Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677

Imprints of the Invisible

Imtiaz Habib

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317173946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria di letteratura comparata

Containing an urgently needed archival database of historical evidence, this volume includes both a consolidated presentation of the documentary records of black people in Tudor and Stuart England, and an interpretive narrative that confirms and significantly extends the insights of current theoretical excursus on race in early modern England. Here for the first time Imtiaz Habib collects the scattered references to black people-whether from Africa, India or America-in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and arranges them into a systematic, chronological descriptive index. He offers an extended historical and theoretical interpretation of the records in six chapters, which serve as an introductory guide to the index even as they articulate a specific argument about the meaning of the records. Both the archival information and interpretive scholarship provide a strong framework from which future historical debates on race in early modern England can proceed.

Chapter One

Early Tudor Black Records

The Mixed Beginnings of a Black Population

‘Born where they are not christenyd’

I

The beginnings of human subjecthood, both political and racial, lie in the evolution of difference. Sameness is not visible, and the very act of differentiation is an instinct of epistemological seeing. From the family, through the community and the kingdom or the state, human bodies are tracked, identified, classified, and, through that, politically constructed. Such construction is not visibility, however, as it is only one kind of created sight that substitutes for the thing-itself. In the fictional sight of the collective seeing unit—the family, the community, or the state—subjecthood appropriates personhood and stands in for it. Personhood, the thing itself, is the excess out of which subjecthood is restrictively carved, the latter being a defining insculpture that is an effacement of the original. The visibility of the political subject is the invisibility of the human being. To deal with the beginnings of black people in early modern England is therefore to deal with absences, with the non-visibility of a presence whose communitarian processing has to write the grammar of its sight in order to reveal the objects of its view.

In the white, isolated Northern consciousness of the early modern English, unweaned as yet from the sameness of its phenotypical being, black personhood is phenomenologically cast in a fluctuating scale between the novelty of the exotic and the repugnance of a difference that is as yet unknown. As the entropic exchange between the xenophilic and xenophobic impulses defaces the contours of the black subject’s knowability, the latter haunts the limits of civic sight, a phenomenon present but not recognized. Its sighting, which is its recordation, is a cryptic, uncertain, mark bereft of the paratactical desiderata that can render it intelligible to critical analyses. Whereas all the records of black people presented in this book have a varyingly uncertain luminosity, some early Tudor black records occupy an irrecoverable heuristic aporia—orthographic and archival, as well as historical. Such records are mere palimpsests of human presence, the outlines or substances of whose narratives no ancillary light can sharpen, and who must therefore be read as the models of their own meaning. To track the early modern English black subject’s archival beginnings is thus to negotiate the disjunctive history and indeterminate logic of early modern English archival culture itself.

There are seven possible complementary avenues of a minimal visibility into the fundamental opacity of the early Tudor records of black people. These constitute, therefore, five heuristic caveats in the procedures of their reading. First, catalogic typology will have to be considered as a key of identity, whereby the nature and history of each kind of record is a clue to the social knowledge and hence communal imprint of the black individual cited by it. Second, the black person’s namelessness when encountered will have to be regarded as a pre-Christian identity marker, as the visible residue of an individual history before the effacement of baptism has occurred, and therefore as the trace of an earlier historical self in the process of its obliteration. Third, a given or improvised surname of the black subject when present will have to be parsed as a sign of ethnographic and geographic origin, following the basic logic of traditional onomastics. Fourth, the aggregate of record citations will be regarded symptomatically rather than literally, that is, as the prognosis of a population size rather than as its proven range. Fifth, the extreme sparsity of incidence and crypticity of content of the early Tudor records of black people necessitate more of an extended case-by-case analysis of these records than will be desirable or possible with those of the other periods examined later in this study. Sixth, the meaning of the records will be constructed as theoretical hypotheses that will contribute transparency and coherence where there are none, that is to say, as the projective historiography of material that otherwise has no history. This could be described as the assembling of the elements of a methodology to write history from absence, from the simulacra of data rather from data itself.

II

It is a truism to say that the wealth of scholarly knowledge about the second half of the sixteenth century in England has obscured the lack of a correspondingly adequate understanding of the nature of political and cultural life in the reigns of the earlier Tudor monarchs. If a fuller awareness of the complex nature, origins, and impact of the Reformation has only recently begun to be available, that increase in historical knowledge has still not extended to the England of the first Tudor king. Scholarly disagreements about whether Henry VII was avaricious or fiscally efficient (Elton), a cautious traditionalist (MacFarlane, Guy), or an innovative modernist, and whether that England was an oppressive or a progressive one,¹ merely underline the fact that the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries represent what one historian has termed “a gap” in early modern English history.² Among the relative imponderables of Henry Tudor’s political life, his variable internationalist projects are significant for a reason that has been of little value for traditional historians: the unpredictable and still little-known consequence they had in starting an influx of black people into England.

Having achieved the monarchy against improbable odds, and having lived on the fringes of the royal advantages that both the mainline Yorkist and Lancastrian families had accrued, and therefore being bereft of the formidable familial connections that such advantages traditionally bred,³ Henry’s reign had to be focused on consolidating his power in both national and dynastic terms, that is, in inventing his monarchy in original ways.⁴ If within the kingdom that resulted in aggressively taxing the nobles to simultaneously break their power and fatten his treasury (following the axiom that a poor king is a weak king), in the foreign context it meant both exploring new familial alliances for himself and initiating new projects of overseas exploration to seize territory, increase trading goods, and establish markets, as such projects were being pursued by Spain and Portugal. These strategies may have been a canny mixture of both cultivated ideology and vicious self-interest, but the twin latter projects in particular started a new demographic phenomenon that while being hardly noticeable at its inception was to continue steadily and grow in effect over the next two centuries. Whether Henry had wanted to forge a “different” England from that of his predecessors, his foreign initiatives introduced into the country the colored/black “other” against which an early modern English “difference” was to define itself.

