Vulgar History - Who were the Black Tudors？

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women's history comedy podcast. My name is Anne Foster.

00:00:15.180 I'm a historian and an author, and I've been curious about the Tudors since I was a little

00:00:19.580 girl. This season on the podcast, we're talking about the notorious Tudor era, what the royal

00:00:24.780 family was up to, but also what other people were doing at that time, including people in other

00:00:29.580 countries. Today, we're going to be talking about Black Tudors. So not members of the royal family,

00:00:36.060 the Tudor dynasty, who are Black people, but people who lived in this time who were of African

00:00:41.680 descent. And my guest today is Miranda Kaufman. And Miranda has written two books recently. So

00:00:48.700 the book we're talking about especially is her first book, Black Tudors, The Untold Story,

00:00:54.080 which came out in 2017. And this was a book that got a lot of attention at the time.

00:01:00.840 Emma was named a book of the year by both the Evening Standard and The Observer and shortlisted

00:01:04.420 for the Wolfson History Prize and the Nayef El Rodin Prize in 2018. So this really kind of

00:01:09.940 kick-started a lot of people's knowledge and interest in Black history in Great Britain.

00:01:16.320 And Miranda explains in this interview that you're about to hear how, why she decided to

00:01:21.960 write this book and also what other books have come out since then that develop on the themes

00:01:27.000 that she talks about in her book. A bit about Miranda herself as well. So she is a senior

00:01:32.860 research fellow at the University of London Institute of Commonwealth Studies and she has

00:01:37.820 appeared on Sky News, the BBC and Al Jazeera and has written for the Times, Guardian and BBC History

00:01:42.760 Magazine. She lives in North Wales and I was really happy to get to talk to her about her book

00:01:49.700 Black Tudors and also about what she's learned and how more people can find out more about

00:01:54.780 Black people living in England at this time.

00:02:04.380 So I'm joined today by Miranda Kaufman, author of Black Tudors, The Untold Story.

00:02:10.700 Is that the full search subtitle or is it?

00:02:13.460 It's the third, yeah.

00:02:14.300 Yeah.

00:02:14.920 And so I do want to clarify for people, we're not talking about members of the Tudor family.

00:02:18.580 these are people who lived in the Tudor era when you were choosing the title is that a consideration

00:02:24.060 how how you're going to describe these people yeah I mean I think in the UK at least when we

00:02:29.120 say the Tudors I think that is used to mean people living in the Tudor era as well as

00:02:34.320 the royal family I mean some of some of the figures towards the end of the book

00:02:38.760 probably spent more time being ruled by Stuarts than Tudors but Tudors certainly Tudors uh for

00:02:46.380 the publishers there's a sort of more of a touchstone for sales so so that I did have one

00:02:52.800 more academic review pointing out that there were quite a few stewards in there but I think all the

00:02:57.060 figures in there were born I would say were born in the Tudor era at least well and that's what I'm

00:03:02.200 doing for this podcast series as well I'm calling it Vulgar History Tudors and I am for myself it's

00:03:08.260 like anyone who was born between the birth of the first Tudor monarch and the death of the last

00:03:12.740 Tudor monarch I'm a fair game so I'm being as expansive so I think we have a similar definition

00:03:17.660 so could you explain in general how the the 10 people profiled in your book how they wound up

00:03:26.000 in England because there's sort of a they all have their specific ways but there's a connection to

00:03:30.420 Spain often so can you explain sort of that trade route situation yeah so the 10 people in the book

00:03:37.280 They're kind of emblematic of far more people that I identified in my research of sort of over 200 people of African descent in Britain between, as you say, within the Tudor era.

00:03:52.200 And I stumbled there slightly because I did go up to 1640 with my PhD research.

00:03:57.920 So there were definitely more Stuarts that I found after that.

00:04:01.520 uh but and I identified sort of three main ways that Africans might end up in the UK and uh you

00:04:09.500 know the first one were these interesting early early uh English voyages to to West Africa start

00:04:17.020 in the mid-1550s uh they go well they actually get to Morocco in 1551 and then the first voyage

00:04:22.780 to guinea is i think 1553 or 1554 and these voyages uh they're going to africa they're going

00:04:31.620 to africa not to engage in slaving but to buy gold ivory uh melagueta pepper they're sort of

00:04:41.320 trading in in those goods and they need interpreters uh you know you have hacklets

00:04:46.560 principal navigations has actually got kind of bits of vocab of what words to use when you're

00:04:52.020 communicating with with the local merchants um but they do um pick up a few a few young men

00:04:58.620 quite often have sort of noble birth or high standing in their societies and bring them to

00:05:04.660 london and teach them a bit of english and then bring them back to africa to act as interpreters

00:05:10.680 uh so that's quite an interesting phenomenon but it's fairly small scale uh and then

00:05:16.160 there were also africans coming to england through uh sorry you didn't did you hear that

00:05:24.400 that was a noise outside uh there were also africans coming from southern europe uh particularly

00:05:30.080 spain portugal and sometimes italy in the households of royals or aristocrats or merchants

00:05:36.800 uh so john blank the trumpeter the tudor trumpeter at the court of henry the seventh and henry the

00:05:42.660 eighth that's chapter one of the book uh we think probably came to England with Catherine of Aragon

00:05:48.060 the Spanish princess when she came to marry Prince Arthur Henry VIII's older brother

00:05:52.120 in 1501 and there are other examples Philip II of Spain had an African in his entourage when

00:05:58.060 he came to marry Mary Tudor and yes and there are merchants like Hector Nunez from Portugal who has

00:06:06.660 africans in his household later in the elizabethan period so so that's another route uh because um

00:06:14.020 there were there was a much larger black population in um in spain and portugal and to some extent

00:06:20.620 italy in this period because they had initiated the the enslavement of of africans uh the first

00:06:28.440 enslaved africans arrived in portugal in 1444 so there's quite an established population there and

00:06:34.320 they also begin trafficking enslaved Africans across the Atlantic in the 16th century and 0.71

00:06:40.380 so that's where we find the third way when privateers who are sort of legal pirates

00:06:45.920 or somebody like Francis Drake captures Spanish or Portuguese ships at sea or raids Spanish ports

00:06:52.700 in the Caribbean and captures everyone on board including enslaved Africans and brings them back

00:06:59.360 to England. So that's the sort of the third way. So it all sort of kicks off with just more global 0.88

00:07:06.460 travel by British ships or encountering, they're going to other places where there's already either 0.57

00:07:12.440 they're going to Africa or they're going to places where Africans have been taken or brought

00:07:16.800 due to the slave trade. But I do think it's important to note that Britain was not at this

00:07:22.160 time engaging in the slave trade. They were not importing people for slavery reasons, right?

