It's time to tell the history of Britain in black as well as white.
I'm a fifth-generation black person
and what my great-grandparents went through
really paved the way for everything that I am today.
It's the story of people who came here to make a better life...
Nursing was calling me,
so I came to England to pursue the career that I wanted so badly.
..the story of people who were carried here by force.
I'm the seventh-generation descendant
of a ten-year-old boy brought on the slave ships to this country.
It's a history written into the landscape
and into the faces of the people who live here,
the story of a relationship between Britain
and people whose origins lie in Africa.
And the relationship between these small islands
and that vast continent stretches back far beyond living memory.
'From the first black Briton almost 2,000 years ago...'
That's just incredible.
..to the black sailors who fought at Trafalgar...
..and Queen Victoria's African goddaughter.
But British history has been whitewashed,
so in this series, I'm going to put black history back on the map...
APPLAUSE
..joining forces with people all over Britain,
the Caribbean and Africa to set the story straight.
Where people and events have been erased from memory,
we're putting up new reminders in cast iron and stone.
"There is a feeling of terror among the coloured people of the city.
"Had we arrived a few minutes earlier,
"we probably could have saved him."
What it means to be British is an increasingly contentious question.
Remembering the full story of how we got here
is now more urgent than ever.
A black history of Britain brings together some familiar landscapes
with some unfamiliar faces.
It tells us that our common heritage binds us together
in ways that are as surprising as they are revealing.
Ultimately, this is our national story.
This is British history. It belongs to all of us.
We've just never heard it told this way before.
Right, what have we got here?
- This one's of a Roman soldier. - It's a Roman soldier.
This is the Roman fort Aballava.
- This is the fort that was right here? - Yeah.
'Our black history begins here
'in the Cumbrian village of Burgh by Sands.'
This is a house that a Roman family would have lived in.
'During the second century AD,
'this village was the site of a Roman fortress
'near the western end of Hadrian's Wall.'
- And is that the fort, that other one? - Yeah.
'The villagers have been proud of this history for centuries,
'but today's children are learning what that means
'in a way that was unimaginable
'when I was growing up in the north-east of England.'
I first came here to Hadrian's Wall on a school trip when I was a boy.
And back then, pretty much everything I knew
about Roman Britain came from books like this -
from Ladybird books. This is Julius Caesar And Roman Britain -
An Adventure From History.
And what I really loved about these books, to be honest,
were the illustrations,
the pictures of Roman life and the pictures of the Roman army.
And this was the image I had of the Romans -
of men in armour striding manfully across the landscape.
Now, I knew that Rome was in Italy,
so I think I must have presumed that the Romans were Italians,
but what seemed obvious,
and what books like this seemed to make clear,
was that there can't have been anybody back in Roman Britain
who looked like me or my family.
We're now learning that this is far from the truth.
Hadrian's Wall was the northern limit
of a multiracial empire that stretched as far as North Africa,
where Libya, Algeria and Morocco are today.
And the image of the Roman Imperial force
is starting to look very different
to archaeologists like Richard Benjamin.
For me, it was a way in, it was a conduit to kind of my past.
You know, I'm from a small Yorkshire town,
but I'm from, you know, a diverse background.
My dad's from, you know, British Ghana.
But when I was at school, you know,
I was never taught about African history.
Although I knew I was different,
sometimes, you're made to feel very different.
And what evidence is there for people from the African parts
of the empire here in northern Britain?
We've got some inscriptions on stone tombs.
We've got Victor. Victor was maurum,
so he was a Moor, so from the North African provinces.
This tomb was found in South Shields.
- That's on the Tyne near Newcastle. - That's right, yeah.
There's a document called a Notitia Dignitatum,
so it's a Roman military list.
It mentions forts and individuals who were on those forts.
And there was a particular unit
called a Numerus Maurorum Aurelianorum,
named in honour of the emperor Marcus Aurelius,
and it was a unit - an auxiliary unit - of Moors,
so from the North African provinces.
They were stationed at Aballava, which is modern-day Burgh by Sands.
The likelihood is it would have been a rather mixed unit,
- but we know that the nucleus came from North Africa. - Yes.
They were named because they were Moors from North Africa.
That's why the unit was named that.
Do we have any idea what these people would have looked like?
We may not know exactly what they looked like,
but the likelihood is they were brown or black.
Not all of them,
but, equally, people can't say to me that they weren't,
that this unit were all white by the time they got here.
