Miranda Kauffman - Tumblr Posts

It is true that John Hawkins masterminded the first English transatlantic slaving voyages in the 1560s, but he was, in an awful sense, ahead of his time. After his final voyage returned in  disarray in 1569, the English did not take up the trade again in earnest until the 1640s. Elizabeth I did not ‘expel’ Africans from England in 1596; rather her Privy  Council issued a limited licence to an unscrupulous merchant named Caspar Van Senden, who was only allowed to transport individuals out of England with their masters’ consent: a consent that he utterly failed to obtain.

Black Tudors: The Untold Story

John Blanke was not the last African to serve King Henry VIII. As a French diplomat remarked to his English counterpart in the summer of 1545: ‘King’s hearts are  in God’s hand and he turns them as pleases him from peace to war and from war  to peace’. During his final war with France, instead of a skilled musician King Henry required the services of a man versed in an art that was at this time little practised by Europeans, but which people from West Africa were taught from birth:  swimming and diving.

Black Tudors: The Untold Story