00:07:27.940 right so um we know that john hawkins did initiate trafficking enslaved africans in the elizabethan

00:07:36.600 period in the 1560s the early years of elizabeth the first reign and she and other courtiers

00:07:42.140 actually did get involved in sponsoring those voyages as well uh it's not the first one but

00:07:47.400 once that proved profitable uh they got involved in in the second one and but he he ultimately

00:07:53.840 dropped it um not for any moral reasons but because it wasn't working out because england

00:08:00.040 didn't have any of their own colonies at this point and he was trying to sell to spanish colonies

00:08:05.340 and the spaniards weren't very happy about that and they attacked his uh fleet in in 1568 the

00:08:11.280 final effort that he made uh there was a big fight and it was a disaster for him and so he stopped

00:08:18.320 he stopped um trafficking africans at that point so it's this kind of

00:08:23.840 So that's kind of the aberration in the broader scheme of the Tudor period where we're not trafficking Africans.

00:08:31.000 Again, for economic reasons, because we don't have our own colonies, we don't need that enslaved workforce in the colonies.

00:08:37.160 And that's something that develops in the 17th century in Barbados and Virginia in the early 17th century. 0.68

00:08:43.420 That demand develops.

00:08:44.640 but also you know that we're not we don't need enslaved labor in the british isles either

00:08:51.080 because we haven't got those high labor intensive crops or that kind of economic setup so

00:08:56.960 that's part of the reason that that these africans in england there's also this kind of concept of

00:09:03.220 free soil so you know writers at the time talk about if you set foot on english soil you become

00:09:09.140 free and there are at least actually two africans who themselves testified to having become free

00:09:15.680 because they had visited england and there's another court case with that hector nunez that

00:09:20.120 merchant i mentioned who complains to uh the court of requests that he's he has a an african

00:09:29.060 who had run away from his service and he realizes there's no law of the lands to force him

00:09:34.980 to come back you know and he said I was surprised to find this I thought the law would be same here

00:09:40.180 as in my native Portugal but it was actually a bit different I just when I was reading through

00:09:46.420 your book I I was struck by this quote I'm just going to read your own words back to you

00:09:50.120 so you mentioned domestic service may sound a little better than slavery today but there's

00:09:55.000 no shame in being a tutor servant and I think that's a good distinction because so much of what

00:10:01.600 especially in America, people think about black history. It's specifically just shadow slavery

00:10:08.720 and human trafficking. But what you're talking about and what you found in your research are

00:10:13.180 people working as servants in Tudor England. And it seems like they're doing the same sort of work

00:10:18.900 that a white person could be doing. It's not, they're being paid for their work and it's sort

00:10:25.120 of a noble occupation i guess can you talk a bit about that not no not typically noble sort of a

00:10:32.380 respectable i guess yeah i mean i would say occupation i would say that it was an occupation

00:10:37.300 that occupied large numbers of uh of british people it certainly had nothing to do with sort

00:10:43.900 of racial backgrounds so so i think it's not unusual and i think you can compare their experience

00:10:50.760 with that of white servants and and not find you know any substantial differences uh so i think i

00:10:58.140 think that was the point i was making there although read when you read those words back i

00:11:02.020 mean i'd also say there's no shame in being an enslaved person and actually you know their

00:11:07.640 their survival uh the way you know the way they resisted um even in day-to-day way you know is

00:11:14.040 something to be admired you know I do find frustrations in the literature sometimes people

00:11:20.600 use this phrase enslaved servant which is really confusing usually they use it more like in the

00:11:27.220 18th century in the English context but it's like well either they're a servant or they're enslaved

00:11:32.100 but they can't be both but I think it's because they're thinking of domestic service I suppose

00:11:37.320 they're using servant to mean they're a kind of household servant but it's a bit it's a bit

00:11:42.160 confusing yeah well I mean the wording is we're applying contemporary words to to the past and

00:11:48.480 that actually reminds me of could you explain how you track down the people who you found for your

00:11:53.440 book sometimes sometimes it's their surname but that's not always a hundred percent like people

00:11:58.800 have a surname like black man which is I was very very particular about this because I think there

00:12:06.140 is some room for confusion potentially and I I was very I was perhaps on the conservative side of

00:12:11.020 i wouldn't just take a surname um so reasonable blackman in the book is also described as black

00:12:16.880 more uh in one of the sources so i really wanted those ethnic descriptors in the source so there

00:12:23.900 may be other africans in tudor england whose ethnicity was never recorded and therefore we

00:12:29.400 don't know whether they're african or not and sometimes and that's probably true because you

00:12:33.180 know sometimes you have multiple sources about the same person but only one of them mentions their

00:12:38.380 ethnicity so i'm looking for terms like blackamoor was the most common word used to describe an

00:12:45.060 african in this period uh and then i think about 40 percent of my sources used the word blackamoor

00:12:51.160 uh but there are other words um you know negro was used and uh so was uh ethiope uh because

00:12:59.160 they used the word ethiopia to sort of as a broad reference to africa rather than to modern ethiopia

00:13:05.320 particularly uh so so that that was the kind of stuff i was looking for and you know i found