For me, personally,
I realised that there may have been Roman soldiers,
you know, 2,000 years ago,
who actually may have looked like me or members of my family.
That gave me a sense of identity. It made me very proud.
After some 1,800 years,
the people of Burgh by Sands are reawakening the memory
of their village's African Roman heritage.
- Septimus Severus. - Ah. So, this is the emperor? - Yeah.
Who we know was from North Africa.
It's spectacular that Romans came from Africa
and this is where the Aballava fort was.
Few traces of the fort remain,
but at the village church, we can see stones from the wall
that were used to build the tower 1,000 years later.
There could have been as many as 500 soldiers
occupying the fortress that stood here,
and the culture and beliefs they brought with them
would have shaped life around the fort.
Beyond the walls of the Roman fortress
was the vicus, and this was a civilian area.
Roman soldiers were pretty well paid
and so there was no shortage of traders and merchants
only too happy to provide them with everything they needed.
So, out there, there would have been bars and gambling houses
and grocers and takeaways and doctors and spirit guides.
Now, some of these merchants will have travelled across the empire
with the legions, but so, perhaps,
would some of the families of the soldiers,
and they would have settled here.
So, what we have here at Aballava
is the first community that we know of in Britain
that included people from Africa.
It's quite amazing that a small village like Burgh by Sands
can have such, like, big history.
If you think about the songs that the soldiers would have sung
and the bedtime stories
that would have been told in the civil settlement,
they would have been African songs and African stories here.
It's such a long time ago and they travelled so far.
In the Roman times, it probably would have took a while
to actually get here,
since there was no, like, aeroplanes, if you know what I mean.
Members of the African and Caribbean communities
who live alongside Hadrian's Wall today have joined the celebrations.
Tony, would you come and do the honours
of unveiling one of our plaques here?
I'm privileged for me to unveil the plaque
to signify the Africans who were here.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
For me, what started here was the black presence in Britain,
the presence being real rather than just in a history book.
In times when multicultural Britain seems to be breaking down,
I think it's quite interesting that, before the formation of Britain,
there were foreign African Romans working here to protect the borders.
So, yeah, it makes me proud to be African and proud to be British.
I'm so pleased that the African army taught the children African songs.
So, children, we promise you,
if you want to learn any African songs, let us know.
- I will come and teach you. - LAUGHTER
THEY SING
I'm fourth-generation in this village.
In Cumbria, we go back to the 1100s,
but not as far as the black history that we've revealed today.
This is now part of our story in a very real, special way.
I think, if you ask most people to guess
where one of the first encounters
between Britons and Africans took place,
they wouldn't guess that it was in this tiny Cumbrian village.
And I think, if you asked those same people
to guess when that encounter took place,
they wouldn't dream that it was nearly 18 centuries ago.
But the people of this village are genuinely proud and excited
that their village and the African Romans who were stationed here
are the first chapter in this long history.
The records suggest that the Africans carried here
within the Roman Imperial army didn't simply occupy Britain.
They settled and raised families here, too.
And now newly emerging evidence can bring us face-to-face
with those first black Britons.
The basement of Eastbourne Town Hall is a place of unsolved mysteries.
For decades, the remains of 300 unidentified bodies
have been stored here.
Then, in 2012, archaeologist Joe Seaman
set out to discover who one of them was.
The story behind this woman
did take us on such an unexpected journey...
..and one that I couldn't help getting emotionally caught up in.
There were few clues to go on.
Her remains had been found more than a century ago
in the seemingly tranquil village of East Dean
near Beachy Head in Sussex.
As Joe found out more about her,
he saw that she was going to change the way the village saw itself.
Not only is she a big story in herself,
but it's making us rethink the history
of this area of Sussex, as well.
What are the techniques available to you
to try and find some more information?
The first technique is to look at radiocarbon-14 dating.
It was very successful cos her bones are in fairly good condition,
and we got a solid Roman date...
- A Roman date? - A Roman date, yeah.
..between 125 and about 240 AD.
'A Roman find in this area was unexpected,
'but did she come here or was she from here?
'To find out, Joe used a technique called isotope analysis.'
By examining the chemicals in the teeth,
chemicals that are picked up in food and in water,
they're then absorbed into the tooth enamel and they can be traced.
So, it's almost like a geographical fingerprint,
and the great news was that that geographical region was right here,
- the Eastbourne area. - So, she had lived in Eastbourne?
She had lived and grown up in this area of chalk downland
in the south-east of Britain.
