The parish of Lydney lies some thirteen miles southwest of Gloucester, between the River Severn and the Royal Forest of Dean. Beyond the forest to the east are the southern parts of Wales, while a journey southwest along the river takes one past Chepstow to Avonmouth, the bustling trading port of Bristol, and out into the Bristol Channel and the Atlantic Ocean.3
White Cross Manor lay just beyond the south-west end of Lydney, off the Chepstow road.4 The house had been built by Edward’s father, Sir William Wynter, on land given to him by Queen Elizabeth I. He named it White Cross in honour of his promotion to Admiral of the White, the second-highest rank in the Navy, after the Battle of Gravelines against the Spanish Armada in 1588, in which father and son served together on the Vanguard.
Detail from John Speed’s 1610 map of Gloucestershire – Lydney is in the bottom left hand corner.
The Wynter family was originally from Wales, but by the sixteenth century they had been merchants of Bristol for several generations. Sir Edward’s cousin John had captained the Elizabeth on Drake’s circumnavigation voyage of 1577–80. Both Sir Edward’s father, William, and his grandfather, John, were in royal service, as treasurers of the Navy. Queen Elizabeth knighted William for his services and William Cecil, Lord Burghley, considered him a man ‘to be cherished.’5 Despite their success at court, the Wynters risked their prosperity by deciding not to relinquish their Catholic faith when the Reformation came. This was a dangerous choice, as Catholics, or ‘Papists’, were increasingly unwelcome in England. In 1581, it was made high treason to convert to Catholicism, and over the following thirty years more and more anti-Catholic legislation was passed. By 1603, one hundred and ninety-one Catholics, both priests and laymen, had been executed.6
Catholics were politically suspect, especially between 1585 and 1604, when England was intermittently in conflict with Spain, and in the aftermath of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, which resulted in further measures against ‘Papists’. Despite this, the Wynters continued to practise their faith. When they were in London, it came to the notice of the authorities that they were not attending the required Church of England services: Sir Edward Wynter and his wife, Lady Anne Wynter, were listed amongst those not attending ‘church, chapel or any usual place of Common Prayer’ on 25 June 1615, ‘nor at any time during the three months then next following’. Recusants (those who refused to attend Church of England services), were fined the huge sum of £20 a month. This was not enough to ruin a gentry family, but if they did not pay they ran the risk of their lands being confiscated by the Crown to service the debt. Although the Wynters were able to conduct their affairs more privately at home in Gloucestershire, their faith continued to mark them out as untrustworthy.7
In most other ways, the Wynters were a typical county gentry family. Edward Wynter had an education fit for a gentleman’s son. In 1577, he matriculated at Brasenose College, Oxford, aged seventeen, and remained there for two years before moving on to the Middle Temple, one of London’s Inns of Court. His time at Oxford coincided with the period in which Richard Hakluyt, of Christ Church, began giving public geography lectures, presenting ‘instruments of this art’ and showing how the ‘old imperfectly composed’ maps, globes and spheres had been ‘lately reformed’. These demonstrations were, according to Hakluyt, made to ‘the singular pleasure and general contentment of my auditory’. The pre-eminent English geographer of his age, Hakluyt went on to publish The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, a compendium which included accounts of the first English voyages to Africa.
When Wynter moved to Middle Temple, he had the chance to meet Hakluyt’s older cousin, also named Richard. At this time, Hakluyt the elder was working on his Inducements to the Liking of the Voyage Intended towards Virginia, in which he listed the purposes of the voyage as: ‘1. To plant Christian religion. 2. To trafficke. 3. To conquer. Or, to do all three.’ When the younger Hakluyt visited in 1568, he was fascinated by the collection of maps and cosmographic books in his cousin’s chamber. Years later he recalled the passage from the Bible his cousin had shown him: ‘they which go down to the sea in ships, and occupy by the great waters, they see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep’.8 Given his later exploits, it seems that Edward Wynter was also inspired at a young age to travel and observe the world for himself. What is more, his later relationship with Edward Swarthye would be informed by the latest scholarship on the subject of Africa and Africans.