00:13:12.320 references in quite a wide range of sources and parish registers give us the sort of numbers and

00:13:17.940 distribution across the country from baptisms burials marriages and uh there are tax so there

00:13:25.420 are tax returns because there was this alien poll tax so if you were an alien another unusual word

00:13:33.380 if you were if you were a foreigner you had to pay a poll text so it turns up there and uh

00:13:40.420 you know that there were wills where people actually interestingly in the wills they're

00:13:45.320 african people being left money by their employers not being left as property which is something i

00:13:51.920 found uh you know in my late in my current in my research for my new book heiresses which is set in

00:13:57.980 the later period where britain was at the forefront of enslavement and you find wills with long lists

00:14:03.800 probate inventories of all the people that they owned that they're passing on to their descendants

00:14:08.680 so it is that striking contrast there and the most exciting sources often are court cases

00:14:14.980 where because then you get a bit of drama in them because there's you know implicit conflict and

00:14:21.220 you get a bit more detail about people's lives well i mean you say that and that makes me think

00:14:27.080 right away about one of the people you profile in your book are all really interesting really

00:14:31.480 fascinating people but i was especially fascinated by jacques francis the the salvage diver there is

00:14:37.560 a court case involved in that but first just the concept that people were doing diving in the tutor

00:14:44.660 era i didn't think that the technology existed can you explain his work so jacques francis was

00:14:51.960 a salvage diver living in Southampton in the south of England in the reign of Henry VIII

00:14:59.100 and he was part of a team that were employed to salvage guns from the Mary Rose which was

00:15:05.900 Henry VIII's flagship that had sunk on its way to go and fight the French in this really sort

00:15:11.720 of dramatic fashion with most of the sailors on board dying and you know it's kind of because

00:15:17.300 people didn't swim I just wanted to mention that too I found that interesting yes the

00:15:21.780 most europeans couldn't swim so that meant that it wasn't just diving that was a special skill

00:15:26.220 it was swimming as well uh but you find you know a lot of africans in the early modern world did

00:15:31.340 know how to swim and dive and they were good with canoes as well there's a historian called kevin

00:15:36.440 dawson who's written about this he's based in california he's actually a diver himself so i

00:15:41.700 mean it was fascinating uh in researching the technology or lack of uh of diving deep sea

00:15:49.340 diving uh during this period it's absolutely fascinating it wasn't you know they didn't have

00:15:55.080 scuba equipment but there were things like a diving bell where you would submerge a big bell

00:16:01.140 underwater and that gave you a kind of pocket of air so that you could kind of keep popping back

00:16:05.720 to that and getting a new breath and found this great story about leonardo da vinci inventing some

00:16:12.000 diving equipment but then refusing to publish the details because he felt that it would just be used

00:16:18.600 for warfare and you know and scuttling your your enemy's ship and that sort of thing so so he then

00:16:24.740 yeah we don't know whether it would ever have worked so yeah so you find him him doing this

00:16:29.600 in Southampton uh yeah which is just fascinating isn't it it blew my mind honestly like just the

00:16:36.040 fact that there was not just that he had this ability and the skill and he'd been trained but

00:16:40.700 that there was a company like oh did your ship sink like hire these guys you know just we'll

00:16:45.040 come in we'll we'll salvage we'll see what we can get out of your your shipwreck so he was using

00:16:49.220 techniques also that people today it's called free diving I think where you just kind of train

00:16:54.260 yourself to hold your breath for a long time and I don't know how you do make yourself okay with

00:16:59.200 the pressure that's down there yeah I think that is something that people people do now and and at

00:17:05.180 the time it was like part of the culture in West Africa just from from childhood you know that it

00:17:12.860 was just something people did and knew how to do and it was you know quite common knowledge even

00:17:18.660 in england that that was something that the africans could do and you find that in the

00:17:22.300 travel literature even in plays you know somebody says you know i will more like learn to dive into

00:17:29.000 the sea and and this sort of thing so so um yeah it's amazing and a skip better skill to really be

00:17:35.020 able to to trade on in in england where it was so uncommon uh although you know he is he is part of

00:17:41.220 team led by a guy from Venice Peter Paolo Corsi so it wasn't he wasn't an independent diver in

00:17:48.100 that sense but we think he was paid by the Italian guy because there's a reference to him them

00:17:53.680 arguing about him about wages and you know again you have this court case so there's there's loads

00:17:58.740 of information on the the broader kind of context of this drama because Jack Francis is in court

00:18:04.440 testifying because because his employer Corsi has been accused of stealing tin from another wreck

00:18:11.720 so it's quite interesting I gave a talk about this at the the historical diving society

00:18:17.060 oh a couple of years ago now and and it was really interesting because they

00:18:21.360 Alex Hildred who's from the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth was sharing details of me and various

00:18:27.800 wrecks from this period that have been found in the right sort of area and you know I don't think

00:18:32.900 it's been pinned down but it would be fascinating there was potential that maybe one of these actual

00:18:37.340 wrecks has been found is the one that Jacques Francis dived on uh not the Mary Rose but the

00:18:42.460 one where the theft is meant to have happened so because he's testifying saying oh it's down there

00:18:46.980 I know what I saw and you know that wasn't you know it wasn't how the other guys were saying

00:18:50.920 and yeah so I found that absolutely fascinating it's I agree I think that court cases I mean

00:18:56.700 there's so many people who are not royal we don't know about them and you only kind of hear about

00:19:01.480 them if there is a court case sometimes so it's always something especially interesting

00:19:05.420 and they do have that bit you know when anyone testifies in in this case it was in the high

00:19:10.240 court of admiralty but when everyone testifies you know it says they have to give a bit a brief

00:19:14.680 description of who they are their name their age where they're from and that's where we get a bit

00:19:20.200 of that biography for jeff francis the fact that he had this skill set like if he's growing up

00:19:25.840 somewhere in the coast of africa perhaps where a lot of ships get shipwrecked so the people there

