several Black women in your book and someone who doesn’t get a chapter, but she’s certainly mentioned a lot in the chapter, you have Diego, The Circumnavigator, and then there’s a woman named Maria, who comes up in that story. So, people will need to read the book to get all the context of everything, but could you explain Diego and Maria and what their situations were?
Miranda: So, Diego was a man who was enslaved in Panama in Nombre de Dios by the Spaniards, but he ends up sailing around the world with Francis Drake. So, Francis Drake is raiding the port of Nombre de Dios in 1572, and this guy, Diego, just sort of runs down the quay and jumps on the ship here, despite the fact that the English are shooting at him, and demands to be taken aboard, and warns them that they’re in danger because the Spaniards are on the way. Although that doesn’t seem to have actually been the case, so he’s kind of being a bit of a trickster and sort of using what he can to join the English, because it was common knowledge in the Americas as well that people were not enslaved in England. So, I think the idea is he’s escaping the Spanish enslavement and hoping to find freedom by being with the English.
He then brokers an alliance between Drake and his men and the Cimarrons, who were these formerly enslaved people who’d run away from the Spaniards and set up their own settlements in the hinterland. And they successfully steal a whole lot of treasure from the Spaniards because the significance of Nombre de Dios was that prior to the building of the Panama Canal, the Spaniards had all these silver mines in Peru and Ecuador, and to get it back to Spain, they sailed it to the Isthmus of Panama and then marched it across the Isthmus on the backs of mules, and then, you know, the silver fleet came over from Spain and picked it up at Nombre de Dios. So, Drake was hoping to get it, but he’d messed up his timing, and so then they had to attack the mule train next time it came across the Isthmus. It was quite an adventure. And then Diego goes back to Plymouth with Drake and ends up coming on his circumnavigation voyage a few years later, but unfortunately dying along the way.
Ann: And then Maria is a woman who… She’s pregnant by one of the men, by one of Drake’s men, and then she just gets kind of…
Miranda: Yeah, we don’t know who the father was. So, on this circumnavigation voyage, once they get to the west coast of South America, once they’ve passed the Strait of Magellan, which no Englishman has done before, they start raiding the Spanish ports along the coast that are completely unguarded because there’s never been enemies there. They actually pick up one or two Africans on several of these raids or attacks on shipping. Maria is captured from a Spanish ship that’s on its way to the Spanish colonies from the Philippines, I think. Certainly, by the time they reach Indonesia, she is heavily pregnant, and they actually abandon her heavily pregnant on an island in Indonesia, which they call Crab Island. Yeah, it’s a pretty bleak story.
Although, I mean, there were differing interpretations. You know, certainly she’s not abandoned alone; she’s abandoned with two other African men. Diego’s dead by this point, but they abandoned her with two other African men. One testimony says that they were left there to found their own settlement, but it seems a bit dubious, especially when you read the rest of the text about the voyage, and it says there was actually no running water on this island. Although the English had stayed there for a while, so it wasn’t completely uninhabitable, but it was a bit of a dubious sort of line. But I worked out the times – I don’t think anyone who had written about it before was a woman. So, I looked up, you know, exactly nine months earlier… I was trying to think about the course of the pregnancy and if she’s described as heavily pregnant on the date she’s left behind, how early would she have been impregnated? It’s possible that it could have been prior to her joining Drake’s ship, but it’s really hard to know for sure.
Although there is an interesting theory that it couldn’t have— I mean, you discuss about the power dynamics on the ship and whether it could have been Drake’s child, but then actually, Drake never had any children. He had sort of two wives, I think, and never had any children. So, I think I really upset a Drake enthusiast in an article I wrote about this before the book, where I called him impotent, I think. Actually, I think the guy would have preferred I said “infertile.” I don’t know, the distinction being that this guy could not cope with the idea that his big hero, Drake, you know, couldn’t get it up. [laughs] So, that was pretty funny. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say that on the podcast.
Ann: You can. It’s Vulgar History, you can say whatever you want.
Miranda: Right. Okay, I’ll lean into that. So, he wasn’t very happy about that. But I don’t know if we’re ever going to know who the father was. But either way, you know, they’re meant to be religious Christians, Protestants, and they are having religious services on the ship. So, coming back to England with a woman and child is probably not going to look good for these Christian men, many of whom were married, obviously. I’m not sure if they were married or not, to be honest. It wouldn’t have looked good to come back to England with an African woman and her child. Although it’s not even the point that she’s African. It wouldn’t have looked good to come back to England with an unmarried woman and a small child. So, that’s potentially another reason why they might have left her behind. Also, I mean, it’s not a fun bit… But anyway, yeah, let’s leave it at that.