In Elizabethan England, knowledge of Africa was drawn from ancient writers, some newly rediscovered as a consequence of the Renaissance, and the emerging body of travel literature produced by European explorers. Richard Hakluyt the younger encouraged the translation of Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch texts, though the business of translation was not always easy. ‘Within two hours’ conference’ with Duarte Lopez’s Report of the Kingdom of Congo, Abraham Hartwell, a Member of Parliament and secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who Hakluyt had persuaded to translate the work, found ‘two most honourable Gentlemen of England’ referred to as pirates. It was all he could do to stop himself tearing the book into as many pieces as ‘his Cousin Lopez the Doctor was quartered’. Hartwell had mistakenly assumed that the author was related to Dr Roderigo Lopes, the converso physician who had been hung, drawn and quartered for plotting to poison his patient, Queen Elizabeth I, in the summer of 1594.9
While Pliny the Elder wrote in his Natural History that ‘ex Afrique semper aliquid novi’ – out of Africa, something new always comes – Tudor writers were reproducing some very old stories about the continent. One traveller boasted to Sir Robert Cecil that he had ‘seen above twenty men at one time together with heads like dogs’. Ancient and modern tomes, as well as still-popular medieval works such as Mandeville’s Travels, bristled with tall tales of dog-headed men, cannibals, monopods, Amazons and other monstrous beings. Like Shakespeare’s Desdemona, readers thrilled to hear stories ‘of the Cannibals that each other eat... and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders’. Not all mythical African figures were negative. There were also the likes of Prester John, the fabulously wealthy and powerful Christian emperor; his ancestor, Balthazar, one of the Three Magi, who brought myrrh to the baby Jesus; and the Queen of Sheba, thought to rule over Ethiopia.10
This woodcut from Sebastian Munster’s Cosmographia (1544) shows some of the monstrous beings Tudor voyagers thought they might encounter in faraway places like Africa. There is a Monopod, a Cyclops, conjoined twins, a headless man and a cynocephalus, or dog-headed man.
Those who perused the writings of contemporary voyagers would also find detailed descriptions of the language, customs and religion of the inhabitants encountered on trading and exploratory voyages. But no doubt it was the more monstrous tales that stuck in young minds such as Edward Wynter’s, and fuelled their ambitions to go to sea and discover the world for themselves. It was this ambition of Wynter’s that ultimately led to Swarthye’s employment as his porter at White Cross Manor.
In September 1585, aged around twenty-five, Wynter took command of a ship named the Aid and set out with Sir Francis Drake’s fleet, bound for the Spanish Caribbean.11 Unlike the rest of Drake’s captains, he had no previous military experience. His education had been ‘at school and Court’, and it was no doubt these court connections, fostered by his father, who had personally invested in the expedition, that secured his appointment. Wynter was not the only courtier keen to embark with the hero who had successfully circumnavigated the globe a few years before. Sir Philip Sidney and his friend Fulke Greville were also loitering with intent in Plymouth that summer, but were recalled to court by the Queen. Greville later wrote that it was ‘no delight’ for a young man to ‘rest idly at home’. These young noblemen did not want to ‘soften their manly virtue’ by pursuing the arts of ‘courtly flattery’: they sought adventure, fame and fortune. Sidney was to find all three, and an early death, in the Netherlands the following year. They also appreciated the danger of al
lowing Spain’s power to grow unchecked. Greville identified two ways to attack the enemy: ‘to set fire to his own house’ or ‘to fetch away his golden fleece’. The latter had the advantage of enriching the aggressor. Both were to be a feature of this voyage. Theirs was a dangerous ambition, and many of the company, including Edward Wynter’s younger brother Nicholas, would not return.12
Drake was on a mission to raid the Spanish colonies. Although the two countries were not technically at war in the summer of 1585, Philip II had placed all English ships in Spanish ports under arrest. The Queen ordered Drake to sail for Vigo, on the Galician coast, where most of the English ships were detained, to negotiate. This was clearly never going to be a diplomatic mission. The Spaniards knew Drake as El Draque, the dragon, and considered him a dangerous pirate. In a later report, Captain Carleill described the English activity at Vigo as the ‘usual pillage’. Nonetheless, Drake succeeded in getting the local governor, Pietro Bermudez, who said he had ‘no orders to annoy or trouble any English’, to release their ships.13 Edward Wynter’s letter to Sir Francis Walsingham from the port, dated 24 October, was the last anyone at home heard of the expedition for the next nine months.14
The pillaging and pilfering spree, with some holding to ransom thrown in, continued as Drake’s fleet called at São Tiago in the Cape Verde Islands, Santo Domingo in the modern-day Dominican Republic, Cartagena in Columbia, and San Agustin in Florida. At every one of these ports, Africans, both men and women, ran away from their Spanish masters to join the English.15 Although they cannot have known what would become of them aboard Drake’s ships, this unknown future was clearly preferable to their lives in the Spanish colonies. It is possible that, like Diego, they had heard there were no slaves in England, and were willing to risk their lives to get there.