00:19:31.260 would be able to sort of train themselves on the shipwrecks that are there would that make sense

00:19:34.960 yeah so he says in the sort of latin text of the that he's uh from insula de guinea so like an

00:19:43.680 island off the coast of of guinea uh which is what they used to refer to sort of west africa

00:19:48.920 quite broadly but historians we've sort of concluded it's most likely that this was

00:19:54.320 argwem island off the coast of mauritania because that was a place where there were a lot of shipwrecks

00:19:59.780 as well uh so that's that's the current theory but yes and broadly yes but it's just it's it's

00:20:07.280 such a fascinating and interesting story and i just love the what i find very interesting and

00:20:12.220 i guess ironic is that in contemporary america especially there's a stereotype that black people

00:20:18.280 can't swim that they're not good at swimming and yet you see back then it was the convert like the

00:20:24.440 only people you could call on to do this would be people like him. Yeah. And there are examples of

00:20:30.580 that in the UK as well. But it says a lot more about inequality and even segregation than it

00:20:36.980 does. It's very much a cultural thing, you know, with the history of there being swimming pools

00:20:42.840 where black people weren't allowed to go and just not the facilities to learn or the time or means

00:20:49.840 to pay for swimming lessons or whatever and so it's very much cultural modern modern racism

00:20:55.120 actually that leads to occasionally you know potentially black people being less likely to

00:20:59.720 be swimmers which is really unfair i mean i guess you see it play out in the olympic pool don't you

00:21:04.600 yeah it's quite interesting um but i think there are a lot of initiatives now to try and reverse

00:21:10.680 that and i mean there's also this sort of side sideline to this story of uh you know gender 0.91

00:21:15.600 element of it of hair so you know because um black women hair like they spend a lot of money 1.00

00:21:22.640 on their hair and doing very ornate hairstyles and things and so then then they don't necessarily 1.00

00:21:28.060 want to go into a swimming pool and agree with it all although i definitely saw somebody invented

00:21:33.040 a swimming cap specifically to solve this problem that you know has a lot more space in it so that

00:21:38.980 that really interesting but yeah it's all cultural you know in a completely different context to

00:21:44.220 to the uh the tutor period so speaking of of black women you profile several black women

00:21:50.980 in in your book and someone who doesn't get a chapter but she's certainly mentioned a lot

00:21:54.800 in the chapter you have diego the circumnavigator and then there's a woman named maria who comes up

00:22:01.240 in that story so people will need to read the book to get all the context of everything but

00:22:05.880 Could you explain Diego and Maria and what their situations were?

00:22:11.660 So Diego was a man who was enslaved in Panama in Nombra de Dios by the Spaniards.

00:22:20.980 But he ends up sailing around the world with Francis Drake.

00:22:25.420 So Francis Drake is raiding the port of Nombra de Dios in 1572.

00:22:30.860 this guy Diego just sort of runs down the quay and jumps on the ship despite the fact the English

00:22:37.300 are shooting at him and demands to be taken aboard and warns them that they're in danger

00:22:42.440 because the Spaniards are on the way although that doesn't seem to have actually been the case

00:22:47.220 so he's kind of being a bit of a trickster and sort of using what he can to join the English

00:22:52.700 because it was common knowledge in the Americas as well that the people were not enslaved in

00:23:00.560 England so the I think the idea is he's escaping the Spanish enslavement and hoping to find

00:23:05.880 freedom by by being with the English and he then broke as an alliance between Drake and his men

00:23:13.500 and the Simeroons who were these formerly enslaved people who'd run away from the Spaniards and set

00:23:19.100 up their own settlements in the hinterland and they successfully steal a whole lot of treasure

00:23:25.760 from the Spaniards because the significance of Nombres de Dios and it was that prior to the

00:23:31.660 building of the Panama Canal, the Spaniards had all this silver mines in Peru and Ecuador and

00:23:39.020 to get it back to Spain, they sailed it to the Isthmus of Panama and then marched it across the

00:23:44.700 Isthmus on the back of mules and then got another, you know, the silver fleet came over from Spain

00:23:49.720 and picked it up at Nombra de Dios. 0.97

00:23:52.840 So Drake was hoping to get it,

00:23:54.820 but he'd messed up his timing.

00:23:56.620 And so then they had to attack the mule train

00:23:58.680 next time it came across the isthmus.

00:24:01.300 It's quite an adventure. 0.54

00:24:03.180 And then Diego goes back to Plymouth with Drake

00:24:06.860 and ends up coming on his circumnavigation voyage

00:24:10.480 a few years later,

00:24:12.160 but unfortunately dying along the way.

00:24:15.000 And then Maria is a woman who,

00:24:17.280 she's pregnant by one of the men,

00:24:19.400 by one of drake's men and then she just gets kind of well we don't know who the father was

00:24:23.960 yeah so on this circumnavigation voyage once they uh get to the west coast of south america

00:24:32.920 once they've passed the straits of magellan which no englishman has done before they start raiding

00:24:38.360 the spanish ports along the coast uh that are completely unguarded because there's never been

00:24:45.640 enemies there and uh they they actually pick up one or two africans on on several of these these

00:24:53.480 raids and or attacks on on shipping uh and maria is is captured from from a spanish ship that's on

00:25:01.840 its way to the spanish colonies from the philippines i think and uh and uh she yeah she

00:25:09.840 she certainly by the time they reach indonesia she is heavily pregnant and they actually

00:25:16.380 abandon her heavily pregnant on an island uh in indonesia which they call crab island

00:25:22.800 and it's pretty yeah it's pretty a pretty bleak story uh although i mean there were there were

00:25:29.560 different interpretations you know well certainly she's not abandoned alone she's abandoned with

00:25:35.000 two other African men Diego's dead by this point but they abandoned her with two other African men

00:25:42.700 and some you know one of one testimony says that they were left there to found their own settlement