Ann: Yeah, it’s an interesting… The way that you put together the research for this book, there’s a lot of “Here’s an interesting story…” and then, “But we don’t know what happened afterwards.” So, there’s a lot of just kind of you’re making your best guesses. But like, even the court case with Jacques, we don’t know the result of that. It’s just kind of, we know that he testified— Or do we know the result of the court case? I forget.
Miranda: [laughs] Do we know…? I know Corsi was in prison for something else later, wasn’t he?
Ann: I think he was.
Miranda: I think we can definitely say that we don’t really know what happened to Jacques Francis after the court case.
Ann: We don’t know what happened to him. We don’t know what happened to him, and that’s what’s more interesting in the context of your book.
In terms of the people who you profiled— Well, you mentioned that, you know, Maria and who is the father of her child and stuff. So, in terms of interracial relationships, I think, is another interesting thing you mentioned in your book. Because there’s a few of the men you profile, you find, he clearly married, and there wasn’t very many African women in England, so he probably would have married a white person. This is sort of at the same time, you know, William Shakespeare is writing his plays… I found that interesting in your book, you kind of have several examples of dialogue from Shakespeare’s plays. So, in Othello, for instance, there is distrust, and some people are uncomfortable with Othello and Desdemona’s interracial relationship. But what you found in actual Tudor times was that wasn’t… That was maybe not the case for the people living then. What did you find out about that?
Miranda: Yes. So, the supposition of… There were, as you say, African men who were described as married or having children, and I did suppose that their women were probably white English women. But there are actual records of marriages between English people and African people in some of the parish registers as well, so it definitely happened. And more broadly, outside of marriage, there are several children of mixed parentage as well that turn up in the baptism records. So, it was definitely happening. And I wouldn’t speculate on the identity of the Dark Lady, but you know, Shakespeare writes sonnets to a Dark Lady, and I have no idea who that would be, but he definitely had the potential to meet African women in London at the time.
Ann: It’s interesting just in terms of the Shakespeare plays as well, because there’s Othello and Titus Andronicus feature characters who he describes as “a Moor,” and I don’t think either of those characters are meant to be culturally Muslim. So, it’s kind of that’s a word, like, you were saying “Blackamoore” is a word that was used. And a lot of these African people came to England via Spain, but you talk in your book about people who are baptized as Christian. So, for instance, Mary Fillis, she came from Morocco, and we know that she was baptized. So, England is such a Christian country. Can you talk a bit about Mary Fillis and her experience?
Miranda: Yeah, I mean, coming from Morocco, it’s highly likely her family were Muslim, but she comes to London as a child, six or seven years old, and so she would have had a limited understanding of any religion at that point.
She’s baptized in St Botolph’s Aldgate in East London at the age of 20 in 1597. And we know a bit more about her baptism, because a lot of these parish registers tend to be one-liners, and you’ve got a name, an ethnic descriptor, and not a lot else. But with her, there was this amazing parish clerk for St. Botolph’s Aldgate that wrote, for 40 years, just wrote a memorandum book of events and happenings in the parish. He writes quite a lot about this baptism because it was still fairly unusual. We learn a bit more about her, who her employer was, who her previous employer was, and that’s quite interesting.
And I think it is potentially surprising that she’s lived in England for so long without being baptized, so there’s clearly a different attitude with her current employer, who’s a seamstress called Millicent Porter, who actually stands as her godmother and so sort of encouraging her to learn the Christian religion. But it’s also potentially, you know, at the age of 20, she might have wanted to get married. There were other examples of Africans being baptized and then married shortly afterwards. So, again, we don’t know. But it’s just one example. I think I found over sixty baptisms of Africans in the parish registers, so it was definitely a concerted effort.
Ann: You know, trying to put myself back in this time period and to understand what the experiences of these people were like, you can’t ever really… No one can really put yourself in that mindset. But living in the world that we live in now, especially with the way that racial understanding is right now about, like, this is what the Black community is. In Tudor England, it was very much like these are people from Africa, via often Spain, but in the Tudor context, it seems like what was important was your religion. Like, were you a Christian? And then eventually, are you the Reformed religion or not? But also, what is your, kind of, status versus what is your skin colour? That’s kind of the impression I got from your book.
When we were talking about, you know, a servant might be a Black person, might be a white person, and their salary is probably going to be the same. Like, in a later cultural context in England, you see things like Anne of Denmark has portraits done where a Black servant is almost decorative next to her. But that was sort of moving onto the later Stuart era. During the Tudor period, it seems people… I don’t know! Can you just talk about the context of what it meant to be a Black person at that time, and how different or similar they might have been treated?
