Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [43]
As we have seen, at Knole in the early seventeenth century two black servants worked in the kitchen. The black servant, often a slave, is ubiquitous in seventeenth-century country-house life, although their stories are not well recorded. In grand portraiture, as in Sir Peter Lely’s Countess of Dysart, with a Black Page, painted in the early 1650s, or in Van Dyck’s Earl of Denbigh, young, good-looking black servants appear with some regularity, and clearly are seen as indications of wealth, status and of having international connections.90
The English had become involved in the slave trade from the 1560s, when Sir John Hawkins acquired 300 slaves from the Guinea coast – previous to that Henry VIII had a black trumpeter. Queen Elizabeth I, who is known to have had black servants, and whose accounts show that a ‘lytle Blackmore’ was provided with a fine Gascon coat, nevertheless issued hostile proclamations towards them, such as the 1601 decree that the country should be stripped of ‘the great number of Negroes and blackamoors [that] are fostered and powered here, to the great annoyance of her own liege people which covet the relief which their people consume’. The decree failed. Like his predecessor, James I employed numerous black servants at court for their ‘exotic’ value, where they appeared in plays and masques, and served as musicians.91
It was then not long before Cromwell acquired through force West Indian colonies such as Jamaica and Barbados, which added to the trade between the former Spanish colonies, with their established slave populations, and England.92 By the later seventeenth century, black pages and dark-skinned servants remain popular and fashionable. Pepys, for instance, owned African slaves, mentioning in his diaries that on 30 May 1662 he saw ‘the little Turk and Negro’ acquired by his great patron, Lord Sandwich, to be pages to his family.93 Some of these unfortunates received a degree of education, for among the Verney papers is a letter written in 1699 by John Verney’s black servant from Guinea.94
By the later years of the seventeenth century, the black servant, page and footman had become an established feature of the English country house. One unhappy tale of an unnamed boy, who became the focus of an extraordinary story of intrigue in the 1670s, illustrates the vulnerability of these young people. He was a servant to the Yorkshire landowner and MP, Sir John Reresby, who records his fate: ‘I had a fine More about sixteen years of age (given me by a gentleman, one Mr Drax, who had brought him out of the Barbadoes) that had lived with me some years, and dyed about this time of an imposthume [abscess] in his head.’95
If that sad end were not enough, the story darkened still further. ‘I received an account in October (six weeks after he was buried) from London, that it was creditably reported that I had caused him to be gelt [gelded?], and that it had occasioned his death. I laughed at it at first, knowing it to be false, as a ridiculous story, till I was further informed that this came from the Duke of Norfolk and his family, with whom . . . I had some suits and differences.’96
Reresby had a coroner and witnesses inspect the body: ‘some that laid him out, the rest that saw him naked, severall bycaus of his colour having the curiosity to see him after he was dead gave in their verdict that he dyed ex visitatione Dei (or by the hand of God)’. At least one more exhumation followed. There is no sadder example of the tragedy of these young black men, sold into slavery when often little more than children, and passed around as exotic objects at a distance of many thousands of miles from their own families or cultures.97
As we have