Black Tudors and the search for sunken guns

When we think of the Tudors (1485-1603), our first thoughts are probably of Henry VIII and his six wives; of Shakespeare and the Globe, and of an England which seems very “English”. But often this particular notion of “Englishness”—so often clung to by the Right—is a code for Whiteness, and for the idea that before colonialism and the immigration which followed it, all of England was a garden. This fantasy, and specifically it’s linking with the Tudor period, was a creation of Imperialists in the 19th Century. Whilst it’s true that before the English embarked on colonialism, England was a very different place, it was also much less powerful: Tudor England was a small and relatively powerless kingdom, far from the centers of European power – a kind of ailing cousin to the massive powers of Spain, of Portugal and even of France. It was also a country which had not yet conceived of slavery as a potential financial project, and a country which had not yet been tainted by the white supremacy which would later be its ideological crutch.

But was the absence of white supremacy in Tudor England merely a function of the complete whiteness of it’s population? It would seem not. Miranda Kauffman’s Black Tudors focuses in on the lives of ten Black Tudors – who they worked for and how and what we can imagine about their private lives. Whilst there were no black aristocrats in Tudor England, class was much more of a defining factor in the period in how you were treated than race – evidenced by the black trumpeter John Blancke earning three times the average servants wage already and petitioning Henry VIII (successfully) for a raise which would double his pay, or by Edward Swarthye, the black Porter, publicly whipping—under the instructions of his master—a white servant in Gloucestershire in 1596. What mattered for the Tudors was not so much your race, but your position in the pecking order.

John Blancke, the trumpeter to Henry VII, as seen in the Westminster Tournament Roll from 1511

In most of the Tudor period, the Portuguese and the Spanish were the major world powers and while their lives were already deeply entangled with and tainted by the slave trade, it wasn’t until the 1640s that England really got involved. After so many indigenous people in North America had been killed or succumbed to disease, the huge boom of colonial crops needed a bigger labour force and it was in this context that the English began enslaving and transporting African people to the Americas. It is not because of the morality of the Tudors that they stayed out of the slave trade, rather just the lack of economic conditions. In fact, in much of the rest of the world, it was well known that England had no slaves, and famously Henry VIII ruled that their air of England was “too sweet for slavery” – telling a Portuguese merchant that he had no right to guard his slave on English soil. This “sweetness” however, was relative and would only last so long.

One of the stories Kauffman tells in her book is of Jacques Francis, a black salvage diver working in England in the 1540s. In 1545 England was at war with France and a huge fleet of 30,000 men was crossing the channel in 235 ships. Henry VIII had gathered his fleet at Portsmouth ready to launch and make a counter attack. At the head of his fleet was the enormous, 91-gun Tudor warship, the Mary Rose. She had been built and launched 34 years earlier and had already sailed and seen battle against the French, the Bretons and the Scots. That year, she had had a huge upgrade, and had been filled with new cannons and guns to the equivalent of about £2 million. The afternoon of their departure, Henry VIII himself ate on the Mary Rose and then when back to Southsea Castle to watch the fleet depart. But in front of his very eyes, before even engaging in battle. the Mary Rose sank in the Solent. Of the 500 men onboard, 470 were drowned.

A detail from the Cowdray engraving of the Battle of the Solent in 1545

Why the Mary Rose sank, historians cannot agree on, but what is sure is that Henry VIII could not afford to lose the precious cannons and equipment inside and so in the months following, hired a scavenging crew to try and bring it back to the surface. It’s hard to imagine life as a professional diver in the the 16th century, especially since most Tudors couldn’t swim, swimming being something that was not at all thought of as a leisure activity or a form of sport, but rather as something dangerous to be avoided. The first crew hired were a crew of 31 Venetians and 60 English sailors who tried to get the boat upright, get ropes underneath it and then lift it back to the surface with other boats, a plan quickly foiled when they broke the mast and were subsequently fired. The second crew that was hired was under the control of another Venetian – Peter Paulo Corsi, who had been living in Southhampton for the last six years. He had a team of eight divers, three of whom we suspect to have been African and one of whom was Jacques Francis.

The best divers in the world were widely believed to come from West Africa in the 16th century and so black people were fairly well represented in salvage crews all around Europe. Francis had been born in the 1520s in what the Tudors called Guinea, probably in what we call Mauritania, and when the Mary Rose sunk he had already been in Southhampton for several years. We don’t know where or when he met his boss Peter, but it would seem likely their paths crossed in Italy, which was third only to Spain and Portugal in terms of black populations in Europe at the time. One of the (few) reasons we have Francis’ name today and we know he was in this crew and that he was black, is that three years after the attempted salvage of the Mary Rose, in a criminal case against his boss brought by merchants who had hired him and his crew to salvage their wreck, he was the first black person to give evidence in a British court.

Based on the evidence he gave, we know he was capable of diving to around ninety feet. After thirty feet you must learn to equalize the pressure and so certainly he was a skilled diver in peak physical condition. Him and his crew managed to retrieve many of the guns and much equipment from the Mary Rose, but could not get the boat herself, whose hull remained visible at low tide for the best part of the next hundred years. It’s a vivid image: a free black diver, maybe with bamboo or even glass goggles and with no breathing apparatus, swimming through a vast Tudor warship, with many hundreds of drowned sailors still trapped inside. It’s an image and story which poses many questions. Where did Francis live and with whom? How did he get along with his neighbours? How did the cold waters of the Solent compare to the waters of his childhood?

It was as late as the 19th century that real developments in breathing apparatus in England were made when a diver named John Deane used a helmet from a coat of armour and a pump and hose to save horses from a burning building in Kent. He and his brother patented the design and eighteen years later a version of it was used to explore the Mary Rose, whose galleys had not been swum through in three hundred years. But after this again she was forgotten until finally being rediscovered in 1971 and until the massive volunteer run diving programme began to excavate the ship at the beginning of the 1980s. By 1982 she was finally fully salvaged and is now on show in Portsmouth for the public to see, having furnished historians with 26,000 Tudor artifacts – a time capsule of everyday Tudor life.

Sadly, all that remains of Jacques Francis are the court proceedings against his boss and a Wikipedia page which describes him as a slave. But Kauffman’s book makes a compelling case for him being a skilled and paid worker. The strong idea in our culture that Black people’s position in England up until abolition was only that of slaves and servants is simply not true. It was entirely possible for people in Tudor England to see black workers as specialists in their fields – be they divers, musicians, tailors or whatever else. The white supremacist ideas linking blackness with an inability to master anything but physical labour, would come later, in the early 17th century, when the imposition of a rigid race-class system would become necessary for the British to maintain order in their colonies in order to control the ongoing production of new cash crops, and in order to justify the murderous regime of slavery.

In the same way as the Mary Rose offered historians a snapshot into Tudor life—being a kind of “English pompeii” as described by one of the 1980s divers—the lives of these Black Tudors which Kauffman has tried to revive and understand give us a window into a relationship to race which would become unimaginable as little as a hundred years later. Far from being a period the Right can fetishize, the Tudor period was one full of popular uprisings, of religious turmoil and of a curiosity and intrepidity for the world outside of England which had not yet been replaced by disdain and and a sense of superiority.