It’s enormously significant,
given how important religion was, that Africans were being baptised and married
and buried within church life. It’s a really significant form of acceptance,
particularly the baptism ritual, which states that ‘through baptism you are
grafted into the community of God’s holy church’, in which we are all one body.
And yet, with the increasing African population came the English
fear that life as it had been known was slipping away. This fear that the English
way of life (an imaginary, artificially monolithic, nostalgic idea) was in some
way coming under attack and that Africans were ‘taking over’, provided rich
soil for anger and hatred. By 1596, the Queen herself was concerned. Writing an
open letter to the Lord Mayor of London, Elizabeth I explained that “there are
of late divers blackmoores brought into this realme, of which kinde of people
there are already here to manae.” A week later, she expressed “her good
pleasure to have those kinde of people sent out of the lande.” No legal action
seems to have been taken, so again in 1601 she argued for the deportation of
black people, complaining about “the great number of Negars and Blackamoors
which (as she is informed) are crept into this realm”. Appealing to a sense of Christian
Nationalism, she condemned these people for “having no understanding of Christ
or his Gospel.” Of course, English merchants, privateers, and the like were
themselves creeping into other realms that England would soon genuinely invade,
and Elizabeth’s xenophobic attitude and words were in fact at variance with
Christ and his gospel, but that irony seems to have been lost.
At this time, English privateers like John Hawkins were
already beginning to kidnap and violently enslave Africans. Between 1562 and
1567, Hawkins and his men violently kidnapped thousands of vulnerable villagers
from the coasts of Sierra Leone and Guinea and sold them in the West Indies to
the Spanish. In many ways, though, the British trade was playing catch-up with
the Spanish and Portuguese. The earliest known slaves in British colonies were
around 20 Africans abducted by pirates and purchased in the colony of
Jamestown, Virginia in 1619 and would develop from their into the racially
constructed white supremacist and black brutalising practice most remembered today.
From this point on, for over a hundred years, it is impossible to separate the
black experience in Britain from slavery. Even when “freemen” appear, the very
word used to describe them is shaped by slavery and treats them as an anomaly,
the exception that proves the rule. Those black men, born free or as slaves,
who rose to prominence in the Georgian era (1714-1837), did so in defiance of
opposition and prejudice, and often as a result of or in connection with their
vocal opposition to the slave trade.
Slavery in the Americas is particularly remembered today,
not least because its toxic legacy was kept alive through a century of racist
laws and segregating structures (the walls of which still stand, after the laws
that erected them were struck down in living memory). That said, there were
slaves living and working in Britain too. Their conditions were somewhat
different, and social sensibilities made it challenging to abuse them to the
scale seen in America. But nonetheless, slaves they were, and there were around
20,000 in London alone. A report in the Gentleman’s Magazine in October, 1764
complained:
The practice of importing
Negroe servants into these kingdoms is said to be already a grievance that
requires a remedy, and yet it is every day encouraged, insomuch that the number
in this metropolis only, is supposed to be near 20,000; the main objections to
their importation is, that they cease to consider themselves as slaves in this
free country, nor will they put up with an inequality of treatment, nor more
willingly perform the laborious offices of servitude than our own people, and
if put to do it, are generally sullen spiteful, treacherous, and revengeful. It
is therefore highly impolitic to introduce them as servants here, where that
rigour and severity is impracticable which is absolutely necessary to make them
useful.
This historical context makes another note in The Gentleman’s
Magazine, this time from March 1765, all the more remarkable.
At an ordination of priests
and deacons at the chapel royal at St James's by the Hon. and Rev. Dr Keppel,
Bishop of Exeter, a black was ordained, whose devout behaviour attracted the
notice of the whole congregation.
Who was this man and where was he from? Sadly, although
reference is made to his character, he is known by his colour: “a black”. No
name is given. We do not know where he was from, or if he came to be in England
by birth, migration, or enslavement.
Was he a slave or freeman? We do not know. But in the best
case scenario, to be a freeman or a freed man, was not necessarily to be free. To
some, you were still just, “a black”.