00:25:48.000 but it seems a bit dubious especially when you read the rest of the text about the voyage and

00:25:54.100 it says there was actually no running water on this island uh although the English had stayed

00:25:58.920 there for for a while so it wasn't completely uninhabitable but it was a bit of a dubious

00:26:04.080 sort of line uh but but i worked out the times i don't think anyone who'd written about it before

00:26:09.220 was a woman so i looked up you know you know exactly nine months earlier yeah i was trying

00:26:14.640 to i was trying to think about um you know the course of the pregnancy and if she's described

00:26:20.180 as heavily pregnant on the date she's left behind how early so would she have been of the would she

00:26:27.100 have been impregnated and it's you know it's possible that it could have been prior to her

00:26:32.680 joining drake's ship but it's like really hard to know uh for sure although you know there is

00:26:39.060 there's an interesting theory that it couldn't have i mean you discuss about like the power

00:26:43.300 dynamics on the ship and whether you know whether it could have been drake's child but

00:26:49.380 but then actually drake never had any children he had sort of two wives i think and never had

00:26:54.600 any children so i think i really upset a drake enthusiast in an article i wrote about this before

00:27:01.700 the book uh where i called him impotent i think and uh actually i think the guy would have preferred

00:27:08.420 i said infertile uh basically i don't know the distinction being that this guy could not cope

00:27:14.160 with the idea that his big hero drake you know couldn't get it up uh was all right so that was

00:27:20.500 that was pretty funny i don't know if i'm allowed to say that on the podcast you can it's vulgar

00:27:24.520 history you can say whatever you want yeah right okay i'll lean into that um yeah so he he wasn't

00:27:30.040 very happy about that but um but i know they were ever going to know who the father was uh but either

00:27:36.340 way it probably you know they're meant to be religious christians that are protestants uh you

00:27:41.560 know and they are having religious services on the ship so coming back to uh to england with a

00:27:49.300 woman and child uh is probably not gonna not wouldn't look good uh for these christian men

00:27:56.880 many of whom were married obviously so so I'm not sure if they were married or not to be honest 0.99

00:28:01.660 it wouldn't have looked good to come back to England with a an African woman and her child 1.00

00:28:06.740 so well no it's not even the point she's African it wouldn't have looked good to come back to 1.00

00:28:12.680 England with an unmarried woman and a small child so that's potentially another reason why they might 1.00

00:28:18.580 have left her behind also I mean you don't it's not it's not a fun bit well anyway yeah let's

00:28:23.840 know that yeah it's it's it's an interesting like the way that you put together the research for

00:28:30.920 this book there's a lot of here's an interesting story and then but we don't know what happened

00:28:34.860 afterwards so there's a lot of just kind of you're making your best guesses but like even the court

00:28:40.160 case with Jacques like we don't know the result of that it's just kind of we know that he testified

00:28:44.360 or do we know the the result of the court case I forget uh do we know I know I know of course he

00:28:51.700 was in prison for something else later wasn't he I think he was I think I think we can definitely

00:28:59.360 say that we don't we don't really know what we don't know what happened to Jack Francis after

00:29:03.540 the court case we don't know what happened to him we know we don't know what happened to him

00:29:06.560 and that's what's more interesting in the context of your book and now for a quick advertising break

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00:33:29.280 In terms of the people who you profile, well, you mentioned that, you know, Maria and who is the father of her child and stuff.

00:33:36.860 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.

00:33:44.020 you find he clearly married and there wasn't very many African women in England. So he probably

00:33:50.680 would have married a white person. And this is sort of at the same time, you know, William

00:33:56.720 Shakespeare is writing his plays. I found that interesting in your book, you kind of have several

00:34:00.640 examples of dialogue from Shakespeare's plays. So in Othello, for instance, there's distrust and

00:34:06.940 some people are uncomfortable with Othello and Desdemona's interracial relationship. But what

00:34:10.780 you found in actual Tudor times was that wasn't that was maybe not the case for the people living

00:34:17.220 then what did you find out about that yeah so the supposition of there were you know like as you say

00:34:24.380 there were African men who were described as married or having children and I did suppose

00:34:31.200 that their women were probably white English women but there are actual records of marriages

00:34:38.020 between English people and African people in some of the parish registers as well so it definitely

00:34:43.820 happened and more broadly outside of marriage there are several children of mixed parentage 0.95

00:34:51.100 as well that turn up in the in the baptism record so it was definitely happening and I wouldn't

00:34:56.920 speculate on the identity of the dark lady but you know Shakespeare writes sonnets to a dark lady

00:35:02.920 and I have no idea who that would be but he definitely had the potential to meet African

00:35:09.780 women in London at the time. It's interesting just in terms of the Shakespeare plays as well

00:35:14.520 because there's Othello and Titus Andronicus feature characters who he describes as Amour

00:35:19.120 and I don't think either of those characters are meant to be culturally Muslim so it's kind of

00:35:24.000 that's a word like you're saying black Amour is a word that was used and a lot of these

00:35:28.280 African people came to England via Spain. But you talk in your book about people who are

00:35:35.460 baptized as Christian. So for instance, Mary Phyllis, she came from Morocco and we know

00:35:42.320 that she was baptized. So England is such a Christian country. Can you talk a bit about

00:35:48.880 Mary Phyllis and her experience? Yeah, I mean, coming from Morocco,

00:35:53.400 it's highly likely her family were muslim but she comes to ink to london as a child

00:36:00.380 six or seven years old and so she would have had limited understanding of any religion at that

00:36:07.680 point she's baptized in st bottles old gate in east london at the age of 20 in 1597 and we know

00:36:16.320 a bit more about her baptism because a lot of these these parish registers tend to be one-liners

00:36:21.000 and you've got a name an ethnic descriptor and not a lot else uh but but with her there was this

00:36:27.800 amazing parish clerk for St Bottle of Salgate that that wrote for 40 years just sort of wrote