If the treaty of Medina del Campo, in the proposed match between Henry VII’s son Arthur and Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter Catherine that is its central feature in both its 1489 and 1496 versions, has for England the allure of a commanding position in pan-European politics, one of its unforeseen consequences is that it connected England with a country that has a large black population in it. Hardly acknowledged in most European scholarship, this population was partly derived from Iberian and Andalusian black Moors defeated and enslaved in the reconquista in the twelfth century and seized from West African coastal states in Portugal’s brutal Christianizing assaults on those regions in the later Middle Ages, and was partly the result of an increasingly voracious Portuguese expeditionary slaving trade with Africa over the fourteenth century, the consequences of which spilled over inevitably into neighboring Spain.⁵ The latter phenomenon, of which the Venetian state is also a part,⁶ rather than Columbus’s American project at the very end of the fifteenth century, is what properly constitutes for early modern Europe the idea of a new world discovered, as Benjamin Braude has importantly pointed out,⁷ from which flowed unimaginable material wealth and human discovery. Estimated by some to be around 150,000 at the start of the sixteenth century, and “one-tenth of the population of Lisbon and Seville,” and in the “thousands,” black people of unassimilated (“bossal”) and assimilated (“ladino”) varieties are a common syncretic feature of the early modern cultural life of the Iberian peninsula as a whole.⁸ They exist on a wide social stratum that extends on occasion from menials to skilled craftsmen to military and religious professionals even to distinguished men of letters (such as Juan de Valladolid, the black magistrate in Seville in 1462; the African poet scholar Juan Latino, who taught Latin and Greek at the University of Granada in the first half of the sixteenth century and who eventually wrote an immaculate Latin epic on the Battle of Lepanto called Austriadis Carmen; and the African Moor of Granada Al-Hassan Ibn-Muhammad al-Wezzani, known after his christening by Pope Leo X as Giovanni Leone or John Leo or Leo Africanus, who in 1518 wrote the first history of Africa in Arabic, which he translated into Italian in 1526).⁹ The Anglo-Spanish connection led to a real but still relatively unnoticed result in 1501 when the Spanish princess arrived in England with her royal retinue that had several black people in it.

These first black arrivals, mentioned casually in a letter of Ferdinand and Isabella to De Puebla, their ambassador in England, in the detailed lists of the Spanish personnel that the Princess Catherine was taking with her to England as her household staff (Item 1), and shortly afterwards observed derisively by a youthful Thomas More watching the spectacle of the lavish city pageants put on to welcome what would be their new English queen and the proud, exotic train of her party, were innocuous figures, the objects of a mixed gaze. In the obtrusiveness of their unnamed mention in the Spanish royal letter, simply as “Two slaves to attend on the maids of honour,” which is buried in the midst of a careful hierarchy of fifty-one waiting people and their specific assignments, above “servants,” “officers,” “chapel” staff, “pages,” “equerries,” and “gentleman in waiting,” but at the very bottom of the list of “maids of honour,” high female companions, and attendants, these black figures, who are for that reason in all probability female, are proud advertisements of an ambitious Christian Spain’s recent imperial achievements. Those achievements are highlighted in Spain’s triumphant conquest of the last Moorish stronghold of Granada just nine years earlier, in 1492.¹⁰ This political history, which positions the two slaves as fitting accoutrements for a Spanish princess in her future foreign home, makes their black identity almost a certainty. This certainty is bolstered by the fact that since 1459 the word “slave” (“escravo”) in common Portuguese usage primarily if not exclusively denotes a black African, an identification that will in fact be confirmed by More’s description.¹¹ At the same time, appearing as they do in meticulous monarchic arrangements for a royal teenage daughter’s future establishment, they are within their bondage, paradoxically, figures somewhat also of love. These black figures are arguably part of the fiercely protective love with which Catherine will try to look after her personal staff in the years of her pecuniary suffering both before and after each of her two marriages to Henry VII’s two sons.¹² Catherine’s passionate generosity will be so marked in future years that it will prompt some historians even to dub the age as the “Age of Catherine of Aragon.”¹³

In contrast, More’s English view cannot see them as anything more than ridiculous pomp (Item 5).¹⁴ More’s description, which is otherwise fulsome in its praise of the young Spanish princess, is significant in that it shows many of the codes that will operate in the naming and conceptualization of black people over the rest of the century. While the geographic identifier “Ethiopian” is onomastically typical in that it is geographically specific but not regionally precise—for More “Ethiopian” is a stand-in for African generally—it is one of the many such words that will be used to pejoratively designate black persons in England. Even if the identifier seems neutral, however, it already appears negatively marked with the trailing qualifier “pigmy,” with which it is conversely linked, the resulting compound phrase itself being progressively arrived at from “ridiculous” to “barefooted.” The negative marking in the geographic identification is visible now, but will not always be so in later decades.

Thus, too, the catalog’s openly negative tone is an abandonment o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Early Tudor Black Records
• 2 Elizabethan London Black Records
• 3 Black Records of seventeenth-Century London
• 4 Black People outside London, 1558–1677
• 5 Indians and Others
• Afterword
• Chronological Index of Records of Black People, 1500–1677
• Works Cited
• Printed Sources
• Secondary Sources
• Index