'She became known as Beachy Head Woman,
'and Joe had one last trick up his sleeve to help identify her.
'He called in a forensic pathologist to reconstruct her face.'
So, here is...
This is Beachy Head Woman, yes.
The biggest surprise of them all was that it was clear
that she was actually sub-Saharan African in origin.
So, she's a black Briton?
Yes, yes. And as far as we know, the earliest black Briton.
So, she's the same as me? She's somebody who is both,
- but who spent their life in this country? - Yeah.
- Just 1,700 years ago. - Yeah.
- HE CHUCKLES That's just incredible. - It is.
She spent her childhood here, she grew up,
she experienced the same things that my children do today
when they're running around on the Downs.
- That's what she was doing. - Yeah. - It's pretty amazing.
Up until now, we've had to build a picture
of African Roman Britain from elusive inscriptions and engravings.
With the discovery of Beachy Head Woman,
that story now has a face
and it tells us that Afro-Romans came not just from North Africa,
but also from beyond the Sahara.
It's come as a total surprise to the people of East Dean.
This seems like a sort of very English place,
and yet, clearly, it was connected -
- interconnected - with the Roman world. - Indeed.
We've always described ourselves as a quintessential English village.
The fact that we've now got a sub-Saharan African woman
as part of our heritage,
I think that will make us all sit up and think
and change our perspective.
'What would it have been like
'to grow up as a black African in Roman Britain?
'That's the kind of question
'that Professor Mary Beard has been asking for years.'
What do we know about how the Romans
viewed those human physical differences?
I don't, in what I'm going to say, want to give you any impression
that the Romans were particularly nice and angelic about this.
The Romans certainly said pretty nasty,
hateful things about foreigners, you know, and the Brits.
The poor little Brits came in for quite a lot
of Roman stereotypical propaganda.
But what the Romans weren't is racist, in our terms.
And there is no sense that skin colour
is really the thing that marks you out
for your position in your culture.
There's one early-third-century emperor
who comes from Africa - from North Africa.
We don't actually know what his ethnicity was.
- And that's unimaginable now. - Yes. - When we think of somebody famous,
their race is always part of how we describe them.
You know, you could say, "Look at President Obama,"
you know, what's always said about him,
"The first non-white American president."
The prejudices of the Roman Empire, you know, they were awful and nasty
and they were a murderous lot of thugs,
but it wasn't racist prejudice.
Now Beachy Head Woman is about to complete her journey
from unidentified human remains forgotten in a basement
to the most ancient black Briton we know of.
This plaque means a lot to me
because the subject of that is incredibly important,
both to me and, I think, to this whole area.
Without further ado, I'd like to hand this plaque over to East Dean
for it to be displayed.
APPLAUSE
One of the things that modern archaeology
is showing us more and more is that Britain, 2,000 years ago,
1,700 years ago, was a really mixed community.
Beachy Head Lady symbolises that mixture better, I think,
than any other discovery in the province of Britain.
So, you really have got something to celebrate here.
It's quite a challenging idea to us in the 21st century
that, when it comes to race,
the Romans were more liberal than we are now.
Yeah, I think we live with the kind of myth
that somehow we've got less and less prejudiced over the centuries,
and that's simply not true.
I think one of the points of looking at the Romans,
one of the lessons they've got for us,
is they remind us that some of the prejudices we hold
haven't been held forever.
And there's something a bit optimistic in that
because it might actually mean that
we won't go on holding them one day.
Who knows? Who knows?
We may never know how many African Romans settled in Britain.
But re-examining well-known Roman cities, such as York,
is giving us a startling new picture of our past.
These are the results of studies of bodies
exhumed from two Roman sites in York.
What the analysis suggests is that around 10% of the sample
were of African descent.
What that means is that there were parts of Roman York
that were more multicultural than parts of modern York are today.
If Britain once had these pockets of African Romans,
why is there no trace of them in the local populations today?
The answer can be found hundreds of years later
in the story of a descendant of a black Georgian named Francis Barber.
Francis had a son called Isaac,
Isaac had a son called Enoch, Enoch had a son called Edward,
Edward had a son called Norman, and Norman had a son called Cedric,
and that's me, and it's as direct as that.
That's my family tree on my father's side
going back 250 years.
Francis Barber might have been lost to history
had he not been part of the household
of the 18th-century writer Dr Samuel Johnson.