00:36:34.060 uh a memorandum book of sort of events and happenings in the parish uh and and he writes

00:36:40.120 quite a lot about this baptism because it was you know still fairly unusual we learn a bit more about

00:36:46.360 her who her employer was who her previous employer was and that's quite interesting and i think it

00:36:53.620 is potentially surprising that she's lived in england for so long without being baptized and

00:36:58.720 so that there's clearly a different attitude with her her current employer who's a seamstress called

00:37:04.140 millicent porter who actually stands as her godmother and so sort of encouraging her to learn

00:37:10.060 the christian religion um but it's also potentially uh you know at the age of 20

00:37:16.360 she might want to get married there are other examples of africans being baptized and then

00:37:21.800 married shortly afterwards so we again we don't know but it's just one example of i think i found

00:37:28.560 over 60 baptisms of africans in in the parish registers so it was it was definitely a a concerted

00:37:35.800 effort. It's, you know, trying to put myself back in, in this time period and to understand what

00:37:43.760 the experiences of these people were like, it's what's, you can't ever really, no one can really

00:37:48.720 put yourself in that mindset, but living in the world that we live in now, especially with the

00:37:54.240 way that racial understanding is right now, but like, this is what the black community is. And

00:37:59.680 in Tudor England, it was very much like, these are people from Africa via often Spain.

00:38:05.800 And, 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 color?

00:38:23.860 is that that's kind of the impression i got from your book was when we were talking about you know

00:38:28.380 like a servant might be might be a black person might be a white person and their salary is

00:38:32.980 probably going to be the same like in a later cultural context in england you see things like

00:38:39.160 anna of denmark has portraits done where a black servant is almost decorative next to her but that

00:38:46.520 was kind of that was sort of moving on to the later stewart era during the tudor period it seems

00:38:52.100 people i don't know can you just talk about the the context of what it meant to be a black person

00:38:57.120 at that time like and how different or similar they might have been treated well i think the

00:39:01.940 black groom in the portrait event of denmark so early 17th century i think he is wearing very

00:39:08.240 nice clothes but i think he is painted it is a portrait you know you can see his face he looks

00:39:13.320 like a real person it's not just a sort of decoration but i take your point annoyingly

00:39:18.980 her household records don't survive from that period otherwise I would hope that we might be

00:39:24.360 able to find out his name you never know there might still be one a letter discovered or something

00:39:29.080 from from the royal court that tells us more so I think you know I wrote this book almost 10 years

00:39:36.860 ago and I think my understanding of of race and racism has developed a little but I mean I'd still

00:39:45.220 stand by the point that religion was one of the most important ways that people judged each other

00:39:51.500 in this period. In Tuna England, if you weren't Christian and after the Reformation, if you were

00:39:56.920 not a Protestant, then you did not really have full civic rights at all. And in order to in any 0.84

00:40:03.100 way engage in that society, you really needed to be going to church. So I think class is also

00:40:10.560 another really key element uh unfortunately still going strong in in england uh of uh how people

00:40:17.800 treated each other and so for example when you do have like the moroccan ambassador coming to the

00:40:24.700 court of elizabeth the first he was treated with the dignity of that status um just as other

00:40:31.020 diplomats might might have been treated whereas you know if you have somebody who's arrived off

00:40:36.380 a privateering ship they're not going to be accorded the same respect but equally they're

00:40:42.380 not necessarily as you say tend to be treated much worse than than their white um or contemporaries

00:40:48.880 and uh you know like i said earlier the african merchants are seen as people that you can do

00:40:55.780 business with uh and so but i think that there is a complicator in terms of sort of not what i now

00:41:02.380 know about intersectionality of you know it's not one or the other it's not like just you can

00:41:08.300 suffer class prejudice and racial prejudice at the same time for example but i think the

00:41:15.540 understanding of race was very different at the time but i mean i suppose i so i suppose i would

00:41:19.700 qualify the argument in the book by saying if you're walking down the street and you see a

00:41:25.240 black person there could be a question mark in your mind as to their religious status which

00:41:29.540 wouldn't be there um for a white person and similarly with class you see an african walking

00:41:36.260 down a tudor london street they're not going to be a lord so so i think there is there is a slight

00:41:43.180 kind of complication there but i and and i i think also the the sorts of sources that i used

00:41:51.800 did not kind of bring up a lot of any real evidence i could find of racial prejudice

00:41:57.820 explicitly but then that is you might not always expect to find that in a parish register

00:42:04.000 yeah exactly exactly yeah i think the literature of the time is is perhaps what we should be

00:42:09.580 examining in context with the reality but i suppose my argument is that whatever it says

00:42:14.640 in the literature in terms of negative language around race it doesn't seem to have played out

00:42:20.180 in terms of people's civic rights and you know africans were being paid wages allowed to testify

00:42:26.260 in court intermarrying with the local population so it's it's it's it's in reality it seems that

00:42:34.060 racial prejudice that certainly wasn't you know holding holding people back in that way and i

00:42:39.700 think i think one of the key cases again i mean i my i always remember my university supervisor

00:42:45.240 saying it's harder to argue from an absence but you know in the case of edward swarthy he's an

00:42:51.640 african man who's a porter in rural gloucestershire for a gentleman called sir edward winter and he

00:42:57.400 actually whips a white servant called john guy in the hall at white cross manor in front of you know

00:43:03.760 20 people because john guy has angered his employer their employer so much that that he's punished

00:43:10.360 and you know there are several testimonies to this event and none of them say oh it was awful 0.94

00:43:18.080 because this black guy was whipping a white guy 0.93

00:43:20.060 and that made it extra humiliating. 0.97

00:43:21.900 There's no kind of racial viewing of it.

00:43:24.660 It's all about the class dynamic.

00:43:26.960 It's saying John Guy was a very well-respected,

00:43:30.140 high-status servant who was well-educated.

00:43:33.360 He'd actually been educated alongside the sons of the house.

00:43:37.720 He was managing the family ironworks.

