Hidden Histories: Black Tudors on Thames Riverside

This talk follows the lives of Africans who lived, worked and worshipped along the Thames during the Tudor and early Stuart period, from the royal palaces downstream to the wharves and parishes of the south bank. Among them are John Blanke, royal trumpeter to Henry VII and Henry VIII and the only Black Tudor whose portrait survives, who is believed to have married at Deptford; Jacques Francis, the salvage diver who raised guns from the Mary Rose and became the first African to give evidence in an English court; and Reasonable Blackman, an independent silk weaver in Southwark. Alongside them are others whose lives surface in the parish registers, court records and royal accounts of the riverside, and the talk asks how these men and women made a place for themselves in Tudor society, and why their stories have stayed hidden for so long.

Yvette Reinfor is the founder of…