I've been to this house many times over the years
cos I'm an admirer of Samuel Johnson
because he was, in my view, a genius,
but he wasn't some detached intellectual.
He was a man who loved his friends, who loved conversation,
who was funny and witty and compassionate.
And he was one of the giants of his age,
not just intellectually, but also physically.
He was an absolutely huge guy.
And when you come to this time capsule of a house,
you get a strong sense of who he was and of the times in which he lived.
Johnson lived at the centre of Georgian London's cultural life.
This is a picture of what was called Johnson's Club.
It was a gathering of some of the most interesting,
most creative people of the age,
and they would regularly get together with Johnson
for drinks and conversation.
So, it was like your dream party guest list.
Here's Johnson and here's his biographer Boswell.
And this is the Georgian portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Reynolds gives us a glimpse into the black history of Georgian London.
This is a copy of his portrait simply entitled A Young Black.
It is really rare for a black person
to take centre stage in a Georgian portrait
and to be the subject of the portrait
and not some exotic detail in the margins.
This portrait has hung here for years,
so the boy in the painting was always assumed to be
Dr Johnson's servant Francis Barber.
The latest research throws that into doubt -
another sign of how elusive this history can be.
What we know for certain is that Francis Barber was born in Jamaica
and that he was born a slave,
and he was brought to Britain by one of Johnson's friends.
When Johnson's wife died, Francis, at about the age of ten,
was sent to this house to become part of Johnson's household.
The two formed an unlikely friendship.
Johnson became like a father to Francis
and changed the course of his life.
These are copies of the little slips of paper
that Samuel Johnson used
when he was writing the book that would make him famous.
This book - his Dictionary Of The English Language.
But on the back of this one,
the young Francis Barber has practised writing his signature.
And on this one, he's been practising writing the word England,
the country that's now his home.
And I just want to smile when I see this
because it is just such an innocent,
such a classically teenage thing to do.
It's what we all did when we were kids
and we were imagining what it was going to be like to become an adult
and what it was going to be like to go out into the world.
And then you remember that the teenage boy who wrote this
had been born a slave. He'd been born the property of somebody else.
He had been born a thing
that, legally, could be bought and sold or whipped and beaten.
So, for the teenage Francis Barber to sit in this room
and imagine a future in which he would be the author of his own life
and the owner of his body was miraculous.
And in the years that the two of them are living in this house
and being this Georgian odd couple were the same years
in which Britain was exporting millions of Africans into slavery.
Francis went on to enjoy the life of a freeman.
He married a white Englishwoman and raised a family,
but he always remained close to Samuel Johnson,
sharing his house and naming his first-born son after him.
And Johnson took the unusual step
of leaving this former slave the lion's share of his fortune -
more than £100,000 in today's money.
But it's not only through documents that Francis is remembered.
Cedric Barber is his great-great-great-grandson.
Historians sometimes say that there's a mystery
about the disappearance of the black Georgian population
that we know numbered thousands.
- But, really, the answer to that mystery is you. - Yes.
We're going around in disguise, in camouflage.
We're walking about the place and many people don't know.
But I'm glad that I know.
I'm proud of that because they're mine
and because it's my history,
and I feel sorry for people who don't know.
Cedric lived most of his life not knowing.
He only became fully aware of his link to Francis Barber
through a cousin when he was in his 50s.
It was at a time in my life when
most people will have settled into their ways
and become, you know, fixed in their views.
But all this information -
emotional information, factual information -
flooded into me and it changed my life in a big, big way.
So, when you read those accounts of slavery,
knowing now that your ancestor was Francis, who'd been a slave,
that had a different emotional impact on you.
Yes. Two things running alongside.
Black history? "Well, what a shame for people
"that that should have happened so many years ago,
"it can't be important now," to thinking,
"This was my family they were doing it to.
"These were real people."
Cedric's story reveals how our black Georgian past
can so easily be lost.
It also shows the power of remembrance.
The unveiling of our plaque
is bringing together other descendants of the black Georgians,
friends of the Johnson House and Francis Barber's biographer.
And I'm delighted now to be able to call
on one of those direct descendants, Cedric Barber,
to unveil the plaque to commemorate the life of his
great-great-great-great-grandfather, Francis Barber.
APPLAUSE
All the black side of the family were a big inspiration to me.
We've turned white now, but they're still part of me
and I'm very, very proud to be here today,
very, very proud of this. Thank you very much.
I keep trying to put myself back into Frank's shoes.
It's like coming home, in a way, I suppose.