Miranda: Well, I think the Black groom in the portrait of Anna of Denmark, so early 17th century, he is wearing very nice clothes, but I think he is painted… It is a portrait, you know, you can see his face, he looks like a real person. It’s not just a sort of decoration. But I take your point. Annoyingly, her household records don’t survive from that period, otherwise, I would hope that we might be able to find out his name. You never know, there might still be a letter discovered or something from the royal court that tells us more.
So, I think, [sighs] you know, I wrote this book almost ten years ago, and I think my understanding of race and racism has developed a little. But I’d still stand by the point that religion was one of the most important ways that people judged each other in this period. In Tudor England, if you weren’t Christian and after the Reformation, if you were not a Protestant, then you did not really have full civic rights at all, and in order to in any way engage in that society, you really needed to be going to church. So, I think class is also another really key element – unfortunately, still going strong in England – of how people treated each other.
So, for example, when you do have, like, the Moroccan ambassador coming to the court of Elizabeth I, he was treated with the dignity of that status, just as other diplomats might have been treated. Whereas, you know, if you have somebody who’s arrived off a privateering ship, they’re not going to be accorded the same respect. But equally, they don’t necessarily, as you say, tend to be treated much worse than their white contemporaries. You know, like I said earlier, the African merchants are seen as people that you can do business with.
But I think that there is a complicator in terms of sort of what I now know about intersectionality. You know, it’s not one or the other. You can suffer class prejudice and racial prejudice at the same time, for example. But I think the understanding of race was very different at the time. So, I suppose I would qualify the argument in the book by saying if you’re walking down the street and you see a Black person, there could be a question mark in your mind as to their religious status, which wouldn’t be there for a white person. Similarly, with class, you see an African walking down a Tudor London street, they’re not going to be a Lord. So, I think there is a slight kind of complication there, but… I think also the sorts of sources that I used did not, kind of, bring up a lot of any real evidence that I could find of racial prejudice explicitly. But then you might not always expect to find that in a parish register.
Ann: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Miranda: I think the literature of the time is perhaps what we should be examining in context with the reality. But I suppose my argument is that whatever it says in the literature in terms of negative language around race, it doesn’t seem to have played out in terms of people’s civic rights. You know, Africans were being paid wages, allowed to testify in court, intermarrying with the local population. So, in reality, it seems that racial prejudice, that certainly wasn’t, you know, holding people back in that way.
And I think one of the key cases again… I mean, I always remember my university supervisor saying, “It’s harder to argue from an absence,” but in the case of Edward Swarthye, he is an African man who’s a porter in rural Gloucestershire for a gentleman called Sir Edward Wynter, and he actually whips a white servant called John Guye in the hall at White Cross Manor in front of twenty people because John Guye has angered their employer so much that he’s punished. There are several testimonies to this event, and none of them say, “Oh, it was awful because this Black guy was whipping a white guy and that made it extra humiliating.” There’s no kind of racial viewing of it; it’s all about the class dynamic. It’s saying John Guye was a very well-respected, high-status servant who was well educated; he’d actually been educated alongside the sons of the house, he was managing the family ironworks. It’s the idea that this high-status servant is being whipped by a porter, who’s a lower-status servant, that they all remark on. They’re not discussing any kind of racial dynamic, and I think that’s quite telling.
Ann: Yeah, well, as you said, it’s hard to argue for an absence of something. And I don’t mean to suggest to the listeners, and I don’t want to give you the impression that I read your book and thought, “Wow! Nobody was racist in Tudor England.” But I just mean, it was a different context, different cultural context. I mean, it was a very xenophobic time. You talk in your book about… There was really anti-immigrant feelings then, and a Black person would obviously be from away.
Miranda: There were anti-immigrant riots in London in the 1590s, but they’re all complaining about Flemish people and French people; there’s no mention in those riots at all of African people. And again, I think it’s partly a numbers game. You know, there were not enough Africans in Tudor England to upset anyone that much, really, compared to other nationalities. But yeah, it was definitely a very xenophobic period. Although, yeah, we’re in a glass house to throw stones right now. [chuckles]
Ann: Yeah. How different are things?
I also just wanted to, if you could clarify, because you do mention your book, some people have a misunderstanding that Elizabeth I had, I don’t know if it’s an edict or a proclamation. Can you explain what she did or didn’t do?