But first, they had to survive the rest of the voyage. In February, Drake gave a commandment ‘for the general well-usage of Strangers, namely Frenchmen, Turks & Negros’, suggesting that decent treatment of others did not come naturally to his men.16 One episode shows how Drake reacted when Africans were not ‘well-used’. While the English were at Santo Domingo, Drake sent an African boy to talk to the Spaniards, presumably because he was fluent in the language of his former masters. Although both sides carried white flags, at the end of their discussion a Spaniard ran the boy through with his pike. Fatally wounded, the boy was just able to report to Drake before expiring. Incensed, Drake ordered the execution of two captive Spanish friars and threatened to hang two more prisoners each day until the man responsible for the murder of the African boy was handed over. The Spaniards swiftly complied, and executed the man at the scene of his crime.17
By the time they reached Cartagena, in February 1586, Captain Wynter was keen to see some action. He swapped control of his ship, the Aid, for a land command and was in the vanguard when the English attacked.18 A pair of African men fishing in the bay had revealed that Hicacos Point remained unguarded. The English disembarked there in the dead of night, and marched along the spit named La Caleta, dodging sharp poisoned stakes planted in the sand, to surprise the city. By mid-morning the fighting was over. Drake took up residence in the home of a Spanish Captain named Alonso Bravo and spent the next two months negotiating as large a ransom for the city as he could muster. In the end they came away with 110,000 ducats, much bolstered by payments extracted from private citizens, and plunder.19 This was a sizeable sum, enough to purchase a small Italian dukedom.20 They also left with a number of Africans. The Spanish reported that ‘most of the slaves and many of the convicts from the galleys went off with the English as did some of the negroes belonging to private owners.’21
Most of the hundreds of Africans who joined Drake on the voyage did not make it to England. Like many of the English crew, scores died when a terrible storm hit the fleet in mid-June 1586 while they were anchored at Roanoke, in modern-day North Carolina, the nascent colony Walter Ralegh had founded two years earlier. One man aboard the Primrose reported that the tempest was so ferocious that all the ships either broke or lost their anchors, and so were forced out to sea. The hailstones that rained down upon them were ‘as big as hen’s eggs’ and the seas appeared to rise up high enough to reach the heavens. The hurricane raged for three days and nights.22
Once the storm had abated, the survivors, including the Roanoke settlers, headed for home. There were at least three Africans amongst them, one of whom travelled on to France. Less than a month after the voyage returned to Portsmouth on 28 July 1586, Edward Stafford, ambassador to France, reported that an African man with a cut on his face was going about Paris saying he had sailed with Drake, and stole away from him after landing in England. The African appears to have been in cahoots with the Spanish Ambassador, Bernardino de Mendoza, who was using him to spread rumours that Drake had ‘brought home little or nothing, and has done less, and that his taking of Cartagena, Nombre de Dios and the rest is false’. Word of Drake’s return had not yet reached France, so Stafford begged to be told the latest news, ‘and as much as may be known of the particular successes of his journey’ so that he could ‘make them blown abroad to his honour’, and better combat Mendoza’s anti-English propaganda.23
The African had a good chance of freedom in France at this time. As Francois de Belleforest wrote in his L’Histoire Universelle du Monde (1570):
The custom is such that not only the French, but foreigners arriving in French ports and crying ‘France et liberté!’ are beyond the power of those that possess them; [their owners] lose the price of the sale and the service of the slave, if the slave refuses to serve them.