We just don't know exactly how many black people
were living in Britain in the 18th century
when Francis Barber was living here in this house,
but there are estimates from the time
and they put the figure at between 10,000 and 15,000.
Now, if those black Georgians had the average number of children,
and the average number of their kids survived
and went on to have their own children,
what that could mean is that, in Britain today,
there are between two and three million people
who have a black ancestor, who are related to the black Georgians.
Through intermarriage, the black Georgians disappeared without a trace,
as did the African Romans before them.
Yet even when there was no visible black presence in Britain,
the idea of Africa and Africans burned brightly in the imagination,
most vividly during the Middle Ages.
It's something we can still feel to this day.
This is Jesus and this is Joseph
and these are the Three Wise Men.
And this is Balthazar.
Balthazar brings frankincense.
The children at Our Lady and St Joseph's Catholic School
in East London, like countless generations before them,
are learning the Christmas story.
In your nativity play, which of the kings are you playing?
- Melchior. - You're Melchior.
And which of the Kings are you?
- Casper. - You're Casper.
Which means that you're playing...?
- Balthazar. - You're King Balthazar.
- But which direction should we go in now? - I'm not sure, Balthazar.
It just so happens, in this play, that the role of one of the
three kings is being played by a little African girl.
But when I was growing up, and I was asked to play one of the
three kings in my school, it wasn't an accident.
What I didn't know then, and what I think my teachers didn't know,
is that by asking a little black boy to play one of the three kings,
we were all taking part in a medieval tradition.
I bring frankincense.
Because this idea that one of the three kings is an African,
is a black man, emerged in the Middle Ages.
It's tradition that was built upon, and eventually,
he went from just being an African, a black king, to being a character.
- ALL: - Merry Christmas!
The black king is something we've just become accustomed to.
But we've forgotten where he came from.
And his story illuminates Africa's place in the medieval imagination.
..incredible stone coming from round here.
We can get an insight into that lost world here, at Hereford Cathedral.
With the help of medievalist Dr Janina Ramirez,
I've come to see what secrets it can reveal...
..starting with the early-14th-century map
of the world - the Mappa Mundi.
So, to us, everything about this map is wrong.
It doesn't make sense if you look at it straight on.
But if you turn your head to the side...
..then it all starts to make a bit more sense.
The northern part of the map is up here.
That's actually facing towards the east.
- This is Asia. - Asia.
Europe.
- Africa. - Right.
And you've got, right at the very centre, Jerusalem.
So this is a map of Christendom.
Christianity had reached Ethiopia in the early fourth century.
By the time the English drew this map,
it was an important stronghold of the Christian faith.
This area around here, which is Ethiopia - you can see that
there's a rather glorious little palace there.
This is a place that is being celebrated,
it's as beautifully depicted and civilised as these European places.
Beyond the known Christian world,
Africa is a place of imagined tribes and mythical beasts.
All around it are the unknown.
And even fictional types of humans as well.
So this is a mandrake, a sort of man plant.
- Half man, half tree. - Half man, half plant, yeah.
So all of these monstrous peoples
occupy these unknown parts of Africa.
Yes. We're talking sub-Saharan Africa.
To the medieval eye,
the portrayal of Africa conveyed a more powerful message.
Here, we have this idea of three Christian continents,
all bound together -
Africa, Europe, Asia - these become,
in the later Christian tradition, the Three Wise Men.
We can see how the three continents took on human form as the
three kings of the Christmas story in one of Hereford's rare artworks.
This is a 1530-ish altarpiece.
But the idea that the three magi represent
the three Christian continents -
Europe, Asia and Africa.
So he becomes African,
he evolves into an African persona in the Middle Ages.
He does, he does. And it's very, very clear.
You can see this is a great example,
because his colour is very distinctive.
- But so are his facial features. - He's very clearly African.
VERY clearly African.
And he's contrasting with the other kings there.
You can see he's got his got his gift shaped as a cornucopia -
as a horn of plenty, if you like,
really revealing how the medieval mind saw Africa -
it was rich and plentiful.
He's a young man.
He's a Christian king, but he symbolises a continent that might be
a continent full of bounty and riches,
that might change the world and enrich Christendom.
Enrich Christendom - that's the phrase, that's exactly it.
Because it's not about exclusion,
it's about including them into this Christendom,
this fraternity that binds these people together across great spaces.
It wasn't just about riches.
At a time when the Christian and Islamic faiths were engaged in
a battle for hearts and minds,
the image of the African king was a potent symbol.