00:43:41.260 And it's the idea that he, this high-status servant,

00:43:43.560 is being whipped by a porter who's a lower-status servant

00:43:46.500 that they will remark on they're not discussing any kind of racial dynamic and i think that's

00:43:51.980 quite telling yeah well as you said it's hard to argue for an absence of something and i don't mean

00:43:57.800 to suggest to the listeners and i don't want to give you the impression that i read your book i

00:44:01.260 thought wow nobody was racist in tutor england but i just mean it was a different it was a different

00:44:07.320 context different cultural context i mean it was a very xenophobic time you talk in your book about

00:44:12.120 there was really anti-immigrant um feelings then um and somebody was obviously be from away so

00:44:21.720 there were anti-immigrant uh you know riots in london in the 1590s but they're all um

00:44:28.600 complaining about flemish people and french people uh that there's no mention in in those

00:44:34.980 riots at all of african people at all and again i think it's partly a numbers game you know there

00:44:41.160 were not enough Africans in Tudor England really to upset anyone that much really um compared

00:44:50.000 compared to to other nationalities but yeah it was definitely a very xenophobic period although

00:44:55.560 yeah I don't think we're in a glass house to throw stones right now yeah and how different

00:45:01.000 are things but so I also just wanted to um if you could clarify because you do mention in your book

00:45:06.060 there's some people have a misunderstanding of elizabeth the first um had uh i don't know if

00:45:12.040 it's an edict or a proclamation um there's a can you explain what she did it's funny i was just

00:45:19.420 thinking about that because this is one of the only documents where it does actually suggest that

00:45:23.800 it says that africans are taking jobs that english people that christians could be having

00:45:28.620 uh but this is a that's a draft document that's never actually sent around

00:45:33.160 so uh if you go if you go to my website i wrote an entire article about these uh these proclamations

00:45:39.780 and a blog post based on it and so the kind of popular narrative has been that elizabeth first

00:45:46.880 attempted to expel africans from the realm in 1596 but when i dug into it it was a it was a much

00:45:54.340 less dramatic and more complicated episode but essentially there was a merchant from Lübeck

00:46:04.580 in modern Germany called Caspar van Senden and he had been bringing back English prisoners of war

00:46:12.980 from Lisbon during the Elizabethan war with Spain and he wanted some recompense for his troubles

00:46:21.520 And he was trying to get some money or something of value out of the council, Elizabeth's council.

00:46:30.220 And he teamed up with a kind of disgraced nobleman called Sir Thomas Shirley.

00:46:36.520 And between them, they start petitioning the Privy Council. 0.99

00:46:40.040 And what they are asking for is the right to go around England and picking up any Africans they can find 0.98

00:46:47.780 and taking them away with them, presumably for sale in Lisbon,

00:46:53.360 where Aaron Sladen is a going concern.

00:46:56.860 So there is a letter from the Privy Council that is sent.

00:47:02.880 So, I mean, one of the things I say is,

00:47:04.860 I'm pretty sure Elizabeth I was not actually present

00:47:07.460 at any of these Privy Council meetings,

00:47:09.200 and so this whole thing may have been operating on a level

00:47:11.740 that she wasn't even involved with.

00:47:13.540 but there is a letter sent out to the authorities by the privy council saying you know you please

00:47:22.480 help casper van senden but that the africans could only be handed over to van senden with

00:47:27.920 the consent of their masters what's really interesting is that i then found these documents

00:47:34.960 in the sesal papers so robert sesal is the head of the privy council by this point and i found

00:47:41.860 these petitions to settle from van senden and shirley and it essentially boils down to van

00:47:48.360 senden writes to settle saying that late that original letter was no use to me i've been around

00:47:53.640 the country and no one will let me take the african servants away uh so can you please get

00:48:00.200 the council to issue a letter to some stronger purpose and he includes a draft of what he'd like

00:48:06.640 the letter to say which is a version that's much stronger and uses some of that stronger language

00:48:11.380 i was mentioning and also kind of gets away deletes the whole bit about consent and just says

00:48:18.120 i want to have them but the key point is that that version was never sent out that was never

00:48:24.940 promulgated it only exists in draft form and so there was never any expulsion so so it's like that

00:48:32.380 draft has been read as an actual thing that was sent out by the queen but actually it was just

00:48:37.660 a draft in the Cecil papers. So as far as the evidence I've found goes, there were no Africans

00:48:44.560 actually taken away by Van Zandt. So it's one of these sort of red herrings. It sounds a bit

00:48:51.920 complicated and the headline keeps on being reiterated. It's one of those ones where there's

00:48:57.420 a fact in inverted commas that just sort of keeps on getting repeated without everyone necessarily

00:49:03.520 going deep into the the archival evidence well and you mentioned you have a blog post about that

00:49:09.460 so on your website which is miranda kaufman.com so people can can get more background on that

00:49:15.680 there miranda so i wanted to just remind everybody that so your book black tutors the untold story

00:49:22.720 is available in north america and in the uk and it's been such a successful book i think you've

00:49:29.280 been chatting to people about it for 10 years now. So what a legacy. But you also have a new

00:49:35.780 Ur book that we talked about before on this podcast, Erasis, Marriage, Inheritance and

00:49:40.320 Caribbean Slavery. And so that's available in hardback in North America. And it's coming out

00:49:46.860 this month, September in paperback in the UK, right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Go after you

00:49:52.420 need it. Exactly. And I love, can you talk a bit about the cover, the paperback cover? Because

00:49:58.400 it's a different cover from the hardcover i suppose just dialing back i don't know if you

00:50:03.260 can put this in there but i i mean i think i think it's important to note that not everyone agrees

00:50:08.100 with my interpretation of the lives of africans in this period and there are some other key key

00:50:14.040 key uh writers on this um there's a book by mts abid called black lives in the english archives

00:50:20.040 which is uh you know a key text although yeah we disagree on quite a few things uh and there's