This was put into action in 1571, when a Norman merchant arrived in Bordeaux with a cargo of slaves. After he attempted to sell them, he was arrested, and the Parlement of Guyenne freed the men because ‘France, the mother of liberty, does not permit any slaves’. The principle was followed by no less an authority than King Henri III, who freed between 2,000–3,000 Spanish galley slaves after they were shipwrecked at Calais.24
Two other Africans stayed in England. In October 1587, a Cornish mariner, John Lax of Fowey, brought an ‘Ethiopian Negar’ to London, where he sold him (illegally) to the Portuguese converso physician Hector Nunes for £4 10s. The African man had come from ‘Santa Domingo in Nova Spayne beyond the seas’, one of the ports Drake had raided a few months before. The following year, Nunes reported to the Court of Requests that the man ‘utterly refuseth’ to ‘tarry and serve’ him, but admitted that he had no legal means to compel him to do so.25
Another ‘blackamore’ was brought to Petworth House in Sussex, the home of Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland, during the winter of 1586–7. The young earl had only recently succeeded to the title, and vast estates in the north of England, after his father’s suicide in the Tower of London, where he had been imprisoned on suspicion of treason. The African was brought to his Sussex home by ‘Mr Crosse’s man’, an employee of Captain Robert Crosse, who had sailed with Drake as commander of the Bond. The African he sent to Petworth was still there in May 1588, when he was bought a new pair of shoes for the princely sum of 18d.26
The voyage of 1585–6 was by far the most feasible opportunity for Swarthye to have joined the Wynter household, as Edward Wynter was in no position to acquire an African servant during the next few years. After serving in the Armada battle of 1588, he ‘resolved to follow the wars’ on the continent the next year. This decision was made in the wake of his father’s death, and his being granted a royal pardon for killing Henry Walsh, the son of the High Sheriff of Gloucestershire, in a duel in Marylebone. The wars overtook him pretty quickly. He sailed for the French coastal town of Dieppe, but a storm drove his ship north along the Normandy coast and he was captured by the wife of the governor of Eu and Tréport. Her husband then sold him to Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador. For the next four years he was a pawn in the diplomatic game between the warring powers, imprisoned at Antwerp Castle in the Spanish Netherlands, in the custody of Christobal Mondragon, force
d to spend ‘the sweetest time of my youth in all melancholy’. In the end he was forced to pay his own ransom: the eye-watering sum of £4,500. It was all he could do to breathe ‘some words only of choler, which otherwise might have burst out more violently’. His wanderlust well and truly sated, he retired to life at White Cross Manor in Lydney. In 1595 he married Lady Anne Somerset, daughter of the Earl of Worcester, and was knighted. They went on to have ten children.27
Their home also became Edward Swarthye’s home. Swarthye’s first name suggests that Wynter had recalled Hakluyt the elder’s dictum that the first priority of the voyager must be ‘to plant the Christian religion’.28 When King Nzinga a Nkuwu of Kongo and his queen were baptised by Portuguese missionaries in May 1491, they took the names of the King and Queen of Portugal: João and Eleanor. Their son Nzinga Mbemba became Afonso, after the prince of Portugal, and their courtiers followed suit, taking the names of prominent Portuguese nobles. Dederi Jaquoah, who we will meet in Chapter Seven, was given the baptismal name John in 1611, after John Davies, the merchant who brought him to London. Edward Swarthye almost certainly got his name from Edward Wynter in the same way. His surname seems more like a nickname inspired by his dark skin, though lacking the ‘wit’ of John Blanke’s.
As porter, Swarthye’s job was to answer the door and turn away undesirable visitors. While the word now conjures up images of someone carrying luggage in a train station, airport or hotel, the duties of a Tudor gentleman’s porter were closer to those of an Oxbridge college porter or an apartment block concierge. He was the first person visitors met at the gate or lodge of the manor, and so their first impression of the household. As Erasmus remarked to the Earl of Surrey in the Elizabethan play Sir Thomas More:
Black Tudors Page 11