So you could see this as like one of those Second World War posters
that shows the Russians and the Americans and the British and,
"Look, we're not alone in this struggle."
This is a form of propaganda.
It's a propaganda that is encouraging all the people
that would have come to worship in front of it
to start to see themselves as Christians,
part of a unified Christendom, that's bringing in Africa,
and very much wholeheartedly wanting Africa to be onside.
The idea of Africa as a land of riches would endure
throughout the Middle Ages.
It would eventually inspire the British to try to reach its shores.
But first, Britain would see the arrival of more Africans.
Their reappearance in Britain was due, in part, to a royal saga...
..a familiar cast of characters, whose schemes and desires led to
one of the most tumultuous events in British history -
the Reformation.
Right where I'm standing is where Greenwich Palace once stood.
And this is what it looked like back when it was the grand Tudor palace.
Now, almost nothing of it remains,
but the lay of the land is still pretty much the same.
And this view is still, clearly, that view.
And this hill here,
is now the hill where the Greenwich Observatory stands.
Now, Greenwich Palace was one of the stages on which the grand drama
of the Tudor dynasty was played out.
Henry VIII was born right here,
as were both of his surviving daughters, Mary and Elizabeth -
both of them, future queens of England.
And it's through the ambitions of the Tudor dynasty that we can
find evidence for the re-emergence of a black presence in Britain.
MUSIC: John Blanke Theme by Randolph Matthews
In 1501, the 16-year-old Catherine of Aragon came here for her
long-awaited marriage to Prince Arthur, heir to the English throne.
Catherine was a princess of the Spanish court,
one of the most powerful and cosmopolitan in Europe.
And it showed.
The entourage she brought to England
was both multicultural and multiracial.
We know that among Catherine's entourage was a Spanish Moor,
a North African woman called Catalina.
Now, she was a lady of the bedchamber.
One of her jobs was to change the Queen's sheets.
And in royal and aristocratic circles,
the condition of the bedsheets was taken as proof or not
as to whether a marriage had been consummated.
So Catalina found herself drawn into the great Tudor saga
that was about to unfold.
TRUMPET PLAYS A LAMENT
Within six months of their marriage, Prince Arthur died of a fever.
Catherine was now betrothed to his younger brother,
the ten-year-old Henry.
They married seven years later, once Henry had come to the throne.
And in 1511, Catherine gave birth to the son
they hoped would secure the Tudor dynasty.
Henry celebrated the birth of his son with a great extravaganza
of music and jousting called the Westminster Tournament.
And it was recorded in this, the Westminster Tournament Roll.
And it shows all of the great aristocratic families on their
horses, in their best clothes.
It shows that all the great courtiers, who were in favour,
were all in attendance.
And that this was a very public and very important event.
This is a depiction of Catherine and her ladies-in-waiting.
And this knight is believed to be Henry.
And right at the beginning of the Westminster Tournament Roll
are the royal trumpeters.
Their job was to announce the arrival of important people
by blowing fanfares.
And among the six trumpeters is a black guy.
And he's not just here at the beginning
of the Westminster Tournament Roll,
there's another picture of him here, at the end of the day.
But this time to announce that the jousting's over,
and the festivities and the banquets are about to begin.
Not quite a fanfare...
For diversity...
The trumpeter's appearance in the records around this time
suggest he also arrived with Catherine.
The records also give us his name - John Blanke.
In the Norman French
The name has a ring that's nice
Not John Blanke
Jean Blanc!
To be precise.
This is a letter from John Blanke to his employer, to Henry VIII.
And, to put it bluntly, what he's asking the king for is a pay rise.
He explains that his current wages are not enough to keep him and
allow him "to do your Grace like service as the other trumpeters do".
So he's saying he can't perform as well as they can,
because he's not paid as much.
LIVELY JAZZ SOLO
But, reading between the lines, what seems also to have happened,
is that John Blanke has discovered that one of the other
trumpeters is paid more than he is.
So he's writing to demand not just a pay rise,
but for his pay to be backdated.
Now, there is something wonderfully human
about this little Tudor soap opera.
It tells us that John Blanke was somebody who believed that his
skills were valuable, and he had the right to be paid the same
as somebody else doing the same job.
And, incredibly, he is successful in his petition.
And we have Henry's signature agreeing to his pay rise.
APPLAUSE
The presence of John Blanke and Catalina in England was
a reflection of the Tudor court's links to the Mediterranean world,
and its connections with Africa.