Miranda: It’s funny, I was just thinking about that, because this is one of the only documents where it does actually suggest that… It says that Africans are taking jobs that English people, that Christians could be having. But that’s a draft document that’s never actually sent around. So, if you go to my website, I wrote an entire article about these proclamations and a blog post based on it.
The kind of popular narrative has been that Elizabeth I attempted to expel Africans from the realm in 1596. But when I dug into it, it was a much less dramatic and more complicated episode. But essentially, there was a merchant from Lübeck, in modern Germany, called Caspar Van Senden, and he had been bringing back English prisoners of war from Lisbon during the Elizabethan War with Spain, and he wanted some recompense for his troubles. He was trying to get some money or something of value out of the council, Elizabeth’s council. He teamed up with a kind of disgraced nobleman called Sir Thomas Shirley, and between them, they start petitioning the Privy Council. What they are asking for is the right to go around England picking up any Africans they can find and taking them away with them, presumably for sale in Lisbon, where enslavement is a going concern. So, there is a letter from the Privy Council that is sent.
I mean, one of the things I say is I’m pretty sure Elizabeth I was not actually present in any of these Privy Council meetings, and so this whole thing may have been operating on a level that she wasn’t even involved with. But there is a letter sent out to the authorities by the Privy Council saying, you know, help Caspar Van Senden, but that the Africans could only be handed over to Van Senden with the consent of their masters. What’s really interesting is that I then found these documents in the Cecil papers – so, Robert Cecil is the Head of the Privy Council by this point – and I found these petitions to Cecil from Van Senden and Shirley.
It essentially boils down to Van Senden writes to Cecil saying, “That original letter was no use to me. I’ve been around the country, and no one will let me take the African servants away. So, can you please get the council to issue a letter to some stronger purpose?” And he includes a draft of what he’d like the letter to say, which is a version that’s much stronger and uses some of that stronger language I was mentioning, and also kind of gets away… Deletes the whole bit about consent and just says, I want to have them. But the key point is that that version was never sent out; that was never promulgated. It only exists in draft form, and so there was never any expulsion. So, it’s like, that draft has been read as an actual thing that was sent out by the Queen, but actually, it was just a draft in the Cecil Papers. So, as far as the evidence I found goes, there were no Africans actually taken away by Van Senden at all.
It’s one of these sort of red herrings. It sounds a bit complicated, and the headline keeps on being reiterated. It’s one of those ones where there’s a “fact” in inverted commas that just sort of keeps on getting repeated without anyone necessarily going deep into the archival evidence.
Ann: Well, and you mentioned you have a blog post about that. So, on your website, which is MirandaKaufmann.com, people can get more background on that there.
Miranda, so I wanted to just remind everybody that your book Black Tudors: The Untold Story is available in North America and in the UK. It’s been such a successful book. I think you’ve been chatting to people about it for ten years now, so [chuckles] what a legacy. But you also have a newer book that we talked about before on this podcast, Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance, and Slavery in the Caribbean. And so, that’s available in hardback in North America, and it’s coming out this month, September, in paperback in the UK, right?
Miranda: Yeah, that’s right. Yes. Go out and read it.
Ann: Exactly. And I love… Can you talk a bit about the cover, the paperback cover? Because it’s a different cover from the hardcover.
Miranda: First, just dialling back, I don’t know if you can fit this in there, but I mean, I think it’s important to note that not everyone agrees with my interpretation of the lives of Africans in this period, and there are some other key writers on this. There’s a book by Imtiaz Habib called Black Lives in the English Archives, which is a key text, although, yeah, we disagree on quite a few things. There’s another British author called Onyeka Nubia, who’s now written two books about this period, and he goes in a lot of depth as well into the interpretation of those Casper Van Senden documents. And there’s quite a lot of work on that. And yeah, and again, I think on the Van Senden stuff, I do cross-reference that in that blog post as well. But maybe I can share the link for your listeners at some point.
Jumping back to your paperback question. With Black Tudors, it wasn’t published separately in North America, but with Heiresses, I had an American publisher as well. So, I’m published by Pegasus in the US and Oneworld in the UK. And so, it meant there were two covers for the hardback, you know, the American edition has quite a different cover to the UK edition. Your listeners can look it up, but the hardback in the UK was mostly black and white, with a sort of pink heiress printed on top of it, based on a portrait of one of the heiresses in the book, but with a plantation scene in the background in black and white. And then the US version was quite a sort of dark green colour, which was the background of a portrait of another of the heiresses, an interesting woman called Frances Dalzell, who was of mixed heritage from Jamaica, and they’ve cut her face out and put the plantation image where her face ought to be. So, your listeners will have to write in and say which one they think is more effective.
