Elizabethan London and The Black Canary

       
 

Queen Elizabeth, who ruled England from 1558/9 to 1603, was the last and greatest of the Tudor monarchs, and London, "the flower of cities all," in her time became

                                   
a rich center of trade, wealth and power, music and theatre, prosperity, crime and poverty-- in other words, a great modern city.  To learn more about life in Queen Elizabeth's London, you can visit the Museum of London (which James visits in The Black Canary when he returns to the present).  To see displays from the Museum's section, The Tudors, click on:
                                                             
     

 

 

  
 

         The London of Elizabeth the First

                                                                   

Elizabethan London was a crowded, bustling city, with many narrow streets and frequent traffic jams. For wood-framed structures, the houses were quite tall.  The large six-storey (counting the attic) building below at the lower center faces onto the street called Long Southwark, and is very likely an inn. The church is St. Olave's.

  
 

                                  From Blackfriars north to Clerkenwell and Smithfield, beyond the City Wall.

  

 

 

You can also learn more about the Great Fire that destroyed most of the London James knew in 1600 if you go to the Museum of London to see an image of the display that he sees there on his visit. Just click on the Great Fire button below and on the Museum of London page that appears, click on either "The Great Fire of London" or on "Investigate the Great Fire of London."

                
                     
           
                                                       
                               

To visit a site that will tell you more about Queen Elizabeth herself, and her reign, click on:

   
     
Queen Elizabeth Plays the Lute  
 

                   
                                                           
    The wide differences between European and American Black History often come as something of a surprise to American readers. In the long history of the relations between peoples, "race" is a relatively recent concept. Elizabethans, who didn't much care for any foreigners, appear to have thought of Africans primarily as exotic foreigners. However, Africans and Europeans had a shared history rooted in in the distant past, for the Punic Wars of 264 to 202 B.C. that made northern Africa part of the Roman Empire made North Africans of all colors into Roman citizens. By A.D. 117 the Roman Empire stretched from Syria to Britain.
   

The first Africans to arrive in Britain came, in fact, almost two thousand years ago, as legionnaires in the Roman army—an army that included Spanish, African, Italian and German "Romans." Among the Africans, as with the other Roman nationalities, there were officers, ordinary soldiers and slaves. Indeed, the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus (A.D. 145-211), who traveled to Britain in A.D. 203 and died in York in A.D. 211, was an African who grew up in North Africa, the son of a black Libyan father and Etruscan mother.

Some of the African soldiers settled in Britain after their military service was finished, and in later centuries Viking raiders brought Africans north to Britain and Ireland. Fourteen hundred years after the Emperor Severus, by the time of Queen Elizabeth I and the story of The Black Canary, there were not only “blackamoor” citizens and servants, both English-born and African immigrants, in many towns in England, but there had been favoured black servants and musicians in the court of King James IV of Scotland and the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth's grandfather and father. It was no wonder that she, too, enjoyed the presence and the talents of Blacks in her Household.

Inevitably, there were prejudices, but these seem often to have risen from that sense (often mistaken, since many were English-born) of Blacks as foreigners. From time to time there were mutterings of protest about there being “too many” and that they were “taking work from Englishmen.” In 1596, four years before the events described in The Black Canary , just such a protest was made to the queen by a group of citizens and, politician that she was, she made a proclamation that Blacks should be “sente forth of the land”—but after she ordered a small number to be sent to Spain and Portugal in exchange for English prisoners there, and afterward made several more stern proclamations, her Government never really enforced any of these orders. In The Black Canary, what Ben Jonson tells young James of the 1596 incident is one version of the event, but accounts differ over whether any Blacks at all were successfully deported-- not that the queen would have hesitated if she judged action politically necessary. Elizabeth's heart may have been in the right place, but it was her shrewdly calculating head that ruled. Thirty-four years earlier, on learning that a Captain John Hawkins had smuggled three hundred Africans out of Guinea and sold them in the West Indies, she was furious. She raged that "it was detestable and would call down vengeance from heaven upon the undertakers”—but when the pirate told her that he had brought back a fortune in sugar, ginger, hides and pearls, she swallowed her anger and provided a ship for his next expedition—in return for a share in the profits!

 
                                                 
     

 

 

To visit a Web site about Black History in Queen Elizabeth's time, click on the red Black History/Early Times button bar-- but remember afterward to click on the BACK arrow to return to this page and read on!

                 

               
                                                           
     

 

 

In The Black Canary James Parrett's mother, Reenie, is black and his father, Phil, white—and in the long acquaintance of Africa, Europe and America that is an old—though often neglected —story. Interracial marriages were not only a fact throughout Europe's history, but between free blacks and whites or Indians in America from the seventeenth on into the eighteenth century. Later in America, as slaves came to be regarded in law as property rather than as unfree persons, attitudes hardened toward all blacks, both free and slave. Tragically, in those times, mixed-race children were most often born as the slaves of their white slaveowner-fathers, not as the free children of loving parents.

Across the Western world mixed-race marriages took place between servants— and also in rich and powerful families. The families of Roman emperor Severus and his son, the emperor Caracalla, were not the first of those or the last. The buttons below will take you to other Web sites, one from a PBS television documentary about a family of mixed racial heritage which has a number of interesting pages. Just click on a topic below that you would like to read more about-- and then click the Back button to return to this page and choose another topic.

 
                                         
                             
                                                 
                                 
                       

 

                              
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