We know all these details about their lives,
because they were part of this inner world of the Tudor court.
And that makes both of them really special.
But what makes John Blanke unique is that he's the first black Briton
for whom we have not just a name, but also a picture.
We can look into his face.
And through that picture, and through the records and the
archives, we can gain some idea of his character.
And it's for that reason he's being remembered here today.
Blanke's modern-day counterpart, Lance Corporal Lawrence Narkum,
has come to herald his Tudor predecessor.
For some black Britons, John Blanke has become
something of a cult figure.
I think this is a great moment of invocation and exorcism.
Blanke also plays a role in a pivotal moment in our
national story, that's usually presented as exclusively white.
But it's also invoking the hope for connectedness,
in the sense that John Blanke should not be seen
as the possession of the black people.
It is an intricate part of the fabric of British history.
FANFARE
APPLAUSE
We know Blanke went on to marry.
Henry VIII sent him a royal wedding gift, a matching cap and gown.
Yet, after this, John Blanke disappears from the records.
But Catalina, the lady of Catherine's bedchamber,
makes one last appearance in the Tudor saga.
Catherine and Henry's son had died in infancy.
They went on to lose a further three sons,
leaving Mary as their only surviving child.
Henry was convinced that he'd been cursed by God for marrying
his brother's widow. He sought to have his marriage annulled.
Catherine protested that her first marriage had never been consummated.
To help settle the matter, the court appealed for witnesses.
If there was anyone who was in a position to know whether the
marriage between Arthur and Catherine had been consummated,
it was Catalina - the woman who had made the Queen's bed.
But she'd already gone back to Spain, got married,
had a family of her own.
And despite searching, she was never found.
Eventually, Henry got his annulment.
But at huge cost.
Henry was excommunicated by Rome.
The English were left isolated and envious of the wealth
of the great Catholic powers.
In time, the tables would be turned.
While other European nations were establishing trade links with
Africa, for the English, it had remained a distant shore.
As rumours of the wealth of the continent spread,
they became increasingly difficult to resist.
Now, English merchants and traders set sail for Africa, and its riches.
But they would have a fight on their hands.
The first English traders to reach West Africa arrived here,
on what was then called the Guinea Coast,
back in the middle of the 16th century.
And they came here not as conquerors or as empire builders,
but as something pretty close to pirates.
And that's because, officially, they had absolutely
no business being here.
The first to reach this coast, the Portuguese,
had pretty much stitched everything up.
They'd made deals with the local leaders, they'd built trading posts,
and most importantly, they'd got the Pope
to give them a monopoly over all trade from this coast.
So these English traders were interlopers.
They were rogue traders. And they were here illicitly and illegally.
Upon arrival, the English would've been confronted by Portuguese power,
and places like this - the fortress of Elmina.
Built in 1482, some 70 years before the English arrived,
it's the oldest European structure in all of sub-Saharan Africa.
But Elmina is not all that it seems.
People come to this fortress today
to remember the victims of the slave trade.
But it's easy to forget that this fortress wasn't built as
a slave fortress - it was repurposed for the slave trade later on.
Elmina is a relic from an era in the relationship between
Africa and Britain that we often forget about.
The land this fortress was built on isn't conquered land,
it was negotiated for.
This fortress wasn't a military headquarters from which
Europeans launched military raids - it was a trading centre,
from which they sent out diplomatic missions.
So you can see this place as a symbol of African power.
This was a phase in which the Europeans fought one another
for access to African kingdoms that they couldn't dream of dominating.
It was also a phase in the 16th century, under the Tudors,
in which the English had one of their great bursts of fascination
with this continent and its people.
Ultimately, it wasn't the Portuguese the English had to win over,
but the local kings.
We know that the first English traders who arrived in
West Africa held audiences with the local kings.
And they probably sat around like this, in the sun,
waiting for their ceremonial arrival.
We also know, from the accounts of those traders, that the relationship
between the English and the Africans was one of trading partners.
Now, that's because they were dealing with societies who
were worldly, who were savvy.
They had been in contact with the Berbers and the Arabs,
trading with them since the fifth century.
And the Portuguese had already been here for decades,
so they weren't people who were easily duped.
So one English trader tells us that,
"The Africans are very wary in their bargain,
"and they will not lose one sparkle of gold of any value."
There's a Dutch trader, he says, "When we have brought them things
"that they did not like, they have mocked us in a scandalous way."