Is this the first black church officer to be ordained in
Britain? Perhaps. It seems to be the first known record of such. How he
ascended the ranks of church life to ordination, we do not know, nor do we know
the motives behind his appointment. Unfortunately, we cannot even be sure as to
what is meant by “devout behaviour”. It could be hoped that 1 Timothy 3
characteristics would be in mind, whether he was being ordained to the
priesthood or the diaconate, but we cannot be sure. It was, after-all, not uncommon
- in America at least - to identify particularly subservient black men and
appoint them to spiritual tasks like preaching and diaconal responsibilities in
order to preserve the enslaving status quo. Such men were elevated as role
models for other black people to follow, all in service to the preservation of the
racial caste system artificially constructed to justify the unique brand of
slavery flourishing in the British Empire’s colonies. Perhaps though, this man
was very much the opposite and the reason he is lost to history is because
those who appointed him soon came to regret it. This seems unlikely, considering
the visibility of black contemporaries of whom we do have good record despite
their social nonconformity and political theology. Unfortunately, we can only
speculate.
What we do know is that this man’s ordination came:
the year before the later
abolitionist Oloudah Equiano purchased his freedom and 24 years before the
publication of Equiano’s The Interesting
Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: or, Gustavus Vassa, the African
Seven years before the case of
Somerset v Stewart, which ruled that an enslaved person on English soil had the
right to not be forcibly removed for sale in Jamaica – widely, if inaccurately,
heralded as making slavery in England illegal and leading to the emancipation
of many slaves in England by masters who thought this
10 years before John Murray,
Lord Dunmore of Virginia, declared from the HMS William the outright liberty of
all slaves who could flee Rebel plantations to join the Loyalist cause in the
American Revolution. This prompted tens of thousands of slaves to flee for the
safety of British lines
20 years before William
Wilberforce became an evangelical Christian and with encouragement from
repentant slave trader-turned-clergyman John Newton and fellowship with a group
of Christian activists, took up the cause of abolition two years later
22 years before Ottobah
Cugoano (one of the founders of London based black abolitionist group, “Sons of
Africa”), published his influential Thoughts
and Sentiments On the Evil and wicked traffic of the slavery and commerce of
the human species
42 years before the legal
abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire (it would take decades of
diplomacy and naval patrols before anything approximating functional abolition
was seen)
68 years before the Slavery
Abolition Act, which freed around 800,000 enslaved Africans in Caribbean, South
Africa, and Canada
Whoever this newly ordained black man was, and whatever the
nature of his devotion, there can be no question that he stood at the moment
the tide began to turn. The seismic changes that would follow were led in no
small part by devout Christian men and women, who whatever their residual flaws
and blind-spots, knew that the slavery of Britain and its colonies was evil,
that an African is not just “a black” but a man and a brother, and that
neighbour-love in this context did not mean favouring the slave traders and
masters of the world, but those people whom they stole and enslaved.
For
further reading:
'Importing Negroe Servants' – Transcript from The Gentleman's Magazine, Oct 1764, p.
493 https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/work_community/transcripts/import_servants.htm
“Ordination of the
First Black British Preacher?” – National Archives Transcript from The Gentleman's Magazine, March 1765, p.
145
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/work_community/docs/gentsmag1765.htm
Bidisha, “Tudor, English and black – and not a slave in
sight”, The Guardian, 29 October
2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/29/tudor-english-black-not-slave-in-sight-miranda-kaufmann-history
Emily C. Bartels, “Too Many Blackamoors: Deportation,
Discrimination, and Elizabeth I”, in Studies
in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 46, No. 2, Tudor and Stuart Drama
(Spring, 2006), pp. 305-322 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3844644?read-now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Paul Edwards, “The History of Black People in Britain”, History Today Volume 31 Issue (9
September 1981) https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-black-people-britain
Miranda Kaufman, Black
Tudors: The Untold Story (London: Oneworld, 2017)
Simon Schama, “Dirty Little Secret”, Smithsonian Magazine, May, 2006 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/dirty-little-secret-115579444/
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