00:50:26.520 another british author called onyeka nubia who's now in two books about this period uh and he he

00:50:32.920 goes in a lot of depth as well into the interpretation of those casper van senden

00:50:37.180 documents uh as and there's there's there's quite a lot of work on that and yeah and i again i think

00:50:43.700 on the van senden stuff i do cross-reference that in that in that blog post as well uh but i can

00:50:49.160 maybe i can share the link for your for your listeners at some point i it's jumping back to

00:50:54.480 your paperback question yeah with uh black tudors it wasn't published separately in north america

00:51:00.540 but with heiresses i had an american publisher as well and so i'm published by pegasus in the us and

00:51:06.660 and one world in the uk and so uh that it meant there were two covers for the hardback you know

00:51:13.820 the american edition has quite a different cover to the uk edition your listeners can look it up

00:51:19.920 But the hardback in the UK was sort of 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.

00:51:36.960 and then uh the u.s version was quite a sort of dark green color but based on which was the

00:51:43.380 background of uh another a portrait of another of the heiresses an interesting woman called

00:51:48.480 francis diell who was of mixed heritage from jamaica and they've cut her face out and put

00:51:54.680 the plantation image where her face ought to be so your listeners will have to write in and say

00:52:00.700 which one they think is more effective there was a completely sort of different vision again for

00:52:05.900 the UK paperback that's coming out in September and it's it's definitely more colourful I am

00:52:10.500 afraid I do I do like those colours and it's it's turquoise with yellow lettering on it

00:52:17.160 and it has the same heiress Mary Ramsey as the UK edition hardback edition had but in all her

00:52:25.380 glorious blue she has the beautiful blue dress it's a portrait that's now in the National Gallery

00:52:30.360 in london uh and then we wanted another heiress on the other side because it's you they're kind

00:52:36.460 of slightly cut in half so that you can see their outlines and half their faces and that's i think 0.79

00:52:42.040 meant to make them representative of more women by sort of cutting them in half uh and the other

00:52:47.800 one is actually because i do have but we found portraits of all of the women in the book but

00:52:53.820 they're of varying quality you know some of them are just prints some of them are um

00:52:58.360 silhouettes or whatever so they're not going to work on a high glossy cover so the other heiress

00:53:05.400 in the yellow dress is actually the mother of one of the heiresses um in the book although she

00:53:12.520 herself was also an heiress so she's definitely an heiress and that one's actually in the frick

00:53:17.200 collection in new york now so so it's a transatlantic cover and the image in the background

00:53:22.760 is a plantation scene from quite a certainly a well-used and well-replicated image of a plantation

00:53:32.480 in Antigua and it's quite interesting the debate around that in terms of a lot of these images were

00:53:41.680 created for the enslavers and so are sort of necessarily very idealized and quite far from

00:53:50.280 very far from the reality of what life was really like on these plantations uh certainly an image on

00:53:55.980 the book they're probably wearing a lot more clothes than they would have done and you just

00:53:59.140 have this sort of more of a bucolic image whereas actually it was more like a forced labor camp with

00:54:04.100 sort of shocking brutality and horrible things going on but at the same time i wouldn't want to

00:54:11.000 have wanted to put a really brutal image on the book cover because that is just sort of almost

00:54:16.060 repeating that violence all over again and assaulting the viewer so yeah so was there

00:54:22.640 anything else about it yeah I saw the paper cover like oh that's very different from the other just

00:54:26.960 the colorful I don't I I saw you post it I'm like oh that's a nice cover and yeah I mean I'd add

00:54:34.000 that I definitely don't get the final say on these things you know I definitely write right I end up

00:54:40.320 writing very long a particular feedback emails whenever they send me a picture and they probably

00:54:45.020 wish that I wasn't involved at all but we'll see we'll see I think it's quite eye-catching

00:54:51.420 the paperback I like it I think so too and I hope that you know I think just the bright colors might

00:54:58.260 just catch people's eye who maybe didn't notice a darker color of the hardcover before but everybody

00:55:02.480 loves a paperback so it's it's good it's available in this new format and so can you let people know

00:55:07.460 if they want to follow you and your work and just see where you're going to be appearing and things

00:55:12.580 you have your website mirandakaufman.com is that the best place people can can follow up with you

00:55:17.980 yeah the website is a good place to go i'm also on various forms of social media at dr miranda

00:55:24.160 kaufman that's perfect and thank you so much for joining me again to talk about this i also

00:55:29.480 appreciate that you mentioned the other other people writing in this area because i think it's

00:55:34.360 it's always so good to read different people's point of view especially on a topic like this

00:55:37.940 where there's so much unknown there's so much kind of fill in the blank or what do we think

00:55:42.360 this means. So I think it's really, I'm going to be looking at those sources as well, just to kind

00:55:46.000 of round out this, this emerging topic of research. So thank you so much for joining me today.

00:55:52.340 Oh, thanks a lot. It was fun.

00:55:57.200 So the book that we were mostly talking about today was Miranda Kaufman's book,

00:56:01.260 Black Tudors, The Untold Story, which is still available everywhere. And her newer book,

00:56:06.060 Eresis, Marriage, Inheritance, and Slavery in the Caribbean is available now in paperback as well,

00:56:11.500 wherever you pick up books. And I think both are well worth a read. And I think it's both

00:56:16.900 helped to sort of develop everyone's understanding of fairly well-known time periods by kind of just

00:56:23.160 filling in in some areas that maybe haven't been explored as fully before. And I really appreciate

00:56:28.920 Miranda taking the time to speak with me about the Black Tudors. And I also appreciate that you

00:56:33.820 recommended some other authors' works that you can look to learn more about this time period,

00:56:37.380 and I will list those books and authors in the notes of this episode. So this podcast,

00:56:43.740 Vulgar History, it's here because of listeners like you. So either you're listening to this on

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Vulgar History - September 16, 2026

Who were the Black Tudors？

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