We can still get a glimpse of what those early traders experienced.
The Ashanti are the direct descendants of the Akan,
the people who were here
when the English first set foot on African soil.
And in the procession of the Ashanti king, there's a vivid display
of what first drew the English to this place...
..gold, and in quantities that confirmed the medieval legend
that Africa was a land of riches.
The sense you get being here, with the Ashanti,
is of a people for whom gold has been important for 1,500 years.
These are people who started trading in gold back in the fifth century.
And there are people here - the kings and the chiefs -
who are literally dripping in the stuff.
Gold is everywhere, and it's part of a moment
in the history of Africa and Europe that we forget about,
when it wasn't about slavery, when it was about this stuff -
it was about gold and the wealth of Africa.
If you look carefully, when the king shakes someone's hand,
another hand comes up from underneath to support his arm,
because he's wearing so much gold, he needs help with the weight.
So there is a figure at the court of the Ashanti king,
who is the official Propper of the Royal Arm.
The Ashanti kingdom is now part of Ghana, a modern democracy.
But the king of the Ashanti still has an influential role.
Like most royals, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II rarely speaks to the media.
It's part of his regal mystique.
But he has granted us an interview with his deputy,
Oheneba Odwesi Puku Ashanti.
It's difficult not to notice that you're wearing
- quite a lot of gold today. - Yes, sir.
You can't tell the history of the people of this part of the world
without talking about gold.
Part of protecting the kingdom, historically, has been to keep
- invaders away from the gold mines, the source of the wealth. - Yes.
That was the original idea.
Why the attack took so many campaigns -
to preserve the gold mines for Ashantis.
It was the British who decided to colonise the Ashanti.
But so late, it was the 1890s they get up here.
- So it's 400 years of defeating colonial ambition. - Yes.
The Ashantis were determined to make life unbearable for them.
Most of the British people who died outside their country...
..died in Ashanti, because of the gold.
And they wanted to take it away from Ashanti.
Ashanti said no.
The West African kings were canny enough to work out the arrival
of the English was an opportunity for them.
Because, up until that point, the Portuguese had been using
their monopoly position on the coast to keep the price of gold down.
So when the English and other Europeans turned up,
it introduced some competition back into the market.
So the Africans even offered the English goods on credit,
with the profits payable on the return journey.
So this is long-range, long-term financing of international
trade deals, between African kings and English traders.
Those first English visitors had proved the viability
of a trade with Africa.
So more than 1,000 years after the first Africans came to
Britain as soldiers of the Roman Empire,
the English had gained a tentative foothold in Africa.
From that moment on, there would be increasing two-way traffic
between this vast continent and the British Isles.
Those first traders returned home with pepper, ivory and gold.
But they also went a step further.
This book is Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations,
Voyages, Traffiques And Discoueries Of The English Nation.
It's a 16th-century compendium of all the travel accounts and
journals of England's merchants and adventurers and pirates.
It tells us that one of the first expeditions to Africa,
led by the merchant John Lok, brought back to England
not just a stash of African gold, but five African men.
They came from the small fishing town of Shama,
which can still be found on the coast of Ghana.
And three of them were given new names - Anthonie, Binne and George.
While they were in London, the five men learned English.
The hope was that they would act as intermediaries and
interpreters for future trade missions.
We don't know much about their time in England,
other than what Hakluyt tells us.
He describes them as tall and strong men,
and says that, "They could well agree with our meats and drinks,
"but that our cold and moist air doth somewhat offend them."
Within a couple of years, all five men were safely returned home.
Just as the first seeds of an equal trading relationship were
taking root, a devastating new chapter was about to open.
Seven years after the five men from Shama had been brought to London,
a trader from Plymouth, called Sir John Hawkins,
set sail for the coast of Africa.
Hakluyt tells us that once off the coast,
Hawkins got into his possession 300 Negroes.
Now, what Hakluyt means by that, is that Hawkins intercepted some
Portuguese ships, captured the enslaved Africans on board,
took them to the Spanish colonies in South America
and sold them into slavery.
Through that one expedition,
Hawkins made himself an enormous personal fortune.
But more than that, he had demonstrated that the trade
in human beings was just as profitable as the trade in gold.
He had become a pioneer of the English slave trade -
a trade that, in the coming centuries,
would consume the lives of millions of Africans.
Next time...
the Atlantic slave trade...
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..a Georgian superstar...
..and the fight for freedom.
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