It was a completely sort of different vision, again, for the UK paperback that’s coming out in September. It’s definitely more colourful. I’m afraid, I do like those colours. It’s turquoise with yellow lettering on it. And it has the same heiress, Mary Ramsay, as the UK hardback edition had, but in all her glorious blue. She has the beautiful blue dress; it’s a portrait that’s now in the National Gallery in London. And then, we wanted another heiress on the other side, because they’re kind of slightly cut in half so that you can see their outlines and half their faces, and that’s, I think, meant to make them representative of more women by sort of cutting them in half.
The other one is actually— Because, we found portraits of all of the women in the book, but they’re of varying quality. You know, some of them are just prints, some of them are silhouettes or whatever, so they’re not going to work on a high-glossy cover. So, the other heiress of the yellow dress is actually the mother of one of the heiresses in the book, although she herself was also an heiress, so she’s definitely an heiress. And that one’s actually in the Frick Collection in New York now. So, it’s a transatlantic cover.
And the image in the background is a plantation scene from quite a… Certainly a well-used and well-replicated image of a plantation in Antigua. It’s quite interesting, the debate around that, in terms of a lot of these images were created for the enslavers, so are necessarily very idealized and quite far, very far from the reality of what life was really like on these plantations. So, in the image on the book, they’re probably wearing a lot more clothes than they would have done, and you just have this sort of more of a bucolic image, whereas actually it was more like a forced labour camp with sort of shocking brutality and horrible things going on. But at the same time, I wouldn’t want to have wanted to put a really brutal image on the cover, because that is just sort of almost repeating that violence all over again and assaulting the viewer. So, yes. Was there anything else about it?
Ann: I saw the paperback cover and was like, “Oooh! That’s very different from the other…” Just the colourful. I saw you post it and was like, that’s a nice cover.
Miranda: Yeah. I mean, I’d add that I definitely don’t get the final say on these things. You know, I definitely end up writing very long and particular feedback emails whenever they send me a picture, and they probably wish that I wasn’t involved at all. [both laugh] But we’ll see. We’ll see. I think it’s quite eye-catching, the paperback. I like it.
Ann: I think so, too. And I hope that, you know, I think just the bright colours might just catch people’s eye who maybe didn’t notice the darker colour of the hardcover before, but everybody loves a paperback. So, it’s good it’s available in this new format. And so, can you let people know if they want to follow you and your work and just see where you’re going to be appearing in things? You have your website, MirandaKaufmann.com. Is that the best place people can follow up with you?
Miranda: Yeah, the website is a good place to go. I’m also on various forms of social media @DrMirandaKaufmann.
Ann: That’s perfect. Thank you so much for joining me again to talk about this. I also appreciate that you mentioned the other people writing in this area, because I think it’s always so good to read different people’s point of view, especially on a topic like this, where there’s so much unknown, there’s so much, kind of, fill in the blank, or what do we think this means? So, I’m going to be looking at those sources as well, just to kind of round out this emerging topic of research. So, thank you so much for joining me today.
Miranda: Oh, thanks a lot. It was fun.
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So, the book that we’re mostly talking about today is Miranda Kaufmann’s book, Black Tudors: The Untold Story, which is still available everywhere. Her newer book, Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance, and Slavery in the Caribbean, is available now in paperback as well, wherever you pick up books. And I think both are well worth a read. I think it’s both helped to sort of develop everyone’s understanding of fairly well-known time periods by kind of just filling in some areas that maybe haven’t been explored as fully before. And I really appreciate Miranda taking the time to speak with me about the Black Tudors. I also appreciate that she recommended some other authors’ works that you can look at to learn more about this time period, and I will list those books and authors in the notes of this episode.
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And until next time, my friends, keep your pants on and your tits out.
Vulgar History is researched, scripted, and hosted by Ann Foster. Editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. Vulgar History artwork by Karyn Moynihan. Social media videos by Magdalena Denson. Transcripts of this podcast are available at VulgarHistory.com by Aveline Malek. You can get early, ad-free episodes of Vulgar History by becoming a paid member of our Patreon at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. Vulgar History merchandise is available at VulgarHistory.com/Store for Americans and for everyone else at VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com. Follow us on social media @VulgarHistoryPod. Get in touch with me via email at VulgarHistoryPod@gmail.com.
References:
Buy a copy of Miranda’s book Black Tudors (affiliate link)
Further reading on Black British history:
Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga (affiliate link)
African Europeans: An Untold History by Olivette Otele (affiliate link)
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Buy a copy of Ann’s book Rebel of the Regency
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